Cuba

Our Woman in Havana

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 21:31:00 +0000

Our Woman in Havana Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/01/2018 - 14:31

Aimee Anderson

When they first met, at a 1991 Palacio de la Revolucion celebration, Fidel Castro asked Vicki Huddleston if she was someone’s spouse.

She told him she was the director of Cuban affairs for the United States.

“Oh? I thought I was!” Castro said.

Huddleston (IntlAf’64) — the top U.S. diplomat in Cuba from 1999 to 2002 — held the position at a time when few women held a comparable rank. And despite Castro’s initial condescension, she found that being a woman was to her advantage.

“I felt I was more personally involved with the Cuban people and Fidel Castro, because Castro liked women,” she said over the summer from her home in Santa Fe, N.M.

In a distinguished diplomatic career that began in 1976, following service in the Peace Corps in Peru, Huddleston served not only in Cuba — the main subject of her recent memoir, Our Woman in Havana — but also as U.S. ambassador to Madagascar and Mali.

The book explores the tense history of U.S.-Cuba relations while recounting rich anecdotes from her own experience — of the saga of Elian Gonzalez, the 5-year-old Cuban boy who was the subject of a fierce international custody battle, of the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and of Fidel Castro himself.

It also clarifies why Huddleston felt being a woman was helpful.

As head of the U.S. Interests Section, she implemented programs intended to empower the Cuban people to engage with the wider world. She and her staff provided access to uncensored devices and information by handing out books and portable radios. They also hosted dissidents in their homes to help activists make connections.

“A male ambassador would not have done what I did,” Huddleston said. “I think in a way it would have been beneath him to be handing out radios.”

Castro’s notorious fondness for women helped.

“Fidel was more open to working with a woman,” Huddleston said. “So there was always a possibility of finding a way open [between the U.S. and Cuba]. I don’t think there are any kind of personal relationships now.”

Huddleston’s memoir offers a window into the start-and-stop, forward-backward nature of U.S.-Cuba relations over the past two decades.

When she arrived in 1999, the U.S.’s trade embargo was still firm. But the Clinton administration eased travel restrictions and enabled relations with the Cuban government. The Bush administration initially continued this, before reverting to stricter policy.

In 2002 Huddleston left to become U.S. ambassador to Mali. Soon afterward, Castro jailed 75 dissidents and Huddleston’s radio and book distribution program stalled.

“I didn’t agree with anything the [U.S.] administration was doing,” she said.

Huddleston still follows foreign affairs closely and expresses frustration with U.S.-Cuba policy, increasingly fraught after seeming improvement during the Obama years. She hopes her book will convince readers that hardline U.S. policy has failed.

“And not only that it failed,” she said, “but that when we are more open, Cuba is more open.”

Photo courtesy the Overlook Press

Vicki Huddleston was the top U.S. diplomat in Cuba from 1999 to 2002. She held the position at a time when few women held a comparable rank.

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Colors of Cuba: A Photo Essay

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 22:34:07 +0000

Colors of Cuba: A Photo Essay Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/01/2016 - 16:34

The past year has been an eventful one in the fraught recent history of the United States and Cuba.

In March, seven months after the U.S. reopened its long-shuttered embassy in Havana, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president in 88 years to visit the Caribbean nation. American hoteliers are preparing to put their names on Cuban lodgings. Legal tourism from the U.S. has spiked amid relaxed travel rules, and U.S. airlines are expected to start direct, scheduled service to Havana this fall. Cruise ships have made direct crossings from Florida already.

Amid all this, photographer Glenn Asakawa (Jour’86) has traveled to Cuba twice, photographing a nation and a people on the cusp of potentially transformative change. His arresting work (see slide show above) captures the life and spirit of the island and its people as they are, largely unaffected — for better and worse — by all that may soon come.

“Their colorful art and unique sense of fashion were a photographer’s dream,” said Asakawa, a member of the Rocky Mountain News photography staff that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and CU Boulder’s chief photographer since 2008. “It was delightful capturing moments of bonding between generations, especially in Havana’s limited public Wi-Fi areas. Everywhere I was greeted with warm smiles and a friendliness not often seen at home.”

The relationship between the U.S. and Communist Cuba remains complex, and the direction and pace of change will hinge on political developments in both nations.

But with the door now ajar for Americans, Asakawa plans to keep going back: He’s got three more trips on the books already.

Photos by Glenn Asakawa

People and places I won't forget.

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In Cuba with Former Denver Mayor Guillermo Vidal

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:00:00 +0000

In Cuba with Former Denver Mayor Guillermo Vidal Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/01/2016 - 00:00

Eric Gershon

A forthcoming CU News Corps documentary will tell the life story of former Denver mayor Guillermo “Bill” Vidal, who fled Cuba as a boy and is now trying to define his role in the modernization of the economically isolated island nation.

Call Me Guillermo will follow Vidal from his Cuban boyhood through his six-month mayoralty in 2011 and into his current quest, which takes place as tourism and business ties between the U.S. and the communist Caribbean country multiply.

“It’s about Guillermo Vidal’s amazing story, his life so far, and what that last chapter might include,” said Jeff Browne, the CU Boulder journalism instructor who directs News Corps, an explanatory reporting project of the College of Media, Communication and Information (CMCI). “He wants to help rebuild Cuba — or build Cuba, as the case may be. What sort of role will he have in that? And how does his amazing story inform his ability to do that?”

Vidal, a 1973 CU Denver graduate, became mayor in January 2011, after John Hickenlooper resigned to become governor. Then a deputy mayor, Vidal served until July 2011, when he became president of the Hispanic Chamber of
Commerce of Metro Denver.

As the thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations accelerated this year, culminating in President Obama’s historic March visit, the CU News Corps team was hunting for a story that would bring it to life for Colorado residents. Michelle Fulcher (Jour’78), a former Denver Post editor then working as CMCI’s communications director, suggested Vidal as a subject.

The former mayor, now 65 and living in Florida, was game. In July a 10-member team of students, faculty, staff and alumni traveled to Cuba to film him as he visited Camagüey, the hometown he’d fled as a boy with his twin brothers, in Havana, where he swam in the Bay of Pigs, and in various places important to him in his youth.

A trailer for the film is scheduled to air on Channel 6 in October. Negotiations for a full broadcast were underway over the summer.

CU News Corps produces student-driven investigative and explanatory news of interest to Colorado audiences with faculty oversight.

The film is loosely based on Vidal’s 2007 memoir, Boxing for Cuba: An Immigrant’s Story.

Photo by Ross Taylor

CU News Corps is producing film about exile's return.

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Environmentalist in Cuba

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 20:06:57 +0000

Environmentalist in Cuba Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/17/2016 - 14:06

Andrew Faught

With relations between the United States and Cuba thawing, the island nation beckons a growing number of American tourists and businesses. But not everybody is fantasizing about the Caribbean country’s potential as a vacation destination and profit center.

Take Dan Whittle (Law’89), for instance, senior attorney with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF): He sees increased tourism and business as a veritable “tsunami” threatening Cuba’s long-standing commitment to natural resources protection.

“Cubans are well aware of the opportunities and challenges associated with opening up,” said Whittle, who leads EDF’s Cuba Program. “Most Cubans I know see it as a real opportunity to grow the economy. There’s a fierce debate about where to strike the balance.”

President Obama has pushed hard for normalizing relations with Cuba and in March became the first U.S. president to visit in nearly a century. Americans are traveling to Cuba in record numbers and U.S. businesses are scouting opportunities there.

All that presents risks to local ecosystems, said Whittle, who has been helping safeguard Cuban ecosystems for more than 15 years and has traveled to Cuba more than 70 times — 11 in the last year alone.

“The health of shared marine and terrestrial ecosystems depends directly on environmental decision-making in both countries,” he said.

Whittle’s personal interest in the outdoors became a commitment to the environment while he was at CU, partly through a law school seminar about natural resources.

He joined EDF in 1997 and became involved in Cuban affairs in 2000, while running an EDF program to help fishermen on the U.S. East Coast establish sustainable, profitable fisheries. A colleague suggested expanding the program to include Cuba, given its ecological connection to the U.S. via ocean currents and its exceptional biological diversity. Cuban officials signed on and EDF’s work there has blossomed since.

One project underway involves protecting a quarter of the island’s insular platform — a nearly 27,000-square-mile coastal region that is home to thousands of species of fish, crustaceans, sponges and mollusks, as well as 1,360 miles of pristine coral reefs.

Whittle’s work involves convening scientists and policymakers from Cuba and the U.S. to coordinate the habitat assessments necessary to develop and advocate for environmental policies.

“Both countries have an interest in the environment, and it’s not terribly political,” Whittle said. “I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Whittle grew up in New Hampshire and Kentucky and studied economics and German at Vanderbilt. An advanced natural resources seminar at Colorado Law with professor Charles Wilkinson helped steer him toward work as a professional environmentalist.

“We spent the semester looking at management of two national parks and five national forests in the Yellowstone area, and the many conflicts around public land use,” Whittle said. “The course taught me about the importance of getting diverse viewpoints around the same table when
making decisions about natural resources. I am still using lessons learned from that experience.”

Photo by Noel Lopez Fernandez

Dan Whittle and the protection of Cuba's natural splendor.

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Cuba

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