You're added, and welcome to the list.
Like others here, I'm from FL and warm blooded. I dig the FSP, but I'm kind of waiting for Castro to keel over and invade Cuba with the pissed off group of liberty lovers in Miami.
As a 10-year-old kid and son of a Caltex/Texaco refinery process engineer, my parents thought it would be a swell *learning experience* if I were to accompany him to his new three-year assignment at the Caltex Santa Clara refinery. Neither his position nor the Batista government lasted quite that long, and I did get quite an education, indeed, including firsthand observations of Marine small-unit tactics, my first experience of being shot toward if not quite directly at as the intended recipient, my first brush with the sudden death of another from gunfire, and a lexicon of several Cubano Spanish-language phrases not generrally taught in school courses.
We got shipped off to Miami before Fidel's New Year's Day victory parades, so I have some memories of that town that are not all that pleasant; I always liked Ft Lauderdale and Gainesville better in the south, Jax up north.
Neither do I make it a habit of celebrating the death of another; but when Fidel goes, I'll be breaking out the rum and cigars, if only figuratively, and putting my old Celia Cruz tapes on to dance to. Azucar!
And if I can make the trip from the Free State to Calle Ocho and thence to a Havana that's at least a little more free than previously, that too would be a happy time. There'll be at least as much work for the Cubanos who have to dismantle the machinery of Fidel's human-grinding regime as for the porcupines in our new home, but I hope we can offer at least some example of methodology and perhaps some other more real support to them in their efforts; may they go with God.
-archy-/-
