Blogging the democratic revolution
From Venezuela’s government propaganda, a news organ called Venezuelan Global News reports meat shortages in Caracas, calling attention to a problem that obviously is being discussed in the streets by Venezuela’s poor, a topic Venezuela’s private-sector media, or at least the mainstream English-language media, may have missed. This is the first I have heard of this shortage. The meat reportedly in short supply is pork legs, used in the making of Venezuelan Christmas hallacas (we’d recognize that as a tamale over here), a traditional Christmas food. Although I had not seen any reports of pork shortages in the press, the…
Cuban exiles at Killcastro.com (the name comes from Havana street graffiti) went over, point by point, U.S. proposed reforms for a post-Castro Cuba. They focused exclusively on how effective each individual measure would likely be to dislodge “The Beast” from power and enable the blossoming of freedom in Cuba, the coming Havana Spring all hope to follow in the wake of Castro’s unmournable death. The fascinating item from these real Cubans is here.
With the recent magazine photos of the sexy young bin Laden niece – tell me THAT girl isn’t, in her own way, a revolutionary – I thought it would be worth it to note that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has wealthy young offspring who like to party it up in Havana, too. But unlike the bin Laden girl, who’s doing her cheesecake pictures to stick it into bin Laden’s face, these young Castros have no idea that their sybaritic lifestyle is actually on film. The Real Cuba has found some authentic news photos showing the sons and daughters of the…
Christmas is barely legal in Fidel Castro’s monstrous dictatorship in Cuba, and this year more than most. There is a sullen, sad atmosphere in Havana these days, partly from want, and partly from the sour, tired nature of the regime on its last legs. That’s why Val Prieto at Babalu blog came up with the idea of asking Cuban Americans from all over to describe their best Cuban Christmas memories, from childhoods either in Miami or in Havana. The rich tapestry of customs and relationships is completely unique and, given Castro’s tyranny, distinctly revolutionary. The whole fascinating thing can be…
During the old days of the Soviet regime, one of the most salient features seen of the public under communism was the telltale sadness in the faces of the people. I remember asking a Soviet diplomat about this during the days of the Cold War and recall his defensive lying – ‘The people are contented,’ he insisted. Then I saw the sadness in his face too as he spoke to me. Someone else I recall said that people in Soviet communist regime always look like they are about to cry. It is the same story in Cuba. The Real Cuba…
There is something very eerie about black markets flourishing imperviously in a place like Fidel Castro’s Cuba. It’s one of the world’s most repressed places, with only North Korea more hostile to the perfectly human activity of trade, there demonized as ‘capitalism.’ But such trade markets do flourish in Cuba, on, of all things, the elusive Internet. Yet other than in North Korea again, there is no country where Internet access is more tightly controlled than Castro’s island carcel. Somehow, they flourish anyway, giving us a window into the holes in the Castro police state, holes that allow the human…
Venezuela’s Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has a stunning piece translated from the Mexican press about the extent of Hugo Chavez’s and Fidel Castro’s political meddling in Mexico and its elections. That’s MEXICO – right on our border, walking distance from San Diego and El Paso and Laredo and Matamoros and Yuma – that Mexico! The extent of the cash shoveling and gunrunning is far deeper than anyone knew, and extends even to violent groups who have commenced blowing up banks in Mexico these days, over free trade. Which just happens to be what Chavez has declared war on. With Chavez’s…
When your country becomes a totalitarian regime, you often preserve your identity through exile. This is largely because all institutions have been shattered in your country and there is virtually no possibility of democratic resistance to tyranny. Every institution is politicized in a communist regime. It’s shocking to think about this matter of exile in a historic context – all through this ages, exile on a vast scale is relatively rare – but under communism it’s a perfectly accepted reality. Of 13 million Cubans worldwide, 2 million are in exile. And this, under conditions of extreme totalitarian control. If emigration…
Val Prieto at Babalu blog has an excellent news roundup – called ‘a link ajiaco‘ in ‘Cuban,’ with all the significant news and events happening in and around Cuba in the blogosphere. He’s done it up bien. Read it here.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa has a great discussion about Argentine-Cuban poseur revolutionary Che Guevara on NPR. Hispanicon has the link to the audiotape, and it can all be found here.
…in Hungary, where the memories of bleak, gray communism and the tanks and massacres of 1956 are not entirely forgotten. I wrote up the whole unexpected turn of events, with the rightful blog links on Babalu here.
I knew of the hunger strike of two Cuban ’75’ dissidents in Fidel Castro’s prisons but had very little information about Castro’s actual GULag at Guantanamo, and the conditions of which that led to the drastic hunger strike. Today, Wall Street Journal‘s Mary Anastasia O’Grady has done a great public service by publicizing this terrifying communist dungeon that stands alongside what she calls, in comparison, the ‘tropical resort’ of the U.S. Guantanamo terrorist prison that has been subject to such international reproach. On the human rights violations that are occurring at Castro’s Guantanamo, the media and international left are utterly…
Tuesday’s essay on property rights by the great Carlos Alberto Montaner, has awesome intellectual firepower. He is the best writer I know of anywhere in the world, and this is his most luminous essay. Montaner writes about how the destruction of property rights, as is happening in Venezuela, makes democratic revolution nearly impossible. He carefully cites examples from Eastern Europe and Cuba, showing how stripping people of these property rights leaves not only no freedom, but no possibility of freedom. His original ideas are so powerful you will never quite look at the world in the same way again. It’s…
This past Sunday, 60 Minutes ran an “interview” with Elian Gonzalez, who is now 11 years old. Elian, you recall, was the 6-year old boy who was picked up at sea by two fisherman and taken ashore, where an international custody battle between Fidel Castro and the Miami exile community ensued, leaving bitter and unforgotten feelings among the freedom-loving Cubans now in the U.S. The 60-Minutes interview had a staged appearance, with CBS itself admitting it got “help” from Fidel Castro’s own camera-man, making the film communist-approved propaganda to shed the most favorable possible light on the Castro regime. The…
Source: Babalu The photographs will break your heart. Ten people from Cuba, where Hurricane Dennis hit this year, riding the worst piece of rusted junk you can see, inventively powered by a tractor motor and some strange orange sail, rode through HURRICANE RITA and its storm-tossed seas for a week in the Florida Strait determined by hope to reach life and freedom on U.S. shores. Just as they were within sight of U.S. land, a Coast Guard cutter tried to ram their boat and sink them. The poor Cuban refugees were desperately resisting the Coast Guard (see the photos here),…
Not through guerrillas this time but through pork-barrel-spending. Along with Hugo Chavez’s oil billions, Evo Morales has taken the lead in the Bolivian polls. Castro knows exactly why he’s doing this. Do we? Read the whole thing here or here. It’s on Real Clear Politics here.
Brazil’s failure as a regional leader in the face of growing communist aggression from the likes of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is a major concern, I argue, in this American Thinker essay here. UPDATE: It’s on Real Clear Politics this morning here. VCrisis has an in-depth analysis from a famous Brazilian writer about the internal problems that are debilitating the Brazilian government, hampering its capacity for leadership. It’s well worth reading here.
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has loudly volunteered the services of 1,600 doctors to New Orleans, making a bet that if the U.S. doen’t take them, it’s his propaganda victory as the U.S. looks heartless on the world stage. But today’s Investor’s Business Daily makes an argument against it. Castro’s record on medical aid is a bad one. Wherever Castro’s Cuban doctors go, political havoc follows. This isn’t revolution, this is the weakening of political institutions and the damaging of free markets. There are a whole string of incidents from these Cuban “doctors.” It’s happening right now in Honduras and a…
Three attacks on the Church from the hemisphere’s Marxist Axis in two days makes me think there may be a coordinated effort by Chavez-Castro & Friends to confront the Church. Given the weak state of the Church in most of the world, it’s hard to grasp why dictators should see it as such a threat but perhaps this is an region where the Church remains a robust force. It certainly was in Poland back in the 1980s. There may be a brewing showdown between the Church and communism, something not seen since Pope John Paul II verbally mauled Daniel Ortega…
The Cuban dictator was lying in wait for about three months, silently, stealthily, like a shark in stilling water … and then the brutal tyrant moved. Friday the Monster At Our Gate confiscated the land and house of the homeowner who lent it to Cuba’s fearless civil society democrats who riveted the world with their unprecdented meeting last May. What this underlines is that there are no, absolutely no, property rights in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The civil society democrats launched an unprecedented meeting at the end of last May. They pleaded for civil society, a large component of which includes…
Ecuador is a basket case about to blow. It’s likely to get yet another a new president before U.S. Labor Day. And with its sudden oil production shutdown and troop dispatch, it’s also the leading news story moving world financial markets, hitting stocks and oil prices Friday. Just see the Top Ten leader here. No country is more important. And what is the turmoil about this time? A splitting apart government, with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro in the middle of it. Alek Boyd has an excellent – and rare – political x-ray of the shenanigans going on there. It’s…
Something from Val over at Babalu blog. I think she’s trying to tell us something. See it here.
Amid growing signs of discontent in Cuba now, George Moneo at Babalu blog proposes a new meme for Cubans on the island, to remind them and reinforce them that the vile Castro regime is over and it’s time for the birth of freedom. His words, which he urges Cubans to utter, write, engrave, graffiti and use are: ‘Ya No Mas,’ meaning “No More Already.” Simple, efficient and likely to catch on, watch for these revolutionary words as the decaying pillars of the Castro regime come tumbling down.
It’s as if the mighty impact of CAFTA that we all worked so hard to achieve has really started to yield something. Veneconomy, in a brilliant essay here, noted the signs of stinging defeat it rained on Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Suddenly all his oil billions are meaningless compared to the vast opportunity of the great Gringo market up north. What’s Chavez’s oil billions compared to the U.S.’s trillion-dollar buying market? Who wants charity when they can have something way bigger and own it free and clear, no strings attached, through honest two-way trade? National sovereignty? Get it, for real,…
Fidel Castro’s goons were in for the surprise of their lives when a whole neighborhood in Havana rose up and beat them back with sticks when they tried to confiscate a barrio TV set. A line was crossed. Nobody gets between Cubans and their TV sets. Nobody.