THE CHARMER AND THE TORTURER

By Michelle Malkin

January 25, 2002

A gaggle of gullible women from Seattle flew to Havana last week to meet with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. They found him "charming" and "eloquent." They were especially flattered that Castro -- the head of one of the world's most repressive regimes, listed by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism -- took time out of his busy schedule to lavish personal attention on them. "He obviously had read the biographies and knew who each person was," gushed Susan Jeffords, dean of social sciences at the University of Washington. "Charming," she said. Golly gee, Ms. Jeffords, is that because Castro's just such a people person? Or is it because he has had decades of practice memorizing the dossiers of countless political prisoners? Castro also reportedly spent two hours with Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and even chaperoned her to the airport in his Mercedes-Benz. You just can't beat communist hospitality.

Connie Niva, another member of the Washington state delegation, sounded like a teen-age groupie who had just returned from a Backstreet Boys concert. "It was an amazing trip," she bubbled to the Everett (Wash.) Herald this week. "You don't have any sense that this is a police state." Well, gosh, Ms. Niva, you wouldn't get that sense from dining on seafood, yukking it up with Castro for five hours, and hopping around Havana all week with government-approved chaperones, would you? Reciting straight from the dictator's propaganda primer, Niva told the Herald that Cubans "are in poverty, but they are very happy people."

These women should have stayed right here in the United States and talked to some of the "happy people" who escaped Castro's regime. They should have lunched with Eugenio de Sosa Chabau, who fled Cuba after two decades as a political prisoner. He could have told them about his 52-page complaint against Castro for crimes against humanity, which he filed with a group of nine Cuban exiles last fall under a Belgian war crimes law. He could have told them about his torture at the hands of Castro's Cuban Security Services in a Havana psychiatric hospital. He could have told them how he was hooked up to wet electrical prods and "treated" with 14 sessions of shock therapy delivered to his temples and testicles.

But he can't tell them now. The 85-year-old de Sosa Chabau, whose torture was documented in a ground-breaking book about Cuba's psychiatric abuse of political dissidents, died earlier this month as the Washington women were giddily packing their Eddie Bauer bags for Castro's dog-and-pony show.

Before his death, de Sosa Chabau had been preparing to testify as a key witness in a federal trial against his torturer - Castro henchman Eriberto Mederos, known by Cuban exiles as the sadistic "El Enfermero" or "the nurse." In 1991, de Sosa Chabau spotted Mederos working at a nursing home facility where one of his relatives resided. Despite detailed media reports of Mederos' abuse, vocal protest from Florida's Cuban-American community, and dogged whistleblowing by former State Department official Richard Krieger, our immigration authorities rewarded Mederos with U.S. citizenship in the spring of 1993.

Krieger, who runs a watchdog humanitarian group called International Education Missions in Florida, spearheaded the drive to denaturalize Mederos. In September 2001, Mederos was arrested for illegally obtaining citizenship and will face trial in July 2002. Although de Sosa Chabau was the key witness against Mederos, more than a dozen other surviving victims have agreed to provide depositions and testimony. In the meantime, Mederos is out on $500,000 bail in Miami - and Castro has condemned the trial against Mederos as a trick by his enemies to discredit his "revolution."

The subject didn't come up when the Seattle women lunched with Castro earlier this month. Instead, Connie Niva praised the "good quality health care" Cubans receive and learned that Castro is more of a "merlot guy" than a champagne guy. "Terribly charming," Ms. Niva said of her host. No. Just terrible.

END

Michelle Malkin

Creators Syndicate, Inc.
townhall.com

Northwest Veterans Newsletter Comment:

For more on Castro and American POWs from the Vietnam war please see former POW Mike Benge's U.S. House testimony at:

http://members.aol.com/lilsispam/benge.htm

For the complete story on Sen. Cantwell and our King County Council's courting of Cuba during our war on terrorism, please see:

http://members.aol.com/bear317e/war.htm

As an interesting sidebar, when Vietnam Veterans of America [VVA] decided to work directly with our former enemies in Vietnam to search for the remains for fellow American soldiers that never made it home, VVA had several initial meetings with Vietnamese authorities. According to one who were present at those initial meetings, the Vietnamese had done their homework very well and know the backgrounds on all the U.S. members who attended. However, the Americans at the time DID NOT HAVE A CLUE as to who they were meeting with!

One of those Vietnamese present was later learned to have been a doctor in a POW camp where several American POWs where held that never came home. Nor has there been any explanation forthcoming from the Vietnamese as to how or why these Americans perished. This, was perhaps a golden opportunity missed no matter how well meaning VVA's vet initiative is.

I fear once again that Sen. Cantwell and others -- working for what they feel is a noble cause -- are being used by the communists as VVA was in the early going. It pays to do your homework before rubbing elbows with the communist elite.

I thank Lois Gustafson for sending me Michelle Malkin well-written article. Hopefully others in our area will write Sen. Cantwell and the KCC. Additional articles, letters and hyperlinks are provided on our "America at War" page.

Regards,

Roger Young
The Northwest Veterans Newsletter
http://members.aol.com/bear317/nwvets.htm

http://members.aol.com/bear317e/war.htm

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