HAVANA, Cuba — Taking full advantage of their new license to travel abroad, Cuba’s leading dissidents have been on a whirlwind campaign in recent weeks, denouncing President Raul Castro’s government on three continents and promising new tactics to challenge its 53-year rule.

Now the question is: What happens when they return home?

For Cuba’s traveling dissidents, an anxious return

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

NEED TO KNOW

Another day, another dare. North Korea’s latest ploy to goad its neighbors is to cut off access to the industrial megapark it shares with South Korea.

More than 50,000 North Korean laborers and several hundred South Koreans work at in the Kaesong complex, which lies just across the demilitarized zone within the North’s borders. Some 850 South Koreans were inside when Pyongyang announced that they were personae non gratae. They’re allowed to leave, but no one else from across the border is being let in.

South Korea says it “deeply regrets” the entry ban, and will “take necessary measures” to ensure the safety of its citizens.

WANT TO KNOW

Colorado, or How One State Learned to Start Worrying and Control Guns. In the months a gunman shot dead 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora last July, the state’s lawmakers have introduced their strictest weapons control measures in years, ordering universal background checks and limits on ammunition. Today, President Barack Obama travels there to press other states to do the same.

The visit – one day, incidentally, after the UN finally agreed on a landmark treaty to regulate the sale of arms globally – is part of a series of presidential appearances calculated to put the gun control debate front and center before Congress returns to work next week. “I haven’t forgotten those kids” killed by gun violence, Obama said last week. He’ll try and make sure no one else has, either.

Good news on Nelson Mandela. According to the latest update on everyone’s favorite former South African president, he continues to respond satisfactorily to treatment in hospital and is making “steady improvement.”

Doctors say he is now “much better” than he was when he was first admitted with a lung infection, one week ago.

Critical Cubans beware. It’s been a whirlwind few weeks for Cuba’s most prominent dissidents, as they take advantage of their new freedom to travel to tour the world, raise money abroad, and denounce President Raul Castro’s government on three continents. But as they prepare to return in the coming days, observers will be watching to see if the activists face retaliatory measures from Cuban authorities.

GlobalPost ponders what will happen when Cuba’s traveling dissidents go home.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

You know what they say about Berlin… It’s covered in bombs. They don’t say that? Well they should, because just last night construction workers came across a 220-pound, unexploded World War II bomb, scarily close to the German capital’s main train station.

The area is now cordoned off, houses evacuated and trains either halted or diverted as authorities try to decide how best to defuse the device. Not that they don’t have experience: thousands of leftover bombs lie all over Germany, quietly – and sometimes not so quietly – rusting away.

HAVANA, Cuba — There are no elections scheduled any time soon in Cuba, but Miguel Diaz-Canel’s long campaign for president is already in full swing.

His public audition for Cuba’s top job began last month when he was named first vice president, designating him as chosen successor to Raul Castro. Since then, over the course of several carefully choreographed weeks, the island’s aging leaders have lifted him from relative obscurity to become Cuba’s man for all occasions.

The 52-year-old Diaz-Canel’s newfound visibility is a first step by Cuban authorities to prepare the public for a new face at the top. The vast majority of the island’s 11 million citizens was born after the 1959 Revolution, and has never lived under a ruler not named Castro.

VP Diaz-Canel: Cuba’s man on the make

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

NEED TO KNOW

Cuba without Castro? That’s like… well, the point is we don’t now what that’s like, since one or other of the brothers Castro has been running the country since the revolution in 1959. Not for much longer, though: President Raul has promised to retire in 2018.

Cuba’s first leader outside the family more than half a century is expected to be Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, who was yesterday appointed Castro’s first ever vice president and who, at 52, has spent his entire life under a Castro government. Viva la post-revolucion.

Just call Park Geun-hye Madam President. South Korea’s first female head of statewas sworn into office today, two months after beating her liberal opponents in a hotly fought election.

Top of President Park’s agenda, unsurprisingly, is everyone’s least favorite nuclear power: North Korea. In her inauguration address, Park called North Korea’s recent nuclear test “a challenge to the survival and future of the Korean people” and promised zero tolerance for any further threats. Ms Park, welcome (back) to the Blue House.

Italians are still deciding. Today is the second and final day of voting in what could prove one of the most important general elections in years – not just for Italy, but the whole of the euro zone.

Silvio Berlusconi is on the ballot yet again, but the current favorite is an ex-Communist with the center-left Democratic Party, Pier Luigi Bersani. Voting ends late this afternoon; the first exit poll results are due shortly after.

WANT TO KNOW

And the Oscar goes to… a motley crew. Best Picture for a movie that didn’t have a Best Director? Best Director for someone who’s not Steven Spielberg? Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis, again? Best Actress for an actress who wasn’t best? (Sorry Jennifer Lawrence, but Emmanuelle Riva rules.) These and other questionable bests, here.

And it wasn’t only us Riva fans who were left disgruntled: Iran has taken objection to the choice of ‘Argo’ for Best Picture, and not just because they thought ‘Lincoln’ was a shoo-in. Iranian state media is busy denouncing the movie as an “advertisement for the CIA” and a Zionist plot to misrepresent a memorable moment in the Islamic Revolution – and the fact that Michelle Obama presented the award live from the White House is only adding fuel to Tehran’s fire.

Nuclear disasters have a long half-life. Quarter of a century after the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, the surrounding region remains an eerie wasteland, where wolves and wild horses roam the woods and Geiger counters beep off the hook. GlobalPost takes a tour.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

The Harlem Shake isn’t just annoying – in Egypt, it can get you arrested. That’s what happened to four people who made a video of themselves and their friends dancing the Harlem Shake in front of the Pyramids. Egyptian authorities said the pranksters – one of whom was featured riding a camel in nought but his underwear, a bow tie and a gold trilby hat – had violated indecency laws with their “pelvis-thrusting dance.”

Come back, Gangnam Style, all is forgiven.

HAVANA, Cuba — During his 47-year rule, Fidel Castro developed a leadership PPmodel few management schools would endorse as a healthy approach to institutional robustness.

Government ministers, state company executives, hospital directors and other top figures tended to remain in power until brought down by illness, error or scandal. There was little precedent for stepping aside gracefully for younger leaders to gain management experience. Retirement was a kind of capitulation, a sign of weakness.

So President Raul Castro’s declaration in 2011 that he wanted the government to implement term limits for top posts was a clear and relatively radical break with his older brother’s iron-man leadership philosophy.

End of the Castro Era

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

HAVANA, Cuba — For most of the past 50 years, the Cuban government has had a straightforward strategy for keeping opposition activists from spreading their criticism abroad and linking up to international sympathizers.

It wouldn’t let them leave.

By blocking dissidents from traveling, the Castro government could punish their activism and limit the unflattering things they might tell foreign audiences about life under tropical socialism.

Over the decades, countless speaking invitations for Cuban dissidents from universities and foreign parliaments went unfulfilled. Awards were never picked up. Prize money went uncollected.

Now many of those activists are packing their bags.

Cuba’s dissidents go abroad

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

HAVANA, Cuba — A cholera outbreak in eastern Cuba has put the best and worst of the island’s image-conscious socialist system on stark display.

Cuba’s well-regarded public health system has responded aggressively to the disease, quickly treating patients, providing clean water and mobilizing a sanitation campaign. They say the rate of infection is diminishing, and the outbreak appears to be almost entirely limited to an area around the eastern city of Manzanillo, where it has killed three senior citizens and sickened at least 110.

Such information is critical to Cubans worried the disease could spread across the island and reach their families. Only, they’d have to be watching CNN to get it.

Continue reading at GlobalPost

HAVANA, Cuba — Niurka says she is “halfway out of the closet” as a lesbian in Cuban society. She doesn’t talk about her sexuality in public, and she’s thankful nobody asks at work. But with her curly cropped hair and more masculine dress — most notably gym shoes on an island where most women prefer sandals — she says she can’t conceal it.

On the streets of Havana, people sometimes call her “tortillera,” she says, at first just mouthing the prerogative Cuban Spanish term for a lesbian. Niurka repeats the word in a whisper, leaning across the institutional waiting room chairs so that nobody else can hear her on the broad, airy porch at the Cuban National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX).

 Read more on GlobalPost

HAVANA, Cuba — When heads of state meet this weekend at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, two contentious issues are expected to dominate the debate.

One will be Cuba’s exclusion from the meeting, since the Communist-ruled country isn’t a member of the Organization of American States (OAS), which organized the summit.

The other will be the growing backlash against the US-led drug war, including bold new talk of drug decriminalization.

Ironically, the two countries in the hemisphere that may be the most adamantly opposed to legalization efforts are Cuba and the United States.

But elsewhere in the region, more and more nations are losing patience with drug wars, as organized crime, corruption and savage violence spread, and security expenditures suck up public spending.

Continue reading: Can the US snuff out Latin America’s ‘legalize it’ push?