{"id":1857,"date":"2013-01-28T09:26:16","date_gmt":"2013-01-28T14:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=1857"},"modified":"2013-01-28T09:42:42","modified_gmt":"2013-01-28T14:42:42","slug":"recent-offerings-including-cuba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=1857","title":{"rendered":"Recent Offerings, Including Cuba"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ofertas<\/a><\/p>\n

The february 2nd birthday of the sea goddess appproaches, and this nice offering\u00a0was seen recently on our local beach.<\/p>\n

Just after new year, we were fortunate to visit Cuba.<\/span>\u00a0<\/em> What a fascinating\u00a0place, and we had a memorable time.\u00a0\u00a0 Knowing things are starting to change there,\u00a0for some time we’ve\u00a0wanted to see this country before the pace of change accelerates.\u00a0 \u00a0I was only 12 in 1959 when\u00a0Fidel Castro’s communist government took power after six years of armed revolutionary struggle, and so have little memory of that except that my parents were concerned and became very stressed, along with the rest of the world, as international tensions heightened in the leadup to the Bay of Pigs and the Russian\/Cuban Missile crisis of the Kennedy era.\u00a0 As the economic blockades and sanctions tightened, Cuba became isolated from countries that were not communist, and the resulting isolation has had profound long term effects still highly apparent, so that\u00a0arriving there\u00a0today\u00a0gives the visitor a strong sense of stepping back in time – much\u00a0as\u00a0we experienced when we first started coming to Uruguay\u00a0just 4 years after the end of the last dictatorship here, only\u00a0much more pronounced.<\/p>\n

One fascinating thing we saw, which we might not\u00a0have\u00a0happened upon\u00a0or understood without our guide, was a small group of people down at the water’s edge who were meeting with a shaman (green headgear)\u00a0 He\u00a0conducted their offering ceremony to the water goddess.\u00a0\u00a0 The blue shopping bag you can see on the river’s edge just\u00a0in front of the lady with the white hat and shoes,\u00a0contained the same\u00a0corn, lentils and other grains, fruit, vegetables, fabric, bottle of scent and\u00a0cheap glittery jewellry\u00a0that form\u00a0similar offerings here.\u00a0 We didn’t like to go close with our\u00a0cameras, but stood back and watched them place things in the water and\u00a0wash\u00a0devotional objects\u00a0including some fabric.\u00a0\u00a0 From our guide it was quite clear that with some local differences, this is the same spiritual belief system\u00a0 – brought to the continent with the\u00a0African slave trade from early in the C16.<\/p>\n

\"Ofertas<\/a><\/p>\n

Some day soon I’m going to re-listen to the recorded book (in english translation) of\u00a0“Island Beneath The Sea’ by Isabel Allende<\/em><\/span>, a fabulous story of the early plantation\u00a0 era\u00a0of\u00a0the caribbean islands including Haiti and Cuba.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The february 2nd birthday of the sea goddess appproaches, and this nice offering\u00a0was seen recently on our local beach. Just after new year, we were fortunate to visit Cuba.\u00a0 What a fascinating\u00a0place, and we had a memorable time.\u00a0\u00a0 Knowing things are starting to change there,\u00a0for some time we’ve\u00a0wanted to see this country before the pace […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-tX","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1857"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1871,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1857\/revisions\/1871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}