Cuba Has Already Been Liberated!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

My guess is, based on internet news sources, that the United States will invade the sovereign island nation of Cuba sometime this week.  Trump is desperate to not only deflect the attention of Americans away from their re-emerging interest in seeing what (and who) is in the Epstein files, but now that he has crapped the bed with his impulsive war on Iran, he needs to draw attention away from that fiasco as well.  The Trump regime has been starving Cuba of fuel and basic humanitarian assistance for months, especially since gaining control of Venezuela's oil production this past January, in an effort to either bring about the collapse of the government or to weaken it to the point where it would be unable to resist a US invasion.

Now, with the war in Iran rapidly going to hell in a hand basket, Trump will surely revert back to the art of distraction.  It will either be Greenland or Cuba, and from Trump's glitzy and gold-plated view of the world, Cuba makes the most sense.  He wants to be the "liberator" of the socialist island nation.  One problem with that is, of course, Cuba has already been liberated.  That happened on January 1, 1959, when brothers Fidel and Raul Castro, Dr. Che Guevara, and other guerilla warriors who had been fighting their way across the island for two long years and gaining the support of the populace as they went, stormed into Havana and drove dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile.

Batista was a tool of the American mob, the man who turned Havana into a cesspool of shiny hotels and casinos and a major hangout for American mobsters.  His government helped to fund the swanky mob-operated hotels and casinos, and in return he received massive kickbacks from the American criminals.  As an example of the connections between Batista and the American mob and how tightly they were bound, Batista appointed famed American crime boss Meyer Lansky as director of Cuba's "gambling reform" in the 1950's.  Lansky was the primary architect of mob activities in Havana, 

When Batista fled, so too did many wealthy Cubans, the majority of whom flew to Miami, Florida, and began new lives in the United States  Today the descendants of those well-heeled Cuban refugees harbor dreams of returning to the island of their parents and reclaiming the properties they abandoned in order to maintain some semblance of their status and lifestyles in the United States.  Marco Rubio, the current US Secretary of State, is one of those focused on reclaiming past glories and possessions of his family, and he is certainly prodding Trump to increase his legacy by becoming the American President who "liberated" Cuba.

I had the opportunity and privilege to visit Cuba ten years ago last month as part of a tour sponsored by The Nation magazine.  The flight from Tampa to Havana aboard a commercial airliner was fifty-one minutes.  The following is part of the post I wrote on April 23, 2016, in the evening of our first day on the island.  Internet service was awful, so the posting did not go on-line until April 30th.

"When Fidel and the other revolutionaries took over on January 1, 1959, the US-backed dictator, Batista, cleaned out the banks and fled with much of the nation's money.  Ordinary Cubans stormed the Mafia casinos and piled all of their gambling equipment in the streets and burned it.  It took less than ninety minutes for those hardy souls to eliminate gambling on the island."

Donald Trump is a big fan of glitzy hotels and casinos.  He is also a big fan of shady characters who stroke his ego and buy his crypto.  It doesn't take a genius to see where Cuba will be headed if Trump "liberates" it.  The island, and Havana in particular, will be returned to its former gangster state in short order.  

The good people of Cuba deserve so much more than just a rehash of their inglorious past.   Trump will find more resistance there than he did in Venezuela, and his pal, Putin, may also weigh in on the matter -  so a quick and bloodless victory is far from a sure thing.  But if Trump is successful in  re-liberating Cuba for the Rubios of the world and his own vanity, it is almost certain to be another case of . . .

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Viva Cuba libre!