FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE The 2013 Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent Awarded to Ali Ferzat, Park Sang Hak, and the Ladies in White NEW YORK (May 3, 2012)- The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) today announced the recipients of the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent. The 2013 laureates are: Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat, North Korean [...]

Luis sent me this essay on the Elian kidnapping and subsequent march on Calle Ocho. It was so perfect and heartfelt for the sad anniversary of that black day thirteen years ago that I asked for his permission to publish it. I think you will cry and feel a little pride in who and why [...]

Greg Gutfeld sat in for Bill O'Reilly last night on FOX. He had a segment about Jay-Z's Cuba trip and the rap song that followed. One of his guests was black California college professor Mark Sawyer who says he lived for a year in Cuba and he pretty much assumes himself one of those "Cuba [...]

You remember pretty actress Stacey Dash during the 2012 presidential campaign voicing her support for Romney/Ryan on Twitter, and then taking a flood of vile personal attacks and even death threats via tweets from the never failing to disappoint Obama/Biden supporters. Well, they're at it again. Today Miss Dash tweeted about Jay-Z's and Beyonce's Cuba [...]

Remember this, all you castro-Cuba-loving celebrities? Remember a couple decades ago the very concerned and outraged entertainment industry celebrities and music artists got together to protest the apartheid in South Africa? "Not Gonna Play Sun City". The same severe crippling poverty and lack of dignity and human/civil rights for political dissidents, women, gays and blacks [...]

Val and Alberto have already posted this morning on the shootdown of our four brothers over the Florida Straits, but I have to add a short note. I always chuckle when the pro-castro left call us "hardliners" and "intransigent" as though the words were some kind of severe insult. Well, they are not. We are [...]

In The American Spectator, Robert Stacy McCain attempts to clarify the current state of the Bob Menendez scandal -- and asks a question for the ages... [...] Again, however, the Menendez denial is false. Matthew Boyle says he interviewed two of the women last year, and Boyle is adamant in his belief that these accusers were telling the [...]

And so 2013 is starting out pretty good for the Cuban regime: [r]aul gets to be the president of something called CELAC, Chavismo seems to be entrenched in Venezuela, guaranteeing the flow of oil subsidies to the island prison, Obama starts his second term, nominating John Kerry for State and brining [c]astro loving Chuck Hagel [...]

I am not sure if anyone at Babalu has covered this before, but I had no idea. I admit to being one of those who simply took for granted one of my all time favorite Christmas carols had been written a century or more ago in some chilly New England loft or a dusty European [...]

A number of years ago, on my personal blog, I wrote that to fix America, we must do right by Cuba. I wrote about the non-interference agreement with the Soviets, the Wet Foot-Dry Foot policy, and the hypocrisy of politicians talking about support for a free Cuba, while doing nothing. The focus of that post was [...]

From the GlobalPost site: "The GlobalPost Mission is to provide original international reporting rooted in integrity, accuracy, independence and powerful storytelling that informs, entertains and fills the void created by diminished foreign coverage by American media." From a GlobalPost story today: According to Evelina Santiago, who moved to the United States from Mexico 25 years [...]

Superb piece in PowerLine Blog from Steven Hayward: "The Cuban Missile Crisis @50: A Reconsideration | Power Line." [...] But the best and brightest of the Kennedy-Johnson administration were so self-deluded with their “success” that they decided to apply the same strategy of “flexible response” in Vietnam. Cyrus Vance, who was a deputy secretary of [...]

Fifty years ago tonight President John F. Kennedy announced to the world what he had been informed of a week earlier: evidence of Soviet missiles, capable of carrying nuclear weapons and destroying many American cities, were discovered by American reconnaissance overflights of Cuba. The shameful end to the crisis drove the final nail into the [...]

Excellent post from The DiploMad 2.0 that complements Humberto's Nazi post from the other day: "Castro and the Nazis: Makes Perfect Sense." [...] There is no real conflict between Communism and Nazism except, of course, of which one takes power. They are both phenomena of the left; both believe in the state over the individual; [...]

Of course, we can count on the Cuban government to keep its promises just as they've done for the last 53 plus years: The Cuban government announced Tuesday that it will no longer require islanders to apply for an exit visa, eliminating a much-loathed bureaucratic procedure that has been a major impediment for many seeking [...]