08/11/15

America Naively Swoons While Communist Cuba Cracks Down

By: Ben Weingarten

What is it about dictatorships that make Americans swoon?

Juxtaposing two recent articles published within 24 hours of each other on Cuba is instructive.

First, a Wall Street Journal article titled “Amid Thaw, First Authorized U.S. Yacht Sails to Cuba on Hopes of Travel Surge” reads:

The 78-foot Still Water docked in the marina late Wednesday after a four-hour jaunt. Aboard the sleek yacht were three crew and 12 passengers eager to see Cuba before the sharp economic and social change that many Americans expect to sweep the country as a long-frozen U.S.-Cuba relationship thaws. Some also hoped to sniff out business opportunities that such a transformation might spawn.

“Being born in the 50s and being indoctrinated the way we were, it’s interesting to be able to see this,” said 57-year-old passenger Jack McClurg, who manages his personal investments from Colorado and sails the Caribbean in his own 115-foot Italian-made yacht. “I’m just wanting to see this change happening.”

… Though Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro agreed in December to restore diplomatic relations between their countries, the trade embargo remains largely in effect. But officials and entrepreneurs in both countries are chipping at its edges, hoping to marry U.S. investors with Cuba’s hope to revive its economy.

“The genie of free enterprise is out of the bottle and it is a powerful genie,” Jose Viera, a retired senior Cuban diplomat, assured the yacht’s group in a private briefing. [Emphasis mine]

Contrast this sunny view with what is actually happening on the island to non-apparitchiks:

With tense bilateral ties recently renewed after five decades, and top US diplomat John Kerry due in Havana in days, Cuba arrested some 90 activists on Sunday.

Cuban security forces rounded up marchers — about 50 with the Ladies in White dissident group and around 40 other activists, some wearing masks with the image of US President Barack Obama, according to an AFP reporter.

One protester slammed Obama, and said the December announcement to normalize relations between the former Cold war foes had bolstered Havana’s crackdown on dissidents.

“It’s his fault, what is happening,” said former political prisoner Angel Moya, speaking about Obama.

“The Cuban government has grown even bolder,” he added before being detained. [Emphasis mine]

This is just the latest in a series of crackdowns on dissent in Communist Cuba, where in July the Cuba Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN) documented 674 political arrests, the highest number since June 2014.

To travel to Castro-run Cuba is to give a regime still dedicated to the violent overthrow of the capitalist order your sanction. We should not be sanctioning a great evil.

03/19/15

Anti-Marxist Counter-Revolution in Latin America

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

On Saturday, March 21, at 1:00 p.m., the Washington Conclave for Democracy will be held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to discuss freedom, democracy and free elections in Latin America. “The conference is aimed to expose fraud and deception in electoral processes in Latin America,” says organizer Dalmo Accorsini. The event is open to the press and the public and will feature several speakers with knowledge of the communist advance in the Western hemisphere, including in the U.S. The event will congregate conservative leaders and political activists from the USA and Latin America to denounce the Foro de São Paulo and the recent election results in Brazil.

The National Press Club is located at 529 14th Street, NW, 13th Floor, Washington DC, DC 20045 United States. Contact: Dalmo Accorsini, 561-803-5724, [email protected]

Background: With the end of the Cold War in 1989, it was believed by many that communism was on the wane. However, with Fidel Castro isolated in Cuba, he reached out to Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva of the Worker’s Party of Brazil, who would later become President of Brazil. An event was hosted in São Paulo, Brazil in 1990, the seat of Lula’s power, bringing together what came to be known as the São Paulo Forum.

03/8/15

New Zealander: Amnesty Is Obama’s Trump Card To Transform America

Hat Tip: Nelson Abdullah

By: Ginni Thomas
The Daily Caller

Libertarian New Zealander, author and founder of the popular website, KeyWiki.org, Trevor Loudon is spending a lot of time lately telling Americans that “amnesty is the trump card” for President Obama to permanently transform America.

Citing a speech in 2010 by White House consultant and radical leftist, Eliseo Medina, Loudon implores Americans to wake up before it is too late in this video interview. He says, with Mitt Romney losing to Obama in 2012 by 2 and ½ million votes, if Obama can succeed in legalizing “10, 15 or 20 million more votes, almost all of whom will vote Democrat,” Obama can lock in progressive electoral victories for the foreseeable future and “make it practically impossible for the Republicans to ever elect another president.”

As for the Republican consultants who promote Hispanic outreach and the need for amnesty for future Republican victories, Loudon asks why would anyone listen to Karl Rove, “when he has lost so many elections.” Dismissing Rove as “a fool” who “spits on his base,” Loudon believes these consultants and Republicans are doing the bidding of the business community who want cheap labor. Loudon reminds viewers of what Lenin said, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”

Asking why new Latinos would be of higher value to Karl Rove and the political consultants than the 20 million conservative Christians currently not registered to vote, Loudon says Rove is demonstrating a “lack of understanding of political realities in his own country.”

Deriding those Republicans or conservatives who still write off President Obama as “incompetent,” he says this is a “power play for control with no viable opposition” reminiscent of what happened in South Africa, Venezuela and Czechoslovakia, with public deception covering up the true nature of regime change.

Although many in his country and in America may not be paying attention to politics, those foreign commentators who are, he says, are troubled by what they see happening. Loudon says, for those “thinking New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians, Brits, French and Germans, they are just freakin’ out. They are so worried. They see what Obama is doing to Israel. They see ISIS expanding in the Middle East. They see China building a big blue-water navy in the Pacific. They see Putin bullying the Ukraine, clearly wanting to reestablish his empire in Europe. They are freaking out because they have just come to the realization that they have been relying on America to defend them… when America is actually working for the other side, in many instances.”

To this self-described libertarian, Obama and his allies have set their sights on not just fundamentally transforming America, but the world. After all, Loudon says, “The world leader who was protecting us from the bad guys [America] is now helping the bad guys.”

Loudon ends with the admonition, “If America loses its Constitution, everything good about America will go. Vladimir Putin, the Chinese and the Iranians will rule the planet,” he says. “What you guys do in the next two years is going to make a huge difference to the fate of our civilization.”

WATCH PART 2:

For more on Trevor Loudon see his book, “The Enemies Within,” and his current short term crowd-sourcing fundraiser effort to produce a movie of the book by next October here.