Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalDeep in an ancient cave an unexpected form of life
Deep in an ancient cave … an unexpected form of life
Dec 8, 2016 / Lars Abromeit
A team of geologists has been exploring the caves beneath the table mountains of Venezuela, where new lifeforms may have been quietly developing for millions of years. Journalist Lars Abromeit describes the expedition into the unknown.
We are in Canaracuni, a village on the northern edge of the Amazon basin. A concert of cicadas, frogs and night swallows drifts over the mud huts of the Ye’kuana people. A few hunters sit around the fire, working on traps and arrows. Some 2,300 meters (7,546 feet) above us rises a mysterious mountain — the Ye’kuana call it “Sarisariñama,” one of the largest of the more than 100 table mountains in the area bordered by Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana. These mountains are incomprehensibly old, the last remains of a gigantic plateau of sand that covered this region more than 1.7 billion years ago. Geologist Francesco Sauro (TED Talk: Deep under the earth’s surface, discovering beauty and science), who has been exploring caves since his childhood and is a professor at the University of Bologna in Italy, is co-leading an exploration into the underworld of this particular table mountain, or tepui. What can the caves below tell us about primitive times? And what creatures live in it? These are the questions that Sauro, together with his geology colleague Marco Mecchia, ten other speleologists from the La Venta and Theraphosa cave research associations, and I have come to here to answer.
Untold numbers of simas, or sinkholes, break through summit plateau of the Sarisariñama and may often lead the way to larger catacombs underground. Photo by Robbie Shone
We descend on Sarisariñama via helicopter. As we step onto the ground, a wonderful fragrance surrounds us, from orchids, tree lilies and trees densely covered with mosses and other plants. It’s like we’ve landed on a strange jungle planet.
Tectonic forces raised the sandstone plateau of the tepuis over hundreds of millions of years. Then the plateau was slowly eroded and transformed by rain and storms. Here, evolution has created new species, including carnivorous plants lurking between the mists and dozens of unique bromeliads.
More:
http://ideas.ted.com/deep-in-an-ancient-cave-an-unexpected-form-of-life/
California man's 'meltdown over alpacas' in Peru goes viral
California man's 'meltdown over alpacas' in Peru goes viral
By Ben Hooper Contact the Author | Dec. 8, 2016 at 4:18 PM
This man loves alpacas. Photo by @beavs/Twitter
SANTA MONICA, Calif., Dec. 8 (UPI) -- A California man's "meltdown" when he met his first alpacas in Peru is going viral thanks to some photos shared by his daughter.
Santa Monica resident Alexandria Neonakis posted a series of text message screenshots to Twitter showing the conversation she had with her father, Dimitris, as he sent her photos of himself with the alpacas -- furry llama cousins -- during his trip to Peru.
"This was the absolute SOFTEST and most HUGGABLE animal EVER. It is an Alpahaca. I just couldn't stop hugging it and kissing it and putting my face on its thick soft wool," Dimitris told his daughter, along with a photo of him embracing one of the creatures.
"Its wool was so soft on my face it kept me laughing," the father wrote. "That was the softest ever."
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2016/12/08/California-mans-meltdown-over-alpacas-in-Peru-goes-viral/3331481230642/?spt=sec&or=on
[center] 
Remember to dance with alpacas.
Don't try to outrun an alpaca. Just pretend you're not there.
http://www.alpacalink.com/assets/HISTORY/It'sAnAlpacaPoster.jpg
US court allows victims lawsuit against Chiquita over Colombia killings: Attorney
Source: Colombia Reports
US court allows victims’ lawsuit against Chiquita over Colombia killings: Attorney
written by Stephen Gill December 6, 2016
A US judge ruled Colombian war victims are allowed to sue banana giant Chiquita Brands under American jurisdiction, according to the victims’ defense.
The court decision quashed the multinational fruit and vegetable company’s pleas to hear the case in Colombia where they no longer have operations nor assets and allows it to proceed in the US where they can pay for their crimes.
. . .
Chiquita Brands in 2007 was fined $25 million after being found guilty of paying $1.7 million to now-defunct paramilitary umbrella group the AUC , between 1997 and 2004.
The $25 million however was paid to the US government with the families of the victims not receiving a cent.
Read more: http://colombiareports.com/us-court-allows-victims-lawsuit-chiquita-colombia-killings-attorney/
You imagine the leader of that island with approximately 10,000,000 people, maximum, at that time,
had the wherewithal, and the intention of killing John F. Kennedy?
Didn't you know John F. Kennedy held secret meetings between his aide, and Che Guevara in the months prior to his assassination?
[center]Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba
INITIATIVE WITH CASTRO ABORTED BY ASSASSINATION,
DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS SHOW
Oval Office Tape Reveals Strategy to hold clandestine Meeting in Havana; Documents record role of ABC News correspondent Lisa Howard as secret intermediary in Rapprochement effort
Posted - November 24, 2003[/center]
Washington D.C. - On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the eve of the broadcast of a new documentary film on Kennedy and Castro, the National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the President and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing the possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape, dated only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records a briefing from Bundy on Castro's invitation to a U.S. official at the United Nations, William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret talks on improving relations with Washington. The tape captures President Kennedy's approval if official U.S. involvement could be plausibly denied.
The possibility of a meeting in Havana evolved from a shift in the President's thinking on the possibility of what declassified White House records called "an accommodation with Castro" in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Proposals from Bundy's office in the spring of 1963 called for pursuing "the sweet approach…enticing Castro over to us," as a potentially more successful policy than CIA covert efforts to overthrow his regime. Top Secret White House memos record Kennedy's position that "we should start thinking along more flexible lines" and that "the president, himself, is very interested in [the prospect for negotiations]." Castro, too, appeared interested. In a May 1963 ABC News special on Cuba, Castro told correspondent Lisa Howard that he considered a rapprochement with Washington "possible if the United States government wishes it. In that case," he said, "we would be agreed to seek and find a basis" for improved relations.
The untold story of the Kennedy-Castro effort to seek an accommodation is the subject of a new documentary film, KENNEDY AND CASTRO: THE SECRET HISTORY, broadcast on the Discovery/Times cable channel on November 25 at 8pm. The documentary film, which focuses on Ms. Howard's role as a secret intermediary in the effort toward dialogue, was based on an article -- "JFK and Castro: The Secret Quest for Accommodation" -- written by Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh in the magazine, Cigar Aficionado. Kornbluh served as consulting producer and provided key declassified documents that are highlighted in the film. "The documents show that JFK clearly wanted to change the framework of hostile U.S. relations with Cuba," according to Kornbluh. "His assassination, at the very moment this initiative was coming to fruition, leaves a major 'what if' in the ensuing history of the U.S. conflict with Cuba."
Among the key documents relevant to this history:
•Oval Office audio tape, November 5, 1963. The tape records a conversation between the President and McGeorge Bundy regarding Castro's invitation to William Attwood, a deputy to UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, to come to Cuba for secret talks. The President responds that Attwood should be taken off the U.S. payroll prior to such a meeting so that the White House can plausibly deny that any official talks have taken place if the meeting leaks to the press.
•White House memorandum, Top Secret, "Mr. Donovan's Trip to Cuba," March 4, 1963. This document records President Kennedy's interest in negotiations with Castro and his instructions to his staff to "start thinking along more flexible lines" on conditions for a dialogue with Cuba.
•White House memorandum, Top Secret, "Cuba -- Policy," April 11, 1963. A detailed options paper from Gordon Chase, the Latin America specialist on the National Security Council, to McGeorge Bundy recommending "looking seriously at the other side of the coin-quietly enticing Castro over to us."
•CIA briefing paper, Secret, "Interview of U.S. Newswoman with Fidel Castro Indicating Possible Interest in Rapprochement with the United States," May 1, 1963. A debriefing of Lisa Howard by CIA deputy director Richard Helms, regarding her ABC news interview with Castro and her opinion that he is "ready to discuss rapprochement." The document contains a notation, "Psaw," meaning President Kennedy read the report on Howard and Castro.
•U.S. UN Mission memorandum, Secret, Chronology of events leading up Castro invitation to receive a U.S. official for talks in Cuba, November 8, 22, 1963. This chronology was written by William Attwood and records the evolution of the initiative set in motion by Lisa Howard for a dialogue with Cuba. The document describes the party at Howard's Manhattan apartment on September 23, 1963, where Attwood met with Cuban UN Ambassador Carlos Lechuga to discuss the potential for formal talks to improve relations. In an addendum, Attwood adds information on communications, using the Howard home as a base, leading up to the day the President was shot in Dallas.
•White House memorandum, Secret, November 12, 1963. McGeorge Bundy reports to William Attwood on Kennedy's opinion of the viability of a secret meeting with Havana. The president prefers that the meeting take place in New York at the UN where it will be less likely to be leaked to the press.
•White House memorandum, Top Secret, "Approach to Castro," November 19, 1963. A memo from Gordon Chase to McGeorge Bundy updating him on the status of arrangements for a secret meeting with the Cubans.
•White House memorandum, Top Secret, "Cuba -- Item of Presidential Interest," November 25, 1963. A strategy memo from Gordon Chase to McGeorge Bundy assessing the problems and potential for pursuing the secret talks with Castro in the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination.
•Message from Fidel Castro to Lyndon Johnson, "Verbal Message given to Miss Lisa Howard of ABC News on February 12, 1964, in Havana, Cuba." A private message carried by Howard to the White House in which Castro states that he would like the talks started with Kennedy to continue: "I seriously hope (and I cannot stress this too strongly) that Cuba and the United States can eventually sit down in an atmosphere of good will and of mutual respect and negotiate our differences."
•United Nations memorandum, Top Secret, from Adlai Stevenson to President Johnson, June 16, 1964. Stevenson sends the "verbal message" given to Lisa Howard to Johnson with a cover memo briefing him on the dialogue started under Kennedy and suggesting consideration of resumption of talks "on a low enough level to avoid any possible embarrassment."
•White House memorandum, Top Secret, "Adlai Stevenson and Lisa Howard," July 7, 1964. Gordon Chase reports to Bundy on his concerns that Howard's role as an intermediary has now escalated through her contact with Stevenson at the United Nations and the fact that a message has been sent back through her to Castro from the White House. Chase recommends trying "to remove Lisa from direct participation in the business of passing messages," and using Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga, instead.
Key Figures in the Dialogue
William Attwood
Gordon Chase
Lisa Howard
Carlos Lechuga
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB103/index.htm
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When J.F.K. Secretly Reached Out to Castro
Michael Beschloss
DEC. 17, 2014
President Obama’s surprise effort to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, concurrent with an economic embargo, recalls the two-track approach — economic and sometimes military force, along with secret, sporadic attempts to find some kind of accommodation — that formed American policy toward Cuba during the most dangerous years of that relationship.
On Monday evening, Nov. 18, 1963, at the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach — four days before his assassination — President John F. Kennedy, wearing black tie, told the Inter-American Press Association that only one issue separated the United States from Fidel Castro’s Cuba: Castro’s “conspirators” had handed Cuban sovereignty to “forces beyond the hemisphere” (meaning the Soviet Union), which were using Cuba “to subvert the other American republics.” Kennedy said, “As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible.”
The president had asked his speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, for language that would open a door to the Cuban leader, although, as Sorensen later observed, the audience was “a very tough anti-Castro group.”
That same day, Ambassador William Attwood, a Kennedy delegate to the United Nations, secretly called Castro’s aide and physician, Rene Vallejo, to discuss a possible secret meeting in Havana between Attwood and Castro that might improve the Cuban-American relationship, which had been ruptured when President Eisenhower broke diplomatic ties in January 1961.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/upshot/when-jfk-secretly-reached-out-to-castro.html?_r=0
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OPINION: JFK’s Secret Negotiations with Fidel
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr
WHITE PLAINS, New York, Jan 5 2015 (IPS) - On the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, one of his emissaries was secretly meeting with Fidel Castro at Varadero Beach in Cuba to discuss terms for ending the U.S. embargo against the island and beginning the process of détente between the two countries.
That was more than 50 years ago and now, finally, President Barack Obama is resuming the process of turning JFK’s dream into reality by re-establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Those clandestine discussions at Castro’s summer presidential palace in Varadero Beach had been proceeding for several months, having evolved along with the improved relations with the Soviet Union following the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
During that crisis, JFK and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, both at odds with their own military hardliners, had developed a mutual respect, even warmth, towards each other. A secret bargain between them had paved the way for removing the Soviet missiles from Cuba – and U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey – with each side saving face.
. . .
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was spying on all parties. In a top secret January 5, 1963 memo to his fellow agents, Richard Helms (later to become Director of the CIA in 1966) warned that “at the request of Khrushchev, Castro was returning to Cuba with the intention of adopting with Fidel a conciliatory policy toward the Kennedy administration for the time being.”
JFK was open to such advances. In the autumn of 1962, he and his brother Robert had dispatched James Donovan, a New York attorney, and John Dolan, a friend and advisor to my father Robert Kennedy, to negotiate the release of Castro’s 1500 Cuban prisoners from the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Donovan and Nolan developed an amiable friendship with Castro. They travelled the country together. Fidel gave them a tour of the Bay of Pigs battlefield and then took them as his guests to so many baseball games that, Nolan told me, he vowed to never watch the sport again.
After he released the last 1200 prisoners on Christmas Day 1962, Castro asked Donovan how to go about normalising relations with the United States. Donovan replied: “The way porcupines make love, very carefully.”
My father Robert and JFK were intensely curious about Castro and demanded detailed, highly personal, descriptions of the Cuban leader from both Donovan and Nolan.
The U.S. press had variously caricatured Fidel as drunken, filthy, mercurial, violent and undisciplined. However, Nolan told them: “Our impression would not square with the commonly accepted image. Castro was never irritable, never drunk, never dirty.” He and Donovan described the Cuban leader as worldly, witty, curious, well informed, impeccably groomed, and an engaging conversationalist.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/01/opinion-jfks-secret-negotiations-with-fidel/
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Learning about the secret meetings years ago was real food for thought for a lot of US Americans. Finding out as much as possible can only help, no matter how set in one's way a person might be at the moment.
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Memorandum on Conversation between Richard Goodwin and Che Guevara
Subject
Bay of Pigs
Description
In August, 1961, just 4 months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, presidential aide Richard Goodwin traveled to Uruguay for the Punta del Este Conference. Here, a meeting between him and Che Guevara was set up. As Guevara was wholeheartedly opposed to US foreign policy and one of Castro's best friends (he was instrumental in the 1959 revolution), the conversation went much better than expected. Both were at ease, spoke freely, and even humored one another. Guevara promised no attack upon Guantanamo, that free elections would be held after the revolution was complete, and that they could pay for expropriated US properties.
Guevara explained the Cuban revolution to Goodwin in terms he was unaware of, namely, that Cuba is now irreversibly out of the US sphere of influence, and that the revolution, too, is irreversible. They have the support of the masses, and that support will grow even more as time passes, Guevara asserted. Above all, Guevara sought a modus vivendi with the United States. This conversation was extremely important for the top of Kennedy’s administration to understand the “new” Cuba, and to deal with it more effectively in the future (a year later during the Cuban Missile Crisis).
Creator
Richard Goodwin
Source
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/19610822.pdf
Publisher
The White House
Date
August 1961
Contributor
Tyler Gabrielson
Original Format
Paper Memorandum
http://americancentury.omeka.wlu.edu/exhibits/show/bay-of-pigs/item/268
Lack of access to medicine in Latin America taken to rights body
Source: Agence France-Presse
Lack of access to medicine in Latin America taken to rights body
By AFP 5 hours ago.
Complaints over lack of access to medicine in Latin America were brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Tuesday, with demands that big drug companies be punished for preventing the sale of generics.
Various regional groups highlighted the situation to the IACHR during a hearing held in Panama, saying that 21 percent of Latin America's population had no access to basic health services and that 700,000 people died annually of preventable causes.
This should be qualified as a "crime against humanity," said German Holguin, coordinator for Alianza LAC-Global por el Acceso a Medicamentos, one of the groups.
He argued that pharmaceutical firms that block needed medicines should be punished.
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/lack-of-access-to-medicine-in-latin-america-taken-to-rights-body/article/481176#ixzz4S7uLLDB2
Veterans at Standing Rock shock tribe members, beg forgiveness for war crimes against tribal nations
Veterans at Standing Rock shock tribe members, beg forgiveness for war crimes against tribal nations
By Jen Hayden
Monday Dec 05, 2016 · 3:13 PM CST
attribution: Tina Malia on Facebook
U.S. military veterans kneel before tribal members at Standing Rock
Jon Eagle Sr., Tribal Historic Preservation Officer at Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has reported something wholly unexpected happened at the Standing Rock Reservation today. The veterans gathered to join the Dakota Pipeline protest stunned the gathered tribal members when they took a knee and asked for forgiveness:
More:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/12/5/1607591/-Veterans-at-Standing-Rock-shock-tribe-members-beg-forgiveness-for-war-crimes-against-tribal-nations
Timbergs Tale: Washington Post Reporter Spreads Blacklist of Independent Journalist Sites
December 2, 2016
Timberg’s Tale: Washington Post Reporter Spreads Blacklist of Independent Journalist Sites
by Pam Martens - Russ Martens
Craig Timberg, a Washington Post reporter with an interesting history (which we’ll get to shortly), doubled down last night with a new article suggesting that Congressional legislation may be coming to further crack down on independent journalists not properly adhering to the dogma of Washington. Timberg has become the deserving piñata of writers like Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Max Blumenthal of AlterNet, Robert Parry at Consortium News and numerous other writers at alternative media.
Timberg and the Washington Post, which is owned by the billionaire CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, are being stridently called out as McCarthyites for an article published on Thanksgiving Day that cited unnamed “experts” at a shadowy group called PropOrNot to smear 200 alternative media sites as tools of Russia. The blacklist included some of the most informed and courageous voices on the Internet like Naked Capitalism, Truthout, CounterPunch, and Truthdig, where the brilliant Chris Hedges, part of a New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, regularly asks the uncomfortable questions — like this one:
“When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?”
Theories abound as to why Timberg would write such a shoddily sourced article and smear some of the best writing and thinking on the Internet. One line of thought is that corporate media is struggling to survive financially and needs to take out its competition. Others see something far more nefarious. Max Blumenthal sums it up this way at AlterNet:
“Fake news and Russian propaganda have become the great post-election moral panic, a creeping Sharia-style conspiracy theory for shell-shocked liberals. Hoping to punish the dark foreign forces they blame for rigging the election, many of these insiders have latched onto a McCarthyite campaign that calls for government investigations of a wide array of alternative media outlets.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/02/timbergs-tale-washington-post-reporter-spreads-blacklist-of-independent-journalist-sites/
Roaming Charges: The CIAs Plots to Kill Castro
December 2, 2016
Roaming Charges: The CIA’s Plots to Kill Castro
by Jeffrey St. Clair
When it came to trying to eliminate Fidel Castro, the Central Intelligence Agency spared no effort across a quarter of a century. In 1975, former CIA director William Colby admitted to the US Senate’s Church Committee investigating CIA abuses that the agency had tried and failed to kill Castro several times, but, Colby claimed, not nearly as often as its critics alleged.
“It wasn’t for lack of trying,” Colby observed. “Castro gave McGovern in 1975 a list of the attempts made on his life – there were about thirty by that time – as he said, by the CIA. McGovern gave it to me and I looked through it and checked it off against our records and said we could account for about five or six. The others – I can understand Castro’s feeling about them because they were all ex-Bay of Pigs people or something like that, so he thinks they’re all CIA. Once you get into one of them, then bingo! – you get blamed for all the rest. We didn’t have any connections with the rest of them, but we’d never convince Castro of that.”
Five or six assassination plots is a sobering number, especially if you happen to be the intended target of these “executive actions.” But even here Colby was dissembling. He certainly had the opportunity to consult a secret 1967 report on the plots against Castro by the CIA’s Inspector General John S. Earman, and approved by Richard Helms. The CIA had in fact hatched attempts on the Cuban leader even prior to the revolution. One of the first occurred in 1958, when Eutimio Rojas, a member of the Cuban guerrillas, was hired to kill Castro as he slept at a camp in the Sierra Maestra.
On February 2, 1959, Cuban security guards arrested Allan Robert Nye, an American, in a hotel room facing the presidential palace. Nye had in his possession a high-powered rifle equipped with a telescopic scope, and had been contracted to shoot Castro as he arrived at the palace. A month later Rolando Masferrer, a former leader of Batista’s death squads, turned up at a Miami meeting with American mobsters and a CIA officer. There this deadly conglomerate planned another scenario to kill Castro outside the presidential palace.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/02/roaming-charges-the-cias-plots-to-kill-castro/
Brazil's Senate president ousted over embezzlement charges
Source: Reuters
Brazil's Senate president ousted over embezzlement charges
Renan Calheiros, key ally to Brazilian president Michel Temer, becomes latest politician to fall amid widening investigation into corruption
Reuters
Monday 5 December 2016 20.01 EST
Brazil’s supreme court on Monday removed Renan Calheiros as president of the Senate after he was indicted last week on charges of embezzlement, a court spokesman said.
The removal of Calheiros was a new blow for Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, whose government has been weakened by corruption scandals as it strives to push through unpopular austerity measures.
His replacement by Senator Jorge Vianna of the leftist Workers party, who is opposed to spending cuts, could challenge efforts to control a widening budget deficit in Latin America’s largest economy, which is mired in a two-year recession.
Justice Marco Aurelio de Mello imposed an injunction against Calheiros based on a majority ruling by the high court last month that any person indicted for a crime could not be in the presidential line of succession.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/06/brazil-senate-president-ousted-embezzlement-renan-calheiros
Why Chicanos Love Fidel Castro But Hate Cuban Exile Politics
Why Chicanos Love Fidel Castro But Hate Cuban Exile Politics
By Gabriel San Roman
Monday, November 28, 2016 at 10:04 a.m.
Cuban exiles greeted news of Fidel Castro's death this weekend with jubilant celebrations from the streets of Miami to Echo Park. They danced on Castro's grave, seeing him as nothing more than a brutal dictator forever more than a few bags shy of a ten million-ton sugar harvest.
But while Cubans in the United States danced, many Chicanos mourned what they felt was an extraordinary man. They shared pictures of Castro on social media and dedicated tribute songs by Carlos Puebla in memory, all hailing the Bearded One as a modern-day Spartacus against U.S. imperialism. The activist group Unión del Barrio even gathered in Los Angeles to celebrate Castro's rebellious life. And while Univisión and Telemundo broadcasts in the wake of Castro's death toed the official Cuban-American line, the average Mexi immigrants huddling to get coffee at Jax Donuts in Anaheim or standing at loncheras in SanTana were quick to call Castro a chingón, proving that to be a Fidelista doesn't necessarily mean being a comunista.
In a hemisphere filled with intra-Latino rivalries, the Chicano-Cuban split over Castro on this side of the border is among the most bitter. Cubanos can't fathom why Chicanos would say anything nice about a man who upended the lives of their viejos, while Chicanos (and Mexicans, for that matter) ultimately see Castro as one of the only individuals to ever fulfill the Latin American dream of defying los Estados Unidos—and for over 60 years, no less! But the clash makes perfect sense given the marked contrast in immigrant stories and statuses between Chicanos and Cubans stateside, one created by the American government in a divide-and-conquer strategy straight out of J. Edgar Hoover's evil mind and perpetuated ever since by Cuban exile politics.
Mexican affinity for Castro traces back to the Mexican roots of the Cuban Revolution in 1956. Back then, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista released a jailed Fidel who had tried to overthrow his government, freeing him to resettle in Mexico where he met Ernesto "Che" Guevara and began plotting sedition anew. When Cuba turned Communist after the revolution, the Organization of American States (OAS) expelled the island from its membership. Only Mexico maintained diplomatic relations, a tradition that explains why Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto lamented Castro's death and paid homage to the two nations' special history. Add in Pérez Prado, guayaberas, boxing and baseball, and it's a veritable love-in.
More:
http://www.ocweekly.com/news/why-chicanos-love-fidel-castro-but-hate-cuban-exile-politics-7705045
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