Word: havana
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With his studied style, Roberto Robaina Gonzalez looks more like a manager of a rock band than a Marxist model. Yet Robaina, at 37, exemplifies the new face of Cuba. Two months ago, Fidel Castro surprised Havana by picking the man he affectionately calls Robertico, a math teacher who speaks only Spanish, as Foreign Minister. U.S. diplomats dismissed him as "dynamic but dumb." Havana's bureaucrats were speechless: in his previous job as head of the Union of Communist Youth, Robaina had wooed the young with discos and salsa music -- and those T shirts. Even Fidel had a public laugh...
Americans refused to take in the "Ship of Fools" in 1939, the liner St. Louis, even though it sailed as close as Havana with its 1,128 refugees fleeing Hitler. The American military in 1944 declined to bomb the death camps or the rail lines leading to them. These decisions (documented in the museum) have a contemporary resonance: bureaucratic cowardice and fecklessness, indifference, appeasement, denial, tribal intolerance and fanaticism, racial hatred. This is the way these things happen. The Holocaust is a densely compacted drama of warning that needs to be remembered repeatedly. In the world...
After academic studies in Havana, he went to Europe in 1923; presently he came to know Picasso (whose work strongly influenced him) and the Surrealists, who took him in as a member of their group. Another black painter who knew him in Paris claimed that Lam "forged the link between African sensibility and European tradition," and he wasn't exaggerating much. But in 1941, correctly surmising that a black Surrealist who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War would have a short future under the Nazi occupation of France, Lam returned to Cuba; from there...
...Miami, some 160 Haitian refugees concluded that it was time for a desperate gesture. They announced a hunger strike to win their freedom, in an effort to protest what they see as an immigration double standard. The Haitians watched angrily as 48 Cubans who hijacked an airliner out of Havana earlier this month were released almost overnight. Hundreds of black Haitians -- who risked a 600-mile sea voyage in rickety boats to flee an often cruel military rule -- have been detained for months while their asylum claims are reviewed...
...Person in Havana...