Reposted from The Miami Herald
By Juan O. Tamayo
Internet analysts say higher speeds in Internet connections to the island show a new cable is in use but perhaps only for traffic coming into Cuba
A fiber-optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela, built to speed up Cuba’s access to the Internet but long delayed amid reports of corruption during construction, appears to have finally entered commercial use — but perhaps only for island-bound traffic. More…
Reposted from NPR
Socialism has been Cuba’s official economic policy for more than a half-century, and some 85 percent of the Cuban workforce is employed by the state.
But that is changing fast. Communist authorities say that nearly half of Cuba’s economic activity will shift to the private or “non-state” sector in the next four or five years. More…
Presidents Leonel Fernandez Reyna and Michel Martelly
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (defend.ht/Le Nouvelliste) – Dominicain President, Leonel Fernandez Reyna, awarded the highest honor of his country to Joseph Michel Martelly, his Haitian counterpart. The two presidents of the island initialed at the Dominican Presidential Palace seven memoranda of understanding covering various areas. The creation of a fund to be financed from a debt Dominicans have to Venezuela. More…
Havana, Cuba
Dividing Old Havana from Chinatown is Cuba’s Capitolio Nacional, a monumental edifice with a fateful past. El Capitolio was conceived during the “Roaring Twenties”, when the island led the world in sugar exports and the future seemed blue-sky. President Gerardo Machado, who dreamed of turning Cuba into the Switzerland of the Americas, decided that his four million countrymen needed a domed Capitol building even taller and more ornate than the one he toured in Washington. More…
