Cuba last In Americas For Internet

As a reminder whenever you read a post with the byline from Havana as below, do It with the proverbial grano de sal.


Since they must watch how to write the reports without angering the censors who are ready to throw them out.

A slice:

"Cuba must rely on an expensive but relatively slow satellite connection to the Internet, and those limits frustrate officials who highlight computer training as early as the first grade.
"Our infrastructure is the worst," the official said.

Many of those shortcomings will be remedied after Cuba and Venezuela complete an underwater 965-mile fiber-optic cable in 2009, the official said.

The cable will modernize and expand the island's digital capacity.
Critics, meanwhile, aren't convinced the U.S. is entirely to blame.

Jean Francois Julliard, head of research for Reporters Without Borders, which last October criticized Cuba's "system of control and surveillance" of the Internet, said U.S. policies are wrongheaded.

But as for Cuba, which is noted for subsidizing and providing a high level of free education and medical care, he asks, "Why couldn't they provide a cheaper access to the Internet?"

Since last year, Reporters Without Borders, a French non-profit group, has been raising concerns about Cuba.

"With less than 2 percent of the population online, Cuba is one of the world's most backward countries as regards Internet usage," the report said, ranking it as the worst in Latin America."

the rest:http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5156200.html

More Cubans Escaping to the USA

"South Florida migrant-aid offices are suddenly much busier. More Cubans, frustrated by long waiting lists for visas, are arriving illegally aboard boats, buses and planes. Nationally, 16,100 undocumented Cubans have arrived in this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30 - 1,749 more than last year.
The Coast Guard has caught 2,435 Cubans in the Straits of Florida this year, exceeding interdictions for all of 2006.
Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection also disclosed figures showing an overall increase in Cuban migrant arrivals on South Florida shores and at border entry points nationally and at international airports - exceeding arrivals during a similar period last year.
Cubans attempting to reach the United States without visas generally make the voyage by boat, either crossing the Straits of Florida or taking alternate routes, such as through the Mexican resorts of Cancun and Isla Mujeres. Those eventually show up at the Mexico-U.S. border. Many others are arriving in Miami on flights from Europe and South America carrying forged or stolen passports. "


Read more below H/T John

http://www.philly.com:80/philly/news/nation_world/20070916_A_new_wave_of_illegal_immigrants_from_Cuba.html

Who Was This Cuban?

Pol Pot murdered more foreigners than was previously known including an unknown Cuban documented here in this article.

a slice:


Phnom Penh - Although 79 foreigners and hundreds more Vietnamese prisoners of war are known to have died in Pol Pot's secret prison, the real toll is even grimmer, two former photographers from S-21 claimed this week. From his present provincial home south of the capital, former photographer Nim Im, charged with documenting in pictures the thousands of prisoners who were tortured or killed at S-21 or Toul Sleng, remembered a New Zealander, a Cuban, a Swiss, their Thai boat driver and more who he says may have simply disappeared from the records.
"There were a lot. I particularly remember the Cuban. It was 1977. He had a camera and they seized it. He was young. He had a beard. They took him from the sea," Im says. "Mostly I remember he looked sad. Just sad, not screaming ... he was killed and burned."

read more below:

http://www.earthtimes.org:80/articles/show/106042.html

Chavez to see Fidel In December

Hugo Chavez expects to visit Cuba in December to set up an oil refinery to be run bilaterally, according to Venezuela's ambassador to Cuba.

The Venezuelan Caudillo's largess towards his mentor in crime Fidel "Cartel" Castro now is almost on par with Fidel's previous benefactor the Soviet Union's 5 bill a year.

By this Chavez is essentially defrauding the Venezuelan people of their own money which is instead being used to prop up a degenerate regime that oppresses it's own people under totalitarianism.

read more

http://www.presstv.ir:80/detail.aspx?id=23366&sectionid=3510207

Tabaquero History / Ybor City

In this photo note in the far right the raised lectorn and it's "lector".This space held 1,125 cigar rollers and was taken in Ybor City , FLA In 1925.

This is one of a series of notes and excerpts that we will be doing on the history of Ybor City and it's "Tabaqueros".

Even today the best "Cuban" Puros are produced in Exile by families such as the Perdomos an Italian- Cuban family that started on the island and had to flee to freedom from criminals that took over their business.

A slice:

"Ybor City, a section of the large metropolitan area of Tampa, Florida, owes its beginning to three Spaniards who came to the "New World" in the 19th century: Gavino Gutierrez, Vicente Martinez Ybor, and Ignacio Haya. Ybor immigrated to Cuba in 1832, at the age of 14. He worked as a clerk in a grocery store, then as a cigar salesman, and in 1853 he started his own cigar factory in Havana. Labor unrest, the high tariff on Cuban cigars, and the start of the Cuban Revolution in 1868 caused Ybor to move his plant and his workers to Key West, Florida. While his business there was successful, labor problems and the lack of a good fresh water supply and a transportation system for distributing his products led him to consider moving his business to a new location.
Gavino Gutierrez came to the United States from Spain in 1868. He settled in New York City, but he traveled often–to Cuba, to Key West, and to the small town of Tampa, Florida, searching for exotic fruits such as mangoes and guavas. During a visit to Key West in 1884, he convinced Ybor and Ignacio Haya, a cigar factory owner from New York who was visiting Ybor, to travel to Tampa to investigate its potential for cigar manufacturing. That same year Henry Bradley Plant, a businessman from Connecticut, had completed a rail line into Tampa and was in the process of improving the port facility for his shipping lines. These methods of transportation would make it easy to import tobacco from Cuba as well as distribute finished products. Tampa also offered the warm, humid climate necessary for cigar manufacturing, and a freshwater well.
After visiting Tampa in 1885, both Haya and Ybor decided to build cigar factories in the area. Gutierrez surveyed an area two miles from Tampa, even drawing up a map to show where streets might run. Ybor purchased 40 acres of land and began to construct a factory. He continued to manufacture cigars in Key West as well, until a fire destroyed his factory there in 1886. Afterwards, Ybor spent all of his time on his operations in the Tampa area. At age 68, Ybor began developing a company town "with the hope of providing a good living and working environment so that cigar workers would have fewer grievances against owners."1
There had been Spanish and Cuban fishermen in the Tampa region before Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1819, but the city had grown slowly. As late as 1880, the population was only about 700. In 1887 when the city of Tampa incorporated Ybor City into the municipality, the population increased to more than 3,000. By 1890 the population of Tampa was about 5,500. Most residents made their living from cigar making, while the occupations of many other workers revolved around the cigar trade. For example, some workers made the attractive wooden cigar boxes in which the hand-rolled cigars were shipped and which, in most American homes, came to be used for holding keepsakes. Other workers made cigar bands, pieces of paper around each cigar denoting its brand, which once were collected by children all over the country.

From Russia With Love Gone Bad

Russion women and other Eastern European females have been discarded and forgotten from Cuban society by a regime that sucks the soul out of anybody that has ever had the misfortune to have helped it.

a slice:



They came from Russia with love to a tropical socialist utopia when the going was good.
They were young women romantically drawn to Fidel Castro's revolution, a breath of fresh air on a distant Caribbean island for those who were disillusioned with Soviet communism.
But when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, hundreds of Russian women who married Cubans and moved to Cuba were cut off from home and stranded in poverty as the Cuban economy plunged into deep crisis.
For those who had lived through the hardships of World War II in Russia as children, the long blackouts and the lack of food, medicine and fuel for transport were a cruel flashback.
"We were young and Cuba was beautiful when we got here," said film historian Zoia Barash, who arrived in 1963. Cuban leaders were so young compared to the Soviet gerontocracy and abstract art was not seen as incompatible with communism.
Her hopes of finding "true socialism" were dashed, though, as Cuba copied the Soviet model, with sweltering heat added.
"Today our situation is difficult, as it is for the whole country," said Barash, 72, who cannot make ends meet on her 260 peso ($10) monthly pension after 30 years working for the Cuban film industry.
About 1,300 women from Russia and former Soviet republics Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan still live in Cuba, scraping a living as best they can---

read the rest below

http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKN2135841320070905?pageNumber=1

Fontova On Fidel's Finale

The rats are fleeing fracaso island or at least preparing to do so.

Raul's daughter Mariela who is married with a Sicilian and has a home there is ready .

So is Celia Guevara ,Che's daughter now armed with an Argentine passport.

Meantime one can almost smell the fear and loathing in Havana as the clock runs out on the Castro criminal cartel and their ponzi scheme, which has defrauded an entire nation. Unfortunately the repression is only worsening especially for Cuban dissident journalists.Think to yourself , If foreign reporters are monitored , censored and expelled , how are the few brave enough and defiant Cuban ones treated?The answer is like "terrorists" and "mercenaries"Jailed beaten tortured released on house arrest and closely monitered with their phone lines tapped.And we wonder why we don't get the facts about Cuba?If you don't follow the script it's bye bye fantasy island.




A SLICE:


Practicing what their professors preached at journalism school can be costly to Havana correspondents. This past March, for instance, Gary Marx of The Chicago Tribune, Stephen Gibbs of the BBC, and César González-Calero, of the Mexican newspaper El Universal, were all expelled from Cuba. The regime cited these reporters' "lack of objectivity," for the hasty explusions.
From all accounts Yolanda Martinez remains in Cuba. Her reporting has always been characterized by an obsequiousness to the regime much more pronounced than even those mentioned above.
She reportedly has sources high in the regime, probably within the Castro family. This is what makes her recent report on Castro's health interesting. Many speculate that, as in the case with Mariela's recent announcement, the regime is feeding out this information in order to further soften the imminent — though probably not imminently announced — blow.
Cuba, a country with more telephones and televisions in 1958 than half of Europe, has fewer Internet connections than Uganda. On Aug. 14 a Samizdat smuggled out of Cuba reported that these very, very few Cubans (mostly trusted journalists who work for the regime's official publications) would have their internet access further curtailed.
All of their internet searches and correspondence is now re-routed through one government-monitored Web portal.

Read the rest below

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/8/16/115028.shtml

Cuban Dissidence

See what Cuban dissident groups are doing on the slave island against all hope and in the face of world ignorance and apathy.

Only the US government along with the ex-Soviet bloc countries help and understand the horrors of Cuban communism--a lie and a fraud just like theirs was.

you can help raise awareness just by reading and disseminating this information.

these prisoners will thank you from their souls.

do the right thing and support human rights in Cuba

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN0538727720070905

John O' Donnell Rosales On New Media Journal Tonight

A reminder for tonight Thurs 6 September on The New Media Journal with Frank Salvato host, John O' Donnell Rosales of Conversa Cuba Companioni will be Interviewed and give a analysis on the links between Leftist Latin America and Iran. be sure to tune in or download the replay at your leisure. the call in number is 646-652-2629 tonight at 9pm eastern time--the link is below

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hostpage.aspx?show_id=45197

BBC Reporter Ousted from Cuba

Via the Intrepid John O' Donnell Rosales the following slice of what It's like when you don't follow the script In the Fidelian Animal farm of Dr. Castro.




Packing up home 'easy' in needy Cuba

Packing up after having his press accreditation withdrawn, BBC correspondent Stephen Gibbs reflects on whether the Cuban authorities really need to go to the lengths they do to control information.

Cuba's people struggle with daily pursuitsMoving home, they say, is one of life's five most stressful experiences. It comes in at number three. Ranked a bit below bereavement, a bit above divorce.
But in Cuba it is different. Packing up a home in Cuba is easy.
The reason is that you do not have to go through that agonising problem of wondering about what to do with all your junk. You can sell it, or give it away. All of it. In a matter of hours.
Cuba is a place where almost all consumer items are prohibitively expensive, or, more likely, not available. And scarcity breeds desire.
Most Cubans, and plenty of foreigners living on the island, spend the majority of their time not thinking about the country's future, or transitional governments, or the health of Fidel Castro, but on rather more mundane things. Like how to find a square meal, a fridge that works, or an electric fan.


See more below:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6972511.stm

Cuban Exile Brigade

This is the standard for the Cuban Exile Brigade 2506.

here is their link updated for the museum in Little Havana where all are welcome to see the other side of the story of these semi forgotten heros--at least to most Americans--but not to the Cuban American community which considers them the bravest of men --true valience and fighting spirit that endures to this day.

Modern Cuba's greatest generation may their example illuminate our path to freedom.

here is the link

http://brigada2506.com/

Patron Saint of Cuba --The Virgin of Charity

Our Lady of Charity, the Order's Pilgrim Virgin image for 2007-08.

September 8th is the feast of the Copper Virgin as she is known for having her original hermitage in the copper mining town in eastern Cuba named "El Cobre" .

She is also known affectionately as "Cachita" and her Santeria Oricha or god is Ochun , goddess of rivers and streams, she is representative of fertility love and beauty as well as fine arts and culture her colors are gold and yellow and her number is 5. As the youngest of Orichas she is the messenger to the house of Olorun creator of the world .

A slice from an an article via John from the Knights of Columbus:


Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba (Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre) may not be as well known in American culture as Our Lady of Guadalupe. But one can find Our Lady of Charity’s image in churches around the world. Wherever Cuban refugees have resettled, they have brought with them their devotion to la Caridad.
She is in a side chapel at the pre-eminent Marian shrine in the United States, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
She stands to the right of the altar at the open-air Our Lady, Star of the Sea Church in North Padre Island, Texas.
And in Miami, just south of the downtown skyscrapers, there is a beautiful shrine built in her honor by exiles 40 years ago.
“La Virgen de la Caridad is the most profound symbol of the Cuban nation,” said Auxiliary Bishop Felipe de Jesús Estévez of Miami, a member of Padre Felix Varela Council 7420 in Hialeah. “The British have their queen, the Cubans have la Caridad. Even before Jamestown, El Cobre kept this gracious statue.”

The rest below:

http://www.kofc.org/un/publications/columbia/detail.cfm?id=458998

Cubans cracking the Internet

We've talked about and covered the Cuban Internet topic here at Cuba Companioni and this article from John brings us the latest from the world wide web of Cuban Internet usage which the regime can't get a handle on --and which is good for us who want to spread free Cuban perspectives and valid information to our people on the apartheid Isle.

a slice:

Defying restrictions on commerce between individuals and limits on access to the Internet, Cubans have created an unusual virtual marketplace on the Web where users can find everything from speedboats and GPS systems for reaching US shores to cemetery vaults.Just a few years ago, classified ad Web sites included few offers from Cuba, and most of those were rooms for rent at people's homes, according to the Spanish news agency EFE.But now, despite the restrictions on Internet use - according to unofficial estimates fewer than one million of Cuba's 11 million people have e-mail accounts - Cubans are getting up to speed with the information age.In contrast with the limited supply of goods available at stores on the island, anything, or just about anything, can be bought and sold on the Internet in the 'strong currency' - meaning the Cuban convertible peso, or CUC, which is worth $1.08, compared with four cents for the ordinary peso.


cuco is right --you'de have have to be a coco puff --to not see how the convertible Castro Cartel controls the money and "welfare" of the entire slave Island.


read the rest:

http://newspostindia.com/report-12594