Cuban intellectual and former diplomat Professor Carlos Alzugaray is interviewed by Newsclick. He dwells on a variety of subjects related to the political economy of Latin America, but focuses in particular on the role, character and dimensions of US hegemony in the continent today. This is the first part of the interview conducted by Newsclick.

Cuban Ambassador to India, Mr. Ramirez talks about the challenges and developments made in the field of agriculture and science in last fifty one years.

Next year will mark a half-century since the Bay of Pigs, the failed assault on Fidel Castro’s young regime in Cuba that helped ignite the long cold war across the Straits of Florida. Although Castro himself has largely disappeared from the public stage, replaced at the helm by his brother Raúl, most Americans still think of Cuba as the dictatorship that time forgot – a poor, sweltering island of rusted 1950s-era automobiles that clings against all sense to the decaying vestiges of Communist orthodoxy.

An international cast of luminaries who traveled to Cuba and met with Fidel Castro, as well as top members of his government and military, talk about their experiences with the man who ruled the island for 49 years in U.S. documentarian Estela Bravo's "Anecdotas Sobre Fidel," or "Fidel Anecdotes."

The UN general assembly has overwhelmingly condemned the US economic embargo against Cuba, adding pressure on the Obama administration to abandon its 47-year-old policy.