Michael Moore loves Cuban health care, but apparently forgot to look at Cuban prisons

This from Human Rights First, regarding the case of Cuban journalist and political dissident Dr. José Luis García Paneque, currently serving a 24-year sentence in Fidel's prisons:

Dr. García Paneque was arrested in March 2003 as part of a major crackdown on peaceful dissent in Cuba. He was charged under Law 88 and sentenced at a summary trial to 24 years in prison. Since 2005, he has been held in the “Las Mangas” prison in Bayamo, Cuba, where his health has been dangerously deteriorating.

In addition to developing severe digestive problems from the poor prison food and lack of movement and sunlight, Dr. García Paneque has been harassed by the common criminals in the prison. Dr. García Paneque cannot digest lactose and gluten, and such dietary restrictions are not accommodated by the prison diet. His wife reports that he has lost nearly 50 percent of his body weight.

In early June 2007, Dr. García Paneque informed his mother that the prison doctors had taken him to a hospital in Bayamo, Cuba, after he complained of intense abdominal pain. An ultrasound revealed a cyst measuring 36 by 38 mm on his kidney, which prison doctors want to surgically remove. Dr. García Paneque was transferred to the medical ward of “Las Mangas” from the beginning of June until the end of July 2007. The ward is not equipped to properly treat Dr. García Paneque’s health condition. Medical exams at the “Carlos Manuel de Céspedes” Hospital in Bayamo revealed that he is suffering from a cyst on his kidney and from pneumonia.

Despite his fragile health, Dr. García Paneque was returned to a humid cell without windows in early August 2007, sharing the space with more then 15 criminal detainees who reportedly subject him to harassment and beatings. On August 28, 2007, a common criminal entered Dr. García Paneque’s cell and beat him about the head. The injuries required four stitches above his eyebrow.

Members of Dr. García Paneque’s family, including his four young children, have been repeatedly harassed at home and at school, culminating in their fleeing the island in March 2007. Yamilé Llanes Labrada is an active member of the Ladies in White.

His family’s petitions for his release based on health concerns, as well as requests that he be treated by an independent medical professional, have gone unanswered by the Cuban authorities.

I continue my quixotic quest to find the true socialist workers' paradise.

(Being sure that Dr. García Paneque’s ill treatment in prison can be attributed to the US trade embargo.)

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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