April 22 - A former Venezuelan army general on Thursday denounced what he called the widespread involvement of Cuban troops in President Hugo Chavez's military.

Former Brig. Gen. Antonio Rivero, who used to head the government's emergency management agency, said his decision to retire from the army this month was motivated mainly by "the presence and meddling of Cuban soldiers" in Venezuela's armed forces.

He told reporters that Cubans are now involved in training troops, including courses for snipers, and are also playing a role in intelligence, weapons, communications and other areas. There was no immediate reaction from Chavez's government.
Rivero's televised remarks add to claims by government critics that Cuban advisers and operatives hold various positions in the government and military. 

Rivero said in his infantry division there were "classes like the one for snipers" where Cuban soldiers and personnel provided training.

He said Cubans were also involved in teaching military doctrine at the command level, and are also in divisions like military engineering. Cubans, he said, are now placed "at a high level in vital areas of national security."

April 22 - After many years of shameful passivity, Cuba's Roman Catholic Church leader is finally beginning to speak out against the most blatant abuses of Cuba's dictatorship. But he may be doing it too timidly and too late. 

Earlier this week, the head of Cuba's Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, made uncharacteristically strong statements in an interview published by the Church's official magazine, Palabra Nueva (New Word). There were headlines around the world proclaiming, "Cuban Church demands changes."  

Ortega, 73, said that Cuba is going through "the most difficult times that we have lived in the 21st Century," and that there is a growing national consensus that "necessary changes be made in Cuba quickly."

In the interview, the cardinal addressed the international turmoil around the recent death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a political prisoner who died after an 85-day hunger strike.

Ortega repeated earlier calls by Cuba's Conference of Bishops that the government respect the lives of prisoners of conscience, and asked Guillermo Farinas, a dissident who is being fed intravenously at a hospital since he stopped eating in February, to abandon his hunger strike. Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami herald.

April 21 - I receive many e-mails criticizing me for saying that the regime in Cuba is fascist.

 "Why do you call it fascist, when it is a communist regime?", they ask.

But, lets look at the definition of fascism: "A political regime, having totalitarian aspirations, ideologically based on a relationship between business and the centralized government, business-and-government control of the market place, repression of criticism or opposition, a leader cult and exalting the state above individual rights. By vague analogy, any system of strong autocracy or oligarchy usually to the extent of bending and breaking the law, race-baiting and violence against largely unarmed populations."

That, my friends, fits the regime of the Castro brothers like a glove

 I never believed that Fidel Castro was a true Marxist.

In my opinion, Castro doesn't have any ideology. He is a gangster who has kidnapped an entire island and runs it as his private farm and the 11 million Cubans as his peons.

The reason why he embraced the USSR was because, at the time, it was a way for him to guarantee that he was going to stay in power for life.

As a matter of fact, I have talked with people who were with Fidel Castro at the University of Havana, who say that his true hero back then was Hitler, not Marx.

The fact that Fidel Castro doesn't have any true ideology, is what has made it so difficult to get rid of him.

He betrayed the millions of Cubans who believed in him, when he sold Cuba to the Soviet Union simply to insure his permanence in power.

When the Soviet Union disappeared, he became business partner with foreign piranhas who were willing to deal in stolen properties and exploit the only slave labor force in this Hemisphere.

Why is he disguising himself as a "leftist revolutionary"? Because that way he can count with the support of those useful idiots, who think that by supporting his regime they are getting even with those 'Yankees" that they hate so much.

Did you ever see any of the "Hollywood elite" embracing and posing with Pinochet, Somoza or Batista?

Did you see anyone going around with a Trujillo t-shirt?

Did you ever read an article in the New York Times or the Washington Post, or any other member of the main stream media referring to "president Pinochet" or "president Batista"? 

No, because those are considered "fascist dictators."

Fidel Castro and his brother are catalogued as "revolutionaries," "Marxists," "leftists" and, as such, are entitled to the title of "president" even though they have never been elected to anything, or even allowed a free election in Cuba in 51 years!

I, for one, am not willing to follow the Castro brothers' script.

In my opinion, Fidel Castro and his brother are more fascist than Batista, Pinochet, Somoza, Trujillo, Stroessner, Perez Jiménez and Franco combined.

And if that makes some people upset, so be it.

April 21 - This video was taken without the knowledge of this agent of Cuba's state security, who was warning the Ladies in White that the government was going to retire its "protection" against "spontaneous demonstrations by Cuban citizens" if they insisted in continuing marching.

When one of the Ladies in White tells this thug that they do not need protection, that what they need is for Cuba's state security to stop organizing and sending mobs to insult and beat them, the state security agent doesn't know what to say.

According to sources inside Cuba, this is the last maneuver by Cuba's fascist regime against the Ladies in White.

They will now claim that there is no way for them to stop "enraged citizens" from attacking them.

Click here to see the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5bLx0nxsuU&feature=player_embedded

April 21 - When federal agents stormed a home in the Little Havana community, snatched Elian Gonzalez from his father's relatives and put him on a path back to his father in Cuba, thousands of Cuban-Americans took to Miami's streets. Their anger helped give George W. Bush the White House months later and simmered long after that. 
Ten years later, the Little Havana home — for weeks the epicenter of a standoff that divided the U.S. — is a museum dedicated to Elian's brief time in this country, but visitors are rare. Almost no one involved in the international custody case wants to talk about Elian, who is now a teenager back in Cuba. 

Even most Cuban-Americans have moved on.

 "It was a very sour taste left in their mouths," said Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. "But, realistically, it was a battle to be lost."  Los Angeles Times

Apr 15th 2010 | HAVANA | From The Economist print edition

WHEN one of Cuba’s leading musicians, Silvio Rodríguez, took to the stage at a hastily organised “Concert for the Motherland” in Havana on April 10th the audience of a few thousand expected him to sing. Instead, he read a text he penned last month in which he defended the Cuban government against foreign criticism over the recent death of a hunger-striking prisoner, Orlando Zapata. He then left without performing a single note.

Mr Rodríguez, for decades a big star throughout Latin America, and a few other well-known artists enjoy privileges denied to ordinary Cubans, such as freedom to travel abroad and to earn. In return, they must toe the revolutionary line. But last month when launching a new album, Mr Rodríguez was unusually critical, calling for “conceptual revisions” in the way that the country is run. He said that he favoured granting an amnesty to 100 prisoners of conscience in the island’s jails. In one of his new songs he suggests that the Cuban revolution should “move on from the R” (ie, to “evolution”).

Perhaps he believed that this would be officially welcomed. When he took over as president in 2006 from his brother, Fidel, Raúl Castro urged Cubans to debate their future “fearlessly”. But Cuba’s communist leadership now finds itself in a familiar position: rallying its people in the face of outside criticism of its suppression of freedoms. And Mr Rodríguez’s comments were seized upon by those whom Cuba’s government considers enemies.

The catalyst for Mr Rodríguez’s criticism and recanting was the death in February of Mr Zapata, whom the government branded a “common criminal” but whom human-rights groups abroad say was one of around 200 political prisoners in Cuba. Another dissident, Guillermo Fariñas, who is not in prison, promptly began his own hunger strike and is seriously ill. Others in the island’s small dissident movement threaten to follow.

The Ladies in White, a group formed by the relatives of political prisoners jailed in a crackdown in 2003, staged a week of protest marches in Havana. The government allowed the marches, by about three dozen of them, but organised bigger crowds of counter-demonstrators shouting insults. Several of the ladies were briefly detained. They claim they are receiving more public support.

Read the complete article at The Economist

 April 20 - Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Tuesday that men need to stop eating chicken, if they don't want to become homosexuals.

According to Evo, chicken producers inject their birds with female hormones "and because of that, men who consume them have problems being men."

Evo also said that men who eat too much chicken tend to lose their hair.

"In 50 years everyone will be bald," said Evo.

Imagine that, wig makers will become billionaires!

As expected, Morales blamed the US and the West for "bringing us more and more poison."

He also said that the potatoes that come from Holland "look beautiful, but are pure poison."

I don't know where Evo made his research to determine that eating chicken made men homosexual and bald, but my research indicates that chewing coca leaves, which Evo does on a daily basis, make people say stupid things.

April 19 - The leader of Cuba's Catholic Church said Cubans were impatient for change to get the country out of what he called a "very difficult situation" in an unusually blunt interview published on Monday.

Cardinal Jaime Ortega told church publication Palabra Nueva (New Word) there was a national consensus that the government should "make the necessary changes quickly" to end "economic and social difficulties" on the communist-led island.
"Its delay produces impatience and unease in the people," he said.  

"Our country is in a very difficult situation, certainly the most difficult we have lived in this 21st century," said Ortega, whose public statements are generally cautious.

It took him almost two months, but Ortega finally lamented the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died on February 24 after a hunger strike to protest the terrible conditions in Cuba's prisons.

He also said the "harassment" of the Ladies in White was "distressing."  Washington Post

April17 - A single 9:30 p.m. telephone call on April 16, 1961, 49 years ago today, could well have assured what was to become more than a half-century rule of Cuba by Fidel and Raúl Castro.

The call from McGeorge Bundy, special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, went to Gen. Charles Cabell, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who at the time was at CIA headquarters for Operation Zapata, more commonly remembered today as the Bay of Pigs. 

Cuban exile Brigade 2506 -- organized and trained by the CIA -- was to land on a Cuban beach at dawn the next morning, April 17, to begin the assault that would free Cuba from more than two years of Castro's increasingly dictatorial and communist-oriented rule.

As Cabell testified later, Bundy ``notified me that we would not be permitted to launch air strikes the next morning until they could be conducted from a strip within the beachhead. Any further consultation regarding the matter should be with the secretary of state.'' It was a decision that by many accounts -- including from members of the CIA task force who planned the operation -- doomed it to failure.

Don Bohning

April 19 - In a tragic end to this sad story, Venezuelan police said this morning that boxing champion Edwin "El Inca" Valero died during the night, when he hanged himself inside the cell where he was being held after murdering his wife on Sunday.

According to police, Valero hanged himself using his own clothes. Guards were advised by other prisoners around 1:30 AM on Monday morning.

April18 - Venezuelan boxing champion Edwin "El Inca" Valero confessed on Sunday to the murder of his wife, 24 year old Jennifer Carolina Viera de Valero. 

Valero had held the World Boxing Council lightweight title, but has had a troubled start to 2010 and is listed by the WBC as "champion in recess".

Valero, a friend and supporter of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, was previously arrested on March 25 for punching his wife and breaking one of her ribs, resulting in the perforation of one of her lungs.

However, Valero was allowed to remain free and was supposed to have traveled to Cuba for alcohol and drug treatment.

The boxer said on several occasions that he was "immune" to prosecution because of his support for Chávez.

In September of 2007, Valero was accused of physically abusing her mother and sister but was also allowed to remain free.

On Saturday night, the boxer and his wife checked in at the Inter Continental hotel in the Venezuelan city of Valencia. They were seen chatting in the lobby of the hotel until about 1:30 AM, before going to their room.

At 5:30 Valero came down and told hotel employees that he had stabbed his wife to death.

In this video dated April 28, 2909, Chávez is seen praising the boxer and thanking him for his support after he won his latest title.