The prison called Cuba

From the Warning Signs of Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

Know Caruba's Warning Signs

We are told we need to feel sympathy for the Cuban people who have suffered from a U.S. embargo and lack of diplomatic recognition. That ignores a long history of oppression in Cuba no matter who was in charge.

Prior to Fidel Castro, Cubans were in the grip of Flugencio Batista who overthrew the existing government in September 1933 and then dominated Cuban politics for the next 25 years until Castro’s revolutionary movement took control of the capitol in January 1959.

Fifty-six years ago in 1959, I was about to graduate from the University of Miami and among my friends were young Cubans sent there to get a degree. I have often wondered which among them returned to Cuba and which, like those who could afford it, were joined by their family who fled Cuba.

The U.S. had been involved with Cuba from the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 when Spain ceded Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam for $20 million. We stayed in Cuba until it was granted independence in 1902 as the Republic of Cuba. Its first president faced an armed revolt in 1906 so we returned to briefly occupy Cuba to restore some stability, but they never really got the hand of being a democratic self-governing nation.

How much better it would have been for the Cubans if the U.S. had decided to make the island a territory like Puerto Rico. Then we could have let the island prosper without having to end up with becoming a Communist nation closely allied, first with the Soviet Union and after its collapse in 1991, with others like China and Venezuela.

The lesson we might be expected to draw from this is that Communism does not work. It is an utterly failed economic and social system that can only stay in power by jailing or executing anyone who resists. That is exactly what the brothers, Fidel and Raul Castro, have done since seizing power. One consistency of the past five decades has been the anti-America policies they have pursued.

The reason given by Obama was that U.S. policies toward Cuba “have not worked” and that it is time for a change. There is some truth in this and it should be noted that Canada has long had good relations with Cuba as have European and, of course, Latin and South American nations.

Even so, what are we to conclude from the report that Russia plans to join military drills with Cuba and North Korea that may also include Vietnam and Brazil? Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has left it sanctioned and isolated, so the military drills send a message that it still has nations friendly to it, but what nations!

Cuba was caught not long ago when it attempted to ship weapons to North Korea, so we are talking about two dedicated Communist nations. Over the years, it has more than demonstrated its anti-American hostility.

Generally, there is little to be gained by exchanging embassies or relieving Cuba. Lifting our embargo and other sanctions leaves the U.S. with even less leverage, if any.

What has been largely overlooked since Obama’s announcement is the fact that Cuba is still ruled by a Castro and is likely to remain so because Raul’s son, Alejandro Castro Espin, a colonel in Cuba’s intelligence apparatus is likely being groomed to take over after becoming a general and a member of the Communist Party Politburo, Cuba’s ruling body. As noted in an article in The Atlantic, it is the Cuban military not only that plays a major role in the Politburo, it also controls at least sixty percent of the island nation’s economy.

I have no doubt that reaching out to Cuba ranks just below reaching out to Iran as Obama contemplates his “legacy.” Both are notorious enemies of the U.S. Nor would it surprise me if Obama would try to unilaterally shut down Guantanamo. Failing that, he will do everything he can to empty it by the time he leaves office.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba has had to struggle to survive economically. Its earlier behavior got it banned from the Organization of American States that was not lifted until 2009, but which did not confer full membership until it was deemed to be “in conformity with the practices, purposes, and principles of the OAS.” At the time, Fidel said he was not interested in joining.

Not much has changed in terms of the enmity the Castro brothers have expressed toward the U.S. but practical considerations to keep unrest among elements of Cuba’s population under control require them to ease some of the earlier control over being able to travel and likely who Cubans can do business with would improve whatever commerce will be permitted.

At this point, the only “winner” is Cuba.

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Putin in Russia: A gangster regime

By Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Putin is a coldly corrupt, KGB-trained totalitarian, not someone
with whom the West — as Margaret Thatcher said of
Mikhail Gorbachev — "can do business."

"I'm afraid Putin will kill me," Boris Nemtsov told a Russian website on February 10. He was dead before the month was out.

The charismatic opposition leader, a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, was assassinated in the heart of Moscow on Friday night as he walked over a bridge near Red Square, only yards from the Kremlin walls. The killing, it seems clear, was a professional hit.

Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by gunmen who escaped in a precisely timed getaway car, the murder unrecorded by nearby security cameras, which were mysteriously turned off — all in a section of the Russian capital that normally teems with security personnel and surveillance.

It was a calculatedly shocking crime, the highest-profile assassination since the Stalin era, and Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine immediately moved to exploit it. The Russian ruler said he would personally oversee the inquiry into Nemtsov's killing, which his press aide described as a "provocation" intended to make the government look bad.

With almost unfathomable cynicism, government investigators speculated that one of Russia's best-known liberal democrats might have been martyred by his own allies in a bid for sympathy.

"Nemtsov could have been a kind of sacrifice for those who stop at nothing to attain their political ends," spokesman Vladimir Markin suggested. Meanwhile, Pravda — a Putin mouthpiece — published a column labeling the murder "a CIA-staged false flag" and "Washington's latest attempt to destabilize Russia."

Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, noted on Twitter that he was being flooded with thousands of messages parroting the "USA killed Nemtsov" line.

In the Russia that Putin has built, such brazen Big Lies are pervasive, relentlessly promoted by a regime that manipulates the media and the law to destroy its critics and strangle democratic opposition.

Putin's time in power have seen the elimination of a jaw-dropping array of inconvenient individuals: Courageous journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, Anastasia Baburova, Ivan Safronov, and Paul Klebnikov. Human-rights defenders, such as historian Natalia Estemirova and lawyer Stanislav Markelov.

High-placed whistleblowers, including one-time Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko and accountant Sergei Magnitsky. They are only a few of so many Putin foes who met untimely deaths. Other opponents have been neutralized in other ways, from long prison terms on trumped-up convictions to forced exile.

Did Putin order the latest assassination? As Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and longtime Nemtsov friend, noted over the weekend, whether or not Putin issued a directive is beside the point.

The Russian strongman "is directly responsible for creating the conditions in which these outrages occur with such terrible frequency."

What Putin's propagandists and proxies have done in Ukraine, Chechnya, and Georgia — inciting hatred and violence against far weaker opponents, demonizing all critics as traitors, fifth columnists, and enemies of Russia — they do at home to liberal dissidents and democratic reformers.

In such a culture of fear, there is little point asking who gave the order to kill. Ask rather whose killing will be ordered next.

And ask an even more pressing question: When will American policymakers
stop treating Putin's regime as anything but the gangster state that it is?

For those with eyes to see, there has never been any mystery about Putin's ways and means. He is coldly corrupt and vicious, a KGB-trained totalitarian who still resents the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century."

Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, Putin is not a Russian leader with whom the West "can do business." He is a brute, one who scruples at nothing in his pursuit of power, wealth, and the breaking of his opponents.

Yet US leaders have consistently denied the obvious. George W. Bush famously looked Putin in the eye, got "a sense of his soul" and concluded that the former KGB colonel was "very straightforward and trustworthy." Barack Obama sought to "reset" relations with Moscow in his first term, and promised even more "flexibility" in his second.

Putin took their measure, and acted accordingly: crushing Chechnya, occupying Georgia, annexing Crimea, running interference for Syria and Iran — all while eviscerating Russia's democratic opposition, plundering its wealth, and periodically reminding anyone who might forget that those who get in his way are apt to die young.

Washington can best give meaning to Nemtsov's death by emulating the resolve and courage he embodied in life. Condolences won't slow Putin's aggression. Backbone is a different story.

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