Rob Sequin | Havana Journal

Maybe it is premature to declare the end of a US policy that is almost fifty years old but the Havana Journal is closely watching developments that appear to lay a path towards lifting the travel and/or trade Embargo against Cuba. We are listing events, although may not appear to be immediately related to changes in US Cuba policy, we think collectively the events below are related to the big picture of changing US Cuba policy.

We will update this article as events develop.

May 23, 2008: Presidential candidate Obama says he is in favor of rolling back restrictions on Cuban American travel and remittances to Cuba at a speech in Miami in front of the Cuban American National Foundation audience. This is a very bold move with much political risk that has not been done by any serious Presidential candidate in history.

February 10, 2009: President Obama announces that he will attend the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago on April 17 -19, 2009. The effectively sets a deadline for the President to formulate a comprehensive Latin America policy that will most likely have to include some action with regards to US policy towards Cuba.

February 24, 2009: Havana Journal publishes summary of five bills submitted in the US House of Representatives that are all design in one way or another to ease or lift Cuba trade or travel restrictions on Americans.

February 26, 2009: US House of Representatives passes HR1105 Omnibus Appropriations bill that contains language that will restrict OFAC enforcement of Cuban American travel and remittances to Cuba along with language to suspend the “cash in advance” payment structure that requires Cuba to pay US agriculture sellers in advance of shipment.

March 2, 2009: Raul Castro announces a major reorganization of the Cuban government where Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Vice President of Council of State are fired.

March 11, 2009: After some political wrangling, the Senate passes the Ominbus spending bill that will continue to fund US government operations but contains controversial language that is a small step towards easing the restrictions of Cuba sanctions. Senator Menendez objects to having the Cuba language in the bill but eventually supports the bill as Treasury Secretary Geithner sends him a letter stating that the language will not substantially change US Cuba trade laws. Senator Menendez can see the writing on the wall that the momentum is building against the Embargo.

March 16, 2009: Brazil’s President Lula, who is well respected by the US, Cuba, Venezuela and other Latin American countries, meets with President Obama in the White House then gives a speech in New York calling on the US to reconsider US Cuba policy. This meeting may have been scheduled in advance of the Summit of the Americas so the two Presidents could develop a working relationship and perhaps even discuss Cuba in order to formulate talking points before, during and after the Summit.

March 17, 2009: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez “fires the first shot” at Obama before they meet at the Summit of the Americas next month. Chavez challenges President Obama to discuss Cuba before and during the Summit. We see this as a carefully worded and carefully timed announcement by Chavez in preparation for the upcoming Summit of the Americas.

March 18, 2009: Well. It appears things are heating up nicely. Today is the sixth anniversary of the “Black Spring” crackdown on Cuban dissidents (Cuba calls them agents of the US government) so maybe today’s news is just rhetoric but again, taken in the context of this developing timeline of the end of the US Embargo, they are relevant. New Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez made a statement that Cuba would work with the European Union to discuss human rights violations and would work with the EU to normalize relations. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Obama Administration has made what I think is it’s first public statement regarding Cuba calling on the Communist government to release political prisoners.  Are these two events an unrelated coincidence or is this international political posturing that precedes the release of political prisoners? Raul really has little to loose and much to gain by releasing political prisoners. This move allows President Obama to reach out to Cuba in a “new spirit of dialog” or some tag line like that. Hey, whatever it takes, let’s talk people. Let’s talk.

March 19, 2009: I guess we started this article just in time. The Cuba news stories are coming fast as you can see by the dates of the entries above. How about this news… Costa Rica and El Salvador both announced that they will normalize relations with Cuba. Comments in the article like “It appeared to be coincidental that the decision was made public on the same day that Salvadoran President-elect Mauricio Funes reiterated his campaign pledge to re-establish relations with Havana.” AND “Funes made the comments hours before he was to meet with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon.” has to make most people really start to wonder if all these announcements are in some way a coordinated effort or at least perhaps all parties are motivated by the upcoming Fifth Summit of the Americas that will see President Obama in attendance. Did I mention that Costa Rica and El Salvador are member states and will be attending? Hmmm.

March 26, 2009: Republican Congressman Jerry Moran from Kansas introduced Bill (HR 1737), Agricultural Export Facilitation Act of 2009. It is designed to facilitate the sale of United States agricultural products to Cuba, as authorized by the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000.

March 30, 2009: U.S. Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Michael Enzi (R-WY), Myron Brilliant from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, President of the American Farm Bureau Federation Bob Stallman and Human Rights Watch Executive Director Jose Miguel Vivanco will hold a press conference Tuesday, March 31, at 12:00 p.m. in room SVC-203 of the United States Capitol Visitors Center in support of S428, the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act.

AND

The Havana Note writes two articles that summarize the fact that the hardliner Cuban American Senators and Representatives no longer have much power to stop the loosening of the Embargo.

AND

The President of Trinidad has invited President Castro to visit Trinidad “whenever he wants”. The timing of this meeting and the release of this information is obviously designed to coincide with the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Trinidad in a couple weeks.

March 31, 2009: President of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza said the OAS should take steps to readmit Cuba forty seven years after it was banned in 1962. Cuba is the only Latin American or Caribbean nation excluded from proceedings at the 35 member-nation OAS, and the U.S. is the only country in the Americas that doesn’t have full diplomatic relations with the country. El Salvador and Costa Rica reestablished ties this month with Cuba, the only country in the region that isn’t a democracy. Insulza said Cuba’s readmission into the OAS should come after serious study and dialogue.

AND

U.S. Representatives Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ), the co-chairs of the bipartisan House Cuba Working Group, will be joined by Cuban-American leaders and other Representatives in a press conference at 11:00 AM on Thursday April 2 in Room 2255 of the Rayburn House Office Building. The participants will discuss HR 874, the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act, which now has over 120 co-sponsors, and will urge its passage by the Congress.  The legislation would end the current ban on travel by Americans to Cuba.  At present the US government allows Americans to travel almost anywhere in the world - except Cuba.

April 3, 2009: The Obama Administration has announced that it will lift the remittance and travel restrictions on Cuban Americans who wish to send money and travel to Cuba. The date has not been set but we think he will sign an Executive Order before the April 17 Summit of the Americas.

April 10, 2009: The Cuban American National Foundation, a long time hard line exile group influencing the direction US Cuba policy, released the report A New Course for U.S.-Cuba policy: ADVANCING PEOPLE-DRIVEN CHANGE that calls for a new direction in US Cuba policy. It appears that US Cuba policy hardliners like Senator Menendez and the likes of the Diaz-Balart brothers have to realize that the days of the Embargo are numbered if their own CANF no longer even supports the US Embargo.

April 13, 2009: As expected, an announcement before the Summit was made today and in a big way. Obama will lift all restrictions on Cuban American travel and remittances to Cuba. They can go as often as they like, stay for as long as they like and go see pretty much any family member. The move goes beyond travel and remittance restrictions to include a loosening of cellphone, satellite radio and satellite television restrictions too.

April 17, 2009: Secretary Clinton says she expects Cuba to reciprocate for Obama’s move and Raul says he is ready to talk about “everything” with the US.

April 21, 2009: Fidel Castro does not like what Raul Castro said regarding his willingness to talk about “everything” with the US so Fidel writes a Reflection saying that Raul Castro was misunderstood. If Raul thought that he was misunderstood, why can’t Raul Castro make a statement that he thought he was misunderstood?

April 27, 2009: The New York Times is quoting anonymous Obama Administration officials saying that they are ready to start talks with Cuba regarding migration, drug trafficking and other regional security matters along with opening cultural and academic exchanges with Cuba. Also, a State Department official described the pressure building for a new policy toward Cuba as a “steamroller” and said that the administration was “trying to drive it, rather than get run over by it.”

May 20, 2009: Longtime supporter of easing Cuba sanctions in order to benefit US businesses, Senator Max Baucus introduced the Promoting American Agricultural and Medical Exports to Cuba Act of 2009 that, if passed, will allow US businesses to sell agricultural and medical exports to Cuba.

May 21, 2009: The Obama Administration has broken the recent silence in the recent US Cuba dialog by saying that it is open for discussions on Cuba migration issues. This is positive for two reasons: 1. Obama continues to reach out to Cuba and 2. migration is a life and death situation for Cubans leaving Cuba by raft.

June 1, 2009: Cuba has agreed to Cuba migration and direct mail service talks with the US. A conversation that has been silent for five years. This is a positive move the Cuba is willing to talk with the US and vice versa. Maybe other issues would be discussed in private while the two countries are engaged.

June 4, 2009: Yet another brick has been knocked out of the US Embargo. The Organization of American States has voted to lift Cuba’s suspension from the Washington DC based organization that is a collection of 34 democratic Latin American nations. Even the presence of Secretary Clinton could not influence the OAS members to side with the United States that wanted Cuba’s suspension to remain intact. This action only lifts Cuba’s suspension. Cuba will need to make steps towards Democracy in order to rejoin but the gravity of the vote in favor of Cuba and against the US is very telling of the sentiment against the US Embargo.

June 15, 2009: The economic conditions in Cuba are getting worse but Cuba has been there before during the Special Period when the Soviet Union collapsed. Cuba is having trouble paying its debts but that is nothing new either. What is new and why I have decided to add this news to this timeline is that the dire economic situation is being reported in the government controlled Cuban press AND I don’t think the Cuban people are going to put up with another Special Period. Fidel talked them through that but he’s not around and Raul is certainly no leader, he is a manager. Right now, there isn’t much to manage in Cuba. I think Cuba HAS to give something to Obama in order to move the dialog forward.

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Contained in a release of OFAC’s Civil Penalties today, Philips Electronics of North America has agreed to settle allegations of violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations occurring between June 2004 and March 2006 by paying a fine of $128,750.00.

OFAC alleged that an employee of Philips of North America traveled to Cuba without an OFAC license in the course of business of selling medical equipment to Cuba.

Philips voluntarily disclosed this matter to OFAC and it was resolved according to prior enforcement guidelines published by OFAC, 68 Fed. Reg. 4422.

There were no other violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations and there were no individual penalties. Individual penalties are usually assessed for the purchase of Cuban cigars over the Internet.

Back in the ‘80s, Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, with unemployment as high as 17 percent. But the scrappy nation had one advantage: It always invested in education, so while the Irish were poor, they were smart.

American tech companies like Dell and Intel eventually realized the island was full of underemployed brainiacs and opened up offices there. The Irish were soon performing tasks such as developing software and working in pharmaceutical manufacturing and research. By the late ‘90s, the influx of jobs turned the country around: Ireland was filled with people who were smart and also wealthy, among the richest in Europe. The Celtic Tiger was born.

Is there another country today with the same potential, one that could erupt in an intelligence-driven boom? Yep, though it’s probably not one you’d expect: Cuba.

I visited Cuba a few years ago and was surprised at how much it reminded me of Ireland. Everyone was smart, skilled, and seemed hungry for opportunities to improve their lives—perhaps even more so than the Irish had been back in the ‘80s, because they’d spent decades under Fidel Castro’s human-rights-crushing thumb. Now that President Obama is talking about opening up trade, Cuba experts predict that the country could explode with creativity and entrepreneurial innovation. “There’s tremendous potential,” says Gustav Ranis, an economic-development expert at Yale.

Like the ‘80s Irish, Cubans are eerily well educated, particularly for such an impoverished people. Education is one thing Castro has done right: 99.8 percent of adults are literate, and nearly a third have graduated from high school, many with the sort of vocational training in mechanics and farming the US foolishly let slip a generation ago. Based on UN statistics, one out of five young adults in Cuba graduates college.

Cubans also have a hacker mindset. They’ve needed it to handle the constant privation. They keep 50-year-old cars running with cobbled-together parts. They cadge gray-market Internet access by making friends with local officials—among the anointed few the government allows online. When Soviet food supplies vanished, Cubans turned to urban gardening.

If the US embargo ends, Cuba could become an Ireland-like high tech outsourcing resource. “They’ve got all the skills you need for software programming,” says Kenneth Flamm, professor of international affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Cubans, many of whom study English in school, would be particularly good at “localizing” US software for Latin American markets, Flamm says. Plus, Havana is only an hour’s flight from Miami, making it convenient for offshoring.

Medicine would be another potential area of growth. Cuban health care, particularly preventive care, has been amazingly good; Cuban life expectancy is on a par with that of the US. The country has poured millions into biotech, creating vaccines for meningitis B and hepatitis B. “Biotech and health tourism have really serious potential,” says Vicki Huddleston, a Brookings Institute expert on Cuba.

Mind you, white-collar jobs aren’t enough. Cuba has more than 11 million people, and gainfully employing that many requires tons of jobs in textiles, light industry, and agriculture. Organic farming, interestingly, could be big: Because the embargo has made it hard to get pesticides, Cuba has used comparatively little of them, which means much of the island is organic-ready, so long as it avoids the “resource curse” and stays away from too much mining and oil drilling. Retaining the social welfare net would also be crucial.

Obviously, this is blue-sky thinking. To really open up trade, the Castros will have to liberalize their repressive regime. (An independent journalist I met while visiting in January 2003 was arrested two months later.) There’s no telling if or when that will happen. But let’s hope it does. In sheer human potential, Cuba is an economic and technological miracle waiting to happen.

Email clive@clivethompson.net 

Raul Castro dismissed Barack Obama’s policy changes toward Cuba as “achieving only the minimum,” and said Wednesday that it is up to the U.S. — not Cuba — to do more to improve relations.

The Cuban president suggested the communist government is not willing to appease Washington by embracing small political and social reforms on the island, saying in a speech before an international gathering of government ministers that “it is not Cuba who has to make gestures.”

The Obama administration has allowed unlimited travel and money transfers for Americans with family in this country and eased restrictions on telecommunications between the United States and Cuba. But top U.S. officials have also said they would like to see some Cuban reforms before truly exploring normalizing diplomatic relations that Washington broke off in January 1961.

Raul Castro has said previously he is willing to discuss such sticky subjects as human rights, freedom of the press and political prisoners in Cuba during possible negotiations with the United States. Obama reacted favorably to such sentiments, but Raul’s ailing brother Fidel appears less comfortable with them and even accused the U.S. president of “misinterpreting” his brother words.

Raul’s comments Wednesday appeared to take a harder line on unilateral concessions to meet U.S. expectations, and echoed the words of Fidel, who has written in public essays that Obama’s policy changes did not go far enough because Washington’s 47-year-old trade embargo is still in place.

The younger Castro said that the U.S. steps were, “fine, positive but only achieve the minimum. The embargo remains intact.”

“There is not political or moral pretext that justifies this policy,” he said of the embargo. “Cuba has not imposed any such sanction against the United States or its citizens.”

The 82-year-old Fidel has not been seen in public since July 2006 and ceded the presidency to Raul Castro more than a year ago — but still writes influential essays almost every day which are published in state-controlled newspapers and read on official radio and television.

On Wednesday, Raul Castro repeated that Cuba would be willing to sit down with U.S. negotiators, saying “we have reiterated that we are ready to talk about everything with the government of the U.S. under equal conditions.

“But not to negotiate our sovereignty nor our political and social system, and our right to self-determination and internal affairs.”

He made it clear that if Cuba is willing to broach thorny issues, the U.S. should be ready to do the same.

“If they want to discuss all, it should be ... everything, everything, everything of ours but also of theirs,” Castro said at the ministerial meeting of the Nonaligned Movement.

The granddaughter of Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara is at the forefront of another revolution — for vegetarianism.

Lydia Guevara poses semi-nude in a PETA campaign that tells viewers to “join the vegetarian revolution,” said PETA spokesman Michael McGraw.

This undated photo provided by PETA shows Lydia Guevara posing on the set of her PETA photo shoot.

(AP Photo/PETA)

The print campaign is expected to debut in October in magazines and posters, McGraw said. It will be launched first in Argentina, where Che Guevara was born, and then internationally. PETA approached the 24-year-old in recent months after finding out she was a vegetarian, McGraw said.

In the ad, Lydia Guevara wears camouflage pants, a red beret, and bandoliers of baby carrots while standing with one fist on her hip and the other outstretched.

“It very much evokes the tag line of the ad, which is ‘Join the vegetarian revolution,‘“ McGraw said. “It’s an homage of sorts to her late grandfather.”

Che Guevara was a Marxist leader who played a pivotal role in Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba. He was executed in Bolivia in 1967.

The ad is PETA’s first campaign promoting vegetarianism in South America.

Ricardo Alarcon told The Associated Press in an interview late Wednesday night that no date has been set for immigration talks with the U.S., but he said that Raul Castro’s government hopes to expand the agenda to include environmental issues and efforts against terrorism, drug smuggling and natural disasters.

Yet Alarcon also called the U.S. “an ignorant lion,” criticizing the Supreme Court’s refusal this week to hear an appeal by the so-called “Cuban Five,” men convicted of being unregistered foreign agents by a Miami court in 2001. Their lawyers claim that anti-Castro sentiment kept them from receiving a fair trial in South Florida.

Cuban officials say the men were heroes trying to avert terrorist attacks on the island and they have held massive rallies for their freedom, plastered their faces on billboards and commissioned songs, poems and paintings in their honor. Alarcon said the government will continue campaigning on their behalf, but he suggested that their legal status won’t impede U.S.-Cuban talks.

“We share the sentiments of many who feel insulted by that decision, but I don’t see why one necessarily has to affect the other,” Alarcon said when asked if the high court’s move could spoil negotiations.

The five were sentenced to terms that ranged from 10 years to life in prison. Three were also found guilty of conspiracy to obtain military secrets from the U.S. Southern Command.

A three-judge federal appeals court panel reversed their convictions in 2005, but the full 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later reinstated them, ordering new sentences for two of the men in coming months.

Alarcon said the men’s freedom will be “at the top” of any list of priorities in talks with U.S. leaders, adding that President Barack Obama “has a moral obligation” to pardon the five if he really wants improved relations with Cuba and Latin America.

Still, he acknowledged that Obama has a clear desire for improved U.S.-Cuban ties, and noted that “there is an obvious change in language” in Washington, even if some people are “working to try and sabotage that.”

Cuba’s parliament meets just two weekends a year, when its members do little more than unanimously back measures proposed by Castro’s government. Still, Alarcon is one of the island’s most-public faces. He lived in the U.S. for years as Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, and answered questions on Wednesday partly in English.

Alarcon also suggested that the June 4 arrest of two new accused Cuban spies, retired State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, was intended to undermine improved relations between the neighboring nations.

“The administration makes traveling to Cuba easier for Cuban Americans and Congress is discussing the elimination of travel restrictions for everyone, and suddenly this strange case pops up,” he said, calling it something “out of a police novel.”

The pair is not believed to have been paid, but rather to have been ideological supporters of the communist-run island.

“Cuba does not buy spies,” he said. “They don’t do it for money.”

U.S. lawmakers have heard testimony about continuing weaknesses in US government funded television broadcasting to Cuba. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) updated members of Congress on steps taken by the Broadcasting Board of Governors and its Office of Cuba Broadcasting on recommendations to deal with management, morale and other problems.

Since its inception in 1990, TV Marti has been the subject of controversy over cost, contracting, internal management and journalistic issues, and the inability of the Miami-based station to reach enough of the population in Cuba to justify the $500 million spent on the operation so far.

The Office of Cuba Broadcasting which runs TV and Radio Marti manages a staff of 153, producing 330 hours of Spanish language broadcasts each week to Cuba, costing nearly $37 million annually.

Radio and TV Marti Critics

While TV and Radio Marti have received praised for broadcasting news to people in Cuba, where the government jams foreign signals, TV Marti continues to face internal and external criticism.

Critics continue to question why TV Marti’s audience by most accounts has remained small. The station has been the subject of GAO and State Department investigations into mismanagement and allegations of fraud and abuse.

“I wanted to focus on what seems to me to be a most egregious waste of money. TV Marti does not seem to have an audience. It’s a station that no one watches. So why spend all the money on it?,” said Massachusetts Democrat William Delahunt, who heads the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight Subcommittee.

TV Marti transmits over-the-air signals from an aircraft, the Aero Marti, two satellites, and the Internet to get programming into Cuba.

Limited Audience for TV and Radio Marti

Jess Ford of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), said that despite using multiple methods, the station’s audience remains small based on four telephone surveys conducted since 2003. “The four telephone surveys have reported less than one percent of the respondents had watched TV Marti over the past week. Most notably, the most recent surveys in 2006 and 2008 showed no increase in reported TV Marti viewership after the launch of the Aero Marti and Direct Broadcasting,” he said.

GAO mentions one non-random survey showing that 21 percent of recent Cuban émigrés listened to TV Marti within six months before leaving Cuba, but GAO says these results likely do not represent the actual size of TV Martí‘s audience.

A lack of access to Cuba, says GAO, has made it difficult to obtain nationally representative data on audience size, and decision-makers have had limited information to assess the relative success or return on investment for each transmission method.

Mismanagement and Lack of Effectiveness

While critical of mismanagement and other problems uncovered at TV Marti, California Republican Dana Rohrabacher says scrapping the station would be a mistake. “I think instead of focusing on scrapping radio or TV Marti, we should be focused on how to scrap the Communist dictatorship that [has] oppressed the Cuban people for these past 50 years,” he said.

John Nichols, a comparative media expert and Professor of Communications and International Affairs at Penn State University reiterated his longstanding criticisms of TV Marti, saying it has failed to build an audience.

“TV Marti’s response to a succession of failures over a two decade period has been to resort to ever more expensive technological gimmicks, all richly funded by Congress, and none of those gimmicks, such as the airplane have worked or probably can work without the compliance of the Cuban government. In short TV Marti is a highly wasteful and ineffective operation,” he said.

Philip Peters, Vice President of Lexington Institute, a private research orgnization based in Virginia, disagrees with members of Congress who assert that ending TV Marti broadcasts would strengthen the Castro regime in Cuba: “I don’t know how we have gotten ourselves in the position where this particular instrument of public diplomacy is a test of everyone’s manhood with regard to Communism in Cuba. It’s a tactic, it’s not an end in itself, and I think that the only thing TV Marti has challenged is that Congress truly cares about the taxpayer money,” he said.

In its overview, GAO said the Office of Cuba Broadcasting lacks a formal strategic plan to guide decision-making on its funding and operations, including a proposal to reduce TV Martí newscasts from two 30 minute evening programs to five minute news updates every half hour.

It also identified weaknesses in program review processes that broadcast managers use to assess compliance with journalistic standards, including accuracy, balance, and objectivity, and a lack of training for OCB staff.

While not commenting on specifics from Wednesday’s hearing, Broadcasting Board of Governors Public Relations Chief Letitia King said the Broadcasting Board of Governors was in general agreement with GAO recommendations and has worked very closely with management of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and has a series of actions underway to address them.

Reporters Without Borders on Wednesday demanded the immediate release of Cuban photojournalist Maria Nelida Lopez Baez, who is being held at an unknown location on the communist-ruled island.

The journalist faces possible persecution for “pre-criminal social danger,” the Paris-based organization, known as RSF, said in a statement.

“The regime once again feels the need to censor and crack down on dissidents and journalists,” RSF said. “This helps to explain why it was so contemptuous about the recent decision, obtained thanks to the efforts of other Latin American countries, to let Cuba back into the Organization of American States.”

“Rejoining the OAS would have meant respecting basic freedoms, a clearly unacceptable prospect for the continent’s last dictatorship,” the press freedom watchdog said. “The international community must press for the release of Cuban political prisoners.”

The organization noted that the accusation of “pre-criminal social danger” leveled against the journalist is commonly used by the Cuban government against individuals who have committed no crime, jailing them merely for their “potential” threat to society.

Three journalists have been convicted on this charge since 2006 and given sentences ranging from three to four years: Oscar Sanchez Madan, Ramon Velazquez Toranso and Raymundo Perdigon Brito.

Cuban factories are closing down and production is being cut at other workplaces as the international financial crisis weighs on the import-dependent Caribbean island, the official media said on Sunday.

A growing shortage of foreign exchange has forced the Communist-run country to drastically cut imports and local budgets, impose power quotas on state-run companies, restructure debt and put off payments to foreign suppliers.

The state-run Juventud Rebelde newspaper, the only national Sunday publication, said a tire factory had shut down since February due to a lack of rubber imports while an aluminum packaging plant cut output for similar reasons.

The newspaper said the plants were examples of a wider problem “in other sectors of the Cuban state company sector,” which encompasses 90 percent of economic activity.

Other workplaces were having difficulty obtaining spare parts, the newspaper said, and still others were being forced to scale back output after a recent government measure mandating a 12 percent reduction in power consumption.

Cuba, like other Caribbean countries, has been hit hard by the global financial crisis, which has slashed revenue from key exports, dried up credit and reduced foreign investment.

It is under longstanding U.S. economic sanctions and is recovering from three hurricanes that struck last year, causing an estimated $10 billion in damages.

Workers at lobster processing plants, cigar rolling factories and other establishments have reported layoffs for months, but Sunday’s Juventud Rebelde report was the first official admission of growing problems in the productive sector.

“The waves of the present international financial and economic crisis are slowly gaining force and the rough waters are reaching the pockets of companies and workers around the world,” the newspaper said.

“We can’t harbor the illusion that we can escape just because our country has a social system that defends justice for all,” it said.

Economy and Planning Minister Marino Murillo recently said Cuba’s growth forecast for 2009 was reduced from 6 percent to less than 2.5 percent.

Some local economists believe this year’s growth will be 1 percent or less, similar to forecasts for the region overall.

IT WOULD SEEMINGLY require a sadism-tinged sense of leisure for someone to consider Guantanamo Bay a vacation destination. Or it might be just a lack of imagination. Instead of kneeling, shackled, orange-jumpsuited men, picture a pristine bay and protected coastline where endangered hawksbill sea turtles nest, mingling with Cuban iguanas. The slopes above the bay, too steep for sugarcane, are covered in forests that shelter 10-foot-long Cuban boas, tree frogs, bee hummingbirds (the world’s smallest bird) and hutias - arboreal mammals the size of a housecat. In recent years there have been sightings of the elusive solenodon - a small, shrew-like burrower with venomous saliva - and even the ivory-billed woodpecker, still thought by many ornithologists to be extinct. All in all, it’s an ecotourist’s nirvana.

And in place of the detention center itself, picture a research compound, maybe two, devoted to the region’s distinctive ecology, or to combining the best practices of Cuban and American healthcare. Perhaps a museum that manages, in a feat of curatorial brilliance, to commemorate the detention center while not explaining away its troubled legacy. These are all potential futures for Guantanamo that some are already working to bring into being.

With two wars and an economy on life support, President Obama may have bigger problems than Guantanamo, but he doesn’t have thornier ones. By pledging to close the prison by year’s end, the administration has forced itself to face a raft of tough questions: whether to release some of the detainees and how to keep track of them; where to put those not released and how (and whether) to try them; and how much to reveal about what has gone on there.

But there’s another aspect that hasn’t received as much attention: what do we do with the place itself? Even with the detention center gone, Guantanamo Bay will remain a unique and fundamentally odd piece of property, a 45-square-mile chunk of a hostile island nation that the US has laid claim to and placed a military installation on. And with the Department of Defense yet to announce plans of its own, suggestions have popped up in op-ed pages, scholarly articles, and conversations between policymakers. They range from turning the base into an amphibious warfare training center to designating it a national park, from building an institute for the study of neglected tropical diseases to hosting back-channel international negotiations.

The fate of the detention center doesn’t carry the same weight as the question of what to do with the people currently kept there - lives, after all, aren’t at stake. But the same qualities that led the Bush administration, in the fall of 2001, to choose Guantanamo Bay Naval Base for the detention center shape the sense of opportunities and challenges around what to do there now. More than any practical consideration, it is a question of what message to send. For more than a century, the US naval base there has served a primarily symbolic purpose. It has been an irksome, ineradicable - and, for most of that time, little-used - reminder to Cuba and the rest of Latin America of US military hegemony. Most recently it has become a symbol of the brutality and excesses of the American war on terrorism, our willingness, particularly in the eyes of our European allies, to put ourselves above the law. So the question for President Obama, and for all of us, is what new symbol do we want to erect in its place?

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