Tensions in Rifondazione Comunista, the Italian hard left party were already high following the support of the party leadership for maintaining Italian troops in Afghanistan, as the price of maintaining the L'Unione coalition in government. As a consequence they have done badly in the recent round of local elections, losing between 20 and 50 percent of their own votes from last year.
Now there is a big row brewing over Cuba.
It started with two articles by Angela Nocioni on the 31st May in the party's daily paper, Liberazione, which attacked the Cuban government, the Five Cubans imprisoned in the US, and Giustino Di Celmo, an old Italian, whose son was killed by Posada Carriles in 1997 in a terrorist bombing in Havana.
This produced a huge response from readers, and on the Internet. For several days running, Liberazione has been publishing entire pages of letters against those articles.
On the 5th June, there was a letter by Marco Consolo, who is in charge of the Latin American desk in the International dept of the PRC, who says that the paper is breaking with the party over the question of Cuba.
However, both the paper editor, Piero Sansonetti, and some party heavyweights like Rina Gagliardi have come out on the side of Nocioni.
3 comments:
To follow this and other stories related to Cuba, may I recommend CubaNews, the free Yahoo news group which I've operated for the past seven years?
CubaNews has sent out over sixty-five thousand items, from, about or related to Cuba, from a very wide range of perspectives. As editor I don't hide my strong support for Cuba, but CubaNews as a resource provides lots of materials from other viewpoints to serve as a service for its readership.
My father and his parents lived in Cuba from 1939 to 1942. They were German Jewish refugees from Hitler’s holocaust. That’s where my own interest in Cuba comes from. Cuban society today represents an effort to build an alternative to the way life was under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
Some things work, some don’t. It has its flaws and contradictions, as well as significant achievements. No society is perfect. But we can learn many things from Cuba’s experience.
Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
Los Angeles, California
but reporting from Cuba frequently.
Thanks Walter
I should also have credited you as being the source for this story.
Are there any links to translated versions of the articles, or a basic explanation of what the criticisms of the Miami 5, Cuban Govt made in the articles is?
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