The US to normalize relations with Cuba

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The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby RocketMan » Wed Dec 17, 2014 2:47 pm

To borrow a turn of phrase from Dick Cheney, my head just exploded.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/d ... aul-castro

The United States and Cuba have ended decades of cold war hostility by agreeing to normalise diplomatic and travel relations after 18 months of secret talks on prisoner releases brokered by the Vatican.


:shock:

And check out that cool customer at the Vatican:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/pope ... -talks-us/

Pope Francis played a vital role in bringing Cuba and the United States to the negotiating table, making a “personal appeal” to the nations’ leaders, a US official said Wednesday.

The pontiff “sent that letter directly to President (Barack) Obama, and separately he communicated through a letter directly to President (Raul) Castro early this summer,” a move that gave “greater impetus and momentum” in the process to normalize relations, the senior administration official said.
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby slimmouse » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:05 pm

Thanks RM.

No mention of sanctions being lifted?

It certainly should be interesting to watch how all this plays out
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby RocketMan » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:09 pm

slimmouse » Wed Dec 17, 2014 10:05 pm wrote:Thanks RM.

No mention of sanctions being lifted?

It certainly should be interesting to watch how all this plays out


That requires a change in legislation annnnnnnd...

The US Speaker of the House, the Republican John Boehner, says “relations with the Castro regime should not be revisited, let alone normalized”, in a statement just released from his office.

Boehner, Republican Senators Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham and Democrat Bob Menendez have all indicated they will try to block a push to lift the embargo on Cuba.
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby 82_28 » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:20 pm

I've lived on Earth for 40 years and have yet to understand this Cuba thing. It has never made any sense just on a gut level. Also the Rubio take on it is absurd. If you're going to normalize "relations" then fucking normalize them. It's not that hard I wouldn't think.
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby Elihu » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:30 pm

I've lived on Earth for 40 years and have yet to understand this Cuba thing. It has never made any sense just on a gut level.
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby Searcher08 » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:42 pm

On the channel4 news here, some US Dem chap started talking about what normalising relations actually meant - he referred to "... there is much oil and gas off Cuba and they are worried about oil spills and we need our oil company execs to get over there and educate them and help them..." at which point I just larfed...
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby NeonLX » Wed Dec 17, 2014 4:59 pm

Searcher08 » Wed Dec 17, 2014 2:42 pm wrote:On the channel4 news here, some US Dem chap started talking about what normalising relations actually meant - he referred to "... there is much oil and gas off Cuba and they are worried about oil spills and we need our oil company execs to get over there and educate them and help them..." at which point I just larfed...


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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby cptmarginal » Wed Dec 17, 2014 8:50 pm

Castro will soon be dead, Chavez is already dead. The American financial press that wanted to project this image that things would be a cakewalk in Venezuela sans Chavez were all wrong. The economic hitmen orchestrating the political strife there are still not able to totally push through their agenda. They will be equally disappointed to find out that Cuba is always going to resist empire as well. But everyone there better expect that a big push is coming to that little island as soon as the Castro brothers are out of the picture. Their carefully groomed successor will definitely be challenged.

(and a big Fuck You to those economic hitman assholes anyway)
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby cptmarginal » Wed Dec 17, 2014 9:04 pm

The American Prisoner Alan Gross and Cuban-American Relations

Q. Who is Alan Gross?

A. Alan P. Gross, 65, is a former government contractor from Maryland who was detained in Havana on Dec. 3, 2009, for delivering communications equipment to religious groups. Cuba sentenced Mr. Gross to 15 years in prison for plotting to “destroy the revolution” (distributing satellite communications equipment is illegal in Cuba). His imprisonment was a main point of contention between the American and Cuban governments.

Various proxies for the American government have gone to Cuba hoping to secure his release, including Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, and former President Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Gross’s wife, Judy, also appealed to the Cuban government to release her husband, saying he was in poor health.

Q. How did imprisonment affect relations between Cuba and the United States?

A. The arrest, which came about nine months after President Obama loosened restrictions on the ability of Cuban-Americans to visit the island and send money to family members, sent a chill through Washington and Havana. Mr. Gross’s case became the latest obstacle to improved relations between the two countries, which share a long history of mutual mistrust and missed opportunities to reconcile.


Et cetera. I like how none of the questions pertain to what Alan Gross was actually doing in Cuba.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/world ... 3cuba.html

The United States has portrayed the contractor, Alan P. Gross, 61, as a suburban Washington humanitarian who was merely bringing satellite telephone equipment, which could be used to bypass heavy Internet restrictions in Cuba, to the small community of Cuban Jews when he was detained in December 2009.

But Cuban authorities said American officials, who eventually acknowledged that Mr. Gross lacked a proper visa and was working on a secretive United States Agency for International Development, or Usaid, program to expand Internet access, must have known such equipment was barred in Cuba without a permit.

They accused Mr. Gross of being a spy, tried him and convicted him of taking part in “a subversive project of the U.S. government that aimed to destroy the revolution through the use of communications systems out of the control of authorities.”


Sounds pretty shady to me. Especially glaring what with all of the recent leaked information regarding psyop campaigns in Cuba, starting several months back with The Intercept:

The “Cuban Twitter” Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket By Glenn Greenwald

Not that we couldn't just guess that this sort of thing was happening. It's not exactly groundbreaking information, but very appreciated nonetheless.

But the timing of this most recent item was obviously related to the coming announcement of normalized relations:

US agency infiltrated Cuban hip-hop scene to spark youth unrest - Investigation finds USAid recruited musicians ‘to break information blockade’ as part of covert social project
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby cptmarginal » Wed Dec 17, 2014 9:11 pm

The Cuban spy at the center of the Obama-Castro deal

By Michael Isikoff

They were known as La Red Avispa, or the Wasp Network — a group of Cuban undercover agents who sneaked into South Florida in the 1990s and were arrested by the FBI for spying for Fidel Castro’s government.

But today, Gerardo Hernandez — the group’s ringleader, who has been serving a double life sentence — and two of his associates were released from U.S. federal prisons and returned home as national heroes, as part of a breakthrough agreement between Cuba’s communist government and the U.S. that is already provoking a storm of controversy. For some, the release of Hernandez and his fellow operatives is an important confidence-building step toward what could be a landmark diplomatic agreement.

“This is a seminal moment in American history,” Martin Garbus, a New York lawyer hired by the Cuban government to free the Wasp Network members, told Yahoo News in a telephone interview. “It’s a landmark — the beginning of a normal relationship between Cuba and the United States.”

But for anti-Castro hard-liners, the deal is a betrayal and capitulation to communist tyranny. “It’s absurd, and it’s part of a long record of coddling dictators and tyrants that this administration has established,” said Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

As part of the agreement, Alan Gross, a jailed American contractor who has been sitting in a Cuban prison for more than four years after being convicted of distributing sophisticated satellite equipment to Cuba’s tiny Jewish community, flew home to Washington — the result of intensive efforts by the State Department and members of Congress to free him. U.S. officials said Gross was released on “humanitarian grounds” and that separately, in a formal spy-for-spy swap, the Cubans released an unidentified American espionage agent who had been “instrumental” in identifying and disrupting Cuban intelligence operatives in the U.S. — including the members of the Wasp Network. A U.S. intelligence official called the trade a “fitting closure to this Cold War chapter of U.S.-Cuban relations.”

But for Cuba, the release of Hernandez and his fellow convicted spies, Antonio Guerrero and Ramon Labanino, is a major diplomatic coup. Known originally as members of the Cuba Five (two of the convicted spies had already been released), they were household names in their island homeland — the subjects of mass demonstrations, their pictures on billboards and posters.

Schoolchildren were taught to idolize them. Nobel Prize winners and celebrities like Danny Glover — even former President Jimmy Carter — joined an international campaign to push for their release, convinced they had been unjustly tried and convicted in a South Florida courtroom poisoned by anti-Castro hysteria.

And their leader was also unrepentant. “I regret that I got caught,” Hernandez said with a smile when this reporter interviewed him in a federal prison in California two years ago and asked if he had any regrets. “I would do it again.”

Yes, he acknowledged on tape in a follow-up telephone interview, he and his colleagues “violated some U.S. laws.” They had failed to register as foreign agents with the Justice Department. They also came to the U.S. with “fake passports” and “fake identities.” But, he added emphatically, “we act out of necessity.”

As Hernandez and senior Cuban officials, whom I also interviewed, told the story, the Wasp Network members did not come to Florida to spy on the U.S. government (although the charges against them included conducting surveillance of U.S. military installations). Instead, they argued, they were fighting terrorism. Specifically, their principal mission was to infiltrate anti-Castro exile groups in South Florida that had been implicated in terror attacks inside Cuba — the bombing of Cuba Flight 455 over the Caribbean in 1976 (which killed 73 passengers, including teenage members of the Cuban national fencing team) as well as a series of hotel bombings in Havana in 1997 that killed an Italian businessman and disrupted Cuba’s nascent tourist industry.

“Cuba doesn’t have drones to neutralize the terrorists abroad,” Hernandez told me. “They need to send people to gather information and protect the Cuban people from these terrorist actions... I think it’s the same feeling that Americans have that defend their country and love their country when they go to infiltrate al-Qaida and send information here to avoid the terrorist acts.”

He added, “And the U.S. has to understand that Cuba has been involved in the war against terrorism for 50 years.”

Hernandez, 49, sporting a trim goatee, came off as a warm and sympathetic figure when I interviewed him. He showed no spite toward the U.S. government and displayed a sense of humor, laughing heartily at times about his predicament despite having served, at that point, 14 years in prison and facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars.


Continued at link
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Re: The US to normalize relations with Cuba

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Dec 20, 2014 12:57 am

Assata Shakur: What Does New U.S.-Cuba Pact Mean for Exiled Black Panther Wanted in New Jersey?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYgjHnF7kJg
Martin Garbus, considered a leading attorney in the United States. Time Magazine calls him "one of the best trial lawyers in the country," while the National Law Journal has named him one of the country’s top 10 litigators.


Authorities in New Jersey have said they hope a historic warming of ties between the United States and Cuba will help them capture and imprison Black Panther Assata Shakur. "We view any changes in relations with Cuba as an opportunity to bring her back to the United States to finish her sentence for the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973," said State Police Superintendent Colonel Rick Fuentes. The encounter left both the officer and a fellow Black Panther, Zayd Malik Shakur, dead. Shakur has said she was shot by police with both arms in the air, and then again from the back. She was sentenced to life in prison but managed to escape and flee to Cuba, where she has lived since 1984. What will happen to Shakur now? We put the question to two attorneys: Michael Ratner and Martin Garbus.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, I wanted to switch gears before the end of the show and go back to Cuba—massive news this week about the beginning of normalization of relations. And I wanted to ask you about the issue of Assata Shakur. Authorities in New Jersey have said they hope a historic warming of ties between the U.S. and Cuba will help them capture and imprison Black Panther Assata Shakur. In a statement, State Police Superintendent Colonel Rick Fuentes said, "We view any changes in relations with Cuba as an opportunity to bring her back to the United States to finish her sentence for the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973."

The encounter left both the officer and a fellow Black Panther, Zayd Malik Shakur, dead. Assata Shakur has said she was shot by police with both arms in the air, and then again from the back. She was sentenced to life in prison, managed to escape, fled to Cuba, where she has lived since 1984. I got to see her there a few years later. In 1998, Democracy Now! aired Assata Shakur reading an open letter to Pope John Paul II during his trip to Cuba. She wrote the message after New Jersey state troopers sent the pope a letter asking him to call for her extradition.

ASSATA SHAKUR: I later joined the Black Panther Party, an organization that was targeted by the COINTELPRO program, a program that was set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to eliminate all political opposition to the U.S. government’s policies, to destroy the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, to discredit activists and to eliminate potential leaders.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Assata Shakur reading an open letter to, at the time, Pope John Paul II. Martin Garbus, what will happen to Assata Shakur?

MARTIN GARBUS: She will not be returned. Fidel Castro, when she came there, said that she would be allowed to stay in Cuba indefinitely. I had a meeting about a month ago with five congresspeople, including Representative Barbara Lee, and they were also absolutely clear that they would oppose any attempts on the United States to succeed that would get Assata Shakur back. So, to me, it’s absolutely clear she’s not coming back.

AMY GOODMAN: Black Panther Sundiata Acoli has been ordered released on parole, a state New Jersey—appeals court in New Jersey, after more than four decades in prison, but New Jersey has appealed, so he’s remaining in prison. The significance of this, Michael Ratner?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, New Jersey has been outrageous about these cases. I mean, think about Assata’s case. And think about driving while black in New Jersey. Think about what’s happened from Ferguson to Garner in New York. And I ask you, "What do we think about what happened to Assata?" And I agree with Marty: There is a 100 percent chance that she will not be forced out of Cuba. A hundred percent. I don’t even question it. But, of course, you see New Jersey. They’ve raised the reward on her to $10 million. The FBI put her on their most wanted list, etc. So they’re clearly after her. But I’m completely confident, as Marty is, that the Cubans will not have her extradited to the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: We will—

MARTIN GARBUS: If Menendez is indicted, that will be helpful.

MICHAEL RATNER: What? I’m sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’ll link to our pieces—what did you say?

MARTIN GARBUS: If Menendez is indicted, that will be helpful.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll link to our pieces on Assata Shakur at democracynow.org. That does it for our show. Michael Ratner, thanks so much for joining us, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. As well, Martin Garbus, thanks so much for being with us, a leading attorney in this country.
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