One Side of A Two-Sided Story
Updated: Friday, November 27th, 2015
Greg Abbott has been the Governor of Texas since January 20th, 2015. He was the Attorney General of Texas the previous 13 years. He is shown above with his wife Cecilia and their daughter Aubrey. Mr. Abbott is 58-years-old and has been a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair since 1984 when an oak tree fell on him during a storm. On Monday he will fly to Cuba to lead a large trade delegation. Earlier this year New York Governor Mario Cuomo led a huge trade delegation to Cuba. Texas has the 12th largest economy in the world. While in Cuba, Governor Abbott will visit Cuba's newly refurbished state-of-the-art Mariel Port Economic Zone 28 miles southwest of Havana. He said, "With a new era of eased trade and travel restrictions between the U. S. and Cuba, and as the 12th largest economy in the world, Texas has an opportunity to capitalize and expand its economic footprint in Cuba."
This Dallas Morning News photo shows Senator Ted Cruz of Texas with his mentor, Texas Governor Greg Abbott. All the main Texas newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle, have reported on Cruz latching onto the Bush dynasty when he cut his political teeth in Texas but his mentor was Greg Abbott. Cruz, believing his presidential bid will never be hurt by anything he says or does regarding Cuba, has sharply rebuked Governor Abbott for his trip to Cuba starting Monday.
Both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, not unexpectedly, went ballistic when they heard of Governor Abbott's trip to Cuba starting Monday. Cruz is a first-term U. S. Senator from Texas and Rubio is a first-term U. S. Senator from Florida. They are well-financed Republican candidates to be President of the United States. Their comments relating to Governor Abbott's Cuban trip are asinine and will not be repeated here.
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are self-serving zealots unfit to be President and Commander-in-Chief of the United States. There are certainly a plethora of Cuban-Americans fully qualified to hold those positions, but not these two bought-and-paid-for radicals. As their comments regarding Governor Abbott illustrate, they believe they can do or say anything related to Cuba and it will not cost them a single vote. As Commander-in-Chief, they obviously believe there is nothing they could do regarding Cuba that would draw a rebuke from proselytized and propagandized Americans. They might be right. For sure...Batista's Cuba, the Cuban Revolution, and Revolutionary Cuba say a lot more about the United States than they say about Cuba.
Virtually since sunrise on January 1, 1959, the Cuban narrative in the United States has been dictated by two generations of the leading remnants of the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship, which was overthrown by the Cuban Revolution. By 3:00 A. M. on Jan. 1, 1959, Batista and Mafia kingpins such as Meyer Lansky were flying to safer havens -- such as nearby Miami. The U. S., since 1959, has not been transformed into a Banana Republic but its democracy has been severely scarred by almost six decades of anti-Cuban vitriol from U. S. soil, including such things as assassination attempts against Cuban leaders, the Bay of Pigs military attack, the terrorist bombing of the child-laden Cubana Flight 455 airplane, and a litany of anti-Cuban/pro Cuban-exile laws easily and permanently passed by a Batistiano-directed U. S. Congress. That being said, propagandized Americans can not be expected to understand the photo depicted above, because the proselytized or intimidated U. S. media certainly doesn't report such things. But the photo shows the U. S. Congress being briefed a few days ago on this important topic: "Beyond the Rhetoric: Why Cuban Innovation Matters To Our Health In The United States." The speakers included some of North America's greatest medical experts and included two members of the U. S. Congress -- Karen Bass and Barbara Lee -- who actually care more about helping U. S. citizens than hurting Cubans on the island. The impassioned speeches educated Congress on Cuba's medical techniques and advances -- including medicines, vaccines, and the island's admirable and unique pre-natal care of pregnant women -- that is "unavailable to United States citizens because of the long-standing United States embargo against Cuba."
Gail Reed is the Executive Director of the MEDICC Review. MEDICC is a highly respected organization that promotes cooperation instead of antagonism between the U. S. and Cuba regarding medical techniques and advances. One of her latest projects was spearheading the aforementioned congressional session. Gail Reed's mission is an honorable one: To help American and Cuban citizens. Her dishonorable opponents, however, continue -- decade after decade -- to successfully dictate congressional laws designed {1} to hurt Cubans on the island to induce them to rise up and overthrow their revolutionary government; {2} to enrich and empower Cuban-exiles in the U. S.; and {3} to control the Cuban narrative in the U. S. by codifying the vilification of Cuba while sanitizing the Batista-Mafia rule that preceded it. In that milieu, it is virtually verboten for the U. S. media to introduce Americans to the other side of a two-sided story, such as the medical expertise of Gail Reed and her commendable efforts to bring out cooperation, not hubris, between the two neighboring nations. On Gail Reed's MEDICC website, she has posted four videos of impassioned, knowledgeable, and honorable people pleading for the U. S. Congress to allow medical cooperation between Cuba and the United States. But it is a U. S. Congress and a U. S. media that, mostly, has deaf ears and heartlessly cold reactions to anything even remotely positive regarding Cuba.
Like Gail Reed at MEDICC, Sarah Stephens at the Washington-based Center for Democracy in the Americas is mostly shunned by the U. S. media, which affords unlimited time to almost anyone who benefits economically or politically or revengefully from the continuation of U. S. antipathy towards Cuba. That's unfortunate in a democracy considering that Sarah Stephens probably knows more about U.S.-Cuban relations than any American. Recently on the Cuba Central segment of her Center for Democracy in the Americas website, Sarah Stephens expressed optimism that, at long last, there is hope that President Obama's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba are showing some positive results despite the dire opposition of self-serving Cuban-Americans in the U. S. Congress who conveniently ignore even the majority opinions of Cuban-Americans in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood. Ms. Stephens optimistically summed that up with these words: "This cat has scampered out of the bag. The U. S. policy transition to a post-embargo world is underway, and the forces to make the new policy irreversible are now getting stronger." Let's hope so, not only for 11.2 million innocent Cubans on the island but also for the U. S. democracy that, for far too long, has been demeaned by a handful of Americans, a handful of Cubans, and a handful of Mafiosi who, since the 1950s, have very firmly and self-servingly maintained a tight grip on America's Cuban policy. Unfortunately, that unholy grip includes the U. S. Congress and the U. S. media -- despite the Herculean and courageous efforts of aforementioned women such as Congresswomen Karen Bass and Barbara Lee as well as brilliant, well-informed democracy-lovers like Gail Reed and Sarah Stephens.
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