By Frank Calzon
September 11, 2011

Four young women holding a banner made from a bedsheet were standing halfway up the huge escalinata that leads into Cuba’s former capitol building, a close replica of the U.S. Capitol. The women were holding a bedsheet banner and loudly shouting: “Libertad.” “Libertad.”

The Havana building no longer houses Cuba’s parliament; it houses the Cuban Academy of Science. Yet, it remains a powerful icon for Cubans wanting to restore the rule of law and a freely elected, independent legislature…
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By Frank Calzon
September 11, 2011

Four young women holding a banner made from a bedsheet were standing halfway up the huge escalinata that leads into Cuba’s former capitol building, a close replica of the U.S. Capitol. The women were holding a bedsheet banner and loudly shouting: “Libertad.” “Libertad.”

The Havana building no longer houses Cuba’s parliament; it houses the Cuban Academy of Science. Yet, it remains a powerful icon for Cubans wanting to restore the rule of law and a freely elected, independent legislature.

The unusual demonstration attracted about 100 passersby. Finally, a woman, obviously connected to the government, and a uniformed police officer approached and grabbed one of the demonstrators. In a typical civil-disobedience response, all of the demonstrators sat down and refused to turn over their banner. Amazingly, the crowd began to yell: “Let them go. Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t abuse the women.” The police officer and government woman retreated, but about 30 uniformed officers arrived to arrest the demonstrators, drag them into police vehicles and speed away.

Cuban authorities are seeing a new face of opposition. Cubans call it “the Resistance” and spell it with a capital R, the same way the word “Revolution” is capitalized in official state media. Moreover, the Resistance is employing the same tactics of civil disobedience used by Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders in the United States. One small dissident organization in Cuba is named for Rosa Parks.

Surveillance Video: Subway double shooting near Lauderhill: Warning: Graphic video

What is also new is that the Castro brothers’ regime no longer enjoys the impunity of anonymity. With new technology, the regime’s actions are now at risk of public exposure. Hardly a week goes by without a “freedom video” reaching the outside world.

Despite the fact that the island has one of the world’s lowest rates of access to the Internet, there appear to be a growing number of dissident bloggers.

Blogger Yoani Sanchez has received numerous international awards, including the 2009 Maria Moors Cabot Prize from New York’s Columbia University. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and she has exchanged messages with President Obama. One way Cuban bloggers gain access to the Internet is by posing as foreigners and visiting Cuba’s hotels. Flash drives are used to distribute items of interest gleaned from the Internet.

Among the most courageous Resistance groups is the Ladies in White — mothers, sisters, wives of some 75 writers, independent journalists, librarians, and human-rights activists rounded up and thrown in prison in 2003 by the Castros’ regime. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mary O’Grady observed that “rocks, iron bars, and sticks are no match for the gladiolas and courage of these peaceful Cuban protesters.”

Then there are the punk rockers. Their music is banned in Cuba, just as similar music was banned by communist regimes in East Berlin and Prague. Still the Resistance is heard.

Gorki Aguila, the founder of the band Porno para Ricardo, was imprisoned but released after a sizable international protest. The band’s provocative music and lyrics continue to mock the regime and its leaders. Its videos can be seen on YouTube, and having once been jailed, Gorki says he’s no longer afraid.

What the samisdat movement was for Soviet dissidents, who copied and passed censored and banned books and articles, what German Protestant churches were to the defeat Erich of Honecker and East German communism, and what the students and artists who gathered around Vaclav Havel to overturn communism in Czechoslovakia, is what Cuba’s communists are seeing and hearing from young dissident rockers, bloggers, and the Ladies in White.

All courageously stand up to face down the Castros’ brutality and security forces and give voice and hope to Cubans that they can break the political and economic paralysis imposed by the Castros and live instead in the world of the 21st century.

Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Arlington, Va.

BY FRANK CALZON

When pondering U.S. relations with Cuba and how to effect democratic change there, it helps to retain the perspective of history. Just sending athletes to Cuba to engage in some “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” won’t change Cuba.
In reading the recent spate of articles suggesting American athletes be sent to Cuba to supplement hard-nose diplomats, I was reminded of a story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward. The KGB had painted “Fresh Meat, Fresh Vegetables” signs on trucks taking victims of the Stalinist repression to Siberia. An American journalist returning to his hotel room, after attending an official reception, saw the trucks and the next morning sent a story to his newspaper that the distribution of fruits and fresh vegetables had improved recently in Moscow. A single glimpse often leads to false conclusions…
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The Miami Herald

Friday, 09.09.11

BY FRANK CALZON

When pondering U.S. relations with Cuba and how to effect democratic change there, it helps to retain the perspective of history. Just sending athletes to Cuba to engage in some “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” won’t change Cuba.

In reading the recent spate of articles suggesting American athletes be sent to Cuba to supplement hard-nose diplomats, I was reminded of a story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward. The KGB had painted “Fresh Meat, Fresh Vegetables” signs on trucks taking victims of the Stalinist repression to Siberia. An American journalist returning to his hotel room, after attending an official reception, saw the trucks and the next morning sent a story to his newspaper that the distribution of fruits and fresh vegetables had improved recently in Moscow. A single glimpse often leads to false conclusions.

So, what is happening in Cuba? Do you know? Do you know about the increase in repression, about the police beatings of the protesting women, who dress in white and walk together on Sundays in quiet rebuke of the Cuban government’s repression?

And what was happening in the 1970s when ping-pong diplomacy captured public attention as China was splitting with the Soviet Union and then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and China’s Premier Zhou En-lai were laying the groundwork for President Richard Nixon’s visit? Might the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and subsequent economic reforms have had some influence on events?
During the 1970s, the Soviet Union was funneling billions of dollars in aid to Cuba, and Fidel Castro was dispatching tens of thousands of Cuban troops to Africa to fight in Soviet Union-supported wars. Castro was also supporting training camps for international terrorists. He had begun playing an active role in the anti-Israeli coalition at the United Nations. Could Castro’s long and documented record of anti-American actions and the continued domestic repression in Cuba today possibly account for and justify what is being denigrated as the “hard-line anti-Castro” views of Cuban Americans?

Why is it “hard-line” to demand the end of a murderous, anti-American dictatorship off the coast of the United States? Why isn’t it an “entirely reasonable” point of view? Was Martin Luther King Jr. an unreasonable “hard-liner,” when he insisted on “desegregation, now”?

No amount of agitprop suffices to obscure the facts: President Obama has made many conciliatory gestures, which have resulted in the Castro brothers’ regime receiving hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when Cuba was on the brink of bankruptcy and foreign companies doing business in Cuba were prohibited from withdrawing their funds from Cuba’s banks. Our president extended an open hand of friendship to the Castro brothers and asked in exchange that the Cuban government lower its high taxes on the remittances that Cuban Americans send to relatives and to initiate significant economic reforms. Havana ignored the president’s requests. It also continues to imprison an American, sentenced to 15 years by a kangaroo court for donating a laptop computer to a group of Cuban dissidents.

In order to believe Ping-Pong diplomacy will change Havana, one must suspend all critical faculties and be willing to ignore Havana’s alliances with Iran, Syria and North Korea. The fawning coverage given to Libya’s embattled despot Moammar Gadhafi by Granma, the Cuban government’s official newspaper is indicative of another of the unsavory and dangerous facets of today’s Cuban government.
It is Cuba that needs to catch up to the 21st Century. The island has been stuck in the 1950s not because of U.S. policy but because of economic and political decisions made by Fidel Castro.

Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Arlington, Va.

The Center for a Free Cuba’s executive director Frank Calzon weighs in on President Obama’s new Cuba policy, and lays down the facts on what effects these changes will bring.

By Frank Calzon
January 16, 2011

It was more than 50 years ago, October 1960, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed a trade embargo against Cuba. Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, already designated as Fidel’s successor, had been in power less than two years but already had confiscated American and Cuban companies, welcomed the Soviet Union into Havana, initiated subversion against neighboring countries, executed many protesting Cubans, blamed the United States for the island’s misfortunes, and led mesmerized masses in chants of “Yankee, Go Home!”

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By Frank Calzon
January 16, 2011

It was more than 50 years ago, October 1960, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed a trade embargo against Cuba. Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, already designated as Fidel’s successor, had been in power less than two years but already had confiscated American and Cuban companies, welcomed the Soviet Union into Havana, initiated subversion against neighboring countries, executed many protesting Cubans, blamed the United States for the island’s misfortunes, and led mesmerized masses in chants of “Yankee, Go Home!”

“There is a limit to what the United States … can endure. That limit has now been reached,” Eisenhower said when Washington severed diplomatic relations. Havana saw it differently: “Now the Yankees will learn to drink bitter coffee,” Ernesto “Che” Guevara said when the United States, which had paid Cuba prices higher than the world market, stopped buying Cuba’s sugar.

Today the embargo remains, but very different from those 1960 sanctions. It has been repeatedly modified, and American companies now annually sell Cuba more than half a billion dollars in agricultural products. Still the Castro brothers cling to communism and have reduced Cuba’s economy to that of a beggar state that has frozen bank accounts of foreign companies doing business in Cuba and depends on exile remittances and the charity of Hugo Chávez.

Two years ago, President Obama offered a hand of friendship by lifting remaining restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba by Cuban-Americans. He expected the Castro brothers to open their still-clenched fists, but was rebuffed. Havana grabbed the dollars but continued its anti-American jihad with Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela — and then provided diplomatic support to North Korea and Iran. Cuba even detained Alan Gross, a USAID contractor. Gross has now spent a year in prison in Cuba for the “crime” of giving his laptop and a cell phone to Cubans.

What the Castros want is U.S. credits and access to international financial institutions. What they don’t want to do is make the fundamental economic reforms those institutions demand. Granted, Raúl Castro has agreed that Cuban barbers may work “independently,” and Cuban housewives can sell paper flowers on street corners. They are meaningless changes: Havana — like North Korea — disdains fundamental changes in the Cuban economy and routinely resorts to intimidation to obtain concessions. In particular, the regime is now demanding President Obama silence U.S. radio and TV broadcasts to the island and abandon U.S. efforts to promote democracy in Cuba.

The European Parliament has stood tall against similar efforts: It has maintained its “Common Position,” conditioning trade benefits, and normalization of relations to significant reforms on the island.

When the embargo was first enacted, Cuba’s leaders were happy to get rid of America’s “pernicious” ties to the island, particularly since the Soviets were willing to provide generous assistance. For many years, Fidel Castro boasted that rather than hurt Cuba, “the blockade has been effective in favor of the revolution.”

“At best,” he said, the embargo was the subject of “scorn and laughter.” In 1985 he said that “economic relations with the United States would not imply any basic benefit for Cuba, no essential benefit.” Cuba, Fidel Castro said, would produce “more milk than Holland, and more cheese than France.” Enough milk indeed “to fill Havana’s bay.”

By 1986, he was blustering that the Soviets and socialist countries “pay Cuba much higher prices and sell their products to us at lower prices, but also charge us much lower interest for credits and reschedule our debt for 10, 15, or 20 years without interest. In fact, what are we supposed to do? There is an old folk saying that goes, ‘Don’t swap a cow for a goat!’”

The Castros’ attitude hasn’t changed; neither has their propaganda. Until there’s change in Cuba, there are no discernible reasons for the United States to actually play the role of goat and change its policy toward Cuba.

Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Arlington, Va.

January 7, 2011
by Frank Calzon

This Monday (January 10) will mark one year since the tragic night when 20 some Cuban mental patients died at Havana’s national psychiatric hospital due to a cold spell, according to the Cuban authorities. Human rights leaders on the island told Reuters (January 14, 2010) that “the patients were not properly protected from temperatures that dipped into the low 40s during an unusual extended cold snap on the tropical island…”

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BY FRANK CALZON

Learning about BP’s efforts to free the Libyan terrorist serving a prison sentence for his part in the 1988 bombing of the ill-fated Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, I came to appreciate the Bible’s verse that says “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Eight years after the Pan Am flight was blown up, four men flying two unarmed small Cessna aircraft, in a rescue mission in international airspace over the Florida Straits, were murdered by Cuban warplanes. The four, Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales, died as the result of an international terrorist attack carried out in 1996 by Havana.

Three of them were American citizens, and one was a legal resident of the United States.

Now press reports indicate that BP put profit over justice in the case of the 270 souls — 190 Americans — who were murdered by Moammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship. The deaths, as Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has indicated, meant little to BP when compared with the profits it sought by getting access to Libyan oil. The British government now acknowledges it committed a grave error by releasing the terrorist.

That the crime occurred 22 years ago has not prevented the American people from condemning BP’s disregard for the innocent victims.

Be that as it may, now the Texas Farm Bureau, the National Farmers Union and the chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., are working tirelessly to provide trade benefits, subsidies and export insurance, to be paid by American taxpayers, to the Cuban regime — the regime that awarded medals to the air force officers who committed their barbarous act on the Florida Straits.

But the Cuban officers were not the only ones responsible for the crime. Cuba’s minister of the armed forces at the time was Gen. Raúl Castro. U.S. courts sentenced several Cuban spies linked to the crime. These spies, mind you, were not like the recently exchanged Russian spies; the record shows that they were assigned by Havana to find sites on Florida shores suitable for the landing of arms and personnel, who presumably were not coming to the United States to engage in a humanitarian mission.

One, Gerardo Hernández, is serving in a life sentence in a federal penitentiary. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, espionage and other illegal activities. Another one of the spies, Juan Pablo Roque, fled to Cuba shortly before the two unarmed Cessna aircraft were shot down.

Today we face a well-financed and orchestrated campaign calling on President Obama to set all of the Castro brothers’ spies free. And American companies selling to Havana believe that “selling” to Cuba equals getting paid, and that they are simply engaging in a business deal. Havana, however, is broke, and Spanish investors on the island are not permitted to withdraw their own funds from Cuban government banks, because of Cuba’s liquidity crisis.

Furthermore, trading with Cuba is not like trading elsewhere: There are no Cuban businesses independent of the government, and the Castros believe that when they purchase American grain, they also purchase influence by American companies. Havana believes that those who sell to Cuba have a duty to advance the regime’s interests.

The intersection between justice, American deaths and profits, is lethal to the U.S. national interest. BP played its part in the release of the man who murdered so many Americans over Scotland. American corporate interests would like to conduct business with Havana, as if the Castro brothers’ hands were not soiled with American blood.

The headline in the Times of London read, “Lockerbie bomber `set free for oil.’ ” It remains to be seen whether the murderers of Americans in the Florida Straits will be “set free for grain.”

Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Arlington, Va.