Thursday, December 29, 2016

Thursday's show: Cuba 2017 , gasoline prices in Mexico & US-Israel rift gets worse



Tags: Israel and the US, Gasoline prices in Mexico, Cuba 2017  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!
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My parents were engaged many years ago this week


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According to all of those family stories passed down from parents to kids, the story goes like this.

 Circa 1950, my future father was a very young banker in Sagua La Grande (near the Isabela Port).    He decided to take a little vacation and went to Ciego de Avila (close to Camaguey) to visit some family friends.

My future left the hotel and crossed Parque Marti, located in the center of the city.   

 My father knocked on the door.  My future mother answered it!  (She happened to live next door and was visiting a friend who lived in that home!)

My future father took a look at my future mother and came back every weekend (and whenever else his work allowed him) until they got married.

I understand why my dad flipped over my mom. She was quite a "beauty" in her younger days!   I guess that it was that mixture of Asturias and Cuba, along with a Cuban accent!

My brother, sister and I came along in the 1950s.

Our family left Cuba in 1964 because my parents refused to live in a communist country. My brother, sister and I are so grateful that my parents sacrificed a great deal so that we may grow up in freedom.

Today, my father is gone and my mom is recovering from an operation.

 Nevertheless, we remember that it all started many years ago in December.     

 And you can read more in "Cubanos in Wisconsin".

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2017: ‘Muy malo’ for Cuba

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For 10 years, Raul has benefited a lot from having Fidel around. Fidel always showed up at the big celebrations or wrote a column.
Forget that. It won’t be pretty in 2017, as we see in this report from the AP:
Castro must manage these twin economic and diplomatic challenges during a year of transition. The 85-year-old general has promised to hand over the office in early 2018 to a successor, widely expected to be Miguel Diaz-Canel, a 56-year-old official with neither the Castro name nor revolutionary credentials. The change will occur without Castro’s older brother Fidel, the revolutionary leader whose largely unseen presence endowed the system he created with historical weight and credibility in the eyes of many Cubans before he died last month at 90.
“Even if those two events hadn’t taken place — Trump’s victory and Fidel’s death — 2017 was going to be a very difficult year for Cuba,” said Cuban economist Omar Everleny Perez, a visiting professor at Keio University in Tokyo.
Cuba publishes few credible economic statistics, but experts expect the country to end this year with gross domestic product growth of 1 percent or less. It maintained a rate close to 3 percent from 2011-2015.
 
By the way, it’s nice to see an analyst admit that Cuba produces very little credible economic data. This is why so many have been skeptical of health care or literacy gains boasted by Cuba.
Back to the economy.
Indeed, there are tourists but it does not seem to help the Cuban economy. This is because Cubans have very little to gain from these hotels or restaurants where tourists are spending their dollars.   
Add to this the mismanagement of Cuba’s economy and you have profits that end up in the Castro accounts rather than the pockets of the Cuban people.
We are not saying that this is new. Cuba has always been for the benefit of Castro and the gang that protects them. However, this is the first time that they are going to do without a USSR subsidy, EU loans, cheap Venezuela oil, or a U.S. president willing to go around the embargo. 
It will be Raul vs reality in 2017 and the Cuban elites don’t have a clue of what will hit them. There is no one waiting to bail them out anymore.   
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