CODE PINK Traitors Announce Trip to Castro's Cuba; Propping Up Yet Another Dictator

Cuba is one of the most beautiful and fascinating countries on Earth—and George Bush says you can’t go there. Well, we’re going anyway, and we invite you to join us!

This New Year’s CODEPINK will be organizing a large group of fun-loving and freedom-loving Americans to break George Bush’s ban on travel to Cuba. Join co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, together with Academy Award winning producer Paul Haggis, as we visit with farmers at their co-ops, doctors at their family clinics, dancers at the National Folklore Group, and young people at the ballpark. Don’t miss this historic chance to dance salsa, drink mojitos, and visit beautiful beaches—all while defending our constitutional rights!!!

The federal restrictions barring travel to Cuba are not only counterproductive and outmoded in this post-Cold War context, but also a violation of our constitutional freedom to travel.

The Bush administration says we can only travel to Cuba if we have immediate family there. Well, we do. Cubans ARE family—Somos Familia. And while we’re there, we’ll be holding a mutual adoption ceremony in order to demonstrate that family transcends political boundaries. In the ceremony, each participant will be paired with a Cuban brother or sister. After all, we are all part of one human family and there should be no artificial barriers dividing us.

This historic opportunity to visit Cuba will cost approximately $1,500 (to Cancun) or $1,800 (to Mexico City). Participants will fly out of three points of entry: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. We will all meet in Mexico City, where we will then take a chartered flight to Havana. Our trip this New Years will truly be a family affair. Feel free to bring children, parents, partners, neighbors, and friends. It is a trip designed for all ages, interests, and backgrounds (family rates available).

After seven action-packed days on this wonderful island, we will re-enter the United States through these same three points of entry. This re-entry will be a powerful challenge to Bush’s restrictive policies that deny us our fundamental liberty to travel where we please. Though past high-profile “travel challenge” groups have experienced no adverse legal consequences to date, we will have our lawyers ready at each airport of entry to provide legal aid, if necessary.

Because we will be traveling to Cuba without government permission (i.e. a license from the US treasury), CODEPINK participants will be breaking the embargo and therefore subject to civil penalties. (For further questions on the legal implications of unauthorized travel to Cuba, check out www.nlg.org/cuba). With these risks in mind, your participation in our trip is a crucial protest in the growing movement to end the travel ban.

We expect a huge response to this trip, so get your applications in early. Also year–end travel gets booked up VERY early (especially the return flights after New Years), so make your plans early! We look forward to spending some marvelous days together, while pushing to overturn a policy that keeps us from building bonds of friendship with our neighbors.

If you are interested in participating in this trip, please contact Dana (at) codepinkalert.org and forms/applications will be sent out shortly. You can also reach Dana by calling the CODEPINK office at (310) 827-4320.

NOTE: Medea, Jodie, Gael and all their "peaceful followers" will be in Cuba to celebrate the 47th anniversary of the Communist takeover of the island nation of Cuba, and the enslavement of the Cuban people.

Fidel Castro: An outpost of tyranny next door

Humberto Fontova
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 21 February 2005

The picture from North Korea gets hairier by the week. And you'd think Kim Jong-il's head would be alarming enough. You'd also think that with Don King, Donald Trump and Al Sharpton constantly in the news, we'd seen it all, coiffure-wise.

But no. Let's face it: When young, we all aped our favorite musicians' hairstyles. I was always partial to the Keith Richards look, if only because he never seemed to wash or comb his hair. Most of my chums preferred Mick or John or Paul. So, was Conway Twitty big in the Hermit Kingdom? How else to explain Kim Jong-il's hairdo?

On a more serious note, last week Kim was basically telling us: "You're damn right, I got nuclear missiles! Built 'em right under your nose. Ha-ha! Now, whatcha gonna do about it, hunh?!"

That's bad enough – but hardly the worst of it. Now I'll quote directly from a December 11, 2004 article in The Pyongyang Times, titled DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] Military Delegation Visits Cuba.

"The Cuban army and people will fight shoulder to shoulder with the Korean army and people in an anti-US joint front. Our armed forces exchanged views on strengthening cooperation in military fields."

Now I'll quote from an August 2004 article in London's Jane's Defence Weekly: "The DPRK has long sought to obtain the ability to directly threaten the continental US."

Now I'll quote from an October 5, 2003 This Week program on ABC, where host George Stephanopoulos interviewed CIA weapons inspector David Kay regarding what his team found in Iraq.

David Kay: "I would contend we've already found things that if they had been known last December, January, February would have made huge headlines: clandestine labs in the biological program, North Korean missiles going to Cuba. ... There's a whole host of stuff we have found."

Typically, none of this made a splash in the mainstream media. Then again, historical knowledge has never been its strong suit. Connecting the dots between North Korea and missiles going to the regime that came closest to setting off nuclear Armageddon in 1962 — a regime that begged, pleaded, even tried to cajole the Butcher of Budapest into incinerating several U.S. cities — simply stumps the likes of Peter Jennings, Katie Couric and Paula Zahn.

Not that Castro's outpost of tyranny is chumming it up only with Kim's outpost of tyranny.

"Given its high economic and industrial potentials, Iran is prepared to collaborate with Cuba in all domains," declared Iranian Majlis Speaker Gholamali Haddad-Adel in a meeting with the visiting Cuban vice president, Jose Ramon Fernandez, on January 16, 2005.

"The solidarity between our nations and governments is the key to overcoming the U.S. hegemonic pressures. Cuban President Fidel Castro is a symbol of resistance against the U.S. throughout the world," continued Haddad-Adel.

For his part, Fernandez expressed his country's interest in bolstering ties with Iran and said, "The Cuban government and nation will stand against the U.S. pressures and stand beside the Iranian nation."

Fernandez also expressed his country's support for the undeniable right of the Iranian nation to have access to nuclear technology." All this from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, January 16, 2005.

"Iran is strengthening her economic and political relations with Cuba, and there exist other areas of interest for cooperation." Cuba is constructing a biomedical plant in Iran, by the way, for "vaccinations against Hepatitis B and the manufacture of Interferon," we're told.

Almost daily, liberals and farm-state ward healers berate us on how the Cuban "embargo" is so hopelessly anachronistic in this day and age. "Mighta made sense back in the '60s," they admit. "Because back then Cuba was a totalitarian country in league with our Cold War enemies."

Well? I answer. What's Cuba today? A totalitarian regime in league with our terrorist enemies. What's changed, except that our terrorist enemies, unlike our Cold War enemies, have actually landed blows against the homeland.

Hopefully, friends, I've gotten your attention. But Castro's foreign policy should only be half of it. Let's not forget his in-house butchery and repression in this, the longest-running "outpost of tyranny."

To that end some very dedicated and selfless folks are staging a memorial service including a mass and vigil at the Memorial Cubano in Miami's Tamiani Park this weekend (February 19-20).

A picture's worth a thousand words, they say. One look at that sea of white crosses that span the memorial to Castro's murder victims and you'll understand, amigos — you'll understand instantly why we Cuban-Americans get so "emotional" at times.

Not that all the crosses have Cuban names. Walk among these crosses, notice the people with itchy noses and red eyes, pass the grandmothers with their faces buried in their grandsons' chests and their shoulders heaving — then look at the inscriptions on the crosses. There you'll find names like Howard Anderson, a U.S. citizen who was head of Havana's American Legion post until 1961, when a Castro firing squad riddled him.

"Death to the American!" screamed Howard Anderson's Communist prosecutor at his farce of a trial on April 17, 1961. "The prosecutor was a madman!" says a Swiss diplomat who witnessed the trial, "leaping on tables, shrieking, pointing. He called Anderson rotten fruit only good to fertilize Cuban land with his carcass."

Given the rate of firing squad executions in Cuba in those years, thousands of gallons of perfectly good, perfectly valuable blood gushed from the bodies of young men only to soak uselessly into the mud, wash into gutters or get sopped up by buckets of sawdust. What a waste, reasoned Dan Rather and Ted Turner's pal.

And heaven knows, then as now, Castro's government could use some foreign exchange. In two short years Castro ("one of the world's wisest men," according to Oliver Stone. "A genius!" according to Jack Nicholson, and "The Hemisphere's greatest Hero!" according to Norman Mailer) had rendered a nation with a living standard higher than half of Europe utterly destitute, utterly bereft of foreign exchange.

And here was an ocean of fresh, plasma-rich blood freed from its confines by bullets and spilling in torrents daily. Let's collect it and sell it, Diane Sawyer's future cuddle bunny reasoned. And so they did. But don't take it from me. Take it from official court records – from the suit that Howard Anderson's family filed against Barbara Walters' charming chum.

Anderson v. Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Cir. April 13, 2003): "In one final session of torture, Castro's agents drained Howard Anderson's body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad."

After the volley at La Cabana's blood-spattered wall, Howard Anderson's sparse blood soaked into the same soil and bricks as that of Rogelio Gonzalez, Virgilio Companeria and Alberto Tapia, all Havana University students and members of Catholic Action. Like Howard Anderson, they refused blindfolds, and perished yelling, "Long Live Christ the King!"

Fourteen thousand young men would join them in mass graves shortly on the orders of Diane Sawyer's cuddle bunny and Burlington Industries' T-shirt icon.

When Doug MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte, he grabbed a radio: "People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil — soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples."

Cuban soil was similarly consecrated.

Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club Book of the Month for March. You may reach Humberto Fontova at hfontova@earthlink.net

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