Washington

Brazil helps in small business creation

September 19, 2010

Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, met yesterday with Cuba’s de facto president Raúl Castro. Castro and Amorim discussed current international and regional issues, and characterized bilateral relations as excellent. Brazil has invested $1B in various projects in Cuba including the reconstruction of the Port of Mariel. And, Brazil has also extended lines of credit to the island as an [...]

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Tactics of survival

July 21, 2010

Alvaro Vargas Llosa on the Castro brothers as masterful tacticians: Other releases have lifted people’s hopes in the past. In 1969-70, about 1,300 prisoners were deported. In 1979, after a controversial negotiation with some exiles, 3,600 opponents were set free – and expelled. In 1998, Pope John Paul II’s visit was followed by the release of [...]

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Lifting the communications embargo

July 15, 2010

Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society/Council of the Americas and editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, argues for lifting the communications embargo on Cuba in the July/August 2010 issue of Foreign Policy magazine: This leaves Washington in a quandary. Last week’s release of the 52 prisoners — independent journalists and human [...]

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U.S.-Cuba environmental cooperation

June 10, 2010

In early May, the Brookings Institution published a study on U.S.-Cuba environmental cooperation when dealing with the potential risks of oil exploration in shared ocean waters: As Cuba continues to develop its deepwater oil and natural gas reserves, the consequence to the United States of a similar mishap occurring in Cuban waters moves from the [...]

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Honeymoon over before it began

March 4, 2010

From today’s The Economist: However disgruntled they are with the everyday failures of the communist government, few Cubans dare brave the harassment meted out to active opponents. Those in the United States who argue that the American economic embargo merely serves to shore up the Castro regime hoped that Mr Obama’s team would agree with [...]

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CIA director and Cuban soap operas

July 27, 2009

Last September, Gen. Michael Hayden (Director, Central Intelligence Agency) addressed the ODNI Open Source Conference in Washington, D.C. about the importance of open source intelligence collection. General Hayden made an interesting anecdote (as follows) about his visit to a Key West open source facility wherein he watched a Cuban program and observed what analysts were [...]

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