On Monday, the Pentagon announced that 15 Guantanamo Bay detainees have been transferred to the United Arab Emirates, bringing the total number of prisoners at the facility to 61. According to CNN, the State Department says this is the largest single transfer of Guantanamo detainees under President Obama.

Despite a tourism boom, Cuba’s economy is struggling so much that some are warning of a brewing “perfect storm” of social unrest. Thank god these communists can look to America as an example of social and political stability.

On Sunday, the Carnival Adonia docked back in Miami, ending the first cruise from the United States to Cuba in over 50 years and days of vomit- and diarrhea-soaked Hell for 14 passengers suffering from “stomach-related symptoms.”

At the Defense Media Activity, a little-known and oddly named office in Ft. Meade, Maryland, that provides “news and information to U.S. forces worldwide,” there are thousands of classified“educational” films about the American military—including a huge trove of secret home movies from Gitmo.

Old communists never die; they just introduce incremental change while slating major political reform for the unspecified future.

Next week, the U.S. government will announce that it is allowing commercial airline service to resume between the U.S. and Cuba, up to more than 100 flights a day. This is the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end.

Aldo Chang, once an official photographer for Fidel Castro in Cuba, looks at his old photos from his home in a Havana housing project: “When I show these to my grandson, he says, ‘What good did it do? Look at you now. You’ve got nothing.’”

The heirs of notorious gangster Meyer Lansky want to be compensated for the seizing of Lansky’s Havana casino by revolutionary forces in 1959. “Cuba owes my family money,” says the grandson of the racketeer who helped prop up the dictator whose corruption drove Cubans to revolution.

Five Yemeni detainees have been transferred to the United Arab Emirates from the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the Department of Defense announced Sunday. Each had been held for nearly 14 years as wartime prisoners, the New York Times reports, and none were charged with a crime.

Rafael Cruz, father of Republican presidential candidate Ted, is the subject of a New York Times investigation which alleges that maybe he wasn’t quite the Molotov cocktail-tossing Cuban revolutionary he’s made himself out to be. Woe is the man whose dad’s tall tales become a matter of public concern.

The Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, the U.S. military prison where detainees have reported horrific accounts of abuse and torture, is finally expected to close after a long delay. According to The New York Times, a Pentagon plan outlining the closure is expected in the coming week.

The Obama administration has relaxed several rules on doing business with Cuba, which will help to bring more Americans to the island that is already overflowing with Europeans telling American reporters “The Americans are coming, so we wanted to see it before it changes.”

On this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon, to the complete surprise of the American public, announced that he would be visiting communist China in 1972. It was an abrupt, about-face departure from a stance the vehemently anti-communist Nixon had campaigned upon. But the lost lives and political costs of the Vietnam war—as well as the insistent advice of Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger—led Nixon away from his intransigence and into a momentous meeting that would shape the course of American diplomacy and international affairs for decades.

During a press conference this morning that was broadcast live on Cuban TV, President Obama announced that the U.S. has agreed to formally re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba. “We don’t have to be imprisoned by the past,” the president said before calling for Congress to lift the 53-year-old embargo. Secretary of State Kerry will travel to Havana to open a U.S. embassy later this summer.

As wide-eyed foreigners lustily eye Havana real estate, liberalized Cuban economic rules are “re-gentrifying the city along racial lines and class divisions, particularly because lighter-skinned Cubans are more likely to have relatives abroad with money to invest.” Viva capitalismo!

In a new interview aired Monday, former tiny child and current attractive adult Elián González said he’d like to visit the United States, specifically for the purpose of giving you love.

Great news for Yankee imperialists too lazy to travel to Florida: Starting in July, JetBlue will offer a direct charter flight from New York’s JFK Airport to Havana.

Remember Elián González? The six-year-old boy who was apprehended from a relative’s home in Miami in 2000 and sent back to Cuba by American federal agents? Do you recall what he looks like? Well it doesn’t matter, because he’s hot now.

Cuba will officially be removed from the US list of nations that sponsor terrorism, meaning that Americans will soon be able to use credit cards in Cuba, go to a real U.S. embassy in Havana, and gradually make the whole place unbearable with our overwhelming presence , as is our way.