Ros-Lehtinen aiming for top slot on House foreign affairs panel

[Judi Lynn]

Published Sunday, June 26, 2005

Ros-Lehtinen aiming for top slot on House foreign affairs panel

By CURT ANDERSON
Associated Press Writer
MIAMI
U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a fierce opponent of communist Cuba under President Fidel Castro, could gain even more clout over the volatile issue if she gains the chairmanship of the House International Relations Committee in the next Congress.

Ros-Lehtinen, who has represented a Miami district since 1989, would become one of the most powerful Cuban-Americans on Capitol Hill if she can defeat Republican colleagues with greater seniority to win the post being vacated by veteran U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., who is retiring and would be forced to relinquish the chairmanship anyway under House term limits rules.

To reach her goal, however, Ros-Lehtinen has to move ahead of several senior GOP colleagues, chief among them U.S. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind. But since Republicans took control of the House after the 1994 elections, GOP leaders have shown a willingness to catapult lawmakers past those with greater seniority for top jobs on committees, where the nuts-and-bolts work of Congress gets done.

Her bid comes at a time when Republicans and Democrats are trying to woo Hispanic voters, including South Florida's politically powerful Cuban-American community. But in an interview, Ros-Lehtinen said her heritage is less important than her command of foreign affairs issues, her willingness to carry out the GOP agenda and her ability to work with Democrats,
(snip/...)

http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050626/APN/506260673



Ileana Ros-Lehtinen,Ileana Ros-Lehtinen cashing in on Elián Gonzalez.

[democracyindanger]

1. She'd better hurry up, 'cause she's going to be in the minority next year

[Judi Lynn]

2. Absolutely! Her little gang has seen its better days.Their sun is setting.

Not a minute too soon. These people are thugs. It will be hilarious if she loses.

[Mika]

3. Time to git tough on Castro - again. LOL

Of course, as anyone who has followed her "career" knows, its in her best interests to have Castro around.

:hi:

[kskiska]

4. I've seen more than enough of that woman

during the Elian debacle. Has she ever been to Cuba (as an adult - her parents emigrated when she was 7)?

[Mika]

8. Nope. She's never been to Cuba as an adult...

.. but she knows all about the place then and now.





"Crumbling" Havana

[dchill]

5. Good. The more strident the ideologue,

the higher the position, the more crude insanity released into the atmosphere, the quicker and more pronounced will be the "crumble factor" already taking hold in this administration.

[AlCzervik]

6. oh gawd she's awful offal.

[weldon berger]

7. Oh, please, make it Dan Burton ...

Burton, who may be best remembered for assassinating a watermelon while attempting to prove that Vince Foster was murdered, would be a wonderful, wonderful representation of Congressional Republicans. Ileana may be a shameless sleaze, but Burton is genuinely ill and without a hint of compromise in his dark soul. Run, Dan, run!

[Judi Lynn]

9. He IS a strange one. He screeched about Bill Clinton

and was discovered to be hiding the fact he had quite a rep. for wild and crazy behavior outside his OWN marriage.

Maybe he meant to say DEMOCRATIC ADULTERY is undesirable.



Burton, surrounded by Cuban "exiles" with Ros-Lehtinen looking on

[weldon berger]

11. Yeah, he has a child outside the marriage.

It took me a while, but I finally cottoned to how these things work: when a Republican has an affair or molests a kid or whatever moral trespass is at hand, it's a sin and he can both personally repent and be forgiven by other sinners. When a godless Democrat does the same thing — and we all know they're all godless — that bridge is out.

[Judi Lynn]

14. True! George Bush has been rumored to have been a cocaine user

of major proportions, but when asked about it, went to the old "But now I'm a Christian" defense, and that made him off-limits to further questioning! It's just mean to bother a Christian, you know! The press suddenly became sensitive and left him alone.

Also, it's out of bounds to bother an important Republican like Henry Hyde who was simply "youthfully indescreet" in his 40's, even though he's raising hell about a man on a year or two out of his forties.



Henry!

[kskiska]

10. Her family was OK with Batista

(snip)

Although the Cuban revolution took place over forty years ago. The Cuban exiles fervor and dreams of returning to their land and privilege still burns hot. Few Cuban Americans remember that Fulgencio Batista y Saldivar came to power as the result of a 1952 coup and that it was Batista's political illegitimacy that made the rise of Castro possible. In the process they seem to forget that it was Batista and other dictators who turned the island into a mafia fiefdom that allowed Cuba to be monopolized by international land companies like the United Fruit Company. More important, they forget that many of their leaders supported these oligarchies.

(snip)

The appeal of Jorge Mas Canosa and groups such as the Cuban American National Foundation lies in the perception that they can control, or at least influence, American foreign policy toward Cuba. Therefore, it is not surprising that they see the Elian Gonzalez controversy as a test of this power. So they desperately fall back on their habit of myth making, blaming their every calamity on the bearded one, angrily blaming Castro for the abolishment of democracy in Cuba, as if it ever existed.

U.S. Cuban exiles spin myths such as that Cuba was democratic before Castro, and that God has destined them to free Cuba. The reality is that these people are not part of the modern Cuba. Anyone who has been to Cuba or had relations with the Cuban community in the United States would be dense if they did not notice the contrasts between the two societies just in terms of race.

The Miami Myth Machine
http://aztlan.net/miami.htm

[Judi Lynn]

12. Great article. Thanks for posting it.

Very interesting item revealed:

Relations between Cuban American leaders and other Latino groups have always been tenuous. Privately, many Latino leaders resent the appeal of Cuban Congressional Representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to the memory of the civil rights movement, remembering that in the 1960s Cuban Americans to advance their interventionist policies crawled in bed with almost every reactionary group and leader, working and supporting the Republican party against the best interests of other Latinos. It has always been their way or no way, with the two mentioned congressional representatives resigning from the Hispanic Congressional Caucus because Mexican American Congressman Xavier Becerra was elected its chair. Becerra committed the sin of visiting Cuba without their permission.

God, that could get old, couldn't it?

[Davis_X_Machina]

13. Ought to have...

...(R-Gusanos) after her name when it appears in print.

[Judi Lynn]

15. Here's an interesting bunch of photos I found, looking for "gusanos!"

It shows very LARGE photos of a group of demonstrators standing near the Cuban Interests Section in Washington D.C. who went there to counter a demonstration by anti-Cuban people calling for MORE U.S. intervention in Cuba. This was in 2003.

http://www.nowaroncuba.org/Photos/51703/index.html

You probably remember that during Elián Gonzalez's imprisonment in Miami, some gusanos went to the Interests Section and kept a loud presence there, and claimed Cuban diplomats came out and got violent with them. If that had REALLY happened, they would have loved it, and would have had photos to show the world.

[Wabbajack]

28. Gusanos?

[Say_What]

16. Ros-Lithium is such a f*ck'n DOUCHBAG!!

although Burton is in CANF's pocket, I'd rather see him get this position. Lithium doesn't care for anything else except their anti-Cuba bullshit.

:puke: :puke: :puke: :puke:

[IndianaGreen]

17. Ros-Lehtinen's heritage is an issue!

She is one of the Miami elites, a CANF lapdog, and like all of that ilk, an anti-Semite (CANF's goal is to Christianize Cuba, return her to the days where the open practice of a religion that was not Catholic was not permitted).

[flordehinojos]

18. i was born and lived in cuba for 17 years.

I do not recall other religions not being permitted there... there were many other religions in Cuba as I remember it... (protestant people had churches there. There were Jewish temples in Cuba. The Masons were not seen kindly--but as i remember things ... it was Fidel Castro who suppressed religious and church gatherings in Cuba. Including the Catholic religion...although, other religions were perhaps not as widely accepted by the cuban elite which included the catholic church...but they were permitted...and incredibly enough, many of those in that catholic cuban elite, went to the espiritista or attended seances which were supposedly absolutely forbidden by the church)and as far as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's heritage is concerned, she is the daughter of a Batista (lower rank, i believe) soldier. She has climbed up the ladder of power in this country and her want is to return to Cuba ... not to christianize it... but to make it another dictatorship of the right where elite and money will flow into only a few select pockets and where she will have the same power that fidel castro does, except that they will call it Madam President. She, like Bush, is not a principled woman. She has a Doctorate's degree from the University of Miami in early childhood education. And, still and all, she was one of the ones who let politics govern what otherwise her educational level was telling her was wrong and that the right thing to do was to return elian gonzalez to his father, as thankfully, janet reno had the guts to do and to, finally, after they exhausted her patience and her kindnesses, stand in their face and say, this is it. elian is being returned to his father because it is the right thing to do.

[Mika]

19. The Vatican pulled the official Catholic church out of Cuba..

.. when the Cuban gov't mandated that all education must be free of charge (no more profit motive for the church, so they left). This resulted in the separation of many children from their parents in the then ongoing CIA/Catholic Church psyop Operation Pedro Pan.


Pedro Pan
http://www.teresita.org/Teresita.org-index2.html

Professor plans to sue CIA over Cuba airlift papers (a 1998 Miami Herald article)
http://www.christusrex.org/www2/fcf/pedropan11298.html

Church and States plot with Cuban children (scroll down a bit)
http://republican-news.org/archive/1998/January20/22worl.html

Operation Pedro Pan left many stranded in U.S.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9801/12/pedro.pan/

[flordehinojos]

23. i've not read the links in your post, so my perspective on Pedro Pan and

the leaving of the Catholic Church religious from Cuba may differ quite a bit from the articles posted in the link by you.

It is my understanding from religious nuns and priests that i eventually met in Miami (i had already left Cuba) that they were EXPELLED FROM CUBA BY FIDEL CASTRO...and i know that my own school was taken over by milicianos and milicianas of the fidel castro milicias, some of whom had been schooled in the very school that they were now TAKING OVER with the purpose of making it a SECULAR OFFICE FOR THE CASTRO GOVERNMENT.

And, for a while I worked at the Catholic Charities on Flagler Street in Miami, where Monsignor Bryan Walsh headed the OPERATION PETER PAN. (although, I did not work for Msgr. Walsh nor his PETER PAN OPERATION,) BUT I understand that the PETER PAN OPERATION was a way through which, parents who were seeing the repressive hand of fidel castro grow ever so more, would send their children out of Cuba, to the United States, where the children would be met by workers for the PEDRO PAN OPERATION and then they would be settled or resettled into group homes or foster homes all over the U.S.

And, like in many human situations, many of those children who came here to what was a foreign country at the time to them, and placed with previously unknown families to them ... many of them faced unhappy situations of abuse and exploitation in some of those placements...but many are grateful for the support the families that they were placed into gave them.

What I am still not able to understand is that having gone through so much pain themselves, as a result of a repressive hand in Cuba, they, nor their parents who sent them here cannot see the repressive hand in Bush. That is perplexing to me.

[Mika]

25. The church was working with the CIA..

..So it is understandable that the Cuban government had an interest in secularizing the 'religious' front offices of the CIA.

Check the links I posted. I know quite a few Pedro Paners. Some have heartbreaking stories. Their parents didn't want them participating in the intensive literacy program that the Cuban government enacted (enlisting educated young people to teach reading and writing to poor and unschooled underclass under the previous dictatorships).

There's a lot of background reading in this book about Cuba's transition to modernity, post '59 revolution to 1998. Well worth it for those who love Cuba..

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0968508405/qid=1053879619/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-8821757-1670550?v=glance&s=books

[flordehinojos]

26. i don't know what church or what part of the church was working with the

CIA in Cuba ... none of the religious and priests that i know were and all were heartbroken over having to leave so much of their own history behind. they had, in fact, supported fidel castro in his fight against batista when he was a fighter in the mountains, and in the early days of his entry into the cities after batista fled the country.

[Say_What]

27. Something from Jerry Siera's History of Cuba, like you, born in the island

and now lives here and maintains a website that has loads of information.

<clips>

Excerpt from:
The Bay of Pigs and the CIA
By Juan Carlos Rodríguez

Page 55 | Legal Custody of Children

Operation Peter Pan began to take shape in Washington in mid-1960. (It was called that because Peter Pan had taken the three darling children away to Never-Never Land.) The name was sadly ironic: for many of those children who were sent out of Cuba, the United States would be a land from which they would never, never return home. The operation formed part of the arsenal used to psychologically soften up the Cuban people. With it, the Propaganda Section in Quarters Eye decided to unleash a propaganda campaign to make ordinary Cubans believe that, under a communist government, children - like the land, industries, stores and housing - would become the property of the state. If that happened, parents would lose legal custody of their children.

The CIA experts were confident that, if they managed to sow that doubt in some of the people, the fear would gather momentum and could lead to the exodus of thousands of children, split up families and thus undermine the families' support of the government. Undoubtedly, it would be a most effective destabilizing measure.

The first phase of the operation consisted of having the radio station carry a "news" bulletin that would alarm the people and be spread by word of mouth. Therefore, one October night in 1960, Radio Swan made its first reference to this subject in its 8:00 news broadcast:
"Cuban mothers, don't let them take your children away! The Revolutionary Government will take them away from you when they turn five and will keep them until they are 18. By that time, they will be materialist monsters."

During the following months, over and over again, the station would rebroadcast that false "news item" about children being taken away from their parents. In December 1960, the CIA experts felt that the idea had taken root on the island and decided to go on to the next phase, which would split Cuban families and finally cause some of them to oppose the government. That would guarantee solid support for the invaders. Under apparently legal cover, using the services of the Catholic Church, the children's exodus began. Operation Peter Pan was carried out under a religious cloak as "humanitarian assistance" provided by the Catholic Services Bureau in Florida. Its main protagonist, who allowed himself to be used as a figurehead, was Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh.

http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/pedro.htm

[Malikshah]

20. May she fall into a pit of rabid ferrets

and have them nest in her hollow soul.

Or is that a bit too much?

Sorry, from south florida here. She is vile, despicable, deserving of as much mercy as she has shown others.

[Judi Lynn]

21. A group of US newspaper people visited a Cuban newspaper

You'll see in this article the nickname by which Ros-Lehtinen is known in Cuba:

SUBJ: US Editors, Publicists Visit Granma's Offices

SOURCE: Havana Granma (Internet version) in Spanish 12 Jan 00

TEXT:

Report by Nidia Diaz

FBIS Translated Text

A group of US editors and publicists who are members of the US National
Dailies Association visited the offces of Granma daily yesterday afternoon.
They are exchanging experiences under the auspices of the International
Journalism Institute.

The 37 Americans were welcomed by our director, Frank Aguero, who
explained to them issues that have to do with editorial policies, the
daily's edition and scope, electronic issues, and weeklies in various
languages. Other members of the Directorate Council also participated in
the meeting.

An interesting exchange of opinions on the case of little Elian, whose
right to be taken back to his father was unanimously stressed by the
visitors, took place.

An interesting and exemplifying anecdote was recounted by war
correspondent and cartoonist Willian (Chip) Beck, whom she-wolf
congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen mentioned a few weeks ago to shore up her
charges against Cuba regarding US soldiers who were imprisoned during the
Vietnam War.

He explained that when he told her aides of his previous visit to Cuba
and his affection for Cubans, he was told that his services were no longer
needed.

Finally, the US media workers toured the various editing rooms of the
daily.
(snip/)

http://www.miafacts.org/granma_article.htm



She-Wolf

[Mika]

22. Didya know that her husband (Dexter) took off one of her fingers..

.. when he (supposedly) slammed a door on it? Personally, I think its a method that he learned serving in Vietnam.

He (Dexter Lehtinen) has a history as being loose cannon with an extreme temperment, pulling his gun on people, fist fights, chokings, etc.



Dexter is in the grey jacket

[Judi Lynn]

24. Damn! Did not know this.

I had heard she's "accident prone," however, including showing up with black eyes, and excuses like running into doors, etc.

That's the first time I've seen his photo. Holy smokes. He definitely seems her match. Thanks, Mika.