She has not been allowed into Cuba since that publication. Michael Moore, needless to add, faces no such ban.
A PLUG FROM CNN
Shortly before the Dengue epidemic CNN was granted its coveted Havana bureau, the first allowed to a U.S. network. Bureau chief Lucia Newman assured viewers: “CNN will be given total freedom to do what we want and to work without censorship.”8
Hard-hitting stories immediately followed. At the height of the epidemic CNN featured Fidel’s office in its “Cool Digs” segment of CNN’s “Newsstand.” “When was the last time you saw a cup full of pencils on the boss’s desk?” asked perky CNN anchor Steven Frazier. “And they do get used—look at how worn down the erasers are! Years ago, our host worked as an attorney, defending poor people.... He’s Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader since 1959!”
“No dubious campaign spending here [in Cuba].” So reported Lucia Newman during the height of the Dengue epidemic, which coincided with some bogus elections. “No mudslinging—a system President Castro boasts is the most democratic and most honest in the world!”9
Though two more epidemics have been reported by the Cuban samizdat press since 1997, CNN (along with NBC, CBS and ABC) has never seen fit to mention outbreaks of Dengue fever in Cuba.
Instead, in August 2009, CNN’s report on Cuba’s healthcare by Morgan Neill boasted on Castro’s behalf: “Cuba’s infant-mortality rates . . . are the lowest in the hemisphere, in line with those of Canada.”
“Amazing!” probably gasped the typical CNN viewer. And indeed, according to UN figures, Cuba’s current infant-mortality rate places the country 33rd from the top in worldwide ranking, directly above the U.S.
What CNN left out of its report was that, according to those same UN figures, Cuba in 1958 ranked 13th from the top, worldwide. This meant that pre-Castro Cuba had the 13th-lowest infant-mortality rate in the world. This put her not only at the top of Latin America but atop most of Western Europe, ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Today all of these countries leave Communist Cuba in the dust, with much lower infant-mortality rates.
And even plummeting from 13th (under capitalism) to 33rd (under Communism), Cuba’s “impressive” infant-mortality rate is kept artificially low by, among other things, a truly appalling abortion rate of 0.71 abortions per live birth. This is the hemisphere’s highest, by far. Any Cuban pregnancy that even hints at trouble gets terminated.
DOCTORING INFANT-MORTALITY RATES
The UN’s World Health Organization has a fetish for infant-mortality figures, regarding them as the be-all and end-all of a nation’s health index. And Castro, whose fiefdom was awarded a prestigious UNESCO award in 2000, reports carefully doctored—if not utterly bogus—figures on Cuba’s infant-mortality rate to the WHO. Michael Moore’s Sicko relies on these UN figures exclusively.
In April 2001 Dr. Juan Felipe Garcia of Jacksonville, FL interviewed several doctors who had recently defected from Cuba. “The official Cuban infant-mortality figure is a farce,” asserts Dr. Garcia. “Cuban pediatricians constantly falsify figures for the regime. If an infant dies during the first year the doctors often report the baby was older. Otherwise such lapses could cost him severe penalties and his job.”
A samizdat smuggled out of Cuba in January 2003 by Mario Enrique Mayo reported that Dr. Olga Oropeza of Camaguey province was severely reprimanded by her hospital chief, Leonardo Ramirez, for delivering a premature baby. “That could raise this hospital’s infant-mortality rate!” Ramirez exclaimed as he berated the terrified woman.
Dr. Julio Alfonso said, “We personally used to perform 70 to 80 abortions a day.” Yanet Sanchez, a Cuban exile, said she was simply told to submit to an abortion. “They told me I should end the pregnancy,” said Sanchez. “It was my very first pregnancy. I wanted to have the child.”10
Other defecting doctors have testified that if a child dies a few hours after birth, the child isn’t counted as ever having lived. This obviously cranks up Cuba’s UN ranking in the all-important infant-mortality sweepstakes.
According to a report by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the mortality-rate of Cuban children aged one to four is 34 per cent higher than the U.S. (11.8 versus 8.8 per 1000). But these figures don’t figure into UN-spotlighted infant-mortality rates, you see. So apparently the pressure is not on Cuban doctors (thus far) to doctor these figures.11
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons also reports that the current maternal mortality rate in Cuba is almost four times the U.S. rate (33 versus 8.4 per 1000). Peculiar and tragic: how do so many mothers die during childbirth in Cuba? And how do so many one-to-four-year-olds perish, while from birth to one year old (the period during which they qualify in UN statistics as infants) they’re perfectly healthy?12
This might lead a few people to question Cuba’s official infant-mortality figures. But such people would not get a Havana bureau for their network, much less a visa to film a documentary in Fidel Castro’s fiefdom.
Upon Fidel Castro’s resignation in 2006—and apparently fearful that some of their reporters might actually take that job-title seriously—CNN issued a memo to its employees, as follows.
From: Flexner, Allison
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:46 AM
To: *CNN Superdesk (TBS)
Subject: Castro guidance
Some points on Castro—for adding to our anchor reads/ reporting:
* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba—namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration.
* Also the Cuban government blames a lot of Cuba’s economic problems on the US embargo, and while that has caused some difficulties, the bulk of Cuba’s economic problems are due to Cuba’s failed economic polices. Some analysts would say the US embargo was a benefit to Castro politically—something to blame problems on...
* While despised by some, he is seen as a revolutionary hero, especially with leftists in Latin America, for standing up to the United States.
Any questions, please call the international desk.13
Michael Moore, lionized in the MSM for “brazenly speaking truth to power,” finds the equivalent of a welcome-mat, honor-guard and 21-gun salute upon his every visit to Castro’s press-censored fiefdom. He might also be interested to know that his hosts and co-producers hold the honor as “the world’s worst jailer of journalists.”
On June 16, 2010 Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, testified to that effect at a hearing on “Press Freedom in the Americas” held by the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. Interestingly, not one medium belonging to the press in these Americas saw fit to report on the item. The reason is not far to seek: most of those media possess Castro-issued Cuban visas, or full-fledged Cuban bureaus.
CHAPTER 15
The Cuban “Embargo” —Are You Kidding?
“The embargo against Cuba is the stupidest law ever passed in the U.S.,” claims Jimmy Carter.
Yet President Jimmy Carter imposed more economic sanctions against more nations than any American president in modern history. These sanctions were against Rhodesia, South Africa, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, the Shah’s Iran and Somoza’s Nicaragua. President Carter was extremely selective in imposing his sanctions. Let’s give him that. He was careful to punish only U.S. allies.1
But hypocrisy is not our issue here. Stupidity is our issue—more specifically, the stupidity (or mendacity) of claiming that the U.S. embargoes all commerce with Cuba, as relentlessly reported by the media. Webster’s defines “embargo” as “a government order imposing a trade barrier.” As a verb it’s defined as “to prevent commerce.” So let’s consider:
In 1957—when Cuba was a “U.S. economic colony” as we’re constantly told by the media—the U.S. exported $347.5 million worth of goods to Cuba.2
In 2010—when Cuba was being “strangled by a U.S. economic blockade,” as we’re constantl
y told by the media—the U.S. exported $366.5 million to Cuba, a drop from the $720 million of 2008. In fact, for every one of the past 8 years the “Cuba-blockading” U.S. has exported more goods to Cuba than it did in 1957.3
In 1957—when Cuba was a “playground for U.S. tourists” as we’re constantly told by the media—263,000 people visited Cuba from the U.S.4
In 2011—when Cuba was being “blockaded” by the U.S.—an estimated 400,000 people visited Cuba from the U.S.5
In 1958 with Cuba under a “U.S.-backed dictator,” with the U.S. “controlling Cuba’s economy,” etc., the staff of the U.S. embassy in Cuba numbered 87, including Cuban employees.
Today, with supposedly no diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S., the staff of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana numbers 351, including Cuban employees.
The U.S. has transacted almost $4 billion in trade with Cuba over the past decade. Up until three years ago the U.S. served as Cuba’s biggest food-supplier and fifth-biggest import partner. We’ve fallen a few notches recently but we’re still in the top half.6 Besides banning some paltry imports from Cuba, nowadays the so-called U.S. embargo mostly stipulates that the Castro regime pay cash up front through a third-party bank for all U.S. medical and agricultural products; no Ex-Im (U.S. taxpayer) financing of such sales. Enacted by the Bush team in 2001, this cash-up-front policy has kept the U.S. taxpayer among the few in the world spared fleecing by Castro.
Here are a few items regarding the so-called embargo studiously side-stepped by much of the media (especially those with Havana bureaus):
Per capita, Cuba qualifies as the world’s biggest debtor nation with a foreign debt of close to $50 billion, a credit-rating nudging Somalia’s, and an uninterrupted record of defaults.
In 1986 Cuba defaulted on most of her foreign debt to Europe.7 Seven years ago France’s export credit agency, COFACE, cut off Cuba’s credit line. Mexico’s Bancomex quickly followed suit. The Castro regime had stuck it to French taxpayers for $175 million and to Mexican taxpayers for $365 million. Bancomex was forced to impound Cuban assets in three different countries in an attempt to recoup its losses.
Recently the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) ranked Cuba as virtually the world’s worst country business-wise. Only Iran and Angola ranked lower. Standard & Poors refuses even to rate Cuba, regarding the economic figures released by the regime as utterly bogus.
Just last year we heard from one of Castro’s latest suckers. “The Cuban regime has a long track-record of failing to pay back our loans,” lamented South Africa’s shadow deputy minister of Trade and Industry, Geordin Hill-Lewis. “In 2010, South Africa had to write off R1.1 billion [about $126 million] in bad Cuban debt, and on Friday we wrote off another R250 million [about $29 million] in bad debt. The time has come for South Africa to invest in strategic partnerships that deliver prosperity for our people.”8
A Wikileaked cable from December 2010 reported on a breakfast hosted by a U.S. diplomat in Havana with commercial and economic counselors from five of Cuba’s largest trading partners—China, Spain, Canada, Brazil and Italy—plus key creditor nations France and Japan. “The diplomats reported continuing problems collecting their Cuban debts, with the Japanese noting that after restructuring all of Cuba’s official debt in 2009, Tokyo had not received any payments.... Even China admitted to having problems getting paid on time and complained about Cuban requests to extend credit terms from one to four years,” the cable said. “France and Canada responded with, ‘welcome to the club.”’9
One fine morning in February 2009, the Castro brothers woke up and decided to freeze $1 billion that 600 foreign companies kept in Cuban bank-accounts. Another fine morning in April 2012 the Cuban regime arrested the top officers of Britain-based Coral Capital that had invested $75 million in the Castro brothers’ fiefdom and was planning four luxurious golf resorts.10 These hapless (greedy, unprincipled and stupid, actually) businessmen now find themselves with no more recourse to law than the millions of Cubans who had their businesses and savings stolen en masse in August 1960 by Castro’s gunmen.
After all, Che Guevara, who served as Cuba’s finance minister during the initial mass burglaries of Cuban- and U.S.-owned properties, explained the regime’s legal guidelines very succinctly in January 1959, when he served as chief hangman. “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute based on revolutionary conviction.”
All the nations, whose taxpayers and businessmen get fleeced and/or arrested by Castro, routinely condemn the U.S. embargo of Cuba at the UN. Our UN ambassador usually keeps poker-faced and mum during the vote and related pontifications. What fun Susan Rice is missing!
As they lobby against the Cuba embargo, the U.S. farm lobby and their affiliates are simply craving the same business deal from U.S. officials via the U.S. Export-Import Bank (i.e., U.S. taxpayers) that government elites in France, Mexico, South Africa, Canada, Italy, etc. bestowed on their business cronies and cocktail guests, at the expense of those nations’ taxpayers.
FAILURE OR SUCCESS?
“OK, so there’s no embargo. But come on, Humberto! Haven’t these sanctions, as you call them, been a long-running failure? I mean, the regime’s still there!”
On January 21, 1962 at Punta del Este, Uruguay, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk gave a speech to the Organization of American States recommending the members join the U.S. in voting for an economic embargo of Cuba. In this speech there is not a single word, or even an inference, that toppling the Castro regime was the embargo’s goal. Indeed, Secretary Rusk went out of his way to stress that this was not the embargo’s goal. “The United States objects to Cuba’s activities and policies in the international arena, not its internal system or arrangements.” (emphasis mine)
Actually, few U.S. foreign policy measures in recent history have been as phenomenally successful as our limited sanctions against the Stalinist robber-barons who run Cuba. Firstly, as mentioned, the U.S. taxpayer has been spared the fleecing visited upon many others who reside in nations that eschew “embargoing” Cuba. Secondly, for three decades the Soviet Union pumped the equivalent of almost ten Marshall Plans into Cuba. This cannot have helped the Soviet Union’s precarious solvency or lengthened her life-span. Thirdly, as more and more suckers get burned and sour on doing business with Castro, our sanctions (and our example) may indeed start influencing Cuba’s internal system.
Until Castro’s Soviet sugar-daddy finally expired in 1991, not much was heard from his mainstream-media auxiliaries about a “cruel U.S embargo” or “blockade.” The PR campaign went into high gear with Pope John Paul’s visit to Cuba in January 1998, when an outfit called Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba kicked off. “Ordinary Cubans are paying a severe price for the ban on U.S. food and the most severe restrictions on the sale of U.S. medical products,” mourned the AHTC manifesto. “Forty years of the strongest embargo in our history has resulted in increased misery for the people of Cuba.... We can no longer support a policy carried out in our name which causes suffering of the most vulnerable—women, children and the elderly.”11
On the Board of this AHTC sat David Rockefeller of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dwayne Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland and Frank Carlucci, at the time chairman of the Carlyle Group, the world’s biggest private-investment corporation, which is headquartered on Washington, DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue itself. Carlyle Group is widely regarded as the most politically-connected corporation in the world. George Soros was among its founders and major investors.
A few years earlier, something called the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council had burst upon the scene. Lo and behold, Dwayne Andreas sat on the board. Follow the money-trail and most of these names keep popping up on practically everything associated with easing the Cuban “embargo.” Somebody sees dollar-signs, and it’s not the U.S. taxpayer. That’s exactly the rub with the politically-connected companies that are trying to sell Castro.
When it comes to political influen
ce, liberals denounce Cuban-American lobbyists as singularly unscrupulous, diabolically clever, and awash in ill-gotten lucre—unlike those babes-in-the-woods Dwayne Andreas, David Rockefeller and George Soros.
The anti-“embargo” reasoning seems to go something like this: the Carlyle Group, Archer Daniels Midland and the Council on Foreign Relations, along with congressmen representing the most heavily taxpayer-subsidized sector of the U.S. economy, spend most of their waking hours agonizing over the welfare of the Cuban people and yearning to succor them. The Cuban peoples’ cousins, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in Miami, however, only want to starve and torture their relatives.
Furthermore, after a couple of junkets to Cuba, executives of the above-mentioned corporations and their crony congressmen and lobbyists become endowed with an uncanny clairvoyance. This enables them to divine the whims and motives of Cuba’s officials much more accurately than those who lived for years under Cuba’s communist system, and often within the system. These latter often had daily contact with Cuba’s current officials.
But never mind. They know nothing. They cannot be trusted. Jeff Flake and Charles Rangel are much shrewder judges of Raul Castro’s psyche than Alcibiades Hidalgo, Raul Castro’s adjutant and chief-of-staff for over a decade, who defected to the U.S. in 2002 and flatly stated: “Ending the travel ban would be a gift to the Castros.”12
SOME “EMBARGO” HISTORY
“But come on, Humberto. When Castro took office amidst all the euphoria, couldn’t we have tried some carrot along with Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick? It seems that right off the bat we started trying to overthrow him or assassinate him!”
In fact, the U.S. elite’s fetish for carrots and “engagement” with Fidel Castro began before he was even in office.
“Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” boasted Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s “Caribbean desk’s specialist on the Cuban revolution” from 1957 to 1960.
The Longest Romance Page 18
