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I admit to imprecision when labeling Fidel Castro a "Stalinist dictator." For the record: the Castro-Che incarceration of political prisoners actually surpassed Stalin's. In her authoritative book, Gulag, Anne Applebaum documents that, all-told, 18 million people passed through Stalin's prison-camps. At any one time 2 million were incarcerated. That was out of a Soviet population of 220 million. Cuba's population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro and Che's prison camps. At one point in 1961, 350,000 Cubans crammed Castro's Gulag. Do the math.
"A profound racism exists in the U.S.," continues Fidel Castro in his Obama-endorsement. "It's a miracle that the Democratic candidate has not suffered the fate of other Americans who dreamed of equality and justice like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King."
For the record: Fidel Castro, forcibly overthrew a black Cuban head of state (Fulgencio Batista) and replaced his government with one where only nine percent of the ruling Stalinist party is black and where the prison population is 80- 90 percent black. He jailed the longest suffering black political prisoner of modern history (Eusebio Penalver who suffered longer in Castro's dungeon's than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa's.) He sentenced other blacks (Dr Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20 year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in a public square.
"(Obama) has a habit of looking at his adversary with serenity and laughing at the verbal gaffes of an opponent who looks blankly into space," continues Castro's chucklesome article, where he proceeds to denounce McCain as "a habitual liar, who lacks an ethical code and is an instrument of the "Miami Mafia" (overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-Americans.)
Castro laments the "brutal measures" the U.S. is adopting during "this capitalist crisis," because these "will provoke more inflation, more devaluation and more loss of markets." Thus a McCain victory would be economically disastrous, because, "he was one of the worst students ever at West Point and knew nothing about mathematics, and knows nothing about economic complications."
For the record: Fidel Castro converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland, a huge influx of immigrants and whose workers enjoyed the 8th industrial wages in the world into one that repels Haitians. And this after being lavished with Soviet subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (again, into a nation of 6.4 million) -an economic feat that defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the very laws of physics.
Actually, Castroites have been associates of Obama's associates for decades. "I have been affiliated with the Cuba Council of Churches since the 1980s," boasted Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon on July 16, 2006. "I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuba Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project's trips to Cuba. The Cuban Council of Churches has been a non-partisan global mission partner for decades. I have worked with them for two decades."
"Non-partisan," Reverend Wright? Not according to Cuban intelligence defector Juan Vives, who from hands-on experience reports that the Cuba Council of Churches is in fact an arm of Cuba's ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) itself an arm of Cuba's DGI, Cuba's secret police, founded and mentored by the KGB and East German STASI. The ICAP's long-time chieftain was Rene Cruz Rodriguez, perhaps one of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's "friends."
Rodriguez' meteoric rise through Cuba's Stalinist bureaucracy was facilitated by his diligence as an early executioner, often beating out Che Guevara and Raul Castro themselves in his zeal to shatter the firing-squad victim's skull with a coup d' grace from his .45.
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About 100 Napa County-based Barack Obama supporters showed up Monday afternoon on the front steps of the Napa Valley Register building in downtown Napa to protest the newspaper's Sunday endorsement of John McCain for President.
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SAN DIEGO CITY BEAT:
Seems kind of pointless to run through a litany of policy areas in which Barack Obama is a far superior choice over John McCain, what with California already signed, sealed and delivered for the Democrat, but we'd like to run up the score and make it a landslide, so we'll say, briefly, that Obama has shown himself to be the more thoughtful and, dare we say it, more presidential candidate. He's the guy in whom we'd have far greater trust on the economy, energy, healthcare and foreign policy.
As for McCain, we can go into his past and detail his fondness for industry lobbyists. We can go into his neoconservative, imperialist views on foreign policy that would absolutely be a continuation of the past eight years. We can cite our concerns about how he was once rightly against the Bush tax cuts before he was wrongly for them.
But we'll simply point to a couple of recent decisions his campaign made. The first was his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. It was a cynical move to shore up the conservative Republican base, and it showed no regard for real-world possibilities--such as, What if McCain were to die or be incapacitated while in office? The second was the desperate, disgusting decision to portray Obama as a terrorist sympathizer, which is the kind of thing you do when you have nowhere else to turn, when you know you can't capture votes on serious policy issues facing Americans.
McCain would likely win this election four years ago--before the public realized how wrong the invasion of Iraq was, before the Republican Party imploded amid scandal after scandal (Cunningham, Foley, Abramoff, DeLay, Craig, Stevens, et al.), before the current president became radioactive and before the economy descended into unimaginable crisis.
So, it's the right time for you moderate Republicans and you independents to give our guy a chance. McCain's thinking is no different than Bush's in the key areas""costly military interventionism, trickle-down economics and free access for lobbyists""and if you really think about it, you'll realize that it's unsustainable. Please vote for Barack Obama.
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