19.4.09

Chavez shows Obama only one side of Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano became today the author of the 5th best selling book in Amazon.com a day after Hugo Chavez handed Obama a copy of his 1971 book "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent". Isn't Chavez aware of Galeano's of 2003 essay: "Cuba Hurts"? If he is, why didn't he also provide Obama with a copy of that?

Is it because even Galeano, a pro-Castro and anti-Cuban dissident socialist recognizes the cruelty of his idol and the rights of non-supporters of the Cuban regime? Indeed, in said essay, Galeano agrees with Rosa Luexmbourg, another socialist, whom he quotes:
"Freedom for only the supporters of the government, however many there may be, is not freedom. Real freedom is freedom for those who think differently."
Further excerpts in English and Spanish are quoted below:
"The recent wave of executions and arrests in Cuba is ...very bad news-and very sad-for those of us ...who also believe that freedom and justice go together or not at all...

"...the Cuban government is now committing acts that, as Uruguayan writer Carlos Quijano would say, "sin against hope."

"...Without general elections, without freedom of the press and unlimited freedom of assembly, without a contest of free opinions, life stagnates and withers in all public institutions, and the bureaucracy becomes the only active element.

"My conscience clear...I do not believe in, and have never believed in single-party democracy ...Nor do I believe that the omnipotence of the state is a valid response to the omnipotence of the market."
UPDATED BELOW AT 10:15 PM FROM ARGENTINA
I shouldn't have written that Galeano is pro-Castro for that is not all certain. He's pro-Castro's 'revolution' or what should be more correctly characterized as 'Castro´s post-revolutionary coup'.

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