Odds and ends

• Granma published the text of the foreign investment law today.

• In the Mariel economic zone, as in foreign investment projects in general, workers are hired and paid through an employment agency.  Payment is made in hard currency, the agency keeps most of the money and pays the workers a normal Cuban wage.  Foreign businesses then make side payments to the workers to raise their wages and productivity, which is why jobs with foreign businesses are sought-after.  Trabajadores reports that in the Mariel economic zone, the agency will no longer have a “revenue-collecting” function and will pay workers 80 percent of the wage negotiated between the foreign business and the agency.

• Reuters on Cuba’s new private non-farm cooperatives; more than 450 are now operating in the program’s “experimental” phase.

• Granma: the new labor code makes Good Friday a holiday in Cuba, this week and permanently.

• A granddaughter recounts an interview that her grandfather Clark Hewitt Galloway conducted with Fidel Castro in 1959.

• Dodger phenom Yasiel Puig’s flight from Cuba was harrowing, and still is so, recounted in detail by Los Angeles Magazine in English and Spanish.