Alfredo at El Cafe Cubano has a wonderful post, "Olor a Cuba". It's a gift, evoking the essence of Cuba, its heart and soul, always with you, no matter your distance from the island. An excerpt:

El del jazmin del cabo en la noche...El del rocío oliendo a esencia del alma...El del frijol "colorao" y el frijol negro humeando en la cocina...El de la carne de cerdo asándose entre hojas de guayaba o plátano...El del mar salpicando la piel en el Malecón de La Habana...El del agua de violeta de los bebes...El de las sábanas almidonadas, azuleadas y planchadas de nuestrasabuelas...

Update: Unfortunately, Francisco Umbral's wonderful poem is no longer available at El Cafe Cubano, instead, you will find links to the poem here.

Go now, and read it here.

There's a new kid on the block in the land of leftist anti-American organizations. This one calls itself the "International Endowment for Democracy". It's a non-profit whose aim is to help finance the activities of leftist organizations throughout the United States through international contributions. You'll recognize many of the board members -- Ramsey Clark, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Sandra Levinson, Director of the pro-castro Center for Cuban Studies, and Leonard Weinglass, attorney for the "Cuban 5".

Visit their website where you can read their preamble that begins with these probing questions, referring to the U.S., "What does the country that has just experienced two stolen presidential elections like to call itself? -- "The Greatest Democracy in the World", and What name did the U.S. government give to the organization it set up to subvert foreign governments (including Haiti and Venezuela whose presidents were honestly elected) of which it disapproves? -- "Democracy Nation Building". Linked together on their sidebar is the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto.

The non-profit designation in the tax code should be revised to end government supported sedition.

Read more about the group and its members at Discover the Networks.

The execrable immigration bill that had been making the rounds in the Senate has died. Congressman J. D. Hayworth made a statement yesterday on the bill that pretty neatly sums it up:

The Senate compromise is so convoluted, so complicated, and so unworkable that is surely must have been the work of Senators Rube and Goldberg.

This is déjà vu all over again. The 1986 amnesty law had a similar approach, and that was a catastrophe. It said if you could prove you did agricultural work for just 90 days a year for the previous three years, you would qualify for a green card. The number of those applying for this benefit was three times higher than expected, largely because of fraud, which was rampant. The Senate bill would likewise be vulnerable to fraud on a grand scale and be a nightmare to administer. It is amnesty wrapped in bureaucracy surrounded by fraud.

(H/T The Corner on NRO)

As I type this, my mother in law is in the emergency room of a local hospital. She was having trouble breathing and rescue was called some time around 2:00 AM. She has been suffering from an increasingly debilitating disease called myasthenia gravis for some time and the meds havent been working despite many increases in dosages.

I dont even know where to begin in describing my mother in law save to say that she is the epitomy of the strength, generosity and compassion of the Cuban woman. She saw her husband go off to the Bay of Pigs and subsequentyly raised her daughter on her own in exile while that husband languished in prison. She has started NPO's to help recently arriving Cubans stand on their own two feet. She has been a teacher, a school administrator and has been instrumental in the start up of many Day Care centers and pre-k schools throughout the state of Florida. Her life has been and is selflessness.

She has fought the tyranny of the island with every breath for the better part of her life and now she lies on a hospital bed with the possibility of needing a respirator.

I am not the most religious of men, but right now I'm praying for my mother in law, who took me into her heart and has treated like her very own son.

I ask all of you to keep her in your thoughts and pray for her recovery.

I get a lot of email about Cuba. It's hard to read it all. A lot of it is in Spanish, so I have to really be interested in the content to spend the time to translate it. Well tonight I received one such email. It's a letter from Independent Journalist, Jaime Leygonier Fernández to Teresa Heinz-Kerry. Two things struck me about this letter. First off, how well it is written and how cutting the author's remarks are at the end. The other is the method in which it was written. A God-knows-how-many-years-old typewriter was used. Notice how the typewriter is missing the "R" key and all Rs had to be hand-written. He could have hand-written the entire letter but I assume he felt it would be more professional type-written. Also look at the paper he used. These miserable pieces of scrap paper, that don't even match each other, were probably among this writer's most prized posessions along with that typewriter.

What follows is my best translation of the letter. UPDATE: I was given some corrections to the translation which have been incorporated below.

Havana, March [sic] 6th 2006

Mrs. Teresa Heinz-Kerry:

Tide Foundation:

Directors, shareholders and person related to I.G.C. and A.P.C.:

All persons that sympathize with a man who dies for protesting the denial of his rights:

I direct these comments firstly to Mrs. Heinz-Kerry and the above mentioned entities because for benevolent or profit motives you connected the Cuban government to the Internet which permits said government to privilege a few with state permits to communicate via Internet while discriminating against the majority of Cubans. Effectuating propaganda internationally to deceive world public opinion about the problems and violations of human rights occurring in Cuba. Influencing with its propaganda to achieve its well known ends of exporting the Cuban “model” so that it can metastasize in [Latin] America and the world.

This Internet connection also permits those fighting for human rights and independent journalists to transmit news about the Cuban reality, communicating by way of foreign embassies, which the State uses to accuse us of being “mercenaries in the service of foreign powers” and jail us under this pretext.

One prisoner of conscience, an independent journalist under house arrest, is about to die because of his hunger strike in which he demands free access to the Internet so he can complete his duties and have the human right to information be observed. A right that is enjoyed by any schoolkid in other countries. His hunger strike has lasted 62 days, and so he may die at any moment, even if he abandons the strike. He was already suffering paralysis as a result of conditions in the presidio in Cuba and other strikes, he now suffers irreversible damage to his health, and quality of life. His name is Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez.

Mistreatment and humiliation drive these extreme protests.

Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta, another journalist condemned to 20 years of prison for exercising freedom of the press has joined this protest, beaten by his jailers, he stitched mouth shut on the 23rd of March. On the 30th of March he had been on a hunger strike for 25 days.

Amnesty International is aware of their cases and has classified them as prisoners of conscience, Reporters Without Borders reported this tragedy, and called for the Castro regime to have mercy.

You are involved in the political and discriminatory use of the Internet by the Cuban state, it depends on you for this use.

You can, and I believe you have the moral obligation to, join the call for mercy and to prevent the use of your computer networks for violating such elementary human rights and for use as a mechanism of harassment in the hands of the political police, that will cost Guillermo Fariñas his life because of his act of rebellion.

Do for Fariñas, Herrera Acosta and the Cubans what you would do for any animal in danger of extinction.

I use this example because it seems that the centuries of legalities and the enjoyment of rights and material well-being makes people of certain countries like Canada excessively neutral in the face of these miseries.

Therefore, please pretend that we Cubans are not human beings, but animals whose deaths by hunger and mistreatment can inspire your sympathy.

You can save these lives, plead for rights in Cuba or wash your hands like those Swiss bankers who very neutrally kept in their bank vaults the gold teeth that the Third Reich pulled from the Jews in its concentration camps.

Jaime Leygonier Fernández
Independent Journalist

Note that although the letter is dated March 6th I believe the author meant April. The lengths of the hunger strikes mentioned in the letter would not match if it were written on March 6th.

Ziva has more.