Not Surprised by Cuba's Weapons Smuggling to North Korea

Mauricio Claver-Carone Director, Cuba Democracy Advocates in Washington,
D.C.

Not Surprised by Cuba's Weapons Smuggling to North Korea
Posted: 08/09/2013 11:14 am

A lot of people were baffled -- although it's not clear why the
befuddlement -- that Cuba's Castro brothers were caught red-handed
smuggling fighter jets, radar and missile components, and other weaponry
to Kim Jong-un and North Korea in violation of the U.N. Security
Council's arms embargo.

It was no great surprise to those who've watched the defiant dictators
of Cuba. We know the Castros don't think with their brains first.
Instead they remain obsessed with flashing their cojones. What's
baffling is that year after year they still get with away with it.

It can't be a surprise either that the world's remaining totalitarian
states pursue their own survival, mutually assisting each other
politically, economically and militarily. Apparently neither wants the
dubious honor of becoming the world's sole remaining totalitarian state.

Throughout their long rule in Cuba, the Castro brothers have acted
illegally and irresponsibly with brawn -- even when it's borrowed at the
time from allies-of-convenience. It's a "machismo" thing that they enjoy
practicing at home, as for example, their use of brute force against the
Havana democracy advocates known worldwide as "The Ladies in White."

In 1962, Fidel Castro was lusting over the nuclear missiles of the
Soviet Union. He provoked the "Cuban Missile Crisis" and then urged
Nikita Khrushchev, then-Soviet premier, to push the button and launch a
nuclear strike against the United States. The Castro objective was: Kill
tens of millions of Americans. Khrushchev wrote about the incident in
his memoirs concluding that Fidel Castro is crazy. Apparently Fidel and
Raul didn't care that the United States would retaliate and obliterate
the island of Cuba.

The Castros' power fantasies and fallacies don't seem to fade. In the
1980s, Fidel's ego took a beating and Cuba's economy foundered under the
weight of his ill-considered military adventures in Africa, which became
deeply unpopular in Cuba. To keep playing on the world stage, the
Castros are always searching for "hard currency" and the Angola war was
one way to extract it from the Soviet Union.

As Soviet cash dried up, the Castros turned to courting Colombian drug
lord Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel, opening Cuba's ports to the
cartel for trans-shipping narcotics. To Fidel, who considers the United
States his arch enemy, this too was an entirely sensible policy: If he
couldn't nuke his capitalist American enemies, or run 'em out of Africa,
he'd ship 'em drugs and Americans would poison themselves. What's to lose?

When the United States turned up the heat on drug smuggling, Fidel and
his brother Raul, then-head of Cuba's armed forces, identified Gen.
Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez as their scapegoat. Cubans in general held Ochoa's
legendary courage in the African wars in high esteem. To the Castros
that made him a potential rival. In quick order, Ochoa was accused of
drug trafficking, given a televised Stalinist-style trial and executed.

Several months later, the United States invaded Panama and arrested its
leader Manuel Noriega for selling "safe passage" through the Panama
Canal to the Medellin Cartel. Noriega was hauled off to Miami, tried and
convicted. Testimony and evidence gleaned in that trial led U.S.
prosecutors, in 1993, to prepare a racketeering indictment naming Raul
Castro and 12 other high-ranking officers in Cuba's armed forces as
drug-trafficking conspirators with the Medellin cartel. The Clinton
administration later chose not to pursue the charges.

Economic depression gripped Cuba in 1996, which the Castros named "the
Special Period." The suffering populace was unhappy and 130 opposition
groups, banded together as Concilio Cubano, announcing a February 24th
"unity rally" demanding free elections. To thinking people, the date
might have been a good time for the Castro government to announce
political and economic reforms. Instead Raul Castro rolled out his guns
and ordered Cuban Air Force MIG fighters to shoot down a couple of
civilian-American Cessna's flying over international waters in the
Florida Straits in search of Cuban rafters to rescue. Four men died when
the small planes were shot down. There was an international outcry and
investigation that pinned responsibility on Raul. World attention was
diverted from the rally in Havana, and the protesting dissidents
arrested and jailed.

Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations, famously called out the Castros for their criminal acts:
"This is not cojones, this is cowardice."

Now, Panamanian authorities have found an arsenal of Cuban weapons
loaded onto a North Korean ship, the Chong Chon Gang, and hidden by bags
of sugar, all loaded in Havana. Ironically the Panamanians had stopped
the ship expecting to find drugs. In the last few years, five other
ships have set sail from North Korea, docked in Havana and then returned
directly to North Korea via the canal. Who knows what else has passed
through the canal? Kim and the Castros know, but those addicts of power,
force and flouting impunity are not gloating... yet.


Follow Mauricio Claver-Carone on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@capitolcubans

Source: "Not Surprised by Cuba's Weapons Smuggling to North Korea |
Mauricio Claver-Carone" -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mauricio-clavercarone/not-surprised-by-cubas-we_b_3721899.html