Free Republic

Once you start digging into the Deep State, what you discover is remarkable continuity when it comes to attacking Republican presidents over the last many decades. One of the happy unintended consequences of the Russia Hoax of 2016 was that it exposed Americans to the mendacity, amorality, and chicanery of our Deep State and Intel Community (“IC”). Another was learning about the Falstaffian character Stefan Halper. Halper’s role in the hoax—the FBI used him to surreptitiously question Page, Papadopoulos, other others—sent me down a rabbit hole leading to Carter, Nixon, and JFK. Stefan Halper was a legacy hire: the nephew...

A military judge ruled Wednesday that plea deals sparing accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other terrorists the death penalty must remain in effect. The stunning move comes three months after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin revoked the shocking plea deals handed out to Mohammed and two alleged accomplices by the Office of Military Commissions in July. ... The order, issued by Air Force Col. and Judge Matthew McCall in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba ... Family members of the victims of the heinous terror attack, which killed nearly 3,000, were outraged by the judge’s ruling.

Iranian Minister of Information and Communications Technology Sattar Hashemi is set to visit Havana next week. The United Nations General Assembly voted by a large margin on Wednesday to denounce the decades-old American embargo against Cuba for the 32nd time since 1992, with only Israel (and the United States) opposing the resolution, and Moldova abstaining, the AP reported. While General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, the annual vote gave Havana a stage to slam Washington’s 64-year-old embargo on the Caribbean island nation.

Less than three weeks ago, on October 10, I had a post about Cuba with the headline “What The Hell Is Going On In Cuba?” The post noted that it is difficult to get real information from Cuba, and that there had recently been almost total silence about that island from the mainstream media. But if one researched some out-of-the-way sources, it turned out that there is some sort of sudden economic collapse going on there. Besides economic production declining significantly, and pervasive shortages of basic goods, there was also information from a source in Spain (El Pais) that Cuba’s...

With the election and inauguration of Claudia Sheinbaum to the presidency, Mexico is rapidly descending into a dictatorship. Here's the marquee case: #Mexico's entering a #constitutionalcrisis. Pres @Claudiashein said she'll willfully fall in contempt of court after a federal judge orders congressional approval of the dismantling of the #judicialbranch halted due to legislative procedural violations-so much for the #RuleOfLaw. — Tony Payan (@PayanTony) October 19, 2024 Sheinbaum plans to ignore the courts and do what she wants, which doesn't portend much future for rule of law there. The MORENA party of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and Sheinbaum seems to have...

Cuba's electrical grid collapsed again on Sunday, the fourth such failure in 48 hours as a looming hurricane threatened to wreak further havoc on the island's decrepit infrastructure. Cuba earlier on Sunday had said it was making headway restoring service after multiple false starts, though millions of people remained without electricity more than two days after the grid's initial collapse. "Restoration work began immediately," the country's energy and mines ministry said on X. The clock was ticking as Hurricane Oscar bore down on the Caribbean island on Sunday, bringing strong winds and rain to northeastern Cuba and threatening to further...

Cuba's government said late on Saturday it had restored power to nearly one-fifth of the island's people after the national grid collapsed twice in 24 hours, plunging millions of people into darkness. The unprecedented nationwide blackout is the latest blow in the nation of 10 million, already suffering from dramatic shortages of food, medicine and fuel. Cuba's top electricity official, Lazaro Guerra, said the grid operator was working to restore electricity but that the process would be slow and rushing the job could lead to more blackouts and a deterioration of service. "I cannot assure you that we will be...

A massive outage left millions of Cubans without power and prompted the government Friday to implement emergency measures to slash demand, including suspending classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and canceling non-essential services. Cuban officials said that the blackout, which started late Thursday, saw 1.64 gigawatts go offline during peak hours in the early evening, about half the total demand at the time. “The situation has worsened in recent days,” Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said in a special address on national television in the early hours of Friday. “We must be fully transparent … we have been halting economic activities...

While the causes of the crisis are multifaceted, the country-wide blackout is a new low for the government — and those Cubans still living on the island. Amid growing desperation, an unprecedented number of Cubans are trying to migrate to the U.S. by any means possible. The island has lost an estimated 10 percent of its population over the last three years.

"It's not only the lack of electricity but also of gas and water," she told AFP, 11 hours after the unplanned shutdown of Cuba's main thermal power plant triggered the collapse of the country's grid. With a frown, she said her "generation wants to continue trusting" in the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, but her "resilience has limits". Cuba is in the throes of its worst economic crisis in 30 years, marked by sky-high inflation and shortages of food, medicine, fuel and water.

Havana CNN — Cuba’s electrical grid shut down on Friday, putting the country into a blackout after the failure of one of the island’s major power plants, according to its energy ministry. In a statement on X, the ministry said “the failure” of the Antonio Guiteras Power Plant caused “the total disconnection of the National Electrical System” from 11 a.m. ET on Friday. In Havana, motorists on Friday tried to navigate the city where no street lights appeared to be working and only a handful of police were directing traffic. Generators are a luxury for most Cubans and only a...

HAVANA, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Cuba plunged into a countrywide blackout on Friday after one of the island's major power plants failed and caused the national electrical grid to shut down, its energy ministry said. The Communist-run government had already closed schools and non-essential industry and sent most state workers home in a last-ditch effort to keep the lights on during severe power shortages. But shortly before midday, the Antonio Guiteras power plant, the country's largest and most efficient, went offline, prompting a total grid failure and leaving approximately 10 million people without power. Officials did not say what had...

Have you seen any economic news coming out of Cuba recently? With barely a couple of exceptions, if you read the U.S. Corporate Media, likely you have not. Searching for the most recent articles on Cuba’s economy from mainstream sources just now, I find nothing in the Washington Post about Cuba’s economy since May 2022; nothing from the New York Times since a piece in April rehashing the usual litany of Cuba’s long-known economic failures; silence at CBS since a piece in April quoting a Cuban official as “blam[ing] the U.S. for exodus of migrants, economic issues”; nothing from CNN...

Havana (AFP) – Thousands of Cubans, led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel and other leaders of the communist-run island, marched in Havana on Monday to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The demonstrators, including some 250 Palestinian medical students living in Cuba, carried a large banner that read "Long live free Palestine," while the president and his allies wore traditional keffiyeh scarves. "For a whole year our Gaza has not had a single day of calm, not a single day of peace and our people in the West Bank suffer daily aggression while the world remains paralyzed and unable to stop...

Daniel Alman from Squirrel Hill @DanielAlmanPGH Cuba's newly legalized private businesses are paying their workers many, many times more than what they had been making when they worked for the communist government. https://aljazeera.com/economy/2023/7/19/as-cubas-private-sector-roars-back-choices-and-inequality-rise https://miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article276456256.html #Cuba #Communism #Capitalism #Marxism #Socialism #Economics

With his whirling, twisting delivery -- strikingly unique from any other pitcher in history -- Luis Tiant turned his performances into theater. During the peak of his career in the 1970s, you didn’t need a radio or television to know that Tiant was pitching at Fenway Park. Throughout the packed houses he pitched in front of, cries of “Looie, Looie, Looie!” echoed around Kenmore Square and other parts of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. The lovably charismatic El Tiante -- as he came to be known throughout his memorable career -- died on Tuesday at the age of 83. “Luis had...

HAVANA, October 8. /TASS/. Cuba has submitted an official request to be included in BRICS as a partner country in a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the director general of the Cuban Foreign Ministry’s General Division of Bilateral Affair, Carlos Pereira, said. "Cuba has submitted an official request to join BRICS as a partner country in a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin who is the chairman of the grouping which is consolidating global politics and the hope of the Global South as a key player," the senior Cuban diplomat said in a statement on his page on X.

The American scholars continue to be brainwashed by the false name Columbus! Columbus means “pigeon”, but the navigator was no pigeon… In the United States there is an economic conspiracy to continue with the name Columbus because of the many printed books, videos and other paraphernalia worthy in sales many millions of dollars! Like in so many fields of endeavor the TRUTH will come to the surface and eventually will triumph!! Cristóvão Colon was the trade name of the discoverer. His natural name was Salvador Fernandes Zarco, born in the southern Portuguese town of Cuba, son of Isabel Gonsalves Zarco...

On the eve of the 2016 Presidential election, Issue #464 of Revolution announced in its headline, “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America. . .Rise Up. . .Get Into The Streets. . .Unite With People Everywhere to Build Up Resistance in Every Way You Can. . .Don’t Stop: Don’t Conciliate. . .Don’t Accommodate. . .Don’t Collaborate”.Revolution is an online newspaper published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Maoist group descended from splinters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1969, RCP founder Bob Avakian and fellow Maoist H. Bruce Franklin had cofounded the...

The Biden-Harris parole program that allows as many as 360,000 illegal aliens a year from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) to enter the United States is not only illegal, but is fraud-ridden. The fraud is so massive that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) quietly paused the program in the hope they could get it fixed before the American public learned about the extent of the problems.