Word: cuba
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...Cuba talks, held since Friday, seemed no closer to solving the refugee crisis despite a U.S. offer to admit more than 20,000 Cubans a year. A 45-minute meeting today reportedly contained an undisclosed Cuban response, and the two sides are to resume talks Wednesday morning. In Madrid, Cuba's Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina denied reports that Cuba would only be satisfied with a whopping 100,000 immigration ceiling. Meanwhile, 100 Cuban refugees in the Guantanamo Naval base volunteered to be moved out of the camp and put aboard planes for Panama, which has agreed to accept several thousand...
...Wednesday on the Malecon, where Havana meets the swelling breast of its bay. The Malecon is Cuba's promenade, its boardwalk, its Champs Elysees. Across the Straits of Florida in Miami, kingdom of dollars, citadel of wealth unimaginable, the exiles have a favorite T shirt: it portrays the Malecon after Castro's fall as an endless vista of shiny, neon-lighted fast-food joints. The crumbling, once graceful seafront is still a long way from that plastic vision. Potuombo gestures at the crowd in his cafe, who are placidly consuming not Whoppers or Big Macs but the tepid brown soda...
Farther down the avenue, Baldomero Alvarez Rios, 70, shakes his head. "The problem with young people in Cuba today," he says, "is that they have no idea what it was like before the revolution." His wife Maria Luisa Vina Alonso, 67, nods solemnly. Before 1959 they were members of what Maria calls the petite bourgeoisie, but then Baldomero's revolutionary fervor turned him into a party-line journalist. They worked all over the country and even abroad, spreading Castro's word in receptive capitals like Santiago and Mexico City...
...American capitalism are far more eager to put to sea in its pursuit than their parents, who knew capitalism's dark side firsthand. "They see pictures of their relatives in Miami with late-model cars and Seiko watches and Levi's," he says, "and they are tricked into thinking Cuba's problems are internal and salvation lies elsewhere." The revolution brought fair distribution of the country's wealth, he says, and improvements in health and education. Even if it had not brought those things, he went on, it is justified on patriotic grounds alone: it made Cuba free and independent...
...waves and more rain. The balseros along the shore use their time to work on their rafts, dream, complain. Jorge Luis, 36, introduces his raft's crew. "Just because we're discontented, we're considered antisocial," he says. "But in fact we're all professionals. Cuba is like a prison these days. You work one month to eat one day. You . . . " And then he pauses and smiles, surveying one raft after another beached on the white sands. Someone has passed the word. The forecast for Monday is clear...