Odds and ends

• On Raul Castro’s 80^th birthday: AP notes that it passed with little fanfare, IPS surveys the economic policy tasks ahead of him, and AFP Spanish quotes him during a brief encounter with reporters: “We have to keep straightening all this out, we have to do things in an orderly way, within the institutional order, there are many things in effect that are really absurd or that were correct when they began, but now time has passed.”

• Diario de Cuba: Guillermo Farinas is beginning his 24th hunger strike to demand an independent investigation of the death of Juan Wilfredo Soto. From the article: “[Farinas] was meeting in his house in Santa Clara with the board of directors of the United Anti-totalitarian Front to name a spokesperson and to evaluate the possibility of undertaking the hunger strike in another location, since his family ‘is desperate.’”

• “A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now,” a photography exhibit at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (Los Angeles Times).

• The New York Times reviews an “exhilarating” performance of the Creole Choir of Cuba at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

• With the headline “Human rights in Miami: 12 police discharge their arms on an Afro-American suspect,” Granma takes note of this case in Miami.

• At Cuba Money Project, Tracey Eaton posts the Administration’s answers to Senator Kerry’s questions on Cuba democracy programs.