Havana schools of art still cause outrage

Rowan Moore reports in today's Observer newspaper that the great ballet dancer Carlos Acosta wants to give something back both to his art form and to Cuba, and has offered his own money and the fundraising power of his energy and his name, to create a new centre for dance and culture on the edge of Havana. In the process, he hopes to give a new future to one of the most remarkable buildings of the 20th century, in Cuba or anywhere else. The eminent Lord Foster has helped him with a feasibility study, free of charge, yet the plan has provoked uproar, says Rowan.
The building in question is the School of Ballet, a work of the heady early years of the Cuban revolution, and Cuban architects are questioning whether a powerful international practice, Foster's, will best reflect its spirit. The school's original architect, Vittorio Garatti, has written to Fidel Castro in protest. The reason is that Foster is a modernist - a movement which the original architect rejected.
The current debate, says Rowan, is the latest episode in a story so dramatic and colourful it could inspire a book, a feature film or an opera. As, indeed, it has – all three. The ballet school is part of a complex called the National Schools of Art, about which architect and educator John Loomis has written a book, Revolution of Forms, which has been made into a movie (called Unfinished Spaces) now doing the rounds of film festivals, and is the basis of an opera directed by Robert Wilson. Watch the trailer above

EU ice is melting?

Cuban Cartoon: "Clearly my love, I know that you like my position, but everyone is commenting that the only thing that I have in common with anypone is with you"

News has reached me that European Union Foreign Ministers agreed on 19 November to "explore the possibility" of drawing up a new co-operation accord with Cuba that would supplant the 1996 Current Position that governs relations with Cuba.
Spain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Gonzalo de Benito, said:“Starting now, what the [European] Commission is going to do is to establish some guidelines so that this cooperation accord may be negotiated, representing a step forward in the relationship between the European Union and Cuba,”
The EU sees the recent chnages in Cuba as “a positive evolution”, he added.
This is welcome news and means that some form of EU-Cuba association agreement might eventually be agreed. Cuba is the only country in Latin America that the EU has no formal relationship with.
The EU has previously argued that its unilateral ‘Common Position’ “encourages dialogue with the Cuban authorities to promote respect for human rights, progress towards pluralist democracy and economic reforms”. However, officials and some Member States believe that this policy has been a failure and that there is a need to begin to put in place the possibility of bilateral agreement.

US spy sues US government

Demonstrators outside Cuban Interests Section

in Washington calling for Gross's release

Alan Gross, the American who has been imprisoned in Cuba for nearly three years for spying is suing his former Maryland employer and the United States government for $60 million, saying they didn’t adequately train him or disclose risks he was undertaking by doing the work he did on the island.
Alan Gross and his wife Judy sued Friday in federal court in Washington. The lawsuit alleges that the "economic development" company Gross was working for in Cuba and the U.S. government, with which the company had a contract, failed to provide Gross “with the education and training that was necessary to minimize the risk of harm to him.”
Gross, 63, was arrested in December 2009 while on his fifth trip to Cuba as part of a project to increase the availability of Internet access in the country. Gross was working on the effort as a subcontractor for Development Alternatives Inc., an economic development company based in Bethesda, Md. The Cuban authorities arrested him for illegally bringing sophisticated wi fi equipment into the country that they say was intended for use in oprgnaising an oppostion to the government. Gross was imprisoned as an enemy agent.
Last week, Alan Gross's wife said that she was disappointed in the US government for not having done enough to get her husband freed.

The numbers game

It does appear that what I was saying yesterday has really happened. As the graph above from The Wall Street Journal shows, the numbers of Cuban-Americans voting Democrat has increased steadily over the years since 2000 and now they are voting in roughly equal numbers with their Republican colleagues. What this means is that the demographics have fundamentally changed. The Democratic half of the community by and large favours contact with the island and wishes to visit it freely, send money to their families and possibly even look forward to having a share in a business there once the new private sector becomes established. The Republican half favours the embargo and punishing Cubans, driving down their living standards in the hope that they will turn on the government. The former group is growing, the latter is declining. The latter is declining because the community is dying off, they are early migrants who left in the sixties, have few ties to the island and whose children do not share their vehement hatred of Castro. The latter group are growing because they are new migrants and they are growing fast. Look at these figures posted today by Phil Peters on his blog:

Numbers of Cubans who obtained legal permanent residency in the past ten years, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

2002                28,182

2003                9,262

2004                20,488

2005                36,261

2006                45,614

2007                29,104

2008                49,500

2009                38,954

2010                33,372

2011                36,261

Total              326,998

That's nearly 3 per cent of the total Cuban population becoming US citizens in the past nine years. Think about it, can this be allowed to go on? Cuba simply cannot afford to keep losing these people and the US can't keep absorbing them - especially since the Cubans are made a special case among the Hispanic communities, benefitting from the ridiculously anachronistic Cuban Adjustment Act and the ability to obtain citizenship easily. Logic tells you that sooner now than later something has to change - and following this election, Obama has the best opportunity to do it than any President since Kennedy.

More on all the voting from Fabiola Santiago in the Herald; in the Wall Street Journal, “Cuban-Americans Move Left;” and in the Financial Times, “Cuban-Americans Stun Republicans.”

Bell tolls for the hardliners

It is still too early to say, but some commentators are suggesting that Obama may have won a majority of Cuban American votes in Florida. If they are correct then the power of the right-wing Cuba-American lobby is in terminal decline. True enough, Republican Castro baiters Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart may have both won with thumping majorities in their districts, but overalll in Miami-Dade and Broward counties where most of the Cuban-Americans are located, Obama won over Romney. It is obvious that he could not have done so without picking up a good proportion of their votes. This might be as much as 62 per cent, as my fellow blogger Phil Peters reported yesterday.

Add to this the fact that Joe Garcia became the first Democrat Cuban-American ever to be elected, and that veteran Castro hater Connie Mack lost his senate seat, it all adds up to a very interesting scenario. Garcia openly supports more engagement with the island. The split in the Cuban-American community in Florida could therefore not be more clear.

When they finally count all the votes we will know for sure, but either way Obama won the White House without the need for Florida at all. He owes the Cuban right-wing nothing. Furthermore, he is in a final term and therefore should have a free hand to open the door to Cuba. I am 99 per cent certain that he will do so.

Make no bones about it, Obama wishes to end socialism in Cuba just as much as Ros-Lehtinen, but he differs on how it should be done. I use the following analogy: Instead of trying to starve Cuba into submission through an embargo, a strategy that has not worked, Obama inclines towards what I call the poisoned apple approach. Just like the wicked stepmother, he would try to kill Cuba with apparent kindness. It's going to be an interesting four years.

The stakes in Florida

 As the US election day looms, polls are showing America’s largest swing state Florida to be tied in a dead heat between Romney and Obama. Florida has 29 electoral votes and the third largest “Hispanic” population in America. Normally this means an easy victory for any Democrat.

But oh dear! It turns out that about a third of these Florida Hispanics are Cuban-Americans.

A poll last week of voters in Florida’s Miami-Dade county by the Miami Herald found the following breakdown:

                 Obama     Romney       Undecided
White:         64%             30%             6%
Black:          95%               2%             3%
Hispanic:      33%            62%              5%

Hey, wait a minute!” liberals wail. “But every poll on the planet shows Obama with at least 70% of the U.S. Hispanic vote. So what’s going on here?”
Americans of Cuban heritage as usual, that’s what’s going on. The Miami Herald poll broke it down further, noting that Cuban-Americans support Obama 19%, Romney 76% and 5% are undecided.
In brief: no ethnic group in the U.S. comes even close to matching Cuban-Americans in their level of disdain for President Barack Obama in particular and the Democratic Party in general.
What does this mean for the election? It means if Romney wins and he needs Florida to win and he wins in Florida - he will owe his victory to the Cuban -Americans... so kiss goodbye to any change in US policy towards Cuba. However, if Obama wins and he needs Florida to win and he wins there, he will owe them NOTHING!
It's not rocket science...

Time for a sane approach to Cuba?

Now that the Cuban government has removed the exit visa requirement for its citizens to travel, the penny is beginning to drop as to what this means for US Cuba policy. Some, such as the editorial writers from the Los Angeles Times, fear that it is going to result in a deluge of Cubans entering the United States and produce a situation akin to the so-called 'rafters crisis' of the early nineties, while others, such as Democrat Representative Jim McGovern, argue that it represents yet another tick on Washington's wish list for Cuba and therefore merits a reciprocal act by the Administration.
Of course nothing is going to happen on US Cuba policy at all until after the election. McGovern hopes, as all sane people must, that Obama wins next week. McGovern hails from Massacussetts, home of the Kennedies - and next year is the 50th anniversary year of JFK's assassination. Shortly before he was killed, Kennedy was pursuing a back channel approach to Fidel Castro in the hope of settling their differences in his second term. Let's hope that an Obama second term will finally lay that ghost to rest...