Word: avila
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...closest you'll get to a YouTube moment in communist Cuba - and perhaps a harbinger of the post-Fidel Castro era. Earlier this month a video surfaced on the island showing a Havana university student, Eliecer Avila, peppering National Assembly leader Ricardo Alarcon with the kind of public questions that usually get Cubans tossed in jail. Why does a worker have to toil two or three days just to be able to buy a toothbrush? Avila, a computer science major, asked the visibly flummoxed Alarcon, who was visiting Avila's school outside Havana. Why can't Cubans freely travel abroad...
What was most surprising about the interrogation was the fact that Avila got away with it. After initial reports that the young man had been detained for his effrontery, he appeared a week later on another video denying that he was jailed and insisting that his confrontation with Alarcon was meant "to build better socialism and not to destroy it." He added: "What needs to be fixed, what needs to be changed and revised, [we want to] do it within the revolution...
...Fidel Castro, as the country's provisional leader in the summer of 2006 after Fidel underwent major intestinal surgery, Raul, 76, has pushed a more pragmatic, even reform-minded agenda that has encouraged limited public debate - and, just as important, worked to undermine hard-line fidelistas like Alarcon. The Avila episode was yet another sign of how firmly Raul seems to have consolidated his position - and why he's most likely to succeed his brother as full President this weekend in a National Assembly vote after Fidel officially resigned from the post today. "It wouldn't surprise me if people...
Perhaps. But as Hernandez points out, Raul also has to deal with the heightened reform expectations he's planting in the minds of younger Cubans like Eliecer Avila. In the end, he may have little choice but to keep turning to them - which would be good news for Cuba, the U.S. and everyone else this small Caribbean island has captivated for the past 50 years. With reporting by Dolly Mascarenas/Mexico City and Siobhan Morrissey/Miami...
...security forces who were responsible for drug trafficking and death-squad style killings. The four were murdered before they could reveal the full extent of their allegedly illegal activities. "They were killed to keep the lid on Pandora's box," said El Salvador's chief of police Rodrigo Avila...