People in Havana more concerned about buying chicken suspect little will change with Raúl’s departure
News travels swiftly through Havana, bumping against people so they turn, then rolling on. Cubans have a phrase for it: la bola en la calle, the ball in the street.
Raúl Castro’s announcement on Friday that he is to retire and bring 62 years of Castro rule on the island to a close caused barely a ripple, even if it sent waves around the world.
Continue reading...His retirement means that Cubans will not have a Castro formally guiding their affairs for the first time in over six decades
Raúl Castro has confirmed that he is resigning as head of Cuba’s Communist party, ending an era of formal leadership by him and his brother Fidel Castro that began with the 1959 revolution.
The 89-year-old Castro made the announcement on Friday in a speech at the opening of the eighth congress of the ruling party – the only one allowed on the island.
Continue reading...As Covid pushed the island’s economy to the brink of collapse, musicians and film-makers found another way to be creative – cooking, baking and selling
Not far from Havana’s Plaza de la Revolucion, where Che Guevara stares out nine storeys high from the side of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior, Julio Cesar Imperatori perches on the edge of a table in the kitchen of a shuttered restaurant.
“We started to run out of money,” he says of himself and two friends, Osmany and Wilson. “Everyone was closing down. No one was buying pictures. So we decided to do something. We thought, everyone’s gotta eat and my grandmother, Eldia, she has a recipe for pie. And so … the American Pie company.”
Continue reading...‘Man in Havana’ role usually taken by experienced diplomats goes to ex-trade minister George Hollingbery
Boris Johnson’s government has been accused of fostering a culture of cronyism after the appointment of a former Conservative MP to become the ambassador to Cuba.
George Hollingbery, the former minister and MP until 2019, was announced on Tuesday as the UK’s new “man in Havana”, a post usually taken up by experienced diplomats.
Continue reading...Donald Trump has reclassified Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism” in a last-minute move that could complicate efforts by Joe Biden’s incoming administration to re-engage with Havana.
The controversial step was announced by secretary of state Mike Pompeo on Monday, at the start of Trump’s final full-week in office, and places Cuba alongside Iran, North Korea and Syria.
Continue reading...BBC reporter Will Grant has produced an excellent look at the group of strongmen who came from left field
If there was ever a surreal start to a trip to Cuba, it was the one that coincided with the news Fidel Castro had died. That was what I woke up to on 26 November 2016, hours before my husband and I were due to fly to Havana. A day later, we found ourselves in what seemed like an endless queue under a blazing autumn sun, waiting to enter Castro’s memorial at the Jose Martí monument in the Plaza de la Revolución.
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Continue reading...First official explanation of illness that affected US diplomats in Cuba says ‘pulsed’ energy may have led to unexplained symptoms
The mysterious symptoms that have afflicted American diplomats stationed in Cuba, puzzling scientists and intelligence agencies alike, are most likely to have been caused by “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy”, according to a report commissioned by the US government.
Those suffering from Havana syndrome, as the condition has become known, have complained of headaches, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision and other ailments.
Continue reading...Rights campaigners voice concerns as Cuba and Pakistan also expected to be elected
China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are expected to be elected to the board of the UN human rights council on Tuesday, leaving human rights campaigners in the countries aghast and pleading with EU states to commit to withholding their support.
The Geneva-based monitoring NGO UN Watch described the situation as the equivalent of allowing five convicted arsonists to join the fire brigade.
Continue reading...Donald Trump repeats claims he earlier made online, boasting of winning the 'Bay of Pigs Award' – an honour that doesn't exist. Trump twice visited a Bay of Pigs museum in Miami in 2016, where he received 'a hand-painted Brigade 2506 shield', which his campaign insisted was the award in question. Trump made the claims while courting Latino voters in Nevada, a state where he trails rival Joe Biden in polls, and one where the president failed to overcome Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign
Continue reading...Attacking Joe Biden and seeking to exploit reports that his rival is struggling with Latino voters, Donald Trump boasted on Sunday of receiving “the highly honoured Bay of Pigs Award” from Cuban Americans in the battleground state of Florida.
Perhaps inevitably, and to the glee of the internet, no such award exists.
Continue reading...Cuban authorities have launched a strict 15-day lockdown of Havana to try to stamp out the low-level but persistent spread of coronavirus. In addition to a curfew, most stores are barred from selling to shoppers from outside the immediate neighbourhood to prevent people from moving around the city
Continue reading...Nations from New Zealand to Cuba closed borders promptly with strict quarantine rules, but the UK won’t admit its ‘serious mistake’
Island nations have an advantage when it comes to stopping travellers importing disease, be it Covid or other infections.
Seas are usually harder to cross than land, and beaches are easier to police. There are no cross-border towns, and fewer ways to sneak over frontiers.
Continue reading...Much-loved citizen was born poor but went on to mastermind restoration of the island’s splendid capital
The old town of Havana has sheltered many famous faces over its 500 years, Alexander von Humboldt and Ernest Hemingway among them, but few more loved than Eusebio Leal Spengler, who died on Friday.
The city historian could be seen most days walking through the cobbled streets, past the fruit hawkers and musicians, passing under balconies strung with drying sheets. He would stop to talk to residents who knew him by sight, despite his understated manner and the grey guayabera shirt of the Cuban bureaucrat he favoured.
Continue reading...Almost 10,000 new cases in India on Thursday as WHO warns situation outside Europe deteriorating
India reported almost 10,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, with hospitals swamped in the worst-hit cities of Mumbai, New Delhi and Chennai, and predictions that the infection rate will not peak before the end of next month.
The country of 1.3bn people now has the fifth highest number of confirmed cases in the world, at 286,579. Over the last 24 hours 357 people have died from the virus, bringing the official toll to 8,102.
Continue reading...Big Kid Circus has been stranded overlooking the beach and promenade at the Lancashire resort since lockdown began
Continue reading...The rugged Soviet-era car is 50 years old – and in Havana, classic models still sell for the price of a house
Landy is a stylish man. He has an ageing crooner’s slicked-back hair, the short-sleeved cool of a Miami Beach architect, and a terrible, terrible Lada car.
He’s my go-to chofer in Havana, which sounds a little grand, but it’s more economical than buying one of these babies, which will set you back £15,000. It’s also why, despite the windows having no handles (a wrench is passed back) and the rear seat containing a loose spring like an unkind proctologist, Landy fusses over it like a baby.
Continue reading...Cubans can go out only if strictly necessary and always wearing a protective mask
Continue reading...Oxen are replacing tractors as the island gets by on just 30% of petroleum deliveries thanks to Trump-ordered measures
Justo Rodríguez mashes through the mud, whipping the two oxen that guide his iron plough as it slowly carves a furrow in the dry soil.
In normal times Rodríguez, 60, uses a tractor to plough these fields. But for months, the farm where he works 12 miles east of Havana, hasn’t had any diesel.
Continue reading...The Cuban dancer talks about food rationing, what he ate at ballet school and his father’s terrible cooking
I always lived with rationing in Cuba – I was born in 1973. We used the term “the three musketeers” to mean rice, chicharos [split peas] and eggs, although at one point eggs disappeared completely.
I had two rabbits as pets and I arrived home from school one day and there was that smell I’d almost forgotten, of meat. Then I realised that Mamá had roasted my pets and I cried a lot. My mother pressed us to eat them and we all did. The rabbits tasted very good, obviously – I was a kid and I sort of got distracted. I was very sad, but I ate.
Continue reading...After US allies expel foreign health missions, Havana warns that patients will pay the highest price for campaign against its scheme
A Cuban medical programme that has helped some of the world’s poorest communities has become the latest target of the Trump administration’s escalating attempts to pressure Havana’s faltering economy.
Dubbed “Cuban doctors”, the celebrated – if controversial – humanitarian medical mission was founded more than half a century ago in the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s revolution, in part to enhance the country’s international influence.
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