Editorial

ON November 15, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the arm of the United States Congress that investigates how the federal government and its agencies administer the federal budget and assesses the degree of effectiveness with which they implement their functions and programs, published an extensive 63-page report titled "Foreign Assistance: U.S. Democracy Assistance for Cuba Needs Better Management and Oversight."

After a painstaking review of the millions allocated by the United States government to promote subversion in our country, and to conceive and nurse squalid and discredited mercenary factions in Cuba, the abovementioned document arrived at the inevitable conclusion that the funds allocated to that end have been squandered.

The report had been requested by two Congress members, Arizona Republican Jeff Flake and Massachusetts Democrat William Delahunt, both members of the House of Representatives International Relations Committee who have proposed initiatives aimed at easing the blockade and promoting change in the Bush Administration’s anti-Cuba policy.

The report would be cause for ridicule if the facts it reveals were not so serious: how and on what $73.5 million was spent between 1996 and 2005 to try to subvert the internal order of our country.

Immediately, major U.S. media agencies reported the irregularities and corrupt waste in the utilization of almost $74 million that — just via this channel, which is not the only one for financing their mercenary groups in Cuba — the U.S. government has taken from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets to finance its criminal and failed anti-Cuba policy, and to maintain active the industry of the anti-Cuban counterrevolution via programs for promoting so-called "democracy" in our country, which are directed by institutions like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department.

According to the U.S. media itself, more than half of these funds never made it to Cuba; instead, they remained in Miami. Likewise, part of the money was used to buy articles such as video games, canned crabmeat, bicycles, luxury coats and chocolates and DVD players, reflecting, in all of its magnitude, the official U.S. business of the counterrevolution in Cuba, and the enormous dividends that that it brings to the anti-Cuba industry based in Miami.

The report also reveals that of the total funds wasted, part was squandered on items that the United States Interests Section in Havana is trying to distribute in Cuba, to which end that office handed out, between 1996 and 2006, some 385,000 books, bulletins and other "informative" material, according to the information in the GAO document. That was in addition to the correspondence "journalism courses" for more than 200 mercenaries, the publication of approximately 23,000 reports by so-called "independent journalists" on the situation in Cuba, and the financing of the visit to our country by more than 200 "international experts" to train the domestic counterrevolution.

This confirms the grounds for the reiterated revelations by our government of the U.S. Interests Section, which acts as the headquarters of the counterrevolution, and it also shows in an irrefutable manner how that Interests Section flagrantly violates the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of April 18, 1961, by bringing into Cuba — abusing its diplomatic privileges — articles and materials that are not for the official use of that diplomatic mission, but for supplying the mercenaries who work at the service of the U.S. government.

The GAO report provides incontrovertible proof of the systematic revelations by the Cuban government to the effect that the ill-named dissidence is nothing more than a group financed and directed by the U.S. government, real mercenaries, on the payroll and at the service of the historic enemy of the Cuban people: Yankee imperialism, which today is not concealing its voracious intention of taking over Cuba again, something for which it spares no resources, despite the fact that it will never attain its final goal, which is to overthrow the Revolution.

It is unusual to verify the disdain they have for the very people of the United States, whom they constantly try to manipulate, to make them believe in an immoral and failed policy that is aimed at breaking the independence-loving and sovereign determination of our people, and the financing for which, moreover, they impose.

Via its subversive anti-Cuba programs, the Bush administration is providing unlimited travel funds for inciting unpatriotic individuals, while denying the U.S. people their right to travel to Cuba and to have relationships with our country, and has cruelly reduced the number of visits that can be made by Cubans resident in the United States to once every three years, to those that it has arbitrarily redefined as their family members in Cuba.

In its turn, the Bush administration is imposing heavier restrictions on remittances and packages from Cubans resident in the United States to their relatives in Cuba, while at the same time, maintaining a wide, dirty pipeline for resources of all kinds, but only at the disposition of the mercenaries who make a living from the business of counterrevolution.

The Bush administration is imposing increasingly heavier restrictions on Cuba for acquiring in the United States medicines that are vital for our children and elderly and other vulnerable groups, and maintains permanent obstacles to the purchase of foodstuffs from the U.S. market for consumption by our entire population; while at the same time, cynically, it sends all types of medicines — and even coats and fine chocolates — to counterrevolutionary elements that lick the boots of the empire.

The Bush administration is imposing on the Cuban people the longest and cruelest blockade ever known in human history, while at the same time, nurturing and carefully maintaining its paid parasites, as corrupt and immoral as the imperialism that sustains them.

These are the real "humanitarian" and "human rights" policies that the Miami mafia and the anti-Cuban Congress members in Florida wish for our people, a policy that allows them to receive the benefits of an ongoing "dance of the millions" at the cost of the U.S. and Cuban people.

Without a doubt, by implementing the criminal and genocidal policy contained in the Bush Plan, the U.S. government is attempting to improve and continue its financing for internal subversion in our country, for which it has decided to allocate $80 million in additional funds over the next two years, and no less than $20 million every year following that, until, according to their long-desired pretensions, it is able to overthrow our Revolution.

However, they should not delude themselves. The Cuban government and people will ensure, as they have done to date, the guarantee that these plans are completely ineffective, and the total rupture of any macabre plans being hatched in Washington to foster subversion and internal counterrevolution in our country.

The Cuban government and people are exposing, once again, the provocative, insulting and unacceptable nature of the constant aid that the U.S. government, with its criminal political goals, is attempting to get to its counterrevolutionary cubs, while at the same time intensifying the iron-fisted economic blockade that it has maintained against the Cuban people for almost five decades.

For a long time, the imperialist U.S. government has lacked any moral authority whatsoever in Cuba, and it is increasingly losing what it does have in many other parts of the world.

With dignity, serenity and courage, Cuba will adopt, at any time, the measures it deems necessary for confronting this type of aggression.

No matter how much money they waste, they will never be able to break the determination of the Cuban people.

(Translated by Granma International)

(Granma) 14-12-2006