“First lady Jill Biden hosted a White House ceremony on Monday for “women of courage” who have fought political repression, sexual violence, economic hardship and gender discrimination around the world” reported PBS this week. “Twelve women received the awards, which were distributed by the U.S. Department of State. One of the honorees, Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, was not able to attend because she was not allowed to leave her home country of Cuba. She’s faced detention and harassment during her decades of advocacy for human rights and political freedom.”
Better late than never, Mrs Biden. But some of us wonder if you’ve actually had a change of heart regarding Mrs Beatriz Roque’s torturers?
Some of us vividly remember how you starred in a tourism commercial to boost the terror-sponsoring Castro regime’s income. We also recall how the tourism commercial was co-produced with a KGB-trained spy who was booted from the U.S. for espionage. To wit:
“Dr. Jill Biden in Cuba to study Cuba’s achievements in health and education," read a headline in Stalinist Cuba's media, Oct. 6, 2016.
More interestingly, during Jill Biden’s co-production with communist apparatchiks of her Potemkin tourism commercial to boost the income of Castro’s military and secret police who majority own Cuba’s tourism industry— her frequent escort was a Cuban lady named Josefina Vidal.
The KGB-trained Vidal was expelled from the U.S. in October 2003 for her suspected operational links to Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes, responsible for the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent history. Montes was known as “Castro’s Queen Jewell” by the intelligence community and was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Montes was released on January 6, 2023, after serving 20 of the 25 years of her sentence. Only a plea bargain saved her from frying like the Rosenbergs. If Jill Biden suspected Vidal’s background, she gave no indication.
While Joe Biden served as U.S. vice president, President Obama, employing executive order after executive order, whittled down the (so-called) Cuba embargo and opened a U.S. economic lifeline to the terror-sponsoring Castro regime to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba (mostly in remittances and the tourism spending Jill Biden so graciously boosted) exceeded what the Soviets used to send Cuba at the height of their Castro-sponsorship. No small “achievement.”
As a result—and in a thundering refutation of the liberal/libertarian/Castroite propaganda line that an avalanche of U.S. tourists and their dollars would magically convert Cuba’s Stalinist rulers into Rotarians and their fiefdom into a Caribbean Switzerland—during this Obama/Biden-engineered deluge of U.S. dollars, Castroite repression increased both in Cuba and in their Venezuelan colony.
Speaking of Cuba’s colonies. When President Reagan was fighting tooth and nail to arm the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras in their desperate fight against the Soviet/Cuban colonization of their homeland, Senator Joe Biden was just as desperately fighting against the anti-communist freedom-fighters.
Three different times (in 1984, 1986, 1987) Senator Joe Biden voted and lobbied AGAINST Reagan’s attempts to help the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras, who were being helped by many Bay-of-Pigs affiliated Cuban American heroes including (Che Guevara captor) Felix Rodriguez as volunteers. Years earlier, Biden had distinguished himself by voting and lobbying AGAINST helping the anti-communist South Vietnamese against their Soviet-lavished mass-murdering enemies.
“I met so many strong women in Cuba!…Cuba is full of STRONG WOMEN!” Jill Biden gushes in her Cuba tourism commercial.
She’s right. Problem is, Biden never met with ANY of them – or featured them in her regime-co-produced commercial. There’s absolutely no mention of the Ladies in White or of Martha Beatriz Roque. Instead Biden’s version of “Cuban strong women” are the regime apparatchiks who OPPRESS and TORTURE the Ladies in White–and who spy on the U.S.
Cuban women’s prison conditions were described by former Cuban political prisoner Maritza Lugo: “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consisted of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rats come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. For weeks we’d be locked up in total darkness with a little cup of filthy water daily to drink. Nothing to wash or to flush the excrement and vermin crammed whole that passed for a toilet. Nothing to wash away the menstrual-fluid that caked to our legs. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”
Indeed a study found that by 1986, Cuban women’s suicide rate reached twenty-four per thousand – making it double Latin America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world.
How these women survived years and even decades of such horrors then “took charge of their lives” and “got their groove back,” might seem newsworthy and inspirational. Indeed their stories fairly epitomize the most popular themes of women’s chat shows. You can almost hear Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg greet these long-suffering-but somehow-surviving Cuban ladies on stage with a standing ovation, sniffles, and teary hugs.
Ha! Instead, “the national media has never shown the slightest interest in any of our stories,” shrugged the late Caridad Roque to this writer in Miami. Roque (not related to Martha Beatriz Roque) was arrested by Castro’s KGB-trained police at the age of 19 and suffered 16 years of prison and torture in Cuba.
Her torturer, on the other hand, has been fawningly interviewed by feminists from Barbara Walters to Andrea Mitchell and from Maria Shriver to Oriana Fallaci. On a visit to Cuba in 2002, feminist pioneer Carole King (also at the “Women’s March”) sang Fidel Castro a personal and heartfelt “You’ve Got a Friend.”