The anti-“embargo” reasoning seems to go something like this: the Carlyle Group, Archer Daniels Midland and the Council on Foreign Relations, along with congressmen representing the most heavily taxpayer-subsidized sector of the U.S. economy, spend most of their waking hours agonizing over the welfare of the Cuban people and yearning to succor them. The Cuban peoples' cousins, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in Miami, however, only want to starve and torture their relatives.
Furthermore, after a couple of junkets to Cuba, executives of the above-mentioned corporations and their crony congressmen and lobbyists become endowed with an uncanny clairvoyance. This enables them to divine the whims and motives of Cuba's officials much more accurately than those who lived for years under Cuba's communist system, and often within the system. These latter often had daily contact with Cuba's current officials.
But never mind. They know nothing. They cannot be trusted. Jeff Flake and Charles Rangel are much shrewder judges of Raul Castro's psyche than Alcibiades Hidalgo, Raul Castro's adjutant and chief-of-staff for over a decade, who defected to the U.S. in 2002 and flatly stated: “Ending the travel ban would be a gift to the Castros.”
12
“But come on, Humberto. When Castro took office amidst all the euphoria, couldn't we have tried some carrot along with Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick? It seems that right off the bat we started trying to overthrow him or assassinate him!”
In fact, the U.S. elite's fetish for carrots and “engagement” with Fidel Castro began before he was even in office.
“Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” boasted Robert Reynolds, the CIA's “Caribbean desk's specialist on the Cuban revolution” from 1957 to 1960.
“Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except [Republican] Ambassador Earl Smith,” admitted Robert Weicha, CIA operative in Santiago, Cuba.
The overwhelming CIA and State Department infatuation with Castro proved decisive with the Eisenhower administration; and so January 7, 1959 marks a milestone in U.S. diplomatic history. Never before had the State Department extended diplomatic recognition to a Latin American government as quickly as it did on (unelected) Fidel Castro's that day.
Nothing so frantically fast had been bestowed upon “U.S.-backed” Fulgencio Batista (note the obligatory prefix, used in every MSM and scholarly mention of him) seven years earlier. Batista had in fact been punished by a U.S. arms embargo and heavy diplomatic pressure to resign for a year. Batista was subsequently denied exile in the U.S. and not even allowed to set foot in the country that had supposedly backed him.
When U.S. State department officials finally got their man Fidel Castro in office, however, they were the ones stepping and fetching and rolling over and begging. During Castro's first 16 months in power, while he was insulting the U.S. as “a vulture preying on humanity,” flooding Cuba with Soviet agents and stealing U.S. properties to tune of millions of dollars weekly, the State Department made more than ten back-channel diplomatic attempts
to ascertain the cause of his tantrums and further “engage” him with ever bigger carrots. Argentinean President Arturo Frondizi was the conduit for many of these and recounts their utter futility in his memoirs.
13
In the summer of 1960, Castro's KGB-trained security forces stormed into more than 1,600 U.S.-owned businesses in Cuba and stole them all at Soviet gunpoint. Two billion dollars were heisted from outraged U.S. businessmen and stockholders. Rubbing his hands in triumphant glee, Fidel Castro boasted at maximum volume to the entire world that he was freeing Cuba from “Yankee economic slavery” and that “he would never repay a penny.”
This might be the only official promise Fidel Castro has ever kept.
Not all Americans surrendered their legal and hard-earned property peacefully. Among some who resisted were Bobby Fuller, whose family farm would contribute to a Soviet-style
kolkhoz
, and Howard Anderson, whose profitable Jeep dealership was coveted by Castro's henchmen. Both U.S. citizens were murdered by Castro and Che's firing squads, after torture.
Here are court records from a suit in the 11th Judicial Circuit Court, Miami-Dade County by Katy Fuller, whose father was murdered in 1960 by for resisting the theft of his family farm.
From
The Estate of Robert Otis Fuller vs The Republic of Cuba
, filed May 5, 2002:
“Agents of the Castro Government acting under orders of the Castro Government, led Bobby Fuller to a firing squad where he was shot and killed after being tortured by having his blood drained from his body. Thereafter, his body was thrown into an unmarked mass grave in an unknown location.”
Here's another lawsuit against Fidel Castro by the family of U.S. citizen Howard Anderson, who resisted the theft of his filling stations and Jeep dealership by Castro's gunmen in 1960: Anderson v. Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Circuit Court, April 13, 2003). “In one final session of torture, Castro's agents
drained Howard Anderson's body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”
Two days after his trial, Howard Anderson refused a blindfold, preferring to glare at his executioners. Medically he was probably in shock at the time from the blood-draining. “
Fuego!”
The bullets shattered Howard Anderson's body at dawn on April 19, 1961.
So, however valuable they have proven to American taxpayers, U.S. sanctions against Castro's regime were not originally enacted due to the regime's abysmal credit rating.
In July 1961, JFK's special counsel Richard Goodwin met with Che Guevara in Uruguay and reported back to Kennedy: “Che says that Cuba wants an understanding with the U.S.; the Cubans have no intention of making an alliance with the Soviets. So we should make it clear to Castro that we want to help Cuba.”
14
(How Che managed a straight face during this conversation requires a book of its own.)
In response, Soviet nuclear missiles locked and loaded in Cuba a year laterâand pointed at Goodwin's and Kennedy's very homes.
In 1975, President Gerald Ford (under Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's influence) allowed foreign branches and subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade freely with Cuba and persuaded the Organization of American States to lift its sanctions.
In response, Castro started his African invasion and tried to assassinate Ford. You read right. On March 19, the
Los Angeles Times
ran the headline “Cuban Link to Death Plot Probed.” Both Republican candidates of the day, President Ford and Ronald Reagan, were to be taken out during the Republican National Convention. The Emiliano Zapata Unit, a Bay Area radical group linked to the Weather Underground, would make the hits.
15
Jimmy Carter, in a goodwill gesture, lifted U.S. travel sanctions against Cuba and was poised to open full diplomatic relations with Castro.
In response, more thousands of Cuban troops spreading Soviet terror (and poison gas) in Africa, more internal repression, and
hundreds of psychopaths, killers, and perverts infiltrated on boats and shoved at the U.S. in the Mariel boatlift.
Ronald Reagan sent Secretary of State Alexander Haig to meet personally in Mexico City with Cuba's Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez to feel him out. Then he sent diplomatic troubleshooter General Vernon Walters to Havana for a meeting with the Maximum Leader himself.
In response, Cubans took over Nicaragua and practically practically took over Grenada and El Salvador. But unlike Carter, Reagan responded to Castro with pretty salutary results.
In the 90's, President Clinton tried playing nice again by relaxing trade and travel restrictions.
In response, three U.S. citizens and one U.S. resident who flew humanitarian flights over the Florida straits (Brothers to the Rescue) were murdered in cold blood by Castro's MiG's. Castro agent Ana Belen Montes “moled” her way to head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Cuba division, achieving the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Department by an enemy agent in modern history.
The Obama administration mimicked President Clinton's Cuba policy, with similar results. “We have seen Raul Castro's comments and we welcome this overture,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in April 2009. “We are taking a very serious look at it. We are continuing to look for productive ways forward, because we view the present [George W. Bush administration] policy as having failed. Engagement is a useful tool to advance our national interests.”
16
Deeds quickly followed words. In executive order after executive order, President Obama abolished Bush's travel and remittance restrictions to Castro's terrorist-sponsoring fiefdom, to the point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba in 2011-12 was estimated by Senator Marco Rubio's staff at $4 billion a year. While a proud Soviet satrapy, Cuba had received $3-5 billion annually from the Soviets. Some “embargo.”
In response, on December 3, 2009, Castro's police arrested Alan Gross, a U.S. citizen working in Cuba under contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Mr. Gross has languished in a Cuban prison cell ever since. His crime was bringing cell-phone and Internet equipment into Castro's fiefdom to help Cuba's tiny Jewish community communicate more freely with the outside world. Pre-Castro Cuba boasted more phones and TV's per capita than most European countries, by the way. Today, Castro's fiefdom has fewer Internet users per capita than Uganda, and fewer cell phones than Papua New Guinea. The Stalinist regime is very vigilant in these matters.
17
In March 2011, after he had lost almost 100 pounds from his prison ordeal, a Castroite court finally got around to trying Mr. Gross. He was condemned to a prison sentence of 15 years for working for an agency of the U.S. government “that aimed to destroy the revolution through the use of communication systems out of the control of authorities.”
And there's the hitch: control of the authorities. Not even Gaddafi's late regime or HuJintao's in China seek to control cell-phone and Internet access. Censor? Absolutely. But outright control of all means of communication is a fetish peculiar to communists, a term which no longer applies to the mainland Chinese regime, though it certainly remains despicable and dangerous.
Senator Marco Rubio was among the first to comment on Alan Gross's sentence: “Mr. Gross is simply a humanitarian who was seeking to help the Jewish community in Cuba access the Internet, and he deserves to be freed and reunited with his family at once. With Mr. Gross's sentencing, the Castro regime has effectively demonstrated the hopeless and dangerous naivete of this administration's policy toward the regime.”
Upon CNN's being bestowed its coveted Havana bureau in 1997, CNN bureau chief Lucia Newman (now with Al Jazeera) assured viewers that, “CNN will be given total freedom to do what we want and to work without censorship.” Alas, CNN had little to
report on the Gross trial except for the verdict. The trial, in perfect keeping with the Stalinist regime's agenda, was closed to all media.
This type of relentless press censorship by the Castro regime proved too much for Al Jazeera's correspondent, who on June 20, 2012 packed up and left Cuba in a huff. “We can't do any work down here!” complained correspondent Moutaz Al Qaissia of Castro's secret police, who constantly tailed him. Al Qaissia said: “They're unculturedâbarely know how to read. They're dogs!” Al Qaissia had offered some mild criticism of the reforms in Cuba and was promptly accused of being in the pay of the Yankees.
Apparently the censorship from “dictators” Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, etc., proved petty compared to that of “President” Castro. What's this say about the networks that
stay
in Cuba?
From these networks we'll obviously never learn the totality of the evidence against Alan Gross, but some evidence was later leaked by the regime to some sympathetic blogs. From these we learned that Gross had worked with Cuban Freemasons and Cuban Jewish groups. His main contact, Jose Manuel Collera Vento, was in fact the “Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Cuba.”
18
Collera was also a Cuban intelligence agent. Gross had worked with him since 2004. Before that, Collera had often visited the U.S. on cultural exchanges and was even awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom by a group of U.S. senators. Alan Gross made a total of seven trips to Cuba and worked with Jewish delegations in the cities of Havana, Santiago and Camaguey. Every head of every Jewish group that he worked with and befriended testified against him in court.
Another moral of this story: any Cuban academic, cultural or religious figure easily traveling to and from Stalinist nation is probably working for the communist regime's intelligence service. This was common knowledge regarding “cultural ambassadors” from Soviet-bloc countries. “Cultural and educational exchanges with foreign countries are our most effective means of propaganda,”
states a declassified KGB document recently translated by Vladimir Bukovsky.
19
The U.S. embassy in Cuba (officially euphemized as an “Interests Section”) also responded to Mr. Gross's sentence: “He is guilty of nothing more than caring for the Jewish community and the people of Cuba,” said the embassy's public-affairs officer, Gloria Berbena, who added that “the Cuba government seeks to criminalize
what most
of the
world deems normal
âin this case, access to information and technology.”
20
(my emphasis)
So Cuba is Communist after all! Did Ms. Barbena think she was being posted to Belgium? In February 2011 pictures were snuck out of Cuba showing the third-highest ranking U.S. diplomat in Cuba, Puerto Rican-born Joaquin Monserratte, partying hardy with Fidel Castro's son Tony along with the son of the vice-chief of Cuba's secret police, Ernesto Milanes. Monserratte also belongs to the Smoker's Club of Cuba, famous for throwing many bacchanals involving the Castroite elite. Maybe if our diplomatic officers spent less time partying with Cuba's
nomenklatura
, they'd learn how someone like Alan Gross might be subject to arrest.