As I have said more times than I can count, I hate the tropics. The reason for it is probably mostly about humidity and comfort, but it has mostly to do with my heritage. I was born in Fort Lauderdale while my mother was on home leave from her life in Venezuela. I like telling the story that she told her friends at the time that she knew she was having a boy and she wanted him to have the ability to be the President of the United States when he grew up. That’s funny on many levels. To begin with, she had no such concern apparently about my older sister, Barbara, who was born in Caracas eighteen months prior. That’s particularly funny for a woman who was spearheading a women’s movement that she didn’t even know existed yet. She had headed out to do development work for the Rockefellar Foundation in Venezuela in 1946 while Rosy the Riveter took off her shop apron and donned her suburban attire, but it never occurred to her that her daughter might want to be President one day? Anyway, as she headed off with her bulging belly for Florida, her Venezuelan friends told her that she was forestalling her son’s ability to be President of Venezuela. So wait…I could have been eligible to be the Nicholas Maduro of my generation, but gave that up to be eligible to be the Donald Trump of my day? And my sister could have been the Hillary Clinton of her day, but couldn’t? Sounds even stranger today than it might have back then.
I headed back from Florida in early 1954 to spend my first four years in the tropics of suburban Caracas. While I would like to say I remember this or that from those days, what I really have to rely on are a few old pictures of me and my sisters running around the verdant and tropical back yard, swimming in a stone pool that looks like its in a jungle setting, and playing in the sand on a humid beach somewhere. Perhaps my favorite picture is of me wearing my Likki-Likki suit, which is an all-white linen suit with a Neru collar that is popular among well-to-do Venezuelans and their young boys. I look right at home in the tropics with my tropical gear on. After about a year spent between Santa Monica, going to nursery school with Jerry Lewis’ kids (supposedly) and then an interregnum at my grandfather’s farm in Myers, New York, getting mildly sexually abused by the neighbor farm boy, I toddled off with Mom and my sisters to Turialba, Costa Rica, where I got a real taste of the tropics. Turialba is literally an inland tropical valley in central Costa Rica and this was in the days long before Costa Rica was any kind of tourist destination. It was just a backwater Central American place where people took siestas by necessity (remember, this was all before air conditioning) and waited for the daily afternoon rain to wash off the accumulated dust from the streets. We were lucky to have electricity in Turialba and my recreational activities included pulling down banana trees to eat the green bananas, watching the sugar cane harvest as the local kids rotted their teeth on chewing fresh cut cane, and occasionally hunting six-foot long jungle snakes that we would drag behind our bicycles on the gravel roads around our house. If there is a time and a place to lock in one’s dislike of the tropics, Turialba in the late 1950’s would be that time and place.
So, this morning, I am sitting on a balcony here in Key West, where we are spending a few days to see what this famous Mecca has to offer. I ate some Key Lime Pie last night and I’m betting I will have to try some conch fritters today, just to complete the experience. I note on the map that I am just 90 miles due north of Havana, a place I recall transiting through just before Castro took over in the late 1950’s. As we all know, time has virtually stood still in Cuba over these 65 years and life is now especially hard with the cessation of Venezuelan oil thanks to Donald Trump’s oil grab and intervention. This all brings back many memories to me this morning, but my tropical nightmares were also given another dimension in the last few days.
We have planned a motorcycle trip to Ecuador for next month. It is not my first choice and my tropical obsession was already making me twitch, but I agreed to go, braving the Andean altitude of Quito and then spending six days on motorcycle along the northwest coastline into Esmereldas. We were initially four couples on the trip and have since dwindled from eight to five with the drop out of one couple and one woman who was not up to the reports of drug cartel activities. We spent time discussing the risks and decided they were marginal, but manageable, as the cartel issues seemed mostly down by Guayaquil. The report of drug gangs putting people’s heads on stakes on the beach were a bit disconcerting, but we rationalized those away as sensationalism. Then, this week everything changed. The headline news reported that the Trump Administration has decided that attacking Iran and fucking with Venezuela while trying to steal Greenland from Denmark was not enough to distract everyone from the Epstein files. They have now reported that they will partner with Ecuador and take in troops to help stem the flow of drugs that run through Ecuador as they transit from Peru to Colombia. They will engage directly in the Ecuadorian drug cartel battles, starting later this month (we are supposed to fly into Quito on April 8). The U.S. State Department has kept Ecuador at a Level 2 risk for now, but has reassigned Levels 3 (Reconsider Travel) and Level 4 (Do NOT travel) to parts of the northwest of the country including Esmereldas, where coastal drug cartel activity is now reported to be quite heavy. Oops.
I can’t quite decide what bothers me most. Is it the altitude of the Andes (I have some untoward experiences there in my past)? Is it the tropics of the coastal region, where bananas flourish (lots of memories there)? Is it drug cartels and heads on stakes on the beach? Or is it the Trump Administration goons that are likely to not care about wayward and potentially stranded Americans (there are one million of them right now in the Middle East) as they reach for headlines to make Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump look strong? Actually, I think what worries me most is the fact that we Americans have enough trauma to worry about foreign travel these days as we are personas non grata pretty much everywhere…including Canada. So you think maybe some disgruntled drug lord might want to take some of that out on some motorcycling Americans they encounter on the road to Esmereldas? That brings a whole new meaning to my personal sense of tropic thunder.