Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Odds and ends

  • BBC: Two months after the policy change, no Cuban post offices have been equipped to give Cubans full Internet access. Reporter Fernando Ravsberg chalks it up to the “slowness that is typical of the Cuban bureacucracy.” In his story, he follows a Cuban who gets full web access by paying for it at the Hotel Nacional, and he notes that Cuban bloggers are using these hotel facilities to run their blogs.

  • AFP finds a woman who sells pizza and ice cream from her house on Obispo street, and whose business is booming since the nearby finance and internal commerce ministries closed their cafeterias.

  • The LA Times profiles first baseman Kendry Morales, who hit .306 this season with the Angels and is headed with his team to the playoffs against Boston.

  • Reuters: Cuba publishes statistical reports showing a 30 percent cut in tobacco acreage.

  • A bit of history: the 1965 testimony of Fidel’s sister, Juanita Castro, before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (H/t Penultimos Dias.)

  • AP: Singer Omara Portuondo has a U.S. visa and will perform in California later this month.

  • Senator Dorgan, displeased with the Treasury Department’s decision regarding the New York Philharmonic’s travel license, wants the agency “to think straight just a bit.” Cuban Colada reports that orchestra officials will try again, and tells us the program that would have been played.

  • USA Today: Charles Hill, an American fugitive in Cuba, looks at prospects for normalized relations and what it would mean for him.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The democratic American govt denies the revolutionary NY Philharmonic to go to Cuba. Why?

But it's the Cubans who get all the condemnation for restricting travel. Mr Orwell would love this.

ok guys, let the spin begin.

Anonymous said...

Phil Peters,

One thing that was left out of this potpourri was the conflicting stories about what Health Vice-minister Estruch said about the Cuban preparations for the exprected Virus A H1N1 pandemic. In an interview with the AP that was reported in ENH yesterday, he is quoted as saying that the vaccine is ineffective and therefore the Cuban government will rely on isolation and quarantine (entire towns if necessary) to contain the spread of the virus. On a separate interview to Granma that was published yesterday he is quoted as saying that Cuba has requested financial aid from WHO and PAHO to purchase the vaccine.

International health authorities have said that quarantine and isolation are of little use in containing the spread of influenza. Although certain measures can slow the speed of the pandemic, the virus will spread no matter what you do because by the time one isolates symptomatic individuals they may have already spread the virus to others. It appears that Vice-minister Estruch was corrected on time. Maybe the Cuban government will not treat this pandemic as they treated the neuropathy epidemic in the early 1990s.

Vecino de NF

leftside said...
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