Take Cuba off the State Sponsors of Terrorism List?
Left: Panama Canal inspectors discovered an illegal arms shipmen being smuggled on a ship from Cuba to North Korea, hidden under thousands of tons of sugar, in July 2013. Right: Cuban dissident Digna Rodriquez Ibañez was pelted with tar by agents of the regime, in February 2015.
Let us not give Castro the resources he needs to continue his regime’s 56-year reign of terror on his own people, and his continued support for terrorists and terrorist states.
To enrich and solidify that dictatorship at this time only prevents the Cuban people from being able to forge a better life through elections in a few years, now that they are finally “on the one-yard line,” when the Castro brothers, now in their eighties, could simply be left to their natural, un-bankrolled, ends. In a dictatorship such as this, only the dictators benefit.
As Sonia Alvarez Campillo was leaving Catholic Mass on July 14, 2013 with fellow members of Ladies in White, her pro-democracy organization, she was assaulted by Raul Castro’s agents.
These “security” agents broke Alvarez Campillo’s wrist as well as her husband’s ribs in their attack on her and other members of her group.
Sunday after Sunday in Cuba, the Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco) — members of a movement started in 2003 by wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents in Cuba — have peacefully demonstrated for freedom and human rights in cities across Cuba. They have continually been harassed, beaten, and imprisoned in Raul Castro’s Cuba.
In an attack just two months ago, Lady in White member Digna Rodriquez Ibañez was pelted with tar by agents of the regime.
The Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation — an organization of Cuban dissidents that the Castro regime claims is illegal — reported that in 2014 alone, 1,810 members of the Ladies in White were detained. The detentions of these extraordinary women are among the total of 8,899 detentions evidently designed to crush political dissent. That figure represents a 27% rise from the previous year.
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The White House has announced that President Obama plans to take Cuba off the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Congress has 45 days to review and reverse this decision.
Of tremendous concern is Cuba’s relationship with Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The State Department’s most recently available State Sponsors of Terrorism Overview for 2013 detailed Iran’s vast support for terrorist activities — including: funding Assad’s brutal regime in Syria, where (by that point) 100,000 civilians had died in the ongoing civil war; supporting innumerable terrorists groups that continually attack Israel; supporting rebels trying to overthrow governments in Yemen (now done) and Bahrain; and increasing its presence in Africa.
Both Iran and Hezbollah, one of its prime terrorist proxies, were shockingly left off last month’s annual terrorism threat assessment report to Congress from James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.
Iran-Cuba relations are strong, including an annual Iran-Cuba economic summit. In 2008, former Iranian President Ahmadinejad approved 500 million euros for the Cuban regime and Cuba is training Iranian scientists and sending scientists and researchers to Iran. The stated purpose has been for medical biotechnologies. Are these Cuban scientists involved in Iran’s biological or even nuclear weapons programs?
In 2003, Cuba gave Iran access to a location in Cuban territory it apparently needed to block U.S.-backed, uncensored Farsi-language broadcasting to Iran — the equivalent of blocking Radio Free Europe during the Cold War.
Cuba also has a long-time alliance — and shares intelligence capabilities — with Venezuela, which, just last month, the U.S. government declared a national security threat, slapping sanctions on top Venezuelan officials.
There are reports that Tarcek Zaidan El Aissami Maddah, a man with strong ties to the Middle East who is now governor of the Venezuelan state of Aragua, may be at the center of this Iran-Cuba-Venezuela alliance and that he has built “a criminal-terrorist pipeline, bringing militant Islamists into Venezuela and surrounding countries, and sending illicit funds from Latin American to the Middle East.”
Regional intelligence officials also believe Maddah’s office has been using technology given to them by Cuba, to issue new Venezuelan identification documents to 173 Middle Easterners.
