Janine Mendes-Franco · December, 2011

Latest posts by Janine Mendes-Franco from December, 2011

Trinidad & Tobago: Online Petition Against Offensive Ad

  16 December 2011

Globewriter is heartened that Project Runway winner, Anya Ayoung-Chee, has “[thrown]her weight against hate” by signing a petition “to demand the Trinidad Express apologize for running an offensive advert that, among other things, described LGBT people as ‘broken’”, and urges you to do the same.

Cuba: The Living Dead

  16 December 2011

Generation Y sees parallels between the film “Juan of the Dead” and life in Cuba: “More than gazing on a story of beings taken from our worst nightmares, the public wants to decipher the second reading contained in the film…such that, between laughter and shrieks, the metaphor crumbles, it is...

Haiti: Housing Still a Problem

  15 December 2011

“While over one million refugees suffered under tents following the January 12, 2010, earthquake, 128 newly constructed homes, finished in May, 2010, sat empty for 15 months,” reports Haiti Grassroots Watch, adding: “Today, the majority of these ‘social housing’ units are occupied, but mostly by illegal squatters…”

Trinidad & Tobago, Belize: Gay Rights

  15 December 2011

Globewriter notes that some of the more homophobic nations are getting “their knickers in a twist” over the Obama administration's statement at the UN “that it is standing up for the rights of LGBT people worldwide”, calling the Belizean Prime Minister “about as enlightened to human rights as a lamppost…so...

Cuba: In Defense of Human Rights

  15 December 2011

Pedazos de La Isla highlights the testimony of one of the Ladies in White who relates her experience as a victim of the “vigilance operations, brutal beatings, arbitrary arrests, deportations, and other forms of violence against those who publicly demonstrated on the streets of the island in defense of human...

Barbados: Courts Send Message that Women are Nothing

  15 December 2011

“Men again learned that no matter how badly you beat women, they can always be pressured to drop the charges. Police learned that it is useless to treat an assault on a woman seriously. The judge learned that assault charges are a waste of time when a West Indies cricketer...

Trinidad & Tobago: Dangerous Ad

  15 December 2011

Bloggers from Trinidad and Tobago voice their outrage at a newspaper ad that claims to educate people about homosexuality, calling it “a vile advertisement that can only be described as hateful, mean spirited and a pack of lies.”

Guyana: Rape Allegations against Police Chief

  15 December 2011

Save Guyana reports on rape allegations being brought against the police commissioner, explaining: “The Alliance For Change…has called for [his] dismissal or at least interdiction from duty…and is viewing the matter as the first real test of the Donald Ramotar administration.”

Cuba: Defining “Vulgarity”

  14 December 2011

Without Evasion continues to share her thoughts about the outcry over the “vulgarity” of a popular reggaeton song, saying: “The confusion lies, then, in properly ascertaining the limits of vulgarity and limiting at the same time in what spheres of social life vulgarity will be allowed without it constituting a...

Cuba: Food History

  14 December 2011

Iván García reviews Fidel Castro's history with “experiments”, saying: “The ex-president has put his foot in it many times. In all fields. The most painful has been in regard to food.”

Jamaica: So What About the Spy Plane?

  14 December 2011

After reading a newspaper editorial which was nonchalant over the presence of a spy plane during the country's state of emergency, Active Voice says: “The big deal…is that 73 people were killed under unexplained circumstances during that Tivoli Gardens operation. This spy plane has video footage of what happened…and the...

Haiti: Celebrity Visits Overshadow Real News

  12 December 2011

“I just don't get it. Why is it newsworthy that Kim Kardashian was in Haiti?”: Toussaint on Haiti “continue[s] to be baffled by the relative media silence around the effort of Haitians to hold the United Nations accountable” and asks: “How can we maintain attention on this issue until it...

Jamaica: Politics or Party?

  12 December 2011

Jamaica Woman Tongue says of the new Prime Minister's choice of a December 29 election date: “If our PM/minister of education knew his history, he would never have dared to ‘mash up’ the holidays with politics. But ‘im young; im wi learn.’”

Puerto Rico: The Success of TEDx San Juan

  12 December 2011

Gil the Jenius had his reservations about TEDx San Juan, but is pleased to report that it was “a rousing success.” Dondequiera adds that it was a day “of wonderful stories, passionately told.”

Cuba: Christmas Lights, No Human Rights

  12 December 2011

“In the long list of the words forbidden in my childhood, there were two in particular that were censored: ‘Christmas’ and ‘Human Rights'”, writes Generation Y, explaining that Christmas has become acknowledged – unlike human rights; Uncommon Sense supports her claim by quoting “one of the island's preeminent human rights...

Jamaica: Spy Games

  12 December 2011

Active Voice blogs about “the spy plane the government didn’t see” and the effect that the admission of its existence is having on the ruling Jamaica Labour Party.

Cuba: Human Rights Day

  9 December 2011

Uncommon Sense says that tomorrow, International Human Rights Day, “is for all to celebrate the basic rights we share and to remember those in Cuba and elsewhere whose rights are trampled by their rulers.”

Bahamas: Postcolonialism Issues

  9 December 2011

A recent “one-day symposium in honour of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist whose field of study was the psyche of the colonized” gets Blogworld “thinking about the value of democracy, of statehood, of the wretchedness of postcolonialism.”

Trinidad & Tobago: Traffic Tips

  9 December 2011

“After crime the number one negative social issue that affects most of us on a daily basis is traffic”: Plain Talk has some suggestions for easing the congestion.

Cuba: Same Old Story

  9 December 2011

Laritza's Laws compares the content of a 1989 edition of “Granma…the official mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Party” to a current one, and says: “The failure is evident. The housing situation is precarious…public services in decline; and don’t even talk about the protection of the workers…”