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We have recognized before that the policy of hostility towards Cuba has been a mistake. First of all, because it never worked to achieve its objectives. But also because it was counterproductive... We know that Cuban policy does not automatically align itself with the enemies of the United States; and that it is not fair to have put Cuba on the list of terrorist countries, where none of our allies have it. If Cuba feels like a besieged fortress, and fears that its opponents are at the service of a foreign power, we would like to reiterate that it will have no reason to perceive any threat from us... That is why we have invited a group of young students and professors from public universities, doctors, farmers, businesspeople, communicators, artists, scientists, religious people from various states, some of whom have already initiated exchanges with Cuba on their own, to accompany us in this meeting, so that they may take part in this new dialogue between civil societies on both shores. A dialogue that should not be limited, naturally, to the non-state sector, but should include primary and secondary school teachers, university professors, health specialists, journalists from public media, People’s Power delegates, diplomats, experts in law and public order, leaders of the Communist Party of Cuba and the Young Communist League, all of whom also constitute the human capital of the new Cuba. We witnessed how the previous administration poisoned the atmosphere of understanding achieved in 25 months of intense negotiations, and recharged it with the sound and fury of the worst moments of the Cold War; it closed the doors of the consulate in Havana to the relatives of Cuban immigrants in the United States; it restricted air traffic between our airports and those of the Cuban provinces; it interrupted the people-to-people exchange policy; it severely limited remittances, and put the channels for their delivery in crisis; finally, it obliquely encouraged rhetoric hostile to normalization within Cuba itself. This is how I imagined, in the first hundred days of his administration, a speech by Joe Biden in Havana. I reproduce it here, not only to illustrate how one makes mistakes at the beginning of a government, but to remember the lost opportunities and the policies not rectified at the time; and how history never stops taking its toll. In all fairness, when Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, all the forecasts were optimistic, not just mine. From “anything will be better than Trump” to “he will pick up where relations left off under Obama.” And so on. But those predictions were nothing more than calculations and opinions based on the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement under Obama, of whose administration the new president and numerous appointees in his new government had been part. However, it was not known how those same people were going to act in their new roles, and in the context of a work team that was beginning its first term. The advantage we have now regarding the future is that we do know how President Trump behaved in his previous government; and how Biden’s behaved. Let’s see how much we can extract from a cold assessment, which allows us to think about the present and the foreseeable future, so as not to make mistakes again, by excess or by default. Related Posts Antidotes to Trump? 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Notes for a political sociology October 26, 2024 Notes on the far right October 12, 2024 Mexico and us September 26, 2024 var jnews_module_313515_0_673fcc88216a1 = {"header_icon":"","first_title":"Related Posts","second_title":"","url":"","header_type":"heading_1","header_background":"","header_secondary_background":"","header_text_color":"","header_line_color":"","header_accent_color":"","header_filter_category":"","header_filter_author":"","header_filter_tag":"","header_filter_text":"All","post_type":"post","content_type":"all","number_post":"4","post_offset":0,"unique_content":"disable","include_post":"","exclude_post":313515,"include_category":"34473","exclude_category":"","include_author":"","include_tag":"","exclude_tag":"","sort_by":"latest","date_format":"default","date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","force_normal_image_load":"","pagination_mode":"nextprev","pagination_nextprev_showtext":"","pagination_number_post":"4","pagination_scroll_limit":0,"boxed":"","boxed_shadow":"","el_id":"","el_class":"","scheme":"","column_width":"auto","title_color":"","accent_color":"","alt_color":"","excerpt_color":"","css":"","paged":1,"column_class":"jeg_col_2o3","class":"jnews_block_21"}; The hostility of the Trump administration was not long in coming. Within the first 100 days, the Treasury Department put Cuba on a list of countries that favor money laundering, and just five months after taking office, the president proclaimed in Miami that he was “canceling President Obama’s completely unilateral agreement with Cuba,” “firmly limiting the money that flows to the military services” [remittances], as well as “enforcing the ban on tourism” [people-to-people individual visits and cruises ]. Trump’s changes At that gathering of “Cuban-American brotherhood” at Miami’s Manuel Artime Theater, the new president would make clear, however, that he would maintain “safeguards to prevent Cubans from risking their lives by traveling illegally to the United States” [ the cancellation of the dry foot/wet foot policy ], as well as “our Embassy open with the hope that our countries can forge a much stronger and better path.” The most radical action in Trump’s turn toward Cuba occurred in August of his first year: the affair of the “ sonic attacks ” against U.S. diplomats and representatives in Havana. This affair served to reduce the staff at its Embassy in Havana to a minimum and to suspend de facto the processing of immigrant visas, agreed since 1995. I have no space to dwell here on the boom of conspiracy speculations unleashed among many commentators on bilateral relations, attributing those strange and never verified “neurological damages” of the supposed victims to the surreptitious action of a mysterious “external” or internal factor (“the Cuban G2”). The harvest of the so-called “Havana syndrome,” harvested by respectable news agencies and periodicals, and quickly replicated in Beijing and other propitious places, with a true cloud of covert actions attributed to incarnations of the evil empire (Russia, North Korea, Iran), vanished into nothingness. However, its direct consequences in the interruption of the Cuban migratory flow to the United States and the deterrent effect among possible visitors, extended for more than five years, were very tangible. In November of that first year, 2017, the U.S. government launched its first blacklist of “prohibited Cuban organizations and companies” (179), including the Ministry of the Armed Forces and Ministry of the Interior, agencies, companies, hotels, etc. This inquisitorial index grew until it reached almost 250. I believe that, at this point, there is only one hotel in Havana where visiting Americans can legally stay. The second event that would mark the extent of Trump’s hostility towards Cuba was his failure to sign the suspension of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act in May 2019. The decision, which not even the George W. Bush administration had adopted, left the door open to a frenzy of lawsuits against third-country interests, which could be presented not only by U.S. firms nationalized in 1959-60, but by affected Cubans (who at the time were not U.S. citizens), including, say, members of the Batista dictatorship whose embezzled property was confiscated in 1959. Naturally, most experts predicted a wave of lawsuits against Cuba’s numerous foreign investors and trade partners. It is difficult to measure the psychological inhibitory effect that this application of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act could have, in 2019 and subsequently, on these potential businesses. However, expectations about the wave of lawsuits were not met; and some that seemed to be initiated were resolved by agreement between the parties. This observation does not underestimate their negative impact, it only attempts to establish the effectiveness and scope of these hostile measures. A striking example was the litigation against large Cuban-American businessmen, the Fanjul brothers, for having bought Cuban sugar from London, which the claimant finally abandoned . Subsequently, the number of remittances was again restricted, people-to-people visits and direct flights to the provinces were canceled, dozens of vessels transporting crude oil to Cuba were blacklisted, new Cuban entities were included among those prohibited, the agreement was canceled between both sides so that players residing on the island could participate in the Major Leagues, numerous European companies were fined for transactions with Cuban institutions, Cuba was classified in the worst category of countries that practice “human trafficking.” In his last year in the White House, the Trump administration banned Western Union from sending remittances to the island , put Cuba on the list of “countries that do not cooperate in the fight against terrorism,” put us on the highest “risk alert category for visits by U.S. citizens,” prohibited them from bringing rum and tobacco from the island in their suitcases, eliminated the general license to attend conferences, sports competitions, art exhibitions, etc.; extended restrictions on funds for cultural and educational exchanges, and kept us on the watch list of “governments that have participated in or tolerated systematic, continuous, and atrocious violations of religious freedom.” Ten days before leaving the presidency, Trump made sure that Cuba remained on the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism. How many of these measures have been dismantled by Biden in his first and only term, as announced just days after taking office? Very few and none of the main ones. Quite the opposite. Despite having declared himself “committed to reviewing the previous administration’s policy decisions, including that of designating Cuba as a sponsor of terrorism,” the island was never removed from that list. The regulations established would prevent supplies of spare parts for the main Cuban thermoelectric plants by European companies, as well as equipment for transportation services. About a hundred banks blocked accounts and transactions related to Cuba, including humanitarian donations; fines were imposed on accommodation agencies such as Airbnb for violating prohibitions on categories of travelers; the Cuban government was accused of nothing less than “interfering in the US elections”; the inclusion of the island on the list of countries “that do not do enough to prevent human trafficking” was maintained, alleging that “medical missions abroad” presented “strong signs of forced labor.” The blockade policy did not give way even in exceptional situations, such as the fire at the Supertanker Base in Matanzas . I have previously commented, with references from the Foreign Ministry itself and from U.S. diplomats in Havana, on the instructions and actions aimed at directly supporting the opposition, since before the demonstrations of July 11, 2021 . To a large extent, this interventionist and hostile tone, initiated under Trump, and reflected even in the discourse of President Biden himself, was further reinforced from that moment on, marking the climate of relations from then on. The Biden administration kept the flame of the “Havana syndrome” alive, granting compensation to “the victims,” without advancing a serious investigation into the problem itself, but rather prolonging the closure of consular services for visa processing, and breaching the migration agreement, until relatively recently. For four years, the Trump administration continued to “study” the exclusion of Cuba from all blacklists, in particular, those of terrorist countries, practitioners of “slave labor,” “human trafficking,” and other that were equally disconcerting, and lacking the endorsement of any of its allies. Derived from this meticulous and incomplete inventory, a couple of conclusions jump out. The first is that the Trump administration applied practically everything imaginable in the U.S. arsenal, except military force, to isolate, erode, destabilize, and subvert not only the Cuban government but the system itself. It is difficult to conceive of new measures that, in the next four years, could catch Cuba and Cubans off guard. Although the old ones can continue to cause a lot of damage, especially today, experience shows, for the hundredth time, that they do not achieve more than what dialogue does, and that they also affect not only the government and residents in Cuba but also emigrants and their descendants in the United States. The second is that the Biden administration, despite integrating decision-makers from the Obama administration, not only did not want to resume that policy but, by omission and also by conviction, in fact, adopted Trump’s logic. The explanation that its hands have been full of all kinds of global and regional conflicts and challenges is not enough to justify this fidelity to a Cold War pattern towards Cuba as the one that is maintained, not only in the facts but even in his rhetoric, very similar to that of Trump. For Cuba, in practical terms, never as now has it been more evident that the policy of force and exclusion has a bipartisan character, that it continues in the logic of the so-called deep state, the bureaucracies in charge of implementing it, regardless of who is in the White House. A week before the end of his term in January 2017, Obama signed an agreement with Cuba ending the wet foot/dry foot policy (which he had previously refused to adopt, arguing that the Adjustment Act prevented it). And less than 48 hours after handing over the presidency to Trump, a company made an export to the United States (40 tons of vegetable charcoal from that shrub known as marabú in Cuba), the first in more than half a century. This administration has only 60 days left in government. How many executive measures could it adopt to reduce some of the most irrational and counterproductive areas of this bipartisan policy, based on exclusion and force? While this remains unfulfilled, the Cuban government, political system, and society, under the shock of Trump’s sweeping victory, are experiencing the anticipated tension in the face of what is to come. Typically, the syndrome of the besieged fortress will tend to increase. From experience, we Cubans know that this syndrome is not at all favorable to change. It is time to think carefully, with a cool head, about what can be done to control this damage. Tags: donald trump featured Joe Biden Trump Measurements
The suspect in the high-profile killing of a health insurance CEO that has gripped the United States graduated from an Ivy League university, reportedly hails from a wealthy family, and wrote social media posts brimming with cerebral musings. Luigi Mangione, 26, was thrust into the spotlight Monday after police revealed he is their person of interest in the brutal murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a father of two, last week in broad daylight in Manhattan in a case that laid bare deep frustration and anger with America's privatized medical system. News of his capture in Pennsylvania -- following a tip from a McDonald's worker --triggered an explosion of online activity, with Mangione quickly amassing new followers on social media as citizen sleuths and US media tried to understand who he is. While some lauded him as a hero and lamented his arrest, others analyzed his intellectual takes in search of ideological clues. A photo on one of his social media accounts includes an X-ray of an apparently injured spine. No explicit political affiliation has emerged. Meanwhile, memes and jokes proliferated, many riffing on his first name and comparing him to the "Mario Bros." character Luigi, sometimes depicted in AI-altered images wielding a gun or holding a Big Mac. "Godspeed. Please know that we all hear you," wrote one user on Facebook. "I want to donate to your defense fund," added another. According to Mangione's LinkedIn profile, he is employed as a data engineer at TrueCar, a California-based online auto marketplace. A company spokesperson told AFP Mangione "has not been an employee of our company since 2023." Although he had been living in Hawaii ahead of the killing, he originally hails from Towson, Maryland, near Baltimore. He comes from a prominent and wealthy Italian-American family, according to the Baltimore Banner. The family owns local businesses, including the Hayfields Country Club, its website says. A standout student, Mangione graduated at the top of his high school class in 2016. In an interview with his local paper at the time, he praised his teachers for fostering a passion for learning beyond grades and encouraging intellectual curiosity. A former student who knew Mangione at the Gilman School told AFP the suspect struck him as "a normal guy, nice kid." "There was nothing about him that was off, at least from my perception," this person said, asking that their name not be used. "Seemed to just be smiling, and kind of seemed like he was a smart kid. Ended up being valedictorian, which confirmed that," the former student said. Mangione went on to attend the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, where he completed both a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science by 2020, according to a university spokesperson. While at Penn, Mangione co-led a group of 60 undergraduates who collaborated on video game projects, as noted in a now-deleted university webpage, archived on the Wayback Machine. On Instagram, where his following has skyrocketed from hundreds to tens of thousands, Mangione shared snapshots of his travels in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. He also posted shirtless photos flaunting a six-pack and appeared in celebratory posts with fellow members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. However, it is on X (formerly Twitter) that users have scoured Mangione's posts for potential motives. His header photo -- an X-ray of a spine with bolts -- remains cryptic, with no public explanation. Finding a coherent political ideology has also proved elusive, though he had written a review of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto on the online site goodreads, calling it "prescient." Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, carried out a string of bombings in the United States from 1978 to 1995, a campaign he said was aimed at halting the advance of modern society and technology. Mangione called Kaczynski "rightfully imprisoned," while also saying "'violence never solved anything' is a statement uttered by cowards and predators." According to CNN, handwritten documents recovered when Mangione was arrested included the phrase "these parasites had it coming." Mangione has also linked approvingly to posts criticizing secularism as a harmful consequence of Christianity's decline. In April, he wrote, "Horror vacui (nature abhors a vacuum)." The following month, he posted an essay he wrote in high school titled "How Christianity Prospered by Appealing to the Lower Classes of Ancient Rome." In another post from April, he speculated that Japan's low birthrate stems from societal disconnection, adding that "fleshlights" and other vaginal-replica sex toys should be banned. ia/nro/dwThe 49ers had a big win on Sunday against the Bears, but 49ers wide receiver Deebo Samuel did not have a big game. Samuel was held to two catches for 22 yards, continuing a disappointing season in which he’s averaging career-lows in catches per game and yards per game. But Samuel took to social media on Monday afternoon to say nothing is wrong. “Not struggling at all just not getting the ball!!!!!!!” Samuel wrote . A comment like that could be portrayed as a complaint that Samuel has been surpassed in the 49ers’ wide receiver pecking order by Jauan Jennings, who has more targets, more catches, more yards and more touchdowns than Samuel this season. But Samuel quickly added in another post that he’s not in any way criticizing his teammates. “Just cause I voice my opinions mean I’m hating on any of my teammates!! Be Fr,” Samuel wrote . It’s been a disappointing season in San Francisco, both for the 49ers and for Samuel individually. And there’s little doubt that Samuel is disappointed he’s not getting the ball more.The Container Store shares to be pulled from NYSE
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hannah Hidalgo scored 24 points and No. 6 Notre Dame defeated JuJu Watkins and third-ranked Southern California 74-61 on Saturday in a marquee matchup on the West Coast. Watkins and the Trojans (4-1) fell behind early and were down 21 points in the fourth quarter. She had 24 points, six rebounds and five assists. Hidalgo came out shooting well, hitting 5 of 8 from the floor in the first quarter and had 16 points at the break. She added six rebounds and eight assists. Hidalgo's backcourt mate, Olivia Miles, added 20 points, eight rebounds and seven assists for the Fighting Irish (5-0). Even though Hidalgo outshone her, Watkins’ imprint was all over the game. A documentary about her life aired on NBC leading into the nationally televised game. A buzz arose when Snoop Dogg walked in shortly before tipoff wearing a jacket in USC colors with Watkins' name and number on the front and back. Her sister, Mali, sang the national anthem. Notre Dame: The Irish struck quickly, racing to a 20-10 lead in the opening quarter. Even after cooling off a bit, they never trailed and stayed poised when the Trojans got within three in the second and third quarters. USC: The Trojans were without starting guard Kennedy Smith, whose defense on Hidalgo would have proven valuable. It was announced shortly before tipoff that she had a surgical procedure and will return at some point this season. The Trojans got within three points three times but the Irish remained poised and never gave up the lead. Notre Dame's defense forced the Trojans into 21 turnovers, which led to 22 points for the Irish. Watkins, Kaleigh Heckel and Talia von Oelhoffen had five each. USC was just 1 of 13 from 3-point range Notre Dame plays TCU on Nov. 29 in the Cayman Islands Classic. USC plays Seton Hall in the Women's Acrisure Holiday Invitational on Nov. 27 in Palm Desert, California. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here. AP women’s college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-womens-college-basketball-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/womens-college-basketball