Castro regime denies involvement in drug trafficking: Historical record places in doubt their claim of innocence.

Time to stop giving the benefit of the doubt.

Part of cocaine shipment seized in Panama

The Cuban government is denying that it was involved in the smuggling of tons of cocaine on a ship bound for Turkey with a stop in Holland. The Panamanian government is also giving the dictatorship in Havana the benefit of the doubt on the cocaine shipment. The only problem is that the Castro regime lies consistently. The government of Panama is making a mistake.

#CUBA: Govt issues statement denying involvement in #cocaine bust in #Panama. That govt initially said cargo came from #Cuba. Statement says drugs were likely added after cargo left Cuba, something #Panamanian govt said yesterday as well. https://t.co/Y7SqO2PBjl @wplglocal10 pic.twitter.com/ZvAiawJISy

— Hatzel Vela (@HatzelVelaWPLG) May 22, 2019

Consider the following:

U.S. and Canadian diplomats suffering from unexplained brain injuries.

 At least 24 U.S. diplomats and 14 Canadian diplomats have suffered unexplained brain injuries in Havana, Cuba. Symptoms included "nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, hearing and eye problems." Official Cuban government response: The diplomats are victims of mass stress and the sounds that they are hearing are crickets. The Cuban embassy in Washington DC on September 19, 2017 claimed that “Cuba strictly observes its obligations to protect foreign diplomats on its soil” is not true. This is another lie. There is a decades-old pattern of hostility. In 2006, the Miami Herald reported how a high-ranking member of the U.S. mission found his mouthwash replaced with urine. In another case, after one diplomat’s family privately discussed their daughter’s susceptibility to mosquito bites, “They returned home to find all of their windows open and the house full of mosquitoes.” American diplomats, like their Canadian counterparts, have also had pets poisoned while stationed in Cuba. The types of injuries suffered by diplomats since November 2016 are new, but Cuba’s outlaw behavior toward them is not.

Raul Castro on March 21, 2016 in the joint press conference with President Obama said that there were no political prisoners in Cuba, and if any were identified they would be released immediately. A list of current Cuban political prisoners was provided, but they were not freed.

Weapons and fighter jets hidden under sacks of sugar.

In July 2013, Cuban officials were caught trying to smuggle tons of arms that included: warplanes, missiles, and technology related to ballistic missile programs hidden under 220,000 bags of sugar to North Korea and lied about it. This was also in violation of U.N. sanctions.

The Castro regime has sought to smuggle narcotics into the United States since 1961, and has been implicated time and time again. Indictments have been issued and documentaries have caught the illicit activities of the dictatorship on film.

Raul Castro with Aldo Santamaria-Cuadrado

According to the UPI in 1982 the following high ranking Cuban officials were indicted by the United States for operatiing a drug ring out of Cuba: Aldo Santamaria-Cuadrado, head of the navy and a member of the Communist Central Committee; Fernando Ravelo-Renedo, ambassador to Colombia; Gonzalo Bassols-Suarez, a former staff member at the Cuban embassy in Colombia; and Rene Rodriguez-Cruz, a Central Committee member and president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People.

If one still has any doubts then take a look at the role the Castro regime has played in Venezuela with regards to narcotics trafficking.

Speaking truth to power can save your life in Cuba

"What’s past is prologue" - William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene I

 @RosaMariaPaya Angel is in danger. Will the world once more accept the rules of the Cuban government?

There are important lessons to be drawn from the past 53 years of totalitarian rule under the Castro brothers but despite this people of good will fail to see the patterns or learn the lessons of history. Our friends in Europe who co-existed with these type of regimes and had in their midst men of the caliber of Václav Havel who understood the power of the truth against a system built on lies.

In the case of Cuba the power of the truth was able to shake the regime from the its very beginnings while going along with the regime’s lies would destroy the complicit liar. It is not easy to hold on to the truth when one has been subjected to the techniques of interrogation, manipulation, torture and blackmail that Cuban state security are experts in. Even democratic governments can be duped into thinking that remaining silent and going along with the lie will benefit an imprisoned citizen or subject.

They could not be more mistaken.

Cuban history provides two parallel examples in which high ranking military officials in the regime were told that if they went along with the lie and pleaded guilty to the charges made against them that they could go home.

Towards the end of 1959, less than a year into the Castro regime, as it was still consolidating power and holding mass executions by firing squad the regime wanted to eliminate Huber Matos. Matos was one of the Commandants of the revolution who had entered Havana at Fidel Castro’s side but he was a fervent anti-communist who had fought Batista’s regime to re-establish democracy in Cuba not install a communist dictatorship. He had tried to resign his position but was repeatedly refused by Fidel Castro. Until the moment came to accuse Huber Matos of conspiracy and treason and set up a summary military trial in order to have him speedily executed. While being held in custody Fidel Castro sent a messenger to Huber Matos to tell him that if he confessed to everything that he had been accused of over the proceeding days and remained silent during the trial that he would not be executed and could go home.


Huber Matos in the above video describes how they asked him to go along with the lie to save himself

Huber Matos rejected the offer and said he would defend himself. He went on to do so at his military trial and was able to shift the opinion of military officers in the room who applauded his courage during the trial. The Castro brothers had planned to execute him but instead, fearing they would make him a martyr, sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

Monsignor Agustin Roman in an important essay on the importance of the Cuban dissident movement in Cuba described the role that the truth played in its genesis:

The concept of nonviolent civil resistance is introduced into the history of Cuba. Take the truth as a weapon, placing it in practice in the civic field, what Scripture proposed in the spiritual realm: "the truth shall make you free". Hence its importance at that time and its transcendence for the future of Cuba.

If the truth shall make you free then what does the lie offer? The Ochoa case offers a dramatic answer. Nearly 30 years later in June of 1989, General Arnaldo Ochoa is arrested. He had been declared a “Hero of the Revolution” by Fidel Castro in 1984 but was deemed too dangerous by the dictatorship because he had been contaminated with ideas of Glasnost and Perestroika while visiting the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era. He was also popular within the ranks of the military due to his exploits in Africa. As was done with Huber Matos he was slandered and accused of conspiracy and treason this time tied to drug smuggling and corruption. He was also approached with the offer that if he confessed to everything he had been accused of and did not mount a vigorous defense that he could go home into retirement.


Confession of General Arnaldo Ochoa during military trial 

Unlike Huber Matos he went along with the lie and pled guilty in an abject fashion reminiscent of the 1930s Stalinist show trials and was executed days later by firing squad on July 13, 1989.

These are two high profile and historic examples but there are many others in which the families of political prisoners have been told that if they remain silent and behave that their loved ones would be sent home to them.

Years and in some cases decades would go by before the family would understand that it was a lie. At the same time those who organized international campaigns and spoke out were able to obtain improved conditions for their imprisoned relatives and in many cases an early release. The most high profile examples of this practice are the Ladies in White. Their husbands, fathers and sons had unjust prison sentences that ranged up to 28 years yet thanks to their efforts all were out of prison within eight years.

The obvious questions raised by the previous examples outlined are why is the truth uttered by an individual so powerful and how can it possibly protect an individual instead of going along with the regime’s desire that one lie?

Václav Havel in his 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless which he dedicated to the memory of Jan Patocka explained the power of confronting the lies with the truth saying:

As long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations.

Living in truth is a powerful shield of protection within a totalitarian regime but it doesn’t mean that one is still not in danger. Jan Patocka, a great Czech philosopher and dissident and Charter 77 signatory, that Havel dedicates his essay to, died after an 11 hour interrogation at the hands of state security in his country on March 13, 1977.

However, once one goes along with the lie their life is in greater danger because as long as the one who has gone along with the lie lives they can still recant and for the dictatorship it is more convenient to silence them. They have the video confession giving their version of events and no one to contradict it.

This is why when Rosa Marie Paya tweets that Angel [Carromero] is in danger she is telling the truth.

Libya and the Big Lie: Denying Qaddafi's Human Rights Atrocities

'To witness a crime in silence, is to commit it.' - Jose Marti

Libyan burning image of Qaddafi (2011)

The end of the Qaddafi regime in Libya is a bloody and disastrous affair for the Libyan people and the new regime appears to have embraced some of the sordid practices of the old regime. The decision of the opposition to embrace violence and invite NATO intervention guaranteed that the struggle for a free Libya would become far more difficult and fraught with even more danger to the populace. As of today one could credibly make the argument that it has been a failure.



At the same time deniers of Moammar Qaddafi's bloody reign have emerged claiming that the Libyan tyrant had not been engaged in the systematic gross human rights violations that invited condemnation from the United Nations Human Rights Council and the United Nations Security Council. Furthermore that organizations and individuals that signed an Urgent Appeal to Stop the Atrocities in Libya calling for the condemnation of the dictatorship at the United Nations and its expulsion from the UN Human Rights Council are liars who are responsible for this conflict.

The chief villain according to the defenders of Qaddafi is the Libyan League for Human Rights. They fail to mention that one of the founders of the group, Mansour Kikhia, was abducted in Cairo on December 10, 1993 and taken to Libya where he was executed on Qaddafi's orders. According to The Washington Post: "Kikhia, who defected to the United States in 1980, served as Gadhafi's foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations before turning into a sharp critic of the regime." Nor do the apologists mention "the Abu Salim Prison killings in June 1996, when the security forces allegedly killed up to 1,200 inmates" reported by Amnesty International in its 2011 annual report (which covers 2010). There are many more atrocities committed by the Qaddafi regime prior to the crisis of 2011 that are well documented prior to the "fog of war" which requires greater discernment.

However, the document makes no mention of the numerous reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch denouncing mass killings and systematic human rights abuses by Qaddafi's regime in Libya. For example on February 18, 2011 Amnesty International reported at least 46 people shot dead by security forces over the previous 72 hours. Two days later on February 20, Amnesty International called on the Libyan leader to "end the spiraling of killings," stating that “[l]arge numbers of people are being killed and the situation is escalating alarmingly. More than one hundred have been killed so far.”



Amnesty International on February 23rd accused both the Security Council and the African Union of failing the people of Libya referencing and describing the above speech: "Colonel al-Gaddafi gave a speech in which he called protesters 'cockroaches' and 'rats', and compared the situation to China, saying that national unity had been “more important than the people of Tiananmen Square." Also in the course of the speech Qaddafi threatened to “cleanse Libya house by house”. Human Rights Watch documented beginning on February 17, 2011 on how Qaddafi's forces had opened fire on peaceful demonstrators and disappeared scores of people.

On February 25, 2011 Amnesty International called on the Security Council to refer Qaddafi to the International Criminal Court. In the video below Philip Luther outlines the egregious acts of Al-Qaddafi and Western complicity in torture:



On March 2, 2011 Libyan medical teams attempting to treat the wounded reported to Amnesty International that they were being targeted by Pro-Qaddafi forces. On March 21, 2011 Amnesty presented a fact sheet on what had turned into a conflict between pro and anti-regime forces.

The regime of Moammar Al-Qaddafi systematically violated human rights and engaged in mass atrocities. It is a pity that the opposition to the Al-Qaddafi regime would use the same methods as the dictator to dislodge him from power. It does not bode well for the new government in Libya. Early on in the conflict when the resistance chose to embark on the path of violence I wrote about the negative consequences of such a course of action and involvement of NATO forces only compounded that opinion.

Nevertheless, if I had it to do over again I would not remain silent and would once again sign the document calling for the international community to condemn the atrocities being committed against the Libyans. At the same time refusing to remain silent today when the new government commits human rights violations against former regime officials and African immigrants. To remain silent when a crime is being committed is to be complicit.

Photograph of Castro and Qaddafi. Taken from Libyan despots residence

The Libyan episode has only further proven the need to speak out in a timely manner and to also call on opposition movements to reject violence and embrace strategic non-violent conflict strategies to end brutal dictatorial regimes increasing the probability of a lasting victory.