The exile group Unidad Cubana (their English-language website is here) issued their “Declaration from Miami” last night, for a free Cuba. The Miami Herald has more.
Let’s just say, their lips to God’s ears!
Oct 022007
Religious freedom in Cuba?
Anti-Communism, Freedom of Religion
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Oct 012007
“In the end, we have not accomplished what we’re entitled to; the Catholic Church has not been granted the right to evangelize and spread without fear of losing its religious freedom,” (retired Archbishop Pedro) Meurice said in a recent interview.
In the year since President Fidel Castro has been ill and out of the public eye, analysts and religious leaders point to the fate of a popular Catholic magazine and civics workshops in the western city of Pinar del Rio as dramatic examples of tighter church control.
Aww, poor little babies, want a hankie?
Anti-Communism, Bush, Castro Is Dead
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Sep 252007
Sniff, sniff. Waa, waa. Boo hoo.
Cuba’s foreign minister walked out of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday in protest of President Bush’s speech in which he said the “long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end” on the communist island.
There’s more:
“In Cuba, the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end,” Bush said. “The Cuban people are ready for their freedom. And as that nation enters a period of transition, the United Nations must insist on free speech, free assembly and, ultimately, free and competitive elections.”
Beautiful!
Someone else who gets it
Anti-Communism, Friends of Cuban Freedom, Media
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Sep 162007
I’m shocked when I find there’s anybody (outside of those who are of Cuban descent) who knows what Castro and his sidekick Che “The Butcher” Guevara are really about. But I’ve just discovered that the Times of London knows the real deal:
A ROMANTIC hero to legions of fans the world over, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the poster boy of Marxist revolution, has come under assault as a cold-hearted monster four decades after his death in the Bolivian jungle.
A revisionist biography has highlighted Guevara’s involvement in countless executions of “traitors” and counter-revolutionary “worms”, offering a fresh glimpse of the dark side of the celebrated guerrilla fighter who helped Fidel Castro to seize power in Cuba.
“Attacking an almost legendary figure is not an easy task,” said Jacobo Machover, author of The Hidden Face of Che. “He has so many defenders. They have forged the cult of an untouchable hero.”
Now, why would that be, Mr. Machover?
Machover, a Cuban exiled in France since 1963, blames the hero worship on French intellectuals who flocked to Havana in the 1960s and fell under the charm of the only “comandante” who could speak their language.
They turned a blind eye to anything that did not fit in with their idealised image of Guevara. A prolific diarist, Guevara nevertheless wrote vividly of his role as an executioner. In one passage he described the execution of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide.
“I fired a .32calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple,” was Guevara’s clinical description of the killing. “He moaned for a few moments, then died.”
That’s the “man” whose ugly mug can be found on the t-shirts of so many useful idiots. Maybe said t-shirts should include that quote, “I fired a .32calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain; He moaned for a few moments, then died.” I wonder how many useful idiots would wear it then?
‘Blame It on Fidel’
Anti-Communism, Politics
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Sep 142007
Here’s an excerpt of the review of what sounds like a fascinating film:
Fernando and Marie give up their respective jobs as lawyer and writer for Marie Claire magazine and become intimately involved with Salvador Allende’s election in Chile. Soon, they have fired Filomena (the Cuban nanny), who hates Castro and all the “rojos barbudos” (bearded reds) responsible for taking her land back home and forcing her into exile, and they’ve withdrawn Anna (their daughter who grows fearful of her parents’ politics, and rightly so) from her religion class. As their apartment becomes increasingly invaded by activists who refer to her as their “pequeña momia,” Spanish for “little mummy,” which was what Chilean left-wingers called right-wingers at the time, Anna takes refuge in her bourgeois grandparents, who tell her it’s one thing to be polite to the poor and another to let them take one’s property.
But here’s my favorite part, sad though it may be:
When Anna, finally ready to concede to her parents, misinterprets their belief in group solidarity and answers a question incorrectly in class because everyone else answered incorrectly, her parents are stumped. What’s the difference between group solidarity and behaving like sheep?
But why should her parents be stumped? That is what communism is and has always been about: acting, being and thinking like a sheep, being one with the “collective” no matter how wrong the collective is.
Oopsie: the name of the film, of course, is “Blame It on Fidel.”
Sep 022007
Moving home, they say, is one of life’s five most stressful experiences. It comes in at number three. Ranked a bit below bereavement, a bit above divorce.
But in Cuba it is different. Packing up a home in Cuba is easy.
The reason is that you do not have to go through that agonising problem of wondering about what to do with all your junk. You can sell it, or give it away. All of it. In a matter of hours.
Cuba is a place where almost all consumer items are prohibitively expensive, or, more likely, not available. And scarcity breeds desire.
Most Cubans, and plenty of foreigners living on the island, spend the majority of their time not thinking about the country’s future, or transitional governments, or the health of Fidel Castro, but on rather more mundane things. Like how to find a square meal, a fridge that works, or an electric fan.
Yep, it’s that wonderful Cuban socialist economy at “work.” You can see how it works to Castro’s advantage, though: if you spend your day worrying about how you’re going to get your next meal, it’s kind of hard to worry about overthrowing the government.
Mr. Gibbs talks about other things in Cuba, too, such as press censorship and why he got kicked out:
I had a first-hand glimpse of all this when I returned to my home in Old Havana, just days after hearing the disappointing news that I was one of three foreign correspondents to be stripped of their press accreditation by the Cuban government. Our reporting was deemed “negative” by a nameless committee.
As I entered my apartment the phone was ringing. It was an ex-pat friend whom I had not heard from for some time. The conversation went along these lines: “I am so sorry to hear you are being thrown out,” he said, “what a disgraceful attempt to intimidate the foreign press.”
Later on, he talks about an amateurish, ridiculously botched attempt at censorship of the film Hotel Rwanda by the Castro government:
I was at home watching it, when, a few minutes after the opening titles, I noticed that some shots had been clumsily repeated. It had been edited.
I happened to have a DVD of the original version. I put it on to compare the two.
It became obvious that the Cuban censors had gone to the trouble of cutting out a 30 second portion of the film. The banned images contained a couple of harmless jokes about Cuban cigars.
Aug 232007
then you KNOW you did a good thing:
Cuba branded Hungary an “imperial accomplice” of Washington on Wednesday for granting political asylum to 29 Cubans who were held at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base.
Those given Hungarian visas were among 44 Cubans picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. Authorities deemed them at risk of persecution if repatriated and held the group at the U.S. base while officials sought a third country to take them.
Many were dissidents, and some were at the base more than two years.
The Cubans at the Guantanamo base included 17 who staged a hunger strike to protest conditions, but it ended August 17 when Hungary announced it would take 29 migrants.
A third country was expected to take seven more, and five others were approved to go to the United States. One chose to return to Cuba for family reasons, and the status of a couple who were offered Hungarian visas but apparently refused them was unclear.
Too effing bad, Castro. Screw you and the horse/hearse you’re riding in if you don’t like it.
Aww, poow widdle babies
Anti-Communism
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Aug 202007
The five CONVICTED (that’s right, CONVICTED) spies Castro sent to the U.S. (disclaimer: link goes to a website I own) are appealing their prison sentences.
Why?
Because, {sniff, sniff} they say their sentences are {whine, whine} too long:
Almost nine years after their arrest, five Cubans convicted of spying on the U.S. government and South Florida exile groups will appeal Monday to judges in Atlanta, arguing that their sentences are excessive and they should be free.
Awwwwwwwwww, poor little babies. I say we should give them the same type of, ahem, “justice” Castro would give a convicted spy: a bullet to the back of the head.
At a time when the most visible movie related to Cuba is a sick(o), twisted propaganda piece on Castro’s so-called “health system,” here’s a breath of fresh air:
Now, more than a decade later, (niece of Brothers to the Rescue shootdown victim Armando Alejandre, Jr., Christina) Khuly wants to make the tragedy real for a much broader audience with the Oct. 1 release of Shoot Down, her blow-by-blow account of the Feb. 24, 1996, downing of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.
The 90-minute documentary tells the rich back-story of the most serious crisis across the Straits of Florida since the 1962 missile showdown, from the growing tensions produced by Cuban rafters washing up to the Florida shores like debris to the Cuban opposition’s bold demands for political change.
May 222007
The Socialist government of Spain wants to relive the days of concentration camps and the like for Cuba. But a group of bloggers called Bloggers United for Cuban Liberty is doing everything it can to expose José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero and his ilk:
The Spanish government is being denounced by Bloggers United for Cuban Liberty (http://bucl.org) in a new advertising campaign aimed at educating the public about oppression in Castro’s Cuba.
The multimedia campaign, unveiled today, consists of bus shelter panels that target areas near the Spanish consulate and the Spanish Cultural Center, both in Coral Gables, Florida. An online component, launching today, will steer readers searching for certain information about Cuba and Spain to BUCL.org.
“This effort marks the first of several coordinated activities aimed at exposing those countries, companies and institutions that aid and abet the Castro regime in oppressing the Cuban people,” said Henry Gomez, the spokesman for Bloggers United for Cuban Freedom. Gomez continues:
“Spanish businesses are dealing directly with the Castro regime and are helping perpetuate Cuba’s totalitarian system by complying with that country’s unfair labor laws and enforcing an apartheid system in which Cubans are not allowed to use the same facilities as tourists. From the Spanish perspective, there is no reason to pursue change in Cuba, they are benefiting from exploitation of Cuban workers and would like to see the status quo perpetuated.”
The Socialist Spanish government of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero has been leading an effort to normalize relations between the European Union and Cuba. Those relations have been strained since the Castro regime’s crackdown on and jailing of 75 dissidents and independent journalists in 2003. In April of this year, Spain’s foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos visited Cuba and met with Raul Castro, while noticeably snubbing Cuban dissidents that had requested a meeting with him.
“It’s important for the Spanish government and business interests to know that freedom-loving Cubans will not forget who conspired with the Castro brothers and against their liberty when the inevitable fall of the dictatorship comes,” said Val Prieto, editor of BabaluBlog.com and member of Bloggers United for Cuban Liberty.
BUCL’s campaign has been covered by local, national and even international media.
Meanwhile, the guys at Babalu Blog have posted the video of a commercial by Spain’s Iberia Airlines. The commercial depicts two Cuban women of African descent as being at the whims of a baby who wins a free trip to Cuba. To say the commercial is both sexist and racist is to say that the sun is a little warm. No word yet on whether Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton plan to organize any boycotts of Spain or Iberia Airlines.
