Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL) spoke on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to evaluate the recently concluded “Summit of the Americas”. He described the Summit as “an embarrassment for this hemisphere.”

Below please find Congressman Diaz-Balart’s remarks of April 21, 2009 on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:

“The Summit of the Americas,” held last weekend in Trinidad and Tobago, constituted an embarrassment for this hemisphere.

Fidel Castro in Cuba is a psychopath and a serial killer, but he has long had a plan. His long-term goal has been to have the United States apologize to him, and for the US to bankroll his repressive totalitarian apparatus, before he dies. He wants the U.S. to apologize for having kept the US market and its millions of tourists and its billions of dollars in financing from him, and for having denied him full diplomatic recognition for decades.

In order to achieve his goal, Fidel Castro has been recruiting advocates for years.

The ideological and psychological fascination and dependency that Hugo Chavez has on Fidel Castro has allowed Castro to utilize Chavez’s billions of petro-dollars to purchase many important advocates. It is part of the public record that a suitcase of Chavez-cash heading to Mrs. Kirchner in Argentina was accidently intercepted by authorities before reaching its intended destination.

Castro has purchased advocates through the years via the always present threat of blackmail after trips to totalitarian Cuba where the regime tapes visitors in “compromising” situations, as confirmed by Interior Ministry defector Roberto Hernandez del Llano and Cuban Counter-Intelligence defector Major Roberto Ortega. Castro also serves as a “banker” for illicit money possessed by those who seek to avoid detection by the anti-laundering mechanisms set up by the international community; it matters not if the money’s source is political corruption or narco-trafficking.

Hugo Chavez’s absolute dependency on Fidel Castro for every major decision, even for his phrases and gestures in international forums, is unprecedented. While the Soviet Union used to send Castro economic aid and also orders and instructions, Chavez sends Castro billions of dollars and receives orders from him.

What the world witnessed at last weekend’s “Summit of the Americas” was a culmination of years of preparation in the purchase and cultivation of advocates by Fidel Castro.

The goal for the advocates: Mass American tourism with its billions of dollars a year and US trade financing, so that the US taxpayer ultimately bails out and bankrolls Fidel Castro. Castro’s advocates know very well that Article III of the Charter of the Organization of American States requires the existence of representative democracy in all the countries of our hemisphere, and that the Inter-American Democratic Charter of 2001 even spells out the collective steps to be taken when an American republic’s democracy is usurped.

They know that Cuba under Castro is the only country in our hemisphere where free elections have not been held in over 50 years and where dungeons are full of non-violent political prisoners. They know that under Castro, Cuba is a personal island-estate, a ranch, a personal land holding or homestead, a totalitarian fiefdom, owned by one man, with a brother who enjoys the title of head of state and carefully carries out his brother’s orders.

Any goods the people on the island purchase must be purchased in the island-fiefdom’s “company stores” and with worthless “vouchers,” called “convertible pesos” sold by the regime. Castro takes 30 per cent of all hard currency “off the top” at the time island residents purchase the “vouchers,” and all hard currency must be spent with purchased “vouchers” in his “company stores.”

The inducement for child prostitution on the island-fiefdom is unparalleled in the world, because, no matter how hard island residents work, only foreign “hard” currency allows them to purchase the “vouchers,” the “convertible pesos,” for use in the stores that sell everything, from food, to clothes, to soap to toothpaste. Equally, only foreign “hard” currency allows residents to purchase medicines. The shelves in the old stores and pharmacies where residents used to be able to purchase Soviet-bloc supplies with their ration cards, are absolutely empty since there is no money to be made there by the dictator.

The Castro-advocates at the weekend “Summit” knew all this, like when Mrs. Kirchner called for the US to make amends with “our sister republic, Cuba.” Or when Mr. Ortega condemned the US for organizing the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Somehow, they knew that President Obama would refer to Castro’s totalitarian fiefdom as “Cuba.” Somehow they knew that President Obama would not respond to Mr. Ortega that at the Bay of Pigs Cubans bravely fought to spare their country half a century of totalitarian oppression (President Obama said, “I’m grateful President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”).

Somehow they knew President Obama would not make clear that, as per US law, the US embargo will go away when all of Castro’s political prisoners are freed and when there is freedom of expression and multi-party elections are scheduled in Cuba.

Of course they knew; President Obama had just unilaterally granted the fiefdom’s owner hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in exchange for nothing.

Labels: Cuba, United States