LET'S FIGHT BACK
GOD BLESS AMERICA
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
“THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND CUBA:
The Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies
Cordially invite you to a Panel Discussion
“THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND CUBA:
WHAT TO EXPECT”
MODERATOR: Jaime Suchlicki, Director, Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, and Emilio Bacardi Moreau Distinguished Professor at the University of Miami. He is also editor of “Cuban Affairs”, a quarterly electronic journal published by ICCAS and the author of Cuba: From Columbus to Castro; Mexico: From Montezuma to the rise of PAN, and Breve Historia de Cuba. Dr. Suchlicki is a highly regarded consultant to the public and private sector in the U.S.
PANEL: Ambassador Otto Reich, President of Otto Reich Associates, LLC of Washington, D.C. served as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, from 1986 to 1989. In the 1980’s, Reich received three appointments from President Ronald Reagan: As special Advisor to the Secretary of State from 1983 to 1986, he directed the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean, which received the department’s Meritorious Honor Award. From 1981 to 1983, he was Assistant Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in charge of U.S. economic assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean. He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs from 2001 to 2002. He then became President Bush’s Special Envoy for Western Hemisphere Initiatives, reporting to Dr. Condoleezza Rice in the National Security Council. He left government service in June 2004.
Jose Azel, Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami. He was one of the founders of Pediatrix Medical Group, the nation’s leading provider of pediatric specialty services. Dr. Azel was an Adjunct Professor of International Business at the School of Business Administration, Department of Management, University of Miami. Azel holds a Ph.D. in International Affairs from the University of Miami. He is the author of the book “Manana in Cuba.”
Pedro Roig, Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami. Historian and attorney, is the author of several books including “The Death of a Dream: A History of Cuba” published by ICCAS in 2009 and “Marti: The Cuban Struggle for Freedom.” Former director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) – Radio & TV Marti, a veteran of the Brigade 2506.
DATE: Thursday, December 1, 2016
7:00 p.m. Lecture
DONATION: $10 (Free to Faculty, Staff, Students and Media)
WHERE: Casa Bacardi, University of Miami, 1531 Brescia Avenue, Coral Gables
RSVP: The Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (305) 284-CUBA (2822).
Please reserve early. Space limited.
IF YOU WANT TO PRAISE HELL, THEN GO LIVE IT...
Those nationally prominent figures who diminish our country and attack it's culture constantly, should be boycotted, banned from any lucrative position and shunned for life, and if possible, exiled or deported, to a communist or islamic state, so they can suffer first hand the nightmarish and brutal dictatorships they so praise. They don't deserve the blessings of living in a free society, but the penalty of living, in their own flesh, sweat and blood, in the hell holes of extreme misery and filth...By: Eduardo E. RodrÃguez
Castro, Obama, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
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Monday, November 28, 2016
Sunday, November 27, 2016
President-Elect Trump Statement on the Passing of Fidel Castro
Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.
While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.
Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty. I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.
WaPo: Farewell to Cuba’s Brutal Big Brother
at 10:23 PM
One of the most brutal dictators in modern history has just died. Oddly enough, some will mourn his passing, and many an obituary will praise him. Millions of Cubans who have been waiting impatiently for this moment for more than half a century will simply ponder his crimes and recall the pain and suffering he caused.
Why this discrepancy? Because deceit was one of Fidel Castro’s greatest talents, and gullibility is one of the world’s greatest frailties. A genius at myth-making, Castro relied on the human thirst for myths and heroes. His lies were beautiful, and so appealing. According to Castro and to his propagandists, the so-called revolution was not about creating a repressive totalitarian state and securing his rule as an absolute monarch, but rather about eliminating illiteracy, poverty, racism, class differences and every other ill known to humankind. This bold lie became believable, thanks largely to Castro’s incessant boasting about free schools and medical care, which made his myth of the benevolent utopian revolution irresistible to many of the world’s poor.
Many intellectuals, journalists and educated people in the First World fell for this myth, too — though they would have been among the first to be jailed or killed by Castro in his own realm — and their assumptions acquired an intensity similar to that of religious convictions. Pointing out to such believers that Castro imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands more of his own people than any other Latin American dictator was usually futile. His well-documented cruelty made little difference, even when acknowledged, for he was judged according to some aberrant ethical code that defied logic.
This Kafkaesque moral disequilibrium had a touch of magical realism, for sure, as outrageously implausible as anything that Castro’s close friend Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez could dream up. For instance, in 1998, around the same time that Chile’s ruler Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London for his crimes against humanity, Cuba’s self-anointed “maximum leader” visited Spain with ample fanfare, unmolested, even though his human rights abuses dwarfed those of Pinochet.
Even worse, whenever Castro traveled abroad, many swooned in his presence. In 1995, when he came to New York to speak at the United Nations, many of the leading lights of that city jostled so intently for a chance to meet with him at media mogul Mort Zuckerman’s triplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue that Time magazine declared “Fidel Takes Manhattan!” Not to be outdone, Newsweek called Castro “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan.” None of the American elites who hobnobbed with Castro that day seemed to care that he had put nuclear weapons to their heads in 1962.
If this were a just world, 13 facts would be etched on Castro’s tombstone and highlighted in every obituary, as bullet points — a fitting metaphor for someone who used firing squads to murder thousands of his own people.
●He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
●He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.
●He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.
●He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.
●He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.
●He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.
●He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.
●He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.
●He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.
●He censored all means of expression and communication.
●He established a fraudulent school system that provided indoctrination rather than education, and created a two-tier health-care system, with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care for himself and his oligarchy, and then claimed that all his repressive measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.
●He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and established an apartheid society in which millions of foreign visitors enjoyed rights and privileges forbidden to his people.
●He never apologized for any of his crimes and never stood trial for them.
In sum, Fidel Castro was the spitting image of Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” So, adiós, Big Brother, king of all Cuban nightmares. And may your successor, Little Brother, soon slide off the bloody throne bequeathed to him.
N.Y. Post Editorial: Castro’s Rotting in Hell, But Cuba’s Not Free Yet
at 10:16 PM
The dancing in the streets of Miami tells you all you need to know: The people who knew Fidel Castro best, and are free to express their opinion, are ecstatic that he’s burning in hell.
He led a revolution promising liberty in the island nation — then instead transformed it into an island prison. Along with the rest of his inner circle, he lived a life of luxury — 20 homes, including a private island, Cayo Piedra, that his former bodyguard called a “millionaire’s paradise.”
He jailed, tortured and “disappeared” countless thousands of his people, including many who’d helped lead the revolution. His utter denial of basic human rights — freedoms of speech and assembly, for starters — drove more than a fifth of Cuba’s population into exile.
Castro deceived from the start, and fools around the world chose to believe the lies long after the truth was obvious. He took power claiming to be a nationalist, then came out as a fervent Communist — with firing squads for any who complained.
Yes, he removed US influence over his country — and sold it to the Soviet Union. His bid to host a Soviet atomic arsenal on the island brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
He outlawed not only private enterprise, but also labor unions, and put gays in concentration camps.
His policies impoverished what had once been the most prosperous nation in Latin America. The regime blamed the US embargo, without ever noting that the rest of the world hadn’t joined in: The problem was that Castro’s Cuba had next to nothing to export — beyond mercenaries, terrorism and secret police.
By the 1990s, he was even bragging about Cuba’s legions of prostitutes, who served the tourist trade he’d been forced to embrace to replace the subsidies he lost with the fall of the USSR.
In 2006, ill health forced him to hand power over to younger brother Raul, who continues the oppression.
So, while you cheer the death of one of history’s bloodiest tyrants, temper your joy: Cuba is not yet free.
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