Since 2006 when he was “provisional” president, Raúl Castro has pushed for a salary reform that would eliminate the previous egalitarian system in favor of a system familiar in most other countries: paying higher wages to individuals who work harder and yield higher production. The idea, of course, is to spur production by creating an […]
The Bush administration boycotted the United Nations Human Rights Council since its creation three years ago, criticizing the Council for ignoring abuses in a number of states in favor of increasing the attention paid to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (an issue that merits attention, but not instead of paying mind to other states’ egregious offenses). […]
Orbitz, a large and well-known online travel booking company, and Ipsos, a survey-based market research company, released the results of a public opinion survey today, showing that a great majority of Americans favor lifting the ban on travel to Cuba. Orbitz simultaneously launched a campaign aimed at getting Congress to allow travel to Cuba by […]
This weekend, the department of sociology at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada hosted a conference called “The Measure of a Revolution: Cuba 1959-2009.” Today was the close of the conference, which was rare and interesting not because it sought to analyze the successes and failures of the Cuban Revolution at 50 years—indeed, this has been the […]
In a previous post, we noted that only 2% of the Cuban population, or about 200,000 individuals, have any access at all to the World Wide Web. The individuals who make up that 2% (those that are not government employees, academics or researchers) circumvented the limitations imposed by the Cuban government by using hotel Internet […]
Thirty years ago, in April 1979, Carlos Muñiz Varela was murdered in Puerto Rico. The native-born Cuban was the 26-year-old founder of Viajes Varadero, a travel agency that booked the first flight from the United States to Cuba after over 15 years without. He was one of the group of Cuban exiles that negotiated with […]
The most recently publicized victim of Washington’s policy of stifling U.S.-Cuban exchange was Cuban musician Silvio Rodríguez. He applied well in advance from his current residence in Paris for the visa he would need to travel to New York for last evening’s celebration of Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday, but as of the time he would […]
The last few weeks in the Latin American world has been anything but calm. Coming off meeting of the G20 and Summit of the Americas, the region has moved towards many intended transformations in policy and relations with the US and the EU. Some of these major changes are discussed below. Mexico: With a severely […]
On April 30, the U.S. State Department made public its annual list of countries that back or abet terrorism. There are only four countries included, and Cuba was left on again this year. Iran, Syria and Sudan join the Caribbean island on the list. But some point to a softening of report’s language as yet […]
Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations had an excellent piece in today’s Washington Post that detailed the contentious past, present and future of the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. She presented a controversial but necessary proposition that I’ve mentioned before: the United States should return the property to Cuba. True, the United States has […]
May Day, observed by many countries on May 1, is a holiday celebrating the achievements of the labor movement and especially commemorating the successful fight for the eight-hour work day. It is a day for celebration, but also for political protest, like the pro-immigrant and pro-worker immigration reform rally in Los Angeles I had the […]
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a collection of nations whose mission is to protect members’ sovereignty “against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics.” Associated countries account for 2/3 of the members of the United Nations and around […]
A local Cuban newspaper in Ciego de Ávila reported this week that Cuba’s population has been declining for several years: between the end of 2005 and the end of 2008 the population shrank by about 7,100. The article ascribes the change to declining fertility coupled with the natural aging of the Cuban people. Indeed, average […]
Even without a particularly welcoming response from the highest Cuban authorities (and without any reciprocal policy moves), the State Department is quietly moving forward with the administration’s plans to gradually change policy toward Cuba, by opening channels of dialogue with Cuban diplomats in the United States and testing the waters to see what other steps […]
The recent outbreak of swine flu—so far most serious in Mexico but also in the United States and several other countries—is causing global concern, and Cuba is taking its own precautions to try to make sure the illness does not reach the island. The state is limiting flights to Mexico (there are usually 4 flights […]