Saturday, January 09, 2016

Raul to Obama: “The dog ate the missile”



According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, a “missile” has been found in Cuba:
“For more than a year, amid a historic thawing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, American authorities have tried to get the Cuban government to return the missile, said people familiar with the matter.
At the same time, federal investigators have been tracing the paper trail of the wayward Hellfire to determine if its arrival in Cuba was the work of criminals or spies, or the result of a series of blunders, these people said.
Hellfires are air-to-ground missiles, often fired from helicopters.
They were first designed as antitank weapons decades ago, but have been modernized to become an important part of the U.S. government’s antiterrorism arsenal, often fired from Predator drones to carry out lethal attacks on targets in countries including Yemen and Pakistan, said people familiar with the technology.
This particular missile didn’t contain explosives, but U.S. officials worry that Cuba could share the sensors and targeting technology inside it with nations like China, North Korea or Russia, these people said.
Officials don’t suspect Cuba is likely to try to take apart the missile on its own and try to develop similar weapons technology, these people said. It is unclear whether a U.S. adversary has ever obtained such knowledge of a Hellfire.”
Well, so what happened? To be fair, we don’t know but there are some interesting possibilities:
First, the Cuban government didn’t know a thing and the whole darn affair was just a simple error.   This is the Cuban version of “el perro se comio el cohete”!
Second, the Cuban government knew that they had the missile but the US negotiators did not insist on its return prior to any normalization. According to the story, the US discussed it with Cuba but nothing was resolved.
Third, and this is scary,  Cuba was trying to sell it to North Korea or trade it with Russia or China. After all, didn’t some Russian ships show up in Cuba recently?
We don’t know for sure but I think that the Obama administration dropped the ball. They should have insisted on the return of the missile prior to any moralization.
Stay tuned because there is more coming from this story.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.



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