Jim Wyss has a shocking story in the Miami Herald about the sprawling state-sponsored human trafficking ring known as Barrio Adentro, and the Cuban doctors now getting stranded in Bogota as they try to flee indentured servitude in Venezuela. The stories the Cuban doctors tell tell read like the stories of Eritrean refugees trying to get…
It’s been a week since the Diosdado/Shannon picture show and we’ve read many hypothesis over what had to happen to get that photo opp. Both Jackson Diehl and Heinz Dietrich believe it had to do with Leopoldo Lopez’s release. While Diehl says the US is looking to release tension on the region by the release…
My first post for FiveThirtyEight.com is up on their site now. Behold: It’s easy to lose sight of just how central Venezuela’s oil largesse has been to the Cuban state’s financial strategy. Following a landmark 2003 “Cooperation Agreement,” Venezuela has been sending 115,000 barrels a day to the island. The Cubans re-export some of the…
This video deserves to be seen. In it, four prominent members of the Cuban dissidence movement make their case. They basically feel betrayed by Obama, in the words of Guillermo Fariñas. They feel the lifting of the embargo is a reward to the Castros, and will end up benefitting the regime. And they also had…
It is too soon to tell just what the recent détente between the US and Cuba will produce, but there are already a few lessons the folks currently governing in Caracas can take from it. The first is that the announcement creates the first real gap between Caracas and Havana in years. As Quico rightly pointed out yesterday,…
Cuba and the U.S. spent a year and a half secretly negotiating the normalization in their diplomatic relations through a Canadian back-channel. A year. And a half. Still, when it was announced this morning, the Venezuelan state seemed caught totally off-guard. State media went into deer-in-the-headlights panic mode, defaulting to silence for hours on end while…
The decades-old feud between the US and Cuba is coming to an end. After exchanging political prisoners – one Alan Gross in exchage for three Cubans held in the US – Presidents Obama and Castro will make major announcements today. Sources are confirming they will announce the end a major easing of the embargo, and future diplomatic relations…
One of the new textbooks being distributed in Venezuela’s schools makes the strange claim that Simón Bolívar was nursed … by a Cuban woman. Now, the story of Bolívar’s early nutrition has always been draped in mythology. As you can imagine, baby formula was not readily available back then, so it was customary for wealthy mothers who…
Here you have two items: a chocolate bar, and a box of over-the-counter painkillers. One of these items costs BsF 4.5, about 60 US cents at the official rate, and about 7 cents at the black market rate. The other item costs BsF 50, about 8 dollars at the official rate, and about 83 cents…
As you know, an enormous haul of cocaine made its way into an Air France 777 A340 that flew from Caracas to Paris last week. While a few low-ranking National Guardsmen have supposedly been detained, I await with short breath to hear which Cubans will fall on their sword for this one. It has long…
Today we “celebrate” the 60th anniversary of the assault on the Cuartel Moncada, which marked the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. Maduro is in Cuba, alongside Evo, Daniel Ortega, and that charming old man, Pepe Mujica. They are all there singing the praises of the Cuban Revolution. And I ask: ¿hasta cuando vale?
Let’s recap Monday’s events: A conversation is leaked between Mario Silva and a Cuban intelligence operative, in which it is made clear that the Maduro faction in this government is heavily influenced by the Cubans. In it, Silva suggests that the military – at the prodding of Diosdado Cabello – is plotting against Maduro. In…
My take on the big, fat question mark we may be electing tomorrow – over at Transitions, by Foreign Policy. An excerpt: One of the failures in this campaign is that we have yet to learn much about Maduro’s life prior to politics. Earlier this week, a document presuming to be Maduro’s work evaluation from his days…
On February 5th, 1992, Caldera sided with Chávez and Fidel Castro sided with Carlos Andrés Pérez. I’ve always been struck by what a grubby, squalid little Myth of Origin the putsch of February 4th makes. Next the glories of the Sierra Maestra, next to the romance of Granma, next to the whole majestic sweep of the Bay…
As the ongoing electric crisis continues, this blog reported last September how Cuba was helping the national electric company CORPOELEC handle the numerous problems of our power grid system. Today, an article in the Valencia newspaper Notitarde gives us an estimate of how that assistance is worth by the day: 3.1 Million US$. Expenses include…
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