Banned but not silenced

To start this blog I would like you to click here and listen to the beautiful and forbidden music of Cuba. Buena Vista Social Club can kiss my ass.

I want to write so much on this music and the movie it inspired, but I have to give it to Charlie Bravo at Killcastro for a marvelous post. If you haven't already read it, please click here.

Val, has a great post on the forbidden books in Cuba, and the fight to make them public. Click here if you want to read the details.

Many of the banned voices of journalists imprisioned for speaking their minds do not go un-noticed. Ziva at Blog for Cuba gives great attention to this as she posts extensively on the independent journalist Guillermo Fariñas hospitalized after 8 days of a hunger strike. Alfredo at el cafe cubano also points out how the EU wants to put pressure on fidel to release all political prisoners.

La ventanita gives a wonderful post and picture of the "memorial" that castro has put up in order to block the USIS ticker. Killcastro makes some excellent points on what a bad job the flags do on blocking the ticker, and some suggestions the USIS should consider broadcasting on it. As La ventanita put it: the ticker will continue, it will not be silenced.


Okay, I've refreshed the Habana Blues website about a zillion times while writing this. I can't get over the music, the movie, and the significance of it all. In this age of instant information -this age of internet and global communication- we find ourselves on the front of fighting against intellectual oppression. Oppression that seeks to block the minds of so many for the luxury of so few.

Dictators like fidel are no exception as he ban books, movies, music, photos, living human beings, freedom, truth, justice, and peace. Yet, what castro will never comprehend is that this is only a temporary oppression of the mind. Freedom is a God given right -so long as people can express themselves then these things will never be silenced. The truth will surface and the prisons will fill. More and more stories will be told and newer music will be played -banned but not silenced.