Hurt Both the USA & Cuba!!
{Fresh update for: Tuesday, January 30th, 2018}
{Fresh update for: Tuesday, January 30th, 2018}
This is an updated photo this week of ten top Cuban Foreign Ministry officials. That's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez in the middle wearing the red tie and the Ministry's American expert Josefina Vidal third from the right in the blue jacket. The other three are members of the U. S. Congress standing just to the right of Rodriguez. They are Congresswomen Barbara Lee, up front, and Karen Bass, both from California; and Congressman Roger Marshall from Kansas. Marshall is also a doctor. The members of Congress were in Havana to investigate the alleged sonic attacks on 24 members of the U. S. embassy in Havana. The U. S. State Department, pressured by Cuban Americans in Congress, has convenient used the alleged attacks as the pretext to gut the embassies in Havana and Washington while also, of course, "WARNING" Americans it is unsafe to visit Cuba. Most expert observers are convinced that the Cuban government would be the last force on earth to be responsible for such attacks because tourism, including visits from Americans, is vital to the island's economy. Cuba has, in fact, begged the FBI to investigate the alleged attacks and release the results, and indeed the FBI has repeatedly VISITED. But with the FBI and most everyone...for months now...not believing Cuba is at fault, the U. S. State Department Monday-Jan. 29-2018 claimed nineteen...19...U. S. visitors to Cuba are now showing symptoms, but -- with the U. S. and Counter Revolutionary forces famed for creating historic pretexts against Cuba -- non-Counter Revolutionaries desire some proof. Right after the above photo was taken, Congresswoman Barbara Lee released this official statement: "I think we should restore our diplomats and either end this travel warning or share with the public the evidence that supports the travel warning." Yet, the pretext still reigns supreme.
Yesterday -- Sunday, January 28th, 2018 -- marked the intersection, or clash, of factions trying to forge good relations between the U. S. and Cuba vs. elements trying to destroy those prospects. At considerable expense and effort, New York City's magnificent Marti Statue was transported to Cuba and gifted to Havana along with the official reminder that "New York City is proud to be Cuba's friend." For 50 years the statue had graced New York City where Jose Marti lived as an acclaimed poet until he returned to Cuba to fight against Spanish soldiers to try to attain independence for his beloved island. He died in battle on Cuban soil in 1895, three years before the U. S. gained dominance of Cuba with an easy victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War. The ceremony officially transferring the Marti Statue to Havana from New York City was bittersweet and that was expressed best by Marc Frank, the great Reuters journalist whose article is entitled: "Trump Casts Pall on Inauguration of U. S. Statue of Marti in Cuba." In other words, all the good people who had made the decision to transfer the statue to Havana did so when the decent Barack Obama was President of the United States and trying desperately to normalize relations with Cuba. All that changed when the Democrat Obama was replaced by the Republican Trump, which is the difference between decency and indecency as far as Cuba and America's democratic reputation is concerned. Marc Frank, in the aforementioned article, wrote: "With the advent of the Republican administration in Washington, a pall has fallen over the two countries' fragile detente." That pall, as Marc Frank explained, darkened Sunday what otherwise should have been a happy U.S.-Cuban interaction.
The present and future leaders of Cuba -- Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz-Canel -- are shown Sunday arriving for the transfer of the Marti Statue from New York City to Havana. They were both silent and solemn throughout the ceremony. In April the 86-year-old Castro is due to retire as Cuba's President and be replaced by the 57-year-old Diaz-Canel, marking the first time since 1959 that Cuba will have a non-Castro as its leader. But Cuban insiders note that Raul Castro worked closely with President Obama to normalize relations but Diaz-Canel, soured by another Republican administration in Washington, prefers to devote his time and energy to "Cuba's friends, not our one enemy. Waiting for another Obama is just not practical for us."
A teacher, Diaz-Canel is Cuba's former Education Minister and he has popular support across the island, according to Reuters' two outstanding Cuban journalists, Marc Frank and Sarah Marsh, who are free to report very objectively about Cuba.
The world's most renowned and most respected Travel Writer/Photographer is Christopher P. Baker. He was born 62 years ago in Britain and that fact is important. It means, in shameful contrast to USA journalists, he can write not only expertly but also truthfully about Cuba. In that vein, Chris Baker this month of January-2018 has penned a major article that Americans are not supposed to dial up and read because it clearly depicts Miami's U. S. Senator Marco Rubio, President Trump's latest Republican USA Cuban dictator, as a liar as he dictates USA Cuban policies that reverse the decent detente that former democracy-loving President Barack Obama had painstakingly forged until he was replaced a little over a year ago by Trump.
The world-famed Travel Writer Christopher P. Baker has won just about every top journalistic award he has been eligible for, and as indicated above just about every single U. S. network has used him as a renowned and honest travel expert.
The Christopher P. Baker Travel Books under the Moon banner are legendary, including the Cuba book above and many others. In countless countries that are tourist attractions he has met the people and studied the landscape traveling by foot, autos, motorcycles, etc. So, Chris Baker knows those countries, including Cuba, better than other foreign journalists. His article today, the one Americans are not supposed to read, can easily be dialed up online with the title: "Let's Stop Calling Cuba Unsafe." The article was surely inspired by the Rubio lies that have persuaded President Trump's State Department to "warn" Americans, who visited Cuba in record numbers during the Obama presidency, not to visit the largest and safest Caribbean island because it was "unsafe." Being a Brit, Chris Baker, unlike U. S. journalists, had the guts to contradict the lie in the aforementioned article. He wrote:
"On January 18, 2018, Cuba was named 'Safest Country for Tourism' at the 38th annual International Tourism Fair in Madrid, Spain. That is no surprise to me. I've always considered Cuba to be the safest place in the Americas outside Canada despite the almost laughable accusations of 'sonic attacks' in the U. S. diplomatic staff in Havana. But the wide publicity given to these accusations, together with the State Department warning have reduced U. S. Cuba travel to a trickle...tour operations specializing in Cuba 'people to people' programs report this winter is down about 80 percent. That's a pity because the nation of Cuba being unsafe is bogus."
The internationally renowned travel expert, Christopher P. Baker, easily challenges the Rubio-orchestrated indecent reversal of President Obama's decent Cuban policy. Baker calls the lie about Cuba being unsafe "a pity" because it cruelly targets innocent Cubans as well as cruelly targeting Americans and Cuban Americans as well as the U. S. democracy by dictating that everyday U. S. citizens are the only people in the world without the freedom to travel to Cuba. That reversal of Obama's decency harms everyone except a few extremists Cuban Americans, and Rubio knows it. Chris Baker understands that but U. S. citizens are bombarded with propaganda from the vast Castro Cottage Industry in the United States that people like Rubio in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood use to build their political and economic nests, and their pathway to Congress. With the Cuban narrative in the U. S. dominated by Cuban extremists, Americans {including the intimidated, mainstream U. S. media} are programmed to ignore true, unbiased experts like Chris Baker and believe every word that proven benefactors and liars, like Rubio, say about Cuba...the Rubio who has never set foot on Cuban soil and who got to Congress from Little Havana still claiming his parents escaped the Castro tyranny in Cuba for the Freedom of Miami when Rubio's parents actually escaped the very brutal Batista tyranny long before the world ever heard of Fidel Castro.
Sufficiently propagandized Americans are not supposed to complain or even acknowledge how much the photo above mocks the United States democracy to appease a mere handful of Counter Revolutionary extremists in Little Havana, which is U. S. territory in Miami just as occupied Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is a highly controversial U. S. military base and prison. The photo above was taken on June 16, 2017, when President Trump embarrassed Democracy. This photo illustrates why the U. S. Cuban policy was condemned 191-to-0 in a UN vote during the last year of the decent Obama presidency. On June 16-2017 in a plush Little Havana building named for a Bay of Pigs "hero," Trump stood before a huge Bay of Pigs assault banner and promised the few remaining Bay of Pigs veterans that he would reverse Obama's decent Cuban policies and also reverse their smashing defeat in the Bay of Pigs attack in April of 1961. Such utter anti-Democratic gutlessness was accepted by the gutless mainstream U. S. media and by the sufficiently propagandized American people. And if that is not so, perhaps some Cuban expert in Miami could explain why the photo depicted above does not represent sheer and utter anti-Democratic gutlessness.
The Getty photo above shows an insult to the U. S. democracy earlier this month of January-2018 that, typically, the mainstream U. S. media didn't have either the competence or the courage to report to the American people. On the left is U. S. Senator Robert Menendez alongside U. S. Senator Marco Rubio. They are two extreme Counter Revolutionary Cuban-Americans, the only kind that can get elected to the U. S. Congress although the majority of Cuban Americans even in Miami support Obama's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. In this photo this month Rubio was the Chairman and Menendez was the Co-Chairman of a U. S. Senate Foreign Relations and Western Hemisphere Committee hearing designed to brutally assault Cuba based on the "bogus" claim, as depicted by Chris Baker and by even the FBI, related to the "sonic attack" scheme. Counter Revolutionary Cuban-Americans such as Rubio and Menendez flock to the Foreign Relation and Western Hemisphere committees, of course, because Cuba is a foreign country and in the Western Hemisphere. And like in the 435-member House of Representatives, in the 100-member Senate it is anti-Cuban extremists like Rubio & Menendez who are allowed to dictate Congress's Cuban policy, a policy the world condemns 191-to-0 and a policy that not even decent Presidents like Obama can overcome. Since the 1950s the Cuban Revolution -- which chased the Batistianos-Mafiosi to U. S. soil, has said more about America and its Democracy than it has said about the island of Cuba itself.
The photo above depicts in the front row Congresswoman Ileana Ros Lehtinen and Senators Marco Rubio & Robert Menendez. They have ample reason to cheer the clearance they have in the 535-member U. S. Congress to self-servingly dictate America's Cuban policy. The Havana-born Ros-Lehtinen has always been aligned in Miami with the most anti-Castro Cubans, even including the infamous Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. She has been in the U. S. Congress since 1989 when Jeb Bush was her Campaign Manager, denoting the Bush dynasty's mutually beneficial alliance since the 1950s with Cuban American extremists. American citizens are not supposed to question such things, and when Miami's top Cuban-American newsman, Emilio Milian, did so, he got car-bombed. Of course, Americans are also not supposed to Google the name Emilio Milian just as they are not supposed to question Rubio & Menendez as the Chair & Co-Chair of a Senate hearing designed to assault Cuba and, of course, solicit "expert testimony" from famed Counter Revolutionary zealots such as the infamous Otto Reich. Of course, expert testimony from true and unbiased Cuban experts, such as the aforementioned Chris Baker, would not be permitted because of a sharply altered democracy since 1959.
Although it was surely a big deal this month when Rubio & Menendez were the Chair & Co-Chair of a Senate committee designed to bury Revolutionary Cuba, the fact the mainstream U. S. media was too afraid to report on it is perhaps the biggest insult to a democracy founded in the belief a strong media was essential. That committee session could not have had two more controversial Chairmen. One of America's best and most respected journalists, Ken Silverstein, penned an easily dialed-up and unchallenged article that called Rubio, with massive documentations, "head and shoulders above everyone else" when it came to chicanery and corruption in Washington. And that's a massive statement. The U. S. Government has spent three exhaustive and expensive years investigating and trying to convict Menendez of 18 corruption and bribery charges. In 2017 after an exhausting and expensive 3-month trial in Menendez's backyard of Newark, New Jersey, a hung jury was declared. Still determined, the U. S. Justice Department has announced its intention to retry Menendez. Yet, with no complaints from the mainstream U. S. media nor from propagandized U. S. citizens, Chairman Rubio & Co-Chairman Menendez are typical Counter Revolutionary Cuban-Americans who are allowed to control America's Cuban narrative and America's Cuban policies.
And by the way:
This is a very important memorial that neither Americans nor tourists are supposed to take particular notice of in America's capital city of Washington. It concerns a day -- September 21, 1976 -- when two totally decent and productive people were murdered by a car-bomb within sound of the White House. They were Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his beautiful, young American aide Ronnie Moffitt. The memorial engraves the words "Justice-Peace-Dignity" with the images of the two victims as well as the dates of their births and deaths. But neither Orlando nor Ronnie have ever received Justice, Peace, or Dignity. And to this day Americans are not supposed to care enough to even Google why it happened, who was responsible, and did the CIA Director and future President mislead the FBI's investigation to protect the culprits? Did right-wing thugs in the White House who promoted the coup that overthrew and killed the wildly popular democratically elected President of Chile, Allende, to install the murderous U.S.-friendly Pinochet dictatorship for 17 bloody years have anything to do with the infamous car-bombing? And how many anti-Castro Cubans were involved in the car-bombing that murdered two innocent people near the White House on September 21, 1976?
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But does any of that matter?
And speaking of memorials, this one still resonates in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean as well as in Latin American history books, but not in the USA. A few days after the deadly car-bombing near the White House on September 21, 1976, a child-laden civilian Cuban airplane -- Cubana Flight 455 -- was blown into the ocean October 6, 1976 by a terrorist bomb, killing all 73 people on board including two dozen teenage athletes. Within hours, de-classified U. S. documents revealed the U. S. government had quickly pinpointed the culprits. By the way, Luis Posada Carriles will turn 90-years-old in a few days -- on Feb. 6, 2018 -- as a heralded citizen of Miami, Florida!
But does any of that matter?