Connexion
CBS News’s 60 Minutes ran a segment on Sunday that sought to blame the “Havana Syndrome” illnesses, which largely occurred during the Trump administration, on Russian espionage, possibly involving sonic weapons.
The post 60 Minutes Blames Russia for Cuba ‘Sonic Attacks’ Under Trump with Anonymous Source and Vague Intel appeared first on Breitbart.
Biden’s open-border extremism is helping Havana’s communist junta cling to power.
Media reports indicate that the dictatorship in Havana is encountering serious unrest and growing political opposition from Cubans in the streets demanding life’s necessities, such as basic electricity and enough to eat. Under pressure and financially bankrupt, Cuba’s communist junta, led by Miguel Diaz-Canel, has even turned to the United Nations to ask for food supplies.
Regime apologists and fellow-travelers, as usual, rush to blame the long-standing U.S. embargo as the root cause of Cuba’s crisis, instead of the economic incompetence of the communist dictatorship. First in line to defend Havana, no surprise, is Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador, who regularly bestows Diaz-Canel awards and praises the “hope and future” that Marxism offers Cuba.
The Mexican president lives in the same ideological fantasyland as the United Nations, which elected Cuba for the sixth time last October to the world body’s Human Rights Council. Few even comment on the UN routinely giving this responsibility to a ruthless dictatorship that currently detains some 1,020 political prisoners.
Yet, despite the constant ideological pandering, the much-decried U.S. embargo is not the most consequential Washington policy vis-a-vis Havana. The most significant U.S.-Cuba policy concerns migration, and Washington’s robotic willingness to promote the never-ceasing exodus of Cubans who abandon their homeland to live in el Norte. This bad policy has been pushed into hyperdrive by Biden’s extreme open-borderism.
It is the departure of these frustrated and often desperate Cubans, the very people who would constitute a formidable opposition to the communist junta, that relieves pressure on Diaz-Canel and enables the regime to resist any change. The Fidelista maxim to these Cubans: “If you cannot sacrifice for the revolution, then go!”
Americans have always been generous to foreigners escaping tyranny, and Cubans, at the top of the list, have been fleeing their communist overlords for decades. But since the end of the Cold War, Washington strategists have never honestly addressed the direct connection between constantly expanding Cuba’s diaspora northward and the unintended impact of that policy on the broken-down regime’s survival.
The Biden administration, obsessed with throwing open U.S. borders, has taken a dubious migration policy towards Cuba and turned it into a migrant tsunami, unleashing a human maelstrom of fleeing people. Just in 2021–23, under President Biden, more than half a million Cuban migrants have entered the U.S., representing an incredible 5 percent of the island’s total population.
To understand the scale of what Biden is doing, consider that U.S. immigration law would have authorized a typical country of Cuba’s population size (11 million) about a total of 12,000 immigrant visas over those same three years.
Both the Diaz-Canel junta and Biden’s misguided policies tell disaffected Cubans they should abandon their country and come to the United States. The Biden approach promotes brain-drain on steroids as the island continues to bleed its greatest resource and hope for change: motivated young people. As they flee in the hundreds of thousands, homegrown political pressure on the dictatorship evaporates.
The Biden administration has no other policy for dealing with Havana. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has no comments on Diaz-Canel’s dictatorship and says nothing about how totalitarian Marxism continues to strangle a forgotten nation.
Where are the American voices exhorting young patriotic Cubans to stay, resist, and struggle to make a better future for their forlorn country? Of course, encouraging Cubans to remain and join the opposition entails risks. Even peaceful acts of protest can bring out Diaz-Canel’s armed and deadly henchmen.
Yes, the Cuban state-security service arrests and intimidates, but the alternative is to condemn poor Cuba to yet another half century of penury and oppression as corrupt ideologues like Diaz-Canel play at “making revolution.” During South African apartheid, American leaders regularly expressed solidarity with the oppressed, who were urged to resist, not to flee their country en masse.
Opportunities abound for Biden to go to his bully pulpit. For example, Cubans protesting in the streets have changed Fidel’s fanatical motto “Patria o Muerte” (fatherland or death), long considered by Fidelistas as the country’s sacred watchword. Demanding a normal country, protesting Cubans instead proclaimed “Patria y Vida” (fatherland and life). Touche! Washington should speak in solidarity with these people, denounce Diaz-Canel’s dictatorship, and encourage patriots to stay on the island.
Today, hearing no demands from the Biden administration, Diaz-Canel is thrilled to continue pushing disgruntled Cubans off the island through Mayorkas’s open door right into the United States. Diaz-Canel knows that these frustrated Cubans, who tend to be young and ambitious people, would swell the ranks of protestors in the streets.
Diaz-Canel also wants these Cubans in el Norte, where they can earn and send back billions in remittance dollars. Taxed by the regime, these remittances ($4 billion, or 26 percent of the economy) literally save the bankrupt communist system from imploding, just as Soviet subsidies were crucial in keeping Castro in power. These funds, mainly provided by family members, also have an outsized impact on the Cuban economy since they often go into creative private hands.
Meanwhile, the Havana regime is incapable of finessing a China-style mix of communist party state control that permits real commercial enterprise. Fearing he will go down Gorbachev’s path to doom, Diaz-Canel has not really advanced beyond Fidel’s basic economic principles, which were best illustrated by Castro’s decision, many years ago, to name Che Guevara as head of the Cuban central bank. Che famously joked that he agreed to run the bank because he thought Fidel had asked for a “comunista” instead of a “economista.”
All of this is why Washington’s embargo (communist propaganda calls it a “blockade,” as if U.S. warships were right offshore) is far less significant in frustrating Cuba’s commercial activities as are the regime’s own nonsensical Marxist policies.
The most common Cuban aspiration, of all those banned by the communists, is not to read the New York Times online or debate with their ruling ideologues, but to undertake their own free-enterprise commercial activities—in traditional trades, tourism, farming and fishing, construction, and small-scale production. As I observed as a U.S. diplomat during three years on the island, interacting with countless unofficial Cubans, they are remarkably creative, hardworking, and entrepreneurial people. They must be in order to survive.
That is why, under strict control, the communists channel this economic creativity into the hands of small-time entrepreneurs, known in Cuba as cuentapropistas. Otherwise, the regime would have long ago starved the country to death. Today, the cuentapropistas make huge contributions to the country’s fragile economy, and in no serious way are hampered by the U.S. trade embargo. If allowed to flourish without the government on their backs, the cuentapropistas could remake Cuba.
But it is not going to happen under communist rule. Instead of ramping up this kind of commerce, the Diaz-Canel junta keeps it on a knife’s edge. The regime always keeps cuentapropistas and their commercial activities vulnerable to the whims of arbitrary communist state planners, who can decide, by fiat, to declare their business activities illegal and prohibit them. This devious tactic also drives frustrated Cubans to Miami.
Cuban Marxists, of course, outlaw such unregulated commerce in the theoretical name of “preventing exploitation.” The reality, of course, is that Havana’s communist overlords fully understand that robust private economic enterprises on the island will bring about countless small power centers the regime cannot control. With economic strength comes political power.
That is why the Diaz-Canel junta has no higher priority in its engagement with Washington than to ensure that disgruntled Cubans continue to have an option to abandon their country and move north.
While many of our Cuban-American anti-communist friends may disagree, the time has clearly come to end this exodus. It is not because Americans do not have great sympathy for Cubans fleeing a corrupt tyranny, but a new approach, for both countries, is very much needed.
A new American president must terminate the parole programs that admit hundreds of thousands of Cubans. These programs began with the 1994–95 Washington-Havana migration accords and were vastly, irresponsibly expanded by the Biden administration. It is also time to end the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that fast-tracks Cuban arrivals to U.S. legal permanent residency and provides federal financial subsidies. This is a magnet for Cubans to come here, and the act is unfair to other immigrants also fleeing tyranny.
It is way past midnight in Havana. New U.S. diplomacy and policies must encourage Cuban patriots to stay and resist, to find their future in a new, free Cuba, and not in Miami.
The post Immigration to the U.S. Strengthens Communism in Cuba appeared first on The American Conservative.
Cuba reportedly banned Christians from celebrating traditional Catholic Holy Week processions across several regions of the country.
The post Cuba Bans Holy Week Processions, Fearing More Anti-Communist Protests appeared first on Breitbart.
Caresha Romeka Brownlee, better known as Yung Miami, has been added to the lawsuit against Sean "Diddy" Combs in a 25-page addendum.
The post Lawsuit Accuses Diddy’s Ex-Girlfriend Yung Miami of Transporting ‘Pink Cocaine’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, which opened after 9/11, still has 30 detainees.
Music producer Rodney Jones, who is suing rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs for sexual assault, reportedly added actor Cuba Gooding Jr. to his lawsuit on Monday.
The post Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ Accuser Adds Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. to Sexual Assault Lawsuit appeared first on Breitbart.
The figurehead "president" of the communist state of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, participated in a "virtual reality" Gaza experience this week presented by the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese outlet al-Mayadeen in Havana.
The post Puppet President Declares Every Cuban ‘a Child of Palestine’ After Watching Hamas Propaganda on VR Headset appeared first on Breitbart.
Relatives of people killed in the attacks spent an emotional week testifying inside the Camp Justice compound at Guantánamo Bay.
A memorial service for the 20th anniversary of the Bali bombing attack in Perth, Australia, in 2022.
Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, left, and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep spent years in secret C.I.A. prisons after their capture in 2003.
A memorial for the 202 people from 22 nations who were killed in the 2002 terrorist attack, in Bali, Indonesia.
Voters casting ballots in November. Russia appears to be paying close attention to the 2024 election, as its war in Ukraine is soon to enter a third year.
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The FBI’s revelation that former State Department official Manuel Rocha was a mole for Communist Cuba indicates a pathetic ideological zealotry in the face of reality.
It is impossible to read the U.S. Attorney complaint against Ambassador Manuel Rocha without deep sadness and outrage. As a fellow Foreign Service officer, I worked alongside Manuel in Havana and feel personally betrayed (as surely others do, too). As of this writing, Rocha has not made any public admissions, but the damning narratives in the court filing present many similarities with the case of Alger Hiss, perhaps the most notorious of all American ideological spies. Serving as an American diplomat, Hiss spied for mass-murderer Stalin, while Rocha’s loyalty was to the tyrant Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution.
While the prosecution’s case is still coming out, the basic indictment unmasks Rocha’s blind devotion to the Cuban dictatorship, which also puts him in company with espionage agents Ana Montes and Kendall Myers, other U.S. officials who violated their allegiances to their country over decades to serve Fidel Castro’s revolution. If a worldly man like Rocha swallowed Castro’s ideological flim-flam and held onto it for an incredible forty years, there are probably still other undiscovered American officials out there also hiding a clandestine record of service to the Cuban dictatorship.
Alger Hiss and Manuel Rocha (as well as Montes and Myers) have in common that they apparently did not betray the United States for any financial or material gain. They worked instead for their own idealistic brands of Marxism, the class-struggle ideology that unleashed so much 20th century conflict and today has been repackaged as a social-justice weapon to push race and gender revolution. It seems probable that Rocha, like Montes and Myers, was somehow infected in adolescence by romanticized visions of Fidel and Che, marching in fatigues, cutting sugar cane, dispossessing property owners and making four-hour speeches.
It is one thing to have caught the Fidel-Che virus as a teenager, in the early days of the revolution, when Cubans of goodwill and their friends wanted to modernize their country. Yet, as with all revolutions, human nature triumphed over Fidel’s empty promises and lies. Without Soviet subsidies, Cuban society imploded, and Castro fully bared his brutal and bloody soul. By the 1990s, to work as a foreigner for Castro’s dictatorship (openly or secretly as a deep mole in the U.S. government) required much more than youthful idealism or ideological abstractions; it required absolute fanaticism.
The story of Alger Hiss can help us to better understand Rocha. Hiss was famously exposed by Whitaker Chambers, whose best-selling autobiography, Witness, is a must-read conservative classic. Witness detailed the espionage case against Hiss, whose years of perfidy as a Soviet agent carried him all the way to the historic 1945 Yalta conference as a senior State Department advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt.
Witness also delved thoughtfully into what motivated otherwise normal people into taking up the Marxist cause. Having once been a communist and Soviet operative himself, Chambers recounted how Marxism seduces vulnerable idealists who want to make a better world; ultimately, however, the Marxist revolution is an ideological con game that disillusions and destroys many adherents and transforms others into bitter-end fanatics. Today, faced with the failures of communism, Castro apologists, unrepentant fellow-travelers, and agents argue that their struggle to defend the revolution was not about excusing the regime’s many mistakes, but about stopping the interventionist policies of the colossus El Norte.
That self-serving “blame America” argument is as unpersuasive as the justifications that Western communists made in defending Stalin’s bloody purges in the 1930s and the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. For someone like Manuel Rocha, who served in Havana as a U.S. diplomat and witnessed firsthand the depravities of Castro’s dictatorship, it would have required extreme fanaticism and self-delusion to remain a deep-cover Fidel agent; to stay loyal to such a criminal regime required cult-like devotion.
Rocha saw firsthand all the abuses that were attributable to Castro’s totalitarianism: millions of Cubans forced into economic idleness and the resulting poverty; no free press, media or expression; corrupt officials rewarded with houses, cars and travel privileges; Potemkin hospitals with no medicine, while Cuban doctors were sent abroad; and above all, a Stalinist state security apparatus that destroyed Fidel’s enemies.
At some level, Rocha must have comprehended that the Cuban revolution was a myth. Castro and his collaborators wanted nothing but raw power, just like any old-fashioned Latin American caudillos. They skillfully manipulated the empty threat of U.S. intervention and el bloqueo yanqui as just useful propaganda tools to crush their internal opposition. In the face of such a stark reality, only fanatics refuse to reassess their values and commitments; only zealots stay loyal to obvious lies.
It is doubtful that Rocha ever read Witness, although part of his Foreign Service persona, very cleverly, was to present himself to his colleagues as right-of-center politically. Manuel’s deceptive act was very good, and it caught my attention when we first met in the summer of 1995 in Havana, after State Department assignments brought us together in the U.S. Interests Section. USINT was the de facto American embassy in Havana, which Fidel allowed to re-open only because he demanded that anti-revolutionary Cubans, whom he contemptuously denounced as gusanos or “worms,” be quickly processed off the island.
Conservative FSOs are relatively few, and those who admit it publicly even fewer, so Manuel made a good start with me. We served together two years in the small USINT community, sharing conversations in meetings and brief hallway encounters, usually lambasting Castro’s struggling regime. My hope today is that deep-cover Marxist Manuel at least chalked me up as counter-revolutionary to be shot and not just, as Lenin would have said, one more useful liberal idiot.
We were not close, in part because Rocha outranked me; he was USINT’s deputy principal officer, the number two U.S. diplomat in Havana, supervising all staff and post activities. Observing his work, most of us agreed that the Colombia-born, naturalized American Rocha was smooth and clever, with exceptional diplomatic talents that included native Spanish. He was, yes, even very likeable.
Natural gifts in dealing with people serve diplomats well, and they serve spies even better. Like the notorious Hiss, Rocha had attended all the right Ivy League schools and had made extensive connections with everybody in the Washington foreign-policy establishment who worked Latin America. Rocha was clearly a rising Foreign Service star, destined for an ambassadorship which he later got in his Bolivia assignment.
Although few details are public as of this writing, the likely damage of Rocha’s treachery to U.S. policy in Latin America cannot be minimized. In recruiting Rocha, probably when Manuel was a young idealist in 1973 Chile, influenced both by Allende’s Marxism and Pinochet’s coup against it, Cuba’s Dirección General de Inteligencia made a small investment with a big payout. Over his long career, which included work on the NSC staff, Rocha was indeed in a position to steal much information and subtly influence policy in a pro-Castro direction. During his posting in Havana and in other assignments abroad, Rocha likely double-crossed numerous anti-Castro Cubans, particularly democratic and human-rights activists who put their trust in American hands. That was the very real human cost of Rocha’s treachery.
Yet I doubt he changed history, or even meaningfully put U.S.-Cuban relations on a different path. Rocha would have been one more intelligence source of many, admittedly very highly placed, but Cuba’s DGI had—no doubt still has—many clandestine operatives in the United States, and all their information went into Castro’s hopper. Moreover, Fidel was constantly wary that sources could be double agents; the paranoid Cuban leader could never had been fully confident that Rocha stayed loyal to the revolution.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration went through a love-hate diplomatic courtship with Havana, which decidedly ended in hate. A product of 1960s radical chic, the young Bill Clinton himself was surely smitten with Che’s revolutionary excitement. As a hard-nosed politician, Governor Clinton had lost a re-election because of mismanaging rioting Cubans jailed in Arkansas, and President Clinton had faced a massive and chaotic rafter crisis of desperate Cubans going to sea, sparked when Fidel unleashed them on South Florida.
Although Castro was always trouble, a too-eager President Clinton thought he could maneuver the wily dictator into a historic rapprochement, built on parlaying the 1994–95 American-Cuban migration accords into a new Caribbean detente. Clinton wanted to be the American president remembered for “normalizing” bilateral relations with Havana, a dubious distinction that was destined to go to Barack Obama.
Ultimately, President Clinton’s diplomatic initiative failed because Castro yet again revealed his true colors in February 1996 by ruthlessly ordering Cuban MiG fighter jets to shoot down unarmed airplanes piloted by the Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue. But the president declined, wisely, to rise to the bloody provocation, refusing to go down a path that possibly could have made the U.S. military responsible for Castro’s broken-down country.
Instead, the White House reimposed a freeze on many nascent bilateral activities, such as direct airline flights, while killing talk of ending the trade embargo. Further, the president made common cause with an unlikely ally, anti-communist Senator Jesse Helms. Congress passed the hardline Helms-Burton legislation, today known as the Cuban Libertad Act of 1996, as another U.S. policy tool to squeeze the bandit Fidel. Rocha would have had little to no influence on those large events.
As his former friends and colleagues await news of his judicial fate, it is probable that Manuel will never renounce his service to Castro; the authentic fanatic descends down the stairs into the bunker with his Führer when all is lost. In dismissing his perfidy, Rocha will swell in pride as a Hero of the Revolution; he will tell himself that he was much more than a pedestrian “spy,” but instead part of the select revolutionary vanguard who ensured that small minds and bungling yanqui policies did not go off the rails and start a war with Cuba. He will tell himself he fought to push human nature into the brave new world that Fidel and Lenin promised is coming.
Above all, Manuel will remind himself in the silence of his empty prison cell, he was smarter than everybody else, just like Alger was.
The post Manuel Rocha: Fanatic, Spy—and My Colleague appeared first on The American Conservative.
The American people must be shown that foreign policy crises don’t arrive out of the blue.
As usual, with the current surge of Venezuelans coming across the southern border, the American news media, both mainstream and right-leaning, focus on the immediate “crisis” while usually neglecting to mention or downplay any role that American foreign policy has in creating or exacerbating that crisis.
For example, it is true that Venezuelans are now trying to migrate en masse to the United States because they are exhausted by years of destruction of a once prosperous Latin American economy primarily by the authoritarian socialist governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
However, the U.S. government, going way back to the Cold War, has interpreted the Monroe Doctrine—originally conceived in 1823 to keep the United States out of European affairs and new European intervention or colonization out of the Western Hemisphere—to mean actively trying to rid the hemisphere of indigenous socialist or communist movements. Under this twist in the doctrine, the Colossus of the North, for example, used assassination attempts (against Fidel Castro in Cuba), CIA covert operations (Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba and Contra operations against the Nicaraguan socialist government), direct military interventions (in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and in the invasion of Grenada in 1983), coups and coup attempts (against Salvador Allende’s government in Chile), and economic sanctions (against many left-leaning regimes in Latin America).
In Venezuela, the latter two tools have been used. The Trump administration backed Juan Guiado’s attempted coup against Maduro, and administrations of both parties have imposed stringent economic sanctions against the Chavez and Maduro governments. Although the gross mismanagement of the Venezuelan economy, especially of the largest known oil reserves on the planet, is mainly responsible for the current influx of Venezuelans at the southern border, harsh U.S. economic sanctions against Venezuela exacerbated the desperation of the average Venezuelan and allowed the socialist governments there to blame all their economic problems on such foreign meddling. Although Venezuela was run by socialists, it has been no threat to U.S. security. The sanctions merely hurt the Venezuelan people while helping the government stay in power by blaming a foreign bogeyman.
American policy toward communist Cuba has been an even greater travesty. John F. Kennedy supported a 1961 invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in a harebrained and failed attempt to oust Fidel Castro. The plot had been unlikely to overthrow Castro and had the unintended knock-on effect of almost causing a nuclear Armageddon in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This brush with potential nuclear destruction, however, taught the United States nothing; planning to oust Castro continued. General economic sanctions, originally imposed against the Castro regime in 1960, have continued to the present day, even as Cuba now poses little threat to American security; these sanctions, like the ones in Venezuela, have helped impoverish the population while allowing a leftist regime a foreign threat to blame, thus outlasting thirteen American presidential administrations.
And these are not the only foreign policy crises in which the U.S. government and the nationalist American media have exhibited amnesia about U.S. involvement in causing or exacerbating the original problem. For example, Iran’s influence in the Persian Gulf predictably increased after George W. Bush demolished one of the few counterweights to it with the unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003. The United States not only fought an exhausting eight-year counterinsurgency after the main invasion was “successful,” but went back for more after the vicious Islamic State militant group, which had its roots in fighting the U.S. invader, took over a third of the country from the weak Iraqi government. Iraq survived, but only as an Iran-influenced “democracy.”
In 2011, in Libya, the Obama administration, even after seeing the chaos caused by Bush’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, couldn’t help trying to take advantage of the Arab Spring to get rid of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who actually had made nice with the West. Again, popping the top off of an authoritarian regime in a splintered country unleashed forces that are still fighting a civil war and flooded nearby African countries with Gaddafi’s weapon stocks to fuel Islamist insurgencies there.
Although Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is inexcusable, the U.S. government and American media have been too quick to attribute it entirely to the Russian autocrat’s desire to reestablish a Russian Empire. Ukraine, like Belarus, is very strategic to Putin because Russia has poor intrinsic security on its western flank and has been invaded through those corridors many times. After the Cold War, instead of wisely inviting the defeated enemy into European structures, the United States drove multiple rounds of expansion of the NATO alliance right up to Russia’s borders.
In April 2008, at NATO’s Bucharest summit, George W. Bush pushed the alliance to state formally, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”; shortly after taking office in 2021, the Biden White House renewed Ukraine’s dormant hope by using the code phrase that it was “supporting Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations.” Denying that expanding a hostile alliance up to any nation’s borders and pledging to admit a neighboring country that is strategic to that nation, and that Russia’s security fears played any role in prompting Putin’s invasion, is self-serving and attempts to get the U.S. government off the hook for previous bad policy.
Americans have very little introspection about their government’s overly interventionist foreign policy because the compliant and complicit American media, both left and right, feed U.S. government propaganda about American actions into the public sphere when the intervention occurs but conveniently absolve them when future crises arise because of the bad policies. Without such introspection, U.S. interventionist foreign policies will continue to cause blowback that the American people believe just arrives out thin air.
The post An American Lack of Introspection on Failed U.S. Foreign Policy appeared first on The American Conservative.
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