Screwing Cuba...Again!

"Legally," of course!!

         This photo -- courtesy of Cristobal Herrera/European Pressphoto Agency -- shows The Adonia docked in Miami. It is the pride of Carnival Cruse Lines and it was scheduled to make an historic cruise to Cuba on May 1st, but that won't happen. The Adonia carries 703 passengers and most of the bookings had been sold for the May 1st trip to Cuba but some suites and balcony cabins were still available at rates exceeding $6,000 per person. Carnival had scheduled the Cuban cruise with the understanding that Cuban-Americans could not purchase tickets, abiding by a Cuban law. It is, in fact, a reasonable law designed to protect Cuba from terrorism but it was sure to provide a huge opening, as Carnival has discovered, for the hard-line Cuban-Americans who dictate America's Cuban policy, at least the portions not bravely and finally challenged by a courageous U. S. President, Mr. Obama. So, why is there a Cuban law banning Cuban-Americans to arrive on ships while Cuba allows hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans to visit the island each year via airplane flights? The answer is simple: Cuban airports have the capacity to screen passengers to make sure that terrorists do not arrive with weapons, bombs, etc. The Cuban ports simply do not possess such screening precautions. The always lucrative and still revengeful Castro Cottage Industry in the United States, by dominating the Cuban narrative since 1959, can easily belittle such Cuban precautions only because it has thoroughly propagandized Americans.

        Arnold Donald, Carnival's Chief Executive, understood Cuba's reason for banning Cuban-Americans from the cruise ship, at least till he buckled under. In announcing that Carnival was postponing the scheduled May 1st voyage, Mr. Donald says he is negotiating with Cuba to change its policy. He said, "The issue has been a top priority with us, and our team has been working hard to reach a positive outcome."  

     Regarding Cuba, United States Secretary of State John Kerry's acuity, of course, often gives way to political correctness. In Miami, in regards to the Carnival episode, last Friday Secretary Kerry said, "Cuba should change its policy." On behalf of the U. S. government, Kerry is not permitted to admit that Cuba has suffered mightily from Miami-based acts of terrorism, not to mention that Cuba  -- supported by history as well as topical headlines -- claims that Miami is still a safe haven for well-known anti-Castro terrorists.

       Carlos Gimenez was born in 1954 in Havana. He is the Mayor of Miami-Dade County. He doesn't like Fidel Castro, which some people consider an excuse to endlessly embargo or otherwise harm innocent Cubans. Mr. Gimenez says that Carnival's proposed cruise to Cuba "is violating the county's human rights ordinance." I wonder...indeed, a lot of people wonder...if any of the top officials in Miami-Dade County would ever admit that human violations also should relate to innocent Cubans not living in South Florida.

       Emilio Milian, if he were alive today, would probably be concerned about Cubans on the island. In 1976 Emilio was the top Cuban-American newsman in Miami when he loudly and bravely spoke out against Miami-based terrorism against innocent Cubans, such as strafing coastal fishing cabins with cannon fire from speed boats, bombing Cuban hotels, and even blowing up the civilian airplane Cubana Flight 455.

        The heroic Emilio was car-bombed, producing one of the hundreds of such criminal headlines in Miami throughout the 1960s and 1970s that made the AP's crime reporter, Edna Buchanan, a journalistic legend.

         Edna Buchanan won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News as the AP's star crime reporter. She is now 77 and an award-winning crime novelist. In the famous "Cocaine Cowboy" documentary, Ms. Buchanan was featured standing on a hotel balcony with the Miami skyline as a backdrop. She turned and gestured toward that splendid skyline, pointing out that much of it was built by the rampant drug trade that roiled Miami throughout the wild and bloody 1960s and 1970s after it had roiled Havana in the 1950s.

        Beginning in 1959, after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the U. S. government put Luis Posada Carriles and many other anti-Castro zealots on the U. S. payroll and sent them to the Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. That was where soldiers and police from U.S.-friendly dictatorships -- such as Batista's Cuba, Trujillo's Dominican Republic, Somoza's Nicaragua, etc. -- were trained and then sent back to their native countries to protect those dictators. After Batista was overthrown on January 1, 1959, Brigade 2506 -- consisting of Cuban exiles such as Posada -- was clandestinely created at Fort Benning for the purpose of recapturing Cuba, but it later failed in its infamous Bay of Pigs attack in April of 1961, which mainly served to only make Fidel Castro even more of a revolutionary icon. It also made Posada and many other Cuban exiles more determined than ever to eliminate Castro's revolution. In a famous interview -- conducted by the great Ann Louse Bardach for the New York Times -- Posada praised the American taxpayers and the richest of the Fort Benning graduates, Jorge Mas Canosa, for backing his explosives and sabotage training. {He later recanted the mention of Mas Canosa}. In that interview Posada also admitted his role in the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, but also later recanted that confession. However, he has never recanted and, in fact, has always bragged about his decades of terrorist acts against Cuba, including the bombing of a Cuban hotel in which a young Italian tourist was killed.

       Luis Posada Carriles was born on February 15, 1928 in Cienfuegos, Cuba. So, he is now 88 years old but he has recently made the television news in Miami by taking to the streets to publicly protest President Barack Obama's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. Posada Carriles hasn't had problems with U. S. authorities but the last time he was freed, with help, from a Latin American prison was in Panama, where he was imprisoned for attempting to kill Fidel Castro at a venue where Castro was making a speech.

       Jim DeFede was an Emmy Award-Winning journalist and a top columnist at the Miami Herald when he wrote a famous column pointing out that terrorism against Cuba is the same as terrorism against the UK or America or any other country. He particularly excoriated Miami members of the U. S. Congress -- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart brothers -- for their efforts to free Posada Carriles from the Panamanian prison. Jim is no longer with the Miami Herald but today he's a brilliant broadcast journalist in Miami.

      Josefina Vidal is Cuba's Minister of North American Affairs. She has worked tirelessly with the Obama administration to normalize relations, and she has succeeded in some prime areas such as getting Cuba removed from the punitive Sponsors of Terrorism list, re-opening embassies in the two capitals for the first time since 1961, etc. But she is not about to agree to "full normalization" as long as the embargo, imposed in 1962, remains in place or as long as the U. S. refuses to "seriously discuss" the return of Guantanamo Bay to Cuba. She realizes that those two things "won't happen as long as Miami dictates Cuban policy to the U. S. Congress and the majority of Americans put up with it." And this week she is irked that "Cuba is being misrepresented by Miami and Washington" concerning Carnival's scheduled but now postponed May 1st cruise to Cuba. "Cuba," she says, "has allowed hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans to fly to Cuba each year, because we welcome them and because our airports can screen them to prevent possible terrorism. But our ports do not currently have that ability and that's the only reason Carnival was told about our concerns. Of course, as always, Miami and Washington insist there has never been Miami-directed terrorism against Cuba. And that is a lie. We have a lot of graves, far too many, that prove the lies."

        Also, another cruise line -- Pearl Sea Cruises -- had sold tickets for a trip out of Miami with stopovers in the seven Cuban cities as depicted in this advertisement map. The tickets were being sold after the U. S. granted permission but Cuba has since denied permission to Pearl Sea for these cruises, again with ample reason. With the vast influx of American tourists since President Obama's Dec.-2014 announcement about normalizing relations, Cuba simply does not have the capacity to handle the tourism overload. There are Cuban hotels totally sold out for the entirety of 2016; last week there were headlines confirming that Cuba has run out of beer amid plans to build additional breweries; etc. Of course, Cuba doesn't expect Miami or Washington, or the American people, to consider the fact that the island simply is not ready for such a tourism boom or that, yes, Cuba tries to protect its citizens from terrorists, like other nations do.

      In addition to the U. S. allowing cruises to Cuba for the first time in over half-a-century, the U. S. has reached agreement with Cuba for the first commercial U. S. airplane flights to the island since 1962!! In fact, 110 such daily flights are now in the works beginning in the fall, with 20 to Havana and up to 10 to each of nine other Cuban cities. Again, the problem is...Cuba is not ready for such Obama-orchestrated normalization!! Right now it doesn't have enough hotel rooms, enough beer, enough...of a lot of things. The Los Angeles Times this week had two informative articles. One was entitled: "Carnival Will Let Cuban Natives On Its Cruises After All -- But Will Cuba Accept Them?" The answer is, "Not really, not until Cuba has screening procedures in our ports like we have in our airports." The other informative LA Times article this week was entitled: "Airlines Get Nasty in Competition for Routes to Cuba." Yes, Cuba wants to accommodate those eager U. S. airlines, but it also wants to prepare for the huge influx of additional passengers. If Mr. Kerry, Mr. Gimenez, and others don't consider Cuba's side of the equation, Ms. Vidal is ready to toss in the towel on normalization. "Like all sovereign nations," she said this week, "we need to protect our citizens from being harmed by terrorism or, regarding tourism, from being unduly overwhelmed."

In other words:

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