Portside

President Obama’s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens. But in agriculture, U.S. investment could cause harm instead.

Among the accomplishments of the Cuban revolution have been the great strides made in the education of its entire people. Education is completely free from primary school through university. Cuba today has a literacy rate of over 96 percent, putting it at the top of all Latin America. But the struggling economy has not created the kind of economic opportunity that is commensurate with an educated population, particularly in the professions.

Reader Comments: Bernie - Jewish Secular Values and what they represent; Long Legs of Bernie's Army; 2016 is not 1968 or 1932; John McCain: Salute to a Communist; Fidel's Message to Brother Obama; the Right Minimum Wage; Tech Workers and the Working Class; Israeli Minister Calls for 'Civil ' Targeted Killings of BDS Leaders - Azmi Bishara is No Enemy of the Israeli State; Military Leviathan and the Draft; Announcements: Washington, DC; Brooklyn; Berkeley; New York

We don’t need the empire to give us anything. Our efforts will be legal and peaceful, because our commitment is to peace and fraternity among all human beings who live on this planet.

In advance of President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba on March 20, there was speculation about whether he can pressure Cuba to improve its human rights. But a comparison of Cuba’s human rights record with that of the United States shows that the US should be taking lessons from Cuba.

Cuba stands at a historic crossroads. Down one path lies strict adherence to the revolutionary legacy of the Castros. Down another path lies a revival of Cuba as a playground of rich moguls and shadowy criminal types, as it was just before the revolution. Are there any other paths that Cuba can take?

Younger Cuban Americans are radically departing from the political views of their elders

“A veritable tour de force in archival and oral history documenting 1950s Cuban worker activism, and in the process, compelling us to revisit the nature and extent of the role of labour in the Cuban Revolution then, and now.” Professor Emerita Jean Stubbs, Queens University, UK, author, Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History and Cuba: The Test of Time.

The Haitian Revolution sowed fear in the hearts of Cuba's slaveholding class. In Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, historian Ada Ferrer undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of the impact made by the Haitian Revolution on Cuba, then still a Spanish colony located only fifty miles from Haiti's western sea borders.

Changes are happening and the Cubans are trying to figure out how to accommodate them within a socialist framework.