Showing posts with label Cuba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cuba. Show all posts

Thursday, July 22, 2021

THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME… [UPDATED]

THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME… [UPDATED]

…is the love that American liberals have for Cuba’s Communist dictatorship. By any sane reckoning, Fidel Castro was an utter disgrace. And yet American liberals, as well as some Europeans, have never been able to let go.

When asked in a press conference whether Cubans are protesting and trying to leave the island because they “don’t like Communism,” Jen Psaki could only dither:

I think we’ve been pretty clear that we think people are leaving Cuba… and protesting in the streets as well, because they are opposed to the oppression, to the mismanagement of the government in the county.

Mismanagement! It’s just another case of failing to implement socialism properly. One of these days we’ll get it right; that is the liberal view.

One of the Left’s most ridiculous conceits, for many years now, is that Cuba’s poverty and backwardness are somehow the fault of the United States because we don’t trade with them. Of course, if socialism were a superior system, its survival wouldn’t depend on trade relations with a capitalist power. And in any event, Cuba was kept more or less afloat for decades by the Soviet Union, which pumped enormous amounts of money into Castro’s regime. In a competitive environment, Communist Cuba was always a basket case.

That canard was revived today by Black Lives Matter, showing once again that BLM has nothing to do with justice–or with blacks, for that matter:

BLM goes crazy if a policeman shoots a black criminal in self-defense, but when millions of blacks are oppressed and impoverished, and many are imprisoned, tortured and murdered by a Communist dictatorship, BLM is worse than silent–it openly sides with the oppressors. What a disgusting organization.

Many may not remember that BLM’s support for the Castro regime is of long standing. Back in 2016, when the Tyrant died, we noted BLM’s praise for the dictator. Why? Because he harbored criminals who murdered police officers:

[W]e are particularly grateful to Fidel for holding Mama Assata Shakur, who continues to inspire us. We are thankful that he provided a home for Brother Michael Finney Ralph Goodwin, and Charles Hill, asylum to Brother Huey P. Newton, and sanctuary for so many other Black revolutionaries who were being persecuted by the American government during the Black Power era.

To repeat: what a disgusting organization.

Anti-Communism protesters in Cuba are waving American flags, perhaps unaware that Joe Biden is now our president. But other political leaders do support them, with Marco Rubio in the forefront. He is on to BLM:


It is good to see a political leader calling out Black Lives Matter for what it really is. But back to Cuba: Rubio points out that the idea that the U.S. has somehow caused the failure of Communism in Cuba–do our responsibilities never end?–is a leftist myth:


It has been a long time coming, but it feels as though Cuba may finally be freed from the boot-heel of socialism. You know the end may be near when Joe Biden throws in the towel, as he did hours ago:


Providing Cubans with internet access so they can communicate and organize apparently is feasible, and is something that Marco Rubio has been pressing for. And for the moment, at least, not even the Biden administration is willing to stick up for socialism, no doubt to the dismay of many, or most, Democratic Representatives and Senators. We should all be cheered by that.

UPDATE: One more thing–we will give Michael Ramirez the last word. Click to enlarge:

FURTHER UPDATE: This is how the Black Lives Matter organization commemorated the death of Fidel Castro:


It is hard to understand why anyone takes these people seriously.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/07/the-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name.php

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Friday, July 16, 2021

Democrats Are Looking More Commie Every Day

Democrats Are Looking More Commie Every Day

BY STEPHEN KRUISER 
AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Top O’ the Briefing

Democrats Keep Getting Their Commie On

Happy Thursday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. More lemon, please.

Weird week so far here in Turkbidenstan, no?

For a good portion of my life, I was usually the craziest one in any given situation. I never hung out in any asylums or anything, but when around everyday folk it was easy to red-flag me as the one who was a little more touched than the rest of the crowd. Even when perusing the news of the day, I would feel that I was out of sync with the rest of the world, but that was on me.

Now, it’s on the world.

OK, maybe everyone hasn’t lost it, but a lot of people have. I can’t put it all on the people on the other side of the political aisle because we have a few crazies roaming around in our backyard too. But, yeesh, the Democrats have really gone Looney Tunes.

At the beginning of the week, we discussed the protests in Cuba and how they seemed to have exposed some of the more commie sympathies in the media. It’s easy to expect the worst from the media hacks. I do it every day and they never disappoint. I would like to think, however, that we’re not living in some McCarthy-esque nightmare where we have to constantly worry about the upper levels of government in this country being riddled with communists.

Oops.

The people who are unfortunately in charge of this once-great country have had ample opportunity to condemn the commie regime in Cuba and voice full support for the American flag-waving freedom seekers.

The administration isn’t exactly opening its arms to any potential freedom seekers from Cuba.

Stacey wrote about it yesterday:

Menendez may be disappointed by the Biden administration’s tone now. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who fled Cuba with his family in 1960, made a statement Tuesday evening and said that Cuban asylum seekers would be resettled in a third country even if they establish a fear of being persecuted. The same will happen to Haitian asylum seekers as the country sinks into chaos following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise. “The time is never right to attempt migration by sea,” Mayorkas said. “To those who risk their lives doing so, this risk is not worth taking. Allow me to be clear. If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.”

Cuban citizens waving American flags as a symbol of freedom while they oppose an oppressive regime will hear those words from a Biden administration official, while economic migrants, mainly from Central America, are pouring over our border in record numbers. The Biden administration has dismantled every policy that would require those migrants to seek refuge in a third country or remain in Mexico for the duration of their asylum claims. The Biden administration will send those seeking political asylum from Cuba to another country.

As far as we know, Sinaloa cartel members are allowed to stay here and hang out in California and my home state of Arizona. Not so much for any pesky freedom seekers who might want to flee communism.

There are two people in this administration who should never be allowed to speak in front of a camera: Joe Biden and the woman who is tasked with explaining him to the public, White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Brain Cell Jen was given an opportunity on Wednesday to condemn communism and, darn it, she just couldn’t find the right words.

Tyler has the story:

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki refused to condemn communism by name on Wednesday. A reporter asked her whether President Joe Biden considers opposition to communism to be the driving factor behind the protests and Cubans’ flight to the United States. Rather than acknowledging the evil oppression of Cuba’s communism, Psaki condemned the government’s “mismanagement.”

“Don’t we know that the reason people want to leave Cuba is because they don’t like communism?” a reporter asked. After some back-and-forth about mechanisms to enter the country, he repeated the question: “Do you think that people are leaving Cuba because they don’t like communism?”

“I think we’ve been pretty clear that we think people are leaving Cuba — leaving Cuba or protesting in the streets, as well — because they are opposed to the oppression, to the mismanagement of the government in the country. And we certainly support their right to protest,” Psaki replied.

Mismanagement, dontcha know.

Joe Stalin didn’t really deliberately starve millions of his own people, he merely misallocated food.

We could play the euphemism game with every dictatorial commie/fascist regime of the last hundred years and we would all know that we were being sarcastic.

The Democrats would think we were onto something.

Like all things having to do with this Biden charade, this is really embarrassing for the country. We went through this with The Lightbringer and the jihadis — he could never just say that the bad guys are bad. We’re seeing that now with Biden and Cuba. After a while, it’s easy to believe they won’t say that the bad guys are bad because they don’t really believe they are. Democrats have no problem faulting the United States for a host of ills. It would be nice if they could find something negative to say about the scum in charge of Cuba.

Instead, as we saw earlier in the week, the babbling moron occupying the Oval Office said that all the oppressed people in Cuba really want are COVID vaccines. The news from this administration reads like dystopian fiction that was written by someone on acid who lapped up everything his commie professors in college fed him.

Democrats can’t disparage communism because they’ve been inexorably moving to a full-on embrace of it for a long time now. They celebrate latter-day Soviets like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her far-left Squad. They won’t say anything bad because they don’t have anything bad to say.

Now if you ask them to condemn a Republican…

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/07/15/the-morning-briefing-democrats-are-looking-more-commie-every-day-n1461832?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=333548a2571394d78f5984884e55069e&recip=28668535

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Wednesday, July 14, 2021

KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON CUBA

KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON CUBA

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN CUBA

John noted last night the large anti-regime protests in Cuba, and one hopes that this is the beginning of the end for the Castro tyranny, in just the way that mass protests in Eastern Europe in 1989 presaged the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that year, and the collapse of Communist rule shortly thereafter.

There are reasons to worry about this scene, however. Protestors took to the streets “in cities all around the country” according to media reports. Did these protests happen spontaneously? There are credible reports of building unrest among Cubans for several months now, but protests usually require some planning, coordination, and communication. Cuba keeps a tight lid on communications (and especially the internet). It is reported today that Cuba has shut down the internet to hinder further protest planning.

Cuban intelligence is really good: can it be they had no inkling that a protest might be reaching critical mass? Or could this have been a false-flag operation of Cuban intelligence to smoke out leading dissidents so as to identify and arrest them? There are lots of examples of the Communist regimes of old in Eastern Europe actually setting up or running “opposition” groups for the very purpose of identifying and arresting potential troublemakers. And protests of any kind in Cuba are very rare. Keep your eye out to see if we get credible reports of mass arrests, though the the Cuban government will likely do this quietly and out of sight of foreign observers to the largest extent possible.

Maybe the Cuban regime has grown less competent—wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened in a Communist country—or has lost its nerve to some extent. Incompetence is actually the proximate cause of the Berlin Wall coming down in an instant in 1989. But it is good to bear in mind a central fact from that now long-ago happy ending: As Angelo Codevilla once put it in his inimitable direct style: Communist rule collapsed when the rulers lost the will to shoot their own people in large enough numbers. Do we think Cuba’s rulers have reached that point? I doubt it.* Hope to be wrong about all of this.

* I know of a credible account from more than 25 years ago where someone asked Fidel and Raul Castro over a fancy dinner what would happen if they liberalized Cuba at all. One of the Castros reportedly answered: “We’d all be hanging from lampposts in a week.”

Postscript: The Bee stings again.

OMG, they’re not going to let up!

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Sunday, March 8, 2020

BERNIE: WHAT’S WRONG WITH CUBA?

BERNIE: WHAT’S WRONG WITH CUBA?
BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN BERNIE SANDERS

This is the kind of thing that explains the stop-Bernie movement in the Democratic Party. Sanders is a Communist, or, best case, a Communist sympathizer. I am so old, I can remember when The Manchurian Candidate was fiction.
The latest comes from NPR. I take it that this is one more instance of the mainstream Democratic Party lining up in lockstep against Sanders. NPR interviewed Alan Gross, who was for five years a political prisoner in Cuba. In 2014–2014! Gross was visited in prison by three senators, Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp and Bernie Sanders. This is what happened:
During the one-hour meeting, Sanders told the prisoner that he didn’t understand why others criticized Cuba, Gross said in an interview with NPR.
“He said, quote: ‘I don’t know what’s so wrong with this country,'” Gross recalled.
Gross was wrongfully imprisoned by Castro:
Gross, who now says he opposes Sanders’ campaign for president, was arrested in December 2009 after completing a U.S. Agency for International Development subcontract. He was in Cuba working to expand Internet access to the country’s small Jewish community, beyond the restrictive Internet regulations set by the Castro government.
He spent 1,841 days in detention, during which he lost five teeth and over 100 pounds. He also said his interrogators threatened to pull out his fingernails and to hang him.
“The first year of my captivity was akin to sensory deprivation because I saw about 20 minutes of sunlight during the first year,” Gross said.
The Obama administration and Gross’ advocates said he was wrongfully convicted. He was ultimately released by Cuba in exchange for the U.S. government releasing three Cubans convicted of spying.
None of this bothered Sanders, apparently.
Gross said Heitkamp and Tester brought him a big bag of peanut M&M’s, a memory that Gross remains fond of today because of his undernourishment at the time. Sanders brought an issue of The Atlantic magazine. Gross was also allowed to wear civilian clothes for the visit — a treat because normally he was allowed to wear only prison pajamas.
He said he had a pleasant conversation with Heitkamp and Tester, while Sanders remained mostly quiet for the duration of their one-hour meeting.
“Senator Sanders didn’t really engage much in the conversation,” Gross said.
But near the end, the Vermont senator offered a comment to the detained American, saying he didn’t see what was so wrong with the country.
Gross, as a prisoner in that country, said he took offense to the remark.
No kidding! NPR reached a representative of Heitkamp, who essentially confirmed Gross’s account:
A source close to Heitkamp said the then-North Dakota senator remembered that Sanders seemed to disregard the meeting with Gross and that an uncomfortable exchange occurred, but did not remember the exact remark.
There is a pattern here. Sanders honeymooned in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1988, one year before the Berlin Wall fell and three years before the USSR dissolved. The Russian empire was in its last stages of decomposition, but Bernie returned to the U.S., singing its praises. Similarly, by 2014 Cuba was in desperate straits. Essentially no one was defending Castro’s regime at that point–except Bernie Sanders.
Sanders is a lifelong apologist for the world’s cruelest regimes, and his defense of them has continued more or less to the present. Sanders is either an evil man, or a profoundly stupid one. No wonder the Democratic Party establishment wants to go with Joe Biden, who is undeniably stupid, but, at least arguably, not evil.
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Monday, March 2, 2020

WHY DID SANDERS CLING TO FAILING COMMUNIST REGIMES DECADES LONGER THAN OTHER LEFTISTS?

WHY DID SANDERS CLING TO FAILING COMMUNIST REGIMES DECADES LONGER THAN OTHER LEFTISTS?

I think it was in the summer of 1962 that our family stayed with my father’s brother and his family in Brooklyn. I had a cousin who was a year or two older than I was and, being a New Yorker, probably five years older in sophistication years.
During the visit, my cousin, age 14 or 15 going on 20, extolled the virtues of Fidel Castro. I was skeptical, but he had the numbers to back up his arguments — literacy statistics, statistics about health care, and so forth.
When I returned to the provinces — our home in the D.C. suburbs — I did a little bit of research to confirm my cousin’s stats, and became an apostle of Castro’s revolution. I don’t think I persuaded anyone at my junior high school of the virtues of communist Cuba, but I never lost an argument — at least as I perceived it.
Two years later, our family again stayed with my father’s brother and his family in Brooklyn. I was full or facts and figures with which to show my cousin how sophisticated I had become about Cuba, if nothing else. But before I could really get going, my cousin cut me off: “Fidel? I gave up on him last year.”
Bernie Sanders seems never to have given up on Fidel completely. He remained a fan through the 1980s and still defends Castro based on those literacy programs.
My father (and his brother, I think) were Brooklyn socialists in the 1930s. My father was never a communist and hated the Soviet Union, but many of his friends in the 30s believed in Stalin and his “workers’ paradise.”
Many of them gave up on Stalin when he signed that pact with Hitler’s Germany in 1939. Others drifted away during the 1940s.
By the time Stalin died and his successor publicized the tyrant’s crimes, no one my father liked still had any use for the Soviet Union. Nor, when I became a radical leftist in the late 1960s, did any leftist I knew.
But Bernie Sanders never gave up on the Soviet Union. He honeymooned there in the late 1980s. By then, even his tour guide, assigned by the Communist Party, was telling him the system was collapsing.
It didn’t matter. Sanders stuck to his guns and heaped praise on the Soviet Union. He even made Burlington, Vermont, of which he was mayor, the sister city of one the USSR’s failing outposts.
It should be clear from the foregoing that socialist ideology didn’t require Sanders to remain a fan of Cuba and the Soviet Union. Nearly all true believing socialists gave up on these two regimes half a century before Sanders was still defending them and touting their accomplishmentss.
And true democratic socialists never had any use for these murderous regimes. By definition, they couldn’t.
Is Sanders that much more oblivious than other socialists? Or does he just hate America much more than they did, to the point that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and therefore must be defended? I think it’s the latter.
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Friday, February 28, 2020

I went to school in Cuba under Castro. Here’s what it’s like, Bernie Sanders | Opinion

I went to school in Cuba under Castro. Here’s what it’s like, Bernie Sanders | Opinion

 
Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago, pictured in third grade in Cuba, was ostracized for not wearing her school uniform with the required scarf of the young Communist pioneers.
Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago, pictured in third grade in Cuba, was ostracized for not wearing her school uniform with the required scarf of the young Communist pioneers. FAMILY PHOTO
Look at the little girl in the picture.
In her serious demeanor, a front for fear — and in her story — you might find, Senator Bernie Sanders, some of the profundity lacking in your populist bid to become the Democratic nominee and 46th U.S. president.
This girl’s real-life experience is the antidote to your cheap, propagandist talking points on Cuba’s education system and Fidel Castro.
The banner behind her tells you her school in the city of Matanzas is confiscated property. “Intervenida” is the euphemism the new government led by Castro used to swoop in and appropriate every asset in the country, not only from the wealthy but from the middle class, too.
And, to make the point that this is now Castro country, take it or leave it, the private school is renamed after his 26th of July Movement.
Listen to today's top stories from the Miami Herald:
“You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program,” you told “60 Minutes” host Anderson Cooper. “Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Let’s break it all down.
The girl is 8 and in the third grade, the daughter of a beloved and respected teacher forced to resign over her refusal to teach Communist dogma to her students. (More on the mother later.)
Her father, a merchant of flour goods, sees his small, one-man business operation confiscated, and when he declines to continue to operate it as an employee of the state, he is sent to work in the agriculture fields as punishment.
Everyone in town knows the family is leaving the country to the United States.
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Like the thousands before them and thousands along with them, they’re branded “gusanos,” worms — and this creates a lot of tension for the children in your idyllic “literacy system.”
The girl has never scored below a 96 on any test.
She’s No. 1 on the honor roll — and the principal wants her to wear the state-mandated red scarf of the Communist youth organization, los pioneros, or she’s out. Her parents refuse. Her mother is called in for a conference. The women argue.
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The truce: The price for not wearing the pañoleta is being knocked down to second place for lack of revolutionary spirit. The top spot will go to a boy who is an eager and loyal pionerito (like decades later, a returned Elián González would be, too).
The girl is sad to lose the place she worked hard for over a scarf she sort of liked and everyone gets to wear, except for her and her little brother. But she loves her friends, no matter whether they’re leaving or staying, or if they chant every morning —“Pioneers, for Communism! We will be like Che” — or stay silent like she does.
Duration 1:25
Oppenheimer: Fidel a coward for not allowing political challenge
Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer comments on the death of the former Cuban president. BY JOSE A. IGLESIAS

COMMUNIST INDOCTRINATION

As the years pass and the wait for a visa wears on, she learns to work around the Communist indoctrination.
When she’s asked to write a glowing essay on Fidel Castro, she writes biography, complete, thorough, but no glowing appraisal because at 10, she knows more than Bernie Sanders at 78.
She’s a little more effusive with Camilo Cienfuegos, the more charismatic comandante who mysteriously “disappeared” during a plane flight. Even she, a child, suspects foul play.
Her little brother, a smart-aleck class clown, also has to make adjustments.
When his teacher asks him to form a sentence with the words “agrarian reform,” her brother eagerly chimes in out loud: “The agrarian reform is very sour!” His sentence rhymes in Spanish — and it’s a hit with classmates, but not with the teacher, an ardent revolutionary.
She is so mad she grabs him by an ear and pulls so hard and long that the boy bleeds all the way home. The next day, the mother goes to school and she could be heard screaming to the teacher that if she ever touches one of her kids again, she’ll be the one dragged down the street.
The girl fears that her mother could go to jail and she would be without parents. But her mother is still respected because she had earned the place she gave up on principle.
Duration 1:01
Fidel Castro: A visual evolution of a leader through the decades
Fidel Castro's image has evolved since his time as a University of Havana student leader and young lawyer. Here is a visual compilation of the man behind Cuba’s revolution. BY EDITOR: MARIO MATEO

LITERACY PREDATES CASTRO

See, despite your claims, senator, that it was Castro who started a literacy program in Cuba, a common and often-repeated lie, the girl’s mother worked in a literacy program in the countryside after graduation from a teacher’s college in the early 1950s.
Teachers had to do so to earn their spot in a city classroom.
She drove a Jeep (bought by her oldest businessman brother, who paid for her schooling) part of the way, then she rode a horse that was brought to her so she could reach the one-room school house.
This isn’t a tall tale of Cuban exiles in Miami. There are photos of all the above to prove it.
In one, she’s tending to the garden planted in front of the school, while a student peeks from inside. The back is inscribed: “First school where I was able to practice my profession as a teacher. San Gregorio Farm. Ceiba Mocha, Matanzas, Cuba.”
IMG_5762.jpg
In early 1950s pre-Castro Cuba, teacher Olga Ruiz tends to the garden in front of a one-room school house in the countryside. She drove a Jeep and rode a horse to get there. Service in the country was a must to earn a spot in a city school. FAMILY PHOTO
Yes, by the time she leaves Cuba in 1969, this girl knows that the Cuban education system is dogmatic and abusive to innocent children who are ostracized for their parents’ beliefs.
Her parents’ heart-wrenching decision to leave it all behind and start a new life in Miami, saves her from worse. After their 12th birthdays, her friends have to enroll in la escuela al campo. They have to leave their home and their parents to live in barracks in the countryside and work in agricultural fields.
Because the “free education” in Cuba isn’t free, and the Castro literacy program the American left has bought into is rooted in indoctrination and devotion to the one-party political system.
Your apparatchik views on Cuba, senator, are as old and dated as the photos of me and my mother.
Sixty-one years of unrelenting dictatorship later, and in the year 2020, the least Florida Democrats looking forward to the primary in March deserve from the front-runner is lucidity, not more obfuscation.
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But when you can’t even verbalize on “60 Minutes” how you’ll fund your signature healthcare project, pay for all that free college and child care you’re offering, what else can be expected on Cuba?
You are who you are, a populist riding a wave of discontent, as unfit for the presidency as your rival on the other side of the political spectrum.
Truly not yours, the little girl in the photograph, a registered Democrat in swing-state Florida.
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