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How Should US Prepare for a Post Castro Cuba?

LINK MIAMI, Nov. 27, 2005 — From the Bay of Pigs to poison cigars, American attempts to rid the world of Fidel Castro have repeatedly been met with embarrassment and failure.

After 46 years, Castro's wheezing revolution has even outlived his cold-war ally, the once-mighty Soviet Union.

Now, amid reports of Castro's fragile health and conflicting expectations about the shape of a post-Castro Cuba, the U.S. government is facing a choice about how aggressively it should press for democratic reforms in Havana after Castro's reign. Top Cuban officials, for their part, are reacting with alarm and bracing for a possible new round of American meddling.

Those in favor of taking bold action — namely, trying to stop Raul Castro from stepping into his brother's shoes — cite post-9/11 concerns that any failing or hostile nation may become a launching pad for terrorists seeking to attack the United States.

December 20, 2005 in El Futuro | Permalink | Comments (1)

Cuba Converting Cane-growing Areas for Food and Reforestation

Havana, Sep 9 (Prensa Latina)
Over 300,000 hectares of cane will be replaced with other cultivation in the second stage of the restructuring process undertaken by the Cuban Ministry of Sugar (MINAZ), called task Alvaro Reynoso.

The lands will be sown with food, vegetables, seasonings, fruits and timber-yielding trees to strengthen production for the domestic market and reforestation in the country, which has faced excessive exploitation of its forests since 1958.

As in the first phase of task Alvaro Reynoso, salary and employment or study support will be guaranteed, and are evidence of appropriate social and industrial assistance, informed the document discussed with sugar producing workers and their families.

Through the information provision and discussion process, farmers and agronomists learned that transport, health services, and food provision will continue under the charge of the Ministry of Sugar.= Luis Manuel Avila, first Vice Minister of the Sugar Industry, informed workers in the municipality of Melena del Sur in Havana province, that more than 2500 social constructions will be built in areas where sugar refineries have been closed down.

Tania Varela, Georgina Brito and other citizens expressed to Prensa Latina their confidence in the measures suggested and approved at the public meeting, attended by officials and authorities from the Ministry and the municipality...

September 11, 2005 in El Futuro, La Tierra | Permalink | Comments (1)

What the future may hold for Cuba after Castro

June 12, 2005.  BY TODD LEWAN.  AP
MIAMI -- On this side of the Puddle, as the sunlit sea between Florida and Cuba is known to some Cuban exiles here, the biggest news splash in quite some time was the fall of Fidel Castro.

It happened last October -- although clearly, it was not the sort of fall for which Castro's enemies have long hoped. Fidel simply fell while descending a stage in Santa Clara, where he had just given one of his gargantuan public addresses. With his bodyguards looking on, Castro went into a forward plunge that left the Cuban leader with a broken left knee and a hairline fracture to his upper right arm.

Helped to a folding chair, the 78-year-old president tried to make light of his spill. ''As you can see,'' Castro told television viewers, ''I can still talk.''

On this side of the Puddle, talk of the fall was anything but light.

If nothing else, Castro's misstep and the flood of media coverage that followed it had Cuban Americans of all ages, incomes, ethnicities and political stripes thinking long and hard about two undeniable facts.

*Fidel -- maker of revolution, torturer of 10 U.S. presidents, indomitable icon of the communist world -- is old, and getting older.

*Someday, Fidel's Island will be Fidel-less -- which, as it happens, is worrisome not only to Cubans who have remained on the island, but to many of their U.S.-based compatriots.

Military has tight grip
.
Who, or what, exiles wonder, will be arriving with the dawn? And just how will the 11.2 million newly liberated Cubans -- if, indeed, they turn out to be truly ''liberated'' -- treat those among the 2 million or so Cuban exiles around the world who choose to return?=

It is this haziness about what comes next that makes Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, so sought after these days.

Suchlicki runs the ''Cuban Transitional Project.'' He oversees the collection, sifting and analyzing of data on Cuba, so recommendations can be made on how Cuba might be rehabbed once Fidel is no more.

Suchlicki gets calls not only from think-tank types, but also from Cuban-American entrepreneurs and multinational conglomerates -- IBM, McDonald's, Texaco, Anheuser-Busch -- which are concocting ''entrance strategy'' plans.

But Suchlicki says American firms may have to wait a while -- five to 10 years after Castro's death.

''Cuba isn't going to open up the way Eastern Europe did,'' he says. ''I think Cuba will probably act more like China, only with a lot less economic freedom. In the beginning, anyway.''

Why? ''The military.
The armed forces are running 65 percent of the Cuban economy. Those guys are not going back to the barracks -- not unless they think they can make more money for themselves by wearing a suit and a tie.''

The fact that Cuba is, literally, an island unto itself and equipped with a sophisticated homeland security apparatus should make it easier for the country's generals to keep capitalism at sea for years, he says.

''Of course, in the end, it will depend on how they manage the economy. Sure, it's a disaster right now, but the Communists are helped by three factors: cheap Venezuelan oil, tourism, and remittances from Cuban exiles. I think they'll be able to muddle through for a good, long while.'' And to Cuban-Americans who dream about returning to Cuba to become president, Suchlicki has one bit of advice: ''Get a good suntan.''

Nowadays, he notes, Cuba is one-third white and two-thirds black and mulatto -- the reverse of what it was in 1959. ''I can't see mulattos in Cuba voting for a white, fat-cat Cuban-American.''

$80 billion, 15-20 years= There are those in Little Havana who say a tsunami of Miami exiles will wash over the Caribbean island upon Castro's death, leaving golden arches, freshly paved highways, spanking new hotels, and lots of smiles in their wake.

Antonio Jorge, a renowned guru of Cuban economics who teaches at Florida International University, says these rosy predictions are hokum. Studies, he says, show that fewer than 100,000 of the more than 1.2 million Cuban exiles in the United States will move back for good after Castro dies.

''You dread to think what it will take to bring Cuba back even to where it was in 1959,'' says Jorge, who in 1959 was Cuba's chief economist and undersecretary of the treasury. ''Castro has succeeded, quite well, I'm afraid, in developing underdevelopment.''

Just to rebuild the island's highways, bridges, phone networks, sewage and drainage systems -- not to mention airports, electric grids, ports -- ''we're talking about $80 billion and 15 to 20 years,'' he says.= And the longer Fidel remains in power, he says, the more things will deteriorate, and the higher the reconstruction price tag will go.

In south Florida, Cuban Americans operate more than 80,000 businesses, and some are expected to invest in a post-Castro Cuba. But without the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and big U.S. banks to finance big ventures, Jorge says, the reconstruction of Cuba will go nowhere fast.

July 04, 2005 in El Futuro, Los Exiliados, The View from Washington | Permalink | Comments (1)

Exile to Reveal Plan For Post-Castro Cuba

Raul Goal Is Indictment of Leader's Successor.
By Manuel Roig-Franzia. Washington Post Staff Writer. Tuesday, May 24, 2005.

MIAMI, May 23 -- Political intrigues don't come any more epically scaled than this one: the future of Cuba after the inevitable death of Fidel Castro, the world's longest-reigning head of state and an American government nemesis like few others.

The singular obsession that consumes the exile community here only grows more passionate as Castro, 78, ages. It tends to crescendo at the tiniest hint of vulnerability, such as the fall last year that broke his kneecap and arm, erupting in banner headlines and talk-radio vitriol in Miami. Castro has named his brother Raul, who is five years younger, to succeed him. But a Cuban exile daredevil who once flew missions over the island to drop human rights leaflets wants to get in the way.

Jose Basulto, president of Hermanos al Rescate, or Brothers to the Rescue, plans to announce Tuesday afternoon that he is offering $1 million for information leading to the indictment of Raul Castro on charges of drug trafficking and of murdering four Brothers to the Rescue pilots and passengers whose two small planes were shot down by Cuban MiG fighter planes off the island's coast in 1996.

The offer is intended to publicly pressure the U.S. government into resurrecting investigations of long-standing claims of criminal wrongdoing. But -- more important -- it also is intended to weaken Raul Castro and his allies politically and to complicate or even make illegal his succession.

"It would throw a wrench in the machinery," Basulto said of the hoped-for indictment....

May 29, 2005 in El Futuro, Los Exiliados, The View from Washington | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cuban migrant smugglers find new launch spot

LINK BY JENNIFER BABSON.  Knight Ridder Newspapers.
NAPLES, Fla. - (KRT) - Cuban migrant smugglers, who for years have brought people from the island to remote spots in the Keys, have adopted a new strategy to get around the heavily patrolled waters off the Keys:= Launch their smuggling missions from Collier County in Southwest Florida.

The cat-and-mouse shift has everyone, including the Coast Guard and Collier County sheriff's deputies, trying to keep up.

''Criminals look to take advantage of vulnerabilities,'' said Lt. Tony Russell, spokesman for the Coast Guard in Miami. ``We are working hard to minimize those. The Florida Straits covers from Cay Sal in the east, to the Marquesas in the west. That's 25,000 square miles of ocean.''

The increase in smuggling from Collier has been accompanied by another tactic: dropping off the Cuban migrants in the remote Dry Tortugas and Marquesas Islands well off Key West, rather than the Keys mainland. Both are closer to Cuba and harder to patrol....

May 24, 2005 in El Futuro | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cuban exiles prep post-Castro plan

Several Cuban exile groups that have had differing agendas have come together to lay out a transition plan for Cuba after Castro.

BY NICOLE WHITE.  nwhite@herald.com

A group of Cuban exiles -- known to have to vastly divergent political and ideological views -- have set aside their differences to craft an 18-point blueprint of how the island should be governed after Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Representatives from 16 groups, including the Cuban American National Foundation, Agenda Cuba, the Cuba Study Group and members of the clergy, spent months working up the template called ``Pillars for a Cuban Consensus.''

April 23, 2005 in El Futuro | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hunt for medicine in the seabottom begins

FORT PIERCE, Fla., April 4 (UPI) -- An ocean research organization from Fort Pierce, Fla., is spending the next two weeks in the Florida Straits north of Cuba looking for medicines.

The exploration includes the first submersible exploration of the Cay Sal Bank, a 60-mile wide sand bank fringed by a number of small uninhabited islands 30 miles off the Cuban coast.

The researchers are looking for organisms that produce chemicals with the potential to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimers.= "We don't really know what organisms to expect," said Dr. Amy Wright, who heads the Harbor Branch Marine Research Group.

"Given the difference in the habitat, we expect to find some new species that we haven't collected before. That's why we're going," she said.= The expedition also includes exploration aboard a submersible on the Miami-Terrace, a 60-mile long, deep-water reef east of south Florida.

The researchers will try to gather samples of a species of sponge found last May that produces chemical that show potential for fighting pancreatic cancer.= Copyright 2005 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved

April 13, 2005 in El Futuro | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Imperious Vision of Cuba's Other Ruler-for-Life

Alicia_alonso Alicia Alonso

As the curtain closed on the final gala of the International Festival of Ballet in Havana in November, Alicia Alonso, the aged matriarch of Cuban ballet, stood unsteadily at center stage, her arms outstretched toward the raucous adulation of the crowd. Silent and still, a gracious smile chiseled on her face, she seemed less a woman than a monument. She has presided over the biennial festival since 1960, and her power is such that she - and perhaps she alone - is able to draw the globe's best artists to her slight, impoverished nation to dance.

Ms. Alonso, who is 83, has ruled the Ballet Nacional de Cuba - has been the Ballet Nacional de Cuba - for nearly six decades. Before, ballet in Cuba was a marginalized extravagance. Now, men in one of the world's most macho countries clamor to put on dancing tights. She has trained some of the era's greatest dancers and created a world-class ballet company renowned for its precise classicism and exuberant virtuosity.

She has accomplished all this despite her nation's poverty. Despite its isolation from the world's great ballet companies. And one other thing: despite the fact that she is, depending on whom you ask, either largely or completely blind...

February 14, 2005 in Cultura, El Futuro, Nostalgia | Permalink | Comments (0)

Santeria Priests in Cuba Predict Catastrophic Year

Babalaos By Vanessa Arrington. Associated Press Writer. Posted January 4 2005, 3:59 PM EST

Revered priests of Cuba's Santeria religion warned of everything from environmental contamination to male impotence in 2005 as part of their annual New Year's predictions announced Tuesday.

Cuba and the world are also at risk of widespread disease, betrayal, and military interventions, according to the latest ``Letra del Ano,'' or Letter of the Year. Despite all the catastrophe, a well-known Santeria priest, or babalao, urged followers to not abandon hope....

Download: Letra_del_2005_de_los_Babalaos.doc

Babalaos Predicen un Año "Muy Malo"

January 07, 2005 in Cultura, El Futuro, The View from Havana | Permalink | Comments (0)

EVENTS IN CUBA POINT TO ISLAND NATION'S DESPERATE STATE

By Georgie Anne Geyer WASHINGTON -- Strange things are happening in Cuba. Events in the island nation more and more resemble the surrealism that has infused all of Latin American literature with mysticism and, often, mayhem.

First, Chinese President Hu Jintao came through Havana on his recent triumphal trip to Latin America, deliberately designed to usurp American influence in that region. One would have thought Cuba, with its eternal anti-Americano bugaboo, would have been Hu's first "hit" for investment. But no.

Instead, the young Chinese president, who is peacefully expanding China's influence all over the world while America fights desperately in Iraq (news - web sites), offered no investment in oil exploration and only a pittance in nickel. This, after offering to invest $100 billion in Latin America in the next decade.

But perhaps that should not have been so surprising. Once again, the Cuban sugar industry is in crisis. Castro, never a stickler when it comes to dates or hours or the realities of agriculture, had to postpone the sugar crop harvest from November to January...

December 12, 2004 in El Futuro | Permalink | Comments (2)

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