Happy May Day, comrades.

:hi:







:grouphug:

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New word for me.

Cubanismo para que o quien ??? Gracias.

"3:10 to Yuma" with Glenn Ford was popular in Havana at the time of Batista's hurried departure. It seems to designate US Americans, or sometimes US America itself.

"Yuma" is mentioned in this tender, sentimental song:
Charanga Habanera - Gozando en la Habana
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLygUMStNzk

That would be some spectacle from the sidelines, wouldn't it?

Same to ya. Yay, May Day. :bounce:

:party:

Latest Update: Saturday1/5/2010May, 2010, 11:47 PM Doha Time
Work hard: May Day message to Cubans
Reuters/Havana

http://www.gulf-times.com.nyud.net:8090/mritems/images/2010/5/1/2_358815_1_252.jpg

A sea of red-clad Cubans paraded through Havana’s Revolution Square yesterday in a politically charged May Day celebration that urged rejection of international criticism of the island’s human rights policies and harder work to bolster socialism.

Hundreds of thousands of people, most in red shirts and many waving red flags, filed through the vast plaza where President Raul Castro and a podium full of dignitaries looked on from beneath a giant statue of national hero Jose Marti.

Absent for the fourth consecutive year was former leader Fidel Castro, who ruled Cuba for 49 years but has not been seen in public since undergoing intestinal surgery in July 2006.

Cuba billed the annual parade as a show of solidarity against condemnation from the US and Europe for the February death of dissident hunger striker Orlando Zapata Tamayo, and the rough treatment of opposition group “Ladies in White” in recent protests.

It has portrayed US and European reaction as part of a long campaign to discredit the communist-led government, whose leaders have been hammering that message home in state-run media and speeches to stir nationalist sentiment.

More:
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=358817&version=1&template_id=43&parent_id=19

Does Reuters, by the way, claim demonstrations and festivities in the U.S. on the 4th of July, or Veterans Day, etc., etc. are attempts to "stir nationalist sentiment?" Apparently it only becomes definition worthy when it concerns a leftist government and population. So shabby, Reuters. We see right through you, dirtbags.

May Day is as American as apple pie! A holiday born in America, out of the blood spilled in the fight for the 8-hour workday.

Time for the American working class to reclaim what is ours!

America BELONGS to the Working Class....if we simply decide to claim it.


The Democratic Party is a BIG TENT, but there is NO ROOM for those
who advance the agenda of THE RICH (Corporate Owners) at the EXPENSE of LABOR and the POOR.


Health Care for The People,
NOT Mandatory Profits for Corporations!

There's no leftist party... there's a lot of work to say the least. It's actually a cruel paradox that the world commemorates the massacre of the workers in Chicago while the US still don't even stop working for the International Workers' Day.

How could Americans not massively demonstrate for their healthcare is a big question for us in the rest of the world.

not only dissent but nonconformity in any form. The Puritan ethic is still very much with them.

It's a testament to the cynicism of the "founders" that they were able to turn that into a "struggle for freedom" and the "American way".

There were the same men that embargoed Haiti's revolution, remember?

and thrown away, cleared out before it became "livable" for the Europeans, and they allowed a very few to continue to live, but in a broken, and devastated condition, and deeply injured spiritually, far from the life their own people had known for millennia.

What an eternal sorrow handed the world by a relatively small, but heavily armed group of human shapes.

That was an image that was sold as late as the modernists and very successfully. Then factor in Hollywood and the mass media spreading the lie. You never saw an episode of Little House on the Prairie where the Ingalls family displaced a people.

Native Americans are also targeted by the AZ Juan Crow law. It's not over, Judi Lynn.

this people had the guts to write freedom and justice for all while having their slaves prepare their soup. And what about France, "la petrie des droits de l'Homme" who forced Haitian governments to pay reparations for each slave they freed. Did you know their last reparation payment to France was made in 1947... 1947?!

After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6281614.ece

We should follow Aristide's movement to make France repay those reparations. I think they were estimated at 25 billion $..

:boring:

but happy May Day.

:eyes:

There is nothing axiomatic about the idea that the government and the people must be in opposition, the USA was founded on the opposite idea.

Same crazy as the "Obamacare is socialism / hands off my medicare" whackos.

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Unfortunately, with the "Cubans-love-Castro" and the "Cubans-hate-Castro" crowd in DU, any intelligent debate on the matter is impossible.

" ...the idea that the government and the people must be in opposition"
What kind of absurd idea is that? The govt and the people?!

The people?
...The govt?
Must be?

I know that some fanatic "dirtbags" here consider any opposition in Cuba or Venezuela to be a US fabrication, but I do think there's something axiomatic about the idea of having some people in the opposition expressing themselves publicly in large numbers... in any democracy.

Despite the people here who mewl otherwise.

The "dirtbags" here saying that the only dissent in Cuba is US financed are the anti Castro Cubaphobes. It is this group that obsesses over Castro and the US paid professional dissidents, and ignore the real deal that exists in Cuba.

Most of us in the pro normalization camp recognize that there is a wide spectrum of indigenous political debate in Cuba - most especially including the domestically produced opposition parties/movements that several of us have witnessed in person. these indigenous political movements abhor the taint to all opposition that the US funded worms bring about, and that taint is easily seen here in uninformed statements like yours.

It is you, as exemplified by your post, who ignores the non US funded domestically created opposition. You even seem to deny that they even exist!

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Even the *gusanos*, you make me realize.

Sorry but you seem confused. With all those people who "mewl otherwise"... no wonder!

Do you actually ignore that this "indigenous" political opposition has been badly, badly repressed in the last half century? Do you deny that they're still being repressed?

May 2nd, 2010
09:33 AM ET
Workers hit the streets on May Day in Cuba

HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) - Thousands packed Havana's Revolution Square on Saturday for International Workers' Day, drawing hoards of Cuban demonstrators, spectators, and trade unionists from around the world - including the United States and the United Kingdom.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Brian Hattsberger, a British labor unionist in attendence, wiping the sweat from his brow with his red labor hat. "It's just amazing."

For years since Cuba's bearded revolutionaries toppled then-dictator Fulgencio Batista on New Year's Day over half a century ago, residents have gathered in Havana on May 1 to listen to hours-long speeches from their former president Fidel Castro.

The elder Castro made his last showing in 2006 before stepping down because of illness, at first temporarily and then permanently, leaving the reins to his younger brother Raul.

More:
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/02/workers-hit-the-streets-on-may-day-in-cuba/

Cubans know that even during the harshest of times, like the special period, that more schools will be built, and more clinics will open, and more Drs (their kids) will graduate to serve all of them, just as they themselves have served.

It is what Cubans want, and they work together to attain their goals of fairness and charity, as well as an overall contribution to humanity.

¡This is Cubañia!



Viva Cuba!

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It's been building every day since then, and it's gone so far in these 50 years in bringing life and hope to the entire population, in spite of all the hardship heaped upon it from the giant country next to it. They are BECOMING, not disintegrating.

In the meantime look what's happened to US, in our own human rights, medical system, schools, roads, bridges, cost of living, etc., etc., etc. Unbelievable.

It's funny that as Cubans become more self actualized via their open government system, all the more invisible they become in the eyes of corporatized America.

They were fit to be tied at the Code Pink people who DARED to drive upon their streets protesting the U.S. protection of mass murderer/airline bomber Luis Posada Carriles.

Thanks for the stroll down Recent Memory Lane!

It's "calling out" DUers as comrades.

:rofl:

In the old days, DU used to have a sense of humor.