Cuba accuses US of financing a counter revolutionary group By Larry Moonze in Havana, Cuba, Zambia Times, Sat 10 Apr. 2010

CUBA has accused the USAID of financing a counter revolutionary group in Cuba with some US $20 million.

In a front page editorial on Thursday, the Granma - an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, alleged that the US and its European allies were drawing up plans, coordinating the work of their special services, sending their diplomats onto the streets to monitor the work of their paid agents on the island and increasing funds for subversion in Cuba.

“The USAID alone has a budget of US $20 million this year to supply counterrevolutionary group and finance the media attack on Cuba,” the Granma reported. “They are currently focusing their cynical campaign on another hunger striker Guillermo Farinas– whose common crimes and counterrevolutionary acts were exposed in Granma last March 8 – and who is being offered all the qualified medical treatment he requires. They are internationalising his show while maintaining a cynical silence concerning his cruelty and criminal record, his aggression and death threats to a doctor, the director of the hospital where he worked, and his attack on a defenseless elderly man who had to undergo emergency surgery as a result of the injuries he received. They are likewise kicking up a fuss around the self-denominated Damas de Blanco (Women in White), who are lending themselves to the enemy’s game while supporting themselves with dollars stained with Cuban blood, supplied among others by the terrorist Santiago Alvarez Fernández Magriá, who attempted to blow up the Tropicana Cabaret and is the Miami benefactor of Luis Posada Carriles. Thus it is not surprising that the mastermind behind the sabotage of a Cubana de Aviacion passenger plane and other execrable acts should have come out a few days ago in Miami to show his support for these "damas," whose only sanction to date has been the overwhelming and energetic repudiation of our people in the streets.”

The Granma stated that in the United States receiving money from a terrorist organisation was a felony that was severely punishable.

It stated that in the same vein acting in the service of a foreign power was a crime in the US.

“The crimes of the so-called "dissidents" have nothing to do with freedom of expression but are related to paid collaboration with the enemy superpower in its conspiracies against our nation,” the Granma explained. “It is proven that all of them were in direct or indirect receipt of funds from the US government and more than a few European foundations collaborating with the policy of war on Cuba.

What would happen to these "dissidents" if they acted in the country of their master in the same way they are in Cuba? The US Penal Code sets out a sentence of 20 years for those who advocate the defeat of the government or the established order; 10 years for persons who make false statements with the aim of threatening national interests in relation to another nation, and three years for those who maintain "correspondence or relations with a foreign government" with the intention of influencing its conduct in relation to a conflict or controversy with the United States."

The Granma charged that Cuba’s enemy was using all its weapons of pressure.

“It is using political coercion and ordering the media annihilation of those wishing to show their solidarity with Cuba,” it stated. “It is attempting to silence any voice that is in discrepancy with its dictate. It has even forgotten the much-trumpeted freedom of expression by obliging Google to close the digital blog of a Cuban intellectual who has exposed with irrefutable arguments the real political propositions of the campaign against our homeland.
Nothing surprises us. They are the same perverse methods as those put into practice 50 years ago when President Dwight Eisenhower passed the Covert Action Plan against Cuba.”

The Granma stated that the more than half a century of permanent combat had taught Cubans that vacillation was synonymous with defeat.

“We will make battle with our ideas in our streets and in all international scenarios,” stressed the Granma. “We will defend the truth with our ethics and our principles.”

It stated that the US and European allies were cynically invoking human rights issues that they themselves had disregarded and were still disregarding with impunity today in diverse parts of the world.

The Granma argued that despite the continued US policy of hostility and constant aggression ranging from armed invasion, terrorist acts and attempts on the lives of Fidel Castro and others including the 50-year-old embargo the Cuban administration had never murdered, tortured or displaced even one of its enemies.

“Can the governments of the United States and the European countries that are shouting their heads off criticising Cuba and condemning it as if they were vestal virgins say the same thing?” posed the Granma. “What can they say about the million dead in Iraq and the tens of thousands of victims in Afghanistan as a consequence of the illegal wars executed there? How can they explain the secret prisons and the torture of alleged terrorists? What is the legal basis for the selective assassinations that the United States has perpetrated against its enemies in various parts of the world with a special force headed during this period by the very same general who is now commanding the troops in Afghanistan? How can they justify the death in the last five years of more than 100 immigrants who were in the custody of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement?

What human right sustains the brutal blows dealt to representatives of social movements protesting during the Climate Summit in Copenhagen or Californian students demanding a larger budget for and less money taken out of education?

Who is supervising the humiliating treatment meted out to immigrants in hundreds of detention centers scattered throughout Europe? Have the US Congress or the European Parliament and the right-wing parties of Europe, currently so concerned about Cuba, responded with alarm to, denounced or condemned these scandalous violations of human rights? What is really making them concerned is the moral fortitude of the Revolution, its fidelity to principles, its growing prestige in our region, where it has become an important actor in promoting the integration process; its intelligent and serene response to confronting the harsh consequences of the international economic crisis and the blockade; and its clarity in terms of having to change what has to be changed in pursuit of attaining full justice for our people, as we have been asked by Fidel and Raul.”