Odds and ends

·      Student Emma Gonzalez is attacked for having a Cuban flag patch on her sleeve at the March for Our Lives. “Idiots” is the right word, from New Times.

·      Granma: a deal to bring Cuba’s diabetes drug Heberprot-P to the United States for clinical trials.

·      From Larry Press, interesting speculation on future steps in Internet development. In Granma, an outline of what is being done now (English here).

·      Granma: In Fort Lauderdale, a U.S.-Cuba dialogue on oil spill response.

·      Cuba’s likely next president calls on the press to, as this article paraphrases, “stand up to the imposition of a standardized culture that breaks with the historical memory of peoples and fractures identities, also as a method of domination.” Elsewhere, he calls for emphasis on learning English, “in spite of the opposition by some.”

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

• In Global Post, Nick Miroff on Cuba’s sigh of relief after last Sunday’s Chavez victory in Venezuela.

• AFP: New data from the National Statistics Office (see public health section in right-hand column here) shows that consolidation and cost-cutting in the health sector are continuing.  There are 12,738 locations for health care delivery – including everything from the biggest hospital to the smallest one-doctor consultorio – 465 fewer than before.  There are 161 hospitals operating, 25 percent fewer than before.

• Reuters on the foreign executives arrested apparently as part of an anti-corruption crackdown, awaiting charges for more than a year.

• Scientific American: Looks like an opossum to me, but it’s called an almiquí, nocturnal and venomous, endemic to Cuba and thought to be extinct until a team of Cuban and Japanese researchers found a bunch out east in the Humboldt National Park between Moa and Baracoa. 

• Granma: An investigation into last month’s massive blackout finds that the cause was human error at a time when operators were scrambling to handle peak demand.

• Spain’s consul general in Havana attended the Carromero trial last week in Bayamo,  pronounced it “clean, open, and procedurally impeccable,” and said the accused was defended “very well.”  The BBC’s Fernando Ravsberg agrees, wrote down the defense lawyer’s name in case he ever needs a lawyer, and described the day-long session here.

• The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford on the new Cuban residential real estate market.

• One more from the BBC: as Cuba’s reform czar Marino Murillo visits Hanoi, the editor of BBC’s Vietnamese-language service on “What Cuba can learn from Vietnam.”

Odds and ends

·         A Florida foreign policy update, a little late: The state law that bars companies that do business in Cuba from bidding on state and local government contracts was blocked by a federal court, and the state law that bars the use of state university funds for academic travel to Cuba was allowed to stand by the U.S. Supreme Court.

·         FT’s John Paul Rathbone on a 1959 Errol Flynn documentary, Cuban Story, recently rediscovered and released in Britain.

·         New York Times: A derrumbe in Brooklyn.

·         The New York Times on rock climbing in Vinales.

Odds and ends

• Granma: 56,500 Cubans have registered and updated their property titles since new procedures went into effect last November.  The benefit, the article explains, is that the owner is “recognized before the law as legitimate owner of his property and gains legal protection in exercising any transfer of the property.”

• Sun-Sentinel: The offshore oil exploration rig continues to work in Cuban waters in the Gulf of Mexico, shifting westward to sites that would be, if something went wrong, more dangerous for Florida.

• La Jornada reviews a series of reforms approved and not yet implemented.

• El Mundo: Spain’s new ruling party rejects a 2.5 million Euro appropriation to pay for extended aid to former Cuban political prisoners and their families who now reside there.

• The New York Times on anti-AIDS efforts in Cuba, here and here.

Odds and ends

• Yoani Sanchez on the sight of new, renovated, and spruced-up houses, more common in Cuba these days than before.  In English here.

• The Los Angeles Times, from Santiago, on the different outlooks encountered among members of different generations of Cubans, including youth who want more opportunity.

• AP: A Cuban trade oficial says exports of goods and services grew 20 percent in 2011.

• Some of the commentaries on the Ozzie Guillen “I love Fidel” incident are much more interesting than the incident itself: see this from Wright Thompson at ESPN.com on changes in Cuban Miami, this from Univision’s Jorge Ramos on what he calls the “Miami baptism,” this from Andrew Johnson at Minnesota Daily arguing that it’s not a cut-and-dried free speech issue, and this from Carlos Frias of the Palm Beach Post on long-ago losses that still, for some, feel like yesterday’s.

• The Sun Sentinel on U.S. response plans in the event of a Cuban oil spill: the priority will be not beaches, but rather “shielding inlets and intracoastal waterways to protect the most vulnerable parts of the state's coastline.”

Odds and ends

·         Raul Castro proposed, and the Council of State agreed, to remove Abel Prieto as culture minister, a post he has held for 15 years, and to replace him with his deputy.  Prieto, whose work was described as “positive” in this nota oficial, now becomes an advisor to Raul.

·         El Espectador: Colombian President Santos will go to Cuba tomorrow, he said, “to have the opportunity to talk personally, as good friends talk with each other, with the Cuban government, with Raul Castro, about the matter of the summit.”  He refers to the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, an event where Cuba’s friends in the hemisphere are making an issue of Cuba’s exclusion.

·         The Environmental Defense Fund will administer a Pew Fellowship awarded to a Cuban marine scientist, Dr. Fabian Pina, for three years of research that he will conduct in Cuba (see EDF press release).  This is a step forward in environmental collaboration and a good move by the Obama Administration.

·         Digging into a case covered by Granma, the Herald identifies a Cuban who once lived in Hialeah as the subject of an investigation into the operations of a farm in Matanzas that benefited from reportedly illegal acquisition of supplies.