However, no one hates Communists more than people who have had to live under it. The most anti-Communist people I have met are Czechs and Poles. Unlike American celebrities, who try their damnest to condemn America, this Czech model was afraid to expose the "socialist paradise." Also notice how she was arrested for just taking a picture.... something "liberals" should take notice of.
She should be applauded. It would be easy for her to go walk down the easy looking well-traveled path, closing her eyes to that which isn't wished to be seen. She could tell Baba-Wawa what a wonderful place it is, get patted on the back by the media, and even land a guest role on a sitcom. Braver than many, she took the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference.
Top Czech model Helena Houdova was arrested in Cuba last week while taking
photographs of Havana's slums – but she managed to smuggle out pictures she hid
in her bra.
Houdova – Miss Czech Republic 1999 – was arrested along with fellow model Mariana Kroftova, and Cuban police confiscated a roll of film in the women’s camera. However, Houdova concealed the memory card of her digital camera insider her brassiere.
"The revolution's watchmen rose up because I was taking pictures of something they do not like," Houdova told journalists after returning to the Czech Republic.
The Communist regime of Fidel Castro denies the existence of slums on the island.
The two women spent 11 hours in police custody and were not allowed to contact the Czech embassy. Upon their release, the women were asked to sign a statement saying they would not travel beyond Havana, and they remained under police surveillance until their departure from the island, according to the Czech news source Ceskenoviny.
The photos Houdova saved will be included in an exhibition she plans to organize together with People in Need, a Czech humanitarian relief organization that has supported Cuba's pro-democracy opposition. The exhibition would portray Cuba’s beautiful scenery but also highlight its political oppression, Houdova disclosed.
During her 10-day stay in Cuba, Houdova said, her meetings with dissidents, the wives of political prisoners and ordinary Cubans reminded her of her childhood in Communist Czechoslovakia.
The Czech Foreign Ministry summoned the Cuban charge d'affairs in Prague to explain the conduct of the Cuban authorities in arresting the two women.
Czech-Cuban political relations have been frozen since the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989.
The Czech Republic has attempted several times to push through U.N. resolutions critical of Castro’s regime over its record on human rights.
12 comments:
I remember talking to a Czech girl who wanted to go on vacation, and being younger and much more naive, I suggested Cuba because it was cheaper, but she replied, "I've had enough of communism for one lifetime."
Do you think that the presence of Cuba's slums has anything to do with being under a 40 year economic, and at times military, seige set by a close and extremely powerful neighbour?
Despite these slums, and the blockade, how do you account for Cuba's relative success in the fields of health, welfare and education, when compared to its neighbours, such as the Domincan Republic - a nation of comparable geography and economic base that, rather than having a revolution, has its oligarchy cemented in place thanks to a US Marines supporting General Trujillo?
As for your little peice of sociology - arguing that those who lived in the Eastern Bloc are the most anti-socialist, well, I can tell you anecdotes which contradict that. They hold no truck with the police states, but are nevertheless disillusioned with capitalism and do want to build a socialist society.
I guess, though, that by choosing members of the celebrity class, with their sense of priviledge and largely untoiled for wealth slightly skews your understanding. But hey, don't let me stop your train of ignorance.
"how do you account for Cuba's relative success in the fields of health, welfare and education"
Andrew, that's the point of the article. Those "successes" aren't accurate. They are manufacturered by the communist state. Things that the government does not want people to see, they keep hidden... just like those slums.
The girls I spoke w/ was a working stiff. Also, how to do you explain Castro's millions of $$$ in his socialist workers paradise (and our economic embargo)?
I think you need more than an anecdote to demonstrate that the widely accepted fact that Cuba has better levels of health care, education and welfare - in spite of its slums - than its comparable neighbours is a fabrication.
"how to do you explain Castro's millions of $$$ in his socialist workers paradise (and our economic embargo)?" I don't know if Castro has millions. What I do know is that a country that preaches free-trade is using is military, economic and diplomatic muscle to strangle the economy of one its neighbours. For the good of the Cuban people, eh? Well, if that is the case, then the slums are a necessary evil in your moral calculus, and your citing of these is hypocritical. Drop the blockade and we will see how closed and controlled Cuban society could be.
In 2005, American business and financial magazine Forbes listed Castro among the world's richest people, with an estimated net worth of $550 million. Castro is considering filing a lawsuit against the magazine, claiming the accusations are false and the article was meant to defame him.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro
Castro isn't much better than Kim Jong Il. Perhaps he isn't as crazy.
I would bet that Castro would win that lawsuit.
I think the best ancedote possible is that people are willing to try to float to the US in rafts through 90 miles of open shark infested waters, risking getting caught, in order to leave Cuba. And all to get to the country with supposedly the most inefficient healthcare system in the world.
It's gotta be bad. No one would try that otherwise.
People are willing to die in the Arizona desert to escape non-Communist Mexico. People die on rafts fleeing the capital-friendly Domincan Republic.
Your argument by anecdote is hopelessly flawed, lacking any form of rigour. Taking into account the variety of political systems that people risk death to 'flee', one would find that the common condition is poverty. And while that is the inevitable product of a capitalist system, a system that demands that the 'winners' accumulate the wealth, the determinedly hostile actions of the USA with regard to Cuba make poverty inevitable. What term can be used for those who, in full knowledge, make this condition so? Nothing other than 'scum'.
Further, as great as the USA is, the world cannot be made up of 170 Americas. In a capitalist economic system of few winners and many losers, there needs to be many Haitis for every America. And that is what we see, just as within every capitalist economy we see the necessity of people living in poverty.
But Mexico and Dominican Republic are far from capitalist societies. Corruption is rampant and political and social barriers prevent free enterprise and upward mobility. The Wall St. Journal's index of economic freedom ranks Mexico #60/157 as only "mostly free", with the Dominican Republic 116/157 as "mostly unfree".
Cuba or the Dominican Republic doesn't have to be so poor. America isn't the bad guy (that's always the reason for the world's problems, right?). Look at how well other small places have done. Singapore was poor prior to the 1950s. But the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew turned that country around. Taiwan does well considering China is constantly threatening to invade them. The Cayman Islands does remarkably well despite its size and lack of natural resources.
A take on Churchill's saying that capitalism is the worst form of economic system except for all those others that have been tried.
I think that you are confusing 'capitalism' with 'free-markets'. The two are very often at odds. A capitalist has no interest in markets being free once he is established in that market. Look at the history of the American corporation, the oligopolies (un-free markets) that they gravitated towards and the battle to break them up through legislative action (anti-trust laws to make the market more 'free').
So Singapore is rich. It is also an authoritarian, dictatorial state. It is no friend of freedom, though it might be a friend of capital. Ditto much of the history of Taiwan. But even if they were paragons of political and social freedom, they do not alter the necessary truth of capitalism; that for every winner there are many losers, and, even if capitalism is the best option, you have to accept the necessity of the poor and exploited, and acknowledge that your attempts to attach some kind of moral cause for their failure is simply a lie. They fail because it is a truth of capitalism that someone MUST, regardless of how much each person or nation works.
Any society there are different functions and jobs. There will always be people who are needed to wait tables or make clothes. Should they make as much money as people who design computer chips or are doctors?
If you say yes, than what incentive is there to go through the 10+ years of schooling required to become a doctor? Why not just wait tables?
There are winners and losers in socialism, communism, and fuedalism as well. There are many more losers in the above systems, and the winners are only people who run the government.
However, a big difference in a free-market society, class mobility is possible. Just because you are waiting tables now, does mean you have to do that for the rest of your life. So while you may be currently poor, you need not be for your whole life. Rags to riches stories are quite less common in a socialist society like France.
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