Greco's Cuba trip brews furor

TAMPA -- The mayor's surprise trip to Cuba has threatened to turn Tampa politics into an emotional maelstrom more often seen in South Florida.

A day after it was learned that Mayor Dick Greco and a group of local leaders had quietly headed for Cuba to consider trade opportunities, an attorney blasted him and threatened political payback, mayoral candidates positioned themselves and others applauded the trip.

The most vocal reaction came from prominent Cuban-American attorney Ralph Fernandez, who called a news conference, vowing to turn the trip into a campaign issue in the upcoming mayoral race and to use it to try to stop Tampa from hosting the 2004 Republican National Convention.

"It will be a cold day in hell before the Republicans come to Tampa," Fernandez told reporters.

A spokesman for the Republican National Committee, which will send a group to Tampa next week to evaluate the city, did not want to comment Tuesday.

Fernandez accused the mayor of going to Cuba to socialize with international terrorists who work for Cuban President Fidel Castro and to lay plans with businessmen to "profiteer" from the suffering of the Cuban people. Fernandez said he plans to fly to Washington this week to meet with officials at the U.S. Department of the Treasury to demand they enforce travel restrictions to Cuba. U.S. law prevents Americans from traveling to Cuba or spending money on the Communist island without obtaining a license or meeting specific criteria.

Fernandez said he will also rally Miami's anti-Communist Cuban leaders against bringing the Republican National Convention to Tampa. He said he will raise campaign funds from Miami's anti-Castro leaders to help mayoral candidates who firmly oppose Greco's trip.

City Council member and mayoral candidate Bob Buckhorn voiced his opposition Monday night. The mayor "is insulting every Cuban-American who left Cuba with nothing on their backs," Buckhorn said. "It's sad."

But not everyone was up in arms. Mayoral candidate Frank Sanchez, a business consultant who has worked widely in Latin America and has touted bringing trade to Tampa, said he needed to speak to Greco before he could judge the mayor's decision.

"I am not going to be reactionary," Sanchez said. "I am going to learn the facts, and I don't have the facts."

He added, "I have absolutely no plans to take any official trips to Cuba as mayor."

"I think it is important that Tampa not fall into the same precarious situation that Miami has fallen into," Sanchez said. "This is a divisive issue, and pulling on the heartstrings of people shows a lack of leadership."

A key Sanchez fundraiser, Don Wallace, founder of the Lazy Days RV SuperCenter, had planned to go on the Cuba trip, but didn't for health reasons.

Albert Fox Jr., executive director of the Washington-based Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation, which opposes the U.S. trade embargo of Cuba and sponsored the trip, donated $500 to Sanchez's mayoral campaign. The two met in Washington when Sanchez worked for the Clinton administration.

"I have over 2,000 people helping me," Sanchez said. "I suspect if you looked into the beliefs of each of those supporters, there are probably things we don't agree on."

Mayoral candidate and City Council member Charlie Miranda, acting mayor while Greco is gone, said he would not have taken the trip.

Former Tampa Congressman Sam Gibbons, chairman of Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba, said Fernandez denounced him after he went to Cuba too.

"I said, 'Come on, Ralph, bring the handcuffs," Gibbons recalled. "I'll get the television cameras, and we will have a showdown." He called the mayor's trip "a fine piece of leadership."

Maura Barrios, a Cuban-American community organizer who leads an anti-embargo group, said many Cubans support the mayor's trip.

"If you really know this community, there are many Cuban Americans not represented by Ralph Fernandez," she said. Business executives including La Gaceta newspaper publisher Patrick Manteiga and Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce chairman Sandy MacKinnon, also made the trip.

-- Staff writer Tamara Lush and researcher John Martin contributed to this report. David Karp can be reached at (813) 226-3376 or karp@sptimes.com.

THE CONGRESS AND SENATE’S SUPPORT OF CASTRO’S TERROR NETWORK.
Jesús J. Chao

In view of the appalling betrayal of President Bush’s war against terrorism by members of the U.S. Congress and Senate by supporting Cuba’s terrorist regime we should expose to the American people the profound danger in which they have placed our country.

World renown and highly respected American investigative journalist and author, Claire Sterling, who is considered one of the foremost experts on international terrorism, wrote in 1981 a definitive report on this theme in her book “The Terror Network, The Secret War on International terrorism.”

According to her: “All of the world’s emerging terrorist bands in the 1970’s were indebted to the Cubans and their Russian patrons for that honeycomb of camps around Havana. None could have started without rudimentary training, and those who didn’t train in Cuba were trained by others who did.”

Twenty years later, the central and main head of the terrorism network is still the same diabolical tyrant, Fidel Castro. What Sterling wrote then, still applies and helps to understand the central role of Castro in today’s terrorist explosion and his relationship with the “axis of evil.”

Sterling mentions “in the summer of 1968, the Soviet Union forced Fidel Castro into a secret agreement whereby Cuba surrendered sovereign control over its foreign policy to the Kremlin and consigned its intelligence service – the Dirección General de Inteligencia - (DGI) to the KGB.

That same summer, the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee decided, at the KGB’s urging, to reverse its old policy of avoiding Palestinian entanglements. Arab Communists, meeting secretly in Moscow in July, were instructed to infiltrate, spy upon, and gain ascendancy over the Palestine Resistance. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union itself began to train and arm the Palestinians.”

This fact was well known in 1968 by our intelligence services as stated by John Barron in his book “KGB”, since the United States learned about it through penetration of the KGB. By 1970, promising Fedayeen were being sent to officers’ Special Schools in Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Libya, Iraq, China North Vietnam and Cuba where they received political indoctrination on Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

But, according to Sterling, Castro’s relationship with international terrorism was already strong and deep for over ten years before the Soviets got involved in the promotion of terrorism against the West.

Sterling held that “Castro had always wanted to export his revolution. No sooner did he come into power in January 1959 than he sent his first expeditionary force to Panama, where he flopped. He tried again three times that year, in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, and sent a full battalion of Cuban ‘medics’ to liberate Algeria. Barely two years later, he had already bagged the future leader of Africa’s first successful Marxist coup, in Zanzibar… Few knew that ‘Field Marshall’ John Okello seized this small island off East African Coast in January 1964, after spending three years in Havana training for the job… His coup was flawless. It took just a few hours for his six hundred men – many of them Cuban-trained – to overthrow the Arab sultanate and proclaim a Communist ‘people’s republic.’ Thousands of non-black Zanzibaris, Arab and Indian, were slaughtered with deliberate savagery in next few days, and thousands more fled in terror…” The small island of 300,000 inhabitants became a base for Castro’s penetration into the African mainland.

Castro’s dreams of a Cuban presence in Africa were well advanced before the Soviet joined the game. According to Sterling, “as early as 1961, Castro sent a shipload of Cuban weapons to the West African Coast. Offloading in Casablanca, it took on a return cargo of guerrilla trainees from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, the Congo, South Africa, Kenya, Tanganyika, Spanish Equatorial Guinea, and Zanzibar itself… From then on, Cuba would keep turning out professional guerrilla fighters for just about every new African state.”

When Spain withdrew from Equatorial Guinea, Castro’s man, Francisco Macias Nguema, came into power shielded by Cuban elite henchmen who kept him in power for the next ten years. About three to four hundred Cuban ‘counselors’ were at his side till the end while 50,000 of his 350,000 subjects were murdered (many with his own hands), and another 100,000 were driven into exile. Nguema paid himself a state salary of $5 million a year, and turned his once prosperous mini-state into a derelict non-country in the name of scientific socialism. He was drinking a glass of human blood a day by 1979, when he was overthrown and executed.”

Castro’s expertise running down prosperous countries into wastelands mired with slavery and misery worked in Africa as efficiently as it worked in Cuba.

Meanwhile, reported Sterling, “Castro was training the advance guards of the coming European fright decade – Palestinians, Italians, Germans, French, Spanish Basques – and forming guerrilla nuclei in practically every Western hemisphere state south of the American border. As far back as 1962, Castro’s camps were taking in 1,500 Latin American guerrillas a year. . ‘Any revolutionary movement anywhere in the world can count on Cuba’s unconditional support,’ declared Castro at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana”. It was then and there that the international terrorism network was consolidated under Castro’s leadership.

By then, however, said Sterling, “Colonel Kotchergine of the KGB would soon be supervising a new honeycomb of training camps around Havana for Russian – approved candidates from Europe, Africa, and Asia.” In 1968 the Soviets were underwriting the entire Cuban economy and, “as a part of the bargain, Castro also accepted five thousand Russian advisers, (growing to ten thousand later) posted in various economic sectors, the armed forces, and the DGI. Soviet Colonel Viktor Simenov of the KGB was given an office adjoining the director’s own at DGI headquarters in Havana. Twenty-five DGI agents a year (which later became fifty) would be selected with his approval for training in Moscow. All the DGI’s operational decisions, and its annual budget, had to be cleared through Colonel Simenov. From then on, Cuba would be the only Soviet satellite state whose intelligence service was directly subsidized by Russia ‘for extending its range of activities abroad.’”

“Anything Cuba did in aid of worldwide terrorism after that would have to be done with the Russians’ knowledge and consent, under their close supervision if not their express command,” stated Sterling.

Orlando Castro Hidalgo a Cuban DGI operative in Castro’s embassy in Paris, who defected in 1969, testified before the United States Senate Committee, giving a valuable opportunity for our senators to learn first hand of Castro’s involvement with the international terrorism network. Hidalgo’s duties in Paris at the time were “mainly to support revolutionary activities in Latin American and African countries. The candidates for training would fly over to Paris at Castro’s expense, and Hidalgo would then ‘provide lodging, money, messages from Havana, and visas to Czechoslovakia to camouflage the trail of guerilla trainees on their way to Cuba. He also had to screen young Europeans signing up for Castro’s ‘summer camps’… two thousand from France itself, another six thousand from elsewhere in Europe. Before they were allowed to leave for Cuba, they had to pass a final screening by a high-ranking DGI officer named Adalberto Quintana, sent to Paris specially from Havana.”

According to Hidalgo: “The same meticulous selection went into recruiting 2,500 young Americans in the ‘Venceremos Brigades’, which appeared the following year. A smashing success for the DGI (and KGB), the Brigades visited Cuba in ten contingents between 1966 and 1977. Under Colonel Simenov’s fatherly eye, they learned how to mount a truly effective campaign to destabilize the United States. The pace was set by the U.S. Weathermen, whose Bernardine Dohrn and Peter Clapp were invited to Havana midway through 1969 to meet a delegation from North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Chicago’s ‘days of rage’ devoted to ‘bringing the war home’ followed within weeks of their return to U.S. soil. (The art of rioting was passed on to thousands of other Americans students through do-it-yourself publications as The Anarchists’ Cookbook. Drive a large nail through a plank if another lethal weapon is not handy, advised this manual, whose contents were copied word for word from lectures in Cuba’s guerrilla classroom.”

It is amazing to learn how short is the memory of the American Senators is, especially those who acquiesced to give a helping hand to Castro at the expense of our taxpayers even though Cuba is involved now more than ever in the sponsoring of international terrorism.

“Castro’s guerrilla camps in Cuba went on catering to capacity crowds. Palestinians in particular began to check in several hundreds at a time, as they would go in doing through the decade; both, Yassir Arafat and George Habash paid stately visits to Havana to discuss these ongoing arrangements.” In August 1976, the CIA estimated that three hundred Arab fedayeen were training in Cuban camps. George Habash was received by Castro in April 22, 1978, and requested training for five hundred more fedayeen in the PFLP. Arafat, who had maintained a PLO office in Havana since 1974, signed in the summer of 1978 a formal military pact with Castro that September (according to the Jerusalem Post, July 27, 1978; Economist Foreign Report, June 28, 1978).

Before long, however, affirmed Sterling, Cuban instructors in guerrilla warfare began to go abroad, fanning out over the great Arab arc sheltering the Palestine Resistance. Barely two months after the October Middle East War, Cuban experts in terrorist warfare arrived secretly in South Yemen. On June 26, 1978, after Aden was shelled by Soviet naval forces and severely bombed by Cuban-piloted Soviet aircrafts, South Yemen was openly annexed as a Soviet colony converting the country into a terrorist safe haven becoming the heart of Palestinian training network.

According to Sterling, “everybody who was anybody in planetary terrorism passed through South Yemen sooner or later, for training or shelter or both. That was true of the whole German underground…Japanese, Turks, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds, Italians, French, Irish, Dutch, Belgians, South Moluccans, the Polisario Sahraouis, the Dhofar tribesman of oil rich Oman. All received advanced instruction in guerrilla warfare from Cubans and East Germans.”

When Colonel Qaddafi went into the guerrilla training business for the Palestinians’ sake, the Cubans moved in on Colonel Qadaffi. In 1976, the first reliable account of Libya’s camp network reports that Cuban instructors were teaching Spanish Basques there just when a democratic government was struggling to take hold in Spain… Some 150 Cuban guerrilla instructors were installed in Libya by 1980 while another 200 were installed in Algeria to train Sahraoui guerrillas from the Polisario Front.

“Meanwhile, yet another platoon of Cuban instructors moved in on Syria. Some were detailed to the Syrian army, others to guerrilla training camps. The first of these were spotted in 1976; according to former U.S. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, they were training Japanese, Germans, and Iranians terrorist as well as Arabs. Then came a massive infiltration of southern Lebanon …with the Palestinians entrenched there by March 1978, a Cuban team turned up at the port of Tyre.”

According to the Journal de Geneve, “Two months afterward, a second team of Cuban instructors arrived, engineers, and experts in setting up military bases and installing missile-launching ramps. All the equipment arrived in Tyre aboard Soviet freighters: SAM missiles, artillery, transceivers … At the end of an intensive eight month training period, the first group of terrorists was reportedly ready to embark for the Persian Gulf countries, carrying false passports, false work permits, and possessing perfect knowledge of the accents, ways, and customs of these countries. Preceding these revolutionaries, large quantities of arms were routed to the Persian Gulf countries through intermediaries traveling that route.”

Sterling stated, “The uses of Cuban expertise abroad, starting in the mid-seventies, grew clearer when plans for the Latin American European were discovered by Argentinean police around that time (1979). As we have seen, the top-secret Tucumán Plan, drafted under DGI-KGB supervision, involved the transfer in a body of the Cuban-sponsored Junta for Revolutionary Coordination, the JCR, to Western Europe. Its four main guerrilla bands- Uruguay’s Tupamaros and like-minded groups from Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, all forced into exile with the advent of right-wing military regimes – were to work out of headquarters in Lisbon and Paris, for an orchestrated assault to the Continent. Castro had set up special camps for them, on a four thousand acre state near Guanabo (a beach about 15 Km. From Havana), providing intensive three-month courses in explosive, sabotage, weaponry, and urban guerrilla tactics.”

In her book Sterling states that “there is another and bigger side to the Cuban story abroad. Russia’s deal with Fidel Castro in 1968 included his armed forces as well as his intelligence service. Starting in the mid-seventies, he would send Cuban troops halfway around the planet on the Kremlin’s behalf. Between forty and fifty thousand of them were deployed around Africa and the Arabian peninsula by 1980.”

Twenty-odd thousand men were in Angolan alone helping the pro-Soviet revolutionary army junta, seventeen thousand Cuban troops were in Ethiopia, and the first wholly sovietized black African state. “To help install Colonel Mengistu’s Marxist-Leninist regime, the Russians had airlifted ten thousand Cubans from Angola to Ethiopia, another ten thousand from Cuba to Angola for its replacement. According to London’s Institute for the Study of Conflict, the Soviet airlift required about five thousand flights within seven months, flying all day and night, twenty four hours a day.” The airlift also rushed Cuban troops from Ethiopia to South Yemen in the cover of night, the following winter.

The trail of blood and suffering left by Castro’s exploits, especially throughout Africa and Latin America, has had no bearing on the American Black Caucus and other members of both parties that keep supporting Castro disregarding that his victims were both blacks and whites, Cubans as well as Africans. Che Guevara expressed in paradigmatic words the essence of Castro’s regime when he stated: “We must above all keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm… hate as a factor of struggle, intransigent hate to the enemy, hate that can push a human being beyond his natural limits and make him a cold, violent, selective, and effective killing machine.“ This is the kind of regime our Senators and Congressmen want to support with our taxpayers’ money.

REPUBLICANS WAKE UP CALL

Por Liliana Quincoses
Texas
La Nueva Cuba
Agosto 4, 2002

Some members of the Republican party have left me no alternative than to be indignant due to their desire to change the US policies towards Cuba. I feel like I have been stabbed in the back by members of my own family. Recently, I received a form to join the National Republican Committee and I ask myself, should I do it?

It is beyond believe that farm states Republican Party members want to ease restrictions on travel to Cuba. In particular, representatives Jeff Flake, George Nethercutt, Jo Ann Emerson, and Jerry Moran to name a few. Flake even stated “I feel at some point that the farm state politics will overwhelm the Florida politics” this is from a member of our own party! To which Nethercutt added “There are people from all regions of the country who don’t think Florida should set the policy, that it ought to be a national policy.” Listen Nethercutt I am not from Florida!

Several members of congress want the US taxpayers to subsidize the payments of the goods they want to sell to the Dictator Castro. He has defaulted all his loans, and paid for the recently purchased goods with money destined to pay debts to European countries. The European Union cancelled all further credit to the regime. Therefore, the congressmen pushing the issue want me to pay when Castro defaults in his payment! We might as well give money from the treasury to these members of Congress.

It is most disturbing that these members of congress, belonging to the Republican Party, have not in the least requested democratic changes in the Island. All they see is the almighty dollar for their constituents. Nothing wrong for looking out for your constituents, but not using the suffering of other people.

Jeff Flake thinks flooding the Island with American vacationers will hasten dictator Castro’s downfall or produce windfall profits for U.S. businesses. There are many Canadian and European tourists that visit the Island for a budget vacation or for what it has become known “sex-tourism”. Such tourism has not helped release political prisoners, nor force the regime to change its totalitarian policies. So where is Flake’s logic? I tell you where. It is in dollars and cents!

Are you aware that Cubans have no access to the hotels and beaches reserved for tourist?. This congressmen surely must have seen that, the regime wines and dines US representatives. This is called tourism apartheid!! I am sure these congressmen were against the apartheid of South Africa and supported the policies of not trading with that country.

It is amazing that the aforementioned members of congress belong to the Republican party which is the Party that advocates freedom and liberty. It is as if they have joined the democratic party who have members of congress advocating the same agenda. I thank Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior adviser, for trying to make this people come to their senses. It hurts to see how the integrity in this country is disappearing little by little. Frankly, it looks like they would do anything for a dollar.

How can members of our government want to establish business with one of the biggest enemy this country has. Castro hates the United States with passion and he does not hide it. He never misses any opportunity to openly talk about Yankee imperialism. He assisted in the planning of the terrorist attacks on September 11. Four months before the attacks he toured Syria, Libya, Iran, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia with the purpose of strengthening ties with radical Islamic movements and to share biotechnology to use in bio-terrorism. In Iran, President Khatami welcomed him with open arms.

Castro and Bin-Laden were united in planning the big massacre of 9-11. We can not forget the thousands of innocents that lost their life due to a barbarian act conducted by sick and evil people. How can I forget. My cousin’s wife sister perished in the Twin Towers. She worked on the 84th floor and left two little girls, six and three. As of this date, every morning the toddler asks where is my mommy?

If members of the Congress and Mr. Jimmy Carter don’t stop catering to Castro, this country is going to be in a serious situation and will be lost before we know it. God help us.

With sincere affection

Liliana Quincoses

Weatherford, TX 76087

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