2012

Save the Date & Kick off your Holiday Season in a Spirited Fashion!

Join the Latin America Working Group Education Fund staff, friends, and fellow Latin Americanists for our holiday happy hour at The Passenger in Washington, D.C.

When: Monday, November 19, 5 – 8 p.m.  

Where: The Passenger, 1021 7th Street, NW, Washington, D.C. (1 block south of Mt. Vernon Sq./7th St. Convention Center Metro Station, green/yellow lines)

Why: To support the Latin America Working Group Education Fund, mix and mingle with LAWGEF staff and fellow Latin Americanists, and kick off your holiday season in a spirited fashion!

The Latin America Working Group Education Fund will receive 10 percent of the total sales from our group during this special time. We hope that you will join us and bring along a few friends!

For more information, please check out our Facebook invite or contact Ruth I. Robles at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 202-546-7010 ext. 103.

See you there!
 
P.S. In the spirit of the holidays and OUR way to show appreciation of you all, the first 10 people to purchase a drink will receive a LAWG tote bag!

While many of us are facing the difficult task of rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy’s devastation along the north Atlantic coast, there are many others who face this undertaking with few or no resources, even without food reserves to face the days that have followed. Those living in Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago de Cuba, and in other towns in eastern Cuba were directly hit by Sandy’s wrath a few days before she reached the shores of the United States. On October 25, winds of 110 miles per hour devastated homes, businesses, and agriculture in the eastern provinces of Cuba for up to five hours. Now the Cuban people, just like many here in the United States, are in the recovery stages.

People-to-people travel has been one of the few successful elements of U. S current policy towards Cuba.  However, this category of travel has been under constant attack since its implementation by the Obama Administration in January 2012.

According to the Treasury Department, approximately 160 organizations were granted people-to-people licenses in the past year. Now about 140, a sizeable number, of those people-to-people travel licenses are languishing in the bureaucratic depths of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, pending renewal.   Twenty applications of the total 160 have been newly granted or renewed within the past month, but some very respectable organizations have been denied their renewal. In 2010-2011 we worked tirelessly to reinstate this category of travel, and we will not stand by quietly and watch it shrivel and disappear.

We were proud to join with YOU and so many partners and allies in hosting Mexico’s Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity here in our nation’s capitol last month.  Highlights of their 3-day stop in Washington, D.C. included a TV-camera crowded press conference on the steps of a Capitol Hill church and a ‘lobby day’ where teams of victims and advocates deployed all over Capitol Hill to tell their stories to individual members and congressional aides. The historic visit ended with a moving vigil and march through Columbia Heights to a final event in Malcolm X Park, a dramatic poetry reading by the Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, whose reaction to his son’s murder sparked the movement, and a stirring speech by the legendary farmworker union leader, Dolores Huerta.