South America has been a special part of my life for four decades. I have lived many years in Brasil and Peru. I am married to an incredible lady from Argentina. I want to share South America with you.
by: Jessica Dye in New York and John Paul Rathbone in Miami
Donald Trump on Monday threatened to end the Obama administration accord that restored diplomatic ties between the US and Cuba if the former Cold War foe did not negotiate a better deal with his government.
Following the death of longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro on Friday, the US president-elect tweeted that he would be willing to undo the historic deal struck in 2014 by his predecessor, President Barack Obama.
“If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the US as a whole, I will terminate deal,” Mr Trump said in a social media message on Monday morning.
Mr Trump’s statement comes amid questions about the direction in which he will take US-Cuba relations following Castro’s death and the Republican’s surprise election victory earlier this month.
During the campaign, Mr Trump promised to renegotiate or jettison several military and trade deals struck by the US under his predecessors. His chief of staff Reince Priebus told Fox News over the weekend that the president-elect would seek movement in the “right direction” from Cuba to continue the relationship.
“We’ve got to have a better deal,” Mr Priebus told Fox News.
Mr Obama’s policy of detente sought to engineer a post-Castro soft landing via increased US tourism and business deals, an approach that critics said merely buttressed Havana’s communist regime.
Mr Trump, who tweeted on Saturday “Fidel Castro is dead!”, last week named Mauricio Claver-Carone, a political lobbyist and lawyer who has criticised normalisation of US-Cuban relations, to his transition team at the Treasury Department. The department is in charge of enforcing the US embargo’s trade and travel restrictions; Mr Claver-Carone is a director of the US-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee.
Mr Trump’s transition team said on Sunday that the president-elect had an “open mind” about how he would approach Cuba’s newly-opened diplomatic relations.
“He is open to researching and, in fact, resetting relations,” Kellyanne Conway, a senior Trump adviser, told ABC. “His criticism of what has happened in the last couple of years is very simple — we got nothing in return.”
Argentina unemployment drops in breath of fresh air for government
Workers work at a construction site to build an office building and shopping mall in a residential area in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Argentina's unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent in the third quarter of the year, the government's Indec statistics agency said in a report on Friday, a bright spot in a slew of poor economic data for the recession-stricken country.
That was down from 9.3 percent unemployment in the second quarter, as the total number of unemployed Argentines fell by nearly 100,000 to 1.1 million.
The drop in unemployment came a day after government figures showed economic activity shrank 3.7 percent in September compared with a year earlier. Industrial output fell in September for the eighth straight month.
The decline in joblessness will provide some relief for President Mauricio Macri, whose center-right policies have come under fire from the country's powerful labor unions and Peronist opposition as a promised return to growth in the second half of the year has failed to materialize.
Last week, tens of thousands of protesters marched in Buenos Aires to pressure the government into increasing subsidies for the poor. More than 32 percent of Argentines live in poverty, the government said in September, up from private estimates of 29 percent last December, when Macri took office.
"It's a good figure for the government, which has been politically bruised recently," said Hernan Hirsch, chief economist at Argentine consultancy FyE Consult. "The recession has lasted longer than the government promised, putting their strategy in doubt. A favorable employment figure gives them some political oxygen."
Hirsch noted that while there was a seasonal component to the drop and many of the gains were concentrated in the less-productive informal sector, the fact that the total unemployment rate fell despite an overall increase in the labor force was encouraging.
Macri won office on promises of attracting foreign investment and reducing poverty, but the anticipated influx of investments has been slower than hoped, and some of the administration's austerity-minded policies, like reducing subsidies for home-heating natural gas, have contributed to inflation, limiting Argentines' purchasing power.
Friday's data marked the second time the government published official unemployment figures since Macri revamped the country's statistics agency, which was widely viewed as manipulating economic data under the populist administration of previous President Cristina Fernandez.
Argentina's gross domestic product is expected to shrink 2 percent in full-year 2016, before rebounding to grow 3.2 percent next year, according to private estimates.
Three days after the phone call between Trump and Macri on Nov.14, Trump’s associates at Buenos Aires firm YY Development Group announced that the construction project would go ahead, in an interview with La Nación (link in Spanish). The tower’s construction had reportedly been held up for years, for various reasons, with YY Development actively restarting construction permit requests when pro-business Macri took over from statist former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Jan. 2016.
There’s nothing substantive to confirm that the phone call and construction announcement are linked, but local news media have reported that the call itself was arranged in very unusual fashion. Macri, who is son of one of Latin America’s richest men and has reportedly known Trump since beating him at golf in the 1980s, had backed the wrong horse at the election, openly supporting Hillary Clinton. Accordingly, a crisis meeting was called to work out how to put relations on the right track (Spanish language) with Trump’s administration.
He seized power audaciously in 1959 and commanded to the last a powerful personal following inside and outside Cuba. But during more than half a century in office Fidel Castro, who has died at the age of 90, metamorphosed from a popular and charismatic guerrilla leader into a traditional caudillo, an autocratic holdover from another age.
At his life’s end, although bolstered by the emergence of a few new friends such as the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, he was assailed by foreign governments and human rights groups and spurned by many former supporters, including even his daughter. Yet Castro remained one of the most remarkable revolutionary figures of the 20th century.
As one of the longest serving national leaders of his time, first as prime minister and then as president, he nurtured his own legend, keeping even into old age his beard and olive-green uniform that had made him an instantly recognisable world figure. The slogan he coined and repeated in his later years, “socialism or death”, is a fitting epitaph for a stubborn and headstrong rebel turned statesman who swam with the current of history when it suited, but dared to fight it when it turned against him.
Even after President Barack Obama moved to re-establish diplomatic relations and end more than five decades of embargoes between Washington and Havana, in a deal worked out with the help of Pope Francis in December 2014, Castro continued to mistrust the US. A few days after a historic visit to Cuba by Mr Obama in 2016, Castro wrote a scornful letter railing against the president and saying Cuba needed nothing from its longtime enemy.
Driven by a certainty of his destiny to oust the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, he accomplished an extraordinary feat of leadership. A combination of discipline, courage, an astute instinct for popular feeling, luck and sheer force of personality proved more than a match for Batista’s large army. Castro’s victory gave hope to guerrilla movements throughout Latin America and beyond.
To dismiss the hagiography surrounding that revolution cannot detract from the heroic journey Castro embarked on when, on November 24 1956, he left the coast of Mexico on the Granma, an ageing motor launch, bound for Cuba. The Granma was designed to accommodate only eight people, yet 82 comrades in arms were crammed on board. The vessel broke up when it ran aground on the coast, turning the landing into more of a shipwreck, and only 21 survived an early ambush.
Castro led a number of them into the forest-covered mountains of the Sierra Maestra, among whom were his younger brother Raúl and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the legendary Argentine doctor turned international revolutionary.
The caption describing Fidel Castro in his 1945 high school yearbook reads: "Distinguished student and a fine athlete. Very popular. Will study law and we have no doubt he will have a brilliant future."
Raúl Castro in 1957, left, stands next to his brother and then rebel leader Fidel, middle, and an unidentified fighter, as they operate against dictator Fulgencio Batista from Cuba's eastern mountains. Fidel officially designated Raúl as his successor at a Communist Party congress in October 1997.
Fidel Castro, right, in 1959, next to a lookalike, the Cuban actor Armando Roblan who was impersonating Castro at Marti theatre, in Havana.
Fidel Castro throws a baseball before the start of a game between the Cuban military and the police in July 1959.
The Cuban rebel leader, centre, waves from a jeep in January 1959 as he enters La Habana after the victory over dictator Fulgencio Batista’s forces. He is surrounded by members of his leftist guerrilla "26th of July Movement", including revolution leaders Camilo Cienfuegos, left, and Huber Matos, right.
Fidel Castro, right, next to Argentine guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara during a meeting.
Fidel Castro, Cuba's then prime minister, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, embrace one another at the UN General Assembly, at the UN building, in New York, 1960
Cuban leader Fidel Castro, bottom right, sits inside a tank during the Bay of Pigs invasion, April 17 1961, in this photograph provided by Granma, the Cuban government newspaper. A young, animated Castro joked and swore as he barked out orders to defending troops.
Fidel Castro addresses the crowd in Havana during the 1970s.
Fidel Castro, left, and Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, at Havana airport during Arafat's first visit to Cuba in November 1974.
Then vice-president General Raúl Castro, left, and President Fidel Castro, attending the 11th World Festival of Youth and Students
Fidel Castro exhales cigar smoke during an interview in March 1985 at his presidential palace in Havana.
Cuban president Fidel Castro talks to the umpire during a baseball game against Venezuela, led by his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chávez, in Barquisimeto, 350km (180 miles) east of Caracas, in October 2000.
President Fidel Castro addresses the audience at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana in July 2005.
Cuba’s now former president Fidel Castro gives a speech in September 2010 at Havana's university. Castro talked to the students about the possibility of a nuclear war.
Pope Benedict XVI meets with Fidel Castro in Havana, in this image made available by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano
Within two years the Batista regime crumbled, as Castro’s increasingly popular rebellion exploited internal weaknesses of the government, which was in the end abandoned, even by the US. By January 1959, a bearded Castro was riding in triumph on a tank through the streets of Havana. He was only 32. Cuba was at his feet.
That feat of arms, together with the failure of US President John Kennedy’s attempt to remove him in 1961 – via an invasion of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs – fired the imagination of a generation in the developing world as well as students in Europe and the US. To many on the left, Castro’s socialist experiment promised the dawn of a new era for emergent nations.
Castro wrote from the Sierra: “When this war is over, a much wider and bigger war will commence for me: the war that I am going to wage against [the US]. I am aware this is my true destiny.”
Through the sheer force of his personality, Castro strode the world stage in the 1960s and 1970s. He was an influential member of the nonaligned movement; a self-depicted David standing up to an imperial Goliath. Gripped by fears generated by the cold war with the Soviet Union, the US saw Castro as a direct threat to its regional hegemony, and successive administrations in Washington developed such an obsession with Cuba that his real capacity for mischief was exaggerated.
Such was the US perception of the threat posed by Castro that the CIA hatched a number of alleged plots and schemes to try to assassinate or discredit him. The more bizarre of these involved poisoned cigars, exploding seashells and chemicals to make his beard fall out.
Even if Washington had been less obsessed, Castro would not have been an easy partner. His attitude towards the US was complex and ambivalent. Although passionate about baseball, at heart he always perceived the US as the aggressor nation. He never forgave the US for backing the Batista regime. This stance, coupled with his own brand of socialism, led him almost inevitably towards Moscow. The alliance was a marriage of convenience: Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev and his successors bartered extensive economic and military aid in return for using Cuba as a cat’s paw in the cold war with the US.
The missile crisis of 1962, during which the world came to the verge of nuclear war, brought home the dangers of this policy. The confrontation was over Russia’s construction of sites in Cuba to house intermediate-range nuclear missiles to threaten the US. Castro himself was a marginal player during the showdown and it was from the Associated Press news agency that he first learnt of Moscow’s decision to withdraw its missiles.
Under the Soviet umbrella, though not always in agreement with Moscow, Castro continued his internationalist ambitions, dispatching aid and military advisers to Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean in support of governments and guerrilla movements. Perhaps he felt constrained within the confines of a small island of only 11m inhabitants; he had to export his revolution in order to make it safe at home.
His most audacious and effective move was to send troops to Angola in 1976 to bolster the new Soviet-backed leftwing government there. By the mid-1980s, these were built up to a more than 50,000 strong force that was finally withdrawn under a US-brokered Angola ceasefire and an independence settlement in neighbouring Namibia.
The alliance with Moscow solved Cuba’s desperate fuel needs and found a market for its sugar crop, previously bought by the US. Soft credits and high support prices for sugar allowed the country to make spectacular progress in health, housing and literacy, Castro’s proudest achievement. And yet the arrangement masked serious inefficiencies. It locked Cuba into a single-crop economy and linked the island to distant trading partners with which it had little affinity.
This flaw was exposed when the cold war came to an end. Cuba was set adrift by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which had channelled some $65bn in financial support over three decades. The economy shrank by half in the four years from 1989, plunging the island into a deep recession.
Initially, Castro refused to countenance change in the centrally controlled economy – but as time passed his government appeared increasingly at the mercy of economic and social forces rather than in control of them. Eventually, as economic conditions worsened, he bowed to circumstance. In doing so, he overturned some of the fundamental tenets of his first 30 years in power.
He began to woo foreign investment, permitted the use of the US dollar, legalised private sector activities, including limited reforms in agriculture, and implicitly tolerated unemployment by allowing the closure of lossmaking state enterprises. However, he was never more than a reluctant reformer and later reversed some of these changes.
Social advances were undermined by the recession of the early 1990s. Prostitution, banished from Havana for three decades, returned with a vengeance. His economic legacy was less ambiguous: for all its social inequities, the economy he inherited had a thriving middle class and boasted one of the best infrastructures in Latin America. But his policies brought hardship, even food rationing, and drove 1.5m into exile, many of them settling only a few miles across the Florida straits in Miami.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born in August 1926 in Oriente province – or so the official Cuban biographies say. But investigative biographers have demonstrated that his date of birth was put back a year so that he could enrol in La Salle school in Oriente. His father Angel, a tough emigrant from Galicia, was a prosperous farmer in Oriente. He had two children by his first wife. Fidel’s mother was originally hired as a maid; she had Fidel, along with his sister Angela and brother Raúl, out of wedlock before she married Angel and bore four more children.
Fidel’s childhood home was rich, but culture was evidently lacking – a visitor once described the atmosphere as “barbaric beyond belief”. Perhaps it was there that he first imbibed the anti-Americanism that was so important to his life. He grew up under the shadow of big US-owned sugar plantations. His father had fought the Americans as a sergeant in the 1898 Spanish-American war. Spain’s defeat had left Cuba dominated by the US, which engendered resentment by supporting a succession of unpopular dictators.
Cubans were told little of Fidel’s personal life. In 1949 he married Mirta Díaz-Balart, who bore him one son, known as Fidelito, before their divorce five years later. His later companion Dalia Soto del Valle, a former schoolteacher, bore him five more sons. Fidel fathered other children including Alina Fernandez-Revuelta, who was born out of a romance with Naty Revuelta, a society figure.
As a child Fidel spent 11 years in boarding schools, seven of those with the Jesuits, who provided him with a strong intellectual discipline. His student ability was that of an outstanding all-rounder; his final school report recognised that he was cut out for great things: “He will make a brilliant name for himself.”
At university in Havana, studying law, he relished the challenge and violence of campus politics. But he also had a reputation as a playboy. Indeed, when he married Mirta, a philosophy student, he could have opted for a life of wealth and privilege. His father was then worth more than $500,000.
He set up a law practice but the law could not sustain his great ambition. He moved into politics, deciding that he could not work within the system after Batista engineered a coup in 1952. In that year, he asked his father for $3,000 to finance an insurrection (he received $140). He and a small group then went ahead with a suicidal venture to attack the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, in the hope of provoking an uprising. The 1953 attack failed disastrously. Castro was lucky to be captured alive.
His political career, however, was enhanced by his own defence at his trial, when he turned the tables and put the regime in the dock. His speech culminated in the memorable words: “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.” It was clandestinely edited and published while Castro was in prison. He emerged in 1955 after two years, a dedicated revolutionary.
His ideology was a homegrown mix of nationalism, communism and opportunism. Arguably he gave most importance to the ideas of the man he sought to equal: José Martí, the 19th-century national hero. Castro exploited the Cuban Communist party to attain power, then proceeded to oust its leadership and expropriate its language.
Progress, he claimed, was possible only in a command economy with a tightly controlled state apparatus under a loyal one-party system. Such a view became increasingly discredited as Cubans suffered the collapse of their economy once the Soviet subsidies disappeared, yet the system enabled him to run Cuba as his fiefdom.
Castro ruled with a mixture of caprice, obsession and hard-headed pragmatism, which generated many ironies and contradictions. He railed in public against the evils of capitalism but hosted private dinners for leading capitalists of the world, including from the US, who visited to check out business opportunities.
In the early years of the revolution, he fanned anti-Catholic sentiment to dislodge a conservative church hierarchy that had largely sided with the Batista regime. Thirty years later, shrewdly perceiving the rejuvenated Cuban Catholic church as a possible threat to his internal power base, he increased official tolerance for religion and engineered a historic meeting with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 1996. The meeting agreed on a papal trip.
Ever mistrustful, he delegated only to his brother Raúl, his longtime armed forces minister who succeeded him as president in 2008, and three years later as party leader. His greatest personal confidante was Celia Sanchez, who had helped to organise his life from the earliest days of his campaign in the Sierra. Her death in 1980, from cancer, brought on Castro a deep melancholy from which he never fully recovered.
From that time he seemed increasingly out of touch, and he was badly tainted by a scandal arising from the supposed discovery of top generals’ involvement in drugs trafficking with the Colombian mafia in 1989. He had the main culprits executed by firing squad, the popularity among the troops of one of them suggesting he was seen by the Castro brothers as a rival.
His behaviour – his lengthy paternalistic discourses, his chiding of officials, his public admission of errors – endeared him to Cubans when it did not irk or bore them. It also betrayed a gigantic ego. Castro never believed in democracy, once describing multi-party politics as “multi-rubbish”. He regarded free speech in a developing country as a luxury and he spurned the idea of elections, thereby alienating many who had initially supported the revolution.
His refusal to countenance significant political change and his continued persecution of internal opponents earned him sharp criticism from foreign governments and human rights groups, and slowed Cuba’s integration into a US-dominated international community after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. His domestic popularity also waned. Defections multiplied and included the flight to the US of his daughter Alina.
Castro used the hostility of the US, and the continuing American embargo, to justify maintaining one-party socialism and the persecution of opponents. The embargo became one of his strongest propaganda weapons in his quixotic struggle to prove he would never bow to Uncle Sam. It was an enduring effort but one that left him and his country an anachronism in a changed world.
Rather than absolving him, history seemed to have passed him by.
