Odds and ends

• Something doesn’t compute in this public account by Carter advisor Robert Pastor, that Alan Gross “claims not to know he was bringing equipment from the U.S. government.” Could it be that he knew it was USAID money but didn’t know the legislative and political baggage that comes with the program?

• Blogger Claudia Cadelo met President Carter and came away with hope; her comments in English are here.

• AP covers the trouble Cuban doctors have establishing their credentials in the United States.

• Martha Beatriz Roque writes at Miscelaneas de Cuba that Cuba’s dissidents aren’t bothered by government agents infiltrated in their ranks. They “do not deserve to be called agents because in most cases they act under blackmail,” she says. “There is not even a need to shoo these flies away,” she says, because they are not relevant and the movement is stronger than the damage they can cause.

• At a Partido Popular event, former Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar says it’s wrong to act one way in Libya and another in Cuba – without saying whether airstrikes should stop in Libya or begin in Cuba.

• From the Foreign Policy Blog, the U.S.-Cuba relationship in numbers.

• Havana as backdrop for a couple’s engagement shoot.

• No es fácil for the crabs in Cuba either, at least for the 3.5 million whom local “specialists” say are squashed by cars and die each year on the highway in the Zapata peninsula. The carnage happens as they ovulate and cross back and forth to the beach. Local and German environmentalists are working on it, and step one was to build a few tunnels. Juventud Rebelde story here.