Can Batistianos Capture America?

Before They RE-capture Cuba?
Saturday, August 23rd, 2014

     Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro and Cuban revolutionary heroine Vilma Espin, has been besieged by the media this week. She is an elected member of Cuba's 612-member National Assembly. She voted against a Workers Rights bill that her father strongly supported. Reminiscent of her guerrilla-fighting mother, Mariela has always been a rebel. In college she performed topless in a play to the chagrin of both her father Raul and her uncle Fidel. This week, after the brouhaha over her National Assembly vote, the unperturbed Mariela said, "Good heavens! Cuba is already as democratic as a lot of democracies that have a lot more turmoil than we have here. When we are fully democratic, I guess these reporters will follow me to the bathroom and thrust their microphones under the stall door!"

     Rusney Castillo {above} has joined the large pantheon of Cuban baseball players who have quickly become instant multi-millionaires in the United States. Rusney is 27-years-old, 5-foot-9 and weighs 205 pounds. He is a speedy outfielder. The Boston Red Sox Friday signed Castillo to a 7-year, $72.5 million deal. {Yes, every penny is guaranteed whether or not Castillo turns out to be a Major Leaguer} The Red Sox are expected to quickly put Rusney in their outfield alongside Yoenis Cespedes, the Cuban who has become a star after being originally guaranteed $36 million by the Oakland A's. The instant success in the U. S. Major Leagues of players like Cespedes, Yasiel Puig and Jose Abreu has greatly enhanced the bidding for players like Rusney, and starkly increased the pipelines of scouts and agents vying to get Cuban players off the island. The LA Dodgers guaranteed Puig $42 million and consider that a steal; the Chicago White Sox guaranteed Abreu $68 million and consider that a steal. In his first season in the U. S., Abreu leads the Major Leagues in homers; back in June Cespedes won the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game. The U. S. has 30 Major League baseball teams and obviously not enough talent to fill those rosters without a plethora of players from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan, and Venezuela. Thus, if players like Rusney Castillo can get off the island of Cuba, which is easy to do these days, than they will have 30 Major League teams bidding for them. Rusney's agent is billionaire entertainer Jay-Z, the owner of the Roc Nation Sports Agency.

And speaking of Jay-Z: He and his superstar wife Beyonce made other Cuban-related headlines this week. Thursday (August 21st} a headline in USA Today blared this news: "Beyonce and Jay Z's Trip to Cuba Declared Legal." The United States government, according to the first paragraph in the USA Today article, made that ruling "despite questions raised in Congress." Of Course, those "questions in Congress" were raised by the Cuban-American anti-Castro congressional zealots who routinely belittle the U. S. democracy by thrusting their anti-Castro venom down everyone's throats while, perhaps, they should be devoting their time and energy to deal with a myriad of American problems not remotely related to Cuba. Yes, Beyonce and Jay-Z visited Cuba in April of 2013 and, thanks to the dictates of ultra-powerful and rich Cuban exiles, Cuba is the only place in the world that Beyonce and Jay-Z could have visited and then had to wait months before finding out whether or not they would be charged with a criminal violation of U. S. laws, such as the infamous Cuban exile-fueled Helms-Burton Law. Amazingly, the U. S. government, in declaring Beyonce and Jay-Z innocent, stated that the billionaire couple's visit: "served the U. S. foreign policy goal of helping the Cuban people by facilitating exchanges with them and supporting the development of independent activity and civil society." Wow! The U. S. government's "foreign policy goal" is to help the Cuban people? Or did it indicate that the U. S. government didn't charge Beyonce and Jay-Z because the ultra-rich entertainers could have spent unlimited amounts of money on teams of lawyers that would have easily contested the ridiculous charges? What do you think?

       Nicolas Maduro, the 51-year-old President of Venezuela, paid a surprise visit to Fidel Castro this week. This photo was taken by Fidel's son Alex Castro in the living room of the Castro home in western Havana. President Maduro said it was a "belated birthday visit to honor the Commander whom I think of everyday." {Fidel turned 88-years-old on August 13th} Fidel later told cubadebate.com that President Maduro "surprised me with three gifts -- himself, a basket of fruit, and a track suit."

Now...can Batistianos Capture America?

Let's take a look:

    Hillary Clinton's book "Hard Choices" was officially released this summer. It was an opening salvo of her official bid to become President of the United States in 2016. Pre-release publicity revealed that Ms. Clinton is now advocating for the U. S. to end its embargo against Cuba, which has been officially in place since 1962, much to the chagrin of America's and democracy's best friends around the world. While Ms. Clinton can have the Democratic presidential bid for the asking and the U. S. is in dire need of a female President, there are far better feminine candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren and Kathy Castor, who are not in lock-step with the moneyed minority that has bought-and-paid-for the American democracy. Ms. Clinton's self-serving but belated sanity regarding Cuba merely reflects that her advisers read both the tea leaves and the polls, which reveal that even the vast majority of Cuban-Americans in Miami now advocate an end to the embargo against Cuba. Of course, a yearly UN vote reveals that, in an interconnected world, all of the global nations, including America's best friends, are against a U. S. Cuban policy designed solely to appease and benefit only a handful of rich and revengeful Cuban exiles, mostly from the Mafia havens of Miami and Union City {NJ}. This situation has existed now through two generations of exiles from the over-thrown Batista-Mafia dictatorship. Those exiles were first led by Cuban-born Jorge Mas Canosa and Cuban-born Rafael Diaz-Balart but now are led by Cuban-born Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Miami-born Mario Diaz-Balart, Miami-born Marco Rubio, and Cuban-born Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Massive, self-indulgent collaboration since the 1960s by the unending Bush political dynasty and other self-serving sycophants have greased the political and economic skids for the Cuban-exile machine that, essentially, constitutes a self-sustaining government deeply embedded within the sacrosanct bowels of the U. S. government.   

       So this is the montage you should pin on your wall as the 2016 presidential election cranks up in earnest for the next couple of years, with billions of dollars being amassed to pay for unending streams of nauseous television ads mindlessly extolling the "virtues" of these three politicos while insulting {to sane Americans} negative ads will belittle and demean their opponents. In the above montage, that's Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, on the left. In the middle is Republican Jeb Bush and on the right is Republican Marco Rubio. From now till 2016 realms of data on this already over-hyped threesome will be rammed down the throats of unwitting Americans who will be victims of billions of dollars of campaign contributions, most of it from wealthy trolls bent on purchasing what little remains of the cherished American democracy. If Ms. Clinton wins the presidency in 2016, it will be the same bought-and-paid for "democracy" Americans have become accustomed to. If either Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio wins, it will create this revolting situation: THE BATISTIANOS WILL HAVE CAPTURED AMERICA BEFORE RE-CAPTURING CUBA. No one, absolutely no one, would have predicted that! Except, possibly, two trutly outstanding women: A Cuban named Celia Sanchez and an American named Penelope Purdy.

    Penelope Purdy, surely one of North America's greatest Latin American experts, included this sentence in a famous Denver Post article: "The U. S. Cuban policy for all these decades has been conducted with the IQ of a salamander." No sane, unbiased human being can deny the succinct accuracy of that sentence. Ms. Purdy devoted the rest of that long article to pointing out by name the vile Latin American dictators -- Batista, Videla, Trujillo, Somoza, Pinochet, etc. -- that the U. S. had installed and supported, sometimes backing murderous coups that overturned decent, democratically elected Presidents, such as Salvador Allende in Chile, to install fiendish, U.S.-backed dictators such as Augusto Pinochet. If you study Ms. Purdy's article, you would understand, I believe, that she was pointing out how ignorant, cowardly, and undemocratic the majority of we Americans have been since the 1950s to allow this to happen. When she referenced "the IQ of a salamander," Ms. Purdy was not demeaning the intelligence of either the vile dictators or the equally vile Americans who backed them. Indeed, those collaborators were actually very smart Americans -- such as the Bush dynasty, the Dulles brothers, Nixon, Kissinger, etc. And the most vicious dictators, such as Pinochet, were all smart individuals who benefited enormously both politically and economically from all those U.S.-backed Caribbean, African, and Latin American dictatorships that mowed down decent government's like Allende's that wanted to use their national resources to benefit their indigenous majorities instead of having them usurped by Mafiosi thieves.

     Celia Sanchez, the petite doctor's daughter who happened to be the most important player in both the Cuban Revolution and Revolutionary Cuba, penned, in addition to Penelope Purdy's definitive quotation, the other most salient Cuban-U.S. quotation: "The Batistianos will never regain control of Cuba as long as I live or as long as Fidel lives." She first made that proclamation in April of 1959 after returning from a 12-day trip to the United States. No one, of course, believed her then. But in August of 2014 -- the month Fidel Castro turned 88-years-old -- everyone believes her now. At the same time, Americans in 2014 have little or no cognitive comprehension of the vast significance of those two historic quotations made by Penelope Purdy and Celia Sanchez. The following photo delineates precisely why that is a pertinent, true fact.

      This photo was taken by Andrew St. George in April of 1959 in the hallway of a New York hotel. The photo is owned and copyrighted by Yale University. If Americans understood the ramifications of this photo, they would have been in a much better position to properly influence America's involvements with Cuba. But such understandings would have resisted an unfortunate U.S.-Cuban relationship that has existed since the 1950s to benefit only a self-serving minority that has ranged from Batista, the Dulles brothers, and the Mafia in the 1950s to the Bush dynasty and a second generation of Diaz-Balarts in the summer of 2014. So, what is the meaning of this photo? Answer: In January of 1959 Celia Sanchez took off her guerrilla uniform to assume her role as the prime decision-maker in Revolutionary Cuba, with the total support of Fidel Castro. In January, February and March of 1959, despite all she had on her plate in Cuba, Celia Sanchez was constantly on the phone speaking to whoever would talk to her at the U. S. State Department and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Americans need to know about her many phone calls.

      Celia Sanchez finally derived fruition from her persistent telephone diplomacy in the early days of Revolutionary Cuba in 1959. For the sake of Cuba, she realized that she needed the nearby superpower United States to be Cuba's friend and its major trading partner. The very last thing she wanted was for her beloved island to have the United States as an enemy. She fervently believed that Cuba's resources should be used to help Cuba's peasants, not utilized to defend the island against the awesome might of a superpower. In the first week of April-1959 the U. S. State Department assured Celia that, if Fidel Castro met and convinced President Eisenhower that Cuba would soon hold democratic elections that the U. S. could closely monitor, President Eisenhower would meet face-to-face with Fidel, who at the time was very popular in America. Celia joyously jumped at the offer. She immediately arranged to forsake everything else she was doing on the island in those halcyon days to arrange for Fidel to fly to the United States to meet President Eisenhower. As it turned out, the U. S. government blatantly lied to Celia and it is a lie that has shaped, colored, and predicated U.S.-Cuban relations from April of 1959 to the present day. It would be helpful to Cubans, Americans, and people around the world if Americans -- still capable of influencing their democracy -- knew that Celia Sanchez and Fidel Castro, in April of 1959, did not come to the United States on a sight-seeing mission.

    Historians are abundantly aware that this photo encapsulates and chronicles the lie the U. S. State Department made to Celia Sanchez in April of 1959. The wing of the Eisenhower administration led by Vice President Richard Nixon and the Dulles brothers {Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles} arranged for the decent but malleable President Eisenhower to be out of Washington that fateful week in April-1959 so the diabolical Vice President Nixon could be the one to meet Fidel. Nixon was not interested in hearing about an upcoming democratic election in Cuba. Instead, Nixon sanctimoniously told Fidel that the U. S. {along with the Mafia and the Cuban exiles, of course} would re-capture Cuba "in short order." Celia Sanchez was heart-broken. Her unbroken heart had amazingly been strong enough to boot the Batistianos and the Mafiosi off the island -- all the way to Miami and Washington, as it turned out. Would her broken heart be able to keep them off?

     After 12 days in the United States in April of 1959, Celia Sanchez led Fidel Castro back to Cuban soil. She would continue, with his blessing, as the island's prime decision-maker. And now...she took Richard Nixon at his word. She had been a do-or-die fighter to defeat Batista; now she would be a do-or-die fighter to thwart the plans of Nixon, the Dulles brothers, the Cuban exiles, and the Mafia to re-capture the island "in short order." The Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the U. S. embargo in 1962, and numerous assassination attempts against Fidel Castro quickly followed Celia's arrival back in Cuba. Celia's revolutionary plans for Cuba called for a democratic election that would have benefited the island she loved. The trip to the U. S. in April of 1959 convinced her that the United States would not permit that to happen. The crucial parameters that had kicked Batista, the Mafia and the United States out of Cuba were laid down by Celia Sanchez. The crucial parameters that continued to protect the island from foreign domination were also laid down by Celia Sanchez. Americans do not understand that basic, crucial fact. If Americans were allowed to understand the above photos -- Celia's telephone diplomacy, Celia in New York, Fidel meeting Nixon, Celia's mindset when she and Fidel flew back to Cuba in April of 1959, etc. -- Americans would be able to understand Celia's proclamation in 1959 as well as modern-day conclusions by experts such as Penelope Purdy. But such realizations have not been possible because, since the epochal year of 1959, a mere handful of two generations of self-serving Cuban exiles have dictated the Cuban narrative in the U. S. government and the U. S. media. 

However, understanding the role Celia Sanchez played in the Cuban Revolution and in Revolutionary Cuba would mitigate against the greedy viciousness of the policy makers in Washington and Miami that have predicated and orchestrated America's Cuban policy since the 1950s. Yes, it is a policy that to his day severely hurts 11 million innocent Cubans on the island. But mostly it is a policy that hurts democracy and the image of the United States throughout Latin America and around the world. It has been proven that a superpower loaded with record amounts of money and weapons can sustain that policy decade after decade even with the United Nations and the vast majority of America's friends around the world detesting it. As Celia Sanchez, Penelope Purdy and other worthy souls seemed to realize, the reason such perniciousness can persist in the world's most powerful democracy is simply because the vast majority of Americans have neither the intelligence nor the guts to challenge a few self-indulgent benefactors. In other words, America's Cuban policy personifies a troubled world in which the wisdom and leadership of decent people such as Celia Sanchez and Salvador Allende fall victim to the more powerful but far more pernicious designs of people like Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Augusto Pinochet. The significance of Celia Sanchez, strategically unknown to Americans, reflects perhaps a fatal weakness in America's democracy.

     At the top of this essay the question posed was: Can the Batistianos capture America before they re-capture Cuba? The answer is yes, perhaps as early as the 2016 presidential election that includes wannabees like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. Two things the U. S. democracy has permitted combine to make it possible: {1} The U. S. teaming with the Mafia to create and support the thieving, brutal Batista dictatorship in Cuba in the 1950s; and {2} the U. S. creating and supporting the most visceral Cuban exiles that fled the victorious Cuban Revolution in the first hours of January, 1959. Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship in Cuba had two co-dictators -- Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the two absolute leaders of the ultra-powerful U. S. Italian-Jewish Mafia. In this montage, that is Batista in the upper-right, Lansky in the lower-center, and Luciano in the upper-left. They all three died as very rich and very free old men thanks to their safe exodus from Cuba in their lushly packed airplanes, ships, and boats. The sudden influx of all that money and political connections, through two generations now, has overwhelmed Miami, Union City, Washington, and the democratic fabric of the United States. It was no problem for Cuban-exile leaders, Canosa and Diaz-Balart, to align with sycophants such as Jesse Helms, Dan Burton, and Robert Torricelli to pass self-serving laws such as the Helms-Burton Act and the Torricelli Bill that, to this day, benefit the economic, political and revenge motives of a few while harming everyone else, including foreign nations and companies that remotely exercise their sovereign right to do business with Cuba. And, of course, uniquely, the Cuban-government-within-the-government has passed laws -- such as the infamous Wet Foot/Dry Foot policy that relates only to Cubans and the incessant Radio-TV Marti boondoggle that apparently, since the 1980s, has achieved just one function -- enriching and ingratiating select Cubans while costing American taxpayers billions of unchallenged dollars. Not only are controversial politicians such as Helms, Burton, and Torricelli readily aligned to the Cuban-exile zealots but less notorious politicos typically tether themselves to Cuban-exile extremists in quid pro quo deals that saturate Congress and thus the universe. The shifting sands of politics usually mean that a democracy can rearrange irrelevant, disastrous, or harmful legislation, but not when it comes to Cuba. Thus, there is no safety net regarding America's Cuban policy. Therefore, the three men pictured above -- Batista, Luciano, and Lansky -- established a Cuban policy back in the 1950s that prevails to this day. That is a fact that has been pointed out by much more decent, democracy-loving individuals -- such as Celia Sanchez and Penelope Purdy, dos mujeres excepcionales. {"two exceptional women."}  Two exceptional women indeed!

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