8.3.18

A Pretext to Hurt Cuba

Hastily Devised In Trump White House!
{Updated: Saturday, March 10th, 2018}
     The image above, I believe, illustrates the greatest weakness of the United States democracy -- WHICH IS a propaganda-obsessed and pundit-driven mainstream U. S. media at a time when Americans are in desperate need of fair and unbiased journalism, not a preponderance of self-ordained journalists masquerading as propagandists. Peter Brown is the highly respected Commander of the United States Coast Guard Seventh District in Miami. He is among many of the very decent military and political U. S. officials who frequently point out how important it is for the United States and Cuba to work cohesively together for the mutual benefit of all Americans and Cubans. Such sanity, of course, would correct a half-century in which America's Cuban policy has been dictated by a small cabal of extremists from the Batista-Mafia dictatorship whose leaders were booted off the island in January of 1959 only to align with a handful of self-serving right-wing U. S. politicians. Peter Brown this week represented the U. S. Coast Guard in another productive meeting with top Cuban officials held in Fort Lauderdale. Another such session this week was held in Key West, Florida. The topics concerned bilateral cooperative work on preparing for oil spills and otherwise protecting the marine environment in the region vital to both nations. Also discussed were well-known U.S.-Cuban cooperation related to drug and human trafficking in the Florida Straits. Peter Brown then said, "The session was held in a professional and mutually respected ambiance. This reflects cooperation for the protection of the marine environment in a region of great importance for both countries. Of course, the mainstream American media has neither the guts nor the competence to report on the daily cooperation of U. S. and Cuban officials regarding mutually positive engagements, which continue even with Batistiano-aligned Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress.
     While not having the courage or integrity to mention such things as the comments from the United States Coast Guard's Peter Brown, the mainstream American media bursts out of its seams to herald any grossly pernicious anti-Cuban schemes or proclamations from career Counter Revolutionary benefactors such as United States Senators Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez. In a recent shameful display of how anti-democratic the United States government can be regarding Cuba, Rubio was the Chair and Menendez was the Co-chair of a Senate Foreign Relations-Western Hemisphere assault on former President Obama's decent Cuban overtures. The sheer fact that the gutless American media and the unpatriotic American citizenry permit such tactics decade-after-decade shames both America and Democracy.  
     The moment the Republican Donald Trump replaced the Democrat Barack Obama as President of the United States, anyone with an IQ as high as 10 knew that Trump would return America's Cuban polities back over to a mere handful of vicious Counter Revolutionary Cuban-Americans in Miami and in the U. S. Congress.
     Totally disregarding the opinion of most Americans, most Cuban-Americans, and the 191-to-0 unanimity vote in the United Nations, the photo above shows the day -- June 16, 2017 -- when President Trump officially turned his Cuban policy over to Miami  extremists. Brazenly and cowardly, Trump made the proclamation before the choir in Miami's Little Havana in the plush Artime Theater named for a leader of the 1961 Bay of Pigs military attack on Cuba. But when it comes to Cuba since the 1950s, Trump realized the last two generations of Americans have been too afraid, too propagandized, or too unpatriotic to challenge any Cuban military, terrorist, or diplomatic act, even though such policies are condemned by America's democracy-lovers and by America's best friends worldwide. Of course, when you are Commander-in-Chief of the world's nuclear Superpower and also have a veto vote in the UN, you can easily revert back to the Cuban policies dictated since the 1950s by right-wing thugs aligned with two generations of Counter Revolutionary Cubans.
    But, of course, to implement his June 16-2017 assault on Obama's decent Cuban policies, President Trump's minions had to devise a pretext. And actually, not surprisingly, it was not exactly an intelligent or believable pretext. To curtail the vital increase in Cuban tourism that Obama had made possible, and to blunt the Washington and Havana embassies that Obama had reopened for the first time since 1961, the Trump geniuses claim that Cuba was purposely somehow using sonic waves to injure the hearing and other senses of U. S. diplomats. Most unbiased observers instantly realized the Cuban government would be the very last entity to do such a vicious and stupid thing because it would be shooting itself in the foot...or head...because tourism was the island's lifeblood. Of course, Trump's Counter Revolutionary friends in Miami and in Congress fully realized that. But, Trump's State Department "warned" Americans that Cuba was "unsafe" to visit. At almost the exact same time, the highly respected monitor of international tourism -- The International Tourist Fair in Madrid, Spain -- announced that "Cuba is the safest nation in the world for tourists." After that announcement, the world's most respected Travel Writer, Britain's famed Christopher P. Baker, confirmed the salient Madrid proclamation.
    The Counter Revolutionary right-wing Fox Network on March 7th-2018 used the above photo of Counter Revolutionary Marco Rubio to headline a new article entitled: "Faulty Bugging Devices May Have Caused Mysterious Diplomat Illness in Cuba." I provide that title IF you want to dial it up online and read it but I strongly suggest that anything either Fox or Rubio says about Cuba is not the real truth.
      On the other hand, in the U. S. there are truly great journalists-historians who are universally considered unbiased Cuban experts that Americans can depend on for brave and true facts regarding U.S.-Cuban relations. In the top echelon of that class, of course, is Peter Kornbluh, the top Cuban expert at the U. S. National Archives in Washington. Kornbluh this week -- March 7, 2018 -- not surprisingly penned the top article updating the Trump administration's sonic wave pretext to justify its unjustifiable assault on innocent, everyday Cubans. I suggest that anything Peter Kornbluh writes about Cuba is something Americans should know, for America's and democracy's sake. His article yesterday was entitled: "What the U. S. Government Is Not Telling You About Those 'Sonic Attacks' in Cuba." In this article, easily dialed up online, Peter Kornbluh suggests, as he has done before, that Republicans in Washington never have to worry about their Cuban lies because they have reason to believe that American citizens and the mainstream U. S. media are too intimidated or too propagandized to challenge them. But great U. S. journalists and authors like Peter Kornbluh, Julia E. Sweig, Ann Louise Bardach, etc. have challenged them.
     In this week's article, the great Peter Kornbluh lambasted the Trump administration for using the "sonic waves" as the pretext to "warn Americans not to visit unsafe Cuba." Here are some exact words written by Peter Kornbluh: "Predictably, these travel warnings have led to significant cancellations at the Capri and the Nacional, as well as a significant drop-off in overall U. S. visitors to the island. That might not have been the case if the Trump administration had been transparent and honest about what happened in Cuba, instead of exploiting the troubling situation to sabotage normalized relations." Also, Peter Kornbluh pointed out this fact: "The first four Americans to report being struck by the phenomenon were all CIA officers working under diplomatic cover, as were two others affected later on." In other words, as a truly, incontrovertible, and unbiased American expert like Peter Kornbluh would know, Counter Revolutionary forces in the U. S. since 1959 have readily concocted pretexts to justify self-serving anti-Cuban policies such as the Torricelli Bill, the Helms-Burton Act, etc., but ALSO terrorist attacks such as car-bombs in Miami, airplane bombs in the Caribbean, both boat-&-airplane strafings of Cuban coastline hotels, farms, fishing villages, etc. In a milieu in which such anti-Cuban tactics from U. S. soil have been accepted, there is no incentive at all for self-serving Republican administrations in Miami and in Washington to curtail drastic measures to regain control of Cuba. Peter Kornbluh, not Republicans in the White House or State Department, and certainly not the Counter Revolutionaries in Miami and in Congress, is the prime source for truth about United States-Cuba relations, truth not available in the mainstream media.
      It is interesting to note, I believe, that even many in the Trump administration have long ago determined that Cuba would not purposely hurt Cuba by stupidly harming U. S. diplomats or even CIA operatives in Cuba when Cuba urgently needs as many U. S. tourists as it can get, which was a record number till Trump replaced Obama. But as Kornbluh, Sweig, Bardach, and other true U. S. experts on Cuba realize, Counter Revolutionaries in the U. S. for decades have devised innumerable pretexts to justify their military, terrorist, and political assaults on Revolutionary Cuba.
     America's great democracy consists of a two-party system and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have decent approval ratings with polls showing that most Americans would like at least a third alternative, not a lesser-of-two-evils choice. But only Republican administrations -- in both the White House and in Congress since the 1950s -- have turned America's Cuban policy over to only the most vicious and self-serving Counter Revolutionaries such as the three current Miami members of the U. S. Congress shown above -- Marco Rubio, Mario Diaz-Balart, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. But American citizens, out of cowardice or a lack of patriotism, who have allowed this to persist for well over half-a-century are as much to blame as the revengers and the benefactors. What America is therefore left with is a 191-to-0 condemnation of its Cuban policy in the United Nations. That does not only include every one of America's and Democracy's best friends in this world but it is also the ONLY TOPIC that could possibly get such unanimity in a very, very diverse world.
And by the way:
      This week celebrated Womens Day in many countries. The great Associated Press photographer in Cuba, Desmond Boylan, posted this image on his Facebook/Instagram pages. It shows Cuban female soldiers marching.
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