Fifty years ago this month, the United States began the embargo on Cuba which continues to this day. But the country against which it was aimed is rapidly becoming a very different one to the alleged communist menace just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Under Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul, it is in the throes of a second Cuban revolution.
For a sign of the change which is turning life on their island on its head, the people of Havana have only to peer into the night at the northern horizon. This month, Repsol, the Spanish energy company started drilling the first oil well from a massive and brightly lit rig, the lumbering Scarabeo 9, built in China for ENI of Italy. This morning it will still be grinding away seeking the billions of barrels of oil and the trillions of cubic feet of gas that the US government, among others, says lie under Cuba’s offshore waters.
The Spanish oilmen working on the structure, which has been towed halfway around the world amid US efforts to delay its progress, will be followed aboard by a succession of Norwegians, Russians, Indians and Malaysians.
Optimistic geologists reckon that within a few years the island ”“ long cursed by a lack of oil supplies, half of which it has had to import ”“ will actually be exporting the stuff. And it will be able to do so without the aid of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela who has kept the island’s motors, power and air-conditioning going with his subsidised crude.
Also, at the fine harbour in Mariel, a few miles to the west of the Cuban capital, is another pointer to the future, the big island-changing harbour that Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant, is building with a large wodge of money provided by the booming South American nation.
The end of the first national conference of the Cuban Communist Party set the seal last month on changes that President Raul Castro had been building up to. Since he took over from his ailing elder brother, Fidel, in 2006, the new president, himself an octogenarian, has pushed ahead with measures which are turning the traditional Cuban lifestyle upside down by decreeing that the party will henceforward cease micro-managing daily life and confine itself to strategic matters.
Landscapers are working hard on matters of equally urgent national strategy. Fifteen more golf courses and new marinas are being laid out in Cuba and they can’t be finished quickly enough: golfers from abroad will even be able to lease chalets and timeshares. The island’s hotels are packed. European visitors are pouring in. After decades of US-imposed isolation from high-speed internet, Cubans and their visitors are finally beginning to receive it via a new cable laid from Venezuela.
Yet Raul’s strategies are not confined to big infrastructure projects; they reach down deeper into an effort to keep Cuban society together. Senior Cuban figures make no secret of the fact that even more important work has to be done to improve Cubans’ ideological outlook and the economic conditions.
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The United States would have taken that oil and the Cuban people would have seen not one penny from it had Batista not been overthrown by Castro. It is why the U.S. tried to overthrow Castro over and over again. Prior to Castro a number of U.S. investors, some of them happen to be U.S. Army officers had investments in Cuba’s oil development. The security for JFK’s visit for Dallas was handled by one such military investor. Oh, you didn’t know that higher ups in the U.S. military can have large investments in oil development? Americans are so Naive about how the world works. No, no, it’s about Communism? R i g h t !
It’s about the oil that they’re drilling for in 5600 feet of water that they couldn’t even detect 50 years ago? That oil? I want some of that crystal ball.
“In combat one should be very suspicious of painless moral choices. When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.” ~ Karl Marlantes
Owned by Americans, founded by, wait for it, Willian F Buckley Sr. but included investors Colonel Jack Crichton special agent of the OSS and Everette DeGolyer rich Texas oilman who later founded Texas Instruments They were drilling in 1955 in Cuba under contract with Standard Oil of Indiana. It was Jack Crichton who had the close relationship with Bush Sr who was at the time running an oil company too and in 1959 Bush and Crichton raised funds to support operation 40 an organized campaign of Sabotage against Castro. These are private business men with oil interest in Cuba working with the CIA. Later, Crichton, a private business man founded the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment, formed mostly from Dallas policemen. In 1960, Crichton was appointed head of the intelligence component of Dallas Civil Defense. By 1962, Crichton had turned the basement of the Dallas library into a “secret” civil defense command post. It was Crichton’s unit that arranged security for JFK’s Dallas visit. The guy riding the motorcycle that paused the entire motorcade for several minutes for unknown reasons in front of the Book Repository was one of Crichton’s men. Cichton’s personal papers can be found in the Bush Sr. Library.
I am really disturbed though that the amount of information on the subject of Cuban pre-revolutionary oil development on the Internet is much less than a year ago including articles in Wikipedia. There used to be information about U.S. oil companies collaborating with Bautista that I can no longer find. Last year, on January 2nd I wrote this article. It tells a very disturbing story that I was easily able to put together from references online. Many of those references do not exist anymore, WTF! Also a large number of articles on the history of U.S. oil companies in Venezuela are gone! History is rewritten in front of our eyes, hello 1984.
The web is getting more and more ”revisions”. Guess that someone or something is proving false the assumption that nothing is ever erased from it.
One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of information about Ronald Reagan’s early career, before and during his stint as President of the Screen Actor’s Guild, has gone missing including some letters written by his movie star friends. I can understand it, it would be hard to make Ronald Reagan into a George Washington like character when there is this annoying information about him being a Socialist who was turned into an FBI Informant, etc. The people who knew him at that time are mostly gone now, my Mom is one of the remaining few and so history is forgotten and rewritten.
One of Ronald Reagan main supporters was Jack Crichton and you will remember who was Vice President.
AP foreign, Sunday February 12 2012
DESMOND BUTLER
Associated Press= WASHINGTON (AP) — Piece by piece, in backpacks and carry-on bags, American aid contractor Alan Gross made sure laptops, smartphones, hard drives and networking equipment were secreted into Cuba. The most sensitive item, according to official trip reports, was the last one: a specialized mobile phone chip that experts say is often used by the Pentagon and the CIA to make satellite signals virtually impossible to track.
The purpose, according to an Associated Press review of Gross’ reports, was to set up uncensored satellite Internet service for Cuba’s small Jewish community.
The operation was funded as democracy promotion for the U.S. Agency for International Development, established in 1961 to provide economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of U.S. foreign policy goals. Gross, however, identified himself as a member of a Jewish humanitarian group, not a representative of the U.S. government.
Cuban President Raul Castro called him a spy, and Gross was sentenced last March to 15 years in prison for seeking to “undermine the integrity and independence” of Cuba. U.S. officials say he did nothing wrong and was just carrying out the normal mission of USAID.
Gross said at his trial in Cuba that he was a “trusting fool” who was duped. But his trip reports indicate that he knew his activities were illegal in Cuba and that he worried about the danger, including possible expulsion.
One report says a community leader “made it abundantly clear that we are all ‘playing with fire.’”
Another time Gross said: “This is very risky business in no uncertain terms.”
And finally: “Detection of satellite signals will be catastrophic.”
The case has heightened frictions in the decades-long political struggle between the United States and its communist neighbor to the south, and raises questions about how far democracy-building programs have gone — and whether cloak-and-dagger work is better left to intelligence operatives.
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better yet we should mind our own business and why does everything involve Jewish rights?
Radio Cadena
Thursday, 16 February 2012 10:36
Havana, Cuba, Feb 16.- The Political Council of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas-Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) declared itself to be in favor of Cuba’s presence in the 6th Summit of the Americas scheduled for April.
The islands full participation in the Colombian forum, condemnation to Washington’s economic, commercial and financial blockade of Cuba, and the obtaining of regional support against the latter, appear on the Special Declaration of the 8th (Extraordinary) Meeting of the Council, made up by the foreign ministers of member nations, held at the capital’s Occidental Miramar Hotel on Wednesday.
Categorical was the support in Havana of the document issued by the foreign ministers of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro; Bolivia, David Choquehuanca; Ecuador, Ricardo Patiño; Saint VBincent and the Grenadines, Douglas Slater, and Cuba, Bruno Rodriguez, and of Nicaragua’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Valdrack Joentschke.
They rejected the recent declarations of US government officials who reiterated the refusal of that administration to Cuba’s participation in the Summit of the Americas, to take place in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.
Each head of delegation agreed that there’s no reason for the island to be prevented from attending any meeting for which nations in the region are convened, so they asked authorities in Bogotá, in their condition as hosts, to carry out consultations on this matter with each of the countries invited to the Summit.
The Cuban Foreign Minister passed on the gratitude and greetings of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro and Cuban President Rau Castro, who, according to the speaker, kept abreast of the development of the meeting. (ACN).
Oil Drilling Opens Up New Possibilities
By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Feb 16, 2012 (IPS) – The search for oil in Cuba’s Gulf of Mexico waters, launched by the Spanish firm Repsol, has triggered speculation about future prospects for Cuba and the possibility of this country one day making the transition from importer to exporter of crude.
Moreover, given its strategic importance for both the United States and Cuba, some analysts believe that energy offers a potential area for cooperation that could eventually help pave the way to the normalisation of relations between the two countries.
For the moment, the Cuban authorities and oil industry personnel are remaining discreetly silent on the subject. CUPET, the state-owned oil company, has limited itself to officially confirming the arrival in the country on Jan. 19 of the Scarabeo 9 oil rig for “the resumption in the coming days of deepwater drilling for oil exploration.”
Drilling operations presumably began in late January. According to CUPET, the goal is to continue testing to determine the potential for oil and gas production in Cuba’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the Gulf of Mexico. The results of the drilling will contribute to defining that potential.
After opening up its economy to foreign investment in 1991, Cuba divided the EEZ, which covers an area of 112,000 sq km, into 59 oil and gas exploration blocks. On Jan. 18, Rafael Tenreiro, director of exploration and production at CUPET, reiterated a previous estimate of a potential 20,000 million barrels in the area.
At the launching of the book “Perforación de pozos petroleros marinos” (“Offshore Oil Well Drilling”) by Rolando Fernández, supervisor of the Gulf of Mexico operations group, Tenreiro stated that it was “possible” that Cuba could become an oil exporter.
“We have to prepare the country for this good news,” he added, stressing the need for the production of technology and participation in the entire process.
In 2011, more than 20 offshore exploration blocks had already been leased to large foreign energy companies, including, in addition to Repsol, StatoilHydro of Norway, ONGC Videsh of India, PETRONAS of Malaysia, PetroVietnam, Gazprom of Russia, Sonangol of Angola the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA.
Reflecting on the potential ramifications should Repsol’s exploratory drilling prove successful, university professor Fernando Martirena told IPS that large-scale development of the Cuban oil industry would obviously provide a boost to the government programmes currently underway, since it would represent “a needed injection of fresh foreign currency into a tense national economy.”
This scenario, “combined with the package of measures being implemented as a result of the ‘updating’ of the Cuban economic model, will heat up the issue of the blockade,” said Martirena. Under the U.S. economic embargo against this Caribbean island nation, in place for 50 years this month, U.S. companies are shut out from profiting from a potential oil boom in Cuba.
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