What’s the best way to mark the fifth annual Cuba Solidarity Day? If we want to help the long-suffering people of Fidel Castro’s island “paradise,” the answer should be obvious: Shine a light on the repression and tyranny that makes daily life there such a grinding ordeal. Show unflinching support for dissidents and advocates of non-violent change on the island. …

Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Cuba, later this month had the potential to greatly advance the cause of human freedom, which is, after all, the continuation of Jesus Christ’s work on this earth.  During this visit the pope could meet publicly with dissidents to offer them a measure of protection from their tormentors. He could speak clearly and loudly about their…

The tragic death of Cuban dissident Wilman Villar after a 50-day hunger strike should make clear that the Cuban people seek freedom and are increasingly willing to defy a repressive regime to get it.  They deserve outside moral support, which is best expressed by a repudiation of the regime that brutalizes them, not by establishing relations that would only…

Last week, just outside Cuba’s holiest Catholic shrine, government thugs attacked in plain daylight a group of opposition women -- beating them, stoning them and stripping them naked to the waist. The women, mostly black and middle-aged, suffered this public humiliation because they were trying to find a dignified way to bring attention to the plight of their husbands,…

As Muammar al-Qaddafi clings to power by ordering his troops to shoot on their Libyan compatriots, across the globe in the Caribbean one of his last remaining global buddies is doing his best to keep the lid on his own victims. Fidel Castro, presiding over the wreckage of what was once the thriving island of Cuba, stepped up repression today, the first anniversary of the…

When i was a child and the communist authorities would send a volunteer worker to inquire why I had not yet joined the Pioneros or generally was not going along with the rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, my grandmother would react in a way I found puzzling. She would show the visitor, usually a woman, to the sitting room my family used for people with whom we were not…

It was a strange way to kick off the Martin Luther King weekend. But last Friday night, President Obama slapped hundreds of Cuba’s political prisoners’ right in the face. That’s when the administration announced it will make it easier for Americans who support Castro’s government to send money there and visit the island for propaganda purposes. Travel restrictions…