Fidel Castro, Cuba, castro death watch, havana, habana

…as Cuban female judo champion disappears and possibly defects to the US during a tournament in Miami:

The Cuban contingent that competed in last week’s Pan American Judo Championships left Miami for Havana on Monday afternoon without gold-medal-winning judoka Yurisel Laborde, who left the group Sunday afternoon.

As I write this post, no official word on Laborde’s whereabouts, but the rumor mill is buzzing with news that she has indeed defected. Kiai!

Because I’ve long been a big fan of Irish rock group U2, I–in my naive youth–briefly joined Shamnesty International after U2 gave them a free plug during a concert. But then I got older and–as Winston Churchill noted–became more conservative and wiser. And I terminated my membership in the organization.

This news story today bears out my decision:

Amnesty International might not be able to take U.S. citizens to Guantanamo Bay, but the group has made it possible to bring Guantanamo Bay to the U.S.

…

The group said they’ve created a replica of how many of the detainees are housed 23 hours a day.

Yo Amnesty, why no replicas of a jail cell from one of Castro’s prisons? Heck, it’d be easy for one person to carry around–in a shoebox.

Speaking of shoeboxes, plugs and Castro’s prisons, Babalu Blog–and I as well, for that matter–want you to sign this petition for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners.

If Shamnesty International wants to concern itself with real human rights violations, they might want to focus a little more on real human rights violators. Like the Castro brothers.

Before I go, I invite you to learn more about Cuba Solidarity Day, which takes place May 21st.

night follows day, the sun rises in the east, water is wet and Cuba’s leader tells another whopper:

As a practical matter, it is impossible for this or any other newspaper to set the record straight every time the Cuban government tells a whopper. Orchestrating lies is the specialty of police states. Anyone who has ever listened to Radio Havana or watched a Cuban TV ”news” program knows that Cuban leaders lie to their own people and lie to the outside world. They even lie to each other. But sometimes the lie is so blatant, so malign, so far removed from the painful reality of life in Cuba that it must be refuted, for the sake of common decency if nothing else.

That’s the case with Raúl Castro’s recent claim that there has not been ”one sole case of torture” in Cuba. Even by Cuba’s standards, this is an astonishing falsehood, a lie of such outsized proportions that even Raúl Castro should have been ashamed to utter it.

Or wild colts, as the case may be.

Remember last year when Cuba’s chief propagandist, Ramiro Valdes, said Cuba needs to tame “the wild colt of new technologies” (meaning the Internet)?

Well, via the wonderful blog Bilingual in the Boonies, today I learned about a new blog from Cuba (yes, fron INSIDE Castro’s huge island Gulag) called “Potro Salvaje” (Wild Colt). Potro Salvaje says it’s a “blog about the thorny issue of the Internet in Cuba.” It calls itself a “virtual raft” and it’s motto is “we must liberate the tamed colt of technology,” a dig at Valdes’ comment.

Cool! I’ve added them to the blogroll and I’ll take a stab at translating some of their posts from time to time.

In case you’re wondering why I haven’t posted in a while, it’s simply because I’ve been (and will more than likely continue to be through the end of this month) excruciatingly busy in both my personal and professional lives.

So there you have it. My apologies for any inconvenience. I’ll at least try to post something here and there until my life gets back to (ab)normal. Scout’s honor.

If you’ve received spam from an address ending in “@castrodeathwatch.com,” please know it did not come from me or this blog/website. It seems some spammer is spoofing (faking) his/her/its e-mail addresses by using a made up @castrodeathwatch.com e-mail address.

According to Wikipedia’s e-mail spoofing entry, “By changing certain properties of the e-mail, such as the From, Return-Path and Reply-To fields (which can be found in the message header), ill-intentioned users can make the e-mail appear to be from someone other than the actual sender,” which is apparently what happened.

So if you’ve gotten an e-mail from an @castrodeathwatch.com with a subject line that appears spammy, just delete it. Because I don’t control it, I can’t say if it contains a virus or not, so better safe than sorry. My apologies to you for any inconvenience this event may have caused you.