The LIBERTAD Act, known as the Helms-Burton law as stated in the text, Fidel and Raul Castro cannot be part of the governing structure. Cuba has supported and provided safe haven to members of the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Both are U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). The Obama administration would therefore need to remove ETA and FARC from the FTO list, before removing Cuba from the state-sponsors-of-terrorism list.
The State Department terrorism report also makes references beyond ETA and FARC — most significantly that Cuba harbors several fugitives of U.S. justice. Terrorists, murderers, and other violent criminals are being protected, well fed, and supported by the Communist regime. Among these is a woman convicted of first-degree murder, Joanne Chesimard. Also known as Assata Shakur, she is on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list for executing a New Jersey State Police trooper. With the help of the Black Liberation Army, she broke out of prison and found refuge in Cuba. According to the FBI, Chesimard “continues to profess her radical anti-U.S. government ideology.” Read more here from NRO.
Russia may build a large international airport in Cuba with investors from the United Arab Emirates, Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov said in an interview with a newspaper in Abu Dhabi.
Manturov told newspaper The National that Russia is in discussions with Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala investment company to invest in building a hub in Cuba for flights to Latin America. Russia is ready to invest $200 million in the project. More here.
For a complete list and timeline of sanctions against Cuba, go here. Most of the sanction activity occurred in 2016 due to the Obama White House normalizing relations with the country, the Castro brothers and appeasing Russia. It must also be noted that Cuba has been propping up Venezuela for many years.
October 10, 2003: In response to a crackdown on human rights by the Castro regime, President George W. Bush announced a measure to tighten sanctions on the country, including increased border inspections of travelers and shipments between the two countries.
May 2009: The Obama administration lifted restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling and sending money to Cuba, also allowing U.S.-based telecommunications firms to seek business on the island. More here.
Why is any of this important? Who is who and breaking sanctions perhaps via the United Arab Emirates and shadow companies?
Bloomberg: Cuba has only one 18-hole golf course: the government-run Varadero Golf Club, about two hours east of Havana. Built on the 1930s estate of chemicals magnate Irénée du Pont, it was refurbished in the 1990s when the government turned to tourism to bolster its economy after the fall of the Soviet Union. Du Pont’s former residence, Xanadú Mansion, serves as the clubhouse. On the third floor, a wood-and-marble bar offers sweeping views of the Florida Straits.
The course, expanded by Canadian architect Les Furber, is largely flat and littered with palm trees, and the greens fee runs $70. One reviewer described it as “inoffensive golf at its finest.” Yet lining up a putt on the 8th or 18th holes, both of which are right on the azure water, even a duffer can’t miss Cuba’s potential. With fertile soil, plentiful green coastline, and topography that spans plains, rolling hills, and rugged mountains, the island is a golf course architect’s Shangri-La.
On an afternoon late last year, the golfers teeing off included a group of U.S. executives from the Trump Organization, who have the enviable job of flying around the world to identify golf-related opportunities. The company operates 18 courses in four countries, including Scotland and the United Arab Emirates. It would like to add Cuba. Asked on CNN in March if he’d be interested in opening a hotel there, Donald Trump said yes: “I would, I would—at the right time, when we’re allowed to do it. Right now, we’re not.” On July 26 he told Miami’s CBS affiliate, WFOR-TV, that “Cuba would be a good opportunity [but] I think the timing is not right.”
That, however, hasn’t stopped some of his closest aides from traveling to Cuba for years and scouting potential sites and investments. The U.S. trade embargo, first established in 1962, prohibits U.S. citizens from traveling to the island. But over the years, the U.S. has carved out allowances for family visits, journalism, and other social causes. Most commercial activity is still forbidden, though, with a few exceptions, such as selling medical supplies or food. Golf isn’t on that list.
The Varadero Golf Club after its redesign.Photographer: David Alan Harvey/Magnum Photos
Trump Organization executives and advisers traveled to Havana in late 2012 or early 2013, according to two people familiar with the discussions that took place in Cuba and who spoke on condition of anonymity. Among the company’s more important visitors to Cuba have been Larry Glick, Trump’s executive vice president for strategic development, who oversees golf, and Edward Russo, Trump’s environmental consultant for golf. On later trips, they were joined by Jason Greenblatt, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, and Ron Lieberman, another Trump golf executive. Glick, Greenblatt, and Lieberman didn’t respond to requests for interviews. Melissa Nathan, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, declined to answer a list of detailed questions.
In a series of telephone interviews, Russo confirmed he’s traveled to Cuba about a dozen times since 2011. Although he’s spearheading the company’s Cuban golf efforts, according to three people familiar with his role, Russo says these trips haven’t been on behalf of the Trump Organization. He says he’s taken at least one with Glick to go bird-watching and “check out some habitats”—activities that could conceivably qualify for exemptions to the travel ban.
Despite saying his trips with Trump executives were unrelated to the Trump Organization, Russo referred questions about those trips to Eric Trump, the 32-year-old son of the Republican presidential nominee and the company’s executive vice president for development and acquisitions, including golf. “In the last 12 months, many major competitors have sought opportunities in Cuba,” Trump said in an e-mailed statement. “While we are not sure whether Cuba represents an opportunity for us, it is important for us to understand the dynamics of the markets that our competitors are exploring.”
So which was it: a little birding? Keeping an eye on the competition? Maybe neither. According to Antonio Zamora, a well-known Cuban-American lawyer, who says he’s advised the Trump Organization on Cuba for about a decade, he and Russo visited a prospective golf site east of Havana in an area called Bello Monte several years ago.
Russo, Trump’s environmental consultant, enjoys Havana in a photo posted to Facebook in December.
Based in Miami, Zamora took part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion but is now an outspoken critic of the U.S. sanctions. “An embargo that has been in place by a world power like the United States for 50 years and has not accomplished anything substantial is a disgrace,” Zamora writes in his 2013 book, What I Learned About Cuba By Going To Cuba. “This is not what great powers do.” He advises U.S. investors throughout Latin America. He’s circulated conceptual drawings of a Trump tower in Havana beside refurbished versions of the Hotel Neptuno-Triton, a dilapidated pair of 1970s buildings in the city’s business district, according to a person who saw them. (Zamora denies this.)
Zamora does say that he discussed with the Trump Organization the possibility of teaming up with a foreign company to give Trump a minority position in a venture. He says the deal failed to materialize. Zamora dismisses any legal concerns about this, saying he’s been to Cuba dozens of times for conferences, and that the U.S. Department of the Treasury doesn’t bother with these kinds of trips. “It’s a nonissue,” he says.
Farhad Alavi, managing partner of Akrivis Law Group in Washington and an adviser to companies on U.S. sanctions, says that, before 2015, exploring most potential deals in Cuba was “not even in the realm of what Treasury might have licensed.” He adds that “prior to 2015, a fact-finding trip by a U.S. person for a business activity, like building a golf course or hotel, was prohibited. It’s not under one of the categories of permissible travel to Cuba.”
In January 2015, the Treasury Department broadened an exception for “professional research.” That’s viewed by attorneys to encompass all sorts of potential investment activity—short of signing deals. To finalize an investment in Cuba requires a specific license from Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Marriott each announced in March they’d received authorization. (A Treasury spokeswoman says it is agency policy not to confirm or deny whether specific licenses have been issued.) Russo says the Trump Organization hasn’t secured one.
“Professional research” makes it easier for companies to explore business opportunities in Cuba, but it may not put the Trump Organization in the clear. Golf could be seen as promoting tourism, which remains illegal for U.S. companies. (President Barack Obama can’t change that—the tourism ban cannot be repealed without an act of Congress.) “If the Treasury Department believed that a new golf course in Cuba were intended to attract tourists from outside Cuba, then U.S. persons who meet in Cuba to develop the golf course could be charged with promoting tourism in Cuba,” says Richard Matheny, chair of the national security and foreign trade regulation practice group at Goodwin Procter in Washington. “This is unlawful under the current sanctions.”
“You can’t help but say, ‘Wow, here’s a hotel that could be renovated’
Golf’s history in Cuba is tinged with the absurd. In the 1950s the country staged tournaments that weren’t on the official PGA Tour but still attracted top players. In 1958 famed mobster Meyer Lansky—who’d been deported from the U.S. a decade earlier and was running a number of successful casinos in Cuba—set out to build the greatest hotel Havana had ever seen and further showcase the sport. With backing from Frank Sinatra, his Monte Carlo de La Habana was to feature a casino, a helicopter landing pad, and several glorious courses.
Lansky’s timing was spectacularly bad. A few weeks after construction started, Fidel Castro began his final rebel offensive against Cuba’s president, General Fulgencio Batista. On New Year’s Eve, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic. Castro rolled into Havana a few days later, and Lansky soon halted work. Castro declared golf “a game of the idle rich and exploiters of the people” and plowed over almost all the island’s courses. Even so, a series of early 1960s photographs shows Castro and his fellow revolutionary Che Guevara hamming it up with golf clubs. Castro was a baseball player, but Che took up golf as a young man and was rumored to have a 4 handicap. Last year a Cuban composer and an American librettist staged an opera in Havana based in part on those photos.
Guevara (left) and Castro (third from right) get in a round—and a photo op—in the early 1960s.Photographer: Carlos Nunez/Prensa Latina/AP Photo
These days, Cuban officials actively promote golf development. A 200-page brochure published by the government late last year, Portfolio of Opportunities for Foreign Investment, features three hoped-for golf developments around the island, including two under contract with British and Chinese developers. The government also reportedly has a deal with Spanish airline Air Europa to develop a hotel and golf course at Playa El Salado, about 25 miles west of Havana. The Trump Organization has a particular interest in that development, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Although it’s not clear if Donald Trump is aware of his aides’ activities in Cuba—he didn’t return phone calls for this article—he’s demonstrated a familiarity with the rules for investing there. In his March interview with CNN, he said he wouldn’t enter Cuba “on the basis that you get a 49 percent interest, because right now you get a 49 percent interest.” The exchange was an apparent reference to Cuban law limiting foreign investors’ stakes in Cuban operations to less than 50 percent. Trump didn’t mention the more onerous U.S. regulations limiting investment in Cuba. He said he likely favored Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, “but I’d want much better deals than what we’re making.”
Encouraged by the White House’s loosening of regulations, plenty of other U.S. companies, including Airbnb, Google, PayPal, and Western Union, are gradually entering Cuba, but they must still carefully navigate the embargo. In late June, Starwood began managing a refurbished hotel in Havana’s main business district, the first U.S.-managed hotel in Cuba in 60 years. At a June event in Manhattan, a Starwood executive repeatedly referred to the “business travelers” who would be attracted by the property, apparently mindful of the perils of promoting tourism.
The repercussions of breaking the embargo are real. Violators are still being penalized, even for ventures only remotely connected to Cuba. In February, the Treasury Department alleged that two Cayman Islands subsidiaries of the energy-services company Halliburton had been involved in oil drilling off the shore of Angola, as part of a consortium in which the Cuban government held a 5 percent stake. Halliburton agreed to pay the U.S. $304,706 to settle the matter.
For the Trump Organization, there’s a further concern: the potential conflicts of interest posed by Trump’s far-flung business empire should he be elected president. In addition to his operations in the U.S., Trump operates in Azerbaijan, Brazil, Georgia, Israel, Turkey, and several other countries. Federal conflict-of-interest laws do little to prevent presidents from continuing to exert influence over their businesses—even as they exercise powers that could broadly benefit those interests.
“Make sure that whatever you do is absolutely legal in every way, and at some point, when it’s legal, I’d be interested in it”
Russo, 70, lives in Key West, Fla. He first encountered the Trump Organization in 2002. The former chairman of the town planning board in Bedminster, N.J., Russo helped Trump get authorization for his golf course there. Though he has no formal environmental training, he appears before local regulators around the country seeking approval for Trump projects.
On the phone, he’s friendly, a talker, but the first to admit his memory’s not the best. “I don’t remember last night,” he says. He was unsure how many times he and Glick, Trump’s golf chief, had traveled to Cuba. He says he took Glick on at least one trip to Cuba for some bird-watching.
“He was into it. And that’s the thing. I’m going to Cuba, I’m bringing people to Cuba. And I know people from Trump, I know people outside of Trump. So if somebody from Trump wanted to come with me, I don’t think that means they were representing anything having to do with the Trump Organization. They just enjoyed the environment, like you or I would.” Russo says that on his travels in Cuba, “you can’t help but say, ‘Wow, here’s a hotel that could be renovated,’ or, ‘This is a particular spot that would be perfect for this or perfect for that,’ and I would only hope that someday that the Trump Organization or other investors could develop something nice over there.”
Courtesy of Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida
Asked if he’s discussed Cuban opportunities with Donald Trump, Russo says: “I don’t remember exactly what our conversations were. But you would have to realize that talking to Donald Trump is, you know, it’s a very complicated experience.” He added later that Trump admonished him on Cuba to “make sure that whatever you do is absolutely legal in every way, and at some point, when it’s legal, I’d be interested in it.”
Glick, 49, is close to the Trump family and has worked for Trump for nine years. He recently traveled with Eric Trump, checking the status of the company’s developments in Bali, Dubai, Manila, and Aberdeen, Scotland, according to pictures posted by the two men on their Twitter accounts. He sits on the board of Eric’s foundation. Although he has no formal campaign role, he’s a fierce advocate for Trump’s White House run, excoriating Hillary Clinton on social media almost daily. He accompanied both adult Trump sons at the Republican National Convention during TV interviews. One person recalled a conversation with Glick after he returned from Cuba during which he described the company’s ambitions for golf on the island. Glick didn’t respond to requests for comment.
For his part, Russo gets that even now, pursuing golf in Cuba is problematic. “I would interpret golf as tourism, and therefore it can’t be done at this time,” he says. He maintains his dozen or so trips have all been environmental—and for birding—with only the most casual inquiries into golf-related properties. “Given the nature of the regulations and OFAC’s licensing trends, I would be quite surprised if it authorized multiple trips to Cuba for nonspecialist, nonexpert, random bird-watching,” says Alavi, the U.S. sanctions adviser.
In February 2013, Zamora, the Cuban-American lawyer, set up a nonprofit in Miami called the Florida-Cuba Environmental Coalition. Its directors include Russo and several advisers for investors in Cuba, including some who have consulted for the Trump Organization. Certain “environmental” projects qualified as one of the reasons U.S. citizens could travel to Cuba legally in 2013. When he’s asked about the nonprofit, Russo’s memory falters again. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a meeting. I didn’t even know my name was on that group,” he says.
Larry Glick, Ed Russo, Ron Lieberman, and companion on the links in Cuba in a photo posted on Facebook.
Another board member of the coalition, Dominic Soave, is a Havana-based business consultant from Canada who’s made introductions for Trump executives in Cuba, according to two people familiar with the matter. He’s also circulated a set of drawings of Havana with a Trump tower. “I really haven’t been advising anyone,” says Soave. He, Zamora, and two other directors say their nonprofit has taught sustainable fishing techniques to Cuban fishermen. The group has also promoted the Ernest Hemingway International Billfishing Tournament in Cuba, helping Americans get licenses to take part.
A second nonprofit, the American-Cuban Golf Association, was set up last year by Russo’s wife, Jennifer Hulse, and lists a residence in Key West as its address. The group lists her and her husband as directors. The organization’s third director is David Schutzenhofer, who runs the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster. Schutzenhofer did not return calls prior to publication.
Asked about the golf nonprofit, Russo first seems confused: “What is that supposed to do?” he asks. “Am I listed on that also?” He eventually explains that the group was intended to provide cross-cultural golf instruction: Cubans teaching golf to Americans and vice versa. “You should know that the organization was my idea and had nothing to do with the Trump Organization,” Hulse wrote in an e-mail. “One of my passions in life is golf, and I would like to find a way to bridge the distance between our countries through love of the game.”
A couple of Hulse’s cultural exchanges may have taken place toward the end of last year. Photographs and a video posted to Hulse’s Facebook page in December show her husband and Greenblatt, the Trump chief legal officer, at the Floridita restaurant in Old Havana, a favorite of Hemingway’s. Another set of pictures, posted a month earlier, shows Russo, Glick, Lieberman, and Soave listening to a live performance of Hotel California in the lobby of the Parque Central hotel in Old Havana.
Still another series finds the men playing at the Varadero course. One shot shows Russo teeing off, with Glick and Lieberman waiting their turn. Below the pictures of the Trump executives golfing, one Facebook friend asked: “How is the golf course?”
Hulse replied: “Not spectacular but it’s the only one in Cuba right now. Plans to build many more in the near future.”
Doing the research and investigative work that the major U.S. media have all but abandoned, an organization called the American Life League (ALL) has uncovered dramatic evidence of links between the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church and an international communist group known as the World Social Forum. The evidence suggests overt Marxist influence on the climate change movement that Pope Francis and his top advisers are now embracing.
The ALL report, a 76-page PowerPoint presentation complete with original source material and numerous photographs, documents how Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican’s top social justice organization, is actually “providing leadership” to the communist group.
The report’s author, Michael Hichborn, stated, “This is a very serious problem. Given how intimately connected the World Social Forum (WSF) has been with the promotion of communism, abortion, and homosexuality since the very beginning, it’s impossible to see how any Catholic can participate in it, or even speak positively about it, let alone have any involvement in its governance. But Caritas Internationalis does!”
These allegations can’t be dismissed as anti-Catholic bigotry, since the American Life League is itself a Catholic organization that has been working for years to expose Catholic funds and organizations that promote causes at variance with official Catholic teaching.
However, Hichborn tells Accuracy in Media that except for specialized publications such as Lifesitenews, the media have ignored the report.
The ALL report on the WSF includes eye-opening photographs from the group’s events, featuring open displays of communist flags and banners as well as images of such personalities as Lenin, Castro and Mao.
Most of our media, of course, reported on the “death” of communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But the ALL report notes that “There can be no mistaking the materialist and revolutionary (Communist) nature of the forum itself, which sets it in opposition to the Catholic Church.”
Hichborn told AIM that he delivered a copy of the report to the Vatican office known as Cor Unum, but that nothing came of it, and that one Vatican official concerned about the issue was relieved of his duties.
ALL identifies the other Catholic groups involved in the activities of the WSF as Pax Christi, Center of Concern, Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Catholic Relief Services and CIDSE, an international alliance of Catholic development agencies.
An independent review of the ALL report confirms the research into the links between Caritas Internationalis and the WSF. In fact, a document on the Caritas website still affirms that “Caritas has been involved in the WSF since its beginnings. Caritas believes it’s an opportunity to exchange ideas and to build the momentum towards real change.”
After the ALL report was released, a conference at the Vatican was sponsored by Caritas Internationalis that featured Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University professor and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of Marxist-oriented Liberation Theology.
As Accuracy in Media reported, Sachs wrote an article for the Jesuit publication America attacking the “American idea” of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as narrow and selfish. He suggests that America’s founding document is outmoded and incompatible with his idea of Catholic teaching about social justice.
Sachs is an advocate of global taxes to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from the American people in order to finance some form of world government. The climate change movement, based on dubious science, is the most popular current vehicle that Sachs and others can use to bring this about.
Seizing on Sachs’ extraordinary remarks in a major Catholic publication, the well-known writer Edward Cline comments on the Family Security Matters website that “It would take a village—or, at least, the ‘global’ one—to subjugate and sack America. That is what is being proposed by Jeffrey Sachs.”
The Cline piece carries the title, “The ‘Sach-ing’ of America,” and he concludes that “In its essentials, Sachs’ plan for the future sacking of America differs little from Islam’s.”
In short, the American way of life is at risk, this time from a Vatican alliance with America’s academic elites and the U.N.
The World Social Forum itself just held another international conference focusing on one aspect of the Sachs agenda: global taxes. The WSF announced the launch of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, including a statement that “Our vision entails progressive redistributive taxation polices that fund the vital public services, end inequality and poverty, address climate change and lead to sustainable development.”
The topic fits nicely with the expected papal encyclical on climate change.
At the Caritas conference, Pope Francis adviser Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga said that critics of the proposed papal document are advocates of an “ideology” that he concludes “is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.”
Critics are concerned because of the pope’s several statements indicating hostility to the system of capitalism and free markets that has brought prosperity to hundreds of millions of people.
This kind of Marxist rhetoric from a top Vatican adviser makes it appear as if the pope has aligned himself with an ideology that, despite the “collapse” of communism, is still very much alive, and which the Black Book of Communism says has already claimed 100 million lives.
The recent cordial Francis visit with Cuban dictator Raul Castro only adds to the growing concern.
“Pope Francis will give us his encyclical letter on ecology,” said Maradiaga, anticipating its impact. “This year is a unique opportunity to take responsibility for the future of our world and the lives of future generations.”
The title of the Caritas conference was, “One Human Family, Caring for Creation.” But it appears that the “caring” part lies in replacing capitalism with structures of “global governance” that involve a massive transfer of political and economic power to international organizations like the United Nations.
After Maradiaga stepped down, he was replaced by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila, Philippines, as the new president of Caritas Internationalis. But Maradiaga continues as the coordinator of a group of nine cardinals that serves as Francis’s Council of Cardinals.
Since we published our article, “Catholic Church Captured by ‘Progressive Forces,’” it is starting to dawn on many in and out of the media that Pope Francis has come down on the side of the “progressive,” and even Marxist, forces in the world today.
Writing at the Blaze.com and commenting on the pope’s friendly meeting with Cuban dictator Raul Castro, Catholic writer Stephen Herreid of the Intercollegiate Review called the pope’s dealings with Castro and other Marxists “a new Catholic scandal” as significant and terrifying as the presence of pedophiles in the church. He wonders how conservative Catholics can continue to pay respect to a pope “intent on making friends with the enemies of religious liberty.”
Francis had a one-hour meeting with Raul Castro on May 10. The day before, Castro had greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Francis will visit Cuba in September prior to his tour of the United States.
The Associated Press reported that Castro commented, after meeting with the pope, that the pontiff “is a Jesuit, and I, in some way, am too.” Castro added, “I always studied at Jesuit schools.” He also promised, “When the pope goes to Cuba in September, I promise to go to all his Masses, and with satisfaction.”
The evidence is getting too big for the major media to ignore: the pope has made common cause with the forces of international Marxism, which are associated with atheism, the suppression of traditional Christianity and the persecution and murder of Christians.
Conservative Catholics and many others are terrified of what is to come. Some fear that the Roman Catholic Church has joined the campaign for a global socialist state that could turn into an anti-Christian tyranny.
Dr. Timothy Ball, author of The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, told me during a recent interview, “I think the Catholic Church is regretting making him the pope. They did it because the previous pope was starting to deal with the problems of pedophilia and corruption in the money in the church. So the powerful Cardinals pushed him [Benedict] aside. It wasn’t a health matter at all. He just realized he couldn’t beat them…He [Francis] is bringing in these socialist ideas. He’s already expressed some of them—about inequities of wealth, redistributing the wealth, which are themes you’ve heard from Obama.”
Benedict had also been a strong opponent of Liberation Theology.
As Herreid put it in his Blaze column, “In a matter of months, Pope Francis has announced a desire to ‘quickly’ beatify a deceased liberation theologist bishop, reconciled with a Sandinista activist priest who once called Ronald Reagan a ‘butcher’ and an ‘international outlaw,’ and even invited the founder of the liberation theology movement, Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak on the need for a ‘poor Church for the Poor’ at an official Vatican event this week.”
In fact, this is the latest example of Francis welcoming advocates of Liberation Theology—a doctrine manufactured by the old KGB to dupe Christians into supporting Marxism—directly into the Vatican.
Francis received Gutierrez, considered the father of Liberation Theology, in September 2013, but in a private audience without photos. Then, on November 22, 2014, at the end of an audience granted to the participants of the National Missionary Congress of Italy, Francis warmly greeted him personally. Gutierrez, a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest, is being welcomed as an official guest at the Vatican to participate in this week’s Caritas Internationalis General Assembly, whose theme is, “One Human Family, Caring for Creation.”
Caritas is a global confederation of 164 Catholic organizations. Its U.S. affiliates are Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services.
Herreid comments, “Neither Pope St. John Paul II nor his trusted friend and successor Benedict XVI were taken in by liberation theology. John Paul fought Communism throughout his pontificate, and Benedict was equally forceful against liberation theology’s interpretation of the traditional ‘preferential option for the poor’ as a preferential option for violent state-mandated wealth-redistribution.”
The Francis-Marxist alliance seems to confirm the predictions of the late Vatican insider Malachi Martin, who wrote penetrating books about the Catholic Church entitled The Jesuits and The Keys of This Blood. He believed that Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the “restructuring” of the old Soviet Union, never gave up on Marxism-Leninism but adopted the viewpoint of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci that a worldwide communist state could only be achieved gradually. It was to be a “revolution by infiltration.” He said, “Liberation Theology was a perfectly faithful exercise of Gramsci’s principles.”
Martin wrote that “The most powerful religious orders of the Roman Church—Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Maryknollers—all committed themselves to Liberation Theology.”
In addition to Gutierrez, one of the speakers at this week’s Vatican conference is Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N.’s Millennium Project, an advocate of a global tax that could impose a cost of $845 billion from the U.S. alone. Sachs is speaking at a panel discussion on “Growing inequalities: a challenge for the one human family.”
Sachs previously appeared at a Vatican conference on “Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility,” which was held from May 2 – 6, 2014. It was held under the authority of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
A joint statement published after the close of that Vatican conference called for Sustainable Development Goals “to guide planetary-scale actions after 2015.”
It said, “To achieve these goals will require global cooperation, technological innovations that are within reach, and supportive economic and social policies at the national and regional levels, such as the taxation and regulation of environmental abuses, limits to the enormous power of transnational corporations and a fair redistribution of wealth. It has become abundantly clear that Humanity’s relationship with Nature needs to be undertaken by cooperative, collective action at all levels—local, regional, and global.”
This week’s Caritas conference includes consideration of a “strategic framework” for the years 2015 to 2019 that quoted Francis as calling on every Christian “to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor…”
In building “a civilization of love,” the document urges the “transforming [of] unjust systems and structures” and desires an outcome in which “Justice is attained with respect to climate change and the use of natural resources…”
Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, explained what all of this means in simple language. “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” she said. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change…It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.”
The pope’s left-wing supporters at the Catholic Climate Covenant are ecstatic over his upcoming encyclical on ecology and climate change and believe it can be the catalyst for this deliberate transformation. Dan Misleh of the Catholic Climate Covenant tells his supporters that his group is creating what he calls “an educational, inspirational video” on how to stop global warming and developing new programs to help Catholics “reduce their carbon footprint.”
Armando Valladares, Castro’s political prisoner for 22 years, said his Catholic faith was strengthened behind bars by hearing young Catholics shouting “Viva Cristo Rey,” for “Long Live Christ the King,” and “down with communism!” as they faced the firing squad. It has been his hope that Cuba would one day be free of communism. But he is far less hopeful now that Pope Francis has taken measures that he says “objectively favor the political and ecclesiastical left in Latin America” and could undermine the “Christian future of the Americas.”
Meanwhile, Marxist writer Richard Greeman has written an extraordinary article, “Catholicism: The New Communism?,” arguing that “progressive forces” have “captured” the Vatican, and that Francis is conducting a “purge” of traditional elements, such as those loyal to anti-communist Pope John Paul II.
Valladares, author of Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag, was the United States Ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission under the Reagan and Bush administrations. He writes in a recent column that Francis was the “most eminent architect and mediator” of the Obama administration deal with Cuba that will “now provide the repressive apparatus of the Cuban regime with rivers of money and favorable publicity.”
He goes on, “We are witnessing one of the greatest examples of media sleights-of-hand in history: From a well-deserved image of aggressor, a regime which for decades spearheaded bloody revolutions in Latin America and Africa and continues to spread its tentacles in the three Americas, has been craftily made to look like a victimized underdog.”
He says the responsibility lies with the unexpected rise of a Francis-Obama “axis” in foreign affairs that benefits Marxist governments throughout Latin America.
Valladares, who received the Citizen’s Presidential Medal from President Ronald Reagan, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in communist Cuba in 1960 for being philosophically and religiously opposed to communism. He was tortured and kept in isolation for refusing to be “re-educated.” He was released after 22 years in prison, in 1982, when international pressure was brought to bear on the regime.
Valladares says it’s not just the Cuba betrayal that concerns him. He notes that Francis overturned the suspension of Nicaraguan priest Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, a former communist Sandinista foreign minister and a leading pro-Castro figure in liberation theology.
Despite his credentials as a political prisoner turned human rights activist and powerful voice for freedom, his column on the Obama-Francis “axis” has received very little attention. An associate says it seems “too politically incorrect,” an apparent reference to the fact that Francis is a global media star for identifying with the poor, and that liberals and conservatives alike are reluctant to criticize him.
Valladares, however, says the pope has gone far beyond taking up the cause of poor people. His column notes that Francis personally attended something called the World Meeting of Popular Movements last October in Rome. “It gathered 100 revolutionary world leaders, including well-known Latin American professional agitators,” Valladares points out. “The meeting turned out to be a kind of marketing ‘beatification’ of these Marxist-inspired revolutionary figures.”
One of the participants in the Vatican event was Evo Morales, the Marxist President of Bolivia who dedicated his election victory last year to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the late Venezuelan Marxist ruler, Hugo Chávez.
The Vatican’s own description of the meeting referred to changing “an economy of exclusion” and “an idolatrous system of money.” The statement went on, “Together we want to discuss the structural causes of so much inequality (inequidad) which robs us of work (labor), housing (domus) and land (terra), which generates violence and destroys nature. We also want to face the challenge Francis himself sets puts [sic] to us with courage and intelligence: to seek radical proposals to resolve the problems of the poor.”
Valladares isn’t the only one to notice the “radical” or leftward drift of the papacy. Greeman’s article wondering if Catholicism is the “new communism” appears in New Politics, a socialist magazine “committed to the advancement of the peace and anti-intervention movements” and which “stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism…”
New Politics has strong links to the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that backed Barack Obama’s political career from the start. Its “sponsors” include Noam Chomsky, Frances Fox Piven, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West and the late communist historian Howard Zinn.
Greeman notes that the world’s Catholic Bishops have “explicitly pointed to capitalism as the basic cause of impending global catastrophe,” in the form of climate change, and have “called for a new economic order.” He was referring to a group of Catholic Bishops who met at the U.N. climate talks last December and blamed “the dominant global economic system, which is a human creation,” for global warming. They argued for “a new financial and economic order” and the phasing out of the use of fossil fuels.
Greeman says the Bishops’ attack on capitalism was generally ignored, even on the left, and he understands why. There have been so many “rapid changes” coming out of Rome “since the ascension to the Throne of Saint Peter” by Pope Francis that it is hard to keep up with them, he says.
Francis will issue a Vatican document, known as an encyclical, on climate change in June or July.
Greeman writes that these “radically anti-capitalist Catholic positions” have got him wondering whether Catholicism is “the new Communism,” Rome “the new Moscow,” and the church “the new Comintern.” The term “Comintern” refers to the Communist International, an association of national communist parties started by Lenin.
Growing up as a “red diaper baby” during the Cold War, Greeman writes, Catholicism was “synonymous with militant anti-Communism.” But changes that started coming years ago in the church have been accelerating under Francis, he writes. He attributes some of this “change” to Francis, who is from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a Jesuit, which is a “progressive” religious order whose “solid organization and discipline” and “attempts to take over the Church” go back centuries.
Greeman refers to the Catholic or “universal” Church as “the only actually existing organized world-party,” whose “vast wealth and influence are now in Francis’ hands.” He writes about “the capture” of the church by “progressive forces,” a development which opens up “huge possibilities for human liberation and perhaps a chance for the planet to avoid climate catastrophe.” He believes Francis “and his allies” are now conducting a “purge of the apparatus” in the Vatican.
Writing in Links, an international socialist journal, Canadian activist Judith Marshall discusses meeting the pope during the World Meeting of Popular Movements and witnessing his presentation to the group. “Pope Francis’ forthright statements on the social ministry of the church hearken back to the 1960s and 1970s when liberation theology was such a dynamic force in promoting struggles for social justice, particularly in Latin America,” she wrote. “The symbolism of a World Meeting of Popular Movements which brought a multitude of the poor right into [the] heart of the Vatican has not been lost on those looking for a resurgence of liberation theology.”
She also insisted that Francis “has arguably made the Papacy the most radical and consistent voice in pointing to the profanity of global inequality and exclusion. He has also repeatedly named the inordinate power of multinational corporations and finance capital as key factors in reproducing global poverty and destruction of the planet.”
She says Francis met with several Marxist activists from Latin America and even met privately with President Morales of Bolivia who “stressed how Mother Earth had become ill from capitalism,” and that “under the prevailing global economy, the planet would actually do better without humans—but humans need the planet.”
In a previous meeting Morales told the pope, “For me, you are brother Francis.” The pope responded, “As it should be, as it should be.”
A Special Report from the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism
With the war on Islamic terrorism being portrayed as a righteous cause in “American Sniper,” the Clint Eastwood film breaking box office records, a book which documents the days when Hollywood was a mouthpiece for communist propaganda might seem out of date. But Allan H. Ryskind’s book, Hollywood Traitors, is a reminder that Hollywood can’t always be counted on to take America’s side in a war, even a World War when the United States faced dictators by the names of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
The Ryskind book, published by Regnery, documents how the much-maligned House Committee on Un-American Activities, known as HUAC, uncovered dramatic communist infiltration of Hollywood and forced the studios to clean house.
Ryskind calls HUAC’s investigation of Hollywood in 1947 and 1950 “one of the most effective, albeit controversial, probes ever carried out by any committee of Congress.” He adds, “HUAC had revealed that Hollywood was packed with Communists and fellow travelers, that the guilds and the unions had been heavily penetrated, and that wartime films, at least, had been saturated with Stalinist propaganda. Red writers were an elite and powerful group in Hollywood—many of them working for major studios.”
He writes that, “HUAC, though bruised by elite opinion, had won the support of the American people and a victory over Hollywood Communists, fellow travelers, and the important liberals who supported them.” Members of Congress involved in HUAC did their jobs, in the face of opposition from “the East coast establishment newspapers” like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The book reminds us that the Hollywood agents of Stalin had also been “Allies of Hitler,” a threat symbolized on the book cover by a Hollywood director’s chair featuring a Nazi swastika. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939-1941 had paved the way for World War II.
As a result of the purging of communists from Hollywood, the so-called “blacklist,” we entered a time, from about 1947 to 1960, when the communists lost control of the major Hollywood unions and “the studios were actually creating anti-Communist pictures,” Ryskind writes. It was a remarkable turnaround.
But while Hollywood did turn anti-communist, at least for a while, the communists scored their own ultimate victory, succeeding in forcing Congress to abolish HUAC. The committee, which had been renamed as the House Internal Security Committee, was the target of what HUAC called the Communist Party’s “Cold War against congressional investigation of subversion.”
For many years, there was a comparable body in the Senate, which went by different names but tackled such matters as “Castro’s Network in the United States,” a 1963 investigation into the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” that we later learned included JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
To those insisting it was somehow inappropriate to ask Hollywood figures about their “political beliefs,” Ryskind counters that “Few questions could have been more important for a congressional committee to ask than whether American citizens were actually serving as agents of a hostile foreign government.” He said HUAC was engaging in hearings designed to accurately disclose membership in the Communist Party, “a subversive organization controlled by an enemy nation and designed to turn America into a Communist country…”
In its battle against communism, HUAC had subpoena power and was not afraid to use it. HUAC also issued contempt citations against those who refused to testify completely and truthfully. All of the members of the so-called “Hollywood Ten,” who refused to testify about their involvement in the Communist Party, eventually went to prison.
Ryskind cites estimates that over 200 Hollywood Communists were named in this process. His book provides the Communist Party card numbers of the Hollywood Ten as well as the names of other “well-known radicals,” many of them overt Communists, who were active in the movie industry.
Bring Back HUAC?
Today, with dozens of leading conservatives now clamoring for congressional action to “Stop the Fundamental Transformation of America,” the Ryskind book may add to the impetus for Congress to reestablish a HUAC-style panel. The George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) acted frightened and alarmed in 2010 when Rep. Steve King (R-IA) expressed agreement with my suggestion at that time that re-establishment of such a committee would be a good idea. “I think that is a good process and I would support it,” he said.
The oath of office for members of Congress requires that they support and defend the Constitution of the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” HUAC is a model for how such a problem can be identified and confronted.
Donald I. Sweany, Jr., a research analyst for the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its successor, the House Committee on Internal Security, sees the need for such a committee. He has issued this statement:
“The re-creation of the House Committee on Internal Security will provide the Congress of the United States, Executive Branch agencies and the public with essential and actionable information concerning the dangerous and sovereignty-threatening subversive activities currently plaguing America. This subversion emulates from a host of old and new entities of Marxist/Communist revolutionary organizations and allied militant and radical groups, some of which have foreign connections. A new mandated House Committee on Internal Security is of great importance because it would once again recommend to Congress remedial legislative action to crack down on any un-American forces whose goals are to weaken and destroy the freedoms which America enjoys under the Constitution. In addition, this legislative process will provide public exposure of such subversives.”
Ryskind’s father, Marx Brothers screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, testified before HUAC about communist penetration of Hollywood that he had learned about first-hand through his involvement with the Screen Writers Guild. Morrie Ryskind had attended the Columbia School of Journalism in New York and written for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper World. But he underwent a political transformation, from an anti-war socialist who became disillusioned with FDR to a Republican determined to stop the communist advance. He wrote for conservative publications such as Human Events and National Review, which he helped William F. Buckley Jr. launch.
Morrie Ryskind helped found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to counteract the work of the communists and educate the American people about what was at stake. The Ryskind book also notes how the American Legion and various Catholic organizations were focusing attention on Hollywood’s far-left elements and making the public aware of this problem.
The book includes Allan Ryskind’s memories of his Hollywood upbringing, including meeting famous people such as top Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow. He spent decades as editor of Human Events, which was President Ronald Reagan’s favorite paper. It also became known for its aggressive reporting on the communist and socialist threats. Reagan so appreciated the weekly paper that he had arranged for copies to be sent to him personally at the White House residence.
Ryskind, who still serves as Human Events editor-at-large, documents the development of Reagan’s anti-communism in Hollywood Traitors. Reagan began his acting career as a liberal who got involved in Communist-front activities, later realizing that the “nice-sounding” groups he was supporting were secretly controlled by members of the Communist Party. He carried this understanding and analysis of the communist threat into his presidency and talked openly about the growing Marxist influence in Congress as he battled with congressional liberals and tried to stop the Soviet advance in Latin America.
In fact, as President, he told journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave in a 1987 interview that “I’ve been a student of the communist movement for a long time, having been a victim of it some years ago in Hollywood.” He said that he regarded some two dozen Marxists in Congress as “a problem we have to face.”
The problem is far worse today. Analyst Trevor Loudon now counts the number of Marxists in Congress at more than 60, a fact that would seem to make it more of a controversy to re-establish HUAC, but even more of a reason to do so. All it would take is more courageous members like Rep. King, backed by the House Leadership. Such a committee would be able to seriously analyze an area that remains off-limits to the House Homeland Security Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, and the Select Committee on Benghazi—subversive infiltration of the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the White House and Congress.
One key to HUAC’s success was finding those in Hollywood, including in the unions, willing to name names and identify the subversives. Reagan testified before HUAC and took a leadership role in defeating communist influence in the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), later becoming the union’s president. Labor leader Roy Brewer was another effective anti-communist in Hollywood highlighted in Ryskind’s book.
Although the 506-page book is based on HUAC hearings, Ryskind conducted independent research that adds to his case against the Hollywood traitors. For example, he combed through the historical papers of one major Hollywood-Ten figure, the Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who refused to cooperate with HUAC and expose his comrades. Ryskind reports on an unpublished script Trumbo wrote that treated the invasion of South Korea as a “fight for independence” for the communist north.
Trumbo wrote many excellent film scripts, including Roman Holiday, but was “a hard-core Party member, a fervent supporter of Stalinist Russia and Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, and an apologist for Nazi Germany until Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet union,” Ryskind notes. “Yet to this day he is regarded as a hero in Hollywood.”
Almost on cue, as Ryskind’s book was being published, it was reported that Hollywood is planning a new film which glorifies Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad” fame as the screenwriter. The battle over communist influence is slated to return for another act.
Love for Cuban Communism
The book’s chapter, “Hollywood Today,” tries to bring the communism problem up to date by examining Hollywood’s love affair with the longtime Stalinist ruler of Cuba, Fidel Castro. He writes that much of Hollywood “is still lured by the romance of Marxism, and its films are still filled with heavy doses of anti-American propaganda.”
I recently asked Fontova why a Stalinist like Castro gets fawning treatment, while the Stalinist North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, is ridiculed in the movie The Interview. “My best guess is that it’s a generational thing, nostalgia mostly,” he told this writer. The Castros and Che Guevara, he said, are perceived as “the first hippies” or beatniks.
Indeed, The Longest Romance quotes The New York Times reporter who helped bring Castro to power, Herbert Matthews, as saying, “Castro’s is a revolution of youth.” Fontova adds, “The notion of Castro’s Cuba as a stiflingly Stalinist nation never quite caught on among the enlightened. Instead the island often inspires hazy visions of a vast commune, rock-fest or Occupy encampment, studded with free health care clinics and with [the hippie icon] Wavy Gravy handing out love-beads at the entrance.”
Perhaps the pro-Castro influence in Hollywood is something that a new HUAC might want to tackle.
Another issue worth investigating is how Hollywood has also come under the influence of radical Islam. For example, the 2002 film, “The Sum of All Fears,” which was the movie version of the Tom Clancy book of the same name, replaced the Arab terrorist villains with neo-Nazis so as not to offend the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate. The Fox network responded to complaints about its popular series “24” depicting Muslims in America secretly plotting terrorism by running public service announcements from CAIR portraying American Muslims as moderate and peaceful.
It bears repeating that Senator McCarthy never had anything to do with the House committee or its investigation of Hollywood.
This book is a valuable contribution to understanding a dangerous time in American history when America’s elected representatives and the people themselves rallied to the defense of their homeland against these foreign and domestic enemies.
While it is worth noting that the veteran Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood has bypassed the censors at CAIR with “American Sniper,” this kind of film is the exception and not the rule. The film portrays the great sacrifices being made by U.S. military personnel in the Middle East as they combat an enemy that is depicted as savage and barbaric. It is based on the life of Chris Kyle, an Iraq War veteran and Navy SEAL who joined the Armed Forces to defend his country from Islamic terrorism.
Zaid Jilani, a “progressive” writer who left the Center for American Progress after being charged with anti-Semitism, has emerged as one of the film’s most vocal critics. A regular on the Kremlin channel Russia Today (RT) and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Al Jazeera, he insists the film about the “remorseless” sharpshooter has sparked “anti-Muslim bigotry,” and he complains about it becoming “a rallying point for the political right.”
However, he admits that Eastwood’s skill as a filmmaker could result in a “Best Picture” award for “American Sniper” and “Best Actor in a Leading Role” award for Bradley Cooper, who plays Kyle. He just can’t bring himself to admit that the pro-military and anti-terrorist message is also a major factor in its success. The Academy Awards take place on February 22.
Indeed, this is the fear from the modern-day “progressives”—that Hollywood will rediscover the box office appeal of American patriotism.
But according to the annual Reuters/Ipsos Oscars poll, if ordinary Americans voted for the Academy Awards, “American Sniper” would be the Best Picture winner. Those who wonder why we don’t get more pro-military and pro-American movies out of Hollywood should read Ryskind’s new book.
No Florida Congress member can take more credit in laying the groundwork for President Barack Obama’s “normalizing” of diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba than Tampa area Democratic Party Representative, Kathy Castor.
Despite a very strong Cuban-exile, anti-Castro lobby in her home state, Rep. Castor has been relentless in her quest to make life easier for the terrorist-sponsoring, revolution exporting Castro brothers.
Using commercial opportunities and trade as bait, Rep. Castor has helped build a powerful lobby in her own state, which has set the stage for President Obama’s unilateral decision.
Rep. Castor is not a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus or similar pro-communist alliances.
She emphasizes commercial advantage over ideology in her campaign. Castor will also criticize Cuba’s abominable human rights record when convenient.
However, I believe she is just as ideologically committed to the Castro cause as is President Obama himself.
Interestingly, a report to the Communist Party USA was supportive of several Democratic candidates in the 2004 election cycle, including “Barak” Obama and Kathy Castor’s mother, Betty Castor, in her race for the US Senate from Florida:
It would be helpful for each district to single out House seats that can be swung from Republican to Democrat to develop our list of key races, which includes progressive Frank Barbaro in New York and Cynthia McKinney in Georgia.
A number of exciting candidates are emerging in the Senate, in the first place Barak Obama in Illinois, and also several progressive women including Betty Castor seeking to retain retiring Bob Graham’s seat as Democrat…
Incidentally, Betty Castor was appointed by President Obama in September of 2011, to the J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board, which oversees the worldwide Fulbright Program. On November 13, 2014, the Board elected her as Chair to begin a one-year term on January 1, 2015.
If the Communist Party liked Betty Castor, they should just love her daughter.
In April 2013, the Center for International Policy partnered with the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation to host “Rapprochement With Cuba: Good for Tampa, Good for Florida, Good for America.” Rep. Castor provided the opening remarks at the Friday evening cocktail event in Tampa, FL and welcomed the panelists. The following day, the panelists discussed the Obama Administration’s Cuba policy, the State Department’s list of terrorist states, the Cuban-American vote, the US Congress’ Cuba policy, doing business in Cuba, deep water oil drilling in Cuba’s territorial waters and travel to Cuba at the Historic Cuban Club.
The highlight of the evening was hearing Representative Kathy Castor (D-FL) express her specific interest in normalizing relations with Cuba. According to Representative Castor, “Congress needs to change its policy towards Cuba, but Congress doesn’t have to act for the U.S. to begin to engage.”
“I am confident that change is on the horizon,”Castor began. “Think about what can happen at the Port of Tampa, ports all across the Southeast. All across America. These are values that we share as Americans — trade, travel and the ability to have a productive dialogue. There’s no reason any longer that it should not move forward.”
Among those cheering Castor that evening was panelist and The Nation magazine contributor, Peter Kornbluh, of the DC-based National Security Archive (another Institute for Policy Studies spin-off). He called Castor a “trailblazer for a new, modern, post-Cold War policy towards Cuba,” and said that the four-term congresswoman can be the catalyst to redefine the Florida-Cuba relationship, which until now has generally been controlled “by Castro-hating exiles who live in Miami.”
Kornbluh has a history of cheerleading for communism.
When a $14 million aid package for the anti-communist Nicaraguan “Contras” came up in the spring of 1985, Congress initially voted it down. Just forty-eight hours before the vote, Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) traveled to Nicaragua. Their “celebrated meetings with the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista junta leaders, which captured the headlines and helped sway Congress, were arranged by Peter Kornbluh, then a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Within a week, the Sandinista president, Daniel Ortega, flew to Moscow and secured $200 million in Soviet aid.” “Shocked and embarrassed, Congress reversed gears” and granted $27 million in aid to the “Contras.”
The Institute for Policy Studies’ 33rd Annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards were granted, Thursday, October 15, 2009. One of those the Award was named for was Cuban intelligence officer and Institute for Policy Studies staffer Orlando Letelier, killed by a Chilean government ordered car bomb in Washington, DC, September 21, 1976. Kornbluh was on the Award selection panel.
Rep. Kathy Castor also attended the Center for Democracy in the Americas’ 7th Anniversary Event, July 11, 2013.
Kathy Castor, left
Kathy Castor traveled to Cuba in early April of 2013, with members of her staff and representatives of the Center for Democracy in the Americas.
As she told the May 19, Tampa Bay Times on her return:
Cuba is changing, however, as I learned on my recent fact-finding visit. Cuba has embarked on meaningful economic reforms, which deserve encouragement by the United States, not continued isolation. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have a window of opportunity to engage and encourage reform in Cuba and should act now…
Reforming Cuba policy will improve our diplomatic standing in the region and, at a critical moment, strengthen the credibility of our policy against terrorism. The Summit of the Americas concluded in 2012 with a warning from our allies that if Cuba is not allowed to attend the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama, they will boycott this important regional conference. The Obama administration should use the next two years to put U.S.-Cuban relations on a constructive path.
Castor said Fidel Castro is no longer in power and described his brother, President Raul Castro, as “a much more practical ruler.”
“They are still a hard-core communist nation, but they are embarking on market reforms in their economy that deserve encouragement,” said Castor.
Castor said she plans to ask President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry “to open talks to lead to greater trade and travel opportunities.”
In December of 2013, the Center for Democracy in the Americas convened “Cubans in the New Economy: Their Reflections and the U.S. Response,” C.D.A. co-hosted at George Washington University and featured Cuban guests, plus Alex Lee, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Rep. Kathy Castor and several other mainly leftist “experts.”
The Center for Democracy in the Americas connection is problematic from another angle.
Until recent times, the Center listed as one of its key Advisory Board members as the infamous Julia Sweig.
Also listed among “former fellows, project co-ordinators and staff” of the Institute for Policy Studies, Julia E. Sweig is the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In October of 2008, in Miami, Christopher S. Simmons, one of America’s foremost authorities on Cuban Intelligence, a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army and a career counterintelligence officer, identified several Cuban spies and their operations in the US. He later added several other names.
Speaking of Sweig, Simmons noted:
She may be one of two very unique categories of agents – an Agent of Influence or a “Persona de Confianza,” – another DI intelligence category. She has directed numerous Council-sponsored Task Forces on Latin America, currently serves on the Board of Directors for Foreign Affairs en Español; consultant on Latin American affairs, Congressional Program, The Aspen Institute (1999-present); Project Director, Center for Preventive Action Commission, Andes 2020: A New Strategy for the Challenges of Colombia and the Region (2004); Director, Independent Task Force, U.S.-Cuban Relations in the 21st Century, A Follow-On Chairman’s Report (2001). Wrote OPED pieces re Elian scenario and “Cuban terrorists” in the U.S.
In 2002, Sweig published her book, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground. Among those she thanks in her acknowledgements are six Cuban Intelligence Officers: Jose Antonmio Arbesu, Ramon Sanchez Parodi, Fernando Garcia Bielsa, Hugo Yedra, Jose Gomez Abad and Josefina Vidal. Not surprisingly, Sweig does not acknowledge that the six are career Intelligence Officers. The six Cuban spies she thanks are:
Ramon Sanchez Parodi Montoto: Became the first Chief of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, DC on September 1, 1977, when the US and Cuba re-established diplomatic missions. This career spy served in Washington until 1989… Experts remain undecided as to whether he is DGI or from the infamous America Department (DA). In testimony before the US Senate, Dr. Daniel James charged Sanchez-Parodi with targeting the Congressional Black Caucus to foment opposition to existing US policies toward Cuba.
Jose Antonio Arbesu Fraga: Director of the America Area (formerly the DA) of the International Department of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC/ID). Following the 1992 resignation of legendary Cuban Intelligence officer Manuel Pineiro, Jose Antonio Arbesu Fraga, one of the DA’s Vice Directors, was selected as his replacement. In May 2004, Mexico forbade future visits by Cuban officials Arbesú and Pedro Miguel Lobaina-Jimenez de Castro.
Fernando Miguel Garcia Bielsa: As a 1st Secretary at the Cuban Interests Section, he was one 14 spy-diplomats expelled in May 2003. Earlier this year, Garcia Bielsa served as the Political Counselor in Santiago. Normally, Garcia’s extensive DA service, long-term ties to US terrorist groups (i.e., Puerto Rican extremists) and past service in the US would make his Santiago posting an anomaly. However, Santiago is likely a relatively benign operational area for a “burned” spy to continue to work with leftists groups and American agents.
Josefina de la C. Vidal Ferreiro: First Secretary at the Cuban Interests Section. One of 14 expelled in May 2003.
Hugo Ernesto Yedra Diaz: Yedra attracted considerable attention on November 22, 1977 when his briefcase exploded in the lobby of an Upper East Side apartment building. Yedra had set the case down to call for an elevator and apparently failed to activate the safety device on the case’s self-destruct device. Yedra lived in the building, but gathered his documents and fled the scene before police could arrive to investigate.
Jose Gomez Abad: A central figure in an attempted terrorist effort known as the “Black Friday Attack” on November 17, 1962, just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The FBI detained three Cuban Diplomats from its UN Mission and seized a cache of explosive and incendiary devices. Washington detained the Cubans on espionage-related charges and stockpiling munitions for use against US installations. Cuba’s targets included the Statue of Liberty; retail giants Macy’s, Gimbels and Bloomingdale’s; the main bus terminal on 42nd Street; Manhattan’s busiest subway stations – including Grand Central Station and several oil refineries along the New Jersey riverbank. Twelve detonators, several incendiary devices, grenades and 500 kilos of TNT were to be used on Black Friday – the busiest shopping day in the US.
Many of us forget the murderous intent shown by Castro’s agents in the United States.
Rep. Castor is knowingly, or unknowingly, serving the interests of an enemy nation with a long history of spying, subversion and aiding and planning terrorist attacks on US soil.
She has also allied herself with some of America’s worst homegrown subversives.
Should Kathy Castor and her associates be investigated by the incoming Republican controlled Congress?
For more information on Rep. Castor and more than 70 other US representatives and Senators, read Trevor Loudon’s 2015-2017 Edition of “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the US Congress.”
The book is timed for release on April 11, 2015, but you may order your personally signed copy, or copies here:
“Trevor Loudon does the job that few in the media ever attempt” – Glenn Beck
New Zealander Trevor Loudon has addressed more than 400 events, in the United States of America.
He is an internationally known blogger and researcher, noted among other things for exposing the communist background of Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones, which led to his eventual resignation from his White House position. Loudon was also the first to publicize Barack Obama’s ties to Hawaiian Communist Party member, Frank Marshall Davis.
Loudon’s research has been cited by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, in many articles, blog posts and in books by well known authors Paul Kengor, Aaron Klein and Jerome Corsi. He has given hundreds of radio interviews and addressed audiences in more than 40 states in several tours of the United States.
The Protests were Organized for one Specific Purpose – Dead Cops
In December 2012, a respected Egyptian news magazine named six Obama administration officials who were in fact agents of the international terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. They claimed that these individuals had helped change the White House “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
One of these alleged agents was Imam Mohamed Magid, a Koranic scholar from Sudan. In the Obama administration, Magid was appointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violence and Extremism working group in 2011. He is on the FBI’s Sikh, Muslim, and Arab advisory board (yes, we have one of those). He has trained and advised personnel affiliated with the FBI and other federal agencies.
Under Obama’s dictates since he entered the Oval Office, the United States government decided to publicly announce a softer approach to countering Islamic terrorism and the ideology behind jihad (i.e., war in the name of Islam). Imam Mohamed Magid has been a centerpiece in Obama’s show of tolerance (of violence) and diversity (of means of death), so much so that he and his organization have been “cited … as the primary means of outreach to the American Muslim community.”
It’s now known that Magid has a remarkable connection to the murderer of two NYPD officers this December.
***
Unlike his approach toward American Muslims, who apparently (at least based on policy since 2009) need the White House to reassure them that they are not “violent extremists,” Barack Hussein Obama’s attitude toward police officers has been hostile from the beginning. Multiple instances mar the six year old administration’s relationship with law enforcement.
The anti-police stance of the administration has been toxically mixed with anti-gun propaganda, and the blatant fanning of racial tensions that have resulted in violence, murder, and even city-wide chaos.
The first example came in July 2009, when Harvard Professor Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct by the Cambridge Police department. Sgt. James Crowley saw Gates trying to break into a home, and, not realizing it was actually his own home, arrested Gates. The charges were later dropped by the police, but not before Obama said on national television that the police “acted stupidly,” and further insinuated that the arrest was racially motivated. To make everyone feel better, Obama later held a “beer summit” at the White House, hosting Gates and Crowley in what was presented as some great healing moment. (No word on whether pork or all beef hot dogs were served.)
In 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder, while noting that the number of officers killed in the line of duty jumped 13% that year, blamed the increase on illegal gun ownership. In 2013, Holder went on the record saying that he had to tell his son how to protect himself from the police, because, you guessed it, he’s black. Holder said this talk was family tradition.
For his part, Obama came out in support of the 2011 anti-cop and anarchist movement, Occupy Wall Street, who were not only occupying Wall Street, but terrorizing downtown Manhattan.
Then came the February 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida. Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, as he was being violently assaulted and threatened with death while on neighborhood patrol. In what has become a national tradition, Al Sharpton and Eric Holder descended to prey upon the citizens of a small community, calling for “justice.”
In fact, mob justice is what they were looking for.
The next stop for the Obama, Holder, and Sharpton anti-police racial mob circus was Ferguson, Missouri, following the death of Michael Brown by the gun of a police officer who he was attacking and threatening. The case is familiar and fresh enough in everyone’s minds not have to rehash in any detail. Once again, Obama and the administration issued thinly veiled attacks on the police and insinuated that the officers and the department were racially motivated haters.
The caustic and raw social tumult that ensued led to widespread looting, riots, arson (even by allegedly “peaceful” protestors), and even the murder of a friend one of the trial witnesses.
Obama’s, Holder’s, and Sharpton’s carnival of hate then went prime time, this time to the Big Apple. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And, with a little help from the all-too-willing Mayor Bill DeBlasio, in the Staten Island death of Eric Garner, which was caused not by bullets but by a lung condition, the carnival got what they were looking for all along: the blood of police officers.
On December 20, 2014, five days before Christmas, Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were assassinated by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. After weeks of anti-police protests, which explicitly shouted for “dead cops,” Brinsley had bragged to pedestrians just prior to the shooting that he was going to satiate the protestors with their pound of flesh.
***
At this time, you may be asking what Mohamed Magid, the alleged Muslim Brotherhood agent, has to do with the assassination of two NYPD officers. This will be clear to you soon enough. But first it is necessary to understand that the supposedly grassroots protests, in Ferguson and in New York, were anything but organic.
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton at NoisyRoom.net has documented the nefarious players behind the protests, and has an incredible list of organizations involved in the protests. One of the most prominent organizing groups is ANSWER, which stands for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. ANSWER is often found alongside Occupy Wall Street. A little digging into ANSWER’s coalition partners and speakers reveal their roots; groups such as the Muslim Students Association, Free Palestinian Alliance, National Council of Arab Americans, the Nicaragua Network, and Korea Truth Commission (you got me ?).
Furthermore, ANSWER is described by DiscoverTheNetworks as “a principal player in all anti-war and pro-Palestinian demonstrations… ANSWER was formed a few days after 9/11 as a ‘new anti-racism, anti-war, peace and justice’ group and led its first protest just weeks later against the impending US-led attack on Afghanistan.”
To be blunt about it, ANSWER is a pro-jihad front organization that was fully behind Hamas in this summer’s Gaza war. Hamas, it’s noted, is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood – the same Muslim Brotherhood that the Egyptian magazine claimed Mohamed Magid was a member of.
***
Isn’t it odd that a Muslim Brotherhood front group would lead protests in New York City over the accidental death of a black man in the course of an arrest? Last time I was there, Staten Island wasn’t a center of Israeli-Palestinian debate, and there are no public pictures of Eric Garner smoking hookah or riding camels in Giza. On the contrary, Garner was dealing single cigarettes, and tobacco is decisively haram (forbidden) according to Islamic sharia law.
Puzzling, perhaps, but the Facebook page of Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley Muhammad ties the story’s loose ends together. According to his own biography on Facebook, Brinsely-Muhammad “Worked at: Islamic Society of North America.” The Islamic Society of North America, aka ISNA, is headquartered in Plainfield, Indiana. Hmm.
Who is the President of ISNA, where the cop killer said he worked? That would be Imam Mohamed Magid, Obama’s advisor to DHS and the National Security Council.
Obama himself addressed ISNA’s annual convention in 2013. You can read about one of ISNA’s greatest influences, Pakistani radical Abul A’la Maududi, here.
Here are a few other facts to consider when contemplating that the Obama and Holder-inspired cop killer was, according to himself, employed at the organization of one of Obama’s most trusted security advisors, the Islamic Society of North America.
ISNA President and Obama advisor Imam Mohamed Magid was a lecturer at Howard University, teaching courses on the Koran.
The Trayvon Martin case only caught on after it was plucked from relative obscurity from a student at Howard University. This student, Kevin Cunningham, began a petition on the website change.org. Said Cunningham, a lawyer, “that’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer.”
Cop killer Brinsley-Muhammad, who additionally may have attended a Brooklyn mosque associated with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, martyred himself by suicide in a subway station before being apprehended by police. He’s no longer with us to answer any questions.
In light of Obama’s recent embrace of Communist Cuba, it is worth noting that one of Castro’s last acts as a revolutionary leader was to order the targeted killing of Cuba’s police officers. Why? Police keep law and order on the streets, and because they’re uniformed, they’re easy targets for revolutionaries who thrive off anarchy.
Obama’s six yearlong anti-cop jihad has serious consequences. In 2014, there was an increase of 56% in police killed by guns – 50 officers, compared to 32 in 2013. Since the assassinations in New York, many infractions are going unpunished, as police are reluctant to engage with the community, fearing targeting by assassins and mobs. This is a very tenuous and delicate situation.
It might be worth mentioning, to the next person you bump into who still has a functioning brain, that Obama’s trusted advisor, Imam Mohamed Magid, had the NYPD cop killer as an employee of his nationwide Islamic organization. This, according to his own Facebook bio.
The circumstantial evidence presented above points to a deliberateplan by the administration and the Muslim Brotherhood to stoke violence that led to cop killings. These are revolutionary tactics, creating conditions that lead to chaos, anarchy, and eventually the total dissolution of societal trust. After that occurs, people beg for order, in whatever form it offers itself.
Is 2015 the year of the American Spring? In the New Year, several detailed reports will be published that point to deliberate, witting, and eager cooperation between the Obama administration and the Muslim Brotherhood aimed at precisely this end.
POLITICO has run a piece citing various claims that President Obama is a practicing Christian of some sort. Nice try. But the article is entirely unconvincing.
Obama isn’t prevented from going to a Christian church and doesn’t cite security reasons for not attending. Instead, he “worries that his presence detracts from other worshippers’ experience,” the publication said. We are told he reads scripture and prays in private.
In 2008, when he first ran for president, the Obama campaign insisted he was a “committed Christian.” Glenn Greenwald, who later became NSA defector Edward Snowden’s mouthpiece, found Obama’s claim so alarming that he wrote an article for Salon about it. Greenwald, whose anti-American outlook includes Muslim sympathies, was apparently deeply concerned that Obama could, in fact, be a committed Christian.
We now understand that Obama’s Christian claim was as phony as his promise, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
POLITICO reports that Obama has “attended Sunday services only occasionally, visiting a patchwork of congregations 19 times in all since taking office, according to a POLITICO analysis of White House pool reports.” Further down in the story we learn that “In all, Obama has gone to services on about 6 percent of the Sundays of his presidency and just once on Christmas Day, in 2011, which also happened to be a Sunday.”
Another insight into Obama’s religiosity is when he tries to quote from the Bible or make religious references. He once compared Mary and Joseph to illegal aliens. Even The Washington Post admitted that was false. On another occasion, he said, “The good book says, don’t throw stones in glass houses.” But the Bible has no such quote.
It appears that this man of deep faith, as described by POLITICO, doesn’t even read the “good book” he likes to quote from. So what has he been doing in those private prayer and Bible study sessions?
But the story goes beyond mere hypocrisy.
When questions emerged about Obama’s religious affiliation, in view of his Muslim background, his aides flatly asserted that he was a “practicing Christian” and was “baptized” in the Trinity United Church of Christ. We examined that claim and found it wanting. As we noted at the time, “People see him [Obama] playing golf on Sunday; they don’t see him going to church.”
Obama’s claim to being baptized in the Christian faith is found in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006. Obama wrote on page 208, “I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.” We argued that what Obama described sounds like a religious experience, but not what Christians regard as baptism.
Obama’s pastor for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, gave a speech in which he praised Marxism and faulted the media for claiming that communism and Christianity were somehow opposed to one another.
It also turns out that Wright’s church accepted Muslims as members. Wright told author Edward Klein that he “made it comfortable” for Obama to accept Christianity “without having to renounce his Islamic background.”
Obama is now on vacation in Hawaii, and the White House is releasing details about his daily activities. “Like most Americans,” the White House proclaims, “President Obama is a creature of habit.” But church or Bible study doesn’t appear to be on his list of priorities. His activities are said to include:
Daily morning workout at the Semper Fit Center at MCBH [Marine Corps Base Hawaii]
Golf at the Kaneohe Klipper golf course
Golf at the Mid-Pacific Country Club
Golf at the Ko’olau Golf Club
Golf at the Royal Hawaiian Golf Club
Dinner at Alan Wong’s Restaurant
Dinner at Nobu Waikiki
Dinner at Morimoto Waikiki
Visit Punchbowl Cemetery
Snorkeling at Hanauma Bay
Christmas Day: Visit service members at Anderson Hall
New Year’s Eve: Traditional talent show at home
Bowling at K-Bay Lanes at MCBH
Basketball at MCBH
Swim at Pyramid Rock Beach
Swim at Bellows Beach
Shave Ice at Island Snow in Kailua
Hike the Maunawili Falls trail
One writer, Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a self-described heathen, didn’t like the POLITICO story for another reason. He doesn’t even like the topic of Obama’s religiosity being discussed. “It doesn’t matter if Obama goes to church or not,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter if he is even a Christian, or, as conservatives often charge, a Muslim. In a word, it is nobody’s concern but that of Barack Obama himself.”
Of course, if Obama claims to be a Christian, and the evidence suggests otherwise, it is a significant story. That’s because his alleged Christianity was a factor in his 2008 and 2012 victories.
In 2008, for example, Catholics voted for Obama by a margin of 54-45. In 2012, the margin was 50-48.
Now, with his recognition and bailout of the Castro regime, he can count on Pope Francis being in his corner. It’s quite an achievement for a politician without a church.
I recently asked John A. Stormer, author of the 1964 bestseller, None Dare Call It Treason, if he thought President Barack Obama was a Marxist. “He’s two things,” Stormer told me. “Is he a Marxist or is he a Muslim? He is really involved in both of these things. He’s anti-American.”
Obama’s policies have benefited enemies of the U.S. across the spectrum, from Muslim to Marxist. All of these anti-American forces have made dramatic gains under Obama. This means that the situation is far worse for America than when Stormer wrote his seven-million-copy bestseller.
Stormer’s book was described at the time as an exposé of how the U.S. government was ostensibly “fighting” communism with its right hand, while actually aiding, supporting, and promoting communism with its left. The book was self-published at a time when the U.S. was opposing communism in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, but doing business with countries like the Soviet Union, which were supplying the enemy that was killing American soldiers on the battlefield.
The difference now, as we have seen with Obama’s recognition and bailout of the Castro regime in Cuba, is that the U.S. government doesn’t even pretend to be anti-communist anymore. Obama has made the U.S. into a facilitator of international communism.
Our troubles are compounded by the spectacle of “conservatives” who pretend not to grasp what is going on. Columnist George Will writes at National Review that Cuba is a “geopolitical irrelevancy.” He says, “Cuba’s regime, although totalitarian, no longer matters in international politics.”
Will must have missed Vladimir Putin’s visit to Cuba in July, when he had meetings with brothers Raul and Fidel Castro and participated in a ceremony at the Memorial to the Soviet Internationalist Soldier. It is a tribute to Soviet soldiers who were stationed in Cuba in the early 1960s and died there. Putin forgave most of Cuba’s debt to the former Soviet Union.
Before that, in May, investigative reporter Bill Gertz noted that Cuba and Russia “concluded a security deal” aimed at bolstering “intelligence and military ties” between the two countries.
Will must have missed that dispatch.
But Russia isn’t the only U.S adversary that considers Cuba geopolitically relevant.
Toby Westerman, editor of International News Analysis Today, wrote a 2012 column noting that Communist China regards the island of Cuba as “strategically located for the interception of U.S. military and civilian satellite communications,” and that “China’s spy service also cooperates closely with Havana’s own world-class intelligence services.”
Westerman added, “The value Beijing places upon the information acquired via Havana can be seen in the October 2011 visit to the island by General Guo Boxiong, Vice Chairman of China’s Central Military Commission. Guo’s presence in Cuba underscored that China has a special military commitment in addition to a sizable economic investment in Cuba.”
Considering the damage that is being done to the United States, and the failure of “conservative” columnists such as George Will to recognize it, we are reminded that the title of Stormer’s book came from the famous John Harington quotation: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
But it gets worse.
Just two days after Obama announced his new Cuba policy, Raul Castro received the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Rogozin, during an official visit to Cuba on the occasion of the 12th Session of the Cuba-Russia Intergovernmental Commission.
Will should be advised that all of this is being covered in the English-language version of the official Cuban Communist Party paper Granma. The information is not a national security secret.
The Cuba-Russia Intergovernmental Commission on economic-trade and scientific-technical collaboration held a meeting designed to “advance tasks and objectives established during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Cuba in July…” The objective, according to Granma, is “to realize agreements in order to increase exchanges in diverse spheres” and “address key areas of interest to both countries.”
While Raul Castro’s talk of a “new economic model” in Cuba has been trumpeted far and wide by the U.S. media, his December 20 speech to the “National Assembly of People’s Power” said this does not mean that capitalism will be tolerated. He said the “guidelines” for the new economy make it clear that “The economic system which will prevail in Cuba will continue to be based on the people’s socialist ownership of the fundamental means of production, governed by the socialist principle of distribution, from each according to his/her capacity to each according to his/her contribution.”
He referred to “the irreversibility of socialism in Cuba.”
To understand the strategic significance of Obama’s change in policy toward the dictatorship in Cuba, Castro said he will be participating in the Seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama on April 10-11, 2015. The event is managed by the Organization of American States (OAS), a group that used to be dedicated to promoting democracy in the hemisphere.
How things change.
In January 1962, the OAS was an anti-Communist organization, having established a “Special Consultative Committee on Security Against the Subversive Action of International Communism.” The group declared, “The principles of communism are incompatible with the principles of the inter-American system.”
It passed a resolution declaring, “The present Government of Cuba has identified itself with the principles of Marxist-Leninist ideology, has established a political, economic, and social system based on that doctrine, and accepts military assistance from extra-continental communist powers, including even the threat of military intervention in America on the part of the Soviet Union…”
Nothing has changed over the years, except that Russia has replaced the Soviet Union and international communism has made dramatic gains in the hemisphere.
Another big change, of course, is that the U.S. President is either a Marxist or a Muslim. Take your pick. Perhaps, as Stormer says, anti-American is the best description.
Referring to Republican Senators Rand Paul (KY) and Marco Rubio (FL), Will writes, “As they brawl about Cuba, a geopolitical irrelevancy, neither seems presidential.” But this is the kind of debate that we desperately need to have. It will determine if the U.S. is a force for good or evil in the world. Senator Paul has sided with Obama and Castro. Senator Rubio has come down on the side of freedom.
This debate will not only determine if the Republican Party remains pro-freedom and anti-communist, but whether the United States will stay true to Ronald Reagan’s vision of a world free from communism.
It is troubling, 50 years after the publication of None Dare Call It Treason, that we have to go through this debate all over again—this time with the stakes even higher.
One thing is clear at this point: we need a new generation of conservatives in the media willing to take a stand for freedom, and to conduct a review of the “death of communism.”
In Memoriam
Available at Amazon.com 
