Thanksgiving In Cuba

Reflects U. S. Ties
Posted: Friday, November 27th, 2015::

       This remarkable EFE photo was taken Thanksgiving day -- November 26, 2015. It shows some of the more than one thousand people -- Cubans, Americans, Japanese, Albanians, etc. -- dancing the salsa at the famed Malecon seafront in Havana, Cuba. 

        This photo is courtesy of Penn State University. The Penn State baseball team is playing a 4-game series this week at Latin American Stadium in Havana. #28 is the Penn State third baseman Willie Burger fielding a ground ball against Ciego De Avila, which won the game 2-to-0 in Game 2 of the series. The American university had played the Industriales in Game 1. The Good Will supersedes who wins the games.

        This photo is courtesy of Havana Times.org. Fifty members of the American peace group Code Pink held a Thanksgiving Day hunger strike at the U. S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As the sign indicates, Code Pink wants the United States to close the military base and return the land to Cuba.

Colonel Ann Wright is the leader of Code Pink.

7-story U. S. Embassy building in Havana.

        On Thanksgiving Day 2015 an insightful new book -- "Cuba 1959" -- was released in the U. S. It is an amazing portrait of the first week in January of 1959 when Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution replaced the overthrown Batista dictatorship. Most of the photos, such as the one above, have never been published before. Burt Glinn, on assignment for Magnum Photos, was the photographer. He passed away in 2008 but now this book chronicles in pictures what happened in Havana that eventful week.

       By the time Burt Glinn arrived in Havana from New York on January 1, 1959, Fulgencio Batista's getaway airplane had landed in the Dominican Republic, Mafia kingpin Meyer Lansky was safe in Florida, etc. But Glinn was there in time to photograph this shoot-out as Batista loyalists fired shots at the conquering rebels.

     The EFE photo above was taken on Thanksgiving Day -- Nov. 26, 2015. It shows some of the more than 3,000 Cubans stopped by Nicaraguan soldiers at the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border. They reportedly have been told by human traffickers that a possible normalization of relations between Cuba and the U. S. might cause an end to a litany of U. S. laws favoring Cubans that encourage Cubans to defect to the U. S. One of those laws -- dating back to the Cold War in 1966 -- is known as Wet Foot/Dry Foot and allows any Cuba that sets foot on U. S. soil to have permanent residency and instant welfare. On Thanksgiving Day this week, member nations of the Central American Integration System, known as SICA, voted unanimously to condemn U. S. laws that strictly favor Cubans and strongly discriminate against all non-Cubans.

            The Central American Integration System {SICA} includes these countres: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, and the Dominican Republic. Observer nations include: Mexico, Chile, Brazil, China, Spain, Germany, and Japan. SICA has offices at the United Nations. Its unanimous vote on Thanksgiving Day to condemn Wet Foot/Dry Foot, the 1966 U. S. law that still induces Cubans to defect to the United States while discriminating against all non-Cubans, will be ignored by the United States government just as the recent 199-to-2 vote in the UN condemning the U. S. embargo of Cuba is routinely ignored year after year. 

     This heart-wrenching Reuters photo was taken Thanksgiving Day in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. These Honduran women are mourning relatives newly killed in a city that leads the world in homicides. Reuters reported that there were 15 such murders in the 12-hour period its reporters covered on Thanksgiving Day. Cities in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala -- just below Mexico's southern border -- have murder rates comparable to Tegucigalpa. On Thanksgiving Day Aljazeera America's brilliant journalist, Mary Jane Gliha, hosted a documentary directly from the scenes of constant murders in those three countries. Her documentary is entitled "Mexico's Migrant Crackdown" and, if you missed it, it's worth going online to view it. Teenage girls desperately trying to escape forced prostitution and murder are interviewed in their desperate attempts to reach the Mexican-U.S. border. But Mexico is now "cracking-down" at the behest of the U. S. and rounding them up and sending them on 12-hour bus rides back to Honduras, where the girls told Mary Jane Gliha they will try again if they are not routinely murdered for refusing to be forced prostitutes. If those girls were Cuban, they would be home free and on welfare the moment their front foot touched U. S. soil at the Mexican border. While Cubans have powerful incentives, mostly economic, to reach the U. S., Cuba is not engulfed with gangs or violent crime. The special Cuban laws in the U. S. that so mightily favor Cubans are strictly political and revengeful as well as being undemocratic. Ask the Honduran women depicted above on Thanksgiving Day, or study Ms. Gliha's documentary.

By the wayAnd by the way:

      The EPA photo above was taken at an air show Thanksgiving Day at the Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand. It shows two Chinese J-10 fighter jets stealing the show with spine-tingling acrobatic moves. China has upgraded its air force and navy.

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