Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Tue 03/19/2024 View Mon 03/18/2024 View Sun 03/17/2024 View Sat 03/16/2024 View Fri 03/15/2024 View Thu 03/14/2024 View Wed 03/13/2024
2021-06-22 Caribbean-Latin America
Expatriated Pro-U.S.- Cuban Dissident Heads to Southern Border After Officials Ignore His Case
[Breitbart] Daniel Llorente – an anti-communist Cuban dissident who achieved world renown in 2017 by interrupting the nation’s Marxist May Day parade waving an American flag and receiving a beating on live television – has joined the thousands risking the harrowing trek across Central America to reach the United States.

Llorente confirmed to Breitbart News on Wednesday that he, his son Eliécer, and his nephew left Guyana in late May en route to the southern border of the United States. He is seeking legal entry. At the time of his last communication with Breitbart News, he had just reached Costa Rica. He was arrested in Venezuela shortly after departing Guyana but released and bussed to the Colombian border, allowing him largely uninterrupted transit.

Llorente is now using his journey to teach other Cubans making their way north about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A fervent Christian – though not belonging to any church or creed – Llorente has taken to preaching to Cubans as they wait for buses, traverse dangerous jungle territory, or line up for humanitarian aid. He asserts that the “curse” that befell Cuba in 1959 began when dictator Fidel Castro ordered the removal of a popular Christian sign from people’s homes, reading “Jesus Christ, this is your house,” and replaced them with a sign reading “This is your house, Fidel.” According to Cuban-American scholar Carlos Eire, “hundreds of thousands” of homes bore the latter sign in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

While Cuba is statistically a majority-Catholic country, the Cuban Communist Party is formally atheist and persecutes Christians who do not use their faith to promote communism. Most Cubans alive on the island today have never experienced religious freedom – including Llorente, who expressed awe to Breitbart News on the prevalence of Christian imagery and churches in Colombia and Central America.

The dissident told Breitbart News he left Guyana after two years of attempting to find a legal way to leave to the United States. Both the United States and the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), he said, promised to help him achieve some form of normalized migrant status upon his first visit, but neither followed through.

“The U.S. embassy two years ago committed to me that they would attend my case. Two years passed, they did nothing, I went several times and they never saw me,” Llorente said in an interview with Breitbart News. “The U.S. has shown the world through me that it has dropped the ball.”

Unlike the vast majority of the thousands attempting the journey to America, Llorente never chose to leave Cuba and has no legal documents to help him receive political refugee or asylum status in the United States. Llorente was first arrested in Cuba in 2002 for placing a sign in front of his home denouncing communism. He spent nine years in prison for that infraction.

In May 2016, police arrested him again for greeting the first cruise ship from the United States to visit Havana in the Castro era, the Adonia. Llorente waved an American flag and shouted “yes, we can!” – the campaign slogan of then-President Barack Obama. Prior to his arrest, the regime sent a mob to threaten and antagonize him with racial slurs, a practice known as an “act of repudiation,” prompting Llorente to call the majority of Cubans “hypocrites” for participating in government functions without question.

A year later, he interrupted the largest regime parade of the year, the parade organized on May 1, or International Workers’ Day. Llorente ran before a crowd of thousands of communists in Havana, waving an American flag in protest of the event. Video of his intervention shows plain-clothes officers immediately apprehend and publicly assault him.
Posted by Angaick Flurong7347 2021-06-22 00:00|| || Front Page|| [336134 views ]  Top
 File under: Human Trafficking 

06:05 Skidmark
06:01 Skidmark
06:01 Warthog
06:00 Grom the Reflective
05:56 Grom the Reflective
05:55 Skidmark
05:51 Skidmark
05:42 Grom the Reflective
05:38 Skidmark
05:34 Skidmark
05:32 Skidmark
05:25 Skidmark
05:21 Skidmark
04:57 Skidmark
04:51 Skidmark
04:49 Skidmark
04:48 Skidmark
04:43 Skidmark
04:38 Skidmark
04:24 Skidmark
04:12 Grom the Reflective
04:10 Grom the Reflective
04:04 Angealing B. Hayes4677
03:38 Grom the Reflective









Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com