Go to Cuba with Ed Rabel

06/09/2022

Washington — The U.S. Transportation Department made it easier for Americans to travel to Cuba, lifting flight restrictions that were established during the Trump administration.

The restrictions had prevented U.S. airline flights and chartered flights from going to Cuban cities other than Havana. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a letter to the Transportation Department on Tuesday asking it to revoke the restrictions, and the agency followed through Wednesday.

Blinken said opening up flights to Cuba was "in support of the Cuban people and in the foreign policy interests of the United States." He said that once the Transportation Department followed through on his request, "scheduled and charter air services between the United States and Cuban airports may resume effective immediately."

The Biden administration announced last month that it would expand flights to Cuba, take steps to loosen restrictions on U.S. travelers to the island and lift restrictions on money that immigrants can send to people on the island.

The administration said it would also move to reinstate the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program, which has a backlog of more than 20,000 applications, and increase consular services and visa processing.

"With these actions, we aim to support Cubans' aspirations for freedom and for greater economic opportunities so that they can lead successful lives at home," State Department spokesman Ned Price said last month.

04/28/2018

My next trip to Cuba is set to go on July 11 for a week of fun and frivolity not to mention education. So far, a group of 10 is in my party😀

10/25/2017

MEXICO CITY — Ernesto Che Guevara died 50 years ago in the wilds of Bolivia, near Vallegrande. He was captured in Quebrada del Yuro, a barren ravine close to the town of La Higuera, where he spent his last night in a small schoolhouse, which is still there. The following morning, he was executed, on the orders of the Bolivian president and the Central Intelligence Agency officer present during his interrogation. His body was flown to Vallegrande, where it was exhibited to the press. That was when the iconic photograph of a Christ-like Guevara was taken and made famous, along with the photo Alberto Korda shot in Havana in 1960, of Guevara with his starred beret. It appears today on millions of T-shirts and posters all over the world — a world he would not recognize.

Half a century since his death, Guevara’s legacy and relevance is practically nil, in terms of his aspirations and achievements. Paradoxically, though, he became a symbol of historical changes that he did not identify with, that he did not fight for and that only came of age after his death. He is remembered far more for the momentous events that took place less than a year after he perished, when in 1968 hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets in dozens of capitals and universities across the globe and changed the way they, their children and today their grandchildren live.

Guevara, an Argentine doctor, stood for various ideas and causes during his lifetime. All failed or were discarded. Although initially he was a passionate advocate of the young Cuban Revolution’s alliance with the Soviet Union, by the mid-1960s he became a critic of the crucial role Moscow was playing in Cuba. That mattered little. By July of 1967, when Premier Alexei Kosygin visited Havana, Fidel Castro had aligned his regime unconditionally with the U.S.S.R. In August 1968, Castro supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the end of the Prague Spring. Similarly, Guevara opposed Cuba’s former dependence on sugar cane. But by 1970, Castro had committed his country to producing 10 million tons of sugar for the Soviet Union, disrupting the island economy, yet nonetheless failing to achieve his goal.

Guevara also fought for the creation of a “new man” under socialism in Cuba, and against the vices of the former regime, centered on tourism, prostitution and gambling. Little did he know that not only would there be no new man in Cuba but also, nearly 60 years after the revolution, one of Cuba’s main sources of income continues to be tourism. Widespread prostitution has endured for half a century, at levels not dissimilar to those during the Batista era, and thousands of Cubans attempt to leave the island nearly every day, any way they can.

Guevara was known for seeking to spread the Cuban Revolution. He sought to do so as an insightful but ultimately mistaken observer and participant in what actually occurred in the Sierra Maestra: revolution through the barrel of a gun. He preached the armed struggle to hundreds, if not thousands, of young enthusiasts across Latin America and in Africa; he gave his life for it, and they lost theirs. Until 1979 in Nicaragua, not one of the fires he or Castro tried to light throughout the region survived, let alone burst into flames. The results were not glorious snapshots of the barbudos entering Havana in January of 1959 but rather military coups, torture, disappearances and thousands of student lives lost in vain.

When the left finally reached power in many Latin American nations, its path and features did not at all resemble Guevara’s vision. Gifted labor union and indigenous leaders, charismatic intellectuals, scheming military officers and persistent mayors and legislators made their way gradually up the ranks of their political parties, their electoral systems and their countries’ governments. Once in office, they did not govern like Guevara would have wished. They were everything but idealistic revolutionaries: social-democratic reformers, moderate globalists, nationalist demagogues, corrupt couples or dynasties and would-be dictators. Some extracted millions of their countrymen from poverty and inequality. Others strengthened democratic institutions. Others plunged their countrymen into destitution and violence as in Venezuela.

But the millions of young people everywhere who wear Guevara’s effigy on their chest are a product of what he came to symbolize. The students who took to the streets in Berkeley and Riverside Heights, in Mexico City and the Left Bank, in Prague and Milan, just months after his death, were already carrying posters and banners of the martyred revolutionary. They, unlike their hero, did largely change the world, though obviously not in the manner he would have hoped. Theirs was an existential, cultural, generational and antiwar rebellion that laid the groundwork for the freedoms we enjoy today, at least in the Western nations, Latin America and parts of Asia.

Women’s freedom to use their bodies as they see fit and to fight back against countless abuses; the freedom for people of color to elect who they wish and fight racism where it shows its face; the freedom for university students to participate in the design and ex*****on of educational plans; the expanding possibility of people with different sexual orientations to come out from the shadows: All these joys of life in the 21st century stem, in one fashion or another, from those years in the 1960s.
Guevara became a cultural icon, not a political or ideological one. Today’s world is an enormously better one than where the generation that followed him grew up in. It is far less poor, less unequal and far more tolerant, diverse and enlightened.

So which Guevara should we recall? The autocrat who executed hundreds of Batista collaborators outside Havana in 1959? The disheveled guerrillero captured under humiliating circumstances in Bolivia? The warrior whose irreverence is a symbol all over the world? Or the unwilling icon of the cultural revolution of 1968, to which we owe the lives we live today? He would have preferred being remembered as the martyred revolutionary, but those who survive him today can only thank him, despite himself, for becoming the cultural icon he did. That is his legacy, relevance and glory.

Jorge G. Castañeda, Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, is a professor at New York University and the author of “Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara.”

The causes he stood for during his lifetime failed, but he inspired a generation that changed the world.

09/18/2017

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering closing the recently reopened United States Embassy in Havana after 21 Americans associated with the embassy experienced a host of unexplained health problems.
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that such a closing was “under evaluation.”
“It’s a very serious issue with respect to the harm that certain individuals have suffered,” he said. “We’ve brought some of those people home. It’s under review.”
The Trump administration has already reversed crucial pieces of what President Trump has called a “terrible and misguided deal” with Cuba that was struck during the Obama administration, but closing the embassy would be the most dramatic action yet to return the relationship to its Cold War deep freeze.

Closing the embassy would be the most dramatic action yet by the Trump administration to return the Cuba relationship to its Cold War deep freeze.

04/01/2017

Cuba may still be under embargo with little access to the internet, but that technology deficit hasn’t stopped some of the country’s artists from venturing into computer animation.

The art form was a rarity there just a decade ago, and a lack of resources and money remain a problem. “The majority of the animators in Cuba are students in the design or art schools,” said Ermitis Blanco, founder and head animator of ÑOOo Productions in Havana. “Once you graduate, it’s not easy to continue. There are few people who keep going.”

Still, many animators have solved their internet and equipment problems by improvising. “The software we have is pirated; there are no licenses here,” Mr. Blanco said. “We do most of our work in Adobe. We have software that I don’t even know what country it’s from.”

Early in the Cuban revolution, the government invested in the country’s fledgling movie industry for the first time. This gave an artist like Juan Padrón, Cuba’s answer to Walt Disney, the means to make short propaganda films and features about a Cuban hero of the working class, Elpidio Valdés, and an allegorical take on capitalists as creatures of the night in the popular “Vampires in Havana.” But after years of economic crises and slumps, financing for the arts slowed, and that also contributed to a delay in the introduction of computer animation. Only in 2014 did state-sponsored computer animators release their first feature-length film, “Meñique.”

Limited internet access, equipment and financing mean that computer-animation artists in Cuba have to make do to create their thoughtful shorts.

03/15/2017

More than a half-century after the severance of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, both countries have reopened their embassies, and Americans are once again welcome to discover this politically and culturally unique country. As the doors to Cuba swing open, be among the first to experience Cuba’s colorful history and customs before the country is overrun with American-style fast-food chains. We offer you an opportunity to explore, analyze, and soak up the rich history and intriguing socio-political significance of Cuba in the world. Drawing on my experience of hundreds of expeditions to the island as a network television news correspondent (CBS/NBC), you will have the opportunity to meet the Cuban people, discover how the restoration of relations with the U.S. may change the island nation, visit old and new Havana, and journey to the countryside and coastal regions.

03/09/2017

In cooperation with the Episcopal Church of Charleston, WV, let's go to Cuba June 3-11. Visit historic sites and soak up Cuban culture in a week-long, affordable tour that I will lead. Vamos a Cuba!
Contact St. John's Episcopal Church, Charleston, WV for details

12/04/2016

SANTIAGO de CUBA — Bringing to an end nine days of national mourning, the burial of Fidel Castro got underway on Sunday morning in a cemetery in this coastal city where, 63 years ago, he began his socialist revolution.
The Cuban government has closely guarded the details of the funeral service, which was private and closed to the news media, but the ceremony followed a short cortege through the city and a 21-gun salute, and Mr. Castro’s remains were expected to be entombed near the burial site of José Martí, the 19th-century Cuban poet and independence fighter, perhaps the only other native son held in such great esteem by Cubans.
It made for a subdued ending to a busy week of remembrance marked by large, government-orchestrated tributes in the country’s public squares and nonstop television and radio coverage that provided a continual soundtrack in households and businesses across this nation of 11 million.
The mourning period was a time of reflection for the nation, as it considered Mr. Castro’s life and legacy, measuring the achievements of “Castroismo” against its undelivered promises.
“Nothing’s perfect — it’s taken a lot of work, that’s true,” said Liliam Dominguez, 60, a professor of psychology and pedagogy at the University of Havana, as students and faculty gathered for a memorial march at the university campus last week. “There are good things and bad things. But in the balance, for me, what we have had weighs more than what we haven’t had.”
Like many Cubans are quick to do, she extolled the virtues of the country’s free health care and education systems. Her father was from a poor family and became a manual laborer in the sugar industry at 15, before the revolution. But a generation later, Ms. Dominguez and her two siblings earned university degrees — thanks, she said, to Mr. Castro’s initiatives.
Many spoke of Mr. Castro this week in terms befitting a father figure. But Mr. Castro’s long illness, which compelled him to cede power to his brother Raúl Castro a decade ago, seemed to blunt the emotional impact of his death. The nation’s response was generally stoic, with public displays of unchecked emotion rare.
“For me, he’s going to be alive forever,” said Julia Piloto Cuellar, 53, who attended one of several public memorial gatherings last week in Havana, the capital. “He left physically, but he’s going to be with us forever.”
While analysts abroad speculated about the possible effects of Mr. Castro’s death on Cuba’s domestic and foreign policy, Cuban citizens appeared to keep expectations in check, perhaps because hopes for speedy improvements at other historic junctures, like the re-establishing of diplomatic relations with the United States in 2014, had gone unrealized for most people.
The government, meanwhile, harnessed Mr. Castro’s death to reaffirm its socialist program, urging people to honor his legacy by redoubling their commitment to the ideals he espoused and the country he built. The government even placed logbooks in schools and other locations throughout the country and invited Cubans to sign an oath of loyalty to the revolution’s ideals.
“This is undefeated Fidel, who summons us with his example and with the demonstration that, yes, we could; yes, we can; and yes, we will be able to overcome any obstacle, threat or turmoil in our firm commitment to build socialism in Cuba,” President Raúl Castro said during an address to a large gathering here in Santiago on Saturday night.
The public events during the mourning period, as expected, drew vast, yet restrained, crowds. Perhaps the most dramatic homage was a three-day cortege that carried Mr. Castro’s ashes hundreds of miles to Santiago from Havana, reversing the route that he and his guerrillas took after overthrowing the forces of Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
Hundreds of thousands of people lined the route, with some traveling long distances and many hours for a glimpse of the modest convoy and the small, flag-draped wooden box containing Mr. Castro’s ashes, which sat in a glass case on a trailer hitched to a military jeep.
Esteban Caraballo, 63, a maintenance worker at an agricultural studies institute, rode in a caravan of 36 buses that had been provided by his town to carry spectators to the cortege route. They were waiting roadside at a spot east of Havana by 2 a.m. one morning last week, even though the cortege was not expected to arrive until after 8 a.m. People held small plastic Cuban flags on wooden sticks or clutched images of Mr. Castro to their chests.
“We’re here to accompany our commander,” Mr. Caraballo said. “Even though our commander has died, he will always accompany us.”
The cortege came into view at about 8:30 a.m. and, as the crowd went quiet, the convoy passed and, a second later, disappeared from view. The bystanders walked in silence to their vehicles and drove away.
For those who could not make it to the cortege route, the entire trip was covered live on television and radio, which is how most Cubans saw it, including Maria Aleisy Hernandez Ruiz, 71, a retiree in the municipality of Santa Cruz del Norte, who kept her television on for much of the week.
“A man so large in a box so small — it really impacts you,” she said. “He was such a big man, with his big chest.”
The cross-country caravan was bookended by two large memorial events, one at Revolution Plaza in the capital on Tuesday night and the other at Revolution Plaza in Santiago on Saturday night. Both were attended by heads of state from around the world and other high-level representatives of foreign governments, many from developing countries that admired Mr. Castro’s socialist idealism and pugnaciousness toward the United States.
The state’s engineering of the week’s homage included a nine-day ban on alcohol and a shutdown of Havana’s nightclubs and music venues, as well as a near-total dedication of state-run newspapers, television and radio to tributes to Mr. Castro and often breathless coverage of the week’s events.
“He is now absolutely tranquil,” a broadcaster intoned as the cortege set off from Havana on Wednesday. “A sad nation, but a committed nation.”
Dissent within Cuba was, unsurprisingly, muted.
At a gathering of students and faculty on the campus of the University of Havana to honor Mr. Castro, not everyone attended with an equal degree of conviction.
A professor allowed that she was not exactly in mourning, noting with a sardonic laugh that she was not wearing black. Indeed, she wasn’t. She was wearing a blouse decorated with colorful flowers.
The professor, who requested anonymity because she was wary of repercussions from her colleagues and the authorities, said her view of Castroism was mitigated by the ordeals of scarcity and hardship, citing food rationing and low salaries.
But voices like this were overwhelmed by the outpouring of praise, often unbridled, for Mr. Castro and the country he built, however flawed.
In conversations across the country this week, many spoke about the country’s free health care and educational systems, the high literacy rate, the low infant mortality rate and the government’s efforts to combat racism.
But Mr. Castro’s greatest legacy may well be the deep and unyielding national pride he cultivated, in part by unifying the Cuban people against a common nemesis of the United States government and its trade embargo.
“We aren’t fearful,” said José Manuel Perez, 64, a merchant mariner who was standing in a long line under a hot sun to view a shrine to Mr. Castro in Havana’s Revolution Plaza last week. Earlier that day, President-elect Donald J. Trump had threatened on Twitter to reverse the rapprochement carefully brokered by Raúl Castro and President Obama.
The news elicited a shrug from Mr. Perez. “If we lived for 50 years with it,” he said of the animosity between Washington and Havana, “we can live 50 years more.”
“Another country couldn’t do it,” he added. “But we can. We’re a nation that has always fought.”

Bringing to an end nine days of national mourning, Mr. Castro’s private funeral service in Santiago de Cuba made for a subdued end to a week of tributes.

12/03/2016

A Nation in Mourning: Images of Cuba After Fidel Castro
By TOMAS MUNITA, MAURICIO LIMA and AZAM AHMEDDEC. 3, 2016
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Cuba declared nine days of mourning after Fidel Castro’s death, a period that will culminate in his funeral on Sunday. Photographers for The New York Times crossed the nation to capture the mood of Cubans grappling with life without him.

Photographers for The New York Times crossed the country to capture the mood of Cubans grappling with life without Mr. Castro.

11/29/2016

HAVANA — It seemed like a fresh moment in a long and troubled history.
Thousands of Cubans bid farewell to Fidel Castro on Monday, filing into a plaza where he often railed against American imperialism. The same morning, the first regularly scheduled flight from the United States in more than 50 years landed in Havana, a potent example of the newly opened doors between the former rivals.
But President-elect Donald J. Trump warned on Monday that the push to build ties with Cuba after decades of animosity could quickly be wiped away.
“If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal,” he said on Twitter.
Mr. Trump’s message threatened to end one of President Obama’s signature foreign policy initiatives. Mr. Obama’s moves to relax restrictions on commerce, trade and financial transactions with Cuba were never part of a single “deal,” but rather a decision that engagement with the island nation would bring more change than decades of isolation.
“Change is going to come to Cuba,” Mr. Obama said shortly after announcing the thaw in December 2014. “It has to.”
Since then, the number of American visitors to Cuba has risen quickly, with hotels in Havana sometimes being booked nearly a year in advance, often with large American tour groups. Billions of dollars in goods from American stores like Walmart and Best Buy, financed on American credit cards, make their way to Cuba every year, experts estimate. Restaurants, cellphones and the internet have changed the rhythms and expectations of Cuban life.
President Obama met with the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, in Havana in March. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
But critics have long attacked Mr. Obama, saying he gave too much to the Cubans too soon, without first demanding that they open up their society and usher in an era of political freedom.
Now, after two years of presidential directives by Mr. Obama to strengthen ties with Cuba, and millions of dollars in American investments, a question remains: Can the détente be rolled back?
Even some Obama administration officials concede that the thaw is highly vulnerable to reversal because much of it has been accomplished through executive action. Mr. Trump could, for example, order the State Department to review its decision last year to remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, or suspend diplomatic relations that were resumed last summer with the opening of embassies in Havana and Washington.
But Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, argued on Monday that Mr. Trump would have a hard time reversing a policy that had already yielded business deals and benefited the people of both countries. There will soon be 110 daily flights from the United States to Cuba, he noted, not to mention the investments by cruise, tour and hotel operators to prepare for those visits.
“Unrolling all of that is much more complicated than just the stroke of a pen,” Mr. Earnest said, adding, “It’s just not as simple as one tweet might make it seem.”
The Cuban government remained uncharacteristically silent on similar threats Mr. Trump made during the campaign, choosing instead to issue a congratulatory note after his election. But when Mr. Trump takes office, and his words become policy, “the Cuban government will have to respond, but hopefully with moderation,” said Ricardo Torres, a professor of economics at the University of Havana.
Professor Torres said that there was much to be lost if the concessions were reversed, and that Havana would exercise restraint in its dealings with the Trump administration. But Mr. Trump’s antagonistic posture could embolden those in the Cuban government who have always been suspicious of the Americans and were against the warming relations brokered by President Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother.
“There’s no question this is a bad start to things,” Professor Torres said as thousands of students streamed by to bid goodbye to Fidel Castro, adding that Mr. Trump’s “belligerent attitude and animosity gives more reasons for suspicion and confirms the belief that this warming of relations wasn’t real.”
Mr. Trump has placed Mauricio Claver-Carone, a lobbyist who has been a harsh critic of Mr. Obama’s opening to Cuba, on his transition team for the Treasury Department. Under Mr. Obama, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which handles sanctions, has issued several rounds of regulations to remove impediments for American companies and individuals seeking to do business with Cuba and to travel there.
In an opinion piece in The Miami Herald this month, Mr. Claver-Carone argued that Mr. Obama’s “new course for Cuba has made a bad situation worse.”
Human rights activists have long complained that the Cuban government simply shifted its strategy regarding political prisoners after Mr. Obama’s détente. No longer are Cuban dissidents jailed for prolonged sentences, activists say. Instead, they are now rounded up for a few hours or a few days, according to the Cuban Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission, which logs every detention.
There were 9,125 detentions from January through October this year, the commission said — more than four times as many as in all of 2010. The highest number of arrests, 1,416, occurred in March, when Mr. Obama made his historic visit to Cuba, becoming the first sitting American president to do so in 88 years.
“To be clear, the president-elect wants to see freedom in Cuba for Cubans,” said Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump.
Still, Elizardo Sánchez, who runs the commission, said Mr. Obama’s more open policy had helped more than it had hurt. “The personal contact that comes from all the travel has a huge impact in terms of fighting propaganda,” he said. “In a closed society, the door can only be opened a bit at a time. It’s going very slowly, but it’s happening.”
Others took Mr. Trump’s words as an assault that threatened to restart the kind of hostilities that the thaw was meant to end.
“For a lot of people, it is an open threat to our sovereignty and history,” said Juan Alejandro Triana, also a professor at the University of Havana. “If the government of the president-elect threatens these things, we will respond.”
And yet, with the loss of Mr. Castro, Cuba’s response would most likely be muted, and easier for the world to ignore. Without their leader, for many, Mr. Trump’s comments seemed reminiscent of the longstanding policy of confrontation between the two nations.
“We don’t have anyone else like him right now,” Randy Calderon, a biology student at Havana University, said of Mr. Castro as he stood in a crowd of thousands paying tribute on university grounds.
Inside the law school, where Mr. Castro studied, a small shrine had been set up showing him as a student leader, with posters filled with comments from students, many expressing a desire for Mr. Castro to live forever as the country’s “eternal comandante.”
Even Cubans who challenge the ideology of “Fidelismo” express support for some of the revolution’s achievements, especially universal health care, and they often call for exactly the kind of hybrid of socialism and capitalism that the recent détente with the United States has expanded.
Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a former Cuban diplomat, said the urgency to lock those changes into place had only intensified with Mr. Trump’s victory. “That type of bullying won’t work with Cuba,” he said. “Mr. Trump should remember the main reason President Obama changed the policy and made the agreement with Raúl Castro: The previous policy had failed.”
Financially speaking, the biggest and most immediate impact of reversing détente would be in the travel and hospitality sector in Cuba. The surge in American visitors to Cuba since the easing of travel restrictions has been a boon to hotels, transportation and the restaurant scene in Havana.
Reversing some of Mr. Obama’s decisions could be legally difficult. Companies like JetBlue, Starwood and Airbnb have invested millions of dollars in time and resources to enter the Cuban market, and did so with the American government’s blessing.

“In theory, Donald Trump has the ability to reverse almost everything Obama has done,” said Matthew D. Aho, an adviser on Cuba at the New York law firm Akerman. “In practice, that reversal would be far more complicated from a legal process than most observers realize.”
Niuris Ysabel Higueras Martínez runs Atelier, a popular restaurant in Havana where Michelle Obama dined with her daughters during the president’s trip this year. Ms. Martínez is one of the nearly 500,000 private-sector businesspeople who have entered the work force since the government began loosening employment restrictions in 2008.
In 2015, she saw her business increase by 50 percent, she said, the largest rise since she opened in 2010. For the most part, the increase was a result of American visitors, who now make up some 85 percent of her clientele.
“It would be a major blow to us,” Ms. Martínez said of Mr. Trump’s threats to reverse the détente. “Still, while we really need the American market, it won’t be the end of the world. We aren’t going to die.”
The debate is unfolding amid a fight among influential Cuban-Americans who are vying for the president-elect’s ear. On one side are hard-liners who advocate clamping down on the relationship and insisting on concessions in exchange for any United States engagement. On the other is a growing group that is pressing for further opening.
“He’s surrounded by people who are only giving him one point of view — a very straight, hard-line approach that says we need to go back to the old approach — and it would be wise for him to be hearing the other side and the benefits of continuing to engage Cuba,” said Carlos Gutierrez, a Republican former commerce secretary who heads the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s business council on Cuba. “To just get rid of that strikes me as going well overboard.”
After Mr. Castro’s death, he added, Cubans “would feel like when they needed us most, we turned our backs on them.”

In a post on Twitter, he said he would “terminate” the pact President Obama made if Cuba is unwilling to make “a better deal for the Cuban people.”