CUBA: 10 Feb UPDATE: Bread Shortage As Black Market Devours Flour; Blogger Yoani Sanchez Posts Unblocked On Isla; Undersea Cable Reaches Isla.

G.POST/ NICK MIROFF / Apparently Miroff is still only a freelancer for the WashPost /

    For over 50 years, a ration of one bread bun per person per day has been the accepted norm in Cuba.
    But with a slew of new small businesses opening up under Raul Castro's reforms, state-run bakeries are suffering shortages as the black market bids up the price of flour...as popular 10 peso pizza kitchens pop-up like weeds after a rainfall.
     “We’re making about 60 percent as much as we used to,” said one La Habana government baker where customers were turned away. “We don’t have the flour,” he said.

 AND:  10 Feb UPDATE -- WITH LINK CHANGE:
    The Castro regime has unblocked access to dissident Yoani Sanchez's blog, off limits on the island's Internet since 2008.
 "In the long night of censorship, a small hole has opened. My blog Generation Y returns to the insular light,"  wrote the 35-year-old blogger on Twitter.
   Now Habanistas around the world are trying to figure out why the government has unleashed Sanchez.
  Sanchez and her husband believe it is because Cuba is hosting an internet conference.
 “It would not be very elegant for those persons to be able to confirm that in Cuba there are blocked Web sites,” he told El Nuevo Herald. The blocks could be put back once the foreigners leave Cuba.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/09/2058892/cuban-government-unblocks-critical.html

ALSO: Undersea Cable Reaches Santiago from Venezuela:

   A $70 million usd undersea fiber optic cable financed by ALBA has reached Cuba's shore. 

It can potentially increase Internet speed 3,000-fold and handle about 80 million simultaneous phone calls.

   It will be ready for use in July.

  Cuba currently has the second slowest Internet speed in the world and the lowest internet penetration in the Hemisphere with just only 2.9 percent of the population having used the Internet during a 12-month period.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/09/2058223/fiber-optic-communications-cable.html#storylink=mirelated

MEXICO: Prisons Fail To Keep Convicts Inside During Narco Wars.

WA.POST/ NICK MIROFF
/ Annoying 2 Screen Read /

(The Wash.Post has apparently hired former G.Post Cuba freelancer Nick Miroff full-time. Congrats on this astute action. He's a story breaker. Period.)

  As the Mexican army, marines and federal police battle and die to arrest narco terrorists, Mexico's prisons fail to keep the convicted felons...locked-up.
    Embarrassingly, recently hundreds have escaped.
    "I lock them up, and they( local officials) let them out," said President Felipe Calderon.
    The Calderon government is moving to build more federal penitentiaries from the present eight facilities to as many as 20 by the end of next year.
    Nationally there are 223,000 prisoners with 45,000 are federal prisoners, convicted for drug trafficking, gun violations or drug-related killings.
    But today only 9,000 of the federal inmates are held in federal facilities.

CUBA: Evangelical Movement Soaring As Hardships Grow.

G.POST/ NICK MIROFF:
     "Over the past two decades, the number of evangelical Christians on the island (pop. 11 million) has soared from roughly 70,000 in 1991 to more than 800,000 today, according to Cuba’s Council of Churches. While the Catholic Church and Afro-Cuban traditions have also made large gains since religious persecutions eased in the 1980s, evangelical Christianity may be the communist-run country’s fastest-growing practice.
    The spiritual revival has coincided with a long period of economic hardship that Cubans have faced since the demise of the Soviet Union and the abrupt loss of its generous subsidies."

CUBA: Soccer Fever Breaks Out In La Habana.

GLOBALPOST/ NICK MIROFF/      Cubans call soccer/futbol, simply "pelota." Enthusiasm for "pelota" is growing on the island where baseball is king, despite the fact that Cuba has not qualified for the World Cup since 1938. “We still have a long way to go,” said Yusniel Biscet, a 23-year-old mechanic wearing a bright yellow Brazilian soccer jersey. “We don’t have good fields here, or equipment, or coaches. There’s no tradition.”

CUBA: Early Cuba Travel Enthusiast Looks Back And Ahead.

GLOBALPOST/ NICK MIROFF/
"Twenty years ago, U.S. travel writer Tom Miller became one of the first American journalists to explore Cuba since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Miller’s book, “Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba,” took readers on a grand tour of the island: its books, baseball, music, cuisine and tangled politics, with an ear for biting humor and an eye for amusing contradictions."
AND..."And one thing that’s striking is the number of similarities between the moment you captured in "Trading with the Enemy" and Cuba’s current economic crisis. Then, as now, there was a growing of tolerance for criticism and calls for limited reforms. Does that suggest we’re on the cusp of a new period of changes, or that Cuba is going around in circles?" (Foto of Tom Miller)

CUBA: Gulf Gusher May Benefit Island's Offshore Drilling.

GLOBALPOST/ Nick Miroff /     "The worst oil spill in U.S. history may not be such a bad thing for Cuba — assuming that the crude now fouling up the Gulf never reaches the island's shores. It's an environmental threat that also comes with a potential economic opportunity. Cuba’s untapped offshore reserves are growing increasingly attractive to U.S. oil companies with every gushing barrel into the Gulf, some experts say."  AND...“If the U.S. government places onerous restrictions — taxes, legal, bureaucratic red tape, etc. — on oil companies operating in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, it will force them to explore and develop hydrocarbon resources on the Cuba side of the Gulf of Mexico,” said Pinon, who advocates U.S. involvement in Cuba’s oil industry."