Odds and ends

• AP: Cuba’s sugar output, still in the tank.

• Yoani Sanchez in two moods about the Carter visit, in El Pais and the Washington Post.

• Marifeli Perez-Stable also reviews the visit and calls for a more creative approach to USAID programs than the Bush and Obama Administrations have shown.

• Former Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega launches a new blog, Inter-American Security Watch.

• Frank Calzon, dreaming that jefe del partido means the same thing here as there.

• Oscar Elias Biscet is named Cuba’s “most important” dissident in this Herald article, where he says that the Cuban government should enter a dialogue with political opponents so as to avert a civil war. In fairness to Biscet, the civil war comment is not in quotes.

• Los Muñequitos de Matanzas at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium on April 22.

• Cuba’s country risk, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.

• Café Fuerte has a list of political prisoners freed since last summer.

• A Georgia company accuses Cuba of “denial of assistance” last December when its tug and barge, en route to Haiti with humanitarian cargo, had engine trouble and were dead in the water offshore of Moa. The barge ran aground and sank. AP story here.

Quotable

“Independent of the specific interests that motivated this visit, it must be recognized that Carter’s conciliatory posture, his capacity for respectful dialogue and his exchanges with representatives both of the official line and of opposition and independent civil society sectors, mark a particular style that clashes with the belligerence on which the Cuban regime feeds.”

– Blogger Miriam Celaya after attending a meeting with President Carter

Presidential trip report

“Both privately and publicly I continued to call for the end of our economic blockade against the Cuban people, the lifting of all travel, trade, and financial restraints, the release of Alan Gross and the Cuban Five, and end to U.S. policy that Cuba promotes terrorism, for freedom of speech, assembly, and travel in Cuba, and the establishment of full relations between our two countries. At the airport, Raul told the press, ‘I agree with everything that President Carter said.’”

– From President Carter’s report on his March 28-30 trip to Cuba