Latinos with roots in New Mexico are discovering ancestors who were Native American slaves, prompting new debates over identity https://t.co/B6VpNjXmq1
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 28, 2018
Take a highway out of any Mexican city and you'll see rapidly-decaying slums, even though they're only a few years old. What went wrong? My LA Times investigation. https://t.co/JWPmnpjC8O
— Richard Marosi (@RichMarosi) November 26, 2017
Sixteen years ago, Mexico embarked on a monumental campaign to elevate living standards for its working-class masses.More.
The government teamed with private developers to launch the largest residential construction boom in Latin American history. Global investors — the World Bank, big foundations, Wall Street firms — poured billions of dollars into the effort.
Vast housing tracts sprang up across cow pastures, farms and old haciendas. From 2001 to 2012, an estimated 20 million people — one-sixth of Mexico’s population — left cities, shantytowns and rural ranchos for the promise of a better life.
It was a Levittown moment for Mexico — a test of the increasingly prosperous nation’s first-world ambitions. But Mexico fell disastrously short of creating that orderly suburbia.
The program has devolved into a slow-motion social and financial catastrophe, inflicting daily hardships and hazards on millions in troubled developments across the country, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found.
Homeowners toting buckets scrounge for water delivered by trucks. Gutters run with raw sewage from burst pipes. Streets sink, sidewalks crumble, and broken-down water treatment plants rust. In some developments, blackouts hit for days at a time.
Inside many homes, roofs leak, walls crack and electrical systems short circuit, blowing out appliances and in some cases sparking fires that send families fleeing.
The program cost more than $100 billion, and some investors and construction executives reaped enormous profits, hailing themselves as “nation builders” as they joined the ranks of Mexico’s richest citizens.
Meanwhile, the factory workers, small-business owners, retirees and civil servants who bought the homes got stuck with complex loans featuring mortgage payments that rose even as their neighborhoods deteriorated into slums.
The Times visited 50 of the affordable-housing developments from Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico. It also reviewed thousands of pages of government and industry documents, and interviewed hundreds of homeowners, municipal leaders, housing experts, civil engineers, construction workers and government officials.
The American housing crisis and recession a decade ago also were marked by regulatory failures, and the U.S. economy eventually recovered. But the crisis in Mexico has been deepening.
Conditions at the developments vary widely. While some meet basic standards, rapid decay is evident at developments in or near every major city: Failed water systems. Unfinished electrical grids, wastewater systems and other infrastructure. Parks and schools that were promised but never materialized.
Many developments were built far from employment centers on marginal land — wetlands, riverbanks and unstable hillsides — with scarce access to water. Local officials rewrote zoning laws and approved developments with little or no review.
Developers downsized homes — building about 1 million one-bedroom units as small as 325 square feet, which is smaller than a typical two-car garage in the U.S. Many families of six, seven or more live in these postage-stamp dwellings, sleeping in laundry nooks and hallways.
Builders have all but abandoned hundreds of developments without completing infrastructure, resulting in a patchwork of public services.
In developments without working streetlights, youngsters wield flashlights to navigate pitch-black streets. In those without trash-hauling, people burn garbage in vacant lots to deter rats.
Tree stumps are placed in open manholes to alert children to the hazards of poorly maintained streets. Residents of water-parched neighborhoods lock the lids of rooftop cisterns to keep thieves from siphoning water.
The unfinished developments blight cities across the country. An estimated 300,000 people live in more than 40 incomplete tracts in the fast-growing Baja California cities of Tijuana and Ensenada.
In Mexico state, which surrounds Mexico City, developers have completed only 36 of the 235 developments started between 2005 and 2012, leaving 200,000 to 500,000 people in limbo, according to state records.
“It was a world of corruption,” said Alberto Uribe, the mayor of Tlajomulco, a suburb of Guadalajara. His predecessors in the city approved developments where the well water has run low for an estimated 300,000 people, he said. Water is now rationed, and many families receive water only every other day...
Scenes of desolation and rejoicing unspooled Thursday at the sites of buildings crumbled by Mexico’s deadly earthquake, which killed at least 274 people and galvanized heroic efforts to reach those trapped.More.
But a parallel drama transpired as the government announced that there were no missing children in the ruins of a collapsed school — after the country was transfixed for a night and a day by reports of a 12-year-old girl feebly signaling to rescuers from under the rubble.
Outrage ensued over what many Mexicans believed was a deliberate deception.
On Thursday afternoon, the Mexican navy reported that there was no sign that any child was missing and alive in the rubble of the Enrique Rebsamen school on Mexico City’s south side, where at least 19 children and six adults had died. One more adult might still be trapped in the rubble, navy Undersecretary Angel Enrique Sarmiento said at a news conference.
“All of the children are unfortunately dead,” he said, “or safe at home.”
Mexico’s larger tragedy continued to unfold as rescuers in three states, battling grinding fatigue and mountains of rubble, raced against time, keenly aware of ever-dwindling odds of finding people alive beneath the debris after Tuesday’s magnitude 7.1 temblor.
The overall confirmed fatality count was expected to climb as more bodies were recovered. Rescuers at sites across the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City used search dogs and calls to the cellphones of those trapped to try to pinpoint the location of anyone who had survived two nights under the remains of damaged buildings.
The harrowing rescue effort at the Enrique Rebsamen school had become a social media sensation when news outlets began reporting intensively about the search for a trapped girl thought to be named “Frida Sofia.”
By Thursday afternoon, authorities said that at least one boy or girl was believed to be alive in the wrecked building but that they were not sure of the child’s name. Then the navy’s announcement dashed any remaining hopes for small survivors.
The confusing Frida Sofia saga took another strange turn Thursday night, when a grim-faced Sarmiento went on live television and sought to explain earlier statements by the navy about the girl. He ended up confusing matters even further.
Earlier Thursday, Sarmiento had insisted that the navy never had any knowledge of a girl who was supposedly trapped in the rubble.
In his evening news conference, however, Sarmiento contradicted the earlier statement, conceding that the navy had distributed reports of a girl surviving inside the school “based on technical reports and the testimony of civilian rescue workers and of this institution.” He offered no explanation for the conflicting accounts, but apologized.
“I offer an apology to Mexicans for the information given this afternoon in which I said that the navy did not have any details about a supposed minor survivor in this tragedy,” Sarmiento, dressed in military fatigues, told reporters at an outdoor news conference.
Sarmiento repeated his earlier assertion that it was possible that someone remained alive in the rubble. But Thursday evening he did not rule out the possibility that it was a child. Mexicans and others following the matter were left perplexed.
“Nonetheless,” Sarmiento added, “the Mexican people should know that as long as the minimum possibility exists that there is someone alive, we will keep on looking with the same determination.”
Both he and a colleague, Maj. Jose Luis Vergara, denied any effort to mislead the public...
The earthquake nearly toppled this building across from me in Mexico City. People fled screaming as buildings crumbled. Scary as hell. pic.twitter.com/PDCFm8vh0B— Kate Linthicum (@katelinthicum) September 19, 2017
A powerful 7.1 earthquake rocked central Mexico on Tuesday, collapsing homes and bridges across hundreds of miles, killing at least 217 people and sending thousands more fleeing into the streets screaming in a country still reeling from a deadly temblor that struck less than two weeks ago.More.
Entire apartment blocks swayed violently in the center of Mexico City, including in the historic districts of El Centro and Roma, crumbling balconies and causing huge cracks to appear on building facades.
Panic spread through the city's core; rescue vehicles raced toward damaged buildings, and neighbors took on heroic roles as rescuers.
Firefighters and police officers scrambled to pull survivors from a collapsed elementary and secondary school where children died.
"There are 22 bodies here — two are adults — 30 children are missing and eight other adults missing. And workers are continuing rescue efforts," President Enrique Peña Nieto announced Tuesday night.
At least 86 people were reported killed and 44 buildings severely damaged in the capital alone. Twelve other people died in the surrounding state of Mexico, 71 across the state of Morelos, 43 in Puebla state, four in Guerrero state and one in Oaxaca, according to Mexican officials.
The temblor struck 32 years to the day after another powerful earthquake that killed thousands and devastated large parts of Mexico City — a tragedy that Peña Nieto had commemorated earlier Tuesday.
Around 11 a.m., Julian Dominguez heard alarms sounding in the neighborhood of Iztapalapa, part of a citywide drill to mark the anniversary of the magnitude 8.0 quake. Schools and other buildings evacuated, but he kept working at his computer.
About two hours later, Dominguez, 27, started to feel the building move, and alarms sounded again.
"It started really slowly,” he said, but within seconds it was clear that this was no drill.
Dominguez raced down a flight of stairs. Crowds of people already had gathered outside. Parents were crying, worried for their children still in school.
"It was strange that it fell on the same day … as another earthquake that caused so much damage," Dominguez said.
The federal government declared a state of disaster in Mexico City and dispatched 3,428 troops to affected areas there and in nearby states.
"We are facing a new emergency in Mexico City, in the state of Puebla and Morelos, following the 7.1 magnitude earthquake,” Peña Nieto said, adding that he had asked all hospitals to help care for the injured...
Venezuela squashed a small uprising on a military base Sunday, the first inkling of armed unrest in the beleaguered South American country after a new all-powerful legislative body condemned by the international community began targeting opposition foes.More.
Though the would-be rebellion, which left at least one man dead, appeared short-lived, it reignited spontaneous anti-government protests that had been absent for days after nearly four months of prolonged street tumult. Security forces once again repressed the demonstrations with tear gas and rubber pellets.
Further clashes loom. The opposition-held parliament intends to convene Monday at the legislative palace, which was taken over Saturday by the new constituent assembly. Its delegates, all ruling socialist party members elected last week in a vote widely seen as fraudulent, face potential sanctions from the U.S. and countries in Latin America and Europe.
The government of President Nicolás Maduro insisted Sunday’s incident was an outside attack staged by civilians hired by his political opponents. While security forces claimed the skirmish was quickly quelled, the defense minister acknowledged an ongoing search for an unknown number of stolen military weapons.
The extended confusion over what took place before dawn Sunday at the Paramacay military base in Valencia, a city in central Venezuela about two hours west of the capital, Caracas, fed opposition calls for dissenting troops to rebel.
They were fueled by the morning release online of a video — the kind used in failed coup attempts against previous Venezuelan governments — showing more than a dozen men dressed in military fatigues and holding assault rifles. They declared themselves in rebellion and urged like-minded security forces to stage a revolt against Maduro.
Without citing the video, socialist party deputy Diosdado Cabello asserted early on, via Twitter, that an irregular situation at the base was under control. But for hours, no government official took to the airwaves, communicating only in Twitter posts and written statements. State-run television replayed an episode of the late Hugo Chávez’s weekly TV show, “Aló Presidente.” The convening of a new “truth commission” was postponed.
When Maduro finally appeared on TV, at 3 p.m., he congratulated military leaders for their swift response but also admitted security forces were still hunting down a group of men from the morning assault who had gotten away.
“We’re going to capture them,” he said. “A week ago we defeated them with votes. Today, we were forced to defeat them with bullets.”
In an incongruous scene, Maduro spoke from a park, standing on a logo with colorful hearts — and surrounded by bodyguards. He admired a naturalist exhibit of animal skulls and skins, and cheered on a little girl standing in the middle of a circle of happy children, whacking a piñata.
According to Maduro, the scuffle at the base began at 3:50 a.m. when the instigators surprised overnight guards and went directly to weapons caches...
Forget all you’ve heard about dialogue in Venezuela between the regime and the opposition. Hungry, hurting Venezuelans are done talking. The country is in the early stages of civil war. Sunday’s Cuban-managed electoral power play was the latest provocation.More.
In my column two weeks ago, “How Cuba Runs Venezuela,” I failed to mention Havana’s 2005 takeover of the Venezuelan office that issues national identity cards and passports. It was a Castro-intelligence coup, carried out with then-President Hugo Chávez’s permission. The move handed Havana the national Rolodex necessary to spy on Venezuelans and surreptitiously colonize the country. Islamic extremists received Venezuelan passports to give them false cover when crossing borders. Regime supporters got the papers they need to vote under more than one identity.
This is something to keep in mind when Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro reports the results of Sunday’s election for representatives to draft a new constitution. In polls, some 80% of Venezuelans oppose Mr. Maduro’s “constituent assembly.” But the opposition boycotted Sunday’s election because they know Cuba is running things, that voter rolls are corrupted, and that there is no transparency in the operation of electronic voting machines.
Opposition leaders in Caracas are still trying to use peaceful means to unseat Mr. Maduro. Last week they orchestrated an effective 48-hour national strike and on Friday another day of demonstrations.
But grass-roots faith and hope in a peaceful solution has been lost. One symptom of this desperation is the mass exodus under way. On Tuesday the Panam Post reported that “more than 26,000 people crossed the border into Colombia Monday, July 26, according to the National Director of Migration in [the Colombian city of] Cúcuta.”
Venezuelan applications for asylum in the U.S. were up 160% last year, making Venezuelans No. 1 among asylum seekers to the U.S. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were 27,000 Venezuelan asylum seekers world-wide in 2016. By mid-July this year there were already 50,000.
Last week the National Guard arrested and badly beat violinist Wuilly Arteaga, who has become a national symbol of peace. Many of those fleeing say they fear that after Sunday the regime crackdown will intensify. Some of those staying behind have already begun to launch counteroffensives. This provides the regime an excuse for increasing repression, yet there is a growing sense that violence is the only remaining option.
The regime has the armored vehicles, the high-powered rifles, and the SWAT gear. But the population has the numbers and the anger. It also may increasingly have support from dissident government forces.
Consider what happened in the municipality of Mario Briceño Iragorry in the state of Aragua earlier this month, when the pro-government mayor and the regime’s paramilitary, known as colectivos, began looting shops that were closed during a one-day national strike.
Eyewitness testimonies sent to me by a source in Caracas describe how townspeople tried to defend the shops. The mayor brought in paramilitary reinforcements. But the town was saved when the judicial police arrived from the state capital of Maracay. According to the Venezuelan daily El Nacional, they arrested the mayor, who was armed, and “many” colectivos.
Socialists like to claim that “real” socialism has never been tried. There is a very simple reason for that: whenever a socialist experiment fails (as they invariably do), socialists, including those who have once endorsed the experiment in question, retroactively declare it “unreal”.RTWT.
People are dying of #AIDS in #Venezuela today in a way and in numbers they die nowhere else in the world https://t.co/HEw10hE5W7
— Stephanie Nolen (@snolen) June 22, 2017
More than a decade ago, the country was lauded for its treatment program. Now, Venezuela is years into a political and economic crisis.Keep reading.
Juan Coronel was so thin that his kneecaps jutted out like tent poles in his sweatpants. He was 39 when I met him a few weeks ago, with reddish-brown hair that clung to his scalp like a baby’s and deep hollows below his cheekbones. His voice was soft and raspy, and he seemed dazed at his own fragility. “I need to go and look for medicine,” he said, “but I’m having trouble getting around.”
I had not seen a person who looked like Mr. Coronel – a person dying of untreated AIDS – since I covered the pandemic in Africa at its height more than a decade ago. In fact, there is nowhere in the world today where people are dying of AIDS at the pace and in the sheer numbers that they are in Venezuela: Even the poorest African countries today have HIV treatment programs. They still don’t reach everyone, and people are still dying, or getting treatment only after they become very ill – they may come to look as Mr. Coronel did when I met him. But in other countries, they are the exception. Today, in Venezuela, his case is the rule...
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.)
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.”Also, from Melissa Tweets:
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.
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
More than anything else, what surprised me during my first Olympics was the sheer scale of the bubble the IOC has made for itself. After arriving at the airport, members and assorted apparatchiks were ushered into private cars, ferried along exclusive highway lanes—look out the window, and there were Rio 2016-branded walls to mask the favelas—and dropped off at their exclusive hotels ringed by security, so only those with credentials could enter. They then took the same private cars to all of their events. Some even got motorcades. Once they got to the various sports venues, they went in the Olympic Family entrances, passed through the Olympic Family security lines, mingled in the Olympic Family club lounges, and watched athletes compete from the Olympic Family seats. When they were hungry, they surely put their $900 per diems to use at the city's most exclusive restaurants and bars, never risking having to interact with anyone who wasn't wealthy. Except, perhaps, for the people serving them.Rather than bring development and prosperity, the games will increase economic inequality and social division.
Yes, the Olympic Bubble is so all-encompassing that the IOC has convinced itself that it doesn't exist. "These games have not been organized in a bubble," IOC President Thomas Bach told reporters on Saturday as he made other demonstrably false claims, such as the Games not using any public money and Brazilians being "united behind these Olympic Games" despite the fact that half of them weren't. Bach ended his press conference by no-commenting almost every question, but adding that if the Olympics can happen in Rio, they can happen anywhere.
Putting aside Bach's sportocrat snobbery, there is a critical lesson here. The Olympic Bubble's comprehensiveness illustrates just how little the IOC is concerned with anyone but themselves—and how blithely, even happily indifferent the entire Olympic "movement" is to the waste and corruption it fosters, and the human wreckage it leaves in its wake...
Does Ryan Lochte owe Rio and the #Olympics an apology? @cbrennansports says yes! https://t.co/RMYsuxtK8J pic.twitter.com/TWaZIx57VK
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) August 19, 2016
Here’s #RyanLochte statement on Twitter pic.twitter.com/LWIvrLQf2e
— Ryan Smith (@ryansmithtv) August 19, 2016
