“A republic, if you can keep it.” -Benjamin Franklin's response to Elizabeth Willing Powel's question during the Constitutional convention: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
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| Cuban presidents 1902 to 1952, and dictator Batista 1952-59. |
The Lost Republic
After 406 years of Spanish colonial rule, and four years of a United States occupation, Cubans got their Republic.
Between 1902 and 1952 Cuba had democratic, multiparty, competitive elections, and 17 different Cuban presidents were elected. It was messy and contentious, but it was a free society.
Cuba had several independent newspapers, radio, and television stations. There was a vibrant civil society, and culture that made its mark in the world.
Cuban diplomats in this democratic era fought for improved international human rights standards. They helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, lobbied for its passage in 1948 and the creation of the UN Human Rights Commission..
Cuba had regular and periodic, free and fair elections until March 10, 1952 when Fulgencio Batista carried out a coup against the last democratically elected president of Cuba, Carlos Prio Socarras.
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The Castro brothers led a revolution, against Batista, promising a return to democracy, and the rule of law to Cuba, but used terrorism, including bombing civilian targets, taking innocent hostages, and engaging in air hijackings to take power.
Fidel Castro repeatedly told Cubans and Americans he was not a communist. Washington believed it, placing an arms embargo on Batista in March 1958, and diplomats pressured the Cuban dictator to leave power in December 1958.
Cuba had seventeen different rulers from 1902- 1959 versus two from 1959 - 2024, the brothers Fidel Castro (1959 - 2006) and Raul Castro (2006 - present).
Cuba has been under communist control since 1959.
Millions exiled, hundreds of thousands jailed for their political beliefs, and tens of thousands killed for them.
Castro lied, but communists view lies in the service of imposing communism as justified, and the truth as non-existent when it does not advance their agenda.
This is how Cubans lost their Republic.
The Havana Cartel and the Terrorist International
Terrorists, drug dealers, and regime's hostile to democracies gained an ally with the rise of the communist dictatorship in Cuba.
The Castro dictatorship early on began, with the assistance of the KGB, assisting drug trafficking networks improve their ability to get more drugs into the United States to strike at American youth. The Havana Cartel documentary provides an overview of these practices to the present day.
Havana hosted terrorists from Africa, the Americas, and Asia at the Tri-Continental Conference on January 3rd through 16th in 1966.At the Conference, Fidel “Castro insisted that ‘bullets not ballots’ was the way to achieve power.” He maintained “‘conditions exist[ed] for an armed revolutionary struggle.’
The Cuban dictatorship created the Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAL) to coordinate terrorist groups worldwide.
Afterwards Havana set up terrorist training camps in Cuba, Libya, and Algeria.
This wreaked havoc in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, but it did not exempt the United States.
Terrorists attack on U.S. soil killing Americans
The Puerto Rican terrorist group, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña, (FALN), from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, carried out more than 130 bombings, including in the United States.
This group was started in the mid-1960s and received
advanced training in Cuba. This information is taken from Zach Dorfman’s
article “How Fidel Castro Supported Terrorism in America: ‘FALN was
started in the mid-1960’s with a nucleus . . . that received advanced
training in Cuba,’” published in The Wall Street Journal on June 8, 2017.
The FALN was responsible for the January 24, 1975 bombing of the historic Fraunces Tavern in New York City which killed Alejandro Berger (28), James Gezork (32), Frank Connor (33), Harold H. Sherburne (66) and wounded 63 others.
The same Puerto Rican terrorists were also responsible for a bombing spree in New York City in August 1977 that killed Charles Steinberg, (age 26), injured six, and forced the evacuation of 100,000 office workers; and the purposeful targeting and maiming of four police officers, among many other crimes.
Joseph Connor, who's father Frank Connor was murdered in the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing, on March 20, 2024 made a statement in which he revealed that William "Guillermo" Morales, the FALN bombmaker, likely responsible for his dad's untimely death, fled U.S. custody becoming a fugitive, and is currently protected in Cuba by the Castro dictatorship that harbors him.
Other terrorists groups in the United States were also backed by the Communist dictatorship in Cuba. The New York Times reported on October 9, 1977 that “according to a top‐secret report of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” prepared in August 1976 and 400 pages long, “Cuban espionage agents operating in the United States and Canada supplied limited aid to the Weather Underground, a militant antiwar organization, in the late 1960's and early 1970's.”
This is the same Weather Underground that carried out bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the State Department and the Pentagon.
Weaponizing migration
During President Obama's detente with General Raul Castro between 2014 and 2016 over 120,000 Cubans entered the United States in another migration surge comparable to Mariel. This was at a time of loosened sanctions, and under an Administration seeking normalized relations that provided an influx of international credits to the Castro regime.
Secondly, tougher sanctions began to be put in place in 2017, but migration from Cuba during the Trump Administration returned to the lower pre-normalization levels of 2011.
President Biden, during his 2020 campaign, promised a return to the Obama Cuba policy, and engagement by an Administration that, unlike his predecessor, "would act rationally."
Cuban migration began to rise during the early days of the Biden Administration and was drawing press scrutiny in April 2021. In mid-July 2021, Senator Marco Rubio warned of a Mariel-style crisis after the 11J protests in Cuba.
The disastrous Afghanistan pullout completed on August 30, 2021, sent a green light to Havana that they could further intensify the migration crisis and leverage additional concessions from the Biden Administration
The influx dramatically increased with Cubans traveling through Nicaragua in the last month of 2021. In late November 2021, days after the United States condemned Cuban-ally Daniel Ortega for stealing the Nicaraguan presidential election on November 7, 2021, Managua lifted visa requirements on Cubans entering the country, creating a new and larger channel for an exodus.
Over 500,00 Cubans have entered the United States over the past two and a half years.
Havana's tactic against Washington is explained in Professor Kelly M. Greenhill's 2002 paper, "Engineered Migration and the Use of Refugees as Political Weapons: A Case Study of the 1994 Cuban Balseros Crisis." (Please let us know if you need a copy.)
Havana's actions over the past 65 years demonstrate that the communist dictatorship in Cuba uses migration as a weapon and has the capability to open migration up or shut it down depending on foreign policy goals and the perceived risk that a hawkish administration may call their bluff or pursue some sort of action that would endanger the regime's future, or negatively impact the dictatorship internationally.
History demonstrates that economic conditions and sanctions are not the determining factors in generating a migration crisis. It is the ability to obtain unilateral concessions from the United States without incurring a negative response for compromising U.S. national security, and taxing resources with hundreds of thousands of refugees.
The communist dictatorship murders and brutalizes Cubans to maintain absolute power.
Cubans who seek a better life abroad on their own terms are targeted with violence by the dictatorship.
Mariel 1980
The 1980 Mariel exodus was the first time that acts of repudiation were seen and documented, when Cubans who simply wanted to leave the country were brutally assaulted and forty Cubans were lynched.
Granma, the Communist Party’s daily paper, compiled a list of 100 insults to scream at those who wanted to leave. Meanwhile Fidel Castro prepared to associate these refugees with the worse of the worse.
Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Fidel Castro's former bodyguard, wrote a tell all book published in May 2014 of his time with the dictator titled, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo that included a remarkable passage on the events of Mariel.
Brian Latell, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and academic at the University of Miami, in a June 8, 2015 op-ed in The Miami Herald reviewing the above book touched on how Castro dealt with the Mariel boatlift during the Carter presidency:
For me, Sánchez’s most appalling indictment of Fidel concerns the chaotic exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans in 1980 from the port of Mariel. Most who fled were members of Cuban exile families living in the United States. They were allowed to board boats brought by relatives and to make the crossing to South Florida.
But many of the boats were forcibly loaded by Cuban authorities with criminals and mentally ill people plucked from institutions on the island. Few of us who have studied Fidel Castro have doubted that it was he who ordered those dangerous Cubans to be exported to the United States. He has persuaded few with his denials of any role in the incident. Yet Sánchez adds an appalling new twist to the saga. We learn that prison wards and mental institutions were not hurriedly emptied, as was previously believed. Sánchez reveals that Castro insisted on scouring lists of prisoners so that he could decide who would stay and who would be sent to the United States. He ordered interior minister Jose Abrahantes to bring him prisoner records.
Sánchez was seated in an anteroom just outside of Fidel’s office when the minister arrived. The bodyguard listened as Fidel discussed individual convicts with Abrahantes.
“I was present when they brought him the lists of prisoners,” Sánchez writes, “with the name, the reason for the sentence, and the date of release. Fidel read them, and with the stroke of a pen designated which ones could go and which ones would stay. ‘Yes’ was for murderers and dangerous criminals; ‘no’ was for those who had attacked the revolution.” Dissidents remained incarcerated.
A number of the criminal and psychopathic marielitos put on the boats to Florida went on to commit heinous crimes — including mass murder, rape, and arson.
The author and former bodyguard of Fidel Castro, Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, passed away at age 66 on May 25, 2015. Within a year of the Spanish edition of the book being published.
Cuban migrant shot in the back by State Security in 2015
Yuriniesky Martínez Reina (age 28) was shot in the back and killed by state security chief Miguel Angel Río Seco Rodríguez in the Martí municipality of Matanzas, Cuba on April 9, 2015 for peacefully trying to leave Cuba.
A group of young men were building a small boat near Menéndez beach to
flee the island, when they were spotted trying to leave and were shot at by state security. Yuriniesky was left for two days in the
lagoon, before being found by his brother. Unlike the families of many
other victims who are intimidated into silence, Yuriniesky's family
spoke out, identified his killer and demanded justice in a video published on April 27, 2015 by Libertad Press.
July 13, 1994 "13 de marzo" tugboat massacre
Three Cuban families totaling about 70 persons looking for a better life away from the regime boarded the Cuban tugboat "13 de Marzo" in the early morning hours of July 13, 1994. The captain of the tug was among those who wanted to depart. Despite their best efforts, an informant had already reported them to State Security. They left the port at 3:00am on July 13, 1994 and almost immediately were being pursued by other tugboats, also of the Maritime Services Enterprise of the Ministry of Transportation. Seven miles from the Cuban coast line at a location known as "La Poceta" the “13 de Marzo” tugboat was confronted by the tugboats. Amnesty International in their 1997 investigation reported that the vessels which attacked the “13 de Marzo” were Polargo 2”, “Polargo 3″ and “Polargo 5″ and identified as belonging to the Ministry of Transport. According to the IACHR report the attack did not appear improvised. Thirty seven were killed in the "13 de marzo" tugboat massacre.
Massacres of Cubans fleeing continue to the present day
On October 28, 2022, off the coast of Bahía Honda, Artemisa Province, Ministry of the Interior (MININT) agents of the communist dictatorship in Cuba rammed and sank a boat of fleeing Cuban refugees. Seven Cubans were killed in this latest attack, and their names are: Aimara Meizoso, Israel Gómez, Indira Serrano, Omar Reyes, Yerandy García, Nathali Acosta, and Elizabeth Meizoso (age two). This is not an isolated incident, but the latest in a list of vessels sunk by the regime to prevent Cubans from fleeing communism. Those who survived the attack on October 28th stated that the MININT vessels blocked their path as soon as their boat departed, and that they were deliberately attacked to break the boat in half with which they intended to flee the island. These witness reports, gathered after the event, say that one of the repressors threatened to “split them in two.”
Cubans who stay, and seek democratic change within the existing rules of the system face death threats, attempts on their life, and extrajudicial killings by government agents.
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| Sirley Avila Leon: Machete attacked for speaking out. |
Sirley joined the ranks of the democratic opposition and repression against her increased dramatically. On May 24, 2015 she was the victim of a brutal machete attack carried out by Osmany Carriòn, with the complicit assistance of his wife, that led to the loss of her left hand, right upper arm nearly severed, and knees slashed into leaving her crippled. Following the attack she did not receive adequate medical care and was told quietly by medical doctors in Cuba that if she wanted to get better that she would need to leave the country.
On July 22, 2012 agents of the Cuban dictatorship murdered pro-democracy leaders Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero. Oswaldo Payá was a Sakharov Laureate who had been twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Why did the Cuban dictatorship seek revenge against Oswaldo and Harold?
The Varela Project demonstrated to the international community that thousands of Cubans were not satisfied with the status quo, and wanted human rights to be respected, and multiparty democracy to return to Cuba. This contradicted the official narrative that Cubans are happy with the existing communist dictatorship.
On May 10, 2002, Oswaldo, along with Regis Iglesias and Tony Diaz Sanchez of the Christian Liberation Movement, turned in 11,020 Varela Project petitions, and news of the petition drive was reported worldwide.
Regis Iglesias and Tony Diaz Sanchez were sentenced to long prison sentences in March 2003 following show trials, along with 73 other Cuban dissidents. Many of them had taken part in the Varela Project and, nearly eight years later, were forced into exile as an alternative to completing their prison sentences.
In spite of the crackdown, Oswaldo would turn in another 14,384 petition signatures with Freddy Martini on October 5, 2003. He would spend the next eight years campaigning for the release of his imprisoned compatriots and continuing campaigns to achieve a democratic transition in Cuba.
Early in 2012 Oswaldo also denounced that the Cuban government was engaged in a fraudulent change in which Cuban exiles were being asked to be complicit in their own repression.
Once again he was disrupting the Cuban regime's narrative, they killed him, and through continuing death threats forced his family into exile.
His daughter, Rosa Maria Payá Acevedo, continues his struggle for a free Cuba.
What Cubans want and what the Communist dictatorship in Cuba wants are in conflict.
Cubans want to live in freedom. In recent protests across the island in addition to chants of "food" and "electricity" one can also hear the chants for "liberty." Cubans want to be the protagonists in their own lives, not automatons with everything decided for them by the communist elite of the dictatorship. They want their Republic back.
The communist dictatorship wants to maintain power, and continue to spread their model beyond Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to other countries while assisting America's enemies in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.
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