Last month I was fortunate to have the opportunity to participate and ask questions of Brazil’s Minister of Planning, Budget and Management, Mr. Paulo Bernardo. The discussion was an overview for foreign investors, economic experts and journalists on the second phase of Brazil’s national Growth Acceleration Program (PAC 2), which is the second phase of […]
Chances are not great for Congress to unite for much of anything controversial in the current partisan environment. But Cuba legislation is making its way around, and we continue to watch its path. The House this week mulled legislation that would lift the travel ban and remove some obstacles to agricultural sales. In a hearing […]
Another month, another chance to move forward on the US-Cuba relationship… Progress seems to have stagnated lately, and April’s comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton predict more of the same. Clinton, speaking at the University of Louisville at the beginning of this month, answered a question from the press about Cuba by underlining the efforts […]
Just over a year ago the emergence of H1N1 stoked global hysteria; today it is all but forgotten. With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder, What lessons can be learned from the public health responses around the region? In considering this question I have focused on the region’s bookends, Mexico and Argentina. Mexico responded swiftly […]
Cuban voters have so far held over 21,800 assemblies to nominate candidates to the People’s Power Municipal Assemblies (local governments) for 2010 elections. The elections will be held tomorrow, and on May 2 where there will be a second round in the constituencies if none of those nominated wins over 50 percent of valid votes. […]
As the ash cloud ruins plans for many to attend the funeral in Poland and China becomes the next location which suffered from a major earthquake, Latin American leaders spent the last week and a half mostly in international summits in the region and in Washington DC. As a reflection of the region’s new found […]
To be honest, I do not know much about the Cuba Business Bureau, and cannot vouch for it. Anyone out there that can? Please feel free to leave info in the comment section. The group is new to me as of today. I do know that the Cuba Business Bureau conducted a survey, the results […]
In a previous post, we mentioned Raúl Castro’s April 4 speech to the Youth Communist League (UJC) in Cuba, focusing on its discussion of regime continuity in the coming years. But the speech merits revisiting in order to zero in on another topic: economic reform. Raúl’s discussion covered a number of familiar topics—the moral imperative […]
(Photo: Inside Havana) Cuba expands its limited free-market experiment (Los Angeles Times) Cuban barbershops and beauty salons are now joining a small but growing group of free-market entrepreneurs on the island: the government is allowing owners of these businesses to set their own prices for services rendered—according to the market, of course—and pocket their revenues, […]
The Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) puts out two highly relevant electronic publications that readers might find helpful and interesting. One, the Chronicle on Cuba, is a monthly compilation of top news items on Cuba, collected from diverse sources. The other, FOCALPoint: Canada’s Spotlight on the Americas, is a broader look at important current issues […]
A thrilling article in this week’s TIME recounts the effort to safely remove highly enriched uranium (HEU) from Chile. The spread of HEU across the globe is just one more cold war legacy that threatens blowback. In order to prevent states with nuclear ambitions from developing their weapons, the nuclear club decided to give HEU […]
{Preface: In my penultimate post I discussed the trends that may allow Argentina and Chile to upend the region’s longstanding natural resource curse. I then pointed to one notable exception—Bolivia. In response to that piece I received a very pithy comment from Roque Planas, an editor at Latin Dispatch. My aim in this post is […]
Senator John Kerry (Democrat – Massachusetts), as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has put a temporary hold on all US democracy promotion programs for Cuba while the State Department conducts a review of these programs so that the Committee can investigate their effectiveness. This is a review that many experts have hoped for, […]
Last night the Mexican state of Baja California was hit by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, about 10km below the surface at the epicentre of the quake. The closest major city of Mexicali was hit hardest by the quake, albeit only one victim was reported as of this morning local time. The quake was felt as […]
Sean Murphy of FPA’s Global Film Review blog has posted yet another intriguing post on a documentary called Crude (2009) which details evidence regarding a lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador’s Amazon region and the difficulties in achieving justice for those victims of toxic dumping in the affected region in Ecuador. Like judicial decisions in the […]