March 2, 2018
By Leslie Díaz Monserrat.
Degree in Journalism (2011). Instructor teacher at the Central University.
Honorable Mention in the Provincial Prize for Scientific Journalism.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Now that little walking loudspeakers are playing –or not playing– music in the city, it is quite common to listen to songs such as Mayores, where Becky G with Bad Bunny unhappily come together.
Some teenagers walk down the street with the song loud and clear, while the lyrics can be heard in the young woman’s loud voice:
I like older men/ Those who you call gentlemen/ Those who open the door/ And send you flowers.
Up to that point, everything is perfect, because the age difference doesn’t have to be an impediment to love, it can even have its charms. The problem is when the other stanza comes with a refrain like this:
I like them bigger / so they don’t fit in my mouth…
And yes, you don’t need to blow your imagination away. It’s just what you’re thinking.
With the arrival of Trap, direct and unadorned sex has become an essential element to sell and accompanies the music videos of this musical subgenre, as some people call it. The truth is that I have no category where to place it.
In the clip of Mayores, the singer appears dressed in the costume of a sadomasochistic porn star. Sitting on a sofa, she opens her legs, in a pose with a marked sexual charge, with gestures that, more than sensual, are coarse, with little class…
It is not about giving a moralistic reading to the clip. Well-created human sensuality can and has been one of the most exquisite edges of art. But of course, the artistic completely removes vulgarity and the justly vulgar, that’s what Becky G look like.
On the other hand, the nefarious Bad Bunny appears using a jargon of a young alpha male talking about his powers in bed, in the style that, with him, there is no need for toys. How sweet!
The video, where dark tones reign and imitate the life of a nightclub, returns to a story in the style of the delinquents Bonnie and Clyde, because, in the end, they cheat the old man, but not before leaving him handcuffed to the bed.
It’s amazing that it’s the women, us, who make this type of artist’s popularity fatter? who sells a stereotyped, silly, insipid image of intimacy.
Becky G and Bad Bunny are the ones who shape your musical taste and, in turn, become a reference point on how to dress and act. That would be fatal.
By Juventud Rebelde digital@juventudrebelde.cu
Published: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 | 09:14:07 PM
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
WASHINGTON, March 14. – A month after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students from across the country left their classrooms for 17 minutes to commemorate the 17 victims who lost their lives in the incident.
Thousands of U.S. students on Wednesday honored those fallen in the latest massacre inside a school in the northern nation and joined demands for greater gun control.
“When students protest, our school staff will respond appropriately and allow them to express themselves,” Robert Runcie, superintendent of Broward County, Florida, where Marjory Stoneman High School is located, told Reuters.
In Washington, D. C., Pennsylvania Avenue became a giant silent space for exactly 17 minutes, while hundreds of young people stood on the road with signs demanding urgent action against gun violence, Notimex said.
“Enough, no more deaths “,” Make our schools safe again ” and “Protect the boys, no more guns” were some of the messages written on the posters waved by high school students, who marched to the Capitol to demand, among others, reinstatement of the ban on assault weapons, raising the minimum age for purchasing rifles from 18 to 21 years old, and to apply the background check to the police.
During their tour, the young people chanted slogans against the National Rifle Association, which opposes greater regulations for the purchase of arms.
This day’s protest was a foretaste of the massive mobilization that will take place in Washington on March 24.
A day earlier, activists and volunteers placed 7,000 pairs of empty shoes in front of the capitol, representing the 7,000 children and young people who have died in school shootings since the success of Sandy Hook in 2012.
The shoes, which come from relatives of victims, celebrities and citizens across the country, were placed in front of Congress to demonstrate their protests against legislators’ inaction in the face of frequent school shootings, HispanTV reported.
This is trying to portray, at the legislators’ own door, the cost in human lives of refusing to pass a gun control law,” said Emma Ruby-Sachs, deputy director of Avaaz, the organization that planned the protest in Washington, Reuters reported.
By Juventud Rebelde digital@juventudrebelde.cu
Published: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 | 09:14:07 PM
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
WASHINGTON, March 14. – A month after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students from across the country left their classrooms for 17 minutes to commemorate the 17 victims who lost their lives in the incident.
Thousands of U.S. students on Wednesday honored those fallen in the latest massacre inside a school in the northern nation and joined demands for greater gun control.
“When students protest, our school staff will respond appropriately and allow them to express themselves,” Robert Runcie, superintendent of Broward County, Florida, where Marjory Stoneman High School is located, told Reuters.
In Washington, D. C., Pennsylvania Avenue became a giant silent space for exactly 17 minutes, while hundreds of young people stood on the road with signs demanding urgent action against gun violence, Notimex said.
“Enough, no more deaths “,” Make our schools safe again ” and “Protect the boys, no more guns” were some of the messages written on the posters waved by high school students, who marched to the Capitol to demand, among others, reinstatement of the ban on assault weapons, raising the minimum age for purchasing rifles from 18 to 21 years old, and to apply the background check to the police.
During their tour, the young people chanted slogans against the National Rifle Association, which opposes greater regulations for the purchase of arms.
This day’s protest was a foretaste of the massive mobilization that will take place in Washington on March 24.
A day earlier, activists and volunteers placed 7,000 pairs of empty shoes in front of the capitol, representing the 7,000 children and young people who have died in school shootings since the success of Sandy Hook in 2012.
The shoes, which come from relatives of victims, celebrities and citizens across the country, were placed in front of Congress to demonstrate their protests against legislators’ inaction in the face of frequent school shootings, HispanTV reported.
This is trying to portray, at the legislators’ own door, the cost in human lives of refusing to pass a gun control law,” said Emma Ruby-Sachs, deputy director of Avaaz, the organization that planned the protest in Washington, Reuters reported.
By Lázaro Fariñas
Cuban journalist living in Miami.
Monday 12 March 2018 | 06:56:50 PM
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The controversy over gun control in the United States has been red-hot. The numerous and repeated massacres that have been going on for many years are leaving the millions of citizens without arguments and against the wall who, in this country, support the Second Amendment of the Constitution, that which gives the right to all the people who live here to possess a firearm.
The National Rifle Association is a very powerful organization with hundreds of thousands of members and immense financial resources. It is the main advocate of the famous Second Amendment. It is the NRA that provides millions of dollars to politicians in this country to maintain strong support for the upholding of that constitutional right. By direct or indirect means, they channel all that money to members of Congress to avoid any legal changes regarding firearms.
So far, no bill of any kind aimed at controlling, changing or eliminating the Second Amendment has been able to prosper. Some presidents have tried to pressure senators and representatives, but none of them have been successful, even though some congressmen have been victims of attacks. Several presidents have been murdered in the course of this country’s history. Nine have survived attacks, but four did not survive. These were Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy.
At the moment, America has been creating a state of opinion in favor of doing something about how easy it is for citizens to acquire such deadly equipment. They are likely to make some sort of change, but I doubt that they will be able to get the amendment protecting gun ownership completely removed.
It is estimated that there are currently more than 300 million firearms in the possession of the population. This indicates that, if a law banning the sale of firearms in all states of the Union were to be enacted tomorrow morning, it would be totally impossible to remove all that arsenal from the hands of the inhabitants of this nation. To think that this was possible would be like daydreaming, rather, as an impossible mission.
But it seems that the number of weapons on the streets and in the fields is not enough. Now, President Donald Trump has come up with the brilliant idea that, in order to prevent further killings from occurring in schools, ten to 20 percent of school teachers should be armed. If we estimate that there should be about seven million of these at the primary and secondary levels, with only about ten percent being armed, it would be roughly 700,000, and almost one and a half million more if it were 20%. What do you think? Mr. Trump wants to create an entire army of armed teachers. It’s as if to say,”We were few and far between and Catana gave birth.”
The problems of this society are getting more complicated every day. As I said in a previous commentary, I do not believe that the problem of violence in this country will be solved only by the elimination of the aforementioned amendment. We must try to reverse a whole way of thinking and acting in this society. We must create a social consciousness for the citizens that is different from the one that has prevailed until now. That is not easy to do. Violence is so deeply rooted in the lives of the people of the United States that I find it almost impossible, over the years, to achieve, not eliminate, or even mitigate it.
This state of opinion, which I spoke of in previous paragraphs, has gradually been created by citizens who are aware that something has to be done. Different organizations and groups have been forming, but all in all, there are many ways to walk and little time to avoid new massacres.
Thousands of heavily armed and trained militias are scattered around the country. Hundreds of thousands of deranged militias roam the streets of cities without medical treatment, thousands of lone wolves are locked up in their homes waiting to claw their way out. Tens of thousands of war veterans wander traumatized by clinics, alcoholised and psychologically destroyed, drug addicts, murderers, drug addicts and drug addicts alike.
I know I am showing a dark and terrible panorama in this commentary, but it is not pessimism on my part, it is the reality that surrounds us. For the good of this country, where I have lived almost all my life, where I have made a family and to whom I sincerely wish the best, I wish things were not as I am painting them.
By Lázaro Fariñas
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Posted: Monday 26 February 2018 | 06:09:11 PM
Updated: Tuesday 27 February 2018 | 02:55:25 PM
Three days after the murder of 17 people at a high school in South Florida, a gun show took place in a facility less than an hour’s drive south of the scene. The exhibition featured weapons of all types, from low-caliber weapons to assault rifles such as the famous AR15.
Hundreds of such events are held annually in the United States and are attended by thousands upon thousands of citizens who, for a small fee alone, have access to the exhibition.
The exhibitions are not only to show the different types of weapons that are on the market for sale, but also, so that those who want to buy are able to do so right there and leave with their preferred weapon.
With incredible insensitivity, the organizers of the exhibition held in Miami told the press that they could not suspend the event because they had spent a lot of money on organizing it. While the relatives of the victims of the massacre buried their loved ones, a few miles to the south, merchants of the death boasted of how well they were doing with the sales of such deadly equipment.
Any sensible person would have to wonder what madness that is? How come it’s so easy to acquire a firearm? How can one justify the fact that it is legal for an adolescent to be able, calmly, to locate a gun dealer and acquire an assault rifle that in reality only serves as an offensive weapon?
I don’t really think anyone rational has a rational answer to this question.
What kind of society has this great country created that cannot prevent firearms from being legally purchased without any restrictions as easily as you can buy onions in a grocery store?
The right to possess the weapon of choice is enshrined in this country’s Constitution and dates from the 18th century. Today, in the 21st century, the same law as it was more than 200 years ago continues to apply. And the worst thing is that the constitutional amendment that protects this citizen’s right has been almost impossible to repeal or alter, given that there is a lot of money involved in trying to prevent that from happening.
The theory of those who blindly advocate that the famous [Second] Amendment remains in effect. It says we all have the right to have a firearm for our personal or family defense. But the argument is not even as to whether that is desirable or not, but as to the type of weapon and caliber that the law allows being purchased.
Can you justify a parent having a weapon of war in his or her home? What are you doing with an assault rifle that’s only produced for combat?
No one who has the ability to respond or create laws to make it illegal to possess assault weapons or any other weapons in the hands of private individuals dares to act.
Representatives, senators, governors, mayors and even U. S. presidents who have dared to mess with the firearms industry are few and far between. The economic power of that conglomerate is so great that most politicians do not dare go head-to-head with it and create laws that prevent anyone, including crazy, insane, mentally ill, teenagers, murderers or a normal, rational person, from reaching a gun dealer and buying the gun they want.
In reality, it is very difficult to imagine what the solution to the problem facing American society could be.
We should also ask ourselves whether, by preventing arms from being bought for without limits, the problems facing this country would be solved? I don’t think that with only laws that prevent their acquisition or possession, these massacres that occur so often will end.
There are other factors involved that lead to the creation of a society as violent as the North American one. These include its own history of wars, invasions and massacres by governments, the proliferation of organized mafias, the assassinations of presidents in office, the annihilation of indigenous peoples, police abuse, high drug use, TV serials with a high level of violence, action movies, violent video games, the loneliness in which children are raised, etc., etc.
The violent acts are in the DNA of this country, therefore, I fear that unfortunately, every now and then, we will continue to see and regret events such as those that occurred in the Florida high school where 14 teenagers and three adults were murdered.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Democracy and freedom are two very manipulated categories by the elite that governs the United States. It has installed them in the minds of most of its citizens as qualifiers of the model of the capitalist system that governs that North American nation, which is assigned by a manifest destiny to spread throughout the world.
The “merit” of its ideologues for having managed to control the psyche of its inhabitants is even greater if one notices that they are two categories – democracy and freedom – that in today’s U. S. society have acquired diametrically opposed characteristics to those that semantically correspond to them.
There are other concepts commonly manipulated by the ruling elite in the world superpower. These include human rights and governance, which they systematically use, relying on their immense resources and the possibilities given to them by the control of the media they exercise on a global scale.
It is, for example, insultingly ironic and misleading that the United States uses the economic blockade as a coercive measure against many nations. In the case of Cuba, it has seen all the rights of its people violated for more than half a century. Nevertheless, the US boasts to world public opinion that they are the main defenders of the human rights of peoples. To pretend to act, at the same time, as prosecutor and judge, in cases of violations that it only detects in governments that do not bend l./to Washington’s will and convenience is the height of cynicism.
The practice of presenting itself as a model for the world is intended to challenge and control the management of the internal affairs of the countries that are subject to them. They always link the characteristics of such submission to their responses to requests for financial assistance, technology transfer or support in political conflicts with third countries. It should be noted that, when the Cuban revolution came to power in 1959, the struggle that unified the Cuban people for self-determination was, first and foremost, the struggle for human rights and justice, aspirations that had the Washington authorities as their main opponent.
Cuba is probably the only country in the world where no single prisoner has ever been tortured since 1959, where no extrajudicial executions have ever taken place in this period and where no police forces have ever used jets of water, battering or other humiliating forms of repression against demonstrators. Cuba is currently the only country in Latin America where, in the last 58 years, there have been no paramilitary forces or death squads, no killings, no disappearances or torture of prisoners, and no violence against the people.
In Cuba, since 1959, (with the exception of the U. S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay), no prisoner has ever been killed, tortured, sexually raped, taken abroad to be remotely tortured, locked up without trial or simply “disappeared”, in the style of the brutal Latin American dictatorships sponsored by Washington during the shameful Plan Condor.
In Cuba, since 1959, only in the naval base that Washington has illegally maintained next to Guantánamo Bay, could one find civilian and military leaders who promote or permit physical torture or other equivalent forms of humiliation against detainees.
Such shameful practices were introduced in Latin America by the U. S. Defense Department’s School of the Americas. Officers are trained there for the armed forces of the countries controlled by the superpower.
Methods of breaking prisoners include: sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep denial, forced nudism, fear inspired by trained animals, acts of sexual or cultural humiliation, simulated execution and threats of violence or death against detainees or their loved ones, among other inhumane practices. These were spread through the barracks and military and police stations of the continent on the advice of counselors and instructors from the United States.
In Cuba, there are no political prisoners, if by that we mean people imprisoned for propagating or professing political ideas against the government.
Anyone who has doubts about where democracy works and where it is pure fiction can compare, objectively and comprehensively, Cuba’s electoral system – where the people are the ones who postulate, elect and control their leaders without intermediaries – with the one that led Mr. Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.
Or, without going any further, with the recent elections in Colombia applauded by Washington.
March 13, 2018.
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