Green Left Weekly's $250,000 fighting fund: What are they so afraid of?

Famous Cuban singer/songwriter Silvio Rodriguez has been banned by the US State Department from attending folk singer Pete Seeger's 90th birthday celebrations in New York.

"I think that the State Department's attitude is very much in contradiction with President Obama's express desire for a rapprochement with Cuba", said Rodriguez in a May 1 statement.

What are they so afraid of?

Seeger brought global popularity to the famous Cuban song "Guantanamera" by Joseito Fernandez, which includes verses from Cuban independence hero Jose Marti. Seeger has been a tireless critic of the US blockade of Cuba, which he has visited five times.

Is this just a case of petty-minded bureaucratic punishment? Or something more?

Rodriguez's visa denial brings to mind those famous lyrics: "Yo soy un hombre sincero ..."

"I am an honest man/From where the palm tree grows/And before dying I want/To share the verses of my soul.../With the poor people of the Earth/I want to share my fate/The brook of the mountains/Gives me more pleasure than the sea."

Such dangerous words and dangerous ideas, it seems, are what the world's richest and most powerful state is so afraid of.

Green Left Weekly is a project dedicated to the poor of the Earth, and is remarkably kept alive by those same poor of the Earth and their partisans. Please make a donation to our fighting fund at: Greenleft, Commonwealth Bank, BSB 062-006, Account No. 00901992.

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From GLW issue 794