For every race in America, there’s another racial barrier. Ernesto Quiñonez examines the often contentious divide between Latinos and African-Americans. – Esquire Magazine

You won’t find too many portraits of Bill Clinton hanging in Cuban American households — adiós, Elián — but in Puerto Rican homes, he’s as familiar a face as any Catholic saint. RFK is the martyr of choice on Mexican Americans’ walls, while the late white-skinned president Joaquín Balaguer presides over Dominican barbershops across Manhattan’s Washington Heights. The Latino-American community is diverse and divided, some forty-four million people and twenty different nationalities struggling in their own way with immigration, assimilation, and political destiny. Yet for all the differences, there’s one thing language aside that many Latinos have in common: You won’t find too many pictures of dark-skinned leaders in their homes.

Growing up in Spanish Harlem in the eighties, I don’t recall too many Latinos of any nationality going crazy over Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. I recall a dark-skinned Panamanian church elder cheating on his wife with a white woman; when his dark-skinned Puerto Rican wife found out, she forgave him and dyed her hair blond, all the better to mimic the prize of the white world. I recall the urban legend of the black-skinned Latino with a pregnant wife who entered a botanica to ask the orishas to grant him a white baby. I recall terms like “un negro fino,” or “a delicate black,” meaning light black skin, thin lips, and a sharp nose, and I recall “un negro bembon,” which meant the opposite. I recall pecking orders and historic beefs and a belief that light skin was somehow preferable to dark, and I recall nobody thinking twice about it.”*

• Ana Isabelle de Puerto Rico is chosen ¡Viva el Sueño! Latin music superstar
• Raúl Martinez, founder and chief creative officer of ad agency AR New York, has been brought on as creative consultant to Vogue after the departure of the magazine’s design director.
• It is Better to “Spic”? When Were Ricans Ever the Model Minority?
• When Fidel Castro Dictated to the Old U.S. Media
• Pro-Castro mob attacks spouse of top Cuban blogger – Yoani Sánchez
• Efrain’s Corner: A Response to….”Puerto Ricans in New York Struggling…Still” Comment
• Puerto Ricans in New York Struggling…Still – Puerto Ricans are some of the most prominent figures in New York politics and culture, so some people are surprised when they hear that, overall, Puerto Ricans are among the poorest and least educated New Yorkers. Almost a third in New York are living in poverty.
• Democrats and Republicans deployed their heavy artillery Thursday in a heated congressional hearing to debate a bill seeking to end the travel ban to Cuba.
• Part of a Cuban blogger’s essay that advocates lifting the ban on U.S. travel to Cuba was read aloud at a House Foreign Affairs committee hearing. – Yoani Sánchez
• Celebrate Puerto Rican Heritage at the Comité Noviembre Puerto Rican Artisans & Health Fair – Saturday, Nov. 23 – Bronx, NYC
• Obama answers top Cuban blogger – Yoani Sanchez
• The Cuban band Septeto Nacional de Ignacio Piñeiro can legitimately claim to be inventors of salsa. But it last played in the United States when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, and there was no telling when it might be able to return — until the very slightest hint of a thaw in cultural relations between the United States and Cuba quietly brought the band to New York early this month.
• Puerto Rican, Latino Clergy, Theology Professors, Community Members To Condemn Brutal Hate Killing of Gay Puerto Rican Man
• 70% of Cuba’s Farmland Threatened by Erosion
• The University of Panama indefinitely suspended classes on Wednesday after confrontations between students and police during a protest against alleged U.S. involvement in plans to build new military installations.
• Who seriously wants the Cuban trade embargo?
• The Associated Press on Wednesday announced changes in its Latin America and Caribbean operations, closing a service limited to Puerto Rican news within Puerto Rico while adding editors and reporters elsewhere for the expanding Spanish market in the Americas.
• Report: Cuba’s human rights as abused under Raúl Castro as Fidel
• The Cuban ties that bind, 50 years on – Visiting her father’s homeland under newly relaxed travel restrictions is both invigorating and saddening.
• Poll: Cubans ‘frustrated’ over life in Cuba – A poll conducted in Cuba shows residents unhappy with their government and pessimistic about the economy.