"Castro is a murder." Tearful relatives of Cuban dissidents call for sanctions against Castro

(AFP/File/Adalberto Roque)

South America's new-style military coup***LIMA, PERU - A new form of military coup d'état is emerging in South America. Today's new militarism is characterized by leftist military men who lead a rebellion, are jailed for it, and then emerge with the popularity to win the next presidential election with large majorities of the vote.

With the patriarchal blessing of Fidel Castro, the model of new militarism started with Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan colonel who led a failed coup in 1992, served two years in prison, and returned to capture the presidency in 1998. Ecuador's President Lucio Gutierrez - an Army colonel who led a successful indigenous rebellion in 2000, was jailed briefly, and was elected president last November - has consolidated the trend that, without a doubt, will spread.***

Fidel is starting to look more and more like a confused scitzophrenic (sp) homeless person as he ages. Chavez, of course, looks like something that passed out of my body.

I really would like for the USA to take a harder line in Latin America, rather than continuing the "benign neglect" initiated by Clinton.

BUMP

Can we send this to all the Senators, representatives, governors etc., who went to Cuba and buddied up to Castro? And don't forget Jimmy Carter, Dan Rather and Oliver Stone?

They don't give a damn.

We should send this to the International Acation Center and the WWP, both parties who see Castro as some "great and moral" man and view the US as the terrorist state. Would love to shove it in their face!

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.”

REP. FLAKE, THERE ARE POWERFUL REASONS FOR NOT TRADING WITH CASTRO
by Jesús J. Chao*
May 12, 2002

When Castro sees American congressman, Jeff Flake, he keeps "laughing day and night" at this valuable and useful idiot who works diligently for him, perhaps without pay, instead of representing the best interest of the American taxpayers and the security of his own country.

Flake maintains that Castro "is not a man who has missed too many meals because of the embargo." Certainly no, Castro is among the richest heads of state in the world with over 1.5 billion personal fortune.

Cuba can freely trade with the rest of the world, but he starves his people as Stalin did with the Ukrainian peasants. The big problem is that whoever trades with Castro is never paid back. Flake, wants you, American taxpayers, to feed and maintain Castro's repressive apparatus.

THERE ARE POWERFUL REASONS FOR NOT TRADING WITH CASTRO.

1st.-- Cuba is, and has been a terrorist state for 43 years, and counts with advanced chemical, biological and cyberwarfare capabilities aimed against our country. The cooperation between the Cuban regime,Iraq and Iran in the chemical and biological research is well documented.

Just a few days ago the Bush Administration made public their deep concern about Castro's menace to our security.

A few months before the September 11 attack Castro affirmed at the University of Tehran that their cooperation would put the U.S. down to its knees. That was an ominous threat that materialized on the 9/11 attacks to our country.

Castro plays a central role in the international terrorist network as recognized by the U.S. State Department, with strong nexus with the Islamic terrorism. Right after the attack without even counting with Fidel Castro, Prime Minister Putin dismantled their most important Russian spy and electronic base, which was located in the outskirts of Havana.

Castro went berserk when he found out about it by the media. Did Castro's partners in the Islamic terrorism gather the necessary intelligence for the success of the attack through Castro's access to the Russian spy base? Castro once tried to nuke our cities and he has the means and the will to fulfill his dream of destroying our country.

If we are involved in a worldwide war against terrorism, Cuba at 90 miles from our coast should be a prime target in that war; so, those involved in appeasement policies towards Castro and in the promotion of the lifting of the commercial embargo against Cuba are in fact aiding and abetting our worst enemy.

2nd.-- Cuba has defaulted in all its international financial deals and Castro encourages other Third World nations to follow his example. Why are we going to sell to someone without the expectation to ever be repaid. The American taxpayers should be aware that they are the targets of the scam by which the multinationals sell to Castro whatever he needs and we, the taxpayers, end footing the bill. Castro for 42 years has been with commercial ties with over 150 nations. Now when he has exhausted the patience of nations foolish enough to have given him credit. Castro's puppets in the media, and the Congress in cahoots with some greedy commercial circles are wanting for the American taxpayers to shoulder the heavy burden of subsidizing his regime to the tune of 9 billion dollars annually.

Is not enough the billions of dollars in pork just approved by the Congress for the benefit of ADM and the powerful agriculture lobby? How much blood does Rep. Flake and Castro's lobbyists want to extract from the overburdened American taxpayers?

3rd.-- The American companies can not legally conduct business with Cuba without violating several American laws.

A.- Trading with the Enemy Act.
B.- U.S. Commercial Embargo Against Cuba.
C.- Helms-Burton Law.
D.- Involvement in bribes in commercial dealings with another nation. Foreign companies must hire the workers through Castro who keeps 96% of their salary for himself and the repressive apparatus.
E.- Involvement in slave labor of foreign workers in connivance with the local authorities. This is another factor necessary to reconcile with. Every deal; every investment in Cuba is a "joint venture" in partnership with the Cuban tyrant, and that includes being part of slave labor practices, for which those entrepreneurs and multinationals, sooner or later, will pay dearly just as it happened with the companies involved in slave labor during the Nazi era. The scam consists that for each worker they employ, the foreign companies must pay Castro $300 to $500 monthly in dollars and the Cuban dictator pays them 500 to 600 worthless Cuban pesos, which is the equivalent of $12 to $20 dollars or 96% bribe, an outrageous bribe without parallel in the world.

That outrageous business practice is in violation of international and American labor laws and will expose those companies to huge law suits for the slave labor exploitation of the Cuban worker in cahoots with the corrupt communist regime.

We have to wonder why there are so many American politicians promoting the violations of our trading laws, and in the process, they are endangering the security of the U.S. Why is the Treasure Department authorizing all those business trips and all kind of conventions in Cuban soil by which American citizens circumvent and break the U.S. laws? Why is Rep. Flake betraying President Bush's war against terrorism and stabbing the American taxpayers in the back?

As Senator Jesse Helms rightly stated: "Unfortunately, some in Washington are all too willing to give Castro what he wants. At the least they should stop pretending that they are doing this to promote Cuban democracy and American values.

Why can't Casto just DIE already.....

He will.