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Gross’s work involved distributing computer and satellite phone equipment to members of the island’s Jewish community so they could use the Internet, according to his family and U.S officials.

MADRID - Spanish oil firm Repsol YPF SA has begun offshore drilling in Cuban waters as part of its global exploration operations, a person familiar with the situation said Thursday. Deep-water exploration drilling began about 50 kilometers north of Havana and will take at least 60 days to complete, this person added. Repsol is resuming exploration in the area after it failed to find exploitable oil in 2004. The U.S. Geological Survey has said there could be a substantial amount of untapped oil off the Cuban coast. The Repsol well is much closer to Florida than any other well in...

Tonight on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Joseph Farah alleged that Florida senator Marco Rubio is ineligible to serve as vice president, saying he’s “not a natural-born citizen. We’ve been through this with Obama now for four years.” Farah, the editor of WorldNetDaily.com, drove much of the controversy over President Barack Obama‘s birth certificate, claiming the president also was ineligible to serve because of where he was born. He speculated that former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum hasn’t been more aggressive in taking on Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney because he is angling to be Romney’s running mate. “I think Santorum is...

MIAMI - Florida’s voters effectively ended Mitt Romney’s presidential dream four years ago. He won in only about one-third of the 67 counties, gained the support of only 9 percent of Cuban Americans, rejected advice from local advisers, and misplayed the ideological landscape. Now the political battlefield, the issues, and the competition are different - but the stakes in Tuesday’s vote are even higher as the one-time front-runner battles to regain his primacy against the candidate who has emerged as his chief challenger, Newt Gingrich. After Romney was sent reeling by Gingrich’s victory a week ago in South Carolina, he...

Former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro characterized the Republican case for ousting President Obama in the upcoming election as “the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.” “Listening to these apologists for personal greed you’d get the impression that an individual ought to be free to do whatever he wants,” Castro complained. “Where’s their social conscience?” Castro contrasted the “anti-social” GOP field with “President Obama’s appreciation for the collective well-being of the whole. While he may not feel confident to openly admit it, I sense that he is, at heart, a socialist. That American voters might reject him...

[paraphrasing] Wolf Blizter: "What would you do if Raul Castro called you in the White House?" Ron Paul: "I'd ask him what he was calling about." Duh! Was he trying to be funny or was it a senior moment? I laughed out loud.

MIAMI — Former House speaker Newt Gingrich on Wednesday mocked as an “Obama-level fantasy” Mitt Romney’s plan to deal with illegal immigration by encouraging “self-deportation.” Gingrich made the comment as he began a day of outreach to Florida’s Hispanic voters with an extensive interview on Spanish-language television and a speech at Florida International University in which he called for a more a forceful U.S. role in ending communist rule in Cuba, as well as an overhaul of U.S. economic policies toward all of Latin America. In an interview with the Univision network, Gingrich said it was unrealistic for millions of...

WASHINGTON — On Dec. 31, just hours before a New Year's Eve celebration, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. Section 1245 of the law contains language providing authority to impose economic sanctions on Iran in order to deter the ayatollahs from acquiring nuclear weapons. White House efforts to have the sanctions provision stripped from the bill failed, and the measure became law with a quiet flourish of the presidential pen. Ever since, Washington and Tehran have been waging a war of words. None of this works to the advantage of the American...

..."Romney cree en nosotros," U.S. Rep.Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., tells viewers of a TV ad in South Florida, amid scenes of swaying palm trees, the Miami skyline and smiling Cuban-Americans. "Romney believes in us." ...Despite his hard line on immigration, Romney has rounded up endorsements from Hispanic Republican leaders across Florida, while pollsters and political analysts predict he will draw solid support from Hispanic voters in the primary..... "...I've already gotten three fliers from Romney - in Spanish," said DarioMoreno, a Miamipollster and professor at Florida International University who focuses on Hispanic voters. "CentralFlorida and the TampaBay area are where Newt...

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday that his government will close its consulate in Miami after the U.S. government expelled a diplomat. Chavez said he decided the consulate will shut its doors in response to what he called an unfair action by the U.S. State Department...Livia Acosta Noguera, Venezuela’s consul general in Miami, was ordered out of the U.S. last weekend followed an FBI investigation into allegations that she discussed a possible cyber-attack on the U.S. government while she was assigned to the Venezuelan Embassy in Mexico. The allegations were detailed in a documentary aired by the...

When it comes to Cuba, President Obama can do little right in the eyes of exilio politicians. When he eased travel restrictions to the island, for example, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen accused him of undermining democracy on the island. Now she's slamming Obama for his decision to order U.S. inspectors to check a deep-water oil rig that is on its way to Cuba. ... "A state sponsor of terrorism [is] poised to achieve a tremendous economic boon by entering the oil business and endangering U.S. waters to boot," she said. "It is deeply disappointing that the Obama administration appears content to...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended his country's nuclear program as he began a four-nation tour of Latin America, joining his ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in accusing the U.S. and its allies of using the dispute to unjustly threaten Iran.[snip] Both leaders planned to travel to Nicaragua on Tuesday for the inauguration of newly re-elected President Daniel Ortega, and then Ahmadinejad will also visit Cuba and Ecuador.

The United States has ordered the expulsion of Venezuela’s consul general in Miami, AFP reported on Sunday. The expulsion comes amid reports linking the diplomat to an alleged Iranian plot to target sensitive U.S. facilities with cyber attacks. According to the report, the Venezuelan embassy in Washington was notified on Friday that Livia Acosta Noguera, the consul general in Miami, had been declared persona non grata and had until Tuesday to leave the country...

Cuba's iconic revolutionary Fidel Castro warned that the world was on an "inexorable" march into the abyss this year because of climate change and the threat of nuclear war. In an article published Thursday -- Castro's first since November 2011 -- the 85-year-old retired leader also took aim at the United States and at gas shale "fracking," a new source of fossil fuels condemned by environmentalists. He did not, however, address rumors of his death, which were denied by an official Cuban blogger after they surfaced on Twitter earlier this week. "Many dangers threaten us, but two of them, nuclear...

VATICAN CITY – This week’s 50th anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s excommunication of Cuban leader Fidel Castro coincides with preparations for a visit to the Communist-ruled island by the current pontiff, Benedict XVI. Castro was excommunicated a month and a day after his Dec. 2, 1961, speech proclaiming himself a Marxist-Leninist and announcing his plans to lead Cuba to communism. John XXIII supported that measure in the 1949 decree of Pope Pius XII, which established the penalty of excommunication for anyone spreading communism. The revolution headed by Castro had already proclaimed itself “socialist,” and later the state declared itself to...

Pobre Fidelito. Being a dying dictator was his idea. But now Hugo Chavez has fat cancer, and Kim Jong Il went to ride his giant rabbits in the sky. Nobody's paying attention to the totally dead antics of Fidel Castro. He's like the fourth-grade girl who wore Silly Bandz before it was kewl. Now that everybody's got death, el jefe supremo grande con extra jalapeños just doesn't feel special anymore. But we believe that monitoring Castro's death level is of the utmost importance...

Cuba says it is expanding free-market reforms, opening more of the retail services sector to private business. From 1 January workers including carpenters, locksmiths, photographers and repairmen will be allowed to become self-employed. They will be able to set their own prices, while paying taxes and leasing their premises from the state. The measures are the latest reforms aimed at reviving Cuba's socialist economy by boosting private enterprise. President Raul Castro, who took over from his brother Fidel in 2008, has said the changes represent an effort to update rather than abandon the socialist model. His government plans to have...

Last week’s 60 Minutes featured another in its long line of joint CBS-Castro productions. This time Anderson Cooper and his production crew partnered with the Stalinist regime’s Centro de Investigaciones Marinas for a propaganda piece on the marvels of Cuban coral reef conservation. The co-host of the CBS show and conduit for this fruitful Communist infomercial was Dr. David Guggenheim, senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation in Washington, D.C. who chairs its Cuba Marine Research and Conservation Program. Dr. Guggenheim toasts himself as a “Cubaphile” and toasts Castro’s fiefdom (which he has visited over 40 times in recent years) as...

Jewish American Alan Gross not among thousands to be freed in a sweeping amnesty ahead of papal visit. HAVANA - Cuba will release 2,900 prisoners in the coming days for humanitarian reasons in a sweeping amnesty ahead of a visit next spring by Pope Benedict XVI, the Cuban government said on Friday. Those to be pardoned do not include Jewish American Alan Gross, serving 15 years in prison for setting up Internet equipment on the island under a secretive US program in a case that stalled progress in US-Cuba relations, a government spokesman said. Cuban President Raul Castro said the...

Penn sees red in LAX tirade Sean Penn and Cuban actress Maria Conchita Alonso were once Hollywood co-stars — but they had an angry bust-up at LAX, with Alonso branding Penn a “communist [bleep]hole” after he called her a “pig” in front of a stunned crowd. It started when Alonso picked up her mother from a Miami flight and spotted Penn in an American Airlines lost luggage area Sunday. Alonso, born in Cuba and raised in Venezuela, says her “heart stopped” when she saw the actor, to whom she’d written an open letter last year to say she was “appalled”...

Cuban-born, Venezuelan-raised actress Maria Conchita Alonso and actor Sean Penn had a contentious exchange at Los Angeles International airport recently, in which Alonso called Penn a “communist a**hole“ and Penn called Alonso a ”pig.” Over a year and a half after Alonso penned an open letter to Penn asking him why he supports socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the two met up serendipitously (or not so) at LAX while both were waiting to claim lost luggage. Alonso, who starred alongside Penn in the 1988 film “Colors,” described the exchange to Steve Malzberg on WMAL. “I go ‘Hello,’ and he smiles...

HAVANA (AP) -- The Cuban government has decreed three days of mourning for the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. An official statement read Monday on Cuban state television also said the Communist government had ordered Cuban flags to be flown at half staff at public buildings and military installations.

Excerpt and video of Rubio's speech: "Here's my challenge to the Administration and the State Department: You're not going to change your mind, but at least examine how this is being implemented because this is a charade." Washington, D.C. (Right Side News) – During a Senate floor speech this evening, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio highlighted the rampant abuses that occur under the Obama Administration’s “people-to-people” program. As part of his remarks, Rubio read from several days’ worth of dancing and music appreciation-heavy travel itineraries that are currently licensed under this program. Below is an excerpt of the speech: “There’s this...

Nearly twelve years have passed since he was pulled from a closet by a masked machine gun wielding US agent. Now Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who survived a perilous raft journey that killed his mother and became a symbol of troubled relations between the United States and Cuba, is an adult. Gonzalez currently studies at a military academy on the island and took part in an 18th birthday celebration Tuesday in his native city of Cardenas alongside his father, according to images broadcast on the nightly news.

Hundreds of Cubans paid homage on Saturday to the patron of the country, the Virgin of Copper Charity, at the Plaza de la Revolución (Revolution Square) the political heart of the island and at the precise point where Pope John Paul II in 1998 held a mass to hundreds of thousands.“We are not in any place, we are at a place of great significance: it is the moment to pray for all” said the Deputy Bishop of Havana Juan de Dios addressing the faithful who had congregated in early dawn with candles and burning torches. With the statue of Cuba’...

Leaders of Latin American and Caribbean governments gathered in Caracas, Venezuela, on Friday and Saturday to forge a new regional organization that includes representatives from every country in the Western Hemisphere except the United States and Canada. According to socialist rulers backing the new scheme, it is aimed at providing a counterweight to U.S. “imperialism” in the region while promoting “integration.” The communist regime ruling mainland China celebrated the news and vowed to support the group. The budding 33-member alliance — dubbed CELAC, the Spanish initials for “Community of Latin American and Caribbean States” — is reportedly the brainchild of...

Many people have the misconception that sanctions are an effective means to encourage a change of behavior in another country without war. However, imposing sanctions and blockades are not only an act of war according to international law, they are most often the first step toward a real war starting with a bombing campaign. Sanctions were the first step in our wars against Iraq and Libya, and now more sanctions planned against Syria and Iran are leading down the same destructive path. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) latest report, just out this month, there is no evidence...

There are many who argue that President Obama has (repeatedly) broken his promise to bring transparency and openness to the White House. In literal terms, however, Obama may not have actually broken that specific promise ,.. it’s just that people may not have understood what Obama meant by transparency and openness. ..Here’s a case in point: First Dot: Several months ago, the union world was shocked when Andy Stern, the ignominious president of the Service Employees International Union abruptly “quit” as leader of the Purple Hand. Surprise and speculation swelled. Was it the Blago Trial? Is he sick?Second Dot: Then,...

The Cain Train hit South Florida on Wednesday, and hundreds of voters clamored to get on board. “He’s the best hope to turn America around,” said Rudy Schneer of Coconut Grove, wearing a Cain sticker and a Cain button and holding Cain’s book while waiting for the candidate to arrive in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. “We’ve got to change our ways and this man is the one to do it.”

President Raul Castro has agreed to allow people to buy and sell cars in Cuba, ending a ban on Cubans selling cars bought after the 1959 revolution that ushered in communism. However, the changes could spell the beginning of the end for many of the island's classic American cars, which are a key feature of Cuban roads.

The Holy See is the oldest continuing international organization in the world. Its Secretary of State office was established in 1486, and that is also when its first permanent representatives were established in Venice, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and France. Today, the Holy See maintains diplomatic relations with 176 states. It is also the only Permanent Observer State at the United Nations, and it participates in various internationals conventions and agreements. While it is officially neutral, it is not silent.The Holy SeeÂ’s diplomatic prowess was tested severely during the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it played a crucial role in maintaining...

Pope Benedict XVI Vatican City, Nov 10, 2011 / 12:50 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Benedict XVI is expected to visit both Mexico and Cuba in the spring of 2012. “The nuncios in Mexico and Cuba have been instructed to inform the highest civil and religious authorities that the Pope is examining concrete plans to visit those states, in response to invitations he has received,” papal spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., said on Nov 10. Fr. Lombardi said it is “well-known that expectations among people in Mexico are high,” while “Cuba also has great desire to see the Pope, having never forgotten...

Her (INS Agent Mill's) instructions: Locate Elian, get him safely into a waiting van, and stay with him and allay his fears until federal agents reunited him with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.After Elian was found in a closet, Mills told him in Spanish: ``I know this seems frightening to you now, but it will all be over very soon,'' said Russ Bergeron, director of media relations for the INS. ``She told him: `We're not going to take you to Cuba. We're not going to put you on a raft. We're taking you...

MANAGUA (Reuters) - Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla leader, looks likely to win re-election on Sunday after heavy social spending won him strong support among the country's poor. Ortega has overseen a period of economic progress in his five years in power, backed by financial aid from his socialist ally in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez.

Karl Marx has indigestion; Cuba has just announced the imposition of private property rights and a citizen's right to sell and buy real estate. Fidel and Raul Castro have maintained the most classical example of Marxism in the world for over 50 years: consequently, the Cuban people live in abject poverty under totalitarian rule, while their leaders enjoy wealth, opulence, and outrageous personal economic portfolios so typical of iron fisted thugs ruling over a Socialist dystopia. Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, is the strongman of Cuba, ever since his brother went into semi-retirement, due to failing health. Raul has just...

Cuba announced Thursday it will allow real estate to be bought and sold for the first time since the early days of the revolution, the most important reform yet in a series of free-market changes under President Raul Castro. The law, which takes effect Nov. 10, applies to citizens living in Cuba and permanent residents only, according to a red-letter headline on the front page of Thursday's Communist Party daily Granma and details published in the government's Official Gazette. The law limits Cubans to owning one home in the city and another in the country, an effort to prevent the...

Cuba announced Thursday it will allow real estate to be bought and sold for the first time since the early days of the revolution, the most important reform yet in a series of free-market changes under President Raul Castro. The law, which takes effect Nov. 10, applies to citizens living in Cuba and permanent residents only, according to a red-letter headline on the front page of Thursday's Communist Party daily Granma and details published in the government's Official Gazette. The law limits Cubans to owning one home in the city and another in the country, an effort to prevent the...

The ban on property sales took effect in stages after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959. Parents were able to pass property on to their children, but buying and selling property was not allowed. The rules have meant that for decades Cubans could only exchange property through complicated barter arrangements, or through even murkier black-market deals, often involving illegal payments and bribes. With the new law, Cubans will be allowed to own a maximum of two properties - their main home and a holiday home. A popular aspect of the law will be the abolition of the...

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers today blasted the Obama administration for not doing more to block offshore drilling off the island nation’s coast. “We are extremely concerned over what seems to be a lack of a coordinated effort by the administration to prevent a state sponsor of terrorism . . . from engaging in risky deep-sea oil drilling projects that will harm U.S. interests as well as extend another economic lifeline to the Cuban regime,” the lawmakers, which are all of Cuban descent, said in a letter to President Barack Obama. The letter signers, Reps. David Rivera, R-Fla., Mario Diaz-Balart,...

Castro should go: Clinton WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday the United States remained firm that the Castro regime should end in Cuba, despite overtures seeking reform on the communist island. Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Cuban American...

Media: Does the Washington Post ever consult a dictionary? In what looks like an effort to lasso Republican Sen. Marco Rubio's rising star, they've built a shoddy two-story attack on a faulty definition of "exile." It started Oct. 20 when, on the front page, the Post headlined, "Marco Rubio's compelling family story embellishes facts, documents show." The hit piece, by Manuel Roig-Franzia, cited Rubio's repeated self-reference as the "son of exiles," saving the "Gotcha!" for the second paragraph: "The documents show that Rubio's parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-half years before...

Our world is coming apart....... ........China faces the reality that their huge surpluses in owning debt around the world could become a massive problem if write-downs become epidemic....China's heretofore strengths are rapidly becoming its weaknesses. It may thus perceive only one rational choice. War! .... Argentina is saber-rattling... Instability in the Americas is surging as Cuba and Venezuela work to undermine their age-old enemy, the U.S. The massive growth of Islamic extremists around the world is being fueled by a deluded foreign policy initiative from the Obama administration.... Israel is about to become a victim of the first nuclear world...

For more than eight years, the Castro regime tried ...to silence Ladies in White leader Laura Pollán. Ten days ago Pollán did fall silent. She passed away, after a brief illness, in a Havana hospital. Hospital officials initially said that she died of cardiac and respiratory arrest... Since there was no independent medical care available to her ...we are unlikely ever to find out what killed Pollán... she had been healthy only weeks before her death... We also know that the longer she remained under state care, the sicker she got... ...suspicious deaths (most commonly heart attacks) of otherwise healthy...

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez likely has less than two years to live, his former doctor said, as the ailing firebrand traveled to Cuba for a checkup following cancer treatment. Chavez, 57, has been through four rounds of chemotherapy in Cuba since revealing he had a cancerous tumor removed in June. But Venezuela has provided few details about the exact nature of the cancer, aside from that it was in the pelvic area. Salvador Navarrete, his former personal surgeon, told Mexican newspaper Milenio Semanal on Sunday that the leader's condition likely was worse than publicly admitted. The doctor described the prognosis...

In Florida, where Cuba and Fidel Castro can be highly combustible political issues, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is defending himself against allegations he embellished his family's story in saying his parents left the island after Castro came to power. So far, prominent members of the Cuban American community are standing by him, including the head of one of Miami's oldest and most respected exile groups, who said Friday he is willing to give the rising GOP star a pass. The 40-year-old freshman senator has always publicly identified with the exile community and has a strong following within it. Rubio's biography...

It's bad enough that some public officials have no second thoughts about drilling for oil off Florida's coastline. Now Floridians have to be concerned about Cuban drilling, which could be as close at 50 miles from the Florida Keys. A massive Chinese-built rig is expected to begin drilling the first well off Cuba in January. And what happens if oil drilling in Cuban waters produces a major spill that heads towards Florida's shores? You don't really want to know.

HAVANA - A state-run newspaper in Havana published a column by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in which he said that he believes that Venezuela "is destined to become a revolutionary model for the world," and discussed this and other revolutionary revelations with the ailing autocrat Hugo Chavez, who is in the country reportedly to receive a check-up on the status of his cancer. In his newspaper column "Reflections," Castro wrote, "I talked with him at length yesterday and today (referring to Monday and Tuesday). I explained the eagerness with which I spend my remaining energies to the dreams of a...

Good news, domestic energy fans! After extraordinary delays, it looks like there will finally be some energy production activity in the Gulf of Mexico once again. This time it’s in the fertile fields to the south and west of Florida, employing some brand spanking new deep-water drilling rigs with all the latest technical features. This is terrific, and I’m sure you’ll all join me in congratulating President Obama for moving forward with this much needed expansion of … What’s that? We’re not the ones doing the drilling? Then who is? “Before the end of the year, a Chinese-made drilling platform...

[snip] It was a little over two and a half months ago that Chávez, during a national television address, told stunned Venezuelans that he'd undergone two surgeries in Cuba to remove a pelvic abscess and cancerous tumor. Speculation has been rife since then about what a post-Chávez Venezuela will look like. Last month, early elections for next year were called for October as opposed to December. To date, however, Chávez has no credible successor. But he does have his fanatic supporters, Chavistas, along with plenty of help from Cuba. Large numbers of Cuban intelligence agents now operate in Venezuela in...

The United States is paving the way for American firms to respond to any oil spills from drilling set to begin off Cuba’s northern coast later this year, an Obama administration official told the Senate today. The decision would mean relaxing the 19-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, which generally bars American commerce with the nation and caps the amount of American-made components in offshore drilling vessels and other equipment at 10 percent. The federal government is “taking measures to ensure that the appropriate private industry parties are able to respond quickly in the event of an oil spill in...