Uncommon Sense

Family blocked from visiting Cuba political prisoner (UPDATED)

José Daniel Ferrer García

Cuban political prisoners are forced to suffer numerous tortures at the hand of the captors.

And when that is not enough for the regime, it goes after the prisoners' families, adding to their pain.

That's what happened recently when relatives of imprisoned journalist José Daniel Ferrer García not only were blocked from seeing him, guards forcibly removed them from the Las Tunas provincial prison.

The episode reminds that when it comes to its repressive ways, there is no limit to whom the Castro dictatorship hurts.

UPDATED, Jan. 14, 2010 — Ciudadanos has a few more details about what happened.

Cuban activist: 'This is not the time' to lift travel limits

A Capitol Hill hearing today was considering proposals to lift limits on travel by Americans to Cuba.

Testimony by Cuban activist Betha Antúnez, the sister and niece of two former political prisoners, probably won't help that cause:

The real people of Cuba, the Cuban people that suffer and deeply desire to live in freedom, will not benefit from any tourist travel. Rather, those resources will serve the totalitarian regime to increase its repressive capabilities. Some people ingenuously think that tourists will have direct contact with the Cuban people, and that this will help Cubans to have a clear vision of freedom. In the first place, Cubans are reprimanded, fined, and even imprisoned for maintaining contact with tourists. There are places in Cuba where Cubans are subject to restricted entry or time schedules so that they will not be present at the same time as tourists.

It must be understood that for years, European, Canadian, and Latin American tourists have traveled to Cuba, without having any impact on the Cuban reality, but rather on the government's coffers.

It is an error to think that American tourism will mean something positive to the Cuban people. What the Cuban people need once again is the support of the American people in their struggle for freedom. The Cuban people and the internal resistance, more so than they need tourists, need people who will stand in solidarity in the US Congress and advocate for their liberation.

Read the whole thing, via Capitol Hill Cubans, here.

Cuba is Spanish for Iran

The dictatorial brethern of the Castro regime are found around the world. In Venezuela. In Burma. And, as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reported today, in Iran. If you oppose repression and tyranny in one place, there's no excuse not to somewhere else.

Their ideologies are different — albeit, not by that much — but the secret police and their masters in the Tehran government, use tactics and justifications not unlike those perfected by the Cubans to persecute and prosecute independent journalists.

RSF reports:

Reporters Without Borders strongly condemns the arrest yesterday of journalist Emadeddin Baghi on a charge of “propaganda against the government.” Baghi is a leading advocate of the rights of prisoners of conscience in Iran.

“Baghi’s arrest is an example of the strategy of harassment and pressure being used against journalists by the Iranian authorities, who are trying to silence the growing number who are demanding the legitimate right to a free and independent press,” the press freedom organisation said.

Reporters Without Borders added: “We urge all democratic countries to firmly condemn Baghi’s arbitrary arrest and we call for the release of all of Iran’s prisoners of conscience, who are growing in number by the month.”

Baghi was arrested when he responded to a summons to report to a Tehran revolutionary court. The summons listed new charges against him. His lawyer said he is now accused of propaganda against the government and “publishing secret government documents obtained with the help of prisoners held for security violations in special centres.”

Read the rest here.

The hypocrisy of the Washington Post

Humberto Fontova nails the Washington Post to the wall, with nothing but the facts, for its publication of Pat Oliphant's cartoon assault on Cuban Americans:

Note that a smiling Uncle Sam insults an American ethnic group as “nuisances" while forcibly expelling them from the nation in a rickety boat titled "Cuban-Americans," while these scowling, elderly and Mafiosi-clad people scream “we demand a chance to interfere with the '08 election!”

By “interfere” we have to assume the cartoonist refers to the right, privilege and duty bestowed upon U.S. citizens known as "voting." It so happens that the cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, is himself an immigrant to this country. In an interview with Time magazine he admitted to “leaning Democratic” in his politics.

I now invite you to contemplate the reaction from the usual political-correctness police had any other U.S. ethnic group (except overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-Americans) inhabited that boat. Imagine the fire and brimstone (literal, perhaps) if instead of Fedoras (rarely worn by Cuban-Americans, by the way) the group had worn kuffiyeh's, burkha's and chadors!

Imagine the clamor and attempted extortions followed by craven apologies and grovelings if the boat's passengers had been "nappy-headed" and headed for Africa! Imagine the rallies in Los Angeles and the indignant blusterings by California politicians and Nancy Pelosi if they'd worn sombreros!

Such cartoons are indeed imaginable with other ethnic groups — but surely with Uncle Sam cast as the villain, wearing a white hood, a swastika or an Ann Coulter mask. Maybe all three. In this one Uncle Sam smiles benevolently while handing the boat's ethnic occupants their just desserts.

Fontova concludes:

Attempting to enforce U.S. law as in potential expulsion, (with full due process) of, illegal immigrants is denounced by the Washington Post as "xenophobic," "shameful," "poisonous," "nativist," "cruel," "self defeating," "illogical," and "ugly."

But a cartoon celebrating the expulsion of Americans who happened to be foreign-born, who played by the rules, who became U.S. citizens, who then outpaced even the overall U.S. population in educational and income levels (in "Americanization" you might say) and who specialize in exercising their right and duty to vote, well, these vermin should be shoved off en masse to Stalinist prison camps by a smiling Uncle Sam. Unreal.

Read the whole thing here.

If Cuban Americans had a history of going on murderous rampages when a cartoon pisses us off ...

... maybe the Washington Post would protect our sensibilities, too.

However, since most of us are relatively civil and understand that in a democracy, you aren't free to burn buildings and kill people just because a cartoon offends you, we get treated like this.

I am not suggesting we act any differently, if only because the idea of "crazy Cubans" is much easier for many in the media to accept, and harp on, than the idea of "crazy Muslims." No need to fuel those Oliphantian fires of bigotry and misperceptions.

I can hear the PC police now. The Oliphant and "Opus" cartoons are not the same thing. "Opus" ridiculed the very basic tenets of Islam, Oliphant criticized only Cuban Americans' political views, and that's fair game.

However, take a closer look at the Oliphant cartoon, and its real insidiousness is clear: Cuban Americans are interlopers, they are not Americans. Send them back to Cuba!

The insult against Cubans and Muslims is the same, but not the remedy. That's almost worse than the cartoon itself.

As Cubans, I know we can take a joke, even a sick and offensive one in some cartoon. We are not "victims," except of a brutal dictatorship and a world that for too long has not given a damn about us.

But the double standard exhibited with the Oliphant and "Opus" cartoons, is yet another example of the challenges Cuban Americans will face in telling our stories in a post-Fidel world.

(H/T Gusano at Babalú.)

Cartoon shows it's OK to hate Cubans (UPDATED)

I have thick skin, so it takes a lot to offend me, especially if you are going to go after me because I am Cuban. Our sense of humor equips us with what we need to deal with that kind of idiocy.

But this cartoon is too much. The worst part is not that the cartoon misrepresents Barack Obama's position or what most Cuban Americans want from American policy towards Cuba.

What is most offensive is the suggestion by Pat Oliphant and his editors, that Cuban Americans are somehow less "American." That we are "nuisances," a new safe target for the worst of our angels, the xenophobia and racism that has been a constant, covertly and overtly, of our politics and our society for too much of our history.

Political correctness?

Cubans need not apply for protection, just get to the back of the bus. Or better yet, just get the hell out of here.

You can't depict in cartoons Jews or Muslims on a boat back to the Middle East or blacks on ship back to Africa. Nothing PC about that.

But sure, there's nothing wrong with ridiculing Cubans with the suggestion they be placed on a raft back to Cuba. After all, They're just a bunch of crazies.

(H/T Babalú.)

UPDATED, 3:21 p.m. EDT

Ziva has a version of this cartoon that would never be published in most American newspapers.

A reader asks why I am not more indignant about anti-Cuban version of the cartoon, the one published in a supposedly enlightened newspaper like the Washington Post.

I am angered by the cartoon, and I thought I got that across in my original post. But frankly, there are more important things to do than to throw a fit about a cartoon.

However, the cartoon — and that it was allowed to be published in a major news outlet — illustrates the magnitude of the challenge facing those of us who advocate for Cuban liberty.

Too many Americans, and too many in other parts of the world, just don't get it, they don't get the barbarity of the regime in the Havana and how it deprives its own people of life, liberty and the purusit of happiness. They see Cuba as an American problem, the result of something this country did wrong 50 years ago, and the mistakes it keeps making. If we would just leave Castro alone, or better yet, help him, all would be better.

People really think that, trust me. That's the mindset we are facing as we blog and demonstrate and whatever else we do, to show solidarity and support for our brothers and sisters on the island. For us, Cuba is, at least, another South Africa deserving of the same scorn and sanctions that helped bring down apartheid. Too many others disagree, and too often they prevail in the media and elsewhere.

So if I and others don't get too indignant about a cartoon, that's OK. Because the cartoon only is a symptom of a much greater challenge before us.

One last note about the cartoon:

The cartoon not only reflects a gross lack of respect for Cuban Americans and what we have brought to this country. It also represents a disdain, a hatred for all immigrants, that they somehow are deserving of the liberties and protections that come with living in America. Part of that is a lack of understanding about Cuba, but it also reflects the bigotry and hatred towards many Hispanics that has been stirred up during the ongoing debate about immigration reform. Undoubtedly, the coming developments in Cuba will become wrapped up in that discussion, giving this type of filth a chance to propogate if it is left unchallenged.

He's heavy, he's big brother

Not that Granma and other commie rags are real newspapers, but there is something very bizarre — but not surprising — about the Cuban government's new way of spying on writers and editors with the state-run media. Reporters Without Borders reports:

At the behest of communication minister Ramiro Valdés, the Cuban Institute for Radio and Television sent a letter to the heads of state media on 13 August announcing new restrictions on their staff. They must henceforth use a portal created by the Cuban state telecommunications company, enet.cu, to access websites and email services. This will enable the government to easily monitor their online activity.

“Forcing state media journalists to go through a government website so that all their online activity can be monitored is further evidence of the government’s paranoia,” Reporters Without Borders said. “It is important to remember that the overwhelming majority of Cuban citizens are not allowed to have a connection to the Internet on the pretext that the US embargo has held up its development.”

According to the Madrid-based website Encuentro en la Red, the letter also instructed state media to make an “appropriate” choice of staff to update their websites and said the web-browsing facilities made available to “trusted” journalists could be subject to additional controls. It is the journalists of the official daily newspapers Granma, Juventud Rebelde and Trabajadores who will be forced to use the new Internet connection method.

The letter, sent out on Fidel Castro’s 81st birthday, follows the communication minister’s comment in February that the Internet was a “tool of global extermination” that had to be “controlled.” Encuentro en la Red said print media journalists have already been restricted to an hour of web-surfing a day since 2003. In April of this year, the government blocked access to Yahoo! and Hotmail websites from the state radio and TV stations.

Read Encuentro en la Red's original story, in Spanish, here.

(Cross-posted at Babalú.)

My promise to Sean Penn

As a newspaper reporter and editor with more than 18 years of experience, I have an offer for Oscar-award winning actor Sean Penn:

If he quits trying to be a "journalist," I promise never to try acting.

Funniest thing I read today

From an Associated Press story about the scheduling of "elections" for the Cuban National Assembly:

Cuba defends its system as democratic, but critics of the government argue that tight state control, a heavy police presence and neighborhood-watch groups that report on their neighbors prevent any real political freedom.

I am a journalist, so I know all about the importance of being "fair and balanced." This type of "nut graph" is inserted into all sorts of stories every day, almost as a throwaway line.

But I wonder exactly where in the world the AP has found real political freedom, where there also are "tight state control, a heavy police presence and neighborhood-watch groups that report on their neighbors."

Certainly not in Cuba — at least not in the Cuba not visited by Cindy Adams.

There is "fair and balanced," and then there is of this world.

I'm not sure this observation by the AP correspondent is either.

Read your favorite columnist

Today is National Columnists Day.

Here, here, here, here, here, here and here are some recent works from some columnists always worth reading.