‘I fleeced the Americans’
By Jean-Guy Allard
“Fleecing the Americans” is nothing new for the managers of the anti-Castro industry in Miami and the “dissidents” of all kinds who were turned against Cuba from Washington in five decades.
This was confirmed by a recently declassified memorandum, rescued by Puerto Rican researchers, that recounts a strategy meeting between José Miro Cardona, chief of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (C.R.C.) and Arthur M. Schlessinger Jr., President Kennedy’s special assistant, Oct. 22, 1961, at the White House.
Participating in the top-level gathering were Richard Bissell and his assistant, Tracy Barnes, both in charge of covert operations for the C.I.A., Col. J. C. King, chief of the State Department’s Western Hemisphere Division, and Jacob “Jake” Esterline, the C.I.A. official who directed the project that ended in the failed invasion at Bay of Pigs.
At the start of the meeting, Schlessinger expressed his concern over information that the Cuban “wanted more money to broaden the base of his organization” and was thinking of leaving the C.R.C.’s directorship.
During a tense moment, Tracy Barnes spoke up to stress the C.I.A.’s “extreme displeasure” over the way Miro Cardona used “the monthly budget of 90,000 dollars” he received from the U.S. government.
The official pointed out that “50 percent goes for salaries to people whose role in the program is very questionable.”
He suggested that measures be taken to obtain better results with “this investment.” (sic)
Miro Cardona’s C.R.C. proposed a program that matched its appetite for greenbacks. It prioritized the flow of foreign capital into a “liberated” Cuba, as well as the restitution of the properties confiscated by the revolutionary government to their former owners.
The willingness of the annexationist power to fabricate an internal opposition in Cuba, as a mechanism to destroy the Revolution, remains intact until today, at a very high cost to the American taxpayer.
From Eisenhower and his Cuban Action Program, which aimed “to create dissidence inside Cuba” by dint of millions of dollars, to the anti-Cuban USAID budgets under Obama, hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared with the passage of time into the pockets of a mafia that will never renounce its desire to guarantee its own prosperity.
Jean-Guy Allard is a Canadian journalist who writes for Granma. From 1971 to 2000, he was an editor and reporter for Le Journal de Montreal and Le Journal de Québec.
