"Cuba visit renews hope over US convict; Richardson won’t discuss agenda" September 09, 2011|By Paul Haven, Associated Press
HAVANA - A surprise visit by Bill Richardson, New Mexico’s former governor, has revived hope that Cuba may soon free a US government subcontractor whose imprisonment has snarled efforts to improve relations between the two countries, with a senior Cuban official praising the American politician yesterday and describing the jailed Alan Gross as a victim.
Related: Slow Saturday Special: Cuba Coverage Still Sickening
You can say that again, although it will soon disappear.
Parliament Chief Ricardo Alarcon, normally a leading voice on issues concerning the United States, said he had no idea whether Richardson would be allowed to leave the island with Gross, a Maryland native who is serving a 15-year sentence for bringing communications equipment into Cuba illegally.
“I don’t know what Bill’s program here involves,’’ Alarcon said. “I’m not a fortune teller.’’
But the parliamentarian also offered measured words about Gross, who was working on a USAID-funded democracy-building program when he was arrested in December 2009.
AID = CIA and the whole world knows it.
“It is a shame that this gentleman has been a victim of politics,’’ he said. “They’ve used him.’’
Alarcon also lauded Richardson’s efforts to improve ties between Washington and Havana, including advocating freedom for five Cuban agents serving long jail terms in the United States....
Ever hear of the Cuban Five, readers?
Or these things?
"the United States government has a long history of using biological and chemical warfare against the Caribbean island nation. In 1961-62, the CIA’s infamous “Operation Mongoose” sought to cause sickness among sugar cane workers by spreading chemicals on the cane fields.
After that “success,” the U.S. moved on to introduce African swine fever to Cuba in 1971. This was the first outbreak of swine fever in the Western Hemisphere. As a result of the epidemic, Cuba was forced to slaughter the entire pig population (some 500,000 animals), eliminating the supply of pork, a staple of the Cuban diet. When Cuban government spokesmen first accused Washington of unleashing the biological attack, U.S. officials dismissed this with a wave of the hand. However, six years later, following the post-Watergate Congressional investigations of skullduggery by U.S. intelligence agencies, a New York paper reported that a “U.S. intelligence source” told the paper that “he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U.S. Army base and CIA training ground in Panama with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group” (“CIA Link to Cuban Pig Virus Reported,” Newsday, 10 January 1977). The article explained in detail how the virus was transferred from Fort Gulick to Cuba.
A decade later, the U.S. introduced a virulent strain of dengue fever in Cuba, as a result of which 273,000 people on the island came down with the illness and 158 died, including 101 children. An article in Covert Action (Summer 1982) detailed U.S. experiments with dengue fever at the Army’s Fort Detrick chemical/biological warfare center and its research into the Aedes aegypti mosquito which delivers it. The article noted that only Cuba of all the Caribbean countries was affected, and concluded that “the dengue epidemic could have been a covert U.S. operation.” Two years later, a leader of the Omega 7 gusano (Cuban counterrevolutionary) terrorist group, Eduardo Victor Arocena Pérez, admitted (in a Manhattan trial in which he was convicted of murdering an attaché of the Cuban Mission to the UN) that one of their groups had a mission to “carry some germs to introduce them in Cuba to be used against the Soviets and against the Cuban economy, to begin what was called chemical war” just before simultaneous outbreaks of hemorrhagic dengue fever, hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, tobacco mold, sugar cane fungus and a new outbreak of African swine fever (Covert Action, Fall 1984).
These are only a few of the most spectacular and best documented cases of U.S. biological warfare against Cuba. James Banford in his book Body of Secrets (Doubleday, 2001) revealed that while the Pentagon was refining plans for a biological strike on Cuba, in “Operation Northwoods” the U.S. military developed plans to fake incidents to cause popular outrage. These included shooting people on American streets, sinking refugee boats on the high seas and blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo....
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Yeah, it's not good if you expose the U.S. as a nation that harbors terrorists, blah, blah, blah.
Of course, when they are our terrorists they are called freedom fighters, rebels, or some other euphemism.
Washington has long insisted that the case of Gross has nothing in common with those of the five Cuban agents, who were convicted in Miami in 2001, and that a prisoner exchange is not possible.
Yeah, we foment terrorism with our guys; they were trying to expose and prevent it -- and got thrown into an AmeriKan jail!
The “Cuban Five’’ are considered national heroes by Havana, which says they were monitoring militant anti-Castro groups in the United States to prevent bomb attacks and posed no threat to US national security....
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Related: CIA in Cuba
When haven't they been?
Also see: Chávez returning to Cuba for treatment
They tried and failed with a coup once; isn't killing them usually next?
I guess that would be too "conspiratorial," especially with that pile of oil Chavez is sitting on.
