Cuban Colada

Cardinal heartened by visits by expatriates

In his Christmas message to Cubans, Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, Archbishop of Havana, referred in passing to Washington's recent easing of restrictions on travel by Cuban-Americans to the island.
"It is true that those who departed forever to meet the Lord will be absent at the celebration of Christmas; so will other members of the family, perhaps the youngest, who have left the country," he said. "Families rejoice this year at being able to welcome relatives from the United States who wished to come visit them and couldn't. For this, we thank God."
Elsewhere in his speech, Ortega says:
"Although the economic situation is worrisome and affects me and my people, although disease, difficulties in coexistence or other [difficulties] limit us, although our just desires for well-being and equity are not fulfilled, faith continues to shine like a light in our minds and hearts. [...] Therefore, do not make room in your hearts for discouragement and hopelessness."
To read the entire address, in Spanish, click here.

Con man is sentenced to 5 years in prison for selling bogus religious tours to Cuba

A California man was sentenced Monday to five years in state prison for selling "phony travel packages" to senior citizens seeking to visit Cuba for religious and cultural purposes, the California Attorney General's Office said in a press release.
Ralph Adam Rendón, 33, a resident of Santa Ana, was also ordered to pay $154,000 in restitution.
"Rendón never arranged for travel to Cuba, but used the funds to purchase a Mercedes, pay his rent and hire a divorce lawyer," AG Edmund Brown Jr. said.
In 2006, Rendón began advertising his travel agency, USA to Cuba, in religious magazines. He said he could arrange trips for Jewish and Greek Orthodox Americans who wanted to visit members of their faith in Cuba.
Approximately 41 individuals, including 20 senior citizens, responded to the ads and purchased travel packages priced at up to $4,000 each. Once Rendón received payment, he falsely informed his victims that the trip had been cancelled by the U.S. Treasury Department and then ignored demands for refunds.   
The case was referred for prosecution and Rendón was arrested in April 2008 on 78 charges of felony. For more details, click here.
–Renato Pérez Pizarro, with thanks to Lesley Clark.

Young Cuban pianist prepares debut disc

Alfredo Rodríguez is playing a concert today (Oct. 3) at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. A profile of the 24-year-old Cuban pianist in the Los Angeles Times describes him as a "classically trained [musician who] can ad-lib his way from traditional Cuban son and modern jazz to Bartok and Iranian popular tunes, in a manner that suggests Art Tatum by way of Ernesto Lecuona."
Nicely phrased.
Rodríguez defected to the United States in January of this year, while accompanying his father on a tour to Mérida, Mexico. He is recording a debut album with composer-producer Quincy Jones, who has become his mentor and teacher.
Rodríguez is "an absolute monster," Jones told The Times. "He composes and writes all day long. He played so hard on that piano [one] day, he broke the C string." The first time Jones heard Rodríguez play, "it knocked me on my booty, man."
To read more of what Rodríguez is all about, click here.
–Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Cuba concert backlash for Cucu Diamantes

Cucu Diamantes, the Cuban-born, New York-based singer who was one of 14 artists to join Juanes in his enormous concert in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución, is suffering some backlash from an unexpected quarter – the New Jersey public school system. The singer, whose real name is Ileana Padrón, was supposed to perform at the opening of Union City High School last Saturday. However, on Thursday the Union City Board of Education cancelled the show, saying the city's heavily Cuban community would be "enraged" at their young people being entertained by an artist who had performed in Cuba.
Here's the main text of the email to Padrón's agent from Suzanne Lavelle, an attorney for the Union City Board of Education.
"This letter will serve to confirm Ms. DiNardo’s conversation with you on Thursday, September 24, 2009, wherein the Union City Board of Education cancelled the contract for the Cucu Diamantes’ performance at the Union City High School on September 26, 2009.
"As advised during said conversation, it is unfortunate that we must cancel the contract; however, due to your client’s recent performance at the Paz Sin Fronteras in Cuba, our community, which is comprised of approximately 85 % Cuban immigrants, became enraged at the thought of the High School supporting an artist who would perform in Cuba. The community perceived Ms. Diamantes’ performance in Cuba as support of the current political regime in Cuba. The community came together and threatened civil unrest, protests and the like at the grand opening gala if the High School went ahead with its plans to allow Ms. Diamantes to perform. Clearly, this is not the atmosphere we envisioned for the grand opening of our new High School." [Italics mine]
Amazing. Another Cuban-American city has usurped Miami's reputation for reactionary backlash. Here we got rid of the Cuba Ordinance, which prohibited local arts groups from presenting Cuban artists, years ago. Concert supporters outnumbered concert protesters on Calle Ocho two to one. The hundreds of thousands of young Cubans on the plaza in Havana weren't enraged. And there were certainly tens of thousands of Cubans avidly watching the show on TV in Miami.
Somebody should ask the New Jersey school board – did New Jerseyans protest when Springsteen sang for East Germans at the Berlin Wall? What would the Boss have done if they had?
Juanes expressed indignation and anger on his Twitter blog.
“Es sorprendente que esto pase en Nueva Jersey, estado hermano de Nueva York, donde siempre se han respetado todas las libertades propias de un individuo en un país democrático… vivimos en un país democrático, donde todas las opiniones pueden y deben coexistir,” he said.
“Eso es para los que hablan de represión y falta de libertad… y más vergüenza aún viniendo de una escuela… absurdo total. Qué tal el ejemplo de educación que quieren dejar, qué mensaje tan negativo, y eso, que estamos en USA, donde sí hay "libertad". ¡Me da risa!”
In Cuba, Radio Baraguá made a gargantuan leap of logic to blame the cancellation on the loooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnggggg arm of Emilio Estefan, head of the Miami Mafia's musical arm, and Ricardo Alarcón, head of radio chain SBS and Miami's Mega TV (whose influential talkshow host, María Elvira Salazar, literally wept with gratitude as she thanked singer Olga Tañón – on behalf of the Cuban-American community – for her performance in Havana.). Apparently blaming Union City would require too big a propaganda shift.
–JORDAN LEVIN.

Western Union is ready to $end tran$fer$

The Western Union Company on Wednesday announced that it is ready to implement the new rules issued by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on sending money to Cuba.
In its announcement, WU says that "while an affidavit is still required, the new OFAC guidelines, effective Sept. 3, 2009,
• allow persons in the U.S. to send remittances to 'close relatives' in Cuba, including aunts, uncles, cousins, and second cousins who are nationals of Cuba, and
• remove limits on the total amount and frequency of remittances sent to Cuba."
Western Union says it has 3,000 agent locations authorized to send money transfers from the U.S. to Cuba and more than 100 agent locations in Cuba. For more information, call 1-888-984-CUBA (in digits, that's 1-888-984-2822).

A Young Cuban Who Rocks

 Felice Gorordo, one of the co-founders of the Cuban youth movement "Raices de Esperanza" will be featured today (Friday, Aug. 7) on CNN. The title of the segment: Young People Who Rock. 

       Gorordo is a 26-year-old graduate of Belen Jesuit High School and Georgetown University. He was chosen a few months ago by Alliance for Youth Movement, a project by Facebook and Google to celebrate youth who use social networking for good causes. Shortly afterward, he got a nod from CNN, too.
       The five-minute interview will air on CNN.com Live at 3:30 p.m. and on TV as a filler segment throughout the weekend. The show, Gorordo reports, is a weekly interview series focused on people under 30 — from CEOs to entertainers to athletes to community and political leaders — who are doing remarkable things. He was interviewed by CNN anchor Nicole Lapin.
       His group's latest project is to collect old cell phones, refurbish them and send them to youth in Cuba to "boost their connectivity."
     "The purpose when we first got started with Raices was that many of us were studying outside of Miami, and were kind of going through an identity crisis," he told Cuban Colada. "We created a forum to find our own voice in the cause. Our focus is to empower young people."
     Gorordo's dad was a Pedro Pan who arrived in 1961, and his mother came to South Florida in the early 1970s after her father worked in a labor camp in exchange for her exit papers.

    Gorordo is a national accounts manager for Liberty Power, a Fort Lauderdale energy company.

    "I am truly humbled and honored," he says.

-Frances Robles

Los Angeles-Havana flights have resumed

Charter flights from Los Angeles to Havana resumed on Tuesday after a 5-year hiatus. Continental Airlines Boeing 737s with capacity for 150 passengers will leave Los Angeles every Tuesday at 11 a.m. (PST) on a five-hour trip to the Cuban capital. Price of a round-trip ticket: $689.
"We are excited to resume the nonstop flights out of LAX to Havana that were in such high demand" before President Bush imposed harsh travel restrictions in 2004, said Michael Zuccato, general manager of Cuba Travel Services, which charters the flights. President Obama relaxed those restrictions in April.
According to Zuccato, Cuba Travel hopes to attract journalists, government officials and researchers who qualify for travel, as well as sports teams, religious organizations, educational facilities and other organizations or individuals issued a license to travel to Cuba. The company has been in business since 2000.
About 100,000 Cubans live in California, 85,000 of them in Los Angeles County.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Fidel: Pedro Pan was a 'diabolical' trick

Operation Pedro Pan was "one of the most repugnant acts of moral aggression ever carried out" against Cuba, "a low and repugnant blow," writes Fidel Castro in his latest article in the Cuban media.
The extraction of 14,000 children from the island in the early 1960s, after the triumph of the revolution, was a "diabolical, clandestine operation" concocted by the Central Intelligence Agency in cahoots with Msgr. Bryan Walsh, "an American Catholic priest who answered to the Bishop of Miami," Castro writes.
The CIA claimed that the children's parents were about to lose their parental rights to the revolutionary government, thus triggering the exodus, yet "none of the children needed to be saved."
Castro quotes the son of one of the creators of the plan as saying that Operation Pedro Pan "was a sinister, immoral trick designed and dreamed up by the CIA." Even today, the agency refuses to declassify documents related to the children's exodus, Castro says.
"The affair smells so bad that they don't want to lift the lid," he comments. "[It] was a maneuver of cynical publicity that [Joseph] Goebbels himself, the Nazi propaganda minister, would have envied." To read the entire denunciation, in English, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

CANF wants 'a new direction' in US policy

The Cuban American National Foundation is asking the Obama administration to expand relations with the Cuban government and  funnel more money to the Cuban people, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The CANF's vision of "a new direction for U.S.-Cuba policy" comes in a 14-page document that, among other proposals,
• recommends an increase in how much money Cuban-Americans can send to their relatives in Cuba;
• says that the 1997 federal ban on cash should be rescinded;
• advocates an increase in private aid for pro-democracy groups and a plan that allows Cuban-Americans "to send cash, building materials, agricultural implements and provide services to independent, private entrepreneurs";
• facilitates travel to Cuba for cultural, academic or humanitarian purposes, and
• identifies several channels for diplomatic engagement.
"We have to [...] change the emphasis to the Cuban people, because they are going to be the ones who change things in Cuba," CANF president Francisco Hernández told The Times. "We have to adapt. And that's what we have done." To read the entire story, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Tampa bids for air-charter permission

A Florida legislator is asking Washington to allow U.S.-Cuba charter flights from Tampa.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Tampa) wrote to U.S. Customs and Border Protection asking that Tampa be permitted to establish an air bridge to Havana, as Miami, New York and Los Angeles have.
That would increase direct air-charter flights from the U.S. from three to 8 or 10 a day and raise the number of American travelers from 10,000 per month to nearly 30,000 per month, The Tampa Tribune reported Saturday.
"The addition of Tampa International Airport as a departure point could be one less burden the [Cuban-American] families would have to face," the Miami-born Castor wrote. For details, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.