Free Republic

Thousands upon thousands of Venezuelans pour into Colombia over the crowd cross-country bridge, their faces gaunt, carrying little more than a backpack. Rail-thin women cradle their tiny babies, and beg along the trash-strewn gutters. Teens hawk everything from cigarettes to sweets and water for small change. The young, the old and the disabled cluster around the lone Western Union office – recently established to deal with the Venezuelan influx – in the hopes of receiving or sending a few dollars to send home. Without passports or work permits, the Venezuelans – many with university degrees or decent jobs in what...

The agreement would allow Cuban players to come to the United States on work visas, with MLB teams playing the CBF a release fee, a similar system to how Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese players join MLB teams. As Jeff Passan noted, the pact would "end the trafficking of players by smugglers—situations that have led to players being kidnapped, threatened and extorted. Cuban players coming to MLB have been smuggled out by human trafficking organizations that are often tied to other criminal organizations, and often they lose a big chunk of their bonus to pay for their passage out of Cuba,"...

Don’t get me wrong, amigos. The “mainstream media” does not label gun-control-loving Tim Mc Graw’s upcoming tour in the same manner as does this column. Instead we read stuff like this:  “Tim McGraw to perform in (totalitarian) Cuba-- McGraw’s 2019 Memorial Day Weekend trek, dubbed “One of Those Havana Nights.”..The McGraw trip offers lodging in ocean-view rooms at (totalitarian) Havana’s upscale Meliá Hotel, where a box of cigars and a bottle of rum will await each traveler. The all-inclusive tour is designed to make foreigners' typical Havana dreams come true, featuring a ride around (totalitarian) Havana in a classic American...

As Venezuela continues to crumble under the socialist dictatorship of President Nicolas Maduro, some are expressing words of warning – and resentment – against a six-year-old gun control bill that stripped citizens of their weapons. “Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear...

MANAGUA - Nicaraguan police raided the offices of a prominent journalist often critical of President Daniel Ortega, the latest sign of a broad crackdown on civil society and independent media organizations. Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the son of former president Violeta Chamorro, runs the digital newspaper Confidencial and hosts television news programs. He blamed the Thursday night raid and seizure of equipment on increasingly authoritarian efforts to purge the country of domestic dissent. “This was an absurd attack on free expression,” the award-winning Chamorro told Reuters on Friday.

CARACAS - Venezuela’s El Nacional newspaper, which has been heavily critical of the ruling Socialist Party, on Friday published its last print edition after struggling for years under government pressure and a collapsing economy. The paper, which is transitioning to a web format, has found it increasingly difficult to obtain newsprint due to exchange controls that make imports nearly impossible, and has potentially massive payments in a defamation lawsuit brought by Socialist Party No. 2 Diosdado Cabello. “I want to think that this is a pause,” said the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Patricia Spadaro, at a press conference in the...

Fr. Mario Guevara was Hearing ConfessionsFr. Mario Guevara, aged 59, vicar of Managua Cathedral, suffered a sulfuric acid attack on December 5, 2018, when a 24-year-old woman threw the acid on the priest’s face and body while he was in the cathedral hearing confessions. This is according to a December 6 report by Fides News Agency. According to information obtained by Fides, the rector of the cathedral took Fr. Guevara immediately to the hospital for treatment. Despite serious burns, the priest’s condition appears stable. The woman, detained by people in the cathedral as she tried to escape, was arrested by...

Russia is deploying nuclear-capable Tu-160 Blackjack bombers to Venezuela this week as part of an increasingly provocative pattern of bomber training flights, according to American defense officials. At least two Blackjacks will fly from a strategic forces air base in Russia to Venezuela as part of a series of training exercises that will include long-range refueling, said officials familiar with Russian plans for the flight. The bomber foray to South America will be Russia's seventh training flight for Blackjack bombers in the past three months. Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon official and specialist on the Russian military, said Tu-160 flights...

"In Havana, some of the same architectural gems that draw tens of thousands of American tourists crash to the ground every year. Causes range from weather and neglect to faulty renovations and theft of structural beams."

I recently received a message from my father-in-law, containing a link to a Spanish language Facebook post by a man named Habitante, which translates to “Inhabitant.” I was unable to confirm the identity of Habitante, but his words and insights are so compelling and authentic — and what my family personally knows to be true — that it must be shared. What follows is my translation of the post written by Habitante (In trying to stick to his message, I have, to the best of my abilities, not disturbed his grammar and paragraph structure. So there is a little awkwardness....

Maria Meza is the Honduran migrant who was catapulted to media stardom this week for being in the right place at the right time for an intrepid Reuters photographer who caught the U.S. Border Patrol red-handed in the act of performing its duty by defending the U.S. border.Best we can tell—despite her claims of “I thought we were all going to die!”--she was not hurt, even slightly, and neither were any of her five children. Nonetheless the Media/Democrat/Celebrity complex is all over Trump like a cheap suit for his “brutality.” On the other hand, Maria Garcia is a Cuban refugee (a genuine...

he house at 1212 1/2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe...

Chile's extreme militant left is reorganizing around the Patriotic Front Manuel Rodriguez -- or FPMR -- but only the Communist Party seems to be noticing. Most politicians, concerned with their own pre-election internal squabbles, have ignored the process. But the communists, the only remaining legal institution of the Marxist left, paid considerable attention. The government, kept informed by the Defense Ministry, apparently preferred to turn a blind eye to the rebuilding of the FPMR. Rocking the boat would have overshadowed the tributes that it lavished on former president Salvador Allende in September as part of its of national and international...

Following in the well-worn footsteps of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Blueprint for Federal Action on Illegal Guns, this week the Council on Foreign Relations released a memo urging the Obama administration to disregard the will of the American people and Congress and unilaterally enact a series of gun controls. Entitled, A Strategy to Reduce Gun Trafficking and Violence in the Americas, and written by CFR Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies, Julia F. Sweig, the memo pins the ills of Central and South America on U.S. gun owners and urges the president to curb our rights to...

On the Friday after Thanksgiving 1962, Cuban agents planned to detonate 500 kilos of TNT inside Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba's "Foreign Liberation Department" at the time. On September 11th 2001, roughly 50,000 people worked at the World Trade Center. Macy’s alone gets roughly 50,000 shoppers on Black Friday. Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger one. "Say hello to my little friends!" Castro had dreamed of yelling at us in October of 1962, right before he imagined...

The narratives of the midterm elections were set when suburban voters turned against President Trump, women racked up record numbers of electoral wins and Republicans dominated rural states and counties. But dive deeper into the results and some more surprising storylines emerge, from familial ties to long shot candidates, expanding suburbs and new battlegrounds. Here are the overlooked stories that didn’t get enough coverage after the polls closed. Did Puerto Ricans elect Rick Scott? When Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico devastated in 2017, almost 400,000 of the island’s residents moved to the mainland. Many of them landed in Florida, where...

HAVANA – A first group of Cuban doctors who treated impoverished patients in Brazil returned to Havana on Friday as both countries end a program that saw thousands of doctors dispatched to underserved areas. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel greeted 211 doctors who had worked in the South American country in exchange for hundreds of millions in badly needed hard currency given to the government. They were among the more than 8,000 doctors that Cuba has recalled after rejecting conditions imposed by far-right Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, who stipulated that doctors would need to directly receive their salaries from Brazil and...

On the morning of November 17th, 1962, FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. took on “all the trappings of a military command post,” according to historian William Breuer. The previous night an intelligence puzzle had finally come together. The resulting picture staggered the FBI men. And these had served at their posts during WWII and the height of the Cold War. They’d seen plenty. Now they had mere days to foil a crime against their nation to rival Hideki Tojo’s.At the time (pre-Mueller! And pre-Comey!), the FBI relied heavily on “HUMINT” (Human Intelligence.) So they’d expertly penetrated the plot, identified the ringleaders...

The Trump administration is considering plans to designate Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime in Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism over its support for Hezbollah and Marxist guerrillas, according to a report from the Spanish newspaper ABC on Tuesday. According to U.S. officials who spoke with the Spanish newspaper, administration officials are currently deliberating whether to add Venezuela to the list of state sponsors of terrorism over its support for groups including the Basque separatist movement ETA, Iran’s Lebanese terror proxy Hezbollah, and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Officials have so far refused to officially confirm whether they plan to...

Considering her record and documented history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and insurance. With Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, come January the 14-term California congresswoman is expected to head the committee, which also has jurisdiction over monetary policy, international finance, and efforts to combat terrorist financing. Throughout her storied political career, Waters has been embroiled in numerous controversies, including abusing her power to enrich family members, getting a communist dictator...