By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on July 21, 2022
Nixon and the Watergate scandal, image: RT
Watergate is systemic. A practice, an institutional manifestation of the American political structure. The famous scandal did not even begin in 1972, 50 years ago, when five men were arrested at 2:30 a.m. one June morning in the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. They were bugging and taking photographs, something they had done earlier at the Chilean embassy and in the office of Daniel Ellsberg, the government analyst who had leaked the Pentagon Papers and challenged the official narrative about the U.S. war in Vietnam.
They were known as The Plumbers, the plumbers, because once they were arrested they declared: “If we were hired to prevent leaks, we are plumbers”, that is, undercover special agents. They had been employed by Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, two men linked to the President’s Re election Committee, a team formed by Republican Party militants created by Richard Nixon and to whom the president had entrusted his campaign in the November 1972 elections.
The five arrived on June 17 of that year in the capital from Miami, and that day they stayed at the Watergate Hotel. It is not a minor fact that this group is known, in addition to the plumbers, as “the Cubans”. Three were born on the island and the other two, Americans, were directly involved in the CIA’s terrorist plans against the Havana government. Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez and Virgilio Gonzalez had emigrated to the United States after 1959, while Frank Sturgis and James W. McCord had participated in dozens of covert CIA operations to bring down Fidel Castro.
Bernard Barker, whose mother was Cuban and father American, admitted that all his life he had been involved “with the paramilitaries, the intelligence movement, and people who live by their own rules…. I don’t even trust politicians”. When questioned by a special Senate committee about his involvement in the case that cost Nixon the presidency, the former Fulgencio Batista cop promoted to CIA enforcer said he was there “to carry out orders, not to think” and that he was looking for evidence to prove that the Democratic Party received financing from the Cuban government.
Since 1959 the same Miami people and the same ABC’s have been involved in sinister plots of political espionage, bribery and illegal use of funds that have led directly to the White House. Before, during and after Watergate, the carnal ties of the US Executive with certain Cuban terrorists from Miami are the common variable of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the military coup in Chile against Salvador Allende, the Condor Plan, the Iran-Contra scandal… and the assault on the Capitol, on January 6, 2021.
The Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein team have not yet appeared to follow the money trail that connects seven Cubans who participated in the assault on the Washington legislative building with the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s White House. In the 2020 elections, Cuban-Americans Gilbert Fonticoba, Pedro Barrios, Nowell Salgueiro, Chris Bárcenas, Gabriel García, Alan Chovel and Bárbara Balsameda, all members of the violent far-right group Proud Boys, were elected to the Miami-Dade County Republican Party Executive Committee. Among them are three who face criminal charges for participating in the attack. All seven have or have had relationships with or worked directly in the offices of prominent Florida politicians, such as Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio.
This is not mere coincidence, but deliberate infiltration to take over the South Florida Republican Party, according to an investigation recently published by the New York Times that has not attracted much
attention, as it did initially when the Watergate criminals were exposed and Deep Throat had not yet appeared. An aide famously told Nixon when “the Cubans” were caught by a clueless watchman inside the building, “Don’t worry, Mr. President, this is a three-day story.”
Like so many other “rebel” groups created in enemy territory by Washington, who kick when they are no longer useful, the diligent Cuban plumbers are the work of the U.S. political elite who always leave the dirty work to them. The Proud Boys infiltrating the Republican Party in South Florida are not even a remake of Watergate. The old case was uncovered with Nixon, but it is much more extensive, transversal, systemic and boringly repetitive than what the legendary Woodward and Bernstein told us.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English