Chavez insults the German Chancellor, proving that he is an equal opportunity insulter

May 12 - Hugo Chavez has lashed out at German Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of her trip to Latin America.

"She is from the German Right, the same that supported Hitler, that supported fascism, that's the chancellor of Germany today," Chavez said Sunday during his weekly TV program.

Merkel Tuesday embarks on a one-week Latin America trip that will take her to Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, where the European Union-Latin America summit takes place this week.

Chavez apparently was mad at Merkel, who had said the leftist Venezuelan dictator doesn't speak for Latin America.

He stopped short of telling Merkel where to go. "Ms. Chancellor, you can go to ... ," he said, adding, "because she's a woman, I won't say anything else."

Chavez in the past has called U.S. President George W. Bush "the devil" and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "la negrita" (the little black woman).

Cuban judo team returns without its top athlete (UPDATED)

May 12 - The Cuban contingent that competed in last week's Pan American Judo Championships left Miami for Havana on Monday afternoon without gold-medal-winning judoka Yurisel Laborde, who left the group Sunday afternoon.

''No, she never showed up last night,'' USA judo president Jose Rodriguez said.

Chavez, knowing that Interpol will certify that he is involved with the FARC, renews his insults against Colombia

May 11 - The Interpol is expected to confirm next Thursday, that the documents found in the laptop of FARC commander Raul Reyes are authentic and have not been modified by the Colombian government.

Knowing that this will create a grave problem for his government, Chavez has gone on the offensive against the neighboring country and its popular president, in advance of the Interpol declaration.

Chavez said Sunday on his radio talk show that Colombia is trying to provoke Venezuela into a war so as to draw in and "justify" an armed intervention by the United States.

"The government of Colombia is capable of provoking a war with Venezuela to justify a US intervention in Venezuela," Chavez said on his weekly program "Alo Presidente." He warned Colombian President Alvaro Uribe: "think closely about how far you can go, and I publicly urge you a moment of reflection."

Columbia University appoints a pro Castro professor as dean of the School of International Affairs

Cuban-Americans and other close watchers of events in Cuba are voicing strong opposition to the appointment of John Coatsworth as dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.

Coatsworth's promotion was announced last week by Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger.

Coatsworth made national headlines in September 2007 when he defended inviting the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Columbia by saying he would also have welcomed Adolf Hitler to campus.

That has also prompted opposition to Coatsworth from Jewish students and faculty members. But to some observers of Cuba, Coatsworth's view of Fidel Castro is as egregious as his statement about Hitler.

At the heart of the debate is a book issued in 2004 by Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, when Mr. Coatsworth was its director. In a preface to the book, which is titled "The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century," Coatsworth claimed that Cuba's economy was only one of two in Latin America that grew in the 1980s, attributing that to "careful management of its economic relations with the Soviet Bloc led by the Soviet Union."

"The benefits of this strategy were impressive," Mr. Coatsworth wrote, citing, "rising standards of living in a society characterized by a high degree of equality and universal access to employment, basic nutrition, housing, education and medical care."

The former American ambassador to Venezuela who served as assistant secretary of state for the Western hemisphere under President Bush, Otto Reich, ridiculed Coatsworth's assessment. "The Cuba that this man describes is a Cuba that exists in the minds of academics only. It has nothing to do with the Cuba of centralized planning, of complete political repression, of hundreds of thousands of people dying in the straits of Florida trying to flee over the last 40 years," Reich said.

WSJ: Chavez ties to the FARC are broader and deeper than previously known

May 9 - The Wall Street Journal has a front page article today about Hugo Chavez's involvement with the FARC terrorists.

"A cache of controversial computer files closely tying Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez to communist rebels seeking to topple Colombia's government appear to be authentic, U.S. intelligence officials say.

The trove -- found on a dead guerrilla leader's laptops during a military raid in March -- is likely to ratchet up pressure for the U.S. to impose sanctions on one of its most important oil suppliers.

The files that have been made public so far have largely confirmed Mr. Chávez's well-known sympathy for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

But a review by The Wall Street Journal of more than 100 new files from the computers suggests that Venezuela has broader and deeper ties to the FARC than previously known.

These documents indicate Venezuela appears to be making concrete offers to help arm the rebels, possibly with rocket-propelled grenades and ground-to-air missiles.

The files suggest that Venezuela offered the FARC the use of one of its ports to receive arms shipments, and that Venezuela raised the prospect of drawing up a joint security plan with the FARC and sought basic training in guerrilla-warfare techniques.

Chavez threatens to intervene in Bolivia

May 8 - Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez says he will not tolerate a movement for secession in Bolivia's eastern lowland states.

Chavez says his government will intervene if Bolivian states now seeking greater autonomy from Bolivia's central government push for total independence.

Venezuelan woman went to Cuba for a nose surgery and returned with a disfigured face

May 6 - Ifley Patty, a 40 year old Venezuelan woman who went to Cuba for a nose reconstruction, told Globovision that she returned with a disfigured face, a missing right cheekbone and a loss of her sense of taste.

Patty traveled to Cuba as part of the health agreement signed between the two countries, which allows Venezuelans to go to the island to receive medical treatment.

The woman told Globovision that she contracted a bacteria during the operation at a Cuban hospital.

Patty decided to make her case public because Venezuelan authorities have refused to help her.

A doctor from the state of Aragua who is trying to help her, told Globovision that "whoever did this cannot be considered a surgeon."

The doctor said that the Venezuelan authorities have "closed all the doors" to their attempts to get help for her. "They do not want t accept these type of complaints," he said.

Patty, who used to be a model, told Globovision that she now has problems breathing and talking.

"I just want to get back to having a normal life," the woman told Globovision.

Click here to see Ifley Patty's interview (In Spanish)

Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez on Time's list of "The World's Most Influential People"

Yoany Sánchez, the blogger behind Generación Y, appears on Time magazine's latest list of  "The World's Most Influential People."

Her name appears under the category of "Heroes and Pioneers."

"Trained as a philologist in Havana but denied a career in academia—her dissertation, entitled Dictatorships in Latin American Literature, was perceived as a veiled criticism of the Castro regime—Sánchez has made a living working in Havana's tourist industry.

More important, under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot: freedom of speech. The pieces she has been clandestinely sending out from Internet cafés—while posing as a tourist—are often funny, elegantly written and poignant. Her subjects have included the shortage of lemons, the turgid proceedings of the Cuban parliament and the slowness of meaningful reforms by Raúl Castro. These have earned her international acclaim.

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Cuba's Communist Party: Being crazy or senile is not a reason to quit

April 25 - In an effort to limit the losses within its ranks, Cuba's Communist Party has called on members near retirement not to shirk party-related tasks and cautioned that "disease is not a reason for deactivation.''

Party militants may not quit even if they have senile dementia, according to an internal document issued in January by the Organization Department of the party's ruling Central Committee.

That must be the reason why Fidel Castro, who is sick, senile and demented, has refused to quit and continues to rule Cuba's Communist Party.

The document recognizes that in recent years there has been "an incipient tendency to an increase in applications for deactivation from workers in different sectors, close to retirement.''

The applications "are justified by health or family problems, and arguments are also raised about the lack of physical and mental conditions to deal with the complex tasks tackled ... (by party cells) which [the applicants] do not wish to join," says the document obtained by El Nuevo Herald. The document was included in the bulletin ''Internal information for the nuclei,'' which is distributed to militants for the purpose of discussion.  More

The senile First Secretary of Cuba's Communist Party  Video

Two videos of Monday's violent attack against the Ladies in White (UPDATED)

Brutal attack by Castro's police against The Ladies in White

Members of the Ladies in White being forcefully dragged by Raul Castro's police, for peacefully protesting the detention of their loved ones
Raul Castro's Gestapo trying to stop the Ladies' protest	Members of a mob paid, protected and controlled by the Cuban regime dragging the Ladies from the park where they were protesting

April 21 -  A group of Cuban women peacefully demonstrating for the release of their jailed husbands were roughed up by a mob and arrested on Monday near the offices of Cuban dictator Raul Castro.

The 10 women, members of an organization known as the "Women in White," gathered at a park Monday morning at the edge of Cuba's Revolution Square, where the government and Communist Party headquarters are located.

They wore white T-shirts emblazoned with the faces and names of their loved ones, but carried no signs.

"We are here to demand the release of our husbands and won't leave until they are free or they arrest us. We have waited long enough, we want to talk to the new president," group leader Laura Pollan said.

Moments later, a bus pulled up and about 20 female corrections officers tried to arrest the women, who sat on the sidewalk, clasped arms and refused to move. "They are dying, they are dying," one women yelled with tears in her eyes as the corrections officer tried to move her toward the bus.

Meet Chavez's new Minister of Labor

April 20 - On Tuesday of last week, Hugo Chávez dismissed Labor Minister José Ramón Rivero and replaced him with a former Communist Party member and vice-president of the National Assembly Roberto Manuel Hernández.

Two days later, during a National Assembly meeting to discuss a new oil tax, Hernández seemed pretty bored, while speaker after speaker took the opportunity to condemn the "yankee imperialists" for everything that is wrong in Venezuela. And there is plenty of things that are wrong.

Hernández thought that the best way to stay awake during the boring debate was to begin playing with his dentures! I swear that I'm not kidding.

What Hernández didn't know was that someone was taking a video of him playing with his dentures.

Maybe Hernández got his dentures in Russia before the end of the Soviet Union and has the same problems that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had with his, which on many occasions almost came out of his mouth while he was giving one of his lengthy speeches.

Now that he is Labor Minister and can afford anything, don't be surprised to see Hernández getting a new set of dentures during his next trip to "enemy territory."