And Without Irony (Note on Granma)

From time to time I like to take a look at Granma, the daily newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. In today's web edition the top of the page invites us to take another look at a fragment of one of Fidel's speeches, this one from December, 1988. It's a harangue about the dangers of "social indiscipline," this counterrevolutionary fifth column that threatens to undermine the island. 1988 is twenty years after the beginning of the infamous "Caso Padilla," when poet Heberto Padilla was condemned for publishing his work Fuera de juego. One of the better poems in that collection is "En tiempos difíciles" and it does a nice job of deconstructing the kind of Big Brotherish terror-think that Fidel has been such an expert at inflicting on Cubans for the past half century. Padilla was tortured for daring to call out the double speak.  Castro's "reflection" is a battle cry, a call to fight on many fronts. The classic call from the dictator for his people to sacrifice all for the grand cause so beautifully represented by the Leader.
The image shown above is moving around cyberspace as a call for internet access for Cubans. See a brief explanation here.

Big Dunce of 2011 #2: Orly Taitz

Wow! This woman has totally flipped. She also appears to be a compulsive liar. After the White House released the long form of Obama's birth certificate, this nutcase made the claim that it must be false because Obama was identified on the form as "African" and in 1961 he would have been identified as "Negro." Guess what? It's another lie: the document does not identify Obama, but rather his father, as African. Incredible: Obama's father was, indeed, African. It's hard to know where to begin with this woman. She may have been born in the Soviet Union, but she seems like a true American freak. This is the woman who says Obama is a "radical communist" and a "radical Muslim."

Cuban Media

 This morning newspapers around the world lead with large headlines of outrage and indignation over the grotesque and murderous ruthlessness of Bachar El Asad's massacre of his own people in Syria. Yesterday his gunmen killed close to a hundred unarmed protesters. Granma, the official daily of the Cuban Communist Party has... not a word! (Their International section does report, on the other hand, on a woman interrupting a talk by Obama in California; she was demanding freedom for Bradley Manning, the soldier who made possible the huge wikileaks cache of State Department documents.)  Dickinson hosted a Cuban journalist this week, a regime journalist. Hedelberto is a very nice guy with some curious ideas, among them that Amnesty International is a very right wing organization. I look forward to communicating with him regarding Granma's international coverage.