Odds and ends

• Dow Jones:  The “Section 211” case, named after a 1998 law that invalidated Pernod-Ricard’s registration of the Havana Club rum trademark in the United States, came to an end in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Pernod lost and, cutting its losses, announced the “Havanista” trademark for a Cuban rum that will enter the U.S. market when the embargo ends.  Cuba’s foreign ministry, citing a WTO decision in Pernod’s favor, continues to call on the U.S. government to register the trademark.

• Politico on the voting propensities of younger-generation Cuban Americans.

• EFE: University admissions in Cuba are down 26 percent, the national statistics office reports.  In today’s Granma, a story on the priority being given to technical education.

• Trabajadores: In large numbers, Cubans are updating and registering the titles to their homes, and in spite of the streamlined process government workers are straining at the workload.  A clean title is prerequisite to any sale or transfer of a property.

• AP on the “mystery” of the undersea fiber optic cable that connected Cuba and Venezuela last year and seems not to be working.

• The New York Times looks ahead to the promised reform of Cuba’s migration norms.

• AP: A Cuban official tallies the distribution of idle state lands since 2008: 1.5 million hectares to 163,000 producers, with 79 percent of that land now in use and 59 percent being used for livestock.

• Governor Romney issued a Cuban independence day statement charging that the late Damas de Blanco leader Laura Pollan died “at the hands of the dictatorship.”

• At Huffington Post, coverage of Café Laurent, a great new Vedado paladar.

• The New Yorker rounds up some of its Cuba coverage over the years, including dispatches from the island in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Odds and ends

• “La Glee-Mania” gets a long feature in Juventud Rebelde. The Fox program airs Saturdays at 6:00 p.m. in Cuba. “More than other series of its type,” the article says, Glee “sends optimistic messages, presents values in a positive way, and prepares adolescents to understand that once the dance is over, life begins.”

• AP: Tourism is up ten percent in the first six months of 2011: 1.537 million visitors, according to a national statistics office report.

• Arguments were heard last Friday in Cuban appeals court in the case of USAID contractor Alan Gross. From the Herald: “The court can uphold Gross’s conviction and sentence; overturn it and set him free; or uphold it and reduce the sentence. Raúl Castro, president of the Council of State, can pardon Gross after the court rules.”

• Prensa Latina: The education sector is headed toward personnel reductions of 15,000.

• AP takes a colorful look at the Cuban real estate market today and the people and practices that make it work. More on this here.

• In Tampa, they are looking forward to direct flights to Cuba.

Odds and ends

• Penultimos Dias links to video of protests by Pakistani medical students in Jaguey Grande, Matanzas that resulted in deployment of anti-riot units. The video was shown on MegaTV’s Maria Elvira Live program in Miami. Ernesto also digs up this link to a petition (in English) that these same students apparently wrote last September complaining respectfully about the conditions under which they live and study – including a lack of normal Internet access. Herald story here.

• In baseball: The Nationals brought up pitcher Yuniesky Maya, 29, and he took a loss to the Mets in his first outing….Aroldis Chapman, brought up by the Reds as a reliever, is dazzling. This column from MLB.com includes video of his “cartoon-like slider” and says Chapman’s debut “puts a greater emphasis on the remaining talent” in Cuba….And Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez ended his minor league assignment and went home upon learning that the Nats were not going to bring him up to the majors this month.

• The magazine Poder360 looks at TV Marti, and follies such as the news crew arriving late to the Obama inauguration. Meanwhile, director Pedro Roig has resigned, giving President Obama an opportunity to name his own Cuba broadcasting chief.

• The Calle Ocho of the north, Bergenline Avenue in Union City, New Jersey, profiled in the Wall Street Journal.

Stuck on stupid

In 2002, President Bush offered scholarships for “Cuban students and professionals who try to build independent civil institutions in Cuba, and scholarships for family members of political prisoners.” The Cuban government apparently saw it as an effort to train the next generation of its political opposition, and it didn’t go very far.

In the final months of the Bush Administration, the State Department made the smart move of removing the political criteria and offering scholarships just as we would in any other country. (In January, I wrote about this here.)

It hasn’t worked.

Wilfredo Cancio reports in El Nuevo Herald that 28 students were selected, but the Cuban government denied them permission to travel to the United States. The Cuban government said that while these students won’t be allowed to go, it may allow others to participate in the future, according to a State Department source cited in the article.

State Department spokeswoman Sara Mangiaracina says the scholarships will continue to be offered to Cubans. Whether Cubans will continue to apply on the hope that their government will change its mind, is another matter.

One can’t help but recall Cuban protests about the Bush Administration’s interference in academic freedom when it denied Cuban scholars visas to attend conferences of the Latin American Studies Association in 2004 and 2006.

It took six years for the Bush Administration to move off its dumb position with regard to this scholarship program. Let’s hope it takes the Cuban government much less time to move off its own.

Time to debate

A reader put me in touch with John Tredway of USA Youth Debates, an organization that takes American high school and college students abroad to debate foreign counterparts. The organization sponsored debates in Cuba on two occasions in 2000, and has received a license from the Treasury Department to bring American students to Cuba early next year.

The license “kind of came out of the blue,” Tredway told me, but he is now eagerly starting to organize a trip where students from the New College of Florida will debate Cuban students.

In the 2000 programs, students debated in the congress format, where a proposition is put before the house, debaters make three-minute speeches, and then vote. The Cubans weren’t thrilled with the three-minute rule, Tredway says, but the format worked. They debated whether the United States should end the embargo (the Cuban students were surprised that the Americans were divided on that question), whether both countries should adhere to UN human rights standards, whether multinational companies should make Internet access available to students in Cuba and the United States, whether the United States should return the Guantanamo naval base, and more.

Tredway tried but failed to get licenses to conduct more debates during the Bush Administration. In 2005, he said, a State Department official told him that the activity was “within the scope of the regulations, but as a policy matter we are not going to support it.”

Congratulations to Mr. Tredway for his persistence, good luck to the students on both sides, and one cheer to the Obama Administration for granting the license. I would offer three cheers, but in America it shouldn’t be necessary to beseech our government to allow speech and debate, should it?

Odds and ends

• BBC Spanish: The United States has turned down the visa request of Tomas Ramos, who just completed an 18-year prison sentence in Cuba. Reportedly, he went to Cuba in 1989 on a mission to destroy hotel communications towers and to try to organize a coup. Ramos says he worked for the CIA; his code name was “Dumbo” and his handler was Frank Sturgis. Cubaencuentro consulted dissident sources in Havana who said that visas were denied to others during the Bush Administration for “violent opposition activity.”

• Juan Tamayo of the University of Miami compares Cuban data on telecom/IT usage to the same data from other countries in the region.

• This letter (pdf) sent to President Obama last week urges changes in U.S. regulations to open up academic contacts – and it also calls on the Cuban government to allow its citizens to travel here on academic exchanges when they are invited to do so.

• Blogger Yoani Sanchez wins a special citation for journalistic excellence from Colombia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

• Our Chinese friends are in town for a “strategic and economic dialogue.”

• Cuban Colada: Russia is providing $150 million in credits for purchase of construction and farm machinery.

Odds and ends

• The Royal Ballet of London made headlines for its performances in Havana and because several of its members came down with swine flu. But I liked this piece by NBC’s Mary Murray about the Cuban symphony orchestra players who learned the score to the ballet Manon, rehearsed four times with the British conductor, opened the boarded-up orchestra pit in the Gran Teatro, squeezed 70 musicians into it, and pulled it off with flying colors.

• The EU’s foreign relations chief arrives in Havana today and wants to “deepen the political dialogue” with Cuba on “issues of common interest,” including human rights.

• “Transformations in higher education” are in store for the coming school year, Juventud Rebelde reports, including higher admissions standards and “political-ideological work.” “In the university, the profesor or student who is not revolutionary, does not fit in its classrooms,” the Minister of Higher Education says.

• El Pais reports in detail on the murders of two Spanish priests; one committed in conjunction with a robbery, the other perpetrated by the priest’s “sentimental partner.”

Odds and ends

• Cuba is condemning the coup in Honduras and says that its ambassador in Tegucigalpa was “beaten” by Honduran soldiers. The ambassador, along with those of Venezuela and Nicaragua, was reportedly with the Honduran foreign minister when soldiers “broke into the place where they were” and detained them. Prensa Latina story in English here. “The place where they were” was later identified by Fidel Castro as the foreign minister’s home. The New York Times covers the coup here, and the region’s unanimous rejection of it here.

• Reuters reports on the low penetration of phone and Internet service in Cuba, based on new data released by Cuba’s statistics office.

• A report on ties between Spanish and Cuban universities from Granma International.

• AFP: the Colombian singer Juanes says he wants to do a public concert in Havana.

Odds and ends

• Someone should tell Rui Ferreira and his graphics editor that Lt. Col. Simmons’ accusations are NOT FUNNY.

• Mary O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal, on Hector Palacios and Gisela Delgado as they prepare to return to Cuba.

• Reuters: Eight American students finished a free medical education at the Latin American Medical School in Havana, and graduated last weekend.

• Why has Granma been running a 1973 Fidel speech, and why did Raul dwell on it in his July 26 speech? Brian Latell takes a stab at an answer in a Herald op-ed.

Odds and ends

• From Stars and Stripes, “Guantanamo Bay – outside the wire” – a look at the base and its 7,265 residents on “an isolated edge of an island they can never explore.” The photo gallery shows the topography, the bay, the desert-like vegetation, the big iguanas, and a museum created on the base, with a collection of crafts that Haitians and Cubans have used to get there. And this sidebar tells of the monthly meeting at the gate between the base commander and a Cuban officer – “very formal, very scripted” – but the only contact between our two military institutions.

• Senator Jesse Helms, author of the Helms-Burton law, died last week. R.I.P.

• From an independent journalist in Cuba, a story on preparations for the tests UNESCO used to measure elementary school achievement.

• The New York Times on the competition between Brazil and Venezuela, with Brazil taking the upper hand.

• U.S. 1, Cuba 0, in the Netherlands.

• The Sporting News recounts how the Atlanta Braves shortstop Yunel Escobar and five other players came to the United States in 2004, and how they have fared since.

Gold stars for Cuban kids (Updated)

In 2001, when UNESCO tested elementary school kids across Latin America and the Caribbean for math and language attainment, the test results from Cuba didn’t seem to make sense.

As Christopher Marquis wrote then in the New York Times, the “performance of Cuban third and fourth graders in math and language so dramatically outstripped that of other nations that the United Nations agency administering the test returned to Cuba and tested students again.” They tested again, and the results didn’t change.

A just-released UNESCO education study of third and sixth graders’ math, language, and science achievement has just been released, and it’s no mystery why Granma is crowing over the results.

Cuba creamed the rest of Latin America.

Cuban education has its problems – teachers leaving for better-paying jobs, the use of young, inexperienced maestros emergentes, ideological content – but these test results tell a striking story.

In every area tested – third grade math and reading, and sixth grade math, reading, and science – Cuban students had by far the highest average achievement level. Cuba is the only country whose average score in any area was more than one standard deviation above the regional average, and Cuban students achieved that distinction in four of five categories – sixth grade reading being the only exception.

You can see the study, with charts depicting all this, here (in Spanish, pdf, 50 pages). A Reuters Spanish story is here.

[Update: Did Cuba pull the wool over the testers' eyes and rig the tests? At Encuentro, a writer thinks so, and so do some of the commenters.]