The Revolución marches on.
Read my post, Cuba: Fidel Jr kills himself
American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
By Fausta
By Fausta
With a vested interest for the status quo,
According to Otero, there are eight armed groups that make up the Maduro administration’s muscle:
- Armed civilian militias that are uniformed and trained by the army
- The Bolivarian National Guard (Guardia Nacional Boliviariana — GNB)
- The Bolivarian National Police (Policía Nacional Bolivariana — PNB)
- The Bolivarian National Armed Forces (Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana — FANB)
- Cuban military advisors surrounding Maduro
- “Colectivos,” the pro-government paramilitary organizations that operate throughout the country
- The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — FARC)
- Colombia’s National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional — ELN)
Read it at InSight Crime,
The Eight Criminal Armies Supporting Venezuela’s Maduro Administrationhttps://t.co/BslLQlUQek pic.twitter.com/D78xycD0YP
— InSight Crime (@InSightCrime) January 22, 2018
In other Venezuela news,
Venezuela has just announced an election — and it’s terrible news for democracy
Colombia evicts over 200 homeless Venezuelans from sports field squat
How Much Worse Can it Get for Venezuela’s State Oil Firm PDVSA?
Venezuela’s Most-Wanted Rebel Shared His Story, Just Before Death
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I’m getting over a flu. Juliette filled in for me yesterday at DTGB, Who Can Investigate the Investigators?
By Fausta
If you decide to join the jerks who visit cool countries and travel to the island-prison, there are a couple of things you may want to keep in mind.
Number three is a doozy. Read my post, Cuba: Before you Airbnb.
By Fausta
Mary O’Grady writes about A Soviet Cleansing in Cuba.The Russians used their experience at home to annihilate dissident peasants.
Most Americans have never heard of the anti-Castro uprising in Cuba’s Escambray Mountains, which began in 1959 and took Fidel and the Soviet Union six years to put down. At the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the episode is worth revisiting. If not for 400 Soviets sent to Cuba under the command of the Red Army and the KGB in 1961, it is unlikely that Castro would have prevailed.
What happened in the Escambray pokes a giant hole in Castro’s narrative that his revolution was a justified power grab supported by working-class and rural Cubans. The fact is that when Cubans began to understand that Fidel planned to replace Fulgencio Batista as the next dictator and to impose communism, many rebelled. None fought harder than central Cuba’s guajiros—small land owners and tenant farmers.
. . .
Castro understood the importance of controlling the press, foreign as well as domestic. He used that control to popularize his version of events. He framed the resistance—those who rejected his communist takeover—as a white, urban aristocracy unhappy because it was losing its privilege under his new justice. Meanwhile, he wiped out whole farming communities with Stalinesque ruthlessness, and he did it with guidance from the Kremlin, which exported its experience in intelligence gathering and repression.
Read the whole thing.
By Fausta
Carlos Eire reports that Castro, Inc. profits from hurricane Irma by offering loans to its victims
Time for a slight correction: Castro, Inc. has not totally ignored ordinary Cubans.
No, not at all.
It has offered them loans. Yes, loans.
In other words, it is profiting from this natural disaster and the suffering it has caused the Cuban people.
Since insurance doesn’t exist in a totalitarian regime such as Castrogonia, there is no way for anyone to repair damage caused by hurricanes or any other disasters.
This means that Cubans — all of whom earn no more than $30 per month — have no way of fixing their damaged homes.
So, along comes Castro, Inc. with a diabolical solution: loans. Yes, loans! Unbelievable, but true.
It’s even more obscene when you realize that there are no property rights in Cuba.
By Fausta
Carlos Eire, who lived near the mansion that Che appropriated for himself, has a theory on Che’s Irish Postage Stamp and the New, Improved, Postcolonial White Folk’s Burden
(emphasis added)
In sum, anyone from the affluent world who thinks that the repressive, soul-crushing, collectivist nightmare that calls itself the Cuban Revolution is good for Cubans but not for themselves is implicitly admitting that they are superior to Cubans in some way, be it morally, economically, intellectually, culturally or racially. It makes no difference how the differences are parsed; anyone who says that Che was a virtuous hero or that the repressive Castro regime he served is good for Cubans but not for themselves necessarily implies that Cubans are somehow different and that they are undeserving or incapable of enjoying the same political, social, and economic rights, either because they are in some way inferior or less developed, or because they are construed as simpler, purer, abnormal or uncivilized in some essential way, much like Rousseau’s noble savage. And no one can dispute the fact that most of those who tend to hold such views or who invest capital in Cuba’s tourism industry, or go there as tourists happen to be Europeans and North Americans of European stock who think of themselves as white and of Cubans as “people of colour.” Ironically, then, Rudyard Kipling, the ultimate poster boy of old-style colonialism, turns out to be the intellectual and spiritual forebear of today’s leftist ideologues, and of anyone who defends the so-called accomplishments of Che, and the so-called Cuban Revolution. It may come as a surprise and a great shock to anyone who venerates Che to hear that they are similar in outlook and attitude to Rudyard Kipling, a dead white male who embodies so much political incorrectness. But the obscene, undeniable truth is that there is virtually no difference between anyone alive today who says that Fidel and Che did great things for Cubans and anyone in days of yore who argued that European imperialism was a blessing to all those benighted “new-caught, sullen peoples,” that Kipling called “half-devil and half-child.”
The bigotry and racism of these postcolonial neocolonialists may not lead them to conquer non-white folk, but it does cause them to think that there are still “sullen peoples” who are actually happier when subjected to all sorts of repression at the hands of their own “enlightened” or “visionary” despots.
Read the whole thing.
I wonder what the Venn diagram would look like if you join the Che worshippers, the people who think Mao’s revolution made women’s lives much better, and those believing on the superiority of communist women’s orgasms.
By Fausta
2017: Fifty years after he left being in charge of Cuba’s firing squads and heading to Bolivia, where he was killed while still wearing his Rolex, communist Che Guevara was honored in India and Cuba this week.
Ireland issued a commemorative stamp.
The design for the stamp was approved by the Dublin government back in 2015.
They should have gone with this instead,
Four years ago, in 2013: The murderous racist was honored by UNESCO
.
Cuba held a ceremony on Friday to celebrate UNESCO’s despicable decision to include “The Life and Works of Ernesto Che Guevara” among 54 new additions to the Memory of the World Register, approved on June 18 by UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova.
Spanish news agency EFE has the most information on the ceremony, with quotes from Che’s family members who attended the event. Here is the official UNESCO page documenting the inclusion of 431 manuscripts by Che and 567 documents about Che or related to him
Would they find this quote?,
“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent… We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!”
Returning to this week’s news,
Anyone at all still questioning today’s decision to leave UNESCO? https://t.co/g9MgVaLN5t
— Mike Gonzalez (@Gundisalvus) October 12, 2017
By Fausta
Dr. Darsi Ferrer has been found dead in West Palm Beach, cause unknown.