Brothers to the Rescue Martyrs Remembered 20 Years Later: A legacy of Love and Freedom

“There is no greater love than this: that a person would lay down his life for the sake of his friends.” – John 15:13 

 
Four men were killed when the two planes they were flying in were shot down on a Saturday afternoon at 3:21 and 3:27 on February 24, 1996 over international airspace while engaged in a search and rescue flight for Cuban rafters. Their planes were destroyed by air-to-air missiles fired by a Cuban MiG-29 aircraft on the orders of Raul and Fidel Castro. The purpose of this essay is not to analyze how they died but more importantly understand who they were and why they felt it necessary to be on those planes searching the Florida Straits for Cuban rafters despite the dangers.

Who were they?
The four individuals killed represented all aspects of the Cuban diaspora: a child who arrived with his parents from Cuba in 1960, another born in Miami Beach in 1966 and a third born in New Jersey in 1971 the children of Cuban exiles. The fourth was born in Cuba in 1966, raised there and was saved by Brothers to the Rescue when he was 26 years old while fleeing the island on a raft. Two were from Havana, one was from New Jersey and the other from Miami Beach.

The oldest of the four, Armando Alejandre Jr. born in Havana, Cuba on April 16, 1950 who was nine years old when Fidel Castro came to power. He arrived in the United States with the rest of his family at the age of 10. He graduated from high school in Miami enlisted in the military, out of gratitude for the United States providing refuge to Cubans fleeing the Castro regime, serving two tours in Vietnam. Following his military service, he attended Florida International University, which is my alma mater, and following graduation went to work in Metro-Dade Transit Agency in Miami. At the time of his death he was 45 years old leaving behind his wife of 20 years, Marlene and an 18-year-old daughter Marlene Victoria. Armando became a U.S. citizen and was a Cuban-American.

Mario Manuel de la Peña, the youngest of the four was born the township of Weehawken, New Jersey on December 28, 1971 when the Castro regime had already been in power 12 years. He was a son of Cuban exiles. Mario received his degree of Associate in Science in Professional Piloting Technology from Miami-Dade Community College at age 21. In 1996, he was completing his senior year at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. Following the shoot down, Embry Riddle conferred upon Mario the degree of Bachelor of Aeronautics honoris causa. At the time of his death he was just 24 years old and is survived by his parents and brother.

Carlos Costa was born on June 23, 1966, in Miami Beach, FL, to Cuban exiles and attended Monsignor Pace High School. He was a graduate of Embry-Riddle University of Aeronautics, where Carlos obtained a bachelor of science in airway science and was licensed as a commercial, instrument, and private pilot, as well as a flight instructor and multi-engine flight instructor. Carlos worked at Miami International Airport, where he trained employees on aviation rules and enforced Federal Aviation Administration standards. Carlos Costa was 29 years old when the shoot down occurred. Carlos is survived by his parents of Cuban origin, Mirta and Osvaldo Costa, his sister, Mirta Mendez, one niece and two nephews.

Pablo Morales was born in Havana, Cuba, on May 16, 1966 and was the same age as Carlos Costa but with a different life experience. He studied cartography and obtained a degree as a geodesics technician. In August 1992, Pablo fled Cuba on a raft and after three days at sea, was spotted in the ocean by Brothers to the Rescue. This experience motivated him to join the previously mentioned organization. He was a passenger in the aircraft with Carlos Costa when they were shot down. Pablo was survived by his mother Eva Barbas, who passed away in 2013, a sister, and a brother. He was a Cuban citizen at the time of his death with residency in the United States and was just 29 years old.

One month from today, January 24, 2016, friends and families will be observing the 20th anniversary of this terrible crime, an act of state terrorism, in which four humanitarians were murdered trying to save the lives of fleeing rafters. As this essay is being written a group of Cubans sent by the dictatorship gathered outside of the Havana headquarters of the Ladies in White, a human rights movement, in order to harass them and burn a pile of copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A document that today as in 1996 remains a taboo to possess in Cuba.

15-year-old rafter Gregorio Perez Ricardo died of dehydration in 1991

Why where they there?
Mario and Carlos were both volunteer pilots of the nonviolent and humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue. In February of 1991 news accounts of the death by dehydration of 15-year-old Gregorio Perez Ricardo, a rafter fleeing Cuba, as U.S. Coast Guard officials tried to save his life deeply touched several pilots. A 1995 monograph by academics Holly Ackerman and Juan Clark, The Cuban Balseros: Voyage of Uncertainty reported that “as many as 100,000 Cuban rafters may have perished trying to leave Cuba.” There is anecdotal evidence that some of them were victims of the Cuban border patrol who used sand bags and snipers against defenseless rafters.

It was within this context that on May 13, 1991 the previously mentioned group of pilots founded Brothers to the Rescue with the objective of searching for rafters in the Florida Straits, getting them water and food, and rescued. Armando and Pablo were observers who would fly with the pilots and look out for the rafters below. The core group of the organization was made up of 70 pilots, observers and volunteers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, England, France, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, the United States, and Venezuela.

In addition to the humanitarian mission, Brothers to the Rescue in November of 1995 took a two-day course at the Florida Martin Luther King Institute for Nonviolence and marched in the King Day parade in 1996. On February 8, 1996 The Miami Times reported “that this group has come around to the belief that change can be brought about in Cuba in the same way that it was brought about by Dr. King in the United States.” The Miami Times concluded in the editorial “Spreading King’s Message” that “In throwing Dr. King's principle into the volatile mix of Cuban exile politics, Brothers to the Rescue is showing a willingness to be creative. But it is unlikely to accomplish much until there is wider commitment in the exile community and leaders emerge who are willing to do as Dr. King did and stake their lives on their belief.”

Coretta Scott King and Jose Basulto of Brothers to the Rescue

A legacy of freedom
Armando, Mario, Carlos and Pablo risked their lives in the Florida Straits to rescue Cuban rafters and at the same time Brothers to the Rescue challenged the Cuban exile community to abandon a failed violent approach in order to embrace strategic nonviolence following the path laid out by Martin Luther King Jr. The end result was that Brothers to the Rescue saved more than 4,200 men, women, and children ranging from a five-day old infant to a 79 years old man, and the rescue of thousands of others during the refugee crisis of 1994.

Two rafters holding plastic container & letter thrown down by BTTR pilots. (BTTR Archives)

At the same time the organization served as a bridge between a nonviolent civic movement inside of Cuba and an exile community seeking a different approach after the failure of armed resistance in the 1960s and 1970s. These are the reasons why these four risked and lost so much when they were extrajudicially executed on the orders of the Castro brothers on February 24, 1996. They did not die in vain and their martyrdom is remembered inside and outside of Cuba and will continue to be so wherever free Cubans gather.

Remembering how Gandhi lived on the 68th anniversary of his assassination

Gandhi was asked why he always rode third class on the trains. His response: "Because there is no fourth class."  - Tweeted by Shane Claiborne on January 30, 2016

68 years ago today Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated but his nonviolent legacy remains intact and continues to inspire others. Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948 while on a walk at Birla Bhavan by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse.  He was 78 years old at the time of his death.  However, it is more important to remember how he lived and not how he died. The documentary series "A Force More Powerful" shows us Gandhi the nonviolent strategist in his struggle for Indian Independence:




Below are ten quotes to read and reflect on from this practitioner of nonviolence:

"No people have risen who thought only of rights. Only those did so who thought of duties."

"Appeasement has become a word of bad odor. In no case can there be any appeasement at the cost of honour. Real appeasement is to shed all fear and do what is right at any cost."

"I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can move the world." - Young India Journal, September 1920

"It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

"Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak."

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."

"A saint who considers himself superior to a sinner forfeits his sainthood and becomes worse than the sinner, who unlike the proud saint, knows not what he is doing."

"Centralization as a system is inconsistent with non-violent structure of society."

They say, 'means are, after all, means'. I would say, 'means are, after all, everything'. As the means so the end.

"The truth is that cowardice itself is violence of a subtle type and therefore dangerous and far more difficult to eradicate than the habit of physical violence."

Cuban Committee for Human Rights founded 40 years ago today in Cuba

 Honor, honor. - Jose Marti

Logo of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights

The struggle for a free Cuba has been a long affair with different episodes and different approaches.
Between 1959 and 1966 there had been a violent resistance to the Castro regime that carried out armed landings (1961); guerilla uprisings (1961 - 1966) that according to Carlos Alberto Montaner "lasted until approximately 1966, when the last foci of peasant guerrillas on the central mountains were exterminated." Many of the participants in the Anti-Castro armed struggle had first been members of Castro's July 26th Movement, who had fought in good faith to rid Cuba of the Batista regime with the aim of a democratic restoration. These Cubans returned to fight in the hills when it became obvious that the Castro brothers were imposing another and more brutal dictatorship.




On January 28, 1976 a candle was lit in Cuba and a new type of struggle for freedom initiated when Ricardo Bofill together with Marta Frayde at her home in Havana founded the Cuban Committee for Human Rights. Carlos Alberto Montaner described how this movement came into existence during a speech in 2009 in Madrid, Spain:

Finally, in 1976, half a dozen Cuban opposition actvists with leftist backgrounds were summoned by professor Ricardo Bofill [3] and founded in Havana the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, the first political organization in the nation's history to expressly renounce violence as a method of struggle. The group decided to abide by the rule of law to reclaim the rights quashed by the dictatorship. Meanwhile, in exile in Washington, about the same time, Mrs. Elena Mederos, former minister in the revolutionary government, and activist and political scientist Frank Calzón, founded Of Human Rights with the same objective: to defend, by nonviolent and legal means, persecuted individuals, dissidents and political prisoners in Cuba.

In 1982 at the Combinado de Este prison Gustavo Arcos Bergnes and his younger brother, Sebastián Arcos Bergnes, joined the Cuban Committee for Human Rights. The brothers had been imprisoned in 1981 for trying to leave the country illegally. Soon thereafter, the Committee began to send out proclamations denouncing the deplorable conditions in which political prisoners were kept. 

Shortly after his release from prison in 1988, Gustavo Arcos succeeded the committee’s executive director, Dr. Ricardo Bofill, who was forced into exile.

In 1990, against the protests of many Cuban exiles, Gustavo Arcos issued a statement to Castro asking him to convene a "National Dialogue," which would include all segments of Cuban society, on the island and in exile. During his address to the Worker's Congress on January 28, 1990, Castro issued his response noting that "the Cuban people" will take care of those activists.

On March 5, 1990 government sponsored mobs attacked Sebastian Arcos's home. On March 8 another mob, led by future Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina, attacked Gustavo's home. From exile, many old friends asked Gustavo to dissolve the Committee to save the activists' lives. Gustavo replied: "The Cuban Committee for Human Rights will continue its work, even if it costs us our own lives...no terror, nor propaganda will be able to deter the development of humanistic ideas in our country."

On January 13, 1992 the executive board of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights again issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to nonviolence and calling for dialogue:   "Violence is not and cannot be the solution to our problems... We will not tire from insisting that the only possible solution is civilized discussion of our differences. This is an appeal to Cubans for wisdom and common sense... No act of violence is justified... Let us say no to violence and learn to live in peace."

Gustavo Arcos Bergnes, Sebastián Arcos Bergnes and Jesús Yanes Pelletier were arrested at their homes in Havana on the evening of 15 January 1992. Both Gustavo and Yanes Pelletier were released after approximately 24 hours. However, Sebastian Arcos Bergnes was charged with "enemy propaganda" and "inciting rebellion," he was sentenced to four years and eight months in jail. He was transferred to Ariza Prison in  Cienfuegos Province,  more than 130 miles from Havana, where Sebastian was imprisoned alongside dangerous criminals and was systematically denied medical attention. In 1993 the regime offered him a deal: Sebastian would be released immediately if he only agreed to leave the island for good. Sebastian rejected the deal, becoming the first documented case of a political prisoner choosing prison in Cuba over freedom in exile.

After an international campaign that included his designation as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and a request by France Libertés, the organization founded by former French first lady Danielle Mitterrand, Sebastian Arcos was released in 1995. A few weeks after his release, Arcos was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in the rectum, for which he had previously been denied medical care in prison. After a Cuban doctor was fired from his post for treating Arcos, he traveled to Miami for further care.

In 1996, Sebastian Arcos Bergnes testified before the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland. Sebastian Arcos Bergnes died in Miami surrounded by relatives on December 22, 1997.

Due to his worsening health in his last years Gustavo Arcos lowered his profile and ceded much of the work to exiled members of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights. Nevertheless, he met with US Senators visiting Cuba in 2000, with former President Carter in 2002 and signed a letter in 2003 denouncing the unjust imprisonment of 75 Cuban dissidents imprisoned in the Black Cuban Spring.

In the 2005, Associated Press article, Anita Snow reported that he stayed in touch with other dissidents and spoke "frequently with Oswaldo Paya, a devout fellow Roman Catholic who led a signature-gathering effort called the Varela Project, which sought a referendum asking voters if they favored civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to business ownership." The article concluded with Gustavo's concern that he would not live to see the return of democracy saying : "I do hope I will see the end of this, but I'm not sure if I will.
 
Gustavo Arcos passed away in Cuba on August 6, 2006. Martha Frayde passed away in Spain on December 4, 2013. Ricardo Bofill remains in exile in Miami, Florida and an active member of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights.

This nonviolent approach would endure and grow into a nationwide movement across Cuba and write new chapters in Cuba's history of resistance to tyranny. Today we remember the activists who forty years ago initiated this new, and nonviolent struggle for a free Cuba with the Cuban Committee for Human Rights.

Human Rights Watch World Report 2016: Cuba

"Freedom can not be fruitful for the peoples who have their forehead stained in blood." - Jose Marti

The Cuban government continues to repress dissent and discourage public criticism. It now relies less on long-term prison sentences to punish its critics, but short-term arbitrary arrests of human rights defenders, independent journalists, and others have increased dramatically in recent years. Other repressive tactics employed by the government include beatings, public acts of shaming, and the termination of employment.

In December 2014, President Barack Obama announced that the United States would ease restrictions on travel and commerce and normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. In exchange, the Cuban government released 53 political prisoners and committed to allow visits by international human rights monitors. The two governments restored diplomatic relations in July 2015.

Arbitrary Detention and Short-Term Imprisonment

The government continues to rely on arbitrary detentions to harass and intimidate people who exercise their fundamental rights. The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, an independent human rights group that the government views as illegal, received more than 6,200 reports of arbitrary detentions from January through October 2015. While this represented a decrease from the number of detentions during the same 10-month period in 2014, it was still significantly higher than the number of yearly detentions prior to 2012.
Security officers virtually never present arrest orders to justify the detention of critics. In some cases, detainees are released after receiving official warnings, which prosecutors can use in subsequent criminal trials to show a pattern of delinquent behavior.

Detention is often used preemptively to prevent people from participating in peaceful marches or meetings to discuss politics. Detainees are often beaten, threatened, and held incommunicado for hours or days. Members of the Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco)—a group founded by the wives, mothers, and daughters of political prisoners and which the government considers illegal—are routinely harassed, roughed up, and detained before or after they attend Sunday mass.

Lazaro Yuri Valle Roca, a blogger and videographer who often covers the Sunday demonstrations of the Ladies in White, wrote that police arbitrarily detained him on June 7 and drove him 30 miles from Havana, where they took him from the car at gunpoint, made him kneel on the grass, and put the gun to his neck, telling him he was “on notice” to stay away from the demonstrations.

The artist Tania Bruguera was arrested on December 30, 2014, hours before her planned performance art piece in Havana’s Revolution Square, in which she was to have invited passersby to walk up to a podium and express themselves at a microphone for one minute. Security officials confiscated her passport and computer. Bruguera was released the following day but was detained and released twice more during the next two days. Cuban dissidents and independent journalists who had planned to attend the event—including Reinaldo Escobar, Eliecer Avila, and Antonio Rodiles—were also arrested on December 30. Bruguera was again detained in May during the 12th Havana Biennial Art Exhibition. She was released the same day.

On August 9, a few days before US Secretary of State John Kerry was to attend a ceremony to mark the opening of the US embassy in Havana, 90 people—including an estimated 50 Ladies in White—were arrested and detained after Sunday mass in the Havana neighborhood of Miramar during a peaceful march against political repression.

During the visit of Pope Francis in September, police detained some 100 to 150 dissidents to prevent them from seeing him. Miriam Leiva, a freelance journalist and blogger and a founder of the Ladies in White, was invited by the Papal Nuncio in Havana to greet the Pope twice, on September 19 and 20, but was detained for several hours each time, preventing her attendance.

Political Prisoners

Despite the release of the 53 political prisoners in conjunction with the agreement to normalize relations with the US, dozens more remain in Cuban prisons, according to local human rights groups. The government prevents independent human rights groups from accessing its prisons, and the groups believe there are additional political prisoners whose cases they cannot document.
Cubans who criticize the government continue to face the threat of criminal prosecution. They do not benefit from due process guarantees, such as the right to fair and public hearings by a competent and impartial tribunal. In practice, courts are subordinated to the executive and legislative branches, denying meaningful judicial independence.

Graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado, known as “El Sexto,” was arrested in December 2014 and charged with “contempt for authority” for attempting to stage a performance involving two pigs painted with the names “Raul” and “Fidel”—a satire of the current and former heads of state. He was released on October 20.

Freedom of Expression

The government controls virtually all media outlets in Cuba and restricts access to outside information, severely limiting the right to freedom of expression.

A small number of journalists and bloggers who are independent of government media manage to write articles for websites or blogs, or publish tweets. However, the government routinely blocks access within Cuba to these websites, and those who publish information considered critical of the government are subject to smear campaigns and arbitrary arrests, as are artists and academics who demand greater freedoms.

Only a fraction of Cubans are able to read independent websites and blogs because of the high cost of, and limited access to, the Internet. In July, Cuba increased Internet access by opening 35 Wi-Fi hot spots in parks and city boulevards nationwide. The US$2-an-hour Wi-Fi connection fee is expensive in a country where the average wage is approximately $20 a month.

Travel Restrictions and Family Separation

Reforms to travel regulations that went into effect in January 2013 eliminated the need for an exit visa to leave the island. Exit visas had previously been used to deny the right to travel to people critical of the government—and to their families. Since then, many people who had previously been denied permission to travel have been able to do so, including human rights defenders and independent bloggers.

Nonetheless, the reforms gave the government broad discretionary powers to restrict the right to travel on the grounds of “defense and national security” or “other reasons of public interest.” Such measures have allowed the authorities to deny exit to people who express dissent. For example, José Daniel Ferrer, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (Unpacu), was denied the right to travel abroad in August for “reasons of public interest,” authorities said.

The government restricts the movement of citizens within Cuba through a 1997 law known as Decree 217, which is designed to limit migration to Havana. The decree has been used to prevent dissidents from traveling to Havana to attend meetings and to harass dissidents from other parts of Cuba who live there.

Prison Conditions

Prisons are overcrowded. Prisoners are forced to work 12-hour days and punished if they do not meet production quotas, according to former political prisoners. Inmates have no effective complaint mechanism to seek redress, and those who criticize the government or engage in hunger strikes and other forms of protest are subjected to extended solitary confinement, beatings, restrictions on family visits, and denial of medical care.

While the government allowed select members of the foreign press to conduct controlled visits to a handful of prisons in April 2013, it continues to deny international human rights groups and independent Cuban organizations access to its prisons.

Labor Rights

Despite updating its Labor Code in 2014, Cuba continues to violate conventions of the International Labour Organization that it has ratified, specifically regarding freedom of association, collective bargaining, protection of wages and wage payment, and prohibitions on forced labor. While the formation of independent unions is technically allowed by law, in practice Cuba only permits one confederation of state-controlled unions, the Workers’ Central Union of Cuba.

Human Rights Defenders

The Cuban government still refuses to recognize human rights monitoring as a legitimate activity and denies legal status to local human rights groups. Government authorities harass, assault, and imprison human rights defenders who attempt to document abuses.

Key International Actors

In January, a month after announcing plans to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba, President Obama called on the US Congress to lift the economic embargo of Cuba imposed more than four decades ago. The United Nations General Assembly has repeatedly called on the United States to end the embargo, most recently in October by a vote of 191 to two.

At time of writing, Cuba had yet to allow visits to the island by the International Committee of the Red Cross or by UN human rights monitors, as stipulated in the December 2014 agreement with the US.

The European Union continues to retain its “Common Position on Cuba,” adopted in 1996, which conditions full EU economic cooperation with Cuba on the country’s transition to a pluralist democracy and respect for human rights. After a meeting in April 2014 in Havana, EU and Cuban delegates agreed on establishing a road map for “normalizing” relations. A fifth round of negotiations towards an EU-Cuba Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement took place in Havana in September 2015, and a sixth round was scheduled for late November.

In November 2013, Cuba was re-elected to a regional position on the UN Human Rights Council, despite its poor human rights record and consistent efforts to undermine important council work. As a member of the council, Cuba has regularly voted to prevent scrutiny of serious human rights abuses around the world, opposing resolutions spotlighting abuses in North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Ukraine. However, Cuba supported a landmark resolution the council adopted in September 2014 to combat violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016/country-chapters/cuba

Never Forget: International Holocaust Remembrance Day

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." - Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963


Today is recognized by the United Nations as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and is observed around the world but not in Israel. In Israel in 2016 Holocaust Day (Yom HaShoah ) will be observed on May 4th beginning at sundown and ends on the evening of May 5th.

 “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness...” Elie Weisel

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere. - Primo Levi, 1986 The Drowned and the Saved

Memory and truth are needed to stop it from happening again. There are memorials around the world and acts of remembrance. Listen to those who were there and survived to bear witness. We must never forget this evil event.

U.S. Treasury Cuba Announcement in brief: "U.S. taxpayers get ready to pick up the tab for the Castro regime."

"They’re normally like chupacabras.  The only thing they’re looking for is someone to give them money for free." - Vicente Fox, Former Mexican President, in 2015 on the Castro regime

 
Today's press release from the Treasury Department appears innocuous titled: "Treasury and Commerce Announce Further Amendments to the Cuba Sanctions Regulations"  as does the "subheading Amendments Further Implement President Obama’s Policy Related to Easing of Sanctions on Cuba."  However the devil is in the details reproduced below from paragraph six:

Financing–

Removing financing restrictions for most types of authorized exports.

• Restrictions on payment and financing terms for authorized exports and reexports, except for agricultural commodities and agricultural items, will be removed, and U.S. depository institutions will be authorized to provide financing, including, for example, issuing a letter of credit for such exports and reexports.  Currently, payment and financing terms for all authorized exports are restricted to cash-in-advance or third-country financing.  Effective January 27, 2016, examples of permissible payment and financing terms for authorized non-agricultural exports and reexports will include: payment of cash in advance; sales on an open account; and financing by third-country financial institutions or U.S. financial institutions.  OFAC is required by statute to maintain the existing limitations on payment and financing terms for the export and reexport of agricultural commodities and agricultural items. 

The United States is the only country in the world that since 2000 has had a cash and carry arrangement with the purchase of agricultural and pharmaceutical products.Under this arrangement American companies sold over $5.2 billion to the Castro regime. This arrangement protected U.S. taxpayers from having to subsidize the dictatorship when it defaulted on its financial obligations.

How did the Castro regime raise the money to purchase U.S. goods?

James Prevor, President and Editor in Chief of the publication Produce Business in October of 2002 in the article, Cuba Caution, reported on how Cuba "had exhausted all its credit lines and, at best, was simply rotating the accounts. When the opportunity came to buy from the United States, Cuba simply abandoned all those suppliers who supported the country for 40 years and began buying from us."  The suppliers were not the ones impacted by Cuba's failure to pay its debts, the taxpayers of the suppliers' home countries were the one's left holding the tab.  

For example in December 2015 it was announced that Spain would forgive $1.88 billion that the Castro regime owes it. In December of 2013, Russia and Cuba quietly signed an agreement to write off 90 percent of Cuba's $32 billion debt to the defunct Soviet Union, a deal that ends a 20-year squabble. Canadians have had to pursue Cuban maritime debts seizing Cuban vessels and negotiating payment through Canadian courts. On November 1, 2013 the government of Mexico announced that it was ready to waive 70 percent of a debt worth nearly $500 million that Cuba owes it. The former president of Mexico Vicente Fox protested the move stating: “Let the Cubans get to work and generate their own money…They’re normally like chupacabras.  The only thing they’re looking for is someone to give them money for free.”

Trade with the Castro regime peaked under the Bush administration and has crashed under the Obama administration. The Treasury Department's announcement today means that the United States will join the rest of the world in financing the Castro regime.

While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce touts the virtues of free trade, free markets and free enterprise in its advocacy for lifting economic sanctions on Cuba what it is actually pursuing is trade with the Cuban government that passes the risk of not getting paid on to taxpayers.  Darío Fernández-Morera an associate professor at North Western University in the May 1, 2014 issue of Chronicles in the article The Cost of Normalization reports that the Small Business Exporters Association announced 

"since March 2009, a select group of commercial banks now will be able to offer terms of 180 days to five years on federally-guaranteed loans to the foreign buyers of U.S. exports without having to obtain prior federal approval.  ... Because of the foreign risks involved  in export lending, most commercial banks through-out the world do not make these loans without government guarantees. In the U.S., the guarantees are provided by the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), a federal agency.

This will mean that the Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture lobby will sell to the Cuban dictatorship and have the taxpayers pick up the tab if anything goes wrong.  The record with other countries over the past half century indicates that the Castro regime will default on what it owes. On April 23, 2014 Moody's Investor Service downgraded Cuba's already poor credit rating to Caa2 from Caa1which Nasdaq defines as follows: "Obligations rated Caa2 are judged to be of poor standing and are subject to very high credit risk."  

Legacy of Obama's Cuba Policy: Americans taken hostage, become bargaining chips

The cost in American lives and freedom is rising

Taken hostage in Iran and swapped by Obama Administration for Iranian criminals

The day that President Obama announced the administration's new Cuba policy and drive to normalize diplomatic relations the following observation was made on this blog:

First the news that three spies who had spied on military installations and congressmen on American soil, that had plotted terrorist acts in the United States, and were implicated in the February 24, 1996 murder of three American citizens and one American resident were freed in a swap to return to Cuba sends a terrible message. 

This led to the following prediction being made with regards to the Castro regime's behavior in the future:

Regime hardliners have won, thanks to the Obama Administration's actions today. Kidnapping an American and holding him for ransom for five years has paid off.  Moderate elements within the dictatorship, seeking to transition Cuba into a responsible member of the family of nations, will have to continue to remain silent and wait.
Over the past year there was an escalation in violent repression and a ten fold increase in religious repression in Cuba.  Worse yet, we now have learned that the Cuban government had obtained control of a Hellfire missile in 2014 that somehow ended up in Cuba. Despite repeated requests by the Obama Administration the weapon has not been returned as of today.

One day later on December 18, 2014 in another blog post explained how the behavior of the Obama administration would make American lives less secure:

Unfortunately, the consequences for Cuba and the Americas with these moral compromises by the Obama Administration will be "big and dangerous ones" generating new problems and challenges.  Make no mistake the message to enemies of the United States yesterday was crystal clear: Take an American hostage and hang on to him for years until your demands are met and you'll get what you want. It sets a terrible and dangerous precedent.

2015 and 2016 are shaping up to be difficult years for Americans traveling abroad. Consider the following: Kayla Jean Mueller, an aide worker captured in Northern Syria in 2013 was killed while in captivity on February 6, 2015. She had been repeatedly raped by the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. She is the fourth American to die in ISIS captivity since August 2014.

Kayla Jean Mueller taken hostage by ISIS, raped and killed

 Two American citizens Scott Darden, a 45-year-old working for a New Orleans logistics firm, and Sam Farran, a 54-year-old security consultant from Michigan were taken on March 27, 2015 and held for six months as hostages in Yemen before being released. At the same time as the Obama administration did before with Cuba swapping innocent hostages for convicted criminals he did it again in Iran. Politico reported on January 16, 2016 that:

As part of a prisoner swap with Iran, President Barack Obama granted clemency to seven men of Iranian origin either facing criminal charges in U.S. courts or already serving time in U.S. prison, an American official confirmed Saturday.

The deal led to the release of four Americans being held in Iran: Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian as well as Amir Hekmati, Saeed Abedini and Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, the official said. In a move that was not part of the prisoner deal, the Iranians have also released a fifth American in their custody, student Matthew Trevithick.

 The message remains clear: If the United States is holding criminals that another power wants then all it has to do is take innocent Americans hostage and exchange them. Meanwhile in Iran, Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent and contractor for the CIA who was kidnapped while working in Iran in 2007, and after appearing three years later in a video and then a series of photos made by his captors, he hasn’t been heard from since. The Obama administration has remained silent on his plight.With this new approach criminals, terrorists and intelligence officers are exchanged for innocent American hostages. The latest is a young student taken after a five day trip to North Korea:

A University of Virginia student honored as an “intellectual risk-taker” has been arrested in North Korea, its state-run media said Friday, accusing the American of an unspecified “hostile act” against the state. Otto Frederick Warmbier, 21, was detained Jan. 2 at Pyongyang airport as he prepared to leave after a five-day trip over the New Year’s holiday, said Gareth Johnson of Young Pioneer Tours, the agency that organized the trip. This was four days before North Korea conducted its latest nuclear test, and makes Warmbier the third Westerner known to be held in North Korea — a move that is certain to elevate already-high tensions with Washington.

 There is already speculation that North Korea wants to use the student as a bargaining chip. It has worked before in Cuba, Iran and with the hermit kingdom itself. A bad time to be an American traveling abroad. This is the end result of normalizing relations with abnormal regimes.

Hostage in North Korea: Otto Frederick Warmbier, age 21

End Impunity: Truth and Memory three and a half years after Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero killings

"Three and a half years since the attack that took away #OswaldoPayá and #HCepero. Their hope remains #EndImpunity" - Rosa María Payá Acevedo, over twitter in Spanish and reproduced below
 

Rosa María Payá tweeted this photo with her dad  Oswaldo Payá

Today marks another sad anniversary that a daughter observed posting a picture from better days when her dad was still alive. The tragedy is that Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas was murdered by agents of the Cuban dictatorship along with Harold Cepero, a young man who was a friend of hers and a youth leader in his nonviolent democratic movement.  Three and a half years later and the evidence that an extrajudicial execution was carried out by Castro's state security service has piled up and petitions made to the UN Human Rights Council and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights but nothing has been done and the killers remain at large and unidentified.

Young members of the Free Cuba Foundation in an open letter replying to Cuban American businessmen advocating engagement with the Cuban dictatorship and the Obama administration's "new policy" of unilateral concessions to the regime that began in 2009 made reference to both of them. The bitter harvest of this approach can be seen in the high profile body count generated. The December 17, 2014 announcement by President Obama doubled down on this policy that has been hostile to Cuba's democratic aspirations.

Cuba has seen rising levels of violence against nonviolent activists and the suspicious deaths of human rights defenders during the Obama presidency: Orlando Zapata Tamayo (February 23, 2010), Daisy Talavera de las Mercedes Lopez (January 31, 2011) , Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia (May 8, 2011), Laura Inés Pollán Toledo (October 14, 2011), Wilman Villar Mendoza (January 19, 2012), Sergio Diaz Larrastegui (April 19, 2012), Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas (July 22, 2012) and Harold Cepero Escalante (July 22, 2012).

Both Laura Pollán and Oswaldo Payá each had the international recognition and ability to head an authentic democratic transition in Cuba. Oswaldo Payá had forced the dictatorship to change the constitution in 2002 because of Project Varela, a citizen initiative demanding legal reforms within the existing system, and Laura Pollán through constant street demonstrations achieved the freedom of scores of Cuban prisoners of conscience. It is important to remember that the deaths of these high profile human rights defenders all happened on President Obama's watch.

 What is profoundly moving is that despite all of this, Rosa María Payá Acevedo continues not only to advocate for justice on behalf of her dad and her friend but also for Cubans to be able to decide their country's destiny in a plebiscite in a initiative called CubaDecide. She will be addressing these issues on February 23, 2016 in Switzerland at The Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy. You can register online if you plan to attend in person or watch it live stream.

De-Classified in 2015: CIA memo reveals Oswald visited Cuba and Soviet embassies to plot escape before assassinating JFK

“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”  - Fidel Castro, September 6, 1963*

Oswald visited Cuban, Soviet embassies in Mexico on 9/28/63

Last year on September 15, 2015 the international media reported on a newly declassified memo from the CIA concerning presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald that reported the following:

Three days after the shooting in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963, Lyndon B Johnson was informed that Oswald had visited the Cuban and former Soviet Union embassies in Mexico City on 28 September 1963 to arrange visas.

The Daily Mail reported that the memo had "remained a secret until today, when the CIA released 19,000 confidential documents from the 1960s."
On the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination this blog published two entries: one analyzing who benefited most from the murder of the President on November 22, 1963 and a second reporting on an official denial made by the Castro regime on November 21, 2013.

Brian Latell, PhD, author of Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine, gave a presentation to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers at their June 1, 2012 luncheon in McLean, Virginia in which he addressed the information known then on the Castro regime and the Kennedy Assassination.

The High Cost of Doing Business in China

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." - Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter meet with Deng Xiaoping in 1979

Normalizing relations with China and engaging it both diplomatically and economically is often given as an example of the inconsistency of a human rights based policy in Cuba. This fails to look at the negative consequences of China policy not only for the United States but the world. Swedish human rights defender Peter Dahlin was taken in China by state security on January 3, 2016 and today was paraded on television to make a scripted confession. In Hong Kong the long reach of the Chinese communist regime has led to five book sellers disappearing because they sold books critical of the dictatorship.  The Free Cuba Foundation in an open letter replying to Cuban American businessmen advocating engagement with the Cuban dictatorship summarizes some of the costs of this policy on the world stage:

Human rights and democracy have been in retreat for the better part of a decade emboldening dictators and terrorists to challenge the international order turning it into something cruel and indifferent to human aspirations for freedom and dignity. We are witnessing today in Venezuela the attempt by the Maduro regime to undermine the results of a democratic election while at the same time rejecting calls for an amnesty to free Venezuelan prisoners of conscience. This change poses a challenge for a democratic Cuba in the future.

This new reality is in large part due to unprincipled engagement with Communist China by Western Countries, including the United States. Corporations shifted manufacturing away from their free markets, labor unions, and environmental protections toward Communist China were workers are paid slave wages, work in terrible conditions and where environmental regulations are non-existent. The world today is dirtier, less free, and human dignity has been debased to the point that organ trafficking is a common practice and the bodies of dissidents are put on display for the amusement and curiosity of paying visitors around the world.   

 Dr. King's epigram "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" can be seen in action in China. The decision to continue the China policy initiated by Nixon and Kissinger in a Cold War context with the Soviet Union when it had a basis in realpolitik but ended with the collapse of the Soviet empire (1989 - 1991). The decision to continue based on narrow economic self-interests has had negative consequences not only in China but around the world. It is long past time for the United States and other democracies to advance a principled human rights policy in China and elsewhere. This also does not mean going to war that often has made things worse but doing the right thing. This is the third way, that neither engages in preemptive wars or appeasing brutal tyrants, and is the best hope to a world of freedom and justice which is necessary for a lasting peace.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide: Unprecedented crackdown on religious freedom in Cuba

"If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's anti-religious laws." - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

 Unprecedented crackdown on religious freedom  

18 Jan 2016

An unprecedented crackdown on churches across the denominational spectrum in Cuba in 2015 has fuelled a spike in reported violations of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), according to a new report by CSW.

Figures compiled by CSW, which are not exhaustive but which serve as an indicator of the level of FoRB violations, reveal a tenfold increase - with 2,300 separate violations recorded in 2015 compared to 220 in 2014. Many incidents involve involved entire churches or, in the case of arrests, dozens of victims. A digital illustration by CSW highlights the crackdown on churches in Cuba.

The spike in cases was largely due to the government declaring 2,000 Assemblies of God (AoG) churches illegal, ordering the closure or demolition of 100 AoG churches in three provinces, and expropriating the properties of a number of other denominations, including the Methodist and Baptist Conventions. Legally registered and unregistered religious groups across the denominational spectrum reported varying degrees of hostility from the government.

According to the report, “the consistently antagonistic relationship” between Caridad del Rosario Diego Bello, director of the Office of Religious Affairs (ORA), an arm of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party which oversees religious affairs on the island, and the leadership of many religious groups, “is evidence that the office exists solely to monitor, hinder and restrict the activities of religious groups.”

In 2015, the ORA continued to deny authorisation for a number of religious activities and in cooperation with other government agencies, issued fines and threats of confiscation to dozens of churches and religious organizations. The ORA also sanctioned the arbitrary expropriation of historic, registered church properties and the actions against the AoG churches.

CSW’s report also highlights “more brutal and public tactics” being employed by government agents than were witnessed in the first decade of the millennium:

“Week after week, state security agents physically and violently dragged scores of women away from Sunday morning services. Most were arbitrarily detained until after the conclusion of religious services. The government continued to employ a strategy of frequent, temporary arbitrary detention to target those it views as political dissidents. This tactic is also applied to religious leaders who are viewed as problematic, for whatever reason, by the authorities…for the first time in four years a church leader was sentenced to and served six months in prison for holding unauthorised religious services.”

In the face of intense pressure, many Christians are engaging in peaceful protest, as seen in the case of the attempted demolition of an AoG church in Santiago de Cuba in November 2015 which was thwarted after local Christians held a peaceful sit-in at the church building. On 8 January 2016, a large-scale government operation led to the mass arrests of several church leaders and the blocking of their communications devices while two churches were demolished, possibly to pre-empt a similar protest. Both churches belonged to the Apostolic Movement, an unregistered network of Protestant churches.

CSW’s analysis suggests that the Cuban government is trying to eliminate the potential for social upheaval by cracking down on any and all groups that are calling, or could call, for social and political reforms alongside the limited economic reforms the government has enacted.

CSW’s Chief Executive Mervyn Thomas said, “CSW doesn’t use the word ‘unprecedented’ lightly to refer to violations of freedom of religion or belief in Cuba in 2015. Following an upward trend in violations in recent years, 2015 witnessed a spike as the authorities deployed ever more public and brutal tactics to target churches across the denominational spectrum, regardless of their legal status. It is clear that despite promises of reform, the government is determined to maintain a tight grip on civil society, including churches. We commend the courage of religious groups who have spoken out publicly to denounce these violations and to call for the right to freedom of religion or belief to be upheld. We urge the international community to stand with them and to hold Cuba to account for these human rights violations.”

Taken from: http://www.csw.org.uk/2016/01/18/news/2952/article.htm

Dialogue on Nonviolence: Is nonviolence step one?

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." - Vaclav Havel

Amritsar massacre on April 13, 1919 in which as many as 1,000 people massacred

Yesterday a dialogue on nonviolence began with the question: Why did Jewish nonviolent resistance against Hitler not work? The answer to this question is that it was not tried. There was Jewish resistance but, although morally right, it was violent and looking at the end result, unsuccessful.

Furthermore, although limited, there were examples of nonviolent resistance to the Nazis by Danes and German housewives that saved thousands of Jewish people from the Holocaust as did Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved up to 100,000 Jews in Hungary only to be imprisoned and disappeared by Soviet troops after the war. Today is Raoul Wallenberg Day in Canada to honor his example.

However other questions remain and the dialogue continues. For example Maria Al-Masani argues that nonviolence is tried first, and often it works,  then if that doesn't work because the "population is brainwashed then step 2." In the course of this conversation on twitter the obvious question arose: "What is step two?" The answer given was as follows: "Step one is non violent resistance for months, step 2 is to fight for your freedom until the death. Ukraine, Step 1 & 2". However the Euromaiden was predominantly a nonviolent phenomenon and the violent elements, if anything, provided cover for Russian objectives that ended in the invasion and occupation of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.

Fighting for ones freedom until the death fits within a nonviolent context. Mohandas Gandhi described it as follows: "I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill." Non-violent resistance is a method of struggle that like violent resistance in a conflict is not without risk. However, Gandhi's outlook on nonviolence, "[t]o die in the act of killing is, in essence, to die defeated."

Al-Masani offers as another example "India" saying that "First started with non violence, then with violence now its independent." However my reading of Indian history is very different. First there were violent uprisings against British rule before and during Gandhi but they all failed to achieve independence. Sadly, the greatest violence in 1946 and 1947 was not for the cause of independence from Great Britain but religious violence between Hindus and Muslims that led to a bloody partition of India and the new state of Pakistan.

It is also important to recall that the worse massacre carried out by the British against nonviolent protesters was on April 13, 1919 when British troops on the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired on a large crowd of unarmed Indians in Amritsar in the Punjab region killing between 379 (number claimed by the British) up to 1,000 Indians killed (number claimed by Indian sources). Women and children were among the massacred. This action is what led Mohandas Gandhi to initiate his nonviolent movement for Indian independence and it was this nonviolent movement that achieved an India free of British rule. In 1982 the film Gandhi recreated the massacre for the big screen.

There were other efforts that sought to violently resist Great Britain forming alliances with Nazi Germany that failed miserably, but did play a role in the religious hostility that led to a post-independence blood bath in which over a million died.

The past century has demonstrated that violence escalates in a spiral with unforeseen consequences that over the long run are negative while at the same time demonstrating how acts of nonviolence over the long run have positive outcomes.

Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer