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Shakur’s addition to Most Wanted Terrorist List reeks of Cuba Lobby desperation

May 2nd, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Hard-line hijinks | Uncategorized - (3 Comments)

Connect these dots if you will.

February 21st, 2013, The Boston Globe reports:

High-level US diplomats have concluded that Cuba should no longer be designated a state sponsor of terrorism, raising the prospect that Secretary of State John F. Kerry could remove a major obstacle to restoring relations with the Cold War-era foe, government officials said…“There is a pretty clear case . . . that they don’t really meet the standard anymore,” said a senior administration official with direct knowledge regarding US-Cuba policy who was not authorized to speak publicly. “They have neither the wherewithal nor are they doing much.”

Not even 24 hours later, EFE reports:

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland rejected the suggestion contained in an article published Thursday by The Boston Globe, which said that several top officials and members of Congress had concluded that Cuba should be removed from the list and had conveyed that idea to Secretary of State John Kerry…”I saw that report. Let me say firmly here it is incorrect. This Department has no current plans to remove Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism list,” said Nuland at her daily press conference.

For the next three months, not so much as a peep from the State Department as to whether Cuba would or would not remain on the State Sponsors of Terror list. The updated version of the list was to be published on April 30th, 2013.

In the meantime, Cuba finds itself in a bit of an economic pickle after the death of Chavez and decides it needs to make new friends. Less than 24 hours after two American fugitives kidnapped their children and fled to Cuba, the Cuban government turned them in to US authorities. Then, in the wake of the Boston bombing, Josefina Vidal, the director of the Cuban Foreign Ministry’s North American Affairs Division, expressed “the most heartfelt condolences of the people and government of Cuba to the people and government of the United States, particularly those directly affected by this tragedy.”…and, said that Cuba “rejects and condemns unequivocally all acts of terrorism, in any place, under any circumstance, and with whatever motivation.” As the AP reported, “one of the requirements for getting off the [state sponsors of terrorism] list is that countries publicly renounce terrorism.”

All while hosting peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC.

At this point, the odds that Cuba will be removed from the list are looking pretty good. I mean, one would really have to grasp at straws to justify its presence on the list anymore, right?

Well, queue the bushels.

On April 25th, a mere five days before publication of the State sponsors of terror list, in a peculiar display of more-than-convenient timing, WashPo reports:

The Justice Department on Thursday announced the indictment of a former State Department employee for allegedly spying on behalf of Cuba, but it is unable to arrest her because she lives in Sweden, a country that does not extradite citizens accused of espionage…A grand jury in Washington indicted Velazquez in 2004 (!), but the charges remained sealed until Thursday.

On April 28th, The Hill reports that, like clockwork:

…four Cuban-Americans in the House are drafting a joint letter to Secretary of State John Kerry laying out why they think the communist island still meets the criteria established by the 1979 sanctions law. And the Senate’s three Cuban-Americans are also vocally opposed to delisting Cuba, which was first added in 1982.

Then yesterday, the news breaks:

A State Department spokesman said Wednesday that Washington has no plans to remove Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism that also includes Iran, Syria and Sudan…The report was supposed to have been released Tuesday, but has been delayed. Officials say it is likely to come out later in May.

Finally today, Fox News reports that the Newark FBI office announced that a whole 40 years after Black Panther Joanne Chesimard killed a cop during a prison escape and fled to Cuba, she is just now being designated a “terrorist”:

Chesimard was serving a life term for killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 when she escaped prison. After hiding out in a New Jersey safe house for several years, Chesimard managed to flee in 1979 to Cuba, where she has been living for decades under the name Assata Shakur. “Joanne Chesimard is a domestic terrorist,” Aaron T. Ford, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark division, said at a press conference Thursday. “She absolutely is a threat to America.”

What to make of all this? Will Sweden be added to the terrorism list for harboring Velasquez for 9 years? Are the Black Panthers now considered a domestic terrorist organization? Or have the hardliners taken over the DOJ? Now, now, those are all as ridiculous as Cuba’s continued presence on the list.

My take is that the Administration was getting holy hell from the Sapingo Six led by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Bob Menendez (and their combovered chihuahua Mauricio Claver-Carone) for moving to pull Cuba from the terrorism list. Garcia probably signed on to avoid the “soft on terror” GOP attack ads that would inevitably follow in his battlefield district.

The Obama administration, being the yellabellies they are, and not wanting to look soft on terror after Boston, decided to hold off for now on removing Cuba from the list (hence the delay in publishing the report), unsealing the Velasquez indictment to justify keeping Cuba on the list for the time being.

As for Chesimard, that has Bob Menendez’s name all over it. He probably got the administration to designate her a domestic terrorist to justify keeping Cuba on the terrorism list for years to come.  The administration likely agreed, figuring that if the Cubans really want off the list, they’ll extradite Chesimard to the US.

So now it’s up to the Cuban government to move. If they’re smart, they’ll turn over Chesimard. But something tells me they are just as stubborn and hooked on the status-quo as the Sapingo Six.

I’m with Sapingos.

Conservatives respond to BeyJay trip by slamming Cuban Embargo

April 16th, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Cuba policy | Cuba travel - (0 Comments)

A welcome highlight of the controversy over BeyJay’s trip to Cuba has been watching media conservatives rail against the US embargo on Cuba like never before.

Geraldo Rivera of FOX News wrote an op-ed calling out the absurdity the travel ban:

Cuba is not Iran. It is 90 miles away, and its 11 million are related to our million and more. I’m sure most were as pleased to see Beyoncé and Jay-Z go to Cuba as they were to see the Cuban people. Tourism is not terrorism. It is the beginning of freedom.

Rivera later schooled the gang over at Fox & Friends on how to make friends and influence the Cuban people:

“We’ve made friends with communist China. We do business with them,” [Rivera] added. “Vietnam – we lost 50,000 soldiers and we have normal relations.”

“What if you had a relative rotting in prison there because they spoke up?” asked Brian Kilmeade.

“But the way to loosen them up is to expose them to freedom,” Rivera shot back.

“With Hollywood stars?” asked Gretchen Carlson incredulously.

“Jay-Z and Beyoncé showed the good life to millions of Cubans who will envy America as a result,” asserted Rivera. “It was a harmless trip and the reaction was way over the top.”

Judge Jeanine Pirro, also of FOX News, dedicated the entire opening of her show to questioning the travel ban and embargo, ultimately calling it a “charade”:

Fifty years later this embargo has accomplished nothing. Wouldn’t American influence and American dollars put us in a more positive light as opposed to the image that Castro has created of Americans? In the end it isn’t so much about that celebrity couple who chose to vacation on that pristine island as it is about trying to make new friends in a world where we could certainly use a few more.

Finally, conservative kingmaker George Will declared on ABC’s This Week that the embargo no longer makes sense (watch at 39:00 mark):

The Cuban embargo may have made a lot of sense during the Cold War. The Cold War is over, and it is hard to think of a policy more firmly refuted by events than the policy of the embargo that was supposed to weaken one of the, it turns out, most durable dictators in the world.

All further proof that calling for the lifting of travel and trade restrictions against Cuba is a bi-partisan issue, and that the Cuba Lobby, which likes to slander anti-embargo advocates as liberal useful idiots and Castro apologists, only represents itself, not conservative values nor the Cuban-American community.

Pitbull backs Cuban exile community and Jay-Z, disses out-of-touch politicians

April 16th, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Cuba travel | Culture | Hard-line hijinks - (2 Comments)

It must be hard being a Babaloser these days. Their narrow little world is crumbling all around them. First, Obama wins re-election, then we find out 49% of Cuban-Americans voted for him, then Joe Garcia defeats their golden boy David Rivera, then Yoani Sanchez speaks out repeatedly in favor if lifting the Cuban travel ban and embargo (at the Freedom Tower no less!), George Will slams the embargo on ABC’s This Week, and now hometown-boy-made-good, Pitbull pens an “Open Letter” backing Hova.

Humberto “I-have-voices-in-my-head-and-they-all-blog” Fontova doesn’t want to see it though. He compiles a long list of MSM headlines recognizing that the song supports Jay-Z, and then argues that just as when Bruce Springsteen released “Born in the USA”, people now “hear what they want to hear”.

Actually, it’s pretty clear Mr. Worldwide is paying tribute to the exile community and supporting Jay-Z (two concepts that taken together must make Fontova’s brain melt). The only people who get dissed in the song are the Castro regime and their bizarro twins across the Straits, our Cuban-American politicians who threatened fines and possible jail time for the Brooklyn rapper and his bootylicious Mrs.

But hey, read Pit’s lyrics and be the judge:

Don’t agree with the change Castro talk
But it’s hard to understand unless they educate you
Politicians loves to hate you
But then they runaway when it’s time to debate you
Question of the night, would they have mess with Mr. Carter if he was white?

Now if we only knew which politicians have called for federal investigations on Jay-Z as of late?

Humbi, pipo, mas claro ni el agua. Strap on your tin foil hat because the sky’s a fallin’.

DALEEE!

What does Yoani Sanchez think about tourism to Cuba?

April 15th, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Cuba travel - (6 Comments)

Amidst all the hoopla over Beyonce and Jay-Z trip to Cuba, we thought it would be a good time to remind our readers of what acclaimed Cuban blogger said about tourism during her recent trip to Miami (hear her say it at the 9:00 mark):

Yoani Sanchez on tourism to Cuba

 

Yoani Sanchez sobre el turismo a Cuba

The Cuba Lobby represents itself, not the Cuban-American community

April 12th, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Hard-line hijinks | US Politics - (2 Comments)

Must-read article by William Leogrande on Foreign Policy about The Cuba Lobby in DC, and their influence over Washington.  I have a couple issues with this article:

1) the headline “Castro-hating right wing”. To clarify, they’re not the only ones who hate Castro. An overwhelming majority of Cuban-Americans have no love for Fidel and Raul, and most of us are not right-wing.

2) It depicts the Cuba Lobby as the most powerful lobbying group in America. They are not. Their PAC raised only $500,000 last election cycle, almost a 40% drop from what they raised in 2008, and is ranked 1,206 out of all PACs in campaign contribution amounts by OpenSecrets.org. They are not drawing in new donors who actually care about maintaining the embargo, only donors who care about gaining access to our Cuban-American members of Congress. Their influence is directly proportional to salience and urgency (or completely lack thereof) of Cuba policy within foreign policy circles. In other words, in the list of foreign policy priorities our country faces, Cuba ranks very low, and any fruit borne of reforms implemented today will not be seen for many years. So in the cost-benefit analysis that goes on in every DC bureaucrats head, the immediate cost of having the insufferable Mario Diaz-Balart or Mauricio Claver-Carone jamming their noses up your ass and screaming “communist apologists!” through the halls of Capitol Hill, even if they can’t really do anything to you, is usually higher than any benefit that may come from pushing for changes in Cuba policy. Meanwhile, they’re support in both the Cuban-American and larger American communities has been steadily plumeting over the past decade. The minute Cuba becomes a half-way real priority for the Administration or State Department, you will see the Cuba Lobby’s “influence” drop to a level on par with their OpenSecrets ranking.

So now that we go that out of the way, lets focus on the major points the article does get right:

Today, U.S. relations with Latin America are suffering from an…irrational policy toward Cuba — a policy designed in the 1960s to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government and which, more than 50 years later, is no closer to success. Like U.S. policy toward China in the 1950s and 1960s, policy toward Cuba is frozen in place by a domestic political lobby, this one with roots in the electorally pivotal state of Florida. The Cuba Lobby combines the carrot of political money with the stick of political denunciation to keep wavering Congress members, government bureaucrats, and even presidents in line behind a policy that, as President Barack Obama himself admits, has failed for half a century and is supported by virtually no other countries.

—-

The irrationality of U.S. policy does not stem just from concerns about electoral politics in Florida. The Cuban-American community has evolved to the point that a majority now favors engagement with Cuba, as both opinion polls and Obama’s electoral success in 2008 and 2012 demonstrate. Today, the larger problem is the climate of fear in the government bureaucracy, where even honest reporting about Cuba — let alone advocating a more sensible policy — can endanger one’s career. Democratic presidents, who ought to know better, have tolerated this distortion of the policy process and at times have reinforced it by allowing the Cuba lobby to extort concessions from them. But the cost is high — the gradual and insidious erosion of the government’s ability to make sound policy based on fact rather than fantasy.

—-

If Obama intends to finally keep the 2008 campaign promise to take a new direction in relations with Cuba, the job can’t be left to foreign-policy bureaucrats, who are so terrified of the Cuba Lobby that they continue to believe, or pretend to believe, absurdities — that Cubans are watching TV Martí, for instance, or that Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism. Only a determined president and a tough secretary of state can drive a new policy through a bureaucratic wasteland so paralyzed by fear and inertia.

Ok, a couple more things the article doesn’t mention – The founding members of the Cuba Lobby, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Robert Menendez, Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart, were all elected into the US Congress at a time when a hardline position on Cuba was important to Cuban-American voters: 1988 through 2002. That is no longer the case. The community by every measure has left the hardliners behind. There is no resurgency whatsoever of support for the family travel bans or remittances, nor for any other travel restrictions toward Cuba (even those young Cuban-Americans who have stepped up to criticize Jay-Z have done so on the grounds that he was irresponsible in choosing the island as a vacation spot, but make no calls for restricting his right to do so). Thus the continued re-elections of these politicians has everything to do with their success in appealing to their constituencies in other matters, rather than their continued intransigent stance on Cuba. For years they peddled the myth that the Cuban-American community stood united in favor of a hardline policy, and then we went ahead and elected Joe Garcia and re-elected Obama in ’12, both of whom support greater openness toward the island.

Bottomline: this lobby only represents itself and absolutely no one else, especially not the Cuban-American community or the Cuban people.

Best lines from Jay-Z’s “Open Letter” to his Cuba critics

April 11th, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Cuba travel | Hard-line hijinks | US Politics - (0 Comments)

No sooner did Jay-Z fly in from “Havana to Atlanta” – inspired and a bit ticked – than he wrote these verses for his “Open Letter” to certain South Florida politicians who believe in promoting freedom by denying it to Americans:

Sorry y’all I don’t agree with y’all parents
Politicians never did shit for me
Except lie to me, distort history
They wanna give me jail time and a fine
Fine, let me commit a real crime
And our favorite:
I’m in Cuba, I love Cubans
This communist talk is so confusing
When it’s from China the very mike that I be using
“Idiot wind” the Bob Dylan of rap music
You’re an idiot baby, you should become a student/
The world’s under new management
New role model, f*ck that Zoolander shit

We totally see it.

“the single stupidest piece of American foreign policy that all presidents, Democrat and Republican, fully embrace”

April 9th, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in US Politics | WTF? - (0 Comments)

Lawrence O’Donnell called it like it is in tonight’s The Last Word. Don’t miss it. Favorite quote:

“From this day forward, now that we see that the president’s friends can come and go freely from Cuba, this government has forfeited the moral right to penalize anyone in any way for travel to Cuba…and for that we should thank Jay-Z and Beyoncé and their mothers and their bodyguards for setting the precedent that we should all be allowed to live by.”

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that Beyonce & Hova went to Cuba on a cultural license after all:

“The [Treasury Department] source told Reuters that the trip included visits with Cuban artists and musicians, as well as several nightclubs where live music was performed, and some of the city’s best privately run restaurants, known as “paladares.”

The visit was planned as a “people-to-people” cultural visit and involved no meetings with Cuban officials, or typical tourist activity such as trips to the beach, the source said. Even a walk around the Old City of Havana, mobbed by crowds of excited Cuban spectators, was led by Miguel Coyula, one of the city’s leading architects.”

And Mauricio Claver-Carone, always the first among the comecandelas to recognize a P.R. clusterf*ck when he sees one, stopped attacking the celebrity couple and assumed a more constructive tone:

“The point is not to get them fined or reprimanded,” he said. “I just hope they can take five minutes to meet with someone like Berta Soler and hear their side, and I will be a happy camper.”

Because it’s all about keeping Mauricio a happy camper.

Yoani’s World Tour: Crowdsourcing at its finest

April 7th, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Cuban entrepreneurs | Cuban opposition - (0 Comments)

Proving that Kickstarter has nothing on good ol’ fashioned Cuban ingenuity, The Miami Herald’s Mimi Whitfield’s wrote a fascinating analysis on everyone who’s picked up the tab for Yoani’s World Tour. We recommend reading the whole piece, but here are some highlights:

For more than six weeks, dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez has crisscrossed the Atlantic, making a splash and garnering accolades as she hopscotches between high-profile events in Brasilia and Amsterdam, Mexico City and New York, Washington, D.C. and Miami, with an eloquent, unvarnished plea for freedom of expression in her homeland.

But how has this woman with limited Internet access at home in Havana, few high-powered connections, no organization and limited financial resources pulled off a grueling, attention-grabbing itinerary across three continents that would challenge even the most savvy road warrior?

As it turns out, the same way she has managed to make a living in Havana and cultivate hundreds of thousands of Internet and Twitter followers around the globe: by plugging into an extensive, informal network of dedicated supporters who for years have translated her blog and helped Sánchez get her reports on life under communism out to the world — and also by improvising like mad.

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“Much like Yoani’s message, which is viral and organic, so too were the logistics for her visit, which were coordinated through a handful of regular, everyday people,’’ said Juan Mendieta, a spokesman for the college, in an email. “It was very grass-roots, and we’re extremely pleased with how everything turned out.”

__

During the Freedom Tower talk, Sánchez addressed her funding and said money and prosperity are sensitive topics for the Cuban government.

When a Cuban, through talent or solidarity with others, starts to move beyond the “survival level,’’ she said, “that starts to bother the government and it starts questioning the integrity and moral ethics of a person.

“The Cuban government says I am a millionaire — yes, a millionaire in friends,” she said.

Leavin’ suckas in the dust.

The End of the End of the Castro Era

April 5th, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Cuban reforms | Life After-Castro - (2 Comments)

From University of Denver professor Arturo Lopez-Levy. As sober, concise, and prescient a prediction of the next 5 years in Cuba as you’re likely to find. Recommended.

Quote of the Day (by a Cuban blogger other than Yoani Sanchez)

April 2nd, 2013 | Posted by William Vidal in Life After-Castro - (0 Comments)

From the Associated Press, on Miami Dade College’s “A Conversation with Yoani Sanchez” event at the Freedom Tower:

Alejandro Barreras, who runs a blog in Miami called On Two Shores, said he sat behind a man who had yelled at him not so long ago for attending a concert of Carlos Varela, a Cuban folk musician. Now they were sitting one behind the other, equally captivated by Ms. Sanchez’s words.

“You can’t help but feel hopeful,” he said.