But Prepares for His Exit
This photo shows Saturday's opening {April 16th} of Cuba's National Congress, which is only scheduled every five years. At the rostrum kicking it off is Cuba's 84-year-old President Raul Castro. The backdrop is a huge photo of his 89-year-old brother Fidel. The two clapping men on the right are also worth mentioning -- 85-year-old revolutionary icon Jose Ramon Machado Ventura and, in the blue shirt, Raul's heir apparent Miguel Diaz-Canel who turns 56 next week, April 20th. In the speech, Raul Castro stressed the impending transition to a post-Castro Cuba by telling the one thousand delegates on hand that future delegates must be under sixty, which would eliminate the now very elderly heroes of the Cuban Revolution. The other thing he stressed was for Cuba to be on the "alert" for the continuation of underhanded U. S. influence. He voiced appreciation for the efforts made by President Obama to "ease the hostility" between the two neighbors but clearly didn't expect two Cuban prerequisites to normalizing relations -- ending the embargo and returning Guantanamo Bay to Cuba -- to be accomplished during the final 8 months of Obama's two-term, 8-year presidency. Thus, beginning in January of 2017 he said Cuba can expect that the Republican U. S. Congress will "reassert itself" even if another Democrat replaces Obama in the White House and despite the excitement "Obama aroused" in so many U. S. companies that "seek to do business with us." President Castro also stressed that Cuba must expedite "economic reforms." Emphasizing non-U.S. foreign companies, he projects a Chinese or Vietnamese-style Cuban economy. He is abundantly aware of the political transitions or turmoils that are embroiling some of Cuba's very best friends -- including Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina.
It is fitting that yesterday's Cuban National Congress acknowledged that the inevitability of age has finally caught up with the revolutionaries who impacted the world when they overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship on the first day of January, 1959. Unless there is unforeseen internal or external events dictating otherwise, Miguel Diaz-Canel will be the first post-Castro leader of Cuba but, beyond doubt, the island's well educated and highly restive young adults will play huge roles in Cuba's future. The above photo shows Cristina Escobar, Cuba's brilliant 28-year-old television news anchor and a respected expert on U.S.-Cuban relations. Fluent in English as well as Spanish, Cristina recently told U. S. journalist Tracy Eaton, in a video posted on YouTube, "I don't want the U. S. to bring me democracy. That is a project for Cubans on the island." Cristina, and many young Cubans like her on the island, share the Castro brothers' intense distrust of the United States. "Progress regarding reconciliation is nice and long overdue," Cristina very cogently says, "but we would be stupid to trust the hard-line Cubans in Miami or the Republicans in Washington. They have proven to be untrustworthy and any wishful thinking that they will change would be both meek and cowardly. My generation of Cubans on the island must encourage all Cubans on the island that our future is in our hands. We should get shed of America's and Miami's influence altogether. Our heroes are those who fought and died or fought and lived striving for sovereignty and independence that Spain and the United States kept from us for the 500 years prior to 1959. We must fight just as hard to keep it. I don't want a damn thing from the U. S. except TWO things -- an end to the blockade and a return of Guantanamo Bay. Only then will Cubans on the island breathe normally. Till then, instead of criticizing us and trying to destroy our government, the American leaders should shut-up and deal with their own problems in Miami and the U. S."
The U. S. embargo, which Cuba calls a genocidal blockade that is a noose around its neck, has been in effect since 1962. It's the longest and cruelest embargo ever imposed by a strong country against a weak one. If Americans don't understand that fact, it is because the Cuban-exiles and their right-wing sycophants, who put it in place and have kept it in place all these decades, have also dictated the Cuban narrative in the United States. Declassified U. S. documents confirm the reason it was imposed in 1962: To starve and deprive the Cubans on the island for the purpose of enticing them to rise up and overthrow Fidel Castro. That dastardly law was imposed on Cuba right after the failed and humiliating military attack at the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961, followed by many unsuccessful assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, had failed to recapture the island, an island that had been so brutally pillaged by the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship from 1952 till January 1, 1959 when the Cuban Revolution triumphed. By not being concerned enough or informed enough to acknowledge such facts, Americans since the 1950s have, on the international scale, caused far more harm to the U. S. image than to Cuba's. The UN each October acknowledges that fact with a 191-to-2 vote, which unconcerned and uninformed Americans tend to ignore.
Mightily irking Cristina, the United States stole the plush port of Guantanamo Bay in 1903, five years after it gained dominion over Cuba with the easy 1898 victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War. Cuba was the long-awaited grand prize but, while it was at it, the U. S. also gained dominance of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines -- like taking candy from the fast-fading empire of imperialist Spain.
The Cuban-American hardliners and their right-wing sycophants in the U. S. Congress chortle when they tell the world that the U. S. acquired Guantanamo Bay in a "legal, binding treaty." They make that claim hiding behind the skirts of the world superpower and assuming that everyone is either too ignorant or too scared to challenge their lie. No Cuban was in attendance when the Treaty of Paris was signed to end the Spanish-American War in 1898. And no Cuban, of course, was in a position to resist when the U. S. stole Guantanamo Bay in 1903. The U. S. agreed to pay $2,000 a year and in 1934 the U. S. doubled that amount. From 1898 till 1959 the stooge leaders of Cuba took the money. But after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Revolutionary Cuba has refused to cash the U. S. Treasury checks, which simply have piled up in the lower right-hand drawer of one of Fidel Castro's desks. To this day, no unbiased person or nation will describe the U. S. occupation of Guantanamo Bay as anything but a mammoth imperialist theft. Yet, as with a host of other American laws related to Cuba, the U. S. is willing to accept the international scorn, apparently because it is the nuclear superpower. The updated comments about Guantanamo Bay by Raul Castro and Cristina Escobar are pertinent, I think, because they reflect the strong viewpoints of Cuba's Old Guard and Cuba's Twentysomething Generation that is determined to chart the future course for the pugnacious island. Cristina's are particularly relevant because they reflect the fact that, with the more famous help of the Castro brothers and some other men, Cuban women fueled the revolution.
This historic photo was taken by Lee Lockwood after daylight in Havana on January 1, 1959. Take note of the Associated Press caption beneath that photo. Cuban citizens, especially women like the two on the left, frantically tried to keep the Batistiano and Mafiosi leaders from escaping the island because they wanted them to be held accountable for what they had done. But in the hours before daylight that morning, after word came that the charging rebels had taken the key city of Santa Clara southeast of Havana, a vast array of getaway airplanes, ships, and boats had already taken the top echelon of Batistianos and Mafiosi -- Fulgencio Batista, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, etc. -- to safer havens, such as U.S.-friendly Dictator Rafael Trujillo's nearby Dominican Republic and, especially, to nearby Mafia-friendly Miami, Florida.
Armed female citizens like this one, many of whom were former front-line guerrilla fighters, roamed the streets of Havana after daylight on January 1, 1959, hoping to find fleeing Batistianos and Mafiosi.
This female thanked Fidel Castro outside Santiago de Cuba.
On the long trek from Santiago de Cuba, Fidel didn't reach Havana until January 7th, 1959. All along the way, euphoric Cuban females like this one barely gave him time to light his then-very-famous cigars.
This young Cuban female couldn't wait to kiss the first tired rebel she saw. And there are historic reasons that Cuban females were the most joyous people after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.
After all, the Cuban Revolution was fueled by brave Cuban mothers like these who very boldly and courageously took to the streets to protest the murders {"asesinators"} of "our children" {"nuestros hijos"}.
And Cuban women from start to finish fought doggedly on the frontlines of the Cuban Revolution. Three of the most notable heroines are shown above arriving in Havana after the monumental victory.
Tete Puebla today is a General in the Cuban army.
In this interview General Tete Puebla was asked why, in the aforementioned photo, did she look "a little glum" on the "euphoric day" she arrived in Havana "after chasing the Batistianos off the island?" She replied, "Well...Lidia, Eloisa, and all of us were a little glum. We were disappointed that Batista and the Mafia leaders did not hang around to fight us. What they did to my Cuba was...horrendous. I will never forget it."
And believe it or not....
.......there are young female Cubans on the island today, like Cristina Escobar, who empathize with those historic revolutionary women like General Tete Puebla. "I wish," Cristina says, "Americans had a fairer perspective of the Cuban women who spawned and fought the revolution and why they did it. I've been to the United States as a broadcaster, but I love my island. I love its history, it's struggle to be sovereign and independent. The revolution gave us that but since January of 1959 the elements in the United States -- Cuban and American -- that want to overthrow it and again make Cuba a conquered dependent nation are incessant. The Revolution gave us many things -- free excellent educations, free excellent health care, free food and shelter, and the lowest crime rate and the lowest infant mortality rate of almost any country, certainly including the United States. Yet, there is so much more the revolution could do, good things, if the U. S. wasn't always trying to re-conquer us. Americans need to know that many great Cubans fought and died for Cuban independence and that many of us have those feelings today."
Most Americans, sufficiently propagandized since the 1950s, have no clue about what Cristina Escobar says or why she says it, or why she is Cuba's top broadcast anchor instead of being Miami's, which she well could be. But most great historians, such as Philip S. Foner {above} clearly understand every word she says. In his 1962 book -- "A History of Cuba & Its Relations with the United States, Vol. 1" -- Foner wrote: "The story of Cuba's struggle for liberation from four-hundred years of Spanish domination is one of the great epics in history. The struggle for over half-a-century to change its status from a theoretically independent state, dominated by American imperialism, into a truly independent country is equally and truly inspiring."
Cristina Escobar wishes that Americans knew as much about Cuba's history as historians like Philip Foner, or even unbiased American journalist like Tracy Eaton. On Eaton's YouTube video you can hear Cristina lament the image that she says propagandized Americans have of Cubans on the island -- you know, smoking cigars and jumping into 1950s cars or getting on flimsy intertubes to cross the Florida Straits to partake of the special financial rewards that both entice and await them. Cristina says, "The United States has always misjudged us -- with the theft of Guantanamo Bay, supporting Batista's brutality and thievery, attacking the Bay of Pigs and supporting terrorist acts against us, inflicting upon us the blockade that any other nation would have succumbed to, and projecting a U. S. Congress that shows no respect for democracy or for innocent Cubans on the island but one that discriminates massively in favor of certain Cuban exiles. If Americans put up with that for another half-century, rest assured we on the island do not intend to." And that is the same Cristina Escobar who told U. S. journalist Tracy Eaton, "I don't want the U. S. to bring me democracy." Cristina, you see, has keenly studied U.S.-Cuban history. She is aware that, after the 1898 Spanish-American War, the U. S. promised to bring Cuba democracy. Now she's wary of more promises.
And now a more peaceful note:
This little guy is a Vermilian Flycatcher. The photo is courtesy of Steve & Dave Maslowski via Birds & Blooms Magazine.
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