Thread: The buddy system begins: Fidel Castro 'believes in Obama'

HAVANA (AP) - Fidel Castro watched the U.S. inauguration on television and said Wednesday that Barack Obama seems "like a man who is absolutely sincere," Argentina's president said after meeting with the ailing Cuban icon. "Fidel believes in Obama," Cristina Fernandez said.

The meeting with Fernandez, just before she ended a four-day visit to Cuba, dispelled persistent rumors that the 82-year-old Castro had suffered a stroke or lapsed into a coma in recent days.

"I was with Fidel about an hour or more," she told reporters at the airport as she left. "We were chatting, conversing. He looked good."

Fernandez said Castro wore the track suit that has become his trademark since he fell ill in July 2006 and vanished from public view. A spokesman said the two met alone.

"He told me he had followed the inauguration of Barack Obama very closely, that he had watched the inauguration on television all day," Fernandez said. "He had a very good perception of President Obama."

Fernandez said Castro called Obama "a man who seems absolutely sincere," who believes strongly in his ideas "and who hopefully can carry them out."

Raul Castro, who took over the presidency from his brother, appeared with Fernandez, scoffing at the rumors about his brother's health.

"Do you think if he were really gravely ill that I'd be smiling here?" Raul Castro said. "Soon I'm going to take a trip to Europe. You guys think I could leave here if Fidel were really in grave condition?"

Castro, 77, said his older brother spends his days "thinking a lot, reading a lot, advising me, helping me."

The rumors about Castro's health were fanned by the fact that he hasn't written a newspaper column in more than a month and hadn't held a confirmed meeting with a foreign leader since Nov. 28. The presidents of Panama and Ecuador visited this month but left without saying they had seen the elder Castro.

"Now you know that Fidel is fine, and not like the rumors around here," Raul Castro said.

Earlier Wednesday, Raul Castro said Obama "seemed like a good man" and wished him luck.

Obama has pledged to ease limits on Cuban-Americans' visits to the island and on how much money they can send home to relatives. He has also offered to negotiate personally with Raul Castro, though he has said he won't push Congress to lift the U.S. trade embargo, at least not right away.

Cubans see those as important steps in improving U.S.-Cuba relations. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, tightened sanctions on the communist-governed country.

The comments by the Castro brothers contrast with those of their ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose government took exception to Obama's characterization of Chavez as "a destructive force in the region." Obama made the comments in an interview with the Univision television network.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said he hoped Obama would "rectify" the comments, which he said showed his "total ignorance" about Latin America.

"President Chavez has won 12 of the 14 elections in the past 10 years," the state-run Bolivarian News Agency quoted Maduro as saying. "He is the legitimate president."

---

Associated Press writer Mayra Pertossi contributed to this report from Buenos Aires.

Castro Tells Far Left Democrats That US Owes Cuba an Apology
[i]Congressional Democrats praised Marxist tyrant Fidel Castro today after their meeting in Cuba.

Castro and Che Guevara brought communism and
death to Cuba.

Today democrats praised the evil tyrant. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21008.html

A group of far left tools met with Fidel Castro this week.

They told Castro that the US is a racist state.
FOX News reported: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009...-fidel-castro/

Former Cuban President Fidel Castro was "very engaging, very energetic," U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said following a congressional delegation's meeting with the ailing revolutionary.

The delegation that traveled to Cuba featured six members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., and they returned to Washington late Tuesday afternoon and urged the United States government to begin steps to alter its relationship with Cuba.

"For the past 50 years, the United States has been swimming in the Caribbean Sea of delusion," said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who described the United States as "the isolated nation" compared to European countries which have diplomatic ties with Havana.

"This is the dawning of a new day," Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., declared. "Fifty years of foolishness is over. It's time for the children to sit in the corner and the adults to take over."

Tuesday afternoon, the Cuban government released a statement that it indicated was Fidel Castro's assessment of a session he had with the lawmakers. In the statement, Castro said that one of the Members of Congress told him that the United States should "apologize" to Cuba. And another lawmaker told the former leader that despite the victory by President Obama, U.S. society is still "racist."

Unfortunately, these tools came to the wrong dictator to whine about racism.

Cuba has more racism than ever before. http://www.therealcuba.com/Page21.htm

The Cuban Freedom Blog Babalu is not amused with these idiot leftists. http://babalublog.com/2009/04/castro...-black-caucus/


http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/20...s-that-us.html

on one of the other articles about the "black caucaus" Obama plans to open up visiting lines to Cuba and now Fidel is offering "help" to BO.

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.

***

CBC: Congressional Boot-Lickers for Castro

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/10...-boot-lickers/

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.



How many of these CBC folks are up to their ears in ACORN chicanery and the FMAE/FMAC sub-prime fiasco? Isn’t Laura Richardson the one who doesn’t pay her mortgage? What jokes these people are. Talk about believing a lie and being damned. I never thought that I would live to see our country led (straight to hell) by such weak brained idiots.

Perhaps these CBC members should spend a few days in Miami with the residents of “Little Havana” … hopefully they would have a Paul Harvey moment and learn “the rest of the story” …

As for the CBC members of this little taxpayer paid vacation group … what a bunch of biased idiots …

We are supposed to have confidence in the opinions of a prominent “Black Panther” from Chicago (Bobby Rush), a “Black Panther community worker” from the bay area with a degree from Berkley (Barbara Lee), and a chronic “default-a-holic” from Southern CA (Laura Richardson) …

Yep … that sure strikes me as a really trustworthy group …

So you send Marxists to a Marxist country, do you expect they’re going to see anything amiss? Heck, Hugo Chavez probably already has his invitation to the CBC in the mail as we speak. Come down and see the true Venezuela, right? I never thought I’d live to see the day that Nikita Krushchev’s boast about his children or grand-children defeating ours would be so close to happening, and from within our own government.



BTW : Does anybody know why we don’t have a Congressional white caucus?



Why is there even such a thing as the CBC? It’s discriminatory, exclusionary and racist.

Oh, I forgot. It’s liberal.

we should have 2 sections to this forum --

one entitled "The Promises and The Talk"

and

one entitled "What was REALLY meant"

Reminds me of a comedian who used to do a whole show on "What they said versus What they meant" .... hilarious. From our goverment officials ... not so much. :

Obama to allow travel, money transfers to Cuba
By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP White House Correspondent
22 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama directed his administration Monday to allow unlimited travel and money transfers by Cuban Americans to family in Cuba, and to take other steps to ease U.S. restrictions on the island, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.

The formal announcement was being made at the White House Monday afternoon, during presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs' daily briefing with reporters. The official spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the president's announcement.

With the changes, Obama aims to create new space for the Cuban people in their quest for political freedom and a democratic government, in part by making them less dependent on the Castro regime, the official said.

Other steps taken Monday include allowing gift parcels to be send to Cuba, and issuing licenses to increase communications among and to the Cuban people. About 1.5 million Americans have relatives in Cuba.

Obama had promised to take these steps as a presidential candidate. It has been known for over a week that he would announce them in advance of his attended this weekend of a Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.

"There are no better ambassadors for freedom than Cuban Americans," Obama said in a campaign speech last May in Miami, the heart of the U.S. Cuban-American community. "It's time to let Cuban Americans see their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. It's time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime."

Sending money to senior government officials and Communist Party members remains prohibited. Restrictions imposed by the Bush administration had limited Cuban travel by Americans to just two weeks every three years. Visits also were confined to immediate family members.

Other steps taken Monday include expanding the things allowed in gift parcels being sent to Cuba, such as clothes, personal hygiene items, seeds, fishing gear and other personal necessities. The administration also will begin issuing licenses to allow companies to provide cell and television services to people on the island, and to allow family members to pay for relatives on Cuba to get those services, the official said.

Also in that Miami speech nearly a year ago, Obama promised to depart from what he said had been the path of previous politicians on Cuba policy — "they come down to Miami, they talk tough, they go back to Washington, and nothing changes in Cuba."

"Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy," he said then. "This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century — of elections that are anything but free or fair; of dissidents locked away in dark prison cells for the crime of speaking the truth. I won't stand for this injustice, you won't stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba."

He also promised to engage in direct diplomacy with Cuba, "without preconditions" but with "careful preparation" and "a clear agenda."

Some lawmakers, backed by business and farm groups seeing new opportunities in Cuba, are advocating wider revisions in the trade and travel bans imposed after Fidel Castro took power in Havana in 1959.

But Obama is keeping the decades-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba in place, arguing that that policy provides leverage to pressure the regime to free all political prisoners as one step toward normalized relations with the U.S.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090413/...Xo0q96Ee8EtbAF

Cuba, U.S. signal thaw as Americas leaders meet
Pascal Fletcher – 1 hr 6 mins ago

PORT OF SPAIN (Reuters) – Leaders from across the Americas gathered for a summit on Friday after the United States and Cuba said they were ready to talk to try to end a conflict that has marked the hemisphere for half a century.

The prospect of a rapprochement between the long-standing ideological foes dominated the buildup to the Summit of the Americas starting later on Friday in Trinidad and Tobago.

Communist-ruled Cuba is barred from the meeting but Latin American leaders say it is time to bring it in from the cold and are pushing Washington to drop its 47-year-old trade embargo against the island.

U.S. President Barack Obama, who will be meeting most of his peers from Latin America and the Caribbean for the first time, said during a visit to Mexico on Thursday he wanted to "recast" the U.S. relationship with Cuba, which has remained frozen in Cold War hostility for half a century.

In response, Cuban President Raul Castro said his country was open for talks with the United States about "everything".

"Human rights, press freedom, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about," he said in Venezuela during a meeting of left-wing allies,

The conciliatory signals from the hemisphere's most emblematic political foes came as Obama, who has promised a "new partnership" with Latin America, is facing a chorus of calls from the region to end the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba.

He was expected to hear this call again in Trinidad from many of the 33 other leaders attending the summit, who argue that U.S. efforts to marginalize Cuba are obsolete and have instead ended up isolating the U.S. government in the region.

Earlier this week, the U.S. president opened a crack in the embargo by scrapping restrictions on family travel to Cuba and letting U.S. firms bid for telecommunications licenses.

But he has made clear he expects Cuba to reciprocate by opening up more political freedom for its people. Cuba is said to have about 200 political prisoners, whom it considers mercenaries for the United States. It also severely limits freedom of expression, puts limits foreign travel by its citizens and does not hold multi-party elections.

BACKDROP OF ECONOMIC WORRIES

In the past, Cuba's leadership has rejected such linked conditionality for an improvement in ties, and several Latin American and Caribbean states support Havana in this position.

Cuba insists that any relationship with its neighbor 90 miles north across the Florida Straits must be on equal terms and respectful of its sovereignty. Raul Castro repeated that demand on Thursday even as he said he was ready to discuss the thorniest of issues like political prisoners and press freedoms.

The issue of Cuba-U.S. relations is set to frame the summit in Port of Spain, even though it is not on the formal agenda, which talks of confronting the global downturn and energy and security challenges.

Obama hinted earlier he was willing to leave behind entrenched ideological positions of the past to seek practical solutions to the serious problems facing the Americas, in particular the global economic downturn that has hit the United States as hard as it is squeezing the rest of the region.

"Years of progress in combating poverty and inequality hangs in the balance. The United States is working to advance prosperity in the hemisphere by jump-starting our own recovery," Obama wrote in a pre-summit op-ed article.

"To confront our economic crisis, we don't need a debate about whether to have a rigid, state-run economy or unbridled and unregulated capitalism -- we need pragmatic and responsible action that advances our common prosperity," he added.

Obama's conciliatory message may not be enough to appease more virulent critics of U.S. policy, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who has condemned Cuba's exclusion from regional groups and says he will not endorse the draft declaration from the Port of Spain summit.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the pragmatic socialist who leads Latin America's economic powerhouse, is also seeking changes in U.S. policy toward the region, including Washington's attitude to Cuba.

"There is no more Cold War," Lula said after speaking with Obama by telephone on Thursday.

Cuba was suspended from the OAS in 1962 at the height of the Cold War.

The summit meeting falls on the anniversary of one of the worst U.S. foreign policy disasters in recent history, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 17-19, 1961.

CIA-supported Cuban exiles were routed in a battle that consolidated communist rule 90 miles from U.S. soil.

(Additional reporting by Fabian Cambero in Cumana, Venezuela and Guido Nejamkis in Port of Spain; Editing by Kieran Murray)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090417/...HoeneJqS4EtbAF

US considers response to Raul Castro overture
Vivian Sequera, Associated Press Writer
9 mins ago
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad – The head of the Organization of American States said Friday that he will ask its members to readmit Cuba to the organization 47 years after they ousted the communist island nation.

OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza made the announcement as Western Hemisphere leaders began arriving for 34-nation summit that excludes Cuba and amid indications of a major thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations.

It suggested unanimity among member states because the OAS is run by consensus.

"We're going step by step," Insulza said he would request at a meeting beginning of the hemispheric organization's general assembly in Honduras at the end of May that it annul the 1962 resolution that suspended Cuba.

The resolution called Cuba's communist system incompatible with the organization's principles and coincided with the imposition of a U.S. trade embargo. Among OAS members, only Mexico didn't break relations at the time.

Most countries in the hemisphere have since restored diplomatic ties and have been clamoring in recent months for an end to Cuba's exclusion.

On Thursday, Cuban leader Raul Castro said he is prepared to discuss any and all topics — from freedom of the press to freeing political prisoners — with Washington. Cuba is the hemisphere's only non-democracy.

At a meeting in Venezuela on Thursday of allied nations organized by President Hugo Chavez the Cuban chief called for the OAS to "disappear."

And Chavez said he would refuse to sign the final declaration at the Fifth Summit of the Americas being held in this twin-island Caribbean republic through Sunday.,

He said the OAS remains a tool of U.S. policy.

Washington provides more than 70 percent of the organization's budget, which affords it certain privileges.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090417/..._ca/cb_us_cuba

U.N. declares Castro a “World Hero of Solidarity”
By Michelle Malkin • September 5, 2009 01:33 PM

Yes, it’s true.

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!

:

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/09/05...ocial-justice/

On September 5th, 2009 at 1:46 pm, Atlanta Media Guy said:

This administration is an embarrassment to freedom and liberty.

Isn’t it time to tell the UN to find another home? To think about the money the taxpayers of the US have paid to the UN, only to have it go to Sexual Molestations of the downtrodden around the globe.

Enough!

I’ve been to Cuba and spent 5 weeks there in 1991. Those people want freedom but they can’t express themselves. if they do, they are sent to prison. I guess Obama is about to ignore our constitution and try the same thing here. Actions speak louder than words and Obama’s action against the Honduran Constitution and Supreme Court scares the hell out of me. Seems to me with the radicals he has surrounded himself with he’s trying to do the same thing here. Banks, autos, health and home and the media is next!

On September 5th, 2009 at 1:49 pm, greenfairie said:

U.N. out of the U.S., U.S. out of the U.N...

On September 5th, 2009 at 1:51 pm, ITookTheRedPill said
“Social Justice” is code for Socialism.

Call it “Social[ist] Justice“.

Conservatives see “fairness” as equality of opportunity.

Socialists/Communists see “fairness” as equality of results.

Conservatives seek a level playing field and then say if you work harder and serve more people, you deserve to have better results.

Socialists/Communists see conservatives who have more material results than other people in the world, self-righteously declare that this is “unfair”, and then believe it is their “moral imperative” to take (steal) from those conservatives and give to “less fortunate”.

They like to play Robin Hood… Robbin’ Hood’… Robbing Hoodlum.

On September 5th, 2009 at 1:54 pm, Romeo13 said:

Next up?

UN gives Joseph Stalin an award for Economics?

Pol Pot for Humanitarian Excellence?

Hitler for Race Relations?