How Ileana Ros-Lehtinen ambushed

		How Ileana Ros-Lehtinen ambushed Obama in Panama Published on April 20, 2015 by Iroel Sánchez Ileana Ros-Lehtinen listens as Obama addresses Congress in January about his new Cuba policy. Is her face foreshadowing what was going to happen in Panama? A comment about my text La lista de terroristas que le queda a Obama (Obama’s last list of terrorists) led me to consult sources in Miami and friends in the Cuban delegation to the Summit of the Americas in Panama. AnonymousMiami wrote: “Everyone in Miami was surprised by Félix Rodríguez’s presence in Panama. This public figure of the [Cuban] community is in very bad health and in a pitiful physical state… He has been all but confined to bed until recently, except when he had the usual appointments with his doctors at the nearby Medical Center… he was taken out of bed for ‘something big’ in Panama. “Obviously, all the people who have been to his home lately were not there just paying charity visits; they were cooking something up… but I don’t understand what they can do with this old man who can barely stand by himself… his family and doctors were very irresponsible to let him take such a trip… his heart is not the same; it’s fucked up and undergoing serious medical treatment… anything could have happened to him… but then again, the politicians in Miami always have an ace up their sleeves…” “Anything could have happened to him…” A blog in Miami titled Villa Granadillo that is linked to [former Cuban tyrant Fulgencio] Batista and close to the Díaz-Balart family gives some clues as to what was to be expected from the presence at the events staged in Panama City’s Porras Park of Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía, the murderer of Commander Che Guevara: “It’s worth mentioning that the handshake between Barack Hussein Obama and Raúl Castro at the Summit in Panama stems from the compulsive nature of a man who’s naturally inclined to dealing with the enemy. (North Vietnam, the Sandinistas, Castro’s communism, the Ayatollah’s Iran) “And why do we say Porras Park? “Because once again two antagonists and historical enemies, John Kerry and Felix Ismael Rodriguez Mendicutía, measure their strength against each other. “Their grudge could be said to date back to when Ronald Reagan was president and the liberals in Congress questioned the then-occupant of the White House about what came to be known as the Nicaragua-related ‘Iran-Contra’ affair’, which landed Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Felix Ismael Rodríguez Mendicutía, the legendary Cuban who took part in Che Guevara’s capture, in the dock. “Kerry and Felix I. Rodríguez have declared themselves irreconcilable enemies since then. That’s why, when the former ran for President, the latter did his best with great energy and went to great lengths to keep him from winning.” […] “The way I see it, that’s what happened at Porras Park: they lacked the cojones to lay a finger on the survivor of a thousand battles: FIR [Félix Ismael Rodríguez Mendigutía] “But let’s imagine what would have happened if the reds had decided to settle old scores with FIR: doing so would have spoiled all the plans devised for the Panama Summit by the Vatican, the European Community, the United Nations, the Union of Socialist American Republics (USAR, the continuator of the USSR), Washington, Cuba, etc. Well, that was precisely the idea: to prevent a meeting in Panama between the Presidents of the United States and Cuba and to sabotage the process of normalization between both countries. The time and place of the provocation -in front of the Cuban embassy and next to a bust of José Martí– and the presence there of a media darling in poor health (held up as a ‘public figure of the community’ by Miami’s worst right-wing extremists) aimed to turn the man who murdered Che into a ‘martyr of the exiles’ whose corpse they could throw at President Obama’s feet, like they did the Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed during the provocation of February 24, 1996, to prevent Bill Clinton's administration from changing the Cuba policy and forcing them to pass the Helms-Burton bill that made the blockade even stronger. Villa Granadillo describes very clearly the way these zealots think:‘These were unexpected events that God put in our path so that we could go on with this cyclopean confrontation’. Quoting the commentator, “anything could have happened” to Rodríguez Mendigutía, something on which they had pinned all their hopes. An sick old man who suffered, say, a heart attack during the said provocation would have been a feather in the Cuban-American right-wingers’ cap. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and former CIA agent Félix Rodríguez at Washington’s Capitol Hill in April, 2011 According to U.S. sources, the presence in Panama of Rodríguez Mendigutía, and other violent Miami-based counterrevolutionaries, was part of a plan orchestrated by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who put former Florida representative Lincoln Díaz-Balart at the head of the group. He was the one who took the agitators arrested at Porras Park by the Panamanian authorities –Jorge Luis García Pérez (Antúnez), Rodríguez Mendigutía and Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat– among others, out of a police station, and prevented their deportation, which was confirmed by some friends in our delegation to Panama. Posted on Lincoln Díaz Balart’s twitter account are several pictures of his “meeting that Cuban opponents, both exiled and from the Island”, as can be heard in the videotaped interview –also posted– that he gave to Univision 23 journalist Gloria Ordaz right before he took his plane in Miami . Held right after the events at Porras Park, the meeting was attended by all the agitators, as seen in the photograph below, which shows Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía, Antúnez and Lincoln Díaz-Balart (center) and Gutiérrez Boronat and Augusto Monge (on the sides). In his interview by Ordaz, Díaz-Balart makes the same comparison between Cuba’s transition and the one of Franco’s Spain that we have discussed here before, hailed by El Nuevo Herald as the road map to be presented at the Summit in Panama. A tell-tale sign of the political operation mounted to fan the flames of provocation is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s twitter account, which dedicated ten messages to covering the Porras Park events and got House Majority Leader John Boehner involved in them. Boehner will be key to hindering any effort by Congress to both take Cuba’s name off the list of state sponsors of terrorism and lifting the blockade. Ileana also talked him into inviting the violent Antúnez to President Obama’s State of the Union address in January, an opportunity that Antúnez seized to say that “President Obama’s actions to reestablish relations with Cuba are irresponsible”. On November 18, 2014 I wrote: “Even if President Barack Obama* did not use in the near future the prerogatives* –which he has– to start taking steps (for instance, more travel licenses to American citizens, an exchange of prisoners, removing the Island from the list of state sponsors of terrorism) toward normalization of relations with Cuba, those opposed to change, especially the so-called Cuban-American far right, would use all their wiles to trigger an incident that could tamper with the process. They are known to have done it in the past every time a rapprochement was in the offing, and right now they must be frantically trying to find grounds for provocation.” Then came 17D, and by December 30 we already had the first of those provocations in a “performance” aimed at creating a Cuban Maidan at Revolution Plaza. What can we not expect after such a cynical plot in Panama! In light of the good progress made by Cuba and the United States regarding the complex process to re-establish relations, and both governments’ will to keep moving towards that end, a frenzied search for an exceptional event to make it fall through is to be expected. In Cuba, where all the adversities imposed by the North for more than 50 years have been firmly resisted, hope for peace and harmony prevails. Most Cubans in the United States have warmly welcomed the latest developments, whereas the violent albeit financially and politically powerful minority represented by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen feels that the business they have hitherto lived off of is threatened. However, they keep receiving financial support from the U.S. for their actions. It’s a very dangerous game, the one the United States is playing, by still funding these groups so prone to violence. Despite efforts by the U.S. security forces and police to try and do their job, it will be hard to keep those groups at bay while the extreme right forms part of the political power and their interests are at stake, as history has often shown. They will do their utmost to derail the negotiation process between the two countries. Their hostility towards Obama –which became plain in the last election– will increase insofar as Havana and Washington come closer to each other and, in their desperation, they could try anything. (Posted on CubAhora)