Gerard Dion's Blog, page 9

History of the Present: Havana

In the looming post-Castro era, Cuba’s capital faces profound social and economic challenges.

Havana, viewed from an El Vedado high-rise. The Hotel Nacional, by McKim Mead and White, is in the foreground. In the distance is the mouth of the harbor, guarded by Castillo del Morro. La Habana del Este lies beyond. [Photo: Belmont Freeman]

The Cuban rum industry is booming

SANTIAGO DE CUBA

Cuban rum and cigars seem to have become the souvenir of choice for U.S. visitors to the island.

Marvin Peña, who works the counter at La Barrita del Ron Caney, a bar and store that adjoins the Santiago Rum Factory, said that the end of the limit on rum and alcohol purchases as well as this year’s arrival of the Miami-based Fathom cruise line, which calls in Santiago every other week, have really perked up sales.

The Obama administration’s opening to Cuba has included reestablishing diplomatic relations and allowing more travel and commerce with the island, but the rule change most consumers remember involves tobacco and alcohol.

ADVERTISING

Prior to October, U.S. travelers could bring back only a combined total of $100 in tobacco and alcohol products. That limit meant they couldn’t even buy a full box of premium cigars. Brands like Cohiba Espléndidos, for example, cost about $20 a pop. Ultra premium rums also were out of the question.

But now there are no limits — as long as a traveler brings them back for personal use and pays appropriate duties. So don’t expect to find Havana Club or Santiago rum distilled in Cuba or Cuban-made Montecristo cigars in American stores any time soon.

The embargo precludes such sales in the United States.

The use of the Havana Club rum trademark in the U.S. is also the subject of a long-standing battle between Bacardi and Cuba Ron, the Cuban rum company, and its distribution partner Pernod Ricard. Cuba currently holds the trademark because it registered it with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after the original owner let the registration lapse. Bacardi claims it is the rightful owner of the trademark in the U.S.

La Barrita sells a variety of rums, but only two brands are produced at the Santiago factory: Santiago de Cuba and Caney.

“Santiago de Cuba is considered one of the best rums in Cuba,” Peña said. It’s also the best seller at La Barrita.

Cheaper bottles are aged from three to five years, but rum aged 20 to 25 years also is available, and the price goes up accordingly.

Among the most expensive bottles for sale are Isla de Tesoro (Treasure Island), available in a special ceramic jug and packed in a wooden chest, and Siglo y ½ , made to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the city of Santiago.

Isla de Tesoro sells for 650 CUCs (about $747), and Siglo y ½ , which was produced in a limited edition of 3,000 bottles, retails for more than $1,000.

“These are rums that you won’t find everywhere or even all over Cuba,” Peña said.

There’s also a Bacardi connection to the rum factory in Santiago. It’s the old Bacardi factory, which was expropriated by the Cuban government on Oct. 15, 1960, along with the company’s Santiago headquarters. The day before, the Bacardi sales office in Havana was nationalized.

Bacardi, which is now headquartered in Bermuda, had made rum in Cuba since 1862.

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White House hopes Cuba policy too ‘irreversible’ for Trump to turn back

‘Turning back the clock’ would have significant trade, travel repercussions

Thomson Reuters Posted: Dec 13, 2016 11:43 PM ETLast Updated: Dec 14, 2016 12:05 AM ET

Cuban President Raul Castro, right, lifts up the arm of President Barack Obama at the conclusion of their joint news conference on March 21, 2016 at the Palace of the Revolution, in Havana, Cuba. (Ramon Espinosa/The Associated Press)

President Barack Obama will make his case directly to President-elect Donald Trump not to derail the recent U.S.-Cuba detente, the White House said on Tuesday, insisting that “turning back the clock” would be damaging to American interests and the Cuban people.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said the outgoing administration hopes to persuade the incoming Trump administration to preserve Obama’s policy of engagement despite the president-elect’s threat to roll back the opening with the communist-ruled island.

Just weeks before Trump takes office, Obama and his aides are seeking to further cement one of his top foreign policy legacy initiatives, a breakthrough between former Cold War foes announced two years ago. But since Obama eased travel and trade restrictions through executive actions, Trump would be able to reverse them on his own if he chooses to do so.

“Cuba has been and will be on the list of issues where President Obama will make his case that this is the right approach for American interests,” Rhodes told reporters on a teleconference, referring to transition talks between the two.

‘Do you really want to cancel travel plans for hundreds of thousands of Americans? Do you want to tell businesses as diverse as our major airlines or Google or General Electric… that have been pursuing opportunities in Cuba that they have to terminate those activities?– Ben Rhodes, Obama’s national security adviser

Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has vowed to “terminate” Obama’s engagement with Cuba unless Havana gives the United States what he calls a “better deal,” including allowing broader political freedoms on the island. The Cuban government so far has refrained from commenting on Trump’s statements.

“What we believe would be very damaging is any effort to turn off the opening,” Rhodes said, asserting it would hurt the Cuban people, U.S. business interests and Washington’s standing in Latin America.

Economic embargo still holds

He said the administration has sought to make the policy “irreversible,” and suggested that Trump, a businessman-turned-politician, should consider whether it makes sense to roll it back.

Rhodes, who played a key role in negotiating the opening, said a reversal would boost Cuban “hardliners” opposed to engagement as Havana heads into its own political transition. Cuban President Raul Castro has said he will step down in 2018.

“Do you really want to cancel travel plans for hundreds of thousands of Americans?” Rhodes asked. “Do you want to tell businesses as diverse as our major airlines or Google or General Electric… that have been pursuing opportunities in Cuba that they have to terminate those activities?”

Canada won’t change Cuba stance regardless of new U.S. administration: Trudeau
With Trump in and Fidel gone, Cubans wonder what future holds

Rhodes, who was also in Cuba for memorial services for late Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro this month, said Cuban officials were uncertain about Trump and would wait to see how he proceeded.

Trump was unsparing in his remarks when Castro died on Nov. 25.

The White House is planning a meeting with “stakeholders” on Cuba policy this week, he said.

The administration is pressing Cuba for further economic reforms, Rhodes said, and encouraging new deals with U.S. companies before Obama leaves office.

Rhodes also said there was currently an “incentive structure” for economic change following the death of Fidel Castro, a vocal critic of detente, but that no progress has been made on political reforms. U.S. critics of Cuba engagement have accused Obama of making too many concessions.

But despite restoration of relations, the Republican-controlled Congress has resisted lifting the broader U.S. economic embargo.

Make space at Havana Harbor: Pearl Seas Cruises joins the cruise frenzy to Cuba

The 210-passenger Pearl Mist will sail to Cuba on 10-day trips beginning Jan. 17. Pearl Seas Cruises

By Chabeli Herrera

cherrera@miamiherald.com

Havana Harbor is getting crowded for 2017.

On Thursday, Connecticut-based Pearl Seas Cruises announced that it gained approval to sail to Cuba from Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades on 10-night voyages to the island’s capital city and several other cities on Cuba’s sourthern border.

The line is scheduled to depart for its first voyage on Jan. 17 aboard the 210-passenger Pearl Mist. The full trip will circumnavigate the island, staying overnight in Havana, and stopping in Isla de la Juventud, Trinidad, El Cobre, Santiago de Cuba and Parque Baconao. Eleven Cuba voyages are planned between January and May.

“There is significant demand to visit Cuba on a smaller ship and we are honored to be among the first cruise lines to have access to the country,” said Timothy Beebe, vice president of Pearl Seas Cruises, in a statement.

$7,810 Starting price of Pearl Seas Cruises Cuba voyages

Pearl’s announcement brings the number of American cruise lines that gained Cuban approval this week to six. The others — Norwegian Cruise Line Holding’s Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas, and Royal Caribbean Cruises’ Royal Caribbean International and Azamara Club Cruises — were approved within minutes of each other on Wednesday.

The three cruise companies — Pearl, Norwegian and Royal Caribbean — were among several that were rushing to seal deals with Cuba before the start of President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, which has promised to roll back engagement with Cuba.

All three cruise lines will be participating in “cultural” voyages, as Pearl calls its Cuba trips, which fall under the people-to-people social exchange visa category of approved travel to Cuba from the U.S.

Trips on the Pearl Mist start at $7,810.

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Cuba’s Surge in Tourism Keeps Food Off Residents’ Plates

By AZAM AHMEDDEC. 8, 2016

Cuba’s Surge in Tourism Keeps Food Off Residents’ Plates – The New York Times

Workers in a lettuce field this past week at a farm in Alamar, outside Havana. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

HAVANA — For Lisset Felipe, privation is a standard facet of Cuban life, a struggle shared by nearly all, whether they’re enduring blackouts or hunting for toilet paper.

But this year has been different, in an even more fundamental way, she said. She has not bought a single onion this year, nor a green pepper, both staples of the Cuban diet. Garlic, she said, is a rarity, while avocado, a treat she enjoyed once in a while, is all but absent from her table.

“It’s a disaster,” said Ms. Felipe, 42, who sells air-conditioners for the government. “We never lived luxuriously, but the comfort we once had doesn’t exist anymore.”

The changes in Cuba in recent years have often hinted at a new era of possibilities: a slowly opening economy, warming relations with the United States after decades of isolation, a flood of tourists meant to lift the fortunes of Cubans long marooned on the outskirts of modern prosperity.

But the record arrival of nearly 3.5 million visitors to Cuba last year has caused a surging demand for food, causing ripple effects that are upsetting the very promise of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Tourists are quite literally eating Cuba’s lunch. Thanks in part to the United States embargo, but also to poor planning by the island’s government, goods that Cubans have long relied on are going to well-heeled tourists and the hundreds of private restaurants that cater to them, leading to soaring prices and empty shelves.

Without supplies to match the increased appetite, some foods have become so expensive that even basic staples are becoming unaffordable for regular Cubans.

“The private tourism industry is in direct competition for good supplies with the general population,” said Richard Feinberg, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and specialist on the Cuban economy. “There are a lot of unanticipated consequences and distortions.”

There has long been a divide between Cubans and tourists, with beach resorts and Havana hotels effectively reserved for outsiders willing to shell out money for a more comfortable version of Cuba. But with the country pinning its hopes on tourism, welcoming a surge of new travelers to feed the anemic economy, a more basic inequality has emerged amid the nation’s experiment with capitalism.

Rising prices for staples like onions and peppers, or for modest luxuries like pineapples and limes, have left many unable to afford them. Beer and soda can be hard to find, often snapped up in bulk by restaurants.

It is a startling evolution in Cuba, where a shared future has been a pillar of the revolution’s promise. While the influx of new money from tourists and other visitors has been a boon for the island’s growing private sector, most Cubans still work within the state-run economy and struggle to make ends meet.

President Raúl Castro has acknowledged the surge in agricultural prices and moved to cap them. In a speech in April, he said the government would look into the causes of the soaring costs and crack down on middlemen for price gouging, with limits on what people could charge for certain fruits and vegetables.

“We cannot sit with our hands crossed before the unscrupulous manner of middlemen who only think of earning more,” he told party members, according to local news reports.

But the government price ceilings seem to have done little to provide good, affordable produce for Cubans. Instead, they have simply moved goods to the commercial market, where farmers and vendors can fetch higher prices, or to the black market.

Havana offers stark examples of this growing chasm.

At two state-run markets, where the government sets prices, the shelves this past week were monuments to starch — sweet potatoes, yucca, rice, beans and bananas, plus a few malformed watermelons with pallid flesh.

As for tomatoes, green peppers, onions, cucumbers, garlic or lettuce — to say nothing of avocados, pineapples or cilantro — there were only promises.

“Try back Saturday for tomatoes,” one vendor offered. It was more of question than a suggestion.

But at a nearby co-op market, where vendors have more freedom to set their prices, the fruits and vegetables missing from the state-run stalls were elegantly stacked in abundance. Rarities like grapes, celery, ginger and an array of spices competed for shoppers’ attentions.

The market has become the playground of the private restaurants that have sprung up to serve visitors. They employ cadres of buyers to scour the city each day for fruits, vegetables and nonperishable goods, bearing budgets that overwhelm those of the average household.

Photo



Workers cleaning vegetables at a food market in central Havana. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

“Almost all of our buyers are paladares,” said one vendor, Ruben Martínez, using the Cuban name for private restaurants, which include about 1,700 establishments across the country. “They are the ones who can afford to pay more for the quality.”

By Cuban standards, the prices were astronomic. Several Cuban residents said simply buying a pound of onions and a pound of tomatoes at the prices charged that day would consume 10 percent or so of a standard government salary of about $25 a month.

“I don’t even bother going to those places,” said Yainelys Rodriguez, 39, sitting in a park in Havana while her daughter climbed a slide. “We eat rice and beans and a boiled egg most days, maybe a little pork.”

Mrs. Rodriguez’s family is on the lower end of the income ladder, so she supplements earnings with the odd cleaning job she can find. With that, she cares for her two children and an infirm mother.

Trying to buy tomatoes, she said, “is an insult.”

Another mother, Leticia Alvarez Cañada, described what it was like to prepare decent meals for her family with prices so high. “We have to be magicians,” she said.

The struggle is somewhat easier now that she is in the private sector and no longer working for the government, she said. She quit her job as a nurse to start a small business selling fried pork skin and other snacks from a cart. Now she earns about 10 times more every month.

“The prices have just gone crazy in the last few years,” said Mrs. Cañada, 41. “There’s just no equilibrium between the prices and the salaries.”

While many Cubans have long been hardened to the reality of going without, never more than during what they call the “Special Period” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new dynamic that has emerged in recent months threatens the nation’s future, experts warn.

“The government has consistently failed to invest properly in the agriculture sector,” said Juan Alejandro Triana, an economist at the University of Havana. “We don’t just have to feed 11 million people anymore. We have to feed more than 14 million.”

“In the next five years, if we don’t do something about it, food will become a national security issue here,” he added.

The government gives Cubans ration books to help provide staples like rice, beans and sugar, but they do not cover items like fresh produce. Tractors and trucks are limited and routinely break down, often causing the produce to spoil en route. Inefficiency, red tape and corruption at the local level also stymie productivity, while a lack of fertilizer reduces yield (though it keeps produce organic, by default).

Economists also argue that setting price ceilings can discourage farmers and sellers. If prices are set so low they cannot turn a profit, they argue, why bother working? Most will try to redirect their goods to the private or black market.

“From the point of view of the farmer, what would you do?” asked Dr. Feinberg, the California professor. “When the differentials are that great, it requires a really selfless or foolish person to play by the rules.”

Paladares sometimes go directly to farms to buy goods, and even provide farmers seeds for specialty products that do not ordinarily grow in Cuba, like arugula, cherry tomatoes and zucchini.

Most acknowledge that they distort the market in some ways, and this year the government stopped issuing licenses for new restaurants in Havana. But some restaurant owners argue that it is the government’s responsibility to create better supply.

“It’s true, the prices keep going up and up,” said Laura Fernandez, a manager at El Cocinero, a former peanut-oil factory converted into a high-priced restaurant. “But that’s not just the fault of the private sector. There is generally a lot of chaos and disorder in the market.”

On the outskirts of Havana, Miguel Salcines has cultivated a beautiful farm. Rows of tidy crops stretch toward the edge of his modest 25 acres, where he employs about 130 people.

Though he grows standard products on behalf of the government, there is no product he is more excited about than his new zucchini. A farmer for nearly 50 years, he had never grown the crop before, but planted a batch two months ago.

Now, the vegetables are coming into shape, the spots of bright orange flowers visible amid the green plumage. He knows this crop is not for the regular market, or for the government. It is like the arugula he grows.

It is for the tourist market and, by extension, the future.

“We are talking about an elite market,” he said. “The Cuban markets are a market of necessity.”

Hannah Berkeley Cohen and Kirk Semple contributed reporting from Havana, and Frances Robles from Miami.

A version of this article appears in print on December 9, 2016, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cuba’s Surge in Tourism Is Keeping Food Off Its Residents’ Plates. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

Miami writer Vanessa Garcia Testimony

November 26, 2:13am: A Testimony, by VANESSA GARCÍA ‹ Cuba Counterpoints

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November 26, 2:13am: A Testimony, by VANESSA GARCÍA

December 1, 2016
0

We had to park on a side street and walk because Calle Ocho was so congested. Our goal: Versailles Restaurant, which we knew would be the epicenter – the glowing ember that was reverberating out through all of these red brake lights, lined up, like an impressionist painting. One car after another, the people inside longing for community, for their fellow Cubans to celebrate with.

The soundtrack: Wooden and metal spoons against pots and pans of every color. Pots and pans that had been lifted from stove tops and pantries on the way out the door, for music. Because of course there had to be music. Timbales, claves, drums made out of buckets. Horns accenting chants: Viva Cuba Libre! An old man with a liberty bell, clanging like his life depended on it – because it had (for so many years). “Libertad! Libertad!”

The most common brushstroke: Floating flags swaying: American, Cuban, Venezuelan (in camaraderie). A smattering of orange balloons, I can only imagine were left over from a party — orange-copper, color of flame, starred – some of them escaping, scraping past hands, up toward the sky.

And then, every once in a while, like small ditches, there were pockets of sadness – little black holes where the censure and repression and death still crept, so used to hiding out they didn’t know where to go now. Tired kids holding their parent’s dreams, not quite understanding, but feeling-through what all of this might mean. Smiles, laughter, tears; rage, hope, and despair.

This is 8th street in Miami the night Fidel died.  

As an American Born Cuban (ABC), this is a mythic moment – a moment the exile community that raised me has longed for, for nearly six decades. In my mind now, however, a kind of emptiness marks the occasion – a basket for the catching of this news, this celebration: Fidel Castro’s death. I circle the crowd like a dreidel. My fiancé turns to me and asks: “Are you ok? You’re not crying?” He knows I’m usually a fountain – tree sap, I confess. But not now. The first phase of grief, perhaps – shock? Grief not for the death of Fidel, but for all those that had lost an island – had been forced to flee by sea or land – through the Florida Straits and the Amazon. Some of them never to look back, others like Orpheus, forever reaching backward, forever losing. For those that had died at sea, trying to get out of the pressure cooker. Out no matter what, floating like those copper balloons, some swallowed by sharks or by the water itself, out of Cachita’s hands.

I spent my childhood watching Cubans wash-up onto South Florida’s shores. 500 a day during the worst of times, that “Special Period,” marked by hunger – the end of Soviet subsidies to Cuba, a final chokehold on the lizard-looking landmass after the fall of The Berlin Wall. Risking it all, gasping for air on inner tubes the size of pool floats, people leaped toward freedom. Boats made of cars, rubber, wood, anything that would float, take them out of Havana, Cienfuegos, Santiago, Camagüey.

All of this swims in my head as I drift, out on the street, no pots to hold or play – only a camera. It’s too soon to really clarify all this, too soon to tell what the merengue we are making will turn out to taste like.

My grandmother said it best when my mom told her what had happened. “Me siento extraña,” she said. “I feel strange.” For an entire generation on the island there is no reference point for change. For an entire generation outside the island, there is no reference point for our lives without Fidel, that real and imaginary figure, reshaped in Miami – Enemy #1. No wonder we spin, and spin. The hope is that once we stop spinning, we’ll still be able to find our North Star.

Cubans cheer Castro’s ashes on last journey across island

World News | Wed Nov 30, 2016 | 8:16pm EST

Cubans cheer Castro’s ashes on last journey across island | Reuters

By Sarah Marsh and Diego Oré | JOVELLANOS, Cuba

JOVELLANOS, Cuba Feted by cheering Cubans, a funeral cortege carried the ashes of Fidel Castro out of Havana on Wednesday on a three-day journey to his final resting place in the east of the island where he launched the Cuban Revolution six decades ago.

Cubans on the roadside chanted “Fidel!” and waved small Cuban flags, displaying revolutionary zeal or nationalist pride for a man who ruled Cuba for 49 years with a mix of charisma and iron will, creating a Communist state at the U.S. doorstep and becoming a central figure in the Cold War.

Castro died on Friday at age 90, a decade after stepping down due to poor health and ceding power to his brother, current Cuban President Raul Castro, 85.

“Fidel is everything to Cuba, and we are going to miss him,” said Guillermo Cadiz, 83, who said he fought with Fidel and his rebel army in the Sierra Maestra mountains.

“There will never be another like him,” he said from the town of Jovellanos around 100 miles (160 km) east of Havana, wearing a straw hat and a clutch of medals.

Irma Pedreros, a 63-year-old retiree, called his death a “huge loss.”

Cubans cheer Castro’s ashes on last journey across island | Reuters

“Who doesn’t feel the death of our Commander in Chief? He’s dead but lives in the heart of all those who feel it,” she said.

A green military jeep towed a flatbed trailer displaying a flag-draped box that contained Castro’s cremated remains. The box was encased in glass and surrounded by white flowers.

The remains were to rest overnight in the city of Santa Clara at the mausoleum of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who fought with the Castro brothers and died in Bolivia in 1967 while trying to realize their dream of spreading revolution across Latin America.

The ashes will be interred on Sunday morning in Santiago de Cuba, where Castro first launched his revolutionary movement in 1953 with an assault on the Moncada barracks.

The eastward journey reverses the path taken by Castro’s bearded rebels upon the overthrow of U.S.-backed strongman Fulgencio Batista, who fled Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959. Castro spent a week traversing the island on the way to Havana, building his popularity by stopping in towns along the way.

While an anti-imperialist hero to many, especially in Latin America and Africa, Castro was also hated by his enemies who say he ruined the economy with socialism and ruthlessly jailed or silenced his opponents with a Soviet-style dictatorship.

On Tuesday night, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Cubans gathered in Havana’s Revolution Square, many cheering “I am Fidel!,” for a four-hour service commemorating “El Comandante” (The Commander).

Leaders of leftist allies from around the world delivered a series of speeches praising Castro for instituting free education and health care, and sending doctors overseas on missions of mercy.

No one mentioned how he jailed political opponents, sent them to work camps or, in the early days, had them shot by firing squad.

“The majority loved you with a passion. A minority hated you. But nobody could ignore you,” said Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa.

(Additional reporting by Nelson Acosta; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and James Dalgleish)

Is Communism Cool? Ask a Millennial

 

Opinion
Commentary








The U.S.S.R. broke up 25 years ago—ancient history for some.









By
Andrew Clark

Updated Dec. 22, 2016 7:01 p.m. ET

Millennials are one of history’s luckiest generations. We were fortunate to be born around the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago, when the tyrannical Communism embodied in the Soviet Union came tumbling down, also knocking socialism down a few pegs along the way. We have grown up in a world where, for the most part, economic and personal freedom are the rule rather than exception.

And apparently we hate it. How else does one explain why so many millennials seem to long to live in government-run economies, or worse?

A Gallup poll in June 2015 found that almost 70% of U.S. millennials would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Even more shocking, a poll conducted before this year’s presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of millennials believe “Communism was or is a problem.”

 

The same poll found that a quarter of millennials hold favorable opinions of Vladimir Lenin, while 18% think favorably of Mao Zedong. More than 10% even have positive feelings about Joseph Stalin. Never mind that these men were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and the impoverishment of hundreds of millions.

These polling numbers are frightening—especially when the Communist-ruled and socialist nations in the world today, from North Korea and Cuba to Venezuela, show so clearly how such systems invariably lead to repression and declining standards of living for their populations.

Part of the problem is that many millennials see these ideologies as represented by Scandinavian countries, an ignorant view fed them by candidate Bernie Sanders, among others. As Harvard and Stanford visiting professor Daniel Schatz (a Swede) wrote in Forbes in February, “Sweden began to reverse its economic model during the 1990s” through privatization and deregulation. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen was even more unequivocal in a speech earlier this year: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Scandinavian economies are in some ways freer than those in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom gives these countries high marks for limited regulatory burdens and for corporate tax rates lower than in the U.S. In many ways it’s easier to start a successful business and take part in economic life in a Scandinavian country than it is in America.

Millennials who wish to see a socialist or Communist Party-ruled nation in action should look to Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Venezuela’s current troubles make daily headlines. The country is crippled by inflation and shortages of basic goods, and the government takes more control over the economy each day. No wonder even millennials want to get out. A poll conducted by the Venezuelan market analysis firm DatinCorp in September found that 69% of youths there wanted to emigrate.

As Venezuelan blogger Maria Antonia Marturet recently observed, the country’s millennials are fleeing because, “They wanted to live in a place where they could go out at night without being kidnapped, where they could eat whatever they wanted without queuing, and where they could eventually have babies without the stress of not finding a hospital where to give birth.”

At least Venezuelan millennials still feel somewhat able to speak up. Communist Cuba arrests political dissidents. In North Korea, speaking against a regime that imposes starvation on its population can mean joining what the United Nations estimates are as many as 120,000 political prisoners kept in prison camps.

Young people living in Communist and socialist countries today don’t deserve U.S. millennials’ envy, but their concern and pity. There was nothing to admire about the Soviet Union, and there is even less to admire in countries that seek to perpetuate its failed philosophy at the expense of liberty and prosperity. Our generation is lucky it hasn’t learned this firsthand—and let’s hope we never have to.

Mr. Clark is the executive director of Generation Opportunity.

President Obama Signs Defense-Policy Measure

Legislation authorizes $611 billion for U.S. military in 2017; funding to be addressed in separate bill

 

ENLARGE
A U.S. Army vehicle travels near Qayara Air Base in northern Iraq on Aug. 29. Provisions in the defense-policy legislation are designed to sustain momentum for America’s fight against Islamic State. Photo: Susannah George/Associated Press




















Associated Press

Dec. 23, 2016 6:53 p.m. ET

HONOLULU—President Barack Obama signed into law a defense-policy bill that authorizes $611 billion for the military in 2017, lauding provisions designed to sustain momentum in countering Islamic State while criticizing Congress’s insistence on keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The legislation provides a 2.1% pay increase for the military and sets spending priorities and guidance for the current fiscal year. The funding for the programs is delivered through a separate spending bill.

Mr. Obama, who is vacationing in Hawaii, said Friday that the law would provide vital benefits to military personnel and their families. He also said it improved flexibility for government agencies in countering cyberattacks and adversaries’ use of drones.

But he was critical of the continued operation of Guantanamo. Mr. Obama said spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep fewer than 60 men in isolation undermines U.S. standing in the world and emboldens extremists.

Republicans in Congress have said releasing the detainees could pose a security threat.

Mr. Obama submitted a plan in February to close the detention facility, one of his earliest campaign promises. Instead, lawmakers are trying to keep the facility a permanent feature in the war on terrorism, the president said.

Over the last two years, the administration has transferred 73 detainees to other countries, and Mr. Obama said in a release that the efforts to transfer others would continue until his final day in office.

—Copyright 2016 the Associated Press

Statement by Gerard Dion Author of Cuba Unchained Following News of the Death of Fidel Castro

Statement by Gerard Dion Author of Cuba Unchained Following News of the Death of Fidel Castro

Miami, FL – San Diego CA 

Gerard Dion, Author of Cuba Unchained today issued the following statement following news of the death of Fidel Castro:

“With the passing of Fidel Castro, Cuba is presented with an opportunity for all Cubans to work together to achieve a free and inclusive society. I pray that Cubans both on and outside the island find a peaceful path toward the reconciliation and reunification of the Cuban nation.” http://www.cubaunchained.com/