The administration figures Cuba will be an easier nut to crack than Iran.
The Trump administration has declared a two-week deadline on Cuba to release two “high-profile” prisoners, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Pérez (aka Maykel Osorbo), described as dissident artists from the San Isidro movement (Movimiento San Isidro, MSI). Alcántara is described as a performance artist from the El Cerro neighborhood of Havana, while Pérez is known as a musician and author of Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life), a work described as a rallying cry for Cuban dissidents.
“With provocative performances that have seen its most prominent figures parade through Old Havana waving American flags, and through flagrant displays of contempt for Cuban national symbols, San Isidro has antagonized the authorities, triggering frequent detentions of its members and international campaigns to free them,” writes the journalist and filmmaker Max Blumenthal.
Pérez was arrested in 2021 and convicted of public disorder and crimes against state security. Otero Alcántara was arrested numerous times for performing in violation of Decree 349, a Cuban law mandating artists obtain prior permission for public and private exhibitions and performances. Osorbo was sentenced to nine years in prison and Otero Alcántara received a five-year sentence.
“The Cuban State does not recognize the political nature of these convictions and continues to construct common criminal cases to prosecute them and keep them imprisoned,” Anamely Ramos González, an academic curator who worked with Otero Alcántara and Osorbo, told Freedom House.
Freedom House, the CIA, NED, and USAID in Cuba
Freedom House is a US-government-funded regime change operation linked to the CIA. “Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy stress their commitment to freedom of thought and democracy, but both cooperated with a CIA-organized propaganda operation in the 1980s,” the late Robert Perry of Consortium News wrote in 2015.
Under the Reagan-Bush administrations, Freedom House advanced the foreign policy objectives of the United States in Central America, including the support of death squads linked to the ARENA party in El Salvador and “championing Contra leaders like Arturo Cruz, and serving as a conduit for funds from the National Endowment for Democracy [NED].”
According to Blumenthal, “the US government has spent millions of dollars to cultivate anti-government Cuban rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in an explicit bid to weaponize ‘desocialized and marginalized youth.’”
The leaders of the San Isidro movement
have raked in funding from regime change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development [USAID] while meeting with State Department officials, US embassy staff in Havana, right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.
USAID’s “Travelers Project,” which operated from 2009 to 2012, recruited young individuals from Peru, Venezuela, and Costa Rica. These individuals were tasked with running and participating in civic programs in Cuba. However, the project’s true objective was to secretly incite anti-government activism.
USAID’s “Cuban Twitter”
The agency is notorious for the creation of ZunZuneo, an internet social network and blogging platform, recommended by the State Department’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, and marketed toward Cubans.
In order to hide the source of the “Cuban Twitter,” Joe McSpedon, a US government official, and his team of high-tech contractors “set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the U.S. government.” In 2014, the US confirmed USAID was responsible for creating ZunZuneo (Cuban slang for a hummingbird).
At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.
USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) met with State Department officials and US embassy staff in Havana, along with right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro, Blumenthal continues.
Behind their branding as cosmopolitan intellectuals, renegade rappers, and avant garde artists, San Isidro’s has openly embraced the extremist politics of the Miami Cuban lobby. Indeed, its most prominent members have expressed effusive support for Donald Trump, endorsed US sanctions, and clamored for a military invasion of Cuba.
Miami Cuban Lobby
Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State and acting national security advisor, is a leading figure in the Cuban lobby. As a member of the Cuban exile community (although he was born in the United States and has never visited Cuba), Rubio has championed regime change on the Caribbean island.
The Cuban lobby historically ranks as one of the most powerful ethnic foreign policy lobbies in the United States, second only to the lobby in support of Israel, reports Drop Site News. According to Ed Augustin, a British journalist based in Havana, “dollar for dollar,” the Cuba lobby “surpasses even AIPAC.”
“Next we’re going to war with Cuba,” Trump announced on April 17, and added, while speaking at a Turning Point USA rally in Phoenix, Arizona, ”a new dawn for Cuba” is coming “very soon.” Reports from April 14 indicate that the administration has discreetly instructed Pentagon officials and other government entities to enhance their readiness for potential military operations against Cuba, as per two sources knowledgeable on the matter, and a third individual who has been briefed on the situation.
“There have been reports that the Pentagon is preparing for military action in Cuba. Are those reports true? Is Cuba next?” Trump was asked during an Air Force One flight on April 18. “Well, it depends on what your definition of military action is,” the president responded.
Trump and Rubio point to Cuba’s failed economy while omitting the primary cause for the failure: a crushing US embargo, first imposed in 1958 following the Cuban revolution, supplemented beginning in 1960 by CIA-instigated acts of terrorism and sabotage against civilians and the Cuban military designed to overthrow Castro’s government. The embargo was imposed after Cuba nationalized American business, including oil refineries.
The CIA’s Operation Mongoose proposed a number of terror and sabotage plots, including instigating a “Communist Cuban terror campaign” in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and also Washington. Additional plots include sinking refugee boats, biological weapons aimed at starving Cubans into an uprising, and several attempts to murder Fidel Castro, most notoriously an effort to assassinate the Cuban leader with an exploding cigar. Operation Mongoose was officially authorized on November 30, 1961, by President Kennedy.
Republicans Demand Overthrow of Cuban Government
“Cuba poses a security threat to the United States,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez, a Florida Republican born in Havana, told Fox News. “President Trump has said, ‘enough is enough.’ We need Cuba to be democratic, free, and we need them to be a friend to the United States, not a foe.”
On the second day of the US-Israel Iran attack, Cuban-American Texas Senator Ted Cruz was interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity, “In the next 6 months, we will see new governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran,” he declared, and characterized a potential fall of Cuba as “the most consequential geopolitical shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall, since America won the Cold War without firing a shot.”
A few days later, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, appearing on Fox News, held up a “Free Cuba” baseball cap. “If we get in a fight, I want to win it quick. I’m in Miami. You see this hat? ‘Free Cuba.’ Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. We’re marching through the world. We’re clearing out the bad guys. Cuba is next,” he promised.
Senator Rick Scott, also a Florida Republican and a former governor of the Sunshine State, advised against negotiation with the Cuban government and criticized congressional Democrats for visiting Havana. “The Cuban people are marching in the streets and crying out against the illegitimate, communist rule that has stripped them of their freedom, liberty and basic human rights and dignity for more than 60 years,” he penned for the Miami Herald in 2021, neglecting to mention USAID, NED, and the CIA are behind much of the opposition to the Cuban government.
Trump and the Republicans are desperate to move on from the disaster of the failed effort to conduct regime change in Iran. Cuba, like Venezuela, presents far easier target for Trump. Cuba is on the verge of becoming a failed state with serious economic and social issues, including energy blackouts as a result of Trump’s oil embargo, and a staggering rate of poverty, most of it due to decades of a US-imposed embargo.
Article posted with permission from Kurt Nimmo
