A little reading on Cuba/Castro

[Toma]

I knew very little of the 1959 revolution, or the dictator Castro overthrew with just 800 men against thousands of theirs till I started reading stuff on the topic recently....

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarti...0&ItemID=10845

Anyone wanting a great vacation largely devoid of "yankees", you better go now. If Castro dies, you can bet the US will be in there like a dirty shirt trying to install a US friendly government, and will leave the place in turmoil for years....

[01RedDX]

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[Toma]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarti...0&ItemID=10841

[Toma]

Fawk.... how will American's sneak off to the US then??

The result is a gross infringement of our civil liberties that will likely become far worse in the wake of the Orwellian Real ID Act of 2005 passed by the US Congress to become effective in May, 2008. This law mandates that every US citizen and legal resident have a national ID card (in most cases a person's driver's license) that will contain on it the holder's vital personal information. It also requires the states to meet federal ID standards. A likely future requirement will be what now is mandated by mid-2007 for all newly issued and renewed passports - that they be embedded with a radio frequency identification (RFID) technology computer chip that will be able to track all the movements, activities and transactions of everyone having them. This is an Orwellian dream for any government wanting police state powers and will let US authorities know the names of all persons in the US travelling to Cuba or anywhere else in cases where they did it from third countries so as to remain anonymous. No longer, and with national ID cards mandatory by mid-2008, the tracking of all US citizens and legal residents will become even easier.

[Toma]

Fidel Castro's revolution likely was born in March, 1952 after Fulgencio Batista seized power forcibly by coup d'etat after it was clear he had no chance of winning the presidential election that year in which he was running a distant third in the polls. Batista, with full backing from the US, instituted a brutal police state that served the interests of capital and turned the island into a casino and brothel. It was marked by severe corruption, little concern for social needs, and violent crackdowns against the people to maintain order. Fidel Castro wanted none of it.

[Toma]

Besides the schemes listed above, the list of US terror tactics against Cuba is far too long to list in total here. They include US attacks on Cuban sugar mills by air, a 1960 blowing up of a Belgian ship in Havana harbor killing 100 sailors and dock workers, dynamiting stores, theaters, a Havana department store and burning down another one. In addition, there were dozens of attacks and bombings and over 600 known plans or attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro including the bizarre ones listed above. The CIA also conducted biological warfare against Cuba including introducing dangerous viruses to the island affecting sugar cane and other crops, African swine fever in
1971 that resulted in the need to slaughter half a million pigs, and hemorrhagic dengue fever that caused the deaths of at least 81 children in 1981. These incidents were later confirmed in declassified US documents.

[Toma]

It's also well remembered that Cubana flight 455 was terror-bombed in October, 1976 by former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles that killed the 73 people on board. The plot was likely masterminded by Orlando Bosch who devoted his life to committing terrorist attacks against Cuba and trying to kill Fidel Castro.
Now at age 80, he lives near Miami and was recently interviewed by Andy Robinson of La Vanguardia. He told Mr. Robinson he once nearly succeeded in killing Castro in 1971 in Chile (with a pistol hidden in a camera), but the assassins sent there to do it "chickened out and didn't shoot" even though they were standing meters away from the Cuban leader and easily could have done it.

Posada, too, was frank in at least one interview he gave to the New York Times. He said "The CIA taught us everything... explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage." Posada, like Bosch, spent 40 years trying to overthrow the Castro government forcibly and was personally responsible for many acts of violence over that period. In April,
2005 he sought political asylum in the US, apparently won't get it as the Bush administration is seeking a "friendly" country to extradite him to while ignoring requests for extradition by Cuba and Venezuela to face charges of terrorism in both countries. Posada was also likely responsible for other terror-bombings of hotels later in the 1990s to destroy the Cuban tourist industry with the help of CIA financing to do it.

It's also well known that CIA trained US based paramilitary groups like Alpha 66 and Brothers to the Rescue in Florida are free to operate from here where they're regarded as heros among Cuban reactionaries.
They have no fear of prosecution or extradition to Cuba for their crimes against the island state.