The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this Tuesday and upheld Florida's 2006 state law prohibiting state university funding for trips to designated State Sponsors of Terrorism such as Cuba.

Marc over at Uncommon Sense has updates on the continued manipulations of Cuba's imprisoned political opposition by the regime and its accomplices.

6 Cuban political prisoners arrive in Spain today

Officials tell Cuban political prisoner he will be released Friday

The Human Rights Foundation has a released an exclusive video documentary short of the Ladies in White.

Socialist propaganda from the Obama administration.

One accepts campaign contributions from those doing business with Cuba's criminal and murderous regime, and the other one doesn't.

... Cuba is a passionate point of contention in the fiery race between Rivera, a Republican, and Garcia, a Democrat. The two Cuban Americans -- who at different times each worked for the same powerful Cuban-exile group -- back the trade embargo and a ban on U.S. tourist travel, but are otherwise at odds on greater engagement with the island.

For evidence, look no further than their campaign contributions: Those who want more travel to Cuba are contributing to Garcia. Those in favor of keeping tougher sanctions against Cuba back Rivera.

Instapundit:

And — to take things beyond the Obama question — on a similar moral plane. In fact, if you look at a Marxist Utopia — say, Cuba — what you’ll see is basically a plantation. At the top, you’ve got the Massa and his family — Fidel, Raul, et al. — followed by various layers of overseers — the Communist Party apparat, the secret police — and House Negroes — e.g., the state-controlled media — all living off the surplus labor of the Field Negroes, whose produce is disposed of not according to their own desires (that would be capitalism!) but according to their betters’. This, we’re told is for the best, since they aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions anyway, and the Massa looks after them with food, housing, and health care. Slaveholders even defended their system as more humane and less exploitative than atomistic capitalism, conveniently ignoring the role of the lash, just as apologists for Marxism conveniently ignore the role of the gulag.

Sometimes, word just fall way short:

Unreal.

(H/T our friend Frank Resillez, who in NO WAY endorses these commercials' viewpoints!)

The incomparable Alfredo Pong:

Newsweek's Mac Margolis has written an interesting article detailing the increasing attacks against the free press by leftist governments in Latin America. Although Margolis makes a feeble attempt to attribute these attacks to governments both on the left and the right, he finds himself only being able to cite as current offenders the leftist governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, and Nicaragua.

Nevertheless, it is a surprisingly interesting and informative article, which you can read HERE.

Read this series of five profoundly moving entries from the translated version of Ángel Santiesteban's beautiful blog Los Hijos Que Nadie Quiso/The Children Nobody Wanted:

 Prison Diary 4, Hunger:

The sergeants collect the empty trays, so well cleaned by the tongues of the detainees they don’t need to be washed.

The sound of the last door being shut leaves a silence that makes them feel more trapped, and the air, scarce and hot, suffocates them.

No detainee would even dare to raise their voice to avoid being taken to the punishment cell for indiscipline. The sergeants walk slowly, stopping to spy through the doors and listen to what the prisoners say when the apathy and despair of seclusion provokes a feverish state of anxiety that spills out into idle talk, and later they denounce them to the higher-ups.

When the silence feels eternal, some sadistic mechanism stops the night, making it last longer than usual; and there comes a whisper, a word grinding at the metal doors, sliding on the floor like a glass of water; and the detainees are frightened because they know well the voices of each sergeants, the steps, the way they let their boots fall when they walk, how they clear their throats and even how they snore. So, from their cells, they are all intrigued because they can’t decipher whose voice escapes like a lament. This time it is not someone who dreams and calls out for a loved one or shouts the name of an officer telling him to stay away, now someone shouts from a cell, every word pronounced forcefully; at first you can’t hear what he’s saying, then you understand something like, “I’m hungry.”

The sergeants quickly walk past the cells, searching, like dogs with rabies, for where the voice is coming from; they open the slot, tell him to shut up, but the detainee talks, and through the orifice of the door the words escape with more clarity, forgive me, sergeant, but I don’t know how to bear hunger, I can’t stand it, a thousand pardons, but I have always been a man with a good appetite; the guards continue advising him it is better to remain silent, that if he continues it will go very badly for him; the prisoner begins to plead, and the plea becomes tears. They warn him that later they won’t be able to do anything when he wants to stop, now is the time; but the detainee cries like a baby and asks forgiveness, he was never a man who caused problems, I never have been, please, understand me.

The sound of the padlock is heard, and then of the bolt being violently opened, then the screech of the hinges. The man’s panic grows, his weeping increases while the menacing voices of the sergeants question him; he begs them not to hit him; and the guards tell him then shut up and they’ll leave and there won’t be any problems; they insist that he understand they are giving him more chances than usual, but the detainee claims that they don’t understand him, the problem is that he can’t stand the hunger, it’s something that’s not in me, I don’t know how to control it.

We hear a few blows, and then he cries. The sergeants ask him if he is finally going to shut up, and the prisoner in the midst of his uncontrollable crying explains that even a piece of stale bread is enough, a tiny scrap of leftovers, a piece of sweet potato. The guards realize that not even the blows will shut him up and decide to take him to the punishment cell, what they call “the hammock.” His weeping turns into screams of panic, not the hammock, please, not there. And the sergeants force themselves on him to immobilize him to be able to move him. The detainee twists his body, curls up like spring so he can burst out and escape the hands of jailers, until he can’t move any more and they drag him in front of the other cells. He keeps crying and apologizing, he doesn’t want them to see him as an antisocial, he’s a good man, but with a big appetite, this is his only crime. Not the hammock, I’m afraid, he says. They take off his clothes, as the punishment requires, throw him in the cell and close it; but the soldiers know they haven’t done much, the detainee keeps asking for food because he is a man with a good appetite, he’s convinced that this excuse is enough to make them understand.

The sergeants open the cell, they warn him if he keeps acting up it’s going to make them furious. But nothing shuts him up, he asks for food over and over. One of them enters, desperate, and hits him over and over until he realizes he won’t shut up as long as he’s conscious. Another soldier brings handcuffs for his hands and feet and some bandages to tape his mouth. They struggle with him a while until the voice of the detainee can no longer be heard. Then they slam the door and from the footsteps of the sergeants and the way they let their boots fall, the detainees conclude that they are tired. The silence returns, a silence that had been forgotten for a few minutes.

At dawn, they open the punishment cell. Nobody has been able to sleep thinking of the man in the “hammock,” on the damp floor bathed by the drops of water that inevitably fall from the ceiling and crash against his body; they know it’s unbearable to spend an entire day there.

When they take the bandage off his mouth he’s still crying, now with less strength, but you can still hear his voice: I’m hungry, please, I’m a man with a good appetite.

Translated by Raul G.

Via: Gordiano

Cincinnati Reds manager Dusty Baker on Cuban pitcher Aroldis Chapman's ability to deal with pressure while throwing 105 mph fastballs.

“I think he can handle it because if you can handle pitching for food - which is what he was doing in Cuba, pitching for food - then you can handle pitching here.”

Juan O. Tamayo is reporting in the Herald that a Cuban dissident lawyer who operates outside the regime and provides legal assistance for members of the opposition has for the first time in the dictatorship's history achieved a legal victory in Castro's courts.

Cuban court to consider suit against Ministry of Justice

In an apparent first, a Cuban court is considering a lawsuit that could force the government to officially recognize a group of dissident lawyers.

BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

In a small but rare legal victory in a country where the courts faithfully follow the government line, a dissident Cuban lawyer has won the initial stages of a lawsuit against the Ministry of Justice.

A Havana court first agreed to consider Wilfredo Vallín's suit seeking official recognition for his group of dissident attorneys, then ordered the ministry to defend itself.

``I don't have high hopes for this in the long run because I know how things work in Cuba, but our victories so far are pretty rare,'' said the 62-year-old Vallín.

``To have a case against a ministry even admitted in court is something extraordinary. That's never happened,'' said Camilo Loret de Mola, a veteran Havana lawyer now living in Miami.

Chances are, as the dissident lawyer himself points out, not much will come of this; in the end the Castro regime will do whatever it pleases. Nevertheless, it is an interesting development that I believe may be a sign that the Cuban dictatorship is beginning to crack under its own weight. It is highly unlikely that this small legal victory will be the impetus that topples the tyrannical regime, but it may chip off one more stone from the regime's crumbling foundation.

Let me count the ways  money hungry anti-embargo activists can say Human Rights for Cubans do not matter. Brig. Gen. John Adams and David Jones are pigs.

From Capitol Hill Cubans:

How About Reconciling With Hitler's Germany?

In today's Roll Call, retired Brig. Gen. John Adams and David Jones, a former fundraiser for Congressman Charlie Rangel of New York and now lobbyist for Vigilant Worldwide -- whose clients seek to do business with Cuba's dictatorship -- argue in favor of unilaterally lifting sanctions towards the Castro regime.

However, they do so by making the following odd analogy:

U.S. reconciliation with Germany took about a decade after that terrible war introduced words such as "genocide" and "Holocaust" into the global vocabulary and claimed the lives of more than 400,000 U.S. military personnel.

By helping Germany transition from occupation to sovereignty, we kept the peace in Europe and established a beachhead against expansionary communism that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification of the two Germanys just one year later.

U.S. reconciliation with Vietnam took 20 years after Americans were stunned by news footage of men and women clinging to helicopters making their flight to freedom from rooftops in Saigon. In an act of political foresight, President Bill Clinton, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and then-Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) skillfully navigated the emotional wreckage left by that war and its 58,000-plus U.S. casualties and restored diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995.

This not only produced an invaluable economic and diplomatic presence for our nation in Southeast Asia, but enabled Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to visit Hanoi in July to commemorate the 15th anniversary of normalization and to express our concern about the human rights record of our former adversary on its own soil.

If we can reconcile with Germany and Vietnam, why not with our neighbor Cuba?

Let's help them put their concern to rest.

Undoubtedly, the U.S. should (and will) quickly reconcile with a post-Castro democratic Cuba, as it did with a post-Hitler democratic Germany.

However, they should ask themselves the inverse question:

Should the U.S. have reconciled with Hitler's Germany?

Of course not.

As for Vietnam, despite Secretary Clinton's commendable remarks regarding that regime's human rights atrocities, our policy of unfettered business ties has done nothing to improve the plight of Vietnam's courageous pro-democracy movement -- to the contrary, it has helped condemn it to secondary obscurity.

We believe our Cuban neighbors deserve better.

Florida Senator George LeMieux provides SunSentinel readers with another dose of reality in regards to Cuba.

U.S. tourist dollars would only tighten Cuba's grip on power

The recent Sun Sentinel editorial, "Lifting ban on travel to Cuba best way to push democratic ideals," fails to consider the most important facts regarding U.S. Cuba policy.

First, tourism travel to Cuba represents the Castro regime's foremost source of income — akin to the energy industry being Iran's foremost source of income and thus the main target of sanctions. Few would disagree that Canadian and European tourists have financed the existence of the Castro regime, and therefore their repression of the Cuban people. For the United States to create a tourism bonanza for the regime at this time would provide the dictatorship an economic lifeline.

Second, to argue that U.S. tourists are going to stir the winds of political and economic change by spreading democratic ideals is unrealistic and insensitive. What could tourists do to surpass the efforts of Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, Guido Sigler Amaya and other courageous Cubans currently spending decades in prison for advocating democratic ideals?

What change could tourists inspire above that of Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died this year after an 85-day hunger strike? What economic or political pressure will tourist dollars bring beyond the five pro-democracy activists who stood on the stairs of the University of Havana last week and demanded freedom for the Cuban people — three of whom are now facing lengthy prison terms? It seems the world could learn a great deal from the inspiring courage and resilience of Cuba's pro-democracy movement, not vice-versa.

Finally, to argue that allowing tourism to Cuba would prevent the Castro regime from "cherry-picking" for travel only "those who are neutral and harbor sympathies towards the regime" is completely misguided. What the Castro regime wants are apolitical and uninformed tourists they can contain in isolated, all-inclusive resorts. Such "easy income" would reduce the regime's reliance on, and likely the frequency of, humanitarian travelers.

Cuba is not a tourist paradise. Behind the curtain of white sandy beaches are people held captive by a brutal regime. U.S. tourist dollars would only serve to tighten the regime's grip on power.

Rather than concede human rights and the rule of law, we should align with pro-democratic movements, instead of giving the Castros the fodder and means to crush them.

George LeMieux is a U.S. senator for Florida and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Finding themselves falling deeper into the abyss of oppression and hopelessness that has defined the existence of Cubans for the past half century, Venezuelans are now finding themselves having to resort to hunger strikes in order to protest the dictatorial rule of Castro protege, Hugo Chavez. One such Venezuelan, Franklin Brito, attempted such a protest, and he ended up paying for it with his life.

Here is the story and analysis via Notes from the Cuban Exile Corner:

Franklin Brito: A Martyr for Liberty and Human Rights in Venezuela

"I’ve learned of the death of hunger striker Franklin Brito. It appears that Hugo Chavez now has his Orlando Zapata" - Yoani Sanchez, August 31, 2010 on twitter

(Above) Franklin Brito before and after engaging in 8 hunger strikes

Hunger strikes are the ultimate recourse in the arsenal of non-violent resistance, and over the years around the world it has succeeded at times but in places like Cuba, Ireland, and now in Venezuela a human being has died on hunger strike.

In Cuba the names of Pedro Luis Boitel and Orlando Zapata Tamayo are remembered as is Bobby Sands of Northern Ireland (who the Cuban dictatorship built a memorial to in Cuba) and now Venezuela's Franklin Brito has joined this select grouping that demonstrates the ultimate price when engaging in a hunger strike.

Franklin Brito was a farmer and a biologist whose land was expropriated by Hugo Chavez in 2000 according to CNN. Other news agencies place the date of expropriation anywhere between 2003 and 2004. He exhausted every recourse and was driven to the final option: the hunger strike in 2005.El Universal out of Caracas offers a chronology of Brito's odyssey. In the video below taken October 5, 2009 on day 93 of a hunger strike Franklin was carrying out in which he explains how all of this began:

Continue reading A Venezuelan dissident dies of a hunger strike

Reality is tenacious and unforgiving, and regardless of the attempts by some to reshape it, it is impervious to manipulation. Nonetheless, the unchanging nature of reality has not deterred those who seek to change it in order to progress their agendas.

Since the announcement of the release and forced exile of 52 prisoners of conscience in Cuba, we have been bombarded by those who are attempting to reshape the reality in Cuba into something that will benefit their business interests. They started out strong and were able to initially sway the uninformed into believing something that was not true, but as is always the case, reality did not cooperate and their well-constructed ruse is falling to pieces.

For all their machinations and careful planning, it only takes a dose of reality to bring down their house of cards.

Via Capitol Hill Cubans:

The Political Prisoner Reality

For those doing back-flips over the "announced release" of 52 political prisoners by the Castro regime -- of which 26 have been banished to Spain and 26 remain in prison -- please consider the following tragic reality:

According to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), there have been over 940 dissident arrests between January and July of this year alone.

Please note that these are only arrests that are known and compiled. Just imagine how many unknown arrests there must be.

Either way, that gives you a sense of how quickly the Castro regime can (and does) fill up its political prisons.

Furthermore, as Havana-based blogger Yoani Sanchez noted in a recent interview:

I find [the "announced release"] it very positive; however, it's not enough. While in Cuba there continues to be a system of surveillance and punishment for whoever expresses an opinion different from the State, at any moment there could return another Black Spring of 2003… or there could come a Gray Autumn of 2012 or a Dark Spring of 2014.

As long as the Cuban government doesn't say, "Here there is no punishment against freedom of opinion, people can associate in ecological or political groups, they can found parties, they can have platforms, and they can create publications (whenever they fulfill the norms of a national publication, such as declaring where its resources come from, etc.) – whenever they do that, they can have it."

As long as that is not done, we are all potential prisoners. This will be true as long as the government has in the penal code a criminal violation that it calls "illicit association" against enemy propaganda. There is a law that they apply against people who print and distribute something critical, different, contrary to the government. We are all in danger as long as there exists this penal code and the criminal decree of peligrosidad predelictiva (pre-criminal danger, whereby the government or its courts can determine that someone potentially in the future could commit a crime and they could be sent to prison for up to four years).

So, these releases should be followed by a process of guarantees. Well, they're already free, now, those who are in the street should know that they will never go to prison for reasons of opinion or for political motives. And these are the guarantees. The Cuban government has to ratify the human rights pacts that it has not ratified. As long as it doesn't ratify those pacts, there is no public commitment.

Via Uncommon Sense:

103 Cuban dissidents arrested in August, says independent news agency

The Castro dictatorship in August arrested at least 103 Cuban dissidents, the highest monthly count since April, according to information compiled by the incomparable CIHPRESS news agency.

That brought the yearly total to 861.

The arrests in August, as well as those in the prior month, are instructive in that they occurred at the same time the dictatorship was receiving attention for releasing and expelling into exile in Spain some two dozen dissidents imprisoned since the "black spring" of 2003. Not wanting to waste any jail space, the regime moved to stock up on political prisoners.

If you pay close attention, you'll see that nothing has changed in Cuba.

Most of those arrested were released after a few hours or a few days of detention, but not before the government delivered its message: Give up your work against the revolution or you will face harsher punishment.

But the August activity includes the arrest of five activists in eastern Cuba and of three dissidents who were carrying out a protest on the steps of the University of Havana. They all remain in jail, facing charges of "public disorder," or other such nonsense.

To see the list of 103 names and any available information about what exactly happened to them, go here.

The huge elephant in the room that all the anti-embargo advocates make believe does not exist is the fact that every single penny of revenue streaming into Cuba goes into the coffers of a repressive dictatorship. No matter how they try to twist the facts and bend reality, the Cuban military, which runs everything on the island, is the sole recipient of any cash that comes in from business dealings.

A perfect example of this is the telecommunications industry in Cuba. While you can make calls to such faraway places like Hong Kong for only pennies per minute, it can cost a dollar or more per minute to make a call to Cuba. The reason? The Cuban dictatorship extorts a minimum of 84 cents as a connection fee for each and every call entering the island.

US telecommunications companies are now lobbying the White House to loosen the government restrictions on calls to Cuba, which place a 19 cent limit on the amount paid to the Cuban regime. Such limitations make it difficult for these companies to do business directly with Cuba, so they have asked President Obama to loosen those restrictions.

In essence, US telecommunications company are asking the US government to give them permission to be extorted by a murderous and criminal regime.

On this date in history, September 1, 1960:

Havana — Raul Castro indicated early today that the seizure of the remaining American property in Cuba — estimated at a quarter of a billion dollars — is imminent. But the fiery minister of armed forces told a midnight rally of sugar workers his brother's regime does not plan to confiscate the big U.S. naval base at Guantánamo "for now."