By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on June 12, 2021
Down with the Cuban Adjustment Act. Photo: Bill Hackwell
The insistence with which U.S. government officials repeat that Cuba “is not a priority” is reminiscent of a song by Ricardo Montaner that says more or less the same thing to a scornful love. Only in the case at hand, the facts belie the words.
At a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the State Department’s fiscal year 2022 budget, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken promised to review the appropriation for the office that handles broadcasts to Cuba and coordinates the so-called Radio and Television Martí, as well as Martinoticias.com. This machine of anti-communist persuasion and propaganda received $13 million annually during the Trump administration. After Blinken’s promise to Florida Congressman Mario Diaz Balart, it could receive 20 million in the coming months.
If Cuba is not the priority, why is money still flowing from the US government for “regime change” on the island? Why are the sanctions imposed by the Democrats’ archenemy, Donald Trump, still in place?
U.S. researcher Tracey Eaton recently released documents proving that, in addition to Usaid and NED, CIA fronts according to The New York Times, some of the best-known non-governmental organizations linked to anti-Castro business continue to rely on various government funding sources, share money with each other, and sometimes transfer grants to unidentified sub-recipients. “Tax records also make it clear that hundreds of Cuban activists receive money from U.S. government-funded NGOs each year as part of an extensive democracy promotion campaign…,” comments Eaton.
This industry is not new and the only explanation for why it has been going on for decades, at U.S. taxpayer expense, is that the White House has always given high priority to the attempt to disappear the Cuban revolution and, above all, to the effort to mask those intentions.
In a classic of U.S. television history, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, researcher Erik Barnouw recalls how the CIA trained Cuban mercenaries while creating a brigade of propagandists to justify the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961: “Along Miami’s back streets, the agency began quietly recruiting an army from among Cuban refugees. Included were former Batista adherents, disenchanted former Castro supporters and others. The recruiters said they had nothing to do with the U.S. government, but were employees of a group of wealthy capitalists who were fighting communism and had friends in Washington…. The recruits felt that the U.S. government was behind it and this reassured them. There were jokes about the billionaire from Cuba paying the expenses and perhaps being called ‘Uncle Sam’.”
From then until today the subversion industry has been correctly described as an employment office in Miami, even if the high-flown rhetoric of the expense-coverers says otherwise. Whatever percentage of dollars actually reaches the “dissidents” in Cuba, the bulk of the money goes into the hands of the group that opposes the normalization of relations between the two countries and clamors for the continuation of the blockade. They have spent more than 60 years between asphyxiating sanctions and swindling the taxpayers, which have been a source of suffering for the Cuban people and a shower of gold for crooks like Mario Diaz-Balart and his ilk.
Even if they behave worse than Donald Trump when it comes to Cuba, there is no chance for the Democrats to win the vote of the anti-Castro Republicans. Trumpism is getting ready to return and this is well known to Diaz-Balart, son of a minister of dictator Fulgencio Batista. He and another Florida congresswoman, María Elvira Salazar, have been singled out this week in an investigation published by the Miami Herald as responsible for spreading “intentional disinformation” on local radio by proclaiming that there was fraud in the elections that brought Joe Biden to the presidency.
Blinken has no idea how much we Cubans would like to sing “I was never your priority / nor your center of attention / And I have to assimilate, that if I was there I am no longer / inside your heart”. But as long as dirty money is involved and the Trumpist sanctions remain in place, not even Ricardo Montaner believes that refrain.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English