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

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.

Probably because he–Daniel Finkelstein–his father and his grandfather were all victims of Stalin’s oppression. Yep, that might explain why someone might not be too fond of Fidel Castro:

Those cigars, those battle fatigues, that beard. Kinda cool, no? No. Death sentences for those who want to flee, prison sentences for dissidents, gags for the press, jail for homosexuals, ruinous central planning for the economy, his support for a nuclear first strike against America, his opposition to any kind of reform, his four-hour long speeches, his personality cult.

But Finkelstein’s main purpose is to explain why the left loves Fidel so. He gives three reasons, the best one being that the left loves anyone who stands up to the U.S., no matter how evil they are:

Almost anyone - a homophobic, misogynist Islamist cleric for example - is given some credit if the US is their punchbag.

…being reported as news? Yep, when it has to do with Castro’s Cuba, right is wrong, yes is no, left is right and the obvious is newsworthy:

Cuba’s parliament named Raul Castro president on Sunday, ending nearly 50 years of rule by his brother Fidel but leaving the island’s communist system unshaken.

In a surprise move, officials bypassed younger candidates to name a 77-year-old revolutionary leader, Jose Ramon Machado, to Cuba’s No. 2 spot—apparently assuring the old guard that no significant political changes will be made soon.

Raul also proposed he would consult with the ailing, 81-year-old Fidel on all major decisions of state, and parliament approved the proposal.

“(N)o significant political changes will be made soon,” huh? Is that what we’re getting from Raul, the candidate of “change?” What a rare admission from the AP.

The only consolation I can see in all this is that at a doddering 76 years old himself, Raul won’t be dictator for long.

Make of this what you will, but I found it interesting. Fark blogger Drew Curtis comes to his own conclusion as to why Fidel Castro’s “resignation” was announced at 3AM and not at a more convenient time:

The only valid reason to make an announcement like that at 3am was that the government was in a hurry. Something happened in the middle of the night to make them move up the timetable.

I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that Castro is dead.

The Cuban government is getting their house in order before announcing it. They’ll “elect” his brother Raoul as Supreme King Hand of God of Cuba or whatever they call it. Then next week they’ll announce that Castro suddenly died, peacefully and in a way in no way related to his colon.

An interesting theory, for sure. Nothing out of the Castro brothers’ twisted world surprises me so this sounds plausible to me. But we’ll have to wait to see if Curtis is right…

[Ed. note: sorry, I previously typed in the code for a past poll. The correct poll is below.]

Okay, now that the bearded one has resigned and we’ll (hopefully) shortly see a free Cuba, who do you think should be its first president? Vote below.

A big “Thanks” to Babalu Blog for pointing this one out:

A Florida congresswoman asked the Justice Department yesterday to bring charges against resigning Cuban leader Fidel Castro for the deaths of four U.S. rescue workers who were killed while looking for Cuban migrants stranded at sea.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said earlier attempts to prosecute Castro in the 1996 downing of a humanitarian flight off the Cuban coast might not have been successful because of his role as head of state.

But now that Castro resigned, there is no longer the technicality of his status as “head of state” to contend with. Bravo to Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen for not waiting a day to press for justice for the victims of this act of murder!

It sure looks that way after finding out, via The Natural Truth, the “news” agency sent its on-air staffers an e-mail yesterday with the following talking points on the “Castro resigns” story (my comments in parentheses):

-Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education (you mean indoctrination) and universal(ly awful) health care, and racial integration (yep, now EVERYBODY gets treated like a slave, regardless of skin color).

-Some analysts would say the US embargo was a benefit to Castro politically – something to blame problems on (Castro never missed an opportunity to blame the US for Cuba’s problems, nor did CNN), by what the Cubans call “the imperialist,” meddling in their affairs.

-While despised by some (Some? Try millions!), he is seen as a revolutionary hero, especially with leftist in (the CNN newsroom) Latin America, for standing up to the United States.

Yep, brought to you by the network that spiked stories about Saddam Hussein’s atrocities.