¡Cuba RebelióN!

http://hotair.com/archives/2007/11/07/video-%c2%a1cuba-rebelion/

The real face of Che Guevara

The real face of Che
posted at 9:50 am on November 5, 2007 by Bryan
Young America’s Foundation is using this week to raise awareness of just what kind of monster is behind the trendy T-shirts and jewelry. Che Guevara wasn’t a hero. He was a killer.
“The Victims of Che Guevera” poster, produced by the Young America’s Foundation, centers on a collage that uses tiny photos of those killed by Cuba’s communist regime to compose the face of the Marxist guerrilla, who has become a popular T-shirt icon.
“Che is one of the heroes that the left idolizes,” said Patrick X. Coyle, vice president of YAF. “But a lot of kids don’t know anything about him. We thought this would be a great way to highlight his atrocities.”
YAF designed and printed 10,000 posters featuring the famous Che photo, made up of tiny photos of his victims.
Guevara was “an international terrorist and mass murderer,” the YAF poster declares.
It’s no accident, Mr. Coyle suggests, that Guevara T-shirts are worn by students on so many campuses today. “Colleges and universities are the last holdouts of Marxist ideas,” he said.

http://hotair.com/archives/2007/11/05/the-real-face-of-che/

Che Guevara’s communist ideals lose ground in Cuba

Che Guevara’s ideals lose ground in Cuba

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) – “Pioneers for Communism: we will be like Che,” Cuban children chant each morning in school courtyards, hands raised in a salute to the revolutionary martyr.

Roadside billboards of the leftist icon proclaim: “Your example lives on, your ideas endure.”

Forty years after he was captured by soldiers in a Bolivian jungle and executed on October 9, 1967, Argentine-born doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara is still a national hero in Cuba, where he joined Fidel Castro in the guerrilla uprising that ousted a U.S.-backed dictator in 1959.

But as the ailing Castro, now 81, fades from the political stage after emergency intestinal surgery last year, many Cubans appear more concerned with making ends meet in an inefficient state-run economy than following Guevara’s lofty ideals.

Guevara was industry minister and central bank governor in the early years of Castro’s rule. He advocated nationalizing private businesses and dreamed of a classless society where money would be abolished and wages unnecessary.

To this day, he is the poster boy of communist Cuba, held up as a selfless leader who set an example of voluntary work with his own sweat, pushing a wheelbarrow at a building site or cutting sugar cane in the fields with a machete.

Emblazoned on T-shirts, Swatch watches and other products of the capitalist consumer society he sought to bury, the image of a long-haired Guevara with a star on his beret is a universal symbol of protest, even for some young Cubans.

“Many of us idolize Che more than Fidel. He is a symbol of rebellion in Cuba too, not just for government supporters,” said Ruth, a computing student who asked not to be named fully. “The problem is Cuban society has gone down the drain.”

Cuba will mark the 40th anniversary of Guevara’s capture on Monday in Santa Clara, the central city he captured as a guerrilla leader in 1958 and where a mausoleum was built for his bones when they were dug up from a secret grave in Bolivia and returned to Cuba a decade ago.

Dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe says Guevara remains well respected “for his courage as a guerrilla fighter” but that no one advocates his economic ideas in Cuba today.

“Cubans are having a very hard time because of the economic crisis. They are no longer motivated by these ideals. Their only worry is eating three meals a day,” he said.

Acting President Raul Castro, who took over the government from his elder brother Fidel Castro 14 months ago, has launched a national debate on reforms, including proposals to allow more private enterprise and foreign investment.

TOUGH GUERRILLA

Older Cubans who fought with Guevara and followed his revolutionary adventures remember him as an austere and demanding leader who drove his outnumbered men into battle with dictator Fulgencio Batista’s soldiers.

“He was marvellous. He gave his life to help the poor,” said Celida Caballero, 77, whose husband Isidoro Rodriguez was an illiterate wood-cutter when he smuggled weapons and medicine under his logs to Guevara’s rebels in the Escambray hills of central Cuba in 1958.

Rodriguez shed a tear as he recalled the day Guevara’s death was announced four decades ago. “That was such a loss for the Cuban people. He is our hero.”

Critics say there was a dark side to the revolutionary legend. Biographer John Lee Anderson describes how Guevara executed traitors during the rebel war in the Sierra Maestra mountains, a task his Cuban comrades-in-arms could not stomach.

When Batista fled Cuba and Castro’s bearded guerrillas marched into Havana, Guevara set up his office in the La Cabana fortress overlooking the city, where he oversaw the trials of Batista henchmen and executions by firing squad in the moats.

When he set off to Bolivia in 1965 to start a new guerrilla insurrection, Guevara said in his parting letter to Castro that he was leaving behind his wife and four children with no material goods.

“And I am not sorry: I’m glad it is that way,” said Guevara, a Marxist who believed in building a “new man” who would put community needs above personal interest.

Besides the massive iron figure overlooking Havana’s Revolution Square and the famous image of Guevara gazing into the distance from posters and banknotes, one former guerrilla fighter says little else remains of him in contemporary Cuba.

“If the new man that Che wanted is what we have today, it has been a total failure,” said Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, a leader of the Escambray front until Guevara showed up.

Menoyo said he admired Guevara the guerrilla fighter but not the communist, a view that led him to break with Castro and earned him 22 years in Cuban prisons.

“If Che were alive today, he would probably be protesting against this failed system just like me.”

http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/international/ticker/detail/Che_Guevara_s_ideals_lose_ground_in_Cuba.html?siteSect=143&sid=8282804&cKey=1191510446000&ty=ti

Communist Dictator Fidel Castro Hopes Clinton/Obama Ticket Wins U.S. Election

Castro’s tip: Clinton-Obama the winning ticket
Wed Aug 29, 2007 2:06AM EDT
By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) – Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and win the U.S. presidential election.
Clinton leads Obama in the race to be the Democratic nominee for the November 2008 election, and Castro said they would make a winning combination.
“The word today is that an apparently unbeatable ticket could be Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate,” he wrote in an editorial column on U.S. presidents published on Tuesday by Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper, Granma.
At 81, Castro has outlasted nine U.S. presidents since his 1959 revolution turned Cuba into a thorn in Washington’s side by building a communist society about 90 miles offshore from the United States.
He said all U.S. presidential candidates seeking the “coveted” electoral college votes of Florida have had to demand a democratic government in Cuba to win the backing of the powerful Cuban exile community.
Clinton and Obama, both senators, called for democratic change in Cuba last week.
Castro has not appeared in public since intestinal illness forced him to hand over power to his brother Raul Castro in July last year.
He has turned to writing dozens of columns and essays, but rumors that his health is worsening or that he may even be dead have swirled through the Cuban exile community in Miami in the last two weeks.
Castro’s only reference to U.S. President George W. Bush in his latest essay was to say that he “needed fraud” to win Florida’s electoral college votes and the presidency in the fiercely contested election in 2000.
Castro said former President Bill Clinton was “really kind” when he bumped into him and the two men shook hands at a U.N. summit meeting in 2000. He also praised Clinton for sending elite police to “rescue” shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives in 2000 to end an international custody battle.
But even Clinton was forced to bow to Miami politics and tighten the U.S. embargo against Cuba in 1996, using as a “pretext” the shooting down of two small planes used by exile groups to overfly Havana, Castro wrote.
He said his favorite U.S. president since 1959 was Jimmy Carter, another Democrat, because he was not an “accomplice” to efforts to violently overthrow the Cuban government.
Sixteen years after Dwight Eisenhower broke off diplomatic ties with Cuba, Carter restored low-level relations in 1977 when interest sections were opened in each country’s capital.
Castro made no mention of Republican Cold War victor Ronald Reagan, or of John F. Kennedy, whose Democratic administration launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by CIA-trained Cuban exiles in 1961.
One of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War came a year later when Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev faced off for 13 days over Soviet missiles that Castro allowed Moscow to place in Cuba.

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN2825114320070829?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews&rpc=22&sp=true

John Edwards Wants to Know if Cuba’s Healthcare System Is "a Government-Run System"

‘Sicko’ Twister
August 17, 2007 3:57 PM

Ed OKeefe
ABC News’ Rick Klein Reports: When an Iowa resident asked former senator John Edwards Thursday whether the United States should follow the Cuban healthcare model, the 2004 vice presidential contender deflected the question by saying he didn’t know enough to answer the question.“I’m going to be honest with you — I don’t know a lot about Cuba’s healthcare system,” Edwards, D-N.C., said at an event in Oskaloosa, Iowa. “Is it a government-run system?”

But just three days earlier, the candidate was asked a question about the Michael Moore documentary “Sicko” — which focuses extensively on the Cuban healthcare system.As Willie Nelson’s classic “On the Road Again” blared, Edwards leaned out of a window of his campaign bus dubbed “Fighting for One America”, to hear an off-camera voice howl, “I wanted to ask ya, is it required that everyone go see “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “Sicko”?Edwards, in between autographs outside Dan’s Pizzeria in Onawa, Iowa, replies, “I watched Sicko,” later adding, “It’s a great movie.”You can watch the moment captured by C-SPAN and spread to the world on YouTube by clicking here.

Is this a cinematic flip flop? Another hairy situation for the Edwards camp? As they say in the NFL, after further review, ABC News says it may not be so.With the help of our able colleagues at ABC News Radio, we isolated the audio, enhancing it to hear a key phrase that Edwards says between his claim of seeing “Sicko” and proclaiming it “a great movie.”In the exchange, barely audible over the twang of Willie, Edwards adds, “I didn’t quite get to see the end.”While not a silver bullet, the exchange begs the question: does one really need to see the end of “Sicko” to know that communist Cuba provides government-run healthcare?

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/08/sicko-twister.html