Word: el
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...short and ill-fated career as a saxophone player, I was one of a wave of American musicians who made the pilgrimage to Havana. I was a worse player than most, but luck was with me--I quickly fell in with Oscar and a traditional band called El Septeto Tipico de la Habana. I played out the summer at their regular gigs in the mansion district called Vedado, west of the old city...
...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...
...terrorism has been the CIA's kidnapping suspected terrorists and shipping them to secret prisons around the globe--where obeying the Geneva Conventions is more an exception than the rule--a practice known as rendition. Unfortunately, some of those snatched by CIA officers were innocent. German citizen Khaled el-Masri was one such victim. El-Masri was vacationing in Macedonia in December 2003 when authorities arrested him on wrongful suspicions that his passport was fake. A tragic case of mistaken identity then played out. El-Masri has the same name as an al-Qaeda operative being hunted at the time...
...Sachs, might say that allowing people from destitute places to migrate doesn’t help them where it counts: at home. This Washington Consensus logic asserts that immigration-friendly policies prevent poor states from developing their own economic infrastructure. But perhaps we should care less about Somalia and El Salvador and more about Somalis and Salvadoreños. What citizens of developing countries have as a comparative advantage is cheap labor and little else because of geographical constraints and entrenched, frozen financial and legal institutions. Individuals should be permitted to work in countries with aging and picky populations. There...
...same time, Chávez's feckless foes should realize that they're still weak enough for El Comandante to consider the constitutional issue a still viable option. Chávez, a former army paratrooper officer who led a failed coup attempt in 1992 before winning the presidency in the 1998 election (and a special race in 2000 under a rewritten constitution), has benefited greatly from a dysfunctional opposition led largely by leftovers from the old guard that pilfered Venezuela's oil wealth and left more than half the population in poverty; it thwarted Chávez last year only...