An affront to the Cuban nation

[Say_What]

Dr. Alberto Jones is a member of the West Indian Welfare Society in the city of Guantanamo, Cuba who now resides in northern Florida. He is an activist with strong communal ties to his homeland and is the director of the Caribbean American Children's Foundation as well as a director of the Cuban American Alliance Education Fund, Inc.

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Today, President George W. Bush committed an abominable affront to the memory of tens of thousands of Cubans who on this day in 1868 rose-up against 375 years of Spanish oppression and colonialism, shedding their blood and sacrificing their lives for the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban Nation.

The dreams and aspirations of these valiant men and women was thwarted in 1898, by the unilateral intervention of the United States in what became known as the Spanish-American War. A military intervention under the leadership of General Teddy Roosevelt, later described by him as "our best little dirty war." The United States overnight became a world power after reaping the bounties – Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines – of a dying Spanish empire.

Four years later, in 1902, American forces presented Cuba as a "free and democratic nation." But this free nation was led by a hand-picked president, a U.S. citizen who had lived outside Cuba for 25 years. Then under the watchful eyes of the Monroe Doctrine, the Platt Amendment, with US naval bases on the island, Cuba festered in political corruption, nepotism, police/army repression, vicious racism, illiteracy, unemployment, and lack of healthcare.

For the next half century, the Cuban people fought an epic battle against a horde of dictators, crooks, and torturers, until the triumph in 1959, of the Revolution. A revolution so disliked through a span of ten U.S. presidencies that hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of human lives have been sacrificed in a futile effort to bring about a “regime change.

http://www.rprogreso.com/