For several days I exchanged messages with some friends concerning the plight of Cuban writer Angel Santiesteban. The award-winner author — who was a published writer until his increasing anti-governmental belligerence relegated him to ostracism — is going through the last moments of a long legal trial.
He doesn’t deserve such uncivil treatment …not him or anyone else. In the twilight of his life, Fidel Castro, the octogenarian former commander, was featured in the Cuban media in an awkward interview when he went to vote in the recent elections this past Sunday, February 3.
A long time ago the people, in their diversity, cherished the hope of a better life with justice and freedom, and they did their best to achieve this. Today in Venezuela, like in the rest of the world, there persists that need to preserve this hope and the urgency to fight to defend it.
What is now urgently needed is to defend, “with all and for the good of all,” the well-being of Antonio Rodiles, a Cuban who has chosen — with courage, creativity and public-spiritedness — to defend our right to a better country.
Only those who don’t seem to understand the difference between a member of the “Tea Party” and a “New York liberal” can show themselves indifferent to the eventual triumph of one or the other candidate in next Tuesdays United States elections.
On the whole, this was an exemplary process in which the winner — without ideological distinction — was a Venezuela that accepted to democratically resolve its political disputes.
The October 7 elections in Venezuela will reveal all of the strengthening and wearing down of a government anchored in power for 14 years, one whose success depends largely on the charismatic leadership of Hugo Chavez and the scope of his successful (yet deteriorated) social policies.
The “chronicle of a disgrace foretold” has just been recorded in Moscow. Russian judges have sentenced members of political punk-rock group “Pussy Riot” to two years in prison.
When I am “accused” of flirting with socialism, I always explain that my being left isn’t something that offends me, because everything I’ve done in my intellectual and political life is related to agendas and movements that are identified with that ideological perspective in its various expressions.
Veronica won’t be able to smile, eat ice cream or go to the movies with her parents and friends. A murderous bullet snatched away her future this past Friday when a 24-year-old — armed with two rifles and a couple of pistols — committed wholesale slaughter in Greater Denver (Colorado).