Thousands of people took to the streets at several locations in Cuba including the capital Havana on Sunday to call for the end of the decades-old dictatorship and to demand food and vaccines as shortages of basic necessities have become commonplace and COVID-19 cases have soared in recent weeks.
From the Malecón, Havana’s famous boardwalk near the old city to small towns in Cienfuegos province and Palma Soriano, the largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, videos live-streamed on Facebook showed thousands of people walking and riding bikes and motorcycles along streets while chanting “Freedom,” “Down with Communism,” and “Homeland and Life,” which has become a battle cry among activists as it turns the revolutionary slogan “Homeland or Death” on its head.
“We are not afraid!” chanted Samantha Regalado while she recorded hundreds of people walking along a narrow street in Palma Soriano.
JUST IN – Mass protests erupt in several cities in #Cuba over the poor state of the socialized medical system. Protesters demand freedom from communist dictatorship.pic.twitter.com/NOSdVgP0By
Hundreds of Cubans have gathered in front of a public monument to Raul Castro to protest and chant “LIBERTAD” (freedom). I have never seen anything like this. We’re witnessing history.#SOSCuba🇨🇺 pic.twitter.com/bw9Qz5VlXQ
Video streamed on Facebook by Antonio Miguel Cobas Jalowayski around 1 p.m. in Palma Soriano showed hundreds of protesters calling for freedom and shouting “down with the dictatorship” and “down with Díaz-Canel,” but also demanding medicine, vaccines and “the end of hunger.” A crowd is seen pushing a police car and shouting “the dictators just arrived,” in reference to the police. Later, one protester is heard saying, “this is a pacific demonstration.”
Facebook user Carlos Alberto Ceballos Brito published a video around the same time showing a crowd gathering in Alquizar, a town in Artemisa province, also protesting against the government and chanting “down with Diaz-Canel” and “Patria y Vida”. Another video published on Facebook shows a similar protest in nearby Guira de Melena. In all cases, the crowd used strong language to refer to President Miguel Díaz-Canel, whose popularity is sharply falling as life in the island deteriorates.
Cuba is in the throes of its worst economic contraction in over three decades as chronic inefficiencies and paralyzing bureaucracy have gradually eroded the country’s production capacity, including in the essential food ad agriculture sectors. Trump-era sanctions have reduced access to vital economic lifelines like remittances, and foreign investment has plunged. Painful currency reforms this year have sent inflation soaring, and long lines for food have again become commonplace.
Now Cuba is struggling to control transmission of the coronavirus and is setting record highs almost daily in the past few weeks. Cuba decided to make its own COVID-19 vaccine and didn’t seek to buy shots from other countries. But plans to vaccinate the population with a homegrown shot has been plagued by delays.
Earlier this week, calls for the government to accept humanitarian aid had increased as Cubans began documenting on social media the collapse of the health system in Matanzas, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the island.
Wait, Cuba’s socialized medicine isn’t superior to that in the U.S., despite leftists lecturing us on this point incessantly? Imagine my shock.
This is impossible. Numerous bluecheck leftwing media personalities have assured us for years that #Cuba’s socialized medicine is far superior to our own…https://t.co/TFuJvqJepo
The government responded by sending more doctors to that province and setting a bank account to receive aid, but the account is in a Cuban bank under US sanctions. Although Cuban officials said this week the country is open for donations, historically, the government has refused or seized the humanitarian aid coming from Cuban exiles.
In a separate video posted on Facebook on Sunday, activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara called on Cubans to head to the Malecón boardwalk to gather in protest against the island’s authoritarian regime.
“I’m going to the street, I’m going to the Malecón, no matter the cost,” he said.
Otero Alcántara went on hunger strike earlier this year to draw international attention to increased repression of artists and activists, who have stepped up calls for more civil liberties. He was forcibly removed from his home and hospitalized.
Later in the afternoon, Cubans were sharing videos of the police response. A Facebook video posted by user AntenaCubana shows people in Palma Soriano throwing stones at the police while a person is heard saying the police had been beating the demonstrators.
Speaking of the police:
🚨BREAKING🚨
Cuba’s communist regime is mobilizing its infamous Black Berets to shut down the uprising that is currently underway across the island. This is going to get violent.
It would be great to see ordinary Cubans overthrow the Communist dictatorship, but we’ve seen mass protests in communist countries peter out before (such as in Venezuela). Also, the Obama Administration retreads in the Biden Administration will hardly be enthusiastic about helping the Cuban people overthrow the regime Obama famously cuddled-up to.
Funny how Obama and company never sought to stage a “color revolution” in Cuba, isn’t it?
Greetings, and welcome to the return of the Friday LinkSwarm on Thursday! My Mac is working, my house is clean, and I have a newly painted master bathroom with a new floor and a new toilet.
Some links are new, some from a week or two ago.
Minneapolis: “Black Lives Matter activists block city council member’s car until she signs statement that charges against rioters will be dropped.”
“Peter Daszak – whose ‘EcoHealth Alliance’ funneled U.S. taxpayer cash to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – defended SARS gain-of-function experiments that potentially rendered the virus ‘capable of directly infecting humans’ in a Nature article unearthed from November 2015.”
Know who else was funding Peter Daszak’s research? Google.
The unearthed financial ties between EcoHealth Alliance and Google follow months of big tech censorship of stories and individuals in support of the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory.
The Google-backed EcoHealth Alliance played a critical role in the cover-up of COVID-19’s origins through its president, Peter Daszak.
Daszak served on the wildly compromised World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 investigation team. He championed the efforts to “debunk” the lab origin theory of the virus, despite mounting support for the claim…
The more we learn about Peter Daszak, one of the main villains of the COVID epidemic, the worse it gets.
Daszak is president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization mostly funded by the US government. EcoHealth passed some of that money on to the lab in Wuhan, China.
It was Daszak who organized the letter in The Lancet from February 2020 dismissing as “misinformation” claims that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Virology Lab. The letter created the illusion of consensus, which internet companies proceeded to enforce through censorship, and the media reinforced by constantly interviewing Daszak himself.
There might be journalistic value in hearing from the Chernobyl plant director about all those clouds floating over Ukraine. But if he suggests the rash of mysterious sores and cancers were due to a faulty shipment of microwaves recently arrived in Pripyat, you’d probably think he was engaged in a bit of “motivated reasoning.”
Apparently not the World Health Organization, which invited Daszak to join their microwave hunt in Wuhan.
In the last two days, Daszak has been removed from The Lancet’s own UN-backed commission investigating COVID’s origins, though whether he removed himself or was fired remains unclear.
Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated on Tuesday night in an attack on his home, the nation’s prime minister announced.
First lady Martine Moïse was hospitalized for gunshot wounds she received in the attack. Unidentified gunmen broke into the president’s residence on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince during the night and opened fire on the couple.
“A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” Prime Minister Claude Joseph said in a statement. “The country’s security situation is under the control of the Haitian police and the armed forces of Haiti. . . . Democracy and the republic will win.”
Moïse has ruled by fiat for the past two years after Haiti failed to hold elections and the parliament dissolved. Meanwhile, a new prime minister, Dr. Ariel Henry, was scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday.
Opposition figures said Moïse should have stepped down on February 7 of this year to complete a five-year term, and after Moïse refused to leave office thousands of Haitians protested in the streets. The government responded by arresting 23 people, including a senior judge and police official, whom Moïse accused of conspiring to assassinate him.
He might have been right! But it’s not like Moise was some sort of Jeffersonian paragon:
Haiti has experienced growing instability during the administration of President Jovenel Moïse, withunrest, high rates of inflation, and resurgent gang violence. The government’s failure to hold elections in October 2019 resulted in the terms of most of the Haitian legislature expiringon January 13, 2020, without officials elected to succeed them. Moïse is now ruling by decree. The judiciary is conducting ongoing investigations into Moïse’s possible involvement in various corrupt activities, which the president denies. Haitian Senate and Superior Court of Auditors investigations allege embezzlement and fraud by current and former Haitian officials managing $2 billion in loans from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe discounted oil program.
Speaking of getting whacked: “John McAfee Found Dead In Prison Cell After US Extradition Approved.” Ahem:
Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: "We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself". I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm.$WHACKD available only on https://t.co/HdSEYi9krq:) pic.twitter.com/rJ0Vi2Hpjj
It took 18 months of steady abuse by rioters and their overlords at city hall for Portland cops to say “no mas” and tap out. As one retired Portland police detective said, “If anyone did to a horse or a dog what has been done to PPB cops for 18 months, that person would have amassed hundreds of counts of felony animal abuse, but it’s perfectly OK to do it to cops, wholesale, and with an army of anarchist pals.”
The police officers in the Portland riot squad, officially called the “rapid response team (RRT),” still work for the agency, but will no longer volunteer themselves for the duty that resulted in “nearly all” members being injured with “broken bones, torn ligaments, and cartilage, traumatic brain injuries, hearing damage, damaged eyesight, lacerations and burns,” in the words of the resignation letter sent to the chief by the squad’s leader.
Expect more of this.
Snip.
The chaos started at the top by assuming rioters were victims and cops were criminals.
In their letter, RRT leader Lieutenant Jacob Clark said rules on the books for dealing with protests and riots didn’t change, but interpretation of those rules changed often and were in conflict with interpretations by council members, the city attorney, and others. Worse, the changes in the interpretations were applied retroactively and officers, staying within the limits of the law, were suddenly written up under a new interpretation of the rules.
Snip.
You can trace the walkout by Portland cops directly to efforts that began with George Soros.
Singer John Legend and BLM co-founder Shaun King followed Soros’s lead and poured money into the campaigns of district attorney candidates who believe cops are the problem, not the solution to keeping order. In fact, keeping order isn’t really a thing for these activists.
In both cities, Leftists poured money behind DA candidates who promised to free criminals and do what they could to stick it to cops and police departments. Portland got Mike Schmidt and LA got carpet bagger George Gascon. These DA’s, aided by unhinged city council members – Jo Ann Hardesty in Portland, Kshama Sawant in Seattle, and their allies in city bureaus – have created less safe cities.
Seattle’s city attorney and King County prosecutor’s lack of prosecutions against actual criminals – because woke ideology – has turned the Emerald City, like Portland and San Francisco before it, into a homeless encampment with no rules, free-flowing drugs, and free rent.
Portland Police union head Daryl Turner is interviewed following the resignation of Portland’s entire riot-response trained police team. pic.twitter.com/dD53nkAGlJ
Nine months after the declaration of a national emergency due to the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. births fell by 8% in a month.
The December drop marked an acceleration in declines in the second part of the year. For the full year, the number of babies born in the country fell 4% to about 3.6 million, the largest decline since 1973.
Michael “Creepy Porn Lawyer” Avenatti sentenced to two and a half years in prison over Nike extortion case. Let’s take a stroll through memory lane over the endless MSM fawning over Avenatti:
May we always remember and cherish the time Ana Navarro compared Michael Avenatti to the Holy Spirit pic.twitter.com/y63JoX4leq
s I previously reported, earlier this year, the University of Texas at Austin (UT) went off the deep end of all things “woke” and politically correct.
Despite warnings from alumni, faculty, and organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars, UT quietly adopted a “Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity” that is genuinely chilling. Among other questionable practices, this plan institutionalizes the Critical Race Theory version of “equity” (equality of results, as opposed to equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and meritocracy) as the paramount driver of decisions on hiring, promotion, tenure, leadership positions, and even teaching awards and endowed chairs at UT. It also creates a bureaucracy of diversity commissars in each college to enforce the new orthodoxy and mandates re-education of virtually all faculty in the new catechism.
UT insiders tell me this plan was the brainchild and pet project of UT Vice Provost Edmund Gordon, a pronounced CRT advocate. UT’s adoption of this extraordinarily ill-considered plan was the last straw for me (and, based on responses I have received to my article, apparently many other UT alumni as well). UT President Jay Hartzell’s response to this criticism has been to ignore it, which seems to be his preferred modus operandi. President Hartzell’s calculus appears to be that, with the Texas legislature now safely adjourned from its biennial session. UT can continue on its merry way, unmolested by the unenlightened peasantry.
He may be in for a rude awakening.
Russia unveils world’s largest submarine. I’m sure it will be well-engineered and quite capable (Soviet subs were), but I’m betting those “Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedoes” are almost pure vaporware.
“Hedge Fund That Bet Against GameStop Shuts Down As Backers Pull Money.” “White Square Capital, run by a former Paulson trader, has announced that it will return capital to shareholders. Some of the FT’s sources said the decision was likely due to heavy losses stemming from the firm’s GME short.”
A heart I transplanted recently on the Organ Care System. Amazing technology to benefit our patients on the waiting list. Recipient is doing great! pic.twitter.com/8Zr2MxI1ZX
Joe Rogan guest Michael Pollan notes that caffeine was unknown in Europe until the 1650s, when coffee, tea and chocolate all arrived:
“Before caffeine, it was a very different world, and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all the time. People drank morning, noon and night because it was safer than water.” They gave kids hard cider for breakfast!
So a drug comes on the market that encourages sober, linear thought, and shortly after that the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution ensue.
I hope you’re enjoying America’s 245th Birthday today. In celebration, enjoy some vaguely-related videos. Here are some fireworks fails, complete with lots of cussing:
This is a video about Sharks! More specifically, about Sharks! the art project, and about the war between conceptual artists and a London-area conservation planning bureaucracy:
Plus a side story about how The Guardian is garbage.
Raytheon has delivered the US Navy’s first Block V configured Tomahawk missile, marking a major milestone for the capability modernisation programme.
The latest delivery creates a path to provide the fleet with an ‘upgraded warfighting capability’.
Tomahawk is a long-range, all-weather, subsonic cruise missile in service with the US and the British Royal Navy’s surface ships and submarines.
In a press statement, US Naval Air Systems Command said that these first Block V missiles are from the existing Tomahawk Block IV inventory.
The first Block V missiles have been recertified and modernised for fleet use.
Tomahawk Weapons System programme (PMA-280) programme manager captain Vernon ‘John’ Red said: “This is the next big advancement in Tomahawk capability and a major achievement for the programme.
“We’re focused now on delivering advanced capability to the fleet by recertifying and modernising our Block IV inventory, and by contracting production Block V missiles.”
Here’s a video that covers the enhanced capabilities:
The navy’s VLS has proven pretty flexible, being able to accommodate both the Tomahawk and the new Naval Strike Missile, and presumably some in-development hypersonic missiles. Lots of countries have cruise missiles, and supposedly Russia, the UK and France all used cruise missiles at some phase of the Syrian conflict, but none has the demonstrated battlefield record of the Tomahawk.
I used to follow some college athletics. Now I don’t. At the same time universities were getting more and more expensive, they were also getting more and more woke. College sports used to be an oasis from that nonsense, but so many programs bent the knee to #BlackLivesMatter last year that I just stopped paying attention.
he U.S. Supreme Court on Monday threw out limits set by the major governing body for American intercollegiate sports on education-related benefits that schools can give players as a violation of antitrust law, handing a big victory to student-athletes fighting for greater financial compensation.
The 9-0 ruling put the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) further on the defensive as it struggles to preserve a business model – huge revenues generated by college sports and big salaries for executives and coaches while players remain unpaid – under assault on multiple fronts.
The NCAA’s curbs on non-cash payments to college athletes related to education – including benefits such as computers, science equipment and musical instruments – were part of what critics have called the fiction of amateurism in college sports, an enterprise that rakes in billions of dollars annually.
These limits, according to the ruling authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, are anticompetitive under a federal law called the Sherman Antitrust Act. The ruling could pave the way for challenges to other NCAA compensation rules, a prospect that Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to invite in a separate opinion agreeing with Gorsuch.
Kavanaugh wrote that those other limits on compensation for players “also raise serious questions under the antitrust laws” and suggested they likely would be struck down if lower courts follow the analysis laid out in Monday’s ruling.
“The NCAA is not above the law,” Kavanaugh added.
For years, football and basketball have been big moneymakers for some colleges and universities (and money losers for others). Why not let student athletes benefit from that? Tradition? Hell, colleges are hellbent on destroying every tradition that made them vital institutions (including freedom of speech, free inquiry and the rule of law), so why not that one as well?
I’ve long thought that traditional football power schools (Alabama, Texas, USC, Oklahoma, etc.) could make a lot more money by leaving the NCAA and forming their own competing football conference of 15 or so teams, playing a round robin schedule plus playoffs. They could pay athletes and forge a partnership deal with the NFL to provide year-round professional coaching. It would provide more entertainment than watching power schools beat up on Rice or UNT every year.
America’s entire higher education system needs a hard reboot: Shut down all colleges and universities for a year, eliminate SJW departments like Women’s Studies entirely, hand every woke professor and administrator a pink slip, and deny federal loan and contracts for any university it costs students more than 10 grand a year to attend. Right now all this is a pipe-dream, but college athletics are one of the last sources of unwarranted affection ordinary people feel toward higher education. (“College is a $120,000 hooker, and you are an idiot who fell in love with her!”) Maybe the demise of the current plantation athletic complex will help pave the way for real reform.
I can’t remember if I’ve included a LinkSwarm link on the problems of Zumwalt-class destroyers, which the navy killed after only three of the projected thirty-two ships were built. This video offers a solid overview of the issues that led to the cancellation.
Zumwalt-class destroyers turned out to be quite stable, and the stealth design worked well, but they require far more personnel to run than originally specified, and the small number of Zumwalt class actually built resulted in the radical new shore-attack munitions costs spiraling to more than $1 million for each projectile, or more than the cost of a Tomahawk cruise missile, which offers 15 times the range and 30 times the payload.
Other problems include having to retrain crew to take into account the unique shape and handling characteristics:
The combination of the Zumwalt ’s size and inability to switch quickly from ahead to astern propulsion or vice versa (because of fixed pitch propellers) creates substantially more inertia than on a smaller vessel, a characteristic magnified by the large sail area.
…The outward-sloping tumblehome design creates the illusion that the ship is farther away from the pier than it is.
…All the mooring stations are internal. (it) makes it impossible for the bridge to see progress in the mooring stations.
…A relatively low height of eye of 35 feet, along with large gun mounts on the forecastle, result in a substantial shadow zone of 469.2 feet dead ahead.
If all this is disheartening, realize that technical innovations have just as many teething problems for the Chinese navy as well (and probably much worse quality control). I would say the Russians as well, but almost all of their much-hyped “superweapons” turn out to be pure vaporware.