Posted on 05/15/2002 3:49:38 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON (AP) - To undermine Fidel Castro, the United States must ease its four-decade-long embargo on Cuba, facilitate sales of U.S. agricultural goods and allow U.S. travel to the island, a bipartisan group of 40 members of the House contends.
"For over forty years, our policy toward Cuba has yielded no results," said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a House International Relations Committee member. "Castro hasn't held free and fair elections, he hasn't improved human rights, and he hasn't stopped preaching his hate for democracy and the U.S.
"I think it's safe to say that our current policy has failed," Flake said. "It's time to try something new."
The House's Cuba Working Group was to announce its Cuba policy review Wednesday in advance of an anticipated statement next week by President Bush.
The president gave no indication Tuesday the statement will include anything new.
He was asked whether former President Carter's current visit in Cuba, in which he has met with President Castro and dissidents as well, had changed his Cuba policy. "It doesn't complicate my foreign policy, because I haven't changed my foreign policy," Bush said.
"That is, Fidel Castro is a dictator, and he is oppressive, and he ought to have free elections, and he ought to have a free press, and he ought to free his prisoners, and he ought to encourage free enterprise."
Bush already has recommended twice during his presidency tighter restrictions on Cuba, not loosening the embargo, including making unauthorized travel to the island by American citizens more difficult.
"We're saying just the opposite: The best way to undermine Fidel Castro would be to lift the travel ban, allow private financing of agriculture sales to Cuba," Flake's spokesman, Matthew Specht, said Tuesday.
Many farm state lawmakers have sought to knock down the trade embargo. A law enacted two years ago allows grain sales to Cuba but is made much less effective by a bar on public or private financing of the sales. America's competitors readily sell their products to Cuba, often providing credit and subsidies.
However, an effort to include an easing of relations with Cuba was deleted from this year's farm bill, which Bush signed Monday.
"Ending the Cuban embargo is a bipartisan issue," said Sally Grooms Cowal, who was U.S. ambassador to the Caribbean nations of Trinidad and Tobago during the administrations of the first President Bush and President Clinton. She is now president of the Cuba Policy Foundation.
"The embargo denies Americans the right to trade and travel and has not brought freedom and prosperity to Cuba," said Cowal in a statement. "For 40 years, the embargo has failed to lead to political and economic reform in Cuba. When a policy this old fails to produce the intended results, it is time for a new policy."
The Cuba Working Group has 20 House Republicans and 20 House Democrats committed to lifting the travel ban, allowing normal exports of agriculture and medical products and improving human rights for Cuban citizens.
In the Senate, Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan., have led the charge for an easing of U.S. restrictions on trade and travel.
The Cuba Policy Foundation, said spokesman Brian Alexander, "is a centrist organization that shares the U.S. goals of freedom and prosperity for the Cuban people. We just don't believe U.S. policy has served to advance those goals, and we do believe it has had a negative impact on the U.S. economy and does not prepare Cuba for a peaceful and stable transition" to a free society.
______________________________
Friends of Fidel Washington Times *** Louisiana rice and Illinois wheat producers should not assume that selling to Havana is synonymous with getting paid. U.S taxpayers should be wary. Mr. Castro desperately needs credits and subsidies, and Washington is being pressured to provide them. If the United States begins to subsidize trade with Cuba estimated at $100 million a year five years from now, U.S. taxpayers could be holding, or paying off, a $500 million tab. That´s real money. Before extending Mr. Castro credit, grain growers should visit any street corner in Manhattan and observe a game played there. Called three-card monte, it consists of convincing the player that he knows exactly where the card carrying his money is. Until it disappears. In this game, the gambler takes his own chances. Where trade with Mr. Castro is concerned, the U.S. taxpayer will be left holding the losing card. ***
__________________________________________________________________
All eyes are on Carter, but what are Castro's intentions? - "..bring America to it's knees" Orlando Sentinel ***Carter even plans a tour of Cuba's Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, a high-tech facility that produces vaccines for other countries. The Bush administration created a stir last week by accusing Cuba of sharing its dual-use biotech capability with "rouge" states that are looking to create plagues for biological warfare. That charge should put into perspective Castro's own warning to the United States during his swing through the Middle East last May. "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees," Castro said at the University of Tehran. "The U.S. regime is very weak and we are witnessing this weakness from close-up."***
+ ``A number of Basque ETA terrorists who gained sanctuary in Cuba some years ago continued to live on the island;''
+ ``Several U.S. terrorist fugitives'' also live in Cuba;
+ And Havana has ties with Colombia's two main guerrilla movements, which have ``a permanent presence on the island.''
Sally Grooms Cowal, president of the U.S.-based Cuba Policy Foundation, a centrist organization that opposes the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, said the United States now has a self-defense incentive to ease its hard-line policy toward Havana and remove it from the list of rogue states.
NEW CONSIDERATIONS
``We have a big hole in our defense perimeter and that hole is Cuba,'' she said. ``I think we would be safer if we proceeded along those lines.''
For the Cuban American National Foundation and Castro's other die-hard foes, however, he has been a ``terrorist'' since the early days of the revolution when hundreds of opponents were executed and Cubans fanned out across Latin America to spread revolution.
``In the entire history of the Castro regime they have actively supported terrorist groups throughout the world,'' said Dennis Hays, executive vice president of the foundation.
Hays also cited Castro's recent ``terror tour'' to Iran and Libya as evidence Havana maintains close ties to other ''terrorist'' states. ``From every way you look at it, Cuba continues to actively support violent terrorist groups.''
Hays said if Cuba is serious about not being a terrorist state, it would have to sever all ties to alleged terrorist nations and groups, extradite criminals, shut down intelligence operations and open up its biotechnology industry to world scrutiny to check its capacity to produce biological weapons.***
Why does Jimmy Carter, arguably the smallest, meanest and most incompetent soul ever to be President, hold such views? One answer may be greed. Carter's motive in attacking Israel becomes clear the instant one sees how many millions of dollars his Carter Center in Atlanta has pocketed from Arab leaders and interests. Many wealthy multinational corporations are eager to profit from the end of America's trade embargo against Castro, and it would be fascinating to follow their money and see how much is going to the Carter Center and related groups and individuals.
But Mr. Carter, 77, also seems possessed by other demons, including Leftist ideology and loony idealism. "Jimmy Carter," said liberal journalist Mort Kondracke, "is [second only to Jesse Jackson] the biggest nuzzler of anti-American dictators in the country."
Among those in whose service Jimmy Carter has put his lips, as noted by National Review's Jay Nordlinger and Frank Gaffney, Jr., of the Center for Security Policy, are these: the Marxist dictator Ceausescu of Romania (of whom Carter said "Our goals are the same…."); Syrian mass murderer and Soviet ally Hafez al-Assad; Ethiopian mass murderer Mengistu; and North Korean Marxist madman Kim Il Sung [of whose totalitarian state with which we fought the Korean War, Carter said "I don't see that they are an outlaw nation."].
Jimmy Carter was a relentless supporter of the Castro-aligned Marxist Sandinistas of Nicaragua, doing all in his power to keep their leader Daniel Ortega in power and undermine President Ronald Reagan's attempts to restore freedom to this Central America nation. And both as President and since, Carter has befriended Fidel Castro and sought to end the bipartisan trade embargo against this country (the same kind of embargo Carter eagerly supported against non-Communist white-ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa).
Carter has always claimed to favor "human rights." In the name of such rights he as President withdrew U.S. support for the Shah of Iran because the Shah had imprisoned (and in some cases tortured) about 3,000 people, many of them agents of the Soviet Union bordering his nation. Because of Carter, this pro-Western leader was replaced by the fanatic anti-Western Muslim theocracy of the Ayatollah Khomeni.
The Ayatollah's dictatorship immediately put more than 20,000 pro-Western Iranians before firing squads. It reversed the Shah's opening to Western culture and rolled back the equal rights he had extended to women. And it promptly plunged Iran into war with neighboring Iraq, a war that never would have happened with the Shah in power - a war that killed more than 500,000 people. It also created the regional instabilities that led to Iraq's later invasion of Kuwait and to Operation Desert Storm, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands more.
And the Ayatollah's overthrow of a major American-aligned leader on the Persian Gulf inspired many thousands of Muslim fanatics to destabilize their own modernizing nations in hopes of likewise creating medieval theocracies and making women again submissive.
Jimmy Carter is therefore part of the reason why Osama bin Laden operatives slammed airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon last September 11th.
And yet, with the blood of perhaps a million people dripping from his hands, Jimmy Carter continues to stalk the world in his sick quest to be given a Nobel Peace Prize.
In fact, Jimmy Carter arguably has done more to undermine and destroy world peace than any other human being now alive.
If, God forbid, New York City or Washington, D.C., are vaporized by a Muslim terrorist atomic weapon - or if such fanatics kill millions by unleashing a dread disease agent such as Ebola virus in Chicago, Houston, Miami, Seattle or Los Angeles - Jimmy Carter's demented politics should be held responsible for framing the fearful symmetry that caused such horrors.
Speaking from Cuba, Jimmy Carter denounced last week's assertion by U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton that "Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states [that]….could support BW [Bacteriological Warfare] programs in those states."
"I asked them specifically," said Carter of government officials who briefed him before his Cuba trip, "…'Is there any evidence that Cuba has been involved in sharing any information to any other country on Earth that could be used for terrorist purposes?' And the answer from our experts on intelligence was No."
Mr. Carter had been briefed by underlings with no expertise in biological warfare, as it turned out. As Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, even if Carter accurately represented what he had been told in what was supposed to be a confidential briefing, it contradicted nothing in Bolton's statement about the weapons potential in Cuba's technology sharing.
Carter made a show of touring one biotechnology facility in Cuba and then telling reporters he saw nothing amiss there. But as Associated Press observed, "the former American president had no biotechnology experts in his delegation."
In May 1998 Clinton Administration Secretary of Defense William Cohen warned of Cuba's biological weapons potential. This week Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich affirmed that "Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological weapons research and development effort, and has provided…biotechnology to other rogue states."
"There is plenty of reason to be very concerned about what the Cubans are doing in this area," said National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
"You can't show someone a biotech lab and be assured they're not creating weapons of mass destruction," Rice continued. "That's not how biotech weapons work. And they're actually very easy to conceal and you need multiple measures to make certain biotech weapons aren't being developed and transferred."
Among the nations with which Cuba acknowledges it is sharing biotechnology are Libya and Iran, both terrorist-supporting states like Cuba itself. Mr. Carter simply brushed these facts aside, saying he did not believe Cuba was providing terrorist assistance to either nation and calling Cuba's biotech relationship with
Iran one in which Cuba could be trusted to "prevent any illicit or improper use of the technology which they share."
A cynic might wonder how the likes of Jimmy Carter ever became President. The answer is Time Magazine, which put the obscure-but-liberal Georgia governor on its cover four times in a successful effort to play king-maker. (Johnny Carson likewise made obscure, failed Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and his saxophone a star on the Tonight Show, and has lately taken to voicing his distaste for patriotism associated with the War on Terrorism.)
Time nowadays owns CNN, popularly known as the Clinton and/or Castro News Network for its relentless far-Left slant. The Media Research Center recently described CNN as a "propaganda tool for Fidel Castro's government" and a "megaphone for a dictator." CNN, of course, is the half-brainchild of Ted Turner (former husband of Hanoi Jane Fonda), who once boasted aloud to Chinese leaders that he, like them, was a socialist.
CNN's Havana bureau, the only Cuba-based bureau of any network (even PBS, once parodied on Saturday Night Live with the words: "PBS: If we didn't bring you Fidel Castro's 60th Birthday Gala, who would?"), once described Marxist Cuba's elections as superior to America's because they "have no dubious campaign spending" and "no mud slinging."
My Communist Party overseer when I was in Cuba long ago to do a piece for the Los Angeles Times expressed puzzlement that I was an editor at Skeptic Magazine, which featured debates among those on different sides of an issue.
"Here," my government shadow told me, "we do not confuse the people with debate. The Communist Party decides what the correct view of an issue is, and then it tells the people what that is." No wonder Castro and his bootlicks like former Turner Books author Wayne Smith are furious that Bush Administration visitors to Cuba hand out free shortwave radios. When I was in Cuba, all the radios lacked tuning dials, giving listeners instead only buttons tuned to the government stations, rather like what Leftists try to impose on American university campuses.
The recently deceased great international economist Peter Bauer, if my memory serves, once said: "By the year 2050 there will be only two True Believing Marxists left on Planet Earth - and they will be two nuns in Brazil."
In year 2002 one other True Believer in the ultra-Left continues as a specter haunting our world, and his name is Jimmy Carter. Carter would deny this, fancying himself a "Liberal." But as P.J. O'Rourke so rightly put it, nowadays "Liberalism is just Marxism sold by the drink." [End]
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and Sundays 9-11 PM Eastern Time (6-8 PM Pacific Time) that can be heard on 218 stations and via TalkAmerica.com. The show's live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.