![cubanazo [del bx] profile picture](/assets/images/profile.png)
Are we the last group that can be ridiculed publically in a major media outlet?
Aside from the prejudiced and stereotypical depiction of Cuban Americans, and the suggestion that we all should be sent back from where we "came from" apparently we all live in Key West, the most disgusting part of the cartoon is the idea that we interfere in u.s. elections. I did not know that by voting one interferes in their country's electoral process.
Since Elain , we are no longer perceived as the model immigrant/refugees. I don't give a rat's ass what this stupid old mfer from Australia thinks of us or anybody else for that matter. But I think you should write to the Washington Post to let them know how you feel.
Last year I read a reprehensible Editorial by the NY Times. It basically blamed Cuban Americans for everything that is wrong with Cuba. I wrote them and they published my response .
Let your voice be heard, because the same fundamental freedom that allows the cartoonist to spew his hate also endows you with the right to articulate your disgust with his prejudice and the paper's bias toward our community.
The Washington Post
Newspaper Information: www.washpost.comNewsroom:Contact Us Main Phone: 202.334.6000 800.627.1150
Letters to the Editor: Letters to the Editor
The Washington Post1150 15 St. NW
Washington, DC 20071
and by e-mail at: [email protected]
Now we arrive at a more sophisticated assualt on fredom loving Cubanos everywhere - on the island and those in the half century diaspora.
See my letter to the LA Times published today.
I could not believe they said Castro's regime 'only' threatens its own people. I like the part about 'pale' tourists. Nice visual. lol - Now if only the Washington Post would show me some love!
Cuba and cash Re "It's a start," editorial, Aug. 25
Why lift any of the travel and economic bans on Cuba, as your editorial recommends, if the increased economic infusion will only be received and controlled by the very oppressive regime you acknowledge "only" threatens its own people? If the stated purpose of these bans is to topple the Fidel Castro dictatorship, they have clearly failed. But so have 50 years of Canadian, European and Latin American engagement and tourism. Change in Cuba will come from within, from those on the island. It will not be fostered either by external embargoes or nurtured by hordes of pale tourists basking on the beach. Lifting these restrictions will only help maintain a dictatorship in power and remove one of the few American foreign policies resting on any moral foundation.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/letters/la-le-friday31au
g31,0,521132.story?page=2&coll=la-news-comment-letters
Original LA Times editorial
Obama's right on Cuba
The candidate's call to end the U.S. ban on travel and remittances to Cuba should go even further.
August 25, 2007
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, determined to cast himself as the Democratic presidential candidate most open to new ideas on foreign policy, raised plenty of eyebrows recently when he proclaimed that he would be willing to meet personally with such rogue figures as Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. But that was nothing compared with the opinion article he published Tuesday in the Miami Herald saying Cuban Americans should have unrestricted rights to travel and send remittances to the island.... continues
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-cuba25aug25,1,3909
14.story?ctrack=2&cset=true
Just another consorte here. Nada mas. Born in Havana, brought to the states when I was just un nino. Grew up in da hood, en el Bronx (second best move Mom made:)). El mejor lugar en este mundo imo.... Been in Miami for awhile. Well educated, mild mannered, professional, intellectual, but the cubanazo in me (y tambien lo del bronx) always emerges ... and sometimes takes over ... alabaoooooo
I usually get along, play well with others. Into easy going unpretentious people who are fun, don't take themselves too seriously, yet can carry a conversation that delves beyond popular culture, and other superficial bs, unless we be drunk, then all bets are off! jk, anyways hit me up if you wantz to know more.
Escrito por
AGUSTIN TAMARGO (1924 - 2007)
El Nuevo Herald
Dic. 7, 1997
Sobre mi mesa de trabajo encontré una nota. No sé de dónde vino, ni quién la escribió, acaso fui yo mismo en dÃas que he olvidado. Pero quiero transmitirla a mis lectores porque creo que recoge un sentimiento colectivo. La nota dice asÃ:
Soy cubano. Para algunos tal vez no es mucho, pero a mà me basta y me sobra. Soy cubano. PodrÃa ser venezolano, español o norteamericano. Pero serÃa un modo de ser artificial, de voto y pasaporte, hijo del papel y la tinta, que no cuadra a mi naturaleza. Soy cubano. Un cubano integral, de las buenas y de las malas. Soy cubano. Tengo un himno y una bandera. Y tengo, sobre todo, una historia, llena de nombres, hechos y lugares gloriosos en la que bebo, como en una fuente, cada vez que me acosa el desaliento. ¿PodrÃa cambiar por algún hecho histórico extranjero a Las Guásimas, Palo Seco y Peralejo? ¿PodrÃa negociar por algo el 10 de Octubre, el 24 de Febrero, Baraguá, Playa Girón o El Escambray? Soy cubano. Cubano de café negro, de tabaco y de casabe, de son y de ron, de baile en La Tropical y de guateque guajiro. Soy cubano de hablar a gritos, de jugar a la pelota, de piropear a las mujeres. Y de bajar como un rÃo de fuego por la escalinata de la universidad. read entire essay
read obit ...
I am easy going for the most part, unless you fcuk wit me that is, :) you can take the boi out da bronx ... but... I am pretty much an intellectual, cerebral type, who can carry a conversation on many topics and know how to have good time anyway.
I believe in the classical Greek imperative to know thyself. So my mind remains engaged in that attempt to not only understand the world and people arround me but also examine enigmas of my own existence, constitution and actions. And sometimes I just don't give a shyt! - Asere ergo sum :) and como ese old roman philosopher - so much of what I am and do is beyond my grasp ... I still ... hate and I love, and I don't know why.
A rebel and innovator, pop singer Lupe Yoli, otherwise known as La Lupe or La Yiyiyi, was renowned for her emotional performance style. Her renditions of classics such as “My Way,†“Fever†and “Going Out of My Head†were famous worldwide. But the legendary Cuban-born star was also a single mother of two, a survivor of domestic abuse and a Santera who later became an evangelist Christian speaker. LA LUPE QUEEN OF LATIN SOUL tells La Lupe’s story through character-driven interviews in first-person anecdotes, in an oral history much like those found in a folk ballad or a bolero.
A long-time gay icon who was often described as the first performance artist, La Lupe was ahead of her time. In trying to discover who Lupe was, LA LUPE also provides a collective portrait of mid-20th-century Latin musical history.
La Lupe: Queen of Latin Soul - Independent Lens on PBS
pbs website http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/lalupe/
Versos Sencillos
Jose Julian Marti Perez
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma.
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma.
Yo vengo de todas partes,
Y hacia todas partes voy:
Arte soy entre las artes,
En los montes, monte soy.
I love Cuba. I have very few recollections of the place. I was three when I looked out the airplane window at the sea below, leaving it, never to return for thirty years. My first memory if of being taken away from there - away from my family. People don't understand the depth of an exile's love. My communist uncle, and god father (last time he stepped foot in a church he says) was surprised at the strength ... endurance of that love by us gusanos. I guess they never understood why we left.
I dreamed about Cuba, read its history, studied its culture, and eventually returned several times before my grand mothers died. Just to answer - What was it really like? After their deaths, my closest relatives there, I could no longer return due to new American restrictions. [Given what I had written in the nyt about the Castro dictatorship, however, I probably would not be admitted anyway].
Oigo un suspiro, a través
De las tierras y la mar,
Y no es un suspiro. -es
Que mi hijo va a despertar.
Rápida como un reflejo,
Dos veces vi el alma, dos:
Cuando murió el pobre viejo,
Cuando ella me dijo adiós.
Nuestro exilio brought my family after stays in various cities and a final long train ride from Miami, to New York. I grew up in the boogie down bronx, when it was a bad ass place. Which begged the question, why did we leave Cuba for this? I love the bronx in a different perhaps more viseral way. It's typology was not a product of the audacity of my imagination or based on stories of the past as much of Cuba had to be.
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow,
I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current,
I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats,
I look'd.
~ Walt Whitman,
It was not until my first return to Havana, however, that the intersections between the life I lost there and the one I lead in the bronx became real. Both had the wounded pride of a faded glory that had passed them but lived on in the hearts of its residents, those who stayed or could not leave, but still had not abandoned it. And where survival was the central focus of everyday life.
To the untrained eye of the returning exile [gusano], Havana looked like a bombed out mess - dresden on the caribbean, [not the paris it once was called], buildings were falling apart due to decades of neglect, like certain parts of the bronx. As I met its residents - habaneros reminded me of mi gente del bx. They looked out for each other, laughed loud, loved, and hurt hard but endured - under extreme poverty and oppression, and they embraced me - a native son.
Oculto en mi pecho bravo
La pena que me lo hiere:
El hijo de un pueblo esclavo
Vive por él, calla y muere.
Yo he puesto la mano osada
De horror y júbilo yerta,
Sobre la estrella apagada
Que cayó frente a mi puerta.