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URBAN MYTH: WHO STOLE JOSE MARTI'S BUST FROM WASHINGTON PARK?
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By <strong>Juan Montoya</strong><br />Few â€" if any â€" Brownsville schoolchildren could tell you where the memorial for the man Cuban-Americans consider the Apostle of that island’s liberation is at in their city.<br />And probably, most have seen the white marble memorial when they visit Washington Park for the Christmas light show or the Sombrero Fest during Charro Days.<br /><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixHxee7_2rXNQn9_S9NA63z2SnfcMqfRZGOPtL-ioP8KXQ5OpN5n-deNZsb-EbTMVVlu6gRB6PafMgUMbTKNkNYx7cfSfR8Hhx3RA5eHb6IYAjaQtsQwMTYrT5-ekQp045twtFGMePg3U/s1600/marti1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" kba="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixHxee7_2rXNQn9_S9NA63z2SnfcMqfRZGOPtL-ioP8KXQ5OpN5n-deNZsb-EbTMVVlu6gRB6PafMgUMbTKNkNYx7cfSfR8Hhx3RA5eHb6IYAjaQtsQwMTYrT5-ekQp045twtFGMePg3U/s320/marti1.jpg" width="320" /></a>But the man who fought for Cuban independence from Spain and who coined the unforgettable verses inscribed in black lettering on the marble siding of the memorial is remembered in this border city.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">“Men are divided into two bands,†reads one. “Those who love and build; and those who hate and destroy.â€</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">José Julián Martà y Pérez was born in Havana, Cuba in January 28, 1853 â€" almost 159 years ago. At the time, he was the son of a peninsular official. Peninsulares were Cubans born in Spain, and as such, afforded the privileges of the colonial power. The young MartÃ, however, did not share his father’s loyalty to a system that enslaved the black population which labored in the lucrative sugar plantations and who bore the brunt of the empire’s repression.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">He soon rebelled against his father â€" a military official â€" and schemed to make the island independent from Spain.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">For his troubles, Marti was exiled from Cuba and traveled to Spain, then later to Mexico seeking to build a revloutionary movement to oust the colonial Spanish empire. Martà became a spokesman for the independence movement throughout Latin America. His plans to invade Cuba failed and in 1895, he died in battle fighting for Cuban independence.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Cubans everywhere remember Marti for his struggle against Spanish rule and honor him everywhere. The <em>Circulo Cubano</em> in the Rio Grande Valley built the monument to his memory pictured above and donated it to the City of Brownsville to be erected at Washington Park. The monument included a bust of the Cuban martyr atop the white marble column.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">But soon after the monument was built, the bust mysteriously disappeared and vile rumors circulate that conservative elements in the city (most notably a well-known right-wing Republican) sent someone to have the bust removed because he considered him a communist. He is said to have had the bust tossed into a local resaca where it lies buried in the silt. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Those who have related this anecdote to us swear by its veracity. They say the man's wife was a principal in the inclusion of the monument into the park and was very active in restoring the fountain there. Can any of our readers add anything to this tale? </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6016803033174468094-7557645266383881508?l=rrunrrun.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
LINK: http://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2012/01/urban-myth-who-stole-jose-martis-bust.html
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THE FORGOTTEN ONES: INCARCERATION TO WHAT END?
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<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">By <strong>Juan Montoya</strong></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">We hadn't run into Felipe in many months and his name often came up in conversations among those of us who knew him.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Felipe was about as hardworking a businessman as you'd want to meet. He always had a sharp eye for an opportunity, and when he saw that large department stores like Target, Walmart, Dilliards, Marshalls, Old Navy, K-mart, etc., were selling pallets of slightly damaged merchandise and electronic appliances such as floor samples, he invested in the business.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9-Um4fxePlQvjnBmGnjGsbRjUG9rFjxmIPQQfR0ouc0Kk6Jcy-bapjmTkmzZqJymKJY9lCTBjtBUf_EuE-42uiGka8FleRquDKDqX4hmPxXvSbyAMHRhsbVkaAmwgsaBmYTc2gpv5zHc/s1600/fence.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" kba="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9-Um4fxePlQvjnBmGnjGsbRjUG9rFjxmIPQQfR0ouc0Kk6Jcy-bapjmTkmzZqJymKJY9lCTBjtBUf_EuE-42uiGka8FleRquDKDqX4hmPxXvSbyAMHRhsbVkaAmwgsaBmYTc2gpv5zHc/s400/fence.png" width="400" /></a>He started buying the pallets of slightly damaged electronics of or floor samples for resale. He had a set up a shop in a warehouse on Lincoln Street by the railroad tracks where he repaired what he could and sold the items at discount. He was a big success at the 77 Flea Market where he did a good business.</div>But after a series of burglaries at the store and no arrests by the local cops, he moved to the large flea market in Pharr, where he traveled daily. As proof of his problems in Brownsville, he kept a collection of the business cards left him by the different police officers taking his reports. He had at least 20 to 25 cards in his truck when he gave up on Brownsville.<br />It was while doing business in Pharr that he ran into trouble. He bought some merchandise from vendors who approached him at the flea market and it turned out to be stolen. He was arrested and, unable to pay his bond and with an ICE hold, he decided to await trial in the Cameron County Ruben Torres Detention Center1 in downtown Brownsville. <br />While he was incarcerated, Pharr police caught the people who sold Felipe the hot merchandise. They confessed that they had stolen the stuff and that Felipe knew nothing of the crime. That's when the Cameron County DA office offered him a reduced charge and probation. By then he had spent five months incarcerated at the county jail at the expense of taxpayers. Once the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor and probation assessed, the ICE hold vanished and he was given his freedom.<br />In a cell in the neighboring DC 2, Roberto Zavala (not his real name) has spent four months awaiting his trial on resisting arrest in Port Isabel. Zavala also had an ICE hold because he was in the United States illegally. He was not fighting extradition, but delays in the city forwarding the information to the DA's office and postponements by his court-appointed attorney had extended his stay past the amount of time normally haded down first-time offenders on the charge.<br />He said he was ready to plead guilty and get it over with and be transferred to the federal government. But he rarely sees his attorney and when he does it's usually to learn that there has been yet another postponement of his case in court.<br />What is common about both these cases?<br />Every time that a case is delayed in court, or because court-appointed attorneys ask for postponement, it costs county taxpayers money to house, feed and guard these inmates. Many are being held for offenses that carry a sentence that will be fulfilled with the time already served. The sheriff, in charge of running the jails, can only do as the courts ask him. His jails are filled with cases like those of Rivera and Zavala.<br />Right now, the county is struggling under an unbudgeted cost of housing prisoners in Cameron County and facilities in Brooks and Willacy counties and in the Coastal Bend facility. The bottleneck, it is becoming evident, is with the courts that have not cleared the dockets of cases like those of these two inmates. Multiply that by scores of others and you can see why the county is struggling with the costs associated with housing these prisoners.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6016803033174468094-4549781611584454222?l=rrunrrun.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
LINK: http://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2012/01/forgotten-ones-incarceration-to-what.html
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WAS THE WAR IN IRAQ REALLY WORTH IT?
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By <strong>Andrew J. Bacevich</strong><br />Professor of International Relations and History <br />Boston University.<br /><br />As framed, the question invites a sober comparison of benefits and costs - gain vs. pain. The principal benefit derived from the Iraq War is easily identified: as the war's defenders insist with monotonous regularity, the world is indeed a better place without Saddam Hussein. <br />Point taken.<br /><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzxMUN2KuZRQe6u1r6QRRDJXmuOKR409MzNKCaugt1FhyQWeddEm-f4y5eCUSKtO31ozUVW1XxY7wEgltBwxdyDWgNYqZFus4I9P1g0crDp8m6F68uLx67yxoYkxoAtpReMwVJOLrt21E/s1600/us+troops.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" kba="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzxMUN2KuZRQe6u1r6QRRDJXmuOKR409MzNKCaugt1FhyQWeddEm-f4y5eCUSKtO31ozUVW1XxY7wEgltBwxdyDWgNYqZFus4I9P1g0crDp8m6F68uLx67yxoYkxoAtpReMwVJOLrt21E/s400/us+troops.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Yet few of those defenders have demonstrated the moral courage - or is it simple decency - to consider who paid and what was lost in securing Saddam's removal. That tally includes well over four thousand US dead along with several tens of thousands wounded and otherwise bearing the scars of war; vastly larger numbers of Iraqi civilians killed, maimed, and displaced; and at least a trillion dollars expended - probably several times that by the time the last bill comes due decades from now. </div></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Recalling that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda both turned out to be all but non-existent, a Churchillian verdict on the war might read thusly: Seldom in the course of human history have so many sacrificed so dearly to achieve so little.</div></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Yet in inviting a narrow cost-benefit analysis, the question-as-posed serves to understate the scope of the debacle engineered by the war's architects. The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Central to that legacy has been Washington's decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">War is US.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">One senses that this was what the likes of [Vice President Dick] Cheney, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, and [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz (urged on by militarists cheering from the sidelines and with George W. Bush serving as their enabler) intended all along. By leaving intact and even enlarging the policies that his predecessor had inaugurated, President Barack Obama has handed these militarists an unearned victory. </div>As they drag themselves from one "overseas contingency operation" to the next, American soldiers must reckon with the consequences. So too will the somnolent American people be obliged to do, perhaps sooner than they think.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6016803033174468094-117944658884762028?l=rrunrrun.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
LINK: http://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2012/01/was-war-in-iraq-really-worth-it.html
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