Iroel Sánchez

Panama will be the venue of an event to be held April 25-29, whose objective is the setting up of an “elite international task force” to enhance the cyberwar against Cuba. The sponsors of this meeting, under the intellectualized name of “ThinkCuba”, use military terms like “task force”, while several of their alliances are quite too close to extremism and US military institutions, including the marines, according to the curriculum of Janessa Goldbeck, one of the event´s organizers.

Panama has been chosen to hold a meeting aimed at setting up an “elite international task force” to enhance cyberwar against Cuba.

The sponsors of this meeting, under the intellectualized name of “ThinkCuba”, use military terms like “task force”, while several of their alliances are quite too close to extremism and US military institutions, including the marines, according to the curriculum of Janessa Goldbeck, one of the event´s organizers.

The first of the Websites under “ ThinkCuba” is “Babalu Blog, linked to blogger Yoani Sanchez promoting violent actions against Cuba and support for terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. “ThinkCuba” is sponsored by “The Albert Einstein Institution, the same entity that was behind the so-called “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and that sponsored the training of young Yugoslavians with the Otpor organization by a US colonel in the eve of the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia.

Over the past few weeks, numerous materials have exposed the US strategy to provide its agents on the island with modern I.T. technology to keep covert communication avenues with them, thus violating their own regulations established by the US blockade of Cuba.

On 7 April 2010, the main organizer of the Panama event, Stephanie Rudat wrote on her blog about the use of these technologies to promote “change” in Cuba and she explained about their implementation in countries, such as Iran, something acknowledged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a work of the Department of State.

In her 2007 writings, Rudat tells about the role played as part of this strategy by organizations such as “Raices de Esperanza,” which maintains links to the so-called Ladies in White, in Cuba.

A point in the Panama agenda may be the updating of the strategy, after the repeated defeats undergone by the United States in trying to boost the use of such technologies in Cuba, in an effort to find inexistent similarities with the ongoing events in the Middle East, with media and entrepreneurial support.

The CubaMoneyProject has collected significant information on the antecedents, relations and financial sources related to Rudat. This information suggests that the Panama event counts on the highest-level support of the US government, including the CIA and the State Department. All this has led journalist Tracey Eaton to say: “Let´s see if Rudat, who has said that technology is a synonym of transparency, gets to voluntarily reveal the source of money.”

The US taxpayers´ money has been largely used with these aims over the past years. CubaMoneyProject recently published a list of recipients of these funds, after explaining that it is not a complete picture of the “Cuba Program” financed by the United States. Out of that list, we bring you some of those directly linked to the supply of technological support to the counterrevolution in Cuba:

2007

“Plantados hasta la Libertad y la Democracia en Cuba” (organization made up of individuals with terrorist backgrounds)
13 September – Contract signed for 200,000 dollars. Description: technical support for a peaceful transition to Democracy, of the Cuba Program.

2008

Creative Associates International. 29 September – 6.5 million-dollar contract signed with USAID´s Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI).

2009

DAI / Nathan Group (The company that sent Alan Gross to Cuba)
29 September –853.976-dollar contract. Description: “Provide extra funds amounting to 853.976 dollars.”

2010

Creative Associates International
03 September – A two-million-dollar contract. Contract expiring date is 30 September 2011.

Freedom House
28 September – One-million-dollar contract. Description: This cooperation agreement supports the Freedom House´s New Media Initiatives for Cuba project (NewMIC).

These sums are joined by projects with entities such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the CIA direct operations, which also include the supply of technology for subversion as it has been exposed by the TV series Cuba´s Reasons.

Translated by lChirino in The South Journal

Original in spanish

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