Terror Made in Cuba
Rosa Martinez
HAVANA TIMES —It may be true that some people in Cuba are being terrorized. Those dubbed as dissidents probably fear being imprisoned or tortured for their ideas. The former has happened on many occasions. I have no proof the latter has ever taken place.
Some Cuban workers may be afraid to speak their minds, because they could lose their jobs or Party membership. It happened to Esteban Morales and many others.
Some may fear persecution, as they tell us on their personal pages. As for me, I can’t say I’ve ever been persecuted or seen others be persecuted.
Perhaps some foreigners are afraid to live in Cuba, fearing socialism will devour them or rob them of their rights or properties. Some may perhaps renounce enjoying our beaches and other natural treasures out of fear of being mistreated by a totalitarian regime. Some people around the world may fear this and more, but no one will ever be able to rightly say Cuba is a terrorist country.
Last week, for the thirty-first consecutive time since 1982, the United States included our country in its list of nations that sponsor terrorism, placing it next to Iran, Syria and Sudan. The true purpose of this is to justify the preservation of the blockade, a failed policy which the entire world condemns.
For Cubans, that doesn’t really change anything. We’re used to defamatory campaigns against our country and being called murderers, when all of us know well where the true murderers and terrorists in the world are.
I can only hope people from other nations will start to get to know us better – our reality, our idiosyncrasies – so that they will see that my island may be anything except a terrorist country.
No, you read like a bad Cold War novel: hackneyed characters, poorly written, and lacking in fact.
Anyway…
That the US viewed the Soviet Union as an enemy and acted against it in no way contradicts the fact that the Soviet Union organized and directed a world wide Communist conspiracy. Both are true.
In the space of some 30 years or so beginning with the U.S. /European invasion in 1918 to overthrow the Bolshevik Revolution, , the Western capitalist powers made three invasions of the Soviet Union, killing some 40-50 MILLION Soviet citizens.
Everything and anything the Soviets did during and after that slaughter was defensive in nature.
You bet they had spies and that was how they got nuclear weapons to be able to create MAD ( Mutual Assured Destruction) and successfully defend themselves from another invasion defend themselves.
Every next step in the arms race was made by the U.S. and not the Soviets.
The U.S. was the aggressor and had the S.U. surrounded with U.S. missile bases and not the other way around.
You have a knack for turning history on its head.
Even the British Intelligence service said (after the Soviets collapsed) that the Soviets were NEVER a serious military threat to the capitalist west.
You read like a bad Cold War novel.
There never was a international communist conspiracy operational in the world? Wow, that will come as a big surprise to all the NKVD & KGB agents who were posted around the world. I suppose Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Alger Hiss, John Abt, Lee Pressman, Whittaker Chambers, Earl Browder, Jacob Golos, Elizabeth Bentley, Nathan Silvermaster and Harry Dexter White were all working independently without any sort of contact or co-ordination from Moscow? And Trotsky died in a gardening accident, I suppose, nothing to do with the killer sent by Stalin.
You can quibble over the use of the word “conspiracy”, but you are absurd to deny the very well documented history of hundreds of Soviet espionage plots from the 1930’s on to the end of the Soviet Union.
Dear Monzon, no answer for you other than it is automatic. Cheers, the editor
It is not nor should it be the responsibility of mainstream media to report on every wacko idea or in this case, poll, that comes along. The NYT et al is too busy trying to cover the kidnapping of hundreds of girls in Nigeria or the movement of pro-Russian forces in Ukraine or the search for the final bodies of children lost in the Korean ferry disaster. The left-wing marginal media is better-suited for your off-the-wall nonsense. It is not from censorship that your “news” is not published in mainstream media, it is lack of widespread public interest.
This reads like a poorly written comic book.
The Soviet Union collapsed some 24 years ago .
There never was a international communist conspiracy operational in the world but there was a U.S. foreign policy of interventions into leftist economies that has been going on for close to 100 years at this date and shows no sign of let up as the continuing war on the people of ( semi-socialist) Cuba clearly shows. .
Today Latin America is turning left and there is no Communist Party influence in any of these countries except Cuba. where the PCC is decidedly Fidelista and not Stalinist : not following past and standard CP policies.
IMO, you need to do some catching up with history AND the present.
It is the minority opposition in Venezuela who are destroying things , are instigating unrest and causing violent demonstrations. The government is doing what any elected government would do in suppressing the violence and destruction.
The U.S. teaches torture around the world to suppress dissent and is itself behind the demonstrations in Venezuela.
North Korea needs Cuba’s obsolete weaponry when they have nukes?
If it weren’t for Cuba, I suppose North Korea would be just like South Korea in your thinking of how far Cuban power reaches.
Since you brought up Cuban censorship, I will make a similar point for you about U.S. corporate media censorship.
I have been recommending that you read Paul Street’s ” Uncle Sam : Top Menace To Peace and/on Earth ” that details an unprecedented poll of some 66,000 people across 68 countries in which the U.S came in first place by a wide margin as the biggest threat on the planet .
As Street noted: ” This poll was met with deafening silence across the dominant U.S. corporate and so-called mainstream media .
It did not receive a single mention in the New York Times,, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal , the Chicago-Sun Times or the Las Angeles Times . It was not considered worthy of reportage on the nightly news at NBC, CBS, ABC or PBS . It barely registered in the U.S. mass media , receiving at most , short and dismissive treatment on the margins of serious news and commentary” .
So we have cases of establishment suppression of unfavorable news in both countries .
Cuba is in an existential war with the U.S. and needs to institute and maintain defensive measures such as censorship.
What excuse does the government and the wealthy of the U.S who own the media and the government have for censoring unwanted facts of major import to decision making in a purported democracy .
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While it is certainly arguable that the US is being hypocritical given their support for people and groups which have been labelled as terrorists, that does not mean therefore Cuba does not support terrorists.
Cuba has supported many Leftist guerilla groups throughout Latin America which were considered terrorists, including FARC (Colombia), ELN (Colombia), FALN (Venezuela), FMLN (Nicaragua), M19 (Colombia), MACHETEROS (Puerto Rico), MIR (Chile), MONTONEROS (Argentina), MRTA (Chile), POLISARIO (Western Sahara), PFLP (Palestine), and MNLT (Uruguay) to name a few. Some of these groups are no longer functioning, some are still out there in the hills engaged in terrorist activities.
Additionally, Cuba maintains close relations with other states currently or recently designated as State Sponsors of Terror, including Syria, Sudan, Iran, North Korea, and until his death, Qadaffi’s Libya. Are the Cuban people aware of these relationships? What exactly was the subject of Cuba’s recent contact with an emissary of the butcher Bashir al-Assad?
Another reason the US cites for keeping Cuba on their list is because the Cuban government continues to harbour fugitives from US justice. These incude convicted murderer, Joanne Chesimard, embezzler Robert Vesco, hijacker Charlie Hill, and many, many more.
Furthermore, Cuban agents have been arrested for involvement in terrorist attacks in the US. On Nov. 17, 1962, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI cracked a terrorist plot by Castro-Cuban agents that targeted –not only Macy’s—but also Gimbel’s, Bloomindales and Manhattan’s Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Fortunately, that plot was broken up and the suspects arested. However, the people who gave the orders to carry out that plot are still living in Cuba.
For these reasons, and perhaps for other reasons which remain classified for political and diplomatic reasons, the US government keeps the Castro regime on the list of states who sponsor terrorism.
Except neither of those things are anything to do with sponsorship of terrorism.
Because the Castro-controlled press in Cuba has not reported on the scandal in Cuba, I assume Rosa is not aware that her country was caught in the act of sending weapons to North Korea in direct violation of the UN sanctions against weapons transfer to that country. I also assume she has not heard of Cuba’s role in the arming and training of Venezuela’s colectivos who are being used to fight against the peaceful protesters in Venezuela. If she had the full picture, she would clearly understand why Cuba remains on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list.
If the Soviet Union wouldn’t have collapsed do you think there will be any dissident free in Cuba, do you think any church would have reopened, that any expatriate could visit their families back in Cuba…..never!!!
The truth about the timidly opening that is currently happening in Cuba is that it is due to the USA policy against communist around the world.
The truth is that without the USA policy against communism, out of the hundreds of political parties, TV channels, newspapers, religions, unions , organisations that exist today in Latina America you would have seen just one party in the whole continent, The “Communist Party of Latin America” led by the army, 3 newspapers, and one union …… what a horrible picture.
It has been a central part of U.S. foreign policy to claim that first the Soviets, then the Chinese, then the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, then the Cubans were out to spread their revolutions around the world.
The fact was and is that it was the U.S. that from 1918 on invaded, embargoed, subverted and overthrew governments they did not like and not the other way around .
For every Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese (leftist) intervention there were and are scores of U.S. interventions to defeat popular , democratic uprisings against capitalism .
Skeptics and the ignorant need read only ” Killing Hope ” in either book form or at the eponymous website.
This book details some 54 U.S. interventions between 1945 and the mid nineties and is all anyone need read to see that it is the U.S. that is the true STATE terrorist in the world and has been for a century.
For a superbly detailed and recent article on which country is the world’s biggest threat to peace in the world everyone interested can Google up:
“Uncle Sam: Top Menace To Peace On/And Earth : Paul Street
It begins: According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR)
and Gallup International at the end of 2013 , Earth’s people see the United States as the most significant threat to peace on the planet”
Some of our closest allies gave us the worst ratings.
Read the report for yourself.