At a May 12 press conference Haitian agriculture minister Joanas Gué announced that the government had accepted a "gift of 475,947 kilograms [about 523.6 US tons] of hybrid corn seeds along with 2,067 kilograms of vegetable seeds" from the Monsanto Company, a US-based biotechnology multinational that produces genetically modified organisms (GMO). He denied that the seeds were genetically modified.

Police agents took control of the entrances to the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) in San Juan on the morning of May 14 in an effort to cut off student protesters on the campus from their supporters outside. The action came one day after an assembly of some 2,000 students voted to continue an open-ended strike that started on April 21 at Río Piedras, the largest of the UPR's 11 campuses, to protest plans for a $100 million cut to the annual budget of the public university, which has a student body of about 65,000.

On April 29 the Vietnamese telecommunications company Viettel formally acquired 60% of the shares in Haiti's state-owned phone company, Télécommunications d'Haiti (Haiti Téléco). Central Bank president Charles Castel said the company, which escaped the privatization process that led to the sell-off of several state enterprises in the 1990s, was constantly in the red and required monthly subsidies from the government. According to Téléco director Michel Presumé, the company had "more than 5,000 employees who weren't doing anything." "A lot of them spent more time in the radio stations than in their places of employment," he added, presumably referring to workers giving interviews about their opposition to the company's privatization.

On the night of April 15-16 the Haitian Senate approved an 18-month extension of the state of emergency that President René Préval decreed after a Jan. 12 earthquake killed some 230,000 people and devastated the capital area. The "emergency law," which had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies one week earlier, would take effect once Préval had it published in the official government gazette, Le Moniteur.

Cuba's president Raúl Castro led some 800,000 people in the traditional May 1 march to Havana's Plaza de la Revolución. In a brief speech, Salvador Valdés, head of the Cuban Workers' Confederation (CTC), asked workers to support the government's economic plan, which he said "will require extraordinary efforts and sacrifices" but is "vital for preserving our social system." In April President Castro called for a reduction of public spending, the elimination of subsidies and of the black market, a stimulus for agriculture, and layoffs of as many as 1 million workers, about a fifth of the workforce, from their current employment. Castro said the government would seek to create conditions so that everyone would be able to find a productive job. (Prensa Gráfica, El Salvador, May 1 from AFP; La Jornada, Mexico, May 2 from correspondent)

The Haitian government decided on April 22 to declare a three-week moratorium on forced evictions of homeless Port-au-Prince residents from improvised encampments at schools and other private property where they have been living since a Jan. 12 earthquake devastated much of southern Haiti. The government made the decision because "there are a lot of tensions," Edmond Mulet, a Guatemalan diplomat and the acting head of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), said at a press conference later on April 22. "There are pupils who want to return to their schools to continue their studies; there are displaced people who are installed in the schools," Mulet explained. "Well, instead of having confrontations, a moratorium has been established." (Radio Métropole, Haiti, April 23 from AFP)

As of April 25 students were continuing an occupation of the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) in San Juan to protest plans to cut next year's budget by $100 million. The cutbacks might mean an end to exemptions for students with less resources at the public university. About 65,000 students are enrolled in the UPR's 11 campuses, of which Río Piedras is the largest.

Former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), now United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon's special envoy for Haiti, said on April 17 that the international community needs to stay involved in Haiti if it wants to prevent violence from breaking out there. "We know one thing for sure: If you like the gunfight that's going on in northwest Mexico, you will love Haiti 10 years from now," he told reporters during a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. "If that's what thrills you--this horrible chaos from Monterrey to the border--you will just love Haiti if you walk away from it."