Tag Archives: Cuba

The Press

cracking Down on Journalists in Cuba and Hong Kong

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Communists need their people to toe the party line without question, just like INGSOC does in Orwell’s 1984.

In Cuba, the island nation that could be a paradise, 66 protestors arrested for their actions last summer were tried in December and are still awaiting their sentences. A few who were also arrested for unauthorized use of speech have been sentenced to 15-30 years in prison.

“It has never been easy for journalists to work in Cuba,” Juliane Matthey, press officer for Latin America at Reporters Without Borders, said. On the organization’s 2021 list ranking countries on journalistic freedom, Cuba is the 9th worst, not taking last summer into account.

The Communist Chinese continue to bully journalists in Hong Kong. Stand News was the largest free news agency in the country until Dec 29, when police raided their offices. “The online media organization, which had operated for seven years, took down its website and social media accounts and dismissed all staff.”

Fiction, Non-fiction

Cuba in ‘1984’

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A few weeks ago, I started reading 1984 as a change of pace from the Rubus novels I went through. That was when news from Cuba came out on Twitter, and Cubans had taken to the streets.

Our media, which allows claims of Cuba’s “entirely free” health care to go unchallenged, told us they were upset that COVID vaccines were in short supply. But everything has been in short supply. Farmland that could be cultivated with modern techniques is wasted by political bullies who must control everything even when there’s nothing left. Little abuelas are saying they have lived under communism for 60 years and they’re sick of it. The protests sprang up everywhere. Police have ushered hundreds of people off the streets, beating them for protesting or “disappearing” them. World reports some of the details here.

Communists blocked all or most of the country’s Internet access early on, prompting U.S. advocates to talk about deploying special Internet beacons like we did in Puerto Rico a few years ago. Doctors are now speaking up about the sorry condition of state-run hospitals. Health is not a particular care of the state.

This week, Cuba has made it illegal to complain online, so the video last month of a woman crying hysterically over her son bleeding to death under state-run care, wounds caused by police, would be a crime to record and share. Praising the all-knowing, ever-benevolent state is all that’s allowed.

With this going on, I found it difficult to read 1984. The parallels were too strong, the story too dark. It was akin to enduring my mother’s death in a hospital a couple years ago and later trying to watch a Korean TV drama set in a hospice care facility in which characters regularly pass away.

I made it through about 70-90 pages. I heard a professor (I think) say he thought the book felted dated, pulled out of history’s dustbin. I think it describes Cuba perfectly. A country at war with ideological enemies. History constantly rewritten to agree with present claims. Enthusiastic support of our dear leader is required from all. No one is interested in discussing the truth or exploring possibilities. No one wants personal risk or neighborly respect. The state speaks for the people, because the people have no voice of their own.

I don’t find that kind of fear entertaining or enlightening.

I wonder if Cuba has their own version of Newspeak.

Uncategorized

The ‘Backbone’ for Terror Is Broken

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Armando Valladares spent twenty-two years in Cuban prisons. Last year, Marvin Olasky interviewed him on his thoughts of Castro in the beginning and how he survived imprisonment.

What do you say to those who say, “The United States has had an embargo regarding Cuba for more than 50 years and it hasn’t worked?”The embargo was never intended to remove the government in Cuba. The embargo has worked because it has prevented the Cuban government from receiving millions of dollars from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other banking institutions.

Now that the U.S. government and the pope embrace Raúl Castro, what do you think will happen?The only person who really inspires terror in Cuba is Fidel Castro, even if he’s agonizing in a bed. That’s how it was with Josef Stalin. Raúl Castro is alive because his backbone, Fidel, is alive. The day Fidel Castro dies will probably end the entire process.

Fiction

A Sci-Fi Cuba as Earth Under New Management

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For rent, one planet that’s lost its way in the race for development, that showed up at the stadium after all the medals had been handed out, when all that was left was the consolation prize of survival.

For rent, one planet that learned to play the economics game according to one set of rules but discovered once it started playing that the rules had been changed.

That planet in Yoss’ novel A Planet for Rent is a stand-in for 1990s Cuba. Emily A. Maguire describes the story of an unmanageable Earth. “In the interests of ‘saving Earth from itself,’ [aliens] have turned the planet, now a ‘Galactic Protectorate,’ into a vacation destination: Earth and its inhabitants exist solely to satisfy the desires of its alien visitors.” (via Prufrock News)