Harry's Place

The dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, in Berlin, tells of her visits to the Jewish Museum and the Stasi Museum.
Of the latter she writes:
I enter their cells, the interrogation rooms. I come from the perspective of a Cuban who was detained in the same place, where a window looking outward becomes an unattainable dream. One [...]

After finally getting a passport allowing her to travel outside Cuba, the great dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez has arrived in Brazil.
You can follow her blog posts here and her tweets here.
A small group of pro-Castro demonstrators have made a point of trying to harrass and silence her. They blocked the screening of a documentary film [...]

The good news from Cuba is that– after years of being denied permission to travel abroad– the great dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez (Generation Y) has obtained a new passport which will allow her to visit other countries.
By her own account Sanchez has on some 20 occasions been rejected for the much-detested exit visa that for [...]

This seems like a significant piece of welcome news from Cuba.  Rather than apply for a visa if they want to travel abroad, now Cubans will just require a passport:
Cuba previously saw people attempting to leave the country as traitors or enemies of the revolution, says our correspondent, but official recognition is growing that many [...]

This is a guest post by Howard Fuller, Branch Secretary, PCS South West Thames Branch (pc)

The Cuba Solidarity campaign held its usual fringe meeting at the Annual Conference of the Trade Unions Congress(TUC) this year attended by several leading trade union figures including Bob Crow, General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and [...]

I read on this blog how many members of the Cuban Patriotic Union, an organisation whose aims are to promote democracy using non-violent means, have been arrested.  More than 60 dissidents have also apparently been arrested, some of them during a vigil being held for political prisoners.
The dissident Ladies in White, meanwhile, urged democratic governments [...]

Here’s something I wrote back in 2003:
Here’s when I’ll believe that most of the Western Left has finally wised up (or grown up):
–When Oswaldo Paya’s picture replaces Che Guevara’s on hundreds of thousands of t-shirts.
–When filmmakers like Oliver Stone make positive documentaries about Oswaldo Paya instead of Fidel Castro.
–When leftist publications and organizations demand that [...]

Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez writes about the Havana neighborhood that houses foreign diplomats and many of Cuba’s privileged elite. (The area is dominated by the former embassy of the USSR, now the Russian embassy, a building which tells you everything you need to know about the Soviet-Cuban relationship.)
A meet-and-greet place that is also called the [...]

This is a guest post by Hubert Gieschen, PCS Members Trustee (personal capacity)
On 13 February 2012 the British TUC, the umbrella organisation of British trade unions, wrote to the Mexican ambassador about lack of freedom of association in Mexico to call for an end to the use of protection contracts in Mexico, which are [...]

The dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez writes about an abortive effort by her and her husband to take a boat ride normally limited to foreign tourists, under the title “Apartheid Persists.”
We arrived at the dock half an hour early. The sun-burnt tourists began to board the boat. Rei and I reached the spectacular corner from [...]