Rival Protesters Clash at Cuba's Venezuela Embassy

yahoo.com news ^ | April 27, 2003 | Reuters

[Cincinatus' Wife]

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan police fired tear gas to separate opponents and supporters of Cuban President Fidel Castro who clashed on Saturday near the Cuban embassy in Caracas.

Around 100 anti-Castro demonstrators and opponents of Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez gathered near the embassy to protest the Cuban government's recent jailing of dozens of political dissidents. Police carrying riot shields kept them a block away from the embassy.

National guardsmen shoot tear gas at protesters in Caracas on April 26, 2003. Venezuelan troops and police fired tear gas and shotgun pellets to separate opponents and supporters of Cuban President Fidel Castro who clashed near the Cuban Embassy. (Chico Sanchez/Reuters)

The protesters carried Venezuelan flags and banners, including one reading "Castro, Cuba's executioner," which criticized the April 11 executions in Cuba of three men who hijacked a ferry in a bid to reach the United States.

A smaller group of supporters of Castro and Chavez, many carrying posters of Castro, confronted them. The two sides exchanged taunts and insults, then started throwing stones and bottles. Police fired tear gas to separate them.

The topic of communist-ruled Cuba, where Castro is facing a storm of international criticism over his crackdown, is highly sensitive in Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Chavez, a former paratrooper who was first elected in 1998, is a close friend and political ally of the Cuban leader and has turned his oil-rich country into the Caribbean island's single biggest trading partner.

Venezuela ships oil to Cuba under a preferential energy accord and several hundred Cuban doctors, coaches and sugar specialists work in the South American country.

Foes of Chavez accuse him of trying to imitate the Cuban leader and of seeking to install Cuba-style communism in Venezuela.

Venezuela was the only country in Latin America to vote with Cuba this month against a U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution calling on the communist state to accept a visit by a U.N. envoy to probe alleged abuses. The resolution was passed overall by 24 votes to 20, with nine abstentions.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Fidel Castro - Cuba

Hugo Chavez - Venezuela

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, center, talks to supporters before a lecture to socialists and communists party members at in the northeastern city of Recife, Brazil,Saturday, April 26, 2003. Chavez is on his last day of visit to Brazil, after he met with Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Friday. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

Violent Clash Outside The Cuban Embassy in Paris***A cameraman from Televisión Española (TVE) as well as two directors from Reporters Without Frontiers (RWF) are among the injured in yesterday's confrontation outside the Cuban Embassy in Paris, when members of the security detail of said Embassy attacked a group of protesters gathered there to deliver a letter to Cuban Embassador Eumelio Caballero, protesting the recent wave of oppression set loose in the island.

"The Ambassador did not want to accept the letter. They didn't even open the gates. Then, some members of Reporters Without Frontiers chained themselves to the fence', said Cuban author Zoe Valdés, currently residing in Paris.

In her telephone interview with El Nuevo Herald, Valdés indicated that Embassy personnel "who are obviously not diplomats, but rather oppressors", exited the Embassy building carrying hammers and sledgehammers to break the protesters chains, whose hands and harms they beat, as well as striking several observers standing near by.

[FreeManWhoCan]

Those "Doctors" that Fidel keeps sending out are nothing more than agents. The Venezuelan security forces have Cuban agents infiltrated into them and Chavez is said to have Cuban bodyguards surrounding him.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Cuba Exports City Farming 'Revolution' to Venezuela - Has U.N. Blessing *** CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - In a conference room at Venezuela's military academy, a group of soldiers listen attentively to a pair of Cuban instructors. The subject being taught is not revolutionary guerrilla warfare as once practiced by Fidel Castro, but the "organoponic farming revolution," communist Cuba's latest export to its closest South American ally, Venezuela. "Organoponic gardening," a system of concentrated, organic urban vegetable cultivation, is taking root in central Caracas, amid the piles of garbage, bands of homeless beggars and tens of thousands of vehicles belching out polluting gas fumes.

Inspired by Cuba's system of urban market gardens, which has been operating for several years, left-wing President Hugo Chavez has ordered the creation of similar intensive city plots across Venezuela in a bid to develop food self-sufficiency in the world's No. 5 oil exporter. "Let's sow our cities with organic, hydroponic mini-gardens," said the populist former paratrooper, who survived a brief coup a year ago and toughed out a crippling opposition strike in December and January. Inside Fuerte Tiuna military headquarters, soldiers of the crack Ayala armored battalion supervised by Cuban instructors have swapped their rifles for shovels and hoes to tend neat rows of lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, coriander and parsley.

Since his election in late 1998, Chavez has drafted the armed forces to serve his self-styled "revolution" in a range of social projects, from providing medical services to running low-cost food markets for the poor. Besides the military vegetable patch in Fuerte Tiuna, the government has also planted a 1.2 acre (half-hectare) plot in Caracas' downtown Bellas Artes district. The market garden, denominated "Bolivar 1" in honor of Venezuela's independence hero Simon Bolivar, is being run by an agricultural cooperative set up in a nearby poor neighborhood.

PUBLIC SKEPTICISM The sight of sprouting vegetables nestling in concrete-lined earth beds behind wire fences in central Caracas causes many passers-by to stare. "This might be all right to provide for a family but not to feed a country," scoffed Diego Di Coccio, a 40-year-old unemployed businessman. "They should use the money to unblock the drains," said chemical technician Hector Gonzalez, pointing to the piles of rubbish in the streets around. Skeptics question why resource-rich Venezuela should need urban vegetable gardens when it has hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile farming land, much not in use. ***

[Luis Gonzalez]

World support is unraveling for Fidel.

[Luis Gonzalez]

BTTT!!!!

[Howlin]

Has Castro decided to provoke us? He has really ramped it up, hasn't he?

Or is he cleaning house in case he's next?

[Luis Gonzalez]

Sat Apr 26, 9:59 AM ET

Demonstrators wave Cuban and Venezuelan flags and holding a banner reading 'Liberty for the Cuban people. No more wars. I love Cuba,' as they shout slogans against Cuban President Fidel Castro (news - web sites), in central Madrid April 26, 2003 during a protest against the April 11 execution of three men who commandeered a Havana commuter ferry in a bid to reach U.S. soil. Castro defended the firing squad executions as a deterrent to a mass exodus that he said the United States was seeking to provoke in communist-run Cuba. REUTERS/Andrea Comas

[Luis Gonzalez]

Sat Apr 26,10:09 AM ET

A demonstrator holds up a banner in central Madrid April 26, 2003, during a protest against the April 11 execution of three men who commandeered a Havana commuter ferry in a bid to reach U.S. soil. Cuban President Fidel Castro (news - web sites) defended the firing squad executions as a deterrent to a mass exodus that he said the United States was seeking to provoke in communist-run Cuba. The executions, which followed the arrests of 75 dissidents in the worst political repression in Cuba in decades, prompted an outpouring of criticism worldwide and lost Castro some close friends among left-wing intellectuals, such as Portuguese Nobel prize winning writer Jose Saramago and Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano. REUTERS/Andrea Comas

[Grampa Dave]

Good! It is about time.

Wait until we find out how much he has paid the NY Slimes and other liberal mediots for them to make him look like a Poster Boy of what is good in S America.

[TLBSHOW]

THANKS FOR THE PING AND DID YOU READ THIS ONE?

Fuentes warned it will be hard for Castro to bounce back.

The Cuban president, he said, is preparing "the way for his own exit from the world stage in a hail of flames."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/900683/posts?page=

[Dec31,1999]

Libertad-para-el-pueblo-Cubano bump.

[Alamo-Girl]

I'm very glad to see world support for Castro falling away! Thanks for the heads up!

[b4its2late]

Castro should be pushing up daisies.......

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bump!!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Wifes and mothers of jailed Cuban dissidents walk in silence in Havana April 27, 2003, after a mass in the church of Santa Rita to protest the emprisonment of their husbands and sons, recently sentenced to long prison terms in the harshest political repression in decades in Cuba. The jailing of the 75 dissidents, human rights activist and independent journalists, accused by Cuban government of conspiring with the United States to undermine Cuban revolution, brought an outpouring of international criticism. REUTERS/Rafael Perez

Wifes and mothers of jailed Cuban dissidents walk in silence in Havana April 27, 2003, after a mass in the church of Santa Rita to protest the emprisonment of their husbands and sons, recently sentenced to long prison terms in the harshest political repression in decades in Cuba. 'We are here to pray and protest the unfair jailing of our husbands and sons,' said Blanca Reyes (in the center of the picture), wife of poet and independent journalist Raul Rivero, sentenced to 20 years of jail. The jailing of the 75 dissidents, human rights activist and independent journalists, accused by Cuban government of conspiring with the United States to undermine Cuban revolution, brought an outpouring of international criticism. REUTERS/Rafael Perez

[PhilDragoo]

Fidel y Hugo side by side: one shot, two kills.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Willful blindness shattered by Cuba's crackdown - Castro shows the brutal face of his regime***The wilful blindness to President Castro's repression has been underlined by the shock at the recent crackdown. The Pope, who insisted on his controversial visit to Havana five years ago that he had won significant human rights concessions, spoke of his "deep sorrow" at the executions and urged Señor Castro to consider a "significant gesture of clemency" toward those convicted. Perhaps the biggest shock was felt by the writers, poets and artists who have long defended Cuba and its autocratic ruler. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes called the country "a suffocating dictatorship", the Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago said Fidel Castro "cheated his enemies" and the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, who once praised him as a "symbol of national dignity", acknowledged that the crackdown had fuelled opposition claims that he was a dictator. There have been demonstrations in Caracas and Madrid.***