Guillermo Fariñas lies in a bed in Santa Clara, Cuba, ready to die. Six weeks ago, Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo died while on hunger strike in protest of the torture he had endured for seven years and in protest of the Cuban government’s treatment of all of its prisoners.Since his death, Fariñas has refused food in solidarity with Zapata.

Like Zapata, Fariñas is prepared to die so that the suffering of people inside Cuba exacts a heavy price on the Castro regime’s international reputation.

These photographs, published here for the first time, were taken by an independent journalist in Cuba four days ago.

Guillermo Fariñas is a journalist and a doctor of psychology. Like his father, Fariñas was a soldier of the Cuban revolution. He fought in Angola and received military education in Moscow. Later, he was elected General Secretary of Healthcare Union Workers. Fariñas was jailed in 1995 for speaking out about the corruption of Cuban healthcare. As they do with all such dissidents, the Cuban government labeled him a “mercenary” and a “CIA agent.” (more…)

This week, nominated by Tom Costella of Canton, MI, the “Educated Idiots Award” goes to…

Fidel Castro (remember him)?

The communist octogenarian/anachronism has come out of semi-comatose retirement to praise President Obama’s trillion dollar government takeover of Americans’ health care.  Herewith Cuba’s bath-robed butcher sings a few bars of praise for our President:

“We consider health reform to have been an important battle and a success of his (Obama’s) government,” Castro opined in a published screed.  Though, he couldn’t resist poking a newly socialist Uncle Sam:  “It is really incredible that 234 years after the Declaration of Independence …. the government of that country has approved medical attention for the majority of its citizens, something that Cuba was able to do half a century ago.”

Yet, ominous clouds hover over the dictator’s socialist Utopia.  The very socialism that has earned Comrade Castro “global praise” – “free” health care and education, and heavily subsidized food, housing, utilities and transportation – is not sustainable in the nation’s perpetually depressed economy according to the Cuban regime.

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How resilient is the ghost of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who ably assisted the Castro brothers’ sadly successful mission to turn Cuba into an island hellhole? His legend survives even a lackluster, long-winded biopic released in 2008 and now just out on DVD.

More important, Che’s legend survives the facts of his own life. Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”

When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.

By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson’s torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world. Despite Che’s pronounced contempt for rock music, Carlos Santana wore a Che T-shirt during a performance at the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony. Other invocations of the Che image, such as the image above from a greeting card line that features a dog as Che, suggest unconscious (or at least unknowing) parody.

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[Note: This is the latest segment in an ongoing series about Code Pink and its co-founder Jodie Evans.  Click here to read earlier articles.]

Top Obama donor and fundraiser Jodie Evans met with the Taliban in Afghanistan on a recent trip there, according to a report by Jane Fonda of a discussion she had with Evans last month. The meeting with the Taliban took place just weeks before Evans was videotaped directly handing to President Barack Obama a package of information about her trip to Afghanistan at a high dollar fundraiser in San Francisco.

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