How 1950s Cuba Punctured America's Democracy

And Why It Has Not Recovered
Updated: Wednesday, October 3rd, 2013

When World War II ended in 1945 this sailor and the world celebrated.

      America and its allies had prevented vile dictatorships in Germany, Japan, and Italy from conquering the world. Ironically, the U. S. gained its most powerful ally, the Soviet Union, only after Germany's dictator Hitler double-crossed his ally, the Soviet Union's Stalin, who then used his massive army and about 26 million Russian lives to help defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan -- mightily helping the U. S. win the war!

The outcome of WW2 not only saved the world from domination by vile dictators but re-calibrated it.

       The U. S. {left in blue} emerged from World War II as the strongest, richest, and most beloved nation in the history of the world. But it didn't trust its war-time ally, the massive Soviet Union {in red} and its violent, paranoid dictator Joseph Stalin, especially after Stalin's massive spy operation, the KGB, secured nuclear secrets. Thus, from 1945 till the 1990s the two post-war superpowers engaged in a Cold War that greatly affected the entire world. One of the consequences resulted in the U. S., the nation that had the capacity to do the most good in the world, creating a dreaded counter-balance to Stalin's notorious KGB.

In 1947 the reconfigured world witnessed the birth of America's Central Intelligence Agency.

President Harry Truman in 1947 signed the National Security Act, creating the CIA. 
It's located in Langley, Virginia, a few miles across the Potomac River from the White House.
Like the KGB, the CIA soon evolved into a secretive power within the bowels of a superpower.

   Another indelible product of World War II was the almighty American Military Industrial Complex. Dwight David Eisenhower was a brilliant, decent man. He was the top general on the winning side, the man who made the decisive decisions. Then he spent two terms, eight years, as the President of the United States. With that background and that insight, Ike on January 17, 1961, made his farewell television address as President. The main purpose of that speech was to warn the American people that the biggest threat to the U. S. democracy was the Military Industrial Complex that during and after World War II had created an alarming number of millionaires and billionaires. Thus, Ike warned that wars and the threat of wars would be fabricated to convince the American taxpayers and voters that their last dime should be spent on armaments to protect the nation. Of course, the Military Industrial Complex had the money to pay lobbyists and buy-off politicians to further their goals. In his famous speech, Ike said, "We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow." He warmed, with impeccable insight, that the biggest threat to that democracy was America's own Military Industrial Complex. He said, "We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations."

Those words, that dire warning, were destined to go unheeded.

         Dwight D. Eisenhower also warned Americans that, "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."  That sage warning, that simple advice, also went unheeded. World War II and post-World War II, particularly the 15 years with Eisenhower the American catalyst, were watershed moments for the United States and the new world order that the United States dominated. When great, decent, democracy-loving Americans like Eisenhower were this country's primary defenders and policy-makers, the United States democracy was the envy of the world as the greatest form of government ever devised by mankind. But a man as great and insightful as Eisenhower recognized how fragile and vulnerable democracy was. He also knew that the strongest and richest nation in the history of the world -- stronger and richer than the rest of the world combined -- was most fragile and most vulnerable when confronting interior, not exterior, demons. It was Eisenhower who monumentally laid out for the American people how best to protect their precious democracy -- namely, by reigning in the vast Military Industrial Complex and its unending array of subsidiary components, including politicians, who profit from wars and the threat of wars. As I type this essay, my USA Today today {Sept. 30, 2013} informs me on its front page that the U. S. sells/exports 30% of the world's war weapons with Russia next at 26% followed by Germany 8%, France 6%, and China 5%. If Eisenhower were alive to read today's USA Today, he would probably shed a tear regarding the post-World War II generations of Americans who, unlike his generation, did not have the decency, the courage, or the patriotism to defend democracy against...the Military Industrial Complex.

Next to World War II, the Cuban Revolution is the most telling watershed moment for the U. S. democracy.

         In the early 1950s -- when the ashes of World War II were finally cooling off and "the world was safe for democracy" -- the United States teamed with Lucky Luciano {above left} and Meyer Lansky {center}, America's two most powerful Mafia thugs, to support the brutal-thieving military dictatorship in Cuba led by Fulgencio Batista {upper right}. Luciano, in fact, had been put in prison for fifty years by the state of New York prior to World War II but the U. S. government over-ruled New York and freed their Mafia friend, which resulted in untold suffering for many Cubans and Americans. So, why did the U. S. team with the Mafia to support a brutal dictator on the nearby island of Cuba? Two reasons: #1: The American people didn't care; and, #2: it enabled rich American businessmen to partake in the rape and robbery of a helpless small country. At least, the whole world back in the 1950s believed Cuba was a helpless small country.

        But to the utter amazement of the entire world, Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959 defeated the U. S. - backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship! While the superpower U. S. during the 1950s was also supporting brutal dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and other Caribbean and Latin American nations, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution sent a resounding message across the entire region: Perhaps we too can gain sovereignty and independence and not have to live forever under foreign domination! For sure, no other small nation replicated the success of the Cuban Revolution, although many tried. However, beyond doubt, the Cuban Revolution inspired waves of democracy that began to sweep over the region in the 1970s and 1980s, replacing brutal U.S.-backed dictatorships that included murderous dictators like Augusto Pinochet in Chile who had replaced a popular democratically elected government in a bloody coup championed by U. S. President Richard Nixon and his prime adviser Henry Kissinger. To this day it is politically incorrect in the U. S. to suggest that the Cuban Revolution, not the U. S. democracy, inspired the influx of democratic rule throughout Latin America. But those interested in the truth should ask unbiased and unafriad souls who would know, such as.................................

         ............Dilma Rousseff, Prisoner #3023 after she had tried to replicate the Cuban Revolution and overthrow a brutal U.S. - backed dictatorship in her country, Brazil. She was captured and then unmercifully tortured in a military prison for three years. That was in the early 1970s. But Dilma survived and today she credits the Cuban Revolution with inspiring her to become a guerrilla fighter and, after that didn't turn out too well, to become a politician. With Cuba as her example, Dilma never let go of her belief that even a dictatorship supported by the world's superpower did not have to rule Brazil forever.

Today Dilma Rousseff is the democratically elected President of Brazil, the Latin American superpower!

         And today President Rousseff of Brazil chides the United States of America for being home to "The Banana Republic of Miami," her way of pointing out the second most significant consequence of the Cuban Revolution: The fleeing Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba quickly reconstituted itself on U. S. soil!

Which reminds me of an important book published this week.

It reveals how the U. S. support for dictatorships harms future generations of Americans.

Gary Bass {above} is a great historian and professor at Princeton University.

      Gary Bass's new book, published this week by Knopf, is entitled: "The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide." An earlier Random House book by Gary Bass is entitled: "India's Secret War in East Pakistan: How Two Madmen Brought the World to the Brink of a Third Great War." This week {Sept. 29-2013} Gary Bass authored a long editorial in the New York Times entitled "Nixon and Kissinger's Forgotten Shame." He began that editorial with these words: "Bangladesh is in fresh turmoil. On Sept. 17, 2013, its Supreme Court decided that Abdul Quader Mollah, a leading Islamist politician, should be hanged for war crimes committed during the country's 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. This may sound remote or irrelevant to Americans, but the unrest has much to do with the United States. Some of Bangladesh's current problems stem from its traumatic birth in 1971 -- when President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser, vigorously supported the killers and tormentors of a generation of Bangladeshis." And in that long editorial this week in the New York Times, Gary Bass goes on to explain how the actions of President Nixon and Henry Kissinger back in 1971 have so massively harmed democracy as well as generations of people in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and America. In doing so, Gary Bass is suggesting that Americans should, in defense of their democracy and decency, hold their officials accountable.  

Gary Bass, in his new book, details the consequences of the genocide in Bangladesh in 1971.

       In Latin America to this day many observers and players believe Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for years ran roughshod over democracy without being held accountable by the American people.

        Great investigative journalists like Peter Kornbluh {above} are the best friends a democracy can have. It may take them decades but eventually they unearth details on governmental acts that democracy-lovers had a right to know from the beginning, such as the Nixon-Kissinger penchant for overthrowing democratically elected governments in Latin America to install U.S.-friendly dictators. Peter posts his findings on the informative National Security Archive website for all the world to see. For example, on September 11, 2013, Peter's Briefing Book #437 was entitled "KISSINGER AND CHILE; THE DECLASSIFIED RECORD ON REGIME CHANGE." Peter wrote: "Henry Kissinger urged President Richard Nixon to overthrow the democratically elected Allende government in Chile...the coup against Allende occurred on this date 40 years ago {Sept. 11-1973}. The posted records spotlight Kissinger's role as the principal policy architect of U. S. efforts to oust the Chilean leader, and assist in the consolidation of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The documents were never shown to the special Senate Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in the 1970s. 'These documents provide the verdict of history on Kissinger's singular contribution to the denouement of democracy and rise of dictatorship in Chile,' said Peter Kornbluh who directs the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. 'They are the evidence of his accountability for the events of forty years ago.'"

         Peter Kornbluh is also the Director of the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project, of course. As with his aforementioned posting on Kissinger's dominant role in the 1973 Allende coup in Chile, the shame is that it takes even a superb journalist like Peter forty years to document the facts, four decades in which Kissinger has been glorified, sanitized, and lionized by the mainstream U. S. media. Therefore, while much of the data revealed and posted by Peter Kornbluh have long been known to the people in maligned countries like Chile, the American people for all these years have been conveniently lied to via the conveniently anti-democracy vehicle known as classified information, meaning information Americans are not supposed to know lest they might object to their heralded democracy overthrowing decent democratically elected governments, such as Allende's in Chile in 1973, to install a brutal, thieving but U. S. - friendly dictator like Pinochet. Forty years ago America's democracy-loving Senator Frank Church and the American people themselves needed to know what Henry Kissinger/Richard Nixon did in Chile and elsewhere but now, forty years later, even as an historical lesson, few Americans even care. 

But many others throughout Latin America do remember and do care!

      Today Latin America has two democratically elected female Presidents -- Cristina Kirchner of Argentina {left} and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil {right}. Both Kirchner and Rousseff believe that Nixon and Kissinger were responsible for the bloody coup in 1973 that overthrew the democratically elected President of Chile {Salvador Allende} to install, for 17 years, the very brutal U.S.-friendly dictator Augusto Pinochet.

      In fact, Michelle Bachelet was the democratically elected President of Chile during U. S. President Barack Obama's first term. After a very popular term as Chile's leader, Ms. Bachelet retired to devote her life to being a doctor and humanitarian. However, she is running for re-election next month and will win a second term. Needless to say, during the above session with President Bachelet, President Obama was embarrassed. He is well aware that her beloved father was one of the many innocent people killed during the unspeakable terror dispensed by the U.S.-installed and U.S.-backed Pinochet dictatorship.

    {Chile does not allow successive presidential terms; Bachelet worked at the UN in NY between terms}

         Michelle Bachelet -- the former and future democratically elected President of Chile -- is a great admirer of 87-year-old Fidel Castro...as are Latin America's other two female Presidents -- Kirchner and Rousseff. Americans are not supposed to comprehend why that is so. But as Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address in 1961 and Gary Bass's new book in 2013 point out, it is perhaps time that Americans respect their democracy enough to hold their leaders accountable when those leaders defame their democracy.

          Richard Nixon was President Eisenhower's Vice President in April of 1959 when he defamed democracy the day he shook Fidel Castro's hand {above}. Celia Sanchez, the prime dynamo and decision-maker in Revolutionary Cuba, had flown the newly celebrated Fidel to the U. S. less than four months after they had been guerrilla fighters in the Revolutionary War that ousted the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship. The pragmatic Celia, for Cuba's sake, wanted friendly relations with its superpower neighbor and she had instructed Fidel to assure the U. S. that Cuba was willing to do whatever was necessary to bring that about. But Nixon, using Cuba as a political punching bag on his way to the presidency, shocked Fidel by bragging that the United States and the Cuban exiles would re-capture Cuba within three months.

        Back on Cuban soil in April of 1961 after what she considered the double-cross by Richard Nixon in Washington, Celia Sanchez told Fidel Castro: "Dammit, we tried. Now at least we know where we stand, thanks to Nixon. Ours was a do-or-die fight against Batista and now we are in another do-or-die fight. As long as we live, you 'n I, we will do what we have to do." Within days in 1959 the U. S. government sanctioned repeated CIA/Cuban-exile/Mafia assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. But it was not until after the Bay of Pigs attack in April of 1961 that Celia instructed Fidel to declare Cuba a Marxist-Socialist state. And after that she was willing to align Cuba with the Soviet Union as a counter-balance to the United States and, among other things, it was Celia's friendship with Deputy Premier Anatas Mikoyan that initiated nuclear missiles on Cuban soil in 1962 as part of Celia's determination "to do what we have to do." In 1959 after she and Fidel had returned from their 12-day visit to the U. S., Celia first uttered and wrote her daunting proclamation that still has resonance today: "The Batistianos will never regain control of Cuba as long as I live or as long as Fidel lives." Decades ago no one believed her; those doubters didn't know Celia. 

      After he got out of Batista's prison in 1955 when Celia and young school-teacher Frank Pais were keeping the revolution alive, Fidel left the island at Celia's behest to recruit funds and fighters in the U. S. and Mexico. When he finally hooked up with Celia's guerrilla unit in December of 1956 in the Sierra Maestra after barely surviving the ill-fated trip from Mexico, when only 17 of the 82 men aboard the old yacht Granma survived a blistering ambush by Batista's soldiers, Fidel wanted Celia by his side day and night because his dependence on her was inviolable. In the photo above Celia is holding a candle in their tent in the Sierra Maestra so they could read. Fidel is reading a book; Celia is reading and studying a map that contained jotted notes about the approximate location of a fresh army Batista had sent to destroy them.

Celia Sanchez, as above with fellow guerrilla fighter Vilma Espin, was always the studious one.

        After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Celia remained the studious one, enabling Fidel to relax in his rocking chair with his slippers off. So this photo in Revolutionary Cuba is quite appropriate. Celia was the decision-maker and Fidel's primary role was to support, whether he agreed with her or not, whatever decision she rendered. Roberto Salas, their long-time associate and world-class photographer, said in his book "A Pictorial History of the Cuban Revolution": "Celia made all the decisions for Cuba, the big ones and the small ones." Cuban insiders knew that; American outsiders are not supposed to either know or admit that. But in 2013, many unbiased observers believe the U. S. democracy is strong enough to finally acknowledge that it was the petite female Celia, not the macho Fidel, that led the Cuban Revolution against Batista and then led Revolutionary Cuba against the reconstituted U.S.-based Batistianos. When she died of cancer at age 59, Celia believed that her Cuban Revolution had bettered the lives of the island's children. And, of course, she believed the Batistianos would not regain control of Cuba at least as long as Fidel lived. To this day, he has lived almost 34 years beyond her death. The Batistianos have not regained control of Cuba. Thus, both her resolve and proclamation still live as a testament to her uniqueness.

Celia Sanchez

May 9, 1920 - January 11, 1980 

******************************

The Cruel War on Innocent Cubans

Did Maria Isabel Fernandez Have to Die This Week?

Updated: Sunday, September 29th

About two old buildings like this collapse each month in Cuba. Yes, they are homes to families.

        This week the building housing several families in the Vibora suburb of Havana collapsed, bringing four stories crashing down. Some escaped but 50-year-old Maria Isabel Fernandez was buried under the rubble. Family members and rescue teams frantically searched for her for the next 24 hours, but to no avail. Maria this week became the latest victim of a Perfect Storm on the island -- namely, the combination of a lack of funds, a series of devastating hurricanes that weakened already weak structures, and, of course, the cruelest cut of all -- the U. S. embargo against Cuba that has been in effect since 1962 to appease two generations of the richest and most powerful Cuban-exile anti-Castro zealots. While conveniently proselytized American citizens and the conveniently propagandized American media are not supposed to care abut Maria Isabel Fernandez, there are many others who do care.

Sara Rainsford {left} cares when Cubans like Maria Isabel Fernandez die in Cuba. But Sara is British. And she is the BBC's brilliant journalist in Cuba. In her regular informative insights from Cuba about the lives of everyday Cubans, Sara is neither proselytized nor propagandized. Therefore Sara is free to publish the  truth and she is keen enough to recognize the truth when she sees it. Sara this week encapsulated the death of Maria Isabel Fernandez, how she died and why she died. After six decades of sublime ignorance, cowardice, and heartlessness, it is perhaps time that Americans embraced such hows and whys. As she told about the death of Maria Isabel Fernandez this week, Sara Rainsford included this sentence about the collapsed building: "Inside Malecon 161, on Havana's sun-soaked seafront, you have to pick your way through wooden props supporting the ceiling to reach the empty space where several apartments used to be." The BBC's Sara Rainsford can write such a sentence, and tell such a story. It is a shame for the U. S. democracy that American reporters cannot and will not do the same. In that cowardly, heartless manner, Americans have been intentionally misinformed for six decades about a nearby island that is very much ingrained in the history and fabric of the U. S. democracy.

        In 1962 the United States imposed an embargo on Cuba. Declassified U. S. documents reveal that the purpose of the embargo was to starve and deprive the Cuban people on the vulnerable island to induce them to overthrow Fidel Castro and the Revolutionary Government. This U. S. policy was instituted in 1962 after the U. S. government, Cuban exiles, and the Mafia had failed in repeated attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and had also failed in one brazen military attack, at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, to overthrow the revolutionary rule in Cuba. In fact, most non-proselytized and non-propagandized observers, like Sara Rainsford, believe that the cowardice, greed, and stupidity of such tactics constitute a prime reason that, at age 87, Fidel Castro is still alive and so is the Cuban Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship way back on January 1, 1959! The Batista-Mafia rule didn't end because it was loved.

          The Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba as well as such things as the U. S. embargo of Cuba and the terrorist bombing of Cubana Flight 455 have been sanitized in the U. S. by such distorted misconceptions as, "Batista and the Mafia treated the Cubans like Mother Teresa would have treated them" and "There were no innocents on that airplane." But Fulgencio Batista and Meyer Lansky were not clones of Mother Teresa; and there were 73 innocent souls, including many children, on Cubana Flight 455. Such distortions relate to the fact that the Cuban Revolution was the first to overthrow a U.S.-backed dictatorship and, even more significantly, the leaders and riches of that overthrown dictatorship quickly -- and permanently, it seems -- reconstituted themselves on American soil, namely nearby Miami, Union City, and then Washington.

        For sure, Cuba's revolutionary government has made more than its share of mistakes since 1959 -- some colossal mistakes, in fact. But there are two reasons, against all odds, it has survived for all these decades: #1: The majority of Cubans on the island love sovereignty and tired long ago of foreign domination; and #2: the majority of Cubans on the island remember when the U. S. democracy shamefully installed-and/or-supported brutal, thieving dictators like Batista, Trujillo, Samosa, Pinochet, etc., throughout the Caribbean and Latin America -- even overthrowing democratically elected governments to install U.S.-friendly dictators in countries like El Salvador, Chile, etc. For Americans, especially self-proclaimed patriots, to ignore those historic facts is a disgrace to democracy, and to Cubans like Maria.

     Since the 1960s a handful of two generations of rich and powerful Cuban exiles have aligned with enough rich and powerful U. S. politicians to enact stringent laws that mutually benefit them but harm everyone else -- including Maria Isabel Fernandez, who died so needlessly this week in Havana!

The history of Florida is rather well know, except since 1959 its True History has been distorted.

To not know the sugar monopoly in the U. S. is to not know the post-1959 history of the U. S. or Florida.

      From South Florida to the incredibly luxurious Casa de Campo resort on the Dominican Republic's southeast shores lies the world's greatest sugar monopoly and one of the world's greatest fortunes. It is controlled by the multi-billion-dollar Fanjul family. In an article that originated in England's The Week magazine and is still Online at theweek.co.uk entitled "Alfy Fanjul, the Sugar Daddy," Charles Lawrence writes: "Alfonso 'Alfy" Fanjul Jr. is the 'Big Sugar,' the patriarch of the Cuban family which dominates the huge sugar industry of Florida. His is the fifth generation of a family which owned the lion's share of the Cuban sugar industry, slave plantations and all, before Fidel Castro's revolution seized their land, smoke-stack refineries, and Havana palaces in 1959. The Fanjuls sailed to Florida with cash, jewels and a few paintings, and went back to business. Fifty years later, his profit protected by a federal regulation that pegs the price of sugar at a minimum 18 cents a pound in the U. S. compared to between six and 12 cents elsewhere in the world, Fanjul is poised to complete his conquest of Florida's sugar country. His company, Flo-Sun Inc., is about to buy up the last 187,000 acres of sugar cane it does not already own in the state, and a nice new refinery that comes with them. That is what is left of Flo-Sun's last commerical rival, US Sugar. But the really neat trick is that Fanjul and his family are buying it not at the market rate from US Sugar but on the cheap from the Florida state government. How did the Fanjuls persuade the state of Florida to hand over 187,000 acres of sugar cane? First, the Fanjuls are good pals with the Bush family. When George W. Bush ran for President in 2000, the Fanjuls made maximum contributions to the campaign; when George W.'s brother Jeb, Florida's governor, called for the recount that took the White House from Democrat Al Gore and gave it to Bush, Fanjul's lawyer Joseph 'Pit Bull' Klock was the man who defended the recount against legal challenges. In the 1990s, a series of prosecutions stopped the Fanjuls' age-old tradition of cutting costs by shipping in workers from the Caribbean, keeping them in barracks behind locked gates, and charging them for food while paying below-minimum as they harvested with machetes. But it didn't stop Fanjul making friends with the men in power. When he faced a government plan to end a lucrative tax break in February, 1996, he knew what to do; he telephoned President Bill Clinton to vociferously complain. No one would ever have been the wiser if it had not been for the fact that Fanjul's lobbying call to Clinton -- as made public by Kenneth Starr's famous impeachment report -- distracted President Clinton from a blow-job being bestowed by a soon-to-be-famous intern named Monica Lewinsky."

        On August 6, 2001, the print edition of U.S. News & World Report featured an article written by Marci McDonald entitled: "A Sweet Deal for Big Sugar's Daddies: Palm Beach's Fanjul Brothers Devour Domino." The article is still readily available at usnews.com. It states: "Alfonso -- or, as he prefers to call himself, Alfy -- Fanjul was on the line, wanting to talk about the sugar business. This, in itself, was nothing unusual. In his most famous call on the subject, the Palm Beach, Fla., sugar billionaire was on the phone with Bill Clinton one afternoon in February 1996, trying to persuade the then president not to support a sugar tax. It was two years later -- when Fanjul saw Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report -- before he discovered that while he was trying to bend the president's ear, Monica Lewinsky was in the Oval Office trying to get Clinton's attention in other ways. 'I heard no heavy breathing or nothing,' Fanjul recalled last week. 'I was really handling my own business, and I didn't know anything else was going on.' The subsidy scheme has clearly sweetened the Fanjuls' sumptuous lifestyle. Since their 1959 flight from Cuba, where their family ruled the sugar industry -- entertaining the Duke of Winsor and Hollywood's royalty -- they have toiled to reclaim their lost glory. Their secretive web of global holdings now includes 180,000 acres of sugar cane in Florida and 240,000 more in the Dominican Republic. Still, the Cuban Revolution taught them not to leave their political fate to chance. During the last election cycle, the sugar industry contributed $3.3 million to candidates in both parties -- about a third of that from the Fanguls' own larder." The Fanjul sugar monopoly in Batista's Cuba was worth many millions; the Fanjul sugar monopoly in the U. S. and the Dominican Republic is clearly worth many billions. In a weird twist of fate, Fidel Castro's overthrow of Batista has ended up incredibly enriching many unlikely benefactors who obviously didn't realize in the fog of the 1950s that the U. S. democracy, like Batista's Cuba, could be purchased with deftly honed kickback money secreted to elected leaders!

The Fanjul sugar empire dates back to the early 20th century in Cuba.

  But Alfy and Pepe Fanjul became billionaires in Florida after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

The Miami Herald's columnist Carl Hiaasen parodied the Fanjol brothers in his book "Strip Tease."

Hiaasen depicted two brothers as sugar barons who, among other things, imported cheap labor.

Powerful Republicans have long had cozy relations with powerful Cuban exiles. 

But so have powerful Democrats! And in a two-party system, it is democracy that suffers.
And that is especially true when voters do not hold the culprits accountable.

      Fanjul's sugar monopoly -- transferred by the Cuban Revolution from Batista's Cuba to Florida and the Dominican Republic -- reveals a flaw in America's democracy: It's a two-party system -- Republican and Democratic -- and if both parties are for sale, then the system has a problem. Neither the George W. Bush presidency, the Jeb Bush governorship, nor the Bill Clinton presidency -- all two-term affairs -- represented a problem for the incredibly rich Fanjul family. Jose Lambert, a top reporter on the Palm Beach political scene, wrote an article, which you can easily find Online, for Forbes Magazine entitled "Palm Beach Sugar Barons Accused in Wikileaks Cables of trying to Sabotage U. S. Trade Deal." It began with these words: "Palm Beach sugar barons Pepe and Alfy Fanjul, who lavish both the Republican and Democratic parties with millions in contributions, were accused of trying to sabotage U. S. foreign policy and corrupting foreign politicians in diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks. While the U. S. government has spent millions in farm subsidies on the Fanjuls, the Cuban expats allegedly tried to torpedo the CAFCA free-trade agreement in the mid-2000s because it was expected to threaten their bottom line. The story came to light this week in a Palm Beach Post investigation into the Fanjuls businesses. The brothers grow sugar canes on 12 percent of Palm Beach County's entire land mass. The sugar is sold under the names Florida Crystals and Domino."

   In an article entitled "Who Are the Top 100 Richest Hispanics in the U. S.," wiki.answers.com begins, of course, with the Fanjuls and a conservative estimate of $30 billion. The article says, "The two oldest Fanjul brothers, Alfonso and Jose -- known as Alfie and Pepe -- with their wives, Tina and Emilia, embody a Latin-style elegance and panache reminiscent of the high-flying days of Old Havana." While it is politically and socially correct in the U. S. to say that the Cuban-exile millionaires and billionaires "fled Castro's Cuba pennyless," the fact is that many, many millions or billions of dollars left Cuba during the Batista-Mafia dictatorship for banks in Switzerland, New York, South Florida, and Union City, New Jersey. Or to quote wiki.answers.com: "When the Fanjul family fled from Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959, they arrived first in New York with a strong sense of family, a hefty financial portfolio and a perfect pedigree as one of Cuba's largest and wealthiest sugar plantation families. All that was missing were the sugar fields." Well, soon the Fanjuls owned 400,000 acres of land in Florida and the Dominican Republic. The Fanjul jet in the above photo, according to wiki.answers.com, flies guests to parties in South Florida and the Dominican Republic's Casa de Campo.

Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, for example, relishes {above} his invitations from the Fanjuls.

        Meanwhile, in Havana this week a beloved lady, Maria Isabel Fernandez, died beneath the unyielding rubble when the entire interior of a decaying old four-story building that she called home collapsed from the top level to the bottom level. In other words, the Americans who have allowed the cruel embargo against Cuba to be in effect since 1962 can be proud that, while the embargo has not induced the Cuban people to overthrow their revolutionary government or to kill Fidel Castro, it indeed has succeeded in starving, depriving, and killing a lot of innocent Cubans. Maria Isabel Fernandez is merely the latest.

****************************** 

    

America's Improbable Cuban Spy

UPDATED: 2013 and 2020.

Few women, based on their own merits, have risen as high in the U. S. Government as Ana Belen Montes.
And none have fallen so far from such a lofty pedestal.

      Ana Belen Montes once was the shining star among the analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency with heralded credentials that included her status as the U. S. government's top expert on Cuba. In the above photo that is CIA Director George Tenet presenting Ana with one of her many governmental awards.

      This illustration, prepared for the Washington Post by Andy Potts, encapsulates the amazing saga of Ana Belen Montes -- from the well paid and highly honored heights as America's top Cuban expect to being unveiled as the infamous "Viva Fidel" spy for Cuba. She is now 56-years-old. For over a decade she has been America's most securely imprisoned female, tightly confined in the Lizzie Borden ward of a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Convicted of being an incredibly effective Cuban spy for 17 years, Ana will not walk out of that prison until at least July 1, 2023. In the eyes of many, she is a pariah; but to some, she is a heroine.

        Of Puerto Rican descent, Ana Montes was born on a U. S. military base in Germany 56 years ago. Her father Alberto was a highly respected army doctor. They moved often before settling on a nice estate in Towson, Maryland, outside Baltimore. Ana became an outstanding student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. On a UVA study-abroad trip to Spain Ana fell in love with an Argentinian who mocked Ana's American patriotism. He instilled her with regrets about the U. S. support for authoritarian regimes -- namely, dictatorships such as Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, Mobutu in the Congo, etc. Ana got over her brief romantic fling with the Argentinian but his vivid depictions of U. S. support for brutal dictators stayed with her. In particular, she chafed over the reason the great U. S. democracy preferred brutal dictators to democracies in small or weak countries. Upon her return to the U. S., she studied what the Argentinian had said. Supporting dictators with military and financial aid, she concluded, enabled rich American business-men to share in the rape and robbery of such nations while a democratic government in those countries would have insisted on the lion's share of a nation's resources benefiting its indigenous people, not foreigners. In particular, Ana's Argentinian lover in Spain convinced her that the American CIA that was still trying to assassinate and overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba had earlier helped assassinate democratically elected leaders in nation's like the Congo and Chile to install U.S.-friendly brutal dictators Mobutu and Pinochet. The more she learned about Cuba, the more she loved it. And as she emerged as the U. S. government's Cuban expert, she had unique knowledge of what she perceived as American injustice toward the island. She didn't think Fidel Castro was perfect but believed he was a Cuban patriot who cared about poor Cubans. Thus, she was willing to forfeit her lush American life to prevent a Mafia-aligned Batista-like dictator regaining control of Cuba.

        This photo shows Ana Montes {right} at a party in Spain with her friend Ana Colon during the UVA-sponsored educational trip abroad in 1977. As it turned out, Ana's most lasting remembrance was about being vividly reminded of the U. S. support of vile dictatorships. In April of 2013 Jim Popkin wrote a long essay about Ana for the Washington Post. Ana Colon told Popkin: "Ana Belen used to explain to me the 'atrocities' the U.S.A. government used to do to other countries. She was already so torn. She did not want to be American but was." Imbued with that mindset, Ana Belen Montes, intellectually brilliant, rose quickly through the ranks to become the top United States expect on Cuba and, from that vantage point, for 17 years she was Cuba's most important spy. Ana was never paid a dime or a peso by Cuba for her services. 

       After graduating with high honors at the University of Virginia, Ana lived briefly in Puerto Rico but then enrolled in the Master's Program at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. After getting her Masters, Ana began working for the U. S. government, soon embarking on a meteoric rise as an intelligence analyst and America's top Cuban expert. Still embedded with that anti-U. S. indoctrination she received in Spain during her junior year at UVA, by the time she was working for the Reagan-Bush administration Ada adamantly opposed the U. S. support of the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Soon, she had made five trips to Cuba, four on personal trips and one when she stayed at the U. S. Interests Section building in Havana. By then she was an unabashed spy for Cuba, purely a reflection of her strong political views that fervently objected to America's Cuban policy.

           This is Ana Montes in Washington in 1990. When this photo was taken she had been Cuba's top spy as well as the top U. S. Cuban expert for seven years, a dual role that would continue for another decade!

       Ana's sister Lucy Montes {above} is an agent for the FBI! Ana's last serious boyfriend, Roger Corneretto, is a senior intelligence officer for Southcom, the military installation in Florida where the initial suspicion about Ana surfaced! Eight years younger, he admits he was once smitten with Ana's intelligence and looks. In his article for the Washington Post, Jim Popkin revealed that Lucy wrote Ana a letter that said: "Why did you do what you did? Because it made you feel powerful. Yes, Ana, you wanted to feel powerful. You're no altruist, it wasn't the 'greater good' you were concerned for, it was yourself. You needed power over people. You are a coward. You betrayed your family, you betrayed all your friends. Everyone who loves you was betrayed by you. You betrayed your co-workers and your employer, and you betrayed your nation. You worked for an evil megalomaniac who shares or sells our secrets to our enemies." But Lucy Montes told Jim Popkin she will be waiting for Ana when she gets out of prison on July 1, 2023. "There's nothing acceptable about what she did," Lucy said. "On the other hand, I don't feel I can turn my back on her because she's my sister."

        As for Ana Belen Montes, except for finally getting caught, she still has no regrets about what she did. Her movements and contacts are closely confined and monitored. But Jim Popkin and the Washington Post had access to a letter Ana wrote from her Texas prison to a nephew. In the letter she said her spying for Cuba was justified "because the United States has done some terribly cruel and unfair things to Cuba." She closed that letter to her teenage nephew with this sentence: "I don't owe allegiance to the U. S. or to Cuba or to Obama or to the Castro brothers or even to God." One thing that is clear regarding Ana Belen Montes is this: She is a quintessential person of conscience although a hard person to psychoanalyze. Perhaps, indeed, she lost her moral compass but for over a decade now, despite her harsh sentence, not once has she expressed any regret for what she did. Still available on many Websites is the heartfelt statement she very calmly read in the federal courtroom on October 15, 2002 right after she received, with no hope of a pardon, a 25-year prison sentence. Here is that statement word-for-word in its entirety:
         "An Italian proverb perhaps best describes the fundamental truth I believe in: 'All the world is one country.' In such a 'world country,' the principle of loving one's neighbor as much as oneself seems, to me, to be the essential guide to harmonious relations between all of our 'nation-neighborhoods.' This principle urges tolerances and understanding for the different ways of others. It asks that we treat other nations the way we wish to be treated -- with respect and compassion. It is a principle that, tragically, I believe we have never applied to Cuba.
     "Your honor, I engaged in the activity that brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. I believe our government's policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, profoundly unneighborly, and I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it. We have displayed intolerance and contempt towards Cuba for most of the last four decades. We have never respected Cuba's right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand why we must continue to dictate how the Cubans should select their leaders, who their leaders cannot be, and what laws are appropriate in their land. Why can't we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for over two centuries.
       "My way of responding to our Cuba policy may have been morally wrong. Perhaps Cuba's right to exist free of political and economic coercion did not justify giving the island classified information to help it defend itself. I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a gave injustice.
         "My greatest desire is to see amicable relations emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility towards Cuba and to work with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect, and understanding. Today we see more clearly than ever that intolerance and hatred -- by individuals or governments -- spread only pain and suffering. I hope for neighborly love, a policy that recognizes that Cuba, like any nation, wants to be treated with dignity and not with contempt. Such a policy would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people. It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation in our one 'world-country', in our only 'world-homeland.'" 

"I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice."

"My greatest desire is to see amicable relations emerge between the United States and Cuba."

     There is no doubt that the U. S. support of the Mafia in Cuba during the brutal Batista dictatorship in the 1950s greatly affected Ana Belen Montes, reshaping her life and the lives of many others similar to her.

       Moreover, it is abundantly clear that, after the Cuban Revolution overthrew the Batista dictatorship in Cuba in January of 1959, Ana Belen Montes was appalled that the Batistiano-Mafioso leaders -- Fulgencio Batista, Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante Jr., etc., and their tons of money looted from Cuba -- fled to their waiting homes and bank accounts in South Florida and, with Miami as their new hub, immediately began horrific assaults on Cuba in an effort to recapture their lucrative criminal paradise on the nearby island. Beyond doubt, the fact that Ana Belen Montes believed the U. S. government was "morally wrong" to have supported the Batista-Mafia dictatorship -- first in Havana and then in Miami -- put Ana on an amazing trajectory or career path that found her, at one and the same time, the U. S. government's top Cuban expert and Cuba's top spy in the United States! The best Hollywood fiction writers could not have come up with that scenario! Yet, it should also be noted that Ana Belen Montes was not the first nor will she be the last beautiful, talented, and conscionable American woman who has and/or who will sacrifice their careers and/or their lives to try to correct what they earnestly deem to be America's "morally wrong" Cuban policy.

       Lisa Howard {above} died "mysteriously" on July 4th, 1965. Americans today can Google the details and decide for themselves but most keen observers believe Lisa was murdered. Why? Lisa was a Hollywood actress with four solid movies to her credit before she also starred in recurring and lucrative television Soap Opera roles. But she wanted to be a newscaster. So she quit acting and became a reporter for the then top-rated Mutual Radio Network. She was soon hired by ABC-TV where she became the first national female anchor on "The News Hour With Lisa Howard." In that capacity she came to despise America's treatment of Cuba, believing the U. S. was supporting the Miami Mafia against Cuba the way it had aided the Havana Mafia against the Cuban people. With unrelenting zealotry, Lisa Howard worked tirelessly to bring about normal relations between the U. S. and Cuba. And of all the people who have tried since 1959, Lisa Howard came the closest to achieving that goal. By November of 1963 Lisa had persuaded President John Kennedy to normalize relations with Cuba. Kennedy told his top aides that would be his top priority...once he returned to Washington from a southern trip. That trip took the President to Dallas where, on Nov. 22-1963, he was assassinated. Lisa Howard was devastated but she continued her quest to get the U. S. to normalize relations with Cuba. However, she did not trust certain elements she believed responsible for targeting not only Cuba but also Kennedy, who was blamed by the CIA and Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs disaster in April of 1961. Lisa also believed the same exile and CIA elements were aware of what Kennedy had informed his aides. And Lisa felt that elements within the Mafia, the CIA and the new Lyndon Johnson presidency were culpable in both targeting Kennedy and supporting the Mafia designs on Cuba. President Johnson himself persuaded ABC-TV to fire Lisa Howard. Then on the 4th of July in 1965 she died "mysteriously." No one has ever been charged nor was her death ever seriously investigated.

        Ronnie Moffitt {above} was a beautiful 25-year-old American patriot when she was murdered on Sept. 21st, 1976 by a car bomb within two blocks of the White House in Washington, D. C. She was working for Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, who was driving the car and also killed. They did not deserve their fate.

       The Moffitt-Letelier murders and countless others around the world were attributed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet {above}. He had begun a long stint as Chile's dictator after a U. S. - backed coup -- attributed by history and the U. S. National Archives to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger -- bloodily overturned the democratically elected Chilean government that Orlando Letelier had worked for. It is known that Cuban exiles -- expertly trained as bomb experts beginning in 1959 at Fort Benning, Georgia -- were often utilized by Pinochet and were involved in the Moffitt-Letelier bombing according to FBI reports.

Movies and books call Pinochet's 17-year reign of terror "The Condor Years," referring to a buzzard to depict the murderous 17-year-old of Chile's U.S.-backed dictator Pinochet.

          On October 6, 1976 -- just days after Ronnie Moffitt and Orlando Letelier were murdered by the car-bombing in Washington -- this Cuban civilian airplane, Cubana Flight 455, was blown out of the sky near the Barbados killing all 73 on board, including two dozen Cuban teenage athletes. The U. S. FBI, as indicated by the poster above, well knew that Cubans like Virgilia Paz planted the car-bomb that killed Ronnie Moffitt and Orlando Letelier within sound of the White House AND a plethora of research points to long-time Cuban exile terrorist/"freedom fighters" Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch as the masterminds of the Cubana Flight 455 bombing. Such Counter Revolutionary Cubans had ties to the U. S. government.

       It is known that Ana Belen Montes, now  a LONG-TIME federal U. S. prisoner, even as she was a top U. S.-government expert on Cuba she became appalled as she learned about U.S.-approved terrorism by Cuban extremists against totally innocent Cubans........

           such as the two dozen teenage Cuban athletes who were among the 73 murdered aboard Cubana Flight 455.

            Now isolated in her prison cell, it is known that Ana Belen Montes still thinks about those teenage athletes.

     Many Americans who have wanted Ana Belen Montes to be freed believe she was convicted at the insistence of Cuban Counter Revolutionary forces aligned with powerful Republican operatives dedicated to regaining control of Cuba as during the 1950s prior to the Cuban Revolution that ousted the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba in 1959. The Ana Belen Montes saga reminds many people of other dark edges to America's obsession with Cuba...such as the death of famed ABC-TV News Lisa Howard and even the death of famed newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen.

         The lady diligently working over this Underwood typewriter is Dorothy Kilgallen. In the 1950s and 1960s she was one of the most celebrated and best known columnist/celebrities in America. She was a regular panelist on the top-rated television show "What's My Line?" She died "mysteriously" on November 8th, 1965, just a few months after Lisa Howard's "mysterious" death. Many researchers believe that they, and others like them, were murdered because they "knew too much" about delicate things such as...Cuban exiles, the CIA, and the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, just before her "mysterious" death Dorothy Kilgallen had appeared on national television flaunting a manuscript for a book that was soon to be published, a book that she said would "blow the lid" off the Kennedy assassination, etc.  When her "mysteriously dead body" was discovered in her bed, the only thing missing from the room and her luxurious apartment was...THE MANUSCRIPT. A few days later a rich New York socialite, and the only other person believed to have worked with Dorothy on the manuscript, also turned up mysteriously dead.

        Before her untimely death in 1965 Dorothy Kilgallen probably had close relationships with more famous people than anyone in America. In the photo above taken in 1960, that's Dorothy with her friend Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn herself died famously and "mysteriously" on August 5, 1962 and, many believe, it was because of her known threat to "spill the beans" about certain politicians like several Kennedy associates and certain Cuban-related mobsters like Sam Giancana and Carlos Marcello. Some respected journalists, as your research would confirm, believe that Marilyn, who was once President Kennedy's lover, had turned over to Dorothy some material that shed light on both Kennedy's assassination and Cuban-exile involvement in "significant and nefarious things," material that Dorothy Kilgallen supposedly had included, among many other things, in her manuscript that quite famously never got published. 

        In other words, "The Mafia in Havana" that the U. S. government supported in the 1950s was "A Caribbean Mob Story" that should not have been transported to Miami and Washington after the overthrow of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba in January of 1959. In Cuba and in the U. S. the Cuban Mafia and their associates have benefited enormously, including since 1959 while trying desperately to recapture the island, which I believe will finally happen within the next five years. In the meantime, the synergy between the Mafia and the U. S. government, with Cuba caught smack dab in the middle, has devoured a lot of talented and beautiful American women including Lisa Howard, Ronnie Moffitt, Ana Belen Montes, etc.

      When the Mafia ruled Havana in the 1950s, this ad featuring "Havana Hunnies" flashing cigars and straddling an out-sized cigar enticed flocks of tourists to the island. At the moment Cuba is the only place in the world Americans cannot freely travel. But I believe, after six decades, that will change within the next five years when ads like this one will be back in vogue to herald the end of the Cuban Revolution.

Fidel Castro, the famous {some say "infamous"} anti-Mafia rebel, was a powerful young man in 1959.

He died at age 90 in 2016 but Fidel still reigns over Cuba.

          Super-Revolutionary Heroine Celia Sanchez's prophecy first uttered in 1959 amazingly and eerily turned out to be true. So permit me to repeated it:

"The Batistianos will never regain control of Cuba as long as I live or as long as Fidel lives."

        Celia, a chain-smoker, died on Jan. 11-1980; Fidel, a famous former smoke, died Oct. 25, 2016, and long after both Celia and Fidel died the Batistianos {still headquartered in the Little Havana section of Miami} have stilled not recaptured Cuba despite being...UH...powerfully supported by the most powerful and richest nation in the whole world.

**************************