I have the day off and am planning on spending it looking over some beautiful cars at the
Barrett-Jackson Auto Auction in West Palm Beach, but first I wanted to make you all aware of a situation that has materialized in the SoFla blogosphere over the last couple days.
After what I went through over at
Stuck on the Palmetto, I have loads of sympathy for any anonymous blogger whose identity is threatened or, in the worst case, revealed. When your job, your identity, or, as in the case I share with you in this post, your relatives and friends lives, are jeopardized by being "outed," it's extremely upsetting.
Val Prieto at
Babalu blog knows this. He's a family-oriented kind of guy. He understands the tyranny and ruthlessness of the Castro regime. And he has anonymous bloggers writing at
Babalu. So when
he goes and reveals the name of an anonymous writer who uses the pseudonym "KillCastro" at a blog of the same name knowing that writer has relatives in Cuba, it's an offense of the highest order.
Prieto is the guy who holds himself out as a spokesman for Miami's Cuban-American exile community and is looked to often times when the media needs a quote or a sound bite from a CA in Miami. But yesterday, as he did at
SotP so many times before, Val Prieto demonstrated that he is nothing more than a Cuban-American hardliner goon who resorts to thuggery when someone doesn't view Cuban politics the way he does. What the media really needs to know is that Val Prieto is a crass, boorish, vulger and dangerous Cuban-American troglodyte, who no more represents the Cuban-American community than the Tropichop Max at Pollo Tropical represents the quality of food you can buy in Little Havana.
What makes this all the more ominous is that just a little over an hour before he commented at
KillCastro, Val Prieto had
this to say here at
SFDB...
Of course, Val Prieto was alluding to the controversy that brought SotP to a screeching halt in the hopes that, somehow, that situation still created concern for me.
This is who Val Prieto is. This is what he does. And everyone, especially the media who have anointed him one of Miami's CA representatives, should know it.
Val Prieto clearly owes an apology to KillCastro. But therein lies the problem. Val Prieto never apologizes. To anyone.
(Photo: Carl Juste,
Miami Herald)
......
3/30/2008
In
a post that is dated yesterday, KillCastro reports that his relatives in Cuba have been detained, phones are being monitored and, basically, it looks like the Castro regime has acted on Val Prieto's outing of KillCastro.
I'm not sure how much of this to believe as KillCastro and his followers appear to be pretty sensationalistic about the thing, not that I really blame them, but the bottom line is that all this is hard to verify.
Having said that, and not really knowing whether this information is accurate, babalu's Henry Gomez has taken the extraordinarily arrogant step of posting this caricature that he has given the file name "squashingthelosers."
The post is not titled nor is there any content but in the comments Henry Gomez says this...
Without getting too deep into it, there are douchebags out there that think they can viciously attack a female contributor to this blog and not expect the editor to do or say anything about it. And furthermore when the editor called their bluff they think that they can spread calumnies about said editor. And even furthermore there are sanctimonious sons of bitches out there who have stolen thousands of hours from the taxpayers blogging at their government jobs that think they can repeat the calumnies. Well maybe they can. But it doesn't matter really, does it? At the end of the day they are still coachroaches, douchebags and sanctimonious time stealing weasels and Babalu is still an island on the net without a bearded dictator.
In a nutshell, Gomez not only verifies that Val Prieto intended to do what he did but expresses absolutely no concern for the Cubans who may be detained as a result of his words. In fact, one can interpret the cartoon as a statement of satisfaction that things have turned out the way they have.
Which leads me to wonder as a spectator to this fiasco whether Val Prieto and babalu writers are more of a risk to the freedom of Cubans than the Castro regime they despise so much.
......
3/31/2008
Henry Gomez's post has been removed from
babalu. And for Val Prieto,
it's all a joke.
.
