Recently, while driving from Miami to Tampa, I decided to make a quick stop to see how things were coming along in Ave Maria, the two-year-old "Roman Catholic town" whose construction was spearheaded by Domino's Pizza magnate and über-Papist Tom Monaghan out amid orchards and farmland east of Naples,...

The southernmost member of North America has certainly had a rough 2009 so far (as have many of the rest of us), but touristically speaking it's been close to disastrous. So now the Mexican government has launched a campaign that's spending $90 million and enlisting Plácido Domingo and a bunch...

Who knew? After all these years of the stale same-old, same-old, the ideologues who've hijacked Washington's Cuba policy for the last couple of generations have managed to come up with a new and updated twist. And this one's a bit of a doozy.

It's a motley cast of fools...

The front pages of today's Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald made a pretty big deal of the one-year anniversary of Raúl Castro's rise to Cuba's top job. In English, "Cuba, Year of Change" catalogues both the past year's flurry of diplomatic activity between the island and a host...

Those of us on the liberal-progressive side of the spectrum can be thankful for the term limits that brought the malfeasance of the Reagan and especially the Baby Bush eras to a merciful and inevitable end. Both were popular -- even occasionally rising to immensely popular -- and Reagan left...

As the United States prepares for a momentous political shift in less than three weeks, Europe has just marked its own first: a president from the former Soviet bloc. As the Czech Republic -- a member for just four years -- today took over from France the European Union's six-month...

Maybe you've heard of that old Cuban joke about an island youngster asked what he wants to be when he grows up. The answer: a tourist, who can travel and live the "high life," unlike the average Cuban. But as the Castros' slowly evolving revolution reaches its half-century mark on...

Amid the joy we progressives and Obama fans have all felt since Election Day, you know the most interesting thing that jumps out about the sour note sounded in Florida, thanks to the nearly 2/3 majority which voted to enshrine in the state constitution a redundant ban on same-sex marriage?...

The media and the Democratic Party would have us believe that Dems will clean up down here at the Sunshine State's tip, and as NPR's "All Things Considered" put it a couple of days ago, "they see signs that South Florida's strong Republican Cuban-American voting bloc may be crumbling."...

"Daniel Ortega No Tolera La Democracia"
--headline in the once anti-Somoza La Prensa, October 8, 2008

Anybody recall when, back in the Cold-Wartime era of the legendary Ronaldus Rex, this wee country -- Central America's largest, but still just over the size of New York State --...

No, this isn't a piece about politics, drugs, terrorism, or foreign or trade policy. This time I bring kinder, gentler tidings: that this sprawling Andean capital of 7 million is a safe, under-the-radar gem with plenty of nifty surprises up its municipal sleeve. I found that out first hand recently...

Uh oh, I thought, reading today's Miami Herald front-pager entitled "Wave of Arrests Targets Cuban Activists." Word has gotten out that over this past Fourth of July weekend, 200 dissidents and opposition activists were rounded up -- for a few hours or a day -- on their way to...

(Para español, vea abajo)

Okay, the timing was a little bit fishy -- right as John McCain was trying to pander to U.S. Latino voters with his visit to Colombia and its president, Álvaro Uribe, who happens to be a Bush buddy and Obama critic. Nonetheless, the Colombian military's...

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La ultra-derecha cubano-americana de Miami lanzó este sábado pasado lo que sin duda alguna se llevaría como mínimo el tercer premio en el creciente catálogo de calumnias absurdas contra el candidato demócrata Barack Obama, tildándolo de "comunista" y "terrorista".

Para empezar a entender cómo...

Ever since he started running to succeed Jeb Bush as Florida governor in 2006, I knew instantly there was something insincere and too slick by half about then state attorney general Charlie Crist. Rightwinger Bush left office still a fairly popular pol, but after some butching up, the moderate image...

"Dance the Chiki-Chiki," a sophomoric but brilliantly marketed Eurovision contest entry, was sweeping the country as I traveled through Spain on assignment just recently. My friends Carlos and Santiago celebrated their second wedding anniversary. Oh, and the defense minister gave birth.

In my ongoing effort to keep Huffpo readers apprised...

Barack Obama's gutsy appearance Friday in Miami before the Cuban-American National Foundation was of course a refreshing change of pace from the lame and stale "stay-the-course" boilerplate that's been passing for a John McCain foreign policy vision. Unlike McCain, who despite the baby-step reforms in Cuba is stubbornly holding out...

I started migrating into travel journalism 20 years ago for reasons both selfish and altruistic: call it naïve, but besides my own innate wanderlust, I truly felt it was a kind of public service to, in some small way, bring the greater world to readers in a country where only...

My goodness, all this drawn-out brouhaha about how Florida Democrats did or didn't really stick their feet in it this time by going along with the Republican-dominated legislature's scheme to move up the state's primary. But it's just the latest episode in the ongoing saga of this state's hapless Dems...

Monday we learned that the possibility I raised here in February in "Could 2008 Be The Year of the Castro Convertible?" may already be coming to pass -- and "tourism apartheid" seems to be one of its first big casualties.

Born of the need to generate hard currency...