Is BushCo creating more 'boogeymen terrorists' from Cuba, or does Cuba really pose a 'real' threat to the US?

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?artic..._international/

US risks losing the plot over Cuba
11 March 2005 07:59

Unrelenting United States pressure on Cuba, set to ratchet up again at next week's United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva, is testing relations between the Bush administration and a new generation of centre-left Latin American leaders.

As it has done each year since the early 1990s, the US will urge the commission to adopt a resolution condemning Cuba's human rights record. And Cuban officials predict that the US will again use “arm-twisting and threats" to get its way.

Republican attacks on President Fidel Castro's communist government intensified during last year's US election campaign. The Treasury Secretary, John Snow, tightened the 42-year-old embargo and vowed to “bring an end to ruthless and brutal dictatorship".

But according to Abelardo Moreno, Cuba's Deputy Foreign Minister, the latest moves could foreshadow more muscular intervention. “US officials are speaking of regime change in Cuba. They were already attacking us as sponsors of terrorism. Now we are told we are an ‘outpost of tyranny'," Moreno said this week. “We do not discount the possibility of military action against Cuba. The administration has to prepare public opinion. So human rights are being used. If the [UN] resolution is adopted, it will be extremely dangerous, more so than in previous years.''

Yet for all its failings Cuba's government is steadily strengthening ties with its Latin American neighbours.

Recently installed leaders in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Venezuela were raised in the left-wing, activist tradition of the 1970s and 1980s.

Castro appears to be very angry towards BushCo. I've not hard Castro threatened the US in such heated words as this since the early '60s!


http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fArticle...=613&fSetId=304

Castro warns US to keep hands off Venezuela
May 7, 2005

Havana - Cuban leader Fidel Castro warned the United States that all of South America will go up in flames of conflict if it invades Venezuela, in the latest broadside to his Cold War foe.

Castro launched the attack in a fiery speech lasting almost five hours that was shown on Cuban television late Thursday.

The communist Castro and Venezuela's left wing president Hugo Chavez have formed an alliance and both are strong critics of the United States, which gets half of Venezuela's oil exports.

"In attacking Venezuela, they (the United States) will set fire to the whole continent, they will burn it down, it will not be just a question of Venezuela, they will have to occupy the whole hemisphere," said Castro in his second prolonged speech in two nights.

"I know what will happen if they invade Venezuela," he declared. "I have to point out that it is someone who has been in this post for 50 years who is saying this," added the island's revolutionary leader in a veiled reference to the failed US Bay of Pigs invasion.

In April 1962, the CIA organised an expedition of about 1 400 Cuban exiles who landed in the bay, about 160 kilometres in a bid to depose Castro's communist regime. The bid failed and Castro celebrates the victory over the United States each year.

"It would cost them 100 times more to occupy this island than it has Iraq, and Iraq is far from being occupied," Castro said of any US military attack on Cuba.

"I hope that they are not so stupid and idiotic, they must know that it will be a disaster."

The main threat that Castro poses is to his own people.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0520/p01s03-woam.html
World > Americas
from the May 20, 2005

A Castro ally with oil cash vexes the US


Venezuela's Chávez is the new driving force for a left-leaning region.
By Danna Harman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
CARACAS, VENEZUELA – Llorente Muñoz has a photograph of her sons tucked into the corner of her bathroom mirror. Arnaldo, 7, and Enrique, 13, are back in Cuba while she is at this small Caracas clinic taking care, as she puts it, "of my other children" - Venezuela's poor.

Ms. Muñoz, a medic, is one of 20,650 Cuban healthcare workers and 8,600 "sports instructors" who have fanned out across Venezuela in the past two years, offering free checkups, medicines, and stretching classes. President Hugo Chávez, as leader of the world's fifth-largest oil supplier, is footing the bill, sending up to 90,000 barrels a day to Fidel Castro's communist island.

For critics, the relationship is a troubling sign of where Mr. Chávez wants to take his country - and even the region. Unlike Castro, who lacked the funds and support from Latin America's previous right-wing leaders to spread his socialist revolution across the Spanish-speaking world, Chávez is flush with oil money. He is also finding receptivity thanks to a wave of left-of-center presidents who have come to power in recent years. The combination gives the US its first real challenge in the region in decades.

"Chávez sees Castro as a father figure," says Otto Reich, former undersecretary of State for Latin America in the Bush administration, "an anti-American precursor whose footsteps he can follow, and whose built-in network of supporters around the hemisphere he can take over when Castro passes on." Reich calls the Castro-Chávez relationship an "axis of subversion."

"The US is a very ideologically oriented administration and has a lot of animosity toward us," says Andrés Izarra, Venezuela's minister of information. "But we can ally ourselves with whomever we want." Since the so-called misión barrio adentro, or mission inside the neighborhood, was started in 2003, some 60 percent of the population have received healthcare at one of the 300 clinics, and 2,575 lives have been saved, says Mr. Izarra. "What is the cost of 2,575 lives saved?" he asks. "Cuba is our ally in the war against poverty and illiteracy. We are thankful to them, and we can show it in any way we please."

They are showing it to the tune of more than $1 billion in annual oil shipments alone, says economist Carlos Granier of Cedice, a think tank based here. Chávez further bolsters the Cuban economy by purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products from Cuba's state-run industries and providing financing to purchase everything from Venezuelan chocolate to sardines to work boots. Hundreds more clinics are set to open in the coming months, while more than 1,000 Venezuelans will be sent to Cuba to study healthcare there.

"Oh dear, so exhausting," gasps Sanchez, readjusting her hairs pins. "These Cubans are showing us how to live correctly - but it takes practice."