My frustration over the visit of the 6 members of the Congressional Black Caucus has slowly been growing and this morning I'll admit that I lost it when I read that Useful Idiot Rush (D-IL) says that he is endeared to Raul for his sense of humor, oh, and his "basic human qualities." (How basic are we getting here? Like, he breaths, has 2 arms and 2 legs)
How nice! I'm so glad he was won over by the charming personality of a murderous dictator...I hear Hitler was pretty cool himself, wonder what the CBC members would have thought of him!
Now, it wasn't bad enough that they met with Raul, which could be justifiable--he is Cuba's President and if you want dialogue, well I guess you just have to talk with him, fine. However, they also met with Fidel, the convalescent ranting buffoon that finds it way too inconvenient to die and rid the world of his endless rantings now published in Granma almost daily.
Why they would find it necessary to meet with this decrepit old sociopath who begged Khrushchev to obliterate the U.S. during the missile crises, saying it was alright if Cuba was destroyed in the process, is beyond me. Unless of course they are truly Communists. No Congressman can claim ignorance of the hundreds of political prisoners currently in Cuba's jails, nor can they say they know nothing of the thousands of executions ordered under Fidel's watch.
These brothers are ruthless murderers and these US Congressmen bow before their feet.
What has probably been the most frustrating thing of all is that these Congressmen (and the US should be ashamed that its representatives would do such a thing) met with the families of the Cinco Heroes and have said they will consider lobbying Michelle Obama to see if they can get the Cuban spies released from prison.
Unlike the hundreds of prisoners of conscience currently rotting in Cuba's jails (not to mention the tens of thousands that have been imprisoned or executed), these spies had fair trials. They were even able to file appeals and the original verdicts were upheld. And yet these Congressmen are going to fight for them to be released?!
Mind you, they can't be bothered with asking the Cuban government to release its hundreds of prisoners of conscience, let alone ask to be taken to see those rotting behind bars after being summarily tried and imprisoned.
They didn't meet with any dissidents or other members of the opposition. They didn't meet with Las Damas de Blanco, they haven't met with the relatives of Cuba's political prisoners that are in the US, and they haven't met with former political prisoners that currently live in the US...I'm sure at least one lives in one of the districts of these seven Congressmen.
Maybe if they had done any of these things, their meetings with the murderous pair would have been somewhat tolerable, but without exhibiting any display against the human rights violations in Cuba, without any display advocating for democracy, the Congressmen are just Lenin's useful idiots, allowing themselves to serve as marionettes for the dictatorship.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
In Today's Granma
In today's Granma, there were some eloquent words...Can you guess who said them?
"Y, claro, se encuentra uno una república organizada como está, colonizada por completo, atrasada por completo, y enderezar esto lleva tiempo, arreglar esto correctamente lleva tiempo, porque todo está no solo atravesado sino enredado; porque es el enredo de años y de siglos y cuando usted arregla por aquí se le desarregla por allá, y tiene que ir arreglándolo todo sin desarreglar nada, y a veces la menor medida crea inconvenientes."
One could think it was Raul, trying to explain to people the predicament that he is in, asking them to be patient, basically blaming it all on the last 4+ decades of his brother's rule.
But, then one would have to guess again because it is really the big brother himself, in 1959.
Ironic.
"Y, claro, se encuentra uno una república organizada como está, colonizada por completo, atrasada por completo, y enderezar esto lleva tiempo, arreglar esto correctamente lleva tiempo, porque todo está no solo atravesado sino enredado; porque es el enredo de años y de siglos y cuando usted arregla por aquí se le desarregla por allá, y tiene que ir arreglándolo todo sin desarreglar nada, y a veces la menor medida crea inconvenientes."
One could think it was Raul, trying to explain to people the predicament that he is in, asking them to be patient, basically blaming it all on the last 4+ decades of his brother's rule.
But, then one would have to guess again because it is really the big brother himself, in 1959.
Ironic.
Changes in the Opposition Too
Martha Beatriz Roque has stepped down from her position in the organization Agenda for the Transition, citing health concerns. She will continue on as a member of the organization.
For more information, see excerpts of a CubaEncuentro article below:
Martha Beatriz Roque renuncia a su cargo en la Agenda para la Transición
'Es la salud, que no me acompaña, la que me obliga a dar este paso', dijo la líder opositora.
Redacción CE 06/04/2009
La opositora Martha Beatriz Roque renunció a su cargo en el secretariado pro tempore de la organización Agenda para la Transición, de la que forman parte varios líderes de la disidencia interna.
"Es la salud, que no me acompaña, la que me obliga a dar este paso", dijo Roque en una nota de prensa fechada el domingo y difundida este lunes.
"Agradezco a algunos hermanos que desde meses atrás, preocupados por mis dolencias, que cada día se hacen más visibles, han solicitado de un país de la Unión Europea que tramite con el gobierno la posibilidad de salir a recibir asistencia médica, aunque sin respuesta", añadió.
© cubaencuentro.com
For more information, see excerpts of a CubaEncuentro article below:
Martha Beatriz Roque renuncia a su cargo en la Agenda para la Transición
'Es la salud, que no me acompaña, la que me obliga a dar este paso', dijo la líder opositora.
Redacción CE 06/04/2009
La opositora Martha Beatriz Roque renunció a su cargo en el secretariado pro tempore de la organización Agenda para la Transición, de la que forman parte varios líderes de la disidencia interna.
"Es la salud, que no me acompaña, la que me obliga a dar este paso", dijo Roque en una nota de prensa fechada el domingo y difundida este lunes.
"Agradezco a algunos hermanos que desde meses atrás, preocupados por mis dolencias, que cada día se hacen más visibles, han solicitado de un país de la Unión Europea que tramite con el gobierno la posibilidad de salir a recibir asistencia médica, aunque sin respuesta", añadió.
© cubaencuentro.com
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Fidel does it too!
Fidel Castro meets with 3 visiting US lawmakers
By WILL WEISSERT – 32 minutes ago
HAVANA (AP) — Fidel Castro met Tuesday with three members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the former Cuban president's first known meeting with American officials since he fell ill in July 2006.
A spokesman at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana confirmed that Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, and two other lawmakers met with the ailing, 82-year-old Castro. He did not have further details nor could he provide the names of the other American leaders who attended the meeting.
Lee led a delegation of six Democratic representatives who left Havana Tuesday after a five-day trip designed to encourage dialogue between the United States and Cuba, amid much speculation long-chilly relations may improve.
By WILL WEISSERT – 32 minutes ago
HAVANA (AP) — Fidel Castro met Tuesday with three members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the former Cuban president's first known meeting with American officials since he fell ill in July 2006.
A spokesman at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana confirmed that Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, and two other lawmakers met with the ailing, 82-year-old Castro. He did not have further details nor could he provide the names of the other American leaders who attended the meeting.
Lee led a delegation of six Democratic representatives who left Havana Tuesday after a five-day trip designed to encourage dialogue between the United States and Cuba, amid much speculation long-chilly relations may improve.
Raul Meets with Members of Congressional Black Caucus
I wonder if they will be meeting with Biscet?...
Here's a disturbing article from Granma:
Sostiene Raúl encuentro con miembros del Caucus Negro del Congreso de los Estados Unidos
El General de Ejército Raúl Castro Ruz, Presidente de los Consejos de Estado y de Ministros, sostuvo la tarde de este lunes un encuentro con miembros del Caucus Negro del Congreso de los Estados Unidos, quienes realizan una visita a Cuba desde el pasado viernes.
Asistieron los representantes federales demócratas Bárbara Lee, del estado de California y presidenta del Caucus Negro, Melvin Luther Watt (California), Bobby Rush (Illinois), Marcia L. Fudge (Ohio), Emanuel Cleaver II (Missouri) y Laura Richardson (California); participaron también Patrice Willoughby, asistente ejecutiva del Caucus Negro, y Eulada Watt, esposa del congresista Melvin Luther Watt.
En el amplio intercambio de criterios se abordaron diversos temas, con énfasis en la posible futura evolución de las relaciones bilaterales y los vínculos económicos, luego de la llegada al poder de una nueva Administración norteamericana.
Al respecto, Raúl ratificó la posición cubana, expuesta de forma diáfana en varias intervenciones públicas y coincidente con los principios mantenidos de manera invariable por nuestro país durante 50 años: la disposición a dialogar sobre cualquier asunto, teniendo como únicas premisas la igualdad soberana de los Estados y el absoluto respeto a la independencia nacional y al derecho inalienable de cada pueblo a la autodeterminación.
Estuvieron presentes los miembros del Buró Político Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, Presidente de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, y Pedro Sáez Montejo, Primer Secretario del Comité Provincial del Partido en Ciudad de La Habana; el Canciller Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Dagoberto Rodríguez Barrera, viceministro de Relaciones Exteriores, y Jorge Bolaños Suárez, jefe de la Sección de Intereses de Cuba en los Estados Unidos.
Some People just Have no Sense of Humor
This is the first I hear or this, but it's pretty funny...to some.
Officials doomed by jokes about Castros
The New York Times on Sunday cast new light on the dismissal March 2 of Cuban officials Carlos Lage, Felipe Pérez Roque and Fernando Remírez de Estenoz. "The men were involved socially with a man named Conrado Hernández (in undated photo), who was surreptitiously recording their conversations during regular parties at his ranch in Matanzas," The Times reported, citing two unidentified Cuban functionaries. "Some of those recorded conversations [...] included acerbic criticism and off-color jokes about various government leaders, including Fidel and Raúl Castro," The Times said.
Hernández, a Cuban with good business connections who represented the Basque-owned Society for Industrial Promotion and Reconversion (SPRI), was arrested on Feb. 14 as he prepared to leave Havana for Spain with his wife. His wife was released but he reportedly remains in detention.
On March 6, Raúl Castro summoned his top 20 officials to explain the dismissals, The Times said. "In broad details, he described the evidence against the men and played certain sections of the recordings for those gathered."
The Bilbao newspaper El Correo reported Sunday that a four-man delegation from the Basque government has arrived in Havana to inquire about Hernández's legal status and to find a replacement for him as a business liaison.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Officials doomed by jokes about Castros
The New York Times on Sunday cast new light on the dismissal March 2 of Cuban officials Carlos Lage, Felipe Pérez Roque and Fernando Remírez de Estenoz. "The men were involved socially with a man named Conrado Hernández (in undated photo), who was surreptitiously recording their conversations during regular parties at his ranch in Matanzas," The Times reported, citing two unidentified Cuban functionaries. "Some of those recorded conversations [...] included acerbic criticism and off-color jokes about various government leaders, including Fidel and Raúl Castro," The Times said.
Hernández, a Cuban with good business connections who represented the Basque-owned Society for Industrial Promotion and Reconversion (SPRI), was arrested on Feb. 14 as he prepared to leave Havana for Spain with his wife. His wife was released but he reportedly remains in detention.
On March 6, Raúl Castro summoned his top 20 officials to explain the dismissals, The Times said. "In broad details, he described the evidence against the men and played certain sections of the recordings for those gathered."
The Bilbao newspaper El Correo reported Sunday that a four-man delegation from the Basque government has arrived in Havana to inquire about Hernández's legal status and to find a replacement for him as a business liaison.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
More from Monday
Once the majority of Cubans are labeled "anti-Cuba," does that make the ones doing the labeling anti-Cuban?
Participants in art show branded as `dissidents'
BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO
In a swift reaction Tuesday to a daring call for freedom by participants in a public performance art show in Havana, the Cuban government branded the speakers ''dissidents'' and ``individuals at the service of the propagandistic anti-Cuban machinery.''
The reaction came via a statement from the 10th Havana Biennial's Organizing Committee, which charged that those who took the opportunity of a minute at a podium to protest the lack of freedoms on the island had ''taken advantage'' of artist Tania Bruguera's Monday performance.
But Bruguera, who staged the most daring performance art show the city has seen in decades, sees herself only as conceptual performance artist.
''I'm fine. I don't want to create unnecessary mythology,'' she said Tuesday from her home in Havana, a day after the stunning images of Cubans clamoring for freedom were posted on YouTube, generating thousands of hits and Internet commentary.
''What I was doing,'' she said, ``was giving my space to others.''
The biennial is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture. Bruguera said her performance was on the approved schedule.
Bruguera set up a podium in front of an ochre curtain with a microphone at the Wifredo Lam Center, an official art-exhibition space. Two actors clad in the military fatigues of the Ministry of the Interior, the agency charged with spying on Cubans' activities, flanked the podium and tended to a white dove.
When Bruguera invited people from the standing-room-only audience to come to the microphone and, for a minute, say whatever they wanted, Cubans and foreign visitors protested the lack of freedom of expression on the island.
As some spoke, the white dove was placed on their shoulders by the actors -- a mocking reference to a historic Jan. 8, 1959, victory speech by Fidel Castro during which a similar bird landed on his shoulder, a sign many people viewed as divine recognition.
The dove wasn't the only mockery of Castro.
A man in a black hood strode to the microphone, lifted the hood just a little to reveal a scraggly white beard and, mimicking the voice of Castro, said, ``I think this should be prohibited.''
He was booed, but to every call for more freedoms, the audience responded with applause and shouts of ''Bravo!'' The commotion could be heard from the street, as speakers were set up outside the Lam Center to broadcast the art performance, and passersby flocked inside to see the performance and cheer.
Bruguera, whose late father was a high-ranking Cuban official, said she had no idea how the audience -- a mix of Cubans, foreign visitors and artists, curators and collectors from the international artistic community -- was going to react to her offer of a microphone.
''People went up, but they could have done nothing, and the performance would have been the vacuum,'' Bruguera said. ``I never thought that so many people were going to go up like that, that people were going to speak out like they did. I don't know the people who spoke.''
She added: ``In reality, it was out of my hands, which I think is fine.''
Bruguera said the performance ended when Bruguera thanked the participants -- not when a technician dismantled the audio system, as a news outlet reported.
''It was dismantled because it was over. There was another performance scheduled after mine,'' she said.
The Havana performance was one in a series of works Bruguera has titled El susurro de Tatlin (Tatlin's Whisper) after Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, famous for his attempts to build a monstrously tall building.
In January, as part of that series, Bruguera staged another titillating performance at the Tate Modern in London.
Mounted police rode into the museum and confronted perplexedmuseum-goers, riding around them, back and forth, and using the horses to corral and control movement. Bruguera stood, observing, in the crowd.
''People were reaching all sorts of conclusions, that there was a bomb scare,'' said Bruguera, who holds a tenure-track position at the University of Chicago and a U.S. work visa she obtained before cultural exchanges were curtailed during the George W. Bush years.
Bruguera also staged a disconcerting performance last December during Art Basel Miami Beach at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO).
Basel VIPs were brought at random into a room filled with historic images of dead people and then interrogated by a museum guard about ``why so many people want to assassinate President Barrack Obama.''
She staged that work because she found it unusual that people were having such a conversation.
''I'm an uncomfortable artist wherever I go,'' Bruguera said. ``I'm an artist who tries to do the impossible. That's my work, and that's how I conduct my personal life.''
Participants in art show branded as `dissidents'
BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO
In a swift reaction Tuesday to a daring call for freedom by participants in a public performance art show in Havana, the Cuban government branded the speakers ''dissidents'' and ``individuals at the service of the propagandistic anti-Cuban machinery.''
The reaction came via a statement from the 10th Havana Biennial's Organizing Committee, which charged that those who took the opportunity of a minute at a podium to protest the lack of freedoms on the island had ''taken advantage'' of artist Tania Bruguera's Monday performance.
But Bruguera, who staged the most daring performance art show the city has seen in decades, sees herself only as conceptual performance artist.
''I'm fine. I don't want to create unnecessary mythology,'' she said Tuesday from her home in Havana, a day after the stunning images of Cubans clamoring for freedom were posted on YouTube, generating thousands of hits and Internet commentary.
''What I was doing,'' she said, ``was giving my space to others.''
The biennial is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture. Bruguera said her performance was on the approved schedule.
Bruguera set up a podium in front of an ochre curtain with a microphone at the Wifredo Lam Center, an official art-exhibition space. Two actors clad in the military fatigues of the Ministry of the Interior, the agency charged with spying on Cubans' activities, flanked the podium and tended to a white dove.
When Bruguera invited people from the standing-room-only audience to come to the microphone and, for a minute, say whatever they wanted, Cubans and foreign visitors protested the lack of freedom of expression on the island.
As some spoke, the white dove was placed on their shoulders by the actors -- a mocking reference to a historic Jan. 8, 1959, victory speech by Fidel Castro during which a similar bird landed on his shoulder, a sign many people viewed as divine recognition.
The dove wasn't the only mockery of Castro.
A man in a black hood strode to the microphone, lifted the hood just a little to reveal a scraggly white beard and, mimicking the voice of Castro, said, ``I think this should be prohibited.''
He was booed, but to every call for more freedoms, the audience responded with applause and shouts of ''Bravo!'' The commotion could be heard from the street, as speakers were set up outside the Lam Center to broadcast the art performance, and passersby flocked inside to see the performance and cheer.
Bruguera, whose late father was a high-ranking Cuban official, said she had no idea how the audience -- a mix of Cubans, foreign visitors and artists, curators and collectors from the international artistic community -- was going to react to her offer of a microphone.
''People went up, but they could have done nothing, and the performance would have been the vacuum,'' Bruguera said. ``I never thought that so many people were going to go up like that, that people were going to speak out like they did. I don't know the people who spoke.''
She added: ``In reality, it was out of my hands, which I think is fine.''
Bruguera said the performance ended when Bruguera thanked the participants -- not when a technician dismantled the audio system, as a news outlet reported.
''It was dismantled because it was over. There was another performance scheduled after mine,'' she said.
The Havana performance was one in a series of works Bruguera has titled El susurro de Tatlin (Tatlin's Whisper) after Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, famous for his attempts to build a monstrously tall building.
In January, as part of that series, Bruguera staged another titillating performance at the Tate Modern in London.
Mounted police rode into the museum and confronted perplexedmuseum-goers, riding around them, back and forth, and using the horses to corral and control movement. Bruguera stood, observing, in the crowd.
''People were reaching all sorts of conclusions, that there was a bomb scare,'' said Bruguera, who holds a tenure-track position at the University of Chicago and a U.S. work visa she obtained before cultural exchanges were curtailed during the George W. Bush years.
Bruguera also staged a disconcerting performance last December during Art Basel Miami Beach at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO).
Basel VIPs were brought at random into a room filled with historic images of dead people and then interrogated by a museum guard about ``why so many people want to assassinate President Barrack Obama.''
She staged that work because she found it unusual that people were having such a conversation.
''I'm an uncomfortable artist wherever I go,'' Bruguera said. ``I'm an artist who tries to do the impossible. That's my work, and that's how I conduct my personal life.''
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