Reports tell us that American diplomats in Cuba met with Cuban dissidents yesterday. They shared a meal together and talked. That is in Communist undemocratic repressive Cuba. The Cuba that restricts its people from coming to the USA even more than the USA restricts its people from going to Cuba.
Now to U.S. allies, non-communist anti-democratic allies:
A few months ago an American undersecretary of state was kicked out of Bahrain because he talked with some opposition leaders. Three years earlier another American diplomat was hounded out of Bahrain because he talked about human rights.
Can an American delegation meet and talk with local dissidents of whom there are many (in and out of prison) in Saudi Arabia? Or in the United Arab Emirates? Or even in Egypt? Would they dare?
Of course it is possible that because Cuba is in the Western Hemisphere, geographically and culturally, we should expect more of her. Which is like saying that Arabs (and Muslims) either do not deserve or don’t want democracy and freedom of expression. Which may not be as bigoted as it sounds. I know that, based on painful experience, most Arabs (outside Lebanon) are wary of the freedom of expression: mostly it gets you prison, torture, premature death, exile, or a combination of the above.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum 
[email protected]
Have Yourself a Merry Little——-> Kenny G. Holiday
Sunday morning saw Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on one TV network interview blasting the new Obama policy towards Cuba. One of his main objections, one of them, was that Cuba is not ‘free’ and not democratic but communist.
The senator almost certainly was watching himself on a television set made in China at the time. After that he probably made some phone calls in an American iPhone or Android phone assembled in China. He probably went home and had cold drink, kept cool in a fridge made in China. All courtesy of dividends he received from American corporations that are in partnership with the rulers and the oligarchy of China. That is democratic non-communist China………
I forgot other democratic countries the senator and others do not object to the USA having close relations with. Like Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Burma, Zimbabwe, and many others. All free and democratic……
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
[email protected]
Pundits and columnists in the West have been recently mentioning that Vladimir Putin seems to be going back to a Cold War stance (speaking especially of the Ukraine crisis). That Putin is following aggressive Soviet-like policies toward his neighbors that are similar to those of the Cold War days that ended around 1991. Mr. Putin has been in power for about 13 years. His new image of the aggressive cold warrior is more recent, a function of his recent strong objections to European Union attempts at expansion into what Russians consider their traditional sphere of influence.
Which made me think quickly of that other, more enduring even more ridiculous relic of the old Cold War. The foreign policy relic that never went away, that will likely remain in place as long as the “Cuban vote” is important for winning Florida. The unilateral and senseless U.S. economic blockade of Cuba that has been around for more than half a century, longer than the original Cold War. It will almost certainly survive Fidel Castro, it might even survive the last of the Castro brothers.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
“An Obama administration program sent a dozen Latin American youths to Cuba with the secret purpose of sparking political change. Starting in October 2009, the U.S. Agency for International Development sent young Latin Americans from Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Peru to Cuba under the guise of health-care programming. They entered the country with the “perfect excuse” of providing HIV prevention training, but sought political actors to lead a potential revolution. The U.S. reportedly paid them as little as $5.14 an hour, and they were offered as little as 30 minutes of training on how to avoid Cuban intelligence officials. The youths sent encrypted emails that could have set off alarms and put them in obvious danger. Creative Associates, the contractor employed for the job…………..Alan Gross, who worked for the U.S. government’s U.S. Agency for International Development, has been jailed in Cuba since 2009……………..”
Bay of Piglets. We can surely call this newest attempt that. if they would lift the stupid blockade and allow the “freedom” of travel, there might be no need for all this.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
[email protected]
Which reminds me: did everyone see the absurd charges by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) blaming his whoring and corruption scandals on Cuba? I have heard of the excuse: “the devil made me do it”, but a Castroite devil? Does he mean the Cuban comrades supplied the paid women? That they paid for the services to the questionable Central Americans in Miami? Some might consider this allegation ridiculous nowadays since Cuba has not been a major brothel for American politicians and tourists since 1959.
Or was he saying that Marxism made him do it? I am surprised he did not blame the usual suspects: Hezbollah or Hamas or Al-Qaeda or IRGC, names that resonate back there as well as with the media.
Not that the voters of New Jersey are particular these days; in fact they haven’t been too particular for decades, maybe since Woodrow Wilson left the statehouse.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
[email protected]
Video:
A Kenny G Holiday
“Nelson Mandela helped popularize use of sanctions. His greatest impact was as a moral leader, but Nelson Mandela also left a legacy in diplomacy by helping popularize the use of international sanctions to pressure a government to change its policies. Since sanctions were imposed in an effort to end apartheid and bring down South Africa’s white-minority government, they have been used hundreds of times, especially by Western countries. President Clinton, who ordered sanctions against Cuba, Libya, Iran and Pakistan, mused near the end of his second term that the United States had become “sanctions-happy.”…………..”
Cute but poisonous distortion of history in the L.A. Times. It says: “Nelson Mandela helped popularize use of sanctions”, and I haven’t read a pile of dung (caca, if you prefer) that smelled worse than this one today. Mandela inspired starving out the peoples of Cuba and Iran? This piece somehow ties American and Western sanctions against Third World peoples to Mandela. The cruel Western blockades of Cuba and Iran were apparently inspired by Nelson Mandela, according to this twisted logic.
Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, applied sanctions exclusively to several third world countries, but refused to apply sanctions against the worst offender of the time, the apartheid White supremacist regime of what was called (with a straight face) the “Republic of South Africa”. AS did much of the U.S. Congress. After all, it ain’t kosher (nor halal) to blockade white folks, even in Africa.
Cheers
mhg
[email protected]
“The rising power of leftists in South America made the election of Chile’s President Salvador Allende a threat to the United States, a journalist says. That was one of the reasons the CIA became involved, directly or indirectly, in the socialist leader’s assassination in 1973, author Carlos Bosso said in an interview published Sunday in the Santiago (Chile) Times. In his book, “The CIA in Chile,” Bosso said the CIA detected what it saw as “a strong increase” in Chileans voting for leftist political parties in the 1960s He cited an analysis of leftist guerrillas done by the CIA that said attempts by leftist groups to take over governments by violence “were not feasible anymore,” so the groups began getting involved in the continent’s political processes. That resulted in the election of Allende…………”
That was then. Now the gates have opened. Now they have several leftists to get rid of: Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Maduro (Venezuela), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), the Castros (the toughest ones, in Cuba). Then there are the softer leftists who in the old right-wing days would have been overthrown just as quickly: in Chile, Brazil…………
Cheers
mhg
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“A summit of nearly 30 Western Hemisphere leaders has ended without a joint declaration due to divisions over Cuba and Argentine claims to the Falkland Islands. “There is no declaration because there is no consensus,” said Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos as the summit’s closing news conference. Washington, backed by Canada, stood fast against widespread demands to include in the meeting’s final declaration language specifying that Cuba be included in future hemispheric summits. They had also balked at backing Argentina’s claims to the British-held Falkland Islands. “All the countries here in Latin American and the Caribbean want Cuba to be present. But the United States won’t accept,” President Evo Morales of Bolivia told reporters late Saturday. “It’s like a dictatorship.”……..”
So, no more Summits of the Americas unless ALL nations of the Americas are allowed to attend. Canada’s right-wing government and the United States’ allegedly communist socialist government blocked any consensus on Cuba (and perhaps Florida)and the Malvinas (Falklands). At least until after the 2012 elections. This time Canada got the Malvinas (Falklands) in exchange for Cuba (and perhaps Florida), next time: who knows.
Cheers
mhg
[email protected]
“Cuba criticized the United States Tuesday for “aggressive” Cold War-style moves to block it from attending the Summit of the Americas which meets in Colombia this week. The US government vetoed proposals to include Cuba, the Americas’ only Communist country, among invited leaders to the summit in Cartagena, Colombia. “The veto, once again, by US authorities clearly demonstrates that Washington has no real desire to get closer to its southern neighbors, nor to change its aggressive policy against our country,” an editorial in the official Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma said………..”
The Cubans don’t realize that it all has to do with “Florida” this year. They don’t realize that Florida is a battleground state in the elections. That anything goes in what can be one of the most fierce election battle since Appomattox. If they knew, they would sympathize with the Obama administration.
That is why China is not sanctioned: no Florida, a lot of trade.
Cheers
mhg
[email protected]
Multidisciplinary: Middle East, North Africa, Gulf, GCC, World, Cosmos…..
