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The result is a gross infringement of our civil liberties that will likely become far worse in the wake of the Orwellian Real ID Act of 2005 passed by the US Congress to become effective in May, 2008. This law mandates that every US citizen and legal resident have a national ID card (in most cases a person's driver's license) that will contain on it the holder's vital personal information. It also requires the states to meet federal ID standards. A likely future requirement will be what now is mandated by mid-2007 for all newly issued and renewed passports - that they be embedded with a radio frequency identification (RFID) technology computer chip that will be able to track all the movements, activities and transactions of everyone having them. This is an Orwellian dream for any government wanting police state powers and will let US authorities know the names of all persons in the US travelling to Cuba or anywhere else in cases where they did it from third countries so as to remain anonymous. No longer, and with national ID cards mandatory by mid-2008, the tracking of all US citizens and legal residents will become even easier.Nearly Forty-Eight Years Later and Looking Back - the Castro Revolution and His Government
Fidel Castro's revolution likely was born in March, 1952 after Fulgencio Batista seized power forcibly by coup d'etat after it was clear he had no chance of winning the presidential election that year in which he was running a distant third in the polls. Batista, with full backing from the US, instituted a brutal police state that served the interests of capital and turned the island into a casino and brothel. It was marked by severe corruption, little concern for social needs, and violent crackdowns against the people to maintain order. Fidel Castro wanted none of it. Despite being born into a wealthy Cuban farming family in 1926, being educated in private schools and later at the University of Havana to study law, Castro went his own way. He became politically active early on in 1947 and joined the Partido Ortodoxa Party of the Cuban People to campaign against government corruption and misrule and to demand reform. He also began a law practice in a small partnership after receiving his degree in 1950 devoting most of his time to representing the poor.
The PCC has governed Cuba since being formed and is Cuba's only legally recognized political party. While other political parties and opposition groups exist in the country, their activities are minimal and the state views them as mostly illegal. The Cuban Constitution allows free speech, but the opposition's rights are restricted under Article 62 that states: "None of the freedoms which are recognized for citizens can be exercised contrary to....the existence and objectives of the socialist state, or contrary to the decision of the Cuban people to build socialism and communism. Violations of this principle can be punished by law." That one party basis is how Cuba has been governed since Castro assumed power, and officially the Republica de Cuba is called a socialist state. It was inspired and guided by the principles of Jose Marti, Cuba's 19th century born greatest hero who believed freedom and justice for the people should be the cornerstones of any government and despotic regimes that abused human rights should be condemned.
Castro's Human Rights Record In A Climate of Continued US Efforts To Destabilize and Topple His Government and A Comparison to Hugo Chavez's Record in Venezuela
Castro's record as Cuba's leader is mixed at best as judged by the principles its "greatest hero" espoused. Unlike his ally and friend President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela who established a true participatory democracy by national referendum, Castro chose not to allow Cuba to be governed democratically. Instead he decided early on that he above all others would decide what was best for the Cuban people and little dissent would be allowed. The result is that while Cuba is a model state in delivering essential social services to be discussed in detail below, it comes at the expense of the freedom to oppose the ruling state authority. In the past, Amnesty International reported on the crackdown on dissent in Cuba and in recent years on the significant increase in what Amnesty calls the number of prisoners of conscience. The Cuban government claims only "foreign agents" whose activities endanger Cuban independence and security have been arrested, but Amnesty disagrees even while recognizing the threat to the island by the US and the harm done to it by years of an oppressive and unjustifiable embargo.
Amnesty was quite clear in its language stating: "The economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States against Cuba has served as an ongoing justification for Cuban state repression and has contributed to a climate in which human rights violations occur." Those violations include accusations of police state arrests, unfair trials, arbitrary imprisonments and the right to use capital punishment in cases of armed hijacking even after the Castro government placed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2001. While it's true what Amnesty reports, it's also important to note what it doesn't. No attention is paid to how for decades the US repeatedly tried to destabilize Cuba under Castro, isolate it in the region, destroy its economy, and failed in many attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader.
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has also been a US target for elimination but charted a different course than Fidel Castro in spite of it since being elected President in December, 1998 and assuming office in February, 1999. From the start, Chavez and his Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) wanted and got his revolution by the ballot box. In fairness to Castro, he too preferred that way but found it impossible under the repressive dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Hugo Chavez had a more favorable climate and once elected sought to achieve what few other political leaders ever do - keep his promises to the people who elected him. In a nation of overwhelming poverty, he wanted to follow the vision of 19th century revolutionary hero Simon Bolivar and his spirit of Bolivarianism to free the Venezuelan people of what Bolivar called the imperial curse "to plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty."
He did it with his own Bolivarian Revolution based on the principles of participatory democracy and social justice, convened a National Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution that reflected these principles, and allowed the Venezuelan people the right to vote it into binding law by national referendum which they did overwhelmingly in December, 1999. The new constitution which went into effect in December, 2000 established the legal foundation for Hugo Chavez to move ahead with the political, economic and social justice structural changes he wanted for his people. He wanted to lift them from poverty, guarantee them essential social services like free health care and education to the highest level, the right of free expression to include criticizing the President, and the fundamental principle of true participatory democracy so that the people have a say in how their country is governed.
Fidel Castro much earlier was a model for Hugo Chavez in how he established essential social services for the Cuban people like world-class free health care for all and free education through the university level. These will be discussed in detail below. But he failed by not fully permitting Cuba to be governed democratically with unrestricted free and fair elections, effective opposition parties, the right to speak freely, openly and critically of the President even though everyone holding political office in the country including the President and Vice-President must be elected to it.
The Castro government also imposes unfair travel restrictions on the movement of its people requiring them to obtain exit visas to leave the island. More recently these restrictions were relaxed somewhat but not entirely. They're still imposed on professionals with essential skills, and in the case of human rights activists who have the right to leave Cuba but not to return. These freedom of movement restrictions violate international law under Article 12 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as already explained. Seeing that Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro appear to be good friends and allies, it's to be hoped the Cuban leader or his successor will see how successful the Chavez approach has been in Venezuela and one day wish to alter the Cuban state model to be in full accordance with the spirit and letter of Bolivarianism.
Nearly Five Decades of US-Directed Intimidation, Destabilization and Attempts to Overthrow the Castro Government
The US-directed terror campaign to oust Fidel Castro began under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Kennedy with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, continued with "The Cuban Project" (aka Operation Mongoose) in 1961 to "help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime" and Fidel Castro and aim "for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October, 1962." It continued under the same and new names with many dozens of plots through the years to kill Castro including bizarre ones like using a poisoned wetsuit, poison pens, a pistol hidden in a camera (that almost worked), exploding cigars, explosive seashells in Castro's favorite diving places and a special hair removal powder to make the leader's beard fall out (maybe believing the latter scheme would remove Castro's power much like the biblical Sampson lost his physical strength after Delilah had his hair cut). In the mid-1990s, Noam Chomsky commented that "Cuba was the target of more international terrorism than probably the rest of the world combined, up until Nicaragua in the 1980s." And it was conducted by US-initiated state terrorism against the island state to remove a leader because he chose not to govern the way the US wished him to.
Besides the schemes listed above, the list of US terror tactics against Cuba is far too long to list in total here. They include US attacks on Cuban sugar mills by air, a 1960 blowing up of a Belgian ship in Havana harbor killing 100 sailors and dock workers, dynamiting stores, theaters, a Havana department store and burning down another one. In addition, there were dozens of attacks and bombings and over 600 known plans or attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro including the bizarre ones listed above. The CIA also conducted biological warfare against Cuba including introducing dangerous viruses to the island affecting sugar cane and other crops, African swine fever in 1971 that resulted in the need to slaughter half a million pigs, and hemorrhagic dengue fever that caused the deaths of at least 81 children in 1981. These incidents were later confirmed in declassified US documents.
It's also well remembered that Cubana flight 455 was terror-bombed in October, 1976 by former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles that killed the 73 people on board. The plot was likely masterminded by Orlando Bosch who devoted his life to committing terrorist attacks against Cuba and trying to kill Fidel Castro. Now at age 80, he lives near Miami and was recently interviewed by Andy Robinson of La Vanguardia. He told Mr. Robinson he once nearly succeeded in killing Castro in 1971 in Chile (with a pistol hidden in a camera), but the assassins sent there to do it "chickened out and didn't shoot" even though they were standing meters away from the Cuban leader and easily could have done it.
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