.S. Athletes Compete in Cuba Beginning Today

[Judi Lynn]

Source: USOlympicteam.com

.S. Athletes Compete in Cuba Beginning Today
By Nicole Jomantas // USA Judo // April 27, 2007
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(Colorado Springs, Colo.) – For the first time in nearly 10 years, a delegation of 20 USA Judo athletes will train and compete in Havana, Cuba during the next week.
The team, fresh off the USA Judo Senior National Championships in Miami, departed for Cuba from Miami on Wednesday and will compete in the Jose Ramon Rodriguez (Men) and Golden Judoguis (Women) Championships.

Competition begins Thursday with the women’s 48kg, 52kg, 57kg and 63kg and men’s 60kg, 66kg and 73kg divisions. Heavyweight divisions will be fought on Friday, including women’s 70kg, 78kg and +78kg and men’s 81kg, 90kg, 100kg and +100kg.

“Cuba has one of the best judo teams in the world and it’s an excellent chance for our athletes to train and compete with World and Olympic medalists,” said Eddie Liddie (Colorado Springs, Colo.), USA Judo Director of Athlete Performance. “Opportunities like this don’t come around very often and I’m looking forward to our team learning a great deal both during the event and during the training camp.”



Read more: http://www.usolympicteam.com/11659_52241.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. A New Stance Toward Havana

posted April 26, 2007 (May 14, 2007 issue)
A New Stance Toward Havana
Julia E. Sweig

~snip~
To be sure, a few lonely voices still carry the torch: Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte testified in his last hearing as intelligence czar in January that despite official Cuba's efforts at an orderly transfer of power, the United States does not want to see a "soft landing" in Cuba. And Cuban-American members of Congress in both parties--but especially House Republicans Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Díaz-Balart and his brother Mario Díaz-Balart--remain unreconstructed but increasingly isolated defenders of overthrowing the Cuban regime. Together with some White House allies, they are willing to risk, and perhaps even welcome, the consequences of a crash landing, on the gamble that the violence and chaos that would ensue would create a post-Castro, post-socialist, post-revolutionary vacuum into which they and their increasingly divided constituents could step.

Beyond these Cuban-American Congressional holdouts, both parties in Washington are experiencing regime-change fatigue. It's an open secret in Washington, one that failure in Iraq and stability in Cuba have helped spread, that if taken today a secret vote in Congress would reveal an overwhelmingly bipartisan majority in favor of ending economic sanctions against Cuba and allowing all Americans to travel there freely. This is indicated even by votes taken between 1998 and 2001 in the Republican-controlled Congress. Agricultural, travel and energy lobbies; Cuban-American family associations; and cultural, religious and humanitarian groups all currently support an opening with Cuba. Their views are fully representative; some 52 percent of the American public, according to opinion polls, favor lifting the trade embargo against Cuba and pursuing more normal relations.
(snip)

One order of business under consideration in Congress is to explore why Cuba remains on the State Department list of terrorist nations. The first witness could be Paul Bremer, the former Bush proconsul in Iraq, who could explain to the public why he recommended that Clinton remove Cuba from the State Department list in the late 1990s. Former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez could illuminate the State Department's rationale for keeping Cuba on the list by explaining why, in the 1980s, he asked Fidel Castro to allow former Basque terrorists to reside in Cuba. Colombia's former president, Andrés Pastrana, and current president, Álvaro Uribe, could explain why Havana has sponsored talks with Colombia's terrorist groups as well. And, to illuminate the rationale for America's historic tolerance of anti-Cuba terrorist activities, Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch should be summoned from his Miami retirement--made possible by an administrative pardon granted by George H.W. Bush--to testify about his alleged collaboration with Luis Posada Carriles in the 1976 terrorist explosion of Cubana Flight 455, which killed all seventy-three passengers on board.
(snip)

The Armed Services Committees could call former generals Barry McCaffrey and Jack Sheehan, who have both visited Cuba and met with Raul Castro, to offer an assessment of how US national security might benefit from establishing channels with the Cuban military. They could testify to the cooperation that the Cuban military has provided on counternarcotics operations--including Cuba's recent decision to deport a Colombian drug lord back to Bogotá so he could be extradited to Miami--as well as to the support Cuba has provided to operations at Guantánamo Bay in the name of assisting the fight against international terrorism. And the Foreign Affairs Committees could ask former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz to explain why they called for a bipartisan commission to review Cuba policy in the 1990s and whether such an initiative would, in their view, be appropriate today.
(snip/...)

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070514/sweig/3