Cuba USA

Two stories regarding the editorials of The New York Times about Cuba

By Omar Pérez Salomón

Source La Pupila Insomne

The fact that The New York Times, one of the most influential dailies in the United States and the world, has published in one month six editorials against the economic, commercial and financial blockade that Washington imposed on Havana more than 50 years ago is a sign that the Cuba issue has given rise to differing opinions within U.S. political circles.

However, the search for ways to tighten the net around the largest island in the West Indies is what has prevailed so far in the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches. Two examples confirm this.

The first refers to legal claims for over a billion dollars belonging to Cuba. These have been frozen by our northern neighbor following U.S. court rulings against the Cuban government in the last few years in its ceaseless pursuit of new sources to collect money.

This is why Cuban assets derived from telephone communications with the United States, blocked in U.S. banks since 1966, have been totally plundered as a result of the “compensation” ordered by the courts. One of the most notorious was Miami Federal Judge Alexander King’s finding that the Cuban state and its Air Force had to pay $187.6 million dollars to the families of the pilots of the counter-revolutionary “Brothers to the Rescue” group whose planes were shot down when they violated Cuban airspace on February 24, 1996.

On November 12, 1998, Judge King filed a motion before a New York Federal Court seeking to order seizure of the blocked Cuban funds and to start proceedings against AT&T and the Chase Manhattan Bank. This was based on the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, approved on October 12, 2000, and thanks to which the plaintiffs received around $97.6 million dollars.

The second example is the war declared by the multinational Bacardi corporation against the French-Cuban Pernod-Ricard-Havana Rum corporation over ownership of the Havana Club trade mark. That ended in May 2012, when the U.S. Supreme Court prevented the Cuban company Cubaexport from defending its right to renew registration of the Havana Club brand with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

No enterprise has devoted so much in terms of money and resources to finance actions against the Cuban Revolution as Bacardi, whose managers have been involved in countless terrorist, subversive and judicial maneuvers against Cuba. Back in the 1960s, Pepin Bosch, the then head of Bacardi, organized the bombing of Cuba’s oil refineries. As it happened, his plan, as well as a picture of the B-26 bomber he had intended to use, were exposed in The New York Times and never materialized.

Bacardi’s stockholders have stood out because of their contributions to both Democratic and Republican Congress members and anti-Cuban laws such as the Torricelli and Helms-Burton acts. In the words of the Colombian journalist Hernando Calvo Ospina in his bookRon Bacardi: la Guerra Oculta [Bacardi: The Hidden War], “As one of the company’s top executives has admitted, Bacardi is a Bermuda-based company without a nationality. And yet, it used its economic power and contacts in the highest political circles to virtually draft a U.S. law tailored to its own needs. Not only does this piece of legislation –known as the Helms-Burton Act– threaten Cuba’s sovereignty and the survival of its people, it also adds to the madness into which capitalism’s commercial system is dangerously creeping in its longing for bringing down every barrier to its.”

In violation of trade-related international standards, these same actors promoted the approval of Section 211, as another step toward the enforcement of the Helms-Burton Act included in the 4,000-plus-page 1999 budget bill. The first stages of Section 211 have it that no U.S. court can recognize any rights over foreign trademarks or patents related to assets of an American citizen confiscated without indemnity by the Cuban revolutionary government. Jurisdiction over this cause was thus denied to the judges.

As we can see, the fact that Pernod-Ricard executives attending the recently-held Havana International Fair said they were ready to market Havana Club rum in the United States and that several American telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon are interested in re-establishing direct telephone links with Cuba is not good enough. The whole thing is about penetrating the anti-Cuban structure through which Washington’s Cuba policy is dictated.

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