My big news? Baby Mariel!

There have been some exceptions, but during that time we’ve looked mostly outside of our own community to find “news.”

Though we always cared about finding the stories that were overlooked by mainstream media and bringing them back to you–as often as possible by reaching out to someone on the ground for a first-person dispatch like this one– we recently realized how much news is being overlooked within our own community.

In the three years since Matador was founded, we’ve created a large, tight-knit community of travelers and writers around the world who are living what we call the “Matador vision” every single day. That vision is to:

“…raise questions and share ideas and information in a way that isn’t bounded by geography or culture but ripples out from one traveler to another worldwide. Over time, these connections, dialogues, and relationships are affecting positive changes and creating new opportunities in the real world.”

Living the Matador vision looks different for each of the 12,000+ members of the Matador Travel community, the 1.6 million + people who visit our blogs each month, the nearly 8,000 people who follow us on Twitter, and the 70+ students enrolled in our travel writing school, Matador U.

For new member justdanny, who is currently serving in Iraq (which has a “hell of a sunrise,” he says), living the Matador vision means figuring out how to use the time and experiences he’s had at war once he gets back home. For HittheRoadJACK, it’s figuring out how to “hold on and continue believing in this dream” of living in their RV and “taking photographs and sharing our stories with others,” even when nothing seems to be going their way.

So long story short: go get your travel news elsewhere. Check Global Voices Online for politics and world news. Check other travel blogs for fare deals. And stay here to learn more about the incredible people who make up the Matador community.

Community Connection:

Want to contribute to Matador? Read our submission guidelines here.

If you have a story about what’s going on in your part of the world or if you want us to celebrate your good news, send me an email at julie@matadornetwork.com.

[Feature photo: qrtzcntrl]

Photo: Yamil Gonzales

After publishing a breaking news article about the military raid of Honduran President Zelaya’s home, his ousting, and subsequent pajama-clad plane ride to temporary exile in Costa Rica, Matador editors received some thoughtful comments and e-mails about the developing political situation in Tegucigalpa. We also continued to monitor news reports, both from mainstream media and the blogosphere, comparing viewpoints that were often at odds with one another.

Matador CEO Ross Borden came across this posting, in which someone claiming to be Honduran emphatically declared that the event was not a coup. One Matador reader wrote to say he was glad that the military had “kicked his [Zelaya's] ass out.” Folks were afire on Twitter, too: “There was no coup.” “We didn’t have a coup.” “Honduras did not have a coup on Sunday the 28th.”

All the chatter sent us back to the dictionary to look up the definition of a coup, and here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary yielded:

“a sudden violent seizure of power from a government.”

The definition says nothing about the motives of such a power grab, nor does it confer judgment on whether a coup is “right” or “wrong.” Instead, it suggests four specific criteria or conditions: the degree of swiftness (sudden); the type of force used (violent); the wresting of authority from one entity by another (seizure of power); and that the entity from which power is wrested is the government, which, in this case, was elected democratically.

What can we take from this definition in our analysis of the current political situation in Honduras?

The events that occurred over the weekend were, based on the information we have now, indeed a coup. Regardless of one’s feelings about the politics or legitimacy of the referendum President Zelaya had proposed to extend term limits (a referendum, I might add, that has similarly been proposed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and which resulted neither in a coup nor in conspiracy theories about leftist governments, though it was not without criticism), Zelaya was removed from his home in a military exercise that was clearly hostile according to this report by The New York Times.

Today, President Zelaya appeared before General Assembly of the United Nations, where he was received with support from the body that passed a resolution that “condemned the removal of Mr. Zelaya as a coup and demanded his ‘immediate and unconditional restoration’ as president.

Zelaya indicated he plans to return to Honduras on Thursday, potentially escorted by other world leaders and heads of state who support the resolution of the underlying political questions in a democratic, peaceful manner.

Now that we’ve had our semantics lesson, can we stop debating whether this was or wasn’t a coup and get back to some real dialogue?

Photo: Brayan Collazo

The U.S. embargo against Cuba–quite possibly the most comprehensive and punitive piece of foreign policy legislation in modern U.S. memory– may be marching toward history.

Just a few weeks ago, a significant change in US foreign policy towards Cuba was made by the US Treasury Department. Negating a decision enacted by the Bush administration five years ago, the Treasury Department, which is charged with the responsibility of overseeing and enforcing a considerable portion of US-Cuba policy, announced that effective immediately, Cuban Americans will be allowed to travel to Cuba to visit family once a year (as opposed to once every three years) and no time restrictions will be imposed on these visits.

Though it received fairly limited press, Matador’s own contributing editor, Christine Garvin, gave the policy change some thoughtful coverage on Brave New Traveler.

Now, there’s evidence that still more of the travel-related laws prohibiting Americans’ travel to Cuba are being chipped away at.

The Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act is a bipartisan bill introduced yesterday. It is co-sponsored by 118 members of the House (House Bill H.R. 874) and 20 Senators (Senate Bill S. 428) from both parties. The bill is intended to extend the right to travel to Cuba to all Americans… for the first time in decades.

The bill is being supported by special interest groups as diverse as the US dairy, wheat, and rice industries, as well the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

Though similar bills were proposed with regularity during the Bush administration, they quickly died before being passed.

Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, articulated my own feelings, which I expressed in this article, when she said:

“…the constitutional right to travel belongs to all Americans no matter what their ethnic background or national origin might be.

Under George Bush, we had ‘travel for nearly none’; under Barack Obama, we have progressed to ‘travel for some’; and under this legislation we can realize the goal of ‘travel for all’.

All of our goals – for U.S.-Cuba policy, for regional diplomacy, for boosting the U.S. economy, and for advancing our values and remaking our nation’s image-are best served by replacing our policy of isolation with engagement starting with ‘travel for all’.”

Though the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act, if passed and signed into legislation, is not expected to completely dismantle the trade embargo, the continued efforts to revise US foreign policy toward Cuba signal an important–and exciting–new chapter in the complicated history of US-Cuba relations.

As someone married to a Cuban American, and as a traveler who has visited Cuba many times (that’s me in this article’s feature photo, clowning around with my husband and my mother-in-law at her apartment in Centro Habana), I’m interested to see if the bill passes this go round.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

If you’re an American interested in traveling to Cuba off-the-radar before any policy changes take effect, check out two of my articles full of first-hand advice here and here. Find out how to prepare for your trip by watching some of my favorite films or reading some of the best books about Cuba; you can find the list here. Wondering what to do once you get there? Check out my nightlife recommendations.

Have you been to Cuba? Share your experiences! Would you love to visit Cuba? Share your thoughts about the Freedom to Travel Act below.

Photo: Zarko Drinic

Eva Holland and I have been co-editing Pulse for a while now, turning out an average of two pieces per day about international news. The stories have included quirky quick takes (Obama fingers, anyone?) to concise, thoughtful analyses about world developments overlooked by mainstream media.

As the Matador Network gets a face lift, we’ll continue to bring you news about travel–and we’re not talking about fare deals or new airline routes. Though Eva will be taking a sabbatical at the end of March as she hits the road, you can still count on Pulse to keep you up-to-date with what’s going on in this big world.