Agustin Blazquez with the collaboration of Jaums Sutton
Saturday, May 18, 2002

The late actress Jayne Mansfield once said, "A rock garden is better than no rock garden." And former President Jimmy Carter went to Cuba ...

Apparently I was smarter than many of my fellow Americans, who overwhelmingly elected little-man Jimmy as the president of this great country. I decided to go to work dressed in black mourning clothes for three days after his election, for what I thought was a terrible mistake.

But perhaps many Americans realized the same thing in their collective guts when Jimmy talked to the nation wearing a cardigan and seated by a fireplace. Facing that spectacle of a diminishing America, some may have even said to themselves, "Oh my God, what have we gotten into!"

To Jimmy – among many other blunders – we owe the rise to power of the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And the spread of communist revolutions and instability throughout Central America and the resulting influx of millions of illegal immigrants coming to the U.S. to escape the havoc caused by guerrillas aided by Castro. Central America still has not fully recuperated from the devastation of Hurricane Jimmy.

Blundering on, there was the infamous Mariel boatlift of 1980, in which 125,000 Cuban refugees arrived in South Florida. And to add insult to the injury of Jimmy's failure to control the situation, Castro inserted into the onslaught thousands of hard-core criminals and mentally and terminally ill hospital patients, to create problems in the U.S.

Then Jimmy gave away the Panama Canal and now that vital water passage is controlled by a "company" owned and operated by communist China. That didn't work out too well, either.

Jimmy pressured the Shah of Iran – a longtime friend of the U.S. – to leave his country and then denied him asylum and medical treatment for his illness. Which fanned the flames of fanatic anti-American Islamic fundamentalists in Iran that dreadfully worsened the geopolitical situation of that region.

And who can forget the taking of the U.S. Embassy and the American hostage situation, and the dismal failure of the operation to rescue the hostages. The U.S. loss of prestige in the international arena cannot be calculated as we still reel from it.

The world has not been the same since the ayatollahs spread their terror and hatred for America. Gee, thank you, Jimmy.

With hindsight, after suffering Jimmy's presidency for four long years while the U.S. economy collapsed under record unemployment, slipped into double-digit inflation, suffered embarrassing international defeats and loss of prestige galore, I think I did the right thing by dressing in black.

Fortunately for America and the rest of the world, the American people resoundingly voted him out of office. What a relief! After he left the White House (thank GOD!) I said, "He was an incompetent president and he is now an incompetent citizen."

But like the smell of fish that never left the kitchen, Jimmy keeps meddling in foreign affairs, trying to act "presidential" and even giving advice! He is clueless. So forgive him, he just doesn't know.

My humble advice to Jimmy is to stick to what I assume he knows best: building houses for Habitat for Humanity. Hammering and cutting wood is good, Jimmy. And raising them peanuts.

The latest installment of Jimmy's follies is his trip to Castroland, where the clever tyrant can dance a million circles around his gullibility. How can Jimmy and his entourage wine and dine, laugh, tell jokes, play baseball, etc., with a man who has caused the deaths of 105,000 citizens (including 30 U.S. citizens)?

And that's just in Cuba. There is no count yet of how many people have been killed by his guerrillas and army all over Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and other places where Castro's henchmen have intervened.

How can Jimmy flash his trademark smile on the man who has been sending drugs as an instrument of his war against his hated U.S.? What about all the young Americans dead and lives ruined as the result of his covert war?

How can Jimmy publicly say that the U.S. government is lying about Cuba's production of biological agents with terrorist purposes? Just because he was given a controlled tour of a lab and Fidel says so?

What credibility does Castro have? He said many times in the Sierra Maestra mountains and in his 1959 trip to the U.S. that he was "not a communist," while he was laying the foundations for a totalitarian Stalinist regime in Cuba.

Somehow the tune "What kind of fool am I?" comes to mind.

And talking about foolishness, Jimmy praised the health care and education system of Castroland. Obviously, he is a privileged foreigner, not an ordinary second-class Cuban citizen suffering apartheid in all fields.

Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. Castro must be laughing at you with a "hee-hee-hee."

Cubans living under Castro's boot say, "It's not easy." They are right. Nothing is ever easy in Castroland and things are not as they appear.

So apparently, in that land of make-believe, under the overzealous totalitarian control of the "Maximun Leader," not all Cubans were able to hear the "Mr. Carter went to Havana University" speech.

The U.S. media – which do not and cannot have reporters all over the island – admiringly remarked that it was broadcast "live and uncensored" to all Cuban people. They should verify that.

I have already read two reports about massive electricity blackouts throughout the island of Cuba at the time of Jimmy's token subversive speech about freedom on Tuesday, May 14 – one of them throughout much of the city of Havana (except in the neighborhoods where foreigners and government elite live) and another one in the city of Camagüey.

And the newspaper Granma – Castro's mouthpiece – did not mention Jimmy's references to freedom and human rights, but published his criticisms of the U.S. embargo and the other bad things he said about America.

Castro is well aware that "the truth will set you free." Therefore, from day one he started to control the media until by 1960 freedom of the press was eliminated and all media were under the clutch of his regime. So, in 2002, what isn't easy for the populace is very easy for a government controlled by one person.

Little by little, however, these facts will transpire through the independent journalists on the island who are Cuban natives and live as ordinary citizens. Because we cannot expect real news of Cuba from CNN (known to Cubans for years as the "Castro News Network" and lately exposed as collaborators with Castro's propaganda by a publicized report from the Media Research Center), the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, Reuters and others.

These foreign "news" agencies are there just to keep their offices in Havana, because if they report the real facts, they get expelled immediately. So they willingly cooperate with Castro's regime. So what's the point? Who are they kidding?

Sorry to be so blunt, Jimmy, but you have to understand someday that with your disastrous failures as the president of this great country, you did more harm than good. And that letting yourself be used by a criminal tyrant like Castro is not what I call helping the Cuban people. It is helping Castro and his goals more than anything else.

If Castro used and danced around the pope and so many other international figures, you haven't got a chance. Being a back-slapping pal while getting in a few digs amongst your anti-U.S. policy statements will have no effect on any of this snake's 75-year-old spots.

So, your meddling in Cuban affairs at this point in time and making those public statements Castro was expecting from you is not welcomed by anyone but Castro himself.

Please, stop these foolish follies and don't visit my lost country anymore until Cuba is free from tyranny and becomes a constitutional republic with inalienable rights and freedoms for all. Then you can come help build some houses.

© 2002 ABIP

Agustin Blazquez is producer/director of the documentaries "Covering Cuba," Covering Cuba 2: The New Generation," and the upcoming "Covering Cuba 3: Elian," and author with Carlos Wotzkow of the book "Covering and Discovering."

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Castro/Cuba
Media Bias

A product that might interest you:
Find out the truth about Castro and his secrets