Tema: Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work

As for the utterly laugh-out-loud "repentance" BS. He's done far too much harm for far too long to far too many people. Only an eternity of suffering in hell could do achieve due justice.

Iniciado por Tamakun

How anybody can look at Castro as anything but mass-murdering communist scum is beyond me.

Marxist leaders like Castro are constantly whitewashed by the leftist media in the U.S. and Europe, so it's not surprising. Hugo Chavez is another thug who gets a coat of white paint splashed on him by the media and, amusingly and not surprisingly, Hollywood Marxists like Sean Penn.

Fidel Tries To Wiggle Out of One
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fidel-tries-to-wiggle-out-of-one/62826/

Jeffrey Goldbe
Sep 10 2010, 9:28 PM ET

According to CNN, Fidel Castro is claiming that I misunderstood his statement, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore":

In a speech at the University of Havana that was then broadcast on Cuban TV, Castro said he meant "exactly the opposite" of what was understood by Jeffrey Goldberg, who was interviewing him for The Atlantic...

On Friday, Castro said he was correctly quoted, but that, "in reality, my answer meant exactly the opposite of what both American journalists interpreted regarding the Cuban model. My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system no longer works for the United States or the world," he said. "How could such a system work for a socialist country like Cuba?"

Castro called Goldberg "a great journalist." "He does not invent phrases, he transfers them and interprets them," he said. "I await with interest his extensive article."
First, thank you very much, Fidel, for the kind words. Second, I'm sorry to say it, but I think the expression, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" means, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."

Fidel says that his answer meant "exactly the opposite" of what Julia Sweig and I heard him say. Just as a language experiment, here is what the opposite of his statement would sound like: "The Cuban model works so well for us that we want to export it." But he didn't say this. What he said was -- well, you've read what he said. I'm not sure how this statement --accurately quoted, according to Fidel -- could mean anything other than what it means.

What Castro said the first time was the truth, what most people know about Castroism, it doesn’t worked. The honest response from him the second time should has been that he made a mistake; instead he said we all misunderstood his answer. What a despicable human being, his is a coward and a liar.

Why the mainstream media have this never-ending fascination with Castro? Castro at this late and decrepit stage of his life; is the political equivalent of tyrannosaurus, but he's been a media darling for decades, and old habits die hard. The media effectively treats him as a living legend, someone larger than life. His anti-Americanism has helps him quite well, he has become the embodiment of that ideology. The media doesn't give a dam about what he truly represent for generations of Cubans, the devastating effect that he has over their wasted lives and unfulfilled dreams.

Fidel Castro, the inspiration and maximum leader of the progressives, has exposed the real truth to the world that the communist economy system doesn’t work. He can’t unscramble a broken egg.

Castro always has been a communist, whose speeches are disconnected from the truth. He can’t tell the truth, he is a consummate liar.

To Cuba's failures
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/14/1823526/to-cubas-failures.html

BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
www.firmaspress.com
Posted on Tuesday, 09.14.10
Fidel Castro has said that the Cuban model doesn't work.

The Comandante is not exactly a perspicacious person. It has taken him 50 years to realize what all his countrymen discover from the time they gain reasoning, look out the window and begin to dream about a raft. But, besides being slow in the head, the Comandante is a living contradiction. If he knows that the system doesn't work and sentences Cubans to misery, why has he insisted on maintaining it?

An intelligent member of the nomenklatura who travels abroad as an official merchant confirmed that to me, disheartened: ``The old man is the brake.'' That's true. It is well known that a huge majority of Cubans, even those who are part of the ruling class, want deep changes in the economic scene, but it is also well known that the big obstacle that has impeded those changes so far is Fidel Castro's Stalinist intransigence.

It is Fidel who doesn't want Cubans to freely buy and sell their homes or automobiles, who doesn't want them to undertake entrepreneurial activities, neither major nor small, who for decades banned the farmers' markets that might have alleviated his compatriots' misery. It was he who, in 1968, against almost everybody else's better judgment, in a collectivist fit, confiscated and destroyed 60,000 private microbusinesses that made life less intolerable for Cubans.

If Fidel's words are the Revolution's gospel and the time has come for changes, two essential aspects need to be established: how far-reaching those changes shall be, and who shall perform them. Raúl Castro's answer is obvious: The changes will be determined by himself and his clique. But that kind of philosophy -- if I cook it, I eat it -- doesn't work that high up in the dictatorship.

Those who have provoked, prolonged and dispensed the disaster for half a century have totally lost society's trust. The Cuban people don't believe them, and it's a fact that the fundamental element in any radical process of change is the people's enthusiasm.

But Raúl doesn't want to expand the circle of decision makers. On the contrary, he moves stealthily with a small group of army officers and has given enormous unofficial power to his son, Alejandro Castro Espín, tapping him as the de facto heir of the dynasty.

Alejandro, a colonel in the Interior Ministry formed in the extinct Soviet Union, has created a fearsome support circle, with the aid of Senén (Senencito) Casas, another political police officer, son of a late general. This ghostly organization supervises, controls and terrorizes the government's entire managerial apparatus, including Alejandro's own brother-in-law, Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas, also a colonel, married to Deborah, Raúl's daughter.

Luis Alberto, Raúl's presumptive Dauphin until a couple of years ago, fell into disgrace (although with a velvet parachute) because of certain serious irregularities in the management of Cuban Army enterprises (40 percent of the Cuban GDP) that were investigated by Alejandro. Today, he directs the development plan at Port of Mariel, which means that there are serious tensions in the Cuban royal family.

Naturally, that family nucleus, full of intrigues and quarrels, is not the right institution to make the changes that the country needs. That wouldn't be serious. If they finally have admitted that collectivism doesn't work -- which is tantamount to saying that Marxism-Leninism is nonsense -- it is no longer a question of arbitrating half a dozen administrative measures but of performing major surgery. This implies a general debate inside and outside the Communist Party, an institution that, like the National Assembly of the People's Power, is co-responsible for the nation's sinking.

Therefore, they will have to broaden the margins of participation, include the opposition democrats (people such as Oswaldo Payá, René Gómez Manzano and Oscar Espinosa Chepe, among others, could make great contributions) and set up a constituent assembly to revoke the constitution that shapes a system that doesn't work. The danger is that Fidel might want to lead the opposition to communism. In that madhouse, anything is possible.

The reason that Castroism was keep alive was the Soviet Union prop of the system at the tune of $5 billion a year for 30 years, and after that as a bloodsucking parasite of Chavez’s Venezuela. The economic support of the Socialist field and later on the live line provided by other countries prevented the collapse of system. How convenient that at a time when the Castro regime has run out of benefactors and options, he decide to say “The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore.” It looks that the fantasy island is leaking water on all sides, and the funny thing is how it has lasted for so long.

The actual issue is whether there is any justification for the survival of a regime that can’t provide the basic needs of the people, who has to import above 80% of the food stuff, most of it supplied by the U.S., up to 80% of what they consume. The system doesn’t works; it is incompetent, unproductive, and inefficient.

Cuba is an excellent example of how a very successful nation in the western hemisphere was destroyed by Castroism in the 20th century. The failures of the revolution, are not by chance, was programmed that the misery in Cuba, imposed by the Castro brothers, would be the way to stay in power for more than 50 years. Now it is to the Cuban people to decide if they have had enough and get rid of the Castro brothers, the two main responsible of their deplorable situation.

There are so few positive things to say about communist dictatorships like Cuba, achieved at the cost of the loss of basic freedoms associated with self determination, that leftists everywhere have no choice but to point out flaws in other countries to keep some of their self-respect.

The failure of the Castros regime should serve as an example to the harmful fantasies of leaderships, especially in Latin America. Revolution or death! The dictator shouts. The answer is served: death to the dictatorship.

Expert: Cuba in first phase of de-Fidelization
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/15/1827050/expert-cuba-in-first-phase-of.html

By CAROL ROSENBERG AND FRANCES ROBLES
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com

Raúl Castro is presiding over the dismantling of big brother Fidel's legacy, a leading Cuba expert said Wednesday at the Americas Conference.

Monday's announcement that the Cuban government plans to lay off 500,000 workers -- 10 percent of its workforce -- is not so much a step toward political reform but a fight for survival, El Nuevo Herald columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner said. It's an assault on Fidel, who in 1968 closed small and medium-sized businesses in a big step toward central control of the economy.

Montaner offered this analysis at a luncheon address to the region's political and business leaders at the end of the two-day conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. ``We are in the first phase of the de-Fidelization of the country, without even waiting for the physical disappearance of the maximum leader,'' Montaner said.

``In Stalin's Russia, they did not begin to criticize his economic nonsense while the dictator lived. With Fidel, as a consequence of his illness and, curiously, recovery, the process of criticism and demolition has begun beforehand while he is alive and watching the spectacle.''

The plan is Raúl Castro's boldest move yet to overcome Cuba's economic crisis by cutting government spending and broadening the role of market forces in the communist-run country.

Under the plan announced Monday, about 200,000 jobs would be generated by turning small state enterprises into private cooperatives run by employees. Another 250,000 jobs would be created by allowing more ``self-employment'' -- mostly one-person jobs such as plumbers, flower salesmen and piano tuners.

But Montaner doubts that Cuba has the infrastructure -- such as capital or supplies -- to make the plan work. Quoting 19th century French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, he said: ``This type of regime shudders and collapses when it tries to change, not when it stays quiet and indifferent in the middle of disaster.''

The Castro brothers, after looting the country, are preparing the conditions for their progeny to keep doing the same. The time will come when justice will start by frozen their family assets on those countries holding them.

Finally after 52 years the Cuban people recognize that Castros’ regime views them as the greatest threat to keep their power and rule the country. After 52 years of endless speeches the oppressed Cuba’s people find out that the threat to their existence wasn’t the US, they finally realize, their enemy and menace was the Castros’ regime.

In the near future their nightmare will be over, as the regime slowly comes apart, and then the Cuban people will be able to choose the life of their choice.

The major economic legacy of the Castro brothers tyranny will be acute capital starvation, which will mean that Cubans will have even less say about how their economy will develop than they did in 1959.

Capitalist or communist, the Golden Rule applies when it comes to development "He who has the gold makes the rules."

Cuba and the death of communism
ttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-oped-0919-chapman-20100919,0,4342554.column

Even the government can’t deny its failures
Steve Chapman
September 19, 2010

Communism has been proclaimed dead more than once in the past couple of decades. But today, it’s safe to say, it is really dead. Irreversibly dead. Cemetery dead.

Consider this comment from a knowledgeable Cuban observer who was asked if the country’s brand of socialism, created by Fidel Castro after his 1959 revolution, could be of use in other countries: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” That remark would have gotten him in trouble with authorities, if his name were not Fidel Castro.

There may yet be admirers of Cuban communism in certain precincts of Berkeley or Cambridge, but it’s hard to find them in Havana. The 84-year-old Fidel (who later said he didn’t meant to say that) has turned control over to brother Raul, whose faith in the shining power of Marxism-Leninism has also dried up.

Last week, the regime said it will dismiss 500,000 people from government jobs, which account for 84 percent of the work force. Reflecting ruefully on the perils of sheltered bureaucracy, Raul Castro declared recently, “We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working.”

As a blanket indictment, that statement is grossly unfair. Many Cuban government employees put in long hours — working in the black market.

That option is not necessarily optional, since the average Cuban makes only about $20 a month — which is a bit spartan even if you add in free housing, food and medical care. For that matter, the free stuff is not so easy to come by: Food shortages are frequent, the stock of adequate housing has shrunk, and hospital patients often have to bring their own sheets, food and even medical supplies.

For a long time, Cuba enjoyed the generous support of the Soviet Union. But when communism collapsed in Moscow, Cubans had to confront the deficiencies of their system.
Admirers of Castro point to his alleged success in eradicating illiteracy and improving health care. But even these fall short of impressive progress.

Roger Noriega, a researcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., notes that before communism arrived, Cuba “was one of the most prosperous and egalitarian societies of the Americas.” His colleague Nicholas Eberstadt has documented that pre-Castro Cuba had a high rate of literacy and a life expectancy surpassing that in Spain, Greece and Portugal.

Instead of accelerating development, Castro has hindered it. In 1980, living standards in Chile were double those in Cuba. Thanks to bold free-market reforms implemented in Chile but not Cuba, the average Chilean’s income now appears to be four times higher than the average Cuban’s.

The regime prefers to blame any problems on the Yankee imperialists, who have enforced an economic embargo for decades. In fact, its effect on the Cuban economy is modest, since Cuba trades freely with the rest of the world. How potent can the boycott be when we’re the only participant?

Cubans have had to pay for their meager economic gains by surrendering their political liberties. In its latest annual report, Human Rights Watch says, “Cuba remains the one country in Latin America that represses virtually all forms of political dissent.”

The latest instrument for strangling dissent is a law allowing the arrest of people exhibiting “dangerous” un-socialist tendencies even before they commit crimes. “The most Orwellian of Cuba’s laws, it captures the essence of the Cuban government’s repressive mindset, which views anyone who acts out of step with the government as a potential threat and thus worthy of punishment,” says Human Rights Watch.

But even economic failures and political tyranny have been not enough to deprive Castro of Western admirers. On a 2000 visit to Havana, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan asserted, “Castro’s regime has set an example we can all learn from.” His lieutenant Che Guevara has been endlessly romanticized. Movie director Oliver Stone once marveled of Fidel, “I’m totally awed by his ability to survive and maintain a strong moral presence.”
Cubans may differ. About 1.5 million of them have fled since Castro arrived, many in rickety boats that put their lives in peril. And the government, for some reason, doesn’t let ordinary citizens decide if it remains in power.

That’s the grisly fate of modern Cubans. Communism is dead, and they’re shackled to the corpse.

Cuban people, under a procedure supervised by the United Nations, should be allow a free an open secret ballot vote as to what sort of government they choose for themselves. Any election carried out by the present ruling class of the regime, is no more than asking prisoners to vote as to who they want to be their warden. Under those circumstances a fair vote would be impossible knowing retaliation was forthcoming to those that don’t tow the line.

Seem that the time is ripe for the Cuban people to rise up in justify anger and rage, and march in the streets calling for the demise of the Castro brothers’ regime; to be replace for a form of government more in tune with the people. Let not forget that around 20 percent of the Cuban population has chosen to escape the island of Dr. Castro, rather than yield to his insane experiment.

Understanding Fidel: Easy to see the problems
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/fl-cuba-oped0926-20100926,0,3531952.story

By Frank Calsone

If it were not Fidel Castro, who now says he did not say what two American visitors heard him say, he would not have had time to speak again to another foreign visitor. He would be in for heavy interrogation in the dark cells of Cuba's political police where Alan Gross, an American visitor, remains since December 2009 for giving a laptop and a telephone to a Cuban.

Now, Fidel says he was misinterpreted; that he did not say "the Cuban economy doesn't work anymore," but the opposite. But one does not have to be a trained economist to realize the gravity of the situation.

The Cubans have lived under strict food rationing for 50 years. The sugar industry that was the engine of Cuban progress for over two centuries is no more — the sugar mills idle, its workers jobless. Cuba, which was known as the world's sugar bowl, now imports sugar from abroad to cover internal consumption. And only remittances from Cuban Americans prevent famine on the island.

The Castro brothers have been forced to freeze bank accounts of foreign investors in Cuba's national bank due to the regime's "liquidity crisis." Havana is broke and cannot pay its bills. That is the reason the regime desperately seeks the lifting of the U.S. embargo and the American tourist dollar.

We must concede, however, to some progress. At least Fidel feels he has to make an effort to be understood. It is not his fault that the world, the Cubans, misunderstand him. The problem goes back to the early days when, according to his official newspaper Revolucion (Jan. 13, 1959), that "neither he, nor his political movement, were communist;" an assertion he repeated before American editors on April 19 of the same year.

There are other statements Mr. Castro has yet to really retract, such as his request to Nikita Khrushchev in 1963 to drop an atomic bomb on the United States.

In April of 1985, 23 years after the United States imposed a trade embargo on Cuba, in an interview published by Playboy Magazine, Fidel said "the United States had less and less things to offer Cuba. If we could export our products to the United States, we would have to start new lines of production, because everything that we produce now and everything that we will produce in the next five years is already sold to other markets." He would have "to deny Cuban products to socialist countries to sell them to the United States. But the socialist countries pay us better prices, and have much better relations with us than the United States. There is a popular Cuban phrase: 'Do not exchange a cow for a goat'."

Castro thought the Soviet Union was the cow, and America the goat. He bet on the cow, on the wrong horse, and before the end of the next five years the Soviet Union was no more and millions of Cubans entered Fidel's "special period" of destitution, misery and despair. Despite what you might have heard from Havana these days, Fidel, 20 some years after, that to trade with the United States was more trouble than it was worth.

Today, Castro's acolytes will tell you the problem is not Fidel. He, the maximo leader, still the chairman of the Cuban Communist party, the world thinker on guerilla warfare and economic development, is the originator of 1,001 failed economic enterprises. The problem is in the execution.

The Cubans misunderstood when he said in 1992 that "Cuban prostitutes are highly educated, and very healthy," as they misunderstood when he said in 1966 that "by 1970 the island will have 5,000 experts on the cattle industry and eight million cows and calves that will be great milk producers." "There will be so much milk," he said, "that he could fill Havana's harbor with milk."

The Cubans, whose milk rations end the day they turn seven years old, unfortunately misunderstood Fidel. It is all a huge misunderstanding.

Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba. Reach him at frank.calzon@cubacenter.org.

Why if asked by the Cuban model he responds by referring to another model?

So, when he says Cuban model he means the capitalist system, and when he says we are concerned he means the U.S.

And how it is that not even one of the Castroites was able to understand the "true meaning" of the words of the tyrant, before he made this "clarification"?

He made himself dictator for life, he was the model; the only model to blame is his model.

He reversed his previous statement. A lapse?; a slip? It happened to him what almost never happened before, he is already old. His rectification is incoherent and it does nothing more than confirm what the journalists interpreted.

Fidel Castro has ruined the island. His regime has been a complete and absolute failure. There is no free health care, education or housing. Those things aren’t free; they don't come from thin air, nothing is free. They are the true meaning when he says the system doesn’t work.

Those who have defended him and support his regime have been voluntarily disseminating lies. Doesn’t matter what they say in their defense, it’s evident they’ve been deceived, with the evidence coming straight from the “horse” mouth.

Protest marchers beaten detained
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/02/1903584/protest-marchers-beaten-detained.html
Cuban authorities cracked down on a march Sunday to pray at the tomb of a dissident whose death became a rallying cry for human rights activists.


BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
Posted on Tuesday, 11.02.10

Cuban security agents beat and detained about 40 dissidents after the mother of the late political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo and her supporters prayed at his tomb, activists reported Monday.

The mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, said she was repeatedly hit on the head, thrown to the ground and gagged with a smelly rag that left her breathless as she shouted anti-government slogans.

Security officers also kicked several handcuffed young men during the incident Sunday, added Marlon Martorell, a dissident who took part in the protest.

Tamayo and most of the 40 others detained were released later Sunday or early Monday but some remained unaccounted for Monday afternoon, including one of Tamayo's sons, Martorell reported.

The detentions appeared to be one of the harshest crackdowns yet on supporters of Tamayo, whose son's death in February after a lengthy hunger strike became a rallying cry for dissidents in Cuba and abroad.

Tamayo and Martorell said about 40 supporters joined the regular Sunday march from her home in the eastern town of Banes to Mass at a local Catholic church and to the cemetery where her son is buried.

The mother said groups of government supporters harassed them on the way from church to the cemetery, and one man ``authorized by the state security'' threw rocks at the marchers, hitting at least three.

Martorell also reported that a ``security agent in civilian clothes'' shouted epithets and threw rocks at the marchers. Some of the marchers threw rocks back, he said by phone from Banes, but kept walking toward the cemetery.

Scores of police and state security officers ringed the cemetery by the time the marchers had finished praying at Zapata's tomb, Tamayo and Martorell said. ``They attacked when I set foot outside the gates to the cemetery,'' Tamayo told the Miami-based Cuban Democratic Directorate. ``They threw me to the ground and dealt blows and kicks to all the brothers.''

Martorell said agents carried out the crackdown ``with a lot of violence, with beatings for all.''

Tamayo, who is Afro-Cuban, said she was forced into a police vehicle and as she shouted ``Down with Fidel!'' one officer shouted at her, ``Shut up, you lousy black.'' She was then gagged with a rag smelling of gasoline that nearly asphyxiated her, the mother added.

Police threw the protesters into two waiting buses, Martorell said, and he later heard Tamayo shouting ``Down with Fidel'' and ``Zapata Lives!'' while they were held in a Banes lockup.

``Once again, there's proof that they are a bunch of murderers,'' Tamayo added. ``Let them kill me, but I will die with honor, dignity and valor.''
The Miami-based group Cuba Independent and Democratic reported Monday that one of its members in Banes, Daniel Mesa, suffered an injury to his hand during the detentions.

The cell phones of Tamayo and those of several other supporters involved in the incident appeared to have been blocked Sunday afternoon and much of Monday.

State Security agents initially blocked Tamayo's marches to the church and cemetery, sometimes with mass detentions like Sunday's. But they had been allowing the protests since mid-August, when Catholic church officials intervened on her behalf.

Church officials told Tamayo last month that she and her immediate family had government permission to leave for the United States, but she replied that she would not leave unless she was allowed to take her son's remains.

While the news media was reporting the latest "reforms" being implemented by Raul Castro, Reina Luisa Tamayo and 40 other dissidents were getting brutally beaten in the town of Banes, Holguin (Oriente) province. They were being stoned and rounded up like cattle.Banes was the birthplace of Fulgencio Batista, located about 20 miles north from the small town of Biran. Fidel Castro birthplace.

Fidel's experiment with Marxist-Leninist political economy has been a total failure. Cuba was one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America before 1959. Under the Castroism the island economy has been ruined beyond recognition, transforming it into a third world country.

Cuba sugar production was 1.3 million tons in 2009, the worst harvest in 105 years. In the decade of the 1950s Cuba exported an average of 5.0 million tons a year, supplying 35% of the world's export market. Who would have imagined that the world's largest exporter of sugar would have to resort to external supplies to meet its needs?

The regime currently imports about 84% of the food stuffs. Who would have imagined that Cuba would become an importer of food, even importing sugar, of all things, from the United States, of all places?

Food shortages are a function of an inefficient collectivized agricultural system resulting from Castro regime unwillingness to liberalize Cuba's economy, gross incompetence and criminal negligence.