American Politics Journal -- Little Havanans, Drugs, and the Bush Family CIA



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"Little Havanans", Drugs, and the Bush Family CIA
The Story that Elian's Kidnappers and the GOP Don't Want You to Hear!

by Tamara Baker

Monday, April 3, 2000 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA -- Remember the ruckus a few weeks ago that resulted when it was revealed that some of Elian Gonzalez's Miami "relatives" (i.e., captors), had extensive criminal records?

The Little Havanans reacted predictably, with vociferous charges of character assassination and "smear job!"

To quote the great Joe Conason, who uttered his remarks in a somewhat different context, "Since when is the truth a 'smear'?"

Especially since it now looks like the mainstream news reports didn't tell the half of it.

According to Jerry Mendon of The Consortium, it turns out that many of the folks holding Elian captive, refusing to allow him to so much as see an American child psychologist to deal with the trauma of having witnessed his mother and so many others slowly die on the raft last November, are not only up to their neck in criminal activity, but also terrorist activity, too, especially on the CIA's behalf.

Here's some excerpts from Mendon's story:

...one prominent Miami-based spokesman on the Elian case is Jose Basulto. A Bay of Pigs veteran, Basulto has acknowledged past involvement in terror attacks on Cuba in the 1960s as well as work for Argentina's military government, a regime that tortured and "disappeared" an estimated 30,000 political dissidents from 1976-83 -- and allegedly financed some of its operations with drug proceeds.
Basulto's experiences in secret wars against Castro and other leftists dated back to 1959. In that year, Castro's revolutionary army overthrew a Mafia-connected dictator, Gen. Fulgencio Batista, and Basulto emigrated to the United States. In Miami, he and his friend Felix Rodriguez signed up with the CIA-backed Brigade 2506. They were infiltrated into Cuba before the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
After the invasion failed, Basulto and Rodriguez escaped back to Miami, where they nursed grievances over alleged U.S. betrayal. They also continued work for CIA-funded groups and plotted new ways to strike at Castro....

And get a load of this tidbit:

...[One of Basulto's Cuban comrades in the U.S. Army was his friend, Felix Rodriguez, who would go on to a long career in the CIA before representing Vice President George Bush's office in Central America during the 1980s.]...

You know the CIA, right? The Bush family's favorite government agency? The agency Poppy Bush used to head, and which named a building after Poppy Bush not too long ago?

Isn't it rather interesting that the same Cuban-exile families involved in doing the GOP's dirty work, from the Bay of Pigs to the Watergate break-in to the drug smuggling for Iran-Contra, are also tightly connected to the family whose heir and scion now wants to succeed his daddy as President?

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. To continue Mendon's story:

...In the years after the Army, Basulto claimed he adopted the pacifist teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. But outside experts believe Basulto remained active in the anti-Castro terrorist underground.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Basulto seemed to confirm that suspicion. He said: "About that time in my life, I have only one thing I want to say. We had come to the conclusion that the only hope for the Cuban people lay in the physical elimination of Fidel Castro."...

But Foxy Fidel wasn't the only target Basulto and his fellow Batista-ites were happy to attack:

...After Reagan's victory, American ultraconservatives sought out the Argentines to fight the new leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. John Carbaugh, an aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., first broached the idea with the defeated remnants of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza's National Guard who were licking their wounds in Honduras.
Carbaugh then flew to Buenos Aires for talks with Argentine intelligence officers who agreed to assist the contras. [For details, see Roy Gutman's Banana Diplomacy.]...
...According to William Turner, a former FBI agent who kept tabs on Basulto's anti-Castro activities, the Cuban émigré served as an adviser to Argentine intelligence officers who were training the contras in methods of torture. [Chicago Tribune, March 3, 1996] ....

Much later, it was revealed, before Congress, that the Cuban exile partners of the CIA were dealing in drugs in order to finance their terrorist operations:

...In sworn U.S. Senate testimony, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse, a financial officer for the Argentine intelligence services, said Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suarez contributed more than $30 million to finance the Argentine-backed "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia in June 1980 and to support the Nicaraguan contra rebels and other paramilitary operations in Central America. Sanchez-Reisse said Suarez's $30 million was laundered through businesses in Miami. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]
In 1998, a CIA inspector general's report also found that contra operatives subsidized their activities with cocaine smuggling into the United States. Through the decade, as this contra-connected cocaine trafficking continued, the CIA took special steps to head off criminal and congressional investigations that threatened to reveal the secret, the inspector general's report admitted. [See Lost History.]
Although Basulto was not mentioned in the CIA report, the inspector general found that other Cuban-Americans who had volunteered to assist the contras were moonlighting as drug traffickers or were serving as money launderers for the Medellin cocaine cartel...

One of the issues the Republicans like to claim as their own is that of "Family Values." Here's how their Argentine and Cuban-exile friends practiced these values, not so long ago:

... During the Argentine "dirty war," when the military's secret police captured a pregnant female deemed subversive, they would subject the woman to a Caesarean section or induce labor. They then would give the baby to a military family and murder the new mother, usually by shackling her naked to other captives and then dumping her from a plane into the ocean to drown.
Sometimes, the infants were literally raised by their mothers' killers.

Charming, moral, character-filled people, aren't they?

It's time for this information to be passed along to every newsroom in the country. The drug-dealing terrorist Bush family friends who claim to be speaking for Elian Gonzalez need to be exposed for what they are, and soon.

For Elian's sake, and our own.