I live in a cul-de-sac in the Marylandian suburbs of Washington, DC.  In order to drive from my house to the main street in the area, I have to drive three quarters of a mile and take three right turns in my neighborhood's streets.

The neighborhood itself is made up of single family homes - each one with its own driveway and two-car garage.  Assuming that most people have their garage full of junk, there's ample space in their driveways for two cars to park and be off the street.

One of the planet's smartest minds is Malcolm Gladwell, who has eloquently discussed the 10,000 hour rule for becoming an expert at anything. He discussed this in his amazing book “Outliers.” As Gladwell tells it, the rule goes like this: 

It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials.

I've somewhat adapted the rule to gather 10,000 points of data for an interesting experiment.  Here how it started.

I moved into this house in 2009.  Soon afterwards I started to notice an interesting and baffling series of curious events whenever I drove away from my house towards any destination (or the return trip) - for the first 3/4 of a mile they're nearly always the same. Or when I enter the same entry point (from the main street towards my house) and drive home. In other words, a round trip.

The streets leading to the neighborhood exit are mostly clear of parked cars, as nearly every house parks in their own driveways.  Households with more that two cars do often park on the street, as do visitors, etc.  Whenever a vehicle is parked on the neighborhood streets, it essentially blocks that side of the street, forcing any traffic on that side of the street to have to use the oncoming/other side of the street to continue on.

The neighborhood also has a lot of "regular" street walkers (not hookers), dog walkers, and runners, and car traffic is generally very light.

Vehicular traffic is generally very light in the neighborhood - usually only the people who live there, delivery vehicles, visitors, and garbage and/or recycling trucks.

A few months after we moved in, I noticed that there seemed to be a higher incidence of the following scenario... that one would expect statistically.

The scenario is that the incidence of two oncoming vehicles "meeting" at the spot where one side of the road is blocked by a parked car appeared to be weirdly tilted towards a Murphian dictate of events.  

Add to that the odds of the random dog walker, stroller or runner, a parked car and two oncoming vehicles meeting at precisely the worst spot on the streets from my house to the neighborhood exit, and my curiosity was kindled.

And thus, I started to keep a log in my car - using a calendar book - to record these instances of two cars, driving towards each other, meeting at the narrowest space created by a third car parked on the street.

A few days ago, my 10 thousandth drive took place - about 12 years or so of trips, usually at random times of the day or night, and 12 yearly calendars full of data.

Of those 10,000 data points the following was recorded:

• No oncoming traffic was met whenever a parked car blocked one side of the road 4,611 times
• An oncoming car was met at the blocked spot (forcing one car to stop and wait for the other car to pass) 5, 389 times
• Of that 5, 389 times, 2, 673 times, not only where there two cars meeting at the "blocked" spot, but there were also either walkers, runners or dog walkers in the same narrow area - thus making driving maneuvers even more complicated.

54% of the time that I drove from/to my home I came across an oncoming vehicle at precisely the one spot (in an otherwise generally open street) where there was a third car blocking one side of the road!

Under what statistical scenario does that make sense when there are .75 of a mile of streets which are 98% empty of parked cars (on the street)?

Murphy!!!!!!! 

The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards, a juried art competition produced by the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, announced the 2022 prize winners during last night’s awards reception. 

WonJung Choi and Carol Trawick

WonJung Choi of Richmond, VA was awarded the prestigious “Best in Show” title and received the $10,000 top prize. Caryn Martin from Baltimore, MD was named second place and given $2,000; Robert Martin from Staunton, VA was bestowed third place and received $1,000; and Evie Metz from Henrico, VA was awarded the Young Artist Award and received $1,000.

WonJung Choi, was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Her series of sculptures, paintings, drawings, and installation explores the power of her every changing identity in the making. She’s studied the process of mutation and evolution undertaken by diverse organisms to adapt to their current surroundings reflecting her hybrid identity through the continuous interactions between herself, contemporary culture and society. Choi received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design and Artists Alliance Inc. (AAI) in New York as well as a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.

2022 Trawick Prize Finalists

MK Bailey, Washington, D.C.

WonJung Choi, Richmond, VA

Marcia Haffmans, Richmond, VA

Ali Kaeini, Richmond, VA

Caryn Martin, Baltimore, MD

Robert Mertens, Staunton, VA

Evie Metz, Henrico, VA

Judith Pratt, Orange, VA

Entries were juried by Alexis Assam, Regenia A. Perry, Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VFMA); Thomas James, Visual Arts Curator at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD; and Maria del Carmen Montoya, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Spatial Practices, Director of Graduate Studies, M.F.A. in Fine Arts and Social Practice, Studio Arts Program.

Founded by Carol Trawick in 2003, the regional competition is one of the largest prizes to annually honor visual artists. Ms. Trawick, a longtime community activist in downtown Bethesda, also established the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2005. She has served as the Chair of the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, Bethesda Urban Partnership, Strathmore and the Maryland State Arts Council. She founded the Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation in 2007 to assist health and human services and arts non-profits in Montgomery County, MD. The Foundation has awarded grants to more than 90 nonprofits in Montgomery County and funds the annual Trawick Prize and the Bethesda Painting Awards.

To date, The Trawick Prize has awarded more than $260,000 in prize monies and has exhibited the work of more than 160 regional artists.

The work of the finalists will be on exhibit at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, until October 2. Gallery hours for the duration of the exhibit will be Thursday-Sunday, 12 – 5pm.

Chief Executive Officer, International Arts & Artists 

International Arts & Artist's Board of Trustees is immediately seeking a dynamic, skilled, experienced leader to become IA&A's next President and Chief Executive Officer when our founder David Furchgott retires this fall.

Ideal candidates will have:

• A passion for IA&A’s mission of increasing cross-cultural understanding through the arts.
• 10+ years appropriate professional experience, including at least five years in an executive role.
• Substantive connections in the arts and strong relationships with national & international arts leaders.
• A record of success in the growth of her/his past endeavors. • A deep understanding of, and a driving commitment to, the arts and cultural exchange.
• A history of effective leadership and the ability to motivate and inspire a small but talented team.
• Entrepreneurial instincts with strong business acumen with a drive for results, and a track record in building new relationships and developing new programs.
• Track record in building revenue earned and charitable revenue streams. Compensation ranging from $120,000 to $145,000 plus health insurance and other benefits, and reasonable moving expense reimbursement (depending upon experience).

To learn more about this great opportunity, download the full job description. To apply visit DRi Waterstone.

IA&A at Hillyer | 9 Hillyer Ct, NW, Washington, DC 20008

(202) 338-0680 | | atHillyer.org

When I first wrote the below post a few years ago, I then printed it and mailed it to Nikole Hannah-Jones.... hopefully she's better educated now, although dogma is a pretty harsh mistress.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of that paper's controversial 1619 Project recently showed a spectacular lack of background knowledge on the Cuban dictatorship's well-documented racist history and abuses of its black population by her statement that “If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” and then proceeding to cite socialism as her reason to make the statement.

Ms. Hannah-Jones' rosy-eyed view of the Marxist dictatorship's oppression of its citizens, especially its Black citizens not only reveals loads about her own political leanings, but also serves as a brilliant example of suspicious lack of research skills about a subject as widely discussed as Cuba's oppressive and racist government.

Had Ms. Hannah-Jones - who visited Cuba in 2008 - bothered to look past her clear admiration for the Marxist government, and bothered to take a quick tour of the facts, she would have discovered that much has been written and documented about racism in Cuba, and it was even one of the earliest subjects addressed by the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson upon his arrival to the DMV a few decades ago from his various Latin American postings.In his article a couple of decades ago, Cuba Begins to Answer Its Race Question, Robinson, also clearly and openly a very extreme left-wing oriented writer, tried hard to find excuses for the dictatorship, but nonetheless admits that:

Academics say that black Cubans are failing to earn university degrees in proportion to their numbers--a situation to which Castro has alluded publicly. The upper echelons of the government remain disproportionately white, despite the emergence of several rising black stars. And while perceptions are difficult to quantify, much less prove true or false, many black Cubans are convinced that they are much less likely than whites to land good jobs--and much more likely to be hassled by police on the street, like Cano's husband, in a Cuban version of "racial profiling."

But how about some Cubans inside Cuba discussing the subject?

In primary [Cuban] education, skin color is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention color in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.

Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.

Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States

A lot of hopes have been pinned by many people (who know little about Cuba and the repressive nature of its government) on President Obama's monumental decision to re-establish diplomatic relations with the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:

...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."

Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana

And thus, it is curious to me that in his attempt to re-establish diplomatic ties, our socially conscious President (and his cadre of advisors) back then also - like Ms. Hannah-Jones - appeared to know little or nothing about the way that Afro-Cuban citizens are treated in their own country.

In reference to the President's visit to Cuba, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Connecticut and a scholar at Harvard University, and writing in Ms. Hannah-Jones own newspaper, noted in the New York Times that  

“The images of the meetings, the agreements, they’re all shameful for many black Cubans — I’m including myself in this — because it’s difficult to feel represented.”

Was the projected flow of American tourists expected to help Black Cubans in a pre-COVID Cuba? Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban expert in Afro-Cuban identity, race and literature based out of Havana wrote in his 2013 New York Times article that:

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

Zurbano was subsequently punished by his Marxist government for daring to express that opinion on the pages of Ms. Hannah-Jones employing newspaper. Because that's how Communists roll!

That "not long ago" is still the case, as anyone who has been to Cuba recently can testify to and which Ms. Hannah-Jones could clearly see during her 2008 visit to the island - it is very rare to see a black face in any of Havana's "tourist only" hotels and nearby beaches. Discussing those lucrative jobs, Yusimí Rodríguez López, an Afro-Cuban independent journalist, said in a 2016 New York Times article that there were job listings in Revolico — sometimes called Cuba’s underground Craigslist — “where they say they only want whites.”

In the same NYT article we read:

“They talk a lot here about discrimination against blacks in the United States. What about here?” said Manuel Valier Figueroa, 50, an actor, who was in the park on Monday. “If there’s a dance competition, they’re going to choose the woman who is fair-skinned with light, good hair. If there’s a tourism job, the same.”

He added: “Why are there no blacks managing hotels? You don’t see any blacks working as chefs in hotels, but you see them as janitors and porters. They get the inferior jobs.”

One would hope that Ms. Hannah-Jones' exploration of Cuba, a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public, could at least have educated her on the disturbing status of blacks in their own island nation.

Fact: Twice as many African slaves were brought to Cuba than to the United States... twice!

And what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how often historically and socially clueless American academics, journalists, activists, etc. make spectacularly ignorant statements - as Ms. Hannah-Jones did - about the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships (a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own Black population) without even mentioning the issue of racism... or is Ms. Hannah-Jones' case praising the socialist dictatorship!

Ms. Hannah-Jones should learn about the Cuban version of the 1619 Project, which in Cuba's case would have been called the 1511 Project, as that was when Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out from Hispaniola to establish the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, and brought the first African slaves to the island.

Since then and to its present day, Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.

Cuba even had its own race war.

General Antonio Maceo, known as "the Bronze Titan." He was the true warrior leader of the Cuban Wars of Liberation. His father was white of French ancestry; his mother was black, of Dominican ancestry. After the first Cuban Liberation War ended in a truce with Spain, some say that Maceo was so disillusioned with the realities of life in Cuba as a black man, that he left Cuba and lived in Panama, until he was called back to lead the Cuban rebels in a new rebellion in 1895. He returned to Cuba and was killed in battle against the Spanish Army in 1896.

In 1912, Black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.

As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically and although 65% of Cubans self-identify as white in recent censuses, many experts estimate that today the island is actually about 60% black or biracial.

But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd. 

In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population."

"I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."

Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana

While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism on paper, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper. They would have told Ms. Hannah-Jones during her visit to Cuba in 2008 - but she probably didn't notice that nearly everywhere that she visited, the presence of the Cuban government was not far, and people fear that presence.

The harsh Cuban reality today, Black Cubans will tell you, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.

Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.

Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban Parliament

Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants' atrocities should be dealt with in silence? -- especially in view of our nation's own racial history and what Ms. Hannah-Jones so expeditiously attempted to document in her controversial 1619 Project? 

We have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight.

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.

What would she say if she had discovered the "permanent and shameful police harassment of young Cubans of African descent in our streets..." as noted by Leonardo Calvo Cardenas, the Cuban National Vice-Coordinador of the Citizens' Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR))?

As Omar López Montenegro, the Black Cuban director of Human Rights for the Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana recently stated in the Panama Post:

The situation for Black Cubans worsened after Castro assumed power... even though there were always racial issues, before Castro in Cuba there had been Black governors, a President of the Senate, Martín Morua Delgado, and also many Congressmen such as the labor leader Jesús Menéndez, a member of the Socialist Party. 

When Cuba became a Communist dictatorship, and democracy was lost, the advance of Black Cubans came to a halt. 

And this is what makes it even more maddening to a pedantic Virgo like me -- when even the lackeys of the Cuban dictatorship like Alarcon Quesada and Black voices from within the brutalized island speak out, knowing that there will be consequences - as Zurbano discovered after his New York Times opinion piece - why does Ms. Hannah-Jones live in this rose-colored atmosphere where she perceives the poor jailed island as an example of equality?

Does she know that even though about 60% of Cubans are Black or brown, that 94.2% of the students at the University of Havana are white?  Is she aware - as evidenced by the hundreds of videos one can see at #SOSCuba, that the epicenters of the demonstrations in most Cuban cities during this historic uprising are in the Black neighborhoods? Does she know about Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a young Black Cuban from La Güinera who was arrested and then murdered by the Cuban police? When notified that her son was dead, his mother committed suicide. Does she know that her own newspaper, The New York Times documented a few years ago how Black Cubans are routinely discriminated in Cuba? Is she aware that while 48% of white Cubans have an annual income of less that $3,000 USD, a whooping 95% of Black Cubans fall below that incredible line?

By the way... In 1959 Cuba had the third-highest per capita income in Latin America, exceeded only by Argentina and Venezuela (around $550 a year back then which is about $5,170 in today's dollars). In 1959 that was also higher than Italy, Japan, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and every single Eastern European nation in the Soviet bloc.

Nikole Hannah-Jones now has an opportunity to clear the air, clear her mind, clear her perception and gain instant respect from Cubans of all races. All she has to say is that she's learned a lot since the statements that she made in 2019 surfaced during the current Cuban uprising - which as video evidence clearly shows, appears to involve Cubans of all races - and state that she was wrong and is now aware of the sorry and sad state of the Marxist government's deeply rooted racism.

Boom! Case closed.

I live in a cul-de-sac in the Marylandian suburbs of Washington, DC.  In order to drive from my house to the main street in the area, I have to drive three quarters of a mile and take three right turns in my neighborhood's streets.

The neighborhood itself is made up of single family homes - each one with its own driveway and two-car garage.  Assuming that most people have their garage full of junk, there's ample space in their driveways for two cars to park and be off the street.

One of the planet's smartest minds is Malcolm Gladwell, who has eloquently discussed the 10,000 hour rule for becoming an expert at anything. He discussed this in his amazing book “Outliers.” As Gladwell tells it, the rule goes like this: 

It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials.

I've somewhat adapted the rule to gather 10,000 points of data for an interesting experiment.  Here how it started.

I moved into this house in 2009.  Soon afterwards I started to notice an interesting and baffling series of curious events whenever I drove away from my house towards any destination (or the return trip) - for the first 3/4 of a mile they're nearly always the same. Or when I enter the same entry point (from the main street towards my house) and drive home. In other words, a round trip.

The streets leading to the neighborhood exit are mostly clear of parked cars, as nearly every house parks in their own driveways.  Households with more that two cars do often park on the street, as do visitors, etc.  Whenever a vehicle is parked on the neighborhood streets, it essentially blocks that side of the street, forcing any traffic on that side of the street to have to use the oncoming/other side of the street to continue on.

The neighborhood also has a lot of "regular" street walkers (not hookers), dog walkers, and runners, and car traffic is generally very light.

Vehicular traffic is generally very light in the neighborhood - usually only the people who live there, delivery vehicles, visitors, and garbage and/or recycling trucks.

A few months after we moved in, I noticed that there seemed to be a higher incidence of the following scenario... that one would expect statistically.

The scenario is that the incidence of two oncoming vehicles "meeting" at the spot where one side of the road is blocked by a parked car appeared to be weirdly tilted towards a Murphian dictate of events.  

Add to that the odds of the random dog walker, stroller or runner, a parked car and two oncoming vehicles meeting at precisely the worst spot on the streets from my house to the neighborhood exit, and my curiosity was kindled.

And thus, I started to keep a log in my car - using a calendar book - to record these instances of two cars, driving towards each other, meeting at the narrowest space created by a third car parked on the street.

A few days ago, my 10 thousandth drive took place - about 12 years or so of trips, usually at random times of the day or night, and 12 yearly calendars full of data.

Of those 10,000 data points the following was recorded:

• No oncoming traffic was met whenever a parked car blocked one side of the road 4,611 times
• An oncoming car was met at the blocked spot (forcing one car to stop and wait for the other car to pass) 5, 389 times
• Of that 5, 389 times, 2, 673 times, not only where there two cars meeting at the "blocked" spot, but there were also either walkers, runners or dog walkers in the same narrow area - thus making driving maneuvers even more complicated.

54% of the time that I drove from/to my home I came across an oncoming vehicle at precisely the one spot (in an otherwise generally open street) where there was a third car blocking one side of the road!

Under what statistical scenario does that make sense when there are .75 of a mile of streets which are 98% empty of parked cars (on the street)?

Murphy!!!!!!! 

The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards, a juried art competition produced by the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, announced the 2022 prize winners during last night’s awards reception. 

WonJung Choi and Carol Trawick

WonJung Choi of Richmond, VA was awarded the prestigious “Best in Show” title and received the $10,000 top prize. Caryn Martin from Baltimore, MD was named second place and given $2,000; Robert Martin from Staunton, VA was bestowed third place and received $1,000; and Evie Metz from Henrico, VA was awarded the Young Artist Award and received $1,000.

WonJung Choi, was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Her series of sculptures, paintings, drawings, and installation explores the power of her every changing identity in the making. She’s studied the process of mutation and evolution undertaken by diverse organisms to adapt to their current surroundings reflecting her hybrid identity through the continuous interactions between herself, contemporary culture and society. Choi received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design and Artists Alliance Inc. (AAI) in New York as well as a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.

2022 Trawick Prize Finalists

MK Bailey, Washington, D.C.

WonJung Choi, Richmond, VA

Marcia Haffmans, Richmond, VA

Ali Kaeini, Richmond, VA

Caryn Martin, Baltimore, MD

Robert Mertens, Staunton, VA

Evie Metz, Henrico, VA

Judith Pratt, Orange, VA

Entries were juried by Alexis Assam, Regenia A. Perry, Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VFMA); Thomas James, Visual Arts Curator at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD; and Maria del Carmen Montoya, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Spatial Practices, Director of Graduate Studies, M.F.A. in Fine Arts and Social Practice, Studio Arts Program.

Founded by Carol Trawick in 2003, the regional competition is one of the largest prizes to annually honor visual artists. Ms. Trawick, a longtime community activist in downtown Bethesda, also established the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2005. She has served as the Chair of the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, Bethesda Urban Partnership, Strathmore and the Maryland State Arts Council. She founded the Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation in 2007 to assist health and human services and arts non-profits in Montgomery County, MD. The Foundation has awarded grants to more than 90 nonprofits in Montgomery County and funds the annual Trawick Prize and the Bethesda Painting Awards.

To date, The Trawick Prize has awarded more than $260,000 in prize monies and has exhibited the work of more than 160 regional artists.

The work of the finalists will be on exhibit at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, until October 2. Gallery hours for the duration of the exhibit will be Thursday-Sunday, 12 – 5pm.

Chief Executive Officer, International Arts & Artists 

International Arts & Artist's Board of Trustees is immediately seeking a dynamic, skilled, experienced leader to become IA&A's next President and Chief Executive Officer when our founder David Furchgott retires this fall.

Ideal candidates will have:

• A passion for IA&A’s mission of increasing cross-cultural understanding through the arts.
• 10+ years appropriate professional experience, including at least five years in an executive role.
• Substantive connections in the arts and strong relationships with national & international arts leaders.
• A record of success in the growth of her/his past endeavors. • A deep understanding of, and a driving commitment to, the arts and cultural exchange.
• A history of effective leadership and the ability to motivate and inspire a small but talented team.
• Entrepreneurial instincts with strong business acumen with a drive for results, and a track record in building new relationships and developing new programs.
• Track record in building revenue earned and charitable revenue streams. Compensation ranging from $120,000 to $145,000 plus health insurance and other benefits, and reasonable moving expense reimbursement (depending upon experience).

To learn more about this great opportunity, download the full job description. To apply visit DRi Waterstone.

IA&A at Hillyer | 9 Hillyer Ct, NW, Washington, DC 20008

(202) 338-0680 | | atHillyer.org

When I first wrote the below post a few years ago, I then printed it and mailed it to Nikole Hannah-Jones.... hopefully she's better educated now, although dogma is a pretty harsh mistress.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of that paper's controversial 1619 Project recently showed a spectacular lack of background knowledge on the Cuban dictatorship's well-documented racist history and abuses of its black population by her statement that “If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” and then proceeding to cite socialism as her reason to make the statement.

Ms. Hannah-Jones' rosy-eyed view of the Marxist dictatorship's oppression of its citizens, especially its Black citizens not only reveals loads about her own political leanings, but also serves as a brilliant example of suspicious lack of research skills about a subject as widely discussed as Cuba's oppressive and racist government.

Had Ms. Hannah-Jones - who visited Cuba in 2008 - bothered to look past her clear admiration for the Marxist government, and bothered to take a quick tour of the facts, she would have discovered that much has been written and documented about racism in Cuba, and it was even one of the earliest subjects addressed by the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson upon his arrival to the DMV a few decades ago from his various Latin American postings.In his article a couple of decades ago, Cuba Begins to Answer Its Race Question, Robinson, also clearly and openly a very extreme left-wing oriented writer, tried hard to find excuses for the dictatorship, but nonetheless admits that:

Academics say that black Cubans are failing to earn university degrees in proportion to their numbers--a situation to which Castro has alluded publicly. The upper echelons of the government remain disproportionately white, despite the emergence of several rising black stars. And while perceptions are difficult to quantify, much less prove true or false, many black Cubans are convinced that they are much less likely than whites to land good jobs--and much more likely to be hassled by police on the street, like Cano's husband, in a Cuban version of "racial profiling."

But how about some Cubans inside Cuba discussing the subject?

In primary [Cuban] education, skin color is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention color in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.

Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.

Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States

A lot of hopes have been pinned by many people (who know little about Cuba and the repressive nature of its government) on President Obama's monumental decision to re-establish diplomatic relations with the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:

...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."

Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana

And thus, it is curious to me that in his attempt to re-establish diplomatic ties, our socially conscious President (and his cadre of advisors) back then also - like Ms. Hannah-Jones - appeared to know little or nothing about the way that Afro-Cuban citizens are treated in their own country.

In reference to the President's visit to Cuba, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Connecticut and a scholar at Harvard University, and writing in Ms. Hannah-Jones own newspaper, noted in the New York Times that  

“The images of the meetings, the agreements, they’re all shameful for many black Cubans — I’m including myself in this — because it’s difficult to feel represented.”

Was the projected flow of American tourists expected to help Black Cubans in a pre-COVID Cuba? Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban expert in Afro-Cuban identity, race and literature based out of Havana wrote in his 2013 New York Times article that:

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

Zurbano was subsequently punished by his Marxist government for daring to express that opinion on the pages of Ms. Hannah-Jones employing newspaper. Because that's how Communists roll!

That "not long ago" is still the case, as anyone who has been to Cuba recently can testify to and which Ms. Hannah-Jones could clearly see during her 2008 visit to the island - it is very rare to see a black face in any of Havana's "tourist only" hotels and nearby beaches. Discussing those lucrative jobs, Yusimí Rodríguez López, an Afro-Cuban independent journalist, said in a 2016 New York Times article that there were job listings in Revolico — sometimes called Cuba’s underground Craigslist — “where they say they only want whites.”

In the same NYT article we read:

“They talk a lot here about discrimination against blacks in the United States. What about here?” said Manuel Valier Figueroa, 50, an actor, who was in the park on Monday. “If there’s a dance competition, they’re going to choose the woman who is fair-skinned with light, good hair. If there’s a tourism job, the same.”

He added: “Why are there no blacks managing hotels? You don’t see any blacks working as chefs in hotels, but you see them as janitors and porters. They get the inferior jobs.”

One would hope that Ms. Hannah-Jones' exploration of Cuba, a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public, could at least have educated her on the disturbing status of blacks in their own island nation.

Fact: Twice as many African slaves were brought to Cuba than to the United States... twice!

And what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how often historically and socially clueless American academics, journalists, activists, etc. make spectacularly ignorant statements - as Ms. Hannah-Jones did - about the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships (a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own Black population) without even mentioning the issue of racism... or is Ms. Hannah-Jones' case praising the socialist dictatorship!

Ms. Hannah-Jones should learn about the Cuban version of the 1619 Project, which in Cuba's case would have been called the 1511 Project, as that was when Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out from Hispaniola to establish the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, and brought the first African slaves to the island.

Since then and to its present day, Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.

Cuba even had its own race war.

General Antonio Maceo, known as "the Bronze Titan." He was the true warrior leader of the Cuban Wars of Liberation. His father was white of French ancestry; his mother was black, of Dominican ancestry. After the first Cuban Liberation War ended in a truce with Spain, some say that Maceo was so disillusioned with the realities of life in Cuba as a black man, that he left Cuba and lived in Panama, until he was called back to lead the Cuban rebels in a new rebellion in 1895. He returned to Cuba and was killed in battle against the Spanish Army in 1896.

In 1912, Black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.

As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically and although 65% of Cubans self-identify as white in recent censuses, many experts estimate that today the island is actually about 60% black or biracial.

But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd. 

In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population."

"I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."

Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana

While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism on paper, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper. They would have told Ms. Hannah-Jones during her visit to Cuba in 2008 - but she probably didn't notice that nearly everywhere that she visited, the presence of the Cuban government was not far, and people fear that presence.

The harsh Cuban reality today, Black Cubans will tell you, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.

Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.

Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban Parliament

Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants' atrocities should be dealt with in silence? -- especially in view of our nation's own racial history and what Ms. Hannah-Jones so expeditiously attempted to document in her controversial 1619 Project? 

We have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight.

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.

What would she say if she had discovered the "permanent and shameful police harassment of young Cubans of African descent in our streets..." as noted by Leonardo Calvo Cardenas, the Cuban National Vice-Coordinador of the Citizens' Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR))?

As Omar López Montenegro, the Black Cuban director of Human Rights for the Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana recently stated in the Panama Post:

The situation for Black Cubans worsened after Castro assumed power... even though there were always racial issues, before Castro in Cuba there had been Black governors, a President of the Senate, Martín Morua Delgado, and also many Congressmen such as the labor leader Jesús Menéndez, a member of the Socialist Party. 

When Cuba became a Communist dictatorship, and democracy was lost, the advance of Black Cubans came to a halt. 

And this is what makes it even more maddening to a pedantic Virgo like me -- when even the lackeys of the Cuban dictatorship like Alarcon Quesada and Black voices from within the brutalized island speak out, knowing that there will be consequences - as Zurbano discovered after his New York Times opinion piece - why does Ms. Hannah-Jones live in this rose-colored atmosphere where she perceives the poor jailed island as an example of equality?

Does she know that even though about 60% of Cubans are Black or brown, that 94.2% of the students at the University of Havana are white?  Is she aware - as evidenced by the hundreds of videos one can see at #SOSCuba, that the epicenters of the demonstrations in most Cuban cities during this historic uprising are in the Black neighborhoods? Does she know about Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a young Black Cuban from La Güinera who was arrested and then murdered by the Cuban police? When notified that her son was dead, his mother committed suicide. Does she know that her own newspaper, The New York Times documented a few years ago how Black Cubans are routinely discriminated in Cuba? Is she aware that while 48% of white Cubans have an annual income of less that $3,000 USD, a whooping 95% of Black Cubans fall below that incredible line?

By the way... In 1959 Cuba had the third-highest per capita income in Latin America, exceeded only by Argentina and Venezuela (around $550 a year back then which is about $5,170 in today's dollars). In 1959 that was also higher than Italy, Japan, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and every single Eastern European nation in the Soviet bloc.

Nikole Hannah-Jones now has an opportunity to clear the air, clear her mind, clear her perception and gain instant respect from Cubans of all races. All she has to say is that she's learned a lot since the statements that she made in 2019 surfaced during the current Cuban uprising - which as video evidence clearly shows, appears to involve Cubans of all races - and state that she was wrong and is now aware of the sorry and sad state of the Marxist government's deeply rooted racism.

Boom! Case closed.

I live in a cul-de-sac in the Marylandian suburbs of Washington, DC.  In order to drive from my house to the main street in the area, I have to drive three quarters of a mile and take three right turns in my neighborhood's streets.

The neighborhood itself is made up of single family homes - each one with its own driveway and two-car garage.  Assuming that most people have their garage full of junk, there's ample space in their driveways for two cars to park and be off the street.

One of the planet's smartest minds is Malcolm Gladwell, who has eloquently discussed the 10,000 hour rule for becoming an expert at anything. He discussed this in his amazing book “Outliers.” As Gladwell tells it, the rule goes like this: 

It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials.

I've somewhat adapted the rule to gather 10,000 points of data for an interesting experiment.  Here how it started.

I moved into this house in 2009.  Soon afterwards I started to notice an interesting and baffling series of curious events whenever I drove away from my house towards any destination (or the return trip) - for the first 3/4 of a mile they're nearly always the same. Or when I enter the same entry point (from the main street towards my house) and drive home. In other words, a round trip.

The streets leading to the neighborhood exit are mostly clear of parked cars, as nearly every house parks in their own driveways.  Households with more that two cars do often park on the street, as do visitors, etc.  Whenever a vehicle is parked on the neighborhood streets, it essentially blocks that side of the street, forcing any traffic on that side of the street to have to use the oncoming/other side of the street to continue on.

The neighborhood also has a lot of "regular" street walkers (not hookers), dog walkers, and runners, and car traffic is generally very light.

Vehicular traffic is generally very light in the neighborhood - usually only the people who live there, delivery vehicles, visitors, and garbage and/or recycling trucks.

A few months after we moved in, I noticed that there seemed to be a higher incidence of the following scenario... that one would expect statistically.

The scenario is that the incidence of two oncoming vehicles "meeting" at the spot where one side of the road is blocked by a parked car appeared to be weirdly tilted towards a Murphian dictate of events.  

Add to that the odds of the random dog walker, stroller or runner, a parked car and two oncoming vehicles meeting at precisely the worst spot on the streets from my house to the neighborhood exit, and my curiosity was kindled.

And thus, I started to keep a log in my car - using a calendar book - to record these instances of two cars, driving towards each other, meeting at the narrowest space created by a third car parked on the street.

A few days ago, my 10 thousandth drive took place - about 12 years or so of trips, usually at random times of the day or night, and 12 yearly calendars full of data.

Of those 10,000 data points the following was recorded:

• No oncoming traffic was met whenever a parked car blocked one side of the road 4,611 times
• An oncoming car was met at the blocked spot (forcing one car to stop and wait for the other car to pass) 5, 389 times
• Of that 5, 389 times, 2, 673 times, not only where there two cars meeting at the "blocked" spot, but there were also either walkers, runners or dog walkers in the same narrow area - thus making driving maneuvers even more complicated.

54% of the time that I drove from/to my home I came across an oncoming vehicle at precisely the one spot (in an otherwise generally open street) where there was a third car blocking one side of the road!

Under what statistical scenario does that make sense when there are .75 of a mile of streets which are 98% empty of parked cars (on the street)?

Murphy!!!!!!! 

The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards, a juried art competition produced by the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, announced the 2022 prize winners during last night’s awards reception. 

WonJung Choi and Carol Trawick

WonJung Choi of Richmond, VA was awarded the prestigious “Best in Show” title and received the $10,000 top prize. Caryn Martin from Baltimore, MD was named second place and given $2,000; Robert Martin from Staunton, VA was bestowed third place and received $1,000; and Evie Metz from Henrico, VA was awarded the Young Artist Award and received $1,000.

WonJung Choi, was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Her series of sculptures, paintings, drawings, and installation explores the power of her every changing identity in the making. She’s studied the process of mutation and evolution undertaken by diverse organisms to adapt to their current surroundings reflecting her hybrid identity through the continuous interactions between herself, contemporary culture and society. Choi received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design and Artists Alliance Inc. (AAI) in New York as well as a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.

2022 Trawick Prize Finalists

MK Bailey, Washington, D.C.

WonJung Choi, Richmond, VA

Marcia Haffmans, Richmond, VA

Ali Kaeini, Richmond, VA

Caryn Martin, Baltimore, MD

Robert Mertens, Staunton, VA

Evie Metz, Henrico, VA

Judith Pratt, Orange, VA

Entries were juried by Alexis Assam, Regenia A. Perry, Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VFMA); Thomas James, Visual Arts Curator at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD; and Maria del Carmen Montoya, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Spatial Practices, Director of Graduate Studies, M.F.A. in Fine Arts and Social Practice, Studio Arts Program.

Founded by Carol Trawick in 2003, the regional competition is one of the largest prizes to annually honor visual artists. Ms. Trawick, a longtime community activist in downtown Bethesda, also established the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2005. She has served as the Chair of the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, Bethesda Urban Partnership, Strathmore and the Maryland State Arts Council. She founded the Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation in 2007 to assist health and human services and arts non-profits in Montgomery County, MD. The Foundation has awarded grants to more than 90 nonprofits in Montgomery County and funds the annual Trawick Prize and the Bethesda Painting Awards.

To date, The Trawick Prize has awarded more than $260,000 in prize monies and has exhibited the work of more than 160 regional artists.

The work of the finalists will be on exhibit at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, until October 2. Gallery hours for the duration of the exhibit will be Thursday-Sunday, 12 – 5pm.

Chief Executive Officer, International Arts & Artists 

International Arts & Artist's Board of Trustees is immediately seeking a dynamic, skilled, experienced leader to become IA&A's next President and Chief Executive Officer when our founder David Furchgott retires this fall.

Ideal candidates will have:

• A passion for IA&A’s mission of increasing cross-cultural understanding through the arts.
• 10+ years appropriate professional experience, including at least five years in an executive role.
• Substantive connections in the arts and strong relationships with national & international arts leaders.
• A record of success in the growth of her/his past endeavors. • A deep understanding of, and a driving commitment to, the arts and cultural exchange.
• A history of effective leadership and the ability to motivate and inspire a small but talented team.
• Entrepreneurial instincts with strong business acumen with a drive for results, and a track record in building new relationships and developing new programs.
• Track record in building revenue earned and charitable revenue streams. Compensation ranging from $120,000 to $145,000 plus health insurance and other benefits, and reasonable moving expense reimbursement (depending upon experience).

To learn more about this great opportunity, download the full job description. To apply visit DRi Waterstone.

IA&A at Hillyer | 9 Hillyer Ct, NW, Washington, DC 20008

(202) 338-0680 | | atHillyer.org

When I first wrote the below post a few years ago, I then printed it and mailed it to Nikole Hannah-Jones.... hopefully she's better educated now, although dogma is a pretty harsh mistress.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of that paper's controversial 1619 Project recently showed a spectacular lack of background knowledge on the Cuban dictatorship's well-documented racist history and abuses of its black population by her statement that “If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” and then proceeding to cite socialism as her reason to make the statement.

Ms. Hannah-Jones' rosy-eyed view of the Marxist dictatorship's oppression of its citizens, especially its Black citizens not only reveals loads about her own political leanings, but also serves as a brilliant example of suspicious lack of research skills about a subject as widely discussed as Cuba's oppressive and racist government.

Had Ms. Hannah-Jones - who visited Cuba in 2008 - bothered to look past her clear admiration for the Marxist government, and bothered to take a quick tour of the facts, she would have discovered that much has been written and documented about racism in Cuba, and it was even one of the earliest subjects addressed by the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson upon his arrival to the DMV a few decades ago from his various Latin American postings.In his article a couple of decades ago, Cuba Begins to Answer Its Race Question, Robinson, also clearly and openly a very extreme left-wing oriented writer, tried hard to find excuses for the dictatorship, but nonetheless admits that:

Academics say that black Cubans are failing to earn university degrees in proportion to their numbers--a situation to which Castro has alluded publicly. The upper echelons of the government remain disproportionately white, despite the emergence of several rising black stars. And while perceptions are difficult to quantify, much less prove true or false, many black Cubans are convinced that they are much less likely than whites to land good jobs--and much more likely to be hassled by police on the street, like Cano's husband, in a Cuban version of "racial profiling."

But how about some Cubans inside Cuba discussing the subject?

In primary [Cuban] education, skin color is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention color in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.

Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.

Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States

A lot of hopes have been pinned by many people (who know little about Cuba and the repressive nature of its government) on President Obama's monumental decision to re-establish diplomatic relations with the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:

...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."

Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana

And thus, it is curious to me that in his attempt to re-establish diplomatic ties, our socially conscious President (and his cadre of advisors) back then also - like Ms. Hannah-Jones - appeared to know little or nothing about the way that Afro-Cuban citizens are treated in their own country.

In reference to the President's visit to Cuba, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Connecticut and a scholar at Harvard University, and writing in Ms. Hannah-Jones own newspaper, noted in the New York Times that  

“The images of the meetings, the agreements, they’re all shameful for many black Cubans — I’m including myself in this — because it’s difficult to feel represented.”

Was the projected flow of American tourists expected to help Black Cubans in a pre-COVID Cuba? Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban expert in Afro-Cuban identity, race and literature based out of Havana wrote in his 2013 New York Times article that:

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

Zurbano was subsequently punished by his Marxist government for daring to express that opinion on the pages of Ms. Hannah-Jones employing newspaper. Because that's how Communists roll!

That "not long ago" is still the case, as anyone who has been to Cuba recently can testify to and which Ms. Hannah-Jones could clearly see during her 2008 visit to the island - it is very rare to see a black face in any of Havana's "tourist only" hotels and nearby beaches. Discussing those lucrative jobs, Yusimí Rodríguez López, an Afro-Cuban independent journalist, said in a 2016 New York Times article that there were job listings in Revolico — sometimes called Cuba’s underground Craigslist — “where they say they only want whites.”

In the same NYT article we read:

“They talk a lot here about discrimination against blacks in the United States. What about here?” said Manuel Valier Figueroa, 50, an actor, who was in the park on Monday. “If there’s a dance competition, they’re going to choose the woman who is fair-skinned with light, good hair. If there’s a tourism job, the same.”

He added: “Why are there no blacks managing hotels? You don’t see any blacks working as chefs in hotels, but you see them as janitors and porters. They get the inferior jobs.”

One would hope that Ms. Hannah-Jones' exploration of Cuba, a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public, could at least have educated her on the disturbing status of blacks in their own island nation.

Fact: Twice as many African slaves were brought to Cuba than to the United States... twice!

And what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how often historically and socially clueless American academics, journalists, activists, etc. make spectacularly ignorant statements - as Ms. Hannah-Jones did - about the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships (a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own Black population) without even mentioning the issue of racism... or is Ms. Hannah-Jones' case praising the socialist dictatorship!

Ms. Hannah-Jones should learn about the Cuban version of the 1619 Project, which in Cuba's case would have been called the 1511 Project, as that was when Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out from Hispaniola to establish the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, and brought the first African slaves to the island.

Since then and to its present day, Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.

Cuba even had its own race war.

General Antonio Maceo, known as "the Bronze Titan." He was the true warrior leader of the Cuban Wars of Liberation. His father was white of French ancestry; his mother was black, of Dominican ancestry. After the first Cuban Liberation War ended in a truce with Spain, some say that Maceo was so disillusioned with the realities of life in Cuba as a black man, that he left Cuba and lived in Panama, until he was called back to lead the Cuban rebels in a new rebellion in 1895. He returned to Cuba and was killed in battle against the Spanish Army in 1896.

In 1912, Black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.

As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically and although 65% of Cubans self-identify as white in recent censuses, many experts estimate that today the island is actually about 60% black or biracial.

But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd. 

In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population."

"I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."

Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana

While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism on paper, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper. They would have told Ms. Hannah-Jones during her visit to Cuba in 2008 - but she probably didn't notice that nearly everywhere that she visited, the presence of the Cuban government was not far, and people fear that presence.

The harsh Cuban reality today, Black Cubans will tell you, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.

Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.

Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban Parliament

Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants' atrocities should be dealt with in silence? -- especially in view of our nation's own racial history and what Ms. Hannah-Jones so expeditiously attempted to document in her controversial 1619 Project? 

We have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight.

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.

What would she say if she had discovered the "permanent and shameful police harassment of young Cubans of African descent in our streets..." as noted by Leonardo Calvo Cardenas, the Cuban National Vice-Coordinador of the Citizens' Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR))?

As Omar López Montenegro, the Black Cuban director of Human Rights for the Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana recently stated in the Panama Post:

The situation for Black Cubans worsened after Castro assumed power... even though there were always racial issues, before Castro in Cuba there had been Black governors, a President of the Senate, Martín Morua Delgado, and also many Congressmen such as the labor leader Jesús Menéndez, a member of the Socialist Party. 

When Cuba became a Communist dictatorship, and democracy was lost, the advance of Black Cubans came to a halt. 

And this is what makes it even more maddening to a pedantic Virgo like me -- when even the lackeys of the Cuban dictatorship like Alarcon Quesada and Black voices from within the brutalized island speak out, knowing that there will be consequences - as Zurbano discovered after his New York Times opinion piece - why does Ms. Hannah-Jones live in this rose-colored atmosphere where she perceives the poor jailed island as an example of equality?

Does she know that even though about 60% of Cubans are Black or brown, that 94.2% of the students at the University of Havana are white?  Is she aware - as evidenced by the hundreds of videos one can see at #SOSCuba, that the epicenters of the demonstrations in most Cuban cities during this historic uprising are in the Black neighborhoods? Does she know about Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a young Black Cuban from La Güinera who was arrested and then murdered by the Cuban police? When notified that her son was dead, his mother committed suicide. Does she know that her own newspaper, The New York Times documented a few years ago how Black Cubans are routinely discriminated in Cuba? Is she aware that while 48% of white Cubans have an annual income of less that $3,000 USD, a whooping 95% of Black Cubans fall below that incredible line?

By the way... In 1959 Cuba had the third-highest per capita income in Latin America, exceeded only by Argentina and Venezuela (around $550 a year back then which is about $5,170 in today's dollars). In 1959 that was also higher than Italy, Japan, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and every single Eastern European nation in the Soviet bloc.

Nikole Hannah-Jones now has an opportunity to clear the air, clear her mind, clear her perception and gain instant respect from Cubans of all races. All she has to say is that she's learned a lot since the statements that she made in 2019 surfaced during the current Cuban uprising - which as video evidence clearly shows, appears to involve Cubans of all races - and state that she was wrong and is now aware of the sorry and sad state of the Marxist government's deeply rooted racism.

Boom! Case closed.

I live in a cul-de-sac in the Marylandian suburbs of Washington, DC.  In order to drive from my house to the main street in the area, I have to drive three quarters of a mile and take three right turns in my neighborhood's streets.

The neighborhood itself is made up of single family homes - each one with its own driveway and two-car garage.  Assuming that most people have their garage full of junk, there's ample space in their driveways for two cars to park and be off the street.

One of the planet's smartest minds is Malcolm Gladwell, who has eloquently discussed the 10,000 hour rule for becoming an expert at anything. He discussed this in his amazing book “Outliers.” As Gladwell tells it, the rule goes like this: 

It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials.

I've somewhat adapted the rule to gather 10,000 points of data for an interesting experiment.  Here how it started.

I moved into this house in 2009.  Soon afterwards I started to notice an interesting and baffling series of curious events whenever I drove away from my house towards any destination (or the return trip) - for the first 3/4 of a mile they're nearly always the same. Or when I enter the same entry point (from the main street towards my house) and drive home. In other words, a round trip.

The streets leading to the neighborhood exit are mostly clear of parked cars, as nearly every house parks in their own driveways.  Households with more that two cars do often park on the street, as do visitors, etc.  Whenever a vehicle is parked on the neighborhood streets, it essentially blocks that side of the street, forcing any traffic on that side of the street to have to use the oncoming/other side of the street to continue on.

The neighborhood also has a lot of "regular" street walkers (not hookers), dog walkers, and runners, and car traffic is generally very light.

Vehicular traffic is generally very light in the neighborhood - usually only the people who live there, delivery vehicles, visitors, and garbage and/or recycling trucks.

A few months after we moved in, I noticed that there seemed to be a higher incidence of the following scenario... that one would expect statistically.

The scenario is that the incidence of two oncoming vehicles "meeting" at the spot where one side of the road is blocked by a parked car appeared to be weirdly tilted towards a Murphian dictate of events.  

Add to that the odds of the random dog walker, stroller or runner, a parked car and two oncoming vehicles meeting at precisely the worst spot on the streets from my house to the neighborhood exit, and my curiosity was kindled.

And thus, I started to keep a log in my car - using a calendar book - to record these instances of two cars, driving towards each other, meeting at the narrowest space created by a third car parked on the street.

A few days ago, my 10 thousandth drive took place - about 12 years or so of trips, usually at random times of the day or night, and 12 yearly calendars full of data.

Of those 10,000 data points the following was recorded:

• No oncoming traffic was met whenever a parked car blocked one side of the road 4,611 times
• An oncoming car was met at the blocked spot (forcing one car to stop and wait for the other car to pass) 5, 389 times
• Of that 5, 389 times, 2, 673 times, not only where there two cars meeting at the "blocked" spot, but there were also either walkers, runners or dog walkers in the same narrow area - thus making driving maneuvers even more complicated.

54% of the time that I drove from/to my home I came across an oncoming vehicle at precisely the one spot (in an otherwise generally open street) where there was a third car blocking one side of the road!

Under what statistical scenario does that make sense when there are .75 of a mile of streets which are 98% empty of parked cars (on the street)?

Murphy!!!!!!! 

The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards, a juried art competition produced by the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, announced the 2022 prize winners during last night’s awards reception. 

WonJung Choi and Carol Trawick

WonJung Choi of Richmond, VA was awarded the prestigious “Best in Show” title and received the $10,000 top prize. Caryn Martin from Baltimore, MD was named second place and given $2,000; Robert Martin from Staunton, VA was bestowed third place and received $1,000; and Evie Metz from Henrico, VA was awarded the Young Artist Award and received $1,000.

WonJung Choi, was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Her series of sculptures, paintings, drawings, and installation explores the power of her every changing identity in the making. She’s studied the process of mutation and evolution undertaken by diverse organisms to adapt to their current surroundings reflecting her hybrid identity through the continuous interactions between herself, contemporary culture and society. Choi received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design and Artists Alliance Inc. (AAI) in New York as well as a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.

2022 Trawick Prize Finalists

MK Bailey, Washington, D.C.

WonJung Choi, Richmond, VA

Marcia Haffmans, Richmond, VA

Ali Kaeini, Richmond, VA

Caryn Martin, Baltimore, MD

Robert Mertens, Staunton, VA

Evie Metz, Henrico, VA

Judith Pratt, Orange, VA

Entries were juried by Alexis Assam, Regenia A. Perry, Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VFMA); Thomas James, Visual Arts Curator at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD; and Maria del Carmen Montoya, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Spatial Practices, Director of Graduate Studies, M.F.A. in Fine Arts and Social Practice, Studio Arts Program.

Founded by Carol Trawick in 2003, the regional competition is one of the largest prizes to annually honor visual artists. Ms. Trawick, a longtime community activist in downtown Bethesda, also established the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2005. She has served as the Chair of the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, Bethesda Urban Partnership, Strathmore and the Maryland State Arts Council. She founded the Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation in 2007 to assist health and human services and arts non-profits in Montgomery County, MD. The Foundation has awarded grants to more than 90 nonprofits in Montgomery County and funds the annual Trawick Prize and the Bethesda Painting Awards.

To date, The Trawick Prize has awarded more than $260,000 in prize monies and has exhibited the work of more than 160 regional artists.

The work of the finalists will be on exhibit at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, until October 2. Gallery hours for the duration of the exhibit will be Thursday-Sunday, 12 – 5pm.

Chief Executive Officer, International Arts & Artists 

International Arts & Artist's Board of Trustees is immediately seeking a dynamic, skilled, experienced leader to become IA&A's next President and Chief Executive Officer when our founder David Furchgott retires this fall.

Ideal candidates will have:

• A passion for IA&A’s mission of increasing cross-cultural understanding through the arts.
• 10+ years appropriate professional experience, including at least five years in an executive role.
• Substantive connections in the arts and strong relationships with national & international arts leaders.
• A record of success in the growth of her/his past endeavors. • A deep understanding of, and a driving commitment to, the arts and cultural exchange.
• A history of effective leadership and the ability to motivate and inspire a small but talented team.
• Entrepreneurial instincts with strong business acumen with a drive for results, and a track record in building new relationships and developing new programs.
• Track record in building revenue earned and charitable revenue streams. Compensation ranging from $120,000 to $145,000 plus health insurance and other benefits, and reasonable moving expense reimbursement (depending upon experience).

To learn more about this great opportunity, download the full job description. To apply visit DRi Waterstone.

IA&A at Hillyer | 9 Hillyer Ct, NW, Washington, DC 20008

(202) 338-0680 | | atHillyer.org

When I first wrote the below post a few years ago, I then printed it and mailed it to Nikole Hannah-Jones.... hopefully she's better educated now, although dogma is a pretty harsh mistress.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of that paper's controversial 1619 Project recently showed a spectacular lack of background knowledge on the Cuban dictatorship's well-documented racist history and abuses of its black population by her statement that “If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” and then proceeding to cite socialism as her reason to make the statement.

Ms. Hannah-Jones' rosy-eyed view of the Marxist dictatorship's oppression of its citizens, especially its Black citizens not only reveals loads about her own political leanings, but also serves as a brilliant example of suspicious lack of research skills about a subject as widely discussed as Cuba's oppressive and racist government.

Had Ms. Hannah-Jones - who visited Cuba in 2008 - bothered to look past her clear admiration for the Marxist government, and bothered to take a quick tour of the facts, she would have discovered that much has been written and documented about racism in Cuba, and it was even one of the earliest subjects addressed by the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson upon his arrival to the DMV a few decades ago from his various Latin American postings.In his article a couple of decades ago, Cuba Begins to Answer Its Race Question, Robinson, also clearly and openly a very extreme left-wing oriented writer, tried hard to find excuses for the dictatorship, but nonetheless admits that:

Academics say that black Cubans are failing to earn university degrees in proportion to their numbers--a situation to which Castro has alluded publicly. The upper echelons of the government remain disproportionately white, despite the emergence of several rising black stars. And while perceptions are difficult to quantify, much less prove true or false, many black Cubans are convinced that they are much less likely than whites to land good jobs--and much more likely to be hassled by police on the street, like Cano's husband, in a Cuban version of "racial profiling."

But how about some Cubans inside Cuba discussing the subject?

In primary [Cuban] education, skin color is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention color in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.

Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.

Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States

A lot of hopes have been pinned by many people (who know little about Cuba and the repressive nature of its government) on President Obama's monumental decision to re-establish diplomatic relations with the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:

...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."

Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana

And thus, it is curious to me that in his attempt to re-establish diplomatic ties, our socially conscious President (and his cadre of advisors) back then also - like Ms. Hannah-Jones - appeared to know little or nothing about the way that Afro-Cuban citizens are treated in their own country.

In reference to the President's visit to Cuba, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Connecticut and a scholar at Harvard University, and writing in Ms. Hannah-Jones own newspaper, noted in the New York Times that  

“The images of the meetings, the agreements, they’re all shameful for many black Cubans — I’m including myself in this — because it’s difficult to feel represented.”

Was the projected flow of American tourists expected to help Black Cubans in a pre-COVID Cuba? Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban expert in Afro-Cuban identity, race and literature based out of Havana wrote in his 2013 New York Times article that:

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

Zurbano was subsequently punished by his Marxist government for daring to express that opinion on the pages of Ms. Hannah-Jones employing newspaper. Because that's how Communists roll!

That "not long ago" is still the case, as anyone who has been to Cuba recently can testify to and which Ms. Hannah-Jones could clearly see during her 2008 visit to the island - it is very rare to see a black face in any of Havana's "tourist only" hotels and nearby beaches. Discussing those lucrative jobs, Yusimí Rodríguez López, an Afro-Cuban independent journalist, said in a 2016 New York Times article that there were job listings in Revolico — sometimes called Cuba’s underground Craigslist — “where they say they only want whites.”

In the same NYT article we read:

“They talk a lot here about discrimination against blacks in the United States. What about here?” said Manuel Valier Figueroa, 50, an actor, who was in the park on Monday. “If there’s a dance competition, they’re going to choose the woman who is fair-skinned with light, good hair. If there’s a tourism job, the same.”

He added: “Why are there no blacks managing hotels? You don’t see any blacks working as chefs in hotels, but you see them as janitors and porters. They get the inferior jobs.”

One would hope that Ms. Hannah-Jones' exploration of Cuba, a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public, could at least have educated her on the disturbing status of blacks in their own island nation.

Fact: Twice as many African slaves were brought to Cuba than to the United States... twice!

And what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how often historically and socially clueless American academics, journalists, activists, etc. make spectacularly ignorant statements - as Ms. Hannah-Jones did - about the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships (a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own Black population) without even mentioning the issue of racism... or is Ms. Hannah-Jones' case praising the socialist dictatorship!

Ms. Hannah-Jones should learn about the Cuban version of the 1619 Project, which in Cuba's case would have been called the 1511 Project, as that was when Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out from Hispaniola to establish the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, and brought the first African slaves to the island.

Since then and to its present day, Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.

Cuba even had its own race war.

General Antonio Maceo, known as "the Bronze Titan." He was the true warrior leader of the Cuban Wars of Liberation. His father was white of French ancestry; his mother was black, of Dominican ancestry. After the first Cuban Liberation War ended in a truce with Spain, some say that Maceo was so disillusioned with the realities of life in Cuba as a black man, that he left Cuba and lived in Panama, until he was called back to lead the Cuban rebels in a new rebellion in 1895. He returned to Cuba and was killed in battle against the Spanish Army in 1896.

In 1912, Black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.

As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically and although 65% of Cubans self-identify as white in recent censuses, many experts estimate that today the island is actually about 60% black or biracial.

But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd. 

In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population."

"I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."

Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana

While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism on paper, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper. They would have told Ms. Hannah-Jones during her visit to Cuba in 2008 - but she probably didn't notice that nearly everywhere that she visited, the presence of the Cuban government was not far, and people fear that presence.

The harsh Cuban reality today, Black Cubans will tell you, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.

Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.

Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban Parliament

Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants' atrocities should be dealt with in silence? -- especially in view of our nation's own racial history and what Ms. Hannah-Jones so expeditiously attempted to document in her controversial 1619 Project? 

We have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight.

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.

What would she say if she had discovered the "permanent and shameful police harassment of young Cubans of African descent in our streets..." as noted by Leonardo Calvo Cardenas, the Cuban National Vice-Coordinador of the Citizens' Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR))?

As Omar López Montenegro, the Black Cuban director of Human Rights for the Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana recently stated in the Panama Post:

The situation for Black Cubans worsened after Castro assumed power... even though there were always racial issues, before Castro in Cuba there had been Black governors, a President of the Senate, Martín Morua Delgado, and also many Congressmen such as the labor leader Jesús Menéndez, a member of the Socialist Party. 

When Cuba became a Communist dictatorship, and democracy was lost, the advance of Black Cubans came to a halt. 

And this is what makes it even more maddening to a pedantic Virgo like me -- when even the lackeys of the Cuban dictatorship like Alarcon Quesada and Black voices from within the brutalized island speak out, knowing that there will be consequences - as Zurbano discovered after his New York Times opinion piece - why does Ms. Hannah-Jones live in this rose-colored atmosphere where she perceives the poor jailed island as an example of equality?

Does she know that even though about 60% of Cubans are Black or brown, that 94.2% of the students at the University of Havana are white?  Is she aware - as evidenced by the hundreds of videos one can see at #SOSCuba, that the epicenters of the demonstrations in most Cuban cities during this historic uprising are in the Black neighborhoods? Does she know about Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a young Black Cuban from La Güinera who was arrested and then murdered by the Cuban police? When notified that her son was dead, his mother committed suicide. Does she know that her own newspaper, The New York Times documented a few years ago how Black Cubans are routinely discriminated in Cuba? Is she aware that while 48% of white Cubans have an annual income of less that $3,000 USD, a whooping 95% of Black Cubans fall below that incredible line?

By the way... In 1959 Cuba had the third-highest per capita income in Latin America, exceeded only by Argentina and Venezuela (around $550 a year back then which is about $5,170 in today's dollars). In 1959 that was also higher than Italy, Japan, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and every single Eastern European nation in the Soviet bloc.

Nikole Hannah-Jones now has an opportunity to clear the air, clear her mind, clear her perception and gain instant respect from Cubans of all races. All she has to say is that she's learned a lot since the statements that she made in 2019 surfaced during the current Cuban uprising - which as video evidence clearly shows, appears to involve Cubans of all races - and state that she was wrong and is now aware of the sorry and sad state of the Marxist government's deeply rooted racism.

Boom! Case closed.

I live in a cul-de-sac in the Marylandian suburbs of Washington, DC.  In order to drive from my house to the main street in the area, I have to drive three quarters of a mile and take three right turns in my neighborhood's streets.

The neighborhood itself is made up of single family homes - each one with its own driveway and two-car garage.  Assuming that most people have their garage full of junk, there's ample space in their driveways for two cars to park and be off the street.

One of the planet's smartest minds is Malcolm Gladwell, who has eloquently discussed the 10,000 hour rule for becoming an expert at anything. He discussed this in his amazing book “Outliers.” As Gladwell tells it, the rule goes like this: 

It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials.

I've somewhat adapted the rule to gather 10,000 points of data for an interesting experiment.  Here how it started.

I moved into this house in 2009.  Soon afterwards I started to notice an interesting and baffling series of curious events whenever I drove away from my house towards any destination (or the return trip) - for the first 3/4 of a mile they're nearly always the same. Or when I enter the same entry point (from the main street towards my house) and drive home. In other words, a round trip.

The streets leading to the neighborhood exit are mostly clear of parked cars, as nearly every house parks in their own driveways.  Households with more that two cars do often park on the street, as do visitors, etc.  Whenever a vehicle is parked on the neighborhood streets, it essentially blocks that side of the street, forcing any traffic on that side of the street to have to use the oncoming/other side of the street to continue on.

The neighborhood also has a lot of "regular" street walkers (not hookers), dog walkers, and runners, and car traffic is generally very light.

Vehicular traffic is generally very light in the neighborhood - usually only the people who live there, delivery vehicles, visitors, and garbage and/or recycling trucks.

A few months after we moved in, I noticed that there seemed to be a higher incidence of the following scenario... that one would expect statistically.

The scenario is that the incidence of two oncoming vehicles "meeting" at the spot where one side of the road is blocked by a parked car appeared to be weirdly tilted towards a Murphian dictate of events.  

Add to that the odds of the random dog walker, stroller or runner, a parked car and two oncoming vehicles meeting at precisely the worst spot on the streets from my house to the neighborhood exit, and my curiosity was kindled.

And thus, I started to keep a log in my car - using a calendar book - to record these instances of two cars, driving towards each other, meeting at the narrowest space created by a third car parked on the street.

A few days ago, my 10 thousandth drive took place - about 12 years or so of trips, usually at random times of the day or night, and 12 yearly calendars full of data.

Of those 10,000 data points the following was recorded:

• No oncoming traffic was met whenever a parked car blocked one side of the road 4,611 times
• An oncoming car was met at the blocked spot (forcing one car to stop and wait for the other car to pass) 5, 389 times
• Of that 5, 389 times, 2, 673 times, not only where there two cars meeting at the "blocked" spot, but there were also either walkers, runners or dog walkers in the same narrow area - thus making driving maneuvers even more complicated.

54% of the time that I drove from/to my home I came across an oncoming vehicle at precisely the one spot (in an otherwise generally open street) where there was a third car blocking one side of the road!

Under what statistical scenario does that make sense when there are .75 of a mile of streets which are 98% empty of parked cars (on the street)?

Murphy!!!!!!! 

The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards, a juried art competition produced by the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, announced the 2022 prize winners during last night’s awards reception. 

WonJung Choi and Carol Trawick

WonJung Choi of Richmond, VA was awarded the prestigious “Best in Show” title and received the $10,000 top prize. Caryn Martin from Baltimore, MD was named second place and given $2,000; Robert Martin from Staunton, VA was bestowed third place and received $1,000; and Evie Metz from Henrico, VA was awarded the Young Artist Award and received $1,000.

WonJung Choi, was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Her series of sculptures, paintings, drawings, and installation explores the power of her every changing identity in the making. She’s studied the process of mutation and evolution undertaken by diverse organisms to adapt to their current surroundings reflecting her hybrid identity through the continuous interactions between herself, contemporary culture and society. Choi received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design and Artists Alliance Inc. (AAI) in New York as well as a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.

2022 Trawick Prize Finalists

MK Bailey, Washington, D.C.

WonJung Choi, Richmond, VA

Marcia Haffmans, Richmond, VA

Ali Kaeini, Richmond, VA

Caryn Martin, Baltimore, MD

Robert Mertens, Staunton, VA

Evie Metz, Henrico, VA

Judith Pratt, Orange, VA

Entries were juried by Alexis Assam, Regenia A. Perry, Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VFMA); Thomas James, Visual Arts Curator at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD; and Maria del Carmen Montoya, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Spatial Practices, Director of Graduate Studies, M.F.A. in Fine Arts and Social Practice, Studio Arts Program.

Founded by Carol Trawick in 2003, the regional competition is one of the largest prizes to annually honor visual artists. Ms. Trawick, a longtime community activist in downtown Bethesda, also established the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2005. She has served as the Chair of the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, Bethesda Urban Partnership, Strathmore and the Maryland State Arts Council. She founded the Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation in 2007 to assist health and human services and arts non-profits in Montgomery County, MD. The Foundation has awarded grants to more than 90 nonprofits in Montgomery County and funds the annual Trawick Prize and the Bethesda Painting Awards.

To date, The Trawick Prize has awarded more than $260,000 in prize monies and has exhibited the work of more than 160 regional artists.

The work of the finalists will be on exhibit at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, until October 2. Gallery hours for the duration of the exhibit will be Thursday-Sunday, 12 – 5pm.

Chief Executive Officer, International Arts & Artists 

International Arts & Artist's Board of Trustees is immediately seeking a dynamic, skilled, experienced leader to become IA&A's next President and Chief Executive Officer when our founder David Furchgott retires this fall.

Ideal candidates will have:

• A passion for IA&A’s mission of increasing cross-cultural understanding through the arts.
• 10+ years appropriate professional experience, including at least five years in an executive role.
• Substantive connections in the arts and strong relationships with national & international arts leaders.
• A record of success in the growth of her/his past endeavors. • A deep understanding of, and a driving commitment to, the arts and cultural exchange.
• A history of effective leadership and the ability to motivate and inspire a small but talented team.
• Entrepreneurial instincts with strong business acumen with a drive for results, and a track record in building new relationships and developing new programs.
• Track record in building revenue earned and charitable revenue streams. Compensation ranging from $120,000 to $145,000 plus health insurance and other benefits, and reasonable moving expense reimbursement (depending upon experience).

To learn more about this great opportunity, download the full job description. To apply visit DRi Waterstone.

IA&A at Hillyer | 9 Hillyer Ct, NW, Washington, DC 20008

(202) 338-0680 | | atHillyer.org

When I first wrote the below post a few years ago, I then printed it and mailed it to Nikole Hannah-Jones.... hopefully she's better educated now, although dogma is a pretty harsh mistress.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of that paper's controversial 1619 Project recently showed a spectacular lack of background knowledge on the Cuban dictatorship's well-documented racist history and abuses of its black population by her statement that “If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” and then proceeding to cite socialism as her reason to make the statement.

Ms. Hannah-Jones' rosy-eyed view of the Marxist dictatorship's oppression of its citizens, especially its Black citizens not only reveals loads about her own political leanings, but also serves as a brilliant example of suspicious lack of research skills about a subject as widely discussed as Cuba's oppressive and racist government.

Had Ms. Hannah-Jones - who visited Cuba in 2008 - bothered to look past her clear admiration for the Marxist government, and bothered to take a quick tour of the facts, she would have discovered that much has been written and documented about racism in Cuba, and it was even one of the earliest subjects addressed by the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson upon his arrival to the DMV a few decades ago from his various Latin American postings.In his article a couple of decades ago, Cuba Begins to Answer Its Race Question, Robinson, also clearly and openly a very extreme left-wing oriented writer, tried hard to find excuses for the dictatorship, but nonetheless admits that:

Academics say that black Cubans are failing to earn university degrees in proportion to their numbers--a situation to which Castro has alluded publicly. The upper echelons of the government remain disproportionately white, despite the emergence of several rising black stars. And while perceptions are difficult to quantify, much less prove true or false, many black Cubans are convinced that they are much less likely than whites to land good jobs--and much more likely to be hassled by police on the street, like Cano's husband, in a Cuban version of "racial profiling."

But how about some Cubans inside Cuba discussing the subject?

In primary [Cuban] education, skin color is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention color in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.

Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.

Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States

A lot of hopes have been pinned by many people (who know little about Cuba and the repressive nature of its government) on President Obama's monumental decision to re-establish diplomatic relations with the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:

...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."

Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana

And thus, it is curious to me that in his attempt to re-establish diplomatic ties, our socially conscious President (and his cadre of advisors) back then also - like Ms. Hannah-Jones - appeared to know little or nothing about the way that Afro-Cuban citizens are treated in their own country.

In reference to the President's visit to Cuba, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Connecticut and a scholar at Harvard University, and writing in Ms. Hannah-Jones own newspaper, noted in the New York Times that  

“The images of the meetings, the agreements, they’re all shameful for many black Cubans — I’m including myself in this — because it’s difficult to feel represented.”

Was the projected flow of American tourists expected to help Black Cubans in a pre-COVID Cuba? Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban expert in Afro-Cuban identity, race and literature based out of Havana wrote in his 2013 New York Times article that:

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

Zurbano was subsequently punished by his Marxist government for daring to express that opinion on the pages of Ms. Hannah-Jones employing newspaper. Because that's how Communists roll!

That "not long ago" is still the case, as anyone who has been to Cuba recently can testify to and which Ms. Hannah-Jones could clearly see during her 2008 visit to the island - it is very rare to see a black face in any of Havana's "tourist only" hotels and nearby beaches. Discussing those lucrative jobs, Yusimí Rodríguez López, an Afro-Cuban independent journalist, said in a 2016 New York Times article that there were job listings in Revolico — sometimes called Cuba’s underground Craigslist — “where they say they only want whites.”

In the same NYT article we read:

“They talk a lot here about discrimination against blacks in the United States. What about here?” said Manuel Valier Figueroa, 50, an actor, who was in the park on Monday. “If there’s a dance competition, they’re going to choose the woman who is fair-skinned with light, good hair. If there’s a tourism job, the same.”

He added: “Why are there no blacks managing hotels? You don’t see any blacks working as chefs in hotels, but you see them as janitors and porters. They get the inferior jobs.”

One would hope that Ms. Hannah-Jones' exploration of Cuba, a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public, could at least have educated her on the disturbing status of blacks in their own island nation.

Fact: Twice as many African slaves were brought to Cuba than to the United States... twice!

And what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how often historically and socially clueless American academics, journalists, activists, etc. make spectacularly ignorant statements - as Ms. Hannah-Jones did - about the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships (a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own Black population) without even mentioning the issue of racism... or is Ms. Hannah-Jones' case praising the socialist dictatorship!

Ms. Hannah-Jones should learn about the Cuban version of the 1619 Project, which in Cuba's case would have been called the 1511 Project, as that was when Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out from Hispaniola to establish the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, and brought the first African slaves to the island.

Since then and to its present day, Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.

Cuba even had its own race war.

General Antonio Maceo, known as "the Bronze Titan." He was the true warrior leader of the Cuban Wars of Liberation. His father was white of French ancestry; his mother was black, of Dominican ancestry. After the first Cuban Liberation War ended in a truce with Spain, some say that Maceo was so disillusioned with the realities of life in Cuba as a black man, that he left Cuba and lived in Panama, until he was called back to lead the Cuban rebels in a new rebellion in 1895. He returned to Cuba and was killed in battle against the Spanish Army in 1896.

In 1912, Black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.

As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically and although 65% of Cubans self-identify as white in recent censuses, many experts estimate that today the island is actually about 60% black or biracial.

But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd. 

In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population."

"I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."

Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana

While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism on paper, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper. They would have told Ms. Hannah-Jones during her visit to Cuba in 2008 - but she probably didn't notice that nearly everywhere that she visited, the presence of the Cuban government was not far, and people fear that presence.

The harsh Cuban reality today, Black Cubans will tell you, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.

Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.

Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban Parliament

Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants' atrocities should be dealt with in silence? -- especially in view of our nation's own racial history and what Ms. Hannah-Jones so expeditiously attempted to document in her controversial 1619 Project? 

We have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight.

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.

What would she say if she had discovered the "permanent and shameful police harassment of young Cubans of African descent in our streets..." as noted by Leonardo Calvo Cardenas, the Cuban National Vice-Coordinador of the Citizens' Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR))?

As Omar López Montenegro, the Black Cuban director of Human Rights for the Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana recently stated in the Panama Post:

The situation for Black Cubans worsened after Castro assumed power... even though there were always racial issues, before Castro in Cuba there had been Black governors, a President of the Senate, Martín Morua Delgado, and also many Congressmen such as the labor leader Jesús Menéndez, a member of the Socialist Party. 

When Cuba became a Communist dictatorship, and democracy was lost, the advance of Black Cubans came to a halt. 

And this is what makes it even more maddening to a pedantic Virgo like me -- when even the lackeys of the Cuban dictatorship like Alarcon Quesada and Black voices from within the brutalized island speak out, knowing that there will be consequences - as Zurbano discovered after his New York Times opinion piece - why does Ms. Hannah-Jones live in this rose-colored atmosphere where she perceives the poor jailed island as an example of equality?

Does she know that even though about 60% of Cubans are Black or brown, that 94.2% of the students at the University of Havana are white?  Is she aware - as evidenced by the hundreds of videos one can see at #SOSCuba, that the epicenters of the demonstrations in most Cuban cities during this historic uprising are in the Black neighborhoods? Does she know about Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a young Black Cuban from La Güinera who was arrested and then murdered by the Cuban police? When notified that her son was dead, his mother committed suicide. Does she know that her own newspaper, The New York Times documented a few years ago how Black Cubans are routinely discriminated in Cuba? Is she aware that while 48% of white Cubans have an annual income of less that $3,000 USD, a whooping 95% of Black Cubans fall below that incredible line?

By the way... In 1959 Cuba had the third-highest per capita income in Latin America, exceeded only by Argentina and Venezuela (around $550 a year back then which is about $5,170 in today's dollars). In 1959 that was also higher than Italy, Japan, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and every single Eastern European nation in the Soviet bloc.

Nikole Hannah-Jones now has an opportunity to clear the air, clear her mind, clear her perception and gain instant respect from Cubans of all races. All she has to say is that she's learned a lot since the statements that she made in 2019 surfaced during the current Cuban uprising - which as video evidence clearly shows, appears to involve Cubans of all races - and state that she was wrong and is now aware of the sorry and sad state of the Marxist government's deeply rooted racism.

Boom! Case closed.

I live in a cul-de-sac in the Marylandian suburbs of Washington, DC.  In order to drive from my house to the main street in the area, I have to drive three quarters of a mile and take three right turns in my neighborhood's streets.

The neighborhood itself is made up of single family homes - each one with its own driveway and two-car garage.  Assuming that most people have their garage full of junk, there's ample space in their driveways for two cars to park and be off the street.

One of the planet's smartest minds is Malcolm Gladwell, who has eloquently discussed the 10,000 hour rule for becoming an expert at anything. He discussed this in his amazing book “Outliers.” As Gladwell tells it, the rule goes like this: 

It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials.

I've somewhat adapted the rule to gather 10,000 points of data for an interesting experiment.  Here how it started.

I moved into this house in 2009.  Soon afterwards I started to notice an interesting and baffling series of curious events whenever I drove away from my house towards any destination (or the return trip) - for the first 3/4 of a mile they're nearly always the same. Or when I enter the same entry point (from the main street towards my house) and drive home. In other words, a round trip.

The streets leading to the neighborhood exit are mostly clear of parked cars, as nearly every house parks in their own driveways.  Households with more that two cars do often park on the street, as do visitors, etc.  Whenever a vehicle is parked on the neighborhood streets, it essentially blocks that side of the street, forcing any traffic on that side of the street to have to use the oncoming/other side of the street to continue on.

The neighborhood also has a lot of "regular" street walkers (not hookers), dog walkers, and runners, and car traffic is generally very light.

Vehicular traffic is generally very light in the neighborhood - usually only the people who live there, delivery vehicles, visitors, and garbage and/or recycling trucks.

A few months after we moved in, I noticed that there seemed to be a higher incidence of the following scenario... that one would expect statistically.

The scenario is that the incidence of two oncoming vehicles "meeting" at the spot where one side of the road is blocked by a parked car appeared to be weirdly tilted towards a Murphian dictate of events.  

Add to that the odds of the random dog walker, stroller or runner, a parked car and two oncoming vehicles meeting at precisely the worst spot on the streets from my house to the neighborhood exit, and my curiosity was kindled.

And thus, I started to keep a log in my car - using a calendar book - to record these instances of two cars, driving towards each other, meeting at the narrowest space created by a third car parked on the street.

A few days ago, my 10 thousandth drive took place - about 12 years or so of trips, usually at random times of the day or night, and 12 yearly calendars full of data.

Of those 10,000 data points the following was recorded:

• No oncoming traffic was met whenever a parked car blocked one side of the road 4,611 times
• An oncoming car was met at the blocked spot (forcing one car to stop and wait for the other car to pass) 5, 389 times
• Of that 5, 389 times, 2, 673 times, not only where there two cars meeting at the "blocked" spot, but there were also either walkers, runners or dog walkers in the same narrow area - thus making driving maneuvers even more complicated.

54% of the time that I drove from/to my home I came across an oncoming vehicle at precisely the one spot (in an otherwise generally open street) where there was a third car blocking one side of the road!

Under what statistical scenario does that make sense when there are .75 of a mile of streets which are 98% empty of parked cars (on the street)?

Murphy!!!!!!! 

The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards, a juried art competition produced by the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, announced the 2022 prize winners during last night’s awards reception. 

WonJung Choi and Carol Trawick

WonJung Choi of Richmond, VA was awarded the prestigious “Best in Show” title and received the $10,000 top prize. Caryn Martin from Baltimore, MD was named second place and given $2,000; Robert Martin from Staunton, VA was bestowed third place and received $1,000; and Evie Metz from Henrico, VA was awarded the Young Artist Award and received $1,000.

WonJung Choi, was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Her series of sculptures, paintings, drawings, and installation explores the power of her every changing identity in the making. She’s studied the process of mutation and evolution undertaken by diverse organisms to adapt to their current surroundings reflecting her hybrid identity through the continuous interactions between herself, contemporary culture and society. Choi received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design and Artists Alliance Inc. (AAI) in New York as well as a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.

2022 Trawick Prize Finalists

MK Bailey, Washington, D.C.

WonJung Choi, Richmond, VA

Marcia Haffmans, Richmond, VA

Ali Kaeini, Richmond, VA

Caryn Martin, Baltimore, MD

Robert Mertens, Staunton, VA

Evie Metz, Henrico, VA

Judith Pratt, Orange, VA

Entries were juried by Alexis Assam, Regenia A. Perry, Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VFMA); Thomas James, Visual Arts Curator at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD; and Maria del Carmen Montoya, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Spatial Practices, Director of Graduate Studies, M.F.A. in Fine Arts and Social Practice, Studio Arts Program.

Founded by Carol Trawick in 2003, the regional competition is one of the largest prizes to annually honor visual artists. Ms. Trawick, a longtime community activist in downtown Bethesda, also established the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2005. She has served as the Chair of the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, Bethesda Urban Partnership, Strathmore and the Maryland State Arts Council. She founded the Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation in 2007 to assist health and human services and arts non-profits in Montgomery County, MD. The Foundation has awarded grants to more than 90 nonprofits in Montgomery County and funds the annual Trawick Prize and the Bethesda Painting Awards.

To date, The Trawick Prize has awarded more than $260,000 in prize monies and has exhibited the work of more than 160 regional artists.

The work of the finalists will be on exhibit at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, until October 2. Gallery hours for the duration of the exhibit will be Thursday-Sunday, 12 – 5pm.

Chief Executive Officer, International Arts & Artists 

International Arts & Artist's Board of Trustees is immediately seeking a dynamic, skilled, experienced leader to become IA&A's next President and Chief Executive Officer when our founder David Furchgott retires this fall.

Ideal candidates will have:

• A passion for IA&A’s mission of increasing cross-cultural understanding through the arts.
• 10+ years appropriate professional experience, including at least five years in an executive role.
• Substantive connections in the arts and strong relationships with national & international arts leaders.
• A record of success in the growth of her/his past endeavors. • A deep understanding of, and a driving commitment to, the arts and cultural exchange.
• A history of effective leadership and the ability to motivate and inspire a small but talented team.
• Entrepreneurial instincts with strong business acumen with a drive for results, and a track record in building new relationships and developing new programs.
• Track record in building revenue earned and charitable revenue streams. Compensation ranging from $120,000 to $145,000 plus health insurance and other benefits, and reasonable moving expense reimbursement (depending upon experience).

To learn more about this great opportunity, download the full job description. To apply visit DRi Waterstone.

IA&A at Hillyer | 9 Hillyer Ct, NW, Washington, DC 20008

(202) 338-0680 | | atHillyer.org

When I first wrote the below post a few years ago, I then printed it and mailed it to Nikole Hannah-Jones.... hopefully she's better educated now, although dogma is a pretty harsh mistress.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of that paper's controversial 1619 Project recently showed a spectacular lack of background knowledge on the Cuban dictatorship's well-documented racist history and abuses of its black population by her statement that “If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” and then proceeding to cite socialism as her reason to make the statement.

Ms. Hannah-Jones' rosy-eyed view of the Marxist dictatorship's oppression of its citizens, especially its Black citizens not only reveals loads about her own political leanings, but also serves as a brilliant example of suspicious lack of research skills about a subject as widely discussed as Cuba's oppressive and racist government.

Had Ms. Hannah-Jones - who visited Cuba in 2008 - bothered to look past her clear admiration for the Marxist government, and bothered to take a quick tour of the facts, she would have discovered that much has been written and documented about racism in Cuba, and it was even one of the earliest subjects addressed by the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson upon his arrival to the DMV a few decades ago from his various Latin American postings.In his article a couple of decades ago, Cuba Begins to Answer Its Race Question, Robinson, also clearly and openly a very extreme left-wing oriented writer, tried hard to find excuses for the dictatorship, but nonetheless admits that:

Academics say that black Cubans are failing to earn university degrees in proportion to their numbers--a situation to which Castro has alluded publicly. The upper echelons of the government remain disproportionately white, despite the emergence of several rising black stars. And while perceptions are difficult to quantify, much less prove true or false, many black Cubans are convinced that they are much less likely than whites to land good jobs--and much more likely to be hassled by police on the street, like Cano's husband, in a Cuban version of "racial profiling."

But how about some Cubans inside Cuba discussing the subject?

In primary [Cuban] education, skin color is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention color in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.

Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.

Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States

A lot of hopes have been pinned by many people (who know little about Cuba and the repressive nature of its government) on President Obama's monumental decision to re-establish diplomatic relations with the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:

...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."

Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana

And thus, it is curious to me that in his attempt to re-establish diplomatic ties, our socially conscious President (and his cadre of advisors) back then also - like Ms. Hannah-Jones - appeared to know little or nothing about the way that Afro-Cuban citizens are treated in their own country.

In reference to the President's visit to Cuba, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Connecticut and a scholar at Harvard University, and writing in Ms. Hannah-Jones own newspaper, noted in the New York Times that  

“The images of the meetings, the agreements, they’re all shameful for many black Cubans — I’m including myself in this — because it’s difficult to feel represented.”

Was the projected flow of American tourists expected to help Black Cubans in a pre-COVID Cuba? Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban expert in Afro-Cuban identity, race and literature based out of Havana wrote in his 2013 New York Times article that:

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

Zurbano was subsequently punished by his Marxist government for daring to express that opinion on the pages of Ms. Hannah-Jones employing newspaper. Because that's how Communists roll!

That "not long ago" is still the case, as anyone who has been to Cuba recently can testify to and which Ms. Hannah-Jones could clearly see during her 2008 visit to the island - it is very rare to see a black face in any of Havana's "tourist only" hotels and nearby beaches. Discussing those lucrative jobs, Yusimí Rodríguez López, an Afro-Cuban independent journalist, said in a 2016 New York Times article that there were job listings in Revolico — sometimes called Cuba’s underground Craigslist — “where they say they only want whites.”

In the same NYT article we read:

“They talk a lot here about discrimination against blacks in the United States. What about here?” said Manuel Valier Figueroa, 50, an actor, who was in the park on Monday. “If there’s a dance competition, they’re going to choose the woman who is fair-skinned with light, good hair. If there’s a tourism job, the same.”

He added: “Why are there no blacks managing hotels? You don’t see any blacks working as chefs in hotels, but you see them as janitors and porters. They get the inferior jobs.”

One would hope that Ms. Hannah-Jones' exploration of Cuba, a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public, could at least have educated her on the disturbing status of blacks in their own island nation.

Fact: Twice as many African slaves were brought to Cuba than to the United States... twice!

And what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how often historically and socially clueless American academics, journalists, activists, etc. make spectacularly ignorant statements - as Ms. Hannah-Jones did - about the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships (a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own Black population) without even mentioning the issue of racism... or is Ms. Hannah-Jones' case praising the socialist dictatorship!

Ms. Hannah-Jones should learn about the Cuban version of the 1619 Project, which in Cuba's case would have been called the 1511 Project, as that was when Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out from Hispaniola to establish the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, and brought the first African slaves to the island.

Since then and to its present day, Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.

Cuba even had its own race war.

General Antonio Maceo, known as "the Bronze Titan." He was the true warrior leader of the Cuban Wars of Liberation. His father was white of French ancestry; his mother was black, of Dominican ancestry. After the first Cuban Liberation War ended in a truce with Spain, some say that Maceo was so disillusioned with the realities of life in Cuba as a black man, that he left Cuba and lived in Panama, until he was called back to lead the Cuban rebels in a new rebellion in 1895. He returned to Cuba and was killed in battle against the Spanish Army in 1896.

In 1912, Black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.

As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically and although 65% of Cubans self-identify as white in recent censuses, many experts estimate that today the island is actually about 60% black or biracial.

But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd. 

In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population."

"I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."

Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana

While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism on paper, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper. They would have told Ms. Hannah-Jones during her visit to Cuba in 2008 - but she probably didn't notice that nearly everywhere that she visited, the presence of the Cuban government was not far, and people fear that presence.

The harsh Cuban reality today, Black Cubans will tell you, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.

Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.

Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban Parliament

Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants' atrocities should be dealt with in silence? -- especially in view of our nation's own racial history and what Ms. Hannah-Jones so expeditiously attempted to document in her controversial 1619 Project? 

We have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight.

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.

What would she say if she had discovered the "permanent and shameful police harassment of young Cubans of African descent in our streets..." as noted by Leonardo Calvo Cardenas, the Cuban National Vice-Coordinador of the Citizens' Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR))?

As Omar López Montenegro, the Black Cuban director of Human Rights for the Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana recently stated in the Panama Post:

The situation for Black Cubans worsened after Castro assumed power... even though there were always racial issues, before Castro in Cuba there had been Black governors, a President of the Senate, Martín Morua Delgado, and also many Congressmen such as the labor leader Jesús Menéndez, a member of the Socialist Party. 

When Cuba became a Communist dictatorship, and democracy was lost, the advance of Black Cubans came to a halt. 

And this is what makes it even more maddening to a pedantic Virgo like me -- when even the lackeys of the Cuban dictatorship like Alarcon Quesada and Black voices from within the brutalized island speak out, knowing that there will be consequences - as Zurbano discovered after his New York Times opinion piece - why does Ms. Hannah-Jones live in this rose-colored atmosphere where she perceives the poor jailed island as an example of equality?

Does she know that even though about 60% of Cubans are Black or brown, that 94.2% of the students at the University of Havana are white?  Is she aware - as evidenced by the hundreds of videos one can see at #SOSCuba, that the epicenters of the demonstrations in most Cuban cities during this historic uprising are in the Black neighborhoods? Does she know about Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a young Black Cuban from La Güinera who was arrested and then murdered by the Cuban police? When notified that her son was dead, his mother committed suicide. Does she know that her own newspaper, The New York Times documented a few years ago how Black Cubans are routinely discriminated in Cuba? Is she aware that while 48% of white Cubans have an annual income of less that $3,000 USD, a whooping 95% of Black Cubans fall below that incredible line?

By the way... In 1959 Cuba had the third-highest per capita income in Latin America, exceeded only by Argentina and Venezuela (around $550 a year back then which is about $5,170 in today's dollars). In 1959 that was also higher than Italy, Japan, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and every single Eastern European nation in the Soviet bloc.

Nikole Hannah-Jones now has an opportunity to clear the air, clear her mind, clear her perception and gain instant respect from Cubans of all races. All she has to say is that she's learned a lot since the statements that she made in 2019 surfaced during the current Cuban uprising - which as video evidence clearly shows, appears to involve Cubans of all races - and state that she was wrong and is now aware of the sorry and sad state of the Marxist government's deeply rooted racism.

Boom! Case closed.