Via CNN:
A group of prominent African-Americans has challenged Cuba's race record, accusing the island nation of harassing its black citizens and cracking down on civil rights activists.
Sixty intellectuals and artists, including Princeton University professor Cornel West, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and actress Ruby Dee, have signed a declaration of protest.
Dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez describes a gangland-style kidnapping by Cuban government agents, in which she and some of her colleagues were severely beaten:
Hat tip: Harry's PlaceThe curious crowded around and I shouted, “Help, these men want to kidnap us,” but they stopped those who wanted to intervene with a shout that revealed the whole ideological background of the operation, “Don’t mess with it, these are counterrevolutionaries.” In the face of our verbal resistance they made a phone call and said to someone who must have been the boss, “What do we do? They don’t want to get in the car.” I imagine the answer from the other side was unequivocal, because then came a flurry of punches and pushes, they got me with my head down and tried to push me into the car. I held onto the door… blows to my knuckles… I managed to take a paper one of them had in his pocket and put it in my mouth. Another flurry of punches so I would return the document to them.
Orlando was already inside, immobilized by a karate hold that kept his head pushed to the floor. One put his knee in my chest and the other, from the front seat, hit me in my kidneys and punched me in the head so I would open my mouth and spit out the paper. At one point I felt I would never leave that car. “This is as far as you’re going, Yoani,” “I’ve had enough of your antics,” said the one sitting beside the driver who was pulling my hair. In the back seat a rare spectacle was taking place: my legs were pointing up, my face reddened by the pressure and my aching body, on the other side Orlando brought down by a professional at beating people up. I just managed to grab, through his trousers, one’s testicles, in an act of desperation. I dug my nails in, thinking he was going to crush my chest until the last breath. “Kill me now,” I screamed, with the last inhalation I had left in me, and the one in front warned the younger one, “Let her breathe.”
Via Harry's Place: At Generacion Y, Yoani Sanchez describes a visit to the offices of the Cuban interior ministry for questioning about an upcoming meeting of Cuban bloggers. She encapsulates the message she was given by interior ministry officials like this:
We want to warn you that you have transgressed all the limits of tolerance with your rapprochement and contacts with counter-revolutionary elements. This totally disqualifies you for dialog with Cuban authorities.
The activities planned for the coming days cannot be carried out.
We, for our part, will take all measures, make the relevant denunciations and take the necessary actions. This activity, in this moment in the life of the Nation, recuperating from two hurricanes, will not be allowed.
Generacion Y is remarkable for candidly reflecting daily life in Raul Castro's Cuba - a land that in some respects is uncertainly turning to the West, but where the government is still locked in most of the totalitarian reflexes of the past, and where ordinary people are still held hostage in conditions of state-imposed poverty and information control. The blog - published both in English and in Spanish - provides a much-needed antidote to the false revolutionary romanticism of Cuban government supporters like the American actor Sean Penn. For a critical dissection of the attitudes and sentiments of the latter, see this post by Marc Cooper.
1) The two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers, which Russian media sources say were intercepted twice by NATO aircraft over Iceland and the Norwegian Sea on their way westward, landed at Venezuela's El Libertador air base on the eve of the significant date of September 11.
Their presence is intended as a "warning" to the U.S.
President Hugo Chavez said yesterday: "It's a warning. Russia is with us. ... We are strategic allies. It is a message to the empire."
2) "For those with a sense of history, a factor behind the 1962 Cuban missile crisis was Washington’s deployment of Atlas IRBMs in Italy and Turkey, which, in the wake of the confrontation, Washington quietly agreed to remove, as the development of ballistic missile submarines, the final component of Washington’s nuclear triad, obviated the need for forward basing of nuclear missiles off Russia’s southern shore. Forty years later, Turkey, sea power, and the Caribbean as subplots in rising U.S.-Russian tensions seem as interconnected as ever." (John C. K. Daly)
I dag är Kuba det enda landet i den västra hemisfären som saknar en folkvald regering. I stället tyngs det av ett föråldrat och förstelnat kommunistiskt styre.
Today Cuba is the only country in the western hemisphere which lacks a popularly elected government. Instead it is weighed down by an obsolete and fossilized Communist regime.
RFE/RL has a further report.The United Nations top human rights body condemned “defamation” of religion on Friday and, in an apparent reference to the storm over the Prophet cartoons, said press freedom had its limits.
With the support of China, Russia and Cuba, Moslem and Arab states comfortably won a vote on the 47-state Human Rights Council to express concern at “negative stereotyping” of religions and “attempts to identify Islam with terrorism”.
