Memories of Cuba

Look who's back! Joan of Arrggh has some memories of Cuba from 20 years ago. I hope she keeps on posting regularly.

A visit that will live in infamy

At the Wall Street Journal Mary Anastasia O'Grady debunks the idea that the lives of average Cuban citizens will be improved by the Obama administration's lifting of trade embargos.

Aliuska Gómez, a member of the Cuban opposition group Ladies in White, is arrested during a march in Havana, March 13. PHOTO: EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Keep in mind as this extravaganza unfurls over the next couple of days that some foreigners who have been critical of the regime, including your humble columnist, are barred from reporting from the island.

...Congress believes that before there are American investments in Cuba the regime ought to pay for the property it stole after the 1959 revolution, and ensure basic human-rights for Cubans. Since Congress still passes the laws in this country, Mr. Obama’s capitalism for the Castros remains uncertain until U.S. lawmakers capitulate.

The Obama administration boasts that it negotiated the liberation of 53 political prisoners in 2014. But more than half of those have been rearrested, and four who received multiyear sentences were exiled last week. In 2015 there were more than 8,600 political detentions, and in the first two months of this year there were 2,555, according to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

On March 13, the secret police in Havana again set upon the Ladies in White, a group of peaceful dissidents. One member, Aliuska Gómez, told the online newspaper Diario de Cuba about her arrest. “After they had taken away all of my belongings,” she said, “they told me to strip naked, and I refused . . . so they threw me down on the floor and took off all of my clothing, right in front of two men” and “they dragged me completely naked into a jail cell.” That alone should have been enough for Mr. Obama to cancel his trip.

...The big lie will be that by legalizing commercial and banking relations with Cuba, the U.S. will empower the Cuban people. The opposite is true.

...If there is a great capital infusion from the U.S., it can flow only to state-owned monopolies. U.S. hotel chains, for example, will become minority partners with the Cuban military, which owns the tourism industry.

Visitors to the island are charged in hard currency, but Cubans who work in tourism are hired and paid by the state in all-but-worthless pesos. They can’t form independent unions. The big profits go to the Castro mafia, which uses some of the money to run the repressive intelligence network necessary to contain rebellion and keeps the rest for personal gain. Last week Mr. Obama stepped up to help the Castros move these profits around the international banking system by lifting the U.S. ban on facilitating their dollar transactions.

None of this will liberate Cubans, who are voting on the matter with their feet. Some 51,011 undocumented Cubans arrived in the U.S. in 2015, an 84% increase over the previous year. An additional 20,000 entered the country with visas.

Read more here.

God's country?

Patrick Buchanan writes in World Net Daily,

In America 2015, homosexuality, abortion on demand and same-sex marriage – shameful crimes in Ike’s America, mortal sins in the catechism of Pius XII – have become constitutional rights.

...These represent the values that define Barack Obama’s America, the values our officials defend at the United Nations, the values we preach to the world.

What Ike’s America saw as decadence, Obama’s America calls progress. And among its noisiest celebrants are our Catholic vice president, Joe Biden, and the Catholic leader of the Democratic Party in the House, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

...The church of Pius XII and John Paul II taught that the truths of the Ten Commandments brought down from Sinai and the truths of the Sermon on the Mount are eternal. Those popes also taught that a valid marriage is indissoluble, that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, that abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn, an abomination.

Yet one reads regularly of discussions inside the Vatican to alter what is infallible church teaching on these doctrines to make the church more appealing to those who have rejected them.

In Cuba, Pope Francis declined to address the repression of the Castro brothers. Will he also avoid America’s moral crisis to chatter on about income inequality and climate change and find common ground with Obama?

Read more here.