03/28/2024 | 57m 46s | Video has closed captioning.
Thursday on the NewsHour, disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried is sentenced to 25 years in prison for defrauding investors. The sister of the American journalist jailed in Russia for a year speaks out about his detention. Plus, the legacy and impact of the late senator and vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman.
Aired: 03/28/24
Expired: 04/27/24
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Good evening.
I'm William Brangham.
Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz are away.
On the "NewsHour" tonight: Disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried is sentenced to 25 years in prison for defrauding investors.
Then, the sister of the American journalist jailed in Russia for a year speaks out about his detention.
DANIELLE GERSHKOVICH, Sister of Evan Gershkovich: We have no other choice.
We have to keep going.
We have to stay positive, optimistic, and I know we're going to get him home.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And the legacy and impact of the late Connecticut Senator and vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman.
(BREAK) WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Welcome to the "NewsHour."
Huge barges are carrying cranes to Baltimore tonight to clear away the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Officials say that has to happen before divers can locate the bodies of the four maintenance workers that are still missing.
Two others have been recovered.
Today, the collapsed bridge and the container ship that struck it still blocked access to the port.
Maryland's governor asked for $60 million in federal funding to start the cleanup.
GOV.
WES MOORE (D-MD): The best minds in the world are coming together to collect the information that we need to move forward with speed and safety in our response to this collapse.
Government is working hand in hand with industry to investigate the area, to clear the wreck, and to move the ship.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: President Biden has pledged the federal government will cover the full cost of reconstruction.
The U.N.'s court ordered Israel today to open more land crossings into Gaza to allow in more food, water, and other aid.
The legally binding order arose from a South African lawsuit accusing Israel of genocide.
Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon killed 16 people on Wednesday.
One Israeli was killed by Hezbollah rockets.
It was the deadliest day in five months of border clashes.
Russian investigators have arrested a 12 suspect in the Moscow concert attack.
They also claimed today the attackers were financed by Ukrainian nationalists, but gave no evidence.
Gunmen opened fire and set off explosives at the site near Moscow last Friday.
The building burned and at least 143 people died.
The Islamic State group claimed again today that it carried out the attack.
Russia used its veto today to end 14 years of the U.N. monitoring sanctions on North Korea's nuclear program.
The Russians insisted they haven't worked.
The U.S. charged Moscow is hiding its own violations of those sanctions, as it buys North Korean weapons to use against Ukraine.
The vote in the Security Council would have extended the monitoring effort for another year.
American diplomats vowed to press on.
ROBERT WOOD, Deputy U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations: Moscow has undermined the prospect of a peaceful diplomatic resolution of one of the world's most dangerous nuclear proliferation issues.
Russia, you silenced the panel of experts today, but you will never silence those of us who stand in support of the global nonproliferation regime.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The North Korean sanctions themselves will remain in place, but there will be no way to check how effective they are.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning, the war in Ukraine could expand if F-16 fighter jets from the West get involved.
Putin spoke as he toured a helicopter base.
He said Ukraine's new jet fighters won't matter, and even if they're based in neighboring states, they could still be attacked.
VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russian President (through translator): First, if they do supply F-16s, this will not change the situation the battlefield.
Of course, if they are used from airfields in third countries, they become legitimate targets for us, wherever they might be located.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Multiple countries have agreed to send the American-made jets to Ukraine.
Back in this country, former President Trump attended the wake for a New York City policeman, as his campaign focuses on violent crime.
Mr. Trump visited Massapequa, New York, where the wake for Officer Jonathan Diller took place.
He was fatally shot during a traffic stop this week.
Meanwhile, Biden campaign officials say a fund-raiser in New York tonight will take in a record $25 million.
President Biden traveled to the city today with former President Obama.
They will be joined by former President Clinton for tonight's event at Radio City Music Hall.
The federal government is changing how it categorizes race and ethnicity for the first time in 27 years.
Today's announcement says government forms will combine the categories into one question, with the option to check multiple boxes.
A new Middle Eastern and North African category will also be added.
The goal is to get more accurate, insightful data.
The Biden administration today reinstated certain rules to protect threatened species of plants and animals that had been rescinded by the Trump administration in 2019.
The regulations mandate blanket protections for newly classified species, and officials won't have to consider economic impacts when deciding if a species needs protection.
Environmental groups had urged the administration's to rescind all the 2019 changes.
And on Wall Street, stocks edged higher again to finish a strong quarter.
The Dow Jones industrial average gained 47 points to close at 39807.
The Nasdaq fell 20 points.
The S&P 500 added five.
Still to come on the "NewsHour": Cuban musicians struggle to navigate the constantly shifting diplomatic relations with the U.S.; a new book chronicles the long fight for women's economic empowerment; and Major League Baseball begins a new season with a controversy over uniforms.
The former FTX crypto currency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison today for what prosecutors said was one of the biggest financial crimes in U.S. history.
A judge handed down that sentence after a jury this fall found Bankman-Fried guilty of seven different counts relating to fraud and money laundering.
Bankman-Fried was found to have stolen at least $8 billion from FTX customers.
He was also ordered to pay $11 billion today.
Bankman-Fried has said he will appeal.
For a closer look at this case, we're joined by David Yaffe-Bellany.
He's covered this saga for years for The New York Times.
David, thank you so much for being here.
You were in the courtroom today when that sentence was handed down.
I wonder, what stood out to you the most from the judge's sentence?
DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY, The New York Times: I think what I was struck by the most was some of the language that the judge used to kind of justify the length of the sentence.
He didn't just say, these were really serious crimes.
He said that Sam Bankman-Fried had to go to prison for 25 years because, if he was let out any earlier, he might commit more crimes.
Basically, there's this sense that he hasn't really expressed remorse for what happened, and were he to get out, he might pitch a new company and try to commit a similar fraud to the one that brought down FTX.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Is this because, all along, Bankman-Fried really hasn't expressed a great deal of remorse about this, which I know judges love to see?
DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: Yes, I mean, it's complicated.
He will say that he's sorry about what happened and that he's apologized to customers, he's apologized to employees of FTX, but he obviously challenged the charges against him.
He's planning to appeal.
So he hasn't apologized for committing crimes, because it remains his position that he hasn't committed any crimes.
But that certainly hurt him at the sentencing stage.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: For people who have not been following this as closely as you have, can you just remind us of the basic sort of flow of what happened here?
How did FTX come crumbling down?
DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: Sure.
So, just 18 months ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was a huge star in the business world.
He ran a cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, which was basically a platform where you could take your dollars and spend them to buy Bitcoin or Ether or other cryptocurrencies.
And you could also store your crypto on the platform.
So it kind of operated as a bank as well.
And it became really popular as the crypto industry grew and grew.
And then, in November 2022, there was essentially a run on the bank.
And that exposed a big $8 billion hole in the money that FTX was supposed to be holding on behalf of its customers.
And that kind of kick-started the series of events that kind of brought the whole edifice crashing down.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And so those people who had -- quote, unquote -- "banked their money" in his exchanges, they lost all the money?
Those are the victims in this case?
DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: Those are sort of one subset of the victims.
They're probably the largest subset.
But the other victims include venture capital investors who put in more than a billion dollars into FTX and also lenders who gave money to companies in Bankman-Fried's empire.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So the $11 billion that he's been ordered to pay, who is that or where is that supposed to go?
DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: That's actually going to the U.S. government.
That's not restitution that's going to victims.
But, really, that number is kind of academic because Bankman-Fried does not have $11 billion sitting around that he can just disburse to people.
And really the root for recoveries for the customers of FTX is through the bankruptcy process.
So you have got a team of lawyers that took over the exchange after it collapsed and have spent the last almost year-and-a-half kind of cobbling together assets wherever they can find them to try to create a pool of funds that can be returned to the people who lost their money.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But, so far, those people have not yet been made whole, but that is the hope and/or expectation?
DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: That's the hope.
And the bankruptcy lawyers have said they're expecting to make customers whole, but what being made whole means is complicated.
They will receive the dollar value of their holdings on the FTX platform as of November 2022, when the bankruptcy happened.
So that doesn't account for the rapid surge in cryptocurrency prices over that period.
So if you had one Bitcoin on FTX and it was worth $20,000 in November, you will get $20,000 back, even though that Bitcoin would be worth $70,000 today.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I see.
Many people have seen this case as kind of an overarching stain on cryptocurrency writ large.
And I wonder, do you think that's fair, and is that is actually what is happening?
Like, does this say anything about cryptocurrency itself, or is this just about one person's potential crime here?
DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: I think there are specific characteristics of the crypto industry that sort of helped enable this fraud.
One sort of mechanism that Bankman-Fried was using to kind of cover up some of his crimes was that he was kind of inventing new currencies, new digital currencies, and then putting them up as collateral to borrow actual money from lenders.
And so that's sort of a unique aspect of this kind of strange world of digital money that kind of helped enable the fraud.
I think it's also the case that the crypto world has kind of attracted a type of person who's sort of inclined toward gambling, who wants to take lots of risks.
And that sort of says a lot about the culture of the industry, and it's part of what laid the foundation for this massive disaster.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, David Yaffe-Bellany of The New York Times, thank you so much.
DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY: Thanks for having me.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: One year ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained by Russian police.
He has been in detention ever since on espionage charges, an accusation that the U.S. and his employer strongly deny.
Nick Schifrin has more about the efforts to free him.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Last November, the United States made Russia an offer, a trade for two Americans the U.S. labels wrongfully detained, former Marine Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich.
Russia rejected it.
The administration says it continues to try and find a deal that Russia might accept.
In the meantime, Whelan and Gershkovich wait.
This week, Gershkovich appeared in court, and, for the fifth time, a judge extended his detention.
He is accused of acting on behalf of the U.S. government to collect state secrets, the first American journalist facing Russian espionage charges in more than 35 years.
The U.S. strongly denies the allegations, as U.S.
Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy said this week.
LYNNE TRACY, U.S.
Ambassador to Russia: The accusations against Evan are categorically untrue.
They are not a different interpretation of circumstances.
They are fiction.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Gershkovich moved to Russia in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times, before joining The Journal in 2022.
He loved his work.
He loved traveling through Russia, and he has shown remarkable resilience, strength, and even good humor throughout this ordeal.
I'm now joined in the studio by Evan's sister, Danielle Gershkovich, and Almar Latour, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones.
Thank you very much, both of you.
Welcome back to the "NewsHour."
Danielle, let me start with you.
How's your brother doing?
DANIELLE GERSHKOVICH, Sister of Evan Gershkovich: I'm so amazed by him.
He still is himself.
I look at the courtroom footage and photos, and I recognize all his little mannerisms.
And he writes me letters.
We write letters to each other about once a week, and they're still so full of humor.
It's still my little brother.
We get to correspond.
But I know he works incredibly hard to keep his spirits up.
He has a very strict routine for himself.
He reads, he writes, he meditates, and he works really hard to be able to, yes, stay... NICK SCHIFRIN: To stay healthy, yes.
DANIELLE GERSHKOVICH: Yes.
Yes.
NICK SCHIFRIN: What has he managed to tell you about the conditions that he faces?
DANIELLE GERSHKOVICH: Well, I know that he is in a small cell, and he gets about an hour exercise a day.
And he's cut off from his family, from his friends, from the world, and his job that he loves so much.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Almar Latour, the conviction rate in Russian courts is higher than 90 percent.
Is it possible for Evan to receive a fair trial, or will his release necessarily come from some kind of swap?
ALMAR LATOUR, Dow Jones CEO/The Wall Street Journal Publisher: I'm afraid that the conviction rate for espionage cases is actually even higher than that.
And so, this trial, as you heard Ambassador - - the ambassador say just now, this is fiction.
And so the farcical performance that's taking place would not stop at a pretrial detention.
I assume that that would continue through trial as well, if a trial indeed takes place, and that we still hope that something can happen before a trial would start.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Do you refer to Evan as a hostage?
Do you consider him a hostage of the Russian government?
ALMAR LATOUR: Absolutely.
We're dealing with a department within the State Department called the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs that is quarterbacking at least some of the efforts to release Evan.
And that name says it all.
But even beyond that designation by the government, this is a hostage affair.
We have seen that confirmed again and again, just the transactional nature of how even Putin himself has addressed this.
It keeps underscoring that this is a game and Evan is a pawn in a geopolitical play.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Danielle, you're here in D.C. You're not meeting any officials this week, but do you believe the Biden administration is doing all it can to release your brother?
DANIELLE GERSHKOVICH: President Biden made a promise to our family.
This is personal for him.
He's going to do whatever it takes.
And we know the White House is taking this very seriously.
And there's a team of experts working around the clock.
But, unfortunately, it's an opaque case.
So we just have to continue to have faith in the government.
And, in the meantime, we can just continue to keep the spotlight on Evan, so he's not forgotten.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Almar Latour, let me ask you about some of those details.
It is opaque, and this is a government-to-government issue.
But, as I said at the top, there has been a prisoner swap on the table that the U.S. offered to Russia.
Putin has said that he's still open to agreement.
The U.S. has said it is still trying to find an agreement.
Has the administration informed you about any efforts that it is still trying to make to get this swap done?
ALMAR LATOUR: We talk to the administration as often as we can.
And they have been, I must say, quite accessible throughout this very, very long year.
And even this week, there was contact, and there will be ongoing contact.
And so we get updates on how attempts at freeing Evan evolve all the time.
And this goes with ups and downs, as with any sort of complicated endeavor.
And so we have come close at certain points, and we hope, one of these days, we can cross that threshold.
I think the administration has done a remarkable job of showing its engagement, showing its commitment, and making a public commitment, including to Danielle and her family.
But, ultimately, this is a binary outcome.
Either Evan is imprisoned or he's free.
And so we cannot judge ourselves until we get to that point of getting Evan out of prison.
NICK SCHIFRIN: You said there were contacts this week.
Can you reveal any more details about those contacts?
ALMAR LATOUR: No, not specifically.
By that, I only mean to say that there are regular interactions and they take place at regular intervals just to make sure that we understand how we can be helpful and that we understand that the government is indeed focused on Evan, as it should be, not just with public commitments, but also with actions.
And we have full faith that that will be seen through to its hopefully natural conclusion, which will be his release.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The Journal does not have anyone on the ground in Russia.
Many news organizations does not have anyone on the ground in Russia.
What do you think the impact of that is?
ALMAR LATOUR: Well, it's the desired impact from an autocratic regime that holds its own people and the truth in extreme disregard.
So there's been a very active, proactive discouragement of proper journalism for the better part of two decades.
That's only intensified in the past couple years and really has reached a crescendo in the past year.
There are numerous journalists, Russian and foreign journalists, imprisoned in Russia.
There are two American journalists currently imprisoned there.
And the signal is, the truth is dangerous to the Putin regime, and so don't try to offer the truth.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Danielle, let me end back to you.
I asked about how Evan was doing.
How are you doing?
How's your family doing?
DANIELLE GERSHKOVICH: I'm sure you can imagine this has been a very difficult year for us, filled with a lot of uncertainty.
But whatever we're going through, I know it's harder for Evan, and we just take so much inspiration from his strength.
And we have no other choice.
We have to keep going.
We have to stay positive, optimistic.
And I know we're going to get him home.
NICK SCHIFRIN: And, finally, what makes him a good journalist?
DANIELLE GERSHKOVICH: I just have to smile, because it's my brother.
I love him so much.
And he's just such a passionate, curious, driven person.
He loves travel.
He loves writing.
All of these things came together, and he realized that this is his passion.
And we're so proud of him that he got to do that.
I hope he can get back to it.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Absolutely.
We all do.
Danielle Gershkovich, Almar Latour, thank you very much to you both.
DANIELLE GERSHKOVICH: Thank you so much.
ALMAR LATOUR: Thank you so much.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Memories and condolences are pouring in for former senator Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent who never shied away from bucking the party line.
Lieberman had a lengthy political history, serving more than four decades in both his home state of Connecticut's capital, as well as the nation's.
He was also the first Jewish candidate on a major-party ticket when Al Gore chose him as his running mate in 2,000.
For a deeper look at his life and legacy, I'm joined by one of his longtime friends and former colleagues.
That is Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.
Senator, thank you so much for being here.
And I'm very sorry to you for the loss of your friend.
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT): Thank you.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Your careers followed these very similar paths, from statehouse, state attorney general, to the U.S. Senate, where you serve together.
How would you like people to remember your friend and colleague?
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: We had lives and families that intertwined.
And I knew Joe personally for more than 50 years.
And we sometimes disagreed, as friends do.
But he was always affable and amiable even in our toughest disagreements, on the Iraq War, for example.
That was key to his bipartisanship, his reaching across the aisle, his bringing people together and bridging gaps.
So I think he should be remembered as a peacemaker, a consensus-builder, someone who tried to reach across the aisle, as the saying goes.
Tempers in the United States Senate can frequently flare.
Personalities can clash.
Joe was respected as someone who really worked with other people in a very serious, but personable way.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I mean, as you're noting, some people have been saying that Senator Lieberman, whether he was your political ally or not, could change from day to day.
And that independence won him a great deal of praise, as you are showering on him, and some criticism.
How did you view that trait of his?
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: He was ferociously independent, a maverick, and he thought through positions, but he also listened.
In my job as a U.S. senator and earlier as attorney general, I have said to people the most important thing I do is to listen.
And Joe was a great listener, and I will always remember him listening to me, but also to others.
He recognized that every person has a story, a point of view that is worth hearing.
And he was a person of deep conscience and conviction, which led to his independence and his forging his own path on a lot of important issues.
But he was also, let's be very blunt, a Democrat on issues like gun violence prevention, gay rights, women's reproductive health care, civil rights, consumer protection, environmental values.
He was, at heart, in many ways, a Democrat, even though he disagreed with us from time to time.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Some people have noted with his passing that it seems to be that there's very little space anymore for moderates like him.
Do you think, for any of the young Joe Lieberman types out there, that they would have a shot in politics in America today?
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: Definitely.
You know, people are hungry for bipartisanship.
They're really so desperate for folks in our positions who want to get things done, which was Joe's mission: How do we accomplish something?
He accomplished, with the intelligence community reform, ending the silos that prevent us from recognizing 9/11 before it occurred.
He built the Department of Homeland Security and the modern intelligence community as we know it now that has probably saved us countless times from terrorist attacks, as well as other law enforcement.
And that is just one of his accomplishments.
But he also had a very personal side, which is important in politics.
I was talking to one of his former colleagues from Louisiana, and he was telling me that he and Joe formed the Kosher Cajun Caucus... (LAUGHTER) SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: ... Louisiana and kosher Connecticut.
And they would invite colleagues to meals that they took from the recipes that they each brought to the Kosher Cajun kitchen.
And it just is one tiny example of how he tried to bring people together.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: In recent months, as you know, Senator Lieberman was helping lead efforts to find a candidate for the No Labels, this third-party idea.
And separate from that organization's intentions, many people in your party felt that that effort, if they found a candidate that could run for presidency, would in essence make Donald Trump the likely next president and were very critical of that.
Do you share that belief?
And did you ever talk with him about that?
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: I spoke to Joe about principally Donald Trump and what might happen if No Labels caused the election of Donald Trump, which was a nightmare for him, as it is for me.
And Joe opposed Donald Trump in 2016.
He opposed Donald Trump in 2020.
I believe he would have opposed Donald Trump in 2024 and would have supported Joe Biden.
And the reason is that Donald Trump was an anathema to all of those values and principles that Joe Lieberman holds dear.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, thank you so much for being here.
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: Thank you.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The on-again/off-again diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba have made it much harder for Cuban musicians to travel to the U.S. for this summer's music festivals.
Special correspondent Mike Cerre from Havana for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
MIKE CERRE: Since the broad-based success of the 1999 Buena Vista Social Club film and album celebrating Cuban musicians, there has been a succession of virtuoso Cuban musicians, like Roberto Fonseca, who have regularly played major music festivals and venues throughout the U.S. ROBERTO FONSECA, Musician: United States is a great and important platform for young musicians.
MIKE CERRE: But changes in U.S. visa procedures are making it more difficult for this current generation of Cuban musicians, like Rodrigo Garcia Ameneiros and his wife, Tania Haase Solorzano.
They have spent much of the past year trying to get visas to play at festivals and schools in the United States they have been invited to.
RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS, Musician: No, we don't have a guarantee, and we are trying to, but, yes, it's hard to process.
MIKE CERRE: Like most Cuban jazz musicians, Rodrigo and Tania are classically trained graduates of Cuba's national music schools they attended from elementary school through college.
They have spent the majority of their lives preparing for professional music careers and joining the ranks of Cuba's world-class musicians.
RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS: Eight years or 10, we start in the school, like a career.
At that age, you are not thinking in a career.
But we had that... TANIA HAASE SOLORZANO, Musician: Opportunity.
RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS: Yes, opportunity, but, also, it's like a responsibility.
MIKE CERRE: During the last week of the Trump administration in 2020, the U.S. shut down its embassy in Havana, accusing Cuba of state-supported terrorism.
Since then, most Cuban musicians now have to travel to a third country with a U.S. embassy just to apply for a visa.
BILL MARTINEZ, Immigration Attorney: It's devastating, emotionally and otherwise.
It's -- the toll is at so many levels.
MIKE CERRE: Immigration attorney Bill Martinez helped get the original Buena Vista Social Club musicians into the U.S. for their celebrated Carnegie Hall debut in 1998.
He continues helping them and other Cuban musicians work through their visa application nightmares.
BILL MARTINEZ: The big change is that administrative processing, which happens after the consular interviews, is causing long delays and sometimes resulting in the cancellation of tours.
MIKE CERRE: And is it predictable?
Do you know, when you apply for a visa, how long it's going to take?
BILL MARTINEZ: You can never know.
It's absolutely unpredictable.
MIKE CERRE: At this year's annual Havana International Jazz Festival held every January for showcasing Cuban and other international artists, American music promoters were struggling to book Cuban performers for their upcoming festivals due to visa issues.
KEVIN BALL, Festival Booker: You have to have the visa in order to get the booking.
When they get the booking, you have to -- it's kind of like a double-edge sword, right?
It's like, what came first, the chicken or the egg?
MIKE CERRE: Kevin Ball and Lonnie Smith (ph) represent jazz festivals in North Carolina and Texas.
Rodrigo's uncle and teacher, pianist Aldo Lopez-Gavilan, started playing major summer music festivals like this one in Napa Valley in 2017 after the Obama administration started normalizing relations and travel protocols with Cuba.
But most of them were reversed by his successor, and the Biden administration has done little to lift the new restrictions during an election year.
RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS: If you are coming tomorrow and you tell me, can you be in San Francisco next week to work, of course not.
(LAUGHTER) RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS: We have to do it with a lot of time.
MIKE CERRE: While they waited indefinitely for their visas, American audiences could only see them perform in Old Havana's tourist restaurants, which have also been impacted by the added U.S. restrictions on Americans and foreigners traveling to Cuba.
Their band is paid in cash and in meals, which have become even more valuable this year due to the government's latest round of food price hikes and rationing.
RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS: We know a lot of cases of musicians going out of the country, not because they don't want to be here.
Because it's pretty hard to get a job.
MIKE CERRE: Most of the cast for last year's off-Broadway musical revival of the Buena Vista Social Club film were Cuban musicians who had previously left their country for professional reasons.
According to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, nearly a half-a-million Cubans are believed to have migrated to the U.S. in just the last two years due to their declining economy.
RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS: Our proposal at this moment is to live here in Cuba and to go and just return at the end.
I think that's about love to the family, to our home, and also to our country.
MIKE CERRE: As headliners at this year's Havana International Jazz Festival, Rodrigo's mother and Tania's extended music families joined them on stage to honor Cuba's rich musical history and culture they are dedicated to preserving.
RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS: This concert is about the history of the country, talking about loss, how we suffer sometimes with immigration.
It's a place to be happy and also to cry together.
TANIA HAASE SOLORZANO: We are always hoping that it will be better for all of us.
RODRIGO GARCIA AMENEIROS: Yes.
I mean, think, I think that the restrictions are just stopping the interchange between one and the other people.
A lot of culture is being stopped.
MIKE CERRE: After intensive lobbying by festival promoters and government officials on both sides of the process, Rodrigo and Tania received educational and cultural visas to salvage some of their American invitations, as long as they don't get paid to perform in the U.S. For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Mike Cerre in Havana, Cuba.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: A new book by journalist Josie Cox charts the fight that women have waged to try and close the gender pay gap and the many hurdles they faced in that struggle.
"Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality" tells the story of the women who challenged the system.
Amna Nawaz recently sat down with one of those women and the book's author.
AMNA NAWAZ: These days, 98-year-old Anna Mae Krier is always on the move, often in her cherry red Chevy pickup truck.
But her first big move eight decades ago was from her small town in North Dakota on a train to Seattle, Washington, where the teen joined the work force building B-17 bombers during World War II.
ANNA MAE KRIER, Built B-17 Bombers: This was one of my pay stubs at Boeing.
Can you imagine that?
AMNA NAWAZ: The real-life Rosie the Riveter was inspiration for journalist Josie Cox's book, in which she writes about Krier being paid just $0.83 an hour, half what the men made for the same job.
ANNA MAE KRIER: I don't think it's fair.
If you can do the job the same as a man, why should you get paid less?
I don't understand that.
And I fought that for quite a few years.
AMNA NAWAZ: All these years later, when you look back at the role that you played, do you feel you got the credit that you deserved?
ANNA MAE KRIER: Oh, no.
When the war was over, the men came home to flags, flying flags, the parades, everything.
They got all the benefits, the G.I.
Bills.
They got to go back to school.
They got everything.
When Rosie came home, she came home with a pink slip.
We had so many widows and women who, now, when they were let go, they had no income, no place to go.
AMNA NAWAZ: Josie I want to bring you in here.
What did that war and that moment in time represent for women in the work force?
JOSIE COX, Author, "Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality": I mean, in a way, it was everything, because it was the first time that women in significant numbers had the opportunity, out of necessity, to come into the paid labor market.
And I think it was the first time that women and men actually realized and had to admit that many women were actually just as capable at doing all the jobs that had previously been reserved for men and had been the domain of men.
AMNA NAWAZ: Cox's book examines the many ways gender discrimination in America was long enshrined into law and features the barrier-breaking work of civil rights activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray.
Murray graduated as the only woman in her law school class at Howard University, and first coined the term Jane Crow to describe the misogyny she endured.
ROSITA STEVENS-HOLSEY, Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice: I think in some ways she was very ahead of her time.
And then in other ways, she really, as a female and as a Black female, did not have very many opportunities.
AMNA NAWAZ: Rosita Stevens-Holsey is Murray's niece and on the board of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice.
She says the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turned to Murray's legal theories to argue her own cases and, in Murray's boundary-pushing life, she rejected gender norms and forged an intersectional approach to equality.
ROSITA STEVENS-HOLSEY: She would do things I thought other people didn't do.
For example, I have seen her smoke a cigarillo, and I had never seen -- in fact, I had never seen anyone smoke a cigarillo.
I saw her puff on a pipe once or twice.
AMNA NAWAZ: I mean, she really challenged gender norms.
It was in the 1930s.
She was asking for hormone therapy.
She was repeatedly denied by doctors.
For Pauli Murray to be making those kinds of requests, challenging those kinds of norms at that time, how big a deal was that?
ROSITA STEVENS-HOLSEY: It was a very big deal.
But, oftentimes, the general public did not know that.
A lot of her challenging was directly with psychiatrists or doctors or psychologists, in which she was trying to determine what she was feeling and what it meant.
But when other people were just looking for civil rights for Black -- basically, Black men, she was already thinking, well, women are being treated like secondhand citizens.
And she decided that women actually needed the same kind of organizations or laws that would protect them.
AMNA NAWAZ: Cox documents in her book how the signs of progress in the 1940s, followed by decades of legal steps, like the Equal Pay Act and Title IX protections, have yet to translate into the equality they promised.
The gender pay gap, for example, has narrowed, but still persists.
What is it about who we are or our culture, our society that ends up blunting the force of those laws?
Why haven't they delivered on the promise that they carried?
JOSIE COX: The way that I characterize it in the book is that I think of the law as this fishing net with really big holes.
And the most egregious offenses, firing a woman for getting pregnant, paying two people who are different genders different amounts for doing the same work, all of those really egregious offenses get caught in these fishing nets, but everything else can slip through.
And these things are still slipping through the cracks because they are so inextricably linked to culture and linked to the way that we think as a society.
AMNA NAWAZ: Josie, you talk a lot about childcare in the book too.
Why is this one piece of it so crucial when you're talking about female economic empowerment?
JOSIE COX: Because women still are the default caregivers in America, in the societies in which we live.
And so, as a result of that, there is still this very entrenched culture in this country that women are sort of the social security net that takes care of the childcare piece.
America has this approach where certain things are public utilities, and they are provided and they are accessible and they are available.
And childcare is not one of them.
AMNA NAWAZ: More than any other piece of the puzzle, does the childcare piece of it feel like, if we could somehow fix that, that would dramatically change the landscape?
JOSIE COX: Absolutely, yes.
It is a concrete, specific policy that can be introduced that would hugely impact the gender pay gap, the female labor force participation, the ability for women not to have to make these decisions, these choices between professional fulfillment and personal fulfillment, between reaching their full economic potential and being a present and good parent.
AMNA NAWAZ: You have multiple generations in your family alone following in your footsteps.
What is it that you want to be different for them than you lived through?
ANNA MAE KRIER: I want people to be equal.
I don't want to be superior.
For years, the men have always had control of everything, maybe not your lifetime, but in mine.
I always think of about mother said, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, but we have some work to do.
(LAUGHTER) AMNA NAWAZ: And Krier's not nearly done.
She heads to Washington, D.C., next month to accept the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor, in recognition for the work she and millions of other women did decades ago.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Today is opening day for Major League Baseball, and it comes after a spring training chockful of controversies and curiosities, among them, some very unpopular uniforms.
Economics correspondent Paul Solman has been pulling threads to bring us this report.
PAUL SOLMAN: Major League Baseball's controversial new uniforms, getting fans closer to players than the latter might have imagined.
One widely circulated photo showed underwear through the new mesh pants.
The reception has been harsh on the bottoms and on the tops, which one player called papery, another like a knockoff jersey from T.J. Maxx.
Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Trea Turner:" I know everyone hates them."
And fans picked up the thread on social media.
"These are absolute trash, pure garbage," as one user put it.
On the other hand, to designer Isaac Mizrahi: ISAAC MIZRAHI, Fashion Designer: I find it kind of sexy, I got to say.
PAUL SOLMAN: No matter your opinion, says Stephen Nesbitt, who covers baseball for The Athletic.
STEPHEN NESBITT, The Athletic: The jerseys look pretty radically different.
It's more of a mesh feel in the jersey.
So, when you talk to players, they say there's a certain feel you expect when you wear a Major League uniform, and it doesn't currently have that.
PAUL SOLMAN: Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, of course, defended the duds.
ROB MANFRED, Commissioner, Major League Baseball: They're designed to be performance wear, as opposed to what has traditionally been worn, so they are going to be different.
But they have been tested more extensively than any jersey in any sport.
STEPHEN NESBITT: Players generally like the idea of something more breathable on a hot summer day.
And so they might like it when it's 95 degrees out in Oakland this summer or in Texas.
But for spring training, at least, it was a shock to players when they put on the uniform for the first time.
PAUL SOLMAN: Regardless, to this erstwhile baseball fan with grandkids, who think the game, typically, two hours and 40 minutes, of which just 18 minutes involves action, is a crashing bore, a game whose World Series TV viewership, for example, is a mere one-quarter what it was 50 years ago, the story's economic angle seemed, well, transparent.
The new unis are an act of desperation to attract young people to a dying sport.
So, was I right?
ANDREW ZIMBALIST, Economist, Smith College: Around 25 or 26 teams actually have a positive operating income.
PAUL SOLMAN: Out of 30, says sports economist Andy Zimbalist, though he does acknowledge: ANDREW ZIMBALIST: It is clear that young people don't want to spend the time that us older folks always enjoyed spending to watch a baseball game.
PAUL SOLMAN: But so then how can baseball be flourishing economically?
ANDREW ZIMBALIST: Well, the country has been flourishing economically.
Population has grown.
Incomes have grown.
The number of large corporations that buy sponsorships to support Major League Baseball teams has grown.
So I think that it's gotten pulled along with the tide.
PAUL SOLMAN: In fact, as the game has taken pains to shorten itself, live attendance has actually gone up some.
Plus, says Zimbalist: ANDREW ZIMBALIST: Baseball is able to use their monopoly leverage in the marketplace to get cities to offer higher and higher amounts, so that instead of there being 20,000 people in an old ballpark paying $10 or $20 per seat, you have 30,000 or 40,000 people in the ballpark paying $100 or $200 or $500, and also lots of sponsorship and signage all around the ballpark and catering services around the ballpark.
PAUL SOLMAN: Also, in recent years, with live sports the most popular thing on TV, broadcast rights have soared in price.
STEPHEN NESBITT: And there is also the element with Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, his teammate in Los Angeles who came over from Japan.
PAUL SOLMAN: Again, baseball journalist Nesbitt.
STEPHEN NESBITT: They have the ability now to advertise themselves to an entire nation in Japan.
PAUL SOLMAN: And throughout East Asia.
Baseball even played four spring training games in Korea a few weeks ago.
Now Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, a sort of latter-day Babe Ruth because he is both a prodigious home run hitter and pitcher, has been much in the news lately, first for the richest contract in sports history, $700 million over 10 years, and second for a gambling scandal involving so far just his longtime translator.
But however it turns out, baseball has weathered betting scandals for more than a century, most famously the Black Sox World Series fix of 1919, and survived.
Moreover, the legalization of sports gambling and mobile apps have enormous revenue potential.
STEPHEN NESBITT: The opportunities to bet on baseball are enormous.
PAUL SOLMAN: One hundred and sixty-two games a year, nine innings or more per game, 20-some-odd players to bet on.
And, look, says Nesbitt: STEPHEN NESBITT: If you can bet on the outcomes of plays or outcomes of player performance, maybe people care about games they wouldn't otherwise care about.
Baseball would love for that to happen.
PAUL SOLMAN: OK, so if not economic desperation or anything close to it, why the new uniforms, all designed by Nike?
STEPHEN NESBITT: I think it's an act of consumerism.
The league believes it benefits from having a uniform supplier like Nike, perhaps the biggest name in the apparel industry.
PAUL SOLMAN: And, of course, new uniforms - - there are several versions of each -- mean new merch to hawk.
ANDREW ZIMBALIST: You see lots of new uniforms that the players are wearing.
And if the players are wearing more uniforms, then fans will be buying, presumably, more uniforms.
PAUL SOLMAN: But uniforms, even at $100 to $200 a piece, how much money can they bring in?
ANDREW ZIMBALIST: Merchandise sales are a very small part of baseball's revenue picture, certainly less than 5 percent.
But that doesn't mean that the owners aren't going after whatever bit of money that they can go after.
Baseball is trying to squeeze all the money out of the system that it can.
PAUL SOLMAN: OK, but there's still the fact than fans have their knickers in a twist.
ROBIN GIVHAN, The Washington Post: Baseball has positioned itself as America's pastime.
And when you do that, that automatically, I think, sort of creates some boundaries that you can't really cross.
PAUL SOLMAN: Longtime "Washington Post" fashion correspondent and critic-at-large Robin Givhan.
ROBIN GIVHAN: You have Nike, a company that's sort of deeply embedded in the zeitgeistiness of what's going on and connecting with different niche communities, and there's this element of fashion and style, which ended up leading these uniforms astray.
PAUL SOLMAN: As for designer Mizrahi, astray may mean the fans and players find the sheerness a bit risque and think ISAAC MIZRAHI: Uh-oh, it's a little creepy.
PAUL SOLMAN: Do you find it creepy yourself?
ISAAC MIZRAHI: I personally think it's hilarious.
I think it's funny because I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who think it's a little creepy.
PAUL SOLMAN: But he does think baseball made a mistake.
ISAAC MIZRAHI: Maybe they should have considered all of this before they went and purchased so many thousands and thousands of yards of that textile.
PAUL SOLMAN: For the "PBS NewsHour," dressed old-school, as always, Paul Solman.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: David Miles Jr., known as the Godfather of Skate, has been the driving force behind the roller skating scene in San Francisco's Bay Area for decades.
He runs what's called the Church of 8 Wheels, a roller rink inside an old church.
DAVID MILES JR., The Godfather of Skate: Well, you know, a lot of people take skating for granted.
They like to skate and all, but, for me, it's everything.
It is my entire life.
When you get that good James brown song come on, you know, you're thinking about that beat, you're thinking about doing that step, crossovers and spins.
You just do it according to what the beat says.
The city of San Francisco lets me do what I do.
Here, I am the Godfather of Skating.
I kind of didn't really even find myself until I discovered skating.
I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri.
In Kansas City, I was a bricklayer, every day, every day.
Nah, man.
When I first came here, I didn't know not one person.
It wasn't until I went to Golden Gate Park that I fell in love with the city.
I always talk about it as -- you know "The Wizard of Oz," the movie?
Dorothy's in the house.
It's spinning around.
Everything's in black and white, right?
And then they open the door and it's all full color, people dancing and skating.
And ever since that very day, I have been out there promoting skating, representing it.
This is like my life's calling.
The Golden Gate Park Skate Patrol was basically formed because, we're talking 20,000, 25,000 roller skaters that would come out.
It was overwhelming the infrastructure, basically.
You need bathrooms.
You need food.
You need everything when you have thousands of people gathering in a spot.
So, the Recreation Parks Department was going to ban roller skating in the park, unless they was -- to be able to come up with a group of people that could handle the problems.
When they came up with the idea of this roller patrol, I just happened to be there that day.
This guy with a clipboard came by and started saying, hey, you want to do all this?
And they threw me in charge.
Ever since then, I got the group trained in first aid, CPR.
We became people that were a help, not just roller skaters.
I see people talking about San Francisco all the time as if it's dying, as if it's gone.
And San Francisco is a fantastic place.
I have done things there I could never do anywhere.
Back in 2013, I met a guy that told me about this church that was empty, and I asked him, could we have a skate party there?
The rest is kind of history.
The Church of 8 Wheels is really just a group of people that love skating.
It's never the building.
It's the people.
We do our skating with a certain energy to it.
All the problems of the world we all hear about, you go turn on the radio now, everything's bad.
But there's a bubble over this thing where you go to escape that.
When you look at what a church really is, it's a place where people congregate and they gather and they celebrate life.
And we just do it on skates.
And when you are around that, it is rolligion.
You spread it.
My name is David Miles Jr., and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on spreading rolligion.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.
And that's the "NewsHour" for tonight.
I'm William Brangham.
On behalf of the entire "NewsHour" team, thank you so much for joining us.
