Another Bay of Pigs USA Defeat?
{Friday, December 22nd, 2017}
{Friday, December 22nd, 2017}
Among my top news sources are the Voice of America reports sent to my email address each day. The VOA, supported by USA taxpayers, has influenced America's images to billions around the world with its international reach via its various media platforms. The image-graphic above headlined a major VOA report this week -- Dec. 18, 2017. It concluded that some of President Trump's recent decisions or comments -- such as eliminating the USA as a major player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with his dangerous & controversial Jerusalem decision -- will leave the USA "out in the cold." And the VOA seems to suggest that Trump's "America's First" doctrine AS APPLIED TO DESTROYING CUBA will also "leave America out in the cold" BY PLEASING ONLY AMERICA'S MOST VICIOUS ENEMIES WHO THEN USE IT AS EXCUSES TO ASSAIL AMERICA, verbally and otherwise. Yes, Cuba is a small island nation but its international influence -- as related to the USA -- is far out of proportion to its size or its economy. In 2016, the last year of the Obama presidency, the UN condemned the USA's Cuban policy by a 191-to-ZERO vote because not even the Obama administration could support a Cuban policy in Washington dictated by a mere handful of Batistiano-connected right-wing thugs. On Sunday, Dec. 17-2017 President Trump issued another incredibly stupid and grossly anti-American statement regarding Cuba, a statement Americans should go online and study. That official Trump statement, word for word, was:
"Hopefully everything will normalize with Cuba, but right now, they are not doing the right thing. And when they don't do the right thing, we're not going to do the right thing. That's all there is to it. We have to be strong with Cuba. The Cuban people are incredible people. They support me very strongly. But we'll get Cuba straightened out."
Americans who don't Google that quotation are, I believe, Americans who don't care a whit about America or its image. The stupidity of the Trump approach to Cuba is overwhelming in the belief that...as 2017 turns into 2018...a sovereign nation must conform precisely to USA's dictates or the Superpower USA will "get Cuba straightened out" is as un-American and un-Democratic as one can get in the modern world, a world far different than it was in, say, 1973. That's when the Nixon-Kissinger White House decided a wildly popular and democratically elected President in Chile should be replaced by a brutal dictatorship that would be "U. S. Friendly," which meant one that would allow rich Americans to reap the prime benefits of that country's resources. So, in 1973 a bloody coup killed the democratically elected President Allende in Chile and replaced him, for 17 bloody years, with the murderous but "U. S. Friendly" Pinochet dictatorship. Allende had famously tried to defend his government from the windows of his presidential palace till he ran out of bullets.
After the bloody coup in 1973 that replaced the dead democratically elected Chilean President Allende with the murderous Dictator Pinochet, the photo above from the 1970s still haunts America's and the world's democracy-lovers. It shows Henry Kissinger -- on behalf of America and President Nixon -- warmly greeting Chile's new murderous but U. S. Friendly Dictator Pinochet. American citizens, disgracing America, accepted the shamefully undemocratic handshake above. Since 1959 right-wingers in Miami and Washington...in a process disgracefully accepted by many Americans...the Superpower USA has tried...but failed...to put a "U. S. Friendly" government in Cuba that probably would have resembled the "U. S. Friendly Pinochet government" in Chile or at least the U.S.-Friendly Batista-Mafia dictatorship that brutalized Cuba in the 1950s. Study Kissinger's glee depicted above.
Chile's U. S. Friendly dictator Pinochet died peacefully in a hospital at age 91 in 2006. His key American friend Kissinger is now 94-years-old, un-scarred by his Pinochet connections only because of extreme right-wing propaganda that even great democracies are susceptible to if their citizens are asleep or undemocratic.
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To comprehend today's U.S.-Cuban relations, Americans need to understand the photo above, which was taken in Washington on Nov. 10-1938. It reflects the fact that the imperial-minded United States had replaced imperialist Spain as the dominant power in Cuba after the 1898 Spanish-American War, which needed the deadly explosion of the USS Maine warship in Havana Harbor to give the U. S. the pretext for the War. The photo above shows Dictator Batista, second from the left upfront, being welcomed to Washington by U. S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Wells on the left and Chief of the Staff of the U. S. Army General Malin Craig. The man on the right with his hat at his side is Cuba's new U. S. Ambassador Pedro Fraga. By 1938 a two-bit Cuban army Sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, was the U. S. Friendly Cuban dictator. He later retired to South Florida where his Mafia buddies...including the likes of Al Capone and Batista's best friend Meyer Lansky...also had homes. Legend correctly has it that Lansky, the #2 Mafia kingpin behind only Lucky Luciano at the time, in the early 1950s talked his buddy Batista into returning to Cuba as the U.S.-backed dictator so, to quote Lansky, "The mob can own its own country, which has been my long-time dream." And so, Batista acquiesced to Lansky's request...and the rest is history.
Thus in 1952 the new U.S.-Friendly Cuban dictatorship was led by -- left-to-right -- Mafia kingpins Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky with Fulgencio Batista being the upfront Dictator. This arrangement permitted rich U. S. businessmen to also partake in the wholesale rape and robbery of the helpless island, creating a trilogy of evil intent.
Of course, beginning in 1952 the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba left the majority peasants, as shown above in an historic photo, in dire poverty even as the island was being used as a lush piggy-bank for the Batistianos, Mafiosi, and U. S. businessmen.
The wealthy Batista dictatorship -- supported by ill-gotten wealth as well as by the post-World War II superpower USA and by the Mafia, the strongest criminal organization in the world -- had a powerful military, which is shown in the Wikipedia photo above executing a Cuban rebel in 1956. But neither the rampant executions nor the wholesale poverty among the Cuban peasants were enough to fuel a revolution capable of overthrowing such an omnipotent dictatorship. BUT ONE HUGE MISTAKE BY Batista, the Mafia, and the United States DID IGNITE A REVOLT.
The U.S.-backed Batistianos and the Mafiosi in Cuba developed a ploy to quell dissent among the majority peasants -- executing peasant children. But instead of quelling dissent, it historically ignited the firestorm that doomed Batista's regime.
The gruesome murders of their children sent brave Cuban mothers into the streets to protest, and it was these demonstrations that fueled the revolution.
"Los asesinatos de nuestros nijos" means "The assassinations of our children." Because of courageous mothers like the ones shown above carrying posters with such searing denunciations, the Cuban Revolution had the spark and the fuel, if not the immediate means, to succeed. In Revolutionary Cuba today the major Children's Hospital is named for little Willie Soler, one of the assassinated children.
America's love affair with Cuba's brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista from 1933 through the 1950s is not exactly our proud America's proudest historical claim.
This Corbis photo shows Batista's U.S.-armed troops preparing to leave for the Sierra Maestra in 1956 to end the Cuban Revolution. In a cable to Washington and also on Havana radio, Batista said, "This won't take long." Indeed, the rebels were grossly out-gunned and out-manned, but these soldiers didn't have the rebels' motivation.
The rebel leader was...Fidel Castro.
No matter what the Batistiano-dominated Cuban narrative in the United States says today, there is no way the Cuban Revolution could have triumphed in 1959 without the fuel and inspiration provided by the Cuban mothers protesting the unconscionable murders of their children in Batista's Cuba. And furthermore, without such memories on the island today there is no way Revolutionary Cuba could possibly have survived all these decades against the U.S.-based and U.S.-backed Batistiano & Mafiosi forces still headquartered today in the United States.
And that brings us back around to the Dec. 17-2017 Voice of America graphic depicted above. With the whole world opposing America's cruel Batistiano-fueled Cuban policies, as evidenced by that 191-to-ZERO condemnation in the UN, the sheer stupidity of President Trump's statement on Sunday, Dec. 17-2017 is mind-boggling, even for him. He proclaimed, if you remember the exact quotation shown at the top of this essay, that he will "straighten out" Cuba if Cuba doesn't do precisely what he demands that it do. Well, Mr. President, everyday since January 1 of 1959 Cuba has proven to the world that it will not submit to being dictated by a foreign power, even the world's #One foreign Superpower. And remember these particular two exact sentences Trump said on Dec. 17-2017: "The Cuban people are incredible people. They support me very strongly." Such delusional nonsense is, of course, very dangerous for both Cuba and for the United States of America itself.
Almost without exception, Cubans on the island today dearly love former President Barack Obama and dearly hate current President Trump. That basic and undeniable fact is reflected by the young Cuban man shown above as he sits on Havana's famed Malecon seawall and gazes over the sea toward the nearby shores of Key West, Florida. This young man is typical of Cubans on the island today...they love Barack Obama and they don't hate America. This young Cuban's attire proudly features a large image of Barack Obama enmeshed among the American flag.
It is highly possible that President Obama's most lasting legacy will be the unique kindnesses he displayed toward the Cuban people. No other American president since the 1950s had the guts and the intelligence to confront the Batistiano-Mafiosi dictation of America's Cuban policy. Cubans on the island will never forget that President Obama went to Cuba and told them in person and on live television: "Cuba does not need to fear a threat from the United States." The very decent and brave President Obama sincerely believed those 12 famous and now historic words. But he didn't anticipate being replaced by President Trump in 2017.
Throughout 2017 President Trump has shown no respect for 11.2 million totally innocent Cubans on the island, the people that President Obama respected and still respects so much. President Trump, with his Cuban harangues, is disrespecting America and Democracy, two entities that Obama would never disrespect. In Miami's Little Havana neighborhood in a plush theater named for a Bay of Pigs leader, and in front of a huge Bay of Pigs Brigade 2506 Assault banner, President Trump assured the choir, composed mostly of surviving Bay of Pigs veterans, that he, after all these decades, plans to reclaim Cuba for them. While Americans will roundly oppose Trump on almost all of his other actions, the sad indications are that this generation of propagandized Americans wouldn't oppose Trump even if he nuked Cuba. The Voice of America seems direly concerned about such things, even if many Americans are not. After all...Batista, the Mafia, the Bay of Pigs, terrorist assassinations as well as deadly hotel, car, and airplane bombings, AND the longest and cruelest embargo ever imposed by a strong nation against a weak nation have never concerned the American people because the target was Revolutionary Cuba...although in essence it also targets America and democracy. So why would we expect this generation of Americans to be concerned if Trump kept all of the promises he made in the speech above to a handful of Bay of Pigs survivors???
I mean...it's like Trump's and America's newly anointed U. S. dictator -- Senator Rubio -- preaches as he shapes and reshapes America's post-Obama Cuba Policy: All the good Cubans are either in Miami or the U. S. Congress while all the bad Cubans are still on the island. "Uh, absolutely, Senator Rubio!! Whatever you say or decide, sir!! Rest assured our tax dollars as well as our nukes and reputations will support you ALL THE WAY 100%!!"
And by the way:
I think the Jamaica Observer is THE BEST newspaper in the Caribbean and the entire region, which includes Miami. On the island just south of Cuba, the Observer both in print and online has excellent and fair-minded journalists. Also, its photos and its Editorial Cartoons are simply terrific and amazingly descriptive in support of its interesting articles.
For example, the Jamaica Observer photo depicted above told its readers precisely what the article was all about. It was entitled: "I want him but she's in the way."
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