And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man."--American Rhetoric: Ronald Reagan -- A Time for Choosing, 1964
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"... An investigation by the ICAO later concluded that the planes were shot down over international waters, several miles outside of Cuban airspace. Cuban and U.S. radar data conflicted, with Cuba claiming the planes were inside its airspace, according to the ICAO, so the organization based its findings on data from a nearby cruise ship.
The ICAO also noted that international law bars countries from firing at civilian planes, even inside their own airspace. And the organization found Cuba did not attempt less drastic measures, including communicating with the planes via radio or guiding them out of Cuban airspace. Intercepting civil aircraft is supposed to be a "last resort," the ICAO wrote.
Cuba has long defended its decision to shoot down the planes, insisting that Brothers to the Rescue had encroached on the country's sovereignty. Months later, Fidel Castro acknowledged to then-"CBS Evening News" anchor Dan Rather that he had given "general orders" to the military to stop planes from encroaching on Cuba, though he said that he and his brother, Raúl Castro, hadn't specifically ordered the two Cessnas to be shot down on Feb. 24.
In an interview with Time magazine, Fidel Castro said after repeated incursions on Cuban airspace: "We instructed the armed forces that we would not tolerate it again."
The U.S. reacted furiously to the shootdowns. Within weeks, Congress passed tighter sanctions on Cuba, and former President Bill Clinton suspended charter flights to the island nation and expanded broadcasts to Cuba by a U.S.-sponsored radio station.
"The planes posed no credible threat to Cuba's security," Clinton said in a speech a few days after the Cessnas were shot down. "Although the group that operated the planes had entered Cuban airspace in the past on other flights, this is no excuse for the attack, and provides—let me emphasize—no legal basis under international law for the attack."
Years later, one person was convicted of murder conspiracy in connection with the shootdown, after U.S. prosecutors accused him of spying for Cuba and seeking to pass on information about the Brothers to the Rescue flights. After over a decade in prison, he returned to Cuba in a 2014 prisoner swap. Two fighter pilots and the head of Cuba's air force were also charged with murder in federal court but were never tried.
The incident was also heard in civil court. The families of some of the killed Cessna pilots sued the Cuban government, and a federal judge awarded them nearly $50 million in compensatory damages and just over $137 million in punitive damages. " .......
Even Bill and Jezebel Clinton were forced to pretend they were against it, even as the were hunting down Fidel's Runaway Slaves for him.
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| Castro's Little Bastard: A chip off the old Comandante! Unretouched photo |
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THE CUBAN REGIME IS A THREAT AND MUST END
"We, former officers of the Armed Forces, Ministry of the Interior, Communist Party, and government of Cuba, left our posts, risking our lives, to reject the corrupt tyranny subjugating and impoverishing the Cuban people. Knowing its objectives and methodologies from the inside, we are compelled to warn of the threat it represents to the security of the Cuban people, the United States, the Western Hemisphere, and the world.
Cuba’s intelligence services currently have a large number of agents in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe. Numerous citizens of many countries —many whose seeming loyalties do not arouse suspicion— are spies and agents of influence recruited to serve the interests of the Cuban dictatorship. They operate within their governments, parliaments, media, universities, churches, cultural institutions, businesses, and other sectors of society, some at the highest levels. Some spy and send information clandestinely, others just identify people to study for their potential recruitment, and all exert influence to favor the Cuban government.
In the United States, the recent indictment of former diplomat Victor Manuel Rocha and the long prison sentences of the Pentagon’s top Cuba analyst Ana Belén Montes in 2002 and senior State Department official Kendall Myers in 2009 are just the tip of the iceberg. These are not isolated cases or Cold War “relics,” as some have claimed, but the result of decades of work with exponential returns that are hard to imagine.
Cuba’s intelligence services direct and induce the narrative seeking to minimize the regime’s International influence and the damage caused by its agents. Spying for ideological motivations is exalted, obscuring that it supports a totalitarian military regime responsible for egregious human rights violations and countless deaths in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Angola, Ethiopia and many other countries. Defending the Cuban Revolution is extolled, disregarding that it’s been hijacked for decades by a duplicitous and privileged elite that has destroyed the nation with increasingly ludicrous political-ideological justifications. Claims of their “moral principles” fail to mention that none of these agents have, from their advantageous positions, shouldered the absence of rights, the apartheid, or the shortages imposed on the Cuban people.
Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate conducts aggressive work directed overseas, primarily tasked against the United States and with overthrowing democracies and their values. They collaborate with autocratic governments and criminal cartels that share these goals. Supported by a gigantic State apparatus dedicated to disinformation, propaganda, and influence, they also count on cooperation from virtually every government official, including diplomats, journalists, academics, and artists. Together with the apparatus dedicated to internal police-state control, they enjoy a priority allocation of resources despite the great needs of the people.
As a result of the above, we urge democratic governments to not support the Cuban regime with legitimacy or resources of any kind ...
We know firsthand how the regime surveils, humiliates, and blackmails you. Break the chains, as we did, and assume the historic duty of forging a rule of law that guarantees freedom for your own families and generations of Cubans. Do not allow fraudulent mutations seeking to maintain privileges for the oligarchy under different facades. The essential change to be promoted and defended is towards a multiparty democracy that structurally reforms the economy and the State. The people must recover their sovereignty to build the prosperous society they deserve."
Orlando Brito
José Cohen
Rafael del Pino
Enrique García
Alcibíades Hidalgo
Máximo Omar Ruíz ...........
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| Jorge Luis García Pérez known as Antúnez, Cuban human rights activist. |
Blaming the U.S. embargo for Cuba’s economic disaster has lost its political firepower because the law has been watered down. Today Cuba can buy, with cash, all the food, medicine and construction materials it wants from the U.S. It can get lots of other stuff from the rest of the world. It can’t get credit from U.S. banks, which is a good thing since the U.S. is the rare jurisdiction that has never suffered from one of the revolutionary government’s many defaults...
Cuba’s economic crisis is caused by a hard-currency shortage. Output from once-vibrant export industries like sugar, tobacco, coffee and fruit can’t even supply the domestic market. Barren agricultural fields are covered in weeds. Manufacturing is gone. Even tourism, which the regime has tried to hype since the 1990s, is in bad shape. Handouts from the Soviet Union, bilateral lenders and Venezuela, which kept the country afloat for decades, are no more.
Even before January, when the Trump administration began to ensure that Venezuelan oil largess couldn’t go to Cuba, the monthly Cuban ration book supplied food for less than two weeks. Cubans are kept alive thanks mainly to the country’s most reliable export: people. If not for remittances, families would suffer even greater privation.
As for President Trump, he hasn't changed his tune at all. He said again today that Cuba may be next after he finishes what he's doing in Iran.
Cuba has made itself a base for spying for Russia and more recently China. Trump should put an end to the Cuban regime as it exists. It has been on its last legs for years. All the blockade is doing is accelerating the collapse which was imminent once Cuba's support from Venezuela ended.
Diaz-Canel would no doubt love a US invasion to live out his fantasy of standing up to America on behalf of the Castro regime. But he's not important enough to warrant that. There's no need for any boots on the ground to achieve the transition. Someone in Cuba will be willing to accept a deal similar to the one we have with Venezuela. At most, special forces will need to go in and remove one person, Diaz-Canel himself. That shouldn't present any serious challenge when dealing with a regime that can't even keep the lights on." .......
The 15 Worst Atrocities Committed By Fidel Castro - Facts Wrack - YouTube
The Execution Of Children
There are a total of 95 minors documented that were killed by the order of Fidel Castro. Of these teens and children, 22 died by firing squad and 32 were killed in extrajudicial assassination. Three children also died in 1971 when a Cuban navy boat sunk the ship by ramming the boat, to make it all the more horrific, their mother was eaten by sharks in front of them.
Mayor Karen Bass, a Castro Groupie, would often travel to Cuba to help the Castros oppress the Cuban People. Back in those days, the Castros would drain all the blood out of living political prisoners, people who just wanted to vote or publish a newspaper, and sell it to the North Vietnamese.
Bass is now complaining that Spencer Pratt's cartoon tomatoes look like blood, but she had no objection to her Vampire Commie Heroes murdering Cubans for literal Blood Money at the time.
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Maybe you shouldn't have burned his house down, lady.
Or his parent's.
Or his neighbors.
A Monster and his Suck-Ups: Cuba on Our Mind :: SteynOnline:
Justin Trudeau and "some A-grade dictatorial crawling...
It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba's longest serving President.
Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.
While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro's supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for "el Comandante".
I know my father was very proud to call him a friend ..."" .......
Your mom was. Your father was proud to call Pierre a friend.
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2017: Castro's Little Bastard meets with Castro's Other Little Bastard to discuss truck-wrecking and forced injections over omelets at Montreal's International House of Pancakes and Communism but Mostly Communism |
1 Happy is the person who doesn’t listen to the wicked.
He doesn’t go where sinners go.
He doesn’t do what bad people do.
2 He loves the Lord’s teachings.
He thinks about those teachings day and night.
3 He is strong, like a tree planted by a river.
It produces fruit in season.
Its leaves don’t die.Everything he does will succeed.
4 But wicked people are not like that.
They are like useless chaff
that the wind blows away.
5 So the wicked will not escape God’s punishment.
Sinners will not worship God with good people.
6 This is because the Lord protects good people.
But the wicked will be destroyed.
"... Trump said: not anymore. ,,,
🔥 Let’s zoom out. This story is bigger than Cuba, and bigger than one indictment. Consider what has happened in just the past few months. The Trump DOJ captured Venezuela’s cartel-boss-slash-communist dictator Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York to stand trial. Spain’s leftist former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was indicted— with information helpfully supplied by U.S. agencies. And now Raúl Castro.
Three former heads of state. No armies deployed. No wars declared. Just indictments and the credible threat of what comes next.
The Times noted that Blanche “sidestepped questions about whether the indictment was a prelude to U.S. military action,” drawing comparisons to “how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Maduro to swoop into Caracas and capture him.” (Blanche didn’t “sidestep” anything. He deferred military questions to the military. Good grief, Times.) But Blanche did say he expected Castro to “eventually show up in the United States, whether ‘by his own will or another way.’”
By his own will or another way. That is a sentence keeping Castro from getting his beauty sleep (which he badly needs, by the way. Just saying).
🔥 Here is the big-picture context trad-media seems unable to connect. What is actually happening —without announcement, without fanfare, without a single press conference calling it what it is— is nothing less than a global war on corruption. And it may be the most consequential anti-corruption campaign in world history.
Think about what it actually takes to pull this off. Last September, Filipino columnist Rigoberto Tiglao wrote a piece identifying the single most important factor in any successful anti-corruption reform. His conclusion was: you need a strong political leader with enormous political will and an outsider’s reputation untainted by the existing corrupt system.
Alice, we might be all the way down the rabbit hole, because that description fits Trump almost perfectly. And here is the irony that history will not let us ignore: the Democrats’ decision to indict Trump —several times, using novel legal theories, in what even many legal scholars called a weaponization of the DOJ— may have given him the perfect cover to do exactly this. He did it himself. To foreigners watching, it proves the DOJ holds all leaders to the same standard.
You cannot credibly accuse the United States of political targeting when the sitting president was himself indicted by the same Department of Justice.
The creaky old model of international accountability was mainly symbolic: indict foreign warlords who will never be arrested, hang their faces on “most wanted” posters in embassy lobbies, and call it a day. The new model is different. Indict. Use the indictment as leverage. Use the leverage to extract concessions, force regime change, or simply wait for the right moment to make an arrest.
It’s the ultimate bloodless decapitation strike — and it’s being deployed across an entire hemisphere.".......
Proverbs 2 20 So follow the steps of the good, |
