Today’s Times features a story on the past, present and future of Puerto Rican baseball, and the politics behind their recent decline.
Check out a excerpt from the story below…
…In 2009, only 3.5 percent of position players in Major League Baseball came from Puerto Rico, a 24-year low. Meanwhile, the percentage of Cuban and Venezuelan position players has nearly doubled in the last decade.
An average of 27 Puerto Ricans a year were drafted and signed during the past decade, down from 35 a year during the 1990s. Ten times as many amateurs were signed from the Dominican Republic.
Major League Baseball has tried to boost the popularity of the sport through the World Baseball Classic and by playing regular-season games in Puerto Rico, including this week’s series between the Mets and the Florida Marlins.
The NY Times puts together an interesting feature on German/Jamaican tennis player, and Wimbledon hopeful, Dustin Brown. Check out a few line from the story below…
Dustin Brown, the most accomplished tennis player in the history of Jamaica, was born in Germany and trained by an American before polishing his game near the picturesque shores of Montego Bay.
He remains a man of worldly influences, fluent in German and English, with distinct dreadlocks and a serve-and-volley style. But Brown’s rise into the top 100, his first Wimbledon singles appearance and his late-blossoming career can all be traced back to an unlikely vehicle — a Volkswagen camper van….
While Haiti’s problems are far from gone, and while lives of people are still far from what it used to be, life still moves forward. One of the best things is despite all the hardships certain staples of Haitian culture won’t die - namely art and music. I threw up a report a from the NY Times a few weeks ago about the hardships of Haitian artists. This NY Times video shows how artist are still pushing on, making music, painting and surviving.
Carnival is jumping off around the Caribbean and South America but unfortunately not this year in Haiti. Due to the earthquake it has been canceled sadly enough and that also brings more hardship for artists and mask makers that prepare pieces for Carnival. The NY Times has a story about the plight of one artist in Jacmel.
The NY Times had a travel article about Guyana, explaining how it has risen as a tourist attraction in recent years for naturalists and eco-tourists. It talks about the rich wild life and stunning landscape as well as how to plan your own trip there.
… Guyana is truly off the tourist path — a place, as Evelyn Waugh wrote in “92 Days,” his 1932 travel memoir of what was then British Guiana, “of conflicting cultures and states of development where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation.”
Nestled between Venezuela, Brazil and Suriname, Guyana — South America’s only English-speaking country — is a place that rarely registers as a vacation spot. In recent years, however, the country has started pushing to capitalize on its often stunning scenery, abundant wildlife and rich Amerindian heritage, repackaging itself as a haven for adventurers, naturalists and eco-tourists.
… Once in the interior, you can forget any ideas of rambling off on your own, thanks to a lack of roads and often limited accommodations and food supplies in the rural villages. (And don’t even think about visiting the rain forests without a local guide, unless you are fully prepped in the niceties of dealing with caiman, black widow spiders and armadillo wasps.)
This isolation, though, has resulted in the emergence of eco-lodges across the country, built with the help of both foreign aid and Amerindian knowledge — meaning that visitors get in-depth, personal, insider perspectives. In Surama, where we stayed, a tiny Macushi village of about 300 inhabitants set in a five-square-mile patch of open savannah in the northern Rupununi, two four-bed eco-lodges have drawn a steady stream of visitors. (Built in 2004 as part of a sustainable tourism initiative between Guyana and the United States, the lodges are now managed and operated by the local Macushi tribe.)
I’ve been waiting until the holidays before I posted this recipe for Black Cake, a dense rum-soaked fruit cake which is usually made for Christmas and weddings. When my mother started her batch last weekend, I knew it was time. Check out the details below…
Black Cake
Ingredients:
1 pound prunes
1 pound dark raisins
1/2 pound golden raisins
1 pound currants
1 1/2 pounds dried cherries, or 1 pound dried cherries plus 1/2 pound glacé cherries
1/4 pound mixed candied citrus peel
2 cups dark rum; more for brushing cake
1 1/2 cups cherry brandy or Manischewitz Concord grape wine; more for grinding fruit
1/4 pound blanched almonds
1 cup white or light brown sugar for burning, or 1/4 cup dark molasses or cane syrup; more molasses for coloring batter
4 sticks (1 pound) butter; more for buttering pans
1 pound (about 2 1/2 cups) light or dark brown sugar
The NY Times posted an article today that talks about the pride that Sotomayor’s appointment brings to the Puerto Rican community. This is a sign of how the generational gap has been bridged in one way. It also reflects on the past achievements of Puerto Ricans in politics that have led up to this point.
Arguably the highest rung that any Puerto Rican has reached in this country, the appointment of Judge Sotomayor is a watershed event for Puerto Rican New York. It builds on the achievements that others of her generation have made in business, politics, the arts and pop culture. It extends the legacy of an earlier, lesser-known generation who created social service and educational institutions that persisttoday, helping newcomers from Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Yet the city has also been a place of heartbreak. Though Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship in 1917 and large numbers of them arrived in New York in the 1950s, poverty and lack of opportunity still pockmark some of their neighborhoods. A 2004 report by a Hispanic advocacy group showed that compared with other Latino groups nationwide, Puerto Ricans had the highest poverty rate, the lowest average family income and the highest unemployment rate for men.
In politics, the trailblazer Herman Badillo saw his career go from a series of heady firsts in the 1960s to frustration in the 1980s when his dreams of becoming the city’s first Puerto Rican mayor were foiled by Harlem’s political bosses. Just four years ago, Fernando Ferrer was trounced in his bid against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
All those setbacks lose their sting, if only for a moment, in the glow of Judge Sotomayor’s achievement, which many of her countrymen say is as monumental for them as President Obama’s victory was for African-Americans. It has affirmed a sense of Puerto Rican identity at a moment when that distinction is often obscured by catch-all labels like Latino and Hispanic — and even as it is subjected to negative comparisons.
The Times put together a nice story on the rise in popularity of Cricket as a summertime sport, covering a youth league set up by the P.A.L. in Brooklyn. Check out an excerpt form the article below…
…And so the police decided to experiment with cricket, a game with a huge following across the Caribbean and South Asia. The response has cut across community lines. Tuesday’s opening match pitted the SuperStars — made up largely of players from Guyana — against the KnightRiders, a predominantly Pakistani team….
