Cuban graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado Machado (‘El Sexto’) continues to be detained in a maximum-security prison, a month and a half after his arrest. He is a prisoner of conscience who must be released immediately and unconditionally.
On Thursday, when President Obama ended the “wet foot, dry foot” policy allowing any Cuban who reached U.S. shores to be granted resident status as a refugee, he merely followed his unconditional support of the Raúl Castro regime to its logical end.
The logic is easy to follow: If relations have been normalized between the United States and Cuba, why should those Cubans who arrive here in rafts be treated any differently from other migrants? Why should Cuban doctors working as indentured servants abroad be allowed to claim refugee status when they manage to reach a U.S. Embassy?
Throughout my teen years, I knew that the government of my country could not stand to see the streets full of young people. That's why my generation was forced to spend the three pre-university years in difficult “scholarships” to live-in schools in the countryside.
"Los dictadores saben más de la política de Estados Unidos que el Congreso", dice Frank Calzon, director del Centro para una Cuba libre al comentar el fin de la política de "pies secos, pies mojados."
The announcement that President Barack Obama has rescinded the so-called “Dry-foot Wet-foot” policy for Cubans fleeing Castro is another example of a heartless foreign policy developed in secrecy without public discussion, and apparently without consultation with the U.S. Congress. Not even the three Cuban-American Senators seemed to have been consulted; while the White House has been negotiating for months with the Cuban dictatorship on this issue.
Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson said Wednesday that he wouldn't support legislation to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba, a major goal of the Obama administration that now seems likely to go unfulfilled for the next several years.
Human rights activists on the island have alerted the Center for a Free Cuba that Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was arrested by the political police this morning. He is a former political prisoner, a physician who is not allowed to practice, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi’s doctrines and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
We are writing to you and other supporters of human rights around the world to urge you to ask President/General Raul Castro to immediately release him.
A Florida congresswoman has joined five former U.S. diplomats in publicly urging President-elect Donald Trump to rescind President Obama’s recent directive that U.S. intelligence agencies share information with Cuba’s government.
Opponents, meantime, are defending the October 2016 directive.
Google’s Lack Of Transparency Harms US-Cuba Commercial Relationship
The refusal by Mountain View, California-based Google (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc.; 2015 revenues exceeded US$74 billion) to provide the following information about their transaction with the government of the Republic of Cuba harms the United States-Republic of Cuba commercial relationship- and opportunities for its expansion and support by the soon-to-be Trump Administration.
Cuba paraded troops and hundreds of thousands of citizens through its emblematic Revolution Square on Monday in a traditional show of nationalist fighting spirit in the face of steep economic and diplomatic challenges.
The event marked the 60th anniversary of the landing of the Granma yacht which brought the Castro brothers and their bearded rebels from Mexico to Cuba to start their revolution against a U.S.-backed dictatorship.