Any questions on Cuba?

"I'll check back with you after two years. If you've done as I ask...... I'll take out that neural block. Then you can deal with Bester....."

Lyta to Garibaldi in Babylon 5: "The Wheel of Fire"

Why do they parade an increasingly incoherent Fidel Castro in front of the cameras in Cuba? Isn't Cuba yesterday's news? Isn't the Cuban-American vote the only interest the USA has in Cuba?

If you even have to ask these questions, you would be amazed at the answers.

Read up sometime on some of the business deals the Castros have made with various state-owned businesses in places like Europe. Then remember those resources Cuba would need to move offshore to participate in these ventures, as well as its other reasons for moving money offshore (funding intelligence operations, buying frills for the elite, etc.). Look at the lack of success and the debt to these other governments Cuba has accumulated. So what do you think happens when Fidel finally dies? Can we say......probate? 

Ever since August of 2006, I would hazard a guess that many nations that possess both Cuban debt and Cuban assets have been doing their level best to keep the assets from leaving their countries, in anticipation of seizing them  as personal assets of a deceased Fidel Castro. I would also hazard a guess that George W is doing his damnedest to keep these same nations advised to the best of his ability as to what US Intelligence knows about Fidel's health. 

Speaking of what US Intelligence knows about Fidel's health, it is an open secret that some kind of deal was struck to keep the United States from harming a hair on Fidel Castro's widdle punkin head in order to end the Cuban Missile Crisis. Given the nature of dictatorships, in that dictators like to ensure their own physical survival, it is very likely that the terms of this deal expire on Fidel Castro's death. So it has been very much in our interests to know everything we can about the current state of Fidel Castro's health. I sure hope you don't think it was a coincidence that George Bush had breakfast at Versailles in Miami the morning before the announcement of Fidel's stepping down?

Given the USA's quick recognition of Fidel Castro's government in 1959, it seems we were ignorant of Castro's true agenda and employer in the KGB. For all the allegations those on the Right make about alleged KGB ties with the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, especially its most violent side, why have we seen little published proof of this? Could it be that since at least 1959 or 1960, KGB activities in the Americas went through Cuba, which is still under the same government, and still hostile to American interests, and for whom US Counterintelligence files are still classified?

Very likely. 

If so, doesn't this funding of subversive activity and making our nation chase its agents around our country kinda go beyond the stated reasons for the embargo (uncompensated expropriation of American resources--which is also true) and make the long continuation of the embargo a little more justifiable?

And as for Cuba's continuing significance, remember what happened when VENONA was declassified, and the world finally could see the guilt of many people whose innocence in the 1950s during the Rosenberg prosecution and the Army-McCarthy hearings was bandied about by the Left? Just think what being able to declassify Counterintel files on Cuban agents and their contacts, the pay stubs in Havana for supposedly "independent" thinkers, and the purchase orders for the weapons of violent activity are free for the entire world to read and document?

Given George W's problems with some of these guys, don't you think he's just dying to let the world know?

Well, I'm glad I could answer your questions today. Now on to work with me!