Fidel Castro Gave Book of Memories to Rousseff

Thursday, 02 February 2012 10:30

Written by Radio Guantanamo

The leader of the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro Ruz, gave the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff two volumes of a biography on his life which is still unpublished.

It was reported by Globo news network, based on Brazilian diplomatic sources, regarding the private encounter between Rousseff and Fidel Castro in Havana.

According to sources, Fidel received Rousseff, who gave him Brazilian chocolates.

In a conversation lasting an hour and a half, said the president´s special adviser Aurelio Marco García, Dilma visited Fidel accompanied by the chancellor Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, the governor of Bahia, Jacques Wagner and Marco Aurelio himself.

They drank tea and water, in an encounter taking place before the president went to Mariel Port, a work financed by Brazil.

The leader, who made a visit of two to Cuba in order to promote Brazilian investment on the island, had said it could be “a proud” to be received by Fidel.

Rousseff, a former left guerrilla fighter against the dictatorship of her country, received from the Cuban leader two volumes written by the Cuban journalist Katiuska Blanco of a biography about him dealing with the guerrilla phase of the Revolution Chief.

The Brazilian head had visited Cuba and known Fidel in a congress on economics held in Havana in 1982.

Brazilian sources reported that great part of the encounter between Rousseff and Fidel Castro discussed on the crisis in Haiti, a country that is now visited by the Brazilian leader.

Translation: Ilia Charon

Brazil eases Cuba into free market economy

UPI.com

Published: Feb. 2, 2012 at 7:00 AM

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- Brazil is easing Cuba into the free market economy with a generous package of aid in cash and kind and joint projects that give the Latin American country a pre-eminent position in Havana's heady mix of communism and experimental capitalism.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff appeared to be in the right place at the right time when she flew into Havana in a spirit of revolutionary camaraderie and clinched deals that secured Brazil's status as the senior partner in a long-term, multifaceted relationship.

Current bilateral trade exceeds $642 million a year.

In talks with Fidel Castro, his brother President Raul Castro and senior Communist Party leaders, Rousseff readily invoked her own revolutionary credentials as a former left-wing guerrilla fighter and chided the United States for continuing to operate its Guantanamo Bay prison.

Her meeting with Fidel Castro was described in the media as an emotional encounter for the Brazilian president, who as a young militant was one of many Latin Americans who admired the Cuban leader after the 1959 communist takeover.

Rousseff followed in the footsteps of populist former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. But reports said she appeared quickly to have established rapport with the Castro administration.

The "excellent" ties secure Brazil an advantageous position in Cuba's hugely porous economy, hungry for basic consumer goods, investment and modernization. Economic upgrading in all sectors and a phased end to Cuba's international isolation offer lucrative opportunities for Brazil's state and private sectors.

Brazil will invest $640 million in a $900 million modernization of the Mariel container port, west of Havana, led by the Brazilian firm Odebrecht.

Brazil is also giving Cuba $400 million in credits for food imports and investing $200 million in modernizing Cuban agriculture. Rousseff pledged Cuba a long-term commitment to help its economic regeneration.

A Brazilian role in reviving the sugar industry will mean more investment and more private and public sector involvement.

Odebrecht and Cuba's state sugar company Grupo de Administracion Empresarial del Azucar are in talks to help revive the industry and may jointly operate available capacity, including the 5 de Septiembre sugar mill on the southern coast.

Cuban sugar production plummeted after the communist takeover and is reported to be about 1.2 million tons compared with 8 million tons in the first decade of Castro's rule.

Critics blame an inefficient state administration and lack of accountability among causes of the drop in production.

Brazilian interest in the modernization of Cuban sugar industry is linked to Brazilian plans to promote its pioneering production of cane-derived ethanol, which has led to most new cars in Brazil being fitted with flex-fuel technology to run on ethanol or gasoline or a mixture of both.

The port modernization program also fits in with Brazil's plan to forge fruitful partnerships that will benefit its aim of making its exports of both commodities and manufactured goods more competitive in the international markets.

Cubans say they need the Mariel port to be ready for expanded trade with the United States, whenever the U.S. embargo is lifted. The embargo, begun in 1960, is the longest on record.

Topics: Fidel Castro, Dilma Rousseff, Raul Castro, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff meets with Fidel and Raul Castro in Cuba

Chicago Tribune

Jeff Franks

Reuters

11:20 p.m. CST, January 31, 2012

(Reuters) - Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff met with Fidel Castro, the revolutionary hero of her youth, and held talks with his younger brother, President Raul Castro, on Tuesday in a visit to strengthen financial ties with communist-led Cuba.

She toured the port of Mariel near Havana where a Brazilian company is leading a massive renovation and chided the United States for its controversial military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Cuba released few details about the visit and did not allow coverage by the international media, but state-run television said the two governments signed agreements on Cuban food purchases from Brazil, the Mariel project and Cuba's biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industry.

A Brazilian diplomat confirmed that Rousseff had met with Fidel Castro, whose 1959 communist revolution she tried to emulate as a leftist guerrilla fighter against Brazil's 1960s military dictatorship.

She told reporters she would go see him with "much pride."

Citing a Brazilian press report, government website http://www.cubadebate.com said Rousseff, after lunching with Raul Castro, led a "small delegation" to meet the man who ruled Cuba for 49 years.

The 85-year-old Fidel Castro resigned the presidency four years ago, but still occasionally writes columns for Cuban press and meets with visiting leaders. Younger brother Raul Castro, who is 80, succeeded him in office.

Cuban media said Rousseff and Raul Castro discussed "the excellent state of their bilateral relations" and later toured the Mariel port together.

She said Brazil is contributing $640 million toward the $900 million project, led by Brazilian firm Odebrecht.

Mariel, best-known as the site of a 1980 Cuban exodus to the United States, is being turned into Cuba's main commercial port and hub for its nascent offshore oil industry.

HISTORIC COMMITMENT

She also said Brazil had granted $400 million in credits for Cuba to buy Brazilian food and $200 million under a program to improve Cuban agriculture.

Rousseff said Brazil had made a "historic commitment" to "help the process of economic development" on the island, which has been under a U.S. trade embargo for 50 years.

Cuba is in the midst of modernizing its creaky Soviet-style economy by easing the role of the state and encouraging more private initiative.

Brazil is one of Cuba's largest commercial partners, with $642 million in trade last year, and one of its biggest foreign investors. Brazil-Cuba economic and political ties were deepened under Rousseff's predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Rousseff arrived in Cuba on Monday amid controversies over the recent death of a jailed Cuban dissident and Brazil's decision to grant a visa to dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez.

Brazil's first woman president was arrested in 1970, tortured and imprisoned for three years for guerrilla activities, which some believe would make her more sympathetic to opponents of the Cuban government.

Sanchez and others asked to meet with her, which Brazilian media reports said was unlikely.

On Tuesday, Rousseff said she would discuss human rights with Cuban leaders, but that talks would include the controversial U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay for suspected terrorists.

"We are going to start by talking about human rights in the United States, with respect to a base here (in Cuba) called Guantanamo," she said.

The United States has been accused of depriving suspects of civil liberties by holding them indefinitely at the U.S. base in eastern Cuba. Many detainees have said they were tortured at the prison, opened in 2002 by President George W. Bush to hold suspected terrorists after the invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Rousseff did not speak of dissident Wilman Villar, who fellow government opponents said died of a hunger strike and mistreatment behind bars. The Cuban government has said he was a common criminal and denied that he conducted a hunger strike.

Of Sanchez, Rousseff said Brazil had given her a visa last week but whether she could travel was up to Cuba.

The Cuban government views Sanchez as one of its top opponents and as such a mercenary for the United States. It has repeatedly blocked her from traveling abroad, where she has a large international following.

Sanchez said on Twitter that she has requested permission from Cuba to go to Brazil and is awaiting an answer.

Rousseff was set to go to Haiti on Wednesday, where Brazilian troops lead the UN peacekeeping force and Brazil has helped finance a Cuban medical mission at work since a powerful earthquake struck that Caribbean nation last year.

(Additional reporting by Rosa Tania Valdes)

Yoani Sánchez no longer wants to be a Yankee Mercenary. Now she wants to go to Brazil.

Photograph: Javier Galeano/AP
Cuban blogger appeals to Brazil's president for help to leave Cuba

Dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez has issued a video plea after being denied permission to leave the country since 2004

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

guardian.co.uk - Thursday 5 January 2012 14.08 EST

The dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez – famed for her outspoken online critiques of the country's communist regime – has issued an appeal to Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, to help her leave the Caribbean island.

Sánchez, a Havana-based writer who has been accused by Cuban authorities of conducting a "cyberwar" against the government, has not been able to leave the country since 2004 because of migration rules that require Cubans to receive government permission to travel.

She has now been invited to the Brazilian state of Bahia in February for the screening of a documentary about press freedom in Cuba and Honduras in which she features.

But speaking to the Brazilian television channel Record this week, Sánchez said she expected her latest request for an exit permit would again be declined without "high-level intervention".

Sánchez told Record she had "exhausted all of the options inside my country to get them to allow me to travel".

In the video appeal to Rousseff, posted on YouTube, Sánchez called on Brazil's first female president to intervene.

"Please help me," said the blogger, who says it is her 19th attempt to get travel permission from Cuban authorities. "Through this small video I want to send a very respectful [and] very humble message … to the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff."

"Unfortunately I am forbidden from leaving my own country – I have not committed any crime."

Referring to the time Rousseff spent in jail during Brazil's military dictatorship, Sánchez said: "I know very well that she has felt first hand … what excessive control and repression is."

"I have done everything that is within my reach but the wall of control, the wall of censorship, the wall which stops me travelling freely and returning to my island seems not to move," said Sánchez, whose supporters have also created an online petition calling on Rousseff to intervene.

Before Christmas, activists had hoped that Cuba's president, Raúl Castro, would announce major changes to the country's migration laws, particularly the rule that means Cubans require exit permits to travel abroad.

But while Castro, who officially took over from his brother as president in 2008, announced pardons for nearly 3,000 prisoners, those hoping for a loosening of travel rules were disappointed.

"The migration reforms … were not announced again," Sánchez says in her video appeal to Rousseff. "In the 21st century … we are forbidden from leaving and entering freely our country."

Sánchez has earned international plaudits for her blog, Generación Y, on which she publishes regular critiques of the Cuban authorities, often secretively posted from internet cafes.

In 2008, Time magazine named her one of the world's 100 most influential people. The magazine's profile, written by the American novelist Oscar Hijuelos, described her "feisty dedication to the truth".

"Under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot: freedom of speech," Hijuelos wrote.

But while the blogger's supporters view her as a standard-bearer for press freedom, Cuban authorities have accused her of conducting a Washington-backed "cyberwar" against the island's communist regime.

In a recent piece for Foreign Policy magazine, the Cuban blogger said that while many foreign correspondents in Havana feared expulsion if they offended authorities, social networks were helping independent journalists get the message out.

"Opening the world's eyes to the real Cuba … no longer requires a wire service dispatch; it can be done with a cell phone," she wrote.

Meanwhile, Cuban authorities have vented their anger at a Twitter user whom they accused of starting a wave of online rumours this week claiming that the former president, Fidel Castro, had died.

An article posted on the state-run Cubadebate website pointed the finger of blame at a tweeter called @Naroh.

In the story, entitled: "New lie against #FidelCastro fails on Twitter", the website claimed that after the rumours began "necrophiliac counterrevolutionaries, aided by some media, immediately started to party." Responding to the allegations that he had started the hoax, Naroh tweeted: "Cuba is blaming me for killing Fidel Castro on Twitter. Can I now consider myself a Twit-star?"

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JG: Cuba should give her a kick in her rear end, and say: BON VOYAGE!