Means of Communication

Means of Communication

The only three ways we really have to interact with Aniplant in Cuba are mail, email, and actual visits. And these often seem to be less reliable than I would have them. Mail between the US and Cuba is a somewhat iffy proposition.

Several months back I found a postal regulation covering mailing items to Cuba. Prior to that I had failed to get a letter or a package through to Nora. Starting at the beginning of this year, with a package of vet supplies and that postal regulation in hand, I marched into the local Post Office and accosted a woman behind one of the counters. She looked at the address on the package, saw the destination was Cuba, and began to tell me they couldn't accept the package. She pulled up several screens on the display at her desk and then repeated it couldn't go.

I asked for the Postmistress come over and to read the regulation I had found, and she looked briefly at it and then started pulling pages up on her little screen. "Nope, there's no way to send it," she said, and I was beginning to look bothered. I know hundreds of thousands of Floridians have relatives in Cuba, and they mail them packages all the time.

"Wait a minute," said Alice from the end counter; "I have something on Cuba here." (Alice is the only attendant in the Post Office I can trust to know what can and cannot be done.) She had pulled up a page on her screen, and the Postmistress walked down to her desk. Now the first attendant joined them to make a trio reading Alice's screen, and finally I was told it could be shipped after all. Since then I have sent a half dozen boxes this way, but the staff at the Post Office still look like they wish I would use another Post Office for my Cuba business.

Email is another story. There is no human behind a desk to argue with you, but when your server doesn't deliver everything you send, you wish there were a real person around. I've used Microsoft Outlook for years to send email without a problem, but it has failed completely recently, and it became so unreliable I had to stop using it altogether. Then I started to use Comcast's Smart Zone, but it only thought it was smart. Still, some of my sent items never arrived. I set up Hotmail and Gmail accounts, and now I'm using Windows Live Mail on a new computer.

Well I'd like to tell you that email problems are a thing of the past, but no such luck. All I can say is most stuff arrives here OK, so don't stop writing. Most of my outgoing works too, but every so often, my outgoing emails go into a black hole.

The final and best means of communication is to visit Cuba. I've been there 5 times, and I have another trip planned for late February. Cuba is such an interesting place that it's worth figuring out all the licenses, affiliations, approved agents and charter flights. Of course one little misstep, and they don't let you fly, and then you're no better of than you were with mail or email.

Les Inglis