Dugin's call to arm US adversaries is at least five years too late: Russian troops have been in Latin America for years, and armed Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela

“The American Empire should be destroyed. And at one point, it will be.” - Aleksandr Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

Vladimir Putin and his philosopher Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, known as Putin's philosopher, who has Vladimir Putin's ear, has called for Russia to arm U.S. adversaries in Latin America like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. He is at least five years too late.

Russia already armed these three dictatorial regimes hostile to democracies in the region. Dugin's "threat" describes an existing state of affairs. 

Russia not only armed these three countries, but has had a military presence in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for years.

In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry declared the end of the Monroe Doctrine era. The US would no longer counter intrusions from outside powers into the Americas. 

The reality is that it had been a dead letter since 1961. 

In April 2016, Nicaragua purchased 50 Russian battle tanks at a cost of $80 million. Vladimir Putin signed a new security agreement with Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega in 2016.

Maduro's regime invited Russian mercenaries to protect him in Venezuela. Reports in 2019 indicated that there are already 2,000 Russian nationals working in intelligence roles and reporting to the Ministry of Defense, and their numbers are increasing.

During the Cold War, Paulina Zelitsky, a Soviet born Canadian Engineer, was a member of a design and construction team for a Soviet submarine base installation in Jagua Bay, Cienfuegos, Cuba. In 2020, she said, the Russians were rebuilding their nuclear submarine base in Cuba.

The United States has remained publicly indifferent to the Russian military buildup in Latin America.

In the case of Ukraine, when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, and Kyiv became independent with its own nuclear stockpile. Moscow tried to negotiate with Kyiv for them to give up their nuclear weapons, but could not reach an agreement. The United States and the United Kingdom together with Russia guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and Kyiv gave up their nuclear stockpile to Russia in the 1990s. 

In stark contrast, Vladimir Putin is threatening nuclear war because NATO countries are helping Ukraine, a nation he invaded in an act of naked aggression in violation of international law, and pledges made by Moscow too Kyiv to respect its territorial integrity. 

The invasion itself is considered a war crime, but the targeting of civilians rises to the level of crimes against humanity.  

Putin's enablers are trying to equate the present Ukraine crisis with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The two are not comparable. The United States did not invade Cuba when the Russian set up a military presence there, or armed the Castro regime with conventional weapons. 

It was only after the Soviet Union shipped in intercontinental ballistic missiles with hydrogen bombs that could reach the entire continental United States that the crisis began, and was ended when those offensive weapons were removed, but the Russians stayed, and so did their conventional weapons.

Dugin and Putin both seek the restoration of the Russian empire, and are willing to risk WWIII to achieve their imperial designs.  Russia in taking Ukraine would seize an additional 11.5% in world production of Wheat. The current war is also creating greater global food insecurity threatening multiple famines.

On September 21, 2019, at the Nexus Symposium in  Amsterdam French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy debated Russian philosopher and nationalist Aleksandr Dugin. Over the course of an hour one could hear first hand the case made for Russian imperialism by Dugin, and his critiques of Western democracy, the Enlightenment, and  Lévy's powerful rebuttal.

Independence on July 4, 1776: Triumph of American political genius, and a failure of the British Parliament's political imagination and magnanimity

"Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." - Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775

Edmund Burke

 

July 4, 1776 is Independence Day, and marks the publication of the Declaration of Independence by thirteen former British colonies against the government in London. It is a day of great celebration in the United States and with good reason. It marks the decision of free peoples to establish a new Republic that has now endured and prospered over 245 years, but for Great Britain it was a magnificent failure that could have been avoided, but Parliament failed to address American concerns and dealt with harshness against their colonists. 

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and others who would lead the American Revolution drafted and signed the Olive Branch Petition that was adopted on July 8, 1775 and reached London on August 14, 1775 seeking redress on colonial grievances from the British King, and for the colonies to remain within the empire, but it was not to be. 

Months earlier the British statesman Edmund Burke spoke out against arbitrary rule over the 13 colonies in his March 22, 1775 speech on conciliation with America in which he explained to the British government that the way to keep the allegiance of the American colonies was to maintain the identification with civil rights associated with colonial rule warning that if that relation were broken it would lead to dissolution. 

"Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government-they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation - the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you."

Burke's concept of human dignity as derived from the creator , combined with a concept of man's moral equality, has deep roots in the Christian tradition which is where the language and concept of human rights first emerged in the 1200s in the Catholic Church and was refined by Thomas Aquinas.  

Edmund Burke's defense of the marginalized, the colonized, and the conquered was rooted not in abstract enlightenment theory but a Christian moral vision of the universe. According to Burke, in his 1796 Letters on a regicide peace ,man has freedom but it is not absolute:

"As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of total independence of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct."

Enlightenment liberalism constructed abstract models that failed to take into account the full complexity of human nature and its contradictions. The French human rights charter declares men absolutely both free and equal. Edmund Burke and modern conservatives believe that "full equality" outside of the moral and spiritual sphere is unattainable and a dangerous fiction. 

First, to permit absolute freedom is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own devices develop hierarchies. 

Secondly, to enforce absolute equality requires an all powerful state to repress natural inequalities. The end result is not absolute equality but a small group with great power at its disposal making slaves of the majority.

Edmund Burke's counsel in 1775 remains relevant today, as do his warnings of embracing political abstractions to impose government policies, and calling for magnanimity and wisdom in political deliberations.

 

A Rebuttal of Dean Dettloff's "The Catholic Case for Communism" Part One.

 Recovering some facts from the memory hole.

Cuban revolutionary Carlos Franqui (middle of the picture) was flushed down the memory hole.

This is the first in a series of blog entries rebutting a "Catholic" defense of communism authored by Dean Dettloff in the Jesuit magazine America on July 23, 2019 that downplays the crimes of communism much like the perpetrators.  Counter-intuitively, the counter-argument will begin at the end and work its way to the start.

Others have outlined the theological problems with Mr. Dettloff's argument, the horrors committed against Catholics, the large scale loss of life over the past 100 years, the communist alliance with the Nazis, and they should be widely shared.

The point of this rebuttal is to set the record straight on the facts, and reject the propaganda.

This blog focuses on Cuba, the last portion of Dettlofff's essay is a whitewash of the Castro regime, referencing Dorothy Day's observations on the Cuban Revolution in 1961 without exposing the horrendous record of the past six decades. It has left the Castro family multi-millionaires living lifestyles of  the 1% while the majority of Cubans live in extreme poverty, and are punished when they protest savage capitalism in Cuba.

Fidel Castro's son Antonio Castro visited Greece in this 160 foot yacht with five suites.

The war on Christianity
Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959, praised the support of the Catholic Church and declared, “Catholics in Cuba have given their most determined collaboration to the cause of freedom.”

Six years earlier, Archbishop Enrique Pérez Serantes of Santiago saved Castro’s life after the attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953. Batista's military massacred many involved in the attack. Castro fled to the mountains with other assailants. Fearing for their lives and under pressure from the families, Archbishop Pérez Serantes went into the hills, looking for Castro and the others and brought them safely home. Despite this, the Archbishop was imprisoned along with many other priests.

When Dorothy Day wrote in "About Cuba" for The Catholic Worker in July-August 1961 that "Fidel Castro says he is not persecuting Christ, but Churchmen who have betrayed him." The systematic effort to end Catholicism in Cuba was already underway, but Castro, lied both about what he was doing and his intentions. 

In May 1961 the Cuban revolution confiscated all Catholic private schools and most seminaries to eliminate religion. 

Arnaldo Socorro Sánchez

 On September 10, 1961 a catholic youth, Arnaldo Socorro, age 20 , was shot in the back by a member of the communist militia in front of the Church of Our Lady of Charity of Cobre in Havana as he carried an image of the Virgin of Charity. But in order to fool public opinion at the time, the regime buried him with the honors of a communist militant.

On September 17, 1961 the communists at gun point collected 131 priests, brothers and a bishop, placing them on board the Spanish ship Covadonga and deported them from Cuba. 

Priests were taken at gun point and forced out of Cuba in 1961

 The US State Department 2003 International Religious Freedom Report described how the Cuban revolution turned against religious believers in the mid-1960s following the forced expulsion of hundreds of religious leaders:

From 1965-67 the Government forced many priests, pastors, and others "who made religion a way of life" into forced labor camps called Military Units to Aid Production (UMAPS), alongside homosexuals, vagrants, and others considered by the regime to be "social scum." The UMAP system ended in 1967. However, over the following 30 years, the Government and the Communist Party systematically discriminated against and marginalized persons who openly professed their faith by excluding them from certain jobs (such as teaching). Although the Government abandoned its official atheism in the early 1990s, most churches had been weakened seriously, and active participation in religious services fell drastically.

Among the jailed priests was a future Cardinal of Cuba, Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino.  
Sociology professor Juan Clark outlined the mechanisms used by the Castro regime to degrade and destroy religious life in Cuba in his 1998 report on Religious Repression in Cuba.

"The 1960s also saw the dawn of a more subtle, but very effective, indirect repression. This less visible form of repression used education and the work place as its main vehicles. It begun as early as grammar school with simple questions posed to schoolchildren practicing their faith, in an attempt to ridicule them in front of their classmates. Students have a Cumulative Academic Record that supervises "ideological integration" and the religious involvement of students and their parents. This involvement would constitute a "demerit" on their record and would be used to deny access to the university or to careers with social impact to those who had that blotch in their record. This indirect repression followed Castro's religious policy of "making apostates not martyrs," and thus began the slow process of gradually attempting to choke off the religious community."

Fidel Castro canceled Christmas in 1969 under the pretext to prevent work shortages for the 1970 ten million ton sugar harvest but continued the ban until 1997, and sent mobs to intimidate Cubans who attended religious services. Three Kings Day and Easter were also abolished. Priests who stayed behind often paid a terrible price.

In 1976 the Castro dictatorship adopted a constitution which turned Cuba into an atheist state. 

Today, the Office of Religious Affairs (ORA), an arm of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, still oversees religious affairs in Cuba, and exists to monitor, hinder and restrict religious activities. 

The Catholic Church was not clinging to Batista regime in the 1950s, as some communists claim. It was a Catholic priest who saved Fidel Castro's life following the disastrous July 26, 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks. Castro portrayed himself as a Jeffersonian democrat who would restore the preexisting democratic order.

Communist morality

Fidel Castro at the time was repeatedly claiming that he was not a communist because he knew that speaking the truth would lead Cubans to abandon him. On December 2, 1961 he explained his reasoning.

"If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains."

Years later on March 26, 1964, after announcing that he had always been a Marxist Leninist, Fidel Castro explained: "I conceive the truth in terms of a just and noble end, and that is when the truth is truly true. If it does not serve a just, noble and positive end, truth, as an abstract entity, philosophical category, in my opinion, does not exist." Jose Ignacio Rasco, who knew Fidel Castro from school and afterwards concluded that the Cuban revolutionary had been a committed communist by 1950.

Castro is copying Lenin. The first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin on October 2, 1920 in a speech to Russian communist youth stated:  "The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society." He also addressed the necessity of the lie observing: "'To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie's aim."

These lies in the service of maintaining and consolidating power in Cuba can be seen in the contortions around human rights.  In the 1950s and early in 1959 the Cuban revolutionary spoke of restoring human rights and civil liberties. He did this at the same time that he was unleashing a campaign of revolutionary terror in 1959 and threatening, then shuttering newspapers. In the midst of this on July 17, 1959 Fidel Castro announced, "I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement, but we do not have to say that we are anticommunists just to fawn on foreign powers." 



Twenty seven years later Castro, in a 1986 interview in Havana, claimed that universal human rights were alien to the Cuban experience dividing them between revolutionary liberties and bourgeois liberties. 

This rejects the Latin American tradition, which was best expounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that there are basic human rights that are universal and not separated by politics or ideologies.  It also ignores prior Cuban constitutions and the critical role that Cuban diplomats, from the democratic era, played in the drafting of the declaration. Not to worry. History is rewritten and all has been airbrushed out of existence.

Preserving the Castro dynasty in power is the "just and noble end" that turns a lie into a "truth that is truly true" according to the communist mindset.

Antonio Castro, Cuban dictatorship's point man for baseball business

To preserve the elite communist's lavish lifestyle does not come cheap. The Castro regime exports workers abroad and gets billions of dollars a year with this practice. In 2014 the Cuban dictatorship forecast "$8.2 billion from sending doctors and nurses abroad." In order to achieve these results the health workers are paid miserable wages and as a result some defect, and are denounced as traitors.  Worse yet some of the workers have sued for being victims of human trafficking or worse yet subjected to conditions of forced labor without pay.

This also leads to questions about Cuba's healthcare system. A subsidiary of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) was being paid off by the Cuban government using Cuban health care workers in what amounted to human trafficking.  These are the organizations that report Cuban government health statistics as legitimate. 

Totalitarian regimes often times make outlandish claims of great successes in particular areas in order to justify or rationalize repression and political terror elsewhere. It is true of North Korea and it is also true of Cuba. The only difference being that Cuba has a much more effective propaganda apparatus than their counterparts in Pyongyang and they have invested heavily in their education and healthcare claims.

Katherine Hirschfeld, an anthropologist, who wrote the book:  Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 described in it how her idealistic preconceptions about the Cuban healthcare system were dashed by 'discrepancies between rhetoric and reality,' she observed a repressive, bureaucratized and secretive system, long on 'militarization' and short on patients' rights. There is a health care system in Cuba which is decent for regime elites in good favor and tourists with hard currency and another one for everyday Cubans that is a disaster. With regards to the public health system the priority is the good image of the dictatorship not the well being of Cubans or visitors. 

In 1997 when a Dengue epidemic broke out in Cuba the dictatorship tried to cover it up. When a courageous doctor spoke out he was locked up on June 25, 1997 and later sentenced to 8 years in prison. Amnesty International recognized Dr. Desi Mendoza Rivero as a prisoner of conscience. He was released from prison under condition he go into exile in December of 1998. The regime eventually had to recognize that there had been a dengue epidemic.

The same pattern repeated itself in 2012 with a cholera outbreak, but this time it was an independent journalist jailed for breaking the story on mishandling of medical aide by Cuban officials. Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias was recognized by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience and the organization described how: 

"He had been investigating allegations that medicine provided by the World Health Organization to fight the cholera outbreak (which began in mid-2012) was being kept at the airport instead of being distributed. Since then, he has been detained in various detention centres. He has been held at Combinado del Este prison since November 2012." 

If you have to lock up journalists and doctors to cover up problems in your healthcare system then its probably not a great healthcare system and outsiders should be a little more skeptical with official claims. Medical neglect led to scores of psychiatric patients dying of exposure and hypothermia in Cuba in 2010. There are also consequences to believing the lies of the Castro regime for foreigners visiting Cuba.

The publication New Scientist reported on January 8, 2019 in an exclusive report that "thousands of Zika virus cases went unreported in Cuba in 2017, according to an analysis of data on travelers to the Caribbean island. Veiling them may have led to many other cases that year." This was reconfirmed in another study involving Spanish travelers returning home from Cuba with Zika in 2017 that was reported in the press on July 21, 2019.

Massacred by the Castro regime on July 13, 1994

The body count in Cuba
Glenn Garvin wrote an important essay in the Miami Herald on December 1, 2016 titled "Red Ink: The high human cost of the Cuban Revolution" and in it addresses the question of how many extrajudicial executions have taken place in Cuba and cites an authoritative source.

"University of Hawaii historian R. J. Rummel, who made a career out of studying what he termed “democide,” the killing of people by their own government, reported in 1987 that credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000."

Extrajudicially executed on July 22, 2012

On October 31, 2003 in a letter to former Czech president Vaclav Havel, the late Cuban Catholic layman and founder of the  the Christian Liberation Movement, Oswaldo Payá addressed the existing reality of communism in Cuba.

Oswaldo Payá spoke out against the fraudulent change that sought to perpetuate the rule of the Castro family. Some believe that this was a contributing factor to why he and Harold Cepero, the youth leader of his movement, were killed on July 22, 2012.

Communism is an exclusionary regime. This is not theory. It is the living experience of these regimes from the moment of their inception to their demise. When communism comes to an end, it leaves a dispossessed majority without property, money, resources, labor unions, parties, or social organizations capable of protecting anyone. It leaves behind a corrupt legal system that negates the basic principles of the rule of law, it kills off the work ethic, and it institutionalizes corruption, turning the economy into a hybrid of a collectivist concentration camp and savage capitalism. This is “savage communism.” To describe it fully would take too long, but let us note that in the European countries where communism once held sway, it has left behind a few big capitalists who, until just the day before, had been officeholders or otherwise very powerful figures within the communist regime. These “new rich” had previously been the “only rich,” as under communism there can be only one of everything: one party, one doctrine, one opinion, one union, and one governing individual. In Cuba, where people are told “Socialism or death,” these powerful regime figures will also become the “only” capitalists, the future business class. 

The extreme violence against those who peacefully dissent has been well documented as recently as the 2015 machete attack against Sirley Avila Leon, a dissident who had been purged from her government post trying to keep a school open and later joined the opposition.

The late Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in his autobiography, Before Night Falls, observed: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream." 

One final anecdote. Years ago in a television studio in Lima, Peru I heard a spokesman for the Maoist Shining Path movement on a television panel denounce Fidel Castro for betraying communism Cuba. This true believing communist denounced him for not executing two million Cubans at the start of the revolution.

Cuban Opposition Leader Denounces: The Cuba they want to make fashionable.

"Cuba is fashionable to vain politicians who want to take their photo with the last dinosaurs on earth." - Regis Iglesias

The Cuba they want to make fashionable.

By Regis Iglesias, spokesman Christian Movement Liberation

Published in Spanish in El Nuevo Herald on February 16, 2016

Cuba is in fashion. No, not Cuba, Cuba is more than 11 million people without rights that seem forgotten by the free world, by those countries with a long democratic tradition. Even those countries that after many sacrifices and a lot of solidarity and international support were able to obtain for their peoples rights long denied just two decades ago.

Cuba is fashionable to vain politicians who want to take their photo with the last dinosaurs on earth. So they go to Cuba and spend hours listening to the very feverish official version of how due to the fault of a democracy, the largest and oldest in the world, that they the saurian-commanders had to convert a whole nation into a military camp in the middle of the sea, surrounded by barbed wire with nuclear missiles pointed at the heart of America. The same America, as it does with every fashion trend it adopts, now tries to sell to the world its mistaken policy for the longest dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.

But in our island nothing has changed, nor will it change on the current path even though from Washington they want to sell us that.

The Cuban regime is only recycling itself. The old oligarchy gives continuity to the new oligarchy that with their offspring, heirs of a military economic junta, the architects of fake change, as Oswaldo Paya of the Christian Liberation Movement denounced before being assassinated.

Cuba is not changing nor will it change with more foreign investment because the capitalists of the world go there to compete amongst themselves, not with Cubans who are not allowed the possibility to promote some important business. They will accept the policy conditions of exploitation and segregation that are imposed by the regime on authorized employees. In any case, Liu Xiaobo remains a hostage of Beijing. Tibet remains occupied by China. Millions of people are starving outside the major economic centers promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. All this despite the Asian nation having most favored nation status in trade with the United States. Is that what they want to sell to us Cubans? No thanks.

Cuba is not changing nor will change because Ozzy Osbourne and the Rolling Stones visit or give a concert. Nor will it change because Rihanna poses naked in a room with the aesthetics of a 1950s brothel. Beyonce, smoking habanos in the streets of Vedado, or Marc Antonty recreating a party in a fictional Old Havana will not bring change. The New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves or the Tampa Devil Rays going to train on the island is not change nor will it bring change. Not even because Don King goes to Cuba to recruit fighters or the saga of Fast and Furious attempts to film on the battered roads of the island.

Cuba will change and be in style when Cubans finally decide to demand, as over 25,000 citizens have already done so legally, their right to think and act freely, associate to form economic ventures that allow them to thrive, when they can choose their own government and be part of it. But even today it is not possible in the island stopped in time. Even today this is overlooked by those who look at us and only see an island of beautiful beaches, a stale museum where any Marlon Brando played bongos and had sex with any native within his reach, according to the memories of the most elderly.

But that is not Cuba, not the Cuba that we want.

***

La Cuba que quieren poner de moda  

REGIS IGLESIAS

Cuba es la moda. No, no Cuba, Cuba somos más de 11 millones de personas sin derechos que parecen olvidadas por el mundo libre, por esas naciones con una larga tradición democrática e incluso por aquellas que luego de muchos sacrificios y mucha solidaridad y acompañamiento internacional lograron alcanzar para sus pueblos los derechos hace apenas dos décadas.

Lo que está de moda es que las celebrities ociosas con más dinero que talento, los aspirantes a una santidad mediática que dando la espalda a las víctimas toman café con el victimario, los beodos iconos musicales de una generación que padeció persecución, segregación, cárcel y hasta la muerte por escuchar de manera semi clandestina sus éxitos en discos entrados a la isla de contrabando o en estaciones musicales del sur de la Florida que eventualmente llegaban con su señal a nuestras costas, los mercaderes ansiosos de fácil ganancia, no importa que el éxito de sus jugosos negocios se deba a una mano de obra esclava a la que le es prohibitivo sindicalizarse o contratarse directamente sin la mediación de un régimen militar-empresarial que se lleva el 95% de su salario y solo paga el equivalente de 25 dólares mensuales a los “privilegiados” cubanos que pueden trabajar para alguna firma extranjera. Eso es lo que está de moda, que vayan a nuestra isla, la isla en la que por muchas décadas leer revistas del corazón, escuchar rock, ser homosexual o practicar alguna religión era poco más que un pecado mortal que debía ser purgado en campos de concentración, la isla donde sus ciudadanos no tienen derechos y son segregados de las oportunidades de negocios solo por ser precisamente cubanos.

Cuba está de moda para políticos vanidosos que quieren hacerse la foto con los últimos dinosaurios sobre la tierra. Por eso van a Cuba y pasan horas escuchando la muy afiebrada versión oficial de cómo por culpa de una democracia, la mayor y más antigua del mundo, tuvieron que convertir los saurio-comandantes toda una nación en un campamento que en medio del mar, rodeado de alambradas con misiles nucleares apuntando al corazón de América, esa misma América que al igual que hace con cada tendencia de moda que adopta, ahora vende al mundo su equivocada política respecto a la dictadura más longeva del hemisferio occidental.

La época en que los deportistas eran tildados de traidores, porque prefirieron ganar millones en los circuitos profesionales de Estados Unidos, quedó atrás solo con un par de declaraciones para la TV norteamericana de algún que otro mandamás de la oligarquía y ahora pueden regresar y, por supuesto, llevar dólares a sus antiguos jueces para que continúen condenando, encarcelando, desterrando y asesinando a personas que solo disienten, que solo quieren vivir en un país, su país, con libertad para expresarse, para asociarse, para tener sus propios negocios, para elegir y ser elegidos, para entrar y salir libremente de su propio país o residir en cualquier punto de la geografía de ese archipiélago llamado Cuba.

Pero en nuestra isla no ha cambiado nada, ni por el actual camino cambiará nada aunque incluso desde Washington nos quieran vender eso.

El régimen cubano solo se recicla a sí mismo. Da continuidad la oligarquía vieja a la nueva oligarquía que son sus vástagos, los herederos de la junta económica militar, los artífices del cambio fraude, como denunció antes de ser asesinado Oswaldo Payá.

Cuba no está cambiando ni cambiará con más inversión extranjera porque los capitalistas del mundo irán allí, a competir entre sí mismos, no con los cubanos a los que no se les permite tener la posibilidad de fomentar algún importante negocio. Aceptarán las condiciones de explotación y segregación política que a los empleados autorizados imponga el régimen. En todo caso, Liu Xiaobo continúa siendo un rehén de Pekín, los tibetanos ocupados por China y millones de personas mueren de hambre fuera de los grandes polos económicos fomentados por el partido comunista chino a pesar de que la nación asiática tiene trato de nación más favorecida en su comercio con Estados Unidos.

¿Eso es lo que nos quieren vender a nosotros los cubanos? No, gracias.

Cuba no está cambiando ni cambiará porque Ozzy Osbourne y los Rolling Stones la visiten o den algún concierto, porque Rihanna pose desnuda en una habitación con estética de prostíbulo cincuentero, Beyonce se contonee fumando habanos por El Vedado o Marc Antony simule andar de fiesta en una ficticia Habana Vieja. No está cambiando ni cambiará porque los New York Yankees, los Bravos de Atlanta o los Tampa Devil Rays vayan a entrenar en la isla. Ni siquiera porque Don King vaya a contratar boxeadores o la saga de Fast and Furious se intente filmar en las maltrechas carreteras de la isla.

Cuba cambiará y estará de moda cuando finalmente los cubanos decididos hayan reclamado, como ya lo han hecho legalmente más de 25,000 ciudadanos, su derecho a pensar y actuar libremente, asociarse para formar empresas económicas que les permitan prosperar, cuando puedan elegir su propio gobierno y formar parte del mismo. Pero aun hoy eso no es posible en la isla detenida en el tiempo. Aun hoy esto es pasado por alto por todos aquellos que nos miran y solo ven una isla de playas paradisíacas, un museo añejo donde cualquier Marlon Brando tocaba bongoes y tenía sexo con cuanto nativo y nativa estaba a su alcance, según recuerdan los más viejos.

Pero eso no es Cuba, no es la Cuba que queremos.

Nuestra libertad es solo responsabilidad nuestra y por eso vamos a continuar trabajando. Otros Estados y personas sean quienes se definan si están a favor de apoyar nuestro derecho a los derechos o sus intereses y los de una tiranía.

Portavoz del Movimiento Cristiano Liberación.

Read more here: http://www.elnuevoherald.com/opinion-es/opin-col-blogs/opinion-sobre-cuba/article60955702.html#storylink=cpy

http://www.elnuevoherald.com/opinion-es/opin-col-blogs/opinion-sobre-cuba/article60955702.html

A nonviolent moment in America: Martin Luther King Jr. - I Have A Dream Speech - August 28, 1963

Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington D.C. August 28, 1963

 Fifty years ago today in Washington D.C. following a nonviolent march on the capitol to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial over 250,000 Americans gathered together peacefully to demand that the United States live up to the values espoused in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution and the promise made  when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It was a nonviolent moment in American history in which citizens spoke truth to power. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the nation proclaiming his dream of the future of the United States.


Less than four years later in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. would say that the dream had "turned into a nightmare" with the war in Vietnam and the black power movement that embraced violence.

On April 4, 1968 he would be martyred in Memphis, Tennessee shot down by a sniper while he was supporting a sanitation workers strike. His widow, Coretta Scott King, would continue her husband's work marching with 42,000 people on April 8, 1968 and achieved a negotiated solution to the strikers demands.

Fifty years ago today was a moment of optimism and hope that generated positive changes across America with voting rights laws that would soon be passed and government institutionalized segregation become a thing of the past. This was not because of one speech but through a movement that with its disciplined nonviolent resistance changed the United States of America forever. Reverend King fifty years ago outlined the movement's nonviolent vision: 

"This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

 It is a message that is still relevant today not only in the United States but in many places around the world were injustice persists.