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More than one Miami friend has asked me for tips on what to do when visiting Boston. This is what I recommend doing in the Hub of the Universe.

1. Duck Tour. Buy tickets ahead of time, online, as it’s a very popular attraction. And do it early in your vacation because you’ll get to see most of the city, and you may find spots you’d like to explore further.
2. Freedom Trail and U.S.S. Constitution. Go to the Common (Park Street) and buy a guided Freedom trail tour. It’ll end in Faneuil Hall, which is another major attraction. You can have lunch/snack there and then continue to the U.S.S. Constitution. The walk will take you through the Big Dig and the North End (Italian Section).
3. The Boston Tea Party Museum and Children’s Museum
4. Boston Common/Garden
5. Commonwealth Avenue Mall: Boston Garden to Mass Ave.
6. Newbury Street
7. Christian Science Center/Symphony Hall
8. Copley Square/Boston Public Library
9. Museum of Fine Arts/Gardner Museum
10. Kenmore Square/Fenway Park/B.U. Good pizza at Bertucci’s next to the B.U. bookstore, good beer at Boston Beerworks across Fenway Park
11. Charles River Basin Esplanade/Boston Pops at the Hatch Shell (this is where the fireworks go off on the 4th of July)
12. Harvard Square/Harvard Yard
1. Bombay Club (good Indian food)
2. Grendel’s (good local pub. Order a pint of Harpoon IPA)
3. Don’t touch Mr. Harvard’s boots, unless you like the touch of freshman urine residue.
13. MIT (It’s best to cross the Harvard Bridge from Boston over to Cambridge) Once you’re on the Cambridge bank of the Charles River, you’re on the most scenic part of the MIT campus. Keep walking on Mass Ave to enter the main entrance, go in, exit the building to find the famous dome and yard.
14. Coming back from Harvard Square on the Red Line Subway (the T), you get a great view of the Back Bay skyline. (This is the subway train that shows up on the Cheers opening scenes.)

Good places to eat:

1. Bertucci’s (Pizza)
2. Vinny T’s. (Good Italian food)
3. Legal Seafoods
4. Bombay Club: Harvard Square. Good Indian, a little pricey
5. Barking Crab or Summer Shack: Good seafood, less pricey than legal seafoods, especially Barking Crab
6. Quincy Market in Faneuil Hall has a great food court.
7. Kenmore Square Area

Human rights are for humans. Cubans need not apply.

Liberals’ double standard when it comes to human rights in Cuba has always puzzled me. Why is it that they so love, admire, and support those who systematically deny the Cuban people their unalienable Rights, rights they demand for themselves? My best guess thus far has been to attribute it to political expediency. Carlos Eire, T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History at Yale University, attributes it to racism.

The worst thing about being a Cuban exile, at least for me, is having to field proposals such as that pitched at me by the New York Times, which display utter disdain for us exiles.. Why is it, I ask myself, that any editor at the Times should look down her nose at Cuban exiles who rejoice at Fidel’s demise, and then look for some Cuban who will confirm her bigotry?

Why should any well-educated North American utter a contemptuous remark reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake� to me, hoping that I will agree with such inane and contemptible prejudice? Does she not know that every freedom she enjoys in the United States is illegal in Cuba? Does she not know that all those Cubans on Calle Ocho are jumping for joy at the thought their country might be able to enjoy the same freedoms she takes for granted? Does she care? Even worse, why is it that my opinion should have to pass some test before it is expressed?

How can this be?

Unfortunately, the answer to all my questions is brutally simple. When it comes to Cuba, bigotry is still acceptable in the highest circles. An insidious kind of prejudice still underlies the thinking of many well-educated North Americans when it comes to Cuba, a prejudice that allows otherwise reasonable people to accept or even praise political and social repression of the worst sort from any third world leader who pays lip service to egalitarian goals.

And the foundation on which this bigotry rests is at bottom a racist one: there are still far too many comfortably affluent First World people who judge all Third World people as inferior beings who must play by different rules. .

This is why Fidel not only escapes the kind of censure other dictators normally receive, but continues to be revered, despite the fact that he has ruined Cuba, driven twenty percent of the population into exile and imprisoned, tortured, and executed thousands more people than his Chilean counterpart Augusto Pinochet ever did. The mere fact that he boasts of free education and health care for his dark-skinned people makes him a great leader.

I’m not completely convinced the cause is purely racism, though I have seen evidence to this effect. A very liberal New England university professor and his wife once argued to me that the Chinese did not really need “Western-style” human rights, you know, freedom of speech, religion, press, etc… Such concepts were too advanced for them to handle and also maintain order.

But what about the Chilean case? Liberals denounce Pinochet’s human rights abuses, a right-wing dictator of a third world country.

So, perhaps the answer is both racism and political expediency. Liberals, in a means-to-an-end calculus, are able to overlook human rights violations perpetrated by left-wing dictators if the oppressed are unlucky enough to reside in the third world.

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn’t see?

H/T: Babalublog.