Why aren’t other members of the gay community as offended as I am about this disgusting tribute to one of the most infamous homophobes (and murderers of homosexual men) of the 20th century? Che Guevara explicitly wrote volumes of vitriolic hatred towards gay men, and considered them deviant/threats to his society. He blatantly, personally executed hundreds of men because they were admitted “homosexuals”. When are the hipsters and their wealthy, [privileged], naive New York sponsors going to get an education? So sad…
— Miami Herald Commenter Frederick Stebbins on W Hotel’s artistic homage to Che Guevara.
A small peek at the real Cuban health care system - that is, the health care that is available for the Cuban people themselves and not tourists and the politically-connected.
(Source: youtube.com)
Fidel Castro on Gun Control, 1959 →
I’m going to ask you all a question. Weapons for what? To fight against whom? Against the Revolutionary Government that is backed by the entire population?
Weapons for what? Is there a dictatorship here?
Are they going to fight against a free government that respects the rights of the citizenry?
Now that there is no censorship, and that the press is entirely free, more free than it’s ever been, and having the assurance that it will continue to be forever without there ever being censorship here again?
Today, that the entire population can gather freely? Today, that there’s no tortures, or political prisoners, or assassinations, or terror? Today, that there’s nothing but happiness, that all the traitorous leaders have been sacked in the trade unions and that there will be immediate elections in all the trade unions?
When all the rights of the citizen have been restored, when an election is being planned in the briefest time possible, weapons for what? Hiding weapons for what? To blackmail the President of the Republic? To threaten to disturb the peace? To create gangster organizations? Are we going to return to gangsterism? Are we going to return to daily shootouts in the streets of the capital?
Weapons for what?
Hopefully, no additional comment is necessary.
Yoani Sánchez’s passport is full of visas (with over a dozen visas issued, there are literally no pages available for more visas), but has never boarded a plane.
“I have a very peculiar passport. Full of authorizations to enter other countries, but without a single authorization to leave my own.”
(Source: youtube.com)
There is no way to become a Julian Assange in Cuba and stay alive, believe me.
— Cuban Dissident Blogger Yoani Sanchez
To praise Che, one must overlook mountains of evidence concerning his crimes. But why would anyone do that, willingly? Because some people — especially those who see all of history as nothing but class struggle — need a saint to venerate, someone who they think embodies the cause of the downtrodden. Ironically, though most Che lovers tend not to admit it, they act very much like religious zealots: As they prefer to see it, Che was a saintly crusader for the poor, so everything he did must have been good, and anyone harmed by him must have deserved it. So what if he killed Cubans willy-nilly, without trials, including plenty of poor peasants? Or helped establish one of the most repressive regimes on earth? Or built concentration camps for dissidents and gays, including one with a sign over the front gate that read “Work will make real men out of you”? It’s what needed to be done. It was just. And in this warped religious view of Che the idol, and of politics in general, we who call that false history into question are worse than heretics. We are the unjust cretins who still deserve to be killed by the likes of Che.
(Source: jgreendc)
Tomorrow’s cover today: our cover in America notes that change is coming to Cuba at last. But the United States could do far more to encourage it.
If only it were true… That a Castro and his authoritarian communist cronies remain in power makes it is sadly difficult to believe that Cuba is “hurtling” toward anything but more of the same.
Ironically enough, the same rebellious youths who wear Che Guevara shirts most likely would’ve been targeted by Guevara had they grown up in Cuba. Guevara considered anyone who listened to rock and roll music, who wore his hair long, or who spoke up against him a delinquent. His very goal was to, “make individualism disappear from the nation!” He considered it, “criminal to think of individuals!” Perhaps these young American individualists should think twice before brandishing the picture of a man who persecuted “hippies, homosexuals, free-thinkers and poets,” and who employed constant surveillance, control, and repression.
— Che Guevara: Exposing myths about a murderer (via stillmindstillcosmos)
(Source: satans-advocate)
Because the glitzyness of a city is clearly an indication of well off the people are.
Does anyone see anything wrong with Havana? It actually looks like a really nice place.
FFS no it doesn’t. It looks like a ghetto. The image is even enlarged on your own damn blog so quit lying to yourself.
Havana is a wonderful place to live if you like literally crumbling infrastructure (not just the hyperbole used around here), technological advancements stuck in the late-50’s/early-60’s, cars and bikes kept together with fishing line and spit, wearing the same 2 or 3 holed underwear per year, thickening stews with mop rags because the government’s rations can barely feed your family, rarely spotting stray dogs and cats for the same reason, rolling blackouts, limited access to electronic communications, selected areas set up as apartheid against locals to keep the tourists from having to commingle with the proletariat, hospitals that require you to bring your own supplies and sheets and clean up for/after yourself (and that uses third-rate personnel and equipment since the good stuff is saved for the high-paying tourists), plain-clothes agents of the “revolution” who will beat/jail you for so much as complaining about Castro/the state/education/healthcare/whatever…
Yeah, Havana is awesome.
(Source: verbasinfinitas)
I want to express my solidarity to all those who struggle for a free life in Cuba. … I cannot go to Cuba to relax on the beach and keep my eyes shut, while dozens of political prisoners are behind bars there.
— Vaclav Havel
Cuban Political Police operation in eastern Cuba brings more violent attacks and arrests of peaceful activists →
Sounds familiar…
Cuba: a tragedy of the commons →
Over half a century ago, the Cuban Revolution abolished all private property rights, pursuing heaven on earth on the communist premise that the entire community would own all property and a “new man” would emerge that would be communal in outlook and sacrificial for the common good. That experiment turned out as an economically bankrupt dystopian society featuring enormously repressive social control systems and a government with unlimited power over its citizens.
Today, the collapse of the Cuban economy can be clearly traced to its communal ideology and actions against private property rights. The fallacy of communal approaches was vividly described by Garrett Hardin in his influential 1968 scientific article titled: “The Tragedy of the Commons.” The article describes a dilemma of herders sharing a common pasture on which they are entitled to let their cows graze. The “tragedy of the commons” is thus a shorthand metaphor for a structural relationship and its consequences; specifically, common versus private property ownership.
Under the common property condition described by Hardin, each herdsman, acting rationally, will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons, even if the capacity of the commons is exceeded and it is ultimately depleted to the detriment of all. Individually, each herder receives the benefits from his additional animals, while the damage is shared jointly by the entire group. This asymmetrical division of costs and benefits gives rise to the tragedy of the commons inherent in communal systems devoid of private property rights.
Any resource held in common is owned by everyone and by no one, thus everyone has an incentive to overuse it, and no one has an incentive to preserve it. Aristotle expressed it succinctly, “For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.” Economic history shows that individual owners take better care of their own property than they do of common property. And yet, the utopian chase of the commons and its attendant governmental controls persists.
On the eve of the Cuban Revolution, about 80 percent of Cuba’s arable land was under cultivation (or used for grazing) and domestic production supplied 70 percent of the country’s food consumption. The comparable figures today are 60 percent and 20 percent respectively.
The extraordinary degree of communist Cuba’s unproductivity is most dramatically shown by comparative analyses of purchasing power. A study by the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies shows for example, that to purchase a 400-gram box (14 ounces) of powdered milk, the average Cuban worker has to work 57.5 hours. To make the same purchase, the average worker in Costa Rica has to work only 1.7 hours. Comparable inefficiencies hold for the other items in the consumer basket analyzed. In contrast, in 1957, Cuba’s income per capita was fourth in Latin America, and real wages in Cuba were higher than any country in Latin America.
Even though Cuba was certainly a corrupt and politically inept republic, many economic and social milestones were achieved, anchored on private property rights during its 56 years as a republic (1902-1958). In the following 52 years, after the abolishment of private property rights, Cuba has descended into its current pauperized and tragic socioeconomic situation. But longstanding beliefs are difficult to shed and private property rights are still vilified.
John Locke, the father of modern political philosophy, argued that people have natural rights, that is, rights that we posses prior to the existence of governments. These rights are not granted by government or any other human. Locke also articulated clearly the idea of property rights: “Every man has a property in his own person . . . labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say are properly his.” The ownership of property is a necessary implication of self-ownership. Indeed, all human rights can be seen as derived from the one fundamental right of self-ownership.
The Cuban tragedy of the commons, rooted in its disdain for private property, and thus for human rights exemplifies, as Karl Popper once noted, how “the attempts to make heaven on earth invariably produce hell.”
