The rise of Darth Valdes

Ramiro "Darth" Valdes

La Nueva Cuba sounds the alarm about the rise to renewed prominence in Cuba of former secret police chief Ramiro Valdes.

As interior minister, he helped create the Cuban police state and gulag.

And now, as minister of information technologies and communications, he's hoping to bring the same ruthlessness to policing the Internet.

The Internet is not so easy to break, but Valdes' role in policing what Cubans do with their computers — trying to stamp out the "virus" of freedom, if you will, that so clearly defines the Internet — signals that the Castro 2.0 version of the dictatorship plans on not crashing anytime soon.

An excerpt of the La Nueva Cuba editorial:

Valdés is not a new threat, but an old one-the brutal, conscience-free executioner of people and policies in a regime which has hidden its crimes against humanity behind flamboyant anti-American rhetoric and a threadbare disguise of romantic populism. All the more surprising that the usual voices of liberal outrage have been uniformly silent on his ascension to new power. Had the head of a brutal secret police from any right-wing regime been so elevated, the chorus of libertarian Furies would have hardly held their tongues. Instead, Valdés has merited no recrimination. Even the trusted Reuters recently describe him innocuously as nothing more than "an academic of Cuban origin." Even the new Venezuela-Cuba optic cables being laid across the Caribbean, in conjunction with President Chávez's appropriation of telecommunication companies in Venezuela, have failed to provoke any concern, with their obvious indication of what totalitarian controls await internet users in the Bolivarian Republic and elsewhere in Latin America where the newly re-packaged "Socialism of the 21st Century" is taking hold.

Valdés new powers should annul any hope that the Cuban regime awaits the imminent death of its founding Pharaoh to begin the process of liberalization. If anything, Cuba is planning for a fiercer totalitarian future for itself and Latin America, and beyond. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have already sounded the alarm on Cuba's tightening grip on internet access and use, but the Western media and the usuall vocal, liberty-conscious intellectuals have yet to denounce these new Cuban crimes against freedom. Valdés' draconian policies cannot be rationalized as defenses against alleged American imperialism, for the internet has become the lifeblood of information and freedom for all the world. Will the West sit and watch the Havana Strangler with patronizing awe, or will it finally do its duty and demand a stop to his reign of terror?

Read the whole thing here.