A message-in-a-bottle washes ashore in a supposed enemy land—and builds a bridge of friendship.

Photo By Steve Virello

This story starts on a Friday night just before sunset somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean. The year is 2003, the month February, and Sausalito, California-based sailor Rick Hastie is alone at the helm of the First Home, a 54-foot sailboat headed for the Virgin Islands. Rick and his two crewmates have recently cleared the Panama Canal, and in this moment, Rick is steering north toward Jamaica to escape some heavy weather blowing in from the east. He is feeling the solitude of the sea, feeling very far from everyone and everything, and all this makes him remember a promise he’d made to a bartender buddy back home the night before setting sail.

Rick puts the boat on automatic pilot, and he leaves the helm. He heads for the cabin where he retrieves a $43 bottle of Bunnahabhain single malt Scotch whisky—the bartender’s bon voyage present, now polished off. Empty bottle in hand, Rick grabs a piece of paper and a pencil, and he heads back to the helm.

What Rick pens in the cockpit is not the profoundest of posts, but it does fulfill his promise to the bartender. Rick writes: “Whoever finds this is entitled to a bottle of free Bunnahabhain Scotch at the Cat ’N Fiddle.” Rick includes his name and address, the name of his vessel, the date, the longitude and latitude. He rolls his message up and slides it down the slender neck of his green Bunnahabhain bottle. He encases his envoy in electrician’s tape, throws it into an enormous aqua-green wave, and then promptly forgets about it.

Keep reading Message en una Botella at Perceptive Travel.

She hadn’t always been this snide. Once, she too had believed in beauty, revered it even. As a child, she had chosen her career because of it. This was back in the days of Batista, when she had noticed that all the beautiful people in La Poma, that bottleneck of chaos and corruption and color that has forever been Havana, were all professionals—doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers. When the Revolution triumphed, on the eve of her tenth birthday, she had been immediately caught up in its spell of social justice, its promise of education (the path to professionalism) for everyone…

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Thursday, March 22, 7:15 p.m.
Larkspur Library
400 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur (415) 927-5005

About the Book and Author:
Es Cuba is a poignant and passionate travel memoir about falling in love with a country and with one of its compatriots. Aschkenas never strays from her acute awareness that there is no way to separate her foreignness from the complex mix of emotions – devotion and rejection, enrapture and apprehension – that she develops toward the country.

Lea Aschkenas has written about travel, literature, and life at large for the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com. She is also published in the books, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2006, Travelers’ Tales Central America, Travelers’ Tales Cuba, The Unsavvy Traveler, Two in the Wild, and Beside the Sleeping Maiden: Poets of Marin.

Lea Aschkenas shows slides and talks about Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island.

“Es Cuba” is a poignant and passionate travel memoir about falling in love with a country and one of its compatriots. Aschkenas never strays from her acute awareness that there is no way to separate her foreignness from the complex mix of emotions – devotion and rejection, enrapture and apprehension – that she develops toward the country – Book Passage

Stop by Mill Valley Whole Foods (414 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley) on Thursday, August 10 from 4 to 7 p.m. for a sampling of Cuban music, food, photos, and an Es Cuba book signing.

August 2006—The release of the anthology The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2006, which includes an excerpt from Es Cuba.

(The Writer, August 1, 2006)

Read Lea’s article in this month’s issue of The Writer magazine about the process of cutting Es Cuba.

Killing Your Darlings

July 6, 2006

Listen to an interview with Lea on Radio Sausalito.

(Perceptive Travel, July 2006)

While reluctantly becoming a group tour participant in Havana, Lea Aschkenas finds a way to mount her own mini revolution on a bicycle.

When I returned to my hotel late one night at the end of my first week in Havana, I found Amaury, a bellboy I’d befriended the day before, waiting for me in the lobby.

“Lea,” he called out. “I have some important news for you.”

But then as I approached, Amaury put his hand up as if to stop me, rolling his eyes in the direction of one of the overhead lights.

Keep reading Black Market biking at Perceptive Travel.

On my first trip to Cuba, I fit everything I needed into my trusty old camping backpack. But on my second visit, to accommodate all the presents I had for my new friends, I bought a fancy, fashionable wheeled suitcase. Despite its supposedly comfort-enhancing pullout handle, I had calluses on both hands after wheeling it from the airport entrance to the check in terminal where the agent promptly informed me that, at 95 pounds, my suitcase was a whopping 50 pounds over the limit.

For the past several months, I had been stocking up on the things I wished I’d brought before, for others and for myself. My suitcase now contained multi-vitamins and ibuprofen, toilet paper, an assortment of power bars and dehydrated bean soups, twine for impromptu laundry lines, automatic laundry detergent for my friend Dinora, bed sheets for my friend Liudmila, and running shoes for my boyfriend Alfredo, who I had met on my first trip.

Once I’d run out of money to purchase more gifts, I’d begun scavenging through the lost and found at the bookstore where I worked. With its multitude of misplaced and never retrieved cell phones and watches and palm pilots, the bookstore drawer contained more electronic gadgets than Alfredo had seen in his lifetime.

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