Odds and ends

·      What were the main changes during Raul Castro’s presidency? Granma and 14yMedio sum it up and are not very far apart.

·      Profiles of President Diaz Canel, by the New York Times and AP.

·      Faced with the same issues our embassy in Havana faced, Canada’s foreign ministry decides to keep its diplomatic staff in place and withdraw spouses and children. Also in Canada’s statement: “There is no evidence to suggest that Canadian travelers to Cuba are at risk.”

·      In Politico, a nonfiction bodice-ripper from Peter Kornbluh of all people, set in the Kennedy/Johnson years.

·      Granma reports on the Hotel Paseo del Prado, being built at Prado and Malecon, due to open next year. It is being built on a lot that was cleared years ago, at one time awaiting a China-financed hotel that never panned out. Across Prado and a block uphill, there’s the soon-to-open Hotel Packard, a large project that incorporates an old façade that was propped up by scaffolding for about 20 years. Spain’s Iberostar will manage it. From Skift in 2016, here’s a survey of hotel development in Cuba. Hotel construction is proceeding in Trinidad too; on a recent visit I saw two long-stalled projects under way, one a few blocks from the Plaza Mayor, and another way up the hill behind the church on the Plaza Mayor; this one is incorporating the ruins of a very old church that has just a few walls remaining.

·      There's a drop in U.S. travelers that is making many place in Cuba feel like 15 years ago (all Europeans and Asians, no Americans), and overall visits are down seven percent so far over 2017 (ACN). (Preceding sentence is corrected; some media reports noted growth rather than the seven percent decline.) And while some U.S. airlines have dropped out, those who continue to operate Cuba routes continue going to the Department of Transportation to bid for available routes (Forbes).

·      These scientists demonstrated that two ultrasound emissions on conflicting frequencies can cause a screeching sound – but this doesn’t explain any possible injury. Apparently, ultrasound can be used both in listening devices and in devices to interfere with them. Radio interview here.

·      This Kenyan medical school professor wants Cuba’s help not just with doctors, but in organizing the country’s public health system.

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The presidential speeches

If you were looking for a roadmap to his presidency, a differentiation of style or emphasis or direction, you probably found the inaugural speech by President Diaz Canel disappointing.

He used the occasion to set a tone and to mark the moment. He delivered a message of continuity and expressed reverence for the Revolution’s elders (those seated around him and those departed), or the “historical generation” as they call it. To hammer home the continuity point, he addressed those who “by ignorance or bad faith doubt the commitment of generations that today assume new responsibilities,” and followed with a paragraph that paraphrases a famous Fidel Castro declaration about the meanings of “revolution” (a “sense of the historical moment,” “to change all that must be changed,” etc.) 

By way of assurance, or to acknowledge the Party’s constitutional role, he said that “knowing public sentiment,” he affirms that Raul Castro, “as first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, will lead the most important decisions about the present and future of the nation.”

There was also perhaps a hint about coalition-building: “We must exercise leadership and management that is ever more collective.”

In his speech, Raul took a different approach and made more news.

He said the constitution will be amended – a complete redraft, it appears, to “reform” it “according to the transformations that have occurred in the political, economic, and social order.” Top officials will be limited to two five-year terms in office, and this will apply to Diaz Canel. The work will begin in the July session of the National Assembly and the new document will be submitted to a referendum.

He said Diaz Canel will replace him as party chief in 2021 – “It has been planned this way,” he said – and by serving ten years in that post, Diaz Canel will have three years overlap with his successor. (All this provided that he “works well” and is re-elected to his party and government posts, Raul added.) As for Raul himself, he will then be “one more soldier” defending the Revolution.

He said that in an apparent break from normal procedure, the naming of the new cabinet (council of ministers) will be be postponed until the July National Assembly session, at the suggestion of Diaz Canel.

He joked that Diaz Canel is the “sole survivor” of his generation, alluding to the ousted Lage, Perez Roque, etc.

Issue by issue, he reaffirmed his commitment to economic reform and admitted a failure of  “social communication about the changes that have been introduced.” Regarding private entrepreneurship, he said: “We have not renounced the pursuit of expansion of trabajo por cuenta propia” in part because it allows the state to shed “the management of activities not of strategic value for the country’s development.”

Off script, he digressed about Cuba’s war of independence and the U.S. role in it, from the defeat of the Spanish fleet at Santiago to the United States’ treatment of Cuba upon Spain’s surrender. If you have never understood why Raul and his fellow revolutionaries consider 1959 the date when Cuba’s true independence was fully achieved, it’s a good primer.

Odds and ends

·      Cuba and the United States agreed on a framework for cooperation on law enforcement (terrorism, drugs, human trafficking, contraband, etc.), but did not release a text. Announcements here (U.S. and Cuba). Meanwhile, the Bergen Record editorializes that Trump should not reverse Obama’s policies but he should press hard for the return of fugitive Joann Chesimard.

·      A magnitude 4.5 quake shook southeastern Cuba,

·      Miami’s ABC affiliate WPLG opens a bureau in Cuba.

·      What it’s like to hijack a plane and live the rest of your life in Cuba.

·      AP on a fine effort by universities and libraries to preserve parish records that record births and other information about Cubans centuries ago, including the slave population. In Cuban parishes, you can see the old registries in separate books, one for blacks only.

Recognition

The critics do have a point. Cuba got something today: recognition that the socialist government in office in Havana since 1959 is in fact the governing authority in Cuba.

One wonders how Fidel Castro feels about it.

He reacted to the December 17, 2014 announcements with the grumpiness to which his age entitles him, saying he is not against peaceful solutions even though he does not trust the United States. Nonetheless, he huffed, “The President of Cuba has taken the pertinent steps according to the prerogatives and powers granted him by the National Assembly and the Communist Party of Cuba.”

I also wonder if he thinks back to his April 1961 speech, when he couldn’t envision that “the imperialists” could ever change their spots:

“Because what the imperialists cannot forgive us is that we are here, what they cannot forgive us is the dignity, the integrity, the bravery, the ideological strength, the spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people. That is what they cannot forgive us, that we are right under their nose and we made a socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States!”

I don’t know about forgiveness, but there they are, still right under our nose, and they have been recognized. So there.

But did we lose anything?

For those who think that the past policies were successful or productive, or the only morally correct posture toward our socialist neighbor, we have lost a great deal. Pass the smelling salts, please.

For the rest of us, it’s a rational path, it has nothing to do with approval, and it’s no more radical than Nixon’s relations with China or Reagan’s with the Soviet Union.

And let’s be clear that for decades, our policies have been tantamount to formal recognition anyway.

We have had a diplomatic mission in Havana since 1977, housed in our old embassy building. We, the imperialists, have more diplomats accredited there than any other country. We negotiated agreements on migration and other matters. We have collaborated on drug enforcement, search and rescue, transfers of prisoners, and other matters, with our diplomats dealing directly with each other.

This relationship carried on even during the George W. Bush Administration, and has long amounted to de facto recognition of the Cuban government.

Today it changes to full legal recognition. What matters more than that legal formality is the opportunity before us, and what both nations make of it.

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.