Looking to a Post-Castro Cuba

[QueEx]

CUBA and the U.S

ROAD MAP ON EFFORTS TO IMPROVE
RELATIONS REVEALED IN DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS

Archive Posts Documents used in new Cigar Aficionado Article: "Talking To Fidel"
Secret Kissinger Era reports on Ending "Perpetual Antagonism" may hold Lessons for Obama Administration

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 269
Posted - January 22, 2009
For more information contact:
Peter Kornbluh - 202/994-7116



Washington, D.C., January 22, 2009 - In March 1975, a top aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drafted a secret/nodis report titled "Normalizing Relations with Cuba" that recommended moving quickly to restore diplomatic ties with Havana. "Our interest is in getting the Cuba issue behind us, not in prolonging it indefinitely," states the memorandum, which was written as the Ford administration engaged in secret diplomacy with Castro officials to lessen hostilities. "If there is a benefit to us in an end to the state of 'perpetual antagonism,'" the report to Kissinger noted, "it lies in getting Cuba off the domestic and inter-American agendas—in extracting the symbolism from an intrinsically trivial issue."

The Kissinger document is one of several declassified records posted today and cited in a new article, "Talking to Fidel," published in the February issue of Cigar Aficionado now available in newsstands. Written by Archive Cuba analyst Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande, Dean of the School of Public Affairs at American University, the article traces the secret, back-channel efforts by Kennedy, Kissinger, Carter and Clinton to improve and even attempt to normalize relations with the Castro regime. "The historical record," the authors write, "contains important lessons [for President Obama] on how an effective effort at direct diplomacy might end, once and for all, the perpetual hostility in U.S.-Cuban relations."

The article also quotes former President Jimmy Carter as stating that he should have followed through on his initial efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. "I think in retrospect, knowing what I know since I left the White House," Carter told the authors in an interview, "I should have gone ahead and been more flexible in dealing with Cuba and establishing full diplomatic relations."

The Kissinger documents, posted for the first time on the Web, along with other documentation from the Kennedy and Carter administrations, were obtained by the Archive's Cuba documentation project as part of a major research project on secret dialogue and negotiations between Havana and Washington over the past fifty years. The article in Cigar Aficionado is adapted from a forthcoming book by Kornbluh and LeoGrande, Talking with Fidel: The Untold History of Dialogue between the United States and Cuba.

"History shows that presidents from Kennedy to Clinton considered dialogue both possible and preferable to continued hostility and aggression in U.S. policy toward Cuba," Kornbluh noted. "This rich declassified record of the past provides a road map for the new administration to follow in the future."



Read the Dialogue Documents

Document l: White House memorandum, Secret, "Conversation with Commandante Ernesto Guevara of Cuba", August 22, 1961.

In a secret memo to President Kennedy, Richard Goodwin recounts his impromptu meeting with Ernesto "Che" Guevara that took place on August 17, 1961 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Their conversation covered several key points: First, Guevara expressed Cuba's hope to establish a "modus vivendi" with the United States. Second, although Castro was willing\ to make a number of concessions toward that goal, the nature of Cuba's political system was nonnegotiable. "He said they could discuss no formula that would mean giving up the type of society to which they were dedicated," Goodwin reported. Finally Guevara raised the issue of how the two countries would find "a practical formula" to advance toward accommodation. He made a pragmatic suggestion, according to Goodwin: "He knew it was difficult to negotiate these things but we could open up some of these issues by beginning to discuss secondary issues … as a cover for more serious conversation." The meeting marked the first high-level talks between officials from the United States and Cuba since the break in diplomatic relations on January 3, 1961.

Document 2: White House memorandum, Top Secret, "Mr. Donovan's Trip to Cuba," March 4, 1963.

This document records President Kennedy's interest in negotiations with Castro and his instructions to his staff to "start thinking along more flexible lines" about negotiations with Cuba toward better relations. At issue were talks between James Donovan, who had negotiated the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, and Fidel Castro, who had expressed an interest in using the prisoner negotiations as a springboard to discuss more normal relations. The memo recording Kennedy's views makes clear he expressed a concrete interest in exploring and pursuing an effective dialogue with Castro.

Document 3: Central Intelligence Agency memorandum, Secret, "Interview of the U.S. Newswoman with Fidel Castro Indicating Possible Interest in Rapprochement with the United States", May 1, 1963.

After ABC News correspondent Lisa Howard returned from interviewing Castro in April 1963, she provided a debriefing to CIA deputy director Richard Helms. Helms's memorandum of conversation notes her opinion that Castro is "ready to discuss rapprochement." Howard also offered to become an intermediary between Havana and Washington. The document contains a notation, "Psaw," meaning President Kennedy read the report on Howard and Castro.

Document 4: Oval Office audio tape, Kennedy and Bundy, November 5, 1963. (.mp3 audio clip - 6 MB)

This audio document, recorded by a secret taping system in President Kennedy's office, records a discussion between the President and his National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, regarding Castro's invitation to William Attwood, a deputy to U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, to come to Cuba for secret talks. "How can Attwood get in and out of there very privately," Kennedy is heard to ask. The President suggests that Attwood should be taken off the U.S. payroll prior to such a meeting so that the White House could plausibly deny that any official talks had taken place if the meeting leaks to the press.

Document 5: National Security Council, memorandum for Secretary Kissinger, Confidential, "Cuba Policy," August 30, 1974.

This memorandum for Kissinger lays out the growing multinational pressures on the U.S. to change its sanctions policy toward Cuba. A number of Latin countries are pushing for licenses for U.S. subsidiaries to export goods to Cuba, and the OAS nations are threatening to lift the ban on trade and diplomatic ties with Havana that the U.S. imposed in 1964. Stephen Low, an NSC staffer on Latin America, recommends an options paper for changing U.S. policy and negotiating with the Cubans that "should be held very closely." Kissinger authorizes the project. Unbeknownst to all but his two top aides, he also initiates contact with the Cubans through intermediaries to begin exploring talks. (Newly posted)

Document 6: Kissinger Aide-Memoire to Cuba, January 11, 1975

In an effort to renew a dialogue between Cuba and the United States, Kissinger's aides and Cuban representatives meet for the first time in a public cafeteria in La Guardia airport in New York on January 11, 1975. During this secret meeting, the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, William Rogers, provides an aide-mémoire, approved by Kissinger, to Castro's representative, Ramon Sanchez-Parodi. "We are meeting here to explore the possibilities for a more normal relationship between our two countries," the untitled and unsigned U.S. document reads. The message takes a very positive tone in suggesting that the "U.S. is able and willing to make progress on such issues even with socialist nations with whom we are in fundamental ideological disagreement." (Newly posted)

Document 7: Department of State, Secret, "Normalizing relations with Cuba", March 27, 1975.

As the OAS prepared to lift multilateral sanctions against Cuba, and the U.S. Congress pushed for lifting the embargo, deputy assistant secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman drafted a secret/nodis memo for Kissinger on "Normalizing Relations with Cuba." His report suggests that the U.S. should move quickly to negotiate with Cuba through a scenario that will result in normal diplomatic relations. "Our interest is in getting the Cuba issue behind us, not in prolonging it indefinitely," the memo states. Shlaudeman warns that the conventional scenario of talks will become mired in disagreements over compensation for expropriated property and suggests setting that issue aside. The document lays out a series of steps that would be taken to normalize relations and finally get the "intrinsically trivial issue" of Cuba "off the domestic and inter-American agendas." (Newly posted)

Document 8: Presidential Directive / NSC-6, Secret, "Cuba", March 15, 1977.

This directive, issued shortly after Carter took office, represents the only time a President has ordered normalization of U.S. relations with Castro's Cuba. "I have concluded that we should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba," the directive states. Carter instructed his foreign policy team to "set in motion a process which will lead to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba." Although negotiations led quickly to re-opening diplomatic ties through the establishment of interest sections in Havana and Washington, secret talks, including with Fidel Castro, broke down over the U.S. insistence that Cuba withdraw its troops from Africa before the Carter Administration would consider lifting the embargo.

 

[QueEx]

AMEN!!!

Castro looked out for darker people in this country at a time when America wouldn't. Let the media and the upper-class Cubans (that migrated after he took over Cuba) in Miami influence you if you want. Dude has always been real. You can keep your "communist" titles or whatever.

If a mfckr scratches my back knowing that I'm itching, and that I didn't even ask him to. I'm going to look out for him in some kinda way...

You might want to get a little insight on that "looked out for darker people" in this thread: Please Meet: Carlos Moore.

QueEx

 

[QueEx]

Obama will use spring summit
to bring Cuba in from the cold

US companies are queuing up as the president moves to
ease restrictions on travel and trade, raising hopes of
warmer relations and an end to the embargo


The Observer
By Rory Carroll
Latin America correspondent
Sunday 8 March, 2009


President Barack Obama is poised to offer an olive branch to Cuba in an effort to repair the US's tattered reputation in Latin America.

The White House has moved to ease some travel and trade restrictions as a cautious first step towards better ties with Havana, raising hopes of an eventual lifting of the four-decade-old economic embargo. Several Bush-era controls are expected to be relaxed in the run-up to next month's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago to gild the president's regional debut and signal a new era of "Yankee" cooperation.

The administration has moved to ease draconian travel controls and lift limits on cash remittances that Cuban-Americans can send to the island, a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of families.

"The effect on ordinary Cubans will be fairly significant. It will improve things and be very welcome," said a western diplomat in Havana. The changes would reverse hardline Bush policies but not fundamentally alter relations between the superpower and the island, he added. "It just takes us back to the 1990s."

The provisions are contained in a $410bn (£290bn) spending bill due to be voted on this week. The legislation would allow Americans with immediate family in Cuba to visit annually, instead of once every three years, and broaden the definition of immediate family. It would also drop a requirement that Havana pay cash in advance for US food imports.

"There is a strong likelihood that Obama will announce policy changes prior to the summit," said Daniel Erikson, director of Caribbean programmes at the Inter-American Dialogue and author of The Cuba Wars. "Loosening travel restrictions would be the easy thing to do and defuse tensions at the summit."

Latin America, once considered Washington's "backyard", has become newly assertive and ended the Castro government's pariah status. The presidents of Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Guatemala have recently visited Havana to deepen economic and political ties. Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to tell Obama on a White House visit this week that the region views the US embargo as anachronistic and vindictive. Easing it would help mend Washington's strained relations with the "pink tide" of leftist governments.

Obama's proposed Cuba measures would only partly thaw a policy frozen since John F Kennedy tried to isolate the communist state across the Florida Straits. "It would signal new pragmatism, but you would still have the embargo, which is the centrepiece of US policy," said Erikson.

Wayne Smith at the Centre for International Policy, Washington DC, said: "I think that the Obama administration will go ahead and lift restrictions on travel of Cuban Americans and remittance to their families. He may also lift restrictions on academic travel.

"There are some things that could be done very easily - for example it's about time we took Cuba off the terrorist list. It's the beginning of the end of the policies we have had towards Cuba for 50 years. It's achieved nothing, it's an embarrassment."

Wayne Smith, a former head of the US Interest Section in Havana, famously said Cuba had the same effect on American administrations as the full moon had on werewolves.

Cuban exiles in Florida, a crucial voting bloc in a swing state, sustained a hardline US policy towards Havana even as the cold war ended and the US traded with other undemocratic nations with much worse human rights records.

To Washington's chagrin, the economic stranglehold did not topple Fidel Castro. When Soviet Union subsidies evaporated, the "maximum leader" implemented savage austerity, opened the island to tourism and found a new sponsor in Venezuela's petrol-rich president, Hugo Chávez.

When Fidel fell ill in 2006, power transferred seamlessly to his brother Raúl. He cemented his authority last week with a cabinet reshuffle that replaced "Fidelistas" with "Raúlistas" from the military.

Recognising Castro continuity, and aghast at European and Asian competitors getting a free hand, US corporate interests are impatient to do business with Cuba. Oil companies want to drill offshore, farmers to export more rice, vegetables and meat, construction firms to build infrastructure projects.

Young Cuban exiles in Florida, less radical than their parents, have advocated ending the policy of isolation. As a senator, Obama opposed the embargo, but as a presidential candidate he supported it - and simultaneously promised engagement with Havana.

A handful of hardline anti-Castro Republican and Democrat members of Congress have threatened to derail the $410bn spending bill unless the Cuba provisions are removed, but most analysts think the legislation will survive.

Compared to intractable challenges in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East, the opportunity for quick progress on Cuba has been called the "low-hanging fruit" of US foreign policy.

That Obama has moved so cautiously has frustrated many reformers. But after decades of freeze, even a slight thaw is welcome, and there is speculation that more will follow.



Old Enemies

President Kennedy imposed an economic and trade embargo on Cuba on 7 February 1962 after Fidel Castro's government expropriated US property on the island. Known by Cubans as el bloqueo, the blockade, elements have been toughened and relaxed under succeeding US presidents. Exceptions have been made for food and medicine exports. George Bush added restrictions on travel and remittances.


The sanctions regime

• No Cuban products or raw materials may enter the US

• US companies and foreign subsidiaries banned from trade with Cuba

• Cuba must pay cash up front when importing US food

• Ships which dock in Cuba may not dock in the US for six months

• US citizens banned from spending money or receiving gifts in Cuba without special permission, in effect a travel ban

• Americans with family on the island limited to one visit every three years.​

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/08/cuba-obama-administration

 

[QueEx]

Obama officials ask court to overturn Florida Cuba travel law

McClatchy Newspapers
By Lesley Clark
March 20, 2009


WASHINGTON — Wading into a legal battle between the state of Florida and 16 Miami agencies that sell travel to Cuba, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday that controversial amendments to a state travel law "interfere with the federal government's ability to speak for the U.S. with one voice in foreign affairs."


The Justice Department argues in a 35-page "statement of interest" that the 2008 amendments to state law that seek to cut travel to Cuba were "not a consumer protection measure... The Florida amendments are instead an attempt by the state of Florida to conduct its own foreign policy."

The court filing notes that the legislative history "demonstrates that the amendments were enacted to denounce the Cuban government and its practices."


The government argues for the amendments to be struck, noting that they could "limit travel that the federal government has deemed consistent with U.S. foreign policy initiatives." The government argues the amendments could put travel sellers out of business.

And noting that Treasury recently relaxed Cuba travel rules, it argues "by effectively reducing the number of sellers of travel to Cuba, the Florida amendment will limit the federal government's intended expansion of family travel."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/117/story/64540.html

 

[QueEx]

`
Copy of the lawsuit: ABC Charters, Inc., v. Charles H. Bronson, in his official capacity
as Commissioner of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

`

 

[QueEx]

Report links donations, lawmakers' support of Cuba embargo

Supporters of the U.S. embargo against Cuba have contributed
nearly $11 million to members of Congress since 2004 in a largely
successful effort to block efforts to weaken sanctions </font size></center>



McClatchy Newspapers
By Lesley Clark
November 16, 2009


WASHINGTON — Supporters of the U.S. embargo against Cuba have contributed nearly $11 million to members of Congress since 2004 in a largely successful effort to block efforts to weaken sanctions against the island, a new report shows.

In several cases, the report by Public Campaign says, members of Congress who had supported easing sanctions against Cuba changed their position — and got donations from the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee and its donors.

All told, the political action committee and its contributors have given

• $10.77 million nationwide to nearly 400 candidates and members of Congress,

• more than $850,000 to 53 Democrats in the House of Representatives who sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this month opposing any change to U.S.-Cuba policy.
  
  • The average signer, the report says, received $16,344.

• The top five recipients of the embargo supporters' cash:
  
  • Miami's three Cuban-American Republican members of Congress,
  • 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain and
  • New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, whose parents fled Cuba before his birth.

<SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">The report comes as defenders of the embargo fend off efforts to repeal a decades-old ban against U.S. travel to Cuba.</span> Proponents of greater engagement with Cuba contend that they have the votes, and a hearing on the issue is scheduled for Thursday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Critics of U.S.-Cuba policy long have suggested a link between campaign contributions and policy. Public Campaign — which advocates for public financing of political campaigns — says the contributions raise questions about the role that money plays in lawmakers' decision-making.

"The pressure they get to raise money plays heavier in their decisions than it ought to," said David Donnelly, the national campaigns director for Public Campaign. "We think this is a damning pattern. We think these are good people caught in a bad system. If members of Congress have to spend too much time raising money, they have to listen to people who give money."

The director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, Mauricio Claver-Carone, defended the contributions as support for lawmakers who side with Cuban-Americans who think that easing sanctions against Cuba will only benefit the Castro regime.

"I will not apologize for the Cuban-American community practicing its constitutional, democratic right to support candidates who believe in freedom and democracy for the Cuban people over business and tourism interests," Claver-Carone said. "Unions help elect pro-union candidates. The Chamber of Commerce helps elect pro-business candidates. AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) helps elect pro-Israel members. Who are we supposed to help? Pro-Castro members?"

Public Campaign looked at the Cuba committee because of a seeming disconnect between congressional votes and public opinion polls that suggest most Americans support lifting a ban on travel to Cuba, Donnelly said.

"On this issue there appears to be a clear distinction between what the American public appears to want and what some in Congress are advocating," Donnelly said, pointing to a World Public Opinion survey in April that found 70 percent of Americans support travel to Cuba.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who backs greater engagement with Cuba, said the report wasn't a surprise.

"I don't know how else you can explain how our current policy has survived for so long without yielding any meaningful results; it's all politics," Flake said.

The report says that at least 18 House members — including several from agriculture-rich districts — received campaign contributions from the PAC or its donors and switched their positions on Cuba, from voting in favor of easing travel restrictions to voting against any efforts to soften the embargo.

Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., said his changed views came from humanitarian interests and concerns about oppression in Cuba. He said he spoke with Florida Republican Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart about their family's experience in Cuba under Fidel Castro.

"I thought, 'This is not right, and it's not humanitarian, and it doesn't promote democracy and I'm not going to support someone who is repressive and evil,' " McIntyre said. "Yes, I changed my vote. That's the reason I changed: the horrors they suffered."

"They're really savvy people," Lars Schoultz, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the author of "That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution," said of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC. "They know one vote is one vote. They scratch around and see who might be open to their way of thinking."

Claver-Carone, who started the PAC in 2003, said agricultural and business interests had heavily lobbied members of Congress before the committee was in operation.

"The farm lobby came in and they were telling people, 'Cuba is like Costa Rica,' " Claver-Carone said. "We came in and started telling people, 'Hey, here's what's really happening in Cuba.' "

Though hard-line embargo supporters traditionally have been considered Republicans, the report shows the PAC shifting contributions to Democrats as they assumed control of the House and Senate in 2006.

In the 2004 election cycle, the PAC gave just 29 percent to Democrats. By 2008, the Democrats' share was up to 59 percent.

(Barbara Barrett and David Goldstein contributed to this article.)


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/78884.html

 

[lerri]

Re: US steps up planning for a Cuba without Castro

US steps up planning for a Cuba without Castro
By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Financial Times
Updated: 12:42 a.m. ET Nov. 1, 2005

US planning for Cuba's "transition" after the demise of Fidel Castro has entered a new stage, with a special office for reconstruction inside the US State Department preparing for the "day after", when Washington will try to back a democratic government in Havana.

The inter-agency effort, which also involves the Defense Department, recognises that the Cuba transition may not go peacefully and that the US may have to launch a nation-building exercise.

Caleb McCarry, the Cuba transition co-ordinator, is working on the project within the Office for Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was established by the Bush administration to prevent and prepare for post-conflict situations.

Every six months, the National Intelligence Council revises a secret watchlist of 25 countries in which instability could require US intervention. The reconstruction office, headed by Carlos Pascual - a Cuba-born former ambassador - was focused on Sudan, Haiti, Congo and Nepal. In a controversial move, Cuba was added to the list.

The US Institute of Peace, funded by Congress to work on conflict management, declined to lend its expertise to the Cuba project. "This was an exercise in destabilisation, not stabilisation," said one person involved.

Mr McCarry acknowledges wearing two hats: to help a post-Castro Cuba establish a democratic government and market economy, and to hasten that transition.

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, appointed Mr McCarry in July. His post was recommended by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which she noted was created by President George W. Bush "to accelerate the demise of Castro's tyranny".

The commission declared in its May 2004 report that it "sought a more proactive, integrated and disciplined approach to undermine the survival strategies of the Castro regime and contribute to conditions that will help the Cuban people hasten the dictatorship's end".

Wholesale engagement is envisaged post-Castro, including immediate assistance so that "schools are kept open and provided with new instructional material and staff", food and medical aid is distributed, and pensions are paid.

Mr McCarry told the FT that last year's tightening of the US economic embargo - such as restrictions on visits to Cuba by Cuban-Americans, and a curbing of remittances - had cost the Castro regime an estimated $500m (€417m, £283m) in lost income.

Human Rights Watch last month condemned the travel restrictions imposed by both Cuba and the US, saying: "Both countries are sacrificing people's freedom of movement to promote dead-end policies." Mr McCarry declined to comment on his work in the Office for Reconstruction and Stabilization, except to say that it would be "thoughtful and respectful of the Cuban people and their wish to be free".

"The transition genie is out of the bottle," he said, referring to opposition activities inside Cuba, and a "broad consensus" reached with the exiled community. "They are the ones to define a democratic future for Cuba."

Officials say the US would not "accept" a handover of power from Mr Castro, who is 79, to his brother Raul, aged 74. While it is not clear what the US position means, Mr McCarry stressed the US would not "impose" its help.

Addressing the Association of the US Army last month, Mr Pascual indicated his co-operation with the military was at an early stage. He said his strategic planning was aimed at understanding "how we would manage that transition process between Fidel's death and a democratic Cuba, because we know that at some point, that is going to happen".

Analysts said the military, worried about a mass exodus of Cuban refugees, was keen to understand the administration's plans for what is called "the day after".

But they also question whether the White House is really committed to the task, noting the limited budgets of both Mr Pascual and Mr McCarry.

Some suspect Mr Bush drew attention to the issue in 2004 with an eye on securing votes in Florida from Cuban exiles. "The US has a history of not being very successful in achieving desired outcomes in Cuba," cautioned Daniel Erikson, analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue think-tank.

A US military officer said: "The truth is that nobody, including anyone on the island, knows what will happen during a transition. It's a little like trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9881666/

? FOR REAL DAWG WHO IS GONNA BE FOCUSING ON POST UNITED STATE'S OF AMERICA.WHEN THE STOCK MARKET CRASHE'S.AND THE DOLLAR IS DUMPED WORLDWIDE.I WONDER.BECAUSE FEMA IS NOT GONNA BE ABLE TO DO IT FOR THE LONG HAUL.I WONDER.?

 

[lerri]

Re: US steps up planning for a Cuba without Castro

US steps up planning for a Cuba without Castro
By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Financial Times
Updated: 12:42 a.m. ET Nov. 1, 2005

US planning for Cuba's "transition" after the demise of Fidel Castro has entered a new stage, with a special office for reconstruction inside the US State Department preparing for the "day after", when Washington will try to back a democratic government in Havana.

The inter-agency effort, which also involves the Defense Department, recognises that the Cuba transition may not go peacefully and that the US may have to launch a nation-building exercise.

Caleb McCarry, the Cuba transition co-ordinator, is working on the project within the Office for Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was established by the Bush administration to prevent and prepare for post-conflict situations.

Every six months, the National Intelligence Council revises a secret watchlist of 25 countries in which instability could require US intervention. The reconstruction office, headed by Carlos Pascual - a Cuba-born former ambassador - was focused on Sudan, Haiti, Congo and Nepal. In a controversial move, Cuba was added to the list.

The US Institute of Peace, funded by Congress to work on conflict management, declined to lend its expertise to the Cuba project. "This was an exercise in destabilisation, not stabilisation," said one person involved.

Mr McCarry acknowledges wearing two hats: to help a post-Castro Cuba establish a democratic government and market economy, and to hasten that transition.

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, appointed Mr McCarry in July. His post was recommended by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which she noted was created by President George W. Bush "to accelerate the demise of Castro's tyranny".

The commission declared in its May 2004 report that it "sought a more proactive, integrated and disciplined approach to undermine the survival strategies of the Castro regime and contribute to conditions that will help the Cuban people hasten the dictatorship's end".

Wholesale engagement is envisaged post-Castro, including immediate assistance so that "schools are kept open and provided with new instructional material and staff", food and medical aid is distributed, and pensions are paid.

Mr McCarry told the FT that last year's tightening of the US economic embargo - such as restrictions on visits to Cuba by Cuban-Americans, and a curbing of remittances - had cost the Castro regime an estimated $500m (€417m, £283m) in lost income.

Human Rights Watch last month condemned the travel restrictions imposed by both Cuba and the US, saying: "Both countries are sacrificing people's freedom of movement to promote dead-end policies." Mr McCarry declined to comment on his work in the Office for Reconstruction and Stabilization, except to say that it would be "thoughtful and respectful of the Cuban people and their wish to be free".

"The transition genie is out of the bottle," he said, referring to opposition activities inside Cuba, and a "broad consensus" reached with the exiled community. "They are the ones to define a democratic future for Cuba."

Officials say the US would not "accept" a handover of power from Mr Castro, who is 79, to his brother Raul, aged 74. While it is not clear what the US position means, Mr McCarry stressed the US would not "impose" its help.

Addressing the Association of the US Army last month, Mr Pascual indicated his co-operation with the military was at an early stage. He said his strategic planning was aimed at understanding "how we would manage that transition process between Fidel's death and a democratic Cuba, because we know that at some point, that is going to happen".

Analysts said the military, worried about a mass exodus of Cuban refugees, was keen to understand the administration's plans for what is called "the day after".

But they also question whether the White House is really committed to the task, noting the limited budgets of both Mr Pascual and Mr McCarry.

Some suspect Mr Bush drew attention to the issue in 2004 with an eye on securing votes in Florida from Cuban exiles. "The US has a history of not being very successful in achieving desired outcomes in Cuba," cautioned Daniel Erikson, analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue think-tank.

A US military officer said: "The truth is that nobody, including anyone on the island, knows what will happen during a transition. It's a little like trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9881666/

? FOR REAL DAWG WHO IS GONNA BE FOCUSING ON POST UNITED STATE'S OF AMERICA.WHEN THE STOCK MARKET CRASHE'S.AND THE DOLLAR IS DUMPED WORLDWIDE.I WONDER.BECAUSE FEMA IS NOT GONNA BE ABLE TO DO IT FOR THE LONG HAUL.I WONDER.?

 

[MASTERBAKER]

Cuba launches 3 days of intense military exercises to guard against US invasion

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HAVANA - Cuba's armed forces launched three days of intense military exercises across the island Thursday, a mobilization that state-controlled media says is designed to guard against an American invasion. Americans focused on a U.S. military assault more likely are thinking about how President Barack Obama will pursue war in Afghanistan — not Cuba. But the siege mentality of the Cold War hasn More..'t faded on the island, where the communist government continues to warn about imperialist aggression and the menace from the north

 

[thoughtone]

Re: Cuba launches 3 days of intense military exercises to guard against US invasion

Is this Homeland Security Advisory System Cuban style?

 

[lerri]

Re: Cuba launches 3 days of intense military exercises to guard against US invasion

i heard earlier this year.that russia was thinking about re-opening their military base there in lourdes,cuba.their in negotiations with RAUL CASTRO the acting president.they also said that they would like to station a couple of TUPOLEV TU-160 bombers and possibly set up a there version of a missile defense shield with intercepters on the island.

 

[QueEx]

Re: Cuba launches 3 days of intense military exercises to guard against US invasion

<font size="5"><Center>
Cuba faced worst economic crisis in 2009</font size><font size="4">

Deepening economic troubles, rising crime and corruption,
and a burgeoning blogger movement vexed Cuba in 2009</font size></center>

Cuba's President Raul Castro attends the National
Assembly's final plenary session in Havana, Sunday,
Dec. 20, 2009. Ariana Cubillos / AP Photo


Miami Herald
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com
January 2, 2010


Raúl Castro was right, when he predicted on Jan. 1 that 2009 would be a tough year for Cuba.

Havana faced its worst economic crisis in 20 years, myriad scarcities, freezing foreigners' deposits in its banks -- with promised reforms stalled and its political cohesion put in doubt by one of the revolution's worst-ever leadership purges.

Crime and corruption increased, according to official reports. Bloggers as well as black Cubans fired increasingly daring darts at the government, but Castro gave no ground on human rights.

Brother Fidel Castro, meanwhile, often appeared to veto deep reforms intended to help Cuba survive, and ended the year apparently far healthier than he was at the beginning.

At the root of Cuba's crisis is its centralized, unproductive communist-styled economy, $10 billion in damages caused by three hurricanes in 2008 and a global recession that shriveled virtually all the sources of Cuba's income.

The price of main export nickel plunged by half, income from tourism sank by 10 percent and foreign credits dropped by a reported $1 billion -- a devastating blow to an island long accustomed to financing its operations by taking out loans to pay old debts.

Throughout the year, the government railed against admitted economic mismanagement and exhorted Cubans to tighten their belts and work harder. And while Castro initially promised ``structural'' reforms to improve the economy, his actual steps were more tentative. ``Raúl has done more to diagnose the problems than to solve them,'' said Phil Peters, a Cuba expert with the Lexington Institute think tank in suburban Washington.


<font size="4">FREEZE ON DEPOSITS</font size>

With his coffers empty, Castro set out to cut government spending and imports, step up production and reduce labor inefficiencies. In the most telling sign of Cuba's crisis, he also reportedly froze at least $600 million in foreign businesses' deposits in Cuban banks.

``It's one thing to fail to pay a loan, but to seize money in Cuban banks, that tops it all and shows the chaos in the country,'' said dissident Havana economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe.

On an island that spends some $1.4 billion buying 60 to 80 percent of its food abroad, Castro slashed imports by 37.4 percent -- U.S. imports alone dropped by about 27 percent. An order to cut electricity consumption by 12 percent led to the closing of thousands of factories and workplaces.

To increase productivity, the government raised the retirement age by five years, allowed workers to hold more than one job and raised some salaries, including those of the island's 545,000 teachers.

It also slashed the massive subsidies that augment Cubans' meager salaries -- $17 to $20 a month -- by removing several items from ration cards and cutting back the quantities for others. Hundreds of free cafeterias at state enterprises were closed, as were some state boarding schools in rural areas.

As the year passed, the government's forecasts of economic growth kept shrinking, starting at 6 percent, hitting 1.7 percent by late summer and 1.4 percent by year's end, though several independent analysts projected minus growth.


<font size="4">BLAME THE EMBARGO</font size>

Cuba continued to blame the U.S. embargo for many of its travails, issuing a report in the fall that estimated the sanctions' total damages since 1962 at $236 billion.

But Castro was brutally honest when it came to Cuba's most critical domestic problem -- a moribund agricultural sector. Half the arable land is fallow, and the state sector controls 75 percent of the land yet accounts for only 40 percent of production.

``The land is here! The Cubans are here! Let's see if we can work, if we can produce!'' he declared in one speech.

In his government's most ambitious effort to revive agriculture, by August it had reportedly loaned 1.7 million acres of fallow land to 82,000 private farmers. It also shifted Acopio, the inefficient Agriculture Ministry agency that gathers and distributes harvests, to the Commerce Ministry.

Castro also closed some farmers' markets, where supply and demand set prices, hoping to force more products to state-run markets that have lower government-set prices but fewer products.

Havana residents reported seeing more vegetables by year's end. But major problems clearly remained.

Some new farmers were inexperienced city dwellers, and the bureaucracy retained control of supplies like seeds, fertilizers and gasoline, as well as the vehicles that take the harvests to market.

``This is a Gordian Knot that can't be undone little by little. Cuba needs major changes, and Raúl is only picking at the problems,'' said Jorge Sanguinetty, a Miami economist who follows Cuba closely.


<font size="4">THE POSITIVE</font size>

It wasn't all bad news.

On the international front, Cuba enjoyed its best standing since the late 1970s, with solid allies around Latin America and much improved relations with Spain, Russia, Iran, Algeria, Angola, China and even Australia. Castro made a string of trips abroad and heads of state streamed to Havana to sign trade and other deals.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez kept up his massive subsidies to Havana -- their size unknown, but estimated in the billions -- and the Organization of American States voted to welcome back Cuba as a member, an invitation the Castros declined.

President Barack Obama made friendly gestures, such as lifting most restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island. The U.S. opened immigration and postal service talks. By year's end, however, bilateral relations remained strained.

Castro also appeared to face political problems at home, canceling a Communist Party summit he had set to approve a new model of socialism for Cuba.

Castro replaced his entire economic cabinet, a dozen top party officials, 30 ambassadors and the heads of the Central Bank and Communist Youth Union. Most importantly, he fired Carlos Lage and Felipe Perez Roque, once presumed heirs to the reins of power.

Fidel Castro also remained a power to contend with at age 83, by most accounts blocking some of his brother's proposals for major changes while receiving a steady flow of visits by foreign heads of state. He also wrote more than 100 columns, called ``Reflections,'' over the year.

``This was a man who was thought to be literally on his last legs, and in many ways he emerged during the year in a stronger position,'' said Daniel Erickson, author of The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution.

Many Cubans accepted the pain with resignation.

``What can we do? We have suffered for many years, and now there's some more suffering. We have no option but to bear it and survive somehow,'' said a Havana journalist who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of government reprisals.

But others voiced complaints in increasingly novel ways, with critical bloggers winning international attention and black dissidents complaining of racism -- a move that drew a first-ever show of support from a group of 60 well-known African-American activists.

``The young generations see the frustrations on the island continuing to increase, and it's not just the economy but the politics, the lack of hope and future that they see for themselves,'' said Andy Gomez, assistant provost at the University of Miami and senior fellow at UM's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.


<font size="4">PROTESTERS</font size>

Near year's end, the government sent supporters to the streets to bully the protesting wives and mothers of jailed dissidents as well as blogger Reynaldo Escobar. His wife Yoani Sánchez, who writes the popular Generación Y blog, reported that security agents had beaten her and another cyber-writer.

The number of Cubans leaving illegally reportedly dropped to the lowest level since 2002, perhaps because the U.S. economic crisis meant fewer jobs or less money to pay for smugglers, maybe because people were waiting for Raúl Castro to make changes.

Nevertheless, a steady stream of boxers, baseball and even basketball players continued to defect, and the Spanish embassy in Havana reportedly received 20,000 applications for citizenship in the first month of a law allowing those with Spanish grandparents to become Spaniards.

By the end of the year, as the rest of Latin America appeared to be emerging from the global crisis, there was widespread talk in Cuba of more belt-tightening coming in 2010.

One idea: The state would scrap the ration card, now good for 10 days of food a month, and issue food coupons to only the most needy. All 24,700 free workplace cafeterias will close.

Another: Cuba's detested two-currency system would go. Employee-run cooperatives would take over government-run retail stores like clothing, butcher and car repair shops -- all nationalized in the 1960s.

But none of that would be sufficient to straighten out an economy burdened by 50 years of Soviet-style socialism, Espinosa Chepe said by telephone from Havana.

``This has been a year of total frustration,'' the dissident economist said. ``What should have been done this year was not done. There are no credits, and no reforms. So the problems have been accumulating, and will continue to accumulate.''

Cuba's Minister of the Economy and Planning seemed to agree. Granma reported in July that Marino Murillo had predicted that 2010 ``will be equally difficult.''


http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/v-fullstory/story/1405416.html

 

[LennyNero1972]

Re: Cuba launches 3 days of intense military exercises to guard against US invasion

Don't put too much stock in that Miami Herald article, they have writing smear articles about Cuba for years.

 

[MCP]

Cuba President Raul Castro seeks 10-year term limits

<IFRAME SRC="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13107318" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="">link</A>

</IFRAME>

 

[QueEx]

'Cuban Twitter' raises question:
Is it OK for US to help Cubans?​

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
El Nuevo Herald
April 3, 2014

MIAMI — Does the U.S. government have the right to circumvent a dictatorship's controls on information? And if Washington tries to help foster democracy in a country ruled by a dictator, is it pushing for "regime change?"

Those are the fundamental questions raised by an Associated Press report Thursday that the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, financed a "covert" Twitter-like system for Cubans "designed to undermine the communist government."

Replies predictably ranged from a rotund "no" to a flat "yes," largely reflecting the divisions over U.S. policies on Cuba and the more than half-century of animosity between the two nations.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said the AP was wrong in branding USAID's "Zunzuneo" program as covert. In "non-permissive environments" it is "discreet" to "protect the practitioners and the public," he said. "This is not unique to Cuba."

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf took aim at what she called the "misconceptions" in the "breathlessly written" AP report and said, "The notion that we were somehow trying to foment unrest ... nothing could be further from the truth,"

But Max Lesnik, a Miami radio commentator who supports the government of ruler Raul Castro, called Zunzuneo "an operation aimed at changing the Cuban government - regime change. This is a covert aggression through social networks."

Cuba's government has outlawed the USAID programs as subversive and calls all dissidents "U.S. mercenaries." The agency says its programs promote democracy and support civil society, and notes that Congress approved $20 million for them this year alone.

USAID subcontractor Alan Gross is serving a 15-year sentence in Havana for giving Cuban Jews sophisticated communications equipment that would have allowed them to sidestep government controls on the Internet and telephone connections.

Ninoska Perez Castellon, a Miami radio commentator and Castro critic, said the USAID programs are needed. "Cuba is a dictatorship, and any program that helps a country where there is repression and censorship is justified," she said.

She added that Cuba's complaints that Washington is promoting subversion on the island are "total hypocrisy" because the Castro government trained and armed leftist guerrillas from throughout Latin America in the 1970s and '80s.

But Washington should be careful in how it supports civil society in repressive countries, said Emily Parker, author of a book on Internet controls in Cuba, China and Russia and an adviser on digital diplomacy to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"The U.S. needs to tread very carefully in countries like Cuba because to directly support (dissidents) makes it easy to call them mercenaries," Parker said. "That sometimes does more harm than good."

There are other ways for Washington to support the Internet in Cuba, she said, such as eliminating U.S. obstacles to access that are sometimes created by the trade embargo. Her book, "Now I Know Who My Comrades Are," was published early this year.

Cuba democracy advocate Mauricio Claver-Carone, meanwhile, said it was no surprise for the U.S. media and some politicians to complain about U.S. policies in Cuba but praise the same policies when they are applied to other countries.

A global outcry followed Turkey's ongoing attempts to cut off Twitter amid the ongoing anti-government protests, he said, and USAID runs similar programs to expand the flow of information in dictatorships such as Syria, North Korea and Iran.

"That's not controversial. Everybody supports that. But it seems Cuba is the only place where we have to accept a totalitarian government's control over communications," said Claver-Carone, director of the U.S. Cuba Democracy political action committee.



Cuba's communist government controls all newspapers, radio and TV stations, makes access to the Internet very expensive and blocks access to many Web pages and the transmissions of the U.S. government's Radio/TV Marti stations.

"The story that needs to be told is the lack of access to the Internet and Twitter in Cuba," said Marc Wachtenheim, a Washington consultant who has been involved with the Cuba programs. "All efforts to overcome that information blockade are valid and moral."

Cuba blogger Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo said his complaint about the Zunzuneo program was that it was so ineffective in reaching Cubans - 40,000 in a nation of 11 million - that he only heard about it from a government supporter a few years back.

But he supports the goal of promoting democracy on the island.

"The U.S. government, and many democratic governments, have a moral debt with countries ruled by dictatorships," he said. "They talk about a debt with slavery, a debt with colonies, but not a debt with despotic countries."



Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said USAID's Cuba programs are not secret but have to keep a low profile to protect people in Cuba from government retaliation.

While bags of U.S. food sent to Haiti carry a U.S. stamp, Ros-Lehtinen said, a U.S. government program that sends books to independent libraries in Cuba does not put U.S. stamps on the books.

What's more, the objective is not to change the Cuban government, she added in an interview with El Nuevo Herald, "but to provide information to an oppressed people."

"And we will keep doing these programs," she vowed. "We are trying every which way to penetrate Cuba's hold on information, to foster a hunger for democracy. But in no way are we calling for regime change."
​

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/04/...aises-question.html?sp=/99/117/#storylink=cpy

 

[QueEx]

US to restore relations with Cuba
​

McClatchy Washington Bureau
By Lesley Clark
December 17, 2014


The U.S. will restore diplomatic relations with Cuba and expand travel and trade in the most sweeping changes to U.S.-Cuba policy in 50 years after President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro agreed to the outlines of a deal that freed American contractor Alan Gross and sent three Cubans convicted of spying back to Cuba.

"We will end an outdated approach that has failed to advance our interests,” Obama said in remarks from the White House. “These 50 years have shown isolation does not work, it’s time for a new approach.”

The deal – which was reached with the involvement of Pope Francis -- also involved the release of a U.S. intelligence “asset” who had been imprisoned for nearly 20 years, Obama said.

As a result, the U.S. will look at setting up an embassy in Havana – it severed contact in 1961 -- and possibly removing Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism. And it will loosen restrictions on travel and trade with the country, making it easier for more Americans to travel there, and allowing them to bring back as much as $400, including $100 in alcohol and tobacco.

The moves are a repudiation of the hands-off stance and economic stranglehold the U.S. has employed against Cuba since Fidel Castro came to power in the 1960 – a policy the White House said “had failed to advance our interests.’

The moves stop short of lifting the economic embargo against Cuba – which only Congress can do – but Obama said he “looked forward” to talking with Congress about the possibility.

The move was immediately condemned by some of the staunchest anti Castro lawmakers from South Florida as a paean to the Cuban regime, even as Obama insisted he would continue to press Cuba on democracy and human rights.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called the decision to relax U.S. restrictions, “the latest in a long line of failed attempts by President Obama to appease rogue regimes at all cost.”

Rubio said he was pleased that Gross was released, but said the Castro family still controls Cuban economy and “all levers of power” and that loosening restrictions would only benefit the regime.

Rubio said he plans to use his role as incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee “to make every effort to block this dangerous and desperate attempt by the president to burnish his legacy at the Cuban people’s expense.”

Obama said spoke with Raul Castro on Tuesday and “made clear my strong belief” that the Cuban government continues to prevent its people independence. But he said it is time to scrap a U.S. policy that isn’t working.

“I don’t expect a transformation of Cuban society overnight, but I’m convinced with engagement we can more effectively stand up for our values,” he said.

Obama had taken office hoping to improve relations with Cuba, but Gross’s imprisonment was a major stumbling block.

But officials said in talks that began in the spring of 2013 -- and were held in Canada and at the Vatican – the two governments agreed to a swap that involved today’s return of three Cubans who were convicted in 2001 in Miami on charges including conspiracy and failure to register as foreign agents.

In exchange, Cuba released an unidentified intelligence asset who Obama said was “responsible for some of most important intelligence and counter intelligence prosecutions the U.S. has been able to pursue,” including the conviction of the three Cuban spies, as well as Ana Belen Montes, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and Walter Kendall Myers, a former State Department employee, who, along with his wife, Gwendolyn, was convicted of spying for Cuba in 2010.

White House officials insisted Gross, who was arrested in 2009, was not part of the prisoner swap, but was released on humanitarian grounds. The Cuban government has also agreed to release 53 prisoners, some of whom the White House considers political prisoners,

White House officials said normalizing relations could help both countries coordinate on issues, including response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and counter terrorism.

The White House said the new steps will include: asking Secretary of State John Kerry to review Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.
​

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/12/...with-cuba.html?sp=/99/100/&rh=1#storylink=cpy

 

[QueEx]

<iframe width="780" height="1500" src="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-30755179" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[QueEx]

The Monitor's View

Obama's Cuban invasion


In opening official ties with Cuba, President Obama made sure to focus
on the Cuban people more than the Castro regime. Globalization, such
as the Internet, has empowered individuals, making governments less
important to the forces of change.

When President Obama announced Dec. 17 that the United States would normalize ties
with Cuba, his first words were not about the Castro regime. Rather he said the US was
altering its relationship with the Cuban people. That point reflects how, in today’s
globalized world, people more than governments are driving change.

The big surprise in the announcement is not about the new official ties after more than
half a century. Rather, it is that Cuba and the US took so long to catch up with the global
changes that have made their frozen relations seem so archaic.

Long gone are the 20th-century constructs that kept them apart: the cold war, anti-
colonialism, anti-US rhetoric in Latin America, Marxism, and big-power positioning of
nuclear missiles. A younger generation of Cuban-Americans in Florida has shifted views
on the US embargo. Few in Cuba believe in communism.

The two nations now need to be bound by those things that are uniting the world rather
than the things of the past that have kept them apart.

Governments matter less today as more individuals are empowered by the rapid spread of ideas,
travel, and telecommunications. Nongovernmental groups, known as civil society, act as a source
of change more than government does.

That is why Mr. Obama insisted Cuba’s activists have a seat at the table when Cuba is finally
allowed to attend the Summit of the Americas this April. Civil society and citizens, not just
leaders, “are shaping our future,” the president said.

Obama is banking on a flood of private investment and travel to move Cuba away from its dicta
torial, anti-market ways. And he has authorized better Internet connections to the island nation.

As more people around the world seek to be online, governments are being forced to change the way
they deal with each other. People engagement rather than a trade embargo is a better tactic for
change when people in the 21st century have so many more tools that can reach across borders.

The arc of history in recent centuries has been toward more individual freedom. But the ways
to promote freedom must change as freedom itself creates better means to reach people who are less
free. The US recognition of Cuba is not really of its regime but of its people’s potential.



http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2014/1217/Obama-s-Cuban-invasion

 

[QueEx]

 

[QueEx]

Senators introduce bill to lift embargo,
open trade with Cuba​

Four gantry cranes loom over the newly built container terminal at the Port of Mariel, Cuba, on Dec.
23, 2014. Cuba hopes the port will become the biggest in the Caribbean in terms of volume of cargo.​

WASHINGTON — In another step in the process to thaw relations with Cuba, a group of lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation to lift the trade embargo that has existed with the country for decades.

The legislation comes two months after the White House announced its plans to normalize relations with Cuba, and two weeks after a group of lawmakers introduced legislation to relax travel restriction between the U.S. and Cuba.

The opening to Cuba is a complicated, multipronged effort – part of which Congress can influence, part of which the administration can, and has, implemented on its own authority. The December announcement by the White House already loosened some travel and financial restrictions. But the major controls on travel and trade are much stronger and reversing them would require congressional action.

The legislation was introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who was joined by Sens. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.; Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.; Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; and Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

According to its sponsors, the bill would eliminate legal barriers to Americans doing business in Cuba and “pave the way for new economic opportunities for American businesses and farmers.” If passed, it would repeal laws on the books that block Americans from doing business in Cuba; it would not repeal laws addressing human rights or property claims against the Cuban government.

Said Klobuchar in a statement: “It’s time to the turn the page on our Cuba policy. Fifty years of the embargo have not secured our interests in Cuba and have disadvantaged American businesses by restricting commerce with a market of 11 million people just 90 miles from our shores.”

The legislation is being pushed by farm interests, including the U.S. Agriculture Coalition for Cuba.

As for its chances for success, experts on the Cuban policy say that overturning the embargo will be difficult – although a coalition of Democrats, libertarian Republicans and farm state lawmakers from both parties could eventually make it happen.

However, asked in a recent interview with the CBS News program “60 Minutes” whether the trade embargo would stay in place, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, “I would think so.”

Email: cadams@mcclatchydc.com. Twitter: @CAdamsMcClatchy
​

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/02/12/256427/senators-introduce-bill-to-lift.html#storylink=cpy

 

[SPECTRE1]

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/74v4U1zUQD4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This is what Cuba will have to be dealing with, once they let their guard down.



<iframe width="640" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Hzyiv3r1VI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here will be the Cuban plotters from the military with their satellite phones supplied by the CIA.

 

[QueEx]

Cuba and U.S. agree
to open embassies July 20​

Obama made the announcement at the White House

Congress has been notified

Sticking point had been diplomatic travel

When the U.S.-Cuba agreement on embassies goes into effect later this month, the Cuban flag will be raised in
front of what now is the Cuban Interests Section in Washington | Jacquelyn Martin - AP ​

Casting aside more than a half century of hostilities, President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that the United States and Cuba would restore full diplomatic relations and open respective embassies on July 20.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, he called the rapprochement “a historic step forward in our efforts to normalize relations with the Cuban government and people, and begin a new chapter with our neighbors in the Americas.”

The president said Secretary of State John Kerry would soon travel to Havana to “proudly raise the U.S. flag over our embassy.” No date has been set yet for the ceremony marking the opening of the embassy.

Kerry, who was in Vienna for talks about Iran’s nuclear program, said he was looking forward to the Havana trip because it would officially mark the end of a Cuba “policy that didn’t work and had been in place for far too long.”

On Wednesday, as required, a 15-day notification of the plan to change the status of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana to an American Embassy was sent to Congress, but a senior State Department official said the resumption of diplomatic ties wouldn’t start until five days after that.

The United States and Cuba held four rounds of talks — two in Havana and two in Washington — to reach agreement on the terms for opening embassies and renewing diplomatic ties after Obama and Cuban leader Raúl Castro jointly announced on Dec. 17 that the two countries planned to work toward normalization.

Obama said that since then he was seen “enormous enthusiasm for this new approach.”

There was no immediate reaction from the Cuban government, but a diplomat from the U.S. Interests Section in Havana met with acting Foreign Minister Marcelino Medina Wednesday morning to deliver a letter from Obama about the opening of the embassies and resumption of diplomatic ties. Castro conveyed a similar letter to Obama confirming the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the United States.




Among the final sticking points had been the United States’ desire for its diplomats to travel freely throughout Cuba to talk with a wide variety of Cubans. The Cuban government agreed to allow such travel but said that U.S. diplomats must inform the Ministry of Foreign Relations (Minrex) 24 hours in advance of such travel.

The United States broke off relations with Cuba on Jan. 3, 1961 after the relationship between the two countries had steadily deteriorated since the 1959 Cuban revolution. The day before, Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa, speaking before the U.N. Security Council, said the United States was planning to invade Cuba and was engaging in espionage from its embassy in Havana.

The invasion didn’t actually come until April of that year when the CIA-sponsored Brigade 2506 failed in its attempt to invade Cuba and topple the Castro government. In 1960, the United States began phasing in the trade embargo against Cuba.

Noting that the U.S. shuttered its embassy at the height of the Cold War, Obama said, “I don’t think anyone expected it would be more than a half a century before it reopened.”




Opening the embassies and renewing diplomatic ties are just the beginning steps in a long process of normalization that includes issues both big and small that separate the two countries that are only 90 miles apart.

Among the major issues still to be dealt with are the embargo, compensation for properties taken from U.S. citizens after the revolution, the U.S. base at Guantanamo, migration policy and the return of U.S. criminals who have been given safe harbor in Cuba.

“While there are still many issues to be resolved in the full normalization of relations between the two countries and its peoples, today’s announcement gives us another reason to be optimistic,” the Cuba Study Group, which supports engagement with Cuba, said in a statement. “It is further evidence that engagement rather than isolation is the best way to advance U.S. interests and the interests of the Cuban people.”

In Havana, retired Cuban diplomat Carlos Alzugaray said there are so many issues between the two countries that “you need a very tall building, a 50-story building’’ to house them all. “But we have to construct that building on very shaky ground — so the foundations have to be very strong.”

Alzugaray, who wrote his first paper advocating normalization of relations with the United States in 1999, said that he didn’t think a U.S. flag flying above an American Embassy in Havana was anything that he would see in his lifetime.

Now his hope is for “a civilized relationship where both countries respect each other.”

Dany Hernandez, 39, a former baseball player who now runs two bed-and-breakfast properties in Havana, said he started learning Russian when he was in elementary school and was taught the United States was the enemy. “That’s crazy. From my point of view, it’s not true,” he said. “I think people are very content with the opening. I’m an optimist.”

On her Twitter account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now a Democratic presidential hopeful, wrote: “New US Embassy in Havana helps us engage Cuban people & build on efforts to support positive change. Good step for US & Cuban people.”’

But former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said he opposes opening a Havana embassy.

“The real test of the Obama administration’s rapprochement with the Castro regime in Cuba is not whether President Obama’s legacy is burnished with dubious diplomatic achievements and photo-ops, but whether improved relations between Havana and Washington advance the cause of human rights and freedom for the Cuban people,” he said. “The ongoing detention of dissidents and continued human rights abuses suggest the administration’s policy is failing this test.”

Although many in the United States hailed the embassy announcement as long overdue and recent polls have shown the majority of Americans support better relations with Cuba, critics say the United States has made too many concessions in its effort to begin a new chapter in its relationship with Cuba.

South Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo was among those. “This deplorable move adds to the long list of unilateral concessions the Cuban government has received from the Obama Administration as a reward for cruelly holding an American hostage for five years.”

He was referring to USAID subcontractor Alan Gross, who was convicted of smuggling military-grade telecommunications equipment into Cuba. The new U.S.-Cuba relationship was an outgrowth of secret negotiations between the United States and Cuba that began in mid-2013 to free Gross and three Cuban spies who were serving time in U.S. jails.

On Dec. 17, Cuba freed Gross and the United States swapped the three spies for a CIA agent who had been imprisoned in Cuba. The United States also announced a limited commercial opening toward Cuba that would allow U.S. companies to trade with private Cuban entrepreneurs and U.S. telecom and Internet companies to try to strike deals with the Cuban government to improve Internet connectivity and telecommunications on the island.

South Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen called opening an American Embassy “just another trivial attempt for President Obama to go legacy shopping” and said it did “nothing to help the Cuban people.”​

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article25983913.html#storylink=cpy

 

[QueEx]

Obama tells Cubans he aims to ‘bury’ Cold War rivalry

U.S. President Barack Obama waves as he arrives to deliver a speech at the Gran Teatro in Havana, Cuba

MSNBC
March 22, 2016.
By Jon Schuppe


Comparing the United States and Cuba to estranged brothers, President Obama said he was hopeful that the two countries will someday be fully reunited — and be free of a decades-old economic embargo — despite their long history of differences and disagreements.

“I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” Obama said in an unprecedented speech to the people of Cuba, delivered at the El Gran Teatro de Havana and broadcast on the communist island nation’s state-run television.

The live audience applauded, and when it died down, he added: “I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people.”

The president delivered the speech on the last day of a historic three-day visit to Cuba, where he has pressed the Castro regime to speed up economic reforms and improve its human rights record. Obama’s counterpart, Raul Castro, brother of former president Fidel Castro, has in turn said full normalization of relations with his country depends on Congress lifting an economic embargo that dates to the early years of the Cold War and closing down a U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay. Raul Castro has also said the United States should not criticize Cuba’s human rights record when it has its own long history of racial and economic inequality — and its holding of terror suspects indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay.

RELATED: Cuba Welcomes Obama for Historic Presidential Trip

Later on Tuesday, Obama and Castro are scheduled to attend a baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team, a goodwill matchup that marks the first time in nearly 20 years that a Major League club has visited Cuba.

Peppering his speech with Spanish phrases, Obama pointed out the two countries’ many similarities, starting with their having been “built in part by slaves from Africa” and the many citizens who can trace their ancestry to slaves or slave owners. The two countries also share literary, artistic and musical cross currents, he said. And they share a national pastime in baseball.

One day, he said, “Our grandchildren will look back at this period of isolation as just an aberration.”

But Obama also listed key issues that keep the Cuba and America apart: a one party political system versus multi-party democracy, a socialist-based economy versus capitalism, and the emphasis on the state’s rights versus an emphasis on individual rights.

RELATED: Tense Cuban leader Raul Castro on political prisoners: Give me their names!

In a reference to the Castro regime’s crackdown on dissidents and political opponents, Obama made it clear that he believed that an American system focused on individual liberties and the freedoms to criticize government belonged everywhere.

“Not everyone agrees with me on this. Not everyone agrees with American people on this. But I believe those human rights are universal,” Obama said.

Despite those differences, Obama said, he and Cuban President Raul Castro have taken small steps, including loosening of travel bans and making it easier for people to open private businesses, toward normalizing relations.

But the Cold War-era economic embargo — enacted after a 1959 communist revolution put Cuba on the side of the Soviets — still exists, and can’t be lifted without the agreement of Congress, which has resisted such a move.

Addressing critics who’ve asked why he was pushing for changes now, Obama said: “There is one simple answer. What the U.S. was doing was not working. We have to have the courage to acknowledge that the policy of isolation designed for the Cold War made little sense in the 21st century. The embargo is only hurting the Cuban people instead of helping them.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com.


SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/obama-tells-cubans-he-aims-bury-cold-war-rivalry


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[QueEx]

Photographer: Carlos Barria
Location: Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
Reuters / Wednesday, March 23, 2016

President Barack Obama dances tango during a state dinner hosted by Argentina's President Mauricio Macri at the Centro Cultural Kirchner as part of President Obama's two-day visit to Argentina, in Buenos Aires March 23, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

 

[QueEx]

A Snapshot of Cuba's Underground Private Sector
Apr 20, 2016 |

Video by Alex Mallis, Bryan Chang, and Allison Pottasch
Ché Alejandro, a self-described “neo-hippie communist,” owns a tattoo shop in Havana, Cuba. Raul
Castro began to loosen restrictions on private business ownership five years ago, but Alejandro’s
shop still isn’t legal—he finds himself toeing the line in Cuba’s nascent free-market economy. This short
documentary by Alex Mallis, Bryan Chang, and Allison Pottasch, The New Che of La Havana, is a smart profile
of the trials of being an illicit business owner and free spirit in contemporary Cuba.

Author: Nadine Ajaka

 

[QueEx]

Fidel Castro, Cuban dictator, dies at 90

Kevin Sullivan and J.Y. Smith
Obituaries
November 26 at 12:40 AM



1961 Cuban leader Fidel Castro, sits inside a tank near Playa Giron, Cuba, during the Bay of Pigs
invasion in this file photo provided by Granma, the Cuban government newspaper. President
John F. Kennedy wanted increasing acts of sabotage against Cuba in the days leading to the
Cuban missile crisis, according to declassified documents revealed in 2001. Raul Corrales/
Canadian Press Photo via AP


Fidel Castro, whose Cuban revolution turned his Caribbean island into a potent symbol of the world’s greatest ideological and economic divides of the 20th century, has died, Cuban state media announced late Friday. He was 90.

The death was announced on Cuban state TV by Castro’s younger brother, Raúl, who succeeded his sibling years ago as the country’s leader.

The son of a prosperous sugar planter, Mr. Castro took power in Cuba on New Year’s Day 1959 promising to share his nation’s wealth with its poorest citizens, who had suffered under the corrupt quarter-century dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Mr. Castro, a romantic figure in olive-drab fatigues and combat boots, chomping monstrous cigars through a bushy black beard, became a spiritual beacon for the world’s political far left.

Fidel Castro, bearded Cuban leader, has a shipboard conference with Capt. Alfred Boerum, skipper of the mercy ship African Pilot, and E. Barrett Prettyman
Jr., right, after the boat docked in Havana Dec. 27, 1962. (Joe McGowan Jr./AP)


To his legion of followers, Mr. Castro was a hero who demanded a fair deal for the world’s poor and wasn’t afraid to point his pistol at the powerful to get it. His admirers said he educated, fed and provided health care to his own people, as well as to the poor in other countries, more fairly and generously than the world’s wealthy nations, most notably what he called the “Colossus to the North.”

But one of the world’s longest-serving heads of state was as loathed as he was loved. He was among the world’s most repressive leaders, a self-appointed president-for-life who banned free speech, freedom of assembly and a free press and executed or jailed thousands of political opponents.

He abolished Christmas as an official holiday for nearly 30 years. While he dispatched Cuban-educated doctors and Cuban-developed vaccines to the poorest corners of Latin America, Cubans in central Havana found pharmacy shelves empty of medicine, and many lived in apartments in which they used buckets in their kitchens as toilets.

Mr. Castro’s long reign began to unravel July 31, 2006, when he temporarily transferred power to his 75-year-old brother, Raúl, after undergoing what he described as intestinal surgery (the precise nature of Mr. Castro’s health problems was an official state secret). The transfer of power came just weeks before Mr. Castro’s 80th birthday on Aug. 13, and Mr. Castro was not seen in public again for nearly four years.

He formally resigned on Feb. 19, 2008, in a statement read on national television by a spokesman, ending his 49-year reign and giving George W. Bush the distinction of being the first U.S. president to outlast Mr. Castro in power.

The National Assembly officially — and unanimously — named Raúl Castro, the longtime head of the Cuban armed forces, as Cuba’s new president. The move was seen as deeply anti-climactic, an Earth-shaking political transition that registered barely a tremor, since Mr. Castro had gently stage-managed the shift to his brother for almost two years.

With almost theatrical relish, Mr. Castro taunted 10 successive U.S. presidents, who viewed the Cuban leader variously as a potential courier of Armageddon, a blow-hard nuisance, a dangerous dictator, a fomenter of revolution around Latin America, a serial human rights abuser or an irrelevant sideshow who somehow hung on after the collapse of communism almost everywhere else.

All of them maintained a strict trade embargo against the island nation, which Bush, in particular, vigorously tightened and enforced.

By the time President Obama, the first U.S. leader elected in the post-Fidel era, announced efforts to re-establish full diplomatic relations with Havana in December 2014, Fidel Castro had virtually vanished from public life. U.S. officials said he played no role in the behind-the scenes negotiations with the Obama administration. As Raúl Castro announced his new deal with Washington to the Cuban people, his older brother was apparently too ill to make any public appearances or statements.

Tweaking the “imperialists” was always a Fidel Castro passion. He built an enormous public demonstration space — complete with stage lighting and sound — outside the U.S. diplomatic mission on the Malecon, Havana’s main seaside boulevard. There, he regularly led anti-American rallies and delivered the lengthy speeches for which he was famous.

He was a particular thorn to President John F. Kennedy, whose clumsy Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961 by a ragtag group of CIA-trained fighters was a humiliating low point of his presidency.

o his benefactors in the Kremlin during the height of the Cold War, Mr. Castro was the useful commander of a communist citadel 90 miles south of the United States. That point was drawn in terrifyingly stark terms during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Mr. Castro allowed the Soviets to base on his soil missiles that could carry nuclear warheads to Washington or New York in minutes. The resulting showdown between Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.

Unlike the world’s few remaining communist leaders, Mr. Castro did not create monuments to himself or lend his name to streets and buildings. Instead, he erected billboards carrying patriotic slogans of the revolution: “We will overcome!” “Motherland or death!”

Under Mr. Castro, Havana became something of a Marxist Disneyland — a shiny, happy veneer over something much uglier.

Mr. Castro personally ordered the restoration of Old Havana, an architectural gem where tourists can savor $300 boxes of Cuban cigars, some of the world’s best music and sweet Havana Club rum — the proceeds of which went to Mr. Castro’s revolution. But just a block behind the restored facades, impoverished Cubans lived in crumbling homes on rationed food. Teenage prostitutes in tight spandex openly offered their services to tourists.

While many Cubans expressed genuine and deep loyalty to Fidel — he was never called “Castro” in his homeland — others clearly feared a leader who imprisoned tens of thousands of his enemies over the years, often on little more than a whim.

Many Cubans wouldn’t criticize him for fear of being overheard by government informants, who lived on practically every block. To indicate Mr. Castro, they would tug on an imaginary beard. Still more accepted Mr. Castro as a simple fact, like the tropical humidity — what good would it do to complain?

The most striking condemnation came from Cubans who fled Mr. Castro’s rule by the thousands every year. The wealthier paid for speed-boat trips across the Florida Straits, while the poorest attempted the dangerous trip in rickety boats — and, on a couple of occasions, one of Cuba’s vintage 1950s American-made cars and trucks, refitted to float by Cubans who had become highly skilled at making do with materials at hand.

sources.This content is paid for by an advertiser and published by WP BrandStudio. The Washington Post newsroom was not involved in the creation of this content. Learn more about WP BrandStudio.

In the later years of his presidency, and his life, Mr. Castro enjoyed a resurgence in popularity across much of Latin America, fueled in part by the election of several leaders who were inspired by Castro’s staunch anti-Americanism.

In particular, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela viewed Mr. Castro as a political beacon and father figure to the Latin American left. Sweetheart oil deals from Chávez, until his death in March 2013, were key to Cuba’s ability to survive in Castro’s last years as its state-dominated economy sputtered.

Toward the end of his time in office, Mr. Castro acted more like a man intent on purifying his legacy, returning his revolution to its ideological core, reversing economic openings and stepping up attacks on political dissent. He imprisoned Cubans whose crimes were as simple as passing out books on democracy.

Raúl Castro embarked on a plan of economic liberalization that, to date, has been more symbolic than substantial, with private enterprise permitted in a few small areas, such as food service and repair shops. But the military-led government still controls as much as 80 percent of the economy.

The inauguration of President Obama in January 2009 seemed to portend a shift in relations with Cuba. Two weeks after the inauguration, Mr. Castro, who had barely been seen in public since his surgery in 2006, surfaced in one of his newer incarnations — blogger — to deliver a generally welcoming message to Obama.

He held out what appeared to be at least a grudging olive branch, telling Obama that, “being born of a Kenyan Muslim father and a white American Christian deserves special merit in the context of U.S. society and I am the first to recognize that.”


Obama promised a “new beginning” with Cuba and eased some restrictions on remittances to Cuba from family members, as well as academic and cultural exchanges. But U.S. relations with Cuba did not change substantially until the December 2014 announcement of renewed diplomatic ties.

Mr. Castro slowed noticeably in his final years. He had long ago given up cigars and rum, and his beard faded from thick and black to scraggly and thunderstorm gray. In June 2001, he appeared to faint while giving one of his weekly Saturday speeches; then, in October 2004, he fell and broke a kneecap and an arm. Those events were the first time most Cubans had seen physical weakness from Mr. Castro. From that point on, his public appearances became more infrequent and stopped altogether in 2006.

Mr. Castro’s low profile intensified speculation about the “biological solution” that many Cuban exiles in Miami and other Castro foes had so long hoped for. But as pundits and Cuba experts repeatedly and wrongly predicted his imminent demise, Mr. Castro would answer by appearing in photographs with visiting heads of state, or with blog posts, essays or other messages reminding his people that his detractors had it wrong again.

David Scott Palmer, a Cuba scholar and professor at Boston University, said in a 2009 interview that Mr. Castro seemed to be preparing his country for his eventual death and “skillfully managing his own departure.”

Mr. Castro returned to the public eye in July 2010. His trademark fatigues now traded for an old-man’s track-suit, he appeared on live Cuban television, looking thinner and weak. Rather than address Cuba’s deepening economic woes, he gave what amounted to a lecture to the United States on the dangers of nuclear confrontation with Iran and on the Korean Peninsula. His address, aimed at world leaders more than ordinary Cubans, seemed designed to mainly to burnish his legacy and cement his status as elder statesman.

He was clearly entering his twilight, speaking haltingly and wandering. In The Washington Post, the Cuban writer Yoani Sánchez described the reaction of Cubans at seeing the once-invincible Mr. Castro as a “stuttering old man with quivering hands.”

“We had already started to remember him as something from the past, which was a noble way to forget him,” she wrote in August 2010. “In recent weeks, he who was once called The One, the Horse or simply He, has been presented to us stripped of his captivating charisma. Although he is once again in the news, it has been confirmed: Fidel Castro, fortunately, will never return.”

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born at Las Manacas, his family’s plantation in the village of Biran in eastern Cuba’s Oriente province, on Aug. 13, 1926.

His father, Angel Castro, was born in Spain and went to Cuba as a soldier in the Spanish army. He became a laborer on a railway owned by the United Fruit Co. Soon he was clearing land for himself in the wilds of Oriente and growing sugar cane, which he sold to the fruit company. In time, Las Manacas comprised 26,000 acres, of which almost 2,000 were owned by the elder Castro.

His son Fidel was well off, but nowhere near as wealthy as some of the boys at the schools to which he was sent, including the prestigious Colegio de Belen, a Jesuit school in Havana.

Behind his back, he was sometimes called guajiro, or peasant. In his authoritative 1986 biography of Mr. Castro, author Tad Szulc quotes this assessment from Enrique Ovares, an old Castro friend: “I think that the worst damage Fidel’s parents did him was to put him in a school of wealthy boys without Fidel being really rich . . . and more than that without having a social position. . . . I think that this influenced him and he had hatred against society people and moneyed people.”

In 1945, Fidel Castro entered the University of Havana. Apparently applying his first-hand experience of social and economic inequality, he immersed himself in the legacy of Cuba’s bygone revolutionaries.

In a country that had often tumultuous relations with the United States since the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor sparked the Spanish-American War, Mr. Castro concluded that casting off the hegemony of the United States was more important than mere prosperity.

He joined the Insurrectional Revolutionary Union, and carried a pistol. In 1947, he signed up for an aborted expedition to free the Dominican Republic from the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In 1948, he went to Colombia to protest a meeting of the Pan-American Union, which was reorganizing into the Organization of American States.

Mr. Castro earned his law degree at the University of Havana and set up a practice in the city in 1950. Two years later, he ran for a seat in the Cuban congress on the ticket of the Ortodoxo Party, a reform group. Mr. Castro’s campaign was cut short on March 10, 1952, when Batista staged a coup and retook the presidency.

Even as a young man, Mr. Castro showed a remarkable ability to persuade people to join him in seemingly impossible tasks — such as his wild scheme to take over the army’s Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.

Mr. Castro’s plan was to distribute arms from the barracks to the people and overthrow Batista. Mr. Castro was not deterred by the fact that the garrison numbered more than 1,000 soldiers and that he fielded only about 120 followers.

The July 26, 1953, assault went off with almost comic mismanagement. The contingent with most of the arms got lost in the city’s old quarter, and Mr. Castro’s men rushed into what they thought was an arsenal, only to discover that it was a barbershop. Having fired not a single shot himself, Mr. Castro called a retreat. He and most of the others were captured.

Through the intercession of a bishop who was a friend of his father, he was spared immediate execution and put on trial. Although the court proceeding was held in secret, it gave Mr. Castro, who acted as his own attorney, the chance to make what became the most famous speech of his life. Smuggled out of prison, it concluded with the words that became known to generations of Cuban schoolchildren: “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”

Mr. Castro was sentenced to 15 years but was released after less than two under an amnesty declared by Batista. He then moved to Mexico City, where he continued his work with a group calling itself the 26th of July Movement, commemorating what became known as the opening salvo of the Cuban revolution.

The Moncada debacle and its aftermath also ended Mr. Castro’s first marriage. In October 1948, he had married Mirta Diaz-Balart, the daughter of a well-to-do family with close ties to Batista and U.S. business interests. In 1949, they had a son — Fidel Felix Castro Diaz-Balart, known as Fidelito.

On Dec. 2, 1956, Mr. Castro and 81 followers returned to Cuba from Mexico aboard a second-hand yacht called “Granma,” whose name was later adopted by the Communist Party newspaper in Cuba. All but 12 in the landing party were killed or captured almost immediately. Mr. Castro, his brother Raúl and an Argentine physician, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, escaped into the mountains and began organizing a guerrilla army.

In the summer of 1958, Batista launched a major offensive against Mr. Castro’s ragtag group. When it failed, it was clear that Batista’s days in power were numbered. But his announcement to a few close colleagues at a New Year’s Eve party in 1958 that he was leaving the country came as a complete surprise. Mr. Castro and his followers took control of Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959.

He drew support from many intellectuals during the early years of his rule. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, a Castro hero and longtime resident of Cuba; authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Garcia Márquez; and Bob Dylan, the troubadour of the American counterculture.

When Mr. Castro took power, he preached democracy and reform. He sought to assuage his critics, insisting that he was not a communist. A wary United States cautiously offered economic aid, which Mr. Castro refused. Economic and political relations grew increasingly more difficult, particularly as his executions of opponents came to light. And within two years, Mr. Castro had expropriated $1.8 billion in U.S. property without compensation and turned Cuba into a bastion of Marxism-Leninism.

In May 1960, Cuba established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which was soon supplying most of the island’s petroleum needs (and a constant flow of weapons and other military hardware). The government nationalized U.S. and British oil refineries and U.S.-owned banks. In October, the U.S. government imposed an embargo on all trade with the island except for food and medicine.

On Jan. 3, 1961, diplomatic relations with the United States were broken. This set the stage for one of Mr. Castro’s greatest triumphs, the defeat of the CIA-organized invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, which U.S. intelligence officials thought would set off a popular revolt against Castro.

The invasion by about 1,350 CIA-trained fighters was put down by Mr. Castro’s forces, and about 1,200 of the invaders were captured.

The following year, Mr. Castro abetted the nuclear confrontation between Washington and Moscow, which ended when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw his missiles and promised not to use Cuba as a base for offensive weapons. In return, the United States pledged not to invade Cuba and to remove missiles it had stationed in Turkey.

The U.S. promise to forgo force after the Cuban Missile Crisis was a major victory for Mr. Castro, but for years he lived under the threat of various CIA assassination plots.


Mr. Castro cited U.S. threats to justify a massive military buildup, and he tried to export his revolution to countries across Latin America, including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia (Guevara was killed leading an uprising in Bolivia in 1967).

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Castro sent thousands of troops to wars in Angola and Ethiopia. In addition, Cuban military training missions and thousands of physicians and teachers operated in more than a dozen other countries, from West Africa to North Korea.

In the early 1980s, he gave economic and military assistance to the leftist government of Grenada. President Ronald Reagan argued that an airport under construction on the island would be used to support communists in Central America and, in 1983, ordered an invasion. Nineteen Americans and 24 Cuban soldiers were killed, the only time that U.S. and Cuban troops fought each other.

One of Mr. Castro’s first economic acts in 1959 was to start an industrialization program. Cubans would make their own steel, and the country would end its dependence on sugar and tobacco. He promised that the standard of living would rise faster than anywhere else in the world. The plans failed. Food rationing began in 1961.

In 1968, Mr. Castro ordered a “revolutionary offensive” in which 50,000 small businesses were nationalized and the economy ground to a virtual halt. He abolished Christmas as a national holiday in 1969, saying it interfered with the sugar harvest.

Mr. Castro’s Cuba enjoyed better times in the 1980s thanks to huge subsidies from Moscow, which sent cars, food, fuel and fertilizer to keep the island’s economy afloat. But the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse meant calamity for Cuba.


In 1990, Mr. Castro called for austerity measures he described as a “special period in time of peace.” Rationing was increased. As industrial enterprises cut back or shut down, workers were shifted to agriculture.

At the same time, Mr. Castro opened the door a crack to private enterprise. He legalized the use of U.S. dollars in Cuba. Small businesses flourished on the streets of Havana, with merchants selling car parts, cigars and more. While technically illegal, private businesses gave unemployed Cubans a bit of income. Faced with grim economic times, Mr. Castro appeared to tolerate a certain level of rule-bending.

But in 1995, Mr. Castro said that although he was willing to include “unquestionable elements of capitalism” in the Cuban system, that didn’t mean giving up state control of the economy or socialist ideology.

Later Mr. Castro started rolling back economic reforms. By 2006, the government was arresting people who used their cars or bicycles as taxis and even shutting down some of Havana’s most popular restaurants, eateries in private homes known as paladares, that had begun in the early 1990s with approval of the government.

The successes of Mr. Castro’s Cuba included universal health care and the near-eradication of illiteracy. He built thousands of classrooms in rural areas and increased the literacy rate to more than 95 percent. There were more physicians and hospital beds per capita in Cuba than in the United States.

But Mr. Castro’s Cuba remained a place of repression and fear. AIDS patients were confined to sanitariums. Artists and writers were forced to join an official union and told that their work must support the revolution.

The government conducted surveillance on anyone suspected of dissent. In 1965, Mr. Castro admitted to holding 20,000 political prisoners. Some foreign observers thought the number might be twice that. Numerous historians and human rights groups have concluded that Mr. Castro’s government carried out thousands of political executions.

Hundreds of thousands of Cubans simply left, most of them for the United States, flooding mainly into Florida and creating a politically influential bloc of anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Miami. At first, travel was legal, but Mr. Castro soon imposed restrictions.

In April 1980, Mr. Castro opened the port of Mariel to any Cuban wishing to leave. More than 125,000 people, branded as “worms” and “scum” by Mr. Castro’s government, took advantage of the highly publicized “boatlift” before it was closed in October. Among those encouraged to leave were convicts, the mentally ill and other “antisocial” elements.


By 1994, economic conditions were so bad that riots in Havana were followed by another exodus. Thousands fled from Cuba’s beaches on makeshift rafts; many were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard.

In February 1996, the Cuban air force shot down two light planes belonging to an exile group in Miami that Havana claimed violated Cuban airspace. President Bill Clinton retaliated by signing the Helms-Burton Act, which tightened the embargo further.

With other countries, relations were on the upswing. When the United Nations convened for its 50th anniversary in 1995, the Cuban leader was a much-anticipated speaker.

In his address to the U.N. General Assembly, Mr. Castro made no mention of the United States but called for “a world without ruthless blockades that cause the death of men, women and children, youths and elders, like noiseless atom bombs.”


The speech lasted seven minutes and received more applause than Clinton’s.

Mr. Castro’s difficult relationship with the Catholic Church improved over the years. A former altar boy educated by Jesuits, Mr. Castro reinstated Christmas as an official holiday when Pope John Paul II visited in 1998. And he met with Pope Benedict XVI when he visited Havana in March 2012.

Mr. Castro also seemed energized by sparring with Washington over Elian Gonzalez, a young Cuban boy rescued at sea in 1999 after his mother and her boyfriend drowned trying to reach the United States. U.S. courts eventually ruled that the boy should be returned from Florida to his father in Cuba. The case became an embarrassing spectacle, but its conclusion handed Mr. Castro a huge symbolic victory.


The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States marked the beginning of new lows in U.S.-Cuba relations. Mr. Castro’s initial response to the attacks was remarkably conciliatory, and he expressed his “profound grief and sadness for the American people.” Cuban musicians donated blood for the attack victims, and Mr. Castro offered other humanitarian aid, which was ignored by the George W. Bush administration.

After Bush addressed Congress in late September and announced his “war on terrorism,” Mr. Castro changed tone. He said Bush’s call to arms could turn into a “struggle against ghosts they don’t know where to find.”

Mr. Castro’s anger at Bush and Washington grew as his years advanced, and so did his fury at his domestic critics. In 2003, he ordered the arrests of 75 human rights activists, independent journalists and other dissidents who were later convicted on charges of collaborating with U.S. diplomats to subvert the government. They were sentenced to terms of six to 28 years in prison. Many of the dissidents were in their 50s and 60s, and some were in poor health. The dissidents were freed in 2010 and 2011 through the intervention of the Catholic Church.

The arrests were denounced at the time by Oswaldo Paya, leader of the Varela Project , which gathered tens of thousands of petition signatures demanding a national referendum on free elections and other democratic openings in Cuba.

“This is a war against peace and against pacifists,” he said. Paya, who was routinely harassed by Castro’s police at his tiny Havana home, said in an April 2003 interview that Castro was using KGB-like tactics to silence dissent at a moment when the world was focused on the imminent U.S. war in Iraq.

Paya and a young activist were killed in a July 2012 car crash that Paya’s family and human rights groups allege was caused by Cuban government agents. In one of his last public comments, Mr. Castro wrote in Granma, the state-run newspaper, that questions raised about Paya’s death in a New York Times editorial were “slanderous and [a] cheap accusation.”

Mr. Castro obsessively guarded details of his private life. The names and photos of his family rarely appeared in the media, and Cubans were generally not even aware of where Mr. Castro lived.

Rumors about his private life abounded. From the 1980s until his death, he was reportedly married to Dalia Soto del Valle, with whom he had five children. But many accounts say the closest partner in his life was Celia Sanchez, who was with him from his days as a guerrilla in the mountains and died in 1980.

Mr. Castro was so secretive about his female companions that for decades Vilma Espin de Castro, a fellow revolutionary and Raúl’s wife, acted as his de-facto first lady.

addition to his son Fidel, survivors include a daughter, Alina Fernandez Revuelta, who defected to the United States, and a granddaughter, Alina Maria, whom Mr. Castro permitted to join her. Alina Fernandez Revuelta was the daughter of Naty Revuelta, a society beauty and former Castro mistress. None of his immediate offspring are involved in politics.

Two nephews of Mr. Castro’s ex-wife became Republican U.S. congressmen from Florida. Lincoln Diaz-Balart served from 1993 until his retirement in 2011, when he was succeeded by his younger brother, Mario Diaz-Balart.

Read more:

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SOURCE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...7bf3bc-b399-11e6-be1c-8cec35b1ad25_story.html



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[MASTERBAKER]

Khalif Nuriddin Occupy Democrats wins the internet today...well done.
Like · Reply · 425 · 1 hr
7 Replies · 14 mins

John Bryan Reid Castro laughed himself to death upon hearing who was elected. My humble opinion. "Hee hee hee! Ay dios, que idiotas! No puedo respirar!" Thud!
Like · Reply · 372 · 1 hr · Edited
20 Replies · 1 min

Phillip Dillard Fidel Castro outlasted 10 American Presidents & survived 638 assassination attempts. But couldn't stand Trump as the next American president
Like · Reply · 151 · 1 hr

Barry Adamson 638? Nice figure
Like · Reply · 1 · 55 mins

Diorio S. Vousden The man was 90 years old......lol
Like · Reply · 1 · 50 mins

Eryk Johnson Phillip, please take a few minutes to read through this petition. If you'd like to support it, please sign and share!

https://www.change.org/.../united-states-protect-and...

United States : Protect and…
change.org
Like · Reply · 48 mins · Edited

May Radakir 638 assassination attempts? Wow! Is that like 650 million new immigrants? Does it ever get to a point when you people start questioning these numbers and realize that some people are just full of

Like · Reply · 40 mins

Phillip Dillard More like do you people realize a joke?
Like · Reply · 9 · 36 mins

Jessica Burns No,he did survive that many attempts
Like · Reply · 8 mins

Diorio S. Vousden Yes we know you were joking chillax
Like · Reply · 4 mins

Phillip Dillard Was talking to May
Like · Reply · 1 min

Write a reply...

Claudia Jones ...and this is why the Cubans in America voted for Trump! They want America to be destroyed so Castro could die. Good job for your ungratefulness Cubans!
Like · Reply · 62 · 1 hr · Edited
13 Replies · 9 mins

Christa Borum Floyd Castro said he won't die until America is destroyed,well,I guess you knew when too die,Trump made it happen,along with some dumb asses.
Like · Reply · 24 · 55 mins
1 Reply

John Callaghan The loss of Mrs. Brady was too much for Fidel to take. He's been watching Brady Bunch reruns since Raul took the helm.... Marsh
...Marsha...Marsha!