The Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation says that the island's communist government is still holding a hundred political prisoners, in spite of releasing numerous imprisoned dissidents last year.
New guidelines announced Friday by Obama administration making travel and remittance to Cuba easier for US citizens.
A salsa band, dancing schoolchildren and showgirls in bikini tops and feather headdresses welcomed some 1,500 tourists on a British cruise liner that officials described as among the biggest ships to visit Cuba in years.
Layoffs planned to eliminate some 500,000 state jobs in Cuba this year got underway this week, according to the island’s only legal workers’ organization. The official weekly Trabajadores cited a speech by CTC chief Salvador Valdes in the eastern province of Holguin, in which he said it was the union’s responsibility to “be the guarantor” of the process of labour reorganization.
Cuba’s government, trying to save money and eliminate subsidies announced this week it will remove soap, toothpaste and detergent from the monthly ration of food and consumer products it has handed out since the early days of the Cuban revolution.
In a dramatic speech to the National Assembly Cuba’s Raul Castro said he wasn’t elected to restore capitalism nor to surrender Socialism but admitted that “too much secrecy and too many lies” had taken the revolution to a critical situation: “either we rectify or we will plunge from the cliff and the efforts of entire generations would be lost”.
Cuba began this week a public debate over landmark plans to lift the island's struggling economy and “preserve the revolution’s victories” by liberalizing some private enterprise, admitting small farmers private property, streamlining the vast state bureaucracy by leaving redundant a half-million workers.
The Cuban government has launched an aggressive campaign on its proposed economic reforms as it tries to whip up public opinion enthusiasm and in its own ranks ahead of a Communist Party congress to approve them in April.
The Cuban government is proposing the orderly elimination of the rations’ card according to a document prepared for the ruling party Communist Congress scheduled for April 2011.
Cuban President Raul Castro told unionists to accept layoffs and reforms that open the way for private enterprise as necessary for the survival of socialism.