Yesterday’s post was about the chilling attacks on Tucker Carlson and his family.

A November 10 article on Breitbart, ‘Tucker Carlson Antifa Riot Mimics Cuban Mob Attacks’, discusses the long-standing tactic of the totalitarian government’s support for terrorising freedom-loving dissidents.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Despite Cuba having been Communist for six decades, this personalised terrorism is still going on:

Pro-democracy and right-leaning political activists, journalists, and artists 90 miles from our shores, fighting for their rights in communist Cuba, have faced similar mob attacks on their homes for years. Unlike the Carlson incident, in Cuba, the government actively organizes the mobs. The riots are so common they have a name: actos de repudio, or “acts of repudiation.”

In the past several years, since dictator Raúl Castro took over for late dictator brother Fidel, Cuba has endeavored to export the practice of actos de repudio, attacking the presence of dissidents at international summit events, violently beating them in public on foreign soil, and even using mob behavior to silence American diplomats at the United Nations.

Actos de repudio, the article says, can be defined as follows:

bully Mobs [used] to intimidate, instill fear, and to restrict democracy activist’s freedom of movement and speech.

In Tucker Carlson’s case, the DC police have had the good sense to term the attack on his home as a hate crime:

According to the official police report, the mob vandalized the Carlson home, driveway, and the car parked there by scrawling various leftist messages all over them. The mob also broke the front door, nearly managing to enter the home to presumably hurt Carlson’s family. Washington, DC, police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Carlson sees this for what it is — restriction on his thoughts and speech:

Carlson accurately described the attack as an attempt to silence his political thoughts in a subsequent interview Thursday night on Fox News.

“This has a chilling effect on people’s ability to speak and to think freely. That’s the point,” he argued. “It’s totalitarian in its intent. We should fight it” …

“What’s it like to find out that your wife is hiding in the pantry because people are threatening her? I mean, it’s upsetting,” he noted.

Meanwhile, back in Cuba, female churchgoers have been attacked with severe actos de repudio:

With some notable exceptions on the far left, mainstream political observers have condemned the attack as fundamentally anti-American and argued that such mob tyranny is a scary new development in political speech, practically unprecedented. Those who view this as a novel threat have clearly not studied the Ladies in White, a group of pro-democracy peace activists in Cuba who experience some form of this harassment on a weekly basis.

Unlike the Antifa event, the Ladies in White, and in particular their leader Berta Soler, face similar attacks organized and funded by their own government. The women, whose sole act of protest is to attempt to go to Catholic Mass on Sundays, have faced beatings, stoning, tarring at the hands of these mobs.

Here’s a 2016 video of an attack outside the headquarters for the Ladies in White:

The video also shows mobs destroying media equipment.

These mobs attack artists, too:

Below is a mob attack against Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist who courted the ire of the regime by planning an art installation consisting only of a microphone placed in the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana for the use of anyone in the public to say whatever they want. Bruguera has an official Cuban police officer assigned to monitor her at all times.

Cuba began exporting mob violence three years ago:

In 2015, the Cuban government decided to begin exporting actos de repudio after being invited to the Summit of the Americas for the first time. At the time, Latin American leaders like Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, corrupt Brazilian socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and similarly corrupt Argentine former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner hijacked the summit to invite Cuba despite the nation not meeting the Organization of American States’ democracy requirements.

The Cuban state agents used the invitation to stage actos de repudio in Panama. The agents physically beat a small group of dissidents who gathered to honor Cuban founding father José Martí in Panama City.

These mobs do not respect human rights or the rule of law, even international law:

In a memorable 2016 acto de repudio, a mob made a bonfire out of copies of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a reminder that its ideals do not apply to them.

They also disrupted a discussion of human rights at the UN this year.

Nothing happens to them at home or abroad, so the violence continues.

Frances Martel, the author of the Breitbart article, warns that this is unlikely to be a short-term trend.

Being nice to totalitarian regimes doesn’t help, either:

The extensive, repulsive history of mob attacks in Cuba similar to what Carlson experienced – and their increased frequency abroad since 2015, when the Obama administration flooded Cuba with foreign investment in return for nothing – is a reminder that interacting with foreign regimes does not necessarily make them freer. Sometimes, values flow in the opposite direction, resulting in authoritarian minorities in the free country becoming emboldened and infected with the same tactics common in the repressive regime.

How terrible that such violence has been taking root in the United States since 2016, starting with the Trump and other conservative rallies. Now we have mobs attacking media personalities, ICE and who knows what next?

Law enforcement is not doing much to stop it, especially in West Coast cities such as Portland.

It would be a shame if these mobs become commonplace in America.