Remember and condemn the October 7th Hamas terror attacks on Israel, and those who back them

 #RememberOctober7 #CubansStandWithIsrael

 

 

On September 26, 2024 the Israeli military carried out an airstrike while Hezbollah leaders were meeting at their headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut. Killed in the attack was Hassan Nasrallah, the long time leader of the terrorist group.

 

Miguel Díaz-Canel, Raul Castro’s handpicked president, denounced Israel on X, “We condemn the cowardly targeted assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, as a result of Israel’s attack on residential buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut, causing destruction and death of innocent civilians.” 

 

This is in sharp contrast to the Cuban government's response to Hamas' terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7.

 

One year ago, on October 7, 2023, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Iranian proxies, invaded and attacked Israel, killing over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals (including 46 Americans ) and seizing 251 hostages. 

The United Nations' inquiry commission "verified information concerning the deliberate targeting of civilian women, including the killing, abduction and abuse of women, as well as the desecration of women's bodies, sexual violence and other gender-based crimes.This was the largest mass murder of unarmed Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. 

 

This terrorist attack sparked a Middle East war that began between Israel and Hamas, a terrorist organization based in Gaza. The war expanded into Lebanon when Hezbollah, another Iran proxy, on October 8, 2023 began launching rockets into northern Israel. 

Friends and allies of the Jewish people condemned the attack and mourned the victims. International communist networks, led by the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship in Cuba took a different approach.

 

Cuban official media spokespersons Leticia Martinez, chief of communications for Miguel Diaz-Canel, and "El Necio" took to social media to celebrate a "Free Palestine" and justify terrorist attacks. He retweeted the People's Forum's genocidal call on October 8, 2023 to abolish the Israeli state, which included the phrase "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!"

 

 

On October 8, 2023, one day after the terror attacks in southern Israel, militant leftists held a protest in Times Square to commemorate the killings as an act of resistance, chanting anti-Semitic slogans, waving banners and posters. The Center for a Free Cuba was aware of the protest at the time, as well as the promotion of it by official Cuban media. 

 

 On October 8, 2023, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations published a statement criticizing Israel's "impunity," describing the Jewish state as an occupying force and the United States as historically complicit. 

 

Dictator Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Dictator Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua , President and former M-19 terrorist Gustavo Petro in Colombia refused to condemn the terrorist attacks on Israel, while calling for the end of the “illegal occupation of Palestine” on October 7, 2023.

On October 11, 2023, The People’s Forum (TPF) issued a statement defending their October 8th rally in Times Square, doubling down on their support for the terrorist attack.

The group’s co-executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, is a longtime researcher at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and was “based out of Cuba for many years,” where he “worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations,” according to his biography at the anti-Israel group Black Alliance for Peace.

On November 23, 2023, the Cuban dictatorship organized a 100,000-person pro-Hamas march with prefabricated banners, and posters featuring photos of Hamas militants such as Abu Obaida carried by Cuban youth. 

In July 2022, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, received De los Santos and executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Vijay Prashad with the aim of “elaborating a new consensus, based on theory and according to the different experiences of social movements and countries, on the path of socialism.”

Official Cuban journalist Pedro Jorge Velázquez, who goes by the pseudonym El Necio on X with over 157,000 followers has been graphically repackaging antisemitic tropes out of the "Protocols of the Elder of Zion" and spreading blood libels against the Jewish people far and wide in threads on X since the Hamas terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 which he described as "Palestinian resistance launches unprecedented offensive in Israeli territory."

  Independent voices in Cuba that sympathize with the Israeli people threatened and silenced.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide in their 2024 Annual Report on Cuba informed that "In the final months of [2023] numerous Protestant pastors from both registered and unregistered religious denominations across the island were summoned for interrogation in regard to comments they had made about Israel. In each case, the pastors were told that that expressing any kind of support for Israel was unacceptable, they were ordered to stop praying for Israel or, in one case, for the ‘peace of Jerusalem’ and told that any commentary on the situation must be in line with the position of ‘the Revolution and the CCP’ [ Cuban Communist Party].

Advancing antisemitic tropes, and the destruction of Israel

“When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”

-Manolo De Los Santos speaking at The People’s Forum in NYC. pic.twitter.com/TxGcaVK62j

— Jason Curtis Anderson (@JCAndersonNYC) January 15, 2024

On January 24, 2024 Manolo De Los Santos spoke the quiet part out loud at The People’s Forum in New York City: “When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”

De Los Santos is echoing Karl Marx’s early formulation of communism which is antisemitic and offers a “solution” to the “Jewish Problem.”

“Money is the Jealous God of Israel, beside which no other God may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world. In emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself…by destroying the empirical essence of Judaism, the Jew will become impossible.” Source Karl Marx-Engels Collected Works (London 1975ff),vol. iii, pp146-74

“The People’s Forum” (TPF) is funded through Goldman Sachs and linked to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Both its executive directors Manolo De Los Santos and Claudia De La Cruz are PSL members, and active supporters of the Cuban communist dictatorship. TPF put out an advertisement in The New York Times in October 2022 that repeated numerous propaganda claims by the Cuban dictatorship, and was rebutted by the Center for a Free Cuba. 

Prior to another Pro-Hamas March in Havana on March 2, 2024, Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel in a video tweet on X accused Israel of a new genocide and operating an "extermination camp" in Gaza in which he said that five months ago, “humanity witnessed with horror a new holocaust.” 

Remembering when Fidel and Raul Castro allied with Arab states, and militarily attacked Israel

Castro severed diplomatic ties with Israel on September 10, 1973, just days before the Yom Kippur War began, fifty one years ago, on October 6th. There were no outstanding bilateral issues between Cuba and Israel. During that war, 3,000 Cuban soldiers participated in the attack on Israel, alongside forces from Egypt and Syria, and expeditionary forces from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Kuwait, Tunisia, Morocco, and North Korea. Soldiers left Cuba bound for Syria, dressed in civilian clothes, with forged passports identifying them as university students. Soviet military equipment, including T-62 tanks and SAM rocket artillery, were provided to them. Cuban tank crews fought alongside Syrian troops in their war of aggression. According to Foreign Report, 180 Cubans were killed and 250 were injured in that conflict.

Cuban combat troops remained in Syria until 1975. 

Below is the documentary in Spanish by Abraham Rivera from 2020 on the Yom Kippur War.

This hostility towards Israel did not end when Cubans left Syria in 1975, but the Havana regime continued to aid and train terrorists in the Middle East, and allowed Hezbollah to set up a base in Cuba. 

Today, the Cuban dictatorship, both directly and through Venezuela, continues to provide support to Hamas, and Hezbollah as it has for decades. Cuba is a state supporter of terrorism all throughout the world, including in the Middle East, where it has long harbored animosity for Israel.

Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism around the world, including in the Middle East, with a decades long hostility against the state of Israel. The Cuban dictatorship has a problem with Jewish people.

They repeat old Soviet lies about the state of Israel, and refuse to recognize that the Jewish people are the original inhabitants of what is today Israel.

Free Cubans on the other hand recognize the historical facts, and today join with our Jewish brother, and sisters in remembering the atrocities committed on October 7, 2023, and call for the hostages to be freed, and the Islamic Regime of Iran, and their terrorist proxies to end their war against Israel.

6:29AM

October 7, 2023.

The moment time stopped.

Beeri. Nahal Oz. Nir Oz. Reim. The Nova Festival. Kfar Aza. Sderot. Ofakim. Nirim. Holit. Zikim. Ashkelon.

We remember the victims.

We pray for the return of the hostages. #RememberOctober7 pic.twitter.com/DuTL9ml8kI

— Israel ישראל (@Israel) October 7, 2024

Why the Embargo on Cuba and the Cuban Adjustment Act are still needed

"La 'crisis' no es en Costa Rica, alli son 4000 que ya escaparon de la tirania. La 'crisis' es en Cuba, donde son millones queriendo escapar del comunismo." Tony Diaz Sanchez, November 27, 2015

Cubans at the Ecuadorian embassy in Havana, Cuba (Photo: 14yMedio)

International news today is reporting on the manufactured Cuban migrant crisis in Central America while ignoring the underlying crisis in Cuba. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that this has happened and those familiar with the situation in Cuba understand the real crisis. Exiled Cuban opposition leader Tony Diaz Sanchez, of the Christian Liberation movement and a former prisoner of conscience explained it well above in Spanish: "The 'crisis is not in Costa Rica, there are 4,000 who have already escaped the tyranny. The 'crisis' is in Cuba where there are millions wanting to escape communism."

It seems that many in the media are confusing the effects with the underlying cause and it is not only with the question of Cuban migration, but also with the sanctions placed on the Cuban dictatorship by the United States. The reason for the poor relations between the Castro regime and the United States is not because of the embargo but just the opposite. The reason for the embargo on the Castro regime is to safeguard U.S. taxpayers and not have them subsidize a dictatorship hostile to U.S. interests.

The Cuban embargo was first imposed on the Castro regime on  January 3, 1961 by President Eisenhower in response to the confiscation of U.S. properties and toughened by President Kennedy a short time later. The logic for economic sanctions was to raise the cost for the Castro regime to engage in subversion in the hemisphere. Unfortunately, the reason for the embargo still endures.

Cubans were fleeing the Castro regime prior to and following the embargo. However in 1965 the Lyndon Johnson Administration was faced with the Camarioca Boatlift, an migration crisis provoked by the Castro regime. Kelly M. Greenhill in her February 2002 paper, Engineered Migration as a Coercive Instrument, gave an analysis of what the Castro regime did and how the Johnson Administration responded that can be briefly summed up as follows:

In September 1965, Castro announced that any Cuban who had relatives living in the US could leave the island via the port of Camarioca, located on Cuba’s northern shore. Castro also invited exiles to come by sea to pick up family members who had been stranded on the island, following the suspension of commercial flights between the two countries during the Cuban Missile Crisis three years earlier. Two days later he began offering two flights daily from Havana to Miami. ... By unleashing his “demographic bomb,” Castro demonstrated to the US government he could disrupt its immigration policy and the opening of the port at Camarioca carried with it a “lightly-veiled” threat, namely that Havana, not Washington, controlled Florida’s borders.  Almost overnight, and with little warning, the Castro regime had presented the US with a major refugee crisis. President Johnson initially responded with contempt to Castro’s move, making a speech before the Statue of Liberty in October 1965, in which he proclaimed that the US would continue to welcome Cubans seeking freedom “with the thought that in another day, they can return to their homeland to find it cleansed of terror and free from fear.” However, after the numbers of those leaving the island began to escalate, Johnson quickly changed tack and began a series of secret negotiations with Castro. The result, announced the following month, was a “Memorandum of Understanding,” a formal agreement that established procedures and means for the movement of Cuban refugees to the US.

 All the above took place before the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) even existed.  The CAA was brought into existence on November 2, 1966 due to the humanitarian crisis spurred by the communist dictatorship in Cuba when hundreds of thousands of Cubans found themselves in a legal limbo that necessitated the creation of the Cuban Adjustment Act.

Cubans historically have not been the only people to enjoy this special privilege but others such as the Hungarians, Czechoslovakians, Vietnamese and others have benefited from similar measures although for shorter periods. They did not come to the United States pursuing the American dream but fleeing the communist nightmare in their own homelands.

The common denominator was not economic sanctions but that these regime's systematically denied the human rights of their nationals under communist dictatorships, including the right to enter and exit their own country.

Sadly, Cuba today remains a communist regime with first generation leadership firmly in charge. No other people who suffered under this type of regime was able to overthrow first generation leaders due to their will to hang on to power with extreme brutality.

The Castro regime for decades has sought the elimination of both the Cuban Adjustment Act and economic sanctions on the dictatorship. However both continue to be needed the Cuban Adjustment Act to protect fleeing Cubans from a repressive communist regime and the Embargo on Cuba to defend American taxpayers from the predation the Castro regime has visited on many other countries to the tune of billions of dollars.