CUBA'S GET RICH QUICK SCHEME: RETURN AMERICAN FUGITIVES FOR THE REWARD MONEY

The Coming Race War Begins In Cuba, Not South Carolina

Optics of USA’s Killers Returning Home Is Not A Good One

The View From The U.S. Virgin Islands

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

Virgin Islands Free Press

 

Charles Manson wanted to start a race war in America by directing his “family” to mass murder people and then try to put the blame on black folks. Last week, confessed mass murderer Dylann Storm Roof was accused of trying to put the country at odds against itself over race.

 

But someone who took substantive steps to do just that is former Cuban President Fidel Castro who favored black fugitives over white ones when race relations were touch and go in the early 1960s.

 

Cuba has provided safe haven to American criminals since then. In 1961, a black militant leader from North Carolina accused of kidnapping a white couple during a racial disturbance evaded the FBI and arrived in Havana.

 

By 1968, United States fugitives were arriving like clockwork, often aboard hijacked airplanes. Many were members of self-proclaimed revolutionary groups who carried out their political agenda with bombings, bank robberies and murder of police officers drawn by Cuba’s open embrace of anyone who claimed to be carrying out “armed struggle” against non-communist governments.

 

“We understood that if anything ever happened in the U.S. and we had to leave, the best thing was to come to Cuba,” explained Charlie Hill, a member of a militant group called the Republic of New Africa that wanted to form an independent black nation in the American South.

 

Hill and two other members hijacked a plane to Cuba after shooting and killing a New Mexico police officer who wanted to search their car, which was loaded with guns and dynamite. His comments were made to Teishan Latner, a research fellow at NYU’s Center for the United States and the Cold War, whose 2013 book, “Irresistible Revolution: Cuba and American Radicalism, 1968-1992,” offers a revealing look at the Cuban government’s treatment of the fugitives it deemed to be genuine revolutionaries.

 

The Castro regime gave them ration cards and free housing. One large Havana home became known as the “Hijack House” because so many of its occupants arrived on pirated aircraft. Neighbors referred to another as Casa de las Panteras for the all the fugitive Black Panthers living there.

 

These revolutionary pilgrims got many privileges not available to ordinary Cubans, including the loan of AK-47 rifles for hunting expeditions. To be fair, Castro came to regret that one when his relations with exiled Black Panther chief Eldridge Cleaver — who fled to Cuba after a shootout with Oakland police — went south.

Cleaver chillingly reminded the government he had guns. After a tense standoff of several weeks, there was mutual agreement that Cleaver would move on to Algeria.

 

For more labile fugitives, the rewards were bounteous: college educations and cushy jobs. Some worked at propaganda stations beaming revolutionary rhetoric at the United States. Others taught English at elite Havana schools.

William Lee Brent, a Black Panther who hijacked a plane after shooting three San Francisco cops, was a Cuban emissary to the left-wing government of Grenada during the 1980s before his death from pneumonia. Assata Shakur (Tupac’s godmother), a member of the cop-killing Black Liberation Army convicted of murder in the death of a policeman during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, became a hostess for delegations of international visitors.

 

As recently as the 1990s, the FBI had a list of 91 fugitives from terrorist-type charges living in Cuba. But age and disillusionment have taken a toll, and researcher Latner believes there are no more than two dozen left, perhaps only half that.

 

Still, they include some big names: Ishmael LaBeet, one of five men convicted of the infamous Fountain Valley Massacre, a racially-tinged 1972 armed robbery in St. Croix, Virgin Islands that turned into mass murder, with eight dead. William Morales, the master bomb-maker of the Puerto Rican separatist group FALN, which set off 140 or so blasts around the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, killing at least six people. Victor Gerena, an armed robber working for another Puerto Rican separatist group, who is believed to have taken the proceeds of a $7 million heist to Cuba with him.

 

The biggest of all remains Shakur. Even the act of naming her reveals the depth of the schism. Law enforcement calls her JoAnne Chesimard. Her supporters know her by her chosen name, Assata Shakur. If the name rings a bell to the apolitical, it is likely because she is the godmother and aunt of slain rap star Tupac Shakur.

 

Thirty years ago, Shakur fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro. There she has remained. U.S. law enforcement has repeatedly sought her extradition, and the FBI has placed her on its “Top Ten Most Wanted Terrorists” list. Information directly leading to her apprehension carries a $2 million reward.

 

The question now: What becomes now of  Shakur?

 

She used to be a star attraction on the Cuban government’s cultural reception circuit, but has virtually disappeared in recent times.

 

“I think they are definitely worried about bounty hunters trying to grab her,” says Latner. Maybe President Obama’s easing of travel restrictions to Cuba will have a silver lining after all, at least for the FBI.

 

To law enforcement, Shakur is the killer convicted in the execution-style slaying of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973. She is the Black Liberation Army leader busted out of prison by her comrades two years into a life sentence, a domestic terrorist implicated in a string of crimes and a key part of organization that waged war on police.

 

To her supporters, Shakur has been persecuted by the same corrupt and racist justice system that they say persecuted Michael Brown and Eric Garner. During the protests in Ferguson, Mo., her name became a rallying cry. She has long been a revolutionary symbol, a radical black female often described as “the ultimate fugitive from injustice.”

 

Immediately after the president’s mid-January announcement, the New Jersey State Police issued a statement saying the move to normalize relations with Cuba presents an opportunity to bring Shakur back to finish her sentence in Foerster’s murder.

 

“We stand by the reward money and hope that the total of two million dollars will prompt fresh information in the light of this altered international relationship,” said State Attorney General John J. Hoffman, adding that his office would be working with federal authorities to find a way to “return her to her rightful place in a New Jersey prison.”

 

Jeff Rathke, a spokesman for the State Department, said the decision to drop Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism list it has occupied since 1982 “reflects our assessment that Cuba meets the statutory criteria.”

 

“While the United States has significant concerns and disagreements with a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions, these fall outside the criteria relevant to the rescission of a state-sponsor-of-terrorism designation,” Rathke said.

 

President Obama was forced to release a Cuban spy who was also serving two life sentences for conspiracy to commit murder — in order to reach the point diplomatically that we’re at now.

 

Maybe Cuba doesn’t meet the strict standards of a state sponsor of terrorism, but if a planeload of lionized black militants comes back from Havana to the United States to face murder charges – it will be a public relations nightmare the likes of which this country has never seen.

 

But as President Obama is going late into the lame duck phase of his second term, it is unlikely that the State Department would allow it to happen during this administration.

 

If I were Chris Christie, I’d ask Hillary Clinton what she would do as president if this were the first crisis she faced. Pardoning mass murderers or even garden-variety murderers is not an option.

 

When this air sequel to the Mariel boatlift happens, it is likely that Fidel Castro will ignore his health regimen for one day, look out on the beach his home is situated on (it has a view of the Bay of Pigs) and smoke a cigar and have a few jolts of Chivas Regal, thinking about this long-playing hand he has dealt us.

 

John McCarthy publishes the Virgin Islands Free Press at: http://vifreepress.com

True Blue Americans Seeing Red Over Public Displays of Rebel Flag

SUPPORT FOR THE STARS AND BARS IS FLAGGING, EXCEPT IN:

GEORGIA, MISSISSIPPI, ARKANSAS, FLORIDA, ALABAMA

THE VIEW FROM THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

Virgin Islands Free Press

 

 

One of the things to come out of the debate over what is wrong with South Carolina after nine African-American citizens were massacred Wednesday in an historically black church is the symbolism of the Confederate flag flying in public places in the American South.

 

It has been argued that there are more important issues at stake such as racism and gun control. Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the American public should blame confessed killer 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof – not the Confederate flag being proudly displayed in South Carolina. For people like Graham the flag stands for southern tradition – not racism.

 

When Adolf Hitler took power in 1930s Germany, the first law he brought to fruition was national legislation that made burning the German flag a crime punishable by imprisonment. In China, you will do three years in prison for burning their flag. Two other countries punish flag desecration: Iran and Cuba.

 

I was half paying attention to CNN this afternoon when someone defended the flying of the Confederate flag in front of the South Carolina statehouse because it represented “history.” The argument being that the people who object to the Confederate flag flying aren’t thinking about the 20,000 South Carolinian soldiers who died during the Civil War.

 

"It's a symbol of family and my ancestors who defended the state from invasion. It was about standing up to a central government," Chris Sullivan, who is a member of the Sons of the Confederacy, told CNN. "The things that our ancestors fought for were not novel and they really are the same issues we have today."

 

The problem with that argument is that South Carolina batteries started the Civil War on April 12, 1861 by firing on Fort Sumter. The result was that 620,000 people died nationwide in the war – the people who started the war lost 20,000 of that total. So if the purpose of the Confederate flag is to remember the history – that is the bigger picture of the “history” that needs to be remembered.

 

The primary reason South Carolina gave for leaving the “union” in 1861 was that for 25 years the United States had failed to enforce the “Fugitive Slave Act” and that the election of Abraham Lincoln meant that slavery would be abolished. The elected leaders in Columbia saw “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery” and declared that their membership in the United States of America was “hereby dissolved.”

 

Certainly nobody in South Carolina today could say that the United States government is not living up to its financial obligations to the state. According to an Atlantic Monthly study, South Carolina nets $7.87 for every dollar in pays in to the federal treasury – the highest rate of return in the country.

 

Another problem with the Confederate flag is – even if it is eventually removed from the Civil War memorial in front of the statehouse in the capitol city of Columbia – the flags will still be flying on Fort Sumter (if history is the main reason for the flags remaining – doesn’t it confuse the issue of who actually won knowing that the Stars and Bars fly on the fort where shots were first fired during the war?)

 

And South Carolina’s current state flag is a blue version of the red Sovereign-Secession Confederate flag from the Civil War. Five other states, including Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida and Alabama put Neo Geo spins on their state flags to try to confuse the issue about what their flags most look like. (Or, in the case of Mississippi, maybe not so confusing – as the Confederate battle flag is incorporated lock, stock and barrel into its own state flag.

 

And yet they say symbolism is not important. But if it is not important – then why are these six states still clinging to the rebel flag – the dynamic artistic representation of the dissolution of U.S. constitutional law? Some have pointed out that the United States flag and the current blue rebel flag of South Carolina are flying at half mast, while the red Confederate flag flies high atop its pole at full mast? The answer is clear if you look closely. The Confederate flag is clipped in place and cannot be lowered – no doubt to keep some well-meaning citizen from taking it down some night.

 

The display of the Nazi flag is not just illegal in Germany, it is also illegal in France. In fact, in areas of Europe where the Nazi flag cannot be legally displayed, neo-Nazis use the Confederate flag in its place. However, in the United States and Israel, it is not illegal to display the Nazi flag.

 

Two years ago, the German painter and sculptor Jonathan Meese was brought up on federal charges that he used the “symbols of unconstitutional organizations” by giving the Nazi salute twice during a public discussion about art for Der Spiegel magazine that veered off into performance art. Meese faced three years in prison for the salutes, but was eventually acquitted of all charges because what he did was judged to be “art.”

 

The modern-day people of South Carolina have taught us a lot about what to do in the face of tragedy and injustice. And what is going on in Charleston today has everything to do with knowing that we are all stakeholders in this great nation that we are all proud to call our own. These good people need new symbols to represent their new spirit.

 

What is artless is the specious argument that the Confederate flag still needs to be displayed, especially if it represents is schism and racism. One only has to look at the photos of “Peter” – released in 1863 during the height of the Civil War – to know which side we should come down on when it comes to the symbols of hate that divide us.

 

John McCarthy is the publisher of the Virgin Islands Free Press at http://vifreepress.com

A MASS MURDERER, A CARPETBAGGER AND A STATE

A Schizephrenic Southern Splinter State

The Confederate Flag Flies At Full Staff

The View From The U.S. Virgin Islands

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

Virgin Islands Free Press

 

There’s no denying it.

 

South Carolina has a violent and racist past, with some tolerance mixed in.

 

The mere name “South Carolina” – suggests that it broke away from a larger Carolina – and that would be true.

 

The name Carolina is Latin for “Charles land” and goes back to 1629 when Britain’s King Charles I gave all of the southern colonies to Britain’s Attorney General Robert Heath. In 1663, Charles’ son King Charles II gave eight wealthy English aristocrats (mostly migrating from their sugar cane plantations in Barbados) a royal charter to settle Carolina because they had helped him regain his throne.

 

The Carolina coast was originally founded by the Spanish, but they were forced to leave due to violence from Native Americans and a lack of provisions. From the beginning of colonization, blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina and that would remain so up until the turn of the 20^th century.

 

Carolina originally split in 1719, when southern settlers seized control from its proprietors. In 1729, Carolina became two royal colonies, North and South Carolina.

 

Farmers from inland Virginia grew tobacco in North Carolina, while the fertility of the low country and its natural harbors, such as in Charles Town, later Charleston, allowed South Carolina to prosper.

 

Slaves were imported from the rice-growing regions of Africa, who created the dams and canals used to irrigate rice and indigo as commodity crops. South Carolina tolerated religious freedom and allowed French Huguenot and Sephardic Jewish communities from London to be merchants in the growing economy.

 

The Stono Rebellion of 1739, resulted in the colony no longer allowing African slaves to be imported through Charleston for ten years, as they believed the less-seasoned slaves to be more likely to seed rebellions than the Caribbean slaves who had grown up on plantations.

 

Although its name comes from an English king, South Carolina became the first republic in America when it adopted its own constitution on March 26, 1776. It was also the first state to adopt the Articles of Confederation, the initial governing document of the United States.

 

In 1822, following discovery of a conspiracy for a slave rebellion led by freed slave Denmark Vesey, the state passed the Negro Seaman Act, which prohibited foreign and northern black sailors from interacting with people in South Carolina ports. As the act violated international treaties, it was declared unconstitutional by Supreme Court Justice William Johnson. But Johnson’s ruling was not enforced.

 

South Carolina responded by passing the Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, declaring unconstitutional and null the federal tariff laws of 1828 and 1832, and prescribing that those laws would not be enforced in the state after February 1, 1833.

 

The seventh U.S. President Andrew Jackson, a native of the Waxhaws border region between the Carolinas, ended the crisis through the Force Bill that allowed the federal government to use military force to enforce federal law in South Carolina. It is considered the first law of the land ever to deny individual states the right to secede.

 

Which brings us to last night and 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof of nearby Lexington, South Carolina who is accused of killing nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston – a church Vesey helped found and which was burned to the ground by white supremacists in 1822 – the same year he and 34 other black men were hanged after being found guilty of the alleged slave revolt plot in a secret trial.

 

Asked today by Democracy Now! co-host Nermeen Shaikh on PBS if there has been any precedent “for this kind of violence” in South Carolina, Dr. Lonnie Randolph, Jr. said: “yes.”

 

“Unfortunately the answer is yes,” Randolph said. “And we don’t have a history of being a leader in this country on human rights. And unfortunately it brings us to reality … a reminder of the way South Carolina got to be South Carolina, the things that South Carolina has done throughout history.”

 

Randolph then referenced when Rep. Preston Brooks (D-SC) entered the U.S. Senate chamber in 1856 and used his gold-tipped cane to beat Sen. Charles Sumner (R-MA) nearly to death for his abolitionist views. Following the beating, in which Sumner lived after sustaining a brain injury, Brooks was forced to resign his seat, but returned home to South Carolina for a hero’s welcome.

 

Everyone knows that the Civil War (officially called by the federal government “The War Between The States”) began when Confederate batteries began shelling Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, but how many remember 620,000 Americans died for that South Carolina-driven, eight-year experiment in political limbo?

 

You would have to be a student in Civil War-era flags to know that the current South Carolina flag is an updated blue and white version of the rebel red Sovereignty-Secession flag from the Confederacy of States of America.

 

Now that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has announced his intentions to be the second POTUS from South Carolina and the first bachelor in the White House since James Buchanan in 1857, how would he explain in a debate why South Carolina still allows the “Stars and Bars” to fly in front of its statehouse?

 

As a follow-up, someone might ask Graham why the United States flag and the South Carolina flag atop the statehouse flies at half mast today, but the Confederate flag in front of the building on a Civil War monument flies at full mast?

 

The symbolism is important, unless you forget your history.

John McCarthy is the Publisher of the Virgin Islands Free Press at: http://vifreepress.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDERAGE CUBAN ILLEGALS KEPT AS SEX SLAVES IN ST. THOMAS BY U.S. "ICE"

CHARLOTTE AMALIE – Juan José Santovena flew out of Cuba on a plane bound for Panama one day in March, the beginning of a long journey to rejoin his son, Hansell, who lives in Hialeah, Florida.

Santovena is now stranded in the Virgin Islands, one of 20 Cuban migrants whose travel documents were delayed by American officials because the Cubans allegedly refused to cooperate with a migrant trafficking investigation.

On Friday, Santovena detailed the saga of the Cubans during a lengthy telephone interview with el Nuevo Herald from St. Thomas — part of a strategy to pressure U.S. immigration authorities to supply them with travel documents known as paroles. Without the paroles, the Cuban migrants cannot board planes to travel to South Florida where most of them have close relatives.

Santovena’s son, Hansell, and Claudina Lambert, aunt of a young woman in the group, Yubisnei Franco — deemed the alleged denial of paroles as an illegal pressure tactic. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has said it cannot comment on the case because it is under investigation.

While parole delays for Cuban migrants have occurred before, this is the first that a large group of island migrants has complained publicly about the problem.

The case made headlines last month when one of 20 Cubans contacted el Nuevo Herald to denounce U.S. immigration authorities for the delay in granting the paroles. That person asked that his name not be published and provided only a bare outline of the group’s journey to the Virgin Islands.

Santovena, in his interview Friday, added richer detail to the account. It’s clear that the 20 Cubans left their country separately and only met each other for the first time after they gathered on the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean and boarded the boat that took them to the Virgin Islands.

At 59, Santovena is the oldest of the 20 Cubans — most of whom are men and women in their 20s and 30s. Two are twin sisters who are 17.

Santovena began his trip March 24 when he boarded a jetliner at Havana’s José Martí International Airport bound for Panama City. There, Santovena boarded a flight to Guyana where he switched to a plane bound for Barbados. From Barbados he flew to nearby St. Lucia.

Though none of the 20 Cubans knew each other before they boarded the boat that transported them, all of them — including Santovena — knew that boats left St. Lucia with Cuban migrants for the U.S. Virgin Islands. Cuban migrants who have no U.S. visas, can — nonetheless — stay in the United States if they manage to reach U.S. soil under the wet-foot/dry-foot policy. Cuban migrants interdicted at sea are generally returned to the island.

He said that the two twin teen sisters have been held separately in another part of the detention facility and are visited often by male ICE officers -- a source of great concern because the females are underage and vulnerable.

“I had been told that in St. Lucia Cubans were contacted to undertake that type of journey [to the Virgin Islands],” said Santovena. "But I never thought that the U.S. government would try to keep us trapped here indefinitely -- I especially worry about the two minors and their treatment."

At 7 p.m. one day in late March, Santovena and 19 other Cuban migrants gathered at a marina and later that night sailed on a boat to the Virgin Islands — a distance of about 400 miles.

“When we hit the beach, everybody ran away from the boat,” Santovena recalled. “I couldn’t even walk because when we jumped off the boat and hit the water I twisted one of my ankles.”

At any rate, the Cubans were not detected by immigration authorities when they landed late one night. The boat that transported them turned around and left in a hurry, Santovena said.

As a result, he added, no one really got to know the captain and none of the Cubans knew who organized the trip. The boat left the Cubans on the island of St. John, across the bay from St. Thomas.

At daybreak, the group walked to the marina to take a ferry to St. Thomas so they could report to immigration authorities and claim status under the Cuban Adjustment Act.

“The first ferry left at 5 a.m.,” recalled Santovena. “Then we took a bus to the immigration office and we sat down in the parking lot to wait for the office to open.”

Once the office opened, an immigration official told them to return the next day. Santovena said that when the group returned, they were put off yet again because of Holy Week.

After Holy Week, said Santovena, group members were given forms to fill out with biographical details. Then they were told to set up individual appointments through an immigration Internet system.

Once Santovena showed up for his appointment, he was told to come back about 12 to 15 days later so he could answer questions about his life in Cuba. At that appointment, he said, an immigration official showed him what he said was his parole document.

“I asked him when I would get the parole and he said, ‘I don’t know. I have to wait for authorization,’” said Santovena.

About 10 days later, Santovena was summoned to another interview at immigration.

He said they asked him whether he could identify the captain, and he replied that he could not because the captain left them on the beach and left. Santovena did not receive his parole.

Seven people in the group are believed to have received paroles because they answered questions to the satisfaction of immigration officials, said Santovena.

“We have been here in the Virgin Islands almost three months and we still don’t know when we’re going to be able to leave,” said Santovena. “Now we hear nothing from immigration officials. They are totally silent.”


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