Word: cuba
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...things engender hypocrisy more broadly than U.S. policy on Cuba. It's embarrassingly inconsistent for Washington to maintain a trade embargo against Havana and to bar U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba when the U.S. gleefully does business with regimes like China, whose human-rights violations are more egregious than Cuba's. At the same time, it's curious at best that embargo foes like California Representative Barbara Lee, who led a congressional delegation to Havana last week that met with President Raúl Castro and his brother Fidel, rarely mention Cuba's jailed dissidents but will...
Americans long ago came to the rational conclusion that we can trade with communist China and still criticize its rights record. But communist Cuba keeps us in a trance of irrational contradictions. That is, perhaps, until now. As Barack Obama packs for the Summit of the Americas this week in Trinidad, where he hopes to improve Washington's dismal relations south of the border, the U.S. President knows that Cuba policy will be the marquee topic. "Any solution to the U.S.'s problems in Latin America has to go through Havana," says Larry Birns, head of the Council on Hemispheric...
With that in mind, the Obama Administration on Monday lifted restrictions on Cuban-American family visits and remittances to family members in Cuba. It also announced measures to get broader cell-phone and television service to Cubans, which White House officials said would "open the flow of information" on the island. Either way, many hope Monday's moves will eventually lead to a dismantling of the trade embargo. But the moves should at least be followed this year by an end to the travel ban for the rest of the U.S. population - that is, if Obama throws his support behind...
Obama has long suggested that Cuban Americans are the "best ambassadors" to spread the democratic conversation in Cuba. But Birns and other Cuba-policy watchers consider the general travel ban a violation of U.S. citizens' rights to move freely, and they argue that continuing to make it illegal for non-Cubans to visit the island sends a half-baked message to the rest of Latin America, which views the Cuban embargo as a symbol of Washington's historically imperious approach to the region as a whole. "To have in place a Cuba travel policy that privileges just one small segment...
...Gammons reflected on the extent to which baseball, whose prominence on the international stage has increased substantially in the past decade, mirrors the melting-pot composition of American culture. He recalled the words of Major League Baseball pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, who fled Cuba to play in the United States and later acknowledged of his fellow ballplayers: “We all came over by boat.” “In that way, baseball reflects us.” Gammons said, pointing to the parallel between Hernandez’s characterization...