Castro's Useful Idiot

One often hears news on short-wave radio not to be found elsewhere. Such is the case of Fr. Geoffrey Dennis Bottoms, a Roman Catholic priest from Lancaster, England. On June 20, Fidel Castro's Radio Havana Cuba (6000 kHz) reported that the British priest was awarded Cuba's highest honor. Fr. Bottoms received the Friendship Medal from Cuban Parliament President Ricardo Alarcón.

The 58-year-old priest, a zealous member of the National Executive Committee of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in Great Britain, said that receiving the Friendship Medal was the highest honor of his life. And why? Says he: "…because working for Cuba is one of the noblest causes that one can imagine."

In a pastoral letter released earlier this year, Havana's Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino pointed out that Cuba is "one of the Latin American countries that has suffered the most devastation through the destruction of institutions and the sweeping away of traditions." Cuba's highest ranking prelate particularly lamented the absence of Catholic schools in Cuba. In 1962, the fledgling Castro government seized more than 400 Catholic schools, closing them permanently. Castro charged that the parochial schools spread dangerous beliefs among the people. To this day, the Catholic Church in Cuba remains hamstrung by political repression: The Castro regime prohibits the Church from operating its own press or news media, from building churches, and from establishing any institutions such as schools, hospitals, or nursing homes. Nor is the Church in Cuba allowed to train an adequate number of priests.

After Pope John Paul II's historical visit to the island in 1998, the Church was hoping the pontiff's influence would pave the way for a return of religious education, some access to the media, or at the very least permission to hold public religious gatherings, such as devotional processions. Castro, however, has granted none of this. The only result of the Pope's visit was that Christmas was reinstated as a national holiday.

Fr. Bottoms ought to know this well. According to Radio Havana Cuba, the British priest has visited Castro's isle eleven times.

The priest's passion for Cuba seems to center on the defense of five Cuban men who were arrested in Florida several years ago and charged with espionage, using false identification, and conspiracy to murder. All five were convicted June 8, 2001 and received prison sentences from 17 years to life.

Given that Cuba is one of only six countries that remains on a U.S. State Department list of nations that sponsor terrorism-Cuba has links to Basque separatists, Colombia's Marxist guerilla groups, and the PLO-it doesn't seem out of the way that these five Cuban spies would be sentenced to prison as a result of due process in a Miami-Dade County court.

Fr. Bottoms considers these Cuban spies, popularly known to their defenders as "the Five," to be honorable Cuban patriots who were merely defending their country from what Castro Communists call the "ultra-right Miami Mafia," Cuba exiles perpetually said to be planning terrorist attacks against their native Cuba. According to the Committee to Free the Five, for which Fr. Bottoms serves as president, the Cuban spies were "framed up in a political witchhunt and railroaded by the U.S. in a 7-month trial in Miami."

For Fr. Bottoms it seems the Free the Five campaign is a social justice issue of singular importance. In fact he intends to visit each of the five Cuban "patriots" at their respective federal penitentiaries in the United States. Thus far he's visited two of the incarcerated spies. Last October, the British priest met with Gerardo Hernández at the maximum security prison in Lompoc, California. According to RHC, "Fr. Bottoms reported that Gerardo is the most integral human being he had ever met, full of humanity and compassion." Likewise upon visiting Ramón Labaniño at his Beaumont, Texas prison this summer, Fr. Bottoms reported that Labaniño "considers that he is fighting not just for Cuba but for the whole of humanity" and that the prisoner is "convinced that the left and progressive forces must unite to defeat the new imperialism which is the greatest threat to humanity at the present time."

If Fr. Bottoms is truly championing the cause of freedom and human rights, he'd have to turn a blind eye to just about everything that's been happening in Cuba this eventful year-not to mention the collective events of the past four decades.

An example: just three months before Fr. Bottoms was lauded at Havana's Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), Castro launched one of his most aggressive crackdowns in the 44-year old history of the western hemisphere's sole Communist regime. On March 16, Cuban state agents began arresting dozens of political dissidents, charging them with sedition, a stark reminder that Cuba, under Castro, is a police state. The 79 political prisoners, made up of independent journalists, librarians and human rights activists, were accused of conspiring with U.S. diplomats and collaborating with the "enemy press." In actuality, their offenses were three: promoting uncensored libraries, practicing independent journalism, and advocating peaceful political reform. In Cuba these activities are defined as crimes of subversion. According to state-run newspaper Granma, the long prison terms, ranging from 6 to 28 years, were meted out "in order to rein in political dissidents." It's worth mentioning that Castro's political prisoners were convicted after one-day summary trials. (Compare that to the Five's 7-month trials).

In April, three men accused of "terrorism" in an unsuccessful hijacking of a commercial ferry headed for Florida were summarily executed in front of a firing squad without trial. Castro said that he was making an example of them.

The crackdown received unprecedented worldwide condemnation, reaching well beyond Cuba's usual opponents. The executions of the ferry hijackers also disabused countries that previously thought the Castro regime was easing its hard-line attitudes toward political opponents. But European government officials aren't the only unlikely sources to have condemned Castro's recent aggression. Some of his most ardent supporters, including leftist intellectuals, have also turned against him. Portuguese author José Saramago, considered to be one of Castro's closest Communist allies amongst the European intelligentsia, broke all ties with the Cuban dictator after the execution of the ferry-boat hijackers in April. In an editorial published in Spain's El País, the Nobel Prize-winning author wrote: "This is as far as I go… Cuba has won no heroic victory by executing these three men, but it has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, robbed me of illusions."

For Fr. Geoffrey Dennis Bottoms, not so. His illusions, for now, continue unfettered.

But the good reverend is by no means alone in his Castro crusade. He's joined by others like the 160 starry-eyed intellectuals and screen personalities, including American actor Danny Glover and singer Harry Belafonte, who recently signed a two-paragraph declaration, entitled "To the Conscience of the World," condemning the United States for "harassing" the Castro regime. This public statement seems to have been inspired by El Commandante himself. Six days earlier, in a four-hour talk broadcast on RHC, Castro blamed his recent crackdown on the United States and Cuban exiles in Florida ("the Miami Mafia"), who he said have a "warped plot" to provoke a crisis with Havana that could serve as a pretense for a U.S. invasion of the island-a vague charge Castro has been making off and on for years now.

Fr. Bottoms also has an American ally in his Free the Five campaign. According to a special report broadcast on RHC on June 10, the Berkeley City Council unanimously passed an unprecedented resolution in support of granting a retrial to the five convicted Cuban spies. Never mind that the famously liberal college town in northern California has nothing whatever to do with the politics of Miami-Dade County, some 3000 miles away. What it does demonstrate, however, is that the Free the Five campaign-despite any merits it may have (if it has any)-is one of the top pet causes amongst leftists these days.

What sets Fr. Bottoms apart from many of these other trendy Marxists ideologues is that he is a Catholic priest. Considering that the Catholic Church in Cuba has long been bludgeoned and that Fidel Castro is an avowed enemy of the Church, it is especially noteworthy that a man wearing a Roman collar (at least figuratively speaking) would be publicly honored in a country where the Church has so few rights. As such, the award smacks of a publicity stunt intent on presenting a façade of healthy Church-State relations in Cuba-something that could not be further from the truth.

The fact that Fr. Bottoms not only flew across the Atlantic to receive the Friendship Medal, but went so far as to say that the award was "the highest honor of his life" and identified Cuba as "one of the noblest causes one can imagine" is proof that Castro could not have nursed a more useful idiot than this British cleric, who must take great pains to blind himself from the harsh realities of Cuba's totalitarian state, least of all the endless string of well-documented human rights abuses, including the Castro regime's treatment of political prisoners: beating, torturing, starving, and denying medical treatment to political dissidents rounded up for opposing Castro's tyrannical dictatorship has long been standard operating procedure in Cuba.

According to the U.S. State Department's Report on Human Rights Practices for 2002, Cuba's prisons appear to be modeled after KGB gulags: "Detainees and prisoners, both common and political, often were subjected to repeated, vigorous interrogations designed to coerce them into signing incriminating statements, to force collaboration with authorities, or to intimidate victims. Some endured physical and sexual abuse, typically by other inmates with the acquiescence of guards, or long periods in punitive isolation cells."

According to human rights activist Laida Carro, head of the Miami-based Coalition of Cuban-American Women, Cubans are "victims of a brutal totalitarian regime whose citizens face few options but to remain in Cuba and become slaves to the totalitarian state, or dissent and become political prisoners."

This is the well-known pattern that has followed in all countries where Communism has taken over as a measure to control power. Cuba is no exception. The bottom line is that the Cuban people are not able to exercise their God-given right to free-will. Castro's recent crackdown has given the world more evidence of this fact.

"The Cuban people have never stopped struggling to be free from Communist rule since 1959," said Carro. "The thousands of victims speak for themselves: drowned, shot by firing squad, and casualties who died in prison or due to other repressive tactics."

Meanwhile, Fr. Geoffrey Dennis Bottoms is like a man who looks at his own face in a mirror. He sees himself, then goes off and promptly forgets what he looked like.

Protection of Catholics in the country.

I wish you could see the state of the Catholic Church in Cuba. Pope John Paul was a crusader against Communism at one point, but he got old, and the Vatican got soft after the wall fell. And the forgot about the Cubans. What Christians go through there is beyond words. I spent a week there in April. It's a psychotic place.

Nobody pays attention to the Pope on foreign policy because he remains silent in the face of tyrants. Like Castro.

I'm not big fan of the Vatican, but at one point this Pope was great in the fight against Communism. He's gotten too old though and he is surrounded by Marxists under him. It's a sad exit to a great man's life.

By the way, how can you criticize the Pope's attitude towards the United States, when you are a fan of the National Catholic Reporter? Show me anything by the Pope dripping with the hatred for the U.S. displayed by that publication. The Pope has often praised the U.S., but to the NCR the U.S. is the source of all evil in the world.

By the way, how can you criticize the Pope's attitude towards the United States, when you are a fan of the National Catholic Reporter? Show me anything by the Pope dripping with the hatred for the U.S. displayed by that publication. The Pope has often praised the U.S., but to the NCR the U.S. is the source of all evil in the world.

I'm a fan of John Allen, Rome correspondent for NCR. I've never posted anything from NCR that criticizes the US, because I don't agree with them on it.

What does the NCR have to do with the Pope's criticism of American foreign policy? I don't see the connection.

"And what are we to say of the threat of a war which could strike the people of Iraq, the land of the prophets, a people already sorely tried by more than 12 years of embargo?" he said.

http://www.americancatholic.org/News/JustWar/Iraq/papalstatement.asp

The American-led U.N. embargo was the reason for their suffering??

Tariq Aziz's 4th Vatican Visit

"He received red carpet treatment at the Vatican for his fourth visit there since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, entering by the gate normally reserved for heads of state in a motorcade of 10 limousines."

I don't mean to bash this Pope because as I said in a post above, I believe he is a great man and was once a great crusader against Communist tyranny. But he is very old and suffering from a terrible disease and has some horrendous advisers around him. The combination of all those things resulted in them being way too easy on tyranny this time around.

You claimed that the Pope ``condemned the U.S. and Britain.'' After how many posts, you still can't present a shred of evidence to support that statement. By the way, this thread was about something else, but any thread is an excuse to bash the Pope.

Nick, the Pope condemned the war. By impication, that's a condemnation of the US and Britain.

This thread was about a defender of Castro, and I merely pointed out that the Pope has been silent on Castro's atrocities.

Aziz, a war criminal, received the red carpet treatment, and the Pope read Tony Blair the riot act when he visited shortly before the war began.

Ironically, when Aziz called on the Italian Prime Minister, he was told the Prime Minister couldn't squeeze him into his schedule.

That should have been done to him when he organized the breaking of the embargo on Iraq at the same time the French and Russians were pushing to break it. How conveeenient.

As for him "knowing about 911," I don't think he did, unless his friend Tariq Aziz of Iraq also knew about it and spilled the beans, which would imply Iraq did indeed have something to do with it in spite of assorted denials by the left.

The first time any word of him "knowing about 911" didn't occur until two days AFTER 911 in a Catholic publication. I think the tale was just an effort to curry amazed adoration from the Madonna-sighted-in-every-potato-chip faction in the church, assorted conspiracy theorists, etc. I see no reason to believe he knew it in advance.

I'm more interested in the possibility this guy isn't in the church's employ sprititually so much as he and others like him, such as the "liberation theology crowd" which has for so long plagued central and South America are spiritually bought and sold by more "earthly" ideologies and states.

It's bad company for a pope to keep, particularly an aging one.

I believe this refers to the "Wasp Network" or "Wasp group" which had operated in the US and which had been tasked with finding places to hide smuggled weapons and Cuban agents, as well as with keeping tabs on MacDill AFB.

The arrest of this group seems to have led to the discovery of Elena Belen Montes, a Cuban spy. She had written false reports on the Cuban military and Cuba's capabilities which were used to bolster the effort in the US congress to drop the sanctions on Cuba, and her activities also led to the capture of US "human assets" by the Cubans upon their arival on the island. Some claim those people are alive but I don't believe that has been proven. She was arrested shortly after 911, in September, while phoning her Cuban bosses.

Couple charged as spies

Washington Times--[Excerpt]

FBI Agent Hector M. Pesquera, who heads the bureau's Miami field office, announced the arrests. In July, in the wake of the convictions of the five Cuban spies, Mr. Pesquera pledged that additional arrests would be made in what he described as a continuing inquiry. He told reporters at the time that his office had "not finished the investigation." Federal authorities said that the espionage by the Garis occurred between 1991 and 1998, and that Mrs. Gari used her U.S. Postal Service job to gain access to mail sent by and intended for Cuban Americans.

The couple also are suspected of conducting surveillance on the Cuban American National Foundation, an influential exile group, and of unsuccessfully trying to infiltrate the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Mr. Gari, who worked for Lockheed Martin in Orlando, had been ordered by his Cuban handlers to apply for work at the Southern Command, according to authorities, although they did not elaborate.[End Excerpt]

BUMP!

I agree. I think that the strain of Catholicism that leans towards "social justice" has a myopic tendency to sympathise with people of the left and their ideas even if they ARE brutal dictators. OTOH, they seem to have the same instinctive prejudice against certain right oriented nations where freedom (and therefore capitalism) are allowed to flourish.

Yes, materialism is a problem, but it pales next to the brutality of a dictatorship. For some reason, the players in the global culture hold America to a far higher standard than they hold the dictatorships to. In a microcosmic way, it echoes the higher standards the liberals hold conservatives to.

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