Uncommon Sense

Terrell Owens attempts suicide — report (UPDATED)

I am a life-long Dallas Cowboys fan who hungers for another Super Bowl championship, or two.

So I was thrilled when Jerry Jones signed wide receiver Terrell Owens, with baggage and all, to wear a star on his helmet.

In professional sports, it's all about winning and on the field, few are better than T.O., even if he is a jerk. He made the Cowboys a better team.

Off the field, though, there may be few with as many problems as Owens, as evidenced by the report out of Dallas that he tried to take his life with an overdose of prescription pain medicine.

Whatever you think of his antics, he deserves your prayers for a quick recovery — whether or not he plays for the Cowboys ever again.

For more, read the Dallas Morning News' Cowboys blog.

I just caught a piece of a Dallas Police Department news conference, during which a spokesman declined to confirm or deny that Owens had attempted suicide.

Darsi Ferrer blasts the police for his arrest

Dr. Darsi Ferrer, with wife and child

Cuban dissident Dr. Darsi Ferrer is a hero.

His determination is unmatched.

His courage is inspiring.

I am honored to receive his writings straight from Havana.

In his latest e-mail, Ferrer attached a copy of a letter to Cuba's top prosecutor, in which he denounced his arrest and detention earlier this month, and again accused the police of trying to murder his 5-year-old son by turning on the gas in Ferrer's house as they lead him to jail.

Ferrer also ridiculed the reason police cited for his arrest — a sticker on the outside of his house that states, "Cambio," or "change."

"It is peculiar that this same sticker has been on the outside of the door to my house for more than a year, and it never constituted a crime.

"At never any moment, the agents did not refer to the article of the penal code that I violated by posting the stickers."

The real reason for Ferrer's detention likely is his demand that that Cubans be allowed to vote on whether Raúl Castro should be allowed to succeed his brother as dictator.

You can read Ferrer's letter, in Spanish, here.

Journalists under siege in Cuba

If you are a Cuban journalist who works outside the state-run propaganda machine, you are an enemy of the state.

So it's part of the job, realizing the next interview you conduct or story you right might be your one-way ticket to the gulag.

But in recent weeks, the authorities have ramped up the pressure to a new level, grabbing journalists off the streets and detaining them for hours, if not days. Before releasing them, the secret police often warn them to quit their work as journalists.

Otherwise, they may face harsher treatment — a warning not easily dismissed, considering the more than two dozen journalists in Cuban prisons.

It makes you wonder about all the stories the government does not want to them to tell.

The latest report of government harassment of a journalist comes from Luis Esteban Espinosa.

On Sept. 17, Espinosa wrote for Payolibre, two police officers arrested Abel Escobar Ramírez, 50, as he talked with a security guard at a store in Ciego de Ávila.

Escobar was taken to a local police station. During three hours of interrogation, an officer searched Escobar's backpack, where he three address/telephone books, a ball point pen and a few other items.

The officers told Escobar he was being investigated for "disobedience."

He was then taken to a jail cell, where he was forced to sit on a metal chair for about three hours, before he was released.

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Journalists at one Cuban news agency are fed up with the harassment.

This week, Jóvenes sin Censura (Youth Without Censorship), which has had several of its journalists arrested, or otherwise harassed, issued a statement requesting that the international community intervene with the government on behalf of Cuban journalists.

"The Jóvenes sin Censura news agency asks international organizations that defend freedom of expression to demand that the government stop these acts of repression and immediately free all the independent journalists who are in jail." (emphasis added)

The journalists with are mainly in their 20s.

Don't let their age fool you.

These kids have balls and ovaries of steel.

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Meanwhile, the lawyer for one of those jailed journalists, Oscar Mario Gonzalez, failed in her latest bid to win his release.

Gonzalez has been imprisoned since July 2005, even though he never has been formally charged.

UN expert says Cuba fails on human rights

In the non-surprise story of the day — except for maybe Kofi Annan — Cuba, a member of the newly minted United Human Rights Council, has failed to improve its human rights record, according to a U.N. expert.

"The situation doesn't seem today to be anything that could be described as improved, and I'm putting it mildly," Christine Chanet told the 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva.

Chanet, a French lawyer, cited censorship, the imprisonment of political activists, and restrictions on rights campaigners as particular concerns, according to an Associated Press story.

In response, Cuba's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Juan Fernandez Palacios said Chanet was doing the bidding of a "fascist clique," and that the best thing she could do for human rights is to quit her job.

If that's the case, just imagine the human rights in Cuba if the Castros quit their jobs and moved off the island.

Proving that you can tell a lot about a country by who its friends are, some of the world's most leading human rights violators — China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Belarus, Algeria, and Zimbabwe — sided with the Cubans.

Only the United States, the European Union and Vietnam — yes, Vietnam — thanked Chanet for her report.

U.N. Watch stated that the fact Cuba is on Human Rights Council exhibits everything that is wrong with the new body.

From the group's news release on Tuesday:

UN Watch applauds Ms. Christine Chanet, the Council expert on Cuba, for her persistent work under difficult circumstances, given the Cuban government’s refusal to allow her to visit the country or to otherwise cooperate. We fully endorse her call on the Cuban government to stop prosecuting citizens, and to free those already imprisoned, for exercising their basic civil and political rights—such as the 60 pro-democracy activists still sitting in jail from the government’s March 2003 crackdown. UN Watch also endorses Ms. Chanet’s calls for the Castro regime to end restrictions against non-governmental organizations, to allow for dissenting views in trade unions, press, and political parties, and to lift the travel ban that prevents Cubans from leaving the island without permission.

UN Watch condemned the Cuban ambassador for resorting to personal insults against Chanet. “We will send your report to the same place as your previous reports, i.e., to the circular file," he said. "Among your many occupations, Ms. Chanet, this is not one of your honorable jobs. No one will remember your illegitimate mandate. There is a significant contribution that you might make—by quitting.” Referring to the U.S., Cuba said “we struggle for survival as a nation against the most powerful and aggressive empire in history, this fascist clique trying to destroy us.”

“That Fidel Castro’s Cuba, one of the world’s most repressive regimes, is a member of the Human Rights Council is an outrage,” said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer. “Cuba uses its Council seat not to promote human rights, but to shield itself and fellow dictatorships from criticism. For months, council delegates have been subjected to Castro-style political theater, with Havana’s ambassador lambasting its political enemies, such as the U.S. and the E.U., and standing in the way of needed reforms. Cuba’s refusal to cooperate with Ms. Chanet is just another example of its obstructionist policy vis-à-vis the Council.”

For more, visit Child of the Revolution, which gets the H/T.

Darth Valdes

Is Ramiro Valdes, veteran of the revolution and longtime rival of Raúl Castro, the new jefe behind the throne in Cuba?

Whether Fidel recovers or withers away from his illness, the answer might be, "Yes."

He has been throwing his weight around since Raúl placed him in charge of information of communications technology.

Read some tantalizing speculation — but that's all it is, speculation — at the highly informed KillCastro blog.

The Cuban stare

From the young.

And from the old.

I cannot imagine what their eyes have seen.

For more photos of Cuba's people and places, visit TrekPhoto.

Earlier, My Beautiful Cuba and The Face of Cuba.

Cuba Idiot Watch: James Early

By day, James Early is a board member of TransAfrica Forum and the director of cultural heritage policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution.

By night, he is an apologist and useful idiot for Fidel Castro, as evidenced by an op-ed with his name on it published last week in the Chicago Defender.

The enormity of this man's idiocy is summed up in one sentence:

Fidel Castro's leadership and statecraft transformed Cuba into a much better, kinder, gentler society, especially for poor people of color and other historically exploited and marginalized Cubans.

There's more.

Consider these choice excerpts, with my commentaries:

"Castro is justifiably revered globally as a political icon. Several reasons show why. First is his visionary leadership. Fidel did not just dream a nation free of injustice, poverty, disease and ignorance. Envisioning a country of "new man" he and his comrades with direct and consistent collaboration with Cuban citizens of all sectors brilliantly wrestled back their country — an island being exploited, debauched and corrupted by the greed and imperial domination of U.S. capitalism. And despite missteps and some failures, the self-determined national revolutionary project has transformed much of the dream into life-defining achievements in health, education, and physical security."

If true, all it was for Castro was a dream, because the reality is he has turned Cuba into a country where injustice, poverty, disease and ignorance is what has kept him and his cohorts in power. And Cubans who don't collaborate with Castro risk finding themselves in a special kind of hell.

As for the "health, education and physical security", what good is it without freedom?

The Cuban Revolution, from the beginning, squarely confronted institutional racism, an ongoing social and governance transformation with a renewed national focus in the last few years in the Color Cubano project, under the ministry of culture and other special social and educational polices, instituted by the Cuban government.

The revolution may have confronted racism, but Castro must have liked what he saw because in communist Cuba, blacks and mulattos make up the majority of the population, yet enjoy little political power. And blacks like Oscar Biscet suffer the worst the regime has to offer.

Most inspiring, Cubans died to liberate non-Cuban people of color. The battle fought in Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan town, best exemplifies this. In 1988 Cuban and Angolan soldiers stopped apartheid South Africa's war machine which had invaded Angola and was bent on capturing Cuito Cuanavale, and then all Angola. The purpose? To impose the murderous Jonas Savimbi as an apartheid-defending puppet president of Angola. Defeating apartheid South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale was highly significant. It marked the beginning of the end both in the liberation of Namibia and of South Africa, and in ending Angola's nightmarish civil war.

So it was "inspiring" for Cuba to pimp out its soldiers to Angola, as well as Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa, on behalf of its Soviet paymasters?

And if anything, South Africa was the model for an insidious Cuban brand of apartheid.

Cuba is no paradise. And Fidel Castro is no god, just an extraordinary statesman over the last half-century who, despite at times stumbling on some fundamentally important issues of participatory democracy, has never fallen away from the Cuban nation's solemn historical quest for true independence and self-determination.

You know, "fundamentally important issues" like freedom of speech and the press and multiparty elections.

One day, hopefully soon, James Early and other idiots like him with owe the Cuban people a huge apology.

With friends like these ...

... who needs a crazy uncle?

Leftist Ecuadorean presidential candidate Rafael Correa said Monday he is proud to call Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is a friend.

''I am honored by the friendship. I don't see what the problem is,'' Correa said, according to an Associated Press story.

He doesn't see what the problem is?

Well, even if you ignore Chavez' affinity for dictators, just consider the mess he has made of Venezuela.

Ecuadorean journalist José Hidalgo Pallares reminds his readers:

After seven and a half years as president, with inflation in Venezuela at 15 percent, unemployment at 13 percent as of 2005 (higher than the 11 percent at the beginning of his mandate), and with a poverty level reaching 55 percent in 2003, which according to the most recent data was 47 percent in 2004, Mr. Hugo Chavez seems to have forgotten the reason he was elected: To improve the living conditions of his people, and not to get involved in matters that don't concern him.

Beyond the spectacle that he puts on at every stop of his round-the-world tour -which is all that his presidency amounts to - and the laughter that he elicits by making a mockery of George W. Bush (of course, with no lack of motive), Hugo Chavez has taken upon himself attributes that don't correspond to him, believing himself capable of imposing his will on several Latin-American countries.

Read Pallares' entire column, in English, here.

Ecuadoreans go to the polls on Oct. 15. The latest surveys show Correa leading, but a runoff in November likely will be needed to decide the winner.

Hopefully, Ecuadoreans, like Peruvian and Mexican voters before them, will serve as a roadblock for further expansion of Chavezism.

Fidel Castro killed her father

Posted without comment, because I couldn't say it better.

From the Providence (R.I.) Journal:

My father's killer

By Cynthia Torroella Merrill

'Socialism or death': Castro's only truth 'Fidel Castro is slipping slowly, mysteriously from sight, and will be gone for good," they say. "This time he's really sick," they warn. "The end is very near!" they insist.

"How do you feel about that?" they ask me.

And I, who have had Fidel Castro by my side for decades -- my invincible nemesis, who shadows me like a fatal ailment that no one sees, like anemia of the soul -- am not dancing in the streets or raising mojito toasts.

Fidel Castro, whose very name brings a kind of hollow thud into my heart, plowed into the quiet, shaded streets of my childhood and smacked right into its center. Just as if his triumphant tanks had crashed through our hedges into our small patio, filled with cages of parakeets, all was silenced inside me. I could no longer hear birds sing or even see the flamboyant petals grace the blue Havana skies with orange confetti.

Castro arrived and I had to leave. My five-year-old world was disassembled as completely as a Lincoln Log house tossed into the sea: all the odd bits of wooden structure floating aimlessly, unceremoniously, upon the waves of what they called La Revolucion.

Do children cheer for revolutions? Do they rejoice to see the turbulence of la lucha unleashed upon their home, their playground, their pet alligator (who may very well still live in some Cuban swamp)?

Did I realize that my own father, a Cuban -- passionately, irrevocably in love with Cuba -- had supported this triumph of the Revolution? That he joined those cheering mobs who welcomed the new liberator into town so that real democracy -- the "just" political system he had studied at Dartmouth College -- could begin? That he had even, dare I say, joined in la lucha when Batista still held sway and thus helped usher in this new regime?

What could I have known as I played with my amigos or sat with my abuelos during tropical evenings while my parents danced at la Copa and my madrina made me flan? Children are the last to know.

But when my mother and I were suddenly made to hurry to the Havana airport I began to know. Why did my father stay behind? Why did he insist we must leave? Why did my mother cry out to bearded soldiers that I would not stay with them and be a Cuban citizen?

Where did my grandparents go? My uncles, my foolishly crying godmother, Bebita, who refused to leave?

I began to feel in my childish heart that first thud of fear, of loss. That thud has kept pace with me these 47 years, as if I had a pacemaker marking out my rhythm with the island of my birth and exile.

Wherever I have lived I have been aware of the inevitable, unrelenting Cuba of my family history, and of present reality. The two Cubas. The one of dreams and decadence, of captivity and defiance, of scarcity and patience. I have never left that Cuba of my birth, even though I am here, in the United States, another statistic of exodus.

I am here, but every day it's as if I were in Cuba, too. I have felt the silent tread of combat boots upon my heart. I have felt the invisible spear of sugar cane upon my palms and wiped away the sweat that falls upon my cheek like tears.

For when el jefe -- that god-like Cuban King Kong, Fidel Castro -- began his real Revolution, all of us, those who stayed and those who left, were caught in his colossal grip and made to watch.

We watched him spin the filaments of fear while hearing of libertad. We watched him elaborate the strands of oportunidad while we heard the firing squads. And, even worse, we heard him weave words of fraternidad, which sounded so good, because they included the poor, the sick, the uneducated. And with each year the tapestry of the new Cuba became an intricate fantasy of moral realignment and chest-pounding theatrics.

But I was forced to see something hidden beneath that fantasy. My story was not the Elian Gonzalez story. I did not reunite with my Cuban father and become a heroine. My father stayed in Cuba, because all too soon he saw the truth.

To fight the totalitarian reality in Castro's Cuba required more than a difference of opinion. All disagreement with the real Revolution is disobedience. All disobedience is a mortal battle. He dared contradict the Cuban King Kong, and lost.

His captivity, unlike mine, was tangible. The firing squad came for him, as it has come for thousands like him.

In the "Cuba of the people," there is only one reality: "Socialism or death!" is Castro's only truth. And with the blast of those prison guns, Fidel Castro made certain that I would never leave the place where I lost my father.

Worst of all, I would never live without Castro's image in my mind -- that green-clad, bearded man who now, they say, lies dying.

I do not rejoice. I do not even allow myself to imagine a Cuba without Castro.

But I do know that I will mourn the day when that man no longer lives. For then I will truly know how many, many years I have had to carry both grief and homelessness within my weakened heart.

Cuban cops have freedom to repress the press

As a general rule on this blog, I try to write with passion, while not letting my emotions get away from me so they don't cloud my argument and/or cause readers to question my objectivity and fairness.

That approach has served me well in more than 17 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, and as far as I concerned, my work on Uncommon Sense is journalism by another name.

But my rule gets chucked out the window when I read yet another story exhibiting how the Castro dictatorship has turned my colleagues in Cuba, the independent journalists who know that the next story they write may be the ticket to a jail cell, into enemies of the state.

Two recent examples of how the communists try to repress the free press in Cuba can be found today at Payolibre.

When it comes to their repression of the press, the son-of-a-bitch, fucking communist bastards in charge really piss me off.

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In the first story, Ahmed Rodríguez Albacia of the Youth Without Censorship news agency — himself, fresh off 14 hours in police custody — reports on the detention and beating of journalist Oscar Sánchez Madan.

Sánchez described how he was picked up by two officers as he was leaving a meeting of the Alternative Indepedent Option Movement and the Marta Abreu Feminist Movement.

There message to him was simple: Quit working as a journalist.

Sánchez gave a chilling account of what happened as the officers drove him to a police station.

"For more than 20 kilometers, they threatened me with jail," Sánchez said. "At one point, they threw me to the ground and dragged me through a roadside ditch. ... They tied me to the car and struck me in the chest and face, causing a swollen lip and strong pains in the left ribs."

During his dentention, Sánchez said he was warned that the police could arrest him and at any time. And that in other countries, he would be killed for being a journalist.

Before Sánchez was released, he was issued a warning for not having a government work permit and fined 30 pesos for not answering a citation recently issued to him by the National Revolutionary Police.

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In the second story, journalist Luis Esteban Espinosa reports on how policeman broke into a house and stole a telephone used by Liannis Meriño, director of Youth Without Censorship, and her husband, Guillermo Llanos Ricardo, the eastern regional president for the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights.

Llanos told Espinosa that his wife, who is pregnant, had to leave a hospital where she was being treated for health problems, because she was discriminated against and because the medical attention was inadequate.

"I make State Security responsibile for the health of my wife and our son," Llanos said.

|—————|

My sympathies and with Cuba's independent journalists is twofold.

First, I am a Cuban. As long as a dictatorship rules the nation, I am not fully free.

And I am a journalist, and anytime, anywhere a policeman tries to intimidate a colleague just because they are doing their job, I am less free to do mine.

However, everyone should be pissed off at how the son-of-a-bitch fucking communist bastards treat the independent press.

The repression of the free press reveals a fundamental evil — and a fundamental illegitmacy — of the dictatorship.

Some of the regime's harshest scorn is saved for the independent press because every day, the reporters and editors, for little if any money, challenge the moral standing of the regime, by simply doing their jobs.

Information is a powerful weapon, and the dictatorship knows it cannot survive if its flow is left unchecked.

For Cubans might actually use information brought to them by the nation's independent journalists to set themselves free.