Cuba’s top diplomat in the United States, José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez, may be a man of his time. The youthful-looking Cabañas, who’s not much older than the Cuban Revolution, was dispatched to Washington at a time when U.S.-Cuba relations are clearly stuck in a deep freeze.
He has a reputation for being shrewd and intelligent, with special aptitudes for pressing Cuba’s agenda and making important connections to the Cuban exile community. Those skills may serve him well if the political winds shift and Cuba’s relations with the United States warm before President Obama leaves office in January 2017.
Holguín is one of the five provinces established in 1976 by splitting up the former province of Oriente. The others are Las Tunas, Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo.
Failed efforts to find oil off Cuba’s northwestern coast led the Castro government to turn to old friends in Moscow.
Russian state oil giant Zarubezhneft currently has an exploration concession off Cayo Santa María in north-central Villa Clara province in an area 330 km east of Havana labeled Block L.
NOTE: This is the second in a series of monthly articles on Cuba’s 15 provinces by cartographer Armando H. Portela, who has a Ph.D. in geography from the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
The province of Ciego de Avila was born in 1976, when the government replaced Cuba’s original six provinces with 14 new administrative divisions. Ciego de Avila covers 6,783 square kilometers (2,620 sq miles), including 589 sq km (204.5 sq miles) of adjacent keys — or 6.2% of Cuba’s total land area.
Hurricane Sandy, one of the most destructive storms in years, killed 11 people and caused immeasurable suffering when it tore through eastern Cuba on Oct. 25.
The apagón, which struck Sep. 9 at 8:09 p.m., just as the evening TV news was starting, blacked out a huge swath of Cuba from Pinar del Río in the extreme west to Villa Clara in the center of the island.
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