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WINDOW ON CUBA


 

STABILITY NO, FREEDOM YES

 

By Osmani Ricardo Segura García

Independent Journalist

“La Estrella Solitaria”

Havana, Cuba

October 26, 2007

 

In a speech given on the afternoon of October 24, 2007, United States President George W. Bush announced a series of measures to support the work being done by opposition groups in and out of Cuba.  He also demanded that the government of Fidel Castro immediately free all political prisoners currently in Cuban jails, with a goal toward giving Cuba the opportunity to achieve complete and total liberty.

 

In his speech President Bush was clear and direct with respect to Cuba’s reality today.  The situation in Cuba can be changed and he called on the international community to support the measures he is proposing in order to help the Cuban people achieve their true freedom.

 

The response by the Cuban government was immediate.  Barely two hours after the speech by the President of the United States, Foreign Relations Minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, was giving its response to the White House.

 

At a press conference, the Minister attacked the speech by President Bush contradicting everything the President had said.  Without shame, as they always do in Cuba, Felipe Pérez Roque referred repeatedly to “the people” when talking about Cubans.  He used manipulation and lies because we all know that all decisions in Cuba are made by Fidel Castro and the elite in his inner circle and not the Cubans that make up the majority in the island.

 

It’s important to point out that contrary to what was said by the Foreign Relations Minister, President Bush did not utter one lie when speaking to the Cuban people.  President Bush described the reality of Cuba today and said the United States is willing to help our cause as we fight for a better Cuba.

 

One example of the truth told by President Bush and the lies of Pérez Roque is the assertion by the latter that all Cubans have access to the Internet through the Computer Clubs for Young People. This is a huge lie! Everyone here knows that what is offered through these Communist clubs is a very limited version of an “Intranet”, where the government restricts the sites that can be accessed.

 

I will not take the time to point out all the lies told by Felipe Pérez Roque at this press conference, but I will say there was a worried look on his face and those of his cohorts.  It almost seems that they too are realizing there is little time left to the Castro dictatorship and that CHANGE is very near.  The Cuban government wants to pretend they are not worried, but it is they who are frustrated and desperate and not President Bush as the Cuban Minister wants the public to think.

 

Once again we were called “mercenaries” by Felipe Pérez Roque.  This is not new. Unfortunately we have become accustomed to being offended in the most cowardly manner.  We are used to being called names that have nothing to do with our work and the just cause we fight for, even while being constantly harassed for the simple fact of publishing the truth and defending the freedoms that are denied to us by the Cuba of Fidel Castro.

 

If I am labeled a mercenary for defending freedom and human rights and for publishing the truth that is hidden by the Cuban government, so be it.  I will continue to be a committed mercenary in the service of my people.  All the ignominy and cruelty perpetrated against us by putting us behind bars in the worst prisons imaginable or exiling us to remote corners of the island will not break our desire and our spirit to continue our fight.

 

This is the reason that I dedicate this article to those who, like me do their part, no matter how small, to bring freedom to Cuba.  And I ratify without any qualms what was said by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, in his magnificent speech to the Cuban people.  I paraphrase, “WE DO NOT WISH STABILITY FOR THE CUBAN PEOPLE, WHAT WE WANT IS LIBERTY! STABILITY NO, FREEDOM YES!
 


 

May of 2007

Alpha 66 has the honor of being one more vehicle to bring to the public opinion of the world, a full interview filled with anger and patriotism that, received from Villa Clara, through Information Bridge Cuba Miami and the Lawyer Guillermo Fariñas Hernández, director of Cubanacán Press, was done to the prisoner of conscience Jorge Luís García Pérez Antúnez, who in its long sentence in Castro’s prison became to be known as “The Black Diamond.” Next this document:  

They have to cut us because we won't break nor split".
An interview with Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez

PLACETAS, CUBA - April 27 (Lic. Guillermo Fariñas Hernández, Cubanacán Press/Puenteinfocubamiami.org) - I dreamed of this interviewed for the longest time, but it could not take place on April 22 of 2007, day when Antunez was released from prison. Several factors interfered; the most important factor I did not take into account was the "agoraphobia" syndrome, a psychological state of mind that consists of the difficulty of a human being to adapt to live in open spaces after spending many years in severe confinement.

Finally, in my second visit to Placetas, I was able to interview one of the most emblematic Cuban prisoners of conscience, Jorge Luis García Perez Antúnez, also known as "The black diamond".

Guillermo Fariñas Hernández: Why do they call you Antunez?

Jorge Luis García Pérez Antúnez: Because I am the son of Ruben Antunez Lavallet.

GFH: Is your father still alive?

JLGP: Yes, right now he is in this city of Placetas.

GFH: What is your mothers' name?

JLGP: My mother's name was Alejandra Garcia Perez; she is no longer with us.

GFH: You don't want to talk about your mother, do you, it makes you uncomfortable to talk about her.

JLGP: I would appreciate it if we don't talk about her because it's a nostalgic subject for me, is a hard and cruel episode of my life.

GFH: OK, let's change subjects. When were you born?

JLGP: I was born on October 10th, 1964, a glorious date for our republic, the uprising of La Demajagua in 1868. I will turn 43 next October.

GFH: When were you imprisoned?

JLGP: On March 15, 1990. Another historic date in our Republic's history, that of the Baragua Protest in 1878.

GFH: What were you accused of?

JLGP: I was accused of oral enemy propaganda; I was sentenced to 5 years in prison.

GFH: Were you innocent or guilty of the charges?

JLGP: Yes, and No.

GFH: Can you please elaborate?

JLGP: Yes, in the laws of the Cuban government, its citizens cannot express openly different views than those of the government and I did. But No, in civilized and democratic societies this is not a crime. This type of punishment is considered a judicial aberration; therefore, the Castro-communist legal judicial system is an aberration.

GFH: Yes, but you served more than 5 years in prison, what happened?

JLGP: I think it was due to my rebellious nature, when my mother was dying they violated prison rules by not taking me to see her and I had to escape from prison in order to see her one more time before she died; I was charged and sentence for the crime of " Evasion from Penal Institutions".

GFH: But, as I understand it you we charged with a third crime?

JLGP: That's right, they made up a charge of tentative sabotage in order to discredit me so that I would loose my status of prisoner of conscience before Amnesty International.

GFH: Antunez, how many years did you serve behind bars?

JLGP: To be exact, 17 years and 34 days.

GFH: Do you believe you spent your youth and part of your adult life in jail?

JLGP: I don't believe so, because jail did not stop me from speaking my mind, our homeland deserves that and much more, and I never lost my principles and much less my dignity in prison.

GFH: Any regrets in this struggle?

JLGP: Yes, not starting younger my fight against this totalitarism that's been a dark cloud over our country for almost 50 years.

GFH: Antunez, you have published 2 books while in prison "Life in Prison Kilo-8" and "Boitel Lives", we heard of a third book now being printed, will you continue writing in liberty?

JLGP: I don't consider myself an intellectual; at least not my vision of what an intellectual should be, I am simply a former political prisoner who wrote about his living experiences in jail. I don't have the formal education a writer should have.

GFH: That is your opinion, and I don't agree with it, but I respect your point of view, your works speaks for itself, my actual question was: will you continue writing?

JLGP: Yes, I plan to expose in writing all the cruelties, abuses and genocides I witnessed and was subjected to at times.

GFH: Then will this be the beginning of a testimonial and denouncement literary career, in this new phase of your life in freedom?


JLGP: No, my main task will be defending the political prisoners still inside Castro's jails, I will write when I have the time, and if I can I will try to practice Independent Journalism, if you are willing to teach me the ropes, but everything will revolve around the defenseless prisoners I left behind not long ago, in the hells of Castro's jails.

GFH: If this is the case, what will be your main responsibility in the evolving Civil Society that opposes the Castro regime?

JLGP: Well, I will be the National Coordinator of "Presidio Politico Cubano "Pedro Luis Boitel" out side the prisons.

GFH: Can you please define the Presidio Politico Cubano "Pedro Luis Boitel" and its purpose?

JLGP: This organization of prisoners and former political prisoners and that of conscience as well as those serving time for violent acts against the dictatorship and those of common causes who assume a position of defenders and denouncers of the atrocities that are daily inflicted with impunity on the inmates with harshness and cynicisms.

GFH: Will you be a part of one of the most important coalitions of the pacific opposition interacting at this time.

JLGP: El Presidio Politico Cubano "Pedro Luis Boitel" is part of all the coalitions and at the same time is part of none in specific, due to the affiliation characteristic of our members whom have different positions and attitudes of fighting this communist government, and as a consequence, in order for us to sign and support any posture or document, it has to be approved and supported by the entire opposition to Castro, otherwise we will abstain.

GFH: Have you ever considered the possibility of leaving the country and continue fighting this regime from the exile?

JLGP: The thought has never entered my mind. I will fight communism in my homeland because I subscribe to the phrase that "The Homeland Belongs to All", this in no way criticizes those who cannot withstand the pressures and leave to free societies, they'll always have my respect, consideration and admiration as long as they don't forget those of us left behind fighting and suffering.

GFH: Can you tell me, how is your physical condition?

JLGP: I will have a medical checkup soon, but my health is not the most important thing now, I am out already, at this time we have to worry about the health of those who are still in prison, which is why I never get tired of repeating time and time again that Cuban prisons are extermination factories of men and women locked in them.

GFH: Is there any person in particular that you consider responsible for the fact that a simple sugarcane reaper as yourself, who never studied journalism, today is one of the most famous political prisoners in the world?

JLGP: First and foremost my paternal sister Berta Antunez Pernet, president of the "Pedro Luis Boitel" Civic Resistance Movement, her husband Alejandro Gracia Sardiñas my sacrificed and unconditional brother in law, my niece Damaris Garcia Antunez and my nephew Sergio Garcia Antunez, because their support cost them their right to go to school.

GFH: Why have you earned the nickname "The Black Diamond"?

JLGP: Well, black because I am of the black race, and as to the diamond part must be because like all precious stones are very hard, hence we don't break nor split, in another words we never surrender and jewelers are the only ones that can cut us, in other words kill us, because we never give up.

GFH: Well, thank you very much for giving us this interview Antunez, is there anything else you would like to add?

JLGP: No, maybe in another occasion but not now.


Information given from Villa Clara to the Information Bridge Cuba Miami by Dr. Guillermo Farinas Hernández, director of Cubanacá Press. Given on the 6th day of April of 2007.


November 2006

FAREWELL TO AN UNBURIED CORPSE 

By: Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez

Secretary General of ALPHA 66

Vice-president of UNIDAD CUBANA 
 

The recent images of a Fidel Castro as a crumbling shell of a man trying to pretend that he is more than just an unburied cadaver are so pathetic as to be ridiculous. The aging dictator does not want to accept the bitter reality of his destiny.  Accustomed to imposing his will with a steel fist, he surely must feel humiliated when the mirror he faces shows him the mortal remains of a nauseating skeleton conveniently anchored in the anteroom of hell.

 

No longer does the diabolical “caudillo” of the Sierra Maestra represent anything.  Destiny has condemned him to a sad past in the present, forcing him to be a witness to his own arid future, without throne  or glory like a bleak wilderness.   At his feet is now

 the carpet where his mentors Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler passed on their way to the garbage heap of history.  All indications are that the voyage of the tyrant to the immensity of nothingness, so desired by the Cuban people, is almost at hand.  With not much pity, even if some find this hurtful, we are seeing how the Cuban dictator turns into a human blob.  Incapable of putting a sentence together his thoughts get clogged in his viscous tongue.  His somnambulist eyes accentuate the look of a mad man.

 

Not only is the grotesque figure of this sinister character beginning to fade, but also those that supported him for many years and leaned on his shoulders and are beginning to slip away with the fear of death in their throat as they face the cracking of their agonizing “Revolution”.  The more realistic ones are preparing to abandon the ship reminding us of that old saying, probably by a Chinese philosopher, that “When you see the rats jumping overboard you can be sure that the ship is sinking”.

 

Yes, no one can doubt that the ship is sinking for that macabre Revolution that was first announced to be a clear crystal green.  Green like the palm trees and like mint that later began to change at the convenience of the tyrant.  Soon it turned the color of blood and the prisons were dressed in black and black also became the hopes, and the beaches, and the immense cemetery of the ocean.

 

But the cry of the mothers of those murdered is becoming a light in the horizon of the captive homeland.  Roses are germinating at the bottom of the Florida Straits, white roses. And in the sky the stars begin to dance and the rainbow can be seen dressed in its seven colors because finally the tyrant of Cuba has begun to disintegrate into the slow and chattering death that destiny has determined.  It is the price God is making him pay for his stubborn arrogance, for his human insensitivity, for the uncontained scorn he showed toward his own people.  A people that paid a high price for its innocence by helping someone gain power that should have instead been condemned to a guillotine. Had this been done the Cuban people would have saved themselves from half a century of pain and agony, half a century of dragging the misery and humiliating chains of slavery.

 

Fidel Castro is definitely dying.

 

(Poor old man! is what the owls that croak in the night must be thinking.  Only the owls and perhaps a crow. No one else. No one else). 
 



September
2006

THE CUBAN GOVERNMENT HAS TORTURED ME DURING EIGHT YEARS. TRYING TO DRIVE ME INSANE."

Testimony of prisoner of conscience, Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet,  from the Prison of Combinado del Este in Havana, Cuba.

PRISON CONDITIONS
"The government of Cuba has tortured me during eight years; they have done so trying to drive me insane though, thank God, I have been able to preserve my sanity. in reality, they continue torturing me because I live in a box with no windows or natural light, no water.with a mattress that feels as if one were sleeping on a plank, a stone. unfit for a human being. surrounded by criminals and under the threat, as it has happened on previous occasions, of being attacked by the government who instigates these dangerous prisoners."

"I believe that what the government is doing is torturing me to humiliate me so that I abandon the struggle on behalf of the freedom of my country but, thank God, I have been able to keep up my stance and will continue doing so with God's help."

SYMBOLIC FAST AS OF JULY 13, 2006
We began this fast (in prison) because I believe we should pray to God and demand our rights before the government, the right to be free which belongs to every person just for being a citizen. Our country has lived so long without any rights, under a dictatorship.I believe that we must demand rights that belong to us and, in everyone's interest, these liberties must be observed... In order to live a full life, it is essential to live in freedom and the Cuban people are denied these rights. that is why I'm initiating a fast along with other brothers (in prison) to demand that the government sign the international covenants of civil, political, economic, cultural and social rights - the Cuban regime must sign them and abide by them so that the Cuban people may live in freedom at last..

MESSAGE TO THE CUBAN PEOPLE
"The Cuban people must do their utmost in their struggle to win their freedom and succeed in obtaining the international support of all free and democratic countries. I trust that the Cuban people prove their dignity as they have done so on other occasions, so that we may enjoy FREEDOM.."

Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, 45 years old, is an internal medicine specialist of the black race who established and presides in Cuba the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, an organization that promotes universal human rights through non-violent civil disobedience. He was released October 31, 2002, after serving a three-year sentence at a maximum-security prison 700 km. away from his home. He was violently arrested thirty-six days later and remained in prison until March-April, 2003, when he was included in a crackdown carried out by the Cuban regime against the independent civil rights movement in the island. He was tried summarily and sentenced to serve 25 years in prison, accused of being "a mercenary at the service of a foreign state". He continues to suffer the cruel prison conditions he has been exposed to during eight years, which have seriously deteriorated his physical health.

On July 17, 2006, Amado Gil, a journalist in Radio Martí, was able to speak with Dr. Biscet in Cuba thanks to the intercession of an independent journalist in Havana who, beyond governmental control, used the limited time allotted to Dr. Biscet to make telephone calls from prison.

(Listen audio - in Spanish - of the entire interview: http://www.martinoticias.com/ocbstory.asp?MediaID=37276)

Received through LouPagani -Net for Cuba Network


A CALL FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
By Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet
President of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights

Havana, Cuba, August 1, 2006
Combinado del Este Prisión
Building 1, 2nd Floor, Cell 1232

To the people of Cuba, fellow citizens, and persons fasting:

The people of Cuba have been suffering the scorn of a totalitarian tyranny - in Communism -- for more than four decades. Due to this inhumane treatment where the civility of a people is violated, many indignant Cubans have risen to fast and to pray to our God of the Bible and are demanding the government adhere to international agreements on human rights (the international agreement for civil and political rights and other economic, social, and cultural rights) signed by the international community at the United Nations.

As we have clearly explained, these demands are made to the Cuban government, independent of who is at the head of such a government, for we say as the people of Boston once said:
"Tyranny is tyranny, come from where it may."

This is why we must continue to fast and to pray until we obtain the government's signature, and expeditious adherence in the practice of respecting the human rights of the Cuban people.

We must speed the acquisition of these basic human rights through Civil Disobedience. We must use all methods until we achieve our humanitarian end:
"If there is no fight, there is no progress. Power does not concede anything without a demand, it never has, it never will." -- Frederick Douglas.

We have the right to be free and to make use of our sovereignty as individuals and as a people.
"Liberty alone brings with it peace and riches." -- José Martí.

From this dark cell where I am forced to live, I will continue to resist until the freedom of my people is achieved.

Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet

(Message transmitted by La Nueva Cuba on August 20, 2006)


ALPHA 66 takes as its own this call by Dr. Biscet and asks all those in exile to think about the best way to support this call to Civil Disobedience that has come to us from cell #1232 of the dreaded Cuban political prison system.



October
2005

THE TRUTH OF ALPHA 66

 By: Tania Díaz Castro

 

La Habana, Cuba—October (www.cubanet. org)

We Cubans have always asked ourselves why the government of Fidel Castro calls Alpha 66 a terrorist organization when the tactics used by this organization are the same as those that were used to fight the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

 

Founded 43 years ago and headquartered in Miami, Alpha 66 has claimed responsibility for the military operations that it has carried out on Cuban territory since 1962, the year it was founded.

 

On December 31, 1964 ex commander and chief of operations of Alpha 66, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, landed in Baracoa with the purpose of opening a guerrilla front just as Castro had done years earlier. Menoyo and three of his men were captured near the Moa River and served 22 years in prison after being sentenced to 50 years.  Since 2003 Menoyo lives in Havana waiting for legal recognition of his pacifist organization, Cambio Cubano.

 

It is curious to note that almost all the founders of Alpha 66, including its recently deceased general secretary, Andrés Nazario Sargén, participated in the guerrilla struggle against Batista as members of the Second National Front of Escambray. It was during this time that they learned guerrilla tactics like ambushes, the use of snipers, surprise explosions and attacks against enemy installations and operations.  They used these tactics because they lacked the numbers and necessary equipment to confront an established army.

 

The practice of this type of violent war is very ancient.  The Bible relates how in this manner the Israelites under the command of Joshua conquered Canaan.  Simón Bolívar, Miguel Hidalgo, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are all examples of guerrilla leaders.

 

The poet and ex political prisoner (plantado) Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez is the new leader of Alpha 66.  He was captured in a rural area of Pinar del Río on December 4, 1968 after landing with a group of guerrilla fighters.  He was given a prison sentence of 45 years and served 22.

 

Díaz Rodríguez denounces the regime of Fidel Castro and affirms that his organization has never carried out terrorist acts that would bring panic to the population.  He says that “ I wish the solution for Cuba could be through peaceful means” but he states that Alpha 66 is an  organization of combat with the same strategy proposed by José Martí,  Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo during the struggle for independence.

 

He further states that Alpha 66 “defends the right of Cubans to fight for the liberation of Cuba”.  This is why they have a military training camp named Rumbo Sur where they train on shooting, karate, judo and other activities that are all legal in the United States.

 

Vicente Méndez, an ex commander in the fight against Batista, is one of Alpha 66 most respected martyr.  He landed in Cuba on Abril 17, 1970 and died in combat.  Other martyrs of this organization died by firing squad.  These are the true heroes that are fighting Castro’s totalitarianism and who the Cuban government calls terrorists.  This is a lie that has been repeated for many years and it has yet to be proven true.
 


 

Castro Spies Get Reprieve
Humberto Fontova
Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2005
On September 14, 1998, the FBI uncovered a Castro spy ring in Miami and arrested ten of them. Four others managed to scoot back to Cuba. These became known as the "Wasp Network."

According to the FBI's affidavit, these Castro agents were engaged in, among other acts:
 
  • Gathering intelligence against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the McDill Air Force Base in Tampa and the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Homestead, Florida.
     
  • Compiling the names, home addresses and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command's top officers, along with those of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica.
     
  • Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.
     
  • Sending letter bombs to Cuban-Americans.
     
  • Spying on McDill Air Force Base, the U.S. armed forces' worldwide headquarters for fighting "low-intensity" conflicts.
     
  • Locating entry points into Florida for smuggling explosive material.

    At the bail hearings, Assistant U.S. District Attorney Carolyn Heck Miller said the urgency to act on the case was because "the defendant has made allusions to the prospect of sabotage against buildings and airplanes in the Southern District of Florida."

    These Castro agents also infiltrated the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue. From them, Castro got the flight plan for one of their flights over the Florida straits, also known as "the cemetery without crosses." The estimates of the number of Cubans dying horribly in the "cemetery without crosses" run from 50,000 to 85,000.

    Brothers to the Rescue risked their lives almost daily, flying over the straits, alerting and guiding the Coast Guard to any balseros, and saving thousands of these desperate people from joining that terrible tally.

    By February of 1996 they'd flown 1,800 of these humanitarian missions and helped rescue 4,200 men, women and children. That month Castro's Wasp spies passed a Brothers flight plan to Havana. This allowed Castro and his military to ambush and shoot down (in international air space) two unarmed Brothers' planes. Four members of Brothers to the Rescue met a fiery death from the gallant Castro's MiGs. Three of these men were U.S. citizens, the other a legal U.S. resident.

    Armando Alejandre Jr. came to the U.S. at age 10 in 1960. His first order of business when he reached the age of 18 was fulfilling his dream of becoming a U.S. citizen. His next was joining the United States Marine Corps and volunteering for service in Vietnam. He returned with several decorations.

    As a member of Brothers to the Rescue, he often dropped flowers over the sea in memory of the thousands they'd been unable to rescue in time.

    A man with a weapon or with both hands free to fight has always palsied Castro with fright. The notion of Fidel Castro facing a United States Marine in combat mode is simply laughable, in a pathetic way. So Castro waited for Armando and his Brothers to be carrying flowers -– and made his move, murdering them in cold blood. MiGs against Cessnas, cannon and rockets against flowers.

    This is a Castro specialty. In high school Fidel got into an argument over a debt (he was always a deadbeat) with a schoolmate named Ramon Mestre, who pounded him like a gong. Fidel cried uncle and slunk away whimpering that he'd go fetch the money he owed Ramon.

    Instead he came back with a cocked pistol, hoping to surprise and murder the unarmed Mestre, who'd already gone home. There's your genuine Fidel in all his macho splendor. He does have a long memory, however. Six months after he grabbed power, Castro had his goons grab Senor Mestre, who then suffered 20 years in Castro's dungeons.

    The premeditated atrocity against Alejandre and his Brothers is what added the "manslaughter" and "conspiracy to commit murder" charges (on top of the ones listed above, 26 charges total) against the Wasp Network spies.

    Came the trial, and lawyers for Castro's agents' all ranted and raved that "no Cuban-Americans should be on the jury!" Interestingly, Leonard Weinglass, who represents Gerardo Hernandez, the Brothers to the Rescue infiltrator/spy charged with manslaughter, has represented Jane Fonda, Pentagon Papers defendant Anthony Russo, Angela Davis, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Chicago Seven, Amy Carter and Mumia Abu-Jamal. He's known as a specialist in 'civil rights' and 'human rights.'

    But ah! When it came to Cuban-Americans? Now Weinglass argued vehemently against their right to serve on a jury based simply on their ethnicity.

    The U.S. Supreme Court itself supposedly prohibits this: "The Equal Protection Clause guarantees that the State will not exclude from the jury venire anyone on account of race, or on the false assumption that members of his race as a group are not qualified to serve as jurors." This from a case titled Batson v. Kentucky (1986.) "By denying a person participation in jury service on account of his race, the State also unconstitutionally discriminates against the excluded juror," the Court decision continues.

    Apparently not when it comes to Cuban-Americans. As we all know by now, none of the usual liberal bugaboos and standards apply to a minority that votes overwhelmingly Republican. During the Elian circus the New York press ran an article by Stalinist Alexander Cockburn urging the "nuking" of Little Havana. OK, so it was in jest.

    But the same jesting with regard to Harlem, the Bronx or East Los Angles would have sent Cockburn to the unemployment office, mandatory "sensitivity training" or maybe to Weinglass himself to defend him against a "hate-speech" rap.

    At any rate, not a peep was heard from the usual "civil rights watchdogs" (the Miami Herald, for instance) about the expressly racist request by the "civil rights" attorney and "activist" Weinglass –- and one that violated a decision by the Supreme Court itself.

    And no objection by the judges either. They agreed with Weinglass and the rest of the defense and excluded Cuban-Americans from the jury like the very plague. "The case would be infected with prejudice," argued another defense lawyer, Paul McKenna. And again, after the judges' decision in agreement with Weinglass and McKenna, nary a peep from "civil rights" mongers.

    Well, came June of 2001 and that jury -– utterly free from "infection" by a single Cuban-American –- found all five of the Castro spies guilty as charged on all 26 counts. The evidence against them was absolutely overwhelming and devastating. The jury concluded that these five were patently agents of America's most hate-filled enemy, and bent on damaging their country. It didn't take a Cuban-American to see this.

    Last week, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta (the same one that ruled Elian Gonzalez could not apply for political asylum even though the very INS manual has examples of 6-year-olds applying for asylum – "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," p. 169) overturned the conviction of the Castro spies. The 93-page opinion states that seating an impartial jury (even one thoroughly disinfected against Cuban- Americans) was an "unreasonable probability because of pervasive community prejudice."

    "Never before in the history of the United States has a federal circuit court of appeals reversed a trial court's finding with respect to venue. This is a first!" crowed a triumphant Leonard Weinglass from atop his dunghill of cases.

    Apparently, just having Cuban-Americans in the same community as other jurors infects them! By the way, Cuban-Americans make up only 1/4 of the community in which the trial was held. You really gotta hand it to us. We are one influential bunch! It's starting to go to my head.

    We make up a minuscule 1/300 of the U.S. population, yet -– from all I keep hearing and reading in the MSM (mainstream media) -– we not only decide jury verdicts through some form of telepathy, osmosis or bribery, we also control U.S. foreign policy with a firm testicular grip.

    "Cuba policy isn't made in Washington," harrumphed Bill Press in a CNN column. "It's made in Miami by former Batista supporters who think they can reverse history!"

    "A small number of powerful exiles in South Florida cow our politicians into keeping the crazy Cuban policy!" snapped media baron Al Neuharth in a USA Today column.

    "Man, we BAD!" I finally started shouting, while strutting around like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in the movie "Stir Crazy."

    There are others besides Weinglass and McKenna simply delighted by last week's decision. "This Atlanta court decision was demonstrative of the dignity, decorum and professionalism of the three judges, who merit all our respect." That ode comes from none other than Ricardo Alarcon, the eunuch who serves as Castro's "President" of Cuba's "National Assembly," which is to say: the representative of a regime whose first order of business on January 9, 1959, was abolishing habeas corpus and introducing the death penalty to apply retroactively.

    This is the same regime whose main executioner and magistrate at the time, Che Guevara, took a brief breather from murdering hundreds of men (and boys, some as young as 15) without trial to declare: "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! We execute from revolutionary conviction!"

    The three Atlanta judges should feel very proud of their accolades by such august adherents of civilized jurisprudence.

    Humberto Fontova is author of "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," described as "absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you'll never forget" by David Limbaugh. "A remarkable book," says Phil Brennan. "An eye-opener. Fontova explodes myth after myth." David Horowitz says: "Humberto Fontova has performed a valuable service to the cause of decency and human freedom. Every American should read this book."

    Reprinted from NewsMax.com  


  • June 2005

    "THEY WANT TO DEPRIVE ME OF MY HOMELAND, BUT I ACCEPT NO MASTER."
    By Juan Carlos Herrera
    (Condemned to 20 years in prison during the repressive wave of March 2003 -

    Actually at PRISION KILO 7, Camaguey. Cuba.)

    Sixteen years ago (March of 1988), I began to experiment changes in my perspective on Cuba's reality and all that was in my surroundings. I perceived that living beneath the supposed socialism were only government parasites, specifically within the upper echelons of power--in other words, those who are in power today. I understood the falseness of the blurted slogans, the wasted five-year plans, of the total backwardness, and of the hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing the abstractions, the imposition,
    and the supposed uniformity.

    The Florida Straits and the perimeter bordering on the Guantanamo Base became large cemeteries. During the almost thirty years of "Revolution" that had passed, I understood that a Cuban only carried to the grave hopelessness and pain, in addition to a life plagued
    with uncertainty. We march to other lands under a supposed proletarian internationalism in the midst of an economy more inefficient by the day. Almost suddenly, I found myself in the middle of a tunnel. I managed to see the light and my neurons began to act independently of the induced political manipulations, for they no longer found a handle to hold onto in a single atom of my body.

    The collapse of the system that made so many promises regarding a "new man" and a luminous future, totally evaporated. Radical changes were taking place in what were formerly our "protectors"--their societies and their citizens were claiming freedoms suppressed and trampled upon. I finished by proving that I lived under a political sequestration and, without realizing it, I was simply a victim of a macabre socio-political
    experiment. It was then that I opened my eyes, and although I found myself trapped within a monster, I needed to express myself with total freedom. 

    The day arrived which marked a radical change in the history of humanity. Soviet Socialism fell and with it the strings that held dozens of European nations--and almost like a magic act, so did the subsidies that had supported the Cuban dictatorship. With all my being, I yelled, "Eureka!!"

    I already knew that I lived under a degrading police state, so I took the just course. After experimenting with unbiased, uncensored literature (of course, in a clandestine manner), I carried out comparisons to prove that I was right--that I should reclaim my rights which had been usurped and amputated.

    How many lies in the speeches of the Cuban Cesar? I managed to publicly classify him as a "Czar", and in spite of my youth, I began to have contact with dignified Cubans in Havana and in my native Guantanamo who themselves were detested by the dictator-in-chief. I did not know the true history of Cuba. It's all distorted. What I previously saw as a system of "justice" was nothing more than a great farce, a constitution elaborated only to represent the interests of those in power, while the people of Cuba lived totally oppressed by the state. A nation of brave men and women ended up bound hand and feet by a vile and conniving political betrayal. The biggest lunatic had curtailed rights and planted the seeds of terror in the face of popular discontent. 

    The new constitution of the Republic (1976) is a dishonor, where the citizens are declared as "non-persons'. In opposition to the Great Chief emerged what is today the great movement for human rights composed of noble Cubans. The ruler, heartless and resentful, viciously attacked back. Many faced filthy dungeons and many more saw
    themselves forced into exile. But for those brave Cubans there remains in their hearts the hope of recuperating a homeland once lost and decimated, enslaved in the midst of total chaos. We do not resign ourselves to live on our knees even though prison or death may be our destiny.

    Ever since I was able to glance at the horizon of the national reality, and listen to the many redundant speeches plagued with lies that pictured a "paradise" today unattainable, I decided to say enough to so many injustices and cruelties. No more rights infringed
    upon in the midst of an inexorable fundamentalism that obliges millions of citizens to coexist under an induced mutism of subtle methods degrading to all.

    It's been 45 years of political, economic, and social immobility under the aegis of an illegitimate, egocentric personality that stirs and divides his own people. Personally, I suffer the vindictive political shrapnel of the Great Dictator, but I do not resign myself to let freedom die. Twice the tyrant-in-chief has sent me to prison. The crime? Not being in agreement with the omnipresent power that causes such pain to the nation. I don't regret being behind bars because it fills me with pride to know that I am not one of the double-thinkers, and that I follow the ideas of the greatest and most distinguished of
    Cubans, Jose Marti. The Apostle once declared: "I want the highest law of the land to be the Cuban people's tribute to the dignity of man". I follow his lessons along with many other courageous compatriots who suffer, and not a single lament is heard.

    Today, the ideas are imprisoned, but they will not die. We are tortured physically and psychologically, but we do not bow our heads, and we resist from the depths of the gut of the Castroite monster that makes up his inhospitable dungeons. Not only are we enclosed and confined, but also we lack the most inherent necessities. We are treated like non-persons and within the prisons we cannot even aspire to adequate medical treatment, amongst hundreds of other violations.

    Hundreds of Cubans today are proudly behind iron bars, but they are not defeated. They want to deprive us from being a part of the nation. They confine us, but hope lives on because one day the longed for freedom will arrive, although the price to be paid has been high. That day, not too distant, a monument will be erected for all the victims of the black Castroism, to the ones who have fled from terror, to the ones who gave their lives in prisons, but who never accepted the despicable boots of a master. I live proud to be one of the 75 victims of the black spring of 2003 because I know that the ideas will flourish in the midst of a Free Nation, clean, and with an open heart for all. Although today they want to deprive me of my homeland, I do not accept a master.


    This information received from Cuba through Cuba Net is a valiant and masterful exposition of the tragedy suffered by the youth in Cuba......Alpha 66
     

    ALPHA 66: THE TRUTH COMES OUT
    Tania Díaz Castro

    Havana, December (www.cubanet.org)

    The strategies used by the government of Fidel Castro against its opponents have been so varied over these 45 years that a simple look will discover the lies in that history.

    The judicial process that took place in the Cabaña Prison on October 9, 1974 against various members of the anti-Castro organization Alpha 66, like many other trials, is absolute proof that the Cuban regime has done whatever it has wanted against its opposition. It has used the judicial process to its advantage every time.

    During the trial Alpha 66 was labeled a counter-revolutionary organization. It was not labeled terrorist as the government began calling it soon after, even though by 1974 this organization had been in existence for thirteen years.

    But the biggest surprise was received in 1995 when Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, ex commander in the struggle against Batista and ex head of military operations for Alpha 66 visited Havana with his family. It was revealed at this time, and not through the national press but by the voice of the people that he had dialogued with Fidel Castro. This even after the regime had labeled Menoyo's old organization, terrorist.

    However, the only terrorist acts that the Cuban people in our streets remember are those committed by the 26 of July Movement and the Revolutionary Directorate. These were armed attacks against military garrisons, police stations, and the Presidential Palace. They were also sabotages against public services like telephones and places like movie theaters, night clubs, etc. These were all referenced by the daily Granma this past November 30.

    Recently Nazario Sargen, secretary general of Alpha 66 and ex commander of the Second Front of the Escambray during the struggle against Batista passed away. From his exile, Nazario Sargen was completely dedicated to the cause of freedom for his homeland.

    The poet and ex political prisoner, Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, a man whom the Castro political police could not break during the 22 years he spent in prison is replacing Nazario Sargen. 

    Díaz Rodríguez was imprisoned after an armed confrontation in the Province of Pinar del Río on December 4, 1968. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. For continuing the activities of his organization inside prison he was given a sentence of 25 years at a trial that he has described as a gross farce and something very typical in the island of Fidel Castro.

    The history of Alpha 66 remains to be written. Only then will the entire truth be revealed. 
     

    September 2002

    SPEAKING FOR THE CUBAN PEOPLE
    By: Miguel L. Talleda

    The Congress of the United States is poised to pressure the Bush Administration to end the embargo imposed by President Kennedy thatprevents any trade or credit agreements with the Communist government of Fidel Castro.  If this craziness succeeds it would be an enormous historical black mark in the politics of this country.

    Why?  First, it would give the tyrannical government of Fidel Castro breathing room by opening the doors to credit that is controlled by the U.S. at a time when his world standing is totally discredited.  Second, it would create a open door for American tourists that would help financially to consolidate the economy of the Communist system in Cuba to the detriment of the Cuban people.  The Cuban people would see their suffering prolonged under a cruel system at a time when their own pressure against the government has Castro on the verge of a collapse.

    So then, why?  Because members of Congress are being pressured by special interests that for years have been “friends” of Fidel Castro and have begun a campaign to convince the American people that “selling to Cuba would help the agricultural industry in the U.S.”  Can one conceive such stupidity?  They also say that ending the embargo will help the Cuban people.  Is it possible that at this stage they still don’t know how Fidel Castro works?  Don’t they realize that by lifting the embargo they will HELP CREATE A PERMANENT COMMUNIST PROTECTORATE in our unfortunate island?

    But actually the Cuban people think differently and this is good to know.  Alpha 66 also thinks differently and it is well worth repeating one more time.  See the following declaration received via the internet from Matanzas, Cuba.

    Pro Democracy Party Pedro Luis Boitel
    Calle Peatonal C No. 6, Las Canteras Perico
    Matanzas, Cuba, Tel/Fax 534-58-2845

    WE WISH TO INFORM:

    The Cuban people find the Cuban government (1959-present) responsible for the total economic bankruptcy and the current external debt of Cuba.  Any individual, institution, corporation, or government that has cooperated or plans to cooperate in any way with the current Cuban government is only helping to prolong a totalitarian government that does not and never has represented the interests of the Cuban people.

    The Cuban people will exercise its legal rights when the moment arrives to recover its national heritage and be compensated for the damages incurred since 1959 to the present.

    Cuba will be free by the efforts of its own people.

    To this we swear before God and the Cuban nation today, September 12, 2002, in the city of Matanzas, Cuba.

    Félix Navarro Rodriguez, President; Tomás Fernández Tiher,
    Vice-President; Emilio Bringas Dévora, National Coordinator

    (The above was received from www.payolibre.com/presos.htm)

    There is no doubt that the voices coming from Cuba as well as our own from exile speak for the Cuban people.

     

     


    June 2005

    "THEY WANT TO DEPRIVE ME OF MY HOMELAND, BUT I ACCEPT NO MASTER."
    By Juan Carlos Herrera
    (Condemned to 20 years in prison during the repressive wave of March 2003 -

    Actually at PRISION KILO 7, Camaguey. Cuba.)

    Sixteen years ago (March of 1988), I began to experiment changes in my perspective on Cuba's reality and all that was in my surroundings. I perceived that living beneath the supposed socialism were only government parasites, specifically within the upper echelons of power--in other words, those who are in power today. I understood the falseness of the blurted slogans, the wasted five-year plans, of the total backwardness, and of the hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing the abstractions, the imposition, and the supposed uniformity.

    The Florida Straits and the perimeter bordering on the Guantanamo Base became large cemeteries. During the almost thirty years of "Revolution" that had passed, I understood that a Cuban only carried to the grave hopelessness and pain, in addition to a life plagued with uncertainty. We march to other lands under a supposed proletarian internationalism in the midst of an economy more inefficient by the day. Almost suddenly, I found myself in the middle of a tunnel. I managed to see the light and my neurons began to act independently of the induced political manipulations, for they no longer found a handle to hold onto in a single atom of my body.

    The collapse of the system that made so many promises regarding a "new man" and a luminous future, totally evaporated. Radical changes were taking place in what were formerly our "protectors"--their societies and their citizens were claiming freedoms suppressed and trampled upon. I finished by proving that I lived under a political sequestration and, without realizing it, I was simply a victim of a macabre socio-political experiment. It was then that I opened my eyes, and although I found myself trapped within a monster, I needed to express myself with total freedom. 

    The day arrived which marked a radical change in the history of humanity. Soviet Socialism fell and with it the strings that held dozens of European nations--and almost like a magic act, so did the subsidies that had supported the Cuban dictatorship. With all my being, I yelled, "Eureka!!"

    I already knew that I lived under a degrading police state, so I took the just course. After experimenting with unbiased, uncensored literature (of course, in a clandestine manner), I carried out comparisons to prove that I was right--that I should reclaim my rights which had been usurped and amputated.

    How many lies in the speeches of the Cuban Cesar? I managed to publicly classify him as a "Czar", and in spite of my youth, I began to have contact with dignified Cubans in Havana and in my native Guantanamo who themselves were detested by the dictator-in-chief. I did not know the true history of Cuba. It's all distorted. What I previously saw as a system of "justice" was nothing more than a great farce, a constitution elaborated only to represent the interests of those in power, while the people of Cuba lived totally oppressed by the state. A nation of brave men and women ended up bound hand and feet by a vile and conniving political betrayal. The biggest lunatic had curtailed rights and planted the seeds of terror in the face of popular discontent. 

    The new constitution of the Republic (1976) is a dishonor, where the citizens are declared as "non-persons'. In opposition to the Great Chief emerged what is today the great movement for human rights composed of noble Cubans. The ruler, heartless and resentful, viciously attacked back. Many faced filthy dungeons and many more saw themselves forced into exile. But for those brave Cubans there remains in their hearts the hope of recuperating a homeland once lost and decimated, enslaved in the midst of total chaos. We do not resign ourselves to live on our knees even though prison or death may be our destiny.

    Ever since I was able to glance at the horizon of the national reality, and listen to the many redundant speeches plagued with lies that pictured a "paradise" today unattainable, I decided to say enough to so many injustices and cruelties. No more rights infringed upon in the midst of an inexorable fundamentalism that obliges millions of citizens to coexist under an induced mutism of subtle methods degrading to all.

    It's been 45 years of political, economic, and social immobility under the aegis of an illegitimate, egocentric personality that stirs and divides his own people. Personally, I suffer the vindictive political shrapnel of the Great Dictator, but I do not resign myself to let freedom die. Twice the tyrant-in-chief has sent me to prison. The crime? Not being in agreement with the omnipresent power that causes such pain to the nation. I don't regret being behind bars because it fills me with pride to know that I am not one of the double-thinkers, and that I follow the ideas of the greatest and most distinguished of Cubans, Jose Marti. The Apostle once declared: "I want the highest law of the land to be the Cuban people's tribute to the dignity of man". I follow his lessons along with many other courageous compatriots who suffer, and not a single lament is heard.

    Today, the ideas are imprisoned, but they will not die. We are tortured physically and psychologically, but we do not bow our heads, and we resist from the depths of the gut of the Castroite monster that makes up his inhospitable dungeons. Not only are we enclosed and confined, but also we lack the most inherent necessities. We are treated like non-persons and within the prisons we cannot even aspire to adequate medical treatment, amongst hundreds of other violations.

    Hundreds of Cubans today are proudly behind iron bars, but they are not defeated. They want to deprive us from being a part of the nation. They confine us, but hope lives on because one day the longed for freedom will arrive, although the price to be paid has been high. That day, not too distant, a monument will be erected for all the victims of the black Castroism, to the ones who have fled from terror, to the ones who gave their lives in prisons, but who never accepted the despicable boots of a master. I live proud to be one of the 75 victims of the black spring of 2003 because I know that the ideas will flourish in the midst of a Free Nation, clean, and with an open heart for all. Although today they want to deprive me of my homeland, I do not accept a master.


    This information received from Cuba through Cuba Net is a valiant and masterful exposition of the tragedy suffered by the youth in Cuba......Alpha 66


    ALPHA 66: THE TRUTH COMES OUT

    Tania Díaz Castro

    Havana, December (www.cubanet.org)

    The strategies used by the government of Fidel Castro against its opponents have been so varied over these 45 years that a simple look will discover the lies in that history.

    The judicial process that took place in the Cabaña Prison on October 9, 1974 against various members of the anti-Castro organization Alpha 66, like many other trials, is absolute proof that the Cuban regime has done whatever it has wanted against its opposition. It has used the judicial process to its advantage every time.

    During the trial Alpha 66 was labeled a counter-revolutionary organization. It was not labeled terrorist as the government began calling it soon after, even though by 1974 this organization had been in existence for thirteen years.

    But the biggest surprise was received in 1995 when Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, ex commander in the struggle against Batista and ex head of military operations for Alpha 66 visited Havana with his family. It was revealed at this time, and not through the national press but by the voice of the people that he had dialogued with Fidel Castro. This even after the regime had labeled Menoyo's old organization, terrorist.

    However, the only terrorist acts that the Cuban people in our streets remember are those committed by the 26 of July Movement and the Revolutionary Directorate. These were armed attacks against military garrisons, police stations, and the Presidential Palace. They were also sabotages against public services like telephones and places like movie theaters, night clubs, etc. These were all referenced by the daily Granma this past November 30.

    Recently Nazario Sargen, secretary general of Alpha 66 and ex commander of the Second Front of the Escambray during the struggle against Batista passed away. From his exile, Nazario Sargen was completely dedicated to the cause of freedom for his homeland.

    The poet and ex political prisoner, Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, a man whom the Castro political police could not break during the 22 years he spent in prison is replacing Nazario Sargen. 

    Díaz Rodríguez was imprisoned after an armed confrontation in the Province of Pinar del Río on December 4, 1968. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. For continuing the activities of his organization inside prison he was given a sentence of 25 years at a trial that he has described as a gross farce and something very typical in the island of Fidel Castro.

    The history of Alpha 66 remains to be written. Only then will the entire truth be revealed. 


    September 2002

    SPEAKING FOR THE CUBAN PEOPLE
    By: Miguel L. Talleda

    The Congress of the United States is poised to pressure the Bush Administration to end the embargo imposed by President Kennedy thatprevents any trade or credit agreements with the Communist government of Fidel Castro.  If this craziness succeeds it would be an enormous historical black mark in the politics of this country.

    Why?  First, it would give the tyrannical government of Fidel Castro breathing room by opening the doors to credit that is controlled by the U.S. at a time when his world standing is totally discredited.  Second, it would create a open door for American tourists that would help financially to consolidate the economy of the Communist system in Cuba to the detriment of the Cuban people.  The Cuban people would see their suffering prolonged under a cruel system at a time when their own pressure against the government has Castro on the verge of a collapse.

    So then, why?  Because members of Congress are being pressured by special interests that for years have been “friends” of Fidel Castro and have begun a campaign to convince the American people that “selling to Cuba would help the agricultural industry in the U.S.”  Can one conceive such stupidity?  They also say that ending the embargo will help the Cuban people.  Is it possible that at this stage they still don’t know how Fidel Castro works?  Don’t they realize that by lifting the embargo they will HELP CREATE A PERMANENT COMMUNIST PROTECTORATE in our unfortunate island?

    But actually the Cuban people think differently and this is good to know.  Alpha 66 also thinks differently and it is well worth repeating one more time.  See the following declaration received via the internet from Matanzas, Cuba.

    Pro Democracy Party Pedro Luis Boitel
    Calle Peatonal C No. 6, Las Canteras Perico
    Matanzas, Cuba, Tel/Fax 534-58-2845

    WE WISH TO INFORM:

    The Cuban people find the Cuban government (1959-present) responsible for the total economic bankruptcy and the current external debt of Cuba.  Any individual, institution, corporation, or government that has cooperated or plans to cooperate in any way with the current Cuban government is only helping to prolong a totalitarian government that does not and never has represented the interests of the Cuban people.

    The Cuban people will exercise its legal rights when the moment arrives to recover its national heritage and be compensated for the damages incurred since 1959 to the present.

    Cuba will be free by the efforts of its own people.

    To this we swear before God and the Cuban nation today, September 12, 2002, in the city of Matanzas, Cuba.

    Félix Navarro Rodriguez, President; Tomás Fernández Tiher,
    Vice-President; Emilio Bringas Dévora, National Coordinator

    (The above was received from www.payolibre.com/presos.htm)

    There is no doubt that the voices coming from Cuba as well as our own from exile speak for the Cuban people.

    Wednesday, November 27, 2002 1:29 PM

    ACULISTA | Extensive rebutal to a "confused" Canadian, by a Cuban named Jesús Chao

    11/24/2002

    Dear Mr. Akins:

     In your reply to my first e.mail you gave as a proven “fact is that the living standard, education level, abilitity to access health care, and the quality of that care for the numerical majority of Cubans increased when the government changed hands from military dictatorship (Batista) to socialist revolutionaries (Castro),” although in due course I will prove that was not so.  For the sake of the argument, lets accept it, and let us analyze if those portrayed advances were worthy of the sacrifices and blood bath carried out during the 43 years of Castro’s tyrannical rule. 

    It is completely baseless to maintain that the living standard for most Cubans improved after the revolution. Today, (Sunday, Nov. 24th) on Cspan, Castro’s biographer Georgie Anne Geyer, answered a question from a caller, and according to her: ”Cuba was at the top of this hemisphere, just behind United States and Argentina, when Castro took power, today Cuba is at the bottom along with Bolivia and Haiti.”  (I wonder what place was Canada in 1959?). Georgie A. Geyer is the foremost foreign expert among the American journalists and his book “The Guerrilla Prince” is one of the best written about Castro.  She also commented that Castro has a very intelligent and diabolical mind, and although it is true that Cuba has chemical and biological weapons, she thinks that Castro will not use it against U.S. in spite of his pathological hatred towards the United States.  In Geyer’s opinion, he is neither crazy nor suicidal.

     According to the best world authority in Cuba’s History, English scholar Hugh Thomas, referring to the Cuban tragedy, (The Spectator, 7/12/1986) he affirmed that: “The comparison must be with the account of Nazi concentration camps.  Although there are yet no gas chambers in Cuba, there have been experiments of a criminal biological type designed to see how far an individual can survive starvation, beating, solitary confinement, and many various kinds of ill treatment.  Valladares’ account of working in a stone quarry is not dissimilar to, and no more humane than, the many accounts extant of ‘life’ in Manthausen.  Nor should one forget that the brutalities in Nazi Germany lasted at most 12 years and the gross cruelties in the Auschwitz camp continued for four years.”

    The brutal violations of human rights in Castro’s Cuba has been proven beyond any doubts and denounced by all the international human rights organizations, form the United Nations in Geneva to Amnesty International.  It defies logic that a person who lives in Canada with access to a free press, is not aware of these undisputed facts and nevertheless accept as fact, Castro’s propaganda.  This proves that the Canadian press is as a sycophant of Castro as CNN and most Western media.  Ideological prejudices against the United States blind the objectivity, professionalism and honesty of the media when dealing with Castro and the Cuban revolution.  So, people who has been brain washed by the media, when confronted with proven facts, tend to find them biased. 

    It is incomprehensible to me that to this day, while tens of thousands of Cubans were assassinated by Castro’s henchmen, and the fact that over 300,000 men, women and children have been tortured inside Castro’s dungeons, many people in the world still look the other way in an attitude of deceit and indifference.  As it happened during the Jewish Holocaust, nobody wanted to listen.  And, when we denounce those atrocities, we are portrayed as emotional, but how could not those factual histories of horror bring strong emotions into the hearts of those whose families and friends were victimized by Castro’s henchmen?

    In Paris, on April 11 and 12, 1986, Resistance International organized a Nuremberg type tribunal composed by world renowned personalities, mostly European socialists, some of them sympathizers of the Cuban Revolution, to judge Castro’s alleged crimes.  The members of the tribunal were:  Jorge Semprún, Spanish writer, communist ex-prisoner of Buchenwald and the Minister of Culture in the Spanish Socialist government; René Tavernier, President of the French “Pen Club”; Paul-Loup Sulitzer, international specialist in finance; Bernard Stasi, member of the French Parliament; Philippe Sollers, writer; Fernando Sanchez Dragó, Spanish writer; Haing Ngor, Cambodian actor, winner of the “Oscar” for the “Killing Fields”; Bernard Henri Levi, French philosopher and writer;  Marie Madeleine Fourcade, Heroine of the French Resistance; Leon Boubien, jurist; Monique Garnier Laocon, Vice-President of the European Security Institute; Martin Gray, writer and survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinca; Osmund Faremo, member of the Norwegian Parliament and President of the Inter-Parliamentary Caucus of Norway; Pascal Bruckner, writer; Yves Montand, French actor; Jean Francois Revel, French writer and philosopher.  The witnesses were twelve former Cuban political prisoners of Castro.

    The tribunal reached the conclusion that “the common practice in Cuba is: arbitrary arrests, sentences by military tribunals without public audience or defense, interrogations lasting for several days with beatings, woundings, tortures, internment in forced labor camps without enough food, without dress and without medical care, suffering promiscuity from common prisoners.  The imprisonment of boys as young as nine years old and young adolescents exposed to the worst tortures and the promiscuity of prisons was considered very grave.  Furthermore, as it was proven by certain testimonies, the methods used to obtain confessions bring to our minds the methods used by Hitler in the German concentration camps: suffocation by submergence, mutilations, etc..., in addition to methods of intellectual terrorism used to force the prisoners to abandon their principles.  Particularly grave is the practice of biological experiments on prisoners by Russian physicians.” (“Lumiere Sur Cuba”)

     They concluded: “The crime of ignoring the reality of the Nazi concentrations camps, as it happened during the Second World War, should not be repeated.  To do it again will be to become accomplices of those crimes.”

    You can ask in French or English the full process: Lumiere Sur Cuba, Internationale de la Resistance, 102 Avenue de Champs Elysées, 75088 Paris, France.

     This was the turning point for the European socialist intellectual establishment.  Castro’s myth was destroyed and the real brutal and tyrannical character of his regime was exposed to the world.  Even in this hemisphere many former Castro sympathizers began to express their discomfort with the regime of terror reigning in Cuba.  Tad Szulc, Castro’s friend and biographer, affirmed in 1986: “A gulag south exist in Cuba under the socialist revolution launched by Fidel Castro over 27 years ago, and in terms of prisons networks, it appears to rank high along with the Soviet Union and South African gulags… years of supreme brutality against tens of thousands of human beings.” (Washington Post, Book World, July 20)

    The findings of the Paris Tribunal were reported by the European Western media, and Latin America but almost ignored by the American elite media. From reading your e.mails, I have to assume that the Canadians ignored it completely, how otherwise could you in conscience maintain that there is not “evidence to suggest that he (Castro) is not a (bloody) dictator” even when I proved the point with Ambassador Valladares’ address to the United Nations Human Rights Commission which, in front of the proven facts, reached a condemnatory verdict against Castro’s regimen.

     In the book “The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba” by scholars Charles J. Brown and Armando M. Lago you will find well documented, the use in Cuba of mental wards as torture chambers against Castro’s political dissidents.  Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading member of the democratic movement in the Soviet Union during the 60 and 70s who live in Cambridge, England, wrote the Preface of the book and commented in 1991: “Cuba has covered in thirty-two years what the Soviet Union achieved in seventy-three.  Within a single generation, Cuba advanced from ‘revolutionary justice’ to ‘socialist legality,’ from liquidation of ‘class enemies’ to ‘political re-education and psychiatric treatment of those ‘apathetic to socialism.”

     Peter Reddaway, co-author of the book “Russia’s Political Hospitals: Abuse of Psychiatry in the USSR: commented about the Brown-Lago’s book:  “Not until now has the subject been so systematically investigated and documented.  Brown and Lago’s carefully researched book reveals a picture of cooperation between an oppressive, cruel regime and morally corrupt doctors… These crimes will go into the history of medicine along side of the Nazi doctor Mengele.”

     On the other hand, you are convinced that the United States government: “is also rather obsessesedly bound to overtaking Cuba, since it participated in the battle for independance from Spain.”  Which was true at the end of the XIX Century, but, judging by the accompliced silence of the Canadian media and government, hiding Castro’s crimes against humanity, isn’t the fact that they might be trying to protect the spurious interest of Canadian companies who are exploiting Cuban slave labor in cahoots and partnership with the Cuban Tyrant in a modern version of colonialism?

     Canadians, Spaniards, Mexicans, British, French, and investors of other countries went to Cuba attracted by Castro’s offer of cheap slave labor, a country without labor problems where workers do not have even the right to strike. In fact, whoever invests in Cuba cannot hire a single worker.

     I am sure that a person of your sensibility would find it outrageous that the Canadian companies must pay up front to Castro $300 dollars per worker every month, and the Cuban regime pays the worker 300 Cuban pesos, the equivalent of $15 dollars a month. That means that in order to be able to hire a worker, a foreign investor has to give Castro a bribe of 2,000% up front, that goes to finance the repressive apparatus that keeps the Cuban people under feudal bondage conditions.  I am afraid that you had not been aware that Canadians were among the worst exploiters and that the Cuban people repudiate all those investors and tourists that have exploited them in partnership with the Cuban tyrant.  Greed is not an exclusive characteristic of the American ethos.  In fact, American companies were the ones paying the highest salaries and benefits to their workers in Cuba before Castro. Greed is a sin of human nature regardless of the country of origin. In fact, as with the companies involved during the Nazi era in the slave labor exploitation, those that have been involved in Cuba during Castro’s regimen will have to pay dearly once Cuba recovers its freedom.

     In the 1987-1988 Freedom in the World, Political and Civil Liberties’, annual report assessing in an unbiased way, the conditions of freedom in the world, by Freedom House, reported the conditions in Cuba at the bottom of all countries in this Continent.  In Cuba ”writing or speaking against the system, even in private, is severely repressed".  There are reports of psychiatric institutions also being for incarceration.  Independent human rights organizations are not allowed to function in Cuba.  Freedom to choose work, education, or residence is greatly restricted.  It is generally illegal to leave Cuba, but some have been forced to leave.  Comparatively: Cuba is as free as Gabon, and less free than Guyana.”  Cuba has held the same awful record from 1973- to 1987, the worst in Latin America including Haiti (Freedom of the World, 1987-1988, Raymonf D. Gastil, Freedom House, pages 298,299, 56)

     The Freedom House’s annual summary on the status of freedom in the world is based on the reports made by more than 50 of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.  A rating is made in three categories: Political Rights and Civil Liberties, giving a rating 1 to the best to 7 for the worst.  The third category is Status: Free, Partly free, and Not free.  Cuba in the 1987-1988 report was classified as 6 in Political Rights, 6 in Civil Rights, and Status, Not Free.  In the 1993-1994 report Cuba fared even worse: “Political Rights 7, Civil Rights 7, and Status: NOT FREE.  Cuba was among the “20 worst rated countries”, a shameful distinction that was only shared by Haiti in this Continent.  “Since 1990 the International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to prisoners.” (Freedom in the World, 1993-1994, pages 220, 222, 5)

     Dear Ms. Akins, let us assume for a moment that you made an exhaustive research and found that all theses facts I have been presenting are true, and let us assume that the accomplishments you think the revolution reached were also true.  Would you still think that it was worth it?

     Jesus


    May 2002

    WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO ELIAN GONZALEZ?
    By April Shenandoah

    With every hot story, the news media will milk it for all it's worth -- even when it is over. When stories do die they usually resurface from time to time. Why the exception with the Elián González case? Haven't journalists been curious after the fact as to the whereabouts and emotional condition of the key players - especially cousin Marisleysis who Elián was so attached to and the great-uncle, Lázaro? And what about the fisherman Donato Dalrymple who rescued the six year old from the Atlantic Ocean -- and later tried to protect him by hiding in the closet when the submachine gun wheeling feds broke down the doors and raided the González home? Where were the interviews with the Mayor of Miami and Governor Bush? It's as if the family disappeared and Elián never existed, except for when Castro wants to put out a little propaganda. Instinct tells me that the Justice Department, the immigration and Naturalization Service and Janet Reno muzzled everybody concerned. Since that April 22, 2000 Eastern morning (5:15am), when little Elián was taken by force, there has been barely a peep out of anyone.

    At long last information explaining the silence mey be forthcoming. Conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch released an internal INS e-mail memo making claims of anti-Cuban-Ameican bias at the INS headquarters in Miami. Doris Meissner, chief of the INS, ordered that any copies of the memo be destroyed. It is noted that she may have also ordered the destruccion of other case documents as she ordered that no more discussions related to Elian's case be put in writing. Recently, Armando Gutierrez, former spokesman for Elián's Miami relatives, has requested that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft investigate the possible destruction of internal documents by high-ranking INS officials. Meissner did acknowledge that no notes be taken or memos circulated concerning the boy's case because the issue is too sensitive.

    You bet it is too sensitive! The entire scenario played out buy Janet Reno and the Clinton administration was/is insensitive and evil! My heart broke -- not only for Elián but also for the country. Those of us who were affected, almost sick, knew it was a sign of what American has become. Senator Bod Smith from New Hampshire was deeply troubled, as he knew exactly was was going down. He was a go-between consoling and assisting the family as best he could. When Elián was being held at Andrews Air Force Base with his father, Senator Smith was turned away not being allowed to enter. Again - a United States senator denied access to a military base! What does that say? When I went to the Senator's office in Washington DC and asked the obvious questions of why this was happening in America, this is the answer I received, "They are all Communists.

    Ëlián's father, Juan Miguel, was silenced while he was in this country. He was watched every minute and never spoke for himself. If allowed, he would have freely gone to Miami to visit his relatives. It should have been a family matter instead of an orchestrated Gestapo operation ordered by Castro. Unbeknownst to most of us, there was be a reason that our government kowtows to dictators. Now we have former President Carter and journalist Kate Snow propagandizing for Castro from Havana.

    CNN reported, "According to the United Nations," 96% of Cuban students are literate and are learning English as well as Spanish. Cuba has turned mansions into schools of learning. Ms. Snow, interviewing a Cuban woman about healthcare, "We were born with that 'right' we do not know anything else."The news piece was blatantly glorifying the Cuban way of life making it sound as if they have a system that "works." The average American will actually buy that pack of lies. Then -- when we talk of socialized medicine and the govenment controlling our children, those same American people will think that it is a good idea. Propaganda works! Take a look around!

    Mr. Carter you could hae done a good deed and gone to Cárdenas and said hi to Elián for us. Perhaps the media would have followed with their cameras so we could have seen for ourselves that he is living as well as Castro has said. Oh, you were not allowed to go there?  Thanks anyway, at least you said "Hi"to Castro for us!


    Article published on February 7, 2002, in the section "Your Views," letters to the Editor, by the Daily Breeze, one of the most important newspapers in the Los Angeles area.

    "FIDEL" BILLBOARD INSULT TO CUBANS

    I am writing about a huge billboard in the city of Torrance on Torrance Blvd. and Western Avenue. The name “Fidel” appears in large letters in the center with the image of Fidel Castro to its left. This is the propaganda of a television network.

    I believe this is not only an insult to thousands of Cubans who live in the South Bay, but to all citizens who respect freedom  and democracy.

    Who is Fidel?

    He is the first terrorist of this hemisphere. He is a tyrant who for 43 years has murdered thousands of Cuban for one reason: They fought for their freedom.  He has destroyed the economic system of Cuba.  He spent more than $3.35 billion that the former Soviet Union gave him to send guerrilla fighters and arms to Angola, Congo, Yemen, and Ethiopia (in Africa) and to Bolivia, Panama and  Nicaragua, (in South America). He trained terrorists from  Colombia in Havana, including his leader Manuel Marulanda. In Havana, he trained Comandante  Marcus, the leader of the guerrillas  in Chiapas , Mexico.

    I believe our leaders should not permit this kind of propaganda for  a terrorist in our clean city.  If it is permitted today, tomorrow we will see the image of Hitler or  Osama bin Laden in the same  place.

    God Bless America.

    OSCAR TALLEDA
    Torrance
     

    January 2001 

    THINGS WE CAN NEVER OVERLOOK 
    By Adrian 
    (Received directly from Cuba) 

    To bring Fidel Castro to trial would not only serve to eliminate a tyrant but would also lead to a democratic regime.  In reality it would mean to make him pay for all the crimes he has committed against the Cuban people and other peoples in the world with his confessed terrorism. 

    Fidel Castro is the most corrupt and ruthless ruler that Cuba has had since 1492.  He is the biggest liar, most demagogic, corrupt and immoral political leader (if he can be labeled this) that our nation has suffered. 

    His demise would not only lead to an acceleration of the process for change, but would also serve to eliminate from our society his debauchery and  serve as an example for the generations of delinquents surrounding him. 

    If  Fidel Castro were to be tried by an international justice tribunal, he would undoubtedly be condemned. 

    Ariel Hidalgo* failed to mention (or perhaps forgot?) that under the tyranny of Castro more than 17,000 people have been executed without any trial or due process.  This means they were practically assassinated. Thousands have perished in the Straits of Florida while fleeing Castro. Thousands more died in futile wars.  The list of crimes against humanity during these past 42 years is endless and constitutes a black mark in our history. 

    To eliminate Castro would be an act of justice and never one of shame. 

    *Published in El Nuevo Herald, 1/22/01


    January 2001 

    THE MOMENT IS GETTING CLOSER FOR A MORE FRONTAL ATTACK 
    By Adrian 
    (Received by telephone directly from Cuba) 

    The problem with the Czechs detained in Cuba, for visiting two activists in Ciego de Avila, is being cleverly manipulated by the Cuban authorities. 

    To begin with, the country has been visited by hundreds of journalists, law makers, political figures, social and religious leaders, from different trends, who have interviewed Elizardo Sánchez, Payá and other moderate dissidents, in many occasions and there was never any type of incident. Even after the reunion with the “dissidents,” many of those personalities were received by Castro himself. 

    But now, Cuba has some spies facing a judicial process in Miami and needs to have  “something” at hand to overcome what is coming over them. Even though no reaction is expected from Havana in that sense. Simply, they show no remorse and will continue to claim their right to spy.  Castro himself said so and Clinton accepted it. 

    On the other hand, Castro needs to feel important. Let us remember the “leader”. Castro considers himself a born leader. A positive one to his unconditional followers and a negative one to his opponents, but a leader anyway. 

    He wants to force the European Union to sit down with him and discuss, at the highest possible level, any actions against his regime, organized by the United States, using European citizens, and turning all this into a giant propaganda campaign on his behalf. This will take place after he frees the Czechs. 

    They are already preparing the best conditions for such an event. He will only need a declaration of guilt by the Czechs against those in the United States who incited them into such an adventure, and then they would be freed. 

    If we add to this that there is no Cuban detained for such visits, we can understand why it is all a trick. Let see what Femenias and Valdivia, from Ciego de Avila, will testify about it. I haven’t heard from them so far. We will have to wait and see.

    The truth is that all the avenues in matters of intelligence are being exhausted by the Castro's regime. The ideological breakdown is such that he is even afraid of his own followers. Here, at this time, everybody is being watched. 

    The principal focus of the constantly renovated internal control apparatus of the Interior Ministry (controlled by Castro himself) are the generals, other military chiefs, ministers, and vice-ministers, managers, directors of organizations and all the confidential personnel, that work in corporations and mixed associations with foreigners. I think the counter-intelligence apparatus is diminishing by so many functions. 

    All this proves the ideological weakness of the regime. The moment is approaching for a more frontal attack, disregarding the outdated  models of struggle, that has been followed by the internal opposition in the last few years, with the consent of the Clinton administration. 

    We continue to follow from within the Cuban agenda. Let's hope that our positions will remain intact, or even incremented inside our official guidelines. The moment is excellent for it.
     

    January 2001 

    CYNICISM 
    By Adrián 
    (Received by telephone directly from Cuba) 

    The Cuban government has just broken the boundaries of cynicism and lack of scruples. 

    It has to do with the death of two young men that stowed away in the landing gear of an airplane flying to London in an effort to escape from Castro.  A sense of frustration, hopelessness, and the absence of any future are some of the reasons that drove these young people to such an adventure.  There are thousands of young people with the same ideas but perhaps lacking in possibilities or courage. 

    And now the server, the oppressor, the one that forced almost two million Cubans to emigrate, mobilized the students and workers to protest in front of the U.S. Interest Section accusing the Americans of causing the stampede of a whole nation while organizing a “much felt” funeral for the young men.

    The boundaries of cynicism, deception, and manipulation have been broken. 

    To stop more people from leaving this land what needs to be done is overthrow Castro. 

    The foreign press is an accomplice of the situation in Cuba.  Therefore, the version that the international public opinion has for the reasons of the Cuban migration is very limited. 

    We have to keep working toward our goal of overthrowing Castro.  There is no other alternative…All other things favor him…Remember he has no shame.
     

    This is a news item received directly from Havana and is self-explanatory. 

    January 28, 2001 

    PRESENCE OF ALPHA 66 IN HAVANA 

    On Sunday, January 28, on the anniversary of the birth of José Martí, leaflets with anti-governments slogans and signed by ALPHA 66 appeared in different locations throughout Havana, despite the large presence of police in the city. 

    According to some confirmed reports we received by telephone, leaflets appeared at Linea y Malecon, in El Vedado; in the intersection of Virgen del Camino, in San Miguel del Padron; and on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, in Miramar.  In all these locations the leaflets were signed by ALPHA 66.  There are unconfirmed reports that more leaflets were found in other areas of the city. 

    In cases of this kind, the government authorities immediately try to pick up all anti-government material in the most discreet manner. 

    What is significant is that this kind of activity is occurring at a time when the Castro government is facing the highest level of ideological fatigue in its history and has had no other alternative but to increase repression in order to stay in power.

    April, 2000

    THE V FOR VICTORY 
    By Miguel L. Talleda 

    The three years sentence imposed by a court  in Havana to Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet for supposedly dishonoring a patriotic symbol by hanging three Cuban flags upside down at his home, where an act of protest was being organized (article by Vivian Sequera in the Jersey Journal 2-26-00) constitutes one more outrageous abuse to try to intimidate de resistance inside Cuba. The Cuban resistance, without fear, is defending our right to be a free country with all the rights that today the tyrannous Castro regime violates with impunity. 

    This young doctor whose presence and physic reminds us of General Antonio Maceo, one of our heroes in the War of Independence against Spain, has been a sore thorn stuck in the side of the despotic regime. Organizer of the Lawton Foundation, a group that has participated in several protests, among them the hunger strike that lasted one month at Tamarindo 34, in Havana, Biscet has withstood the abuses of the regime against him and his family with dignity. He personifies the new generation, the youth, that carries the ideals that have been a part of the spirit of our eternal Cuba. The spirit that rose in the Ten Years War in 1868; the o