Is Obama planning adios for U.S. Cuban Embargo?

Fidel Castro was among the first to celebrate Obama’s election on Tuesday. During the election campaign, a picture of Che Guevara on the wall of Obama’s Houston election office circulated the Internet. Wiliam Ayers served as “Collaborative” co-chair crafting education policies to Obama’s chairmanship in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). CAC, a foundation the Obama campaign maintained allocated “grants targeted to improve student performance and promote teacher training and leadership development in the Chicago Public Schools,” reportedly funneled over US $100million to radical activists. (Marinka Peschmann, Canada Free Press, Oct. 7, 2008). An FBI report documents that Ayers was given Cuban aid while still a member of the radical Weather Underground organization. Ayers and his radical wife, Bernandine Dohrn, were in Cuba as on a social justice mission as recently as this past September.

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The U.S. president-elect is touted as President of the World and in global opinion, some 98.9 percent of the world opposes the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba as documented in United Nations statistics. Before Obama even came into power, the European Union had agreed to lift its diplomatic sanctions against Cuba. At the same time, Venezuela was working with Cuba to lay undersea Internet cable to bring more Cuban citizens onto the Information Highway. “A new undersea fiber-optic cable being laid between Cuba and Venezuela will help provide high-speed Internet access to Cuban citizens by 2010.” (www.cabledirectory.com, July 18, 2008). “The United States economic embargo against the island nation has forced the communist country to rely on slow and expensive satellite links for Internet connectivity, according to a recent Wilkileaks article. “Even though it would cost less and be more efficient to lay a new cable between Cuba and the U.S., which are only 120 kilometers apart, Cuba is working with Venezuela to lay a 1,500-kilometer cable to get high-speed Internet connectivity.” It could be easily argued that the communist Cuban government held back its own people from gaining access to the Worldwide Net. It was only this past May when the Cuban government’s embargo against its own people was lifted “allowing” average Cubans to buy desktop PCs. It is worthy of note that the new cable, which provides high-speed Internet access to Cubans comes from Castro’s self-avowed close friend, President Hugo Chavez. The proposed cable, which is being deployed by CVG Telecom (Corporation Venezolana de Guyana) and ETC (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba), will also provide high-speed Internet access to Jamaica, Haiti and Trinidad. But while nobody’s talking about it, none other than Teresa Kerry first linked Fidel Castro and Company to the Information Highway. In other words, Chavez could never do for Cuba what Kerry already did. In 1991, using a Canadian connection funded by her Tides Foundation, Kerry linked communist Cuba up to the Worldwide Internet. The Toronto-based Web/Nirv, Canadian affiliate of the Institute for Global Communications (IKC) and its offshoot the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), used a 64 KBPS undersea cable IP link from Havana to Sprint in the United States, linking Cubans, or at least the Cuban Government, to the Worldwide Web. At the time, IGC and APC were two of the Tides’ Foundations largest ongoing projects. The deed went off without a hitch even though the US had officially broken off relations with Havana under the 1961 Trading with the Enemy Act. Lifting sanctions for the U.S. embargo seems to coincide with rumours of Fidel Castro’s failing health. The EU agreed to lift its diplomatic sanctions against Cuba, but imposed tough conditions on the communist island to maintain sanction-free relations. The U.S. criticized the move, saying there were no significant signs the communist island was easing a dictatorship. EU External Relations Commissioner Venita Ferrero-Waldner said the bloc felt it had to encourage changes in Cuba after Raul Castro took over as the head of the country’s government from his ailing brother Fidel. “There will be very clear language also on what the Cubans still have to do…releasing prisoners, really working on human rights questions,” she told reporters at a EU summit. “There will be a sort of review to see whether indeed something will have happened.” “No one asked Ferrero-Waldner what a “sort of review” is. State Department Deputy spokesman Tom Casey said the United States would “like to see a real transition occur in Cuba, one that would allow for the release of political prisons, for starters, and ultimately for free and fair elections in which the Cuban people could choose their own leadership. Casey portrayed the post Fidel Castro era as one showing “some very minor cosmetic changes” in Cuba. “We certainly don’t see any kind of fundamental break with the Castro dictatorship that would give us reason to believe that now would be the time to lift sanctions or otherwise fundamentally alter our policies,” he said. Cuban exiles, many of whom risked their lives fleeing Castro’s Cuba, and number about 650,000, account for just over a quarter of the total population of the greater Miami area. Cuban Americans, who have traditionally voted four to one for Republicans, ret-elected the three Miami-based Cuban American Republicans who serve in the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Should Obama choose to say adios to the Cuban embargo after he takes office on January 20, it won’t go down without a fight.