As well, before presidential elections for Cuba's first president in December, 1901, one of the two candidates, General Batrolome Maso, quite the race, in part over the terms of the Platt Amendment, leaving only Tomà ¡s Estrada Palma, a US citizen living in the United States at the time of the campaign.
To argue that the Guantanamo lease, signed under such imperialist conditions, provides any kind of legal justification for the US to continue to occupy Cuban territory is simply farcical and ahistorical.
Of course the US should return the Guantanamo Bay territory to Cuba (a gesture which would have the added benefit that it would eliminate the GITMO torture detention center that has made the US a hated object of ridicule around the globe).
As for Raul Castro's other pre-diplomatic recognition demand that the US should pay reparations to Cuba for its 50-year embargo, that too is logical. Reparations would be a sound basis for renewed relations between the two estranged countries. The embargo -- still in effect -- has been an illegal act of war by the US against the Cuban people from the beginning, and by some estimates has cost the island as much as $1 trillion in lost development and economic growth over that time. Perhaps expecting the US to repay $1 trillion is too much to hope for, but an acknowledgement of the abusiveness of the embargo, and some kind of no-strings financial aid as recompense for that abuse, would be appropriate. While it's at it, the US should also pay Cuba reparations for the illegal "Bay of Pigs" invasion it sponsored in 1960.
In any case, unless it wants to drop its claim to be reporting the news differently and more fully than the corporate media, NPR should at least be giving its listeners the whole story about Guantanamo and about America's history of bulling and war-mongering against the people and government of Cuba.
DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LORI SPENCER, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on January 30, 2015 at 14:23)
(Article changed on January 30, 2015 at 19:53)
(Article changed on January 30, 2015 at 19:55)
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