Odds and ends

• The Cuba-Venezuela undersea cable now seems to be fully operational, resulting in faster Internet connection to Cuba, the company Renesys reports on its blog.  The Cuban telecom monopoly Etecsa confirms that the cable is in use; beginning last August it carried voice traffic, and beginning January 10 it carried Internet traffic.  More from AP.

• LA Times: Venezuela’s Telesur television network is now available on Cuban television, which allowed Cubans to see Monday’s inaugural address by President Obama.

• CNN: A scheme that created fake Cuban birth certificates for non-Cubans was exposed by the feds and its participants are now being sentenced.  The idea was for the recipients to claim Cuban nationality and thereby get the immigration privileges and federal benefits that Cubans get.  The recipients got some coaching in case anyone challenged their nationality, the Herald reports.

• Radio Marti: Cuba’s new “ambassador,” Jose Cabanas, chief of its Interests Section in Washington, was received in the State Department by Roberta Jacobson, Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

"One Today"

The text of “One Today,” Richard Blanco’s poem for the presidential inauguration, is here, with video.

The Nation magazine says it published him for the first time, in 1997:

Last Night in Havana

The palms sink willingly
into the saffron ground.
All I can map now is
the marble veins of static rivers,
the island coastline retreated like a hem
from the sargasso patches of Caribbean.
I think of you primo hermano,
huddled on the edge
of an Almendares curb last night
your Greco shadow spilled over the street,
and over the tracks stapled to the weeds
below your bedroom window.
Shawled in cobwebs of wind,
we slapped at unreachable mosquitos
as Havana’s tenements collapsed around us,
enclosed us in yellow
like the pages of old books
or the stucco walls of a hollow chapel.
You confessed you live
with one foot ankled in the sand of a revolution,
one Viking sole on the beach
testing an unparted sea
for the stag tide, the gulf wind,
a legible puzzle of stars, the perfect moon
that will increase your chances through the straits
to my door, blistered, salted,
but alive, to cry—Llegué hermano, llegué!
And silence the sweep
of labor trains in your window,
the creak of your father’s wheelchair
in the hall searching for a bottle
of pills he will find empty,
the slam of your eyelids forcing sleep.
The bus tires are ready, bound with piano wire,
and the sail will be complete
with a few more scraps of linen
Tia Delia will stitch together after midnights
when the neighbors are asleep.
Last night in Havana,
your words bounced from your knees
bent against your face
and drowned with the lees
in an empty bottle of bootleg wine
you clutched around the neck
and will keep to store fresh water.

Odds and ends

• Two Cuban-Americans in today’s presidential inauguration ceremony: poet Richard Blanco, profiled here in TIME, and Rev. Luis Leon, who will give the benediction.

• This article in El Confidencial Digital reports that the Spanish government has decided to adopt a “more serene posture” regarding Cuba, including fewer activities in Havana involving dissidents and no activity regarding Cuba in the European Parliament.  This has led many to say that Madrid has entered a pact of silence that has kept Angel Carromero, the Partido Popular activist who drive the car in which dissidents Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero were killed, from telling what really happened in that crash last July.  See, for example, this call from a Cuban organization in Spain that says that Carromero, having been “a hostage of the Castros,” cannot now become “hostage of his party and the Spanish government.”  When we last heard from Carromero’s associates, they were saying that he was considering speaking out, and he was in the process of reconstructing his memory of the event.  They have been quiet for some time now.

• The Cuban television program Al Derecho has questions and answers about the new immigration law.

• Havana Times: “Where Cubans Can Go Without a Visa.”

• In Diario de Cuba, Oscar Elias Biscet’explains his “Proyecto Emilia” and Miguel Fernandez-Diaz offers a critique.

• Cuba’s lineup for the 2013 World Baseball Classic was announced last week.

• Granma on “the most Cuban of masses.”

The cable seems to be working

On the company blog of Renesys, there’s a post indicating that the Cuba-Venezuela submarine cable is finally being used.  The writer’s hunch is based on his finding that Telefonica has just joined the three satellite providers that were handling Cuba’s Internet traffic, and the speed (latency) of transmission has improved.

How to “stay well informed on events in and around the island”

Read Babalu and The Cuban Triangle. 

That’s USAID’s advice to DAI in this memo (see p. 3) that records a meeting where USAID explained the ins and outs of its Cuba program as DAI was gearing up to get its project going. 

Good luck.

Alan Gross' m.o.

“Radio Frequency activity in the Capitol City is more difficult to monitor than in the provinces because of an already existing level of RF congestion (e.g., from government, commercial sites, embassies, etc.). Therefore, monitoring and detection in the use of ICTs is less likely to occur in the Capitol City. Conversely and because there is little RF congestion in the provinces, monitoring and detection of ICT devices is highly probable.

Even limited use of BGANs and wireless networks will be monitored and detected because Island government technicians routinely "sniff" neighborhoods with their handheld devices in search of ham-radio and satellite dishes. While wireless computer networks (intranet) are not likely to cause any problem if detected, discovery of BGAN usage for Internet access would be catastrophic.

“In order to improve and supplement security tactics and protocols already in place, the contractor will use an alternative SIM card, called "discreet" SIM card, that will increase the level of technical security with each of the 3 BGANs deployed. Discreet SIM cards impede the ability to track or detect specific aspects of non-terrestrial transmitted signals, regarding location and IP identification of transmission. This is accomplished by:

• Masking the IP address of the BGAN, in case some entity is able to "hack" into the transmission at either end, and

• Masking the signal so that its GPS location cannot be pinpointed within 400 km.”

– from a report by jailed USAID contractor Alan Gross, cited in a memo filed in court in connection with his suits against the U.S. government and his employer DAI.  Reporter/blogger Tracey Eaton summarizes the memo, which describes the USAID’s view of the program, the urgency of getting it implemented at the end of the Bush Administration, and other political and technical details.