Word: concert
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...motivated to help our servicemen? I don't think enough is being done by the artists of today. I don't think that they're going out there. I was away for nearly four months touring around India and Burma. Today they might fly out and do an odd concert or two, but they're not doing a stretch of entertaining and meeting the boys and mingling with them and talking to them, which is very important. The troops don't just want to be entertained. They want to talk to people who've just come from home...
...island where communism is the de facto state religion, it was a refreshing shock on both sides of the Florida Straits to see the hallowed Revolution Plaza packed not for a 10-hour Fidel speech but for something as joyously secular as a pop concert. As Granma itself noted afterward, there was "no political manipulation of cultural expression ... just a vote for human understanding." And while that's to the Castros' credit, the truth is that the long-term effects of that sort of nondogmatic fiesta don't always favor systems like Cuba's. Says Daniel Erikson, a senior associate...
Which is why the concert's supporters, including many in the Miami exile community, say it's time for the Obama Administration to revive the U.S.-Cuba cultural exchanges that began in the 1990s but were nixed under former President George W. Bush. "I took part in the Bay of Pigs, and I've been fighting the Castros for 50 years," says Francisco (Pepe) Hernandez, 73, president of the Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami, which backed Juanes' efforts despite protests by more hard-line exiles that included smashing the singer's CDs in Little Havana. "But it was tremendous...
...island. Though he favors keeping intact the 47-year-old trade embargo against Cuba, he eliminated restrictions on travel to Cuba for Cuban-American families, and his Administration is now in talks with Havana about improving immigration and postal service between the two countries. Erikson says the concert by Juanes, who lives in Miami, was a reminder of the "soft power tool kit" the U.S. should wield more often. "Obama needs to bring more of that kind of cultural diplomacy back into the arena," he says, "but so far it's taking a backseat...
Obama, however, seems less than impressed with such arguments. Sunday morning, in an interview with the Spanish-language television network Univisión, he said that while he didn't think events like the Juanes concert hurt U.S.-Cuba relations, "I wouldn't overstate the degree that it helps." If that indifference seems to contradict the spirit of U.S.-Cuba engagement that Obama expressed in his presidential campaign and at the Summit of the Americas earlier this year, it may be because he's found that conservatives can still give him headaches over Cuba and the Latin-American left. Republicans...