Castro targeted for assassination by CIA

This confirms what was often conjectured years ago. I wonder if Chavez is now in the sights of the CIA? Birds of a feather get along together as the billing and cooing of the CIA and the Mafia illustrates.


CIA tried to get mafia to kill Castro: documents
Tue Jun 26, 2007 12:45PM EDT

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA worked with two of the country's
most-wanted criminals in a botched attempt to assassinate Cuban
President Fidel Castro in a "gangster-type action" in the early 1960s,
according to documents released by the CIA on Tuesday.

The CIA declassified hundreds of pages of long-secret records that
detail some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years
of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping.

The documents are known in the CIA as the "Family Jewels," and some
describe the agency's efforts to persuade Johnny Roselli, believed to
be a mobster, to help plot the assassination of Castro.

A CIA official at the time, Richard Bissell, in August 1960 approached
Col. Sheffield Edwards of the agency's Office of Security to determine
if Edwards "had assets that may assist in a sensitive mission
requiring gangster-type action," according to the documents.

"The mission target was Fidel Castro," one memo said.

Roselli was believed by the CIA to have been a high-ranking member of
the crime syndicate and who controlled all the ice-making machines on
the Las Vegas Strip.

He was approached by a go-between, Robert Maheu, who reckoned Roselli
had connections leading into Cuban gambling interests. The story
Roselli was to be told was that several international business firms
were suffering heavy financial losses in Cuba as a result of Castro's
action and they were willing to pay $150,000 for his removal.

"It was to be made clear to Roselli that the United States government
was not, and should not, become aware of this operation," a document
said.

In documents that often read like a cheap detective novel, the story
is outlined: The pitch was made to Roselli at the Hilton Plaza Hotel
in New York and Roselli was initially cool to the idea. But the
contact led the agency to two top mobsters, Momo Salvatore Giancana
and Santos Trafficant, who were both on the U.S. list of most-wanted
men.

Giancana, who was known as Sam Gold, suggested firearms might be a
problem and said using a potent pill that could be slipped into
Castro's food or drink might work.

Eventually, six pills of "high lethal content" were provided to Juan
Orta, identified as a Cuban official who had been receiving kickback
payments from gambling interests and who still had access to Castro
and was in a financial bind.

"After several weeks of reported attempts, Orta apparently got cold
feet and asked out of the assignment. He suggested another candidate
who made several attempts without success," the document said.

(Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan)

(c) Reuters 2006.

--

Castro on Ethanol

Some environmentalists agree with Castro but often the critique of ethanol use especially made from corn is that net energy gain may be small or even negative. It is not clear how in the US using corn for ethanol displaces corn grown to feed the worlds poor and makes their situation worth. Unless the US govt. subsidizes corn production to feed the worlds poor it would not be produced for their consumption anyway. Strangely enough Bush does not even mention the subsidies that the huge grain companies such as ADM get from US agricultural policy. I have also posted a couple of other articles on this issue to complement this one.

From Monsters and Critics.com

Americas News
Castro ends 8-month silence to slam US ethanol plans (2nd Roundup)
By DPA

Mar 29, 2007, 19:59 GMT

Havana - Ending eight months of silence, ailing Cuban President Fidel
Castro published an article in Cuban state media Thursday criticizing
US environmental policies, and in particular plans to boost the use of
ethanol.

'The sinister idea of converting food into fuel has definitely been
established as an economic lineament in US foreign policy,' the Cuban
leader wrote, arguing that US President George W Bush's support for
using crops to produce ethanol for automobiles in rich nations could
deplete food stocks in developing countries.

The article published in the Cuban Communist Party daily Granma was
the first attempt by Castro, 80, who is recovering from intestinal
surgery, to comment on international issues since he was taken ill in
July 2006 and handed over power to his younger brother Raul.

Fidel Castro has only been seen in half a dozen videos and several
pictures since the surgery, the last ones published in March where he
appeared with Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

'More than 3 billion people in the world condemned to premature death
by hunger and thirst,' read the headline of Castro's article.

Castro's health has been treated as a state secret in Cuba, which has
not revealed the exact cause of his illness. Over the past months,
rumours of the imminent death of the Cuban leader have been strongly
denied by the authorities. However, over the last few weeks the
expectation of his return has increased, owing to several hints by
Cuban and international officials.

A few weeks ago, Bolivian President Evo Morales announced the
possibility of that Castro would appear publicly on April 28. This
would mark the first anniversary of Bolivia's joining the Alternativa
Bolivariana para las Americas (ALBA), the Cuban and Venezuelan
alternative to the US-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA).

Cuba has not yet confirmed Castro's appearance. The island is entering
its ninth month without its socialist leader of almost half a century.

In the article, Castro warned that the plans to convert products like
corn, sugar cane or soy into ethanol for use as fuel additives could
cause serious ecological damage and would adversely affect the third
world population.

Castro referred to a meeting Bush had Monday with leading US
automotive groups, in which he urged them to double the number of
vehicles fuelled by alternative combustibles such as ethanol, in an
attempt to combat climate change and US dependence on oil.

'I think that reducing and recycling all the electricity and
combustible consuming motors is an elemental and urgent necessity for
all humanity. The tragedy does not consist in reducing the costs of
energy, but in the idea of converting food into combustibles,' Castro
said in the article.

Bush strongly promoted the production and use of biofuels in Latin
American countries in a regional tour earlier this month, with
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as his main ally. The US
and Brazil together produce around 72 per cent of the world's ethanol.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said he 'respects' the Cuban
leader but defended the position of Lula's leftist government.

'I think everyone is free to express their opinion. But I do not think
that was meant against the Brazilian government or Brazil. Our opinion
on ethanol is that ethanol's success has been proved in practice,' he
said.

Amorim pointed out that Brazil produces ethanol from sugar cane, while
the United States uses less energy-efficient corn.

'Brazil is today looked at as almost an object of pilgrimage, or a
Mecca - to use two different religious examples - by all developed or
developing countries, who come to seek in ethanol and (other) biofuels
a way out of energy problems, not to remain totally dependent on oil.
Everyone knows that oil is going to run out,' the minister said.

According to the Cuban leader, even if the US dedicated its entire
corn production to the production of ethanol, there still would not be
enough ethanol for its fuel needs.

'If you apply this recipe in Third World countries, you'll see how
many people of the hungry masses of our planet will stop eating corn.
Or even worse: finance poor countries to produce ethanol from corn and
there won't even be one tree to defend humanity of the climate
change,' Castro wrote.

The Cuban president said instead of these policies, countries should
concentrate on other ways of saving energy, as Cuba does.

'All the countries in the world, poor and rich, could save millions
and millions of dollars just by changing all incandescent light bulbs
into fluorescent ones, something Cuba has been doing in all homes.
That would give climate change a break without starving the poor
masses of the world,' said Castro, who in the past few years has made
ecology one of his major interests.

(c) 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

(c) Copyright 2006,2007 by monstersandcritics.com.

--

Castro compared to Chavez

This is an interesting article. I am no expert on either Castro or Chavez but from my limited knowledge Whitford's article conforms with what I know (or think I know!)
By the way Castro has not smoked cigars for some time now. If Whitford gets that wrong what else might he get wrong!


http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ben_whitford/2007/03/chvez_is_no_castro.html

Chávez is no Castro

Neither the excesses nor the achievements of the Venezuelan leader are
in the same béisbol-park as his cigar-puffing neighbour.

Ben Whitford

March 1, 2007 9:30 PM

Hugo Chávez likes to style himself as a revolutionary. When he won
reelection last year, having finally broken the back of the domestic
opposition, he dedicated the victory to "the Bearded One": his friend
and mentor, Fidel Castro. Since then he's painted himself as the aging
Cuban's heir apparent, nationalizing Venezuela's largest
telecommunications and electricity companies and moving to take a
majority share in foreign-owned oil-drilling operations along the
Orinoco belt.

From his bombastic policies to his trademark red beret, everything
about the Venezuelan leader's revolutionary streak is carefully
calibrated to stir up strong feelings in supporters and critics alike.
The American right's demonization of Chávez is in large part a
knee-jerk reaction to his outspoken praise for Castro and mimicry of
the Cuban's brand of revolutionary socialism. For much the same
reasons, as George Galloway showed yesterday, Chávez inspires
something close to infatuation among certain sections of the British
left. In Chávez's Bolivarian revolution, both sides hear echoes of
Havana, 1959, and are respectively appalled or enthralled.

The truth of the matter, however, is somewhat more complicated. Chávez
is no Castro: neither his excesses nor his achievements are in the
same béisbol-park as those of his cigar-puffing neighbor. The former
paratrooper is a more moderate breed of caudillo, using the rhetoric
of revolution to manipulate both his enemies and his allies, at home
and abroad.

Chávez has little time for the checks and balances of liberal
democracy. Both the Supreme Court and the National Assembly are
stuffed with his cronies; his knack for gaming the country's electoral
system makes Karl Rove look like Jefferson Smith; and he recently gave
himself the right to govern by decree well into 2008.

But if Chávez loads the decks, he is at least still playing the game.
He welcomes the legitimacy of being the more-or-less
democratically-elected leader of a more-or-less democratic country. He
may occasionally close down a TV station he dislikes, but he also
tolerates a robust and highly critical news media and allows
Venezuelans to gather in their thousands to demonstrate against him.
And while there are unsettling rumors of political detentions,
Venezuela has nothing to rival Cuba's systematic suppression of
dissent.

Venezuela is a troubled nation [aren't they all? -- JD], then, but
hardly a totalitarian one. Neither, however, is it in the throes of
Cuban-style social revolution. Say what you like about Castro: in the
face of overwhelming odds, he gave Cuba a world-class health service,
a thriving biotech industry, and a free and flourishing education
system. Under his rule, despite America's misguided economic blockade
and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Cuba's infant mortality
rates fell below those of America; literacy soared. These achievements
don't begin to justify Castro's awful human rights record, but they
are astonishing feats of social engineering.

Chávez, with far greater resources and in the face of far fewer
obstacles, has accomplished far less. He has presided over a period of
enormous wealth - oil was $12 a barrel when he took office, and stands
at over $60 a barrel today - but has little to show for it besides a
hundred thousand AK47s and a hefty stack of frequent flyer miles [from
Chávez's globe-trotting diplomacy]. By some measures social spending
has actually decreased under Chávez; poverty is still rampant;
inflation remains high; more than a million Venezuelans remain
illiterate; corruption is rife; crime rates are rocketing.

Worse, many of Chávez's "revolutionary" programs fail to make lasting
improvements to Venezuelan society. Take Chávez's most-widely
trumpeted social program, the importation of some 20,000 Cuban doctors
to establish free local clinics for the poor. While the program has
done some good in the poorest barrios, it does little to fix
Venezuela's creaking healthcare system in the long term. When the oil
boom ends and the Cubans go home (or defect), Venezuela's poor will be
left back where they started: with a barely-functioning two-tier
health service.

The truth is that while Chávez's sympathy for the poor is probably
genuine, his "Bolivarian revolution" has sought not to impose seismic
structural changes on Venezuelan society, but rather to leverage the
country's oil wealth to temporarily paper over the cracks. Revolution,
for Chávez, was less an ideology than a gambit; in speaking so long
and so loudly of revolution, he hoped to polarize his own people and
international opinion, and thereby cement his own grasp on power.

Chavez is both a democrat and an authoritarian: opposition is too
widespread to be safely repressed, so he seeks instead to remain
broadly within the democratic mainstream, splitting and antagonizing
his critics, pushing them further to the right and then using their
very virulence to justify the concentration of power in his own hands.
In that light, preaching revolution has served Chávez well. The ragbag
of right-wingers and out-of-work oligarchs who make up the Venezuelan
opposition's leadership were sent into a predictable frothy-mouthed
frenzy by his talk of communist revolution; they now spend the bulk of
their time spluttering in reactionary outrage, attacking the model he
claims to represent rather than putting forward their own solutions to
the country's problems. His supporters, meanwhile, are too caught up
in the fervor of revolution to quibble over the erosion of their civil
liberties.

Hugo Chávez's opponents like to portray him as a clown; in fact, he's
proven remarkably shrewd. He is neither a socialist saviour nor a red
menace; rather, he is a calculating and pragmatic leader who donned
the mantle of Castro-style revolutionary socialism to wrong-foot his
opponents. In attacking America and cosying up to Cuba, Chávez has now
won the support of a broad swathe of the international left, and the
opprobrium of a still-wider tract of the American right. Both sides
are ultimately playing into his hands, validating his revolutionary
sleight-of-hand and overlooking the essential realpolitik that lies,
for good or for bad, at the heart of chavismo.

--