But let’s send more money, and TVs, and yet more money!

Capitol Hill Cubans: The Sad Truth “Desde la Habana.”

Castro is only interested in the money that comes from emigres. That they come to Cuba and spend lots of money. That they bring more dollars each time. But he wants them at arms length. Forget about business in strategic sectors. It’s better to keep milking them by taxing their trips and the packages they send to the island. The Castro brothers have no desire to treat emigres fairly.

”When the exile community learns how to use its economic might as a weapon, it will force the government to change its antiquated discourse and anachronistic laws. In the meantime, he only needs them to keep filling the piggy bank.

Engagement doesn’t work. Dialog doesn’t work. It didn’t with Hitler or Stalin, it won’t with castro.

Human Rights Watch denounces attack on Yoani

Via Capitol Hill Cubans:

November 7, 2009
(Washington, DC) – Cuban authorities should cease all attacks on human rights defenders, journalists, bloggers and civic activists, Human Rights Watch said today. The international community should condemn attacks on those who peacefully exercise their basic rights to freedom of expression, opinion, and assembly in the strongest terms.

On November 6, Cuba’s most prominent blogger, Yoani Sánchez, together with blogger Orlando Luís Pardo Lazo, were abducted by three men. Sánchez and Pardo were forced into an unmarked vehicle, beaten, and threatened by their captors before being released onto the street.

“The Cuban authorities are using brute force to try to silence Yoani Sánchez’s only weapon: her ideas,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch. “The international community must send a firm message to Raul Castro that such attacks on independent voices are completely unacceptable.”

Sánchez and Pardo had been walking to attend a “march against violence” in Havana when they were abducted. When Sánchez called for help and bystanders started to intervene, one of the captors warned the other civilians, “Don’t get involved, these people are counterrevolutionaries.”

Sánchez wrote that, while in the car, “one man put his knee on my chest and the other, from the seat next to me, was punching me in the face.” The captors told Sanchez that her “clowning around” was finished.

Cuba is the only country in the region that continues to repress virtually all forms of political dissent.

“This brazen attack makes clear that no one in Cuba who voices dissent is safe from violent reprisals,” said Vivanco.

The history Cubans will never forget

This stunning post from Capital Hill Cubans serves as a reminder to those celebrating this weeks OAS decision on Cuba:

“Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.” –Elie Weisel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, April 12, 1999

This morning, U.S. President Barack Obama visited the former Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald with Elie Weisel, where they dedicated a minute of silence to the 56,000 people that were executed at that site during the Holocaust.

nazisquad3

Across the Atlantic, pursuant to the Organization of American States’ decision to repeal the 1962 that suspended Cuba’s dictatorship from its ranks, President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras — who together with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega led the efforts to revoke the 1962 resolution — gloated that with this gesture by the OAS, “Fidel Castro has been acquitted by history.”

Despite the Western Hemisphere’s condemnable indifference, the only thing history will record is that the Cuban people — like all other victims of tyranny throughout modern history, whether Jewish, Armenian, Rwandan or Sudanese — will never forget the countless victims of the brutal dictatorship they have been subjected to.

Below is a picture of Raul Castro personally overseeing the execution of a colleague in the rebel army, and of the Cuban National Memorial in South Florida, where tens of thousands of crosses each carry the name of a victim of Cuba’s dictatorship.

raul-castro-executes cubanmemorial1

Read “The Perils of Indifference.”