Odds and ends

• Herald: Charlie Crist is having no second thoughts about opposing the Cuba embargo.

• Cuba Standard on former NFL player Pasha Jackson, now studying to be a doctor at Cuba’s Latin American Medical School.

• In the Herald, former Senator Bob Graham of Florida and former EPA chief William Reilly, back from Cuba, write that “Florida and neighboring states have a paramount interest in ensuring that Cuba’s drilling operators employ the highest safety standards and the best available technology,” and U.S. restrictions on equipment and training should be eased to that end.

• Washington Post: Former Rep. David Rivera is tanned, rested, and ready to run for the House seat he lost to Rep. Joe Garcia. First, he has to win a competitive primary.

• Senator Rubio in January, touring Asia and wishing the communists prosperity: “I’ve never accepted the idea that we wanted to contain China. We welcome a China that's richer and more prosperous.”

Odds and ends

• Herald: One of Rep. Joe Garcia’s staffers is gone and another is on leave after the feds searched their homes in an election fraud probe.  During last year’s Democratic primary election they allegedly went on-line, using computers with masked IP addresses, to request absentee ballots in the names of hundreds of voters.  It is not clear from any of the articles how they planned to obtain the absentee ballots, once issued.  In the event, authorities smelled something fishy and did not act on the requests.  Garcia says he did not know of the scheme.  He is cooperating in the investigation and conducting his own investigation, and while he is angry about the scheme, he said: “I think it was a well-intentioned attempt to maximize voter turnout.”  Strange.  The primary was already marred by apparent fraud in the case of David Rivera’s straw-man candidate Justin Lamar Sternad.  Now it appears to be bipartisan.

• Herald: The Florida law designed to punish the Brazilian firm Odebrecht for the business it does in Cuba was struck down by a federal appeals court.  Earlier note on the Florida law here.

·         Progreso Weekly interviews Jorge Pinon of the University of Texas on Cuba’s energy future.  Note his comments on ethanol, the untapped resource that could revive sugar production, creating jobs and producing by his estimate 70,000 barrels of the fuel per day.  See also Reuters on the Russian company Zarubezhneft that is abandoning a deep-water exploration project and says it will be back next year.

• El Pais on the difficult story of the 115 Cuban dissidents who were released from jail and went to Spain (along with 650 relatives) in 2011: “big intentions, insufficient planning, too many surprises, and very few resources.”

·         Diario de Cuba: Cuba’s national baseball team will come to the United States to play a few games next month.  As for Cubans in the majors, the Dodgers called up outfielder Yasiel Puig and he’s not doing badly, hitting a grand slam last night; see also here and here.

• JTA: Jailed USAID contractor Alan Gross settled his lawsuit with DAI, his employer, and his separate suit against the U.S. government was dismissed.  There’s more at Along the Malecon.  CNN reports that Cuba will permit a U.S. doctor to examine Gross; last September his family requested such an examination.

·         Havana Times has an English translation of an interview that the BBC’s Fernando Ravsberg did with Rene Gonzalez, one of the “Cuban Five” intelligence agents who completed his sentence in the United States and has returned to Cuba.

• El Pais interviews economics professor Carmelo Mesa-Lago on the economic reforms in Cuba.

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

• The Boston Globe calls for a “new diplomatic agenda with Cuba” beginning with ending “the silly claim, reinstated by the Obama administration last summer, that Cuba remains a ‘state sponsor of terrorism.’”

• Reuters on the search for a partner to expand the Cienfuegos refinery, a project where the Chinese showed interest but have not bought in.

• Diario las Americas gets the first interview with Pedro Alvarez, the former Alimport chief who defected in 2010 and now lives in Tampa.

• “People who don’t believe strongly in immigration, they’ve lost confidence in the greatness of America,” says former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, a Cuban American trying to show his party the light on immigration.  He is profiled in the Washington Post.

• AP’s Andrea Rodriguez on how Venezuela’s Telesur, now on Cuban television 12 hours a day, has changed Cuban’s media mix for the better.

• Tracey Eaton has a redacted version of the classified annex of the Bush Administration’s Cuba transition commission report from July 2006, much of which has been declassified.  You can’t make a full judgment since parts of it are blacked out, but it’s not as interesting as one might expect.  

• In the Herald, from the guy who ran the USAID program that sent Alan Gross to Cuba: Gross’ predicament is all Castro’s fault, if you question the program you are aligned with the Cuban government, and the program has a “measure of tolerance for losses and failed initiatives” in places such as Cuba.  So suck it up, Alan.