Ghost Ship, Meet the Actual Ghost Spreadsheet

In Ghost Ship (2002), a salvage crew in the Bering Sea is lured toward a long-lost ocean liner and the movie wastes no time telling you exactly what kind of story it wants to be.  Not a story about insurance, maritime liens, beneficial ownership, sanctions databases, or the exact legal meaning of “abandoned.”  No, this is a story about a creepy ship, a mysterious past, a plucky salvage crew with bad luck, and the wonderfully cinematic notion that if a haunted liner is floating around in international waters, whoever gets there first can pretty much plant a boot on the deck and say, with professional enthusiasm, “Gentlemen, we have hit the jackpot.” The plot follows that marine salvage crew as it discovers an ocean liner lost since 1962, and the whole thing is wrapped in the sort of damp, rusty, supernatural nonsense that horror movies allegedly do well. 

The legal fantasy underneath it is even better.  Ghost Ship leans into the old movie rule of salvage, which can be summarized as: “find it, tow it, keep it.” Actual admiralty law, alas, is a killjoy.  The popular belief that a salvor becomes the owner is erroneous; ordinarily the owner can reclaim the property by paying salvage money.  And under the more limited law of finds, a would-be taker must prove intentional abandonment, possession, and intent to reduce the property to ownership.  In other words, real salvage law is less “Yo-ho-ho,” and more “Please hold while counsel reviews the paperwork.”

Which brings us to the Arctic Metagaz, a vessel that sounds like the title of a low-budget streaming thriller but is, in fact, a very real LNG tanker having a very bad year.  Unlike Ghost Ship’s glamorous phantom liner, the Arctic Metagaz is a working gas carrier, IMO 9243148, built in 2003, now about 23 years old, roughly 909 feet long, about 43.4 meters wide, and sailing under the Russian flag.  In plain English, it is less “ghostly palace of the damned” and more “very large refrigerated industrial problem with geopolitical implications.”  Public ship databases also show it currently under numerous heavy sanctions imposed by the U.S., the UK, and the EU, which is generally not the sort of accessory that improves resale value. 

The ship’s biography reads like a witness trying very hard not to be recognized in a lineup.  The vessel’s former names include Berge Everett, BW Suez Everett, BW GDF Suez Everett, BW Everett, Metagas Everest, Everest Energy, and then, eventually, Arctic Metagaz.  Some of those earlier names plainly belong to a normal commercial life before sanctions politics swallowed the plot.  Others, especially the recent shuffle among Metagas Everest, Everest Energy, and Arctic Metagaz, have all the breezy innocence of a man wearing a fake mustache and insisting he has never, in fact, heard of the bank that was robbed yesterday. 

The ownership and management picture is as murky as you would expect from a ship floating around the Mediterranean with sanctions attached to it.  Reuters reported in October 2025, that the registered owner was Lathyrus Shipping and the commercial manager was Ocean Speedstar Solutions, both with registered addresses in Mumbai which appear to be mail drops for paper corporations.  Other reporting around the March 2026 casualty identified the vessel’s Russia-based manager as LLC SMP Techmanagement.  The best way to describe this without requiring a chart the size of a dining-room table is that the paper trail points to Mumbai paper companies, while operational responsibility appears to run through Russia.  Everyone involved looks less like an old-fashioned shipowner in a commodore’s cap and more like a stack of filing cabinets speaking in accents. 

This aging vessel is a perfect example of the Russian “shadow fleet”: aging ships with poor maintenance and a horrible record of environmental issues   used to circumvent sanctions imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Shadow fleet ships are engaged in illegal operations to circumvent sanctions, evade safety or environmental rules, avoid insurance costs, or engage in other illegal activity.

Then came the part where reality outdid Hollywood for melodrama, while somehow becoming even less cinematic.  On March 3, 2026, Reuters reported that the Arctic Metagaz caught fire in the Mediterranean—probably (but unconfirmed) because Ukraine attacked it with a drone—and that its crew was later found safe in a lifeboat within Libya’s search-and-rescue region.  There was early confusion, including a Libyan advisory later cited by Reuters as saying the ship had sunk, but later reporting made clear that the vessel was, in fact, still afloat, damaged and drifting unmanned.  Even the ship’s obituary had to be retracted.  It is hard to look ominous and legendary when the first question is not “What ancient evil lives aboard?” but “Wait, is it sunk, or not sunk?”

By March 18, Reuters reported that the damaged tanker had entered Libyan search-and-rescue waters, and by March 20 Italian officials were warning that the vessel posed an “imminent and serious risk” of ecological disaster, estimating that it still carried 450 metric tons of heavy oil, 250 tons of diesel, and an uncertain amount of LNG, with only two of its tanks thought intact.  This is the moment where any lingering fantasy of jaunty freelance salvors racing out in a tug to claim a prize should yield to the sober realization that a drifting LNG tanker is not treasure.  It is a very large chemistry exam in bad weather. 

Libya, understandably, did not treat the matter as a charming adventure and Libya’s coast guard began towing the vessel away from its shores, while the country’s National Oil Corporation worked with Russian and Maltese authorities to prevent a maritime and environmental mess.  Then, because the sea enjoys plot twists of its own, the towing operation failed.  Reuters and AP both reported that the ship broke loose in bad weather near the limits of Malta’s search-and-rescue zone on April 2.  Libyan authorities warned other vessels to keep at least 10 nautical miles away and to report any sign of leaks or smoke.  This is not “open for salvage.” This is “please back away slowly from the giant floating danger can.” 

According to the latest reliable reporting, the Arctic Metagaz is best described as still adrift in the central Mediterranean after the failed tow, still  somewhere in the unhappy neighborhood of Libyan waters and the edge of Malta’s search-and-rescue zone.  So, anyone claiming to know the ship’s exact present location from a cheerful little consumer map is either overselling the map, overselling himself, or both.  The honest answer is that the latest hard reporting places it out there, loose again, with official authorities trying to keep a dangerous situation from getting worse.

Now let us return to the movie myth.  Is the Arctic Metagaz available to the first rugged opportunist with a towline, a beard, and a dream?  Nope.  Very much nope.  Under ordinary salvage law, the salvor does not get title merely by rescuing a vessel.  He gets, at most, a claim to a salvage award or lien, while ownership remains with the owner, unless very specific legal standards for abandonment are met, and it would probably take a decade to establish who really owns the Arctic Metagaz.  “No crew aboard” is not the same thing as “free on Craigslist.”  

That, really, is why the Arctic Metagaz fascinates.  It is Ghost Ship stripped of romance and left under harsh fluorescent light.  It has the eerie, drifting hull, the vanished crew, the uncertain cargo, the maritime rumors, the dramatic photographs, and the sense that something lawless is happening just beyond the horizon.  But instead of supernatural gold and demonic ferrymen, the real supporting cast consists of sanctions officials, Libyan maritime authorities, insurance questions, Mumbai registration addresses, Russia-linked management, tracking data, and a lingering environmental threat.  It is the same human appetite for mystery, only fed through spreadsheets, acronyms, and emergency advisories. 

So the final lesson is almost disappointingly adult.  Movies taught us, “find it, tow it, keep it.”  The Arctic Metagaz teaches a harsher and much less marketable rule: find it, document it, sanction it, argue over it, tow it badly, lose the tow, warn shipping traffic, and call more lawyers.  That version will never sell as many tickets, but it has the distinct advantage of being how the world actually works.  The ghost ship of the movies offers a cursed treasure.  The ghost spreadsheet of the real Mediterranean offers a 23-year-old LNG tanker, a maze of names, and a reminder that the sea may be romantic, but maritime law absolutely is not.

Corrugated Time Capsule

Twice a week I travel across the Organ Mountains to White Sands, where I participate on a drinking team with a small bowling problem.  It is quite an excursion for a semi-retired historian.  The drive passes through a landscape so crowded with history that the miles scarcely have room to breathe.  I go past the place where Pat Garrett was murdered, past the high mountain spring where the Union garrison surrendered to Confederate Colonel Baylor, across Saint Anthony Gap, past the lonely stretch where Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain and his little son disappeared in 1896.  The murders, despite all the years, remain unsolved, and the boy with him was only five years old.  From there I roll down into White Sands Missile Range, where former Nazi rocket scientists, including Werner von Braun, helped build the American military rocket program.  At the entrance to the post stand dozens of early rockets, silent, upright reminders that history has a wicked sense of continuity.  There is even a mint-condition German V-2 on display, which is well worth the trip all by itself.

Less noticed along the way is a small round-topped building that now houses a mechanic’s shop.  I wish I knew more about the building’s history as it appears to be one of the surviving Quonset huts dating from World War II, a humble relic crouching beside a road otherwise crowded with murder, mystery, conquest, and rockets.

The Quonset hut is one of those gloriously unromantic inventions that somehow becomes lovable the more you learn about it.  It has nob*’r cathedral spires, no marble columns, no elegant Georgian symmetry, no architect standing on a hill in a black turtleneck whispering about “the dialogue between structure and sky.”  A Quonset hut looks like someone took a giant corrugated metal loaf of bread, sliced it in half, and plunked it on the ground.  And yet this homely metal igloo did an astonishing amount of work in the twentieth century.

The Quonset hut was born in 1941, right when the United States Navy decided that what it really needed was not beauty, but shelter, speed, and portability.  The design was created at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, which is where the hut got its name.  The Americans, being sensible people in wartime, did not invent the basic idea out of thin air.  They borrowed heavily from the British Nissen hut, which had been developed during the First World War by Major Peter Norman Nissen.  The Nissen hut was the earlier ancestor, the British prototype, the plain-spoken parent of the shinier American child.  It was cheap, portable, and could be put up quickly by soldiers who were not necessarily master carpenters, which in wartime is a very good thing.

The U.S. Navy looked at the Nissen hut and essentially said, “This will do nicely, but let us tinker with it.”  So, the Quonset hut emerged as a more standardized, Americanized, mass-producible descendant.  It kept the great virtue of the half-cylinder shape, which was strong, simple, and easy to ship in pieces.  But it also included improvements such as insulation, interior lining, and flooring.  The result was a building that could be disassembled, packed up, shipped across oceans, and reassembled where it was needed (which was a marvelous trick in a war that sprawled across continents and islands).

And goodness, were they needed!  The Quonset hut was the Swiss Army knife of buildings.  It could be a barracks, a warehouse, a mess hall, a supply room, an administrative office, a classroom, a repair shop, a chapel, a hospital unit, or whatever else the military suddenly realized it needed by Tuesday.  It was not choosy.  It had no artistic pretensions.  It was the sort of structure that did not ask what sort of building it wanted to be when it grew up.  It simply rolled up its corrugated sleeves and said, “Fine.  I’m all of them.”

What made the Quonset hut especially lovable to quartermasters was that a building that would stand 20 by 48 feet once assembled could arrive broken down into a remarkably compact kit.  One Navy description said its shipping cube was about 450 cubic feet—only about one-third the volume of a 2½-ton cargo truck—while later improvements cut some versions down to roughly 270 to 325 cubic feet when crated.  In other words, the Quonset hut was not quite something one tucked under the arm on the way to Guam, but by wartime standards it was wonderfully portable: a sturdy little metal village that could be boxed up, hauled by truck, rail, or ship, and turned back into a building before the paperwork had finished catching up.

During World War II, over 150,000 Quonset huts turned up all over the place.  They appeared on isolated Pacific islands, in cold and miserable outposts, on bases, in staging areas, near airfields, and in places where a normal building would have taken too long, would have cost too much, or required too much skilled labor.  If soldiers, sailors, medics, clerks, mechanics, or cooks needed a roof over their heads and walls around their supplies, the Quonset hut was ready to serve.  They even appeared in connection with the Manhattan Project, which means that one of the most humble-looking structures in wartime America was, in some cases, standing quietly near some of the most consequential work in human history.  Not bad for a glorified metal arch.

One of the Quonset hut’s chief glories was speed.  A typical 20-foot model could be erected by a crew of around ten men in a single day.  That is extraordinarily quick by the standards of ordinary construction, where even putting in a decent backyard shed can sometimes resemble a diplomatic crisis.  This was the magic of prefabrication.  The parts arrived ready to go.  You did not have to quarry stone, season timber, or summon a guild of medieval masons.  You needed a site, a crew, a stack of parts, and a willingness to follow directions.  The entire construction manual (left) is only 23 pages long and is far easier to read and use than the cryptic hieroglyphics that accompany an Ikea bookshelf.

As for cost, Quonset huts had another great virtue: they were cheap.  That was part of their whole reason for existing.  The military needed buildings by the thousands, and it needed them without the sort of price tag that would cause taxpayers or quartermasters to swoon onto a fainting couch.  Exact wartime per-hut prices are maddeningly hard to pin down in a tidy, universal way, because prices varied by model, use, transport, and contract.  But what is clear is that postwar civilian versions were advertised at as little as $1.50 per square foot, which helps explain why they spread across the American landscape after the war.  Farmers, small businesses, schools, and practical-minded civilians looked at these sturdy metal half-tubes and thought, “For that price, why not?”

And so, the Quonset hut enjoyed a vigorous second life after the war.  Surplus huts were sold off, repurposed, and adapted to civilian use.  They became garages, machine shops, workshops, storage sheds, farm buildings, and commercial spaces.  Some people even turned them into homes, which required either admirable practicality or a very forgiving attitude toward curved walls.  In a country that has always had a soft spot for affordable utility, the Quonset hut fit right in.  Even today, there are Quonset huts on every continent, (yes, even at McMurdo Station in Antarctica).

But if the Quonset hut was so cheap, quick, tough, and versatile, why did it not become the default building of the American future? Why are we not all living in steel half-moons, waving cheerfully from our corrugated porches?

Well, because the Quonset hut, for all its virtues, is not perfect.  Its shape is both its strength and its nuisance.  The curved roof and walls make it sturdy and simple, but they also make the interior awkward.  Straight furniture and curved walls are not natural friends.  Cabinets sulk.  Shelves become complicated.  Ordinary windows and doors require a little fuss.  If you want to divide the interior into neat rooms, the hut begins to object.  If you want the crisp domestic dignity of a normal house, the Quonset hut replies, “Best I can do is a very competent metal tunnel.”

There are also insulation and condensation issues.  Steel is many admirable things, but it is not naturally cuddly.  Turn a bare metal shell into a comfortable year-round home, and you must start adding layers, finishes, and systems.  By the time you have done all that, some of the original cheap simplicity begins to wander off in a huff.  Quonset huts remain excellent for storage, workshops, garages, and broad-span utility spaces, but for ordinary housing or institutional use, more conventional buildings became more attractive.

There was also a psychological factor.  After the war, many people were ready for permanence.  They had spent enough time around temporary military structures to last a lifetime.  A Quonset hut may have been efficient, but it also looked like war, rationing, mud, cold mornings, and government coffee.  If given the choice between a curved corrugated hut and a nice brick house with honest vertical walls, many veterans understandably chose the brick house.

Even so, the Quonset hut never quite vanished.  Many are still standing.  Not in the grand, world-striding numbers of World War II, when roughly 150,000 were built, but in enough places to remind us that practical solutions have staying power.  Some remain in military or industrial use.  Others survive on farms, in commercial yards, or behind old buildings where they have spent decades quietly sheltering tools, machinery, hay, inventory, and assorted mysteries.  They are the architectural equivalent of a dependable old mechanic who never brags, never retires, and always knows where the wrench is.

And that, really, is the charm of the Quonset hut.  It was never glamorous.  No one gasped in delight at its ornamental moldings.  No poet wrote sonnets to its corrugated steel.  But it solved real problems, and it solved them very well.  It gave armies speed, shelter, flexibility, and thrift.  It gave civilians an inexpensive building that could do almost anything.  It was the kind of invention that wins wars, supports livelihoods, and gets very little applause because it is too busy being useful.

So let us give the Quonset hut its due.  It may resemble half a soup can set on end, but history has been kind to it.  In an age that often admires the flashy and forgets the practical, the Quonset hut stands as a reminder that sometimes the ugliest building in the room is also the most hardworking.  And if it is not beautiful in the conventional sense, it has earned a more respectable compliment.  It is one of the most useful buildings America ever made.

We may not have seen the last of the Quonset hut, however.  NASA’s current plans for the Trans-Hab, the structure future astronauts will live in while on Mars, calls for an inflatable Quonset hut-like structure. 

When Old Was Younger

When Old Was Younger

The calendar insists that I have reached a certain age.  In fact, the calendar and I are now in one of those long, bitter relationships in which one party keeps bringing up unpleasant facts, while the other keeps pretending not to hear them.  Officially, I am rather old.  Not “eligible for a museum display” old, perhaps, but old enough to remember President Eisenhower, which is no small thing in a country that now treats the 1980s as archaeology.

I still own an IBM Selectric typewriter…Not a keyboard designed to imitate one, mind you, but an actual Selectric—a machine built in that vanished era when office equipment was expected to survive direct artillery fire.  I also still own both a DVD player and a VCR, because I am apparently running a branch office for obsolete media.  I have clocks that need to be wound, which means that, from time to time, I must perform the same duties as a Victorian butler.  My car’s glove compartment still contains maps that are folded the way maps always are (which is to say incorrectly).  I keep them because I do not entirely trust a calm British woman inside a dashboard to tell me where I am.

I also still have a landline and it is listed in the phone book.  That sentence alone should qualify me for federal historic preservation.  Go ahead, look it up and call me!  It won’t bother me since, during the great presidential-election hysteria of 2008, I removed the bell from the phone.  You can still call it and, on your end, you will hear it ringing away like a respectable citizen’s telephone, but my end there is only blessed silence.  Ever since then, life has been so peaceful that I have begun to look upon the mailbox with similar suspicion.  A silent telephone was the gateway drug.  Neåxt comes a mailbox with no slot, then perhaps a front gate, a moat, and a tasteful sign reading, “NO SOLICITORS, CAMPAIGNERS, OR PEOPLE WITH IMPORTANT NEWS”.

Lately, I have attended a great many funerals and hardly any weddings.  That, too, is one of the unmistakable mile markers of age.  At a certain point, your social calendar becomes less “save the date” and more “in lieu of flowers.” The musicians who provided the soundtrack of my life are mostly gone, as are many of my favorite authors, actors, commentators, comedians, and larger-than-life public figures.  I still remember the names of the seven Mercury astronauts, which used to make me sound informed and patriotic, but now, mostly makes me sound like a museum docent.

All of that is standard old-age equipment—the usual set of rattles and creaks—but lately I have noticed something new, and it is profoundly unsettling.  I am increasingly shocked to discover that I have lived longer than a number of famous people who, in my memory, looked absolutely ancient.  Their appearance was not just older than I am now in spirit or in bearing, but old in the fully upholstered sense.  They bore the face, the posture, the jowls, and the exhausted gaze of people who seemed to have been born old, lived old, and died old.  And yet, examining one after another, I discovered that many of them checked out well before reaching the age I now occupy with such mixed emotions.

Perhaps the best example is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  I have read biographies of Roosevelt… and shelves of books on the war years, memoirs, histories, political studies, and enough wartime commentary to qualify as pedantic at parties.  I know the photographs.  I know the voice.  I know the cigarette holder, and the grin, and the cloak of cheerful confidence draped over catastrophe.  But somehow, it had never really struck me—in any personal way—that Roosevelt had died before he was even old enough to collect Social Security benefits under the program he helped create.  Look at the man in those final photographs: he seems carved out of fatigue, worry, and world history.  He looks like the burden of the entire twentieth century has been carried home on his shoulders.  Yet he died at only 63!

That realization is becoming one of the rude little surprises of age.  The mirror says one thing.  History says another.  Memory, meanwhile, lies shamelessly.

Most of our presidents look ancient by the time they leave office.  The presidency is not a job so much as a public embalming process.  It sands a man down in full view of the nation.  By modern standards, though, many of those presidents were still surprisingly young.  Take a dollar bill out of your pocket and look at George Washington.  The Gilbert Stuart portrait that appears there was painted only three years before Washington died and he was just 67.  Sixty-seven!  In that portrait he looks like a man who was a passenger with Columbus.  He does not look 67. 

Then there is Lyndon Johnson.  In November 1963, when he became president, I thought he was older than God and by the time he left office he looked to me as if the Almighty had been leaning on him.  Vietnam, riots, domestic upheaval, the ceaseless grinding gears of power—all of it had left visible marks—yet, he was only 55 when he became president, and he died at 64.  Those numbers simply refuse to line up with the images stored in my head.  My memory insists on a man who looked weathered, battered, and Biblically ancient.  The facts say otherwise.

Actors can be equally disorienting.  When Spencer Tracy played Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, he was only 57.  Fifty-seven! Watching that performance and seeing the gauntness, the heaviness, and the air of a man who had seen every hard thing the sea could offer, I would have guessed much older.  Consider, too, that Ernest Hemingway, himself, committed suicide at the distressingly young age of 61.  Hemingway hated Tracy’s portrayal of his protagonist, reportedly saying Tracy looked more like Gertrude Stein than a fisherman, which is one of those literary insults too specific not to admire.  The truly alarming part, from my point of view, is that I am not only older than Tracy and Hemingway were when they died, but older than Gertrude Stein was when she died, too!  There are certain comparisons one does not enjoy winning.

War ages men in especially merciless ways.  You can see it in the faces of soldiers, of statesmen, and of generals who have spent too long keeping company with Death.  Robert E.  Lee and Ulysses S.  Grant are perfect examples.  Given what both men witnessed, commanded, and endured—as well as the memories they carried afterward—it is no surprise that their faces show more than years:  They show the knowledge.  They show the strain.  They show the physical toll of having lived through catastrophe on a scale no decent person should ever have to contemplate.  And yet both Lee and Grant were only 63 when they died.  In the photographs taken near the end of their lives, each looks much older, as though the war had reached forward and stolen extra decades as interest.

That, I suppose, is part of the lesson:  People in the past often looked older at younger ages, partly because Life was harder, medicine was cruder, work was more physical, smoking was more common, stress was more visible, and leisure was less available and less therapeutic.  There were fewer serums, fewer treadmills, fewer kale evangelists, and fewer dentists making everyone look as if they had been issued the same teeth by the Department of Modernity.  They took on adulthood harder and much sooner.  They also “dressed older”.  Nobody ever looked youthful wearing a frock coat, a stiff collar, and an expression suggesting concern about tariffs!

Still, the shock remains.  There is something unnerving about discovering that the “old men” of your memory were, in fact, younger than you are now.  It rearranges the furniture in your head.  It makes you wonder whether age is not merely counted in years, but accumulated in burdens, in wars, in cigarettes, in grief, in high office, and in the plain wear and tear of living before antibiotics, statins, sunscreen, ergonomic chairs, and the magical modern assumption that 70 is the new 50.

I do not entirely object to being old—there are compensations.  Old age allows certain freedom of opinion, a welcome indifference to fashion, and the right to keep maps in the car without explanation.  But I must confess that I do object to opening a history book, to studying some exhausted-looking monument of a man and then discovering that he died at an age I now regard as annoyingly youthful.

There ought to be a law against that.  Or at least a warning label.

Havana Today

Note.  I haven’t been to Cuba.  The three main sources for the information here comes from Reuters, The New York Times, and the Miami Herald.  Any mistakes are solely mine.

People often ask what living conditions in Havana are like today.  The answer is that Havana remains a functioning capital city—one with electricity, water, food markets, buses, taxis, apartment buildings, schools, and all of the normal civic furniture one expects to find in a metropolis.  The trick is that many of these things operate on something closer to a suggestion than a guarantee.  In modern Havana, daily life tends to be organized less by the clock than by the moment: when the power happens to be on, when the water happens to be flowing, when the bus happens to appear, or when the bread truck happens to arrive.

This is not to say that Havana has descended into some cinematic wasteland where residents barter shotgun shells for canned beans.  The city still hums along.  People go to work, children go to school, and tourists still sip mojitos while admiring pastel facades and 1950s Chevrolets.  But behind that postcard image lies a city where infrastructure is aging, supplies are inconsistent, and the art of improvisation has become the chief civic virtue.

One quick note on tourism.  Yes, Cuba is still getting visitor (mostly Canadians and Europeans), proving once again that human optimism can survive almost anything—including airline schedules, food shortages, and municipal plumbing.  But the trade is running on four bald tires.  Tourist numbers are down roughly 60 percent from the pre-pandemic days and are off about 20 percent from last year alone, which is less a slump than a trapdoor.

Part of the problem is the broader economic collapse, which tends to put a damper on the whole “tropical getaway” pitch.  Part of it may also be the result of the Havana sewage system’s coming apart like a Soviet tractor during harvest.  The city is dumping some 48,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into the bay every day, with some of that cheerful brew making its way onto the beaches.  Add in the fact that over half of Havana is no longer properly connected to the sewer system, and suddenly, the tourism brochure’s promises of sun, surf, and Old World charm begin to sound less like a vacation and more like a gastrointestinal dare.

Let us begin the day.

Morning in Havana starts with a game of utilities roulette.  Residents wake up and check the two most important questions of the day: Is the electricity on? Is there water? These are not rhetorical questions because, although  city does have electrical and water systems, both operate with a degree of reliability that would make an American utility executive wake up screaming in the night.

If the power stayed on overnight, the refrigerator is still cold and the phone still has a charge.  If not, breakfast planning becomes an exercise in improvisation.  Electricity outages have become common enough that many households instinctively keep candles, battery lights, and portable chargers ready.  Fans stopping in a tropical climate is not a trivial inconvenience.

Closely related to electricity is the equally thrilling question: Is there water? Havana does have a municipal water system with pipes, pumps, and reservoirs.  The challenge is that pumping water requires electricity and fuel, both of which have been in short supply.  As a result, water sometimes arrives on a schedule best described as “when circumstances permit.” Experienced residents respond by keeping containers, buckets, and tanks ready.  When water appears in the pipes, it is greeted the way desert travelers greet an oasis—fill everything you own before it disappears again.

Breakfast in Havana is less about culinary inspiration and more about logistics.  Food exists in the city, and markets sell it, but acquiring it often involves patience, creativity, and a willingness to stand in line long enough to form friendships.  Bread lines are a common morning sight.  Prices have risen sharply, and certain items appear sporadically.  The result is that breakfast tends to be whatever combination of bread, fruit, eggs, or coffee happens to be obtainable that week.

Then comes the next great adventure: transportation.

Havana possesses buses, taxis, shared cars, bicycles, and the occasional heroic Soviet-era vehicle that refuses to retire.  In theory, these form a transportation network.  In practice, fuel shortages have turned movement around the city into something resembling an improvisational sport.  Bus routes run but may be crowded or delayed.  Taxi rides cost more than they once did.  And bicycles—long neglected relics of earlier decades—have returned to fashion not so much as recreation as a necessity. 

If a Havana resident once drove to work, he may now ride a bicycle.  If he once rode a bus, he may now share a taxi with strangers.  And if all else fails, he walks, because Havana is still a city where many destinations are reachable on foot—assuming the sidewalks cooperate.

The workday proceeds under similar conditions.  Offices open, shops operate, and the city continues to produce and sell goods.  But everything functions with a background awareness that the electricity might vanish, supplies might run out, and transportation might falter.

A shopkeeper may spend part of the day selling merchandise and the rest trying to locate more of it.  A mechanic might devote equal time to repairing engines and hunting spare parts.  The rhythm of work is therefore less about efficiency and more about adaptability.

Meanwhile, the city’s sanitation system is conducting its own experiment in endurance.  Havana still collects garbage, but fuel shortages have reduced the number of operating garbage trucks from over 200 to fewer than 50.  When fewer trucks run, trash piles accumulate in corners and along sidewalks.  It is not exactly the glamorous Havana of tourist posters.

Speaking of the city, itself, we must address the matter of buildings.

Havana’s architecture is beautiful—faded colonial mansions, art deco apartments, and ornate balconies that look like something from a film set.  Unfortunately, beauty does not guarantee structural stability.  Much of the housing stock is old and poorly maintained.  Cracked plaster, leaking roofs, moldy walls, and sagging staircases are not unusual.  The homes of Havana are a metaphor for life in Cuba:  beautiful façades hiding decay and corruption.

Every so often, a building collapses.  Sometimes it is a partial collapse, sometimes a total one.  Due to poor maintenance, the lack of building materials and amateur construction efforts to create new apartments by putting doorways through load bearing walls, building collapses happen often enough that residents view them with grim familiarity.  Living in certain older structures requires keeping a skeptical eye on the ceiling during heavy rainstorms.

Housing anxiety is, therefore, a quiet but constant part of life in some neighborhoods.  People patch walls, reinforce beams, and hope the next rainy season will be gentle.

Afternoons bring more of the same juggling act.  A Havana resident might spend the midday hours running errands—buying food if it appears, repairing a bicycle, or checking whether a store has received new supplies.  Lines form quickly whenever scarce goods arrive, and joining a line without quite knowing what is being sold is a time-honored tradition.

The economic landscape has shifted noticeably in recent years.  Private businesses and informal markets have become increasingly important sources of food and household goods.  Items may be easier to find in these markets, but they often come with higher prices.  In short, goods exist—but they sometimes require more money than many households would prefer to spend.

The city’s digital life adds another layer of complexity.

Yes, Havana has cell phone service.  People carry smartphones and use them regularly.  The entire system runs through the state telecommunications company, which provides voice service, text messaging, and mobile data.

Internet access also exists and is widely used.  People message friends, read news, and scroll social media like everyone else in the modern world.  The difference lies in cost and speed.  Mobile data plans can be expensive relative to average Cuban wages, and connectivity is sometimes slow or disrupted by the same infrastructure problems affecting electricity.

So, Havana residents do have internet—but they tend to use it carefully, stretching their data allowances the way previous generations stretched ration coupons.  Users also have to remember that both the internet and cell phones are run by the state and are both monitored and censored.

Television is simpler.  The city receives a modest lineup of state-run channels—roughly eight major ones.  These include national channels like Cubavisión and Tele Rebelde, educational channels, a news channel, and a local Havana station.  It is not exactly the American universe of hundreds of cable channels, but it provides official government news, sports, educational programming, and entertainment.

Then comes evening.

Dinner preparation again depends on the electrical grid.  If the lights remain on, families cook normally.  If the power disappears, dinner becomes an exercise in candlelight and creative cuisine.  Refrigerators warm, fans stop spinning, and people drift outside to balconies and sidewalks to escape the heat.

Oddly enough, blackouts sometimes produce the most social moments of the day.  Without televisions or internet, neighbors gather outdoors and talk.  Rumors about the electrical grid circulate like weather forecasts.  Someone inevitably predicts that power will return “in twenty minutes,” a statement delivered with absolute confidence and very little supporting evidence.

Night in Havana often reveals another contrast.  Tourist hotels and certain central districts sometimes run generators during blackouts.  Their windows glow while surrounding neighborhoods sit in darkness.  Visitors continue drinking cocktails under electric lights while residents a few blocks away wait for the grid to recover.

Finally the electricity returns, at least most days, sometimes late at night.  Phones charge, refrigerators hum back to life, and fans resume their gentle rotation.

And tomorrow morning, the cycle begins again: check the lights, check the water, check the market, check the bus schedule.

Havana today is not a city without utilities, food, or transportation.  All those things exist.  The difference is that they operate intermittently and unpredictably.  But, every week, the services seem to decline just a little, forcing people to adapt just a little more, compromise again, with the certain knowledge that circumstances are unlikely to improve.

The result is a culture built on patience, ingenuity, and humor.  People repair appliances that would be thrown away elsewhere, ride bicycles through streets lined with vintage cars, and keep spare buckets ready for the next water interruption.

In short, Havana remains very much alive—colorful, chaotic, and stubbornly resilient.  The city is neither the tropical paradise sometimes imagined by tourists nor the apocalyptic ruin sometimes portrayed by critics.  It is something more complicated: a capital where infrastructure creaks, shortages appear and vanish, and ordinary citizens navigate daily life with a mixture of patience, ingenuity, and dark humor.  Somehow.

And tomorrow morning, when the alarm clock doesn’t ring (the electricity never came back on overnight) the whole adventure begins again.

Static, Dynamic, and Other Fairy Tales from New York City

Zohran Mamdani’s latest fiscal sales pitch rests on a familiar political miracle: tax the rich, tax big business, tax a few luxury transactions, and the money will appear as obediently as my cat Charlie at dinnertime. 

The Mayor says that unless the city and state governments enact his sweeping tax plan called Path One, he will be forced to enact a more draconian Path Two, a 9.5 percent property-tax increase that would hit more than 3 million residential units and over 100,000 commercial buildings.  That is less a policy option than a budget memo written with a revolver on the desk. 

Now, on a static model, this all looks delightfully tidy.  Mamdani’s Path One, as reported March 6, includes about $3.0 billion from a two-point income-tax increase on filers earning over $1 million, about $1.75 billion from narrower corporate and unincorporated business tax changes, about $700 million from trimming the city’s pass-through entity tax credit, about $1.2 billion from new or expanded taxes on pricey real estate, and about $300 million from ending the sales-tax exemption on gold bars and other precious metals.  Add the pile together and you get roughly $6.95 billion a year.  On paper, that is the sort of number that causes politicians to speak in soft, reverent tones about “shared prosperity,” while taxpayers consider taking up drinking before lunch. 

But a dynamic model is what happens when we admit, reluctantly, that taxpayers are not decorative turnips with deep roots.  Dynamic analysis asks how policy changes affect economic behavior, employment, income, output, prices, investment, and therefore the actual tax haul.  In other words, it does not merely ask, “What is the tax rate?” It asks, “What will people do when you change it?” The Tax Policy Center explains that dynamic analysis accounts for those broader macroeconomic effects, and that those feedback effects can either soften or worsen the budget impact of a proposal.  So, the difference between static and dynamic is the difference between counting the fish in the pond and asking whether the fish can swim away. 

A great example is the $300 million that Mamdani hopes to raise from the sale of gold.  It is hard to imagine an investor who doesn’t already know that gold is available to purchase everywhere.  New York City knows this, and says that if you purchase gold someplace else, when you bring it into the city, you will have to pay that tax.  Unless they inspect the baggage of everyone entering the metropolis….

Let’s take the millionaire tax next.  Static scoring treats the tax base (otherwise known as people) as though it were bolted to the pavement.  Dynamic scoring asks whether some of those high earners will rearrange compensation, realize income in different years, move certain activities, change residency, or pay clever people in expensive suits to make taxable income appear less taxable.  That matters in New York because the tax base is already unusually top-heavy.  The Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) notes that in 2023, filers earning over $1 million paid 37 percent of New York City’s personal income taxes and that New York City residents already face a 14.8% combined top marginal personal income tax rate.  CBC also says Mamdani’s proposed two-point increase would push that to 16.8%.  When that much of the city’s tax revenue rests on so few shoulders, you do not need a full-blown stampede to shake the budget foundations; a brisk, offended jog will do.

Then come the business taxes, which in campaign rhetoric are always aimed at “the most profitable corporations,” a phrase designed to make the target sound like a dragon sleeping on a mattress of gold.  In practice, the latest plan would raise city corporate taxes by 1.8 percentage points for finance firms, 1.77 points for other corporations, and 0.4 points for large, unincorporated businesses, while also cutting back the PTET credit to 75 cents on the dollar.  Dynamic analysis here asks whether firms absorb the hit, pass it on in prices, reduce hiring, delay expansion, shift activity elsewhere, or simply get extremely creative with the legal geography of profits.  And because the package also leans on taxes tied to luxury property and cash real-estate deals, dynamic scoring would ask the obvious rude question: what happens when fewer people decide to buy the penthouse quite so urgently?

CBC argues that New York’s tax burden is already the nation’s heaviest, that the state’s share of the nation’s millionaires fell from 12.7 percent to 8.7 percent between 2010 and 2022, and that the number of publicly traded company headquarters in New York shrank between 2020 and 2025 while Texas and Florida gained.  That does not prove that every additional tax increase causes a U-Haul parade at dawn, but it does suggest that competitiveness is not an imaginary concept invented by hedge-fund lobbyists while they sipped champagne and ate canapés. 

If Mamdani’s Path One tax plan were passed, New York City’s business taxes would be 8.73% higher than New Jersey’s, 14.73% higher than Florida’s, and 19.48% higher than the business tax in Texas.  To put that in dollars and (common) sense, if Mamdani is successful in raising business taxes, J. P. Morgan can save $14 billion by moving to Fort Worth.  And that’s each and every year.

So what would a plain-English dynamic model look like? Something like this: the static total is about $6.95 billion, because that is what you get when you assume the tax base salutes smartly and remains where it is told.  But public documents I found list those revenue claims as straightforward amounts; they do not provide a published macroeconomic feedback score.  So, the next step is necessarily an illustration rather than revealed scripture from City Hall. 

Suppose the behavioral and economic effects of the tax increase shave 10 percent off the static forecast.  That leaves a shortfall of about $740 million.  Suppose the haircut is a more noticeable 17 percent.  Then you are at about $1.25 billion.  Suppose the reaction is fairly strong and knocks off 29 percent.  Then the haul falls to about $2 billion.  Same taxes, same press conference, same righteous language, but very different money. 

Painfully, New York Mayor Mamdani is learning that proposing lavish new government programs is the easy part; prying the money loose to fund them is where the parade runs into the brick wall.  Remember the promised government grocery stores?  While they are still in the planning stage, the mayor’s latest proposals are more than $10 million a year more expensive.

All of this reminds me of an old joke.  A politician dies and arrives at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter tells him that, by special arrangement, he may spend one day in Heaven and one day in Hell before deciding where he wants to spend eternity.

First, he visits Heaven. It is lovely enough: soft music, puffy clouds, pleasant people in flowing robes, and an endless supply of calm conversation.  Nice, certainly, though a bit quiet for his taste.

The next day, he is taken down to Hell. To his astonishment, it is magnificent.  The sun is shining, the fairways are perfect, and all his old political friends are there, laughing, slapping him on the back, and calling him by his first name.  They spend the morning playing golf, the afternoon drinking excellent whiskey, and the evening at a splendid banquet with steak, lobster, champagne, and a cabaret floor show.  The devil himself is charming, witty, and a magnificent host.

The following day, the politician is returned to Heaven and asked for his choice.  "Well," he says, "Heaven is pleasant, of course.  But Hell is clearly more suited to my temperament.  I choose Hell."

So down he goes.

This time, when the doors open, he finds not green fairways and fine liquor, but a blasted wasteland of smoke, fire, filth, shrieking, and misery. His friends are nowhere to be seen. Demons are whipping the damned, the air stinks of sulfur, and the banquet appears to have been replaced by something boiling in a dented bucket.

The politician stares at the devil in outrage. "What happened?  Yesterday this place was a country club.  Today it looks like Newark during a sanitation strike."

The devil smiles.  "Yesterday," he says, "we were campaigning. Today, you voted."

Galveston, Cannons, and a Boat Wearing a Bale Suit

Galveston has always been a place where commerce, weather, and human judgment wrestle in public, and none of them likes to lose.  Even in the Civil War, Galveston could not simply be “captured” like a polite chess piece.  It had to be negotiated with, argued over, accidentally surrendered, loudly reclaimed, and then remembered—sometimes in brick, sometimes in splinters, and sometimes in the soggy afterlife of a sandbar.

When people talk about “the Battle of Galveston,” they usually mean the New Year’s Day brawl of January 1, 1863.  But Galveston got two bites at that apple, because there was an earlier, oddly diplomatic showdown in October 1862, that set the stage for the main event.  If you like your history with a dash of irony, consider it a two-act play: Act I consists of a naval squadron arriving with an ultimatum and a timetable, and Act II involves two of the weirdest warships of the Civil War.

Then, hovering behind it all—because Galveston never misses an opportunity to turn chaos into valuable real estate—is the Hendley Building, that still stands on the Strand, like a witness who refuses to be cross-examined without a docent present. 

Act I (October 1862): The Battle That Began with a “Surrender,” and Ended with Everyone Leaving.  On October 4, 1862, Union forces, under Commander William B. Renshaw, sailed into Galveston Harbor to demand surrender of what was (inconveniently for everyone involved) the most important port in Texas.  The Confederate commander in the district, Paul O.  Hébert, had already judged Galveston essentially indefensible and had removed much of the heavy artillery from the island—one of those decisions that makes perfect sense right up until your enemy arrives and asks politely—though heavily armed—for your keys.  The Fort Point garrison did fire on the Union ships, and the Union replied by dismounting Confederate cannon with return fire. 

Now, in a more orderly universe, this is where the city either falls or it does not.  But Galveston is always different.  Colonel Joseph J.  Cook arranged a four-day truce, which he used to quietly evacuate his men to the mainland, which was technically a violation of the truce, but there wasn’t a referee, so he got away with it.  The Union ships held the harbor, but the onshore occupation force was thin, delayed, and not exactly brimming with “we own this place now” energy.

Meanwhile, the Stars and Stripes briefly went up over the city, then came down again, because Renshaw had the awkward problem of possessing a navy but not possessing a town-sized garrison.  In other words, Galveston was “captured” in the same way you “capture” a cat: you declare success, and the cat continues doing whatever it wants.  Eventually, enough Union troops arrived to occupy the city.

Intermission: The Confederacy Invents “Armor,” Texas style.  After October, the Confederacy did what it often did best: it improvised.  When Major General John Bankhead Magruder took over the district, he began organizing a recapture.  The land side would be a push across the railroad bridge with infantry, cavalry, and guns.  The water side would be—how shall we put this—less traditional.

For the naval attack, Magruder placed artillery and dismounted cavalry aboard two river steamers, CS Bayou City and CS Neptune, under Captain Leon Smith.  These were not purpose-built warships, but the naval equivalent of repurposing a delivery van into an armored personnel carrier because it was available, and because nobody nearby was operating an iron mill.  This was going to be an example of good ol’ boys improvising.

Enter the cottonclad: a wooden steamer with 500 lb. bales of cotton used as protective layering, because iron plating was scarce, expensive, and generally not sitting around in coastal Texas waiting to be stapled onto a boat.  Cotton bales could absorb a surprising amount of punishment—right up until they caught fire, at which point your “armor” became an enthusiastic bonfire with strong opinions.  Still, it was an emergency and when all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

Meet the star of our show: the CS Bayou City, a Commercial Steamer with Military Aspirations.  Bayou City began life as a 165-foot side-wheel steamer, built for commercial use at Jeffersonville, Indiana, in 1859.  She was chartered in 1861 for service in the Texas Marine Department, operated as a freighter in the Galveston area, until taken over by the Confederate Army in October 1862—because nothing says “wartime efficiency” like reassigning a working boat from freight to combat and hoping the paperwork catches up later. 

Act II (January 1, 1863): New Year’s Day Celebration, complete with Boarding Parties.  The January battle is sometimes called the “Second Battle of Galveston,” because historians enjoy numbering things almost as much as generals enjoy naming them after themselves.  What matters is that it was a combined operation: a land attack against the Union-held waterfront and a naval strike against the Union squadron in the bay.  The Union had multiple ships mounting heavy artillery; the Confederacy’s floating punchline consisted of surprise, two improvised cottonclads, and a great deal of confidence. 

At dawn, the cottonclads moved in.  Neptune took a beating and was badly damaged; Bayou City pushed through and closed with Harriet Lane.  Accounts emphasize the chaotic intimacy of the fighting—ramming, locking ships together, and then boarding, because once you have a river steamer wrapped in cotton, the obvious next step is to treat it as a medieval siege tower with a paddle wheel. 

The land forces quickly moved into the center of Galveston, taking over the Hendley Building as an artillery position.  Sharpshooters manned the windows while light artillery was positioned on the roof, quickly engaging the gunboat USS Owasco in the harbor.  You can still spot cannonball or shell damage on the building’s 20th Street-facing side.

Meanwhile, the Union flagship Westfield managed to get grounded on a sandbar, which is the maritime equivalent of tripping over your own shoelaces during a duel.  With capture looming, Renshaw ordered the Westfield blown up to prevent her falling into Confederate hands.  Unfortunately, this task was done so speedily, that Renshaw perished along with his ship.  Since the two largest Union ships were lost, the rest of the fleet decided to retreat.

When news of the loss of the Westfield reached Washington, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox called it “the most melancholy affair ever recorded in the history of our gallant navy.”  That is a remarkably dramatic sentence for a bureaucracy, and you can practically hear the desk drawers being slammed in Washington.  When US Naval ships perform well, the name of the ship is recycled on later ships.  Not surprisingly, the Navy never named another ship “Whitfield”.

Why the Cottonclads Worked (This Time).  The trick was not that cottonclads were “better” ships.  They were not.  The trick was that they were good enough, at the right moment, in the right water, with the right blend of surprise, sandbars, and audacity. 

Galveston Bay is not a featureless arena; it is a place with channels, shoals, and the sort of geography that punishes anyone who assumes the map is merely decorative.  The Confederates exploited the fact that close action—boarding range—neutralizes some of the Union advantage in heavier guns.  Cotton bales helped keep a charging steamer intact long enough to arrive at the part of the battle where muskets, pistols, and boarding parties could matter. 

And then, of course, there is morale.  Cottonclads look ridiculous right up until they are next to you, at speed, with angry armed men leaping onto your deck.  Military history is full of bad ideas that work once, largely because the other side did not expect anyone to try them. 

There is something perfectly Galvestonian about Bayou City: a commercial steamer repurposed into a warship by literally strapping prosperity to the sides and charging into a superior fleet.  It is industrial improvisation, regional economics, and pure nerve, all stitched together with the confidence that, if you cannot outgun the other fellow, you can at least get close enough that the argument becomes a wrestling match.

The two Galveston battles also make a tidy paired lesson.  October 1862 shows how a port can be “taken” in theory while remaining contested in practice.  January 1863 shows how a desperate, improvised strike—cotton bales and all—can flip the board when timing, terrain, and surprise cooperate.

And the next time you are on the Strand, near the Hendley Building, look at the brick and imagine the view toward the bay: the smoke, the confusion, the sandbar humiliations, and, sliding into history on paddle wheels, a cottonclad steamer doing its best impression of an ironclad.  History likes ironclads, but Galveston should be remembered for the cottonclad that made the Union Navy learn, the hard way, that geography, grit, and bales can all be weapons.