Vox Sentences: Obama en Havana

An awkward and historic moment in Cuba; round 1 in Hulk Hogan vs. Gawker goes to Hulk; Tories in disarray in Britain.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Acercamiento

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• President Obama is in Havana, Cuba, today, on a historic trip that — coupled with other high-profile visits this week, like from the MLB's Tampa Bay Rays and Mick Jagger — have created a logistical frenzy the locals call "Hurricane Obama."

  [LA Times / Kate Linthicum]

• Part of that frenzy of activity was the arrest of dozens of dissidents, another reminder (as this New York Times video points out) that Cuba's human rights record is slow to improve.

  [NYT / Deborah Acosta and Neil Collier]

• This created an eventful joint press conference with Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro on Monday: American journalists asked Castro some tough questions on human rights (and got frustrated with his answers), while some Cuban journalists marveled that Castro was taking questions at all.

  [Washington Post / Karen DeYoung and Juliet Eilperin]

• This sort of awkward moment is only likely to increase as Cuba opens up to further American tourism. The fantasy Cuba that some Americans fetishize and the grim Castro-era reality that many Cuban Americans remember are both about to fade, to be replaced by something new and dimly understood.

  [Washington Post / Albert Laguna]

• Last fall, Vox's Johnny Harris went to Cuba. His photo essay captures a moment in time that may not last more than a few years, if that.

  [Vox / Johnny Harris]

• As the Financial Times's Cardiff Garcia points out, Obama's visit is intended to cap his achievement in rapprochement with Cuba. But for Cuba to improve in the long term, both countries will need to make policy changes after Obama leaves office.

  [Financial Times / Cardiff Garcia]

• But culturally, the winds are already shifting. Matt Vasilogambros, in Miami, depicts the generation gap among Cuban Americans: The anti-Castro generation is aging, and a new generation of pro-detente Cuban Americans is rising in its stead.

  [The Atlantic / Matt Vasilogambros]

• Arguably, America's entente with Cuba has distorted its view of Latin America as a region. If Obama's visit can normalize relations with Cuba, maybe it can take a healthier attitude, Catherine Addington hopes, toward Latin America as a whole.

  [The American Conservative / Catherine Addington]

Florida Man Gets $140 Million in Damages

John Pendygraft-Pool/Getty Images

• A Florida jury has awarded Terry Bollea (otherwise known as Hulk Hogan) more than $100 million in damages in his lawsuit against Gawker, regarding Gawker's posting of a sex tape involving Bollea in 2012.

  [Re/code / Peter Kafka]

• The jury declared that Gawker should pay Bollea $115 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitive damages. It also ruled that Gawker founder Nick Denton owes Bollea $10 million in punitive damages, and former Gawker editor in chief AJ Daulerio owes him $100,000.

  [The Hollywood Reporter / Eriq Gardner]

• Gawker's odds were never good at jury trial. It's confident that it can win on appeal, where judges might be more sensitive to freedom-of-the-press concerns. Legal experts agree.

  [Reuters / Joseph Ax]

• In the meantime, though, thanks to convoluted Florida laws, the company still might have to pay tens of millions of dollars on bond.

  [Capital New York / Peter Sterne]

• That's a lot of money. Denton opened Gawker to outside investment for the first time in January, reportedly to supply the necessary cash on hand for the Bollea verdict. But Gawker's financial future could still be precarious.

  [Re/code / Noah Kulwin]

• The verdict is less threatening to the rest of the media, in the eyes of most legal experts — they don't think the First Amendment implications of "don't publish sex tapes" are that dire.

  [NYT / Erik Eckholm]

• But the real fear in First Amendment cases, argues defense lawyer Scott Greenfield, is the "chilling effect": not the things that are punished because they go over the line, but the things editors never publish because they could come close to the line. And by definition, the public would never know what those were.

  [Simple Justice / Scott Greenfield]

The IDS of March

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

• The ruling Conservative Party is in disarray in Britain, after Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith resigned Friday in protest of 4 billion euro cuts to disability programs in the budget proposed by Chancellor George Osborne.

  [BBC ]

• The cuts Duncan Smith was protesting have now been reversed in the latest budget proposal, which leaves a 4 billion euro shortfall and doesn't undo the damage to the party.

  [The Guardian / Rowena Mason]

• Duncan Smith, apparently, really doesn't like Osborne. Neither do a lot of other Tories. But the resignation reveals deeper fault lines than that.

  [The Telegraph / Asa Bennett]

• For one thing, it's a demonstration of how, over the course of David Cameron's premiership, the demands of austerity budgeting have trampled the Tories' attempted embrace of "compassionate conservatism."

  [Politico Europe / Robert Colville]

• It's also a reminder of the Tories' continued ambivalence toward Europe: Duncan Smith is a strong supporter of "Brexit" (the British campaign to leave the European Union, which will come up for a voter referendum this spring), while Osborne is opposed to leaving.

  [Financial Times / George Parker]

MISCELLANEOUS

Drinking flat ginger ale apparently really does work on upset stomachs. [STAT / Megan Thielking]

• How Manhattan's SoHo ruined neighborhood names and produced monstrosities like NoLita and ProCro.

  [99% Invisible / Avery Trufelman]

• Despite having a constitutional right to a lawyer, hundreds of people in Louisiana are either on waitlists or straight-up refused representation by overworked, underfunded public defenders' offices.

  [NYT / Campbell Robertson]

• Art restorers are used to working with paintings done with old, durable pigments. What do they do now that materials have gotten cheaper — and deteriorate faster?

  [New Yorker / Ben Lerner]

• Old terrifying development: nuclear weapons in North Korea. New terrifying development: a growing push within South Korea to develop nukes too.

  [Washington Post / Ann Fifield]

VERBATIM

"In my role as a civilian contractor for the Department of Defense, I spent the first three months of 2004 torturing Iraqi prisoners. At the time, we were calling it enhanced interrogation, but that’s a phrase I don’t use anymore … We humiliated and degraded them, and ourselves." [NYT / Eric Fair]

• "The head of casting said, 'I couldn’t put you in a Shakespeare movie, because they didn’t have black people then.' He literally said that."

  [Wendell Pierce to NYT / Melena Ryzik]

• "You were kids, and now you’re not, and who you hang out as teenagers with sometimes depends way too much on exactly what you’re willing to drink or which drugs you’re interested in trying and how comfortable you are with various misdemeanors."

  [Autostraddle / Riese Bernard]

• "You look at two of my colleagues — Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg — for example, maybe there were two or three dissenting votes between the two of them. Now you look at my more recent colleagues, all extremely well-qualified for the Court, and the votes were I think strictly on party lines for the last three of them, or close to it. That doesn't make any sense. That suggests to me the process is being used for something other than ensuring the qualifications of the nominees."

  [C-SPAN / Chief Justice John Roberts]

• "You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

  [John Ehrlichman to Harper's / Dan Baum]

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