Monday, November 30, 2009

Odds and ends

  • A new blog, about Catholic faith in Cuba: Creer en Cuba. A story from Catholic News Agency here.

  • Cuba’s 2009 tourism arrivals are on pace to beat last year’s record, according to Cuba’s National Statistics office. Data through October are here (pdf) and more data charts are linked here.

  • ESPN.com reports that Aroldis Chapman, the Cuban southpaw now shopping for a major league contract, has switched agents. This analysis reaches this bottom line about him: “Chapman is going to be a risk for whatever team signs him. His upside is tremendous, but he’s raw in every sense of the word.” In other baseball news, Nelson Diaz, a top Cuban umpire, has arrived in Miami with his family, and tells El Nuevo Herald his views on the decline in the quality of Cuban baseball.

  • From the Bradenton Herald (Florida): Marine scientists and conservationists are making work plans that include their Cuban counterparts.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great tourism data, thanks. Interesting to see that Canada tops the list by far.

English blokes are also going to Cuba in droves.

Can't wait to see when USA tops the list.

Anonymous said...

And I can't wait till you get a good taste of a Cubanita's VD.

Commie-Hater

leftside said...

Is it really a "defection" (as every US media article says in its headline) when a umpire boards a plane with his family to live somewhere else with his parents, other family and friends?

And Diaz's excuse is getting played out. It seems like every other supposed "defector" makes the decision to leave only AFTER they were prevented from leaving because they were deemed a flight risk? They were not a flight risk before, of course. Even with his "most of his family and friends" living abroad (his words).