"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
Here is the English translation of their post demanding freedom.
#Cuba: We demand freedom for artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Pérez, also known as “Maykel Osorbo”, prisoners of conscience of the government of Miguel Diaz-Canel. Raise your voice for a Cuba without repression and without censorship. #FreeArtists #InternationalArtistsDay
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was arrested when he tried to go out and join nonviolent protesters on July 11, 2021. On July 10, 2023 in the Miami Herald, a letter of his was published as an opinion piece titled 'Cuba’s Authorities Have Stolen My Youth Just For Speaking My Mind’ in which he describes the prison conditions he is enduring.
"I’m imprisoned in Guanajay, a maximum-security penitentiary southwest of Havana. Many of my fellow prisoners are serving life sentences for murder. The authorities have separated me from other political prisoners. I share a cell with three others. I’m allowed to talk to other inmates in the hallway, but I’m only taken out to the yard when other prisoners are gone. I should be allowed to spend an hour outside every day, but I’m only let out occasionally at the whim of the guards. I’ve lost weight because of the scarcity of food and poor quality of meals. I’m often afraid to eat because the food looks rotten. After I was sentenced in June 2022, the rules for visiting me changed. Now my family can only visit me once a month, instead of twice. No one else is allowed. Even my beloved uncle is banned because of his involvement in activism."
Following bios were taken from Amnesty International, and adapted to the present day.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is an artist and member of the San Isidro Movement, a group that mobilized initially in opposition to a law which stands to censor artists. He was detained on 11 July around 3pm in Havana, after posting a video
saying he would join the protests. It is believed he is being held at
Guanajay prison, but the charges against him are unclear. Amnesty
International has named him a prisoner of conscience on three prior occasions.
Maykel Castillo Pérez,known by his stage name Maykel
Osorbo, is a Cuban musician and human rights activist. He is one of the
authors of “Patria y Vida”, a song critical of the Cuban government that
has been adopted as a protest anthem. On 4 April 2021, Maykel was
walking in Havana when police officers questioned him and attempted to
arrest him but desisted in the face of complaints from other passersby
who considered the action unjust. On May 18, 2021, security agents arrived at
his home and arrested him. He was held at the Pinar del Río
Provincial Prison under charges of “assault”, “resistance”, “evasion of
prisoners and detainees” and “public disorder.”
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
and Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez were sentenced to five and nine
years in prison respectively by the Castro regime on June 24, 2022. They are currently serving out their unjust prison sentences.
Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
"Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is remembering without pain." - Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz 1925 - 2003
Úrsula
Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso was born 98 years ago today in
Havana, Cuba, but she was better known as Celia Cruz. She played in
Cuba for twelve years from 1948 until 1960. Because she wanted to play
her music around the world, she was banned by the Castro regime from
returning to the island.
Celia was not able to return to Cuba when her father died there in 1961, and she was not allowed to return to Cuba when her mother became ill, or at attend her funeral when her mom died in 1962. Celia
Cobo of Billboard Magazine observed that "Cruz is indisputably the best
known and most influential female figure in the history of Cuban
music." The impact of the Castro regime on music in Cuba goes beyond
jailing musicians and includes systematic censorship that threatens the
island's musical legacy as has been the case with the Queen of Salsa.
Google Doodle of Celia Cruz from 2013
She is recognized around the world as an icon of music and in 2013 Google honored Celia on the 88th anniversary of her birth with a Google Doodle. In 2010 the United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp in her honor describing the Cuban artist as follows.
"A dazzling performer of many genres of Afro-Caribbean music, Celia Cruz (1925-2003) had
a powerful contralto voice and a joyful, charismatic personality that
endeared her to fans from different nationalities and across
generations. Settling in the United States following the Cuban
revolution, the “Queen of Salsa” performed for more than five decades
and recorded more than 50 albums."
However in Cuba the Castro regime continues to ban the music of Celia Cruz from the radio airwaves. She is not alone. There are other banned Cuban musicians of great importance. According to Shoot the singer!: music censorship today,
a book edited by Marie Korpe states that there is increasing concern
within the international music community that post-revolution
generations are growing up without knowing or hearing these censored musicians and that this could lead to a loss of Cuban identity in future generations.
The Queen of Salsa passed away twenty years go on July 16, 2003 and her music is still banned in Cuba today. At the time of her death the Associated Press reported:
"While the death of salsa singer Celia Cruz was reported prominently in newspapers across the world,
the news got scant and somewhat bitter treatment Thursday in the
official media of her homeland. The Cuban Communist Party newspaper
Granma reported Cruz’s death in a tiny, two-paragraph story published
low on page 6 of the eight-page edition."
On August 8, 2012 BBC News reported that
the Cuban regime's ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted
and two days later the BBC correspondent in Cuba, Sarah Rainsford, tweeted that she had been given names of forbidden artists by
the central committee and the internet was a buzz that the ban on
anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted. Others soon followed reporting on the news. The stories specifically mentioned Celia Cruz as one of the artists whose music would return to Cuban radio.
Let Celia Cruz's music be heard in Cuba
This
wasn't news but a rumor that nine years after her death her music would
be played on Cuban radio, after a half century absence but they were
dispelled by regime officials. On August 21, 2012 Tony Pinelli, a
musician and radio producer,distributed an e-mailin which Rolando Álvarez, the national director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión(ICRT) confirmed that the music of the lateCelia Cruzwould continue to be banned.
Sharing
the music of Celia Cruz in Cuba is a counter-revolutionary act
according to the Castro regime and is an act of subversion against the
communist dictatorship. Please share her music widely because it is the
sound of freedom. This is why Cuba's tyrants hate her and her music so
much, even in death.
"My definition of terrorism is the systematic and deliberate attack, the murder, maiming, and menacing of innocents, of civilians, for political goals." ... "Those who fight with terroristic means end up being masters of terrorist states." - Benjamin Netanyahu, Firing Line (May 30,1986)
..."It describes so many other post-colonial states that came into existence from people who described themselves as freedom fighters, but used terroristic means and then ended up creating despotisms in their own societies. Its not unique to the Palestinians." - Bret Stephens, Firing Line (October 13, 2023)
This is the third blog entry on the unfolding events in Israel, and the
international reaction to the Hamas terrorist attacks against innocent
Israelis provides a profound reflection by journalist Bret Stephens on
the October 13, 2023 episode of Firing Line with Margaret Hoover. It is
required viewing, and available here.
The other entries raise different concerns, and are complementary to this one.
The first entry, a fact sheet was posted on October 11, 2023 which documents that the Jewish people are both the indigenous and ancestral people of the land they currently live in known as Israel.
A fourth, and related blog entry was posted on the eve of the October 7th attacks on the 50th anniversary of the surprise attack against Israel by Muslim states, North Korea, ad Cuba.
"If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very
heart of the United States, including New York. We must never establish a
peaceful coexistence." Ernesto "Che" Guevara, London’sDaily Worker (1962)
Paragliders were used to murder concert goers in Israel last week.
What are Ernesto "Che" Guevara's secular ideas inspiring Hamas, and promoted by UNESCO with US taxpayer funds?
Here are a few of them.
"Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies." - Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)
"When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with our own voice." - Che Guevara, Tactics & Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)
"When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with our own voice." - Che Guevara, Tactics & Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)
"We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims." - Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Tactics & Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)
"Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over & beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to & transforming him into an effective, violent, selective & cold killing machine." - Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental (1967)
"It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move." - Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental (1967)
"Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline. He will even become more beastly, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to appear." - Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental (1967)
This is what has been normalized, and is being promoted by UNESCO, and young children are, and have been, reading in Gaza for years.
1/ The radical left is already using the "paragliding terrorist" as a symbol for the exact same reason they use the picture of Communist leader Che Guevara on t-shirts:
The same crowd that normalized Che Guevara on t-shirts is trying to do the same with images of the para-gliders used to slaughter hundreds of music concert goers last week.
These communists and Hamas supporters would like us to either normalize, ignore, or deny the mass murder and terrorism committed by Hamas last week, but we have a duty to remember, and denounce this crime. Here are the latest figures from the State of Israel on the over 1,300 murdered and 3,360 injured in the terror attacks in which over 6,300 rockets were launched at the Jewish State..
It also explains why the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini was making visits to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to obtain "a German-Italian declaration recognizing the independence of
Arab states and their right to work to prevent the establishment of a
national home for the Jewish people in the Holy Land." He did not succeed in his mission.
According to Yad Vashem, "Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was
a despicable antisemite and ardent Nazi
supporter. Nevertheless, the role he played in the Holocaust was
marginal."
Haj Amin al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, 1941Credit: German Federal Archives
The Jewish people without their own homeland since 70 AD had endured centuries of pogroms, persecution, ethnic cleansing, forced religious conversion, and in the 20th century in Europe the Holocaust. The revulsion of the international community in the aftermath of opening the death camps underscored the Zionist case for a Jewish homeland. What goes unmentioned in the conversation over Israel and Palestine is that there had never been a Palestinian state or kingdom prior to its creation together with the reemergence of a Jewish state in 1948.
Let’s be clear:
Before Israel, there was a British mandate, not a Palestinian state. -Before the British Mandate, there was the Ottoman Empire, not a Palestinian state. -Before the Ottoman Empire, there was the Islamic state of the Mamluks of Egypt, not a Palestinian state.…
Although the United Nations had authorized a two state partition: One Jewish and One Palestinian Arab. The Palestinians allied with their Arab neighbors in a coalition to invade and destroy the new Jewish nation, and although outgunned in the first Arab-Israeli War 1948-49, Israel survived, and gained territory against their aggressors.
Wars would continue with the Suez Crisis in 1956, and the Six Days War in 1967. Israel's victory in the Six Days War redrew the map of the Middle East with the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank
and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria taken over by the Jewish state.
The Arab states together with communist Cuba tried to destroy Israel in
another war of aggression fifty years ago October 6, 1973 during high holy
Jewish holidays in what became known as the Yom Kippur War.
Operation SIG is the KGB operation to sow worldwide disapproval for the US and Israel. SIG is the Russian acronym for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Jewish (or Zionist) Government.” The operation started shortly after 1967, when the drive for Arab unity collapsed along with the economies of the armies that attacked Israel (Shlaim, 2003). ...“After defeat of Soviet-controlled Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day war, the Soviet Union started a widespread under-cover campaign against Israel, involving propaganda as well as direct military support (funding, arms, training) to terrorist groups declaring Israel as their enemy. Additionally, the USSR took the decision to increase anti-Israeli sentiment by disseminating anti-Zionist propaganda and even referencing previous anti-Semitic tropes from Western culture… The overall goal of the campaign was to spread the idea that the state of Israel was an oppressive, imperialist state which was built on unjust terms operation “SIG” (“Zionist Governments”) that was devised in 1972 to turn the Arab world against Israel and the United States”
This effort officially ended in 1988, but may have been resumed by former KGB officer and current Russian despot Vladimir Putin.
The rest of this blog entry focuses on the history of the Jewish people in the land currently known as Israel, and seeks to dispel this disinformation.
I have attended meetings in the United States were folks who identify as progressive would begin the meeting with a land acknowledgement. The Smithsonian Museum's National Museum of the American Indian on their website Native Knowledge 360° provides the following description of the practice.
Land acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back
centuries in many Native nations and communities. Today, land
acknowledgments are used by Native Peoples and non-Natives to recognize
Indigenous Peoples who are the original stewards of the lands on which
we now live. Before public events and other important gatherings hosted
by the National Museum of the American Indian, a speaker offers this
acknowledgment displayed in the quote container on behalf of everyone
present.
After millennia of Native history, and centuries of
displacement and dispossession, acknowledging original Indigenous
inhabitants is complex. Many places in the Americas have been home to
different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer
live on lands to which they have ancestral ties.
The Jewish people are indigenous to the land they live on today, and lands inhabited by Palestinians, such as Gaza and the West Bank. Three thousand years ago the state of Israel was dominated by a Jewish community, until they were taken over by the Roman Empire in 63 BC and turned into a protectorate to rule over them, until the Romans crushed them, and drove many of them out of their homeland for violently resisting imperial rule beginning in 66 AD, the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD and Jewish resisters to occupation were scattered across the Roman Empire in modern day Iraq, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Eastern Europe.
The Romans erected the Arch of Titus which depicts the Emperor's sack of Jerusalem in 70 AD to celebrate their victory. It still survives today in Rome just outside of the ruins of the Colosseum. This past week following the start of the wave of terrorist attacks against Israel by Hamas the emblem of the modern state of Israel was projected onto it.
The Romans built this arch to celebrate their defeat of the Jewish people in ancient #Israel. The Roman Empire is long gone, but 2,000 years later, the #Jewish people and Israel are still here. !!!עם ישראל חי pic.twitter.com/T1IUKydKet
The term Palestine has a long history, but the word is a European invention. According to historians the name first appeared in the 12th century BC and derives from the Greek word Philistia, the name Greek writers gave to the land of the Philistines, and revived by the Romans 1,400 years later in the 2nd century AD as "Syria Palaestina." However the name Palestine, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, had no official status until the British took over the land from the Ottoman Empire after WW1 through the League of Nations and it was called the Mandate for Palestine, but it also recognized the right to a Jewish homeland.
Centuries of history in 18 minutes – @MelanieLatest unravels the truth and myth of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This is not to say that the self-identified Palestinians do not have a right to a sovereign state, but the problem has been when repeatedly offered one, many have preferred to take the opportunity to wage a war of extermination against Israel with the aid and encouragement of neighboring (or nearby) Islamic states. The Palestinian problem is truly a Palestinian problem with the existence of a Jewish state in a sea of Muslim ones. It has been compounded by communist misinformation first spread by the KGB in an active measure against Israel and the United States.
The Grito de Yara on October 10, 1868 has a double significance for Cubans, and Black Cubans specifically. It was the initial cry for independence that marked the start of the "Ten Years War" that seriously challenged Spanish colonial rule, and the institution of slavery.
This day marked an immediate and concrete start of liberation.
Plantation and slave owner Carlos
Manuel de Céspedes del
Castillo,
sounded a bell that gathered enslaved black Cubans together to begin the
work day, but on October 10, 1868 he freed them instead.
This slave owner then invited them, if they chose, to take up arms and
join him in a new struggle for independence. The nearest town to his plantation was
called Yara and this cry for freedom became known as the "Grito de
Yara."
This
was a day of choosing for black Cuban slaves and over the next decade
they fought for freedom, together with free blacks, and white Cubans.
On October 10, 1878 in the Pact of Zanjón
slaves that had taken part on either side of the fight were freed, but
those who remained on the sidelines would not be freed until October 7,
1886.
General Martínez Campos and General Antonio Maceo meet
Not everyone agreed with the pact. General Antonio Maceo was summoned by Martínez Campos to Los Mangos de Baraguá on March 15, 1879. General Maceo refused to accept the conditions established in the agreement. He demanded full independence and the complete abolition of slavery. This became known as "La Protesta de Baraguá"
whereGeneral Antonio Maceo told his
Spanish counterpart: "We do not understand each
other".
Juan
Gualberto Gómez Ferrer, a free Cuban black, and leader of the independence struggledefended the rights of Black Cubans for his
entire career. In 1892 he founded the “Directory of Colored Societies” - the same year that slavery ended in Cuba.
It
would be a fair assessment to define October 10, 1868 as not only the
beginning of Cuban independence, but a day to celebrate black liberation
from 373 years of bondage beginning with the arrival of the first African slaves to Cuba in 1513. Over 900,000 Africans would be taken from
West Africa and brought
to Cuba over
350 years.
Juan Gualberto transmitted the order that
began the 2nd war of independence on February 24,
1895. Gómez
Ferrer was captured on February 28, 1895 and imprisoned by the Spanish for
three years. Upon his release he went to New York and continued the struggle
for Cuban independence from exile.
"In December 1898, he
accompanied Major General Calixto García to Washington, D.C. as a member of the
commission sent to negotiate for funds necessary for the Cuban Liberation
Army and recognition of the rebels" by the United States.
Following
independence he was deeply critical of the Platt Amendment. The United
States military had occupied Cuba from 1898 to 1902, and the
bitter price of independence was accepting the Platt Amendment in the
1901 Cuban Constitution, which permitted U.S. interference in Cuban
internal affairs to preserve order
and protect American interests, put into question the status of Cuba's
Isle of Pines as a possible U.S. possession.
Gómez
Ferrer held seats in the
Cuban House of Representatives (1914–1917) and Senate (1917–1925),
representing Havana.
Juan Gualberto Gómez
Ferrer
Between
1886 and 1962 in Cuba, free black people were able to organize in a network of
societies founded by Juan Gualberto Gómez Ferrer to press for black social, economic and political advancement in
Cuba.
Cuba
during the later colonial period, and during the Republic wrestled with the
legacy of slavery, and racism, but it was part of the public discussion – with
its high and low points.
Ugly periods,
such as the 1912 race war, and private discrimination persisted, but so did
black agency to advocate for each other.
General Pedro Ivonnet Dufort was a Mambi officer killed in 1912
Political
leaders had to answer to these black societies, and provide patronage to them,
and in a vibrant free press, and in publishing houses debates on race, and
racism, and the need for redress took place.
The
Central Directory of Societies of Color, founded by Gómez
Ferrer in 1892 succeeded in lobbying for the 1940 Constitution to address racism
in Articles 10,20,74, and 102.
And
although incomplete and too slow, progress had been made in the 1940
Constitution, and in labor legislation to provide greater inclusion for
black
Cubans over the next 20 years.
All
of this came crashing down with Castro’s communist revolution.“Of
the 256 Negro societies in Cuba, manyhave had to close their doors and others are in death agony. One
can
truthfully say, and this is without the slightest exaggeration, that the
Negro
movement in Cuba died at the hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” … “Yet this is
the man
who had the cynical impudence to visit the United States in 1960 for the
purpose of censuring American racial discrimination. Although this evil
obviously exists in the United States, Castro is not precisely the man
to offer
America solutions, nor even to pass judgement,” reported Cuban
nationalist Juan René Betancourt in his essay in the NAACP's publication
The Crisis in 1961.
Some
of the more prominent clubs that are still remembered are the Sociedad Buena
Vista ( Buena Vista Social Club), Amantes del Progreso, Unión
Fraternal, Progreso, Nueva Era, and El Club Atenas.
Juan René Betancourt
Between
1898 and 1959 the relationship between Black-Americans and Black-Cubans
was based on their race and being black minorities. The relationship
between the two diasporas ended when the Castro regime ended autonomous
black civil society in 1962.
It was replaced by Castro and his white
revolutionary elite allying with Black elites in the United States, and Africa. The
Castro regime would selectively target black elites in the NAACP, the
Nation of Islam, and representatives of newly liberated nations in
Africa. This was exemplified by Fidel Castro meeting with Malcolm X on
September 19, 1960.
The elimination of
Afro-Cubans from this dynamic demonstrated how the new communist
revolutionary elite transformed what race meant within the island while
at the same time turning it into a political tool outside of Cuba to advance the Castro regime's communist agenda.
This
ended black agency in Cuba for decades, and replaced it with a policy
based in obedience, submission, and gratitude to the white revolutionary
elite, and this was reflected in official propaganda with racist
tropes.
From the Castro regime's publication Verde Olivo 1, no. 29 (October 1, 1960)
Cuban blacks today that would have been
political leaders in the 1940s and 1950s are dissidents persecuted, hunted and killed by the secret police.
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