Perhaps because his early Florida ancestors lived under Spanish rule, and remembering his own proximity to Latin culture in Tampa, the Feral Poet has always had a thing about Cuba.  We cite the following case:

New Pines

In green glistening needles emerging
from the blackened aftermath of fire,
the Cuban patriot Marti’, passing in a train,
saw a metaphor of revolution,
tuned it, tweaked it, built a manifesto
and rallied the cigar workers of Tampa
to stick it to the Spaniards.
We are the new pines, he said, Pinos Nuevos,
rising from the ashes of oppression.
Marti was a poet and should have known better.
Yes, the things of the earth always recover,
green, slick, and tender, from calamity,
but it was the sun suddenly breaking through
a clearing in the woods, the yellow grass
against new growth in unexpected light
that dazzled, that’s all.  You want it
always to be more; you look for meaning
in the pattern of rain on the window
when the simple sound of thunder will do.
Lightning fires the coolest imagination.
Marti’ was killed on the road to Havana
beside a field of sugarcane and never saw
a bad thing just get worse.

* * *

Air Waves

Havana was virtually next door
when I pressed the small
transistor set to my ear,
something akin to placing
a glass against the wall
to eavesdrop on the neighbors.
The wall between was the Gulf of Mexico,
vast, black, and horizontal
conductor of Spanish,
the apartment alive
with rhythms, static, and rapid
cigar-mellowed monologues.
I slept with the radio between my ear and pillow,
and when I woke in the night,
two, three times, it was
to the somehow comforting sounds
of that continuous party.
I dreamed Havana, the Malecon,
the Acacia trees in rain,
someone saying, hey,
turn up the radio.

And then the music stopped.
not long, a few hours,
one night at most.  There was
the great silence of the Gulf
between us, tentative, uncertain.
And when my neighbors spoke again
the voice was a strident harangue,
as if some guest, lampshade on head,
turned mean with drink,
had silenced all the revelers
with what was really wrong
inside him: the Gulf between us.
When again the music played
it was sad.  I remember
wondering about that.  It was like
me telling you, “I am in pain;”
and you hearing, “I want to hurt you.”
All my life I have been dreaming
Havana, the Malecon,
the Acacia trees in rain,
someone saying, hey,
turn up the radio.

* * *