Take Cuba off the State Sponsors of Terrorism List?
Take Cuba off the State Sponsors of Terrorism List?
by George Phillips
April 28, 2015
• Let us not give Castro the resources he needs to continue his regime's 56-year reign of terror on his own people, and his continued support for terrorists and terrorist states.
• To enrich and solidify that dictatorship at this time only prevents the Cuban people from being able to forge a better life through elections in a few years, now that they are finally "on the one-yard line," when the Castro brothers, now in their eighties, could simply be left to their natural, un-bankrolled, ends. In a dictatorship such as this, only the dictators benefit.
As Sonia Alvarez Campillo was leaving Catholic Mass on July 14, 2013 with fellow members of Ladies in White, her pro-democracy organization, she was assaulted by Raul Castro's agents.
These "security" agents broke Alvarez Campillo's wrist as well as her husband's ribs in their attack on her and other members of her group.
Sunday after Sunday in Cuba, the Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco) -- members of a movement started in 2003 by wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents in Cuba -- have peacefully demonstrated for freedom and human rights in cities across Cuba. They have continually been harassed, beaten, and imprisoned in Raul Castro's Cuba.
In an attack just two months ago, Lady in White member Digna Rodriquez Ibañez was pelted with tar by agents of the regime.
The Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation -- an organization of Cuban dissidents that the Castro regime claims is illegal -- reported that in 2014 alone, 1,810 members of the Ladies in White were detained. The detentions of these extraordinary women are among the total of 8,899 detentions evidently designed to crush political dissent. That figure represents a 27% rise from the previous year.
Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero were leaders of the Christian Liberation Movement, a political party opposed to Castro's Communist Party.
In July of 2012, Cuban state security agents allegedly murdered Paya and Cepero by ramming into their car and running them off the road, where they crashed and died.
The Cuban government officially claims the crash was an accident. But, as documented in the U.S. State Department's Human Rights Report for 2013, when David Gonzalez Peres, another leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, was arrested, Cuban officials at the jail warned him about what happened to Paya.
Paya and Cepero were most likely murdered for trying to change a system in which all 612 candidates in a recent Cuban election were members of the Communist Party and ran unopposed, and in which all other candidates had been rejected by the regime.
Left: Panama Canal inspectors discovered an illegal arms shipmen being smuggled on a ship from Cuba to North Korea, hidden under thousands of tons of sugar, in July 2013. Right: Cuban dissident Digna Rodriquez Ibañez was pelted with tar by agents of the regime, in February 2015.
Cuba is still a brutal place, with Raul Castro -- who replaced his brother, Fidel, in 2006 -- as a dictator doing everything he can to hold onto power.
The White House has announced that President Obama plans to take Cuba off the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Congress has 45 days to review and reverse this decision.
Of tremendous concern is Cuba's relationship with Iran -- the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. The State Department's most recently available State Sponsors of Terrorism Overview for 2013 detailed Iran's vast support for terrorist activities -- including: funding Assad's brutal regime in Syria, where (by that point) 100,000 civilians had died in the ongoing civil war; supporting innumerable terrorists groups that continually attack Israel; supporting rebels trying to overthrow governments in Yemen (now done) and Bahrain; and increasing its presence in Africa.
Both Iran and Hezbollah, one of its prime terrorist proxies, were shockingly left off last month's annual terrorism threat assessment report to Congress from James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.
Iran-Cuba relations are strong, including an annual Iran-Cuba economic summit. In 2008, former Iranian President Ahmadinejad approved 500 million euros for the Cuban regime and Cuba is training Iranian scientists and sending scientists and researchers to Iran.
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