Odds and ends

• The Wall Street Journal looks at the carriers serving the growing market for flights to Cuba.

• A Los Angeles Times editorial calls the $84,000 Radio Marti contract to send spam text messages into Cuba the “cyber equivalent of dropping propaganda leaflets on the island.”

• Prensa Latina: Some restoration work has been completed in Santa Maria del Rosario’s “country cathedral,” a precious 18^th century building. Santa Maria is a quiet little town close to Havana that was the setting for the movie El cuerno de la abundancia. If you go, directly across the square from the cathedral there’s a very nice lady selling bonsai trees from her house.

Hold the mail

The U.S.-Cuba talks on restoring direct postal service started in 2009 and seem to have gone nowhere fast. There were direct talks, exchanges of data, visits to Cuban postal facilities, etc. Two years later with no visible result, the Cuban side is giving its reason why: Cuba insists on reciprocal treatment, such as the reciprocal landing rights for mail delivery planes that are provided in International Postal Union conventions. The United States, Cuba says, won’t agree to Cuban planes landing here. So no agreement.

People in the United States and Cuba are long accustomed to poor, slow mail service, and have long turned to alternatives. So it’s not exactly a human tragedy that these talks have not prospered. In the year 2011 it even seems a little quaint, with everyone using e-mail, for there to be talks on direct mail service. Maybe they will resume and even succeed.

For now, the talks have shown that at least in this instance, Cuban officials mean what they say when they assert that they are willing to normalize relations with the United States, completely or bit by bit, as long as Cuba is treated as an equal. Until that matter is settled, the mail can wait, perhaps for decades more.

Protecting the Gulf

This Interior Department testimony (pdf) from last week sometimes seems to take pains to include the word “Cuba.” But it places Cuba’s oil drilling in the context of other drilling in the Gulf and looks ahead to talks among the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Bahamas, and Jamaica regarding protection of our shared maritime environment. And it sounds as if the U.S. government is preparing to license U.S. firms to help Repsol and the Cuban oil company Cupet in the event of an emergency.

Of course it would be stupid to keep the resources of the U.S. oil industry out of an emergency response in Cuba or any part of the Gulf, but that hasn’t stopped us before. For now it appears that the Obama Administration is trying to protect the Gulf regardless of Miami politics, and to improve the protections that were in place when BP’s well blew. Let’s hope so.

But it sounded so much better...

In a sign of the seriousness with which Senator Marco Rubio is being mentioned as a potential Vice Presidential pick, the Washington Post dug into the story he tells about his family’s history and found it not to be true.

It turns out his parents came to America when Batista was in power, not Castro. They were normal immigrants, not exiles, although they decided that they did not want to return to Cuba once the socialist government was in power.

No big deal, but it’s odd that this statement remains in Rubio’s bio on his Senate website: “In 1971, Marco was born in Miami to Cuban-born parents who came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover.”