The Venezuelan-owned Oil Company Citgo, together with the organization Citizen’s Energy, will provide about 460,000 energy efficient light bulbs to low-income households throughout the U.S., according to Citgo’s CEO Alejandro Granado.

The announcement was made in Washington D.C. yesterday in the home of one of the beneficiaries of the program, together with Venezuela’s Ambassador to the U.S., Bernardo Alvarez, and Citizen’s Energy Chairman Joe Kennedy, II. Another launch will be held tomorrow in Houston, also in the home of a program beneficiary.

Alvarez said the project was inspired by Venezuela’s program “Mission Energy.” “This program is a counterpart to our efforts in Venezuela, where more than 60 million conventional light bulbs have been replaced by energy efficient ones through Misión Revolución Energética,” said Alvarez. (more…)

Since 1994, Casa has been “Building A Movement of Alternatives” for womyn of color in the South Bronx. Casa has a unique approach in supporting collective transformation and social change by providing holistic and alternative healing techniques for the self-empowerment of womyn of color worldwide to reclaim the power of their minds, bodies and spirits, and as a consequence their rights. We looked at women organizing models and explored organizations such as the Dominican Women’s Development Center, Medgar Evers Women’s Center, and the Puerto Rican Working Women’s Organization in Puerto Rico.We, in Casa Atabex Aché, are proud to say we follow the legacy and are part of the history of struggle for empowerment, healing and action of our community.
http://www.casaatabexache.org/

English hour:

Fly me to the moon - Willie Garcia (Chicago)
Bombeando - Papo Lucca (Puerto Rico)
The Falling Leaves - Willie Garcia (Chicago)
Manteca - Dizzy Gilespie (USA Jazz legend)
Danilo en la flauta - Various Artists (USA)

Other Links:

Peliculas de Tony Romero

Mas informacion de la musica Afro-Cubana

Hora en espanol:

Night in Tunisia - Mario Bauza & His Afro Cuba Orchestra
Lindo Yambu - Eddie Palmieri (New York City)
A todo Cuba le Gusta - Afro Cuban All-Stars (USA)
Giovanni Speaks - Hilton Ruiz (New York City)
Noche como Boca’e Lobo - Sonora Poncena (Puerto Rico)

A few months before Myrian Cossio’s 20th birthday, in San José del Guaviare, a bustling frontier town deep in Colombia’s eastern tropical lowlands, armed men forced her into a car. She immediately knew they were from one of the three armed groups fighting in Colombia’s decades-long civil war—army, paramilitary, and guerrillas. They took her to the town’s outer limits and put a gun to her head. “We know you have AIDS, and we know you work with those whores and faggots,” they told her. She had 48 hours to leave town, or they’d kill her.

Cossio’s problems began the year before, in February 1996. At the health clinic where she worked as an administrator, her boss enlisted the staff for a blood drive, and Cossio had dutifully rolled up her sleeve. “I wanted to be a good example, so the community would do the same,” she remembers. Two weeks later, the results of her blood screening came back HIV positive. Her boss told the entire staff before telling her; she was the last to know. Co-workers stopped using the bathroom she used. At the cafeteria, she no longer received her lunch on normal plates like everyone else; her meals now came on disposable plates with plastic utensils. Eventually, she was fired. (more…)

Plans for new coal mining in the Sierra de Perijá, the northwestern region of the state of Zulia, Venezuela, were suspended by President Hugo Chávez last year following anti-coal declarations by Chávez and several ministers. The Wayúu, Yukpa, and Barí indigenous communities who would have been displaced by the projects cautiously interpreted the suspension as a temporary sign of relief. But their struggle against coal mining has lasted a quarter of a century and will not conclude until mining concessions are repealed for good.

On May 11, 2008 President Hugo Chávez announced on his weekly Sunday talk show Aló Presidente that Corpozulia, the state-owned development corporation in the oil and mineral-rich state, would acquire 51% of all coal mining projects in the region within two years. Transnational coal companies which already operate in Zulia, such as Carbones de la Guajira, which is controlled by the Chevron-Texaco-owned holding company Inter-American Coal, shall be turned into state-run “socialist” enterprises, the president said. (more…)

This week Radio Diaspora examines the impact of race on the electoral process both in United States and on the impact that it has on the Region.

In the US criminal justice system, the politics of the police, the politics of the courts, the politics of the prison system and the politics of the death penalty are a manifestation of the racism and classism which governs the lives of all of us. Every part of the criminal justice system falls most heavily on the poor and people of color, including the fact that slavery is mandated in prisons by the 13th Amendment of the US constitution. The US didn’t abolish slavery; it just transferred it into the prisons. Prison slavery in the form of involuntary labor is real. Listen as Radio Diapora Talks to Andrea Ritchie and Hakkem Shaeed