Gunga Dan in his Natural Environment
Posted on 05/02/2003 9:32:18 AM PDT by kattracks
In the wake of the execution without trial of three hijackers and the sentencing of 75 Cuban dissidents to long prison terms, more that 160 so-called intellectuals from around the world, including two Nobel Prize winners, have signed a declaration defending Fidel Castro's brutal regime.
Among the "intellectuals" signing the two-paragraph declaration "To the Conscience of the World," a vicious attack on their own country, were two Hollywood has-beens: Democrat house slave and washed-up calypso singer Harry Belafonte, who has a far higher opinion of the Cuban tyrant than of Colin Powell and Condi Rice, and former movie star Danny Glover, whose anti-U.S., anti-capitalism rants somehow don't prevent him from cashing a big fat paycheck for shilling for the scandal-plagued corporate giant MCI.
"A single power [the U.S.] is inflicting grave damage to the norms of understanding, debate and mediation among countries," the declaration claims.
"At this very moment, a strong campaign of destabilization against a Latin American nation has been unleashed. The harassment against Cuba could serve as a pretext for an invasion."
The declaration ends with a call to governments and others to "uphold the universal principles of national sovereignty, respect for territorial integrity and self-determination, essential to just and peaceful co-existence among nations." Also signing were Nobel Prize winners Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Rigoberta Menchu, Marxist darling of left-wing professors all across America even though the book that won her the prize has been exposed as a series of fabrications. "The book is one lie after another, and she knows it," Alfonso Rivera, a municipal clerk who for three decades kept all official records for the area in Guatemala dealt with in the book "I Rigoberta Menchu," told the New York Times.
On countless U.S. campuses the book is assigned reading despite its proven fraudulent nature.
Did the dictator himself dictate the declaration? It sounds a lot like the anti-U.S. rant the paranoid Castro delivered yesterday as he claimed yet again that the U.S. was preparing to invade Cuba.
Lest you think all leftist intellectuals still love Castro, Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago, a longtime supporter, last month wrote that Castro had shattered his illusions and that "from now on, Cuba can follow its own course, and leave me out."
Among the others disappointed in the Cuban tyrant: Susan Sontag, Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, Oscar-winning movie director Pedro Almodovar, philosopher Fernando Savater, actor Javier Bardem and Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who has decried Castro's "suffocating dictatorship."
And American actor Andy Garcia, whose family escaped from Cuba when he was a child, has long risked the wrath of Hollywood's left-wing thought police by denouncing Castro.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
BUMP!
Castro set the tone Thursday morning in a televised speech he dubbed "Cuba and the Nazi-Fascism" delivered at a huge gathering in Havana's Revolution Square, as smaller rallies and marches unfolded across the Communist-run Caribbean island.
Castro charged the Bush administration was out to assassinate him or invade the country, stating that he was not worried about being killed, but rather about a U.S. attack. "If the solution were to attack Cuba like Iraq, I would suffer greatly because of the cost in lives and enormous destruction it would bring Cuba. But it might turn out to be the last of the (Bush) administration's fascist attacks, because the struggle would last a very long time," he said.
Cuba is smarting from a deluge of international criticism from friends and foes over the sentencing of 75 dissidents to long prison terms, and the execution of three men who hijacked a ferry in a failed bid to reach the United States. Castro insisted the repression came because Cuba was under threat from Washington. The 76-year-old revolutionary icon, in power since his 1959 rebellion toppled a U.S.-backed dictatorship, warned critics, particularly on the left, their words could be used to justify a U.S. invasion.
"We would not want those who have, in our opinion, attacked Cuba unjustly ... to have to suffer the infinite sorrow they will feel if one day our cities are destroyed and our children and mothers, women and men, young and old, are torn apart by the bombs of neo-fascism," said Castro, dressed in his customary military garb.
Castro's words were bound to stoke rising fear among Cubans that the United States, frustrated by more than four decades of failed efforts to topple him and encouraged by success in Iraq, might resort to military force. "In Miami (home to many anti-Castro Cubans) and Washington they are now discussing where, how and when Cuba will be attacked or the problem of the revolution will be solved," Castro said.***
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