Word: havana
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...closest you'll get to a YouTube moment in communist Cuba - and perhaps a harbinger of the post-Fidel Castro era. Earlier this month a video surfaced on the island showing a Havana university student, Eliecer Avila, peppering National Assembly leader Ricardo Alarcon with the kind of public questions that usually get Cubans tossed in jail. Why does a worker have to toil two or three days just to be able to buy a toothbrush? Avila, a computer science major, asked the visibly flummoxed Alarcon, who was visiting Avila's school outside Havana. Why can't Cubans freely travel abroad...
...which indicates that the youthful outburst may not have been the spontaneous Havana Spring it was widely billed as, but rather a part of something quietly sanctioned by Cuba's interim President, Raul Castro. Since being tapped by his older brother, Fidel Castro, as the country's provisional leader in the summer of 2006 after Fidel underwent major intestinal surgery, Raul, 76, has pushed a more pragmatic, even reform-minded agenda that has encouraged limited public debate - and, just as important, worked to undermine hard-line fidelistas like Alarcon. The Avila episode was yet another sign of how firmly Raul...
Fidel's exit was hardly unexpected, and the streets of Havana today are reportedly calm. Seriously incapacitated by his stomach condition, the 81-year-old comandante, who has ruled Cuba and roiled the U.S. since taking power in 1959, has not been seen in public for a year and a half - even failing to appear at the podium last July 26 for the anniversary of the launching of his communist revolution. In December he released a letter saying he didn't want to "cling to power," which analysts like Latell called his de facto resignation. In his statement today, released...
...that Fidel's resignation could be a step toward a "democratic transition" in Cuba, he insisted that Washington will have to see "free and fair elections" in Cuba before the U.S. softens its stance, "not those staged elections the Castro brothers try to pass off as free and fair." Havana seemed to expect as much. One Cuban official joked to TIME that Fidel had timed his announcement for the middle of the night in the Western Hemisphere because "we knew Bush was in Africa and due to the time difference it would be the best time, as he certainly would...
...Company: CIA Diary, critiqued U.S. policy and named purported CIA operatives, enraging U.S.officials and inspiring the U.S. law criminalizing the exposure of covert agents (which later figured in the Valerie Plame case). After living in Germany for years, Agee, whose U.S. passport was revoked in 1979, moved to Havana to start a travel website that encourages U.S. tourism in Cuba. He was 72 and died after ulcer surgery...