When the State Department granted the head of Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education, Mariela Castro Espín, a visa to chair a panel on LGBT issues at the Latin American Studies Association in San Francisco later this week, the Republican response was as obvious as the Cuban LGBT activist’s relations to the Caribbean island’s Communist dictators. Her father is Cuban President Raúl Castro, her uncle is revolutionary leader and longtime dictator Fidel Castro, and the Republicans were “appalled.”

“The State Department needs to wake up from its delusional love fest with the dictators in Havana,” said right-wing House Foreign Affairs chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). Republican Members of Congress released web videos and organized conference calls denouncing the visa as “outrageous.”

Even presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney got in on the action, releasing a statement accusing the Obama administration of “a slap in the face to all those brave individuals in Cuba who are enduring relentless persecution.”

Ros-Lehtinen and Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), David Rivera (R-FL) and Albio Sires (R-NJ) wrote a strongly-worded letter to the State Department saying:

The administration’s appalling decision to allow regime agents into the U.S. directly contradicts Congressional intent and longstanding U.S. foreign policy.

If it’s “longstanding U.S. foreign policy” to deny Mariela Castro a visa to enter the U.S., someone forgot to tell President George W. Bush. The Bush administration granted Castro not one but three visas to enter the U.S. in 2001 and 2002. State Department spokesman william Ostick told the Miami Herald:

Mariela Castro visited once in 2001 and twice in 2002. I can’t discuss her visas specifically, but you can assume she needed one to travel.

An Obama surrogate, Freddy Balsera, told the Herald:

In fact, the top State Department Official in charge of Latin America at the time was a Cuban American. Where was their criticism then? Nowhere, because ultimately this is all about politics for them.

A ThinkProgress search of the Lexis Nexis news database for Mariela Castro’s name during 2001 and 2002 returned no results relevant to her trips to the U.S.

Former attendees at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) said that Cuba has long been a presence at LASA conferences. This year, the State Department accepted 60 visas, denied 11, and is still processing 6. A State spokesman said visas couldn’t be rejected simply because “we don’t like you.”

LASA’s president told the Associated Press that Castro’s appearance at the conference was “an academic issue, not a political issue,” and that she’d answered a call for papers like any other conference speaker.

GOP presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) has a history of flubbing basic foreign policy facts, like when she claimed that Americans still live in fear of the Soviet Union. She made another whopper yesterday when she claimed that Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Muslim political and military organization, is equipping communist Cuba with missiles. It would be “foolish” to normalize trade relations with Cuba, Bachmann told a crowd in Iowa, because Hezbollah could soon have “missile sites” there:

BACHMANN: Why would you normalize trading with a country that sponsors terror? There’s reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is potentially looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you’re 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don’t want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hezbollah could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. This would be foolish.

Watch it:

There is absolutely no evidence to support her claim, which seems to be based on spurious reports in an Italian publication that did not even mention missiles.

Bachmann doesn’t appear to be too pleased that the United States has made significant strides toward normalizing relations with Cuba in the past few years.

Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee engaged in a marathon mark-up of the State Department budget authorization bill. One of the most stunning votes was a party-line 22-20 victory for an amendment that defunded the Organization for American States (OAS), the multilateral group of Western hemisphere democracies formed under U.S. leadership in 1948.

The funding, which accounts for about half of OAS’ budget, doesn’t amount to much — just $48 million. So why did House Republicans, led by right-wing Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), vote for Rep. Connie Mack’s (R-FL) amendment eliminating it? Because, Mack said, the OAS was supporting U.S. foes. The Associated Press reported on the mark-up:

Mack insisted that the measure did not represent isolationism but rather was targeted at an organization that backs Venezuela and its U.S. foe, President Hugo Chavez.

“Let’s engage our allies and friends, but let’s not continue to support an organization that’s perpetuating some countries’ ability” to destroy democracies, Mack said.

Likewise, Rep. David Rivera (R-FL) criticized Cuba’s human rights record as the amendment was being debated.

But the OAS’ close allegiance with Cuba and Chavez’s Venezuela are both highly suspect — as in: not actually true.

Cuba is not even a member of the OAS, as Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) pointed out. At Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin adds that in 2009 the OAS lifted its ban on Cuban membership, but the democratic threshold for membership remains in place — and so Cuba, for now, is out.

And the OAS has actually strongly criticized Chavez and Venezuela twice in the past two years. In early 2010, the OAS issued a blistering report about Venezuela’s human rights record and slipping democratic credentials. In January of this year, OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza criticized a Venezuelan law passed in December as being “completely contrary” to the Inter-American Democratic Charter passed by the OAS in 2001. Insulza added that the issue would likely come before the OAS.

As Daniel Larison points out at the American Conservative, the OAS might not do a whole lot, but its work is “fairly innocuous or even constructive when it comes to election monitoring and development aid.” At such a small cost — 0.02 percent of what the U.S. will spend in Iraq and Afghanistan this year — it hardly seems worth cutting and running from OAS by the logic of completely flawed and hollow reasoning.

Earlier this week, The Nation magazine and the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté announced a partnership whereby they would work together to publish findings from 1,918 U.S. embassy cables — dated between 2003 and 2010 — from Haiti.

Now, the two papers have released their first article about the cables. In “The PetroCaribe Files,” Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives review an ordeal discovered within the cables involving an oil and development deal Haiti was negotiating with Venezuela and Cuba between 2006-2007.

As a part of the deal struck that year, Haiti would join the Venezuelan-led oil alliance known as PetroCaribe and it would purchase oil “only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest” — a remarkably good deal for the Western hemisphere’s poorest country.

The U.S. embassy at the time noted that Haiti would save a hundred million U.S. dollars a year under the terms of the PetroCaribe deal; the saved dollars would then be earmarked for development in schools, health care, and infrastructure. Yet, under the charge of ambassador Janet Sanderson, the embassy immediately set out to sabotage the deal.

In a classified cable, Sanderson noted that the embassy started to “pressure” Haitian leader Rene Preval from joining PetroCaribe, saying that it would “cause problems with [the United States.]” Major oil companies — such as ExxonMobil and Chevron — began threatening to cut off ties with Haiti, and Sanderson repeatedly met with the energy firms to assure them that she would pressure Haiti at the “highest levels of government.” The U.S. embassy also continually warned Preval against traveling to Venezuela and collaborate with other left-wing governments in the region.

Despite this intimidation campaign, Haiti successfully completed its deal with PetroCaribe, rebuking both its superpower neighbor and the combined threats of the world’s most powerful oil corporations. Yet the story of the PetroCaribe deal outlined in the cables is a powerful tale of how multinational corporations have exerted pressure on the U.S. government to undercut development in the emerging world economies.

On Wednesday, The Nation and Haiti Liberte will publish articles detailing a campaign by the United States that pressured the country against bringing its minimum wage to $5 dollar a day. This campaign was allegedly waged under the Obama administration, where Sanderson currently works as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.