Old Friend Returns to Cuba

and he is still.................

.......Saddened by the Embargo!!
{Updated: Tuesday, Sept. 11th, 2018}

Photo courtesy: Steve Lundy/Associated Press.

      84-year-old George Ryan and twenty other avid anti-Embargo Americans arrived in Havana Monday -- Sept. 10th, 2018 -- on a mission to blunt the Trump administration's tightening of the Embargo against Cuba that has existed since 1962 to appease Counter Revolutionary Cuban-American extremists and their Republican sycophants. Ryan, the former Governor of Illinois, visited Fidel Castro in Havana in 1999 on the same mission. Till Castro died in 2016, each year he had sent a box of Cuban cigars to celebrate Ryan's birthdays. As a jab at the Trump administration, the Ryan group of twenty-one is staying at the Hotel Capri, one of the alleged places the Trump White House has labeled off-limits because it is where some of the alleged sonic-attacks against American diplomats have taken place, the excuse the Trump administration has used to curtail Cuban tourism that had reached new heights during the Cuba-friendly Obama presidency that preceded Trump's new assaults.

     The famed 82-year-old Chicago billionaire Jerry Reinsdorf is also on the George Ryan-led mission to Cuba this week that will extend from Monday through Thursday. For the past 25 years Reinsdorf has been the owner of Major League baseball's Chicago White Sox and the National Basketball Association's Chicago Bulls.

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Photo courtesy: Jorge Ray/Associated Press.

   Back in October of 1999 George Ryan visited Cuba at the invitation of his friend Fidel Castro. At the time George Ryan was the Governor of Illinois and he was one of the many Americans ashamed of the U. S. embargo against Cuba that has existed since 1962 at the behest of a handful of Counter Revolutionary extremists and their easily purchased sycophants in the U. S. Congress and in all Republican White Houses. At about the time of this visit, de-classified U. S. documents revealed that the purpose of the Embargo in 1962 was to starve, deprive, and make miserable the lives of ordinary Cubans to induce them to rise up and overthrow their revolutionary government. From cowardly generation-to-cowardly-generation since 1962, that remains the primary intention of the embargo after all other means to recapture Cuba have failed --including a world-record number of assassination attempts, the 1961 Bay of Pigs air-land-and-sea military attack, an endless litany of Congressional "legals" laws designed to destroy Cuba, and an astonishing series of murderous terrorist attacks against innocent Cubans in airplanes, on ships, in cars, and against pedestrians on foot. Such things, of course, embarrassed America's democracy-lovers, AND THEY STILL DO.

   The photo above was taken by T. J. Salsman for the Illinois Journal-Register. It shows Governor George Ryan on his October-1999 visit to Cuba. He was surrounded by students from Havana's Abraham Lincoln Primary School. Today -- Monday, Sept. 10-2018 -- Mr. Ryan arrives back in Havana. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, he said: "I can't go back as a tourist. This is not a client trip or a humanitarian trip. Hell, I'm 84 years old. I'm just really looking forward to going back to rekindle memories of old times and dreams we had back in 1999 for my first trip to Cuba in hopes of getting the embargo lifted."

    Of course, the Embargo from 1962 till today still hasn't been lifted, despite the herculean efforts of democracy-loving Americans like George Ryan and President Barack Obama. As a decent and brave two-term President that preceded the Republican Donald Trump, Obama did everything in his power to normalize relations with Cuba and end the Embargo but he failed because Batistiano-written laws in the U. S. Congress mandate that only Congress can end it. Thus, the U. S. democracy is not strong enough to end it, despite the efforts of Ryan, Obama, and millions of other decent Americans and despite the unanimity of world opinion as chronicled by the 191-to-0 vote condemning the Embargo in the UN in 2016, the last year the U. S. had a President who was not aligned as a political beneficiary of the Little Havana extremists in Miami.

     Cuba has changed drastically since 2016, the year that Fidel Castro died at age 90 and the year a weird and troubling U. S. election made Obama's successor as President the improbable Trump. That election, that transition, reveals how troubled the U. S. democracy is, and not just because it returns to the White House another Republican President tightly tied to the Cuban Counter Revolutionary extremists in Miami. The U. S. democracy, with a money-crazed and mostly bought-and-paid-for federal government, has many more serious problems than just Cuba. But it is a Democracy now in a downward spiral in which it is almost impossible to get decent democracy-lovers elected to Congress or to the Presidency. So, we are in a period when polls show that both Congress and the current President are extremely unpopular with American voters who often have to choose between the lesser-of-two-evils when they vote. Meanwhile in Cuba, it was the island's new President, Miguel Diaz-Canel, who extended that invitation for a friendly American, George Ryan, to re-visit Cuba today. Diaz-Canel, a former Education Minister who is a non-Castro and a non-revolutionary, now leads Cuba while across the Florida Straits in the USA another handful of Counter Revolutionary Cuban-Americans have tight grips on a U. S. government still determined to regain control of Cuba.

    But does Cuba deserve for the U.S.-backed Batistianos-Mafiosi to regain control of the island that has been a sovereign nation since 1959? History, including the graphic above that tells of the Mafia-led plundering of Cuba from 1952 till 1959, says, "No. Cubans on the island, not foreign-backed plunderers, should determine the island's fate."

     From 1952 till 1959 Batistiano and Mafia thugs as well as rich U. S. businessmen wallowed in wealth on the island but the everyday Cubans, as shown above, lived in abject poverty with no hope of educational or health benefits and little hope of food.

    Yes, before Americans ever heard of Fidel Castro, photos like the ones above and articles in the New York Times by the great Herbert L. Matthews informed U. S. citizens that the Batista thugs were murdering Cuban children as warnings against resisting the brutal dictatorship. It was brave marches by Cuban mothers, like the ones depicted above, that fueled the revolution and inspired rebels like Celia Sanchez and Fidel Castro to attempt what was considered impossible but vital -- the first overthrow of a U.S.-backed dictatorship.

     By not even bothering to throw crumbs at the Cuban peasants and even brutally murdering children as a warning to potential resisters, Batista's dictatorship gave birth to Fidel Castro and to an historic event known as the Cuban Revolution.

    Even when the right-wing rulers in Havana and Washington didn't consider the little rebellion in Cuba a threat, Batista's thugs routinely gunned down expected rebels, with famed murders including University of Havana students like Jose Antonio Echeverria, 23-year-old teacher Frank Pais and his teenage brother Jesus, etc., etc. Study the graphic above from 1953 just as the Revolution was getting started in the Sierra Maestra Mountains on the far southeastern tip of the island.

     The historic AP/NY Times photo above was taken in 1956. It shows Batista soldiers lavishly supported by American trainers getting ready to board airplanes to fly to the Sierra Maestra foothills and put down the rebellion. Such efforts cost many millions of U. S. tax dollars and wasn't challenged by propagandized United States citizens, but it failed miserably because the Cuban rebels were far more motivated.

     This photo reveals a basic fact about U.S.-Cuban relations. Fictionalized Hollywood movies have revealed more truths about U.S.-Cuban relations than either the U. S. government or the mainstream U. S. media has provided. The scene above is from one of the famed "Godfather" movies. It depicts famed Mafia thugs conducting a famed meeting atop the famed Hotel National in Havana. As a semi-truth, this scene is far more truthful than anything U. S. citizens will get from the U. S. government or the U. S. media regarding U.S.-Cuban relations.

     A mere handful of Counter Revolutionary extremists from Miami and in the U. S. Congress have been allowed to dictate America's Cuban narrative and American's Cuban laws since 1959. Therefore, Americans are programmed to believe that the Batista dictatorship in Cuba in the 1950s was a Mother Teresa-like angelic government and that the return of such an angelic foreign domination of Cuba is something the American people must accept and support -- OR ELSE!!

    And so, George Ryan, now 84 and the former controversial Republican Governor of Illinois, today -- Sept. 10th-2018 -- arrives in Cuba at the invitation of the island's new President Miguel Diaz-Canel. Ryan had visited the island in 1999 after being invited by the late Fidel Castro.

     Although a Republican himself, George Ryan seemed to conclude, as indicated by his quote above, that America's democracy had ceased to be the best government in the world. {"I don't know that we do......." He seems to have based that conclusion on his inside knowledge of the renowned corruption of politics in his Mafia-plagued state of Illinois AND on his knowledge of how easily the Bush dynasty profited from questionable economic and political alliances, especially with the Counter Revolutionary Cubans.

     This image chronicles the role Cuba...or the Cuban Revolutionary losers who regrouped in Miami in 1959 and later in the U. S. Congress...had in the precipitous decline of the U. S. democracy. In 2000 the Democrat Al Gore got the most votes nationwide but Florida's enormous pile of Electoral Votes handed the presidency to the Republican George W. Bush, whose qualification was the fact his father was also a former President also tightly aligned with Miami's Counter Revolutionary Cubans. Gore, unlike Bush, never got the chance to change America's cruel Cuban policies, never got the chance to prevent some questionable wars Bush desired, and never got the chance to make lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court and to the hundreds of federal judgeships below that.

    If anyone dared to write the history of how remnants of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Miami beginning in 1959 and by the 1980s in the U. S. Congress colluded with all Republican White Houses since 1959 to alter the U. S. government, the photo above would have to be seared into that devastating bit of American history. As the world watched on television FOR EXCRUCIATING DAYS, vote-counters like those above tried to count the famed "hanging chad Florida votes" that decided the 2000 presidential election and put another Bush, not the more capable Gore who got the most nationwide votes, in the White House. Therefore, no one should wonder that every Republican presidential candidate traipses to Little Havana in Miami to bow down to the Counter Revolutionary extremists who control all those often-pivotal Florida presidential Electoral Votes.

    Thus, no one should have been surprised when the first thing Donald Trump did as President of the United States was to fly Air Force One to Miami so he could thank the Cuban Counter Revolutionary extremists for his 2016 election AND remind them of the upcoming 2020 election. Trump's brazenness in standing before huge Bay of Pigs Brigade 2506 Assault Banners merely reflects his belief that propagandized and intimidated U. S. citizens have neither the courage nor the intelligence nor the patriotism to challenge such things.

     The humiliating U. S. defeat at Cuba's Bay of Pigs in April of 1961 somehow even today remains the theme in Miami's Little Havana that every U. S. Republican president, such as Donald Trump, must not only capitulate to but also support wholeheartedly with U. S. tax dollars, U. S. might, and U. S. prestige. And somehow in September of 2018 that seems to be an insult to the U. S. democracy. It also continues to enhance the belief that perhaps the defense of the Cuban Revolution at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and subsequently, was/is apparently the honorable thing to do in a small, besieged island nation.

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