CUBAN-CRAZED Florida Politics

Still Shaming U. S. & Democracy
{After All These Decades}
{Updated: Wednesday, September 19th, 2018}

    This week -- on Sept. 17, 2018 -- Cuba's new President Miguel Diaz-Canel made the above statement. Translated from Spanish to English, he said: "The blockade is the main obstacle for the prosperity of Cuba." Cuba calls the U. S. embargo, which has existed since 1962, a blockade. By whatever name, it is the longest and cruelest starvation-tool ever imposed by a powerful nation against a much weaker nation. Considering the longevity and the fierceness of the blockade-embargo, the mere fact that Cuba hasn't totally succumbed to it remains one of history's and modernity's greatest phenomenons. Yet, as President Diaz-Canel has also stated, the Cuban Revolution, which in 1959 overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship, has actually changed the USA even more than it has changed Cuba. After all, prior to 1959 no one would have predicted that the U. S. democracy would so blatantly, and for so long, align itself with the Mafia as an agent of it colonial past...a past still magnified by such things as the embargo-blockade against Cuba and the theft of Cuba's plush Guantanamo Bay in "perpetuity" since 1903 and the terrorist bombing of Cuba's civilian Cubana Flight 455 airplane. Americans, for example, are taught to condemn Russia for annexing Crimea or for targeting innocent Ukrainians or for blowing up a civilian South Korean airplane...for example. But the same Americans are also taught that such things are fine as long as the victims are...Cubans on the island.

Photo courtesy: Desmond Boylan/Associated Press.

      Now into a third generation of totally innocent Cubans on the island, women like Barbara Betancourt Bernal are trying to survive history's longest and most pernicious assaults ever directed at ordinary citizens in a small nation by rich and powerful miscreants in a huge, omnipotent nation. That undeniable fact has persisted since 1962 when the United States of America imposed an economic embargo against Cuba to appease the most extremist elements of the lucrative Cuban-American Anti-Castro Cottage Industry that arose on U. S. soil when the leaders of the overthrown Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Havana regrouped with a new capital, Little Havana in Miami, Florida. Highlighting a weakening U. S. democracy, this situation has been allowed to exists for 6+ decades even though de-classified U. S. documents long ago revealed that the purpose of the 1962 embargo was to starve, deprive, and make miserable the lives of Cubans on the island to induce them to rise up and overthrow their Revolutionary Government. This, of course, was after numerous assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, the April-1963 Bay of Pigs military attack, and a myriad of grisly terrorist attacks had failed to recapture Cuba. Fidel Castro died at age 90 in 2016 and Cuba's new leader is a non-Castro, non-revolutionary -- President Miguel Diaz-Canel. Yet, the anti-Castro extremists in Miami and in the U. S. Congress and in all Republican White Houses have attained so much economic and political power in the U. S. THAT starving, depriving, and making miserable the lives of ordinary Cubans on the island remains to this day -- in September of 2018 -- FAR TOO LUCRATIVE for the anti-Castro extremists to let go of from their luscious economic and political standpoints. Yet, somehow, pugnacious Cubans on the island like Barbara Betancourt Bernal honorably try to survive against the overwhelming and unchecked power of Cuban-American exile-extremists still hiding behind the skirts of the world Superpower and benefiting immeasurably from the lack of patriotism of a third generation of pusillanimous American citizens. Barbara has two teenage daughters in Cuba. This week [Sept. 13, 2018] America's top business network, CNBC, updated Barbara's tenacity with these words:

            "Elegant and charismatic, Barbara is the face of an increasingly visible phenomenon in Cuba: the rise in female bartenders who break convention to benefit from the growing tourism industry, grabbing job opportunities that have come in the last five years with the opening of new private businesses." 

          Barbara is a popular bartender at El Gato Tuerto, a club near Havana's famed Malecon seawall. CNBC quoted her this week as saying, "'You have to be a strong woman. With a strong character. You can't be weak or have a husband who says, 'you can't do it,' she says as she whips a silver shaker." In other words, Barbara Betancourt Bernal, the feisty mother of two teenage daughters on the island, is a far stronger and a far better person than a handful of second generational Cuban-American politicians and their self-centered sycophants who distort the U. S. democracy to feather their own economic and political nests by shamefully soliciting the backing of ultra-powerful Counter Revolutionary Cubans in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood...a gutless ploy that includes trying to starve, deprive, and make miserable the lives of Cubans on the island like Barbara Betancourt Bernal. The video below reveals how every politician in Florida shamefully has to beg Cuban-American extremists in Little Havana for their support, which is crucial to winning top state and national offices.

     The image above is courtesy of the Miami Herald and, if you tap it, it'll shows a video in which Ron DeSantis pleads with the Little Havana choir to make him the next Governor of Florida. If you can stomach watching this sad 2 minute, 31 second commentary highlighting a cancerous blight on the U. S. democracy, you will hear the begging DeSantis paying homage to the Little Havana choir that sent him to the U. S. Congress, a position he has forsaken to seek the Governorship of Florida. In addition to reminding the choir that he sacredly fulfilled their desires in Congress, he pledged to do so again if he is elected Governor of Florida. DeSantis wildly promised the choir in this video that he will fervently seek to charge former Cuban president Raul Castro with murder and bring the 87-year-old revolutionary to trial in a Miami courtroom, certainly not in any unbiased forum. Perhaps the saddest aspect of such ridiculous and barbarous rhetoric is the fact that not only DeSantis but OTHER ambitious Florida politicians must replicate what DeSantis so vividly does in this video. So, I invite you to tap the 2 minute, 31 second video above and listen to DeSantis rant about what he will do to destroy Cuba if the Counter Revolutionary extremists in the choir will get him elected as the next Governor of Florida. I do not believe there is a single word in that diatribe that DeSantis would utter...at least with a straight face...in front of an unbiased audience.

    But the problem with Florida's Cuban-crazed politics, which direly affects all of America, is not just Ron DeSantis. Anyone else seriously running for high office in Florida also would be forced to bow before the ruling minority in Miami, the Counter Revolutionary Cubans. Otherwise Miami is awash with Cuban-Americans who favor the decent Obama approach to Cuba and, in fact, send billions of dollars across the Florida Straits to help the targeted Cubans on the island.

      At age 40 Ron DeSantis has resigned his seat in the U. S. Congress to seek Florida's governorship. A graduate of Yale and then Harvard Law, he is a former Lt. Commander in the Navy.

    Ron DeSantis [see the tweet above] savors the endorsement of President Donald Trump in his quest to be Florida's next governor. Trump needs the Counter Revolutionaries in Florida to avoid impeachment and, if he manages that, to get re-elected President in 2020. That's a most interesting scenario because DeSantis, Senator Marco Rubio from Miami, and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley are the three foxes in Trump's Hen House with presidential plans and plans for leadership of the Republican Party that don't include Trump. The billionaire individuals and corporations who own MSNBC, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, and the NY Times are certainly engaged in a determined media coup to overthrow Trump, and they are indeed formidable. But the sly, back-stabbing foxes in Trump's hen-house -- especially Rubio, Haley, and DeSantis  are an even bigger threat to Trump, whose demise, I might add, would surely benefit Cuba.

     The prospect of Ron DeSantis as Governor of Florida is no better and no worse than anyone else in that position because whoever gets if will be marching to the drumbeats of the Counter Revolutionary Cubans. But if you tapped the video above and listened to DeSantis rave about what he plans to do to 87-year-old former Cuban President Raul Castro [now that #1 target Fidel Castro died at age 90 in 2016], you might begin to fathom what has happened on U. S. soil to the U. S. democracy since 1959. Not a word DeSantis said on the video would hold water outside of Miami but by just saying it, as opposed to campaigning on the abundance of real issues that affect most Floridians, DeSantis reveals the anti-democracy mistake right-wingers in Washington made in 1952 when they sicced the Mafia on Cuba and then many of the same right-wingers in 1959 quickly embraced on U. S. soil the most fervent remnants of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship that fled the Cuban Revolution in the wee hours of January 1, 1959.

    The most visceral of the Counter Revolutionary Cubans who became ultra powerful in Miami include easily Googled names such as Jorge Mas Canosa, Rafael Diaz-Balart, Luis Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch, Felix Rodriguez, and Jose Basulto. Even prior to the Bay of Pigs attack in April of 1961 Basulto was in Cuba on clandestine missions to sabotage Revolutionary Cuba for himself, the U. S. government, and Little Havana in Miami. As a pilot, like many other such Cubans, Basulto performed other controversial deeds for Republicans tied to the Batistianos, such as for the Contras in another U. S. loss in Nicaragua where rebel Danny Oterga remains the President to this day. But Basulto is most famed for founding Brothers to the Rescue, a fleet of airplanes that supposedly patrolled over the Florida Straits to rescue stranded Cubans. In 1996 Bill Clinton, the Democratic U. S. President, was strongly rumored to be planning to normalize relations with Cuba. Brothers planes began taunting Cuba in Cuban territorial waters and even directly over Havana where anti-Castro material was dropped. Always lavishly using the Miami media, Basulto bragged about the missions and claimed Cuba couldn't and wouldn't do anything about it. But Cuba did beg the U. S. State Department to stop them, but to no avail. Cuba then begged the United Nations to stop them, but to no avail because the U. S. has a UN veto. Cuba then declared that if the overflights continued it would do something. Basulto, flying the lead 3-plane convoy, still flew towards Cuba and Cuba sent up two planes and shot down two of the Brothers planes, killing three Cuban-Americans, but Basulto's plane turned around and made it safely back to Florida. Basulto and his supporters claim the shoot-downs were in international waters. Later lawsuits in Miami courtrooms awarded untold millions of dollars to Cuban families, with Basulto himself getting one of the huge cash settlements. Also, the mainstream U. S. media has been generally too afraid to challenge anything related to the Brothers controversy but renowned experts such as Wayne S. Smith, former U. S. diplomatic head at the U. S. Interests Section in Havana; Peter Kornbluh, the Cuban expert at the U. S. National Security Archives in Washington, and also both UN and U. S. documents paint more realistic portraits about the Brothers tragedy, which can readily be Googled, than Americans otherwise have been told. In other words, in an unbiased city, courtroom or forum, politicians like Ron DeSantis would have to be a bit closer to the facts than he was/is in the above video. Basulto was born 78-years-ago in Santiago de Cuba and like other legendary Cubans in Miami such as Canosa, Carriles, Bosch, Rodriguez, etc., Basulto has never for a moment shied away from his primary mission in life, the destruction of Castro's Cuba and later also Castro's legacy.

    As mentioned, it was no secret in 1996 that President Bill Clinton was planning to take steps to normalize relations with Cuba. But after the shoot-downs of the two Brothers planes in which Cuba clearly felt provoked and threatened, not only was Clinton forced to forget his normalization plans with Cuba but, as shown in the photo above, Clinton on March 12, 1996, signed the infamous Helms-Burton Act. That to this day is the Congressional Law that even President Obama could not get around when he tried desperately to normalize relations with Cuba. As explained by great Cuban authors like Julia E. Sweig, Ann Louise Bardach, etc., high-paid lawyers drafted the wording of the Helms-Burton Act that stipulates that only Congress can change the most debilitating anti-Cuban measures it mandates, and rich Cubans have made sure they can control Congress, as Obama and others have discovered. By 1996 Cuban billionaires in Miami were believed to have included Jorge Mas Canosa, Rafael Diaz-Balart, the Fanjul brothers, and many more.

     Seconds after signing Helms-Burton into law in 1996, the photo above seems to reveal just how much President Clinton was at the mercy of the Counter Revolutionary Cuban extremists. Study, if you will, Clinton's expression as he stares up at a clapping Bob Menendez who is still the entrenched Cuban-American U. S. Senator from New Jersey. That is so even though just last year Menendez, thanks to a hung jury, barely survived multiple corruption charges brought by the Federal Government after years of investigations into Menendez's dealings with a shady Miami millionaire. The man partially hidden by the woman as he looked down over Clinton's right shoulder is Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the Havana-born son of Rafael Diaz-Balart who was a key Minister in the Batista dictatorship and then, after 1959, one of the richest and most visceral anti-Castro Cubans in Miami. Oddly enough, Rafael Diaz-Balart's sister in 1948 became Fidel Castro's wife. Like their father Rafael, Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart have been anti-Castro zealots all their adult lives and both have represented Miami...and Little Havana...in the U. S. Congress with destroying Revolutionary Cuba their goal, as it was their father's.

   Jose Basulto's hometown newspaper, the Miami Herald, often very bravely reports the facts even if the topic is Cuba. An example is the front-page headline above about "Thousands of Exiles Choosing to Return" from wealthy Miami to poor Cuba. Also, on March 21-2001 the Miami Herald had a factual article written by Gail Epstein Nieves and entitled: "Fliers Downed by Migs Violated Cuban Airspace, Colonel Says." George E. Buchner was the U. S. Air Force Colonel. The first sentence was: "Echoing the Cuban government, a defense expert testified Wednesday that two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were shot down in 1996 because -- according to his review -- they had invaded Cuban airspace and appeared to be on a military, not a civilian, mission. Buchner testified that he reviewed transcripts of MIG cockpit-to-ground communications and radar data...on the day of the shoot-down, Feb. 24, 1996. He concluded that the two Brothers planes were blasted from the sky about six miles and 5.5 miles, respectively, off the Cuban coast. Cuba's territorial limit is 12 miles." The article went on to report "multiple violations of Cuban airspace since May 1994 and in at least one case on 13 July 1995 the Brothers pilot had released leaflets over Havana. The United States authorities had issued public statements advising of the potential consequences of unauthorized entry into Cuban airspace and had initiated legal actions against the above-named pilot." Again, those facts were contained in a major article in the Miami Herald on March 22-2001 just as trials in Miami courtrooms, in which Cuba was not represented, were beginning to award hundreds of millions of dollars to the families of the diseased and to the leader, Basulto, of the Brothers to the Rescue planes. But to this day -- in September of 2018 -- political benefactors like Ron DeSantis can spin the Little Havana narrative about the Brothers planes and expect it to GET HIM ELECTED THE NEXT GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA. It's testimony, I believe, to how drastically the Cuban Revolution changed America in January of 1959 when it chased leaders of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship to their lucrative sanctuary on U. S. soil.

     The Ron DeSantis pledge in Little Havana to bring Raul Castro to trial reminds Democracy-lovers of Ana Margarita Martinez. Trials in Miami courtrooms, in which Cuba was not represented, resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars being awarded to just about anyone who charged Revolutionary Cuba with just about anything. And Ana took notice. Her husband had left her in Miami and returned to Cuba. So in a Miami courtroom in which Cuba, of course, was not represented, Ana sued Cuba, not her runaway husband. BINGO! LOTTERY!! She won $27.175 million.

Ana's former husband is Juan Pablo Roque.

     After Juan returned to Cuba, a reporter for the Miami New Times got in touch with him on the phone. Juan was asked, "What do you miss most about Miami?" The reporter thought he would say something like, "What I miss most about Miami is, of course, my beautiful former wife Ana!!" But that's not what Juan said. He immediately replied, "MY JEEP!!"

  Yes, the beautiful Ana Margarita Martinez also got to keep Juan's beloved jeep. Miami courtrooms being allowed to conduct Cuban trials is merely one aspect of the Soap Opera-style nuances that sometimes invade such shenanigans that have been allowed to persist on U. S. soil since January of 1959 when the Cuban Revolution dethroned the Batista-Mafia dictatorship on the island. But, of course, the remnants of that dictatorship quickly and permanently rebounded quite nicely in Miami and shortly thereafter in the U. S. Congress and in all Republican White Houses.

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