Washington picks up the tab • Two European politicians, alongside terrorists, stage an anti-Cuba show

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD—Special for Granma International—

• IN Berlin, European Parliament Vice President Edward McMillan-Scott and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will co-chair a conference against Cuba in April, alongside some of the most well-known and discredited elements of the Miami terrorist fauna who count on orientation, financing and logistical support from Washington.

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation, an openly anti-communist organization associated in the past with numerous anti-Cuba activities, will serve as the front this time for an event identical to various others that have taken place in the past, notably in Prague, Rome, and Madrid, aimed at swaying European public opinion in favor of the annexationist interests of the United States.

Further confirmation of a media trap: the call for the event is coming from the offices of People In Need (PIN) in Prague, Czech Republic. This pseudo-NGO is designated in the Bush Plan for Cuba's annexation, along with Reporters Sans Frontières, as the axis of the U.S. disinformation campaigns against Cuba "in third countries."

The Czech group is the recipient of significant subsidies from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, the agency created by Ronald Reagan in 1983 to substitute the CIA in the distribution of funds to complicit foreign organizations). Laura Wides-Múñoz, an AP journalist in Miami, revealed in an investigation published December 23, 2006 that PIN has received $200,000 from the NED to discredit Cuba.

For those who do not understand the evidence: in its Prague office, PIN hosts the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba (ICDC), another U.S. NGO fabrication totally financed through a network of known U.S. State Department intermediaries.

The ICDC is made up of an impressive collection of members of the Czech, Slovakian, German, Bulgarian, and Spanish ultra-right whose common characteristics are intense anticommunism and servile cooperation with U.S. diplomatic representatives.

CALZON-MONTANER DUO AMONG THE STARS

The attendance at the Berlin show of several former collaborators of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, whose personnel of 50 is principally dedicated to recruiting paid informants of all types, has already been announced.

Other guests include individuals who have devoted decades to vilifying Cuba, many of whose profiles contain proven and documented terrorist activities.

• Heading the list is veteran CIA agent Frank Calzón, lifetime director of the Cuban Freedom Center in Washington. His organization is named in the recent report by the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO), which describes the U.S government's squandering of more than $65 million to destabilize Cuba. Calzón was only able to secure $5 million for himself. This man in his sixties belonged to the terrorist groups Alpha 66 and Abdala in the 1960's when the CIA used Miami as a training camp.

• Also appearing on the Berlin event menu is Cuban born, pseudo-intellectual Carlos Alberto Montaner. This Madrid resident kick-started his political career by planting bombs in public places around Havana. He was arrested in his home in December 1960 with a terrorist's arsenal but later escaped to the Honduran embassy, then committed to rescuing U.S. counterrevolutionary agents.

• Silvia Iriondo is the leader of M.A.R. Por Cuba, an organization similar to Brothers to the Rescue led by José Basulto, famous for having machine-gunned a Havana hotel from his yacht. Iriondo was a passenger on Basulto's plane February 24, 1996, when he directed other pilots to violate Cuban airspace with deadly consequences. Basulto left his radio on in the cockpit in order to document the operation, thus allowing the world to later hear his roars of laughter when the other planes were being attacked by the Cuban Air Force. Iriondo belongs to a long list of "anti-Castro" activists economically prioritized by the State Department.

• As usual in these events, the participation of various "x" functionaries is probable, such as Vaclav Havel, ex-president of the Czech Republic and failed playwright; ex-Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar; Salvador Armando Calderón Sol, ex-president of El Savador; Rexhep Meidani, ex-president of Albania; and Jorge Paz Zamora, ex-president of Bolivia, all members of the ICDC and always willing to spend a couple of days in a five-star hotel, all expenses paid.

• Among the notable Miami mafiosi always invited to such prefabricated conferences are:

Pedro V. Roig, general director of Radio and TV Martí (currently under investigation); Ramón Colas, famous conman and subsidized playboy; ex-"Comandante" Huber Matos, linked to drug-trafficking; Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, a terrorist whose Directorio Democrático Cubano received $3 million from USAID; and Angel Francisco De Fana Serrano, arrested in California in 1995 with an arsenal to be used in an attack on Cuba.

On February 6, 2006, terrorist Sixto Reynaldo "El Chino" Aquit, famous in Miami for boasting about his lengthy series of criminal actions, appeared on the program of a similar event organized in the Swedish Parliament by PIN, which also recruited some Swedish politicians with close ties to the U.S. embassy.

That European tour was preceded by another one, on which "El Chino" was accompanied by another criminal, Angel Cuadra Landrova, known in Cuba for his participation in the razing of cane fields set on fire using cats as torches.

Despite being one of the founders of Luis Posada Carriles' support committee along with Nelis Rojas, Pedro Remón and Dionisio Suárez, all profiled by the FBI as authors of terrorist acts, Aquit counts on the wholehearted patronage of PIN and the U.S. State Department.

For certain Caleb McCarry, the proconsul designated to the so-called Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba responsible for developing the annexationist Bush Plan, will appear in the corridors of the Berlin event. It is common knowledge that he belongs to the gang of U.S. politicians and functionaries that provoked the kidnapping and grotesque expulsion of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, backed by the U.S. State Department and with the blessing of the Bush clan.

McMillan-Scott is also a member of the ICDC. He recently made a trip to Cuba on a tourist visa, fully paid for by his secret friends.

At the Berlin event he promises to "reveal" the concocted conclusions of this paid journey. Surprisingly, his alleged findings have already been published on the PIN website.

However, like his German friend, he has not found it necessary to date to "reveal" to his country’s media the extent of the links between European agencies and the USAID, NED, and IRI, nor the identities of his millionaire friends in the Cuban-American mafia of Miami, a city whose name he refrains from pronouncing.