Castro's Obituary at the Miami Herald

I'll start this one after I've finished NYT's, heh.

Read the Miami Herald obit. It's a tour de force. https://t.co/M31cj8E0Nw

— Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) November 26, 2016

Fidel Castro, Cuba's Communist Dictator, Dead at 90

I still haven't finished this obituary. I started reading it on my phone last night when I got in bed, and I turned on the Michigan/Ohio State game when I got up.

Extremely comprehensive obituary. #FidelCastro https://t.co/thanwo2CIL

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 26, 2016

I'm loving the commentary on Twitter though.

The glamorization of Fidel Castro today is disturbing, if you love life, freedom and liberty you are appalled. pic.twitter.com/MkJNbDlDBh

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) November 26, 2016

More later.

"Can anyone doubt for a single moment that, were 'people' like this to gain ultimate power over us as they so fervently, insanely desire, they'd be trotting their political opposition off to gulags just as fast as they could get them constructed — just as their ideological twins in the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cambodia, and who knows how many other places did? Just as they always have done upon their ascension to power, no matter where on Earth they might be?"

I posted Cold Fury to the sidebar, but the entry just reminded me of this video I put up here long ago, at "The Cuban Archipelago."

But read the whole thing, from our buddy Mike, "How the Left “Debates”."

No doubt.

You'd be lined up and shot, by folks just like Che and his henchman after Cuba's "national liberation."

Barack Obama Will Not Meet the Invisible Cubans

From Christopher Dickey, at the Daily Beast, "Barack Obama Won't Meet the Real, Invisible Cubans."

Also, "Cubas Reforms Are a Myth."

.@BarackObama trip to Cuba is a giant exercise in self-regard that will legitimize and perpetuate the Castro dictatorship @rhodes44

— Jamie Kirchick (@jkirchick) March 20, 2016

The Clock, the Pope, and Totalitarian Apologists

From Erick Erickson, at Town Hall:

In Irving, Texas, a few days after the anniversary of September 11, a 14-year-old boy named Ahmed Mohamed took a clock to school that he had assembled inside a pencil case. He claimed he wanted to show it to his science teacher.

Afterward, the clock started beeping in another class, and Ahmed got in trouble. We know he was arrested for disrupting school. We know he was not very cooperative. But beyond that, we do not know much more than the public relations spin his family and the Council on American Islamic Relations have put out.

We do not know anything else because Ahmed's family has refused to allow the police in Irving or the local school district to release their side of the story. We know that Ahmed has been photographed with CAIR representatives. We know his father is an Islamic activist. We know his sister once got in trouble for disrupting school. As reported by The Daily Beast, Ahmed's sister, Eyman, said she "got suspended from school for three days from this same stupid district, from this girl saying I wanted to blow up the school, something I had nothing to do with."

On HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said he called Ahmed to talk to him. Curiously, he could [hear] Ahmed's sister giving Ahmed answers. President Obama tweeted that he stood with Ahmed. The mayor of Irving noted in an interview that Obama was tweeting support for Ahmed before a lot of the facts were even known.

The left championed Ahmed as a victim of Islamophobia a few days after September 11. Never mind that multiple people have convincingly shown that they could identically make Ahmed's clock by taking apart a 1986 Micronta digital alarm clock and reassembling it in a Vaultz locking pencil box purchased on Amazon. The media and Obama have ignored so many facts and have ignored that the family is refusing to allow the school and police to tell their side of the story -- something they can do because Ahmed is a juvenile.

When it is easy for the left, they will take the moral high ground. Another example of this came from Washington last week. Obama greeted Pope Francis at the White House. The president invited transgender, gay and abortion activists to greet the pope. This put the pontiff in a difficult political situation to which the Vatican objected.

Among those who were invited to greet the pope was Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopal bishop whose consecration as an openly gay bishop in a relationship helped escalate the breakup of the American Episcopal Church. Robinson, after helping break up the Episcopal Church, got divorced. Likewise, Obama saw no problem inviting pro-abortion and pro-gay Catholic activists to greet the pope. These people are in active, celebratory rebellion against the Catholic Church and its pope, who maintains his strong belief in the sanctity of traditional marriage and life...

Kind of depressing, when you think about it, especially that we've still got 14 more months of this administration.

RTWT.

United in Hate

I just went back and reread Jamie Glazov's chapter on Cuba's totalitarian regime, in United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror, mainly in light of the Pope's visit with Fidel last week.

It's essential reading.

Pope Celebrates Mass in Havana, Cuba (VIDEO)

At PuffHo, "Pope Celebrates Mass In Havana, Warns Against Dangers of Ideology."

Yeah, warning against the "dangers of ideology" after meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana. That oughta work.

American Flag Raised Over Havana as U.S. Embassy Reopens in Cuba

Another "victory" for the Obama administration's 6-year campaign of coddling the world's worst regimes.

Yeah, fuck Cuba.

Fuck Cuba. Spend your money at the Jersey Shore, where it won't go to subsidizing terrorism. pic.twitter.com/gZ6XmtoW7s

— Frances Martel (@francesmartel) August 14, 2015

The Foolish Socialism of Bernie Sanders

From A. Barton Hinkle, at Reason, "Let the presidential candidate have his way and watch the U.S. economy implode":

A couple of weeks ago, Sanders took an uncompromising stand against deodorant proliferation. A growing economy doesn’t matter to most people if all the benefits of growth are going to the top 1 percent, he told CNBC: “You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth. ... You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”

Sanders doesn’t oppose deodorant per se, thank goodness. Rather, as a writer at Demos put it, Sanders would “gladly cut poverty and inequality even if it meant a reduction in superficial product innovation.”

He objects to “the dizzying (and socially useless) number of products in the deodorant category. ... (C)utting poverty and inequality is worth a reduction in innovation, and oh by the way, the kinds of things we call ‘innovation’ are often little more than new marketing gimmicks with dubious social value.” And that, friends and neighbors, is why “we should distribute the national income more evenly.”

This is superficially appealing. We can all think of products that strike us as stupid and useless (Uggs? Pickle-flavored potato chips? Country music?). And we can all think of better recipients for the money spent on them: Starving children. Endangered elephants. Cancer research. In what kind of universe does Kanye West deserve millions in income while homeless veterans are eating out of garbage cans?

But the superficial appeal quickly fades in the face of two competing considerations—one practical, the other principled.

For a peek at the practical argument, avail yourself of a fine little vignette from The Washington Post: “In an Online World, Cuba Remains a Stand-in-Line Society.” At Havana’s state-run retail hubs, reports Nick Miroff, “Customers with long shopping lists face no fewer than seven places to stand in line. One for butter. Another for cooking oil. A third for toothpaste. And so on.” The caption to a dismal accompanying photograph shows people waiting “hours for their government ration of chicken.”

This is what happens when central planners think they can allocate economic resources better than the unguided hand of individual free choice...

But remember, the left's elitist, know-it-all Marxists will argue that Cuba's "actually existing socialism" is a perversion of the genuine Utopian socialism of the Marxist dialectical ideal. Nothing proves socialism wrong "because it's never been tried."

That's the left's Big Lie of the 20th century --- and increasingly, the 21st.

Raul Castro Stands Up for Obama at Summit of the Americas

Communist birds of a feather stick together.

At Telegraph UK, "US President Barack Obama received a remarkable vote of confidence from Cuban leader Castro, who praised his 'humble background'."

The Cuban Archipelago

From Jamie Glazov, at FrontPage Magazine:

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.

—Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries

President Obama’s recent move to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially  important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing an economic lifeline to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag — and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro’s fascistic regime.

Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.

Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.

Half a million human beings have passed through Cuba’s Gulag. Since Cuba’s total population is only around eleven million, that gives Castro’s despotism the highest political incarceration rate per capita on earth. There have been more than fifteen thousand executions by firing squad. Torture has been institutionalized; myriad human-rights organizations have documented the regime’s use of electric shock, dark coffin-sized isolation cells, and beatings to punish “anti-socialist elements.” The Castro regime’s barbarity is best epitomized by the Camilo Cienfuegos plan, the program of horrors followed in the forced-labor camp on the Isle of Pines. Forced to work almost naked, prisoners were made to cut grass with their teeth and to sit in latrine trenches for long periods of time. Torture is routine.[i]

The horrifying experience of Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who endured twenty-two years of torture and imprisonment for merely raising the issue of freedom, is a testament to the regime’s barbarity. Valladares’s memoir, Against All Hope, serves as Cuba’s version of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Valladares recounts how prisoners were beaten with bayonets, electric cables, and truncheons. He tells how he and other prisoners were forced to take “baths” in human feces and urine.[ii]

Typical of the horror in Castro’s Gulag was the experience of Roberto López Chávez, one of Valladares’s prison friends. When López went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink. The guards then urinated in his mouth. He died the next day.[iii]

Since Castro’s death cult, like other leftist ideologies, believes that human blood purifies the earth—and since manifestations of grief affirm the reality of the individual, and thus are anathema to the totality—mourning for the departed became taboo. Thus, just like Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia,[iv] so too Castro’s Cuba warned family members of murdered dissidents not to cry at their funerals.[v]

The Castro regime also has a long, grotesque record of torturing and murdering Americans. During the Vietnam War, Castro sent some of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” Its primary objective was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror.[vi]

The ordeal of Lt. Col. Earl Cobeil, an F-105 pilot, illustrates the Nazi-like nature of the experiment. Among Fidel’s torture techniques were beatings and whippings over every part of his victim’s body, without remission.[vii] Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of fellow POW Col. Jack Bomar...

Keep reading.

President Obama gave this horrific totalitarianism a pass, one of the biggest blows to human rights in the last 65 years.

Val Prieto on Obama's Cuba Normalization Debacle

At Babalú:

This is a major setback for the opposition and dissident movements in Cuba. The Obama administration, by making this "deal", has confirmed that they are OK with the repression, brutality, incarceration, and murder the Castro regime foists upon the opposition. And I will once again say what I have been saying since day one of this farce of a presidential administration, for the record: faced with the fact that he is, by far, the worst President this nation has ever seen, and with no true positive legacy, Obama is relying on the low hanging fruit of the Cuban embargo to placate the left. Look for President Executive Action to undermine codified US Cuba policy.

Continue.

PREVIOUSLY: "Communist Obama Normalizes Relations with Communist Cuba."

Cuba's Communist Intelligence Services Aggressively Recruiting Leftist American Academics as Spies and Influence Agents

Well, they'd be hitting the mother load at Lawyers, Guns and Money, lol.

At Free Beacon, "FBI: Cuban Intelligence Aggressively Recruiting Leftist American Academics as Spies, Influence Agents."

Venezuelan Media Ignores Protests

At WSJ, "Venezuela Media Largely Ignored Protests: Free-Speech Advocates Say Black Out Points to State Intimidation (via Google):

CARACAS—As some of the biggest anti-government protests in months gathered momentum across the country earlier this week, Venezuela's largest private television networks largely broadcast soap operas and entertainment shows.

When the demonstrations turned violent in Caracas and three people died, the coverage was largely blacked out, press-freedom organizations and journalists said Friday. Government officials appeared on state television to accuse opposition leaders of instigating violence to topple the state.

One private television station offering live coverage, NTN24, based in Colombia but widely seen on cable here, was taken off the air in the midst of covering the bedlam on Wednesday. President Nicolas Maduro on Thursday explained that the plug was pulled "to defend the right to tranquility, and no one is going to come here from abroad to ruffle the psychological condition of Venezuela."

Some TV networks, among them Televen and Venevision, did offer reports later in the day. But many locals said they turned to social media during the day to fill the void and remain informed. Officials at Televen and Venevision didn't return calls seeking comment.

Free-speech advocates say that the lack of news coverage demonstrates that privately owned media outlets, particularly the country's biggest TV networks, are being intimidated by the state. Restrictions on what can be covered, coupled with the recent purchases of once-critical news outlets by buyers allied with the government, have resulted in coverage either friendly to Mr. Maduro or indifferent to his governing style, said Marianela Balbi, director of the Press and Society Institute of Venezuela, a press freedom group.

"We think that day was a point of no return for the press," said Ms. Balbi. "Quite simply what happened was that there was no information about the violence, no video images, no live coverage when this was happening in other cities, when people were being hurt, killed."

More.

Behind the Turmoil in #Venezuela

From Mary O'Grady, at the Wall Street Journal (via Google):

The bloodshed in Caracas over the past 12 days brings to mind the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, where President Obama greeted Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez with a huge grin and a warm handshake. A couple of months later the State Department attempted to force Honduras to reinstall pro-Chávez president Manuel Zelaya, who had been deposed for violating the constitution.

Brows were knitted throughout the Americas. Why did the U.S. president favor the Venezuelan dictator, protégé of Fidel Castro, over Honduras, which still had a rule of law, press freedom and pluralism?

Fast forward to last Wednesday, after four peaceful student-protesters had been confirmed as having been killed by the government's armed minions. Mr. Obama took notice, pronouncing the brutality "unacceptable." That must have been comforting to hear amid the gun shots and pummeling on the streets of Caracas.

That same night the government of Nicolás Maduro —Chávez's handpicked successor—unleashed a wave of terror across the country. According to Venezuelan blogs and Twitter posts, the National Guard and police went on a tear, firing their weapons indiscriminately, beating civilians, raiding suspected student hide-outs, destroying private property and launching tear-gas canisters. Civilian militia on motor bikes added to the mayhem. The reports came from Valencia, Mérida, San Cristóbal, Maracaibo, Puerto Ordaz and elsewhere, as well as the capital.

Venezuela has promised 100,000 barrels of oil per day to Cuba, and in exchange Cuban intelligence runs the Venezuelan state security apparatus. The Cubans clearly are worried about losing the oil if their man in Caracas falls. Opposition leader Leopoldo López, who heads the Popular Will political party, spent several years building a network of young recruits around the country. Last week's unrest is a testament to that organization, and it is why the 42-year-old Mr. López is now behind bars.

In Ukraine, the European Union has pressured the government to reach a compromise with the opposition. Venezuelans are getting no such help from the neighbors. Only Colombia, Chile and Panama have objected to the crackdown. The rest of the hemisphere doesn't have even a passing interest in human rights when the violations come from the left. The Organization of American States is supposed to defend civil liberties, but since Chilean Socialist José Miguel Insulza took the OAS helm in 2005, it has earned a disgraceful record as a shill for Cuba.

Venezuelans seeking change face daunting odds. The crowds in the streets of Caracas in recent days have not been significantly bigger than in many prior-year protests, including 2002, when a march in Caracas almost unseated Chávez.

This time the repression has been fierce. Besides injuries and death, hundreds have been detained and it would not be surprising if many are given long sentences. Mr. Maduro needs scapegoats for the violence he unleashed. Iván Simonovis, the former head of the Caracas Metropolitan Police, has been a political prisoner since 2004. Chávez made him take the fall for the 17 people killed in the April 2002 uprising even though video evidence points to chavista snipers. Photos of the once-fit policeman, frail and gravely ill from the inhuman circumstances of his long incarceration, are chilling.

Another problem is the division within the opposition. The governor of the state of Miranda, Henrique Capriles, represented a broad coalition of anti-chavista parties when he ran for president in 2013. But when he conceded to Mr. Maduro amid strong evidence that the election had been stolen, Mr. López and other members of the opposition broke with Capriles supporters.

Students have also been hamstrung by a communications blockade. The government controls all Venezuelan television and radio airwaves. When the violence broke out, it forced satellite providers to drop the Colombian NTN channel. Internet service has been cut in many places.

Getting the very poor on board for a regime change is a challenge. Some still see chavismo as their government, even if they have no love for Mr. Maduro and suffer from high inflation. Others don't dare speak out, for fear of losing state jobs or their lives. The barrios are terrorized by the chavista militia...

More.

Cuba Sends Troops to Venezuela to Crush Democratic Uprising

This is fascinating, from Ezra Levant on Twitter.

While the world watches the Olympics, Cuba sends troops to put down #Venezuelan democracy uprising: https://t.co/LndgctzADI

— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) February 23, 2014

And also at Babalú, "Turmoil in Venezuela: Violent repression continues as Cuban troops arrive to aid dictatorship."

Arribo de 4 aviones a terminal auxiliar de Maiquetía procedentes de Cuba. Imagen confiable hoy pic.twitter.com/sDHUqw3cak

— DeivisRamírezMiranda (@deivisramirez) February 22, 2014

And following the links, see Caracas Chronicles, "Gocho Uprising Update."

Máximo Caminero, Florida Artist Lovingly Displayed by Fidel Castro, Destroys $1 Million Ai Weiwei Vase at Miami Exhibition

Interesting story.

The artist, Máximo Caminero, doesn't communicate well in English. Indeed, commenters at his studio's Facebook page use Spanish. And the link for his personal Facebook page isn't coming up in the search box, perhaps dropped down the memory hole amid the controversy.

In any case, here's the far-left Miami New Times, "Miami Artist Destroyed $1M Ai Weiwei Vase Because PAMM "Only Displays International Artists'."

And the New York Times has it as well, "Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed by Protester at Miami Museum":

MIAMI — Officials at the recently inaugurated Pérez Art Museum Miami confirmed on Monday that a valuable vase by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been deliberately destroyed by a visitor in what appeared to be an act of protest.

A spokeswoman for the museum said the incident occurred on Sunday afternoon when a local artist, whom it did not name, walked into the waterfront museum and picked up one of the vases in an installation of Mr. Ai’s work titled “Colored Vases.” A guard asked the man to put it down, but instead he threw it to the ground, smashing it, the spokeswoman said.

The Miami New Times said Maximo Caminero, 51, was arrested.

Pérez Art Museum Miami, which opened with much fanfare during the Art Basel festival here in December, published a statement on its website saying that after the vase had been broken in the museum’s retrospective exhibit of Mr. Ai’s work, a security team “immediately secured the galleries and the person was apprehended.” Without mentioning Mr. Caminero’s name, the statement said that the museum was “working with the authorities in their investigation.”

“Although the museum can’t speak directly to intentions, evidence suggests that this was a premeditated act,” the museum’s statement went on. “As an art museum dedicated to celebrating modern and contemporary artists from within our community and around the world, we have the highest respect for freedom of expression, but this destructive act is vandalism and disrespectful to another artist and his work, to Pérez Art Museum Miami, and to our community.”

Mr. Caminero, a native of the Dominican Republic who has long lived in Miami, told the Miami New Times, a weekly newspaper, after his arrest that he had broken the vase to protest what he said was the museum’s exclusion of local artists in its exhibits.

Local news reports said he was charged with criminal mischief. Miami police officials would not confirm Monday evening that Mr. Caminero had been charged, but said they would address the issue on Tuesday morning.

More at the link. Mr. Ai is not pleased:

Reached by telephone in China, Mr. Ai said he had initially understood the vase to have been broken accidentally. But then he read a news report that the vase in Miami had been deliberately smashed, and questioned Mr. Caminero’s expressed reason for doing so.

“The argument does not support the act," Mr. Ai said. “It doesn’t sound right. His argument doesn’t make much sense. If he really had a point, he should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble to destroy property that does not belong to him.”

Mr. Ai said he had no idea whether the vase could be fixed or whether its loss would be covered by insurance. But he said he was not overly distressed by the breakage. "I'm O.K. with it, if a work is destroyed," Mr. Ai said. "A work is a work. It's a physical thing. What can you do? It's already over."

Well, it doesn't sound right if you're a normal, well-adjusted person not normally prone to railing against imaginary injustices. But this Caminero dude, by the looks of his Facebook profile, is some kind of passionate idealist motivated by "philosophy" and whose experience is rooted in the "day by day" of the "human struggle." A Marxist utopian, no doubt.

And as it turns out, his work is apparently appreciated enough to hang in the home of Cuban President Emeritus Fidel Castro. The Dominicana en Miami website tweeted a story titled "Fidel Castro y Máximo Caminero." The piece has been taken down, although the cached version is here. The caption reads: "In a recently published photo of Ignacio Ramonet during his meeting last December 13 in Havana, the work of Máximo Caminero ... Dominican painter hangs in the background."

Ramonet is the Spanish journalist featured in this report from the Associated Press, "Cuba's ex-president Fidel Castro appears in first new photo in months." The photo was picked up later by London's Daily Mail as an example of Cuba's state censors doctoring images of Dear Leader Castro. See, "Cuba found to be issuing doctored pictures of ailing former president Fidel Castro and photo-shopping his hearing aid."

I just love how Máximo Caminero, our artist of the "human struggle," gets the obviously huge props from Fidel. Someone down in Miami's Dominican community thought it important enough to tout Fidel's beloved endorsement of Caminero's work. Interesting how now the artist's actions might not reflect back so well on the revolutionary leader and the ideological bankruptcy of the Cuban people's regime. Shoot, Caminero's actions are being excoriated as those of a petulant child in the comments at the leftist Miami New Times, which makes sense, since leftist regressive socialists are petulant clowns fueled by childish notions that imaginary injustices justify the criminal destruction of world class pottery art.