Fidel Castro’s decision to officially relinquish his elected post as president of Cuba once again defied the conventional, but stagnant "wisdom" of U.S. pundits and many Liberal, Right, and Left ideologues and politicians alike.
The announcement of Fidel Castro’s retirement and the subsequent election of his brother Raul Castro as Cuba’s new president came as no surprise to Cuba experts and certainly not to the Cuban people themselves. Most Americans, though, seemed to expect that the passing of Castro — however it should happen — would be a convulsive event for Cuba. Instead, the changes happened peacefully and quietly, illustrating how U.S. perceptions of Cuba are, in general, painfully ignorant. It’s time we recognized why.
Facing imprisonment for treason in 1953, Fidel Castro famously remarked that history would absolve him of his rebellious actions against the decaying dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista. The prophetic declaration marked a turning point in Cuba’s development, culminating in a full-fledged revolution six years later. As Fidel himself now fades into history, Cuba again appears on the verge of change. While the scope of the island’s ongoing transformation pales in comparison to the tumultuous events of the 1950s, the reality of new leadership in Havana does create the conditions for a long-awaited warming in United States-Cuba relations.
It was nearly three in the morning, on a recent Saturday, when the door of a Washington DC jail cell slammed closed with me inside. After an already grueling day in police custody that began at 1:30pm and included being handcuffed for eight hours straight at one point, the ability to move freely (albeit in a 5×7 cell) was a welcomed relief.
James Moran (D-VA) has been in the House of Representatives since 1991. In 2002, he was one of 133 House members to vote against authorizing the invasion of Iraq. Most recently, he has proposed holding hearings in July on closing the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that currently holds several hundred detainees. FPIF contributor Michael Shank interviews him on the implications of his position on Guantanamo.
Guantanamo, CIA secret prisons, and Abu Ghraib represent the first round of the Bush administration’s assault on constitutional guarantees. Now they’ve introduced Round Two with an attack on habeas corpus: the right to Âpresent one’s body before an impartial interlocutor to contest the basis for unexplained, secret, or wrongful incarceration. Habeas corpus is the oldest civil right in the western world and the foundation of constitutional democracy.
The Bush administration’s Cuba policy has reached a dead end, with no hope of success. Its objective is nothing less than to bring down the Castro regime. Or, as then-Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega put it on October 2, 2003: "The President is determined to see the end of the Castro regime and the dismantling of the apparatus that has kept him in office for so long."
For more than 47 years, Washington and the mainstream media have misread Cuban reality. This fallacious view of events on the nearby island continued on July 31 when Fidel Castro (almost 80) entered the hospital and ceded power, temporarily, to his brother Raul, 75. He also named other top Communist Party officials to head major government departments.
Cuban expatriate Luis Posada Carriles, an old U.S. terrorist chicken, has come home to roost in Bush’s nest, exposing the president’s anti-terrorist policies as a hoax. Posada, 77, unabashedly embodies violence as Gandhi stood for nonviolence. His resume contains a long list of terrorist “accomplishments,” including the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados in which all 73 people aboard died.