Detained less often, but still oppressed

Slate has an article by Ben Mathis-Lilley about Cuba:

President Obama’s ostensible line of reasoning in negotiating a historic normalization of official relations with Cuba is that more exposure to outsiders and outside ideas (and outside money) will make Cuba more amenable to civil-society and economic reforms. The good news is that since the December of 2014 announcement of the countries’ agreement, there has already been some apparent progress.
The bad news is that, when you read the Reuters article, you find out that “arbitrarily detaining fewer dissidents” in Cuba still means detaining nearly two hundred dissidents in January of 2015 alone, for periods ranging from two hours to twelve days, according to the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
Most of the detentions were a response to the activism of recognized dissidents, some of whom were harassed on their way to attending church, the commission said. Three were held for handing out political pamphlets, the commission said.
Still, that’s better than the monthly average of over seven hundred political detainees per month in 2014. As the saying goes, “a journey of a thousand miles (toward eliminating the arbitrary detention of dissidents) begins with a single step.”

Rico says that they need to sort this out, and he needs to win the lottery, by May, so he can go to Havana for the Sesquicentennial of the arrival of the CSS Stonewall...