New York Times publishes a truthful story about Cuba without taking a jab at the U.S.?
Yet the renovation has only gone so far, and tens of thousands of people are still trapped in squalid buildings just blocks from the refurbished zones, giving rise to grumbling among some residents that the renovation amounts to a Potemkin village for visitors. They point out that few Cubans can afford the $7 drinks at the Floridita, and by law Cubans cannot stay in the restored hotels, even if they could afford the rates of $150 a night.
“The reconstruction doesn’t have anything to do with the state system we live in,” said Yadira Amoros, a 30-year-old single mother who was using a plumber’s wrench to try to get water flowing to her dingy apartment a block from Calle Obispo. “None of this benefits us.”
H/T News Busters
But wait, there’s more. A Reuters report in the New York Times about the recent atrocious raid in Catholic Church in Santiago de Cuba.
Dionisio García, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Santiago, is seeking an explanation from the government for the reported beating and arrest of dissidents in a parish hall on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Cuba said. Plainclothes policemen had stormed a parish hall used for Masses on the grounds of Santa Teresita Church in Santiago and beat and used pepper spray on a group of dissidents, a priest, José Conrado Rodríguez, said. The police took away seven people who had marched through the streets protesting the arrest of a fellow dissident and had then gone to an evening Mass, he said. Cuba’s main rights group said the seven were freed Wednesday night. The government has not commented on the episode.
I’ve heard that the archbishop in Santiago is a much better man than Cardinal Ortega y Alamino in Havana who has often acted like a stooge of the regime.