Latin American Lowdown

                  On the Road in Morocco      I knew embarrassingly little about Morocco before arriving there, except that travelers were enthusiastic and that it had an interesting hipster vibe.  For example, I knew that Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs had  lived in Tangier.  Then there was Bob Dylan’s lyric  -- “if you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier.”    This  lyric decided to stay in my head the whole visit.       On a ten-day trip there in October, I found that while there might be a few dharma bums  on the road in Morocco,  that’s  not unusual. Almost  everybody else was out there  too.  So there was a lot about Morocco that revealed itself just pounding down its highways.        Our group of five travelers includ...

“Most of Puerto Rico Is Darkened by New Year’s Eve  Blackout,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 2024 A blackout in Puerto Rico early the morning of Dec. 31 left nearly 90 percent of its 1.4 million utility customers in darkness. By the end of the day nearly half of them had power. Early indications were that the cause was a fault on an underground line said Luma, the private Canadian American consortium that took control of the energy grid in 2021. “Puerto Rico has faced a series of blackouts since 2017, when Hurricane Maria severely damaged the island, including its power grid,” the Times said. The latest blackout seemed much larger than the outages that occurred this past summer. In June, 350,000 customers were left without power. In August, after Hurricane Ernesto, 700,000 lost electricity. A Luma spokesman said the blackout started at a control hub where electricity is directed from a power plant into transmission lines. Luma took over operation of the grid from Puerto Rico’s bankrupt ...