A Bit More Detail

• JSTOR Daily notes how early doctors used to party with drugs as a matter of course.


• JSTOR Daily notes the experiences of horses and donkeys in the US Civil War.


• JSTOR Daily notes how the disaster of the Bay of Pigs changed the decision-making of JFK.


• JSTOR Daily notes how early 19th century American Jews made use of raisin wine in Passover, and how this changed.


• JSTOR Daily <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/when-language-started-a-political-revolution/><U>notes</u></a> how the revival of the Irish language, connecting Ireland to the rest of Europe, played a key role in leading to independence for Ireland.</li> </ul>

• At Anthro{dendum}, Daniel Miller writes about how some of the food he cooks evokes his history in Cuba-influenced Tampa.


• Bad Astronomer notes an astonishingly high-resolution image of protoplanet Vesta taken from the Earth.


• The Big Picture shares photos of the Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya.


• Centauri Dreams notes one proposal to help extend the life of a Type III civilization in the Milky Way Galaxy by importing stars from outside of the local group.


• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin talks about changing minds in politics, inspired by the success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.


• Dangerous Minds shares the 1978 BBC documentary on surrealism, Europe After the Rain.


• Far Outliers shares the third part of a summary of an article on African and Japanese mercenaries in Asia.


• Hornet Stories reports on the regret of Buffy showrunner Marti Noxon that her show killed off Tara. (I agree: I liked her.)


• At In Medias Res, Russell Arben Fox wonders what American farmers--by extension, perhaps, other farmers in other high-income societies--want. With their entire culture being undermine, what can they hope for?


• Joe. My. God. notes how far-right groups in Europe are increasingly welcoming lesbian, gay, and bisexual members. (Not so much trans people, it seems.)


• JSTOR Daily reports on the obvious utility of the humble beaver (in its North American homelands, at least).


• Language Log considers the politics of the national language policy of China.


• This Language Hat articlereporting on a conference on xenolinguistics, and the discussion in the comments, is fascinating. What can we hope to learn about non-human language? What will it have, and have not, in common?


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers the slow corruption of independent institutions in Mexico that may occur under the presidency of AMLO.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that, while we have not found life on Enceladus, we have found indicators of a world that could support life.


• Window on Eurasia wonders if Russia is increasingly at risk of being displaced in Central Asia by a dynamic Kazakhstan.

• James Bow shares a deeply personal memory about a streetcar stop by Queens Quay where his life was recently transformed.


• D-Brief notes that antimatter is one byproduct of lightning. (Really.)


• Daily JSTOR counsels against buying into the scam of "authenticity."


• Language Hat shares a 2005 essay by Patricia Palmer, talking about how the spread of English was intimately linked with imperialism, first in Ireland then overseas.


• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money is strongly against Black Friday.


• The NYR Daily notes that Donald Trump's hardline policies are not going to help bring about change in Cuba.


• Out There talks about how we are able to be pretty sure that interstellar asteorid 'Oumuamua is not an extraterrestrial artifact.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer tries to imagine, economically, what an American Ontario would be like.


• Roads and Kingdoms talks about some good local beer enjoyed in Chiapas.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares a list of ten scientific phenomena we should be thankful for, if we want to exist.


• Arnold Zwicky shares a photo of his Christmas bell flowering maple.

Cuba's capital, Havana, was a glittering and dynamic city. In the early part of the century the country's economy, fueled by the sale of sugar to the United States, had grown dynamically. Cuba ranked fifth in the hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, second in per capita ownership of automobiles and telephones, first in the number of television sets per inhabitant. The literacy rate, 76%, was the fourth highest in Latin America. Cuba ranked 11th in the world in the number of doctors per capita. Many private clinics and hospitals provided services for the poor. Cuba's income distribution compared favorably with that of other Latin American societies. A thriving middle class held the promise of prosperity and social mobility.

There were, however, profound inequalities in Cuban society -- between city and countryside and between whites and blacks. In the countryside, some Cubans lived in abysmal poverty. Sugar production was seasonal, and the macheteros -- sugarcane cutters who only worked four months out of the year -- were an army of unemployed, perpetually in debt and living on the margins of survival. Many poor peasants were seriously malnourished and hungry. Neither health care nor education reached those rural Cubans at the bottom of society. Illiteracy was widespread, and those lucky enough to attend school seldom made it past the first or second grades. Clusters of graveyards dotted the main highway along the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, marking the spots where people died waiting for transportation to the nearest hospitals and clinics in Santiago de Cuba.

• blogTO shares photos of Toronto streets in the 1960s, cluttered by signage.


• Crooked Timber and the LRB Blog respond to the death of Fidel Castro.


• Far Outliers looks at the exploitative but functional British treatment of servants.


• Language Hat notes the insensitivity of machine translation and examines the evolution of the Spanish language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money advocates for an energized public response to racist displays in Trump's America.


• The Map Room Blog looks at a controversial Brexit art exhibition.


• Marginal Revolution notes a pay by the minute coffee shop in Brooklyn.


• The NYRB Daily shares images of Hokusai.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares beautiful space photos.


• Window on Eurasia notes how terror famines were used to russify peripheral areas of the Soviet Union, reports on strengthening religion among younger Daghestanis, and suggests there will be larger Russian deployments in Belarus.

• Bloomberg talks about Poland's problems with economic growth, notes that McMansions are poor investments, considers what to do about the Olympics post-Rio, looks at new Japanese tax incentives for working women, looks at a French war museum that put its stock up for sale, examines the power of the New Zealand dairy, looks at the Yasukuni controversies, and notes Huawei's progress in China.


• Bloomberg View is hopeful for Brazil, argues demographics are dooming Abenomics, suggests ways for the US to pit Russia versus Iran, looks at Chinese fisheries and the survival of the ocean, notes that high American population growth makes the post-2008 economic recovery relatively less notable, looks at Emperor Akihito's opposition to Japanese remilitarization, and argues that Europe's soft response to terrorism is not a weakness.


• CBC notes that Russian doping whistleblowers fear for their lives, looks at how New Brunswick farmers are adapting to climate change, and looks at how Neanderthals' lack of facility with tools may have doomed them.


• The Globe and Mail argues Ontario should imitate Michigan instead of Québec, notes the new Anne of Green Gables series on Netflix, and predicts good things for Tim Horton's in the Philippines.


• The Guardian notes that Canada's impending deal with the European Union is not any model for the United Kingdom.


• The Inter Press Service looks at child executions in Iran.


• MacLean's notes that Great Lakes mayors have joined to challenge a diversion of water from their shared basin.


• National Geographic looks at the elephant ivory trade, considers the abstract intelligence of birds, considers the Mayan calendar's complexities, and looks at how the young generation treats Pluto's dwarf planet status.


• The National Post notes that VIA Rail is interested in offering a low-cost bus route along the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia.


• Open Democracy notes that the last Russian prisoner in Guantanamo does not want to go home, and wonders why the West ignores the Rwandan dictatorship.


• TVO considers how rural communities can attract immigrants.


• Universe Today suggests sending our digital selves to the stars, looks at how cirrus clouds kept early Mars warm and wet, and notes the discovery of an early-forming direct-collapse black hole.


• Variance Explained looks at how Donald Trump's tweets clearly show two authors at work.


• The Washignton Post considers what happens when a gay bar becomes a bar with more general appeal.


• Wired notes that the World Wide Web still is far from achieving its founders' dreams, looks at how news apps are dying off, and reports on the Univision purchase of Gawker.

President Barack Obama dangles U.S. dollars before the Castros while Congress stonewalls Puerto Rico’s pleas for debt restructuring. The Tampa Bay Rays take the field in Havana as San Juan fends off New York hedge funds wielding legal baseball bats. The Rolling Stones play a free concert for Cubans; Puerto Rico can’t get no satisfaction.

As Cuba rises and Puerto Rico falls, it’s worth considering the diverging trajectories of these two ex-Spanish colonies that the Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió described more than 100 years ago as “two wings of the same bird.” Even as the resumption of diplomatic ties with the U.S. opens new possibilities for Cuba, Puerto Rico’s current status as a U.S. commonwealth has turned into an ugly dead end.

Puerto Rico is defaulting in slow motion on $70 billion worth of debt. Its economy has shrunk 9 of the past 10 years. A few hundred miles to the west, meanwhile, economic reforms are creating new livelihoods for self-employed Cubans, whose material conditions are improving. Buoyed by the arrival of new tourists, remittances, and foreign investments, Cuba’s economy grew by 4 percent last year.

And when the U.S. embargo is lifted, Cuba – which for much of the 19th and 20th centuries was the Caribbean’s predominant economy -- is likely to take a growing bite out of Puerto Rico’s fortunes, in tourism, manufacturing and services. And that's before accounting for Puerto Rico's existing fiscal straits, which will lead to shrinking government services, higher costs imposed by utilities under siege from creditors and a string of broken social promises and busted pensions.

True, Cubans don’t have democracy. Then again, at the national level, neither do Puerto Ricans: Despite being U.S. citizens, they can't vote for president or in Congress, which these days mostly ignores them. Cubans may face the threat of arbitrary detention and abuse. But they’re much less likely than Puerto Ricans to be shot dead on the street, or to be victimized by drug traffickers or other criminals.

At a rally on Wednesday in Hialeah, Florida, which has the biggest share of Cubans of any U.S. city, Senator Marco Rubio told his audience that they embodied the American dream. "As I walk the streets here, it's small business after small business," he said with a fellow Cuban's pride.

One of these 44,000 businesses in Hialeah -- 80 percent of them Hispanic-owned -- belongs to Fabian Zakharov. It also provides evidence that Rubio's view of his community and its relationship with Cuba is increasingly out of touch.

Zakharov Auto Parts sells the rarest of commodities in the U.S.: components for Soviet-built Lada cars. In the Miami area, where Ferraris outnumber Ladas, nobody except perhaps Zakharov himself, who owns several of the Russian clunkers, needs the parts. But the store, its owner says, does $1 million worth of business per year, and Zakharov keeps expanding his retail space.

His customers are mostly locals, but the parts ultimately go to Cuba, where, he says, up to 50,000 Russian cars still roam the potholed roads. Besides, much of Cuba's signature fleet of U.S. vehicles from the 1950s is equipped with Lada engines and other parts: That's how the stately sedans survived the Communist era. Zakharov has no competition: Since he founded the business in 2011, he has obtained deep discounts from suppliers in Russia and brought delivery times down to three days or less, a steep entry barrier to anyone who doesn't speak Russian and doesn't know the ropes.

Zakharov was born in Moscow to a Russian mother and a Cuban father, not an infrequent intermarriage thanks to active student and professional exchanges between the Soviet Union and Cuba. The family moved to the island, where Zakharov grew up and trained as an electrical engineer. But he dreamed of making a fortune, an impossibility under Fidel Castro, so he went back to President Vladimir Putin's Russia in the early 2000s, when that country still looked like a land of opportunity. It didn't work out as he planned.

The Yankees are coming. 'I think a lot of Canadians and others are probably wanting to get to Cuba before the American onslaught,' says Arch Ritter, an economics and international affairs professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.

U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement that he will make a historic visit to Cuba in March marks another step in the normalization of relations between the two countries — and once again raises questions about how the Canadian tourism experience in Cuba could change.

On Tuesday, the U.S. and Cuba signed an agreement to restore American commercial flights to the Caribbean country for the first time since the two nations became estranged 50 years ago.

During those five decades, Canada has been one of Cuba's main sources of tourism.

"I think a lot of Canadians and others are probably wanting to get to Cuba before the American onslaught," said Arch Ritter, an economics and international affairs professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. "It was very nice for Canadians to be there and they seemed to be welcomed by the Cubans, and I'm sure that's the case now for the Americans."

That "onslaught" of tourists from the U.S. has already begun, according to Jury Krytiuk, senior travel agent in the Cuban department of A. Nash Travel Inc. in Mississauga, Ont.

"There has been a stampede of Americans wanting to see Cuba before it changes," Krytiuk said. "It's just been chaotic."