Communists started infiltrating the US agencies many years ago, it’s not a secret. However, I will focus on our Communist POTUS, Barack Obama. His love affair with Communist Cuba is highlighted when Alan Gross is arrested in Cuba for breaking that country’s laws. You will read in the reports below how our media provides their own views on Alan Gross.
Who is Alan Gross? He’s not a hero, he was paid to break the law in Cuba. Obama released Cuban murderers in exchange for Gross. The love fest began many months before the release/exchange took place. It was coordinated by our Communist Pope and RiNO Jeff Flake, amongst others. As a point of reference, Marco Rubio is a disgrace to Cubans, absolute RiNO. So is Maria Elvira Salazar, our girl from the ‘hood (but that’s a different story for a different day).
The Obama Administration sent Alan Gross to Cuba to disobey Cuban laws and eventually Mr. Gross was caught by Cuban authorities. What was he doing in Cuba? No, he wasn’t helping the Jewish community, he was installing a social media platform similar to Twitter. Mr. Gross was gifted US taxpayer money for breaking another country’s laws.
Thanks for reading Vilma’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
April 3, 2014 (AP) — The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a “Cuban Twitter” — a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, The Associated Press has learned.
The Obama administration project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba’s stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent.
Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a U.S. agency with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes.
It is unclear whether the scheme was legal under U.S. law, which requires written authorization of covert action by the president and congressional notification. Officials at the USAID would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it. The Cuban government declined a request for comment.
1/27/2015 {mosads}This TV news narrative had bipartisan support. In announcing his administration’s shift in Cuba policy, Obama said Gross “was arrested by Cuban authorities for simply helping ordinary Cubans.” Marco Rubio, the anti-communist Republican senator from Florida, said Gross was innocent of all charges against him and that he’d been “taken hostage” for “helping the Jewish community in Cuba have access to the internet.”
Neither was the case. He wasn’t “simply” helping ordinary Cubans. He wasn’t “taken hostage” and he wasn’t “innocent” of breaking Cuban law. I don’t mean to falsely equate Obama’s and Rubio’s statements. One points to the failed policies of the past while the other points to a more pragmatic, hopeful and unknowable future. But the facts behind Gross’s escapades have been largely known since at least 2012 thanks to the dogged reporting of the Associated Press’s Desmond Butler. At the time of his release, any cub reporter could have searched newspaper archives to learn more about Gross. That his presence at the State of the Union address did not raise an eyebrow in Washington, that he was recognized as a kind of hero in the fight for democracy and justice around the world, speaks volumes to the impotence of our national media and the lengths to which Obama is willing to go to end the still-lingering absurdities of the Cold War.
In 2009, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) paid Gross, through a third party, almost $600,000 to go to the island nation to install military-grade Internet equipment in Jewish synagogues that could not be detected by the government in Havana. Gross’s company specialized in installing computer electronics in remote areas and had worked in developing countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
In Cuba, Gross was part of a USAID program that was funded by the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which codified the Kennedy-era Cuban embargo into law and explicitly called for overthrow of the Castro regime. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the United States government has spent more than $200 million since 1996 on so-called “pro-democracy programs” meant to destabilize the Cuban government from the inside.
The GAO report noted that Cuban law forbids citizens from working with “U.S. democracy assistance activities.” Therefore, by necessary, any pro-democracy program could not have been conducted openly. But American law forbids the State Department, which oversees USAID, to engage in covert operations. For this reason, USAID always says its Cuba programs are not “covert” but rather “discreet.” Gross was, however, not discreet enough.
According to reporting by Lou Dubose of The Washington Spectator, Cuban intelligence knew about Alan Gross as early as 2004 when he first delivered illegal networking components to a contact in Havana. That contact turned out to be an undercover Cuban agent well-known to American diplomatic corps but apparently unknown to USAID, an agency ostensibly dedicated to economic development. On his fifth trip to Cuba, in 2009, Gross was detained and later sentenced to 15 years for “criminal acts against the independence of the Cuban nation.”
Gross wasn’t only paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to subvert the Cuban government; he understood that by installing banned Internet networks, he was breaking Cuban law (Havana tightly controls access to the Internet). “This is very risky business in no uncertain terms,” Gross wrote in trip reports reviewed the AP’s Desmond Butler. Gross said: “Detection of satellite signals will be catastrophic.” A Cuban Jew made it “abundantly clear” to him “that we are all ‘playing with fire.'”
Development Assistance Inc. (DAI), the third-party company that subcontracted with Gross, said he remitted regular reports of his activities, and that the entire Cuban escapade was his idea. A spokesman for the Maryland-based company told the Associated Press in a statement that Gross “designed, proposed, and implemented this work” for DAI. Moreover, DAI said that it briefed USAID on everything Gross was doing. It might be noted that the head of USAID, Raj Shah, announced his resignation on the day before news broke of Obama’s shift in Cuba policy.
So the evidence thus far suggests that Gross knew the risks. If so, Gross knew he was endangering American Jews who thought they were helping Cuban Jews when they were in fact unwittingly smuggling, piece by piece, networking components banned by Cuban law. Among these were a “subscriber identity module,” or SIM, card available only to military and intelligence agencies. When asked how Gross came to be in possession of such high-level covert technology, a spokesman for USAID more or less shrugged his shoulders. “We are a development agency,” he told the Associated Press, “not an intelligence agency.”
Gross also endangered the privileges Jews enjoy under Castro, according to the Spectator. Because it is illegal for Cuban citizens to cooperate with “U.S. democracy assistance activities,” Gross identified himself as a humanitarian, not an agent of the American government. An unnamed congressional aide with knowledge of the Gross affair told the Spectator: “Cuban Jews had access to the [I]nternet for years before Gross started working with them. He used the Jewish community for cover.”
Yet after being arrested, Gross claimed he had no idea that what he was doing was illegal in Cuba, that he had no intention of undermining the government, that the company that hired him, DAI, failed to properly inform him of the risks. At his trial, he said that he was “deeply sorry for being a trusting fool. I was duped. I was used.”
He was also enriched. While Alan Gross was serving his prison sentence, his wife, Judy Gross, sued DAI for $60 million in federal court. The company settled nearly two years ago for an undisclosed sum. Whatever the amount, it’s in addition to $3.2 million that USAID agreed to pay Gross and DAI in November before he was released.
December 19, 2014 WASHINGTON (AP) — When the U.S. government’s global-aid agency launched secret plans to undermine Cuba’s communist government, it didn’t turn to the CIA for help. Instead, it used little-known contractors to carry out the operations — leading to multiple detentions and the high-profile arrest of American Alan Gross.
Gross’s release from a Cuban prison Wednesday underscored the dangers for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s partners in Cuba. Those groups received millions of dollars to run clandestine operations, but repeatedly failed to avoid detection in a country where USAID’s work is illegal.
Disclosures by The Associated Press this year revealed how one of those companies — working under USAID’s supervision — sought to bring about grassroots change by providing a “Cuban Twitter” program called ZunZuneo, staging an HIV workshop to recruit activists in Cuba and infiltrating the nation’s hip-hop community.
Communists in the US rejoiced. Bernie Sanders: Statement on Historic Obama, Castro Meeting - of course, these hypocrites live in luxury while supporting the murderers in Cuba. Life for Cubans in the island became a more intense inferno after Obama infused the Communist regime with cash.
December 17, 2014 “A US official said Gross was released on humanitarian grounds and would arrive at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington at noon on Wednesday. CNN reported a prisoner exchange that also included Cuba releasing a US intelligence source and the US releasing three Cuban intelligence agents.”
According to US Senator Richard Durbin, Gross' release comes with significant involvement by the Vatican.
Who Is Alan Gross And Why Was He Imprisoned?
In this Nov. 27, 2012, file photo provided by James L. Berenthal, jailed American Alan Gross poses during a visit by Rabbi Elie Abadie and US lawyer James L. Berenthal at Finlay military hospital as he serves a prison sentence in Havana, Cuba.
Associated Press
Gross was a longtime supporter of Jewish causes and a career development consultant who traveled the world on private contracts before taking his Cuba assignment. He had only once previously visited Cuba and spoke very limited Spanish.
Gross worked for Maryland-based Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), which had a $6 million deal with the USAID to promote democracy and support political dissidents. Gross signed two contracts with DAI paying him a total of $590,000 to deliver telecommunications equipment over 20 months.
During five trips to Cuba in 2009, Gross imported banned satellite communications devices and other high-tech gear in his luggage and helped install it at Jewish centers in Havana, Santiago, and Camaguey.
This is a series on Communists amongst us in the USA - hypocrites who live in luxury while supporting the murderous Communist regime in Cuba. You know who you are, and so do I. These parasites are Republicans and Democrats, White and Black.
Obama’s love affair with Communism started when he was very young, living with his grandparents. Others have written about his childhood and his mother’s relationship with the CIA and how she caused the murders of men in a village in Indonesia. I’m not going down that rabbit hole, but the research does exist.
I loathe Communists. Yes, I loathe you.
Thanks for reading Vilma’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Me too, and especially the hypocritical communists. And, also Ioathe nations that meddle in the business of other, sovereign nations, including those communists and the tender, spoiled, whining american communists.
Me too, and especially the hypocritical communists. And, also Ioathe nations that meddle in the business of other, sovereign nations, including those communists and the tender, spoiled, whining american communists.