Cuba challenges US to lift embargo 'even for a year'

Once again my GOOGLE web crawler has proven invaluable at finding the news not covered in the homogenized, U.S. "state-run" media...at least I didn't see this article....yet!

Cuba's National Assembly president Ricardo "Ricky Ricardo" Alarcon has challenged the United States. This time the challenge is to lift the embargo "even if for a year" as a test to see if Cuba really wants normalized relations with us.

This was Cuba’s first "official response" to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's April assertions that the Castro brothers do not want a transition to democracy or a return to relations with the U.S. as they were prior to 1961.

Call me crazy...but perhaps Secretary Clinton is being a little cautious--remembering that during her husband's administration, Fidel “opened the flood gates” allowing Cubans to flee the island on anything that floated thus creating a humanitarian disaster in the summer of 1994 that the Clinton administration mismanaged.

Or maybe it’s the fact she remembers how Castro manipulated our handling of the Elian Gonzalez debacle.

Or dare I say, perhaps Secretary Clinton remembers that administration’s confusion over Cuba’s intentions, which resulted in the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes.

Which brings me to a key paragraph in this article. “Alarcon said there were things Clinton could do "with a stroke of the pen" to improve relations, such as allowing visits by the wives of two of five Cubans serving prison sentences in the United States for espionage.”

Since late December 2008 when Raul Castro broached the subject of the possibly of President Obama releasing the Cuban Five; the subject of the convicted spies and the wives wishing to visit has become a major source of contention in Cuba – U.S. negotiations.

Once again, Cuba fails to mention that two of the Cuban Five were found to have infiltrated the Brothers organization with the intent of providing information to Cuba--which resulted in the murder of four men—lest we forget that a third spy, Juan Pablo Roque also worked within the Brothers organization with the same intent—but escaped.

At some point perhaps the subject of the Cuban Five being allowed to visit with family members should be discussed, but only after Cuba agrees to extradite the pilots of the MiGs that were used in the ambush and the Cuban Air Traffic Controllers that led them to the slaughter.

Click on the title of this post to read the entire article on Tolerance.ca in its original form.