Odds and ends

• Herald: The UN is awaiting an invitation to Havana to talk to Cuban officials about the North Korean freighter with weapons aboard.

• More reporting from the Herald on the scam whereby immigrants fake Cuban origin, complete with forged Cuban birth certificate, to get the fast-track treatment and federal benefits that only Cubans receive.

• How does Cuba handle the human rights question?  Check out this infographic from the state news agency AIN.

• NPR interviews Arturo Sandoval, the Cuban trumpet virtuoso who will soon be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  He tells how he was touched by Dizzy Gillespie (who himself was influenced by Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo).

• In El Mundo, Rui Ferreira reports on Miami families who send their kids to spend summer vacation with family in Cuba.  There’s another story to be written about those who go to Cuba for medical care.

• Diario de Cuba assembles an all-Cuban dream team of ballplayers playing both on the island and here.

• El Pais: After lots of back-and-forth, Brazil is going to contract for the services of 4,000 Cuban doctors.  More from Global Post.

• From the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, a cholera warning for travelers.

• TIME’s Tim Padgett, writing in the Herald on Daniel Shoer Roth, who is writing a biography of the late Bishop Agustin Roman.

Odds and ends

• Juventud Rebelde: There are now 436,432 Cubans working in the small entrepreneurial sector, nine percent more than were working last November.  18 percent of that number are employees, mainly in food service and transportation businesses.

• Reuters: 46,662 Cubans emigrated in 2012, the most since 1994.

• In Havana Times, Emilio Morales of the Havana Consulting Group estimates the economic impact of the half-million U.S. visitors to Cuba each year.

• In the Herald, columnist Fabiola Santiago writes that it is wrong for the United States to be granting larger numbers of visas for Cubans to visit or immigrate to the United States at a time when the Cuban government is engaged in misdeeds.  It’s hard to find a clearer argument in favor of punishing the people for their government’s actions.  Ugly.  She doesn’t mention ditching the sacrosanct Cuban Adjustment Act.

• Buy a fake birth certifícate for $10,000 or more, get yourself a bad sunburn, and present yourself as a Cuban – CNN on how non-Cubans fake Cuban citizenship to gain admission to the United States.

• CNN: Alan Gross was examined by U.S. doctors who traveled to Havana last month.  Background from last fall here.

• Internet monitor Renesys says that the Internet is getting faster in Cuba as satellite links are increasingly replaced by undersea cable connections.  (If you read the report, “latency” refers to speed of connection between a user in Cuba and a point outside Cuba; lower latency means higher speed.)

• Reuters on slugger Jose Daniel Abreu of Cienfuegos, who left Cuba and seems headed to the big leagues.  More from USA Today.

• This letter to the Economist from Stephen Purvis, the British businessman released from jail in Cuba, is well worth reading.  Note his observation that more are in jail than have been reported, and that there seems to be a particular risk for those who don’t come from Brazil, China, or Venezuela, i.e. those whose investments are not part of a government-to-government assistance program.

• AP: Some munitions are turning up in the Panamanian search of the seized North Korean freighter.  Panama’s work is done, CNN reports, and UN offials are now examining the cargo.

• Florida International University is digitizing interviews from its oral history project and has posted two about Operation Peter Pan: with Monsignor Brian Walsh and James Baker, director of an American school in Havana, both from 1997.

• Cuban American trumpet virtuoso Arturo Sandoval will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Odds and ends

• AP: Following the Boston bombings, Cuba issued a statement of condolences that rejects “all acts of terrorism.”  Statement here.

• With the coming departure of the Songa Mercur rig for Vietnam, University of Texas energy expert Jorge Pinon tells the Sun-Sentinel that Cuba’s deep-water oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico is “for all practical purposes, over.”  Earlier this month, Cuba held a conference on heavy oil and horizontal drilling (where a well is sunk onshore and bends a few kilometers horizontally to reach near-offshore deposits), a sign that there’s a continuing focus on getting more out of deposits that have been producing for decades (Xinhua).

• Ex-presidential candidate and former Congressman Ron Paul on Beyonce’s Cuba trip and travel to Cuba: “Why can’t the rest of us go?”  And at On Two Shores, a roundup of conservatives asking the same thing.

• In Foreign Policy, American University Professor William Leogrande looks back at years of lobbying by Cuba hard-liners and compares them to those who wielded the “Who lost China?” card in the 1950’s.

• El Pais has a Havana travel guide.

• An Australian researcher records Cubans singing songs of their African ancestors and finds the village in Sierra Leone from which their ancestors were taken as slaves.  A remarkable story in the Atlantic.

• Our friend Mauricio gets on his high horse to slam Rep. Kathy Castor of Tampa for citing a 1998 intelligence community report that found that Cuba’s military capability to be “residual” and “defensive.”  The report is discredited, he argues, because it was drafted by Ana Belen Montes, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst who was later found to be a Cuban agent and is now in prison.  But who’s naïve here?  Mauricio would have us believe that the entire intelligence community, which had access to the same information as Montes, was hoodwinked by her.  And if the report was so slanted, why was it never revised by President Bush and his people in the seven years they were in office since her arrest?

• Ana Alliegro, the associate of former Rep. David Rivera who vanished last fall when she was due to appear for an FBI interview regarding Rivera’s campaign finance shenanigans, is found by Miami New Times to be running a hair salon in Granada, Nicaragua under a new name, Ana Sola.

• A reader asks if there’s a way to clean up spelling errors in comments once they are published here.  Sorry, there isn’t. 

Odds and ends

• Cuba’s Cardinal Ortega was impressed with statements that Cardinal Bergoglio made about the state of the Cathilic church just before he was elected to the papacy; he asked for a written version and the Argentine obliged him the next morning, saying Ortega could make the remarks public.  He reiterated that permission days later as pope.  Cardinal Ortega released the text in a mass in Havana, and Palabra Nueva tells the story.  See also EFE, Café Fuerte.

• Rep. Cathy Castor of Tampa on the futility of U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba.

• Roberto Zurbano in the New York Times on Afro-Cubans’ unequal opportunities in an era of reform.

• From strategist Steve Schale, a sober look at the numbers in Miami-Dade – registration, demographics, and recent voting behavior.

• With the passing of Bebo Valdes, all the more reason to take my advice and see this movie, where he composed, arranged, and performed.  Obits from the New York Times and Café Fuerte.

• The New York Times on Cuba’s first transgendered public official.

• Writing in CubaEncuentro, sociologist Haroldo Dilla supports the call for an independent investigation of the death of Oswaldo Paya but is less than impressed with the Spanish Partido Popular activist who drove the car in which Paya died: “Carromero was, and continues to be, a joke in bad taste for the European right.  He was a toxic gift that came at a high price: the death of two opposition activists, including one of its most renowned leaders.”

• Granma runs a post-mortem on Cuba’s elimination from the World Baseball Classic and concludes that Cuban players have skill but need more nerve.  Conclusion: more high-stakes tournament play needs to be built into Cuba’s baseball program at all age levels.

Odds and ends

·         Alan Gross’ new lawyer, Jared Genser, appeals to a UN body to declare that Gross is victim of “arbitrary detention.”

·         Responding to objections by Senators who are opposed to the people-to-people travel program itself, the Administration is tightening standards for approving license applications and the process is slowing down.  See stories in Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and the Herald.

·         Herald: To protest government harassment of dissidents, 13 are starting a hunger strike.

·         Reuters on Cuba’s failure to attract new foreign investment.

·         The key link in the scheme whereby Rep. David Rivera allegedly funded a political nobody to run in the Democratic primary and attack Joe Garcia, who won and is now the nominee, is Republican campaign consultant Anna Alliegro.  Through her lawyer she agreed to an FBI interview but she didn’t show up and is now missing.  Herald story here.  More here on Rivera’s handling of the matter with the media, and here’s an op-ed in El Nuevo asking when Republican leaders and voters will walk away from Rivera.

·         Herald: Recent Cuban defectors prefer Tampa over Miami.

·         NPR on plans to refurbish the ballet school in western Havana.