BY RAISA PAGES (Granma International staff writer)

                   AS a U.S. soldier died in the faraway mountains of Afghanistan –
                   while supposedly fighting terrorism and having been sent by the
                   person who appropriated the leadership in the fight against that evil –
                   that same President George W. Bush was attending a banquet in
                   Miami with the hemisphere’s most notorious terrorists.

                   At a moment when he should have been re-examining his questionable anti-terrorist
                   policies, the U.S. leader was dining with members of the Cuban American National
                   Foundation (CANF) who helped him take over the White House through fraudulent
                   elections.

                   The U.S. president participated in a fund-raising dinner ($25,000 a head) for
                   his brother, Governor Jeb Bush, who hopes to be reelected in Florida. This was
                   after speaking at a rally of his faithful supporters, in which he promised exactly
                   what his audience wanted to hear: a new, more open, more aggressive escalation of
                   the United States’ “Cuba policy.” In doing so, he ignored the opinion
                   of the majority of the American people and the criteria of legislators
                   from both houses of Congress who oppose the blockade of the
                   island.

                   During a panel discussion televised throughout the island on May 20,
                   National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón – who is very
                   knowledgeable on U.S. policy – explained with apparent sarcasm that
                   in his speech, Bush had had the nerve to say that Cuban elections
                   are fraudulent — perhaps thinking that the people of the United
                   States and Miami had forgotten the months they spent without
                   knowing who their own president would be.

                   The purpose of the panel discussion was to examine the statements
                   made by the U.S. leader in Washington and Miami that very day.

                   Referring to an executive summary of a U.S. Civil Rights Commission
                   report, Alarcón stated that the main conclusion reached by the
                   investigation into the 2000 Florida elections was that racism was
                   rampant. The vast majority of the thousands of citizens who were
                   not allowed to vote in that state, because their names were not on
                   the voting lists or because they were prevented from entering the
                   polling booths, were black.

                   The Miami banquet was held at the home of a Cuban-American, so
                   that Bush, his brother, and Otto Reich (U.S. assistant secretary of
                   state for western hemisphere affairs) could share a meal with such
                   arch-terrorists as Orlando Bosch, self-confessed author of the attack
                   on a Cuban passenger plane in 1976; plus Dionisio Suárez Esquivel
                   and Virgilio Pablo Romero. These last two were sentenced for
                   murdering former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his
                   assistant Ronnie Moffit on a Washington DC street. Súarez Esquivel
                   and Virgilio Pablo Romero were released from a Florida prison last
                   year, thanks to an executive order.

                   Bush showed his audacity by taking part and speaking at a 2001 rally
                   at which the main promoters and signatories of a so-called
                   declaration of principles were present in the audience and on the
                   speakers’ platform. In the declaration, Orlando Bosch, Alberto
                   Hernández and some of their buddies confirmed that they would
                   continue to carry out violence and terrorism against Cuba, using all
                   means of struggle. Such words in the mouths of those people smell
                   of dynamite.

                   Five Cubans are in prison in the United States after receiving
                   outrageously long sentences, precisely for having done what U.S.
                   figures such as Bush, prosecutors and federal authorities have been
                   unable to do: fight the terrorism against Cuba that is organized in the
                   United States and that goes unpunished, highlighted Alarcón. He
                   added that this violence also causes the deaths of U.S. citizens like
                   Ronnie Moffit.

                   He called attention to a paragraph in the sentencing hearing for René
                   González, who received a sentence of 15 years — the shortest of
                   the excessive prison terms. At the prosecutor’s request, Judge
                   Lenard included in her sentencing an additional special condition of
                   supervised probation, forbidding René to visit specific places that are
                   known to be frequented by terrorist groups, or to meet with
                   members of organizations that urge violence or are involved in
                   organized crime.

                   Alarcón emphasized that those words mean that terrorists meet
                   openly and publicly in Miami, and the warning to René was, “Watch
                   out, don’t mess with our friends.”

                   He added that the paragraph explicitly acknowledges that terrorist
                   groups exist, but action is not taken against them, only against those
                   who had the courage and heroism to infiltrate such groups in an
                   attempt to frustrate their plans.