Gary Aldrich Mega-Ping!
Posted on 05/16/2002 2:39:55 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Reports of human rights abuses in communist Cuba are nonstop. Fidel Castro is nothing more than a lying, murderous dictator who has oppressed an island nation for more than 40 years. These facts are indisputable. The mere passage of time does not soften these facts. That a former Democratic president named Carter is visiting Castro is no surprise. The left has had affection for Castro and his politics since he seized power many years ago.
A focus of this human tragedy is south Florida, where thousands of Cuban refugees settled after fleeing their homeland. As a young boy growing up in Hialeah, Fla., I went to school with hundreds of Cuban children whose parents were lucky enough to "get out." That's how everyone in south Florida talked about fleeing Cuba – they were fortunate enough to "get out." It truly was a "great escape," like something straight out of a World War II P.O.W. movie.
For years, Cubans boarded small boats and made the 90-mile trek from Cuba to Key West – if they were lucky. If they were unlucky and missed the Florida Keys, they often drifted north getting caught in the currents of the Gulf Stream, never to be seen again.
Sometimes – like in the case of Elian Gonzales – the passengers on the crowded boats were found by south Florida fishermen out for a day of sun and fun. Other times, the boats' passengers fell victim to the fierce storms that raged in the Atlantic. Thousands died fleeing Castro.
But why did they flee? What were they trying to get away from? What were they seeking? What did they hope to find in America?
Many have reduced these brave Cuban patriots' desires and the risks they took to the material. That's because so many see life in America as a continual quest for more "things." The dignity and wonder of life is too often defined by the number of items stocked on our grocery shelves and our ability to purchase as many goods as we can carry off in our new luxury SUV.
To be fair, more than a few Cuban refugees have been reduced to tears as they walked through our giant superstores for the very first time, gazing at the great quantities of food and overwhelming variety that we take for granted. In their homeland everything is rationed, including basics like toilet paper, sugar, coffee and other staples.
Seeing their joy, their excitement, we easily mistake their emotions as evidence that the differences between living in Cuba and living in America are all about the kind of car one drives or the number of chickens one can put into the family pot. How mistaken we are if we think that.
We sully the memory of the thousands who died in the cause of freedom when we describe their efforts as mere cover for those who search for the almighty dollar. We forget that without freedom there is no prosperity.
In 1982, I was smuggled into the hotel room of an old Cuban woman visiting the U.S. for a few precious weeks. She was the grandmother of a very good friend of mine. Most Cubans view the FBI much like we, as Americans, view the KGB. Castro had preached for years about alleged FBI and CIA plots that were underway to undermine his power-base. But, she wanted to talk to me, an FBI agent, because she wanted to tell as many people as possible about the horrible fear she lived with day in and day out.
Was this brave woman afraid of terrorists or criminals or wild animals? No, she was simply afraid of Fidel Castro and the thousands of Castro agents that had been recruited all over the island of Cuba. And, what purpose did these "block captains" serve? Why did Castro want an agent on every single block in every single town on the island? To spy and report back suspicious activities, of course! Every citizen on the island of Cuba is being watched around the clock by Castro's agents. When a Castro agent suspects dissident activity on the part of someone – no matter how young or old – odds are, the truck with the troops will arrive at night and that "comrade" will disappear for awhile … or maybe, forever.
This is the constant fear that the Cuban people live with. In seeking a meeting with an FBI agent, this brave, old woman was risking imprisonment, or worse. South Florida was riddled with Castro agents on the lookout for any signs of dissent. Not only would she be in serious trouble, but her relatives would be also. Castro has a way of being especially angry and revengeful with those whom he considers disloyal to the revolution.
Was this grandmother trying to tell me she wanted more coffee or bread? Was she risking so much to send a message to America that her nation needed more medicine or pantyhose?
The courage she displayed that day was the same courage displayed by the thousands of Cubans who had come before her. They were trying to tell us – we, the people who they believed to be their friends and supporters – that they had lost their liberty and their freedoms to an angry and evil dictator who had instituted in their land a most dangerous and inhuman oppression.
The fact that they don't enjoy a steady supply of coffee, or bread or toilet paper is the direct result of the loss of liberty of the Cuban people, stolen by a treacherous and murderous form of government, and not because the United States supports an embargo designed to drive Castro from illegitimate power. Castro lied to get power and he lies to keep it.
But Jimmy Carter will never understand that. Carter and his friends think that one day some communist leader will "get it right" and communism will prevail so that we can all reach that one-world utopia envisioned and lusted after by the left. The American left had high hopes that Castro could pull it off. The fact that he has failed and his people still suffer so much has not diminished the American left's affection for him.
The evidence of that is the smiling face of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter as he criticizes a war-time commander-in-chief, and simultaneously embraces a murderous foreign dictator.
Lowell Ponte: Carter & Castro - FrontPageMagazine.com | May 15, 2002 [Full Text] U.S. AID TO ISRAEL SHOULD BE CUT OFF unless the Jewish State gives in to Palestinian demands, argued ex-President Jimmy Carter in the April 21 New York Times. And this week Mr. Carter is in Cuba, accusing the U.S. Government of lying. And Carter is giving Marxist dictator Fidel Castro the same loving kiss of comradeship and support that then-President Carter once stood on tiptoe to give to Soviet dictator Leonid I. Brezhnev.
Why does Jimmy Carter, arguably the smallest, meanest and most incompetent soul ever to be President, hold such views? One answer may be greed. Carter's motive in attacking Israel becomes clear the instant one sees how many millions of dollars his Carter Center in Atlanta has pocketed from Arab leaders and interests. Many wealthy multinational corporations are eager to profit from the end of America's trade embargo against Castro, and it would be fascinating to follow their money and see how much is going to the Carter Center and related groups and individuals.
But Mr. Carter, 77, also seems possessed by other demons, including Leftist ideology and loony idealism. "Jimmy Carter," said liberal journalist Mort Kondracke, "is [second only to Jesse Jackson] the biggest nuzzler of anti-American dictators in the country."
Among those in whose service Jimmy Carter has put his lips, as noted by National Review's Jay Nordlinger and Frank Gaffney, Jr., of the Center for Security Policy, are these: the Marxist dictator Ceausescu of Romania (of whom Carter said "Our goals are the same…."); Syrian mass murderer and Soviet ally Hafez al-Assad; Ethiopian mass murderer Mengistu; and North Korean Marxist madman Kim Il Sung [of whose totalitarian state with which we fought the Korean War, Carter said "I don't see that they are an outlaw nation."].
Jimmy Carter was a relentless supporter of the Castro-aligned Marxist Sandinistas of Nicaragua, doing all in his power to keep their leader Daniel Ortega in power and undermine President Ronald Reagan's attempts to restore freedom to this Central America nation. And both as President and since, Carter has befriended Fidel Castro and sought to end the bipartisan trade embargo against this country (the same kind of embargo Carter eagerly supported against non-Communist white-ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa).
Carter has always claimed to favor "human rights." In the name of such rights he as President withdrew U.S. support for the Shah of Iran because the Shah had imprisoned (and in some cases tortured) about 3,000 people, many of them agents of the Soviet Union bordering his nation. Because of Carter, this pro-Western leader was replaced by the fanatic anti-Western Muslim theocracy of the Ayatollah Khomeni.
The Ayatollah's dictatorship immediately put more than 20,000 pro-Western Iranians before firing squads. It reversed the Shah's opening to Western culture and rolled back the equal rights he had extended to women. And it promptly plunged Iran into war with neighboring Iraq, a war that never would have happened with the Shah in power - a war that killed more than 500,000 people. It also created the regional instabilities that led to Iraq's later invasion of Kuwait and to Operation Desert Storm, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands more.
And the Ayatollah's overthrow of a major American-aligned leader on the Persian Gulf inspired many thousands of Muslim fanatics to destabilize their own modernizing nations in hopes of likewise creating medieval theocracies and making women again submissive.
Jimmy Carter is therefore part of the reason why Osama bin Laden operatives slammed airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon last September 11th.
And yet, with the blood of perhaps a million people dripping from his hands, Jimmy Carter continues to stalk the world in his sick quest to be given a Nobel Peace Prize.
In fact, Jimmy Carter arguably has done more to undermine and destroy world peace than any other human being now alive.
If, God forbid, New York City or Washington, D.C., are vaporized by a Muslim terrorist atomic weapon - or if such fanatics kill millions by unleashing a dread disease agent such as Ebola virus in Chicago, Houston, Miami, Seattle or Los Angeles - Jimmy Carter's demented politics should be held responsible for framing the fearful symmetry that caused such horrors.
Speaking from Cuba, Jimmy Carter denounced last week's assertion by U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton that "Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states [that]….could support BW [Bacteriological Warfare] programs in those states."
"I asked them specifically," said Carter of government officials who briefed him before his Cuba trip, "…'Is there any evidence that Cuba has been involved in sharing any information to any other country on Earth that could be used for terrorist purposes?' And the answer from our experts on intelligence was No."
Mr. Carter had been briefed by underlings with no expertise in biological warfare, as it turned out. As Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, even if Carter accurately represented what he had been told in what was supposed to be a confidential briefing, it contradicted nothing in Bolton's statement about the weapons potential in Cuba's technology sharing.
Carter made a show of touring one biotechnology facility in Cuba and then telling reporters he saw nothing amiss there. But as Associated Press observed, "the former American president had no biotechnology experts in his delegation."
In May 1998 Clinton Administration Secretary of Defense William Cohen warned of Cuba's biological weapons potential. This week Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich affirmed that "Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological weapons research and development effort, and has provided…biotechnology to other rogue states."
"There is plenty of reason to be very concerned about what the Cubans are doing in this area," said National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
"You can't show someone a biotech lab and be assured they're not creating weapons of mass destruction," Rice continued. "That's not how biotech weapons work. And they're actually very easy to conceal and you need multiple measures to make certain biotech weapons aren't being developed and transferred."
Among the nations with which Cuba acknowledges it is sharing biotechnology are Libya and Iran, both terrorist-supporting states like Cuba itself. Mr. Carter simply brushed these facts aside, saying he did not believe Cuba was providing terrorist assistance to either nation and calling Cuba's biotech relationship with
Iran one in which Cuba could be trusted to "prevent any illicit or improper use of the technology which they share."
A cynic might wonder how the likes of Jimmy Carter ever became President. The answer is Time Magazine, which put the obscure-but-liberal Georgia governor on its cover four times in a successful effort to play king-maker. (Johnny Carson likewise made obscure, failed Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and his saxophone a star on the Tonight Show, and has lately taken to voicing his distaste for patriotism associated with the War on Terrorism.)
Time nowadays owns CNN, popularly known as the Clinton and/or Castro News Network for its relentless far-Left slant. The Media Research Center recently described CNN as a "propaganda tool for Fidel Castro's government" and a "megaphone for a dictator." CNN, of course, is the half-brainchild of Ted Turner (former husband of Hanoi Jane Fonda), who once boasted aloud to Chinese leaders that he, like them, was a socialist.
CNN's Havana bureau, the only Cuba-based bureau of any network (even PBS, once parodied on Saturday Night Live with the words: "PBS: If we didn't bring you Fidel Castro's 60th Birthday Gala, who would?"), once described Marxist Cuba's elections as superior to America's because they "have no dubious campaign spending" and "no mud slinging."
My Communist Party overseer when I was in Cuba long ago to do a piece for the Los Angeles Times expressed puzzlement that I was an editor at Skeptic Magazine, which featured debates among those on different sides of an issue.
"Here," my government shadow told me, "we do not confuse the people with debate. The Communist Party decides what the correct view of an issue is, and then it tells the people what that is." No wonder Castro and his bootlicks like former Turner Books author Wayne Smith are furious that Bush Administration visitors to Cuba hand out free shortwave radios. When I was in Cuba, all the radios lacked tuning dials, giving listeners instead only buttons tuned to the government stations, rather like what Leftists try to impose on American university campuses.
The recently deceased great international economist Peter Bauer, if my memory serves, once said: "By the year 2050 there will be only two True Believing Marxists left on Planet Earth - and they will be two nuns in Brazil."
In year 2002 one other True Believer in the ultra-Left continues as a specter haunting our world, and his name is Jimmy Carter. Carter would deny this, fancying himself a "Liberal." But as P.J. O'Rourke so rightly put it, nowadays "Liberalism is just Marxism sold by the drink." [End]
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and Sundays 9-11 PM Eastern Time (6-8 PM Pacific Time) that can be heard on 218 stations and via TalkAmerica.com. The show's live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.
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America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
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Perhaps it is Jimmy's try at excelling at something. He is mad because Clinton took away his crown as the worst President ever.
Ronald Reagan brought the Soviet ecomony to its knees by driving their military spending through the roof in a futile effort to keep up with our missile defense program, collapsing the oil market and supporting their foes in Afghanistan. It was Ronald Reagan, the Pope and Lady Margaret Thatcher who, like the three musketeers, fought and won the battle against communism but the Left gives the credit to Gorbachev. When the Soviets went under, Castro became a dead man walking.
Jimmy Carter visits social service groups, Protestant clergymen before farewell dinner with Castro [Excerpts] While the Roman Catholic church is by far Cuba's largest, Protestant denominations have been growing across the island after losing most of their pastors immediately after the 1959 revolution Castro led.
……………While local communist party functionaries sometimes clash with new churches that bubble up without official permission, Ebenezer's pastor, the Rev. Raul Suarez, said that 1,176 once-illegal congregations have been legalized in recent years as the government has shifted from open hostility to a wary embrace of religious organizations. Suarez said another 600 were pending.
The clergymen presented Carter with a Spanish-language Bible, flowers and a painting - as well as rousing hymns during a service in his honor that ended with an English-language rendition of "We Shall Overcome."
Carter said he had read the Bible nightly in Spanish for years, and he used that language on Wednesday. He quoted St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, saying "the things that are most important of all in life" are "the things that cannot be seen, that cannot be measured."
"It is not education. It is not electricity in the house, it is not money in the bank," he said.
Instead he spoke of "cooperation, friendship, love" and said that among citizens of the United States and Cuba there should be "justice, peace, humility, service, compassion. These are very simple things, but the most important."
Earlier in the day, Carter visited social service programs, including a special education school for children, a housing construction project and a family medical clinic - the kind of efforts that Castro's communist government is proud of.
Scores of Cubans greeted Carter in the town of Frank Pais outside Havana with chants of "Car-TER! Car-TER!" when he arrived to tour a family medical clinic.
The night before, Carter told Cubans that their country does not meet international standards of democracy and repeatedly promoted a grass-roots campaign for greater civil liberties.
Cuban newspapers on Wednesday underscored Carter's criticisms of Washington's policies toward Havana, as well as his call for an end to the U.S. embargo of Cuba, but they did not mention Carter's references to a lack of liberties. [End Excerpts]
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