Category: Communism

Miami Cubans Sent “El Voto Castigo” Protest to Clinton’s Betrayal of Elián González

“Armed federal agents raided the Miami house where Elián González, second from right, was staying with relatives.” Source of photo and caption: NYT article quoted and cited below. The original photographer was Alan Diaz/Associated Press.

Today (April 22, 2023) is the 23rd anniversary of the day when the Clinton Administration seized a six year old boy in order to force him back into the slavery that his mother had died trying to escape.

(p. C1) MIAMI BEACH — Elián González, the little Cuban boy at the center of a new play bearing his name, never appears onstage. Instead, audiences hear the sound of a child’s high-pitched giggle, a haunting echo of the events that, more than two decades ago, ripped Miami apart and riveted the nation.

One of three survivors after a storm capsized the small boat carrying his mother and about a dozen others fleeing Cuba, Elián was the center of a monthslong custody battle — his father and the dictator Fidel Castro on one side, Miami relatives and Cuban exiles on the other — that became a proxy for a larger political struggle. After U.S. immigration agents launched a pre-dawn raid in Little Havana to reunite the boy with his father, who ultimately brought him back to Cuba, outraged opponents protested in the streets.

For years, the story’s enduring image has been the dramatic photograph of a terrified 6-year-old boy, cornered by an armed federal agent. Miami New Drama now hopes to broaden that portrait with “Elián,” by the Cuban American playwright Rogelio Martinez, which examines the pain, rage, confu-(p. C4)sion and division that still resonates in a city filled with immigrants.

“Elian was a pivotal event,” said Michel Hausmann, who directed the play and is Miami New Drama’s artistic director. “Let people get upset, let them argue. I think it’s part of our duty as artists.”

. . .

It is all part of Hausmann’s mission to speak to this majority Latino city. A Jewish Venezuelan who left his native country in 2009 amid rising antisemitism and attacks on his Caracas theater troupe from the socialist government, he has commissioned multiple popular plays centered on the Cuban American and Venezuelan communities.

. . .

Enraged by the U.S. government’s actions, thousands of Cuban Americans switched from Democrat to Republican in what they called “el voto castigo” (the punishment vote). It was a crucial shift in an election year, with George W. Bush becoming president after defeating Vice President Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes.

. . .

Martinez, the playwright, has long been interested in politics, with a Cold War trilogy among his plays that have been produced by leading theaters around the country. But with “Elián,” politics became personal.

Martinez’s mother brought him to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when he was 9, but avoided telling him that the Cuban authorities were not allowing his father to leave.

“My mom said, ‘We’ll see him next week,’” Martinez said. “Like we’re just going ahead. But as we were getting into the car, my mom said, ‘Go, go back. Go hug your dad.’”

Martinez did not see his father again until he was an adult, and only briefly.

. . .

Diaz, the lawyer and former mayor, was 6 when his mother brought him to Miami in 1961, forced to leave behind his father, a political prisoner. He was deeply wounded by the raid, which the play portrays as a betrayal of an agreement Elián’s relatives in Miami had signed with Reno 12 hours before. His character struggles to reconcile his faith in the system with his feelings as an exile.

“If you forget these things, they can happen again,” the real-life Diaz said. “It was an incredible learning experience,” he added, “to find myself fighting my old country and my new country at the same time.”

. . .

“You are doing great work in presenting this,” a host for Mega TV, Padre Alberto, told Hausmann and Pelaez, his guests from the play. “Elián was very difficult for all of us, and it continues to be very hard to think about, and to make us very emotional.”

Glenda and Dariel Candelario experienced such emotion at a recent performance. The couple, who emigrated from Cuba in 2014, were among the thousands of children forced to attend rallies in Havana demanding Elián’s return. “They didn’t give us any choice,” Glenda Candelario said.

“We had been indoctrinated — we only had the Cuban government part of the story,” said her husband, who was 15 at the time. “I’m so excited to see this now, to hear the other side.”

For the full story, see:

Jordan Levin. “Divisive Battle Over Elián González Reverberates on a Miami Stage.” The New York Times (Saturday, September 12, 2022): C1 & C4.

[Note: ellipses added.]

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 15, 2022, and has the title “Cuban Boy’s Odyssey Is Revisited.” Where the wording differs between versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

“France’s Most Famous Public Intellectual” Fears That if Putin Conquers Ukraine Western Civilization “Might Collapse”

(p. C1) In his new documentary film “Slava Ukraini,” Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most famous public intellectual, dodges Russian sniper fire in Ukraine, nonchalantly wearing a khaki bulletproof vest over a chic bespoke suit.

He climbs onto a Ukrainian naval vessel in Odessa that is sweeping the Black Sea for Russian mines, his mane of graying hair blowing gently in the wind. And he surveys blown-out apartment blocks in Kyiv, descends into trenches with Ukrainian soldiers in Sloviansk and comforts a mother whose young son is so traumatized by war, he has stopped speaking.

It can be easy to dismiss Lévy — and plenty do — as a 74-year-old reckless war tourist, an heir to a timber fortune playing action hero as Russian missiles rain down on Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol. But instead of spending the last 12 months in his art-filled home on Paris’s right bank or enjoying retirement at his 18th-century palace in Marrakesh, Lévy has been braving Russian military assaults, vertigo and what (p. C5) he calls his natural tendency for melancholy to make his Ukraine film.

It was, he said, a necessary cri de coeur to support Ukraine in a conflict he views as nothing less than a battle for the future of Europe, global liberalism and Western civilization.

“In Ukraine, I had the feeling for the first time that the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren, might collapse,” he said during an interview at the Carlyle Hotel in New York earlier this month, . . .

For the full story, see:

Dan Bilefsky. “A Philosopher Chooses Action.” The New York Times (Wednesday, March 1, 2023): C1 & C5.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 28, 2023, and has the title “A Polarizing French Philosopher Chooses War Zones Over Salons.”)


William F. Buckley, Sr. Spent $100,000 to Fund His Son’s Entrepreneurial Start-Up: National Review

In my Openness book, I give reasons why risky innovative start-ups at fragile early stages almost always need to be substantially self-funded. When close relatives invest, I include that as self-funding.

(p. A15) . . . “William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908-1922,” [is] a fascinating if uneven book by the independent historian John A. Adams Jr.

. . .

The business climate in Mexico was promising for foreigners like the Buckleys, thanks to the pro-development policies of its autocratic president, Porfirio Díaz, who would rule the country for more than three decades.

Buckley’s prominence among the American expatriate community made him a natural conduit between officials in the U.S. and Mexico once the latter country was plunged into chaos following the ouster of Díaz in 1911. Buckley was Zelig-like, cropping up repeatedly at key moments. He visited the U.S. Embassy in February 1913 during the Decena Tragíca (Ten Tragic Days), when Francisco Madero, Díaz’s successor, was overthrown in a coup led by Gen. Victoriano Huerta, instigating a spasm of violence that killed thousands in Mexico City.

. . .

Buckley favored Huerta, serving as the regime’s legal counsel in negotiations with the U.S. aimed at preventing hostilities between the two nations. He was thus dismayed by the ascendance of Venustiano Carranza and, later, Álvaro Obregón. Both leaders endorsed the Mexican Constitution of 1917, including Article 27, which asserted national ownership of natural resources while circumscribing the economic power of the church. These provisions horrified Buckley, who was a staunch believer in free-market capitalism as well as a devout Roman Catholic. In the bulletin of the American Association of Mexico, an advocacy group he founded in 1919, Buckley denounced the “dangerous Bolshevist movement” that had taken root in Mexico.

. . .

. . ., Mr. Adams consulted with several Buckley family members, including a descendant based in Mexico City, as well as Judge James L. Buckley, the sole survivor among the 10 children born to Will and his wife, Aloise. Judge Buckley, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, contributed a foreword acknowledging the importance of Mexico to the family’s understanding of itself, writing that “it had somehow permeated our DNA.”

. . .

As another of his offspring once said, Buckley’s experience in Mexico “deepened his frontier suspicions of autocratic [leaders] (and big government in general), and this attitude dyes all his children strongly.” Surely that was true of Buckley’s favorite son, William F. Buckley Jr., who, after serving a short stint with the CIA in Mexico City (he, too, was fluent in Spanish), founded National Review in 1955, which remains one of the leading voices of the conservative movement. The elder Buckley helped fund his son’s upstart venture with a $100,000 contribution from a fortune that traced its origins to Mexico during the most tumultuous period of that nation’s history.

For the full review, see:

Andrew R. Graybill. “BOOKSHELF; Conservatism’s Mexican Roots.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 27, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 26, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘William F. Buckley Sr.’ Review: Conservatism’s Mexican Roots.”)

The book under review:

Adams, John A., Jr. William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908–1922. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023.

Communist China Fails Again at Flailing Efforts to Centrally Plan Fertility

(p. 1) In China, a country that limits most couples to three children, one province is making a bold pitch to try to get its citizens to procreate: have as many babies as you want, even if you are unmarried.

The initiative, which came into effect this month, points to the renewed urgency of China’s efforts to spark a baby boom after its population shrank last year for the first time since a national famine in the 1960s.

. . .

Many young Chinese adults, who themselves were born during China’s draconian one-child policy, are pushing back on the government’s inducements to have babies in a country that is among the most expensive in the world to raise a child.

. . .

(p. 12) Efforts by the ruling Communist Party to raise fertility rates — by permitting all couples to have two children in 2016, then three in 2021 — have struggled to gain traction. The new policy in Sichuan drew widespread attention because it essentially disregards birth limits altogether, showing how the demographic crisis is nudging the party to slowly relinquish its iron grip over the reproductive rights of its citizens.

“The two-child policy failed. The three-child policy failed,” said Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied Chinese population trends. “This is the natural next step.”

Sichuan, the country’s fifth-largest province with 84 million people, lifted all limits on the number of children that residents can register with the local government, . . .

For the full story, see:

Nicole Hong and Zixu Wang. “Public Is Wary Of China’s Push For Baby Boom.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, February 26, 2023): 1 & 12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “Desperate for Babies, China Races to Undo an Era of Birth Limits. Is It Too Late?”)

Poland Rises Above Past Conflict With Ukraine Because “Russia Has Always Been the Bigger Evil”

(p. A1) . . . the paradox of foreigner-leery governments taking in huge numbers of Ukrainians has been especially stark in Poland, long one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous countries with a deep-seated mistrust of outsiders and a tangled, often painful history with Ukraine.

. . .

. . . , consider the change of heart Ryszard Marcinkowski, 74, a retired Polish railway worker, experienced.

. . .

He grew up with horror stories about the brutality of Ukrainian nationalists told by his parents and aunt, all refugees from formerly Polish lands in what, since World War II, has been western Ukraine.

Yet when millions of Ukrainians started arriving in Poland last February [2022], Mr. Marcinkowski drove to the border to deliver food and other supplies.

“I had a very bad image of Ukrainians from my family but realized that I had to help them,” Mr. Marcinkowski said. “For Poland,” he added, “Russia has always been the bigger evil.”

For the full story, see:

Andrew Higgins. “Insular Poland Opens to Wave Of Newcomers.” The New York Times (Thursday, February 23, 2023): A1 & A8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 22, 2023, and has the title “How Poland, Long Leery of Foreigners, Opened Up to Ukrainians.”)

Brilliant, Courageous, Charming, WASP Publisher Defended Human Rights

(p. A24) John Macrae III, a dashing publisher who gambled on groundbreaking books and dauntlessly defended authors who defied injustices committed by their own governments, died on Feb. 1 [2023] at his home in Manhattan.

. . .

Mr. Macrae was among those who urged his fellow publishers to boycott the Moscow Book Fair in 1983 to protest the Soviet Union’s treatment of dissidents.

He flew to Poland with his stepson Nick and a portable folding kayak to navigate the Vistula River and meet with anti-government leaders undetected. He then met with intermediaries for Lech Walesa, leader of the outlawed Solidarity trade union, and persuaded him to write his autobiography.

Mr. Macrae also championed Salman Rushdie when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in 1989 accused Mr. Rushdie of blaspheming Islam in his novel “The Satanic Verses” and enjoined Muslims to kill him.

“Jack traveled to Cuba and Iran on human rights missions,” Jeri Laber, a founder of Human Rights Watch, said, noting that in addition to making “several trips on his own to Communist Poland,” he traveled to Communist Czechoslovakia to meet with the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, later to become the Czech Republic’s first president.

. . .

Amy Hertz, a former Dutton editor, wrote in The Huffington Post in 2010 that as a publisher Mr. Macrae “went after memoirs from apartheid South Africa and the end of the Cultural Revolution in China so that people would understand the suffering caused by lack of freedom.” And, she said, “he brought over the great Russian poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, and he worked with them to get Russian dissidents released from prison.”

“Jack’s brilliance,” Ms. Hertz added, “and what he passed along to me, is in not worrying about what’s on the page you’re looking at when evaluating a proposal or a manuscript. His brilliance is in hearing the thinking behind the author’s words, inchoate in the holy mess that when I worked for him was usually spread across his office floor. He taught me to find that kernel and to burnish it.”

. . .

“He was probably the last of the old-time, gentleman WASP publishers — born into the business,” said Charles McGrath, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review. “He had immense personal charm, and it was hard not to get swept up by him.”

Late in life, Mr. McGrath added, “he found out he had multiple sclerosis, but didn’t let that slow him down. He zipped around the office — and the city, for that matter — in a motorized wheelchair, as cheerful as ever.”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “John Macrae III, 91, Publisher And Rights Champion, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Friday, February 24, 2023): A24.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Feb. 27, 2023, and has the title “John Macrae III, Eclectic Publisher and Rights Champion, Dies at 91.”)

Russian-Speaking Ukrainian Says When You “Have Felt a Whiff of Freedom . . . You Don’t Want to Go Back”

(p. A4) EASTERN Ukraine –— After a year of war, I remember most the things people said.

Svetlana, a woman in her 60s from Kharkiv, standing amid the press of refugees at a train station, explained why Russian-speaking Ukrainians like her, who had lived half their life in the Soviet Union, did not want to live under Russian control.

“We have felt a whiff of freedom,” she said. “After that, you don’t want to go back.”

For the full commentary, see:

Gall, Carolotta. “We Have Felt a Whiff of Freedom.” The New York Times (Saturday, February 25, 2023): A4.

(Note: on 2/27/23, I spent time searching for the online version of this article on the NYT web site and failed to find it.)

Entrepreneur Andy Yen’s Technology Enables Russians to Elude Censors

(p. A1) After Moscow erected a digital barricade in March [2022], blocking access to independent news sites and social media platforms to hide information about its unfolding invasion of Ukraine, many Russians looked for a workaround. One reliable route they found came from a small Swiss company based nearly 2,000 miles away.

The company, Proton, provides free software that masks a person’s identity and location online. That gives a user in Russia access to the open web by making it appear that the person is logging in from the Netherlands, Japan or the United States. A couple of weeks after the internet blockade, about 850,000 people inside Russia used Proton each day, up from fewer than 25,000.

That is, until the end of March, when the Russian government found a way to block Proton, too.

Targeting Proton was the opening salvo of a continuing back-and-forth battle, pitting a team of about 25 engineers against a country embarking on one of the most aggressive censorship campaigns in recent memory.

Working from a Geneva office where the company keeps its name off the building directory, Proton has spent nine pressure-packed months repeatedly tweaking its technology to avoid Russian blocks, only to be countered again by government censors in Moscow. Some employees took (p. A9) Proton off their social media profiles out of concern that they would be targeted personally.

The high-stakes chess match mirrors what is playing out with growing frequency in countries facing coups, wars and authoritarian rule, where restricting the internet is a tool of repression. The blocks drive citizens to look for workarounds. Engineers at companies like Proton think up new ways for those people to secretly reach the open web. And governments, in turn, seek out new technical tricks to plug leaks.

. . .

Companies rarely discuss being targeted by an authoritarian government out of fear of escalating the conflict. But Andy Yen, Proton’s founder and chief executive, said that after a period of trying to keep its “head down,” Proton wanted to raise awareness about the increasing sophistication of governments, in Russia and elsewhere, to block citizens from reaching the open web and the need for technologists, companies and governments to push back.

. . .

“We’re gearing up for a long fight,” Mr. Yen said in an interview at the company’s office. “Everybody hopes this will have a happy ending, but it’s not guaranteed. We don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, in fact, but you keep going because if we don’t do it, then maybe nobody else will.”

. . .

The battle took on a “Spy vs. Spy” dynamic in Proton’s headquarters. Mr. Yen said a network of people within the government, telecommunications firms and civil society groups had helped Proton operate in Russia, providing access to local networks and sharing intelligence about how the censorship system worked. But those contacts began to go dark as the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent intensified.

. . .

Mr. Yen was interrupted during a staff meeting in mid-July with news that Russian censors had come up with an even more elaborate block. A corporate chart from the time shows use dropping off a cliff. Russian engineers had identified what is known as an authentication “handshake,” the vital moment when Proton’s VPN connection gets established before reaching the wider web. Blocking the link made Proton’s service essentially unusable.

“We had no idea what was happening and how they were doing it,” Mr. Cesarano said.

By August, after working around the clock for days to find a fix, Proton acknowledged defeat and pulled its app from Russia. The company has spent the months since then developing a new architecture that makes its VPN service harder to identify because it looks more like a regular website to censorship software scanning a country’s internet traffic. Proton has been successfully testing the system in Iran, where Proton has seen a sharp increase in VPN use during recent political demonstrations.

In Russia, Proton has reintroduced its apps using the new system. Mr. Yen acknowledged that it probably wasn’t a long-term fix. He has confidence in the new technology, but figures Russian engineers will eventually figure out a new way to push back, and the game will continue.

For the full story, see:

Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur. “The Cat-and-Mouse Battle for Russia’s Internet.” The New York Times (Wednesday, December 7, 2022): A1 & A9.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.]

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 9, 2022, and has the title “Inside the Face-Off Between Russia and a Small Internet Access Firm.” )

Taiwanese Engineers Who Built Dictator Xi’s Computer Chips, Are Voting With Their Feet for Taiwan’s Democracy and Freedom

(p. B1) TAIPEI, Taiwan — The job offer from a Chinese semiconductor company was appealing. A higher salary. Work trips to explore new technologies.

No matter that it would be less prestigious for Kevin Li than his job in Taiwan at one of the world’s leading chip makers. Mr. Li eagerly moved to northeast China in 2018, taking part in a wave of corporate migration as the Chinese government moved aggressively to build up its semiconductor industry.

He went back to Taiwan after two years, as Covid-19 swept through China and global tensions intensified. Other highly skilled Taiwanese engineers are going home, too.

For many, the strict pandemic measures have been tiresome. Geopolitics has made the job even more fraught, with China increasingly vocal about staking its claim on Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy.

. . .

(p. B4) For now, Mr. Li is staying in Taiwan, working for an American chip company operating there and siding with the invigorated patriotic sentiment and the ethos of individual liberty.

“The advantage of working in Taiwan is that you don’t have to worry about officials shutting down the whole company because of one thought,” he said. “The atmosphere is very important. At least I can watch all kinds of programs criticizing the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait without worrying about being arrested.”

For the full story, see:

Jane Perlez, Amy Chang Chien and John Liu. “Taiwanese Who Built Up Chip Sector in China Are Fed Up and Going Home.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 22, 2022): B1 & B4.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 16, 2022, and has the title “Engineers From Taiwan Bolstered China’s Chip Industry. Now They’re Leaving.” The online version says that the title of the print version is “They Built Up China’s Chip Sector. Now, They’re Going Home to Taiwan” but the title of my national edition copy is “Taiwanese Who Built Up Chip Sector in China Are Fed Up and Going Home.”)

Venture Capitalist Invested in Mainland But Now Prefers Taiwan’s “Freedom”

(p. B10) TAIPEI—Tim Draper, a venture capitalist known for his early bets in Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, is feeling good about his decision to stop investing in China.

In an interview in Taiwan, where he is pursuing new investments, Mr. Draper slammed China’s Xi Jinping, whom he called a “weak leader,” saying the country is going backward after more than four decades of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” policy.

“It’s not a place where you invest money to get a return,” he said. “I see China as a place where the government is trying to control everybody.”

An early investor in Baidu Inc.—China’s BIDU equivalent of Google—Mr. Draper said he pulled out completely and froze investment in the country around 2014 after a startup he had invested in was fined by regulators. It was a sign, he said, of the government’s increasing interference in the market.

. . .

Mr. Draper’s fund made its first investments in Taiwan last year, when it bought stakes in Taipei-based digital news company TNL Media Group and other startups. He said he would continue to invest in the island, which he believes will attract frustrated entrepreneurs from China with its openness.

“I’m coming to Taiwan. I’m not going to China,” he said, praising the democracy’s “freedom and trust.”

For the full story, see:

Joyu Wang. “Venture Capitalist Touts His Turning from China.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, September 19, 2022): B10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date September 18, 2022, and has the title “Tim Draper Touts Decision to Pull Out of China.”)

Lancet Editorial Praised Chinese Communists’ Covid Policy of “Restricting Public Freedoms”

(p. A17) China’s zero-Covid policies have recently come under criticism from public-health leaders—including those at the World Health Organization—who once held them up as a model for the West.

“China’s success rests largely with a strong administrative system that it can mobilise in times of threat, combined with the ready agreement of the Chinese people to obey stringent public health procedures,” the Lancet editorialized on March 7, 2020. Western countries, it added, “must abandon their fears of the negative short-term public and economic consequences that may follow from restricting public freedoms as part of more assertive infection control measures.”

That hasn’t worn well. The negative social and economic consequences of lockdowns in the West—from learning losses and destroyed small businesses to alcoholism and drug abuse—weren’t “short-term.” Nor were China’s draconian zero-Covid policies, which three years later are only slowly being eased.

For the full commentary, see:

Allysia Finley. “LIFE SCIENCE; Western Scientists Cheered On China’s Covid Repression.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 12, 2022): A17.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 11, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)