As if one coal plant -Big Stone I- next to beautiful, trophy-walleye-producing Big Stone Lake on the Minnesota – South Dakota border is not enough. Does Otter Tail Power really think it can bring on Big Stone II without a battle? The opposition is growing locally against building more coal plants or burning more coal. Besides, we have WIND here on the Minnesota - South Dakota border (video by American Green TV ) not coal. We like our water clean - not toxic. Get the low down of what lies ahead nationally in "Stopping Coal in Its Tracks" by Ted Nace (Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Orion Magazine). The lines are being drawn. Grind coffee - not coal...

Any wonder folks up here like to head down Cuba way? Well if we're in the middle of winter...you get the point! But, lots of other reasons too. We could have a good thing going, Cuba and the Northern Plains states, tourism wise, but trade wise too. Older generation Cubans remember vividly, nostalgically, almost reverently -- what it was like to bite into a fresh, deep red, crisp apple coming from the U.S.A. Wow, the sighs they would give, wondering if ever that time would come again, open trade with the U.S. When I heard them talking about that, I thought hmmmm, we grow Apples in Minnesota...for over 24 years I could go out the farmhouse door, across the yard and pick apples by the bushel...never really thinking how special it was. If Nixon's Ping-Pong diplomacy could end in 1971 the information blockade against the People's Republic of China in place since the Communist takeover in 1949, why couldn't 'Apple Diplomacy' do the same for Cuba-U.S. relations? But just in case an improvement in diplomatic relations does not come any time soon, head to Victor's 1959 Cafe

The distance between Cuba and the United States extends far beyond the Florida Straits, at least ideologically. ‘Govies’ (government officials) on both sides want their citizens to believe that 'the other' is 'the enemy.' 'The Cuba-U.S. policy arena, dominated by men, has failed to resolve ideological differences, while Cuban women and children continue to suffer excessively under the more than half-century U.S. called 'embargo' - Cubans call blockade as voted on repeatedly in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Now that Castro has stepped down, will we see change on either side of the Florida Straits? Vaclav Havel would like to believe we could see "The Art of the Impossible." All I know is that from my first trip to Cuba in 1999 with Medaid, to the 60 days I traveled across the island the summer of 2002 with Student Project for Amity Among Nations (SPAN) what I especially recall is the camaraderie. Running a close second would be the flourishing arts and music...making you want to dance, yes! Cuban Art such as Gallery 106 and Casa Cubana, Priceless Houses by Pablo H - Proyecto Horizontal –  see “El Castigo de la vida II” (the punishment of life) (below) just waiting for outside discovery. Now if only the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets and Control would not make it so, so difficult to travel there...

photos by maryjo-s