Without One Vote Against

When Castro says that Cuba is the most democratic country in the world, I am uncertain if he is being serious or it is black humor. I can understand that a lifelong guerrilla, fiercely opposed to the capitalist model, does not appreciate at all the system of representative democracy in the Western world.

But from there to setting up a series of institutions, silent and obedient to the government, where the three branches of State are controlled by one person and to tell us that this is the only true democracy, confirms to me that all autocrats have that pathological mania to appear as democrats.

A dictator should state clearly that he is going to rule until his death, because he considers himself a superior being. Or because he does what the hell he wants.

Any resemblance is not purely coincidental

I’m sick of the lies. Perhaps true democracy does not exist. In countries where universally accepted laws operate and human rights are respected, failures occur in bulk, but people shout what they want against their government and no one will look at you with a mean face.

Also, there are independent courts and parliament is like a madhouse, where everyone disagrees with the package of measures released by the president. That’s what I mean by a democracy.

In Cuba, when the Castros talk nobody can go against them. Publicly, no one has ever been seen raising their hand to tell the comandante that he is pondering a load of nonsense.

On the island, everyone is wrong. The infallible are the Castros. If things in Cuba are crooked it’s not by their misrule. No, the ‘guilty’ are the negligent workers and certain talentless ministers.

General Raul Castro wants there to be disagreement. But when they end their speeches and the president of the dull and monotonous Cuban parliament asks the members whether they agree with the words of the leader, everyone, absolutely everyone, raises their hand.

I will believe in the Socialist democracy, as advocated by the regime in Havana, when you see a negative vote.

By Iván García

From: Translating Cuba

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Rapper Who Hails Stalinist Mass-Murderer Invited to White House

Jay-Z, another "revolutionary" rapper.

For inviting the rapper-“poet” named “Common,” to the White House, our First Lady is currently taking some heat. Common’s lyric, it appears, are a trifle “racy,” plus in his “poetry”, he hails Black-Panther/Cop-killer Joan “Assata Shakur” Chesimard.

But for inviting a rapper who identified with a Stalinist mass-murderer who denounced President Obama’s co-citizens as, “hyenas fit only for extermination!” and who openly craved to incinerate millions of them with a surprise nuclear attack….well, not much.

Such is the news cycle.

Above I refer to rapper Jay-Z, honored (on March 4th 2010) in the very White House his T-shirt idol craved to incinerate (in Oct. 1962) and the rapper’s idol, Communist mass-murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

“I’m like Che Guevara with a bling on!” (Jay-Z in his Black Album)

“The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!” raved Jay-Z’s T-shirt idol in his Message to the Tri-Continental Conference in 1966. “Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The solutions to the world’s problems lie behind the iron Curtain. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims! We must keep our hatred against them (the U.S.) alive and fan it to paroxysms!”

More interestingly still, the cop-killer hailed by current White House invitee “Common” in his compositions (along with dozens of other fugitives from U.S. law) has been sheltered for decades by the very regime Che Guevara co-founded.

So we wonder: being as President Obama (apparently) violated Pakistan’s sovereignty in going after Osama Bin Laden, will President Obama now go after Assata Shakur in the same manner? Shakur, after all, was actually convicted of murder in U.S. courts. Seems he’d have a better case, in the view of international opinion, against her.

Imagine the MSM uproar if Pres. George Bush had invited, say, a David Duke T-shirt wearer to the White House! Well, from his very diaries, here’s Jay-Z’s idol, Ernesto “Che” Guevara:

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and booze, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent. The negro has maintained his racial purity by his well known habit of avoiding baths.”

In fact, this is not Obama people’s first public brush with Che Guevara. In Feb. 2008 Houston’s Fox TV station interviewed some Obama campaign volunteers (a precinct captain and head of the “Houston Obama Leadership Team”) who had festooned their offices with Che Guevara banners and Cuban flags. The MSM kept mum, but the conservative blogosphere spread the story. Intrepid blogger Henry Gomez (Babalu Blog), then uncovered 15 different pages of Che Guevara well-wishers on the official Obama campaign site.

More interestingly, those Che Guevara posters had not been hung by a young volunteer who dug the cool looking dude’s awesome guitar licks for the Foo Fighters, or by an older one who thought she remembered the groovy guy with the beret “hangin” with Wavy Gravy at Woodstock. No, the campaign volunteer who hung the Che poster is named Maria Isabel and according to the Lone Star Times, she had hung similar banners from her balcony at home.

Joan “Assata Shakur” Chesimard

Most interestingly, she is a middle-aged woman who was born in Cuba and lived there as a child during the very period when Che Guevara was Cuba’s chief executioner and second in command. At the time Cuba had the highest political incarceration and execution rate on earth, far surpassing that of their Soviet mentors and suitors.

As a public service for Jay-Z handlers and Obama White House staff and operatives, I provide the following: Ernesto “Che” Guevara was second in command, chief executioner, and chief KGB liaison for a regime that outlawed elections and private property. This regime’s KGB-supervised police—employing the midnight knock and the dawn raid among other devices—rounded up and jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin’s and murdered more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered (out of a population of 70 million) in its first six.

Che Guevara’s regime also shattered—through executions, jailings, mass larceny and exile—virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Cuban regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Che Guevara’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag. But please, please, please don’t bother looking for any History Channel, NPR, or 20/20 interviews with these heroes. They were victims’ of the Left’s premier poster boys, you see.

The regime Che Guevara co-founded stole the savings and property of 6.4 million citizens, made refugees of 20 per cent of the population from a nation formerly deluged with immigrants and whose citizens had achieved a higher standard of living than those residing in half of Europe.

Under Che Guevara’s rule “change” indeed came to Cuba.

But don’t misinterpret Che Guevara’s bluster with actual bravery. His stock in trade was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys—bound and gagged is how he demanded his victims. On Oct. 8, 1967, upon finally encountering armed and determined enemies, Che quickly dropped his fully-loaded weapons and whimpered: “Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

Humberto Fontova

From: CFP

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Women’s History Month and Castro’s Female Victims

1994: Cuban women fleeing Castro's  “improvement of status” and “good life”.

When Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro in 1977 cooing: “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful.” dozens of Cuban suffragettes suffered in torture chambers within walking distance of the hyperventilating Ms. Walters.

“They started by beating us with twisted coils of electric cable,” recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”

“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls Manuela Calvo from exile today. “But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us unto the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”

“When female guards couldn’t handle us, male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely with their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalls Polita Grau in Unvanquished: Cuba's Resistance to Fidel Castro

Ok, I apologize for baiting feminist readers during this Women’s History Month “with the term “suffragette.” In fact, voting was merely one of the rights these heroic Cuban ladies sought. Castro’s Stalinist regime jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s own, murdered more political prisoners in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six, and abolished private property. And yes, Castro also outlawed voting. So you’ll please excuse these Cuban ladies if they regard the “struggles” of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem as a trifle overblown.

I also apologize for singling out Barbara Walters. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell also had praise for the tryant: “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!”

Back in 1996 Fidel Castro was hosted by Mort Zuckerman at his Fifth Avenue pad. A throng of Beltway glitterati, including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer all jostled for a photo-op and stood in line for Castro’s autograph. But Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass-murderer’s presence that she lost control, rushing up, breaking into that toothy smile of hers, wrapping her arms around Castro and smooching the Stalinist torturer on his bearded cheek.

“You people are the cream of the crop!” beamed the Stalinist/terrorist to the smiling throng he’d come within a hair of nuking in 1962.

“Hear, hear!” chirped the delighted guests, while tinkling their wine glasses in honor of the smirking agent of their near vaporization.

We’re smack in the middle of “Women’s History Month.” So let’s chew on this: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown–not only in Cuba–but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell and Diane Sawyer came into power. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.

Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo: “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

Many of these heroic ladies (Ana Rodriguez, Miriam Ortega, Georgina Cid, Caridad Roque, Mercedes Pena, Aída Díaz Morejón, Ana Lázara Rodríguez, Ágata Villarquide, Alicia del Busto, Ileana Curra) live in the U.S. today. But no producer for Oprah or Joy Behar or Katie Couric, none from the Lifetime or Oxygen TV–much less the History Channel, has ever called them. No writer for Cosmo or Glamour or Redbook or Vogue has bothered either.

But you’ve certainly seen their torturer hailed by “Feminist” reporters.

Upon the death of Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espin in 2006, the Washington Post gushed that: “She was a champion of women’s rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” Actually, in 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates as a percentage of population than the U.S.

This Castroite “improvement of status” and “good life” for Cuban women also somehow tripled Cuban women’s pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.

On Christmas Eve of 1961 a Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. Castro’s Russian-trained secret police had found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Cubans who took up arms to fight the Stalinist theft of their land to build Soviet –style Kolkhozes.) When the blast from Castroite firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant. These Taliban-like atrocities against women were perpetrated by a regime gushed over by Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer, Medea Benjamin, Maxine Waters and so many other “feminists.”

Thousands upon thousands of Cuban women have drowned, died of thirst or have been eaten alive by sharks attempting to flee the Washington Post’s dutifully transcribed “improvement of status.” This from a nation formerly richer than half the nations of Europe and deluged by immigrants from same.

By Humberto Fontova

From: FrontPage Magazine

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Libya is no Cuba, Gadaffi is no Castro or Che

Gadaffi and Castro in the "old times".

"The only real power comes out of a rifle." Joseph Stalin

"Death is the solution to all problems - no man, no problem." Joseph Stalin

"I trust no one, not even myself." Joseph Stalin.

“I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated!” Che Guevara 1956.

A tribal dictatorship on Gadaffi’s model is vastly different from a Stalinist one on the Castro model. Gadaffi’s goons-for-pay are certainly murdering people in Libya—but it appears a haphazard and tardy affair. “A bumbling, haphazard and amateurish affair,” veteran Stalinists Fidel and Raul Castro are probably nodding to themselves. “We could have shown Gadaffi the proper remedy for these matters.”

“When even a portion of your armed forces turn against you—you’ve had it,” any Stalinist could have advised Gadaffi. “You nip these things in the bud.”

Upon arriving in Havana in Jan. of 1959 Che Guevara immediately recognized the moat around Havana's La Cabana fortress as a handy-dandy execution pit. At Babi-Yar, Hitler's SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had one ready-made and so they put their firing squads to work in triple-shifts.

Cuban-American Scholar Dr. Armando Lago documents 1,168 firing squad murders in the first few months of 1959. The Black Book of Communisms estimates 14,000 by the end of the 60’s.Vengeance – much less justice – had nothing to do with this bloodbath. Che's murderous method in La Cabana fortress in 1959 was exactly Stalin's murderous method in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Like Stalin's massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest, like Stalin's Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier, Che's (Castro-ordered) firing squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise that served their purpose ideally. This bloodbath decapitated – literally and figuratively--the first ranks of Cuba's Contras.

The victims were overwhelmingly military and police officers. Watching how many of these refused blindfolds and yelled defiantly at their murderers before the volley shattered their bodies show that the Cuban Bolsheviks had been diligent in rounding up the right victims. dustry" in Cuba (tourism) is run primarily by Cuba's generals. They also run the export industries. If anyone craves “stability” in Cuba, it's these high-rolling graduates of Cuba' Military Academy—but not just because of fiduciary considerations.

The Red Terror had come to Cuba.

Today Cuba's military is fat and happy -- has been for decades. They run Cuba. The only thing properly describable as an "in

Tito Rodriguez Oltmans, a former Cuban freedom-fighter and political prisoner, watched many of these men, as young cadets, perform one of the requisites for graduation from Cuba's military academy of the time. "They were all armed with Belgian .308 caliber FALs as they lined up for the firing squad," recalls Mr. Rodriguez, a prisoner in La Cabana prison in the early 1960s. "Every evening the cadets would be bused in from the Managua army base and the Mariel naval base near Havana. As darkness fell the condemned patriot -- shirtless and gagged -- would be dragged to the execution wall and bound. The cadets would line up only four meters in front of the patriot and all had loaded weapons." ... FUEGO!

A brief aside: historically and almost universally, most members of a firing squad shoot blanks, to assuage their conscience. But such assuaging would contradict the Cuban firing squads' most vital purpose, secretly named "El Compromiso Sangriento" (the Blood Covenant.) This tried and true Soviet scheme was presented by Soviet GRU agent Angel Ciutat to Che Guevara just weeks after he and Fidel entered Havana in January 1959. The scene was a meeting at Che's palatial (and recently stolen) estate in Tarara just west of Havana. Every candidate for officer, suggested Ciutat, would take his place in a firing squad and pull the trigger with live ammo.

In front of a genuine Soviet GRU agent, Che (who often signed his name Stalin II) was undoubtedly smitten and instantly embraced the idea. So let's see here: a policy suggested by a Soviet butcher and adopted by an Argentine hobo for murdering Cuban patriots, instantly became government policy in newly "nationalist" Cuba.

As recently documented by Cuban-American scholar Jose Azel, Cuba’s “Social media” is so tiny as to be essentially irrelevant. Cuba—a nation with more phones and TVs per capita than most European countries in 1958--today has fewer internet connections per-capita than Uganda and fewer cell phones than Papua New Guinea. The Stalinist regime is very vigilant in these matters.

Castro’s police state controls what its subjects, read, say, earn, eat (both food and amount), where they live, travel or work. In the mid 1990's the Catholic Human Rights group Pax Christi headquartered in Belgium, visited Cuba and (secretly) conducted a study on the status of the neighborhood snitch committees known as CDR's. Castro, under East German STASI tutelage, installed these in 1960, making a potential regime spy out of half the population. Instilling the pervasive fear and a mutual-suspicion society is essential to every communist dictatorship.

“Fear is the basic instrument of (Cuban) political control,” concludes the study. "There is one CDR for every 140 Cubans. The information at the State Security’s disposal can be used to threaten and intimidate anybody. There is no place to escape the tentacles of the State. Most ordinary Cubans reported that they remained intensely wary of CDR surveillance, even while conversing in their own homes.”

The CDRs also supervise the issuing of the monthly food ration cards to all Castro's subjects. “Food is a weapon” famously snickered Stalin's foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov during the Ukrainian Holocaust. 

Humberto Fontova 

From: TownHall

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Lincoln Center Sponsors Jazz for Castro-Stalinism

30 years ago the Jazz was still "an instrument of the U.S. imperialism" in Castro's Cuba, together with other "capitalist" music genres. In the picture, the Jazz Band Sagua from the 1920s, one of the first Cuban Jazz Bands

Multi-Grammy winner Wynton Marsalis, who serves as artistic director for jazz at the Lincoln Center, also serves as an official "United Nations Messenger of Peace."  On Martin Luther King Day 2006, Mr Marsalis addressed Tulane University, quoting Dr King's words and hailing his deeds. "Dr. King's actions made his dream our reality," Marsalis beamed.

In 2004 The Lincoln Center, with Wynton Marsalis as top act, held a concert titled the "Celebration of Human Rights and Social Justice."

Wynton Marsalis and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra spent all of last week as a grateful guest of a Stalinist/Apartheid regime that murdered more political prisoners in its first three years in power than Hitler's murdered in its first six and that  jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin. Among these victims were the longest-suffering black political prisoners in modern history. Within walking distance of where Wynton Marsalis and his Lincoln Center jazz luminaries hob-knobbed with Castro officials at Havana's Teatro Mella,  black political prisoners were being tortured for the crime of publicly quoting the works of Marin Luther King and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Among these prisoners is Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, an Amnesty international prisoner of conscience who was awarded (obviously in absentia) The Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush in 2008.

Many Cuban blacks suffered longer incarceration in Castro's dungeons and torture chambers than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa's. In fact, they qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history. Eusebio Penalver, Ignacio Cuesta Valle, Antonio Lopez Munoz, Ricardo Valdes Cancio and many other Cuban blacks suffered almost 30 years in Castro's prisons. These men were bloodied in their fight against the Lincoln Center's partners but remained unbowed for almost 30 years in its dungeons.   Castro's KGB-trained torturers called these black prisoners "plantados" -- defiant ones, unbreakable ones.  

"Stalin tortured," wrote Arthur Koestler, "not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction."

"The worst part of Communism," wrote Solzhenitsyn, "is being forced to live a lie."

These Cuban blacks refused to collude in this lie. They spit in the face of Wynton Marsalis' hosts.  They scorned any "re-education" by the Lincoln Center's Stalinist partners.  They knew it was they who desperately needed it. They refused to wear the uniform of common criminals. They knew it was Marsalis' hosts who should don them. Charles Rangel, Jesse Jackson, Danny Glover, Jeremiah Wright and the Congressional Black Caucus  all toast the Stalinist torturer, and the Lincoln Center seems delighted with his partnership, but many of the Blacks cursed by fate to live under Fidel Castro stood tall, proud and defiant against his regime's  tortures.

Shortly before the former Cuban political prisoner's death in 2006, this writer had the honor of interviewing Eusebio Penalver. "For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell," Eusebio recalled. "That's 4 feet high, so you couldn't stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide."  Sr Penalver served several months of this 30 year sentence naked in a "punishment cell" barely big enough to stand in, where he languished naked and in complete darkness.

"N**ger!" taunted his jailers between tortures. "We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!" "Castro's apologists, those who excuse or downplay his crimes," said Mr Penalver.  "These people be they ignorant, stupid, mendacious whatever--they are accomplices in the bloody tyrant's crimes, accomplices in the most brutal and murderous regime in the hemisphere."

But have you ever heard of Eusebio Penalver or any of the other black Cuban heroes?   Ever see a CNN interview with them? Ever see any of them on "60 Minutes"? Ever read about them in The New York Times? The Washington Post?  Ever hear them on NPR during Black History Month? Ever seen anything on them on the History Channel or A&E? Ever hear the NAACP or Congressional Black Caucus mention him?

Why do I bother asking?  They were victims of the Left's premier pin-up boys, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. 'Nuff said.

Only six months before the Castroites invited Wynton Marsalis, they murdered Black human rights activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo. This black Cuban had endured an 83-day hunger strike seeking (vainly, as usual) to alert the world to the Castro regime's cowardly Stalinism and racism. Then in February of this year a series of savage beatings by his Communist jailers finished him off.  Naturally the MSM was no more revelatory of his death than they'd been of his jailing or hunger strike.

Samizdats smuggled out of Cuba by eye-witnesses report that while gleefully kicking and bludgeoning Tamayo, his Castroite jailers yelled: "Worthless Ni**er!"

Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 80% black while only 9% of the ruling Stalinist party is black. Many of a certain age well remember many of Wynton Marsalis' musical colleagues mounting a campaign called "Artists United Against Apartheid," aimed at boycotting South Africa, reviling any musicians who played there, and showcasing the human rights abuses suffered by South African Blacks.

Should we hold our breath for the same bunch to organize, "Artists United Against Castro-Stalinism?" 

To top it all, for this heart-warming "Cultural Exchange" the Lincoln Center partnered with Castro's Secret Police. Leftists, kindly stifle the shrieks of "Mc Carthyism  at American Thinker!" and instead read the following :

Here's the Wall Street Journal's report on this "Cultural Exchange" with Stalinist Cuba: "(Wynton Marsalis') invitation came under the auspices of the Cuban Institute of Music, an agency of the Cuban Ministry of Culture."

Now here's what Cuban Intelligence defector Jesus Perez-Mendes,  during a de-briefing in 1983,  disclosed to the FBI  about the Cuban Ministry of Culture: "the Circulo de Cultura Cubana (Cuban Ministry of Culture) is controlled by the Cuban DGI (Castro's KGB -trained Directorio General de Intelligencia.)  

By Humberto Fontova

From: American Thinker

Check this video for more information about Castro's regime:

Cuba: Winds of Change, Part 1

 

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