Stephen Kimber

Field Notes will be a corner of this website where I’ll post a variety of informal odds and ends and impressions collected during the course of my research:

1. Truth, lies and the Cuban American National Foundation: My goal in writing “Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection” is to stick to the facts, reconstructing key events of the case in order to produce an in-the-moment narrative that will help readers understand the true story of what really happened even as it entertains them. But whose facts? Whose truth?
2. Miami Progressives Take 2: Andrés Gómez—a shambling, friendly, 63-year-old bear of a man—is the director of Areito Digital, an online magazine of “progressive Cuban immigrants,” the leader of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a Miami-based pro-Cuba activist organization, and one of the best known moderate voices in Miami’s el exilio.
3. Miami progressives, Take 1: We are sitting in the cramped, cluttered offices of Radio Miami, which look more like a 1960s commune than a modern radio station. Radio Miami—“radio para la difusión de ideas”—is located in a nondescript strip mall well beyond the stifling political and cultural confines of Little Havana. That, I have been told, is more a safety precaution than an accident. Lesson #1. I have come here on this June day to try to learn what it is like to be a progressive Cuban-American in militantly right-wing, pro-blockade, Castro-must-die, our-terrorists-are-freedom-fighters Miami…
4. Livio Di Celmo remembers: I was in Montreal recently to interview Livio Di Celmo, the brother of Fabio, a 32-year-old Italian-Canadian who was killed in a September 4, 1997 bombing that was part of a larger terrorist campaign anti-Castro militants were then waging against Cuban tourism.