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CUBA NEWS
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Coast Guard sends back Cubans who tried to
sail to US in a truck
MIAMI, 24 (AFP) - The US Coast Guard has sent
back 11 Cubans who tried to sail to the United
States in a bright green 1951 Chevrolet flatbed
truck mounted on a large drums, officials in Florida
said.
A US plane spotted the unusual raft in the Florida
Straits, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) south
of Key West, Florida on July 16, the Coast Guard
said in a statement. Key West is located 160 kilometers
(100 miles) north of Cuba.
The Coast Guard repatriated the eight men, two
women and one child, and sank the vessel, deeming
it "a hazard to navigation."
A photograph taken by the Coast Guard shows the
craft cruising on calm seas. Several of the men
sat atop the green truck and others were apparently
under the bright yellow canopy that covered the
back of the vehicle.
When US officials saw the boat, "they couldn't
believe their eyes", the Coast Guard said
in a statement.
"The drive shaft of the truck had been dropped
from the back axle and was now used to turn a
propeller. 55-gallon drums had been lashed together
to form a pontoon on either side of the vehicle,"
the statement said.
Cubans fleeing the communist-run island have
in the past used a variety of means of staying
afloat, including inner tubes, surfboards and
rickety rafts.
In recent months several planes and boats were
stolen or hijacked by Cubans desperate to reach
Florida.
On Monday, the United States Monday returned
to Cuba a group of people who had hijacked a boat
to leave the country, after Havana agreed to limit
the guilty parties' jail terms to 10 years.
The boat was intercepted at sea last week.
Chilean Author Nixes Cuba Over Award
SANTIAGO, Chile, 24 (AP) - Chilean author Carlos
Franz is turning down a journalism award from
Cuba to protest the crackdown on dissidents by
the government of President Fidel Castro.
"I decided that I could not accept a journalism
award purported to support freedom of expression
because among 78 dissidents imprisoned in Cuba
there are a number of authors and some 20 newsmen,"
Franz told the Chilean daily La Segunda Tuesday
in an interview from his London residence.
He said "it was a hard decision" to
turn down the Jose Marti Journalism Prize awarded
by Cuba's government news agency, Prensa Latina.
Franz said he has sent a letter to Cuba rejecting
the prize, awarded for an ironic story describing
a visit to the U.S. Naval Academy.
Cubans Celebrate Carnival With Dancing
By John Rice, Associated Press
Writer
SANTIAGO, Cuba 24 - Fireworks and beer. Parades
and beer. Dancing in the streets with beer - and
rum. This is a whole different kind of communist
party.
Cuba's second city has been dancing through
carnival for centuries, under colonialism, capitalism
and - for most of the past 44 years - socialism.
Cuba owes a part of its world-famed music and
some of its political history to the yearly celebrations.
Carnival has always been celebrated around July
25 for the Feast of Saint James - Santiago, in
Spanish. This year, carnival extends to Sunday,
July 27, in part due to the 50th anniversary celebration
of Fidel Castro's July 26th attack on the city's
Moncada Barracks on Saturday night.
Castro's assault failed, but it launched the
revolution that brought him to power in 1959.
Castro hoped catch the fortress guards hung over
from carnival binges - one of many times Cuban
political movements have taken advantage of the
event.
During Cuba's 19th century independence struggles,
rebels sometimes used the masks and chaos of the
street celebrations to exchange messages beneath
the noses of the Spanish colonial authorities,
according to the city's carnival Museum.
This year, hundreds of thousands of people throng
the streets of Cuba's oldest city to buy sandwiches
carved from whole roast pigs, watch raucous nightly
parades and dance to music blaring from bands
and loudspeakers all over town.
And to drink beer, of course.
Bring your own cup, or buy one from the many
vendors on the street, and a palm-roof beer stall
will fill it from a large metal tank for about
12 cents.
Soviet-built tanker trucks of the sort used for
hauling gasoline occasionally force their way
through the crowd, park before the beer stalls
and top up the tanks through a green plastic hose.
On Saturday, when festivities began, fireworks
exploded in the air over the parade. It was unusually
exciting because inadequate charges let the rockets
burst low in the sky. Many fell, still burning,
in the streets and yards of houses, where they
were chased down by excited 12-year-old boys.
The usual socialist limits on private business
are relaxed during carnival, so the streets are
lined with people selling the traditional pork,
as well as cookies, popcorn, corn-on-the-cob,
fritters, fried chicken, cheap plastic toys, even
electrical outlets.
Noisy, temporary nightclubs with thatched roofs,
live singers and bouncers at the door spring up
in the middle of residential streets.
For centuries, the Feast of Saint James was the
only official day of rest for Santiago's African
slaves, who formed societies known as cabildos
that marched through the streets in masks or costumes
while dancing to African-style drumming that was
often repressed at other times of the year.
The whole thing sometimes got out of hand, in
the eyes of local officials.
As early as 1669, local authorities banned festivities,
according to exhibits at the carnival Museum.
In 1743 the city paid some of the "mamarrachos"
who paraded in masks, often as large papier-mache
caricatures. But in 1815 it banned them.
"In addition to moral and physical damage
caused by the mixing of classes (races), they
take the liberty of insulting anybody with indecent
songs and offensive sayings," according to
decree that year.
Slaves sometimes took advantage of the celebration
to escape for the mountains.
Some of the current cabildos trace their histories
at least back into the mid-19th century, such
as the Isuama, whose members dress in colonial
style clothing to mimic royalty and slaves, while
performing old French dances to African drumming.
In the old days, companies or politicians often
financed marchers and their costumes sometimes
promoted rum or political parties. Since the revolution,
the government has supplied cloth. Marchers sometimes
have carried signs celebrating agrarian reform
or the Moncada attack.
The rattles, maracas and drums of carnival helped
nurture Afro-Cuban music that grew into son and
salsa - though this year's carnival seemed to
include as much rap and Mexican pop - even a bit
of Britney Spears - as traditional Cuban music.
"It's what's today for the youth,"
said Jorge Rodriguez, as a Cuban rap song boomed
from a nearby speaker.
Mariano Hernandez, who stood with friends clutching
plastic beer mugs and watching the impromptu dancing
in another street, offered another explanation:
"During carnival, when you've had the beer,
you'll dance to anything."
Castro Birthplace a Tourist Attraction
By John Rice, Associated Press
Writer
BIRAN, Cuba 24 (AP) - It's been a long time since
anybody paved the potholed road to Fidel Castro's
birthplace. Finding the place isn't easy either:
No signs refer to it and the entry is little more
than an unmarked dirt path.
Still, some 20,000 people over the past year
have made their way to the recently restored,
little-publicized monument to the man who has
led Cuba for the past 44 years and who on Saturday
celebrates the 50th anniversary of the launch
of his revolution.
"We have to take care of it. This is a historic
jewel," said Alcides Leyva, director of the
sprawling, rustic homestead at the heart of 32,100
acres that once belonged to Angel Castro, the
Cuban leader's father.
There's the crib where the leader was born, the
chair where he sat in a one-room school, the cockfighting
arena where his father's birds fought and the
roadside saloon where his brother Raul, now defense
minister and first vice president, briefly tended
bar.
Angel Castro even built a movie theater. There
was no church - and he planned none, Leyva said,
though the bedroom of Fidel Castro's mother, Lina
Ruz, is adorned with portraits and statuettes
of saints.
The Cuban leader has written of happy memories
of his countryside childhood, but he has shown
little attachment to the place itself.
It was the first farm expropriated as Castro's
government pushed into collectivized agriculture.
Leyva said Castro had even signed plans to flood
the buildings under a reservoir in the 1960s before
his secretary, Celia Sanchez, intervened to save
it.
While Castro has rarely avoided the limelight,
he has taken pride in avoiding the showy fawning
by followers of the sort common in Saddam Hussein's
Iraq or North Korea.
"There is no cult of personality around
any living revolutionary in the form of statues,
official photographs or the names of streets or
institutions," Castro said in his May Day
speech this year. "The leaders of this country
are human beings, not gods."
Castro hasn't even visited Biran since the property
was restored and quietly opened to the public
in November 2002. Even the name of the place,
"The Biran Historic Site," makes no
mention of Castro, who is among the most famous
Latin American figures of the 20th century.
"The chief has always been very austere
about this," Leyva said, a bit sadly.
The wooden buildings are scattered between towering
trees on a parklike spread of grass that is still
marked by the trace of the old Camino Real - which
was still the main road from Santiago to Cuba's
north coast when Fidel Castro was young.
Castro's father was born in a one-room stone
house in Spain's Galicia region and served in
Cuba as a Spanish soldier from 1895 to 1898. He
returned as an immigrant in 1902, according to
the Biran site historian, Antonio Lopez.
At first an impoverished laborer, he began to
organize contract labor for the U.S. United Fruit
Company and started to buy land west of the Pinares
de Mayare mountains.
Angel Castro was barely literate, but was wealthy
enough to send his 10 children to some of Cuba's
best schools. Leyva said that an apartment on
the property had been intended for Fidel, in hopes
the son would return to help run the family businesses.
Instead, the young attorney turned to politics
and then to revolution. When Angel Castro died
of a fall at age 81 in 1956, his son was in Mexico,
planning guerrilla war, after being freed from
prison. He had been convicted of attacking the
Moncada military barracks in Santiago to the east
of here on July 26, 1953.
Fidel Castro spent only his early childhood living
at the property before he was sent to boarding
school in Santiago, though he often returned for
vacations.
A reconstructed version of the balcony-lined
family home - the original was destroyed in a
fire - includes rooms lined with photos: Fidel
at age 3, with a flower in his pocket; at age
7, wearing a sailor suit; shooting a basketball
for the Belen school team in Havana in 1943; posing
in a pith helmet with a dog and hunting rifle
in Biran that same year.
In another room, a portrait of Castro as a young
guerrilla was signed for his mother by Santiago's
Catholic archbishop: "God bless him."
Leyva said that fervent Castro loyalists had
been trying to visit - and had been turned away
- for years before Castro agreed to lift the ban
on visits.
"In spite of the fact that he did not want
promotion, everybody knew where he had lived,"
Leyva said.
Cubans Fashion Raft From Pickup Truck
MIAMI, 23 (AP) - Cuban migrants fashioned a
boat out of a 1951 Chevy pickup truck and "drove"
it to within 40 miles of the United States before
they were spotted and returned to the island,
the U.S. Coast Guard (news - web sites) said Wednesday.
The dozen migrants, some sheltered in the truck
cab or under a yellow tarp covering the bed, were
noticed last week by a U.S. Customs aircraft south
of Key West, Coast Guard Petty Officer Ryan Doss
said.
A propeller attached to the drive shaft of the
green vintage pickup was pushing it along at about
8 mph, Doss said. The truck-raft was kept afloat
by empty 55-gallon drums attached to the bottom
as pontoons.
Migrants have been found on rafts or small boats
made out of refrigerators, bathtubs, surfboards
and inner tubes, but the truck was believed to
be a first.
"We haven't come across any vehicles like
that before," Doss said.
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