Opinion

Cuba’s Latest Sports Defectors

We’re now more than accustomed to losing many of the luminaries of our decimated baseball teams. Before and until recently, we were taught to label these players traitors. We would never find out what had become of them, in their careers abroad or personal lives.

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Could We Have Cheap Organic Foods in Cuba?

I often ask myself how far the stupidity of Cuban leaders can go, but I can never quite predict those limits – they always end up surprising me. One case in point is the recent measures taken against street vendors to try and control the price of farm products. As is customary, their solution was to restrict and limit…rather than socialize.

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On Raul Castro’s Trip to France

Yesterday, all that mattered was democracy in Cuba and fundamental human rights that were being trampled on. Today, none of that matters, only that “which unites us” does (i.e. business opportunities). I am put off by all extremes, I prefer a balanced and just position.

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Cuba: The Party of Defeat

Though defined as the revolutionary vanguard of Cuban society, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) has never played such a role. For decades, Fidel Castro was the main obstacle to the normal functioning of the PCC. When he had no choice but to hand power over to his brother, there was the possibility that Raul Castro would choose to change this situation, albeit gradually and without endangering the country’s power structure through such changes.

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Raul Castro’s Machiavellian Ways

For many years, the dance-like maneuvers of Fidel and Raul Castro’s international politics were studied as closely as the works of Machiavelli. This is not unfounded in the case of Raul, who gets much more for far less, having given others lessons in pragmatism since his days at the helm of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR).

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Why in Cuba Does a Rapist Await Trial Outside of Jail?

On the night of Friday, January 29, Cuba’s Educational Channel aired an episode of the police series Tras la huella (“Chasing Clues”) titled “Tarara.” Not two minutes had gone by before my mother and I realized it was a dramatization of an incident that shook the country in 1992.

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Sister Cities: Havana and New Orleans

As a citizen of the United States and a resident of metropolitan New Orleans, Louisiana, I am excited about the easement of restrictions and the thawing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, two estranged neighbors. New Orleans has several Cuban restaurants and many Havana-styled cigar bars, as both cities are sister-cities in that they share busy seaports, grow sugarcane, have humid weather, endure mosquitos, and are regularly threatened by hurricanes in the Caribbean. (8 photos)

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