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Blogger Bob Norman is reporting on his Daily Pulp blog the rumor that has swirled since last week: the South Florida Sun-Sentinel closed its Havana bureau. Reporter Ray Sanchez is reportedly heading to Fort Lauderdale. Sanchez, co-author of Duke of Havana, worked at Newsday for more than a decade, and was a Latin America correspondent there.
His departure leaves not a single U.S. daily newspaper on the island.
-Frances Robles
Msgr. Dionisio Guillermo García Ibáñez, Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, last week was elected president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba. Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino, Archbishop of Havana, was elected the conference's vice president.
The Episcopate is composed of 13 bishops who represent 11 ecclesiastical jurisdictions in Cuba; two of them are auxiliary bishops in Havana.
Monsignor García, 64, was appointed by the Vatican to the Santiago archdiocese in February 2007; until then, he was bishop of the Bayamo-Manzanillo diocese. In December 2007, he made news when he complained to the Cuban government about police violence in the repression of 18 dissidents who staged a demonstration at St. Teresita Church.
For years, the Guantánamo-born prelate has handled Church relations with the diaspora, coordinating meetings between Cuban clergy on the island and their counterparts in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Miami and New York.
In 2006, Monsignor García was one of two bishops allowed to broadcast Holy Week messages on the radio, an unprecedented concession by the Cuban government. [UPDATE: For an interview with the new conference president, in Spanish, click here.]
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
The Organization of American States should readmit Cuba to its ranks, the OAS's secretary general said Monday in Colombia, according to the Bloomberg news agency. Interviewed in Medellín, José Miguel Insulza said that the 1962 OAS resolution that banned Cuba because of its association with the Soviet Union and China makes no sense today.
“One of the countries has disappeared and the other is buying a lot of U.S. Treasuries,” the Chilean diplomat said at the Inter-American Development Bank’s annual meeting. “Please, if they’re going to be excluded, let’s come up with some better criteria.”
In Montevideo on March 5, Insulza made a similar statement, saying that the reasons for Cuba's expulsion were "obsolete" and voicing the hope that "the countries that still don't have any relations with Cuba will normalize them in a proper manner," an apparent allusion to the United States.
The Jan. 31, 1962, OAS resolution that expelled Cuba declared that "adherence by any member of the Organization of American States to Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with the inter-American system, and the alignment of such a government with the communist bloc breaks the unity and solidarity of the hemisphere." Therefore, the "government of Cuba, which has officially identified itself as a Marxist-Leninist government, is incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system."
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Vice President Biden said Monday that he foresees that "in the next decade -- and sooner, probably -- there will be and must be changes in the relationship between the United States and Cuba," the French news agency AFP reported from San José, Costa Rica. The vice president was there attending a meeting of Central American leaders.
"President Obama and I campaigned on a platform that said we were willing to reach out [to the Cuban people] and you will see that we will reach out" to them, Biden told reporters. "Perhaps we'll do something less than lift the embargo," but for that to happen "there is a need for a firm commitment [from the Castro government.] And that commitment is to democracy and human rights." Changes in U.S. policy could expand "to the degree that democracy and human rights emerge" on the island, Biden said, according to the Spanish agency EFE. "Meanwhile, I trust that there are things we can do, measures we can take to build a process."
(PHOTO SHOWS: Biden and his wife, Jill, arriving Sunday in San José. Behind them are relatives of U.S. Ambassador Peter Cianchette.)
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Cuba has begun to restructure its food distribution system in an effort to increase production and efficiency, the Reuters news agency reported Monday, citing sources in the agricultural sector. Acopio, the vast state-run network that buys and distributes locally grown produce, has been transferred from the Ministry of Agriculture to the Ministry of Domestic Trade, the sources said.
State TV recently announced that the Ministry of Agriculture would concentrate on production and not worry about purchases and distribution. Acopio has been criticized for its bureaucracy and inefficiency, Reuters notes. Much of this year's tomato crop rotted on the vine because Acopio did not have enough containers and trucks to transport it to processing plants.
Domestic Trade came under new management on March 2, when its minister, Marino Murillo Jorge, was shifted to Economy and Planning and replaced by his deputy, Jacinto Angulo Pardo, in photo.
Agriculture has been under new management since Nov. 25, 2008, when Gen. Ulises Rosales del Toro replaced María Pérez Hernández.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Vice President Biden said Saturday that the United States is not planning to end its trade embargo against Cuba. Speaking at a summit of leaders from Latin America, Europe and the U.S. in Viña del Mar, Chile, Biden said that he and President Obama "think that the Cuban people should determine their own fate and should be able to live in freedom."
He did not elaborate, telling reporters that he was in Chile "to talk about the economy, not Cuba." However, the newspaper El Mercurio quoted him as saying that there is an opportunity "for a transition" in Washington's policy toward the island nation. [UPDATE: "President Obama has ordered a review of those situations and I think we must trust in him and see what he has to say," former President Bill Clinton said Saturday, in connection with the restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba. Clinton spoke in Medellín, Colombia, where he attended a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank. "Obama is in the process of reviewing those policies" toward Cuba, Clinton said, according to the Mexican news agency Notimex.] For an Associated Press report, click here. [PHOTO SHOWS: Biden and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on Saturday.]
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Dominican newspapers are abuzz today over an alleged dis-invitation for Dominican President Leonel Fernández to attend VP Joe Biden’s meeting with Central American presidents in Costa Rica this weekend.
According to various news reports quoting Dominican and Costa Rican diplomats by name, it seems Costa Rican president Oscar Arias invited Fernández to the meeting since his country is a member of the Central American Integration System and a signor of the CAFTA-DR free trade pact.
Oops!
Costa Rican ambassador to Santo Domingo Marta Núñez Madriz says they had to renege, because if you take a good look at that map, Dominican Republic just isn’t in Central America.
“When president Arias said he would invite president Fernández, he was told the meetings were by region, because they are going to tackle specific problems in those countries,” Núñez told El Nacional newspaper.
The D.R., Washington reportedly said, will be included in a meeting of Caribbean leaders. Asked for comment on the matter, a spokeswoman for the Dominican Foreign Ministry referred The Herald to the Dominican newspaper El Nacional.
“We were informed that the American vice president will hold regional meetings and we were included in the Caribbean nations,” Dominican foreign minister Carlos Morales Troncoso told the paper. “…They said on a later trip through the Caribbean, he will do the same with the leaders of the region.’’
But Dominican Today news outlet has its own theory.
“Although the diplomats didn’t mention it and no one during the preparations for the meeting with Biden made reference to it, Fernandez’s recent visit to Cuba, where for more than two hours met with ex president Fidel Castro, who also wrote two extensive articles praising the Dominican chief executive, could have been one of the reason to snub Dominican Republic,” the web site story says. “Fernandez's strong ties with Venezuela president Hugo Chávez has also been mentioned as a sour point in the relations between Washington and Santo Domingo.”
-Frances Robles
Ethnologist and political scientist Carlos Moore caused a stir recently in Barbados, where he lectured about race in Cuba while on tour for his book, Pichón, A Memoir, Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba. (2008: Lawrence Hill Books, $26.95)
The Cuban ambassador there balked about Moore’s March 18 talk and seethed about a letter to Raul Castro Moore wrote. The Barbados daily “The Nation” published excerpts of Moore’s letter under the headline “Cuba’s Big Black Lie,” which Ambassador Pedro García Roque called “outrageous and hostile.”
“It surprises me that THE NATION, which has traditionally respected and reflected on the real truth of Cuba, has now been an accomplice of an individual who has come to Barbados to spread propaganda against our country,” García wrote in a letter to the editor published Monday.
Moore wrote the widely-circulated piece last year. In it, he argues that race is one of Cuba’s most pressing issues. He believes it threatens the Castro regime, as more blacks in Cuba feel empowered by an Obama presidency.
“I will not beat around the bush to express my strong conviction that racism is our country's most serious and tenacious problem,” he wrote. “It is a phenomenon that gains new ground and expands its influence over our body politic, cultural life and economy.”
Moore, a Cuban of Jamaican descent who lives in Brazil, is a well-known expert on race issues on the island who once worked at Florida International University.
But Moore said the Cuban ambassador was already recoiling over Moore’s presentation – before he gave it, and before the Nation published his letter to Castro. Moore says when he arrived in Barbados for a speech at the University of West Indies, organizers made it clear that Havana was trying to put a stop to Moore’s lecture.
“They had already made it known that the Cuban government would take a dim view to my talk,” Moore told me. “ Something is happening in Cuba, making them more paranoid than usual on the race subject.”
His next stop is Wayne University.
- Frances Robles
