Category Archives: Cuba

Havana explosion: 26 killed and 74 treated in hospital after hotel blast

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Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel says explosion at Hotel Saratoga appears to have been caused by a gas leak

At least 26 people have been killed and a further 74 have been treated in hospital after a powerful explosion tore the façade from a hotel in the Cuban capital, sending plumes of dust into the air and leaving rubble strewn across the street in the historic centre of Havana.

Speaking at the scene soon afterwards, the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, ruled out a bomb and said the blast at the Hotel Saratoga appeared to have been caused by a gas leak.

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US and Cuban officials to hold talks amid tensions over migration

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Cuba says US sanctions and decision to close American consular section in Havana encourage Cubans to seek riskier routes to US

American and Cuban officials are due to meet in Washington on Thursday to discuss migration concerns, people familiar with the matter said, in the highest-level formal US talks with Havana since Joe Biden took office last year.

The meeting comes at a time when Biden’s administration is grappling with rising numbers of undocumented migrants attempting to cross the US border from Mexico, with Cubans making up a growing portion of them.

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Sanctions are neither new nor guaranteed to work – just look at Cuba

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Analysis: Economic penalties have been meted out since Napoleon’s day but there’s little proof they achieve the desired outcome

Waging war by economic means is nothing new. Napoleon imposed an ineffective embargo on British exports in the early 19th century and during the first world war there were attempts by both sides to starve each other into submission.

But since 1945 sanctions have been used with increasing frequency as a means of trying to change either the policy stance or the regimes in targeted countries.

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Cuba protesters sentenced to up to 20 years as hundreds more await verdicts

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Courts sentenced 20 people in eastern Holguín province for sedition after last July’s anti-government protests

Cuban courts have handed out sentences of up to 20 years in prison to a group of people accused of taking part in protests that swept across the island in July.

The 20 defendants sentenced in the eastern province of Holguín were convicted after trials last month on charges of sedition. Hundreds of other people await verdicts following trials elsewhere.

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The rumba radio station, the DJ … and 110,000 albums looking for a noisy new home

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The unique Gladys Palmera archive may cross the Atlantic from Madrid to secure a permanent base

On a hillside an hour from Madrid, not far from the sepulchral splendour of the Escorial monastery, with its royal tombs, imperial maps and sacred relics, lies another, rather less austere, treasure house.

The Gladys Palmera collection, kept in a sprawling, tropical-hued complex crammed with 1950s Mexican film posters and prowled by the odd decorative monkey and jaguar, is the largest private archive of Latin American music in the world.

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Havana syndrome has ‘dramatically hurt’ morale, US diplomats say

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American Foreign Service Association chief Eric Rubin says syndrome, which remains a mystery, has affected recruitment

The spread of Havana syndrome has “dramatically hurt” morale in the US diplomatic corps and affected recruitment, according to the head of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA).

Eric Rubin, whose association represents nearly 17,000 current and former diplomats and foreign aid workers, said it was getting harder to find young people to work abroad, because of concerns about Havana syndrome – and about whether the government would look after them if they got sick.

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Ten Cuban migrants in sinking vessel rescued off Florida coast

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Rescue comes after a boat believed to be used for human smuggling capsized with only one of 40 passengers surviving

Ten Cuban migrants in a sinking vessel were rescued off the Florida coast, according to the US Coast Guard.

A Coast Guard boat spotted the vessel on Thursday about 40 miles (about 64km) off Key Largo, the Coast Guard said in a tweet.

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Cuba leads the world in vaccinating children as young as two against Covid

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With confidence in public health system high, 95% of kids aged 2-18 are fully vaccinated and Omicron infection rates are low

The Swedes have rejected it, Dr Fauci says the US may soon approve it, the Chinese have started, but the Cubans have already vaccinated almost all young children against Covid.

The island is the only country vaccinating toddlers as young as two against the disease, and more than 95% of two- to 18-year-olds have now been fully vaccinated, according to the ministry of public health.

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Four more bodies found off Florida coast from capsized boat

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Discovery brings total to five, but search for survivors will be suspended if new discoveries are not made, says US coast guard

The US coast guard said it would call off the search for survivors at sunset on Thursday if no new discoveries were made following a boat capsizing off the Florida coast at the weekend with 40 people on board.

Four more bodies had been discovered, bringing the total to five, Capt Jo-Ann Burdian, commander of the coast guard’s Miami sector, said in a press conference on Thursday.

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‘They want to make an example’: Cuba protesters hit with severe sentences

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Six months after demonstrations, courts have quietly started imposing harsh charges such as sedition

One Sunday last summer, 18-year-old Eloy Cardoso left his mother’s house on the outskirts of Havana to collect an Atari game console from a friend.

He’d stayed at home the previous day, while the largest anti-government demonstrations since the revolution had ripped through Cuba.

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Blinken says US stumped over Havana syndrome as more diplomats fall ill

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Secretary of state says officials do not know what illness is or who is responsible, with more sickness reported in Paris and Geneva

The United States still does not know what the illness known as Havana syndrome is or who is responsible for it, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in an interview on Thursday after more American diplomats were reported ill in Paris and Geneva.

Blinken said the entire federal government is working to get to the bottom of the illness, which has afflicted about 200 US diplomats, officials and family members overseas.

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Cuba’s vaccine success story sails past mark set by rich world’s Covid efforts

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The island nation struggles to keep the lights on but has inoculated 90% of population with home-developed vaccines

General Máximo Gómez, a key figure in Cuba’s 19th-century wars of independence against Spain once said: “Cubans either don’t meet the mark – or go way past it.”

A century and a half later, the aphorism rings true. This downtrodden island struggles to keep the lights on, but has now vaccinated more of its citizens against Covid-19 than any of the world’s major nations.

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Cuba braces for unrest as playwright turned activist rallies protesters

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The Communist party has banned the planned string of pro-democracy marches, saying they are an overthrow attempt

The Cuban playwright Yunior García has shot to fame over the past year, but not because of his art. The 39-year old has become the face of Archipelago, a largely online opposition group which is planning a string of pro-democracy marches across the island on Monday.

The Communist party has banned the protests – which coincide with the reopening of the country after 20 months of coronavirus lockdowns – arguing that they are a US-backed attempt to overthrow the government.

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Guantánamo prisoner details torture for first time: ‘I thought I was going to die’

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Al-Qaida courier, who could be freed next year despite 26-year sentence, tells court of interrogators’ horrific treatment

For the first time, a Guantánamo Bay prisoner who went through the brutal US government interrogation program after the 9/11 attacks has described it openly in court, saying he was left terrified and hallucinating from techniques that the CIA long sought to keep secret.

Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who became an al-Qaida courier, told jurors considering his sentence for war crimes that he was subjected to days of painful abuse in the clandestine CIA facilities known as “black sites” as interrogators pressed him for information.

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Baracoa review – a poetic journey through bittersweet childhood

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This part fiction, part documentary film captures the spontaneity of young friends Leonel and Antuàn

Directed by Pablo Briones, Sean Clark, and Jace Freeman, here is a film that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary as it accentuates bittersweet childhood connections, full of teases, mischief and innocent tenderness. Following Leonel and Antuàn, a pair of friends who grew up in the small Cuban town of Pueblo Textil, this mesmerising promenade through abandoned landscapes doubles as a journey to the cusp of adulthood.

With a script based on the real-life relationship and conversations between the two friends, Baracoa has an authentic spontaneity of children’s interactions so rarely captured in fiction films that rely on precocious child actors. The camera quietly observes the pair’s wanderings through ruined and deserted compounds whose austerity is transformed by the boys’ imagination. At one point, Leonel and Antuàn pretend to drive as they sit atop a broken down, rusted car frame. The moment is poetic, yet also full of melancholy. Soon, they will not find such childish daydreams so entertaining.

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Cuban scientists say ‘Havana Syndrome’ theories ‘violate laws of physics’

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A 20-member panel questioned whether a single explanation fitted all symptoms and raised possibility of psychological suggestion

Cuba has issued its most detailed report to date from prominent local scientists criticizing allegations that US and Canadian diplomats were subject to mysterious attacks while posted on the island and developed health problems.

Related: Microwave weapons that could cause Havana Syndrome exist, experts say

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Cuba review: American history of island neighbor is telling and timely

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As Ada Ferrer writes, ‘Cuba – its sugar, its slavery, its slave trade – is part of the history of American capitalism’

In July, the eruption of unexpected protests in Cuba, sparked by food shortages and growing frustration with the government, unsurprisingly met with a corresponding flood of commentary from its opinionated neighbour.

Related: Forget the Alamo review: dark truths of the US south and its ‘secular Mecca’

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Cuba’s health system buckles under strain of overwhelming Covid surge

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A lack of medical supplies is crippling the Covid response, amid an economic crisis sparked by the pandemic and US sanctions

Julia, a community doctor in Havana, was drafted to the intensive care unit soon after Covid-19 first reached Cuba.

Last week, her cousin died from the virus. This week, she also tested positive amid a surge in cases which has pushed the island’s vaunted health service to its limits and prompted rare public criticism from Cuban doctors.

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‘New wave of volatility’: Covid stirs up grievances in Latin America

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A new series on Covid’s global political impact starts by looking at how the pandemic has fuelled turbulence in Latin America and the Caribbean

For Filipe da Silva, hitting the streets was about staying alive.

“Unfortunately, Brazil elected a murderer,” the 28-year-old declared as he and thousands of fellow protesters streamed through the seaside city of Fortaleza last month to decry the president’s bungling of a Covid epidemic that has killed more than half a million people.

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If the US really cared about freedom in Cuba, it would end its punishing sanctions | Helen Yaffe

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Critics dismiss Cuba as a failed state, but don’t accept how badly it’s hamstrung by the US blockade

The violent protests that erupted in Cuba in early July were the first serious social disturbances since the “Maleconazo” of 1994, 27 years ago. Both these periods were characterised by deep economic crises. I was living in Havana in the mid-90s and witnessed the conditions that triggered the uprising: empty food markets, shops and pharmacy shelves, regular electricity cuts, production and transport ground to a halt. Such were the consequences of the collapse of the socialist bloc, which accounted for about 90% of the island’s trade.

Betting on the collapse of Cuban socialism, the US approved the Torricelli Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 to obstruct the island’s trade and financial relations with the rest of the world. Meanwhile, more sophisticated and multifaceted “regime change” programmes were developed, from Clinton’s people-to-people programmes to Bush’s Commission for a Free Cuba. From the mid-1990s to 2015, US congress appropriated some $284 million to promote (capitalist) democracy.

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