Odds and ends

Lots of catching up to do:

• Granma has reported on the state of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ health by running the text of Venezuelan government statements, and there has been no sugarcoating.  From the December 30 statement: “Nineteen days after the complex operation, the state of health of President Chavez continues to be delicate, presenting complications that are being treated in a process that is not without risks.”  The January 3 statement told of a “severe pulmonary infection.”  The Washington Post looks at the situation in Venezuela as January 10 approaches, the day that Chavez is to be sworn in to a new term in Caracas, and a day he will surely spend in Havana.  According to USA Today, it’s possible that Venezuela’s Supreme Court would travel to Havana to administer the oath.

• Herald: A David Rivera retrospective.

• A December 28 (April Fool’s) chronicle of the First Lady’s visit to Cuba.

• In last month’s Palabra Nueva, an article of mine recapping the U.S. election.

• Granma: The restoration of El Cristo, the statue that overlooks Havana from a promontory across the bay, is done.

• Herald: With the retirement of an office worker and a welder, there are no more Cubans crossing through the Guantanamo naval base gate to work every day.  Among their duties was to carry cash – more than $40,000 per month – to pay the pensions of Guantanamo retirees in their community.  In this story, the Herald’s Carol Rosenberg reports that the Navy has worked out a way to keep the pension payments flowing each month, but it won’t say what it is.

Odds and ends

• Cuban central bank chief Ernesto Medina announced an eight percent devaluation of the Cuban convertible peso, returning it to par with the U.S. dollar (Prensa Latina, Reuters) and making Cuban tourism more competitive and remittances more powerful. The ten percent surcharge on exchanges of dollar cash for Cuban currency remains; Cuba continues to describe this surcharge as a response to U.S. financial sanctions.

• Our friend Mauricio doesn’t like to see USAID’s covert action programs described as “covert” action because, after all, they are announced here in bid solicitations and other documents. True. Also true that they are attempted to be carried out covertly in Cuba. So we should call them “semi-covert,” which is more accurate but makes them appear even dumber.

• Local authorities come across one tremendo santero in Clearfield, Utah, with a few human skulls in the shed out back.

• Oscar Elias Biscet, just released from prison, is named “the most important opposition figure in Cuba” in El Nuevo Herald while a columnist calls for a Havana boulevard to be named after him. He addressed a Miami audience by video link (see three-minute video excerpt in the El Nuevo story) and called the Cuban government’s ideology “anti-U.S. anti-semitic, and anti-black.” “I demand the immediate resignation of Fidel Castro, Raul, and their acolytes,” he said.

• The Directorio’s Orlando Gutierrez writes in the Herald about an “extensive civil-resistance movement” in Cuba today, and notes “mass demonstrations” on Cuban streets as antecedents – 31 years ago at the Peruvian Embassy, 17 years ago on the Malecon, and in 2006 in Madruga.

• An August 2006 Wikileaked cable from the UN Mission in Geneva covers the beginnings of the new UN Human Rights Council. On Havana’s role: “Cuba, not surprisingly, continues to play the spoiler, looking to eliminate country mandates (at least the one focused on Cuba) and to blame the U.S. and EU for anything it opposes.”

• The Herald’s Juan Tamayo reports on smuggling and installation of satellite communications equipment that has nothing to do with the U.S. government.

• Some time ago I noted this August 2006 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Caracas that reflected U.S. government thinking at the time, that Fidel’s illness spelled “transition” in Havana. Here’s another from that period: September 1, 2006, from the U.S. Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, on discussions with the administration of President Oscar Arias. The State Department did not like suggestions that Washington shake things up by dropping the embargo or returning the Guantanamo naval base and called them “unhelpful.”

Odds and ends

• AP: The renovation of the port of Mariel, a project that Dubai Ports World was studying a few years ago, is being carried out with Brazilian aid. During his visit yesterday, Brazil’s President Lula visited Fidel Castro and said he is “exceptionally well.”

• Washington Post: The Washington Nationals sign pitcher Livan Hernandez.

• CQ Politics takes an objective look at the open seat created by the Diaz-Balart resignation/switcheroo.

• Cuban Colada notes the anniversary of the 1903 agreement that gives the United States use of “lands necessary for coaling or naval stations” at Guantanamo, Cuba.

McJobs...

...in McTanamo, hiring now.

The Obama policy -- straws in the wind

Is President Obama really changing Cuba policy? You figure it out; here are some recent straws in the wind.

• The Herald’s Carol Rosenberg reports that U.S. and Cuban troops have conducted small joint exercises at and around the Guantanamo base. The latest took place last week, on both sides of the fenceline, involving firefighting and medical assistance. The exercises have been taking place for “more than a decade,” Rosenberg reports. What is new is that the Obama Administration, unlike its predecessors, released information about them.

• Last week’s migration talks represented the resumption of twice-yearly conversations on that topic that the Bush Administration had suspended. A Voice of America editorial (“Engaging with Cuba”) seems to indicate that talks on other subjects would be possible. It cites “the U.S. interest in pursuing constructive discussions with Havana to advance U.S. interests on issues of mutual concern.”

• This one, like the Microsoft Instant Messenger case discussed here, could be a case of a new Administration carrying out actions initiated by its predecessor. Treasury issued an announcement (pdf) last week that it had fined Philips Electronics of North America $128,750 for “an employee’s travel to Cuba in connection with the sale of medical equipment by a foreign affiliate.” President Obama has made it clear that he wants to maintain the embargo, but cracking down on the sale of medical equipment seems pretty extreme. This report says the equipment was made by a Brazil subsidiary, but I have seen no report that indicates exactly what was sold to Cuba. In his Spanish-language blog, Fernando Ravsberg of the BBC argues that the action sends a peculiar political message, and notes that “not even two countries at war sabotage the functioning of public medical services.”

Across the fenceline

An American Catholic Archbishop who serves as Archbishop for the Military Services, Timothy Broglio, visited the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo and left the base to celebrate mass in the city of Guantanamo. He also visited Santiago and the shrine of the Virgen de la Caridad in El Cobre, just outside Santiago. Cuba’s Catholic bishops conference reports that the Archbishop, speaking “perfect Spanish” in his Guantanamo homily, expressed “the American people’s affection for you.” He also said that many of the military personnel on the base had wanted to accompany him across the fenceline to visit monuments and gravesites in the places where, “with the blood of both peoples,” the struggle for Cuban liberty was carried out. “We ask God that one day we can worship without separation.” (H/t Cubaencuentro).

Odds and ends

• The EU Council reviewed Europe’s policy toward Cuba and decided that “political dialogue with Cuba should be pursued and deepened on a comprehensive, equal and result-oriented basis,” with “high priority to the principles of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms.” The resolution is here (pdf), AFP coverage here, and Radio Marti covers the story via two dissidents with differing opinions (story here, with audio link).

• What to do with the Guantanamo naval base? Drake Bennett discusses some long-range ideas in the Boston Globe.

• Along the Malecon cites Lonely Planet’s description of Trinidad, “a kind of Varadero in reverse” because there’s so much contact between visitors and locals. About 300 families rent rooms in their homes to visitors.

Odds and ends

• What to do with the Guantanamo naval base? The Council on Foreign Relations’ Julia Sweig visited and has some ideas.

• A look at how a Miami congregation of the Church of Christ, and others, relate to Cuba, and the possibilities they see with the Administration’s lifting of restrictions on Cuban Americans.

• Reason On-line on taxis and socialism in Cuba – and Connecticut.

• AP: Raul Castro reprises Cuba’s position on talks with the United States during a speech to the Non-Aligned Movement.

“The State Department tends to be less reasonable than the Pentagon”

That’s a perceptive Raul Castro, in an October interview he gave to, of all people, Sean Penn, where he spoke more expansively about relations with the United States than he has anywhere else.

Wilfredo Cancio of El Nuevo Herald discovered the interview, Penn’s account of which was published this week in The Nation magazine, and wrote about it here.

Penn’s article is here. He reports that the interview lasted seven hours.

Raul jokes about Cuba’s unprepared army during the Bay of Pigs invasion. He refers to the famous picture of Fidel Castro in front of a Russian tank, and says, “We did not yet know even how to put those tanks in reverse. So retreat was no option!”

Raul also speaks in more detail than I have seen anywhere else about the monthly talks between Cuban and American military officers at the Guantanamo naval base. The two militaries conduct joint emergency response exercises, he says, citing firefighting as an example.

Raul also said he would be willing to meet President Obama, and said a first meeting should be “in a neutral place.”

Odds and ends

• Lt. Col. Simmons didn’t impress former Cuban political prisoner Nicolas Perez, who wrote in today’s El Nuevo Herald. He can’t quite figure Simmons out, and wonders if he is, among other things, settling scores between federal agencies, trying “irresponsibly to promote his book,” or promoting “an electoral agenda.” He says Simmons claims there are Cuban agents among the staff of Miami’s Versailles restaurant, something I had missed. Regarding Simmons’ charges against Marifeli Perez-Stable, Perez asks why he singles her out “in this Miami of a million inhabitants, where 950,000 sympathized and cooperated with the Cuban revolution,” and where people who were “until yesterday” ministers, military officers, functionaries, and torturers in Cuba, are on the radio and television constantly.

• Lincoln, call your office: Alabama’s baseball team heads to Cuba in mid-December to play three games.

• The Czech Republic, one of the few reliable partners of the Bush Cuba policy, broke ranks in June. Now, Costa Rica: President Arias calls on the United States to take the first step toward normalized relations by returning the naval base at Guantanamo to Cuba.

• The UN Human Rights Council picks its new president, Miguel Alfonso Martinez, a Cuban law professor and former foreign ministry spokesman. [Correction: the post is president of an advisory committee, not of the council itself.]

Powell: Close Guantanamo prison, try detainees in U.S. territory

The U.S. prison in Guantanamo should be closed, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says – “not tomorrow, but this afternoon.”

From the AP article:

“I would also do it because every morning, I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds,” Powell said. “And so essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission.”

“We don't need it, and it's causing us far more damage than any good we get for it,” he said.

The naval base prison is convenient to the Administration because its location is under U.S. control, but not in U.S. territory and in a legal no-man’s land. And because it is on the only military base we have overseas where we don’t care one whit what the host government thinks.