Yoani Sánchez, the Golden Girl of the Failed Extreme Right Wing in Miami

Cubaencuentro has recently published an article by Domingo Amuchástegui Álvarez, stating that Yoani Sanchez's credibility is in question after her ultra-reactionary speech before the Cuban exiles in Miami. Yoani, who was "apolitical", "no party preference" and "away from ideological commitments" has become their golden girl. We offer some of the fragments of the speech stating that the blogger traveller, from her opinions and the company that she has been surrounded with, has stopped her being the last hope for a "change" in Cuba. A crucial event took place in the course of her tour, starting with a visit to Brazil. Yoani lost her bid to keep a certain centrist political position. Her initial condemnation of the U.S. embargo and her demand to put an end to it, her demand regarding the necessity or desirability of the Miami Five being released, her position in favour of allowing normal tourism of U.S. citizens to Cuba, her argument for the return of the Guantanamo Naval Base to Cuba, all these together with her criticism of the Cuban government, its lack of democracy and freedom, and calling the current changes and reforms being carried out in Cuba as "cosmetic," and so on, changed overnight as soon she became aware of the wave of criticism, attacks and insults from several sources in Miami and Washington, DC. The next day she apologized for demanding the release of the Five, saying she had said it with irony, as a joke, and that the Five were guilty, as they were accused, and began to note that the embargo was the island's alibi --not intervention in the internal affairs of Cuba, as she previously expressed- to justify its failures and that it should be ended only after Cuba yields to certain pre-conditions imposed by the U.S., and she never returned to address grievances like American tourism and Guantanamo; the next day she focused entirely on these new "rectified" approaches and constantly emphasizing the conventional discourse of "regime change." These new "credentials" opened the way for her grandiose reception in the U.S.and Miami. After this, Yoanis lost her alleged "apolitical" centrism, "no party preference", "away from ideological commitments", while merging with the conventional discourse of the exiles and consequently with the older generations of exiles. In the absence of other alternatives, these seem to convert Yoani into their last hope. The Cuban lobby, recently characterized by Professor William Leogrande as a "right wing based on the hate of Castro" - turned Yoani into the golden girl and she accepted this deadly embrace with her long record of losses and failed policies from 1958, losing sight of a recent remark made by another exiled expert, Arnaldo Fernandez, in the Emilio Ichikawa blog, where he stated: "The starting premise to face Castro is: That he has not stopped winning." In this embrace, Yoani has overlooked the old saying of Don Miguel de Cervantes: "Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you the type of person you are." And in doing so, Yoani is no longer the last hope. She knows that, she is educated and astute enough to realize this, but that is her choice and with this comes her failure. As one Spanish writer and journalist recently said about Yoani's credibility: "How long will her credibility remain is still to be seen." In the past 25 years, Miami has experienced other icons and saviours from the island, and today they are nothing and not even remembered. / With information from Yoanislandia.com

"We were, we are and we will be the Cuban Five"

To my brother Rene, a free man That September 12th, with no adjective to describe its violence, I was the last who arrived in Miami, and therefore the last to be placed in an extremely cold cell, with an uncovered mattress, a blanket and a roll of toilet paper; all isolated. Silence was macabre in that 13th floor of the Miami Detention Center. Due to a purely animal instinct, one starts to walk around that extremely reduced space. Every now and then, I stopped in front of the narrow glass on the metal door, through which we were constantly watched by a guard taking rounds. In a cell across from mine, which was to a side, I looked at a man, who also stopped at times in front of the window. He had an austere bearded face, the naked chest and it made me wonder: who is this guy? Isn’t he cold? It was Rene, I had not met him yet. In those first days, of which there is still a lot to tell, they bring us down, both he and me, to the Court Hall. We were supposed to plead not guilty or guilty, which in our case was to plead worthy or unworthy, honest or dishonest, loyal or traitor. We were both certain of our innocence. But there was a guy I did not know either, who was going to plead guilty. Each one went separately in front of Judge, but Rene had read treason in the eyes of that despicable man, who was trying to convince him with his tale. Then, Rene said to me: “I have to talk to that guy.” I only asked him to calm down That’s how I met him. That’s how we became the five brothers we are. That’s why his freedom is our freedom; his pain and happiness are also ours. That’s why our unfair prison will continue to be his prison. That’s why we were, we are and we will be the Cuban Five, where a single man is formed, a Cuban as millions of compatriots, loyal to his people and his homeland. Tony Guerrero Rodríguez May 10, 2013 Marianna Federal Prison

The Bariay Park

The Holguin's Bariay park has enough attractions for the development of nature tourism programs, it has excellent beaches and a very rich and unique flora and fauna. It’s shows a vegetable formations of mangrove, complex of vegetation of rocky coast, complex of vegetation of sandy coast, heath coastal xenomorphic, forest ever green, forest semideciduo, secondary heaths and secondary forests. There, it is possible to admire two of the most attractive places in the geography of Holguin: La Silla de Gibara, mountain named this way for the Admiral Cristóbal Colón, due to its likeness with a saddle, and Colón’s Mosque, place that recreates a beautiful Andalusian legend. Today it constitutes a confirmed fact that the Bariay bay was the first point of our geography touched by La Niña, La Pinta and La Santamaría, the three ships commanded by Cristóbal Colón -reason for which Bariay Park has been transformed into National Monument- and the beauty of its environment gets rich with the rescue of the history and the bold efforts to return its original appearance to the place. There is a monument by local artist Caridad Ramos, which presents the ruins of a European neoclassical construction next to the copy of objects made by the native ones and found it in the near excavations, to show in a concrete way the encounter, everything amid an exuberant nature very characteristic of Cuba.