History is being made in Washington today when Cuba raises its flag and officially reopens its U.S. Embassy after 54 years. Hundreds are gathering for this historic moment, including U.S. and Cuban lawmakers and diplomats, activists and artists, scholars and historians. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez is leading a delegation of over two dozen officials from Havana, including Cuba’s chief negotiator, Josefina Vidal. Also among the attendees is Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez and former Parliament President Ricardo Alarcón. This afternoon, Bruno Rodríguez will hold a joint news conference with Secretary of State John Kerry at the State Department, where Cuba’s flag was raised earlier this morning, joining the flags of more than 150 other countries that have diplomatic relations with the U.S. In Havana, the U.S. Embassy will also reopen its doors today. Kerry is set to travel there later this summer for the formal inauguration ceremony where a U.S. flag will be hoisted. Cubans have welcomed the diplomatic rapprochement with jubilation.
BUT.
I’m optimistic about the future. I think that President Obama’s move on December 17 and today is irreversible, no matter who gets elected president. However, things can go wrong, and the United States needs to have a president who will exercise his presidential authority to get rid of a number of programs that are damaging to U.S.-Cuba relations, such as, for example, the regime change program that, to the tune of more than $30 million a year, seeks to change the government of Cuba.
Congress mandates gets spent on Cuba under the Helms-Burton law. what they do with that is they pay dissidents in Cuba and in Miami. Opposition to the Cuban revolution in Miami is an industry. People make money and live very comfortably as a result of it. So, the United States needs to get rid of those programs and move forward and respect the sovereignty of Cuba. Cuba does not belong to the United States. Maybe Mississippi does, but Cuba does not.
Luis Posada Carriles, was the Osama bin Laden of Latin America. He was responsible for a campaign of terror against Cuba dating all the way back to the late ’60s, early 1970s, up until very recently. He directed a campaign of bombs in hotels and restaurants in Cuba that resulted in injuries and death.
Copacabana Hotel after the Italian tourist was killed in one of those bombings. His father would not leave the area of the lobby where his son died. He moved to Cuba. He told me—Giustino told me, “I moved to Cuba because if I live anywhere else, I feel that Fabio has died. But in Cuba, I feel his spirit.” And he also—Posada Carriles was also responsible for downing an airliner with 73 people on board. Everybody was killed. This was 1976. Including a nine-year-old girl was murdered. And the entire Cuban fencing team. And the entire Cuban youth fencing team with their medals on their chests. They had won all the gold, silver and bronze medals at the Pan American Games. In Venezuela.
And were flying back to Cuba, singing, and these bombs went off. And the United States continues to protect this man in Miami, him and many other Cuban exile terrorists who live in Miami. Miami is the favorite place for Cuban terrorists to go hang out and retire. And, you know, that’s something that is a problem in U.S.-Cuba relations, as is Guantánamo, because—
Watergate break-in, the involvement of Cuban exiles there. The Letelier assassination down the street here.
Orlando Letelier, the Chilean diplomat, and Ronni Moffitt, his assistant. Killed by agents of the Pinochet government, working with these anti-Castro terrorists, collaborating. That, too, was in 1976. The people who pushed the bomb was right here. Down on Embassy Row. Their car was blown up.
this history is going to be part of a past that certainly we all have to remember. As long as Posada Carriles is in this country without justice, without being prosecuted, without being extradited, that history lives on. But United States and Cuba are poised today to move forward, to keep working on these issues of the past, that include Posada Carriles and the embargo, but to move forward in a much different way. And the fact that these flags are flying, they’re flying in a different wind, aren’t they, José Pertierra? The winds of change have come to U.S.-Cuban relations. And we really can’t forget that, as much and as dramatic as the past is between these two countries.
José Pertierra’s car also bombed. Those were Guatemalans, right here in Washington. “I was representing an American, Jennifer Harbury, whom you’ve interviewed on this program, and her husband was disappeared and tortured in Guatemala. Comandante Everardo—Efraín Bámaca Velásquez is his complete name. And the Guatemalan military put a bomb in my car in the driveway about four miles, three or four miles from here, and it blew up. I don’t think they meant to kill me, because it was at 3:00 in the morning or 4:00 in the morning when it exploded, but it meant to scare me off the case. I remained on the case. And the Inter-American Court in San José, of the OAS, found the government of Guatemala culpable for the disappearance, torture of Comandante Everardo, and ordered compensation be paid to his widow, Jennifer.”
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Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He’s the co-author of the book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. An updated version of the book, which includes the secret story of how Obama used back-channel diplomacy to normalize diplomatic relations, will be published in September.
Jose Pertierra, Cuban attorney based in Washington, D.C., who represented Elián González in 2000-2001. He also represented the Venezuelan government in its efforts to extradite Luis Posada Carriles.
— source democracynow.org