Cuban Independence Day: 1902 vs 2016

A sobering reality

Cuba 1902: On the path to freedom and independence

“Bringing down the American Flag and Raising the Cuban Flag in Havana, May 20, 1902”

Tomas Estrada de Palma becomes the first president of Cuba

One hundred and fourteen years ago today at noon the flag of the United States was brought down and the Cuban flag raised over Havana as Cuba became an independent republic and its first president, Tomas Estrada de Palma, took power and would serve four years and leave office. Prior to the Castro brothers taking over, the Cuban Republic had 12 presidents over its first 58 years which averages out to 4.8 years in office per president. Meanwhile since 1959 two brothers have run Cuba into the ground through an absolutist, totalitarian, communist dictatorship.

Cuba 2016: Over a half century under communist tyranny

#Cuba Otro 20 d mayo sin República, sin libertad y con una dictadura en manos d unos tiranos encaramados en el poder #CubaDecide

— Iván Hdez Carrillo (@ivanlibre) May 20, 2016

Former prisoner of conscience and independent journalist Iván Hernández Carrillo tweets: "Another May 20th without a Republic, without freedom and with a dictatorship in the hands of some tyrants perched in power."

Why have United States presidents only visited dictators and strongman in Cuba and not their democratic counterparts while in power? President Coolidge visited Dictator Machado in 1928 and President Obama visited Dictator Castro in 2016.

Last month the tyrants presided over another rubber stamp session of the Communist Party Congress with the two brothers now in their 57th year of absolute power.

Tyrants Fidel and Raul Castro now in their 57th year of presiding over Cuba's destruction

  Hopefully one day soon Cubans on the island will regain their popular sovereignty and once again proudly declare their freedom.

Why President Barack Obama's Cuba policy will fail both Cubans and Americans

December 17, 2014: A historic blunder on Cuba policy

On December 17, 2014 President Obama with his Cuba policy announcement continued down a path his administration followed in 2009 that had already started in the Carter administration and restarted in the Clinton  administrations that has only served to legitimize and empower the longest totalitarian dictatorship in the Americas. The Castro regime has perceived itself on each of these occasions free to deal with obstacles to its rule without having to fear outside consequences and both Cubans and U.S. policy interests have suffered as a result.  

There is agreement on the publicly stated U.S. policy goals for Cuba which are: helping the island transition from a totalitarian dictatorship to a democratic order with civil society and the rule of law. They coincide with the aspirations of the Cuban democratic opposition. For example, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, co-founder of the Christian Liberation Movement in Cuba spent a life time there pursuing nonviolent means to achieve democratic change. 

Oswaldo Payá during a national dialogue, his movement organized, with 12,000 Cubans inside and outside of Cuba participating in a process that began in 2003 and ended in 2006 with the document “Program for all Cubans”, described a transition that would go from the present totalitarian laws to the rule of law in an emerging democratic order without descending into chaos. Oswaldo was murdered, along with his movement’s youth leader, Harold Cepero, on July 22, 2012 by the Castro regime’s state security services. They aren’t the only opposition leaders murdered by the regime since 2009.

In the course of debating Cuba policy one should not underestimate the Castro brothers and their ruling military junta. The United States attempted twice to topple the Castro regime in April 1961 through the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and again with Operation Mongoose between 1962 and 1964. Beginning in 1964 despite campaign pronouncements, U.S. policy in practice and in particular with regards to economic sanctions has been one of containment with repeated attempts to achieve a détente with the dictatorship.

This is due to the realization acquired during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that Fidel Castro preferred a nuclear first strike on the United States than lose power. The Cuban dictator asked for Nuclear Armageddon during the October 1962 Missile Crisis in a letter to Nikita Khrushchev and actively sought to provoke it. This caused his Soviet allies to rethink basing any nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the early 1980s Castro again pressed the Soviets hard for a nuclear strike against the United States. Andrian A. Danilevich, a Soviet general staff officer made Fidel Castro’s second request public knowledge in 2009 in The New York Times.

This is why the United States in the 1960s stopped trying to topple Castro. Why risk 300 million lives to liberate an island of 11 million people from a sociopath willing to spark Armageddon if his power is threatened?

The Castro regime also has one of the top three intelligence services on the planet, trained by the East German Stasi, along with a half century record of sponsoring and engaging in terrorism and guerrilla warfare on different continents. In 2013 the Castro regime was caught smuggling weapons to North Korea that included ballistic missile technology, rockets, MiG fighter jets, and much more hidden under bags of sugar. Underestimating Castro has led to many a fool’s errand and not only for the United States, just ask the Venezuelan opposition for another contemporary example.

The idea, circulated since the late 1990s, that the Castro dictatorship is not a military threat to the United States was planted in a threat assessment authored by one of Fidel Castro’s spies who had infiltrated the Defense Intelligence Agency. She was only captured in September 2001 after first being detected because of some unusual behavior during the immediate aftermath of February 24, 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot down. Her name is Ana Belen Montes, a graduate of John Hopkins and the University of Virginia, and she is currently serving a 25 year prison sentence for espionage.

The most important action President Obama took on December 17 has been the one least debated and that cannot be undone and undermines stated U.S. policy goals in Cuba. The exchange of three Cuban spies for Alan Gross, an American held hostage since December 2009. Castro had repeatedly stated that Alan Gross would remain imprisoned until the five Cuban spies were returned to Cuba and five years later on December 17 Alan Gross was back on American soil and all five spies were back in Cuba. Adding an American spy to the mix and claiming Gross’s release is humanitarian doesn’t pass the smell test.

One of the supposed end goals of U.S, policy towards the island is to see a Cuba were “rule by law “is replaced by “rule of law.” The best way to accomplish this is to practice what you preach. Unfortunately, the freeing of Gerardo Hernandez, a Castro spy serving a double life sentence (one of them for conspiracy to murder Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales on February 24, 1996) was an unusual act that flouts the spirit of the rule of law. The United States had engaged in spy trades before but not for someone serving life for murder. Add to it that it was done responding to a kidnapper’s demand and the moral dubiousness of the action is compounded.

The idea that one should not focus on the means but on “the ends” is a mistake. Mohandas Gandhi, a great strategic thinker, understood this and on July 17, 1924 in the publication Young India said: “There is no wall of separation between means and end. Indeed the Creator has given us control (and that too very limited) over means, none over the end. Realization of the goal is in exact proportion to that of the means. This is a proposition that admits of no exception.”

This does not bode well for Obama’s Cuba policy.

Tyrants Incorporated: The unusual alliance between Argentina's military junta and Cuba's communist dictatorship

Jorge Rafael Videla died in a prison of Argentina. That should be the destiny of all dictators (including those in Cuba). - Jorge Ramos, over twitter 

Reynaldo Bignone and Jorge Rafael Videla in 2011 photo: AP / Natacha Pisarenko

 Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla died today and the international Left will focus on the military junta's early relations with the United States promoted by Henry Kissinger towards the end of the Ford presidency but remain silent about the later and much longer alliance of Videla's regime with Castro's Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Beginning in 1977, President James Earl Carter took steps to normalize relations with the dictatorship in Cuba while at the same time isolating the military junta in Argentina.  Fidel Castro response was to embrace the Argentine regime at a time when thousands of Argentine leftists were being disappeared.

This embrace of the far right should not be a surprise. Formerly classified documents made public by the German intelligence service in November of 2012 reveal that Fidel Castro in the 1960s personally recruited former Nazi SS Waffen members to train Cuban troops and also reached out to Nazi operatives, Otto Ernst Remer and Ernst-Wilhelm Springer, in Germany's extreme right to purchase weapons.

Both the Argentine military junta and the Castro communist regime have a history of brutal and systematic human rights violations. The main difference between the two is that the Castro brothers are still in power killing people and have not had to answer for their crimes.

Dictators Reynaldo Bignone and Fidel Castro

Whether the cause be saving Christian civilization and the West or implanting a socialist utopia history has demonstrated that the ends do not justify the means. Recalling Mohandas Gandhi's observation on ends and means: “They say, 'means are, after all, means'. I would say, 'means are, after all, everything'. As the means so the end.” The unusual alliance between the communist Castro regime in Cuba and the anticommunist military junta in Argentina is one more example of the truth of Gandhi's statement.

In the end both regimes, although ideologically opposed, were brought together by their common inhumanity for their political adversaries. In the end the means that they chose defined them more than the ends that they sought.

Students at the University of Oslo present dictator of the year prize

Guess who are the only two brothers on the list of nominees?

 

Update 5/15/2013: Dictator of the year with 65 votes is Bashar al-Assad followed by Kim Jong-un with 62 votes and Alexander Lukashenko with 21 votes. Incidentally, the Castro brothers have excellent relations with all three and both Lukashenkko and al-Assad have visited Cuba.

The Dictator of the Year at Oslo Freedom Forum

15 May 2013, 16:45

The Architects of Evil

The Dictator of the Year initiative is an endeavor to complement the most celebrated  peace award in the world: the Nobel Peace Prize.

The idea behind the Dictator of the Year Prize is that it is not enough to celebrate people who have contributed to international peace;  it is just as important to draw attention to the architects of genocide, torture and mayhem –  those who have wrecked livelihoods of millions of people and who remain unpunished to this day.

This initiative is oriented towards both bringing to focus the atrocities committed by political regimes as well as inspiring hope for liberation from oppression and restoration of human dignity in non-democratic countries around the world.

The student community of Oslo University wants to name and shame the totalitarian political leaders in a carnivalesque human rights ceremony, during the Oslo Freedom Forum 2013 festival.

You can vote for the Dictator of the Year 2013 here.

Voting is open from 23. April  – 9. May 2013.

The award ceremony will take place on the 15th of May at 16:45 o’clock, University Square, downtown Oslo.

Candidates

These are the candidates for the 2013 Dictator of the Year Award:
Omar al-Bashir
Robert Mugabe
Kimg Jong-un
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov
Xi Jinping
King Abdullah
Fidel and Raul Castro
Bashar al-Assad
Ali Khamenei
Alexander Lukashenko

Ceremony

The ceremony in which the Dictator of the Year award well be bestowed upon the winning candidate, will take place on the 15th of May 2013, 16:45, in front of the university main building – Universitetsplassen, in Karl Johans gate.

The guest performer is Shabana Rehman Gaarder. The ceremony will be performed in cooperation with the Oslo Freedom Forum.