"MURDER Jose Daniel Ferrer & we will solve your problems." - State Security to 18-yr old

Cuban State Security outdoes Machiavelli

"I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school." (Henry VI, Part III)



Cuban state security agent to 18-year old, Yohandry Pupo Sarmiento, a young dissident that they had pressured into a suicide attempt: "MURDER Jose Daniel Ferrer and we will solve your problems."

Capitol Hill Cubans in their blog entry "Pro-Democracy Leader Targeted in Murder Plot" outlined the context of the conspiracy to murder Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU). UNPACU has identified and mobilized new activists in Eastern Cuba and carried out numerous actions that have upset regime officials and the dictatorship is responding:

Thirty-two of UNPACU's members are currently in prison for political offenses -- two of them are women. Moreover, recently three UNPACU activists, Jesus Diaz Morales, Josue Senna and Ariel Meneses Cruz, were chased down by hooded individuals and beaten with blunt objects. The 18-year old, Yohandry Pupo Sarmiento, attempted suicide due to the pressure put on him by Castro's secret police. Pupo would later confess the episode to Ferrer. He was asked to poison Ferrer's food -- also putting Ferrer's wife and children at risk.

The deaths of human rights defenders in Cuba, over the past three years such as Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Laura Pollan, and Oswaldo Paya is evidence that the regime has taken its previous tactic of decapitation of the opposition to a new and more permanent level involving extrajudicial killings. The latest attempt against the life of Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia is part of the pattern.

There are two constants in the patterns of repression and human rights violations in Cuba over the past 53 years and they are the rising body count of victims and the use of fear as a tool of political control to maintain power over the Cuban populace. Underestimating the Castro regime has been a great mistake made by numerous "Cuba experts." 

One should recall that what would become the Castro regime's Department of State Security also known as G-2 got its start in the Guerrilla movement on August 22, 1958.  G-2 was trained by the most brutal intelligence service in the Soviet East Bloc, the East German Stasi. This relationship between the Stasi and the G-2 officially began on February 13, 1960 when Fidel Castro and Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan signed the Soviet-Cuban pact. In addition to the Castro brothers another one of the founders of state security in Cuba, Ramiro Valdez, is still active and as ruthless as ever with over a half century of experience.

Like their East German counterparts, Castro's State Security has not only infiltrated dissident groups on the island but the highest levels of the United States intelligence services and State Department. The case of Ana Belen Montes and Walter Kendall Myers should serve as a warning to those that underestimate this dictatorship. The poisoning of dissidents and staged car accidents were standard tactics of the Stasi that the Cuban intelligence service made them their own.

Cuban state security has managed to out survive their murderous Stasi mentors or in other words to outdo Machiavelli.