Members of a Cuban medical brigade will begin arriving in Ebola-struck Sierra Leone at the beginning of October. Cuba's Public Health Minister Roberto Morales announced today. He said the 165-member team will include 62 doctors and 103 nurses. All, he said, have more than 15 years' experience and have previously served in medical cooperation missions abroad.

An Obama administration program secretly dispatched young Latin Americans to Cuba using the cover of health and civic programs to provoke political change, a clandestine operation that put those foreigners in danger even after a U.S. contractor was hauled away to a Cuban jail. Beginning as early as October 2009, a project overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba in hopes of ginning up rebellion.

While Castillo is not a diplomat, the gregarious restaurateur has made Caribeno a cultural outpost for his country. Chinese and expats come not only for the food but the lively music and the recently organized Friday-night salsa performances. Photos on the wall include ambassadors and entrepreneurs from many Latin countries, as well as scenes of Havana life, Caribbean beaches and icons like Che Guevara, who looks across the restaurant from an enlarged print of a Cuban 3-peso bill.

Russian President Vladimir Putin began a six-day Latin American tour aimed at boosting trade and ties in the region with a stop Friday in Cuba, a key Soviet ally during the Cold War that has backed Moscow in its dispute with the West over Ukraine. The two countries signed about a dozen accords in areas such as energy, industry, health and disaster prevention. Russian companies will participate in petroleum projects around Boca de Jaruco on the island's north coast, and that cooperation will extend to offshore oil deposits, Cuban government website Cubadebate said.

The United States officially ended one of the most ineffective and widely criticized programs of the last decade aimed at undermining the Cuban government, the State Department revealed Monday. Foggy Bottom's inspector general released a report showing that AeroMarti, a multimillion-dollar boondoggle that involved flying an airplane around Cuba and beaming American-sponsored content to the island's inhabitants, quietly ended in April. 

Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil.” Can the company practice what it preaches – even in Cuba? A delegation of Google employees, headed by executive chairman Eric Schmidt, traveled to Cuba this past week in an effort to advocate for removing government restrictions on the Internet. The executives met with Yoani Sanchez, a prominent blogger and dissident who runs the independent 14ymedio news portal, a site blocked in Cuba.

I had to laugh when I heard about the U.S. Agency for International Development’s botched effort to create a Twitter-like platform for Cuba intended to undermine the communist regime. Even the name — ZunZuneo — to the State Department’s credit, sounded like something cooked up in Silicon Valley, not Foggy Bottom.

Afghans have long been resistant to central authority — as the United States has found to its frustration — with Afghanistan divided along tribal, cultural, religious and linguistic lines. Its mountains and valleys have stood in the way of communications breakthroughs that have unified other societies.