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The move would complicate any effort by the incoming Biden administration to resume President Barack Obama’s thaw in relations with Havana.

A finding that a country has “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” in the State Department’s official description of a state sponsor of terrorism, automatically triggers U.S. sanctions against its government. If added to the list, Cuba would join just three other nations: Iran, North Korea and Syria.

The State Department removed Cuba from its list of terrorism sponsors in 2015, after President Barack Obama announced the normalization of relations between Washington and Havana for the first time since the country’s 1959 communist revolution, which he called a relic of the Cold War. In return for pledges of political and social reform, Mr. Obama dropped economic sanctions, relaxed restrictions on travel and trade, and reopened an embassy in Havana for the first time in decades. In 2016, he became the first American president to visit the island since Calvin Coolidge.

Detained protesters in Cuba could get up to 30 years in prison as they face the largest and most punitive mass trials on the island since the early years of the revolution.

Prosecutors this week put on trial more than 60 citizens charged with crimes, including sedition, for taking part in demonstrations against the country’s economic crisis over the summer, said human rights activists and relatives of those detained.

Those being prosecuted include at least five minors as young as 16.

Cuban President Raul Castro told President Barack Obama that normalizing relations between the two countries could best be achieved by returning land currently occupied by the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay and lifting economic sanctions, Cuban officials said on Tuesday.

The two leaders met with on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday — the first such sit-down between leaders of the two countries on American soil since the Cuban revolution.

In a statement the White House said the president "also highlighted steps the United States intends to take to improve ties between the American and Cuban peoples, and reiterated our support for human rights in Cuba."

They had to justify their trips to a government agency, apply for licenses, sign up with a firm organizing “people to people” exchanges, or circumvent the law altogether by flying somewhere else first.

While ordinary tourism remains banned by law, new rules put in place by President Obama will make it easier for Americans to visit the island than it has been for most of the last half-century

The rules will usher in a new era of contact between neighbors that have been estranged for longer than most of their citizens have been alive.

After years of watching his influence in Latin America slip away, Mr. Obama suddenly turned the tables this week by declaring a sweeping détente with Cuba, opening the way for a major repositioning of the United States in the region.

Washington’s isolation of Cuba has long been a defining fixture of Latin American politics, something that has united governments across the region, regardless of their ideologies. Even some of Washington’s close allies in the Americas have rallied to Cuba’s side.

“We never thought we would see this moment,” said Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who chided the Obama administration last year over the National Security Agency’s surveillance of her and her top aides. She called the deal with Cuba “a moment which marks a change in civilization.”

US-Cuba travel and trade: New rules start on Friday

New travel and trade rules between the US and Cuba are to take effect on Friday, US officials say.

allowing US citizens to use credit cards in Cuba and for US businesses to export some technologies.

Trump's new Cuba policy: What's at stake for the island?

Warmer ties with Cuba after almost 60 years of hostility was one of President Barack Obama's main foreign policy legacies. He and Cuban leader Raul Castro agreed to normalise diplomatic relations in December 2014 and in August 2015 the US re-opened its embassy in Havana, more than half a century after it had closed following Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution.

Opponents of the engagement policy want Mr Trump to adopt proposals which include tightening the 12 categories of travel under which Americans have been coming to Cuba - including the catch-all "people-to-people" exchanges. This would mean US visitors might again face fines if they visit the island without the right paperwork.The potential effects of such a move on Cuba's tourism industry would be significant. However the pro-engagement lobby group Engage Cuba argues that it would have a multi-billion dollar impact on the US economy too, affecting jobs in the airline and cruise ship industries.

dismissed Castro as a “brutal dictator,” days before proposing that Americans have their citizenship revoked for exercising their constitutional right to burn the U.S. flag as a protest

“America will always stand for human rights around the world,”

Yet hypocrisy of the U.S. criticizing Cuba for human rights is even harder to grasp when one considers that the part of Cuba with the worst human rights practices is in fact the part controlled by the U.S.

Those issues relate to what another writer here, George Yancy, in writing about the Trayvon Martin case, referred to as a “white gaze” that renders all black bodies dangerous and deviant. Unless we dismantle this gaze and its centuries-strong cultural pillars, it will be difficult to go past the outrage on race.

 our unjust economic system. Under this system, people compete for basic goods and services in what seems to be a fair and non-discriminating market. But since they enter this market from vastly different social circumstances, competition is anything but fair. Those who already possess goods have a much better chance of renewing their access to them, whereas those who don’t have little chance of ever getting them.

an examination of the recent history of Cuba does in fact provide valuable lessons about the complex links between economic justice, access to basic goods and services, racial inequality, and what Gutting refers to as “continuing problems about race.”

Businessmen go out for sushi and drive home in plush Audis. Now, hoping to keep up, the government is erecting something special for its own: a housing development called Project Granma, featuring hundreds of comfortable apartments in a gated complex set to have its own movie theater and schools.

Cuba is in transition. The economic overhauls of the past few years have rattled the established order of class and status, enabling Cubans with small businesses or access to foreign capital to rise above many dutiful Communists. As these new paths to prestige expand, challenging the old system of rewards for obedience, President Raúl Castro is redoubling efforts to elevate the faithful and maintain their loyalty — now and after the Castros are gone.

Project Granma and similar “military cities” around the country are Caribbean-color edifices of reassurance, set aside for the most ardent defenders of Cuba’s 1959 revolution: families tied to the military and the Interior Ministry.

The United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba and open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century after the release of an American contractor held in prison for five years, President Obama announced on Wednesday.

“We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” Mr. Obama said in a nationally televised statement from the White House. The deal will “begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas” and move beyond a “rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”

For generations, among Cuban-Americans, once a largely monolithic voting bloc, the embargo was a symbol of defiance in exile — more gospel than policy.

a growing number of seasoned politicians to call the embargo a failure and argue that ending America’s enmity with Cuba represents the best chance of encouraging positive change on the island.

. Mr. Obama supported repealing the embargo when he was running for the United States Senate in 2004 but backtracked as a presidential candidate, saying in 2008 that the embargo gave Washington leverage over the Cuban government.

UNITED NATIONS — A U.N. resolution condemning the U.S. embargo against Cuba has won overwhelming approval, with only the United States and Israel voting against it.

This was the 24th year in a row that the 193-member U.N. General Assembly has approved a resolution condemning the commercial, economic and financial embargo against Cuba

Tuesday's vote had the highest ever number of countries voting to condemn the embargo — 191. It was greeted with applause as diplomats jumped to their feet in a standing ovation.

Cubans Still Fleeing Castro While They CanIf Cubans try to float to the U.S., they’re sent back. So they take a great circle route overland that eventually funnels them across the M

In the humid heat of Tapachula in southern Mexico, a group of 40 Cubans relax on a sea of mattresses in a migrant shelter usually filled with about 15 Central American migrants.

“I left Cuba because the economy is in bad shape and I’m searching for a better life,” said 24-year-old Erick Fernández Márquez, sitting on a couch in the shelter.

Flights to nine destinations in Cuba, not including Havana, will be suspended by the Department of Transportation.The department issued a notice on Friday suspending US commercial flights from flying to the Cuban destinations.

The announcement is another step in the Trump administration's attempt to tighten the relationship between the US and Cuba in a direct reversal of President Barack Obama's Cuba policy.

"to further the Administration's policy of strengthening the economic consequences to the Cuban regime for its ongoing repression of the Cuban people and its support for Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela."

The United States on Wednesday abstained for the first time in an annual vote on a General Assembly resolution condemning the half-century-old American trade embargo against Cuba.

“The resolution voted on today is a perfect example of why the U.S. policy of isolation toward Cuba was not working — or wors

According to conventional historical belief, Puerto Ricans have mainly Spanish ethnic origins, with some African ancestry, and distant and less significant indigenous ancestry. Cruzado's research revealed surprising results in 2003. It found that, in fact, 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have Amerindian mitochondrial DNA, 27 percent have African and 12 percent Caucasian.[4]

The trade in slaves was abolished in the British Empire through the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. Men, women and children who were already enslaved in the British Empire remained slaves, however, until Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. When the Slavery Abolition Act came into force in 1834, roughly 700,000 slaves in the British West Indies immediately became free; other enslaved workers were freed several years later after a period of forced apprenticeship.[citation needed] Slavery was abolished in the Dutch Empire in 1814. Spain abolished slavery in its empire in 1811, with the exceptions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo; Spain ended the slave trade to these colonies in 1817, after being paid ₤400,000 by Britain. Slavery itself was not abolished in Cuba until 1886. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848.

The more significant development came when Christopher Columbus wrote back to Spain that the islands were made for sugar development.[20] The history of Caribbean agricultural dependency is closely linked with European colonialism which altered the financial potential of the region by introducing a plantation system. Much like the Spanish enslaved indigenous Indians to work in gold mines, the 17th century brought a new series of oppressors in the form of the Dutch, the English, and the French. By the middle of the 18th century sugar was Britain's largest import which made the Caribbean that much more important as a colony.

Pope Francis, Cuba, and the Yanqui Capitalist Curse

he remembered the early 1990s when he was 18 and his family lived on one Cuban peso a month. “We had nothing,” he says. “No clothing, no food, no hope. Nothing will ever be as bad as that.”

It’s ironic that while he may help alleviate the restraints that have kept Cubans in extreme poverty for five decades, in so doing he may also support the very capitalism he speaks so strongly against.

Pope Francis will meet the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kyril, next Friday in Cuba, the Vatican announced Friday.

It will be the first meeting between the heads of the Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches in history. The Eastern Orthodox and Western factions of Christianity broke apart during the Great Schism in 1054.

The meeting will come less than a year after Francis' first visit to Cuba as Pope. He played a key role in the recent thawing of relations between the United States and Cuba, which reestablished diplomatic ties last year.

What if JFK had lost? 5 things that might be different

If just a few thousand votes in a few key states had gone the other way that day, you could argue that Cuba might now be our 51st state.

By the time it was over, Kennedy had won and Nixon's camp was quietly accusing the other side of dirty tricks. The election was about much more than Washington bragging rights.