Word: robaina
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With his studied style, Roberto Robaina Gonzalez looks more like a manager of a rock band than a Marxist model. Yet Robaina, at 37, exemplifies the new face of Cuba. Two months ago, Fidel Castro surprised Havana by picking the man he affectionately calls Robertico, a math teacher who speaks only Spanish, as Foreign Minister. U.S. diplomats dismissed him as "dynamic but dumb." Havana's bureaucrats were speechless: in his previous job as head of the Union of Communist Youth, Robaina had wooed the young with discos and salsa music -- and those T shirts. Even Fidel had a public laugh...
...Robaina's appointment marks the rise of a new breed in Havana: the young upwardly mobile Marxists, or yummies. They were just babes in arms or school kids when Castro's socialist revolutionaries swept down out of the Sierra Maestra mountains 34 years ago. Now in their 30s and early 40s, educated and ambitious, the yummies hold the key to Cuba's future...
Havana is haunted by rumors of a massive shake-up in the coming months, with young Marxists taking over more ministries. "Many people see the economic crisis in Cuba as an opportunity," says a Communist Party insider. "Robaina and Lage are Castro's natural inheritors. They realize they will have to open Cuba, but they want to be in power before they negotiate an opening." The yummies, however, are in a race against time: in the post-cold war world, turmoil could sweep Cuba before they are ready to take over...
...pairs of riding boots, a box of nickel-plated spurs, twelve officers' uniforms complete with hats, a gross of clinical thermometers, box after box of silver-plated insignia for officers' shoulder straps. A letter in the pockets of de Zaldo led to the arrest of Emilio N. Robaina, correspondent of Excelsior El Pais (Excelsior The Homeland), a gentleman with beetling brows and heavy black mustache. Department of Justice agents telephoned Washington, telephoned Havana where Senors de Zaldo and Robaina seemed to be well known to the secret police. De Zaldo was charged with illegal possession of pistols, released...