La Contra Revolución

Chachita

2011-09-08T07:58:00.000-04:00

Whether you call her La Virgensita. La Santisima, Nuestra Senora de la Caridad, La Caridad del Cobre or just "Cachita"-because only Cubans would have a nickname for their patron saint- or Ochun, today is her day.

And I got me one of those big old candles with her likeness on it and I'm going to light it right now and join the millions of Cubans that today pray that, just like she saved those three Cubans from the storm so long ago, that she protect our fellow Cubans from the Hurricane that is battering the island today. And that once the clouds begin to clear that the light of freedom shines brightly to every corner of our enslaved island.

Happy New Year*.

2010-12-31T15:09:00.002-05:00

For me, New Years has always been a celebration with an asterisk-Happy New Year*.

The New Year brings with it the promise of renewal and the hope of better days to come. Unfortunately, for me and all freedom loving Cubans, it also marks the day that we lost our freedom-the asterisk.

Since this January 1st marks the 52th year of the “revolution,” it means that many more of the generation that were young adults when Castro came to power did not live to see Cuba’s return to freedom. Come to think of it, that means that most Cubans alive today were born after the day of the asterisk.

So, most of us that live on the hyphen have to rely on the ever dwindling generation of Cubans who new life in Cuba before the asterisk to tell us what it was like to live in Cuba when life there was normal. And, I’m sorry, but living under the oppression, indoctrination and rationing that came with the totalitarian regime of Fidel Castro is anything but normal.

When I was a child, I used to listen in amazement of the stories that the adults told of how things were like before Castro. I could not conceive of being able to travel abroad and come back to Cuba without permission or going to the bodega and buy whatever you had money for without a ration book.

I do have a point.

I clearly remember one New Years Eve that my mother and grandmother were fussing over grapes. Yes, grapes. You see Cubans have a tradition of eating 12 grapes at midnight for good luck. I think that’s a carryover from the Spaniards, bless them.

Anyway, on that particular New Years, there we no grapes to be found and my grandmother was not happy with Fidel. And when I asked her what the big deal with the grapes was, she said it was bad luck if you didn’t eat the 12 grapes. She told me how before Fidel the whole family would get together and have a party and I would ask her about all the stuff they ate and drank and it all sounded like a fairy tale to me.

S o that New Years Eve was the first of many without grapes which was ok with me since getting force fed those 12 grapes at midnight took all the fun out of getting to stay up late. Later on though, my superstitions got the best of me and I started to worry about what horrible bad luck would befall my family if we didn’t eat our 12 grapes at midnight. Fidel would never leave, (that proved to be a well founded fear), or we would never get our exit.

I was sure that every obstacle and struggle our family endured in the next few months was due to not eating the 12 blessed grapes. Sometime in February or March, I must have professed my “grape theory” to my father. He proceeded to smack me in the head with a classic Cuban father cocotaso and to tell me not be a comemierda. ( Not having a comemierda for a son ranks high in the Cuban father’s hierarchy of priorities) And he proceeded to explain to me his Castro theory the way only a Cuban father could. He explained that we could have each eaten a truckload of grapes and other than the ensuing cagalera, it would hot have made a bit of difference because all of the problems were caused by Castro. That’s the “No Castro, No Problem” model which admitedly held a lot more water than my childishly superstitious “grape theory”

I’ve eaten my 12 grapes every year since coming into the US. Even when I’ve gone to a party where there are no grapes for the midnight tradition, I’ve had them waiting for me when I got home. I tried taking them in my coat pocket one year, but that’s a another messy post.

I called the old man to see if he had his 12 grapes ready and he said they were taking them to their New Years eve party. I told him not to take them in his pocket. He told me not to be a comemierda. He still worries about me.

So eat 12 grapes at midnight for good luck or just because you can and raise you glass to celebrate this Happy New Year* and hope that next year it will be just a plain ‘ol Happy New Year.

Happy New Year*

Multiple Choice

2010-09-21T17:30:00.001-04:00

I’m probably the only Volvo-driving, France-loving , latte-sucking, tofu-chomping holistic-wacko, neurotic vegan weenie anti-Castro Cuban blogger. Maybe not, I prefer café con leche to latte.

As a Democrat, I have philosophical differences on the size and scope of government with most of my fellow Cuban bloggers. But we do agree that in civil, economic and political life should all be based on free exchange of ideas.

A government by the people and for the people can be a proactive and positive force in society.

We all know what happens when government isn’t for the people.

In recent years, government has grown so that it seems that it doesn’t exist for the governed but for the governors. The governed have become the masses to be lead to wherever the governing class sees fit.

And that is tyranny.

Side-stepping the democratic process in order to exercise a party’s political will against the will of the people as was done when the National Healthcare bill was passed is not government for the people. It is government in spite of the people.

And in spite of the out of control governing class dictating how we live our lives, I figured the “masses” had pretty much given up and were more concerned with Dancing With the Stars and American Idol than with their elected officials

Lo and behold, though, came the tea party. Out of nowhere. And they are mocked, even by the sitting president, as “tea baggers.” Sad.

And I’m watching the news last night and hear the very same President say:

"So the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify, specifically, what would you do?" he added. "It's not enough just to say get control of spending. I think it's important for you to say, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits or I'm willing to see these taxes go up. What you can't do, which is what I've been hearing a lot from the other side, is we're going to control government spending, we're going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts, and that magically somehow things are going to work. Now, some of these are very difficult choices."

Now, for starters, if you accept President Obama’s premise that’s it’s up to the citizens, because after all, the tea party is just that, a bunch of concerned citizens, why should it be their responsibility to come up with the $4 trillion he and the current congress has put us in the hole for? Isn’t that what elected leaders are for? to solve or problems? That’s like blaming the crime victim for the crime.

But no, I do not accept his premise that it’s up to the tea partiers, or citizens, to come up with a plan to fix his mess.

I don’t really think he President Obama gets it. I know he’s a constitutional professor and all, but really. The above quote, to me is mind boggling.

In a democracy, we have elections. Elections are tests, multiple choice tests. A, B or C. They are not essay questions.

If the law professor doesn’t realize this soon, the next few elections may very well turn out to be even simpler-a true and false test, yes or no. And the citizens will say no to his premise that its their responsibility to come up with solution for their leader’s messes and kick him and his like – minded elitists out.

Therapy

2010-09-14T13:21:00.003-04:00

I’ve pretty much given up reading “news” on Cuba. It pretty much all boils down to some “reporter” parroting the regime’s lies. This guy here, Marc Frank, apparently likes parroting the party line since before becoming Reuter’s man in Havana he wrote for the People’s Daily World, a Communist Party USA publication. Heh.

Frankly, I didn’t realize that Frank had written this piece for the Financial Times that I linked into from Drudge, so I started reading and (screaming at my screen).

So, as a therapeutic exercise, I have copied that article here along with my expletive deleted comments.

I don’t feel better now.

Financial Times
AMERICAS
Economy & Trade

Cuba to cut 500,000 from state payroll
By Marc Frank in Havana

Published: September 13 2010

Communist Cuba will shift (shift?)hundreds of thousands of state employees to the private sector (what private sector?) in 2011 as the government prunes more than 500,000 workers from its payroll.

The official trade union federation (the regime) said on Monday that eventually more than a million jobs would be cut. (Is it still going to be illegal not to have a job in Cuba?)

“Job options will be increased and broadened with new forms of non-state employment, among them leasing land, co-operatives and self-employment absorbing hundreds of thousands of workers in the coming years,” (in the coming …years!…hmm…does the socialist paradise have unemployment insurance?) the union statement said.

According to a document circulating within the higher ranks of the Communist party in preparation for the “reorganisation of the labour force” announced on Monday, 465,000 non-state jobs would be created in 2011, of which some 250,000 would fall under the category of new licences for self-employment. (ha I see the regime controlled “private sector”)

Self-employment, begun in the 1990s, (wow, Fidel invented self-employment in the 1990’s..wasn’t his mother self employed in the world’s oldest form of self employment?) covers everything from family-run restaurants to car repair shops, construction and artisans. Non-state jobs included workers hired by the self-employed, ex-state employees such as taxi drivers who would move to a leasing arrangement, and employees of small state businesses that went over to a co-operative form of administration, said sources who have seen the plan. (sounds like a well centrally planned private sector)

The plan represents the most important reform undertaken by President Raúl Castro since he took over from his brother Fidel in early 2008, and the biggest shift to private enterprise since all 58,000 small! businesses were nationalised in 1968.( in 1968 ?!?! 9 years after Fidel & co. turned the place into a concentration camp? How about all the businesses confiscated from 1959 to 1968?!?!? BUT in one year they will create 250,000 jobs….hmmm….so between 1959 and 1968…never mind…in 1968, Cuban exiles owned more than 58,000 small businesses in the US)

Raúl Castro has fostered discussion in the media (lies) and grassroots meetings (more lies) on the problems afflicting the socialist economy, (an oxymoron) but he has made mostly minor changes up till now. The exception has been agriculture, where Mr Castro has leased state lands to 100,000 farmers and loosened the state straitjacket on sale of farm inputs and produce. (some private sector, they get to work the government’s land…more like the feudal sector, really)

The government reported ( and I parrot without question) more than 85 per cent of the Cuban labour force, or about 5m people, worked for the state at the close of 2009. There were 591,000 workers in the private sector, with most of those being farmers (serfs) and 143,000 self-employed. (slaves) The massive layoff of 10 per cent of the state labour force is scheduled to begin in October and stretch through March. New licences for self-employment would be issued beginning in October , the sources said.

Geographical limitations on self-employment and prohibitions on obtaining bank credits, doing business with state entities or hiring labour outside the family, would be eliminated. (not to mention what criteria will be used to issue these licenses? Will Yoani Sanchez or Darsi Ferrer be issued licenses? Who needs to get bribed to get a “license”, Antonio Castro?....please!)

Better accounting would be demanded of businesses, and the way they were taxed would be changed. As well as taxes on income, the self-employed would pay a sales tax and 25 per cent social security tax for themselves and each employee, the sources said, while co-operatives would pay a tax on profits and social security.(wonder if they’re issuing any licenses for tax attorneys?)

The state expected tax revenue from the self-employed to jump from 250m pesos ($9.4m) this year to about a billion pesos in 2011, the sources said. (or else…you don’t want to have to get audited by state security)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

Blue Movies

2010-05-11T12:03:00.004-04:00

OK, so I don’t go to the movies.

I haven’t been to a movie theater in years.

For a while there, every time I went to the movies I would regret it. I’ve had the cell phone talker, the narrator, the chatter all sitting near me. Hell, I’ve even had the snorer and the soundtrack singer. So eventually I gave up and just wait for the movies to come out on DVD.

This weekend a friend got “Avatar” in Blue Ray and invited me over. He takes pity on me because I still watch a 27 inch analog tube TV.

Oh boy. Great effects. After a while you swear those cartoons are real.

However…what about the plot?…unreal.

After the movie was over, I proceeded to explain to everyone why they had just sat through communist propaganda. Laughter ensued.

People just can’t believe that I just can’t sit there and enjoy a movie without looking for the subliminal red flags of communist propaganda. I don’t know, maybe I’m just gifted or cursed.

Avatar, of course, pins the noble savages against the capitalist profit seeking military-industrial complex.

The blue “aboriginals”, (really, red would have been more original), of course, live as one with Mother Nature in a communal egalitarian Utopia. They are so communal that they even connect to the planet, Pandora, and every living thing on it through some tentacle-like appendages. They are like “the Borg” only nicer.

These folks don’t have material possessions, or clothes and they don’t need them because since they understand that they are part of the collective whole. All they need to do to be happy is to be one with each other. Awe.

Their memories are collective. They are ruled by a wise old leader who has inherited his position. No need for elections or debate here. He makes all the decisions.

In the Pandoran jungle Utopia, they are all equal and call each other brother or sister, depending on their genitals. And they refer to themselves as “The People.” (The People’s Republic of the Na’vi, anyone?)

Now, of course, this sounds a lot like John Lennon’s candy coated communist manifesto, “Imagine,” except for the “no religion” part because Na’vi worship a tree or something. (not too sure on that). Maybe they should have been green instead of blue, but green or red people are not as stylish as blue people and the left is all about style.

But it also sounds a lot like Castro’s idea of a perfect society. Or a leftist Hollywood wet drem. Oh wait, Castro is leftists Hollywood’s wet dream.

And the answer to the question of whether I can enjoy a movie for “just” entertainment is yes.

But, Avatar, is a movie with a message. It is a morality tale and as such you are supposed to “get something out of it.” And I did. A bunch of collective, communist propaganda.

Really, I don’t know see how you can get anything else out of it. You have the individualists who are out for themselves on one side and the collectivists who sacrifice their individuality on the other and the whole point is to show the viewer how suppressing their individuality for the good of the whole is the way to roll.

Unfortunately, us humans are not built to roll that way and the only way to make humans roll that way is for heads to roll because we have to be forced, or coerced …or brainwashed…err…educated by cool, friendly cartoon characters.

God, isn’t that just what the evil capitalists do when they advertise?

And A Little Birdie Told Me...

2010-05-06T12:28:00.003-04:00

I was a mischievous child. Always up to some secretive mischief.

I thought I could get away with anything.

A psychologists would probably say I was “Acting out,” but it was rebellion. Totalitarian society encourages small individual acts of rebellion, I think.

And I was thinking about my “acting out” and I though of my grandmother, Ramona.

That old woman loved me more than anything. And I knew it. And I would take advantage of it.

I remember playing with the veins in her wrinkly hands. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. And I remember her telling me about all the bad things that I thought I had done secretly and I would ask her how she knew and I remember her telling me a little birdie told her and I would be furious at the little, big mouthed bird.

And I think back in amazement of how such a young child would know about the evils and dangers of communism and know enough to keep his mouth shut yet he believed that some little bird was ratting him out. I guess it kind of made sense that in a place where everybody was ratting everybody else out, even their own family, and all the walls had ears that birdies would tell all. But, still, the cynicism mixed with innocence is mind-blowing in retrospect.

And so I think of Ramona, and the little birdies that talk to her. They told her Fidel was a devil when they perched on his shoulder in that now infamous “sign”

And I remember watching the tattle taling, gusano eating, chivato birds flying freely around while we were trapped in the world/s biggest bird cage. The birds, they were free. Free to fly to Florida and eat Ham and chew chiclets and play with Rosie.

And I also remember the time I freed the “azulejos” by opening their cage door, but I don’t remember if I did it because I hated them because they told on me or because I wanted them to fly North. I just remember getting in trouble for it.

And I was reading Yoani’s blog the other day and she had a post about a “Wild Beast” and it was about “Twitter”. Twitter’s logo is a blue bird and the whole purpose of “tweeting” is to tell everybody what you’re doing,(sometimes to annoying detail).

And Yoani was talking about how equipped with a cell phone, dissidents can tell a little blue birdie called “Twitter” what’s going on in the Cuban cage in “ 140 character fragments” so the little birdie can tell all

He didn’t know that our tweets travel to cyberspace through the rough sending of
text-only messages by way of cellphones. Nor could he imagine that instead of
ending up in the hands of a member of the British intelligence services, our
brief texts go to this blue bird that makes them fly through cyberspace.

And I though of how the birdies are signing and a different tune and how its being heard all over the world…

…a little birdie told me.

And the hits keep coming...

2010-04-19T19:55:00.002-04:00

And so in the last post I explained why I find it offensive to call the tea party people “tea baggers”

But it gets much worse than that.

Now we have the president of the US mocking concerned American citizens because they don’t share his world view.

Being a life long Democrat, I’m not all too thrilled about has happened to the Democratic party in the last 20 years, It has been high jacked by the left-over left of the sixties, by a bunch of now over the hill clueless hippies.

So I was, unlike some of my friends, a bit pleased to see that someone was making an attempt to lure the president back from the left edge of radical foreign policy by dangling some green in front of him.

Of course, I’m talking about the Estefans.

In reality, politics is about influence and influence is about money and Obama proved that it’s pretty easy to buy his influence even if it’s by one of the only minorities that don’t march lock and step with the Democratic party-The Cubans.

Sorry, I’m not a fan of one-party systems.

Now, in a candy coated way, the ever “diplomatic” and “politically correct” Gloria said as much:

The beauty of this amazing nation is that anything is possible! Even hosting a very political evening to get the “ear” of my President

And in a not so diplomatic way, Estefan warned the president that the considerable sum she helped raise for his party came with some strings attached by quoting Dr. Lawrence J. Peter:

“Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.”

Unfortunately, while he was in Miami the president decided to do to the American people the very thing that the Estefans were lobbying him to put pressure on the Castro regime to stop doing to the Cuban people.

See, the Castros, through their sate – run media ridicule and mock any opposition in order to marginalize it and that is exactly what president Obama did. During the fundraiser, the president had this to say about the tea partiers who were protesting on tax day:

`You'd think they would be saying thank you,''

As far as I know past presidents have always shrugged off protesters and critics rather than to try to mock and ridicule them.

At least he didn’t call them tea baggers or terrorists.

The latter fell to former president Bill Clinton who warned that those angry tea partiers could incite home grown terror a la Oklahoma City bombing:

"But when you get mad, sometimes you wind up producing exactly the reverse result of what you say you are for."

Sure... Timothy McVeigh was home watching “I Love Lucy” re-runs and tuned into some anti-Clinton protest on TV and decided to kill a bunch a people.

If you listen to these two presidents, you get the impression that they would have sided with the tax loving King George instead of with the American patriots.

But that’s not the point. One can shrug off their point of view.

It’s much harder to understand why these two can’t just shrug of the respectful and sincere criticism of many taxpayers who don’t agree with them and try to blame the people rather than realize that ultimately, in a democracy it is the people who choose who's to blame.

Shrugs

2010-04-17T10:05:00.002-04:00

I haven’t been writing lately. Frankly, the run-up to the 2008 election and the election of a President who thinks that the US constitution is flawed shook me to the core. The cult of then candidate and now president Obama’s personality, all hinging on vague concepts like hope and change and Marxist inspired posters as well as the inability of the opposition to mount a coherent defense of the core American value of a constitutionally limited government, brought back such horrible memories of the Cuban tragedy, that I resorted to burying my head in the sand for over a year, playing ostrich, barely sticking it out on occasion to mutter “I’ve seen this movie before.”

At times, I’ve threatened, in desperate jest, to go back to Cuba. I tell my life partner that I already rode the runaway train of socialism down once and have no desire to do it again. At least Cuba has already hit rock bottom.

And so here I am today, writing. Head out of the sand and squinting. Grimacing at all that my senses are taking in. Surrounded by an all too familiar ugly, foul smelling, painful reality that’s leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.

I was watching TV and they were talking about the tea party activists. Whatever. They wear t-shirts and hats, make signs, wave them at the TV cameras, pat themselves on the back and tell each other what great Americans they are and then they go home and nothing changes. A stupid waste of time, really. Kind of like going to a Star Trek convention.

And they were referring to these folks as “tea baggers.” Apparently this is offensive.

Sheesh! Everyone is way too sensitive these days.

Then, I read on a blog that “tea bagging” was a “sexually” offensive epithet and Hah! that made me interested enough to Google “tea bagger” on my miraculous 3G smart phone and Oh My God!, or OMG in 2010 text lingo. Who knew?!? I certainly didn’t. Wow, right there on Wikipedia! It takes a lot to make this old “gusano” blush.

Oh, pardon my spanglish. Lemme esplain what a gusano is…

Ah yes, “gusano”, Spanish for worm, a lowly, belly crawling creature that feeds off rotting carcasses and refuse. That’s what I was called in Cuba when I was a kid. That’s what all of us who didn’t think Fidel Castro had all the answers or was the only one with the right to ask questions were called.

I mean if you didn’t think that government, Fidel’s or Batista’s or Pepito’s, could abolish the constitution, or had the right to force you to do things you didn’t want to do, like “volunteer”, or that it had no right to take your property and give it to someone else, you were a “gusano.” You were a “counter revolutionary”- against the party, against Fidel. So you were ridiculed and shamed with an insulting moniker made to conjure up a disgusting image...a “gusano.”

Some of “gusanos” were lucky enough to escape Castro’s totalitarian amusement park to a place where you could, if you wanted, wear funny t-shirts and hats and wave signs that mostly say hooray for our side and we cherished this more than anyone will ever know. Being allowed to do so, really, even in this day and age, is a rare gift…an unalienable gift endowed by our creator…that’s denied to so many.

And the best thing about this country was that its constitution was so respected that whenever harmless kooks carrying signs and screaming at the tops of their lungs for whatever reason got together and demonstrated, everyone just shrugged.

Imagine that.

Some nut standing in the middle of the street screaming the total opposite of what you believe in and you just shrug.

Amazing!

And why? because of the flawed, according to our president, piece of a paper that founded our government.

Really amazing.

And so I shrugged, starting in November of last year. Because I believe in the constitution and its “negative powers.” I believe in elections.

But when I see celebrities, folks in the media and some elected officials calling these tea party nuts an offensive name like “tea bagger” just because they’re carrying signs and wearing funny t-shirts and hats and patting themselves on the back for being patriots. Damn-it it breaks my heart because it hits way too close to home for this old “gusano.”

These folks aren’t doing anything more than a Trekie does at a Star Trek convention, really. Then, they go home and pay their taxes. I mean, most people shrug off the Trekies (ok some do give understandably quizzical looks), but these tea party folks get called names-a hideous, insulting, sexually charged epithet just because they have a different concept of the role of government.

And really, that you just can’t shrug off.

Nostalgia...

2009-05-18T12:54:00.003-04:00

Para Ziva:

Eres mas cubana que una palma real.

Olé!

Hubo un lugar
Donde los árboles lloran
Y yo no he parado de llorar

Po’ ti seré
Eterno maaa-nan-tial

Cuba linda de mi vi’a
Cuba linda siempre la recordaré
Yo quisiera verte ahora
Como la primera vez

Cuba linda de mi vi’a
Cuba linda siempre la recordaré

¡Ay!
Cuba linda de mi vi’a
Cuba linda siempre la recordaré

Flor de mayo, Sevillana
Flor de mayo que a mi patria levantó
Yo quisiera verte ahora
Como la primera vez

Flor de mayo, Sevillana
Flor de mayo que a mi patria levantó

¡Ay! Flor de mayo, Sevillana
Flor de mayo que a mi patria levantó
¡Éje!

Coro: Te recordaremos
Aunque me cueste morir

El Cigala: A mi me gustaría una mañana
Después del café bebí ’o
Pasearme por La Habana
Con mi cigarro encendi’o

Coro: Te recordaremos
Aunque me cueste morir

El Cigala: Primita oh Dios te vea
Primita oh Dios te vea
Rodando de mano en mano
Que como la ¿****?

Coro: Te recordaremos
Aunque me cueste morir

El Cigala: A mi me gustaría una mañana
Después del café bebí ’o
De pasearme por La Habana
Con mi cigarro encendi’o

Coro: Te recordaremos
Aunque me cueste morir

El Cigala: Lararararaaaai
Larararararaaalai

(piano solo)

Lararalalalala
Laralaaa

Die Already!

2009-02-01T09:30:00.002-05:00

Die Already! The Miami Herald needs the money.

As Fidel rumors swirl, our newsroom plan awaits

BY MANNY GARCIA
Manny Garcia is The Miami Herald's Senior Editor/News.
At Miami Herald Media Company, Fidel Castro is the journalistic equivalent of a kidney stone -- a constant pain who never seems to go away, and you pray that he passes, soon.
Castro is part of our collective newsroom psyche, even outside One Herald Plaza.
You could be on an African safari when Fidel dies and you gotta come home. Publisher's orders.
Everywhere I travel, I take ''the Cuba plan,'' a three-ring binder with every possible scenario for when Fidel dies. Calling-tree diagrams. Bank accounts. Satellite phones. Fixers. Fast boats.
The Cuba plan went on a Mediterranean cruise with my family. It's been to Barcelona, Rome, Vancouver, Disney World -- even down North Carolina's Nanthahala River -- safely tucked in a waterproof bag while my son and I rafted.
Sad, huh?
You've gotta understand that the Cadaver-in-Chief is our story and biggest challenge. The Cuban government will not give us a journalist's visa to report from there, claiming we are the exile's lapdogs, which is garbage. Meanwhile, some exiles call us Granma North.
So we sneak reporters into Cuba to write about what's going on. We don't publish their bylines because it's dangerous, and you run the risk of getting caught and hassled by the authorities.
While that's going on, we sit here at Mother Herald and prepare some more for the Big Day.
We sit in meetings, long meetings, going over possible stories. Phrasing. Tone. Length. We got at least five different versions of Fidel's obit, pegged to the time of day or night he dies. We built a Web page for the big day -- dubbed the `Holy (bleep) page.
We've got Castro plans in English and Spanish, as well as every conceivable photo of Fidel: young, old, fatigue-clad, pajama-clad, vegetative.
We stare at his tinted eyebrows. You've seen them -- a hue possibly achieved only using abuela's Roux Fanci-Full rinse No. 52, Black Rage.
So we keep training and waiting for him to die. You've heard that joke where Fidel outlives us all?
Well, he's outlived journos involved in cobbling out the earliest Cuba plans. Others quit, retired or just figured they should enjoy life away from the Cuba plan.
(On a positive note, Fidel was a great recruiting tool. ''Where would you rather be when Castro dies?'' It worked!)
But we hang in there.
WORD OF MOUTH
On a recent night, the rumor mill kicked in full-throttle -- Fidel had had a heart attack. He'd had a stroke. He's in a coma. Fifo is dead.
My friends call. My relatives call.
``Por fin se murió el hijo de la gran [prostituta]?''
``Did the son of the great [prostitute] finally die?''
I've never understood the ''great'' part of that phrase.
No, Fidel's apparently alive and in yet another track suit and slippers. The Cuban government releases a photo of Fidel, this time with Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who is holding his hand.
We stare at the photo. He looks no different from an abuelo you'd see at Hialeah Hospital wearing the silk pajamas his nietos got him at the Pembroke Lakes Mall -- except that this abuelo is a dictator.
'It's a friggin' wax dummy.''
``No man, he's looking better.''
``Please, it's Photoshopped! He's dead.''
FALSE ALARM
The truth is we don't know squat. So we polish up the Cuba plan some more, send people to Cuba, call State Department sources who know even less than we do. At all times, we try to act super smart and prepared for Anders Gyllenhaal, our executive editor, who asks pointed questions.
``Is he dead?''
Not too long ago, Juan Tamayo, a long-suffering keeper of the Cuba plan, sat in a room with us to see if we needed to scale back our ambitious Cuba plan.
Fidel had refused to suddenly die -- a wonderful scenario, in a journalistic sense, setting the stage for a fat Special Edition that could be on the streets within hours.
You felt deflated. The kidney stone remained lodged. The old bastard would find a way to hurt even our single-copy sales on his way to Hades.

Every Picture Tells A Story, Don’t It?

2009-01-31T17:55:00.009-05:00

Fidel’s revolution has always been about images. The picture perfect dictatorship.

And that image has been successfully sold to the unsuspecting consumers in the market for a Utopia for half a century.

Fidel’s one and only talent has been to lie and sell slavery as revolutionary martyrdom-Patria o Muerte. He was able to tap into the Cuban unconscious and push all the right emotional buttons with symbols. The beards and crucifixes of the early revolution, the fatigues, four hour speeches, the Korda Che picture on t-shirts and cigars later and now the tracksuit and blog have all been part of the symbolic look of his revolution’s marketing campaign.

Castro’s 50 year propaganda campaign has managed to convince the world that even after 50 years Cuba is still undergoing a revolution that was over on Jan 8 1959. The world’s longest going out of business sale.

Ironically, this week that picture perfect dictatorship wasn’t exactly all that picture perfect thanks to a couple of pictures.

Fist off, Newspapers in Argentina and Venezuela as well as most of Miami were questioning the authenticity of the picture that showed the Argentine president next to a “rejuvenated” and some would say a fake Castro. Yawn.

But, I did show the high resolution digital photograph to a friend who uses photoshop and other software to legitimately “fix” photographs. I also told her the story of how a Cuban official “handed” the photo to the Argentine in public. When she finished laughing-she swore she wasn’t laughing at me and my Cuba obsession-she said that the high resolution digital image was that of a scan. So if someone took a digital photo, doctored it, printed it than scanned into a high resolution image, unless they were really bad at “photoshopping” the image, she couldn’t tell if it had been altered. And she said, what difference does it make, anyway?

OK, so it caused me the price of a latte to find out what I already knew.

The other not so perfect picture that caused a stir, especially on the island, according to Yoani Sanchez, was the Cuban Flag Picture in Granma, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party.

In it, the white star on the Cuban flag was black. Doesn’t sound like a big deal in a country that’s been stuck in 1959 since well, 1959. But it was. It was such a big deal, The next day Granma printed an explanation. A translated Yoani comments:

There are errors that have much greater symbolic weight than hundreds of successes. Evasive stars and readers who interpret their escape; Islands that live dependent on prophesies and superstitions; days to remember the national hero and flags that dare to show what so many people keep silent about.

And all while the substitute dictator, who like the evasive star had left the scene of the crime and was in Moscow drinking Vodka, eating boar fat, (yuk), and nostalgically reliving the glory days of the USSR.

Every picture tells a story, don’t it?

CatholicVote.org

2009-01-28T20:33:00.001-05:00

CatholicVote.org

Posted using ShareThis

Even In Hindsight, Future Uncertain

2009-01-24T14:54:00.003-05:00

Unlike others, I didn’t get a chance to “reflect” on the recent “changes” in the world this week.

Maybe that was a good thing because now I can do so with the benefit of hindsight.

But even looking back, things are a bit blurry and hard to make out in the distance. Hindsight is not always 20-20.

We started the week expecting the big announcement after the inauguration.

Did we get it?

I had a feeling that the latest rumors about the demise of Fidel, was the latest setup by the regime and that they were going to prop up the tracksuit tyrant for yet another gruesomely uncomfortable photo op. I figured they would have posed him next to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet because of her red pedigree, but in hindsight, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, made more sense because of her bought and paid for- one $800k suitcase at a time-lack of pedigree.

The speculations all started with Chavez shooting of his mouth by delivering a eulogy for Fidel on his un-real(ity) TV show.

Chavez also compared Obama’s scent to that of Mr. Danger. And as repulsive and un-masculine as it is to compare the scents of your male enemies, it does give an insight into Chavez’s very primal world. A world were where the big dogs mark their territory and he goes around sniffing the boundaries.

So, lo and behold, right after the inauguration, the brothers Castro decide to embrace President Obama, making Chavez the odd socialist new man out. Raúl wished President Obama luck and even said he “seemed like a good man.”

Then, President Fernandez de Kirchner, announces to the world that even Fidel is caught up in the Obamania sweeping the world and that he “believes” in Obama, all stenches aside. She also dispels the rumors, started by Chavez, that Fidel has one foot in the grave.

“Fidel” then gets reflexive in his blog and praises the “11^th” American President, saying that “no one could doubt the sincerity of his words” and that President Obama is “the living symbol of the American dream.”

Talk about a stench. Something smells fishy-very fishy.

While I can see what Fidel sees in President Obama: a bit of himself, it is totally out of character for Fidel to talk about the American Dream.

Castro’s dream society is one where the individual is totally subjugated and the state, Castro, is omnipotent, His is the Nazi and Soviet dream, not the American Dream where individuals are free to pursue their own life, liberty and happiness. That is his nightmare, the kryptonite to Che’s super new man, the holy water to his demon.

There was much talk of the announcement of Fidel’s death after President Obama’s inauguration.

I have no idea about Fidel’s health, but I doubt that Castro wrote this last reflection, where he embraces the embodiment of the American Dream.

Whoever wrote this reflection could be signaling the end of the revolution-which is like announcing the death of Fidel. Fidel is the revolution and the revolution was the antithesis to the American Dream.

In this online essay, Fidel has been cast aside as a an obstacle that “gets in the way of the comrades from the Party and the State as they are called to make constant decisions to tackle the objective difficulties derived from the world economic crisis.”

They could very well have just announced the end of an epic 50 years of “struggle” and “resistance” to an idea by embracing its embodiment-a truce in the “battle of ideas.” Or do they sense that America’s dream has been forever changed by its embodiment?

Time and hindsight will tell.

But it does seem that the regime has decided to embrace the embodiment of the American dream, President Obama, as the way to objectively tackle its economic difficulties. The embrace doesn’t have to be out of love, but in communist Cuba’s jineterismo tradition, out of necessity-American credit, American tourists and American dollars. This “reflection” attributed to Fidel and the full court press campaign against the embargo by the regime’s sympathizers, apologists, fellow travelers and all round useful idiots are definite clues to its goal.

This can only be achieved by burying Fidel.

I think they just might have.

… And the Devil says :

2009-01-21T07:18:00.008-05:00

Do you believe in a God that satisfies
Do you believe in a God that opens eyes
Do you believe in a God that tells you lies
Or do you believe in me?

Do you believe in a God that brings you down
Do you believe in a God that wears a crown
Do you believe in a God that makes you bow
Or do you believe in me?

..the leap of faith...

An Arm, A Leg And A…

2009-01-16T18:34:00.000-05:00

Freedom is expensive.

Historically, it has been literarily been paid for with blood.

Some would give an arm and a leg to be free and have.

And some men in Cuba are willing to part with a piece of something that’s very dear and near to them in order to have the opportunity to join a very exclusive club and leave Castro’s dungeon.

From the Wall Street Journal:

…
Like many young Cubans, 23-year-old Yosniel Castro wants an opportunity to leave this Communist-ruled island for a better life. Unlike many of his peers, he may have found a way out: Judaism.
…
The journey from Havana to Jerusalem, however, isn't easy. The process of converting to Judaism takes years and includes being approved by a council of elders at the synagogue and then an ordained rabbi. Since Cuba has none, usually converts have to wait for a visiting rabbi from Israel, Argentina or Chile. Last but not least, male converts have to submit to a ritual circumcision. In 2007, dozens of adult Cuban men underwent circumcision as part of their conversion process.
…
Since 1992, Bet Shalom has had a rotating troupe of mentors from Argentina, often rabbinical students, who usually commit to a two-year stint, instructing younger members of the congregation as well as conversos. The latest mentor, Fernando Lapiduz, hails from Rosario, in Argentina's grain belt.
.
In 2007, his first year in Havana, Mr. Lapiduz converted 71 Jews, including nearly two dozen adult men. They were required to submit to ritual circumcision by an ordained mohel whom Mr. Lapiduz imported from Argentina. "He did them all in one week," says Mr. Lapiduz proudly.
.
Mr. Zabicki was lucky -- he was circumcised in Mexico a week after his birth. "For those older guys...Well, it was a pretty complicated operation," he says with a grimace.

.
A complicated operation and an ironic situation to say the least.

.
While Castro’s role model, Hitler, was persecuting, incarcerating and slaughtering Jews in Europe, many Jews either converted to or pretended to be Christian in order to escape the his concentration camps.

.
And now in Cuba people convert to Judaism in order to escape Castro’s island concentration camp.

Some Socialists Are Better Than Others

2009-01-14T20:16:00.000-05:00

I’ve got a wound in my soul. It’s called Elian.

I know its never going to heal, but it doesn’t hurt as much as when I was injured.

Elian was every Cuban. We were all a scared refugee at some point saved from the jaws of the sharks. Some figuratively, others all too literally.

I’m glad they didn’t throw me back into the shark tank, but would they have? Would they have been that blind, that cruel?

Obviously yes.

When the people, the system, the society you look up to let you down by doing something immoral it hurts, especially if they hurt a child in the process.

The mantra back in ‘00 was that “the boy belonged with his father.”

No argument, no explanation, no anecdote, no picture, no nothing could convince some people that to send a child back to some parents was child abuse. It was my hatred of Fidel blinding me. I could not see.

Indoctrinating a child into a cult of hate, lies and immorality even with their parent’s consent doesn’t make it right. It is still child abuse. Especially in a totalitarian country where everyone belongs to the state and Papa Fidel has parental rights over all the children, their parents and their pet dogs. Even in the child-welfare community where I worked at the time, this logic was rejected in favor of the “the boy belongs with his father” bumper sticker rationale.

So now I read that Adolf Hitler, the birthday cake boy from Jersey, has been taken away from his neo-nazi parents by the State. It seems that naming a child Adolph Hitler is considered child abuse or is it the environment of hate that the parents are instilling in this child that’s considered child abuse by the Garden State?

Now I’m confused. I thought children belonged with their parents.

Maybe Cuban children are to be measured by a different yardstick than the lily white supremacists?

What’s also troubling is that no ShopRite bakery employee would have batted an eyelash if it had been a birthday cake for a kid named Che or Fidel Castro or Mao Zedung or Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin. Much less would NJ’s DYFS have taken any child named after a communist away from their parents because of the environment of hate that the children may be exposed to in a communist household could be considered child abuse.

The same crowd that defends socialism and the communist murderers who have been responsible for the deaths of 100,000,000 people in socialist states, have turned on one of their own: Adolph Hitler.

Hitler is the pariah even though his body count is considerably less than Stalin’s or Mao’s. Nazis, you see, are far right, the opposite of a communist-or so they would have you believe.

But Hitler was one of them, a socialist. "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei —the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Clearly in Nazi Germany, the individual interests were subjugated for the common good and Hitler and his thugs ran the German economy by deciding what would be produced at what price, etc. In a word: Socialism.

I guess some socialists are better than others.

The Rerun

2009-01-14T12:49:00.000-05:00

The show is about to start.

The rerun.

They should call this movie Déjà vu … They should call this movie Déjà vu … They should call this movie Déjà vu …

They’re setting the stage and props, going over security. You know, the usual.

Fidel’s demise is the talk of the media. And yet it seems that in the place that would welcome that news the most the news, Miami, it’s being received with a shrug and a smile. And as much as the media would like to see Cuban youths banging on pots on the street, by chumming the waters, it just doesn’t seem to be happening.

My kids will probably celebrate Fidel’s death because they think that it will probably mark the end of the dinner time lectures on the evils of Fidel, communism, the left and baggy pants. Yes, baggy pants are a communist plot.

Dr. Mario thinks that they might make the announcement on the 20th to compete with Obama.

I think that once Chilean President Bachalet arrives in Cuba, she will get her chance to kiss Castro’s colostomy bag in front of the cameras. And the regime will have fooled those gusanos in Miami on last time.

But that’s a rerun too. And the emotional response the second or third time you see the movie isn’t the same.

And I've seen this movie before.

Fading

2009-01-13T19:13:00.000-05:00

Apparently Fidel Castro hasn’t reflected on anything since December 15. And he hasn’t been reflected in a camera lens for even longer.

And not too many people have noticed.

I think if Hugo Chavez hadn’t opened his mouth about the world never being able to see Fidel walking around the countryside in his uniform again, no one would have really noticed.

I certainly didn’t. I did find it odd that his half brother Raúl was traveling around Latin America for the first time since he took over and there weren’t any comments from the colostomy gallery.

But now the speculation about his health and mortality are staring up again.

It’s amazing to see how much Fidel’s star has faded since he took ill.

Unlike his pal Che, who died young, his star burning out fast and bright, Fidel’s is fading.

Which of course reminds of……

My my, hey hey

Rock and roll is here to stay

It's better to burn out

Than to fade away

My my, hey hey.

Out of the blue and into the black

They give you this,

but you pay for that

And once you're gone,

you can never come back

When you're out of the blue

and into the black.

The king is gone but he's not forgotten

This is the story of a johnny rotten

It's better to burn out than it is to rust

The king is gone but he's not forgotten.

Hey hey, my my

Rock and roll can never die

There's more to the picture

Than meets the eye.

Hey hey, my my.

2009-01-12T19:45:00.000-05:00

I had a few good head scratchers last week. No, no tengo piojos.

Cubans are now allowed to build shelters to protect themselves from the elements.

Now, if I were a cynic, I would say that what is really going on here is that the regime sees a money making opportunity. They can take all the construction material donations sent in from foreign countries after the hurricanes and sell them to Cubans at Castro Depot who will pay for them with the $300 a month they get from tia Cuca in Hialeah now and the even more they will get later when President Obama opens up the remittance faucet, as promised, once he takes office.

Or I could say that the regime has finally come to grips with the abject failure of their policies and are giving up trying to provide housing for the Cuban people-as if they ever intended to.

Or I could say that all that building “your little home with whatever you can” is just going to exacerbate Cuba’s third world status by turning it into one big giant shanty town.

But that’s not the kind of guy I am. I’m not that deep.

What I can’t get past is how the media reports the news without admitting just how enslaved Cubans are.

Not only that, they make it sound like allowing humans to build a structure to shelter themselves from the elements with their own money is some kind of grandiose gesture of magnanimous compassion by Generalissimo Raúl Castro!

Revolt

2009-01-11T22:26:00.000-05:00

So I had a pretty hectic week and though I couldn’t update the blog, I was able to keep up with the “50th Anniversary” of the Revolution through news alert and Babalú.

At what point is a revolution over, anyway? Once you establish a new “order” the revolution is done-over. But they don’t celebrate that moment in Cuba, they celebrate a perpetual revolution that has struggled for 50 years to establish a new order and still hasn’t. I guess because they’re still revolting and according to Generalisimo Raúl they plan to continue revolting for at least another 50 years. Are they revolting against themselves or just revolting for the sake of revolt? I would argue that they are celebrating a perpetual failure, and although it sounds like I may be nit picking the semantics, a matter of linguistics, that is how they win the argument by dictating the words.

At the stroke of midnight every year, I usually revolt everyone by saying “another year down the tubes”. I say that because of the revolt in Cuba in 1959. This year I said “50 years down the tubes” bracing myself for the barrage of revolting hoopla, celebrations and parades.

Surprisingly, the celebrations on the island were pretty moot even by revolting revolutionary standards. I was more like a wake where nobody really liked the stiff. Let us pray.

The international free press, though, had to play homage to the revolting mythical barbudos who brought free education and healthcare to an island, that as they tell it, had one hospital, two schools, a million casinos and a million and one brothels-all run by mobsters and about 250 rich guys, who by the looks of it, owned about 500 ’57 Chevys apiece. That’s why it has taken 50 years to teach everyone how to read and write and set up a state-run HMO-that, and the embargo.

In next fifty years of revolt we will probably see the reintroduction of toilet paper into Cuban society.

Talk about fifty years down the tubes!

Miami 2009*

2009-01-01T22:55:00.006-05:00

So last night, or rather early this morning, I was walking home from a neighbor's house and there were a few house parties still going on.

From somewhere in the dark, came an old melody that made us feel alright-an old Billy Joel song I hadn’t heard in years…

It was the song about the lights going out on Broadway. Only, I knew that’s not the name of the song. We knew it had a name that had nothing to do with the lyrics but couldn’t think of it.

I remembered to look it up tonight (What did we ever do before Google?).The name of the song is Miami 2017. That’s only a few miles and 8 years away.

And so here’s the last stanza Miami 2017-with an asterisk like Happy New Year* because it reminds me of Cuba and because I changed one of the words,

Miami 2017*

...You know those lights were bright on El Malecon
That was so many years ago
Before we all lived here in Florida
Before the Mafia took over Mexico
There are not many who rememberT
hey say a handful still survive
To tell the world about
The way the lights went out
And keep the memory alive...

Billy Singing in concert with great pictures of The City:

Grape Anesthesia

2009-01-01T21:37:00.003-05:00

So I called up the old man and asked him if he ate his grapes.

He did. My mom put them in sandwich bags. Why didn’t I think of that?

And so I asked him “What where you doing 50 years ago?” and he said “Probably eating my last grape.”

The old man is half existentialist, half cynic and half comedian. In Cuban you can be medio anything. In fact, four medios add up to a peseta.

So I said “Seriously, What where you doing fifty years ago when Batista was leaving Cuba”

And he said: “Seriously, We had no idea. I was probably eating the last grape”

And I thought abut it as I saw all the people partying on TV and heard the distant music of a neighbor's party.

The world as we know it could be changing as we sip our champagne and eat our last grape and even with the instantaneous communications of today’s world, we wouldn’t know it.

So I imagined that New Year’s Eve in 1958 and all the hard partying, dancing Cubans sipping Cidra and chomping on grapes totally unaware that the island they were floating on was about to be swallowed up in a whirlpool of change.

And little did those that knew what was about to happen imagine that 50 years later the island would still be sinking into that swirling, bottomless abyss.

The inevitable yearly visit of my asterisk-my cross-the moment where I realize that the New Year celebration is also the anniversary of the day that freedom died-had arrived,

And the second glass of champagne became not a toast but a bitter grape anesthesia.

Embargo Schmargo

2008-12-08T20:54:00.004-05:00

The chorus is deafening and in surround sound.

End the Embargo. Stop isolating Cuba. Now!

Well, on January 21.

The basic thrust of the end the embargo argument is that it hasn’t worked and that flooding the island with tourists and dollars will bring about freedom.

You see, according to this theory, the Cubans on the island are too stupid and brainwashed to know what freedom is. Their little Hispanic third world minds cannot understand such an advanced abstract concept. All the lives lost by Cubans either trying to achieve personal or national freedom must have been coincidences.

Material things like hard currency, fancy personal electronics and designer clothes- those are the kind of things that Cubans can understand and once they are exposed to these things through contact with Americans tourists who are visiting the land that the 20th century forgot so they can witness some primitives eek out an existence in quaint misery or take advantage of dark skinned, half starved teenager, they will demand them and the regime will crumble like a 50 year old fortune cookie.

Please!

I propose, that maybe, Cubans on the island, since they don’t have freedom, are the ones that actually understand and cherish a concept that is an abstract idea to those that have never, thank God, had to do with out it- to those that think that freedom is freedom to choose between Merlot and Pinot Noir, between a regular latte or a decaf latte or which island to get wasted on.

The “embargo” is not responsible with the suffering and the poverty that the Cuban people have been forced to endure. The TOTALITARIAN Castro regime is. The Castros are evil. They keep the Cubans hungry and destitute in order to control them.

Giving the regime credit and funds will only allow them to buy more up to date repression gear at the Tyrants Я Us mega store.

What is wrong in Cuba isn’t the Cuban people it is the regime. You don’t need to expose Cubans to anything in order for them to raise their social awareness. They know exactly what they are missing

When the regime in South Africa was broken, the world came together to choke that regime out of existence.

So why is it that when it comes to Cuba, that proven approach isn’t replicated?

Any tyranny is a minority rule, like South Africa had.

In Cuba’s case, however, its leader is world-renown for surviving ten US presidents while being an annoying thorn on their side. Because of this, he is idolized and revered by the international left. And so Cuba’s Anti-Yankee revolution must be preserved at all costs-even if the price is 50 more years of Cuban sweat, blood and tears.

And that’s just not me ranting, it’s exactly Raúl Castro has responded to his big brother’s statement that Cuba “could” talk to a President Obama and the ensuing orgasmic echoes of approval from all parts of the supposedly civilized world.

"we have learned to resist for half a century, and we are prepared to fight for Eanother half century."

That means in the Cuban Regime’s Newspeak that they will continue to hold the Cuban people hostage for as long as they are in power. The Regime isn’t interested in improving the lives of the Cuban people, but only in imposing its will, by force, on the Cuban people for as long as possible.

The only thing that easing the embargo and cozying up to the Cuban tyranny is going to accomplish is to perpetuate the oppression and violation of Human Rights for at least another generation.

Oh MY!

My bud, TEP, with another perpective:

Tomás Estrada-Palma said...

The embargo is a moot point if you have no money. Castro uses "embargo" as an excuse and will do anything to keep it in place. Exiles fear dropping the embargo will save the regime and argue that it will have to mean taxpayer backed credit for Castro.
.
It doesn't have to be that way. Make a grand announcement that the embargo is lifted but no credit will be available to the regime until all debt is paid by the thieves in power. Here would be the results:
.
1. There is no credit available for honest individuals outside of Cuba.
.
2. Castro would lose the last leg keeping him standing - that it is the embargo making Cuba poor.
.
3. Castro has no cash and could not buy one penny more than he already buys right now under the embargo. What kind of embargo allows food and medicine? With that kind of thinking we'd still be fighting the Trojan War.
.
4. Cuba has very little to sell and that would be exacerbated by the worldwide commodity price deflation. Their commie production model is toast in this market loaded with stuff nobody is buying now anyway.
.
Unfortunately, only Castro and Tomas Estrada-Palma understand we are in an information war. If you think you are a good information warrior ask yourself this:
.
Have you ever said "I don't care what people think. I say the embargo stays." If you have you are shooting information arrows while Castro is lobbing information grenades into our front lines.

The Cuban "Race"

2008-12-04T22:35:00.009-05:00

I remember sitting in Ms. Ryman’s homeroom in Union Hill High School one morning and having to fill out some kind of a form that asked what race I was. One race was white, another black, another “Hispanic” and so on.

That day, I realized that we Cubans were no longer white. All of us Cubans complained that just because we spoke Spanish, it didn’t mean that we weren’t white. Some of us where some of us weren’t, but “Hispanic” wasn’t a race, it was a language. Whatever. Cuban became my race that day. The best story that day was the confusion on the teachers face when a Chinese Cuban asked what she should put down.

So a few days ago, I get an e-mail from an Obamaniac acquaintance about an article in The Miami Herald by a Cuban author, Dr. Carlos Moore who believes that the Cuban regime is quaking in its boots because the newly elected President of the United States is black.

Dr. Carlos Moore-Cuban

Not only that, but when Mr. Obama makes good on rescinding the Bush restrictions on travel and remittances, the pressure put on the regime by the now black population, might just bring the regime crumbling down.

Now, I’m not going to argue with Dr. Moore that blacks in Cuba have it worst that the whites. I have been pointing that out for years. And one can’t argue that people of color throughout the world have been empowered by Obama’s election either. They have.

But will take issue with some of his points, Cuban to Cuban.

For example, Dr. Moore claims that the worst problem of the revolution is racism.

The bottom line is that racism is Cuba's most intractable problem.

That’s funny, I was under the impression that the worst problem Cuban have is that they're being opressed by a totalitarian regime. Would things be any better if the darker Cubans were being repressed just as bad as lighter Cubans? Forget that Cuba has been stuck in the fifties for fifty years. In America, where blacks weren’t even allowed to sit alongside of whites in the restaurants in some areas, a non white has been elected president. Why? Because of democracy.

Had Cuba remained a democratic republic like it was before Batista took it over, who knows what kind of advances in terms of race, it would have achieved. Contrary to Dr. Moore’s assertions, Cuba was not “segregated”

And it really serves no purpose to decry the historical exiles as bigots:

Many, especially the younger generation, have forsaken the racial bigotry of their parents and evinced a growing awareness that the predominantly white face (85 percent) of the Cuban-American community is a political liability in a Cuba that is predominantly black.

I have never in the many years I have been exiled heard any Cuban exile blame blacks for the revolution’s success or claim that the only reason that the regime is still in power is because it has the support of the majority of the non-white population.

Is it then fair to equate the Miami Cubans with Castro? Castro has had TOTAL control over Cuban society for 50 years. The prejudices that Cubans may have had 50 years have no bearing on reality today or are they the cause of the suffering of non-white Cubans under Fidel.

I really think that in his article, Dr.Moore, does a disservice to “our” race by throwing all exiles under the bus as “bigots”

Coño.

Dr. Moore should remember that here in the US none of us are considered white. If the post Obama America can move into a post racial era, it should be a cinch for us Cubans to do the same, even he could do it.

That said, it is important for Dr. Moore to continue to educate black America as to the economic apartheid and racism that the majority of non-white Cubans are forced to endure in addition to the run of the mill totalitarian oppression.

It is important to point out Fidel Castro’s bigotry, (as opposed to the prejudices of the 1950’s Cuban society), to all the black Americans who see Fidel as a sympathetic figure and his revolution as a model for social equality.

It is also important to tell the world that 85% of the incarcerated men in Cuba are not white. And although these men are considered common criminals, the economic conditions that caused them to turn to a life a crime to survive are political and caused by an illegitimate, corrupt and incompetent regime.

And it is imperative that blacks in America understand that many of the leading, bravest and most oppressed dissidents are what in America would be considered black, but are Cuban.

With respected black scholars like Dr. Moore telling the truth about Castro’s revolution, with the help of American civil rights leaders, like the Reverend Al Sharpton who is now advocating for black Cuban prisoners of conscience like Dr. Biscet, Castro and his thugs will lose a strong base of support within the USA-black America.

If their efforts are reinforced by President Obama the mask of the Cuban revolution’s racial equality might finally be taken off-once and for all.

Truthfully, I was ready to dismiss Dr. Moore’s theory asm well, racist, but in reading another article by non other than Guillermo Fariñas Hernández entitled “Thankful for Obama’s Arrival”, I had to reassess my position.

Guillermo Fariñas Hernández - Cuban

According to Fariñas, since Obama was elected, the old myth that Cuba was the model for a post racist society and the US was inherently a racist country, has been shattered. This has forced the regime to revisit the economic apartheid that kept Cuban blacks from getting the better jobs-those with access to hard currency-and they have decreed that 40% of the employees that work in the hard currency stores, the “shoppings”, be non-whites.

Fariñas claims that the non-whites know that they don’t owe their jobs to the revolution, but to President-Elect Obama.

Amazing!

Lighting A Candle...

2008-12-04T07:49:00.008-05:00

...To The Ones We Can't Hold A Candle To.

I haven’t posted anything in a long time.

I haven’t really had anything to say, or, better said, I haven’t had anything to say that I thought anyone would want to read.

Not that this is worth reading or anything, but I thought I’d try something more personal to get back into the swing of things…

…Today is Saint Barbara’s feast day- a Cuban holiday of sorts.

I was going to light a candle and wait till midnight. The Saint Barbara vigil-“esperar a Santa Bárbara.”

I was sitting in the dark thinking about this Cuban custom and about the many December 3rds in my past when I had gone to parties to “wait for Saint Barbara.”

At one point in my life, I thought the tradition was primitive, pagan and so third world religiously superstitious. Now, it has become a cultured and a rich, sophisticated Cuban eccentricity. The Cuban people have progressed a lot in twenty years.

Anyway, I was sitting there thinking about the Cuban devotion to this Christian martyr and why the attraction.

I don’t know if I was asleep or dozing off or what, but I had a weird stream of consciousness flowing.

I was looking at the red Santa Bárbara velón that we had bought to use as a hurricane candle. Now, at the risk of being accused of “nada mas acordarme de Santa Bárbara cuando truena,” (only thinking of Saint Barabara when it thunders- a Cardinal Cuban Sin), there IS no better time to light a candle to Santa Bárbara then when you’re in the middle of a thunderstorm or hurricane and the power goes out. A modern mixture of practicality and ~~third world religious superstitiousness~~ and rich cultural eccentricity.

The candle was red- Santa Bárbara’s color. I thought of Cuban women wearing red on Dec. 4th. Then, came the association of red with communism and why I don’t like red.

And so in the cool, quiet dark as I lingered between reality and a dream, the red candle became Cuba and the tower at the foot of the virgin was “El morro.”

Saint Barbara was the captive Cuba, isolated from the rest of the world, tortured by a tyrannical father because she had chosen the truth and the light over pagan Godlessness.

Santa Bárbara, rebellious, had miraculously escaped the tower where her father locked her up for her beliefs just like many Cubans who were locked up in La Cabaña, next to the tower of El Morro. And she was persecuted and martyred for intransigently clinging to her principles.

And as I drifted further from reality, Santa Bárbara was there, sword in hand, only she had Yoani Sanchez’s face with her haunting dark eyes and Cuban Mona Lisa smile and she stood in front of El Morro with a tear running down her face.

I suddenly was startled back to the reality I had drifted from by my nodding head, and for a fleeting instant it was all so crystal clear- Santa Bárbara, Cuba and our devotion to red clad, sword wielding rebels. It was all so crystal clear until I drifted off again.

Like the Apostles in the garden of Gethsemane, I had been too weak to stay awake and light the candle for Santa Bárbara and Cuba and Yoani and the many that have been martyred for their beliefs-those that I could never hold a candle to.

This morning, imprisoned in three dimensions, my mind cannot make the connections and associations and the once crystal clear revelation is more like a foggy hallucination. But, it is clear that I should light that candle in admiration.

Coincidently, while looking for a picture of Santa Bárbara to go along with this meditation, I found I wasn’t the only son of a son of a sailor who’s mind had associated Santa Bárbara with freedom, exile…and a salty piece of land.

A Salty Piece Of Land ------Jimmy Buffett

I was listening for answers
That I could not really hear
When the words of a wise old Indian
Put a conch shell to my ear

And I took off for the ocean
I was searching for the coast
Painting pictures of my vision
With the words from grandma ghost

Hiding from the dragons
Riding for the sea
Singing ballads from my childhood
“A pirate’s life for me”

Survivors seem to function best
When peril is at hand
With a song of the ocean
Meets a salty piece of land

I was force-fed my religion
But I somehow saved my smile
Tapped into my instincts
As I headed to’ards exile

Cleopatra did not own a barge
But a schooner was her home
She has centuries of stories
And there’s wisdom in her bones

She was on a sacred mission
And she told me of a place
Where a man can hide forever
But never loose his face

So I saddled up my seahorse
With a fly-rod in my hand
I was not looking for salvation
Just a salty piece of land

Somedays Cayo Loco SHIMMERS
Like the stars up in the sky
And the seabirds they do touch and gos
As the world just tangos by

But there are times when she is hidden
Beneath the wild and crashing waves
And the patron saint of lightening
Keeps the sailors from their graves

Some say it is a blinding sword
Pointing out into the sea
While others say her guiding light
Leads to’ards eternity

Still I sit in contemplation
And I just don’t understand
This mysterious attraction
Of this salty piece of land

Still I search the constellations
And the tiny grains of sand
Where the song of the ocean
Meets the salty piece of land

Raul’s “Sing a Song”

2008-11-19T12:38:00.003-05:00

My father always told me that it was easy being a communist, and the first thing you had to do was loose your shame.-“lo primero que se pierde es la vergüenza.”

When you have no shame, no principles, it’s easy to hate and to let the means justify the ends. Everything is relative in the Marxist philosophical heaven of dialectic materialism.

It is estimated, for example, that in Red China, the ends, absolute and total power, justified the means, the deaths of about 65,000,000 to 70,000,000 lives, give or take a few million, under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong.

That’s more deaths than are attributed to Stalin and Hitler combined!

Yet in Cuba, Mao Zedong is revered by the regime’s new leader, Raúl Castro.

While the “president” of China, Hu Jintao was visiting Havana, Raúl felt compelled to sing a song of praise and adulation to the Chinese mass murderer:

President Raul Castro was in such good spirits on Tuesday that he led 200 Chinese students learning Spanish at a Cuban school in an impromptu sing-along of a Chinese song about late China leader Mao Zedong.

He said he learned the song from a Chinese delegate at a youth rights conference in Austria in 1953.

"I don't have the memory that Fidel has, but I remember that song," he said.

Raúl can sing for his supper anytime he likes, but singing a song praising Chairman Mao is shameful.

Oh, that’s right communists have no shame. The only thing that matters is the millions that the Chinese are pouring into Cuba so that the Castro family can remain in power.

And yes, Raúl doesn’t seem to have as “the same memory” as Fidel, especially when it comes to Mao.

When the USSR and China had an ideological falling out, (probably on which was the best method to eradicate opposition, executions or starvation), Fidel, who knew where his bread was buttered and preferred Stalinism, sided with the USSR in the squabble.

Fidel began, like his Soviet masters, to openly criticize Mao’s policies. At one point, Fidel even accused Mao of murdering innocent people.

But, everything’s good now since the Chinese come bearing dollars and Fidel has never had had a problem with selling Cuba to the highest bidding tyranny.

Video of Raúl’s “sing a song” performance:

Maybe he’ll duet with singing tyrant Hugo Chavez and sing songs in praise of Hitler when he visits Venezuela on his first trip there.

Tremenda “sing a song” that would be.

Letting The Lying Corps Lie

2008-11-13T23:42:00.003-05:00

The Cuban regime’s propaganda machine is working overtime these days.

The propaganda machine has always had two purposes. Internally, its role is to lie to the Cuban citizens. Externally, it lies to the world by marketing the “revolution” and its chief architect, Fidel. They have been very successful at both. Lying is to communists as hammers are to carpenters.

Right now the emphasis is being placed on the marketing.

They’re selling oil, tons of it. They’re not sure exactly where it is or if you can even get at it but they have lots. And for a fee, any country or company that wants to try their luck on the drill baby drill roulette can have a go at trying to find the coveted crude.

They’re also marketing a book by non other than Cuba’s blogger in chief, Fidel.

Yes.

The 81 year old, terminally ill, tracksuit clad, retired despot wrote a book about Columbia, “La Paz en Columbia”. Destroying Columbia has always been one of Fidel Castro’s obsessions. In fact, one of his first “revolutionary” acts was his participation in “El Bogotazo.” And ever since he took power he has been trying to export his revolutionary disease to the South American country which is finally on the verge of eradicating the progress destroying Castro-virus.

Talk about ghost writing.

Talk about an unbelievable sub plot.

The regime is selling a story that an 82 yr. old, terminally ill man who is reported to have undergone almost a dozen intestinal surgeries, who is too weak to appear in public and who, in his last interview, could not keep a train of thought, even though the interview was highly edited, (In the middle of the interview he starts to talk about Einstein and the theory of relativity and interrupts himself and says: “he was born in Germany, you know”), spent 400 hours penning the 259 page book. Amazing! Not only that, he also penned hundreds of “reflections” too. (in his spare time, between changing the colostomy bag, hurricane forecasting and bossing his little brother around.)

But it gets better. The book markets the idea that Castro and his regime are the good guys in Columbia’s struggle to fight the armed Marxist-narco-trafficking insurgency that has devastated Columbian society for nearly 50 years. You see, Castro in the book tells of his regime’s efforts in bringing about a political solution to the conflict.

That’s rich. Castro exports his Marxist revolution to democratic Columbia, he trains and arms the rebels in a guerrilla war that spans decades and kills thousands. Then, when it’s clear that the guerrillas will never win, Castro tries to force the Columbian government to negotiate and share power with a bunch of hostage taking, narco-trafficking, bomb throwing communist criminals and sink Columbia by using its democratic institutions, like he did Venezuela, against them. And he’s the good guy. Even more amazing!

If the regime can sell that one, well, then they can sell just about anything, like the idea that Cuba is a worker’s paradise or a vast underwater oil field.

Oh well. Never mind.

More on Barry O.’s Barrio Watch…

2008-11-11T23:47:00.008-05:00

About a week late and about a trillion dollars short, an American politician has called President –Elect Obama’s “plan” for a National Civilian Security Force” Marxist. No kidding.

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may—may not, I hope not—but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Rep. Broun, having never lived in a Marxist totalitarian dictatorship, cannot quite put his finger on it, but something in his gut tells him that a “national civilian security force” sounds, well, un-American and he’s right.

Over at the conservative web-site Hot Air, Ed Morissey contends that Rep. Broun’s statement hails the onset of ODS, Obama Derangement Syndrome. He also finds the Obama July 3, comments, “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded,” rather innocuous:

In the context of Obama’s remarks above, though, he fairly clearly meant to at least include a volunteer force in outreach within and outside the US as some sort of Department of Peace-like indirect boost to national security…

…Nothing in that speech hints at a Gestapo-like organization at all.

Rep Broun’s remarks are likened to “hyperbole:”

If we plan to offer a rational alternative to the coming debacle of the next two years, then we’d better stick to facts and eschew hyperbole. We need to oppose the reality of the radical agenda proposed by Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress, not fantasies spun out of context-free snippets of speeches. The more critics invoke Hitler and Stalin instead of Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson, the better the reality of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi will seem in 2010.

Ok. Facts. I like Facts. I like jokes better: a Department of Peace?!? Very funny. We can call it the Ministry of Peace, the “minipeace” for short,-it has a certain familiar ring to it, no?

I agree with Rep. Broun that Obama’s proposal for a Civilian National Security Force has a Marxist ring to it, though I disagree with him that it will be Gestapo-like. You see, I had the misfortune of experiencing a “civilian national security force” in the flesh in Cuba. For the same reason, I also disagree with Morissey’s dismissal of the proposal as harmless.

The first Marxist red flags (hehehe...get it? red flags?) tactics can be found in the “official” script of the candidate Senator Obama’s speech on July 3. Back in July, I thought I had heard the Senator call for the civilian force in an audio of the speech and it made the hairs in the back of my neck stand at attention because of my Post Castro Stress Syndrome. I went to the Obama campaign website to make sure that I heard what I thought I heard and could not find the passage. Not thinking I was hearing things, I kept searching and thankfully, some intrepid citizens had preserved the given speech on a Youtube video. After the initial relief that I still had most of my marbles, I was shocked that the campaign had not included the potentially controversial passage in the “official” transcript. It seems like the Obama campaign already had a Department of Truth to go along with its proposed Department of Peace. The fact that the campaign tried to hide the words of the then presidential candidate by omitting them from the official transcript reeks of the kind of truth manipulation that occurs in Marxist regimes.

Obama, given his background as a community organizer, probably envisions a community based “security force”

Now, for folks that think like Senator Obama, National Security is a totally different thing than it is for folks with a more conservative mind set. Most lefties I know believe that the reason that America is being attacked by terrorists is because of our misguided and failed foreign policies. They keep telling me that the CIA created Bin Laden and that Saddam’s Iraq was our “client state.” They also argue that Iran had been our client state back in the days of the Shah and before the Islamic Revolution and that our backing of the despotic Shah caused the revolution and the ensuing hatred for America. They also tell me that our allegiance to Israel causes more problems than it is worth and that America’s insistence in holding despots to our standards of liberty and progress is antagonistic and counterproductive because it makes the rest of the world not “like” us. Evil manifests itself in the world not because it is inherently evil but because America causes it. It’s the Flip Wilson doctrine; the devil, America, The Great Satan, makes them do it.

Since these folks on the left are of the belief that America’s actions cause the security threats in the first place, In order for a civilian national security force to protect America, it has to change America so that it doesn’t offend any potential enemies out there and cause them to do evil things and so they “like” us. It also has to protect America from those who see the world in judgmental black and white and not in the enlightened relative shades of gray that the liberals do. It’s these people that believe in the antiquated notions of good and evil, right and wrong, that get us into these “security” messes in the first place.

You can see how the civilian national security force can morph and take on a different more ominous role. In order to protect America from these backward thinking, un-nuanced black and white type of folks, they would help protect the liberal ideals that would usher in a changed and transformed America.

They would “organize” the community in order to “educate” the citizenry into thinking less about themselves and more about the community, less about their individual happiness and more about collective purposes. What’s more secure than having everyone pull together as team towards a common goal?

Meetings at homes would be organized, community projects would be planned, neighborhood night watches would be instituted, T-shirts and hats would be distributed, programs for children would be started, workplace security details would be proposed.

These programs would, of course, all be coordinated through a national network funded by the Federal government with stipends, incentives and perks to the members of the “civilian national security force.” Perhaps even a new web-based group would be started.

The new community organization would then be responsible form promoting a mission and accomplishing a vision through different programs designed to keep people employed and busy-protecting an ideology and a cult of personality.

There would be voter registration and education drives along with massive get out the vote drives.

Those that are not interested in going to the meetings or volunteering or put posters up their homes would be shunned, ostracized, ridiculed and watched as potential “security” risks.

This is all very easy to organize when you have millions of “followers” who see a politician as the solution to all their problems and the answer to all their questions.

The "civilian security force" could be easily merged into existing non-profits and programs. No one would have to carry a gun or break your down in the middle of the night to make you comply with their programs. Their results are achieved much more subtly, by intimidation and peer pressure. You would not need thugs armed with night sticks or rifles to persuade you to tow the party line. But you would get neighborhood snitches with whistles, notepads and cell phones.
.

I have seen this “civilian national security force” at work. In Cuba, they call it the CDR, Committees in Defense of the Revolution, and I know the kind of pressure that these kinds of organizations can put on citizens. They don’t have guns like the Gestapo, they just have a bunch of radical and committed individuals who have been organized to serve as the eyes and ears of the government and protect an ideology. I also know the kind of people that are attracted to it.

I know it sounds absurd and paranoid to the uninitiated, but it is not. And I’m not saying that it is going to happen in America, but I am saying that the idea of “civilian national security force” could have dangerous repercussions and detrimental effects on our constitutional rights, or “negative liberties” as our new president thinks of them.

And for those of you who say it cannot ever happen here, take a look at a homeowner's association. If people will agree to give up some of their property rights and freedom of expression as a trade off for some security, it is possible.

UPDATE:

OK. So it's even a little more authoritarian than I thought. In Cuba, being a regime snitch is encouraged, but not compulsory. The Obama plan, according to Rahm Emmanuel, the incoming chief of staff, calls for a mandatory 3 month "Universal Civil Defense Training".

UPDATE2:

It seems I underestimated the Internet component of Obama's organizing plan. This article tells on how the Obama campaign plans to pioneer organizing the Presidents followers by using its vast e-mail phonebook to "convert his army of online activists into a viral lobbying and communications machine."

Stock Up On Toilet Paper ... (por si las moscas)

2008-11-05T17:31:00.003-05:00

Wow. So like Obama kicked some Republican butt.

The left has entrenched itself into power in America.

The White House is about to get a tenant-a superhero- who is a deliberate stranger and whose secret identity has been protected from the public by a media that has willfully disregarded the powers entrusted to them by the Constitution- Their “negative liberties” in Barackspeak.

And so, I stay up real late to listen to the speeches. (Yawn). It occurs to me that McCain might have been working on this concession speech since March. The Caribou Barbie was there. She seemed to be holding back tears, like a woman who just found out her husband has been cheating on her and will not give him the satisfaction of crying in front of him. She doesn’t like to loose, this lady. She’s grown on me.

Finally, the President-elect of the United States comes out for his coronation speech. I’m listening intently for the Marxist code words that he tends to throw out in his speeches. I’m waiting for him to lay out his plans for a collective utopia and for the upcoming formation of his national civilian security force.

None of that, though, just the same ol’ “America is the best country on Earth so let’s change it” speech with some contrived “samplings” of Lincoln and King, sob stories and bumper sticker slogans -but in a new hopeful and changeful tone.

The only potentially collectivist words were in this passage:

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change.

And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.

I wonder if Peggy Joseph from South Florida was aware that President Obama, rather than write her a monthly check so she doesn’t have to worry about her mortgage and filling her gas tank, was expecting her to “work harder and look after not only after ourselves but each other” “with a new spirit of service and sacrifice.” In Barackspeak, that basically means that Peggy now gets to worry about her neighbor’s mortgage and gas tank as well. I bet she never thought that this day would ever happen, either.

I have no idea how far President Obama is willing to act on his obvious socialist instincts.
But, stock up on toilet paper just in case.

Socialist countries are notorious for toilet paper shortages. Toilet paper is practically non-existent in Cuba and its considered a luxury. Maybe Obama will institute a luxury "sin" tax on toilet paper. That's called "a Florio" after a New Jersey Governor who did started to tax toilet paper (and raised everything else) in the 80's and wound up getting kicked out of office.

Ecclesiastical "Negative Liberties?"

2008-10-29T15:29:00.002-04:00

Barack Obama on the Issues of Importance to Catholics - Upload a Document to Scribd

Obama's Newspeak UPDATED

2008-10-28T13:13:00.007-04:00

Remember in High School when that weird English teacher made you read George Orwell’s “1984?”

That book was such a drag. We spent what seemed like an eternity going over “newspeak.”

How stupid was that- having to learn a new vocabulary just to read a dumb book?

Back when I read the book, 1984 was still a few years in the future, yet strangely, for me 1984 was in my past.

It was difficult to read a fictionalized account of what had been my life a few years before. I had come from a tropical Oceania complete with a Big Brother, the thought police and the ministry of truth.

I supposed if I were to read 1984 now, I might get a little misty eyed at Winston Smith’s life reminding me of my hellish childhood. But as a teenager I was tremendously annoyed.

But, back to 1984 and “newspeak.”

Yesterday, as I heard the 2001 tapes of presidential candidate Barack Obama commenting on the civil rights movement, the courts, the constitution and the founding fathers, all I could think of was “newspeak.”

Orwell was brilliant in coming up with “newspeak” to explain how Big Brother and the thought police partially controlled Oceania through speech. In practice, Marxist regimes aim at controlling discourse and thought processes through linguistic euphemisms.

Communists, socialists and fellow travelers all talk in “code.” Now, when I try to explain this “code” to the uninitiated, well, you know…they tell me I’m a paranoid exile that sees a communist bogeyman hiding behind every rock. Fair enough, I may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t communists lurking around. And believe me, they are they’re not going to come out and confess. They’re going to try to deceive and confuse you by talking in code. It’s what they do.

Seemingly innocuous words and phrases like “social justice” or “income redistribution” or “activities on the ground” or “coalition of powers” or "equality" or "brotherhood" all take on a Marxist aura when they are deciphered through a socialist code decoder.

Basically, what the Illinois State Senator was talking about way back in 2001, was his dismay that the founding fathers had not codified “egalitarianism” into the US constitution and that the Warren court hadn’t taken the admittedly radical step when it had the chance. That’s what he means when he says that he could now sit down at a lunch counter and order, if he “could pay for it.” If he could not pay for it and the white guy sitting next to him could, then he’s not equal. This is why wealth has to be redistributed-in order to achieve “economic justice” - code for egalitarianism.

Now, mankind is either genetically wired or created, (depending on one’s belief system), to act in the interests of self preservation. Under normal circumstances, man would not share his wealth with other men. It’s not in his best interests to do so. That’s where the state comes in. The state must, therefore, redistribute the wealth so that all men have more or less the same. Since the state has to force one man to give up what’s his for the benefit of another, it must do so by coercion or force, thus also equally distributing misery.

Marxists don’t see the world in terms of rights that come from their creator. The “creator” for the Marxist is an opiate-another form of crowd control. Man isn’t measured by being equal in the eyes of the state. Man is equal if he has the same relative to every other man. As long as all men are given the same rights by the state, then its fair – “social justice”-again, socialist code words for “egalitarianism.”

So when Senator Obama talks about “negative liberties” he’s really talking about the protection of individual rights which are negative, in his view, because they limit the state from instituting “social and economic justice”, egalitarianism, by coercion-his goal.

In Obama’s view, the problem with the Constitution is that it doesn’t say “what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.” In other words, Obama, believes that the Constitution is flawed because it doesn’t give the state the right to coerce another citizen to give you some of his wealth and achieve “social and economic justice” which code for egalitarianism.

So when you put Obama’s “spread the wealth” philosophy with his belief that the constitution is flawed because it stops short of giving the state the power to act “on your behalf,” you can see how the argument can be made that Obama’s “hope” and “change” are really just newspeak euphemisms for the socialist reorganization of society based on the Marxist principles of egalitarianism through activist judicial reinterpretation of a flawed constitution.

You can. Really, if you know the code. And it isn't even a thought crime ... yet.

UPDATE:

A different and brilliant take on Obama's Newspeak from Bruce Walker at Free Thinker:

Notions like "positive liberty" are part of the web of thought control by language manipulation which Orwell described in 1984. If Obama cannot think of "positive liberty" as a contradiction in terms, then he simply cannot think. The conscious surrender of language to the needs of the party creates a self-made prison from which escape is, quite literally, inconceivable. These unguarded remarks by Obama display a mind trapped in a reality in which words are phantoms.

I think Walker lets Obama off the hook for his newspeak though by excusing Oboma for being a product of the left's newspeak "indoctrination.":

Iron and dull control of education, destruction of the nuclear family, disappearance of religion in public life, degradation of art and entertainment into tasteless mush, and, most of all, the politicization of everything in life -- these forces have created a new sort of human being, a person who lacks from life any tools of discernment or devices to describe life outside of the realm of collectivist political rhetoric.

There is something about Obama, many of us sense, which is different from any other politician. Socialism is inadequate to explain Obama. He is both more and less than that. The Left with all its odd menagerie of causes and claims is not enough either. Obama is part of that but part of something more disturbing. He is someone who can say "negative liberties" unaware that he is saying nothing at all.

I would argue that Obama is not the victim of newspeak who mindelessly repeats the Orwellian newspeak and socialist code but a practitioner in the art of socialist euphinistic linguitics- a true believer.

Obama is certainly intelligent enough to have seen through the linguistic indoctranination that someone in our age group would have been subjected to in American academia.

Young people in Cuba, where thay are subjected to the entirety of George Orwell's Ocenia ,are able to see through the propaganda even after generations of Big Brother, the thought police and the ministry of truth.

Favorite line in the Article:

But implying that more state power somehow increases liberty is beyond mere Leftism. It is entry into that dead realm of Newspeak in which language is pureed into nonsense, and then nonsense is presented as argument.

Ha! That's great stuff. No pure there, just tasty chunks to chew on!

What, Me Worry?

2008-10-26T17:42:00.002-04:00

I’m usually the one pointing out the red flags around Obama.

But yesterday I was put in the unusual position of having to calm someone who is despondent about the prospect of an Obama presidency down. This Cuban American was going down the list of similarities between Obama and the Castro.

Obama, you see, was abandoned by his father and had another name until he was a teenager just like Castro….yaddah…yaddah…blah…blah…blah. They had a pretty extensive list.

Over some cold ones, we came to the conclusion that even if Obama is a Marxist, he won’t have enough time to transform our fledging socialist goverment unto a full fledge totalitarian state in eight years. There’s just not enough time. I mean, even Chavez hasn’t been able to do it to Venezuela in 10 years.

That could never happen here…

So we kept watching the football game. We came to the conclusion that even after Obama’s impending victory, we would still be able to watch football on TV or go to the game and keep making our mortgage payments to the government and our car lease payment to the government owned bank. Nothing’s changed, really. Just a temporary swing of the pendulum to the left.

So I get up this morning and find out that the Socialist wing of the Democratic party is busy at work planning the birth of the People’s Republic of America.

Barney Frank wants to cut military spending by 25%. John, reporting for duty, Kerry wants a “The New Deal II”. The, there’s a plan out there to socialize my 401K .

All this on top of what looks like the criminalization of dissent as evidenced by the attacks on Joe the Plumber and the upcoming push to re-institute the “fairness doctrine.”

Meanwhile, “Russia's Central Elections Committee has also assigned its Centre for the Study of Election Technology to review the U. S. election campaign.” A preliminary report obtained by the Russian press formerly know as Pravda, the official organ of the Communist Party of USSR, and organization that knows a thing or two about propaganda says that the American MSM, the official organ of the Democratic Party of the United States has given Barack Obama a “hidden advantage.”

Still, all this only takes to a European style Social Democracy. With time, their inefficient nature causes a swing to the right as has happened in France and Germany, for example. Equilibrium.

And even in the European socialist governments there hasn’t been any serious erosion of civil rights…

…Unless there’s some international crisis happens that could cause martial law to be declared.

What are the chances of that?

It’s not like anyone’s guaranteeing a crisis or anything. Is it?

Ok. So I called my friend this morning and told him that if a white pigeon lands on Obama during his inauguration speech, I’m outta here.

Counting Your Chickens Before They Come Home To Roost

2008-10-23T14:07:00.004-04:00

I guess it’s all over but the crying.

The collective American Pravda has declared that Obama has won. The election is a mere formality like in Cuba.

The candidate is already preparing for a transition. The celebration is on and the senator is trash talking:

"If you'll stand with me, then I know that we can win Virginia and we can win this election and we can finally bring the change we need to Washington," Obama told the estimated crowd of 35,000. "I feel like we got a righteous wind at our backs here."

A righteous wind at his back? Hmm. Maybe he was walking in front of Biden and mistook a “self –righteous” wind from his blowhard running mate for a plain old righteous wind.

Anyway, as his friend Ayres knows, you don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing and Obama feels the wind is blowing his way.

So does the Cuban regime who is salivating at the thought of a fellow traveler blowing into the White House.

The Cuban ~~spy~~ diplomat, Jorge Bolanos, who heads the Cuban Interest Section in D.C. is starting an awareness campaign to generate world pressure to “kill” a half-century old U.S. trade ~~embargo~~ genocide on Cuba by the root of all humanity’s evils, the USA.

The Cuban regime’s goal of talks without pre conditions is about to become a reality on January 20. The regime’s pre condition of being treated as “an equal partner in negotiations." at any kind of a meeting with the Americans seems close at hand since Senator Obama has stated his desire to meet with the Castros without pre conditions (on his side). Communists do not negotiate and never will. Their idea of negotiations is for the US to end the embargo which is what the regime means when it says that it wants to be treated as an equal:

In an IPS interview with Esteban Morales, a Cuban academic and researcher Esteban Morales, a Cuban academic and researcher, Morales lays out the regime’s preference for Senator Obama:

"I’d like to see him win. I think that with Obama in office, the possibilities for change would be richer,"

It seems, though that Raúl is giving the President Select, Obama, an out by agreeing to talks without having to deal with the embargo:

He pointed out that Cuban President Raúl Castro has said on more than one occasion that Cuba is willing to negotiate to find a solution to the long-standing bilateral conflict, provided that its "independence" is respected and that discussions be "guided by the principles of equality, reciprocity, non-interference and mutual respect."

With regard to defining a possible agenda for such talks, Morales said that "the key factor is that the parties cannot come to the negotiating table with preconditions." "If that is achieved, the rest is just drawing up a smart list of issues mutually agreed on, ranging from the most simple matters to the most complex," he said.
In Morales’s view, the embargo imposed in the early 1960s, which Obama says he will not lift, is a "political problem" that could be left out of the debate if both countries decide not to discuss it.In that case, the two nations could begin to regularize economic relations on the basis of the already existing trade flow, which is limited to food imports by Cuba paid up front in cash.

A quick gusano translation: The regime will meet with Obama to shore up his diplomacy cred if they get “credit.” Cred pro quo.

On the other side of the globe, the Iranians are also salivating at the prospect of an Obama Presidency.

"We are leaning more in favor of Barack Obama because he is more flexible and rational, even though we know American policy will not change that much,"

Meanwhile, Al Qaida is trying reverse jihadist psychology by backing McCain so that people will vote for Obama.

Joe the Dissident?

2008-10-20T20:59:00.004-04:00

Is this a sign of things to come?

Senator Obama is running around the country asking for people to vote for him. He’s shaking hands, kissing babies, eating pie and answering questions.

His path crossed with one Joe the plumber, just some guy in an Ohio neighborhood. Joe asked him a question. Obama’s answer wasn’t exactly politically correct in most of flyover small town America and the opposition jumped all over it. That’s politics.

But in the America of Obama’s supporters it was a crime against humanity that had to be avenged.

And Obama’s minions set out to destroy Joe the plumber for having the audacity of hoping to change his lot in life from employee to small business owner-to live the American dream without being penalized by the government for achieving his dream.

The plumbers union, the sindicato, set out to discredit the pipe fitter. Had he been a member of the union, he would have probably been expelled for having ideologically deviant pipe dreams. His career would have gone down the drain. They do that in Cuba. They took my dad’s syndicate card away so he couldn’t get a job with the only employer in town, Fidel, because he had the audacity to want to leave the island.

Then, the public relations arm of Campaign Obama, the press, decided to dig into Joe’s past. They threw the kitchen sink at the plumber, airing all the dirty laundry from his washing machine. Was the Joe that was practicing plumbing without a license really a McCain mole- a plant? They do that to those who dare ask questions in Cuba also-discredit them. They call them mercenaries in Cuba- CIA moles and spies.

It seems that Obama can only be asked questions within certain parameters or boundaries. Any challenges to his officially created persona are considered attacks. Any questions that are too tough to answer with a platitude or slogan are an assault. If anyone steps over the line, their transgressions are dealt with swift and strong personal retaliations by overzealous followers. Fidel once said “within the revolution, everything, outside the revolution, nothing.” It would appear Joe the Plumber crossed the line and stepped outside Obama’s audatious boundaries.

With the fairness doctrine, rearing its ugly head just over the November horizon, what was once an inquisitive citizen exercising his or her right to demand answers form politicians asking them for their votes in America, could now become a dissident with all the honors, rights, and privileges pertaining thereto.

I know...I'm a hysterical paranoid Cuban exile..BUT it has already happened to Joe the Plumber...and Obama has even been elected yet.

Welcome To The Jungle

2008-10-13T22:09:00.003-04:00

The media has been quoting Cuba’s blogger in chief, el compañero Fidel, giving his opinions about the American presidential race.

Reading Fidel’s ramblings is painful, but somebody has to do it since reading what the AP, Reuters and others decide to quote can be um…misleading.

Fidel, in his reflections, gives incredible insights into his warped world view. He peppers his observation with communist phraseology to continue the 50 year old façade that he’s a true believing Marxist.

In the name of his reflection Castro says it all: “The law of the jungle.” To Castro, the predator, you’re either the predator or the pray. Nations are also governed by the same rules and the countries have to compete for a limited pool of wealth that is arbitrarily distributed by the luck of the geographical draw.

Among countries: those with a better climates and more arable land, more water and more natural resources in the area where they are located, when there are no more territories to conquer; those that master technology, have greater development and handle unlimited media resources, and those that, in contrast, do not enjoy any of these prerogatives. These are the sometimes enormous differences between countries described as rich or poor.

It is the law of the jungle.

Interestingly, Castro is still clinging to the idea that all the world’s wealth is finite and mankind is condemned to constantly struggle over it. He refuses to acknowledge that wealth can be created, that the pie can made bigger. That’s why when he took over Cuba, he distributed the existing pie to the powerful and strong, himself, and never created any more wealth in an island blessed by nature with fertile land, ideal climate and breath taking natural beauty.

Castro marvels at the fact that the European whites, who are the power elite in the United States, have not solved the Obama problem by following the law of the jungle by praying on the weak minority as he certainly would have. And again, he tacitly endorses the senator, whom he once called the “most progressive” candidate.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Senator Obama when asked why he would raise taxes to small businessmen who make over $250,000 a year, he responded that he wanted to “spread the wealth.” That’s an interesting answer. Rather than wanting to create more wealth so that more people can make over $250,000 a year, Obama, like his fan in Havana, prefers to redistribute the existing finite wealth. This approach has been tried ad-nauseum with no success all over the world. In Cuba, it only succeeded in making everyone equally miserable living in a place ruled by the law of the jungle where only the strong survive.

Of course, to the left, whatever suffering the citizens have to endure to grow the power and influence of the government is of no consequence. The expansion of the all knowing state that ultimately decides how the pie is split and the power that goes along with it, is what's important.

Reaching

2008-10-09T22:03:00.001-04:00

I have been anticipating this for a few days now.

Ever since to the growing chorus asking questions about Senator Obama’s relationship “with some guy in his neighborhood” started to get louder and his campaign continued to give flippant answers and blow the questioners off, I knew it was coming.

I knew that, eventually, when the talking points about Ayers just being a guy in the neighborhood, and Obama being wet behind the ears when the bombs where going off, and the whinny “guilty by association” rationale weren’t enough, and their backs where against the wall, that they would try to bring John McCain down to Barack Obama’s level.

And who better to scapegoat than the Miami Cubans, the “go to” ethnics, with whom McCain has some common bonds and warm ties.

Today two articles surfaced that argue that since McCain is friendly with communist hating Miami Cubans who are pressuring President Bush to pardon the founder of Alpha 66, Eduardo Arocena ,that he like, Obama, is guilty of , in the words of Sarah Palin, “palling around with terrorists.”

One of the articles comes from the Huffington Post and it tells the sad sorry tale of Max Lesnik of all people, (talk about guilty by association), whose body shivers at the hypocrisy of Sarah Palin in accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists” when the Republicans embrace all the Little Havana terrorists.

Roberto Lovato, the author, takes all his shots at the McCain campaign through the words of Max Lesnik. To Lesnik, of course, anyone who yearns for a democratic Cuba free from his friends, the terrorist Castro twins, are terrorists because they don’t lick the tyrant’s jack boots while they’re getting kicked, like Lesnik delights in doing.

The other more innocuous article comes to us from the Miami New Times blog, Riptide, and it tries to draw a parallel between Ayers and Arocena in a piece called the ‘Tale of two “terrorists”’ in order to excuse Obama’s refusal to come clean about his relationship with Ayers.

Comparing the Ayers affair to McCain’s association with a coveted constituency in south Florida is not only a reach but an exercise in intellectual dishonesty and moral relativity.

Bill Ayers’ terror spree with his communist Weather Underground was meant to bring about a revolution that would destroy American society and value system and plunge it into the totalitarian world that the Soviet Union and Cuba where suffering under at the time, and that unfortunately, Cuba still endures.

Arocena’s Alpha 66 was fighting the same terrorist movement that was fueling and financing Ayers and his merry band of mad bombers. The radical groups of the late 60’s and early 70’s were mostly comprised of Marxist “revolutionaries” who where being financed and supported by the Soviets and by Fidel Castro, the leader and role model of the Hemisphere’s would-be revolutionaries, guerrillas and terrorists.

By fighting the international communist movement that was trying to bring down American society, Arocena was merely trying to preserve the American value system. These Cuban men like Arocena who, in the sixties and seventies, decided to fight communist aggression with some aggression of their own where freedom loving men who saw themselves as warriors in an international struggle for freedom and liberal democratic values.

When John McCain was rotting in a Viet-Cong jail being tortured by his communist captors, some Cubans among them, William Ayres and his friends were trying to turn America into another North Viet Nam. Arocena was trying to stop Fidel Castro from fulfilling Che Guevara’s promise of creating a “hundred Vietnams” including one within America’s borders.

While one set of terrorists where trying to destroy the American way of life and enslave our children under a totalitarian communist system, other “terrorists” where fighting back to prevent that from happening.

Senator Obama and his campaign keeps reminding us that he was only 8 years old when Ayers was setting off bombs. Now, he’s 47. These days, terrorists like Castro, don’t take over countries by terror and revolution. That’s the old Marxist playbook. Nowadays, countries are taken over and enslaved by fast talking politicians that promise change and more equality between the rich and the poor like Chavez, Morales, Correa and Ortega. They later enshrine themselves into power by fixing elections and amending their charters to create constitutional dictatorships. The terrorists of old like Ayers and Castro have never changed their Marxist stripes, just their methods.

That is why it is so important to some American voters that senator Obama explain his relationship with Ayers and ally the well founded fears that some of us have that he’s not another of these 21st Century Socialists that has been backed, groomed by and represents the old Marxist revolutionaries and terrorists of the 60’s.

Food Shortages

2008-10-03T16:57:00.001-04:00

If you were to drop in from outer space and read an article on Cuba, you would never know that hunger, deprivation and rationing existed in Cuba well before the island was ravaged by hurricanes, as this erroneously report in this SFGate article claims:

… the government of Cuban President Raúl Castro this week announced a nationwide food-rationing policy.

Now, consumers will only be permitted to purchase limited amounts of rice, beans, root vegetables, plantains and other basic foods…

Cubans have been suffering the indignity of “la libreta” for 46 years now.
The regime, of course, blames the 46 year shortage of food on the “embargo” and the miscreants and useful idiots in the US blame the “embargo” of the Cuban Exiles in Miami.

Now that the regime has basically shut down the farmer’s markets, Havana has 40, by decreeing a freeze on prices, the shelves are bare:

In markets around Havana, customers found stretches of mostly vacant vendor stalls and limited supplies of food. A market in the Vedado district offered only papayas, a small stack of melons and a few bulbs of garlic.

The regime is forcing all goods into its own stores where the rationing cards must be used including “humanitarian aid” which it is diverting to its hard currency stores.

As a matter of fact, Guillermo Fariñas of Cubacan press reports that there was a spontaneous protest in the city of Santa Clara when some 500 citizens witnessed boxes clearly marked “humanitarian aid” in Portuguese being unloaded from a truck and delivered into the “Siboney” hard currency store. The police, state security and rapid response brigades were called in to repress the citizens who where verbally abusing the truck drivers for diverting the humanitarian aid into a for profit state – run store.

The Wink

2008-10-03T12:47:00.005-04:00

Obama has become a phenomenon.

He has “followers,” not supporters. Children sing him songs. Celebrities swoon.

He’s a rock star. The cult of personality personified.

I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if conservatives, for example, started a personality cult of their own …

Ronald Reagan used to talk about America being a shiny city on a hill. But, my whole life all I ever found was a dilapidated trailer park adorned with Walmart whicker citronella torches on top of a landfill. But I keep looking.

Whenever I went to Mexico or the Bahamas for spring break, (they don’t have politically correct liberal regimes in these countries and they serve you liquor without an ID), I would always pretend to be Canadian because I was ashamed to be from the same country as Bill Clinton who had single handedly, (he held the cigar in the other hand), made America synonymous with lip service and oral sex.

There were other reasons I pretended to be Canadian. It was embarrassing to be from the country with the only military that could turn any place into a parking lot with conventional arms-and that’s just one branch of service, the Marines- and be bitch slapped across the globe by a bunch of rag-tag suicidal religious fanatics while half of my country was more worried about their constitutional rights than what caliber slug would go between their crazed beady eyes.

I was also confused to live in a country where all the movie stars, ( I get ALL my historical perspective from Hollywood movies-and don’t laugh, the college professors who write all the history books are even more biased than Hollywood directors who at least have to answer to movie critics), who made believe for a living would come out of character, (or assume another character), and act like they cared about , global warming, for example, but then act like they we’re acting by turning around and acting totally contrary to the way they urged me to act. (See? It’s confusing.)

Anyway, I tough I would never reach the shiny city. I had lost hope for me and humanity. All seemed lost.

Then I hear her name. Sarah. A biblical name. That was good.

Then I saw her face. And now, I’m a believer. (Hey, if Barry O & co. can steal his campaign slogan from David Bowie, I can steal from The Monkeys.)

No, she didn’t make the oceans stop their rise or heal the planet, but she aroused me and healed my libido-and it is all about me, me, me. Not a shiny city on a hill but a shiny happy face atop two luscious mountains.

And then I heard her speech. A heavenly voice. And she talked about dogs and moms I love dogs and moms. I love dogs so much, I don’t even eat hot dogs, unless you call them frankfurters, in which case, I’ll eat them because I don’t love Frank, although I love frank people.

She was mesmerizing. She told stories of America’s last frontier, about moose and snow machines.

But when she spoke, I couldn’t really listen to her words because for I was so captivated by her personality and personal aura that all I heard was a choir of angels. Is she an angel? Was that a glow? Or was it the stage lights? It didn’t matter what she said. She could talk in circles for all I cared. It was all about her. Sa-Rah! Sa-Rah! Even her name was like a cheer! A mantra, a prayer.

She spoke of hockey and six packs and she was fertile. Five kids worth of fertile and still looked just like she did when she was a beauty queen years ago! Imagine… a beauty queen vice-president. Better looking than that Merkel woman and hotter than what his name in France’s model wife. Finally, something to be proud of! No longer would I have to hold my head in shame and pretend to be Canadian in front of all the people who hailed from countries America had liberated twice in one century!

And last night…sigh. Well, let me tall ya, I just love the way she says that, she can call me Joe or whatever she wants anytime she wants…she, Sarah, winked at me. Right in the middle of the most important day in her life, she looked right at the camera and winked at ME.

Imagine that, a candidate that winks at ME.

The sound of the ensuing ridicule would be deafening and well deserved and yet when you read people talk about Obama in such ridiculous terms, you hear crickets.

(Wink)

A Little Catholic Propaganda...

2008-09-30T14:40:00.000-04:00

Just A Thought

2008-09-28T19:04:00.001-04:00

El compañero Fidel continues his ideological musings from the sidelines, yet it’s clear that the First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party and therefore, still Cuba’s leader has had a resurgence of health and influence of late.

As Raúl has remained out of sight, Fidel has been leading the ideological charge from his blog and his hard line sycophants in “La Mesa Redonda”

If in fact it’s Fidel who is writing, and I believe it is, it is clear that at least mentally, Fidel is dong much better.

And it leads me to ponder what kind of resources have been invested into his recovery.

According to Jesús Marzo Fernández an ex-regime functionary, Cuba has spared no expense in acquiring the latest and greatest equipment available to treat the tyrant, have a medical team at his disposal 24/7 and trying experimental procedures including stem cell treatments designed to help Castro regain his mental agility.

According to his sources, the regime has invested $48 Million in the tyrant’s health.

Let’s say that between Cuban hyperbole and the normal deterioration of information that happens when information is passed from person to person by word of mouth, that they have spent $20 Million. (ever play telephone in 5th grade?) That’s 4 times what the US offered to send to the hurricane battered island.

Habitat for Humanity can build a simple home for about $2,500. Assuming the regime’s 20% cut, that’s 6,667 homes that could have been built with the money that was used to keep Fidel writing his reflections.

6,667 families could have had shelter and we would have been spared…

…just a thought…

Kindred Spirits

2008-09-26T17:54:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I read the on-line newspapers and my head feels like its going explode. Like Marta La Cocinera says, “EHS-Exploding Head Syndrome-there’s a lot of that going around lately”

For example, why would the Cuban vice president, Ramón Machado Ventura, get THREE standing ovations at Harlem event? The fact is that this man has been an integral part of a regime that has oppressed its people for 50 years, a regime that is responsible for the death of over 100,000 of its citizens, a regime that is racist and rules as a white majority over a majority brown/black population running the island more like a slave plantation than a country doesn’t seem to matter.

It makes no sense.

But then again, you read about the Josh Howard disparaging the national anthem and about the event held for Iranian tyrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and you just have get a grip on you EHS.

It’s all about kindred spirits.

All these folks have something in common in that they reject American values and blame these values for everything that is wrong with the world,

When they hear a guy like Chavez or Ahmadinejad speak, it strikes a chord with them. It makes sense. Kind of like when Navin R. Johnson heard rock for the first time or when the clingers in flyover country listen to Sarah Palin.

Well, it’s Friday and I’m going over to buy some libations for happy hour with WaMu debit card…hopefully it still works or else I’m going to have a serious EHS relapse.

The Trouble With Money

2008-09-23T13:05:00.002-04:00

One of the inherent problems in relaxing the remittance limits to Cuba to deal with the aftermath of hurricanes Gustav and Ike is that not all Cubans have relatives in the US to send them money.

When you have a situation where one neighbor has cash and another doesn’t and both are equally desperate to feed their kids and survive, it can get hostile. Also, the majority of blacks in Cuba don’t have relatives abroad so it adds a race to an already unfair situation.

Because of this, I would prefer that the regime allow the US to reach all the hurricane victims. But, fat chance of that happening.

I have, unfortunately, experienced the conflict and confrontations that can happen after a natural disaster like a hurricane in Cuba when the necessities of life become scarcer with each passing day. Even between family members things can get dicey.

But in my experience, the real problem after the hurricane comes from the regime itself. The Cuban people tend to be generous and neighborly and share whatever they have with their neighbors. But, the Cuban regime is another story. It has a civil paramilitary civilian security arm which it regulates through the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, the CDR’s, These communist foot soldiers of the regime at the local level are the ones that control the neighborhood through fear and intimidation. These are not the most compassionate in the neighborhood. In fact they are usually the most bitter, envious and thuggish elements of society.

After a hurricane, more so than usual, they relish exerting their “power” by taking every advantage to be had for themselves and their friends while making sure that those that don’t sympathize with Fidel and his sick ideology get the short end of the stick.

Now how do these elements react when a “gusano” gets money and they, “the powers that be”, only get to wallow in their misery and frustration?

Here’s one example:

The diplomatic note went ignored amid several reports that Cubans receiving cash storm aid from an exile group in Miami were being threatened by state security.

Melba Santana, the wife of a political prisoner in Las Tunas, said that when she attempted to distribute some money to neighbors from $300 in storm aid sent by the Cuban American National Foundation, state security agents threatened to criminally charge her.

''Let's see how far they are willing to take this, how far they are willing to sacrifice people's suffering,'' Santana said in a telephone interview. ``It was a miserable little $10 I was giving out and people are in need.''

I certainly hope that this is an isolated incident and not a sign of things to come.

Just The Facts:

2008-09-22T12:59:00.000-04:00

From Henrietta H. Fore, USAID Administrator, here’s a summary of the steps taken by the US agency responsible for distributing US Aid and response to natural disasters, USAID.

The rest of the noise really doesn’t matter much.

If the Cuban regime refuses these generous offers, and continues to make unreasonable demands, there is little that the US can do to help the Cuban people short of a liberating invasion……We cannot force Cuba to take our aid.

FACT SHEET

U.S. Offers New Direct Humanitarian Aid to Cuban Government; Humanitarian Organizations Set to Move U.S. Aid to Cuba

The U.S. Government has made a fourth offer of critical humanitarian assistance to the people of Cuba in the aftermath of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. In response to Cuba's humanitarian needs USAID is moving forward to provide up to $5 million in emergency relief to Cuban hurricane victims through international relief agencies and non-governmental organizations.

In summary, the U.S. government has officially offered assistance to Cuba on four separate occasions:

September 3, 2008:

The U.S. government issued a disaster declaration (on Hurricane Gustav) and provided $100,000 in cash relief assistance to humanitarian organizations on the ground.

The U.S. government also offered to provide a humanitarian assessment team to assist in producing rapid emergency assessments of health, sanitation, water, shelter and food.

September 12,2008:

The U.S. government provided an additional $100,000 (on Hurricane Ike) in cash assistance to relief organizations on the ground, and affirmed our intention to channel assistance through international organizations. The U.S. government reiterated its offer to provide a humanitarian assessment team.

September 13, 2008:

The U.S. government announced up to $5 million in a relief package that included an unconditional offer of humanitarian assistance to benefit 135,000 Cuban hurricane victims. Despite the Cuban Government's rejection of this offer, international relief agencies and non-governmental organizations will receive U.S. government funding for emergency relief assistance.

September 19, 2008:

The U.S. government offered to unconditionally provide additional relief supplies directly to Cuba relief services at a value of approximately $6.3 million. These supplies are composed of family emergency shelters and household kits which will assist up to 48,000 Cubans affected by the hurricanes.

The U.S. government will continue to monitor the situation in Cuba. For more information about USAID and its programs go to www.usaid.gov. The American people, through the U.S. Agency for International Development, have provided economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide for nearly 50 years.

Here are some of the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s thoughts on the subject:

The U.S. had $2 million in emergency supplies ready to go, pending a report from the usual assessment team about where help was needed. Not so fast, said Fidel. First, Havana refused to accept the aid because the assessment team is a "condition," and Havana can't accept help with strings attached. Washington offered to drop the assessment team and send the $2 million anyway. The regime still said "no." This time the problem was that Cuba can't take charity from a country with an embargo against it.

In a U.S. presidential election year, snowballs have a better chance in Havana than the nearly 50-year-old Cuban embargo has of being overturned in Washington. This week there was some good news, however, when the Bush administration announced that $1.65 million in
supplies will be distributed through nongovernmental organizations that work in Cuba. That Fidel will let that aid through is unquestionably a sign of Cuban desperation.

If the Cuban regime was serious about negotiating with the US about the relaxation of some of the sanctions currently imposed on the island, it would begin the process by accepting the aid and then talking.

Instead we get Fidel Castro himself warning in his blog that:

Any product that enters Cuba from the United States for a counterrevolutionary purpose must be returned or confiscated.

He does, however, prefer that you send cash:

Those who receive remittances from the United States can, upon paying the relevant tax, buy the regular rations at extremely low prices and also purchase goods in the hard-currency shops which sell products that are now significantly more expensive elsewhere in the world.

So there you have it, your marching orders, right from the horse’s mouth. Send him money. He needs the “relevant tax” and the profits.

The Shoe Doesn't Fit Zapatero

2008-09-19T12:31:00.004-04:00

Cranky old guy John McCain came to South Florida early this week.

When he was being interviewed on Miami’s Radio Caracol, he totally confused and angered the MSM with one of his answers.

McCain was being asked about the relationship between the US and the likes of Chavez or Morales. The MSM was of course disappointed that McCain didn’t volunteer to welcome Hugo Chavez to Washington and put him up in the Lincoln bedroom without any pre-conditions.(except maybe a suitcase full of cash…but that’s another post)

McCain was then asked whether he would meet with this blog’s “favorite” European, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain’s very Socialist prime minister.

McCain reiterated his position:

"I will meet with those leaders who are our friends and who want to work with us cooperatively,"

But, but, pero…

The questioner tried to clarify, "Okay, but I'm talking about Europe - the president of Spain, would you meet with him?"

(actually, Zapatero is the Prime Minister of Spain, not the president)

"I will meet with any leader who has the same principles and philosophy that we do: human rights, democracy, and liberty. And I will confront those that don't,"

Said the cranky old white guy.

That was more than the MSM could bear. Why McCain seemed to be lumping Zapatero in with the likes of Chavez and Castro….surely he must have Bush disease from voting with Bush 90% of the time….(That’s the fun thing about the MSM they swallow a fake lure hook line and sinker and yet let the real worm get away…McCain is actually more like Ahhnold except he can’t lift his arms, he’s crankier and harder to understand…) and was having his own Parvez Musharaff moment. It’s must be ignorance, senility or both.

Does he not know who Zapatero is, that Spain is in Europe, that Spain is a NATO ally?

What a gaffe! The MSM marveled.

It’s interesting how a presidential candidate who gives away the store before his inevitable coronation as President of the World by announcing that he would meet with all our enemies without any preconditions, gets hailed for being an enlightened diplomat while McCain is seen as a dunce for even insinuating that even our allies should be held to some “liberal” standards before invitations are extended.

Zapatero was thrown in with Castro and Chavez by the cranky old white guy because he has earned a place in that trash heap of humanity by the actions of his very socialist government.

Since taking office, Zapatero has made it a priority to prop up the Castro dictatorship which directly affects the political and social stability of this hemisphere.

He has done so because of ideology and to protect the quasi-colonial business interests of Spanish companies in Cuba at the expense and exploitation of the Cuban workers.

His government reversed course and rather than continue as the advocate for the oppressed Cuban people in the European Union as the previous Spanish government had, it became the chief promoter of the Cuban communist regime in Brussels, working to lift sanctions and normalize diplomatic relations with the regime and promote “critical dialogue” with Havana.

When the cranky old guy said:

"I will meet with any leader who has the same principles and philosophy that we do: human rights, democracy, and liberty. And I will confront those that don't,"

He knew exactly who and what Zapatero is. Too bad the MSM doesn’t or what's worse, doesn’t want to know.

Zapatero and the Spanish know that the shoe, zapato, of a “leader who has the same principles and philosophy that we do: human rights, democracy, and liberty" doesn’t fit Zapatero and there will be no all-expense paid trip to Washington in his future in the unlikely chance that the cranky old white guy gets elected.

Maybe just some “critical dialogue.”

.

Pretty Pathetic

2008-09-17T22:19:00.004-04:00

More than a week after Hurricane Ike roared into Cuba leaving a path of devastation in its wake, Cuba’s new leader has finally shown his face in public.

Yes, Raúl Castro finally came out of his high and dry hiding place to personally inspect the latest damage to the island.

In some places, it’s hard to tell which hurricane caused the damage, Michelle, Denis, Wilma, Gustav, Ike or Fidel. The damage from any of these has never been fully repaired, so one can sympathize with Raúl for not wanting to show his face.

The international press has excused his lax, aloof attitude as his low-key style. I wonder what they would say if a leader of a representative democracy had acted as uninterested as Raúl has. But since he doesn’t have to answer to anybody, except maybe his moribund brother, it ultimately doesn’t matter.

And what words of wisdom, inspiration and comfort did Raúl Castro have for the Cuban people?

"There were places so affected (by the storm), like the island," Castro said in a report on state-run television.

But, he said, "they will be put back as before, and prettier."

Prettier. I like that word ... "pretty." I think I'll use it in a sentence.

Isn’t it pretty to think so…

US Gives The Regime "More or Less" What They Wanted UPDATED

2008-09-17T06:58:00.002-04:00

The Castro regime has admitted that it doesn’t have the resources to reconstruct the damages caused by hurricanes Ike and Gustav.

The problem is that they don’t have the resources to reconstruct the damages caused by hurricane Fidel.

Before the two storms hit the island, Cuba was already a crumbling, deteriorating shadow of its former self.

Of course they don’t have the resources to rebuild. They don’t produce anything or create any wealth.

But anyway, the US has quietly worked out a deal with the regime to “sell” it “agricultural” supplies:

Bypassing its trade embargo on communist Cuba, the United States on Tuesday announced approving 250 million dollars in "farm sales" to Havana after Hurricanes Gustav and Ike devastated Cuba's crops.

The licenses for agricultural sales, which include food and construction materials, were approved after Ike lashed Cuba a week ago and "wood, a material essential to rebuilding, is included," read a State Department communiqué delivered to reporters at the US Interests Section in Havana.

The United States has decided to pay part of the ransom that the regime was asking. The regime wins again:

The bilateral breakthrough "is more or less what they (the Cubans) are asking for, not credit because our law does not permit it. That will have to be through third parties. The license includes food and wood," a US diplomat in Havana told AFP privately.

Right. More or less. Credit through “third parties”-Leahman Brothers maybe?

Without a doubt, the Cuban people are in dire straights and those of us who know how the regime operates, realize that for all intense and purposes the Cuban people are on their own. Even if one quarter of the US aid reaches the Cuban people, that’s one quarter more than they would have gotten from their “government”.

From what we’re hearing and from past experience, Cubans will be have to “buy” much of the foreign aid from the regime at the regime’s company stores. Keep in mind that the state owns all property in Cuba. So Cubans will be forced to buy the materials to repair the state’s property from the state at the state set prices.

Lest you think that that statement is just another exile rant here’s a quote form a Cuban government official from a Miami Herald article:

''In an eight-day period, two hurricanes struck us; that had never happened in the history of Cuba,'' politburo member Estéban Lazo told the Cuban media last week. ``Gustav affected the people in Pinar del Río, but Ike caused damage to the 169 municipalities. The country does not have sufficient economic resources, so we can't allow someone whose mattress was soaked or who lost a zinc roof tile or several planks of wood to demand that we replace each item.

``The mattress must be dried, the roof tiles must be replaced, the nails must be recovered and re-used to affix the wooden planks. Everything must be recovered. That's what the country is asking for today.''

I’m sure in the coming weeks we will be treated to an article by Anita Snow telling us how much we can learn from Cuba’s hurricane recovery plan because by “recycling” storm damaged materials to repair damaged state property, Cubans are not only teaching us the real meaning of community but also setting the example on how to be better global citizens by reducing the human footprint

AND....Here's a picture from the Miami Herald of a Cuban woman straighting out the "recycled" nails so they could be re-used to repair her blown out roof:

Priorities

2008-09-14T22:10:00.000-04:00

Cuba is a devastated, hurricane battered island.

By the regime’s own admission, they do not have enough reserves to feed its people.

More than 500,000 homes have been destroyed which would cost $8 Billion to rebuild.

More than one third of the island is in darkness, without running water, food or hope.

And what is Cuban government’s response to all this misery?

Well, its number one priority is not to take care of the Cuban people, but to wage a propaganda war on the United States by saying that it doesn’t need humanitarian aid, but credit-which means to relax the series of trade sanctions commonly referred to as the “embargo.”

Its second priority is to re-start its lucrative tourist industry:

The report in the newspaper stated that approximately 30,000 foreign tourist have arrived since the storm moved into the Gulf of Mexico, and are vacationing at resorts scattered throughout the island.

So while Cubans face the aftermath of the worst natural disaster in its modern history, without electricity, food water or any hope that the regime is going to help them or allow anyone with the wherewithal to be effective, (the US), to help them, tourists are drinking mojitos and learning to dance the Mambo just miles away.

Can you imagine the outrage if the US would have allowed tourists to party in New Orleans’ French Quarter days after the levees flooded the city? No, of course not. The outcry would have been deafening and righteously so. But since its Cuba, the world shrugs and turns a blind eye as usual.

And the third priority is to divide the Cuban American exile community by…Oh no wait, That we do on our own, so that we can support another of the regime’s most lucrative industries: remittances from abroad.

The Hostage Situation

2008-09-11T21:38:00.001-04:00

They show you the proof of life videos, the devastation and the suffering on TV.

You know that there, for the grace of God, go you.

Your heart aches, your eyes tear, you want to help.

You take the bait.

They say that the only way you can help them is by doing what they ask.

If you don’t do exactly what they ask, they will let these people die.

They will torture them front of your eyes by not giving them food or water or shelter.

They will parade them in front of the TV cameras and say that if anything happens to them, its your fault because you would not meet their demands.

They are hostages.

Nobody Does It Better

2008-09-11T13:48:00.005-04:00

Nobody does it better
Makes me feel sad for the rest
Nobody does it half as good as you
Baby, you’re the best.

The Associated Press’ Anita Snow is so infatuated with communism that she never passes up the opportunity to show her love for the system that has been directly responsible for the death of 100,000,000 people.

She once decided, with much fanfare, to go on the Cuban diet- to eat the typical diet of a Cuban who has been forced to live on the libreta, ration card, for 45 years. She gloated about how she had lost weight eating the healthy, simple peasant food and waxed on nostalgically on how the diet reminded her of the simple southern cuisine of her youth. She told us she would celebrate the end of her moth long “ordeal” of an “experiment” by eating a fat juicy steak.

In her latest love song to Fidel, she reminds us of how much we have to learn from Cuba when it comes to Hurricane preparedness:

But if there's one thing the communist island does right, it's evacuations. And in the end, that saves more lives than anything else.

Anita says.

Imagine that. A police state where there is no rule of law and citizens have no rights and are forced at gun point to obey soldier’s orders is good at getting citizens to “cooperate” during voluntary evacuations. (The regime also has a good track record of getting Cuban citizens to perform “volunteer work” for the revolution.)

Is she for real?!? You bet. The secret, she reminds us, is to “teach” the citizens from an early age to follow orders.(or else)…

Cubans are taught from an early age to move quickly in the event of a natural disaster and to follow authorities' instructions. So the government rarely has to force people to leave.

That’s right. Armed thugs seldom do.

But aside from the gun barrel pointed at their heads, Cubans have other advantages that make it easier to leave their homes, according to Ms. Snow.

You see, Cubans live in an idyllic world where going to a shelter means…

… soft beds, free meals, the attention of a doctor and solicitous social workers — and the companionship of other friendly Cubans...

Yes, to a Cuban, a shelter is like a luxury hotel- a reprieve from the daily struggle for their daily bread.

It also makes it easier that Cubans have nothing to lose. They are slaves have very few possessions to get stolen. No cars to clog the highways… nothing to live or die for…the brotherhood of man … and cops who shoot on sight and ask no questions, not first, not later…

Most Cubans work for the government and don't have to worry about losing wages if they take off from work. And because police keep a close eye on evacuated areas — and because most Cubans have few possessions of value anyway — looting isn't a major concern.

Imagine what her friends in the press would have written if the Louisiana National Guard had evacuated New Orleans, at gunpoint, before Katrina hit in 2005. Rest assured it wouldn’t have been a glowing love sonnet like Anita’s piece on the Cuban evacuations before Ike’s landfall.
Snow reminds us that especial attention is paid to elderly and the handicapped who in the US where “abandoned” by “US authorities” during Katrina.

She also reminds us that the revolution is also apt at “teaching lessons” by making examples of those who are injured or die by not obeying evacuation orders:

And if anyone has doubts, authorities quickly put an end to them. The state news media often makes examples of people who fail to move out — and who are killed or injured.

Yes, I remember the regime's examples well. My friend's dad-he didn't want to work for the regime. He wanted to work for himself and provide for his family. He was selling margerine on the black market. He got caught and they made an example of him too. 20 years in jail.

If you follow Snow’s (and the regime’s) logic, the US authorities, which in Katrina’s case would have been Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco, did a bang up job in teaching the US population as witnessed by the way most got out of Gustav’s path in New Orleans. Please!

I don’t know if people like Anita Snow really admire Cuba’s communist collective hell because they want to be part of it or because it flies in the face of the free market system that has given them every advantage but yet they find unfair due to guilt or deeper psychological issues or because they are bigoted elitists who don’t think that Cubans are capable of handling freedom and need a daddy state to take care of them or if they are just useful idiots. But I do know that all these articles do, to use the phrase du jour, is put a bunch of lipstick on an ugly and deadly pig.

And nobody does it better

Though sometimes I wish someone could

Nobody does it quite the way you do

Why'd you have to be so good?

King "O" the World

2008-09-10T22:10:00.004-04:00

I’m so bummed out.

It looks like the rest of the world is not going to be too happy with us Americans if we vote McCain Palin into the White House in the fall.

And world opinion of America is the stuff that keeps me up at nights, really.

Panicked by the recent reversal of fortune in the presidential campaign some brit named Jonathan is warning us not to make the same mistake again:

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger.
And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift. Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.

I’m just a dumb refugee, but didn’t Americans stop drinking tea and switch to coffee back in 1776? Wasn’t the whole point of the tea party and the ensuing rebellion to cut ties with the royalists?

I understand that Senator Obama is the world’s candidate and that he’s loved more abroad than aparently he is at home. (Maybe he should have a heart to heart with Jerry Lewis.) But Jonathan should be happy that in the rest of the world Obama is still the beloved:

All 22 countries covered in the poll would prefer to see Senator Obama elected US president ahead of Republican John McCain.

In 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the US and the rest of the world to improve if Senator Obama wins.

But still, Jonathan's a warning is a little hysterical.

Perhaps Jonathan should switch to herbal tea, after all, even Jonathan’s wise and enlightened PM, Gordon Brown, has broken protocol and thrown his support behind Senator Obama. Classy.

And once middle America finds out that the English PM is throwing his tremendous world-wide influence behind Barrack, the polls will rebound and the planet will start to heal and the oceans will begin to recede once again.

We colonials may be provincial and simplistic, but when we realize that its not in our more enlightened and civilized earth-mates abroad, and especially in England, best wishes for us to vote for McCain, we’ll mend our ways and try to please our foreign friends because that’s what we’re here for.

I mean, foreigners, and especially Europeans, have shown in the last 100 years that if anyone can make the right decisions is them. Even in simple things like soccer games, they demonstrate a sophistication that we Americans could never ever even come close to.

For example, our foreign hand ringing American critics are so enlightened that they’re not buying what the US is government is selling about the 9-11 attacks :

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qaeda were responsible, according to an international poll published Wednesday.

The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.

….Shows you how much I know. I just figured that Bin Laden’s al Qaeda was responsible since they took credit. But that just makes me a primitive and incapable of making sophisticated nuansed decisions like voting for Fidel Castro's favorite candidate who just happens to have a first cousin named Fidel Castro Odinga.

Life In The Cone

2008-09-08T13:00:00.000-04:00

Waking up in the morning to find out that you’re in the path of a killer category four hurricane is unsettling. For us Floridians the fear of Hurricanes is more like the fear of the ensuing inconveniences –a few days of urban camping followed by the hassle of picking up the mess and making some repairs.

Watching an update on TV and finding out that the killer storm now has Cuba in its sights is disheartening. You know that whatever damage the hurricane causes will not be repaired and the victims will be suffering even worse hardships than the ones that they are ordinarily subjected to.

Here in Florida, most of us have homes built to standards that ensure that they will withstand hurricanes. Whatever damage a storm manages to inflict on our properties, there is insurance to help us rebuild and repair. Not so in Cuba. There is no insurance in Cuba because there is no private property and no money to pay for insurance and no Home Depot to go buy the materials needed for repairs.

In this Sun Sentinel article, we learn about a Cuban town, Playa del Cajio's, that is still waiting for regime officials to check on them to see how they’ve faired since the hurricane.

That would be Hurricane Charlie back in 2004…

In the days since Hurricane Gustav pummeled western Cuba, angry residents here aid not a single official had checked on this fishing town that was virtually erased by Hurricane Charlie four years ago.

"No one has stopped by to see if we're eating," said 91-year-old Juana Diaz Gonzalez, whose seaside home lost part of its roof to Gustav's Category 4 winds. "We eat what we can. We live like dogs."

The plight of many of Playa del Cajio's 1,500 residents offers a lesson for other hard-hit communities that hope the state will help them rebuild quickly.

People here said they have struggled with official bureaucracy and ineptitude since Charlie battered the town in 2004.

"It's been four years since Charlie and we're still waiting for new homes," said Rachel Gonzalez Ojeda, 44, seated outside her roofless wood and concrete home. "We never even got the materials to do the repairs. We rebuilt what we could on our own."

As she spoke, more than a dozen neighbors nodded in agreement. "We can't remain silent anymore," she said.

Meanwhile, the regime ignores the victims of Gustav as it will surely ignore Ike’s devastation. The Cuban regime will not allow the international Red Cross, for example, to help the Hurricane victims. Why? Because it wants absolute and total control of the aid. The aid will be distributed the way the regime sees fit, which is usually to take care of the party and its faithful.

The United States has offered to send humanitarian aid directly to the vivtims, but the regime “politely” declined. How you “politely” decline to allow international organizations to help victims of natural disasters is beyond me. It’s more like they negligently or criminally declined US assistance.

But the Castro regime did ask for the US to bend the embargo rules so that it could get “credit” from American institutions. Clearly, the regime is using the suffering of the hurricane victims for political reasons and to try to line the party’s, (the Castro family’s), pockets with money that they have no intentions of ever paying back. Cuba never pays its debts.

And here in the US, those like Presidential candidate Barrack Obama, who philosophically oppose the embargo, are also politicizing the devastation in Cuba. The Democratic candidate is calling for the relaxation of rules that govern remittances to Cuba from the US, to drive a wedge and divide the Cuban American community in South Florida where three democratic challengers are campaigning against the tightened Bush administration Cuba policies.

The New Democrats?

2008-09-07T20:45:00.005-04:00

A few months back, when it became obvious that Sen John McCain would win his party’s nomination, I stumbled across a link for McCain-Palin ’08 on an internet site. I clicked and was taken to a website where some folks were running a blog based campaign to get the Alaskan Governor nominated as McCain’s VP. Democracy and the internet: perfect together. “Thanks, Al.” Then, I thought to myself-“dream on.”

Fast forward to Friday and this woman gets picked and I’m dumbfounded and I’m saying to myself, “that’s the lady from the blog!”

I immediately went to the bastion of conservatism that is Babalú and expected Henry George and Mike to be denouncing the pick, but to my surprise, they as well as most conservatives were delighted with the pick. I was shocked. Conservatives are a critical lot. Even uber McCain critic Rush Limbaugh donned the Arizona Senator “John McBrilliant.”

I don’t know too many conservatives, but the few I know love the Alaskan Governor. A few Libertarians, ditto.

My many Liberal friends were at first giddy then angry.

The lady from the great white north is a threat. And after her speech on Wednesday what I first thought to be a gimmicky pick turned real serious, real fast.

I was talking to a friend who kept arguing that Govenor Palin was even less experienced than Senator Obama. I’ve seen pundits on TV argue that since Obama has been running his Presidential campaign for over a year that he does have enough “executive” experience to compete with Palin’s.

This all may or may not be true, even academic, but the Democrats are arguing whether or not their Presidential candidate is worthy of a spot on the Republican ticket and whether he’s stronger candidate than a “girl.” Subtly, the argument has turned into whether Senator Obama is fit to be second fiddle. He’s vying for first and he’s essentially competing for fourth place in the presidential ticket experience sweepstakes.

A while back I was co-hosting Babalu’s Internet Radio show and Henry Gomez asked me which Democrat I like and who I would be voting for. As a joke, I said I would be supporting Senator McCain-the best Democrat running.

After McCain’s convention, that idea of “RINO” McCain as a Democrat doesn’t seem like much of a joke anymore. Senator McCain and Palin have taken the mantle of fighting for the little guy from the Democrats who have now taken the mantle of fighting for the State from the European social democracies.

McCain’s true and tried creed of putting country first and the people before party resonates with the little guy. His history as well as his pick of a small town mom as a running mate highlights that he means what he says. Under his leadership the Republican Party is looking to refocus its historical affinity for individual rights to “fight” for the welfare of common, working class small town Americans. This demographic, forgotten and taken for granted, has always been the bread and butter of the democratic party and constituted the vast majority of the Reagan Democrats-people who just want an opportunity to fend for themselves and get ahead through their own efforts and hard work. These are folks that are not interested in handouts but in opportunity.

The Democratic strategy is to say that a McCain presidency would be just a continuation of Bush-Cheney only it is well known that McCain has been Dubya’s Republican nemesis for eight long years.

Senator Obama, on the other side, is asking us to believe:

He is asking the traditional Democratic small town working stiff voter to believe and cling to the hope that he will make things better after he disrespected them by suggesting that what was wrong with them is that they bitterly cling to God and guns and antipathy to people who aren’t like them.

Most working class Democratic voters probably have no use for Peter Pan politics where the candidate depends on the beliefs of the would be voters in order to achieve a fairy tale promised land that will take care of the constituents. They prefer common sense.

With Palin’s pick, the Republicans are looking to rebuild a new voting coalition by appealing to the traditional Republican base and expanding the tent to include working class Democrats, women and Catholics, all early indications are is that the McCain-Palin will be able to achieve this, even if only modestly. But any amount of votes you are able to skim from swing constituencies in key battleground swing states are pure gold in a close election.

The Obama-Biden ticket continues to try to attract those that are disaffected and unhappy with the current state of affairs in the country. Given the approval rates of President Bush and the current congress, the mortgage crisis and the energy price crisis, there’s plenty of voters to attract.

The one problem with this coalition is that in order to grow it, you have to preach doom and gloom while preaching hope at the same time. This from a candidate who claims to be above the negative politics of old.

Number 2 - With A Bullet?

2008-09-02T20:37:00.002-04:00

La jeva esta le mete miedo al susto

Guapa a lo Cubano y guapa...

Did Raúl Blink?

2008-08-30T18:44:00.003-04:00

Once he realized the world was watching with eyes wide open, (with incredulousness and after a 12 hour wait), at Gorki’s “dangerousness” trial, Raúl decided to change the charges to the American equivalent of disturbing the peace and fined the rocker $28 bucks...blink.

This, of course, was an attempt to by the Cuban regime at damage control. They didn’t want to look foolish for prosecuting a punk rocker for being dangerous especially since the whole world knew that Gorki had been singled out for special attention because of his raunchy anti-Castro lyrics. Had they gone ahead with the original charge, they would have gotten lots of international press which is bad for business.

All the pressure helped get Gorki sprung and grow his international celebrity, thus providing some insurance from future repression, and thwart the regimes plans for silencing Gorki for now, but they’ll keep trying. He’s not going to change his ways.

All the regime can say now to save face is that the “mafia” was lying about the “dangerousness” charge and that they had never intended to charge Gorki with anything but what they convicted him of. Whatever.

The important thing is that Raúl was forced to blink and his forced blink kept Gorki from being transferred to a smaller cell.

But Gorki, like his 11 million compatriots, is not free. He cannot leave the country, for example, and perform in Miami or NYC. He cannot sign a record deal with the company of his choosing or receive royalties from his songs, but at least he’s not in a small barred cell. He’s in the open air portion of prison Havana on the west end side of the greater Cuban penitentiary.

Raul's Self Fulfilling Prophesy

2008-08-29T12:55:00.000-04:00

She’s 89 pounds soaking wet, Yoani Sanchez is.

But she’s a giant.

Today we learned that Yoani joined the rest of the Porno Para Ricardo band members and some friends at a concert in Havana to protest and demand the release of jailed punk rocker Gorki Aguila.

Their plans to protest at the concert were published all over the internet by CB and the Cuban Underground to encourage other Cubnas to join in. So Yoani knew beforehand that taking part in the pro-Gorki protest would be met with the regime’s usual intolerant and brutal response. And still she went. The young mother and wife who already risks so much by serving as a voice to the millions of her generation that have been condemned to perpetual silence by the regime and its accomplices abroad. But still she went. She was assaulted and shaken up in the ensuing regime-lead violence, but not silenced.

She’s the most dangerous woman in Cuba because millions eagerly await the words and thoughts that are too infrequently published on her blog, Generation Y. And the whole world is awaiting her next post on the Gorki experience. She is outside the Playa Municipal court with Gorki’s family, friends, band mates and lawyer…waiting for the “trial” to begin.

Yoani never ceases to amaze and humble me.

And speaking of “dangerousness” …

The regime, frozen in fear, finally decided to make a move against Gorki when it thought that the world wasn’t paying attention and charged him with “dangerousness”.

This was their attempt to silence his dissent, to pull him from the limelight and hush his voice, to make him a non-person who is not even worth the trouble of a real trial-or its Cuban facsimile. Of course, since his only crime has been to tell the truth, the regime couldn’t put him on trial and embarrass itself in the eyes of the world by trying a punk rocker for being anti-establishment and poking fun at the system and the authority figures. I mean, that’s what punk rockers do.

So they pretend he’s a danger, a potential criminal and they sentence him in a venue where no evidence has to be presented because it’s a totally subjective and arbitrary “opinion” of the authorities whether one is a potential criminal or not or whether one is a danger to society or not. The evidence is an opinion and only one opinion counts in Cuba.

But jailing someone for “dangerousness” is even more absurd in the eyes of free 21st century societies than trying him for making fun of the Castro brothers. It makes headlines, especially since Gorki has loudmouthed friends and fans in the Americas and in Europe.

Gorki is not afraid to go to jail. He once said that everyone in Cuba is in jail and that the only difference is the size of the jail cell. He’s been moved to a smaller cell; that is all.

Ironically, though, the regime’s charge of “dangerousness” has become a self fulfilling prophesy. By cowardly jailing him for “potential crimes” against the revolution, they have turned an innocuous, brash and vulgar rocker into a world-wide cause célèbre- a symbol. Gorki has become the symbol of his generation’s struggle to have their frustrations heard and addressed and the absurd Alice in Wonderland like kangaroo court where Gorki’s human rights are being violated as I write this, has been turned into the symbol of the intolerant and brutal revolution that represses and violates human rights.

Gorki has never, ever, been free since he was born into a revolution that rejected his uniqueness and creativity, just as he rejected its conformity and dogma. The regime has reduced the size of his cell, yes, but the “redecoration” has come at a steep price. The Castros have shown that they exert total control and can do whatever they want to whomever they want-just in case anybody thought things, they were a changin’. Gorki’s cell is now smaller, he can’t play with his band or phone his friends abroad, but he has become an international symbol for the plight of all Cubans. Now he is truly “dangerous.”

Free Gorki!

2008-08-26T22:13:00.004-04:00

One of the bravest people I have ever seen is Gorki. It takes incredible courage to stand up to the Castro regime with nothing but your music and your convictions and Gorki has , defiantly and with his head held up.

He has fought communism with his profanity laced righteous rage against the regime.

His lyrics fuel non conformity with the collective and are in turn fueled by the individual genius-something that strikes at the very heart of the beast.

His profane poetry has parodied the faithful castrator with porno-phallic imagery and ridiculed his classless society without class.

He has made us smile and admire him and now its time for us to stand up and fight for him.

Gorki needs two things:

1.International Awareness to let the regime know that leaving him in jail is bad for business.

2.Legal representation with Cuban lawyers that know how to manipulate the system to their advantage.

He has not been charged with any real crime. He has been charged with "dangerousness." A social nuisance that will eventually commit a crime. This "non-crime" results when the neighbor snitches single you out for antisocial behavior.

He will most likely get a four year sentence at a municipal trial. A smart lawyer with experience could get the sentence reduced, but it is crucial he's represented by someone who knows how to manipulate the system and garner a lot of attention so that it can be appealed at the provincial level.

Camilo Loret de Mola from Penultimos Dias was on TV today explaining the dangerousness charge and how important it is for Gorki to get help NOW!

Charlie Bravo is setting up a defense fund to help his band mates and his family get a lawyer HERE.

BUCL is coming together to continue the press blitz to get awareness for Gorki. You can help do that HERE

Thug Solidarity

2008-08-25T12:55:00.002-04:00

Not to kick a dead horse, but … I told you so...

In my last post, I made the case that Angel Valodia Matos’ shameful act of kicking the Twaekondo referee that disqualified him was symptomatic of the society that Fidel Castro has built and has had total control of for the last 50 years.

A friend who read the post, told me I went too far in laying the blame for the athlete’s actions just as squarely on Fidel’s feet as Angel Valodia Matos laid his foot on the face of the unsuspecting referee.

My friend’s underlying sentiment is, of course, that we Cuban exiles like to blame Fidel for everything.

I told my friend that Valodia Matos and his coach did exactly what the regime, Fidel, expected them to do. Like I wrote in my post, “Fidel would be proud.”

AND proud he is.

Reflecting in his blog Today, Castro justified Valodia Matos’ actions. Valodia Matos, the Cuban delegation and ultimately Castro, were the victims here, you see. Kicking the referee in the head was a heroic act by a proud and defiant revolutionary who was provoked by the injustices perpetrated on Cuban athletes by the decadent capitalist elements that have polluted Olympic ideals with the almighty dollar and the Miami Mafia who have somehow “managed to thwart the rules of the Olympic Committee.”

The outrage was such that it prompted Fidel to write yet another ~~rant~~ reflection:

...Perhaps it would not have decided to write something on the subject so quickly had the incident with the Cuban taekwondo athlete, Angel Valodia Matos, not taken place…Astonished by a decision that seemed totally unjust to him, he protested and kicked the referee. Since they had had tried to bribe his own trainer, he was predisposed and indignant. He could not contain himself. The athlete was used to bravely facing the injuries that usually are frequent in taekwondo. The referee suspended the match when he was ahead three to two…

El compañero Fidel goes on (…and on, and on…) to offer the disgraced taekwondo athlete and his coach the country’s gratitude for showing the world the true face of Fidel’s revolution…(I’d like to add my eternal thanks as well, Angelito):

For our taekwondo athlete and his trainer, our total solidarity

Now, perhaps my friend and others who might have taken my last post as an exercise in anti-Castro exile histrionics will understand why I said that the unfortunate incident is symptomatic of the society that Fidel has built.

In praising and glorifying Valodia Mato’s despicable behavior, Fidel and the regime are teaching all Cuban children that aggression and violence are acceptable reactions when things don’t go their way-just like Che and Fidel would.

Unfortunately for the regime, bringing children up to kick authority figures in the head when they are disciplined for violating the rules can be a dangerous two-edged sword...

Revolutionary Sportsmanship

2008-08-23T22:25:00.006-04:00

Score another one for Castro’s “new man-athlete”.

A Cuban Taekwondo team member, Angel Valodia Matos, was disqualified during a bronze medal match for taking too much injury time. And in perhaps the worst display of sportsmanship ever at the Olympics, the Cuban “Angel” attacked the referee, kicking him “square in the face.”

Now, there are sore losers everywhere and I know that everything that’s wrong in Cuban society can’t be blamed on Castro’s blessed revolution, but I contend that this disgusting display of violence and unsportsmanlike conduct is symptomatic of the society engineered by Fidel Castro.

In Cuba’s police state, might makes right and those with the guns make the rules. The ruling class, artists, athletes and other privileged citizens don’t have to abide by same rules that the rest of the population has to.

Cuban children are taught to idolize violent thugs like the Castro brothers and Che Guevara; men who solved everything with violence and force, never with statesmanship and compassion.

The sports programs are part and parcel of the regime’s political and repressive apparatus. Loyalty to Fidel is as important to advance in an athletic career as is athletic ability. Part of being like Che and the way to show loyalty to Fidel’s regime is to be intolerant and aggressive to those that stand in the revolution’s way.

The taekwondo referee stood in the way of the revolution’s Olympic medal glory and paid with a few stitches on his lips and a pounding headache.

Cuban teams, coaches and “fans” have a history of belligerent and violent behavior abroad especially when faced with protesting free Cubans. The free world has a habit of accepting the brutish and uncivilized behavior by restricting those who challenge the revolution at international sports venues.

This time, the revolution showed its ugly and unsportsmanlike face to a world-wide audience in a way that would make its leader proud. Fidel has always brutally kicked and pushed any obstacle that stood in the way of his objectives and then belligerently and loudly blamed the victims of his actions.

Just to make sure that Fidel would be proud of his revolutionary fervor, the Cuban Taekwondo coach, Leudis Gonzalez, refused to apologize and remained defiant, basically saying that the referee, Chakir Chelbat, deserved the kick in the head:

"He was too strict," Leudis Gonzalez said, referring to the decision to disqualify Matos. Afterward, he charged the match was fixed, accusing the Kazakhs of offering him money.

WTF? Yes, the World Taekwondo Federation, secretary general Yang Jin-suk later said:

"This is an insult to the Olympic vision, an insult to the spirit of taekwondo and, in my opinion, an insult to mankind,"

But, just par for the course of Castro’s revolution.

Obama bin Biden

2008-08-23T17:11:00.002-04:00

The first promise of the Obama bin Biden campaign has already been broken. Just like my heart.

Like an idiot I signed up on the Obama website so I would find out immidiately who Barry O. had chosen as a running mate via text message ...

Lies...

It was all over the place and I never got a text message.

Obama bin Biden o8.

Thanks guys.

Probecita La Chinita.

2008-08-21T20:46:00.003-04:00

Parece de que les cogieron la mentira a los chinos comunistas.

La chinita, He Kevin, la que le gano la medalla de oro a la rusa-americana, Nastia Liukin, parece que es menor de edad para competir en la competencia de gimnásticas de las Olimpiadas en Beijing.

Hoy en días, es muy difícil cambiar la historia como están acostumbrados los comunistas. Resulta que un experto en computadoras americano, usando una computadora hecha en la China probablemente, ha descubierto documentos que señalan que el gobierno chino oficialmente le agrego edad a la chinita para que pudiera competir.

¡Que cosa! Comunistas mintiendo.

El comité internacional olímpico, que se estaba haciendo el de la vista achinada, no le ha quedado mas remedio que investigar el escándalo por las pruebas de que se han descubierto.

Pero a este gusano le da lastima con la chinita.

Esta niña no es mas que una esclavita del sistema comunista que no tiene voz para defenderse o derechos para imponerse contra el parido comunista chino.

Y cuando se compruebe de que su edad fue falsificada, el partido comunista no tendrá mas remedio de volver a cambiar la historia y culpar a alguien por haber cambiado la edad de He para “salvar cara.” O culpan a un entrenador del equipo gimnástico o los padres de la niña. Pero a alguien hay que echarle el muerto y la chinita, caerá en desgracia y su carrera como atleta terminara antes de empezar.

Where Pigs Fly...

2008-08-20T21:37:00.002-04:00

The Cuban revolution has always been about a pig.

They have managed to get a pig and put some lipstick on it and say “look no one has ever been able to put lipstick on pig before!”

And their leftist friends abroad have admired and praised the make up and even marveled at the flying pig even though they know damn well the pig is only flying in the face of all that is good and decent.

It’s as amazing as it is incomprehensible.

Today I came across a headline:

“Cuba, needing more food, opens fields to entrepreneurs”

At first, I thought that it had to do with allowing foreign companies to come in and set up farming interests. But no, astoundingly, they were referring to Raul’s recent edict of allowing Cuban farmers to farm some more government land.

So basically they took the pig that is sharecropping and put the entrepreneurial lipstick on it to make the pig attractive.

In another example, this one getting a lot of press since it was published in the Miami Herald:

Cuba reaps goodwill from doctor diplomacy

… Meet the Cuban doctor, the most widely deployed and effective ideological and diplomatic weapon in the almost 50 years since Fidel Castro seized control of the island. And, in the past few years, the most profitable export of the country's economy…

… The strategic deployment of doctors to the world's toughest places has garnered Cuba praise and much goodwill. As Feinsilver notes in her book, that goodwill has contributed to the island's election to leadership positions in many international organizations from the late 1970s to the present, including the Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations Security Council…

Now, clearly Cuba is exploiting its citizens by selling them as indentured servants at best or commodities at worst, to score propaganda points and make the pig look good. But rather than say “Cuba reaps profits off slave doctor labor”, they choose to call the indentured servitude of the Cuban doctors abroad as “diplomacy” when it’s clear that they understand that the regime’s motivation is profits and propaganda

Jokers To The Right ...

2008-08-19T12:35:00.004-04:00

Now that Russian Emperor Putin has decided to recapture Russia’s old Soviet Glory, it has become clear that the cold war is back on.

President Bush is often ridiculed for saying that he looked into Vlad’s eyes, getting a “good sense of his soul.” Bush never said what he saw in that dark abyss, apparently isn’t wasn’t all puppies and pan cakes.

He promptly went on to push for further NATO expansion into former Warsaw Pact territory in Eastern Europe.

Even before Russia’s “humanitarian incursion” into Georgia, the Ruskies started making noises about turning Cuba into a Russian client state, once again.

In this Chicago Tribune op-ed, Dennis Byrne jokingly suggest that the US counter the Russian’s Georgian land grab with a land grab of our own-Cuba:

Russian boss-man Vladimir Putin probably figured he scored a big one for his reawakening empire by barging into the pro-Western, democratic nation of Georgia.

Fine, if that's how Putin Bonaparte wants to play it, we'll take . . . hmmmm . . . Cuba. We'll roll right in, just like the Russian tanks and fleet rolled into Georgia, and say, "Hello, Fidel. Good-bye Fidel."

Wishful thinking, but it will never happen. Americans, you see, worry about what the Russians and the rest of the world think of them and long ago when Khrushchev looked into the soul of a young American President, he saw weakness which resulted in an assurance that the US would never depose Fidel. And so it goes.

Interestingly, Byrne, who sounds like a conservative or neo-conservative at the very least, wades into leftist territory and manages to get a dig in on the Cuban exile community:

Who has a greater interest in securing the liberties of the Cuban people than the tens of thousands of Cubans living in America whose gifts of billions to relatives back home is what has kept Castro's pathetic communist utopia going?

Ouch! Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…only It's so hard to keep a smile on my face.

For What It's Worth

2008-08-18T16:11:00.008-04:00

Way back in the day, in 1968, wedged between the Summer of Love and Woodstock, there was the summer of protests. In Chicago, the anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-everything except sex, drugs and rock and roll Hippies had their heyday protesting at the Democratic National Convention. There were riots, fights, arrests, (mostly for procession), and bra-burnings. It was profound.

Now pushing 60, the “me” generation radicals are anxious to relive their glory days by protesting against the Iraq War at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

One of the many protest groups promising to rain on Barry’s parade is actually called Re-Create ‘68.

Ironically, they will essentially be protesting Barack Obama’s coronation which ostensibly represents a generational power shift from the Baby Boomer’s whining to the exasperated (from listening to the boomer’s whining) tweeners and Gen X’ers. Obama managed to eek out a victory over Baby Boomer Hillary Clinton by riding a wave of support from exasperated young people who were probably sick and tired of hearing their parents tell them about how they changed the world by growing their hair, wearing bell bottoms, “experimenting” with drugs, self absorption and whining.

The perpetually disenchanted, acid popping boomers eventually whined their way into positions of power, finding a home in McGovern’s democratic party and taking it over. There, as Prozac popping politicians they continued their crusade against their parent’s America, their cumbaya-ing, self congratulatory pats in the back, and perpetual whining without ever offering any concrete practical solutions to the problems that they themselves created when they demanded change.

Now that another generation is the change we’ve been waiting for, the die hard 60’s radicals are fighting to maintain the status quo and are boarding their time machines, Volkswagen Microbuses, and heading to Denver to whine about … ~~Viet Nam~~ Iraq. But…you better stop, hey what’s that sound?

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line,
the man come and take you away
Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound Everybody look what's going down

It’s the sound of a jail cell. This ain’t your daddy’s ’68 or his ‘68 DNC convention. So, for What It’s Worth, activist groups are complaining that the "heat" in the city of Denver has built a “secret jail” – like camp x-ray in Guantanamo which they are calling "Gitmo on the Platte". More like a time out room, really, for infantile radical wannabes.

El Combinado De Denver

Protesting in the US is easy. So easy, in fact, that even the clueless can do it successfully. The radical's concern:

Protest groups questioned whether the makeshift facility would be suitable for inhabitation after years as a storage facility.

Now I'm beginning to understand why these so called radicals wail about "gitmo" but remain silent about the greater jail that is the rest of the island of Cuba. They only want to conduct safe, comfortable and convenient protest where "the man" can guarantee air conditioning, private bathrooms and cable. These guys couldn't hold a candle to Antunez or Darsi Ferrer.

Defectors and Traitors

2008-08-17T22:09:00.010-04:00

When one decides to leave a totalitarian regime, one “defects” which is an antiseptic modern euphemism for escaping.

Cuban athletes that escape Fidel Castro’s stable of athletes are said to be “defecting.”

As an aside, it’s interesting how there have been no defections of Cuban athletes in the Totalitarian Olympics in Beijing……..I wonder why…….

When athletes in any other country decide to live and work in another country, they just move. When Cuban athletes decide to do the same, it’s an international incident.

The United States is home to athletes from a host of countries and when international competitions come around no-one bats an eyelash when these athletes choose to represent their native countries. Many Olympians from other countries live and train right here in South Florida, for example.

Cuban athletes who decide to leave Cuba and purse happiness somewhere else are labeled traitors to their country and, more importantly, to the revolution that has given them everything. They are not allowed to represent their country ever again though many would probably like to. They are stripped of their citizenship and birthright.

The rest of the world shrugs this violation of human rights off as the eccentricity of Cuba’s fiery benevolent dictator for life, Fidel. Crazy Cuban quaintness.

In the rest of the world it’s a totally different story.

In these 2008 Totalitarian Olympics we are even being treated to an American athlete, Becky Hammon, who did not make the US women’s Olympic Basketball team and was offered Russian citizenship so that she can play on the Russian squad.

Becky and the Reds

Hammon’s questionable decision to turn her back on her country so that she could fulfill her life-long dream of being an Olympian has not made many headlines. Everyone just shrugs it off as if it was no big deal. And I have yet to see Dubya writing a reflection denouncing her as a traitor and chastising the Imperialist Putin for luring her away with his Petro-Rubbles and Stolichnaya Elit Vodka.

Here in America, many people actually defend her asinine and selfish choice. And while other folks like me bid her good riddance and hope they tear up her passport and put her on the terror-watch list, the vast majority couldn’t care less.

As a matter of fact, Jim Lampley interviewed the newly naturalized Russian lass today and very diplomatically asked her if she felt a tug of her heartstrings when the American delegation marched into the “Bird’s Nest” in Beijing. She said no and deflected the question by saying that she did feel a little jealousy because Team USA's outfits “were so cool.”

Now I can see why Ms. Hammon made the decision to represent the country that pioneered a political system that is responsible for the deaths of 100 Million souls, and as evidenced by recent events seems to be flirting with the notion reclaiming its former “glory,” and justifies it as merely a “once in a lifetime opportunity.” Pure shallowness.

Lies and Revised History

2008-08-13T13:49:00.004-04:00

In case you didn’t read it all over the internet, today is Fidel Castro’s birthday.

It says everywhere he’s turning 82. That’s the official party line, the official lie.

That Fidel was born a bastard on August 13, there is no doubt. The year he was born and thus his real age, is another story.

One would be right in arguing that the year of his birth is irrelevant since it would not bring back the thousands of dead or erase the suffering that the birth of this bastard son of a wealthy Spanish plantation owner and his underage cook has caused. But, there’s no point in blindly repeating another of Castro’s lies and there is a point in highlighting how just about everything in the Cuban revolution is a myth including its leader’s age.

Early last year, Dr. Mario Beira, a Cuban-American psychoanalyst and childhood friend shared his extensive research on the circumstances of Castro’s birth with me and convinced me that Fidel was really born in 1927, not 1926 as he claims. That would make him 81 today, not 82 as is being reported.

Last year, on Castro’s birthday, the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies’ Brian Latell tried to set the record straight and referenced Dr. Beira’s work as to when Castro acquired his new “birthday.”

In this short excerpt from Dr. Beira’s work, we find that not only did Fidel have many birth certificates, but also different names.

… Fidel’s birth was not registered or recorded in any legal document until January 19 of 1935, when the child was baptized, at the age of seven and a half, in the city of Santiago de Cuba. His baptism certificate records his name then as Fidel Hipolito Ruz Gonzalez. As Furitati reports, Fidel was not allowed to receive the paternal surname (Castro) as his parents had not yet legally married (pg 48).

According to Furiati, three birth certificates were subsequently created for the boy. The first, in 1938, registers his name as Fidel Casiano Ruz Gonzalez, that is to say, with Casiano, rather than Hipolito, as his middle name. The next certificate – redacted on May 10th of 1941, when Fidel was a teenager – reveals Castro receiving for the first time the name by which he is known today: Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. [i]

Fidel ~~Hipolito~~ ~~Casiano~~ ~~Ruz~~ ~~Gonzalez~~ Alejandro Castro Ruz who as we all know was born on the 13, (26÷2), goes on to build a whole revolutionary mythology around the number 26, He started to plan the revolution on the 52 year (26x2) And started it on the 26th of July when he was 26 years old.

Of course, once Fidel took control, he had the power to go back and rewrite the historical records to support whatever personal myth he wanted to create for himself, including re-writting biographies.

Fidel ~~Hipolito~~ ~~Casiano~~ ~~Ruz~~ ~~Gonzalez~~ Alejandro Castro Ruz’s own recreated history may absolve him and cover up his tracks, but the truth will come to light and convict him.

Throwing The Baby Out With The Raft Water

2008-08-11T22:41:00.005-04:00

I don’t know where the Miami Herald finds them, but they do.

The latest Cuban columnist, rhymes with communist, to get my attention is Myriam Marquez who is now making the case for the land of the free and the home of the brave to return EVERY Cuban who tries to escape the island back to Fidel & Raul.

Frankly, I’m having trouble following her logic. First she argues that the “real” refugees were those who came in the 60’s and in the 90’s like her cousins. Those who pay to escape are not worthy of political asylum because…I’m not sure. You escape a concentration camp and a life of slavery anyway you can.

Apparently, this Cubanita’s, rhymes with….oh never mind!, sensitivities where hurt when some recently exiled Cubans broke the law by committing Medicare-aid fraud and took their ill gotten gains back to Fidel rather than go to jail here.

Because of these bad mangoes, all Cubans that risk the shark infested Florida straights should be sent back because there’s a one in a million chance that they could possibly, maybe... do something that might embarrass the columnist in front of her otherwise open-minded Anglo friends. Pre-emptive deportations. Our version of the Cuban regime’s “peligrosidad” laws.

Ms. Marquez’s logic is that if the United States would take over all of the jailer’s responsibilities for the regime by returning every refugee that is either intercepted at sea or caught in Hialeah and ostensibly make all Cubans illegal aliens, that this would put pressure on the Cuban regime and force Cubans to revolt in helpless desperation. Cubans would stop escaping because they would know that they would be illegals in the US. (that's worked wonders with Haitians and Mexicans, by the way) and would be forced to jump in front of Castro's bullets instead of into a raft or awaiting smuggler's boat. In other words, the US government should help the Castro regime oppress Cubans in order to encourage the Cubans to help themselves be free. Got that?

If Ms. Marquez cares so much about safeguarding the Cuban Adjustment Act, she should argue that the “wet foot” policy instituted by the Clinton administration be scrapped because that rule is in direct conflict with the spirit and the letter of the Cuban Adjustment Act. Abolishing the “wet foot” provision would also do away with the arbitrariness of the wet foot/dry foot policy that she complains about. No wet foot, no problem. This would also put pressure on the Castro regime because a mass exodus would ensue and something would have to be done –quickly. I can make a dumb argument as well as anybody.(It’s a gift).

But it doesn’t seem that my solution would sit to well with Ms. Marquez who’s main motivation seems to be the fear of letting more Cubans in-darker, faster talking, shifty eyed ones with funny names that start with a "Y"-not like her cousins. After all, they’re just “potential” law breaking criminals. They used to say the same things about the Irish and the Italians, only it wasn’t the Irish and the Italians saying it about their own. Then again, they didn’t have the Miami Herald back then to scour the United States and look under every rock to find one that would be willing to denigrate their own in print, for money and condescending acceptance.

Ms. Marquez ends her piece with a warning:

U.S. benevolence has its limits.

Hmmm...

I wonder if that’s the same benevolent US that considered Cuba a fruit that was ripe for the picking and picked a war with Spain in order to annex Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines? Or the same benevolent US that shoved the Platt Amendment down our Cuban throats? Or the same benevolent US that ensured that Castro would take over by refusing to sell arms to Batista and by telling him that they would not longer support his government or that of "his" newly elected president? Or the same benevolent US that left 1,500 men to die on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs by reneging on the promised air cover? Or the same benevolent US that cut a deal with the USSR that sealed our future as an enslaved satellite of the USSR by agreeing not to invade Castro’s Cuba or allow any exiles to the same? Or the same benevolent US that due to all of the above, took responsibility and drafted The Cuban Adjustment Act as a way to remedy its foreign policy mistakes and bring some relief to its victims, only to later cut another deal with Castro and institute the wet foot/dry foot policy?

That benevolent US? ... Please!

The Beijing Goose-Step

2008-08-09T17:33:00.014-04:00

I really had no intention of watching the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic, but we had company and one of the guests wanted to see the ~~propaganda~~ festivities and so the TV went on.

The first thing I saw was a bunch of goose-stepping Chinese soldiers hoisting up the communist flag. It wasn’t bad enough that I had to watch the world pay respect to a symbol of oppression, torture and death, but they were goose-stepping! Goose-stepping. Bad guys goose-step. It’s the international equivalent of a black hat in an old western. The good guys never goose-step.

And then, the propaganda started. It was all about China and its historic struggle to achieve its destiny as a world power.

The main "theme" was Harmony. It’s China’s chief dictator, Hu’s, vision for society. Bob Costas who proved last night he would have no problems working for Cuba’s state owned television, (we already knew Matt Lauer has what it takes from his Today Show coverage in Havana), kept telling us about First Party Secretary Hu’s vision of a “harmonious society.” A “harmonious society” in totalitarian China, of course, means doing what you are told and asking no questions. Kindda like a Harmonious Classroom.

At one point, they had something like 2,000 synchronized drummers, dressed eerily similar to Cuban Pioneros de la Revolucion, pounding what sounded like a war march. One of the hosts mentioned that the drummers had been told to smile lest they intimidate the western audience. Smiling drumming red demons. To me it was like a vision of an Orwellian totalitarian hell with the masses working as one to achieve a common goal. Of course if anyone had acted as an individual and banged a different tune, disharmony would have resulted and the common goal not achieved. Take note. Apunten…(fuego).

In another incredible display of collective artistic accomplishment they had these box like things that moved around as if they were connected. It was cool. Ultimately it “spelled” the symbol “harmony”. Then people jumped out of the boxes, like strippers from a cake-or prisoners from a cell. They practiced 4 months, 8 hours a day, sometimes more, to get it right. This kind of spectacle will never be duplicated unless the Olympics are held in a place where they have an unlimited amount of people that can be forced to do this. Maybe they were forced to live in the boxes for 4 months. Who knows, it’s not like they have rights or they have laws in China to prevent these kinds of things.

We were told by NBC that China had opened its doors to the world in 1978, while they were retracing China’s historical progress, communist countries always have a historical progress, not historical events. That’s because they’re stuck on stupid, Marx, and believe in societal evolution, that is men, evolve, (are forced), to go from being individuals into communal citizens. Anyway, they totally skipped Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the history lesson. Or maybe NBC went to commercial….

At this point, Costas reminded us how much China had changed since then and how it had decided to allow individuals to seek their own futures…or something like that..(I’m looking for the quote). As I was screaming, I was asked by my life partner to either shut up or leave the room because I was “being political”. Truth is political, Chinese Communist propaganda piped into your living room in HD Peacock living color and read by in English by an American isn’t. Time for ANOTHER beer.

Sadly, I came back to witness the Olympic flag being carried and hoisted up by some more goose-stepping Red Army soldiers. I left on my own account this time. “Red Army” I kept saying…as I left to get yet another beer.

I sat to watch the lighting of the torch. Four years ago, in Athens, a guy that went to my High School, a Hiller, brought in the torch into the stadium. This time it was someone I share another bond with, communism. The lighting of the torch was like as always, spectacular.

And then, we all cheered our countries of origin. As usual, when I saw the Cuban flag,(or was it the Puerto Rican flag-there's always a momentary pause- Oh wait, it couldn't have been the Puerto Rican Flag, they practically cut PR out of the parade to go to commercial-bastards), well, I got that bittersweet feeling I get when I see a Cuban team at an international sports competition-wanting to root for the flag but not the regime. And I imagined the males on the Cuban team hitting on the French, Italian and Australian women and I cheered then on...

Sergeant Clueless

2008-08-07T21:00:00.006-04:00

If you could meet any person dead or alive, who would you meet?

Jesus? Buddha? Mohamed? Moses?

Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot?

Personally, I’d like to meet Jesus and clarify a few things.

Well, one of our Olympic athletes, US Army sergeant Dremiel Byers who’s a member of America’s Greco-Roman wrestling team says his choice would be Fidel. (!?!?)

Of course he must have a really good reason for his choice, no?

"I don't know, it just seems like he'd be interesting," Byers said when pressed.

Perhaps realizing that his choice was somewhat odd, he dug a deeper trench in an effort to justify it:

"I think I wanted to meet Castro to see if I could talk him into letting me get one of those hats from him,'' Byers said at a press conference.

Byers called Castro a "great guy.''

That’s nice.

What defines a “great guy” in Byers’ view:

"He's a strong person, strong willed, what have you,'' Byers said. "I heard a story when I was in Cuba that one of their athletes got a medal and he got to have dinner with Castro. They were sitting at the table and (Castro) said, 'Champion, huh?' Then he reached into his wallet and pulled out a dollar and hands it to the guy... I was like, 'What did you do?' And he said, 'I acted like it was the best dollar I ever got.'''

Byers should enjoy his stay at the Olympic Concentration Camp err I mean Village in Beijing, there’s lots of “great guys” or what have you, over there in China.

And maybe when he comes back, the President can invite him to the white house and slip him a greenback for his efforts and we’ll see how he likes being humiliated by his commander in chief.

Air Obama

2008-08-05T22:26:00.006-04:00

I'm having difficulty gauging this Senator Obama comment:

"We could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires,"

OK. Last month I got new tires. Right now they are exactly 32 PSI- the same as they were last month.

Hmmm...and yet I'm still spending $40 plus dollars every time I fill my Tc.

Maybe now that the energy crisis and dependence on foreign oil have been solved because the Senator has the World's largest proven reserves of arrogant hot air, when I go to gas up tomorrow, it will run me $25 like it did last year.

No. I don't think so.

But watch what happens to oil prices the minute that the first drill hits the Alaskan soil or sand on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. It's called supply and demand.

I already lived in a country where what determined the economic value of goods was the collective effort and good camaraderie, (emphasis on comrade) that citizens put into things and not market factors like supply and demand. Che Guevara economics.

I'm really not interested in how much oil we can theoretically save if everybody decides to cooperate and inflate their tires in a show of collective unity. No, I'm interested in how much money I can actually save with lower gas prices. Lower Prices I can live with, not empty theories I can believe in-that's my motto. Here's another one:

"We are the Lower Gas Prices We've Been Waiting For"

Now, if my car only ran on platitudes, We'd be in business.

Is that’s the best you can do? …. Please! UPDATED:Egg on Gusano Face

2008-08-01T23:17:00.008-04:00

UPDATE:

Ok, So I'm paranoid.... the reason so many Cuban-American sites were not were working was not because of regime hi-jinks, but because of Microsoft lo-tech.

Most of us Cuban American bloggers use sitemeter to track visits and they updated their scripts yesterday without taking into account a bug in Microsoft EI 7.0.

Ramiro wasn't the culprit, it was that other unscrupulous capitalist, Bill Gates. The world doesn't revolve around the Cuban blogosphere! Leason Learned.

Thanks to the reader that took time out to alert me.

Use Firefox, folks.

If your Internet Explorer will not open this blog, download Mozilla Firefox and you can get in that way.

Cuban state security was bored tonight so they blocked access to many Cuban-American blogs through MS Iternet Explorer.

Poor kids. They have to do what they’re told or else…..

The sad part is that with their computer knowledge, these kids would be making a decent living anywhere else in the world, but they're stuck in Cuba being paid slave wages by Ramiro Valdes and forced to do his bidding.

Parece que a los niños de Ramiro los tienen perdiendo el tiempo jugando a hackers esta noche…

Muchachos…yo entiendo que ustedes tienen que hacer los que les ordenen.

Pero con tanto talento deben de dejársela a Ramiro en la mano y cruzar el charco. Por lo menos aquí pagan buen dinero, no la miseria que le pagan a ustedes.

Ustedes saben que los queremos y se les espera con los brazos abiertos siempre.

¡Viva Cuba Libre!

Cuban National Urinal

2008-07-31T21:49:00.003-04:00

Once Raúl Castro dies, they will cremate him and stick his ashes in the huge rock thate he should have crawled under while he was still alive.

The 130 ton rock was brought from the Sierra Maestra and placed in the Sierra Cristal’s mausoleum dedicated to the Second Eastern front revolutionaries which where under Raúl’s command during the armed upraising against Batista that was lead by his big brother.

Though it’s kind of a downer that no expense was spared to build Raúl’s final resting place, it’s good to know where his grave is so that someday we can all go piss on it.

We may not be so lucky with Fidel since they are hinting that he will be cremated and his ashes scattered over the Sierra Maestra after which the name of the fanous mountain range will probably need to changed to the Desierto Maestro or Loma Mocha or something like that.

Raúl Turns Milk To Water

2008-07-30T07:46:00.002-04:00

I finally forced myself to read Raúl Castro’s July 26 speech.

No audacity of Hope there.

More like predictions of doom & gloom.

Raúl basically told the Cuban people that he would do whatever it takes to resist the good life of the neighbors to the North, the USA, and continue to work to make Cuba more like its neighbor to the West, Haiti.

Last year Raúl promised milk, this year he promised water.

But….like everything else in Cuba…it will be rationed:

A piece of advise: the more water that is distributed, the greater the need to save it. Water is a very valuable resource which is indispensable for everything; therefore, it should be used rationally.

Next year, he might promise some fresh air and then figure out a way to ration it…and blame the embargo.

Obama's H.O.A.'s

2008-07-29T13:23:00.002-04:00

On Thursday of last week, I wrote about my shock at finding out that Senator Obama proposed a “civilian security force” in a speech that the MSM ignored.

I cross-posted my thoughts at Babalú which exposed it to many more people than would normally have it read it here.

I got some interesting comments.

Some of my friends suggested I might be suffering from a post traumatic stress induced paranoia .They think that I’m reading too much into Barry O.’s dream of funding an activist civilian army-a politically correct militia. They told me that it was a stretch to compare Barry O.’s utopian dream to the CDR’s (Committees for the defense of the (Cuban) Revolution) of my enslaved youth.

O.K. fair enough. Here’s an insight into my paranoia in terms that even those who have been fortunate enough to never have experienced totalitarianism in the flesh can understand:

“This could never happen in America,” they say. I hope not, but if somebody gives you fair warning that they imagine a society where there is a civilian security force that’s as well funded as the US’s armed forces and this person is no kooky blogger such as myself, but rather a respected, Harvard educated Senator who wants to put himself in a position where he would have the power to propose societal engineering plans that could transform American society as we know it-take him at his word. Because, as he says: “words mean something”

I’m sorry, my young Obamaniacal friends. You can’t have it both ways. Either he speaks in platitudes and non-specifics or he doesn’t. You can’t argue that he does have a message buried deep within his lofty speeches and then argue that his speeches can’t be parsed, analyzed and scrutinized.

Anyway, for those who say that the Obama imagined civil police could never materialize in the U S of A, I say, “HOA”- Home Owner’s Association.

If you have ever been dumb enough to sign your property rights away for the security that these Nazi-like associations of urban busybodies seem to promise, then you know what I’m talking about.

These creeps, who usually have the power to put a lien on your house, go around looking for dirty roofs, uncut hedges, dirty driveways, loose dogs. Etc, Etc with the same gleam in their eyes that the CDR snitches used to have when they were “checking up” on their gusano neighbors in Cuba.

Now, imagine a government funded network of urban commandoes with a politically correct axe to grind.

You can call me paranoid if you like, but I’m just saying …Do you want your life to be governed by a giant state run HOA?

D-Fence.

2008-07-27T14:47:00.005-04:00

Raúl is out of change. Literally and figuratively.

Desperate Cubans waited with their still empty glasses of milk to see if their new leader would offer up a timetable to make good on the promised “structural changes” which he announced in his now famous glass of milk speech a year ago.

But no, Raúl did not announce any change or make any other assurances to the Cuban people other than warn them that things are going to change from bad to worse. Like with all thugs, warnings are really promises.

More sacrifice, more struggle, more of the same. Not a warning put a promise.

Like the much ridiculed exiles across the straights in Miami, Raúl looked back to the good ol’ hey days of the Cuban republic when sugar was king and Fidel wasn’t and reminisced about the day his brother started the bleeding and then promised more blood.

Raúl “warned:”

''We shall continue paying special attention to defense, regardless of the results of the next presidential elections in the United States,'' Raúl said.

Defense.

Raúl, of course, means defense of the revolution, of the status quo, of his regime.
And who exactly does he have to defend the revolution from?

Jamaica? The Dominican Republic? The Cayman Islands?

Those bitter exiles in Miami clinging to their nostalgia of Batista’s Cuba? Hardly, the United States government makes dam sure that will never happen.

The US-The Empire just 90 miles due North? If the US was serious about getting rid of the Castro Nostra, they would be gone in about 12 hours and they know it.

The real enemies of the so called Cuban revolution are its victims-the Cuban people. It is the Cuban people that Raúl was warning in his speech.

He wanted to assure them that his priorities have not changed. His number one priority is to stay in power come what may even if it’s the audacious Barry O.

The real estate market in South Florida is tanking, foreclosures are sky high, gasoline prices are in the stratosphere and the dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to, all of which is cutting into the regime’s remittance business.

Times are tough. It’s going to cost more to arm and train the regime’s goon squads. The price of surveillance equipment is going up. Ramiro needs cash to subdue the “wild colt” that is the internet. The Cuban armed forces need upgrades to defend the regime against the dangerous Ladies in White, the FLAMUR women, kids wearing “cambio” bracelets, assorted writers and poets and the 98 pound blogger Yoani Sanchez. Repression can’t be done on the cheap, you know.

Therefore, Cubans will have to be a little hungrier and a little more miserable so that Raúl can continue to defend them against freedom, happiness and prosperity.

Scary "Barry O."

2008-07-24T22:33:00.009-04:00

On July 2nd, Barry O. gave his “Call To Service” speech.

I was taking a few days off for a little R,R&D around that time, so I didn’t pay too much attention because frankly, I would have expected nothing more from Barry O. than something along the lines of “ask not what your country can do for us, but what you can do for me.”

To my jaw dropping dismay, today, by coincidence I find out that Barry O. really laid out his socialist agenda for America in a sugar coated version of Stalinism a la John Lennon’s sugar coating of Marx’s communist manifesto in the song “Imagine.”

I read in passing that Senator Obama had issued a call for a “civilian security force” in the July 2nd speech. That phrase made the hair in the back of my neck stand up since I grew up being accosted by a “civilian security force” called the CDR, (committee for the defense of the revolution), in Cuba.

So I looked up the transcript of the speech and I read it, and re-read it and I could not find the quote which I had thought I had read. And, unfortunately, I could not remember where I had read it.

But I kept googling and I found this link Obama's 'Big Brother' vanishes from speech

Wow. What "Big Brother" idea did Barry O put forth that his campaign was so afraid that they omitted it from the transcript?

Here it is:

Democrat Sen. Barack Obama's stunning assertion in a recent speech that the U.S. needs a "civilian national security force" that would be as powerful, strong and well-funded as the half-trillion dollar Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force is not included in published transcripts of his prepared remarks.

Actual Transcript:

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

VIDEO:

Basically, what Obama is talking about is creating a Committee for the Defense of Liberal Ideology and Political correctness funded by a half trillion taxpayer dollars.

National Security for this crowd is not about stopping terrorists from killing our children. National Security means to teach our children to understand the terrorists and their motivations so that our children can learn how to live their lives submissively so as not to offend the sensitivities of the very sensitive America haters.

Their version of National Security is to force you to act for the common good of society and not in your own best interest. Since this goes against human nature, the half trillion dollar “Civilian National Security Force” will have to force Americans to change their nature and create a new citizen that is self sacrificing and collective in nature-an ant-like new man, like Che's and Fidel's new man.

This concept is eerily similar to the Castroite CDR block snitch network that I grew up with only better funded and more ideologically pure. Next thing you know Barry O. will set up “field schools” where middle school children will have to go on month long stays to cultivate the bio fuels that will replace gasoline...

So when I'm President, I will set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year. This means that by the time you graduate college, you'll have done 17 weeks of service

No wonder Fidel calls him the more "advanced" presidential candidate.

Be afraid, be very afraid. No, on second thought get angry.

Offers That Could And Couldn't Be Refused

2008-07-21T13:43:00.000-04:00

I keep getting alerts for two books about Cuba that must have just been published.

I’m weak. I clicked.

Apparently one is a novel about some Americans that were living the high life in the United Fruit Company’s “colonial” Cuba . Yes, before WalMart and Haliburton, there was the United Fruit Co. It all came to end when the Castro mob muscled the Americans out.

The other is about how the Cosa Nostra lost Cuba to the Castro Nostra. A turf war between mobs, basically. Only the Castro mob had and Army with planes and tanks and everything- no match for mafiosos with tommy guns, ‘45’s and shark skin suits.

These books are really, really, really, according to the reviews, good because they explain the historical events and the social injustices that fermented and justified the rise to power of Castro & co. Those other books written by Castro’s victims show the misery and pain that Cubans have had to endure since then, but lack the nuanced historical perspective that explain what led the young revolutionary to destroy a country in order to save it from itself. In other words, the heroics. Here we are fifty years and counting and we’re still trying to rationalize and justify the evil that befell Cuba.

I get the Mafia thing every so often… “Didn’t you see The Godfather II?”

Aside from the fact that it’s asinine to get your history from Hollywood movies, it’s even more stupid, naive and offensive to justify the thousands of deaths and the many years of oppression inflicted by the Castro mob because at least they got rid of Mayer Lansky.

Back during Prohibition, gangsters ran the big cities like Chicago and New York-Didn’t you see The Untouchables and The Godfather?

A mobster named Bugsy Siegel built Las Vegas… “Didn’t you see Bugsy?”

Jeez, maybe they should have declared martial law, suspended habeas corpus, rationed food and closed the borders for fifty years to eradicate the mob. It sounds, by some of the comments I get, that some Americans would have agreed with those courses of action. After all, it worked in Cuba and they make it sound like Castro’s actions were partly justified because there was gasp! Organized crime involvement in the casinos!

Then there’s the whole Cuba as colony of America and its corporations idea. Certainly America because of its wealth and proximity to Cuba, had a lot of influence on the island. But the American companies did employ Cubans directly and because of the free market, whose basic laws of Supply and Demand where the same as they are now even in the fifties, were forced to pay a fair wage and abide to Cuban law. Any unfair business practices would have been subject to those laws. And any employees of the large American corporations in Cuba were free to find another employer. They didn’t steal land, they had to buy it, you could refuse their offers. If the “Anglos” barricaded themselves in company enclaves where they didn’t have to deal with the local Cuban, perhaps that was more due to their prejudices and fears than to a way of life. All other immigrants in Cuba, and there were MILLIONS, became Cubans. They chose to segregate themselves and mimic the plantation lifestyle of old Dixie as was their right and choice in a relatively free Cuba.

Those days stand in stark contrast to Cuba under Castro where workers are only allowed to work for one employer who sets prices, wages and controls everything in society. A Cuba where there are no more immigrants, but one that lost over 10% of its population. A Cuba where foreign companies cannot pay the Cuban worker directly, but must pay the Castros who in turn make the Cubans and offer they can’t refuse.

I don’t see how getting rid of a rich, foreign aristocracy and a few thousand, rich powerful and influential families justifies enslaving a whole population, destroying the whole middle class by making everyone equally poor and destitute and ruled by one super rich, super powerful family and its minions.

cha-ching…..

2008-07-20T12:23:00.005-04:00

The “Land Reform” articles continue.

My head hurts.

More land is being made available for farming.

Really?

What exactly did Raúl do to make this land “available”?

Did he grow the island?

Did he fill in a bay or two on the Cuban coastline and reclaim the ocean for farming? (Barry O.: take note)

The land has always been available for farming. It’s been sitting there going to waste because the regime, which up to now centrally planned and managed the agricultural programs failed, either by design or by default, to effectively manage the land.

This is yet another white flag of surrender-an admittance by the regime that another one of its policies, another one of their internationally accepted myths – the sustainable, eco friendly Cuban agriculture model- is nothing more than a failure wrapped in a veneer of lies and propaganda.

But now, raising food prices-slumping dollar-are cutting in the regime’s profits so they are forced to make a policy u-turn and with the help of the international press making it sound like another of Raúl’s, “reforms.” (by the way, have you noticed how Raúl’s “changes” have now turned to “reforms”?)

Please!

So far the regime is going to allow the Cuban guajiros to buy farming supplies from the regime…cha-ching….. They are going to allow the farmers the privilege of working harder so that they can produce more and the regime can import less…cha-ching…The farmers will have to clear the fallow land of the thorny Marabu to make it productive again, saving the regime the time, money and effort of having to do it themselves…cha-ching…The guajiros will then have to sell their produce to the regime at a price set by the regime…cha-ching…cha-ching…AND then the guajiros are going to pay taxes on the extra income that they make…cha-ching…

The Cuban guajiros may not be the most sophisticated people on the planet, but do have common sense, an uncommon sense of self reliance and pride. They are nobody's fools, especially Raúl’s.

Common Communist Miscommunications

2008-07-18T13:48:00.004-04:00

I have to admit that I didn’t pay too much attention to the daily communist indoctrination while I was being rewarded with my free “education” in Fidel’s schools growing up.

But I did get the gist of it. The people this, and the people that. Everything was owned by the people, (el pueblo), and for the people. I remember being confused because “el pueblo” owned everything, but nobody had anything. Pueblo is one of those rare words in Spanish that can mean two things: the people and a town so in my 6 year old mind, I figured that there was a town, (pueblo), somewhere that owned everything and I wanted to go there. Badly.

My father set me straight like only a Cuban father would. He told me not to be an idiot-Castro owned everything. They didn’t teach “Building your child’s Self Esteem 101 at Cuban father school, but Lesson learned: People means Fidel. Substitute Fidel for people and you had the truth. It worked for other countries as well like Mao’s Republic of China.

Anyway, what reminded me of my first grade communist epiphany was an article in the AP, Associated Parrots, informing the world that Raúl Castro was allowing the people to farm some government land.

HAVANA (AP) — Communist officials decreed Friday that private farmers and cooperatives can use up to 100 acres (40 hectares) of idle government land, as president Raul Castro works to revive Cuba's floundering agricultural sector.

Government land? Hold the new cell phone…..

The people own the land. That was the point of that blessed “reforma agraria” that they wouldn’t stop telling us about in school. It was all about Fidel taking the land away from the rich exploiters of the people and giving it to the people.

I was confused yet again.

I was going to call the old man, but I didn’t want to get called an idiot. Besides, there’s a whole bunch of people waiting in line to call me an idiot these days without me having to go looking for it. So, I kept reading….

Ownership will stay with the state. Private farmers can get concessions of up to 10 years, renewable for another 10. Cooperatives and companies can have renewable 25-year terms. And all will have to pay taxes for the lands, though the decree gave no details

It certainly sounds like the land is owned by the “state”. So I guess that in Cuba’s communism, property isn’t really owned in common by the people, it’s owned by the state-the regime as I call them. Another epiphany. They had lied to me about common ownership in communism.

But the same general principle I learned in first grade still applies. All you have to do is substitute Castro with the “state” and it works.

Castro is the state and he owns everything.

All Over But The Crying?

2008-07-17T12:23:00.004-04:00

Wow! Did you hear that splash?

Was that a Chinese or Brazilian drill exploring for $135 a barrel crude in the Cuban waters off the Florida coast? (Heaven knows it’s not Exxon-Mobil or Shell exploring the American waters, Congress forbid!).

Was it the just re-established US 4th Fleet hitting the waters?

Was it the much publicized and promised 500,000 refugee “mass exodus” out of Cuba all jumping off the Malecon simultaneously?

Was it The Miami Herald finally buckling under the weight of its own biases and sinking into Biscayne Bay?

Maybe it was just me getting out of my $400 a month habit, (my car), and sticking my leg-ankle deep-in a puddle.

No, I think it was the embargo, now slowly sinking into the Florida Straights. Glug, glug…

The Bush administration has declared open season on sanctions. First, the deal with North Korea, now the talks with Iran. The “Axis of Evil” demolished as quickly as it was constructed-by the same crew, even.

I can’t even begin to guess what this strategery is all about…

Maybe Dubya is trying out a new psy-ops operation to bring down the price of crude futures by easing tensions with Iran.

Maybe it’s an election year Morrisian triangulation strategery to help the Republicans keep the White House by “out-diplomatizing” the newly American flag lapel wearing “Barry O” and appeasing and pleasing every tyrant on the face of the ever warming planet and thus neutralizing the “not talking to your enemies” gripe that seems to strike a chord with so many of the “turn the other cheekers” in the American electorate. (try turning the other cheek on a rattle snake and see what happens)

Who knows? All I can do is shake my head in disgust and take another sip of my ice cold, All-American Budweiser. Not!

What I do know is that all these events will make it almost impossible for Washington to continue the silent treatment that it has given to the tyranny 90 miles due south of US1’s mile maker 1.

The Bush administration has decided to “negotiate” with the two remaining rogue nations on the “Axis of Evil”. Both are America hating, nuclear proliferating, terrorist financing, immoral tyrannies that haven’t made any real concessions to be allowed the right to join civilized and law abiding nations at a negotiating table. After all, I haven’t seen any reports of North Koreans being allowed to own computers or cell phones. Nor has the theocracy ruling Iran announced that it will provide free sex change operations to transgendered jihadists.

And so, what is Dubya planning on saying when the Castro fan club in Congress starts to pressure his administration to negotiate with Raúl and bring down the economic sanctions? What convincing logical reason can one come up with to justify negotiations, concessions and relations with Pyongyang and Tehran and not Havana?

As I sit here sipping on my InBev,(a company that also brews Bucanero beer in Cuba, by the way), brewed beer, I can’t think of a single solitary one.

So, I raise my bottle to toast the memory of my beloved embargo and say “This Bud was for you”

Raúl's U-Turn

2008-07-15T13:49:00.001-04:00

For FIFTY long and painful years Cubans, lead by Fidel & Co., have traveled on a long, lonely and bumpy road where they have had to sacrifice their freedom and comfort supposedly to reach egalitarianism.

Now, those of us who where on that little red bus and have experienced the proletariat road trip in Cuba, know that Fidel’s shining path to egalitarianism was nothing but an excuse to starve and oppress the people into submission, but the reasons given for the misery, struggles and oppression was always reaching the Marxist Shangri-La of an egalitarian classless society.

Marxism is a materialistic vision of reality where classes struggle for limited resources. Only when no one owns anything can they own the same and be equal since Marxism measures man by what he owns rather than by what he is.

The regime had already been making noises that the orthodox Marxist, (and Fidel’s) path to equality was “inconvenient”, but in a speech to the Cuban “parliament” on Friday, Raúl himself came right out and said so:

Socialism means social justice and equality but equality of rights and opportunities, not salaries. Equality does not mean egalitarianism.

That’s interesting.

Basically, what little brother is telling the Cuban people, in his own pragmatic and sardonic way, is that the road they’ve been forced to travel on for the last FIFTY years was going the wrong way because the navigator was holding the map upside down.

Ooops! We’re Lost. The directions were wrong…make a U-turn!

Not only does Raúl say that egalitarianism is the wrong destination, he says that it is another form of exploitation:

This is, in the end, another form of exploitation, that of the exploitation of the responsible worker by the one who is not, or even worse, by the slothful.

So, let’s see: Egalitarianism was a destination imposed on the Cuban people by the revolution. So I guess is he saying that the revolution has been exploiting the Cuban people by leading down the wrong path. I mean Raúl didn’t just drop from outer space and find Cuba on its dismal Soviet-style command economy highway, he drove the bus and made the Cuban people get on –high jacked- AT GUNPOINT!

But now, he’s says the bridge is out and that the little red bus is heading towards the precipice and since it is a Marxist bus it’s difficult to steer and the brakes aren’t that good. All he can do is to tell the hostages to tighten their safety belts and hold on because he’s driving and he’s making a U-Turn.

So now that the bus has made a U-Turn, will Raúl “social justice and equality but equality of rights and opportunities” Castro lead the bus towards Democracy? Not likely. In the same speech, the new bus driver said as much in the same speech:

I reiterate that we will never make even the smallest decision as a result of pressure or extortion, whatever the source: whether a powerful country or an entire continent.

That’s his response to the EU’s decision to lift their symbolic sanctions on the regime and review the Cuban bus’ progress a year from now.

My guess is that the new direction will be to a new Putin style military dictatorship where the Red Mob runs everything with Raúl as the “capo de tutti capi” and all his made men live in luxury. Kindda like now-except the inequalities between citizens have now been officially legitimized.

The 4th.

2008-07-04T06:47:00.002-04:00

My favorite holiday, really.

When I tell people that, I get a look. Well, I get lots of looks when I talk, but I really get a LOOK when I say that-followed by the inevitable why?

And I tell them, that if it weren’t for the 4th of July, we might not have any of the other great Holidays.

I’m not trying to be a super American or more patriotic than though.

You see, the circumstances of my childhood left me with some perspectives that really compel me to love and appreciate freedom.

When I was growing up in Cuba, one year, Fidel decided to outlaw Christmas. Just like that. Because he felt like it.

We instead got to celebrate July 26th. Because he felt like it.

On the 4th, we celebrate that all men are created equal and are endowed with their creator with certain unalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And that is worth celebrating. Take it from somebody who once wasn’t allowed to pursue any of these-even when the pursuit was as simple and innocuous as dangling a few treasured glass Christmas ornaments on an old metal and plastic Christmas tree.

Today, I will pursue happiness and celebrate these Red White and Blue ideals. One song, one plunge in the pool, one corn on the cob, one veggie burger, one beer and one fire cracker at a time – always keeping in mind another place, about 250 miles due South where another Red White and Blue flag waves and where happiness can only be pursued illegally.

And it will begin with this…

Happy 4th!

2008-07-03T08:01:00.000-04:00

I’ve been taking some vacation time so I apologize for the infrequent posts.

Since my last post, our Compañero Fidel has penned a few more reflections.

He has now become a true blogger since his reflections appear only on the oxymoronically named Cubadebate. That means that Fidel pens his ideas, many of them dissenting from his little half brother’s policies, for the benefit of foreigners and free Cubans who live abroad since the overwhelming majority of Cubans have no access to the internet. Hmmm…..

Have the Fidelistas lost the power struggle that was not taking place within the Cuban Communist Party?

Who knows? Maybe Raúl is preparing the battle field for the looming wave of repression or for the return of Chairman Fidel, (what outfit would he wear? surely not the olive green commander in chief coustume...surely not the Adidas warm up...),to the Plaza Civica’s reviewing stand and podium to review the July 26 festivities.

Dissident Blogger Fidel

2008-06-25T12:48:00.003-04:00

Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez gets more press than Fidel these days.

On Newspapers, Internet Sites, Blogs, TV, Radio, everywhere you go- it’s Yoani says this and Yoani says that. Yoani, Yoani, Yoani…

All the attention given to Yoani must have made a certain dictator, currently out on FMLA, green with envy-or is green from liver failure? No Matter.

The former darling of the international press was being ignored, so even he jumped on the Yoani bandwagon in hopes of regaining some of his lost notoriety. He decided to attack Yoani and managed to make Yoani even more famous even as he made himself more infamous.

Compañero Fidel’s approach to blogging had been to comment on international affairs and world events from his own unique perspective on the pages of his newspapers, Granma and Juventud Rebelde. His sermonic rants not only attacked the hegemony of individual freedom and choice originating in the “Empire” directly due North, but exalted the virtues of the collective misery he brought to Cuba and fought so hard to keep in place. Fidel, no fool, ignored the calls from his little half brother Raul to debate and come up with possible solutions to Cuba’s collective mess published in the same pages. The obvious solution, was, is and always will be not for up for discussion.

Maybe, rather than read the foreign press looking for blogging material, Fidel decided to read his own propaganda sheet, the one he force-feeds to the "masses." In it he found that concessions had been made, deals reached, egalitarianism breached, Fidelismo challenged.

And so Fidel, in the ultimate “if you can’t beat them, join them” move seems to have become, like Yoani, a dissident blogger.

He has taken his act to the internet-where the regular Juan Q. Publico on the Cuban street can’t read his musings-and has started to critisize his brother’s policies.

His first dissenting blog entry on Cubadebate was to trash the European Union for its hypocrital symbolic sanction lifting-just like the rest of the dissidents and dissident bloggers. His brother’s “government” had worked hard to ensure Spain’s cooperation and representation in Brussels. Fidel totally undermined his brother’s policies and publically humiliated Raul and the Spanish with his “diatribe.”

That got everyone’s attention. While he had their attention, Fidel went on to inform the world- that there was no rift in the Cuban Communist Party-of which he’s still Chairman. In this entry, what he’s saying is that it’s the party that rules, not Raul, and that no dissent is allowed-unless he’s doing it. He even threatened to stop blogging and watching sports on TV and devote that time to “other matters”. That’s a threat.

Today I read that the Chinese Communist Party’s head enforcer, He Guoqiang, who is visiting Cuba, had met with Fidel. The AP quotes Fidel as praising the Chinese style socialism:

Castro "underscored the advances of the Chinese people and the importance of socialism with Chinese characteristics" during a two-hour meeting with Politburo member He Guoqiang, according to Cuba's International Press Center.

That means that socialism with “Chinese characteristics” is not pure, egalitarian Marxist socialism. It’s not Fidelismo-and therefore not suitable for Cuba. It also means that Fidel is against any policies that recognize market mechanisms to regulate wages, production, supply and demand, dissenting from the small changes that Raul has tried to implement to save the crumbling revolution.

I look forward to read Fidel’s dissents on Cubadebate…unless they throw him in the cell next to Biscet for "peligrosidad."

Chairman Fidel In Charge

2008-06-23T21:58:00.008-04:00

I go away for a few days….

And there’s my half dead blogging nemesis, El Compañero Fidel, blogging me under the table.

It seems he’s gotten his second or third or fourth wind. He was always full of wind, that one.

No sooner had the ink dried on the EU resolution lifting the symbolic sanctions-the Euros are all about symbolism - that Fidel was out there calling the Euros a bunch of enormous hypocrites. Finally! a truth escapes his lips- but for the wrong reasons.

The deal that Spain’s socialist government had worked so hard to broker for the last two years was skewered by the tyrant, because the land of Volvos and the crowded and obnoxious Ikea stores forced the Spaniards to include some annoying language about human rights-probably yet another symbolic gesture, but still annoying.

"From Cuba, in the name of human rights, they demand impunity for those that try to deliver... the homeland and the people to imperialism,"

What cads! The Euros symbolically demand that the regime do not harass, beat, imprison or otherwise silence those who think differently with impunity- while they sip mojitos and screw Cuban teenagers- symbolically, euphemistically and in the flesh.

Anyway, before his brother had a chance to celebrate and embrace the victory in Europe where Spain was able to convince the rest of the EU members to give Raul their symbolic seal of approval, Fidel was already raining on his little brother’s parade.

All Raul’s regime was able to get out was this little blurb before still Chairman Fidel put a big damper on the festivities:

"If it has happened (as described in the news), I think that, yes, it's a step in the right direction," Perez Roque told Reuters
"We've seen the news, but we'll take our time in evaluating the issue, knowing the official decisions and, in the appropriate moment, we will react in an official way," he said.

And that was that.

Then in his next blog entry which he made on Cuba Debate-a debate site where Cuban issues are "debated"-and where ordinary Cubans who have no internet access can’t read much less debate, Chairman Blogger announced to the world that there was NO rift in the Cuban Communist Party:

"I am not now, nor will I ever be at the head of any group or faction. Therefore, it can't follow that there is infighting in the party,"

That means he’s still in charge of the party and there will be no factions, infighting or dissent allowed.

In today’s reflection, where he denies that he his anti European reflection was a diatribe (as described by El Diario de Las Americas), he speaks of watching a lot of sporting events on TV and that perhaps he will “dedicate this time to other activities.”

Watch out Raúl, Chairman Fidel is feeling better... or then again...

Silent Lucidity

2008-06-20T13:22:00.004-04:00

If you read the by-lines on the new Fidel video stories, it’s easy to see what the message that the regime was trying to deliver since the international press is more than happy and willing to serve as the regime's P.R. firm and advertising agencies. But that’s nothing new. That’s why we’re here.

The message was that Fidel was Vigorous, Lucid and engaged, no, not engaged to Hugo Chavez, engaged in world events and well enough to be outside in Cuba’s oppressive June tropical heat , wearing the now iconic Adidas warm-up suit.

That warm-up suit! It’s his new super-villain outfit. He’s almost always wearing that one. He’s also got a dark Wilson blue one too, but the Adidas suit is his new look. If you look at all the pictures and videos released of the tyrant, it’s hard to tell which was taken when because of the suit. I mean they could have all been taken the same day.

But we know that isn’t the case because previously…on The Vigorous and The Lucid Soap Opera…they always made sure to include, and very tackily obvious, by the way, a reference to date or current event as proof-proof of life, if you will- that the images weren’t pre recorded at an earlier time. We always got to see the tyrant in his retiree costume either with a newspaper or talking about a specific current event usually with Chavez wearing his junior dictator wannabe costume.

If it wasn’t for those painfully obvious proof of life moments, you would never know when those meetings took place since both super-villains always wear the same costumes.

Anyway, they have strayed from the script on this one and have decided to make this Fidel appearance a silent film. That’s probably because Fidel had such important and indispensible strategic advice for his protégé that it would have been and intelligence bonanza for the Empire if the words had been audible.

In that spirit, I asked a friend who claims she can reads lips to watch the video and try and make out what Fidel was saying. The look on her face was hilarious. She couldn’t make out what he was saying AT ALL. She said between her poor Spanish, the beard, all the gesticulating and the slow and labored way in which the tyrant now speaks it made it almost impossible to make out any words. (She probably just told me she was able to read lips to impress me, but really, all she had to do was pat her head and rub her tummy in a circle at the same time-I’m easily impressed.) She told me that she thinks she made out the words revolution and cow. ?!?!?

So there you have it. The crack team of experts at my disposal have authenticated the latest Fidel video as a silent movie shot at unknown time and location. Fidel in all his silent lucidity…

And since it’s Friday…….a little Silent Lucidity......

Mr. "Vigorous"

2008-06-17T21:47:00.003-04:00

Best looking ghost I've ever seen...

Cuban TV shows Fidel Castro chatting with Chavez

HAVANA (AP) —

The 81-year-old Castro looks thinner, and his hair and beard are much whiter in the video images, which did not include any audio. But he nevertheless looks vigorous and animated as he talks with his younger brother, President Raul Castro, and Chavez.

Motor Mouth Reves It Up...

2008-06-16T22:42:00.005-04:00

Hugo is saying that his mentor, Fidel, is “alive and well”

Then again, Hugo also said that Castro used to roam the Cuban countryside at night (maybe while dreaming?) and was at one point “almost” jogging, (away from the angel of death?), so you really have to take what the Venezuelan President says with, well, a bag of salt. He also claimed that he was not involved with the Columbian FARC terrorists, but there are some hard-drives that beg to differ with Chavez.

Chavez is an interesting guy who should really wave listened to some free regal advice he was once given and shut up.

When he announced he was going to visit Fidel for what could be the last time, given reports that the Cuban tyrant has undergone yet another intestinal surgery and is in “delicate” condition, he made sure to over explain his visit by making it very clear that it was just a “working” visit.

Now, when Chavez was asked about the visit with Castro, he automatically makes it sound like someone who just went to visit a very sick friend rather than for a "working" visit:

"Fidel is sitting there, alive and well, thinking, writing and dictating important strategies for Cuba and our Latin America,"

(Heaven help us)

What else did Raúl ask you to say, Hugo?

"Raul, he's holding the reins,"

And how about that Cuban revolution which has just made a giant u-turn on the freeway of Marxism and decided that egalitarianism-equal pay- is incovenient? You know the very same revolution that just last week was described by a party official to be in danger of self destruction if it didn’t adress its many problems.

"This (Cuban) revolution is marching on to a drumbeat ... it's more alive than ever,"

Very good, Hugo….but then instead of heading the free regal advice and shutting up, he keeps talking and offers up this gem:

"In the end, we're one and the same revolution,"(Cuba and Venezuela).

There you have it. An admission from the Venezuelan democrat himself that it’s his intention to turn Venezuela in a totalitarian police state just like Cuba since that is the only thing the Cuban “revolution” ever really accomplished.

Thanks for clearing that up, Hugo. I keep trying to convince folks that your 21st Century Socialism and 20th century Stalinism were clones, and now I have you doing it for me.

Rage

2008-06-11T22:17:00.005-04:00

I don’t mean to come here and rant, but you have to understand, there are things I read that just make me want to scream.

Like today. I get an e-mail alert, then two, then three, than four: Cuban official says equal pay may not work.

Basically, it’s an article about an article in Granma where some “communist” bastard admits that egalitarianism, when it comes to salaries, doesn’t work or as he says it’s “not convenient”

Not convenient.

This system that they so non-chalantly call an “inconvenience” is communism, since egalitarianism, where everyone doesn’t own anything and has the same material goods as everyone else, is the cornerstone of communism.

Needless to say, this wretched system goes against human nature so the authorities have to force everyone to participate and partake in being equally miserable and un-free.

Fidel Castro and his merry band of thugs decided that they were going to institute this system in Cuba about fifty years ago, at gunpoint, for everyone’s own good, especially theirs.

It has been a disaster, plunging my country into slavery, poverty and misery-all in the name of Marx’s blessed egalitarianism. And all the while utopian idiots world-wide pretending that the Cuban experiment resembled Lennon’s “Imagine” more than Lennin’s executions and state fabricated famine.

So it’s incredibly insulting that after fifty years of destroying a country city by city, street by street, home by home, person by person, by forcing and enforcing this unworkable and brutal system, they have decided it’s “not convenient”

How’s that for cynicism?

Oops we were wrong! Sorry for the inconvenience!

Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings

The world is a vampire, sent to drain

Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames

And what do I get for my pain?

Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game

Even though I know - I suppose I’ll show

All my cool and cold-like old job

Despite all my rage

I’m still just a rat in a cage

Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved

Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage

Now I’m naked, nothing but an animal

But can you fake it, for just one more show?

And what do you want, I want to change

And what have you got when you feel the same

Tell me I’m the only one

Tell me there’s no other one

Jesus was an only son

Tell me I’m the chosen one

Jesus was an only son for you

Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage

Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved

Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage

And I still believe that I cannot be saved

EU Sanctions?

2008-06-10T21:42:00.003-04:00

Next week, the European Union is going to be reviewing whether to remove the sanctions they imposed on the regime in 2003 when under the cover of the United State’s invasion of Iraq, Fidel put 75 freedom minded Cubans in jail in what is now called the “Black Spring”.

The current Spanish government has taken it upon itself to work on behalf of the Castro regime to get the European Union to drop the sanctions in favor of what Spain calls “critical dialogue” which means they pretend to criticize the regime, while the regime pretends to listen and pretends to make changes and they both line their pockets with Euros.

The EU, however, has to unanimously vote to drop the sanctions. Fortunately, the Czechs and the Poles, who know full well what its like to suffer through a totalitarian dictatorship, will probably not choose to look the other way and be complicit in the continued enslavement of the Cuban people.

Needles to say, the Cuban dissidents are not happy with the possibility of the EU dropping the sanctions:

"What the (Cuban) government wants is for the opposition to be ignored so it can continue its human rights violations without even a single rebuke from the European Union," Agenda for Transition leaders Martha Beatriz Roque and Vladimiro Roca wrote in a letter.

The new dissident group said that any process to normalize relations between the EU and Cuba "must take into account the Cuban people, to whom the dissidents belong.

"Otherwise, it would mean punishing all of civilian society and especially those of us who are fighting for democracy."

Mission Impossible...

2008-06-10T12:32:00.002-04:00

... This Revolution Will Self Destruct in...

Perfect Comeback

2008-06-09T22:12:00.004-04:00

Senator O "se llena la boca de decir" that a McCain presidency would be akin to a Bush 43 3rd term.

For the most Liberal of Senators in the Senate, it's no compliment to compare his opponent the beleaguered 43rd President.

It's also an attempt to tie Bush's ever falling popularity around McCain's neck.

Fair enough.

But, McCain tonight gave it right back to the rookie Senator from Illinois by saying:

Sen. Obama says that I'm running for a Bush's third terms. It seems to me he's running for Jimmy Carter's second.

Ouch!

Lusting in the heart, Malaise and killer swamp rabbits part deux!

Irked

2008-06-05T21:59:00.003-04:00

Che Guevara was born 80 years ago either this month or last month. His birthday is celebrated June 14th, but rumor has it he was born on May 14th and they made him a month younger on his birth certificate to make an honest woman out of his mother.

Since it’s the Argentine's 80th birthday this year, we are being treated to Che fest: Websites, movies and even an American Presidential candidate with Che-Essence.

Che, like Savior Faire, is everywhere, selling everything from vodka, to cars, to t-shirts - a free market system success story being exploited by the very system he destested.

This irony, though, profitable to Castro, Inc. is “irking” his progeny in Cuba. They are sick of their dad’s likeness being used “to make enemies from different classes.” His daughter, Aleida says “It's embarrassing," Maybe they are upset because they’re not receiving any royalties from their billboard of a dead dad.

I find it revolting that the image of a murdering despot like Che is mass-marketed to the unsuspecting masses, but I was there and I saw what he did.

Camilo Guevara, Che’s Cuban son who was named after Camilo Cienfuegos, has not seen Hollywood’s renditions of his father’s life. (Guevara other Cuba children are Aleida and Ceila who was named after Celia Sanchez-a Cuban revolutionary and Fidel Castro mistress)
.
"I think Hollywood making its version of his life is positive, as long as they are objective and faithful to real life," Camilo Guevara wrote.
.
Should Camilo Guevara ever find out he truth about their father’s life, they may a little more than irked and embarrassed, they might be repulsed. Especially when they find out that Uncle Fidel sent their dad to the Bolivian jungle without support and warning the communist supporters of the guerrillas not to give Guevara not even “one aspirin” in support.

How Does It Feel?

2008-06-04T22:29:00.006-04:00

Ahh today we find that some folks went down to Cuba and asked the Cubans how it felt to live behind the Palm Tree Curtain. They were surprised to learn, apparently, that Cubans are like the rest of humans on the planet. And most of them are worried about where their kid’s next meal is going to come from. Imagine that. In a country where food is rationed and they are paid $15-$20 people are worried about their economic woes!

"Less than 10 percent listed lack of political freedom as the main problem facing the country" Well Fidel's plan of starving Cuba's citizen and keeping them destitude and isolated has had a 90% success rate. That's good and to think I like to boast that Fidel's been at failure at most everything he's ever tried.

I wonder how many Cubans responded to the survey by saying that their biggest worry was the lack of toilet paper. That’s what I would have said when they asked me : "How does it feel?"

A rare study conducted surreptitiously in Cuba found that more than half of
those interviewed considered their economic woes to be their chief concern

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?

People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"

You thought they were all kiddin' you

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hangin' out

Now you don't talk so loud

Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel

To be without a home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

Since taking office, Raúl Castro has rolled out a variety of changes, lifting longstanding restrictions on the sale of cellphones and consumer items, access to tourist hotels and renting cars, among other things. The survey did not specifically ask Cubans about those changes.

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely

But you know you only used to get juiced in it

And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street

And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it

You said you'd never compromise

With the mystery tramp, but now you realize

He's not selling any alibis

As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes

And ask him do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

As for the government’s ability to turn things around, Cubans were skeptical, with 70 percent of those interviewed saying they did not believe that the authorities would resolve the country’s biggest problem in the next few years.

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns

When they all come down and did tricks for you

You never understood that it ain't no good

You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat

Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

Ain't it hard when you discover that

He really wasn't where it's at

After he took from you everything he could steal.

How does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

The study to be published Thursday found that young people were much more critical of Raúl Castro’s government than their parents and grandparents were. Nearly 70 percent of Cubans 18 to 29 said that if given a chance they would support a democratic system with multiparty elections, freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Among those 60 or older, support for such a change dropped to 44 percent.

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people

They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made

Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things

But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe

You used to be so amused

At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used

Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose

You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction

a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

How does it Feel?