The Molding of a Communist
by Dr. Fred C. Schwarz, Part II

The principle of Communist Party organization is known as “democratic centralism.”  The Party, at the base, is made up of local units, each containing a small number of people.  This unit may be called a cell, a club or any innocuous name.  It may be a neighborhood group, a factory group, a school group or a nationality group.  Each local group elects a representative to a district council which co-ordinates the actions of the local units.  This election of representatives is the democratic aspect of the organization.  However, the local unit may not instruct its representative how to vote at the district council.  Once elected, he is responsible to the district council, not his local group.
      When the district council meets, each issue is openly debated with arguments for and against, until the vote is finally taken.  When the vote is taken, a change comes over the situation.  Once the vote is taken, the decision is unanimously binding on every member of the committee.  Back they go to their local units to carry the verdict to them.  They may not go back and say, “This is how the committee voted, but personally I was against it.”  They must present the verdict enthusiastically and with conviction.  The decision of the district council is binding on every member of the local group.  No decision can ever be appealed below.  Under special circumstances it can be appealed to a higher committee.
      In a similar fashion, the district committees elect representatives to a higher committee.  The decisions of that high committee, once made, are unanimously binding on every member, and binding everywhere below it, with a possibility of appeal above.  Finally, the Central Committee of the Party is reached.  From the Central Committee there is elected the executive of the Central Committee, known as the Presidium, formerly called the Politburo.  With this committee the ultimate is reached.  Since decisions made at each committee level are unanimously binding everywhere below it, decisions made by the top committee, the Presidium of the Central Committee, are absolute and final.  There is no possibility of appeal. Their decisions carry the character of absolute truth.
      The members of the Presidium are tried, proven Communists.  They have worked their way up by hard, dedicated service.  They are long established in the principles of Communist discipline and obedience and they observe unfalteringly the principle that the majority vote is final and absolute.  Before the vote is taken, they may oppose a

proposal vehemently, but once the vote is taken they must believe that the majority decision is right with their whole heart.  No vestige of conscientious objection remains.  As a united body they report to the Central Committee.  The Central Committee hears the report, is instructed in the reasons for it, and unanimously approves it.  From the Central Committee, the delegates go down to the next committee level where the same process is repeated.   The report is given, unanimously approved, and processes to work it out are established.  In this way, a decision reached at the top committee level becomes binding on every member throughout the entire organization.   
      Periodically, we see evidence of what appears to be fundamental division within the Communist Party.  Leading Communists are suddenly hurled from their seats of power.  They plunge in the abyss of shame, disgrace, and, frequently, of death.  When we hear of quarreling in the top ranks of Communism, we smile happily and wait for the split to come, and for Communism to disintegrate.  But our hopes are always doomed to disappointment because we do not understand that quarreling at the top level of Communism leading to the disgrace of leading Communists is not an evidence of division, but a proof of unity.  It is not a manifestation of weakness; it is a sign of strength.
      Historically, this is quite easy to prove.  In 1924, Lenin died.  He left the destiny of world Communism in the hands of a Politburo of seven men. All were Communist world figures, each of them utterly dedicated to the Communist cause.  All of them had given a lifetime of service to Communism, had forsaken home, family, and fortune, had undergone hardship and suffered imprisonment and privation for the sake of Communism.  When Lenin died, they turned on one another in an orgy of mutual destruction.  When the final record was written, Stalin had emerged victorious and the other six had died violent deaths.  According to our customary interpretation, the Communist Party should have been rent asunder and have shivered into fragments.  In actual fact, the very reverse took place.   It acquired a monolithic unity and strength, and went ahead to conquer well nigh half the world.
      This seems incomprehensible because the principle of democratic centralism has not been understood.  According to this principle, the decision of the Presidium is absolute.  If that committee votes that one member is a traitor, he must believe that he is a traitor, he must confess that he is a traitor, and he must welcome his own execution.  For his mind is the mind of the Party, and his life belongs to the Party.  The willingness of the top Communist leadership to act in this way is an evidence of unity and strength, not of division and weakness.  It reveals their total dedication and devotion to the Party.

      When Lenin died, the great name in Communism was Leon Trotsky.  The name of Trotsky was linked with that of Lenin throughout the chancelleries of the world as the author of the Communist revolution.  Most people expected Trotsky to assume power.  Trotsky was a great orator, a military genius, a brilliant philosopher, historian and author.
      But Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks only in 1917.  He was more or less a “Johnnie come lately.”  In 1903, he had been called “the dagger of Lenin,” and was Lenin’s spokesman.  In 1905, when revolution broke out in Russia, Trotsky was the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.  When the revolution failed he was arrested and brought to trial.  He made a great oratorical defense of the right of revolution, but was convicted and sentenced to lifetime Siberian exile.  Czarist treatment of political prisoners was benign and compassionate compared with the treatment meted out by the Communists.  He escaped shortly after he arrived in Siberia, and went into European exile.
      Between 1905 and 1917 Lenin and Trotsky quareled constantly about points of doctrine.  Lenin led the Bolsheviks; Martov led the Mensheviks; and Trotsky led an intermediate group trying to conciliate the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.  Trotsky called Lenin the exploiter of the worst elements of the proletariat.  Lenin called Trotsky a compromiser without principle.
      Lenin returned to Russia in April 1917, and formed the Communist Party from the Bolshevik segment of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party.  Trotsky arrived in May from Nova Scotia, Canada, where he had been interned.  He was met at the railway station by cheering throngs and made a speech in line with the policies of Lenin.  In July, 1917, he joined the Bolsheviks.  When the July revolution was a failure, Trotsky was arrested and Lenin went into hiding.  However, influences were brought to bear for Trotsky’s release.  He was re-elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee.  As such he was official military head of the Communist revolution.  Following the success of the revolution, he was Foreign Minister and creator and Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army.  He was leader of the Red Army while it defeated the armies of intervention.  He was a member of the Politburo until 1924.
      Trotsky had a great name and a great popular following.  He was a hero to the Red Army.  But the fact that he had a great name was unimportant.  The fact that he was Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, and its idol, was also unimportant. The only important thing was the vote he could get in the Politburo of the Communist Party after Lenin’s death.  Trotsky received practically no votes at all, for Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin formed a triumvirate to keep

him out of power.  The death of Lenin was followed by an interregnum of collective leadership.  Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo, dismissed as Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, and exiled from Russia.  He could have taken the Red Army and turned it against the Communist Party, but he refused to do so.  The Communists have a name for the act of using military power for political purposes.  They call it “Bonapartism.”  Trotsky scorned Bonapartism.  He said, “History has given one instrument only for fulfillment of its purpose.  That instrument is the Communist Party.”  When he was escorted to the Turkish border, he made them push him across.  He wanted it on record that he had not left Russia of his own volition.
      He settled eventually in Mexico City where he organized and wrote.  He formed the Fourth International.  His name, meanwhile, had become the synonym of evil and hatred within the Communist empire.  The word “Trotskyite” was the vilest curse word their tongues could find.  Finally he was assassinated by a young man who wormed his way into the Trotsky organization and awaited his opportunity.  When that moment came, he took a short-handled ax, the kind used for mountain-climbing, and crashed it through the skull and into the brain of Leon Trotsky.
      Trotsky had the greatest reputation in Russia on the death of Lenin.  But Trotsky was voted out by the Politburo, and his fame availed him nothing.  According to the principle of democratic centralism, the decision of the Politburo of the Communist Party is final and absolute.
      The men who caused Trotsky’s overthrow in the Politburo were Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin.  Zinoviev and Kamenev had been Lenin’s lifelong collaborators and co-workers.  They were brilliant writers with famous names.  Zinoviev was in charge of the Leningrad Soviet organization and head of the Communist International.  Kamenev was President of Soviet Russia.  Stalin did not have the brilliance, the oratory, or the writing skill of the other two, but he was Secretary of the Politburo and the Party.  As secretary, he was the man who appointed all provincial officials.  He was the bureaucrat par excellence.  Suddenly, to their amazement, Zinoviev and Kamenev found themselves isolated in the Politburo.  They were expelled from the Politburo, and from the Communist Party.  They humbled themselves, confessed their sins, and pleaded for readmission to the Party as ordinary members.  Their request was granted.  Thus began the mad, recurring cycle of confession, expulsion, and readmission until, finally, in the great Stalinist purges of 1936, they stood up and said, “We are unfit to live.  We have betrayed the working class.  Please take us out and shoot us.”  Stalin hastened to grant their last request.

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      The most emetic pieces of Useful Idiocy to appear so far in this context have been Douglas Montero’s columns from Cuba in the New York Post.  In one of them, under the headline “It’s as simple as a father picking up his son,” Montero launched into a rhapsodic antithesis between the “simple man” (Juan Gonzalez) and the “powerful man” (Fidel Castro) as they parted at Havana’s airport.  The piece bears quoting at length as evidence that the sentimental idealization of Leninist thugs is not yet a dead art.
      “The powerful man shook the simple man’s right hand and gently clapped him on the shoulder as if he were a son going away to college.
      “Castro stepped to the side and humbly lowered his head as he extended his right arm toward the simple man’s family.”
      There is a good deal of embracing.  Then the powerful man walks slowly toward reporters, “seeming for a moment to choke on the word he was about to utter...The tears welling in his eyes glistened under the light of the television cameras.”
      El Jefe Maximo managed to master himself sufficiently to speak to those reporters for nearly an hour.
      Next we get a glimpse of the relatives—Sr. Gonzalez’s mother, father-in-law and two mothers-in-law—who are staying behind in Cuba so Castro will have someone to shoot if the poor sap defects.  “ ‘I’m not afraid because I know that the Lord is on our side,’ Quintana [the mother] said sadly but firmly.”  And somewhat ambiguously, one cannot help thinking.  Meanwhile:
      “Several yards away another powerful man spoke.
      “Richard Alarcon, president of Cuba’s National Assembly [you don’t get much more powerful than that!], chief Elian negotiator and Gonzalez’s advisor—explaining why Gonzalez might have to stay in the U.S. for a while—said the U.S. government has to first ‘liberate’ Elian from the clutches of his Miami relatives.”
      Clutches?  What were those relatives supposed to do with the boy?  Throw him back into the ocean?  But never fear: The U.S. government—previously known as the Bloodstained Yanqui Oppressor in official Cuban pronouncements—can be depended on to do the right thing.
      “In Washington, the most powerful man in this country merely said he’s satisfied with Attorney General Janet Reno’s handling of the matter: ‘She really understands what’s going on,’ President Clinton said.”

      You bet she does.  But let us hope that she was at least sufficiently chastened by the consequences of her Waco child-rescue strategy that subsequent development in the Gonzalez affair will not feature any tanks or flamethrowers.
      A close runner-up in the Norman Mailer challenge cup for tongue-polishing Castro’s boots  is Michael Moore, the faux-populist lefty who made a movie called Roger and Me to expose the wickedness of General Motors in particular and capitalism in general.  In an open “letter of apology” to Elian, Moore explained that Elian’s mother was not trying to bring the boy to freedom when she died.  The ghastly truth is, “your mother and her boyfriend snatched you and put you on that death boat because they simply wanted to make more money.”  Setting aside Mr. Moore’s heartless impertinence in pretending to know the motives of two people now dead; and setting aside also the word “snatched,” which is a parroting of the Castro propaganda line unsupported by any facts; the gist of Roger and Me, as I recall, was that Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, by closing plants and laying off workers, was preventing those workers from...making more money.  Poverty is a bad thing in Flint, Michigan, apparently; but it is just fine in Havana.
      After some blather about Cuba having 100 percent literacy and rock-bottom infant mortality, as if Cuban government statistics were worth the low-grade paper they are printed on, we get this: “Your mother placed you in a situation where you were certain to die on the open seas...and that is unconscionable.”  Unconscionable?  How about “desperate”?  And if the boy’s death was “certain,” he would now be dead, the ultimate form of child abuse.”  Ah, child abuse!  Send for Janet Reno!
      There are, of course, plenty of other Michael Moores and Douglas Monteros.  Every time I turn on my TV, every time I pick up a newspaper, I see a new one.  It’s like a Night of the Living Dead—lefties coming up out of the ground and lurching off across the landscape looking for a Maximum Leader, a Great Helmsman, a Little Father of the People to slobber over.  With the centenary of Lenin’s revolution looming on the far horizon, and after all the horrors of our age—mountains of corpses, oceans of lies—these fools are still with us.  Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.  Won’t they ever learn?  No, their stupidity is impenetrable.  They will never learn.
      National Review, May 1, 2000, p. 17-18

The New York Times’ Duranty
by Dennis Prager

The world would be a better place if the New York Times apologized for its reporting from the Soviet Union in the early days of Stalin’s dictatorship.  Its correspondent, Walter Duranty, became a virtual spokesman for the Stalin regime, so much so that he denied the 1932-33 Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine.  About six million Ukrainians were murdered by Stalin’s Communists, yet Walt Duranty, the reporter given most access to the scene, denied it was happening, though he acknowledged it in private to fellow journalists.
      In December, 1937, the writer and journalist Eugene Lyons wrote:
      “In “Assignment in Utopia,” I tell how Duranty, returning from a tour of inspection after the 1932-33 famine, told Anne O’Hare McCormick, myself and others that the famine had killed many millions.  His estimate, I say, was the largest I had yet heard.  In the book I didn’t mention the figure he used, but it was 7 million!  Having passed on that figure to us in private conversation, he went home and wrote his famous dispatches pooh-pooing the famine.”

      English journalist and writer Malcolm Muggeridge said that Walter Duranty was: “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.”
      James E. Mace of Harvard University’s Ukrainian Institute wrote:  “Duranty was probably the most effective public relations agent that Stalin had in terms of making his denial of the famine stick in the West.”
      And this is how the Oxford University Press summarized Duranty’s perfidy: “Duranty dismissed other correspondents’ reports of mass starvation and, though secretly aware of the full scale of the horror, effectively reinforced the official cover-up of one of history’s greatest man-made disasters.”
      While denying Stalin’s genocidal crimes, Duranty received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize.  The Pulitzer Committee praised his reports for the “scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and clarity.”  The New York Times and the Pulitzer Committee should apologize to the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, and the Times should return the award.
      The Prager Perspective, March 1, 2000, p. 1

Fidel’s National Council of Churches
by Tucker Carlson

In 1975, the National Council of Churches, an organization of about 30 mainline religious denominations, published an informational pamphlet entitled Cuba: People-Questions.  Written in perfect irony-free Albanian-farm-report prose, the pamphlet offers church members a short history of U.S.-Cuban relations.
      “All through the 1960s,” it begins, “the U.S. did its best to make Cuba buckle under.”  America used “cold war tactics,” blackmailed Cuba’s neighbors, “slapped a trade blockade around the island,” and even trained a CIA-led army to “act against the revolutionary government.”  Thankfully, the pamphlet explains, the Cuban people “overwhelmed the invaders” at the Bay of Pigs, and so allowed Fidel Castro to continue providing “free or virtually free” health care and education.  “Later on the leaders are to call that socialism.  The poor people call it great.”
      The pamphlet goes on to mock the thousands of penniless refugees who have fled Castro’s regime, dismissing them as plutocrats “disgruntled with the equalization process” who have since been “ ‘liberated’ from their positions of wealth.”  It applauds the “guerilla and other grass roots movements” around the world that are “drawing courage from Cuba.”  It ends with this paragraph:

      The Cuban people, as well as Fidel, have always made careful distinctions between the U.S. government, which they oppose, and the U.S. people, with whom they feel an affinity.  In short, the Cubans think their revolution is proceeding apace—and it is the American revolution that is in trouble.  It is their fond hope that as U.S. citizens prepare to commemorate the bicentennial of 1776, new spirit will put them more in touch with their roots...and with reality.

      You can’t order Cuba: People-Questions from the National Council of Churches’ website (the Institute on Religion and Democracy, in Washington, however, has reprinted parts of the pamphlet as a public service).  But if you’re interested in slightly more sophisticated pro-Castro propaganda, the NCC is still providing it.  Tons of it.
      By now, anyone who has followed the saga of Elian Gonzalez knows that the NCC is deeply involved in the story.  NCC officials were instrumental in convincing Greg Craig, the Washington lawyer whose previous clients have included Bill Clinton and John Hinckley, to represent Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.  The NCC chartered the jet that flew Juan Miguel to Washington.  From its offices in New York, the NCC press office has issued statement after statement demanding that the U.S. government return Elian to Cuba.  At every point, the NCC’s positions on the case have been indistinguishable from those of the Cuban government, down

to its insistence that the boy not be given American citizenship.  
      Why would a church group spend so much time and money propagandizing on behalf of an atheist government famously intolerant of religious expression?  The official NCC explanation makes vague references to “human rights.”  The more accurate answer might be: habit.  The National Council of Churches has long gone far beyond the call of fashionably liberal Protestantism in its defense of Fidel Castro.
      Over the years, the NCC has produced a mountain of paper relating to Cuba—books, statements, Official Declarations.  Much of it has consisted of predictable (though in some cases, not entirely baseless) attacks on the U.S. embargo.  But the NCC has also published a number of first-person accounts of life in revolutionary Cuba.  Most of them could pass for press releases from the Cuban ministry of tourism.  One such travelogue, characteristic of the genre, is an account of a church delegation’s trip, entitled Summary Report of a 1976 Visit to Cuba.  The report dwells lovingly on “the spotless state of the streets,” “the purposefulness of the people as they commuted to and from work,” the “vibrant and positive theological awareness” of state-sanctioned churches.  Then it goes over the top. 
      Even allies of the Cuban regime rarely defend Castro’s methods of social control.  The NCC has often seemed more than happy to.  The country’s Stalinist Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the 1976 report notes approvingly, are now “being administered with maturity and confidence.”  The political indoctrination of elementary school students?  A positive good, the report declares:

      Bright children between the ages of five and fourteen years volunteer [sic], after parental consent is given, to dedicate themselves to complete knowledge of and for the Revolution at the provincial Palace of Pioneers.  Our group was absolutely impressed by the level of learning, zeal and intelligence of the young boys and girls.  Their educational training is truly remarkable.

      Can political naivete account for statements like this?  It’s plausible; other defenders of 1970s totalitarianism have since repented, or at least become New Democrats.  The NCC, however, has renounced its infatuation with Third World police states.  As late as 1983, Paul McCleary, the head of the NCC’s international office, testified before Congress in defense of Vietnam’s infamous reeducation camps.  At the 

time, tens of thousands of political prisoners had died in the camps.  McCleary described one he visited as resembling–“a small tropical resort area.”  In general, McCleary concluded, “the entire process of reeducation is one reflecting the government’s commitment to encouraging and enabling people to exercise their rights, restored as full participants in Vietnam’s future.”
      The NCC has never apologized for McCleary’s statement.  Nor, apparently, has it revised its view of Cuba.  The NCC boasts that, all told, it has “adopted over 130 resolutions denouncing human rights violations in many countries.”  This is true.  NCC administrators are avid resolution-adopters.  Since 1951, the NCC has written resolutions attacking an awe-inspiring array of injustices, from racism at Bob Jones University to the tragedy on non-union lettuce.  It has produced at least three statements expressing solidarity with American grape-pickers.  It has weighed in on matters as esoteric as Japan’s alien registration law and the crisis in Micronesia (whatever that was).  It has never called on Fidel Castro to bring democracy to Cuba.  NCC resolution-writers have been staunch in their support of gay rights.  Yet they have never pitched a fit about Castro’s longtime policies of sending homosexuals to labor camps and of quarantining AIDS patients.
      Then there is the matter of religious freedom: There isn’t much in Cuba.  Castro expelled thousands of priests when he took power in 1959.  He declared the island an atheist state, closed Christian schools, banned religious publications and radio stations, made it illegal to proselytize in public.  In 1969, he eliminated Christmas.
      Christmas returned a couple of years ago, after a personal appeal from the pope.  Religious liberty did not.  There are still no Christian media outlets in Cuba (in dramatic contrast to the rest of Latin America).  Pastors are still arrested.  Home churches are routinely shut down.  You’d never know any of this from listening to the leaders of the National Council of Churches.  At the moment they’re too busy arranging charter flights for Greg Craig.
      Last year, Joan Brown Campbell, then the general secretary of the NCC took one of her many trips to Cuba.  At a rally in Revolution Square in Havana, Campbell shared a stage with Fidel Castro.  At one point she addressed the crowd of 100,000.  Characteristically, Campbell used her platform to make a call for freedom—not from totalitarianism in Cuba, but from the tyranny of its capitalist neighbor.  “We ask you to forgive the suffering that has come to you by the actions of the United States,” she said.  The crowd cheered.
      The Weekly Standard, April 17, 2000, p. 24-26

Russia’s Cuban Connection
by Stanislav Lunev, Part I

Today’s Cuba is one of the last strongholds of old-style communism.  After the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed nine years ago and international communism suffered major setbacks elsewhere, it survives on the so-called freedom island and shows no signs of disappearing in the near future.
      As is typical for totalitarian rule, everything in Cuba is under government control.  Virtually all daily activities of Cuban citizens are dictated by the communist iron fist.  No time is wasted on explaining to people the reasons behind the countless rules and regulations that are forced upon them.  Blind obedience to endless restrictions is non-negotiable.  The rights and liberties that Americans take for granted are nonexistent.  There are no freedoms of speech, assembly, travel, education or choice in Cuba.
      Despite these ugly verities, with support from Communist China and “democratic” Russia, the Cuban regime is again strengthening its position in the Latin American countries by means of anti-American propaganda in addition to more aggressive strategies.
      The Russian newspaper Izvestia has the following to report on Cuba’s recent past: 
      “For nearly three decades Cuba ranked first among all foreign countries in terms of the density of agents of Moscow’s two intelligence services per square kilometer of its territory.  This island right under America’s nose was used as an ideal bridgehead for electronic monitoring and as a base for sending agents into Latin American countries.
      “Right up until the end of the eighties, Soviet agents in Cuba observed carefully as Castro’s military and political intelligence services carried out terrorist acts on a wide scale from Argentina to Canada, not shrinking from attacks on banks and the kidnapping of major industrialists, and trained entire rebel armies on Cuban territory.
      “With the start of the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Castro had to curtail these operations—the money stopped arriving from Moscow.  However, a Russian radio-electronic center continues to operate on the island to this day.”
      According to a joint statement by the Russian defense and foreign ministries, the purpose of this radio-electronic center at Laurdez, a Havana suburb, is to track American missiles and maintain communications with Russian embassies in Latin America.  Its most important task, however, is the overall monitoring of activities in the United States.
      Izvestia reported that “the U.S. always regarded the Russian military presence on the island with great jealousy but does not object in principle to the continuing existence of the electronic center in Cuba, which Washington regards as a

counterweight to an analogous American station in Turkey.”
      Russian policy is committed to preserving its presence in Cuba.  With secret assistance from Western collaborators, Russia has succeeded not only in rebuilding the former Soviet Union’s position in Cuba but also in dramatically improving it.
      Despite the Russian Federation’s financial collapse, Kremlin leaders are able annually to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to help Cuba complete its nuclear power plant at Juragua, the construction of which was begun by the former U.S.S.R.
      The ostensible reason for the Russian assistance is to help Cuba save about 4.9 million barrels of oil per year, to alleviate the country’s energy crisis and to help Castro repay a $20 billion debt to the Russian Federation, as the Soviet Union’s main successor.
      In truth, however, the completion of this nuclear plant will give the Kremlin a permanent presence in the Western Hemisphere and allow it to blackmail the United States with the ever-present threat of a nuclear “accident” 180 miles south of the Florida Keys.   Such an accident could be orchestrated at any time deemed advantageous to R.F. leaders.
      The Juragua power plant allows Russia to establish a military beachhead in this highly geostrategic area, where it can easily station a wide array of military forces.  This military presence will be directed not only against the United States but also against most, if not all, of the Atlantic allies.
      Presently, Russia has only a limited military presence in Cuba, due to American policies in this area and to Russia’s economic difficulties.  Nevertheless, Russia and Cuba are now actively intensifying their cooperative efforts, while the Russian SIGNIT station at Laurdez continues its usual activities.
      These developments provide the foundation for a massive deployment of Russian forces to Cuba whenever the Kremlin-Castro axis feels it is to their benefit.
      Controlled and operated by the Russian Military Strategic Intelligence Agency (G.R.U.), the Laurdez station maintains a radio-intelligence field over the Atlantic Ocean and collects cyber-intelligence data in close cooperation with Russian military spy satellites and naval and air force reconnaissance.
      The Laurdez station penetrates coded and ciphered radio-technical signals in the eastern part of the United States and tracks the patrol routes of U.S. nuclear subs around the Atlantic.  But the station is providing the Russian military also with extremely important economic data about the United States and other Atlantic Rim countries.
      To be continued.
      Internet Vortex, April 2000, p. 25,26.