Cubans “The Voyage Of The Damned”

FOR FREEDOM & JUSTICE GROUP ^ | May 19, 2003 | David Hoech

[CHACHI]

Cubans “The Voyage Of The Damned”

By: David Hoech

May 19, 2003

It was sixty-four years ago this past May 13 that the SS St. Louis left Hamburg, Germany with 963 Jews seeking sanctuary from the Nazi regime and anti-Semitism. Cuba permitted only 29 passengers to stay after the ship had sat in its harbor for days, and the United States would not take any. The ship finally docked in Antwerp, Belgium on June 17, 1939. Over 500 of the original passengers perished in the Holocaust. Yet, today the United States wants to find fault with Switzerland’s wartime refugee policy. Switzerland admitted about 28,000 Jewish refugees but has drawn condemnation for turning away another 30,000. The United States accepted only 21,000 refugees from Europe and did not significantly raise or even fill its restrictive quotas, accepting far fewer Jews per capita than many of the neutral European countries and fewer in absolute terms than Switzerland. Sixty-four years later we are still lying to cover our lack of involvement in the rescue effort of six millions Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

Last Friday’s Miami Herald article “2 Migrants threatened officers, U.S. says” referred to those fleeing slavery as migrants instead of immigrants. The article stated, “The two used a knife and part of a boat mast to ward off Coast Guard crew members trying to stop them and two other men, according to federal officials. At one point, a Coast Guard officer drew his handgun and other officers sprayed the men with pepper spray to try to control them.” Let’s get this straight-- these men are in the water with a pocketknife and a piece of wood, and they posed a threat to those who are secure on boats with guns. The “migrants” were jailed in Key West, and bond was set at $70,000. If convicted they could face 20 years in prison and deportation after serving the time. I guess that is not so bad considering going back to Cuba would more than likely make them recipients of lead from Castro’s firing squad.

These “migrants” should have signed a paper before leaving Cuba that they would work at IBP, Tyson Foods, Perdue Chicken and other companies that hire illegal Mexicans. Attorney General John Ashcroft, the largest recipient of money from The Dwayne Andreas Crime Family (Andreas AKA The Great Puppeteer) and Archer Daniels Midland Company when he ran for Senator in 2000, decided the charges against these two men. Dwayne Andreas had to request this action for these two men as he did sending Elián González back to Castro. Once again ADM asked the government to set an example to satisfy Castro and protect ADM’s investments in Cuba. This may not be a good idea for Ashcroft at this time, as the American people are sick and tired of corporate America dictating policy, which boils down to abuse of civil rights and inhumane treatment. If the people who lost their lives trying to reach freedom from Castro’s slave island were laid head to toe they would stretch from Havana to Key West. When the mini-series “The Holocaust” was shown in Germany in the seventies, German children asked their parents and grandparents what the hell were they doing when this was taking place. Our children and grandchildren will ask the same question-- what were we doing to help the voyage of the denied, detained and eventually deported fleeing slavery in Cuba.

When we live in a country whose church-going-Midwest Christians praise trade with Cuba and the bible-thumping Attorney General promotes doing business with a slave owner of 11 million slaves, we got real problems and it damn sure isn’t Castro. One of the greatest men in our nation’s history, Dr. Martin Luther King, must be rolling over in his coffin to see that the U.S. Black Caucus has become Fidel Castro’s “Uncle Toms.” We are no better than a bunch of Nazis to condone the behavior of those who insist on protecting, aiding and abetting in the enslavement of the Cuban people. ADM gave $100,000 for the inaugural party of President Bush. ADM and its toady farm organization gave close to $400,000 to John Ashcroft’s re-election campaign in 2000. There is no difference between President Clinton and Bush or Attorney General Reno and Ashcroft when it comes to ADM and The Andreas Crime Family. They are all bought and paid for and will perform when the Puppeteer Andreas pulls their strings.

Yesterday on ABC’s This Week sponsored by Archer Daniels Midland, George Stephanopoulos interviewed Ricardo Alacórn, the leader of Cuba’s National Assembly. Once again ADM is using the media to paint a picture of Castro being the oppressed one. Also, the Miami exile community continues to be the target of criticism by ADM and its business partner Fidel Castro. The problem between Cuba and the United States isn’t about exiled Cubans it is about slavery and freedom. It is time to stop letting Castro use our media outlets to make the Miami exiled community the brunt of his abusive and untruthful remarks.

Remember the words of Woodrow Wilson, “The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.” We have become like the people of the World War II era, under oppression, who didn’t even know they were oppressed until it was too late. And, yes, we will get on the truck just as they did, only this time we will probably tip the driver. We live in a police state, where the government wants to police everything and the media is controlled by corporate America wanting to police our minds. We are definitely living in dangerous times!

Globalfl1@peoplepc.com

Hoech resides in Hallandale Beach, Florida

[headsonpikes]

The SS St. Louis shame is shared by Canada, as well. The ship was turned away at Halifax.

[Dqban22]

Great article. It should not be forgotten the shameful record of the Roosevelt and Truman administration in regards to the Jews during the Holocaust. During the war, and even when the Holocaust was going on, United States was reluctant to give refugee to Jews fleeing from the Nazis. It is beyond believe that less than 10,000 Jews were given sanctuary in United States, while dictator Franco, even as Spain was a destroyed and starving country after a bloody civil war, open its borders to more than 60,000 fleeing Jews.

We see history repeating itself with the Bush administration illegally capturing fleeing refugees in international waters and forcedly returning them to the Island-Prison of Cuba to face death or long imprisonment in Castro’s political dungeons.

[Dqban22]

Fair Play for Cubans
Jay Bryant

August 4, 2003

In 1854, the despicable Franklin Pierce administration attempted to purchase the island of Cuba and make it a state – a slaveholding state. The idea was eventually to take over the whole Caribbean and create a sufficient number of slave states to offset the creation of the new free states which anyone with a map and a brain could see were on the western horizon.

A better chance for the annexation of Cuba came about in 1898, when the splendid little Spanish-American war resulted in U.S. control of that island, along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines; that same year, we also acquired Hawaii.

Think for a moment about those four island countries. Rank order them in terms of where you would prefer to live. Unless you're weird or something (or have an ethnic relationship to one place on the list), your list will go Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Cuba. In other words, the longer and closer the relationship of the islands with the United States, the better off they are.

(Hawaii became a full-fledged state; Puerto Rico continues in a commonwealth relationship; the Philippines were governed by the U.S. for half a century and then granted independence; Cuba became independent almost as soon as Teddy Roosevelt got back down San Juan Hill and has remained so ever since.)

Today, Cuba, that huge, beautiful and fertile island, fatherland to some of the most talented people in the world, is a place so awful that its citizens again and again risk death at sea in desperate attempts to escape.

Tourism, the island's largest industry, is abysmal, down 5% in 2002. This year's sugar cane harvest is so poor it may be the lowest since 1933. Thirteen percent of the population is clinically undernourished; official unemployment is around 12%, and that is almost surely understated; real wages are down 50% since 1989; university enrollments are down 46%; the credit rating is abominable (Moody's Caa1 -- "speculative grade, very poor"), and no wonder with defaults, missed payments and suspended credit lines glued to the nation's financial ship like barnacles.

A group of intrepid Americans is desperately trying to save a priceless trove of Hemingway manuscripts in the basement of Finca Vigia, Hemingway's hilltop retreat outside Havana, which have been left to molder in the humid Caribbean air. Cuba can't even manage to preserve its national treasures.

When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, President Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations and instituted the beginnings of the embargo, which persists to this day. The Kennedy Administration bungled the one serious attempt to wrest power from Castro, the amateurish Bay of Pigs invasion.

Ever since, the Cuban population of South Florida, growing year after year and never losing its dream of a free Cuba, but even so becoming Americans through and through, has been a bastion of Republican strength.

The three Cuban-American representatives in Congress are all Republicans, and it is estimated that the Cuban vote in Florida went 80% to George W. Bush in 2000.

That means, of course, that the Cuban vote in Florida is responsible for the fact that he is President today. One can go even farther; had it not been for the unconscionable actions of President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno in the Elian Gonzales case, Bush would have lost. He might still have received 80% of the Cuban vote, but there can be no doubt that the passion engendered by the case resulted in a sufficiently increased turnout to more than account for the handful of Florida votes by which he won.

Many people think that because of the importance of Florida politics, Bush should intervene with the bureaucrats in the State and Justice departments who have returned one group of twelve freedom-seekers to Cuba on July 21, satisfied that they had plea bargained Castro down from a death sentence to ten year prison terms. A second group of nineteen is awaiting its fate aboard a US Coast Guard cruiser.

We expected this sort of kowtowing to Castro from Clinton; that it persists in the Bush administration is little short of astonishing; brother Jeb, for one, is angry. "It's just not right," he says.

And that, in the end, is the point. Not that the President may lose the Cuban vote by his uncharacteristic timorousness. It is simply that it's just not right to send people back to slavery in a police state country when they have risked so much to escape. It's something Franklin Pierce (who famously sent escaped slaves back to their owners) and Bill Clinton (as with Elian) would have done, but, as Jeb says, it's not right.

Back in the early Castro days a bunch of left-wingers formed a communist front group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (Lee Harvey Oswald was a member) to build support for Castro in the US.

Today, fair play for Cubans means letting them into the US if they manage to get out of Cuba. It's hard to imagine there isn't some way to set up a system that keeps al- Qaeda terrorists out and lets freedom-loving Cubans in.

Veteran GOP media consultant Jay Bryant’s regular columns are available at www.theoptimate.com, and his commentaries may be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”