Ventura: Cuba policy is 'all about' Florida votes

Jesse must have fallen and hit his head too many times as a rassler. Blame it on Hulk Hogan.

Elian was a watershed moment for many of us. I found FR that day....the only place that didn't parrot the Clinton admin./NCC/Communist lie that Elian belonged with his "father" in Cuba. We still pray for Elian, his courageous Miami family, and his father...a Castro pawn.

They aren't in jail because they didn't break any laws.

Your hatred for the Cuban exiles is apparent, and I learned long ago that trying to reason with such deep-rooted bigotry is an exercise in frustration.

Elian's father wasn't married to Elian's mother when Elian was conceived or born. So, to prove legitimacy, there should have been a DNA test, at the very least. But, the Clinton Administration and Castro didn't care about the boy or his father's alleged abusiveness. A deal was made at the cost of a little boy's freedom.

It's sad to see that even now, there are some FReepers that actually agree with what the Clinton/Reno crime team did to that poor family.

CUBA BUSINESS IS DIRTY BUSINESS

By Alfred G. Cuzan
Pnesacola News Journal
Colaboración:
Paul Echaniz
E.U.
La Nueva Cuba
Septiembre 25, 2002

Enthusiastically endorsed by the News Journal, a local delegation went to Cuba recently in the hope of drumming up business for the Port of Pensacola.

As is his wont, Fidel Castro surprised the visitors by requesting to join them for lunch one day. According to retiring state Rep. Jerry Maygarden, R-Pensacola, a member of the delegation, "It was one of those really rare moments that I wouldn't ever want to miss." After all, Castro has been "on the world stage a long time." What a thrill!

But does he and the rest of the delegation, and do the editorial writers of the News Journal, know what kind of man and regime it is that they are dealing with? Don't they remember or don't they care about what Fidel Castro has been doing on that "world stage" all these years?

Since seizing total power in Cuba in 1959, Fidel Castro has successively aligned himself with every enemy of the United States. In the midst of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis Castro urged Moscow to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against America. During the Vietnam War, his henchmen joined in the torture of American POWs. Castro has consorted with Libya's Khaddafi, Panama's Noriega, Colombia's cocaine kings, and assorted international terrorists. He blasted the U.S. during the Gulf War and denounced NATO during the air campaign against Belgrade. As recently as last year Castro visited Teheran, where he declared that the Iranian and his regime together would bring the United States "to its knees."

At home Castro rules a police state repeatedly condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Commission. During the life of the regime more than 10,000 Cubans have been executed, and hundreds of thousands imprisoned. Merely circulating a copy of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights is punishable by a prison term.

There are no labor unions, commercial enterprises or trade or industrial associations outside the control of the Communist Party. All are infiltrated by the political police (no doubt Maygarden unknowingly shook hands with one or more members of state security, the kind of people that torture political prisoners). Except for church publications of restricted circulation, all media are integral parts of the party-state; there are no independent schools, universities or cultural associations.

But suppose none of this is the Pensacola delegation's concern, nor of the News Journal, which seldom, if ever, mentions any of the regime's unsavory aspects in its news or editorial pages. Let us assume that all that the delegation and the newspaper's editorialists are interested in is the Port of Pensacola's bottom line. In that case, they better hold on to their wallets, or rather to that of the taxpayers, for the regime they are so anxious to do business with is bankrupt, habitually buying goods and services on credit with no intention of making good on its debts.

Cuba is in default of more than $10 billion to Western creditors. According to a Reuters report cited by a University of Miami study, the Castro regime "is notorious for paying its debts late ... and public and private creditors report that the situation has grown much worse in recent months."

This, then, is what the Pensacola delegation, and the News Journal, hope to do business with: a regime ruled by a tyrant, an enemy of the United States in word and in deed, that is in default to the rest of the world. Is this any way to do business? Is this what the people of Pensacola want?

*Alfred G. Cuzan is a professor of political science in the Department of Government at the University of West Florida.

The dirty little secret is that the last thing Castro wants is the embargo lifted. He can explain away his failed system and simply blame it all on the embargo.

CUBA'S ENEMIES WITHIN

By Kevin Diaz
Star Tribune Washington Bureau Correspondent
Star Tribune
Colaboración:
Armando F. Mastrapa III
New York
La Nueva Cuba
Septiembre 25, 2002

HAVANA -- One of Fidel Castro's many "propaganda enemies" is a retired geography teacher named Gladis Linares, who operates out of a small cement-block bungalow in suburban Havana.

She shares the house with her husband, journalist Humberto Mones Lafita, and their dog and three cats. They think their phones are bugged.

That's not a paranoid assumption in a city that posts uniformed officers on virtually every block, and where citizens are commonly stopped and harassed by the police for talking to foreigners.

Linares, 60, is a founding member of the Cuban Women's Humanitarian Front, a small, nonviolent group made up mostly of women her age -- about two dozen in all.

"The younger women are afraid of losing their jobs," she said. "Our neighbors think like us, but are afraid to say so. There's a lot of fear."

Hers is one of dozens of pro-democracy cells that have sprung up in Cuba since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade ago and abandoned its Marxist client state.

Largely ignored by the Castro government and its tightly controlled press, these groups toil in anonymity -- and with little apparent effect.

These are not the people Gov. Jesse Ventura will see when he arrives in Cuba today. "What he will see," Linares said, "is a show."

The groups' relative invisibility illustrates how well Castro has managed to keep opposition in check in a country previously known for its political fractiousness and instability. After 43 years in power, Castro still has not faced a meaningful election, and his control over the nation's security is as strong as ever.

With only nominal opposition inside Cuba, his 76th birthday last month became an occasion for wondering what will happen to the island nation once its charismatic but absolute leader is gone.

"The situation is extremely opaque," said Jeane DeLaney, a professor of Latin American history at St. Olaf and Carleton colleges in Northfield, Minn. "It's surprising that even people in Cuba don't know."

What Cubans know, for the most part, comes from Cuban television and newspapers, which the government controls. And while public computer terminals with Internet access are available all around Havana, the current price of $3 an hour is beyond the means of the average person in a country with a per capita income of about $20 a month.

"Most people can't afford it," said Yosvany Deya, 30, a software engineer for the Ministry of Basic Industry. "The government determines everything," Deya acknowledged. "But we like to think we are the government."

The official plan, as most Cubans understand it, is that Castro's younger brother Raul is being groomed to take over. Few believe that notoriously hard-line Raul Castro has the enigmatic charm his brother has used to consolidate power. But then few believe that the regime is so fragile that it could not outlast Fidel Castro.

"From the Cuban government's point of view, it will be a process of succession, not of transition [to free-market democracy]," said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. "They don't want to open up the economic system, because if they open up economically, they'll have to open up politically.

"Based on the strength of the Communist Party, the armed forces and the security services, it's likely those institutions are going to hold for a while," Suchlicki added. "Just don't ask me how long."

Said Deya: "What we want is for the North Americans to lift the blockade without conditions."

El bloqueo

The 40-year-old economic blockade of Cuba, known locally as El bloqueo, has been the central feature of U.S. policy toward the island since Castro began nationalizing U.S. industries there in 1960.

Evidence of the blockade -- or of the failures of socialism, depending on one's point of view -- can be seen throughout Cuba's crumbling infrastructure: from the decrepit colonial buildings along Havana's Malecon boulevard, to the food rationing that limits each resident to one pound of fish per month.

Although Linares recognizes that the embargo has brought food rationing and privation to ordinary citizens like her, she regards it as a necessary evil.

"Doing business with Castro helps him deny us human rights and social freedom," she said. "What did Castro do with the subsidies he got from the Russians? He didn't help the people. He sent soldiers all over the world."

Other Cubans, no matter how they view Castro, seem puzzled by the logic of the blockade. "It's true that Castro decides everything," said Luis Amores, 38, a gym teacher in Havana. "But in a country where the government provides everything, hurting the government hurts the people."

Even with the limited free enterprise Castro now allows, fledgling capitalists seem to have little chance of improving their lot unless it's from dollar tips through sought-after government jobs plying the tourist trade in hotels and taxis.

Obdulio Ramirez Gomez, who runs a fruit and vegetable stand in central Havana, pays the government 90 Cuban pesos a day (nearly $4) for his street stall. He sells mangos for 3 pesos, of which 2 pesos go to the farmer, who works a private plot on a state-owned cooperative.

"What I make gives me enough to eat, but it doesn't put clothes on my back," said the 54-year-old merchant, a father of four.

The one industry that still thrives in Cuba, as it did before Castro, is the one built around the ubiquitous jineteras, prostitutes who cruise the Malecon, the major hotels and the exotic cabarets for foreign dates.

It is as much out of concern over the jineteras as it is for fear of foreign contacts that ordinary Cubans are not allowed in most tourist hotels.

Communists and Nikes

The desire for change seems tempered by a fear of the unknown. Cuba takes pride in the advances in food and medicine wrought under the revolution. Many fear the return of the Miami exile community, whose leaders are labeled as terrorists in Cuba.

"It's an error to look at Cuba as a public waiting to break free of the chains of communism," DeLaney said. She noted that while Castro has both committed loyalists and opponents in Cuba, most people are in the middle wanting better lives and the social benefits of the revolution.

"I guess you'd say they want a social democracy," she said. "Even diehard Communists want their children to have Nikes."

Still, there are some taking greater risks for greater change.

A dissident group headed by Oswaldo Paya Sardinas got some rare publicity this summer when former President Jimmy Carter was allowed to talk on Cuban TV. He took the opportunity to champion the Varela Project, Sardinas' 11,000-signature petition drive for human rights.

The project, calling for greater democracy, was submitted to Cuba's National Assembly in May. The government immediately dismissed it as a foreign plot, and said it organized a counter-petition of about 9 million Cubans supporting socialism.

Some observers doubt that it would be possible to get 9 million Cubans to agree to anything. Others question the relevance of the project, which still remains a tiny initiative in a nation of 11.2 million.

Whatever the number, exile groups in Miami say, the fact that anyone would take such a risk is a sign of how desperate Cubans have become.

"You have to recognize, it's not easy being a dissident in Cuba," said Dennis Hays, who heads the Cuban American National Foundation office in Washington, D.C. "You can lose your job, your kids won't get educated, or they can take away your ration card."

Nothing to lose

Linares, who signed the Varela petition, said she had nothing to lose. She and her husband are retired. Their 29-year-old daughter lives on her own working as a German translator. They have little the government can take away.

Castro, still seeking support in the United States to lift the blockade, does not seem to be of a mind to pick fights with people who represent so little a threat.

"The police pay us visits," Linares said, "but they do it discreetly."

Things have relaxed a little since December 1990, when Bienbenida Santana, a Women's Front co-founder, was sentenced to four years in prison for "antisocial behavior" and making "enemy propaganda" in a public letter to Castro urging him to respect human rights.

Among the group's biggest fans are some of the anti-Castro organizations in the United States that are derided nightly on Cuban television as the "Miami terrorist mafia."

But Linares' stated aim is to bring change to Cuba from within, not without. In the long run, some see that as the only viable solution for Cuba.

"Nobody from the exile community in Miami has the standing to be the next president of a democratic Cuba," said Javier de Cespedes, president of the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Directorate, a Miami-based dissident group. "The next leader will be from the internal movement. They are the future of democracy in Cuba."

-- Kevin Diaz is at kdiaz@mcclatchydc.com.

Just think about the number of people in America who learned the truth about Castro, the media, the Democrats, Reno, our wonderful Cuban-American residents and heroism through the story of Elian. Many eyes were opened, RM.

I will always be grateful to FR..and Freepers like you...for being there for the Gonzalez family. It seemed the whole world had gone mad...and then there was FR. April 22, 2000...we will not forget.

See #25, also, "papa" = "Papa" Castro. Elian, like his supposed biological father, is a ward of Castro's Communist Cuba. You know nothing about the Miami Gonzalez family, Castro, Cuba or Communism if you believe the words you printed.

Kidnapped? Gee, silly me. I thought the child was placed there by INS. I guess I must have missed the part when they swam over to Cuba and snatched Elian from his daddy's loving arms.

The only authorities "demanding" the child be returned to Juan Miguel were Janet Reno and Fidel Castro. Two of the most unlikely child advocates on the planet, being as they both are responsible for the deaths of innocent children.

Ignorance is bliss, AllSmiles. So you must be one happy individual.

"I see opportunity for Minnesota," he said.

Lefsa and Lutefisk for Cohibas?

Ventura: Cuba policy is 'all about' Florida votes

True even if the source is a bonehead.

SEEING CUBA AS IT REALLY IS
FOUR DECADES AFTER THE REVOLUTION,
CUBA'S POLITICAL PRISONS ARE STILL FULL
AND IT SUFFERS FROM SELF-INFLICTED SHORTAGES
OF PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING

By Dennis Hays*
Guest Columnist
The Miami Herald
Florida
U.S.A.
Colaboración:
CANF News**
Septiembre 25, 2002

Gov. Jesse Ventura says he is a different kind of politician. I hope that he is. He will have a chance to prove it later this week when he travels to Cuba. Through his actions and his public statements, the governor has an opportunity to do something significant in Havana.

The governor believes in education. Well, the most exciting grassroots movement is Cuba today is the growth of the independent libraries — simple rooms in peoples' homes where average Cubans can find books and magazines otherwise denied them.

For their efforts, librarians are often beaten, arrested and thrown out of their houses by the Castro regime, but collectively they bring information and hope to a population that has little of either. The governor can help this movement by taking boxes of Spanish language books to Cuba and personally giving them to one of the independent libraries.

The governor believes in labor rights. He must then know that the International Labor Organization has repeatedly condemned Cuba for the systematic violation of practically every labor right there is.

Hotel jobs are reserved for the communist party faithful and there is rampant racial discrimination in hiring. The regime takes money from foreign partners in dollars and pays workers at an artificial rate in pesos, effectively confiscating over 95 percent of the workers' wages. Independent trade unions are illegal and labor activists imprisoned.

The Dutch human rights organization, Pax Christi Netherlands, notes in a scathing report that the vast majority of Cubans are physically barred from entering tourist areas, a practice known as "tourist apartheid."

The governor has an alternative to becoming complicit in these abuses. There are rooms available in private Cuban homes, known as "casas particulares." By staying with a Cuban family, rather than in a segregated "Sun City" style resort, the governor would register his clear support for the rights of the worker.

The governor wants to promote exports. I hope he has done his due diligence. If so, he knows that Cuba is a bankrupt, deadbeat nation — that Castro owes billions of dollars to every country that has ever been foolish enough to do business with him, that the current round of purchases of American agricultural products is being financed by the regime's decision to stop payment on the debts it owes to other nations, and that the Europeans and Canadians have lost patience with Castro and no longer want to throw good money after bad — thus explaining the Cubans' new interest in us. The regime needs a new source of credit, and we're the only one left.

The governor is justly proud of his service in the military. On his trip he may well be introduced to the Cuban Minister of Higher Education, Fernando Alegret, a man identified in congressional hearings as the infamous "Fidel," a Cuban agent who sadistically beat, tortured, and killed American POWs in Vietnam. Will the governor shake his hand? Or will he insist that Castro release a full accounting of the activities of his agents in North Vietnam?

Finally, the governor spoke movingly on Sept. 11 of how freedom is the foundation of all else. I know he believes this. He must also know that four decades after the revolution, Cuba's political prisons are still full. Cuba suffers from self-inflicted shortages of practically everything, but there has never been a shortage of Cubans who believe enough in freedom to risk their lives.

I urge the governor to go unannounced to the prison cells of Dr. Oscar Biscet, Francisco Chaviano, Jorge Luis Garcia Perez or any of the hundreds of other political prisoners identified by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other organizations. He will know nothing of Cuba if he does not hear their stories.

It is worth noting that the record of Midwestern governors in Cuba is not particularly inspiring. Last month, North Dakota's John Hoeven took the position that whatever the Castro regime does is not of concern to him — as long as Cuba buys his state's agricultural products.

This was practically a "Profiles in Courage" moment, however, when compared with Illinois Gov. George Ryan in 1999. While speaking at the University of Havana, Ryan deleted the entire section of his speech that dealt with human rights, so as to "not offend" Fidel Castro, as he later explained. Castro believes, with ample reason, that American politicians are too polite or too greedy to point out the obvious — that Cuba is a failed state and the single biggest impediment to any improvement is Castro himself.

Ventura has a reputation for being a maverick. Although the odds are against it, I hold out the hope that he earns this reputation and surprises everyone — starting with Fidel Castro.

*Hays, who served coordinator for Cuban Affairs at the State Department from 1993-95, is executive vice president of the Cuban American National Foundation.

Ventura said he heard no complaints from the Bush administration when he led a trade mission to China this year. Criticism of the Cuba trip, he said, "is all about electoral votes in Florida"

And the big farm subsidy bill was about electoral votes in Minnesota and immigration policy is about electoral votes in California and New York. What's his point --- the people of Florida shouldn't have an opinion?

Great post, Dqban. Thanks. I knew about most of the big outrages, but this one: For their efforts, librarians are often beaten, arrested and thrown out of their houses by the Castro regime shows the petty, evil, cruelty of Castro's Cuban leadership.

Ventura shares stage with Castro at opening of ag show
BY JIM RAGSDALE
Pioneer Press

HAVANA
Gov. Jesse Ventura stood next to Cuban President Fidel Castro and officially opened a historic agriculture trade fair today.

The Minnesota governor and the man who has led Cuba since Ventura was in grade school shook hands but did not speak on the podium of the convention center, where hundreds of U.S. food producers came to get in on what they hope is an emerging market for their products.

"I never dreamed that in my lifetime I would be standing here in the great country of Cuba," Ventura told the crowd of Americans and Cubans attending the gathering. "I never dreamed I would see our two flags flying side by side.

"But it proves to me, just as it did when I ran for governor of Minnesota, than anything can happen," Ventura said. The Americans and the Cubans, after the translator finished, had a good laugh.

The 76-year-old Castro, wearing a dark-blue, double-breasted suit with a gold tie, did not speak at the opening ceremonies, and said nothing directly to Ventura. But after the speeches, Castro roamed through the halls and fixed upon the Kaehler family of St. Charles, Minn., who were exhibiting livestock in a corner of the building.

Castro became animated as he discussed animal care, feeding and production totals with Ralph Kaehler, owner of the livestock operation near Rochester, and his two sons, 11-year-old Seth and 13-year-old Cliff. A crush of international reporters followed Castro as he questioned Kaehler and his sons, patted the boys on the head and encouraged them to study Spanish and return to Cuba.

"Once a cattleman, always a cattleman," Ralph Kaehler said as he led Castro into a pen to view his beef cattle. The Kaehlers said Castro, speaking through an interpreter, has a background with farm animals and was keenly interested in milk production, how much the Minnesota animals are fed and other details of Kaehler’s operation.

Ventura and Pedro Alvarez, chairman of Alimport, the Cuban import agency, cut a ribbon to officially begin the U.S. Food and Agribusiness Exhibition in Havana, believed to be the first such trade show since Castro came to power in the Cuban revolution of 1959. Alvarez said U.S. food imports to Cuba could rise to 22 percent of total Cuban food imports this year. He said the number could grow as high as 60 percent in the future.

"I look forward to this being just the first step in trade relations and a better relationship between our two countries," Ventura said in his opening remarks.

"We are for free trade and normal travel between Cuba and the United States," Alvarez said in his remarks.