Castro
Castro’s latest
Via Jack Shafer’s Twitter feed, this AP story on Fidel Castro’s decision to fill three of the eight scant pages in the party-controlled newspaper Granma with nonsense from 9/11 Truther and Bilderberg conspiracy theorist Daniel Estulin. AP writer Will Weissert does a nice job detailing how Estulin’s work actually draws on the thinking (rather, “thinking”) of the extremist right. I’m
Obama hails Yoani
Via NYT’s The Lede, President Obama has directly addressed questions posed by courageous Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, who was recently harassed and roughed up by Cuban security officials for the great crime of blogging. The NYT post also remarks on a new Human Rights Watch report titled “New Castro, Same Cuba,” the thrust of which I don’t need to spell
The handshake
President Obama is taking heat from Newt Gingrich and others for shaking hands with Hugo Chavez and “making nice” with Cuba, etc. Since I’m a dogged liberal opponent of those two particular regimes, let me say I support Obama’s moves and think the Republicans are full of it. It was Chavez who approached Obama at the Trinidad summit, not the
“Manda huevos”
As they say in Spanish. What balls. Fidel Castro is not satisfied with President Obama’s steps to relax the Cuban embargo. Apparently the U.S. needs to live up to Castro’s high ethical standards: Castro responded to the measures in an online column Monday night, writing that the U.S. had announced the repeal of ”several hateful restrictions,” but had stopped short
Coates on Castro
“Dude, he’s a dictator.” That’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’s refreshingly simple takedown of Representative Bobby Rush, who has expressed the highest regard for Fidel Castro after a trip to Cuba. Rush has long availed himself of the right to participate in democratic elections in the United States. Yet he has no problem heaping praise on a man who has denied Cubans the
Penn fallout
I don’t usually cite the New York Post‘s Page Six, but that’s where celebrity flaps are covered, and Sean Penn is nothing if not a celebrity. So it’s good to see someone pointing out James Kirchick’s entirely correct assessment of the recent Penn-Castro-Chávez affair in The Advocate. Says Kirchick: “Gay rights are human rights, as Milk said, and Penn discredits both
Efforts deserving support
~ Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez and her brave comrades have managed, despite open intimidation by the regime, to institute a clandestine bloggers’ “knowledge workshop.” Says Sánchez: “We ended up finding the cracks between the fingers of the censors, between which the fine sand of information and knowledge has managed to slip through.” Sean Penn, writing prominently for The Nation,
Penn sucks up again
There’s little I can say about Sean Penn’s fluff “interview” with Hugo Chávez and Raúl Castro that Marc Cooper hasn’t said. Some have suggested that I tend to overstate the influence of actor-activists like Penn. If anything, I’ve understated it. Penn’s “journalism” is now being published on the cover of The Nation, right at the moment when audiences are swooning