Democracy Challenged by Cuban-Exile Extremists

How The Volatile Mix Hurts Democracy
{Thursday, March 27th, 2014} 

       A good map will reveal that Havana, Cuba's current capital, is a mere 90 miles from Florida. And Santiago de Cuba, Cuba's former capital and second largest city, is just a few miles west of the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. American history confirms that since 1803 the U. S. has been fixated on gaining control of the nearby island, finally achieving that goal by concocting a bloody pretext {blowing up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor} to justify the Spanish-America War, which resulted in the U. S. dominance over Cuba beginning in 1898. In 1903 the U. S. used that dominance to steal Guantanamo Bay from Cuba, a theft that continues in perpetuity because of the vast military superiority of the U. S. Yet, the loss of Guantanamo Bay has created much international sympathy for Cuba and continuing hubris for America. The theft of Guantanamo was an early precursor that the U. S. would not adhere to democratic principles when it came to Cuba and eventually to the Caribbean and Latin America. A glaring example came in 1952 when the U. S. teamed with the Mafia to support the thieving/brutal Batista dictatorship in Cuba so rich American businessmen could partake in the rape and robbery of the helpless Island. That trifecta {Batista, the Mafia and the U.S.} created an unholy alliance comprising a vile dictatorship. The Batista dictatorship in Cuba should have, by all reckoning, lasted till the present day because, after all, Batista had a powerful police force plus the backing of the strongest nation in the world, the U. S., and the strongest criminal organization in the world, the Mafia. But it lasted only eight years. Why?

Reason #1:

     While literally robbing Cuba blind -- and using the island for lucrative drug, gambling, and prostitution enterprises -- the Batista-Mafia-U.S. dictatorship didn't even bother to toss bread crumbs to the majority poor on the island, such as this family. The lady above was responsible for seven children -- ages 3 to 8 -- and she had no help from the rich Batista government when it came to a job, shelter, food, medicine or education. By the time this photo was taken, Latin American newspapers and magazines had reported that the top 21 members of the Batista regime each had Swiss bank accounts exceeding $1 million {in 1950s money} and it was presumed much more loot than that was shipped by each of them to banks in the Mafia havens in South Florida and Union City {NJ}, from whence Batista and top Mafia kingpins had converged on Cuba. But soon, the thieves would have to flee and join all that money.

Reason #2:

     In the 1950s, photos like this were featured in Latin American newspapers and magazines as well as the New York Times explicitly delineating the extreme brutality of the Batista dictatorship against even hints of dissent. The brave street march depicted above was one of many in which courageous women protested the murders of their children, murders apparently for no other reason than to send warnings to quell dissent. More amazing than despots murdering innocent people, an all too frequent occurrence, was the fact that the U. S. citizens in the 1950s did not care about the despotism taking place in their name on the nearby island. "If they had wanted to," Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times wrote, "presumably the American citizens could have persuaded their government to stop what was happening in Cuba." As Mr. Matthews and others would learn, the American citizens chose not to lift a dissenting voice, not even a whimper. Not caring what was happening to innocent neighboring people was one thing. Not caring about the scars it was leaving on democracy was quite another thing altogether. Moreover, in 1959 after a female-powered revolution in Cuba overthrew the Batista-Mafia dictatorship, American citizens meekly permitted an immediate transition of those fleeing dictators to reconstitute themselves on U. S. soil -- namely Miami and Union City -- where a sudden avalanche of money and ruthlessness quickly and permanently overwhelmed the social and political  fabrics of,  first, those communities and, later, -- the hallowed halls of Congress in Washington. Democracy badly needed a denouement. 

Reasons #1 and #2 were engineered by:

A Cuban dictatorship led by {left to right} Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Fulgencio Batista.

The Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba was ended by:

Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution on Jan. 1-1959.

   
    But after being booted off the island of Cuba, the Mafia and the Batistianos quickly returned to safer, friendlier environs -- Miami and Union City, U. S. soil, no less. And like the situation in Cuba, the retrenched marauders found little resistance from the U. S. government and precious few complaints from the U. S. citizens who, unfortunately, were the last vestiges of defense for the world's greatest and most admired democracy.

      The U. S. Congress consists of 535 members. Three of the 100 U. S. Senators are Cuban-Americans -- Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. Four of the 435 Representatives are Cuban-Americans -- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart, Joe Garcia, and Albio Sires. As a lifelong, democracy-loving Conservative Republican, I wouldn't mind if all 535 members of the U. S. Congress were Cuban-Americans -- as long as they didn't trample on democracy. But since 1959 a handful of Cuban-American extremists have dictated America's revengeful, repugnant, resentful, regrettable and anti-democratic Cuban policy that the vast majority of Caribbeans, Latin Americans, Cuban Americans, Americans, and citizens of the world oppose. The seven aforementioned members of the U. S. Congress -- along with ultra-powerful, self-appointed Cuban-American rulers and benefactors such  as Mauricio Claver-Carone, Otto Reich, Gus Machado, and Frank Calzon -- are today able to ignore public and world opinion regarding Cuba to merely suit their self-aggrandizements. In other words, a handful of the very minority that should be the first to recuse themselves from dictating America's Cuban narrative and America's Cuban policy are the only ones controlling that narrative and making those laws. And that's precisely what America's Founding Fathers tried to avoid when they crafted history's greatest form of governance, a governance most severely challenged, since the 1950s, by a handful of extremist Cuban exiles who have had no trouble aligning themselves with economic and political power-brokers such as the ongoing Bush dynasty {Jeb, a huge Republican fund-raiser, is a serious presidential candidate in 2016 AND his son George P. Bush has just been elected to his first major political job in Texas. WOW!}. 

    And now, after you pause to check out the foregoing indisputable conclusions, let's return to this 2014 map that shows the close proximity of Havana to Florida and Santiago de Cuba to the American military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- not to mention a plethora of military bases in Florida. The Cuban Revolution astounded the world and still confounds historians by being the first popular revolution that ever dislodged a U.S.-backed dictatorship. However, even more remarkable is the fact that Revolutionary Cuba has survived for 55 years {and counting} although each day from Jan. 1-1959 till today two generations of the overthrown Batista-Mafia dictatorship, headquartered on nearby U. S. soil and supported by the strongest and richest nation in history, have tried desperately and with no holds barred to re-capture the island. Those two phenomenons -- the overthrow of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba and then the reconstitution of the Batistiano-Mafiosi dictatorship on American soil -- have turned out to be two of the most cancerous events in the long and mostly glorious history of the United States of America. Because of that and because I have a visceral love of democracy, I have had a lifelong passion with Cuba. I believe the U. S. support of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba in the 1950s started the U. S. democracy on a precipitous decline that was markedly accelerated when the Batistianos and Mafiosi in Cuba were allowed to flee and reconstitute themselves almost seamlessly on U. S. soil. Oh, yes, I am aware that such a correct analysis of the U.S.-Cuban imbroglio is politically incorrect in the United States, not to mention a tad dangerous, but its fascination is both overwhelming and irresistible. So, with a small measure of trepidation, let's continue on with some modern, inalienable, and indisputable facts concerning repercussions of those two great American phenomenons -- the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba followed by its transfer to U. S. soil after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. 

     First off, remember that the U. S. democracy has faced many challenges since 1776 and managed to survive them all, albeit with some deep scars. The internal challenges have included the Manifest Destiny belief that it was a sacred right to destroy native Indians to clear their land for white settlement; slavery in the South but also the North; the Civil War; the Great Depression and the rise of the Mafia in the first half of the 20th Century; and the integration of lobbyists with their special interest money as the basic fabric of congressional and presidential elections. The greatest external challenge came in the 1930s and 1940s when vile dictatorships in Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union threatened to conquer the world, at least till Hitler double-crossed Stalin to turn the mighty Soviet Union into America's ally as opposed to Germany's ally. That lucky break, and the victory in World War II in 1945, left the U. S. as the strongest and richest nation in world history...and it also left America's Democracy as the most beloved form of government the planet has known. But by the 1950s right-wingers in the U. S. government realized that, by telling the American people of dire and imminent threats from foreign despots, the unchecked powers of the U. S. military and contaminant agencies such as the newly created CIA, could do vile things overseas and get away with it -- such as overthrowing democratically elected governments in the Congo, Ecuador, Chile, and elsewhere to install U.S.-friendly dictators who would allow rich Americans to partake in the robberies of those nations...spawning such infamous U. S. companies as the United Fruit Company. And it was that mindset that led the U. S. government to team with the Mafia, and a vast assortment of U. S. businesses such as the United Fruit Company, to support the thievery and brutality of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba beginning in 1952. It was all done in the name of the American people who -- overcome with post-World War II cowardice, ignorance or complacency -- simply didn't care. The resurrection and maturation of that overthrown Cuban dictatorship on U. S. soil has also been allowed to evolve as perhaps the major challenge to the U. S. democracy in the year 2014 as evidenced by the fact that a handful of self-serving Cuba-exile extremists now dictate all of America's Cuban policy and much of its other policies to the detriment of democracy and against the best interests of everyone else, including the majority of Cuban-Americans as well as America's best democracy-loving friends all around the world.

  Yet, there are many democracy-loving organizations in the United States -- such as the Washington-based "Center for Democracy in the Americas" -- direly concerned with the challenges facing America's Democracy, particularly the threat from Cuban-exile extremists and their profiteering sycophants. Individually, many of America's greatest journalists and historians -- such as Sarah Stephens, Peter Kornbluh, Wayne S. Smith, Ann Louise Bardach, Julia Sweig, etc. -- regularly present truthful, unbiased assessments of how harmful to democracy Cuban-exile extremism has been and continues to be. And therein lies a problem because, for the most part, the Cuban narrative within the U. S. media and the U. S. government is controlled by these same Cuban-exile extremists. And that, unfortunately, has been the case since 1959. 

      Sarah Stephens is the Executive Director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas. She personally writes the Cuba Central update that is posted on the CDA website each Friday. Ms. Stephens is a brilliant journalist, a democracy lover, and surely one of the greatest and fairest experts in the world when it comes to U. S. - Cuban relations. And those credentials, sadly, are precisely why you will seldom, if ever, see her on television news programs discussing Cuba. That's because those outlets cater only to anti-Cuban pundits and propagandists because {1} they are simply biased; {2} they are simply dishing out what they perceive propagandized Americans expect to hear about Cuba; or {3} they remember what happened to great journalists like the car-bombed Emilio Milian and the fired Jim DeFede when they bravely and fairly reported on Cuba-exile extremists in Miami. As far as the U. S. media covering Cuban issues is concerned, it might be said that Emilio, a Cuban-American broadcaster in Miami, and Jim DeFede, the former top columnist for the Miami Herald, were the last two main-stream journalists who told the truth about Cuban extremists. That's why going to a little trouble to read Sarah Stephens once a week on the Center for Democracy in the Americas website is essential, for Democracy's sake if not for Heaven's sake. 

         For example, in the latest {Friday, March 21, 2014} posting on the Center for Democracy in the Americas website, Sarah Stephens discusses "the historical error represented by the U. S. hanging onto Cuban land," namely the lush Guantanamo Bay that the U. S. stole from Cuba in 1903. {Currently the U. S. is going ballistic over Russia grabbing Crimea although, unlike the U. S. grab of Guanatanamo, the Crimeans speak Russian, border Russia, consider themselves Russian and want to be "grabbed" by Russia}. The U. S. grabbed the plush 45-square-acre Guantanamo Bay port in 1903 and to this day the territorial theft angers every Latin American nation and shames all of America's international friends...as well as democracy. It also, of course, is being used to mock democracy when the U. S. bellows about Crimea.

     
      Amnesty International calls the U. S. prison at Guantanamo Bay "the Gulag of our time"  and it is one of many international human rights organizations that have deplored the torture that has been documented there. In its last posting Friday the Center for Democracy in the Americas lambastes the United States for not "returning rightful ownership to Cuba of land that's been wrongfully under U. S. control for over a century." By ignoring such words, Americans are showing no respect for their democracy.

   
    Americans are not supposed to care about such things as Guantanamo Bay, according to Cuban-exile extremists.

  But the majority of the world that does care about democracy does care about such things.

    

    Democracy-loving Americans, for example, have a right -- and perhaps a duty -- to know why and by whom a beautiful American named Ronnie Moffitt was murdered within sound of the White House in Washington at 9:32 A. M. on September 21, 1976...and why the U. S. government didn't cooperate with the initial investigation, thus leaving the culprits, well known to history, unpunished. Both Ronnie Moffitt AND democracy deserved better than that. And they still do to this very day.

   And Americans have a right -- and perhaps a duty -- to know why and by whom a civilian airliner -- Cubana Flight 455 -- was blown out of the sky by a terrorist bomb on October 6, 1976, three weeks after Ms. Moffitt's murder, killing all 73 passengers on board, including two dozen teenage athletes. Who was the CIA Director in the fall of 1976? How many well-known Cuban-exile extremists were tied to the Moffitt murder and the airplane bombing, and who helped them avoid punishment?

     Jim Defede was the top columnist at the Miami Herald, at least until he wrote a famous column in which he excoriated Miami's then 3 members of the U. S. Congress -- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart brothers -- for their incredible support of Miami-based Cuban-American terrorists who targeted innocent Cubans. DeFede bravely made the point that terrorism against Cuba was no different than terrorism against the U. S., England, etc. Sadly, Jim's column was like a voice in the wilderness, barely a blimp in the Cuban exile-dominated media world in Miami.

   

   
   After losing his high-profile gig at the Miami Herald, Jim DeFede transitioned mostly to electronic {TV} journalism in Miami.

     
       If Alexis de Tocqueville were still around to write Volume 3 of his masterpiece -- "Democracy in America" -- he would sadly have to include such seminal events as the murder of Ronnie Moffitt and the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 to get a balanced, updated portrait of how extremist Cuban exiles have impacted democracy in America since 1959. And you know what? It might take a skilled democracy lover like Alexis de Tocqueville to navigate around the stultifying, uncategorizable obstacles that lie in the path of those expressing the truth -- obstacles such as.........................................................................................

    ................the car bomb that silenced the superb Cuban-American journalist Emilio Milian in Miami on April 30, 1976. The 45-year-old Cuban-born Emilio was News Director at WQBA Radio when he denounced the terrorist acts of Cuban-American extremists in Miami. 

    This photo taken by Jamie Francis shows Alberto Milian standing beside a portrait of his father, Emilio. Alberto was at football practice when he heard that his dad had been car-bombed after being warned not to denounce Cuban-American extremists. Alberto went on to fight in the U. S. Army during the 1989 Panama invasion and the 1991 Gulf War. He became a prosecutor in Broward County and then Director of Political Affairs and Staff Counsel for the Miami-Dade County Police Benevolent Association. He is a conservative Republican. In an interview with David Adams of the St. Petersburg Times Alberto said, "Some in the Cuban-American community...made anti-Castroism a cottage industry. They hide behind the Cuban flag." Alberto also told David Adams, "Americans should read Ann Louise Bardach's book 'Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana' to understand why Miami is the center of terrorism in the United States."

  I happen to agree with Alberto Milian that Ann Louise Bardach's "Cuba Confidential"  is a must read for anyone seeking the truth about terrorism related to Miami and how a handful of Cuban-American extremists in Miami came to dictate America's anti-democracy Cuban policy...via the horrendous Torricelli and Helms-Burton congressional acts as well as commandeering all other pro-Cuban exile vestiges within the bowels of America's once-sanctified economic and political apparatuses.

     

      And then -- after you have studied and taken written notes from Ann Louis Bardach's "Cuba Confidential" -- you should meticulously study the updated 2013 edition of Julia E. Sweig's seminal book "CUBA: What Everyone Needs to Know." Yes, in America everyone needs to know sources you can depend on for factual, unbiased, and important information regarding Cuba, the neighboring island that says so very much about America. Ann Louis Bardach and Julia E. Sweig are the two best sources in that regard in America.

And by the way...........

      Adolpho Suarez, shown in the center of this Eloy Alonso/Reuters photo, was a great democracy-lover. He died Sunday {March 23rd} at age 81 in Madrid. He was Spain's first elected Prime Minister in 1975 after the Franco dictatorship and he is revered to this day as the key figure in Spain's transition back to democracy. Thus, he was truly one of the world's greatest statesmen in the past century.

    Cuba has purchased an AN-158 airplane {right} to begin regular flights to and from the eastern Caribbean island of Martinique starting Thursday {March 27, 2014}. The Cuban News Agency says the French Embassy in Havana helped with the contract. Cuba's Cubana de Aviacion is the only airline in the Western Hemisphere that flies the AN-158 jets. Three of them already fly from Havana to Santiago, Guantanamo, and Holguin in Cuba and to Nassau, Santo Domingo, Cancun, and Caracas. Cuba has also ordered seven more of the 85-seat AN-158 jets because Cuban tourism increased to 2.85 million in 2013 and is projected to reach 3.15 million in 2014. The AN-158 jets are manufactured by a Ukrainian-Russian company with the final assemblage taking place in Kiev, Ukraine. The AN-158s are made from French, German, and American parts with the U. S. components comprising less than 10% to comply with the embargoed U. S. sanctions against Cuba.

       This Ramon Espinosa/AP photo depicts a major event going on in Havana now. It is the 8-day International Rodeo Festival. Top rodeo performers from Cuba, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama are participating at sold-out events. The Cuban girl entering the arena in this photo is a trick-roping star.

        The 8-day Rodeo Festival in Cuba celebrates 200 years of Spanish influence on the island. It features all the traditional rodeo favorites -- steer wrestling, bull riding, calf roping, barrel racing, tricks on horseback, lasso demonstrations and what the Associated Press called, "remarkable feats of daredevilry."

     While Major League baseball in the U. S. is just finishing Spring Training prior to the "regular season," the 53rd National Baseball Playoffs start in Cuba March 27th after this week's end of the regular season. Villa Clara is the defending champs in Cuban baseball and its 57-30 record was the best in the regular season. Villa Clara will open the best-of-seven semi-finals against Matanzas. The other semi-final will have Pinar del Rio against the Industriales of Havana. The finals will also be a 7-game championship series.

       Ramon More is the manager of Villa Clara, Cuba's defending baseball champs. "I expect the usual tough run in the playoffs," he said. "We had the most regular season wins with 57 but the three other playoff teams all won at least 50 games." Many of Cuba's best young players are now stars in the American Major Leagues but Ramon says, "This island is still a baseball mecca. Baseball is in our DNA. We can keep the American Major Leagues afloat. Sometimes our stands are filled with American scouts and agents, with good reason. Their Major Leagues would be Minor Leagues without us Cubans just like their military would be pathetic without Guantanamo Bay. HA! HA!"

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