Posts Tagged ‘Cuba’
US Officials Seize Seven Computers as Caravan to Cuba Crosses US-Mexico Border
9:11 am By Maegan La Mala · Activism|Cuba|Health|Justice|Politics · 1 Comment
21 Jul 2011Note: Some beloved mentors of mine are participating in the caravan this year so, like just about everything, this is more than political, it is also personal. – Mala
Dear Friends and Supporters,
At 12:20 PM on Wednesday, the 22nd Pastors for Peace Caravan to Cuba arrived at the US/Mexico border to break the US blockade against Cuba. The US border officials have again decided to interfere with our mission of breaking the US blockade, and have seized seven computers. More information is in the press release below. Although we are continuing on the caravan and taking the remaining 100 tons of aid to Cuba, our protest against the seizure continues! Your support is vital! We are asking you, our emergency response network, to spread the word:
Call your senators and congressional representatives, the White House, call your local media, and organize in your communities to demand that the US government:
- Return the 7 computers immediately!
- End the blockade and travel ban of Cuba now!
- Find your Congressional Representative here:
https://writerep.house.gov/
writerep/welcome.shtml Find your Senator here:
http://www.senate.gov/general/
contact_information/senators_ cfm.cfm Contact the Whitehouse here: http://www.whitehouse.
gov/contact Now is the time for action against this criminal blockade and in support of the Pastors for Peace Friendshipment Caravan to Cuba!
You can support our work by making a donation here:
https://npo.networkforgood.
org/Donate/Donate.aspx? npoSubscriptionId=4382 Let us work together to end the blockade!
In solidarity,
IFCO-Pastors for Peace
US Officials Seize Seven Computers as Pastors for Peace Cuba Caravan Crosses into Mexico
US Customs and Border Patrol officers seized seven computers intended for Cuban hospitals, schools, and a veterinary clinic at the Pharr (TX) International Bridge on Wednesday.
The computers are part of the 100 tons humanitarian aid carried by the 22nd IFCO/Pastors for Peace Friendshipment Caravan to Cuba. Caravan participants observed officers X-raying and searching the vehicles. Customs officers then said that they were ‘detaining,’ not ‘seizing’ the computers, in order to determine whether the caravan needed to have a license to take them to Cuba. Three of the computers seized were the same ones that were taken from last year’s caravan in 2010, and were later returned to IFCO/Pastors for Peace.
While the brightly painted trucks and school buses were being searched, caravanistas chanted “Cuba is no threat to you; let our computers through!” and “Love is our license! Free the computers!” and held banners and signs reading “Cuba is not our enemy” and other slogans. Caravanistas then prayed and chanted together as they gathered around the pickup truck holding the seized computers.
Although IFCO/Pastors is protesting the computer seizure, we are continuing through the border to deliver to Cuba the 100 tons of aid that have crossed successfully through the border.
This year more than 100 North Americans and Europeans have joined the Caravan.
For updates check www.pastorsforpeace.org
and www.facebook.com/ pastorsforpeace
Today in Latin American Historia : Dia de la Revolucion en Cuba
10:09 am By Maegan La Mala · Cuba|history · 4 Comments
1 Jan 2011
On January 1st 1959, U.S. backed dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista fled the island for the Dominican Republic following the Battle of Santa Clara. This ushered in the communist government, led by Fidel Castro, that remains in power today.
While we can and should debate and question the Cuban revolution, as we should all revolutions, including the ones we actively participate in,
a quote from Grace Lee Boggs, from a conversation at the U.S. Social Forum last year, that I recently read is echoing within as I think about the Cuban revolution, U.S. interventions in Latin America, and the idea of democracy. Boggs was talking specifically about Chinese democracy but it’s applicable here as well.
“What is important is not our critique if the Chinese vertical democracy, but the understanding that democracy is now a concept in contention and that we are all participants in creating what we think should be the democracy of the future”
Image Via / Wikipedia
Grace Lee Boggs Quote Via / A Conversation Grace Lee Boggs, Immanuel Wallerstein, U.S. Social Forum 2010
Cuba : Fidel Resurfaces & Released Political Prisoners Continue Their Struggle
10:45 am By Maegan La Mala · Cuba · 2 Comments
15 Jul 2010
He’s alive!
Earlier this week, Fidel Castro made a public appearance last week, posing for fotos and speaking at Cuba’s World Economy Research Center proving that despite the never ending rumors, he is not dead yet.
No doubt the appearance was meant to draw attention away from the releasing of 52 political prisoners from behind Cuban bars. Some of the released prisoners will stay in Spain. The U.S. and Chile have offered asylum to the prisoners still on the island that are expected to be released shortly. Some of the prisoners, whose release was secured with intervention from Spain and the Catholic Church, have said that they do not want to leave Cuba.
Cuban Memory Lane: Teofilo Stevenson
5 Jan 2010I was surfing around my sports stuff today and came across this clip of legendary boxing great, Teofilo Stevenson.
I am a secret fan of boxing. I actually dig the shit out of it, but don’t often admit it because I am, after all, anti-violence etc. Also, lately boxing is not that interesting–there are no real personalities and boxing on the whole seems to be suffering from the same thing every other sport is suffering from: too many people thinking they can do that–and really nobody can. Diluted talent is what I think it’s called.
Watching this old clip made me remember why I love(d) boxing so much. There is beauty in the perfect hit, but even more so, there is humanity in the story of sports. Remember the olden days when the story of a person’s life mattered just as much as his/her successes (or lack of) in sports? And not in a “Tiger Woods is the cleanest and neatest non-Negro” sorta way–but in an earthy-never-gonna-keep-me down sorta way?
Images back during Teofilo Stevenson’s time were not carefully crafted by handlers–but pretty much all that the athlete had outside of his/her skill. The human being still sits underneath the crafted image these days (as Tiger Woods has shown us)–but for some reason we are addicted to the idea that our athletes are perfect beings that make no mistakes. Back in the old days, the mistakes and the situations we didn’t understand and the drama behind the scenes were what made us love them.
I wonder what caused that change. And I want the old days of sports to come back.
Pointing the Racism Finger at Latin America (And Ourselves)
10:55 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Cuba|Latin America|Peru|race · 8 Comments
4 Dec 2009Every few months the debate starts up again about racism in Latin America. Is it worse than in the United States or just different because of the very specific way colonialism played itself out and continues to play out in the region? Many Latin Americans and Latinos will swear up and down that there is no racism in their countries of origin and in their families, which often times are multi-racial. But what passes for “non-racism” actually includes thinly veiled language and action that reveals centuries old internalized issues around genetic purity and colorism.
Last week Peru’s government apologized to it’s Afro-Peruvian community for centuries of “abuse, exclusion and discrimination”.
The government said racially-motivated harassment still hindered the social and professional development of many African-Peruvians.
A public ceremony will be held to apologise to African-Peruvians, who make up 5-10% of the population.
And earlier this week, at least 60 prominent African-Americans, including Cornel West, actress Ruby Dee Davis, film director Melvin Van Peebles, former South Florida congresswoman Carrie Meek, Dr. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of President Barack Obama’s church in Chicago, and Susan Taylor, former editor in chief of Essence magazine, released a statement condemning racism in Cuba.
What About Latinos in Other Parts of the Americas : UN Calls for End of Cuban Embargo, Again
30 Oct 2009
There’s has been a ton of attention on Latinos in (The United States of) America, with little acknowledgment that the Americas go beyond the borders of the U.S. and that current U.S. policy towards Latin America isn’t any better than internal policy. Just the other day the United Nations’ General Assembly voted 187-3, coming down on the U.S.’s continued embargo on Cuba. This is the 18th consecutive U.N. vote of its kind.
Award Winning Cuban Blogger Banned from Leaving to Recieve Award
11:21 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Blogs|Cuba|Media|media justice · 2 Comments
18 Oct 2009Cubana blogger Yoani Sánchez was awarded the oldest prize in journalism, the Maria Moors Cabot Prize. Problem is, she wasn’t allowed the leave Cuba to accept the award. The awards were announced in the middle of the summer but according to her, she somehow held out a tiny bit of hope that she would be allowed to leave. She posted a video of her visit to the Cuban immigration office where she was told she couldn’t leave the country but not why. Could it be because she has been an unapologetic critic of the Cuban government whose voice, via the internet, has global reach?
Fidel Lives (And Changes His Clothes)
6:27 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Cuba|Ecuador · Comments Off
24 Aug 2009
Apparently Fidel Castro met with the President of Ecuador, Rafeal Correa last Friday and if I may say, he looks pretty good.
Via / Inca Kola News
Castro Praises Obama’s Speaking Skills, but Not his Truthtelling
12:34 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Controversia|Cuba|Egypt|Obama|Politics|World · Comments Off
9 Jun 2009
Cuban leader Fidel Castro doesn’t have all that much to say these days about the U.S., but he did have some reflections to make on Obama’s now famous speech in Cairo. On the one hand, he admits that Obama isn’t the babbling idiot that former president George W. Bush was with regard to speechmaking, but when it comes to the content of said speech, he differs in opinion. In his weekly column “Reflexiones”, Castro says:
“If you take into account how long the speech was, without even using notes, the number of pauses isn’t important if compared to his predecessor (George Bush), who made mistakes at every paragraph. He has a great ability to communicate. However, the policies that the U.S. has followed for the past 7 decades is “in contradiction” with his words, since it was a history of “interventions” and “wars”, said Castro.He expressed that although Obama started his speech saying that no nation has the right to impose its system or its form of governance on any other, he quickly contradicted himself “with a declaration of faith that makes the United States the supreme judge of democratic values and human rights.”
This doesn’t sound familiar to me. Does anyone know statement Castro is referring to here?
The fact is Castro does have a point. America has a way of wandering into countries or regions and telling people how to run their societies when the U.S. has a history of not following its own rhetoric…to say the very least.
Via / La Voz de Houston
Fidel Castro Accuses Mexico of Lying About Swine Flu
4:26 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Controversia|Cuba|Health|Latin America|mexico · Comments Off
13 May 2009
We don’t hear a lot from good old Fidel Castro, but when we do, it’s always something interesting. Take this piece of new: the Mexican government is angry because the Cuban leader is accusing them of keeping the 411 about the swine flu epidemic under wraps so as not to mess up Obama’s visit to Mexico. In a piece published in Cuba’s Granma newspaper, Fidel says that because of this deception, Cubans are now paying the price as citizens there were infected:
Today the presence of the H1N1 flu virus was detected in Cuba. The carrier is a young Mexican citizen who studies medicine in our country. The only thing that can be confirmed is that it didn’t come from the CIA, it came from Mexico [...]
The Mexican authorities did not inform the world of the presence of the virus while awaiting Obama’s visit, and now they are threatening us with suspending that of President Calderón, previously suspended for other, understandable reasons unconnected to the epidemic.
Mexico is emphatically denying this accusation, and Mexican president Felipe Calderon shot back yesterday that he “acted with determination, with promptness and with one single priority, which is and will always be to protect the health and the life of Mexicans.”
On the other hand, the Mexican Secretary for Foreign Relations (SRE) says that Castro’s accusations are making things a bit, well, weird for the relations between the two countries. Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, SRE, says that the declarations “make bilateral relations awkward”.
Via / Granma and Times of India
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