Tag: Cuba

cross posted from The Dream Antilles



La Bloguera Yoani Sanchez

Well, to no one’s surprise, Cuba wouldn’t relent and permit Yoani Sanchez to travel to Spain to receive the Ortega y Gasset prize, despite my post yesterday urging Raul Castro to permit her to go.

AP reports:

A Cuban woman who gained worldwide acclaim for a blog that offers stinging criticism of the Communist regime was honored Wednesday with a Spanish journalism award – in absentia.

Cuban authorities did not approve Yoani Sanchez’s request to travel to Madrid for the award ceremony. But the 32-year-old woman was still able to make some points.

“Nothing of what I have written in these 13 months speaks as loudly as my absence from this ceremony,” Sanchez said in a tape recording.

She said the fact she had to address the group through a recording was “the clearest evidence of the defenselessness of the Cuban people with respect to the state.”

Meanwhile, her blog receives more than 1 million hits a month (my blog receives less than 1 thousand).  And it continues to voice opposition to repression in Cuba.  It’s gotten some attention from Andrew Sullivan, but in general, there hasn’t been much of an uproar, or support in Blogtopia for her right to travel or for her right to express herself without being penalized or calling for her to be allowed to leave Cuba long enough to visit Spain.

Why is that?  What exactly does it take to have bloggers advocate for freedom of expression across the entire Internet?  When are we going to understand the connections between all of us in the typing class?  When are we going to support freedom of speech, even if we don’t agree with the politics or content of what is being written?

I’m asking because I remember Martin Niemoeller.

Liberals are coming to a country near you!

Well, perhaps not liberals in the sense that you and I consider them, but certainly liberal thinking is progressing in our Caribbean Island neighbor.

From BBC:

Cuba’s President Raul Castro says nearly all death sentences are to be commuted to prison terms of between 30 years and life.

It is the latest in a series of liberalising measures. Mr Castro said the decision was humanitarian and not due to international pressure.

Three people charged with terrorism will stay on death row for the time being. Their cases will be reviewed.

While Cuba plans to keep the option of the death penalty on their statute book, this is a very promising move by the Raul Castro administration towards joining the 21st Century in the arena of human rights improvements.

I’m not saying that Cuba is all of a sudden a world leader in promoting Human Rights, but this does bode well as a beginning.

From the BBC here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ame…

Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban Revolution and head of state, has hinted that he will not hold on to the reigns of power in his country!

I often find discussions about Cuba frustratingly polemic. On one side are the demonizers, who see everything the Cuban government does as evil, even if it’s providing free healthcare, education, or inculcating equality as a value in Cuban society that is not going to be erased by any infusion of capital.

On the other side are the romanticizers, who  have such tight blinders on that they cannot see anything wrong with anything the Cuban government does. They refuse to admit that the central management system in Cuba suffers from severe bureaucratism, and they rationalize away the human rights abuses that certainly do take place on the island with a Bush-like excuse of, “we’ll they’re under constant threat, so they have to take tough security measures.” What, so it’s OK to torture somebody if you’re a Cuban government official but not if you’re a Bush Administration one?

Really, the only way we’re going to get a better perspective on any of this is to get rid of the idiotic embargo and restore full diplomatic relations between the two countries. That’s when the dirty laundry will also come out. Like Cuba’s relationship with the Stasi.

Wapo: A coalition of far-left Indian communist parties have effectively killed the US-India nuclear deal, leaving Administration officials with egg all over their faces once again. But you won’t learn that reading the Post piece. FOX isn’t even running the story right now. Drudge neither.

Reuters by way of contrast, puts the facts up high: “Indian Communists Reject US Nuclear Pact”.

Why is the right-wing noise machine blacking the India-Nuke deal story out, and the Wapo burying the facts?

Because getting beating by a bunch of supposedly dead and buried communists confirms the terrible inconvenient truth: US Soft Power is melting faster than the polar ice-caps.