Fr. Gerry Jean-Juste’s mighty heart

Father Gerry Jean-Juste passed away yesterday.  I can think of few deaths, particularly of people I have never met personally, that have saddened me as much.  As Brian Concannon says, “we can honor Fr. Gerry, and keep him in our midst, by continuing his work for justice for Haitians in Haiti and in the U.S.”  Here’s a video interview with Fr. Gerry, posted at the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti website.  Check the IJDH website for further tributes – more are surely on the way.

You say Varela, Barrons says Barilla

Muahahahaha.

Imagine Machetera’s glee as this drifted into her mailbox (thank you Walter Lippmann!).  As Nelson Valdes points out, in Cuba, barilla means the cheap lightweight wood you use to make a kite, but Machetera likes to think of it as her preferred brand of pasta.  And what better way to remember that dim bulb, or should we say overcooked noodle, Oswaldo Paya, than as the frontman for the Barilla Project?  Whatever happened to Paya anyway?  Poor guy, eclipsed by the newest Washington pasta projects: Yoani Sánchez and Oscar Espinosa Chepe (the latter briefly mentioned in the Barrons article as a founding Barilla member.)  You can only cook pasta so long before it goes to mush.

What is going on with Mauricio Funes?

What is going on with Mauricio Funes?

by Omar Montilla

Translation by Diana Barahona

Funes puts his hopes in the IMF, the World Bank and Mexican oligarchs

El Salvador’s president-elect, Mauricio Funes, will participate in the joint general assembly of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “I am going to express my opinion, present what the priorities [of the country] are, so that they can explain to us the state of the relationship with the government, what it is that they see,” Funes said in brief statements to journalists after meeting with business leaders of the country. He will also speak at a regional forum titled “Latin America and the Global Crisis.” Evidently pleased, he said, “So I will be the only Latin American president attending this forum, as a president-elect.” Has Funes asked himself why the rest of the presidents of Latin America won’t be at that meeting?

Yoani the Pentagon babe’s homies write in

Machetera found something odd in her inbox this morning.  A comment – and not just the unintelligible garbage that Machetera receives with depressing regularity, but something that appears to have been somewhat carefully drafted despite the whopper of an error in the first sentence. Rosa Miriam Elizalde’s article on cyber-dissidents apparently struck a nerve.

Instead of approving this in the comments section, Machetera will make it into a post of its own – lucky you, Ernesto Hernández Busto – not everybody gets this treatment.  Of course she reserves the right to answer the craziness as we go along.

Ernesto writes from Spain and has his own blog which you can google yourself if you’re really interested.  It’s nothing so fancy as Yoani’s of course, but maybe if he actually moves to Cuba and starts publishing from there, he too can get in on the Pentagon gravy train and scam an upgrade.

Yoani Sánchez: Pentagon babe

Rosa Miriam Elizalde has finally pointed out what never occurs to Time magazine or Grupo Prisa. Or maybe it has occurred to them – they just can’t bring themselves to admit it.  That blog by the blocked Cuban blogger/whiner ain’t no ordinary blog. Lots o’ cash behind it.

There are other translations of this floating around on the Internet.  Just not as good.

Cyber-command and Cyber-dissidents, More of the Same

Rosa Miriam Elizalde

English Translation: Machetera

Havana – The news has gone around the world.  The Obama administration is putting the final touches on a new cyberspace army.  First the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times reported that the objective of this cyber-command is to guarantee the security of U.S. military computer networks threatened by the intrusion of hackers, particularly those linked to countries such as China and Russia.

Victims are being offered a single pill in which to swallow the fantasy of an external enemy and the details of the homicidal weapon used to kill it (a cyber-command that will keep watch over the planet and eventually enter into action).  As Tom Burghardt, of Global Research [1] put it, the United States is using the subterfuge of cyber-security as a pretext for cyber-war, a project forged by the North American hawks before September 11, 2001 and one that began to come together in 2003, when a secret document [2] signed by Donald Rumsfeld, the ex-Secretary of Defense, was leaked, in which the order was given to create this special Command.

Chasing the tail of U.S. Cuba policy

Washington’s impossible equation

When the late Phil Agee described his job application process with the CIA in the late 1950′s, he talked about undergoing repeated lie detector tests where he deliberately lied about various things, just for the hell of it.  He resented being judged by a machine and wanted to see if he could beat it.  At first it seemed that he failed.  The tests were repeated.  Again, an unhappy result.  He was sent home.  Just as he was feeling most desperate, sure he would never be hired and on the verge of admitting what he had done and begging forgiveness, he was suddenly approved.  There are only two ways of viewing such a process.  Either the CIA’s application process is inept, or it deliberately recruits liars.