"Each person should feel happy at work. They should feel happy with their task as creators. They should instill all those around them with their revolutionary and creative enthusiasm." — Che Guevara.

In Tuesday's State of the State address, New York governor Andrew Cuomo is expected to announce that he will lead a trade mission to Cuba, The Wall Street Journal reports. It's been a tough year for Andrew! He's earned it.

Making good on the promise Cuba made in its landmark deal with longtime enemy the United States, the agreed upon 53 prisoners held in Havana on political charges have been released, American officials confirmed to Reuters.

One of the Cuban spies released in a prisoner exchange this month may have been imprisoned in California, but his sperm sure wasn't.

President Obama announced today the United States is establishing full diplomatic relations with Cuba, ending more than a half-century of official hostility. "To the Cuban people, America extends a hand of friendship," Obama said during a nationally televised press conference this afternoon.

President Obama announced from the White House this morning that Cuba has released American captive Alan Gross, who has been imprisoned in the country for five years.

The United States Agency for International Development—the same government agency that funded "Cuban Twitter" and sent undercover youths to stoke civil unrest in the country—infiltrated Cuba's hip hop scene for two years with hopes of "[sparking] a youth movement against the government," according to an Associated Press investigation.

After spending more than a decade in the notorious detention camp, six Guantanamo Bay prisoners have been transferred to Uruguay for resettlement, the Pentagon announced in a statement today.

According to an investigation by the Associated Press, the U.S. sent Latin American youths to Cuba to provoke rebellion, beginning in 2009. The workers—all Venezuelan, Peruvian, and Costa Rican—entered the country by posing as tourists, and in some cases, HIV educators.

Back in 2012, the Daily Caller whipped up a scandal around Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who, the conservative blog alleged, liked his prostitutes Dominican and underaged. That story turned out to be fake, and now, it seems like forces even more nefarious than Tucker Carlson were behind it.

For more than two years, the United States secretly funded and developed ZunZuneo, a text-based social media platform, in order to encourage an uprising against the Cuban government, according to a report in the Associated Press. USAID spent at least $1.6 million—money that was publicly earmarked for programs in Pakistan—on the the clandestine project, which, at its peak, reached 40,000 Cubans and involved front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands.

There are plenty of reasons to be cross with President Barack H. Obama. Glad-handing with Raul Castro—the Fredo Corleone of Cuba's ruling Castro family—isn't one of them.

The Cuban Foreign Ministry released a statement Tuesday, admitting ownership of the weapons found aboard a North Korean ship in Panama on Monday. The "obsolete defensive weaponry," which included anti-aircraft guns and two MiG-21 aircraft, was on its way to North Korea for repair, according to the statement.

Drug enforcement officials stopped a North Korean vessel on its way through the Panama Canal Monday, only to find sophisticated missile material "hidden in a consignment of sugar."

NSA Leaker Edward Snowden was supposed to be on Aeroflot Flight 180 from Moscow to Havana. He wasn't. But "dozens" of journalists are. It just took off. And there's no booze service on board. Welcome to the Cuban Whistleblower Crisis.

Fugitive cop-killer Joanne Chesimard has become the first woman on America's Most Wanted Terrorists List, joining a previously all male list of super villains. Chesimard, who also goes by the aliases "Sister-Love Chesimard" and "Joan Davis," murdered a New Jersey state trooper 40 years ago today. Chesimard busted out of prison and has lived in Cuba ever since.

President Obama showed his true colors in an interview on Today Wednesday morning, when host Savannah Guthrie asked if he had been aware that two normal, average American citizens named Beyoncé and Jay-Z were planning a visit to Cuba before the trip occurred.

In an effort to further flesh out his mysterious list of 99 problems, Jay-Z has released a track called "Open Letter" that addresses a couple of his more recent predicaments.

Excuse me, miss: did you really engage in cultural exchange with the Cuban people? Florida Senator Marco Rubio is ringing the alarm over Beyoncé and Jay-Z's fifth-anniversary trip to Cuba last week, which he claims was "seized on for propaganda purposes" by the Castro regime. The brief vacation was apparently given the green light by the Treasury Department, which licenses trips to Cuba for "educational exchange activities that will result in meaningful interaction"; according to the New York Times, the crazy-in-love couple "visited the children's theater group La Colmenita, where Beyoncé danced with little girls dressed as bumblebees," and Beyoncé, apparently feelin' it, "half-danced" during a performance by the Cuban Contemporary Dance Company on Friday, which would seem to qualify (if she were a boy she might have, as her husband did, enjoy "a Cuban cigar on the balcony of their government-owned hotel, the Saratoga"). According to Academic Arrangements Abroad, which planned and arranged the trip, the officials that run this town (well really, who run the world of Cuba) had no foreknowledge of the vacation and "struggled to provide adequate security" (What? Who? we imagine them saying), but worked it out—and got Beyoncé bodies to protect her—in the end. "If interested in what life really like in #Cuba @S_C_," Rubio tweeted, "should have visited persecuted rapper #AngelYunierRemon #99problems&dictatorsareone." Listen, Marco: I know you have sweet dreams of showing Jay-Z and his naughty girl what you got, and I get that it's a hard knock life for politicians representing Cuban exiles—can't knock the hustle for Florida Senators—but surely you can work it out without resorting to bad puns based on Jay-Z and Beyoncé tracks? It's like you're making the songs cry. Move on to the next one. [Reuters | TPM | NYT]

The Heritage Foundation has released its annual list of the world's freest economies and, wouldn't you know it, the Asia-Pacific region is number one. Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand are all on top while the world's largest economy, America's, barely cracks the top ten.