Was the United States using cyclones against Cuba?
According to Amanda Vanstone* using cyclones as weapons is not a bad idea. On the ABC’s CounterPoint program (broadcast on 21 Aug 2023), the former government minister had this to say.
Amanda Vanstone: “You talk about war. People think of weapons, all the big arms companies, all the money being spent. Do you think of the weather? Had you thought of that? In the Cold War era there were experiments in weather control. And there’s a new interest. I mean, imagine if you could sort of shift a cyclone a bit over the border into your enemy’s place … “
Her guest, Mark Howden, a climate scientist, tried to hose this down saying: “… The focus that we had was actually how do we reduce the damage that cyclones cause.”
But Vanstone continued: “Didn’t Fidel Castro have an idea once that weather was being used against him or potentially going to be?”
Once again Howden played this down: “… it (Stormfury) was a bit of a kerfuffle and the US pulled the program.”
Not to be outshone by weather science, Vanstone rejoined: “So maybe they could have? Maybe they could have! Maybe somebody should be looking at that. It sounds less nasty to me than a bomb.“
The Counterpoint compere tried to laugh off the suggestion, but war and terror is evil. Neither is the weather a joke, Ganges-Brahmaputra delta (“Bhola”) cyclone of 1970, took the lives of as many as 500,000 people in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Climate scientists near the storm was coming and the devastation that it would break but had no way of telling the people in that impoverished Delta of the Ganges.
This is typical of the propaganda we get from the Australian Broadcasting Commission these days. It’s not just Vanstone who is anti-Iran, -China, -Cuba and anti-climate change. A similar theme was taken up by the ABC’s The Conversation on 8 August 2023. The article is called “In the future, we could snuff out cyclones. But weather control comes with new risks”. For over 70 years the United States has been trying to manipulate the weather with cloud seeding using silver dioxide and various other chemicals. Their scientists have never been able to show a correlation between reduction in the severity of hurricanes and these techniques.
They say that Fidel Castro picked the wrong side when Cuba chose to befriend the Soviet Union and not the United States. This seemed to have been confirmed with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
In the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) article, Castro and the Cold War, this theme is taken up: “Fidel Castro’s life story is not the story of the leader of a poor underdeveloped nation struggling to survive against the fierce opposition of the United States.”
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) of America article quotes Cuba critic Ricardo Bofill: “Like a man at the horse races he bet all his money on a horse. And he bet on the wrong horse.“
Castro chose socialism and was a leader of the non-aligned movement which represented poorer countries against the mighty United States.
But, in choosing socialism, did Fidel back the wrong horse? It is nearly 65 years since Fidel led the Cuban revolution in 1959. In recent years, the United States has been led by fools like Trump and Biden. Perhaps the PBS should revisit their article.
Here is a very different Amanda being celebrated by (Chilean) singer Victor Jara:
I remember you Amanda
the wet street
running to the factory
where Manuel worked.
Your broad smile.
The rain in your hair
didn’t bother you because
you were going to find him,
The one that left for the mountains,
that never harmed anything,
that left for the mountains.
And in five minutes
he was destroyed.
The bell rings
calling them back to work
Many don’t go back
Neither does Manuel.
– Victor Jara
Companeros, la lutta continua!
Ian Curr
25 August 2023
* “Amanda Vanstone is a former senator and federal government minister who has also served as Australia’s ambassador to Italy … She also serves on the boards, councils and committees for various organisations, including … Woomera Protected Area Advisory Committee, Lockheed Martin Australia …” – ABC spiel on Amanda Vanstone, compere of ABC program, CounterPoint.
References
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/castro-and-cold-war/
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/counterpoint/indonesia-fights-a-flood-of-plastic/102676524
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Stormfury#cite_note-38