Free Republic

On Saturday, Oct. 28, Fidel Castro summoned CNN's correspondents in Havana, to demonstrate before the TV cameras that he was alive. Actually, he almost demonstrated the opposite. The spectacle was painful: we saw a senile old man with a haggard face who read the newspaper with difficulty, uttered nonsense in grave tones (?we live in a very complicated world?) and walked like a mummy that escaped from its tomb in the Boris Karloff movie. In addition, to prove he was still at the helm, he announced that he studied the planet's serious conflicts via his television set, then picked up...

A WIRY figure with dark, defiant eyes, Oswaldo Paya is not easily intimidated. His house is under constant surveillance and he has received numerous death threats. Most of his followers are in jail. Cuba’s leading dissident will not be deterred, however, from a campaign to promote democracy in one of the world’s last communist outposts. “It is time for change,” he said last week as the country struggled to adjust to its first new leadership in almost half a century. “The oppression and lies must end.” Behind its sunny, palm-fringed facade as a trendy tourist destination, Cuba was racked by...

Please register or log in Subscribers: Get the Advantage Search: chicagotribune chicagotribune Google chicagotribune.com >> Nation/World Raul Castro goes public, says he has mobilized Cuba to repel U.S. By Gary Marx Tribune foreign correspondent Published August 19, 2006 HAVANA -- In his first public declaration as acting president, Raul Castro said he has mobilized tens of thousands reservists and militia to defend Cuba against a potential U.S. threat. "We could not rule out the risk of somebody going crazy, or even crazier, within the U.S. government," he said in an interview Friday in the Communist Party newspaper Granma. Under the...

With Fidel Castro at age 80, ill and close to death, the essential factor is not when he will disappear but what will happen afterward. Will the dictatorship remain in place without the Comandante? Probably not; all the conditions are there for a change to begin. Here I list eight very important ones.With his ponderous weight, Fidel Castro has crushed all the institutions in the country. The Communist Party is a hollow shell, inhabited by automatons who decades ago lost their devotion and revolutionary mystique. The National Assembly of the People's Power (Parliament), known as “The Havana Boys Choir,” is...

HAVANA - Acting President Raul Castro said Cuba remains open to normalized relations with the United States, but warned the Bush administration in his first comments since assuming power that it will get nowhere with threats or pressure. Raul Castro also said in Friday editions of the island's Communist Party newspaper that he had mobilized tens of thousands of troops in response to what he called aggressive U.S. acts, including stepped-up radio and television broadcasts to the island, and an $80 million plan to hasten the end of the Castros' rule. "Some of the empire's war hawks thought that the...

Your average income is $15 a month. Your meat ration is 3.3 pounds a month. Owning a car is forbidden unless you are among the ruling elite. Computers are illegal. So is Internet access. The prices of the basics you need to live on are low. A decent-size urban apartment rents for $10 a month. But everything is also extremely scarce -- food and gasoline to bicycles and bank loans. To get by, you must supplement your income by moonlighting, working in the black market or getting remittances from relatives abroad. Bath soap, shampoo and chicken are luxuries. Welcome to...

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba's communist government has signaled a crackdown on black-market satellite dishes used by citizens to get news and views from its arch enemy, the United States, nine days after ailing leader Fidel Castro temporarily relinquished power to his brother. The Communist Party newspaper Granma warned that the dishes, which many Cubans use to watch Spanish-language TV programs from the exile bastion of Miami, could be used by the U.S. government to broadcast subversive information. "They are fertile ground for those who want to carry out the Bush administration's plan to destroy the Cuban revolution," said the newspaper,...

Media Embrace Military Dictatorship for Castro Succession by Humberto Fontova Posted Aug 08, 2006 So what's going on in Cuba? Nobody has seen nor heard from either Fidel or his supposed successor, Raul, in more than a week and all foreign reporters are barred entry to the island. In the meantime, Cuba's military is on combat alert and reservists are called up island-wide. The neighborhood spy and snitch groups (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) are much more vigilant and obnoxious than usual. The goons of the Rapid Response Brigades (Cuba's version of early Nazi Germany's S.A.) roam the...

ELIAN Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who became the celebrated object of a 2000 US-Cuba tug-of-war wished Cuban leader Fidel Castro a speedy recovery from surgery. "We send you this letter so that you know that we are concerned about your health," Elian Gonzalez, now 13, said in a letter also signed by five other children in his family and published today in the official newspaper, Juventud Rebelde. A week ago, Mr Castro, 79, handed power "temporarily" to his younger brother, Defence Minister Raul Castro, while undergoing surgery for intestinal bleeding. In November 1999, Elian, who was six at the time,...

HAVANA -- The top American diplomat in Cuba says the end is near for Fidel Castro and his government and that even Castro's supporters are preparing for a transition to democracy. U.S. Interests Section Chief James Cason spoke at his official residence where dissidents gathered Friday for a time capsule ceremony marking International Human Rights Day. Castro's government "is on its last legs," Cason said as dissidents filled the capsule with messages spelling out their dreams for a different kind of Cuba. "Even regime supporters are discreetly preparing for the inevitable democratic transition" on the communist-run island, the American official...

I have created a public register of "bump lists" here on Free Republic. I define a bump list as a name listed in the "To" field used to index articles. Free Republic Bump List Register

Desi Arnaz of "I Love Lucy" fame and fortune helped finance the freedom of hundreds of Bay of Pigs fighters captured in 1961 by Cuban government forces, veterans say. A belated thank you to the late entertainer has now happened, 18 years after he died. This past Friday, according to a Miami Herald report, surviving vets of the Bay of Pigs invasion presented a posthumous award to daughter Lucie Arnaz for his "moral support and generosity." That generosity was legend among Bay of Pigs veterans. "He always supported the Cuban cause," said Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia, president of Bay of Pigs...

From time to time I read the news and articles of the PT (Worker’s Party), www.pt.org.br, official site. And it's not old news from old notebooks, it is this year’s declarations. It’s possible to see that old aspirations – suffering metamorphosis, or not – still live. Look at this affirmation of José Dirceu, head of Civil House: We are retaking the political agenda of 1964 because problems like cultural democratization, agrarian reform, national autonomy and citizenship are still ongoing since then. (http://200.155.6.3/site/noticias/noticias_int.asp?cod=16887) For the reader who doesn’t know what happened around 1964, I can explain in three words: Brazil's counter-revolution....

The world media has all but ignored this week's dramatic events in Iran. The regime has masterfully handled the world media. The regime appears to have a new ally in their efforts to silent the media, Cuba. BREAKING NEWS…… Several days ago we reported the jamming of LA based Iranian broadcasters, the key link of communication of the Iranian protest movement. The regime had been jamming the signals in the past within Iran using equipment purchased from France. But days before the July 9th protests were to begin the broadcaster began reporting that their uplink signal was being jammed as...

The world media has all but ignored this week's dramatic events in Iran. The regime has worked hard to keep this story from being reported. From jamming satellite broadcasts, to prohibiting news reporters from covering any demonstrations to shutting down all cell phones and even hiring foreign security to control the population, the regime is doing everything in its power to keep the popular movement from expressing its demand for an end of the regime. In spite of this, as Michael Ledeen posted recently, "...we can already say that the regime's intimidation was not successful. And you have to admire...

Even the most vehement opponents of the war in Iraq can't help but (perhaps surreptitiously) smile at the sight of Iraqis -- finally free from the yoke of brutal repression -- celebrating in the streets. The joy of Iraq's populace at their newfound liberty is contagious and seemingly the entire world has joined in their roisterous jubilance. Alas, not everyone's glee is magnanimous. Fidel Castro's saw the world's diverted attention as an opportunity to crack down mercilessly on innocent Cuban citizens who dare not tow his totalitarian line. While the news media obsessed over war in the Middle East, he...

By arranging long prison sentences for 75 dissidents - librarians, journalists, people just hoping for a taste of freedom someday - Fidel Castro has disproved or at least challenged some of the most cherished hopes and ideas about him and the island state he has now tyrannized for more than four decades. Gone is the notion that his eventual death will necessarily spell the death as well of Cuban dictatorship. Not a few analysts have told the press the crackdown has the purpose of squelching all opposition in a country Fidel wants to leave to brother Raul, hardly a liberty-loving,...

MEXICO CITY, April 23 -- Vladimiro Roca, fresh from five years in prison for criticizing Fidel Castro's government, was invited to talk about his experience last May at the home of Vicki Huddleston, then the top U.S. diplomat in Havana. Roca recalled that Manuel David Orrio, a gregarious and accomplished dissident journalist, stood up to thank Huddleston for hosting and encouraging peaceful opposition to Castro's authoritarian rule. "He was very well-spoken, talkative and well-educated, and seemed very convinced of what he was saying," said Roca, the son of a Cuban revolutionary hero who split with Castro years ago, in a...

It is said that Monterroso’s short story is the shortest one ever written. Textually it reads: “When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.” It is true that it is very short, what I fail to understand is why people insist on calling it a story. But let’s leave it at that, it isn’t my intention to discuss this very famous, and very short, story. I intend to write about the most frustrated, and short, individual in this world; at least that’s how those of us who have suffered through his bouts of frustration and quirkiness have come to see...

HAVANA (Reuters) - Opponents of President Fidel Castro said on Wednesday that mass arrests and infiltration by government spies knocked them to their knees, but they expect to rise again on growing discontent with Cuba's crumbling communist state. Dissidents who survived the worst wave of repression in Cuba in decades said their fragile organizations were decapitated by the round-up of 75 leading dissidents, activists and independent journalists a month ago. "The dissident movement is practically paralyzed," said Vladimiro Roca, who was freed last year after four years in jail for criticizing Castro's economic policies. "It was a really big blow,...