Category: Wires

HAVANA — Axisa and Aron Alfonso, 6- and 7-year-old siblings in western Cuba, are luckier than most of their classmates: Their father takes them on their 1-mile commute to school on horseback.

The children and teachers who live farther away rely on a spluttering, yellow Soviet-era school bus that no longer shows up. Teachers often do not make it to class, so the Alfonso family and their horse, Chocolate, turn around and go home.

A U.S. oil blockade has set off an increasingly agonizing energy crisis that has brought transportation largely to a standstill. Fewer cars and buses are on the streets, and, as a result, fewer students and teachers are in school.

“My children rarely go to school. They go, but the teachers don’t come,” said Sergio Alfonso Vásquez, 33, a farmer and the father of Axisa and Arona. “I’m afraid because they aren’t learning anything.”

To save energy, the Cuban government in February cut school to half-days and resorted to COVID-era remote learning for college students.

Then Cuba decided to end the school year two weeks early and scrapped college entrance exams for high school seniors after acknowledging that sleepless nights without electricity and a lack of school meals were exhausting students and teachers alike.

The Cuban government’s measures are the latest blows to the country’s once vaunted public education system, which had long been a signature triumph of the country’s socialist revolution.

Schools were already reeling from Hurricane Melissa last fall, which damaged hundreds of buildings; a mass departure of teachers in recent years; and shortages of textbooks, uniforms, and even pencils and paper.

The extreme gasoline shortage finally brought the strained system to a stop.

The Trump administration’s pressure campaign, including an executive order that prohibited countries from delivering oil to Cuba, is aimed at forcing Cuba’s government into making political and economic changes.

But experts say the damage to the educational system is a striking example of the negative consequences of U.S. measures on regular Cubans and that, in the case of schools, amounts to a serious long-term threat.

“Education in Cuba is at risk due to the current energy crisis,” Anne Lemaistre, the regional director of UNESCO, the United Nations education organization, said on Instagram. “It jeopardizes the future of an entire generation.”

All 240 of Cuba’s boarding schools had to close this semester, Lemaistre, who is based in Havana, told the New York Times.

The Cuban government did not respond to requests for comment, but government officials have publicly discussed the schools crisis.

“After a night without electricity, getting a kid to school, figuring out how to engage him, and the class itself, is a challenge,” Naima Ariatne Trujillo Barreto, Cuba’s minister of education, said in February on state television. “And for the teachers, who also suffer just as much, without electricity or with the problem of whether or not they have water at home, concentrating on giving classes has been quite a challenge.”

Even before the Trump administration started imposing stricter measures against the Cuban government, the country had already been in a steep economic decline for several years.

The Cuban government said the school system was facing a shortage of roughly 26,000 teachers, many of whom had quit for better-paying jobs in the private sector.

In Camagüey, a city in eastern Cuba, nearly 1,000 teachers had left the country for good in recent years, state-run media reported.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the country experienced a record-breaking exodus. More than 1 million people, including thousands of teachers who earned an average of $11 a month, left the country.

President Donald Trump cut off international fuel deliveries in January and introduced a new package of aggressive economic measures aimed at starving the Cuban government of cash.

The Trump administration argues that the United States is not to blame for Cuba’s energy crunch, but instead faults Cuban officials for not investing enough in infrastructure while diverting “energy resources to line their own pockets.”

The State Department, in a statement, questioned why the Cuban regime claims it has no fuel for schools, while Interior Ministry officials who quash protests have enough gas to carry out their operations.

Remote learning for college students, one of the austerity measures adopted by the Cuban government, has proved all but impossible. Blackouts stretch over 20 hours a day, and most students and teachers cannot pay for enough data on their phones to support remote classes.

Instead, professors have sent lessons using WhatsApp voice notes.

Leonard Gómez León, a third-year law student at the University of Havana, described the semester as “hellish.”

“The power outages have been constant, the lack of internet connection, and so on, and it’s truly terrifying to see how badly we students are doing,” he said. “I feel like this is almost a lost semester.”

Gómez, 21, is the vice president of the University Student Federation of Cuba, a state-run organization that has traditionally toed the government line. But he helped organize a protest in March outside the university, demanding the semester be canceled until in-person classes could resume.

The vice minister of education, Modesto Ricardo Gómez, told the protesting students that the Trump administration was “massacring an entire society.”

The collapse of education is a stark contrast to the gains that the country made after Fidel Castro toppled a U.S.-aligned dictator and seized power in 1959.

He made education a priority at a time when the illiteracy rate was higher than 20% and mobilized 250,000 students and teachers to teach adults to read, particularly in the countryside.

Illiteracy was all but eradicated. The island’s universal, free university system steadily expanded over the decades, churning out doctors and engineers.

But the government, which has a near monopoly on such professions, has for decades paid minuscule salaries, undercutting economic incentives to study or teach. And the quality of Cuba’s education has deteriorated since the fall of the Soviet Union, the country’s main benefactor, which led to budget shortfalls.

Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York’s Baruch College who has written extensively about Cuba, said the education system is now “a shell of its former self.”

University education in particular, she said, is largely on pause.

“What is happening online is very poor in quality,” she said. “There’s only one, or two, or less, hours of electricity a day, and people in that time are trying to do everything to survive, from washing to cooking.”

Alejandro Paradero Almenarios, 20, had enrolled at the University of Guantánamo, hoping to become a biology teacher, but dropped out in January, five months into his freshman year. He decided the effort was not worth it given the paltry wages he would earn teaching high school, the equivalent of $7 a month.

“I was studying and studying for nothing,” he said.

He now works full time making charcoal, which people now rely on to prepare meals because cooking gas is unavailable.

Raúl Cabrera Oliva, 18, was in his last year at a vocational high school in Artemisa, west of Havana, that specialized in veterinary medicine.

With few transportation options for most students, the school closed.

“No transportation, no school,” Cabrera said.

The government’s push to reduce school hours to half a day caused another set of problems. By the time parents and children, many of whom hitchhiked, arrived at school, there was no time for parents to go home and then return in time for dismissal.

Mothers killed time waiting outside.

Yaymaris Rodríguez López said she would leave her house in a village in western Cuba every morning at 7 a.m. with her two sons, ages 12 and 4, and stood on the side of the road, hoping someone would drive by offering a ride to her children’s school.

Sometimes, 10 a.m. came and went, and they would still be waiting.

“What am I going to do? I have to take them to school,” Rodríguez said. “They can’t grow up to be dumb.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The Treasury Department on Monday issued a 60-day license allowing the production, delivery, and sale of Iranian oil as part of the preliminary U.S.-Iran deal signed last week.

Iran stands to reap significant financial rewards from the reprieve, which represents a sharp reversal of U.S. policy. Most importantly, it clears a path for the country to export its oil at market rates after many years of being forced to sell at a discount to find buyers willing to take the risk of running afoul of U.S. economic restrictions.

But the Trump administration has signaled that it’s ready to provide Iran with financial rewards for opening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the war, which has destabilized the global economy.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on social media that the sanctions exemption was the result of “ongoing productive” talks with Iran that are taking place in Switzerland.

“Iran has committed to free and open transit in the Strait of Hormuz and to permit International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors into their country,” Bessent wrote in a post on social platform X.

The Trump administration provided Iran with temporary sanctions relief earlier this year as it tried to curb oil prices by allowing more crude supplies to flow to global markets. The U.S. then ramped up sanctions and created a military blockade preventing the sale of Iranian oil as part of an effort to cripple its economy.

The new license, which expires Aug. 21, gives Iran greater access to U.S. currency by allowing the country to conduct oil transactions using U.S. dollars. It also allows U.S. importers to buy Iranian crude oil, petrochemical products, and petroleum products.

Iran produced less than 5% of the world’s oil before the war, with the vast majority of its exports going to China. But it was forced to sharply curtail production in recent months because of a U.S. blockade. Time will tell how quickly the country will be able to restart those wells, which can be a tricky process. Iran will also have to repair energy infrastructure damaged in the war.

The Trump administration has faced criticism for striking an initial agreement with Iran that critics say is overly accommodating and more generous than the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that the Obama administration and other world powers reached with Iran to curb its nuclear program.

“It’s also important to note that sanctions relief was not provided immediately when the JCPOA was enacted, it happened at ‘Implementation Day’ — six months after the IAEA verified the nuclear commitments were fulfilled,” said Daniel Tannebaum, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously served as the Office of Foreign Assets Control compliance coordinator for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

CROW AGENCY, Mont. — As a child in South Dakota, Ernie LaPointe was told: Don’t tell anyone who your great-grandfather was.

If his neighbors or friends knew he was descended from Sitting Bull, the storied Hunkpapa Lakota leader, he would never have a normal childhood, his mother told him.

“‘There will be a time and place when you get the permission to do it,’” LaPointe, now 77, recalled his mother saying.

LaPointe kept mum until the early 1990s, when, he said, an aunt told him it was time to “come out from the shadows.”

Now he protects the legacy of Sitting Bull, who helped lead the resistance to the U.S. government’s seizure of the Great Plains and became perhaps even more famous in death than in life.

Almost 150 years ago, Sitting Bull’s followers defeated Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one of the most closely studied and hotly debated military clashes in American history. Sitting Bull is said to have had a vision that presaged a great victory, which came weeks later for warriors led by Crazy Horse.

More than a thousand miles south, in Arizona, Chip Custer’s lineage was not something he could have hidden, even if he wanted to.

He was born George Armstrong Custer IV, the great-great-grand-nephew of the famous lieutenant colonel. After his father (George Armstrong Custer III) died suddenly in 1991, Chip inherited the job of minding the legacy of a man who is among the most lionized, and vilified, figures in American history.

Chip Custer, 70, has long been familiar with the criticism — of Custer’s devastating offensive against the Cheyenne, of his military tactics, of his ego. He hopes people will try to view his relative in his full complexity, in light of his successes and in the context of his time.

“If someone wrote a thousand stories about me,” he added, “what would I end up looking like after all the time under the microscope?”

Last week, crowds converged where the Little Bighorn River snakes through grassy hills in southeastern Montana and where Custer and all of his men died during an attack on a Native American encampment on June 25, 1876. There were reenactments, ceremonies, and talk of a new visitor center scheduled to be completed in the coming months.

To the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and other tribes, the battlefield remains hallowed ground, a place of great triumph over a government that suppressed their way of life.

To historians, it remains an inexhaustible source for debate. Had one cavalry major been drinking? Was Custer undone by recklessness or flawed intelligence?

Chip Custer and Ernie LaPointe are students of the battle and fluent in its intricacies, but their interest is not simply in military history. It is based in a mission to preserve their family legacies.

“The blood of my great-grandfather is in me,” LaPointe said. “He cared for the people; he cared for everything. He even cared for the people who tried to kill him.”

Custer’s kin

Chip Custer first visited the battlefield in 1976, for the 100th anniversary of the battle, as a 21-year-old hippie with no expressed interest in family history. He drove up from college to surprise his father, a retired Army officer who had fought in three wars.

As they sat through a quiet ceremony near what is known as Last Stand Hill, the American Indian Movement leader Russell Means spoke out to celebrate the cavalry’s defeat.

“My father, of course, was incensed over the way that whole event went,” Custer said. “So that was my introduction.”

The national park was known as Custer Battlefield National Monument then, though Native American activists had begun to draw attention to the site’s narrow focus on the more than 260 U.S. deaths, part of a wider discussion of broken treaties and American expansionism.

White marble headstones peeked out of the grass across the haunting prairie to mark where soldiers had fallen. The same was not true for the 60 to 100 Native Americans who the National Park Service has estimated died that day.

“You’d see that powerful landscape out there and it was just the 7th Cavalry headstones,” said John Doerner, who was an historian at the battlefield for more than 20 years.

Perspectives were evolving. Chip Custer said his father recognized that depictions of their relative — long embraced by many as a gallant, fearless commander carrying out Washington’s will to push Native Americans toward reservations — had grown more complicated.

In 1970, the movie Little Big Man portrayed Custer as a vain commander who foolishly led his soldiers to slaughter. Chip Custer remembers watching it on an Arizona army base and that his red-faced father stormed out. His father was similarly upset in 1991 at a proposal to drop the family name from the site. He died of a heart attack just months before Congress rechristened it the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

In the decades since, Chip has served as an occasional spokesperson for the Custer legacy, even as he ran a landscape design business and raised two daughters with his wife. Chip is descended from one of the famed soldier’s brothers, Nevin, whose health problems prevented him from joining the military. Two of George Armstrong Custer’s brothers died with him on the battlefield.

Chip has written about Custer’s rowdy days at West Point and his celebrated successes as a Civil War “boy general,” which included commanding the Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Battle of Gettysburg. He has spoken to groups of Custer buffs.

In 2021, he opposed calls to remove a Custer statue in Monroe, Mich., the lieutenant colonel’s hometown. In a letter to the City Council, Chip argued that Custer, in his writings, had recognized why Native Americans resisted the confinement of reservations and that he had unfairly become the “poster boy for all wrongs committed against the American Indians during our roughly 250 years as a nation.”

The council ultimately left the monument as is.

When it comes to that final battle, Chip Custer believes his relative unquestionably shoulders some blame for the outcome, though some point fingers at subordinates.

“I think he would, as any commander, accept full responsibility for how that all played out,” he said. “But I regret that we only remember him by the last day of his life.”

Sitting with history

For LaPointe, an Army veteran born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the challenge has been defending, not his relative’s legacy, but his own.

After LaPointe publicly embraced his lineage, he began representing the family at events like the 1992 dedication of a bronze bust of his great-grandfather to the National Hall of Fame for Famous American Indians, in Oklahoma. But in the face of competing claims, his connection was still closely scrutinized by the Smithsonian in the mid-2000s as it worked to repatriate some of Sitting Bull’s belongings. Once satisfied, the museum gave LaPointe a braid of Sitting Bull’s hair and a pair of wool leggings obtained by a doctor who had custody of the Lakota leader’s body after his death.

Sitting Bull was fatally shot in 1890 on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during a botched arrest by Native American police officers following orders from U.S. officials. In the years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the U.S. government had responded to the loss by escalating its efforts to force Native Americans onto reservations.

LaPointe’s ancestry was later scientifically confirmed by a Danish researcher, who did a DNA test on a small clipping of his great-grandfather’s hair. When the results were published, news of LaPointe’s lineage ricocheted across domestic and international media. It escalated the outreach he had long received from people who claim to be his long-lost kin.

“They call, they email, they come to the house,” said Sonja LaPointe, his wife of more than 30 years. “One guy from Wisconsin brought his Winchester to the house because he wanted to take a picture with Ernie.”

LaPointe was involved in the creation of an Indian memorial at the Little Bighorn battlefield, and in 2003 he attended the dedication of a sculpture by Colleen Cutschall, an Oglala-Sicangu Lakota artist. The bronze outline of warriors on horseback is level with the horizon, with the sky and grassy hills shining through the tableau.

With permission from park rangers, LaPointe had a pipe ceremony at the memorial that night and said he noticed something special in the air. “You could hear the horse hooves all around us,” he said.

LaPointe was also asked to share the oral histories he had heard as a child with Doerner, who worked to add red granite markers where Native American warriors fell.

LaPointe and Custer have each been to multiple events at the battlefield, but neither planned to attend the anniversary this week. Sonja LaPointe said her husband and Custer briefly crossed paths at a battlefield event years ago, but the men do not remember meeting.

Around 2007, LaPointe did speak with Chip’s uncle, Brice Custer, who called him after LaPointe gave a talk in George Armstrong Custer’s hometown.

Brice, who named one of his sons Garry Owen after the 7th Cavalry marching song, told LaPointe he had not felt well enough to make the trip but wanted to express how much respect he had for Sitting Bull.

“I said I appreciated his call,” LaPointe recalled, “and I don’t hold any animosities toward nobody.”

“‘It happened many years ago,’ I said. ‘I think we have to heal from that.’ He agreed.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.