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The Congressional Black Caucus meets with the
Castro Brothers
By Antonio Benedi
Former Special Assistant to the President of the United States, President
George H.W. Bush
The Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, Member of the Board of
Directors
The Castro Brothers received a warm and grateful audience with the Congressional Black Caucus earlier this week. Representative Barbara Lee of California, the current head of the 42 member Black Caucus and her colleagues seemed by all reports to have had the time of their lives. From watching the 24 hour news shows, their meeting was an extraordinary if not a magnificent series of events, this according to the gushing pundits. The focus was the almost 48 year trade embargo placed on Cuba that has well served the foreign policy agendas of many U.S. Presidents, democrats and republicans alike.
There was a private meeting with Fidel Castro with some of the Caucus’s delegation of six representatives. This friendly and neighborly meeting supposedly took place at Dictator Fidel Castro’s home where his wife met them at the front door. “Leave it to Beaver” episodes crossed my mind. I wonder if she wore pearls. Representative Lee said that, “she believes it is time to open dialogue and discussion with Cuba.” Another member of the delegation, obviously overcome by Castro’s “very healthy, very energetic, and very clear thinking demeanor” said that, “Castro looked directly into our eyes and asked how Cuba could help Mr. Obama in his efforts to change the course of U.S. foreign policy”. Among the Representatives there were Laura Richardson, California Democrat, and Representative Bobby L. Rush, Illinois Democrat. Discussions, we are told, ranged from travel restrictions to free trade and exchange programs. At one point the issue of racism in America was mentioned, a big concern for the Castro brothers. This has been the cornerstone to the Castro’s continued propaganda perpetrated on the Cuban people and throughout Latin America since the so called “Liberation Revolution” came down from the Sierra Maestra, lead by Castro with his cold blooded thugs in tow in 1959.
A subsequent meeting with now President Raul Castro also took place at a different location. The setting was magnificent; an Italian marbled pillared grand room with picture windows filled with waving palm trees symbolic of the Cuba most of us remember. It looked like a palace in paradise. If you have seen some of the recent travel shows to Cuba, this ornate, glamorous room looks nothing like those debilitated 1950’s relic buildings and streets that make up most of Cuba today. It’s glorious to be in Cuba, but only if you are a high communist party member. Too bad the people can’t experience the luxuries enjoyed by its communist leaders. I suppose the people are still “sacrificing” for the good of all.
As I listened to the reports last Tuesday when this story broke, I was overcome by even the most balanced of news forums commenting that the embargo obviously has not worked and that something new has to be tried. As a Cuban refugee who fled my native land to escape tyranny and obtain liberty I find these throwaway observations read from a TelePrompTer to be naive, uneducated and totally irresponsible. Cuba is not in the economic or political parole that it finds itself in because of the U.S. embargo. The rest of the world trades with Cuba. They have no travel restrictions with Cuba. The flow of money has continued to enter Cuba regardless of the U.S. Embargo. Europeans flock to the beaches of Cuba with hard currency. Native Cubans are not allowed on these beaches. Only to work with permits, given by the government and monitored strictly. These activities only further enrich the Castro’s and their cronies. It is estimated that Fidel Castro himself has over 11 billion in overseas accounts.
The underlying cause of Cuba’s economic, cultural and political status is of their own making. The Cuban government under its communist totalitarian regime has inflicted insurmountable and possibly permanent damage to an Island nation that should be the envy of the hemisphere. This institutional communist regime has stripped its people of God given freedoms that are endowed to human beings and must never be taken by any tinhorn dictator. These same basic freedoms were set forth in the Cuban Constitution of 1940. Castro dismissed the Constitution and replaced it with his own manifesto, doing away with any notions of individual rights. The Cuban people have suffered excruciating pain for what some misguided “progressive” American politicians would call social justice and balance.
The facts are; the majority of the Cuban people live in poverty. The majority of the Cuban people at this time are of African decent. A report published in 2002 by the Institute for Cuban and Cuban – American Studies at the University of Miami puts the black population in Cuba at 68 %. The most comfortable and highly educated Cubans on the Island today are White.
Cuba is not a progressive paradise! It’s a banana apartheid existing 90-miles from Miami, sustained by a constant balm of approval from our Hard-Left, who falsely claims to be for human rights
I respectfully ask the Congressional Black Caucus questions arising out of my concerns, as a taxpayer who funded your recent love-fest with the Castro brothers. If you are so concerned about human rights, and insist on opening the gates for Cuba to enter a free world – a world that they have systematically refused their own people, then why did you not ask to visit the prisons, the detention work farms, and talk to the brave dissidents who have been incarcerated for decades because of their views? I assure, you would find many liberty-loving blacks suffering among them.
Why not inquire of Castro about when Cuba went to war in Angola and why the majority of the front line troops (not volunteers) were black. I would also challenge the delegation to give us, the American people, a true accounting of the Cubans of African decent that are in leadership positions that you met with during your visit. How many blacks are in the so called Cuban Cabinet of Ministers, in the “Politburo” made up of 29 party leaders? I have never seen one. What is the percent of Cubans of African decent that make up the Central Communist Party (Ruling Party) of Cuba?
How many Black Cuban government spokesmen have you ever seen on television representing their country? Has anyone ever seen a high ranking black Cuban general in Raul's army in 48 years? Where is the outcry of equality! Only in Sports do you see Cubans of African decent, and then, highly monitored so they don’t escape their bondage, chains of slavery and flee to freedom.
I could go on, but I am sickened by the thought of our elected representatives from the Congressional Black Caucus honeymooning with tyrants, murdering racists, true bigots. The injustice that Castro’s Communist regime has perpetrated on the Cuban people and especially on the minority population on the island is deplorable. Shame on all of you for representing our country in this way, participating in a grotesque, vile exhibition, planned and manipulated by liars and master tyrants, The Castro brothers.