Cuba: Real Commitment to Human Rights

[Mika]

Cuba: Real Commitment to Human Rights
http://www.ahora.cu/english/sections/national/1456-cuba-real-commitment-to-human-rights.html

The monumental media campaign on Cuba by the United States has precisely its Achilles'' heel on the issue chosen to attack a country that has a real commitment to human rights.

Carrying upon shoulders the execution of wars of massive extermination from Hiroshima to Afghanistan, Washington lacks moral authority to draw up guidelines to the Cubans on how to respect and promote especially the right to life.

We should mention the attempts of successive US administrations to cause a food catastrophe in Cuba with sabotages to agricultural and livestock production centers along with the longest economic, trade and financial blockade the world has always remembered.

To launch a bacteriological war against the cattle, to deny the possibility to the Caribbean country of purchasing medicines and food abroad for its people, and to support the sabotage in mid air of a Cuban commercial plane say enough of what the United States understands to respect for human rights.

But the most important response to a campaign that has been constant is the action of Cuba and not only to guarantee people's access to all possible opportunities of food, study, work and cultural development.

Cuba is also defending the rights of other peoples with the presence of tens of thousands of physicians and health professionals in over 70 countries worldwide. They are working in distant places and very complex conditions.

States that have suffered natural disasters, as those recently occurred in Haiti and Chile, know a friendly hand from Cuban doctors, also now strived to carry out genetic studies to thousands people with disabilities in Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia, among others.

More than one million poor people living in Latin America have recovered or improved eyesight through free surgeries by Cuban experts, while thousands of the island's teachers have taught how to read and write people in Latin America and worldwide. / Prensa Latina

---

[Peace Patriot]

1. Thanks for this info--facts we NEVER hear from the corpo-fascist press!

It is quite mind-boggling to me that a country that has invaded and slaughtered a million innocent people, to steal their oil, and has set up torture dungeons around the world, and can't even create a health care system for its own people that doesn't include insurance and other medical profiteers, dares to preach to others about human rights. We must "look forward, not backward," says our president, of mass murder and torture (not to mention treason)--as if these horrendous crimes can be 'disappeared' from history. Blithely the U.S. government goes on, in its campaigns for bloody domination of the world's resources, on behalf of its multinational corporate puppetmasters--and points its bloody finger at Cuba! Cuba! A tiny country that has done no harm to anybody and, indeed, has done much good.

And the slanders and the psyops/disinformation and the bloody-minded plots continue.

----------------

What is this accusation that the U.S. launched a bacteriological war against the cattle in Cuba? I haven't heard of this. What are they referring to? Do you know?

[Judi Lynn]

2. This kind of material never gets national exposure, sadly. It's because U.S. personel

have been involved in actions the country doesn't want publicized.

The matter was thrust into public awareness briefly during the murder trial in New York of a former C.I.A. operative, Cuban "exile" Eduardo Arocena, who was on trial for his part in a murder of a Cuban diplomat, Felix Garcia Rodriguez, to the United Nations who was sitting in traffic at a street light when Arocena and an accomplice stepped up to his window and gunned him down.

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org.nyud.net:8090/belligerence/felix-garcia.jpg

During his trial Arocena testified he had been asked to deliver by hand biological warfare vials to Cuba. There are numerous references available which can be tracked down, and this is only one thread of a much larger topic of US/Cuban "exile"/CIA terrorism against Cubans for decades:

Terrorist Arocena's wife meets Senator Joe Lieberman

On September 11, 1974, Cuban-American Eduardo Arocena (known as "Omar")
and three other men established Omega 7 to carry out terrorist activities
against Cuba. They assassinated people who promoted dialogue with Cuba,
including Eulalio José Negrín in New Jersey and Carlos Muñiz Varela in
Puerto Rico. They set off numerous bombs for years. For example on
September 11-12, 1981, Omega 7 claimed responsibility for bomb blasts that
destroyed the Mexican consulate in Miami and damaged the one in New York
City because Mexico had not broken relations with Cuba.

They seemed to like to commit terrorism especially on September 11,
perhaps because that is the date of the overthrow of the Allende government
in Chile in 1973. (Omega 7 was involved in the murders of Orlando Letelier
and Ronni Moffett.)

On September 11, 1980, Arocena shot to death Cuban diplomat Félix
García Rodríguez who had stopped for a red light in Queens, forcing the FBI
(who had trained Omega 7) to arrest some Omega 7 members because of the
international outcry from other UN diplomats.

Arocena carried out at least one biological weapon attack, most likely
dengue fever; he testified in his murder trial that he took “some germs” to
Cuba. He said he thought the germs were to be used against Soviet people in
Cuba and was disappointed to learn that they were used against Cubans.

On September 22, 1984, Arocena was found guilty of the assassination of
Félix García and the attempted assassination of Cuban Ambassador to the
United Nations Raúl Roa Kourí. The federal jury in New York City found him
guilty of 25 of the 26 charges against him, including 20 bombings, perjury
(lying to a federal grand jury when he denied involvement in the 1979 murder
of Eulalio José Negrín), and financing his operations by being an enforcer
for a Florida drug trafficker. Then a federal jury in Miami found him
guilty of all 23 weapons and conspiracy charges against him. In a second
federal trial in Miami, the jury convicted him of all 24 counts involving
seven bombings in Miami from 1979 until 1983.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/88453

~~~~~
~snip~
In the trial held in the United States in 1984 against Eduardo Arocena, a
ringleader of the terrorist organization Omega-7, he publicly confessed to having
introduced germs into Cuba and admitted that hemorrhagic dengue fever had been
introduced in the island through related groups of Cuban origin, based in the
United States.
(snip)

There is a mountain of evidence, background information and facts that cannot
possibly be ignored.

What is beyond question is that, in just a few weeks, the hemorrhagic dengue
epidemic in Cuba --where it had never existed-- had affected a total of 344,203
people, a figure with no known precedent in any other country of the world. There
was another truly record case when 11,400 new patients were reported in a single
day on July 6, 1981.

A total of 116,143 cases were hospitalized. About 24,000 patients suffered from
hemorrhaging and 10,224 suffered some degree of dengue-induced shock.

One hundred and fifty-eight people died as a result of the epidemic, including 101
children.

The whole country and all its resources were mobilized to fight the epidemic. The
vector's presence was strongly and simultaneously controlled in all of Cuba's towns
and cities, using all possible means and with products and equipment urgently
bought from anywhere, including the United States. A request was made to the United
States through the Pan-American Health Organization and finally, in the month of
August, an important larvicide could be bought. Chemicals and equipment were
brought in, often by plane and sometimes from countries as far away as Japan, whose
factories sold Cuba thousands of individual motor fumigators. Malathion had to be
brought from Europe at a transportation fee of 5,000 dollars a ton, that is, three
and a half times the cost of the product.

In addition to the existing hospital network, dozens of boarding schools were
turned into hospitals in order to isolate every new patient reported, without
exception. At the same time, intensive-care units were built and equipped in all of
the country's children hospitals.

This is how the last infected case was reported on October 10, 1981.

If it had not been for this enormous effort, tens of thousands of people, the vast
majority of them children, would have died. An epidemic that many experts had
forecast would take years to eradicate was defeated in little more than four
months. The adverse economic impact was also considerable.

The list of the dead as a result of the epidemic is authenticated through the
corresponding certifications issued by the Ministry of Public Health, and attached
as document number 22.More:
http://everything2.com/title/Cuba%2520vs.%2520US%2520Govt%253A%2520part%25205

~~~~~
~snip~
This present campaign is a paradigm of Washington's pattern of accusing others of doing what Washington is planning to do or has already done. Even three New York Times reporters--Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad--in their 2001 book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, acknowledge U.S. contingency plans for bioterrorism against Cuba beginning soon after the revolution in 1959. One scenario was to start with a "biological strike against Cuba's soldiers and civilians." Speaking in 1999 about those schemes, Bill Patrick, who carried out biological research for two decades at Fort Detrick, Maryland (the main base for developing germ warfare), told an audience of military officers, "`We would incapacitate the Cuban population from three days to a little over two weeks.'" He explained that only about two percent of Cuba's seven million people (about 140,000) would die, and then "`We could move our forces in and take over the country and that would be it.'" This seems less unlikely and even more frightening when we remember that these plans coincided with President Kennedy's massive use of chemical warfare in Vietnam called Operation Hades, later renamed Operation Ranch Hand, that began in 1961 and continued under Presidents Johnson and Nixon until 1971.

Meanwhile, as the Cubans themselves set about developing a system that could deliver free health care to those seven million people whose incapacitation was being plotted at Fort Detrick, Washington responded with a total ban on trade, including food and medicine--sanctions that have continued for more than four decades.

Pro-embargo logic forms a vicious and bizarre circle: Washington outlaws trade with Cuba, even in medicine, forcing Cuba to develop its own advanced pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry. Washington then cites that industry as evidence of Cuba's ability to wage biological warfare. Washington therefore labels Cuba a terrorist nation. Thus the embargo is not only legitimate but essential.

In 1965, Cuba established the first of its centers for biomedical and scientific research and development. About half of Cuba's doctors had fled the island at the time of the revolution. Those who remained were teaching and learning the medical techniques of a new era. In a 1976 study called "Changes in Cuban Health Care: An Argument Against Technological Pessimism," health specialists from the United States concluded: "Judging from what has happened in Cuba in the last seventeen years, we argue that cynicism concerning the humane possibilities of modern technology must give way to a chastened optimism." "Our survey," they wrote, "has shown that the dehumanizing side effects of bureaucratic institutional care are subject to significant correction in a social context which is free to respond to such concern."

Biotechnology took off in Cuba in 1981 when Cuban scientists produced interferon in just six weeks during an epidemic of dengue fever that was killing dozens of people, many of them children. Here was an historic moment when biotechnology was able to respond to what many believe was U.S. bioterrorism. Suspicion that dengue was introduced into Cuba by the CIA was given added credence three years later by the testimony of the leader of one of the most murderous Cuban-American terrorist groups, Eduardo Arocena of Omega 7, during his trial on charges that included the murder of a Cuban diplomat in New York. As The New York Times reported at the time, "Mr. Arocena testified that he had visited Cuba in 1980 in connection with a mission to introduce `some germs' into the country." The New York Times did not report what Arocena said next: that whatever was carried to Cuba in that mission "produced results that were not what we had expected because we thought that it was going to be used against the Soviet forces, and it was used against our own people and with that we did not agree." This testimony is only one example of a body of considerable evidence that the United States government has carried out multiple chemical and biological attacks on Cuban people, animals, and plants during four decades. In 1982, two years after Arocena's mission, the U.S. State Department put Cuba on a list of terrorist nations, where it still remains.More:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/j/health.htm



http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HyyDHyAwI6k/SPgWh5802XI/AAAAAAAADbI/hHV8vxmc4Z4/s400/Arocena+fbi+hq.jpg

Last year Josh Bolton, US Under Secretary of State, gave a speech before the rabid rightwing Heritage Foundation entitled "Beyond the Axis of Evil." In the speech, Bolton designated Cuba, Libya and Syria as "rogue states," in other words states facing possible military action. Bolton went so far as to say "Cuba's threat to our security has often been underplayed," stopping an inch short of claiming Castro plans to attack Florida with biological weapons.

It was the other way around, though.

Back in 1961 and 1962, the CIA used biological weapons on Cuba's agricultural workers. A decade later, the CIA introduced swine fever into the island, precipitating an epidemic which culminated in the death of 500,000 pigs.

The Washington Post further detailed the US covert war against Cuba in 1979 when it published an article claiming the Pentagon had produced biological agents to use against Cuba's sugar cane and tobacco production. Other suspicious disease outbreaks include haemorraghic conjunctivitis, dengue fever, dysentery, ulcerative mammillitis, black sigatoka, and citric sapper blight, to name but a few. In 1977, CIA documents disclosed that the Agency "maintained a clandestine anti-crop warfare research program targeted during the 1960s at a number of countries throughout the world," according to the Washington Post.

"In 1984, Eduardo Arocena, leader of the terrorist group OMEGA-7, admitted to an American jury that he had taken part in operations to introduce deadly viruses into Cuba as part of a secret biological warfare programme against Havana," writes Marcia Miranda. Arocena was trained in the use of explosives by Cuban exiles who were trained by the CIA.

More:
http://raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1066077200,66752,.shtml

(Author should have written "John" Bolton, not "Josh.")

~~~~~

~snip~
U.S. Biological Warfare: The 1981 Cuba Dengue Epidemic
by William H. Schaap (1982. 1984)

For more than 20 years Cuba has been the victim of American attacks, overt and covert, large and small, unrelenting. Ships and buildings have been bombed; cane fields have been burned; invasions have been launched; and planes have been blown out of the sky. But many of the attacks have been even less conventional. Cuba has seen its share of chemical-biological warfare - some of which has been proved, some of which has not. If the Cuban charges are true - and we believe that this article will help demonstrate that they are - then the dengue fever epidemic of 1981 was only the latest in a long line of outrageous, immoral, and illegal chemical-biological warfare attacks against Cuba.'

The History of Attacks
Many studies have been written on the chemical-biological warfare capabilities of the United States. Some have discussed specifics; some have mentioned Cuba. John Marks, Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, and Seymour Hersh have all discussed various specifics. Shortly after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, during the early 1960s, food poisoning attempts were common, often at the same time that crop burnings were being carried out. A Washington Post report (September 16,1977) confirmed that during this time the CIA maintained an "anticrop warfare" program. Both the CIA and the army were studying biological warfare, primarily at the facilities of Fort Detrick, Maryland. Dr. Marc Lappe noted in his book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: The Science of Public Death, that the army had a biological warfare agent prepared for use against Cuba at the time of the Missile Crisis in 1962; it was most likely Q fever.

Throughout the 1960s there were occasional biological attacks against Cuba, sometimes, according to Cuban allegations in 1964, involving apparent weather balloons. And in 1970 the CIA engineered the introduction of African swine fever into Cuba, a successful operation carried out by Cuban exile agents .2 It led to the forced destruction of more than a half million pigs. The same groups attempted unsuccessfully a few months later to infect the Cuban poultry industry. These operations were first exposed in Newsday (January 9, 1977), and later appeared in the Washington Post, Le Monde, the Guardian, and other papers.
Then, in 1980 - the year of the plagues - Cuba was beset with disasters. Another African swine fever epidemic hit; the tobacco crop was decimated by blue mold; and the sugarcane crops were hit with a particularly damaging rust disease. As The Nation put it, this was "a conjunction of plagues that would lead people less paranoid about the United States than the Cubans to wonder whether human hands had played a role in these natural disasters..."

It is against this backdrop that the Cubans found themselves facing, in the spring and summer of 1981, an unprecedented epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever.

Why Dengue?
As noted above, the arsenal of chemical-biological warfare is unlimited. The U.S. military and the CIA have experimented with diseases which merely make a person uncomfortable for a few hours, with toxins which kill instantly, and with everything in between. John Marks describes a few in his study of MKULTRA, the CIA's mind control experiment, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate." Staphylococcal enterotoxin, for example, a mild food poisoning, would incapacitate its victim for three to six hours; Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis (VEE) virus would immobilize a person for two to five days and keep its victims weak for perhaps another month; brucellosis would keep its victims in the hospital for three or more months, killing some. Even the deadly poisons were prepared with variations: shellfish toxin kills within a few seconds; botulinum, however, takes eight to 12 hours, giving the assassin time to get away.

Dengue fever is one of some 250 arthropod-borne viruses, or arboviruses," diseases transmitted from one vertebrate to another by hematophagous arthropods - blood eating insects, usually mosquitoes. Dengue is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same insect which transmits yellow fever. There are four types of dengue, numbered one through four, depending on the type of antibody which the virus induces. Normal dengue fever begins with the same symptoms as a severe cold or flu, watery eyes, runny nose, headache, backache, fever, insomnia, lack of appetite, and weakness. The bone pain is incapacitating. Indeed, dengue was once known as "break bone." Its characteristic symptom is pain at the back of the eyes, most noticeable when looking from side to side. All types of dengue can give rise to the hemorrhagic form, that is, accompanied by internal bleeding and shock. This form is the most dangerous, especially to children, for whom it is often fatal.

Dengue and other arboviruses are ideal as biological warfare weapons for a number of reasons. Dengue, especially hemorrhagic dengue, is highly incapacitating; it can be transmitted easily through the introduction of infected mosquitoes; it will spread rapidly, especially in highly populated and damp areas. The Aedes mosquito bites during the day, when people are more active and less protected; moreover, in favorable winds, Aedes mosquitoes can travel hundreds of miles before landing, none the worse for wear. And, of course, since dengue fever is found in nature in many parts of the world, a human role in its spread is hard to detect. This is the inherent advantage of biological over chemical warfare.

The 1981 Epidemic
Although dengue fever is much more common in the Far East, there have been many outbreaks in the Caribbean and Central America during the past century. All four types have been found during the last two decades. In 1963 there was a dengue-3 outbreak in Puerto Rico and Antigua; in 1968, dengue-2 was found in Jamaica; in 1977, dengue-1 was found in Jamaica and Cuba; and in 1981, dengue-4 was found in the Lesser Antilles.

The epidemic which hit Cuba in May 1981 was of type 2 dengue with hemorrhagic shock. Except for the type 1 epidemic reported in 1977, this was the first major dengue outbreak in Cuba since 1944, and, most importantly, the first in the Caribbean since the turn of the century to involve hemorrhagic shock on a massive scale.

From May to October 1981 there were well over 300,000 reported cases, with 158 fatalities, 101 involving children under 15. At the peak of the epidemic, in early July, more than 10,000 cases per day were being reported. More than a third of the reported victims required hospitalization. By mid-October, after a massive campaign to eradicate Aedes aegypti, the epidemic was over.
The history of the secret war against Cuba and the virulence of this dengue epidemic were enough to generate serious suspicions that the United States had a hand in the dengue epidemic of 1981. But there is much more support for those suspicions than a healthy distrust of U.S. intentions regarding Cuba.

The Clues
We reviewed the reports on the epidemic of the Pan American Health Organization and of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, and interviewed a number of health officials. There are indeed indications that the epidemic was artificially induced.
The epidemic began with the simultaneous discovery in May 1981 of three cases of hemorrhagic dengue caused by a type 2 virus. The cases arose in three widely separated parts of Cuba: Cienfuegos, Camagiiey, and Havana. It is extremely unusual that such an epidemic would commence in three different localities at once. None of the initial victims had ever traveled out of the country; for that matter, none of them had recently been away from home. None had had recent contact with international travelers. Moreover, a study of persons arriving in Cuba in the month of May from known dengue areas found only a dozen such passengers (from Vietnam and Laos), all of whom were checked by the Institute of Tropical Medicine and found free of the disease. Somehow, infected mosquitoes had appeared in three provinces of Cuba at the same time. Somehow, the fever spread at an astonishing rate. There appears to be no other explanation but the artificial introduction of infected mosquitoes.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Weapons/Bioterror.html

[Peace Patriot]

4. Good God!

Thanks for the info, Judi! I read it all. It is overwhelmingly awful--but we must face it. This is a country--our own, the USA-- that preaches to others about human rights? Our leaders ought to be in sack cloth and ashes, begging the world's forgiveness.

Odd that a bit of this info comes from Judith Miller's book "Germs," for which she used David Kelly as her major quoted source--Judith Miller, the New York Slimes' warmonger on Iraq. It's pretty clear that Kelly was murdered for something that he knew, and hadn't yet disclosed (as the BBC whistleblower just after the invasion of Iraq). Probably something about Iraq and/or Iran (my best guess, a Rumsfeld "Office of Special Plans" plot to plant WMDs in Iraq, after the invasion, possibly made "traceable" to Iran, to push the war into Iran, then and there). But one wonders what ELSE Kelly might have known--since he was the U.K.'s top biological warfare expert and served as a UN weapons inspector as well.

What has been proven true of the Bushwhacks--that whatever they say, the opposite is true, and whatever they accuse others of, they themselves are doing--appears to be applicable to the entire U.S. government, no matter who is president. When Hillary Clinton talks of "democracy" in Honduras, we now know that that means murder by death squad for leftist leaders. When Barack Obama talks of "peace, respect and cooperation" in Latin America, we now know that that means U.S. military occupation of Colombia and probably war preparations against the leftist governments with the oil (Venezuela, Ecuador--adjacent to Colombia). And when either of them speaks of "human rights" in Cuba, are they sending more vials of biological death to kill more Cuban children--via this new loosening of the travel rules to Cuba--or looking the other way as the CIA hires someone to do so?

Thus far, whatever they have said, the opposite has been true. And is the other part of that Rule for Bushwhacks also operable--that whatever they accuse others of doing, they are doing (or winking at)?

It is very appalling to realize that the answer is probably yes.

----------------------

One other thing that strikes me about this amazing cache of information on U.S. biological warfare against Cuba is that we used to have news organizations that actually did their jobs. The New York Times, now the Slimes. The Washington Post, now the Psst (CIA rumormonger). These slimebags and CIA agents actually reported real news at one time. It is good to be reminded of what they once were, compared to what they are now --truly the world's worst and most bloodsoaked shit rags.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Kicking & rec. #3.

:kick: :kick: :kick: :kick:

[naaman fletcher]

5. Did I miss something?

Where in this article is Cuba's commitment to civil rights actually detailed?

I see from it that:

1. Cuba sends doctors around the world.
2. The U.S. sucks

Where is there any mention of actual human rights?

[protocol rv]

6. I think they use a different deffinition of human rights

As George Orwell said, Fidel Castro is the Minister of Love :-)

[Wilms]

7. k&r n/t