Dean's World

ha! ha! ha! The sooner the Commie pig-f****r falls for good, the better. "I apologize for any suffering this may have caused..." As Glenn Reynolds would say, indeed.

And here I thought Dean was referring to a small village in Arkansas; the origin of the Clinton dynasty...

Arnold's right. I only hope that Castro does exit This Mortal Coil, he goes along with the greatest coddler of dictators America has known since the death of Joseph Kennedy Sr: Jimmy Carter.

It's rather ridiculous to blame the Cubans for the failure at the Bay of Pigs, when they were promised air and sea support and didn't find out until they hit the beach that it wasn't coming.

As for what will happen to Cuba once Castro dies: it's up in the air, but I think Arnold is missing crucial data. There is still a stream of Cubans with blood relatives in Cuba who they maintain daily ties with, not to mention financial relationships with. Assuming the island's economy is freed up, there will be a ton of Cubans in America and other countries pouring into Cuba to open up new businesses.

I would take it as a given that in such a situation there will be some who resent the returning Cubans and their children, and that there will be others who still worship Castro (just as there were still Hitler lovers after WWII and are still Saddam-lovers in Iraq). There will be conflicts there. But the influx of dollars and freedom and free speech to that island will almost certain transform it in less than a generation to an almost completely different place--if the new government throws off the shackles of msot of the socialist system, anyway.

One more thing about the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Dean, you are correct that the US government had given the Cuban exile soldiers promises of air support. But they in fact did just that, using aircraft painted up in Cuban air force colors, but with Cuban exile pilots faked-up to appear as Castro defectors, to attack Castro's military air fields before the attack.

The problem was that Castrol was expecting just such an attack and kept his more serviceable fighter-bombers hidden and dispersed, leaving unserviceable aircraft out in the open to serve as targets. As a result, the moment the exile Cuban brigade hit the beaches, Castro's forces were up an ready for them, and Castro's undestroyed aircraft were put to expert use attacking and sinking the brigades ships waiting offshore to unload the vital ammunition resupply and heavy equipment, without which the invasion was doomed.

The invasion of the exiles would have been doomed in any case, unless the US had used main force to establish a secure beach and landing strip for the exile forces. That, the Kennedy administration was too timorous to do. Castro had used the intervening 27 months after he took power in Havana to build up a loyal militia that could be counted on to fight for his regime under any circumstances. The fact is, the US government seriously misjudged the level of support that Castro had on the island, especially from rural peasants to whom he had pitched numerous offers of a much better life, "after the revolution, of course."

I frequently wonder now, 43 years later, whether we are still misjudging what kind of real support Castro's regime has in Cuba. Political polls don't work very well in countries run by dictatorships, and I surely do not trust the objectivity of opinion of the Miami Cubans in judging the truth of what will happen in Cuba after Castro's demise.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Go read Val's fisking of Arnold's comments. It will be worth your time. I loved this stat from the comments: "something like 60% of pre-1959 Cuban sugar mills were owned by CUBAN NATIONALS."

Yours,
Wince

Val, you certainly gave me a fiskover. But I won't respond the same way, because I hold fisk fights in contempt and not worthy of good blogsites. An identical copy of what I'm posting here is going to your blogsite as well.

1) No, I certainly don't get any information from Cuba from its communist government sources or any of their henchmen. But the reason I don't expend effort seeking information from Cuban exiles about current conditions in Cuba is that I don't trust subjective subjective judgements such as your community is noted for. I was trained, in my undergraduate degree program, for a career in journalism. And one of the things I learned up front was not to look for objectivity either among victims or perpetrators.

The US government in 1959-1960 made the mistake of listening to your people too seriously about the likelihood of Cubans taking to the streets en masse to get rid of Castro. If they had any common sense, they would have used an information source other than a group of revenge-bent exiles.

Your people, in turn, made the mistake of listening to the promises of a pack of liberals whom you ought to have known would never follow through on a commitment such as they made to the Miami Cubans.

The initial landing was supposed to have been made near Trinidad, on the south coast near the Escambray mountains. At the last minute, Kennedy chickened out on grounds that he did not want it known that the US had organized and supported the invasion, which purportedly would have been more obvious at the Trinidad location.

So the CIA dumped the 1300 men of Brigade 2506 off swampy coast of the isolated Bay of Pigs. At night, yet, despite that no successful seaborne invasion in World War II had been attempted at night. If your commanders in Guatemala had any common sense, they would have called it off right then. Instead Brigade 2506 suffered 114 men killed and 1,189 men captured to endure the ignominy of Castro's prisons. In short, just another failed Cuban emigre filibuster, like those of Narciso Lopez in the 19th century.

2) I don't have anything personal against any Cuban or Cubans. I am not and never have been a racist. I am in fact a culturalist, in that I strongly believe in the relative superiority and inferiority of various cultures of the world. Culture determines that Germans almost always beat Frenchmen in wars, that Israelis almost always beat Arabs, that Anglo-Saxons beat Latin Americans. Culture determines that some groups inhabit graduate schools and others inhabit prisons. Culture determines that Yankees invent and build steam locomotives, automobiles, airplanes, radio, televison, and thermonuclear weapons. Culture determines that Latins endure unstable regimes and bad government.

And in my objective judgement, the cultures of the Caribbean peoples — whether they be Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Dominican, Jamaican or any of the rest — is that they are marked by unstable governments dominated by military adventurers; general cultural backwardness in terms of education, public health and economic and industrial development; and local rule by rich landowners who are in position to hire their own armies of thugs.

You probably feel insulted by what I have written here. But if I were in your shoes, I would think long and hard about what made Cuba just another Latin hellhole that has suffered bad government, general economic backwardness and other social ills for 500 full years since the first the first Spaniards sailed around your island. And I would think even harder about how to reform Cuban culture and society. Without which, it will be only a matter of time before another Batista or another Castro fucks over the lives of the Cuban people.

3) About Elian Gonzales. No responsible mother that I can think of would have waded out into the shark-filled Florida straits with her small child, protected only by an inflated inner tube from an old automobile tire. And I can think of nobody I know who would have denied that child's surviving father the right to come here to the United States and take his son home. Irrrespective of communism or Castro.

And I can think of no community in this country that sounded more irresponsible about this issue than the Miami Cubans with their quasi-religious-based hysterics in attempting to keep that child from his rightful father. I thought then and I think now that Janet Reno did the right thing in returning that kid to his natural father. Regardless of Castro using him for his fading propaganda machine.

4) You and your people are part of our Republican coalition. And I value you all for that. Because without you, Algore would have won the 2000 election in Florida and with it the US presidency.

But I equally value the support of the 33 million evangelical christians, even though I believe in no religion at all, and the anti-abortion crowd, despite that I support abortion rights. Because western civilization is at a fateful crossroads right now, and we need to keep George Bush in power. In return for that, I will go along with Bush doing everything possible to keep Cuba's communist regime diplomatically and economically isolated until Castro dies.

But when that happens, I want Cuba to transition peacefully to a stable constitutional government. Maybe then, us Norte Americanos will no longer have reason to think of Cuba as the place where the Spaniards proverbially discovered a whorehouse and built Havana around it.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb

YIPES!

I AM IN TROUBLE! I went over to Val's to see what he had going on. I posted on his site when Dean brought to our attention how Val's wife fell down after hearing her husband awaken her sayin' Castro fell down. It was so funny, and I pictured, Lucy Ricardo and asked Val if he was the same guy that shaved his legs. Well, come to find out me thinkin' was right. It was Val. So Val lists how people find him and I go in there and chat about Max and David Robinson and Scotty Pipman and the good works by these fella's....

I am in TROUBLE, Dean had offered to get me a blog and really encouraged me because I am a published writer and have been on radio and television. I have done somethings in my life I am not proud of and knew if I came out and went public I would get thrown to the wolves. I saw things happen to other bloggers, I saw what Dean has gone through and Rosemary. Michelle, that helped with Toy's for Iraq, Donald Sensing, and last night just before dropping off to sleep...La Shawn is going off line for awhile and it may be permanent. She was a sweet voice trying to be a strong christian woman and now she is stepping back.

I went to King of Fools website a day before and asked him to pray for me because I did not have a strong man living in my home that could hold me in his arms and I felt women needed prayers. Then I went to The Happy Husband and asked for a good honest christian man.

I know why Joe Gandleman wrote to me and told me he wan't sure if he would continue to blog. I mentioned I liked his sense of humor and thought it was great that he said good bye to a career in journalism to work with dummies. He has a great job now going around the country with his little dummies and just yesterday he was in my homestate of Texas in our state capitol doing a show for children warning them against drugs.

I really enjoy blogs but when people turn on one another I just hate it. We are so darn divided now because of this election and I hate this. Is it no wonder I will not do a blog? I love being alone most of the time now. The kids are grown and scattered and have their own lives. They call and check on me and I know in the depth of Dean's heart when he sees me here at least he knows I am doing ok. He surely rolls his eyes over and over but he hangs in there. Me kid called me last night from some town in the US just to see how I was and he sent me to the moon when he acknowleged he bought a book by a christian author I like that has one of the largest churchs in America. His name is Joel Osteen. My son tells me some of his buddies go there and he will go on a thrusday night soon since he is single and that is when they meet. Then Rosemary sends me pictures of my Jacob.

Hey, Blessings A Bounty Full...even if you don't believe..

Believe me Steven, I too disagree with things people say. As you said, great minds think alike. Great minds think differently and great minds keep things to themselves as well.

I was speaking as a Mother, a woman and an old fashioned one that is a square in a round world. I have had to as many others rethink things and certainly when Arnold came out and said he felt gay people had their rights to marry it did take some people back. Some people want to put him in a category of an old man, a tyrant, a racist and that is where I part. Not as many people know about blogs as people want to believe. People are still watching the main three media stations and it is not their age. It may because like me I grew up with some of the anchors and even though I do not agree with them does not put me in an old age category nor if I did not know about blogs. Many people are watching television and enjoying the great things the computer has to offer.

I still like to read many newspapers and so do people much younger than me. I am addressing the meaness of people and have seen some good bloggers want to give up. Michelle at Victory Voices got many hateful pieces of mail and she was ready to call it quits. Good people have and I will say again I do not agree with others on issues but try to keep things I do not agree with to myself. I got bounced on here once and it hurt my feelings because I did not mean the way I wrote it. People are precious and people do get their feelings hurt and I am truly much more intelligent than people would know. I sure was a straight A student and then have credentials that are pretty darn nice but don't see a need to bring all of them out. I know my opinions are mine and I know that I alone own them.

Keep writing Steven and the same to other's that fuss. I miss Tim the Soldier but I also know he too is just too tired of the political stuff and has only appeared in Rosemary's site once this past week stating he will vote his choice until he dies. I respect that. My Mother too was a democrat til the day she passed on and she was a tremendous woman that served our country in Okinawa and here in the US.

Maybe you're right about that, Dean. I didn't grow up in, around or affected by any kind of hispanic or portuguese cultures. You are right about Spain and Chile. Maybe a little less so about Brazil, I think.

But the Caribbean cultures, to me, are sort of big stew of downers. Too much marianism, machismo and manana for a guy like me. Maybe a little too much of all that stuff for the Cubans, Dominicans, Haitians, Grenadans, and all the rest. But that's up to them. I don't live their lives; they don't live mine.

Like Val Prieto, I look forward to the demise of Castro and his communist gang along with him. Unlike most Americans, I lived in a communist dictatorship for a more or less extended period when we stayed in Stefi's parents in Croatia, then part of Tito's Jugoslavia. I found it more or less like my late father described Cicero, Illinois under the gang rule of Al Capone in the 1920s.

But I sharply parted company with the Miami Cuban community over their response to arrival to these shores, literally, of then 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez, who washed up unconscious in an inflated inner tube on the beach near Fort Lauderdale, Florida in November 1999. His mother, Elizabeth, had been legally separated from Elian's father Juan Miguel Gonzeles, who had been awarded custody of Elian. On what was supposed to be a visit while Juan Miguel was away from his home, she stole the child and sneaked away on a small boat, along with her boyfriend and some other Cubans.

The world knows the upshot. She drowned. Elian survived. Then shortly afterward, Juan Miguel Gonzalez rightfully demanded that the United States return his child, who had been stolen from his home.

Elian's uncle, his cousin and many other members of the Miami Cuban community, in what grew to the intensity of a febrile religious hysteria, determined that Elian would never be allowed to return to his rightful father.

In the midst of this incident grew what some have described as the Cult of Elian, based on Santeria. This is well-described online under "Religion, Faith Groups and Ethical Systems" as follows:

"The largely unorganized religious movement that has grown around Elián as messiah is based in Santeria. Santeria is a mixture of Roman Catholicism and African aboriginal religion. Various traditional gods of African belief are equated with Roman Catholic saints. Elián is viewed as the personification of Eleggua, the Afro-Cuban deity represented by a mischievous child. He has also been viewed as a form of Moses and Messiah within the Christian community."

As a result of all this massive flight from reason and reasonableness, the United States government was compelled to send armed border guards, at 5am, into the Miami house belonging to the brother and niece of Juan Miguel Gonzalez, where the child had been held against the will of his father. Even then, some of the government personnel were in great danger of bodily harm from the mob of Miami Cubans more or less surrounding the house. A lot of people could have been killed, and the resultant riots initiated by the fury of the Miami Cubans cost that city a lot of money in damages.

The choice of where Juan Miquel Gonzalez would live with his son was strictly his, and ONLY his. This is true under all systems of ethics that I would honor and respect. Even if the Miami Cubans truly and feverishly believed that Janet Reno and the United States Supreme Court ware sending their 6-year-old Afro-Cuban Moses and messiah back to Fidel Castro's communist wasteland.

I made the mistake of trying to have some dialogue with Val Prieto on his blogsite, as he asked me to do. All I got were insults accusing me of being a communist dupe, a racist, and an insulter of the honor of the female members of his family. I've got a thick skin, but I know when when I corresponding with ideological absolutists you view you either as total friend or total enemy.

Dean, you know me well enough to understand that I just am not anybody's dittohead. I have supported the Republican party since I was a kid, and I support the re-election of Bush because I am fully convinced of the primacy of our struggle against islamo-fascism. And as such, I do not mind working on behalf of his cause alongside evangelical christians, catholics, anti-abortionists, anti-Castro Cubans.

And you also know that when I become convinced that I have spent much of a lifetime being wrong about something, which I was about the right of all Americans — heterosexual or homosexual — to organize and conduct their sexual relationships among other consenting adults in private without government sanction or constraints, then I admit it straight-up like any honest man should do.

But I won't eat anybody's line of shit about something I don't believe in, then smile about it. I didn't mean to imply any personal insult to Val about what I thought of Cuban culture or the historically ubiquitous prostitution of the women of their island.

You can read all over the Web about the modern jinateras of Cuba, along with their average fees and the difficulties of north American and European tourists (with hard foreign currency in their pockets) to find ways to sneak these girls into their hotel rooms. These women — and their male homosexual counterparts — are one of the few growth industries and foreign currency earners on Castro's cash-starved island. I would argue — along with Val, I suppose, that this bastard Castro is responsible for the conditions that drive these girls into prostitution. Some would blame it on the US embargo of trade with Cuba, but I don't buy that either.

But if you study Cuba's history, this is exactly the way Cuba and the jinateras have been described since American tourists began coming to Havana in large numbers early in the 20th century. So I think it part of their culture.

Along with routinely bad government. Every leader of Cuba between the time the royal Spanish government there was kicked out, has been somebody who belonged in jail rather than in anybody's presidential palace. Estrada Palma, Gomez, Menocal, Machado, Grau, Laredo Bru, Batista, Castro. Take your pick, because all these bastards were and are cut from the same cloth.

I sincerely hope Val and the people of his Cuban culture can help get rid of Castro and clean up the mess on their ancestral island. But my advice to all of them is this. If you want the people of Cuba to live like the north Americans among whom you took refuge, do something about modifying your culture.

And not just about the jinateras of Havana. Get yourselves a written constitution protecting the equal rights of all your citizens, male, female, black, white, catholic, evangelical, whatever. Then don't tolerate any tinpot army sergeant strongman who wants to pretend he is the savior of your country. Also, change your ideas about machismo. Radically. Maybe then the women of your country won't work to get even by whoring on you.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Janelle:

Thank you!

Arnold:

"Those who know the situation in "domovina" remind the rest of us that the former communists are still largely in charge of everything. This includes the current chief of state, Stipe Mesic. Instead of building industries to create jobs to export products for national income, the economy to some degree is still exporting Croats who cannot make a living there. And the communist mindset has not totally disappeared from the way many people work, think, or expect services to be handed to them rather than earned."

It's been less than ten years, and a large part of those ten years was spent warring. Furthermore, it's insane to expect people who have spent their entire lives in a communist state to embrace capitalism. The fact is, they had free healthcare, which is no longer viable (nor was it under communism, in the long run, of course), but they have no savings, no significant property other than their residence (if that). The job market doesn't need them, and their only income is a state pension, which is, and will be for years to come, a pittance.

Cut all US social security payments down to a uniform two hundred dollars a month, and see the retired folk up in arms.

It happened (and is still happening to some extent) here in Estonia. A significant number of older people (especially the ethnic Russians) think thinks were better and easier during the Soviet era. And for them I'm sure sure it was - for a while, Socialism did its part, everyone had a place to live, food, clothing, and healthcare. And for a few decades, the State didn't even persecute people who didn't stand out too much.

Pining for the USSR pisses me off, but I cannot blame these people for acting like cattle, complaining that with the farmer gone, they're not being fed and housed anymore - they lived under a totalitarian tyranny that didn't give them a choice to be anything else. Other than the not-so-small matter of killing over a hundred million people, this is Communism's greatest crime - crushing the human spirit and leaving an entire generation of people so alienated from the idea of freedom that they want to go back to slavery.

The younger generation (under 60 as of this writing) is completely different. Having been young enough to seize the opportunities that arrived with freedom, yet remembering the darkness of the Soviet era (or told about it by our parents), our way of thinking is largely indistinguishable from that of an old West (I consider us a part of the West now, anyone who cares to argue why we're not, is more than welcome to be beaten into a corner) citizen.

Of course we have our hippie socialist scum, much like every free nation, and center-left parties get a large part of the vote each election.

But their votes are largely from people over 60, and they WILL be gone in a decade or two. The prevalent political philosophy among younger generations is a right-liberal, pro free-market one.

I don't know if it'll stay that way, and I'm scared we'll end up like Germany and France, but it's not a given. And with Croatia and other less developed post-Communist nations, it's too early to pass judgment.

Like Bush, I believe in the transformative power of freedom, so I wouldn't write them off just yet.