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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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
Continue reading...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’
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...After Havana shut down online access for 72 hours, the battle is on to keep the country connected
Cubans used to joke about Napoleon Bonaparte chatting to Mikhail Gorbachev, George W Bush and Fidel Castro in the afterlife. “If I’d have had your prudence, I’d never have fought Waterloo,” the French emperor tells the last Soviet leader. “If I’d have had your military might, I’d have won Waterloo,” he tells the Texan. Turning last to Castro, the emperor says: “If I’d have had Granma [the Cuban Communist party daily], I’d have lost Waterloo but nobody would have known.”
The joke no longer does the rounds. With millions of Cubans now online, the state’s monopoly on mass communication has been deeply eroded. But after social media helped catalyse historic protests on the island last month, the government temporarily shut the internet down.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Haiti to Pakistan
Continue reading...Observers fear pandemic could be responsible for deaths, adding intrigue to freedom protests taking place in Cuba and US
Five mostly elderly and retired Cuban military generals have died in recent days in mysterious circumstances, the country’s communist regime has confirmed, adding intrigue to a new round of freedom protests taking place in the island and US.
Related: Leftwing rural teacher Pedro Castillo sworn in as president of Peru
Continue reading...Director William Burns has initiated a taskforce to investigate the syndrome and tripled the size of the medical team involved
About 100 CIA officers and family members are among about 200 US officials and kin sickened by “Havana syndrome”, the CIA director, William Burns, said on Thursday, referring to the mysterious set of ailments that include migraines and dizziness.
Burns, tapped by Joe Biden as the first career diplomat to serve as CIA chief, said in a National Public Radio interview that he had bolstered his agency’s efforts to determine the cause of the syndrome and what is responsible.
Continue reading...Biden moves to pressure government over alleged human rights abuses amid biggest demonstrations in decades
The US has imposed sanctions on a Cuban security minister and an interior ministry special forces unit for alleged human rights abuses in a crackdown on anti-government protests this month.
The move marked the first concrete steps by Joe Biden’s administration to apply pressure on Cuba’s Communist government as it faces calls from US lawmakers and the Cuban American community to show greater support for the biggest protests to hit the island in decades.
Continue reading...Thousands took to the streets last week in unprecedented protests. Our writer meets some of those trying to force change
There’s a man from the government playing love songs in the park. Orlando Fuentes has a table, an awning against the hard Caribbean sun, and a sound system from which floats Silvio Rodríguez’s Cita con Ángeles. A woman says that she can’t listen, that it’s a beautiful song ruined by being played at too many government rallies.
After 16 months of pandemic and a week of unprecedented protests, the Cuban government wants to soothe the anger. Music is being played in parks across the country.
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