By Robert F. Kennedy Jr
WHITE PLAINS, New York, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

I grew up in Hickory Hill, my family’s home in Virginia which was often filled with veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. 

My father Robert F. Kennedy, who admired the courage of these veterans and felt overwhelming guilt for having put the Cubans in harm’s way during the ill-planned invasion,  took personal responsibility for finding each of them jobs and homes, organising integration of many of them into the U.S. Armed Forces.

Robert F Kennedy Jr

But as the process of détente unfolded, suspicion and anger were so widespread that even those Cubans who loved my father and were always present at my home when I was a boy, stopped visiting Hickory Hill.

To the CIA, détente was perfidious sedition.  Adlai Stevenson [at the time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations] had warned President John F. Kennedy that “unfortunately the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.”  The agency, he said, would never allow normalisation of relations.

JFK was involved in secret negotiations with Fidel Castro designed to outflank Foggy Bottom [Washington] and the agents at Langley [CIA], but the CIA knew of JFK’s back-channel contacts with Castro and endeavoured to sabotage the peace efforts with cloak and dagger mischief.

In April 1963, CIA officials secretly sprinkled deadly poison in a wetsuit intended as a gift for Castro from JFK’s emissaries James Donovan and John Nolan, hoping to murder Castro, blame JFK for the murder, and thoroughly discredit him and his peace efforts.

The agency also delivered a poison pen to hit man Rolendo Cubelo in Paris, with instructions that he use it to murder Fidel. William Attwood [a former journalist and U.S. diplomat attached to the United Nations asked by JFK to open up secret negotiations with Castro] later said that the CIA’s attitude was: “To hell with the President it was pledged to serve.”“There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination, we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalisation of relations with Cuba” – William Attwood, U.S. diplomat asked by John F. Kennedy to open secret negotiations with Castro, speaking of JFK’s assassination

Many exile leaders openly expressed their disgust with the White House “treachery”, accusing JFK of engaging in “co-existence” with Fidel Castro.  Some Cubans remained loyal to my father, but a small number of hard, bitter homicidal Castro haters now directed their fury toward JFK and there is credible evidence that these men and their CIA handlers may have been involved in plots to assassinate him.

On April 18, 1963, Don Jose Miro Cardona, Chair of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, resigned in a fusillade of furious denouncements aimed at JFK and my father, saying that “the struggle for Cuba is in the process of being sabotaged by the U.S. government.”

Cardona promised: “There is only one route left to follow and we will follow it:  violence.”

Hundreds of Cuban exiles in Miami neighbourhoods expressed their discontent with the White House by hanging black crepe from their homes.  In November 1963, Cuban exiles passed around a pamphlet extolling JFK’s assassination. “Only one development,” the broadside declared, would lead to Castro’s demise and the return to their beloved country – “If an inspired act of God should place in the White House within weeks in the hands of a Texan known to be a friend of all Latin America.”

Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss and Havana casino czar who had worked closely with the CIA in various anti-Castro assassination plots, told his Cuban associates that JFK was to be hit.

On the day JFK was shot, Castro was meeting with French journalist Jean Daniel, editor of the socialist newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur and one of JFK’s secret channels to Castro, at his summer presidential palace in Varadero Beach.  At 1.00 p.m. they received a phone call with news that Jack had been shot.  “Voila, there is the end to your mission of peace,” Castro told Daniel.

After JFK’s death, Castro persistently pushed Lisa Howard [ABC newswoman who served as an informal emissary between JFK and Fidel], Adlai Stevenson and William Attwood and others to ask Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson to resume the dialogue.  Johnson ignored the requests and Castro eventually gave up.

Immediately following JFK’s assassination, many clues appeared – later discredited – suggesting that Castro may have orchestrated President Kennedy’s assassination.

Johnson and others in his administration were aware of these whispers and apparently accepted their implication. Johnson decided not to pursue rapprochement with Castro after being told by his intelligence apparatus, including Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) boss J. Edgar Hoover, that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been an agent of the Cuban government.  This despite Oswald’s well-established anti-Castro bona fides.

After JFK’s death, my father continued to press Lyndon Johnson’s State Department to analyse “whether it is possible for the United States to live with Castro.”

“The present travel restrictions are inconsistent with traditional American liberties,” my father, then-U.S. Attorney General, argued in a behind-the-scenes debate over the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba.

In December 1963, the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute four members of the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba who had led a group of 59 college-age Americans on a trip to Havana. My father opposed those prosecutions, as well as the travel ban itself.

In a December 12, 1963 confidential memorandum to then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, he wrote that he favoured “withdraw[ing] the existing regulation prohibiting trips by U.S. citizens to Cuba.”

My father argued that restricting Americans’ right to travel went against the freedoms that he had sworn to protect as Attorney General. Lifting the ban, he argued, would be “more consistent with our views as a free society and would contrast with such things as the Berlin Wall and Communist controls on such travel.”

Secretary of State Dean Rusk thereafter excluded my father from foreign affairs discussions.  He was still Johnston’s Attorney General but the roaming portfolio that had previously empowered him to steer U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy administration years was now revoked.

The CIA would continue its efforts to try to assassinate Castro during the first two years of the LBJ administration.  Johnson never knew it.  Castro provided Senator George McGovern with evidence of at least ten assassination plots during this period.

In 1978, Castro told visiting Congressmen, “I can tell you that in the period in which Kennedy’s assassination took place, Kennedy was changing his policy toward Cuba.  To a certain extent we were honoured in having such a rival.  He was an outstanding man.”

William Attwood later said: “There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination, we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalisation of relations with Cuba.”

When I first met Castro in 1999, he acknowledged the recklessness of his brash gambit of inviting Soviet nuclear arms into Cuba.  “It was a mistake to risk such grave dangers for the world.”  At the time, I was lobbying the Cuban leader against Havana’s plans to open a Chernobyl-style nuclear plant in Juragua.

During another meeting with the Cuban leader in August 2014, Fidel expressed his admiration for John Kennedy’s leadership and observed that a nuclear exchange at the time of the Cuban missile crisis could have obliterated all of civilisation.

Today, five decades later and two decades after the Soviets left Cuba, we are finally ending a misguided policy that at times has done little to further America’s international leadership or its foreign policy interests. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

*             Robert F. Kennedy Jr serves as Senior Attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and co-host of Ring of Fire on Air America Radio. Earlier in his career, he served as Assistant Attorney General in New York City.

Excerpt:

Marijuana grown for medicinal purposes. Credit: Coleen Danger/CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday issued surprise guidance directing its attorneys not to sue states that have moved to decriminalise the recreational use of marijuana, so long as those states implement strict regulatory regimes.

The announcement marks a turnaround for the administration of President Barack Obama, who in January refused to explicitly support cannabis legalisation. Yet analysts are also suggesting that the new policy stance will have significant repercussions for countries that have been at the receiving end of the U.S. “war on drugs”.

“This action is of enormous significance, especially in Latin America, where the United States has for decades been the chief cheerleader for and major exporter of its own punitive drug policy,” John Walsh, a senior associate for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a rights group, told IPS.

“Latin American and other countries have felt bound by various treaties not to experiment with regulatory approaches that they think could do a better job, so the significance here is in providing space in the knowledge that the U.S., at least, is not in a position to pressure them anymore.”

Indeed, the United States is seen as the major architect of three United Nations treaties that codify four decades’ worth of “prohibitionist” anti-drugs policies. While these policies today constitute the global norm, some analysts suggest it is currently breaking down."As the so-called 'war on drugs' enters its fifth decade, we need to ask whether it, and the approaches that comprise it, have been truly effective."
-- Eric Holder

In the United States, strict “mandatory minimum” jail sentences have brought the federal prison population to record numbers in recent years. Of the country’s 219,000 inmates – called “historically unprecedented” numbers – half are locked up on drug-related and overwhelmingly non-violent charges.

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder rescinded mandatory minimum sentence guidelines for a range of crimes, including non-violent drug offences.

“As the so-called ‘war on drugs’ enters its fifth decade, we need to ask whether it, and the approaches that comprise it, have been truly effective,” Holder stated on Aug. 12, “and … to usher in a new approach.”

“Affirmatively addressing” priorities

Thursday’s announcement will remove several significant hurdles for lawmakers and entrepreneurs in the states of Washington and Colorado, where in November voters approved the legalisation of the production, distribution and use of non-medical marijuana. Such policies would be among the most permissive anywhere in the world, but they also directly contradict federal law.

In the context of this discrepancy, in recent years the Justice Department has continued to carry out irregular raids and harassment of growers and distributors of medical marijuana even in the 21 states that have formally authorised the physician-prescribed use of the drug. (Sixteen states have also decriminalised first-time offences for small amounts of cannabis.)

The new guidelines now direct federal attorneys not to pursue litigation so long as marijuana is not being sold to minors or funnelled into states that have not legalised its recreational use.

While the Justice Department memorandum will provide increased legal certainty for those involved in these new experiments in regulation, it goes much further than offering mere grudging promises not to interfere. Rather, officials suggest that de-criminalisation of marijuana could ultimately be more successful than criminalisation in achieving a menu of stated federal policy aims.

“A robust system may affirmatively address those priorities,” the memo states, “by, for example, implementing effective measures to prevent diversion of marijuana outside of the regulated system and to other states, prohibiting access to marijuana by minors, and replacing an illicit marijuana trade that funds criminal enterprises with a tightly regulated market in which revenues are tracked and accounted for.”

Long-time critics of the United States’ punitive approach to drugs interdiction have lauded the move, noting the heavy toll that communities in and out of the country have been forced to pay for drugs policies originating in Washington.

“Existing policies that rely heavily on criminalising drug use undermine human rights and have entailed serious costs in terms of violence and abuse,” Maria McFarland, deputy U.S. programme director at Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, said Friday.

“It’s encouraging that the Justice Department memo recognises that a regulated drug distribution system may be helpful in reducing the power and wealth of criminal groups. Violent organised crime, well financed by revenues from illicit drug markets, poses a real threat to human rights and the rule of law globally. It’s crucial that governments look at alternative ways of regulating not only drug use but also the drug trade.”

New paradigm?

Several Latin American countries are already actively looking at such alternatives. Most notable is Uruguay, which earlier this month approved draft legislation that would both legalise and nationalise the production and distribution of marijuana.

Several possible regulatory approaches are also being discussed in the Mexican Congress, while leaders in several other countries, from Colombia to Guatemala, are also increasingly exploring alternatives.

“Other governments have been less outspoken than Uruguay but they are nevertheless watching what happens there very closely, hoping to learn from Uruguay’s experience and see how similar approaches may work in their own countries,” WOLA’s Walsh says.

“As a result of the new U.S. decision, these countries will now enjoy greater political space to pursue similar legalisation proposals of their own.”

Such moves have been bolstered by a recent landmark series of reports by the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS). Those reports (available here and here) were notable in appearing to explicitly advocate for alternatives to the longstanding U.S.-led model of criminalisation.

“Decriminalisation of drug use needs to be considered as a core element in any public health strategy,” one of the reports states, noting in particular that “it would be worthwhile to assess existing signals and trends that lean toward the decriminalisation or legalisation of the production, sale, and use of marijuana.”

At a summit in Guatemala in June, the OAS member states approved the reports’ policy vision of drug use as a health rather than criminal issue. Over initial U.S. resistance, they also agreed to devote a General Assembly next year to coming up with a new drugs-related action plan.

“We are potentially on the cusp of the collapse of the existing international counter-narcotics regime,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, told IPS when the OAS reports came out. “And it looks like the Latin Americans could be the ones to pull the plug.”