New Cuba travel advisory

The State Department has downgraded its Cuba travel advisory, urging travelers to exercise “increased caution” and no longer recommending that Americans “reconsider” travel to the island.

In the advisory, the State Department continues to say that “attacks” against U.S. diplomats took place in Cuba even though officials have arrived at no explanation for the harms that befell our personnel. Diplomats at multiple posts in China reported similar symptoms, but no attacks have been alleged there.

Odds and ends

• Miriam Leiva’s note last week on the passing of her husband Oscar Espinosa Chepe.

• AP: 182,799 Cubans have traveled abroad in the eight months since restrictions were largely eliminated.

• Geoff Thale and Ana Goerdt of the Washington Office on Latin America on the state of internal criticism in Cuba, and the government’s response to it.

• AFP: Cuba and the United States talked September 20 about search and rescue operations and collaboration, with both sides’ Coast Guards at the table.  Cuban delegation statement here.

• In Cuba Standard, an English language version of the article on the Cuban Supreme Court’s housing decision.

• Granma on the eternal question: does is it pay off to play short in center field?  A review of the evidence says no.

• Juventud Rebelde on a very honest man in Matanzas.

Odds and ends

• Herald: The UN is awaiting an invitation to Havana to talk to Cuban officials about the North Korean freighter with weapons aboard.

• More reporting from the Herald on the scam whereby immigrants fake Cuban origin, complete with forged Cuban birth certificate, to get the fast-track treatment and federal benefits that only Cubans receive.

• How does Cuba handle the human rights question?  Check out this infographic from the state news agency AIN.

• NPR interviews Arturo Sandoval, the Cuban trumpet virtuoso who will soon be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  He tells how he was touched by Dizzy Gillespie (who himself was influenced by Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo).

• In El Mundo, Rui Ferreira reports on Miami families who send their kids to spend summer vacation with family in Cuba.  There’s another story to be written about those who go to Cuba for medical care.

• Diario de Cuba assembles an all-Cuban dream team of ballplayers playing both on the island and here.

• El Pais: After lots of back-and-forth, Brazil is going to contract for the services of 4,000 Cuban doctors.  More from Global Post.

• From the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, a cholera warning for travelers.

• TIME’s Tim Padgett, writing in the Herald on Daniel Shoer Roth, who is writing a biography of the late Bishop Agustin Roman.

Odds and ends

• Juventud Rebelde: There are now 436,432 Cubans working in the small entrepreneurial sector, nine percent more than were working last November.  18 percent of that number are employees, mainly in food service and transportation businesses.

• Reuters: 46,662 Cubans emigrated in 2012, the most since 1994.

• In Havana Times, Emilio Morales of the Havana Consulting Group estimates the economic impact of the half-million U.S. visitors to Cuba each year.

• In the Herald, columnist Fabiola Santiago writes that it is wrong for the United States to be granting larger numbers of visas for Cubans to visit or immigrate to the United States at a time when the Cuban government is engaged in misdeeds.  It’s hard to find a clearer argument in favor of punishing the people for their government’s actions.  Ugly.  She doesn’t mention ditching the sacrosanct Cuban Adjustment Act.

• Buy a fake birth certifícate for $10,000 or more, get yourself a bad sunburn, and present yourself as a Cuban – CNN on how non-Cubans fake Cuban citizenship to gain admission to the United States.

• CNN: Alan Gross was examined by U.S. doctors who traveled to Havana last month.  Background from last fall here.

• Internet monitor Renesys says that the Internet is getting faster in Cuba as satellite links are increasingly replaced by undersea cable connections.  (If you read the report, “latency” refers to speed of connection between a user in Cuba and a point outside Cuba; lower latency means higher speed.)

• Reuters on slugger Jose Daniel Abreu of Cienfuegos, who left Cuba and seems headed to the big leagues.  More from USA Today.

• This letter to the Economist from Stephen Purvis, the British businessman released from jail in Cuba, is well worth reading.  Note his observation that more are in jail than have been reported, and that there seems to be a particular risk for those who don’t come from Brazil, China, or Venezuela, i.e. those whose investments are not part of a government-to-government assistance program.

• AP: Some munitions are turning up in the Panamanian search of the seized North Korean freighter.  Panama’s work is done, CNN reports, and UN offials are now examining the cargo.

• Florida International University is digitizing interviews from its oral history project and has posted two about Operation Peter Pan: with Monsignor Brian Walsh and James Baker, director of an American school in Havana, both from 1997.

• Cuban American trumpet virtuoso Arturo Sandoval will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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. 

Strange travel stories

Part I: Beyonce and her husband have traveled to Cuba, God forbid.  Their trip drew a reaction that shows that a significant part of our beloved Miami political leadership is all about calling for freedom in Cuba and at the same time getting Washington to police ours.  Senator Flake, I think, hit the nail on the head: “Fine by me. Every American should have the right to travel there.”

Part II: A U.S. couple that lost custody of their children snatched them from their maternal grandparents, who were awarded custody, got on a boat and made off to Havana’s Marina Hemingway (CNN).  The Cuban government decided within 48 hours that they would not be welcome there and informed U.S. diplomats that it would hand over the parents and kids to U.S. authorities.  Details of the rendition apparently remain to be worked out.

The opposition on tour

Blogger Yoani Sanchez meets privately with Senators Menendez and Rubio in Washington and complains in Europe that activists from other countries don’t empathize with Cubans.  Blogger Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is falling in love with New York.  The daughter of Oswaldo Paya appears before a UN body and goes on Spanish television criticizing the Spanish government’s handling of the case of Angel Carromero, who drove the car in which her father died.  Berta Soler of the Damas de Blanco gives interviews (here and here) in Spain slamming the Cuban government.  And young activist Eliecer Avila, visiting Stockholm, declares his intention to start a political party when he returns to Cuba.  There’s lots more where all of that came from – press conferences, panel discussions, press coverage everywhere.

The Cuban government surely didn’t set out to do a favor for the Cuban opposition when it made citizens’ travel abroad easier by eliminating the exit permit requirement.  But that is a prominent by-product – a small exodus of political opponents who are touring capitals on both sides of the Atlantic, criticizing the Cuban government, meeting friends, allies, and the curious, and surely making it easier for those who support them to learn, strategize, and provide assistance.

Yoani Sanchez believes that the Cuban government had no choice but to let her travel.  She told CNN that “the political cost of leaving me on the island was becoming pretty difficult to bear,” and “maybe they thought if I left I wouldn’t return.”  As for the new travel policy, “more than a show of reform it was a show of weakness,” she said. 

Maybe so, although I don’t think it would be particularly hard for a government that had restricted travel for 50 years to do so for several more, notwithstanding its promise to include travel among the “excessive prohibitions” being lifted as part of its reform program. 

It’s quite possible that the government decided to open up travel for reasons having nothing to do with its political opponents.  According to press reports since the reform was enacted, the government has barred travel by denying passports in very few cases – dissidents who were released from jail conditionally and whose sentences have not expired, and personnel of key economic importance. 

We’ll see if this practice continues.  If so, it could represent a different calculation on Havana’s part about the political opposition, that its members’ ability to circulate and speak outside Cuba will not alter their political fortunes inside Cuba. 

In Yoani Sanchez’ appearances in New York and Washington, her views on the U.S. embargo were front and center.  At times she expressed her opposition based on the political value it holds for the Cuban government.  Other times she differed with the “pressure cooker” logic of the embargo, that its aim is to create misery and drive the miserable to revolt.  That theory doesn’t sit well if you live in Cuba, she points out.  Shortly after her meeting with Senators Rubio and Menendez, she in part adopted their position and appeared to place herself in a “process of debate” – with whom, she didn’t say – that could lead to change.  From an interview with TV Marti:

Q.  Are you in favor of lifting the embargo unconditionally?

A.  I am not in agreement with that.  I believe that, clearly, at this time there have to be conditions and above all I believe that it is a long process of debate that has to take place beforehand.  We are already taking the first steps and I believe we have to continue on that path.

Surely the topic will come up when she visits Miami.

Also:

Author Zoe Valdes, as ever, less than impressed with Yoani Sanchez.

Clarinet/saxophone virtuoso Paquito D’Rivera is one of many who argues that Yoani Sanchez should be treated respectfully even by those, like himself, who disagree with her on the embargo.  Mambi Watch has an interesting post on this development.

Tracey Eaton on Yoani’s New York visit.