On Wednesday, Mar. 26, United States Secretary of State John Kerry cut his trip to Italy short to fly to Amman in hopes of keeping the Palestinian-Israeli peace process on track. Kerry met with Jordan’s King Abdullah before a long dinner with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. On the three-hour flight to Amman Kerry spoke […]
On a visit to the Western Hemisphere last week from Rome, Pope Benedict XVI stopped first in Mexico, a country whose population is 80-85% Catholic. It is the most Catholic, in this sense, of the world’s Spanish-speaking countries. His second visit was to Cuba, a country that has been traditionally Catholic, but was officially an […]
The greatest challenge to affecting change in current U.S. policies toward Cuba, of course, is the fractious political environment and correspondingly disparate views (both in the public and within government) on what should be done. Nearly everyone seems to agree on a key point about Cuba policy: the embargo and related travel ban have not […]
Spending a week in Tuscany has its benefits, certainly, but without dependable Internet access and Western Hemisphere-centered news items, it seems I’ve missed a number of notable (and indeed, unusual/surprising/jaw-dropping) events in Cuba… Here are a few of the ones I’m picking up in the airport now. What else have I missed? Cuba indicates that […]
Already there has been lots of speculation on why Fidel Castro chose this moment specifically to give himself a bigger presence in Cuban life than he has had for the last several years, during which he had taken on the role of a nearly invisible but omnipresent source of critical opinion through his written commentaries. […]
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 […]