The Cuban People Deserve Freedom: Where Is the US Help?

In this mailing: - Guy Millière: The Cuban People Deserve Freedom: Where Is the US Help? - Amir Taheri: Biden Needs a Long Spoon in Vienna [] [The Cuban People Deserve Freedom: Where Is the US Help?]( by Guy Millière • July 25, 2021 at 5:00 am [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [WhatsApp]( [Telegram]( [Send]( [Print]( - All available data...show that before Castro took power, Cuba was far from being in a disastrous situation. In 1958, the Cuban income per capita was double that of Spain and Japan. Cuba had more doctors and dentists per capita than Britain. Cuba was second per capita in Latin America in ownership of automobiles and telephones, and first in the number of television sets per inhabitant. Cubans could enter and leave the country freely. Fulgencio Battista was a dictator, but Battista's dictatorship was so "fierce" that Fidel Castro, arrested in 1953 and sentenced to 15 years in prison for a failed coup d'état was pardoned and released by Battista in 1954. Under his own dictatorship, Castro would not have been so lucky. - The Cuban economy was rapidly destroyed. All businesses, until recently, have been state-owned. Wages in Cuba are abysmal; the population is effectively destitute. The average monthly salary in 2015 was $18.66. Persecution, imprisonment and torture of anyone who dares to criticize the regime are routine. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have passed through Cuba's reeducation camps since 1959. More than 15,000 Cubans have been executed by firing squad. The health system is good for members of the regime and for medical tourists who pay in American dollars, but in a sordid state for ordinary Cubans. - The Cuban government under Battista was corrupt, but it is difficult to believe that the dignitaries of the Castro regime did not enrich themselves. At the end of his life, Fidel Castro's fortune was valued at $900 million. - In "36 hours in Havana", a report in The New York Times on January 5, 2016, Cuba's capital city is described as full of "classic American cars and salsa singers" and as "an old city where the old and the modern are in contrast". The decay of many buildings, the immense poverty of the bulk of the population, the crushing weight of the communist dictatorship are completely left out. - US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, himself a refugee from Castro's Cuba, immediately threatened his fellow Cubans: While everyone, including criminals who have previously been deported, may freely enter the United States through America's wide-open southern non-border, all Cubans and Haitians fleeing by sea will be returned to their squalor. "The time is never right to attempt migration by sea," he warned them on July 13. "... Allow me to be clear: If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States." - On July 12, the Cuban regime cut the Cubans' access to the internet. The regime's police will therefore able to crush the uprising without one image coming out of Cuba. On July 11, demonstrations erupted in the main cities of Cuba. Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets, knowing they risk being brutally arrested, sent to jail, possibly tortured and killed by the police. They reject the communist dictatorship that has oppressed them for 62 years. They shout "Libertad": freedom. Pictured: Police arrest a demonstrator during a peaceful anti-communist protest in Havana, on July 11, 2021. (Photo by Adalberto Roque/AFP via Getty Images) Sunday July 11. Demonstrations erupt in the main cities of Cuba. Tens of thousands of people take to the streets. They know they risk being brutally arrested, sent to jail, possibly tortured and killed by the police. They reject the communist dictatorship that has oppressed them for 62 years. They shout "Libertad": freedom. They hold up Cuban and American flags -- once again, the symbol of people who yearn to breathe freely. Those who dream of communism for the Western world first kept silent, then, while making a few criticisms of the dictatorship in Cuba, blamed it on an American embargo. They failed to point out that if the Cuban dictators cannot trade with the United States, they still can trade with the rest of the world; and also failed to point out that Cuba has nothing to sell: its leaders have destroyed the country's economy. Governments in Western Europe have made no comment to date; they seem to prefer avoiding the subject. [Continue Reading Article]( [] [Biden Needs a Long Spoon in Vienna]( by Amir Taheri • July 25, 2021 at 4:00 am [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [WhatsApp]( [Telegram]( [Send]( [Print]( - [T]he so-called "nuclear issue" has always been a diversion designed to focus attention on a phantom while the living monster, wielding blood-soaked dagger, goes around spreading mayhem and murder. - [Obama] failed, or refused, to ask the real questions: is the Islamic Republic not a threat to regional peace and the global rule of law with or without its ridiculous uranium enrichment show? - Hasn't the Islamic Republic been the world's number one sponsor of international terrorism for four decades with or without enriching uranium? Was the seizing of over 600 hostages from 32 countries, including the US and all major European states, ever linked to uranium enrichment? - The mullahs assume that as long as they can hoodwink the world, notably the Americans who are suckers for self-deception, by propelling the "nuclear" phantom they could have a free hand to kill and kidnap and destroy the very fabric of statehood in several regional countries while receiving cash rewards from the US and its major allies who pretend to be guardians of global law and order. - That long spoon could be made of a simple reversal of the order in which the talks are held. First, let's talk about terrorism, exporting revolution, money laundering, kidnapping and hitmen without frontiers. Only then we could talk about uranium enrichment and the unfreezing of assets. - There is even no need for Biden and allies to talk about "human rights" and things like that which have become a staple of hollow global diplomacy, because those who demand respect for such rights don't really mean it and those who hear them know that they don't. The so-called "nuclear issue" has always been a diversion designed to focus attention on a phantom while the living monster, wielding blood-soaked dagger, goes around spreading mayhem and murder. Pictured: A ballistic missile on display during a military parade marking the annual National Army Day in Tehran, on April 18, 2019. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images) To talk or not to talk? For Joe Biden's administration in Washington this is the question with regard to "frozen" negotiations with Iran over its so-called "nuclear ambitions". Initially, Biden appeared keen to team-roll the process so that he could revive what his former boss Barack Obama still presents as his greatest foreign policy achievement, thus loosening the lasso that Donald Trump has tightened around the mullahs in Tehran. On the way to the forum, however, two things happened. First, the so-called "moderates" in Tehran, who have always talked like people from the fringes of the US Democratic Party, were booted out of the Islamic power banquet and replaced by a coterie that says it wants to turn the White House into a Hussyeniah once global Khomeinism has seized control of the United States. [Continue Reading Article]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [RSS]( [Donate]( Copyright © Gatestone Institute, All rights reserved. You are subscribed to this list as {EMAIL} You can change how you receive these emails: [Update your subscription preferences]( or [Unsubscribe from this list]( [Gatestone Institute]( 14 East 60 St., Suite 705, New York, NY 10022