"As a crowd of a few hundred Cubans and Americans assembled inside the Embassy grounds, a larger crowd of Cubans, carefully organized and watched over by Cuban security forces, gathered outside as the official onlookers. They included a number of Cubans who, incongruously, waved miniature American flags as well as Cuban ones, while a series of gigantic Cuban flags hung from the façades of adjacent apartment buildings. The Cubans outside the American diplomatic legation periodically let out a cheer, especially when someone who appeared to be American approached."
"At a social gathering in Havana yesterday, a Cuban who has a close relative in one of the adjacent buildings told me that residents there had been visited by Cuban security officials, who informed them that they were expected to appear on the street today and to “be enthusiastic” in their slogans, cheers, and applause. Above all, they were expected to overwhelm and, if possible, drown out any anti-American or anti-imperialist shouts. The Cuban said that his relative had waggishly asked whether the anti-imperialist Cubans were now the “new enemy,” since, for many years, he had been expected to publicly condemn the Americans. In any event, all I heard outside the Embassy today were joyful noises, sincere or not."
“Deeply concerned by inhumaneness of drive hunt dolphin killing,” Ms. Kennedy wrote last week on Twitter. “USG opposes drive hunt fisheries,” she added, referring to the United States government’s stance on the hunts, in which dolphins are herded into coves so they can be hacked to death.I thought Obama was not a co-signer to American exceptionalism. What is Ms. Kennedy doing, promoting a version of our values over there? Who does she think is in the White House? George W Bush?
“How do you rein someone like her in?” said Dave Spector, an American who has worked in Japan for more than 25 years as a television commentator and who has followed Ms. Kennedy’s ambassadorship closely. “Her father is on the 50-cents coin, for crying out loud. She is bigger than life.”
Her fame is so formidable, he said, that she is vulnerable to people looking for meaning in her every move.
But others quickly criticized her for sticking her nose into something that they say is not her, or any other foreigner’s, business. Some angrily reminded her that Commodore Matthew C. Perry opened Japan at gunpoint in 1853 to secure ports for American whalers.
“We don’t want to be told such things by Americans who used to kill whales just for their oil,” said one user. Another was succinct: “Stupid woman! Go home!”
