Posts tagged married
Flagler’s Eaton in spotlight after interview with former Cuban spy
Oct 10th
“I was back in Havana in 2010 and 2011 working on a book about Harley-Davidson riders in Cuba,” said Eaton, an assistant professor of Communication at Flagler College. “One day I was talking with one of the riders and he told me he knew Roque and asked if I was still interested in interviewing him. Sure, I said.”
Roque, a former fighter pilot, swam to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in 1992 and declared opposition to Fidel Castro. While in South Florida, he became a pilot for Brothers to the Rescue, a group dedicated to searching for rafters in the Florida Straits.
In 1996, Roque slipped back into Cuba the day before Cuban MiGs shot down two civilian aircraft flown by members of the Brothers group, who were accused of dropping political leaflets onto Havana. The attack killed four civilians and outed Roque as a spy, surprising not only the Cuban-American woman Roque had married as part of his cover, but also the FBI who had been paying him as an informant.
Eaton’s interview was Roque’s first in 16 years and was featured on Miami’s Spanish-language cable TV station, América TeVe, for four nights on a show called, “A Mano Limpia,” hosted by journalist Oscar Haza.
In the interview, Roque, who now lives in a cramped apartment and claims he is broke, said he wishes he had done more to stop the shoot-down.
“Perhaps now … I’d try to play a much stronger role in the things that happened,” he said. “I’d try to play a better role. If I played it bad or good, let the people decide. Let those who want to judge me, judge me.”
Eaton’s interview even produced an apology from the former spy.
“If I could travel in a time machine,” he said. “I’d get those boys off the planes that were shot down.”
In addition to the video interview, Eaton wrote two stories on Roque for the non-profit Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, which distributed them to a network of news outlet, including the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald. The stories generated more than 1,100 comments and were picked up by dozens of websites.
Source: Flagler College
“Darling Companion” a Shaggy Dog Story
Jun 16th
“Shaggy Dog Story”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Darling Companion is a pleasant little movie about a simple little subject from the beginning to the end.
Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, this movie can be added to his other movies, such as the 1981 Body Heat, the 1983 The Big Chill, and the 1991 Grand Canyon, among many others.
It stars Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins, and Sam Shephard, and it is about a lovable dog that goes missing and all the problems that causes.
When the movie opens, Beth and her daughter Grace are returning home from the airport when Beth orders Grace to stop the car on the freeway, because she saw something on the side of the road.
What Beth saw was a dog, and to make a long story short, after a veterinarian says there is nothing wrong with him that a few good meals and a bath won’t fix, Beth decides to keep the dog and names him Freeway.
Beth tells her reluctant husband, Joseph, “He’s not mine. I’m just going to find him a home.”
Well, you can guess how that works out, can’t you?
Sure enough, a year later, everybody is at the vacation home in the mountains of Beth and Joseph, where Grace is getting married, and Freeway is still a part of the family.
So, Joseph is out in the woods taking Freeway for a walk when Freeway spots a deer and runs off after it.
Freeway doesn’t come back, Beth blames Joseph for losing the dog while Joseph was talking on his phone, and this disrupts everybody’s plans for going back to their homes after the wedding, because now they all decide to stay until Freeway can be found.
Everybody includes Beth and Joseph, Joseph’s sister Penny, Penny’s grown son Bryan and her new boyfriend Russell, a young woman who “sees things,” because her mother was a gypsy and her father was a yogi, and even the local sheriff.
Well, now the story isn’t so much a story about a missing dog, but a story about the relationships of three sets of couples, some good and some not so good.
Darling Companion is like a shaggy dog story, which means that you either enjoyed all the details as it gets to the end or else the end itself was just as enjoyable.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”