“Cuban leader Fidel Castro vowed to build a biotech juggernaut in the Caribbean, advancing the idea in the early 1980s…Forty years later, the communist island nation could be on the cusp of a singular breakthrough: Becoming the world’s smallest country to develop not just one, but multiple coronavirus vaccines, f The Washington Post reported last month.
Cuban “leader” Fidel Castro. Did you catch the WaPo’s respectful designation?
Fine, let’s look for WaPo mentions of Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet, or Nicaraguan leader Anastasio Somoza, or even Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista. They’re nonexistent, of course.
At any rate, the WaPo’s hyping of Cuba’s healthcare marvels is not exactly new or novel. To wit:
“Americans could soon be thanking Fidel Castro for their revolutionary cancer drugs. Cuban immunologists made several other vaccination breakthroughs, including their own vaccines for meningitis B and hepatitis B…All this is even more impressive considering the crippling embargo that America has imposed on the island for half a century," reported The Washington Post, May 12, 2015.
Yes, almost two decades ago, Castro claimed to have invented a cancer vaccine. Owing much to the lobbying muscle and ingenuity of his (always-busy) U.S. agents-of-influence, in 2004 this vaccine, represented by a California-based company named CancerVax, was indeed given an OFAC license for testing in the U.S.
But it never passed FDA approval and CancerVax Corp. went bankrupt.
But ah! This hardly meant that Castro’s nomenklatura, and their U.S. lobbyists and business partners suffered any financial reversals. The mere licensing approval by OFAC, you see, meant $6 million for the Castro-Family-Crime-and-Terror-Sponsoring-Syndicate (grotesquely mislabeled as “Cuba” by the mainstream media.) Chances are, the Crime-and Terror-Sponsoring-Syndicate’s U.S.-based lobbyists and business partners shared in the swindle’s booty...
Indeed the Castro regime’s medical swindles are many and varied. The screening of Michael Moore’s Castroite infomercial titled Sicko some years back was a signal for the Stalinist regime’s other propaganda assets to chime in. “Cuba has developed the world’s first meningitis B vaccine, which is available in Third World countries but not in Europe or the United States due to U.S. sanctions,” reported (i.e. dutifully transcribed from Cuban propaganda ministry hand-outs) Anthony Boadle from Reuter’s Havana Bureau shortly after Sicko’s release in 2007.
Of this 27-word sentence by one of the world’s most respected news bureaus exactly 14 words were true. This vaccine was not available in the U.S. and Europe -- but hardly because of sanctions. In fact, in 1999, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department granted the pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham a license to market the Cuban vaccine in a joint venture with Castro’s medical ministry -- pending FDA approval.
And why not? Castro’s minister of public health himself, Carlos Dotres, had hailed the vaccine as “the only effective one in the world!” Highly impressed, Bill Clinton’s FDA chief Dr. Carl Frasch said it could annually prevent “1,000-2,000 cases” of the dreaded disease in the U.S., and 110 U.S. Congressmen promptly signed a special letter to then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright beseeching her to allow this breach of the diabolical U.S. embargo “if only to protect the lives of America’s children!”
That was 20 years ago. The reason the vaccine is not available today in the U.S. and Europe is simply that -- like so many other Castroite concoctions and proclamations dutifully trumpeted by news agencies that earn Havana bureaus and lobbyists who partner with mass-murderers -- the vaccine is a farce and its sale a swindle. And, at least in this case, most civilized countries refuse to help propagate the swindle on their citizens.
Some countries discovered the swindle the hard way: “Brazil has wasted $300 million on a Cuban vaccine that is completely ineffective,” wrote Dr. Isaías Raw, director of Sao Paolo’s prestigious Butantan Institute, specializing in biotechnology.
A 1999 study by Brazil’s Centro de Vigilancia Epidemiológica (Center for Epidemiological Research) seconded Dr. Raw: “The studies conducted on the use of the Cuban vaccine in children under four years old -- the major risk group for hepatitis B -- showed no evidence that the vaccine protected them against the disease. This vaccine should not be recommended.”
The Washington Post’s propensity to parrot the Castro regime’s propaganda is also reflected in its staff. The Washington Post’s former Latin American correspondent Nick Miroff (he reports from Washington D.C. nowadays) is married to a former educational apparatchik of the Castro regime named Camila Harnecker. She is the daughter of the founder of the Castro regime’s military intelligence (G-2) apparatus. This notorious KGB-protégé, Che Guevara-chum and Stalinist torturer was named Manuel “Barba Roja” (Red Beard) Pineiro.
In brief, the man who (had he not been offed by Castro in typical Stalinist fashion after his services expired) would have been the father–in-law of a star Washington Post reporter is the gentleman with the ZZ Top-type beard alongside his soulmate and fellow mass-torturer and murderer Che Guevara himself in this picture.
Significantly, at the time of its founding in 1959, Castro’s G-2 was under the close tutelage of Soviet GRU torturers who had interned with the masters themselves, Stalin and Beria.
“Barba Roja’s” wife (the WaPo reporter’s late mother-in-law) was Maria Marta Harnecker Cerda, a Chilean Communist who worked for Salvador Allende and scurried to Stalinist Cuba upon Augusto Pinochet’s (just-in-time!) liberation of Chile.
For years, Manuel “Barba Roja” Pineiro served for the Castros exactly as Yezhov, Yagoda, and Beria served for Stalin–as director of mass-murder and torture.
And wouldn’t you know? Like so many others in such “sensitive” positions within Stalinist regimes (Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria– indeed, like Che Guevara himself), Manuel Pineiro’s usefulness to his employers finally expired. In 1998 the infamous “Barba Roja” himself got a taste of his own medicine and was “disappeared.” For the brain-dead, his Stalinist “comrades” concocted a story of a “car-accident."
A couple years ago The Washington Post ran an “in-depth” article (by none other than Nick Miroff) on an islet off the southwestern coast of Cuba called The Isle of Pines, which hosted the biggest prison/torture and forced-labor complex for political prisoners in the history of the Western world. Tens of thousands of American citizens of Cuban heritage had family members tortured there by Castro’s Stalinist regime. Many had family members murdered there.
Dozens of the surviving torture victims are U.S. citizens and live in the U.S. today. Interviews (or even mention) of these people would have sure added a relevant and eye-catching “human-interest” quotient to the “in-depth” article. After all, these people (most of whom are in the phone book) qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor, and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s (8 years.)
Alas! Except for the Cuban-American readers of the WaPo’s “in-depth” story by Nick Miroff, no reader would have guessed any of the above regarding this notorious prison torture-complex. Gosh. Wonder why?
Maybe because most of the victims were sent to Cuba’s Isle of Pines prison/torture/forced-labor complex on the orders of the man (Manuel “Barba Roja” Pineiro) who would have become father-in-law to the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff, the author of the story on the Isle of Pines, who married a one-time educational apparatchik of Cuba’s Stalinist and terror-sponsoring regime.