Leonard Weinglass’s questions for Hillary Clinton

A story filed by Associated Press journalist Anita Snow last Tuesday, April 21, included the following sentences: “Obama could suffer serious political fallout if he agreed to swap the so-called Cuban Five — communist agents who were convicted of espionage in Miami in 2001. The ringleader was implicated in the death of four exiles killed when Cuban military fighters shot their planes down off the island’s coast in 1996.”

In a reflection published soon afterwards, Fidel wrote, “Isn’t that…an indirect threat to the president of the United States?”

Indeed it is a curious comment, detached from any person interviewed in the story, and therefore presumably Snow’s original creation.  Nevertheless, the fallout Obama might expect to encounter through such a swap would likely rest with the minority of Cuban exiles in Miami who never voted for him in the first place.  He won Florida without, or despite, them, and most U.S. citizens outside of Miami have little memory of the February 24, 1996 shootdown and less still of the Miami trial of five Cubans, five years later, where the U.S. Government, the families of the downed pilots and Cuban exiles with a long history of terrorist action against Cuba joined in a simmering fury in search of a victim.

Ultimately they found five victims, but their rage was focused on one in particular: the one Snow pejoratively calls the “ringleader,” Gerardo Hernandez. 

Cuba’s Rubicon

“We’ve said to the North American government, both privately and publicly, that we’re ready…to discuss everything: human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners, everything…but on equal terms.” – Raúl Castro

Speech by Cuba’s President at the Fifth ALBA Summit in Cumaná, Venezuela, April 16, 2009

English translation by Machetera, revised by Manuel Talens

Raúl Castro (to Hugo Chávez): Remember that you need to give me the floor to thank everyone, especially those who’ve spoken – and I’m not going to exclude Daniel, because he’ll also speak as well, just as he’s done throughout his entire life as a revolutionary – in the name of the Cuban people, all the expressions of solidarity and support for our Revolution, to our people, and I believe, therefore, also the Leader of the Revolution, comrade Fidel Castro, who’s listening to us directly. [Applause]

I’m not going to go on, I’ll speak on the other points.  I have to speak – according to what they tell me – at the mass meeting in the Plaza, don’t I?  I still don’t know how it’ll be.  Are we going to speak there in the Plaza?

Hugo Chávez: Yes.  We’ve asked you to speak in everyone’s name.

Raúl Castro: No, that’s a huge responsibility.  If anything, [it should be] the main host.

Anyway, I think that what we’ve heard here this afternoon, that doesn’t surprise us, the whole world knows it, except the United States, its main ally, Israel, and one country or another that occasionally abstains or has even voted against the United Nations General Assembly, is that the entire planet condemns the blockade.

I don’t want to talk about the OAS, I already spoke in Sauípe, at the Rio Summit, right?  And furthermore, our friend Zelaya will meet with all the delegates at the end of May and the beginning of June; I don’t want to answer what Mr. Insulza recently said, because Fidel already did it some hours ago.

We can talk about many other things besides the OAS.  The OAS, it might be said, has oozed blood since its very creation; Cuba is one example, but before Cuba there were plenty more. 

Heelary Cleenton joo espeek espaneesh?

On Wednesday, April 22, while Machetera was admiring new developments in pediatric dentistry (she herself was a victim of the dark ages of the trade),  USA Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was appearing before Congress to discuss foreign policy.  On Venezuela, she repeated the line that her boss tossed out at his limited press conference in Port of Spain – that dangerous handshake between Chávez and Obama?  You know that rascal Chávez, so good with the cameras!

On Cuba, she uttered something truly amazing, and the major media rushed to repeat and amplify it, like a hall of mirrors:

President [Obama]’s actions did draw a response from Raúl Castro which was then contradicted today by Fidel Castro saying that my brother didn’t really mean that we would talk about political prisoners and human rights so I think you could see there’s beginning to be a debate, I mean, this is a regime that is ending.

Whoa Nellie.  I mean Hillary.  That’s some Spanish translation you’ve got going there.  Check it again with your sister-in-law.

What did Raúl actually say?  Since nobody has produced an English transcript of Raúl’s extemporaneous speech at the ALBA Summit, Machetera will oblige.  Here’s an excerpt:

Patron saint of Cuban mercenaries and lazy journalists

AP journalist Anita Snow reports that according to Cuban “dissident” Elizardo Sánchez (El Camaján) more than 200 Cubans serving time in Cuban prisons for taking money from the United States to overthrow the Cuban government, are “nearly unanimous” on the idea that they would rather stay in prison than be traded for the Cuban Five.

Now, Machetera’s just a humble blogger, picking over the carcass of a story dragged back by a beat reporter, but still, she has a few nagging questions.  First of all, it can’t be pleasant talking to someone as slimy as Sánchez, and Snow probably wanted to get off the phone as fast as possible, but Machetera wonders if it occurred to her to ask him how he came by his information?  Did he take a poll?  Snow mentions that Sánchez talks to some of these people and their families every day, but it’s kind of a leap between talking to “numerous” prisoners and saying that “most of the 200″ are unanimous on the idea of serving their entire sentence.  Isn’t it?

Second of all, it’s not Sánchez doing the time, is it?  Sánchez is free to continue hanging out in public parks, trading info for whiskey. So maybe it’s easy for him to say?

And when would it be worth mentioning to readers that Sánchez is a man notorious for playing both sides of the fence – working Cuban security at the same time he worked Frank Calzon – not because he cared about either, but because his main allegiance was to himself?

Machetera will see you now

Comments are back on again.

Try to keep them intelligible.  Violators of this simple rule will be referred back to this post.

Is there an echo in here?

Why yes…or actually, Da!  There does seem to be an echo, and by golly, it’s coming in Russian now.  Wait while Machetera puts on her Russian translating headset…

It seems that some guy named Nikolai Pakhomov, writing for Politikom, the website for the curiously named Russian Center for Political Technology, has the EXACT same theory as Jorge Castañeda about what went down with Felipe Pérez Roque and Carlos Lage.  He even starts the same way, saying that because nobody really knows what’s going on in Cuba, you just have to guess!

CASTAÑEDA: Will Raúl be able to pull off a rapprochement with Washington quickly enough to placate the restiveness his opponents (Carlos Lage, Felipe Pérez Roque and Hugo Chávez) could exploit?

PAKHOMOV: “In this case, the generals [Raúl & the rest] may prove to be not an obstacle to democratization but facilitators of reform. The next test for [the Cuban] regime will most likely be the forthcoming rapprochement with the United States.”

Coincidence?  You be the judge.

Machetera’s Russia correspondent, Anton Dech, says he’s never heard of Politikom and never reads it. “The site is not very interesting and has no distinct position,” he says.  But apparently the Miami Herald doesn’t see it that way.  They actually went to the trouble of digging this piece up and translating it (although Machetera fixed it so you could actually read it).  Anyway, that would put Politikom in a category with a whole bunch of other irrelevant National Endowment for Democracy websites, wouldn’t it?

Found in translation

There’s a reason Machetera works so hard to translate articles you won’t find anywhere else. If you were wondering what it was, Manuel Talens has summed it up perfectly.

* * *

Translation and Commitment

by Manuel Talens – Cubadebate, Rebelión and Tlaxcala

Paper presented at the Fourth Congress of ESLETRA; “Spanish, the Language of Translation,” Toledo, Spain, May 8-10, 2008

Translation: Machetera

Introduction

In 1841, a young Karl Marx wrote the following: “Is the press free which degrades itself to the level of a trade? The writer, of course, must earn in order to be able to live and write, but he must by no means live and write to earn…The primary freedom of the press lies in not being a trade.”[1] As on so many other occasions, the German philosopher put his finger on the sore of a social problem that a century and a half later in our post modern world, has acquired the character of a universal plague.

Today, the dominant global means of communication (the mainstream media), whether radio, television, printed newspapers and magazines, or their virtual Internet equivalents, are in the hands of economic oligopolies, whose primary goal is profit, while information is relegated to a rhetorical pretext through which to achieve it. Its collusion with the different industries that buy space for advertising (often the medium and the message have the same owner), added to its opposition to any kind of political change that might cut short the power it exercises over its audience, turns the media pretension of being champions of press freedom into a fallacy.

In such circumstances, anyone who wishes to find a contrast to the disinformation with which we are passively bombarded, must actively seek out the so-called alternative media, which, by the mere fact of not being an industry, are much less visible and infinitely less powerful. In inverse proportion to the saying about dominant media, the end for alternative media is not profit, but press freedom.

Lessons in manufactured news

Pascual Serrano talks about who is really clamoring for change in Cuba, and surprise! It’s not the Cubans.

The Clamor

Pascual Serrano – Rebelión and pascualserrano.net

Translation: Machetera

A May 8th report on the awarding of a prize by the El País newspaper, is titled, in this same paper, “Clamor for Change in Cuba.” It reminded me of the time I worked for ABC and the recurrent use of the word “clamor” by its director at the time, Luis María Ansón. Whenever he wanted to denounce a case of corruption, however trivial, or ask the administration for a particular investment in infrastructure, Ansón chose titles such as “A Clamor from Citizens Outraged by the Case…” or “A Clamor Over Demands for a New Freeway Lane to La Coruña.” Obviously, upon walking out into the street, no clamor was visible; it only existed in the mind of the newspaper’s director.

The strategy is quite common in the media: when they have an ideological line, a political position, or a demand they don’t acknowledge in their editorials but rather are trying to present their crusade as though it were a reflection of a massive demand by the citizenry, hence, “a clamor.” It is a clear example of intellectual cowardice and audience deception, considering that they do not present it as their own idea or political proposal, but rather, try to make us believe that it’s the citizenry who is part of this position and demanding action, without any hard evidence to sustain it. It’s like when they title something, “The Spanish Ask…” or “Cubans Demand…” without bothering to add any kind of serious statistic whatsoever to back it up. I remember a headline in a Venezuelan paper that said that the Turks were worried about having an Islamic president, two weeks after the majority had voted him in. The only one who was worried was the director of the Venezuelan paper; had the Turks been so worried they would have chosen someone other than the person they elected.

Machetera hit by triple virus

Machetera’s translation factory took a triple hit this weekend, with two computer failures and the flu. The Apple people assure her it’s not the Pentagon’s fault, just bad luck, but who really knows?

In any case, were she up to speed, she’d have provided you with a translation of this article which appeared yesterday at Bolpress – something which amazingly, you won’t have found anywhere in the English language press. Here’s the gist: apparently in yesterday’s fake autonomy referendum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, 20 ballot boxes stuffed with ballots pre-marked “Si” (that’s “yes’ in Spanish for the really language challenged) were discovered in the Plan 3000 section of the city. The story challenges even Machetera’s translation skills because it’s unclear whether the boxes were burned, or preserved as evidence; however, there’s a mention of people in the neighborhood standing watch over polling places to prevent the entrance of such things.

Where did we see this before? Oh right, Port au Prince. Nobody in U.S. “intelligence” ever thinks about updating the manual, apparently. Not that anyone’s complaining.

That’s all Machetera can manage for today. More later…

The unvarnished truth, from Santa Cruz, Bolivia

From Santa Cruz, With Fury and Pain

Grover Cardozo – Alai-amlatina

Translation: Machetera

I’m at Santos Dumont Avenue at the height of Santa Cruz’s third ring. From the very heart of this land, from this region that is preparing for a hard episode in its history, I have a moral duty to denounce the following, to Bolivia and to the world:

Santa Cruz at the moment is a victim of a political agreement, a bloody pact by those who control the region with a strategy of fear. Powers that articulate a discourse with a Cruceñista appearance, but is nothing more than a concealment of the most perverse dark interests against the people and against the democratically elected government.

The social environment here in Santa Cruz is one of fear and uncertainty. Part of the population has taken on a festive atmosphere, joyful, with marches, carnival music, and dancing youth and children. Other sectors watch in silence, impotently biting their tongues against the activities of the affluent sectors, the light-skinned descendants of foreigners.