A popular campaign stop: Cafe Versailles in Miami's Little Havana (Photo: Jason Margolis)

There’s a political truism in Miami: Cuban Americans always vote Republican.

But four years ago, that voting bloc started to fray. Candidate Obama captured about a third of the Cuban vote in Miami.

Now the right-wing Miami Cuban establishment has a warning for their community: President Obama is soft on the Castro brothers.

Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen spoke in Miami this week at a Mitt Romney campaign event. Switching between Spanish and English, Ros-Lehtinen said every time President Obama mentions Cuba it’s to explain why he’s giving further economic concessions to the Castro regime.

Ros-Lehtinen is referring to the Obama administration’s easing of travel restrictions and remittances to Cuba. Critics call the policies an economic boon for the Castros.

“So what you have now is an emboldened regime that feels that they can do whatever they want because they’re not facing any consequences,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, director of the US-Cuba Democracy PAC.

“There has to be consequences to certain bad actions: taking an American hostage, huge waves of repression. If they think they can do it, and they’re going to get this inflow of hard currency, then they’re going to increase the repression and continue doing so.”

Mauricio Claver-Carone introducing Mitt Romney in Miami (Photo: Jason Margolis)

The Republican presidential candidates are seizing on this. Mitt Romney spoke in downtown Miami this week.

“Negotiations are not a matter of giving and hope, they’re a matter of giving and getting in return. This president has done something which is characteristic of his presidency and that is he turns and gives. And says that everybody in the world has the same interest and so people will give back to us. He’s wrong.”

But polls suggest a majority of Cuban Americans actually favor the Obama administration policies toward Cuba.

Uva de Aragón likes the policies and visits the island. She was born in Cuba and left as a young girl. De Aragón recently retired as the associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

“I think the more open Cuba is, the more people who travel to Cuba, the more money you send to Cubans: the more you empower them, the more they’re knowledgeable. The people who travel and who bring magazines or stories, or whatever are an important source of information. So I’m very favorable to anything that opens up the island.”

De Aragón sees a contradiction between what many Cuban-Americans say and what they do. For instance, she said when you ask them about remittances, they respond this way: “Yes, of course I’m in favor of the embargo.”

But De Aragón said when you ask the same people if they send their family money back in Cuba, they’ll say, “Of course, he’s my brother!”

Cuban American Joe Garcia doesn’t mince words about the hardliners on Cuban policy and the Republican candidates courting them.

“What you have going on here is a clown show and the audience is filled with clowns.”

Garcia ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008 and 2010 as a Democrat. He says the president’s Cuba policies have been very effective assisting dissidents and expanding civil society. He said the hard-line hasn’t worked. Garcia called the rightwing position toward Cuba a religion, not a rational policy.

“Part of the problem is that we’re engaged in revenge politics, which of course feels very nice, right? There’s a warmth and a heat that is driven by the absolute loathing of the Castro regime, which I share in. But later in the week someone will call for the 82nd Airborne to invade Cuba and I’m sure Gingrich will up the ante by calling for a nuking of the Havana suburbs just to teach Fidel a lesson.”

That hasn’t happened. But Newt Gingrich did call this week for American support for a “Cuban Spring.”

David Cardenas, left, and Giancarlo Sopo, right (Photo: Jason Margolis)

Some in the under-30 crowd here say all the bad blood and bickering over travel restrictions and remittances is a distraction.

I met David Cardenas and Giancarlo Sopo for dinner in downtown Miami. Cardenas is active in the Republican party; Sopo is with the Democrats. They have small disagreements about travel restrictions, but they say it’s not worth arguing about.

“I think on the big issues relating to Cuba, in the final analysis, Cubans overwhelming agree with one and other,” said Sopo.

“I completely agree with that,” said Cardena. “I think Cubans are united as a community, united in their policy positions toward Cuba.”

The trade embargo has overwhelming bipartisan support here. And in Congress and the White House.

Cardenas and Sopo are able to break bread together, perhaps because Cuba is not the focus of their lives.

“I would say that Cuban Americans of our generation are not single-issue voters, much in the same way our grandparents and some of our parents are,” said Cardenas.

“I would agree with what David is saying,” said Cardenas. “Cuba was much closer to their lives. They had just left the country, many of them still had hopes of going back. I think David and I, we see Miami as our home.”

And that’s where their real disagreement begins: What domestic economic policies are best for their home?

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg was there to cover their arrival.

And she has been back many times since to report on the events at the controversial prison camp.

This past year, she received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her reporting from Guantanamo Bay.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to Carol Rosenberg about the tenth anniversary of the arrival of detainees at Guantanamo.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. Ten years ago today, the first group of twenty detainees arrived at the newly opened US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It’s been a long decade since then.

Donald Rumsfeld (recorded): I think that, uh, we’re in the process of sorting through precisely the right way to handle them, and they will be handled in the right way; they will be handled not as prisoners of war, because they’re not, but, but as unlawful combatants. As I understand it, technically, unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.

George W. Bush (recorded): These were, uh, illegal non-combatants picked up off of a battlefield, and they’re being well treated, and they’ll go through a military tribunal at some point in time, which is a military tribunal, which is in international court. And um… or, in line with international court.

Rumsfeld (recorded): I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the least worst place we could have selected.

Unidentified speaker (recorded): The number of Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees transferred to US forces in Afghanistan continue to grow, and the current number now stands at 346. We expect to be able to begin transfer shortly, of many of these detainees to the facilities in Guantanamo Bay.

Unidentified speaker (recorded): I think it’s important people remember that one of the reasons why security has had to be so strict and tight on those prisoners is because of the threat they pose.

Barack Obama (recorded): By the authority vested in me as President of the, uh, President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to affect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo, uh, and promptly to close the detention facility at Guantanamo.

Werman: President Obama speaking there soon after taking office in 2009. He obviously hasn’t achieved that goal of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo. The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg has visited the controversial detention camp many times over the past decade. She recently received the Robert F. Kennedy journalism award for her reporting from Guantanamo Bay. Rosenberg was there ten years ago, to cover the arrival of the first detainees.

Carol Rosenberg: It was three months after the September 11th attacks and we had been told on the eve of the arrival that these were the worst of the worst, so I would say that the feelings were pretty raw at the time, and that there was a lot of fear, certainly among the military that were putting together this prison camp. You know they’d spent the day before the arrival of the first twenty cutting the handles off of toothbrushes because they though that if you had a toothbrush with a handle on it and a prisoner had one he might ram it through the eye of a guard.

Werman: Mm.

Rosenberg: So there was, there was a lot of fear, they were all, I think as we now know, identically dressed in these orange jumpsuits, being taken off of the plane one by one in shackles, and they didn’t tell us who those twenty were. And who those twenty were became quite controversial because at least six or seven of them have since been released.

Werman: Mm.

Rosenberg: So if the first twenty were the worst of the worst, I think what we’ve learned is that maybe they weren’t doing such a good job of picking and choosing who was being put on those planes, and that we really didn’t know who those men were. But I have to tell you that wasn’t controversial that first day, the military was portraying it as, “We got ‘em,” and they put out their own pictures showing these guys in orange jumpsuits on their knees in the cages at Camp X-ray. Those were Navy photos.

Werman: As you say there was no controversy that first day, when those detainees arrived. What have been though, the main watershed controversies since, that have kind of defined Guantanamo?

Rosenberg: It started very early with, do they get the Geneva Conventions and are they prisoners of war or war prisoners? Because there’s a big distinction there. The Bush administration, and now, frankly, the new administration, has argued that they don’t get treated as POWs because this isn’t a typical war, and therefore they’ve given them a completely new kind of status. First they called them enemy combatants and then they called them unprivileged belligerents and, you know, we call them war prisoners because it’s kind of generic. So the first controversy was their status. Another big controversy in Guantanamo was, you know, how big is the battlefield and what is the authority to hold these people and did they get the right people? Because the planes came in from Afghanistan, but the people were plucked from around the world…

Werman: Mm.

Rosenberg: There’s a man down there who says through his attorney that he was captured by US forces in Bangkok and put on a plane and ends up at Gitmo, and then of course you know, there’ve been interrogation controversies, so treatment has been a controversy.

Werman: The status issue, and the whole idea of where is the battlefield with these detainees in Guantanamo, it’s huge, and remind us what kind of impact those issue have had on the US legal system and the US justice system.

Rosenberg: Well, for the first couple of years, they didn’t even have lawyers. You know, they weren’t charged, they didn’t have a way to meaningfully contest or argue, “You got the wrong guy.” Uh, they’ve been to the Supreme Court fundamentally three times in a series of decisions involving their rights to attorneys. They now do have attorneys. Different kinds of attorneys. But the definition of who the United States is entitled to hold as a prisoner has evolved, and is still working its way through the courts. You know, in Washington the federal judges have ordered men released and in some instances the Bush administration and Obama administration have let them go, sent them home, or send them off to other countries, and in some instances they’ve challenged those judges and moved up through the appeals court and gotten an expansive definition of who they’re entitled to hold. It’s not merely someone who is a member of Al Qaeda, it is the perception of people who have association or a relationship to terrorism. That’s still being defined through the courts on who can be held down there.

Werman: And now indefinite military detention without a trial has been enshrined in law with the Nation Defense Authorization Act on December 31st.

Rosenberg: Yes, but it’s a mix-master, I mean some of these guys will get trials, and some of them will be accused of war crimes, for which they’re seeking the death penalty. Forty-six of the men down there are held as what we call indefinite detainees, they don’t get trials, they don’t get released, their files get reviewed periodically but the understanding is that, and this was done by the Obama administration, that these forty-six men will be held without trial indefinitely, which some interpret to be Guantanamo forever. They originally had forty-eight indefinite detainees. Well, there’s forty-six because two of them died this year – one of ‘em collapsed, the military say, in the shower after working out on an elliptical machine. There’s an open inquest, they say it was a coronary, we’re waiting to know. Another man was found, the military says, hanging from a bed sheet in a recreation yard and they’re saying it’s a suicide and we’re waiting for the inquest. So, indefinite detention is being held indefinitely and the way you get to leave is, in this past year, because they died and went home to Afghanistan to be buried.

Werman: President Obama campaigned on closing, uh, Guantanamo, uh, the deadline to close it came and went two years ago. Do you think Guantanamo will ever close?

Rosenberg: It’s hard to imagine that they’re gonna be able to figure out how to get out of this. The Obama administration started off saying, “We’re going to redefine it, we’re going to give them trials, we’re going to put it into a framework that is more recognizable to greater American society.” And what they found is that there are all sorts of people who didn’t fit into that measure, and so when, by the time their year ended, what they were talking about closing it was not really closing it, but moving it. They were going to take a number of people and move them to a prison in Illinois, and it was gonna be like Guantanamo North, so, I think it depends on what the definition of closure is. There are people they intend to hold indefinitely without trial or charge indefinitely, potentially forever, so it’s hard to imagine a situation under which Guantanamo ends, even if Guantanamo closes.

Werman: Carol, uh, given the restrictions on reporting at Guantanamo, what is the one thing about Gitmo you want to know, that you may never know?

Rosenberg: I don’t know if I can tell you the one thing, I can tell you that I, ten years later I’m still trying to figure out the costs of it. Diplomatically, psychologically, and frankly the cost of it to taxpayers. The Obama administration figured out that we spend $800,000 a year per detainee down there. It’s a huge financial burden, and it’s not the question – the big questions will be answered by historians – but for the journalists, we should be able to sort of drill down and explain what it is that the American people have been paying for for ten year, especially in the last couple when the President has said it shouldn’t even exist.

Werman: The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg. Thank you very much indeed.

Rosenberg: Thank you.

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Ahmadinejad is seeking to reinforce ties with the few allies Iran has left – and also possibly to annoy the United States.

Marco Werman speaks with Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue.

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Marco Werman: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in Latin America today. He’s on a four-nation tour with visits to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Ecuador. Ahmadinejad is seeking to reinforce ties with his allies in the region. He may also be looking to annoy the United States. Michael Shifter is President of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. Michael, you just wrote a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine with the subtitle “Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s latest tour of Latin America a waste of time?” Is it?

Michael Shifter: Well, I don’t think he’s going to get very much out of it. He is going to needle and irk the United States and annoy the United States; he’s already accomplished that. There’s been some reaction in Washington. But he’s not getting much play in the major countries of the region that are not very interested in joining alliance with Ahmadinejad; they reject him. He’s really going to four countries that are on the margins politically, so he’s not going to get very much out of it either in economic terms or in diplomatic terms.

Werman: This is his sixth tour, though, of Latin America since he came to power in 2005. What’s his real interest there? Does he want to expand Iranian influence in this hemisphere and what do the Latin Americans make of that influence anyway?

Shifter: I think he wants to expand and there have been some Embassies that have opened up in the region. Trade has increased with a number of countries. There have been some modest investments, but it really hasn’t amounted to very much. The country itself, Iran, is in dire straits and it’s very little what he can do in Latin America. The countries are open to the economic and diplomatic side but certainly are very wary and cautious and understand that he is under enormous international pressure because of the nuclear program.

Werman: If you look across Latin America though, aren’t there economic relations with Iran in place that are pretty significant; trade deals, oil deals, etcetera that many countries would probably prefer not to put at risk, and I’m wondering, will they abide by U.S. sanctions on Iran or not when push comes to shove?

Shifter: They have a number of trading relationships. Brazil is the most significant trading relationship which has more than doubled since 2005, but there have been a lot of projects that have been promised that haven’t delivered. That oil refinery in Ecuador, constructing a port in Nicaragua; Iran really hasn’t come through. So, Latin Americans are waiting to see whether Iran will come through this time, but there’s a lot of skepticism. As far as the sanctions are concerned, there’s not going to be any appetite to really confront Iran. Also, most Latin American countries, the major countries have said they’ve got to go along with sanctions that are supported by the United Nations and by the international community.

Werman: So, you don’t really see this as an Iranian threat in the U.S. backyard?

Shifter: I think it’s something to keep a close watch on, but I don’t think it’s a threat. Given that he’s going to these four countries really doesn’t amount to very much and it really is to provoke and needle the United States which I think he is accomplishing.

Werman: Michael Shifter, President of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, thanks very much.

Shifter: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

They won’t suddenly be coming out with new outlandish styles and coifs. No.

It’s a much more basic freedom: they’ll simply be able to run their own barber shops, and work outside of state control. It’s part of a trend in this city: more and more of this city’s residents are becoming self-employed.

The Communist government here is cash-strapped, and wants to slash a million jobs from its payrolls. We hope the answer to this Quiz is coming into focus now.

We’re going to turn to Ted Henken for the answer. He’s professor of Latin American Studies at Baruch College in New York. And he writes about Cuba on his blog El Yuma.

The answer to our Geo Quiz is Havana.

Click on the image to enlarge. (Illustration: Manya Gupta)

The detention operation at the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been a lighting rod for criticism since the first enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere touched down there nearly 10 years ago.

But US involvement in this isolated corner of Cuba dates back a lot further than the opening of the notorious prison camp.

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Harvard University professor Jonathan Hansen about his book “Guantánamo: An American History.” The book details America’s centuries-long fascination with Cuba, from the Founding Fathers plans to expand US commerce via control of Guantanamo Bay to today’s notorious prison for enemy combatants.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins : I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. The detention facility at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been the lightening rod for criticism since the first captured enemy combatants touched down there. That was nearly a decade ago, but the US involvement in this isolated corner of Cuba dates back much further than that and there’s a lot more to the base than a high profile military prison. Harvard University professor Jonathan Hansen offers this lesser known fact: Guantanamo is a rich nature preserve.

Jonathan Hansen: There’s an irony to this great nature preserve that is Guantanamo Bay in which that is most of us can’t go to most of those places because there’s all sorts of unexploded ordnance and, in fact, people say that from time to time they hear explosions and everyone says, “So what was that? Was that a Cuban trying to make their way to the base?” And more often it was a deer, so if you have a nature preserve in which not even the deer are safe then you have to wonder how much of a nature preserve is it really, but it truly is a spectacular place just to visit and, as I say, the bird life is remarkable.

Mullins: A remarkable bird life at Guantanamo is just part of the narrative Jonathan Hansen weaves in his book “Guantanamo: An American History”. Hansen describes how Americas interest in Cuba and Guantanamo Bay in particular dates back to the 1700s. He says the founding fathers beleived that if the United States wanted to become a global trading powerhouse, it needed to control access to the Caribbean Sea and the biggest passage into the Caribbean happens to flow through Guantanamo Bay.

Hansen: We seized the bay from Spain in the opening salvo of the Spanish-American war. We retained the bay during the US occupation of Cuba between 1898 and 1902 and then we forced Cuba to lease us the bay as part of the notorious Platt Amendment the brought formal occupation of Cuba to an end in 1902.

Mullins: Does the United States now pay rent on Guantanamo Bay?

Hansen: So we paid rent on Guantanamo Bay for a while, a laughable little amount.

Mullins: It’s like a dollar a year wasn’t it?

Hansen: It was more than that. I think it was two hundred dollars a year, but Fidel Castro famously has stopped cashing the checks because he thinks that it’s an offense.

Mullins: You know, there’s so much history there and you go into great detail in the book which is fascinating, but in pushing forward, after Nine Eleven, Guantanamo Bay was not the the logical, in fact far from the logical place for a US prison camp or for Afghan detainees.

Hansen: Right, so the Bush administration set it’s eyes Guantanamo in about, starting about December 2001.

Mullins: They knew we were going to have prisoners that we had to put someplace, but they were looking where else? Guam and…

Hansen: They knew they had prisoners, so they were looking at Guam, they were looking at some other areas in the Pacific, for instance, other atolls, they were thinking about keeping them on ship board, they were thinking about keeping them in Afghanistan, though Afghanistan was not stable then and so they looked at Guantanamo because in the 1990s the US had detained up to 85,000 Cubans and Haitians behind barbed wire at Guantanamo under the same justification that Guantanamo was sovereign territory of Cubans hence US constitutional protections, in this case, do process the rightful council did not apply. So they thought, “Maybe we could use Guantanamo again.” The thing is there were people at Guantanamo who thought that this would be a disastrous place to have a detention facility.

Mullins: People who worked there?

Hansen: Mainly a public works officer, of someone who had, in fact, had been in Military Intelligence himself and who knew, as Americans don’t like to admit, that Guantanamo was actually, though it’s a great place to have anchorage, it makes a disastrous naval base in the sense that it is surrounded by Cuban highland and Cubans were able to photograph every single thing that happened there.

Mullins: Every visitor that comes in. You were photographed when you were there.

Hansen: Everything that happened at Guantanamo Bay. I was photographed at Guantanamo Bay and the people getting off the planes to come look at Guantanamo as a potential site were photographed. At Guantanamo Bay the detainees were later photographed getting off the bay, so those factors mitigated against putting the prison there in the words of the public works officer, but also Guantanamo is sort of a strange place. The major airfield which is used now is on the so called “Leeward Point” which is across from the main base and across from now where we hold, that housed Guantanamo Prison, so there’s a transportation problem. Not only that, but the most remarkable thing Guantanamo Bay in my mind is that Guantanamo Bay is an American suburb full of up to say ten to twelve thousand American civilians now and to transport the detainees around the base, say to move them now from the prison itself to the courthouse, you have to take them right through the main streets of the neighborhood.

Mullins: Which has what?

Hansen: They consist of everything that a suburb would consist of. It consists of neighborhoods, of schools, of supermarkets, of administrative headquarters. This is really ironic because if you think about one the main arguments that’s preventing Barrack Obama from moving these detainees to the United States is that it would be unsafe to have these so called terrorists in American cities, in towns and here you have one town that’s literally ripped in half by the movement of these prisoners every time they have to go from the prison to courthouse.

Mullins: But it’s not here.

Hansen: But it’s not here. Right. It’s in Cuba and it’s on an island.

Mullins: Well, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary at the time said that Guantanamo Bay was the least worst place. Was it just that it was not here in the United States? I mean what made it the least worst place and therefore suitable for a prison camp?

Hansen: Well the major argument, beside the fact that it was in Cuba, that it was highly defense-able and maybe one of, the most defense-able place in the world right now because South-East Cuba is very isolated. Anyway, we have this base, it’s been ours about which Cuba has nothing to say, especially since the rise of Castro. So it’s extremely, I say, and symbolic I think that’s very nice and also it is this place where, as I’ve said, US, Cuban Law, and International Law are thought not to apply and John Yoo, the man worked in George Bush’s Office of Legal Council, insisted that despite the fact that courts had flirted with extending constitutional protections to Guantanamo, he insisted that that would not be the case this time, so that’s the main reason. It was a place where they could do whatever they wanted.

Mullins: So Jonathan, if that’s the case then why is that you think the current detention operation at Guantanamo should remain open.

Hansen: What I have argued is that over the last ten years, humans rights lawyers, excellent journalists have introduced a modicum of transparency and habeas corpus constitutional protection at Guantanamo Bay and that it might be better to keep the detainees in a place where you have that than in other places where we have none of that.

Mullins: Historian Jonathan Hansen, professor at Harvard University. The book is called “Guantanamo: An American History”. Nice to talk to you.

Hansen: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The program, sponsored by the Catholic Church, aims to teach Cuban students how to start and market their own businesses in the new Cuban economy.

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MARCO WERMAN: Cuba has been shrinking its government workforce. The Cuban government wants to lay off as many as half a million government workers. At the same time, President Raul Castro is liberalizing the island’ s economy, allowing more Cubans to run their own businesses. And this week comes the launch of a new MBA program in Havana. It’ s sponsored by the Catholic Church and it’ s said to be the first of its kind there. Reporter Mark Franc writes about it in today’ s Financial Times.

MARK FRANC: You know it’ s really a sign of the times, both in terms of the government’ s acceptance of small business and also the warming trend in the Catholic Church. So it kind of hits two balls out of the park at the same time.

WERMAN: What made it possible for this new business school to launch?

FRANC: Well, I mean there’ s two things. First of all, a year ago all of a sudden the Cuban government announced that far from treating small businessmen like criminals, that in fact the country needed small businesses. And in fact they would be an important part of the socialist economy in the future. It then began giving out licenses to just about anybody who wanted to go into business. And so as far they’ ve given out about… I would say about 2,000 a week. So on the one hand you have this big boom, and people wanting to go into business, and the government allowing them. But the fact is that the country’ s never been prepared for such a thing. The Economy Faculty at Havana University doesn’ t teach of course how to run a small business, and so it step the church. And the MBA is just the first of many courses that have been planned to be here in Havana and around the country.

WERMAN: You know for the hungry capitalist wannabes in Cuba I would assume that if they really had their druthers they’ d like to go to Harvard and get an MBA there. Do they see getting an MBA from the Vatican as kind of settling? Is it good enough for them?

FRANC: Well when you have zero alternative of course it’ s great. So the people in this first course, it’ s like 30 of them, they are mixed. There’ s a few businesses students from Havana University, there’ s a few people who already run small restaurants and snack shops, and there’ s people who want to run businesses in the future. And so they are certainly very happy with their chance to learn how to do business better, even if it’ s not Harvard or Oxford.

WERMAN: Tell us about this one little street where the school is actually located, Chacón, Chacón Street. Do you see small businesses opening up there? And are these the businesses that are going to bloom in the future?

FRANC: First of all everywhere there’ s lots of businesses just popping up of all kinds. There’ s snack shops, there’ s restaurants, there’ s computer repair shops, and you can go on and on. Now, on the block that the school is located, you just go right out of the door and you walk down one block, there’ s three little kind of home-based snack shops. And of course going up and down the street there’ s lots of private taxi cab drivers, which also weren’ t before. And of course it is interesting, because the school is located in the colonial part of Havana, but basically these people who are selling in this area, they’ re selling to tourists, not necessarily the Cubans, and so they’ re competing directly let’ s say for the tourists and dollars, something that was totally forbidden just a year ago.

WERMAN: Marc, you obviously know the other big headline in Cuba involving capitalism in the past week. The government announced that new cars would be able to be sold and bought on the island, which hasn’ t happened since 1959. Is this how the revolution ends in Cuba with a Cadillac Escalade and an MBA?

FRANC: [laughs] I think that’ s a ways of action. The new law just allows people basically to buy and sell the cars that already exist in Cuba. And the government restrictions on Cubans’ buying new cars or importing cars- it really hasn’ t changed. So it’ s going to be a while before you can buy a really nice car.

WERMAN: Reporter Marc Franc with the Financial Times in Havana. Thank you so much.

FRANC: Pleasure. Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Tour Dates

• Sep.15, 2011: Century Ballroom Seattle, WA – 9:30 PM
• Sep.16, 2011: BLUE HORSE Bellingham, WA – 9:00 PM
• Sep.18, 2011: The Granada in Alhambra Llos Angeles, CA – 7:00 PM

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For the Geo Quiz, we are looking for a Cuban province that is renowned for its tobacco fields. It makes up the western most part of the island of Cuba. If you venture out there, you will probably want to see the Vinales Valley. It is a stunning landscape with tall, island-like, mountain hills, surrounded by wide open lush green fields and burnt orange soil. Agriculture has stayed pretty traditional out there and to find cigars made out of allegedly, the best tobacco in the world, you will have to visit the province’s main city, which has many tobacco factories. The province and its city share the same name.

Pinar del Rio is the answer to the Geo Quiz. It is Cuba’s westernmost province and is known for its tobacco plantations. It is from this province that 13 member band “Wil Campa Y Su Gran Union” hails from.

As the Obama administration relaxes restrictions on cultural exchanges with Cuba that tightened under President Bush, more Cuban musicians are performing in the United States and “Wil Campa Y Su Gran Union” is one of those bands. It performed traditional “son y salsa” music style in San Francisco last weekend, which was the first chance for most of the band’s young musicians to perform on North American soil. The band members, nearly all twenty and thirty somethings, prefer to talk about their close bonds. They’ve all played music since they were kids and studied at Havana’s prestigious National School of Music. Monica Campbell reports from San Francisco.

Listen to Wil Campa’s “Camina Con Swing”

Listen to Wil Campa’s “Mi Vecina”

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. Venezuelans are celebrating their independence today, on the 5th of July.  It’s the 200 year anniversary of Venezuela’s declaration of independence from Spain.  The festivities began a day early for thousands of Venezuelans.  They gave President Hugo Chavez a hero’s welcome as he returned from Cuba where he was getting medical treatment. Now, Chavez is not universally loved in Venezuela, we’ll hear more about his mixed record as president in a moment, but first we go to the BBC’s Sarah Grainger in Caracas.  Sarah, you’ve been out on the streets of Caracas, what’s the atmosphere like?

Sarah Grainger: Well, down on los Proceres, which is a big pedestrianized boulevard, there are military marches going on.  And it’s absolutely filled with thousands of people.  Most of them dressed in red, which shows their allegiance to the socialist party of President Chavez. Many of them there not just celebrating Independence Day and the Bicentennary, but celebrating the fact that the president came back to the country yesterday.  And a jubilant mood.  The government has pulled out all the stops for this celebration. They started off the march with jets through the skies of Caracas streaming colored smoke in the colors of the Venezuelan flag — red, yellow and blue.  And President Chavez himself began the march from the presidential palace on a video link; he wasn’t actually there present himself.

Werman: And that jubilant mood you described, Sarah, across Caracas, is that duplicated everywhere?

Grainger: Obviously if you’re of a certain political persuasion, if you back the president and you back the socialist party, then this really is a huge celebration.  And the government has been planning this for months and months.  They’ve really gone to some trouble to celebrate this Bicentennary, and it’s for them really a political celebration as much as a celebration for the country. I think anyone who is a supporter of the opposition probably isn’t enjoying these festivities, so I think it’s very much split on political lines; and I think it’s very much a political celebration.

Werman: Now, Hugo Chavez has only just returned to Venezuela.  What’s been the reaction there so far to his return and to the news he had surgery in Cuba as part of his treatment for cancer?

Grainger: I think the reaction yesterday when he first arrived back and first addressed the public, amongst his reporters was one of jubilation and delight.  He seemed back to his old self, embracing the public.  He loved being out there watching the thousands of people who’d come to watch him speak. That contrasted very sharply with the man that we saw delivering the message last week that he’d been treated for cancer.  He looked himself very apologetic and almost quite scared when he gave that announcement.  And I think that made a lot of people here quite worried.  And by coming back the day before Independence Day and coming out and talking to the public, he’s trying to ease people’s fears about his ability to continue. But obviously the fact that he’s not present physically at today’s marches shows that he is still having treatments and we’ll have to wait and see over the next weeks and months how he responds to treatment, and how he responds to having to work at the same time.

Werman: The BBC’s Sarah Grainger in Caracas, thanks very much indeed.

Grainger: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Tiempo Libre (Photo courtesy: http://www.tiempolibremusic.com)

This video is available in US only

Upcoming tour dates

• May 13, 2011: Klamath Falls, OR – Ross Ragland Theater
• May 14, 2011: Medford, OR – Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater
• May 20, 2011: New York, NY – Metropolitan Museum of Art

• See complete tour information here
• Tiempo Libre’s official site

Sanchez Yoani Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

There are many adjectives to describe Cuba. “Wired” is not one of them. As of 2009, only about 12 percent of the island’s population of 11 million had any access to the Internet. That’s because Cuba’s government wants to control the message.

So it comes as some annoyance to Cuban officials that one of the few independent bloggers in its midst, Yoani Sanchez, has gained an international following. And now a book of her blog entries, “Havana Real,” has just been published in the United States.

Yoani Sanchez did not intend to be a rebel. She started blogging as a form of therapy, a way to deal with the frustrations of daily life in Cuba: the long lines, the ever-diminishing rations, her obsession with the food she cannot have, and the constant challenge of keeping ancient appliances working.

Sanchez says she did not start her blog as an act of defiance. “My blog is chronicle of daily life and reality,” she said. “And in Cuba the reality is profoundly defiant, very much in opposition to the official truth put out by the government.”

That official truth includes government-choreographed parades and demonstrations every May Day or on the anniversary of Cuban victories like the failed US Bay of Pigs invasion. Then there’s the predictable government-scripted newscasts trumpeting Cuba’s athletes or boasting a bumper potato crop.

Generation Y

The name of Sanchez’ blog is Generation Y, for people with names that begin with the letter Y, like her first name. It’s common among Cubans born around the same time Sanchez was in 1975. Her generation spent their adolescence in late 1980s and 1990s, during the so-called “Special Period,” which was hardly special. Those were the very lean years following the collapse of the Soviet Union when Cuba was left on its own. Everything was scarce. Sanchez remembers nothing available in the Cuban peso stores, constant low-grade hunger pangs, and being sent from Havana to a rural schools to help grow crops.

And then there was the voice, those five- and six-hour-long televised speeches of the only leader she’s ever known her whole life: the unelected Fidel Castro.

By 2002, Yoani had had enough. Like thousands of other Cubans before her, she decided to leave. The decision came after a particular incident.

“It was Fidel Castro’s birthday and when I turned on the radio in the morning, the voice said, ‘Today is the birthday of the nation.’ And that day I decided I didn’t want to keep living in a country where they confuse the nation with one man, the country with an ideology and our identity with a political party.”

Yoani spent two years in Switzerland but being away from family was too difficult. She returned in 2004.

“My friends still think I was crazy to come back,” she said. “But life has shown me I was right. I wanted to come back, but not to the same condition of silence and of wearing a mask. I wanted to come back to speak out and that is what I am doing, even if I have to pay the consequences of doing that.”

Consequences

The consequences have been harsh. Her phone is tapped, her friends harassed, her teenage son taunted. Plain-clothes Cuban security police are stationed outside her apartment at all times and follow her wherever she goes.

One day Yoani decided to turn the tables. She started following them. She walked right up to them and took photos — which are on her blog — and asked them questions. One said, “Are you crazy?” Another time, she was arrested, beaten and thrown in jail. She recorded the whole thing on her cell phone and that’s on her blog, too.

But Yoani says it’s all worth it because what started out four years ago as one Cuban citizen expressing her views has turned into a community, which she helped train. “We are a diverse, plural movement of alternative Cuban bloggers with a range of voices.” She says they’re not a political party and that in fact they’re all quite different from one another. “But we have something in common and that is the desire to express our voices,” she said.

Yoani continues to express her own voice — in any way she can. She makes a living by writing for foreign publications. She then uses the hard currency to pay for time on the Internet at tourist hotels where she emails her blog entries to the Canadians who manage it.

Asked what she’d tell Raul Castro to change if she ever got a meeting with him, she would tell him to de-criminalize differences of opinion. “When we stop punishing free expression in this country, everything will start to change.”

Yoani Sanchez is now a cause celeb in civil society and digital media circles. Jimmy Carter met with her recently in Havana — at his request. And she’s regularly invited overseas to accept awards and speak at conferences. But Cuban authorities have turned down her requests to travel — 14 times. She’s got a 15th one pending — to visit the US to promote her book but she’s not optimistic.

Read More

• The Year of Yoani
• Yoani Sanchez: My Last Bit of Faith
• Yoani Sanchez: A gangland style kidnapping
• Yoani Sanchez: Goodbye to Rationing
• What Jimmy Carter can’t change in Cuba

An excerpt from the Yoani Sanchez’s book “Havana Real”

Given a ration card at birth, and entering adolescence during Cuba’s “Special Period,” my thoughts are obsessed with food. I have to control myself not to let my desires run away with me, or to show the naked hunger that I see in the faces of my friends.
I look at them heading to the market with their plastic shopping bags, often returning with them just as empty as when they left. I, too, have a shopping bag, but I keep it folded in my pocket, so I don’t look like I’ve been devoured by the machinery of the waiting line, the search for food, the gossip about whether the chicken has arrived at the market. . . In the end, I have the same obsession with getting food, but I try not to show it too much.

New status symbol

I live equidistant from two agricultural markets. In one, the sellers are either farmers or members of a cooperative farm, the other is run by the Youth Labor Army. In the first, there is nearly every fruit, vegetable, and other food, even pork, that one could want. In the second, the State market, there is rarely more than sweet potatoes, peppers, onions and green papayas. When there is some kind of meat, lines are longer. But the fundamental difference between the two markets is not variety but price—so much so that my neighbors call the farmers’ market “the market of the rich” and the Youth Labor Army’s market the “market of the poor.”
The truth is, to serve a fairly balanced meal you have to go to both. First, you must inspect the plentiful stands in the large “market of the rich.” Then you must review the capricious offerings and dubious quality in the “market of the poor.”
Sometimes, overcome by desire and nostalgia, I buy a pineapple in the “market of the rich.” But I take care to bring a cloth shopping bag to hide this queen of the fruits, this obscene symbol of status, from the jealous glances of others.

When I watch TV. . .

This week we are having anti-television therapy in our house. We started gradually, and now we only turn on the “smug little fatty” without the volume. This does something extremely interesting. Before our eyes pass images so predictable that our imaginations add voices and sound. If there is a seeded field, inside my head I hear a well-known commentator announcing over-achievement in potato production. If we see images of people in white coats, my mind immediately hears the speech about Cuban doctors who offer their services in Bolivia or Venezuela.
When watching on mute, however, I never hear anything resembling actual conversations that I hear daily on the street. Our small screen shows us “what should have been” or, even worse, “what we must think we are.” So, the commentator in all of us never says, “Prices are sky-high,” “In my polyclinic we have only seventeen doctors because all the rest have left on a mission,” “If you don’t steal from your workplace you can’t live,” or “Where are the damned potatoes that never come?”
What I see on television bears so little resemblance to my life that I have come to think it is my life that isn’t real; that the sad faces on the street are actors who deserve Oscars; that the hundreds of problems I navigate just to feed myself, get transportation, and simply exist are only lines in a dramatic script; that the truth, so adamant are they about it, must be what they tell me on the National Television News and the Roundtable talk show.

The gift of invisibility

For years I boasted that I could become “invisible.” Because at any moment, I could immediately go undetected and escape from complicated situations. Wrapped in this “Harry Potter” cloak, I eluded the Union of Communist Youth, because—incredibly enough considering Cuba’s ideological extremism in the 1980s—no one asked me if I’d like to join.
I was also invisible to any position of responsibility that required an unblemished record. Thus, I avoided, with hardly anyone noticing, until today, the almost obligatory enrollment in the Federation of Cuban Women; I simply played the old trick of having an identity card for one address but living in another. I also got around membership in a union. And I even managed to sidestep the “University is for Revolutionaries,” as I was lucky enough to study at the School of Letters, during a time of relaxed bureaucracy due to the severe conditions of the Special Period.1
However, the hiding trick no longer works. So, I have “pointed myself out” with an act of extreme exhibitionism: Writing this blog. My friend told me the golden rule he learned in a conversation with “the boys of the apparatus.” He said: “You can sign your own name to anything you think and write, but you aren’t allowed to publish any of those things, particularly if you have signed them.”
So, inspired by my friend’s story, I got a little carried away and put my picture up on this blog. Although I appreciate the advice of those who have written in asking me to please use a pseudonym and to take my photo down from the site, I should tell you all that this is part of my “anti-invisibility” therapy.

(flickr image: Nestor)

This mountain range is also known for its coffee plantations. But these days there isn’t enough coffee in Cuba – once a major coffee exporter – to even meet the demands of the local population. So the government decided that it would have to stretch its local coffee blend by mixing it with roasted chickpeas.

Now, back to the mountains: the range is located at the southeast end of the island, where the main city is Santiago de Cuba.

Where are we?

(flickr image: Kenno McDonnell)