LET'S FIGHT BACK
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Sunday, April 30, 2023
Saturday, April 29, 2023
Friday, April 28, 2023
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Free Cuba Now!
To promote a nonviolent transition to a Cuba that respects human rights, political and economic freedoms, and the rule of law.
Havana Syndrome whitewashed and the Castro regime's pattern of attacking diplomats
U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba
Nora Gámez Torres of the Miami Herald in her April 26, 2023 article “‘Knife in the back’: Havana Syndrome victims dispute report dismissing their cases” reported that she “spoke to three former CIA officials and two Canadian diplomats affected by the strange incidents who said they are convinced they were targeted while serving their countries abroad. And all said that a recent U.S. intelligence report blaming their ailments on pre-existing medical conditions or environmental factors is an attempt to whitewash the Havana Syndrome affair, likely due to political considerations.”
She also interviewed Michael E. Hoffer, M.D, who early on ( March through mid-June 2017 ) examined 35 U.S. employees and their family members effected by this phenomenon at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba. Dr. Hoffer says at the end of the interview that “evideece suggests they were targeted, but we can’t prove that.”
In this CubaBrief we share video from the University of Miami’s School of Medicine who gave a December 2018 briefing on their findings.
Michael E. Hoffer, M.D. at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine, and his team talk about their research on the acute symptoms and clinical findings from the health incidents that affected U.S. diplomats in Havana.
While more attention has been focused on the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Canadian diplomats at their embassy in Cuba were also targeted. A study of 16 adult Canadians who reported “health incidents in Havana found changes in areas of their brains that were similar to those found in the Americans affected.
Whereas the Havana Syndrome is a phenomenon that was first observed in late 2016, the Cuban government has a long history of attacking and harassing U.S. and Canadian diplomats that stretches back over decades.
Jim Bartleman, Canada’s ambassador to Cuba from 1981 to 1983 in the 2018 Toronto Star article “Dog poisonings, sex propositions: Canada’s man in Havana remembers the Cold War weirdness” described the poisoning of his dog, and his deputies dog on the same day.
Bartleman’s enchantment with Castro soured in a sudden shock one night. It was a year into his posting, and he woke to find that his dog, a German shepherd named Zaka, was deadly sick. They rushed her to a veterinarian in Havana to have her stomach pumped. He soon learned that his deputy’s dog was also sick that morning, and had died. He later learned that the dogs were poisoned. Zaka died six months later.
José R. Cárdenas, who served in several foreign policy positions during the George W. Bush administration (2004-2009), including on the National Security Council staff on August 16, 2017 had an article published in Foreign Policy Magazine, titled “Targeting American Diplomats, Cuba Is Up to its Dirty Old Tricks” that provided an overview of the Castro regime’s behavior towards U.S. diplomats that fell short of international standards.
The fact is that the Cuban government has been abusing U.S. personnel posted to Havana for decades. In 2003, the State Department provided a declassified cable to Congress detailing the ongoing physical and psychological harassment of U.S. personnel “to frustrate routine business, occupy resources, demoralize personnel, and generally hinder efforts to advance U.S. policy goals.” According to the cable, “The harassment begins from the moment USINT personnel and their belongings enter Cuba. Cuban agents routinely enter U.S. employee residences to search belongings and papers, enter computers and gather other information thought to be useful from an intelligence point of view. Vehicles are also targeted. In many instances, no effort is made to hide the intrusions.” Not only are vehicles vandalized — tires slashed, parts removed, windshields smashed — but in some instances human excrement is left behind in the diplomats’ homes.
The cable continues, “Electronic surveillance is pervasive, including monitoring of home phone and computer lines. U.S. personnel have had living-room conversations repeated or played back to them by strangers and unknown callers.” In one case, after one family privately discussed their daughter’s susceptibility to mosquito bites, “they returned home to find all of their windows open and the house full of mosquitoes.”
News reports on these practices pre-date the Havana Syndrome. Journalist Nikki Waller's article "Diplomats in Cuba wary of snoops and snubs" was published in the Miami Herald on July 1, 2006 in which diplomats expressed concerns that " Cuban government harassment that intrudes on their personal and professional lives." The practices described echo and exceed those described above by their Canadian counterpart.
U.S. diplomats tell of endlessly ringing phones and dog feces strewn inside their homes, urine-soaked towels left on a kitchen table and even poisoned family dogs. A high-ranking member of the mission once found his mouthwash replaced with urine.
More ominous was The Washington Post article, “SURVIVING A NIGHTMARE INSIDE CASTRO'S CUBA,” by Thomas W. Lippman published on November 1, 1996 that described how regime agents tried to ram a U.S. diplomat's car. Rpbin Meyer, then 39 and a U.S. diplomat in Havana described the attack.
They had a car without license plates but it was the same security agents who had been following me all week, it wasn't as if I didn't recognize them."She said the agents' car tried repeatedly to ram the passenger side of her vehicle, its occupants yelling at her -- using her name -- to demand that she hang up her cellular telephone. She finally retreated to the U.S. mission, she said, and left again only when she was able to obtain an escort.
The harm done to U.S. and Canadian diplomats beginning in late 2016 in Havana, Cuba was something new, but targeting and attacking diplomats was not.
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
Free Cuba Now!
To promote a nonviolent transition to a Cuba that respects human rights, political and economic freedoms, and the rule of law.
Fuel shortage exposes two tiered system in Cuba. No turning back because Cubans have seen the true face of the regime says Cuban Priest.
May Day Parade in Revolution Plaza in Havana cancelled this year.
There is a critical fuel shortage in Cuba that appears to be evidence of socialist economic inefficiencies, and a failure to invest in infrastructure according to reporting by the Associated Press.
Cuba's fuel shortage worsened, with officials canceling events such as the May Day Parade in Revolution Plaza in Havana, restricting gasoline sales, and transferring some university sessions online. Cubans have faced shortages of several products during the recent economic crisis, but the cancellation of activities due to fuel shortages had not been recorded before . The cancellations come after several days of heavy queues at gas stations. According to experts, the shortage of gasoline and diesel is not due to a lack of crude oil – Cuba produces approximately half of what it requires and imports the remainder from other countries – but to difficulties in refining it.
“There is no lack of crude oil in Cuba,” said Jorge Piñón, senior research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute.
He claims Venezuela is selling Cuba the same amount of crude as last year, if not slightly more.
Cuba has also acquired oil from Russia. Nora Gámez Torres in her October 17, 2022 article "Cuba ramps up imports of Russian oil, helping Putin to evade sanctions" reported that "amid economic and political turmoil, Cuba has received at least $322 million worth of oil from Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine." The 4 million barrels of Urals crude oil received by Cuba “is the largest quantity since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” said Jorge Piñón, a senior research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Center who closely tracks oil shipments to the island. (United Nations data on world trade documents that Cuba received $35 million in Russian petroleum in 2017 and $55.5 million in 2018.)
According to Piñón, Cuba also got two tankers from the Mexican national oil company Pemex in April, each containing 300,000 barrels of crude oil. He blamed the shortages on technical production issues in the 1957-built refineries. Cuban officials have not revealed a particular cause for the shortages, but have previously highlighted difficulty with "inputs," which Piñón believes could refer to an additive Cuba obtains from Iran and uses to refine Venezuela's heavy oil. This past weekend, fuel shortages became acute.
Officials are calling on Cubans to walk to May Day events to conserve fuel, but have brought in political pilgrims from around the world to ferry around in vehicles. “More than 300 foreign visitors from 29 countries make up the so-called XVI May Day International Volunteer Work Brigade that the Cuban regime receives and attends in Havana a week after the official parade on that date.”
Despite this, after parading on May Day in Havana, between May 3rd thru the 6th, the "brigadistas" will travel to Sancti Spíritus, and there "they will be taken on tours to places of economic, social and cultural interest, such as neighborhoods in transformation and agricultural cooperatives, among others," the note specified. Most of the guests of the XVI May Day International Volunteer Work Brigade are from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ghana and Chile.
These privileged foreigners will get VIP treatment denied to every day Cubans.
Cubans are tired of being treated as second class citizens in their own country, and in July 2021 heard over official media heard the regime elite call for war on dissenters, then followed through with deadly violence to silence Cubans petitioning their government for more freedom..
Father Alberto Reyes
Father Alberto Reyes of the Archdiocese of Camagüey in a report by ACI Prensa said that “there is no turning back now,” because Cubans have seen the true face of the members of the regime, “who for years spoke to us day by day like a drumbeat about how much they loved us and wanted our good.”
“Now we know that it was all a lie, and that neither hand nor voice wavers when it comes to proclaiming destruction and death, and inciting the war of brother against brother in a fight whose wounds perhaps may never heal,” concluded Father Reyes.
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Monday, April 24, 2023
Cuba’s Black Elephant
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