The Cuban Triangle

The Communist Party conference begins

2012-01-28T08:53:00.001-05:00

Cuba’s national Communist Party conference begins today and Granma, the official party daily, sets the stage with a short editorial.

The “essential purpose” of the confab, the editorial says, is “to deepen party work to accelerate the development of society and to guarantee the economic and social policy guidelines (Lineamientos) approved by the sixth Party Congress, based on the concept that there can be no ideology without an economy.”

It also rails against “bureaucratic schemes and attitudes, and old vices such as improvisation, formalism, false unanimity, and opportunism.” It cites the need “to leave behind prejudices against the non-state sector of the economy.” And it cites Raul Castro’s admonition that the hardest “psychological barrier” that party members will need to overcome is that of “being tied to obsolete dogmas and points of view.”

The conference has the power to make changes in party leadership but there is no hint that it will do so.

The party discussion document for the conference is here (pdf).

A critical editorial on that document in Catholic media is noted here.

Here’s coverage from Reuters and NPR.

The Republicans in Florida

2012-01-27T14:51:00.005-05:00

Let’s start with Ron Paul who, asked in last night’s debate what he would say if he found himself talking to Raul Castro in the Oval Office, responded: “I’d ask him what he called about.”

Apart from that, the Brian Williams question about Fidel Castro’s death in the first debate has continued to frame what has become an odd discussion.

The question focused on what will surely be a big moment in history, but one that I do not believe to be foremost in people’s minds in Cuba, or in Miami for that matter. On Calle Ocho, after all, they celebrated Fidel’s death five years ago only to find that our Maker had a different plan.

Nonetheless, we have had days of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney talking about Fidel meeting his Maker, or not, verging on pop theology.

Here’s Romney at a Miami event on Wednesday: “If I’m fortunate to become the next President of the United States it is my expectation that Fidel Castro will finally be taken off this planet. I doubt he’ll take any time in the sky. He’ll find a nether region to be more to his comfort…We’ve waited a long, long time for the opportunity that is represented by a new president, and by new leadership, or by old leadership finally kicking the bucket in Cuba. And I want to take advantage. I want to be the American president that is proud to be able to say that I was president at the time that we brought freedom back to the people of Cuba.”

With that, Romney also released a policy paper. Lifting a phrase from President Obama, who said in 2009 that freedom in Cuba is “our lodestone, our North Star,” Romney’s paper declares: “The North Star that guides Mitt Romney’s policy toward the island is the realizable dream of a free Cuba.”

Romney sees Gingrich on the issue of travel (back to the Bush rules), Helms-Burton (allow Title III to go into effect), and looking into the possibility of indicting Messrs. Castro, and raises him on a few scores:

· Romney will “fully fund and effectively implement” U.S. government democracy promotion programs

· He will beef up broadcasting, Internet, and social media communications

· He will “publicly identify by name those police officers, prison officials, judges, state security personnel, and regime officials who mistreat, torture, and oppress the Cuban people so they know they will be held individually accountable.”

Gingrich, is you’re still with me, elaborated on his earlier tough talk. From AFP:

Mr. Gingrich was asked to explain comments that if elected, he would “not tolerate four more years of a Cuban dictatorship.”

If the US planes bombed Libya, should they do the same with Cuba?

“If there was a genuine, legitimate uprising, we would, of course, be on the side of the people,”Mr. Gingrich told Spanish-language network Univision.

“In that sense, I don’t see why Cuba should be sacrosanct, and we should say, ‘Oh, don't do anything to hurt’ - you know, we’re very prepared to back people in Libya. We may end up backing people in Syria. But now Cuba? Hands off Cuba. That’s baloney.

“People of Cuba deserve freedom.”

The audience at the Miami venue where Univision held the interview broke into applause.

Ernesto Hernandez Busto, Spain-based editor of Penultimos Dias, is following it all in Miami and attended the Romney event. He liked Romney’s remarks and those of his wife, he found Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen “enthusiastic and predictable,” but found something lacking in the whole lineup and in all the other candidates: “an understanding of the Cuban situation that goes beyond the traditional topics.”

Welcome to the club, Ernesto.

Quotable: Romney on “the Cuban situation”

2012-01-27T12:52:00.002-05:00

“Romney…said that the Cuban situation exists because the United States has failed to honor commitments against Communist infiltration in the Western Hemisphere.

“‘By backing away from this basic principle,’ [Romney] said, ‘we still have the Cuban situation which was not corrected in the missile inspection situation or in the Bay of Pigs matter.’”

– The Miami News quoting Michigan Governor George Romney, February 9, 1964

Brazil stays in the game

2012-01-27T11:35:00.002-05:00

Reuters raises the curtain on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s visit to Cuba next week, where she will continue her predecessor’s policy of economic cooperation with Cuba, including the major project of the port of Mariel.

Cuba Standard, meanwhile, found a Folha de Sao Paolo article where a Brazilian official, just back from Cuba, talked about the possibilities for Brazilian companies to invest in ethanol production in Cuba and declared, “Fidel’s resistance in this field is being overcome.”

Let’s hope that’s the case. Brazilian investment in Cuban ethanol production would bring world-class technology and know-how to Cuba, generate jobs, enable Cuba to cut oil imports and foreign exchange expenditures, and provide sorely needed revival to an economically and culturally important sector of the Cuban countryside.

Coincidentally, Brazil just granted Yoani Sanchez a visa to visit Brazil to attend a film screening.

Earlier notes on Brazil’s engagement with Cuba here and here. A Cuban promotional video on the Mariel port project is here. It’s a huge infrastructure project that expands Mariel’s capacity and allows for all the port and industrial facilities along the southern shore of the Bay of Havana to be dismantled and replaced with non-industrial development.

Another prisoner's death

2012-01-27T11:21:00.001-05:00

History repeats itself with another awful, hard-to-comprehend death of a Cuban prisoner. As in the case of Orlando Zapata, Wilman Villar died in a hospital after being in a prison in eastern Cuba; he is described as a dissident by his family but the government claims he was a common criminal.

The following is what I scanned after being away from the news.

Villar, who apparently joined a dissident group last fall, is reported to have been on a hunger strike and died from that. International human rights groups and many governments condemned Cuban authorities for allowing the 31-year-old to die; see this editorial from El Pais and the State Department’s statement.

The Cuban government issued a refutation (text here), claiming there is ample proof that he was neither a dissident nor on a hunger strike, that he received medical care, and his family was always apprised of it.

AFP reports that Villar’s mother, sister, and mother-in-law all “repudiated” him, while human rights monitor Elizardo Sanchez reports from Havana that those three are all married to Interior Ministry agents and are “partisans of the government.”

And regarding Zapata, Café Fuerte reports that his mother, who emigrated to the United States once she had her son’s ashes in her hands, is having a hard time in Miami finding work and economic support. She describes herself as “desperate.”

Odds and ends

2012-01-27T11:13:00.000-05:00

Lots of catching up to do:

· Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, talks to the Peoria Journal-Star about his trip to Cuba.

· The Herald has a story about the sentencia in the Alan Gross case. The document states that Gross used Americans who were traveling to Cuba on Jewish fellowship trips to carry parts of his satellite equipment, without telling them that his project was a U.S. government initiative.

· Reuters: Europeans opting for Cuba over North Africa are one factor driving Cuba’s tourism numbers up, and its hotels to capacity.

· The Repsol oil rig is in place in Cuban waters, ready to drill, and the Herald has a good overview of emergency response issues.

· EFE on the 150^th anniversary of Bacardi, a company that dreams of returning to Cuba, and – well, why not? – does business in communist China.

· Vancouver Sun: Two first-stringers on the Cuban women’s soccer team hopped a cab, went to the U.S. border, pulled their carnets de identidad out of their shoes, and asked to stay. Welcome to el Yuma.

· The New York Times Magazine interviews Sen. Marco Rubio.

· Cuba travel Christopher Baker, author of the Moon’s travel guide to Cuba, has a theory about the scarcity of medicines in Cuba.

In Florida, the squeeze is on

2012-01-24T13:49:00.000-05:00

With the Republican race scrambled by the South Carolina result, next Tuesday’s Florida winner-take-all primary takes on even greater importance.

That means greater competition for the support of the older, hard-line Cuban Americans who vote their Cuba beliefs in primary and general elections, and who to their credit go to the polls consistently and in large numbers.

It also means that this is a delicious, week-long moment of maximum leverage for hard-liners, where they can push the candidates to promise more and more on Cuba policy.

Mitt Romney, who has not been very specific on Cuba to date, will get more specific with a speech tomorrow. In last night’s debate he gave a preview, calling President Obama’s policy “dangerous” and criticizing new regulations that permit greater travel by Americans to Cuba.

Perhaps Romney will try to one-up Newt Gingrich, who issued this letter to Unidad Cubana containing commitments to return to the Bush travel regulations, to examine the possibility of indicting Fidel and Raul Castro for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue Shootdown, and to allow Title III of Helms-Burton to go into effect. The latter action would allow Cuban Americans to use U.S. courts to sue foreign investors in Cuba if their investments in Cuba touch properties that the Cuban Americans possessed. (U.S. courts would then be burdened with cases involving properties in a foreign country, taken decades ago by a foreign government, with no connection to the United States except that the owner later came to the United States. A strange use of U.S. courts.) Gingrich has also promised a speech on Cuba and Latin America before next Tuesday. He is running radio ads that recall Romney’s “fatherland or death” gaffe four years ago, tie Gingrich to President Reagan, and recall that he worked “with Lincoln and Ileana” to pass the Helms-Burton Act in 1996.

As for last night’s debate (summarized here by AFP), the Cuba discussion was prefaced by the odd hypothetical question about Fidel Castro dying and hundreds of thousands of Cubans deciding to get in boats to leave forthwith.

Romney sounded a note that may get him in trouble with his target audience, depending on what people think it means when they decipher it: he would “work very aggressively with the new leadership in Cuba to try to move them towards a more open degree than they have had in the past.” Life, a more open degree, and the pursuit of happiness!

Gingrich said the policy of the U.S. government should be “to overthrow the regime” using everything at our disposal, including overt and covert means. This connects him with a long tradition of U.S. covert actions toward Cuba that are either announced outright, as he did last night, or are a matter of public knowledge, as in the Bay of Pigs invasion. And that are also inept; see Gross, Alan.

Ron Paul proceeded politely to call them both fools; see video below.

Finally, this comment by Achy Obejas notes Cuban Americans’ smaller proportion of the Florida Latino vote, and other interesting general election considerations.

Reforms, slow and steady

2012-01-18T11:00:00.000-05:00

The website of the newspaper Trabajadores is placing news stories on the economic reforms in this useful section called “Sin pausa” (“without pause”). The phrase was used in a speech last July by Vice President Machado Ventura; he said the process is proceeding “sin prisas, pero sin pausa;” i.e. not hurrying, but not pausing. Which seems to be the case:

Juventud Rebelde: 71 contracts have been executed between farm producers and tourism industry businesses. These are the first fruits of what the article calls an “incipient” policy, one announced last November that allows agricultural producers, including private ones, to contract directly with businesses in the tourism sector. It’s a winner all around, except for the government intermediaries rendered unnecessary by these new private transactions. And it’s a very clear sign of the government implementing its plan piece by piece, even in cases such as this where government is called upon to get out of a business that it had carried out for decades.

On the road in eastern Cuba, Reuters’ Marc Frank does some colorful reporting on a great new entrepreneur with an establishment fronting the central highway, and on the development of the residential real estate market outside Havana. (Don’t tell Senator Rubio, but Cuban Americans are a big factor in that market.)

More from Marc Frank, from Holguin: 211 state cafeterias in that province will be the subject of a pilot program where they will be leased to the workers, who will then run them on their own, as they see fit. Whether the enterprise will be constituted as a cooperative or another form of business remains to be seen. They will launch well after private restaurants and lunch stands have established themselves, Frank reports, providing “stiff competition on almost every block.”

Bending the cost curve: Cuban health care spending dropped 7.7 percent last year, the health minister reported.

The Cuban government says it’s not the complete solution to the public’s housing needs, but it will provide 160 million pesos in grants to support home repair or construction for families on the lower end of the income scale. That amounts to about 40 percent of last year’s revenues from the sale of construction materials, Trabajadores reports. The maximum grant will be 80,000 pesos, of which a maximum of 30 percent may be used to pay for labor. Recipients will enter a contract governing their use of the money. More here from Trabajadores and in English from AP.

It’s tax return season in Cuba for private entrepreneurs (state employees do not pay income tax). This story in Granma explains that the season for filing returns is extended one month to March 30, and those who file by February 28 can deduct five percent from their tax payment.

Cuba's case against Alan Gross (Updated)

2012-01-16T12:21:00.012-05:00

Café Fuerte went to the trouble to obtain the Cuban court decision in the case of USAID contractor Alan Gross, who is now serving his third year of a 15-year sentence.

It’s an 18-page document that begins with his business address in Maryland and ends with a list of every single item that was in his possession, right down to his Scotiabank credit card. In between it describes his activities, and it makes reference to several volumes containing hundreds of numbered pages of evidence gathered against him, much of it obtained from the computers and flash drives that Gross carried.

It amounts to Cuba’s case against Gross, as accepted and summarized by the court in its decision to convict.

The document claims that Gross started his activities in Cuba in 2004 and was involved with organizations such as the Pan American Development Foundation, which were penetrated by Cuban intelligence and whose activities became the subjects of Cuban television shows.

Apparently, the evidence in the trial included Gross’ trip reports to his employer (the USAID contractor DAI) and much more. The court describes the defense attorney’s objection to the way in which information was downloaded from Gross’ flash drives when she was not present, and notes that Gross himself authenticated “the majority” of the downloaded documents and provided information about them. Gross apparently said that one document, entitled “How to communicate securely in repressive environments” was not his.

The document notes “the sworn statement of the wife of the accused, Judith Gross, of February 23 of this year, in which she explains the situation of her family and provides details on the presentation of a lawsuit against DAI.”

It cites testimony from a communications ministry official to the effect that Gross never applied for a permit “to establish satellite communications stations.”

It also cites a statement provided to the court by an attorney for DAI who declined to provide information in the investigation, citing a non-disclosure agreement.

When I read the whole thing, I’ll post more. Readers who plow through it are welcome to contribute. Café Fuerte’s story by Ivette Leyva is here. The sentencia itself, posted by Café Fuerte, is here (pdf).

(Image: Cuba’s customs declaration.)

Updates:

---See Along the Malecon for links with information on the Cuban intelligence agents who followed Gross' activities, and others'.

---A reader points out that I wrote that his I-pad was confiscated. My error. The document refers to ten I-pods.

---Credit where credit is due: A reader points out that if you click on the document's properties, it shows that it originated in the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.

---See the reader's comment on the “How to communicate securely in repressive environments” paper, which was apparently not written by Gross.

"Support" for Alan Gross

2012-01-14T14:07:00.002-05:00

I want to note three recent items on the saga of Alan Gross, the USAID contractor now serving his third year in Cuban jail.

First is a vapid USAID/State Department response to this critique of USAID’s capers in Cuba. Obama appointees Mark Feierstein and Michael Posner claim that the author of the critique, Fulton Armstrong, “urges acceptance of the Cuban regime’s laws,” which he does not. He merely mentions Cuban law as an operational reality, as USAID has long done in its own program documents, pointing out that USAID programs contravene Cuban law. By that token, one could level the same cheap accusation at USAID. As for the Cuba programs being “comparable to international efforts in support of democracy elsewhere,” I’m interested to know how many other programs are run by USAID with no office in the country, no agreement with the local government, in contravention of local law, in a manner that attempts to be clandestine, and under a U.S. law that promotes regime change. It doesn’t matter what you or I or Alan Gross or Feierstein or Posner think of Cuban law or USAID’s way of operating. What matters is that USAID has chosen a style of operation in that environment that puts its operatives in predictable danger, and when things go sour, its response is to whine in public and defend the program rather than help get the guy out. Again, if your kids want to become covert operatives, send them to the CIA, not to this crew.

Then there’s a Washington Post editorial that calls for Gross’ release, something everyone wants. It argues that Cuba’s prisoners here should not be released because they acted as “unregistered foreign agents.” And it calls Gross a “would-be humanitarian;” while there’s no basis for doubting his good intentions, he seems to be a businessman in the first instance who was executing a $585,000 contract.

Then there’s an item by Elliott Abrams in the Weekly Standard that accuses members of the Park Avenue Synagogue of having “no shame at all” for traveling to Cuba for a week of religious fellowship while Gross is in jail.

Unlike many of his other writings, this one doesn’t delve into the thinking of the Bush Administration, in which he served. (See, for example, Elliott's interesting discussion of the Bush decision to re-open diplomatic relations with our friends in the erstwhile Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which included his expression of hope “that our embassy folks, visitors, academics and businessmen would – in the long run – pull Libya toward being a more open society.”)

Which is too bad because from the outside and in hindsight, it looks as if the Bush Administration’s strategy toward Cuba was a little cynical, to win hearts and minds along Calle Ocho rather than to change Cuba; that it did so in part by doing what government always does when short on ideas, which is to heave taxpayer money at the problem ($45 million in one year); and that it turned to Beltway contractors to spend so much money, where every red cent was accounted for but where ideas such as Mr. Gross’ prospered readily because they checked the right boxes and kept up the “burn rate” of your money and mine. If “cynical” seems too harsh a word, how else to explain Bush’s massive, expensive strategy to create pressure for change in Cuba that shied away from touching our no-questions-asked immigration policy toward Cubans?

Back to the shameless Park Avenue Synagogue, Elliott argues that American Jews should refrain from engaging with Cuba as long as Gross is in jail. In other words, people who engage effectively should stop in solidarity with someone whose efforts had zero results save for his own imprisonment, the potential endangerment of those he wanted to help, and the waste of taxpayer money.

When the New Yorkers make their trip, they will see that engagement by Jews around the world has helped Cuba’s small Jewish community through fraternal and religious visits, by sending rabbis to a community that has none, by promoting trips to Israel for religious education, by rebuilding the synagogue, by providing Internet connections, and by stocking the synagogue’s wonderful upstairs pharmacy that probably helps twenty Cubans outside the congregation for every Cuban Jew who uses its medicines. None of this help has cost taxpayers one dime and none of it has been provided under false pretenses, which Cuba’s Jews appreciate.

Elliott should join the Park Avenue group. To feel better, he can stay in a crummy hotel or a private home. Like anyone with a sense of shame about wasting taxpayer money, he would find himself wondering about the money the Bush Administration shoveled in the direction of Cuba, and to what effect.

Odds and ends

2012-01-13T17:31:00.002-05:00

The Archdiocese of Miami announces a pilgrimage to Cuba to witness the Pope’s visit in March, with the option of seeing the masses in both Havana and Santiago. The Cuban Liberty Council’s Ninoska Perez calls the trip tourism and says it betrays a “total lack of ethics” on the part of the Archdiocese. In the Herald, Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski looks ahead to the Pope’s visit to Cuba.

Herald: Speaking of pilgrimages, candidate Newt Gingrich schlepped to Versailles, Calle Ocho’s very nice, reasonably priced restaurant, café, and pastry shop. He was joined by Rep. David Rivera, who has endorsed him. Gingrich changed his position on Cuba, calling for restoration of the Bush travel restrictions of 2004. (Previously he said he would not reverse the Obama travel opening). He wants “a Cuban Spring that is even more exciting than the Arab Spring.” Plus full enforcement of Helms-Burton and indictment of Fidel and Raul Castro and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. Plus new governments in Havana, Caracas, and Tehran.

Attorney Jose Palli writes a sharp essay in the Herald about fear of change in Cuba.

Granma covers an address by Dr. Ahmadinejad at the University of Havana in which he rails against injustice around the world and says that capitalism is “in decline.” He saw Fidel Castro during his visit and told Raul that Fidel had done most of the talking; a sign, Raul said, that Fidel “is really doing well.”

What can Rubio deliver? (With update)

2012-01-11T19:03:00.001-05:00

Penultimos Dias posts this New Yorker piece (pdf) in which Ken Auletta examines the recent spat between Senator Marco Rubio and Univision. It’s a long, detailed story about Rubio, the Republican party and Latino voters, and Univision’s dominant position in the U.S. Spanish-speaking audience. (Update: More on all this from Café Fuerte and the Columbia Journalism Review.) An interesting read, but more to the point of this blog, this caught my eye:

Republicans speak of Senator Rubio as a Vice-Presidential candidate in large part because they think he can help deliver Hispanic voters. But it’s not clear that he can. In the 2010 Senate election, he won fifty-five per cent of the Hispanic vote, but this was mostly because he won three-quarters of the Cuban vote. He won only about a third of the Puerto Rican vote and not much more of the remainder of the Hispanic vote. Jeb Bush, a Florida Republican with softer positions on immigration than Rubio—he has supported tuition breaks for the children of illegal immigrants, for example— won nearly two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in his last state-wide election, including fifty-five per cent of the Puerto Rican vote. In the December poll by impreMedia and Latino Decisions, only thirteen per cent of Hispanics said that Rubio’s inclusion on the national ticket would make them much more likely to vote Republican; ten per cent said it would make them much less likely.

Odds and ends

2012-01-11T19:01:00.001-05:00

Granma: Cuba awaits the arrival of Iran’s Excelentísimo señor Doctor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today. VOA: He arrived.

Herald: U.S. officials traveled to Trinidad to inspect the rig that Repsol will use to drill in Cuba’s Gulf waters, and gave it a thumbs-up.

In Qatar, Cuba’s health minister is present for the inauguration of a Cuban hospital.

Romney in Florida

2012-01-11T18:59:00.000-05:00

GOP candidate Mitt Romney is airing this Spanish-language ad in Florida, a general election pitch above the current fray. Former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen are featured. More on Romney’s Florida efforts here and here from the Herald’s Marc Caputo.

Happy new year...

2011-12-27T12:55:00.000-05:00

...back Jan. 9.

Let the private sector do it

2011-12-26T10:30:00.000-05:00

Today’s Granma announces another small step toward reducing government payrolls and expanding private employment.

Beginning next month, employees of provincial enterprises of “personal, technical, and home services” will be converted into private entrepreneurs who rent their place of business from the state and set their own prices and hours of operation. This will include carpenters, photographers, repairmen, locksmiths, and other occupations.

Tax relief for entrepreneurs, and other economic news

2011-12-26T10:00:00.002-05:00

Cuban entrepreneurs will have their income tax reduced in two ways, former economy minister and current vice president of the Council of Ministers Marino Murillo announced Friday in the National Assembly.

One tax cut comes not in the form of reduced rates but rather through an increase in the amount of income that is exempt from tax. Currently an entrepreneur’s first 5,000 pesos in income is tax-exempt; this amount has now been doubled to 10,000 pesos. That amount is nearly twice the average salary of a state sector worker (5,376 pesos per year). See story in Trabajadores.

Murillo also announced that the tax that entrepreneurs pay for each worker that they hire will remain suspended for those employing five or fewer employees. This tax was suspended last May as part of a series of measures to encourage job creation.

Other economic tidbits from the presentations of Murillo, Minister of the Economy Adel Yzquierdo, and President Raul Castro before the National Assembly:

Cuba expects to import 117,000 fewer tons of rice in 2012, 45,000 fewer tons of grain, and 2,000 fewer tons of powdered milk in 2012, all due to increased domestic production.

Employment is expected to grow by 70,000 in 2012 based on forecasts that the government will shed 170,000 from its payrolls while 240,000 jobs are created in the “non-state” sector.

The government is working “at an accelerated pace in the proposal for policies and transitional measures” for the creation of non-agricultural cooperatives. (Murillo)

A legislator from Mayari asked what can be done for state enterprises that have run out of working capital, and got some tough love from Murillo: the solution is to figure out why they are losing money and make them stop. Also: “The central government budget should receive money from the enterprises, not the other way around.”

Growth was 2.7 percent in 2011, an “acceptable and sustained” pace (Raul); 3.4 percent is expected for 2012.

The bank accounts of foreign companies that had been frozen have now been un-frozen, all of them. The freeze, a response to a liquidity crunch, prevented businesses from repatriating revenues and profits. The action is part of efforts aimed at “re-establishing the credibility of our economy.” (Raul)

The tradecraft of Alan Gross

2011-12-26T09:53:00.005-05:00

USAID’s programs in Cuba are not covert operations run by U.S. intelligence agencies, but USAID does its best to make them seem that way, argues Fulton Armstrong, former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America (the top intelligence analyst for the region) and more recently investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

How?

“The programs did not involve our Intelligence Community, but the secrecy surrounding them, the clandestine tradecraft (including the use of advanced encryption technologies) and the deliberate concealment of the U.S. hand, had all the markings of an intelligence covert operation.”

“Advanced encryption technologies?”

The Christmas rush

2011-12-26T09:53:00.004-05:00

CBS: “Twenty-nine flights from the U.S. landed Thursday at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport, forcing airport administrators to quickly shuffle employees around to reinforce the baggage handlers and immigration officials swamped by holiday travelers, mostly – though not all – Cuban-Americans coming here to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve with relatives.”

AP reports here on the Cuban Americans “streaming to the island” for the holidays.

2,900 prisoners to be released

2011-12-26T09:52:00.001-05:00

This December 23 Nota Oficial announces a decision by Cuba’s Council of State to release more than 2,900 prisoners who have served substantial parts of their sentences and shown good conduct, with releases to occur “in the coming days.” The action is “in fulfillment of established policy” and responds to appeals from family members and “diverse religious institutions.” Save for a few exceptions, prisoners convicted of espionage, terrorism, murder, drug trafficking, and several types of violent crimes are not included in the reprieve.

Reuters coverage here. Video of Raul Castro’s announcement of the action here.

Human rights monitor Elizardo Sanchez called it a “shallow gesture.” I suppose that would be the case if the prisoners had all served 90 percent of their sentences, but we don’t know any of those details yet. To me it seems odd to be dismissive of the release of so many. Already, with the political prisoner releases, the number of prisoners of conscience counted by Amnesty International had fallen to zero. Elizardo keeps a list of persons convicted of politically motivated crimes, including some involving violence; I wonder if any of those will be released.

The State Department, for its part, is “deeply disappointed” that jailed USAID contractor Alan Gross was not among the 2,900 and “deplores” his exclusion. It’s as if the strategy of the U.S. government, which sent Gross to Cuba to conduct clandestine operations, is to obtain his release simply by demanding a unilateral gesture. Again, it seems that Gross is on his own and the top priority is to defend the program, not him.