U. S. Cuban Laws

By Cubans Only For Cubans
Updated: Saturday, July 25th, 2015

      This is Fernando Ravsberg. He was born in 1957 in Uruguay but for years he has been considered by much of the world as the best and fairest journalist on all things Cuban. Fernando teaches at the University of Madrid and he has worked as a journalist for BBC, Telemundo and other networks.

        Fernando Ravsberg's blog -- "Cartas Desde Cuba"/"Letters From Cuba" -- is a must for anyone interested in Cuba. His articles are routinely picked up by international outlets. This week -- the week the U. S. and Cuba actually opened embassies in their respective capitals -- Ravsberg penned an article entitled: "U. S. Wants To Send 35,000 Criminals Back To Cuba." Here is how that article began: "While the Cuban flag is hoisted on the building of the new embassy in Washington, D. C., the U. S. Congress continues to put obstacles in the way of normalization of bilateral relations. Now they want to send 35,000 Cuban criminals back to the island. Since the initiative involves persons born in Cuba, Washington has the legal right to deport them. However, for many years the relations between the two countries are not based on law. The U. S. has a law that grants residency to any Cuba who touches U. S. soil, even if they are criminals, terrorists or murderers. Part of the 'Mariel" exodus of 1980 were criminals taken from Cuban jails to send north {to the United States}."

Fernando Ravsberg used this photo to illustrate his article.

         The 1983 "Scarface" movie remains popular. It was directed by Brian DePalma, written by Oliver Stone, and it starred Al Pacino as Tony Montana. It opens with actual black-and-white film of Cuban immigrants arriving in Miami on the Mariel Boatlift in which Fidel Castro emptied his jails and prisons and included them {along with thousands of law-abiding Cubans} among the 120,000 Cubans who settled in South Florida. Soon, exacerbating Miami's already extreme drug-fueled violence, Tony Montana became Miami's most violent drug kingpin. Castro's intent was two-fold. Obviously he wanted to spare Cuba the expense and other problems related to prisoners and, as a bonus, he wanted to transfer the expense and other problems to his main adversary, the United States. In July of 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has referenced Castro's stratagem, equating it with modern-day Mexican immigrants. And the aforementioned article this week by Fernando Ravsberg indicates that anti-Castro zealots in the U. S. are intent on taking a page from the old revolutionary's book. However, while the almost 89-year-old Fidel this month has been more focused on 4-hour speeches at a cheese seminar outside Havana, it is not likely Cuba will accept 35,000 Cuban-born U. S. criminals. Cuba already has its hands full with U.S.-backed dissidents, as indicated by Tracey Eaton's very insightful article in USA Today this week, July 23rd.  

             Meanwhile, Americans must deal with a plethora of laws passed by a Batistiano-friendly U. S. Congress that, among other things, favors only Cubans and, as Ravberg indicates, continually encourages Cubans, including criminals, to relocate to the United States. The message on this T-shirt should make every democracy-lover in the United States cringe with either revulsion or embarrassment. If it doesn't, it's because Americans, since the Cuban Revolution ousted the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship in January of 1959, have been propagandized to fully and meekly accept a Cuban narrative tightly controlled by two generations of only the most extreme anti-Castro exiles from the Batista regime. But rest assured, America's best democracy-loving friends around the world, meaning those not bombarded with propaganda regarding Cuba, are ashamed and embarrassed by the message on this T-shirt. Even Peter Kornbluh, director at the U. S. National Security Archives in Washington, says such things make the U. S. appear to be "a Banana Republic." In decades past, Americans actually cared about their democracy.

          "Wet Foot/Dry Foot" is just one of many U. S. laws designed to benefit Cuban exiles at the expense of everyone else. To understand how such things embedded themselves into the fabric of the world's greatest democracy, I would suggest you read these two seminal books by renowned Cuban experts:

"Cuba Confidential"

by Ann Louise Bardach

and

"What Everyone Needs To Know About Cuba"

by Julia E. Sweig

            These two books minutely explain how, beginning in the 1980s, the Bush dynasty empowered Miami's most radical anti-Castro zealots who, shortly thereafter, were able to easily dictate such congressional laws as The Torricelli Bill and The Helms-Burton Act that clearly focused on sating the insatiable revenge, political, and economic appetites of a few Cuban-Americans while grossly infringing on the rights of all others. For example, everyday Americans are free to travel anywhere in the world...except Cuba. The freedom to travel to Cuba, a very safe country, is a privilege all people except Americans have. While crafting such laws to hurt Cuba, laws to enrich and empower select Cuban-Americans were not forgotten, as evidenced by the ongoing and unending number of tax-funded regime-change/get rich programs that blossom and flourish like swarms of locusts in Washington and Miami. But Wet Foot/Dry Foot is so fundamentally and immeasurably anti-democratic it shocks pro-American democracy-lovers the most. Wet Foot/Dry Foot emerged in the mid-1990s as an element tucked into the Cuban Adjustment Act, an act that seemed to say, "Hey, we can write all the U. S. laws relating to Cuba, so let's add this one!" And so they did, apparently assuming Americans didn't have the courage or intelligence to object. Wet Foot/Dry Foot crowns the U. S. Cuban policy that encourages Cubans -- baseball players, ballet performers, doctors, and even average Cubans -- to defect to the United States. Because of Wet Foot/Dry Foot, any Cuban -- including criminals as the Ravsberg article mentioned -- who touches U. S. soil is home free with instant benefits. All other would-be immigrants in the entire world -- including those with far better reasons to emigrate than Cubans -- are immediately subject to imprisonment or deportation. The Miami-Union City-Washington triangle controls the Cuban narrative in both the U. S. as a whole and the U. S. Congress in particular. Rubio, Menendez, Diaz-Balart, Ros-Lehtinen, etc. -- benefit from the fact that this generation of Americans is less concerned with protecting its democracy than previous American generations were.

      America's Founding Fathers never intended for their pristine democracy to begin supporting vile Banana Republic dictatorships in the Caribbean and Latin America. But that is exactly what happened beginning in the 1950s when the U. S. democracy got in bed with and toasted wine {above} with cruel dictators -- Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, etc., etc. The justification was, in exchange for tax-funded military and economic support, those dictators would permit rich Americans {like the guy on the right in the above graphic} to also participate in the rape and robbery of those helpless nations. Waves of democracy, beginning in the 1970s, began to sweep over the Caribbean and Latin America...easing out in various forms the U.S.-backed dictators. However, the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba remains unique in all the annals of Latin American and American history, and not just because it was the only dictatorship propped up by an unlikely team -- the U. S. and the Mafia. The sheer uniqueness of Batista and Cuba lies in the fact that the Cuban Revolution in 1959 overthrew Batista but all the Batistiano-Mafiosi leaders fled to much safer havens, mostly Miami.

         "Banana Republic" is a pejorative that gets its moniker from the United Fruit Company, which was based in Boston. Beginning in the 1950s, throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, the United Fruit Company -- sometimes actually supported by U.S.-backed soldiers -- emerged as the company most hated and reviled by the maligned peasants of those unfortunate countries, including Batista's Cuba. A medical graduate named Che Guevara took a motorcycle ride down through Latin America on a vacation before returning to Argentina to start his career as a medical doctor. But on the trip he noticed that companies such as the United Fruit Company were indeed raping and robbing those helpless countries at will. In Mexico City, Guevara met Raul Castro and then Fidel Castro. They told him the United Fruit Company was doing the same in Cuba and they were going back to join a revolution to do something about it. Che Guevara, forever forsaking his career as a doctor, jumped at the chance to become a Cuban revolutionary.

This map depicts primary holdings of the United Fruit Company in the 1950s.

Only the Cuban Revolution began the demise of the United Fruit Company.

 The United Fruit Company became Chiquita!!
Chiquita today supplies most of the bananas Americans buy.

          In the 1950s as the United Fruit Company was helping create Banana Republics all over the Caribbean and Latin America, two of the most powerful men in the United States were the Dulles brothers. Allen Dulles, on the left above, was CIA Director. John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State. The Dulles brothers, both with impeccably sanitized reputations then and now, were big supporters of Banana Republics. Decades after they had left office it was learned that they had, in the 1950s, financial ties to...The United Fruit Company. Then and now, classified documents protect such dubious reputations.

 Secrets and sanitized reputations mitigate against democratic transparency.

        This classified letter dated July 12-1956 was a sanitized secret till, decades later, it was de-classified. It was a sweet letter on official CIA stationery from CIA Director Allen W. Dulles to his dear friend, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Both men at the time were big fans of both the United Fruit Company and their Cuban Banana Republic, which reveled in making a few incredibly rich and the majority incredibly poor.

         Cuba's Banana Republic in the 1950s was dictated by Fulgencio Batista {upper-right} and his two best Mafia buddies -- Meyer Lansky {center} and Lucky Luciano {upper-left}. All had previous ties to Miami.

But...Haydee Santamaria and Celia Sanchez didn't like bananas. 

And the rest is history,

including Wet Foot/Dry Foot.

       This photo is courtesy of Yamil Lage/Getty Images. It shows tourists in Havana enjoying 1950-era American convertibles. Cuban ingenuity has many of them still running and still shining on the fast-changing island, still the Pearl of the Antilles.

******************************

ab