From a Reuters report:
The Roman Catholic Church will open on Wednesday its first new seminary in Cuba in more than half a century in a further sign of its improving relations with the island’s communist-led government.
Workers this week put the final touches to the salmon-colored complex of buildings organized around a chapel with stained-glass windows, 15 km south of Havana.
The seminary replaces a similar complex expropriated by Cuba’s authorities in 1966 and transformed first into a military barracks, then a police academy.
After the seminary was taken over by the government, it operated in an 18th-Century building in Old Havana that it eventually outgrew.
The seminary will train new Cuban Catholic priests, who have been in short supply since 75 per cent of them left after the revolution.
Cuba’s government helped facilitate the purchase of construction materials and other aspects of the seminary project, which was financed with donations from the Episcopal Conference of Italy, the Knights of Columbus in the United States, and Catholic groups in Germany.
To read the entire Reuters report, click here. For information in the diocesan publication Palabra Nueva, click here.

From the Spanish newspaper Siglo XXI:
The minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Trinidad Jiménez, said today that the accord reached in the European Union regarding Cuba allows the opening of "a new stage in the relations" with the regime of brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro.
[Addressing the Senate,] Jiménez said the accord […] is fruit of "a new consensus being articulated around the positions that Spain has traditionally maintained."
She stressed that "a change" is occurring in Cuba that requires a dialogue so the reforms may consolidate and pointed out that the Spanish Government has maintained "a prudent but demanding and active diplomacy" toward the Castro regime.
Jiménez stated that "the absence of dialogue never produces results. Results are obtained with a dialogue that leaves no issue untouched" and added that it can now "be said with legitimate satisfaction that the dialogue with Cuba has been extensive."
The minister explained that the EU’s new position regarding Cuba, which establishes a channel of direct communication between both parties, will allow [the EU and Cuba] "to overcome the unilateralism" that has existed in their relationship for years.
She also referred to the defense of human rights as a "fundamental pillar" that always predominates in the European Union’s relationship with any country in the world, which led her to guarantee that the accords made with the island in the future will be linked to that issue.
For additional coverage, click here.

‘Fidel Castro ought to be named Secretary General of the United Nations.’

–Bolivian President Evo Morales, commenting
on the recent U.N. vote against
the U.S. trade embargo.

Three more prisoners not from the 2003 roundup of 75 dissidents will be freed soon and sent to Spain, the Cuban Catholic Church announced Monday.
According to The Associated Press, the Church identified them as Adrián Álvarez Arencibia, Ramón Basulto García and Joel Torres González.
Imprisoned in 1985, Álvarez was serving a 30-year sentence for espionage; Basulto was sentenced in 1994 to 30 years years for piracy (hijacking). Torres does not appear on the lists of Cuban dissidents or political prisoners. His criminal record was not revealed. [UPDATE: The Spanish daily La Vanguardia has more on Álvarez. Click here.]

Fidel Castro is "lucid and touring the areas where the [revolutionary] battles were fought, so he can write books describing that period," said Mercedes de Armas García, Cuban culture and information aide in La Paz, Bolivia.
De Armas, a Cuban Embassy official, made the statement Monday to the Bolivian Information Agency while discussing the presentation in Bolivia of Castro’s book "From Sierra Maestra to Santiago de Cuba; The Strategic Counteroffensive."
The Cuban government so far has made no mention of a tour by Castro of the Sierra Maestra battle sites. Given the 84-year-old leader’s condition, such a strenuous tour would be unlikely.
In Bolivia for the presentation of Castro’s book are Cuban Gen. Guillermo García Frías and Rogelio Polanco, Cuban Ambassador to Venezuela.
[UPDATE: Cuban Ambassador to Bolivia Rafael Dausá stepped in to clarify a statement made earlier by an aide to the effect that Fidel Castro was touring old battle sites to gather material for a new book.
"Comandante Fidel is more than lucid and we can expect a third and a fourth part to this book," The Strategic Counteroffensive, Dausá told the Bolivian Information Agency. "He still has many things to say and I’m very convinced that he will continue to write," the diplomat said.
Castro is "reviewing" the historic stages of the Cuban Revolution, Dausá said.]
–Renato Pérez Pizarro.

President Raúl Castro on Sunday addressed the closing session of the 86th Plenum of the National Council of the Cuban Workers Central. Although the daily Granma reported on his speech, it did so in paraphrase; the text below is a translation of that paraphrase.
The only way to break dogmas, bad habits, taboos, is giving participation to the masses with the working class up front, because, together with the farmers and the people, it is the most revolutionary class, Raúl said.
Later on, he emphasized the need for labor leaders to know the principles that rule the economy, because that’s the determining factor for the operation of any revolution.
It is up to you, from the CTC Secretariat to the humblest leader, to play the same role placed by [Vice President] Lázaro Peña, who, with wisdom and experience, asked during the historic 13th Congress of the CTC in 1973 that we renounce some conquests wrested from the bourgeoisie, because the situation had changed and the workers were the owners of the means of production.

(Castro addressing the meeting. With him, from right, are Vice President Ramiro Valdés and Salvador Valdés Mesa, CTC leader. At left is Vice President José Ramón Machado Ventura.)

For example, [Peña] proposed to repeal a law that – full of good intentions but wrong and therefore unsustainable from an economic point of view – paid those who retired with an exemplary record in their work life 100 percent of their salaries, Raúl recalled.
But, to defend the measures and explain them, the working class must have knowledge and be convinced of its importance for the subsistence of the Revolution, otherwise we’ll go to the precipice, he added.
Raúl insisted once again on the need to be exigent with the cadres, to unearth the pernicious tendency of some to hide their faults, on the urgent need to learn from the mistakes made, because "the errors must leave us at least the usefulness of experience, so that we don’t repeat them," he concluded.
About the actualization of the Cuban economic model, the Army General commented that we are not copying any country, that [the model] is an autochthonous product, adjusted to our characteristics, without renouncing in the slightest to the construction of Socialism.

Alfredo Morales Cartaya, former minister of Labor and Social Security, died Saturday in Havana of a heart attack, a brief obituary in Cubadebate reported. He was 62.
Morales had been secretary general of the Cuban Workers Central in Havana. He was a deputy to the National Assembly and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Morales was promoted to the Labor Ministry in October 1999 and served until March 2009, when a major Cabinet shuffle removed him and other officials – including Carlos Lage and Felipe Pérez Roque – from their posts. Morales was replaced by his First Vice Minister, Margarita Marlene González Fernández.
At the time of his death, Morales was national commission chairman of the Social Prevention and Care System. (For his obituary in Granma, click here.)

From the Bloomberg news service:
Theodore Sorensen, who helped craft some of the most quoted and analyzed speeches in American history as a top adviser to President John F. Kennedy, has died. He was 82.
One of the last surviving members of Kennedy’s inner circle, Sorensen served as senior adviser and special counsel, briefing the president and offering advice on everything from electoral politics to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
During the tense showdown with the Soviet Union in 1962 over missiles in Cuba, Sorensen drafted Kennedy’s correspondence with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He also wrote Kennedy’s Oct. 22 speech to the nation announcing the U.S. blockade of Cuba.
“We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril,” Kennedy said in the nationally televised speech. “Nuclear weapons are so destructive, and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.”
To read the entire obituary, click here. For an obit in The New York Times, click here.

According to The Associated Press, the Cuban government "has a week left to make good on a promise to clear Cuban jails of 52 activists, opposition leaders and social critics."
Thirty-nine have been freed and were put on the first plane to Spain.
The 13 who remain, however, "may be the toughest releases yet for a government that describes dissidents as subversive U.S. agents bent on toppling the socialist system," the AP says.
They refuse to leave prison unless they are freed without any conditions – pardoned, not paroled.
Speculations abound as to what the state will do with them. My guess is that it will pardon and release them. But it will also keep closer tabs on them than before, an ability made simpler by the fact that there’s only 13 of them.
And the minute any of them makes a move considered seditious by the government, he will be given a quick trial and sentenced to domestic exile, i.e., resettled as far away from his home as possible, not in a prison but in some sort of isolated community with minimal communications and fewer forms of egress.
It’s not really my idea. Actor Patrick McGoohan came up with it in the 1960s, sold it to Britain’s ITV and starred in the series. It was called "The Prisoner."
–Renato Pérez Pizarro.

The wife of convicted Cuban spy Gerardo Hernández was allowed to visit him in his U.S. prison last month for the first time in 12 years, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s office confirmed Friday.
Ros-Lehtinen spokesman Alex Cruz said the Republican congress member "raised hell » when State Department officials briefed her on the visit, after it had taken place.
"We again raised the fact that they are treating Alan Gross and this convicted spy as equals, » said Cruz, referring to the U.S. government subcontractor jailed in Havana. "We were assured that there was no such linkage. »
Cruz said the wife’s visit took place in early or mid-September – shortly after Gross’s wife Judy was first allowed to visit him in Havana, where he has been jailed without charges since Dec. 3.
Adriana Pérez visited her husband at the federal prison in Victorville, Calif., according to the blog Cafe Fuerte, which first reported the visit Thursday.
For more details, click here.
–JUAN O. TAMAYO.