[Luis Gonzalez]

"Like Janet Reno and Greg Craig, he is a diligent minion of Castro's totalitarianism-a useful idiot, as Lenin once called his Western accomplices."

Right now, the entire US media is acting as a useful idiot by not mentioning one word of this story anywhere.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

If they got on this, like ducks on a June bug, they'd be able to lance this boil once and for all. But they're afraid he's going to launch a few hundred thousand to Miami.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Willful blindness shattered by Cuba's crackdown - Castro shows the brutal face of his regime***The wilful blindness to President Castro's repression has been underlined by the shock at the recent crackdown. The Pope, who insisted on his controversial visit to Havana five years ago that he had won significant human rights concessions, spoke of his "deep sorrow" at the executions and urged Señor Castro to consider a "significant gesture of clemency" toward those convicted. Perhaps the biggest shock was felt by the writers, poets and artists who have long defended Cuba and its autocratic ruler. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes called the country "a suffocating dictatorship", the Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago said Fidel Castro "cheated his enemies" and the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, who once praised him as a "symbol of national dignity", acknowledged that the crackdown had fuelled opposition claims that he was a dictator. There have been demonstrations in Caracas and Madrid.***