THE PRESIDENT’S DANGEROUS LIAISONS
Which Cuba does Bush dream of?
• It’s not necessary to ask why a Miami court punished five Cuban patriots so cruelly for committing the ‘crime’ of trying to halt the criminal plans of Miami’s terrorist mafia, associated with George W. Bush
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD (Special for Granma International)
THE recent triumph of George Bush II, holding court in Miami, gives a fairly clear idea of the Cuba of the empire’s dreams. In his preaching about democracy and free and honest elections, the current resident of the White House selected an audience of extremists, terrorists, drug traffickers and heirs of well-known Batista supporters.
Standing out among the great “democrats” who showed the most adulation for the U.S. president on May 20 are some characters whose connection with the most revolting aspects of the Batista dictatorship leave no doubt about their concept of democracy.
A good example of the “new Cuba” dreamt of by Bush is represented by the spokesperson for the Cuban Liberty Council, Ninoska Lucrecia Pérez-Castellón, who is among the president’s avid admirers, along with the hysterical Marisleysis González, one of Elián’s kidnappers.
A vituperate commentator on the terrorist radio station WQBA, Ninoska – daughter of one of Batista’s thugs – prides herself on carrying out the grossest attacks against Cuba, particularly against the five imprisoned patriots, and for justifying the crimes committed by murdered Luis Posada Carriles, detained in Panama and the hero of the Miami mafia.
Pérez-Castellón, honorable daughter of a well-known uniformed killer of the Batista dictatorship, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Pérez González, who was second in command of the infamous patrol car section of the Havana police department, proclaims herself a defender of human rights in Cuba.
The reality is that she barely knew the island before her father took her to Miami to flee from the people’s justice.
Ninoska Lucrecia Pérez-Castellón endlessly repeats her admiration for the person who she says has most influenced her life: her husband Roberto Martín Pérez, who also has a shameful family connection to the bloody regime crushed by the Revolution.
Many people in Havana recall the cruelty of Lutgardo Martín Pérez, father of Ninoska’s husband, one of the most savage police officers, in the days of such “distinguished” individuals as the monstrous Esteban Ventura and many other torturers. They fled the country in the final hours of 1958 and retired in Miami, in great numbers, under the benevolent protection of U.S. authorities.
A simple corporal of the dictatorial army, Lutgardo Martín Pérez quickly ascended the ranks of the military structure, thanks to his relentless fervor for mistreating, torturing and murdering the presumed or real enemies of his master, Batista.
Others also recall how at age 14 and 15, Martín Pérez’s son Roberto (husband of Pérez-Castellón) visited the sinister Fifth Station of the Havana police to “help” his father’s colleagues savagely hit defenseless detainees and participate in interrogations.
The father and son left the country hastily once the infamous Batista regime fell, finding refuge in the United States, while Esteban Ventura forcibly persuaded Batista to allow him to board one of his planes and Rolando Masferrer disappeared with his thugs, known as the “Masferrer tigers,” aboard a yacht filled with dollars.
That was the departure from Cuba by some of the most parasitical elements of the new ultra-reactionary society that would form in Miami, and who have been such an inspiration to George Bush I and now to his heir.
However, in 1960 Roberto Martín Pérez Jr. joined a counterrevolutionary army organized in the Dominican Republic by dictator Rafael Trujillo, another great “democrat” blessed by Washington. Believing that the Trinidad airport had been taken over by counterrevolutionaries, the group landed in an airplane that was immediately surrounded by the Cuban armed forces; Roberto Martín Pérez was imprisoned without firing single shot.
Once released, he returned to the Florida metropolis to boast about his deeds and join other sons and daughters of Batista henchmen.
He was soon recognized as one of the leaders of the clandestine armed movement of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), an apparatus specialized in terrorist actions. Today he continues among the Foundation’s saboteurs who have formed the Cuban Liberty Council, in order to connect into the pipeline of the subsidies provided by Bush I and II.
Meanwhile, all of Miami knows about Jorge Mas Santos’ pro-Batista family history. This dictatorial leader of the CANF, nicknamed El Niño, is the son of Jorge Mas Canosa, who founded the organization Ninoska Pérez Castellón has just sabotaged.
The current capo’s grandfather was once a high official of the dictator’s military, mad the late Jorge Mas Canosa also distinguished himself by joining the CIA and later participating in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, although he never came onshore; instead, he remained peacefully on the invading ship.
An article published in The New York Times on July 13, 1998, recalls that two years after the Bay of Pigs invasion terminated in an ignominious failure on the Cuban beaches, two young Cuban exiles were found, propping each other up under the spring sun in Fort Benning, Georgia, in training for their next assault on Havana.
While Mas continued with his career as a CIA agent specializing in dirty warfare and homicide, going on to become a successful and corrupt Miami businessman and finally accepted by Reagan as the leader of the nascent CANF, Posada Carriles made a name for himself as chief of the terrorist networks, ordering numerous attacks and assassinations and becoming a drug trafficker in the dirty war against Nicaragua.
These two CIA protégés, the successful businessman and the professional terrorist, kept in constant contact, the former channeling to the latter all the financing that he regularly needed for his labors in favor of a Batista-style democracy, the only version that suits them.
And arch-terrorist Orlando Bosch, Posada Carriles’ accomplice in the sabotage of a Cubana passenger plane that led to death of 73 persons, was always in the shadow of this criminal pair. The Boston Globe once placed this killer pediatrician in the same terrorist category as Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal.
Neither is there any secret about the fascist genetic makeup of Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart, grandson of a high-flying United Fruit Company attorney and son of Rafael Diaz-Balart, leader of the Batista youth, promoted to deputy minister of the interior because of his supreme efficiency as a link between Batista’s henchmen and the dictatorship.
Upon his arrival in the United States, this character founded the White Rose, a terrorist organization that claimed responsibility for criminal acts of sabotage in the early years of the Revolution, including the disastrous fires in La Epoca and El Encanto department stores.
Many other illustrious preachers of democracy related to the CANF and the ill-named Cuban Liberty Council have monsters in their genealogical tree.
A further example is the case of Francisco José Hernández, at one time CANF president; he is the son of Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Hernández Leyva, tried in Cuba for his crimes in 1959 and sentenced to death.
And this extreme-right elite crew constitutes the “democratic” backing of unelected President George W. Bush in his brother Jeb’s reelection campaign, this November, and in his own efforts to gain a second presidential term.
It is worth asking: What kind of Cuba the U.S. president dreams of, given his association with this unscrupulous underworld composed of the vilest elements of the Batista dictatorship? What kind of free and democratic elections is he talking about when he has recourse to terrorist elements to guarantee his own electoral successes?
All it takes is a look at the scenario of the U.S. president congratulating, encouraging and courting hundreds of characters linked, in one way or another, to one of the most shameful episodes in Cuba’s history, supporters of terrorism against the island, and capos from the most retrograde city in the United States. Then one doesn’t have to ask why a Miami court so cruelly sentenced the five Cuban patriots, for committing the crime of upsetting this terrorist mafia’s criminal plans.
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