Free Republic

Ten years have passed since federal agents seized a Little Havana home snatching a 6-year-old boy from his Miami relatives and reuniting him with his father who lives in Cuba. The Elian Gonzalez saga had major political implications and some credit that single episode to the reason George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000. Elian Gonzalez survived a dangerous journey from Cuba after his mother and others died trying to reach South Florida. A fisherman found the 6-year-old boy holding onto an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day in 1999. Now, the fisherman who found him and his Miami relatives...

HAVANA: Fidel Castro is calling President Barack Obama's accepting of the Nobel Peace Prize a "cynical act," given that he is sending 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. The 83-year-old former Cuban leader initially applauded Obama's selection, but he has backed off that recently. In a column on a government website on Wednesday, Castro wrote: "Why did Obama accept the Nobel Peace Prize when he had already decided to take the war in Afghanistan to its ultimate limit?" Castro said Obama "was not obligated to commit a cynical act" by accepting the prize. He said Obama's Dec. 1 speech during...

HAVANA (AP) - Michael Douglas staged an impromptu walking tour of the Cuban capital's historic district Tuesday, posing for photos with construction workers and surprised residents. His visit came two days after fellow Oscar-winner Sean Penn arrived in Cuba, reportedly seeking an interview with 82-year-old Fidel Castro, who has been little seen since announcing he was suffering from an unspecified illness in July 2006. He stepped down as Cuba's president in February of the following year and was replaced by his brother Raul. Penn traveled to the Isle of Youth, off mainland Cuba on Monday to meet with local artists....

One of Fidel Castro's sisters says in a memoir released Monday that she collaborated with the CIA against her brother, starting shortly after the United States' failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Juanita Castro, 76, initially supported her brother's 1959 overthrow of the Batista dictatorship but quickly grew disillusioned. In a Spanish-language memoir published by Santillana USA and co-written by journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, she says the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to Cuba persuaded her to meet a CIA officer during a trip to Mexico in 1961. By then, her house had already become a sanctuary...

If Fidel Castro and Sean Penn are in the same room, which one do you think hates America more? Such a question doesn't seem to concern Vanity Fair who according to the website TMZ has hired Penn to write an article about how Barack Obama and his administration have impacted Cuba.

HAVANA – Cuban state media have released a second recent photo showing Fidel Castro in regular civilian clothing instead of the track suits that he commonly wore after falling ill in July 2006. In the picture, the 83-year-old Castro is shaking hands with the visiting head of the Chinese parliament in the walled backyard of an undisclosed home. Castro is wearing a red, short-sleeve dress shirt as he greets National People's Congress leader Wu Bangguo. ..

"The Kennedy family, in particular the assassinated President, John F. Kennedy, were representative of a new generation of Americans confronting the old and dirty politics of men in the mold of Nixon...The Kennedy family's (role) in Barack Obama's electoral victory should not be overlooked. Without that moral, political and financial support, the dirty saga of the Bush and Nixon clans would be continuing." That was a portion of an editorial last week in Stalinist Cuba's version of Nazi Germany's Der Sturmer. But no one familiar with Cuban history should doubt the editorials' sincerity. Fidel and Raul Castro, after all, owe...

Diane Watson: "You can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met."

HAVANA (Reuters) – Former Cuban President Fidel Castro marked his 83rd birthday on Thursday with a gloomy warning about the global economic crisis, which is hitting his country hard, and a vow to "carry on." Castro, the leader of Cuba's 1959 revolution that brought communism to the Caribbean island, has remained out of public view for the last three years and in 2008 handed over the presidency to younger brother Raul Castro for health reasons. But while he leaves day-to-day running of the government to Raul Castro, he remains influential behind the scenes and writes regular commentaries for state-run media....

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year, officials with state-run companies said on Friday. Officials said they were lowering the prices of 24 basic goods to help Cubans get through the difficulties provoked in part by the global financial crisis and three destructive hurricanes that struck the island last year. Cuba's financial reserves have been depleted by increased spending for imports and reduced export income, which has forced the communist-led government to take extraordinary measures to keep...

Last week, seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus...returned from a visit to Cuba where they met with the dictators of Cuba, Fidel and Raul Castro. They were quite impressed with Fidel Castro...

HAVANA -- Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro demanded on Thursday that President Barack Obama return the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo to Cuba without conditions, and he accused the new U.S. leader of supporting "Israeli genocide" against Palestinians. Castro, who had recently praised Obama as "honest" and "noble", lashed out at his administration for stating that Washington will not return Guantanamo if it has any military use for the United States and without concessions in return. "Maintaining a military base in Cuba against the will of the people violates the most elemental principles of international law," Castro wrote in a...

Havana - For more than a century, the United States has controlled the Guantanamo naval base in eastern Cuba for a measly $4,085 in lease fees per year. Cuba has long refused to cash the checks. Now, with President Barack Obama ordering the prison for terrorism suspects at the base closed within a year, Cuba is renewing demands that the U.S. hand over the entire base. "We have always said that Cuba expects to recover this territory," Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Wednesday, after announcing that Cuba was inviting the U.N. special investigator on torture to visit the island...

CARACAS, Venezuela – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday it is unlikely that ailing former Cuban leader Fidel Castro will ever appear in public again.

MIAMI - Fidel Castro has been booked in Miami for allegedly driving with a permanently revoked driver's license, police say. Before anyone storms Calle Ocho to celebrate, it's Fidel Christian Castro, 32, not the octogenarian Cuban dictator. The younger Castro appeared in Miami-Dade bond court this morning after his arrest, the Miami Herald reports. Castro was arrested Friday about 1:31 a.m. in a white Ford pickup truck on Southwest 23rd Street and 34th Avenue, police say.

As Cuba prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's revolution on 1 January, most of those in power are the same people who fought alongside him half a century ago. ...But there is a new generation of communists waiting in the wings. ...The youngest, Liaena Hernandez, is just 18 years old. A petite young woman with long black hair and an engaging smile, she has been a political activist since her early teens... "Having young Cubans in parliament shows that the revolution continues. It isn't just something from our history..." Her father is in the army and she...

Fidel Castro, the former President of Cuba, has offered to talk to Barack Obama, in Havana's latest overture to the US President elect. "With Obama, talks could happen anywhere he wants," the former head of the Communist regime wrote in the latest of a series of columns he has published in state-run media since falling ill in 2006. His remarks follow an offer from his brother, President Raul Castro, to meet Mr Obama "on neutral ground" to try to end the 40 year long conflict between the two countries. If taken up it would be the first meeting in half...

IF there was any question as to whether Steven Soderbergh's "Che" portrays the Marxist revolutionary as a hero, the four-hour movie will be shown next month in Cuba at Havana's New Latin American Film Festival. Event president Alfredo Guevara said in July that "Che" would not be shown if it included any "attacks" on Fidel Castro, who was Che's comrade in arms. But the film, starring Benicio Del Toro as the T-shirt icon, evidently passed muster with the dictator's regime. The stars and filmmakers will have to get US permission to attend the screenings, unless they sneak in like most...

Fidel Castro 'bedded 35,000 women'! From ANI New York, Sept 18: Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro has slept with 35,000 women in his 82 years of life, according to an upcoming documentary. "He slept with at least two women a day for more than four decades - one for lunch and one for supper," the New York Post quoted an ex-Castro official named "Ramon" as telling filmmaker Ian Halperin. "Sometimes he even ordered one for breakfast," the official said. "I don't think he would have stayed on as long as he did if not for all the incredible women he...

HAVANA (AP) — Cuban shoppers are snapping up DVD players, motorbikes and electric rice cookers that are going on sale to the general public for the first time. Lines stretch out the doors of major government department stores as Cubans gaze at the new gadgets on display. The goods that went on sale Tuesday previously were available only to foreigners. But the government of new President Raul Castro has lifted that ban. There was no sign yet of two highly anticipated items: computers and microwaves, though salespeople said computers would soon hit the shelves.