This time it's not Galloway, or one of the Fenian pukes. It's some turkey called Stephen Wilkinson in the Guardian's CiF column. Thus his opening flourish:
The announcement on Wednesday that Cuba is to release 52 prisoners is a very positive development because the move once again puts the ball back in the Obama administration's court. It is now up to Washington to make the next step if the idiotic Cuban embargo is to end.Once again? To what previous act of munificence by the hereditary Cuban dictatorship is this arse-hole referring? And if the release of what even the right-on lefties who have taken over Amnesty International have been compelled to recognize as political prisoners is related to the embargo, then it's not so idiotic, is it? Ah, but Wilkinson knows better: they weren't really political prisoners - they were agents of US imperialism.
The result will be freedom for the remainder of the 75 dissidents arrested and jailed in 2003 for having taken money from the United States in order to publish critical reports on the island on US websites. It will leave only about a dozen of Amnesty International's list of prisoners of conscience in jail.Only 'about a dozen', eh? Well, that's a result! Hardly worth bothering about. In fact the 52 inmates represent fewer than one-third of Cuba's 167 political prisoners. Among prisoners notably not mentioned for release on Wednesday was Alan Gross, an Agency for International Development contractor imprisoned in Cuba since December for the crime of distributing cellphones and laptops in Cuba's tiny Jewish community.
The signal is very positive. It is now up to Cuba's critics in the liberal "west" to respond. The EU should now end its ludicrous "common position" that makes co-operation dependent on Cuba changing its political and economic system, and the US should begin to dismantle its cruel and useless embargo.OK - let's see if I have understood Wilkinson's POV:
- Oppress your population for fifty years, shooting or imprisoning anyone who protests.
- Imprison or deport all homosexuals.
- Encourage and participate in kidnapping and other forms of terrorism, including narco-terrorism, throughout Central and South America.
- Create a two-tier economy whereby Party and Army apparatchiks live in luxury while the rest of the population has to whore in the streets for dollars, because pesos can't buy anything anymore.
- Release some, not all the dissidents imprisoned in sub-human conditions.
- Be kissed on both cheeks and welcomed into the bosom of the democratic "west", which previously held the ludicrous "common position" that becoming a democracy was a precondition.
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Wilkinson is remiss in not praising Fidel's supreme generosity a few years ago when he released a large number of insitutionalized mental patients along with as many members of his criminal class as he could round up so that they could ferry themselves across to Miami to happily subsist upon the largesse of the Florida taxpayers.
ReplyDeleteYou would think that this could be worth noting, at least for the sense of humour which it reveals. But is there humour for Guardian writers?
I thought that was a pretty shrewd move by Fidel, poisoning the Cuban diaspora while showing machista contempt for Jimmy Carter's perceived effeminacy. It's hilarious that the last of the great LA nationalist caudillos should be a hero of Brits who pride themselves on being internationalist, while knowing nothing of the world outside the incestuous sphincter that is their own deeply parochial circle.
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