In a New Year's Eve editorial, the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday proposed "A new approach to Cuba." Calling U.S. policy toward the island "50 years of failure," the newspaper made some suggestions.
• "The incoming Obama administration should move quickly to embark on a rapprochement with Cuba and bring an end to punitive policies, especially the economic embargo. [...] This policy change will take time and political will, but it is in our national interest and, ultimately, in Cuba's."
• "Obama has promised to lift restrictions on family travel and cash remittances to Cuba -- an important first step. We'd like to see him go further, to resume the people-to-people or 'purposeful travel' allowed in President Clinton's first term and to push Congress to lift the travel ban and repeal the 1996 Helms-Burton law prohibiting trade with Cuba."
• "There may be an opening here for economic reforms.The United States already exports about $700 million worth of food to Cuba annually [...] Obama should use his presidential prerogatives to expand this, as well as dispatching officials to talk, as they have in the past, about issues of immigration and security. As part of any discussions, the U.S. government must press for human rights reforms, along with freedom for about 200 political prisoners in Cuban jails. (And yes, explore the prisoner trade Raul Castro has proposed in recent days.)"
• "Communication, travel and trade are excellent ways to push for reform of the one-party state. Tourists carrying books and ideas serve as ambassadors for democracy. Manufactured goods speak for the creativity of an open economy. The Cuban people are highly educated [...] and extremely resourceful [...] Their aspirations are fertile ground for change."
To read the entire editorial, click here.
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Milanés: Old leaders should retire
In Vigo, Spain, about to begin a national tour, Cuban singer Pablo Milanés unburdened himself 
in an interview with the Spanish daily Público. Excerpts:
• Asked about conditions in his homeland, he replied "Very bad, after three hurricanes, a crisis that has not been solved, and leaders who do nothing to pull the nation ahead amid this paralysis. If to this you add the world crisis, well, we're fixed for good."
• Asked if he trusts that Raúl Castro will take steps to move the country ahead, Milanés answered: "I do not trust in any Cuban leader who is older than 75, because all of them [...] overstayed their moments of glory [...] they are ready to be retired. We have to pass the baton to the new generations so they may make another socialism, because this socialism is already stagnant. It gave all it could give [...] but we have to make reforms on many fronts of the Revolution, because our leaders are no longer capable. Their revolutionary ideas of the past have become reactionary and that reaction does not allow for the continuation, for the advancement of the new generation, which has been implementing a new socialism, a new revolution."
• The old revolutionary leaders "simply must retire [...] They did what they had to do in their times. Simply, they are not doing today what they should be doing." The Cuban citizen "can no longer live from promises. The old achievements are there; we must now head toward new achievements, [and] these are accomplished with new thoughts and new dynamics that [the old leaders] are incapable of exercising. We are paralyzed in every sense; we make plans for a future that never comes."
• There is unrest among the youth, Milanés said. "Young Cubans are molded in a very beautiful manner, but then they have to emigrate in order to project what they studied. It's very sad, because it's not even political exile; it's an economic exile due to the few possibilities that exist in our country."
To read the entire interview, in Spanish, click here. See also our blog entries "Cubans want change, Milanés says" (July 24) and "Milanés: 'No queers in the Party'" (July 14).
GDP rose only 4% this year, official says
Cuba's economy grew 4 percent in 2008, below the expected 7 percent, 
Economy and Planning Minister José Luis Rodríguez García told Radio Rebelde on Monday. However, "we are going to grow more next year," Rodríguez said in an interview, as quoted by the Reuters news agency. "The country has important cooperation agreements [...] with Venezuela, Brazil and Russia. Relations with China will continue and broaden," he said. In 2008, Cuba's economy was hit hard by three hurricanes, low nickel prices and the international financial crisis, Reuters noted. Rodríguez predicted that future growth will be aided by the reforms in agriculture and wage policy imposed this year by President Raúl Castro. "Without a doubt, the agriculture policy and, most importantly, substituting food imports will impact the economy," the minister said.
According to The Associated Press, Cuba's measurement of the gross domestic product includes spending on free health care, education through college and monthly food rations provided by the government -- an uncommon methodology that critics say inflates growth figures. Officially, the economy expanded by 7.5 percent in 2007 and 12.5 percent in 2006. [UPDATE: At a meeting with legislators on Tuesday, Rodríguez pinpointed the growth figure at 4.3 percent. Click here for details.
Fidel is looking better, visitor says
Fidel Castro looks "a lot more recovered than in recent photographs," 
wrote Stella Calloni in the official daily Granma on Monday, recounting a conversation she had with the Cuban leader earlier this month. "Sitting down, in sports attire, like a man who has invited someone to his home for a leisurely chat [...] he has the same inquisitive, intelligent and curious strength in his gaze" as he had in 1959, Calloni wrote. The Argentine writer, who has met in the past with Castro, said she was led to him by a mutual friend after a workshop on human rights that was held in Havana on Dec. 10.
"The man sitting, waiting in an austere place, is the Comandante," she wrote, "a serene man, with gray hair and beard that soften his face, a lot more recovered than in recent photographs. [...] Castro stands up to greet me and his grasp is firm. The last time I saw him, before his illness, he wore a military uniform. Today, dressed in loungewear, he looks more accessible and this disarms every formality."
The encounter was not an interview, Calloni wrote. Castro apparently wanted to quiz her about Ernesto Che Guevara's mother for his own memoirs, and to talk about other Latin American personalities. "Nothing escapes his recollection" as he goes from one topic to the other, she noted.
"Now he is informed every day of everything that happens in the world and writes like a soldier of ideas, that is, with the weapon of words," the writer said. "He can look back upon everything that has happened and provide abundant detail [...] Fidel Castro does not rest."
To read the entire article, in Spanish, click here. [PHOTO SHOWS: Castro on Nov. 18.]
Havana archdiocese opens its website
The Archdiocese of San Cristóbal de La Habana has launched a Web page as a means of communication and evangelization, the news agency Zenit reported Sunday. The site provides a history of the diocese, a directory with the names of the bishops, the priests, the religious communities and homilies and documents of the principal church events in the Cuban capital.
In a letter of welcome, Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, 
Archbishop of Havana, concedes that the site is "not fully completed, but little by little we'll improve it." The motive behind the site is "to seek the truth, not to hide it in closed coffers but to share it, to announce it," Ortega says, adding that that truth is Jesus Christ.
"We enter this novel world [of the Internet] to announce Him and proclaim Him," Ortega writes, and "to inform about the life and mission [...] of the Church that serves as a pilgrim in Havana -- its clergy, religious people, lay movements, publications, etc." And he closes by inviting readers "to be disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ, so our people can live in Him."
To access the archdiocese site, click here.
Granma ignores mention of prisoner swap
Raúl Castro's suggestion that the United States swap the five Cuban prisoners it holds for an indeterminate number of dissidents in Cuban prisons was omitted from a news report Friday in the official daily Granma.
Castro made the suggestion Thursday in Brazil during an exchange with the international media. It was reported thus by The Associated Press: "Let's make gesture for gesture. Those prisoners you talk about -- if [the Americans] want us to release them, they should tell us so tomorrow. We'll send them over [to the U.S.] with families and everything. Let them return our five heroes to us. That's a gesture from both sides."
The French agency AFP published a similar quotation.
However, Granma on Friday made no mention of the proposal in an otherwise lengthy account of Castro's comments. According to the newspaper, Castro revealed that he received a letter "from a former president" asking him to make some "public gestures [...] and I answered him immediately [...] that the era of gestures was over in Cuba. The gestures have to be bilateral; unilateral gestures are over."
Granma said that, when asked about "the counter-revolutionaries on the island, Raúl Castro answered categorically: 'What dissidents are you talking about? I know that story full well and [I know] about the $57 million that the U.S. Congress approved last year to pay agents. That's the role they play; those are the dissidents. Why don't you talk to me about our five heroes, who did nothing against the United States and have spent 10 years in prison?'"
To read the Granma story, in Spanish, click here. For story in The Miami Herald, click here. (PHOTO SHOWS: Cuban postage stamp bears pictures of five Cubans held in U.S. prisons.) [UPDATE: Speaking to journalists Friday morning, Brazilian President Lula da Silva said he was caught by surprise by Castro's suggestion. "I had never heard Raúl Castro, or even Fidel Castro, make a proposal like that," he said, according to the newspaper O Globo. Nevertheless, Lula said that an exchange of prisoners would be "a positive step" toward a dialogue between Washington and Havana, and added that he hoped the proposal would reach Obama's ears.]
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Farmers upbeat over trade prospects
Agricultural leaders are excited over the prospect of freer and more abundant trade with Cuba under the Obama administration, reports the industry newspaper Ag Journal. Many states and trade groups have sent delegations to the island hoping to sell increasing amounts of their products there. 
Wheat alone has a potential 30-million-bushel market in Cuba, the paper says. "With a different president, there is a good chance of a different approach" to trade with Cuba, said Alan Tracy, president of U.S. Wheat Associates. Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, Obama's Agriculture Secretary-designate, told National Public Radio that he supports "stronger and better dialogue" as a first step to "softening" relations between Havana and Washington. He also said Raúl Castro might take "a different approach to America" that would create new opportunities, Ag Journal reported. Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska and Texas are among the states that will benefit the most from direct trade and open-credit policies with Cuba. To read the entire article, click here. (PHOTO SHOWS: Vilsack after meeting with Obama on Wednesday.)
