http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/end-of ... 14185.html


Raul Castro is 76. How long is he going to last in this?

Doesn't Fidel have any children?

I kind of want to elect McCain now so we can have a geriatric bay of pigs show down.

I am stunned. I'm watching the Spanish channel now because I can't believe there isn't going to be some major celebrations going down around here for the next couple days. Although he didn't die. I remember when the party plans the City of Miami were making following his death were leaked a couple years ago.

on my way to work this morning there were cuban flags everywhere.

As a child of Cuban immigrants (I am first generation American), I don't know what to say. This is what every Cuban in America has been waiting for. At the same time, I don't see anything changing down there for quite some time. The Cubans in Miami would need to help out financially and go down and help rebuild, yet they seem way too comfortable in the states to want to work hard now. The US government would also have to lift this ridiculous embargo, which as of now it says it won't, so I don't see where this transition is going to come from and who is going to lead/implement it. The only Cubans left on that island are either part of the Communist government and military, or living in poverty with no means of helping themselves, nevermind rebuilding a country that's been suffering for 50 years. Their education and healthcare sevices are top notch, and really the only thing they've had going for them, but if the government breaks down and nobody provides any help, those services crumble with it.

The embargo needs to be lifted now, there's no reason for it anymore. Pressure from the US, UN, and most importantly other Latin American countries needs to be put on Raul Castro to hold a free election, or resign himself, or do whatever it takes to really convince people both on the island and in Miami that change is possible. So long as any Castro is in power and this embargo is still effective, any news from the country means nothing.

It is a day for Cubans to rejoice though, and I'm sure even though they're still pessimistic, they are happy at the same time. My grandfather is 85 and not doing well health-wise, it'd be wonderful for him to see his country take a step towards freedom.

http://www.att.net/s/editorial.dll?pnum=1&bfromind=7401&eeid=5702434&_sitecat=1522&dcatid=0&eetype=article&render=y&ac=-2&ck=&ch=ne&rg=blsadstrgt

Miami Quiet Following Castro Resignation
Published: 2/19/08, 11:05 AM EDT
By ADRIAN SAINZ
MIAMI (AP) - Cuban exiles in Little Havana welcomed Tuesday's news that Cuban President Fidel Castro had officially resigned power, but most in the heart of the Cuban exile community weren't optimistic the move would bring major changes or democracy to the communist nation.

As news of the resignation spread, motorists honked vigorously at police patrol cars and television reporters. Shouts of "Free Cuba!" echoed in the streets, and small groups gathered to chat in local eateries. But there was no widespread celebration, just caution.

"I hope this is the beginning of the end of the system, but we have to wait," said 35-year-old chemist Omar Fernandez, who left Cuba for the U.S. six years ago.

Repeated rumors of Castro's death over the years helped prepare residents and officials for a day that all knew would eventually come. The community's reactions so far were calm, peaceful and not as boisterous as when thousands took to the streets after Castro temporarily handed power to his brother Raul in July 2006.

Most exiles view Castro as a ruthless dictator who forced them, their parents or grandparents from their home after he seized power in a revolution in 1959. Police said they were "keeping a sharp eye" on Little Havana, but residents weren't gathering in large numbers to celebrate. Nothing indicated a need for increased patrols off Florida or that a mass migration was imminent, said Coast Guard spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Chris O'Neil.

Ulises Colina, a 65-year-old electrical technician, said he was not certain if the resignation would bring any change. "I think it was a foregone conclusion that his political career would be over soon," Colina said.

Colina theorized that any change in Cuba would have to come from within the military.

"Changes? Well, he's the leader of the gang but he has a bunch of auxiliary gang members who don't want to see change," Colina said.

At a popular Cuban restaurant farther from Little Havana, the sentiments were similar.

"Even though this is great news for Cubans and for me personally, but I don't think anything is going to change," said Jose Miranda, 46. "Last time I was here was when the news said that he was really sick and we thought that he was dead. And look what has happened. Nothing."

A U.S. senator whose parents were Cuban, Robert Menendez, echoed Miranda's comments.

"This Castro is the same as the other in terms of philosophy, having been part of a dictatorship," said Menendez, D-N.J.

"To just embrace Raul would be a huge mistake. All we'd be doing is embracing another dictator," Menendez added.

About 1.5 million Cubans and Cuban-Americans live in the U.S., two-thirds of them in Florida, and the majority in Miami-Dade County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The community with the second-largest Cuban population after Miami is Union City, N.J., where Menendez was formerly mayor.

Since they began arriving, the Miami area has become a mostly Hispanic, bustling city that is a hub for international trade and finance, but also deals with poverty. What was once a city marked by Southern drawls in English transformed into a place where Spanish is spoken everywhere.

The first wave of Cubans who fled the island immediately after Castro took power, often sending their children ahead of them on so-called "Peter Pan" flights, generally support the most hardline U.S. policies toward the island. With waning family ties to the island, they are among the most vocal backers of the U.S. embargo.

The views of the successive waves of Cuban immigrants are more complicated. Those who came over since 1980 are more likely to have grown up under the Castro government and still have family on the island. They chafe under the Bush administration's 2004 restrictions, which limit the money that can be sent home as well restrict island visits to once every three years for immediate relatives only.

Cuba experts in the U.S. didn't expect any immediate changes, or for Castro to completely disappear from view.

"For Cuban-Americans it doesn't mean a whole big deal. It's the continuation with a different face," said Andy Gomez of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies.

Joe Garcia, former executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation and now a Democratic candidate for Congress, cautioned that it was unlikely there would be any immediate political openings in Cuba.

"Today Castro announces the end of the revolution. That doesn't mean it's all over, but that means it allows people to finally begin to move beyond," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Matt Sedensky and Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami and Janet Frankston Lorin in Union City, N.J., contributed to this report.

This won't change anything. He's been retired for nearly two years anyway.

yep. the only change that we might see would be when he dies.

Fucking die already you cunt.

This reminds me of how much I love Cuban sandwiches.

Why do I think somehow George W. Bush will claim this in his legacy? hahahaha

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/02/2 ... with-cuba/

Look at this! Just days after her primary win over Bush Dog Al Wynn and before she will be sworn in, Donna Edwards is already getting face time on major news shows. That’s a rising star for you. Chris Matthews brings Edwards on to temper the right wing fear mongering of Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who apparently has still bought into the great bogeyman of the Cold War era: the Communist. Castro’s despotic and tyrannical rule over Cuba was because he was a 1) despot and 2) tyrant…not because he was a communist. But don’t tell that to Burton.

Notwithstanding that Cuba has represented absolutely no threat to the U.S. since Khrushchev scuttled his missiles, braying pols and official U.S. policy have continued to buttress Castro’s status as a hemispheric bogeyman, oblivious to all measurable reality, much less simple reason. Sure, we’ve traded liberally all through the Clinton and Bush years with far more vicious authoritarian regimes, from Indonesia and China to Colombia– which we’ve armed to the teeth largely to enable fascist paramility Klansmen to murder campesinos so that U.S. corporations can clear-cut their land — but bring up Cuba, the notion of even relaxing nearly a half-century of teeth-gnashing hostility and economic strangulation, and you might as well be Neville Chamberlain in Munich. The reason, of course, is simple political triangulation: the much-contested Florida electorate and its population of right-wing Cubans. [..]

And curiously, Hardball turned to not-yet-even-elected Donna Edwards, of all the Democrats available, to counterpoint Burton. As yet unschooled on the triangulative realities of real politick, herself actually having been to Cuba, Edwards offered the simple admonishments that engaging a society and finding commonalities, versus demonizing them, versus playing global tough guy, might lead to the rudimentary markets and freedoms we’d like to encourage, especially after Helms-Burton had so plainly not worked– and, by the way, after playing global tough guy combined with neolib trade dogma has nearly broken the damn country. “We need to re-establish relations with Cuba on issues of travel, even family travel,” she told Tweety, ” [to] establish dialogue on the ground so that when the transition happens, Cubans have information to make their own decision about their economic future.”

Yeah but Dan Burton is the republican parties version of Cynthia Mckinney.

He's the idiot that gave Roger Clemens the fellatio at the hearings last week. Just another one of those politicians that inexplicably keeps getting reelected.

I can't believe anyone takes that loser seriously.

There isn't really a significant difference, every communist country ends up being a dictatorship.

I was actually in Havana the day he retired and you wouldn't even know anything happened. I only found out because my mom sent me a text seeing if I was ok.

P.S. Cuba was/is awesome. I won't hesitate to go back.

Yeah, they're really inseperable. The only way for communism to not be a dictatorship is if it were 100% voluntary (and that has never happened, in case you've been keeping score). If you don't voluntarily submit to it, the only way for your wealth to be redistributed is through tyranny. To implement communism, you have to forcefully take property from the wealthy, so there's really no getting around the tyranny thing.

This is a pretty great STFU to Sean Penn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opini ... .html?_r=1

January 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Dangers of the Penn
By ROGER COHEN

I thought I’d begin 2009 with a movie, so on its first freezing afternoon I went to see Gus Van Sant’s “Milk,” starring Sean Penn in a breathtaking performance as a smart, wry gay-rights politician whose whimsical effectiveness arouses murderous ire.

Playing Harvey Milk, slain in 1978 after becoming the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, Penn demonstrates why he’s the finest character actor around. He inhabits Milk’s vulnerability as completely as Gielgud inhabited Lear’s folly.

Even as he stands before a San Francisco gay community incensed by proposals to bar them from teaching in Californian public schools, Penn imbues Milk less with a bully-pulpit rage than a quivering indignation that speaks of the hurt of closeted sexuality.

He quotes the Declaration of Independence to refute anti-gay bigotry: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ... . ”

It’s a powerful moment, one that brought my current obsession with Penn to breaking-point.

Was this really the same Sean Penn who’d just penned a fawning tribute to the grim Cuban president, Raúl Castro, a dictator presiding over a 50-year-old revolution that once dispatched gays to labor camps to correct their “counterrevolutionary tendencies?”

Yes, it was, despite the fact that “Milk” is precisely about the sort of grass-roots political movement that would be impossible in the Cuba of the Castro brothers, despite the fact that the “inalienable rights” of hundreds of Cuban political prisoners are trampled daily and despite the fact that the pursuit of happiness for most Cubans has been reduced to eking out an existence on $20 a month.

(Yes, I know about Cuba’s achievements in education and health care, and gays no longer face outright persecution. But even basic liberties, like the freedom to leave, are denied Cubans in the name of a socialism that allowed an ailing Fidel to hand power to the 77-year-old Raúl — the Castro dynasty’s geriatric version of revolutionary politics.)

Penn is a poor writer, as rambling as a journalist as he is disciplined as an actor. A gift for detachment is as important to the journalist as a gift for empathy is to the actor. Penn has only the latter.

His awful December cover story in The Nation has been elaborated in still more interminable form this month at HuffingtonPost.com, where Penn accuses the “mainstream media” of being “conscious manufacturers of deception,” before allowing Raúl Castro to ramble on for seven hours without a meaningful question about Cuba’s disastrous economic situation or stifling political system.

When I read the piece, I’d just returned from Cuba, where among the more prominent of Raúl’s reforms has been allowing Cubans into hotels for the first time (seriously!) and granting them access to cellphones costing six times their monthly salary.

Yet here’s Penn waxing lyrical (and delusional) about how “Raúlism was on the rise” and allowing the president to proclaim, without any comeback from our actor-journalist, that:

“I am the longest standing minister of armed forces in history. Forty-eight-and-a-half years until last October. That’s why I’m in this uniform.”

Yes, Mr. President, and that’s precisely why you should take it off and go home.

Penn, by the way, traveled to Cuba from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela on a plane loaned by the Venezuelan Ministry of Energy and Petroleum. But, says Penn, that’s like a “journalist flying on Air Force One.” He’s apparently unaware that journalists on the U.S. presidential plane pay commercial rates.

But I don’t want to quibble. Penn’s not the first leftist star seduced by revolution despite dictatorship: Simone Signoret and Yves Montand touring Eastern Europe after the Soviet bludgeoning of Hungary in 1956 comes to mind. The French left had a very hard time getting Stalin in focus, just as part of the Euro-American left cannot free itself of Castro worship. Lenin’s “useful idiots” still abound.

They are dangerous. Penn as Milk gets it. Penn the foreign correspondent flails. Certain rights are indeed inalienable, first among them freedom. No Wall Street excess or U.S. failing changes that.

I asked Christopher Hitchens, who accompanied Penn but was snubbed by Castro, why the actor was in the thrall of Castroism. “A lot of people cannot believe there is no alternative to free-market, bourgeois democracy,” Hitchens said. “It would be too bitter a pill for them to swallow if the Cuban Revolution were nothing but a cruel joke on the Cubans. Sometimes David just has to triumph over the American Goliath.”

Romance is treacherous in politics. I couldn’t reach Penn, but if I had, I would have said this: “Sean, truth is as elusive for a journalist as it is for an actor. It takes work. You should never have written that this was Raúl’s ‘first ever interview to a foreign journalist’ in 50 years. You’re no journalist.

“The Bush years have taught us the dangers of amateurism and the preciousness of freedom. Your journalism flouts those lessons even as your brilliant acting illuminates them.”