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

• Reuters: Exporters to Cuba are offered terms to settle back payments – five years at two percent, take it or leave it.

• The Economist on U.S.-Cuba relations: “The honeymoon is over before it began.”

• A magnitude 4.3 earthquake, centered 15 miles from Santiago.

• At Global Post, Nick Miroff looks at the impact of Orlando Zapata’s death.

• All I can say about this statement from Israel’s foreign minister is that if it had appeared on April 1, we would all be able to make sense of it.

• Yahoo Sports: a “glut of Cuban defectors” in Major League Baseball.

• Thanks to a reader for providing this link to a story that corrects earlier news reports, which turned out to be big exaggerations about Cable and Wireless plans to run an undersea cable from Cuba to Jamaica. It would make economic sense compared to the Venezuela idea; maybe less bolivariana but one sixth the distance.

• A House Judiciary Committee hearing looks at the “Section 211” Havana Club trademark fight that pits Bacardi against Pernod-Ricard.