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Cuba calls covert US political work shameful US-funded TAC-equivalent in Cuba Desmond Butler, Jack Gillum and Peter Orsi, Associated Press, Washington, 5 August 2014 The Cuban government on Tuesday called on Washington to halt hostile "covert" operations against it in the wake of the recent disclosure that an Obama administration program secretly sent young Latin Americans to Cuba on politically motivated missions. A top Cuban diplomatic official, Josefina Vidal, said an Associated Press investigation this week reveals that the U.S. government "has not desisted in its hostile and interventionist plans against Cuba, which seek to create destabilizing situations to provoke changes in our political order." Vidal demanded the U.S. "cease, once and for all, all its subversive, illegal and covert actions against Cuba" in a statement emailed to The Associated Press. She noted the U.S. government has "shamelessly acknowledged" running the program. The project, funded and overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development, deployed nearly a dozen young people from Latin America to Cuba to recruit political activists under the guise of health and civic projects. AP's investigation found the operation put the foreigners in danger not long after an American contractor was arrested in the communist island nation for doing secretive work. The Obama administration this week defended its use of an HIV-prevention workshop for its Cuban "democracy-promotion" efforts, but disputed that the project was a front for political purposes. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the program "enabled support for Cuban civil society, while providing a secondary benefit of addressing the desires Cubans express for information and training about HIV prevention." Still, public health advocates and U.S. lawmakers were highly critical of the administration's use of an HIV-prevention workshop to advance a political agenda, saying such clandestine efforts put health programs at risk around the world. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who leads a panel that oversees USAID's spending, said Monday it would be "worse than irresponsible" if the agency "concocted" an HIV-prevention workshop for political purposes. InterAction, an alliance of global non-governmental aid groups, called such a use of an HIV workshop "unacceptable." The U.S. government, it said, "should never sacrifice delivering basic health services or civic programs to advance an intelligence goal." The AP's investigation found the program was deliberately aimed at recruiting a younger generation of opponents to Cuba's Castro government, although it is illegal in Cuba to work with foreign democracy-building programs. Documents prepared for the USAID-sponsored program called the HIV workshop the "perfect excuse" to conduct political activity. From: http://hosted2.ap.org/CAANR/8ef5320729ce4298abefc1903704c7d5/Article_2014-08 -05-US-Cuba-Secret-Infiltration/id-fb02592258a6453980f8ab1f1991f208 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
