Via Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter:

Marginalizing dissidents and white washing the Castro regime's crimes

Befriending tyrants while dismissing Yoani Sanchez and international human rights standards

Dilma Rousseff and Raul Castro in Havana 2012

Over emphasizing and romanticizing the importance of political violence while remaining mute on the Castro regime's torture and extrajudicial execution of opposition figures along with its role in fomenting political violence and terrorism internationally is a difficult task but Julia Sweig, the director of the Latin America program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) manages to do so in the February 1, 2012 article by Matthew Bristow in Bloomberg titled "Dissident blogger says Cuba wanted more on human rights from Rousseff trip":“Yoani’s situation bears zero comparison to what Dilma went through. Unlike Dilma, she hasn’t been and won’t be jailed or tortured and I seriously doubt she’s going to be president of Cuba.”

On November 6, 2009 Yoani Sanchez was kidnapped and beaten up by Cuban state security agents. Other Cuban women have suffered greater abuses for being members of the Ladies in White or simply demanding democratic reforms. They have suffered harassment, beatings, arbitrary detentions and in the case of Laura Pollan what amounts to a very sophisticated form of torture that resulted in her death on October 14, 2011 in at what best could be described as "purposeful medical neglect." She is not the only one.

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