From John Minto’s Global Peace and Justice Auckland’s latest newsletter.
CUBA ~ BEYOND THE SPECIAL PERIOD – HEAR TWO VISITORS SPEAK
PUBLIC MEETING: 1pm, Saturday 21st April, at Descarga Cubana, 280 Karangahape Rd, Auckland.
Speakers: Buenaventura Reyes-Acosta (centre), ICAP Vice President, and Alicia Corredera (far right), Director of ICAP’s Asia Pacific division.
Two leaders of ICAP, Cuba’s international solidarity organization, are visiting New Zealand for a week in mid-April to speak about the challenges and accomplishments of the revolution. Come along and hear their story. Sponsored by the Auckland NZ Cuba Friendship Society.
OTHER MEETINGS:
– Union Reception, 4pm, Thursday, April 19, NDU Offices, 20 Church St, Onehunga.
– Latin America community reception, 6pm, Friday, April 20, 37 Selwyn St, Onehunga.
– Auckland University meeting, 2pm, Friday April 20, Robb Lecture Theatre, B09, (Basement). University of Auckland Medical School, Park Rd
Hear the two ICAP speakers, followed by a free showing of the film ¡Salud! at 3pm. ¡Salud! find out what puts Cuba on the map in the quest for global health …
Filmed in Cuba, South Africa, The Gambia, Honduras and Venezuela, the cameras of ¡Salud! reveal the human dimension of the global health crisis, and the complex challenges faced by developing nations struggling to provide decent health care. The documentary examines Cuba’s example and its cooperation programs, in which 28,000 health professionals volunteer to meet emergencies and staff public health systems in 68 countries.
New Zeal
Instituto Cubano de Amistad con Los Pueblos: The Cuban Institute for Friendship Between People (ICAP) was founded in 1960 to “strengthen the bonds of friendship and solidarity between the peoples of the world. From the beginning, ICAP helped coordinate the International Brigades which came from around the world to support Cuba through aid in agriculture, construction and other parts of the economy. Now they continue to facilitate visits and exchanges between friendship organizations. The Institute organizes delegations for international groups to visit Cuba.”
Unsurprisingly, ICAP is regarded as one of Cuba’s main espionage and propaganda fronts, staffed from Castro’s two leading spy agencies, the DGI and the Department of the Americas (DA).
From US Blog Herald Watch
Mr. David Landsberg, Publisher
The Miami Herald
Dear Mr. Landsberg: Attached you will find a bilingual copy of an FBI debriefing report of Jesús Raúl Pérez Méndez, taken when he defected in Miami on July 13, 1983. Pérez Méndez at the time was chief of the Department of the Community Abroad of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) and was also a captain in the Cuban Directorate General of Intelligence (DGI)…
Pérez Méndez acknowleged during his TV interviews that he “gave birth” to the Antonio Maceo Brigade (BAM). This group was created by the DGI in 1977, with Cuban Americans under the age of thirty, whose mission was to act as agents of influence in the United States on behalf of the Cuban Revolution….
Sincerely,
Dr. Antonio de la Cova
Latino Studies
Indiana University, Bloomington
According to the blog Miami’s Cuban Connection
Pérez Méndez also claimed that the America Department of the Cuban Communist Party (DA), the ICAP, and the DGI control the ANTONIO MACEO BRIGADE (BAM), CASA DE LAS AMERICAS, CIRCULO DE CULTURA CUBANA, CENTER FOR CUBAN STUDIES, VENCEREMOS BRIGADE (VB), NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD, NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF BLACK LAWYERS, PARTIDO SOCIALISTA PUERTORRIQUEÑO-NYC, AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY USA.
They are all controlled by ALFREDO GARCIA ALMEIDA, chief of the North American Section of the Americas Department and former political counselor at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in NYC, with the exception of CASA DE LAS AMERICAS, which is controlled by HECTOR MANUEL ZAYAS QUIALA, of the DGI, and second secretary of the Cuban Mission NYC.
Almeida performed ICAP functions while based in New York.
According to the website Intelligence Resource Program
America Department (DA)
former National Liberation Directorate (DLN)
Operated by the Central Committee Communist Party of Cuba
The DA has control over covert Cuban activities for supporting foreign liberation movements and coordinating Cuba’s secret guerrilla and terrorist training camps, networks for the covert movement of personnel and material from Cuba, and a propaganda apparatus.
The DA is organized into four regional sections: Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and North America, as well as a Center for Latin American Studies (CEAL) and a Center for North American Studies (CEA). Covers used by DA staff include diplomats, Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency, Cubana Airlines, the Institute for Friendship With the Peoples (ICAP), and Cuban-front companies. DA is reportedly the most powerful of Cuban’s security agencies.
In November 1982, Rene Rodriguez Cruz, then head of ICAP and a senior officer in the DGI was one of four Cuban officials convicted by a Miami federal grand jury on drug trafficking charges.
One of the ICAP visitors to NZ, Buenaventura Reyes-Acosta is the former Cuban ambassador to Zimbabwe.
Given his background and the dubious credentials of ICAP, there must be cause for suspicion.
Also given the communist origins of the inviting body, the NZ/Cuba Friendship Society (it was co-founded by Chilean covert NZ Socialist Unity Party member, Victor Batista), it is odds on that the Cuban visitors will be up to no good.
__ You’re invited to view my latest video “684”__ a collection of some short poems. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QQVtsjdiDw )
It is very, very “personal” to laud, with albeit pathetic rationalisations, (a) US crimes in Vietnam and its own 56,000 pointlessly dead, (b) The God Fearing Chickenhawk for his killing feast in Iraq, (c) the IDF for its advisedly pursued 10:1 policy, (d) the near genocidal apartheid visited on Palestinians, and (e) the various cruelties of your various fascists of choice.
“Personal” to write off those not brimming over with Mah-type hatred as commies, anti-semites etc etc etc… Mah’s list of such “evil ones” is endless.
It pales that I have a go at a cantankerous, crusty old zionist who thinks he and his are “special”.
Enough of your your stereotypical snivelling and whining about manners. It’s classic default on the issues, that’s all it is.
“Mah, get a life, you stupid old cow!”
Knock off the personal attacks on me steve.
And while we’re about it Mah, who’s more murderous than your subliminal lover The Chickenhawk.
Certainly outstripped Saddam has he. With his cluster bombs. Oh what a devout Espicopalian War Criminal he is!
Mah, get a life, you stupid old cow!
so, er, what exactly could these evil cuban spies get up to while they are here? I cant see them checking out our military facilities and gathering intel for an invasion or anything?
Mr G
Thanks for that Ship-you obviously have some interesting hobbies.
Whoah, this whole blog is so unintentionally funny. Good luck in your continuing mission to try and rewrite history.
Does it ever bother you that your views will never have any credibility due to your obvious insanity?
It reminds me of that great quote from the movie Se7en: ‘I’ve been trying to figure something in my head, and maybe you can help me out, yeah? When a person is insane, as you clearly are, do you know that you’re insane? Maybe you’re just sitting around, reading “Guns and Ammo”, masturbating in your own feces, do you just stop and go, “Wow! It is amazing how fucking crazy I really am!”? Yeah. Do you guys do that?’
What’s wrong with these people who invite known spies for murderous totalitarian regimes? Don’t they just seem like “nappy-headed hos” for that particular regime?
EXCERPT FROM FIDEL’S EXECUTIONER by HUMBERTO FONTOVA
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 14, 2005
“Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savouring the acrid odour of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”
Che Guevara wrote these lines while in his early twenties, before he had gotten his hands on any such enemy. The passage appears in Che’s Motorcycle Diaries, recently made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford — the only film to get a whooping standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival. It seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che’s diaries from his touching tribute.
In January 1957, shortly after landing in Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with Fidel and Raul Castro, Che sent a letter to his discarded wife, Hilda Gadea. “Dear Vieja (i.e, ‘Old Lady’ — on top of everything else, Che was also a notorious misogynist) I’m here in Cuba’s hills, alive and thirsting for blood.” His thirst would soon be slaked.
In that very month, Fidel Castro ordered the execution of a peasant guerrilla named Eutimio Guerra who he accused of being an informer for Batista’s forces. Castro assigned the killing to his own bodyguard, Universo Sanchez. To everyone’s surprise, Che Guevara — a lowly rebel soldier/medic at the time (not yet a comandante) — volunteered to accompany Sanchez and another soldier to the execution site. The Cuban rebels were glum as they walked slowly down the trail in a torrential thunderstorm. Finally the little group stopped in a clearing.
Sanchez was hesitant, looking around, perhaps looking for an excuse to postpone or call off the execution. Dozens would follow, but this was the first execution of a Castro rebel by Castro’s rebels. Suddenly without warning Che stepped up and fired his pistol into Guerra’s temple. “He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were mine.” Che wrote in his Diaries.
Shortly afterwards, Che’s father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his prodigal son. “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”
This attitude caught Castro’s eye. More executions of assorted “deserters,” informers” and “war criminals” quickly followed, all with Che’s enthusiastic participation. One was of a captured Batista soldier, a 17-years old boy totally green to the guerrilla “war,” hence his easy capture. First Che interrogated him.
“I haven’t killed anyone, comandante,” the terrified boy answered Che. “I just got out here! I’m an only son, my mother’s a widow and I joined the army for the salary, to send it to her every month … don’t kill me!” he blurted out. Che’s unmoved reply was “Don’t kill me!–why?”
The boy was trussed up, shoved in front of a recently dug pit and murdered. Fidel was privy to these events. He thought executing Batista soldiers was incredibly stupid, compared to the propaganda value of releasing them since most weren’t fighting anyway. But he recognized the value of executions in intimidating other Cubans, and noted Che’s value as someone who enjoyed the job. By the summer of 1957 Che Guevara had been promoted to full-fledged Major or “comandante,” the Rebel army’s highest rank. His fame was spreading.
But not all the revolutionaries were favorably impressed. In mid-1958 one of the rebels was wounded and made his way to a Dr. Hector Meruelo in the nearby town of Cienfuegos. The good doctor patched him up and a few weeks later informed him that he was well enough to return to Che’s column.
“No, doctor,” the boy responded. Please be discreet with this because it could cost me my life, but I’ve learned that Che is nothing but a murderer. I’m a revolutionary but I’m also a Christian. I’ll go and join Camilo’s column (Camilo Cienfuegos) –but never Che’s.”
Two weeks after Che entered Havana and took his post at La Cabana fortress, Castro saw his instincts as a personnel manager fully vindicated. The “acrid odour of gunpowder and blood” never reached Guevara’s nostrils from actual combat. It always came from the close range murder of bound, gagged and blindfolded men. “We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (firing squad.)” Che instructed his Revolutionary Tribunals: “We don’t need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him. A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
Actually, Che Guevara was anything but a “cold killing machine.” The term implies a certain detachment or nonchalance towards murder. In fact Che gave ample evidence of enjoying it. Almost all Cubans who knew him and are now in exile and able to talk freely (Jose Benitez, Mario Chanes de Armas Dariel Alarcon among others) recall Che Guevara as a classic psychopath.
As commander of the La Cabana prison, Che often insisted on shattering the skull of the condemned man by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself with watching the executions. Che’s office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his firing squads at work.
A Rumanian journalist named Stefan Bacie visited Cuba in early 1959 and was fortunate enough to get an audience with the already famous leader, whom he had also met briefly in Mexico City. The meeting took place in Che’s office in La Cabana. Upon entering, the Rumanian saw Che motioning him over to his office’s newly constructed window.
Stefan Bacie got there just in time to hear the command of fuego, hear the blast from the firing squad and see a condemned prisoner man crumple and convulse. The stricken journalist immediately left and composed a poem, titled, “I No Longer Sing of Che.” (“I no longer sing of Che any more than I would of Stalin,” go the first lines.)
A Cuban gentleman named Pierre San Martin was among those jailed by Che Guevara in the early months of the Cuban Revolution. In an El Nuevo Herald article from December 28, 1997 San Martin recalled the horrors: “Thirteen of us were crammed into a cell. Sixteen of us would stand while the other sixteen tried to sleep on the cold filthy floor. We took shifts that way. Dozens were led from the cells to the firing squad daily. The volleys kept us awake. We felt that any one of those minutes would be our last.
One morning the horrible sound of that rusty steel door swinging open startled us awake and Che’s guards shoved a new prisoner into our cell. He was a boy, maybe 14 years old. His face was bruised and smeared with blood. “What did you do?” We asked horrified. “I tried to defend my papa,” gasped the bloodied boy. “But they sent him to the firing squad.”
Soon Che’s guards returned. The rusty steel door opened and they yanked the boy out of the cell. “We all rushed to the cell’s window that faced the execution pit,” recalls Mr. San Martin. “We simply couldn’t believe they’d murder him.
“Then we spotted him, strutting around the blood-drenched execution yard with his hands on his waist and barking orders — Che Guevara himself. ‘Kneel down!’ Che barked at the boy.
“Assassins!” we screamed from our window.
“I said: KNEEL DOWN!” Che barked again.
The boy stared Che resolutely in the face. “If you’re going to kill me,” he yelled, “you’ll have to do it while I’m standing! Men die standing!”
“Murderers!” the men yelled desperately from their cells. “Then we saw Che unholster his pistol. He put the barrel to the back of the boy’s neck and blasted. The shot almost decapitated the young boy.
“We erupted…’Murderers!–Assassins!'” His murder finished, Che finally looked up at us, pointed his pistol, and emptied his clip in our direction. Several of us were wounded by his shots.”
After a hard day at the office, Che repaired to his new domicile in Tarara, 15 miles outside Havana on the pristine beachfront (today reserved exclusively for tourists and Communist party members). The “austere idealist” Che hadn’t done too badly for himself in this real estate transaction, known in non-revolutionary societies as theft.
“The house was among the most luxurious in Cuba,” writes Cuban journalist Antonio Llano Montes. ”Until a few weeks prior, it had belonged to Cuba’s most successful building contractor. The mansion had a boat dock, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets. One TV had been specially designed in the U.S. It had a screen ten feet wide and was operated by remote control (remember, this was 1959.) This was thought to be the only TV of its kind in Latin America. The mansion’s garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of A Thousand and One Nights.”
Llano Montes wrote the above in exile. In January 1959 he didn’t go quite into such detail in his article which appeared in the Cuban magazine Carteles. He simply wrote that, “Comandante Che Guevara has fixed his residence in one of the most luxurious houses on Tarara Beach.”
Two days after his article ran, while lunching at Havana’s El Carmelo restaurant, Llano Montes looked up from his plate to see three heavily armed Rebel army soldiers instructing him to accompany them. Shortly the journalist found himself in Che Guevara’s La Cabana office, seated a few feet in front of the Comandante’s desk which was piled with papers.
It took half an hour but Che finally made his grand entrance, “reeking horribly, as was his custom” recalls Llano Montes. “Without looking at me, he started grabbing papers on his desk and brusquely signing them with ‘Che.’ His assistant came in and Che spoke to him over his shoulder. “I’m signing these 26 executions so we can take care of this tonight.’
“Then he got up and walked out. Half an hour later he walks back in and starts signing more papers. Finished signing, he picks up a book and starts reading — never once looking at me. Another half hour goes by and he finally puts the book down. ‘So you’re Llano Montes,’ he finally sneers, ‘who says I appropriated a luxurious house.’
“I simply wrote that you had moved into a luxurious house, which is the truth,” replied Llano Montes.
“I know your tactics!” Che shot back. “You press people are injecting venom into your articles to damage the revolution. You’re either with us or against us. We’re not going to allow all the press foolishness that Batista allowed. I can have you executed this very night. How about that!”
“You’ll need proof that I’ve broken some law” responded Montes.
“‘We don’t need proof. We manufacture the proof,’ Che said while stroking his shoulder length hair, a habit of his. One of his prosecutors, a man nicknamed ‘Puddle-of-blood’ then walked in and started talking. ‘Don’t let the stupid jabbering of those defence lawyers delay the executions!’ Che yelled at him. ‘Threaten them with execution. Accuse them of being accomplices of the Batistianos.’ Then Che jerked the handful of papers from Mr. Puddle and started signing them.
“This type of thing went on from noon until 6:30 PM when Che finally turned to his aides and said, ‘Get this man out of here. I don’t want him in my presence.'”
This was Che’s manner of dealing with defenceless men. He acted this way when he held the hammer. Against armed men on an equal footing his behaviour was markedly different. Two years earlier in the Sierra, Castro had ordered Che to take command over a guerrilla faction led by a fellow 26th of July Movement rebel named Jorge Sotus, who had been operating in an area north of the area where Fidel and Che were and had actually been confronting and fighting Batista’s army. Che and a few of his men hiked over to Sotus command station and informed him that Che was now in command.
“Like hell,” responded Sotus.
“It’s Fidel’s order,” responded Guevara. “We have more military experience than you and your group.”
“More experience in running and hiding from Batista’s army perhaps,” Sotus shot back. Che dithered and Sotus added. “Besides my men and I aren’t about to take orders from a foreigner.”
Che backed off, hiked back and informed Fidel who didn’t press the issue. But a few weeks after Batista’s flight and Castro’s triumph, Sotus was arrested without warning and shoved in the Isle of Pines prison. The intrepid Sotus managed to escape, made his way to the U.S. and joined an exile paramilitary group, taking part in many armed raids against Cuba from south Florida until the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal ended them.
Guevara also had a run in with a rebel group named the Second Front of the Escambray. These operated against Batista in the Escambray Mountains of Las Villas province. When Che’s column entered the area in late 1958, Che sought to bring these guerrillas under his command and met much resistance, especially from a commandante named Jesus Carreras who knew of Che’s Communist pedigree. Again Guevara didn’t press the issue.
A few weeks into the January 1959 triumph Carreras and a group of these Escambray commanders visited Che in La Cabana to address the issue of how they’d been frozen out of any leadership roles in the new regime. On the way in, Carreras ran into a rebel he’d known in the anti-Batista fight and stopped to chat while the rest of the group entered Che’s office. Once the group was inside, Che began to rip into Carreras (who was still not present) as a drunkard, a womaniser, a bandit and a person he’d never appoint to any important position.
Midway into Che’s tirade, Carreras entered the office, having overheard much while outside. “Che went white,” recall those present. An enraged Carreras jumped right in his face and Che backed off. Finally Carreras challenged Che to a duel, “right outside in the courtyard,” he pointed.
“How is it possible,” Che quickly smiled, “that two revolutionary companeros get to such a point simply because of a misunderstanding?”
The subject was dropped and they turned to other issues, but a year later Jesus Carreras found himself a prisoner in a La Cabana dungeon. A few months later he was defiantly facing a firing squad. Fuego! The volley shattered his body. And yes, Che was watching from his window.
Even the notoriously Communist-friendly New York Times admits that the first two months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. A study by Cuban-American Scholar Armando Lago doubles that figure. One by Dr. Claudio Beneda triples it. The preceding “trials” shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades. Guevara clarified the matter. “Evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail,” he explained. “We execute from revolutionary conviction.”
Not that the slaughter ended after the first few months, as most “scholars” imply. In December 1964 Che addressed the U.N. General Assembly. “Yes, we execute,” he declared to the claps and cheers of that august body. “And we will keep executing as long as it is necessary. This is a war to the death against the Revolution’s enemies.”
According to the Black Book of Communism those executions had reached 14,000 by the end of the decade. (Cuba is a small country. In American terms, this would amount to more than three million executions.)
On the eve of his trip to New York, Che gave a speech in Santiago, Cuba where he declared: “We must learn the lesson of absolute abhorrence of imperialism. Against that class of hyena there is no other medium than extermination!”
Two years earlier, Guevara had gotten tantalizingly close to achieving that goal. “If the [Soviet] missiles [removed under the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal] had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York,” he told the London Daily Worker in November of 1962. “We must never establish peaceful co-existence. We must walk the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims.”
“Extermination,” Che stressed. “Millions of atomic victims,” he said for the record. “Pure hate, as the motivating force,” he repeatedly declared.