PittsburghThoughts

Time for an honest look at Cuba and ourselves, 

We, the United States, love, for some reason, to punish Cuba. Maybe it's our colonialist reaction to an unyielding nation that has the audacity to claim its autonomy in OUR hemisphere or maybe it's revenge for the Bay of Pigs. Whichever, our policies have produced nothing but misery for the Cuban people not that the average American is capable of giving a shit.

Our brains have not only been washed but sent a few too many times through the spin cycle and like the poor and disenfranchised here, as well as in Cuba and every other nation that we have ever sought to exploit, hung out to dry. Find an author that dares to write favorably of Castro and you have, according to the political mainstream, unearthed a dangerous lefty to be met, at the minimum, with scorn and derision.

The people in our southern hemisphere have been murdered, tortured and forced to live lives of misery for the benefit of a hand full of wealthy families and the corporations that they esteem. Our South American policy has consisted, *clandestinely, in overthrowing elected socialist leaders and installing extreme right wing dictators. That's changing, due in large part to huge oil reserves that we haven't been able to commandeer.

When I heard the Saul Landau interview on the Thom Hartmann radio show: Saul Landau Part 1.wav and Saul Landau Part 2.wav I was pleased. Castro was many things, and I'm sure if you or a family member were jailed and/or tortured for something anti-Castro that appeared in print or somehow gained public attention, you'd hate his guts as much as any American right-wing nut job. Saul Landau acknowledges Castro's accomplishments as a strong, successful leader who took a country wracked by corruption and improved it against the efforts of the most powerful nation on earth.  

Incidentally, how can you decry Castro's torture while condoning ours, and if you don't think that we have political prisoner's in OUR jails, you haven't been paying attention. Let's stop our 5 decade long embargo against the Cuban people and punishing them for the same crimes that we ourselves have committed and continue to commit. If communism has failed why do we still consider it a threat?  Gene

*The US Army School of Americas (SOA), based in Fort Benning, Georgia, trains Latin American security personnel in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. SOA graduates are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America. In 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians. (See Grads in the News).