Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work

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Report: Castro says cuban model doesn't work
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100908/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_cuba_fidel_castro

fidel castro told a visiting american journalist that cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

the fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

jeffrey goldberg, a national correspondent for the atlantic magazine, asked if cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and castro replied: "the cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" goldberg wrote wednesday in a post on his atlantic blog.

he said castro made the comment casually over lunch following a long talk about the middle east, and did not elaborate. The cuban government had no immediate comment on goldberg's account.

since stepping down from power in 2006, the ex-president has focused almost entirely on international affairs and said very little about cuba and its politics, perhaps to limit the perception he is stepping on his brother's toes.

goldberg, who traveled to cuba at castro's invitation last week to discuss a recent atlantic article he wrote about iran's nuclear program, also reported on tuesday that castro questioned his own actions during the 1962 cuban missile crisis, including his recommendation to soviet leaders that they use nuclear weapons against the united states.

even after the fall of the soviet union, cuba has clung to its communist system.
the state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.

president raul castro and others have instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and have warned cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to depart from cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.

fidel castro stepped down temporarily in july 2006 due to a serious illness that nearly killed him.

he resigned permanently two years later, but remains head of the communist party. After staying almost entirely out of the spotlight for four years, he re-emerged in july and now speaks frequently about international affairs. He has been warning for weeks of the threat of a nuclear war over iran.

castro's interview with goldberg is the only one he has given to an american journalist since he left office.

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How is possible that still are some who are sympathetic to the Tyrannosaurus Rex? Don’t let this psychopath liar fool you, he has no conscience.

Castro during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 12, 1962, the closest the world had ever come to nuclear war, wrote in his cable to Khrushchev in October 26, 1962, “that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through tan act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other… the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.”

Khrushchev response in October 30, 1962, “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that would have led. Rather than a simple strike, it would have been the start of a thermonuclear world war.”


Castro, in his deep hatred against the United States, did not hesitate in asking for the launch of a nuclear strike without given a damn that such action sealed the annihilation of the Cuban people and a large part of humanity. Castro deserves everything that's coming to him.

Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations who accompanied Goldberg on the trip, confirmed the Cuban leader's comment, which he made at a private lunch last week.

She told The Associated Press she took the remark to be in line with Raul Castro's call for gradual but widespread reform.

"It sounded consistent with the general consensus in the country now, up to and including his brother's position," Sweig said.

Link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/10/world/main6853855.shtml

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 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.

How many Cubans in the past 51 years have suffered unspeakable misery for saying the same thing Fidel Castro just said? Cubans are willing to risk their lives sailing in makeshift rafts in order to escape from Dr. Castro island paradise. He has expended Cuba’s resources exporting revolution around the world. The only ones who believe this consummate liar are brainwashed sympathizers and die-hard progressives. Who the cap fits let them wear it.

Fidel Castro has ruined the island. His selfish desire to dominate the Cuban people, has not allow them to prosper and fulfill their potential. The daily struggle that most Cubans have to go through just to live their daily lives is unbelievable. Tourists go to Cuba and relax in the hotels, enjoy the beaches and eat the good food. These are things that the average Cuban can’t afford. Instead of releasing the grip over the people and allow their entrepreneurial abilities to create new ideas and value for others, Castro prefer to keep them under his control, unable to sustain themselves, and hold on to power.

Castros regime has been a complete and absolute failure. The rest of the leadership no longer believe in the regime, they are just puppets obeying order from the Castro brothers. They keep the regime alive by use of force and repression, but the day of reckoning is upon them, the regime is coming apart at the seams.

Fidel Castro was wrong all along. Fidel's experiment with Marxist-Leninist political economy has been a total failure. His model doest work if you want your nation to be a third world dirt poor dictatorship, like Castro turned his country into.

The aging and egotistical Fidel Castro makes this statement without any recriminination after 51 years of living the good life. But of course those who have said that before him, have been shot, or thrown into a jail or have to leave the island.

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.

What Fidel Castro is after? For people to feel sorry for him? Only those who are easily deceived would fall for that. He was, he is and he will die a brutal dictator, who never allow any type of opposition to his absolute power, and has fail miserable with the implementation of his archaic economic policies.

If Fidel Castro really believes that communism is the best system of government for the Cuban people, why he never has allows any other communist candidates to run against him? Why not let the people decide for themselves? The answer is because his insatiable drive for power and prominence, by his belief that his grip on power justify abusing it. Castro in his depraved mind thinks that he knows what is best for the island and will get rid, for whatever means, of those who dare to oppose his Machiavellian tactics.

How convenient that at this particular point in time when the Castro brothers regime has run out of benefactors and other options, they choose to say: “The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore.” I am sure that there are more to it. Like always they will blame the US embargo and polices for their own failures, and the Progressives would used all the tricks in the bag to justify that the regime failure is the fault of the US, not because the archaic policies of Castros’ regime.

The idea that the regime has been selling of free education, health care, and housing, isn’t true. There is nothing free in live, it doesn’t come out of thin air. When Fidel Castro says the system “doesn't even work for us anymore,” what he is saying is that there isn’t such thing as free lunch, nothing in this world is free. The Cuban people will not be truly free until the Castro brothers are removed from power.

According to the ruling class the Cuban people support the regime. If that is true, why the regime continues to censor the media, prohibit the formation of opposition parties, the distribution of copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the formation of independent labor unions, and enforce a penal code that make pre-criminal dangera legal charge, which allow to imprison people on suspicion they might commit crimes in the future?

The answer obviously is that their claim is false. Because it is a government vested with absolute power without restrictions by a constitution, laws or opposition. It is a police state that employ very oppressive measures and restrict civil rights.

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Castro's Confession
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/546721/201009091858/Castros-Confession.htm

IBD EDITORIALS

The Left: Fidel Castro stunned the world this week by admitting socialism had failed in Cuba. The implication of the dictator's statement is unclear, but one thing isn't: Castro's sycophants have some explaining to do.

Castro, now 84 and semi-retired, made a surprisingly lucid admission about how 52 years of communist dictatorship have ruined his country. "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he casually told the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter he summoned to Havana to tell him his thoughts.

Castro made other noteworthy statements to the reporter — that he regretted urging the Soviet Union to rain nuclear war on the U.S. in 1962, and that he wanted Iran's leader to stop slandering the Jews. But nothing was as arresting as the statement that his life work, the communism he forced on Cuba in 1959 was, in truth, a miserable failure.

Castro's motives in stating the obvious are still unclear. He may be desperate for attention. Or, having turned his country into an impoverished hellhole, he may want the U.S. trade embargo to end.
Cuba scholar Humberto Fontova notes that Castro has made similar offhand statements in the past, and none had any consequences.

But one thing is clear: Castro's apologists in the West, who've marched in lockstep throughout his half-century of communist rule, have been hung out to dry. For years, they've held up Castro as some kind of alternate beacon to the U.S. and all its freedom and prosperity.

Filmmaker Michael Moore made a 2007 documentary called "Sicko" that touted the superiority of Cuba's health care system and used it as a means of pushing ObamaCare in 2009. Based on the dictator's own words, that film should now be considered garbage.

Other Castro sycophants have also been played for fools. Hollywood actor Ed Asner's campaign to free five Cuban spies from U.S. jails doesn't have quite the same credibility now, given that Castro has admitted his entire mission is a lie.

Then there's movie director Oliver Stone, who at the showing of "South of the Border," his man-crush paean to leftist Latin dictators, confided he's filming another hagiography about Castro.

Not even Castro's toadies will able to watch Stone's next offering with the same rapt credulity now that the despot has shown himself as the little man behind the curtain.

Even Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who's sought for the past 12 years to turn his country into Cubazuela — complete with police informers, ration cards, worthless money, bad food, dirty water, electricity shortages and poverty — is shown to be a fraud.

Whatever Castro meant in the interview about the failure of communism, it's obvious that those who have defended him and his revolution from their free societies have been willfully spewing lies.

Whatever they say in their defense, it's clear they've been had, with the proof coming straight from the mouth of their failed idol.

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Raúl Castro has, for all practical purposes, confirmed that Fidel's original statement was correct. Cuba's current model doesn´t work, need a new approach. The key question is whether the announced reforms will save the regimen. In y opinion it will not.

It is true that Cuba needs reform. For the pass five decades the island has experiencing a deterioration of the standard of living since 1959. But the current reforms will not be able to accomplish the necessary changes.

Every single time the regime has opened the economy, sooner or later, it has decided unilaterally to take away those changes, ending up punishing those who tried to take advantage of the small economic space that had been provided. This type of reversal has taken place three times under the actual regime.

Well, if only the leftist American politicians would give up their admiration for men like Castro...

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Fidel Castro Turns on the Charm, Dazzles the MSM
http://townhall.com/columnists/HumbertoFontova/2010/09/10/fidel_castro_turns_on_the_charm,_dazzles_the_msm
Humberto Fontova

Fidel Castro recently bestowed The Atlantic Magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg with an exclusive interview. More than a mere exclusive, this is the first interview granted by the Stalinist dictator to an American reporter in 4 years.

The MSM is absolutely agog with the catalogue of insights, woes and regrets bequeathed by the Cuban mass murderer to Goldberg. “I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting,” writes Goldberg.

"'The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore,” Castro replied. The MSM and assorted “Cuba Analysts” are all aflutter over Castro’s “epiphany,” “honesty”, “regret,” - take your pick - “that Communism “doesn’t work.”

Some actual study of recent Cuban history might enlighten these learned parties. To wit:
"This doesn't work, I'm resigning!" - Fidel Castro, July 1959 during political crisis with his puppet "President" Manuel Urrutia)

"This doesn't work! Terrible mistakes were made (especially in adopting Che Guevara's moral incentives) - we need material capitalistic incentives. So I'm resigning!" - Fidel Castro, July 1970, after the much-ballyhooed "10 million ton" sugar harvest proved way short and utterly disastrous.

"The capitalists organize production better than we do. There's much we can learn from them." - Fidel Castro, 1986 during "Rectification Process" i.e. another “re-evaluation” after another economic crisis.

"We are not afraid of the market. We are not afraid of economic reform. The people understand the reasons behind them and support them." - Fidel Castro, Nov. 1991 announcing Cuba’s "Special Period" i.e. loss of Soviet Sugar Daddy - another re-evaluation after another economic crisis.


Has any “Cuba analyst” noticed a marked change in the rights, prosperity and welfare of the Cuban people after any of these “epiphanies,” “regrets,” “re-evaluations”, etc.?

And has any “Cuba Analyst” mentioned that Hugo Chavez (current Cuban Sugar-Daddy) looks to lose the Sept. 26 parliamentary elections in Venezuela Venezuela 52 to 42 percent? (granted, there's much room for altering the results).

And has any “Cuba Analyst” mentioned that this will present Castro with an economic crisis as bad as the "Special Period" in the early 90's after the Soviets collapsed? Will this require another “re-evaluation” that will buttress the regime but have the same effect on the Cuban people’s rights, prosperity and welfare as all the other “re-evaluations?”

And has any Cuba Expert mentioned that - given Castro's history of pronouncements during his various economic crises (to say nothing of this one) - his pronouncements to Jeffrey Goldberg just might be insincere? Just might have an ulterior motive? Just might have meant absolutely nothing with respect to the rights and welfare of the Cuban people?

If so, I haven’t seen or heard it.

Fidel Castro converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland, a huge influx of immigrants and whose workers enjoyed the 8th industrial wages in the world into one that repels Haitians. And this after being lavished with Soviet subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (into a nation of 6.4 million.) This economic feat defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the very laws of physics. (Full documentation for the above here.)

Cuba’s infant mortality rate plummeted from 13th lowest in the world in 1958 (lower than in Germany, France, Japan, Israel among many other first world nations) during the unspeakable Batista era to 44th today. This rate qualifies as an “achievement” in the lexicon of “Academics” and news agencies that have earned a Havana bureau.

This current infant-mortality rate, by the way, is also kept artificially low by an abortion rate of 0.71, the Hemisphere’s (and hovering among the world’s top five for the past two decades) highest, which “terminates” any pregnancy that even hints at trouble. Cuba’s suicide rate is also currently the Hemisphere’s highest, triple its rate during the unspeakable Batista era.
And now, Castro realizes “the Cuba Model doesn’t work”? Please.

Actually, given the goal of Cuba's ruler since January of 1959 (absolute power) the Cuban economy has been EXPERTLY managed and has worked splendidly. Castro inherited a vibrant free market economy in 1959, something unique among communist rulers. All the others, from Lenin to Mao to Uncle Ho to Ulbricht to Tito to Kim Il Sung, took over primitive and/or chaotic, war ravaged economies.

A less megalomaniacal ruler would have considered it a golden goose landing in his lap. But Castro wrung its neck. He deliberately and methodically wrecked Latin America's premier economy. Castro has long believed that the Cuban capitalist is a difficult person to control. Cuba - despite a deluge of tourism and foreign investment for over a decade - is as essentially Communist in 2010 as it was in 1965. The Castro brothers are very vigilant in these matters.

“A foreign reporter — preferably American — was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victory. Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” - Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries

“We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital — propaganda is the heart of all struggles,” - Fidel Castro in a letter to a revolutionary colleague in 1954.
And he’s still at it. And foreign reporters are still eating out of his hand like trained pigeons.

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I wonder if the Cuban population knows about this. He talked to an American reporter and since he controls the media, the citizens shouldn't know anything about it.

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

As for the foreign "reporters" who choose to eat out of Castro's hand, they're not reporters. They don't do what true reporters are supposed to do, which is getting the truth out. They're simply PR types for a particular sociopolitical agenda. The fact they won't admit that changes nothing, and makes them even more contemptible.

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.

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Iniciado por Tamakun

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.''

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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."

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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.

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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.

Cita:

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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.

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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.

Cita:

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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.

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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.

What the regime is after are loans and lines of credit guaranteed by the US. These credits and loans will not be paid and the US taxpayers will be the ones to pick up the debt, as it happens at the present time with the taxpayers of other countries.The regime owns $31 billion to the Paris Club (EU countries), $22 billion to the countries of the old socialist campus, $15 billion to Venezuela and another $12 billion to other countries, for a staggering debt of $80 billion.

US sales to Cuba in 2008 reach $801 million. Import totaled $14.25 billion. The United States government’s embargo has had little effect on the Cuban economy, since this only represents 5.62% of the regime commerce with the rest of the world. Without the embargo the debt with the US could be similar to the debt of 31 billion with the EU countries.

The regime problems are not the result of the embargo; they are due to the corruption and ineffectiveness of a military dictatorship that is against private property and free enterprise. These and no others are the real reasons of the problems.

Cuba's "bailout", by obtaining US-backed credit lines would replace the Soviet subsidy that they no longer receives and add to the Venezuela subsidy, delaying instead of acceleratingthe transition of the Cuban people towards democracy, guaranteeing additional decades of oppression and misery. Castro brothers’ tyranny looks forward to the day when the military apparatus and the massive repressive security service will be maintained at the expense of the United States government.

How is possible that still are some who are sympathetic to the Fidel Castro? Don’t let this psychopath liar fool you, he has no conscience.
Castro during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 12, 1962, the closest the world had ever come to nuclear war, wrote in his cable to Khrushchev in October 26, 1962, “that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through tan act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other… the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.”

Khrushchev response in October 30, 1962, “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that would have led. Rather than a simple strike, it would have been the start of a thermonuclear world war.”

Castro, in his deep hatred against the United States, did not hesitate in asking for the launch of a nuclear strike without given a damn that such action sealed the annihilation of the Cuban people and a large part of humanity. Castro deserves everything that's coming to him.

Cuba in 1958, with a population of 6.6 million inhabitants had 6.3 million head of cattle. In 2009, according to data by Cuba’s National Statistics Office (ONE), with a population of 11.3 million, the number of cattle had been reduced to 3.89 million heads. These figures don’t need explanation, they speak for themselves.

Cita:

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Weekend at Fidel's
Jeffrey Goldberg is not the first American journalist to cuddle up to Castro.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499604575512352291352646.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Mary Anastasia O'Grady
September 27, 2010

At most marine parks in the world the animals provide the entertainment. But at the Havana aquarium last month, Fidel Castro had a couple of humans eating out of his hand and clapping like trained seals.

I refer here to the Atlantic Monthly's Jeffrey Goldberg, who traveled recently to Cuba at Castro's invitation with his friend Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Goldberg has posted a two-part report from his lengthy conversations with the dictator online for the magazine. One part includes details of a day at the aquarium, where Mr. Goldberg, accompanied by Ms. Sweig, seems to have experienced more than one "thrill going up [his] leg" in the presence of Fidel.

The reporter "hope[s] to be publishing a more comprehensive article about the subject in a forthcoming print edition of the Atlantic." I'm guessing that anyone who actually knows something about Castro's Cuba is not the target audience.

Castro again has an urgent need to put a smiley face on his dictatorship. The economy is in dire straits. Food is scarce, electricity is a rarity, and soap and toilet paper are luxuries. Cuba produces almost nothing and this makes it difficult to get hard currency—aka real money—which in turn makes it tough to buy from abroad. Lending sources have dried up.

If the regime is to stay in power, it needs a new source of income to pay the secret police and keep the masses in rice. The best bet is the American tourist, last seen circa 1950 exploiting the locals, according to revolutionary lore, but now needed by the regime. It wants the U.S. travel ban lifted. To prevail, Castro needs to counteract rumors that he is a dictator. Solution: a makeover in the Atlantic. In Mr. Goldberg, he no doubt recognized the perfect candidate for the job.

Fidel's step one was to tell Mr. Goldberg that he is outraged by anti-Semitism. "I don't think that anyone has been slandered more than the Jews," the old man proclaims to his guests. And by the way, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should "stop picking on the Jews." When Mr. Goldberg asks whether Castro will tell the Iranian himself, Castro says, "I am saying this so you can communicate it." Translation: This should be the headline of your piece so that the American people will recognize my benevolence. Mr. Goldberg complied.

We are supposed to conclude that Cuba is no longer a threat to global stability and that Fidel is a reformed tyrant. But how believable is a guy whose revolution all but wiped out Cuba's tiny Jewish community of 15,000, and who spent the past 50 years supporting the terrorism of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Syria, Libya and Iran? And how does Castro explain Venezuela, where Cuban intelligence agents run things, Iran is an ally and anti-Semitism has been state policy in recent years? Mr. Goldberg doesn't go there with Fidel.

It also is passing strange that we hear nothing from Mr. Goldberg about poor Alan Gross. Mr. Gross, a U.S. government contractor and a Jew, has been languishing in a Cuban prison since December. His crime: distributing computers to a handful of Cuban Jews who want to establish contact with the diaspora. Is that any way to show love for the Jewish people?

It never seems to cross Mr. Goldberg's mind that he is being used in a manner Communists first learned at Lenin's knee. Or perhaps he is happy to be useful. In a follow-up post he explains that since Fidel is not as bad as Pol Pot, Cubans should stop complaining. And to demonstrate further how little he knows about the plight of the Cuban people, he says that the "release" of political prisoners "is currently being negotiated." Wrong. Some have been exiled; some others may receive conditional parole meaning that they can be returned to prison at any time if the regime disapproves of their activities.

Mr. Goldberg is peddling his Castro interviews as serious journalism. But while he was "curious" to get a "glimpse of the great man," he was ill-prepared for the job. Presumably he knew this, which is why he allowed Ms. Sweig to lead him around Havana by the nose.

This set him up for failure because Ms. Sweig—an academic with easy access to the island while critics are banned—is a trusted friend of the dictatorship. "Fidel greeted Julia warmly; they have known each other for more than twenty years," Mr. Goldberg reports.

When Castro declares that the Cuban model no longer works, Mr. Goldberg turns to Ms. Sweig, as if there is something profound to be grasped. He is not saying "the ideas of the Revolution" have failed, she explains, but only that the state "has much too big a role" in the economy. Right, except that the state-owned economy is the idea of the revolution.

It is hardly surprising, then, that what we get from this interview is warmed-over Barbara Walters, another whose heart went pitter patter when she got close to the Cuban despot. This encounter also produced nothing of substance.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com

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After Jeffrey Goldberg published his interview with Fidel Castro the best reaction he could get from those who have detail information about Cuba is a laugh. His flattering of this brutal tyrant making him looks like a lovely old man upset even the non-so easily offended.

Mary O'Grady is not one of those fools that are carried away by warm confessions. The reason is that she is very perceptive and well informed about Cuba. While others are allured by the siren call of a brutal dictator, she will call him on it and embarrass him.

Fidel Castro supported with propaganda, money, weapons and Cuban soldiers those who opposed the State of Israel. He is a megalomaniac obsessed with grandiose actions and power, who want to be taken seriously by the world.

To the progressive Jews who support Fidel Castro, their “new” friend, I ask how they feel about his anti-Semitic statement in his June 2010 “reflections":

Cita:

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The hatred felt by the state of Israel against the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send the 1 ½ million men, women and children of that country to the crematoria where millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis” Castro said. “It would seem that the Fuehrer's swastika is today Israel's banner, he said, referencing Adolf Hitler

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You know, maybe I sound like a broken record, but if Goldberg were not a Jew but some Spanish Socialist, or some French intellectual like Sartre, or some Canadian Trudeau type, let alone some "Latin" Che lover, I would both understand his Fidel thing better and feel less offended. A Jew really should know better and act accordingly. I mean, anything even remotely close to shilling for Castro, Inc. is profoundly disreputable, for anybody, but for a Jew it's also demeaning (which it would not be for, say, Santana, who never had an exalted position to fall from, but rather the opposite). Goldberg, as a Jew, should be above this sort of disgraceful self-soiling. Again, it's not that he owes Cuba, but that he owes himself and his own people.

Cuba’s economy is in very bad shape. Food is scare, electrical blackouts continuous, soap and deodorants are hard to obtain, and even toilet is a luxury. Under the Castroit regimen the production of good are very limited, making difficult to obtain hard currency trough trade in order to by products from abroad. Basically subsidies from Venezuela and a few other countries like China, keeps the regime in power.

Castros’ tyranny continuous to starve the people, but the mainstream media still fine good things to say about it. It is amazing how many prominent American Liberals continuous to defend the Castroit regime and give credence to its ideology.

Maybe Mr. Goldberg doesn’t know that those who survived the Moncada attack on July 26, 1953 were given prison terms that, compared to those given by the Castros regime judiciary, may have induced them to commit further acts of rebellion. It is difficult to reach a different conclusion when one compares Fidel Castro’s fifteen-year sentence for organizing the Moncada attack with those of peaceful dissenters tried in 2003. No one fired a weapon against anyone, none kidnapped or killed an individual, but they were found guilty of crimes against the regime and handed down sentences that fluctuate between twelve and twenty-eight years in prison.

Overwhelmed documentary evidence, especially photographs, prove that the survivors of the Moncada attack experienced much more humane prison conditions than those endured by anti-Communist prisoners in years to come.

Notwithstanding the gravity of the insurrectional action, Batista granted amnesty to Fidel Castro and his followers after merely twenty-two months in prison. Aside from proving a willingness to forgive and forget that honors Batista, such pardons stands in stark contrast with the absence of comparable benevolence under Communism. Scores of anti-Communist rebels that took up arms against Castro were captured and executed by firing squad.

Fidel Castro, pardoned twenty-two months after organizing and leading an assault that cost over eighty lives, has penalized his peaceful adversaries with such severity that constitutes the greatest travesty in Cuban history.

In the majority of Eastern European countries the Communist dictators died of natural causes after they lost power due to the fall of the Berlin wall. The fact that they weren’t tried and executed for the millions of people they killed, leave a bad taste in the mouth. It is really a slap on the face that they died in their beds. Hopefully Fidel Castro will live long enough to be executed like Mussolini, Ceausescu, Gadhafi, et al.

People laughs as the Goldbergs & Oliver Stones of this world trying to spin their rhetoric for despots and dictators around the world. Do they really think we are stupid enough to think an old dog can learn new tricks. Their drivel is so predictable, they want the US to please allow tourism so we can fund their agenda. People will gladly spend their money and help the Castroit regime join the world, until then suffer as you have made your people suffer. Maybe an uprising of the people will change what need to be change.

The Left's infatuation with Castro has been going on for decades. Never get so close to evil that you can look into his eyes, since is very easy to cast a spell at that distance. Of course there are monsters who can charm, but that doesn't explain why the charm doesn't wear off once you're back home, and the spell is replaced by the reality of the impoverishment and hopelessness that the Castroit regime has brought to the Cuban people for 53 years.

The left depicts itself as champion of freedom and defender of the oppressed. Yet, for reasons that seem contrary to what common sense would suggest, the left seems to have developed a fondness for cruel and oppressive dictatorships like that of the Castro brothers.

Seems that this apparent contradiction can be explained by the fact that many on the left have a visceral distain for their own country. Over the last thirty years or so the left has fought a culture war against the very country that nurtured freedom and fought for the oppressed, the United States.

The Cuban people won't experience real freedom until they are freed from the Castros tyrannical regime. People like Jeffrey Goldberg, as apologists for the Castros, are severe impediments.

Castrism in Cuba has not only failed, it has destroyed the lives of millions. It set back for over one hundred years a promising country, once considered to be the jewel of the Caribbean. Now Cuba is just a decaying remnant and a constant reminder of the total failure of the Castroit regime. And Castro is just finding out that it isn't working, and Goldberg is in awe?

Cita:

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Iniciado por Tamakun

Over the last thirty years or so the left has fought a culture war against the very country that nurtured freedom and fought for the oppressed, the United States.

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I don't support the left in the US, in fact I'm totally against it. But they are right when they say that the government of the US has never fought for freedom or the oppressed but for their own interest. If the US hadn't stolen Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philipines from Spain (they didn't intend to free anybody) the Cuban communist revolution would have never taken place, because the USA (an alien nation for Cubans, unlike Spain) were taking Cuban resources away from the Cuban people.

Cita:

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Questions, but no answers yet
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/22/1885561/questions-but-no-answers-yet.html#ixzz135Ez355A

BY PAUL WEBSTER HARE

paulhare@bu.edu

Posted on Friday, 10.22.10

Cubans are hearing about big changes in their country but not from their leaders -- the revolution has gone silent. Why is Raúl Castro not explaining the changes? Why is Fidel Castro not talking about Cuba at all?

Here are 10 major issues that Cubans are learning about through statements of trade unions and in the government media -- and the questions that go unanswered.

1. Cuban workers have been told that a million of them -- the same number as the entire Cuban Communist Party -- are surplus to requirements. They can now run licensed private businesses in 178 activities, employ nonfamily members and earn profits if they pay taxes. Fidel Castro's eldest son, touring Japan this month, is saying Cubans should learn from Japanese entrepreneurs.

Q1. What will be the limits of the Cuban public sector where more than 80 percent will still work? Will these licenses be revoked in the future, as has happened in the past? Will the businesses be able to finance their equipment and their vehicles? What buildings will they use?

2. Cuba hopes to discover new oil reserves offshore. The government says there is vast potential for Cuba.

Q2. What is the plan for using these resources? Will Cuban private businesses be able to win business in the oil sector?

3. Foreigners are now allowed to buy and sell property in Cuba. Leases of up to 99 years have been authorized. Foreigners will play golf on new courses to enjoy along with their condos.

Q3. When will Cubans be given the same rights to invest as foreigners? And will Cubans be able to benefit from the market value of their homes?

4. The Cuban revolution is releasing and sending into exile dozens of political prisoners. The government has long claimed they were justly convicted for crimes against the state.

Q4. Is exile now the only route for Cubans with different opinions? What will happen to discussion within Cuba on ideas about political and economic openness -- the new entrepreneurs? Will the jails be the ultimate deterrent again, when even Raúl Castro now favors some of the economic ideas of the opposition?

5. The Cuban government continues to pay the millions who work for the state in one currency -- the old peso -- but many products are only available in CUCs (Cuban currency tied to the U.S. dollar).

Q5. How will Cubans survive long term, when an average salary is worth 15 CUCs a month and a bottle of cooking oil is only available at 3 CUCs?

6. Raúl Castro is not antagonizing the United Sates, saying little at all. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro is calling President Obama ``the little gentleman who's there in the presidency'' and thinks former President Harry Truman ``must be in some place in hell.''

Q6. What is the Castros' policy toward the United States, where more that one million Cubans live and which is one of its major food suppliers?

7. After 51 years of revolution, with their leaders all well over 70 years old, Cubans see their country is dependent on Venezuela with more than $5 billion of annual subsidies. Yet in the September 2010 elections, the opposition to President Hugo Chávez won a majority of votes.

Q7. What is Plan B if Chávez loses power in 2012? Will Cubans suffer again, just like after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

8. The Castros welcome political contacts with China. But they say nothing about the implications of following China's economic policies.

Q8. Is Cuba still communist? Does Raúl Castro believe now that ``to get rich is glorious''? Does he believe, like the Chinese, that prosperity for all is the aim of government? And if the cat catches the mouse, who cares about its color?

9. The Cuban national institute of statistics reports that less than 3 percent of Cubans access the Internet.

Q9. Is there really a bandwidth-technology issue, or is the government determined to hide something?

10. The president of Cuba is not explaining the country's future to the people. Cuba's youth are apathetic. Raúl Castro did not even speak at the sacred Moncada festival on July 26.

Q10. What plans does Raúl Castro have for the future of Cuba?

Paul Webster Hare, a former British ambassador to Cuba, teaches at Boston University.

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Former British Ambassador to Cuba Paul Webster Hare has 10 very valid and poignant questions about the island prison. One would expect the "Cuba Experts" to jump at the chance to show their expertness in all things Cubans, but don't hold your breath.

Cita:

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Cuba: A centralized failure
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_705855.html

By Ralph R. Reiland
Monday, October 25, 2010
Here's a short multiple-choice quiz.

Who said the following? "Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread."

A) Fidel Castro, warning Cubans to resist the power of their capitalist neighbor.

B) Thomas Jefferson, warning about the inherent inefficiencies of centralized power.

It was Jefferson.

He also said, "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave men otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government."

Castro, of course, went in the other direction, putting every pursuit of industry and improvement under his thumb, and the Cuban people ended up wanting not only bread but also fish, meat, cars, air conditioning, clothing and housing.

In its December 2008 report, "The Cuban revolution at 50: Heroic myth and prosaic failure," The Economist magazine described the conditions in Cuba the year before Castro shot his way to power.

"In 1958, Cuba was among the five most developed countries in Latin America: Life expectancy was close to that in the United States, and there were more doctors per head than in Britain or France," reported The Economist. "Havana boasted 135 cinemas in 1958 — more than New York City. Today, only a score remain open, although the city's population has doubled."

And those few screens don't show what Big Brother doesn't want the serfs to see.

The Economist summed up the economic and political results of Castro's success in driving more than a million of his country's more entrepreneurial people to escape to the United States:

"Mr. Castro's Cuba is a sad place. Although the population is now mainly black or mulatto, its rulers form a mainly white gerontocracy. The failure of collective farming means that it imports up to 80 percent of its food. The health and education systems struggle to maintain standards. Inequalities have risen."

Additionally, there are special jail cells for "prisoners of conscience," for those who insufficiently cheered the regime. It's not wise to talk about the scarcity of freedom or the lack of eggs.

NPR, summing up five decades of Castro keeping a lid on individualism and capitalism, reported that government stores in Cuba "regularly run out of meat, eggs and cooking oil." Those shortages in supply exist even with the government keeping demand artificially low through ration books that limit the amount of consumption per capita.

The government-dictated allotments for coffee and vegetable oil, respectively, ran around four ounces and two cups — per month, per capita. The fish allotment? Ten ounces per month per person in a nation surrounded by some of the world's best fishing waters.

One thing worked in Cuba — Castro's campaign of misinformation. "Castro's lasting success has been as a masterful propagandist," stated The Economist. "He has exploited the cult of Che in particular. Guevara's myth — of the romantic rebel, not the murderous, militaristic Marxist of real life."

The romantic version of Guevara shows up regularly on the T-shirts of political science majors, those who are big on hope and change and clueless about economics.

Some enterprising entrepreneur should update the T-shirts: The shirt could feature both Fidel and Che, looking admiringly at each other, 1959, and underneath could be this old Texan put-down about those who can't deliver — "All hat, no cattle."

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A very cleaver turn of words with regard to the responsibility of Fidel Castro for the ruin of Cuba. Ralph R. Reiland, associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University, used the old Texas put-down meaning that Castro is all talk and no substance who cannot back up his words.

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 1.1 million tons in 2009, theworst harvest in 116 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 from the United States of all places?

Cuba is the country where their inhabitants can only buy in the gigantic company store, where the Castros move the fences of the farms at their convenience, set prices as they please, and pay to the worker-servants, in complicity with the official trade union, with simple vouchers (also known as Cuban pesos) that have no value anywhere else. A country where they offer the natural resources or the golf courses to the highest bidder, stipulating that buyers can’t be Cubans’ who manage to escaped from the plantation and demonstrated, with their results all over the world, that happiness and prosperity are possible without having to depend on megalomaniac consumed by his own ego or an ideology that no longer fool anybody.

Cuba in 1958, with a population of 6.6 million inhabitants had 6.3 million head of cattle. In 2009, according to data by Cuba’s National Statistics Office (ONE), with a population of 11.43 million, the number of cattle had been reduced to 3.89 million heads. These figures don’t need explanation, they speak for themselves.

Cuba's economy is in dire straits; food is scarce, electricity is rationed, and soap and toilet paper are luxuries.The regime produces almost nothing and this makes it difficult to get hard currency, making it very hard to buy from other countries since credits have dry up.

Without the Soviet Union to subsidize his Potemkin village, Castros’ regime economy keeps struggling, depending mostly on the money spent by tourist from Canada and Europe and heavy subsides from Venezuela Hugo Chavez.

It is still amazing that many prominent Americans prospering in this country continue to defend Fidel Castro and give credence to his ideology. To be fair, Hitler and Stalin had their admirers and flatterers in the United States as well.

The extravagant passion of Progressives with Castro’s regime doesn’t make sense. This has been going on for five decades. There are megalomaniacs, like in Castro’s case, who can charm an audience, but that doesn't explain why the charm doesn't wear off when the spell is replaced by reality. Progressives depict themselves as champions of freedom and defenders of the oppressed. Yet they seem to have developed a fondness for a cruel and oppressive dictatorships like that of Castro.

Look to me that many on the left have a visceral distain for their own country, the US. Over the last fifty years the left has fought a culture war against the very country that nurtured freedom and fought for the oppressed. The Cuban people won't experience real freedom until they are freed from the monarchival dictatorship of the Castro brothers’ regime.

Castroism has not only failed, it has destroyed the hopes and dreams of three generations. It has set back the clock of development in Cuba to the extent that it has become a third world nation. A one promising country has become a decaying society and a constant reminder of the total failure of the corrupt Castros’ military dictatorship. Castro himself has admitted that “The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore.”

The Soviet Empire collapsed because communism creates a system that is unable to change. It is dogmatic as a religion, unquestionable loyalty to the state. A political dogma running berserk. It is about power and total control at the hands of the most ruthless.

The Castroit regime is a dismal failure no withstanding the bailout it received from the former Soviet Union at the tune of 5 billion a year for 30 years and nowadays the one it receive from Chavez Venezuela. What happened to the billions of dollars that the regime received? It went into Fidel Castro, aka the International Panhandler, money pit.

What happened to the Castro health care and education systems so much praised by the Left?
The report “The health Status of Newly Arrived Refugee Children in Miami-Dade County, Florida” (http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/content/full/93/2/286?ijkey=7b4f34ed11ce265b8f815c2a9405124f4f3f8a5b&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha) published in The American Journal of Public Health,
February 2003, Vol. 93, No. 2, found that a recent Pan American HealthOrganization report estimated that iron-deficiency anemia affects40% to 50% of Cuban children aged 1 to 3 years, 31 per cent of all Cuban refugee children had intestinal parasites, 21 per cent had lead poisoning and all had higher than normal levels of disease.

The Granma newspaper explained that Havana, a city of 2.2 million people needs 2.054 primary teachers 4.396 in secondary, 927 in vocational technical schools and 1.199 in community college. (http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2008/11/01/313197/la-habana-tiene-deficit-de-mas.html)

These posts are cover now by “teachers in training” [students] and other teachers the paper said, adding that the Provincial Department of Education attributed the deficit “to the exodus, the inactivity and low levels of registration in the teaching profession.”
In the educational sector, presented as one of the achievements of the revolution between 17 to 30% of the students resigns before graduating.

Due to the collectivized agricultural system and the regime unwillingness to liberalize the economy, gross incompetence and negligence, food shortages are a major problem in Cuba.

During a speech to the Party Assembly of the City of Havana at the beginning of July, 2002, Castro made reference to the “more than 4,500 emergent teachers graduated working in the schools with his corresponding tutors; 86, 000 youngsters, who neither were studying nor working, incorporated into the Schools for All-Encompassing Development.” [1]

What were these many young people doing that they were not in school, which is tuition-free, when the state acknowledges that they were not in the labor force? This suggests deeper causes among which the highlights are the dollarization of the economy, tourism, and the lack of values.

[1] Reynold Rassi and Alberto Núñez, 2002, “Para este país no hay nada imposible: Presidió Fidel la Asamblea de Balance,” Granma, July 8, 2002.

The regime remind students and parents how grateful they should be to the Revolution for the “free” education they are receiving. Until recently it was mandatory for all Cuban children over the age of 12 to remain on the schools in the countryside for ten months, and allowed to come home only one night per week. Away from all parental supervision the children suffer from venereal disease, as well as teenage pregnancy, which inevitably end in forced abortion.

The Education in Cuba is under the absolute control of the Communist party, and begin in elementary school with the so-called "Cumulative School File." This file measures the "revolutionary integration" of the student and his family. This file documents whether or not the child and family participate in mass demonstrations, or whether they belong to a church or religious group. His university options will depend on what that file says. If he does not conform to the regime indoctrination, he will be denied access to the university. The new Minister of Higher Education of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, ratified the historic slogan that says: “The University is only for the Revolutionaries.” (http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=12571)

The Cuban education which tries to create “the new man” is the most cruel and pitiless ever seen before in any civilized country. The family, relegated to a second place, suffers and remains silent when seeing its transformed son/daughter, where its native control on them, has been seized in the name of the party. What is education for if it turns into a weapon of mass indoctrination?

The apologists of the Castro brothers’ regime blame the US embargo for the island economic problems. But they fail to understand that theirs argument supports free market. Free flowing trade between countries benefits countries economic prospects, as free flowing internal trade does.

The failures of the socialist system in Cuba are very obvious. Cuban refugees risk their lives trying to get to Florida in makeshifts boats to get to the “evil empire” instead of remaining in the “workers’ paradise” in the island of Dr. Castro. Castros’ regime fails because it destroys the human spirit, just ask the Cuban leaving the island in rafts and home make boats.

Capitalism has brought a renaissance of freedom and liberty. It nurture the human spirit and human creativity. Trough incentives it promotes hard work and efficiency.The basic difference between socialism and capitalism is that capitalism works.

Cita:

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Cuba to take a different road
http://www.day.kiev.ua/317036
Attempting reforms with capitalist methods

By Yurii RAIKHEL
November 17, 2010

Archivo adjunto 4599http://www.day.kiev.ua/img/317027/66-3-1.jpg
UNDER BATISTA’S DICTATORSHIP (1958), CUBA
WAS AHEAD OF SPAIN’S PER CAPITA INCOME.
THERE WERE 200,000 CARS. TODAY, THERE ARE
100,000, INCLUDING 75,000 BATISTA SURVIVORS

Cuba, the second-last Leninist-Stalinist socialist paradise on earth, is in its death throes, with the all but dead economy desperately in need of modernization. This is something even the Castro brothers, still in power, are aware of.

As soon as Raul Castro took office he started talking about the need to reform. There being a difference between words and deeds, he found himself faced with countless internal and external problems, with his older brother remaining the main enemy of any reforms. Even though Fidel Castro had formally distanced himself from governance, he remained General Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba. On his website he theorized about the need to keep fighting American imperialism and defended Cuba’s command economy as a necessary aspect of this struggle. Fidel openly opposed Raul as the latter spoke about the necessity of reforms. This family squabble led to the postponing of the next Communist Party Congress, scheduled for 2008, without explanations. The obvious result of this confrontation was the slow but sure elbowing out of Fidel’s ranking companeros. This process took quite some time, but then it was decided to schedule the next congress for April 2011, although the Party Charter reads that these congresses must be convened every five years. The last one took place in 1997.

Raul Castro has consistently shown an interest in the Chinese experience of socialist economic transformation. He started by taking small steps, probably because his hands were tied. For example, Cubans were eventually allowed to buy mobile phones, computers, DVDs, pressure cookers, and Internet access, even thought the Cuban in the street would first step into a store selling such goods feeling as though s/he were exploring an exclusive exhibit. In a country with an average monthly salary being the equivalent of 12 to 20 dollars, all such gadgets looked out of this world. However, the situation changed before long — in first place owing to remittances from emigre relatives in the United States, the country that is constantly cursed and condemned all over Cuba.

Politics came next. In the summer of 2010, with intercession on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, 50 political prisoners were released under the condition that they leave the “Island of Freedom” forthwith (they were given political asylum in Spain). The Cuban government says there are no political prisoners left, although human rights champions insist there are actually 200 still being held in jail. That may well be the case, but it means that their time is still to come, and that their fate depends on Cuba’s home policy.

There are many ways to pretend you’re doing fine while feeling lousy, knowing that things will get worse. In the end, though, people will notice. Raul Castro had known that the situation in Cuba left much to be desired, mildly speaking, before he took over Fidel’s post. Yet when he did, the truth nevertheless shocked him. He discovered that there were factories and whole industries that were unmanned, that the accounting and progress reports submitted by practically all government-run structures weren’t worth even looking through — with all statistics falsified to please everyone “upstairs” — just a heap of sheets good enough for starting a hundred campfires. Raul further learned that his older brother had allowed a thoroughly corrupt system to envelop Cuba during the 50 years of his rule; that this system embraced all walks of life, all the way from top to bottom; that corruption was rampant on all levels (except the army, then under Raul Castro’s command), and that it had reached “critical proportions.” The vertical of dictatorial power existed only for the opponents but by no means impeded total corruption. On the contrary, it facilitated bribe-giving and taking, as well as embezzlement. There was nothing the controlling authorities and special services could do about this, simply because they were part of this system.

Something had to be done about the situation, and even Fidel Castro was aware of this. In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg (September 8, 2010), he said: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” Two days later, CNN quoted him as saying at the University of Havana (a speech later broadcast on Cuban television) that he meant “exactly the opposite” of what was understood by Goldberg. He later said he had been quoted correctly, 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… How could such a system work for a socialist country like Cuba?” A ridiculous statement, considering the way the Cuban government would act afterward.

Cuba’s official periodical, Gaceta Oficial, publishes legislative acts and regulations binding on business activities within the country, including tax rates, penalties, samples of forms required for business paperwork. The current government plans to liquidate some 500,000 posts in the state-run institutions. Another half a million bureaucratic jobs will be lost in the next couple of years. About five million people are employed in the Cuban public/state sector, hence the need for reductions.

Ranking bureaucrats subject to these reductions can be offered other jobs within this sector or “find jobs in the non-public sector.” Those being relieved of their public sector posts are given government subsidies. Gaceta Oficial has a list of 178 lines of business Cubans can undertake, at their risk, including 83 that provide for manpower employment. Thousands of Cubans are standing in lines to the city councils to receive authorizations to start in business.

Such economic reforms will rest on a political foundation. “We have decided to hold the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party in the second half of April 2011; it will pass fundamental resolutions aimed at upgrading the economic model,” Raul Castro declared after meeting with the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Cuba’s leading official newspaper Granma carried the Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy of the Party, including key ideological postulates reading that socialism is the sole principle of the new Cuban economic policy because only socialism can overcome the hardships and preserve the gains of the revolution. As it is, Cuba and its ruling Communist Party are in for a number of substantial changes.

First, the next congress will take place come what may, simply because the current situation in Cuba cannot last any longer. The new economic conditions demand an appropriate political response, the more so that the dismissal of so many functionaries and the de facto prohibition of ration cards will inevitably cause social tensions. A number of experts (Cuban ones included) feel rather skeptical about the forthcoming upgrading. Their attitude is summed up by the following statement: “The miserable private sector is incapable of employing all of those relieved of their posts/jobs. Cuba is in for a course of shock treatment that may well turn out worse than that sustained by Russia in 1992, considering that the majority of the Cuban population is below the poverty line.” Whether the party and the bureaucratic machine will cope with this problem is anyone’s guess.

Second, it is a short trip from Cuba to Florida, with its Cuban diaspora which hates the current Cuban regime. This diaspora’s economic and political influence on Cuba is bound to increase, which is a strong and dangerous challenge to the current regime. Until now this influence has been kept under control using clandestine agencies, but now this kind of control is bound to contradict the economic liberalization plans of the new class of owners which is being formed — it will be obliterated in the process.

Third, the Cuban political leadership is faced with the complex problem of continuity. The Cuban dissident [exiled – Ed.] author, Carlos Alberto Montaner, believes that his home country is entering a defidelization phase, which is very interesting, considering that Fidel is still alive, and that he is directly involved in this process. There is no way Cuba can copy the Chinese experience, because the Cuban ruling tandem doesn’t have the main resource: time. Fidel will be 84 in the summer of 2011, and his brother will be 79. Although Raul looks full of life, his regular abuse of 12-year-old Chivas Regal is having its effect on his system. In other words, top-level cadre changes are inevitable and the next Cuban Communist Party Congress will have to deal with this problem.

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Interesting article from the Ukrainian point of view on recent Cuban news. Look that Yurii Raikhel knows a few things about Cuban Communism.

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Cita:

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Premature thanks in Cuba
The myth of Raul the Reformer
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/nov/24/premature-thanks-in-cuba/

By Daniel Allott
The Washington Times, November 24, 2010
It has been more than four years since Raul Castro assumed the duties of the presidency of Cuba and more than 2 1/2 years since he officially took over for his older brother, Fidel.

In that time, words like "pragmatic," "practical" and "reformer" have often been attached to Raul as a way of contrasting his governing philosophy with his brother's and to signal that major political and economic reforms may be imminent.

But a sober analysis suggests that meaningful change has not occurred. In fact, given the conclusions of several reports on human rights in Cuba, and based on our conversations with dozens of Cuba experts and Cubans both inside and outside Cuba, it is clear that the regime's tyranny is as entrenched as ever.

The Raul-as-reformer narrative began when he announced modest economic changes early in his reign. These included privatizing some farmland, denationalizing small beauty parlors and taxi-driving enterprises and loosening restrictions on the use of cell phones and other electronics.

Then, in July, the Cuban government announced that it would release the remaining 52 political prisoners it had imprisoned during the "Black Spring," a mass arrest of nonviolent activists in March 2003. As of Nov. 12, 39 prisoners had been released and exiled to Spain.

In September, the Cuban labor federation announced a government plan to fire more than 500,000 state employees between October and March. It would mark the biggest shift of jobs from the public to the private sector in nearly 50 years.

All of this has convinced many of the major players in Cuba's relationship with the outside world that Raul is someone they can work with.

Even before the recent changes, President Obama talked about forging "a new beginning" with Cuba. After a July meeting with Raul in Havana, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos proclaimed the opening of "a new phase in Cuba" and insisted "there is no longer any reason to maintain the [European Union's] Common Position on Cuba," which calls for normalizing relations with the regime once progress is made on human rights and democracy issues.

Even the beleaguered Cuban Catholic Church - whose leaders were given the cold shoulder by Fidel, who preferred to negotiate directly with the Vatican on church matters - sees an opening. Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, Archbishop of Havana, announced a "magnificent beginning" to a new relationship with the regime after talks with Raul last spring.

Journalists, too, see change they can believe in with Raul. The prisoner releases prompted Newsweek's Patrick Symmes to write, "A half century of repression [in Cuba] appears to be ending."
Such claims are contradicted by the findings of numerous human rights groups. In a November 2009 study titled "New Castro, Same Cuba: Political Prisoners in the Post-Fidel Era," Human Rights Watch documented more than 40 cases of Cubans imprisoned for "dangerousness" under a Cuban law that allows authorities to imprison persons they suspect might commit a crime in the future.

Scores of other Cubans have been sentenced under Raul for violating laws that criminalize free expression and association. Cubans have been imprisoned for failing to attend government rallies, for not belonging to official party organizations and even for being unemployed.

Non-Cubans are not immune to such treatment. One of this piece's authors, Jordan Allott, was detained briefly and interrogated by Cuban police during a trip across Cuba in 2009 merely for asking a couple of Cubans to talk about the Cuban Revolution on a street in Camaguey.

American contractor Alan Gross has been imprisoned in Cuba for nearly a year. He is accused of trying to provide unauthorized satellite Internet connections to Cuba's tiny Jewish community.

In its report, Human Rights Watch concluded that rather than dismantle Fidel's "system of abusive laws and institutions," Raul "has kept it firmly in place and fully active."

Freedom House's 2010 Freedom in the World survey again designated Cuba as the sole "not free" country in the Americas. It also placed Cuba among its "worst of the worst" countries, which kept it on the shortlist of "the world's most repressive regimes."

In an October 2009 report, the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor rebuked Cuba for its lack of religious freedom. "The Government continued to exert control over all aspects of societal life, including religious expression," the report stated. Violations of religious freedom included efforts to control and monitor religious activities and fines against unregistered religious groups.

The Cuban government continues to be one of the few in the world that prohibit the International Committee of the Red Cross access to their prisons. The condition of those prisons was highlighted in February with the hunger-strike death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo. Zapata, imprisoned for nonviolent political activism, undertook the strike to protest prison conditions. The international outcry after his death was partially responsible for prompting the regime to agree to release prisoners willing to be exiled.

The continued mistreatment of nonviolent political activists comes as no surprise to those who remember Raul as the official who oversaw thousands of executions of political prisoners in the early years of the revolution.

As with most tyrants, the Castros are skilled at sending mixed signals about their intentions. It was months into the revolution before many democrats realized that Fidel's repeated declarations that his revolution was informed not by Marxism but by democratic and Christian principles were lies.

Last year, the Cuban government invited Manfred Novak, the United Nations' special investigator on torture, to inspect Cuba's prisons. The invitation drew praise from the international community. But the government rescinded the invitation last month, stating that an outside investigation was not needed.
In spring, Raul was lauded for agreeing to end persecution of the Ladies in White, a group of wives, mothers and other female relatives of Cuban political prisoners who were being harassed, beaten and prevented by government security agents from making their weekly peaceful protests.

But the government resumed its harassment in August. It deployed large mobs to intimidate Reina Luisa Tamayo, mother of deceased hunger striker Zapata, preventing her from marching and attending Mass.

Even the prisoner releases are less than they appear. The Cuban government pledged to release all its political prisoners without any conditions by Nov. 7. But that deadline has passed, and 13 prisoners who refuse to be exiled from the island remain incarcerated.

Last month, Berta Soler of the Ladies in White accused the government of "applying psychological pressure to those remaining in prison because they want to see them out of the country."

The prisoner releases and economic changes are not meaningful and lasting steps toward reform. Instead, they are short-term measures designed to extract economic concessions from the United States and Europe.

As Susan Kaufman Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami, put it to us in an interview, "It's wrong to think that [Cuba is] now on this one-way road toward openness and democracy. That's not the case at all. Cuba needs something. What the regime is hoping for is to get some economic help."

Cuba's economy is in abysmal shape. Food production has slowed, and tourism, foreign remittances and subsidies from Venezuela have plunged with the global economy.

The Cuban government is laying off 500,000 workers not because it wants to move toward a free-market capitalist system. It is doing so because it can no longer afford to pay those workers' monthly $20 wages.

Similarly, the regime is exiling some of its political prisoners not because it suddenly has seen the light on human rights and democracy. Rather, it's exiling them because it's desperate for America and the EU to relax economic sanctions, which both have made conditional principally on the release of political prisoners.

The Castro brothers are experts at easing their grip on Cuba just enough and just long enough to get what they want. On many occasions throughout the Castro regime's 51 years, it has freed or exiled political prisoners or made other "reforms" only to reverse course once it got what it needed.
Ms. Kaufman Purcell says, "The way [authoritarian regimes] often work is that when things get bad, when there's a lot of external pressure, what happens is that they release [prisoners], and at some point they get new ones."

Armando Valladares, a Cuban-born former political prisoner and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, told us, "The liberation of groups of political prisoners is a frequent practice in Cuba. It has happened many times for the revolution's interests. [The prisoner releases] absolutely should not be interpreted ... as a change in the tyranny's repressive structure."
After foreign aid from the Soviet Union was cut off with the fall of communism in the early 1990s, the Cuban government loosened controls on private enterprise, allowing 200,000 workers to earn money as street vendors and taxi drivers. But as soon as the economy recovered, many of the new businesses were shut down.

When the government wanted some good publicity ahead of Pope John Paul II's visit in 1998, it released 300 political prisoners. As soon as the press attention subsided, the prisons were filled again with political opponents.

If fundamental political and economic reforms are to be made in Cuba, the government's repressive legal system and security apparatus must be dismantled. That didn't happen for more than four decades under Fidel. And it's not happening under Raul.

Daniel Allott is senior writer at American Values and a Washington fellow at the National Review Institute. He also is associate producer of "Oscar's Cuba," a documentary film about Cuban prisoner of conscience Dr. Oscar Biscet. Jordan Allott is director and executive producer of "Oscar's Cuba."

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Excellent article by Daniel Allot. The Mainstream Media just repeat the Castro brothers' press releases about so-called reforms and changes in Cuba without meaningful commentary. In order to change things in the island is absolutely necessary to remove the Castro brothers from power and dismantle their totalitarian and repressive state apparatus. Castros’ tyrannical dynasty has been in power for 51 years and has no intention of relinquish it. It seems that the most expedite way to remove them from power is by force. The Cuban in the island and abroad should start working in that approach, organize and rally the people around it. The opportunity is knocking on the door; the time is ripe to do so.

Cita:

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Cuban Capital Facing “Critical” Water Shortage
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=384732&CategoryId=14510

January 22, 2011

HAVANA – The supply of potable water in the Cuban capital has reached its most critical state in the last 50 years, with more than 100,000 people dependent on tanker trucks for water and with sources of supply ready to collapse, Communist Party daily Granma said Friday.

The Havana water system loses 70 percent of the water pumped for consumers before it gets to them, the newspaper said.

Almost half of Havana’s more than 2 million inhabitants have suffered from serious problems in the basic water-supply system, while some 110,000 people are wholly dependent on deliveries of water by tanker trucks, according to official data cited by Granma.

The paper said that there has been a “notable drop” in accumulated volumes in aquifers and reservoirs due to the drought over the past two years and the poor functioning of an aqueduct “that has deteriorated over time.”

“In a more subtle way than hurricanes, this hydrological drought, together with the poor state of some 2,194 kilometers (1,363 miles) of pipelines, almost 71 percent, and other infrastructure problems, is also damaging the nation’s economy,” Granma said.

Once again the call was made to “stop the waste” in homes and businesses, and said that among the most wasteful were state institutions.

“Because of how serious the situation is, the possibility of cutting off service to those who consume more than planned is being evaluated,” Granma said.

To ease the situation, the government plans to construct several pipelines to improve water delivery, install valves, drill wells, restore pipelines that are in a poor state of repair, and eliminate leaks in water pumps and large aqueducts. EFE

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According to the regime the water distribution system is in serious problem, unable to satisfy the needs of the population. For the last 51 years no significant investments have been made in the water distribution system. I wonder if the regime at this point in time would be able to “eased the situation.”

The daily life of the Cuban people is becoming more and more difficult. Shortages of food, electricity and water, compound with a decrease of basic services provided by the regime, are creating conditions for a social unrest.

Cita:

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Leaked cable: Cuba a nation on the take
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/22/2029383/leaked-cable-cuba-a-nation-on.html

A leaked 2006 diplomatic cable paints Cuba as rife with corruption.
By JUAN O. TAMAYO

jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
January 23, 2011

Corruption in Cuba is so widespread, from the street to a defense minister, that the island has become ``a nation on the take,'' according to a dispatch from U.S. diplomats in Havana.
``Because most Cubans work for the state, the entire system -- from petty officials to Castro's closest advisors -- is rife with corrupt practices,'' the 2006 cable says.

``Corruption and thievery have become one and the same. Corrupt practices also include bribery, misuse of state resources and accounting shenanigans,'' the dispatch noted before adding, ``Cuba has become a state on the take.''

A SYSTEM THREAT

Some Cuban government officials and supporters have warned in the past year that the spreading crookedness is a serious threat to the survival of the communist system, and one even called it the most dangerous ``counterrevolution.''

Civil Aviation Institute President Rogelio Acevedo was fired last year amid an investigation into massive fraud at the state-owned airline Cubana de Aviacion. And Pedro Alvarez, former head of the state agency that handled billions of dollars in agricultural imports, was reported to have defected recently rather than face state corruption investigators.

The dispatch, made available by WikiLeaks and first published by Spain's El Pais newspaper, gave a broad view of the corruption phenomenon but provided few hard examples.

It was signed by Michael Parmley, then head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, though it was not clear whether he wrote it.

Not everyone in Cuba is corrupt, the dispatch noted. Accidentally offering a bribe to ``a clean official -- or worse, a strident revolutionary -- could result in disaster.''

But corruption was widespread and expanding in 2006, despite a crackdown by Cuban ruler Fidel Castro, because of the ``economic desperation combined with totalitarian control,'' according to the report.

Bribes are common in getting around the controls, the cable noted, adding that several hundred dollars are usually required to grease the wheels on an illegal state deal.

Bribes also get good jobs, with a position at a gasoline station worth thousands of dollars -- because of the access to gasoline that can be sold on the black market -- and a tourism job with access to hard currency tips going for hundreds.

Police officers pull over drivers and ask for money for their ``sick child,'' and construction materials are regularly siphoned off government channels and sold on the black market.

A Cuban man told a U.S. diplomat that the government ``can't build anything because it is simply impossible to collect enough supplies in one place,'' according to the cable.

And a Cuban woman reported she had a tooth capped at a black market dental clinic staffed by health ministry dentists and outfitted with equipment stolen from the state, it added.

Some state shops are run by ``mafias,'' the dispatch stated, noting that one manager of a bread distribution center put so many friends in key jobs that he eventually controlled an entire chain of state bakeries.

Even the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which are supposed to watch out for crimes, distribute items such as TV sets based on the recipients' revolutionary credentials and their ability to pay bribes.

BEYOND THE STREET

The corruption is not just a street-level phenomenon, the cable explained, but extends to managers of state enterprises and to middle- and high-ranking officials of the government.

A Swiss businessman told a U.S. diplomat that Cuban managers take kickbacks for awarding large contracts to foreign companies and then deposit the money in banks abroad, according to the cable.

``Just like everywhere in the world, a million-dollar contract gets you $100,000 in the bank,'' the dispatch quoted the businessman as saying.

Above the state enterprise managers ``stand Castro's cadres of régíme faithfuls, some of whom are widely rumored to be corrupt,'' according to the cable. It listed one example as Army Gen. Julio Casas Reguerio, who succeeded Raul Castro as minister of defense when he replaced brother Fidel at the head of the government, but gave no details.

Another example was Otto Rivero, leader of a group close to Fidel and known as the ``Battle of Ideas.'' The dispatch noted that group members were rumored to be ``making off with food and television sets'' set aside for the propaganda campaign on behalf of five Cuban spies in U.S. jails.

The dispatch also mentioned a tourism minister fired in 2004 -- Ibraham Ferradaz. He was the second consecutive tourism chief dismissed amid reports of corruption.

Cuba's official media seldom reports on corruption scandals and senior officials caught with their hands on the till seldom go to jail. They are usually fired and ordered to stay home in what's known as ``Plan Payama.''

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What, there is corruption in the Castros regime? A regime leads by an egocentric and narcissistic consummate liar, who for the last 53 years in power has spread guerrilla war throughout the hemisphere, and has accumulated a personal fortune of more than $1.2 billion is in reality corrupt?
Nothing new here, the practice of corruption and stealing date back to 1957 since the so call “revolutionaries” were in the Sierra Maestra.

This type of widespread corruption under the Castros regime is a carbon copy of the one that existed in the Soviet Union. When the end of the system was evident, nothing could be accomplished without kickbacks to senior officials in the government and dealing in the black market.

Cita:

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Cuban communist party expels intellectual for exposing corruption
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/02/cuba-communist-corruption-censorship

Prominent intellectual Esteban Morales published article criticising unnamed high-ranking officials

Rory Carroll
The Guardian, Friday 2 July 2010 15.28 EDT

Cuba's communist party has reportedly expelled a prominent intellectual for blowing the whistle on high-level corruption.

Esteban Morales is said to have been "separated from the ranks" of the party over a bombshell article, which accused senior officials of looting the state before it crumbled.

The Playa Municipal branch of the party has stripped Morales of his membership and the historian, a frequent commentator on state television, has disappeared from public view, the Havana Times reported.

Morales broke taboos with an article in April that criticised unnamed, greedy apparatchiks. "It has become evident that there are people in government and state positions who are preparing a financial assault for when the revolution falls," he wrote on the website of the state National Artists and Writers Union of Cuba.

He claimed in the article that corruption from within threatened to destroy the 50-year-old communist state. "Others likely have everything ready to produce the transfer of state property into private hands, like what happened in the former Soviet Union."

The article quickly vanished from the site, but was copied and circulated among intellectuals and analysts.

"To publish an attack on high-level corruption on a state-controlled website was fairly amazing," said one European diplomat.

Rumours of a corruption scandal involving Havana airport have been circulating for months. Rogelio Acevedo, the civil aviation minister, and Jorge Luis Sierra Cruz, the transport minister, have been fired. In addition to this, dozens of airport employees have been arrested, amid claims that state aircraft were used for private gain

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Castro brothers’ dictatorship has systematized corruption, and it has become the main problem of the regime. Due to the concentration of political power and economic control into the hands of the military apparatus, inefficiencies in resource allocation lead to consumer-good shortages and black-market activities.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s compounded by five decades of tyrannical rule in the island, made the promise of material prosperity unattainable. Corruption became paramount and many Cubans became proficient at trading on the black market whatever they could steal from the regime.

The level of deprivation now is similar to the special period of the 90s. Seem that the Castros regime officials have taken capitalism on as a way to increase their personal income, while the rest of the population survives on a meager ration book and whatever they can steal from their state jobs. Look that as long as the Castro brothers are in power there is no chance of reverse this trend.

Where the $150 billion have gone? For five decades the billions in loans from the former Soviet Union to the European Union to Venezuela, have gone to the corrupt regime of the Castro brothers and their military elite, helping them to keep the Cuban people under their control. A national debt that will take Cubans generations to pay off. Cuba, as the rest of the already gone communist governments, should serve as a reminder to the rest of us that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

This is the result of 53 years of total control by a corrupt and brutal military dictatorship over the Cuban people. This is the legacy of Fidel Castro, the International Panhandler, and his brother Raul.

One of the Castros’ regime greatest evil is the lies that those forced to live under its rule have been forced to swallow. For more than five decades the people have been forced to march in support of the regime, to denounce the evil capitalist system, to spy and denounce their relatives and friends, more than two million people gone into exile, 100,000 perished trying to escape crossing the shark invested water of the Florida Straight on makeshift rafts in search of freedom.

Communism doesn’t work. It is a system mostly based on hate and class envy. Most of the time those who reach the top posts in the system are not the most qualified, but those who support the crooked methods of the system. In order to succeed people need incentives, success should not be punished. Their main concern isn’t progress, but the retention of power at any cost. In Castros’ regime those people willing to inform on their neighbors and own families are rewarded with small handouts.

This certainly is a pattern of practically all Communist Regimes. As their ideals start to fade, the oppressive system starts to collapse from within and everyone go into survival mode. The phony friendships start to expose themselves for what they always were, a facade. The knives come out and the snakes start turning on one another.

The time is ripe for the people of Cuba to start a real revolution, to get rid of the Castroit clan, but because it is an island and without weapons, it will be very difficult.

Cita:

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Will Cuba Be the Next Egypt?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704709304576124591746057376.html
http://cubadata.blogspot.com/2011/02/will-cuba-be-next-egypt.html

The most striking difference between the two countries is Internet access

BY MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Developments in Egypt over the last two weeks brought Cuba to my mind. Why does a similar rebellion against five decades of repression there still appear to be a far-off dream? Part of the answer is in the relationship between the Castro brothers—Fidel and Raúl—and the generals. The rest is explained by the regime's significantly more repressive model. In the art of dictatorship, Hosni Mubarak is a piker.

That so many Egyptians have raised their voices in Tahrir Square is a testament to the universal human yearning for liberty. But it is a mistake to ignore the pivotal role of the military. I’d wager that when the history of the uprising is written, we will learn that Egypt’s top brass did not approve of the old man’s succession plan to anoint his son in the next election.

Castro has bought loyalty from the secret police and military by giving them control of the three most profitable sectors of the economy—retail, travel and services. Hundreds of millions of dollars flow to them every year. If the system collapses, so does that income. Of course the Egyptian military also owns businesses. But it doesn’t depend on a purely state-owned economy. And as a recipient of significant U.S. aid and training for many years, the Egyptian military has cultivated a culture of professionalism and commitment to the nation over any single individual.

In Cuba there are no opposition political parties or nonstate media; rapid response brigades enforce the party line. Travel outside the country is not allowed without state approval. If peaceful dissidents with leadership skills can’t be broken, they are eventually exiled. Or they are murdered.

The most striking difference between Cuba and Egypt is access to the Internet. In a March 2009 Freedom House report on Internet and digital media censorship world-wide, Egypt scored a 45 (out of 100), slightly worse than Turkey but better than Russia. Cuba scored a 90, making it more Net-censored than even Iran, China and Tunisia. Cellphone service is too expensive for most Cubans.

Yet technology does somehow seep into Cuba. When Fidel took the life of prisoner of conscience Pedro Boitel in 1972 by denying him water during a hunger strike, the world hardly noticed. By contrast, news of the regime’s 2010 murder of prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo hit the Internet almost immediately and was met with worldwide condemnation. The military dictatorship was helpless to contain the bad publicity.

In a similar fashion, when the Ladies in White—a group of wives, sisters and mothers of political prisoners—walking peacefully in Havana were roughed up by state security last year, the images were captured on cellphones and immediately showed up on the Web. It was more bad PR for the Castro brothers and their friends like Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Spanish President José Luis Zapatero.

Technology-induced international pressure is making the regime increasingly reluctant to flatten critics the old-fashioned way. In an interview in Argentina’s Ambito Financiero on Jan. 27, internationally recognized Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez said the “style” of state repression has shifted from aggressive arrests and long sentences to targeted attempts at defamation and isolation. Ms. Sanchez also said that uniformed police are “distancing themselves from the political theme, not by orders from above, but because they no longer want to be associated with the repression.” Now, she said, the intimidation and arbitrary arrests are largely carried out by the secret police in civilian clothes. A little more space has emboldened the population. Ms. Sánchez also said in the interview that she is “optimistic about the slow and irreversible process of interior change in Cubans. In that the citizen critic will grow, will have less fear, and will feel that the mask is increasingly unnecessary and that it doesn’t any longer translate into privileges and subsidies.”

Last week a leaked video of a Cuban military seminar on how to combat technology hit the Internet. It demonstrates the dictatorship’s preoccupation with the Web. The lecturer warns about the dangers of young people with an appealing discourse sharing information through technology and trying to organize. Real-time chat, Twitter and the emergence of young leaders in cyberspace—aka “a permanent battlefield”—are perils outlined in the hour-long talk. The lecturer also shares his concerns about U.S. government programs that try to increase Internet access outside of officialdom on the island.

On Friday, the regime further displayed its paranoia by charging U.S. Agency for International Development contractor Alan Gross with spying. Mr. Gross has been in jail for 14 months for giving Cuban Jews computer equipment so they could connect with the diaspora.
With very limited access, Cubans are already using the Internet to share what has until now been kept in their heads: counterrevolutionary thoughts. If those go viral, even a well-fed military will not be able to save the regime. But for now, Cubans can only dream about the freedoms Egyptians enjoy as they voice their grievances. HCA

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Will Cuba be the next Egypt? It is possible if most of the 500,000 Cuban workers that would be laid off from their jobs cannot find a suitable employment to support themselves, the conditions will be ripe for a protest demanding an end to the regime.

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 their aspirations. 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.

Two conditions are required for a rebellion to take place: A military loyal to the state, not to the Castro brothers, that won't open fire on protestors, and an event that will push people to demand change. Sooner or later, when these conditions are fulfill dictatorships fall.

Time is running out for the Castroit regime. They have no money, have frozen the accounts of foreign companies in Cuba and reduce the imports by more than 36 percent.

The only thing they care about is to keep in power. It is not about fighting imperialism or about communism or whatever lies and propaganda they use, is just simply to retain the power.

This is a forerunner of things to come. On October 22, 2009, Cuban university students from the Superior Institute of Art (ISA) in Havana, Cuba, protest again the regime for lack of food and water at the Institute. The protest quickly transcends those grievances to claim free space for creation and opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSnjE...mbedded#at=125

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYGhjUI6RI&feature=fvwrel

Cita:

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Cuban communists headed for oblivion
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/17/2169612/cuban-communists-headed-for-oblivion.html

By CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
www.firmaspress.
April 17, 2011

An old and disappointed Cuban communist told me, during a recent brief encounter in Madrid: “This Sixth Party Congress reminds me of the atmosphere of sadness and nostalgia one breathes in those theaters that present their last show before being demolished.”

That’s a good metaphor.

Fidel Castro’s generation is now octogenarian. It’s giving its farewell performance. Fidel, 84, had his intestines removed in 2006, and Raúl, almost 80, will leave the stage before long. He gave himself a three-to-five-year period to transfer his authority in full and facilitate a sort of generational relay “so the heirs may continue the revolutionary task.”

What does all that mean? Nothing, except to stay in power. Although Cubans continue to repeat slogans, almost no one believes in Marxism-Leninism, while the government tries to escape from the system’s chronic failures by creating a few spaces that might allow private initiative to alleviate the disaster of collectivism. While they applaud revolutionary mottos, young people call Marx “the little old man who invented hunger.”

The adults, in confidence, acknowledge this outlook. After 52 years of dictatorship, without a hostile parliament or an opposition that could hinder the government’s work, the six basic elements that determine the quality of life of any modern society have decayed into nightmares: food, potable water, housing, electricity, communications and transport.

Raúl Castro, a realist who cannot understand why Cuban children can’t drink milk after the age of 7, is not unaware that his brother has been the worst leader in the history of the republic, founded in 1902. In 56 years of capitalism, despite bad administrations, corruption, frequent uprisings and periods of military dictatorship, the island became one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America, and Havana one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The public sector was mediocre or bad, but civil society functioned reasonably well.

In contrast, in 52 years of communism, society became pauperized, and the urban landscape took on the appearance of a bombed territory. The communist-imposed public sector was terribly clumsy, infinitely worse than the one in the capitalist era, and civil society (which Raúl is trying to revive via artificial respiration) was cruelly crushed.

This is the melancholy diagnosis with which Cuban communists must celebrate their Sixth Congress. Raúl has summoned a docile ruling circle and asked it to support his timid reforms and legitimize the handpicked functionaries. The idea is to appoint cadres under the age of 60, but the ones who existed — Carlos Lage, Felipe Pérez Roque, Roberto Robaina, Fernando Remírez de Estenoz — were destroyed by the rulers themselves.

Who will emerge as the heir presumptive? The name is whispered (though no one is certain) of Marino Murillo, a 50-year-old economist, former Army officer and former Minister of the Economy, despised by the apparatchiks (“he’s a lowly auditor, not an economist,” I was told by an especially shrewd observer), who today is in charge of disciplining the Party so that, during this Sixth Congress, it will accept, without a whimper, the changes proposed by Raúl. He is said to owe total allegiance to the general-president and to be committed to retaining the basic elements of the communist system, although eliminating paternalism.

Will he succeed? I doubt it. Raúl, with the aid of Murillo, his ideological stepson, wants to build a socialism without subsidies and a capitalism without markets. That’s impossible.

That monstrosity has to be buried, the way it was done in Eastern Europe. However, it is not improbable that, after the departure of the Castros, the armed forces will hold on tightly to power for awhile, but only until a spark is lit and we see in Cuba a violent finale.

Those who insist on impeding the natural evolution of history end up provoking devastating catastrophes.

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Most people today have no idea how idea how far ahead Cuba was of most everywhere else in Latin America in the pre-Castro days.

Havana had the highest telephone density (telephones per 100 population) of any city in Latin America, was one of the first capital cities in the world with a 100% automatic dial telephone system in the 1920s (Washington DC did not complete the conversion from manual operators to dial telephones until December 17, 1949), and there were more telephones in tiny Cuba that in all but 3 very much larger countries in Latin America - Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. Today Cuba's telecommunications development ranks it about on a par with Haiti.

Cita:

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Oscar Elías Biscet says Cuban dissidents are willing to discuss transitional government
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/10/2161375/oscar-elias-biscet-says-cuban.html

By JUAN CARLOS CHAVEZ
jcchavez@elNuevoHerald.com

Oscar Elías Biscet, the most important member of the opposition in Cuba, said dissidents would be willing to negotiate a transitional government to implement democratic measures that would avoid a civil war.

“If the regime were willing to have talks, we have demands,” Biscet told El Nuevo Herald from Havana. “We want Raúl and Fidel Castro to resign because they have drowned the country in misery, political assassinations and persecution. Let them assign other people to represent their interests and let us begin a transition toward freedoms for the Cuban people.”

Biscet was released on March 11 after mediation by the Cuban Catholic Church culminated in the release of 115 political prisoners. Fifty other prisoners are still jailed and there are no plans for their release. All, except Biscet and 12 others, accepted exile in Spain.

“The fact that a group is not willing to leave the country is a way to show the world that our fight is about love of our country and dignity for human beings,” he said. “It seems to me that this favors the Cuban people’s cause.”

Biscet, a 49-year-old doctor, said that Cuban authorities are giving the world and the people in Cuba false indications of change — allowing some to be self-employed, opening the country to foreign capital and opening a dialogue with dignitaries who advocate for human rights, such as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Carter met with the Castro brothers and Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly of Popular Power, and other officials during his visit to Havana last week. He also visited Alan P. Gross, a U.S. government subcontractor serving a 15-year prison sentence in Havana. Gross was arrested for carrying transmission equipment for independent groups.

In his meeting with dissidents and bloggers, Carter was briefed on the economic, political and social crisis in the island, as well as on the corrupt, repressive and exclusionist nature of the regime.

“We made it clear to Carter that a dictatorship rules Cuba and that no sovereignty exists,” Biscet said. “We were able to communicate some things, a brief synthesis of our thoughts.”

About the Cuban economic situation Biscet said that any adjustment must be accompanied by policies that would guarantee, among other aspects, people’s fundamental rights, the legalization of independent groups and organizations within the civil society, religious freedoms and the release of all prisoners of conscience.

“We want comprehensive changes and a market system associated to freedoms and things that lead to a harmonious and happy life in our nation,” he said.

Biscet, founder of the Lawton Foundation for Democracy and Human Rights, accused the Cuban government of permitting acts of corruption and trumping up charges to get the members of civil society and their leaders out of the way.

“It benefits the government to have corrupt people because with such characteristics they will not fight against them, and that is why they are allowed to exist,” he said. “And when they feel threatened that a new leader could emerge within their party or among those who govern with them, they attribute acts of corruption to them so they would not have any followers.”

Biscet said that as long as a totalitarian dictatorship exists in Cuba there will always be a risk of raids and massive detentions of independent journalists and opponents, as was the case of the Black Spring of 2003.

Biscet was serving a 15-year sentence after he and 74 other dissidents were arrested. Biscet had been arrested many times since 1998.
“Everything is possible here. They are willing to go to any extent to never lose power,” he said. “This is one of the reasons why they do not sign any international or human-rights agreements, particularly those addressing basic freedoms.”

He said that despite the Cuban government’s extreme vigilance of the opposition movement, there is a social force — the younger generation — escaping from the regime.

“The Cuban youth does not believe in the system, and the spirit they are developing is not afraid of the government’s pressure. The fear the Castros wish to impose is not going to stop the wishes of the youth of pursuing the general welfare, including the economic and psychological perspectives,” Biscet said. “The youths will create their own space to accomplish their objectives.”

Biscet also mentioned the work of the independent reporters and bloggers on the Internet, which threatens to bring down the government’s information monopoly that keeps the population uninformed of the denunciations and criticism against the regime.

“They are giving the world different perspectives and ideas,” Biscet said. “And when these emerge everything else finds its place. This is very important for us because, associated to the state terrorist activities, the government wants to control all the information to continue deceiving the population.”

In 2007, the Bush administration gave Biscet the Medal of Freedom in absentia in recognition of his opposition activities and his appeals to civil disobedience.

Biscet said the U.S. government’s financial support is essential to promote democracy in Cuba. Recently Sen. John Kerry, who presides over the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, announced his opposition to $20 million included in the 2012 budget to promote democracy in Cuba.

“Kerry must know that resources are needed for this type of fight and he knows very well that Cubans in the island do not have those resources,” Biscet said. “If we are able to resist it’s because of our high morale not because we have resources. Here we have to depend on people’s mercy to survive.”

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Cuban opposition leader Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet discusses the situation on the island and the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. The Cuban youth does not believe in the system, and they are not afraid of the regime pressure anymore. Dr. Biscet mentioned a possible civil war. That's looming around and becoming more and more a possibility.Cuba will get rid of the Castroit regime and be free and Democratic again.

The Castroit tyrannical dynasty is one of the few countries that by the “pre-criminal social dangerousness” (minority report) law, allows the regime to jail and punish people before they commit a crime, based solely on suspicion of what they possibly could do in a future.

Under the Castroit tyrannical regime the people has no rights and liberties, with no laws preventing abuse of power, they quickly learn that they can be jailed for something as insignificant as speaking freely and voicing a dissenting opinion.

Under the Castroit tyrannical regime the people has no rights and liberties, with no laws preventing abuse of power, they quickly learn that they can be jailed for something as insignificant as speaking freely and voicing a dissenting opinion.

Cita:

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Cuba's theatre of the absurd
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/20/cuba-reform-theatre-absurd
The so-called reforms announced byRaúl Castro are illusory; a desperate, ridiculous attempt to camouflagerepression
CarlosEire
guardian.co.uk,Wednesday 20 April 2011 12.0

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/GUARDIAArchivo adjunto 6394N/Pix/pictures/2011/4/20/1303294299510/Raul-Castro-Fidel-Castro-007.jpg
Fidel Castro, left, raises hisbrother Raúl's hand as they sing the international socialist anthem at theCommunist party Congress. Photograph: Javier Galeano/AP

Theatre of the absurd. Characterstrapped in hopeless situations, frustrated by illogical speech, compelled byirrational forces to perform meaningless gestures. It was once the rage amongthe thinking classes of the free world. And decades later, unfortunately, it isenjoying a revival at the recent Communist party congress in Havana.

After 52 years in power – 47 of whichhe spent in his older brother's shadow– "president" RaúlCastrois seeking to reform his domain and change nothing at the same time. Two days ago, he toldthe party delegates that henceforth no one should serve more than two five-yearterms in government. Ten years in office; that's it for everyone from now on,himself included. "We need to rejuvenate the revolution," said Raúl.

The assembled delegates respondedwith thunderous applause. Then they swiftly anointed 79-year-old Raúl as theirsupreme leader and José Ramon Machado Ventura, one of Raúl's cronies, as hisimmediate successor. The number three spot went to another revolutionarysidekick, Ramiro Valdés. Machado is 80 years old. Valdés is 79. Then came thepièce de résistance: 300 proposals to shake up Catrolandia's centrally plannedeconomy, including one that would allow Cubans to buy and sell their homes.
The congress will be very busy for a while "voting" on these proposals.

What the government-controlled Cubanpress won't say, and what most foreign correspondents on Cuban soil don't daresay (lest they be expelled, as happened last week to Spanish journalist CarlosHernando) is that these so-called reforms are illusory, and a desperate,ridiculous attempt to camouflage repression and maintain the current statusquo.

Instead of opening up the Cubaneconomy, creating a private sector, or granting more freedom to Cubans, whatthese "reforms" seek is to control the black market that has been inexistence for decades and to tax it. Take, for instance, the plan to removehalf a million Cubans from the government payroll and transform them intoinstant entrepreneurs. This is not only an acknowledgment of the fact that manyCubans already engage in unregulated menial jobs under the table, such asfixing clocks, mending shoes, running errands, or catering to the whims oftourists, but also an attempt to establish a tighter control over theseactivities and claim a share of the money that exchanges hands in all suchtransactions. Even worse, the jobs which these half a millionsuddenly-unemployed Cubans are supposed to create for themselves are limited toa highly specific number of 178 menial professions, such as dog groomer, buttonsewer, and parasol tinker, each of which will require proper licensing,constant supervision, and crushing tax payments.

This much-vaunted "reform"is not new at all. A similar plan was put into effect in the early 90s, afterthe collapse of the Soviet Union left Cuba short of cash and subsidies. Suddenly Cubans were free toturn their crumbling homes into restaurants or inns and their antique cars intotaxis. Many did so, successfully, only to find themselves under the thumb ofbureaucrats who gradually taxed them out of existence.

Or consider the latest proposalwhich will "allow" Cubans to buy and sell houses. This, too, isdeceitful. First and foremost, a daunting obstacle stands in the way: lack ofcash, and the absence of loans. Individual Cubans have no savings. Everyone inCuba earns about $20 a month and all of that is quickly spent. The newentrepreneurs, busy with their wretched tinkering, are not likely to save mucheither, certainly not enough for a down-payment. Even worse, Cuba has noprivate banks and no means to come up with loans for its citizens, let alone topay its foreign debt, which is in the tens of billions.

Then there is the question ofownership itself, an ugly monster that this communist regime has kept tightlychained, chiefly because there are two million Cubans in exile who were neverpaid for the homes they owned and left behind, and those homes are now occupiedby others. Once this monster is unleashed, it will undoubtedly wreak havoc,especially if all those exiles start making their very legitimate claims. Oneneed not be an economist to realise that this alone makes all housing"reforms" moot, and a sign of desperation.

At the close of the Communist partycongress programme yesterday, a very frail FidelCastro appeared on stage. Many of theworld's newspapers reported that the assembled delegates greeted him with arousing ovation and tears in their eyes. One is tempted to ask: what is moreabsurd, the reception Fidel received or the mere mention of it in news reportswritten by external journalists who would be driven mad by bogus reforms ifthey had to live in Cuba as Cubans rather than as privileged foreigners?
Which raises another question: aretyrants ever denied thunderous applause, or tears of gratitude, even when theyconfront their mortality in the theatre of the absurd?

Carlos Eire is the T.Lawrason Riggs professor of history and religious studies at Yale University.He is author of a number of publications including; A Very Brief History ofEternity (Princeton, 2009), and Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1450-1700(forthcoming, Yale, 2011). His memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snowin Havana (Free Press, 2003), won the National Book Award in nonfiction for2003, but is banned in Cuba, where he is considered an enemy of the state.

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US choose not to trade with the Castros’ regime due to the expropriation of US properties without compensation. The US is the largest exporter of agricultural food products and many other products to Cuba.The remittances from Cubans living abroad, is another reason why the Cubans in the island haven’t starved. We can see that the US has done more to help the common Cuban people than other European countries. The hundreds of thousands of people who have risked their lives to escaped Dr. Castro’s island paradise tell very loud everything needed to know about his regime, they have voted with their feet.

The proposal at the close of the much-awaited Communist Party Congress that it will allow Cubans to buy and sell homes and cars for the first time in 52 years proved that communism is the longest road to capitalism. The regime gerontocracy is just only buying time to remain in power.

After 52 years the impoverishment of the common Cuban is the product of the regime policies. That is the main reason the regime doesn’t want to make political concessions, they are afraid Cuba will be thenext Egypt.

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Is It Fidel's Finale?
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/569809/201104201922/Is-It-Fidels-Finale-.htm

IBDEDITORIALS

Communism: Cuba rearranged the deck chairs of its sinkingTitanic by putting Fidel Castro out to pasture and naming another 80-year-oldin his place. Whatever the dictator ship claims, word is out: The end is near.

The defining reality of 52 years of communism in Cuba is massive economicfailure. The one-party state that rules with an iron fist in the name of"the people" is not only bankrupt, but completely incapable offeeding, housing, employing, medicating or providing any semblance of a decentlife for Cuba's 11 million citizens. On every last front, it's a failure.

But that hasn't stopped Cuba's communist party, at its 6th Congress, fromattempting to put a Potemkin face on "reform." Tuesday it named80-year-old Jose Ramón Machado Ventura as party chief and 79-year-old RamiroValdes, famous for cracking down on freedom of speech in both Cuba andVenezuela, as his lieutenant, supposedly to show it can correct course.

Fact is, it can't. Communism is a monopoly of power whose only ambition isto extend its rule into eternity. It creates nothing of value and cannot raisestandards of living, the way, say, Chile, a country the same size as Cuba, did,beginning in 1973.

In stepping down, Castro, 84, said as much when he declared he was confidenthis "revolution" would continue without him. No, not betteringCubans' lives, just his communist cronies continuing to rule.

But the Castroites' "reform" is no more than a rotten state'seffort to save itself by firing workers. Last year, the regime announcedlayoffs of 500,000 state workers and issued 200,000 business licenses formenial jobs.

It didn't go as expected. Half the workers have been laid off, but threequarters of the licenses have been grabbed by Cubans already running illegalbusinesses. Some workers at useless state jobs making $19 a month ask to belaid off to get licenses and be their own bosses.

It's set off a chain reaction of market activities the authorities arepowerless to control. Visitors to Cuba report that in the last four months,every house is now hawking something — string, paint, artwork, fruit — like avast national garage sale.

At some point small businesses become big businesses, as happened in theUSSR and Vietnam. Though the regime believes it's in control, it's not — not ata time when tyrants are being thrown out the world over.

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The Castroit regime is broke and Raul Castro is applying band-aids rather than cures. The same old guard, which ruined the country for the last 52 years, isstill in the leadership position.

What they have to offer? People are desperate and indespair while the official propaganda machine keep proclaiming the accomplishments in health and education. Meanwhile the country keeps spiraling downward. The regime boast about universal educationat the same time that people with BA degrees are working on menials jobs with no hope of improvement. Universal health means doctors living in poverty, without medicines, equipment, and other supplies. This problem is by no means limited to the health sector. Cubans often have tremendous difficulty obtaining basic consumer goods and other necessities, including food.

The Castroit regime has force the people intos lavery and the country into a hellhole. You can see their handiwork in all aspects of the island. Corruption is widespread, workers steal from the government enterprises where they work, bribing their bosses to get the goods out of the workplace and resell them in the black market.

The sooner the Castro clique is removed from power, the better for the people living in the workers' paradise. How tragic will be if these Machiavellian characters will die in their beds. If there is any justice in the world, they should be trial and if found guilty of the tens of thousands of people they murdered over the years, face the death penalty.

The King retires and the Prince becomes King, the baton change hands from the “Maximum Leader to the “Minimum Leader.” It’s deja vu all over again. The more the brothers change things, the more they remain the same. The dynasty got rid of people with sound practical judgment and many of the ones left behind, except for a few brave souls, lack common sense.

Instead of appointing younger intelligent people to important high level positions, they kept themselves in power, an out-of-date leadership. The cult of irresponsibility continues as a central feature of the analysis and decisions of the regime high party leadership, more concerned with not losing the privileges they enjoy that in the hardships of the people.

Let see; the Castroit regimen has been in power for 54 years without democratic institutions nor opposition parties, in control of all the media outlets in the island, with control over the social, economic and political life of the population. Fidel was in power for 47 years without any limits to his authority regulating all aspects of public and private life. The definitions are a shoo-in.

Fidel, after health problems, appointed his brother Raul as his successor to the throne. Who will be next in line, one of Fidel sons? The regime isn’t only totalitarian but a totalitarian monarchy.

The visual evidence of what happened to some of the more than 35 patients that died from exposure during a cold in 2010, brings back memories of the WWII photographs of Nazi concentration camps. Similar to the images that shocked the world after the Second World War, bodies are piled one on top of the other like sacks of garbage to be disposed of.
These are pictures of starving skeleton like in Mazorra psychiatry hospital.
Links: http://www.cubaenelmundo.com/pics/mazorramuertos.jpg
Penúltimos Días » Los muertos de Mazorra

The Castroit regime doesn’t possess “some of the finest doctors in the world.” Many of the Cuban doctors that accept to work overseas do so as a way to escape from the miserable life in the island. Because they live their lives in servitude to work in those countries, many doctors in such medical missions defect to freedom. About 12,000 health workers, many of them physicians, have left Cuba in the last 12 years.

Financially, "doctor diplomacy" is an outstanding source of income for Castro's economy since his MINSAP pays doctors and other personnel only a small fraction of the millions of dollars that are received by the regime. Despite this wonderful health care, you only see Cubans leaving Cuba for the US and not vice-versa.

The regime education is under the absolute control of the Communist party, and begins in elementary school with the so-called "Cumulative School File." This file measures the revolutionary integration of the student and his family. The student must conform to the regime indoctrination, or he will be denied access to the university. The new Minister of Higher Education of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, ratified the historic slogan that says: “The University is only for the Revolutionaries.” (New Changes in Cuba - Havana Times.org)

The regime education which tries to create “the new man” is the most cruel and pitiless ever seen before in any civilized country. The family, relegated to a second place, suffers and remains silent when seeing its transformed son/daughter, where its native control on them, has been seized in the name of the party. What is education for if it turns into a weapon of mass indoctrination? No, it is not “a great educational system”, as the regime apologist want us to believe.

The regime use mobs to attacks and beat dissidents regularly on the streets and those who are only asking for justice and exercising their freedom of expression. They yelled profanities and racial insults at them. The European Parliament, Amnesty International and a growing list of prominent intellectuals and artists have condemned the regime for its repression.

If the Castroit regime is so great, then why the devil are people trying to escape from that place on makeshift rafts? The hypocrisy from the Left seeps through their pores. They'll never attack the Castroit tyrannical regime as they're accomplices to what happens in the island.

With insufficient access to credit and the US market, most of the new small enterprises will sink in the regime’s cash-strapped economy. The problem will be compound by the 1.3 million of workers expected tobe laid off in the near future. .

Are these people suddenly supposed to become entrepreneurs? They are starting from zero, so that’s a huge constraint. How barber jobs, hairdresser jobs, flower shops and restaurants are going to solve Cuba’s job problems? Until 1991 Cuba was under the sphere of the Soviet Union, that foot the bill at the tune of $5 billion a year for 30 years. Expecting change from this failed 54 years Castroit regime is a ridiculous expectation.

The Castro brothers have for all purpose admitted the failure of their socialist regime. Now they are again introducing some basic form of capitalism fallowing the Chinese model. That type of capitalism without democracy will be very difficult to make it work in the island. The brothers control the power and the election process. There is a high degree of corruption, fraud and public use of funds by the party apparatchiks. How is it supposes to work under the Castroit dictatorship which has transformed Cuba into a third world country?