Cuba’s request for USSR protection from U.S. imperialist interventions was not unfounded. Only the year before, in April 1961, the U.S. had suffered a spectacular defeat at the Bay of Pigs, when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded paramilitary operation to overthrow Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution was thwarted in less than 72 hours and 1,200 mercenaries were taken prisoner by the Cubans.

The plan was carried out by the Kennedy administration, although concocted by the CIA during the Eisenhower administration. Following the U.S. defeat, Kennedy proposed social and economic aid for Latin America under the Alliance for Progress programme – a plan which the U.S. hoped would bring the region under increased dependence on Washington and possibly prevent other socialist revolutions in Latin America.

As Fidel stated in his autobiography, “He [Kennedy] realized that social and economic factors in the region could well lead to a radical revolution across the continent. There could be a second Cuban Revolution, but on a continent-wide scale, and perhaps even more radical.”

Fidel’s acceptance of having medium-range missiles in Cuba was, in his words, “a measure meant to protect Cuba from a direct attack and simultaneously strengthen the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp.

The missiles were detected by the UN on the night between the 14^th and the 15^th of October 1962, with the then U.S. President John F. Kennedy  warning that the Soviet Union should withdraw the missiles or face a nuclear war. Kennedy also imposed a naval blockade on Cuba, preventing the installation of further missiles on the island.

A declassified U.S. document following the discovery of the missiles on Cuban soil warned, “I assume you will recall that President Kennedy said a year and a half ago that only two points were non-negotiable between the Western Hemisphere and Cuba – the Soviet tie and aggressive actions in Latin America.”

The U.S. threat was renewed on September 13 by Kennedy: “If at any time the Communist build-up in Cuba were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way… or if Cuba should ever… become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”

On October 25, the U.S. proposed withdrawing its missiles from Turkey, which posed a threat to the Soviet Union, in return for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal of their missiles from Cuba. Notably, the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey was kept secret, in an attempt to twist the outcome as a U.S. victory over the USSR during the Cold War.

Fidel considered the compromise as diverting attention away from the issue of Cuba’s sovereignty and the right to defend itself against U.S. imperialist interventions. One major reason for the political discord on behalf of Fidel would have been the agreement being reached without consulting the Cuban government.

For his part, Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy reiterating that the Soviet Union’s installation of missiles on Cuban territory was done “because Cuba and the Cuban people were constantly under the continuous threat of an invasion of Cuba.” Khrushchev also outlined that the Soviet Union’s actions were defensive not offensive – the latter being the U.S.’s misrepresentation.

Letters exchanged between Khrushchev and Fidel indicate that the Soviet Union sought guarantees that the U.S. “not only will not invade Cuba with their own forces, but will not allow their allies to do so.” However, Khrushchev warned, “Since an agreement is in sight, the Pentagon is looking for a pretext to thwart it.”

A reversal of roles in the current scenario between Russia and Ukraine has NATO and its allies escalating hostile diplomacy. On what grounds is guarding a nation’s borders from NATO violence a security threat?

A war of annihilation is a war in which the goal is the complete obliteration of the state and the extermination of its people. It is defined as a radicalized form of warfare in which “all psycho-physical limits” are abolished and the strategic goals are pursued by any means necessary. It is war without rules, restrictions or moral constraints. The United States is in the early phases of a war of annihilation against Russia the aim of which is the total destruction of the economy, the culture, the population and the nation.

“We have seen 5 waves of NATO expansion. Now NATO is in Romania and Poland and they are deploying their missile-attack systems there. That’s what we are talking about. You need to understand, we are not threatening anyone. Russia did not come to the US borders or the UK borders. No. You came to our borders and now you are saying, ‘Ukraine will join NATO and will deploy their systems there. They will deploy their military bases and their attack-systems.’ We are concerned about our security. Do you understand what that means?” Vladimir Putin, press conference, You Tube

Question– Is there a justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

Answer– Yes, there is. Russia was being threatened by developments in Ukraine, so it told Ukraine to either stop what it was doing or suffer the consequences. Ukraine chose to ignore those warnings, so Russia invaded. That is basically what happened.

Question– But how does that justify the invasion, after all, Ukraine is a sovereign country and sovereign countries should be able to do whatever they want to on their own territory, right?

Answer– No, that’s wrong. Ukraine does not have the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory. Ukraine and more than 50 other countries signed treaties (“at the OSCE summits in Istanbul in 1999 and in Astana in 2010”) agreeing that they would not strengthen their own security at the expense of other’s security. This is called the “indivisibility of security”, but in practical terms it just means that you can’t put artillery pieces and tanks on your driveway and point them at my house. Because that would undermine my security. Do you understand? The same rule applies to nations.

If we accept your reasoning on the matter, then we’d have to conclude that John Kennedy had no right to challenge Fidel Castro for putting nuclear weapons in Cuba. But he did have the right because Castro’s action put the US at risk of a nuclear attack. In other words, Castro had no right to improve his own security at the expense of the United States. This is no different. Putin has every right to defend the safety and security of the Russian people, in fact, that is what people expect of their leaders.

Question– You’re not making any sense. Putin invaded Ukraine, therefore, Putin is an aggressor.

Answer– I disagree, but instead of arguing about it, let’s use an analogy:

Let’s say, I hold a gun to your head and threaten to blow your brains out. But you quickly grab the gun and shoot me in the leg. Who is to blame for that incident?

If you think that I am responsible, you’re right. The victim, in this case, simply reacted in a way that would best ensure his own safety. That’s called self-defense which is perfectly legal.

This same standard can be applied to Russia, whose “Special Military Operation” is a preemptive step to defend its own national security. Russia has no designs on Ukrainian territory nor does it seek to mettle in Ukraine’s internal affairs. Russia’s sole objective is to end the existential crisis that was created by Washington. It was Washington that encouraged NATO to pump Ukraine full of lethal weapons. It was Washington that provided arms for the far-right extremists that were threatening ethnic Russians in east Ukraine. It was Washington that coaxed Ukrainian President Zelensky to jettison Minsk and to publicly support the development of nuclear weapons. It was Washington that launched the coup in 2014 that deposed the democratically-elected president and replaced him with a US-puppet. And, it was Washington that has done everything in its power to isolate and demonize Russia following provocations that were entirely of its own making. In short, it was Washington that held a gun to Russia’s head and threatened to blow its brains out.

Can’t you see that or are you so brainwashed you think this fiasco started when Putin’s tanks rolled across the border? Even the most avid CNN propagandist doesn’t believe that nonsense. The crisis began with the relentless buildup of weaponry followed by one calculated incitement after the other. Russia was deliberately and repeatedly provoked. No one who’s followed events closely would dispute that.

By the way, Putin has never talked about toppling the government in Kiev and replacing it with a Moscow-backed stooge. No. His plan is aimed at “demilitarization” and “denazification.” Why?

Because those are his only objectives. He wants to destroy the weapons that NATO and the US have been shipping to Ukraine (to fuel the conflict) and he wants to eradicate the Nazi militants that are the sworn enemy of the Russian Federation.

Is that unreasonable? Do you think the US would act any differently if Mexico allowed Al Qaida and ISIS cells to operate openly in Guadalajara or Acapulco? Don’t be ridiculous. They’d bomb the entire region to smithereens without batting an eye.

Would you call that “an invasion,” too?

No, Washington would probably call it a “Special Military Operation” just like Russia is calling its intervention a “Special Military Operation.”

The problem here is not what Russia is doing, the problem is that a different standard is always applied to the United States. All I’m asking is that people engage their own critical thinking skills—ignore the hysterical braying of the media—and make their own judgement on the matter.

Russia did what anyone would do; it reacted in a way that would best ensure its own safety. By definition, that is self-defense. It removed itself from the threat of great harm or death, and is now in the process of reestablishing its own security. Ukraine chose to ignore Russia’s legitimate security concerns, and now Ukraine is paying the price. Here’s is an excellent summary of the events preceeding the Russian operation from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

“The narrative in the media, which presents the invasion as an unprovoked action, is a fabrication that conceals the aggressive actions by the NATO powers, in particular the United States, and its puppets in the Ukrainian government.…

In Europe and Asia, the US pursued a strategy aimed at encircling and subjugating Russia. Directly violating its earlier promises that the Soviet bureaucracy and Russian oligarchy were delusional enough to believe, NATO has expanded to include almost all major countries in Eastern Europe, apart from Ukraine and Belarus.

In 2014, the US orchestrated a far-right coup in Kiev that overthrew a pro-Russian government that had opposed Ukrainian membership in NATO. In 2018, the US officially adopted a strategy of preparing for “great power conflict” with Russia and China. In 2019, it unilaterally withdrew from the INF Treaty, which banned the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Preparations for war with Russia and the arming of Ukraine were at the center of the Democrats’ first attempt to impeach Donald Trump in 2019.

Over the past year…the Biden administration recklessly escalated provocations against Russia….The key to understanding this is the US-Ukrainian Charter on Strategic Partnership, signed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on November 10, 2021….”

The Charter endorsed Kiev’s military strategy from March 2021, which explicitly proclaimed the military goal of “retaking” Crimea and the separatist-controlled Donbass, and thereby dismissed the Minsk Agreements of 2015, which were the official framework for settling the conflict in East Ukraine….

Washington also explicitly endorsed “Ukraine’s efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability,” that is, its integration into NATO’s military command structures.

Ukraine’s non-membership in NATO is and was, for all intents and purposes, a fiction. At the same time, the NATO powers exploited the fact that Ukraine is not officially a member as an opportunity to stoke a conflict with Russia that would not immediately develop into a world war.

The US was fully aware that fascist forces in Ukraine would play the principal role of shock troops against both the Russian military and opposition within the population….Their descendants, from the fascist Svoboda Party to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, are now deeply integrated into the Ukrainian state and military and are being heavily armed with NATO weapons.

It will fall to historians to uncover what promises the Ukrainian oligarchy received from Washington in exchange for its pledge to turn the country into a killing field and launching pad for war with Russia. But one thing is clear: The Kremlin and Russian general staff could not but read this document as the announcement of an impending war.

Throughout 2021 and in the weeks immediately preceding the invasion, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned that Ukraine’s integration into NATO and its arming by the Western powers constituted a “red line” for Russia, and demanded “security guarantees” from the US and NATO.

However, the US contemptuously dismissed all these statements, and NATO staged one major military exercise on Russia’s borders after another..., in the weeks leading up to the war, while constantly warning of an impending Russian invasion, the Biden administration made no diplomatic effort to avoid it and instead did everything it could to provoke it.” (“The US-Ukrainian Strategic Partnership of November 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine”, World Socialist Web Site)

So, what can we glean from this summary of events?

We can see that Washington did everything in its power to undermine Russia’s security with the explicit aim of drawing Moscow into a war in Ukraine. That was the objective from the get-go. Washington knew that NATO membership for Ukraine was one of Putin’s “red lines”, so the US foreign policy establishment decided to use Putin’s red lines against him. They decided to make Ukraine a NATO member in everything but name which (they assumed) would be sufficient provocation for an invasion. That was the plan, and the plan worked.

In the last year, there has been a constant flow of lethal weapons to Ukraine; heavy weapons that can destroy tanks and shoot down planes. At the same time, Ukraine’s combat troops and officer corps have received regular training from NATO advisors. They have also engaged in frequent joint-military excercises with NATO units inside Ukraine and in other locations around Europe. (At least 10 more of these joint-military drills are scheduled for this year alone.) For the last 12 months, NATO specialists have been almost constantly on Ukrainian territory while their troop control system has already been fully-integrated into NATO. “This means that NATO headquarters can issue direct commands to the Ukrainian armed forces, even to their separate units and squads.”

Also, Ukraine’s “network of airfields have been upgraded while its airspace is open to flights by US strategic and reconnaissance aircraft and drones that conduct surveillance over Russian territory.”

In short, “Ukraine’s non-membership in NATO is (largely) a fiction”, as the WSWS’s author points out. The country has been stealthily integrated into the Alliance in every way excluding a formal declaration of membership. As a result, Russia faces a hostile army and its military infrastructure on its western border posing an existential danger to the nation’s survival. In Putin’s own words, “NATO’s military infrastructure is a knife to our throat.”

So, Putin’s analysis is essentially the same as our own, that is, that Russia is acting in self defense. Putin was merely grabbing the gun that Washington had pointed at his head. Was that wrong? Should entire populations have to live in constant fear for their lives so the US can pursue its geopolitical agenda without interruption?

No, every country deserves basic security and protection from the threat of violence. Russia is no different than anyone else in that regard. And when those basic security concerns are shrugged off by puppets in T-shirts (like Zelensky), then countries have to take matters into their own hands. What other choice do they have? National security remains the highest priority of the state. Every state! It is unfortunate that the “guarantor of global security” is also (in the words of Martin Luther King) “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” But that is sad irony of our current predicament.

But why—you may ask—has the US gone through so much trouble to prod Putin into invading Ukraine, after all, it is the Ukrainian people who are going to suffer the most just as it is the country that is likely to be a staging ground for disruptive and bloody NATO military operations for years to come? What is the strategic objective here?

Here’s how political analyst and former Member of the European Parliament, Nick Griffin, summed it up in a recent article at the Unz Review. He said:

“The fundamental targets of the NATO warmongers in this crisis are not… Russia, but Germany, and China’s One Belt, One Road initiative. They are trying to keep Germany down, and China out; failure to do both means that the US will become an isolated rust-belt island thousands of miles away from the core economic block of the world….

The same development also spells the forthcoming end of the dollar as the world’s financial reserve currency.……. NATO’s aggression towards Russia is not born of confidence but of fear. In just three decades, we’ve gone from the ‘End of History’ to the looming end of the Dollar Empire….

The attempt to force Russia into war in Ukraine… is not really about promoting the geopolitical interest of the Dollar Empire – it is about its very survival.

(This is why) They are indeed desperate for war!” (“Ukraine Implementing Minsk Accords & Ending Conflict ‘Very Last’ Thing US, UK Want, Ex-MEP Says,” Unz Review)

Griffin is right. The war in Ukraine is not about Ukraine, it’s about geopolitics and, in particular, the steady erosion of Washington’s power on the global stage. That’s why we are seeing this wretched attempt to crush Russia on the way to encircling China. It’s pure desperation, and it’s gotten considerably worse since the February 4 summit between Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, when the two leaders announced a new “global governance system,” that would bind Europe and Asia together through “infrastructure connectivity”, high-speed rail, and colaborative distribution of energy resources. Russia and China are allies on the biggest free trade project in history, which is why Uncle Sam is doing everything he can to rock-the-boat. Here’s more from Alfred McCoy’s article at Counterpunch:

“In a landmark 5,300-word statement, Xi and Putin proclaimed the “world is going through momentous changes,” creating a “redistribution of power” and “a growing demand for… leadership” (which Beijing and Moscow clearly intended to provide). After denouncing Washington’s ill-concealed “attempts at hegemony,” the two sides agreed to “oppose the…
interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.”

To build an alternative system for global economic growth in Eurasia, the leaders planned to merge Putin’s projected “Eurasian Economic Union” with Xi’s already ongoing trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to promote “greater interconnectedness between the Asia Pacific and Eurasian regions.” Proclaiming their relations “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era,” an oblique reference to the tense Mao-Stalin relationship, the two leaders asserted that their entente has “no limits… no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.” On strategic issues, the two parties were adamantly opposed to the expansion of NATO, any move toward independence for Taiwan, and “color revolutions” such as the one that had ousted Moscow’s Ukrainian client in 2014.” (“The Geopolitics of the Ukraine War,” Alfred W. McCoy, Counterpunch)

How does this relate to the war in Ukraine?

It shows that Uncle Sam is trying to destroy Russia so he can project power into Central Asia and maintain Washington’s grip on global power. Who is going control the most populous and prosperous region of the next century, Asia? That’s the question that guides Washington’s actions in Ukraine.

Simply put, Washington’s plan is to crush Russia first and then move on to China. This explains why the US has imposed the most comprehensive and vicious sanctions of all time. The gloves have come off and we are beginning to see that Washington is embroiled in a scorched earth campaign to strangle the Russian economy, crash the Russian markets, slash vital oil and gas revenues, freeze foreign reserves, seize privately-owned assets, terminate the flow of foreign capital, torpedo multi-billion dollar pipeline projects, prevent access to the capital markets, send the ruble off a cliff, demonize the Russian leadership and remove Russia from the community of nations. At the same time, the US has increased the flow of lethal weaponry to Ukraine while the CIA continues to advise and train far-right militants who will be used to launch an anti-Russian insurgency.

It should be clear by now, that Washington’s approach to Russia has fundamentally changed. The ferocity of current strategy suggests that we have transitioned from infrequent skirmishes to a full-blown war of annihilation on the Russian state.

unz.com

Economic sanctions against Cuba were discussed in April 1960 by the U.S. government. If the U.S. found it impossible to counter the Cuban Revolution, a memorandum with the subject “The Decline and Fall of Castro” stated, economic hardships should be imposed on the island. “If such a policy as adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

The memorandum noted that the lowest estimate of support for Fidel Castro in 1960 was 50%, and that the majority of Cubans supported their leader.

On February 3, 1962, ignoring the Cuban popular support for the revolution and influenced by the defeat the U.S. and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) suffered at the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy proclaimed the trade embargo between the United States and Cuba, stressing that the U.S. “is prepared to take all the necessary actions to promote national and hemispheric security by isolating the present Government of Cuba and thereby reducing the threat posed by its alignment with the communist powers.”

The U.S. loss of influence in Cuba and later in the region is one major reason why the blockade was imposed. Grassroots support for the Cuban revolution long before it triumphed existed, as the July 26 Movement took up the fight against the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Sixty years later, U.S. President Joe Biden shows no sign of revoking even the restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, let alone broach the subject of the illegal U.S. blockade on the island. The international community fares no better. As long as the majority of UN member states vote annually against the illegal blockade, passing non-binding resolutions that have failed to dent U.S. policy towards Cuba.

On the 60^th anniversary of the blockade, the National Security Archive (NSA) has published a selection of declassified documents, among them a CIA document which states, “In our judgment, the U.S. and OAS economic sanctions, by themselves or in conjunction with other measures, have not met any of their objectives. We also believe that western economic sanctions have almost no chance of compelling the present Cuban leadership – mostly guerrilla warfare veterans in power since the late 1970s – to abandon its policy of exporting revolution.”

Indeed, the Cuban revolution remained a reference to emulate in the region, later eclipsed by then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s concern that Chile’s example – socialist revolution through democratic elections – would pave the way forward in Latin America.

In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act, which outlined U.S. plans for Cuba and specifically stipulated that the illegal blockade would only be lifted once Cuba holds democratic elections and moves towards a free market system. It also made a provision for U.S. interference in Cuban affairs through a so-called “assistance, through appropriate nongovernmental organizations, for the support and organizations to promote nonviolent democratic change in Cuba.”

Two years ago, in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the world lauded Cuba and temporarily called for a lifting to the blockade. Briefly, the world hailed Cuba for thriving under such restrictions, its medical interventions became mainstream news, while the medical brigades brought much needed help to severely impacted countries, including in Europe. When the vaccine race commenced, Cuba was left in the margins even as it developed its own vaccines under difficult circumstances and secured provision for its citizens and countries in the region. The cry to end the blockade was forgotten, diplomacy once again followed the Western model of capitulating to U.S. interests, and Cuba was left once again to fend on its own, as it also did when the U.S. once again attempted to destabilize Cuba through protests and the world ignored the blockade in its haste to appease the U.S.

Is the U.S. in a position to maintain the embargo upon the pretext of bringing democracy to Cuba with its record in destabilising secure states, even those upholding democracy, such as Chile under Salvador Allende for example, and more recently, Bolivia? Proclaiming human rights through atrocious acts constitutes subversion and it is unlikely that Cubans, with or without Fidel Castro, will forget the U.S. treachery in a hurry.

On January 28, Cubans celebrated the 169^th anniversary of Jose Marti’s birth – the Cuban poet and revolutionary upon whose values the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro was founded. In the aftermath of the attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 when being interrogated by dictator Fulgencio Batista’s officers, Fidel described Marti as “the intellectual author of this revolution.” In 2010, Fidel had declared, “I can only bear witness to the way in which the heroic city [of Santiago de Cuba] fell in the hands of the Rebel Army on January 1st, 1959. Then, Marti’s ideas triumphed in our country!”

Marti’s legacy prevails in Cuba. Fidel’s remembrance is of immense value, given that the Cuban revolution’s premise for mobilisation against colonial and imperial interests derives from recognition the anti-colonial struggle in Cuba started prior to the emergence of the July 26 Movement. Like Marti, the Cuban revolution also recognised the importance of regional liberation, as it refused to limit its struggle to Cuba but instead expanded according to necessity and political will. The Cuban revolutionary consciousness, therefore, is an ongoing process as Marti had indicated in his writings – political independence from Spanish colonial rule and later, US interests in Cuba – would require an entire alternation in the island’s socio-political structure.

When Fidel was imprisoned and awaiting trial for the Moncada barracks attack, the authorities prevented him from accessing any of Marti’s literature, along with other books which could have helped to prepare his defense. In his “History Will Absolve Me” speech, Fidel quoted Marti: “A true man does not seek the path where advantage lies, but rather the path where duty lies, and this is the only practical man, whose dream of today will be the law of tomorrow, because he who has looked back on the essential course of history and has seen flaming and bleeding peoples seethe in the cauldron of the ages knows that, without a single exception, the future lies on the side of duty.”

Marti’s name and legacy, however, is also exploited by the Cuban exiles in Miami and by the US government – both of which have tried unsuccessfully to thwart the process of the Cuban revolution through terror attacks, assassination attempts and sabotage. The portrayal of Marti, therefore, differs among Cubans depending on their political commitments.

For the Cuban exiles who deserted Cuba after the revolution, Marti is a historical figure and his example is not tied to the ongoing revolution started by Fidel. The dissociation between history and the present has been necessary for the Cuban exiles to manipulate Marti’s legacy based upon the community’s counter-revolutionary actions, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Marti is depicted as a historical figure with no current relevance, rather than a revolutionary who started an ongoing legacy. Not to mention the US government’s attempts to exploit Marti in their threats towards socialist leaning governments in Latin America. That Marti would be equated with the imperialist ideologies he fought against is abominable, however it also reflects the symbolism which is revered on one hand, in Cuba, and exploited abroad, as in the case of the US and its interests which reflect a return to imperial hegemony in the region.

By contrast, Marti remained a constant reference for Fidel and the Cuban revolution. “History Will Absolve Me” reflects Marti’s influence as it is replete with the concept of the revolution as an ongoing process. Marti was an important prelude to Cuba’s ongoing tenacity to define its liberation according to revolutionary values, as opposed to colonial and imperial impositions. If Marti is to be appreciated, his legacy needs to be read within the context of a continuous awareness – one that is renewed within revolutionary consciousness and education.

As the U.S. moves nuclear forces closer and closer to the border of Russia, and as our corporate media bang their war drums louder and louder, does anyone remember the Cuban missile crisis?

In June of 1961, just three months after the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was defeated,  the United States began the deployment of fifteen Jupiter nuclear missiles to Turkey, which shared a border with the Soviet Union. Each missile, armed with a W49 1.4 megaton thermonuclear warhead, was equivalent to 175 Hiroshima bombs. With their fifteen-hundred-mile range, the missiles were capable of annihilating Moscow, Leningrad, and every major city and base in the Russian heartland. Each missile could incinerate Moscow in just sixteen minutes from launch, thus wildly raising the possibility of thermonuclear war caused by technological accident, human error, miscommunication, or preemptive attack.

We didn’t hear about the Jupiter missiles and of course we didn’t hear anything about Operation Mongoose, the top-secret plan launched on November 1, 1961, to overthrow the government of Cuba through a systematic campaign of sabotage, coastal raids, assassinations, subversion leading to CIA-sponsored guerrilla warfare, and an eventual invasion by the U.S. military. The armed raids and sabotage succeeded in killing many Cubans and damaging the economy, which was hit much harder by the economic embargo announced in February. However, the assassination plots were foiled, and all attempts to develop an internal opposition failed. Many of the CIA agents and Cuban exiles who infiltrated the island by sea and air were captured, and quite a few of them talked, even on Cuban radio, about the plans for a new U.S. invasion, which was planned for October. Cuba requested military help from the Soviet Union, which by July was sending troops, air defense missiles, battlefield nuclear weapons, and medium-range ballistic missiles equivalent to the U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey.

At 7 p.m. eastern time on Monday, October 22, 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the most terrifying presidential message of my lifetime. Declaring that the Soviet Union had created a “clear and present danger” by placing in Cuba “large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction” “capable of striking Washington, D.C.,” he announced that U.S. ships would immediatly impose a “strict quarantine,” a transparent euphemism for a blockade, on the island. Knowing that the American people knew nothing about the recent and ongoing U.S. deployment of the Jupiter ballistic missiles capable of striking all the cities of the Russian heartland, he stated, “Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any . . . change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.” And knowing the American people knew nothing about Operation Mongoose and its previously planned invasion of Cuba in October, the president stated over and over again that these Soviet missiles were “offensive threats” with no defensive purpose. Here was his most frightening sentence: “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”

On Friday Jane wrote a long letter to her family:

Oct. 26, 1962

Dear Family,

Marie, your letter from the east helped rouse me from a state of paralysis in which I have been suspended since Kennedy’s speech on Monday… Bo, I am glad your orders so far are not changed… I had figured Bill must be in the blockade…

Thursday night Bruce was one of three faculty who spoke on this crisis. Dr. Leppert, a nuclear physicist (he watched the effects of nuclear blasts in Nevada) and Dr. Holman of the medical school were the two other speakers.  There was a large audience.  The discussion afterwards was intelligent and constructive.  But part of the time there I felt like crying because all their hope and desire for reason is, in effect upon those in power, like the vaguest ripple of a breeze.  When we once sent a telegram urging no resumption of nuclear testing, we received in return a very brisk, official pamphlet on how to prepare for a nuclear attack…

Tuesday in the middle of the night Karen appeared at our bed and said through tears, “I’ve been having a nightmare about an atomic bomb.”  We had been being careful about our words around them, but the radio had been on constantly…  Tuesday I had periods of wishing I weren’t pregnant, but I keep telling myself that instead of bringing one more person into the shadow of nuclear war, I’ll be bringing one more person up to hate hate, respect respect, and love love.

Until I recently read her letter, I had forgotten my talk. According to the Stanford Daily, I had explained how Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba violated international law and asked the audience to judge it on “pragmatic, ideological, and ethical” grounds. That all sounds embarrassingly tame and bookish. Jane obviously would have done better.

The recipients of Jane’s letter included her sister Marie and her husband Bo Sims, a Marine lieutenant colonel stationed at the Pentagon, and her sister Bobbie and her husband Bill Morgan, the captain of a destroyer.  Back in 1956, Bill has cut our wedding cake with his ceremonial Navy sword. Although he and I rarely agreed about anything—except the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of 1964—I always figured that he was probably a good, albeit gung-ho, naval officer, fair to his crew and responsible about his duty. Only in 2017 did I discover that the destroyer under Bill’s command was the USS Cony, one of the U.S. warships searching the Cuban coast for surviving invaders the Bay of Pigs the year before.  The day after Jane was writing her letter, Bill was indeed carrying out his orders professionally and efficiently. On October 27, the Cony discovered and then tracked for four hours the Soviet diesel-electric submarine B-59 out in the North Atlantic Ocean several hundred miles from Cuba.

The Cony was one of eight destroyers and an aircraft carrier hunting for Soviet submarines that might be heading for Cuba. They were under orders to force any such sub to surface by bombarding it with “signaling depth charges,” designed to cause explosions powerful enough to rock the sub, while also pounding it with ultra-high-amplitude sound waves from the destroyer’s sonar dome.

Meanwhile, the B-59’s last orders from Moscow were not to cross Kennedy’s “quarantine line” — 500 miles from Cuba–but to hold its position in the Sargasso Sea. After that, it received no communication from the Soviet Union for several days. It had been monitoring Miami radio stations that were broadcasting the increasingly ominous news. When the sub-hunting fleet of U.S. ships and planes arrived, the submarine was forced to run deep, making it lose all communication with the outside world, and to run silent, relying on battery power. The batteries were close to depleted, the air conditioning had broken down, and water, food, and oxygen were running low when the Cony began its hours of bombardment with the depth charges and high-amplitude sonar blasts. Other destroyers joined in an ongoing barrage of hand grenades and depth charges.

The Soviet officers were unaware of the existence of “signaling depth charges,” and international law has no provision allowing one warship to bombard another with small explosives unless they are in a state of war. Since the B-59 was hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, not within the blockade area and not heading toward Cuba, its crew and officers logically deduced that war had started. If so, it was their duty to attack. The officers knew that with one weapon on board, they could destroy the entire sub-hunting fleet of destroyers and the aircraft carrier that had been pursuing them—along with themselves.

Neither Bill Morgan nor anyone else in the U.S. Navy or government was aware that the B-59 was armed with a T-5 nuclear torpedo, approximately equivalent in explosive force to the Hiroshima bomb. If the sub fired its T-5, it would plunge the world into nuclear holocaust.

One nuclear weapon fired from any of the American or Russian subs still prowling the oceans would do the same today, decades after the end of the Cold War. Hardly anyone in America then or now is aware of the command-and-control protocol on nuclear-armed submarines. In order to deter an opponent’s “decapitating” first strike, which would wipe out all the nation’s leaders with the authority to launch a nuclear retaliation, the three top officers of a nuclear-armed sub have the authority and ability to launch a nuclear attack under certain circumstances. On October 27, 1962, the Soviet command-and-control protocol for launching nuclear torpedoes was even riskier: only the sub’s captain and its political officer had to agree.

On the B-59, Captain Valentin Savitsky and his political officer realized that it was now or never. Their choice was either to surface—which was equivalent to surrender while they, perhaps alone, had the ability to launch a significant counterattack—or to fire their nuclear torpedo. They decided to attack and readied to aim for the aircraft carrier at the core of the submarine-hunting fleet.

Only one man stood in the way of a nuclear Armageddon, and he was on board the B-59 by chance. He was Vasili Arkhipov, the commander of the four-submarine Soviet flotilla, who vetoed the attack, leaving Captain Savitsky with no alternative but to surface.

“This week’s events have brought home,” Jane had written in her letter a day earlier, how few people have any say “about nuclear war before it may be brought down upon their heads by the handful of people who decide man’s fate.” Even that handful of people in the White House and Pentagon didn’t know about those nuclear torpedoes. And that handful of people in the Kremlin didn’t know that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had been itching for an excuse to launch a full-scale thermonuclear attack on the Soviet Union and that now, led by the “mad”—President Kennedy’s word—ravings of my ex-boss Curtis LeMay, these dogs of war were demanding to be let off their leashes.

The Missile Crisis ended with the USSR removing all “offensive” weapons from Cuba in return for a public U.S. commitment not to invade Cuba and a secret agreement to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within several months. Years after the Jupiter missiles were withdrawn, we were told that they were “obsolete,” a term still used in almost all accounts of the crisis. But if the Jupiter missiles in Turkey were obsolete, then so were the equivalent Soviet missiles in Cuba. In reality, the problem with both deployments was not obsolescence but reckless brinkmanship, initiated by the United States. Fortunately, Moscow and Washington ended up mutually recognizing that neither was willing to live with a gun that close to its head.

What may have looked to the public like a Soviet capitulation turned out to be a successful, desperate, and potentially fatal gamble by the Soviet Union. They won a tit-for-tat removal of the land-based missiles within sixteen minutes of incinerating either Moscow or Washington, with a bonus of stopping the imminent invasion of Cuba and possibly future invasions as well, all without having to commit to the future defense of Cuba.

Behind the scenes, Kennedy now had to deal with the shrieking hawks, furious at the president both for missing the golden opportunity to annihilate the Soviet Union and for an ignominious surrender of America’s exceptional right to invade Cuba and to station nuclear weapons wherever it pleased.

Alarmed by how close we had come to nuclear apocalypse, Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev set up a telephone hot line to enable direct communication, developed a personal relationship to ease tensions, and succeeded in August 1963 in banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, under water, or in space. The president inspired many of us with an eloquent June 1963 American University commencement address about the world’s crucial need for an enduring peace. He even urged “every thoughtful citizen” who desired peace to “begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward peace, toward the Soviet Union,” which he extolled for its heroic World War II sacrifices. But then of course he went on to claim: “The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.”  Since today Russia is as capitalist as Saudi Arabia, Australia, and United States, what is “the primary cause of world tension today?”

President Kennedy’s final remarks began with this statement: “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”  So it must have been Vietnam that started a war with the United States.

counterpunch.org

Since the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the U.S. has used its base at Guantanamo, Cuba, to carry out the incarceration and torture of foreign nationals suspected of terror activity. The first detainees arrived in Guantanamo in 2002, after the U.S. ascertained it could without all legal rights, including preventing them from legal recourse against their indefinite detention. Most detainees had been subjected to the CIA blacksites for several years before their incarceration in Guantanamo.

This month marked 20 years since Guantanamo started being used by the U.S. as a torture and detention centre. In 2008, while campaigning for the U.S. presidential elections, Barack Obama had declared he would close down the detention facilities within a year, and instead transfer the detainees to indefinite detention in the U.S. The outcome would have seen Obama bring U.S. atrocities home, sparking opposition from lawmakers.

U.S. lawyer and diplomat Lee Wolosky described the Guantanamo situation as “self-inflicted” in a recent article: “a result of our own decisions to engage in torture, hold detainees indefinitely without charge, set up dysfunctional military commissions and attempt to avoid oversight by the federal courts.”

The ”war on terror” rhetoric no longer holds sway globally as it did a decade ago, yet the U.S. is still to close down the detention facilities – a move unlikely to occur during the Biden administration’s tenure. In December last year, the New York Times reported that the facilities would expand to build a $4 million courtroom. Out of 780 men detained in the facility, 39 remain.

On the anniversary of the first detainees’ arrival in Guantanamo, the Cuban government called upon the U.S. to close the prison, noting that only 12 out 780 detainees have been charged with war crimes. Human rights organisations, former detainees and U.S. lawmakers have reiterated the call.

For the Cuban government, closing down Guantanamo would be just one step in its resolve to have the illegally occupied territory returned to Cuba.

Guantanamo is the oldest U.S. military base abroad. While the use of the facilities has sparked outrage globally, there has been no similar outcry for an end to the U.S. military occupation of Cuban territory. It is the blockade that captured international attention through the UN General Assembly’s non-binding and therefore ineffective, resolutions. But world leaders are intent on ignoring the fact that Cuba is still indefinitely partly occupied by the U.S. – a relic of earlier exploitation of the island at a time when the island faced both U.S. and Spanish intervention against their sovereignty.

Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Cuban government has consistently denounced the U.S. illegal occupation of Guantanamo. As U.S. efforts

to destabilise Fidel Castro’s revolutionary rule increased, Guantanamo was used as a base from which violations against the island would be carried out, including provocation of Cubans which the U.S. hoped would lead to a direct confrontation. Several Cubans employed at the military base were tortured and murdered by U.S. soldiers stationed at Guantanamo.

Since 1960, a year after the Cuban Revolution’s triumph, the Cuban government has refused the U.S. payments for its use of Guantanamo, signalling the government’s opposition to the U.S. occupation of its territory.

Apart from the brief thaw in relations between Cuba and the U.S. during the Obama administration, when the Cuban Five were released in exchange for USAID subcontractor Alan Gross, the U.S. has maintained a hostile policy against Cuba, exacerbated by the Trump administration and, so far, upheld by current U.S. President Joe Biden.

Article 10 of Cuba’s 1976 Constitution clearly states, “The Republic of Cuba repudiates and considered illegal and null the treaties, pacts or concessions agreed upon in unequal terms that ignore or diminish its sovereignty over any possession of the national territory.”

The U.S. perception of Cuba has not altered since the earlier intention to exploit the island, while the international community has simplified Cuba in terms of the humanitarian impact of the illegal U.S. blockade on the island. While the immediate implications of Guantanamo with regard to the U.S. violations at the base are of paramount importance, the focus on this relic of the U.S. war on terror must not be dissociated from Guantanamo’s earlier history.

“Ignorance is bliss” my grandmother used to say when I was a child. That is the “American Way” I came to learn especially when the governments and military-intelligence agencies conduct all sorts of crimes against their own people and to other peoples and governments.

My grandmother had a point, because most “common” people accept this daily reality. They have learned to do so by watching what “their” governments do against those who seek information that the powerful wish to hide from us. That is why they want to kill our messenger Julian Assange. That is why they murdered the only U.S. president who challenged the might and will of the “deep state”, namely, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Spectacular Photos Of John F. Kennedy (allthatsinteresting.com)

This article summarizes some of that history and reports new evidence about murderous CIA.

The truth is that the CIA runs United States’ foreign policy covertly, along with the Pentagon and the weapons/oil/minerals industries, which are somewhat more visible. The Establishment knows the “intelligence community” murdered President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, who would have reopened the murder investigation of his brother had he been allowed to win the 1968 presidential campaign. New Evidence Implicates CIA, LAPD, FBI and Mafia as Plotters in Elaborate “Hit” Plan to Prevent RFK From Ever Reaching White House – CovertAction Magazine

The military-industrial complex dominates, Dwight Eisenhower—one of its generals and presidents—told us upon turning over the reins of official power to John Kennedy. Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard Nixon delivered its parting gift to Kennedy: Overthrow Cuba’s revolution and its legitimate government with an invasion, starting at the Bay of Pigs, southwest of Havana.

(See chapters 1-6 of my book, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert, for the following information on U.S. aggression against Cuba.

On the day that Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, April 12, 1961, the new president told the media there was no plan to invade Cuba. The day after, CIA’s Operation 40 was launched from Guatemala Fourteen hundred paramilitaries, mostly anti-revolutionary Cuban exiles, sailed on U.S. navy boats to the Bay of Pigs, 200 kilometers southwest from Havana. After just three days, local farmer militia and some military troops, led by President Fidel Castro, defeated the invaders.

Kennedy had refused to send in official U.S. aircraft to rescue the mission and the CIA was livid. It then set up Operation Mongoose, which included sabotage of production centers, food stores, a harbor, and even schools; assassinations of Cubans, including scores (eventually hundreds) of attempts on President Fidel Castro’s life. Later CIA-led operations included the use of chemical and biological warfare, which destroyed food crops, caused the entire loss of all its pigs, and caused diseases with deaths of hundreds of people. (See Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn: Ridenour, Ron: 9780962497513: Amazon.com: Books, especially chapter 4, “Germ Warriors”).

Imagine any government acting that way against the United States! Cuba and its Soviet ally obviously had to protect the Cuban people and its state. Cuba received some Soviet nuclear missiles to discourage an all-out nuclear war, which the Pentagon and the CIA wanted Kennedy to undertake once they learned that missiles were in the process of being assembled for potential use. This led to the October Missile Crisis, October 1962.

Once again, this U.S. president chose to defy the warmongers—the only American president to do so where it really counts, other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had Big Business against him, even to the point of a plot to overthrow him—the same Big Business that helped finance Mussolini’s fascist regime, Franco’s and Hitler’s military. Nazis & America: The USA’s Fascist Past | History Cooperative and Business Plot – Wikipedia (See also chapter eight, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert.)

Three decades later, President Kennedy rejected the Pentagon-CIA nuclear war plan. Instead, he ordered the navy to conduct a blockade to prevent any more Soviet ships from entering Cuba.

When U.S. Navy ships engaged one of four Soviet submarines sailing in international waters on the way to Cuba, the captains of the submarine thought the U.S. had started a war. U.S. naval depth charges had destroy the submarine’s communications. The Russians had no way to contact Moscow or the U.S. ships. They had one nuclear missile and one captain proposed using it. Another captain, Vasili Arkhipov talked him out of it. They surfaced and turned back to Russia as U.S. jets strafed their vessel. No one was killed.

At the Havana Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2002, a key organizer and leader of the non-governmental National Security Archives, Thomas Blanton, called Arkhipov, “the guy who saved the world.”

Vasili Arkhipov. Photo courtesy of M Yarovskaya and A. Labunskaya

Daniel Ellsberg, once a key figure in the Establishment who risked his life to show the world U.S. government-military-CIA crimes against humanity by revealing its own documents, the Pentagon Papers. In 2017, Ellsberg published a whistleblowing book, The Doomsday Machine. Here is evidence that the U.S. has always thought of using nuclear weapons in first strike.

Following the closest call ever to a nuclear Armageddon, President Kennedy resisted being the usual lackey president for big business and its war machine. He started to secretly contact Cuban leadership hoping to find a way out of the aggressive post he inherited. He did the same with the Vietnamese. Kennedy realized that the United States could not win a war against these resilient peoples, not without using nuclear weapons. He also realized that the U.S. could not drop atomic bombs again without retaliation, leading to an eventual nuclear world war.

When Kennedy’s Democrat president predecessor, Harry Truman, was preparing to kill hundreds of thousands Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets already knew the Yankee and British governments were planning to do that and to manufacture additional bombs that could be used against them with the aim of taking over Russia-Soviet’s sovereignty.

Winston Churchill planned “Operation Unthinkable” for a summer 1945 invasion against Soviet controlled Eastern European areas, and to drop nuclear bombs on key Russian cities. Harry Truman developed a similar plan, “Operation Pincher”, on March 2, 1946—U.S. Joint War Plans. (Chapter 10 of The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert.)

Fortunately, for the safety of the world, some people working on the Manhattan Project gave information to the Soviets so they could make their own bombs, which they did by 1949 before the U.S. had made enough new bombs. Given that balance of nuclear power, the U.S. has not used its monstrous nuclear weapons again, other than less holocaust-causing weapons, known as depleted uranium, which the U.S. has used against many countries’ peoples.

The profit-making war-makers’ solution for everlasting growth, and its America Über Alles mission for world power, “eliminated” its key obstacle, President Kennedy. Under Kennedy’s gleeful successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, they continued their sabotage, and innumerable attempts to assassinate Cuba’s president and his closest comrades Raul Castro and Che Guevara.

The military-industrial complex needed more troops, more war machinery against the stubborn Vietnamese. Lyndon Johnson concocted the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”. He lied that its ship USS Maddox was attacked, on August 2, 1964, by North Vietnamese ships in Vietnam’s territorial waters. There were no U.S. casualties. Two days later, another “enemy attack” was reported. Johnson got the congress to grant him the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution allowing full war operations without declaring war. The war lasted another 11 years before the Vietnamese finally defeated the U.S. and its South Vietnamese lackeys. The war cost between three and five million peoples’ lives, including about 60,000 American lives over a 15-year period, plus several thousand suicides of depressed troops after returning home.

National Security Agency documents, which became public in 2005, show that the North Vietnamese did not engage either ship. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, a war leader during JFK and LBJ administrations, later admitted it never happened.

Most of us know that the Warren Commission decided beforehand that Lee Harvey Oswald was the patsy for the one-lone-man lie, and therefore he had to be killed, immediately.

Jack Ruby shot Oswald surrounded by police in a police station two days after the president’s assassination. Ruby was connected to the Mafia, operating strip joints in Dallas. He was sentenced to death, which was later overturned. Ruby asked the Warren several times to take him to Washington D.C., so he could speak freely about the assassinations. He told the Commission “my life is in danger here”. “I want to tell the truth, and I can’t tell it here.”

Ruby was taken to a hospital for pneumonia, December 6, 1966. Suddenly he had cancer and died extraordinarily quickly, January 3, one month before granted a new trial.

While the mass media covers up who is actually responsible for many mysterious deaths of important persons, from time to time bits and pieces slip out. Such happened recently in Miami of all places. Ricardo Morales Jr., is a son of Richard Morales, known as “Monkey”—“contract CIA worker, anti-Castro militant, counter-intelligence chief for Venezuela, FBI informant and drug dealer”, wrote the Herald. He spoke recently on Miami’s Actualidad Radio 1040 AM, and to the “Miami Herald”. He added new light to one of the theories of President Kennedy’s assassination.

“The Miami Herald”, and its Spanish kin, “El Nuevo Herald”, headlined Cuban-born Nora Gámez Torres’ blockbuster article, “Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp”. It is rare that Oswald is not named “the” killer. Ricardo “Monkey” Morales told sons he knew Lee Harvey Oswald | Miami Herald; Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp (msn.com) and Ricardo “el Mono” Morales le dijo a sus hijos que conocía a Lee Harvey Oswald | El Nuevo Herald

Morales Jr. said that his father was a sniper instructor in secret CIA camps where Cuban exiles and others trained to invade Cuba, and that he realized in the hours after JFK was murdered that the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been one of his sniper trainees.

“Monkey” Morales told his son that he didn’t believe Oswald had killed Kennedy because he had witnessed him shooting, and said “there is no way that guy could shoot that well.”

Morales also told his two sons that two days before the assassination, his CIA handler told him and his “clean-up” team to go to Dallas for a mission. But after the assassination, they were ordered back to Miami without learning what the mission was about, wrote the “Miami Herald”.

The “Miami Herald” pointed to other serious reports “that a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, including the leader of the organization Alpha 66, Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro, met at a house in Dallas days before the assassination, and that Oswald was seen visiting the house or been in the area. As that theory goes, Cuban exiles, who felt betrayed by Kennedy’s lack of support in the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation and his deal with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis not to invade Cuba, could have planned to kill JFK and blamed Castro so the U.S. would invade the island.”

These claims “point the finger at the CIA, which some observers believe could help explain why President Joe Biden backed off last week on declassifying the remaining documents in the case,” wrote journalist Nofra Gámez Torres.

Although Oswald was basically convicted by the government post mortem, the House Select Committee on Assassinations 1979 report contradicted the 1964 Warren Commission conclusion. “The committee instead concluded that the president was likely slain as the result of a conspiracy and that there was a high probability that two gunmen fired at him,” Gámez Torres referenced.

“The House Select Committee, which also interviewed Morales, said they couldn’t preclude the possibility that Cuban exiles were involved.”

“Whatever happened, Biden’s decision to postpone the declassification of the remaining 15,000 documents linked to the case is once again giving life to the conspiracy theories. Morales’ son believes the documents might never be made public.”

Although Biden had advocated for the release of all JFK murder documents, he suddenly ordered the postponement on October 22. The president claimed that the COVID pandemic caused the delay with the caveat for the “need to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

Republican President George W. Bush signed a law, in 1992, requiring the release of all records concerning JFK’s murder within 25 years—before October 26, 2017. That Democrat President Biden disobeys this law is more evidence that Kennedy’s own party leaders are afraid of the CIA.
Biden’s previous boss, Barack Obama, also went along with the CIA. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, sat with the official president every Tuesday to order who should be droned to death. Brennan also dreamed up the fairy tale Russiagate, that is, that President Vladimir Putin, seeking sovereignty and world peace, is behind every interference to the military-industrial complex mission: America Über Alles.

There might still exist some documents that could point to how the president’s fractured brain disappeared. The Mystery of JFK’s Brain: How Did it Disappear? – Historic Mysteries.

Maybe there is evidence showing that one “magic bullet” could not possibly have first penetrated through Kennedy’s back, puncturing his spine, then twisting around and exiting through the front of his neck smashing part of his brain. Then this same bullet penetrated the front seat into Texas Governor John Connally’s right rib, then exiting the front of his chest, wounding his right wrist, and finally stopping in his left thigh.

Maybe there are even papers that show how 17 eye-witnesses who saw what the Warren Commission was forced to hide from us—that there were shots from different directions—came to be murdered or died suddenly within a short time.

After an extensive search on the Bill Gates-founded Microsoft search machine, I could not find any major medium, other than MSN, that picked up on the “Miami Herald” story about the Morales revelations. Yet many media did report on President Joe Biden’s decision of October 22 to postpone for at least a year (or forever) the release of the remaining 15,000 documents held in secret concerning the murder of John Kennedy.

The British daily “Independent” headlined: “Is Biden blocking JFK records over hidden bombshells?” The “bombshell” being that the Central Intelligence Agency “eliminated the obstacle”.

Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana’s own biography-as-told-to his brother and godson, Double Cross (Warner Books, 1992), named the conspirators and killers. Mobster Giancana had close ties with the CIA when one of them, most likely, shot him in his home on June 19, 1975, the day before he was ordered to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Senate was investigating some of the CIA’s “dirty tricks”. Giancana’s family co-authors are convinced he would not have “double crossed” his cohorts in crime, but they double-crossed him.

This Day in History: June 19th- Giancana’s Demise (todayifoundout.com)

“The Independent” suggests that if the “remainder” of the documents are eventually released, we should not expect that anything revealing the actual murderers will be released: “National Security Act”. Is Biden blocking the JFK assassination files over hidden bombshells? – NewsBreak

That anti-democratic 1917 law protects “intelligence agencies” when they murder people, especially world leaders. This is also the reason why they seek to silence—kill one way or another—Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.

“The Independent” wrote:

“Former Massachusetts Representative Patrick Kennedy said: “I think for the good of the country, everything has to be put out there so there’s greater understanding of our history”. His cousin Robert F Kennedy Jr, called the memorandum “an outrage against American democracy”. [RFK called the Warren Report, a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”]

“We’re not supposed to have secret governments within the government,” said Mr. Kennedy, whose father — Senator Robert Kennedy — reportedly did not believe that Oswald acted alone.”

“Kel McClanahan, an attorney specialising in national security law and information and privacy law who previously served as an associate editor for the American Intelligence Journal, told The Independent that those looking to see everything by the end of next year shouldn’t get too excited.”

Mr. McClanahan predicted that Mr. Biden would follow the bipartisan practice of deferring to intelligence officials’ wishes in keeping some records hidden, despite his December 2022 deadline.

“Unless you have a very strong willed president who will say: ‘I do not care because I am so pro-transparency’, they will defer to their intelligence people,” he said. He added that as time goes on and the Kennedy assassination fades from public memory, the clamour for new revelations will grow dimmer and dimmer.

Author James K. Galbraith wrote about the documents postponement on the website for the Assassination Archives and Research Center. Blog Page (aarclibrary.org)

“In reporting this story, The New York Times reminds us that an exhaustive, ‘yearlong inquiry into the murder led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.’ Oswald, like Kennedy, has been dead for 58 years. If he acted alone, and if an exhaustive inquiry established this fact 57 years ago, what secret could be left? If he acted alone, there were no other guilty parties. Not then, not 29 years later, and not today. The Times distinguishes between ‘researchers and conspiracy theorists.’ One may infer that researchers are those who trust the Warren Commission, whereas conspiracy theorists are those who do not. But apart from those few who have made careers out of defending the Commission against its many critics, why would anyone who didn’t distrust the official story be interested in this case? In fact, as the Times admits, people are interested, with surveys finding that ‘most Americans believe others were involved.’”

“…I take them [Biden and related agencies] at their word: that in their view, a full disclosure of all documents would compromise military, intelligence, and foreign relations. It is not difficult to imagine how. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was a conspiracy. Suppose that the remaining documents, together with those already released, were to establish – or permit private citizens to establish – what most Americans already believe. In that case, it would be obvious that the cover-up involved senior U.S. government officials – including the leaders of the very agencies currently being tasked with reviewing the records. And, as a point of logic, it follows that in every succeeding cohort, under every president, the cover-up has continued. Isn’t that the only plausible way the current interests of those agencies might be damaged?

“The irony is that by withholding the records, the government has already admitted, without saying so, that the Warren Commission lied and that there are vile secrets, which it is determined to protect. It concedes, without saying so, that there was a conspiracy and that there is an ongoing cover-up. If there were not, all the records would have been released long ago. You don’t have to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ to see this. Biden’s 2022 deadline will come and go. The song and dance will continue. No one who remembers 1963 will live to see the U.S. government admit the full truth about Kennedy’s murder.”

No U.S. President Can Control the CIA

If the United States’ “Deep State” murdered its own president, there is little else that it would not do. The September 11, 2001 attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, the most heavily guarded building in the world, were impossible to achieve without insider collaboration, at the very least.

What the U.S. government told the world about 9/11 is full of lies and impossibilities, just like the “magic bullet”. No steel building, such as the twin towers, has ever collapsed from fire alone. Never. Witnesses close by and inside heard explosions, like demolitions, inside the building.
Thousands of professional architects and engineers know that what we were told is impossible according to physics. Why lie? (See: Is There Any Truth in ‘The 9/11 Truth Movement?’ – 911Truth.Org; and Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth | WTC Twin Towers and Building 7 (ae911truth.org)

Following the murder of 3000 people, the Bush government created Homeland Security. This agency oversees all law-enforcement, and allows the arrest of people without cause and hold them indefinitely. It ordered the National Security Agency to create technology that allows it (along with the CIA) to spy on every human being in the world. To stop any semblance of a real free press, it now prohibits all journalists in the world from doing their job to report on “Deep State”/Pentagon crimes against humanity. That is why they had Julian Assange kidnapped and imprisoned, and tried to do the same to Edward Snowden. Due to Wikileaks skill and tenacity, they got Edward Snowden to Russia and into exile, although his destiny was Latin America. Implementing 9/11 Commission Recommendations | Homeland Security (dhs.gov)

The 9/11 attacks is the United States counterpart to Adolf Hitler/Herman Gøring’s Nazis burning of the German parliament, on February 27, 1933, so it could blame the legal Communist Party and Social Democratic Party from continuing to have any influence. They imprisoned 4,000 members of the CP within 24 hours. The Nazi firebombing allowed them to make the Reichstag Fire Decree, “legalizing” the round up and murder of tens of thousands opponents or dissidents, and laid the bases for the Holocaust against millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slaves, and 250,000 physically and mentally handicapped people. The Reichstag Fire | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org). See also BBC’s “Rise of the Nazis” The First Six Months in Power (TV Episode 2019) – IMDb

The Nazi war caused the death of 14.5% of the 190 million Soviet people—27 million people, of them ca. 17 million civilians—plus the loss of 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns and 4.7 million house destroyed. The Nazi war caused the death of 0.32% of U.S. Americans—420,000 people, of them ca. 12,000 civilians. No destruction to its land except at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by Japanese.

The CIA is not SS. In fact, it has more power than any United States president unlike the SS, which was under Hitler. The CIA lies, cheats, steals, murders and tortures just like SS and other Nazi murder institutions did. After WWII, the CIA used Nazi scientists for United States domination, and protected Nazi murderers by bringing them to the U.S., Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. Nazis “Arian Superiority” ideology replaced or complemented by, “American Superiority”.

The CIA sought total control over South America (also Central America) through its Operation Condor during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan periods. The CIA provided planning, training, arms, and torture to military juntas and right-wing coup governments that the CIA either supported or put into semi-power. Between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians were murdered, 30,000 “disappeared”, ca. 50,000 imprisoned with many tortured, often repeatedly.

The CIA euphemistically called this “a cooperative effort by the intelligence security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.” Operation Condor, 1968-1989 | National Security Archive (gwu.edu) and Operation Condor – Wikipedia.

“Combating terrorism and subversion” is double speak to cover up for the fact that citizens wish for and struggle for democratic rights of free press and speech; the right to choose their own governments. It is also a classic case of the “intelligence community’s” psychological projection.

The Pentagon and CIA have long used torture themselves and trained others in the use of multi-torture methods. About – SOA Watch and School of the Americas – SourceWatch.

“Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and protecting exponents such as Klaus Barbie,” wrote Jeffrey St. Claire.

Barbie was SS and Gestapo, an insidious torturer—the “Butcher of Lyon—of Jews and French resisters. The CIA protected him and sent him to work for right-wing governments in Bolivia.
See Douglas Valentine’s excellent exposé book on the CIA and its torturing of Vietnamese, The Phoenix Program.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lectured at Texas A&M University, on April 15, 2019. He responded to a question. “When I was a cadet [West Point] our motto was: You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do… [when] I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

That is to say that lying, cheating, stealing (and, of course, constant warring with mass murder and torture) is “the glory of the American experiment”. As this criminal murderer told his story, he laughed and his audience joined him.

President Harry Truman, who created the CIA in 1947, came to the same conclusion as did Pompeo about the CIA but without thinking such behavior was “glorious”. He told his biographer, Merle Miller, that he regretted having created the CIA.

“The CIA doesn’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on…it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody… If I had known what was going to happen, I never would have done [created] it.”

Presented with information that CIA Director Allen Dulles had assisted some French generals and French Nazi sympathizers to overthrow (murder) President Charles de Gaulle, in order to prevent an end to the war against Algeria’s independence, President Kennedy told de Gaulle’s ambassador in Washington, Hervé Alphand, that while he supported de Gaulle he could not vouch for the CIA.

Kennedy told Alphand that, ‘the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.’” (See article by David Talbot, founder of “Salon”, and a CIA biographer).

Republican George W. Bush learned the same lesson regarding the CIA when President Vladimir Putin tried to accommodate the United States government.

“Putin met with [President George W. Bush] several times, and they described themselves as friends. At their first meeting, June 16, 2001, held in Slovenia, Bush said: ‘I looked him in the eye and got a sense of his soul. I could trust him.’” (Chapter 14 of “The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert”.)

Putin looked into Bush’s eyes and saw…- All Hat No Cattle

On the day of the terror attacks in New York, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, Putin and his wife attended their Russian Orthodox Church to light a candle for those killed and injured, and they prayed for them. He told National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that all preexisting hostility between the two countries would be put aside while the U.S. dealt with the tragedy.

Putin even sent arms supplies to the U.S. Northern Alliance ally. He arranged for one of Russia’s close allies, the former Soviet Republic Kyrgyzstan, to let the U.S. military use one of its bases as a spy center and launching pad for flights to and from Afghanistan. The Yankees were there until June 2014. They had moved 5.3 million military personnel (some more than once) in and out of Afghanistan in 136,000 flights.

Two other former Soviet republics assisted. Uzbekistan allowed the U.S. to use a military base with 1,500 troops until 2005. Russia had a military division in Tajikistan, and it allowed the U.S. military to use it, in order to supply weapons and other cargo to its forces in Afghanistan. The U.S. trained some Tajikistan troops.

President Putin even considered joining NATO, but Bush turned that down. Instead, Bush withdrew from the Richard Nixon-signed Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in 1972.

Putin spoke to Oliver Stone about this double standard.

“We assumed that the Cold War was over, that we had transparent relations with the United States, with the whole world, and we certainly counted on support. But instead we witnessed the American intelligence services support terrorists. And even when we confirmed that, when we demonstrated that Al Qaeda fighters were fighting in the Caucasus, we still saw the intelligence services of the United States continue to support these fighters.

“There was one episode. I told President Bush about that, and he said, ‘Do you have any

concrete data [which] specifically does what specifically?’ And I told him, ‘Yes, I do have such data,’ and I showed him, and I even named those persons of the American intelligence services who were working in the Caucasus, including in Baku…they also provided technical support, they helped transfer fighters from one place to another.”

Bush told Putin, “I’ll sort this all out.” This was in 2004-5, and Putin had to wait a long time.

Finally, “the CIA sent us a letter. The response was quite peculiar. ‘We support all the political forces, including the opposition forces, and we’re going to continue to do that.”

Putin told “The Moscow Times” that Russian intelligence had intercepted calls between separatists in the North Caucasus and the U.S. intelligence based in the former Soviet Republic Azerbaijan during the early 2000s, proving that Washington was helping the insurgents.

Putin said that President Bush promised to “kick the ass” (a favorite Bush expression) of the intelligence officers in question. But after the CIA letter came to Russia’s intelligence service, Federal Security Service (FSB), where Putin had been director, no more was heard from Kick Ass Bush.

Putin also told Stone that he thought it was wrong of the U.S. “to impose on other nations and peoples [their] own standards and models… Democracy cannot be imported from outside, it can only be born within society…I think it would be senseless and damaging if the Soviet Union itself was to impose on other peoples and other nations their rules of conduct.”

The problem is the U.S. does not want other peoples to decide how they want to live. It wants America Über Alles. Other than its brutal might, the biggest obstacle for ending this “kiss ass” machine is that the Establishment has captured or stunned most peoples’ minds. They have convinced so many that, yes, “ignorance is bliss”, just like granny cautioned me.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is reportedly marking up its hilarious Havana Syndrome Attacks Response Act this week which calls for sanctions upon whoever the president determines is responsible for inflicting US officials with hangover-like symptoms using high tech microwave beams. The condition has not been proven to actually exist in any tangible way and has been commonly attributed to psychogenic illness, Cuban crickets, and actual hangovers.

At the same time, virulent Russiagater Julia Ioffe has published an anonymously-sourced article proclaiming that the Kremlin is responsible for this mysterious alleged ailment.

In an article for Puck News titled “Havana Syndrome: A Cold War Saga in Biden’s Washington”, Ioffe reports that anonymous sources at the Walter Reed Military Medical Center have told her that this strange affliction now has so many victims among US government employees that the facility is at capacity, and that Russia is to blame for it.

Ioffe writes:

“The intelligence community is increasingly convinced that the Russian government is behind these attacks. Russia has extensively studied and invested in the technology, and, in the spring of 2017, just as the attacks in Havana were ramping up, Putin personally pinned a medal on the breast of a young scientist for his advances in using directed energy and microwaves on signals systems and living cells. Russia certainly has the motive: Putin still thinks America is Russia’s biggest enemy and poking the country in the eye is a worthy end in and of itself. Plus, there’s that location data, placing F.S.B. officers in the same Taiwanese hotel where a senior C.I.A. official was hit.

“But there still isn’t enough evidence to make a public declaration. ‘They believe the hypothesis more but don’t have a smoking gun,’ said the person familiar with the investigation.”

There are now so many cases of Havana Syndrome that Walter Reed is at capacity. The U.S. government has started outsourcing cases to other hospitals

My latest, for @PuckNews. https://t.co/jUi00b2LX8

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) October 20, 2021

To get a sense for the integrity of the sourcing in Ioffe’s report, here’s an actual paragraph from the article with emphasis added by me:

“Burns has also convened a panel of intelligence officials to try to find whoever is behind these attacks. A spokesperson for the Agency told me that the C.I.A. is ‘bringing an intensity and expertise to this issue akin to our efforts to find Bin Laden.’ She added, ‘We will keep doing everything we can to protect our officers.’ People familiar with the inquiry tell me that the political will behind this is palpable. As one source told me, ‘Whereas before you might have said that the folks working on the issue spent half their time trying to convince people that something happened, that kind of distraction has dissipated to a large degree, which is very helpful.’”

This kind of sourcing would make a UK gossip rag blush.

Here’s another delightful bit:

“I think we’re beyond the point of anyone being able to question whether it’s a real thing,” a senior administration official told me.

Ah well if an anonymous government official tells Julia Ioffe that Havana Syndrome is real then hot damn that’s good enough for me.

Apart from anonymous individuals, Ioffe also cites a “retired” CIA officer named Marc Polymeropoulos, who attests that he himself came down with a case of Havana Syndrome that was so bad it forced him to “retire”.

Ioffe writes:

“As we talked, I couldn’t square two things: Marc’s retirement and his age. He had just turned 50, and, by his own account, he had been on the up-and-up at the C.I.A. Why had he left so soon? I asked him… But Marc’s answer surprised me: Havana Syndrome. He told me, off the record, that he had been ‘hit’ while visiting Moscow and that the attack had undermined his health so badly that he physically couldn’t work anymore. A promising career in an organization he loved, and had come of age in, was over.”

Oh wow the “retired” CIA spook had to “retire” because he was afflicted with a condition which just so happens to advance CIA cold war hysteria about a CIA-targeted nation, and how he’s spending his “retirement” telling cold war propagandists about it.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is marking up a bill this week to sanction whoever “directed or carried out” Havana syndrome attacks lol

— aída chávez (@aidachavez) October 19, 2021

Havana syndrome is a mysterious illness whose symptoms include vertigo, nausea, and billions of dollars in new cold war military spending.

It’s just so interesting how Russia keeps attacking America in unverifiable and invisible ways that only the US intelligence community can see. First it was plot hole-riddled claims that Russian hackers attacked American democracy in 2016, and now it’s invisible microwave beams from secret Kremlin ray guns. Someday soon we may turn on the news to see footage of an empty Capitol Building while a reporter solemnly tells us that it has just been stormed by GRU agents injected with invisibility serum.

I’m old enough to remember when the US war machine needed actual, physical events to justify the advancements of its military agendas, like planes crashing into buildings. Nowadays those agendas are justified by invisible, unverifiable allegations for which the evidence is always classified.

Believing that Kremlin operatives are attacking the brains of US government employees with ray guns which cause mild hangover-like symptoms is no less crazy and baseless than the claims by internet crackpots that the Covid vaccine contains 5G mind control nanobots. Literally the only difference is that one has been endorsed by the mainstream US political/media class while the other has not.

When a poor person says spies are attacking their brain with microwave beams it’s called paranoid schizophrenia. When a US government operative says it, it’s called Havana Syndrome.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Much has been said about the Biden Administration’s re-joining international institutions, after former U.S. President Donald Trump broke away from the standardised participation in international agreements and consensus. Notably, the international community singled out the U.S. under Trump for the so-called “deal of the century”, which veered away from the two-state paradigm that has steered international diplomacy on Palestine and Israel for decades.

Trump’s decision to quit the UN Human Rights Council in 2008 was described by former U.S. envoy to the UN Nikki Haley as determined by the body’s “unending hostility towards Israel.” Echoing Haley, the former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the council “a protector of human rights abusers.” Perhaps Pompeo had conveniently forgotten the U.S.’s own track record of backing military coups which disappeared tens of thousands of political opponents. The same goes for the correlation between U.S. financial aid and human rights abuses – the countries which benefit from U.S. aid uphold similar political trajectories to the U.S.

Not much difference has been articulated in terms of U.S. President Joe Biden deciding to re-join the UNHRC in 2022. U.S. Secretary of State Ned Price stated his “concerns” about the organisation. “We will vigorously oppose the council’s disproportionate attention on Israel, which includes the council’s only standing agenda item targeting a single country.” The Trump administration’s departure from the international community was based on the same alleged premise.

Agenda Item 7, which focuses upon Israel’s violations, is a permanent fixture at the UNHRC and the source of much criticism and allegations of “anti-Israel bias” – a term popularised during the Trump era and extended now through the Biden administration. At the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett also accused the body of being anti-Israel and the U.S.’s return to the international fold as working in Israel’s benefit.

The UNHRC is just as farcical as the UN. Whether the U.S. re-joins or decides to boycott, nothing changes in terms of human rights violations. A U.S. seat on the UNHRC will not alter Biden’s foreign policy, nor will it impede the U.S. from warfare and violence. In 2020, the U.S. military spending increased by 4.4 percent from 2019, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The U.S. is the largest military spender globally, making up 39 percent of the global expenditure in 2020. Anyone rejoicing at the U.S. decision to re-join the UNHRC might do well to consider the political violence it is applauding.

Neither Trump nor Biden have portrayed a stance based on human rights values. The same can be said for previous administrations. However, much has been lost in terms of the significance with which Trump exposed and applied U.S. foreign policy.

As long as international institutions exist, and human rights rhetoric remains the only threshold in terms of purported accountability, the mainstream narrative will not take stock of the fact that the U.S., like international organisations, operates from within a manipulation of the human rights and democratic framework. The result is a cycle of violations which are then isolated in terms of the oppressed and the oppressor, to forge a collective concern about human rights. Having a few permanent scapegoats, such as Cuba, for example, which has faced decades of dead-end international support against the U.S. illegal blockade, allows the U.S. to preside over the democratic debacle, even as it annihilates democratic expression throughout the world.

With or without the U.S., the human rights debacle will continue unabated. If, according to the U.S., Cuba does not deserve a seat at the UNHRC, what has the U.S. done to deserve it? In the same vein, given the U.S. inclusion, what values is the UNHRC seeking to impart? 

After gaining access to their private Facebook group, MintPress can reveal that the people who sparked the July 11 protests in Cuba are planning similar actions for October and November.

The group, La Villa del Humor, is widely credited with providing the initial spark that ignited nationwide protests on the Caribbean island in the summer, the most significant demonstrations since the 1990s. On July 10, one of the group’s administrators posted this message:

Tired of not having electricity? Stubborn because they didn’t let you sleep for 3 days? Tired of putting up with the impudence of a government that doesn’t care about you? It is time to go out and demand. Do not criticize from home, let’s make ourselves heard. If we’re not going to do it, we’d better shut our mouths and not talk shit from home that doesn’t solve anything. Are we more afraid to go out than to put up with all this cheek? How is it possible? We demand that [Presidents Miguel Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro] also have blackouts. We demand that, since we have no food, at least they let us sleep. Hit the streets. Down with the opportunistic communist government now. This Sunday at 11am, Parque de la Iglesia. See you there. If you don’t go, stop complaining so much.

The moderator also went on to provide a detailed itinerary of the march, including instructions on where they would march and what items to bring.

News and images of the demonstrations were immediately signal-boosted by individuals and groups in the United States, including the large and vocal Cuban ex-pat community in Miami, politicians, celebrities, and even U.S. government officials, to the point where even President Joe Biden put out an official statement endorsing events. The massive, global exposure this protest received turned it into worldwide news and rallied U.S.-backed anti-government forces across the island into the streets. However, the movement failed to break into the mainstream of Cuban society and quickly collapsed after it became clear that it had nothing like the numbers needed to achieve critical mass.

October surprise

The administration team of La Villa del Humor considered the July action to be a roaring success, and the first step toward a revolution that will depose the Communist government, in power since 1959. Fresh from their achievements, the group is helping to organize two new actions: a planned general strike in October and a larger set of nationwide demonstrations for November.

Sunday, October 10 is Cuban Independence Day and a national holiday. Organizers are calling for it to mark the start of a general strike (paro nacional in Spanish) to cripple or topple the government. An announcement shared on social media (including on La Villa del Humor) states that organizations across the country are gearing up for a strike next week, with hashtags like #ParoNacionalCuba and #SOSCuba trending. “We summon all worthy Cubans, lovers of freedom, their neighbors, their friends and their families, to a National Strike on Monday, October 11,” the communique reads.

As with most anti-government activity in Cuba, there is very little transparency. No individuals or organizations are named, the announcements simply ordering all Cubans to put down tools. This leaves many on the island wondering whether this is simply another operation by the U.S. government, which spends tens of millions of dollars annually on clandestine regime-change efforts, creating or propping up anti-government groups for that sole purpose.

La Villa del Humor is playing a significant role in promoting the general strike. On September 23, the group’s chief administrator, Alex Perez Rodriguez, recorded a livestream for group members, beseeching them to act as one.

On October 10, we are calling on all of Cuba, on the occasion of another year of independence from Spanish conquistadors, to protest again to demand its rights, to express its longing for freedom and democracy. God willing, all the towns of Cuba will be willing to, and will want to, protest one more time and to take the streets.

“The dictatorship,” he insisted, “is about to collapse…” “I am certain that on July 11, Cuba began to head to democracy,” he added, before sharing a conspiracy theory about the country’s domestically-produced COVID-19 vaccines, claiming that they do “absolutely nothing but make people even sicker.”

Peaceful march or beginning of a revolution?

It is, however, the actions scheduled for November 20 that appear to be generating more excitement in the community. Marches across the island are planned, including in Guantanamo, Holguin, Camaguey and Havana, where organizers hope to begin at the iconic Malecón in Old Havana and end up in front of the National Capitol building, the headquarters of the National Assembly of People’s Power.

The movement is being outwardly advertised as a “peaceful march in favor of human rights and against violence,” and already has a who’s who of U.S.-backed figures such as the San Isidro Movement rap group and politician Manuel Cuesta Morúa signed on.

Yet, internally, the goals of the action appear quite different. Sharing an image reading “hit the streets until they [the government] fall,” Perez Rodriguez gleefully announced that “all of Cuba is preparing for this!”– quite a different message from the somber and respectful protests being reported on by sympathetic expat media in Florida. Other group members shared advice on planning and getting permits. Organizers hope to bring out thousands of people in Havana and other cities in what they hope will be the beginning of a revolution.

Conservative Cuban blogs claim that the government is already aware of the plans and has already taken action against those individuals whose names were on the protest permits.

La Villa del Humor: by Americans, for Cubans

Although the group is private, it merely took changing my name to a less English-sounding one and pretending I was from the group’s home town for the moderators to approve my application. The group itself was created in 2017, ostensibly as a local online message board and marketplace for the people of San Antonio de los Baños, a town of about 50,000 people situated in western Cuba. The name “La Villa del Humor” refers to a biannual comedy festival held in the town.

For a while it did function as such a service, as locals posted complaints about thoughtless neighbors, advertised second-hand goods they wanted to sell, or alerted residents about lost pets. In the past year, however, it has taken a radical turn, becoming a hotbed of anti-government organizing to the point where there are now barely any posts relevant to local people. Indeed, many of the group’s posters are not even from Cuba, their profiles revealing that they live in Florida. One particularly frequent contributor even lists his place of work as The Miami Herald, the city’s local newspaper. In the hours during and after the July protests, the group’s membership more than doubled before the admins set the group to private, meaning all new members need to be pre-vetted.

As such, the group has become a conservative echo-chamber, with users primarily posting anti-communist memes or cartoons or promoting actions against the Cuban government. In essence then, La Villa del Humor is a place where Americans go to cajole the residents of a small Cuban town into overthrowing their government.

None of the administration team except Perez Rodriguez reveal their identity, hiding behind pseudonyms, meaning that anyone could be running the group. Perez Rodriguez himself does not live in San Antonio de los Baños. In fact, he does not even live in Cuba; he left the island in 2010 and today works as a pastor at a Seventh Day Adventist church in southern Florida.

The involvement of foreign nationals in the domestic affairs of Cuba is on a level that can scarcely be conceived of in the United States, with even the most adamant RussiaGate proponents stopping short of claiming that Russians directly planned the George Floyd protests or the January 6 insurrection.

What is also clear from interacting with the group and reading its messages is that there is no interest in discussing or improving the lives and rights of Afro-Cubans, despite the fact that corporate media in the U.S. incessantly presented the July demonstrations as so aimed, even chastizing Black Lives Matter and other black liberation groups for refusing to support the protests and siding with the Cuban government. On the contrary, La Villa del Humor continues to be full of pro-Trump content and posts condemning former President Barrack Obama as a dangerous socialist.

A long history of meddling

La Villa del Humor’s arc from useful local service to foreign-controlled regime-change operation closely mirrors that of Zunzuneo, a Twitter-like app launched in 2010. Providing a dependable messaging service and undercutting the competition on price, Zunzuneo quickly gained a wide following in Cuba, attracting 55,000 people by 2012 — an enormous number considering the era and the lack of Internet access on the island.

However, at the height of its popularity, it abruptly shut down. Unknown to either the Cuban government or its public was that the app had actually been commissioned and paid for by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Washington’s regime-change front group. The U.S. government’s plan was to first capture the Cuban market and gain the trust of the people, then to slowly drip-feed users anti-communist messaging, making it appear as if there was a groundswell of resentment. Then, one day, users would be alerted that a huge protest was happening and that they should all attend.

The NED was reportedly finding it increasingly difficult to hide who was behind Zunzuneo, at one point even meeting with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in an attempt to have him buy the service. An Associated Press investigation later found that the NED chose to pull the entire project rather than risk being caught in the act.

While it is still possible to argue that La Villa del Humor is a quasi-independent forum, Facebook certainly is not, and has aligned itself closely with the American government. Last year, after the Trump administration assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the social media giant removed all content praising the Iranian general, despite the fact that he was by far the most popular political figure in the country. Explaining its decision, Facebook stated that it, “operate[s] under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its leadership.” In short, if the U.S. government deems any group or individual to be a terrorist, then social media platforms are required to remove content challenging that idea.

Facebook has also signed a deal with NATO think tank The Atlantic Council, whereby the latter helps curate the news feeds of the Silicon Valley company’s 2.9 billion worldwide users. The Atlantic Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of establishment American power, including senior statesmen like Henry Kissinger, multiple military generals and seven former heads of the CIA. It is also directly funded by the U.S. and other NATO governments, as well as by arms manufacturers. That Facebook chose to hand over partial control of its content moderation to this group gives us a taste of just how close the relationship between big tech and big government has become. Facebook has also admitted to censoring Palestinian voices at the behest of the U.S. government and its Israeli ally.

Quo vadis?

Each year, the United States spends tens of millions of dollars in an effort to oust the Cuban government and install one responsive to U.S. interests. The most recent House Appropriations Budget, for example, allocates $20 million for “democracy programs” in Cuba, helping to support “free enterprise and private business organizations.” In case there is any confusion at what “democracy” means, it goes on to insist that “none of the funds made available under such paragraph may be used for assistance for the government of Cuba.” This is far from the only source of funding for regime-change operations. The U.S. Agency for Global Media, for instance, is spending between $20 million and $25 million on a similar goal.

Most of that money goes towards an information barrage aimed at convincing the Cuban population that their future lies with the U.S. and away from the Communist Party. Online activities are preferred, as it is much easier to remain anonymous and hide where the money for websites and publications comes from. The U.S. funds groups that produce all forms of public online content, including articles, videos and audio. It also provides training courses for young activists both online and in person, using tactics honed around the world to produce change.

They additionally fund and support Cuban artists, intellectuals and musicians who promote anti-government messages. One particularly notable example is rapper Yotuel and the San Isidro Movement, whose song “Patria Y Vida” has become an anthem for regime change. “Patria y vida” (fatherland and life) is a play on Fidel Castro’s slogan “Patria o Muerte” (fatherland or death). Yotuel led a sympathy demonstration in Miami in July.

The CIA also groomed Cuban professor Raul Capote to become the new president of the country. Unbeknownst to the agency, however, Capote was a double agent the whole time, and when the time came for him to lead a protest, he publicly revealed the plan and how he had tricked them into trusting him.

There is no way of knowing for sure who is calling the shots at La Villa del Humor; Perez Rodriguez denies any connection to the U.S. government. However, most of the Florida Cuban community have some links with Washington, even if they do not realize it. The U.S. has spent over half a billion dollars on beaming a TV and radio network into Cuba, creating large numbers of jobs in the process. Added to those are all those working for “non”-governmental organizations dedicated to cataloging human rights transgressions of the Cuban government. There are also contractors paid to build websites, translators, staff paid to work at events, and more. And that is not counting those directly involved in clandestine activities. Thus, the entire local economy is significantly buoyed by the South Florida-based, recession-proof regime-change industry aimed at Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and other Latin American countries.

While Villa del Humor did manage to be the catalyst for a local protest that, in turn, sparked a significant event in Cuban politics, the actual extent of their influence remains highly debatable. What is beyond doubt, however, is that they are indeed planning and hoping that their July stunt was just the beginning and that the end is near for the Communist Party in Cuba. Time will tell whether they can marshal enough forces to take this to the next level. If they are successful, history will absolve them. If not, history will likely forget them.

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