"Pretend I didn't say that. Please. Please. Please, media, disregard that statement. Thank you very much."

"For decades, Cuba has been held up as an ideological lodestar by leftists across Latin America...."

"Even among opponents, Cuba often earned grudging respect as an unyielding bastion of resistance against generations of American presidents. But now Cuba is running out of oil, and its economy is nearing collapse. A new wave of right-wing leaders in Latin America see Cuba not as a place of revolutionary nostalgia, but of authoritarian dysfunction. And in a seismic shift, the leftists at the helm of the region’s three most populous countries — Brazil, Mexico and Colombia — will not provide Cuba with emergency fuel shipments out of fear of incurring President Trump’s wrath.... Cuba’s increasingly draconian crackdowns on dissent, including the expansion of civilian groups that spy and inform on neighbors and new censorship measures criminalizing online criticism of Cuba’s political system, have also hurt Cuba’s standing. As happened in Venezuela under Mr. Maduro, who also imprisoned hundreds of political critics, these moves have withered the support Cuba traditionally held in the Brazilian left...."

From "Is Latin America Ready to Abandon Cuba? Latin America’s left saw Cuba as its lodestar. Now leaders across the spectrum are hesitant to aid a nation in the Trump administration’s cross hairs" (NYT).

"President Trump Gaggles with Press on Air Force One En Route Palm Beach, FL, Jan. 31, 2026."

I'm going to pick through the transcript and will update in about an hour. Meantime, you can pick over the text and pull out your favorite highlights

ADDED: From the YouTube transcript:

Elon Musk loves the idea of Rubio as "president of Venezuela, governor of Cuba, and the Shah of Iran."

I support this 💯 https://t.co/MFckQ5VWqr

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2026

"If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, that looks like a really good deal today."

"Let’s be honest: it’s a US war against Russia... to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, 'exhaust'? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we’ve sacrificed 300,000 Ukrainians. The commander of the special forces unit in the Ukraine, which is probably the most elite fighting force in Europe, has said 80% of his troops are dead or are wounded and they cannot rebuild the unit. Right now, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of either 1:5 or 1:8, depending on what data you believe...."

 
Said Bobby Kennedy, quoted at RCP. I've made small edits to the transcript based on the video that's also at that link. The transcript continues. Excerpts:

"Dry Tortugas National Park has been closed to the public after hundreds of migrants arrived by boat at the remote islands on the tip of the Florida Keys."

"The National Park Service estimated that 300 people arrived at the park over the past couple of days and said Sunday that there will be no visitor services and 'extremely limited' emergency services during the closure.... The people will be transferred to federal law enforcement agents in the Keys.... Though the National Park Service didn’t specify where the migrants were from, it said the Florida Keys has seen an uptick in arrivals from Cuba. The Coast Guard, which sent 80 asylum seekers back to Cuba last week, has also had a number of recent at-sea interdictions but has not provided specific numbers...."

WaPo reports.

Will the U.S. help Cuba after Hurricane Ian? Cuba is asking.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“If Cuba asks for humanitarian aid and the U.S. gives it to them, that would be a real breakthrough,” says William LeoGrande, an expert on Cuba at American University in Washington. 

On other occasions when Cuba has suffered from hurricanes, the U.S. has offered humanitarian aid, but Cuba has turned it down.

"The paradox for [Cuban President Miguel] Díaz-Canel, who is said by people who know him personally to want to be a reformer, is that he is boxed in by circumstances."

"Having been embarrassed by the Cuban uprising, he must show strength in order to preserve order. But to placate the public’s rising frustrations, he must also signal moderation, which he has belatedly tried to do; in a second address, on Wednesday, he acknowledged that his government bore responsibility for the issues that had sparked the protests, including both the shortages and the rising prices of food and medicine. But to call for dialogue, or else to 'open up,' as many outsiders—the European Union and Pope Francis, among others—have urged him to do, could telegraph weakness to the boldest Cuban dissidents, and provoke new demonstrations. In any event, it seems a certainty that the unrest in Cuba has not ended. So far, despite widespread expectation that the Biden Administration might engage in a renewed diplomatic opening, it has taken a tepid approach toward Cuba.... The United States, for its part, should make it abundantly clear that it stands ready to assist Cuba and its people, but that it is opposed to violence and bloodshed, both of the kind the Cuban government has used against its protesters and the kind some Cubans, mostly from the safe distance of Miami, are calling for against their government."

From "Is Cuba’s Communist Party Finally Losing Its Hold on the Country?/Historic protests across the island cast doubt on the regime’s staying power" by Jon Lee Anderson (The New Yorker).

"We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime."

"The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights. Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected. The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves."

That is, in full, the Statement by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on Protests in Cuba."

"From the Malecón, Havana’s famous seawall near the old city, to small towns in Artemisa province and Palma Soriano, the second-largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, videos live-streamed on Facebook showed thousands of people walking and riding bikes and motorcycles along streets while chanting 'Freedom!' 'Down with Communism!'..."

"... and 'Patria y Vida' -- Homeland and Life -- which has become a battle cry among activists after a viral music video turned the revolutionary slogan 'Homeland or Death' on its head. 'We are not afraid!' chanted Samantha Regalado while she recorded hundreds of people walking along a narrow street in Palma Soriano."

From "‘Freedom!’ Thousands of Cubans take to the streets to demand the end of dictatorship" (Miami Herald).

If Trump nominates Barbara Lagoa to replace RBG, will Democrats make the "second Latina" argument? I see 2 big problems!

"An effort to install a second Latina on the high court would immediately raise the stakes of a nomination fight that quickly became a clash over principles of fairness and democratic legitimacy."

I just wanted to isolate that sentence, which appears in the middle of a Washington Post article by Isaac Stanley-Becker and Aaron C. Davis and called "Barbara Lagoa, Cuban American judge, rises on Trump’s Supreme Court list as allies emphasize Florida campaign edge."

First, I see that word "install," which I blogged about at length when we saw it in the text of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dying wish: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

As I explained at the time, "install" was not the normal word to use in the context of a new American President taking office. I won't be surprised to see a sudden vogue for "install." I'll be watching.

But that's not my motivation for writing this post. I want to talk about "a second Latina." Is this the incipient attack on Lagoa? We already have a Latina on the Court, so Trump, in a ham-handed attempt to do diversity, has failed! He would grossly over-represent Latinas on the Court!

Is that the attack they'd use or that they're testing right now or pretending that they'd use in order to scare Trump away from what would, in fact, be an excellent choice?

There are 2 big problems with the "second Latina" argument.

1. The "first Latina" is Sonia Sotomayor, who was born in the Bronx to parents who were born in Puerto Rico. Barbara Lagoa was born in Miami to parents who fled Cuba. You can group them together under the word "Latina," but if you care about diversity, you shouldn't be arguing that the proposed "second Latina" is just a repeat of an ethnicity already represented on the Court.

2. The "second Latina" argument radically exposes the problem with choosing people because of their ethnicity. You're saying just get one and then you've covered that group and you don't need another. This idea limits opportunities for those in the groups that you've posed as caring about. You're saying: We've got our Latina, so we don't need another; we can get back to hiring the type of person we always preferred.

I don't know if Trump will pick Barbara Lagoa, but I'll be very interested to see if Democrats unleash the "second Latina" argument. It's dangerous, and it should go horribly wrong.

"The Cubans also have two medicines, one for diabetes, of which my mother died for, lung cancer, which my father died for, and I would like to have those drugs tested in the United States."

Said Karen Bass — a congresswoman on Biden's VP shortlist — on "Meet the Press" today when she was prompted by Chuck Todd to talk about what seems to have been her "celebrating" of the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba.

My bullshit detector went off at "diabetes, of which my mother died for, lung cancer, which my father died for." I don't doubt that her mother died of diabetes and her father died of lung cancer, but obviously they did not die for their disease. I don't think that's an error that arises out of ignorance of proper English. I think that's the kind of thing that gets out when you're thinking something different from what you are saying.

And what are the drugs that they have in Cuba that aren't even tested here? I'd like to know. Bass was oddly enthusiastic about Cuban medicine and purported to have expertise:

[F]or the last 20 years, I've actually been working on health care related issues in Cuba. You know, the Cubans train U.S. doctors. And I've been recruiting those doctors to work in the inner city because they come in tuition free....

"President Trump has resumed talks with Major League Baseball owners after his administration blocked a historic agreement that would have allowed Cuban baseball players to join MLB teams without having to defect."

"But the White House made clear that in exchange for revisiting that decision, it wants MLB, like other groups with ties to the island, to urge Cuba to reduce its long-standing cooperation with Venezuela's socialist government," NPR reports.

"I am not surprised that this call could disturb people who are not familiar with insect sounds."

"The recording is definitively a cricket that belongs to [the Indies short-tailed cricket, known formally as Anurogryllus celerinictus]. The call of this Caribbean species is about 7 kHz, and is delivered at an unusually high rate, which gives humans the sensation of a continuous sharp trill," said Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, a professor of sensory biology at the University of Lincoln, quoted in "'Sonic attack' on US embassy in Havana could have been crickets, say scientists/Noise which saw diplomats complaining of headaches and nausea could be song of Indies short-tailed cricket" (The Guardian).

"Fidel Castro’s eldest son, a bookish nuclear scientist, commits suicide."

WaPo reports.

The product of his father’s first marriage, to Mirta Diaz-Balart, Fidelito was a symbol of the complexities of the Cuban experience after the revolution. After an acrimonious divorce from Fidelito’s mother, his famous father kidnapped his young son while he was visiting him in Mexico, and after the boy’s mother had taken him to the land of Yankee imperialism – the United States.

"I refuse even to think that my son may sleep a single night under the same roof sheltering my most repulsive enemies and receive on his innocent cheeks the kisses of those miserable Judases,” the late Cuban leader wrote in a letter to his sister....

Fidelito was never viewed, experts say, as a potential replacement [for Fidel Castro].

According to one expert on Cuban government, Fidelito "had some physical resemblance to Fidel, but that was it.... He was never associated with the charisma that his father had."

Flooding in Havana, after Irma.

"Who killed Davey Moore/Why an’ what’s the reason for?/'Not me,' says the man whose fists/Laid him low in a cloud of mist"

"Who came here from Cuba’s door/Where boxing ain’t allowed no more/'I hit him, yes, it’s true/ But that’s what I am paid to do/Don’t say "murder," don’t say "kill"/It was destiny, it was God’s will.'"



Bob Dylan put those words in the mouth of Ultiminio Ramos Zaqueira — Sugar Ramos — who came here from Cuba's door after Fidel Castro banned all professional sports. Ramos — who was only 5'4½" — won the featherweight crown from Davey Moore on March 21, 1963. Moore — who was only 5'2" — was favored to win, but after the 10th round Moore conceded, and shortly after that, Moore said to his manager, Willie Ketchum, “My head, Willie, it hurts something awful!” 3 days later, Moore died. Now, it's 54 years after that, and Sugar Ramos has died (NYT).

“It was my night, my glory,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1964. “I won fair and square. I beat him after he almost knocked me silly in the seventh round. I came back and beat him good. Then he dies, and nobody remembers that Ramos fought a good fight and won.”

Here's something Bob Dylan said when he performed the song in 1964:

This a song about a boxer.... It's got nothing to do with boxing, it's just a song about a boxer really. And, uh, it's not even having to do with a boxer, really. It's got nothing to do with nothing. But I fit all these words together... that's all... It's taken directly from the newspapers, Nothing's been changed... Except for the words.

How many Bob Dylan songs are about boxing? He sings Paul Simon's song "The Boxer." Of his own songs, besides "Davey Moore," there's the song about Hurricane Carter. ("Rubin could take a man out with just one punch/But he never did like to talk about it all that much/It’s my work, he’d say, and I do it for pay...") And there's "I Shall Be Free No. 10":

I was shadow-boxing earlier in the day
I figured I was ready for Cassius Clay
I said “Fee, fie, fo, fum, Cassius Clay, here I come
26, 27, 28, 29, I’m gonna make your face look just like mine
Five, four, three, two, one, Cassius Clay you’d better run
99, 100, 101, 102, your ma won’t even recognize you
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, gonna knock him clean right out of his spleen

I guess Dylan got over his censoriousness about boxing. "Who Killed Davey Moore?" — which I think was written about a year earlier — seems like a flat-out condemnation of the sport of boxing, blaming everybody. After Davey Moore died, there were demands that boxing should be outlawed. Dylan's protest song is part of that. "I Shall Be Free No. 10" goes with Dylan's turn away from protest, the 1964 album "Another Side of Bob Dylan." Who knows how serious Dylan ever was about condemning boxing? Maybe he was just carelessly ripping something out of the newspaper and it had "nothing to do with nothing" for him. "I Shall Be Free" — unlike the earlier "Davey Moore" — is about personal freedom. It's Rabelaisian:

I’m gonna grow my hair down to my feet so strange
So I look like a walking mountain range
And I’m gonna ride into Omaha on a horse
Out to the country club and the golf course
Carry The New York Times, shoot a few holes, blow their minds

ADDED: "Bob Dylans Boxing Addiction":

Bob Dylan owns the complex that includes The 18th Street Coffee House in Santa Monica. It has or had a gym in the back. Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini trained Bob Dylan there. In Ray’s word’s “Bob has his own private gym. Best gym I’ve ever been in. On the wall there are pictures of Joe Louis, Ali, Frazier, Muddy Waters, the Rolling Stones. The heavyweights of boxing and music. First time I was over there we were sparring and just to keep him honest I would tap him with a left or right....

Is it really true, this story about the Cuban boy who played the "Star-Spangled Banner" when the Cuban police forced him to play?

It had an awful whiff of the apocryphal when Trump told it yesterday:



Great story but so sentimental, so seemingly made-to-order for maudlin Americans. Did it really happen like that? I found an article in Newsmax and by Jackie Gingrich Cushman.* It's from last year — when Fidel Castro died — so it doesn't do much if anything to bolster the story. Cushman identifies the violinist, Luis Haza, as her friend. His father, a Cuban police official, was executed after Castro took power.

"My father thought the revolution was for democracy," Luis Haza told me. "Castro betrayed my father and the entire revolution."

By 1963 [at age 12], Luis Haza had become an accomplished violinist and was appointed an associate concertmaster of a professional orchestra in Cuba. According to Haza, "the power structure wanted to see if I could be 'integrated' into the system. If they integrate the son of an executed man, it would be a model for all the young people."

But Luis Haza had a different dream: "To come to the United States for freedom. We knew that in Cuba, eventually we would die, just like we had seen neighbors die, and so-and-so disappeared. It was a daily thing, a daily subject: American freedom, to go to the United States."

After Haza refused to play for the elder Castro, a military squad charged into a rehearsal and pointed machine guns at the pianist. "Boy! Play something!" they shouted.

He did. "I played the American national anthem, 'The Star Spangled Banner.' The entire thing! You could hear a pin drop. I finished playing, and nobody knew what to do."

Great story. Too great? Make stories great again? Do we want the truth or do we like the fake news that we like?

When I heard Trump telling this story — which I never heard before — I was talking back to the screen as Trump crept up on the big reveal — that the boy played "the Star-Spangled Banner." I was groaning: Oh, no, don't tell me.
___________________

* Yes, she's the daughter of Newt Gingrich. The mother was Jackie Battley, Newt's first wife, whom he met when he was a high school student and she was his geometry teacher. According to Newt's second wife, Marianne Ginther, Newt was only 16 when the relationship began. (We always hear about how cruel Newt was to Battley — divorcing her when she had cancer — but does anyone talk about what she did to him when he was a teenager?)

My city's mayor, Paul Soglin, has a blog post titled "Ted Cruz, Cuba, Castro and the Giant, Enormous, Humongous Lie."

I keep trying to read this thing. I'm just trying to understand what is "the Giant, Enormous, Humongous Lie." If something is so big it takes 3 synonyms for big to express its bigness, shouldn't it be visible when I skim this short blog post? I would move on, but the man is mayor of my city. Can somebody help me out and read this for me? I read stuff for you all the time. Return the favor?

Kellyanne Conway's almost-perfect go-to answer for anything.

"Nothing is definite. He'll be speaking with his advisors. And he'll be applying the same brilliance and instincts and, that he, that he applied all throughout the campaign to all of these issues."

I'd have said her perfect go-to answer, but there is that repetition of "that he." I can tell you from watching the show — "Meet the Press" this morning — that she repeated herself to get back on track after the immoderate moderator, Chuck Todd, laughed out loud when she said "brilliance and instincts."

The particular subject there was how Trump was going to deal with Cuba.

Later in the show, Todd prodded her about the problem of conflicts of interest between his businesses and the work of the presidency. Conway said:

[H]e has been talking to his lawyers. He's been talking to ethics compliance folks. Everything will be done the way it needs to be done. But Chuck, there's no question that we're in unprecedented times. This country's not accustomed to having a successful businessman and job creator of tens of thousands of people at the helm. We're just, we're just accustomed to typical politicians ascending through the ranks. So it is different. But it's a large part of why people elected him.

She's testing the idea of flipping the problem into a positive: If his grounding in business is why people wanted him, then we understand the situation, and we should be glad we're not stuck once again with some politician who just ascended through the ranks.