If they had, they would have learned that it is very hard to make accurate predictions about the future.
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"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - President Ronald Reagan
If they had, they would have learned that it is very hard to make accurate predictions about the future.
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"Dear friends: since I became an independent blogger and journalist in Cuba, I was told, by the former Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, and the former director of the Cuban Book Institute, Iroel Sanchez, that I will never publish again in my country. They were both removed from their positions later (Saturn’s law), but the unholy war of the Castros against critical intellectuals goes on and on.The Castro government will put on a show today and celebrate independence day. However, I am sure that most Cubans won't really feel it until this corrupt dictatorship passes on.
While I talk here, the Havanan novelist Angel Santiesteban languishes a 5-year sentence for a common crime announced to him —by State Security agents— as a punishment for his opinion columns in his blog:Los hijos que nadie quiso /The Children Nobody Wanted.
While I talk here, a journalist from the free-lance agency Hablemos Press / Let’s Talk Press, Calixto Ramon Martinez was kept many months in prison for reporting an outbreak of cholera in Cuba, which still constitutes a serious health risk there, even for tourists, a fact that the Cuban government refuses to recognize in its due importance. Finally he was released without any explanation, documentation of his case, or at least an attempt to give him an apology or indemnify him.
While I talk here, a Catholic Afrocuban young mother and her husband, both peaceful pro-democracy activists, Sonia Garro and Ramon Alejandro Muñoz, have been for two years and two months in several Cuban prisons, subject to physical abuse and isolation periods, just because they protested when they were forbidden to attend the Holy Mass of the Pope Benedict XVI in the Revolution Square of Havana city, in March 2012. Hundreds of human rights activists were then arrested, including me, kidnapped for three days with my girlfriend, apparently accused of attempting to take counter-revolutionary photographs of His Holiness with the Heroic Guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara behind him, in the façade of the mysterious Ministry of Interior where the mass took place.
While I talk here, an American citizen under contract by USAID, Alan Gross, is being held hostage since December 2009 in a Cuban jail, serving a 15-year sentence for charges that included espionage. A Jew himself, he was just helping the Cuban Jewish community to have a ready access to the internet, since the right to independent information is not recognized by my government. In fact, it constitutes a major crime: enemy propaganda, diffusion of negative news, among other brutalities of our actual Penal Code. This was a miserable mafia message thrown to the fair-play face of America: mind your own business, do not dare to try to help the Cuban civic society or you will pay a dirty price too.
Besides, dozens of well-known terrorists have found safe haven to grow old in Cuba and take care of their families and their fortunes, after a whole life devoted to international delinquency, including USA fugitives, ex CIA agents and hit-men associated with dictators and paramilitary bands worldwide."

“May 20. Tomás Estrada Palma is sworn in as president, and the Cuban flag is finally allowed to fly over Havana.”
On this day in 1902, Cuba became an independent country. If you grew up in a Cuban home, or had Cuban friends in high school, or lived in Miami, then you may recall celebrations and good food this day.
To make a long history short, Cubans fought for much of the 19th century but just couldn't push Spain from running the island. Then the USS Mainemade a stop in Havana, blew up or got blown up, and President William McKinley decided to declare war on Spain. It was not a long war and Spain was finally was out and the U.S. ran things for a few years.
On May 20, 1902, Cuba, the last of the major Spanish colonies in the new world, got its independence.
Most of the rest of Latin America won its independence in the first 30 years of the 19th century.
I recall my grandmother, a 10-year-old girl at the time, tell stories of celebrations, parties, Cuban flags hanging from windows and a general sense of happiness around the island.
Of course, independence did not fix Cuba's problems. The island went through several ups and downs, government changes and the communist takeover of 1959. It was a rough 50-plus years but nobody rowed a boat to Florida or left for a better life abroad. The island had problems but Cubans were willing to stay and work on them, as my late father once said.
My friend Carlos Eire, author and professor at Yale, pointed this out about pre-Castro Cuba:
In 1902, the population of Cuba was nearly 1.5 million (a 200,000 decrease from 1895, due largely to the genocidal policies of the Spanish government during Cuba’s final war of independence).
• Between 1900 and 1930, the first three decades of Cuban independence, about one million immigrants flooded into the island, mostly European, and mostly northern Spaniards. This population tsunami also included Asians, Levantines, and Jews. These immigrants doubled the population of the island and changed its complexion, literally. Tens of thousands of immigrants continued to flow into Cuba every year after that, up to 1958. Immigration from the U.S. was comparatively slight, but in 1958 there were more Americans living in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S.A. Emigration from Cuba was minimal during this half century.
• Rates of immigration as high as this and of emigration as low require a robust and growing economy, and a considerable degree of political stability.
• Cuba’s economic success can be measured very accurately by tracing the growth of Havana, both in terms of population and construction. Around 1902, Havana was still a very small city, which had just begun to expand beyond its colonial enclosure, known as “Old Havana.”
What happened after communism? People jumped on rafts to look for freedom, the island's economy has been destroyed and the only people who find Cuba exciting are the leftists who hate the U.S. I should know about the latter because I've debated quite a few of them over the years. As I tell them, you love Cuba because you hate the U.S. I remind them that they wouldn't last one second living in the reality of Cuba. It's great to be a "fidelista" over French wine at an expensive restaurant.
Maybe Cuba will eventually celebrate another independence day as a democratic country. We hope so! I’ll remember my parents, my grandparents, and so many more on that future day.