Cuba: the propaganda offensive

The US has a law which requires the destruction of the Cuban system - the Helms-Burton Act. In response, Cuba has laws which ban collaboration with this US project.

In their 2003 book The Dissidents, Rosa Elizalde and Luis Baez discuss the Cuban operations which led to the March 2003 arrests and the evidence used in court. They show detailed evidence of support for Rivero in particular from the US Office of Interests in Havana (there is no US Consulate), and of donations to Rivero from the Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation (CANF).

The CANF - supported by successive US Governments - has a long history of backing terrorist actions against Cuba, as well as demanding the overthrow of the Cuban Government. CANF founder, the late Jorge Mas Canosa, was a close associate and backer of Latin America's most famous terrorist, Luis Posada.

Posada was implicated in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner in Barbados which killed 73 passengers. He was sprung from jail several years later, with Mas Canosa's help. In the 1980s he went on to work in Honduras with the internationally-condemned “Contra” terrorism operation against Sandinista Nicaragua. Armed attacks on Cuba continued. In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, Posada claimed responsibility for bomb blasts at hotels in Cuba the previous year, one of which had killed young Italian tourist Favio di Celmo. Posada received his funds from the CANF. In September 1999 a special rapporteur for the United Nations Human Rights Commission confirmed that the CANF had financed and organised the placing of bombs at hotels in Varadero and Havana between April and October 1997.

This is the same CANF that was funding Raul Rivero, whose only crime (according to McGeough) was to possess "a typewriter, and a will to dream".

Posada was arrested in Panama in 2000 and charged with three others over an attempt to murder Fidel Castro at the Ibero-American summit. In April 2004 a Panamanian court sentenced Posada to eight years in jail. In August 2004, however, outgoing Panamanian President (an ally of Mr Bush), Mireya Moscoso, pardoned and released Posada “on humanitarian grounds”. There was no word of protest from Washington, in the middle of its “war on terror”.

There are people in prison and facing trial in Australia right now, charged with training and associating with “terrorist” groups. Yet neither the Sydney Morning Herald nor Amnesty International has declared them “prisoners of conscience”. Perhaps they should.

We are entitled to scrutinise the treatment of dissidents and prisoners in all countries, beginning with our own. Cuba is no exception to this. The difference between Australia and Cuba is that Cuba is subject to bombings, and overt plans to annex the island and set up a US-controlled puppet regime. Australia is not subject to such threats.

In its current climate of threat, Cuba has restricted opposition parties, but it is far from the “brutal dictatorship” portrayed by McGeough. I have visited the island twice. There is no general climate of fear. People speak freely, criticising their government, but criticising the US Government far more. Cubans also participate in their political system at much higher levels than do Australians.

Cuba's human rights record is remarkable - taking into account its excellent health and education systems, the care of its citizens’ basic needs, and the internationalism demonstrated through its health and education support to many other poor countries.

Unlike Australia, Cuba has never invaded another country, participated in the carpet bombing of civilians, or engaged in a worldwide torture network. There are great dangers in joining in with these new rounds of alleged “human right abuses”, levelled against “the Empire's” latest target.

We Australians know where to look for human rights abuses: it begins at home.