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Notice of Participation of the National Eye Institute (NEI) in the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) for Individual Postdoctoral Fellows (F32)
Release Date: February 18, 2011
National Eye Institute (NEI)
This Notice informs potential applicants that beginning with applications due on April 8, 2011 and thereafter, the National Eye Institute will participate in the Funding Opportunity Announcement for the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) for Individual Postdoctoral Fellows (PA-11-113).
Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance Number: 93.867.
The Components of Participating Organizations section of PA-11-113 has been revised to include NEI:
National Eye Institute (NEI)
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)
National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)
National Institute on Aging (NIA)
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
National Institute on Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR)
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)
National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR)
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)
All other aspects of this FOA remain the same.
Please direct all inquiries to:
Dr. Neeraj Agarwal
Research Training Officer
National Eye Institute
5635 Fishers Lane, Suite 1300
Rockville, MD 20892-9300
Phone: 301-451-2020
Fax: 301-402-0528
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Weekly TOC for this Announcement
NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices
Office of Extramural
Research (OER)
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
9000 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, Maryland 20892
Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS)
Note: For help accessing PDF, RTF, MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Audio or Video files, see Help Downloading Files.


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Some late night news here on Intercepts, as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been cleared to resume flight operations, six days after the entire fleet was grounded due to a crack discovered in an engine.
The joint statement from the Joint Program Office and contractor Pratt & Whitney:
Following engineering analysis of the turbine blade which developed a crack, F-35 flight operations have been cleared to resume.
This decision concludes a cautionary flight suspension that began on Feb. 21 after a 0.6 inch crack was found on a 3rd stage turbine blade of a test aircraft at the Edwards Air Force Base F-35 Integrated Test Facility during a routine inspection. Comprehensive tests on the blade were conducted at the Pratt & Whitney facility in Middletown, Connecticut. The engine in question is part of the F-35 test aircraft fleet, and had been operated at extreme
parameters in its mission to expand the F-35 flight envelope. Prolonged exposure to high levels of heat and other operational stressors on this specific engine were determined to be the cause of the crack.
No additional cracks or signs of similar engine stress were found during inspections of the remaining F135 inventory.
No engine redesign is required as a result of this event. Within the current DoD inventory, 17 F-35s are employed in test and development at Patuxent River Naval Air Station and Edwards Air Force Base; the remaining aircraft are assigned to Eglin Air Force Base and Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, and comprise the initial F-35 training fleet.
Obviously this is good news for a program that has struggled out of the gate in 2013, and capped off a day that saw a new deal awarded to contractor Lockheed Martin for a future purchase of the fifth generation fighter.
Click on the "more" link for some more news about the program.
This afternoon, the Pentagon announced a new deal worth $333,786,000 that will lay the path for an eventual deal on lot 8 of low rate initial production (LRIP). That money is part an advance acquisition contract designed to help Lockheed prepare for manufacturing the eighth batch of fighters.
"Lockheed Martin is pleased to be awarded long lead funding for the eighth F-35 Low Rate Initial Production contract, known as LRIP 8, by the Department of Defense," Michael Rein, a Lockheed spokesman, wrote in an email. "This award provides our supplier base the stability needed to properly execute on our future production commitments. We will continue to drive down costs for these future aircraft as we have done on every previous LRIP contract."
The optimistic tone was echoed 9,000 miles away, as Australian Defence Minister Stephen Smith expressed confidence in the F-35 program during comments made this week at the Australian International Airshow at Avalon, southwest of Melbourne.
"I've always been confident that in the end, the Joint Strike Fighter project would get up, that it would be successful, and that's because the entire weight of the United States is behind it," he said. "I remain confident that the Joint Strike Fighter will get up, but the risks continue to be schedule and cost."
However, Smith reiterated that he would not allow an air combat capability gap to occur between the retirement of Australia's Hornet fighters and F-35A introduction around 2020.
Australia has a requirement for up to 100 Joint Strike Fighters, but faces the dilemma of either stretching out the life of its aging legacy Hornet fleet beyond its planned withdrawal date at the end of the decade or making a further interim Super Hornet purchase from Boeing.
Steve O'Bryan, Lockheed Martin vice president of F-35 program integration and business development, told reporters at the show that he was confident Australia would remain in the program.
"There is no indication from the Australian leadership of a reduction in commitment," he said.
Long term consequences?
Despite the return to flight, there may be long-term consequences for the second grounding of the F-35 in a month.
Only a day after Smith reaffirmed his confidence in the F-35A, U.S. project head Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan told local press at Avalon that he thought Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney would perform better if they had more skin in the game.
"What I see Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney doing today is behaving as if they are getting ready to sell me the very last F-35 and the very last engine," he told a media roundtable. "They are trying to squeeze every nickel out of that last F-35 and engine."
Both Lockheed and Pratt moved quickly to push back against Bogdan's assertions that they are not working as team players.
"Lockheed Martin is fully committed to delivering the F-35's unprecedented 5th Generation capabilities to the men and women of our Armed Forces and those of our allies" Laura Siebert, Lockheed spokeswoman, wrote in a statement. "We are singularly focused on properly executing the F-35 development, production and sustainment tasks laid out in our various contracts. We do this in partnership with Lt. Gen. Bogdan and the entire JSF Program Office and strive daily to drive costs out of the program.
"We believe we are making significant progress in enhancing affordability of the jet as evidenced by the fact that we have reduced costs by 50 percent since the procurement of the first production aircraft; by outperforming U.S. government pricing estimates for the past contract lot buys; and by reducing labor costs by 14 percent between the 4th and 5th lot contracts. Going forward, we are confident the Low Rate Initial Production 6 and 7 contracts, currently under negotiation, will achieve even greater savings for the government and taxpayers," according to the statement.
"Despite numerous cuts in the F-35 acquisition plan, Pratt & Whitney has maintained a long-term view and demonstrated our commitment by investing more than $50M dollars of our own funds and taking on risk ahead of contract schedule to prevent the program from experiencing delays," Bates, the Pratt spokesman, wrote in an email.
Bates highlighted that the engine manufacturer offered to cover cost overruns for low rate initial production Lot 5 a year ahead of what the government had requested.
"We believe it is highly unusual for a contractor to take on this level of risk at such an early stage of a program," Bates wrote. "We have also offered to assume more risk for sustainment cost through performance-based, fixed-priced provisions well ahead of plan. In addition, our investment has contributed to more than 40% of cost reduction since the delivery of our first production representative engine.
"We look forward to our continued dialogue with the Joint Program Office to further review the details of the F135 [engine] program, and to achieve alignment and further progress as the program moves ahead."
It's not the first time Bogdan has criticized the companies' JSF performance. In September, Bogdan raised eyebrows when he called the relationship between Lockheed Martin and the JPO the "worst" he had ever seen — with a delegation of Lockheed officials sitting right in front of him.
Relations between Bogdan and the contractors seemed to warm during winter, especially in December, when an agreement was finalized to purchase a fifth batch of fighters, followed quickly by a preliminary agreement on a sixth batch weeks later.
But the second major grounding of the F-35 in the last month appears to have tested Bogdan's patience. In January, the Marine Corps' F-35B variant was grounded following an engine problem during a test flight. The source of that problem was later identified as an improperly crimped line in the fueldralic system, manufactured by subcontractor Stratoflex.
Last Friday, nine days after the F-35B resumed tests, the entire F-35 fleet was grounded when a crack was discovered in one of the blades in the Pratt-designed engine.
Aaron Mehta
Latest posts by Aaron Mehta (see all)
- A Look at F-35 Close Air Support Tactics Development - December 8, 2014
- We Now Know Why The F-117 Is Still Flying - November 10, 2014
- The F-35A Might Be Late. And It's Because of the A-10. - October 31, 2014

subset: commoncrawl


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News & Events
For the Media
Moeller of Saratoga Springs Receives Clarkson University's Top Award for Young Alumni
[A photograph for media use is available at http://www.clarkson.edu/news/photos/emoeller.jpg .]
Potsdam, N.Y. -- Elizabeth A. Moeller of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., owner of Interactive Media Consulting LLC, has received the Woodstock Award from her alma mater, Clarkson University. Given each year during Reunion Weekend, the Woodstock Award honors young alumni who have demonstrated outstanding loyalty and service to Clarkson and the Alumni Association and who have used their Clarkson experience to make a notable contribution to their careers.
Moeller received her bachelor of science degrees in technical communications and physics from Clarkson University in 1988. She continued her education at Rensselaer and graduated in 1990 with a master of science in technical communication and a Ph.D. in communication and rhetoric in 1995. While at Clarkson, she was a member of the pep band, the Clarkson University Student Association, the Knight Magazine and the Society of Technical Communication.
After graduating from Rensselaer, Moeller returned to Clarkson to teach for a short time. Subsequently, she founded her own business, Interactive Media Consulting LLC. She has spent over 18 years researching the best way to organize and present electronic information for the greatest impact. Her computer and technical skills, combined with her information and visual design skills, are a perfect combination for Web-based communication. Moeller has almost 10 years of teaching experience and custom designs training courses to meet the needs of her clients. She has published numerous articles on topics related to her field and has presented on her expertise at conferences and meetings since 1993.
In 2002, she was named one of the Capital Region's Forty under 40 by The Business Review.
She was active in her community as a member of the board of the Saratoga Independent School from 2003 through June 2008 and served as president of the board from 2005-2007. Since 2007, she has been a member of the board of the SaratogaArtsFest for which she serves as board secretary.
Moeller is one of the founding members of the Dean's Advisory Council in the School of Arts & Sciences. She worked with the school's communications and media faculty as Clarkson developed the digital arts and sciences program. Over the years, she has employed Clarkson students as interns in her business and provided a link for Clarkson students to the professional community. She has consulted with Clarkson faculty and staff on Web development and in 2006 made a very special effort to involve our students and faculty in a national IEEE professional communications meeting which she organized.
She participates regularly in Clarkson alumni activities and events and is a former reunion planning chair and regional chapter board member of the Alumni Association. She has also served on the alumni council and as an alumni admission volunteer.
Clarkson University crosses the boundaries of disciplines, nations and cultures in order for discovery, engineering innovation and enterprise to come together. As a result, faculty and graduates grasp the full impact of their calling, direct their research to the world's pressing issues and lead with confidence and distinction. One in seven alumni is already a CEO or other senior executive. Located in Potsdam, N.Y., just outside the six-million-acre Adirondack Park, Clarkson is home to 3, 000 students preparing for rewarding careers through 50 rigorous programs of study in engineering, business, arts, science, and health sciences, as well as unparalleled outdoor recreation and life experiences beyond the classroom.
Photo caption: Elizabeth Moeller (right) receives the Woodstock Award from Clarkson University President Tony Collins.


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Delay & deceit: Obamacare subterfuge continues
November 24. 2013 4:44PM
The Obama administration does not want to risk a repeat of October's Obamacare signup debacle just before next year's congressional elections. So the Department of Health and Human Services is bumping back Obamacare's 2014 open enrollment period by one month, from Oct 15 to Nov. 15. The 2014 elections are to be held on Nov. 4. What an incredible coincidence.
When Obamacare was passed into law in 2010, it was set to take effect in 2013 — conveniently after the 2012 presidential election. These date selections were not random.
Deception always has been at the heart of this law. Sen. Obama campaigned against an individual mandate. He got elected, then began pushing for an individual mandate, which became the core of the law.
The final bill was rushed to a vote before any member of Congress could possibly have read it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi inadvertently acknowledged that when she famously said "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what's in it."
President Obama and Democrats in the House and Senate falsely told the American people that they could keep their insurance and their doctor. The Obama administration unilaterally changed the passed law by issuing numerous waivers, exemptions and delays, none of which was approved by Congress.
Now HHS is trying to ensure that people do not learn about changes to their plans or premiums until after next year's congressional elections. The deception never ends.


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The amphibian heart
The road was covered with toads. Crouched on the two-lane mountain blacktop, posed like speckled sphinxes on the yellow line. I saved as many as I could, leaping from my idling car to scoop up their warm dimpled bodies and deposit them in adjacent Sonoran Desert. But too many were already belly-up or smeared across the pavement.
Red-spotted toad, the book later said, Bufo punctatus: emerges from creeks and crags following rain to mate or seek heat. It's a glorious emergence, quick reproduction, then return to the dirt. When I described the rescue to my folks on Thanksgiving, my Dad said, "What's so great about toads? What'd they ever do for us?"
He and Mom and I sat in their Phoenix living room. "Joe," Mom said, "get real. They have their own right to live, regardless of what they do."
He shot me a wink. "Really?"
"And they do a lot," she said, "eat insects, fertilize soil. If enough keep getting squished, they could become an endangered species." Dad shook his head, no longer able to contain his laughter. "You bleeding hearts are so easy to rile."
I didn't mention it, but I'd done similar rescuing in Oregon, too. As I was walking home from work one rainy Portland night, a fleet of earthworms appeared at my feet. Worms. Mindless carbon-tubes motored not by nervous systems but reactionary impulses, bundles of near-amoebic urges so primitive as to be hardly distinguishable from microbes, at least by most people. But there they were, freed by moisture from their dark, muddy holes, inching across the bike lane onto the frontage road. And there I was, dumping my umbrella to peel them from the pavement, one by one.
Headlights stacked against headlights behind me on the off-ramp, death looming like a stalking tiger. Passing cars sprayed me where I crouched. Worms coiled in my cold hands as others wiggled past into the road. I set survivors on the grass, went back and forth until there were no more.
"They're these little tender bags of organs and bones," I told my folks. "You can't just drive away." So clearly I recalled the creamy tan of the toads' skin, puffed undersides bearing the purplish pantyhose tone of an exposed ventricle. "Know that gristly color when you cut your hand?" My parents nodded. We're all so fragile underneath - and inside.
That same Thanksgiving, my Grandma asked about the living room. "It looks different," she told Dad. "Is this couch new?" Later, cutting her turkey and yams, she motioned to some Navajo statues against the wall. "Did you always have those?" "Yes," my uncle Sheldon said.
"Sheldon remembers everything," Grandma said, smiling. "If I can't remember something, I say, 'I'll ask Sheldon.' " "I don't remember everything," he barked.
"You do too."
Now that she has dementia, Grandma likes to test herself. My folks and I take her to a movie every Saturday, after which we'll sometimes stop at the mall pet store. There she reads the birth date listed on each dog's tag and tabulates: "That means he's … two months old." She enjoys identifying breeds without looking at the info cards, seeing if she can tell pugs from terriers from miniature schnauzers. The dementia has weakened her short-term recall, but as she likes to say, "At least I know I'm forgetting things. Shows I'm not all gone."
We seem to go in pieces, like a species declining, disappearing toad by toad.
My parents and I cleaned up dishes. Afterwards, I joined Sheldon and Grandma in the bedroom. They'd gathered around a black-and-white family photo from their years in New York. Arranged in a V according to height and age stood Howard, Grandma's oldest, beside Sheldon, the walking encyclopedia, beside my Mom and Grandma, then Grandpa, holding my grinning Aunt Debbie.
Grandma put her finger on Howard's gray-tone face, his straight frame posed stiffly in a suit, half-smiling. "Here's the one I miss," she said. "I'll never understand." How could she? He took his reasons with him. I put my hand on her back. She looked up, eyes clouded pink. "But that's life." Howard had been engaged, a chemistry Ph.D. student. Everyone insisted if I'd met him, I would've loved him. "Everyone loved him," Grandma said, which is why, 40 years later, she still wonders why he took his own life.
"He suffered from depression," Sheldon said, lowering himself onto Mom's bed. His lips tightened when our eyes met. "Manic depression." "I'll never understand it," she said.
A glorious emergence and a swift return to the dirt. Some of us bask longer on the pavement than others. Grandma and I left the room with our arms around each other's backs.
She said, "He would have been -"
"Sixty-five," said Sheldon.
Aaron Gilbreath has written for Backpacker, Texas Highways and High Desert Journal.


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When thinking of Iceland, most people think of the pristine and breathtaking nature. That is of course also encouraged and promoted by the tourism industry showing Iceland as a natural and pure destination.
Then I saw the pictures of photographer Julien Joly the newsletter of UNRIC, The United Nations Regional Information Centre.
The Frenchman was visiting the remote beaches of Hornstrandir, Iceland's northernmost peninsula, situated in the West Fjords, to the north of the Jökulfirðir and to the northwest of Drangajökull, when he stumbled upon a lot of plastic littering the beach.
Iceland's nature is mostly pristine and undisturbed, so this was a rather unusual sight.
We all know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and if you didn't then educate yourself here and other debris gyres roaming the ocean, but now it seems like the marine litter has also reached the shores of Iceland. Nei takk!
I cannot even begin to think about the consequences for the marine life, this is just terrible.
It is easy to just not think about the garbage vortex and not worry because, well, that is all just somewhere out of sight on the oceans.
But when the debris reaches land, our land, it becomes suddenly real.
I mean, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now the size of Texas and there are propositions to find a name for this '8th continent'. This is so sad…
This brings me back to a topic I wrote about a few years ago, recycling in Iceland.
A little update on the matter is in order, I guess. Since said article, there has been a small improvement: citizens can now order new waste bins which collect paper and plastic. So that makes it easier for people to separate their waste, a great step into the right directions.
The UNRIC article also states that a European citizen on average uses 198 disposable plastic bags a year. That is an absolutely insane number! According to the latest figures, Icelanders use a combined 70 million plastic bags per year!
Every time I go food shopping I take bags with me so I don't have to buy plastic bags. I really don't want to reach my annual 198.
But there is still room for improvement. I am still dreaming of bottle banks set up in every neighborhood and supermarkets taking responsibility for waste reduction.
Yes, Bónus, Krónan, Hagkaup, 10/11, Nóatun and so on, I am talking to you!
In my home country of Germany, supermarkets are obliged to take in plastic wrappings of the products they sell therefore they make their suppliers wrap their products environmentally friendlier and go easy on the plastics. Supermarkets have power so this move was a great idea.
I hope people start thinking more about sustainability and use less plastic- hello, Utopia, my old friend!
But remember: nobody wants their beaches littered with garbage.
Katharina Hauptmann - [email protected]


text:
This story appears in the November 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.
"I want to show you where we're hiding it," Eduardo said.
Bad idea, I said. Someone will notice the foreigner and wreck the plan.
"No, I figured it out," Eduardo said. "You won't get out of the car. I'll drive by, slowly, not so slow that we attract attention. I'll tell you when to look. Be discreet."
He had borrowed a friend's máquina, which means "machine" but is also what Cubans call the old American cars that are ubiquitous in the Havana souvenir postcards. This one was a 1956 Plymouth of a lurid color that I teased him about, but I pulled the passenger door shut gently, the way Cubans always remind you to, out of respect for their máquinas' advanced age. Now we were driving along the coast, some distance from Havana, into the coastal town where Eduardo and nine other men had paid a guy, in secret, to build a boat sturdy enough to motor them all out of Cuba at once.
"There," Eduardo said, and slowed the Plymouth. Between two peeling-paint buildings, on the inland side of the street, a narrow alley ended in a windowless structure the size of a one-car garage. "We'll have to carry it out and wheel it up the alley," he said. "Then it's a whole block along this main street, toward that gravel that leads into the water. We'll wait until after midnight. But navy helicopters patrol offshore."
He peered into his rearview mirror at the empty street behind him, concentrating, so I shut up. Eduardo is 35, a light-skinned Cuban with short brown hair and a wrestler's build, and in the months since we first met last winter—he's a former construction worker but that day was driving a borrowed Korean sedan and trying to earn money as an off-the-books cabdriver—we had taken to yelling good-naturedly and interrupting each other as we drove around La Habana Province, arguing about the New Changing Cuba. He said there was no such thing. I said people insisted there was. I invoked the many reports I was reading, with names like "Change in Post-Fidel Cuba" and "Cuba's New Resolve." Eduardo would gaze heavenward in exasperation. I invoked the much vaunted new rules opening up the controlled economy of socialist Cuba—the laws allowing people to buy and sell houses and cars openly, obtain bank loans, and work legally for themselves in a variety of small businesses rather than being obliged to work for the state.
But no. More eye rolling. "All that is for the benefit of these guys," Eduardo said to me once, and tapped his own shoulder, the discreet Cuban signal for a person with military hardware and inner-circle political pull.
What about Fidel Castro having permanently left the presidency four years ago, formally yielding the office of commander in chief to his more flexible and pragmatic younger brother, Raúl?
"Viva Cuba Libre," Eduardo muttered, mimicking a revolutionary exhortation we'd seen emblazoned high on an outdoor wall. Long live free Cuba. "Free from both of them," he said. "That's when there might be real change."
If there is in fact a Cuba under serious transformation—and you can find Cubans all over the country engaging now in their own versions of this same debate—Eduardo is a crucial component of it, although not for the reasons you might think. "Dissident" is the right label for a subset of politically vocal Cubans, notably the bloggers whose critical online missives have gained big followings outside the country, but Eduardo is no sort of dissident. He's not fleeing persecution by the state. He's just young, energetic, and frustrated, a description that applies to a great many of his countrymen. Ever since he was a teenager in high school, Eduardo told me, it had been evident to him that adulthood in revolutionary Cuba offered exactly nothing by way of personal advancement and material comfort to anybody except the peces gordos. The big fish. (Well, literally translated, the fat fish—the tap-on-the-shoulder parties.) Nothing works here, Eduardo would cry, pounding the steering wheel of whatever car he'd hustled on loan for the day: The economic model is broken, state employees survive on their tiny salaries only by stealing from the jobsite, the national news outlets are an embarrassment of self-censored boosterism, the government makes people crazy by circulating two national currencies at once.
"I love my country," Eduardo kept saying. "But there is no future for me here."
Over nine weeks of traveling around Cuba this year and last, I heard this particular sequence of complaints so often, and from so many different kinds of people, that it began to form a kind of collective national lamentation: I love my country and it doesn't work. There were loyal optimists among the complainers, to be sure, and after a while, whenever I encountered one, I found myself marshaling ammunition to bring Eduardo. I wanted to hear how he'd respond, but when I was being honest with myself, I realized that I also wanted to talk him out of the boat. (Sharks swim in those Cuba-to-Florida waters. The currents are dangerous. There are drownings, people never heard from again.)
Optimist: Roberto Pérez, a shaggy-haired environmental biologist, filled with enthusiasm about the progress of Cuba's extensive urban agriculture and organic farming projects. Pérez is six years older than Eduardo. Eighty percent of his own high school graduating class, Pérez told me, has left the country. "But things arechanging," he said. "Very fast. And there are so many good things here that people take for granted, because they were born with them. You tell me another place where a kid can grow up so safe, get his vaccinations, get his education, not be involved in gangs or drugs. I can see people crossing the river north from Mexico, to get away from that. But from here? To face the Florida strait? I fail to see it."
Still no? OK. Optimist: Josué López, exactly Eduardo's age, just immigrated back to Cuba after six years in Florida and a growing disenchantment with the values of some of his hyper-acquisitive Cuban émigré neighbors in Miami. López and his wife are going into business for themselves, taking advantage of the new self-employment laws and new flexibility in agricultural land use, and developing a bed-and-breakfast resort on a few acres they've acquired outside Havana. "I'm telling my friends who went to the States," López told me, in his practiced slangy English, "Dude! If you want to start something, the place to be is Cuba."
Eduardo would listen, interested, his face sober. He would shake his head. We were arguing in a café one morning, a rooftop spot in the historic part of Havana, and Eduardo grabbed a glass saltshaker from the table. "My whole life, the government has been telling us, Look! I'm giving you this nice full saltshaker!" he said. "But it's never full."
This one wasn't either. A half inch of salt, maybe. Eduardo put the shaker down and told me he had gotten hold of some oars. The men would have to row for a while, before they could risk motor noise that might alert authorities; the departure itself would violate Cuban law, since none of them had a tarjeta blanca, a white card, the government permission required of all citizens before they may leave the country, even temporarily. Cubans hate the tarjeta blanca, and the government subsequently hinted at doing away with it entirely—but on this early spring morning Eduardo hadn't even applied for one, since he assumed the tarjeta would be denied, as they sometimes are, with no explanation beyond the bland, omnipresent No está autorizado—It is not authorized. Besides, a Cuban applying for a tarjeta blanca is supposed to have a visa from the destination country. Just to secure a spot on the consideration list for a U.S. visa, a Cuban must pay $160 and produce a written invitation from some actual person living in the United States.
Eduardo had neither. I had expected him to solicit help from me, the money or the invite, but he never did; he just blurted out the boat plan one day in the middle of a long, talky car ride, as though he'd been desperate for a non-Cuban confessor, and now here we were staring at a saltshaker and brooding about Eduardo's son, who was nine and didn't know his father was going.
"I don't know if it will be better to tell him or worse," he said.
At least the money he'd send home would buy his son new shoes, Eduardo said. "Everything has a risk in life," he said. "I'm not worried. Use my real name. I've told you this before. Use it! I'm not afraid of anybody!" He spread his arms wide, trying to look unworried, and repeated his name the Latin American way: first name, paternal surname, maternal surname. I told him to quit being foolish, that he still lived in a one-party state in which people get roughed up or arrested or excoriated as mercenaries for criticizing their leaders too vigorously, and that we were talking about this in public only because the café waiter was a friend of his and nobody else was nearby. So forget it, I said. Sorry. No real name. We were quiet. Beneath us spread the most famous district in Cuba, the streets the tourists want to see first. There were shining 19th-century tile work, the filigreed top of a Corinthian column, a glimpse of the turquoise sea.
The whole city seemed to be shining, that morning with Eduardo, even though there'd been a derrumbe in the neighborhood where I was staying. That's a building collapse, a thing that occurs with some regularity, especially in Havana. Buildings that were once beautiful and grand are rotting now in the tropical air, and the country has no money to repair them, so they cave in, partially or all at once, a giant rumbling roar followed by rubble and grief. This derrumbe killed four people, three of them teenage girls; the building had been designated unsafe, but Cubans are inventive about their living space in Havana, where parts of the city are so crowded that multiple families and generations wedge into residences that in more decadent eras served as single-family homes. Eduardo had the idea that the number of deaths in my neighborhood derrumbe was 21—he had heard this via radio bemba, the radio of lips, which is what Cubans call the word on the street, the only censor-free method for the dissemination of discouraging domestic news. But I had been readingGranma, the national Communist Party daily, which to the surprise of many people had actually run articles about this derrumbe rather than pretending it had never occurred and was steadfast about the death toll of four. Anyway, the city looked shiny. The tourists were charging all over by the busload, maps in hand, and from what I could see they appeared to be having a great time, sipping their rum-and-mintmojitos, following their multilingual Cuban guides, and applauding the happy cacophony of rumba and son that spilled out into the plazas from restaurants and street corners and bars.
Unmistakably, and provocatively, unusual things were transpiring in the streets. In some neighborhoods half the buildings' doorways seemed to have been taken over by new self-employed vendors, the men and women sitting hopefully alongside makeshift displays of hair accessories or homemade pastries or DVDs of movies and television shows. "For Sale" signs, prohibited during the decades when it was legal to exchange residences but not to sell them, now appeared in house windows. In a few weeks Pope Benedict XVI was due to arrive, the first papal visit to Cuba in 14 years. Along the route the papal cortege would follow, state workers were cleaning and painting house facades so assiduously that I heard people joke that they wished the Holy Father would show up more often, just for the urban cleanup.
Hefty half-built structures stuck out here and there—the anti-derrumbes, as I came to think of them, into which the country's sparse investment resources were being directed. High cranes and scaffolding delineated the rehabilitation of historic buildings, the gussying up of tourist destinations, the construction of new port facilities. From certain spots along the shoreline, you could make out the shape of the huge deepwater rig exploring the Cuban seabed, believed to contain billions of barrels' worth of oil. If large-scale oil production is merited, the possibilities for the country's economic future are profound.
Most of the Cubans I talked to seemed consumed, in fact, by this whole idea of possibility. Not permanent transformation, most would say, not yet; the Cuban government has a history of switching signals on its citizens, encouraging private enterprise and then pronouncing it counterrevolutionary and shutting it down again. But Raúl Castro is not his brother, and there's a particularly Cuban combination of excitement, wariness, calculation, black humor, and anxiety that accompanies even the possibility of real change—the suggestion that after a half century under Fidel, something big may truly be happening to the way Cubans live day to day. "The rebuilding of the house of Cuba," an ecclesiastical lawyer and editor named Roberto Veiga said gravely, pronouncing the Spanish words with the elegance of a pastor at the pulpit: La reconstrucción de la casa Cuba.
Careful, though: The rebuilding metaphor implies a blueprint. Those outside Cuba who imagine that this blueprint is agreed to by some clear Cuban consensus are deluding themselves. The unconstrained individualism of the United States, where neither health care nor a college education are free? The showy wealth and environmental havoc of modern China? The economic woes and internal tensions of Europe? The narco wars of Mexico? "This is our great challenge," Veiga told me. He helps run a publication of the Archdiocese of Havana, Espacio Laical (literally,Secular Space), which, like the Cuban Roman Catholic Church itself, has become one of the few venues in which semicritical debate about the country's future is aired in public. "What will it be like, this house of Cuba?" Veiga asked. "These are changes that should have begun two decades ago. But they didn't. And now we are a nation trying to define itself."
Eleven million people live in Cuba, less than the population of central Tokyo. It's the biggest island in the Caribbean, and famously only 90 miles from United States territory, but Cuba still grips the international imagination mostly because the dueling narratives of its history are so exaggerated by myth. Either a ruthless revolutionary took power in 1959, seized American corporate property, forced out his country's own professional classes, and silenced all opposition by creating a totalitarian police state (that's the version audible to this day on Miami's Radio Mambí, the broadcast voice of Florida's most vehement anti-Castro community); or a brilliant revolutionary led the overthrow of a corrupt dictatorship, shook off the colonialism of foreign companies and the Mafia, brought literacy and health care and egalitarian values to a mobilized people, and created a university-educated bastion of socialism in spite of a half century of U.S. efforts to destroy it by prohibiting Americans from doing business with or spending tourist money in Cuba.
Both narratives contain substantial truth, both at the same time. This is why Cuba fascinates and makes people's heads hurt. The placebis exhausting in its complexity and paradoxes—Cubans are the first to tell you that—and the questions modern Cuba sets off in a visitor are big, serious, unwieldy. What is the definition of freedom? What do human beings need? What do they owe to each other? What do they want, beyond what they need? "We've all been the subjects of an experiment," a 58-year-old university-educated woman who works in the arts told me thoughtfully one evening, chopping sweet peppers in her kitchen for supper. She lives in an airy place, with a fenced front lawn and a backyard patio, in a leafy part of Havana; the home has belonged to her family since before the Triunfo, the Triumph of the Revolution, as Cubans generally refer to the events of 1959. Her lightbulbs are compact fluorescents, the woman pointed out—one legacy of an ambitious national project a few years back, directing all Cubans to switch to lower watt fixtures in the interests of energy independence and the environment.
"They'd come to check," she said. "They would break your old bulbs, in front of you, to make sure you didn't sneak any back into your lamps." She smiled and looked over her glasses at me to make sure I was listening closely enough. She has one child, a son a decade younger than Eduardo—gone now, having bailed out on Cuba and obtained a therapy credential in Spain. "The idea was marvelous, to change all the lightbulbs," she said. "The problem is how they did it."
In its headline version, the rebuilding of the house of Cuba looks like this: Capitalism intrudes, around the edges, small bits at a time. Since 2010 more than 150,000 Cuban workers have left or been laid off from their state jobs, a concept previously unimaginable in a system that was supposed to provide all the work and all the social benefits. President Castro himself has said that the state apparatus is bloated and too conducive to dependence and corruption, and that the state must trim a half million workers. State agricultural land is now being leased in pieces to private farmers and cooperatives, and other kinds of legal self-employment are being gingerly promoted as well. Over the past two years the government has authorized 181 job-specific categories of cuentapropismo, as it's called—the keeping of one's own account.
Even the ration book—the libreta issued to all Cuban households, with its check-off columns for the state-subsidized basic foods every citizen is supposed to get each month—may be an artifact near the end of its time, Raúl Castro has said. The libreta! This is big. Nothing is more evocative of the bewildering Cuban economy, and Cubans' complicated reaction to it, than the baseball card-size libreta, each one stapled together from thin cardboard and white paper and listing the items the holder may buy at artificially low prices: rice, sugar, and milk, if the family includes children under eight. There are squares to be checked off by hand. The pages look like the accounting ledgers of Dickensian clerks.
Here are things I have watched Cubans do with the libreta:
Reinforce its fraying cover carefully with decorative paper and tape.
Hold it in one hand, a plastic shopping bag in the other, while sweating in the moist heat, gossiping with neighbors, waiting for subsidized bread.
Whip it from their purses or off kitchen shelves, shoving the opened pages at me, exclaiming simultaneously that it demonstrates Cubans' care for each other and that the allotments have been so cut back the government might as well be trying to starve them all.
Once I was in the home of a priest of Santería, the Afro-Cuban religious practice that is the faith even of many professed Cuban Catholics. I was still trying to compose myself because the priest had just completed an initiation ceremony that included slitting the necks of pigeons and chickens and bleeding their corpses into sacred dishes and praying in Yoruba. But what the priest really wanted to talk about was his libreta. "Look at this!" he cried. "Eight ounces of oil, per person, for a month! Ten ounces of beans! One package of pasta maybe every three months!"
There's a term Cuban housewives use as they make their rounds in search of the day's family food: pollo por pescado. It means "chicken for fish": You have promised fish for dinner, but in the stores there is no fish, so you get a little chicken and pretend it's your fish. Cuba is surrounded by seawater, of course. Where is all the fish? Ah, any Cuban will tell you, leaning in close, a merry gleam in his eye: glad you asked, mi amor. The fish is in the restaurants. The fish is in the hotel buffets, a popular amenity for tourists, where long counters are piled high with varieties and quantities of food no ordinary Cuban ever sees. The fish is being sold out of private homes, if you know which doorbell to ring.
In many of these locales the fish—like nearly every desirable product in Cuba, from nightclub admission to hair dye and plasma TVs and acid-washed blue jeans—is being sold in CUCs.
Now we come to that aspect of present-day Cuba that causes the yuma (that's the grammatically adaptable slang for "American," "foreigner," and also "the general outside world to the north and east") to reach for a calculator and some aspirin and a crash course in recent Cuban history. The CUC, which is shorthand for Cuban convertible peso, is one of the two official currencies of Cuba. Like the libreta, the double-currency system is in theory destined for extinction; things are so fluid in Cuba that by the time you read this, it's conceivable the government will have begun ending it. But to appreciate fully the elaborate survival negotiations that have dominated so many Cubans' daily lives in recent years, you have to come to grips with the essential weirdness of the CUC.
It's a recently invented currency, introduced a decade ago as a replacement for the dollars and other foreign money that began flooding and disrupting the country after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thus ending the big-socialists-to-little-socialists financial support that had been holding up the Cuban economy. The multiyear Cuban depression that followed the Soviet breakup was catastrophic (fuel shortages, 14-hour blackouts, widespread hunger), and the government set out to counter it by throwing the island open to international tourism. This was all done rather fiercely, with a flurry of beach hotel building that continues to this day—current plans include multiple golf courses and jet-capacity airports—while anticapitalist admonishments still declaim from highway billboards and urban walls:
In its purest concept the CUC is used for goods and services somehow connected to foreignness: hotel bills, international transactions, Fidel T-shirts in the souvenir shops, and so on. One CUC is worth about one U.S. dollar, and it's simple to obtain them; whether you're a yuma or a Cuban, state employees at exchange centers will take whatever currency you hand them and count out your reciprocal CUCs, wishing you a pleasant day when they're done.
These employees, like the rest of the Cubans who work for the state—currently about 80 percent of the country's labor force—are not paid in CUCs. They're paid in the other currency, the Cuban national peso. One national peso is worth 1/24 of a CUC, or just over four cents, and in socialist Cuba state salaries are fixed; the range as of mid-2012 was between about 250 and 900 pesos a month. Some workers now receive a CUC stimulus to augment their peso wages, and recent changes are lifting top-end salary limits and linking pay more to productivity than to preset increments. But it was Cubans who taught me the national comic line about public workplace philosophy: "They pretend to pay us, while we pretend to work."
In the city of Santa Clara, where the principal attraction is a massive monument to revolutionary martyr Ernesto "Che" Guevara (fought with Fidel, died trying to foment insurrection in Bolivia), I spent an afternoon with a visiting emergency physician whose medical salary was fixed at 785.35 national pesos per month. That works out to CUC$32.72. Like so much about Cuba, this isn't straightforward; Dr. M owes nothing for his professional education and his own family's medical care. His son's lifetime schooling is free. Produce and certain other basic foods not on the family libreta can be purchased in pesos, as can Cuban books, baseball game tickets, fares on the crowded public buses, and admission to museums and movie theaters and the ballet. The currency in which he is paid as a doctor will buy Dr. M the very kind of 1960s ascetic nationalism Che Guevara liked to espouse—in other words, as long as Señora M uses only the poor-quality peso soap, the M family brews only the peso coffee that comes with fillers ground in, and nobody ever buys deodorant.
"The toy truck I wanted for my son, with the little motor and remote control?" Dr. M said, as we stood side by side beneath the gigantic monument pedestal, craning our necks up at Che. "Forty CUCs."
Forty CUCs in a state store, that is. Cubans maintain a robust black market—por la izquierda, they call it, "over to the left"—in which anything can be obtained. But the most surrealistic aspect of life in Cuba 2012 is the vigor with which the government, the same entity paying Cubans in pesos, sells goods to Cubans in CUCs. Retail stores, like pharmaceutical factories and nickel mines, are national enterprises, run by the state. Clerks often don't bother specifying "CUC" on the pricing of merchandise either; if a thing whirs or glitters or comes in good packaging, Cubans know the currency in which it is being sold, and regardless of whatever the ghost of Che may be whispering in their ear, they want it.
By the time I met Dr. M, I had done so much confounded window-shopping that there were numbers all over my notebooks: Pepsodent toothpaste, CUC$1.50 per tube. Electric blender, CUC$113.60. Upholstered loveseat-and-armchair living room set, CUC$597.35. Multistory malls, with cafés and video game halls and clothing stores, all functioning exclusively in CUCs.
The cell phones Cubans depend upon—pre-Raúl they were prohibited; now they're everywhere—are sold, both the device and the per-minute fees, in CUCs. Even a Bucanero Fuerte, one of the good Cuban beers, is likely to be sold in CUCs. The Bucanero price of one CUC, not an unreasonable sum in many countries for a bottle of beer, constitutes a full day's medical pay for Dr. M. You see the problem with the toy truck. This is why for four days a week, when he's supposed to be recuperating from his 24-hour emergency shifts, Dr. M drives a cab.
Technically, he drives his own car, the aged Russian beater he inherited from his father. But he picks up tourists in it, because tourists pay in CUCs. Over one high-season month Dr. M's cabbie days earn him the CUC equivalent of 15 times his salary as a physician. In Cuba there's nothing remarkable about this. The taxi fleet, like the rest of the tourist industry, is replete with splendidly educated Cubans no longer practicing their professions because their years of study to be of service to the nation—in engineering, medicine, psychology—produced salaries in "the money that's worthless," as a kindly Cuban bank teller once remarked to me. The phenomenon is referred to as the "inverted pyramid." Every Cuban who repeated that term to me did so in a tone of despair, as in: This, you see, is why the ambitious young keep leaving.
Dr. M and I studied the object Che was holding in his giant fist above us, determined that it was a hand grenade, and went into the museum. Che Guevara was an Argentine medical school graduate when he met Fidel Castro, and as we walked past the glass-encased displays of the Che medical journals and the Che lab coat, I glanced over at Dr. M. In the 15 years since Che's ashes were delivered to Santa Clara, Dr. M told me, this was the first time he had visited the museum. But he was silent and impassive, and when we came out, all he said was, "I don't get this about us now—how a taxi driver can make so much more than a doctor." The expression on his face made it clear that Che Guevara was not a topic he wished to continue exploring. "I don't get it," he said.
Eduardo told me the boat's departure date was set, depending on what the men could learn about tide and weather predictions, for the days just after the pope's visit ended. When I was away from Havana, in the island's interior, text messages from his number showed up every so often on my temporary Cuban phone: "hi my friend am going soon on vacation."
I was doing a lot of walking, or strapping on flimsy passenger helmets and climbing (imprudently) onto the backs of unlicensed motorcycle taxis. To my outsider's eye, the New Changing Cuba looked both real and raggedy, as though an enormous flea market had been busted up and scattered the length of the country. Young men sat in stairwells, offering to repair cell phones or refill cigarette lighters. Families lined their front porches with display tables of used kitchen merchandise or thermoses of coffee and chipped plates of wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwiches.
Here were small corner businesses that used to be run by the state but now, experimentally, were not: barbershops and snack bars, for example, in which management was being transferred to the employees. Here was a former high school math teacher, a soft-spoken 42-year-old who had learned to speak Russian fluently back in the comfortable days of life support from the U.S.S.R. Now he was selling baby clothes for CUCs from one corner of a rented street-front foyer in the central city of Camagüey. "My wife does the sewing," the former math teacher said. "She used to be a teacher too."
And here, in the middle of one residential block back in Havana, was a chic new restaurant called Le Chansonnier. No signage marked the entrance; Le Chansonnier is a paladar, a privately run restaurant inside a home, and people with money—correction, people with CUCs—know where it is. Paladares have been legal for years in Cuba but used to be strictly contained, under the pretense that they were all tiny family operations siphoning no business from state restaurants. Since 2011, though, they've been allowed to expand and hire staff, and like the guest rooms Cubans may rent to foreigners inside their own homes and apartments, some of the popular paladares have basically turned into busy CUC cash registers for their owners. "I always dreamed of having my own business," the co-owner, a 39-year-old named Héctor Higuera Martínez, told me the afternoon I stopped by. "I used to think I'd be an engineer. But I saw that there was a living in working with tourists."
Higuera waved a hand at somebody and in short order produced an amazing salad for me, with beautiful butter lettuce, shaved chicken, and a dusting of chocolate. He was trying to figure out how to manage the evening's multiple parties of ten; dinner at Le Chansonnier, which draws foreigners and Cubans alike, runs about 40 CUCs per person. His business partner, Laura Fernández Córdoba, who's run the restaurant with him since they opened in fall 2011 with the help of French investors, was approving a tableware purchase in the next room. It was easy to envision money flying in and out of the building, in a New Changing Cuba sort of way, and part of what had been flummoxing me during my early weeks in Cuba was starting to come clear. Not every Cuban drives a taxi or tends bar for tourist tips, right? So how on Earth, I had wondered every time I examined all the nonpeso merchandise being hawked at Cubans from every direction, were they accumulating these CUCs?
Part of the answer is remittances, the dollars and euros sent from relatives abroad. The amount of money sent to Cuba annually is hard to track, but some economists estimate the number may surpass $2 billion this year. That means the modern Cuban state is being nourished partly by people who've left it. And because both the U.S. and Cuban governments have eased restrictions on émigrés returning to visit family, the Cuban Americans who arrive to weepy reunion embraces at the Havana airport are usually carrying both money and goods: televisions, appliances, duffel bags full of clothing, and anything else their relatives can resell por la izquierda for CUCs.
There's stealing too, which during the post-Soviet-collapse depression years emerged as a nationwide mechanism for family survival. The verb luchar, which means "fight," also translates loosely in Cuba to "transfer workplace items into one's personal possession, which the system impels us to do because our salaries won't cover a lousy Bucanero." The standard lucha involves eating, drinking, using, bartering, or selling the items in question. Reform campaigns pushed by Raúl Castro have produced scores of high-level corruption arrests, but one defining quality of any attractive workplace, still, is the nature of the lucha. ("If you can't look around and find things you can take home or resell," a woman in her 40s from a working-class neighborhood outside Havana told me firmly, "then it's not a good job.")
Nothing about this combination, remittances plus pilfering, is unusual in a small tropical country without abundant raw material for export. Neither is the third important way CUCs arrive in Cubans' pockets: legal commerce, of any sort, that directly or indirectly procures foreigners' money. But the government of the Cubanproyecto socialista, or socialist project—in official dispatches that remains the preferred term—has tried for a half century to wall off much of the country from the very buy-sell system that generated that money in the first place. Watching Cubans grapple, as they consider just how many of those walls ought now to be dismantled, is a sobering experience. Take Higuera and Fernández: Their private, for-profit business and their ten employees are legal under the new self-employment laws, as long as they pay their taxes.
But business taxes, in themselves a relatively new concept in Cuba, increase sharply as employers hire more people. The system is weighted against much private expansion while Cubans experiment with new tax and regulation policies, and this question of limits—of just how successful individual entrepreneurs should aspire to become—is a matter of great philosophical and political contention in the New Changing Cuba. Last year, after months of discussions around the country, a remarkable official document called "Guidelines for the Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution" was published—313 guidelines, to be exact, each one addressing a specific subject, like land use or the civic importance of sports. Guideline number three declares that the "concentration of property" by individuals, as opposed to the state, "will not be permitted."
What does that mean, exactly? The guidelines don't say. The cynical will tell you it means the government shall countenance no threat, no real business competition, to the bureaucracies and personal fiefdoms of government companies. The less cynical will tell you that it means Cuba must manage this move toward privatization carefully, while trying to protect the services Cubans have come to expect—that there remains some genuine national conviction in Cuba, no matter how exhausted theSOCIALISM OR DEATH! slogans may now appear to the young, that it's deeply wrong for certain citizens of a nation to make themselves thousands of times wealthier than others.
"We just don't know yet," a veteran University of Havana economist named Juan Triana Cordoví told me, when I asked about guideline number three. "You can do this big bang style, as Russia did, but I don't think that worked very well. Or you can do it step-by-step, watching what will happen. I am one of the ones who prefer step-by-step. I think of it as testing the stones of the river, one foot at a time, to see if each stone will hold."
I could see how the guidelines, which were released to great fanfare, might look from a certain perspective like one more saltshaker only a quarter full. This is why so many young people spend a lot of time talking to their peers about their futures in Cuba, about whether to stay or go. There are multiple routes away now, most much safer than little boats pushed out to sea in the dark. Family members wait out the long delays for visas to join relatives abroad. Professionals overseas on Cuban service missions, like the thousands of medical professionals and sports trainers now working in Venezuela, sometimes decline to return home. "You're always trying to convince people not to leave," Higuera said. "Always. I have a friend in Madrid now. He got there just in time for the crash."
What might he and Fernández say, I wondered, if they could talk directly to a Cuban I knew, halfway between their two ages, buying canned tuna this very week for an illegal departure into the Straits of Florida?
Higuera sighed. "I'd say to him, If you're going to do this thing, do it," he said.
I had heard this before, after asking other Cubans the same question, and it still surprised me a little; I expected to hear the word gusano, worm, which in an earlier era was the famous public castigation for anybody who abandoned the revolution. But I never did. People would nod and say they understood. Or they'd point to a framed picture—on a wall, hanging from a rearview mirror—of a relative who'd already done the same thing. "But I'd tell him to make sure he's doing it for himself, not somebody else's expectation of him," Higuera said. "And I'd ask him to look hard at what he sees in other places. I really do have hope that things are improving here."
A week later I went home, and I waited for Eduardo to call me collect, as we'd both arranged, from somewhere in South Florida. Two weeks passed without a call. Then another week, and then another. I tried the Havana cell phone Eduardo had been using, but there was no answer, and finally I called his brother, who immigrated to Mexico a few years ago to marry a Mexican woman he had met in Cuba.
The phone connection was bad, and I wasn't sure how much was safe to say. I was an American who had befriended Eduardo in Havana, I said, and I just wondered—how he was, that was all. I said he had spoken of an impending vacation. His brother became very excited. "He didn't make it," he said in Spanish. He was shouting into the phone. "There was a problem with the boat. El timón. They didn't make it."
I didn't have my dictionary in reach, and I didn't know what a timón was, and all I could think was that it was like tiburón, which means shark. "Tell me what that means," I said urgently, and Eduardo's brother said he didn't know how to describe it exactly but that it was a boat part, a thing that had failed before they were too far out, and it was all right, they had used the oars, they were back in Cuba. No one was arrested. He was going to wait a while, Eduardo's brother said, and stay in their mother's apartment with his wife while he saved some more money.
After we hung up I got the dictionary. A timón is a rudder. I had a picture in my mind now, what had happened to Eduardo: Floating in the sea, the rudder broken, he and his companions had surely discussed it for a time, what would happen if they tried to motor on, toward a landfall they couldn't see, with nothing beneath them to keep the direction true. Then they turned the boat around, back into the piece of the ocean they already knew, and rowed home.


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September 02. 2014 7:56PM
Kimball Union mourns murder of alum by militant group
From Correspondent and Wire Reports
The Islamic State militant group released a video on Tuesday purporting to show the beheading of a second American hostage with New Hampshire ties, journalist Steven Sotloff.
A statement released by Sotloff's family through a spokesman indicated the family considered the video to be authentic.
"The family knows of this horrific tragedy and is grieving privately. There will be no public comment from the family during this difficult time," family spokesman Barak Barfi said.
The purported executioner appeared to be the same British-accented man who appeared in an Aug. 19 video showing the killing of New-Hampshire based journalist James Foley, and it showed a similar desert setting. In both videos, the captives wore orange jumpsuits.
"We pray for the soul of Steve Sotloff and for his family and friends," a statement posted Tuesday on the Free James Foley Facebook page said.
Foley, whose family lives in Rochester, was kidnapped in Syria two years ago. He had previously been held captive for 44 days in Libya in 2011.
Congresswoman Annie Kuster, D-N.H., released the following statement regarding Sotloff's death:
"I cannot begin to express the grief and heartbreak that I feel regarding the brutal murder of Steven Sotloff. Steven was a brave and innocent journalist who was callously executed by a group of purely evil terrorists. We must not rest until ISIL is brought to justice and the memories of Steven Sotloff and James Foley are properly honored."
Sotloff, a 31-year-old freelance journalist from Florida, was kidnapped in Syria in August 2013.
"I'm back, Obama, and I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy toward the Islamic State, because of your insistence on continuing your bombings and in Amerli, Zumar and the Mosul Dam, despite our serious warnings," the masked man said in the video, addressing President Barack Obama. "So just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people."
In the video, Sotloff describes himself as "paying the price" with his life for the U.S. intervention in Iraq.
Sotloff's mother, Shirley, appealed last Wednesday in a videotaped message to Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appealing for her son's release.
Kimball Union mourns
The Kimball Union Academy community is mourning the death of Sotloff, who graduated from the New Hampshire prep school in 2002. The Florida native came to the school in the Plainfield village of Meriden in 2000 as a high school sophomore.
"His courageous actions have and will always inspire our students and our community," Head of School Mike Schafer said on Tuesday. "While the Kimball Union community mourns the terrible loss of Steven Sotloff, we proudly celebrate his important legacy and his deep commitment to making the world a better place. We send our deepest condolences to the Sotloff family."
"He was an active and involved student whose interest in journalism was evident early on," the school said.
He is remembered for revitalizing the student newspaper, The Kimball Union, and was recognized for his efforts with the Lawton Award for Journalism at graduation.
He also served as a student council representative, admissions tour guide, and active member of the Kimball Union Fire Brigade. He played on varsity football and rugby teams and appeared in a school production of the musical "Cabaret."
The school community remembers him as a loyal and connected alumnus, serving as his class reporter since he graduated and keeping in close touch with Kimball Union, his teachers and his classmates.
In 2011, Sotloff shared his experiences as a journalist in Libya working for a multi-national news agency with the school through the Kimball Union Magazine.
Sotloff also returned to campus to share some of his experiences at Kimball Union's biennial Global Fair in April 2012 with a presentation on the causes and outcomes of the 2011 Arab Spring and the roles that culture and religion played in the uprisings.
"... He was often under fire, in hiding or on the move. He detailed the destruction, chaos and suffering he was observing. It was important to him that Kimball Union students were exposed to world issues like the Arab Spring," the school's statement said.
"Steven was dedicated to putting a human face on the sufferings and hardships in some of the world's most challenging conflict zones. His work became a humanitarian mission that helped others gain a more accurate and realistic global perspective on issues in the Middle East."
"Barbaric murder"
U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, expressed her sympathy to Sotloff's family in a written statement Tuesday afternoon.
"These despicable acts further underscore the threat that ISIS represents to not only Americans, but also to people of all faiths and nationalities who stand against ISIS' depraved and oppressive ideology," Ayotte said. "ISIS' barbaric murder of Americans must not go unanswered, and the President must produce a strategy without delay to defeat ISIS."
U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, decried Sotloff's killing.
"The brutal murder of Steven Sotloff by ISIL militants is yet another abhorrent act of terrorism and a tragedy for those who knew and loved Steven," Shaheen said in a statement. "Steven was an innocent journalist whose life was horrifically taken in another cowardly act of terrorism that sadly emphasizes the growing threat of ISIL to the region, Americans abroad and the world. ISIL must be stopped, and we must use every tool at our disposal, short of introducing ground forces in combat roles, to put an end to the threat they pose to our national security."
Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter said her "thoughts and prayers are with journalist Steven Sotloff's family and friends at this terrible time."
"Nations must work together to stop the evil of ISIL," Shea-Porter said in a statement.
Sotloff's colleagues described him as a dedicated journalist and gifted writer who had filed in-depth reports from across the Middle East. He covered unrest in Libya for Time magazine in 2012 before his kidnapping in Syria.
Time Editor Nancy Gibbs said that Sotloff "gave his life so readers would have access to information from some of the most dangerous places in the world."
Criminal investigation
A U.S. government source told Reuters that a criminal investigation being conducted by the Justice Department into the killing of Foley was certain to be extended to include Sotloff.
In the video it released last month, Islamic State said Foley's death was in retaliation for U.S. air strikes on its insurgents who have overrun wide areas of northern Iraq. The United States resumed air strikes in Iraq in August for the first time since the withdrawal of the final U.S. troops from the country in 2011.
The raids followed major gains by Islamic State, which has declared an Islamic Caliphate in areas it controls in Syria and Iraq.
"We have seen a video that purports to be the murder of U.S. citizen Steven Sotloff by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The intelligence community is working as quickly as possible to determine its authenticity," White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said in a statement.
"If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends. We will provide more information when it is available."
A masked figure in the video seen by Reuters also issued a threat against a British hostage, a man the group named as David Haines, and warned governments to back off "this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State."
On Aug. 24, al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front militants in Syria freed an American writer, Peter Theo Curtis, who had been missing since 2012, following what officials said were efforts by the Gulf Arab state of Qatar to secure his release.
Union Leader Correspondent Meghan Pierce and Reuters contributed to this report.


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The world premiere of the highly anticipated "Girl Meets World" airs on Disney Channel Friday, June 27
ABC Family is celebrating all things Cory and Topanga with "Boy Meets World" mini-marathons, airing Monday through Friday from 7-8:30 a.m. and 4-6 p.m. all summer long, in anticipation of the premiere of Disney Channel's family comedy "Girl Meets World," Friday, June 27, at 9:45 p.m.
"Boy Meets World" ran on ABC from 1993-2000 and followed the lives of young Cory Matthews (Ben Savage), his friend Shawn Hunter (Rider Strong), and his girlfriend, Topanga Lawrence (Danielle Fishel), as they juggled family, friends and school. The hit sitcom tackled such serious topics as broken families, peer pressure and bullying, while maintaining its clever sense of humor.
"Girl Meets World" picks up the story 14 years later, with Cory and Topanga now living in New York, married and raising quirky 5-year-old son, Auggie (August Maturo), and tween daughter, Riley (Rowan Blanchard). Riley and her best friend, Maya (Sabrina Carpenter), traverse the twists and turns of teenage years at Manhattan's John Quincy Adams Middle School, where Cory is their history teacher.


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Drew Barrymore Visits Drought-Stricken Kenya
Kenya is now being hit by a devastating drought and Drew saw firsthand that people struggle to feed their children, to keep their cattle alive, to survive. WFP is feeding more than 3 million people in Kenya alone and Drew is appealing to the rest of world to join her: "We really need to step up our help. There is a catastrophe happening right now".
Drew recently went back to Kenya with the US-based Magazine "Condé Nast Traveler", on whose cover she will be featured this month. (Click here to see the article).
Drew is an actor, director, and producer with decades of experience in Hollywood (after all, she started at the age of two!) and is used to making big decisions. But the decision three years ago to give 1 million US Dollars to help end hunger and boost education in Kenya was the most important she ever made, Drew says. The challenge was daunting.
"I thought with almost 1 billion hungry people, what on earth could I possibly do as an individual? It sounded just impossible." But the WFP Ambassador against Hunger learned what works. She keeps giving to WFP's School Meals Programme in Kenya, which she first visited in 2005.
"A simple, healthy meal in a school is so important. I saw how it changes a girl's life forever. And right now it is such a crucial safety net for the families during this drought crisis".
In the last few years, the projects she has funded have helped refurbish some 25 schools around Nairobi, with brand-new kitchens, food storage, energy-efficient stoves, and latrines for boys and girls. This summer Drew Barrymore used a second tranche of funds to build wells so that the children didn't have to walk miles to get water for their school lunches. In the past wild animals sometimes attacked the vulnerable children on the road to the muddy river.
Recently she visited Kiltimany, a village about four hours drive north of the capital Nairobi. Her funds helped build a borehole, a well, with a solar-powered tower where the villagers buy water for a few cents which pays for the upkeep of the well.
For the first time ever, the women of the village don't have to walk 4 hours each way to get water; instead, they can get water right in the middle of their village. One very pregnant woman, hugging her belly, thanked Drew that she no longer has to make that long trek to the water.
"This is so exciting. It is so tangible - I really can see results of what I have done with WFP," a smiling Drew said.
The village gave Drew a rousing welcome. They presented Drew with an honorary cape, painted her face with traditional colors, and marched from the village meeting place to the borehole. It was a magic moment when people from two different walks of life came together for an occasion that will change the future of the next generation of that village.
In another village, Kakili near the town of Isiolo, her "Drew Barymore Education Fund" will build a brand-new primary school. The whole village turned out to see Drew. She visited the classrooms in the existing decrepit school, which was actually more sticks and mud than real walls. She asked the students what they wanted to become when they are older and they answered, "doctors, teachers, farmers". They have big hopes which are now much more possible with new investments into the winning combination of schools, education and food provided by WFP.
WFP and Drew are working closely with the community and a hush fell over the crowd when the blueprints for the new building were shown. You could just sense the excitement. The parents know that this means their children can learn in a safe, dry place with new desks and with good food at least once a day to ensure their children can concentrate.
And her work doesn't stop in Kakili and Kiltamany: 10,000 kids in about 25 schools will receive nutritious school lunches for a year. Drew is also asking her friends and fans to join her and donate to help increase the number of kids she can feed: 5 US dollars will feed one child in school for one month.


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Grand had just two upperclassmen make the trip – seniors Calen Shumway and Wesley Rodda – due to the fact that the school's junior prom was held in Moab the night of Saturday, March 2, before the soccer team was able to return.
"That meant they were basically junior varsity games for us," said GCHS head coach Mike Camps.
The Red Devils first played Desert Hills High School, a 3A school in St. George, and lost by a 10-0 shutout on Friday, March 1. The following afternoon, Grand lost to Delta High, also a 3A school, by the score of 8-1. Rodda scored Grand's lone goal of the game.
Camps said he is giving little thought to the preseason losses, and added that he and his players are looking forward to the team's first region games of the season. The Red Devils were scheduled to host South Sevier on Tuesday, March 5, and Gunnison on Thursday, March 7.


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Senate sets hearing on state operating budget for May 9By GARRY RAYNO
State House Bureau
April 25. 2013 11:48AM
CONCORD - The Senate Finance Committee will hear from the public on the state's proposed operating budget next month.
Public hearings on the $11 billion biennial operating budget that would go into effect July 1 will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. May 9 in Representatives Hall.
The House approved its budget proposal earlier this month, now the Senate is working on its plan.
The Senate Finance Committee has been hearing from state departments about their concerns and will soon begin deciding where to make changes.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Morse, R-Salem, has expressed concerns about the House's revenue estimates for the Medicaid Enhancement Tax on hospitals' net patient receipts as well as the uncompensated care program for hospitals, charter schools, school building aid and several other areas.
The Senate has to act on its budget proposal by June 6.


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NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. stock futures pointed to a higher open on Wall Street on Monday, as investors largely ignored jitters in Ukraine and instead took inspiration from upbeat trading days in Europe and Asia and continued merger activity.
Later in the day, Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser will speak.
Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average US:DJM4 gained 53 points, or 0.3%, to 16,580, while those for the S&P 500 index US:SPM4 advanced 6.80 points, or 0.4%, to 1,880.20. The Nasdaq 100 index US:NDM4 rose 19.50 points, or 0.6%, to 3,567.50.
With little in the way of corporate or economic events in the U.S. to help guide the markets, investors looked east for direction. Chinese shares rallied in Asia on Monday, with banks posting some of the biggest advances, in what was partly a reaction to a new market-reform blueprint announced Friday by the State Council (China's cabinet). India shares rallied on hopes the election will bring in a more business-friendly government.
European stocks were also rising, shaking off the latest developments in Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists in the country's east declared victory in a referendum on self-rule held Sunday. Russia on Monday said it respected the result and called for dialogue between opposing parties, but Ukrainian officials dismissed the vote as filled with irregularities. EU foreign ministers are meeting in Brussels to discuss further sanctions against Russia.
Crude-oil futures CLM4, -0.67% rose after the referendum on Monday on sanction concerns, while metals also advanced across the board.
"There's no shortage of reasons why investors ought to be fearful right now," said Joao Monteiro, analyst at Valutrades, in a note. "The threat of civil war in Ukraine, a slowdown in the Chinese economy or deflation in the euro zone being just three examples — so just how long we have to wait before the opportunistic profit-taking starts is something that remains to be seen."
Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser is scheduled to give "welcoming remarks" at conference on reinventing older communities at noon Eastern Time. Plosser is a voting member of the Fed policy committee this year.
In macroeconomic news, the federal budget for April is due at 2 p.m. Eastern.
On Friday, U.S. markets ended a volatile week on a positive note, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.30% notching a record close. The Nasdaq Composite COMP, -0.20% however, posted its biggest weekly fall in four weeks, as investors continued to dump tech shares and small-cap stocks.
Analysts suggested the recent slide in tech and small-cap shares may give way for more merger activity, which could be the next catalyst to send stocks higher. Read: Tech, small-cap stock slide may give way to M&A rush
• Don't go away, just diversify
• Here's the place to hide in May
• When others think it's time to sell
• See full Trading Strategies report for May
In premarket action, shares of Hillshire Brands Co. US:HSH picked up 1.9% after the branded-foods company said it would buy Pinnacle Foods Inc. PF, +0.46% for $6.6 billion, including debt, in a stock-and-cash deal. Pinnacle Foods rallied 20% ahead of the open.
Shares in Twitter Inc. TWTR, -1.20% rose 3% in premarket trade after SunTrust analysts upgraded the stock to buy from neutral and said the company could use monetization of assets to compensate for slowing user growth.
Gogo Inc.'s GOGO, -1.98% shares rose 9% in premarket trade after the communication-services provider that offers wifi on airplanes reported first-quarter results that beat expectations.
Allergan Inc. AGN, +0.27% could also move after its board unanimously rejected a takeover offer from Valeant Pharmaceuticals Inc. US:VRX
21st Century Fox Inc. FOXA, -0.04% was further in the news, after British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC UK:BSY confirmed Monday it is in preliminary discussions to buy pay-TV units from the U.S. production firm.
The corporate calendar on Monday was otherwise short on major events, with only annual general meetings at American International Group Inc. AIG, -1.47% and American Express Co. AXP, -0.46% on the docket during normal trading hours. Read: Race to lead AIG has two favorites
After the market close, McKesson Corp. MCK, +0.71% is projected to report fourth-quarter earnings of $2.39 a share, according to a consensus survey by FactSet. Elizabeth Arden US:RDEN is forecast to break even on a per-share-basis in the third quarter.
More must-reads from MarketWatch:
Why millennials are hurting the real estate recovery
China housing apocalypse: Could it happen?
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(ANSA) - Rome, October 12 - The following is a city-by-city
guide to some of Italy's art exhibitions:
FLORENCE - Palazzo Strozzi: Francis Bacon, including three
unfinished works never seen in Italy; until January 27.
- Galleria dell'Accademia: Art Returns Art;
contemporary masters including Bacon, Klein, Burri, Kounellis,
Picasso and Warhol; until November 4.
LUCCA - Lucca Center of Contemporary Art: David LaChapelle,
53 photos; until November 4.
MAMIANO DI TRAVERSETOLO (PARMA) - Fondazione Magnani Rocca:
Grama Sutherland; until December 9.
MANTUA - Palazzo Te: Pier Luigi Nervi, Architecture As A
Challenge,; until November 25.
MILAN - Palazzo Reale: Picasso, 200 masterpieces from the
Paris Picasso Museum; until January 6.
MODENA - Ex Ospedale Sant'Agostino: American photographer
Edward Weston (1886-1958), 110 photos until December 9.
PAVIA - Scuderie del Castello Visconteo: Renoir, A Life in
Painting; 30 paintings, pastels and sketches, until December 16.
PISA - Palazzo Blu: Wassily Kandinsky, From Russia to
Europe; until February 3.
ROME - Colosseum, Curia Julia, Temple of Divine Romulus:
Rome Caput Mundi, Dominion and Integration; until March 10.
- Vittoriano: Renato Guttuso 1912-2012; until February 3.
- Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (GNAM): Paul Klee and
Italy; until January 27.
- Musei Capitolini: The Age of Equilibrium; an array of
ancient Roman statuary and decor highlighting the balance
achieved between Rome and its provinces between the reigns of
Trajan and Marcus Aurelius; third installment of the five-year
'Giorni di Roma' cycle ranging from the Republican Era to Late
- Scuderie del Quirinale: Vermeer, The Golden Age of
Dutch Art; 8 masterpieces by Delft genius plus 50 by
contemporaries; until January 20.
- Palazzo delle Esposizioni: Robert Doisneau, 240
photographs of Paris 1934-1991 by 'The Kiss' photographer; until
February 13.
- Octagonal Hall of the Baths of Diocletian: Modernity
through Antiquity - Italian Sculpture of the Thirties; until
January 1.
- Castel Sant'Angelo: The Popes Of Memory, seven
centuries of papal life through 130 masterpieces; until December
- Macro: Neon, The Luminous Material of Art, 70 works
by 50 artists over 80 years including Dan Flavin, Maurizio
Cattelan, Mario Merz, Alfredo Jarre, Pascale Marthine Tayou;
until November 4.
STRA - Villa Pisani: 'The Nobility of Work, Arts and Crafts
in Venetian Painting from the 1800s to the 1900s'; until
November 4.
TIVOLI - Villa d'Este: Magnificence at Table; the art of
Renaissance banquets; until November 4.
VENICE - Museo Correr: Francesco Guardi; 70 paintings and 70
sketches from major world museums; until January 6.
- Museo Archeologico Nazionale: Lynn Davis, Modern
View Of Ancient Treasures; series of large photos showing "the
epiphany of places sacred to humanity"; until January 6.
- Punto della Dogana, Francois Pinault Foundation:
'Praise of Doubt', 60 works by 20 contemporary giants including
Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Jeff Bauman, Adel Abdessemed,
Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Flavin, Thomas Schutte and Charles Ray;
until December 31.
VICENZA - Basilica Palladiana: From Raphael to Picasso, 100
works; until January 20.
photo: Emperor Caracalla, from the Caput Mundi show
© Riproduzione riservata
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(Image via JessHenry)
Gather 'round, Potato Nation.
After blasting off to a great start in our quest to raise money for Laura "angrylittlefeet" Nicholson's Hodgkin's Lymphoma-related medical costs, the funding drive has tapered off considerably. We're still ahead of schedule at $2,105 raised so far, but we need your help and generosity to jump-start this thing.
And look, not to prey on your sympathies or anything, but Laura ain't in the best shape right now. Two nights ago, she was admitted to the ER due to fluid in her lungs and around her heart. ("Still trying to hang tough guys. I'll let you all know as soon as i get paroled.")
Here's what I suggest. The next time you go out to a bar/club/concert/MMA event, buy your friend Laura a drink. And by that I mean, visit our "Fight for ALF" Indiegogo page and donate the cost of that drink to our cause, via PayPal or credit/debit card. Even if you can only afford a $2 PBR, Laura will eGuzzle that thing in spirit, with gratitude, from her hospital bed.
Thanks so much for listening, and please donate today if you haven't yet. After all, we would do the same for you.