PRETEXTS to Hurt Cuba

Any Excuse Will Work!!!!
{Monday, January 8th, 2018}

pretext: noun -- A reason presented as an excuse to justify a course of action but it is a fabricated lie and not the real reason, such as Operation Northwoods against Cuba.

       On Saturday, Jan. 6-2018, a frustrated U. S. Senator Jeff Flake stated what most American politicians were afraid to opine. He said what had been common knowledge for weeks in Washington, which is that the Trump administration's claim that Cuba injured U. S. diplomats in Havana with some mysterious sonic-acoustic attack is bogus...merely a lie. Senator Flake said, "Classified briefings have left me with no reason to doubt what Cuba has claimed all along." In making that announcement, Senator Flake indicated that he was ashamed the U. S. government would concoct should a PRETEXT so, back on Nov. 8th-2017, it could have an excuse to reverse positive Cuban overtures made by former President Barack Obama.

Photo courtesy: Associated Press/Scott Applewhite.

        Also, Senator Jeff Flake clearly indicated that he was frustrated with both the American citizens and the mainstream U. S. media that accepts ridiculous PRETEXTS from right-wing Republican politicians and hard-line Cuban-Americans in the U. S. Congress to destroy Cuba's sovereign government. Senator Flake said, "I won't talk about what I have seen in a classified setting, but nothing is inconsistent with what the Cubans have said, and the FBI will also say that." Yet, the sonic-attack PRETEXT has been used by the United States to gut the Obama-reopened embassies in Havana and Washington and to assault Cuba's tourism and its Obama-inspired private business opportunities that had benefited many Cubans and many Cuban-Americans.

     From the outset no responsible U. S. government source actually accused Cuba about using mysterious sonic or acoustic attacks to harm U. S. diplomats or anyone else in Cuba. The island depends mightily on tourism and the U. S. accusations were/are more in line with Counter Revolutionary anti-Cuban Miami extremists.

    A Republican Senator from Arizona, Jeff Flake, is so disgusted with a Republican Party led by President Trump that Flake has announced he is not running for re-election in 2018. In the Trump era Flake is appalled that Trump uses attack dogs like Senator Marco Rubio to target Cuba and Rubio ally Ambassador Nikki Haley to attack, threaten, and "take names" of any nation that disagrees with any of their policies.

      Cuba itself exhaustively used 300 of its top doctors, scientists, and security leaders to investigate the sonic-attack "mystery." They concluded the U. S. was lying in order to justify the Trump-Rubio efforts to reverse the positive Obama overtures. 

      President Obama's detente with Cuba was approved by the entire world, based on the 191-to-0 vote in the United Nations. It also was approved by most Cuban-Americans even in Miami. But democracy has never factored into America's Cuban policy and history is replete with cruel and even deadly PRETEXTS fabricated by right-wing thugs and Cuban-exile extremists to justify the totally unjustifiable.

    Right-wing thugs within the framework of the U. S. democracy have long dictated salacious PRETEXTS to justify greedy and brutal assaults on Cuba. Back in 1898 the U. S. warship, the Maine, blew up in Havana Harbor killing hundreds of young sailors. That was the PRETEXT for the Spanish-American War that finally replaced Spain's conquest of Cuba with America's. That U. S. dominance of the Caribbean's largest and most coveted island lasted from 1898 until the first day of January-1959 when the Cuban Revolution shocked the world by overthrowing the thieving and brutal Batista-Mafia dictatorship. Incredibly, right-wing thugs within the framework of the U. S. democracy permitted the Batista-Mafia dictatorship to resurface immediately and permanently on United States soil -- first in the Miami area of South Florida, then within the fabric of the United States Congress, and massivly deep within the bowels of all Republican administrations.

    The Associated Press photo and caption above shows that by January of 1960 U. S. warplanes were flying from Florida on murderous bombing missions in Cuba. In 1959 the U. S. had already secretively sent infamous anti-Castro Cubans to Fort Benning in Georgia to prepare for the war that was designed to recapture Cuba. That attack, which also involved expensive training operations in U.S.-friendly dictatorships like Somoza's in Nicaragua, became known as the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961. The startling defensive victory at the Bay of Pigs by Revolutionary Cuba served to crown the revolutionary legend of Fidel Castro. So, in 1962 the U. S. created what is now known as history's longest and cruelest embargo ever imposed by a strong nation against a weak one. De-classified U. S. documents prove that the intent of the embargo was to starve, deprive and make miserable the lives of ordinary Cubans on the island to encourage them to rise up and overthow their revolutionary government. Since 1962 the embargo has come to be viewed, around the world, as even more anti-democratic than the murderous 1960 bombings of Cuba depicted above or the 1961 military attack at the Bay of Pigs. Also, of course, all the while the U. S. democracy was doing nothing to quell what history now records as the all-time most assassination attempts. The Guinness Book of World Records lists 638 unsuccessful assassination attempts against just one man -- Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, generations of American citizens -- whose democracy it was and is -- accepted the cowardly bombings from Florida, the military attack, the assassination attempts, the embargo, the terrorist bombing of the civilian and child-laden Cubana Flight 455 airplane, the car-bombing in Miami of the Cuban-American newsman, Emilio Milian, who had complained against such terrorism, etc. AND EVEN TODAY -- in January of 2018 -- the U. S. citizens are not expected to take the time to Google such assaults on their democracy nor is the mainstream U. S. media generally brave enough or competent enough to fairly report on such things...unlike the mainstream AP that did, in 1960, report on events like the warplanes flying from Florida to bomb Cuba.

    Similarly, neither the U. S. citizenry nor the mainstream U. S. media are concerned that the rest of the world, with that 191-to-ZERO UN vote, condemns both America and Democracy for the cruel Embargo against Cuba that has existed from 1962 till today -- and counting! When a handful of self-serving thugs and miscreants, aided by a handful of self-serving sycophants, can demean the United States and Democracy so powerfully for so long with a Cuban policy so expertly depicted in the Latuff graphic, then perhaps it is time for a brave democracy-loving generation of Americans to at least weigh in on the topic. Beyond doubt, in the eyes of the world no issue has demeaned and mocked America and its Democracy so consistently as the insanely cruel and incredibly inept U. S. Cuban policy.

     One of America's greatest heroes is investigative journalist James Bamford. His book "Body of Secrets" exposed the Operation Northwoods PRETEXT that was designed to kill innocent Americans and blame it on Cuba to justify an attack.

       Most PRETEXTS used by the U. S. government to attack Cuba have been covered up by the self-serving convenience of routinely classifying-hiding U. S. documents. But,  as shown above, a great investigative journalist named James Bamford was able to DE-classify U. S. documents that proved, at the highest levels, the U. S. considered Operation Northwoods, a secretive plan concocted by General Lyman Lemnitzer and his Joint Chiefs of Staff that called for terrorist acts, even murders of innocent people, if it could be blamed on Cuba as PRETEXT for a military attack.

A DE-classified March 13-1962 document.

Northwoods remains a classic PRETEXT.

De-classified Operation Northwoods.

De-classified material had protected perpetrators.

     A reluctant President Bill Clinton signed the infamous Helms-Burton Act into law on March 12, 1996, and to this day -- January of 2018 -- it remains the most severe catalyst to punish innocent Cubans despite the efforts of great men like President Obama to end it. Prior to signing Helms-Burton, President Clinton thought he could begin the dangerous process of normalizing relations with Cuba. At the signing he was surrounded by hard-line anti-Castro Cuban-Americans such as Bob Menendez and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen looking over his right shoulder and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, second from the right, whose father Rafael was a key Minister in the Batista dictatorship and the rich creator of the first U. S. anti-Castro paramilitary unit.

     Immediately after signing the Helms-Burton Act into law, I believe it was a very scared President Clinton who glanced up at the clapping Bob Menendez who is still a U. S. Senator and who, in a trial that ended in a hung jury in 2017, survived an expensive and diligent 3-year effort by the U. S. Federal Government to convict him of multiple corruption and bribery charges related to a wealthy Miami resident.

     So let's return to the photo of Senator Jeff Flake taken on January 6th, 2018. It shows his frustration over the latest PRETEXT -- the mystery "SONIC" attacks -- being used by the Trump-Rubio masters to punish innocent Cubans to feather the political or economic nests of a handful of miscreants. Senator Flake remembers when Cuba extremists in Miami hastily needed a PRETEXT to keep President Clinton from normalizing relations with Cuba; thus, Brothers to the Rescue airplanes from Miami began to taunt Cuba, resulting in a catastrophe that not only derailed Clinton's plans but forced him to sign the ultra-punitive Helm-Burton Act into supposedly everlasting U. S. law. No wonder decent politicians like Jeff Flake are too ashamed to seek re-election to Congress although, of course, there are countless rogue extremists ready and eager to take advantage of this ever-widening and embarrassing vacuum.

      Even the Miami Herald seems fed-up with the likes of Miami's U. S. Senator Marco Rubio appeasing his billionaire right-wing supporters by using the Trump administration to hurt totally innocent Cubans in Cuba and totally innocent Cuban-Americans in Miami, most of whom fully supported President Obama's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. Thus, as depicted above, the Miami Herald published a blistering anti-Rubio article written by four decent, hard-working, female entrepreneurs on the island that Rubio is attacking while hiding behind the powerful {if outrageous and cowardly} skirts of President Trump while, of course, insisting he is hurting the Castros instead of hard-working, non-political Cubans like the four women who excoriated Rubio in Rubio's home-town newspaper.

       Meanwhile, the likes of Rubio, Menendez, etc. remain in the U. S. Senate while the likes of Jeff Flake has decided he's had enough of such things as the Helms-Burton Act and fabricated anti-Cuban PRETEXTS that supposedly defend the indefensible.

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