On another July 26

“Cuba and the Cuban revolution will continue fighting and resisting even if we should wake up one day to the news, which we hope would never occur, that a great civil conflict has arisen in the USSR and even that the USSR has fallen apart.

“The revolutionary movement is going through difficulties. We cannot even say that supplies, which have been arriving in the socialist camp like clockwork for the past thirty years, will continue arriving with that reliability and punctuality. It is possible that in the future we may have to continue working and exerting ourselves and making miracles.”

– Fidel Castro, July 26, 1989

In today's Granma

A statement from the Cuban Catholic Bishops conference, signed by Cardinal Ortega, calling Catholics to mass on Sunday to honor the late Bishop Pedro Meurice of Santiago. Meurice died July 21 in Miami, where he had gone for medical treatment. “Our brother desired expressly to be buried in Cuba in the event that he would die outside la Patria,” the statement said.

Odds and ends

• EFE: A Repsol executive expects drilling in Cuba’s Gulf waters to begin in November and has received “neither calls nor messages” from the U.S. government.

• Reuters: Dutch bank ING says it is under a Treasury Department Cuba sanctions investigation; the alleged offenses are unspecified.

• Herald: With Cuban landing rights granted, weekly Tampa-Havana flights are now set to begin.

• How one day’s Granma provides a window on the United States: a story about a North Carolina man who robbed a bank (of one dollar) to get into prison for medical care, and a story about Latinos in the U.S. armed forces.

• New York Times: In a new book, a photographer documents Havana’s “privileged creative class.”

• El Nuevo Herald: The debate over the “People’s Path” document continues (see here and here), with Armando Valladares supporting Biscet and Elizardo Sanchez and Oswaldo Paya rebutting him.