President Obama’s Responses to Yoani Sanchez’s Questions

Thank you for this opportunity to exchange views with you and your readers in Cuba and around the world and congratulations on receiving the Maria Moore Cabot Prize award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for coverage of Latin America that furthers inter-American understanding. You richly deserve the award. I was disappointed you were denied the ability to travel to receive the award in person.

Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely, and I applaud your collective efforts to empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology. The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals.

QUESTION #1. FOR YEARS, CUBA HAS BEEN A U.S. FOREIGN POLICY ISSUE AS WELL AS A DOMESTIC ONE, IN PARTICULAR BECAUSE OF THE LARGE CUBAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY. FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE, IN WHICH OF THE TWO CATEGORIES SHOULD THE CUBAN ISSUE FIT?

All foreign policy issues involve domestic components, especially issues concerning neighbors like Cuba from which the United States has a large immigrant population and with which we have a long history of relations. Our commitment to protect and support free speech, human rights, and democratic governance at home and around the world also cuts across the foreign policy/domestic policy divide. Also, many of the challenges shared by our two countries, including migration, drug trafficking, and economic issues, involve traditional domestic and foreign policy concerns. Thus, U.S. relations with Cuba are rightly seen in both a foreign and domestic policy context.

QUESTION 2: SHOULD YOUR ADMINISTRATION BE WILLING TO PUT AN END TO THIS DISPUTE, WOULD IT RECOGNIZE THE LEGITIMACY OF THE RAUL CASTRO GOVERNMENT AS THE ONLY VALID INTERLOCUTOR IN THE EVENTUAL TALKS?

As I have said before, I am prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a range of issues of mutual interest as we have already done in the migration and direct mail talks. It is also my intent to facilitate greater contact with the Cuban people, especially among divided Cuban families, which I have done by removing U.S. restrictions on family visits and remittances.

We seek to engage with Cubans outside of government as we do elsewhere around the world, as the government, of course, is not the only voice that matters in Cuba. We take every opportunity to interact with the full range of Cuban society and look forward to the day when the government reflects the freely expressed will of the Cuban people.

QUESTION 3: HAS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT RENOUNCED THE USE OF MILITARY FORCE AS THE WAY TO END THE DISPUTE?

The United States has no intention of using military force in Cuba. The United States supports increased respect for human rights and for political and economic freedoms in Cuba, and hopes that the Cuban government will respond to the desire of the Cuban people to enjoy the benefits of democracy and be able to freely determine Cuba’s future. Only the Cuban people can bring about positive change in Cuba and it is our hope that they will soon be able to exercise their full potential.

QUESTION 4: RAUL CASTRO HAS SAID PUBLICALLY THAT HE IS OPEN TO DISCUSS ANY TOPIC WITH THE U.S. PROVIDED THERE IS MUTUAL RESPECT AND A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. IS RAUL ASKING TOO MUCH?

For years, I have said that it is time to pursue direct diplomacy, without preconditions, with friends and foes alike. I am not interested, however, in talking for the sake of talking. In the case of Cuba, such diplomacy should create opportunities to advance the interests of the United States and the cause of freedom for the Cuban people.

We have already initiated a dialogue on areas of mutual concern – safe, legal, and orderly migration, and reestablishing direct mail service. These are small steps, but an important part of a process to move U.S.-Cuban relations in a new and more positive, direction. Achieving a more normal relationship, however, will require action by the Cuban government.

QUESTION 5: IN A HYPOTHETICAL U.S.-CUBA DIALOGUE, WOULD YOU ENTERTAIN PARTICIPATION FROM THE CUBAN EXILE COMMUNITY, THE CUBA-BASED OPPOSITION GROUPS AND NASCENT CUBAN CIVIL SOCIETY GROUPS?

When considering any policy decision, it is critical to listen to as many diverse voices as possible. When it comes to Cuba, we do exactly that. The U.S. government regularly talks with groups and individuals inside and outside of Cuba that have an interest in our relations. Many do not always agree with the Cuban government; many do not always agree with the United States government; and many do not agree with each other. What we should all be able to agree on moving forward is the need to listen to the concerns of Cubans who live on the island. This is why everything you are doing to project your voice is so important – not just for the advancement of the freedom of expression itself, but also for people outside of Cuba to gain a better understanding of the life, struggles, joys, and dreams of Cubans on the island.

QUESTION 6: YOU STRONGLY SUPPORT THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES. BUT, CUBANS CONTINUE TO HAVE LIMITED ACCESS TO THE INTERNET. HOW MUCH OF THIS IS DUE TO THE U.S. EMBARGO AND HOW MUCH OF IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CUBAN GOVERNMENT?

My administration has taken important steps to promote the free flow of information to and from the Cuban people particularly through new technologies. We have made possible greater telecommunications links to advance interaction between Cuban citizens and the outside world. This will increase the means through which Cubans on the island can communicate with each other and with persons outside of Cuba, for example, by expanding opportunities for fiber optic and satellite transmissions to and from Cuba. This will not happen overnight. Nor will it have its full effect without positive actions by the Cuban government. I understand the Cuban government has announced a plan to provide Cubans greater access to the Internet at post offices. I am following this development with interest and urge the government to allow its people to enjoy unrestricted access to the internet and to information. In addition, we welcome suggestions regarding areas in which we can further support the free flow of information within, from, and to Cuba.

QUESTION 7: WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO TRAVEL TO OUR COUNTRY?

I would never rule out a course of action that could advance the interests of the United States and advance the cause of freedom for the Cuban people. At the same time, diplomatic tools should only be used after careful preparation and as part of a clear strategy. I look forward to visit a Cuba in which all citizens enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other citizens in the hemisphere.

ro-Castro mob attacks spouse of top Cuban blogger

By WILL WEISSERT (AP) – 11 hours ago

HAVANA — The husband of an acclaimed dissident Cuban blogger was punched and shouted down by a pro-government mob Friday after he challenged the presumed state agents who earlier roughed up his wife to a street corner debate.

As he promised earlier on his blog, Reinaldo Escobar went to the intersection of Havana's 23rd and G avenues for the proposed discussion. On Thursday, Escobar's wife posted President Barack Obama's responses to her written questions on Cuba-U.S. relations on her "Generacion Y" blog.

Escobar was waiting with at least two companions when he got into an argument with another man. What appeared to a prearranged group of government supporters then moved in, screaming obscenities. They hit him and slapped him in the head and pulled his hair and shirt, but never knocked him down.

Soon, Escobar and the others were surrounded by men thought to be state security agents who protected them as they walked about two blocks. All around, Cubans pushed and screamed "Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!" and "Get out worm!" slang for Cuban-American exiles.

At one point, a band organized as part of a nearby street festival joined the mob, marching through flower beds on the median of a boulevard. The music added an odd soundtrack to a tense situation.

After about 10 minutes, Escobar and the others were placed in unmarked cars and driven away.

Ahead of Escobar's arrival Friday, Cuba's Young Communists Union organized a street book fair on the same corner, blocking off traffic.

It was unclear if the security agents who came Friday where the same ones who presumably assaulted his wife, Yoani Sanchez, two weeks earlier. After the incident, Escobar challenged the alleged assailants to a verbal duel.

Sanchez answered the phone at the couple's apartment moments after Friday's bedlam, but hung up without confirming where her husband was taken. Pro-government "acts of repudiation" against dissidents happen a few times a year. Usually, state security gives opposition activists a ride home after a few minutes to keep things from getting too violent.

"This street is Fidel's!" the mob shouted. They eventually chanted the name of the current president, Raul Castro, who replaced Fidel in February of 2008.

A government press agent came to the aid of an Associated Press Television cameraman after a member of the mob shoved him from behind and grabbed his camera. The culprit later apologized, then was led away by another group of men.

For about 10 minutes after Escobar was gone, the crowd continued to chant "Fidel! Fidel!" for international news cameras. Then it dispersed quietly.

On Nov. 6, Sanchez was walking to a nonviolence march when two men in plainclothes forced her into an unmarked sedan, pulled her hair and kicked her. The incident occurred at the same street corner where Escobar was hit and slapped Friday, and Sanchez says state security agents were involved.

The confrontation was so violent, Sanchez said she thought the men might kill her, but instead they dropped her off near her apartment.

She vowed on her blog to keep writing caustic, often witty criticism of the struggles of daily life on an island where there is no freedom of speech or assembly — and people endure shortages of even basic food.

On Thursday, she posted the U.S. president's answers to her written questions but, like nearly all sites critical of the Cuban government, access is blocked on the island.

In the posted responses, Obama said he isn't interested in "talking for the sake of talking" with Raul Castro and indicated he won't visit the island until the communist government changes its ways.

Escobar has his own blog, which is also blocked on the island.

Cuba tolerates no official opposition to its single-party communist system and dismisses nearly everyone who criticizes its government publicly as paid mercenaries of Washington.

Earlier this year, Time magazine named Sanchez — whose blog gets about 1 million hits a month — one of the world's 100 most influential people. Twice this year, she has been denied permission to leave Cuba to collect international journalism prizes.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

HRW: “New Castro, Same Cuba”

Posted by Juan Carlos Hidalgo

Human Rights Watch has just released a lengthy report detailing the constant and blatant abuses of human rights and basic individual freedoms in Cuba under the rule of Raul Castro.

Some hoped that the timid economic reforms announced by the “younger” Castro brother, when he assumed the official leadership of the geriatric regime, would constitute the opening salvos toward a more open and freer Cuba. However, a few of us spotted cracks in that fairy tale early on.

The recent beatings of Yoani Sánchez and other independent bloggers (described here by my colleague Ian Vásquez) are a clear reminder that, in Cuba, it’s business as usual under the Castro brothers’ rule.

Today's guest post is from the blog Crossing the Barbed Wire, by Luis Felipe Rojas, a free and independent writer, journalist and poet from the town of San German in Holguin, Cuba.

They Are Killing Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a Black Cuban

The old saying that a lie always returns as a banner against the one who told it came to pass, and this time not in favor of the current Cuban regime.

The hoax that the revolutionary state of Fidel Castro ended racist practices falls apart before the case of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a Cuban political prisoner of the renowned Group of 75, arrested during the Black Spring of 2003, in the days when the world's attention was distracted by the American invasion of Iraq. Zapata was condemned to 25 years, and during the seven years he has been imprisoned he has been summarily tried on several occasions so that with the time added he is now sentenced to 47 years.

Now the authorities, acting together and in collusion with the courts and the attorney general of the republic, have handed down a new sentence that leaves him at 25 years again, but without credit for the seven he has already served. This, among other reasons, is why today he is on a hunger strike and is at the point of death in a room in the Amalia Simoni Hospital in Camaguey.

But ... who is Zapata? Why has he been subjected to such torture? Why should his punishment be so long?

Zapata Tamayo is a black Cuban and a front-line opponent of the Castro dictatorship -- clear enough reasons for him to be punished. He is a member of the illegal Alternative Republican Movement whose work focused on taking to the streets and explaining person-to-person about the atrocities of the Cuban military regime against its people. But for the Cuban government, all black people, supposedly, ought to pay homage to Fidel Castro, "the liberator of the black race, and the good master who came to free us blacks." And that was exactly the lesson that Zapata did not want to accept.

Since his incarceration he has led strong protests, which, although peaceful, were intolerable to the prison authorities, and for this he has suffered beatings, humiliation, prolonged solitary confinements, and has since been subject to the maximum prison severity in his first phase.

Before being transferred on December 3, 2009 from the Holguin provincial prison to another special regimen in the Kilo 8 prison in Camaguey he was subjected to a huge beating. He told his mother during a brief visit weeks after the punishment that they handcuffed him and beat him to bring him down; they struck him with an iron bar on the knee where the imprint is still visible. During the transfer he was stripped of his cold-weather clothes, food, water purifying implements and other utensils. Then they threw him in a punishment cell where he was kept without food until he had to be taken urgently to the nearest hospital where he was barely breathing.

On several occasions when they beat him, the guards yelled "black!" as if it they were spitting out an insult. They want to bring him down, but he is still standing proud of the color of his skin - he said- and firm in his ideas about true justice, freedom, and respect for the right of all Cubans to live a different life.

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Luis Felipe Rojas


Follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yoanisanchez

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

A Cuban political prisoner who has been on a hunger strike since December is ``worsening slowly'' despite a hospital's decision to feed him through intravenous tubes, relatives and others said Tuesday.

Orlando Zapata is ``skin and bones, his stomach is just a hole'' and he has bedsores on his legs, said his mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo. He has lost so much weight that nurses were not able to get the IV lines into his arms and are using veins on his neck instead.

``They are feeding him through the IVs because he continues to refuse to eat on his own, but his situation continues worsening slowly,'' said human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz in a telephone interview from Havana.

BRUTAL CONDITIONS

Zapata, 42, has been refusing to eat and drinking water only occasionally since December to protest the brutal conditions at his Kilo 7 prison in the eastern province of Camagüey, according to his mother. Prison guards beat him at least three times in the days before he launched the hunger strike, his mother said, and his back was ``tattooed with blows'' by the time he was transferred recently to the Amalia Simony hospital in Camagüey.

``The authorities tell us that he is stable, within the parameters of his grave condition,'' she told El Nuevo Herald in a phone interview, adding that on Tuesday she was given permission to visit him every day for several hours. She had last seen him on Saturday.

``I will continue in this struggle until the seas dry up,'' she declared to supporters in Miami. ``I hold the Cuban government and the organs of State Security responsible if anything happens to my son, or to one of the brothers who is supporting us.''

ARRESTED IN 2003

Zapata, a plumber and bricklayer and member of the Alternative Republican Movement National Civic Resistance Committee, was arrested in 2003 amid a harsh crackdown on dissidents, known as Cuba's Black Spring, that sentenced 75 government critics to long prison terms.

He was initially charged with contempt, public disorder and ``disobedience,'' and sentenced to three years.

But he was later convicted of other acts of defiance while in prison and now stands sentenced to a total of 36 years.

Amnesty International declared him a ``prisoner of conscience'' in 2003.

Zapata's case has sparked several street protests by government critics, including some in Camagüey last week during which police detained some 35 people for periods ranging from hours to several days.

Some of the detainees complained they were beaten during the round ups, and others used their cell phones to take photographs inside their crowded holding cells.

The photos were later sent to supporters abroad.

What amazes me is how they hold up Yoani Sanchez as some great freedom fighter. Are people that naive?

In Cuba Academic Freedom Does Not Exist

Read More: Cuba , Fidel Castro , Human Rights , University Of Havana , World News


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I have heard hundreds of times that the university - like a cemetery - could not be invaded by the demons of repression. I imagined them milling around the steps, without the power to enter this zone of letters and mathematical formulas where the students are sheltered. But this supposed immunity lived only in my fantasies, as Cuban history shows successive transgressions suffered by the universities in my country. Before the gaze of the statue of Pallas Athena, the ideological castigation has broken into these precincts dedicated to knowledge and scholarship countless times.

During the first half of the Twentieth Century, several student protests went so far as to demand the resignation of the president, bearing witness to the social force that emanated from the student desks. Painted on the walls around La Colina, where the University is located, you can still see the youthful nonconformity that later revolutionary purges reduced to apathy. The University Student Federation (FEU) has ceased to be a hotbed of ideas and actions that more than once shook the city, and become, to the students, a representation of power. Thus, the organization lost all its rebel character and its leaders are no longer elected for their charisma or popularity, but rather for their political reliability. The slogan, "The University is for Revolutionaries," has contributed to imposing the mask as the safest way to achieve a diploma.

In these two years since Raul Castro came to power, expulsions for ideological reasons have continued - and are on an upward course - in the centers of higher education. When Sahily Navarro, daughter of a prisoner of the Black Spring, was prevented from returning to her classroom, I learned that the battered student league had gone from agony to necrosis. A few days after the headstone of sectarianism was placed over the remains of the FEU, Marta Bravo was expelled from her teacher training program for demanding reforms in the country. The notes of a requiem was composed by those who fired the teacher Dario Alejandro Paulino, after he opened a Facebook group to discuss issues with regards to the faculty of Social Communication. With these sad events, the federation - once led by Julio Antonio Mella - has confirmed its death at the hands of the dragons of dogmatism and intolerance, who now freely roam the university campus.

A group -- "Stop the Expulsions in Cuban Universities" -- has been created on Facebook to protest, at least virtually, against these outrages.



Follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yoanisanchez

i though Yoani was being tortured in soem dungeon???

hahahha!


She is a paid spy !!

sigue ahi goulet!! sigue ahi !!

She is a "useful idiot" of the Castro Government.