Countering Trump's Batistianos

By 2 Democracy-Loving Americans!!
{Updated: Thursday, June 7th, 2018}

    The above photo is courtesy of the Associated Press Photographer Desmond Boylan. It shows two high-profile, Democracy-loving Americans -- U. S. Senator Jeff Flake and top Google executive Eric Schmidt -- in Havana this week. They met with Cuba's new President Miguel Diaz-Canel in an effort to combat the Trump administration's alignment with Counter Revolutionary extremists to once-and-for-all strangle Cuba by decimating its fragile economy...after the 1961 Bay of Pigs military attack, numerous assassination and terrorist attacks, the still-punitive 1962 embargo, etc., have failed to restore "democracy"  to Cuba -- meaning the return of the overthrown Batista-Mafia dictatorship that raped and robbed the island at will from 1952 till it was chased to Miami in January of 1959. Senator Flake has long battled the Batistianos who dictate America's Cuban policies in Miami and in the U. S. Congress. Eric Schmidt, as the top executive at the Internet superpower Google, wants to connect Cuba to the vital undersea fiber optic cables that run near the island to the benefit of every regional nation EXCEPT, of course, CUBA. Google is finding out that anti-Cuban extremists in the USA can dictate those undersea fiber optic cables too!!

   This EFE photo shows U. S. Senator Jeff Flake and Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel talking to each other {center} at that important meeting in Havana Monday, June 4th. It was so important that the mainstream U. S. media, very afraid of the Counter Revolutionary extremists, typically ignored it.

     As Cuba's new President, Miguel Diaz-Canel's primary task is to shore up the island's economy so it can withstand the efforts by the Batistiano-dominated Trump administration to strangle Cubans on the island to induce them to oppose Diaz-Canel.

     Soon after becoming President, Miguel Diaz-Canel sadly visited the site of the May 18th plane crash on the edge of Havana that killed 113 people, including 101 Cubans. On live television he reported from the site to update Cubans on the tragedy. Born after the 1959 triumph of the Revolution, Diaz-Canel is the island's former Education Minister and he is well-liked by everyday Cubans, which angers the Batistianos.

     Then two weeks ago a storm assaulted Cuba with raging rivers, like the River Zaza above, ravaging much of the island and killing four Cubans. Millions of people watched the YouTube video of the Zaza Bridge collapse in which two Cubans were one-step from where the span broke away. Because of the Batistiano-dictation of  U. S. Cuban policies, Americans are not supposed to react to such Cuban tragedies, which are exacerbated by the cruel restraints of the unending 6-decade-old embargo.

    Cubans in Sancti Spiritus Province who direly needed the Zaza Bridge could only study its demise, hoping it can be rebuilt.

      This photo of the Zaza Bridge was taken on June 4th, 2018, after the river subsided but had left behind major damage.

     Since 1959 extremists Cuban-Americans -- such as Havana-born Humberto Fontova above -- have been allowed to dictate the Cuban policies and the Cuban narratives in the United States. This has shamed America and Democracy, as registered with a 191-to-0 UN vote in the last year of the decent pre-Trump Obama administration. Thus, such tirades as depicted above, along with much more emphatic REMINDERS, have intimidated U. S. citizens in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave for going on seven decades now. So, Americans are programmed to ignore what democracy-lovers like Senator Jeff Flake and Eric Schmidt said in Havana this week. Instead, whatever self-serving extremists like Mr. Fontova say remains the absolute gospel regarding America's Cuban policies and, with help from an inept mainstream U. S. media, America's Cuban narratives. It's been that way for six decades now, with apparently six more decades on  the horizon as we await a more patriotic and democracy-loving generation of Americans.

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Lying About Cuba

It's Easy & Lucrative in the USA!!
{Updated: Tuesday, June 5th, 2018}

      At age 66 and a University of Virginia graduate, Chris Dickey is a veteran journalist who is now the Paris-based Foreign Editor for The Daily Beast. He's become a leading propagandist for the lucrative Castro Cottage Industry in the United States, meaning he feels free to promote how fantastic and nice the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship was in Cuba from 1952 till 1959 AND HOW fantastic and nice the overthrown Batistiano-Mafiosi exiles have been on U. S. soil from 1959 till today -- June 5th, 2018. Chris Dickey's June 2nd-2018 article was/is entitled: "How Cuba Helped Make Venezuela A Mafia State." If you belong to the Castro Cottage Industry or if you just love extremely slanted propaganda, I invite you to dial up Dickey's despicable piece of garbage.

      In the U. S. media, "BREAKING NEWS" these days, as epitomized by Christopher Dickey, is often nothing more and nothing less than self-serving propaganda. And serving the Castro Cottage Industry's profitable assaults on Revolutionary Cuba is incredibly easy and rewarding. Of course, when Dickey accuses today's Revolutionary Cuba of being the world's greatest Mafia-aligned, drug-dealing, and fiendish government on the planet, he conveniently, as always, ignores the fact that the Cuban Revolution was spawned in the early 1950s because of the Batista-Mafia hoodlums ravaging Cuba by brutally defending its massive illegal drug business along with other illicit operations. And then, of course, Dickey, as always, ignores the fact that beginning in January of 1959 Revolutionary Cuba has had to defend its vulnerable island for over six decades from the Mafiosi terrorists that fled from Havana to safe havens in Miami in Janaury, 1959.

      The pre-revolutionary Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba from 1952 till 1959 was brutally led by the very top echelon of the Mafia, as indicated above. Of course, the Cuban narrative in the U. S. since 1959...as espoused in the aforementioned Dickey article...suggests that Fulgencio, Lucky, Meyer, and the rest of the mob treated everyday Cubans as nice as Mother Teresa would have treated them.

      Of course, the Cuban narrative in the U. S. since 1959 alleges that the Cuban Revolution chased Mother Teresa, NOT the Mafia thugs, to Miami.

       In 2018 we democracy-lovers wonder why only extremists Counter Revolutionary Cuban-Americans can get elected to the U. S. Congress even though the majority of Cuban-Americans, even in Miami, favor Obama-like decency regarding Cuba.

    Perhaps Christopher Dickey should write about whether the U. S. support of the Havana Mafia OR the U. S. support of the Miami Mafia has had the most deleterious effect on the U. S. democracy.

      I'd like to suggest, Mr. Dickey, that the American support of the Miami Mafia since 1959 has had a more damaging effect on America & Democracy than even the U. S. support of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba from 1952 to 1959. The United States embargo of Cuba since 1962, creating the above world-wide image, reflects that opinion. Of course, Mr. Dickey, I assume you approve of this image that got condemned 191-to-0 in the United Nations in the last year of the Obama presidency.

    The last six Republican presidents have been shamefully aligned with the Miami Cuban Mafia. So it was no surprise when President Trump went to Little Havana in Miami and promised the remaining survivors of the humiliating Bay of Pigs Assault Brigade 2506 debacle that he would reverse their 1963 defeat while also very shamefully reversing President Obama's decent and sane overtures to Cuba.

      While most U. S. journalists, such as Christopher Dickey, are programmed or intimidated to either promote or ignore the Mafia dictatorship in Cuba as well as the Cuban Mafia influence in Miami, some great journalists-authors like T. J. English actually have the courage to tell the truth about: "How the Mob Owned Cuba...and Then Lost It to the Revolution."

      And in contrast to Christopher Dickey and his ilk, there are great journalists-authors -- like T. J. English, for example -- who will tell the truth about "An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld" that has cruelly reshaped America and Democracy since the 1950s.

    But Chris Dickey -- the Paris-based Foreign Editor for The Daily Beast -- seems to suggest in his June 2nd-2018 article that Cuba, instead of being severely targeted since the 1950s by the Havana Mafia and the Miami Mafia, has been the great ally of the Mafia in drug-dealing and other dastardly deeds. The Castro Cottage Industry -- headquartered in Miami's Little Havana, the U. S. Congress, and all Republican White Houses -- will savor Dickey's anti-Cuban propaganda spiel but the saner, braver, and more decent among us should simply trash it as Fake Propaganda.

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Preying on Innocent Cubans

The USA's Unending Cuban Shame!!
{Updated: Sunday, June 3rd, 2018}

     As a democracy-loving American...self-proclaimed but also quite true...I subscribe to Smithsonian Magazine, which is a product of the Smithsonian Institution that is a classic symbol of Americana's unique greatness. But my last two editions -- the ones dated May-2018 and now June-2018 -- have reminded me of what I consider the TWO greatest blemishes on America and its cherished Democracy. Those two greatest blemishes are:

    {1} Allowing right-wing thugs in the Eisenhower administration to team the United States government with the highest echelons of the Mafia to support the brutal, thieving Batista dictatorship on the island of Cuba in 1952.

And

        {2} Allowing the overthrown U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba to quickly reconstitute its dictatorship on U. S. soil in January of 1959 with its new capital being Little Havana in the heart of Miami, Florida.

      I am, of course, abundantly aware that it is both politically incorrect and quite unhealthy to make those two aforementioned points, just as it was unhealthy in Miami when the decent Cuban-American newsman Emilio Milian complained about unchecked and rampant terrorist attacks on totally innocent Cubans, such as deadly hotel bombings to discourage tourism on  the island and such as the bombing of the civilian Cubana Flight 455 child-laden plane that killed all 73 on board and then was celebrated in the Miami media as "The biggest blow yet against Castro!!!" Opposing such things in Miami in 1976 got Emilio Milian car-bombed and, quite successfully, such things sent the clear message that Americans and Cuban-Americans should not oppose the reaffirmation of the ousted Batista-Mafia dictatorship on U. S. soil, first in South Florida and later in Washington, namely in the U. S. Congress and in all six Republican White Houses since 1959.

        And now, permit me to explain how the last two issues of Smithsonian Magazine are graphic reminders of how firmly established the Batistiano-Mafisoi dictatorship has been in the USA from January of 1959 until this day more than six decades after it was overthrown in Cuba.

Emilio Milian

Car-bombed in Miami in 1976.

 Eusebio Leal

Assaulted for being a great Cuban in 2018.

     In its May-2018 issue, Smithsonian Magazine featured an excellent 18-page article entitled The Man Who Saved Havana. In one of its summary sentences, Smithsonian stated: "As its greatest old buildings were falling down, a fearless historian named Eusebio Leal remade the city into a stunning world destination." That great man is the now 75-year-old Eusebio Leal, the internationally respected Havana Historian. Of course, as revealed by the new June-2018 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, the Counter Revolutionary Batistiano minority, which still insists on dictating America's Cuban policies and America's Cuban narrative, went ballistic just because a major U. S. magazine very correctly paid tribute to a Cuban in Cuba who has done remarkably good things for Cubans on the island...as opposed to Cubans in Miami who routinely for over six decades have done dastardly things to Cubans on the island. SO WHAT, as expertly documented by the May-2018 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, has a great man, Eusebio Leal, done to make things better for the Miami-maligned Cubans in Havana?

       The 18-page article in the May-2018 edition of Smithsonian Magazine that painted a positive image of Cuba was written by renowned travel writer Tony Perrottet and featured photos, like the one above, by Nestor Marti. Somehow the article escaped the purview of the Miami Batistianos who, since 1959, have vehemently demanded that only they can dictate America's Cuban narrative. But after the publication, of course, they unleashed their vitriol and demeaned everything associated with an update on Cuba that Americans simply are not surpposed to be exposed to. The photo above shows the magnificent 5-star Hotel Manzana Kempinski in Havana. It is one of many formerly dilapidated, rundown buildings that, in the past three decades, Eusebio Leal has restored to a grandeur far exceeding its original structure or intent.

       The 18-page Smithsonian article used this map to delineate 15 of the buildings in OLD HAVANA that Leal has remade into magnificent jewels, with the Hotel Manzana Kempinski pinpointed in the left-central  portion of the map just northeast of Leal's beautifully refurbished Capital Building. The article minutely details how, incredibly, Leal has managed to secure the financial wherewithal to carry out the startling refurbishing of so many formerly rundown buildings. Everyone of the pages and photos in the long article infuriated the Miami extremists who apparently believe Smithsonian should praise the terrorist bombers of Cuban hotels, airplanes, coastal fishing cabins, etc., but not the re-builder Leal. For example, the June-2018 edition of Smithsonian Magazine that arrived in my mailbox this week included this denunciation of the May-2018 article:

"HAVANA HERO?

In 'The Man Who Saved Havana' you do not take into consideration the reason Havana had fallen into disrepair. Fidel Castro came to power in January 1959. At that time, the city was considered the "Pearl of the Antilles." Yet by the mid-1970s it was a slum. The work of Eusebio Leal was the product of a Communist regime. As a Cuban-born American citizen, I am saddened that this man today is considered a hero.

MARIA MATILDE MENOCAL/Miami, Florida"

      Because exiles from the Batista-Mafia dictatorship have dictated the Cuban narrative in the United States since 1959, Americans are not supposed to comprehend the extreme poverty among the majority and everyday Cubans from 1952 till 1959. But that fact is well documented, including by a plethora of photos like the one above. All the while poverty like this was being ignored by Batista and the U. S. government, extreme wealth was being extracted from Cuba by the Batistianos, the Mafiosi, and leading U. S. companies. In other words, as the Cuban-born Miami citizen who assailed the Smithsonian article pointed out, Americans are supposed to "take into consideration" only what they are told by a handful of extremists exiles to CONSIDER!!

      Americans are also not supposed to comprehend the plethora of photos from Batista's Cuba like the ones above. They reveal the primary cause of the Cuban Revolution and it wasn't the aforementioned poverty. It was, incredibly, the murders of Cuban children apparently intended to discourage dissent. Well, the childhood murders encouraged the start of the Revolution that chased the rich Batistianos & Mafiosi to regroup their dictatorship on U. S. soil.

    And from U. S. {Miami} soil, starting in January of 1959, Cuban exile-terrorists, many in the employ of the CIA and the U. S. military, committed horrendous terrorist acts against innocent Cubans. Perhaps the most famous -- although Americans are not supposed to consider it -- was the terrorist bomb that blew the child-laden civilian Cubana Flight 455 into the ocean on October 6, 1976, killing all 73 on board.

       To this day, in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean, there are memorials honoring the victims of Cubana Flight 455. But Americans are not supposed to consider them -- not even when the famed longtime CIA/Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles died a few days ago -- on May 23rd, 2018 -- at age 90 in Miami.

      And so, when a great American magazine, Smithsonian, spends 18 pages in May of 2018 to document what a truly great man 75-year-old Eusebio Leal is, the U. S. democracy is typically soiled by Cuban-American extremists who defame the article because Mr. Leal is a Cuban in Havana, not a Cuban in Miami's Little Havana. Purblind, propagandized, and intimidated Americans and Cuban-Americans, for over six decades, have been programmed to ignore everything about Cuba except what a handful of Counter Revolutionary extremists TELL THEM to think.

     The Smithsonian photo above shows today the once-dilapidated Hotel Ambos Mundos after Eusebio Leal oversaw its refurbishment. Back in the 1930s Ernest Hemingway wrote "For Whom the Bell Tolls" in a room at the Hotel Ambos that he rented for $1.50 a day. Leal, the famed Havana Historian, is directly responsible for the way Hotel Ambos and dozens of other historic buildings look so beautifully today in Old Havana as opposed to the way the miscreant perpetrators of terrorist attacks and the U. S. embargo against Cuba want them to look. A hero like Eusebio Leal who can achieve so much while being opposed every step of the way by vicious Counter Revolutionaries hiding behind the skirts of the nearby world superpower IS A HERO.

   This beautifully Leal-rebuilt building spotlighted by Smithsonian is the Palacio del Segundo Cabo and it is now the center for Cuban-European Union relations. The 28-nation EU has emerged as Cuba's main trading partner. The Smithsonian Magazine article and photos highlighting why Eusebio Leal is "The Man Who Saved Havana" helps explain why the Counter Revolutionary zealots in Miami and in the U. S. Congress so adamantly demand that Americans are the only people in the world who do not deserve the freedom to visit Cuba, lest they judge it for themselves.

       As both America and Cuba try to survive the post-Obama Trump-era in the United States, arguably the most important friend Cuba has in the world is Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the 28-nation European Union. In the photo above taken earlier this year, Cuba's hero Eusebio Leal is pointing out to Mogherini one of his newly refurbished buildings in Old Havana.

      The EU's powerful executive Federica Mogherini is shown here chatting with Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez. Because of her abiding interest in Cuba and her fierce condemnation of America's Batistiano-directed Cuban policies, Mogherini and Rodriguez have met this year in three different capital cities -- Havana, Brussels, and Geneva. She calls the U. S. embargo of Cuba "cruel, insane, and illegal." That, of course, is an apt description of the embargo that the U. S. has shamefully imposed on the Cuban people since 1962. Decent people the world over, including former U S. President Obama, totally agree with Mogherini's depiction, as registered by the 191-to-0 UN condemnation when Obama himself condemned it. Yet, a Batistiano-controlled U. S. Congress is allowed to dictate, decade after decade, a Cuban policy that shames America and belittles Democracy. Because of Federica Mogherini, the European  Union has recently signed economic deals with Cuba designed to help the island survive Trump and the Embargo....but, as always, it's an uphill struggle for the vulnerable nation that lies just across the Florida Straits from vile, unchecked enemies who hide behind the skirts of the world's superpower. 

      Like a majority of Cubans on the island, the EU's Federica Mogherini is a strong supporter of Cuba's new President, Miguel Diaz-Canel. Since taking over as the island's leader on April 19th, Diaz-Canel has had to deal not only with the Miami-Washington belligerence of the Batistiano-dictated Trump administration but just in the past two weeks a plane crash on the edge of Havana killed 101 Cubans and just in the last few days at least four Cubans have died from the continuing devastation of Hurricane Alberto, which has destroyed over 100 homes in Diaz-Canel's hometown Villa Clara region while also destroying or severely damaging homes, bridges, etc., in key cities such as Havana, Trinidad, Cienfuegos, Matanzas, etc. International friends like Mogherini help Cuba as best they can during such tragedies but Mogherini is not afraid to tell the world, "When Cubans on the island are hurting the most, it seems that's when the American-based enemies of the Cuban people, with Washington's acquiescence and assistance, try their hardest to strangle these beautiful people on this beautiful island."

      And so, while 75-year-old Eusebio Leal is considered a hero by the Cuban people, by decent people like Federica Mogherini, by the brave people at Smithsonian Magazine, etc., he's considered a pariah by the handful of USA Counter Revolutionaries in Miami and Washington.

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Cuba-USA in 2018

Updating the Clashes!!

     This week -- on May 28th, 2018 -- Memorial Day was celebrated in the USA. In hundreds of ceremonies and in thousands of other ways, Americans paid tribute to America's fallen military heroes and heroines. But throughout the day CNN repeated an excellent documentary entitled "1968" that graphically and correctly pointed out that warmongering U. S. military leaders in the 1960s did more to defame America than the heroes, the common soldiers, did to preserve and protect the USA's precious freedoms and the USA's pristine reputation that the Founding Fathers had envisioned and forged. The documentary suggested that 1968 was the pivotal year and the 1960s was the pivotal decade in America's modern history. The 1960s started with outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower, the Super World War II General, delivering on national television his famed "Military Industrial Complex" warning. Ike, after 8 years in the White House, realized that the biggest threat to the U. S. was internal, not external, and that threat came from warmongers who were able to start and profit from wars. Thus wars and the threat of wars fueled a military industrial complex that demanded vast expenditures on and mass profits from the manufacture and spread of weapons. The "1968" documentary recounted that year's murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy but stressed the bloody war-mongered Vietnam War, a lost cause and unmitigated disaster that resonates to this day after many thousands of young Americans were killed and many more thousands eternally maimed physically and mentally. But the lies and sordid pretexts that spawned and sustained the Vietnam War did, in fact, create the desired wealth for the warmongers who successfully sent young, innocent Americans to Southeast Asia to fight it...and to DISASTROUSLY lose it. And so, as far as the "1968" documentary was concerned on Memorial Day 2018, American citizens within the bowels of the U. S. democracy have grossly shamed the Founding Fathers who bequeathed to them what was the world's greatest and most respected form of government. Yet, as I take note of the Google animation of the twin U. S. flags depicted above, I am reminded that the Cuban Revolution and its aftermaths as constituted from 1952 till today, I sincerely believe, says even more about the United States than the Vietnam War or any other comparable event says.

     In 1952 -- the year the U. S. was fighting the bloody, unwinnable, and war-mongered Korean War -- right-wing thugs embedded in the Eisenhower administration teamed the U. S. democracy with the highest echelons of the Mafia to create and support the brutal, thieving Batista dictatorship in Cuba. After that generation of U. S. citizens allowed that to happen, it has left an eternal and deleterious imprint on America.

     The Batista thugs, to stamp out dissent, engaged in the murders of children to serve as warnings. But brave Cuban mothers took to the streets in protests against Batista and in support of the nascent Cuban Revolution. The Mother Marches were pivotal.

      The extreme thievery and rampant murders carried out by the Batista-Mafia dictatorship spawned the first threat to a U.S.-backed dictatorship. The vicious poverty of the majority peasants contrasted with the wholesale rape and robbery of the island by the Batista and Mafia thugs in conjunction with wealth extracted by reputedly legitimate U. S. businesses. The poverty and mayhem were instrumental but the primary force and impetus for the revolution remained the murders of Cuban children. In the upper photo above, the mother in the center wearing the white jacket was the mother of little Willie Soler who was murdered, along with three of his peers, with their mutilated bodies left in an abandoned warehouse as a warning. Today a major children's hospital in Cuba is named for William Soler, a key revolutionary martyr.

      The Cuban Revolution shocked the world by overthrowing the Batista dictatorship on January 1, 1959. And its survival today is equally as shocking to the entire world.

 

      The exposed humiliation of losing the Cuban Revolution was eternally exacerbated for the United States when the leaders of the overthrown Batista-Mafia dictatorship were allowed to reconstitute their rule on United States soil with their new capital becoming known as Little Havana in nearby MIAMI, FLORIDA.

     The thieving warmongers in the Eisenhower administration who had sicced the Mafia on Cuba in 1952 were, for the most part, still around in 1959 and still powerful enough to orchestrate that their overthrown Batista-Mafia allies in Cuba could set up shop on U. S. soil still fully backed by the U. S. government. The plan was to quickly recapture Cuba. Six decades later that plan is still in effect with humiliating failures that have included massive assassination attempts, the land-sea-air Bay of Pigs military attack in April of 1961, unchecked terrorist attacks including deadly hotel bombings to dissuade tourism and the bombing of the civilian and child-laden Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 killing all 73 on board, the car-bombing of the Miami Cuban-American newsman Emilio Milian who complained about such things, etc., etc., etc. And in 1962 the U. S. established what has become history's all-time longest and cruelest economic embargo ever imposed by a strong nation against a weak nation. That embargo exists to this day and neither the U. S. government nor the mainstream U. S. media want American citizens to know the reason the embargo was created in 1962 and maintained to this day in 2018. But, for the record, according to declassified U. S. documents the purpose for the embargo was and is to starve, deprive, and make miserable the lives of Cubans on the island to induce them to rise up and overthrow their revolutionary government. It hasn't happened because three generations of Cubans on the island remember or have been told about the atrocities of the Batista dictatorship and they are well aware of the unchecked atrocities committed by the "refugees" from the Batista-Mafia dictatorship who, as noted above, "set sail across ninety miles of ocean and sought asylum in the United States." In addition to six decades of failed but bloody attempts to recapture Cuba for the U.S.-backed extremists, the refugees from the Batista-Mafia regime had enough wealth and enough U.S. government connections to totally and eternally overwhelm first Miami and then Washington politics, especially the U. S. Congress and all six Republican administrations in the White House since 1959.

       And that historic and topical backdrop takes us to the up-to-date Getty Images photo depicted above. It shows tourists in Havana and was used this week to illustrate an article in the Miami Herald entitled: "IF YOU HAD A GOOD TIME, THEN YOU REALLY DIDN'T SEE CUBA." It's a long article that you can dial up and every word is a vicious propaganda distortion that, shamefully, is typical of the U. S. media's capitulation to the Miami Cuban Mafia's dictation of America's Cuban narrative. A typical line states: "The caged people of a desperate nation seem to be crying out for salvation." Those of us who have been to Cuba and freely interacted with everyday Cubans are well aware that every word in such articles are self-serving, unmitigated lies...and that is precisely why there have been constant efforts and LEGAL LAWS to make it hard or impossible for Americans to visit one place on this planet -- CUBA. Such undemocratic laws, you see, make it much easier for the lucrative Castro Cottage Industry in the United States to say and do anything they please in regards to Cuba.

   The "journalist" who wrote the aforementioned article in the Miami Herald this week is Alex Lyda. He is described at the end of the article as "a freelance writer who frequently travels to Cuba." That was the Miami Herald's attempt to legitimize the slanderous article, which that so-called mainstream and unbiased newspaper in Miami paid for. But such routine and utter disregard for the truth and for the U. S. democracy is absolutely typical of what a mere handful of hard-line Cuban extremists have been permitted, by both the U. S. media and the U. S. government, to perpetrate on America -- essentially a rape and robbery similar to what the Batista-Mafia mob did in Cuba from 1952 till 1959. Alex Lyda is a joke as a journalist and the Miami Herald, quite typically, is utterly irresponsible for repeatedly printing such trash. Meanwhile, again illustrating an affront to democracy, the majority of the two million+ Cuban-Americans in the Miami area are decent, democracy-loving citizens who favor decent Obama-style relations with Cuba. Yet, Miami is incapable of sending a moderate Cuban-American to the U. S. Congress, a development that equates post-1959 Miami with what Havana was like from 1952 till 1959. America's best democracy-loving friends around the world are saddened and surprised that the U. S. democracy has, after all these decades, been unable to correct 1952's and 1959's assaults on America's democracy by the Batistianos and Mafiosi. This week's Miami Herald propaganda piece by that "freelance writer who frequently travels to Cuba" is a typical insult to America and to Democracy but, unfortunately, it typifies the overall harm orchestrated by right-wing thugs in Washington perpetually allied with the Cuban Mafia from 1952 till today & beyond.

Meanwhile:

     Many Americans, many Cubans, and many people around the world have suffered since January 17, 1961, which was the day outgoing U. S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned that the biggest threat to America was its own Military Industrial Complex. Pretexts to start wars or to kindle the prospects of wars were designed to enrich warmongers, as Eisenhower realized.

    Incredibly, Cuba's sovereign Revolutionary flag still waves in the Caribbean breezes. That is so even though the vulnerable island of Cuba has been the target of more USA PRETEXTS for war and other mayhem than any nation in the whole wide world.

     The man who actually invented the "A Pretext for War" term was the great author-investigative journalist James Bamford. In 2000 the now 71-year-old Bamford revealed that President Kennedy had inherited "Operation Northfields" and "Operation Mongoose" from the Eisenhower administration. The latter began the record number of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and the former, unanimously proposed by the 7-member Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for such mayhem as the murder of innocent Americans so it could then be blamed on Cuba to serve as the PRETEXT for an all-out military attack on Cuba.

      In other words, Americans are not supposed to know about or worry about the next "Pretext for War" but, of course, they are expected to pay for it. World War II's 5-star General and two-term President Dwight Eisenhower understood war and the Pretexts  for war, as did truly great journalists like James Bamford.

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