DNC fundraising at Smith Bagley's house.
Posted on 04/14/2002 4:36:10 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
This is a LINK to articles since April 21, 2001 about Cuba and the communist threat - CHILDREN'S CODE At this LINK is a LINK to many Elian articles. Below I will post similar articles since the FR format changed and locked posts to this LINK. Please add what you wish to this thread.
Eyes Wide Open--[Excerpts] The Los Angeles kids, chosen for their photographic skills and their ability to work with others, represented the Venice Arts Mecca, a nonprofit organization that brings volunteer artists together with youngsters from low-income families to nurture their creativity in areas ranging from literary arts to photography. They looked. They listened. They photographed. And they took notes for their journals.
…….Before embarking on their adventure, the kids--who were joined by two young people from Washington, D.C., and accompanied by adult mentors--studied the sociopolitical history of South Africa, including apartheid. All were Latino or African American or a mix of the two, and were encouraged to think about their own identity, their own experiences with racism.
……..Before embarking on their adventure, the kids--who were joined by two young people from Washington, D.C., and accompanied by adult mentors--studied the sociopolitical history of South Africa, including apartheid. All were Latino or African American or a mix of the two, and were encouraged to think about their own identity, their own experiences with racism.
…..At the conference exhibit hall, the L.A. kids mounted a photo exhibition showing the underbelly of America. There were bleak images of life on an Indian reservation, of the homeless in Los Angeles. It was an eye-opener to some South Africans, who thought everyone in America was rich. "They were absolutely shocked," said Lynn Warshafsky, executive director of Venice Arts Mecca.
In turn, the L.A. group was surprised at the degree of anti-American sentiment, something they had to process. "They had to ask themselves questions they'd never asked before" about how others see them, Warshafsky said.
……..For Eamon, the highlight was hearing Fidel Castro speak. "I had thought of him as seriously evil. I realized he's not evil, he's doing what he thinks is best. He has this sort of demeanor about him. Whether you like him or not, you respect him. It opened my eyes." [End Excerpts]
"I would not call it a leftist axis because I do not believe it is about left or right," Chavez said early Friday in Ecuador, where he and Cuban President Fidel Castro were visiting to attend the inauguration of an art museum designed by a late leftist artist, Oswaldo Guayasamin. Rather, it is time for Latin America to leave behind 500 years of "domination, exclusion and inequality," said Chavez, whose leftist rhetoric has divided his nation.
Beside Venezuela and Cuba, Ecuador and Brazil will also be led by left-leaning governments with the election of Lucio Gutierrez, a nationalistic former coup leader, as president of Ecuador and leftist labor leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as leader of Brazil. ***
……….Sources told CNSNews.com that Bush will probably re-nominate Reich for his old job and he will probably win Senate confirmation when the 108th Congress convenes in January because of the new GOP majority. Reich has previously served as the assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development and as a special advisor to former Secretary of State George Shultz in the Reagan administration. During that time, he established and managed the interagency Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean. From 1986 to 1989, Reich was the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela and received the State Department's Exemplary Service Award and Superior Honor Award.***
"Fidel Castro has done a lot of growing up since we first met," concluded Harvey. "I hope we both have." It was unclear why Castro chose this year to fire a shot at rum consumption, but his call comes on the heels of a new book that claims Bacardi, the world's largest rum company, has been engaged for more than 40 years in clandestine attempts to overthrow the Cuban government by both violent and other means.***
The 76-year-old Castro, dressed in a military uniform, tossed an arm around her shoulder, questioned her about the school and gave students a brief history lesson of the sort Elian would not have received in Miami. When she said students were studying the history of colonialism, Castro broke in, "Colonialism or neo-colonialism?" Colonialism, he explained, was the 400-year era of Spanish rule in Cuba. "Then came neo-colonialism, when the neighbors to the north (Americans) ... made themselves owners of everything in their path," he told the children.***
DNC fundraising at Smith Bagley's house.
"This is the first time that the assembly has had a mass meeting," she said. "But the objective is to join the 341 organizations so that, in a democratic way, these associations elect someone to lead them." Roque estimated the groups together have about 5,000 members. The loosely organized gathering lasted a few hours, with people coming and going, and broke up around noon. Reporters saw about 50 people. Even at that size, it was an unusually large and public gathering of dissidents in Cuba. "It is an achievement to be able to gather such a large force of the opposition," Roque told reporters. ***
A flag and bumper stickers of the militant anti-Castro group Alpha 66 were tied and pasted to the house of Oswaldo Paya, who advocates nonviolent change of Cuba's socialist system. Scrawled on the bumper stickers were "Death to informers" and words that included "spy" and "traitor." Paya said he has not received the government exit visa needed to leave the country for a ceremony at which the European Parliament next week, where he is to receive the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
"I interpret this (the vandalism) as the government response to my request to leave to receive the prize," he said. Paya is a lead organizer of the Varela Project, an island-wide signature gathering effort requesting a referendum asking voters if they favor guarantees for rights such as freedom of speech and private business ownership, broad electoral reforms and freedom for political prisoners. ***
Reich was shaped by his experiences in the Reagan administration and in Cuba as a boy when Fidel Castro's revolution forced his family into exile. He maintains the hard-line anti-Castroism favored by the Cuban expatriate community in Miami, but elsewhere in the United States many farmers want to sell their products to Cuba, and tourists want to visit the island. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who will become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee next month, opposes Reich's appointment on the grounds that he lacks the range of experience required for the job. This should be the final blow to his chances. The need for fresh thinking on Latin American policy is evident in Venezuela, where protesters from the more affluent segments of society are attempting to unseat President Hugo Chavez.***
Enriquez said he's ready to plant his experiments outdoors - but getting such permission from Cuban regulators is a lengthy process and the fructose sugar cane is years away from supermarket shelves. Enriquez's mission is about more than economics. National pride is at stake. Sugar is still the country's No. 1 export, ahead of nickel and even tobacco, although tourism has replaced sugar as the biggest source of hard currency. The sugar industry employs about 400,000 workers. "This country is very sentimental about sugar," Enriquez said.
Closer to attaining the open field is sugar cane genetically modified to make it more pest resistant. About a dozen of these plants are growing in a greenhouse behind the Havana biotech center, promising to reduce growing expenses by requiring less pesticide. Others at the center are tinkering with sugar cane's genome to make it more resistant to weed killers and disease. Labrada also talks about using sugar cane to fuel electric generators, as a source of ethanol and even as a source for cancer-fighting drugs. But even if the Cuban scientists succeed with their biotechnology projects - Enriquez for one says he's close - they have other hurdles to clear. The European Union, the biggest market currently open to Cuba, has temporarily banned all new imports of genetically modified foods in the face of consumer resistance.***
"These proposals do not constitute a simple enumeration of desires but the basis of a permanent campaign to mobilize national public opinion in the face of the necessity for urgent reforms," said the statement, read by the group's acting spokesman, longtime activist and former political prisoner Vladimiro Roca. Roca was sitting in for Oswaldo Paya, a lead organizer of the Varela Project signature campaign, which seeks a referendum on guarantees for civil rights such as freedom of speech, along with other reforms. ***
The cardinal then encouraged them to sing again, sitting discretely nearby so that the goons wouldn't interfere. Everything simply stopped in its tracks. Guests, restaurant staff, and goons were serenaded for perhaps 20 minutes by songs about the love of Christ and the recently completed Christmas season. In the midst of this impromptu concert, I walked over to where Law was sitting and said, ''I'm not sure this is entirely accurate theologically, but I think you've performed a kind of exorcism here tonight.'' He smiled, and we shook hands, and knew that we were living a very special moment indeed - a kind of foretaste of heaven.***
"On the central, every aspect of life relied on sugar," says Tomas Fernández Tihert, a local dissident activist. "Now 10,000 people whose lives depended on this mill have no hope, and that can be said for dozens of other centrals across Cuba." Castro has promised that workers dislocated by the reform will be given new jobs, retrained, or sent back to school - a pledge that many workers regard with skepticism. "In these new schools, the teacher is only the most educated person in the central," says Mileidys Dias Beltrán, who lost her job in the Granma mechanical workshop. "It is sad to see skilled, talented workers with nothing to do but wait for further instruction."
The social consequences of Cuba's new sugar policy have not yet been calculated, but some predict urban areas such as Havana will swell with the former sugar workers, exacerbating the housing strain and contributing to a rise in crime. Others warn of a possible wave of attempted migration to the US by some of the 100,000 idled laborers. "In other societies, these former sugar workers would form a political opposition," says Oscar Espinoza Chepe, a dissident economist in Havana. "The Cuban workers are not yet that organized, but they could be." During three decades of Soviet patronage, Cuban sugar was bought within the communist economy at generous prices or traded for fuel and other provisions.
But when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Cuban sugar was forced into an unforgiving global commodities market. Average world sugar productivity hovers around 40 tons per acre, but Cuban productivity has slipped to about half that level over the past 10 years. And while global sugar prices have plunged, fuel costs have climbed making today's sugar crop even more costly. Cuban planners have contemplated the current reform for years, though they were reluctant to upset an industry that has gained an iconic status under the Castro regime. While officials insist that reform will not affect sugar output, experts say that Cuba will face a sub-par harvest next year.
Some Cuban observers complain that while the government has swiftly abandoned the sugar industry, it has been slow to articulate a new vision for the country's agriculture. "We agree that sugar production needs to be reduced," Mr. Tihert says, "but not like this, not without consulting the farmers or giving them some time and support to adjust."***
"I quit my job when I got tired of doing dirty work for Chavez with the Cubans looking over my shoulder," Marcos Ferreira says, while showing proof that former Interior Minister Rodriguez Chacin and other presidential aides repeatedly pressured him to launder the identities of terrorists and narcotraffickers transiting through Venezuela. He also was ordered to deceive U.S. authorities on the activities of a Hezbollah financial network whose files were requested by the FBI following the Sept. 11 attacks. Chavez gave instructions to destroy records on 10 suspected Hezbollah fund-raisers conducting suspicious financial transactions in the islands of Margarita, Aruba and Curaçao, and the cities of Maracaibo and Valencia, according to Ferreira. The Venezuelan president then dissolved key military counterterrorist units by firing 16 highly experienced, U.S.-trained intelligence officers at the time of the terrorist plane attacks in New York City and Washington. Circulos Bolivarianos leader Lina Ron celebrated the event by burning an American flag in the center of Caracas.***
MORE from same article but in separate post - CLICK on one to read entire article.
REAL AXIS OF EVIL - Venezuela and CUBA*** The president's scheme also involves government-sponsored armed militias, or Circulos Bolivarianos, modeled on Cuba's Revolutionary Defense Committees. These militias are taking over police stations around the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and invading the facilities of the state-run oil company, PDVSA. Indeed, the latter is presided over by an ex-communist guerrilla leader, Ali Rodriguez Araque. Following the blueprint that Castro drafted for Chile's Salvador Allende, a minority president who similarly imported thousands of Cuban paramilitaries to overthrow the constitution of Chile and establish a Marxist-Leninist regime there, Chavez is facing an internal rebellion against his plans. With 80 percent or more of the national revenues cut off by an oil strike, he is faced with difficult choices. Chavez may be forced to order his navy to take over some 20 oil tankers that are refusing to load. Since he cannot entirely rely on the loyalty of his armed forces, he is expected to bring in the Cuban advisers.
Cuba's Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI) special-operations teams already are positioned at the port of La Guaira, according to Venezuelan navy sources, who report that Cuban undercover agents are using the local merchant-marine school. Sources say that they could be studying Venezuela's oil-tanker fleet as part of contingency plans to prepare for commandeering of some of the tankers by a U.S.-trained Venezuelan intelligence officer. A Cuban special-assault unit reported to be occupying the second and third floors of the Sheraton Hotel in La Guaira also could be part of the plans to break the strike and impose a terrorist dictatorship. During the last few weeks, Chavez has moved to control the military high command with his closest acolytes. Gen. Luis Garcia Carneiro, who has been leading the Caracas-based 3rd Infantry Division in operations to disarm the metropolitan police, now is the effective head of the army.
Possibly thousands of Arab terrorists as well as Colombian narcoguerrillas are being protected by DISIP, which has come under the control of Cuba's DGI, according to members of the Venezuelan security agency. European diplomatic officials in Caracas confirm that Cubans are operating DISIP's key counterterrorist and intelligence-analysis sections. According to a variety of sources, 300 to 400 Cuban military advisers coordinated by Havana's military attaché in Venezuela, navy Capt. Sergio Cardona, also are directing Chavez's elite Presidential Guard and his close circle of bodyguards, some of whom can't even sing the words to the Venezuelan national anthem. As many as 6,000 Cuban undercover agents masquerading as "sports instructors" and "teachers" also are reported to be training the Circulos Bolivarianos and even operating naval facilities.***
Colombian `peace lab' erupts into violence*** VISTA HERMOSA, Colombia -- Sensing a guerrilla ambush, the soldiers stealthily crept toward an abandoned sport utility vehicle parked on the outskirts of this southern Colombian town. Inside the SUV, they found the body of a 14-year-old boy. His throat had been slit, his body wrapped in explosives. "Those SOBs," says Maj. Oscar Fugueredo as he recounts the grisly discovery and shows photos of the teenager who had been slain by Marxist guerrillas. "They made a child bomb!" The killing was among 133 homicides that have been committed in Vista Hermosa and nearby towns since February, when Colombian troops reclaimed a 16,000-square-mile area from rebels after the collapse of peace talks. Officials believe most of the slayings were politically motivated.
Then-President Andres Pastrana pledged that government forces would protect the region's estimated 96,000 residents when he ordered the soldiers to move into the zone. But the hellish facts on the ground show that life in the area has become more perilous. The murder rate has jumped, and some peasant families have been uprooted from their lands. "Although the guerrillas committed numerous acts of violence ... when they controlled the region, the levels of violence have increased since the army retook the zone," says a recent report by Amnesty International, the independent human-rights group. "Civilians have been the victims of systematic attacks."
For more than three years, Vista Hermosa was part of a so-called "peace laboratory." The town sits in a vast region of jungle and plains that was ceded by the Colombian government to the nation's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in late 1998 in an effort to promote peace talks and end a civil war that began in 1964. The rebel-held area became known as the "despeje" -- Spanish for the "clearing" -- because Pastrana had ordered all government forces to withdraw. The zone was one of the few areas in Colombia free of combat, because just one side was in control.
But peace talks between the government and the rebels broke down in February, and Pastrana ordered the military to retake the region, which is roughly the size of Switzerland and covers about 4 percent of Colombia's territory. At the time, it was widely feared that outlawed right-wing paramilitary groups -- which, in addition to government forces, are fighting the rebels -- would move into the zone and go on a rampage against accused guerrilla collaborators. But in an odd twist, most of the 133 slayings reported in the region over the past 10 months have been blamed on the FARC. ***
Roque's bodyguard was killed, as was the gunman, identified as Ramón Sosa, 32, an operative in one of Comandos F-4's clandestine cells within the island, Frometa said. ''We are the only exile organization that has publicly declared being after Juan Pablo Roque to execute him for the crime he committed and for having laughed at this country,'' Frometa said. ``We have been following his paces. We know where he works, where he lives, who his lovers are, because our intention is to eliminate him.''***
Such fighting talk is characteristic of the frail 65-year-old. He is a former guerrilla fighter, reputedly one of the last to lay down his arms at the end of Venezuela's small-scale leftwing insurgency of the 1960s. Forty years later, Mr Rodríguez faces perhaps his most challenging struggle: to restart what a month ago was the world's fifth-largest oil exporter but is now a virtually paralysed network of derricks, pipelines and oil terminals. "Armed guerrilla action is one form of combat I've left behind, but this is a war to save democracy," he says as he reaches up with his cane to tap the pilot's window of the executive jet on the runway of an abandoned airfield near the refinery. A long-time friend of Cuba's Fidel Castro, Mr Rodríguez likens the tightening economic noose that is the oil strike with the long-time US-imposed trade embargo on the Caribbean island.***
Silva takes over Wednesday for outgoing president Fernando Henrique Cardoso in an inaugural ceremony expected to attract presidents from at least six other Latin American countries and 100,000 or more Brazilians. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was also expected to attend. But the four-week-old strike in Venezuela aimed at ousting him was expected to delay him. Earlier this month, Chavez said until the last minute that he would attend an economic summit in Brasilia, but never showed up. Silva, a 57-year-old former union leader, will govern Latin America's largest country and counts Castro and Chavez among his friends. [End]
"Then, I butted into Clinton's disaster in Somalia, to put together the surrender to that charmer Mohamed Farah Aideed after his boys killed 18 of our soldiers and dragged their beaten bodies through the streets. And we now know that the spectacle of the Great Satan knuckling under to a guy whose entire army consisted of 10 second-hand Jeeps directly encouraged Osama bin Laden to believe that America was ripe for capitulation on a much greater scale -- if you killed enough Americans.
"And the clincher -- Korea. Yep, I'm the boy who freelanced the 1994 agreement with the head-case of that horror show to stop his nuclear bomb program, in exchange for a whole bunch of aid from us. When reporters asked me then if it was really reasonable to expect Kim Il Sung to keep his word, given that he never had before, I said: 'This is something that's not for me to judge.' Well, of course, neither that nut-job nor his nut-job son honored the deal for one second. So now, eight years later, another American president has inherited another fine mess I got us in. "Please, take it back, and stop me before I negotiate again."***
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