Take a Good Look: This is the face that was supposed to bring Castro to his knees. A pretty face is the preferred currency of those who seek to exploit it for political reasons. Coincidence?

Elian Gonzalez: Selected for the purpose of crippling Castro through psychological warfare.

May 2000

By BOB WHITE and CYNDI SMITH
nsnews staff

There is no question about the fact that Elian Gonzalez was the hand-picked, child victim of Castro's Cuba. The evidence really speaks for itself. First and foremost, one can make the case that every single man, woman and child in Cuba is a victim of Fidel Castro. What makes Elian stand apart? The answer to that is very simple. The only thing that made Elian stand apart is that he was the "chosen one."

Did God choose Elian Gonzalez? That's what we are supposed to believe. But in the context of the war against Castro, God is merely a tool who is used for the sake of manipulating public opinion. When push comes to shove, the image of God is evoked for the sake of uniting and mobilizing public opinion. But all the pushing and shoving is Bay of Pigs-era politics and since the image of God was selectively evoked for the sake of marketing anti-Castro propaganda, the manipulative, stage-managed campaign to mobilize public opinion was widely rejected.

Who chose Elian Gonzalez? The obvious answer is a group of disaffected ex-Cubans who practice Watergate-burglar style politics. The most rabid amongst them are politically motivated assassins who have spent 40 years planning and executing bizarre plots in effort to kill Fidel Castro. In conjunction with the CIA, they brought us the Bay of Pigs, and now, after 40 years of watching, studying and hating Fidel Castro, they think that they can beat Castro at his own game -hense the efort to 'out-propagandize' Fidel Castro.

If we are denied the opportunity to debate the prudence of all the bizarre, secret wars against Fidel Castro, it is because Bay of Pigs veterans like Jose Basulto have decided that it is their right and their duty to take the law into their own hands. In 1959, Jose Batulto and his friend Felix Rodriguez signed up with CIA-backed Brigade 2506. They were infiltrated into Cuba before the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and they escaped back to Miami after the invasion failed. On Aug. 24, 1962, the 22-year-old Basulto manned a 22mm cannon aboard a boat off the coast of Miramar, west of Havana and opened fire that shattered windows but failed to kill Castro. "On March 20, 1963, Basulto and 50 other Bay of Pigs veterans enlisted in the U.S. Army with commissions as second lieutenants. Basulto received psychological warfare training at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Fort Benning, Ga. After leaving the Army, he returned to the shadowy world of anti-Castro politics in Miami." [Consortium News, March 30, 2000] In the 1980's, the demand for cloak-and-dagger operatives like Basulto and Rodriguez re-emerged, and they exported their brand of terrorism to countries like Argentina. According to former FBI agent William Turner, Basulto served as an adviser to Argentine intelligence officers who were training the contras in methods of torture. The incomprehensible brutality of the Argentine military clearly demonstrates, in terms that are absolutely certain, that the human imagination is the only scope and the only limit of the brutality that terrorists engage. In particular: "During the Argentine dirty war, when the military’s secret police captured a pregnant female deemed subversive, they would subject the woman to a Caesarean section or induce labor. They then would give the baby to a military family and murder the new mother, usually by shackling her naked to other captives and then dumping her from a plane into the ocean to drown. Sometimes, the infants were literally raised by their mothers’ killers." [Consortium News, March 30, 2000] That is what the mentality, the scope and the work of a terrorist is all about, and that is why we must seriously contemplate the possibility that the very same, undetermined terrorists who did not allow Elian Gonzalez to perish at sea, did not share the very same compassion for his poor mother.