Cuban President Raul Castro: US Must Lift Embargo And Give Back Guantanamo To Normalize Relations

[Judi Lynn]

55. You seem to have forgotten US-supported monster Fulgencio Batista took the Cuban Treasury

contents before bailing out of Cuba to avoid trial. How could you forget that so easily?

First you rave on about Cuba "stealing" US corporate "property" after everyone knows it offered compensation, after all the many other owners ACCEPTED compensation, then you crab that the US owners didn't get things in the form they desired, all the time knowing that US-supported dictator Batista pilfered the entire Cuban Treasury before heading for the hills.

Nice work if you can get it.

Here's a small entry from Wikipedia on the subject:

In a manner that antagonized the Cuban people, the U.S. government used its influence to advance the interests of and increase the profits of the private American companies, which "dominated the island's economy."[36] As a symbol of this relationship, ITT Corporation, an American-owned multinational telephone company, presented Batista with a Golden Telephone, as an "expression of gratitude" for the "excessive telephone rate increase" that Batista granted at the urging of the U.S. government.[36]

Earl T. Smith, former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, testified to the U.S. Senate in 1960 that, "Until Castro, the U.S. was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that the American ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president."[47] In addition, nearly "all aid" from the U.S. to Batista's government was in the "form of weapons assistance," which "merely strengthened the Batista dictatorship" and "completely failed to advance the economic welfare of the Cuban people."[36] Such actions later "enabled Castro and the Communists to encourage the growing belief that America was indifferent to Cuban aspirations for a decent life."[36]

According to historian and author James S. Olson, the U.S. government essentially became a "co-conspirator" in the arrangement because of Batista's strong opposition to communism, which, in the rhetoric of the Cold War, seemed to maintain business stability and a pro-U.S. posture on the island.[5] Thus, in the view of Olson, "The U.S. government had no difficulty in dealing with him, even if he was a hopeless despot."[5] On October 6, 1960 Senator John F. Kennedy, in the midst of his campaign for the U.S. Presidency, described Batista's relationship with the U.S. government and criticized the Eisenhower administration for supporting him:

"Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years ... and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state—destroying every individual liberty. Yet our aid to his regime, and the ineptness of our policies, enabled Batista to invoke the name of the United States in support of his reign of terror. Administration spokesmen publicly praised Batista—hailed him as a staunch ally and a good friend—at a time when Batista was murdering thousands, destroying the last vestiges of freedom, and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people, and we failed to press for free elections."[36]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

Interesting snippet from the same source, something many of us, me included, never knew:

The United States supplied Batista with planes, ships, tanks, and the latest technology, such as napalm, which he used against the insurgency. However, in March 1958, the U.S. announced it would stop selling arms to the Cuban government.[63] Soon after, the U.S. imposed an arms embargo, further weakening the government's position,[64] although land owners and others who benefited from the government continued to support Batista.[25]

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
That was only the SECOND time Batista swiped the Cuban Treasury. He had already done it once before before bailing in 1959:

Batista lost the 1944 presidential election to Grau San Martin's Autentico Party and with the millions stolen from the Cuban treasury retreated to his Florida Estate in 1950. Presidential elections in Cuba were scheduled for June 1952. The favorite candidate to win was Roberto Agramonte, Professor of Sociology in the University of Havana. Agramonte belonged to the Ortodox Party (Partido del Pueblo Ortodoxo). The Ortodoxos wanted a return to the original principles of the Autentico Party whose leaders were Presidents Grau San Martin (1944-1948) and Carlos Prio Socarras (1948-1952). (Fidel Castro was an active member of the Ortodoxo Party, whose leader Eduardo Chibas, in despair over the failure of the reform program and the corruption of Cuban institutions--in the midst of a radio program -- committed suicide, August 1951(

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/dolgoff/cubanrevolution/chapter6.html