Val, Ziva and I posing in front of outdoor advertising that was part of a public relations campaign to raise awareness of Spain’s re-colonization of Cuba, May of 2007
I’ve been thinking about what to say on this auspicious occasion, and I’ve been drawing blanks, so I’m going to simply start writing and hope it makes sense in the end.
By the time I started reading Babalú Blog it was already a couple of years old. A co-worker turned me on to it, and I was hooked. I had just published a website, trenblindado.com, about Ché Guevara and the much propagandized “Battle of Santa Clara” during Cuba’s castroite insurrection. I felt I needed to meet the creator of Babalú Blog, Valentin Prieto, in order to promote my new website so I set out to meet him at Cuba Nostalgia. This must have been May of 2005. Val was gracious and helpful to me and by March of 2006 I was contributing to Babalu. At some point Val began to burn out, I could sense it. I still had a lot of energy for what we were doing and began to fill the vacuum slowly being left by Val. The audience continued growing, and so did Babalú’s roster of writers. Eventually, I burned out too. Fortunately, for the blog’s sake, and for Cuba’s sake, Alberto de la Cruz then stepped in and took the reins that he has in hand to this very day. How he does it, I don’t know.
And for Governor Ron DeSantis and Mayor Daniella Levine Cava….
Will Cuban baseball players be allowed to move around freely while in Miami-Dade County or will Cuban State Security agents be allowed to keep them prisoner, in violation of the Constitution of the United States and the laws of the State of Florida?
There’s a very informative Substack called Eugyppius: a plague chronicle. A few days back he asked his readers the following question, “What convinced you containment was a sham?” This was my response.
I knew immediately we couldn’t “contain” this virus and that only bad outcomes could come from our attempts to do so. On March 17, 2020, the second day I was working from home, I began to feel like something was not right. My degree is in economics though I work in advertising, but my background made me think that the putting the brakes on global economic activity would be catastrophic, not just for people’s bank accounts but generally. That day, I posted the following on Facebook:
Given my background and what I do for a living (which involves looking at a lot of consumer data), I started looking at reports from different geographies. Not just news reports but also data. It became clear to me almost immediately that
1: the infection fatality rate was much lower than what the media was reporting and the models were showing,
2: Only a fraction of the population was at real risk from serious covid illness,
3: that locking down Alabama because NYC hospitals were overwhelmed made no sense,
4: that the virus seemed to be spreading regardless of the draconian measures being taken,
5: that it was much easier for politicians to push people around and pretend to be doing something than actually controlling the spread of the virus,
6: that the American left and the news media were using the pandemic as a club with which to bludgeon a president that seemed to be cruising toward re-election prior to the coronavirus.
Not only is Reuters Cuba bureau chief, Marc Frank, a former “journalist” for the official newspaper of Communist Party USA, but look at the caption on this photo in this article about circumventing censorship in Cuba.
People hold Cuba’s national flag during protests against and in support of the government, amidst the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Havana, Cuba July 11, 2021.
Are you kidding me? Not mentioned anywhere in the article: “dictatorship”.
There will be NO MILITARY INTERVENTION in Cuba. For those of you who are calling upon the US government or the UN (ha!) to intervene militarily in Cuba, it’s not going to happen. For one thing, we have a President who belongs to the American political party that is increasingly sympathetic to the communist regime. Even if the President were a Republican, there would be no military intervention. The hope of such an intervention is counterproductive and generations of Cubans, on the island and off, have deluded themselves thinking that Cuba would be rescued by outside forces. The reality is that the responsibility for throwing off the yoke of the regime falls solely on Cubans on the island. Fortunately, it’s possible. We’ve seen it in Eastern Europe. None of those regimes fell because of outside military intervention.
The Cuban populace should use the same destabilizing tactics that leftist mobs use in the US and around the world. Antifa is a plague on our country. For more than a year they have terrorized Portland, making it a veritable war zone. Read Andy Ngo’s book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy for details, but in simple terms, Cubans should dress in black or unidentifiable clothes, wear masks, put on whatever protective gear they might have such as motorcycle helmets and arm themselves with stones (plenty available in crumbling Cuba) and clubs. They should execute their protests under the cover of night, barricading streets, setting fire to government buildings, especially police stations and terrorize the CDR neighborhood spies that have repressed them for years. They should also sabotage the TV and radio transmission towers and facilities in Cuba.
Cubans outside of the island have a role too. We should be posting on social media, gathering in support of our brothers and sisters on the island, not letting this moment pass and not letting people forget what’s going on. We should, of course, also be praying.
We should not be blocking streets and highways. There are three types of people: those who sympathize with us, those who MIGHT sympathize with us and those who will never sympathize with us. We don’t have to worry about the first or the third groups, but, we will never gain sympathy from the second group by blocking traffic. Keeping a mom from getting home to her kids doesn’t help anyone in Cuba and doesn’t win us any friends. Also, Florida’s legislature recently passed a law, signed by our great governor, Ron DeSantis, that prohibits this type of demonstration. Let’s not be hypocrites by using the same form of protest that we don’t appreciate when the cause is one we don’t support.
Don’t send money or goods to Cuba. We’ve been saying it for years. While wanting to help your families is understandable, these types of remittances have been enriching the regime that represses them for decades. The reason people are out in the streets protesting is largely because of the dissatisfaction lack of basic goods and services that is endemic to the communist form of government. Sorry.
Reading a post by Mark Judge, a childhood friend of Brett Kavanaugh who was caught up in the slanderous confirmation hearings of that Supreme Court Justice and he credits Mollie Hemingway for blowing up a book written by two Times “journalists” that sought to continue the lies.
[YouTube] has taken down a video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding a policy discussion with Dr. Atlas and the three creators of the Great Barrington Declaration, a group of physicians and scientists critical of strict lockdowns to fight the coronavirus.
In the hour-and-forty-five minute video, Mr. DeSantis and the four panelists lambaste the U.S. coronavirus response as excessively draconian and ineffective. They emphasize unintended public-health harms from lockdowns and school closures, criticize mask mandates and generally celebrate Florida’s response.
