Explainer

Explainer Mailbag: Free Base?

Last Friday’s item on Guantanamo Bay overlooked a salient fact (and readers let Explainer have it for the omission). Readers want to know: How much does the U.S. pay Cuba to lease Guantanamo Bay?

The 1934 treaty called for $2,000 in gold per year, which works out to $4,085 today, according to this brief history on the Web site for the U.S. Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. To protest the deal brokered by imperialist dogs, Fidel Castro doesn’t cash the checks.

This week’s column on the Symbionese Liberation Army prompted one reader to ask about the Weathermen. Who were they? Taking their name from a line in Bob Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), the Weathermen were also white, middle-class men and women who saw themselves as the start of a revolutionary uprising. A faction of Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen set off bombs in the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, among other places. Later, the group adopted the unisex name the Weather Underground. Click here for Chatterbox’s review of Fugitive Days, a memoir by former Weatherman Bill Ayers, and click here for a post-Sept. 11 follow-up.

Still more Explainer reruns: Both Enron and Kmart have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. What happens in Chapter 11 bankruptcy? What’s the difference between Chapter 11 and Chapter 7? Click here for answers.

If this week’s mailbag is short, it’s because Explainer has been busily researching these imponderables from Slate reader Joseph Britt.

Explainer is jealous of all the literary output in the “Sports Nut” Fray. How about some questions delivered as rhyming couplets?

Next question?