The announcement that U.S. and Cuban officials will hold landmark talks this week toward restarting direct mail service between the two nations prompted a mix of reactions on Monday on whether the Obama administration plans a broader outreach to the Castro regime in the president’s second term.

Veteran Cuba watchers agreed that the development is unlikely to trigger a wider normalization in relations any time soon. But the notion that the talks — slated forThursday and Friday — could pull Washington and Havana closer than they’ve been in more than half a century prompted a harsh reaction from at least one Republican on Capitol Hill.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, said that the White House is caving to pressure from Cuban leaders desperate to end trade restrictions frozen since the 1960s.

“The regime is once again manipulating the U.S. administration in this game because it wants us to lift the embargo and make further concessions,” said Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen, a former chairwoman of the House Foreign Relations Committee and a staunch opponent of easing the stand-off that has defined bilateral relations since Cuban leader Fidel Castro agreed to house Soviet ballistic missiles in 1961.

Mr. Castro, 86, stepped down in 2008, and the top post is now held by his 82-year-old brother Raul.

The State Department said Monday that the postal talks will occur well within policy boundaries set long ago by Congress.

The talks will be led by R. Cabanas Rodriguez, the chief of mission at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, and Lea Emerson, the U.S. Postal Service’s director of international postal affairs.

Similar negotiations in 2009 failed to produce an agreement. Separate negotiations on issues such as immigration have been on hold during recent years amid tensions simmering between the U.S. and Cuba over the trade embargo and Washington’s unwillingness to remove Cuba from its official list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Washington has also demanded that Cuba release jailed American subcontractor Alan Gross, who was arrested in December 2009 while working for a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded program. Cuban authorities gave a 15-year prison sentence to Mr. Gross and accused him of illegally delivering satellite phones to individuals in the nation’s Jewish community.

Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen alluded to the case in a statement Monday, asserting that “a U.S. citizen languishes unjustly in a Cuban prison and brave freedom Cuban activists are risking their lives while on hunger strikes to protest the island tyranny.”

Some Cuba policy experts suggested the postal talks could lead to something more ambitious

This is the way diplomacy is conducted,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Council of the Americas in New York. “The idea some have, that these talks represent a concession, when it fact it will open up precisely the channels of communication we want to have, defies the very notion of diplomacy and the stated goals of our Cuba policy.”

“For the past couple of years, there has been little movement at all — the U.S. has insisted that the unconditional release of Alan Gross was a prerequisite to any action on other issues, and the relationship seemed stuck,” added Geoff Thale, a program director at the Washington Office on Latin America. “But in the last months, we’ve seen small steps on both sides.”

Months prior to Mr. Gross’ December 2009 arrest, President Obama signaled an interest in opening a new era of relations with Cuba. “The United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba,” he said during a speech at the Summit of the Americas held in Trinidad and Tobago that year.

Advocates of such an opening were largely unimpressed Monday by the announcement that postal talks will be held this week. “Any step taken toward expanding the free flow of information and resources from the United States to the Cuban people is a step in the right direction, but it does fall short of Obama’s stated goal of really seeking a new beginning and a new relationship,” said Ricardo Herrero, deputy executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a Washington-based Cuban exile organization.

“There so much more the administration could be doing now to expand the flow of resources and to help empower Cuban society,” said Mr. Herrero, who suggested the administration lift import and export bans on certain goods and services for “private Cuban entrepreneurs.”

“If a private Cuban entrepreneur comes up with an iPhone app, that private Cuban entrepreneur should be allowed to sell that app in the iTunes store,” he added. “The embargo prohibits trade with the Cuban state — with a few exceptions for food and medicine — but this would be trading with private entrepreneurs and that’s a very different set of circumstances.”

Arturo Lopez Levy es profesor de políticas comparadas y latinoamericanas en la Universidad de Denver. En su visita al Real Instituto Elcano nos habló sobre las reformas políticas en Cuba y su impacto sobre la sobre la sociedad civil cubana.

By Jose R. Cardenas

One of the greatest ironies of the late strongman Hugo Chavez’s rule was that even as he attempted to personify Venezuelan nationalism, he was quietly outsourcing more and more of the country’s sovereignty to the Castro brothers in Cuba. Today, with conditions in the country spiraling after April’s tainted election to guarantee the continuation of Chavismo, Cuba’s flagrant interference in Venezuelan affairs has become downright obscene.

As Venezuela’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Diego Arria, put it recently: “Venezuela is an occupied country. The Venezuelan regime is a puppet controlled by the Cubans. It is no longer Cuban tutelage; it is control.”

His comments come after a series of events that began less than two weeks after the election in April that saw Chavez’s anointed successor, Nicolas Maduro, win by just 1 percentage point over challenger Henrique Capriles, prompting charges of electoral fraud by the opposition. In the midst of that controversy, Mr. Maduro quickly decamped to Cuba for a five-hour meeting with Fidel Castro, seeking advice on how to thwart the reinvigorated opposition and to promise more Venezuelan handouts for Havana, which already amounted to about 130,000 barrels of oil a day.

Since then, a stream of high-ranking Venezuelan officials have been regularly traveling to Cuba. This past weekend, Diosdado Cabello, the head of the National Assembly and widely seen as Mr. Maduro’s chief rival within Chavismo, was summoned to Havana for a meeting with Mr. Castro, who no doubt made him a deal he couldn’t refuse to unite behind Mr. Maduro.

Mr. Cabello’s trip to Cuba followed another egregious example of Cuban interference in Venezuelan affairs. Last month, the opposition released an audiotape of a briefing by a well-known Chavez acolyte to a top Cuban intelligence agent with a direct line to the Castros. In it, vitriolic radio broadcaster Mario Silva aired all manner of dirty laundry within Chavismo, including the bitter political infighting between Mr. Maduro and Mr. Cabello following Chavez’s death and the over-the-top corruption. Mr. Silva also complained to the Cuban agent about Mr. Maduro’s equivocation toward adopting Castro’s advice to “get rid of these bourgeois elections because [voters] make mistakes [and] here, with elections the way they are, we could be struck down. They could knock the revolution down.” Mr. Silva soon fled the country and is now residing in Cuba for “health reasons.”

Particularly sensitive is Cuban infiltration of the Venezuelan military. Earlier this year, retired Gen. Antonio Rivero, also a former Chavez ally, was arrested after he publicly denounced the presence of thousands of Cuban military and security personnel assigned to every level of the bureaucracy, up to and including the office of the minister of defense. When Mr. Maduro recently accused Mr. Capriles of “treason” for touring Latin American capitals protesting the tainted election, Mr. Capriles tweeted to his countrymen, “Treason is allowing the Cuban government to infiltrate our armed forces and their officers give orders to ours,” and “The great traitor is Maduro! Every day he gives away our national resources to his bosses, the Castro brothers.”

Indeed, since the death of Chavez in March, the “Cubanization” of Venezuela has only accelerated. From physical assaulting opposition lawmakers in the National Assembly, which occurred on April 30, to the ongoing militarization of Venezuelan society through the imposition of militant brigades patterned after Cuba’s notorious neighborhood-watch committees, to the recent imposition of Cuban-style rationing on certain products such as toilet paper that have disappeared from stores shelves, the hapless Maduro government is left to push nothing but Cuban-style policies.

For the mendicant Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, they have no choice but to increase their control to shore up Mr. Maduro’s faltering government. The spiraling political and socio-economic crises in Venezuela are rightly perceived by them as an existential threat, with opposition leader Mr. Capriles promising to end the billions in Venezuelan handouts to their bankrupt regime and expelling some 60,000 Cubans operating in the country.

Yet the biggest challenge that remains for the Castros and the dwindling numbers of hard-core Chavistas are those millions of Venezuelan voters who expect to have their own choice in the matter. Even under Chavez, the brazenness of Cuban intervention never achieved this degree. That is going to offend a great number of Venezuelans who consider themselves nationalists first and political adherents second. To sacrifice their sovereignty to become merely a Cuban satrapy may just be the bridge too far for Chavismo, and may just be the spark that ignites a real Venezuelan revolution.

Jose R. Cardenas was acting assistant administrator for Latin America at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the George W. Bush administration and is an associate with Vision Americas.

In the context of heightened tensions between Venezuela and neighboring Colombia, provoked by a meeting between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and opposition leader Henrique Capriles, Caracas daily CiudadCCS interviewed Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs Elias Jaua.

Is Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos our “best friend” (as President Chavez once affirmed) or our worst enemy?

Elias Jaua: We are the best friends of the Colombian people and of peace in Colombia. Starting in August of 2010, with the Meeting of Santa Marta, we began building a relationship of mutual respect and cooperation with President Santos. This relationship, however, was derailed last week when Santos chose to receive an opposition leader who fails to recognize Venezuela’s judicial, electoral, and executive powers, the same leader responsible for the post-election violence of April 15th that resulted in the death of 11 Venezuelans, citizens killed for defending the Bolivarian Revolution.

That is the point here. Anyone who doubts our position is invited to remember that in September 2012 President Santos met with then-candidate Henrique Capriles. At that time, we issued no formal complaint. At that time, Capriles was just another political actor within the confines of the democratic process. That is no longer the case. That’s what makes this a grave situation – the Colombian state has received someone who openly defies the Venezuelan state, who fails to recognize the rules of our democracy.

The opposition claims that our Revolutionary Government in Caracas has for years received opposition leaders of other nations. What makes this any different?

Elias Jaua: None of the people we’ve met with carry out their political struggle on the margins of legality, nor do they openly defy the institutions of the countries they represent.

This recent incident demonstrated that there are still many unresolved issues between Venezuela and Colombia. Isn’t it better to place all things on the table?

Elias Jaua: As President Maduro put it, paraphrasing President Chavez, Venezuela and Colombia are Siamese twins. We are the children of the same liberator, of Simon Bolivar, but we maintain two distinct frameworks for our development, two different visions of how society should be organized, and this will always be a source of some tension. But the basis of good relations is respect for the internal development of each country and the model each people chooses to implement. We can expect to understand one another, however, only if each of us stays out of the others’ internal affairs.

Some analysts believe Santos’ recent attitude is related to the visit of US Vice President Joe Biden to Bogota. Do you think that’s the case?

Elias Jaua: I don’t want to speculate on that issue. Only President Santos knows the reasons why he received the governor of Miranda (Capriles).

Here’s another question, in multiple-choice format. The Alliance of the Pacific is an organization that is: a) anti-Celac; b) anti-Unasur; c) antiALBA; d) anti-Mercosur; e) all of the above?

Elias Jaua: All countries have the right to organize themselves, to associate with one another based on their own national interests and perspectives. We have no objection to the Alliance of the Pacific. We have said, however, not in reference specifically to that agreement, but in general, that US Imperialism and the Latin American right-wing feel that with the physical departure of President Hugo Chavez the time has come to restore free trade, neo-liberalism, and all that they bring with them.

We, in contrast, are sure that they’re mistaken. We believe that the people of Latin America and the Caribbean still hold fresh in their memories the dark neo-liberal decades that brought instability, social exclusion, misery, and the privatization of fundamental human rights such as health and education. For us, that model is unviable in the Latin America and Caribbean of today.

Venezuela is the only country that voted against a recent resolution of the UN Human Rights Commission condemning the Syrian government. Why don’t allied nations, including powerful neighbors, take a similar stance?

Read the full story here: http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/9680

Between 1998 and 2001, the population of Florida received through the press, radio and television a flow of negative propaganda to persuade the jury and interfere in the legal process of Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labañino, Fernando Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero and René González. They are internationally known as The Five, and severe penalties were imposed to them in 2001 because they were monitoring violent groups based in Miami, from where actions have been organized during the past 53 years resulting in more than 3.400 victims in Cuba.

René González was released from prison in October 2011 after serving his sentence, but was subjected to three years of supervised release and only returned to the Caribbean nation last April when he renounced to his U.S. citizenship.

“They have refused to hand over documents from before November 1999, arguing that to that date Radio and Television Martí belonged to the United States Information Agency (USIA), said Verheyden-Hilliard while specifying that they did no authorized the access to any other data. The lawyer gave the press conference as part of a global day of solidarity with the Five which took place in Washington from May 30 to June 5.

Havana, Cuba (CNN) — A U.S. State Department contractor jailed in Cuba will be allowed to receive a medical exam from a U.S. doctor, a Cuban government official told CNN Wednesday.

The family of Alan Gross, 64, for months had asked that they be permitted to send a doctor to examine the Maryland native who is serving a 15-year sentence for bringing to Cuba banned communications equipment as part of a U.S. government-funded program to promote democracy on the island.

Gross’ family said that he has lost more than 100 pounds since his incarceration in 2009 and that a mass on his shoulder may be cancerous.

The Cuban government countered that Gross receives medical care from Cuban doctors at the prison hospital where he is being held and that he is in good condition for a man his age.

Jared Gensler, an attorney for Gross, declined to comment on the Cuban government’s allowing Gross to receive a visit from a U.S. physician or when the visit would take place.

The change in course comes as Cuba has intensified its campaign to secure the release of Cuban intelligence agents serving lengthy prison sentences in the United States.

Cuban officials argue that the men infiltrated hardline Cuban-exile groups to prevent terrorist attacks on the island.

But U.S. prosecutors called the men spies, and they were convicted in 2001.

Four of the agents remain in U.S. federal prison. The fifth man, Rene Gonzalez, returned to Cuba last month after serving 14 years in prison and on supervised release.

Gonzalez, who was born in Chicago, renounced his U.S. citizenship last month as part of a deal that allowed him to return to the island and not serve a final year of supervised release in the U.S.

Cuba will continue to push for the four other agents’ release, Gonzalez said in a news conference in Havana Wednesday.

“We have hope that if the American people know about the case, the facts, they will put pressure on the White House for a solution,” Gonzalez said.

Last year, Cuban officials said they wanted to negotiate the jailed agents’ case along with Gross’.

“The ball’s in their court,” said Johana Tablada, subdirector of the department that oversees U.S. affairs at Cuba’s Foreign Ministry. “We are waiting on the U.S. government’s response.”

But U.S. officials have rejected calls for a prisoner swap, instead arguing that Gross did not spy during his visits to Cuba and should be released immediately.

“Hopefully, a solution can be found that is mutually beneficial,” said Kenia Serrano, president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, a Cuban organization working to secure the agents’ freedom. “All the families involved have suffered greatly.”

Editor’s Note: Several Cuban spies, including Josefina Vidal Ferreiro and Johana Tablada de la Torre serve in the North America Division in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX). Their assignments, respectively, are Division Director and Division Deputy Director. Both woman have been involved in the handling of Alan Gross since 2009. (See Cuba Confidential post, Banished Spies Led Cuba-US Talks on Alan Gross, May 9, 2012, http://cubaconfidential.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/banished-spies-led-cuba-us-talks-on-alan-gross/

More recently, a former DI officer reportedly that ICAP is not a DI entity per se, but that it was overwhelmingly influenced by the intelligence service. The highly-reliable émigré claimed ICAP was penetrated by a small cadre of bona fide DI officers, aided by a large staff of agents (i.e., collaborators). As a result, roughly 90% of ICAP was thought to be DI-affiliated.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

Is Washington engaged in a negotiation with Havana to try to free U.S. Agency for International Development contractor Alan Gross from a Cuban jail? If so, what’s on the table?

Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.), Albio Sires (D., N.J.), and Mario Diaz-Balart (R., Fla.) didn’t ask exactly these questions when they wrote to the State Department’s Assistant Secretary of Western Hemispheric Affairs Roberta Jackson Monday, requesting a meeting, but there can be little doubt about their concerns.

The letter was prompted by the issuance of a visa last month to Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, Cuba’s director of North American affairs for the Cuban foreign ministry, so that she could meet with Ms. Jackson. It is the second time Ms. Vidal was granted a U.S. visa in just over 12 months. This has raised some congressional eyebrows, and not only because Ms. Vidal’s husband is a former diplomat to Washington who was “declared persona non grata and expelled for his ‘activities hostile to the national security,’” according to the letter.

A larger problem is that Ms. Vidal is a high-ranking member of Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As such, the congressmen pointed out in their letter, “her sole mission is to promote the Cuban regime’s propaganda, undermine U.S. interests, and justify” Cuba’s repression of its own people. “In addition, she has been at the forefront defending the Cuban regime’s unjust holding of a U.S. citizen and harboring U.S. fugitives.”

The implication is that the Obama administration is playing footsie with the Castros. If so, it would seem to be exactly what Ms. Vidal was asking for when she appeared in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on May 10. The CNN host asked, “What would be good for Cuba that could potentially open the door to freeing Mr. Gross?” Ms. Vidal answered: “For Cuba it would be a right to have a response on the part of the U.S. government about its willingness to respond to our proposal to sit down and initiate a negotiation on [the Gross case] and many other matters concerning our bilateral relationship.”

In other words, Mr. Gross is a negotiating chip. Ms. Vidal would not say what Cuba wants in exchange for letting him go, but the release of several Cuban intelligence officers convicted in 2001 of spying on the U.S. is likely on the list.

Not surprisingly, the three Cuban-American congressmen object to negotiating with the dictatorship and are asking, “What was the purpose and intent” of Ms. Vidal’s trip and “what issues were discussed during her meeting with Ms. Jackson?” In addition, they have asked for an “update” on Mr. Gross’s case, which began in December 2009 when he was arrested by Cuban authorities for having brought satellite telecommunications equipment into the country. The 64 year-old is now serving a 15-year sentence in Havana for his “crime.”

For the record, Ms. Vidal also told CNN viewers that Cuba has free elections, political competition and free speech.

WASHINGTON — An American imprisoned in Cuba is appealing a judge’s ruling dismissing a lawsuit he brought against the U.S. government, for whom he was working when he was arrested. A federal judge in Washington dismissed Alan Gross’ case against the government Tuesday, saying federal law bars lawsuits against the government based on injuries suffered in foreign countries. Lawyers for Gross filed a notice they would appeal Friday.

Gross was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development and its contractor Development Alternatives Inc. when he was arrested in Cuba in 2009. He was ultimately sentenced to 15 years in prison for his work helping Jewish groups with internet access. The lawsuit said he wasn’t prepared for his job’s risks. Gross settled with Maryland-based DAI for an undisclosed amount earlier this month.

Cuba is harboring and supporting U.S. fugitives but may be trying to distance itself from two dozen members of a Basque terrorist group who live on the island, according to the State Department’s annual Country Report on Terrorism released Thursday.

The report for 2012 is totally separate from the department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, which now includes Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan and subjects those nations to a special set of U.S. economic and other sanctions.

Advocates of keeping or removing Cuba from the list awaited the 2012 report with special interest because of media reports earlier this year, flatly denied by the State Department, that Secretary of State John Kerry would take Havana off the list.

The Cuba section of the 2012 report appeared to be similar to the section in 2011, with both noting that Havana authorities are continuing to harbor fugitives wanted in the United States and supporting them with housing, ration books and medical care.

One such fugitive is Joanne Chesimard, on the FBI’s “most wanted terrorist” list since 2005. A Black Panther who was convicted in the 1973 murder of New Jersey State Trooper, she escaped from prison in 1979 and turned up in Havana in 1984. The FBI hiked the reward offered for her capture to $2 million in April.

“There was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups,” the 2012 report said, in wording almost exactly the same as in the 2011 report.

Both reports also noted “suggestions” that Havana has tried to distance itself from members of Spain’s Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA), classified by Washington as a terrorist group, who live in Cuba by “not providing services, including travel documents, to some of them.”

The 2012 version adds that two dozen ETA members are living in Cuba.

Members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also classified as a terror group, received refuge in Cuba in past years, according to the latest version. The 2011 report noted that FARC members had received medical assistance. The FARC and Colombian government are currently holding peace talks in Havana.

Both reports also noted that the U.S. Financial Actions Task Force has identified Cuba as having “strategic … deficiencies” in the fight against terrorism financing and money laundering. The latest report adds that Cuba has now joined a regional body designed for that purpose.

Cuba has been on the separate U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1982. Havana also is on a separate U.S. government list, with Venezuela and others, of countries that are not “cooperating fully with United States antiterrorism efforts.”

To remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors, the White House is required to notify the U.S. Congress that Cuba has not engaged in terrorism for some time and promised not to do so again.

Cuban security officers are studying post-communist changes in Russia — and being nicer to dissidents — in preparation for a possible transition away from the island’s totalitarian system, leading opposition activist Guillermo Fariñas said Tuesday.

Some of the officers fear a sudden collapse of the communist system and “don’t want to suffer the same fate as the followers of (Moamar) Kaddafi” in Libya, Fariñas said during a lengthy visit Tuesday to El Nuevo Herald and The Miami Herald.

They favor a slow transition that would allow them to seize ownership of state enterprises, he added, like the massive grab for public assets that the Sandinistas staged in Nicaragua as they left power in 1990 and became known as the “Piñata.”

Fariñas said he has friendly contacts with a half-dozen lieutenant colonels or colonels because they studied together in military high schools. He also served one year in Angola with a commando unit and spent three years at a military academy in the Soviet Union.

Some of the military officers told him they have been attending weekly lectures on the transitions in Russia and Belarus that they refer to as “Putinismo,” he said, in an apparent reference to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian yet capitalist rule.

They also told him that some of ruler Raúl Castro’s advisers have suggested that 15 to 25 dissidents should be allowed into the national parliament, Fariñas added. Castro replied that he agreed, but that brother Fidel would never allow it.

Some of the Interior Ministry officers in charge of monitoring and repressing dissidents also are “taking care not to get blood on the hands,” the activist said, to avoid punishments later in case Cuba shifts significantly toward democracy at some point.

State Security officials used to boast in the 1990s that the island’s communist system would never change. But now they tell him that they are only following orders, said Fariñas, who has staged more than 20 hunger strikes during his 21years as a dissident.

One State Security agent now politely asks Fariñas’ mother to put together the dissident’s daily medicines before taking him for questioning from his home in the central city of Santa Clara, the dissident said.

And one of the harshest State Security officers in the city, a 28-year-old who turned out to be the son of a bus driver at Farinas’ military school, now tells the dissident when other government opponents confront him, the activist said.

Fariñas said the officer tells him that he is sometimes forced to get tough when dissidents spit at him, swear at him and his mother or jeer him as “nalgón” – big butt.

Those and other Fariñas comments could not be independently confirmed, but other dissidents in Cuba, including human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, have previously said that he does have access to old friends in the security forces.

Fariñas said that he in fact ran into Miguel Diaz Canel — a fellow Santa Clara native and classmate in the military high school — six weeks before his promotion to First Vice President of the Council of State, No. 2 behind Raúl Castro.

Fariñas said he was walking by the home of Diaz Canel’s parents on Jan. 4 when he spotted the old friend parking his car, one of the Chinese-made Geely vehicles used by high government officials.

Diaz Canel shook his hand warmly and asked about his health as they spoke for about 15 minutes, the dissident said, largely about the 135-day hunger strike in 2010 that put him in the hospital several times.

The vice president noted in the chat that Fariñas refused to speak to several government envoys during the strike, the dissident said, and asked if Farinas would talk to him in case of another hunger strike.

Fariñas said he told Diaz Canel that they could indeed speak, and the government official replied that “he would keep that in mind.” But he added that he would have to report the conversation to his superiors in Havana.

Fariñas also said he would oppose an unconditional lifting of the U.S. embargo and added that while he respects the Catholic Church and its bishops, he has been “disappointed” with Cardinal Jaime Ortega.

If the Cuban government ever agrees to talks with the opposition, he added, Ortega should not be part of the negotiations.

Fariñas said he expects to go to Puerto Rico and later to Belgium, to pick up the $60,000 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Conscience awarded to him by the European Parliament in 2010, before he returns to Havana around mid-July.