Stan and Kim in Cuba

(blog by Stan) (Marisela, Arturo, and Comprendo, photo by Julio Cesar Valdés) In this season of celebrating Thanksgiving and another trip around the sun, I have been thinking a lot about my friend Arturo. I learned a lot about being grateful from Arturo, a "third age member" (senior citizen) in Matanzas who passed away a couple of weeks ago. He was well up in years, and had been in poor health for as long as I had known him. He and his wife, Marisela, lived in a small solar, one of the humblest of dwellings I have visited in Matanzas, just a few blocks from the church. Neither could hear very well, and Arturo could barely speak; his shouts would still be in the whisper range. But he loved to talk, to tell stories, especially of how he had gotten involved in music as a youth and had played percussion in the Matanzas big band. While Marisela spent her days walking all over the city (it was uncanny, whichever direction I headed toward on any given day, I would invariably run int