Just file this one under “SickiLeaks.”

In 2007, noted multi-millionaire anti-capitalist Michael Moore released “Sicko,” the film that compared an allegedly lousy US health care system to a purportedly superior Cuban health system.

The UK’s Guardian reported yesterday that, according to information in a cable released by WikiLeaks, the Cuban government had banned Moore’s movie, Sicko. For what alleged reason? Because Cuban authorities feared that if the general Cuban population saw that such a great health care system was available to everybody in the country, there would be a backlash from people wondering why they weren’t being allowed access to it.

Moore took issue in the Huffington Post, saying that the Cuban government did promote his movie:

There’s only one problem — the entire nation of Cuba was shown the film on national television on April 25, 2008! The Cubans embraced the film so much so it became one of those rare American movies that received a theatrical distribution in Cuba. I personally ensured that a 35mm print got to the Film Institute in Havana. Screenings of ‘Sicko’ were set up in towns all across the country.

Taking Moore at his word (it isn’t easy to pick up a phone, call the Cuban government and get them to verify information), my own guess is that any Cuban authority concern about Moore’s over-the-top praise for Cuba’s national health system was trumped by Sicko’s relentless bashing of the American way. In other words, Cuban authorities possibly determined that Moore’s film would make fewer people want to get in a raft and go to Miami (the other way around is never a concern). And if any Cuban citizen ran into Castro’s office demanding the health care depicted in Moore’s film, well, they’re pretty good at dealing with dissidents, so that was probably never a real concern.

In the meantime, Moore continues to serve as unofficial defense counsel for Julian Assange, so the WikiLeaks founder can continue the important work of forwarding the cause of freedom by leaking documents that, according to Michael Moore, are subject to being riddled with lies, half-truths and misleading data.

Said Moore responding to Rep. Peter King, who referred to WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization: “Indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others.”

Terrorize liars by releasing material that, according to Michael Moore, is possibly riddled with lies? My irony addiction is hereby satisfied for the foreseeable future.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Can it be long before Raúl Castro is invited to speak before a joint session of Congress?

HAVANA (AP) – Cuban lawmakers have passed a resolution denouncing Arizona’s new immigration law as “racist and xenophobic,” recalling an old dispute in the process: the argument that the United States’ purchase of Arizona from Mexico in the 19th century was tantamount to theft.
[...]
Several U.S. cities including Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin, Texas, have passed resolutions against the law or urged outright boycotts, and President Barack Obama has denounced it as “a misdirected expression of frustration.”

But the denunciation of the law by Cuban lawmakers, who called it a “brutal violation of human rights,” is sure to raise anger among U.S. backers of the law.

From Human Rights Watch:

Raúl Castro’s government has locked up scores of people for exercising their fundamental freedoms and allowed scores more political prisoners arrested during Fidel Castro’s rule to languish in detention, Human Rights Watch says in a report released today. Rather than dismantle Cuba’s repressive machinery, Raúl Castro has kept it firmly in place and fully active, the report says.

The 123-page report, “New Castro, Same Cuba,” shows how the Raúl Castro government has relied in particular on the Criminal Code offense of “dangerousness,” which allows authorities to imprison individuals before they have committed any crime, on the suspicion that they are likely to commit an offense in the future. This “dangerousness” provision is overtly political, defining as “dangerous” any behavior that contradicts Cuba’s socialist norms.

But who cares about that, because Cuba, like Mexico, is being critical of Arizona, the real criminal. Cue the Democrats!

**Posted by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The United Nations has declared misery-inducing, freedom-strangling Cuban dictator Fidel Castro a “World Hero of Solidarity.”

Via David Kopel at Volokh Conspiracy, h/t Hans Bader at OpenMarket.org, who writes:

The award was presented to Castro by the President of the UN General Assembly, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann. Brockmann also successfully lobbied the Obama Administration to demand that Honduras allow the return to power of its ex-president and would-be dictator, Manuel Zelaya. (Two months ago, soldiers acting on orders of Honduras’s Supreme Court arrested Zelaya after he systematically abused his powers. After the Court quite legally declared that Zelaya was no longer president, he was duly replaced by Honduras’s Congress with a civilian, the Congressional Speaker). The Obama Administration recently decided to impose sanctions on Honduras, and indicated it will not recognize future democratic elections in Honduras unless Honduras first lets ex-president Zelaya return to power.

Marxism seems to be back in fashion in Washington these days.

Rep. Diane Watson, the New York Times book review section, and Van Jones and Valerie Jarrett approve!

Longtime readers of this blog will be quite familiar with race-baiting Democrat Rep. Diane Watson of California.

She attacked Ward Connerly for marrying a white woman.

She bragged about Washington, D.C. being a “chocolate city.”

She polluted the Hurricane Katrina aftermath with race card-playing nonsense.

Thanks to KABC, there’s audio of Watson heaping praise on Castro, Guevara, and the Cuban health system at her town hall meeting last night — as well as injecting her usual racial poison into the health care debate. (For a reminder of what Cuban health care is really like, click here.)

I wrote up a transcript of her remarks. Bring an airsickness bag before reading:

WATSON: You might have heard their philosophical leader. I think his name is Rush Limbaugh. And he said early on, “I hope that he fails.”

And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found…well, just leave it there (laughs), an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro…

Former leader Fidel Castro appeared on Sunday on Cuban television for the first time since June of last year in a video of him chatting with students from Venezuela.

Castro, 83, appeared to be in good condition as he spoke with the students about the state of the world in a meeting that took place on Saturday in Havana, according to the television report.

Via Reuters.

And look, he’s ditched the tracksuit:

Not going to post the photo of their new ad campaign. Click here if you must for the full story and the image that will have you begging for an airsickness bag. And eye bleach:

The granddaughter of Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara is at the forefront of another revolution — for vegetarianism.

Lydia Guevara poses semi-nude in a PETA campaign that tells viewers to “join the vegetarian revolution,” said PETA spokesman Michael McGraw…

…In the ad, Lydia Guevara wears camouflage pants, a red beret, and bandoliers of baby carrots while standing with one fist on her hip and the other outstretched.

“It very much evokes the tag line of the ad, which is ‘Join the vegetarian revolution,’” McGraw said. “It’s an homage of sorts to her late grandfather.”

My Good Friday column this week spotlights the religious oppression in Cuba that the Congressional Black Caucus tools of Fidel Castro choose not to see. If ignorance is bliss, the CBC members who went on tour with the tyrant are the most ecstatically happy people on the planet.

And just a reminder that I’m on a partial Easter break from the blog. Doug Powers and several Tea Party guest bloggers will be holding the fort down the next few days. Enjoy!

***

CBC: Congressional Boot-Lickers for Castro
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

Congressional Black Caucus Democrats went to Cuba to see what they wanted to see. Not since New York Times reporter Walter Duranty traipsed around Stalin’s Russia, filing cheery travelogues whitewashing Communist-engineered famine, has America witnessed such disgraceful propaganda tourism.

Led around by the nose by the Castro brothers, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver declared “if there is repression in Cuba we didn’t see it.” Somehow, the gulags and slums got left off the itinerary. Go figure. The CBC members saw, instead, a land of milk and honey. Fresh air and freedom. Shiny, happy people cared for by a kindly, benevolent leader. As Comrade Fidel himself put it in his official statement on the visit: “Persons who move on the streets in an active and almost always happy manner do not match with the stereotyped images that most of the times are portrayed about Cuba abroad.”

Rep. Cleaver swallowed the Kastro Kool-Aid in one big gulp: “We’ve been led to believe that the Cuban people are not free, and they are repressed by a vicious dictator, and I saw nothing to match what we’ve been told.” Cleaver unabashedly basked in the cult of Castro’s personality: “He’s one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met.”

Lord, what tools these lawmakers be.

Accompanying Cleaver were radical left-wing House Democrats Barbara Lee, Laura Richardson, Bobby Rush, Marcia Fudge, Mel Watt, and Mike Honda. Rep. Rush was enraptured by the tyrant’s “keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities.” Lee fawned over the Castros like your neighborhood ‘tweens giggle over the Jonas Brothers. The aging dictator Fidel “looked directly into our eyes,” she delighted. Where was he supposed to look? Into their ears? He “was very engaging and very energetic,” she confided.

Yes, ask the dozens of independent journalists and dissidents jailed over the last six years: Fidel’s a veritable fuzzball.

It’s too bad Castro’s American boot-lickers jetted back home (why is it these fervent admirers of the Communist regime always buy themselves return tickets?) before Easter. They might have run in to someone with seeing eyes who could have reminded them of the religious oppression that the kindly Castros oversee. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported last year that “[r]eligious belief and practice remain under tight governmental control in Cuba…Both registered and unregistered religious groups continue to suffer official interference, harassment, and repression. Political prisoners and human rights and pro-democracy activists continue to be denied the right to worship.” The panel compiled reports of religious leaders “being attacked, beaten, or detained for opposing government actions.”

The Cuban Communist Party requires religious groups to register to obtain official recognition. They must inform the regime “where they will conduct their activities” and obtain official permission to travel. The distribution of Bibles is controlled by the government. Processions and worship services outside tightly-regulated religious buildings are not allowed without permission of the local ruling official of the Communist Party. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is expressly forbidden from proselytizing. Religious schools are banned.

Two years ago, the U.S. international religious freedom panel reported, a Pentecostal preacher and his family were evicted from their home and their church demolished. A month after that, police raided the Santa Teresita Catholic Church in Santiago de Cuba, beat several persons gathered for Mass who participated in a political protest earlier that day, and detained 18 worshipers.

Every Sunday in Havana, a brave group of jailed dissidents’ wives walk to a government-approved Mass at an old Catholic cathedral to pray for their husbands’ freedom. They are known as the Ladies in White. The group has been harassed and bullied by Castro’s henchmen at Easter time for demanding regime change. Their church is named for Saint Rita, the patroness of lost causes. The hopeless sycophants of the Congressional Black Caucus, willfully blind to Castro’s systemic brutality, could certainly use the saint’s intercession.

Oh.

Crikey.

The aging, ailing, cigar-smoking icon Fidel Castro had three members of Congress visit with him today in Havana, which resulted in the bearded one asking, “How can we help President Obama?” In an effort to improve the relationship between Cuba and the U.S., Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) and Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) were the first U.S. officials to meet with the 82-year-old former dictator since his intestinal surgery in July 2006.

…”I think that what really surprised me, but also endeared me to him, was his keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities,” Rush said.

Henry Louis Gomez at the indispensable Babalu blog (which was recently honored by the White House) provides a handy score card to help you grade the MSM’s Cuban revolution pieces.

The AP aces the propaganda test.

The NYTimes passes, too.

Dictators heart fishwrap.

Over the past few weeks, Michael Moore’s dream paradise has been slowly tightening its vice grip to silence the bloggers. Over the 48 hours, two bloggers have been summoned by police.

Ernesto Hernández Busto e-mailed me this morning:

We would like to bring to your attention some recent facts that we have not seen mentioned in the international press:

—Yesterday, the renowned Cuban Blogger, Yoani Sanchez (Generación Y) was summoned by the Cuban Department of Interior which explicitly warned her against conducting an event for independent bloggers that she was preparing for December 6.

—Today, Cuban independent blogger Claudia Cadelo (Octavo cerco) has been summoned by the Cuban police for the same reason.

—On November 13, the Gaceta Oficial of the Republic of Cuba published the following as a warning to internet providers. “The regulations for the suppliers of services of public access to the Internet,” from Resolution No. 179/2008 of the Ministry of Computer Science and Communications. The resolution states, that providers have the obligation to “adopt the measures necessary to prevent the access to sites whose contents are opposite to the nations social interest, good morals or customs.”

In a ridiculous attempt to censor the incipient Cuban blogging movement, this resolution, signed by Minister Ramiro Valdés, establishes the order to prohibit “the use of applications that affect the integrity or security of the State”.

My friends at Babalu blog have translated Yoani’s account of her reprimand from two Interior ministry bureaucrats. An excerpt:

We want to advise you that you have transgressed the limits of tolerance in your closeness and contact with elements of the counterrevolution. This disqualifies you totally to conduct dialogue with Cuban authorities.

The activity scheduled for the next few days cannot take place.

We, for our part, will take all measures and will lodge the pertinent charges and take the necessary actions. This event- in these moments which the nation is living, recuperating from two hurricanes- will not be permitted.

Cuba’s former president, Fidel Castro, said U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is the “more intelligent” choice though he cautioned that the Democratic senator isn’t concerned with the world’s biggest problems.

Castro, who handed governing authority over to his brother this year after ruling the communist country for 49 years, noted that Obama plans to cut taxes for the middle class and increase taxes for the rich. U.S. voters will decide between Obama and Republican candidate John McCain in today’s election.

“He’s without a doubt more intelligent, refined and even- handed than his Republican adversary,” Castro wrote in a “reflection,” which was sent via e-mail. “McCain is old, belligerent, uncultivated, unintelligent and in poor health.”

Dude.

Exactly. Spread the wealth around, suffer the consequences:

Rebels and activists the world over still take inspiration from Guevara. But the image has lost something; Che’s face on a poster in 1968 isn’t quite the same thing as it is on a mousepad 40 years later. Perhaps it is precisely that loss — the shedding of Che’s radicalism and ideological rigor — that renders him so supremely marketable today. Things are not going well these days. Kids don’t want revolution so much as, um, something different.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that L.A. artist Shepard Fairey, in his design for a Sen. Barack Obama poster, looked to Korda’s Che. Fairey’s Obama is not wearing a beret, and he’s looking left instead of right, but his face tilts at the same angle as Che’s. His jaw is set with the same willfulness and strength, and he too is gazing recognizably upward into the future (hasta la victoria siempre . . . ). Obama’s eyes, though, are filled not with righteous anger but with vague and lofty hope.

Good, good, don’t blow it…*

Che means change, if nothing else — and not necessarily Marxist or anti-imperialist or radical at all.

Aw, crap. You guys were so close.

Look, you just can’t hide from Che’s history. It’s like putting a David Duke for President bumper sticker on your car and then explaining that for you, personally, it’s just about traditional values and not about white nationalism. It’s like flying a Hezbollah flag and just claiming that you’re not for terrorism or wiping out Israel, you’re just opposed to Zionism. This swastika tattoo? Why, it’s just a Hindu/ American Indian good luck symbol, friend–not a Nazi thing at all. Shame on you for thinking so.

I think this cuts both ways–you might, say, want to wear a Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride. There’s actually a much better argument to be made than in the hypotheticals above that the Confederate flag has been rehabilitated–transformed into a symbol of pride in Southern heritage and divorced from its racist connotations. But you shouldn’t be surprised if it raises a few eyebrows from people who understand it as A: a flag of armed rebellion against the United States and B: the flag of a pro-slavery cause.

Even if you’re telling the truth and those things subjectively mean something totally innocuous to you, you’re an idiot for ignoring the commonly accepted symbolism as well as the historical context. You might want that Che T-shirt just to stand for “change”, or for “hey, hippie chicks, I would like to make dirty hippie love to you”, but there’s just not much getting around the fact that Che was a murdering sociopathic Commie ideologue.

Which I think is also what Michelle and Charles are saying about the keffiyeh. Maybe it’s just a cool exotic scarf to you. But there’s a very important background to it that you don’t know or are ignoring, and if you really understood what it meant to Islamic terrorists in the current, ongoing conflict, why would you possibly want to wear it?

P.S. If you just have to wear a keffiyeh, one of the dozens of links at Michelle’s post (sorry, forgot which) had the interesting idea of subverting it. Get one with American flags on it. Or Stars of David. Or the little Mohammed bomb-turban Danish cartoon.

___________
*More about that Shepard Fairey dude from me, back here.

____________________

{Post by See-Dubya}

…he calls Barack Obama “the most advanced candidate” in the race. (That’s the English translation as provided by Associated Press and Reuters; the Granma English-language site translates his characterization as “this strong candidate.” The article in the original Spanish is here.)

“I feel no resentment towards him, for he is not responsible for the crimes perpetrated against Cuba and humanity,” Castro wrote. “Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries an enormous favor.”

The saddest part is that I’m not even surprised.

I’m getting an idea for a bumper sticker here:

_______

{Post by See-Dubya. I do the bumper stickers here.}

“Inside FARC” they say it was a heart attack*, one that coincidentally occurred right about the time Colombian jets were bombing FARC’s strongholds.

“Whether Marulanda died in an air raid or of natural causes, this would be the hardest blow that this terrorist group has taken, since ‘Sureshot’ was the one who kept the criminal organisation united.”

Together with the death of another top commander in Ecuador earlier this year, the discovery of key intelligence on their laptops, the disruption of their hidden accounts and bases, and the surrender of another prominent leader last week, being a member of FARC must be almost as demoralizing as being a conservative Republican these days.

And here’s some even better news:

Meanwhile, President Alvaro Uribe said some rebels were ready to surrender themselves and some key hostages.

He said he had received “calls” from Farc leaders who said they were ready to hand over hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, and leave the guerrilla force if their freedom could be guaranteed.

The FARC is holding around 750 prisoners, and among them are three American contractors. Their names are Kein Stambler, Mark Goncalves, and Thomas Howes. There’s a good chance that the FARC may also be holding an anti-Castro Cuban-American businessman named Cecilio Padrón, who was kidnapped from Panama on April 4th.

The pressure put on the FARC through Plan Colombia is demonstrably breaking their will–and looks like it may lead to the release of these hostages. A civil war that has been fought since before the Beatles came to America is finally being won by the good guys. Yet the Democrats absolutely hate Plan Colombia and still oppose free trade with one of our strongest allies in the region, and they’re still eager to punish legitimate Colombian labor.

Why is that?

*What, do they have, like, a company newsletter?

PM UPDATE: Captain Ed has an interesting German angle on the story…
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{Post by See-Dubya}