“The Cuban president answered the unprecedented protests by authorizing police shootings on unarmed civilians — and, in his words, “summoning all the revolutionaries and all the communists” all over Cuba to confront the demonstrators.
Openly instigating Cuban-on-Cuban violence is a new low — even for a leader caught on video at the onset of his rule boasting that he could care less about international condemnation of his repressive methods.
Under the cloak of night into Sunday and in the light of day Monday, Cuban police and special ops moved into neighborhoods all over the island, at times shooting at homes and at ordinary people staging protests across Cuba, from Havana to Guantánamo.
The unprecedented rebellion — thousands of Cubans taking to the streets chanting “Freedom!” “We’re no longer afraid!” — and the brutal response of Diaz-Canel calling for Cuban-against-Cuban combat has been captured on dozens of videos.
A man holding up a bloodied Cuban flag in a Havana neighborhood, shots ringing in the background, says it all.” Miami Herald
Comment: The silence of the Marxist Democrats in Washington, people like Bernie and AOC shows what they have in mind for Americans. pl
When did our intlligence agencies first warn Biden, Kamala, Blinken, Austin etc about pending turmoil in Cuba, South Africa and Haiti? What have our intelligence agencies been doing with all their capabilies, other than spying on Trump and Americans who might have thought about voting for him?
Yes there are illegal immigrants coming into the US from Cuba, but there is surely nothing new in this. Illegal migrants have been flowing into the US from most South and Central American Countries over the past decade and more; I would question that this has anything to do with socialism. And yes there are protests in Cuba at the moment but these are small and hardly threaten the Havana Government. The dire economic situation in Cuba is not helped by the sanctions that the US has long imposed on the island – the UN have been seeking in vain to get the US to lift these sanctions since 1992. With the possible exception of South Africa, and even that case is questionable, sanctions have never to my knowledge ever worked anywhere; in fact they have often have the reverse impact to that intended. Sanctions and the hope that protests will somehow topple the government is absolutely futile – time and time again history has proved this strategy it will not work. In Russia, Syria, Venezuela and other countries, sanctions have served to strengthen the government, not weaken it. If the US wishes Cuba to become part of the capitalist world, they need to start by lifting sanctions and allowing trade, capital (and ideas via a free media) to flow into the country.
Terence Reeves-Smyth
How about an invasion to overthrow the communist government?
Rough Riders 2.0. Sounds like something we could easily pull off in the current environment. It would take a fraction of what we wasted in Afghanistan to rebuild the country.
That would be Rough Riders 3.0. The RR 2.0 washed up on the Bahía de Cochinos in April 1961. I recall those planners had similar opinions on how easy it would be to pull off.
Ana Santay
You pays your money and you takes your chances.
“a free media” Funny, the dictator just turned off the internet and even the CNN guy is afraid to leave his room to walk the streets of Havana and, you know, do reporter things.
‘The CNN guy’ ? It’s a long time since CNN, or MSNBC for that matter, have done any real reporting – as far as I can see, they do not do ‘news’ anymore but rather entertainment and DNC promotion. Both have spent the last four plus years stringing absurd ‘Russiagate’ stories and a general hatred for Trump. Increasingly, with the dominance of the MSM by only few big corporations and with the prevailing ‘cancel culture’ on the internet, there are serious question marks over how ‘free’ the US media is now becoming.
So your comment about “ideas via free media” was just b.s.
We cannot support Cubans because, the are holding Cuban and American flags.
That is unacceptable to the Bidenistas.
They need to hold BLM or Rainbow flags for American media to cover them.
The problem with claiming for this when in the West we have passed already a year and a half under a harsh dictatorship, a two tier society has been stablished and around half the population is being palced out of the system and probably soon will be labeled as “extremists” or “terrorists” is that it sounds like a bad joke…
Not to mention that all in all, with harsh blockade even under pandemic and all that, the numbers of deaths by Covid-19 in Cuba are far from those in the US and some of the richest countries in Europe, these with all the means avaialble but with a nefarious management.
Why nobody claims for these governments to stand down?
Finally, with regard hunger, this is widespread phenomena due the “pandemic” measures.
There will be hunger in the West very soon…if it is ot here already, only you will never heard of it in the Western media
“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime. The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights. Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected. The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”
That’s the statement Biden issued yesterday. His administration is still reviewing the additional sanctions Trump put on Cuba. This might be one of those not knowing whether to shit or go blind moments for Biden. Does he try to starve the Cubans into democracy? We have become addicted to the sanctions and blockade approach for decades. It also smacks of neocon fever dreams. Do we actively go for regime change? I doubt it. I thought we were trying to get out of those neocon war games. Do we try to shower the Cubans with aid and vaccines? The humanitarian approach would be novel, but it would surely mark Biden as a commie lover. And I really doubt it would weaken the totalitarian regime in Havana. What to do. What to do.
TTG
I do not think that taking military action to free the oppressed would be a “neocon fever dream.” If so, our lives were a bad joke.
“If so, our lives were a bad joke.”
The 6 million war dead between 1955 and 2020 send their condolences for your loss of heart, Walter.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440905/
http://www.necrometrics.com/wars21c.htm
Eironeia
I am overwhelmed by the depth of your sympathy. Don’t get a lot of Indians here.