Guest Post by Eric Peters
America may soon look a lot like Cuba – with lots of ancient cars on the road, kept on the road by determined owners who want nothing to do with the “advanced driver assistance” technology of new cars – or electric cars.
This is better than it sounds.
Continue reading “The Americano Cubano”
U.S.—After Bernie Sanders praised elements of Cuba’s totalitarian regime, the presidential candidate’s loyal supporters scrambled to cobble together makeshift rafts so they could paddle over to Cuba to experience the Communist island’s renowned literacy programs, medical care, and other social services.
Desperate refugees clung to anything that would float as they attempted to sail across the Gulf and get to the idyllic paradise of Cuba.
Guest Post by Joe Guzzardi
In December, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced that it had arrived at an agreement with the Cuban Baseball Federation (CBF) that would allow Cuban nationals to play in the MLB, but still return home without penalty at the season’s end. Cubans could sign directly with MLB franchises which would pay a fee to the CBF, aka the Communist Cuban government.
MLB argues that, among the agreement’s other advantages, Cuban players would no longer have to defect which often involved being smuggled or trafficked into countries from which they could then reach the U.S.
Continue reading “Proposed MLB-Cuba Deal Spells Trouble for U.S. Hopefuls”
Guest Post by Glenn Greenwald
NBC News and MSNBC specialize in repeating and disseminating what U.S intelligence officials tell them to say and then calling that servitude “reporting.” Those two networks really are the all-but-official outlets for CIA messaging. And this status has led their brightest on-air stars to broadcast a series of extremely consequential stories that turned out to be humiliatingly wrong.
This stenographic and highly jingoistic practice of mindlessly reciting the whispered claims of anonymous “intelligence officials” is what notoriously led the New York Times and other leading U.S. media outlets to deceive the country into believing Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz’s fairy tales about Iraqi WMDs and Jeffrey Goldberg’s tales about Saddam’s alliance with Al Qaeda.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev trade verbal threats over the future of Cuba. In the following years, Cuba became a dangerous focus in the Cold War competition between the United States and Russia.
Continue reading “THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Khrushchev and Eisenhower trade threats over Cuba – 1960”
The Bay of Pigs invasion begins when a CIA-financed and -trained group of Cuban refugees lands in Cuba and attempts to topple the communist government of Fidel Castro. The attack was an utter failure.
Continue reading “THIS DAY IN HISTORY – The Bay of Pigs invasion begins – 1961”
The American Conservative, December, 2007
On Havana’s malecón, the seawall that parallels the shore, the waves roll in and hit the sudden obstacle, sending towering explosions of bright white spray far into the air, occasionally soaking the unwary pedestrian. Across the highway that follows the malecón is a cheap open-air restaurant, the DiMar. A steady breeze from the sea pours across the tables. A tolerable shrimp cocktail, topped with mayonnaise, costs a few bucks. On a couple of evenings I drank a beer there, watching Cuba go by. It wasn’t what I had expected.
Unlike many gringo tourists, I was legal, having gotten a license from the Treasury Department. Without a license travel to Cuba is illegal under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. Why Cuba was my enemy wasn’t clear to me. Nor was it to the Cubans.
Continue reading “A Gringo Loose in Cuba: Notes on the World’s Most Useless Embargo”
Nostalgia seems to be very popular in Washington. While the neocons and Democratic Party hard-liners have succeeded in bringing back the Cold War with Russia, it looks like President Trump is determined to take us back to a replay of the Bay of Pigs!
In Miami on Friday, the president announced that he was slamming the door on one of President Obama’s few foreign policy successes: easing 50 years of US sanctions on Cuba. The nostalgia was so strong at Trump’s Friday speech that he even announced participants in the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in the audience!
President Trump said Friday that his new policy would be nothing short of “regime change” for Cuba. No easing of US sanctions on Cuba, he said, “until all political prisoners are freed, freedoms of assembly and expression are respected, all political parties are legalized, and free and internationally supervised elections are scheduled.”
Please do not speculate in the comments as to the identity of the author of this article.
Guest Post by an Anonymous Patriot of Truth
All specific information omitted in this article has been done in the interest of protecting the identity of the FBI’s cooperating witness.
In 1999, during President Clinton’s administration, the FBI was investigating a case where the Cuban government was directly involved in drug trafficking. It definitely was, and the ring leader was Cuban General Ramiro Valdes Menendez, a “Hero of the Cuban Revolution,” a loyal ally of Fidel Castro since 1953 when he was a member of Castro’s insurgents who attacked the Cuban Army’s Moncada Barracks. That loyalty has endured over 60 years, and the Castro brothers have rewarded Valdes with many high-level positions in the Cuban government, to include Minister of Interior, the powerful overlord of the Cuban internal security services. He’s been a member of the Cuban Communist Party’s Politburo since 1965.
Ramiro Valdes and Fidel Castro
Continue reading “LONG SORDID SAGA OF CUBAN DRUG TRAFFICKING & U.S. LOOKING THE OTHER WAY”
On this day in 1959, facing a popular revolution spearheaded by Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista flees the island nation. Amid celebration and chaos in the Cuban capitol of Havana, the U.S. debated how best to deal with the radical Castro and the ominous rumblings of anti-Americanism in Cuba.
The U.S. government had supported Batista, a former soldier and Cuban dictator from 1933 to 1944, who seized power for a second time in a 1952 coup. After Castro and a group of followers, including the South American revolutionary Che Guevara (1928-1967), landed in Cuba to unseat the dictator in December 1956, the U.S. continued to back Batista. Suspicious of what they believed to be Castro’s leftist ideology and worried that his ultimate goals might include attacks on the U.S.’s significant investments and property in Cuba, American officials were nearly unanimous in opposing his revolutionary movement.
Continue reading “THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Batista forced out by Castro-led revolution – 1959”
