New Heights

If the Minneapolis Star Tribune were unfamiliar to me, the wind would have been sucked out of me when I read this op-ed in today's edition.

But unfortunately, I'm all too well acquainted with the "Bush is Hitler - America and Israel are the worst countries on the planet - yada yada yada" type of mentality from my home town rag. So, when I read about how it's Cuba that really is a democratic nation - not the United States - my shock reached only moderate levels.

It's Cuba that could teach the U.S. about democracy

The newest proposals of the Bush administration to further restrict the right of travel of U.S. citizens to Cuba are simply the latest example of what Washington really thinks about democracy.

I agree that gross human rights violations are commonplace in Cuba -- in the U.S.-occupied Cuban territory of Guantanamo! The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad have their immediate roots in Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo. For these and other reasons -- particularly, the bipartisan offensive against domestic democratic rights in the name of fighting terrorism -- I reject the democratic pretensions of Washington and those who claim to speak on its behalf, such as Weiner and Buchanan.

In 1959 the Cuban masses did something that working people have yet to do in this country: They took power out of the hands of a tiny privileged minority and began to exercise it for themselves. They became the makers of their own history. Unlike in the United States, where politics is reduced to a boring spectator sport and working people are treated as mere consumers -- thus, the high abstention rate -- Cubans vote with their feet every day in defense of their revolutionary conquests. More than 1 million took to the streets in Havana May 14 to protest the Bush administration's latest moves. The social gains that the Cuban people enjoy, as in education and health care, are possible because they possess political power -- in other words, real democracy. Precisely because U.S. workers lack such power, their social wages continue to erode.

Anyone out there know of any other daily newspaper in the nation that would have the chutzpah to print such crap?

Anyone know what a frustrated denizen could do to somehow get a reasonable daily paper in town?

Comments

[Steve Michaels]

Everytime I hear someone defending the Castro regime and how wondeful and progressive it is, I simply ask why is it that so many people risk thier lives to do a 90 mile raft ride to Florida? The response usually is that deer in the headlights look.

The other response is due to the massive poverty caused soley by the US embargo. I counter that state that the rest of the world has no embargo on Cuba and maybe it has more to do with a economic and political system that is a proven failure.

Castro is the last of the die hard communists that the radical left can hold on to is all. The Soviet Union and the rest of them have been consigned to the ash heap of history so they have to hold one to what they have.

[John Anderson]

"Cubans vote with their feet every day..." and a lot vote with their boats and rafts.

[John Rogers]

Unbelievable.