What a laugh-riot Raul Castro must be having at the expense of his chum and ally Bashar Assad!
Best we can tell from recent news, using poison gas against villagers, massacring children and sponsoring terror groups will get a dictator’s fiefdom bombed by U.S. planes on the orders of U.S. presidents.
Fine. Now let’s take these airstrike-inducing items seriatim and see how they apply to the poison-gas-wielding, children-massacring, terror-sponsoring dictator who dwells—not thousands of miles distant from our shores in a barbarous medieval pesthole!—but on our very doorstep in a nation formerly richer and more modernized than much of Europe and that formerly hosted more Americans as residents than America hosted Cubans.
Some might even say that the above attributes would make airstrikes against this current criminal, repressive and terror-sponsoring fiefdom -- to say nothing of the “nation-building” afterwards—immensely more sensible and easier.
“Cuba is using a lethal mixture of Soviet-supplied mustard gas and nerve gases to flush out South African-backed Angolan rebels from their strongholds in remote areas, Jane's Defense Weekly reported. Prof. Aubin Heyndrickx, head of toxicology at the University of Ghent in Belgium and a U.N. specialist on biological and chemical warfare, was quoted as saying that his evidence is based on environmental samples taken from the Angolan battle zone in April. Soil, leaf and water samples showed clear traces of mustard gas and nerve gases, Heyndrickx told the London-based weekly, which specializes in military matters.”
Got that, amigos? That’s from Jane’s Defense Weekly—not exactly a “Spanish-language Miami-based scandal-sheet!” And the documentation was provided by a Prof. Aubin Heyndricks of the Univ. of Ghent and U.N.—not exactly an “embittered, loud-mouthed, right-wing Cuban exile!”
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This documentation of Castroite cruelty and cowardice (as if any more was needed by that time) was also picked up by the ever intrepid Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in one of their columns: “Heyndrickx, a Belgian criminal toxicologist, professor and senior UN consultant on chemical weapons, stated that “Samples of war-gas "identification kits" taken from Cuban prisoners after a key Angolan battle at Cuito Cuanavale were of Soviet origin. Heyndrickx wrote: "There is no doubt anymore that the Cubans were using nerve gases against the troops of Mr. Jonas Savimbi."
Now on to the massacre of innocent children: “This was a very heroic and patriotic act!” Fidel Castro gushed in August 5 1994 while decorating one of his subjects named Jesus Gonzalez as “Hero of the Revolution.”
This “heroism” consisted of ramming his steel-prowed cutter against a flimsy boat full of desperate Cuban escapees—then blasting his water cannon against dozens of women and children clinging desperately to the sinking boat and drowning 43 of them including 11 children, some of them infants.
"MI HIJO! MI HIJO!" Maria screamed as the water jet slammed into her, ripping half the clothes off her body and ripping Juan's arm from her grasp. "JUANITO! JUANITO!" She fumbled frantically around her, still blinded by the water blast. Little Juan had gone spinning across the deck and now clung desperately to the tug's railing 10 feet behind Maria as huge waves lapped his legs.
WHACK! The steel patrol boat turned sharply and rammed the escape craft from the other side. Then - CRACK! another one crashed it from the front! WHACK! In Cuba you don't do something like this without strict orders from WAY above.
"We have women and children aboard!" The escapee men yelled. "We'll turn around! OK?!"
WHACK! the Castroites answered the plea by ramming them again. In seconds the escapee craft started coming apart and sinking. Muffled yells and cries came from below. Turns out the women and children who had scrambled into the hold for safety after the first whack had in fact scrambled into a watery tomb.
With the boat coming apart and the water rushing in around them, some got death grips on their children and managed to scramble or swim out. But not all. The roar from the water cannons and the din from the boat engines muffled most of the screams, but all around people were screaming, coughing, gagging and sinking.
Maria Garcia lost her son, Juanito, her husband, brother, sister, two uncles and three cousins in the maritime massacre. In all, 43 people drowned, 11 of them children. Carlos Anaya was 3 when he drowned, Yisel Alvarez, 4. Helen Martinez was 6 months old. Please click here for more details on this massacre.
And all this death and horror to flee from a nation that experienced net immigration throughout the 20th century, where boats and planes brought in many more people than they took out - except on vacation. (Despite what you saw in The Godfather, actually, in 1950, more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. than Americans in Cuba, as befit a nation with a bigger middle class than Switzerland.)
This was obviously a rogue operation by crazed deviants, you say. No government could possibly condone, much less directly order such a thing! Right?
Wrong. Nothing is random in Stalinist Cuba. As mentioned, one of the gallant water-cannon gunners was even decorated (personally) by Fidel Castro. Perhaps for expert marksmanship. A 3-year-old child presents a pretty small target. A 6-month-old baby an even smaller one. "Magnificent job defending the glorious revolution, companero!"
(Raul Castro headed Cuba’s military which carried out both the poison gassings and the child-massacre, by the way. He was hardly an innocent bystander to these horrors.)
Far from any airstrikes by U.S. planes, as I sit here and write (and for several years now--thanks to Obama’s executive orders) the poison gas-wielding, child-massacring Castro regime has been lavished by an estimated $4 to $5 billion annually in U.S. dollars. That’s more than the Soviets lavished on their Castroite colony during the 1980s and '90s. In the Alice in Wonderland occupied by the mainstream media, Democrats and Castro’s agents-of-influence (but I repeat myself) this is known as an “economic embargo.”
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