From Jay Nordlinger:

Friends, I have some news out of Cuba, and I'm afraid that, as usual, it's not good. You know of René Montes de Oca, the incredibly brave and defiant dissident whom I've interviewed a couple of times. He says that, on October 7, his sister was raped, by two men. He blames the crime on "State Security." He says, further, "I am convinced that they want to arrest me again, being that I have openly and publicly proclaimed my ideas." However, "they will never be able to make me give in and make me be quiet." Rape, of course, is a means of torture and oppression employed by many brute regimes, including Saddam Hussein's (d. 2003).

And, according to Ada Kaly Márquez, of the Frank País November 30th Democratic Party,

Political prisoner Arturo Suárez Ramos, being held in Combinado del Este Prison, in Havana, has been on a hunger strike since October 14th, in protest of the search conducted on October 11th in his cell, where he was again threatened with being transferred to another province and locked up with common prisoners, according to information from Isabel Ramos, mother of the prisoner. . . .

In addition, Suárez Ramos wanted it to be public knowledge that the political prisoner Rafael Ibarra Roque, president of the November 30th Democratic Party, and political prisoner Pedro Argüelles Moran had been taken to a section in the prison with common prisoners, where they removed their clothing in protest, and they were beaten by prison authorities and taken to covered punishment cells. . . .

Ibarra Roque and Argüelles Moran are maintaining their stance of defiance of prison authorities in an act of civil disobedience in the form of hunger strikes . . .

Isabel Ramos, faced with this situation, told Rojas, an official with the State Security, that he is responsible for what may happen to her son and the other political prisoners placed together with common prisoners, and in response she was told that if she were to do anything they would take the necessary measures.
Let me just add here that Rafael Ibarra Roque is the husband of the magnificent Maritza Lugo, whom I have interviewed and profiled for NR.

Finally, another report out of Combinado del Este, from the same source:

In the evening hours of October 20th, Luis Campos Corrales, political prisoner and member of the November 30th party, who is almost blind due to a bacterial infection, was handcuffed and then thrown from the second floor of Combinado del Este in Havana by the officer in charge of the detachment — who goes by the name of Leonel — with the aid of another prison official. . . .

According to information received by correspondents of Lux Info Press in Havana, after this incident with Campos Corrales, officials at Combinado del Este also dragged across the floor of the prison the political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo of the Alternative Republican Movement in Havana and member of the Civic Movement Committee of the Varela Project, who was unjustly sentenced to 18 years in prison in the recent wave of repression that began last March. They left Tamayo's back full of lacerations only for requesting medical attention.

Etc., etc., etc.

Great post. Great comment.

Kashei:

The world is a nasty place. But, I do not see why it is America's job to make it better. It sounds like a recipe for more war and higher taxes.

Foreigners have to sort out their own problems. And America would do better if our politicians paid more attention to the problems at home than spreading 'democracy' abroad.

Dan

Dan, were you against the cold war? Did you think we should have let Russia make as much of the world Communist as it could?

Kashei:

If the question is, do I think the deaths of some 100,000 Americans in the Korean and Vietnam Wars were worth it, the answer would be no.

If the question is, should America have spent trillions of dollars (in today's terms) of defending a wealthy Western Europe and Japan against the Soviets, the answer would also be no.

If the question is, should the U.S. have propped up many unseemly governments around the world including the Shah of Iran and Mobutu of Zaire because they were 'friends' against the Soviets, the answer would also be no.

Just because the Soviets were bad does not mean that U.S. Cold War policy was right. And just because Hussein's Iraq was bad does not justify America's policies there either.

Dan

That was a great speech this morning. I was especially proud of him for saying that we have to remember that "modernisation does not mean Westernisation." Big props to the President for not being so Americentric as to ignore that... like too many of his recent critics are doing.

Dan -

You could debate the best way to deal with any situation from Germany to USSR. But in the end, leaders ACT. They make decisions, some good, some bad, but they follow a vision to the end.

The money and lives is sad indeed. But not worth it? Sacrifice is our nation's un-asked-for gift to the world.

What might be a better approach for you is to ask if we learned anything from past "mistakes" as you put them. And the answer is yes on many. We sought more than ever to limit American casualties. Vietnam was replaced by Shock and Awe.

We also spend untold of amounts of money in foreign nations, even before Iraq's 87 billion.