Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s Cholera

The chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who treasures a long history of lies against Cuba, added another chapter by insisting on an alleged spread of cholera on the island.

The new plot was already crushed by solid arguments from Havana, including her frivolous argument about the authorities keeping silent about it due to their interest in not affecting international tourists arriving in their territory.

Mrs. Lehtinen’s source? Versions came from government-funded groups, directed by Washington from inside the island, which some days ago were echoed by the mass media in the U.S.

This is her response, on behalf of the ultra-right of Cuban origin and Congress, to the increasing international tourism to Cuba, which — with an increase of 5.5 percent between last January and May — is equivalent to the arrival of 1.4 million foreign visitors. This, among other things, harms their pale fiction about “the Cuban hell” even more.

Ileana’s great tragedy when she issues opinions is her fragile credibility, severely damaged by the chain of hoaxes that have accompanied the performance of her duties and which have rarely been unexposed.

In October 1999, she put on a show before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in relation to the alleged tortures inflicted by Cuban military men on American pilots who, after bombing Vietnam’s territory, became prisoners of war during Washington’s attack. It was disclosed that there were 19 pilots who, according to Ros-Lehtinen’s narration, were tormented in a field called “Zoo” by the Cuban Fernando Vecino Alegret. It was later confirmed that the latter was not in Vietnam during those years.

In response to a letter from Ileana, Democratic President Bill Clinton reported that the Department of Defense investigated these complaints in 1973, when the allegedly tortured military men returned to the U.S.

“The surviving ex-prisoners of war saw photos of possible suspects. Nevertheless, those efforts could not reach a conclusion and their identity is still unknown,” stated Clinton back then.*

At the beginning of 2011, during Ileana’s visit to Haiti as chairwoman of the Lower House Committee on Foreign Affairs, she became acquainted with the scope and the results of Cuban medical assistance over the years in that nation; when she returned to the U.S., she did not hide, as she promised in Miami and in Washington, D.C., that she would make efforts to eliminate it.

Those brigades of Cuban health care professionals have been praised repeatedly, among other reasons, for the very important work done in Haiti against the cholera epidemic

During the first days of that year, news dispatches from New York revealed that the United Nations Development Program had notified Havana that the American government had frozen $4.2 million assigned to it by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and tuberculosis. Observers in Washington tied this fact to the conspiracy mounted by Ileana to affect the increasing prestige of Cuban medicine and to hinder its well-known human solidarity work abroad.

One of Ros-Lehtinen’s and her deputies’ objectives has been to hit and if possible to stop the increasing international tourists who arrive in Cuba because of the overall safety experienced there, among other reasons.

This is one of the reasons for the American blockade on trips to Havana, which have been affected for years by the “Helms-Burton Act” and the so-called “Bush Plan,” both actively promoted by Ileana.

In 1997, bomb explosions in tourist hotels in the capital of Cuba took the life of young Italian Fabio Di Celmo and caused other people to sustain injuries. Investigations and testimonies revealed that the mastermind of these assaults intended to create panic among international tourists travelling to the island was the Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, closely linked to the ultra-right of the same origin settled in Miami.

To the surprise of many, Ileana dared organize a noisy, public tribute there to Posada, the man who hired Central American mercenaries to commit the crimes in Havana, which he implicitly admitted during interviews with The New York Times and Florida television.

Now Ros-Lehtinen rolled out another of her declarations from Miami, this time to follow her honoree’s steps in the common desire to try to mislead and scare the increasing tourists arriving in Cuba.

*Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.