Total Pageviews

Greetings!

'A gaping silken dragon,/Puffed by the wind, suffices us for God./We, not the City, are the Empire's soul:/A rotten tree lives only in its rind.'

Wednesday 16 May 2012

Cuba Libre

The diurnals have been getting in the way of toy soldierly things. Looking around the blogs, this is, perhaps not surprisingly, typical of our life and times (and 'demographic', to use an ugly phrase). But, it may be that one of the impetuses (have I got the plural form correct?) behind the hobby is the need to find little spaces to escape into, and that, if we had less work, less of the bother of eating, washing, shopping, cleaning, familying etc, then we might, paradoxically, have even less time for the little bits of plastic, white metal and resin. Who knows? Anyway, on the noble men in 20mm front, all I have managed since my last post is to base the Imex figures for my Bay of Pigs project:


Bases are notepad card backing, 15mm x 20mm, for no other reason than I prefer single basing for moderns. Once I have PVA'd the figures, I will assign them to one side or the other - that is the Free Cuba, or the Cuba Free side -undercoat, then crack on with the 'duck hunter' camouflage, or the green drill colours. I think this might be quite an interesting project. I have Alejandro de Quesada's marvellously, and understandably, partisan Osprey, The Bay of Pigs; Cuba 1961, and, somewhere in the loft, a number of books I got through the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, equally partisan, but from the other side - the Fidelistas. We will, in all probability, see some kind of awful denouement following the death of Fidel (why do we have to call the fellow by his Christian name?), even given that Raoul Castro is supposed to be in the driving seat. The whole Cuba business is a bit silly on one level, with the USA and its daft sanctions (yet happy to see the entire world economy propped up by that well-known bastion of  parliamentary democracy, the People's Republic of China) on one side, and petty (but vicious) persecutions on the other. Let us hope that when the time comes, there is a slow drift to a new state of being in Cuba, not some horrid blood-letting, or the sort of  oligarchic robbery that characterised the end of the lunacy of the USSR.

Away from the little men, the Me Bf109 G-10 is now largely built, and primed:


It will eventually joined the ranks of my Italian collection.

A footnote: I think there is something wrong with the Blogger thingy, I have notifications of comments, but they haven't appeared on the blog itself - so, I'm not being impolite, it's just the blog gremlin.

6 comments:

  1. Not a frequently gamed conflict the Bay of Pigs. Have you read "American Tabloid" by James Ellroy?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, I have not - I will investigate. Noir-ish, isn't it?

      Delete
  2. The joy of basing figures. I use mdf precuts/one pence coin mainly these days. I still enjoy looking at the underside of old based figures and see the advent calender,continental chocolates and other card pressed into service.A friends still is using up a stock of beer mats gleaned many a moon ago.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm usually a coin person myself, Alan, and have various AWI rebels mounted on US coinage, while my British and Loyalists sit atop HM - if that isn't a bit questionable.

      Delete
  3. The same issue with blogger happened with me a few days ago, but seem to sort itself.

    Good range of poses and I cannot wait to see the duck hunter effect.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The unfathomable workings of the internet - at least I could understand the workings of a posted letter. On the duck hunter camo - er, I can't wait to see how I'm going to do it in 20mm!

      Delete