[From the Minneapolis Star Tribune -- my comments are below this
excerpt.]
A family's flight from Castro's Cuba
Kevin Diaz
Miguel Acosta didn't really need the gun. But he brought it anyway, a
.22-caliber pistol that he stowed carefully on the plane.
It was July 4, 1960, and Acosta was co-pilot of Cubana Airlines Flight
471. There were 31 passengers aboard and an 11-man crew as the flight
took off from Madrid on its return to Havana. Acosta had piloted the
first leg of the trip and was supposed to be resting on the way back.
Instead, as the plane flew over Bimini shortly after midnight, he and
his co- pilot stood up and offered to take the controls.
The other crewmen thought they were joking. Acosta pulled out the gun.
"Will this help to convince you?" he said. For those in the cockpit
who would not be defecting, the gun provided political cover from
authorities back in Cuba, whose questions would have to be answered
about suspected collaboration.
[The full story is here:]
http://www.startribune.com/stories/389/3399463.html
* * *
The tale spun by Kevin Díaz is dramatic enough. There's just one
problem with it. It doesn't make any sense.
It is, we are told, "One Family's Flight from Castro's Cuba." The
problem is it begins with one pilot's hijacking of a flight from
Madrid. Which raises the obvious question: Being in Madrid, if the
pilot didn't want to go to Cuba, why did he get on a Havana-bound
plane? If he wanted to go to the states, why didn't he just buy a
ticket and take a plane there, the normal way?
OK, maybe it was a visa problem. But that couldn't have been it, for
Díaz tells us later that Acosta's daughter Sara and his mom were
already in the U.S. "As U.S. citizens they had been able to leave Cuba
freely." In fact, in those days pretty much anyone with money and a
visa could leave Cuba freely. This was mid-1960, before the imposition
of the blockade and breaking off of diplomatic relations. True, there
were limits on how much cash you could take out of the island but
otherwise you were free to go.
I don't know the figures, but if I had to guess, I'd say probably
200 thousand or more did so in those first couple of years of the
revolution. My family and countless others I knew in Miami in the
1960's did. Yes, it was traumatic, a terrible thing to go through: your
previous life turned upside down, your business expropriated, your
previous close ties with "the palace" and "the embassy" turned from a
source of status into a source of suspicion. That is what a social
revolution is like.
And there were stories, more than a few, of people who wanted to
leave but in between the hassles of getting visas and passports and
money for the trip got caught by the U.S. severing normal ties and
travel routines. And, yes, there were others who wanted to leave, or
who later said they did, but were instead arrested for participating in
the Batista repression or the CIA networks. But just a regular Joe who
wanted to join his wife in Miami? In the middle of 1960? When he was
already off the island, and his wife an American citizen? That was,
we are told, the specific case of Acosta. Does it make any sense at
all? Suppose on the Cuba-bound plane there were a couple of guys from
State Security, coming back from some mission, and they foiled
the plan? Why take the risk?
Look at the date again. July 4, 1960. Does the date suggest
anything? Does the idea of carrying out a completely unnecessary
skyjacking on that date suggest anything?
I'll give you another bit of highly suggestive history. The date of
the decree nationalizing all U.S. imperialist property in Cuba was July
5, 1960. Undoubtedly the U.S. knew it was coming. Did it decide to set
off the July 4 hijacking stink bomb in response?
This, of course, is pure supposition and surmise on my part, but
I believe this hijacking was carefully organized and orchestrated by
an American secret service whose initials might as well have stood for
"Cuban Invasion Agency." Otherwise it makes no sense at all. It may be
true that hijacking planes then was not yet a capital offense, but
surely pulling a gun on the crew of a civilian airliner in mid-flight
qualified for any number of charges from assault with a deadly weapon
to reckless endangerment. So why would someone do it, who could quite
simply hop on a regular flight and be in the states a few hours later?
As a political propaganda stunt, that's the only reason I can think of.
It is testimony to the ignorance of Americans about history as well
as the current level of American journalistic standards that this bit
of nonsense -- a guy who has already "escaped" from Cuba gets on a
plane TO Cuba to hijack it so he can "escape" from Cuba -- could get
printed. And even if you didn't realize that in 1960 you didn't need to
"escape," surely an editor should have noticed that this "escapee" had
already done so by the time the tale begins.
The reason that the editors didn't and the writer himself don't
question the gaping logical hole at the center of this story is that it
fits perfectly with what they "know" about Cuba. Cuba is communist and
communists keep people from leaving otherwise no one would stay. Entire
forests have fallen to perpetuating this lie about Cuba. Ewa, for
example, refers to it obliquely; but recently here in Atlanta, talking
to a couple of veteran leftists, people who come out of the New
Communist Movement of the 1970s, they said things like we like Cuba ok
but we have some criticisms, like people not being allowed to leave.
So deeply ingrained is this framework that if you talk to Cubans
who've actually had to struggle to emigrate, many will tell you how
Fidel wouldn't let them leave, but when you get the details, you find
out that, actually, the problems were either that the U.S. had cut off
all flights and other means of transportation and/or they couldn't get
a visa into another country.
The story of the CIA's Operation Peter Pan from just after the
period Kevin Diaz refers to is an example of this. It began in December
1960, as the US was cutting back commercial air traffic between Cuba
and the U.S., and getting ready to close the U.S. embassy, which it did
in January and it meant no one could get a visa. Now it became very
difficult as a practical matter to leave Cuba. Without a visa you
couldn't go to the US, and also third countries, where you *might* get
an american visa, didn't want you. But through counterrevolutionary
bands and the Catholic Church hierarchy, the U.S. made available visa
waivers to Cuban minors. The children could come to the U.S., but
without their parents.
Why would parents send children to the U.S.? Because the
Cuban government was said to be preparing a law on the nationalization
of children. At the age of three all children would be taken to
state institutions to be raised there. If you didn't believe it, here
was an actual reproduction of the draft decree, stolen from the Prime
Minister's (i.e., Fidel's) office. It was, of course, a complete
fabrication -- but it had its effect. If Fidel had been able to
nationalize even the omnipotent United Fruit and refineries from Shell
and Standard Oil, and get away with it, what was to stop him from
nationalizing children, too?
So 14,000 children were sent to the U.S. without their parents.
The CIA's idea was that the parents would be so desperate to reunite
with their children that they'd overthrow the revolution.
It was the Cuban revolutionary government who pressured and
maneuvered and eventually trapped the Johnson administration into
allowing the parents to go to the United States also. The way it
happened was this. In October of 1965, President Johnson made a speech
about how any Cuban could come to the United States, it was that
dastardly Fidel who had turned the island into a prison nation. Fidel
responded that it was a lie, and if people in Miami wanted to come get
their relatives, the revolution would outfit the port of Camarioca for
that purpose.
"Someone" in Miami --many counterrevolutionaries insist it was the
revol ution's agents in Florida-- took Castro up on the offer and set
sail, and a boatlift began. All of a sudden the unthinkable happened.
The Johnson administration negotiated with Cuba, and agreed to twice-
weekly flights from Cuba to Miami. The flights also allowed the re-
establishment of direct mail service between the two countries. These
were the socalled "freedom flights", which continued until 1973, when
Nixon cancelled them. Parents separated from their children got first
priority on those flights.
The Mariel boatlift in 1980 and the rafter crisis in 1994 are two
other times when Cuba has used similar tactics to the same effect -- to
push the United States into accepting the flow of immigrants it is
constantly promoting and trying to create. Currently, 20,000 people are
emigrating legally from Cuba to the US every year, the maximum the US
(not Cuba) will allow.
José
“There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.†– Che Guevara
“We still believe that the struggle of Ireland for freedom is a part of the world-wide upward movement of the toilers of the earth, and we still believe that the emancipation of the working class carries within it the end of all tyranny – national, political and social.†– James Connolly
