Word: cuba
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cuba is cracking up from the inside. I came here to find the band, but not only did it split up (Oscar joined Los Reyes long after leaving El Septeto), but most of its members don't even live in Cuba anymore. Jorge and Piri, who played bass and drums, live near Cancún. They've got a regular gig at a Cuban-themed bar; Jorge married the bleached-blond singer who fronts the band, which now calls itself La Barbie de la Salsa. George works in Mexico City as a producer and guitarist with Margarita Vargas Gaviria, known throughout Mexico...
...immigration office to try to get temporary visas to bring them to Mexico. But the Mexican bureaucrats keep asking for bribes. And he's not sure how his wife would even adjust--she's too communist, he says, laughing. She would miss her friends and co-workers in Cuba too much. For her part, she told me when I visited her in Santa Clara that she always knew it would be this way: marrying a Cuban musician is like marrying a soldier or a doctor, she said. They're always on call; they're always overseas...
...says that earlier this year, 19 teenagers went missing from her neighborhood. They had made a pact to leave Cuba by raft. Months later, not one of them had called to say they had arrived in the States. The mothers in the neighborhood knew their children had drowned...
...However Cuba changes, there will be difficult times with its neighbor to the north. Even before the murderous enticement of Washington's wet-foot, dry-foot policy that rewards Cubans who survive the trip across the waters with citizenship (while denying many visa requests made through proper channels in Havana)--even before Fidel Castro--relationships have been uneasy between Cuba and the U.S., which essentially colonized the island after Spain left in 1898. There was the U.S. administrator who in the early 1900s announced plans to "whiten" the population. And the 1901 Platt Amendment, which helped carve the U.S. Naval...
...because the translators have to be paid. We've had an investigator in Bosnia working with us for three years. He has to be paid. Every time we fly to Washington, the only place you can look at this evidence, every time we fly to Florida to fly to Cuba and so forth. It's a very, very expensive case...