Dispatched Saturday by President Trump from Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, the craft arrived at Manhattan’s Pier 90 at 10:42 a.m., as helicopters hovered above and a few dozen onlookers braved social-distancing regulations to catch a glimpse.The vessel has a capacity of 1,000 beds, sorely needed as the contagion continues to strain the capacities of brick-and-mortar facilities.“#NYPD Harbor and Aviation escort the @USNavy USNS Comfort as it enters New York Harbor,” the department’s Special Operations division wrote in a tweet, along with a video of the mammoth hospital ship cutting through an overcast Monday morning.
The town dates to 1916, when Milton S. Hershey, the American chocolate baron, visited Cuba for the first time and decided to buy sugar plantations and mills on the island to supply his growing chocolate empire in Pennsylvania. On land east of Havana, he built a large sugar refinery and an adjoining village — a model town like his creation in Hershey, Pa. — to house his workers and their families.He named the place Hershey.The village would come to include about 160 homes — the most elegant made of stone, the more modest of wooden planks — built along a grid of streets and each with tidy yards and front porches in the style common in the growing suburbs of the United States. It also had a public school, a medical clinic, shops, a movie theater, a golf course, social clubs and a baseball stadium where a Hershey-sponsored team played its home games, residents said.The factory became one of the most productive sugar refineries in the country, if not in all of Latin America, and the village was the envy of surrounding towns, which lacked the standard of living that Mr. Hershey bestowed on his namesake settlement.
What’s often forgotten, though, is that the embargo was actually triggered by something concrete: an enormous pile of American assets that Castro seized in the process of nationalizing the Cuban economy. Some of these assets were the vacation homes and bank accounts of wealthy individuals. But the lion’s share of the confiscated property — originally valued at $1.8 billion, which at 6 percent simple interest translates to nearly $7 billion today — was sugar factories, mines, oil refineries, and other business operations belonging to American corporations, among them the Coca-Cola Co., Exxon, and the First National Bank of Boston. A 2009 article in the Inter-American Law Review described Castro’s nationalization of US assets as the “largest uncompensated taking of American property by a foreign government in history.”Today, the nearly 6,000 property claims filed in the wake of the Cuban revolution almost never come up as a significant sticking point in discussions of a prospective Cuban-American thaw. But they remain active — and more to the point, the federal law that lays out the conditions of a possible reconciliation with Cuba, the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, says they have to be resolved. According to that statute, said Michael Kelly, a professor of international law at Creighton University in Nebraska, settling the certified property claims “is one of the first dominos that has to fall in a whole series of dominos for the embargo to be lifted.”
Baseball had a rich history in pre-Castro Cuba....."The Pride of Havana" by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria http://t.co/BSkEHuz6fm via @amazon
— Silvio Canto, Jr. (@SCantojr) March 31, 2014
Priest: Dominus Vobiscum.May the Lord be with you.Congregation: Et cum spiritu tuo.And with your Spirit.Priest: Oremus.Let us pray.
On Saturday, the National Guard will help them conduct house-to-house searches to find people who traveled from New York and demand 14 days of self-quarantine.“Right now we have a pinpointed risk,” Governor Gina Raimondo said. “That risk is called New York City.”New York is the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., on Friday reporting a total of 44,000 cases.Rhode Island has just over 200, and it has begun an aggressive campaign to keep the virus out and New Yorkers contained, over objections from civil liberties advocates.Raimondo, a Democrat, said she had consulted lawyers and said while she couldn’t close the border, she felt confident she could enforce a quarantine.
Anyone who is familiar with Andrew Cuomo knows how horrible a national candidate he would be. He will play well in liberal circles and big cities, but he’s been poison in much of the nation. His SAFE Act gun control legislation has led to a revolt by all but one upstate county and is deeply unpopular outside downstate. He banned fracking, allowing the Southern Tier of upstate New York to crumble while areas across the border in Pennsylvania to thrive. He forced through one of the most aggressive and abusive pro-abortion laws.
The island faces chronic shortages in basic goods that have worsened with the Trump administration’s tightening of the embargo, citing Cuba’s human rights record and its support for Venezuela’s government. Long lines and crowds outside stores are a normal way of life here.Soap and detergent are difficult to find right now in ration stores, which are those that sell by the “libreta” or ration book. But they are available in dollar stores for those who can afford it.
Great book: Cuban-American, Dancing On The Hyphen by Amarilys Gacio Rassler http://t.co/7ZrihHz2Kl via @amazon
— Silvio Canto, Jr. (@SCantojr) March 25, 2014
The bill I’m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “Today we are affirming that essential truth, a truth every generation is called to rediscover for itself, that we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations.
“…..mandatory diversity reports on corporate boards, requiring same-day voter registration in all 50 states, a bailout of the U.S. Postal Service, establishing a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and new environmental regulations for airlines.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his government have said a shutdown of the country would disproportionately hurt poor people and also be a psychological weight on all Mexicans.They say there is no reason to impose major restrictions before health officials deem them necessary — a moment they are expecting in late March, based on the virus’ pattern elsewhere and the Feb. 27 date of Mexico’s first confirmed case.The approach is worrying many experts.
