Castro regime agents sink a vessel heading to the United States, killing Cuban refugees.

Nathali Acosta Lemus, Aimara Meizoso León, Omar Reyes Valdés , Elisabeth Meizoso, and Rachel Ramaya Ullo

A Cuban coast guard ship sank a boat just north of Bahía Honda, in the province of Artemisa heading to the United States on October 28, 2022, and killed at least five Cuban refugees, and others are missing. This is the news that the Castro regime seeks to obfuscate. Four women (Aimara Meizoso León, Nathali Acosta Lemus, Rachel Ramaya Ulloa, Indira Serrano Cala),  two men (León Omar Reyes Valdés, Yerandy García Meizoso), and a two year old girl (Elisabeth Meizoso) were killed. Journalist Mario Penton shared the above images of the victims over his social media. 

Indira Serrano Cala (age 18)

 

The boat sank this Friday "when it collided with a surface unit of Border Guard Troops during its identification," according to a note from the Ministry of the Interior reported 14ymedio.

That the United States Embassy in Havana and a news bureau on the island give the dictatorship the benefit of the doubt is an outrage. 

Yerandy García Meizoso

Consider the following partial history of how Cuban government agents deal with Cuban refugees fleeing the island.

 

Nine years before the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp was established and there were no detainees from the war on terror being held on the base atrocities were being committed, and the world paid little notice.

 * On June 19, 1993 at 2 p.m., U.S. guards, startled by the sounds of detonations, saw Cuban troops aboard patrol boats dropping grenades in the paths of several swimmers headed for the U.S. base.

* On June 20, 1993 at 1:30 p.m., Cuban troops repeated the action, then strafed the water with machine-gun fire.

U.S. soldiers patrolling the perimeter of the Guantanamo Naval Base were horrified by what they observed. This led to a formal diplomatic note to the Cuban government by the Clinton Administration. This in turn led to a front page story in The Miami Herald on July 7, 1993 which described what had been witnessed:

Cuban marine patrols, determined to stop refugees from reaching the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, have repeatedly tossed grenades and shot at fleeing swimmers and recovered some bodies with gaff hooks, U.S. officials charged Tuesday. At least three Cubans have been killed in the past month as Cuban patrol boats attacked swimmers within sight of U.S. Navy personnel at Guantanamo.

On July 13, 1994, a group of 72 Cubans, including children and women, tried to escape from the Island of Cuba aboard an old tugboat. State Security Forces, and four Ministry of Transportation boats of the Havana regime intercepted the boat 7 miles off the coast of Cuba, with water jets from pressure hoses pulled people off the deck, tore children from the arms of their mothers and sank the tugboat. 37 Cubans were murdered, 11 of them children.  This crime was documented by the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 1995, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1996, Amnesty International in 1997, and referenced by Human Rights Watch in their 1999 report.

 

Why is none of this mentioned on background, or used to inform American diplomats on the likelihood that what occurred today was an "accident" or a premeditated extrajudicial killing?

 

Saddened that reading news in the United States about Cuba requires the same critical thinking skills applied to interpreting the official media of the Castro regime. Megan Janetsky, the new Associated Press Correspondent's first piece, repeated in her article's title "Crisis-stricken Cuba caught between ally Russia, nearby U.S." a talking point by the Cuba lobby that makes no sense when looking at the historical record, and present reality. The Castro regime did not have a problem criticizing Moscow during the Gorbachev years. This included censoring Soviet publications, and executing officers viewed as contaminated by Glasnost and Perestroika. Relations did not return to "normal" until the Vladimir Putin took power in 2000. 

The Castro regime's hatred of the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis manifested itself in trying to manipulate the Russians into launching a first strike on the United States. It was the Russians that sought an accommodation with the Americans.

Now Ms. Janetsky reports the regime talking points with the title "Cuba says at least 5 dead after boat heading to US crashes", but does not provide any of the above background in the story or what the families of the current victims are saying.

 

Worse yet, was the statement from the U.S. Embassy in Havana taking at face value regime claims that it was an "accident" considering the Cuban government's history of brutal cruelty visited on fleeing refugees. 

 

Listen to the survivors of the "13 de marzo" tugboat massacre, and family members of those who didn't make it in 1994, and the need for an international investigation to learn what actually happened becomes clear.

University of Michigan researchers say they have answers on how U.S. diplomats and tourists were harmed in Cuba

This story is far from over

Spy tech may have caused the injuries to diplomats and tourists.

The Michigan Engineer News Center reported on March 1, 2018 that Kevin Fu, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan "reverse-engineered the attacks in a lab" and his team "showed how ultrasonic signals—outside the range of human hearing—can combine to produce audible and potentially dangerous tones similar to the undulating, high-pitched chirping that the diplomats described."

This attacks began in November of 2016 and were reported on in December of 2016. The State Department knew that diplomats were suffering brain trauma in Havana in February of 2017 and evacuated 40 Americans over the next two months.  On January 29, 2018 the news broke that 19 U.S. tourists had also suffered brain trauma in Cuba.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a preliminary report on February 15, 2018 and an accompanying editorial studying health impacts on 21 U.S. government employees in Havana between December 2016 and August 2017. These individuals had severe injuries and the bottom line on medical findings are that:

Concussion-like symptoms were observed in U.S. government personnel in Cuba after they reported hearing intensely loud sounds in their homes and hotel rooms and feeling changes in air pressure caused by an unknown source. The symptoms were consistent with brain injury although there was no history of head trauma.

There are efforts in the media to spin the news about the harm done to these diplomats and tourists without considering some difficult questions.

Secretary Tillerson had to protect his staff by limiting our work at @USEmbCuba to emergency services. While our investigation is ongoing, rather than find excuses, #Cuba should focus on helping to locate who or what is responsible for the harm caused to American citizens.

— Heather Nauert (@statedeptspox) March 6, 2018

First if, as the Castro regime claims, the attacks never happened and are mass hysteria, the sounds recorded crickets then why are there physical manifestations of lasting injuries?

Secondly, if as the University of Michigan engineering professor asserts that the harm done was an "accidental side effect of attempted eavesdropping" then why did these injuries began in November of 2016 and continue through August 2017? Only ending after news of the injuries went public.

Castro agents have used listening devices for decades targeting diplomats. What changed? Why didn't the Castro regime immediately stop it when the injuries began to pile up?

The State Department tonight raised the issue of Cuba's responsibility under the Vienna Convention to protect U.S. diplomats stationed in Cuba. The consequences are grave. Staff cutbacks at the Embassy in Cuba were to be permanent the State Department announced on March 2, 2018.

Questions, if true: Why wouldn’t the Cubans admit it? Wouldn’t the CIA arrived at this conclusion months ago? In the middle, Cuban families affected by visa suspensions. #Cuba #Havana https://t.co/8LwRrynlyt

— Nora Gámez Torres (@ngameztorres) March 3, 2018

Questions remain in this mystery, but three years later Obama's Cuba policy legacy can be summed up as: brain damaged diplomats, the sounds of crickets, and an internationally legitimized dictatorship.  Hopefully the current Administration will turn things around.

Obama Cuba Policy Legacy: Resurrecting systemic legal segregation

"If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." - Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac

President met Castro in Panama as Cuban activists attacked by Castro's diplomats

The Obama Administration beginning in 2009 pushed for a normalization of relations with an abnormal and totalitarian regime in Cuba that treats its own people as chattel. On December 17, 2014 the announcement was formally made and since then new relations established.

Throughout this process human rights have not only worsened in Cuba, but also in the United States with the approval of The White House until popular outrage has forced them to back track. Consider for a moment three episodes from 2016.

Protests against Carnival for discriminating against Cubans to appease Castro regime

First, Carnival Cruise Line signed an agreement with Castro regime officials on March 21, 2016 to sail to Cuba from the United States. In order to conduct their core mission Carnival had to agree to enforce the Castro dictatorship's policy that bans all Cubans from traveling into the island by water. It did not matter if Cubans born on the island were now citizens of another country.   Obama's Treasury Department on July 7, 2015 signed off on the Carnival Cruise Line - Castro regime alliance ignoring that an entire class of Americans would be discriminated against based on their national origin. Mass protests, boycotts and lawsuits led the Castro regime to blink when it became apparent that popular outrage would lead the cruise ship company to cancel its cruises.

Second, the U.S. embassy in Cuba floated a trial balloon that announced that the United States government accepted that U.S. citizens of Cuban descent born in the United States are not recognized by the Castro regime as Americans but as Cuban nationals subject to the dictatorship's laws and regulations. Even though one was born in the United States and has never applied for dual nationality in Cuba they are treated as a Cuban born by the Castro regime in terms of responsibilities but not rights and the government of the USA goes along with it in order to have "normal relations." This also means that these U.S. citizens would be denied consular access in Cuba. The State Department once again had to back track in May of 2016 when this trial balloon sunk amidst negative press coverage and popular outrage. 

Discriminating against Cuban born crew to placate Castro regime

Thirdly, American Airlines is pulling Cuban-American pilots and flight attendants off flights to Cuba in order to placate demands by the Castro regime. Fabiola Santiago, of The Miami Herald, obtained an American Airlines memo announcing the policy as follows: “Please remember that those who are Cuban born should be removed with pay from Cuba flights until we can verify what requirements the Cuban government has for these crew members.” The Democracy Movement has announced that if American Airlines does not end this policy that they will take action.

President Obama's Cuba policy legacy is to resurrect systemic legal segregation against American citizen's based on their national origin in order to placate a foreign dictatorship. Benjamin Franklin was right: "If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas."