Sunday, July 28, 2024

Hope, prayers, and solidarity for pro-democracy activists taking part in today's elections in Venezuela

In remembrance of Génesis, Geraldine, Anthony, Robert, Bassil, and the many others.

 Civil society and the democratic opposition face a great challenge: Ensure all votes of Venezuelans are counted, and the results respected. This election in Venezuela is being held under a dictator who has said he will not hand over power, and is doing all he can to steal it.

Nicolas Maduro has warned that if he loses the election there will be a bloodbath in Venezuela.

Maduro is a dictator, the Venezuelan government is a narco-tyranny with some extremely nasty actors that have demonstrated over the past 25 years the willingness to kill large numbers of Venezuelans to hang on to power.

The Venezuelan dictatorship has been trained by the worse thugs in Havana, Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing. They are experts in the use of violence and terror to hang on to power.

The best chance to defeat them is neither through appeasement or violence, but through strategic nonviolent resistance. I have been witnessing it over the past weeks, and hope to see it continued today, and in the days to come, when Maduro attempts to hang on to power.

My hope is informed by the late Czech dissident Vaclav Havel's definition of the word that is not equated with success but rather the certainty that what one is doing is both good and coherent. In 1990 in the book, Disturbing the Peace, Havel explained how he viewed hope.

“Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

My prayers, hope and solidarity with Venezuelans in the pro-democracy movement in their ongoing struggle for restoring democracy in Venezuela.


Gloria al Bravo Pueblo!

  

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Hezbollah and Hamas commit acts of terrorism around the world, with support from Havana, and today protesters in Washington DC celebrated these terrorist groups while burning American flags

Eighty-five Argentinians, many but not all Jewish, were killed by Hezbollah on July 18, 1994, in an act of international terrorism when the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires was blown up.

A siren sounded at the precise time a Hezbollah suicide bomber, Ibrahim Berro, drove a car laden with explosives in front of the AMIA, and pressed the detonator setting off the explosion on July 18, 1994 at 9:53am (1253 GMT) and reduced the seven-story Jewish-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA) community center in Buenos Aires to rubble reported the BBC.

85 people were murdered ranging in age from five years old to 67 years old and more than 300 hundred wounded. 30 years later those responsible for this act of terrorism remain at large.

The American Jewish Committee called it “the deadliest antisemitic attack outside Israel since the Holocaust.”

This was true until October 7, 2023 when Hamas invaded Israel, and carried out a terrorist attack against civilians murdering 1,200 people in Israel.

Leticia Martinez, head of communications for Miguel Diaz-Canel posted a message celebrating a “Free Palestine” in the aftermath of the October 7th terrorist attacks on her social media.

She was not alone.  

In the midst of this barbarism and evil, Castro Regime spokesman "El Necio" cites Che Guevara visit to Gaza as inflection point that turned Palestine into a world cause, and posts photos of the Argentine guerilla with Middle East leaders during a visit there at the start of the Cuban dictatorship. He lies about Israel calling it a "Zionist colonization" without recognizing Jewish people as indigenous to this their ancestral lands. He claims that Guevara is the inspiration for the "resistance" i.e. terrorist barbarism taking place today, and concludes his rant with "Che Lives." 

The Cuban government, and their agents of influence did not limit themselves to cyberspace.

On October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas terrorist massacre in southern Israel, militant leftists organized a protest in Times Square to celebrate the killings as an act of resistance and waved signs with anti-Semitic slogans and images. The Center for a Free Cuba took notice of this protest at the time, and how official Cuban media was promoting it. On October 11, 2023, The People’s Forum (TPF) issued a statement defending their October 8th rally in Times Square, doubling down on their support for the terrorist attack.

Manolo de los Santos w/ Diaz-Canel Sept 2023. Santos on 10/8/23 celebrates Hamas terror 

The group’s co-executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, is a longtime researcher at the Marxist Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and was “based out of Cuba for many years,” where he “worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations,” according to his biography at the anti-Israel group Black Alliance for Peace. In July 2022, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, received De los Santos and executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Vijay Prashad with the aim of “elaborating a new consensus, based on theory and according to the different experiences of social movements and countries, on the path of socialism.”

On January 24, 2024 Manolo De Los Santos spoke the quiet part out loud at The People’s Forum in New York City: “When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”

De Los Santos is echoing Karl Marx’s early formulation of communism which is antisemitic and offers a “solution” to the “Jewish Problem.”

Today, protesters carrying Hezbollah, and Hamas flags sprayed graffiti, burned American flags, and beat up police officers in Washington DC.  One protester carried a poster with  mushroom cloud over an Israeli flag that said "Allah is gathering all the Zionists for a final solution."

 Truth squad for Israel

These Islamists and communists continue to spread a number of lies against the Jewish people. One of the most outrageous is to deny that Israelis are the indigenous people to the land they inhabit.

The Jewish people are indigenous to the land they live on today, and also 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 conquered by the Roman Empire in 63 BC. Over the next two thousand years, empires would rule over Israel, to be replaced by another until the British Empire in the 20th century when the Jewish people reclaimed their homeland, and were recognized by the United Nations in 1948.

The Cuban dictatorship has spent decades slandering Israel. Fidel Castro personally equated the Jewish state with Nazi Germany, and the communist regime has promoted antisemitic tropes, and discriminated against Cuban Jews.

What of these libels against Israel?

Numbers do not lie, but the Communists and their Islamic allies do.

 In 1933 there were 9.5 million Jewish people living in Europe. Following the Nazi holocaust, the Jewish population in Europe in 1950 was reduced to 3.5 million. The world Jewish population in 1939 was 16,728,000, and in 1945 it had shrunk to 11,000,000.

Palestinians and the Castro dictatorship for decades have accused, and continue to accuse, Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”.

In 1948 there were 1.4 million Palestinians living in what is today, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Today there are 7 million Palestinians living there, and 7.05 million living in the diaspora.

The Palestinian population under 75 years of Israeli “occupation” has grown five fold, and the total world population has grown. This is the antithesis of what happened to Jewish people during the Nazi regime both in Europe, and worldwide.

Since the 1960s Cuba’s communist dictatorship has trained terrorists to attack Israel. In 1973 the Castro regime sent 3,000 Cuban troops to Syria, and invaded Israel on October 6, 1973.

It is not surprising that hours after Hamas terrorists entered Israel on October 7th killed 1,200 Israelis, wounded over 3,360, launched over 6,300 rockets, murdered, raped, and kidnapped civilians; Havana and The People’s Forum blamed the victims.

 

Sunday, July 21, 2024

Remembering Cuban dissident leaders, Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero, both assassinated by the Cuban dictatorship on July 22, 2012.

We remember.

  

The Cuban dictatorship imprisons, forcibly exiles, or kills those who nonviolently advocate for human rights reforms within the existing constitutional framework. The Castro dynasty has also engaged in and sponsored terrorism for 65 years, but before spreading terror around the world, the Castros took power in Cuba through a campaign of terrorism that included bombings, killings, kidnappings, and hijackings in the 1950s.

On July 22, 2012, Havana's secret police murdered Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante, two heroes for democracy in the Americas. The Cuban dictatorship, and its agents of influence have continued to attempt to cover up this crime.

Last year, following a ten year investigation, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights confirmed that the two human rights defenders were killed by Cuban government agents.

Oswaldo Payá  was sixty years old when he was assassinated by Castro regime agents on this day 12 years ago. 

Oswaldo was a family man and lay Catholic from Havana, an engineer who, in September 1988, founded the Christian Liberation Movement with fellow Catholics in the El Cerro neighborhood, and over the next 23 years would carry out important campaigns to support human rights and a democratic transition in Cuba. 

He would speak out against human rights breaches and demand victims' dignity, even if it meant denouncing the United States for mistreating Al Qaeda prisoners at the Guantanamo Naval Base prison in 2002.

Oswaldo was a consistent defender of human rights, but not the only one.

Harold Cepero  was 32 years old when he was extrajudicially executed alongside Oswaldo. He was from the town of Chambas in Ciego de Ávila.  Harold began studying at the University of Camaguey when he was 18 years old, and in 2002, he and other students signed the Varela Project. It was a legal measure inside the existing Cuban constitution sponsored by the Christian Liberation Movement.

Despite this, Harold and other students were expelled from the university for signing it and sharing it with others. The secret police would organize a mob to "judge", scream at, insult, threaten and expel the students who had signed the Varela Project. Following his expulsion on November 13, 2002, Harold wrote a letter warning that "those who steal the rights of others steal from themselves. Those who remove and crush freedom are the true slaves." 

Expelled from university for signing the Varela Project with fellow students. He enrolled in a seminary and began studying for the priesthood before leaving to join the Christian Liberation Movement, embracing a new vocation as a human rights defender.

Why did the Cuban dictatorship seek revenge on Oswaldo and Harold? The Varela Project proved to the world that thousands of Cubans were dissatisfied with the status quo and wanted human rights and multiparty democracy restored in Cuba. This contradicted the official narrative.

On May 10, 2002, Oswaldo, along with Regis Iglesias and Tony Diaz Sanchez of the Christian Liberation Movement, turned in 11,020 Varela Project petitions, and news of the petition drive was reported worldwide.

Regis Iglesias and Tony Diaz Sanchez were sentenced to long prison sentences in March 2003 following show trials, along with 73 other Cuban dissidents. Many of them had taken part in the Varela Project and, nearly eight years later, were forced into exile as an alternative to completing their prison sentences.

In spite of the crackdown, Oswaldo would turn in another 14,384 petition signatures with Freddy Martini on October 5, 2003. He would spend the next eight years campaigning for the release of his imprisoned compatriots and continuing campaigns to achieve a democratic transition in Cuba.

Ten years, two months and twelve days after turning in the first Varela Project petitions while traveling with two international visitors in Eastern Cuba on a Sunday afternoon on July 22, 2012, Oswaldo and Harold were killed. Cuban state security bumped into the car they were driving, and when the vehicles stopped, with everyone still alive in the car, they approached the driver, striking him in the temple with the butt of a pistol. Within hours, the lifeless bodies of both men would appear.
 
Cuba currently has around 1,100 political prisoners, with many more imprisoned under the Orwellian statute known as "precrime." The dictatorship will lock you up simply because you have the potential to become a threat in the future.

Oswaldo Payá, when awarded the Sakharov prize for Freedom of Thought on December 17, 2002, spoke prophetically when he said: "The cause of human rights is a single cause, just as the people of the world are a single people." "The talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain human will be jeopardized."

In the midst of the darkness, it is critical to recall the beams of light that illuminate the path to freedom and the full enjoyment of human rights in Cuba and around the world.

Oswaldo Payá, Harold Cepero, and others, both living and dead, laid the framework for the nonviolent nature of the large nationwide protests that began on July 11, 2021, which established a new before and after in Cuban history.


Thursday, July 18, 2024

AMIA: 30 years later still no justice for victims of terrorist attack that killed 85 people

30 years of impunity in Argentina 

AMIA cultural center bombed in Buenos Aires in 1994

In the span of a week in July 1994, two acts of terrorism killed over 122 Latin Americans. Thirty-seven Cubans were murdered by by Cuban government agents on July 13, 1994, in what amounted to an act of state terrorism, and eighty-five Argentinians, many but not all Jewish, were killed by Hezbollah five days later, on July 18, 1994, in an act of international terrorism. 

Much has been written about the victims of the "13 de Marzo" massacre in the last week, but today, marking thirty years since the bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires, the reality that justice has yet to be served demands that we speak up. 

Justice delayed is justice denied. The World Jewish Congress reports that this act of terrorism was carried out by Hezbollah and supported by Iran.

Havana has permitted the terrorist organization Hezbollah to establish "an operational base in Cuba, designed to support terrorist attacks throughout Latin America," according to emails hacked from then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. The Cuban dictatorship has a decades long relationship with this terrorist movement, and has a serious problem with Jews.

What happened thirty years ago today in Buenos Aires?
A siren sounded at the precise time the bomb exploded on July 18, 1994 at 9:53am (1253 GMT) and reduced the seven-story Jewish-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA) community centre in Buenos Aires to rubble reported the BBC.

85 people were murdered ranging in age from five years old to 67 years old and more than 300 hundred wounded. 30 years later those responsible for this act of terrorism remain at large. A movement to pay homage to the victims of this crime continues to remember and demand justice three decades later.

Photos of AMIA victims
 

The names of the 85 victims:

Silvana Alguea de Rodríguez, Jorge Antúnez, Moisés Gabriel Arazi, Carlos Avendaño Bobadilla, Yanina Averbuch, Naum Band, Sebastián Barreiros, David Barriga, Hugo Norberto Basiglio, Rebeca Violeta Behar de Jurín, Dora Belgorosky, Favio Enrique Bermúdez, Romina Ambar Luján Boland, Emiliano Gastón Brikman, Gabriel Buttini, Viviana Adela Casabé, Paola Sara Czyzewski, Jacobo Chemauel, Cristian Adrián Degtiar, Diego De Pirro, Ramón Nolberto Díaz, Norberto Ariel Dubin, Faiwel Dyjament, Mónica Feldman de Goldfeder, Alberto Fernández, Martín Figueroa, Ingrid Finkelchtein, Leonor Gutman de Finkelchtein, Fabián Marcelo Furman, Guillermo Benigno Galarraga, Erwin García Tenorio, José Enrique Ginsberg (Kuky), Cynthia Verónica Goldenberg, Andrea Judith Guterman, Silvia Leonor Hersalis, Carlos Hilú, Emilia Jakubiec de Lewczuk, María Luisa Jaworski, Analía Verónica Josch, Carla Andrea Josch, Elena Sofía Kastika, Esther Klin, León Gregorio Knorpel, Berta Kozuk de Losz, Luis Fernando Kupchik, Agustín Diego Lew, Jesús María Lourdes, Andrés Gustavo Malamud, Gregorio Melman, Ileana Mercovich, Naón Bernardo Mirochnik (Buby), Mónica Nudel, Elías Alberto Palti, Germán Parsons, Rosa Perelmuter, Fernando Roberto Pérez, Abraham Jaime Plaksin, Silvia Inés Portnoy, Olegario Ramírez, Noemí Graciela Reisfeld, Félix Roberto Roisman, Marisa Raquel Said, Ricardo Said, Rimar Salazar Mendoza, Fabián Schalit, Pablo Schalit, Mauricio Schiber, Néstor Américo Serena, Mirta Strier, Liliana Edith Szwimer, Naum Javier Tenenbaum, Juan Carlos Terranova, Emilia Graciela Berelejis de Toer, Mariela Toer, Marta Treibman, Angel Claudio Ubfal, Eugenio Vela Ramos, Juan Vela Ramos, Gustavo Daniel Velázquez, Isabel Victoria Núñez de Velázquez, Danilo Villaverde, Julia Susana Wolinski de Kreiman, Rita Worona, Adehemar Zárate Loayza.
Over the past thirty years much has been written about this crime and today the 30th anniversary interviews, articles and events  were carried out to recall that terrible day on July 18, 1994 and the need for truth and justice. Below is a playlist a compilation of news footage related to the July 18, 1994 AMIA terror attacks.

Please share this blog entry with others and join in remembering and demanding truth and justice for these victims of terrorism.


 

Saturday, July 13, 2024

July 13th now has a double significance for victims of communism in China and Cuba

  Free Chinese and free Cubans share a common day to mourn their victims of communism.

Over the past 30 years Cubans have mourned the 37 men, women, and children who were extrajudicially executed by Cuban government agents on July 13, 1994 when the "13 de Marzo" tugboat was attacked and sunk.

Tragically, Chinese Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and human rights defender Liu Xiaobo who died seven years ago on July 13, 2017 at the First Hospital of China Medical University, in Shenyang, China after being unjustly imprisoned from December 8, 2008 until his untimely death nearly 10 years later. 

It is likely that he died of a cancer made terminal by politically motivated neglect. Today marks five years since his passing. After eight years in "unofficial detention" his widow Liu Xia was finally allowed to leave China on July 10, 2018.

Liu Xiaobo  was one of the authors of Charter 08 and signed it along with more than three hundred Chinese citizens. The Charter is a manifesto that was released on December 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It calls for more freedom of expression, human rights, more democratic elections, the privatization of state enterprises and economic liberalization and would collect over 10,000 signatures.


 Charter 08 is reminiscent of the Varela Project that was initially signed by 11,020 Cubans in May of 2002 calling on the Cuban government to respect international human rights norms and engage in the same kind of reforms. Both were inspired by Vaclav Havel and Charter 77. Lamentably, the author of the Varela Project, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, founding leader of the Christian Liberation Movement and a youth leader of the same movement, Harold Cepero Escalante were both extrajudicially executed twelve years ago on July 22, 2012 in a crash engineered by the Cuban dictatorship's agents.

The demand for justice remains unfulfilled in all these cases, but we must not despair.

We bear witness embracing truth and memory in defiance of the attempt to whitewash and forget. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explained the importance of doing this in his 1986 Nobel Lecture on why it is important to remember:  

"To forget the victims means to kill them a second time. So I couldn't prevent the first death. I surely must be capable of saving them from a second death." ... "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." 

In 2017, I was present at a candlelight vigil in Washington, DC on July 17th organized by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to pay my respects for Liu Xiaobo and demonstrate my solidarity with Chinese human rights defenders.


 On Wednesday, July 10, 2024 I was in front of the Cuban embassy in a vigil in solidarity with Cubans jailed for taking to the streets in over 50 towns and cities across Cuba, in remembrance of Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, and Christian Barrera Díaz during the 11J protests, for the 37 victims of the July 13, 1994 "13 de Marzo" tugboat massacre and in remembrance of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante both killed by the secret police on July 22, 2012. Together with a dozen others we said prayers for these victims of communism, their loved ones, and for justice.

We continue to remember, and demand justice. 

 

July 11, 2022
Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, Age: 36
Christian Barrera Díaz, Age: 24


July 13, 2017
Liu Xiaobo, Age: 61

July 22, 2012
Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Age: 60
Harold Cepero Escalante, Age: 32

July 13, 1994
Hellen Martínez Enriquez. Age: 5 Months
Xicdy Rodríguez Fernández. Age: 2
Angel René Abreu Ruíz. Age: 3
José Carlos Niclas Anaya. Age: 3
Giselle Borges Alvarez. Age: 4
Caridad Leyva Tacoronte. Age: 5
Juan Mario Gutiérrez García. Age: 10
Yousell Eugenio Pérez Tacoronte. Age: 11
Yasser Perodín Almanza. Age: 11
Eliécer Suárez Plasencia. Age: 12
Mayulis Méndez Tacoronte. Age: 17
Miladys Sanabria Leal. Age: 19
Joel García Suárez. Age: 20
Odalys Muñoz García. Age: 21
Yalta Mila Anaya Carrasco. Age: 22
Luliana Enríquez Carrazana. Age: 22
Jorge Gregorio Balmaseda Castillo. Age: 24
Lissett María Alvarez Guerra. Age: 24
Ernesto Alfonso Loureiro. Age: 25
María Miralis Fernández Rodríguez. Age: 27
Leonardo Notario Góngora. Age: 28
Jorge Arquímedes Levrígido Flores. Age: 28
Pilar Almanza Romero. Age: 31
Rigoberto Feu González. Age: 31
Omar Rodríguez Suárez. Age: 33
Lázaro Enrique Borges Briel. Age: 34
Julia Caridad Ruíz Blanco. Age: 35
Martha Caridad Tacoronte Vega. Age: 35
Eduardo Suárez Esquivel. Age: 38
Martha Mirella Carrasco Sanabria. Age: 45
Augusto Guillermo Guerra Martínez. Age: 45
Rosa María Alcalde Puig. Age: 47
Estrella Suárez Esquivel. Age: 48
Reynaldo Joaquín Marrero Alamo. Age: 48
Amado González Raices. Age: 50
Fidencio Ramel Prieto Hernández. Age: 51
Manuel Cayol. Age: 56