A history of cuban counter-revolution

While we’re still on the subject of Cuba... By Michael
Moore

(Micheal Moore is one of the most popular of US
film-makers in Cuba. BOWLING FOR COLUBINE was shown at
the Havana Film Festival in 2003 and soon played on
Cuban television. Comments by Moore are translated and
reprinted in the Cuban media as well. Moore is one of
the most talented people at translating a wide range of
images and connecting the dots in a way that makes
sense to a broad audience which others of a leftist
orientation haven’t been able to.) From Walter Lippman

===============================================

English: http://battl.nl/mmcuba.rtf Spanish:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?H16412EF7

================================================

While we’re still on the subject of Cuba... By Michael
Moore

Have you ever wondered how Fidel Castro has stayed in
power for so long?

No one, other than the King of Jordan, has been in the
top spot for a greater period of time. The man has
outlasted eight U.S. presidents, ten Olympic Games, and
the return of Halley’s Comet. And no matter what the
United States government does to try to dethrone him,
he’s got more lives than Cher has comebacks.

It’s not that our American leaders haven’t given it
their best effort. Ever since Castro liberated his
country from the corrupt U.S.- and Mafia backed Batista
regime, Washington has tried a variety of methods to
unseat him. These have included taxpayer-funded
assassination attempts, invasions, blockades,
embargoes, threats of nuclear annihilation, internal
disruption, and biological warfare (the CIA dropped a
bunch of African Swine Fever germs over the country in
1971, forcing the Cubans to destroy 500,000 pigs).

And, something that has always seemed strange to me,
there is an actual US naval base on the island of Cuba!
Imagine if we after defeating the British in our
Revolution, we then let them keep a few thousand troops
and a bunch of battleships in New York Harbor. Weird.

President Kennedy, who followed through with President
Eisenhower’s plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs,
ordered the CIA to kill Castro, trying everything from
a pen filled with poison ink to an exploding cigar. (No
I do not get my information from Maxwell Smart; it’s
all in the Church committee report from the U.S.
congress, 1975.)

Of course nothing worked. Castro became stronger and
the U.S. continued to go nuts. Cuba was seen as "the
one that got away." It became an embarrassment to us.
Here we had every nation in this hemisphere in our back
pocket - except those damn Cubans. It looked bad. Like
when the whole family goes out to dinner and the one
bad seed, little Billy, just won’t sit still and do
what he is told. Everyone in the place is looking at
the parents and wondering just what kind of job they’re
doing. The appearance that they have no discipline or
control is the worst humiliation. So they start
whacking little Billy, but forget about it - he ain’t
ever going to finish his peas.

That’s how silly we look to the rest of the world. Like
we’ve been driven insane over this little island ninety
miles from our shores. We don’t feel that way about a
real threat to humanity, like the one posed by the
Chinese government. Talk about a bunch of thugs! Yet we
can’t move fast enough to hop in bed with them.
Washington spent twenty-three years getting us all
worked up against the Chinese - and then, suddenly, one
day they’re our friends. It turned out that the
Republicans and their corporate buddies weren’t really
against communist dictators - just those who wouldn’t
let them come in and make a buck.

And that, of course, has been Castro’s fatal mistake.
Once he took over and nationalized all the American
businesses and booted the Mob out of Havana, he might
as well have taken a seat on the San Andreas fault,
because the wrath of Uncle Sam came down on him hard,
and it hasn’t let up for over thirty-seven years. Yet
Castro has survived. For that accomplishment alone,
despite all his flaws (political repression, four hour
speeches, and a literacy rate of 100 percent), you
gotta admire the guy.

So why do we continue to fight this leftover turkey leg
from the Cold War? The answer can be found by looking
no further than a town called Miami. It is there that a
nutty bunch of Cuban exiles have controlled U.S.
foreign policy regarding this insignificant island
nation. These Cubans, many of whom were Batista
supporters and lived high on the hog while that crook
ran the country, seem not to have slept a wink since
they grabbed their assets and headed to Florida.

And since 1960, they have insisted on pulling us into
their madness. Why is it that every incident of
national torment that has deflated our country for the
past three decades-the Kennedy assassination,
Watergate, Iran-Contra, our drug abuse epidemic-the
list goes on and on-we find that the Cuban exiles are
always present and involved? First it was Lee Harvey
Oswald’s connection to the Cubans in New Orleans. (Or
was it the Cuban exiles acting alone to kill Kennedy,
or Castro ordering the assassination ’cause he just got
bored with Kennedy trying to bump him off? Whichever
theory you subscribe to, the Cubans are lurking in the
neighborhood.)

Then on the night of June 17, 1972, three Cubans -
Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez
(plus Americans Frank Sturgis and James McCord Jr.) -
were caught breaking into the Watergate offices of the
chairman of the Democratic Party. This covert operation
eventually brought down Richard Nixon, so I guess there
is a silver lining to that particular Cuban-exile
operation.

Today, Barker and Gonzalez are considered heroes in
Miami’s Cuban community. Martinez, later pardoned by
Ronald Reagan, is the only one who feels bad. "I did
not want myself to be involved in the downfall of the
President of the United States." Oh, well, how nice of
you!

When Ollie North needed a cover group to run arms into
Nicaragua to help overthrow the government, who else
could he turn to but the Miami Cubans? Bay of Pigs
veterans Ramon Medina and Rafael Quintero were key
managers of the air-transport company that supplied
weapons to the Contras. The U.S. backed Contra War was
responsible for the deaths of thirty thousand
Nicarguans.

One of the big bonuses to come out of our funding of
these Cuban exiles was the help they gave us in
bringing illegal drugs into the States, destroying
families and whole sections of our cities. Beginning in
the early sixties, a number of Cubans (who also
participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion) began running
major narcotics rings in this country. The DEA found
little support within the federal government to go
after these Cuban exiles, because they had organized
themselves under the phony banner of "freedom groups."
In fact, most were nothing more than fronts for massive
drug-smuggling operations. These same drug runners
later helped to run arms to the Contras.

U.S. based Cuban terrorist organizations have been
responsible for more than two hundred bombings and at
least a hundred murders since Castro’s revolution. They
have got everyone so afraid to stand up to them that I
probably shouldn’t even be writing this chapter. I am,
after all, one of the few unarmed Americans.

So why am I not worried? Because these Cuban exiles,
for all their chest thumping and terrorism, are really
a bunch of wimps. That’s right. Wimps.

Need proof? For starters, when you don’t like the
oppressor in your country, you stay there and try to
overthrow him. This can be done by force (American
Revolution, French Revolution) or through peaceful
means (Gandhi in India or Mandela in South Africa). But
you don’t just turn tail and run like these Cubans.

Imagine if all the American colonists had all run to
Canada - and then insisted the Canadians had a
responsibility to overthrow the British down in the
States. The Sandanistas never would have freed their
country from Somoza if they had all been sitting on the
beach in Costa Rica, drinking margaritas and getting
rich. Mandela went to prison, not to Libya or London.

But the wealthy Cubans scooted off to Miami - and got
wealthier. Ninety percent of these exiles are white,
while the majority of Cubans, 62 percent, are black or
of mixed race. The whites knew they couldn’t stay in
Cuba because they had no support from the people. So
they came here, expecting us to fight their fight for
them. And, like morons, we have.

It’s not that these Cuban crybabies haven’t tried to
help themselves. But a quick look at their efforts
resembles an old Keystone Kops movie. The Bay of Pigs
is their best known fiasco. It had all the elements of
a great farce - wrong boats, wrong beach, no ammo for
the guns, no one shows up to meet them, and, finally,
they are left for dead, wandering around a part of
their island completely unfamiliar to them (their limo
drivers, I guess, had never taken them there in the
good old days).

This embarrassment was so monumental the world still
hasn’t stopped laughing - and the Miami Cubans have
never forgotten or forgiven this. Say "Bay of Pigs" to
any of them, and you might as well be a dentist with a
drill on raw, decaying nerve.

You would think that the Bay of Pigs defeat would have
taught them a lesson, but then you would probably be
projecting. YOU would have given up. Not this crowd.
Since 1962, numerous Cuban exile groups have attempted
even more raids to "liberate" their homeland.

Let’s go to the highlights reel:

In 1981, a group of Miami Cuban exiles landed on
Prividenciales Island in the Caribbean on their way to
invading Cuba. Their boat, the only one of four exile
boats to make it out of the Miami River (the other
three were turned back by the Coast Guard due to foul
weather, engine trouble, or too few life jackets), ran
aground on a reef near Providenciales. Stuck there on
the island with no food or shelter, the Miami Cubans
started fighting among themselves. They begged the
people of Miami to rescue them off the island, and
after three weeks they were airlifted back to Florida.
The only one of their group to make it to Cuban waters,
Geraldo Fuentes, suffered an appendicitis attack while
at sea and had to be helicoptered by the Coast Guard to
Guantanamo for treatment.

In 1968, a group of Miami Cubans learned that a Polish
ship was docked in the port of Miami and that a Cuban
delegation might be aboard the freighter. From the
MacArthur Causeway, according to the ST. PETERSBURG
TIMES, the Cuban exiles fired a homemade bazooka and
hit the ship’s hull. It only put a nick in the ship,
and the group’s leader, Orlando Bosch, was sentenced to
ten years of prison, but was released in 1972. Bosch
explained that they had hoped to cause more damage,
but, he pleaded, "It was a BIG ship!" Bosch had earlier
been arrested for towing a torpedo through downtown
Miami during rush hour, and another time he was caught
with six hundred aerial bombs loaded with dynamite in
the trunk of his Cadillac. In 1990, the Bush
administration released him from prison, where he was
serving time for parole violations.

According to Washington Monthly, "During the summer and
early fall of 1963, five commando raids were launched
against Cuba in the hopes of destabilizing the regime.
The negligible Cuban underground was instructed to
leave faucets running and lightbulbs burning to waste
energy."

In 1962, according to the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE,
Cuban exile, Jose Basulto, on a CIA-sponsored mission,
fired a 20-mm cannon from a speedboat at the Incan
Hotel next to Havana Bay, hoping to kill Fidel Castro.
The shell missed, and Basulto, seeing gasoline spilling
all over his boat, high-tailed it back to Florida. "One
of our gas tanks, made of plastic, began to leak,"
Basulto explained later. "Gas ran all over the deck. We
didn’t know what to do."

Years later, Basulto would go on to form "Brothers to
the Rescue," an exile group that for the past few years
has been flying missions over Cuba, buzzing Cuban
sites, dropping leaflets, and generally trying to
intimidate the Cuban government. In February 1996,
Castro was apparently fed up with this harassment, and
after the twenty-fifth incident in the past twenty
months of the Brothers violating Cuban air-space, he
ordered that two of their planes be shot down.

Even though Brothers to the Rescue was violating U.S.
law by flying into Cuban airspace (a fact that FAA
acknowledges), the Clinton administration again went to
the exile trough and instantly got a bill passed to
tighten the embargo against Cuba. This embargo has
brought the wrath of the rest of the world against us -
UN General Assembly voted 117 to 3 to "condemn" the
United States for its economic violence against Cuba
(as it has in every vote since the embargo was
imposed).

The week after the planes were shot down, the exiles
tried to force the hand of the U.S., hoping to get the
military to engage in some kind of action against
Castro. They announced that on the following Saturday
they would take a flotilla of boats from Florida to
just off the Cuban coast, to protest the loss of the
two planes. Clinton decided to stage the greatest show
of force against Cuba since the Missile Crisis, and
sent a squadron of F-15 fighters, eleven Coast Guard
cutters, two Navy missile cruisers, one Navy frigate,
two C-130 planes, and a bevy of choppers, AWACs, and
six hundred coast guardsmen to support the flotilla.

All he forgot to send was the Dramamine - which, it
turned out, was what the Miami Cubans really needed.
Just forty miles out of Key West, the Cubans on the
boats started getting seasick, heaving up big chunks
and begging their skippers to turn the damn yachts
around. With the whole world watching, the Cubans once
again turned tail and ran. When they got back to port,
they held a press conference to explain their retreat.
One spokesman was still a little woozy, and you could
see the journalists backing away from him, expecting
any moment to be covered with a Linda Blair Special.

"A horrible storm arose out of the sea," said the
rapidly paling Cuban exit leader. "The waves were over
ten feet high, and we had to turn back or lose our
ships!" As he spoke some creative genius working the
weekend shift at CNN ran footage of the flotilla taken
from the air as it headed towards Cuba. The sun was
shining, the sea was as smooth as glass, and the wind
blew gently, if at all. Reporters out at sea did say
that after the CNN cameras left, the waters became
"rather rough." I’m sure they did.

Castro has to be laughing his ass off.