JUST A MINOR NOTE TO COUNTER BALANCE ALL THE RECENT HAVANA-PALOOSA:

Posted: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 11:27 AM
Filed Under: Havana, Cuba
By Mary Murray, NBC News Havana Bureau Chief


HAVANA – Cuba’s President Raul Castro sure knows how to get the nation to sit up and listen.

While most people were at school or work and far away from their TV sets on Monday, a news announcer read a typed sheet of paper announcing the reshuffling of 10 Cabinet positions and the collapse of four key ministries into two. But by the end of the day, the shake-up was all people were talking about.

The Cuban public seemed most surprised by the removal of two men closely aligned with Raul’s predecessor, Fidel Castro, and pegged as the frontrunners of the next generation of leaders.


Javier Galeano / AP File
President Raul Castro, right, stands with then-Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque during a session of the National Assembly of Popular Power in Havana on June 29, 2007.

Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque was replaced by his own deputy, Bruno Rodriguez. And Dr. Carlos Lage lost his job as Cabinet Secretary to Brig. Gen. Jose Amado Ricardo Guerra, but Lage remains one of the Council of State’s vice presidents.

Both men are popular leaders, especially with the island’s younger generations.

Possible successors no more
Prior to being named foreign minister, Perez Roque, 43, was Fidel Castro’s chief of staff – he was just fresh out of engineering college when he landed that job. At his appointment in 1999, he became the youngest member of the Cabinet and the only one born after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

The nation watched him grow from a shy figure in Fidel’s shadow into a self-assured politician who adroitly managed Cuba’s complex foreign relations with more than 140 countries. For the moment, Perez Roque remains a senior member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.

Lage, 57, is a pediatrician by training who has been active in Communist Party politics since his student days. He rose to prominence during the turbulent years that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, which had been the island’s financial lifeline. Lage become known as Cuba’s economic czar, credited with designing the financial reforms that allowed the island to survive the crisis that began in the early nineties.

Lage remains an extremely popular figure here. People remember him as the young politician who, like millions of workers, rode a Chinese bicycle to the office when the country had no cash to import oil. He was often spotted jogging along Havana’s public streets without bodyguards or fancy running shoes. In the summer of 2006 when Fidel Castro required surgery, Lage was one of the select group given provisional powers to rule in Fidel’s absence. He has widely been considered one of the successors to the Castro brothers’ rule.

Over the past year as Raul steered Cuba along his own course, Lage and others in Fidel's inner circle seemed to have lost influcence. Today there is no clear successor to 77-year-old Raul, except for his hand-picked vice president, Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, who is actually a year older than the younger Castro brother.

In addition to the shuffling of some 10 Cabinet positions, Raul also took a stab at reducing the socialist government’s enormous bureaucracy.

Under Monday’s measures, the food and fishing ministries collapsed into one entity, as did the ministries of foreign trade and foreign cooperation. As with any reduction in public spending, these moves are expected to leave hundreds of state workers without jobs.

Still dominated by ‘historic generation’
Monday’s announcements could well add to grievances from younger people who complain that their generation holds little influence and power in today’s Cuba. Kids routinely grumble that the island is run and dominated by what’s known here as the "historic generation," the men who fought with Fidel Castro and seized power half a century ago.

Jesus Montoya, 23, said he heard the announcement in a packed university commons room. "It did not go over well. Some kids even started booing."

Personally, Montoya says he is reserving judgment since he backs any and all actions to reduce the government's size. "I hope this will naturally lead to a larger private sector. People need to stop relying on the state and the state needs to allow people to rely on their own abilities to make a living."

He wants Raul to allow Cubans to open up their own businesses. That however does not seem to be a priority for Raul’s administration, although he has allowed more private taxis on Havana’s streets. Instead, he seems focused on trying to tackle the colossal issue of government waste.

‘A matter of survival’
Since officially taking office on Feb. 24, 2008, Raul has hammered away at the idea of Cuba needing to save money and resources by becoming more efficient. "It’s a matter of survival," he has said on more than one occasion.

Over the past year in office, Raul has spearheaded drives to reform state-run companies, open up the agricultural sector and to downsize government. Under his mandate, the younger Castro has even supported economic incentives, almost a treasonous idea to the elder Fidel Castro who organized Cuban society around the ideas of equality and egalitarianism.

With the Cuban state controlling over 90 percent of the economy, Raul’s push for economic reform has had an across-the-board effect.

His government has adopted modern management and accounting practices with local managers being granted more day-to-day decision-making power.

Both state and private farmers can now legally charge higher prices for their products after meeting state quotas. And, in some industries, Cuba has abolished nationally set wage ceilings so that salaries are tied to both an individual's performance and that of the collective.

Raul also has allowed Cubans to buy computers, own mobile telephones, rent cars and spend nights in hotels previously only accessible to foreigners. While most cannot afford such luxuries on their low wages, people generally applauded the end to the discriminatory practices in the Cuban market.

'Two plus two always makes four – not five'
But Raul was forced to curtail his economic and social reform drive after three devastating hurricanes swept the island last season and caused some $10 billion in damages, equal to 10 percent of Cuba’s Gross Domestic Product.

During the 2008 closing session of parliament, Raul revealed that recovery could easily take up to six years but that "this did not mean reforms have been shelved."

At that meeting he turned the spotlight on government deficiencies, calling the lack of accountability and waste in government spending one of the "fundamental problems" of Cuba’s socialist system. He revealed plans to set up a watchdog agency on government spending, eliminate some $60 million a year in state-run company bonuses and cut in half all travel perks for Communist Party and business leaders while promising to raise wages and create jobs.

"We have to eliminate improper gratuities and bloated subsidies, otherwise the bills won't add up. Two plus two always makes four – not five," Raul said.

Updated at 2:30 p.m.: Just 24 hours after the Cuban Cabinet shake-up, convalescing Fidel Castro wrote a column supporting the purge of the two younger leaders.

In his blog published on CubaDebate.cu, Castro revealed that he was consulted beforehand on the decision and justified it by charging that Perez Roque and Lage were seduced by the "honey of power."

Castro also seemed to be sending a message to Washington not to look for alternatives to the current regime. "The external enemy was full of illusions for them," wrote Castro, referring to the United States as the enemy and Perez Roque and Lage as "them."


Source: http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/03/03/1817939.aspx

POINT OF VIEW
The Plot Against The Castros
Two of Cuba's star politicians seem to have been a part of a conspiracy or a coup to overthrow Raúl Castro

By Jorge Castañeda | NEWSWEEK
Published Mar 14, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Mar 23, 2009

For years, two tidbits of conventional wisdom have dominated debates among Cubanologists (a tropical subspecies of former Kremlinologists). First, that Deputy Prime Minister and economic czar Carlos Lage has been in charge of running the island economy since the early '90s, and, despite differences of opinion regarding his performance, was seen as one of the most likely successors to Fidel Castro's brother and successor, Raúl. Second, that Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque was not only in charge of the international relations Fidel Castro took increasingly less interest in, but that he was something of a favorite son. Most observers, including several Latin American ex-presidents close to Castro, saw him as the heir apparent, once the caudillo's brother passed from the scene. So Raúl's decision to dump the two stars a fortnight ago is a major event in Cuba, and unlike previous purges, this one is clearly linked to Fidel Castro's succession, and may tell us a great deal about what lies ahead.

The problem, of course, is that, as in the Soviet Union when Stalin died, or in China after Mao's death, we don't really know what is going on. Yet there are solid reasons to believe that something along the following lines took place: for at least a month or so, Lage, Pérez Roque and others were apparently involved in a conspiracy, betrayal, coup or whatever term one prefers, to overthrow or displace Raúl from his position. In this endeavor, they recruited—or were recruited by—Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, who in turn tried to enlist the support of other Latin American leaders, starting with Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic, who refused to get involved.

Their reasons for wishing to unseat Rául were mainly turf and power, but they also feared that the leader was beginning to feel threatened by the reaction of the Cuban people to excessive economic and social deprivation, and after his brother's demise would be unable to control the flow of events. Consequently, he would accept a series of economic and political reforms to normalize relations with the United States, knowing full well that therein lay the only option for immediate improvement in Cubans' lives. They believed this to be a betrayal of the revolution, and the beginning of the end of its survival.

This would represent the latest of many anti-Castro intrigues since 1959. As usual, Castro (Raúl this time; before, both brothers) detected the plot almost before the plotters themselves. Raúl took the evidence collected by military intelligence to his ailing brother, and forced him to choose: stick with him and extend his support to the predetermined succession path, or back Lage and Pérez Roque and forsake Raúl. With evident disappointment in his old allies, the Comandante Máximo backed Raúl. Then Chávez was summoned to Havana to be placed before another devil's alternative: back off, while maintaining economic support for the island, or lose his Cuban security detail and intelligence apparatus, exposing himself to coups and assassination attempts from eventual Venezuelan replacements. He chose to stick with the Castros.

The day after their resignation, the two plotters were expelled from their other posts in disgrace. In a newspaper column Fidel accused them of harboring excessive "ambitions" fed by the "honey of power" and the "absence of sacrifice." He said they had reawakened the illusions of "foreign powers" regarding Cuba's future. More importantly, and enigmatically, he resorted to a baseball metaphor on the occasion of the World Baseball Classic to praise Dominicans for not participating (the team's plans had been unclear) and to claim that Chávez's baseball players, "as good and young" as they might be, were no match for "Cuba's seasoned all-stars."

When the conspirators were stripped of their titles, they published classic Stalinist mea culpa letters, acknowledging their "mistakes" (without saying what they were), and pledging loyalty to Fidel, Raúl and the revolution. Such behavior raises ominous questions. Pérez Roque was popular in Cuba; his youth, his humble origins, his combative nature all brought him closer to the people than most Cuban bureaucrats. Once Fidel is gone, will Raúl be able to "keep him down on the farm," if and when he claims to be Fidel's true heir? Will Raúl be able to pull off a rapprochement with Washington quickly enough to placate the restiveness his opponents could exploit? Or should he act to remove them from the scene, one way or another, before they return shrouded in glory?

Needless to say, none of this can be fully substantiated, and it is quite possible that, indeed, the entire affair might have now come to an end. Or, more probably, there will be a sequel: further persecution of the fallen idols, growing discontent in Cuba and increasing difficulties on the part of Raúl in managing the succession. It is worth remembering that Lenin, Stalin and Mao were all unable to control their successions, and they were neither fools nor choir children. There is scant reason to believe that Fidel, despite all his talent, will prove more successful.

Castañeda is a former foreign minister of Mexico, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University and a fellow at the New America Foundation.


Source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/189261

their days are numbered no matter what .....there will be no commie parades in Havana ....we are in the countdown the lefties are going to cry plenty when they see how it ends

It's no accident that Russia is looking into placing weapons in Cuba now. It could be that time is running out for the Geriatric club and the opportunists are foaming at the mouth looking to make a move when political instability is on the horizon.

Obama is no JFK or BUSH for serious threats.

Cuban Dissidents Heckled by Mob During Protest

HAVANA – Members of the Ladies in White, a group comprising relatives of the 75 peaceful dissidents jailed in Cuba’s “Black Spring” of 2003, were heckled Thursday by some 40 government supporters while protesting outside the Supreme Court to demand the release of all political prisoners.

More than 30 Ladies assembled at the entrance to the building and made their demands heard before being insulted minutes later by dozens of people, among them plain-clothes police.

After leaving the area, the dissidents were followed by a group of men and women who called them “sellouts” and “worms” while singing the Cuban national anthem and shouting slogans hailing Fidel and Raul Castro.

No physical altercation took place and the dissidents eventually boarded a public bus that took them back to their homes.

Laura Pollan, a founder of the Ladies in White, told Efe that the group’s intention was “to demand the prisoners’ freedom” at the Supreme Court because “that’s the (body) that judges and can get together and determine whether or not to free them.”

On Tuesday, the Ladies in White began an observance of the sixth anniversary of the Black Spring arrests by demanding the “immediate and unconditional” release of the remaining prisoners.

The group noted in a letter to President Raul Castro and older brother Fidel that 54 of the “Group of 75” remained behind bars six years after they were sentenced in summary trials.

“They have served over three times more than you did when you were imprisoned for attacking the Moncada Barracks, where blood was spilled on both sides and you were granted amnesty,” the missive said, a reference to the Castro brothers’ failed 1953 assault on a military installation.

Of the 75 dissidents sentenced in 2003, 54 are still in jail and 19 were paroled on medical grounds.

Reynaldo Labrada left prison in January after serving a sentence of five years and 10 months, while Miguel Valdes Tamayo died in January 2007 after his early release due ......lets get rid of Raul and his brother as soon as possible

If I were making a list of the world's greatest experts on lists, David Wallechinsky would be right at the top. He's been compiling quirky collections of names and facts for more than three decades now, in books like The People's Almanac and The Book Of Lists, and he's the master of the form.

Who else is going to give you the names of 17 Children Who May Have Lived With Wild Animals? (No, Flipper's pal Bud doesn't count.) Or 10 People With The Most Square Miles Of The Surface Of The Earth Named After Them? (Sure, Amerigo Vespucci is at the top of the list, but I bet you didn't know that Norway's Queen Maud came in third.)

So it's with some trepidation that I dispute the absence of our local boys, Fidel and Raul Castro, from Wallechinsky's list of The World's 10 Worst Dictators, in the issue of Parade magazine bundled inside today's Miami Herald.

Admittedly, the criteria for evaluating dictators are vague and controversial. Body counts are indisputably important; any roster of the most infamous dictators of the past hundred years, for instance, would have some combination of Stalin, Hitler and Mao up at the top. But after that, it gets harder to pin down.

Do you give points for weirdness? (Albania's Enver Hoxha banned tractors as a foreign and sinister technology.) Or peculiar sexual proclivities? (North Korea's Kim Il Sung once wrote a love sonnet to the mimeograph machine.) Or downright creepiness? (The Central African Republic's Jean-Bedel Bokassa occasionally ate his political opponents.)

It could be argued that the word count of a dictator's self-proclaimed title ought to be given fair consideration, in which case Uganda's Idi Amin -- or, His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, as his friends called him -- becomes a real contender.

And surely Turkmenistan's Saparmurat Niyazov would deserve some serious attention for requiring anybody applying for a driver's license to first take a 16-hour study course on his book Ruhnama, or The Book Of The Spirit.

But in looking over Wallechinsky's list -- which is a current all-star team, not a Hall of Fame that includes the undearly departed -- it's nearly impossible to see how the Castro brothers didn't make the cut. Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe killed 163 people? Way ahead of you: The Castros are at 15,000 and climbing, according to the extraordinarily conservative count of Miami's Cuba Archive. Sudan's Omar al-Bashir has driven 2.7 million people from their homes in six years? Dude, 10,000 Cubans looking for a way off the island jumped over the walls of the Peruvian embassy in Havana in one day in 1980.

Wallechinsky notes solemnly that Eritrea's Isaias Afewerki has locked up 10 local journalists since 2001. As a reporter, I certainly think that's bad news -- but just last week Cubans observed the sixth anniversary of the so-called Black Spring roundup, when the Castros arrested 75 independent journalists and political dissidents. Fifty-five are still in prison.

If Wallechinsky hasn't heard of Black Spring, I'm not surprised; the United Nations apparently hasn't, either, and made Cuba a member of its Human Rights Council.

And then there's the matter of Moammar Gadhafi, who makes the list mainly on grounds of longevity; in September, he'll celebrate 40 years in power -- a decade less than the Castros. Moreover, they've done it in the heart of world democracy. Every other government in the Western hemisphere; even Hugo Chavez's lurching, spastically authoritarian regime was seated in a reasonably free and fair election. Only the Castro brothers continue to treat their country like a family farm that they can milk at will.


So why aren't they on Wallechinsky's list? Probably for the same reason that Barbara Walters once threw Fidel Castro a dinner party, or that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's brain trust flocked to the Soviet Union to study Stalin's economic program, or that lovable old Will Rogers returned from a trip to Mussolini's Italy with the admiring observation that the ''dictator form of government is the greatest form of government -- that is, if you have the right dictator.'' Because, to paraphrase Lord Acton, power seduces, and absolute power seduces absolutely.

That's not necessarily true for most average Americans, who mostly mind their own business and wish everybody else would do the same. The United States was founded, after all, in a fit of libertarian resistance to the arbitrary whims of a king.

But the chattering classes bred by a society increasingly built around mass communications -- intellectuals, social engineers, policy wonks and the journalists who flit about their margins -- are a different matter.

They share the popular disdain for what they see as arbitrary power. Of the 10 dictators on Wallechinsky's list, eight are sullen despots without discernible ideology who rule for no purpose but to perpetuate themselves. (The two exceptions are North Korea's Kim Jong Il, whose communism has devolved into whackjobbery kidnappings of actresses to make movies for him, and Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose Muslim zealotry is incomprehensible to America's secular political court.)

But it's another matter when it comes to bending the popular will for the purpose of remaking society for egalitarian economic or social purposes. Then the checks and balances built into the constitution become an impediment to good government. And longing eyes start to stray toward totalitarian societies where the rulers know how to get things done.

Rexford Guy Tugwell, one of FDR's chief economic advisors, thought his boss could learn a thing or two from both Stalin and Mussolini. ''It's the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen,'' he said after a trip to the Soviet Union. ''It makes me envious.'' A later visit to fascist Italy made an equal impression. ''Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has,'' Tugford noted. ``But he has the press controlled so that they cannot scream lies at him daily.''

Some admirers of Castro's Cuba have, without a doubt, been communists -- for instance, the New Left activist and author Abbie Hoffman, whose flattery of Fidel Castro was fulsome if peculiar. (''He is like a mighty penis coming to life.'' With friends like that ...)

But others have been simple power groupies, including New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews, whose daftly admiring reports from Castro's guerrilla camps during the war against Batista almost single-handedly created the insouciantly charming image of Castro that persists to this day.

Before switching his affection to Castro, Matthews, too, had been an admirer of Mussolini. And his heroic portrait of the Italian army's 1932 invasion of Ethiopia infuriated Africans almost as much as his later stories did anti-Castro Cubans.

It was also Matthews who provided the rationale for subsequent generations of journalistic and political courtiers to avert their eyes from Castro's dark side: the show trials and their bloody aftermath, the squalid economy, the ramming of a tugboat full of women and children trying to escape Cuba. ''A revolution is not a tea party,'' Matthews wrote. On that, at least, we can all agree.

Plagurist!
Like McCain and all other rubbish from US!

S.