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Autumn generally visits Cuba early, and Harriet had lighted a fire against the chill by the time the women arrived at her place to nail down September's issue. From 1915 until it closed four years ago, Harriet's place was called Young's Hotel. Built by her father John Young, it is hand-hewn pine and stucco, rough planks, notched banisters, Navajo blankets and deer heads on the walls--a set for any movie that goes by the name of Stagecoach. It had 16 rooms to let upstairs above the dusty front desk, rooms you let yourself into. "Our guests just went in the rooms and paid the next day," Harriet said. "Well, those days of leaving your door unlocked are gone." And so are the days of the hotel. Now it serves as a Trailways Bus stop (not a station; Harriet does not want the bother). A GO BIG RED sign out front announces the 7:15 a.m. to Albuquerque, the 8 a.m. to Farmington, the 8 p.m. to Albuquerque and the 11:55 p.m. to Farmington, with connections to Salt Lake City.
On the third Tuesday night of each month, the Cuba News pages are put on the 11:55 bus and transported to Cortez, Colo., where the printer picks them up. Harriet will not stay up to meet the 11:55 bus anymore, so the women take the pages to a clerk at a local convenience store who gives them to the bus driver.
"Harriet was the second editor of the News," Marrietta, the present editor, said proudly as they settled into Young's Hotel to get the latest paper out.
"Now I don't even speak to them," Harriet said. She looked tickled with this biteless bark.
"Now, now," said Marrietta. "She helps in many ways."
Harriet: "Oh, I have a box here, and when people bring news in, I put it in the box."
The big news on this day, however, did not come from the box. A light plane that left Cuba for Taos a week before had disappeared. Also, Cuba had just voted, 84 to 68, to approve Sunday liquor sales. "Somebody was saying that you used to be able to buy enough on Saturday to carry you through," said Betty Jane, "and he doesn't see why they still can't do it that way." She added, "But the most exciting thing in the paper will be that if you won a blue ribbon at the county fair, your name will be in it."
Marie came in and announced that she had baked a German apple-pie cake this morning, and it tasted good enough to publish the recipe. She remembered that her first recipe, in 1964, was a guide to making your own bath salts. Since then, she fretted, she has used up all the recipes she can create as well as plagiarize. Nonetheless, she said, "I would hate to give this newspaper up. I had a birthday Saturday. I was 79. I've had two open-heart surgeries. I'm not about to stop doing anything I like to do."
On that last statement, so say all the other newspaper hands, all of them unpaid. It costs about $300 a month to publish the Cuba News. Any moneys above that go into the community, band uniforms for the high school and whatnot. With the exception of a rough period about three years ago, Cuba's merchants, whose immediate market numbers but a scant 1,500 citizens, have kept the News in the black with their advertising (full page, $50; half, $25; quarter, $12.50; want ad, $2). And even during that lean spot, when word got around that the paper might go under, advertisers who could ill afford it simply dug deeper and set things right.