#cuba 2015

[nhlovesadri3]

Adriana Lima for W Magazine US september 2015.

[diminutoatelierambulante]

[thenewdemocratus]

Foreign Affairs: Carlos W. Fernandez & Eric Lorber: Opening Cuba to Telecommunications Investment

Source:Foreign Affairs I agree that opening up the Cuban telecommunications industry and allowing for others to be involved there outside of the Castro Regime is a way to not only open up Cuba and open up a better relationship between America and Cuba, but the two government’s, is not only a good way to open up Cuba, but also a good way to open up the Cuban economy. The Castro Regime decided in…

[historyhermann]

A paper I wrote in college, in 2015, about the magazine, Puck.

[cappedinamber]

Papa Hemingway in Cuba (2015)

Directed by Bob Yari

Cinematography by Ernesto Melara

[cyparissinos]

Doors of Havana, Cuba Antonio Schubert 2015-2017 pt. 2

[bambooochan6]

Congratulations to Thailand 🏳️‍🌈

Countries Where same-sex marriage is legal: ⏬

2001: Netherlands 🇳🇱

2003: Belgium 🇧🇪

2005: Canada 🇨🇦, Spain 🇪🇸

2006: South Africa 🇿���

2009: Norway 🇳🇴, Sweden 🇸🇪

2010: Argentina 🇦🇷, Iceland 🇮🇸, Portugal 🇵🇹

2012: Denmark 🇩🇰

2013: Brazil 🇧🇷, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿, France 🇫🇷, New Zealand 🇳🇿, Uruguay 🇺🇾

2014: Luxembourg 🇱🇺, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

2015: Finland 🇫🇮, Ireland 🇮🇪, USA 🇺🇸

2016: Colombia 🇨🇴, Greenland 🇬🇱

2017: Australia 🇦🇺, Malta 🇲🇹, Germany 🇩🇪

2019: Austria 🇦🇹, Ecuador 🇪🇨, Taiwan 🇹🇼, Northern Ireland

2020: Costa Rica 🇨🇷

2021: Chile 🇨🇱

2022: Switzerland 🇨🇭, Slovenia 🇸🇮, Cuba 🇨🇺

2023: Andorra 🇦🇩

2024: Estonia 🇪🇪, Greece 🇬🇷, Thailand 🇹🇭

Happy Pride Everyone 💐🏳️‍🌈

[vintagegeekculture]

One detail in the worldbuilding of Back to the Future Part II (1989) that is often overlooked: the police department of Hill Valley in 2015 seems to be made up of statuesque women. And no, it wasn't just the two cops that found Jennifer on a bench and took her home; every time we see a police officer in the background of Hill Valley 2015, they were female.

This was a prediction that did not come true: women only make up 12% of all police officers in the United States today.

However, I can see what they were thinking with this. Consider that it was extremely rare to have female police officers in American cities before the 1970s. So, anticipating the entrance of women into police work, Bob Gale and Zemeckis might have foresaw a future where women make up half of all police officers, or even a majority. There are many examples of professions that were once majority male but over time, became majority female, like primary school teachers and pharmacists. In some countries, like Russia and Cuba, the majority of medical doctors are women, for example. Gender-based shifts in professions happen all the time.

The novelization of Back to the Future Part II gives a bit more information. According to the book, police departments in 2015 are majority women because it was believed by city governments that women's nurturing nature made them more likely to be caring, and less likely to be violent or brutal.

Fun fact: the woman who played the blonde cop was Mary Ellen Trainor, Robert Zemeckis's wife, best known as the only person to ever be in both The Goonies and Monster Squad, and she played a Mom both times. Mary Ellen Trainor also introduced her husband's friend, Spielberg, to her best friend, Kathleen Kennedy, who became Spielberg's most frequent producer-collaborator (Kennedy produced E.T. and the Back to the Future movies).

[gael-garcia]

“My journey has been very free. I’ve been able to work in different parts of the world and on projects that don’t necessarily obey a typical journey of a person that wants to be famous or work in film. I want young actors to know you don’t have to follow a set line to have a career. Sometimes the line is drawn for actors from the English language. But in my case I can reinvent myself all the time.” — Gael García Bernal (Total Film, 07/2021)

Also: Uruguay (El ojo en la nuca, 2001), Sweden & Thailand (Mammoth 2010), Canada (Blindness 2008, Zoom 2015), Brazil (El pasado 2007, Zoom 2015), Serbia (Zalet), Germany (Herzog's Salt&Fire 2016), Cuba (Wasp Network, 2019), Dominican Republic (Old, 2021)

[blueiscoool]

$1 Million Worth of Gold Coins Stolen From 18th-Century Shipwrecks Found

After an extensive investigation, Florida officials recovered dozens of gold coins valued at more than $1 million that were stolen from a shipwreck recovery nine years ago.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission announced in a news release Tuesday it had recovered 37 gold coins that were stolen from the 1715 Fleet shipwrecks.

The fleet of Spanish ships sailed from Havana, Cuba and headed to Seville, Spain on July 24, 1715. The journey was short-lived, as a hurricane wrecked the fleet just seven days later off the coast of Eastern Florida.

The first ship was discovered in 1928 by William Beach north of Fort Pierce, Florida, about 120 miles south of Orlando. Since then, gold and silver artifacts have been recovered offshore for decades following the first discovery.

In 2015, a group of contracted salvage operators found a treasure trove of 101 gold coins from the wrecks near Florida’s Treasure Coast, about 112 miles west of Orlando. However, only half of the coins were reported correctly. The other 50 coins were not disclosed and later stolen.

The years-long investigation by the state’s fish and wildlife conservation commission and FBI “into the theft and illegal trafficking of these priceless historical artifacts” came to a head when new evidence emerged in June, the news release said.

The evidence linked Eric Schmitt to the illegal sale of multiple stolen gold coins in 2023 and 2024, officials said. Schmitt’s family had been contracted to work as salvage operators for the US District Courts’ custodian and salvaging company for the fleet, 1715 Fleet - Queens Jewels, LLC. The Schmitts had uncovered the 101 gold coins in 2015.

During their hunt for the coins, investigators executed multiple search warrants and recovered coins from private residences, safe deposit boxes and auctions, the news release said. Five stolen coins were retrieved from a Florida-based auctioneer, who unknowingly purchased them from Schmitt.

Investigators used advanced digital forensics to nail down Schmitt as a suspect in the case. In most cases, digital forensics can recover data stored electronically on devices such as a cell phone, computer system or memory module.

With the help of advanced digital forensics, investigators identified metadata and geolocation data that linked Schmitt to a photograph of the stolen coins taken at the Schmitt family condominium in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Authorities said Schmitt also took three of the stolen gold coins and put them on the ocean floor in 2016. The coins were later found by the new investors of the fleet’s court custodian and salvaging company.

Throughout the investigation, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission worked closely with historical preservation experts to authenticate and appraise the recovered coins sold by Schmitt.

Schmitt is facing charges for dealing in stolen property, the release says.

The company commissioned to salvage the shipwreck said in a statement it “was shocked and disappointed by this theft and has worked closely with law enforcement and the state of Florida regarding this matter.”

“We take our responsibilities as custodian very seriously and will always seek to enforce the laws governing these wrecks,” the statement read.

Recovered artifacts will be returned to their rightful custodians, the news release said. But the investigation is far from over: 13 coins remain missing.

[opencommunion]

"The sight of hungry people scavenging through dumpsters and panhandling was once more common in cities in the United States and Europe than in Havana. But a series of quiet moves, first by Trump, and now by Biden, have produced a humanitarian crisis throughout Cuba.

... Joy Gordon, an expert on sanctions at Loyola University Chicago and author of Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, told Drop Site News that there has been a shift towards minimizing visible harm to civilian populations since the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in widespread malnutrition and epidemics. 'There’s a strategy of trying to offload the enforcement to the private sector,' she said. 'U.S. policy has created conditions that make it commercially compelling for the private sector to withdraw from whole markets, resulting in severe and widespread economic harm, but in a form that is not directly attributable to US policymakers.'

... Perhaps the best example of an almost invisible but insidious sanction is designating Cuba as a 'state sponsor of terrorism.' Presented as a benign policy tool to make the world a safer place rather than an arm of economic warfare, it has contaminated the word 'Cuba' more than ever in the global economy. Almost overnight the label provoked both global banks and vital exporters to pull out of the Cuban market, according to diplomats and businesspeople on the island. ... The island had been on the State Department’s terror list before, up until 2015. But since the relisting in 2021 the effects have been fiercer.

... Most Cubans fleeing this misery head to America. ... By keeping the terror designation and other sanctions in place, the Biden administration has fueled this record-breaking wave of Cuban migration. Over the last three years, more than a half-million Cubans have arrived in the U.S., according to figures from the Customs and Border Patrol Agency. The whole dynamic has a whiff of madness: record Cuban migration stoked by the Biden administration plays into the broader 'border crisis' that is helping Trump as the election approaches.

... The list of state sponsors of terrorism has always stood on the frontier between analysis and propaganda. No matter how bad their records, U.S. allies never make the list; adversaries do. ... According to former intelligence and State Department officials, for the last three decades the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment has been that the island has not sponsored what even the U.S. would define as terrorism since the 1990s. ... From its first months in office, Biden’s team has repeatedly said—both publicly and privately to members of Congress—that it was carrying out a broad review of policy towards Cuba, including the terror designation. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in 2022 that the administration 'will continue as necessary to revisit those to see if Cuba continues to merit that designation.' But last year, that claim was revealed as bogus. In a private meeting, a State Department official privately told members of Congress that no review process had even begun, according to sources present.

... Analysts agreed that with political will, Cuba could have been taken off the list within weeks of Biden’s inauguration in 2021. Some 80 House Democrats sent Biden a letter urging him to do just that within weeks of his inauguration. Even if the administration carried out a six-month review as some argue the law requires, the designation could have been lifted by the middle of Biden’s first year in office. Had the White House done so, hundreds of thousands of Cubans might well  have been living at home with their loved ones today, living with better access to food and medicine, rather than fighting their way to the border and battling the byzantine U.S. immigration system.

The Biden administration’s position became even more tangled in May when it removed Cuba from the list of countries that are not 'fully cooperating' with the U.S. on counterterrorism. According to official designations, Cuba now 'fully cooperates' with counter-terrorism efforts while at the same time  'sponsoring' terrorism. How the same country could do both things remains unexplained. Asked why the State Department had not even begun a review, spokesperson Matt Miller told Drop Site at a press briefing that the U.S. policy was aimed at furthering 'the democratic aspirations of the Cuban people,' a reference to the U.S. goal of overthrowing the regime."

[diminutoatelierambulante]

[thenewdemocratus]

Keith Hughes: Cuba Explained: Ending the Embargo

. I’m not saying ending the Cuban trade embargo unconditionally is a good idea and sure as hell hope that is not what President Obama did. I’m in favor of ending the embargo conditionally. That any American trade and business that goes into Cuba goes to the Cuban economy and the Cuban people. That the Cuban Government doesn’t tax most of it away, or all of it way to boost up their communist…

[jimintomystery]

MST3K's most wanted

I've been organizing my Mystery Science Theater 3000 collection, so I've become preoccupied with the handful of episodes that are not easily available, and the reasons why. In case in anyone else is interested, I thought I'd share what I've learned.

For our purposes we'll be focusing on the ten seasons that aired on cable, from 1989 to 1999. With the post-2017 episodes, it's trivial to purchase them on home video or streaming. And the pre-cable stuff, from KTMA, is widely available as bootleg footage, which is probably about as good as you're ever going to get. But the episodes from the cable era have been notoriously difficult to re-release, and require special attention.

Of the 176 MST3K episodes that aired on cable, 166 have been released on home video, and 145 are available for streaming/download on the Gizmoplex. As someone who's been trying to collect the whole series since the 1990s, I think that's pretty impressive. But there are 40 episodes that have been particularly tricky. Let's take a look, won't you?

Currently available on the Gizmoplex, but never on home video (1):

913 - Quest of the Delta Knights

As I understand it, nobody was sure who owned the rights to this movie, or how to contact them, for years. The situation has only recently been cleared up, perhaps too late for a DVD release.

Currently available on the Gizmoplex, but out of print on home video (8):

203 - Jungle Goddess

317 - Viking Women and the Sea Serpent

319 - War of the Colossal Beast

510 - The Painted Hills

619 - Red Zone Cuba

806 - The Undead

808 - The She-Creature

912 - The Screaming Skull

It looks like all of these went out of print due to being on a set where a different episode's rights expired. Theoretically Shout Factory could re-release any of them in a "Lost and Found" set, but that may not be cost-effective as people move away from collecting physical media.

Currently available on home video and MST3K's official YouTube, but not on the Gizmoplex (1):

615 - Kitten with a Whip (Vol. 25 DVD, 2012)

Kitten is one of the Universal movies that could only be licensed for physical media. And yet, it's the only one I can find on the official YouTube channel. Beats me why that is.

Currently available on home video, but not on the Gizmoplex (16):

401 - Space Travelers (Vol. 32 DVD, 2015)

522 - Teen-Age Crime Wave (Vol. 33 DVD, 2015)

524 - 12 to the Moon (Vol. 35 DVD, 2016)

601 - Girls Town (Vol. 39 DVD, 2017)

605 - Colossus and the Headhunters (Vol. 38 DVD, 2017)

614 - San Francisco International (Vol. 32 DVD, 2015)

704 - The Incredible Melting Man (Vol. 36 DVD, 2016)

801 - Revenge of the Creature (Vol. 25 DVD, 2012)

802 - The Leech Woman (25th Anniversary Edition DVD, 2013)

803 - The Mole People (Vol. 26 DVD, 2013)

804 - The Deadly Mantis (Vol. 27 DVD, 2013)

805 - The Thing That Couldn't Die (Vol. 29 DVD, 2013)

814 - Riding With Death (Vol. 36 DVD, 2016)

815 - Agent for H.A.R.M (Vol. 33 DVD, 2015)

901 - The Projected Man (Vol. 30 DVD, 2014)

1013 - Diabolik (Vol. 39 DVD, 2017)

I was able to find the DVD sets listed above on Shout Factory's website. As far as I know, they'll remain in print for the foreseeable future, but there's no way to know how long that will last.

The general pattern with these episodes is that the movies are owned by major studios that would only license them for physical media. Columbia owns Teen-Age Crime Wave and 12 to the Moon. MGM owns Girls Town and The Incredible Melting Man. Paramount owns Diabolik. But the big player here is Universal, which controls the rights to Space Travelers, San Francisco International, Revenge of the Creature, Leech Woman, Mole People, Deadly Mantis, Thing That Couldn't Die, Riding With Death, Agent for H.A.R.M., and Projected Man.

The odd man out here is Colossus and the Headhunters; I can't find any info on who owns the rights to this film, which may be part of the problem.

The real hard cases, the stickiest of wickets, are below...

Released on home video, but now out of print (5):

212 - Godzilla vs. Megalon (Vol. 10 DVD, 2006)

309 - The Amazing Colossal Man (VHS, 1996)

910 - The Final Sacrifice (Vol. 17 DVD, 2010)

1001 - Soultaker (Vol. 14 DVD, 2009)

1012 - Squirm (Turkey Day Collection DVD, 2014)

Megalon and Colossal Man were both recalled when rights issues came up after they were released. Oops. These were produced by Rhino, back before Shout Factory took over.

The Final Sacrifice is particularly tough to find, even unofficially, because director Tjardus Greidanus is very aggressive about tracking down download links. I always figured someone was similarly possessive of Soultaker, since it's clearly a passion project, but that's purely my speculation.

The Turkey Day DVD set is still available on Amazon at a reasonable price, so Squirm is still relatively accessible for now.

Never released on home video or streaming (9):

201 - Rocketship X-M

213 - Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster

311 - It Conquered the World

416 - Fire Maidens of Outer Space

418 - Attack of the the Eye Creatures

807 - Terror from the Year 5000

809 - I was a Teenage Werewolf

905 - The Deadly Bees

906 - The Space Children

In 2017, Shout released its final (?) MST3K DVD collection, which included Satellite Dishes, a compilation of host segments from episodes that "may never get a legitimate release." This included the nine listed above, as well as The Amazing Colossal Man and Quest for the Delta Knights. Of course, Delta Knights eventually got a digital-only release, which is cause for a glimmer of hope. But the others are probably tougher nuts to crack.

Wade Williams owned the rights to Rocketship X-M and had a particular sentimental attachment to the film. His death in 2023 may make it easier to negotiate with his estate, but I wouldn't count on that being a swift process.

Godzilla vs. Megalon and Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster are part of a prestigious franchise, and it's remarkable MST3K got away with riffing on Godzilla movies in the first place. I get the impression that Japanese culture doesn't particularly appreciate the sort of mockery MST3K is known for, so the rights to these two movies may be a long, long shot. Then again I used to think there was no hope of for the Gamera episodes too.

Fire Maidens, Deadly Bees, and Space Children are owned by Olive Films, and currently licensed to Paramount. It's possible a deal can be made later on, but not until the current arrangement expires.

The major bugbear for MST3K fandom is Susan Hart, the widow of American International Pictures co-founder James Nicholson. One way or another the AIP catalog was split up and Hart laid claim to several of their films, including Amazing Colossal Man, It Conquered the World, Eye Creatures, Terror from the Year 5000, and Teenage Werewolf. Hart's price for licensing her movies is very high, and it seems Shout has given up negotiating with her. I suppose the situation could change when she passes away, but I'd feel rather silly hoping for an old woman to die just so I can pay 8 bucks to watch robots laugh at a werewolf movie.

In conclusion, I've already purchased all the movies available on the Gizmoplex (I got most of them in a Kickstarter reward package), and the 31 that aren't available there can be obtained by, ahem, other means. So it's a great time to be an MST3K fan, and I'm still amazed how easy it is to watch the show nowadays.

[achillesinhighheels]

rihanna in cuba.

for vanity fair. 2015. 📸 annie leibovitz.

[cyparissinos]

Doors of Havana, Cuba Antonio Schubert 2015-2017 pt. 1