Free Republic

Yolanda Mauri’s ancestors almost certainly came to Cuba in chains, laboring as slaves on an island of French coffee plantations and fields of Spanish sugarcane. Her parents became their family’s first professionals, graduating with engineering degrees after Cuba’s 1959 revolution ended segregation. Mauri, 26, graduated from an elite technical university with a degree in computer programming. Today, she struggles to patch together a living from poorly paid government work and freelance jobs like building websites. She feels the sting of racism in casual derogatory comments or a maître d’s refusal to seat her in an expensive restaurant. For Mauri and...

"This is the beginning of a new day! In my household [Fidel] is known as the ultimate survivor." Fidel himself, in a letter in the state-run Granma newspaper, saluted "this legislative group. The aura of Martin Luther King is accompanying them." To others of us who honor King, there is a barely surviving black Cuban disciple of King (and Mohandas Gandhi) whom the caucus visitors did not meet because he has been in a Castro brothers' cage for many years and was off-limits to them. He is Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, and he is among those designated by Amnesty International...

Blacks of a Lesser GodBy Myles KantorFrontPageMagazine.com | April 18, 2003 “It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money,” the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass said in the winter of 1860.The occasion was a speech in Boston’s Music Hall.  A mob had broken up an anti-slavery meeting there a week before, and Douglass rose in defense of free speech:"No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the...