WASHINGTON, D.C. – Barack Obama will become the first U.S. president to visit Cuba in almost a century next month, a symbolic visit that will cast off one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.
At the start of the Cuban revolution, Javier Llorens was one of thousands of children who left the island unaccompanied for the United States, thinking it would be temporary. He is now 64 -- and is still in the United States.
Cuba's Isla de la Juventud is a boneyard of big ideas, from pirates' hideout to U.S. tourism mecca to experiment in communist internationalism. Now it's struggling to keep its few residents.
Pope Francis on Monday praised the sacrifices made by Cuba's Catholic Church to work on the island as he visited the home region of communist leaders Fidel and Raúl Castro.
HAVANA, Cuba – Pope Francis met Sunday with Fidel and Raúl Castro, the brothers who have ruled Cuba since its 1959 revolution, after celebrating an outdoor mass attended by hundreds of thousands.
Before he lands in the United States on Sept. 22, Francis will arrive in Havana on Sept. 19 for a four-day, three-city tour of Cuba that will put a spotlight on his political and diplomatic skills as never before. His challenge: to accelerate the process of reconciliation between the United States and Cuba charted by John Paul II and push the Castro government to hasten and deepen the pace of change on the island.
A fierce opponent of Cuba's Communist regime, Posada Carriles broke his collar bone and cracked several ribs in the accident, his attorney told the Spanish-language newspaper El Nuevo Herald. Cuban officials accuse Posada Carriles of masterminding the downing of a Cuban jet off Barbados in 1976 that killed 73 people.
The ceremony -- attended by Cuban President Raúl Castro and some 10,000 of the country's ruling elite and their guests, but not by the frail 88-year-old Fidel -- was the first since the restoration of relations with the United States.
