Donald T. Critchlow, Revolutionary Monsters

At Amazon, Donald T. Critchlow, Revolutionary Monsters: Five Men Who Turned Liberation into Tyranny.

Exclusive: Congressional Republicans Seek to Give Biden War Powers for Cuba.

At the American Conservative:

West Virginia GOP Rep. Alex Mooney is planning to introduce a new congressional joint resolution to grant President Joe Biden the ability to use war powers to deliver humanitarian aid to Cuba amid growing unrest in the country.

Images of the resolution reviewed by The American Conservative show that “The Authorization for the Use of Military Forces Against Cuba to Ensure the Delivery of Humanitarian Aid” has three specific goals:

* “ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid to the people of Cuba, including but not limited to food, water, and medicine;” * “create a safe zone in Cuba for the Cuban people to safely receive humanitarian aid;” and 

* “prevent humanitarian aid from being stolen by the Cuban government or its forces.” Mooney’s office stated, “The Congressman hasn’t introduced any legislation related to Cuba. If he does introduce legislation we’ll be happy to comment at that time. Our office doesn’t comment on hypothetical legislation.”

Congressional Republicans have also held separate, virtual, member-level meetings regarding how to respond to the protests in Cuba and have invited representatives of large corporations to them. Emails also reviewed by The American Conservative show an official from Sen. Rick Scott’s office coordinated a meeting on July 19 with members of Congress and representatives with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Verizon, and the wireless communications trade association CTIA.

Sources detailed that senators spoke to companies from Silicon Valley to see what was technically feasible as far as getting internet access into Cuba...

Keep reading.

 

Tomi Lahren on Outnumbered

She makes a good point on Cuba, and how folks are "finally waking up" to Marxism. 

She's up first. 

Watch (she speaks from the beginning):

Senator Marco Rubio on Cuba and Human Rights (VIDEO)

The senator, perhaps the sole remaining neoconservative in the G.O.P., discusses Cuba, human rights, and Black Lives Matter. 

At Fox News:

Plus, more at the New York Post, "BLM under fire for defending Cuban regime, blaming protests on US."

'Astonishing': Cuban Protesters Take to the Streets (VIDEO)

Freedom protests. 

Whenever protests break out like this --- anywhere in the world --- demonstrators always wave the American flag while calling for freedom. The U.S. remains the beacon of liberty for billions of people the world over, and radical, anti-American leftists can't stand that.

At the New York Times, "Cubans Denounce ‘Misery’ in Biggest Protests in Decades":

MIAMI — Shouting “Freedom” and other anti-government slogans, thousands of Cubans took to the streets in cities around the country on Sunday to protest food and medicine shortages, in a remarkable eruption of discontent not seen in nearly 30 years.

Thousands of people marched through San Antonio de los Baños, southwest of Havana, with videos streaming live on Facebook for nearly an hour before they suddenly disappeared. As the afternoon wore on, other videos appeared from demonstrations elsewhere, including Palma Soriano, in the country’s southeast. Hundreds of people also gathered in Havana, where a heavy police presence preceded their arrival.

“The people are dying of hunger!” one woman shouted during a protest filmed in the province of Artemisa, in the island’s west. “Our children are dying of hunger!”

One clip circulating on Twitter showed protesters overturning a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles east of Havana. Another video showed people looting from one of the much-detested government-run stores, which sell wildly overpriced items in currencies most Cubans do not possess.

In a country known for repressive crackdowns on dissent, the rallies were widely viewed as astonishing. Activists and analysts called it the first time that so many people had openly protested against the Communist government since the so-called Maleconazo uprising, which exploded in the summer of 1994 into a huge wave of Cubans leaving the country by sea.

Carolina Barrero, a Cuban activist, went even further. “It is the most massive popular demonstration to protest the government that we have experienced in Cuba since ’59,” she said by text message, referring to the year Fidel Castro took power. She called the public outpouring on Sunday “spontaneous, frontal and forceful.”

“What has happened is enormous,” she added.

The protests were set off by a dire economic crisis in Cuba, where the coronavirus pandemic has cut off crucial tourism dollars. People now spend hours in line each day to buy basic food items. Many have been unable to work because restaurants and other businesses have remained on lockdown for months.

The desperate conditions have triggered an uptick in migration by both land and sea.

Since the start of the fiscal year last October, the U.S. Coast Guard has intercepted more than 512 Cubans at sea, compared with 49 for the entire previous year. On Saturday, the Coast Guard suspended the search for nine Cuban migrants whose vessel overturned at sea off Key West, Fla.

The Cuban government attributes its longstanding economic problems to the American trade embargo, which cuts off its access to financing and imports. But the pandemic has worsened conditions, and in Matanzas, east of Havana, some patients and their families have resorted to posting videos on YouTube of furious people screaming about the lack of medicine and doctors.

The Cuban Ministry of Health website says the nation of 11 million now has about 32,000 active cases of Covid-19. It reported 6,923 daily cases and 47 deaths on Sunday, breaking its prior record, set just Friday. Only about 15 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, the government said.

The protest movement gained momentum after a number of celebrities started tweeting with the hashtag #SOSCuba...

Jamie Glazov, United in Hate

*BUMPED.

At Amazon, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Obama Commutes Sentence of Puerto Rican Terrorist Oscar López Rivera

I had to look this guy up, at Wikipedia:

Oscar López Rivera (born January 6, 1943) is a Puerto Rican nationalist and one of the leaders of the FALN. In 1981, López Rivera was convicted and sentenced to 55 years in federal prison for seditious conspiracy, use of force to commit robbery, interstate transportation of firearms, and conspiracy to transport explosives with intent to destroy government property. In 1988 he was sentenced to an additional 15 years in prison for conspiring to escape from the Leavenworth federal prison. Lopez solicited unincarcerated supporters to obtain weapons, grenades, and C-4 explosives for use in breaking him and fellow inmates – to whom Lopez had boasted about his leadership role in the FALN – out of prison. President Obama commuted Oscar Lopez Rivera's sentence on January 17, 2017. At the time he was the longest-incracerated member of the FALN.

López Rivera was among the 14 convicted FALN members offered conditional clemency by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1999, but rejected the offer. His sister, Zenaida López, said he refused the offer because on parole, he would be in "prison outside prison. Resident Commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi, has stated that "the primary reason that López Rivera did not accept the clemency offer extended to him in 1999 was because it had not also been extended to fellow FALN prisoner Carlos Torres and Cordero Nananin." According to New York Times writer John Broder, López Rivera "refused to accept the President's offer to commute their sentences. Mr. Clinton demanded as one of the conditions of their release that the jailed Puerto Ricans renounce the use of terrorism to achieve their aim of independence for the Caribbean commonwealth." Torres and Nananin were subsequently released from prison in July 2010...

And further:

At the time of their arrest, López Rivera and the others declared themselves to be combatants in an anti-colonial war against the United States to liberate Puerto Rico from U.S. domination and invoked prisoner of war status. They stated that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction to treat them as criminals, and petitioned for their cases to be handed over to an international court that would determine their status. The U.S. Government, however, did not recognize their request...

Well, you can see why the dude's getting sprung. Obama loves terrorists, especially left-wing revolutionary terrorists. O probably idolized this guy. López Rivera has never expressed remorse for his "anti-colonial war against the United States." His terrorist group, the FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation) was closely allied the Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist regime. Indeed, Charles Krauthammer suggested on Fox News just now that the release of López Rivera may have been part of a quid pro quo in the Cuban normalization deal. This is a presidential administration that normalizes terrorism.

Thank God we have less than three days until this hated regime, this reviled Obama regime, is driven from office.

Also at the Guardian U.K., FWIW, "Obama commutes sentence for political prisoner Oscar López Rivera: López Rivera, whose commutation was announced with 208 others, has been incarcerated for 35 years for his role in fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence."

Why All That Dancing in the Streets of Miami?

From Humberto Fontova, at FrontPage Magazine:

Fidel Castro jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six.

Fidel Castro shattered — through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara beat ISIS to the game by over half a century. As early as January 1959 they were filming their murders for the media-shock value.

Fidel Castro also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war.

In the above process Fidel Castro converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with  the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.

Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Yet prior to Castroism Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including the Ellis Island years, in fact.

Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.

Would anyone guess any of the above from reading or listening to the mainstream media recently?

In fact, from their reactions, all that dancing in the streets of Miami’s Little Havana this week-end seems to strike some talking heads as odd, if not downright unseemly.

But prior to the big news this week-end many of those same celebrants could be found with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst long rows of white crosses in Miami’s Cuban Memorial.  It’s a mini-Arlington cemetery of sorts, in honor of Fidel Castro’s murder victims.

The tombs are symbolic, however. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the man whose family President Obama just consoled with an official note of condolence.

Some of those future celebrants were often found kneeling at the Cuban Memorial, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You might remember a similar scene from the opening frames of “Saving Private Ryan.” Many clutched rosaries. Many of the ladies would be pressing their faces into the breast of a young relative who drove them there, a relative who wrapped his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.

Try as he might not to cry himself, this relative usually found that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother or aunt were contagious. Yet he was often too young to remember the young face of his martyred father, grandfather, uncle, cousin -or even aunt, mother grandmother– the name they just recognized on the white cross.

“Fusilado” (firing squad execution) it says below the name– one word, but for most visitors to the Cuban Memorial a word loaded with traumatizing flashbacks.

On Christmas Eve 1961, Juana Diaz Figueroa spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits.” (Castro and Che’s term for Cuban peasants who took up arms to fight their theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s kulaks had guns–at first anyway. Then the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact left them defenseless against Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers. When the blast from Castro’s firing squad demolished Juana Diaz’ face and torso, she was six months pregnant.

Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Castro’s prison guards dragged him from his jail cell, jerked his head back to gag him and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”

“Fuego!” and the firing squad volley riddled Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. “We executive from Revolutionary conviction!” sneered the man whose peaceful death in bed President Obama seems to mourn.

Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s theft of their humble family farm.

According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll–from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.–approaches 100,000. Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to the human rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison and forced-labor camps. This puts Fidel Castro political incarceration rate right up there with his hero Stalin’s.

It’s not enough that liberals refuse to acknowledge any justification for these Miami celebrations. No, on top of that here’s the type of thing the celebrants are accustomed to hearing from the media and famous Democrats:

“Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.)

"Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend." (Democratic presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democratic party,” George Mc Govern.)

“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.”  (Former President of the United States and official "Elder Statesman” of the Democratic party, Jimmy Carter.)

“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.)

“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather)

"Castro's personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to his country." (Barbara Walters.)

 “Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (CNN founder Ted Turner.)

Justin Trudeau, Canada's Laughing Stock

I was gathering some links on Prime Minister Trudeau, and especially liked this one, from Terry Glavin, at Macleans, "Trudeau’s turn from cool to laughing stock":

To be perfectly fair, Trudeau did allow that Castro was a “controversial figure,” and nothing in his remarks was as explicit as the minor classic in the genre of dictator-worship that his brother Alexandre composed for the Toronto Star 10 years ago. Alexandre described Castro as “something of a superman. . . an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets. On everything.” As for the Cuban people: “They do occasionally complain, often as an adolescent might complain about a too strict and demanding father.”

This kind of Disco Generation stupidity about Castro has been commonplace in establishment circles in Canada since Pierre’s time, and neither Alexandre’s gringo-splaining nor Justin’s aptitude for eulogy are sufficient to gloss over the many things Cubans have every right to complain about.

Any political activity outside the Communist Party of Cuba is a criminal offence. Political dissent of any kind is a criminal offence. Dissidents are spied on, harassed and roughed up by the Castros’ neighbourhood vigilante committees. Freedom of movement is non-existent. Last year, the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN) documented 8,616 cases of politically motivated arbitrary arrest. For all our Prime Minister’s accolades about Cuba’s health care system, basic medicines are scarce to non-existent. For all the claims about high literacy rates, Cubans are allowed to read only what the Castro crime family allows.

Raul Castro’s son Alejandro is the regime’s intelligence chief. His son-in-law, Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas, runs the Cuban military’s business operations, which now account for 60 per cent of the Cuban economy. The Castro regime owns and control the Cuban news media, which is adept at keeping Cubans in the dark. It wasn’t until 1999, for instance, that Cubans were permitted to know the details of Fidel’s family life: five sons they’d never heard of, all in their thirties.

Independent publications are classified as “enemy propaganda.” Citizen journalists are harassed and persecuted as American spies. Reporters Without Borders ranks Cuba at 171 out of 180 countries in press freedom, worse than Iran, worse than Saudi Arabia, worse than Zimbabwe.

So fine, let’s overlook the 5,600 Cubans Fidel Castro executed by firing squad, the 1,200 known to have been liquidated in extrajudicial murders, the tens of thousands dispatched to forced labour camps, or the fifth of the Cuban population that was either driven into the sea or fled the country in terror.

What is not so easy to overlook is that Fidel and Raúl Castro reneged on their promise of a return to constitutional democracy and early elections following the overthrow of the tyrant Fulgencio Batista. The Castros betrayed the revolutionary democrats and patriots who poured into Havana with them on that glorious January day in 1959. The Castros waged war on them in the Escambray Mountains until their final defeat in 1965, four full years after John F. Kennedy’s half-baked Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

After he solidified his base in Cuba’s Stalinist party–which had been allied with Batista, Castro’s apologists tend to conveniently forget, until the final months of 1958–Fidel Castro delivered Cuba to Moscow as a Soviet satrapy. He then pushed Russia to the brink of nuclear war with the United States in the terrifying 13-day Missile Crisis of 1962.

For all the parochial Canadian susceptibility to the propaganda myth that pits a shabby-bearded rebel in olive fatigues against the imperialist American hegemon, by the time he died on Friday night Castro was one of the richest men in Latin America. Ten years ago, when he was handing the presidency to Raúl, Forbes magazine calculated that Fidel’s personal wealth was already nearly a billion dollars.
In his twilight years, Castro was enjoying himself at his gaudy 30-hectare Punto Cero estate in Havana’s suburban Jaimanitas district, or occasionally retreating to his private yacht, or to his beachside house in Cayo Piedra, or to his house at La Caleta del Rosario with its private marina, or to his duck-hunting chalet at La Deseada.

Fidel Castro was not merely the “controversial figure” of Justin Trudeau’s encomium. He was first and foremost a traitor to the Cuban revolution. On that count alone, Castro’s death should not be mourned. It should be celebrated, loudly and happily.

Also, from Melissa Tweets:

Where the left, illustrated by Trudeau and Obama, fall short over and over: they just cannot admit evil exists.

— Melissa Mackenzie 🌐 (@MelissaTweets) November 28, 2016

Listen, you morally vacuous dumbbutts, there is good and evil. Castro is not a victim of his childhood. He was a psychopathic murderer.

— Melissa Mackenzie 🌐 (@MelissaTweets) November 28, 2016

Still more at Reason, "Justin Trudeau, Castro's Death, and the Power of Twitter."

For Decades, Cuban Americans Longed to Return Home. But Now That Fidel's Dead, Not So Much

The thrill is gone, baby.

At LAT, "For decades, Cuban Americans have longed to return to a post-Castro Cuba. But now that Fidel is dead, many aren't so eager to go."

Cuban Exiles Celebrate in Miami (VIDEO)

All you have to do is look to Miami to get the real pulse on this historic moment. Forget leftists. They can't stand true freedom.

At CBS News 4 Miami, "Cubans in Miami Celebrate, Look to Brighter Future."

Also, "Cubans on the Island Are ‘Stunned’ as Cuban-Americans Celebrate," and "Cuban People Cautiously Optimistic After Death of Fidel Castro."

Harry Stein, No Matter What...They'll Call This Book Racist

Heh.

It's a good time to break this book out again — or to put on your Christmas gift-giving list!

At Amazon, Harry Stein, No Matter What...They'll Call This Book Racist: How our Fear of Talking Honestly About Race Hurts Us All.

BONUS: ICYMI, Jamie Glazov, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

President Barack Obama's Statement on the Death of Fidel Castro

Is this even surprising.
O's so bad even left-wing journalists have excoriated him.

On Twitter:

Obama's statement on Fidel is so anodyne that it sanitizes his atrocities and terrible place in history pic.twitter.com/jeDhI9sDbS

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) November 26, 2016

And see Gateway Pundit, "Compare and Contrast: DONALD TRUMP vs OBAMA on Tyrant Fidel Castro’s Death."

Humberto Fontova, The Longest Romance

Now we're getting somewhere.

I think folks'll be just fine reading Humberto Fontova.

At Amazon, The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six. Alone among world leaders, Castro came to within inches of igniting a global nuclear holocaust.

But you would never guess any of that from reading the mainstream American media. Instead we hear fawning accounts of Castro liberating Cuba from the clutches of U.S. robber-barons and bestowing world-class healthcare and education on his downtrodden citizens. “Propaganda is vital—the heart of our struggle,” Castro wrote in 1955. Today, the concept is as valid to the Cuban regime as ever.

History records few propaganda campaigns as phenomenally successful or enduring as Castro and Che’s. The Longest Romance exposes the full scope of this deception; it documents the complicity of major U.S. media players in spreading Castro’s propaganda and in coloring the world’s view of his totalitarian regime. Castro’s cachet as a celebrity icon of anti-Americanism has always overshadowed his record as a warmonger, racist, sexist, Stalinist, and godfather of modern terrorism. The Longest Romance uncovers this shameful history and names its major accomplices.

#TrudeauEulogies: Twitter Goes Nuts Over Canadian Prime Minister's #FidelCastro Comments

Just crazy.

I mean, really crazy stuff.

At Blazing Cat Fur, plus some:

Justin Trudeau’s statement on Fidel Castro’s death a revisionist embarrassment https://t.co/w7e3sI9sOP pic.twitter.com/05LBfmzfZO

— Blazing CatFur (@Blazingcatfur) November 26, 2016

History's greatest monsters are given loving Canadian-style send-offs in these #TrudeauEulogies https://t.co/iTULrwK80E

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) November 26, 2016

.@Blazingcatfur Twitter goes nuts over Canadian PM's #FidelCastro comments. #TrudeauEulogies https://t.co/DbgZidlzNc

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 27, 2016

Jill Stein Praises Fidel Castro: 'A symbol of the struggle for justice...'

I'm rolling my eyes.

But see Instapundit, "COMMIES GONNA PRAISE COMMIES."

Fidel Castro was a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire. Presente!

— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) November 27, 2016

PREVIOUSLY: "Jamie Glazov, United in Hate."

Julia Cooke, The Other Side of Paradise

One thing I'm not seeing today: Up-to-date biographies of Fidel Castro. The one's that are being touted are literally decades old, like Tad Szulc's, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (1986), and Robert Quirk's, Fidel Castro (1993).

I'll keep looking.

Meanwhile, here's Julia Cooke, The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba. (The book's got very nice review, and it came out just a couple of years ago.)

Added: Don't forget Ann Louise Bardach, Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington.

Read Babalú Blog for Best Castro Coverage

I probably should've been linking Babalú more frequently over the years, but it's never too late.

See, "A death worth celebrating: Cuba’s ‘Beast of Birán,’ dictator Fidel Castro, finally dead at 90."

Scroll around here.

And see Val Prieto on Twitter.



Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Ann Louise Bardach, Without Fidel

I'm looking around for some of the best biographies of Fidel.

This one looks like a good place to start. I love the title.

At Amazon, Ann Louise Bardach, Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington.

Mayra Veronica Cuban Rule 5

Heh.

She's spicy Cuban hot, lol.

Hat Tip: Twitter.

Also on Instagram.

What a babe!