Havana
Carter to the rescue? Former President Jimmy Carter met with Cuban leader Raúl Castro as well as with prominent Cuban dissidents in Havana this week on a private visit he said was intended to help thaw relations between the two countries. Relations have been particularly poor since last month, when U.S. contractor Alan Gross, 61, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for providing Internet access to Jewish dissidents. Carter denied widespread speculation that he was in Cuba specifically to negotiate Gross’s release. “We have spoken to some officials about Mr. Gross. But I am not here to take him out of the country,” he said. Carter is the only president or ex-president to visit Cuba since the 1959 communist revolution. On his last visit, in 2002, he criticized the country’s lack of democracy on live television.
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