5+5 = 5: Castro's Orwellian Efforts to Rewrite WASP Spy Network

Ten spies that were captured and charged back in 1998 not five, but for the Castro regime the five that pled guilty and became witnesses for the prosecution are unpersons. They no longer exist in the official discourse of the dictatorship. They have been erased. As have the consequences of other Cuban intelligence operations on United States territory.

Alejandro Alonso, Linda Hernandez, Nilo Hernandez Mederos pled guilty and were all sentenced to seven years in prison. Joseph Santos Cecilia pled guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison and Amarylis Silverio Garcia de Santos pled guilty and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

The Cuban "WASP" spies arrested in 1998 used coded material on computer disks to communicate with other members of the spy network. From the 1,300 pages taken from those diskettes translated and used during the spy trial the criminal and terrorist nature of the Cuban regime's operation in South Florida emerges. The networks primary objective was "penetrating and obtaining information on the naval station located in that city." Intelligence operatives communicated about "burning down the warehouse" that housed the nonviolent organization Brothers to the Rescue and sabotaging their equipment. The spies also helped to identify who would be flying at certain times.

In addition the spies were ordered to prepare a "book bomb" so that it evade post office security while at the same time phoning death threats to a man they described as a CIA agent and then having him killed via the mail bomb.

The seriousness of these planned action items would be confirmed by the February 24, 1996 shoot down where two MiGs hunted Brothers to the Rescue planes in international airspace and used air to air missiles to destroy two of the planes killing two pilots and two passengers based on intelligence supplied by the WASP network.

International organizations recognized that Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales were murdered by agents of the Cuban government on February 24, 1996. The first of the participants in the conspiracy to be held accountable for his actions was Gerardo Hernandez who was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy to commit murder. 

What was broken up in South Florida on September 12, 1998 was a terror spy network with plans to damage property and kill persons with the objective of planting terror. The network achieved part of their objective in providing information that led to four extrajudicial killings. George Orwell could have cited the so-called "Cuban Five" campaign as an example of newspeak on the order of "War is Peace" only that it in this case the Castro regime declares "Terrorism is Anti-Terrorism" "Lies are Truth"and "Terrorists are Heroes." 

Meanwhile in Cuba, Lady in White, Sonia Garro, and her husband, Ramon Munoz, after being imprisoned without charges since March 18, 2012 now face a show trial and 12 and 14 year prison sentences respectively. 

Truth and reconciliation also requires a measure of justice and agreement on the facts. Imprisoning nonviolent activists while celebrating terrorists as heroes are just two of many signs that the current dictatorship in Cuba is a long ways away from that.

Rights are neither bourgeois or socialist they're human

Why the totalitarian temptation denies human rights and objective truth


“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶ You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn-bushes or figs from thistles?"  - Matthew 7:15-16

“It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.”

Mr. Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General

For the past half century the dictatorship in Cuba has carried out a massive campaign that claims that Cuba has a first class public health care system. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the regime and the lack of a free press the ability to investigate and hold accountable the Cuban public health system has been a limited undertaking by a few brave souls. The ongoing events in Cuba with the substandard care given to average Cubans and the cholera outbreaks across the island gives evidence that human rights cannot be divided into separate categories of civil-political and socioeconomic rights or what the Castro regime would describe as bourgeois liberties versus revolutionary liberties. Nevertheless, unless the system in Cuba is changed this latest episode as soon as it passes will also be covered up, ignored and denied, and the attack on human rights and those who dared to speak out on the dangers confronting the Cuban public will continue to be harassed, imprisoned and killed. The rest of this essay aims to explain why.

The 1948 consensus and the totalitarian counter-argument
Following the international consensus achieved on December 10, 1948 and codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights there has been an ongoing effort by despots of different ideological stripes to divide, distort and destroy this international standard in order to replace it with one that benefits a particular interest.

Since 1959, Cuba has under the Castro brothers been subjected to a Marxist Leninist dictatorship that does not recognize international human rights standards as outlined in the declaration. Fidel Castro in a 1986 interview spoke plainly on the matter:

"There is revolutionary liberty and there are other liberties which are bourgeois. It's difficult for me to talk about them to Europeans because bourgeois liberties were born there. In England, France, those countries. You talk of equality, liberty, fraternity. I think only our society can truly speak of equality. There's no equality between millionaires and beggars."

What is ironic is that Mr. Castro has a point that with wide disparities of wealth the poor are at a disadvantage in exercising their rights. However, what he fails to mention is that in a society where the rule of law and the concept of equality before the law is exercised a beggar has greater protections that is to say "more equality" than a poor person in Cuba who is entirely subject to the whims of Mr. Castro who also happens to be worth $900 million dollars. In the same interview he went on and expanded his argument:

"Bourgeois liberties, no. We have two different concepts of freedom. Europeans have one, we have another.  Capitalism and socialism are not at all alike. Your political concepts of liberty, equality, justice are very different from ours. You try to measure a country like Cuba with European ideas. And we do not resign ourselves to or accept being measured by those standards."

Empirical and theoretical failure of totalitarian case
The case made by the Cuban despot, as was also made by his Soviet backers, was that what are considered civil and political rights were bourgeois rights and inferior to social and economic rights which they would claim are socialist rights.  The claim that civil-political rights and social-economic rights are mutually exclusive is false. In reality they are mutually reinforcing and are both found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Additionally, the claim by Mr. Castro that bourgeois liberties are alien to the Cuban experience because they emerged in Europe is not correct. The synthesis of civil-political and socioeconomic rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Europeans subscribe to  emerged out of the Latin American experience. Furthermore, it was Latin American diplomats that pushed hard for a human rights charter following World War II and the first international human rights charter was a regional one The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man that was adopted in Bogota, Colombia on May 2, 1948.


What has emerged in Cuba under the Castro brothers is a socio-political model that first emerged in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century and has wreaked havoc wherever it has been applied and that is a totalitarian dictatorship. This kind of regime whether taking power in an advanced industrial country such as Germany or a backward agrarian Russia claimed the lives of tens of millions of its own citizens and impoverished those who remained afterwards.

 Today, in Cuba there is a cholera outbreak underway whose seriousness the dictatorship has hid from the Cuban citizenry and the international community. This may be due to a number of reasons. Cuba has suffered two dictatorships prior to Fidel Castro. In the late 1920s- early 1930s Gerardo Machado who had been elected changed the constitution and ran again unopposed and became a dictator. Between 1952 and 1959 Fulgencio Batista was the dictator of Cuba following the over throw of its last democratically elected president, Carlos Prio Socarras on March 10, 1952. Despite this turbulent political history, Cuba throughout this entire period had not suffered a cholera epidemic because its infrastructure was sound and public health and hygiene prevented it. The fact that Cuba is having troubles with Cholera in the 21st Century means that those socioeconomic "rights" that Castro brothers claim to defend are a fiction and the public health infrastructure is a disaster. However there is a more profound reason for the coverup and why at the root of the totalitarian experiment there is the need for the big lie. George Orwell in his essay, The Prevention of Literature, provided an excellent description of how totalitarian states like Cuba work and thrive:

The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie.

Negative trends in Latin America
Unfortunately, since civil-political rights or what the regime calls "bourgeois liberties" are non-existent in Cuba which means that freedom of expression and an independent press are not there to hold the regime accountable and to inform the public of threats to health and safety that it is facing. An even more disturbing development is that this idea of "bourgeois" and "socialist" freedoms has gained traction in Latin America placing the regional human rights architecture that provided protections for Latin Americans against the military dictatorships of the 1970s in danger, and today thanks to countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Argentina it is being dismantled.




 

Reclaiming Reconciliation from Orwellian Newspeak

"Reconciliation should be accompanied by justice, otherwise it will not last. While we all hope for peace it shouldn't be peace at any cost but peace based on principle, on justice." - Corazon Aquino

"Our Fatherland and respect of human dignity must be the common objective for reconciliation. You must unite in reconciliation in the spirit of love, but also in the spirit of justice. As the Holy Father said five years ago, no love exists without justice. Love is greater than justice and at the same time finds reassurance in justice." -Father Jerzy Popieluszko

In the struggle against the totalitarian regime in Cuba the battle is one not only of power but also of ideas and definitions. Totalitarian regimes throughout history have sought to empty words of their meanings and often times tried to turn them into their opposites. George Orwell best described this process in his novel 1984 in which the fictional regime's slogans were contradictions: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. We are witnessing an effort to create a new contradictory slogan in the Cuban context: RECONCILIATION IS COLLABORATION. As someone who believes in authentic reconciliation and has spoken about it time and time again this campaign to turn it into an oxymoron is profoundly offensive.

Scott Richert in About Catholicism describes how the Sacrament of Confession is also known as the Sacrament of Reconciliation explaining that: "Whereas "Confession" stresses the action of the believer in the sacrament, "Reconciliation" stresses the action of God, who uses the sacrament to reconcile us to Himself by restoring sanctifying grace in our souls." Yale Professor Carlos Eire echoing Richert has written an important essay explaining exactly what reconciliation is within a Catholic context and the error surrounding shifting its meaning and how Catholic teaching actually defines the word as a process of repentance:

 "Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed. At the same time it entails the desire and resolution to change one's life, with hope in God's mercy and trust in the help of his grace. This conversion of heart is accompanied by a salutary pain and sadness which the Fathers called animi cruciatus (affliction of spirit) and compunctio cordis (repentance of heart)."

The Cuban democratic opposition inside the island has spoken about the need for reconciliation and, despite the claims made by Cardinal Ortega, so have exile leaders such as the late Monsignor Agustin Roman.

In March of 2010, Cuban prisoners of conscience announced in a document titled Petitions  for Days of Fasting and Bible Readings that called for the unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience and political prisoners  in Cuba "as a first step for justice and reconciliation." Towards the end of the same document the word reconciliation appears again in the following phrase:  

We propose to proclaim the 18th of March as the National Day of Fasting for Freedom of all captives for Motives of Politics and Conscience, for the end to the discord among Cubans, and the beginning of reconciliation and peaceful changes to democracy that the country needs. 

These imprisoned activists are following a path followed by nonviolent activists around the world and through time. For the sake of brevity will only cite the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who in his first book published in 1958, Stride Toward Freedom claimed that nonviolent resistance, as he practiced it, was based in six principles:

 (1.) Nonviolence is not passive, but requires courage;

(2.) Nonviolence seeks reconciliation, not defeat of an adversary;

(3.) Nonviolent action is directed at eliminating evil, not destroying an evil-doer;

(4.) A willingness to accept suffering for the cause, if necessary, but never to inflict it;

(5.) A rejection of hatred, animosity or violence of the spirit, as well as refusal to commit physical violence; and

(6.) Faith that justice will prevail.

In a later book titled Why We Can't Wait (1964) he explained why African Americans could not wait for White Americans to decide to give them their rights. In the 1950s, Martin Luther King Jr. did not council passivity and accommodation with those in power and in a 1957 interview emphasized the importance of being aggressive in confronting injustice as a necessary stage from the old unjust order to a new order based in justice in freedom:

“I think it’s better to be aggressive at this point. It seems to me that it is both historically and sociologically true that privileged classes do not give up their privileges voluntarily and they do not give them up without strong resistance.

However, this aggressiveness still embodied the six principles listed above as Reverend King stated in the same interview:

"All of the gains made that we received in the area of civil rights have come about because the Negro stood up courageously for these rights and he was willing to aggressively press on. So I would think that it would be much better in the long run to stand up and be aggressive with understanding, good will and with a sense of discipline. Yet these things should not be substitutes for pressing on and with this aggressive attitude. I believe we will bring the gains or other civil rights into being much sooner than just standing idly by waiting for these things to be given voluntarily.”

The Cuban opposition that is aggressively advocating for change using nonviolent means to bring a halt to injustice and violence are following in the same foot steps as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who himself was inspired both by Jesus Christ and Mohandas Gandhi.
  
Bishop Agustin Roman in a December 16, 2006 speech to Cuban exiles in Miami on The importance of the current internal dissident movement in Cuba spoke of reconciliation:

Justice, truth, forgiveness and reconciliation. I said earlier that the cause of the internal dissident movement, the cause of all of us in the end, is the continued pursuit of justice for the Cuban people. Cuba cries out to heaven for justice, justice is essential. The truth is the complement of justice and should be the first condition of our work and firm foundation of the society. Every Cuban will recognize the truth of their responsibilities and errors if we want to enter the new Cuba with the cleanness that we want. At the same time, the country equally needs of forgiveness and reconciliation in order to have possibilities of a future. A society that remains with its wounds permanently open condemns itself to a continuation of its conflicts and eliminates its possibilities to live in peace. Justice, truth, forgiveness and reconciliation are not mutually exclusive or contradictory terms. Our very remembered Pope John Paul II said with respect to the following, in his message for World Day of Peace on 1 January 1997. I quote: "Forgiveness, far from excluding the search for truth, demands it. The wrong must be recognized and, where possible, repaired ... Another essential requisite for forgiveness and reconciliation, is justice, which finds its justification in the law of God ... In effect - the Pontiff added - forgiveness does not eliminate or decreases the demand for reparation, which belongs to justice, but seeks to reintegrate equally individuals and groups into society. "End of quote.

His Holiness Pope John Paul II, referenced above by Bishop Roman, also spoke of reconciliation during his visit to Cuba in 1998 and in his Homily in Santiago de Cuba on January 24, 1998 states:

The Church calls everyone to make faith a reality in their lives, as the best path to the integral development of the human being, created in the image and likeness of God, and for attaining true freedom, which includes the recognition of human rights and social justice. In this regard, lay Catholics — holding to their specific role as lay persons so that they may be "salt and leaven" in the midst of the society of which they are part — have the duty and the right to participate in public debate on the basis of equality and in an attitude of dialogue and reconciliation.  

It is important in this conversation on justice and reconciliation not to confuse justice with revenge. Jorge Garcia who lost 14 family members in July 13, 1994 "13 de Marzo" tugboat massacre continues to demand justice and rejects revenge. During a question and answer session at Florida International University on July 13, 2009 an audience member asked Jorge about justice and reconciliation and he responded:

"I could have easily executed the man who killed my family. The only picture of that man is the one I took a picture of. I knew where he lived. Despite that I didn't do it. The government itself directed me towards him. They wanted to turn me into a criminal. The regime sought to justify what it had first said. The regime had said that a group of anti-socials had stolen the boat and that there were an undetermined number of victims. If you look at the photographs and the profiles there were no 'anti-social elements.' What were there were entire families. I told the man that he would have to face trial that it might not be me but my son. It might take generations but there would be justice."

The dictatorship in Cuba preferred that blood be spilled in an act of revenge that would morally compromise a victim rather than provide justice through a court of law.  The refusal of Jorge Garcia to engage in physical violence and his rejection of hatred is a profoundly Christian response, but the actions of the current regime in Cuba to tempt an innocent man is profoundly anti-Christian and is the antithesis of reconciliation. Asking Cubans to collaborate in their own oppression while remaining silent before ongoing injustices is also the opposite of reconciliation.