Desmond Boylan/Reuters Negotiations at the end of July between Cuban President Raul Castro, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Havana Jaime Ortega, and Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, yielded unusual results: Havana decided to release 52 of the individuals currently identified internationally as political prisoners—a full third of those currently held under that status. The website […]
The “vicious circle” is, as Dalia Acosta and others have written, a pattern that has been repeated over and over during the history of Cuba in the last decades: the seemingly inevitable cycle of relaxing and tightening among the governments of Cuba, the United States and the European Union. The reasons for the vicious circle are […]
Excerpts from a European Parliament resolution passed on March 10, 2010: The European Parliament… strongly condemns the avoidable and cruel death of the dissident political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo after a hunger strike of 85 days, and expresses its solidarity and sympathy with his family; Condemns the pre-emptive detention of activists and the government’s attempt […]
The death last week of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, the hunger-striking Cuban prisoner, has proven to be a international issue of grand proportions, and Havana is stubbornly pushing back against the waves of pressure from friends and foes abroad. On Wednesday, authorities arrested or detained at least 30 recognized dissidents in order to prevent them from […]
FPA blogger Richard Basas discusses COHA’s recent article—“No ‘Common Policy’ as Europe Grapples over its Future Ties to Cuba“—in this post on the Latin America blog. He addresses the difficulty the EU faces in adopting a single policy toward Cuba when its member states have diverse levels of connection to the island: Spain, which has […]