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www.freethefive.org National Committee to Free the Cuban 5
Yesterday morning, the Cuban Ministry of the Interior (MININT) announced that on April 26, four terrorists who live in Miami were arrested for plotting terrorist attacks on Cuba soil. Their names are José Ortega Amador, Obdulio Rodríguez González, Raibel Pacheco Santos and Félix Monzón Álvarez.
According to the MININT report, the men have admitted that they planned to attack military installations and they had entered Cuba several times since 2013 to plot their actions.
Santiago Álvarez, Osvaldo Mitat, Manuel Alzugaray, collaborators with terrorist Luis Posada Carriles,were directing the plotters
The four men who are now detained in Cuba have admitted to Cuban authorities that Santiago Álvarez, Osvalto Mitat and Manuel Alzugaray were directing their actions.
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Granma Lisandra Fariñas Acosta
Opening minds and breaking new ground
For the first time, Cuba will host the VI Regional Conference of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association for Latin America and the Caribbean (ILGALAC), to be held in tandem with the VII Cuban Workshop against Homophobia.
The VI Regional Conference of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association for Latin America and the Caribbean (ILGALAC) will be held in Cuba for the first time, on this occasion in parallel with the VII Cuban Workshop against Homophobia.
From May 6 thru 9, Matanzas city’s Plaza América Convention Center will be the venue of this event organized in favor of the recognition of sexual such as freedom of sexual orientation and gender identity as human rights.
National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX) director Mariela Castro Espín said in a press conference that the ILGALAC meetings reflect the increasingly stronger and closes links of fraternity and respect of diversity in the region. “If we fail to develop bonds based on our views to have the political influence we need, we will not make any progress”.
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Message from the National Committee to Free the Five
One of the most significant presentations made at the International Commission of Inquiry in London in the case of the Cuban Five was by Angela Wright of Amnesty International. A.I. has now released its full report, which you can read by clicking here.
A.I.'s thorough investigation reviews the legal history of the case, noting for example that the 3-judge Appeals Court panel, which ordered a new trial for the Five (later reversed by the full Court), decreed that the evidence submitted in support of the motion for a change of venue was "massive".
A.I. puts the spotlight on the fact that Miami reporters who reported on the Cuban Five prosecution in a highly biased and inflammatory manner were on the U.S. government payroll, an outrageous situation entirely unknown during trial.
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Published on May 1, 2014
Plaza de la Revolución (Revolution Square) shuddered again this May as thousands and thousands of Havana residents marched in support of the revolution and for the future of an even better, more efficient socialism even better and more efficient. This year, the march was opened by a block of health workers, demonstrating their centrality to the historic contribution Socialist Cuba has provided to its citizens and the world.
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By Jane Franklin • Published on April 28, 2014
“If only they had waited a few more years! Oh well, nobody pays any attention to dates anyway so we’ll just wing it!”
All three Cuban-American members of the U.S. Senate – Robert Menéndez, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz – wish they could say truthfully that their parents “fled Castro’s Cuba”. The embarrassing reality is that their parents left Cuba while General Fulgencio Batista was running the country after the 1952 coup that overthrew an elected government and canceled an election in which Fidel Castro was running for office.
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www.revolutionarycommunist.org FRFI 238 Apr/May 2014
On 27 January, Cuban President Raul Castro and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff inaugurated the first 700 metre section of a container terminal at the port of Mariel, Cuba, in a ceremony attended by the Presidents of Haiti, Bolivia, Venezuela and Guyana and the Prime Minister of Jamaica. Raul Castro declared: ‘This container terminal, and the powerful infrastructure accompanying it, are a concrete example of the optimism and confidence with which we Cubans see a socialist and prosperous future.’ The heads of state were in Havana for a summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (see FRFI 237).
The Mariel Special Economic Development Zone is a 465km2 deepwater sea port and industrial park area in Artemisa Province, 45km west of Havana. The $950m development is intended to ‘increase exports, the effective substitution of imports, [promote] high-technology and local development projects, as well as contributing to the creation of new jobs’, and to stimulate foreign investment in Cuba. Mariel is the nearest port to the US. The Zone will benefit from the expansion of the Panama Canal, to be completed in 2015, and the creation of the transoceanic Nicaragua Canal by the HKND Group, expected to be completed by 2019. With world-leading technology and sufficient depth, Mariel will be able to accommodate huge post-Panamax vessels and act as a transhipment hub for the region.
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A scandalous video with false images of Cuba was presented by the NGO UN Watch during the so-called VI Summit for Human Rights and Democracy held in the International Conference Centre of Geneva, Switzerland.
The video is part of the ongoing campaign of UN Watch, an NGO known as "The Trojan Horse" of the CIA in Geneva, aimed at achieving that countries such as Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia, stop being members of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
During its presentation at the Summit, the UN Watch NGO, through its director Hillel Neuer, showed false images of Cuba where riot police officers appear beating some supposed Cuban young persons who are seated on the street shirtless.
Next they publish some images of about twenty of the so-called Ladies in White, women paid by the United States who were marching peacefully down a street of Havana and mix them with another group of women who have nothing to do with the Ladies in White.
Not a single police officer or a single image of repression presented by UN Watch corresponds to Cuba. Every person having lived of visited the Island knows very well that those images do not correspond to the Caribbean country. Cuban police officers wear neither those uniforms, helmets, nor those riot shields...
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Cuba has historically served as a laboratory for the application of U.S. non-conventional warfare methods, Cuban media are charging today as reports about the unveiled ZunZuneo program continue to surface.
Assassination attempts, introduced diseases, support for armed counter-revolutionary grouplets, invasion, and the application of an economic, financial and trade blockade are all part of the history of Washington's aggressions against Havana over the past 50 years.
ZunZuneo, an invention of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meant to promote destabilization in the country through a text-messaging platform similar to Twitter is one more for the list.
According to the Granma newspaper, there is a striking similarity between the data revealed by the Associated Press report, and training manuals that are part of the U.S. Army's guides for Non-Conventional Warfare, such as Training Circular (TC) 18-01.
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The Hummingbird Tweet: An Espionage Tale
by ALFREDO LOPEZ www.counterpunch.org
For two years, starting in 2010, the United States Agency for International Development ran a social networking service — similar to Twitter — for the Cuban people. Its long-term objective was to forment popular revolt against the government and de-stabilize the country.
They called it “ZunZuneo” (Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s “tweet”) and launched it under absolute secrecy about who was really running it. “There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” according to a 2010 memo from one of the companies supposedly running the service. “This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the mission.”
The “mission” was to reach a critical mass of Cuban users by offering tweets on sports, entertainment and light news over the service and signing recipients up through word of mouth — you call a phone number and your phone is hooked up. With that critical mass in place, the tweets would start getting more political: inspiring Cuban citizens to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice to spark a kind of a “Cuban Spring” or, as one USAID document put it, “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”