President Trump rejects Obama Cuba policy

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Havana praises Obama for change in Cuban immigration policy ( with friends like these who cares about the everyday Cuban who wants a chance at freedom )

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Believe it or not the U.N. honored the late Cuba leader Fidel Castro

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Fidel Castro laid to rest in private funeral but there is something bigger to ask

Castro’s ashes were placed in a granite mausoleum Sunday morning during a private ceremony attended by Castro’s little-seen family and a handful of Latin American and African leaders, Cuban state media reported.
The three-minute ceremony at Santiago de Cuba’s Santa Ifigenia Cemetery ended nine days of public mourning for the charismatic but polarizing revolutionary who led Cuba for half a century.

( Billy’s thoughts – The question which none of the media brought up, and for sure the Cuba media rejected talking about the most important thing is where is Castro now. Read the rest of the above story here. )

We can judge Castro, we don’t have to wait for history to judge him

Sometimes history doesn’t have to wait to judge — and when it comes to dictators, even dead ones, we shouldn’t either.
With news of Fidel Castro’s death Friday — finalmente — world leaders began offering eulogies, some of which were so vapid or willfully ignorant that Castro might have written them himself. It would appear in any case that the 20th century’s quintessential “Big Brother” managed to infect a few world leaders with an Orwellian strain of mushy-mouthed aphasia.
Apparently bereft of the right words, they treated Castro’s brutality as polite unmentionables, serving up platitudes as though just another important figure had passed on to his maker.
Did they miss the screams?
Growing up in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis, running bomb shelter drills and hearing the stories of refugees who became lifelong friends, I somehow managed to evade the charms of the revolutionary rogue, who merely replaced one dictatorship with another far worse. There’s nothing sentimental about a ruthless dictator who once held the world hostage to a possible nuclear Armageddon.

It’s one thing to be respectful of the Cuban people — and I’m not suggesting we celebrate anyone’s death. But it is another to sidestep the historical horrors of a murderous, 60-year military regime and strike a pose of diplomatic equanimity that assuages only gluttons of insincerity.

( Billy’s thoughts – Read the rest of the above column by Kathleen Parker right here. I hope Castro repented of his sinful life, and for his evil deeds before he faced his maker. ) 

Farewell Fidel

Listen to a radio commentary here.

González, now 22, returns to public eye to praise Fidel Castro( Thank you President Clinton, and Janet Reno )

HAVANA — Elián González, the boy who found himself at the center of a controversial custody battle between his father in Cuba and his relatives in the United States 16 years ago, on Sunday praised Fidel Castro, who, he said, made it possible for him to return to his home country.

González, now 22, appeared on a government-run television program and said Castro, who died on Friday at the age of 90, was like a father and a friend to him.
“He is my father who, like my father, I wanted to show him everything I achieved. That he would be proud of me. That’s how I was with Fidel,” González said in a subtitled portion of the interview posted online by NBC Latino. “If I learned something and wanted to show him, and there are still many things that I wanted to show him. … And that in a public event he said he considered me a friend, it was an honor.”
González was 5 years old when his mother and several others voyaged by boat from Cuba to get to the U.S. His mother died, but the boy survived and was rescued by fishermen. He was later taken to his relatives’ home in South Florida. What followed was an international tug-o-war waged by Castro, who had led demonstrations demanding that González be returned to his father.
In April 2000, heavily armed federal immigration agents raided the relatives’ home in Miami. González was found in a bedroom halfway inside a closet as Donato Dalrymple, one of the fishermen who rescued him from the Atlantic Ocean, carried him in his arms.
A picture from the raid shows González, crying as he looked at the armed federal agent. Agents reported that the boy was calm afterward. He was later reunited with his father, stepmother and 6-month-old half-brother.

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Goodbye, Fidel CastroWHY UTOPIANISM ALWAYS FAILS

A brutal communist dictator has gone on to meet his reward. And too many seem confused about the legacy of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
LISTEN to the commentary here or read it below. 

John Stonestreet
On Friday, Fidel Castro died at the age of ninety, far older than many of his opponents lived to be. If you’ve been subjected to the fawning epitaphs of many in the media (or read about one NFL quarterback’s ridiculous defense of Castro) please keep this in mind: While exact numbers are difficult to come by, the number of Cubans murdered by Castro’s regime numbers in the tens of thousands, if not more.
In 1998, I found myself standing less than a hundred yards away from Castro. I’d spent a year in Jamaica right after college, and while I was there, Castro came for a visit. Looking back, knowing what I now know about Castro, the esteem in which he was held was amazing: He was met with a hero’s welcome by both public officials and the people… not to mention, streets and sidewalks that had been in disrepair for decades were fixed, and gutters were finally unclogged and cleaned up to honor him.
The obvious question was: Why? And the best answer my Jamaican friends could come up with when I asked was that Castro had “stood up” to the United States for decades.
Implicit in their answer is the idea that Castro had stood up to them because he had the best interests of the Cuban people in mind. A sentiment shared by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he called Castro “a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century.”
But what twaddle that is! Castro certainly was larger than life, and as I learned that day, an amazing public speaker. But oratorical skills cannot mitigate the consequences of evil ideas. Only people who didn’t actually have to live under Castro’s rule would call his treatment of the Cuban people “service.” The Cuba Archive has identified at least 15,000 Cubans who were shot, hanged, bombed or otherwise died in Castro’s notorious prisons.
This is the legacy of the man that today’s version of what Lenin once dubbed “useful idiots” are praising.
daily_commentary_11_29_16In addition, Castro’s idea of “service” included making Cuba a satellite of the Soviet Union. He allowed the USSR to place nuclear missiles on the island, thus giving his people a potential front-row seat for Armageddon.
And then of course, there’s Cuba’s horrendous human rights record. According to Human Rights Watch, “During Castro’s rule, thousands of Cubans were incarcerated in abysmal prisons, thousands more were harassed and intimidated, and entire generations were denied basic political freedoms.”
If this is “service,” I’d hate to see “evil.”
But let’s be clear: what happened in Castro’s Cuba is fully consistent with the historical record of communism and all other attempts at man-made utopias, a word which, you should recall, means “no place.”
All utopian visions attempt to reinvent man and refashion him along ideologically-inspired lines by force of state-level coercion. And that never works. Human nature just isn’t that malleable.
The 2001 film “Enemy at the Gates,” about the siege of Stalingrad during World War II, offers one of the clearest and concise critiques of communism I’ve ever heard. As he lays dying, Danilov, a commissar whose job it was to try and create this “new Soviet man,” tells the hero, “I’ve been such a fool, Vassili. Man will always be man. There is no new man. We worked so hard to create a society that was equal, where there’d be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there’s always something to envy. A smile, a friendship, something you don’t have and want to appropriate.”
Danilov is only mistaken on one point: there is a “new man.” But humans are only made new by a means that Castro tried so hard to destroy during his entire reign: the Christ of Christianity. And I pray this lesson isn’t lost on the rest of us.

Halloween commentaries

Check out this post I did last year around this time.

How the media, and the Clintons tricked Americans over Elian Gonzalez

On the April 6th 2000 edition of 60 Minutes, America saw a bewildered and heartsick father pleading to be allowed to have his motherless son accompany him back to Cuba, his cherished homeland. Dan Rather (who hailed Fidel Castro as “Cuba’s Elvis!”) was interviewing Elian’s “bereaved” father. How could anyone possibly oppose his heartfelt plea? How could simple decency and common sense possibly allow for anything else?
“Did you cry?” the pained and frowning Dan Rather asked the “bereaved” father during the 60 Minutes drama.”A father never runs out of tears,” Juan (actually, as we’ll see, the voice of Juan’s drama school-trained translator) sniffled back to Dan. And the 60 Minutes prime-time audience could hardly contain their own sniffles.

Here’s what America didn’t see: “Juan Miguel Gonzalez was surrounded by Castro security agents the entire time he was in the studio with Rather.” This is an eye-witness account from Pedro Porro, who served as Dan Rather’s translator during the famous 60 Minutes interview. Dan Rather would ask the question in English into Porro’s earpiece whereupon Porro would translate it into Spanish for Elian’s heavily-guarded father.

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