Free Republic

HAVANA -- At an age when most kids play stickball or videogames, Lazarito Castro focuses much of his energy on promoting Cuba’s socialist system, one speech at a time. The studious 14-year-old is not related to President Fidel Castro, but he is one of the comandante’s most passionate young disciples, a member of the Union of Young Communists who is known across Cuba for his fiery, fist-shaking speeches at massive government-organized rallies. Lazarito dreams of becoming a nuclear physicist when he grows up. But for now he sees himself as a soldier on the front lines of the “Battle of...

According to one ardent Barack Obama supporter in the House of Representives, Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.), if you oppose President Obama and Obamacare it is very likely because you are a racist. Her ideal of a great government leader, moreover, is Cuba's ruthless former dictator Fidel Castro, who has returned the compliment by praising Obama. Here are two brief excerpts from a video of Watson's disgraceful remarks shown on Hannity's America this week: WATSON: So, remember, they are spreading fear and they are trying to see that the first president who looks like me fails. And I want you to...

Eleno Oviedo can tell you a thing or two about torture. Oviedo spent 26 years as a political prisoner in Cuba’s hellish prisons. As Oviedo recalled in an interview with this columnist, he and other Cuban prisoners of conscience suffered beatings, extreme temperatures and isolation with very little food or medical care. They received threats of violence. And the Cuban authorities constitute a credible threat. Beatings were routine, and Oviedo said he heard “more than 300 times prisoners being executed” by firing squad. Many of the prisoners cried “Viva Cristo Rey,” as a final act of defiance and profession of...

The Obama Administration received political support from an unexpected source when retired Cuban dictator Fidel Castro denounced the “rightwing racists opposing this visionary leader” and urged all Americans with “progressive values to rally behind their new President.” While many Democratic Party leaders were uncertain that this endorsement would necessarily be advantageous, Representative Diane Watson (D-Calif) had no doubts. “President Castro is one of the brightest leaders I’ve ever met,” Watson said. “He gave his country a great health care system. If there’s anyone’s advice we should be taking on this issue it’s his.” Watson argued that “Fidel’s support coming on...

(English-language translation) HAVANA (AP) — The United States should implement the announced permission for Cuban-Americans to travel to Cuba, and the island should respond by eliminating exit restrictions on its citizens, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson recommended. This was one among a list of suggestions the American devised during his visit to the island, which ended on Friday. "There is a very good environment, the best I have seen in many years," Richardson stated in relation to a possible approach between the two countries. According to the governor, "humanitarian" steps should be taken to stimulate links between people [involved] in...

At CheapTickets we believe passionately in the power of travel to transform lives. And we believe that people should have the freedom to travel wherever they choose. Americans today have the right to travel to any country in the world except Cuba. Recently, we put our support behind OpenCuba.org, a campaign that gives people a way to petition U.S. leaders to end the 50-year Cuba travel ban and give all Americans the freedom to travel to Cuba. 159 Congressmen and 29 Senators recently sponsored the bipartisan Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act, which seeks to open up travel to Cuba...

<p>HAVANA, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- A Cuban retiree says the country’s toilet paper shortage has created a lucrative business for seniors -- buying and reselling newspapers as an alternative.</p> <p>The Havana retiree said he and other seniors line up before dawn to buy surplus newspapers from distribution points for factories and offices that have closed for economic reasons and shortages of electricity and raw materials, The Miami Herald reported Thursday.</p>

Two big questions hang over President Obama's radical "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones. Is he still a communist? Is he a security threat? Many have assumed that Van Jones' committment to communism ended when the organization he helped to lead STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) dissolved in 2002. Yet a 2004 treatise Reclaiming Revolution: History, Summation, and Lessons from the Work of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement written and endorsed by a majority of former STORM members makes it clear that most ex STORMers are still committed to the revolutionary movement; From page 49. When...

The elk in New Mexico are big and beautiful — a hunter's dream, a landowner's nightmare. Property owners across the state long have complained about wildlife overrunning their private land and destroying crops. But the problem is boiling over in the Sierra Nacimiento in northern New Mexico, where ranchers say they're being ignored and wildlife managers aren't doing enough to curb the damage or compensate them. Some frustrated property owners say they are considering a last resort: shooting the hungry animals. "We enjoy the elk. We don't mind the elk being around but we cannot feed the elk. If it...

In December 1917 Bolshevik Russian leaders, including one of the founders of Socialist thuggery Vladimir Lenin, established the Cheka—Russia’s first political secret police. With almost unlimited power, the Cheka implemented “campaigns of terror” against the wealthy, land owners and those who opposed Lenin and Bolshevism. !n 1922, once most of Russia’s opposition to their new absolute rulers had lessened, the Cheka was disbanded. However, under the singularly oppressive Josef Stalin, Cheka was reinstated and ultimately renamed “The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs” (NKVD) and what would be known as Stalin’s “Great Terror of the 1930s began. The NKVD was used...

HAVANA (Reuters) - President Barack Obama is trying to make positive changes in the United States, but is being fought at every turn by right-wingers who hate him because he is black, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Tuesday. In an unusually conciliatory column in the state-run media, Castro said Obama had inherited many problems from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and was trying to resolve them. But the "powerful extreme right won't be happy with anything that diminishes their prerogatives in the slightest way." Obama does not want to change the U.S. political and economic system, but "in...

In the course of the past month, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has been exposed as a supplier of advanced weapons to a terrorist group that seeks to overthrow Colombia's democratic government. In his own country, he has shut down 32 independent radio stations. His rubber-stamp National Assembly has passed laws to gerrymander districts in next year's parliamentary elections and eliminate the autonomy of universities. Chávez has pledged to purchase dozens of tanks from Russia, and scheduled a trip to Tehran... So, naturally, Latin American leaders are planning a summit in Argentina this month to urgently confer about...an unremarkable U.S.-Colombian agreement...

HAVANA – Cuba's Communist Youth newspaper is showing a photo of a healthier-looking Fidel Castro talking with the visiting Ecuadorean president. Sunday's photo in Juventud Rebelde shows the 83-year-old Castro wearing a white shirt instead of the sports apparel he has worn in recent photos. The meeting with Rafael Correa occurred Friday.

SNIPPET: "In March, La Nueva Cuba, an online newspaper, reported that “Russian personnel has been in Cuba for several months working on modernizing SIGINT operations in the old Lourdes surveillance and monitoring facility.” The Web site said the supposed renovation was: …part of a project of rearming and modernization of Russian armed forces and the goal of completion by 2011. The new operations could include military sections dedicated to hacking or computer systems espionage with a capacity to neutralize U.S. military networks… Then last week, an opinion piece appeared in Miami Herald. The headline: Cuba capable of waging a cyberwar....

HOLGUIN, Cuba — Former Cuban President Fidel Castro was famous for his marathon speeches...delivering grand, looping disquisitions that could last for hours in the broiling sun. But on Sunday...Castro’s successor and younger brother Raul was brief and direct in his state-of-the-union-style address — in keeping with his reputation as a practical man with little patience for the island’s plodding bureaucracy. The younger Castro, 78, told a crowd of several thousand in this eastern Cuban city that the country had to pull itself out of its ongoing financial straits by working harder, saving more, and going “back to the land” with...

(English-language translation) HAVANA - In a column in a Cuban newspaper, former President Fidel Castro commented that the United States spends millions of dollars in the arms industry but its President Barack Obama has to "sweat blood" to offer healthcare to its population. "In 2008, some $1.5 trillion were invested in defense budgets. Forty-two percent of worldwide expenses in that sphere, $607 billion, belonged to the United States, excluding war expenses," the former leader added in "Reflections", the opinion columns he publishes in the Cuban media. "While those colossal expenses in killing technologies are produced in the United States, that...

Russia and China, two potential U.S. adversaries in a future war, are committed to big increases in defense spending and global military adventures in the coming years, just as President Obama is forcing the Pentagon to scale back. The imbalance has defense experts worried that re-emergent Russia and China will be able to defeat U.S. forces in an air, sea and ground conflict because they will field superior fighters, ships and tanks in the next decades. This week, China announced its most ambitious military exercise to date. The People's Liberation Army is sending 50,000 troops to far reaches of the...

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....

SNIPPET: "In October 2009, as a result of successful appeals, a federal judge will reduce the sentences of five convicted spies who were part of the Cuban Wasp Network. Havana regularly refers to the spies as the "Cuban Five." One of the Wasp Network operatives who fled to Cuba, Juan Pablo Roque, abandoned a wife in the United States, whom he married only to obtain cover for his operations in the U.S. Simmons told International News Analysis that he is in process of completing a book about the "Cuban Five" and the cold-blooded manipulation of Ana Margarita Martinez, "the spy's...

There’s something deeply wrong with journalism that scrutinizes and criticizes the institutions of free and successful nations, but produces puff pieces on the supposed achievements of totalitarian dictatorships. On Thursday, CNN aired a piece of Communist Party propaganda about how Cuba could serve as “a model for health care reform” in the United States, complete with an authoritative sound bite from an American medical expert, identified only as someone “who’s lived and worked in Cuba for decades.”But the expert, Gail Reed, is a longtime admirer of the Cuban revolution, married to the Cuban official who served as ambassador to Grenada...

HAVANA – Cubans accustomed to hourslong speeches, thousand-word essays and lengthy interviews can now get Fidel Castro at a glance, thanks to a new dictionary of El Comandante's teachings. "Unemployment" and "History" are among the myriad words for which the 339-page paperback provides definitions — based on snippets of speeches, columns and statements dispensed by Castro during the 49 years he governed the communist-run island. The publication, which the government says is meant to provide guidance to Cuban thinkers, calls to mind the "Little Red Book" of the late Chinese communist leader, Chairman Mao Zedong.

"The corporation has taken all the steps so that at the end of the year there will be an important importation of toilet paper," an official with state conglomerate Cimex said on state-run Radio Rebelde. The shipment will enable the state-run company "to supply this demand that today is presenting problems," he said.

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. The shipment will enable the state-run company "to supply this demand that today is presenting problems," he said. Cuba both imports toilet paper and produces its own,...

Many people on the side of single-payer heath care praise the health care system of Cuba. For example just last month: Actor Terrence Howard cited Communist Cuba’s health care system as a good example of providing care for all people in contrast with health care in the United States, which he said was inadequate and resulted in people dying unnecessarily because of the costs for certain treatment and lack of access to doctors. “Well, what’s interesting is we’re level with third world countries in poverty but some of these third world countries still have individuals – they have a health...

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...

It is estimated that there are anywhere from 18-95 BILLION Barrels of oil underneath our continental shelf. There are almost 7 TRILLION Barrels of Oil in the shale under the Rocky Mountains (to be fair, with present technology we can only get to around 800 billion barrels of it). Today America Consumes about 20 Million Barrels/day approximately 7.5 million of which we get domestically. My math tells me, using the minimum numbers (18+800 Billion) divided by 20 million, divided by 365 days, the US has an import free Oil reserves of at least 112 YEARS. Drilling would be a true...

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's famous beret is gone. His iconic beard is filthy and matted against skeletal cheekbones. One bushy eyebrow arches over his half-open eyes. As a Bolivian country surgeon methodically saws off his lifeless hands, Che appears vaguely amused. Gustavo Villoldo, a stocky figure in green army fatigues, stands just inside the tiny laundry room where the Cuban revolutionary's corpse rests atop a sink. For five months, the CIA operative has led soldiers hunting Guevara through the rough crags and valleys of southern Bolivia. Less than 24 hours ago, his team had captured and executed him in a village...

MIAMI — In 1991, Carlos Domínguez, a family doctor in one of Havana’s poorest neighborhoods, bought a boat for 12,000 pesos — the equivalent of saving his entire paycheck for three years — to escape the government that had trained him to be an international doctor. The boat was old and needed to be outfitted with the transmission from a 1952 Ford, one of the many American cars that still cruise the streets of Havana. The mechanic warned him there was no reverse gear. The boat could only go forward. “Perfect,” Dr. Domínguez, now 46, said he replied. “I don’t...

HAVANA – Raul Castro announced Saturday that Cuba will cut spending on education and health care, potentially weakening the building blocks of its communist system in a bid to revive a floundering economy. The former defense minister who took over the presidency last year called state spending "simply unsustainable" and said the cash-strapped government would reorganize rural schools and scrutinize its free health care system in search of ways to save money. But he vowed that the island will not see fundamental change even after he and his older brother and predecessor Fidel Castro are gone. "I wasn't elected president...

HAVANA: It's hard to find a spare tire in Cuba these days, or a cup of yoghurt. Air conditioners are shut off in the dead heat. Factories close at peak hours, and workers go without their government-subsidized lunches. Cuba has ordered austere energy savings this summer, and the Council of Ministers and Communist Party Central Committee met this week to consider more cuts to cope with budget deficits and plummeting export profits. More likely, the shortages result from a global recession that hit an already struggling economy still reeling from last year's hurricanes. President Raul Castro told Cubans in a...

HAVANA, July 30 (Reuters) - Havana's famous seaside avenue, the Malecon, could be mistaken for Hollywood Boulevard this week as four high profile film stars come to the Cuban capital in the splashiest sign yet of warming U.S.-Cuba relations. Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Robert Duvall and James Caan arrived in Cuba on Wednesday, with del Toro in town to pick up an award and the other three working on a "research project," a spokesman for the group said on Thursday. The spokesman, who asked not to be identified, said the stars were accompanied by other people in the movie...

HAVANA (Reuters) - Hollywood came to Havana on Thursday as Cuban writers and artists gave an award to Benicio del Toro, star of the 2008 movie "Che," in a ceremony attended by fellow actors Bill Murray, Robert Duvall and James Caan. Murray stole the show when he improvised a version of the song "As Time Goes By" then jokingly passed around a hat, asking for money. Their presence lent a bit of Hollywood glitz to warming U.S.-Cuba relations, and may have been the precursor for the making of a film in Cuba. A spokesman for the group said del Toro...

Back in late April Fidel Castro stated that President Obama had no right to dare suggest that Cuba make even small concessions with the US. Now Castro has bullied Obama in an effort to squash free speech. Good work Mr.President.

The Obama administration has caved to demands from Fidel and Raul Castro's government to shut down a U.S.-sponsored electronic billboard in Havana. This is a symbolic step backward in America's mission to promote freedom.

Russia is to begin oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, after signing a deal with Cuba, says Cuban state media. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin signed four contracts securing exploration rights in Cuba's economic zone in the Gulf. Havana says there may be some 20bn barrels of oil of its coast but the US puts that estimate at five billion. Russia and Cuba have been working to revitalise relations, which cooled after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia's Zarubezhneft oil concern will work alongside the Cubapetroleo monopoly in the deep waters of the Gulf. "Every time I...

HAVANA, Cuba -- The United States has turned off a news ticker at its mission in Havana that had long irritated the Cuban government, diplomats said yesterday. The 5-foot-tall ticker, which streamed news reports and messages blaming Cuba's problems on its socialist economy, infuriated former President Fidel Castro when it was turned on in January 2006.

(English-language translation) The government of Venezuela will purchase tanks from Russia to double its fleet and strengthen its armed forces. [Venezuelan] President Hugo Chávez made the announcement amid growing tensions with Colombia over its military agreement with the United States, which would allow troops from that country to operate from Colombian bases. "We are going to bring several new tank battalions in order to double the armored force we presently have....I am not going to pay attention to what the neighbors say, or up north, forget the Yankees," said Chávez in "Hello, Theoretical President", the new version of his Sunday...

HAVANA (Reuters) - The United States has turned off a news ticker at its diplomatic mission in Havana that had long irritated the Cuban government, in another sign of efforts to improve relations with Havana, western diplomats said. The ticker, which streamed news, political statements and messages blaming Cuba's problems on the country's communist system and socialist economy, had infuriated former President Fidel Castro when it was turned on in January 2006 at a moment of high political tension with Washington. President Raul Castro took over from ailing elder brother Fidel last year.

LOS ANGELES – A U.S. citizen trying to challenge the ban on travel to Cuba on Friday bemoaned his inability to get arrested or cited — even after having his passport stamped in Havana and bringing back Cuban memorabilia. Mytchell Mora, a 39-year-old freelance entertainment news producer, said he told U.S. customs officials he broke the law after flying through Costa Rica home to Los Angeles early Friday. Officials punched some information about him into a computer and sent him home without punishment, Mora said. They didn't even confiscate his Cuba T-shirt or postcards. "I am just so surprised nothing...

JERUSALEM – The lawyer representing Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor at the center of a national race controversy, was a mentor of both Barack and Michelle Obama and served on the president's black advisory council. Charles Ogletree Jr., himself a Harvard University professor, is closely linked to the Black Panthers and to radical black ideology. He is a key member of the reparations movement and once pursued the possibility of bringing a class action lawsuit to win reparations for descendants of African slaves. "I met Barack when he arrived at Harvard Law School in fall of 1988. He...

July 20 - "Today, on the eve of my 48th birthday, I write these lines from prison cell #1232. If this testimony from the box where I have been unjustly forced to live for almost 10 years now is of some interest to mankind, then publish it. When I began advocating the philosophies of Gandhi and Thoreau, I remember those who commented that I would soon begin walking through the streets of Havana in a loincloth like Gandhi. Upon hearing these insults, I'd simply smile, as surely I would soon be subjected to this condition -- not in the streets...

Somewhere in the dark unknown blotch that is North Korea, there is a young man bent beneath a heavy burden. He is dozens of pounds underweight, fed on corn and salt, hunched over at the waist. His teeth are turning black, and several have already fallen out. He suffers from diarrhea and fever. Every so often, he watches as the camp guards shoot disobedient prisoners in the head. Sometimes, he watches as camp doctors lead young pregnant women into a room where they perform forced abortions. The young man will die before he hits 50; he'll be lucky to make...

Ecuador aligns itself with Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba In speeches against imperialism and neoliberalism, the presidents of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and Bolivia, Evo Morales, and the Ecuadoran President-Elect Rafael Correa, who should assume the government of his country Monday, expressed common ideological and political agreement Sunday. Chavez, Morales, and Correa, who also exalt the figure of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, met together in Zumbahua, an indigenous [Ecuadoran] locality 90 kilometers south of Quito, for a symbolic inauguration of Correa before the indigenous peoples [of Ecuador]. In a speech before a multitude congregated in the central plaza, Correa emphasized that "[Latin]...

The 47-year-old trade embargo against Cuba has been shaken by the revelation that drilling for oil and natural gas is about to take place less than 50 miles off the U.S. coast - in Cuban waters. No one knows for sure just how much oil lies off the northwest coast of Cuba, but the consensus is that it's sizable. The U.S. Geological Survey initially came up with an estimate in 2004 of between 5 billion barrels and 10 billion barrels. But Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, recently said the undersea geology was "very similar" to Mexico's giant Cantarell oil field...

FROM:Dr. Michael S. Brown of Vancouver, WA TOPIC:"NEGROES WITH GUNS" 12/29/01 12:22:27 The year was 1957. Monroe, North Carolina, was a rigidly segregated town where all levels of white society and government were dedicated to preserving the racial status quo. Blacks who dared to speak out were subject to brutal, sadistic violence. It was common practice for convoys of Ku Klux Klan members to drive through black neighborhoods shooting in all directions. A black physician who owned a nice brick house on a main road was a frequent target of racist anger. In the summer of 1957, a Klan...

The New York Philharmonic, hoping to notch another exotic destination in its touring history, said on Thursday it had been invited to perform in Cuba and was seriously considering such a visit. The orchestra’s president, Zarin Mehta, and other of its officials planned to travel to Havana on Friday to investigate concert halls, hotels and other logistical matters. The Philharmonic has received licenses to travel there, in light of the United States embargo. The trip would be yet another recent dip into cold-war waters for the Philharmonic. It would take place just a few days after the orchestra returns from...

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), then based in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, vigorously lobbied for Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, the Cuban-style Marxist regime that shot its way to power in 1979. Today, WOLA pretends it is concerned about the rule of law in Honduras after the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court supported removing the leftist president for defying its constitution. WOLA and Jim Wallis' publication Sojourners have teamed up to spin Honduras' defense of its democracy as another example of a U.S.-supported, imperialist military coup. The constitutional coup in Honduras was...

On the heels of yesterday's casting announcements, Latinoreview has exclusively learned that Tony Gilroy, the oscar nominated writer/director of Michael Clayton (and one of my top five favorite all time screenwriters) has come aboard to rewrite MGM/UA's remake of RED DAWN! Not surprising considering that Dan Bradley, the director of the remake, was the 2nd unit director of the Jason Bourne films which Gilroy penned. Gilroy has recently delivered a 107 page draft dated 06-01-09. The remake was penned by Carl Ellsworth and Jeremy Passmore and based on the 1984 Cold War-era film co-written and directed by John Milius. We...

To think that Boris and Natasha lived right here in South Dakota, and we didn't even know it! Recently, Walter Kendall Myers and Gwendolyn Steingraber-Trebilcock-Myers - a couple who once lived in Aberdeen - were arrested for spying. The news rocked the nation. Well, actually, the nation immediately forgot the story. Still, South Dakota hasn't forgotten. It's not every day suspected spies are found traipsing through your own neighborhood. The espionage likely started after they left Aberdeen, but you still wonder if that abandoned shopping cart you saw in aisle 8 of Kessler's might have contained a coded message. The...

Honduras says Nicaragua has troops moving on border 05 Jul 2009 20:20:26 GMT Source: Reuters TEGUCIGALPA, July 5 (Reuters) - Honduras' interim President Roberto Micheletti said on Sunday Nicaraguan troops were moving to the mutual frontier and urged Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to respect Honduran sovereignty. He gave no further details about troop movements in Nicaragua which shares a border with Honduras to the southeast of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa.