And What Americans Don't Know!!
{Wednesday, July 11th, 2018}
{Wednesday, July 11th, 2018}
Because she works for the London-based Reuters news agency, Sarah Marsh, unlike American journalists, can report the truth from Cuba to the rest of the world.
For the international news agency Reuters, Sarah Marsh covers the Caribbean's largest island and reports the truth -- even about Cuban plane crashes in which U. S. journalists either misuse the key facts or ignore them entirely. I'm speaking of, for example, the two Cubana Airlines crashes on Oct. 6-1976 and on May 18-2018. In 1976, as an ongoing and unchecked part of Cuban exile-CIA terrorist attacks on innocent Cubans, Cubana Flight 455 was blown into the ocean killing all 73 on board, including two dozen teenage athletes and little girls who were the children of coaches. Sarah Marsh, who knows the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, is free to tell the truth about Cubana Flight 455, which can also be easily Google-searched. On May 18-2018 a Cubana Airlines plane crashed right after take-off in Havana killing 112 people. Sarah Marsh has also told the truth about that disaster. In her latest July-2018 article about that crash, Sarah Marsh pinpointed the primary cause -- "the U. S. trade embargo against Cuba" that has existed since 1962 and stands as history's all-time longest and cruelest embargo ever imposed by a powerful nation against a weak nation.
Americans are purposely not told how the U. S. embargo of Cuba figures into such things as the deadly crash of an airplane in Havana on May 18, 2018, just as they have not been told the truth about the terrorist bombing of Cubana Flight 455 back in 1976 or the subsequent car-bombing in Miami of Emilio Milian, the top Cuban-American journalist who complained about such things. But Sarah Marsh of Reuters feels free to tell the truth about historic or topical events in the vast U.S.-Cuban conundrum.
Sarah Marsh reminds us in this month's Reuters update that it is a 16-hour bus ride from Havana to Holguin, which was the route the doomed plane was trying to take on May 18, 2018. {See the above map}. The Cuban government, Sarah reported, greatly subsidized such flights to expedite the travel between such key Cuban cities. Now those flights have been canceled and replaced by subsidized bus travel. Marlene Mendoza told Sarah that she had to wait "seven hours" in sweltering heat to get her flight ticket changed to a bus ticket, such is the urgency for Cubans to travel between the far-flung cities for family reasons or simply for business or leisure reasons.
Among the 112 victims of the May 18th-2018 plane crash in Havana were Dr. Monica Leyva Garcia and her baby daughter Alexia. Dr. Leyva was a doctor at the hospital in Holguin. Monica's husband and Alexia's father, who is also a doctor at the Holguin hospital, was driving to the Holguin airport to pick up his two precious family members when the plane crashed on the edge of Havana. You will very painfully understand the news that awaited him at the Holguin airport if you study the precious photo above.
The plane crash occurred less than a month after Miguel Diaz-Canel had taken over as Cuba's President and the island's first non-Castro leader since 1959. Shown in the center of the above photo in the white shirt and tan pants, Diaz-Canel reported from the tragic crash site on live television. A few days later he ordered all Cuban ministers to regularly go on live television and tell the people "what you are doing about their problems so they can judge whether you are actually doing it...or not." As Sarah Marsh explained, President Diaz-Canel has explained to the Cuban people why the ill-fated 39-year-old Boeing-737 airplane had been leased from a tiny Mexican company and why Cuba has trouble getting spare parts for such planes because of the U. S. embargo. In fact, as Sarah Marsh explained, Cuba is also prohibited from getting planes and parts from "even European Airbus and Brazil's Embraers" because they are afraid of the USA's international economic influence. This month -- July, 2018 -- the USA's Boeing and Brazil's Embraer signed a joint deal to produce regional jets that will seat 100-to-150 passengers...with Boeing owning 80% and Embraer 20%; such deals mean Cuba's former friends in Brazil have succumbed USA dollars to become anti-Cuba. Americans are not supposed to understand such things, just as Americans are not supposed to understand why a small Jamaican company paid the U. S. government a substantial fine because it sent a box of baby aspirin to Cuba in violation of the embargo. Of course, huge international banks have paid billions in such fines when accused by the U. S. of even doing small transactions with Cuba. While Cuba's economy has understandably been pulverized by such "legal tactics"...meaning easily passed laws in the 535-member U. S. Congress routinely dictated by a mere handful of Counter Revolutionary extremists since 1962, extremists such as Miami's JORGE MAS-CANOSA and RAFAEL DIAZ-BALART in the 1960s and such as Miami's MARCO RUBIO and MARIO DIAZ-BALART in 2018.
Sarah Marsh of Reuters this week also informs us that, "For decades Cuba got around some U. S. sanctions and purchased airplane parts it needed" but the three Bush presidencies and now the Trump presidency, acting purely at the behest of Counter Revolutionary extremists, have managed to shut those doors. Sarah reminds us that in 2013 Cuba bought six new Antonov airplanes from a joint Russian-Ukraine company but getting parts for those planes has been impossible since "Russia annexed Crimea in 2014." So, according to a journalist with the guts and ingenuity to know...Sarah Marsh...we learn that Cuba now is flying only "4" of its "16" airplanes and the only international flights are now to "Buenos Aires and Madrid." Prior to the Bush and Trump alliances with only the most extreme Counter Revolutionaries, Sarah Marsh said that "for decades" safe Cuban planes "used to fly to all parts of the world."
Cuba's new President Miguel Diaz-Canel is the island's former Education Minister and he remains very popular with everyday Cubans. He has explained to them how sorry he is that he has had to curtail flights from Havana to key destinations such as Holguin, Baracoa, and Santiago de Cuba on the other end of the island. There are 11.24 million Cubans on the island and all of them...for three generations...WELL KNOW how much they have been severely harmed by the U. S. embargo. While Americans are propagandized not to consider such things, Sarah Marsh of Reuters echoed President Diaz-Canel's words with her own words: "In the busy summer travel period in Cuba, a long line of people wait for hours in the sweltering heat outside the office of Cubana Airlines, many of them eager to visit families in the provinces. But they are not waiting to book flights anymore. Instead, they hope to get bus tickets..." As she interviewed Cubans in one of those lines, that's when Marlene Mendoza told her she had waited "seven hours in this sweltering heat" to get her plane tickets exchanged for 16-hour bus tickets. Back in the U. S. Congress, Miami stalwarts like Rubio & Diaz-Balart get away with calling Marlene's problems necessary "to hurt Castro." Such startling lies have worked in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave since 1959, so why would Rubio, Diaz-Balart, and their ilk cease using them after it has played such a mammoth role in their economic and political fortunes in Miami and Washington?
The U. S. embargo was imposed against Cuba in 1962 and is still in effect today in 2018. TO THIS DAY propagandized {lied to} Americans are not supposed to know the reason it was imposed in 1962 and the reason it is still in effect in 2018. Declassified U. S. documents explained the reason: To starve, deprive, and make miserable the lives of Cubans on the island to induce them to rise up and overthrow their revolutionary government. This egregious scheme was imposed after numerous terrorist acts, the April of 1961 air-land-and-sea military attack at the Bay of Pigs, and countless assassination attempts had failed to recapture Cuba. Incredibly, the embargo has also failed to recapture the vulnerable but pugnacious island as a mystified world watches.
While Democratic presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton made tentative efforts to end the embargo, all Republican presidents and all Batistiano-directed U. S. Congresses since the 1960s have mandated the embargo against Cuba to appease a mere handful of Cuban-American extremists. Only one President, Barack Obama, had the combination of guts, intelligence, and patriotism to sharply cut into the atrocities of the atrocious embargo. But Obama's two presidential terms were sandwiched between Batistiano-directed Bush and Trump presidencies...and only the Batistiano-directed Congress can actually end the embargo...and in flawed, money-crazed Washington that won't happen. In January of 1959 when the Batista-Mafia leaders fled the Cuban Revolution and regrouped back in Miami, they had the wealth to overwhelm South Florida economically and politically...and soon that was extended to Washington with the help of the Bush dynasty, the Tea Party, and such sycophants as Jesse Helms, Dan Burton, and Robert Torricelli in Congress who allowed extremists to write, in their names, such atrocities as Helms-Burton and Torricelli bills that to this day hurt innocent Cubans and insult democracy. In Obama's last year as President, 2016, when he so adamantly and bravely opposed the embargo, the vote in the United Nations condemning the embargo was unanimous -- 191-to-0. It has been said that no other topic in this VERY DIVERSE world could attain such worldwide unanimity. America's image regarding the embargo is universally and accurately depicted by the Carlos LaTuff image depicted above. But another cowardly and unpatriotic generation of Americans...this one...doesn't seem to give a damn. And that's precisely where we are in July of 2018. Americans can't refute those facts but they can cowardly ignore them.
Please study the photo above that Dr. Monica Leyva Garcia posted on her Facebook page on April 8th, 2018, to proudly show off her precious baby girl Alexia. On May 18, 2018, like 110 other precious Cuban souls, Dr. Leyva and Alexia were aboard the plane bound for Holguin when it crashed on the edge of Havana. Like Monica, the husband and father was a doctor at the Holguin hospital and he was driving to the airport to reunite with them when the plane crashed. Was the U. S. embargo a prime reason for the crash? Cuba's new President seems to think so. Some 11.24 million people on the island seem to think so. And, based on her latest article this month of July-2018, the fair-minded and superb Reuters journalist Sarah Marsh seems to think so.
There is reason to believe, I believe, that the only journalist in the United States with the guts to ask Miami's U. S. Congressmen Rubio & Diaz-Balart if the embargo played a role in the May 18th-2018 Cuban plane crash was Cuban-American Emilio Milian. But Emilio is not around in 2018 to ask that question; he was car-bombed in Miami in 1976 for asking probing questions about such things as the Oct. 6-1976 terrorist bombing that killed everyone on board the child-laden Cubana Flight 455.
