Castro: Bush is "stupid" - Cuban Crackdown Deepens Strains With U.S.

WASHINGTON -Secretary of State Colin Powell called Cuba's human rights record "horrible." Cuba described America's backers around the world as "vile lackeys."

Hardly the stuff of classic diplomacy but no cause for particular surprise: it's been going on for a long time. Indeed, these corrosive exchanges occurred, by coincidence, last week on the 42nd anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The rhetoric took place during a politically charged, U.S.-backed examination of Cuba's rights record at the 53-member U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

The commission voted on two Cuba measures, approving a mildly critical one but rejecting by a wide margin another one, which took Cuba to task for imposing long prison terms recently on scores of dissidents. That vote showed that many countries see little harm in the crackdown.

The Bush administration, unhappy about the Cuban action, is contemplating ways to make Fidel Castro's government pay a price. It also has undercut embargo foes on Capitol Hill.

"The embargo is still a bad idea, but changing it isn't going to happen any time soon," Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Monday.

Brian Alexander of the anti-embargo Cuba Policy Foundation said some House members who had entertained dissidents not long ago at a restaurant in Cuba's capital, Havana, were appalled to learn the waiters were state security agents who testified against the activists at their trials.

Cuba contends these dissidents, many of them independent journalists or directors of independent libraries, were subversives working hand-in-hand with the U.S. diplomatic office in Havana, led by career diplomat James Cason. Cuba says the dissidents were funded by the U.S. mission; the State Department denies it and says the mission's role is to seek a peaceful transition to democracy.

Neither Washington nor Havana pays much attention to diplomatic decorum nowadays. In Powell's references to the Cuban leader, he goes straight to "Castro," skipping "president." Castro says President Bush is "stupid." Each side has imposed travel restrictions on the others' diplomats lately. Cuba has even talked about shutting down the U.S. office in Havana and bringing its own envoys home from Washington.

In March, Cuba was troubled when five Cubans convicted of spy charges in U.S. courts were subjected to solitary confinement in small punishment cells, among other abuses. After one month and some second thoughts, the Justice Department eased some of the measures.

Cuba also contends that South Florida anti-Castro groups, intent on provoking an uprising on the island, continue to operate unhindered by law enforcers.

Meanwhile, State Department officials say "walk-ins" at the U.S diplomatic mission in Havana provide bogus "tips" about supposed planned terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens or interests. The results, they say, are wasteful, time-consuming checks.

For the Bush administration, the biggest grievance is the one-party state that Castro, 76, has delivered to Cubans since Bush was barely a teenager.

Until this year, congressional support for curbs on dealings with Cuba had been weakening. Last July, the House voted 262-167 to end restrictions on travel by Americans. A vote on the embargo itself was defeated 226-204. Castro launched a charm offensive, wining and dining visiting U.S. lawmakers and ingratiating himself with those from farm states by importing rice, apples and other food items - all exempted from the embargo in 2000 so long as payment is in cash.

An easing of travel curbs would have been a godsend for Cuba's ailing economy, but the proposal died last year without coming to a Senate vote. In any case, a presidential veto was certain.

Dennis Hays, a vice president of the anti-Castro Cuban-American National Foundation, says the crackdown on dissidents makes it plain that the Cuban leader realizes his wooing of members of Congress has failed.

The best U.S. strategy for Cuba, Hays says, is a "clear call for regime change."

EDITOR'S NOTE - George Gedda has covered foreign affairs for The Associated Press since 1968.

Yes.

Castro Spy Declares Opposition Is Disabled *** HAVANA - An undercover Cuban agent credited with giving some of the most damaging courtroom evidence against dissidents said the island's opposition movement has been shattered. "The opposition is finished, it has ended, it will never lift its head again," Aleida de las Mercedes Godinez told The Associated Press. "The opposition will never flourish again - never!"

……… Godinez provided a rare glimpse inside Castro's intelligence network and demonstrated just how deeply loyal his agents were. She said she never felt any remorse or sorrow for her work even though she worked with some dissidents for years. "Marta Beatriz was an objective of my mission," she said. "I could never be friends with a counterrevolutionary." Godinez said Roque, also a leading member of the Assembly for the Promotion of Civil Society, handled as much as $5,000 every month from various groups in the United States that were funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The USAID Cuba program has given more than $20 million to U.S. groups working with the opposition on the communist-run island since 1996 to bring about a peaceful transition to democracy. Godinez, a former math teacher, said she received about $700 a month from U.S. organizations as head of the National Independent Workers Union of Cuba.

…………………Other agents were just as loyal as her. Dr. Pedro Luis Veliz Martinez, a 39-year-old internist and a member of a long-trusted communist family, told the AP in a separate interview Monday that he was first approached by an Interior Ministry official while doing late-night hospital rounds in 1996. "I never had any doubts," Veliz said. "I am a revolutionary. I am Marxist-Leninist. I believe in communism." After gaining the confidence of government opponents in the Liberal Party and the organizations in Miami that support them, Veliz founded the Independent Medical College, a professional organization for dissident physicians, in 1999. ***

Castro crackdown has dismayed countries that thought the regime was easing its hard line.*** For Brian Alexander of the Cuban Policy Foundation, a group that wants the trade embargo lifted, Castro's charm offensive hit its peak last October when Havana hosted an expo of American agricultural products, which are exempted from the trade embargo. "The Cubans got quite a lot of publicity at the expo, and there was a sense that the movement to end the embargo was growing stronger," Mr. Alexander says. "Now they have hit their base of support in Washington with a sledgehammer. Politically, Cuba is making the embargo a third rail. Politicians who went out on a limb for Cuba are feeling stunned and apprehensive."

Indeed, less than a year ago, the House of Representatives voted to block the administration from enforcing a ban on Americans traveling to Cuba, a measure that was interpreted as bolstering support for lifting the embargo. But last week, the mood on Capitol Hill shifted dramatically. Both supporters and opponents of the embargo in the House voted unanimously, 414-0, to condemn Cuba. For all the criticism of the political crackdown, many see recent events as just one example of a more far-reaching curtailment of freedom on the island as Castro consolidates power for his eventual successor, considered to be his brother Raul.

For many, it began with a widely publicized antidrug campaign of in January. Days later, Cuba's state-run media carried stories of a wider crackdown against black-marketeering enterprises, from massive garment presses and private kitchens to unlicensed landlords and repair shops outside the island's state-run economy. The few licensed private entrepreneurs on the island also came under scrutiny. Most of the recently convicted dissidents were charged under Law 88, which promises tough sentences for Cubans convicted of conspiring with a foreign power. Those convictions and the summary execution of the boat hijackers, coming after a number of other incidents in which hijacked Cuban airplanes were given sanctuary in Florida, were seen as a reminder that Castro was unwilling to brook dissent. "This is the sort of housecleaning that other dictators from Stalin to Mao have been willing to do before they go," Mr. Suchlicki says.***

Excerpted from Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left -Hillary Clinton and the Third Way …………..If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

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.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual-both of which you despise.

It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.

Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)

To appreciate the continuity of communism in the mentality of the left, consider how many recent Hollywood promotions of the industry Reds and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes (in fact, the vast majority of recent academic texts on the subject) have been premised on the Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.

Naturally, today's leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?

On the other hand, conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left's own deceits. It also reflects conservatives' inability to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. For instance, I'm often asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in our academic and political culture. Though still around and sometimes influential in the left, the Communist Party has been a minor player for nearly fifty years. How can there be a communist left (small "c" of course) without a Communist Party?

The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small 'c') communist Idea. It is the idea, as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build a highway to Heaven. It is the idea of returning to an Earthly Paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a tikkun olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: "Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God."

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them-this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so self-righteous.

And it did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of this redemption that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist dreams.

It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails.

Snip

And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.

Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left-by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.

Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them. [End Excerpt] David Horowitz

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