Issue 1. Fidel Castro is a big idiot. Cuba sucks to live in for 99% of the population. Che Guevara was a murderer.

Issue 2. America’s response to Fidel Castro has increased his ability to stay in power. It has been a failure and has NOT weakened his power or helped the Cubans who are still in Cuba.

Issue 3. Fortunately; Fidel Castro will die someday and American foreign policy towards Cuba will change.

And lowest number of mental patients and prisoners? Maybe that’s because Castro emptied out the jails and asylums in 1979 and Peanut Brain Carter let them all come here.

I would have sent them all right back.

Yes, AIDS patients were quarantined in hospitals in the early days of the epidemic. Millions of victims around the world can only regret that other countries did not take similar measures in the early days. Today Cuba has the lowest AIDS rate in the region, and one of the lowest in the world.

There are many so-called dissident leaders leading free lives in Cuba… 250 of them met without hassle last year for a conference in Havana. Raul Rivero is a free man living in Spain – he was released a year or 2 ago. I know his work very well, and can honestly say he is a drunk important to no one except in the eyes of the US and certain exiles. He is guilty of working for publications funded by foreign governments, like most other so-called “political prisoners.”

So called “independent libraries” are neither independent nor libraries. They are political projects fomented by Washington without justification. The American Library Association went to Cuba and found nearly all of the so-called banned books on the shelves in actual libraries, which were found to be free and open to all – and a priority of the Revolutionary government, which has opened more libraries than all the previous governments combined. They found the “independent libraries” never open, without readers and basically a political charade that makes for good sound bites.

Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system”the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become :”" and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy”a tragedy on the hugest scale. The present-day cult of Che”the T-shirts, the bars, the posters”has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality.

The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.

I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba.

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1- Why did the other countries doing business with them take care of them?
2- You are obviously not well versed in law..All one need do is read the case and determine that the case didn’t have anything to do with where the person was going, but did in fact have to do with a passport and the communist party. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled by a narrow margin in Regan v. Wald that the travel restrictions were authorized in light of Cold War national security concerns. As a side note, US citizen’s can travel to Cuba:
 If you’re a full-time journalist, government official, member of an international organization, athlete, or visiting relatives or doing academic research, you may visit the island at any time.

 If your trip is “fully hosted,” meaning all your Cuba-related expenses are covered by a foreign citizen or organization that you don’t reimburse, you’re also home free.

If you’re planning to travel with an educational or religious institution or for humanitarian projects or free-lance journalism, you can apply to the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for a license, a process that generally takes several months. According to the Carter Center, that’s what the former president’s delegation did. But if you’re just interested in taking some sun, don’t waste your time: OFAC does not give licenses for pleasure travel.

5.- 900 people were surveyed, therefore 45% and 55% of 900 people answered as hey did. 

6- If they are doing so well without us, than it only follows that there is no reason to lift the sanctions and bans.

 

 

Che did not kill 2,000 people despite what anyone says. Reliable sources say “a few hundred” were summarily killed after military trials during and after the Revolution. Che personally pulled the trigger on maybe a handful. There is no proof otherwise, despite what exiles try to say to discredit a hero to young people everywhere.

To say any author is banned in Cuba is simply false. The American Library Association went to Cuba and found most of the so-called banned books in the libraries and no evidence of censorship. Look it up. And for a country with “no medicine” I wonder how they live as long as we do – and have a lower infant mortality rate (as well as about every disease).

He makes some sense when he agrees with me on the excuse the embargo provides Casto, but he turns conspiracy theorist, blaming Castro’s secret ways for the US Government not lifting it. Later he turns around and says the Cuban people won’t benefit from the emabrgo’s lifting. And I am accused of twisting logic. He is probably just unaware that most Cubans have gotten a basic double in their wages in the last few years.

Garcia would “bet the house” on the fact that Cubans want to dump their entire leadership and follow (presumably) a bunch of exiles (sounds familiarly naive). Too bad he said this before another Gallop poll, this one performed in Havana and Santiago de Cuba (2nd city), found that the more Cubans approve of their leaders than disapprove – 47 to 40 it was.(95% approved of their health and education – and this didn’t even count the more supportive rural areas)

2) I’ll let you explain how your conservartivism allows for the government to restrict someone’s ability to travel. But relevant case law (Kent v Dulles) holds that “The right to travel is a part of the ‘liberty’ of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment.”

3) Of course there is no International Law dealing with the ability of a state to blockade another. But if the US justifies its Iraq War legalities by UNSC resolutions, then Cuba can invoke an even more clear international rebuke. And just because Cuba does not buy into neo-liberalism does not mean that it is against beneficial trade. Finally, working for the common good is the definition of ANY government (except Republicans perhaps).

4) Here is your stinkin gallop poll results (58% of republicans said lift it!)

5) A near majority 45% oppose the Bush Admin. travel restrictions.  But who cares, exiles can CHOOSE not to go there, but they should not have power over my ability to go there for my Honeymoon.

6) (Hardest to understand) Cuba’s economy is #1 in the Hemisphere right now, so they don’t need anything. But lifting the embargo would certainly unleash an unprecidented boom, which no political party has ever wanted to take the blame for. But that is shortsighted thinking. Similarly Vietnam is hardlyin “the dumps.”They are a model for poverty reduction and have been second only to China since 2000 in GDP growth (they’re growing by 8 percent now). It is the hyper-capitalist Asian nations that are in the doldrums.

You were talking avout facts?

How so Zelda..to hear Andy Garcia talk, there is nothing noble about 5 years olds being dressed in military uniforms and indoctinated into Fidels “system”. Why are they not being rational? I think Garcia’s interview here summed it up best:

H: While the events depicted in the movie occurred almost 50 years ago, you portray Batista, Che Guevara, and Fidel in a similarly negative light, a vision that may not be shared by a younger generation who has come to see, particularly Che, as a great visionary. Do you think this movie will change that?

AG: I don’t know. Most people I ask, ‘Do you know who you have on your T-Shirt?’ They will answer, ‘Yeah, it’s Che Guevara, he was a revolutionary guy.’ That’s as much as they know about him. When you confront them and say ‘Do you know he executed over 2,000 people in Cuba?’ They’d tell you they didn’t. This is historical fact, but people have limited knowledge about him. He talked about the necessity to execute, and about revolutionary justice being ultimate justice so you don’t need a trial to convict someone. This figure has been romanticized over the years and unfortunately people don’t take the time to read and learn about it.

H: Do you believe there is also a skewed, romantic vision of Cuba that is predominant outside the island?

AG: Yes, people think of Cuba as a social paradise. They argue that it has free education. Well, yes, only if you call indoctrination free education. If you believe that education is reading only the books they provide you. You can’t read Cabrera Infante or Faulkner because its illegal and you can go to jail. People believe the propaganda that the [Cuban] government has spread. People say: ‘They have free medicine.’ Well, they have free diagnosis but no medicine for the people. There’s a lot of [misconceptions] that people in the Americas and around the world believe based on the propaganda that comes out of Cuba. As an exile you know the lack of civil liberties that Cubans have, but people in America don’t know that. The majority of people here know very little about American history, let alone Cuban history.

H: It seems like foreign policy towards Cuba has become a waiting game for Castro’s death. Do you think there is more the world should be doing right now to remedy the conditions in which the Cuban people live?

AG: The entire world trades with Castro. I think America is the only country that enforces an embargo against Cuba. And it seems to me –this is just personal opinion- like every time there is talk of lifting the embargo something happens over there that makes the U.S. reconsider lifting it. I don’t believe he wants the embargo lifted, because once he has no embargo, then he has no enemy. That’s just my personal political theory. Also, the problem with an embargo-free Cuba is that it doesn’t solve the problem of Fidel’s embargo over the Cuban people that prevents them from participating in a market economy. The lifting of the embargo wouldn’t directly help the Cuban people. If they can only do business with the government, then how do the Cuban people benefit from that? Why don’t they benefit from the business that Cuba does with European nations? Those countries do business with the Cuban government, but Cuban citizens don’t have access to those business opportunities:And the benefits go to the government who can decide how much they trickle down to the people, which as you know, is nothing. The only way lifting the embargo could help stimulate the economy is if people are allowed to freely participate in a free market society so they can deal directly with investors coming in from the outside, or get hired by those investors. So there are two embargos that need to be lifted, the first is the embargo Fidel has over his own people, and obviously the American embargo. Until then nothing will happen. I don’t think Fidel wants the embargo lifted because it’d put pressure on him to open up the process. He blames the American embargo, but he also keeps it in place. Without an enemy, who’s going to like me?

H: Is a return to the 1940 constitution [which promoted a democratic state] a reality for post-Castro Cuba?

AG: I certainly hope so. It’s a simple move. All you have to say is: we want to go back to the promise of what the revolution was. The revolution has not fulfilled its original promise, which was to restore the constitution. It went in a different direction completely. So, yes, it is possible, but you’ll need a complete change in leadership. You can bet the house on the fact that the Cuban people would want that. But the question is: Will there be a government that wants to go in that direction, and have an election and restore democracy? It doesn’t mean you have to abandon social democracy. That was part of the Cuban constitution and of the revolutionary process. There were social programs established before the revolution, but the one thing that is not negotiable is freedom, democracy.

H: Do you see yourself returning to Cuba one day?

AG: Every day.

Please explain how he is wrong