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CNN reporter falls for Potemkin tour of Cuban "anti-drug trafficking" effort. Here are some of the facts that were left out.
Cuban officials are trying to return to the days when the United States was sharing narcotics intelligence, and are engaging in a disinformation campaign that has snared CNN reporter Patrick Oppmann.
The danger for journalists on assignment in Cuba is that when they report the news accurately they risk being ejected from the country, and are forced to self censor. Over years this can turn into something far worse. Cuban independent journalist Yoani Sanchez in an August 12, 2014 essay warned how foreign correspondents "are always in danger of becoming hostages, first, and then collaborators, of the ruling regime."
CNN's Patrick Oppmann in Cuba at regime staged photo op
The claim that the narcoregime in Havana is combating drug trafficking does not pass muster, and if allowed to go unchallenged can have negative implications for U.S. policy.
Thankfully, there is serious reporting on this matter and credible sources that stretch back decades.
Christopher Dickey World News Editor at The Daily Beast on June 4, 2018 wrote a well researched and documented article "How Cuba Helped Make Venezuela a Mafia State" that outlines the Castro regime's involvement in linking up Venezuelan officials with drug traffickers and guerrilla groups, but begins with the 1989 Ochoa Trial, an effort by the Cuban autocrats to whitewash their drug trafficking image by executing the high ranking Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa in a political show trial. This ended one chapter of large scale drug trafficking for the Castros, but a new chapter would begin with the Chavez regime in Venezuela according to Dickey.
"In the years that followed the Ochoa trial, Cuba offered to cooperate with the United States fighting against drug traffickers. The Clinton administration shelved proposed indictments of the regime, and as relations gradually warmed, the U.S. would begin to liaise with Cuban authorities in the war on drugs. But at the same time the Cuban intelligence services were reaching out in other directions, to networks that would become the world’s biggest suppliers of cocaine: the narco-guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and Venezuela’s security forces. Cuban counterintelligence is said to have tutored the Venezuelan spies, domestic and foreign, and helped to organize them to root out opposition to the regime of Hugo Chávez. Indeed, the Cubans taught them to do whatever might be necessary to survive.Over time, many of Chavez’s officers would become known as the Cartel de los Soles, the Cartel of the Suns: “cartel” because of their involvement with the drug trade on a scale that nobody in 1989 could have imagined; “the suns” for the insignias on the epaulets of Venezuela’s generals."
This also concurs with earlier reporting by Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post on the Venezuela, FARC, Cuba trafficking axis in the May 24, 2015 in the article "A drug cartel’s power in Venezuela":
Ever since Colombian commandos captured the laptop of a leader of the FARC organization eight years ago, it’s been known that Chávez gave the Colombian narcoguerrillas sanctuary and allowed them to traffic cocaine from Venezuela to the United States with the help of the Venezuelan army. But not until a former Chávez bodyguard [Leamsy Salazar] defected to the United States in January did the scale of what is called the “Cartel of the Suns ” start to become publicly known.
[...]
The day after Salazar’s arrival in Washington, Spain’s ABC newspaper published a detailed account of the emerging case against Cabello, and last month, ABC reporter Emili Blasco followed up with a book laying out the allegations of Salazar and other defectors, who say Cuba’s communist regime and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah have been cut in on the trafficking. That was followed by a lengthy report last week in the Wall Street Journal that said Cabello’s cartel had turned Venezuela into “a global hub for cocaine trafficking and money laundering.”
Furthermore there are interviews with individuals that witnessed first hand the links of the highest levels of the Castro regime with drug trafficking. Worse yet this was not the first time that the United States shared drug intelligence with a government deeply involved in drug trafficking. Manuel Noriega was a trusted partner for years, but Washington refused to end the relationship despite an abundance of evidence.
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