THE HANDSTAND

july 2005

HISTORY


The Naked and the Un-Dead
John Maxwell©June 05, 2005
sendmeyournews@earthlink.net

Havana, Cuba.Friday:

For anyone who might feel queasy at killing a cockroach, the words and the images are more than disturbing: they begin to remodel one's view of 'human nature' itself. Even though we know, in Jamaica, that people kill other people at the rate of two dozen a week, nothing can prepare us for the sight and sound of Orlando Bosch - a Cuban born professional murderer, attempting to justify his part in killing a planeload of innocents off the coast of Barbados thirty years ago.

To Bosch they all deserved to die. The members of a Korean trade mission were to him, evil allies of Fidel Castro; the teenaged Cuban fencing team was fair game because they were 'niggers' - teenagers who had won every fencing medal at the Pan American Games and were taking the medals home to present to Fidel Castro, because "he had been so good to them". The Guyanese students on their way to medical school in Cuba deserved to die because "Bishop (sic) was then President of Guyana" and so on.

If that was bad it was worse to hear the stories of the survivors of the United States' four decades war against Cuba. Mothers awoke to the sound of gunfire to find their children's shredded bodies b beside them, the young girl who had dreamt of growing up to wear high heels awoke find her feet amputated by a 50 calibre machine gun bullet; the survivor of the sabotage of the ammunition ship, La Coubre in Havana harbour - when hundreds were killed or injuiredawoke to find himself covered by human body parts.



And what could prepare you for the story of Hebe de Bonafini who has spent almost every day for the last 26 years with other mothers in the Plaza de mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, calling for justice for their children, tortured, murdered and 'disappeared' . Bonafini lost one son to the murderers of the state, then another, then her house was burnt down; one of her compatriots disappeared, then another; Susanna, Estela and Mariposa, because they insisted on going to the Plaza de Mayo to demand justice.

And then she met the plausible young lieutenant who came ostensibly to give comfort but who was in reality a spy and a murderer himself. The women, the mothers were terrified. Somehow they found the courage to continue. They read American produced manuals of torture approved by the US State department and the CIA. One manual even instructed torturers in the kidnapping of children to terrorise the population. Pregnant women were murdered; babies and children of murdered mothers taken from them and given to their torturers and high officials of state, to be reared as anti-communist activists

And the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo continued losing their children and they continued bearing witness and the ostracism the surviving mothers suffered. Their children were "terrorists" And the mothers read the manuals and learned in excruciating detail of the obscene horrors their children had been made to suffer, all in the name of anti-Communism and "Operation Condor."

"Operation Condor" was the name of a United States sponsored programme of terrorist murder, torture and 'disappearance' intended to cleanse Latin America of socialists and communists and revolutionaries and whoever got in the way of their crusade.

Operation Condor murdered Orlando Letelier, President Allende's Foreign Minister, seeking justice in Washington for his murdered leader. Condor murdered Ronnie Moffitt, Letelier's American secretary, blown up in the same fireball Condor made of Letelier's car. Condor killed Chilean Generals Orlando Leighton in Rome and Carlos Prats in Argentina, because they were known to be loyal to the oaths they had sworn to protect the Chilean republic


Campaign for Justice



Hundreds of friends of Cuba are in Havana, hearing evidence, giving testimony, intended to pressure the United States to do the decent thing - to surrender Luis Posada Carriles to a properly constituted Venezuelan court to answer charges that he engineered the mass murder of 73 people in a Cubana airlines plane off the coast of Barbados on October 6, 1976.

We are the guests of the Government and people of Cuba who insist that they do not want revenge, only Justice. They take President Bush seriously when he says that if you are not against terrorism, then you are a terrorist, or that he who shelters a terrorist is a terrorist himself.

Over the past three days the Cubans have exposed a whole panorama of terrorism. As they point out, they have been terrorised for 46 years, ever since Fidel castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Juan Almeida led the 26th of July movement in its three year long guerrilla war against the bloody tyranny of Fulgencio Batista. Batista's henchmen presented to Haydee Santamaria, on a plate, the eyes of her murdered brother Abel. Today, nearly half a century later, the Cuban people are facing the same enemies, using the same methods, to frighten them out of their freedom and rob them of their dignity.



In 1960, on my twenty-fifth birthday, May 20, I was arrested in Havana's Parque Central. I was taking pictures of the young children of Juventud Rebelde (a sort of junior cadet corps) marching in the Parque Central. A week or so earlier, Life magazine had published a spread on the same troop of Juventud Rebelde, drilling in the same park The spread was entitled "Fascism In Latin America?"

The pictures had been taken by a Black American photographer. I was released to great jubilation when the police discovered that I was a British subject: "Ingles! Ingles!" they shouted when I found a UN temporary Press pass from the year before.

I had come to Cuba at my own expense to find out about this Cuban revolution which was creating so many waves in North America. Everybody I knew was against my trip. Wills Isaacs, then Minister of Trade and Industry, offered me a year on an Israeli kibbutz if I would give up my 'dangerous' plan.

In Cuba I found teenagers teaching their elders to read, I found the army leading construction brigades assembling prefabricated concrete houses to replace the 'bohios' (thatched huts) in Pinar del Rio. I saw and heard Fidel and Che at a million strong meeting in the Plaza de la Revolucion and interviewed Carlos Rafael Rodriquez. I learned about the Agrarian Reform I met former prostitutes who rejoiced in the fact that Fidel had freed them from bondage, teachers who had previously 'rented' their jobs from soldiers, milicianos and milicianas intent on creating a new Cuba. Right in front of the National Capitol was a huge sign, advertising Coca Cola. Inside, the Capitol had been transformed into the Ministry for the Recovery of Stolen National Property.

The workers were militant. At Cuba's oldest and biggest daily newspaper, Diario de La Marina, the workers insisted on inserting 'coletillas' - brief disclaimers attached to anti-Castro propaganda reports. The management resisted; the government intervened, the paper was taken over. Freedom of the Press, the Americans said, was dead in Cuba.

Two months before I got to Cuba saboteurs had blown up an ammunition ship - La Coubre - in havana harbour. The titanic explosions killed hundreds, even now the toll is uncertain. The night I arrived bandits sped down the Prado spraying machinegunfire indiscriminately.

About that time, signs produced by the US Embassy began appearing on the houses of those more loyal to the US than to their own country: "This building is under the protection of the United States of America"Like magic, new signs sprouted the next day: "This house is under the protection of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba."


"We are no Communist, we are Humanist" the people told me then.

Policemen could not be seen in bars. Pregnant women were told to go see their doctors every six weeks. Most Cuban doctors had deserted to the US. The government began a crash programme to train doctors. Nowadays, nearly every city block has its own doctor, its own clinic. Thousands of Cuban doctors, nurses and teachers work in countries all over the developing world and Cuban biotechnology is among the world's best.

The Cubans estimate that the United States' terrorist campaigns- not including the embargo - have cost them more than 3,000 lives and $65 billion dollars. The embargo has cost them another $79 billion

Despite this punishment, the Cubans education and health services are among the best in the world and rates of crime and HIV/AIDS are practically undetectable. The odds of getting mugged in Cuba are probably about the same as in Greenland.In all the words spoken at this conference, as harrowing and gut-wrenching as they have been, the most potent have been those of the President of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon


Alarcon, in his speech, quoted only official documents of the United States provided under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents contain explosive information about the role of the US in terrorism in Latin America. One wonders what the US press, in its magisterial freedom, will make of them. Among other things the documents witness:

.1) Luis Posada Carriles for most of the last half-century; has been a CIA asset, trained, supported and protected by the CIA;

. 2)Orlando Bosch was involved in the assassination of Orlando Letelier;

.3)that he had boasted to that effect at a fund-raising dinner in Caracas and that those present drank a toast to the murder of Letelier .

.4)the US government knew, three months before the event, that Orlando Bosch and
Posada Carriles were planning to blow up a Cuban plane in the air;

.5) Bosch and Posada with Lugo and Hernandez planned and executed the bombing and reported back to the US to that effect;

. 6)Bosch and Posada (then head of Counterintelligence at DISIP - the Venezuelan Secret Service) had plans to leave Venezuela after the bombing and that Henry Kissinger, then National Security Adviser to President Ford, was aware of the facts and that the CIA was attempting to get them out.

.7) the United States intervened to get official Salvadoran identity papers for Posada Carriles who then became National Security Adviser to the Salvadorean government

.8) In 1992 Posada Carriles spent six and a half hours in the US embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, then headed by John Negroponte, now Director of Homeland Security for Mr Bush.

.9) A bomb exploded at la Guardia Airport in New York -the most atrocious attack until then, in the USA. The perpetrator was Orlando Otero Hernandez, eventually identified as the culprit while he was in Chile with Orlando Bosch as the guest of Pinochet. He got 8 years in prison for the atrocity.


Against Terrorism and Demanding Justice

Then there is the case of the Miami Five, Cubans sentenced in Miami to long jail terms for "espionage", although the evidence presented made it clear that they were not spying against the US but gathering information against terrorists. They infiltrated the Cuban mafia in Miami and learned of plots to blow up aircraft. Their information was sent by Cuba to the proper authorities in the USA as required under the Montreal Convention

Instead of arresting the plotters, the US arrested the informants and awarded them grotesquesentences (up to two life terms plus 17 years) at huge distances from their families and under conditions which amount to torture, to cruel and inhuman treatment.


Lenard Weinglass, attorney for Antonio Guerrero, one of the five Cuban patriots being held unjustly in US prisons explained how the five were actually anti-terrorists, working to prevent terrorist violence being launched from Miami against Cuba. He also detailed the abuses of the human rights of these five prisoners by US authorities.
Copyright © John Maxwell
jonmax@mac.com