WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Made it to Havana after all, on a full but fleet Aeromexico flight that landed in Cuba well after one in the morning. Cubana de Aviación is back on my shitlist, its agent in Havana insisting the airport people had to change my ticket, the airport people throwing their hands in the air, then pointing to the computer screen that showed access denied.

Landing at José Martí airport in and of itself does not actually end the anxiety of travel to Cuba. In some ways, this is where it reaches its apogee.

You see, Cuban authorities do not see all travelers equally. If you’re American or some other foreigner, you will breeze right through the document check point.

But it’s entirely possible that your baggage will be checked down to its minutiae. Two summers ago, when I first brought my wife here, the customs agent took a sealed bag of Bic pens, opened it, then proceeded to unscrew every single pen individually. An eternity later, she was allowed out on the streets once the pens were cleared of all possible wrongdoing.

Cubans, whether local or diasporic, don’t get off quite so easily.

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If things had gone according to plan, I’d be writing this from Havana, the first of what I hoped – and maybe still hope, I’m not sure now – would be a brief series of blogs from the city in which I was born.

But instead I’m writing from a dreary non-beach hotel in Cancun, Mexico, listening to the rain come down like a machine gun on the roof. The streets are inundated from the avalanche of water, a fact I discovered on my little jaunt downtown to the Cuban consulate.

See, supposedly, as a Cuban citizen with a duly recognized Cuban passport, a trip to Cuba shouldn’t be much of a trial. Sure, Cubans – like most Latin Americans – love a good bureaucracy, but between my own resigned experience and most of the bureaucrats’ own growing experience, it’s been getting better.

Normally, I travel to Cuba via Jamaica, on what I now think of as a great airline, Air Jamaica. I recall they used to have a champagne breakfast en route to Havana. But I digress … the poor suckers went bankrupt and got reorganized and, in the process, friends recommended the Cuba Network. It’s basically a German travel agent that administers business for Cubana de Aviación, the Cuban national airline.

Normally, I try to avoid Cubana.

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Barack Obama is now the last living Democrat whom anyone ever believed was progressive who’s not on board for same sex marriage.

Except, of course, that he used to be.

Back when he lived here in Chicago and went to dinner with his gay pals and celebrated their anniversaries and such.

Back around 1996, when he told Outlines (which later purchased and merged with Windy City Times): “I favor legalizing same sex marriage, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

Nothing ambiguous there.

But just days ago, in response to New York’s legalization of same sex marriage, all the president could muster was that it was “a good thing” it had happened.

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About 30 of Barack Obama’s neighbors gathered at the Hyde Park Treasure Island Wednesday night, deliberately ignoring his big Afghanistan speech, to take on a much bigger task. Huddled in the downstairs community room, they separated into four smaller groups to break down their project into manageable bites: phone banks, canvassing, signs and other such down-to-the-ground matters; one group came up with a slogan: “I’m in.”

It was the first meeting of the Obama Campaign Grassroots Planning Sessions, or the Obama GPS, in the president’s home neighborhood, just a few steps from the 55^th Street Walgreen’s where he was once a common late night cigarette buyer, back in the day when he smoked and went places alone.

Folks had found their way here because they had some grassroots tie to the 2008 election: they were former volunteers, or referred by a volunteer, or they’d taken the initiative to find the meeting on the campaign website or via some other means.

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Last weekend, I went to Iowa to perform and celebrate a heterosexual marriage. A friend of mine, on hearing the news, wrote me a quick note: “Are you already post-gay marriage?”

As my mother likes to point out, I used to be “against” marriage – or, more precisely, with marriage not available to me as an option, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time imagining what might have been. I signed on instead to the idea that if you love, you don’t need a piece of paper from City Hall.

Of course, marriage is more than love. It’s a contract, a deal to live a life together, openly; it’s also a tacit acceptance of membership into mainstream society – it says, we will abide by your rules in exchange for certain rights and protections.

Which is what brought me around, philosophically, to marriage, long before I signed on to it as a possibility for myself. If marriage is available to some – with its rights and protections – then it should be available to all. Isn’t that what democracy is about? (And, no, as sweet as Illinois civil unions have been, the state law is separate but equal – and not good enough.)

Some queer activists decry the prominence the issue has taken, derailing the focus on more radical societal change.

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Printers Row Lit Fest is over and done but, please, think of it as just the tip of Chicago’s literary iceberg. What we have here is a vibrant clan of writers, inventive publishers, and independent bookstores (e.g., Women and Children First, Book Cellar, Quimby’s, to name a few) and bars (e.g., the Green Mill, the Hideout, the Jeffrey Pub) that host slams, readings, and salons where we talk about what we’re reading and what we’re working on. 

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Book Expo America – the biggest publishing conference in the country – took place this week in New York, focused on digital like never before.

Among other things: Barnes & Noble unveiled its new Simple Touch Reader, Kobo debuted its super easy reader, Bloomsbury announced a digital imprint for reprints, Barry Eisler decided to sign with Amazon Books – perhaps the biggest news of all: Amazon announced that it had named Larry Kirschbaum, the former chief of Time-Warner Books and a 40 year industry vet, to head its publishing arm, including – get this!

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