Gift Baskets

Some people live their whole lives without finding a stray cat or dog on the front porch.  Those people aren't usually known as animal lovers.  I think it is impossible to be known as an animal lover in one's area without someone eventually deciding to leave an animal at your door clandestinely.

Granted such secretive "gifts may be motivated by a desire to help a homeless animal, but they are also a burden on the recipient, no matter how much he or she loves animals.  Most animal lovers have more than one companion animal—sometimes a few or several.  I'm not talking here about "hoarders" who are mentally ill and have far too many animals.  I'm talking about normal people with a special love for dogs and/or cats.  People like my dear departed mother-in-law and father-in-law who loved all animals and instilled that love into their daughter, my wife, Charlene.

Mary, my mother-in-law, usually had one dog and a few cats.  She and her husband, Ben, cared for all their animals, spent plenty of time with them, and often talked about them with friends.  But Mary and Ben were often victimized by others who might dump a cat or a few new kittens at their house.  Each time they found a box or basket at the back door, they had to care for the new arrival(s), feed them, and try to find a friend who might want to adopt it.  That meant they usually had a few more animals than they could reasonably support.

In our own case, although I can't prove they were dumped, over the years we have encountered several cats hanging around our house.  This happens with a frequency that leads me to suspect some of them may have been unrequested midnight deliveries.  As a result, we have averaged about 6 cats in our house over the 24 years we have lived here.  It was the same at our farm before we moved here, but the number of strays in that area was always large.

What's the alternative if you find a dog or cat?  Well, first decide if you have room in your life for a new companion.  Do you have any friends who might like to adopt a lifelong pal?  Also, consider a local shelter or refuge.  Yes they are usually full, and some must euthanize animals to control the number they keep, but, assuming the shelter practices humane euthanasia, that is neither cruel nor unfair in this imperfect world.  What does seem unfair is to leave an animal at someone's door just because that person loves animals.

I'm saying that when you encounter a homeless animal you should do everything possible to get it into a caring home.  Charlene's mantra is "Never be too busy to help an animal in distress."  And she lives by that Commandment without exception. But beyond animals found along the roads or in the occasional picture of a rescued dog in foster care that we fall in love with, we really don't need surreptitious additions to our menagerie.

Every animal adopted by loving, sensible people is one less animal at risk of injury, sickness, or starvation.

Les Inglis

Finca Vigia

To me, the best weather in the world is found when you go toward the equator until it gets too hot, and then you go straight up until you find cool breezes.  I learned this years ago when I passed a couple of weeks in Cuernavaca taking Spanish lessons.  Cuernavaca calls itself the city of eternal spring, and that's a pretty accurate description.  Even though it's squarely in the Earth's tropical zone, 6000 feet of elevation assures that Cuernavacans don't need air conditioning.

I have a friend, Lilian, who sited her home halfway up a mountain in the suburbs of San Jose, Costa Rica.  Weather there stays close to perfect due to a happy combination of latitude and elevation.  One night, while visiting there, we all decided to go to a restaurant near the mountain top.  I foolishly neglected to take a sweater along, and shivered through dinner, proving on that mountain you can be either too high or too low.

In 1939, Ernest Hemingway brought his third wife, Martha Gelhorn, to live with him in Cuba.  After settling in, Martha began to look for a permanent home. She must have known that in a hot place like Havana it would be a good idea to be as high up as you can get because after a search, she set her sights on a large finca situated on many acres on top of the highest hill on Havana's southern horizon.  It was in a little town called San Francisco de Paula, and Papa Hemingway agreed with Martha to make it their home.

Finca Vigia (literally, "farm with a view") is home to hundreds of species of tropical trees and plants surrounding a one-story, expansive home with huge rooms.  Soon after the purchase, new bookshelves in the house filled with books and the notes of Papa, who read even more than he wrote.  Papa's fourth wife, Mary, built him a four story tower with a writing studio on the top floor.  From that room you can see all of the metropolitan area of Havana and beyond out into the Florida Straits.  Papa felt the tower studio was too silent for him to write well and resumed writing standing at his typewriter in the house.  Even on the ground floor, one could see the Havana panorama laid out in the distance.

Many animal rights proponents would sneer at Hemingway, the hunter.  He hung heads of buffalo, gazelles, and antelope he had killed on safari on the finca walls, sometimes several in a room.  Yet the finca abounded with pet cats and dogs.  Papa would mourn the deaths of any of his dogs, and he was said to be even fonder of his cats than his dogs.  He established a little cemetery for some of the dogs.  Descendants of his dogs and cats still live on the finca grounds, fed and cared for by the attendants of the property, now a nationally protected museum.  Cuba has restored Finca Vigia to the showplace it must have been when Papa lived there.  No expense was spared in the restoration, and every item was cataloged, removed, stored, and eventually put back in the same place when it was necessary to construct a new roof for the house a few years ago.

Papa, I loved your writing, hated your hunting, marveled at your Cuban home, and snapped a photo of your little pet cemetery.

Les Inglis

Vegan Abroad

I've been trying to be a vegan for 25 years now.  That means eating no animal based foods.  It sounds simple, but in reality the western world is stacked against vegans. Restaurant menu selections by and large contain meat or eggs or some dairy product that vegans forswear.  Years ago Charlene and I became vegans at the same time, setting off a project of reading food package labels, seeking vegan recipes, and gambling on strange ethnic restaurants.  We learned to ask for special preparations when nothing vegan appeared on a menu.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining.  We long ago left the learning phase, and now we've found a number of suitable restaurants, and the meals we have at home are wonderful and cause no animal suffering.  It's when I travel I find the most mealtime challenges.  First of all I'm placed well back on the learning curve of finding a suitable restaurant.  When traveling, you take what you can get.  Also you don't know how adaptable the chef is if you are thinking about asking for a substitution.

But on my trips to Cuba, I have pretty well solved the problem of what to eat.  And the solution was easy—it was in the restaurant in my hotel.  Guests in most hotels are a captive audience it not being convenient to leave the hotel to grab the first meal of he day.  My hotel, the Presidente in the Vedado suburb, lays out a magnificent breakfast spread.  Its large dining room has a well stocked buffet line with just about anything you might like for breakfast.

The buffet line starts near a griddle cook who, on any given day, might be cooking pancakes, fried eggs or French toast.  It then progresses right to left past a steam table loaded with large pans of hash browns, home fries, even mashed potatoes, buscuits, cooked veggies like cabbage or onion, and hard boiled eggs.  You name it, and if it is eaten for breakfast, there will be a tray of it sometime during the week.

Beyond the end of the tray line and placed around the dining room are tables with cereal, oatmeal, fruit, breads, sweet rolls, and even sliced cheese.  To drink are coffee, hot chocolate and different fruit juices.  I have to pick and choose to stay vegan, and usually I'm pretty successful clinging to my dietary life style in the hotel dining room.

At lunch time we guess at restaurants and the selection isn't as grand for a vegan.  But fortunately, the beans and rice dishes I love are ubiquitous in Latin America, and  Italian and Chinese restaurants are a sure bet if you want to avoid meat.  In general when I'm going to Havana, I know I won't be hungry because of my culinary proclivities.

One feature of eating well in Cuba does bother me.  Being a tourist destination for Canada and Western Europe, Cuba supports a well developed system of supplying restaurants and hotels.  They offer nearly everything one might desire in the way of food, and the tourists consume it with gusto, whether vegans, vegetarians or animal eaters.  All this gustatory largesse is bought and paid for in CUC's, the Cuban convertible currency.

Ordinary citizens can't usually buy food priced in CUC's.  They can't afford it.  Their salaries are small and paid in the old Cuban Peso (moneda nacional or MN), worth a fraction of the CUC.  Ration books supplement the citizen's larder, but offer less than enough to last a month and a very limited selection of foods.  The typical family cook shops in food stands placed in the neighborhoods by farmers who haul their fruits and vegetables into town every day.  It is forbidden to raise beef for domestic consumption, but beef can be had for the tourist and anything else he might like.  The hapless citizen can see the rich life of the tourist, but he can't partake.

During World War II the Nazis occupied Norway and the domestic meat industry faded away, leaving the citizens an unappealing diet of plant foods and grains.  After four years of this meager fare, doctors discovered Norwegian citizens were showing lower rates of heart disease and cancer.  Norway's experience may suggest that Cuba's seemingly unfair dual currency system and the simple fare it forces Cubans to eat may well have a silver lining in improved health of the citizens.

Les Inglis