Time to unify behind Trump? Not on your life

In the past, I have not been shy about using this platform to air my opinions on domestic politics. I have been hesitant to do so during this election cycle. For one thing, I’m not that active on Babalú anymore and feel more than a little guilty about posting about things other than Cuba, when I post so little. But my esteemed colleague Silvio Canto has published his opinion that it’s time to move on and “stop the campaigns and let’s look ahead to a big night in November.” I could not disagree with this opinion more and I have a lot of reasons why.

Read more

Reflections on Babalu Blog at 20

Val, Ziva and I posing in front of outdoor advertising that was part of a public relations campaign to raise awareness of Spain’s re-colonization of Cuba, May of 2007

I’ve been thinking about what to say on this auspicious occasion, and I’ve been drawing blanks, so I’m going to simply start writing and hope it makes sense in the end.

By the time I started reading Babalú Blog it was already a couple of years old. A co-worker turned me on to it, and I was hooked. I had just published a website, trenblindado.com, about Ché Guevara and the much propagandized “Battle of Santa Clara” during Cuba’s castroite insurrection. I felt I needed to meet the creator of Babalú Blog, Valentin Prieto, in order to promote my new website so I set out to meet him at Cuba Nostalgia. This must have been May of 2005. Val was gracious and helpful to me and by March of 2006 I was contributing to Babalu. At some point Val began to burn out, I could sense it. I still had a lot of energy for what we were doing and began to fill the vacuum slowly being left by Val. The audience continued growing, and so did Babalú’s roster of writers. Eventually, I burned out too. Fortunately, for the blog’s sake, and for Cuba’s sake, Alberto de la Cruz then stepped in and took the reins that he has in hand to this very day. How he does it, I don’t know.

Read more

Question for President Biden

And for Governor Ron DeSantis and Mayor Daniella Levine Cava….

Will Cuban baseball players be allowed to move around freely while in Miami-Dade County or will Cuban State Security agents be allowed to keep them prisoner, in violation of the Constitution of the United States and the laws of the State of Florida?

The Covid containment sham

There’s a very informative Substack called Eugyppius: a plague chronicle. A few days back he asked his readers the following question, “What convinced you containment was a sham?” This was my response.

I knew immediately we couldn’t “contain” this virus and that only bad outcomes could come from our attempts to do so. On March 17, 2020, the second day I was working from home, I began to feel like something was not right. My degree is in economics though I work in advertising, but my background made me think that the putting the brakes on global economic activity would be catastrophic, not just for people’s bank accounts but generally. That day, I posted the following on Facebook:

Given my background and what I do for a living (which involves looking at a lot of consumer data), I started looking at reports from different geographies. Not just news reports but also data. It became clear to me almost immediately that

1: the infection fatality rate was much lower than what the media was reporting and the models were showing,

2: Only a fraction of the population was at real risk from serious covid illness,

3: that locking down Alabama because NYC hospitals were overwhelmed made no sense,

4: that the virus seemed to be spreading regardless of the draconian measures being taken,

5: that it was much easier for politicians to push people around and pretend to be doing something than actually controlling the spread of the virus,

6: that the American left and the news media were using the pandemic as a club with which to bludgeon a president that seemed to be cruising toward re-election prior to the coronavirus.

Read more

Reuters FFS

Not only is Reuters Cuba bureau chief, Marc Frank, a former “journalist” for the official newspaper of Communist Party USA, but look at the caption on this photo in this article about circumventing censorship in Cuba.

People hold Cuba’s national flag during protests against and in support of the government, amidst the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Havana, Cuba July 11, 2021.

Are you kidding me? Not mentioned anywhere in the article: “dictatorship”.

:

Some thoughts on the current uprising in Cuba

In no particular order:

Its Not Going To Happen GIFs | Tenor

There will be NO MILITARY INTERVENTION in Cuba. For those of you who are calling upon the US government or the UN (ha!) to intervene militarily in Cuba, it’s not going to happen. For one thing, we have a President who belongs to the American political party that is increasingly sympathetic to the communist regime. Even if the President were a Republican, there would be no military intervention. The hope of such an intervention is counterproductive and generations of Cubans, on the island and off, have deluded themselves thinking that Cuba would be rescued by outside forces. The reality is that the responsibility for throwing off the yoke of the regime falls solely on Cubans on the island. Fortunately, it’s possible. We’ve seen it in Eastern Europe. None of those regimes fell because of outside military intervention.

For Five Months, BLM Protestors Trashed America's Cities. After the  Election, Things May Only Get Worse | The Heritage Foundation

The Cuban populace should use the same destabilizing tactics that leftist mobs use in the US and around the world. Antifa is a plague on our country. For more than a year they have terrorized Portland, making it a veritable war zone. Read Andy Ngo’s book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy for details, but in simple terms, Cubans should dress in black or unidentifiable clothes, wear masks, put on whatever protective gear they might have such as motorcycle helmets and arm themselves with stones (plenty available in crumbling Cuba) and clubs. They should execute their protests under the cover of night, barricading streets, setting fire to government buildings, especially police stations and terrorize the CDR neighborhood spies that have repressed them for years. They should also sabotage the TV and radio transmission towers and facilities in Cuba.

Cubans in Miami talk of boating to island to back protests

Cubans outside of the island have a role too. We should be posting on social media, gathering in support of our brothers and sisters on the island, not letting this moment pass and not letting people forget what’s going on. We should, of course, also be praying.

We should not be blocking streets and highways. There are three types of people: those who sympathize with us, those who MIGHT sympathize with us and those who will never sympathize with us. We don’t have to worry about the first or the third groups, but, we will never gain sympathy from the second group by blocking traffic. Keeping a mom from getting home to her kids doesn’t help anyone in Cuba and doesn’t win us any friends. Also, Florida’s legislature recently passed a law, signed by our great governor, Ron DeSantis, that prohibits this type of demonstration. Let’s not be hypocrites by using the same form of protest that we don’t appreciate when the cause is one we don’t support.

Don’t send money or goods to Cuba. We’ve been saying it for years. While wanting to help your families is understandable, these types of remittances have been enriching the regime that represses them for decades. The reason people are out in the streets protesting is largely because of the dissatisfaction lack of basic goods and services that is endemic to the communist form of government. Sorry.

The New York Times is and has been an abomination

Reading a post by Mark Judge, a childhood friend of Brett Kavanaugh who was caught up in the slanderous confirmation hearings of that Supreme Court Justice and he credits Mollie Hemingway for blowing up a book written by two Times “journalists” that sought to continue the lies.

The interesting part of the post to me was Judge’s mention of the book, The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. He describes how the book goes into detail on such things as how Times “journalist” Walter Duranty was actually a propagandist for Stalin’s Soviet Union and how the Times promoted a coup in South Vietnam.

I was surprised that he didn’t mention Herbert Matthews, another Times “journalist” who was basically Fidel Castro’s Walter Duranty. You can read more about him in, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times.

Oh well, I guess it’s hard to call out every disgusting act the Times has committed over its long history.

YouTube erases video of Florida Governor’s COVID round table

While the mainstream press happily employs communists, big tech happily censors democratically elected politicians and respected scientists.

Margot Metroland, "Who Killed George Orwell?" | Counter ...
George Orwell spins in his grave wondering WTF is wrong with us.

Via the Wall Street Journal:

[YouTube] has taken down a video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding a policy discussion with Dr. Atlas and the three creators of the Great Barrington Declaration, a group of physicians and scientists critical of strict lockdowns to fight the coronavirus.

In the hour-and-forty-five minute video, Mr. DeSantis and the four panelists lambaste the U.S. coronavirus response as excessively draconian and ineffective. They emphasize unintended public-health harms from lockdowns and school closures, criticize mask mandates and generally celebrate Florida’s response.

NYT Journo worked for Chinese Communist Party

Via our old friend Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, we learn from The National Pulse that a New York Times Journalist named Jonah Kessel openly tweeted about having worked for the PRC.. Kessel had tweeted more than 23,000 times but now his account has zero.

A sampling of tweets from Kessel

This isn’t the first time that a “mainstream” journalist has worked for a communist party before. The longtime head of Reuters Cuba bureau, Mark Frank, penned over 1000 articles for the People’s Daily World, a Communist Party USA publication.

You see, if you’re working for Reuters or the New York Times it’s okay to have worked the Chinese Communist Party or Communist Party USA but God forbid you are an El Nuevo Herald Freelancer or a talk radio host and moonlight for Radio Martí, a US government broadcaster that is like The Voice of America and which tries to get uncensored news and information into Cuba, If you’re one of those you get a sloppy “exposé” written about you and get fired. Read all about the Martí Moonlighters scandal and how it ruined careers, including that of the Miami Herald’s asshat editor at the time, Tom Fiedler, at Herald Watch.