Havana

When we think of Cuba, we picture the things we heard about but never saw - the sensuous Havana of the '50s, where Frank Sinatra sang at the Tropicana and Ernest Hemingway dined at El Floridita. Combine these feelings of nostalgia with America's obsession for everything Latin - from the first Latin Grammy awards to Cuban coffee - and it was only a matter of time before interior design caught Cuban fever. "Americans have always been fascinated with Cuba because there is a certain mystique about it," said Jackie Hirschhault, vice president of public relations for the American Furniture Manufacturers Association.

As Alan Gross neared his third anniversary behind bars in Cuba, his wife gave new details of his deteriorating health and issued an impassioned plea to officials in Washington and Havana to negotiate his release immediately. Judy Gross, who visited her husband in September, said the Montgomery County man has lost 110 pounds since his arrest in December 2009, is suffering chronic pain from degenerative arthritis and now has a mass behind one shoulder. She said their American radiologist has told her the growth could be cancerous and should be assumed to be malignant until tested and proved otherwise.

Cuba has lived under communism longer than Poland did, and unlike Poland in 1989 it has no broad-based popular movement ready to take to the streets and usher it into a post-communist era. Brave dissidents, yes; Solidarity, no. This means that Cuba is approaching the brink of change without an obvious alternative to the regime, and, for that matter, without an obvious course of action for the regime to take, once Fidel Castro drops the reins - as he...

If Mexico had a St. Patrick's Day, it would be Cinco de Mayo. There's just a slight tweak to the festivities. One can always count on tequila, sombreros and Margaritas - the overly salty, overly soured kind. I have a hard time believing Cinco de Mayo is really all that Mexican anymore. Heck, even area Irish bars offer gimmicky deals in the spirit of boozing. So this year, why not shake up your usual 5th of May and expand your Latin American horizons? Skip the salt on the rim and try one of my favorite Baltimore specialties, a Mojito from Little Havana in Federal Hill.

If Mexico had a St. Patrick's Day, it would be Cinco de Mayo. There's just a slight tweak to the festivities. One can always count on tequila, sombreros and Margaritas - the overly salty, overly soured kind. I have a hard time believing Cinco de Mayo is really all that Mexican anymore. Heck, even area Irish bars offer gimmicky deals in the spirit of boozing. So this year, why not shake up your usual 5th of May and expand your Latin American horizons? Skip the salt on the rim and try one of my favorite Baltimore specialties, a Mojito from Little Havana in Federal Hill.

Ever since Walker Evans created his classic series of portraits from pre-Revolutionary Havana during the early 1930s, American photographers have had a love affair with the land and people of Cuba. Evans brought to his Cuban portraits an uncompromising realism in the depiction of ordinary, working-class folk, along with an appreciation for the elegant, Spanish-style architecture and bustling street life of their city. In the days before color film was practical for documentary work, Evans was able to endow his seemingly artless black-and-white images with an unmistakable aura of tropical light and color.

I'm keeping my eye on 1325-A Key Highway, where work on Little Havana is progressing. It doesn't look as though the new Cuban/seafood restaurant will open anytime soon; but when it does (my guess is late this fall), it should be worth the wait. At least as far as the setting is concerned. I love the idea of sitting on Little Havana's deck, watching the water and eating grilled swordfish with mango and blueberries or steak with papaya-onion salsa. (Those are a couple of dishes from the tentative menu.

JIMMY CARTER made an awfully good point when he addressed the Cuban people Tuesday night on television. The strength of a democracy, he said, is that its citizens can work on correcting its mistakes. As an example, he pointed out that U.S. election laws are already being reformed so as to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida. Take that, Bush brothers. The United States is now entering a new election season, one that sees Jeb Bush running for another term as governor of Florida, and it's fair to point out that U.S. policy toward Cuba is primarily focused on Cubans who live about 90 miles this side of Havana.

'Havana'Starring Robert Redford and Lena Olin.Directed by Sidney Pollack.Released by Universal.Rated R.... ** I'm no good at being noble, but neither is Robert Redford, and it doesn't seem to me that the problems of the three little people in "Havana" -- including Redford -- amount to a hill of beans in this world. A desultory, chaotic romantic thriller, "HaI'm no good at being noble, but neither is Robert Redford, and it doesn't seem to me that the problems of the three little people in "Havana" -- including Redford -- amount to a hill of beans in this world.

Havana, by Stephen Hunter. Simon & Schuster. 416 pages. $24.95 Preparing to eat a cockroach he won playing cards, a cadaverous prisoner in Stalin's frozen Siberian Gulag muses that the roach would be delicious sauteed en beurre with a complex red wine, perhaps a St. Emilion `34 or `35. "Why red?" he asks himself, and then answers: "Because red goes with meat. A cockroach certainly [isn't] fish, of that you may be sure." With that savory bit of whimsy, Stephen Hunter introduces Comrade Speshnev, a brilliant and impishly unpredictable Communist revolutionary who is sprung from the Gulag in 1953 and dispatched to Cuba.

Plans to begin weekly flights to Cuba from Baltimore have been pushed back to October because of lack of demand, the head of the travel company offering the service said Tuesday. The flights were to begin next month. William Hauf, president of Tampa, Fla.-based Island Travel & Tours Ltd., said his company delayed the start of the service to Havana from Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport to allow more time to market the flights to eligible groups, such as university and religious organizations.

Marta Ines Quintana's Havana Road Cafe was one of the sweetest success stories of 2010. The Towson restaurant caught on quickly. "Every once in a while, you come across a restaurant that has distinctive, well-prepared food at sensible prices," The Baltimore Sun's reviewer said. "Havana Road in Towson is such a spot; it is a find. " And since its quiet opening, the cafe has extended its hours and its day of operation. Quintana's story is about to get sweeter. She has just debuted a new line of Havana Road products in area Whole Foods Markets.

Every once in a while, you come across a restaurant that has distinctive, well-prepared food at sensible prices. Havana Road in Towson is such a spot; it is a find. Situated in a storefront in on Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Towson, Havana Road is small — about 30 seats — and serves only Cuban fare. But what it does with a limited menu, it does exceptionally well. Take, for example, the hummus trio ($6), an offering of black bean hummus, red hummus made with sun-dried tomatoes and hummus made with Cuban spices.

Ask Bonnie Benedetta to describe her style, and she laughingly answers, "Cheap. Cheap, but good." The friends she was meeting at Little Havana the night we "Glimpsed" the Catonsville resident say she's feminine and put-together. The 43-year-old sales representative for George Marshall says she loves dresses and skirts, but she doesn't like spending a lot on her look. She's an expert at finding a deal - and dealing with hand-me-downs. The look: Lilac short-sleeve button-down New York & Company shirt.

What Baltimore's Italia lacks in size, it makes up for in red sauce-steeped charm - just like mama used to make. After bowls of pasta at Amicci's or Da Mimmo's or Aldo's or Sabatino's - all various Italian terms that roughly translate to "entrees that cost more than you think they should" - couples could stroll the crisscross of short streets in minutes, but instead take a more circuitous path, licking heaping gelato cones from Vaccaro's and stopping to...

MIAMI - Hurricane Ike ripped through central Cuba yesterday, toppling colonial landmarks and forcing the evacuation of nearly 1 million people - with more likely to be displaced as the powerful storm plowed toward populous Havana. Revolutionary leader Fidel Castro proclaimed his country on "combat alert" against the third large storm to hit the island in as many weeks and what he portrayed as a heartless double standard that blocks U.S. humanitarian aid. The extent of Ike's damage elsewhere in the Caribbean emerged yesterday, a day after it ravaged Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 135 mph and triggered more flooding in devastated Haiti, where the deaths from a series of storms were said to exceed 1,000.

It was referred to in the travel brochures as the "Paris of the Americas" -- an idyllic island of sun, sea and sand, where the plazas were filled with laughter and the spirit of the Cuban people lent an enticing, keep-the-party-going kind of happiness to the setting.That's all gone now, a country entrapped by an over-the-hill communist dictator who claims a passion for baseball, but was nothing more than a Mickey Mouse pitcher and, to make the picture complete, even wore a wristwatch when he was playing.

HAVANA -- There were no agents dressed to kill, no Ray-Ban sunglasses fashionably dangling against $30 T-shirts, no screaming parents, no $10 hamburgers, no patches on the sleeves of the players and no coaches named Nick Bollettieri.This was tennis played in a very simple yet elegant setting within yards of buses that belched smoke and overlooking a glistening blue sea.When Pam Shriver stepped on to a court at the 19th of November Tennis Stadium yesterday, she was wearing a white shirt and white skirt with matching American flags on the pockets.

BURT GLINN, 82 Noted photojournalist Burt Glinn, a photojournalist whose images of historic moments of the Cold War include Fidel Castro's 1959 march on Havana and Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the United States that year, died Wednesday, according to Magnum Photos Inc. The cause of death was not immediately given. He began his career with the Magnum Photos agency in 1951 and photographed events in such locations as Japan, Russia and Mexico. A highlight of Mr. Glinn's career came on New Year's Eve 1958, when he was in New York and got word that the dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled Cuba and that a ragtag band of revolutionaries led by Mr. Castro would be making a triumphant march into Havana.

One day after arriving in Fort Lauderdale to cover the Baltimore Orioles, I was met by Associated Press photographer Rob Carr, who also made the trip from Baltimore to cover spring training at the team's winter home. I warned Carr that I had had a history of covering big stories that broke during spring training. Carr listened while I rattled off the memories of breaking away from baseball in February 1998 to cover the Kissimmee tornado outbreak that killed dozens near Orlando. Recalling an earlier tragedy in which I followed the story of two Cleveland Indians players, killed when their fishing boat slammed into a pier on Little Lake Nellie in March 1993, I predicted that we would cover a news event on a national or international scale this time around.