Wes Vernon
Monday, May. 03, 2004

Last month, NewsMax's special series, "Latin America in Crisis", reported that Castro and his allies now control the destiny of more than 223 million Latinos.

“This is an ominous and dangerous development,” Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said of Castro's re-emergence as a regional influence after reading NewsMax's series.

In an interview with NewsMax, the lawmaker agreed that a Cuba-led coalition in Latin America is collaborating with rogue states and terrorist organizations throughout the world.

He warns this means that Fidel Castro, at the end of his life, sees an opportunity to achieve “much of what he sought to do in the 1960’s and failed.”

“They want to destroy the United States,” he said.

Diaz-Balart is not alone is his fears about Castro.

The State Department's John Bolton has testified in Congress that U.S. intelligence believes Castro has developed a sophistciated bio-weapons programs, and that he is working with rogue states.

'Death to America'

In May of 2002, Castro spoke to students at Tehran University as they chanted "death to America."

At the White House, Otto Reich, the President's Special Envoy for Western Hemisphere Initiatives, e-mailed NewsMax of his concern that Castro's position has strengthened as more than $800 million dollars in oil from Castro ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, has flowed to the island nation.

Reich noted the oil shipments have been sent “without any sign of cash payment by Cuba.”

Diaz-Balart says this action, driven largely by Chavez’s devotion to Castro, shows Venezuela is “Cuba’s colony.”

Strange as it may seem that a large oil-rich country like Venezuela would be the colony of “a bankrupt dictatorship in the Caribbean [Cuba],” what else can one say when the 50,000 barrels of oil are sent to Castro each day?

“That’s hundreds of millions of dollars taken from his own people,” the congressmen said.

Chavez has made his intentions clear: Recently he threatened to stop selling oil to the United States if Washington “doesn’t stop intervening in Venezuela’s domestic affairs.”

The U.S. denies that charge. But Chavez may use the allegation as an excuse to try to influence this year’s U.S. election by taking an action that would spike already sky-high gasoline prices here in this country.

Moreover, Venezuela has provided refuge for terrorists seeking to overthrow the government of Colombia.

In addition to Cuba and Venezuela, Dr. Constantine Menges, a former national security advisor to President reagan, cited Brazil’s President Lula de Silva, who has chaired the Forum of Sao Paulo, the formal name of the coalition formed in 1990 by Castro’s Cuba just at the time the Soviet Union was crumbling.

This group has openly boasted that “our losses in Eastern Europe [i.e. the Soviets and their satellites] will be offset by our victories in America.”

Communist countries from nearly every state in Latin America have attended meetings of the Sao Paul coalition.

When Lula was running for Brazil’s highest office in 2002, NewsMax ran a series of articles warning that failure of the U.S. to direct Voice of America broadcasts to that huge nation could result in the electoral success of the nominal head of a group that threatens America.

Both Lula and Chavez were originally democratically elected -- something that does not impress Diaz-Balart or his younger brother, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R -- also Fla., both of whom have strong ties to the Cuban American community.

Time and again, they noted to NewsMax, dangerous power-mad enemies of freedom have been elected.

Adolph Hitler is a prime example.

Frustration

In separate NewsMax interviews, the Diaz-Balart brothers, whose aunt was the former wife of Castro and the mother of the dictator’s only recognized child, expressed frustration at other lawmakers such as Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who say once a leader is elected, his post-election behavior in moving to end freedom and to kill innocent opposition is irrelevant.

There is a pervasive naïveté about the syndrome of “one man-one vote-one time” in Latin America, the congressmen believe. It dates back at least to liberal Democrat outrage three decades ago regarding the overthrow of the Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile.

“Of course, Castro never got there through the Democratic process, and [Senator] Christopher Dodd still does everything he can to help him,” Mario Diaz-Balart observes.

Ominously, communist China is making a major play in Latin America, in an apparent attempt to supplant the United States as “the major influence in the Western Hemisphere,” warns Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who serves on the House Committee on Homeland Security.

At his invitation, Dr. Constantine Menges, author of one of last month’s NewsMax articles, held a briefing on Capitol Hill, warning that the anti-U.S. Latin America-based coalition has collaborated with terrorists from the Middle East and Europe, as well as Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), Iran, Libya, North Korea, Vietnam and China.

The South Florida lawmaker says colleagues who attended his briefing were “amazed at what they were hearing.”

Sadly, he laments, “the overwhelming majority in Congress is not interested.”

His brother and fellow congressman Mario, in fact, is deeply concerned that there are some in Congress “who believe that the United States—we are the bad guys, that everything is our fault, and that whether it was with the Soviet Union, whether it was Castro, whether it was North Vietnam—or even now with international terrorism -- we’re the ones to blame, we’re the bad ones. Therefore, we should never do anything because they [our enemies] are our victims.”

He cited the refusal of his colleague, Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., to recite the words “under God” in leading the Pledge of Allegiance in the House this week.

“He has the right to do so,” Mario Diaz-Balart told NewsMax, “But the scary part is that there are people in Congress who have that attitude, again, that we are the bad ones, that Saddam Hussein was the victim of aggression, that Chavez is the victim of U.S. aggression, that Castro is good, that we are the reason that Cuba has any problems.”

On the Anti-American Side

Though the Diaz-Balarts are wary of Brazil’s Lula (“The jury is still out,” says Mario. Brazil is “a more diverse and complicated country,” says Lincoln), Chavez of Venezuela is completely on the anti-American side. The congressmen believe Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner is also close to the coalition.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart notes that the president of Bolivia was overthrown by Marxist forces and that in Uruguay’s upcoming election, a “pro-Castro Marxist” leads in the polls.

In some policy quarters in Washington, there are those who say Castro is getting older and won’t be there much longer, that Lula may be salvageable through his economic dealings with the west, and that Chavez is simply “a nut” who is heading for an implosion.

Others warn that we can always hope for the best, but we had better not count on it. Betting the ranch on a rosier scenario is not smart, they warn, especially given that Lula’s foreign policy advisor Marco Aurelio Garcia is a hardline Marxist or that Chavez was dead serious when he said that “either the system changes or the world will end.”

Ambassador Reich points out to NewsMax that President Bush “has ordered the creation of a Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, to prepare the U.S. government for the inevitable transition to democracy in Cuba.”

Quoting the president, Reich says the commission is also set up to “hasten the end of dictatorship.”

There is a political footnote to all this.

The Diaz-Balart brothers express some amusement at the establishment media’s wishfully thinking aloud that support for President Bush in the Cuban-American community has “eroded.”

Lincoln sees that as “all baloney,” and believes the one and only segment of the Hispanic community that does not enjoy the softball fawning treatment by the liberal media will go “at least 80-20” for president Bush.

Editor's note: