“Politics is a small word when you talk about human rights,” said Beatriz Luengo, director of the new documentary Patria y Vida: The Power of Music, which screened at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF) known earlier this summer and is now on the festival circuit.

Coming a day after a pro-government May Day demonstration in the capital city of Havana on Friday, Cubans in the municipality of Caimanera, near the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, marched in protest against the government.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged that the island faces “tremendously difficult challenges” as he arrived in Mexico on Saturday. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called U.S. policy “completely worn out, anachronistic, it has no future or point, and it no longer benefits anyone.”

Same-sex couples are getting married in Cuba, three weeks after the island’s new Family Code, which opened up everything from equal marriage to surrogate mothers, came into effect.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol figures show that 110,061 Cubans crossed the border into Texas from October 2021 through September 2022. During that same time period, 109,106 Venezuelans crossed the border.

Ten days after the storm left still unquantified devastation across western Cuba and knocked out the power grid nationwide, many Cubans are still without electricity, water, or basic goods. The destruction from Ian has piled onto the hardship of people who had already been suffering through scarcity and shortages in recent years.

HAVANA (AP) — Cuba remained in the dark early Wednesday after Hurricane Ian knocked out its power grid and devastated some of the country’s most important tobacco farms when it hit the island’s western tip as a major storm.

Cubans have approved a sweeping “family law” code that would allow same-sex couples to marry and adopt, as well as redefine rights for children and grandparents, officials said Monday, though opposition in the national referendum was unusually strong on the Communist Party-governed island.

Flames engulfed a fourth tank at an oil storage facility in western Cuba on Tuesday as the raging fire consumes critical fuel supplies on an island grappling with a growing energy crisis.

With Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador topping a list of leaders threatening to stay home to protest the exclusion by the host United States of authoritarian leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, experts say the event could turn into an embarrassment for U.S. President Joe Biden.

The Biden administration says it will expand flights to Cuba, take steps to loosen restrictions on U.S. travelers to the island, and lift Trump-era restrictions on remittances that immigrants can send to people on the island.

The cleanup from last Friday’s blast, which killed 44 and injured nearly 100 more, is continuing. The Cuban people deserve our compassion and empathy, not more lies and deceit by outsiders and interventionists about what they see happening in real-time.

A powerful explosion seriously damaged a hotel in the Cuban capital on Friday, and officials reported at least eight people had died.

The government on Saturday issued a statement that blamed the U.S. for the current war in Ukraine. It referred to “U.S. efforts to continue the progressive expansion of NATO” towards Russia’s borders as the main provocation for its attacks on Ukraine.

As Daniel Ortega assumed his fourth consecutive presidential term on January 10, dozens of political prisoners remain behind bars, and those who visited them reported torturous conditions. The Nicaraguan leader still resists international pressure despite increasing isolation

Chile’s lower house on Tuesday impeached President Sebastián Piñera over alleged financial misconduct revealed in the Pandora Papers. Seventy-eight of the 155 members voted to move forward with the charges.

Neither the United States nor the European Union recognized the results from yesterday’s presidential elections in Nicaragua, which Daniel Ortega claims to have won with 75 percent of votes even though independent election observers reported a participation rate of 19 percent.

HAVANA (AP) — Cuba has begun commercial exports of its homegrown COVID-19 vaccines, sending shipments of the three-dose Abdala vaccine to Vietnam and Venezuela.

Racism is a deeply rooted issue that is widely ignored among Cuban Americans.

HAVANA (AP) — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel for the first time is offering some self-criticism while saying that government shortcomings in handling shortages and other problems played a role in this week’s protests.

WASHINGTON (AP) — They are two tiny Caribbean states whose intractable problems have vexed U.S. presidents for decades. Now, Haiti and Cuba are suddenly posing a growing challenge for President Joe Biden that could have political ramifications for him in the battleground state of Florida.