Despite the fact that the brutal Castro regime enslaving Cuba continues to support terrorism and harbor American fugitives from justice — not to mention its ruthless oppression of the Cuban people — the Obama administration is reportedly plotting to remove the Communist Party dictatorship from the official U.S. government list of state sponsors of terrorism. According to media reports, the John Kerry-led State Department completed a “review” of Havana’s record and recommended that the regime be taken off the list. However, numerous analysts have pointed out that doing so would be a disaster — not least because the Castro regime has never stopped supporting terrorism.
Obama, who is currently at the socialist-dominated “Summit of the Americas” in Panama schmoozing with various Latin American autocrats, claimed he was waiting for a “recommendation” from his advisors before deciding to remove Castro from the terror list. “That review has been completed at the State Department,” Obama was quoted as saying. “It is now forwarded to the White House. Our inter-agency team will go through the entire thing and then present it to me with a recommendation. That hasn’t happened yet.” More than a few analysts expect Obama to make his big announcement by the end of the summit, which runs into the weekend, about removing Castro from the list. Multiple media outlets reported that Obama called the tyrant over the phone prior to the confab in Panama.
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Speaking in Jamaica the day before the Panama summit, Obama dropped several hints suggesting that he would cave in to Castro’s demands. “Our emphasis has been on the facts,” Obama claimed, sounding oblivious to the irony. “We want to make sure that given that this is a powerful tool to isolate those countries that genuinely do support terrorism, that when we make those designations we’ve got strong evidence that, in fact, that’s the case.” The Castro regime genuinely supports terrorism, and Obama knows that. In fact, Castro’s thugs are currently in Panama terrorizing dissidents and critics of his regime. However, as The New American has documented extensively, top establishment players — ranging from the global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations and Big Business to the dictator-dominated United Nations — have been trying to legitimize the autocracy for years.
Critics, though, say it would be a tragedy to remove the terrorist regime from the terror list. “Removing Cuba from the U.S. terror list is a terrible mistake,” said Frank De Varona, a Cuban-born American patriot who fought to free Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion and was imprisoned in one of Castro’s dungeons. “Cuba continues to support terrorism around the world.” Among other strategies, De Varona told The New American that the Cuban regime, through its close ally Venezuela, was providing intelligence to Hamas and Hezbollah. The regimes ruling Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran all have a very close relationship and continue to support terrorism across the Middle East, too, he said. The Castro regime also inked a deal with Russia’s Putin to establish military, intelligence, and naval bases in Cuba that “will threaten the national security of the United States,” said De Varona, also a former university professor, author, and expert on Cuba.
In the Western hemisphere, De Varona warned, high-ranking Cuban military officers are working closely with the Venezuelan military and the Marxist narco-terrorist group known as the “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia,” or FARC, in Colombia. “Cuba has worked closely with the drug cartels in Colombia to introduce tons of drugs into the United States,” he added. “Cuba has sent people to the United States to commit massive fraud in Medicare costing U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars and, when these people are investigated, they promptly return to the island. Cuba has placed spies in the State and Defense Department over the years, seriously damaging our security.”
Separately, in 2013, the Castro regime was caught sending weapons shipments to the murderous communist regime in North Korea in brazen defiance of UN Security Council resolutions when the ship was intercepted in Panama. “Members of the Cuban Occupation Army and secret police in Venezuela shot and tortured students who were peacefully protesting in the streets of that nation last year,” continued De Varona, who also serves as the South Florida director for Bear Witness Central, an organization of Americans who have experienced Socialism and/or Communism that works to protect the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, as The New American has documented extensively, the Castro regime is also one of the key forces behind the Foro de São Paulo (São Paulo Forum, or FSP) — a network of communist and socialist strongmen and terrorist groups such as the FARC and the MIR that has now taken over much of Latin America. The U.S. government knows full well about the group’s operations.
Citing the FBI, De Varona also noted that the Castro regime continues to harbor dozens of fugitives from the United States “who live on the island under the protection of the bloody Castro regime.” Many of those fugitives, he added, have been involved with murder, kidnapping, hijacking, and more. They include a convicted cop-killer. “Cuba also provides a safe haven for Basque terrorists even though Spain has again and again requested extradition of these criminals,” De Varona added. Before that, the Castro regime was instrumental in supporting the domestic communist terrorist group known as the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, the State Department, and Capitol Hill, and murdered American police officers. Its goal was to overthrow the government, turn America communist, and, according to FBI agent Larry Grathwohl who infiltrated the group, exterminate 25 million Americans in camps. Obama later launched his political career in the home of Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers.
Ironically, even as Obama officials and the establishment press were gushing about Castro likely coming off the terrorist list, a convicted U.S. cop-killer, “Assata Olugbala Shakur” aka JoAnne Deborah Byron aka Chesimard, was touting terrorism and violence while living freely under Castro’s protection. Just this week, the communist terrorist, who murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973 and then fled to Cuba to escape justice, was advocating violence against the increasingly embattled Afrikaner people of South Africa — a small minority that experts say may be on the verge of facing genocide at the hands of government-linked racist Marxist revolutionaries. “The only thing left to do is to fight centuries of fire with fire,” the cop killer protected by Castro wrote in a South African newspaper. “The European is not your friend.”
In an e-mail to The New American, De Varona said lawmakers must stop the delisting of Castro’s terror regime. “President Obama will soon act on the recommendation of the State Department to remove Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism,” he said. “Congress needs to reject this misguided action which is nothing more than a further appeasement by President Obama to the bloody regime of Raul Castro.”
Research Associate Ana Quintana at the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, who specializes in U.S. policy toward Latin America, also warned against delisting the dictatorship. “To remove the Castro regime’s Cuba from the list would be to ignore both the Cuban government’s inherently malicious nature and the utility of terrorist designations,” she said. “Removing Cuba from the list would also remove restrictions that preclude their receipt of preferential foreign aid and trade benefits. Repealing the designation combined with further weakening of sanctions will not bode well for U.S. taxpayers.”
Of course, administration talking points notwithstanding, U.S. lawmakers know full well that the Castro regime continues to support terrorism. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), for example, chairman of a foreign relations subcommittee, noted that “Cuba, like Syria, Iran and Sudan, remains a state sponsor of terrorism … that colludes with America’s enemies.” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), meanwhile, blasted Obama’s scheming to build up “a totalitarian police state modeled after their old state sponsor, the Soviet Union” and allow Castro and company to “continue their support for terrorist organizations from FARC, to Hezbollah and Hamas.” In the House, resistance to Obama’s pro-Castro scheming is reportedly growing as well — especially among lawmakers with experience on Cuba.
Obama has already largely given in to all of the Castro regime’s demands, and if the terror designation is dropped, just a few sticking points will be left. And while he has sought to portray the scheming as an effort to benefit the long-suffering people of Cuba, the reality almost certainly has nothing to do with that. Powerful establishment forces have decided that “President” Castro, as Obama now refers to him, must be legitimized, despite the regime’s history of mass-murder, terrorism, exporting communist revolution, and more. The powerful CFR’s Latin America boss, Castro apologist Julia Sweig, has even been identified as an “agent of influence” of Havana by a senior U.S. intelligence officer charged with disrupting Castro terror and espionage plots. And as noted above, Obama’s own political career began in the home of an unrepentant Castro-backed communist terrorist.
The media refuses to report the well-documented facts, but they are hardly a secret, and the dots are easy to connect. For the sake of the American and Cuban people, Congress should refuse to play along with the Obama-Castro scheming.
Photo: AP Images
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].
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