"I Love Fidel Castro"

[R_C]

So Ozzie Guillen, the Miami Marlins manager had to apologize to "the Cuban Community" in Miami for daring to hold and express a view they may not agree with AND gets suspended for 5 games....(many, if not most, would like him fired).

These idiots and their families allegedly flee Cuba in order to, among other things, escape the pervasive control by the Cuban government of what speech is allowed in the public domain, who is allowed to speak and and how it is broadcast. So they come to America and do this !

<span style="color: #CC0000">Story</span>

[evanovitch]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

he said that in the translation his sentiment was wrongly displayed...but i concur wid di apparent power that old community seems to display....i have always wondered wen di expiration date re documents from the Bay of Pigs etc expire cause i would love to see the families who owe their wealth to all dat tax money given fi set up banks to fund said attacks...all dat money never been accounted for in public as far as i know...

[R_C]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

Interesting thought evan. That's going to be difficult though since (a) those banks don't exist anymore, and (b) at least two of those involved in funding the invasion were operated by the CIA.

[evanovitch]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: R_C</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Interesting thought evan. That's going to be difficult though since (a) those banks don't exist anymore, and (b) at least two of those involved in funding the invasion were operated by the CIA. </div></div>

so u saying the possibility of ANY papertrail is nil....sigh...but probably true...but it still would be an interesting read....

[johnnycakes]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

Since very few if any at Jamaicans.com reads ZNet, I thought I'd post this for you all.

Ozzie, Fidel, and the U.S. Media Double Standard
By Paul Street

Friday, April 13, 2012
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The Miami Marlins’ Venezuela-born manager Ozzie Guillen has long been a major league jackass. As the manager of the Chicago White Sox (my favorite major league team since I grew up on the South Side of Chicago) he was notorious for endless narcissistic media rambles that all too commonly included noxious macho cultural commentary.

“ ‘Oh, Love’… My Inspiration is Money”

The Guillen riff that sticks most in my mind has to do with money, however. It came at the end the season last year. That’s when Ozzie trashed the first White Sox World Series victory in 88 years – the title he helped bring back to Chicago (where he was a brilliant White Sox shortstop during the 1980s and 1990s) in 2005. I’ll never forget what Guillen said to Chicago Sun Times columnist Rick Morrissey on why he was jumping from the White Sox to the Marlins in 2012. Guillen had some interesting things to say about what mattered most to him. He shat all over the dreams of White Sox fans young and old. He wasn’t motivated by championship rings, he told Morrissey, but by money. “With the rings,” Ozzie sagely observed, “I can’t do [anything] with that.” But with money,” Ozzie observed, “ I can go buy me a new boat, I can go buy me a new car, I can dress my wife the way I want to dress her, I can go to Spain,” Guillen said. “With the ring, I can’t go to United Airlines and say, ‘Hello, I won the 2005 championship. Can you fly me to Spain?’ Hell no.”

Ozzie’s rant continued:

“Money is everything besides health. Money is next to that. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, love.’ They don’t know what love means….I work in this job for money. I don’t work for nothing. Money. That’s it. The ring? [censored] the ring. I don’t even wear my [censored] rings. I don’t….. I want to buy my [censored] boat. That’s my inspiration. My inspiration is money. That’s everybody’s inspiration.’’

Guillen etched himself into my memory forever as an all time low-life with these sickening words. Upon reading them, I flashed instantly to Karl Marx’s and Frederick Engel’s purple 1848 passage on how “the bourgeoisie [really, capitalism/the profits system, P.S.] has…left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value….The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.”

In Chicago, Guillen never paid much of a price for his recurrent ugly remarks. Some reporters, fans, and others would occasionally grumble about his insensitivity and arrogance and self-obsession. But generally the public criticism would conclude with shrugs and statements like “that’s Ozzie,” “that’s what you get with Oz,” “he’s a character,” “he sure likes to hear himself talk,” “oh, well, his players love him.” And “you’ve got to give him credit for that World Series.”

“I Love Fidel Castro”

This week, however, Guillen has paid for his motor mouth. The Wizard of Ozzie has had to publicly apologize for – and disavow – his “offensive” and “regrettable” comments and bow humbly before a 5-game suspension imposed on him by Major League Baseball and the Marlins.

So what was his great sin? Did he make a crack about the President and/or the First Lady? Did he call a Miami sportscaster a whore? Did he make an assertion about the sexual orientation of a Miami Herald reporter? Call the Everglades a stinking swamp? Criticize Disney World? Make fun of Mark Rubio? Blast retirees? Defend George Zimmerman?

No. He said something nice (sort of) about somebody – somebody you are ordered to loathe in Miami. He told a Time Magazine reporter that he loved and respected Fidel Castro.

Here’s the actual quote from Time: “I love Fidel Castro. I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [censored] is still here.”

Idiotic and vapid as this statement of “love” and “respect” might have been, it was an unpardonable transgression as far as South Florida and Miami’s influential community of right-wing Cuban-American Castro-haters was concerned. Still seething over the Kennedy administration’s failure to murder Fidel, they and their progeny will never forgive Castro, Che Guevara and their cohorts for making a great egalitarian and anti-imperialist revolution right in Uncle Sam’s Caribbean lake. The remarkable peasants’ and workers’ revolution led by Fidel and Che cost a small minority of wealthy, mostly light-skinned Cuban compradors their privileged position and property atop the U.S. neo-colony that had functioned as a U.S. playground and profit source until 1959 (the last year the White Sox made it to the World Series – with an earlier great Venezuelan shortstop [Luis Aparicio] – before 2005). Castro’s revolution achieved historic gains in social and medical welfare, poverty-elimination and equality outside and against the U.S. imperial system.[1] It has inspired numerous other “developing” (formerly known as “Third World”) countries within and beyond Latin America to follow a path of independent and equitable development that still goes against Washington’s wishes as during and before the Cold War.

Though Ozzie also got in a bit of hot water for expressing admiration for Hugo Chavez in 2004, I have a difficult time believing that his “respect” for Fidel and Hugo has anything to do with the two Latin American leaders’ commitment to socialism and equality. Ozzie has always been about, well, Ozzie (and to some extent his family) and Ozzie proclaims proudly that he values money (and expensive item) above silly things like love and World Series championships. What he likes most about Fidel and Hugo is their success in gaining and keep strongman power over and against a powerful enemy. He probably also likes the two politician’s shared taste for giving long and rambling talks before vast captive audiences.

As part of his public apology, Guillen offered a curious translation of what he said to Time. “What I meant in Spanish, I was talking Spanish,” Guillen claims, “was that I can’t believe somebody who hurt so many people over the years is still alive.”

Sure, Ozzie. (Please see this essay’s endnote on the many people helped, not hurt, by the Cuban revolution).

The Standard Double Standard

Still smarting from his goodbye comments in Chicago, I take a certain delight in seeing Guillen eat crow. At the same time, I can’t help but be disgusted by the double standard imposed by the bourgeois and imperial biases of the U.S. corporate entertainment and propaganda system. Spit on gays and on women and spit on the World Series in the name of grotesque personal money and wealth attachment (“[censored] the [World Series] ring….I want to buy my [censored] boat”) and you get a pass: “oh, that’s Ozzie.” Offer some weak and tasteless praise for a great social and anti-imperial revolutionary and you must hang your head in shame and beg for forgiveness.

Paul Street’s many books include The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman&amp;Littlefied, 2007), and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio), Crashing the Tea Party (Paradigm, 2011). Street can be reached at [email protected]



[1] For a useful summary of remarkable accomplishments, see Owen Richards’ essay, written on the eve of the revolution’s 50th anniversary: “Cuban Revolution: Celebrating 50 Years of Accomplishments,” Direct Action, Issue 7 (December 2008), read online at http://directaction.org.au/issue7/cu...n_celebrating_ 50_years_of_accomplishments. “To survive for 50 years, despite a constant and aggressive counter-revolutionary campaign waged by the U.S. imperialists involving military attacks, sabotage, assassination attempts and a brutal economic blockade.” Richards notes, “is a world-historic achievement. Socialist Cuba has achieved social, political, economic, and environmental achievements unequalled by any other Third World country and some unmatched by many First World countries.” Health care merits special mention: As with education, healthcare in Cuba is completely free — from the cradle to the grave. And not only is it free, but Cuba’s health system is among the best in the world.”

“Before 1959, the vast majority of Cubans had very limited access to health care. The capitalist elite had their private physicians but the poor had only a handful of rundown hospitals, and medicines were mostly unaffordable. In the countryside it was even worse; health care was virtually non-existent.”

“The revolution established that health care is a basic right of all Cuban citizens. It established a new ethic in health care — not for profit, but for service to the people. Cuba’s 1976 constitution states: ‘The state guarantees this right by providing free medical and hospital care by means of the installations of the rural medical service network, polyclinics, hospitals, preventative and specialized treatment centres; by providing free dental care; by promoting the health publicity campaigns, health education, regular medical examinations, general vaccinations and other measures to prevent the outbreak of disease.’ ”

“According to the Word Health Organization, life expectancy in Cuba is now 78 years — 76 years for men and 80 years for women. In comparison, the US life expectancy at birth is 75 and 80 years for males and females respectively. In 1959, average life expectancy in Cuba was just 58 years.”

“In 2008, infant mortality in Cuba was 5.9 deaths per 1000 live births. In 1959 it was 10 times that. Many other countries in Latin America still have an infant mortality rate more than 10 times that of Cuba. Infant mortality in the US is 7 deaths per 1000 live births. According to the WHO, Cuba has nearly twice as many physicians per capita as the US — 5.91 doctors per 1000 people compared to 2.56 doctors per 1000.”

“In fact, Cuba also has more doctors per capita than any other country in the world. In 1959 there were only 6300 doctors, most of whom soon left for the US. Today Cuba has 70,000 doctors; 30,000 abroad and 40,000 resident in Cuba. There are some 90,000 Cuban students currently studying to work in health care. Cuba is also training — free of charge — 76,000 foreign students in medicine. Cuba also has a flourishing biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industry. It has developed a vaccine for meningitis B and exports the world’s best hepatitis B vaccine. It also developed the first synthetic vaccine for pneumonia prevention.”

“Not only does it look after its own people, but the Cuban Revolution exports its world-class health care to other poor countries. In 2008, 36,500 Cuban doctors were sent to 81 Third World countries to provide health care to people who would otherwise not have received it. This is a greater number of doctors than is provided by the WHO or by all of the rich countries to the Third World.”

[Derek]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: evanovitch</div><div class="ubbcode-body">....i have always wondered wen di expiration date re documents from the Bay of Pigs etc expire cause i would love to see the families who owe their wealth to all dat tax money given fi set up banks to fund said attacks...all dat money never been accounted for in public as far as i know... </div></div>

The Bay of Pigs was mainly CIA-funded, through around 40 business fronts for laundering money, based in Miami.

Google Operation Mongoose.

[Cultcha]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gj59sIbXHxI"></param> <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gj59sIbXHxI" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"> </embed></object>

[Pepper]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: R_C</div><div class="ubbcode-body">

These idiots and their families allegedly flee Cuba in order to, among other things, escape the pervasive control by the Cuban government of what speech is allowed in the public domain, who is allowed to speak and and how it is broadcast. So they come to America and do this !

<span style="color: #CC0000">Story</span> </div></div>

Welcome to the banana republic of Miami. This is what we live and breathe everyday.

[Dr.Dudd]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

Don't they all think like him but only he is dumb enough to admit it??

Fans are short for fanatics .
Fanatics are essentially idiots.
They place the importance of a gsmame much higher than their earnings. It is their substitute for reasonable pay. They don't realize that the whole objective of the game is to scam played them into substituting the satisfaction if a win by the home team for better pay. That is why some riot over the game but not their pay when it is cut.
He is nit a team player like everybody else associated with the game.

[R_C]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

<span style="font-size: 8pt">wtr</span>

[Xavier]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

I recommend visiting to Cuba (through Jamaica, Canada or Panama) and listening to people to understand where the exile community is coming from. Here is an interesting story...It is a bit long but a good read and seems to give different views...had a similar experience talking to people on the ground but these are more positive than the people I talked to....

<span style="font-weight: bold">In Cuba, hitchhikers bemoan a host of economic problems</span>
Writer: Kevin G. Hall
Source: Miami Herald

ON THE CARRETERA CENTRAL, Cuba -- “ Subanse,” climb aboard, I said repeatedly, pulling the right wheels of my eight-seat van off the dangerous two-lane highway that snakes hundreds of miles across an island considered off limits to most Americans.

Ostensibly, I was in Cuba to cover Pope Benedict XVI’s visit. But over the week and across the length of the Ohio-sized country, I gave more than five dozen Cubans a botella — in Cuban slang, a ride.

My riders gave an unvarnished view of the country. They were farmers, housewives and doctors. They were school kids, half a baseball team, an economist and even a judge, who proclaimed herself to be a huge fan of Jack Bauer in the American TV thriller series “24.”

The van was a lark. Waiting for my small rental car at the Havana airport for two hours — described to me as five Cuban minutes — the overworked rental agent finally offered me the huge diesel-powered vehicle if I’d get on my way.

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I spent most of the following week offering ordinary Cubans a ride in my gray Hyundai van — which often carried more passengers than it was designed to.

I don’t speak with a gringo accent. Some riders thought I was Argentine, most were baffled and many were wide-eyed to discover their driver was American and a reporter to boot.

“I have an aunt in Florida,” said Angela, who got in before Camaguey, a central Cuban city. Many others said the same, citing family members in Miami, Orlando and Houston.

A few passengers were nervous — perhaps because of my driving — and sat silently. Most were expressive but guarded, quieter when others were in the car. As the number of riders thinned, the conversation generally opened up.

To break the ice, I played Latin music on my iPod through the van’s speaker system. In an early, surreal moment, four Cuban women belted out Amame, a love song by Colombian rocker Juanes. It put to rest any notion that Cubans in the interior lacked knowledge of the outside world.

I left Havana at 5 a.m. sharp on a Sunday, a good day to travel because people are trying to hitch rides home after weekend visits. I was led out of Havana by a cab driver I paid to get me to the Carretera Nacional, the national highway that is the first stretch of the Carretera Central, or Central Highway.

At the start, the drive looked promising enough, four lanes of completely empty highway. About 20 minutes in, however, the four lanes became two with no advance warning. The only indication of roadwork was the metal barriers — not visible in darkness — that I nearly hit skidding at 70 mph.

Minutes later, I drove over a hole so deep that my head hit the roof as the seatbelt snapped tight. And soon after, there was fog so thick you couldn’t see three cars lengths ahead. It was a tough start.

About four hours in, I got on the narrow Carretera Central. Imagine a two-lane back road in Anywhere USA. Now imagine it rutted with deep potholes. This was my road, and my starting point for picking up riders.

Hitchhiking is about the only way to get around outside Cuban cities. Gasoline costs about what it does in the United States. Most Cubans don’t have cars. Most earn a monthly government salary of less than $20. Getting from Point A to Point B requires patience, lots of it. The central highway is clogged with horse buggies, ox carts and tractors pulling wagonloads of people.

Cuba differs from the rest of Latin America in that there aren’t shops and stalls along the roadside with people eking out a living in sundry small businesses. This sort of self-employment has only just been legalized in Cuba, which officially disdains the private sector, so it isn’t widespread yet.

Instead, the Cuban roadside is mostly bare, with occasional in-home restaurants — known as paladares — and a whole bunch of revolutionary billboards.

One mocked the U.S. financial crisis with a downward plunging red line on a financial chart. Others called for the release of five Cuban spies jailed in the United States. And some were just plain odd.

“Socialism: Homework for the Free Man,” read one confounding sign. Another, near an abandoned workers dormitory, read, “Fidel, yes we did it.” My personal favorite was at an ecological reserve, declaring, “Nature is Revolution.” Huh?

Sometimes subtly, sometimes directly, I asked the same questions of all my passengers. How do they feel about the newly announced economic openings? Are they better or worse off than before? What do they think of President Raul Castro?

If they weren’t too nervous, I asked what would come after the deaths of Fidel, 85, and Raul, soon to be 81. They’ve ruled Cuba for 53 years, 50 of them under a U.S. trade embargo. Simple math says their end is near. And I asked what’ll happen if Venezuela’s cancer-stricken president, Hugo Chavez, dies? He’s helped keep Cuba afloat with cheap oil.

What I was after was this: Is Cuba ripe for an Arab Spring, where people can’t stand it anymore and take to the streets? Has the government lost its moral authority? Is it at risk of collapse from within?

Most riders expected continuity, post-Castro brothers. An exception was Carlos, a paramedic picked up outside Havana late in the week on the way east along the northwestern coastline.

“The day that they both die will be the day that the country reclaims its real liberty,” he said, adding, “Cubans want the same rights as the people who live closest to us, in the United States.”

Carlos, 52, said he was among legions of Cubans who tried to make it to U.S. shores by raft. He was picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard seven miles off Florida and returned during the 1990s.

“We’re living in a country of lies,” he said, angry that tourists can come to Cuba and enjoy a parallel currency, while ordinary Cubans cannot travel.

Franklin, an eloquent economics-trained restaurant worker in his 30s, spoke passionately about his hope for change.

“In every country there are distinct parties because not everyone has the same thought, the same ideology. There are Republicans and Democrats in your country,” he said indignantly. “Here there’s just one party, there’s no party that is in opposition. When we analyze it, it’s as if we are all of the same mindset — and of course it’s not like that. But what can we do?”

Asked if the eventual deaths of the Castro brothers might lead people to spontaneously take to the streets, Franklin wasn’t optimistic.

“We are like zombies. We walk, but we don’t know what our rights are, our duties are, what we should think. What we’re presented is how we think,” he said, not hopeful that the dissident movement has much influence. “If 1,000 or 2,000 people (out of 11 million) think like this, it won’t change anything.”

Most of the riders expected things to stay the same, however. That’s because the structure of governance has been in place for five decades. Local and regional party bosses and secret police have a vested interest in continuity, they suggested.

In the eastern city of Holguin, I was talking with a former soldier, Reynaldo Gonzalez, a jack of all trades, when he paused to take stock of a middle-aged man he said was a secret police officer who’d scooted up a park bench to eavesdrop on our conversation.

Gonzalez was pro-regime and referred to Miami Cubans as gusanos, or worms. He vowed that Cubans on the island can withstand any U.S. invasion, but he acknowledged he’s worried that if Chavez dies or is defeated in October elections there’ll be a repeat of the early 1990s after Soviet funding disappeared, when life in Cuba was particularly hard.

“We will have to tighten our belts,” he said somberly.

A woman named Milagros did fear the coming change. She spoke bluntly and then, remembering she’s in Cuba, asked me to turn off the recorder and begged that I not mention her profession or her city because “everybody knows I complain.”

Milagros feared a harder line after the ailing Fidel passes. His brother Raul has ruled since 2006, but Fidel looms large still.

“Raul is not passive like Fidel. Fidel, all he wanted was discussion of ideas, like he says, a battle of ideas: no war, no arms. But Raul is more aggressive,” she said, adding, “It really scares me. It really scares me that Fidel will die.”

Not one passenger could name a person they expected to succeed the Castro brothers. Until their ouster in 2009, two names were frequently cited in and out of Cuba — Carlos Lage, who was de facto prime minister, and Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque. Fidel Castro famously accused them of falling under the spell of the “honey of power.” (Cubans joke that the pair belong to the Pajama Party, since they now cool their heels at home.)

The police presence in Cuba remains quite visible. There are checkpoints in every town along the highway. Having traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it felt familiar. It wasn’t a menacing police presence, just a constant one.

Hard times dominated almost every conversation with passengers. They complained about how tough it is with rising food prices and shortages of milk and other essentials. They complained about the government cutting back subsidies and slashing government jobs.

Angela, a poor white woman from the interior, said her kids, ages 11, 9 and 2, don’t know yet what ice cream tastes like. The government no longer provides subsidies for milk for children older than 8, she said. Angela gets a 30-peso-per-child subsidy, roughly about $1.50 a month.

“What do you think a mother can do to feed her kids with that money? It’s not even enough to pay for the milk the state sells!” she said bitterly. Her husband divorced her, and Yaritza, a tall black woman who hopped into the van at the same time, urged Angela to seek a husband with a cow.

Cattle are the property of the state. A 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Cuba’s cattle population is at least 20 percent less than it was at the time of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Killing a cow carries a prison sentence of four to 10 years, according to the penal judge I picked up later in the week.

Yaritza complained that Cubans every day are forced to make unpleasant tradeoffs.

“With what they pay us, we can’t live. If you eat, you can’t dress yourself. And if you dress yourself, you can’t eat,” she said. “Food prices are very high, and clothes, don’t even mention it.”

What about those economic reforms getting headlines outside Cuba?

“It’s helped economically, but you need money to invest to start up something you can do later,” said Angela. “The self-employed must have startup money. And for those of us who don’t, what can we do?”

I ask about government plans to adapt microfinance — small loans, often to poor women, which have proven successful in Bangladesh and other developing nations. None of my passengers had caught wind of this idea yet.

All across the central plains of Cuba, the plains were, well, plain. I was traveling in the dry season, a six-month period that generally ends with May showers. Parts of Cuba are in a five-year drought, so some cattle and horses in this region were clearly bordering on starvation.

Their rib cages protruded through their sagging skin as they foraged for anything green. I sent a picture of one cow home to my 10-year-old daughter when I reached Santiago to cover Pope Benedict.

“DAD call animal control it’s neglected!!!!!!!” she wrote back with the innocence of a grade-school student.

Elcio Cabrera, a poor farmer with red eyes and the stink alcohol wafting from every pore, climbed aboard in Bayamo, an eastern city.

“You’ve got to work real hard to get food on the table for your family,” he said of the current hardship, offering guava and other fruit before stealing my spare shoes upon exit.

During the eventful week at the wheel, I sat in on a pickup baseball game near Bayamo, with barefooted players as entertaining as any major league game. I gave eight kids a ride in Biran, the birthplace of Fidel and Raul. I happened upon a horrific car crash in Holguin that left me in a “there but for the grace of God go I” mood. Cuba’s accident mortality rate was 14.5 per 100,000 citizens in 2009, unusually high given how few vehicles there are in the country but almost half what is was in the 1980s. In 2010, the comparable rate was 11.4 per 100,000 in the United States — where nearly all households have a car.

Back in Havana, I reflected on how much was squeezed into a short trip, trying to match so many names to so many conversations.

I was most struck by the warmth of the Cuban people. Three or four strangers climbed in, and within 10 minutes they were talking to each other as if they’d been lifelong friends.

There’s a lot to be depressed about in Cuba, where much in life is brought down to a shared level of misery, a lowest common denominator, if you will. Yet Cubans have come to rely on each other for five long decades in order to survive.

Passenger Milagros best expressed that optimism.

“We all know we are in a poor country, but within undeveloped countries, Cuba is a privileged country,” she said.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/15/v-...l#storylink=cpy

[R_C]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

Hi Xavier, I read the entire article. I find it interesting that a journalist with Kevin G. Hall's background and experience would omit even a passing reference to the contribution that the Cuban Democracy Act, the Helms-Burton Act, the Cuban Assets Control Regulations and so on have made to the conditions he describes. And I give that as just one example of how unbalanced this article is. Point being, as inarticulate as Ozzie Guillen may be, his comments had context. Kevin Hall gives us none.

I am also inherently suspicious of journalists who take a day trip into the countryside of a small country, speak to a dozen or so people and offer up instant analyses of very complex issues.

From Salon Magazine:

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">&quot;Then I spoke with veteran guidebook writer Christopher P. Baker, author of half a dozen travel guidebooks, including Lonely Planet’s guide to Jamaica and the “Passport Illustrated Guide to Jamaica.” I asked Baker what issues and lessons he thinks Kirschhoch’s case raises for travelers.

“Well, Jamaica as a destination certainly poses several challenges,” he said. “Muggings, murders, rapes and other serious crimes are daily events, and though not normally aimed at tourists, the history book on this score is unnerving. Drug use and drug trading proliferate, scamming tourists is a rite of passage for many younger, uneducated Jamaican males and a deep-rooted anger and resentment toward whites and a schizophrenic volatility are ubiquitous elements of the national psyche.

“Jamaican males are extremely quick to get angry, and machismo is so deep-rooted that physical violence — sometimes extreme — is often an imperative. Avoid getting into an argument, and get away from other people’s arguments or volatile crowds as quickly as possible.&quot;</div></div>

[Xavier]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

R_C, I am not a trained journalist but many of my conversations were similar. People scared to talk, want to visit Jamaica but could not and I had an experience with possible a secret police joining a conversation. Take the US out the picture and focus on the people &amp; their freedom. It is easy from afar to look at a situation and say it is good but when you ask the question could I live like that it is very different.

[Cultcha]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

I too read the entire article Xavier. R_ C raises good points. No mention of how U.S. policy is playing a role in the situation the Cuban people find themselves in.

But yet the U.S. trades freely, and borrows a ton of money from places like China.

[Emperah]

Re: &quot;I Love Fidel Castro&quot;

Milo yuh si how de ting weh a gwaan in south america how dem all upset how canada an america won't lowe cuba inna de ting?

Dem show all get some backbone an tell obama and harper fi galang a dem yaad until dem all ppl de same.