“The blackout is the culmination of decades of disinvestment, an economic crisis, and global factors affecting the country’s oil supply, and there doesn’t seem to be a long-term solution to the crisis.
The Cuban government regularly imposes hours-long blackouts in different parts of the country to conserve the fuel necessary to run the electrical plants. But the current outage is different. It was sparked by a breakdown at one of the country’s aging electrical stations and has affected every facet of life for ordinary people: They cannot cool or light their homes, food is spoiling in refrigerators, they cannot cook, and many can’t access water to drink or wash.
Though the situation has now reached a crisis point, it’s a tragedy that has developed over time and emphasizes Cuba’s fragile economy, development imperatives, and its tenuous place in world politics.”
“Early in the administration, Harris was given a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fundraiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her attempt to convince companies across the world to invest in Central America and create jobs for would-be migrants had some success, according to immigration experts and current and former government officials.
But those successes only underlined the scale of the gulf in economic opportunity between the United States and Central America, and how policies to narrow that gulf could take years or even generations to show results.
Rather than develop ways to turn away or detain migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Harris’ work included encouraging a Japan-based auto parts plant, Yazaki, to build a $10 million plant in a western Guatemalan region that sees high rates of migration and pushing a Swiss-based coffee company to increase procurement by more than $100 million in a region rich with coffee beans.
She convened leaders from dozens of companies, helping to raise more than $5 billion in private and public funds.
“Not a huge amount, but it ain’t chicken feed and that links to jobs,” said Mark Schneider, who worked with Latin American and Caribbean nations as a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration.
Jonathan Fantini-Porter, the chief executive of the Partnership for Central America, the public-private partnership Harris helped lead, said the money had led to 30,000 jobs, with another 60,000 on the way as factories are constructed.
She also pushed Central American governments to work with the United States to create a program where refugees could apply for protection within the region.
Still, some of Harris’ critics said her focus on the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador was a mistake.
Most migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during the Obama and Trump administrations did come from those countries. But as migration from that region stabilized during the Biden administration, it exploded from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba.
The Northern Triangle countries accounted for roughly 500,700 of the 2.5 million crossings at the southwest border in the fiscal year of 2023, a 36% drop from the 2021 fiscal year, according to the Wilson Center.
“They didn’t care to do a good diagnosis of the issue, and they have just focused on a very small part of the topic,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political science professor at George Mason University who has studied Latin American relations and their impact on migration. Correa-Cabrera said Harris had “failed completely” in her mission by following an outdated approach to tackling the root causes of migration.
Biden had a similar portfolio to Harris’ when he was vice president. He was in charge of addressing the economic problems in Central America by rallying hundreds of millions of dollars of aid for a region where the United States has a complicated legacy.”
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“Ricardo Zúñiga, who served as State Department’s special envoy for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, said Harris was essential in bringing together Latin American and American business leaders to drive investment in Central America.
Less than a week into her role, Zúñiga recalled, Harris sat with members of the national security team and economists from the Treasury Department. After a round of introductions, she quickly got into probing the personalities of the Latin American leaders with whom she would be interacting.
Zúñiga said he later watched her put the information she had collected into practice. In Mexico City, she connected with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador by expressing interest in the artwork at his presidential palace.
In Guatemala, she took a much more direct approach to President Alejandro Giammattei. She warned him last year about attempts to disrupt the handover of power of the newly elected president, Bernardo Arévalo, while also pushing him to help form programs that migrants could use to apply for refuge in the United States closer to their home countries.
“She was curious and asked many questions,” Zúñiga said. “She very quickly realized that we weren’t going to solve 500 years of problematic history in a single term.””
“This noise was not produced by some kind of sonic weapon, however. It turned out to be crickets. Literal crickets.
And yet, this did not put Havana syndrome panic to rest, even though subsequent analysis by medical experts and U.S. intelligence suggests that the condition is not real. In 2022, the CIA concluded that the symptoms described by various officials were not caused by “a sustained global campaign by a hostile power.” The FBI’s analysis was that Havana syndrome is a “mass sociogenic illness,” which sounds pretty scary, but actually means that the symptoms are essentially caused by social contagion, under conditions of extreme stress, paranoia, and among members of an insular community. Writer Natalie Shure likened it to the “demonic fits” experienced by girls during the Salem witch trials.
“It means that the perceived diagnosis spreads socially, almost like an infectious pathogen would, with symptoms either triggered, exacerbated or wrongly ascribed to a phony cause,” she wrote in a November 2021 piece for Slow Boring. “People experience various maladies all the time and the cause is not always clear.””
“Berioskha Guevara has no words to describe her happiness living in the United States. After decades of fear as a political opponent in Venezuela and struggles to buy staples like milk and bread, the 53-year-old chemist feels she is dreaming.
Guevara and her 86-year-old father came to the U.S. under the sponsorship of her brother, a pharmacist who left after Hugo Chavez took power in 1999.
“Now we are like in paradise,” said Guevara, who arrived in July 2023. “I can’t stop smiling, making plans, thanking God because without parole I would never have been able to live my dreams as I am living them now.”
More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country as it went into an economic tailspin over the last decade. They are increasingly headed to the United States, which prompted the Biden administration to offer parole to 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Texas and 20 other states sued, saying the administration “effectively created a new visa program —without the formalities of legislation from Congress” but does not challenge large-scale parole for Afghans and Ukrainians. A judge has yet to rule after an August trial.
In Venezuela, Guevara graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and for the last decade worked at a foreign private oil company earning $200 a month. It was a relatively good salary for Venezuelans, but inflation was very high, and food scarce. She worried about being arrested for being an opponent of the government.
In the U.S., four months after filing for work authorization, she got a job at a supermarket. She is looking for work that would use her chemistry background while living with her father in her brother’s one-bedroom apartment in Orlando, Florida.”
“In a major departure from established economic policy, the Cuban government has announced it will allow foreign investors into Cuba’s retail and wholesale industries for the first time since Fidel Castro nationalized those industries in 1969.
The move comes as Cuba faces one of its worst economic crises and a new wave of protests against the communist government in Havana. Though the communist government had recovered much of its political footing since unprecedented protests broke out all over the island last July over quality of life and repression of artists and musicians, the regime has seen its standing slip over the last month. Protests have emerged across the country as Cubans have voiced their discontent with days-long blackouts that have hit rural and interior areas of the island. Notable videos have circulated on social media of protests in Santiago de Cuba, Cienfuegos, and Holguin provinces as Cuba have taken to the streets in the dead of night.”
“In a speech delivered last Wednesday at the Ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, President Joe Biden made a passionate plea for renewed purpose and partnership between the United States and its Latin American and Caribbean neighbors.
But it was some conspicuously empty seats in the audience that grabbed the attention. Out of the 35 countries in the Americas, only 23 sent heads of state, one of the lowest attendance rates since the first summit almost 30 years ago.
Most of these absences stem from Biden’s decision to not invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to the summit over their human rights records, a move driven in part by pressure from Cuban-American exile groups. “There can’t be a Summit of the Americas if all the countries of the continent don’t participate,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador stated at a press conference on June 6. The presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, major sources of migration to the United States, also announced they would not attend in protest.
In 2001, the Organization of American States passed the Inter-American Democratic Charter, officially barring nondemocratic states from participating in successive summits at the behest of the United States. However, this rule was seemingly annulled when the U.S. and Cuba reestablished diplomatic relations under former President Barack Obama.
Cuba attended the 2015 summit in Panama, where Obama’s meeting with former Cuban President Raul Castro marked the first time Cuban and American heads of state had met since the Cuban Revolution.”
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“”There is no way President Biden can make progress on addressing the migrant crisis since the Presidents of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador chose not to attend””
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“The summit’s perceived disconnects have confirmed what some in the region have feared: The U.S. is failing to reset or even update its Latin America policy after years of neglect under former President Donald Trump.”
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“”Washington seems to have prepared this summit as if it was 1994,” said Rivero Santos, referring back to the first Summit of the Americas held in Miami. Rivero Santos believes the Biden administration still sees the Americas through the prism of the 1990s neoliberal political wave that swept south, but socialist and populist governments have been making inroads in the region for years. “Washington has not been able to keep up with the changes in the region. The Latin America of 1994 is very different than the Latin America of 2022.””
“The move reinstates the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program, which from 2007 to 2016 allowed up to 20,000 Cubans per year to come and stay in the U.S. while applying for permanent legal resident status. It also removes the $1,000-per-quarter restriction on how much money Americans can send to family, friends, and private entities across the Florida Straits.”
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“Lifting government prohibitions on the movement and trade of Americans is a good policy in and of itself, regardless of impact on captive peoples abroad. But is the impact of increased travel and remittances on balance good or bad for Cubans?
Menendez argues that “nothing changed” as a result of Barack Obama’s decision to ease restrictions. By the unreasonable standard of regime change or even significant liberalization, the senator is correct. But by the standard of measurable differences in living conditions and relationship with the government, things indeed changed. As I wrote after visiting the island in 2016 for the first time in 18 years:
“A noticeable segment of the population has gained at least some financial and experiential independence from the police state. They are not, in my observation, spending that extra money on flower arrangements for the Revolution. As Sen. Jeff Flake (R–Arizona) told us during our visit, “You have about 25 percent of Cubans who work fully in the private sector….The big change is the number of Cubans being able to not have to rely on government and therefore can hold their government more accountable.”””
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“Menendez’s statement nods toward the potential universality of his foreign policy vision: “Today is another reminder that we must ground our policy in that reality, reaffirm our nation’s indiscriminate commitment to fight for democracy from Kyiv to Havana, and make clear we will measure our success in freedom and human rights and not money and commerce.”
That logic, applied evenly, suggests at minimum the dismantling of the World Trade Organization and the imposition of travel restrictions on Americans seeking to visit not just Havana but the more than 60 countries categorized by Freedom House as “not free.” Menendez would never openly advocate such an approach, because that approach would be both politically suicidal and logically insane.
Cuba has long been the crystallization of America’s worst foreign policy instincts. Good on the Biden administration for easing that somewhat.”