Cuba.May Day

It looks like they missed the opportunity to demand the release of the estimated 270 to 280 political prisoners currently held in detention in Cuba. Just recently dissident lawyer Rolando Jiménez Posada and independent journalist Oscar Sanchez received respective sentences of twelve and four years in jail for crimes such as "disclosing state security secrets” and “social dangerousness".

Of course my dear bobby. There are many more than 270 or 280 political prisoners in Cuba suffering torture and prison... remember Guantánamo, and don't be so "bobby"...

Yes, but while people all over the world demonstrate against Guantanamo and other illegal detentions, in Cuba they seem to have completely forgotten about their own political prisoners...

Hey Bobby Those prisoners in Cuba what you keep banging on about are not dissidents or freedom fighters but are mercenaries financed by the United states government. As far as i am concerned they can rot in jail!!!

Anyone see the good news today ? Chavez reclaimed four more oil-fields from western corporations. And yesterday he Venezuala withdrew from the Worldbank and the IMF after paying his dues. Now that is a man who knows how to celebrate Mayday !

(I know this link is from Pravda, snigger if you want, it was just the first one to come up on GoogleNews and I can't be bothered searching for good western PRopaganda )

Of course, my dear bobby, you can start inmediately a campaign for those "cuban political prisoners" you mentioned. I suppose that you have a real and humanitarian interest in all people suffering prison and other kinds of torture all over the world, not only in "Cuba". I suppose also that in your own neighborhood and all over Europe there is many work waiting to do in this direction and you are starting also your work on it... I heard somewhere something about CIA/Europe secret flights, secret prisons in Europe, tortures... don't you?
Anyway, those you mentioned as "cuban political prisoners" and is families are respected in their human rights inside Cuba and of course they are also very well sponsored by numerous organisations, NGOs, etc; among them, of course, the government of the United States of America, so you can be sure that they are not deprived or tortured as are the political prisoners held in Guantánamo or anywhere in this planet.
You can read and found more information and inspiration for your humanitarian labor in the websites of the FNCA/CANF:  http://www.canf.org or in the:  http://www.asambleasociedadcivilcuba.info/index.htm among others.
Don't worry if you also found there some articles referring to Cuba with enormous hate and impotence, that's normal in this case.


"disclosing state security secrets" is of course, my dear bobby, a crime anywhere... isn't it? Or in your opinion Cuba must accede the US government to sponsor in impunity some little mercenaries against the cuban people?


... Steve... by God you are right!

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Something about a Terrorist that's free instead of being in a prison... what do you say, bobby?

The Nation: Terror and the Counterterrorists

The Nation
2007-04-27

26 April 2007, New York, NY – Today The Nation Magazine released its first-ever special issue devoted to the future of Cuba. With Cuba and the media buzzing about the possible return of Fidel Castro next week to the public stage, what now?
The Nation and guest editor Peter Kornbluh writes in this issue:
"Perhaps more than any other nation over the past fifty years, Cuba has consistently faced both threatened and real assassination attempts, sabotage efforts, armed attacks and bombings, infamous among them the midair destruction of a Cubana passenger plane in 1976.

Yet even in the post-9/11 world, US soil continues to be used for such purposes.

In fact, the Five are better understood as counterterrorism agents whose goal was to protect Cubans and other innocent victims from the violence of committed terrorists like Luis Posada. The Bush Administration's handling of these two historically inseparable cases is a reminder that, when it comes to Cuba, US policy-makers refuse to recognize the difference between those who commit acts of terror and those seeking to counter them."
Terror and the Counterterrorists

Peter Kornbluh

On November 17, 2000, shortly after arriving in Panama City for a summit of Ibero-American leaders, Fidel Castro held a press conference to announce that the legendary Cuban exile terrorist Luis Posada Carriles had also come to Panama... on an assassination mission. The Cuban authorities subsequently supplied a video of Posada and three co-conspirators meeting in front of their hotel. Within forty-eight hours Panamanian officials located a gym bag containing thirty-three pounds of C4 explosives that Posada apparently had planned to use to blow up the auditorium where Castro was scheduled to speak.
How did the Castro government know of Posada's plot? Cuban intelligence, known as the DGI, had a high-level mole in one of the exile groups reporting on the assassination operation as it evolved. The Cuban spy program potentially saved dozens of lives and averted an act of international terrorism.
Perhaps more than any other nation over the past fifty years, Cuba has consistently faced both threatened and real assassination attempts, sabotage efforts, armed attacks and bombings, infamous among them the midair destruction of a Cubana passenger plane in 1976. (CIA and FBI documents implicate Posada, who was once paid by the agency as a demolitions trainer, as the mastermind of that attack.) Long after the CIA abandoned its direct efforts to overthrow the Castro regime and terminate its leadership, militant anti-Castro groups continued their campaign of violence. After viewing a 1977 CBS special titled "The CIA's Secret Army", on violent Cuban exile operations in Florida, President Jimmy Carter was, according to a recently declassified White House memorandum, "appalled at the idea that people could use US territory as a base for terrorist actions."
Yet even in the post-9/11 world, US soil continues to be used for such purposes. As recently as November 2005, Posada's leading financial benefactor in Miami, Santiago Alvarez, was caught with a military-grade arsenal of machine guns, grenades, silencers, explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition--leading to speculation that violent exiles were planning another major operation against Cuba.
Just as the CIA escalated its efforts to penetrate Al Qaeda after 9/11, the DGI has devoted considerable resources to infiltrating hard-line anti-Castro organizations in Miami and monitoring the activities of Alvarez and other exile leaders with a track record of violence. In the mid-1990s Cuba sent more than a dozen operatives to Florida to establish a spy ring code-named the Red Avispa--the Wasp Network. Most of the agents were assigned to penetrate groups such as the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF/FNCA), Brothers to the Rescue and Alpha 66; one, Antonio Guerrero, was hired on as a sheet metal worker at the Boca Chica air base, where he took notes on the types of military aircraft landing and taking off and monitored the level of activity on the base.
In September 1998, the FBI moved in. Five agents--Guerrero, Fernando González, Gerardo Hernández, René González and Ramon Labañino--now known as the Cuban Five--were detained, thrown into solitary confinement for seventeen months, prosecuted for conspiracy to commit espionage (as there was no evidence they had gathered any classified US information) and given maximum sentences ranging from fifteen years to double life in prison. When a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals threw out their convictions in August 2005, issuing a unanimous decision that the Five had not received a fair trial, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's office immediately appealed to the full Circuit Court to revisit the ruling.
Gonzales's concerted effort to keep the five Cuban spies in prison stands in sharp contrast to his inaction on keeping Posada behind bars. After being pardoned in Panama in August 2004, Posada snuck into the United States in March 2005 and requested political asylum; he was detained only after publicity on his terrorist background--much of it generated by declassified CIA and FBI documents posted on the website of my organization, the National Security Archive--threatened to undermine the Bush Administration's credibility in the "war on terror." But Gonzales has refused to certify Posada as a terrorist under the provisions of the Patriot Act--certification that would allow the government to detain him indefinitely. Instead, the Justice Department has treated Posada as just another illegal immigrant, charging him only with lying about how he arrived in the country.
With Posada indicted only on immigration fraud, his lawyers have, not surprisingly, convinced three different courts that he should be released. On April 19, he posted $350,000 in bail and returned to Miami. The man that the same Justice Department has described in court filings as "an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots" will now live comfortably under house arrest until his trial, scheduled for May 11.
In Cuba, freeing the Five and keeping Posada in prison have become cause célèbres. The first thing travelers see upon arrival at José Martí International Airport outside Havana is a huge placard featuring photographs of the "heroes of the Republic of Cuba" and demanding "Freedom for the Cuban Five"; similar signs line the corridors of major hotels. Huge public rallies have been held to call for justice for Posada's many victims and to denounce US hypocrisy for releasing him to his wife's Miami home. Fidel Castro emerged from his convalescence to accuse the Bush Administration of freeing "a monster." The Five are frequently referred to as presos políticos--political prisoners.
In fact, the Five are better understood as counterterrorism agents whose goal was to protect Cubans and other innocent victims from the violence of committed terrorists like Luis Posada. The Bush Administration's handling of these two historically inseparable cases is a reminder that, when it comes to Cuba, US policy-makers refuse to recognize the difference between those who commit acts of terror and those seeking to counter them.



Some websites related:

 http://www.antiterroristas.cu

 http://www.freethefive.org/

 http://www.freeforfive.org/

 http://www.freethecuban5.com/

 http://www.cubavsterrorismo.cu/

 http://www.injusticia.cubaweb.cu/

 http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/secciones/conclusiones/index.html

 http://www.familiesforjustice.cu/interface.sp/design/home.tpl.html

 http://www.familiesforjustice.cu/interface.en/design/home.tpl.html

 http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/secciones/crimen_barbados/index.html

 http://www.ain.cubaweb.cu/2005/abril/17cmfidel.htm

 http://www.fabiodicelmo.cu/home.asp

 http://www.ain.cu/2005/abril/17cmfidel.htm

 http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/

Please, please, I can't stop laughing!!

Bobby, I gave you the website of the:  http://www.asambleasociedadcivilcuba.info/index.htm ... do you remember?
Well, in the front page there is a photo of a group of "cuban political prisoners", taked in the "Estación de Policía de 7ma y 62 (Police Station)... laughing as I do in this moment!

You must agree that in Cuba the so called "political prisoners" are very very very well treated, you won't find any other example of this kind of treatment anywhere in this planet.

In the days before the War on Terror, people used to point their fingers at Cuba and talk about 'political prisoners', while ignoring the fact that US allies such as Colombia, Guatamala etc had a far worse human rights record, with large numbers of 'dissapearances' by the security services.
But Cuba, despite the fact that it has had the worlds most powerful country trying to invade, assassinate the president, blow up it's airlines, and pay people inside the country to dissent, has on the whole treated it's political prisoners better ( I won't say 'good' ), than many other countries in the world.
Then, a small group of Arabs carry out an attack in the US, and the US, the worlds biggest superpower, faced with some angry people from the third world, crack down on civil liberties, abduct people, torture people, hold people without trial, invade other countries, murder men, women and children, rape people.

Who are you to point the finger?

Look at the equation.

Small Caribbean nation threatened by giant aggressive superpower = a few hundred political prisoners, who are not kept in the best conditions, may face a work-camp, but don't face torture

Large powerful country threatened by a small group of angry muslims = kidnapping, torture, detention without trial, war, bombings, rape and murder

Who, in reality, has shown the most self-control? Why do people single out Cuba as a violator of human rights? Colombia is worse. The US is worse. Guatamala is worse. The whole of the middle-east is worse. Most of Africa is worse. Many countries of Asia are worse.

The only countries who have better human rights records are places like Europe, Canada, and some other Latin American countries, the ones which are NOT threatened with invasion by the US.

I disagree in a point with Hermes, when he says that Europe, Canadá, or some places of Latin América... have "better records" about respecting human rights; this only shows the stigmatisation Cuba suffers in this terrain.
Yesterday was the Police of Los Angeles, USA, emulated promptly by the chilean, colombian, german, swiss, turkish, among others, who showed to us the methods that "free and democratic" societies -all of them unquestionned about human rights- utilized to conmemorate the International Worker's Day. Nobody makes a human rights scandal of these daily practices. Hypocrisy.
And you can search anywhere or in the Google for photos about the so called Cuban repression... for something similar as those brutal scenes we receives from the other "free and democratic countries"... but probably you will only found there two or three montages, nothing consistent to stigmatise Cuba as a human rights violator country. Of course there are also everywhere many leaflets, articles: a great campaign against the Cuban "dictatorship", organised and financed -of course- by the US government (nobody point to this as "interference", "intrusion"?).
Nobody points anyway to the flights of the CIA in Europe, nobody scandalises themselves with this daily practice that's realised with "freely and democratic" perversion. What about the spanish political prisoners, or the Mapuche political prisoners of the so called chilean democracy? or with Mumia Abu Jamal in the USA? or...?
These "respectful of human rights free and democratic societies" stinks.

Well, if you REALLY think about it, you're right. I made an off-the-cuff remark, I should be more careful. We all know the human rights record of the UK isn't that great, with it's various foreign adventures, and they engaged in torture, detentions and massacres back when they were fighting the IRA. Spain has engaged in torture in the fight against ETA. Whether they are right or wrong to fight ETA is besides the point here, the fact is, that when the going got a little bit difficult, the state very easily let human rights slide. Canada, which maybe has this wonderful tolerant reputation, has a bad human rights record with respect to its indigenous population, if you follow some of the cases. I think Scandanavia has a pretty good human rights record, I'm not really knowledgeable about that.

The point is, states very often let human rights slide, when they are faced with even a minor threat of 'terrorism'. Cuba has faced terrorism sponsored by the worlds most powerful state, and has never fallen to the level that the US has now reached.

Human rights is used as a weapon by western governments. I didn't realise that when I was younger, and I think we all hold the ideals put forward by, for example, Amnesty International, except that these organisations apply these standards to some, and not to others.