Cuban Parliament holds hearing on electoral system

BY SUSANA LEE — Granma daily staff writer —

WITH a profound analysis of the historical roots of Cuba’s electoral system and its unique characteristics, which are based on the broadest popular participation throughout the election process, making it into the basis of the political authority held by People’s Power delegates, Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, a member of the Political Bureau and president of Parliament, summed up the parliamentary hearing on the issue.

Convened by the National Assembly of People’s Power, the hearing became an encounter with history, beginning with a presentation by Professor Eduardo Torres Cuevas, winner of the National Social Sciences Award, and speeches by doctors Eduardo Lara, a Parliament official, and Fabio Raimundo Torrado, from the Office of the Second Secretary of the Party, who reviewed Cuba’s constitutional and legal history from the Constitution of Guáimaro, under the Republic-in-Arms in 1869, to date.

The second main presentation was made by Jorge Lezcano, a member of the Central Committee and a Parliament official, whose subject was “The Cuban Electoral System: Particularities and Challenges,” from which the hearing’s name was taken. In a direct and didactic manner, he addressed outstanding concepts and issues of the National Assembly, differences with other parliaments, the role of People’s Power delegates and basic aspects that make it into a point of reference.

Armando Hart, member of the Central Committee and director of the Martí Program Office, proposed that two Parliamentary commissions should draw up a program for studying the Cuban Constitution and the Cuban constitutional and legal tradition that backs it. In his turn, Lázaro Barredo, editor-in-chief of the Granma daily newspaper, added his own proposal for ninth-grade students to study the Constitution as part of their Civics curriculum, before they reach voting age.

(Translated by Granma International)

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Anti-Correa opposition attempts to stir up chaos and anarchy in Ecuador

QUITO, March 15. — The most recent maneuvers by members of the right-wing opposition and former Ecuadorian congress members are aimed at spreading rumors to cause a financial panic and blame it on the government.

That was the situation denounced by Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who accused the congress members removed by the Supreme Electoral Court of being irresponsible, anti-patriotic liars.

In a message broadcast from Carondelet Palace, the president affirmed that the opposition and a group of 57 deposed legislators were beginning to send messages and make phone calls aimed at announcing a bank shut-down in the country.

After categorically refuting such a shut-down, the president emphasized that “there is not, there will not be and we will never allow another bank shutdown.  “Here there is a patriotic government that will never again allow Ecuadorians to be waylaid,” he affirmed, on recalling that the perpetrators of these lies were precisely “those who in 1999 and 2000, destroyed the Ecuadorians’ economy with the bank shutdown.

Correa, whose has been in power for 60 days this Thursday, noted that it is simply about mafias with economic and political power, who refuse to die and are trying to destabilize his executive, while confirming that the economy is in excellent health.

Translated by Granma International

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 Radio/TV Martí has now cost more than $500 million

WHILE the United States is accumulating debts and experts are predicting a perilous deterioration of the budget crisis, the fiasco of Radio and TV Martí – that cannot even be seen – has now cost the taxpayer more than $500 million.

Since its creation in 1985, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) – the mother-ship of Radio and TV Martí – has constituted a mechanism for corruption to which various politicians are fairly closely linked,

as a Congress commission should be able to verify when it investigates, at the initiative of representatives Bill Delahunt and Jeff Flake, this branch of Voice of America.

However, the commission need only observe, by analyzing the history of this CIA creature, that throughout its 22-year existence, its only result has been to offer sinecures and funding to Batista fanatics linked to the Bush clan, who tolerate, plan or sponsor the use of terror against Cuba.

A report published exactly one year ago by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), a respected Washington-based think-tank, showed how several attempts to reduce the lavish OCB budgets clashed with “massive recriminations and even open threats from the deadly politicians of Miami” led by the Diaz-Balart brothers and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

Thos tantrums on the part of the trio of politicians could perhaps be explained by a “brilliant strategy” based on the contributions they receive, COHA noted.

It went on to say that through an alchemic process, hundreds of thousands of dollars in private campaign contributions to the White House and Congress members are transformed into hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds for programs passed by Congress used to finance anti-Castro groups.

When the corrupt Salvador Lew resigned from his post as OCB director after countless criticisms, his godfather George W. Bush chose current director Pedro Roig to replace him, a man just as corrupt as his predecessor.

With exemplary calm, Lew explained away his departure by saying he had health problems, without making the slightest reference to a report by the Inspector General that showed the indiscriminate contracting of a number of his buddies, all of them characterized by their links with the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship.

It has since been learned that among the most distinguished beneficiaries of the dozens of “juicy tidbits” distributed by Lew, we find:

• Olga Connor, columnist at El Nuevo Herald, who “charged” for two cultural programs, each one hour long, the “modest” sum of $45,770.

• Armando Pérez Roura, notorious member of the Alpha 66 and Cuban Unity groups.

• The late Rafael Díaz-Balart, former deputy minister of Governance during the bloody dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and the father of the afore-mentioned Congressmen.

• Nancy Pérez-Crespo, eminent Miami ringleader who shares the mike with her friend Ninoska (Lucrecia) Pérez-Castellón, daughter and wife of Batista terrorists, and director of the terrorist Cuban Liberty Council.

In order to secure the post – with a salary of $132,000 per annum – Pedro Roig did not have much to offer except his friendly links with Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) and Radio Martí that George Bush Sr. sponsored when he was a high-ranking member and subsequently director of the CIA.

At the beginning of the 1960s in Fort Benning, Roig and Mas were trained for dirty warfare in secret installations as part of the CIA’s Operation 40, with international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, and Félix “The Cat” Rodríguez Mendigutía, the CIA officer who was to order Che’s murder.

Born in Santiago de Cuba, just like Mas Canosa, Roig arrived in Florida as a child in 1960 and joined the Batista plots that abounded at that time among the émigré ranks.

A survey carried out at the request of the U.S. government showed some months ago that audience figures in Cuba for the radio station are at an all-time low. With respect to TV Martí, Salvador Lew himself acknowledged years ago that it is virtually “off the air.”

However, the last straw was recently revealed by The Chicago Tribune: years after he bade his farewell due to corruption, Lew is still on the list of members of the OCB leadership… just like one Charles Tyroler, an intelligence official from the Reagan administration who died in 1995.

For his part, Luis Zúñiga Rey, executive member of the CLC and personal friend of George W. Bush, annually receives $100,00 as a member of this very same phantom body.

The Chicago daily recalled how Pedro Roig has contracted his wife’s nephew as head of personnel and is paying a former client of his as scriptwriter for a comedy show. Something Roig did not deny.

The most ridiculous act of the year, in 2006, was the purchase of an EC-130 military plane worth $10 million, whose only function was to confirm the dogma of TV Martí’s invisibility. It is not known where this expensive piece of equipment is at this time.

In the course of the year, it was also discovered how the OCB paid a significant number of journalists who, locally, are the ones who write most about Cuba. Among these individuals we find Pablo Alfonso, who gobbled up $175,000 just like that, and the pseudo-intellectual and fugitive terrorist Carlos Alberto Montaner, who does not deny living off subsidies from the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

The first ridiculous act of 2007 is without doubt the conferring of $182,500 and $195,000, respectively, to Radio Mambí, WAQI-AM (710), and Azteca América, WPMF-TV 38, for the broadcast of programs on the two moribund stations. Both enterprises, of course, are linked to members of the local mafia.

Simultaneously, “El Chema” Miranda – who was Program Director at TV Martí until last November – confessed in a criminal court in Miami to having received $112,000 in bribes from a production company that he himself had contracted.

To top it all, Fabio Leite, director of the Radiocommunications Office at the International Telecommunications Union, announced that illegal radio and television broadcasts from the United States to Cuba are unacceptable.

It has been predicted that Radio and TV Martí and its network of buddies will receive $37 million this year, unless the Delahunt-Flake Commission manages to destroy this mafia refuge in Congress.

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Annual UNEAC Prize for Pablo Milanés

Also awarded to another Bayamó native, Salvador Alarcón

TROVA singer Pablo Milanés has been awarded the 2006 Annual Prize by the Association of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), highlighting his artistic contribution of a lifetime to that fertile field of Cuban culture.

After UNEAC president and poet Carlos Martí presented the award to the author of anthological Latin America songs, Harold Gramatges, who heads up the association, recalled that on this occasion the prize was shared with another eminent Bayamó resident, Salvador Alarcón, for his exceptional support to the concert bands in the country, but as Pablo was on tour when the Prize was announced, its presentation had been delayed.

Pablo expressed thanks for a recognition that was dear to him for coming from his colleagues in creativity.

Translated by Granma International  

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THE CIA, FROM CENTRAL AMERICA TO IRAQ

“MISTER Bob” Seldon Lady is a former chief of the CIA station in Milan, where he was in charge of the 26 agents who were tried in Italy for kidnapping, torturing and then disappearing Muslim cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, in that city in 2003.

To get a better idea of him, we should recall that Seldon Lady was in Central America in the 1980s: he was a key element in the same network, along with John Negroponte, Félix Rodríguez, Colonel James Steele and Luis Posada Carriles, that sowed death and terror among the Sandinistas.

This 52-year-old American, who was born in Honduras and participated along with his own father in CIA operations in the dirty war organized by the CIA in Central America during the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan, became part of a Middle East version of Operation Condor after 2001.

Characterized by kidnappings, secret prisons, torture and disappearances, the operation has now culminated in the appointment of John Negroponte, former ambassador in Baghdad and former U.S. intelligence czar, as deputy secretary of state overseeing the Iraq dossier.

The 26 CIA agents who will go on trial June 8 in Italy also include the former CIA chief in Rome, Jeff Castelli, and Betnie Medero, a woman currently supposed to be based in Mexico, who led the commando; as well as a mysterious official with the U.S. State Department, Monica Courtney Adler.

This trial is the first criminal case in the world regarding the “extraordinary deliveries” authorized by George W. Bush after September 11.

Abu Omar was kidnapped from a Milan street in February 2003, taken to the Guerzoni military base, and after being placed into a windowless vehicle, was then transferred to the U.S. air base in Aviano, from where he was taken to Ramstein, Germany, with the collaboration of that country, and from there to Cairo, where he was tortured in the presence of Robert “Mister Bob” Seldon Lady himself.

Among the commando members that carried out the kidnapping is the particularly interesting case of Betnie Medero.

That 33-year-old woman was the second secretary of the U.S. embassy in Rome.

She arrived in Italy in August 2001 with diplomatic credentials, and according to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, directed the kidnapping on the ground and ensured the victim’s transportation to the U.S. base in Aviano, northern Italy. It is now believed that she was transferred to Mexico, where she is associated with the U.S. embassy, according to the same newspaper.

Monica Courtney Adler, another defendant in the case, was the State Department official who years before, under the Clinton administration, attended to banker Jorge Castro Barredo, a Cuban-born Venezuelan who contributed financially to Democratic Party election campaign funds and was involved in cases of fraud and money-laundering.

Seldon Lady, the ringleader of a group created in Tegucigalpa, is an illustration of the dirty operations of the U.S. spy agency.

The son of William “Bill” Lady, a former CIA agent based in Honduras, managed together with Manuchar Ghorbanifar, an Iranian businessman, the secret sale of weapons to Iraq, which along with drug-trafficking operations directed from within El Salvador by Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía and Luis Posada Carriles, turned into the biggest scandal to rock the Reagan administration.

Seldon Lady carried out his dirty work under the orders of U.S. Marine Colonel Oliver North, who also directed the operations at the Ilopango military base for illegally providing weapons to the Nicaraguan Contra forces.

His activity in Honduras coincided with the presence in that country of John Negroponte, notorious for his support as ambassador to the bloody operations carried out by Battalion 316, which tortured, massacred and disappeared hundreds of Hondurans.

“Mister Bob” Seldon Lady was still active in Central America in 1994 when spy Aldrich Ames uncovered him by revealing his name to Soviet intelligence forces, according to U.S. media reports.

His name was associated with the “Nigergate” scandal, the disinformation operation for justifying the occupation of Iraq under the pretext – completely false – that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium from Niger. For that maneuver, his old buddy Manuchar Ghorbanifar came to his aid, along with Larry Franklin, an American sentenced last year for spying for Israel.

Seldon Lady fled suddenly from Italy in June 2005 when he discovered that he was wanted in that country for the kidnapping of Abu Omar. Warned, his wife erased all of his computer files, but police experts were able to recuperate most of the material.

The reconstructed documents included several photographs of the victim, taken in the street 33 days before the crime, and Internet searches for the shortest route between the kidnapping scene and Aviano Airport.

Different sources affirm that Seldon Lady is currently on his way back to Central America, where he can take care of CIA work related to Cuba, Venezuela and other progressive governments in the region.

Argentine writer Stella Calloni recently compared the illegal CIA operations in Iraq with a “larger, more sophisticated Operation Condor.”

This was illustrated by the case of James Steele, who created the death squads patronized by John Negroponte, who participated in the supply operations for the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionary forces from the Ilopango air base in El Salvador, directed by Félix Rodríguez y Posada Carriles.

The unexpected exposure of the actions carried out by Seldon Lady and his troop in Italy, with complete disdain for that European nation’s sovereignty, shows once again how — according to imperialist intelligence — the dirty war has no borders.

It is the same CIA gang that has carried out dirty work in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas — who knows how widespread. That gang features John Negroponte, the recently-appointed No. 2 man to Condoleezza Rice in the State Department. What can be expected of him?

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Cuba describes U.S. anti-terrorism campaign as cynical

By Javier Rodríguez —Granma daily staff writer—

GENEVA, March 14.—Cuba has described as false and cynical the supposed U.S. commitment to combating terrorism, in its reply to that country’s representative in the Human Rights Council session, PL reports.

The Cuban delegate, Rodolfo Reyes Rodríguez, referred to the allegations of U.S. Velia de Pirro, who tried to respond to the speech made the day before by Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, in the High-Level Segment of the meeting.

Reyes reiterated the impunity enjoyed by terrorist groups operating from Florida against the Cuban people, highlighting the protection given to Luis Posada Carriles, responsible for the sabotage of a Cubana Aviation passenger plane in full flight and the death of its 73 passengers.

Many of those terrorist were trained and funded by successive U.S. administrations and the CIA directly participated in the plotting of hundreds of assassination attempts against the Cuban head of state, he added.

In his reply, the Cuban representative recalled that the CIA itself at one point backed some of the capos of the terrorist network now known as Al Qaeda that U.S. agencies are currently hunting down. (PL)

Translated by Granma International