Uncommon Sense

Chavez says Fidel "in charge"

In the latest salvo in the PR spin game leading up to May Day festivities in Havana, Hugo Chavez says Fidel Castro is "in charge."

No confirmation yet on whether they're playing this song tonight on Caracas radio.

(Spoken) He went away and you hung around
And bothered me, every night
And when I wouldn't go out with you
You said things that werem't very nice

My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)
You see him comin' better cut out on the double
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)
You been spreading lies that I was untrue
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)
So look out now cause he's comin' after you

(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)
(Hey, he knows that you been tryin')
(And he knows that you been lyin')

He's been gone for such a long time
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)
Now he's back and things'll be fine
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)
You're gonna be sorry you were ever born
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)
Cause he's kinda big and he's awful strong
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)

(Hey he knows I wasn't cheatin'!)
(Now you're gonna get a beatin'!)

(What made you think he'd believe all your lies?)
(Wah-ooo, wah-ooo)
(You're a big man now but he'll cut you down to size
(Wah-ooo, wait and see)

My boyfriend's back he's gonna save my reputation
(Hey-la-day-la my boyfriend's back)
If I were you I'd take a permanent vacation
(Hey-la, hey-la, my boyfriend's back)

Yeah, my boyfriend's back
(La-day-la, my boyfriend's back)
Look out now, yeah, my boyfriend's back
(La-day-la, my boyfriend's back)
I could see him comin'
(La-day-la, my boyfriend's back)
So you better get a runnin'
(La-day-la, my boyfriend's back)
Alright now
(La-day-la, my boyfriend's back)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
(La-day-la, my boyfriends's back)
My boyfriend's back now
(La-day-la, my boyfriend's back)

[Fades]

Know he's comin' after you
(La-day-la, my boyfriend's back)
Because he knows I've been true now...

Lázaro Alejandro Garcia Farah, Political Prisoner of the Week, 4/29/07 (UPDATED)

UPDATED, March 16, 2011 — The Catholic Church announced that Lázaro Garcia would be released and take exile in Spain.
|———|

Lázaro Alejandro Garcia Farah was arrested Aug. 4, 1994, and sentenced to 25 years in prison after he and seven other people tried to hijack the boat "Baraguá" so they could escape Cuba for freedom. But in prison, Garcia, now 37, has proven himself more than a pirate, but as a prisoner of conscience on the front lines of the opposition to the dictatorship, albeit from a jail cell.

No one less than Pope John Paul II stood up for Garcia, including his name on a list of political prisoners for whom he was seeking clemency during his visit to Cuba in 1998. The regime rejected the request, and when Garcia protested, he was thrown into solitary confinement.

Later, from November 2000 until February 2001, Garcia was denied visitation rights, after he refused to participate in political indoctrination classes.

Throughout his time in prison, Garcia has denounced the abuses of and poor conditions for political prisoners. Most recently, according to a story by journalist Tania Maceda Guerra posted at Cuba-Miami Information Bridge, he described how officials at Kilo 5½ prison in Pinar del Rio put inmates' health at risk:

In a telephone conversation with the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, the prisoner declared: “Many times they serve lunch and skip snacks, drinking water is not potable is full of parasites and residues. Occasionally, they turn the water off for up to three days. Medications are given crushed, where most of the dosage stays in the bottle or is accidentally mixed with other medications”.

He also added that there are prisoners that after spending two years in the maximum severity regime, their family visits continue to be restricted to one every four months and their conjugal pavilions one every five months.

In regards to the political prisoners and those of conscience he stated that their rights to correspondence and that of religious assistance are constantly violated.

Garcia Farah expressed a deep concern for the health of Eduardo Diaz Fleitas, a prisoner of conscience of the group of the 75.

One of the surest indicators of the repressive nature of the Castro regime is the jailing of more than 300 political prisoners. To illustrate that reality, Uncommon Sense each week profiles one prisoner. There also is a Political Prisoner archive on the left sidebar. To suggest a prisoner for a profile, send me an e-mail.

For profiles of imprisoned Cuban journalists and related information, read the March 18 Project.

Prisoner's wife stays on her beat

The past few weeks cannot have been easy for Cuban independent journalist Lamasiel Gutiérrez.

First of all, it's never easy for Cuba's independent journalists, who at risk of great peril attempt to tell the real stories of the real Cuba.

But for Gutiérrez, this month was especially challenging after she learned that her husband, the lawyer Rolando Jimenez Pozada, who has been jailed since 2003, had been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Her response?

Keep on working, reporting and writing stories for anyone in the world who will pay attention.

Her latest dispatches can be found at Misceláneas de Cuba, including a report on how a guard stole the PIN for a telephone calling card belonging to political prisoner Fabio Prieto and depleted the remaining minutes.

And in a two-paragraph report that belies one of the great myths of the robo-lution, Gutiérrez quotes a doctor who describes how medical missions to Venezuela have left a shortage of stomach specialists on the Isle of Youth.

Support Gutiérrez, by praying for her and her husband, and by reading her work.

More on Vitral

Ray Sanchez, the (Fort Lauderdale) Sun-Sentinel's man in Cuba has reports from the island on the controversy over Vitral, the Cuban Catholic Church magazine that has served as an outlet for critical examinations of Cuban civic life.

Pinar del Rio, Cuba · In a small Roman Catholic church the other night, an unusual gathering of Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholics, Marxists, barbers, electricians and lawyers discussed how to change the hearts of a society in perpetual limbo.

A moderator, who feared to be named, interrupted with transcendental news.

"The church has just announced that limbo doesn't exist," he said. "The church has admitted that in another era, it had invented the concept of limbo as a place where unbaptized children went after death. They didn't suffer like in hell but they weren't entirely happy like in heaven. It meant they were nowhere."

Indeed, the Vatican recently dismissed the medieval notion that unbaptized babies are condemned to eternity in limbo. But some Cubans believe the Catholic diocese in the western city of Pinar del Rio has destined an acclaimed magazine to such a fate.

The controversy erupted earlier this month when Vitral, the most prominent of two or three alternative voices in a country where the news media is controlled by the communist state, published an editor's note in its April edition saying it was shutting down.

"Because of a lack of resources, the editorial council of Vitral informs its readers that it can no longer guarantee the magazine's publication," the editor, Dagoberto Valdes, wrote in a brief note.

The news immediately put in doubt the future of Vitral and the diocese's much-heralded Center for Civic and Religious Formation, which offers parish-based classes on civic participation.

Within days of the announcement, the diocese's new bishop, Jorge Serpa, issued a statement denying that the magazine would close but alluding to a clash with Valdes and the publication's tone.

"I have asked that Vitral magazine keep to the truth based on the gospel and the church's social doctrine, without falling into aggressive and argumentative expressions," Serpa wrote.

Tuesday night, ordinary Cubans who attend the weekly civic classes here began gathering signatures on a petition asking the diocese to keep Vitral the way it was.

"A voice has been taken from us," said Marilei Castro, a 29-year-old lawyer who signed the petition.

"The issues are taboo. But there are no other places in Cuba where these things are discussed openly. People don't want to speak about them. It makes them uncomfortable."

The magazine's readers and others, like her, who attended the workshops are "confused right now," she added.

"We don't know what will happen."

Read the whole thing here.

One of the many factors hamstringing the Cuban opposition is the lack of moral leadership from the Catholic Church on the island. It is not an ally of the dictatorship, but instead has chosen to just stay on the sidelines.

It has been decades since the church in Cuba has enjoyed the type of stature that it had in communist Poland, which it used to help lead Poles to freedom. The two scenarios are not the same, the history is different, so maybe the church in Cuba cannot be a unifying force, at least right now.

But it is discouraging that instead of speaking out for the need for change, the church hierarchy, in ways big and small, has chosen to appease the dictatorship. It is if Cuban bishops have forgotten Pope John Paul's message during his 1998 visit to "be not afraid."

The controversy over Vitral is just another example, with the new bishop apparently looking out only for the interests of the church, and not of his flock.

The problem is not "a lack of resources," but a lack of courage.

He's baaaaack!

Forget the new boss, still in charge is the old boss.

With apologies to The Who, all indications are Fidel Castro — perhaps unburdened of a few feet of his small intestine — is throwing his weight around again and reminding Raul that he always will be the little brother.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

MIAMI -- Nine months after falling victim to an illness that many US analysts assumed would prove fatal, Fidel Castro appears to have come back from death's door to resume some leadership responsibilities and rein in Cuba's would-be reformers.

He's receiving visiting dignitaries, not just friends such as Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela but official delegations, including one led earlier this month by a senior figure in the Chinese Communist Party, Wu Guanzheng.

Castro's name is again attached to editorials for Cuba's state-run media, ones in which the US government is lambasted for freeing an accused terrorist and Brazil is criticized for using food crops for ethanol production when they could be feeding poor people.

And, to the alarm of veteran Cuba-watchers who sensed a new degree of openness to economic change during Castro's absence, the apparently reinvigorated revolutionary is now believed to be blocking moves to let Cubans open small businesses.

US analysts of Cuban developments acknowledge they know little about Castro's illness or the degree of his recuperation. His personal secretary said he was suffering from intestinal bleeding when he handed over power in the summer to his brother Raúl.

US intelligence sources have speculated he has cancer. But the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported the most plausible version of his prolonged medical attention, citing unidentified doctors familiar with Castro's case. The newspaper said the Cuban president had undergone three surgeries to remove infected intestinal tissue and became gravely ill when the incisions failed to heal and the infection spread to his stomach.

In Bolivia, President Evo Morales said he was sure Castro would resume power during May Day celebrations in Havana, the private Unitel television network reported yesterday. "I'm sure, my Cuban brothers, that on May 1 comrade Fidel will return to governing," he said, adding that he had not received any official word from Cuban authorities.

President Bush yesterday called Cuba's communist government, a "cruel dictatorship," but he predicted that democratic change was near.

Bush said in a commencement speech at Miami Dade College in Florida that many Cubans were dreaming of a better life. "Some of you still have loved ones who live in Cuba and wait for the day when the light of liberty will shine upon them again," the president said. "That day is nearing."

Since Raúl Castro, the defense minister and first vice president, took over for his older brother July 31, state-authorized media exposés on rampant corruption and the younger Castro's public criticism of shortages in food, transportation, and housing have hinted at internal review of Cuba's political and economic system, said Phil Peters, vice president of the Lexington Institute near Washington and a veteran analyst of Cuban affairs.

Raúl Castro has a reputation for pragmatism about private enterprise within the state-run economy, having inaugurated many of the island's most successful hard currency-earning joint ventures in tourism in the early 1990s, when the country was reeling from the sudden cutoff of Soviet aid.

During the fall, when Fidel Castro was too sick even to make an appearance at the September summit of the Non-Aligned Movement or his delayed 80th birthday celebrations in December, the government announced a thorough review was under way to identify, and presumably correct, flaws in the communist ideology guiding the country.

"Now it looks like cold water's getting poured over all that," Peters said. "That, to me, is the clearest sign that Fidel Castro is getting better and getting closer to coming back to office."

Media accounts that Raul and some others in the dictatorship are "reformers" chomping at the bit for the old man to die so they could do their thing, were always overblown.

Raul is as much a hard-core Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist as his brother, as evidenced by the worsening human rights situation on the island. He may be a bit more of a pragmatist on economic matters, but the only changes he wants are designed not to improve the lives of Cubans — something which is desperately needed, and can be achieved only with the demise of the dictatorship — but to maintain the dictatorship's grip on power.

Fidel's recovery, if it is that, reminds of how far Cuba has to go to be free.

This is child abuse

This is sick.

What's next?

Hitler Huggies?

Pol Pot Pacifiers?

Castro Cribs?

Ziva at Babalú has the sad, sad story.

If you want to send a better message, how about buying your newborn one of these:

You can order it here.

Or how about this one?

The raping of Cuba

Fidel Castro has been raping Cuba, in all sorts of ways, for more than 48 years.

Dirty old men from Europe and elsewhere are more than willing to help however they can.

Catherine Bremer of Reuters writes:

ISLE OF YOUTH, Cuba (Reuters) - Grease dribbling through his fingers, the Italian gobbles up two fried lobsters while the girl, young enough to be his granddaughter, picks at some rice and waits.

Facing them, I picture his chubby hands on this pretty 20-year-old mulatta and think about the thin wall between their bedroom and the one I've just rented in this Cuban family home.

I know this goes on everywhere from Brazil to Thailand, but I still feel like telling this leathery old man, with his big gold chain, vest and shorts, that he's a creep, and finding a hotel.

I bite my tongue though, and while the girl watches a Brazilian soap opera, I pour some rum. On the terrace, the man tells me he's a retired Sicilian executive who spends half the year here enjoying the young women.

"Is that so?" I say, trying to look as if I find this an admirable way to spend one's golden years. "That must be quite a few girls."

"Eighty," he smirks. "Well. At least 40 or 50.

"Cuban girls are different from you Europeans. They aren't prudish. In bed, they do everything. If she's not interested, I kick her out and get another one."

When I remark on his age, somewhere over 60, he springs to his feet, beats his chest and flexes his arms.

"I'm a lion! I have the body of a 40-year-old. In bed, I'm 25," he cries. "I don't even need Viagra."

Foreigners have come to Cuba for years seeking escorts for nights out and sex in exchange for gifts or cash to help the family. Cubans dub them "yumas", a term adopted for Americans after a 1957 western set in the town of Yuma on the U.S. border with Mexico.

Traveling here a decade ago, when Cubans were going hungry from the loss of Soviet aid, I saw countless beer-bellied foreign men smooching young women, and mid-forties women with hot young Cuban guys.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro hates sex tourism. After the 1959 revolution, he razed the brothels that had flourished under strongman Fulgencio Batista and he outlawed underage sex and pornography.

The government has also cracked down on hustlers, known here as "jineteros", in recent years, and the trade is now less visible.

But tourists are still like walking bank vaults in the two-tiered economy of Cuban and convertible pesos. The dollars I brought for a three-week stay equate to eight years' of state peso wages -- hence the torrent of romantic propositions.

Read the rest here.

Jailed journalists keep working

They may be imprisoned because of their jobs, but that hasn't stopped at least three jailed journalists from working their beats and telling the real stories about the real Cuba. According to Payo Libre:

— Raimundo Perdigón Brito reports that he and other prisoners at the provincial prison in Sancti Spíritus are being given spoiled and worm-infested food, and that the meals that are edible are overloaded with salt in order to prevent spoilage — raising fears among prisoners that it will cause kidney and heart problems.

Perdigón was arrested last year just days after he and his sister founded the Yayabo Press news agency. He was convicted of being a "pre-criminal social danger," and sentenced to 4 years in prison.

— Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta reminds the world that while Cuban health care may be something to admire outside of prison — or so say the apologists for the robo-lution — in prison, it's not so much.

Herrera was arrested during the "black spring" of March-April 2003, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

— And José Daniel Ferrer García expresses his support, and that of other prisoners for "United for Liberty," a recent proclamation uniting various opposition groups.

Ferrer, who was arrested during the "black spring" and sentenced to 25 years, writes:

Some very important news recently reached us: The principal peaceful opposition groups agreed to a document that unites them in the struggle for liberty and for the respect of human rights for our whole nation, which we consider very positive.

Our nation wants and needs us to unite. Our unity based on respect of diversity of ideas is vital for the transition to democracy.

To read more about Perdigón, Herrera, Ferrer and the other journalists imprisoned in Cuba, click on the names to the left, below "March 18 Project."

Lies, damn lies and statistics

Investor's Business Daily explains how the Cuban dictatorship uses numbers and lies, and a lazy foreign media, to perpetuate a long-standing myth about the robo-lution:

Communist regimes are known to falsify and distort statistics, but they rarely get away with it unless Western media play along. They scored a big hit recently with data about Cuba's storied life expectancy.

In a widely distributed news story, the Associated Press last week explained why Cubans were living such long, healthy lives under their 47-year totalitarian dictatorship. Taking the word of Cuban officials, it credited the island's "mild climate," "free medical care" and "low-stress Caribbean lifestyle." Right on cue, CBS gave "thanks to the socialist island state's free health-care system" that's there so "fortunately."

But media claims that socialism lets Cubans live longer makes no sense. Cuba's living conditions portend anything but a long life. The media reports, moreover, often misinterpret the data. "The average Joe reading these stories doesn't have all the background, and can be fooled by propaganda," says Cuban author Humberto Fontova.

Life expectancy at birth, as defined by Oxford University demographers, is how many years a baby would live if patterns of mortality at the time of his birth remain steady through his lifetime. It correlates closely with infant mortality, because the longer a person lives, the longer he can expect to advance past the average.

According to 2007 CIA World Factbook cited by AP, Cubans live an average of 77.08 years, with men at 74.85 and women at 79.43. But in its praise-filled report, the AP missed that this actually represents a decline in life expectancy. The year before, the average was 77.41 with men at 75.11 and women at 79.89.

Read the whole thing here.

Cuba's Black Diamond (UPDATED)

Antúnez never broke

Two of the bravest Cuban men I have come to know through my reading and writing about the struggle for Cuban liberty are the journalist Guillermo Fariñas and the now former political prisoner, Luis García Pérez, also known as Antúnez, who was jailed for more than 17 years. Their courage and selflessness on behalf of their nation are weapons for which the dictatorship has no counter-measures, except for more repression — which only makes men like Fariñas, Antúnez and other dissidents stronger.

Just days after his release from prison, Antúnez sat down for an interview with Fariñas, the director of the Cubanacán Press news agency.

CubaNet has the transcript, in Spanish.

The final question and answer may cause the dictatorship to re-think the dictatorship's decision to release Antúnez, who in this interview and elsewhere has pledged to continue his resistance to the Castro regime.

Fariñas: Why do they call you the "Black Diamond"?

Antúnez: First of all, I'm black. And the diamond is a very hard stone, which neither breaks or scratches.

After more than 17 years in prison, it is clear that the Black Diamond lives, stronger and braver than ever, providing an example for all Cubans, and the world of what it takes to defeat the dictatorship.

UPDATED, 6:51 EDT

Cuba-Miami Information Bridge has a transcript, in English. The translation is a little rough, but it is still a must-read, this conversation between two great, and at least in Antúnez's case, humble men. Here is an interesting excerpt:

Fariñas: Antúnez, you have published 2 books while in prison “Life in Prison Kilo-8” and “Boitel Lives”, we heard of a third book now being printed, will you continue writing in liberty?

Antúnez: I don't consider myself an intellectual; at least not my vision of what an intellectual should be, I am simply a former political prisoner who wrote about his living experiences in jail. I don’t have the formal education a writer should have.

Fariñas: That is your opinion, and I don’t agree with it, but I respect your point of view, your works speaks for itself, my actual question was: will you continue writing?

Antúnez: Yes, I plan to expose in writing all the cruelties, abuses and genocides I witnessed and was subjected to at times.

Fariñas: Then will this be the beginning of a testimonial and denouncement literary career, in this new phase of your life in freedom?

Antúnez: No, my main task will be defending the political prisoners still inside Castro's jails, I will write when I have the time, and if I can I will try to practice Independent Journalism, if you are willing to teach me the ropes, but everything will revolve around the defenseless prisoners I left behind not long ago, in the hells of Castro’s jails.

This Black Diamond has not broken, indeed.