Truth is a bitter pill to swallow: Lessons on the death of Fidel Castro

27 Nov 2016

      ...
From Facebook. A pretty definitive history of the Cuban Revolution:
[Note: Sam "Momo" Giancana is mentioned in this article. Mike Ruppert
brought up one of his CUBAN MAFIA operations in "Crossing the Rubicon"
as Heroin smuggling to the docks in New Orleans. As Ruppert put it.
Hardhat divers would work the 'legs' of oil platforms in the Gulf of
Mexico off the coast of Lousyanna removing containers of Heroin the
CIA's hardhat divers put there and bring it into port on the workboats.
My dad, a regional coordinator for the ADL in the SE US and US Army
intel since WWII lit up when I mentioned Giancana's name in passing ,,,
Everyone in spookworld knew this was happening. The Cubans who fled here
when Castro took power were te oligarchs, Mafioso affiliated with the
CIA, and later, all the thugs Castro released from prison and told to go
to the US. Many are sitting in prisons in the Southeast US for the rest
of their lives for crimes committed in the US and no place to exile them
to... Tsk... tsk.]

"Truth is a bitter pill to swallow: Lessons on the death of Fidel Castro
and his revolutionary freedom-fighter legacy in the world.

(Please bear with me. I have tried to condense all the researched
material, but this is still a lengthy post..well worth the read though)

History can be a very useful tool. The need to always research the
truth, and understand its relevance is the key to defeating fascism
wherever its ugly head pops up. The true revolution is the evolution of
consciousness. If you rely on the mainstream media or utterances of
"elected" U.S. government officials, you will never truly 'see', or
understand, what is happening all around you, nor will you ever break
free of the chains of mental, as well as economic and physical slavery.

Cuba was one of the last colonial possessions under Spanish rule just 90
miles south of Florida. As Spain’s Imperial power was in decline,
Washington had imperial ambitions to expand its influence on Cuba. Cuba
had the potential to produce unlimited profits for U.S. business
interests. Even organized crime got into the picture when they became a
major player in Cuba in the early 1930’s. The Mafia managed to expand
their gaming industry, prostitution and drug trade operations to Cuba to
avoid harassment from the U.S. government [Citation: "Havana Nocturne:
How the Mob Owned Cuba and then Lost it to the Revolution", an excellent
expose of how the mafia operated in Cuba, by T.J. English]. Cuba was to
be their base of operations as they were looking to expand into other
Caribbean nations. During that time, Cuba was under the leadership of
President Fulgencio Batista, a good friend to organized crime, who had
close political ties to Washington and its multinational corporations.
Cuba became a cesspool of corruption, illegal drugs and prostitution
which became a playground for the rich and famous while the majority of
ordinary Cubans lived in extreme poverty. This is an historical account
of Cuba before 1959, a time period that explains why Cuba’s Revolution
was a long time in the making.

We all know the story of how Cuban leader Fidel Castro established the
first communist state in the Western Hemisphere, leading an overthrow of
the corrupt military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, ruling
over Cuba for nearly five decades, and irking the great American
superpower after nationalizing U.S.-owned businesses in Cuba without
compensation since 1960.
What you don't know is what led to it.

The U.S. has been intervening in Latin America since President James
Monroe established the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy that prevented
European powers from colonizing any sovereign nation in “their
backyard”. Unable to convert Spanish-controlled Cuba into a slave
plantation to serve the interests of the U.S. against the Confederacy in
1860, the U.S. Congress eventually passed the ‘Teller Amendment’ in 1898
which did guarantee Cuba’s independence but was replaced in 1901 by the
‘Platt Amendment’ which gave Washington the power to intervene in Cuba
if their interests were threatened. By 1908, Cubans who fought against
Spain created a new independent political party but were oppressed and
eventually massacred by the U.S. backed Cuban government.

The Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) was composed of former African
slaves and war veterans of the1896 Cuban War of Independence. The PIC
won enough votes that undermined the ruling liberal party under
President José Miguel Gómez. President Gomez ordered the party to
disband under Cuban law which outlawed any political party based on race
although the law favored white Cubans. The PIC staged a revolt under
General Evaristo Estanoz. However, General Jose de Jesus Monteagudo
suspended constitutional rights and ordered an attack against
Afro-Cubans. The U.S. intervened and sent troops to back President Gomez
and protect its vital business interests. More than 5,000 Afro-Cubans
were massacred by lynch mobs because of their skin color. All
Afro-Cubans were under suspicion by the Gomez regime. Several
successions of Presidents eventually led to Batista whose first term was
benign. His second term was a different story though. Batista created an
anti-Communist secret police to silence the public with violence,
torture and public executions. It is estimated that there were between
10,000 to 20,000 people murdered under the Batista regime with financial
and military support from the Washington.

During Batista’s reign of terror, the "July 26 Movement" organized by
Fidel Castro and other anti-government groups throughout Cuba were
forming a rebellion against the Batista government. Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr. who was a writer, historian, speechwriter and a Special
Assistant to President John F. Kennedy who worked primarily on Latin
American issues analyzed Batista’s Cuba on the president’s request and said:
...
"The corruption of the government, the brutality of the police, the
regime’s indifference to the needs of the people for education,
medical care, housing, for social justice and economic justice is an
open invitation to revolution"
Batista was concerned about Castro so he ordered his secret police to
torture and murder people in public to install fear in the population in
case they were considering joining the growing revolution. Batista’s
actions only angered the Cuban people and increased support for the July
26 Movement. Many organizations joined the movement from all types of
backgrounds from the middle class including lawyers, doctors,
accountants and many others united with the poor (who were already
fighting against government forces).

An attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago led by Fidel Castro was
defeated by Batista’s armed forces on July 26, 1953, but with the
handwriting on the wall, on December 11, 1958, U.S. Ambassador Earl
Smith told Batista that the United States could no longer support his
government. The U.S. denied Batista asylum and suggested that he go to
Spain. On New Year’s Eve party, Batista told his government officials
that he was leaving Cuba and flew to the Dominican Republic with between
$300 and $700 million according to various estimates. Portugal’s António
Salazar, a dictator allowed Batista to enter his country. By 1972,
Batista settled in Marbella, Spain where he eventually died of a heart
attack.

Setting aside the two-faced hilarious irony for a minute, whenever you
hear leaders of the United States describe another world leader as a
"ruthless brutal dictator", invariably it brings to mind several
distinct suppositions. The basic one is that this leader must be someone
who successfully resisted attempts by the U.S. to infiltrate, pillage
and exploit that country's mineral resources. It is the height of
hypocrisy for any American politician, given the brutal history of the
United States, as well as its present ruthless racist practices, to
condemn, or see fit to criticize, the internal policies of another
nation. The secondary one is that the 'offending party' must be one who
defied the U.S. to an exasperating point of submission. Without the
efforts of Fidel Castro, South African Apartheid, as we knew it, would
never have ended. Don't buy into the American false narratives that
"protests" by liberals in the U.S. was instrumental in the fall of
Apartheid. If protesting and marching ever produced significant results,
racism would have been a thing of the past a long time ago. Hell, we've
been marching for hundreds of years.......still marching.

"638 Ways to Kill Castro" is a Channel 4 documentary film, broadcast in
the United Kingdom on November 28, 2006, which tells the story of some
of the numerous attempts by the C.I.A. to kill Cuban leader Fidel
Castro. Fabian Escalante, the former Head of the Intelligence
Directorate, and the man who had the job of protecting Castro for many
of the 49 years he was in power, alleges that there were over 600 plots
and conspiracies known to Cuban agents, all dreamt up to end Castro's
life. Some were perpetrated directly by the C.I.A., especially during
the first half of the 1960s, and others, from the seventies onwards,
made by Cuban exiles who had been trained by the C.I.A. shortly after
Castro took power in 1959.

Directed by Dollan Cannell and produced executively by Peter Moore, the
film, whose subtext is a commentary on the contemporary "War on Terror",
also contains extensive material shot with Antonio Veciana, the Cuban
exile who came close to killing Castro on three occasions over 17 years
(and now runs a 'marine supplies store' in Miami). All these men, the
film reveals, were supported and funded by the U.S. government. At one
point the C.I.A. even sought the help of the Mafia in the hope they
would be able to succeed where so many others had failed. Other
characters in the documentary are Cuban exile Félix Rodríguez, the
C.I.A. operative who trained Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion,
and who was present when the Bolivian Army killed Che Guevara in 1967 at
the request of the Bolivian President at the time, and Enrique Ovares,
possibly the first man to make an attempt on Castro's life after he took
power. Robert Maheu is also interviewed, the Hughes associate who served
as liaison between the C.I.A. and mobsters "Johnny" Roselli and Sam
"Momo" Giancana, in another plot to kill Castro, this time using poison
pills.

In 2006, the documentary was the center of a controversy surrounding
U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. In it the Miami Republican, who
had been recently tapped to become the top Republican on the House
International Relations Committee, states "I welcome the opportunity of
having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing
the people." A clip of her statement made its way to YouTube where the
newsmedia quickly picked up the story. There was a subsequent public
questioning of Ros-Lehtinen's morals and suitability for her job. She
responded by asserting that the clip was spliced together and that it
was taken out of context, but after her account was contested by the
film's director, she eventually released a statement, on Christmas Eve,
accepting that she had made the remark.

It is mind-boggling that America, a country which brutally murdered
upwards of 100 million Native-Americans, stole their land, raped their
womenfolk and children, and all but ethnically-cleansed them from the
face of the earth....a nation which gleefully engaged in a repressive
African Slave trade Holocaust which saw the violent deaths of up to 50
million Africans, and led to the forced labor, and Jim Crow laws that
resulted in the emergence of America as a 16th century global power
through the tobacco and cotton international trade, and continues to
marginalize, exploit, murder people of African descent, and exploit
African mineral resources, till today....a Republic that dropped the
first, and only nuclear weapons on Japan, killing up to a quarter of a
million people within days, and almost that much in the resulting
radiation fallout which lasted years.....a nation that dropped 280
million cluster bombs on Laos, a country with which it wasn't even at
war, a country that has invaded or bombed over 90 countries, would have
the arrogant temerity and sagging cojones to dissect the policies of
another sovereign nation.

Until the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, apartheid in
South Africa was secure. There was no substantial resistance anywhere in
southern Africa. Pretoria’s neighbors comprised of buffer zones that
protected the racist regime: Namibia, their immediate neighbor which
they had occupied for 60 years; white-ruled Rhodesia; and the
Portuguese-ruled colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The rebels who
fought against minority rule in each of these countries, operating
without any safe haven to organize and train, were powerless to
challenge the status quo.

South Africa’s apartheid buffer, supported by the United States of
America for economic purposes, would have remained intact for the
foreseeable future, solidifying apartheid and preventing any significant
opposition, but for one man: Fidel Castro.

In October of 1975, South Africa invaded Angola at the behest of the
U.S. government to overthrow the left-wing Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the soon-to-be independent country.
Without Cuban assistance, the apartheid army would have easily cruised
into Luanda, crushed the MPLA, and installed a puppet government
friendly to the apartheid regime. Afraid of having a government
staunchly opposed to white domination so close to home, South Africa
rushed to prevent self-determination for the Angolans. They were aided
by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who believed the threat of
black liberation in Africa, which would lead to local control of their
own resources at the expense of foreign investors, could still be contained.

Bear in mind that at the same time the C.I.A. were engaged in another
brutal massacre in South America, intended to eradicate communist or
Soviet influence and ideas, and suppress active or potential opposition
known as "Operation Condor", a campaign of political repression and
state terror involving intelligence operations and assassinations of up
to 70,000 opponents, which started in 1968, but "officially" implemented
in 1975, by the right-wing dictatorships of South American countries. To
understand how an individual, group, entity or State, operates, you have
to think in parallel terms. It will better illustrate the patterns of
action that individual/entity/State operates under. In addition, the
rest of the world was still aghast and in shock over the American
annihilation of almost half a million Japanese civilians. Operation
Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay,
Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The U.S. government provided technical
support and supplied military aid to the participants until at least
1978, and again after Republican Ronald Reagan became President in 1981.
Such support was frequently routed through the Central Intelligence Agency.
South Africa launched an invasion to topple the MPLA and install the
guerilla Jonas Savimbi, leader of the National Union for the Total
Independence of Angola (UNITA), the smallest and least popular of the
three groups, as a puppet dictator in Angola. Savimbi, a collaborator
with the Portuguese dictatorship before Angolan independence, was known
for his ruthlessness, terrorism, and hunger for power. An avowed
anti-communist who had already aligned with South Africa, Savimbi would
have made the perfect Angolan facade for apartheid control, and
undoubtedly, had he prevailed, would have been touted by the U.S. as " a
hero".

Agostinho Neto, the President of Angola, and distinguished poet who has
led the MPLA since 1962, appealed to Cuba to send troops to ward off the
apartheid army’s invasion. On November 4, 1975, Castro agreed. Several
days later the first Cuban special forces troops boarded planes for
Angola, where they would launch "Operation Carlota".

Research the Battles of Quifangondo and Ebo to fully understand the
impact of the Cuban victory, and how its effects resonated far beyond
the battlefield. More important than the strategic gain, the victory of
black Cuban and Angolan troops against the whites South African racist
army shattered the illusion of white invincibility.

A South African military analyst described the meaning of his country’s
defeat: “The reality is that they have won, are winning, and are not
White; and that psychological edge, that advantage the White man has
enjoyed and exploited over 300 years of colonialism and empire, is
slipping away. White elitism has suffered an irreversible blow in
Angola, and Whites who have been there know it.” [cited by Piero Gleijeses]

Cuba’s 30,000-man strong military intervention in Angola managed to
change the course of that country and reverberate throughout Africa. By
ensuring independence from the white supremacists, Angola was able to
preserve its own revolution and maintain its role as a base for armed
resistance groups fighting for liberation in nearby countries.

The Americans were furious. “Kissinger’s response to Castro’s
intervention was to throw mercenaries and weapons at the problem,”
Gleijeses writes. [Citation: Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions:
Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Envisioning Cuba). The
University of North Carolina Press, 2002].

The U.S. Secretary of State was afraid that after their successful
intervention in Angola, Cuba would put the rest of the racist regimes in
the region in jeopardy:

“We can’t say Rhodesia is not a danger because it is a bad case. If the
Cubans are involved there, Namibia is next and after that South Africa,
itself … If the Cubans move, I recommend we act vigorously. We can’t
permit another move without suffering a great loss.” [Citation:
“National Security Council Meeting, 4/7/1976” of the National Security
Adviser’s NSC Meeting File at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
(pg. 21) http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/…/document/0312/1552402.pdf]
Sore losers that they were, after losing the war, in 1978, the South
African SADF massacred 600 unarmed Namibians at a refugee camp in
Cassinga, but the U.S. opposed any sanctions against them in the UN
Security Council as the apartheid government kept up its relentless
fight for survival. Throughout the 1980's Angola was subjected to
various incursions and invasions by South Africa confrontations which
climaxed in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in late 1987. With the
military confrontation raging, talks started between Angola, Cuba and
South Africa, with the United States moderating, in London in early
1988. In instructions to the Cuban delegation, Castro reflected on the
South Africans and American mindset.

“The fact they have accepted this meeting in London at such a high level
shows that they are looking for a way out because they have seen our
advance and are saying, ‘How is it that Cuba has converted itself into
the liquidator of Apartheid and the liberator of Africa?’ That’s what is
worrying the Americans, they’re going to say: ‘They’re going to defeat
South Africa!” Castro said. [Citation: Instructions to the Cuban
Delegation for the London Meeting, ‘Indicaciones concretas del
Comandante en Jefe que guiarán la actuación de la delegación cubana a
las conversaciones de Luanda y las negociaciones de Londres (April 22,
1988)’]

Castro also told his delegation that the goal was not to pursue a war or
military victory, but to achieve negotiations over SADF withdrawal from
Angola and implementation of Resolution 435, which would grant
independence to Namibia. “They should know that we are not playing
games, that our position is serious and that our objective is peace,” he
said. President Reagan administration's efforts to seek modification of
United Nations resolution 435 on Namibia to allow South African a say,
received a serious rebuff from Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
and Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, until eager to keep doing
business with the mineral resource-rich Angola, and surreptitiously keep
funding other brigands in nearby Congo, the U.S. succumbed.

In the American version of Cold War history, Cuba was carrying out
aggression and acting as proxies of the Soviet Union. Were it not for
one persistent and meticulous scholar, we might never have known that
these are nothing more than dishonest fabrications. In his monumental
books “Conflicting Missions” and “Visions of Freedom,” historian Piero
Gleijeses uses thousands of documents from Cuban military archives, as
well as U.S. and South African archives, to recount a dramatic,
historical confrontation between tiny Cuba and Washington and its ally
apartheid South Africa. Gleijeses is the only foreign scholar to have
gained access to the closed Cuban archives. He obtained thousands of
pages of documents, and made them available to the Wilson Center Digital
Archive, which has posted the invaluable collection online.

Gleijeses’s research made possible a look behind the curtain at one of
the most remarkable acts of "internationalism" of the century.
“Internationalism, (or the duty to help others), was at the core of the
Cuban revolution,” Gleijeses writes. “For Castro’s followers, and they
were legion, this was not rhetoric. By 1975, approximately 1,000 Cuban
aid workers had gone to a dozen African countries, South Yemen, and
North Vietnam. In 1976-77, technical assistance was extended to Jamaica
and Guyana in the Western Hemisphere; to Angola, Mozambique, and
Ethiopia in Africa; and to Laos in Asia....all places that had suffered
bombings and illegal incursions at the hands of the U.S.
Even the C.I.A. noted: "The Cuban technicians are primarily involved in
rural development and educational and public health projects... areas in
which Cuba has accumulated expertise and has experienced success at
home." [Gleijeses, Piero. Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington,
Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991. The
University of North Carolina Press, 2013].
The fight against apartheid, for the liberation of people who suffered
for centuries under colonialism and racial subjugation, was truly a
David versus Goliath conflict. In addition to having a strong military
itself and being armed with Israeli-supplied nuclear weapons, South
Africa enjoyed the diplomatic support of the United States, the world’s
largest superpower. Of course, this was because the main industries
propping up the evil Apartheid regime were American corporations. Within
this context, Cuba’s intervention....a poor Caribbean island under
relentless attack from a racist juggernaut backed by the world’s leading
imperial power, is even more remarkable.

Explaining how the significance of Cuba’s role in Angola is “without
precedent,” Gleijeses writes: “No other Third World country has
projected its military power beyond its immediate neighborhood. The
engine was Cuba. It was the Cubans who pushed the Soviets to help
Angola. It was they who stood guard in Angola for many long years,
thousands of miles from home, to prevent the South Africans from
overthrowing the MPLA government.” He notes that while the Soviet Union
later sent aid and weapons, they never would have become involved unless
Castro had taken the lead (which he did in spite of Russian opposition):

In Castro's Cuba, $1 could buy half a pint of milk, a month's childcare
for one toddler and a box at the opera to see the visiting Bolshoi
Ballet, and with one of the best healthcare systems in the world, cures
for certain forms of cancer (which currently cost about one dollar in
Cuba), Cuba's defiance, spanning the span of 11 U.S. presidencies,
finally brought America to its knees as President Obama recently
restored diplomatic relations with its hated enemy, after over half a
century of enduring tactics the Gestapo would have been proud of. As
usual, salivating over anticipated profits for Big-Pharma, what passes
for American morality has been superseded by prevalent greed. It didn't
assuage the much-vaunted American arrogance, either, that Russians had
already signed a deal to drill for oil off the Cuban coast where Havana
says there may be 20 billion barrels of oil, although the U.S. estimates
there are only five billion barrels.

So in conclusion, do these actions seem to you, the actions of a "brutal
dictator" who cares nothing for the well-being of people? Whenever you
read, or hear that Castro, or anyone else for that matter, was "a menace
and brutal dictator", do your own research. People all around the world
are lamenting the passing of this bearded revolutionary hero, who
survived a crippling U.S. trade embargo as well as hundreds, of
assassination plots for half a century. Castro overcame imprisonment at
the hands of dictator Fulgencio Batista, exile in Mexico and a
disastrous start to his rebellion before triumphantly riding into Havana
in January 1959 to become, at age 32, the youngest leader in Latin
America. For decades, he served as an inspiration and source of support
to revolutionaries spanning Latin America to Africa. There is not a dry
eye in Cuba, and many parts of the world today, and a 9-day period of
mourning has been declared in Havana. The only ones rejoicing....well,
you know it, the Americans, Cuban exile descendants of the Batista-era
elite, and lapdog governments of France and Britain...as well as those
who, either have something to gain from this news, or lacking historical
context, just don't know any better.

My footnote to the sordid tale of the Portugues-South African-American
pillaging of Angola is that 40 years later, Portugal is broke...and
Angola, crude oil-rich, graciously came to the rescue of their former
brutal colonial oppressor, paying off their foreign debts. That is the
true African spirit. America should borrow a page from the book of
African humanity before it's too late....but in true 'Murices fashion,
are busy draining Namibia of its uranium, Congo of its Coltan, and
Botswana of its diamonds.
Let it be known......Castro was a true hero.

[Acknowledgements to Global Research from which portions of this post is
extracted].

Images at the Facebook public post:
https://www.facebook.com/tokunboh.jiboque/posts/10154719863578134

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