French president Francois Hollande's historic Cuba trip leads EU detente
Source: AFP via India Times
By AFP | 9 May, 2015,
HAVANA: Francois Hollande will become the first French president to visit Cuba in more than a century on Monday, cementing Paris's leading role in the European Union's rapprochement with the communist island.
The EU suspended relations with Cuba in 2003 over a crackdown on journalists and activists, but it began talks to restore them in April 2014, aiming to persuade Havana to improve its human rights record.
It was under the French presidency of the EU in 2008 that political dialogue was first resumed between Brussels and Havana. Raul Castro had just assumed power from his brother Fidel and announced a series of economic reforms.
"France has always been a leader in the European Union. The fact that the French president is coming shows France's very important role in the dialogue between Cuba and the European Union," Eduardo Perera from the University of Havana told AFP.
Read more: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/french-president-francois-hollandes-historic-cuba-trip-leads-eu-detente/articleshow/47211217.cms
tough job eh . . .
left-of-center2012
(34,195 posts)I've always felt that the best way to deal with Cuba is to flood it with American tourists.
Judi Lynn
(160,621 posts)A good follow-up would be to end trying to overthrow their government, and turn it all back to the people, or their offspring, who caused the revolution in the first place with their virulent racist, classist, utterly dishonest, brutal treatment of the vast majority of Cubans, the same people who ran the Death Squads, and dropped bombs on the revolutionary fighters, and attempted, even after bloody dictator Batista bailed, having emptied the Cuban Treasury, to send out assassins to try to murder the wave of young teachers who were going out into the country side, staying up at night with lanterns, if needed, in teaching those who didn't know, how to read and write, the same people who set the crops on fire, and dropped chemicals on the livestock, people, in chemical warfare, which was acknowledged in a murder trial of Eduardo Arocena, after he and others in Omega 7 murdered a Cuban diplomat to the UN, Felix Garcia Rodriguez, at a stoplight. He admitted he had carried chemicals to Cuba for the CIA.
Profile: Eduardo Arocena
Positions that Eduardo Arocena has held:
Task Force Chief, CIA
Related Entities:
Member OMEGA-7
Eduardo Arocena was a participant or observer in the following events:
September 10, 1984: Anti-Castro Cuban Testifies Ship with Germs Sent to Cuba in 1980
Eduardo Arocena, leader of the Cuban-exile militant group OMEGA-7, testifies during his trial in New York that in the latter part of 1980 a ship traveled from Florida to Cuba with a mission to carry some germs to introduce them in Cuba to be used against the Soviets and against the Cuban economy, to begin what was called chemical war, which later on produced results that were not what we had expected, because we thought that it was going to be used against the Soviet forces, and it was used against our own people, and with that we did not agree. The testimony is later used by some to support the allegation that Cubas 1981 Dengue fever epidemic, which infected 300,000 and killed 154, was the result of US biowarfare. [Blum, 1995; Covert Action Quarterly, 1999; CounterPunch, 10/11/2003]
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=eduardo_arocena
[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
US Bacterial War Details
J. Clancy. 5 June, 1997
A previous post from details provided by the Cuban Foreign Ministry described the recent release of Thrips Palmi insect over Cuban vegetable growing areas. Granma writer Rodolfo Casals has now provided the history of those attacks. But it is fair to remember that the Miami Mafia appears to act as an independent agent of the US Administration, while providing large financial help to both Democrats and Republicans.
"The US State Dept denies the veracity of these Thrip facts, alleging that "it has not committed a single act of violation of the 1972 agreement on chemical and biological weapons. Cuba maintains that all the following accusations against successive Administations have been confirmed over time from US information releases. In the early 1960's US Intelligence Services and the military began to elaborate plans for biological warfare, which have included blights that attack food crops, sugar cane defoliants, bacteria that thwart sugar cane cultivation and the interruption of rain by highly sophisticated methods.
In 1962, the CIA designed an operation known as Mongoose with the goal of destroying the Cuban Revolution. The opera- tion's strategies included the use of military force, sabotage and the assassination of the nation's leaders, as well as the introduction of nonlethal chemical agents that would cause illness among sugarcane workers (hundreds of thousands of persons) and keep them off work for a period of 24-48 hours.
The Long Island newspaper NEWSDAY revealed in 1971 that a virus originating in Fort Gulik, in the Panama Canal Zone, had been delivered by fishing boat to agents working against Cuba.
A book entitled,'The Fish is Red', for its part, reports that in 1972, CIA agents first introduced the African swine fever virus that decimated Cuba's livestock population. It is estimated that more than half million pigs were sacrificed, burned and buried to combat the epidemic.
Several years later, NEWSDAY reported that a biological warfare program aimed against poultry production in Cuba had failed, for reasons not revealed.
Between 1979 and 1981, four destructive diseases were unleashed that seriously affected individuals and crops vital to the Cuban economy: hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, dengue fever, sugar cane rust and tobacco blue mould. COVERT ACTION a Washington based publication, stated that as part of the CIA-Pentagon anti-Cuban arsenal, a disease known as hemorrhagic dengue was introduced on the island, where it infected hundreds of thousands of people, leaving 158 dead -including 101 children.
More:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/070.html
[font size=4]
ETC., ETC., ETC.
I understand that you are talking about the old Batista regime and its supporters, when you talk about the people who "caused the revolution." But some people might not get it. There is another (wrong) way to read your post. Just saying.
Judi Lynn
(160,621 posts)and Fulgencio Batista was supported full-heartedly by the U.S. Government throughout his presence as overlord in Cuba, where he gave the U.S. Mafia free reign, in return for nightly pay-offs, among other things, from the Mafia owned casinos.
Conditions under Batista were so extreme well before the revolution, one progressive radio host committed suicide on air as a protest. Batista sent death squads throughout the country kidnapping, torturing, and in many cases, after murdering, either hanging their bodies from trees, or removing arms, legs, etc., and haning those parts in trees, or simply throwing them out on sidewalks from cars, etc.
US support for the Batistianos, some of whom served in his government, even in his own cabinet, like the father, Rafael, of US Representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart, and his brother Mario Diaz-Balart, Republicans, moved immediately to Miami when it looked as if their side was finally being removed from power, where they have lived, with the blessings of the US Government ever since. Many of these "exiles" even worked in US Armed Forces in Viet Nam, and/or the CIA, and were very active in Iran/Contra, and, of course, in the Watergate Burglary, as well as hit teams throughout the world murdering Cubans they hated.
That's why pro-Castro Cubans call the emigres "gusanos" ("worms" .
Judi Lynn
(160,621 posts)Monday, April 13, 2015
The Normalization of U.S.-Cuba Relations: the Best Accomplishment of President Barack Obama
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books The Code for Global Ethics, and
The New American Empire)
At the beginning of 1959, United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar landsalmost all the cattle ranches90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions80 percent of the utilitiespractically all the oil industryand supplied two-thirds of Cuba's imports.
Senator John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), (speech at a Democratic Dinner, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 6, 1960, during the 1960 Presidential campaign)
I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime.
I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though (Dictator) Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins.
In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.
President John F. Kennedy, October 24, 1963, (interview with journalist Jean Daniel, The New Republic, published on December 14 1963, pp. 15-20)
More:
http://www.thenewamericanempire.com/tremblay=1168.htm
ucrdem
(15,512 posts)posthumously it appears
I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though (Dictator) Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins.
In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.
But not so unusual. JFK campaigned on "the strategy of peace" and gave similar speeches about Cuba, Latin America, Africa and of course Indochina aka Vietnam throughout the 1960 campaign and in the years leading up to it. Strange how the idea of JFK, cold warrior has taken hold in the popular imagination because he was anything but.
Great find, thanks Judi Lynn!
Sgt Preston
(133 posts)ucrdem
(15,512 posts)It failed, and the next three efforts to invade Cuba including the missile crisis never got out of the gate.
Sgt Preston
(133 posts)<iframe width="640" height="360" src="
?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>