Protests in Cuba: sanctions, COVID, and liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s going on in Cuba?:

From the Malecón, Havana’s famous seawall near the old city, to small towns in Artemisa province and Palma Soriano, the second-largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, videos live-streamed on Facebook showed thousands of people walking and riding bikes and motorcycles along streets while chanting “Freedom!” “Down with Communism!” and “Patria y Vida” — Homeland and Life — which has become a battle cry among activists after a viral music video turned the revolutionary slogan “Homeland or Death” on its head.

“We are not afraid!” chanted Samantha Regalado while she recorded hundreds of people walking along a narrow street in Palma Soriano…

Images circulating on social media of angry crowds overturning police cars are unseen in a country where the communist government has kept a tight grip on the population for more than six decades.

Last time Cubans took to the streets to protest against the communist government was in 1994 and Fidel Castro was alive. But the uprising, known as the Maleconazo, only took place in Havana and didn’t last long, as the former Cuban leader quickly turned the demonstrations into a massive exodus after he opened Cuba’s maritime borders. Thousands of Cubans left the island in makeshift boats and rickety rafts, in what became known as the balsero crisis…

In an impromptu televised address later in the afternoon, Díaz-Canel blamed the protests on U.S. efforts to tighten the embargo, with the alleged intention to “provoke a social uprising” that would justify a military intervention.

Visibly upset and raising his voice, the Cuban leader warned that protesters would face a strong response and called “all revolutionaries” to confront them on the streets “with firmness and courage.”…

Cuba is in the throes of its worst economic contraction in over three decades, as chronic inefficiencies and paralyzing bureaucracy have gradually eroded the country’s production capacity, including the essential food and agriculture sectors. Trump-era sanctions have reduced access to vital economic lifelines like remittances, and foreign investment has plunged. Painful currency reforms this year have sent inflation soaring, and long lines for food have again become commonplace.

I don’t pretend to have any inside information on this, but here are my guesses: these protestors are generations removed from the initial Cuban revolution. The Castros are no longer in power – at least, in terms of holding the reins officially. The new leaders, even though under the sway of the same old Castroite forces, may be lacking that same combination of zeal, hardness, and charisma. Younger generations see the internet and know that they’re not doing well in Cuba, and some of them blame the many-decades-long regime much more than they blame any sanctions. Plus, among at least some people, there really is a hunger for liberty. What happens next to the protestors really depends on how hardline the regime is willing to get with them, and how much energy and coordination the protestors have.

Also, note the reference to “Trump-era sanctions.” The Biden administration initially reacted to the protests very tepidly, by issuing COVID-focused statements such as this one:

Biden himself finally spoke up with this:

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” Biden said in a statement.

“The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights. Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected,” Biden said.

“The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”

So Biden – or his speechwriters – have mentioned the regime and the call to freedom, putting COVID front and center again. I do predict that, if somehow the Cuban Communist regime were to collapse while Biden is president (something I do not think will happen), Biden and the Democrats would immediately take full credit for it. And yet the sanctions set up by Trump appear to have played a significant part in this so far, sanctions that many Democrats want removed (the link is from an article that appeared in March of 2021):

Eighty U.S. House of Representatives Democrats urged President Joe Biden on Tuesday to repeal Donald Trump’s “cruel” sanctions on Cuba and renew engagement, an early sign of support in Congress for easing the clamp-down on the Communist-run country…

Biden, a Democrat, vowed during his campaign to reverse policy shifts by the Republican Trump that “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.”

Trump’s tightening of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba has inflicted further pain on its ailing state-run economy, contributing to worsening shortages of food and medicine.

But Biden has not yet indicated whether he will fully revert to the historic detente initiated by Democratic former President Barack Obama when Biden was vice president.

So, Biden’s history is of supporting the lifting of sanctions, and this was part of his campaign. But nothing has yet happened on that score.

You may not like the song, but I think you’ll like the story

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the piña colada song? I didn’t much care for it (or the earworm it sometimes gave me). I also didn’t even know its title was actually “Escape.”

But no matter. It was a huge hit and apparently has some staying power. Here the singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes tells us the story of how he came to write it and sing it, and I think you’ll be entertained:

[NOTE: Holmes (birth name: David Goldstein) has dual British and American citizenship. I see that, like so many people in the pop or rock music field (for example, the Bee Gees), he’s got a bandleader father and comes from a musical family, with a brother in the business as well.]

The majority of Americans don’t think Joe Biden is in charge

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Here’s a poll on the matter:

The national poll was released by the Convention of States Action in partnership with The Trafalgar Group. The poll, which was conducted toward the end of June, surveyed more than 1,000 likely voters for the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.

Key findings from the poll included:

56.5% of American voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, while 36.4% believe he is directing all policy and agenda
31.7% of Democrat voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, while 58.6% believe he is directing all policy and agenda
83.6% of Republican voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, while 11% believe he is directing all policy and agenda
58.4% of Independent voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, while 36.1% believe he is directing all policy and agenda

So the majority of Democrats think Biden’s in charge, the vast majority of Republicans think he’s not, and the majority of Independents think he’s not.

If you go to the poll results and take a closer look, you’ll see some things that are interesting (at least, I found them so). One is that respondents in the 18 to 24 age group had a lot more skepticism about Joe being in control. Another is that of all the ethnic groups queried, Hispanics were strongly skeptical of Joe’s control, right up there (almost) with white people. And males and females were almost identical in their responses.

I wish the poll takers had asked this followup question of those who don’t think Biden’s in charge: “Do you care?” I bet a lot of Democrats really aren’t perturbed by it, as long as some Democrats and/or leftists – and in particular, people who were in the Obama administration – are steering the ship. But of course that question was not asked.

What if the 2020 election audits end up revealing that Trump was actually the winner?

The New Neo Posted on by

In this American Thinker article, Andrew W. Coy points out that the Constitution is silent on the question of what would happen if, after a president has been declared the winner and taken office, it was discovered that he or she won through election fraud.

I have long thought that in such a scenario there would be no remedy that would undo the wrong. The remedy for such fraud after the person is already in office is to convict the perpetrators of fraud and to either fine them or send them to prison, or both.

Also, fraud is usually found in small, local elections, and it is difficult to prove even then. Nor does it need to have affected or changed the results of an election in order to be actionable fraud. Proving that without the fraud the results would have been different is even more difficult. But that is the situation that those challenging the idea that fraud occurred in 2020 would have the Trump-supporters prove in order to have any credibility at all, and even then it wouldn’t reverse things.

What might the now-ongoing audits show? Even with proof of huge errors and/or misconduct involving enough votes to have changed things, it would remain difficult to prove that those errors or that misconduct actually did change the results. Difficult, but not impossible. More likely, irregularities uncovered by any auditIt would only reveal that Trump might have otherwise won. But, as I stated earlier, I believe that the only remedy at that point would be a conviction for fraud of those who submitted fraudulent ballots (for example). However, it might be difficult to locate the perps, or to tell who it was who allowed bad signatures (to take another example). No one is going to imprison the whole vote-counting team at a certain site.

This is why fraud is so very tempting. This is why prevention is the only answer. If significant fraud is found to have occurred in 2020 – and if the media and social media don’t manage to cover up the news – at the very least it would strengthen the case for states’ passing laws that put in place tighter controls to prevent fraud in the future. And that’s about all it would do, I’m afraid. Would it anger the right even further than they’re angered now? I’m not sure, because the right is pretty angry already.

Here’s a pretty good summary of the last few years of political and intelligence and media developments, and the reaction of the right

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep looking for a simple way to tell the story – which is hard, because there have been so many incidents leading to the current stance of the right towards these things. But this Twitter thread (hat tip: Ace) does a pretty good job, and I recommend reading it and even sending it to a few open-minded liberals, if you know some.

The author doesn’t seem to be on the right – at least, he describes Trump supporters as though looking at them from the outside, albeit with some compassion and understanding. I don’t agree with everything in the thread; in particular, I don’t think that “the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.” No; Gabbard may be an unusual Democrat with a few conservative values, but she’s a Democrat and the press would have supported her win if it was her vs. Jeb.

However, the thread contains a lot of succinct descriptions of the course of events and of the reactions of the populist right. Just to take one example:

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.

Or:

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period…

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true…

They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don’t.

For me, the disillusionment described in that last paragraph above had already occurred some time early in the first decade of the 21st Century.

Nineteen Eighty-Four vs. Brave New World

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Zaphod” writes, of the Orwell work versus the Huxley work: “Funny thing is that Brave New World happened first.”

Well, yes and no. Brave New World was certainly written first, and I agree that it touched on many of the trends in science and propaganda that actually have come to pass, although of course not in exact detail. The book is exaggerated (so far, that is) in the amount of control and social engineering exerted.

Give them time,though; give them time.

But Orwell, in his dystopian masterpiece, was more or less describing something that had already happened – Soviet Russia – and grafting onto it two future developments, one connected with the advance of surveillance technology (he foresaw the telescreen rather than the internet, but he certainly correctly predicted ubiquitous surveillance cameras) and changes in language. My opinion is that it was in that amalgam that Orwell’s genius lay, particularly in his knowledge of the power of language and how the left was already using it to attempt to shape thought.

Orwell also correctly understood and described the leftist demand for holding in the mind as true two contradictory thoughts – or even an illogical thought such as 2 plus 2 equals 5 – if the party demanded it. He had already seen that at work with Communism.

I read both books in early adolescence and was fascinated by both. Orwell’s book terrified me to my core, but Huxley’s did not. It seemed imaginative and strange and sometimes even humorous, but also vaguely sinister. I didn’t quite understand its more subtle nature (subtle compared to Nineteen Eighty-Four, that is) at the time. I didn’t understand that Brave New World was about a different kind of assault on liberty, one that stroked and embraced rather than tortured and horrified, and was all the more seductive because of it.

One January 6th defendant fights back

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrea Widburg writes:

Following January 6, we’ve been reading stories about people imprisoned for months in solitary confinement and meekly accepting grotesque plea bargains just to get out of the government’s toils. Thomas Edward Caldwell and his attorney, however, are made of sterner stuff. It’s to be hoped that their fight against the federal government will open a new chapter in fighting back against the calumnies and prosecutions emanating from a hyper-partisan “justice” department.

Caldwell’s motion can be read here.

The January 6th detainees have been treated disproportionately harshly. This is necessary in order to further the Democrats’ narrative about January 6th. The DC court system with which the defendants must deal is enormously pro-left and pro-Democrat – and, as Caldwell’s motion asserts, only 5% of DC residents voted for Trump. Caldwell is asking that his case be moved to the Western District of Virginia because the DC pool is extremely tainted at this point (my prediction is that the request won’t be granted, however).

More here:

Caldwell is a 20-year U.S. Navy veteran who was apparently outside of the Capitol Building on January 6. He is charged with four felony counts: conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted area, and tampering with documents or proceedings.

Here is what he is not, according to his attorney. Caldwell is not a “white supremacist,” nor a “white nationalist.” He is not a would-be murderer or a member of a militia group. He did not suggest “gassing” and “executing” members of Congress. He did not lead Oath Keepers, since, presumably, one would have to be an Oath Keeper to lead Oath Keepers. Fischer says his client is not a member…

The defense motion claims that prosecutors “knowingly disseminated false and incendiary claims” that Caldwell and others planned to sack the Capitol and “execute” people when they had no evidence for it – not even after conducting a “cyber colonoscopy” on cell phones and computers. There was no “plan,” Caldwell’s attorney claims. That allegation was based on “a rumor started by government bureaucrats attempting to cover up their incompetent leadership.”

The motion alleges, among other things, that these lies have tainted the DC jury pool. Some of these stories included the following:

…a CNN story claiming Caldwell was part of an “execution squad” that planned to “seal” congressional members in “tunnels under capital” [sic] and “turn on [the] gas” – the acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin gave a “reckless” “prejudicial and extrajudicial” interview intimating that Caldwell was part of a plot to overthrow the government…

Would-be jurors’ “psyches” were subject to an assault on their liberty, fear for their safety, and belief that they were imprisoned in an armed encampment … because they basically were, [Caldwell’s attorney] Fischer argues.

I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the people I know – none of them potential DC jurors, however – believe that all of that, and more, is true not just of Caldwell but of the many hundreds of January 6th detainees. They probably also think that the half of the population which voted for Trump approves of the nefarious goings-on, with perhaps the small exception of yours truly.

Lies are very effective, especially when backed by the full weight of the government and the MSM.

On the topic of race and school discipline

The New Neo Posted on by

This paper, called “Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities,” is rather long. But it’s well worth reading. It critiques the sort of reasoning that is commonly used to justify leftist policies of “equity” that have little or no foundation in actual research findings.

Tucker Carlson and the NSA

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t written much about this story yet, but the gist of it is that Tucker Carlson was tipped off that the NSA was intercepting his emails and was planning to leak them to the press in order to discredit him. He was widely mocked – of course – by the left for making this claim. But it turns out to have been correct:

As RedState reported earlier, Tucker Carlson’s previous claims of being spied on and having his communications leaked by the NSA were true. Axios reported on the leaked emails today, which contained nothing but Carlson attempting to set up an interview with Russia’s Vladamir Putin. Of note is that NBC News interviewed Putin just a few weeks ago and there is nothing untoward about a news host seeking an interview with an adversarial figure…

As Carlson points out, when he first made the allegation last week, the usual suspects jumped in to call him a liar with the caveat that if it was true, then it must have been because Carlson was doing something wrong. Now, we know the truth thanks to Axios’ decision to play along with the illegal leak of Carlson’s emails instead of doing the right thing and rebuking the government for spying on a fellow journalist…

Carlson then got to the real heart of the issue — that laws were broken here. The NSA is required to keep the identity of Americans caught up in surveillance of foreign figures secret. Only via an unmasking request could his name have been revealed. After that request was clearly made, likely by someone in the Biden administration and having to have been signed off by the NSA head, they then took that information and leaked it to try to harm Carlson and Fox News.

Years ago this sort of revelation would have been shocking. Now it’s pretty much business as usual.

And I suppose that’s the point – to boil the American public frog very slowly.

And I’ll add the obligatory (but also obvious) “can you imagine if the Trump administration had done this to a journalist?”

Tucker Carlson is one of the most popular voices on the right in broadcasting. He’s also a pretty smart guy, and fearless. That means the left is determined to take him down.