Cuban People

Like many Americans who took social studies for the first time in the early 1960s, Karen Hallowell remembers just one thing about Cuba. "It was not images of Cuban people that I carried away from childhood; it was Cuban missiles," said Hallowell. "I was a child of the missile crisis. " Now, at age 43, Hallowell is admissions director of George School - a Quaker boarding school with longstanding ties to the Cuban people. George School basketball and soccer teams have played Cuban teams at home and away; George School Quakers and Cuban Quakers have been moved to speak at each other's meetings.

The United States is prepared to pay the "predominant" share of an estimated $4 billion to $8 billion needed to help Cuba make the transition to a free-market democracy once Fidel Castro is gone, President Clinton plans to notify Congress today. In a report obtained by Knight-Ridder newspapers, Clinton laid out the help Cuba could expect, and promised: "Due to the proximity and national interest, the United States can be expected to be the predominant bilateral provider of such assistance.

"Six is way too young," said the American businessman, laughing, on a flight this summer from Cuba to Mexico. "Twelve is the youngest I'd take . . . maybe 11, but 6 is too young. " The man was probably 35 to 40 years old. He had a good haircut, expensive casual clothes and a gold wedding band on his left ring finger. He was talking about prostitutes in Cuba. If I hadn't overheard their conversation so clearly, I would have guessed that they were six business associates returning from a golf vacation.

On Friday, almost 200 Americans returned to the United States from a week- long visit to Cuba, where their very presence was a violation of U.S. law. The Americans socialized with the Cuban people, met with Cuban government officials, even played baseball with some Cuban ballplayers, all to protest the long-standing U.S. ban on travel to the island nation. The trip, the second of its kind, was organized by The Freedom to Travel Campaign in San Francisco, part of a grass-roots effort to persuade the Clinton administration to end the 31-year-old trade embargo with Cuba and to establish diplomatic relations.

CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday that he was recovering quickly from tumor surgery in Cuba. He said doctors had put him on a special diet, and he's taking daily walks and spending time with close relatives. "I cannot neglect my recuperation treatment for even a minute," Chavez said during a brief telephone call to state television. "I continue recovering, thanks to Venezuela's support, the Cuban people, the doctors here in Cuba, to the love from the people that fills me. " "I'm taking flight, raising the fatherland of the future," he added.

President Clinton yesterday delayed for another six months a law that would allow U.S. citizens to sue certain foreign companies doing business in Cuba. His announcement eased tensions with foreign allies over Cuban relations in a way that even anti-Castro Cuban Americans accepted. Ever since Clinton last March signed the Helms-Burton Act penalizing foreign investment in Cuba, many U.S. allies have protested, saying it was an illegal assertion of one nation's power to obstruct world commerce.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), son of Cuban immigrants and a leading hard-liner on the Cuban embargo, said there was no joy - but maybe a little hope - in yesterday's announcement that President Fidel Castro would be stepping down. "Just because the dictator is now named Raul instead of Fidel, it doesn't mean that the regime's repressive rule will automatically change," said Menendez, referring to the possibility of Castro's brother rising to power. In a statement, he said a Castro swap would make official "what has been in place for a while now, with Raul continuing to lead the same iron-fisted regime that his brother brought to power almost 50 years ago. " In July 2006, Fidel Castro became ill and appointed his brother Raul Castro to take charge.

Cuba yesterday rebuffed Gov. Whitman's call for the return of Joanne Chesimard, a former Black Panther convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper. Chesimard was sentenced to life in prison in 1977, but escaped from her cell two years later and fled to Cuba, where she lives in political asylum under the name Assata Shakur. Earlier this week, Whitman made a public appeal for Chesimard's return. She repeated the call yesterday on Miami-based Radio Marti, a U.S. government-funded station that broadcasts anti-communist programs to the Cuban people.

WITH THE NEWS that longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro is stepping down, I was reminded of the chance I had six years ago to dine with Castro. After digesting that unique experience, I wrote in these pages, "Despite more than 40 years of effort, the Cuban embargo has failed miserably in its objective - to oust Castro. " The only thing that has changed is that another half-dozen years have gone off the clock. To believe that communism will die with Castro's end is probably wishful thinking.

No parole, MOVE As a former supporter of MOVE who understands the nature of the group and now rejects its "teachings," I oppose parole for any MOVE members ("7 MOVE members coming up for parole," Feb. 28). I once spent many days and nights working for their freedom, corresponding with them, and visiting them in prison. As the years wore on, the facts became clear, and I realized that I was not supporting "political prisoners," but murderers who exploited my idealism. I had to face the fact that not only had I been lied to, but also that I had misled people.

SANTIAGO, Cuba - Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Cuba on Monday in the footsteps of his more famous predecessor, gently pressing the island's longtime communist leaders to push through "legitimate" changes their people desire, while criticizing the excesses of capitalism. In contrast to the raucous welcome Benedict received in Mexico, his arrival in Cuba's second city was relatively subdued. While President Raul Castro greeted him at the airport with a 21-cannon salute and military honor guard, few ordinary Cubans lined Benedict's motorcade route into town and the pope barely waved from his glassed-in popemobile.

CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday that he was recovering quickly from tumor surgery in Cuba. He said doctors had put him on a special diet, and he's taking daily walks and spending time with close relatives. "I cannot neglect my recuperation treatment for even a minute," Chavez said during a brief telephone call to state television. "I continue recovering, thanks to Venezuela's support, the Cuban people, the doctors here in Cuba, to the love from the people that fills me. " "I'm taking flight, raising the fatherland of the future," he added.

HAVANA - Cuba's highest court Friday upheld a U.S. government subcontractor's 15-year prison sentence for crimes against the state, ending the legal side of a case that has brought a new chill to icy relations between Washington and Havana. The ruling means Alan Gross, 62, a Maryland native who has been behind bars since his arrest in December 2009, has no further judicial recourse to appeal his sentence. It leaves him, his family, and U.S. officials hoping instead for a release on humanitarian grounds.

No parole, MOVE As a former supporter of MOVE who understands the nature of the group and now rejects its "teachings," I oppose parole for any MOVE members ("7 MOVE members coming up for parole," Feb. 28). I once spent many days and nights working for their freedom, corresponding with them, and visiting them in prison. As the years wore on, the facts became clear, and I realized that I was not supporting "political prisoners," but murderers who exploited my idealism. I had to face the fact that not only had I been lied to, but also that I had misled people.

WITH THE NEWS that longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro is stepping down, I was reminded of the chance I had six years ago to dine with Castro. After digesting that unique experience, I wrote in these pages, "Despite more than 40 years of effort, the Cuban embargo has failed miserably in its objective - to oust Castro. " The only thing that has changed is that another half-dozen years have gone off the clock. To believe that communism will die with Castro's end is probably wishful thinking.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), son of Cuban immigrants and a leading hard-liner on the Cuban embargo, said there was no joy - but maybe a little hope - in yesterday's announcement that President Fidel Castro would be stepping down. "Just because the dictator is now named Raul instead of Fidel, it doesn't mean that the regime's repressive rule will automatically change," said Menendez, referring to the possibility of Castro's brother rising to power. In a statement, he said a Castro swap would make official "what has been in place for a while now, with Raul continuing to lead the same iron-fisted regime that his brother brought to power almost 50 years ago. " In July 2006, Fidel Castro became ill and appointed his brother Raul Castro to take charge.

FIDEL CASTRO is close to his 80th birthday and in poor health. No doubt the Cuban communists are planning for what comes next, but are we? I hope so, because now is the time to end the Cuban embargo. This has been my view since I made an incredible visit to Havana in January 2002 as a journalist accompanying U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. During the visit, I was part of a small group that met with Castro, spending just under seven hours with him during one long night. I'll never forget being a fly on the wall for an amazing battle of wits, Specter vs. Castro, or as I could see Don King billing it, the DA vs. the Dictator.

Rick Miller's photographs of Cuba at the Lawrence Gallery at Rosemont College, taken in 2001, are a reflection of a none-too-optimistic era in Cuba, a period of isolation, of shortages and economic struggle dating more than four decades. Glimpses of grandiose buildings that Miller photographed in several Cuban cities show signs of crumbling and disrepair, while old bicycles and shabby buses are still the chief means of transportation. Absent here are still-life and landscape photos, for Miller is interested in human beings, their lives and places they live, their behavior and their relationships with family and others.

YOU can't escape Che Guevara's larger than life image along the route from Jose Marti International Airport to Havana Bay. Giant portraits and silhouettes of the late Cuban revolutionary hero in his rakish beret festoon the sides of buildings and fences all along the 15-mile route and in Havana's town squares and intersections. You don't see statues or monuments to Fidel Castro. "Fidel says those are for dead heroes," a tour guide told me. But there are monuments to Che and other Latin American socialist revolutionaries in public parks.

Of all the surprises awaiting the world in Y2K, perhaps none is more surprising than the fact that Jan. 1 will mark Fidel Castro's 41st year as Cuba's maximum leader. That's an extraordinarily long time for a prickly gnat to survive in an angry elephant's ear. Early on, in the Arctic-like days of the Cold War, the communist dictator only 90 miles from U.S. shores was an American obsession. In 1961, there was the U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1962, the world trembled during the Cuban missile crisis.