Says Caribbean Elder Statesman
P. J. Patterson was the Prime Minister of Jamaica from 1992 till 2006. He is now 80-years-old and still in good health...and still the most respected and most influential Caribbean statesman. Recently, at this year's CARIFORUM-EU Business Forum held at the Hilton Rose Hall in Montego Bay, Mr. Patterson triumphantly heralded President Obama's plans to normalize relations with Cuba and, in particular, remove Cuba from the U. S. Sponsors of Terrorism list, which Mr. Patterson called "grossly unjust and an undeserved punishment by the region's superpower that shows it is willing to hurt Cubans and thus all Caribbeans just to appease a few remnants from a long-ago righteously overthrown U.S.-backed regime in Cuba." At that Montego Bay forum he told the European businessmen that the Caribbean had 37 millions "customers and consumers, with over 11 million in our biggest and most important nation, Cuba." Also at that session, as he is doing elsewhere, Mr. Patterson tried to assure the other Caribbean nations that the expected influx of tourism in Cuba, due to the thaw in its relations with the U. S., should be welcomed and not considered competitive. He said, "Instead of people spending their time warning about how the advent of tourist arrivals in Cuba is going to affect the Caribbean, let's spend our time in seeing how, out of that alliance, the entire region is going to benefit by the creation of multiple destinations and multicultural experiences. For all these decades since the 1950s, the entire Caribbean has been punished by the U. S. punishing Cuba to comply with the demands of the Batista-Mafia remnants. If President Obama can end or even dent that wickedness, let all the Caribbean nations rejoice, not just the deserving Cubans on their nice island."
As the long-time Prime Minister of Jamaica, P. J. Patterson had the courage...some say the audacity...to repeatedly thank Fidel Castro for Cuban projects that "profoundly helped Jamaicans and all Caribbeans." He was referencing Cuba's medical expertise that has been shared with nations in the region; giving free scholarships to Cuba's medical school, which happens to be the world's largest; and for such things as Cuba's Operation Miracle whereby Cuba has provided thousands of totally free eye operations to Caribbeans too poor to have otherwise ever hoped for such vital sight-saving and in some cases sight-restoring procedures. Mr. Patterson, in international forums such as the one above, has had the guts to say, "Fidel Castro knows that, at times, I have criticized him. But, unlike the United States, I also have the courage and the decency to attribute good deeds to him, and one of those good needs was chasing the Batista and Mafia crooks off the island and keeping them out of the Caribbean, although dangerously nearby." Some Jamaicans still criticize Mr. Patterson for such statements, not because they believe them to be wrong but because they advise him that it will reduce U. S. economic and commercial aid to Jamaica. Indeed, Mr. Patterson was once outraged because "A Jamaican company with ties to an American company was just fined a huge amount by the United States because the Jamaican company was guilty of selling a box of baby aspirin to Cuba! Guilty! Guilty! WHO ARE THE CROOKS HERE? I'll tell you...the ones with the biggest guns!"
But that's the Caribbean!
Now let's fast-forward to the U. S.:
In the last few days, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio -- the two leading Republican presidential contenders -- have gone ballistic in ranting, raving, bellowing, and spewing against President Obama's plans to open a U. S. embassy in Havana and, particularly, removing Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Bush and Rubio, first off, should have enough personal decency to rant and rave about problems, far removed from their own multiple mansions, in U. S. slums and U. S. streets where crime is rampant and where some people who are not living under bridges are sleeping in cardboard boxes on streets and in parks. Also, of course, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio should have enough decency, as Mr. Patterson in Jamaican constantly points out, not to punish 37 million Caribbeans because of their own revenge, economic, and political motives in hurting 11 million Cubans. Of course, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio can ignore the opinions of Caribbean and world nations because {1} most Americans don't have the courage, intelligence, or the patriotism to care; and {2} most of the mainstream U. S. media has neither the courage nor the integrity to hold Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio accountable for their undemocratic and unfathomable assaults on innocent people in smaller nations, all in the name of "hurting Castro" but in the name of adding to their own economic and political fortunes.
Yet, in the U. S. media.......
there are exceptions to cowardice and incompetence:
DeWayne Wickham is the long-time top columnist for USA Today, America's largest newspaper. In direct reaction to the Bush and Rubio rants about Cuba being removed from the Sponsors of Terrorism list, Wickham's column yesterday -- June 2nd -- was entitled: "U. S. Terrorism List A Lesson In Hypocrisy." He began that column with this exact sentence: "Finally, Cuba is no longer on America's list of state sponsors of terrorism, which in the case of our Caribbean Island neighbor has long been a badly tarnished label." He pointed out that Cuba was unfairly put on the list in 1982 when the Ronald Reagan administration "secretly sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to send arms to the Contras -- in violation of a federal law." The Contras at the time were fighting the Cuban-backed Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas were led by a young rebel named Danny Ortega who since has been democratically elected and re-elected as Nicaragua's President and one of Latin America's best Cuban friends who idolizes Castro. Wickham then added what most U. S. journalists are afraid to mention: "But if Cuba had its own Most Wanted Terrorist list, Luis Posada Carriles would top it. Posada is widely believed to have been one of the masterminds behind the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner near Barbados that took the lives of 73 people. The Cuban exile lives openly in South Florida, where he's widely regarded as a hero for his acts of terrorism..." Wickham's last exact sentence in Tuesday's USA Today was: "The fact that Posada, an alleged terrorist who aided the U. S. effort to maintain hegemony over this hemisphere, was given safe harbor in the United States long ago undermined U. S. standing to accuse other nations of sponsoring terrorism." That and other well-known aspects of America's Cuban policy harms the United States and its cherished democracy a lot more than it harms Cuba, but that appears of little concern to benefactors such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, both of whom can spend countless hours on U. S. television networks without ever having to worry about any questions concerning their support, tacit or otherwise, of vile and historic shameful acts against innocent Cubans who were terror victims.
This Miami New Times photo shows Luis Posada Carriles in Miami.
Peter Kornbluh, a great author and investigative journalist, is the incomparable Cuban expert at the U. S. National Security Archives in Washington, D. C. On that website and in his books Mr. Kornbluh has listed page-after-page of previously classified U. S. documents about terrorist acts against Cuba, including but not ending with Cubana Flight 455 data that most U. S. authors-journalists-news reporters are afraid to mention. This past weekend, in reaction to the Bush-Rubio tirades about President Obama removing Cuba from the U. S. Sponsors of Terrorism list, Mr. Kornbluh penned a long article that was spread around the world by Yahoo News and other international outlets, and it was far more scathing and direct than the column DeWayne Wickham had in USA Today yesterday. Of course, Americans have longed been programmed to get their Cuban news from the likes of Bush, Rubio, and Posada...such as "IT'S THE BIGGEST BLOW YET AGAINST CASTRO!!" which was the famous battle-cry in the Miami media when the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 was confirmed. The U. S. citizens who to this day ignorantly or pusillanimously accept that battle-cry have done and are doing massive harm to democracy in the guise of harming Castro. That is the point brave people like Peter Kornbluh have been saying for many years.
And by the way..............
....................Drew Sheneman is one of America's greatest Editorial Cartoonists. He works at The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey and is syndicated nationally by Tribune Media Services. This week's Sheneman gem depicts some of the Republican presidential contenders with a 7-word aphorism coming from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie: "You guys wanna share a clown car?" Great Editorial Cartoonists, using just a few words to highlight daunting sketches, can say a lot more than most journalists using hundreds or thousands of words. Actually, I believe Mr. Sheneman is stressing that the unending line of Republican presidential candidates is taking advantage of America's money-crazed political system that enables them to raise money even if they never can hope to be real contenders. Christie's mention of the "clown car" actually demeans the U. S. voters. After all, if money is the prime aspect of politics and the voters allow it to happen and to continue, the real "clowns" are us voters, not the greedy politicians.
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Rob Rogers is the great Editorial Cartoonist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and he is nationally syndicated by United Features Syndicate. He called his masterpiece this week "Bernie and Goliath." He was telling you, correctly, that your cherished democratic government has been purchased by the rich and that only presidential candidates who sell out to the millionaires and billionaires have the billions of dollars now needed to campaign. The Bernie in the title is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent running as a Democrat against Hillary Clinton. But he is famous for not selling out to anybody and for using his position in the Senate to constantly rail against politicians who indeed do sell out to everybody and anybody. Rob Rogers astutely is showing you that poor little Bernie with his sling-shot and nothing else doesn't stand a chance against Goliath, in this case the Clinton money-machine that more-and-more is tied to incredible amounts of money from Wall Street billionaires and foreign despots not to mention a plethora of speeches by Bill and Hillary Clinton that have garnered singular "payments" of $500,000-or-more per speech, pretending the speech itself is worth it. In other words, as Rob Rogers seems to indicate here, that money-crazed albatross will likely doom Bernie first and then Hillary, the only Democrat with the requisite billions needed to run. On the Republican side, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are also flush with billionaire "donors" because they, too, hang out "For Sale" signs. That's how to get elected.
Which reminds me...........
....................that Josefina Vidal believes that both Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio will take the presidential sweepstakes away from Hillary Clinton. If Bush is the President, she believes Rubio will then be massively groomed to be the future President. But Vidal believes Rubio will defeat his mentor, Bush, and win the Republican presidential nomination. Alright, you say, what the hell does she know about U. S. politics? Well, Vidal knows a lot more than the high-priced pundits you see nightly on American television. They are there to make money and promote themselves, and fill a lot of airtime for networks that otherwise might need to actually go out and gather the news. Vidal is Cuba's unabashed and unchallenged expert on all things American. For the past fifteen years her prognostications about U. S. politics have been uncannily accurate. If they had not been so, it is highly likely that during the pre-Obama two-term George W. Bush administration the U. S. and its phalanx of Cuban-American extremists would have ended Cuba's status as a sovereign nation...and that was especially true during the brief, bloody, and shameful period when George W. Bush put Otto Reich and Roger Noriega in charge of America's Latin American Affairs. During the brief Reich-Noriega reign, the Cuba-friendly democratically elected Venezuelan government was overturned in a coup, quickly recognized by Washington. If that had been allowed to stand, Vidal figured Cuba would be next. Like most Bush-era anti-Cuban zealots, Reich and Noriega continue on as powerful lobbyists...using vast wealth and connections to target Cuba. During the last Bush era Vidal, if Cuba was to survive, had to be right on all major U. S. prognostications. She was. Now, even while she tries to engineer normal relations with the U. S. while Obama has fifteen months or so left in office, Vidal is preparing for a Jeb Bush-Marco Rubio control of the White House along with Commander-in-Chief status beginning in 2016. If that seems far-fetched, remember...if Vidal makes a major misjudgment about the U. S., Cuba's existence as a sovereign nation will be history, analogous to the 1950s Batista-Mafia era. So, when it comes to the top echelon of U. S. politics, Vidal probably knows a lot more than your favorite pundit. And if that were not so, Cuba as we know it would have ceased to exist during the last Bush presidency and will cease to exist the next time a Bush, or a Rubio, takes control of Commander-in-Chief honors. That's merely the Cuban facts of life...with the island's future very tightly tied to Vidal's wisdom.
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