RUTHFULLY YOURS

Worse still, the flunkie in this article title recently served as U.S. Secretary of State. Back in the ’90s when she served as First Lady (co-president, some say) Hillary Clinton was widely known as “The Smartest Woman in the World.” Her husband Bill supposedly coined the term, but Rush Limbaugh ran with it, snarking and laughing. Soon it was household.

In her new book, Hillary Clinton reveals that she prodded President Obama to “lift or ease” (what’s left of the so-called) Cuba embargo. “The embargo is Castro’s best friend,” Clinton explained to a delighted audience at the anti-embargo Council on Foreign Relations last week while promoting her book Hard Choices.

But doesn’t the “Smartest Woman in the World” and former U.S. Secretary of State know that what’s left of the sanctions against Castro’s Stalinist regime are codified into law and can only be lifted by Congress, obviously after a vote? In fact, this codification took place with passage of the Helms-Burton act in 1996, when she was first lady (co-president.)

The current U.S. president, having already delighted Castro by loopholing the Cuba sanctions almost to death, can’t go much further. Has Ms. Clinton forgotten? Or is this constitutional “expert” advocating (even more) U.S. government by executive fiat?

And what about the $2 billion (worth $7 billion today) stolen at Soviet gunpoint by Castro’s gunmen in 1960 from U.S. businessmen and stockholders, after the torture and murder of a few Americans who resisted? That very Helms-Burton law also calls for a settling of that account before allowing any more loopholing of the embargo.

Perhaps instead of attending Yale Law School and marrying “her way to the top,” Hillary Rodham Clinton should have “stayed home and baked cookies,” (to succumb to her own famous insult against America’s stay-at home moms), then sold them at a lemonade stand. If so, she’d know a little about business. To wit: When somebody stiffs you big–time (as Castro did to the U.S. like nobody in history) before extending them more credit you demand they settle up the amount in arrears. Comprende, “Smartest Woman in the World”?

More basic still, Webster’s defines “embargo” as “a government order imposing a trade barrier.” As a verb it’s defined as “to prevent commerce.” But according to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. (thanks to her husband’s loopholes in 1999) has transacted almost $4 billion in trade with Cuba over the past 14 years. Up until five years ago, the U.S. served as Stalinist Cuba’s biggest food supplier and fifth biggest import partner. For over a decade the so-called U.S. embargo, so disparaged by Hillary Clinton, has mostly stipulated that Castro’s Stalinist regime pay cash up front through a third–party bank for all U.S. agricultural products; no Export-Import Bank (U.S. taxpayer) financing of such sales.

Enacted by the Bush team in 2001, (attempting to patch some of her husband’s loopholes) this cash-up-front policy has been monumentally beneficial to U.S. taxpayers, making them among the few in the world not stiffed by the Castro regime, which per capita-wise qualifies as the world’s biggest dead-beat. Standard & Poors refuses to even rate Cuba.

Again, shouldn’t a former U.S. Sec. of State be familiar with this?

Now back to her parroting of the KGB-mentored meme: “The embargo is Castro’s best friend it provides Castro with a foil for his failures.” This meme ranks as the favorite talking point of Castro’s agents, on the payroll and off. Sadly, it’s widely believed by the superficially-informed on Cuban matters.

First off, if Castro “secretly favors the embargo,” then why did every one of his secret agents campaign secretly and obsessively against the embargo while working as secret agents?   Castro managed the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Montes, known as “Castro’s Queen Jewel” in the intelligence community. In 2002 she was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and today she serves a 25-year sentence in Federal prison. Only a plea bargain spared her from sizzling in the electric chair like the Rosenbergs.

Prior to her visit from the FBI and handcuffing, Montes worked tirelessly to influence U.S. foreign policy against the embargo. The same holds for more recently arrested, convicted and incarcerated Cuban spies Carlos and Elsa Alvarez and Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers. All worked tirelessly to influence U.S. policy against the “embargo” while working as secret agents.

It’s one thing for some talking heads with their typically overworked and harried research staff to remain ignorant of these vital matters. But shouldn’t a former U.S. Secretary of State be familiar with matters so vital to U.S. security?

Also, Ms. Clinton, if you claim to speak on behalf of the “hurt by the embargo” Cuban people, why not look at what these Cuban people themselves think of U.S. sanctions against the regime that oppresses them? Or is it better to take them for idiots, as you apparently do the American people?

In fact, in a way you have a point. The Cuban do want a change in U.S. sanctions—the Cuban people want them tightened ! They’re outraged by the windfall of cash showering their oppressors from the U.S. nowadays. In executive order after executive order, President Obama abolished President Bush’s travel and remittance restrictions to Castro’s terror-sponsoring fiefdom and opened the pipeline to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba today is estimated at $4 billion a year.

Almost half a million people visited Cuba from the U.S. last year. Yet while a proud Soviet satrapy Cuba received $3-5 billion annually from the Soviets. In brief, almost every year since Obama took office more cash has been flowing from the U.S. to Cuba than used to flow there from the Soviets at the height of their Cuba-sponsorship. And more people from the U.S. have been visiting Cuba than visited during year featured in “The Godfather II.” Result?

The Cuban people are suffering a ten-year record of repression at the hands of the fat and happy KGB-trained security forces. The current wave of repression slightly tops the 2013 record wave of repression that coincided with the record tourism revenues that year.)

In brief: record tourism=record repression. In brief: Every shred of observable evidence proves that travel to Cuba and business with its Stalinist mafia enriches and entrenches these KGB-trained and heavily-armed owners of Cuba’s tourism industry. Thus they remain the most highly motivated guardians of Cuba’s Stalinist and Terror-Sponsoring status-quo.

Please note: there is no “doing business with Cuba.” There is only doing business with the KGB- and GRU-trained Stalinist fat-cats who occupy Cuba. Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom allows no genuine private sector, as exists in China, however despicable that regime. The Cuban “constitution” outlaws all private property.

So kindly stifle the reflexive and asinine: “But we do business with China! Why not Cuba?!” The comparison isn’t even an apples to oranges. It’s grapes to pumpkins.

Furthermore, Castro’s Stalinist regime mandates 15 years in their KGB-designed dungeons for any Cuban saying a nice thing about the U.S. embargo. (And yet “The Smartest Woman in the World,” Hillary Clinton, claims the embargo is “Castro’s best friend!”)

“Since it has run out of doors to knock on, (the Castro regime) is now focused on the United States,” writes Cuban dissident and 3-time Amnesty-International prisoner of conscience Rene Gomez Manzanoin in a recent samizdat smuggled from his Communist-occupied homeland:

“Lifting the embargo would be a mistake without Cuba first respecting its people’s fundamental human rights…If the U.S. allows financing towards Cuba, it will be U.S. taxpayers who would be sustaining the Castro regime.”

So here’s a foreign “Hispanic,” who instead of scheming to avail himself of booty courtesy of U.S. taxpayers is actually warning the U.S. taxpayer against the predatory machinations against his wallet by his own millionaire politicians, their cronies at the Council on Foreign Relations all in cahoots with their friend in Cuba.