Hypocrisy plentiful in Cuba skirmish
In the war on terrorism, there are terrorists and freedom fighters, cop killers and poets.
At one extreme there’s Luis Posada Carriles, aka Bambi, Solo and Inspector Basil, a Cuban exile and former CIA operative twice tried and acquitted in Venezuela of the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight that killed 73 passengers, including teenage members of Cuba’s fencing team. He’s also been linked to hotel bombings in Havana in 1997 in which one Italian tourist died. Cuban exiles call him a patriot.
At the other extreme is Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army member convicted for the 1973 slaying of New Jersey Trooper Werner Foerster. She’s been on the lam since 1979, when she escaped prison and ended up in Havana in 1987, peddling her autobiography, no less. Cuban officials, who granted the cop killer “political” asylum, call Chesimard a poet and fighter for civil rights.
In the middle of this melee is Fidel Castro, still duking it out with George W. Bush.
Castro won another round this week with Posada’s arrest.
Posada, after poking Uncle Sam in the eye by entering this country illegally and boasting to reporters about it, fell victim to his own arrogance.
The 77-year-old Cuban exile had the nerve to hold a press conference Tuesday to say he would leave the country because he didn’t want to cause the Bush administration and its war on terror any problems in the hypocrisy department.
No such luck. Homeland Security agents swooped down within a few hours. They whisked him away on the same day that the Cuban government held mass protests about the Bush administration’s double-standard in not pursuing an accused terrorist even though he had been in the country for a couple of months.
Posada’s defenders had been trying to deflect the controversy by pointing to Chesimard and other American killers, hijackers and even multimillionaire fraud kingpin Robert Vesco. They have found safe harbor in Havana for decades. Sure, they should all be returned to the United States.
Apparently no one has told Bush that he won the election and doesn’t have to satisfy every right-wing whim of Florida’s Cuban exiles whose passion hurts the cause of freedom in Cuba more than it serves the people who struggle to survive there. U.S. standards of justice must never be compromised to match a dictatorship’s whims of political convenience.
Posada may be innocent. I understand, with the very core of my being, why my parents’ generation believes that even if he was responsible for the bombings, he was fighting “the good fight” against dictatorship. I’m sorry, the law is the law. Post 9-11, that’s the way it is.
Ideally, Posada would be tried in the International Criminal Court. Of course, Bush and Castro both rejected that court and refused to have their nations sign on. So now we have Posada but don’t know exactly what to do with him.
In the ultimate hypocrisy, Cuba now seems to accept the international court as an option for Posada, though Castro prefers Venezuela.
Returning him to Venezuela would be the absolute corruption of justice. Remember, he was acquitted twice there. In Venezuela, as in some other countries, prosecutors can appeal a non-guilty verdict, which is why Posada is still wanted there. He’s been underground since prosecutors appealed his acquittal and he escaped prison. Not quite the system of justice we uphold as fair, is it?
Even acknowledging that Venezuela’s courts in the 1970s might have looked the other way in favor of Posada doesn’t justify sending him back now. Corruption in Venezuela’s courts is worse today under Fidel Castro’s pal, Hugo Chavez, than it was then.
The best alternative would be for Italian courts to look into the 1997 Havana bombings. A U.S. trial would be a political embarrassment. Already Castro has spent hours on Cuban TV, quoting from declassified U.S. documents about Posada’s years as a U.S. spy.
As for Chesimard, now 57 and living the high life on the government dole in Cuba – better than most of the struggling people there – she, too, claims innocence. Fine, let U.S. courts decide. Plenty of lawyers would take the case. Cuba can play the race card all it wants, claiming Chesimard was falsely accused, but the fact stands that she was sentenced to life in prison. Would that the black Cubans who hijacked a ferry in Havana in 2003 and were summarily executed within days had been so lucky.
Hypocrisy reeks on both sides of the Florida Strait.