Odds and ends

• Reuters: A U.S. delegation sponsored by the Center for Democracy in the Americas visits Alan Gross, finds him “in good spirits” and eager to go home.

• Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control releases a new list (pdf) of companies licensed to provide air, travel, and remittance forwarding services to Cuba.

• Global Post: The Venezuela-Cuba fiber optic cable is due to go into service this summer, and will multiply Cuba’s bandwidth by a factor of 3,000.

• A reader recommends A Brilliant Disaster by Jim Rasenberger, a book about President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco. In the comments section, his notes on surprising findings in the book.

Sec. Rice on Cuba

Some May 26 remarks by former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice are being quoted widely in Cuba blogs as an example of … I don’t know what.

“I do think that particularly in Cuba when Fidel Castro dies, and he will eventually, that his brother is going to find that he is not just going to be able to appropriate Fidel Castro’s authority to himself. And I would hope that by then the international community would have said to Cuba, you need a way to a transition to democracy. Rather than hoping that Raul Castro somehow is going to be a reformer, state the principals, start to put into place a transition for a democratic transition. It may take a while, because there are no institutions in Cuba, but particularly the Organization of American States, where Cuba is the only country that cannot take up its seat at the Organization of American States, because it doesn’t have an elected president. And the European Union needs to be speaking out for the right for the Cubans for that transition.”

These Cuba comments were brief and extemporaneous, so she deserves some slack for the unconnected reference to the OAS and the bizarre statement that there are “no institutions in Cuba.” But there’s not a lot here, to say the least. She left out the idea of naming a “Cuba Transition Coordinator” in the U.S. government, as the Bush Administration did.

I did like her anecdote about Iraq’s Supreme Court defending an Iraqi citizen’s right to travel to any country of his choice:

“And I’ll just tell you one little vignette that says something about what happens when political institutions are in place. An Iraqi legislator visited Israel, and when he came back the Iraqi Parliament tried to strip him of his citizenship, but the Iraqi Supreme Court said, ―Iraqi citizens have the right to travel. You see, institutions, constitutions, documents that establish the relationship between the governed and those who would govern, are not always immediately effective, but they are there and people appeal to them.”

China ups its energy cooperation

Platt’s: China will deepen its cooperation with Cuba in oil and gas, according to a framework agreement signed during the visit to Cuba of China’s vice president. China is working on the Cienfuegos refinery expansion project, its capital guaranteed by Venezuelan oil revenutes.

The announcement by the Chinese oil company CNPC covers lots of areas of cooperation, explicitly mentioning offshore operations.

(Pictured at right: a Chinese rig on Cuba’s north coast, east of Havana.)

Odds and ends

• Reuters: With farm sector reforms only partially completed, production has not gone up (see article pasted in comments, it’s not on-line anywhere).

• Herald: Senator Kerry’s hold on the next $20 million in Cuba democracy program money and his questions about the basic functioning of the program are drawing complaints. The article says he is proposing a $5 million cut, which seems reasonable; the Administration let the entire fiscal year pass, then six more months, before notifying Congress how it would use the money.

• CNN’s Shasta Darlington’s Havana tips.

• Cuba vs. Mexico in Gold Cup soccer tonight, matches starting at 7:00 p.m. in Charlotte, North Carolina. Here’s a note from Americas Quarterly.

• Coming in December: Oakland-to-Havana flights (Mercury News).

Quotable

“We are the real Cuba. Forget the nightmare slave plantation created by Fidel and his cronies. The real Cuba, the Cuba that never died and never will, lives in exile, and within the bruised bodies of those still on the island who oppose the Castro regime. Whether we are in Havana, or Miami, or Connecticut, or Paris, or Cairo, or Buenos Aires, or Hong Kong, or Sydney, those of us who refused to be enslaved are still around, and most of us are willing and ready to transform Cuba when the time comes, as it surely will.”

– Author Carlos Eire, at Babalu