The brief answer is absolutely nothing, except somewhere
in the twisted neurons of my brain, and there, if you look closely, a slender
thread connects the three. In my quest for news of Raul Castro and his
just-ended trip to Vietnam, China and Russia (with new cases of cholera in Cuba
an everyday occurrence, he could not have picked a safer time to absent himself
from island of the palms) I came across a story that appeared in the Monday
edition of the Miami Herald, under
the headline “Palestinian president urged Raúl
Castro to free Alan Gross” ( http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/16/2898301/palestinian-president-urged-raul.html#storylink=cpy)
Why on earth would Mahmoud Abbas involve himself in the fate of a
Jewish subcontractor who works for the US Department of State and who is
rotting in a Cuban jail? In previous posts, I have written about Gross’s
circumstances, but never considered that the Palestinian Authority might want
to free him. The explanation
provided by the Miami Herald is that the Palestinian request came from an
attempt to accommodate a U.S. Congressman holding the purse strings on a $147
million grant to the Palestinian Authority. This odd development led me to a
search for the origin of the phrase, “politics make strange bedfellows.”
Certainly, stranger bedfellows never existed.
According to Wikipedia,
the phrase was coined by Charles Dudley Warner, a 19th century
American essayist, a resident of San Francisco.
As a resident of northern California, my ears perk up, whenever I come
across a literary tidbit that is associated with these parts of the world.
Warner was so popular in San Francisco that three
different streets were named after him—Charles, Dudley, and Warner Streets.
Another of his phrases, “everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does
anything about it” has been misattributed to Mark Twain. Without the news of Abbas’s
attempt (Raúl will not budge on his demand that five Cubans held in the United
States be released), I would still be thinking that Mark Twain was responsible
for the observation of the ironic human preoccupation with the weather.
Thank you Mr. Abbas.
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