Briefly

CUBA

Agriculture reform faces challenges

HAVANA | The Cuban government has turned over more than 2 million acres of previously state-owned land to individual farmers, but half of it still lies fallow or underutilized, highlighting the tremendous challenges facing an agricultural reform program that President Raul Castro has trumpeted as key to the island’s future.

Economy Minister Marino Murillo disclosed the figures in a speech closing a gathering of small-scale farmers in Havana on Sunday. The session was closed to foreign media, but his words were reprinted in the Communist Party newspaper Granma on Monday.

Mr. Murillo said some 2.3 million acres had been turned over to private farmers since Raul Castro announced the program in 2008, shortly after formally taking over Cuba’s leadership from his ailing brother, Fidel.

At the time, Raul Castro said that turning over fallow land to farmers was a matter of “maximum national security,” and was necessary to breathe new life into an agricultural sector hobbled by decades of government mismanagement.

But the land reform thus far has failed to bring the game-changing surge in production that Raul Castro had sought. While national statistics have not been released, a trickle of recent data have shown an inability to meet agricultural targets, sometimes by big margins.

HAITI

Missionary convicted, but free to go

PORT-AU-PRINCE | The last of 10 Americans detained while trying to take 33 children out of Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake was released Monday after a judge convicted her and sentenced her to the time she already had served in jail.

Laura Silsby, the organizer of the ill-fated effort to take the children to an orphanage being set up in the Dominican Republic, returned to her jail cell briefly to retrieve belongings before quickly heading to the Port-au-Prince airport.

“I’m praising God,” Ms. Silsby told the Associated Press as she waited for a flight out of Haiti. She declined further questions.

The Idaho businesswoman had been in custody since Jan. 29. She was originally charged with kidnapping and criminal association. Those charges were dropped and she was convicted of arranging illegal travel under a 1980 statute restricting movement out of Haiti signed by then-dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.

UNITED NATIONS

Costa Rican tapped to head climate panel

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday appointed Christiana Figueres, 53, of Costa Rica as the new U.N. climate chief. She is an expert on climate negotiations and the daughter of the country’s former president.

Ms. Figueres, who has been a member of Costa Rica’s negotiating team on climate change since 1995, will replace Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Mr. de Boer, who has shephered troubled climate talks for nearly four years, announced his resignation in February, saying he will step down July 1 to work in business and academia.

• From wire dispatches and staff reports