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As your humble correspondent attests elsewhere, Poco Cabesa has a rich and varied history typified by bursts of frenetic energy that free-fall into total languor. It is hot, it is dusty, and it is hard to believe anyone would want to live here (except in tropical Medillo Grande).

But around the time that JFK and Nikita were nose-to-nose over that little slice of heaven known as Cuba, an earth-shattering event occurred... Something changed.

Innocent Fidel.
"Who? Me?"
Uncomfortable Nikita.
Victim of tight shoes.
Too busy for love.
"Tell her I've got a country to run and take a message."
Comrade Joe the First (whose given name is Joseph Obologo Feinman Forneaux) is the progeny of a barmaid originally from French Guiana by way of Savannah, Georgia, and a marine supplies salesman from Natchez named Virgil.
A cog in the great wheel of life.
Virgil was basically a happy fellow, but hard times made him hard.

Ruins of a boomtown past.
Abandoned guano-packing factory.

Desperate Virgil passed through Poco Cabesa during the Great Depression, looked around, and stayed just long enough to expand its gene pool and leave behind a few brochures.

Despite the island's isolation, things like this did happen occasionally.

Two years later Virgil fell asleep at the wheel of a "borrowed" Chevrolet outside Clearwater, Florida, and drove into a canal and drowned -- proving that the Big Amigo does sometimes work in mysterious ways.

What's important about all this is the fact that Virgil and DeeDee's son, Joe, grew up and did... well, something. Albeit a bit involuntarily.

Like his peers, Joe Forneaux came of age during the waning hours of the post-guano aristocracy -- referred to by the island's only historian as "The Days of Torpor" -- and spent his days and nights sleeping, singing, drinking, and borrowing against next month's Trust check.

(In 1939, Hyman's beneficence had been expanded by the trustees of the Poco Cabesa Limited trust to include more Poco Cabesans after a three day temperance strike by the island's very own mahatma, Sing Ree Smith.)

It was Joe's mighty thirst and lustrous baritone tremolo that earned him the nickname, El Negro Dino - the black Dean Martin -- and his sparkling gray eyes caused many a young female to swoon.

Although Joe and his mates were inspired by the socialist revolutionary tides sweeping the world in the 1950's, in so far as taking action went, it was really just a topic of conversation to while away the hours between Trust checks.

The dram man.
Rum deliveryman, circa 1952
 
 
Dino
Joe's idol.
 
 
"Hey! That was a Schwinn!"
Someone stole Che's bicycle when he visited Poco Cabesa as a boy.
 
Lovely ladies of 1954 Havana.
The Caribbean ladies just loved young Joe.
 
 
Nikita's roman candles.
Nikita sends his love.
 
 
"I dare ya to put your tongue on this here pipe."
Ex-Prime Minister in exile in New Ulm, Minnesota.

 

Joe's life changed forever one stormy night when he interrupted his extemporaneous one-man street staging of "Oklahoma" to break into the home of the island's Prime Minister looking for something to eat or anything not nailed down.

The terrified, chinless P.M. saw the size of Joe's walking stick, misunderstood Joe's intentions, and surrendered the government to his dazed intruder. Drunk but not stupid, Joe immediately accepted the charge.

When Joe sobered enough to respond to electro-chemical stimulation of his gray-matter he started thinking. Then he started doing.

First thing, Joe's entire family went on the public payroll. At this, most of the island's elite migrated to Boca Raton or St. Paul, Minnesota. Fortunately for Joe, the Cuban Missile Crisis had the world ducking and covering like the gallery at a Gerald R. Ford Pro-Am golf tournament.

 
The collective sigh of relief when Nikita decided one less U.S. missile in Turkey was worth two of his in Havana meant that Poco Cabesa's political sea-change went largely unnoticed. Not that anyone was paying attention.

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The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it.
-- Mr. Twain
 
 
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