Castro, the Carribean, and Terrorism

For years I have tried to warn people about the heating up of trouble spots "south of the border" ( Central & South America ), the inter-linking of terrorist groups there and elsewhere, and the Cuban/left-wing ties to all this.

Here are links, pulled from other links & posts, to give you a heads-up on "what the media doesn't want to talk about...."

IMHO, the "axis" of the Carribean/Cuba, Central America, and northern South America are shaping up as the new "hot spot" in a world full of hot spots- watch this space closely!
U.N. Calls for Colombia to Avoid 'All-Out War'

While we still will probably never convert the "true believers" who still worship the clinton crew, there are a lot of less radicalized citizens out there who just have never been exposed to a lot of the data we here have seen. Here's a good place to start them ( and a Tip O' the Hat to ChaseR who first suggested this approach to winning new converts )--

Give those links to fence-straddlers, and after they have read some, just ask, "See how much you have not been told?"

I was wondering about Ana Belen Montes,a senior intelligence analyst on Cuba for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), arrested for spying for Cuba.

Here's a snip from an article;

~Colleagues offer sharply different appraisals of her work. "She was superb," said one senior retired intelligence officer. Another dismissed her as "very weak" and prone to depression. Laughter was foreign to her.

"She's certainly not a warm person," said Edward Gonzalez, a retired UCLA professor who knew her. "She is not a happy person. She was always scowling."

The daughter of a military psychologist from Puerto Rico, Montes is a U.S. citizen who was born in Germany and educated at top schools in the United States. She spoke Spanish fluently. She obtained a master's degree from the prestigious School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Though she knew many people, she left little wake.
"We're trying to reconstruct who her friends were, and we can't," said Riordan Roett, director of Western Hemisphere Studies at the university. Roett said he only "vaguely" can recall Montes, even though her transcript shows she took two of his classes.

In 1985, Montes got a job as a junior analyst at the DIA, which provides the Pentagon with military and political analysis. A supervisor there at the time, who spoke on condition of anonymity, remembered Montes for her introverted nature.

"She was very private. She never attended parties. When we had office parties, she might show up for only a little while. She'd never bring a boyfriend," he said. ~Snip

The rest of the article is Here

Sounds to me as though she was sexually/socially frustrated. Just a guess though. I hope they hang her.

(April 22, 2001)--Outrage at 'secret' draft of Cuban teachers By Moshoeshoe Monare. Independent Online. South Africa

South Africa's teachers are angry with Education Minister Kader Asmal and his department for importing Cuban teachers without consulting them.

Hassen Lorgat, spokesperson for the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), said: "We are very unhappy with the way Asmal has handled the issue. We don't know any details."

He added, however, that South Africa had a lot to learn from Cuba.

"Cuba values its teachers as professionals, not people to be retrenched, dumped, or have their holidays taken away. But if the teachers are here to take our jobs, there will be a big problem."

Sadtu planned to hold an urgent meeting with Asmal and Cuba's ambassador to South Africa to discuss the issue, he said.

Asmal's spokesperson, Molatwane Likhethe, dismissed the teachers' fears. "There have been concerns, particularly about language, but one of the conditions is that the teachers will speak English. These people will come to train our teachers, they won't take jobs away."

Meanwhile, it has also emerged that the minister plans to dissolve school governing bodies that are no longer functioning.

The proposal to allow the dissolution of governing bodies that are unable to perform their duties and replace them with curators is mooted in an amendment to the South African Schools Act in the latest Government Gazette.

When a school is under such curatorship, the superintendent-general is expected to ensure the election of a new governing body within a year.

So far the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) has appointed curators to replace principals at schools where there has been a managerial collapse.

Lebelo Maloka, a GDE spokesperson, said no governing body had been dissolved by the provincial department so far.

Schools and interested parties have until May 7 to comment to the minister.

(February 7, 2001) --Chávez's school plans ignite furor in Venezuela--Parents and teachers' unions complain that Chávez is not merely fixing problems, but rather trying to establish a Cuba-like system of political indoctrination for young minds. Among the controversial actions: A new constitution written by Chávez supporters requires all schools to teach ``Bolivarian principles'' ---- a code phrase for Chávez's brand of leftist populism ---- and the pro-Chávez majority in the legislative National Assembly is preparing a bill laying out the exact curriculum.

(November 8, 2001) -HUGO CHAVEZ SUPPORTERS ATTACK PARENTS (protesting education takeover) A supporter of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez holds a brick and threatens the parents and teachers who marched against the government's proposed education reforms in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, Nov. 8. 2001. The demonstration ended in violence when the protesters were met by hundreds of Chavez supporters when they reached Congress.

U.S. schools regularily take students on junkets to bask in the wonders of Castro's peaceful paradise.

American Socialists and the Allure of Castro

Derbyshire: When None Cares

Jay Nordlinger: Who Cares About Cuba?-- And what he did he want from Americans, I asked, beyond specific help for his son? "I would like them to remember their principles: their sense of unity, justice, and liberty, maintained over so many years." Last, he wished to say, "Human rights cannot exist without God."

WHY THE DOUBLE STANDARD FOR CASTRO?--Psychologists may be better able than political scientists to explain why many American liberals idealize foreign dictatorships with institutions or values that they find horrifying in milder forms in the United States. For some reason, many American leftists who loathe the military are not troubled by the fact that Castro appears in public only in a military uniform. American liberals somehow manage to support gay rights in the United States while ignoring Castro's vicious campaigns against homosexuality, which he has defined as a "bourgeois perversion" American liberals fret about the FBI and Internet censorship, while calling for the United States to befriend a regime where culture and religion are rigidly controlled by the secret police.

Delighting in the Dictator--- In the late 1970s the American writer Sally Quinn returned from Cuba having found it an Isle of Eros. Said she of the country that then housed thousands of political prisoners in dirty cells and torture chambers, "an attitude of sexuality is as pervasive in Cuba as the presence of Fidel Castro. You can feel sex in the atmosphere." Former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern bounced around the Cuban countryside with Fidel in a jeep and survived to tell of it. Said he of a man who even then was sending arms and soldiers around the world to support Communist terror and oppose American policy, Fidel is "soft-spoken, shy, sensitive, sometimes witty….I frankly, liked him." And Senator Lowell Weicker, the Republican ever on the prowl for a presidential nomination, launched this line certain to illuminate his presidential qualifications. "Castro's been known to snow people but he didn't snow me," Weicker asseverated. He spoke of Fidel's "enormous intellect and idealism" -- yes, idealism! He questioned why the United States did not take Fidel's side, the side of progress.

Fidel, Saddam and Hugo --An improbable but growing friendship of three military revolutionaries

Delirious Democrats --I can't help suspecting that Foxman's laughable critique is linked to the Democrats' efforts to slime Otto Reich and John Negroponte, nominated for top diplomatic jobs. Both men were exceedingly effective at advancing President Reagan's Central American policy. Negroponte was American ambassador in Honduras, and Reich ran a tiny public outreach office in State that greatly annoyed the Left, because he was very good at it. He was later a first-class ambassador to Venezuela.

These terrific men are under attack precisely because they performed extraordinarily well under exceedingly difficult circumstances at the great turning point in the second half of the 20th century. The defeat of Communism in Central America was deadly to the messianic vision of the men in the Kremlin, and to their many supporters and fellow travelers around the world, because it demonstrated that history was NOT on their side. The tide of events was running in favor of the democratic revolution, and Otto Reich and John Negroponte were among its most effective advocates.

It's Cool Again to Be Communist -- "Many of the international communist-front organizations are continuing to operate, but they now are hiding behind one level of cover - groups that are in the antiglobalism coalition," a veteran U.S. intelligence officer explains. "A lot of funding has come from the Communist Party of India. The North Korean Communist Party has taken over some coordination in recent years." Some analysts hypothesize that the People's Republic of China might be trying to jump-start the machinery of the old Soviet front groups, using North Korea as a "funding cutout." But the fronts have changed their terminology: Marxist-Leninist rhetoric is gone, replaced by antiglobalism themes. "It doesn't arouse the concern of Western governments or get stereotyped as being antidemocratic," says a longtime observer. "Though there is a considerable organizational structure behind the antiglobalist movement, it isn't totally coordinated. Much is spontaneous." Spaulding notes, "These rallies have been organized by a combination of Marxists, anarchists, ecologists, feminists and gay-rights activists. And nobody has been able to get control."

Which reminds me of this David Horowitz piece Excerpted from Hillary Clinton and the Racial Left…… Ever since abandoning the utopian illusions of the progressive cause, I have been struck by how little the world outside the left seems to actually understand it. How little those who have not inhabited the progressive mind are able to grasp the ruthless cynicism behind its idealistic mask or the fervent malice that drives its hypocritical passion for "social justice."

No matter how great the crimes progressives commit, no matter how terrible the future they labor to create, no matter how devastating the catastrophes they leave behind, the world outside the faith seems ever ready to forgive them their "mistakes" and to grant them the grace of "good intentions."

….Snip….

There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists-and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today.

But they are lying. (And when they defend racial preferences now-a principle they denounced as "racist" then-even they must know it).

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity-often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?

….Snip….

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.

But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason. [End Excerpt]

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