Perhaps even more than Cubans would like to see normalization of relations with the United States, they would like to see full normalization of relations with Cuban emigrants—the friends and family members who have moved abroad but maintain connections to the island, and oftentimes send money and goods back to those who remain. For years after Fidel came to power in Cuba, the Cuban emigre was portrayed by the state as a weak traitor who had betrayed the motherland. Indeed, for two decades, Fidel publicly referred to emigrants as gusanos (worms).

In years since, general relations between the Cuban state and its emigres have greatly improved. In fact, this morning the “2010 Conference against the U.S. Blockade of Cuba and in Defense of National Sovereignty” began in Havana—a conference of over 450 Cuban emigrants from 42 countries, including 200 individuals from the United States alone. Similar conferences in previous years have not only covered discussions of the embargo, however, but offer Cubans abroad the opportunity to voice concerns to and make direct requests of the Cuban regime.

And they have had tangible effects from the beginning. In 1978, after the first such meeting with emigrants, Fidel announced that he would stop using the derogatory terms gusanos and “counterrevolutionaries” to describe Cuban exiles, saying that these were “unjust generic references to people who had emigrated.” He proceeded to use the term “Cuban community abroad” (Cubanos en el exterior) for the first time in official speech, and adopted it from then on. More importantly, after that meeting it was decided that Cuban emigrants would be allowed to visit the island. In 1979, more than 102,000 Cubans living abroad visited their families in Cuba—many for the first time in 10-15 years or more.

Since then, each conference has had a similar scheme of mutual interest coverage: for the Cuban state, the conferences address the need for organized resistance to U.S. policies; for emigrants, the regime allows dialogue on emigrant-state issues. And as those channels for exchange expand (coupled with the Obama administration’s relaxation of travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans, certainly), emigrants continue to visit the homeland in increasing numbers: former Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque announced in 2008 that in the previous year, over 193,000 Cubans abroad visited the island; today, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez told the Havana Conference that 296,000 Cubans living abroad were able to visit in 2009.

This year’s conference promises to issue a condemnation of the U.S. embargo and strategies for opposition action based on geographical areas. But what issue will the emigres demand action on this year, and will they have a positive response from the regime?

One idea: emigrants may push for elimination of the long-protested and much-despised “tarjeta blanca” (or “Permiso de Salida”), a permission that is difficult to acquire and which costs far above what average Cubans can ever hope to afford, despite the fact that Cubans must apply for and be granted the permiso in order to leave the country on visit or permanently. Opposition to the tarjeta blanca is broad, so much so that it has spawned a Facebook group of Cubans on the island and abroad—an impressive feat. See here.

(AP Photo: Franklin Reyes)

In the first days following the 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, American media failed the public by misreporting or omitting entirely Cuba’s involvement in the relief efforts. Only two mainstream media outlets reported on Cuba’s response. One was Fox News, which claimed (incorrectly) that among the neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid, Cuba was absent. The other was the Christian Science Monitor, which reported (correctly) that Cuba had almost immediately flown in 30 doctors to the stricken nation. All failed to mention that Cuban doctors were already in Haiti in large numbers (350+) and, having already established medical infrastructure before the quake, were some of the most effective responders to the crisis. The discussion got to the point of almost deliberate misdirection: the famous Babalu blog’s Val Prieto scoffed at the suggestion that any Cuban doctors were actually in Haiti at all.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in a press conference before departing for Haiti last week, did not mention the role of Cuban doctors as the crisis unfolded. She thanked Havana for allowing U.S. planes to use Cuban airspace, and said that Washington would welcome any more help Cuba cared to give. That was all.

Finally, on Friday, the U.S. government’s Voice of America (VOA)—the official radio and television broadcasting company of this country—turned around this poor streak (which by last week had admittedly improved, but there had yet to be a U.S. government admission of the omission). In an editorial entitled, “Cuba Aids Haiti Relief,” VOA finally gave much-deserved credit to the country and its doctors:

The massive international relief effort in Haiti has received a boost from Cuba, which has more than 400 health workers, many of them doctors, working throughout the devastated country. The government in Havana has also aided United States relief efforts by opening restricted Cuban airspace to American planes flying medical evacuation missions.

Surprise: the United States sees Cuba in Haiti.

Yesterday, NPR ran a story about the response of Cuban doctors in Haiti, called “Cuban Doctors Unsung Heroes of Haitian Earthquake” (it is excellent). Listen here.

(Photo from Prensa Latina)

For those who missed last week’s Foreign Policy Association event featuring Julia Sweig (in which she drew on her recently published book, “Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know”), check out the full footage from the event here.

(Story below from AFP)

US and Cuban experts are teaming up to try to save the Cuba home where Ernest Hemingway lived for more than two decades and penned his classic “The Old Man and the Sea,” official media said Wednesday. Cuba’s National Patrimony office chief Margarita Ruiz inked an agreement with the private US Finca Vigia Foundation to step up efforts to preserve and restore Finca Vigia villa.

The colonial home outside Havana is now crumbling in some places, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma reported. It did not put a figure on the cost of saving the whitewashed home the US foundation says is “filled with original furniture, 9,000 books, artwork, and several thousand irreplaceable letters, photographs, documents, and manuscripts.”

“The preservation of the documents and repair of the villa must occur immediately, before all is lost forever,” the Boston-based US foundation says on its website.

The Nobel prize winner’s home here officially has been a Cuban museum since 1961.

This week Havana will hold the fifth Cuban Conference on Sexual Education, Orientation and Therapy, organized by the National Center of Sex Education (CENESEX) under Mariela Castro. Ms. Castro, notably, is the daughter of Raul and niece of Fidel Castro, and an outspoken rights advocate on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual Cubans.

In her remarks to reporters today, Mariela characteristically stepped outside the bounds of typical acceptable political and social discourse in Cuba—a rare privilege she enjoys and (thankfully) utilizes as a relatively untouchable member of the Castro family.

She announced that Cuba has now indeed begun performing sex change operations after the government lifted a long-time ban on the procedure in 2007. CENESEX has taken on the role of preparing transsexuals for the procedure and identifying those individuals it deems ready for it, and the surgeries began in 2008. Cuban doctors, working with Belgian counterparts, have as yet performed “less than half” of the 30 surgeries that have been approved by CENESEX, Mariela said, and over one hundred Cubans have now requested the surgery.

The operations have been protested in the past because of the stigma of the related issues, but also because universal health care covers the cost of these (probably expensive) surgeries. In a small country with severe economic problems, some wonder whether such surgeries are the best use of limited state funds. For this reason, Ms. Castro explained, only a small number are scheduled each year, based on budget constraints.

She went on to a second unmentionable: critique of the Communist Party.

Mariela accused the Communist Party of discrimination against gays, and said she will write a letter to its top leadership (note: Fidel Castro is still the official head of the Communist Party) urging them to draft a measure directing that homosexuals not be barred from joining the party. Gay individuals are not technically banned from party membership, but “implicitly they are rejected,” according to Ms. Castro. “Your ideological and party definition have nothing to do with your sexual orientation,” she said, “It’s absurd. It’s laughable.”

Her critique and determination are not unique in Cuba, but her ability to speak completely freely on contentious issues is, indeed, quite rare.

CENESEX’s abilities on the island are also unusual: check out their impressive web forum for LGBT Cubans and allies, la diversidad es natural, with blogs, member pages, and discussion threads here.

(Photo from CENESEX website)

Canada keeps a much lower profile in the hemisphere than the outspoken United States; perhaps it is the simple comparison to Washington which allows it to maintain largely friendly relations with every government in the West. Still, it is interesting that Cuba’s two large northern neighbors would have such very different relationships with Havana. One news item today brought the disparities to my attention: just a few weeks after the Obama administration tightened travel restrictions on flights to Cuba (and other nations it deemed “state sponsors of terrorism”), Canada’s Harper administration reached an agreement with Havana that would expand Canadian airline access to the island’s airports.

Under the arrangement, four Canadian charter airlines will be permitted to fly among multiple locations after landing in Cuba. Canadian vacationers will now be able to fly their nation’s airlines to several different cities on one trip to Cuba, which is a plus for the many tourists that so enjoy the island and visit Cuba several times a year. And that’s Havana’s motivation, as well; the Castro administration is hoping the arrangement will boost tourism in 2010. Last year, 900,000 Canadian tourists visited Cuba. The goal for the coming year is to break 1 million.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper continues to view the Cuban government as a regime with human rights problems, but his administration also has full diplomatic relations with Havana and stands against the U.S. embargo. His nation’s policy of engagement with Cuba stands in stark contrast to the policy of isolation preferred by the neighbor between them.

(Image from eaves.ca)

The death last week of 26 patients in Cuba’s largest psychiatric hospital has stirred up considerable controversy on the island. Such a high number is extremely rare, but the cause is even less common on a Caribbean island—cold weather. More specifically, Boyeros, the Havana neighborhood where the hospital in located, experienced “prolonged low temperatures that fell to 38 degrees Fahrenheit (4 Celsius).”

The independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights, an illegal but tolerated human rights monitoring group on the island, reported that these individuals had died of hypothermia because the hospital failed to take action to protect them from the unusually low temperatures. The Cuban Health Ministry responded by acknowledging that the death was related to the very low temperatures, but due only to natural causes such as old age, respiratory infections, and complications from cancer and cardiovascular problems.

The government has ignored long-standing requests from international aid groups to tour Cuba’s medical facilities, including this hospital, and the Commission believes that this kind of accountability would right some of the problems in the system. Thankfully, the Health Ministry has already begun investigating the deaths and have found several deficiencies at the hospital like those the Commission on Human Rights had suggested. Such a review, despite the fact that it is a self-diagnosis, is a positive note at the end of a troublesome week.

The White House announced today that Cuba has opened its airspace—an area from which U.S. aircraft are usually restricted—for medical evacuation flights from Haiti. “We have coordinated with the Cuban government for authorization to fly medical evacuation flights from the U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Miami, Fla., through Cuban airspace,” a spokesman said. This cuts about 90 minutes from a one-way flight, minutes that are precious for the relief effort, which has been impressive in response time but as yet far from sufficient as victims of the Haitian earthquake continue to crowd the streets of Port-au-Prince waiting for food, water, and medical assistance.

Following my comments Wednesday, Steve Clemons expanded Thursday on the potential for US-Cuba cooperation in the relief effort in Haiti. The United States is devoting massive resources to the effort, and Cuba has a long history and wide experience with disaster relief and provision of emergency medical services worldwide. Their coordinated action, putting aside differences, makes perfect sense in pursuing the best outcome for Haiti from this awful event. Agreements on airspace are the first step in such a partnership. More from Clemons’ excellent Guardian piece:

“After Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans and southern Mississippi, Fidel Castro offered relief support from a 1,600 person medical team called the Henry Reeves Brigade, named after an American doctor who fought in Cuba’s war of independence. The US predictably turned down the offer in September 2005.

“Shortly afterwards, in October 2005, the Reeves Brigade was dispatched to help provide much-needed medical relief after the devastating Kashmir earthquake that tore through the Himalayan mountain region along Pakistan and Kashmir. The US and Europe each sent teams of doctors to Pakistan, each with one base camp deployed for a month. The Cubans deployed seven major base camps and 30 field hospitals in the fundamentalist Islamic region of Pakistan, a nation with which Cuba did not have diplomatic relations at the time. Today, the Cubans and Pakistanis have embassies in each other’s capitals.

“Bruno Rodriguez, now foreign minister of Cuba, headed the mission and lived in Pakistan’s rugged mountains for that full year. The Cuban medical teams reportedly worked constructively and positively with personnel from the US and Europe – and this kind of collaboration, even if informal, could be the kind of confidence-building narrative to move US-Cuba relations out of the gridlock they have been in for decades.

“Haiti is in trouble today – with the earthquake devastating the capital city of Port-au-Prince and highlighting what was already a human development disaster even before the 7.0 quake hit… Notwithstanding any casualties among its own citizens living in Haiti, Cuba currently has 408 doctors providing services there.

“This is time for the US, for Cuba, and other major Latin American nations to throw their weight into stopping a worse human tragedy in Haiti than already exists – and to potentially tie the US and Cuba together in a way that creates greater positives for Haiti and for longer-term, 21st century US-Cuba relations.”

(AP Photo/Medecins Sans Frontieres, Stefano Zannini)

David Sussman of FPA’s Venezuela blog reports on Cuban (and other) doctors fleeing Venezuela over the past year. Cuban doctors in Venezuela, he says, are overworked and underpaid under the government-established health project Misión Barrio Adentro. Recently, seven such doctors paid bribes to Venezuelan and Cuban officials in order to secure a safe departure from Caracas, on a direct flight to Miami.

More analysis on this and other issues is available from Sussman in the FPA Venezuela blog, here.

Yesterday evening, as Haiti was rocked by a devastating 7.0 earthquake and a number of further damaging aftershocks, a tsunami warning was issued to Jamaica and Cuba. Cuban authorities evacuated some residents as a precaution. In the end, no tsunami resulted and these islands remain safe, but the destruction and loss of life in Haiti have been staggering, and have floored the international community. (Donate to the relief effort here, here and here).

Cuba has joined the international community in committing resources to the disaster, an effort currently spearheaded by the United States.

The United States has mentioned the possibility that it might use the Guantanamo Bay site in assisting with relief efforts—an initiative to which Cuba could certainly contribute. General Douglas Fraser, head of the U.S. Southern Command, told a press conference today that Guantanamo is “a resource that’s available if we need to take advantage of it for various reasons,” responding to questions about whether the base could be used to house refugees or perhaps prisoners from jails in Haiti that have collapsed in the earthquake.

This would really be a key time for cooperation between Washington and Havana.

In the meantime, continue to make contributions to the relief effort as you are able: here, here and here.

(Photo from Getty Images)