Twitter’s double standards

Two weeks ago we reported here that we’ve been banned from Twitter and been given no coherent reason for it. Last week we served up a list of prominent people with strong opinions who’ve also been banned for reasons that remain obscure.

To compare this list of people – each of whom had a great many followers and whose views fall well within the mainstream of American and Western opinion – to a roster of people who’ve kept their Twitter accounts is…what shall we say? Is it puzzling? Or is it illuminating?

Take the British activist and journalist Tommy Robinson, who in addition to being kicked off of Twitter last year was removed from Facebook recently – one day, in fact, after his BBC exposé Panodrama was posted there.

Robinson is a vigorous critic of Islamic ideology. But he is no bigot. He consistently makes distinctions between an ideology that calls for the murder of Jews, gays, and apostates and hundreds of millions of people who, while calling themselves Muslims, somehow managing to distance themselves from those monstrous teachings.

Robinson’s allies, colleagues, and supporters, moreover, come from a wide range of backgrounds. His closest friends include black Caribbeans and gay people. In any event – and here’s the big point – he doesn’t have anything remotely resembling the comprehensive record of hate that has been compiled by, say, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Farrakhan, as everyone knows, has described Jews as “satanic.” He has called them “termites.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a black scholar who heads the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, has characterized a book by Farrakhan as “the bible of new anti-Semitism.” Of all the most famous people in America, Farrakhan is one of the vilest.

Yet although Facebook banned him in May, he still has a Twitter account that has never been even temporarily suspended.

He’s far from alone. Also still tweeting away is Linda Sarsour, who claims to be a feminist but is a bosom buddy of Farrakhan, a constant wearer of hijab, and a passionate supporter of sharia law.

Also still on Twitter is BAMN, the violence-prone Trotskyite organization that both the FBI and the Defense Department consider to be a terrorist group. BAMN was behind the riot that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at Berkeley in 2017. But while Twitter has banned Yiannopoulos, who never encouraged violence in his life, BAMN is a blue-check member (a status reserved for public figures and established organizations).

Also surviving perfectly well on Twitter, thank you very much, is that gang of vandals and thugs known as New York City Antifa. Ditto Sarah Jeong, the New York Times board member who gained notoriety last year for her prodigious use of Twitter to savage white people. And the list goes on.

Of course, allowing some perfectly horrible people to stay on Twitter is defensible. Cuba’s dictator, Raúl Castro, and dictator-in-waiting, Miguel Díaz-Canel, have blue-check accounts. But fine – it’s useful to know what’s on their nefarious minds.

Some Twitter bans are arguably defensible, too. The service has banned a number of groups and individuals on the right that practice and encourage violence. Yet at the same time it’s left any number of violent, hate-spewing users on the left entirely untouched. And that’s where the question of inequality comes in.

More next week.

Posted on June 18, 2019June 2, 2019 by usefulstooges 3

AFP whitewashes the Castros

From time to time on this site, we’ve examined various public figures who had a soft spot for the Castro regime in Cuba and media organizations whose reports from Cuba routinely focused on its purported charms rather than its totalitarian government. We’ve written about director Bob Yari, who filmed a movie in Cuba; designer Karl Lagerfeld, who used Havana’s crumbling buildings as a backdrop for a glamorous fashion show; and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who, notwithstanding his own wealth, made a point of castigation capitalism while celebrating the Castros. We’ve told the tale of Fidel’s affair with compliant ABC reporter Lisa Howard, noted the chummy relationship between Jesse Jackson and the Castros, and, not least, the shamelessness and fatuity with which Time Magazine, again and again, has glorified the island prison.

On January 2, Agence France Press demonstrated that the perverse impulse to whitewash the Cuban regime is not dead in 2019. Under the headline “Cuba celebrates 60 years of revolution amid challenges and change,” AFP described Cuba as a longtime “source of inspiration for leftist Latin American governments,” but added that the nation faces “increasing isolation in a region dominated by a resurgent right,” notably the new Brazilian government led by “far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.”

AFP reported that Bolsonaro had “made a point of not inviting” the new Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro to his inauguration, a decision that some of us might consider principled but that AFP seemed to want readers to regard as churlish.

Typically, AFP labeled Bolsonaro – a pro-American, pro-Israeli conservative who has been dubbed the Latin American Trump – as “far-right,” and characterized Argentina, Chile and Peru as having “all swung to the right in recent years, unseating leftist governments.” A more objective media outlet might have put it a bit differently – might have said, that is, that the voters of those countries have rejected socialism in favor of democratic capitalism.

Meanwhile, in its references to Cuba’s leaders, AFP was careful to avoid the word “dictator,” obediently referring to Raul Castro as “[e]x-president” and as “first secretary of the Communist Party,” identifying the late Fidel Castro as “Cuba’s revolutionary leader,” and giving the current thug-in-chief, Miguel Diaz-Canel, his official title of “President.” AFP also reported that Maduro had “paid tribute to the ‘heroic Cuban people,’” whom he praised for their “’resistance and dignity’ in the face of ’60 years of sacrifices, struggles and blockade.’” In addition, according to AFP, “[a]nother surviving leftist leader, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, said Cuba’s revolution gave birth to ‘the light of hope and invincible will for the liberation of the people.’” This effusive rhetoric by Maduro and Morales was presented by AFP without context, so that an ill-informed reader would never know that the Cuban people have spent the last six decades not as stalwart patriots who have bravely resisted a U.S. blockade but as downtrodden subjects of a totalitarian tyranny.

To be sure, the word “dictator” did eventually appear in the AFP article – but only as a means of describing Castro’s predessor, Fulgencio Batista. To its credit, moreover, AFP also mentioned, toward the end of its article, that Cuba is a communist state. It also quoted a dissident, but that dissident, as it happened, was not an anti-Communist who opposed the Cuban Revolution from the start but a diehard Communist named Vladimiro Roca, whose father was a sidekick of Fidel Castro, who himself had run afoul of authorities and spent several years in prison, and whose complaint was therefore that the Cuban Revolution “died a long time ago.”

Moreover, while AFP acknowledged that Cuba “has faced heavy criticism” abroad, it presented the Cuban people not as decades-long victims of a brutal autocracy but as having “had to contend with an increasingly hostile administration under Trump these last two years.” There’s no hint that the Trump administration is hostile not to the Cuban people but to their unelected masters. In 2019, alas, such full-scale misrepresentation continues to be par for the course for all too many Western media.

Posted on January 8, 2019January 8, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Catching up with tyranny-loving Karl Vick

Where to start with longtime Time magazine fixture Karl Vick?

With his breathtaking enthusiasm for Cuba’s Castro regime? As we noted in August 2015, this is a guy who, in describing the political system on that island, prefers to say “security state” rather than “police state” or “dictatorship” or “totalitarian prison.” Of all the idiots who find Cuba’s crumbling buildings and deteriorated infrastructure appealingly exotic, he’s one of the most high-profile and outspoken, celebrating the old cars and lousy plumbing in one of the stupidest cover stories ever to be run by a major newsmagazine. When he gushed in a radio interview over Havana’s “decaying glory,” his interviewer asked how decay could be glorious, and Vick, bubblehead that he is, fumfered around, finally answering the question with a synonym: “faded grandeur.”

Or should we focus on Vick’s consistently starry-eyed take on all things Islamic – his thumbs-up for the “Arab Spring,” his insistence that the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas are moderate – and his equally consistent hostility toward Israel? For a 2010 cover story arguing that Israel is anti-peace, he won a “Dishonest Reporting Award” from Honest Reporting (HR) and was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for echoing the stereotype that Jews are preoccupied with money. In later articles, Vick stuck to his guns, absurdly depicting Palestinians (in HR’s words) as “Gandhian acolytes” and describing Hamas’s commitment to the destruction of Israel as only “[n]ominal.”

In short, he’s a fool. And nothing has changed. For now, just one example. Last December, after Donald Trump’s election but before the inauguration, he warned that the president-elect was “making terrorist attacks more likely.” How? By taking a “them-against-us” approach. You’ve likely heard this argument before: when we’re honest about the nature of the jihadist enemy, we alienate “moderate Muslims,” perhaps even turning some of them into mass murderers. Vick quoted a Darmouth professor and former State Department grind who warned that ISIS was “now in a much better position to make the case that the West really is determined to destroy Islam.” Vick praised George W. Bush for having said, less than a week after 9/11, that “Islam is peace.”

ISIS, Trump: two sides of the same coin?

Does Vick think this is true? He doesn’t say. His argument is that, true or not, if you’re a president you’d better say such things. One is reminded of the familiar joke: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say otherwise, we’ll kill you. In a classic example of moral equivalency, Vick essentially cast Trump and ISIS as two sides of the same coin, both determined to drive Muslims and non-Muslims apart. Vick served up what should by now be a long-discredited canard that jihadist “extremism” is driven by “feelings of aggrievement.” No, it’s driven by a determination to conquer that is rooted in Islamic texts.

After the terrorist attack on Breitscheidplatz square in Berlin, December 19, 2016

Vick slammed Trump for reacting to last December’s terrorist attack in Berlin – the one that involved a truck and took 12 lives – by making the purely factual statement that “ISIS and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad.” In Vick’s view, apparently, if we want peace with Islam, we’ve got to keep mum about what is being done to Christians in the Middle East in the name of Allah. The one “glimmer of hope” (to use Vick’s own words) in the article was that “Trump may be educable.” In other words, he may yet learn from the MSM and Foggy Bottom hacks to tell supposedly strategic untruths.

Posted on November 6, 2017October 19, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Eulogizing Fidel

When Fidel Castro first came on the scene more than half a century ago, the New York Times famously disgraced itself by serving as his chief PR tool. When he died a few hours ago, the Times again brought shame upon itself with a jaw-droppingly fawning obituary headlined “Fidel Castro, Cuban Leader who Defied U.S., Dies at 90.”

Let’s make this clear: Castro wasn’t a “leader”; he was a totalitarian dictator. But the Times, alas, has plainly never gotten over its schoolgirl crush on him. The first paragraphs of its obit, which carried the byline of Anthony DePalma, were studded with the kind of words customarily used to eulogize heroes and saints. Castro was a “fiery apostle of revolution.” He was “a towering international figure.” He was a man who “dominated his country with strength and symbolism from the day he triumphantly entered Havana on Jan. 8, 1959, and completed his overthrow of Fulgencio Batista by delivering his first major speech in the capital before tens of thousands of admirers at the vanquished dictator’s military headquarters.”

castro-obit-slide-1fkf-superjumbo — The Times’s caption: “Mr. Castro with Mr. Guevara in Havana in January 1959.”

DePalma’s account of the events of that day fifty-seven years ago was nothing less than nauseating – useful stoogery at its purest:

A spotlight shone on him as he swaggered and spoke with passion until dawn. Finally, white doves were released to signal Cuba’s new peace. When one landed on Mr. Castro, perching on a shoulder, the crowd erupted, chanting “Fidel! Fidel!” To the war-weary Cubans gathered there and those watching on television, it was an electrifying sign that their young, bearded guerrilla leader was destined to be their savior.

Accompanying all this laudatory prose were photographs (we’ve reproduced them here) that seemed to have been selected with the objective of showing Fidel at his most glamorous, rugged, and heroic.

00castro-fidel-adv-obit-slide-2po9-superjumbo — The Times’s caption: “Mr. Castro with other rebel leaders at a secret base in June 1957 including Che Guevara, the guerrillas’ physician, second from left, and Mr. Castro’s brother Raúl, kneeling in the foreground.”

To be sure, DePalma went on, after his first dozen or so (long) paragraphs, to acknowledge the negative aspects of Castro’s rule. But these obligatory doses of truth about what was, in fact, a thoroughly monstrous regime were brief, grudging, and muted. Every mention of something less than admirable, moreover, was paired with yet more sickening – and baseless – words of praise. For example: “His legacy in Cuba and elsewhere has been a mixed record of social progress and abject poverty, of racial equality and political persecution.” Social progress? Racial equality? Utter hogwash. For the zillionth time, furthermore, the Times served up the ubiquitous, ridiculous lie that Cuba, under Castro, has undergone astounding strides in education and health care.

322122-anthony-depalma-couvert-sommet-ameriques — Anthony DePalma

It’s not really surprising to see the Times serving up nonsense like this. It is rather unexpected to see Anthony DePalma signing his name to it. DePalma – who left the Times in 2008, and presumably filed a draft of this obit some time before that – is the author of The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times, in which he doesn’t pull any punches about Castro being a bloodthirsty tyrant – and about the key role the Times played in making him an international icon. One wonders how much editorial tweaking DePalma’s piece has undergone since he first filed it.

castro-timeline-superjumbo — The Times’s caption: “Mr. Castro, speaking on July 26, 2003, lived to rule a country where the overwhelming majority of people had never known any other leader.”

Once upon a time, people referred to the New York Times – with a straight face – as “the newspaper of record.” Now, that phrase is increasingly likely to be uttered with a smirk. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Times‘s publisher and executive editor felt compelled to express public regret – sort of – for its appallingly slanted coverage of the recent U.S. presidential election and to promise “to report America and the world honestly.” But this obit oozes dishonesty – an eagerness to whitewash Communism and lionize dictators that, unfortunately, seems to be written into the Times‘s DNA. DePalma’s article should go down in the record books as a classic in useful stoogery.

UPDATE, November 30: The Times has actually posted a whole feature about the history of its Castro op-ed. It turns out, indeed, that many hands other than DePalma’s were involved.

Posted on November 26, 2016November 30, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Marcelo’s way

The Odebrecht Group is one of those conglomerates whose international reach and level of diversification make one’s head spin. It’s the largest construction outfit in Latin America; Braskem, one of its innumerable subsidiaries, is Latin America’s biggest petrochemical producer.

“They are more than a company,” a Brasilia-based consultant, Thiago de Aragão, told the Wall Street Journal recently; “they are a symbol of modern Brazil.”

Indeed. It’s Odebrecht that is responsible for Miami’s $213-million American Airlines Arena, where the Miami Heat play. It’s Odebrecht that is Angola’s top private employer, with over 24,000 employees in that country alone. At this moment, among many other projects, Odebrecht is building a highway in Ghana that will connect the capital, Accra, to remote eastern regions of the country; it’s expanding and adding bridges to a highway that links Guatemala’s main ports with the Mexican border; it’s upgrading a major airport in Mozambique; it’s constructing an elaborate hydroelectric facility in Portugal; it’s installing “the world’s deepest and most complex sewage pump station” in Abu Dhabi. In 2014 the group celebrated its seventh decade in business.

On March 8, the firm marked another milestone. That was the day on which its CEO, Marcelo Odebrecht, the grandson of the company’s founder, was sentenced to 19 years in prison after being convicted of paying $30 million in exchange for contracts and influence at Petrobras, the state-owned Brazilian oil firm that is at the center of the massive corruption probe known as Operation Car Wash. According to prosecutors, Marcelo’s firms “used Swiss bank accounts to launder nearly $270 million in bribes” between 2006 and 2014.

The presiding judge, Sergio Moro, said Marcelo Odebrecht was “directly involved” with this systematic bribery and money-laundering and “guided the work of others.” This intimate involvement was demonstrated by (among other things) incriminating messages stored on eight cellphones found at Marcelo’s home. While other construction executives nabbed in the probe have bought themselves shorter sentences by turning state’s evidence, Odebrecht refused to spill the beans, saying that he would punish his own kids more harshly for tattling than for cheating.

Marcelo Odebrecht in happier times, with Dilma Rousseff and Raúl Castro

Given the conglomerate’s dimensions and its importance to the Brazilian economy, the arrest and conviction of Marcelo – who took over the reins of the family firm in 2008, at age 40, and whose nickname is “Prince of the Contractors” – is of obvious significance. According to the Journal, Marcelo’s arrest in June of last year caused an economic earthquake, contributing to the onset of Brazil’s current recession. But what makes these developments even more momentousness is Marcelo’s intimate relationship with the Rousseff administration. When the president met with business leaders, Marcelo was invariably present. “Some of the other executives,” one São Paulo businessmen told the Journal, “were jealous that he always got invited and they had to fight for a seat at the table.”

Marcelo is close not only to Dilma Rousseff but to her predecessor and mentor, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is himself being investigated for allegedly accepting illegal funds from Odebrecht.

One thing about having global reach is that when you get in trouble, the investigations, too, will have a global reach. Swiss and Portuguese authorities are now looking into charges of wrongdoing by Marcelo, and several other countries are considering similar probes.

Posted on April 6, 2016April 7, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Cuba libre?

Michael J. Totten is an indispensable journalist who in recent years has provided immensely perceptive reportage from some of the most oppressed and/or war-torn corners of the world, notably the Middle East and the Balkans. On March 22, he posted on his blog a memorable item entitled “In Cuba, Prosperity is a Crime.” We’ve spent some time on this site detailing the horrors of the Castros’ island prison, but did you know this?

The United States has a minimum wage while Cuba has a maximum wage. And that maximum wage is a paltry 20 dollars a month. No one can get ahead. It’s impossible. It’s illegal. When prosperity is a crime, there can be no prosperity, and that’s entirely the fault of Cuba’s communist party.

Totten also reported that just hours before President Obama landed in Cuba, the Castros “arrested more than 20 people at a Ladies in White demonstration.” Who are the Ladies in White? They’re an internationally respected human-rights group consisting of the female relatives of jailed Cuban dissidents. The women attend Catholic Mass every Sunday in white dresses, then walk through the streets in silent protest against the Castros’ tyranny.

ladies_in_white_120113 — The Ladies in White

But they weren’t allowed to carry on their silent protest while Obama was around. On the day of his arrival, wrote Totten, secret policemen “dragged women to a police bus and threw men onto the ground and handcuffed them.” Yet when an American reporter, CNN’s Jim Acosta, stood up at Obama’s joint news conference with Raul Castro and asked about political prisoners, the Cuban leader replied with a royal combination of utter contempt and absolute mendacity: “If there are political prisoners, give me a list, right now. What political prisoners? Give me their names, and if there are political prisoners, they will be free by tonight.”

The Ladies in White weren’t alone. Mike Gonzales of the Heritage Foundation wrote that during Obama’s visit, a number of other dissidents were “beaten, arrested, dragged through streets, stripped naked, and threatened with the rape of their daughters.” Gonzales quoted anti-Castro leader Antonio Rodiles, who was brutalized and detained (as was his wife), as saying that the American president’s trip had engendered “a festival of repression.”

Gonzales made a crucial point that has been almost completely lost in recent commentary about Cuba and its future. “While the vast majority of commentators speak of Fidel, 89, and Raul, 84,” he suggested, “the Castros to keep in mind are Raul’s son, Col. Alejandro Castro Espin, 50, his daughter, Mariela Castro Espin, 53, and his son-in-law, Gen. Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez-Callejas, 54.” The point being, of course, that the death of the two octogenarian brothers will not necessarily mean the end of brutal totalitarianism in Cuba. After all, Alejandro, an officer in Cuban intelligence, is “an unrepentant ideologue who sports a Lenin mustache and goatee.” Alejandro wrote a 2009 book, The Empire of Terror, that Gonzales describes as “an anti-American screed.” And “he speaks in the hackneyed jargon of a Marxist-Leninist.” This is Raul Castro’s heir apparent – the man who’s in line to inherit the throne when the old men bite the dust. Does anyone really expect such a person to relinquish absolute power the moment he inherits it?

MikeGonzalez-e1392566651302-150x150 — Mike Gonzales

Gonzales also offers an important observation about Mariela, who, as he notes, is a “member of Cuba’s rubber-stamp National Assembly.” This is a woman who has received a boatload of positive press in the Western media in recent years because she is – or at least professes to be – a gay-rights activist. This self-identification is food for thought. These days, many far-left enemies of Israel and apologists for oppressive Islamic regimes have been trained by their cynical capos to accuse Israel of “pinkwashing” – that is, of using its excellent gay-rights record to promote itself as a beacon of human rights, when in fact those enemies’ prime objective is to ensure that Israel is viewed in the West as a first-class violator of human rights.

Mariela Castro is Cuba's most prominent gay rights activist — Mariela Castro

Now the pinkwashing charge, when leveled against Israel, is of course nothing more than an obscene slur. It’s highly interesting, however – though hardly surprising – to note that those who promote the concept of pinkwashing don’t ever use it against Cuba and Mariela, even though, in her case, the otherwise preposterous concept actually makes a kind of sense. How, after all, can there be such a thing as gay rights in a country with no basic freedoms whatsoever? How can a loyal, lockstep member of a Communist ruling family and of a Communist rubber-stamp parliament be seriously considered an activist for any kind of rights whatsoever? Never mind: as Gonzales puts it, Mariela’s “position as an LGBT activist will ensure that Western useful idiots continue to lionize the Revolution” even after the old revolutionaries kick the bucket.

Posted on April 1, 2016March 30, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Leopoldo

Tuesday evening brought what may be promising news from Venezuela. The National Assembly, which since January 6 has been dominated by the anti-chavista opposition, passed a law ordering the release of political prisoners. President Maduro vowed to veto. We’ll see what happens. We’ll have to keep an eye on the Venezuelan media, because outlets like the New York Times and CNN can’t always be relied on to pay attention to such developments.

It’s not as if the international news media have entirely ignored what’s been going on in the Bolivarian Republic, but it does seem to us that, with few exceptions, they’ve failed to recognize just how remarkable the current situation is in that tortured country.

This failure, if that’s the right word, is not entirely a puzzlement, of course, given that many of the aforementioned media were, not so very long ago, eager stooges and vociferous cheerleaders for Hugo Chávez, the father of Venezuelan socialism, otherwise known as chavismo. Chávez, with his brazen and unapologetic anti-Americanism, embodied the hopes of certain Americans and Europeans for a smashingly successful socialist Latin America, led by the example of the fearless Hugo and wonderfully free of the baleful influence of the nefarious norteamericanos.

Instead, Venezuela has turned out to be an extraordinary dramatic – indeed tragic – textbook example of the sheer folly of socialism. The rapidity with which the country’s economy has collapsed, and the terrifying particulars of that collapse, provide – for those too young to remember the Soviet Union and too foolish to recognize that the Castros’ Cuba is not a charming vintage-auto museum or 24/7 salsa party but a well-nigh unlivable everyday reality for 11 million people – a vivid picture of the disaster that is Communism.

That in itself is dramatic enough. But add to that the singular case of Leopoldo López. The chavista regime’s most eloquent critic, the opposition’s most charismatic leader, he has been in prison for over two years now, for no other reason than that he is – quite obviously – by far the most potent threat to the power of Chávez’s hapless, fatuous successor, Nicolás Maduro. López is so manifestly everything that Maduro is not, so completely the Gallant to his Goofus, that it seems almost too tidy a scenario; if this were a film script, the producer would almost certainly order the writer to make the villain at least somewhat less buffoonish and corrupt and the hero somewhat less noble and courageous.

Venezuelan acting President Nicolas Maduro raises his fist during a campaign rally in San Carlos, Cojedes State, on April 4, 2013. The presidential campaign to replace Venezuela's Hugo Chavez formally kicked off Tuesday, with Maduro -- Chavez's hand-picked successor -- battling opposition leader Henrique Capriles for the forthcoming April 14 vote. AFP PHOTO / JUAN BARRETOJUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images — Nicolás Maduro

But on rare occasions, reality is simply better than fiction – and this is, quite simply, one of those times. López – a collateral descendant of Simón Bolívar, the George Washington of South America – studied economics and government at Kenyon College in Ohio and public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Elected mayor of Chacao, one of the five administrative districts of Caravas, by a slim margin in 2000, he was re-elected four years later with 81% of the vote.

leopoldolopezprisonervenezuela-670x472 — With his wife, Lilian Tintori

The glowing success of his mayoral tenure and the thoroughgoing spotlessness of his record were attested to by Transparency International, which gave him its first-prize award in 2007 and again in 2008 for running his country’s most honest and efficient city government. In 2008, he came in third in the World Mayors contest for the planet’s best mayors. He’s a remarkable, almost incredible combination: a learned student of economics and statecraft, a staunch, eloquent defender of human liberty, a highly competent and incorruptible administrator, and an inspired, practical-minded reformer of local government on every level.

venezuela_supermarket_empty_shelves — Just a reminder of those empty Venezuelan grocery shelves…

Since his unjust arrest, he has also proven to be a man of extraordinary bravery. Pretty much every major international human-rights group has declared him a political prisoner and called for his immediate and unconditional release. So have the New York Times and Washington Post. Polls show that if he were to run for president today, he would win easily. It’s clear that the main reason he remains behind bars is that Venezuela’s current leader, a grotesquely inept, ill-educated, and economically illiterate former bus driver, knows that Leopoldo is everything he isn’t and that more and more of the Venezuelan people – who are suffering increasingly from the tragic everyday consequences of chavismo – realize that Leopoldo is exactly what they need to pull their country out of its hole.

…and ridiculously long lines to get into those grocery stores

The present state of affairs, in short, could scarcely be more striking: Venezuela has what may well be the worst government on earth right now, and López, if chosen to replace Maduro, would, upon his installation, immediately become one of the world’s most thoughtful, ethical, and skillful heads of government. Every day that he continues to languish in prison is a lost day for the Venezuelan people, who have waited long enough for rescue. Let’s hope they’re able to finally spring him from the joint – and turn the grim winter of Venezuela’s discontent into a Venezuelan spring.

Posted on March 31, 2016April 2, 2016 by usefulstooges 5

Castro: A hug from Hollande

The headline of a Washington Post editorial on January 31 didn’t mince words: “Failure in Cuba.”

HAVANA, CUBA - AUGUST 14: Secretary of State John Kerry (R) watches as Marines raise the American flag at the U.S. Embassy August 14, 2015 in Havana, Cuba. Kerry will visited the reopened embassy, the first time an American secretary of state has visited Cuba since 1945, a symbolic act after the the two former Cold War enemies reestablished diplomatic relations in July. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) — Secretary of State John Kerry at the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, August 14, 2015

“President Obama’s opening to Cuba,” argued the Post‘s editors, had failed in its declared objective, namely to “unleash the potential of 11 million Cubans,” to “engage and empower the Cuban people,” and to “empower the nascent Cuban private sector.” Obama, the editorial charged, had made concession after concession to the Castro regime without demanding human-rights advances, the release of dissidents from prison, the introduction of independent media, Internet access, or an end to state control of the economy.

4857483_6_3bbc_francois-hollande-et-raul-castro-a-l-elysee_62db6a9159fd50dbf26b3114362a8fae — Hollande and Raúl Castro at the Elysee Palace, Paris

In sum: while Fidel and Raúl Castro were profiting handsomely from Obama’s opening to Cuba, they were refusing to make any meaningful reforms. Obama kept making concession after concession to the Cuban tyrants, but in return the Cuban people were getting nada. “Autocrats everywhere,” wrote the Post‘s editors, “must be watching with envy the Castros’ good fortune.”

Cut to Paris, where Raúl Castro made a historic state visit on February 1. It was a perfect opportunity for French President François Hollande to call for precisely those changes in Cuba that the Post editorial had enumerated.

Yoani Sanchez, the internationally known Cuban blogger and pro-freedom activist, wrote an article urging Hollande to “take advantage of Raúl Castro’s official visit to demand a democratic opening.” France, she wrote, would lose nothing by taking “a stronger stance on the lack of freedom under which 11 million Cubans live.” Reporters without Borders agreed.

Did Hollande heed their call? Au contraire. He gave Castro (in the words of Voice of America) “the red-carpet treatment.” He hugged him. He threw a state dinner. And, according to one source, he actually “declared his love” for Castro.

Indeed, instead of criticizing the Cuban dictator, Hollande lectured Obama, exhorting him to make even more unilateral concessions to the Havana regime. The U.S. embargo, Hollande insisted, was a “vestige of the Cold War” and must be lifted in its entirety so that Cuba could “fully takes its place” in the community of nations. This, Hollande added, was not only “the will of this country” – i.e., France – but was also “the will of the international community.”

hollanderaul — Castro and Hollande raising a toast at the state dinner

Hollande made it clear, in short, he’s big on “normalizing” the world’s relations with Cuba. But he didn’t drop so much a hint that if the Cuban government wants its country to fully join the community of nations, it has its own job of “normalization” to do – it needs, quite simply, to grant its people the same individual liberties enjoyed by everyone else in the Western hemisphere.

hollandemay2015havana — Last May, Hollande visited Havana and met with Fidel

What’s the background to this Franco-Cuban lovefest? Briefly put, Hollande sees Cuba as a golden opportunity for French business development, and thinks U.S. policies are keeping many French entrepreneurs from diving in. Yet as one contractor told Le Monde, the main obstacle to Cuba’s re-entry into the community of nations isn’t the U.S. embargo; it’s the Castros’ refusal to turn their dictatorship into a nation of laws, with property rights, financial transparency, and so on. Without such reforms, many potential foreign investors will prefer to put their money elsewhere.

Meanwhile, we’re left with Hollande’s shameful silence on Cuban Communism. “This encounter,” lamented one Cuban emigre, “is all about profiting from Cuban slave labor. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Posted on February 12, 2016February 11, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Nick Miroff and the charms of totalitarianism

A Cuban national flag is seen painted on a shack in Alamar, a large public housing complex in the Eastern Havana, Cuba, 5 February 2009. — Alamar, Havana

There are run-of-the-mill fools in American journalism, and then there are major-league idiots like Nick Miroff. Yesterday we quoted him fretting in the Washington Post about the new phenomenon of “yawning income gaps” in Cuba – meaning that some people there are actually starting to rise out of poverty.

But there was a lot more fatuity on offer in Miroff’s 2,000-word tribute to the shabby Havana neighborhood of Alamar. Here he is giving us a glimpse of local color:

“Men Die, But the Party Is Immortal,” says a billboard in Alamar, trying to reassure residents who may wonder what will happen after Fidel, 89, and current President Raúl Castro, 84, are no longer around.

Reassure residents? How does a man get to be a Washington Post reporter without being able to recognize propaganda and call it by its real name? We’re talking about a country where people still can’t watch TV from abroad, can’t read the Washington Post or any other Western newspapers, can’t go online without going to a special Internet cafe and paying a hefty fee. But everywhere they turn, there’s a giant hoarding telling them how wonderful the Communist Party is.

Nick Miroff

Miroff went on to hail Cuba’s “social and economic parity” as “unusual” for Latin America, “a region beset by deep class divisions.” He offered the usual starry-eyed left-wing praise for the island prison’s welfare system. Not until three-quarters of the way through his nauseating paean to poverty and despotism did he finally acknowledge – kind of – that what he was writing about here was a community, and a country, living in sadness and squalor: “a collective exhaustion has set in, the toll of steady emigration, corruption large and small, and the knowledge, from the impossible-to-filter influences of globalization, that Cubans live better in almost any other country than their own.”

But, hey, don’t get Miroff wrong here: for him, the problem isn’t that Cuba’s political and economic system has failed the Cuban people; the problem is that a younger generation of Cubans have failed their country’s system. Meaning what? Meaning that they lack the revolutionary fervor, the selfless love for and confidence in their leaders, the bottomless devotion to the cause that (Miroff would have us believe) gave meaning to their grandparents’ lives. After telling us about Aldo, an octogenarian resident of Alamar who, back in the early Castro days, was a photographer for the Communist Party newspaper Granma, and who still “keeps thick manila envelopes of old photos that tell the story of a life in the service of Cuba’s socialist dream,” Miroff lamented that the

…and more…

egalitarian ideals of that era are lost today on Aldo’s grandson, Alejandro, 28. He has an American flag in his bedroom but little else. Trained as a veterinary technician, he was laid off during Raúl Castro’s campaign to downsize the state bureaucracy. Sometimes he drives a taxi. His mother says he is desperate to leave.

“He says to me, “I don’t want to turn 50 in this country with no car and no house of my own,’” Olga Mederos said.

Miroff closed with a vignette of Aldo and his photo collection:

“When I show these to my grandson, he says, ‘What good did it do? Look at you now. You’ve got nothing,’ ” Aldo said.

He shuffled the image to the bottom of the pile, looking away. “Maybe it’s true,” he said. “Maybe he’s right.”

And so ended the article. Miroff was clearly going for pathos, for poignancy. He wanted us to feel sad about the fading of the beautiful “socialist dream,” the loss of those magnificent “egalitarian ideals.” For him, one gathers, that American flag in Alejandro’s bedroom is, above all, a symbol of a generation whose members have selfishly turned their backs on the golden revolution for which their grandparents sacrificed so much and given itself over, heart and soul, to the Evil Empire across the Straits of Florida.

Miroff made no mention, naturally, of the many members of Aldo’s generation who, without a trial or lawyer or any hint of due process, were thrown in prison cells, or lined up against walls and shot, for no other crime than being anti-Communists, writers, homosexuals, whatever.

Any American reporter with half a brain, with even a crumb of a moral sense, would have started his article with that flag in Alejandro’s bedroom, and would have found its presence there deeply stirring. He would’ve recognized that flag as a symbol of young Cubans’ hopes for a free and prosperous future, and would’ve been touched and humbled to realize that his own country’s flag, and his own country’s liberties, could serve as an inspiration to a young man living in one of the world’s last totalitarian nations.

But no. Miroff, in Alejandro’s bedroom, was incapable of seeing what was right in front of him for what it was: the spectacle of a young man born into slavery and yearning for freedom. Miroff, alas, would seem to be all but blind to freedom. It’s barely, if at all, on his radar. All he can see is economic equality or inequality.

It’s disturbing to witness this virtual blindness to freedom in anyone who has been fortunate enough to experience it. But it’s especially scary to see it in a man who’s employed as a journalist by the leading newspaper in the capital of what some of us still think of as the free world.

Posted on January 12, 2016January 3, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Time‘s love letter to Cuba

The problem with Time Magazine‘s just-released special issue begins with the title. It’s called “Inside the New Cuba: Discovering the Charm of a Once-Forbidden Island: The People, The Culture, The Paradise.”

“Charm”? “Paradise”?

Yes, there’s certainly a great deal of natural beauty in Cuba. But the title of this special issue seems designed to suggest that Cuba, under its present management, is some kind of Eden to which Americans, until now, have been denied entry.

Much of the issue is the usual travel-reportage fluff with little political content. In one piece, Karl Vick poses that burning question: “When long-forbidden Cuban cigars become more available to Americans, will they maintain their aroma of glamour?” Vick, a cigar aficionado who spends several paragraphs recounting his own experiences with “Cedros” and “Lanceros” and “Bolivar Gigantes” (these are different types of Cuban cigars), fears that those stogies will lose a “certain cachet,” “the mystique of the forbidden.” The key paradox of this special issue is that even as Time‘s authors fret about the impact that American tourists and businesses and capitalist-style materialism will have on Fidel’s island paradise, the whole product is explicitly designed to be purchased by potential American tourists, whom it encourages in every sentence to book a flight to Havana and consume away.

But the issue does touch on politics from time to time – and when it does, it’s not pretty. In one article, Vick actually dismisses the notion that the Castro regime is totalitarian and that the Cuban people are victims – a view he attributes to Cuban exiles who live in Miami and whose opinions can’t be taken seriously because they’re giving voice to their own personal frustrations and resentments. While admitting, in a classic “to be sure” sentence, that there are facts that support the exiles’ arguments about the Castro regime, Vick insists that the Miami Cubans toward the Castros is “at heart a neighborhood grudge match.” The statement is breathtaking in its glibness and moral blindness – an insult to every free-thinking Cuban writer, artist, democracy activist, and gay person ever imprisoned, tortured, or executed in the name of the Revolution.

havana1 — Let’s hope the American tourists don’t ruin this

But then, as Joel Pollak observed after perusing Time‘s special issue, the people who put it together seem less interested in entertaining the pleasant possibility that the coming years may bring greater freedom for the people of Cuba than in fretting over the supposed likelihood of “a different kind of change – namely, the prospect of thousands of rich American tourists arriving and demanding creature comforts that will ruin the island’s charm.”

More next time.

Posted on August 21, 2015August 20, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

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