Imagine, for example, if George Bush spent his time being photographed smoking Marlboros in order to promote the sale of cigarettes. Now imagine Big Tobacco forcing backwoods Appalachians to work for pennies a day, sometimes against their will, harvesting, curing and preparing the tobacco for cigarettes.
Imagine if the government were burning down virgin forests, and confiscating tens of thousands of acres, to plant tobacco for export around the world, using government power to enrich the tobacco industry.
According to Wotzkow, that is precisely what Fidel Castro does - sacrificing the Cuban environment to the interests of Tabacalera, S.A., the Spanish tobacco monopoly. Castro, in other words, is in bed with Big Tobacco, to the detriment of the Cuban people.
Cuban leader Fidel Castro speaks to President of the Tabacalera Spanish tobacco company Spaniard Antonio Vasquez in Havana, Cuba, Friday, March 1, 2002 during an auction at the end of the cigar festival. Foreigners by the hundreds are making the annual pilgrimage to the green tobacco fields and curing houses for an insider's look at the world-famous Cuban cigar business. (AP phpoto/Jose Goitia) - Mar 02 1:45 AM ET
Tabacalera Spanish tobacco--[Excerpt] Just a few days before, an attempt by Tabacalera, in association with Seita, to buy the international business of RJR Nabisco of the US had been pre-empted by Japan Tobacco. It was a reminder of the failed Tabaqueira bid, and Mr Alierta became more convinced than ever that his group needed size to match its acquisitive ambitions.
Since then, two other factors have made a marriage with Seita all the more attractive.
One is that the French group took over Consolidated, the second ranked cigar company in the US, at the end of last year. That meant it overtook Tabacalera - which controls a string of producers in Honduras and Nicaragua and recently opened a plant in Cuba - as the world's leading cigar producer. [End Excerpt]
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[Excerpt] A new group called the Cuba Policy Foundation (CPF) has been created in Washington D.C. The main goal of the Cuba Policy Foundation is to create a lobby to lift the American sanctions on the Communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro. The CPF also hopes to undermine the work being done by many pro democracy groups inside and outside Cuba which hope to bring civil society to the island.
The CPF is bankrolled by the Arca Foundation.
For those of you who don't know about the Arca foundation, it passes itself as a philanthropic organization that gives millions of dollars annually to organizations that fight for social justice around the world. Unfortunately a grand majority of these organizations are of a far leftist nature, like in 1998 when it gave $1,000 to an obscure contingent called Fondo Del Sol which helped surviving members of the Stalinist Abraham Lincoln Brigade view a photo exhibit on the Spanish Civil War! Among the pro Castro groups Arca has funded have been the Pastors for Peace ($10,000 in 1999), Global Exchange ($50,000 in 1999), and the TransAfrica Forum ($100,000).
Communist Cuba is the main focus of Arca's Foreign Policy grants list, and although it gives money to other international and domestic institutions, it annually gives a substantial amount of funds to causes dealing with communist Cuba. In 1999 alone, the Arca Foundation gave to over 19 organizations that are sympathetic to revolutionary Cuba.
The Arca Foundation's records denote that it has spent over $3 million dollars since 1995 devoted to institutions that ignore human rights in Cuba, but fight aggressively to drop US sanctions to the rouge nation. The Arca Foundation which is run by the R.J. Reynolds tobacco heir Smith Bagley, has silently worked in the background with institutions and Castro sympathetic Democratic politicians working to end economic sanctions against the dictatorship.
"Smith Bagley and the Arca Foundation is the pro-Castro lobby's sugar daddy," says Jose Cardenas, Washington spokesman for the Cuban American National Foundation. "Arca is a walkup window for free checks passed out to any and all comers with an ideological ax to grind against U.S. policy on Cuba."
For the record, Smith Bagley was the individual who threw a party at his mansion where Elian Gonzalez was the guest of honor after the boy was accosted from the home of his Miami relatives. During this party, agents of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington DC provided delicacies like smoked salmon, shrimp and fruit that although taken for granted here in the United States, are unavailable to most of the Cuban population back on the island. Yet, Bagley who is a tremendously rich WASP sees no problem in giving money to organizations that help the Cuban revolution while the rest of the island population goes poor, hungry and oppressed. [End Excerpt] Source
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IPS: Left-Wing Thinkers Interview by Sidney Blumenthal Washington Post, 30 July 1986 [Excerpt] IPS has always attended to operate on two levels: Its public scholars are ideally supposed to be both activists and intellectuals. This stance has ceaselessly inspired conservatives to accuse IPS of subversive intent, down to the present debate over Nicaragua. In recent years, the views of some IPS fellows have prompted the charge that they have become apologists for Third World revolutionary tyrannies. They are absolutely pro-Sandinista. I have not heard a critical word, says Robert Leiken, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has been associated with IPS in the past. It's critical to be critical, says Barnet. There's always a danger of appearing to be an apologist of something you're trying to explain in a hostile political environment. There's a perception that we're overly concerned with the Third World. I think it's fair criticism. He adds, Our biggest weakness is in domestic policy. But the criticism about IPS that comes from places other than the right is not really about being overly concerned with the Third World. Rather, IPS is charged with a romanticism that clouds perception. The focus of much of this criticism falls on Saul Landau, who befriended Fidel Castro in 1960 and made a film about him. But much of the rosy glow has faded. For me, he reflects, Cuba was not a terrible attractive model. The stuff that seemed exciting me 25 years ago - revolution - doesn't seem exciting now. I want to get out of Nicaragua and into America.[End Excerpt]
IPS The Institute for Policy Studies sixteen years later and with 57 Congressional Caucus Members