Rum goings on behind Bacardi's party image (works for violent overthrow of Castro)

The Bacardi rum company has been engaged for more than 40 years in clandestine attempts to overthrow the Cuban Government by both violent and other means, according to a new book.

The company is accused of bankrolling extreme right-wing groups and mainstream politicians in the United States an effort to remove Fidel Castro and re-establish its profitable empire on the island.

Bacardi is the world's largest rum company, with annual sales of more than 240 million bottles in 170 countries, and a history that dates to 1862. But behind its image of a fun drink for partygoers is an empire that has devoted millions of dollars towards removing Dr Castro and the Cuban Government, which nationalised its properties in 1959, the Colombian journalist Hernando Calvo Ospina says in his new book, Bacardi, the Hidden War.

Other countries and private firms have since reached settlements with the Cuban Government over the nationalisation, but the US and Bacardi never have.

The book alleges that in the 1960s the then head of Bacardi, the late Jose Pepin Bosch, planned to bomb Cuba's oil refineries, hoping to create a blackout in the country and thus stimulate "a state of national subversion". His plan, and a picture of the bomber aircraft he intended to use, was exposed in The New York Times and the enterprise abandoned.

A more elaborate plot to kill Dr Castro was suggested in 1964, according to documents not released by the National Security Council until 1998. Details of the CIA plot "to assassinate Castro, which would involve US elements of the Mafia and which would be financed by Pepin Bosch" are contained in documents sent by a CIA agent, Gordon Chase, to his superiors. According to the documents, Pepin Bosch contributed $US100,000 of the $US150,000 requested by those linked to the Mafia who had offered to kill Dr Castro, his brother, Raul and Che Guevara.

Directors and leading shareholders in Bacardi were instrumental in the formation in 1981 of the Cuban American National Foundation, which was to become one of the main bodies co-ordinating efforts to overthrow Dr Castro.

More recently, senior Bacardi figures have been instrumental in the support for the 1996 Helms-Burton legislation that outlined what Cuba must do to be regarded as a democracy by the US and attain diplomatic recognition. The law made it an offence for foreigners to invest in properties that were nationalised by Dr Castro and denied visas to the US to the directors of any firms that did so. In congressional circles the legislation was referred to as the Bacardi bill. Leading Bacardi figures mounted fundraisers for Senator Jesse Helms, one of the architects of the legislation.

The book is published as the Bush Administration has listed Cuba as one of seven state sponsors of terrorism. A Bacardi spokeswoman said: "No-one at Bacardi believes this book is worth commenting on."

I’m going to drink some Bacardi rum tonight! Cheers. Rum goings on behind Bacardi's party image ( By Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles August 16 2002

The Bacardi rum company has been engaged for more than 40 years in clandestine attempts to overthrow the Cuban Government by both violent and other means, according to a new book.

The company is accused of bankrolling extreme right-wing groups and mainstream politicians in the United States an effort to remove Fidel Castro and re-establish its profitable empire on the island.

Other countries and private firms have since reached settlements with the Cuban Government over the nationalisation, but the US and Bacardi never have.

A WEAKER POLICY ON CUBA, A STRONGER CASTRO

By Frank Calzón
The Miami Herald
Agosto 18, 2002

The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to end restrictions on travel, and to lift restrictions on financing exports, to Cuba. The Senate will consider the legislation soon.

While the White House has threatened to veto any legislation that would ''bolster the Cuban dictatorship,'' the anti-embargo lobby is arguing that U.S. tourism will benefit Cubans without strengthening Fidel Castro and that trade with Havana will mean substantial U.S. profits.

Cuban Americans boast about their political power, but they have been out maneuvered and outspent. South Florida Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz Balart, New Jersey Democrat Rep. Robert Menén- dez, and Florida's Democratic Sens. Bob Graham and Bill Nelson tried valiantly to thwart the legislation, but the coalition to lift the embargo is now calling the shots. If the Senate votes as the House did, President Bush will have to accept a weaker policy on Cuba or veto important anti-terrorist legislation.

The coalition to lift sanctions includes some well-meaning people who believe that the embargo is obsolete and that the United States ought to try something new. The trouble is that ''something new'' is the failed policy of engagement tried for years by Canada, Spain and other countries.

Cuba's communist dictator not only spurns foreign leaders' pleas to reform; he also has backtracked on some of the measures he was forced to implement when he lost Soviet assistance. Castro shows ''economic flexibility'' only under severe pressure.

WITH AN IRON HAND

When Castro received millions of Soviet subsidies, he ran Cuba with an iron hand. An influx of American tourist dollars will only strengthen his repressive regime.

Who is working to save Castro's regime? Admirers of the former Soviet Union and communist Nicaragua are. So are several large, grain corporations who also want U.S. government credits ''to sell'' to Castro. Credits mean that U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab if Castro doesn't pay. This is to which Bush alluded when he said that U.S. financing for Cuba's purchases of U.S. agricultural goods ``would just be a foreign-aid program in disguise.''

In a July 11 letter to Congress, Secretary of State Colin Powell warned that several countries have ``suspended official credits, because Cuba has failed to make payments on its debt -- including debt incurred while making agricultural purchases from these countries. Two governments have approached the United States to complain that Cuba's payment of cash for U.S. agricultural products have meant that they are not getting paid at all.''

The inability of the Castro government to pay its debts has sent foreign investment in Cuba plummeting to $39.9 million in 2001 from $448 million in 2000. Associated Press reports that ``the European Union excluded Cuba from a multibillion dollar pool of aid because of its poor human-rights record.''

Remittances from exiles are down, and when Russia closed its spy facility, the Castro government lost $200 million in revenues annually.

But assuming that the Castro government could pay for what it bought, who is going to make millions in profit? Not U.S. factory workers, who would have to compete with the Cubans whom the Castro government pays $15 a month. Also, how many U.S. companies will relocate to exploit a cheap, educated, submissive labor force in a country that bans independent labor unions and has no environmental constraints?

What about some of those ''moderate'' Cuban-American groups subsidized by ''progressive'' foundations and U.S. business interests pushing to lift the embargo? Some mistakenly believe that ending the embargo will bring democracy to Cuba. Some have business aspirations (they don't want to miss Castro's fire sales). Some are made up of aspiring politicians who think that dallying with Castro will turn them into electable celebrities.

Others, no doubt, work for Havana's security services. While Miami sleeps, many are working to ensure that the misery and repression in Cuba not only continues but is supported by American dollars.

*Frank Calzón is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C.

A Black Journalist Goes to Havana
Myles B. Kantor
NewsMax.com, July 11, 2002

I respect Justice Clarence Thomas a great deal, so George Curry isn't someone I'm inclined to praise.

While editor in chief of Emerge magazine, Curry mocked Justice Thomas as a marionette of white conservatives. A 1993 cover depicted Thomas with a handkerchief around his head à la Aunt Jemima and as a lawn jockey on the November 1996 cover.

Curry got Justice Thomas obscenely wrong, but at least he gets Cuba right.
Curry and other black journalists recently went to Havana – capital of America's closest sponsor of terrorism – for a colloquy with Cuban "journalists." Curry knew that journalism means something different in Cuba than in America, but he hoped he and his peers would have some commonality with their hosts.

His hope wasn't fulfilled. "If any of us were momentarily lulled into believing that these were our counterparts," Curry writes in "Reporting on Cuba's 'Reporters' " (http://www.blackpressusa.com/op-ed/Speaker.asp?NewsID=2371), "that impression was quickly shattered when several declared that they had supported the Castro revolution in 1959 and view their job today as helping those in power.

I cringed. These are not journalists, I thought, these are government public relations agents. Actually, I was more derisive – I called them “flacks."

To be a journalist in Cuba, one must belong to the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC, or Unión de Periodistas de Cuba). This corresponds to Article 53 of Cuba's "constitution": "… press, radio, television, movies, and other mass media are state-owned or socially owned, and can in no event be privately owned." Flacks indeed.

Witnessing Cuba's totalitarianism made Curry think of his rights as an American: "At home, we can openly question George W. Bush's intelligence [or deride Justice Thomas], but here it is unlawful to be disrespectful of Castro."

Curry isn't being figurative; "disrespect," or desacato, is a crime in Cuba, applicable to Castro and all of his functionaries. (Disrespecting Castro and senior functionaries carriers a harsher penalty, though) "Disrespect" is the instrument of repression often used against Cuba's bona fide journalists, those who don't work for the regime and report its reality.

One of these crushed voices belongs to Bernardo Arévalo Padrón, sentenced to six years in November 1997 for disrespecting Castro and "Vice President" Carlos Lage during an interview. Forced labor and beatings have been perpetrated against Padrón in prison.

This man should be a professor, not a prisoner.

Neither did the regime's denial of race consciousness in Cuba – where people of color are a majority – persuade Curry. He reports, "[S]peak to any dark-skinned person on the streets of Havana and once they're convinced that you are not a government official, they will admit that both color and class remain staples of Cuban society."

As a black prisoner of conscience, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet wrote to Coretta Scott King in January 1999, "They [black Cubans] have a very low political, economic, and judicial representation in contrast to the numerous prevailing black penal population. This situation is never publicly manifested by the government but is a component of communism's subtle politics of segregation." Heroic black Cubans like Dr. Biscet and Jorge Luis Garcia Perez have been ripped from their families for criticizing Cuba's white autocrat.

Unlike black Fidelistas such as Al Sharpton, Randall Robinson and Alice Walker, Curry doesn't glorify this autocrat.

He doesn't boast about having lunch with Castro, as Sharpton did on "The Chris Rock Show" in 2000.

He doesn't write about how Castro's "eyes shone with intelligent intensity," as Robinson does in "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks."

He doesn't compare Castro to the Dalai Lama and rhapsodize over embracing him, as Walker does in "Anything We Love Can Be Saved." (See "Hugging Fidel.")

Curry appreciates what the black abolitionist and journalist Frederick Douglass said in 1860:

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.

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