It’s an honor to be here once
again to help send off another Friendshipment Caravan
to Cuba. But wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to break the law in order to
visit Cuba or to send humanitarian aid to people in Cuba? When Rev. Lucius
Walker called me 20 years ago to ask me to speak at a press conference where he
would announce plans for the first Friendshipment
Caravan, I never imagined that I would still be speaking at Caravan events 20
years later.
In poll after poll, year after
year, we see that most Americans, including Cuban-Americans, want improved
relations with Cuba. Yet Washington persists in trying to turn back the
historical clock.
Meanwhile, the desire to end
the trade and travel embargo has gone global. Every year, starting in 1992, the
same year as the first Caravan, Cuba takes the issue of the trade embargo to
the General Assembly of the United Nations. The number of nations voting
against the embargo increased rapidly year by year until it has become almost
unanimous. Last year the vote was 186 to 2. It cannot be totally unanimous
because the United States Ambassador is one of the two voting for the embargo.
In the
United States people hear that it is Cuba’s economic system, not the trade embargo, that hurts the Cuban people. Yet the genesis of the
trade embargo was explicitly to starve Cubans into submission. Six months after
the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, an extremely wealthy Texan, Robert
Kleberg, owner of the King Ranch in Texas – one of the largest ranches in the
world, was worried about his cattle ranch in Cuba so he met with Secretary of
State Christian Herter. According to a State Department memo, he told Herter
that depriving Cuba of its sugar quota would cause “widespread further
unemployment” meaning that “large numbers of people thus forced out of work
would begin to go hungry.” The
Secretary of State cautioned that such a policy would be “economic warfare” in
peacetime.
Which
would Washington choose? Warfare or Peacetime? The
answer came in less than a year when a State Department official sent another
memo pointing out that the “majority of Cubans support [Fidel] Castro” and
concluding that the “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is
through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and
hardship.” Therefore “it
follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the
economic life of Cuba….to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of
government.”
So the Eisenhower
Administration terminated Cuba’s sugar quota and launched “economic warfare”
which turned into a State of Siege that continues more than half a century
later.
To defy and expose this cruel
policy, the Caravans began their journeys to Cuba in November 1992 when Lucius
Walker and over a hundred other people risked fines and jail terms, just as the
Caravanistas are doing today, to take the first Friendshipment Caravan across the Mexican border on their
way to Cuba. Here is the historical context of what was happening when Pastors
for Peace launched that challenge and as Cuba began to challenge the trade embargo
on the international stage of the General Assembly.
That year, 1992, with the
Soviet Union having officially disintegrated, Washington could have seized an
opening for changing policy toward Cuba. When Cuban revolutionaries drove the
dictator, General Batista, out of Cuba on January 1, 1959, about 83 percent of
Cuba’s trade was with the United States, but Washington stopped that trade.
Thus, when the Soviet Union officially collapsed in December 1991, about 83
percent of Cuba’s trade was with the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries.
The Cuban economy was spiraling downward after the crash of the Soviet Union.
Washington could have declared
that it approved of Cuba’s achievement of free health care and free education
for its people and therefore would help Cuba maintain that standard of living
by opening trade and travel with Cuba. But instead Congress tightened the trade
embargo by passing the Torricelli Act in October 1992. That law is named for
its main sponsor, whom many of us in New Jersey remember well -- Robert
Torricelli, who was then a New Jersey Representative in the House and later
became a senator until his corruption forced him to resign his Senate seat. The
law was aimed, in Torricelli’s own words, to “wreak havoc on that island.” In other words, to
continue the policy of trying to starve the Cuban people into submission.
Anti-Cuban terrorists
recognized that the passage of the Torricelli Act gave them a green light. Four
days after that law was passed, a hail of bullets fired from a speedboat hit
their target, shooting up the Hotel Melia, one of
Cuba’s main resort hotels. A week later, the Miami Herald reported that it had
received a “war communiqué” boasting that “On the evening of October 7, 1992, Comandos L attacked a military objective off the coast of
the province of Matanzas, Cuba.” A tourist hotel had become publicly -- not
secretly -- a “military objective.” And three months later, Tony Bryant, who
headed Comandos L, boasted on national TV at a Miami
news conference of plans for more raids against targets in Cuba, especially
hotels. Warning tourists to stay off the island, he declared, “From this point
on, we’re at war.”
If arrested, these terrorists
need not fear conviction. When Tony Bryant was charged with possession and transport
of firearms by a convicted felon, Federal Judge James Lawrence King in Miami
dismissed the charges, deciding that “Bryant didn’t act like he committed a
crime.” The courts had become a cohort in the War of Terror.
In 1996 Congress passed and
President Clinton signed into law the Helms-Burton Act that tightened the trade
and travel bans even further. The threat level to the Caravanistas
increased, but the Caravanistas’ courage and
importance also increased. They continued to challenge laws that keep
U.S. citizens ignorant about what is happening in Cuba by demonizing the Cuban
government while preventing
ordinary citizens from seeing Cuba for themselves and having a chance to make
up their own minds.
Let’s
flashback for a moment to the end of the Batista dictatorship. When
Cuban revolutionaries defeated General Batista, foreigners, mainly in the
United States, owned 75 percent of arable land; 90 percent of services like
electricity, water, and telephones; and 40 percent of the sugar industry.
The
Cuban Revolution of course immediately launched programs aimed at a
redistribution of wealth, including the right of all citizens to basic human
rights like education and medical care.
Washington
used the CIA to respond. Air raids repeatedly struck the sugar industry,
mainstay of the economy at that time. Others bombed Havana itself. Another
attacked a train full of passengers.
Cubans, on the receiving end,
experienced the deaths and destruction. But in Washington, those attacks were
discussed in secret memos among people with security clearances on a
need-to-know basis, developing an addiction to the drama and the power of being
among those who are privy to Washington’s secrets and plots.
The War of Terror forced Cuba
to distort its economy by having to develop its Revolutionary Armed Forces and
the popular militia to defend the country from constant armed attacks and of
course the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. From this dynamic between terrorists
and their targets came two opposing agencies: On
the one hand, the army of terrorists based in the United States and on the
other, Cuba’s State Security Department or G-2. Cuba has no option of sending
its armed forces to invade the United States in order to eliminate terrorist
groups. Instead, G2 must infiltrate agents into those groups to uncover their
plans.
The plots discovered by Cuban
agents prevented many assassinations and bombings. But some of course were not
detected in time. The most massive act of terrorism killed all 73 passengers
and crew aboard a Cuban passenger jet when it was blown out of the sky in
October 1976 -- the first time in the Western Hemisphere that civilians on a
passenger jet were used as a political weapon deliberately aimed at creating
terror. That did not happen again until 9/11.
The murders of the 73 people
aboard the Cuban plane were masterminded by Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, the
two most notorious terrorists in the Western Hemisphere. Bosch died last year
in Miami of natural causes. Posada continues to live in Miami, but I understand
that he is evidently in very poor health.
In 1998, Cuba invited the FBI
to Havana and gave them reams of information gathered by Cuban agents about
terrorists in the United States. But instead of arresting terrorists, the FBI
arrested Cubans who had gathered the evidence. Now known as the Cuban Five,
Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero,
Fernando González, and René González were tried and convicted in
Miami and put in separate prisons across the country. René González completed
his sentence last year but must serve three years of “supervised release”
before he can return to his family in Cuba. The others face longer sentences,
including life in prison.
Fortunately, G-2 agents
continued their work and uncovered another plot to kill Castro in the year
2000. Most of the hundreds of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro have
gone unnoticed, but President Castro made sure to call attention to this one.
After arriving in Panama City to attend an Ibero-American
Summit meeting, Castro held a news conference to announce that Luis Posada and
his three Cuban-American co-conspirators were planning to assassinate him by
bombing the auditorium at the University of Panama where he would be speaking.
He even revealed where the police could find the would-be assassins.
G-2 agents not only saved the
life of President Castro yet again but also the lives of hundreds of people,
mainly students, who packed the University of Panama auditorium to hear Castro
speak. That would not have been a single assassination. It would have been a
massacre.
When Posada was pardoned and
smuggled into Miami, he was welcomed as a hero into Miami’s network of
terrorists who aim to carry out Washington’s goal of controlling Cuba once
again. It is instructive to note that the one piece of land in Cuba occupied by
U.S. Armed Forces is the site of the most notorious prison in the world --
Guantánamo.
The Friendshipment
Caravans have created a community of people, like the one here tonight, across
the United States and around the world dedicated to changing U.S. policy toward
Cuba from terrorism to Friendship, and that community is growing despite all
obstacles. I want to thank our hosts, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation,
for hosting this event and the organizers, including Jim Price and Ana Maria
Cárdenas from here in Montclair, and of course the Pastors for Peace organizers
based in New York. To the Caravanistas,
congratulations on your victory at the Canadian border last Sunday and we wish
you a 23rd victory at
the Mexican border.
Thank you all.
***
Historian Jane Franklin is the author of Cuba
and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History.
E-mail: JaneFranklin@hotmail.com