[Conan O’Brien has] A Good Time in Cuba

Conan O’Brien posed in front of a mural and tweeted the following: “This iconic Che Guevara image was born right here in Havana.” Isn’t that cool?

Does O’Brien know that Guevara set up the Cuban gulag, into which artists, liberals, gays, and others were tossed? Does he care?

I’m sure he does, or would — he seems like a good guy. (For a piece I once did on Guevara and his cult — “Che Chic” — go here.)

At the invitation of the Castros’ Ministry of Culture, O’Brien went to Havana to film his comedy show. He is evidently proud of his trip. “This is a very historic time,” he said. “Relations between Cuba and the United States are finally starting to thaw.”

If they are starting to “thaw,” that’s in part because the U.S. president has chosen to turn a blind eye to the dictatorship’s ongoing human-rights abuses. That does not mean the rest of us have to.

In February — February alone (a short month) — there were 492 political arrests in Cuba. Documented arrests, that is. There were undoubtedly many others as well, not documented.

Over the decades, many Cubans have been arrested on the charge of “pre-criminal social dangerousness.” What’s that, you say? The charge means that you have not done anything to offend the dictatorship — yet. But you have a dissident cousin, let’s say, or someone reported you reading the wrong book. Or talking to someone who read a wrong book. Therefore, you are arrested — just so the regime can be on the safe side.

Many Cubans and Cuban Americans are upset by visits such as Conan O’Brien’s to the island. Why? Why does it matter so much to them? What’s wrong with traveling to Cuba, grooving to the music, drinking a few mojitos, and having a good time?

Visitors — especially celebrity ones — rarely show any moral sense. They give no indication whatsoever that they understand where they are: in a one-party dictatorship with a gulag. A country where the innocent are routinely imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.

Cuba has some of the greatest, bravest, most heroic people in the world. Some of them, it is too late to meet. Orlando Zapata and Oswaldo Payá. They were victims of the regime.

But some, you can meet, if you are willing. I myself have interviewed the great Oscar Biscet and Juan Carlos González Leiva (here and here). And if I can — how about the TV star Conan O’Brien?

No one like O’Brien would have gone to film a show in apartheid South Africa. There was great pressure on entertainers not to perform in South Africa. And on athletes not to compete there. Anyone who did was stigmatized.

But most people, I gather, think that O’Brien’s trip to Cuba was really cool.

These visitors are like Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes: “I see nothing” — beyond the pretty girls, the classic old cars, the swaying palm trees, etc.

Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, was just in Cuba. She met with no dissidents, of course. While she was there, more than 100 were arrested, for such crimes as trying to attend church. The American said nothing.

There have long been political pilgrims to totalitarian countries. Paul Hollander has devoted a good part of his career to chronicling them. There have been plain old ignoramuses, too.

As he crossed from Poland into the Soviet Union, George Bernard Shaw threw his food tins out the train window, because there would be no need of them in the land of milk and honey.

He denied that there was famine in the Soviet Union, because there was plenty of food in his hotel — the Moscow Metropol, which was for foreigners only. They have that kind of hotel in Cuba, too.

John Kenneth Galbraith went to Communist China during the Cultural Revolution, when millions were being starved, tortured, humiliated, and killed. He came back with a criticism: The Chinese smoked too many cigarettes.

In my observation, most Cubans and Cuban Americans bear no great grudge against visitors — as long as they show some moral awareness. As long as they have a smidgeon of conscience.

Conan O’Brien was able to flit down there and then flit back home. Does he realize what happens to ordinary Cubans if they try to leave the island? Does he realize that they have been shot and killed in the water, as they desperately try to escape?

I sometimes wish that people in free countries could be sentenced to live in unfree ones — just for a while — in order to appreciate what other people have to endure, and what they themselves have to be grateful for.

Let me end with a movie recommendation (damn rare for me!): Una Noche, made in 2012. It is a glimpse of Cuban reality. And therefore something of a miracle.

March 3, 2015: Colombia Stops Chinese Ship Carrying Large-Caliber Weapons to Cuba

"A mysterious vessel flying the Chinese flag has left a port in Cartagena, Colombia, after being stopped by local officials for carrying large amounts of undocumented, large-caliber firearms, en route to Cuba– where Colombia is currently staging talks with the terrorist group FARC....

.....The Chinese shipment of arms may not have anything to do with the FARC, however, as yet another pivotal negotiation is taking place in Havana: talks between Obama administration officials and the communist government in Havana, which has been clear that “changes in Cuba aren’t negotiable” with regard to the oppressive political system. Instead of resulting in the two parties inching closer to a goal in reestablishing diplomatic relations, the first round of talks concluded with Cuban dictator Raúl Castro demanding President Obama give the Guantánamo Bay military base to the communist government."

Aggressive new HIV strain detected in Cuba

Those tourists who travel to Cuba looking for cheap run and sex are aiding and abetting the most brutal murderous regime in the history of this hemisphere, but in that exchange they might get in return more than they bargained for.

Aggressive new HIV strain detected in Cuba

upi.com ^ | Feb. 14, 2015 | Denise Royal

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3257752/posts

”A new HIV strain in some patients in Cuba appears to be much more aggressive and can develop into AIDS within three years of infection. Researchers said the progression happens so fast that treatment with antiretroviral drugs may come too late. Without treatment, HIV infection usually takes 5 to 10 years to turn into AIDS, according to Anne-Mieke Vandamme, a medical professor at Belgium’s University of Leuvan. According to the study, published in the journal EBioMedicine, Vandamme was alerted to the new aggressive strain of HIV by Cuban health officials who wanted to find out what was happening.”

Before Castro, the Cubans did not need visa to visit U.S. or establishing residence in this country. Cubans did not need before the triumph of the Cuban communist revolution to cross in make shift rafts the Florida Straits where 4 for every 5 Cubans lost their lives in their pursuit of freedom, they came by plane or ferry as tourists and students. There were not Cuban dreamers in quest of the American opportunities. In fact, before Castro, there were more Americans living in Cuba than Cuban living in United States. The living standard in Cuba in the 1950’s was second only to the United States.

About the much maligned portray of Cuba as an American playground and mafia enclave, it must noted that in Cuba before Castro, the mafiosi that created Las Vegas’ emporium, had only three casinos in Havana and the yearly income of those casinos together were less than the income of any single Las Vegas casinos in a week.

Before Castro an average of 200,000 American tourists visited Cuba, in 2014, it was over 650,000. But together with Americans, came also thousands of tourists from Europe and Latin American including many looking for sex with children. Now Cuba is now a Mecca for the most depraved pedophiles and pederasts that go there looking for sexual exploitation of children. In fact Havana is second only Bangkok in that abominable crime.

By 1995 the Italian travel magazine Viaggiare recognized Cuba as the “paradise of sexual tourism,” awarding it five stars for its “general erotic level.” According to the magazine, Cuba beat out such competitors as Brazil and Thailand. (Adams, p. 1A; Dalia Acosta, Culture Tourism: Cuba Brushes up its Tourist Image, Interpress Service, Sept. 19, 1997. Lexis-Nexis).

Those tourists who travel looking for unending bacchanals are aiding and abetting the most brutal murderous regime in the history of this hemisphere.

Renowned English historian, Hugh Thomas, who wrote an scholar “History of Cuba, The Pursuit of Freedom” from the Discovery to the beginning of Castro’s revolution, referring to Castro’s Cuba affirmed in The Spectator (7/12/1986): “The comparison must be with the account of Nazi concentration camps. Although there as yet no gas chambers in Cuba, there have been experiments of a criminal biological type designed to see how far an individual can survive starvation, beating, solitary confinement, and many various kinds of ill treatment. Valladares’ account of working in a stone quarry is not dissimilar to, and no more humane than, the many accounts extant of ‘life’ in Manthausen.”

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