Cuba is not a Place for Good Socialists

Neil Clark went to Havana looking for the socialist paradise he had always heard it would be. By the time he left, he was happy just to get out alive!

All the people whose views we respect had said that the Caribbean island was a progressive model whose policies on education and healthcare ought to be copied throughout the world. We went there last April desperately wanting to like the place — after all, if George W. Bush and other right-wing nasties hated Cuba so much, then the country must be on the right tracks.

But we returned home terribly disillusioned. Neither of us had been to a country which was so utterly decrepit.

...The average wage in Cuba is a pitiful $17 a month. The monthly ration which includes 283g of fish, 226g of chicken, ten eggs and 1.8kg of potatoes is barely enough for a fortnight, meaning most Cubans need to work the black market to stay alive. Things that we in Britain take totally for granted — such as toilet paper, toothpaste and pens — are luxury goods in Cuba. I’ll never forget the look of joy from an old lady when I handed her a couple of old marker pens and a coloured pencil.

For Fidel’s chums, life is somewhat easier. Despite its calls for further belt-tightening, the Cuban government last year ordered Series 1, 3 and 5 BMWs for all its ambassadors and a Series 5 model for Raúl Castro, who had taken charge of the country after his brother’s hospitalisation.

The heartbreaking consequences of Cuba’s currency apartheid were bought home to my wife and I on a Saturday afternoon visit to Havana’s Coppelia ‘Ice Cream’ park. To the right of the park gates was a long queue of Cubans who had only Cuban pesos. They have to wait on average two hours every weekend to get their weekly scoop of ice cream. On the left, there was walk-in access to tourists and the lucky locals who had convertible pesos. Fifty years on, the Cuban revolution has turned full circle in a truly Orwellian fashion. Once again the locals find themselves excluded from the best beaches in their country, as they were under Batista. And prostitution, so rife in pre-revolutionary days, is back — the jineteras being the only group of Cubans allowed to enter the new purpose-built resorts.

...The totalitarian nature of Castro’s Cuba is no right-wing myth, but a reality....After the stress of our final day in Cuba, my wife and I were hugely relieved to leave the country. And when we were safely airborne, we both reflected that if any country was in need of a revolution, it was Fidel Castro’s Cuba. ___Source

Go ahead and read the full story of Neil Clark's visit to Havana. Also consider Czech super-model Helena Houdova, who had to hide her digital memory card in her bra, to get visual evidence of Cuba's collapse out of the country. And think about the people who continue to repeat the lies about Castro's "revolution paradise", and consider what these dishonest rumour-bearers are really up to. And while you are thinking about that, think about the same brainless ideologues who mecca'd to Sandinista Nicaragua, and who continue to pilgrimage to Chavez' Venezuela.

These are the type of true believers who will happily make 90% of Earth's human population disappear, if that is what the gods of global warming and peak oil demand. It is an unhappy group of pilgrims, acolytes, disciples, and zombies. Their beliefs far outweigh anything that can be shown to their lying eyes.

Cocaine Drug Runners Forced to Go Semi-Submersible

Radar and aerial drug surveillance has grounded most drug smuggling flights, and forced drugrunners to resort to sea routes. For long distance runs from South America to the Caribbean, (Puerto Rico and Cuba are two stopover islands used) boats with low radar profiles are preferred. Semi-submersibles have become quite popular with drugrunners--capable of carrying several tons of cocaine--but the Colombian Navy may have picked up a few tricks from the US Coastguard on detecting these sneaky boats.

The Colombian Navy took down another cocaine carrying submarine [PHOTO], off the Pacific coast. This sub appeared to be carrying several tons of cocaine, but the crew of four scuttled the craft before the navy could capture it. The water was about 9,000 feet deep where the craft went down. The four crewmen of the submersible were captured, and found to have traces of cocaine on their clothing. The submersible was first spotted by an air force plane, which called in a nearby navy patrol boat. That makes the third cocaine carrying sub to be caught in the last three months. This makes ten such craft the Colombians have captured in the last two years.

Strategy Page by way of The Subreport

The US Coast Guard is also picking up a number of these semi-submerisbles along the drug seaways between S. America and US waters.

Coast Guard officials in Alameda, Calif., said a 50-foot semi-submersible craft was spotted Monday by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection surveillance aircraft about 300 miles southwest of the Mexico-Guatemala border. The vessel was abandoned by its crew and sank a short time later, the Coast Guard said. The cocaine bundles bobbed to the surface as a boarding team from the USS DeWert approached to rescue the crew.

"This case shows the challenges our counter-drug patrol forces face, and the lengths to which the drug smuggling organization will go to get their deadly product to the U.S.," said Rear Adm. Craig Bone, tactical commander of U.S. counter drug operations in the Eastern Pacific. "This low-profile semi-submersible craft was very difficult to detect."

Eaglespeak
While you might think that regular submarines would serve better than semi-submersibles, apparently the semi-'s are cheaper, capable of carrying more cargo, and given the limited submersion time of most conventional subs, the semi-'s are almost as stealthy. Unfortunately for the drug interdiction effort, most of the semi-submersibles appear to be getting through--judging by cocaine prices graphed below.The total cocaine market is estimated to be over US$70 Billion. Apparently Venezuela is willing to lend a helping hand to the cocaine trade. Very neighborly of Hugo, eh?

Even at those bargain basement prices, cocaine is profitable enough to allow drug runners to buy new boats (for those lost to interdiction), and there are profits aplenty for distributors to bribe federal and local law enforcement. If you want to know the approximate profits and mark-ups at each step in the cocaine production, and distribution pathway, check out the YouTube graphics below:

Tale of Two Oil Lands:Tragic Venezuela, Kurdistan Triumphant

In Venezuela, the people are sinking into a hellish quagmire of socialist decline.

Those economists say the inflation is a result of a surge in public spending by Mr. Chávez and increasingly jittery efforts by the wealthy to circumvent tightening controls on prices and foreign exchange.

“We’re witnessing policy in the form of window dressing, all carried out at the whim of one man whose strong point is not economics,” said Hugo Faría, an economist at the Institute of Higher Management Studies, a private business school here. “Anyone who sees a 12 ½-cent coin as a remedy for this country’s problems isn’t thinking too clearly.”

Inflation has been climbing rapidly since January when a sharp decline in the black-market value of the bolívar pushed up prices of imported goods. Since Mr. Chávez moved to nationalize major telephone and electricity companies in January, Venezuelans have rushed to take money out of the country, currency traders say. That exodus has caused the bolívar to weaken by about 20 percent to a level of 4,000 to the dollar on the black market, placing it among the world’s worst performing currencies this year.

Source

Capital is fleeing Venezuela, and although the country's oil prevents the nation from going totally belly up, oil infrastructure in Venezuela is in rapid decline. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba, North Korea--what do these failing countries have in common?

Meanwhile in Iraqi Kurdistan, business is booming.

The cabin erupted with applause when the wheels touched down on the runway. The pilot announced the weather (sunny and 60) in three languages and cheerfully told us all to have a great day. Have a great day may seem an odd thing to say to people who just arrived in Iraq, but this is Kurdistan. I did, indeed, have a great day.

....Nation-building is a hard and violent slog in the center and south of Iraq, and it might not ever work out. But in Kurdistan, in the north, it already is a reality.

Massive new construction projects are literally everywhere. Most of those that had started when I arrived for the first time are finished, and ambitious new projects are well underway.

....Iraqi Kurdistan is still a Third World country in many ways – there is no sewer system, for instance, and the electricity fails every day. Unemployment is high. But it’s a Third World country with hope, and it is rapidly moving upscale. New houses cost more in and around Erbil than they do in some parts of the United States. An average sized 200 square meter lot can cost as much as 150,000 dollars – and that’s before a house is built on it. There are literally thousands of brand new houses here in this city, and the population is still just a little bit shy of one million.

Arabs are moving up here from the center and south – when they can, and as long as they are cleared by internal security – and they’re hired to do menial jobs the Kurds no longer want. Sunni Arabs were once the oppressors of Kurds. Now they are reduced to the same low status as migrant Mexican workers in the United States.

Source

You might say the problem with Iraq, is arabs. And while the middle and south of Iraq are flush with arab violence, the Kurds appear to be trying to enter the modern world of civil society.

There is only one country in the middle east that offers western standards of living, Israel. How nice it would be for a more peaceful vision of living to take hold in that part of the world, where death cults and blood-thirsty dictatorships such as Syria, Islamic Iran, and Saddam's Iraq traditionally hold sway.

Hiding Photos in Her Bra -- What a Woman!

Here's a refreshingly candid Czech news report relating the travel experiences of two Czech models. Sometimes you just have to be sneaky. Yes, they were arrested, but they still got out of the country with the goods! Beauty and brains are a deadly combination. Oppressors beware!

This story comes courtesy of No Pasaran.

The Face of a Desperado

Take a look at this photograph. This is the face of a desperado--at least what is considered to be a desperado, a grave threat to the state. Publius Pundit has more of the story behind the photograph, and links to more details.

It is sad when a nation's leader feels so threatened by a fragile young woman's voice, that he is willing to put her on trial before a one-man judge/jury/prosecutor, and deny her the right to speak in court at her own trial. That is the sign of a corrupt government. Where do you find such governments in the world? Zimbabwe? North Korea? Iran? Cuba? Well, yes, you do, but this young woman is not being railroaded to decades in prison in any of those countries, simply for being a democracy organiser. Try again.

Once, such injustice might have occurred in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina. Now, one particular country is perpetrating this type of outrage at a rapid rate, as if to catch up to the failed latin dictatorships of the past.