The McCain-Cuba Connection
By There’s rather less to this article than I would have liked, or supposed. While I would prefer that John McCain and Joe Lieberman give the same kind of righteous, full-throated denunciation to Cuban terrorists that they give to, say, Democrats, the links that Bardach tries to provide between the two and the Cuban exile terrorist community are kind of weak. Moreover, the most compelling link is to Joe Lieberman, and not to John McCain.
On July 20, while campaigning for McCain in Miami and just prior to speaking at a McCain event, Sen. Joe Lieberman met with the wife of convicted serial bomber Eduardo Arocena and promised to pursue a presidential pardon on his behalf. Arocena is the founder of the notorious Cuban exile militant group Omega 7, renowned for a string of bombings from 1975 to 1983. Arocena was convicted of the 1980 murder of a Cuban diplomat in Manhattan. In 1983, Arocena was arrested and charged with 42 counts pertaining to conspiracy, explosives, firearms, and destruction of foreign government property within the United States. He is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison in Indiana.
Indeed, even that appears to be overstating the case against Lieberman, who on video promised only to convey the pardon request. The article also notes that the McCain campaign has connections with right wing Cubans who have connections with terrorists, but again this is hardly surprising; any Republican running in Florida (and, to be fair, virtually any Democrat) is going to be no more than two degrees of separation away from the genuine anti-Castro psychos.
John McCain is likely to have a terrible Cuba policy, and Barack Obama will very possibly be the first American President in forty years to pursue genuine, positive change in the US-Cuba relationship. I also think that Luis Posada Carriles and his ilk are murderers; they are more deserving (ironically enough) of detention in Guantanamo than most of the people incarcerated there, and they make Bill Ayers look like the raw amateur that he was. Finally, I do hope that somebody is working on unearthing some genuine ties between McCain and the terrorist anti-Castro right, because the American political elite (both Democrat and Republican) has been far too tolerant of people who blow up planes, as long as those planes are full of Cubans. Unfortunately, the Bardach article just doesn’t get us very far.