Alex Lightman---· This is a big win for me. Several people asked me to talk about this, so, for historical purposes, I can offer a few pieces of the puzzle. When Barack Obama ran for the US Senate in Illinois, he said, If elected to the US Senate, I will end the US embargo of Cuba. Then he got into the Senate, and he learned that Democrats use the Cuba embargo as an excuse to launder federal funds, via Radio Marti, which has received over a billion dollars in funding for programming that no one watches, into their campaigns, and Republicans use Cuba to have Cuban exiles cook the books for close elections, as they did when the Miami Cubans gave George Bush enough fake votes (537, to be exact) to steal the election from Al Gore by getting Floridas 27 electoral college votes and 271 to win. So he gave up on the idea, and on September 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, he authorized the US embargo of Cuba again and again and again. I wrote an entire book - Reconciliation: 78 Reasons to End the US Embargo of Cuba - and sent the manuscript to Fidel Castro and Raoul Castro via their spokesman to the US government, who spent over 100 hours with me as he set up meetings with over 100 people in Cuba for interviews. I was also greatly assisted by the woman who was the bureau chief of CBS in Havana, and who produced the 60 Minutes segments on Castro and Cuba, among dozens of others in world capitals. When the manuscript was complete, I also sent it to the White House, and asked for any changes. Fidel Castro asked me to make a few changes, and made ZERO corrections. The only changes were nasty quotes about him from other politicians, which was fair and reasonable. Amazingly, the White House had NO changes to request...and gave me two assignments, one of which I was able to present to the public (30 ways that the US can use ultra-low cost science and technology for national building beyond what the Dept. of State, Dept. of Defense, and Dept. of Agriculture are doing, and a very cool assignment to write a national innovation plan for the US. I asked the White House to keep Obamas old Illinois campaign promise. I was told, in effect, and I may or may not be paraphrasing, as this was not for attribution, You should understand that we are going to do this. We just have to pick the right time, in the home stretch of our second term. We have no changes in your book. Get it out there. But we will hire you to do a project, so that its clear that we agree in spirit with whats in the book. Yes, I got paid. Yes, there is a record of the payment and of the taxes paid on this, etc. In addition, as I have told many people, and posted on Facebook. former Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA), who would be the chair of the Armed Services Committee if he had not been blackmailed over his 9/11 ABLE DANGER revelations (his daughter was arrested for phony charges, which were immediately dropped after he did as the FBI stooges asked and resigned) spent a week with me telling me how the world really works. Among the things he told me - and, I repeat, I told this to people and posted it - Obama would announce the normalization of relations with Cuba in December 2014. He also told me that my book, and the arguments in it, which were purposefully made from the perspectives, and with quotes from, Republican and Democrat elected officials, were crucial to brokering a deal It is still December. Curt Weldon was correct. Obama kept his promise. And I am very proud to have been a core architect of the arguments that helped make this happen. Yes, its a bi-partisan deal, no matter what else people say. Just ask Curt Weldon if he told me this would happen, and the deal was in the works for over a year.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 20:34:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015