Now that there is some serious talk about the travel restrictions to Cuba being lifted, several CB fans have asked if I would post the piece I wrote for the Media General newspaper group upon my return from Havana and Santiago de Cuba last Spring. Hope you who missed it then will enjoy Sketches from Cuba.

Havana, Cuba

Hanoi Meneses, a 37 year old overnight bartender at the Hotel Raquel in Old Havana can’t wait for the freedom to travel outside Cuba. Like many in this island nation of just over 11 million, he’s hoping President Obama and the Castro brothers will make a deal. Soon.

But his first stop won’t be the U.S. He’ll be headed to Spain.

I’ll get around to Vichyssoise, my favorite, but Gazpacho is the first cold soup I can remember tasting. In the summer of 1970, armed with a U-Rail Pass, backpack and a copy of Europe on $5.00 A Day, I found myself in Sevilla, Spain, halfway through a life changing three month trek that ranged from Helsingborg, Sweden to Marakesh, Morocco and most of Western Europe in between. I recall the soup that night as a pale red, tangy thin and with garlicky croutons, not the chunky, brightly colored dish that’s so often served up by Food Network inspired home cooks and uninspired restaurants. There might have even been an ice cube involved as my two travelling buddies and I were eating on the cheap out of college student neccessity. And the delicious soup was a happy by-product of our visit because we had not travelled to Sevilla in search of Gazpacho. We were there on the trail of a group of French Canadian school teachers, all young women on a two week tour of Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands.

A brand new cookbook for only $2.99? Where am I? Kicking and screaming into the new millennium, amazed and excited…

Eight years ago at just about 4:15 in the afternoon, Patrick, our middle son, then 19, was killed in an automobile accident on I-20 just west of Atlanta in Douglasville, Georgia. He’d offered to drive after a concert so his two friends could sleep in the back of the Ford Explorer. But he fell asleep as well, the car rolled and it was over for him. The two kids in the back survived but he wasn’t so lucky. When Jim and I created this site we said we would write about almost anything, including food. I’ve been urged from time to time over the last eight years to write about what’s it’s like to lose a child. But I’ve never wanted to, because, frankly I was afraid; fearful of calling up good memories of Paddy Wagon only to be reminded that there would never be any others. I’m still scared but I am going to finally try, almost at exactly the same time of day that the Georgia State trouper called the house and gave the news to Michael, the youngest, mistaking a fourteen year old with a deep voice for an adult, that a Patrick Hamby had been killed in an accident.