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Via Postcards from the Revolution
By Eva Golinger
In 1983, the strategy of overthrowing inconvenient governments and calling it ‘democracy promotion’ was born.
Through the creation of a series of quasi-private ‘foundations’, such as Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), Freedom House and later the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), Washington began to filter funding and strategic aid to political parties and groups abroad that promoted US agenda in nations with insubordinate governments.
Behind all these ‘foundations’ and ‘institutes’ is the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the financial branch of the Department of State. Today, USAID has become a critical part of the security, intelligence and defence axis in Washington. In 2009, the Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative became official doctrine in the US. Now, USAID is the principal entity that promotes the economic and strategic interests of the US across the globe as part of counterinsurgency operations.
Its departments dedicated to transition initiatives, reconstruction, conflict management, economic development, governance and democracy are the main venues through which millions of dollars are filtered from Washington to political parties, NGOs, student organisations and movements that promote US agenda worldwide. Wherever a coup d’etat, a coloured revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there.
How does a coloured revolution work?
The recipe is always the same. Student and youth movements lead the way with a fresh face, attracting others to join in as though it were the fashion, the cool thing to do. There’s always a logo, a colour, a marketing strategy.
In Serbia, the group OTPOR, which led the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, hit the streets with t-shirts, posters and flags boasting a fist in black and white, their symbol of resistance. In Ukraine, the logo remained the same, but the colour changed to orange. In Georgia, it was a rose-colored fist, and in Venezuela, instead of the closed fist, the hands are open, in black and white, to add a little variety.
Coloured revolutions always occur in a nation with strategic, natural resources: gas, oil, military bases and geopolitical interests. And they also always take place in countries with socialist-leaning, anti-imperialist governments. The movements promoted by US agencies in those countries are generally anti-communist, anti-socialist, pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist.
Protests and destabilisation actions are always planned around an electoral campaign and process, to raise tensions and questions of potential fraud, and to discredit the elections in the case of a loss for the opposition, which is generally the case. The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, NED, IRI, NDI, Freedom House, AEI and ICNC. The latter two pride themselves on the expert training and capacitation of youth movements to encourage ‘non-violent’ change.
The strategy seeks to debilitate and disorganise the pillars of state power, neutralising security forces and creating a sensation of chaos and instability. Colonel Robert Helvey, one of the founders of this strategy and a director at AEI, explained that the objective is not to destroy the armed forces and police, but rather “convert them” – convince them to leave the present government and “make them understand that there is a place for them in the government of tomorrow”.
Youth are used to try and debilitate security forces and make it more difficult for them to engage in repression during public protests. Srdja Popovic, founder of OTPOR, revealed that Helvey taught them “how to select people in the system, such as police officers, and send them the message that we are all victims, them and us, because it’s not the job of a police officer to arrest a 13-year-old protestor, for example …”
It’s a well-planned strategy directed towards the security forces, public officials and the public in general, with a psychological warfare component and a street presence that give the impression of a nation on the verge of popular insurrection.
Venezuela
In 2003, AEI touched ground in Venezuela. Colonel Helvey himself gave a nine-day intensive course to the Venezuelan opposition on how to “restore democracy” in the country. According to AEI’s annual report, opposition political parties, NGOs, activists and labor unions participated in the workshop, learning the techniques of how to “overthrow a dictator”. This was a year after the failed coup d’etat – led by those same groups – against President Chavez.
What came right after the AEI intervention was a year of street violence, constant destabilization attempts and a recall referendum against Chavez. The opposition lost 60-40, but cried fraud. Their claims were pointless. Hundreds of international observers, including the Carter Center and the OAS, certified the process as transparent, legitimate and fraud-free.
In March 2005, the Venezuelan opposition and AEI joined forces again, but this time the old political parties and leaders were replaced by a select group of students and young Venezuelans. Two former leaders of OTPOR came from Belgrade, Slobodan Dinovic and Ivan Marovic, to train the Venezuelan students on how to build a movement to overthrow their president. Simultaneously, USAID and NED funding to groups in Venezuela skyrocketed to around $9m.
Freedom House set up shop in Venezuela for the first time ever, working hand in hand with USAID and NED to help consolidate the opposition and prepare it for the 2006 presidential elections. ICNC, led by former Freedom House president Peter Ackerman, also began to train the youth opposition movement, providing intensive courses and seminars in regime change techniques.
That year, the newly-trained students launched their movement. The goal was to impede the electoral process and create a scenario of fraud, but they failed. Chavez won the elections with 64 percent of the vote, a landslide victory. In 2007, the movement was relaunched in reaction to the government’s decision to not renew the broadcasting license of a private television station, RCTV, a voice of the opposition. The students took to the streets with their logo in hand and along with the aid of mainstream media, garnered international attention.
Several were selected by US agencies and sent to train again in Belgrade in October 2007. Student leader Yon Goicochea was awarded $500,000 from the right-wing Washington think tank, Cato Institute, to set up a training center for opposition youth inside Venezuela.
Today, those same students are the faces of the opposition political parties, evidencing not only their clear connection with the politics of the past, but also the deceit of their own movement. The coloured revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine are fading. Citizens of those nations have become disenchanted with those that took power through an apparent ‘autonomous’ movement and have begun to see they were fooled.
The coloured revolutions are nothing more than the red, white and blue of US agencies, finding new and innovative ways to try and impose Empire’s agenda.
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Reflections by Comrade Fidel
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/reflexiones/2010/ing/f230110i.html
In my Reflection of 14 January, two days after the catastrophe in Haiti, which destroyed that neighboring sister nation, I wrote:
“In the area of healthcare and others the Haitian people has received the cooperation of Cuba, even though this is a small and blockaded country. Approximately 400 doctors and healthcare workers are helping the Haitian people free of charge. Our doctors are working every day at 227 of the 237 communes of that country.
“On the other hand, no less than 400 young Haitians have been graduated as medical doctors in our country. They will now work alongside the reinforcement that traveled there yesterday to save lives in that critical situation. Thus, up to one thousand doctors and healthcare personnel can be mobilized without any special effort; and most are already there willing to cooperate with any other State that wishes to save Haitian lives and rehabilitate the injured.
“The head of our medical brigade has informed that ‘the situation is difficult but we are already saving lives’.”
Hour after hour, day and night, the Cuban health professionals have started to work nonstop in the few facilities that were able to stand, in tents, and out in the parks or open-air spaces, since the population feared new aftershocks.
The situation was far more serious than was originally thought. Tens of thousands of injured were clamoring for help in the streets of Port-au-Prince; innumerable persons laid, dead or alive, under the rubbled clay or adobe used in the construction of the houses where the overwhelming majority of the population lived.
Buildings, even the most solid, collapsed. Besides, it was necessary to look for the Haitian doctors who had graduated at the Latin American Medicine School throughout all the destroyed neighborhoods. Many of them were affected, either directly or indirectly, by the tragedy.
Some UN officials were trapped in their dormitories and tens of lives were lost, including the lives of several chiefs of MINUSTAH, a UN contingent. The fate of hundreds of other members of its staff was unknown.
Haiti’s presidential palace crumbled. Many public facilities, including several hospitals, were left in ruins.
The catastrophe shocked the whole world, which was able to see what was going on through the images aired by the main international TV networks. Governments from everywhere in the planet announced they would be sending rescue experts, food, medicines, equipment and other resources.
In conformity with the position publicly announced by Cuba, medical staff from different countries – namely Spain, Mexico, and Colombia, among others – worked very hard alongside our doctors at the facilities they had improvised. Organisations such as PAHO and other friendly countries like Venezuela and other nations supplied medicines and other resources. The impeccable behavior of Cuban professionals and their leaders was absolutely void of chauvinism and remained out of the limelight.
Cuba, just as it had done under similar circumstances, when Hurricane Katrina caused huge devastation in the city of New Orleans and the lives of thousands of American citizens were in danger, offered to send a full medical brigade to cooperate with the people of the United States, a country that, as is well known, has vast resources.
But at that moment what was needed were trained and well-equipped doctors to save lives. Given New Orleans geographical location, more than one thousand doctors of the ‘Henry Reeve’ contingent mobilised and readied to leave for that city at any time of the day or the night, carrying with them the necessary medicines and equipment. It never crossed our mind that the president of that nation would reject the offer and let a number of Americans that could have been saved to die.
The mistake made by that government was perhaps the inability to understand that the people of Cuba do not see in the American people an enemy; it does not blame it for the aggressions our homeland has suffered.
Nor was that government capable of understanding that our country does not need to beg for favors or forgiveness of those who, for half a century now, have been trying, to no avail, to bring us to our knees.
Our country, also in the case of Haiti, immediately responded to the US authorities requests to fly over the eastern part of Cuba as well as other facilities they needed to deliver assistance, as quickly as possible, to the American and Haitian citizens who had been affected by the earthquake.
Such have been the principles characterising the ethical behavior of our people. Together with its equanimity and firmness, these have been the ever-present features of our foreign policy. And this is known only too well by whoever have been our adversaries in the international arena.
Cuba will firmly stand by the opinion that the tragedy that has taken place in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, is a challenge to the richest and more powerful countries of the world.
Haiti is a net product of the colonial, capitalist and imperialist system imposed on the world. Haiti’s slavery and subsequent poverty were imposed from abroad. That terrible earthquake occurred after the Copenhagen Summit, where the most elemental rights of 192 UN member States were trampled upon.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, a competition has unleashed in Haiti to hastily and illegally adopt boys and girls. Unicef has been forced to adopt preventive measures against the uprooting of many children, which will deprive their close relatives from their rights.
There are more than one hundred thousand deadly victims. A high number of citizens have lost their arms or legs, or have suffered fractures requiring rehabilitation that would enable them to work or manage their own.
Eighty percent of the country needs to be rebuilt. Haiti requires an economy that is developed enough to meet its needs according to its productive capacity. The reconstruction of Europe or Japan, which was based on the productive capacity and the technical level of the population, was a relatively simple task as compared to the effort that needs to be made in Haiti.
There, as well as in most of Africa and elsewhere in the Third World, it is indispensable to create the conditions for a sustainable development. In only 40 years’ time, humanity will be made of more than nine billion inhabitants, and right now is faced with the challenge of a climate change that scientists accept as an inescapable reality.
In the midst of the Haitian tragedy, without anybody knowing how and why, thousands of US marines, 82nd Airborne Division troops and other military forces have occupied Haiti. Worse still is the fact that neither the United Nations Organisation nor the US government have offered an explanation to the world’s public opinion about this relocation of troops.
Several governments have complained that their aircraft have not been allowed to land in order to deliver the human and technical resources that have been sent to Haiti.
Some countries, for their part, have announced they would be sending an additional number of troops and military equipment. In my view, such events will complicate and create chaos in international cooperation, which is already in itself complex. It is necessary to seriously discuss this issue. The UN should be entrusted with the leading role it deserves in these so delicate matters.
Our country is accomplishing a strictly humanitarian mission. To the extent of its possibilities, it will contribute the human and material resources at its disposal. The will of our people, which takes pride in its medical doctors and cooperation workers who provide vital services, is huge, and will rise to the occasion.
Any significant cooperation that is offered to our country will not be rejected, but its acceptance will fully depend on the importance and transcendence of the assistance that is requested from the human resources of our homeland.
It is only fair to state that, up until this moment, our modest aircrafts and the important human resources that Cuba has made available to the Haitian people have arrived at their destination without any difficulty whatsoever.
We send doctors, not soldiers!
Fidel Castro Ruz
23 January 2010, 5.30pm
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Two days ago, close to 6 in the evening Cuba time, already dark in Haiti due to its geographical location, the TV channels started carrying news that a violent earthquake, –of 7.3 intensity in the Richter scale—had severely shaken Port au Prince. The seismic phenomenon had originated at a tectonic fault in the sea only 9.4 miles from the Haitian capital, a city where 80% of the population lives in fragile houses built with clay and adobe.
The news continued almost uninterrupted for hours. There were no images but it was said that many stouter constructions like public buildings, hospitals, schools and other facilities had also collapsed. I have read that a 7.3 earthquake equals the energy released by the explosion of 400,000 tons of TNT.
The descriptions were dramatic. In the streets, the wounded cried for medical help surrounded by ruins and their families buried under the debris. But, for many hours no one could broadcast any image.
The news took us all by surprise. Rather often we had heard news of hurricanes and large floods in Haiti but we did not know that our neighbor was threatened by a major earthquake. It surfaced now that 200 years ago a major earthquake had hit that city, which at the time was certainly inhabited by a few thousand people.
At midnight there was still no estimate of the number of victims. Senior UN officials and various Heads of Government spoke of the impressive event and announced that they would be sending rescue brigades. Since MINUSTAH –UN international forces– are deployed there some Defense ministers spoke of the possibility of casualties among their personnel.
Actually, it was yesterday morning that sad news started flowing in on the high number of human casualties in the population and even such institutions as the United Nations reported that some of their buildings in that country had collapsed; a word that usually does not say much but that could mean a lot under the circumstances.
For hours increasingly dramatic news of the situation in that country continued to flow uninterrupted with reports of different numbers of deadly victims that depending on which version fluctuated between 30 thousand and 100 thousand. The images are appalling. Obviously, the catastrophic event has been widely reported all over the world and many governments, sincerely moved, are making efforts to cooperate to the extent of their capabilities.
A lot of people are sincerely touched by the tragedy, especially natural unassuming people but perhaps few stop to think on why Haiti is such a poor country and why almost 50 percent of its population depends of family remittances. And in this context, would it not be proper to also analyze the reality leading to the current situation of Haiti and its huge suffering?
It is amazing that no one says a word on the fact that Haiti was the first country where 400 thousand Africans, enslaved and brought to this land by Europeans, rebelled against 30 thousand white owners of sugarcane and coffee plantations and succeeded in making the first great social revolution in our hemisphere. Pages of insurmountable glory were then written there where Napoleon’s most outstanding general tasted defeat. Haiti is a complete product of colonialism and imperialism, of more than a century of using its human resources in the hardest labors, of military interventions and the extraction of its wealth.
Such a historic oblivion would not be so grave if it were not because Haiti is an embarrassment in our times, in a world where the exploitation and plundering of the overwhelming majority of people on the planet prevail.
Billions of people in Latin America, Africa and Asia endure similar privation although probably not all of them in such high proportion as Haiti.
No place on earth should be affected by such situations, even though there are tens of thousands of towns and villages in similar and sometimes worse conditions resulting from an unfair economic and political international order imposed worldwide. The world population is not only threatened by natural catastrophes like that of Haiti that is but a pale example of what can happen to the planet with climate change; an issue that was the target of mockery, scorn and deception in Copenhagen.
It is fair to say to every country and institution that have sustained the loss of citizens or members to the natural catastrophe in Haiti that we do not doubt that at this point they will make the greatest effort to save human lives and to alleviate the pain of that long-suffering people. They cannot be blamed for the natural phenomenon that has taken place there even though we disagree with the policy pursued towards Haiti.
But, I must say that I feel it’s high time to seek true and real solutions for that fraternal people.
In the area of health care and others the Haitian people has received the cooperation of Cuba, even though this is a small and blockaded country. Approximately 400 doctors and healthcare workers are helping the Haitian people free of charge. Our doctors are working every day at 227 of the 337 communes of that country. On the other hand, no less than 400 young Haitians have been graduated as medical doctors in our country.
They will now work alongside the reinforcement that traveled there yesterday to save lives in that critical situation. Thus, up to one thousand doctors and healthcare personnel can be mobilized without any special effort; and most are already there willing to cooperate with any other State that wishes to save Haitian lives and rehabilitate the injured.
Another high number of Haitian youths are studying medicine in Cuba.
We also cooperate with the Haitian people in other areas within our capabilities. However, there is no other form of cooperation worthy of the definition but that of struggling in the field of ideas and political action to put an end to the endless tragedy endured by a great number of nations like Haiti.
The head of our medical brigade has informed that “the situation is difficult but we are already saving lives”. He said this in a brief message sent a few hours after arriving in Port au Prince yesterday with an additional group of doctors.
Late at night he said that the Cuban doctors and the Haitian doctors graduated at the ELAM (Latin American Medical School) were being deployed in the country. At Port au Prince they had cared for over one thousand patients while urgently commissioning a hospital that had not collapsed and using tents where necessary. They were also preparing to rapidly set up other first-aid centers.
We take wholesome pride in the cooperation that at this tragic hour the Cuban doctors and the young Haitian doctors trained in Cuba are giving their brothers and sisters in Haiti!
Fidel Castro Ruz
14 January 2010, 8.25pm
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Via The Guardian.
If this were Burma or Iran the assault on democracy would be a global cause celebre. Instead, Obama is sitting on his hands
If Honduras were in another part of the world – or if it were, say, Iran or Burma – the global reaction to its current plight would be very different. Right now, in the heart of what the United States traditionally regarded as its backyard, thousands of pro-democracy activists are risking their lives to reverse the coup that ousted the country’s elected president. Six weeks after the left-leaning Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped at dawn from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa and expelled over the border, strikes are closing schools and grounding flights as farmers and trade unionists march in defiance of masked soldiers and military roadblocks.
The coup-makers have reached for the classic South American takeover textbook. Demonstrators have been shot, more than a thousand people are reported arrested, television and radio stations have been closed down and trade unionists and political activists murdered. But although official international condemnation has been almost universal, including by the US government, barely a finger has been lifted outside Latin America to restore the elected Honduran leadership.
Of course, Latin America has long been plagued by military coups – routinely backed by the US – against elected governments. And Honduras, the original banana republic, has been afflicted more than most. But all that was supposed to have changed after the end of the cold war: henceforth, democracy would reign. And as Barack Obama declared, there was to be a “new chapter” for the Americas of “equal partnership”, with no return to the “dark past”.
But as the coup regime of Roberto Micheletti digs in without a hint of serious sanction from the country’s powerful northern sponsor, there is every sign of a historical replay. In a grotesquely unequal country of seven million people, famously owned and controlled by 15 families, in which more than two-thirds live below the poverty line, the oligarch rancher Zelaya was an unlikely champion of social advance.
But as he put it: “I thought I would bring about changes from within the neoliberal scheme, but the rich didn’t give an inch.” Even the modest reforms Zelaya did carry out, such as a 60% increase in the minimum wage and a halt to privatisation, brought howls of rage from the ruling elite, who were even more alarmed by his links with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Cuba, and his determination to respond to the demands of grassroots movements to wrest political power from the oligarchs and reform the constitution.
Zelaya’s attempt to hold a non-binding public consultation on a further vote for a constitutional convention was the trigger for the June coup. The move was portrayed by the coup’s apologists as an attempt to extend Zelaya’s term in office, which could not have happened whatever the result. But, as in the case of the Chilean coup of 1973, a supreme court decision to brand any constitutional referendum unlawful has been used by US and Latin American conservatives to give an entirely spurious veneer of legality to Zelaya’s overthrow.
Behind these manoeuvres, the links between Honduras and US military, state and corporate interests are among the closest in the hemisphere. Honduras was the base for the US Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s; it hosts the largest US military base in the region; and it is almost completely dependent economically on the US, both in terms of trade and investment.
Whatever prior traffic there may have been between the Honduran plotters and US officialdom, it’s clear that the Obama administration could pull the plug on the coup regime tomorrow by suspending military aid and imposing sanctions. But so far, despite public condemnations, the president has yet to withdraw the US ambassador, let alone block the coup leaders’ visas or freeze their accounts, as Zelaya has requested.
Meanwhile, an even more ambivalent line is being followed by Hillary Clinton. Instead of calling for the restoration of the elected president, the secretary of state – one of whose longstanding associates, Lanny Davis, is now working as a lobbyist for the coup leaders – promoted a compromising mediation and condemned Zelaya as “reckless” for trying to return to Honduras across the Nicaraguan border. A clue as to why that might be was given by the state department’s Phillip Crowley, who explained that the coup should be a “lesson” to Zelaya for regarding revolutionary Venezuela as a model for the region.
Obama this week attacked critics who say the US “hasn’t intervened enough in Honduras” as hypocrites because they were the same people who call for the “Yankees to get out of Latin America”. But of course the unanimous call from across the continent isn’t for more intervention in Honduras – but for the US government to end effective support for the coup-makers and respond to the request of the country’s elected leader to halt military and economic aid.
The reality is that Honduras is a weak vessel on the progressive wave that has swept Latin America over the past decade, challenging US domination and the Washington consensus, breaking the grip of entrenched elites and attacking social and racial inequality. While the imperial giant has been tied down with the war on terror, the continent has used that window of opportunity to assert its collective independence in an emerging multipolar world.
It’s scarcely surprising that the process is regarded as threatening by US interests, or that the US government has used the pretext of the lengthy “counter-insurgency” war in Colombia to convince the rightwing government of Alvaro Uribe to allow US armed forces to use seven military bases in the country – which goes well beyond anything the Bush administration attempted and is already heightening tensions with Ecuador and Venezuela.
That’s why the overthrow of democratic government in Honduras has a significance that goes far beyond its own borders. If the takeover is allowed to stand, not only will it embolden coup-minded military officers in neighbouring countries such as Guatemala, act as a warning to weaker progressive governments and strengthen oligarchies across the continent. It would also send an unmistakable signal that the radical social and political process that has been unleashed in Latin America – the most hopeful development in global politics in the past two decades – can be halted and reversed. Relying on Obama clearly isn’t an option: only Latin Americans can defend their own democracy.
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Declaration of the Revolutionary Government
In an act of unusual historic significance, the OAS has just formally buried the shameful resolution which excluded Cuba from the Inter-American System in 1962.
That decision was despicable and illegal, contrary to the declared aims and principles of the OAS Constitution. It was, at the same time, consistent with the trajectory of this organisation; with the motive for which was created, promoted and defended by the United States. It was consistent with its role as an instrument of US hegemony in the hemisphere and with Washington’s capacity to impose its will on Latin America at the historic moment in which the Cuban Revolution triumphed.
Today, Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing another reality. The decision adopted at the 39th session of the OAS General is the fruit of the will of governments more committed to their peoples, with the region’s real problems and with a sense of independence that, unfortunately, did not prevail in 1962. Cuba acknowledges the merit of the governments that have undertaken to formally erase that resolution, referred to in that meeting as “an unburied corpse”.
The decision to rescind Resolution 6 of the 8th OAS Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs constitutes an unquestioned disrespect for the US policy on Cuba followed since 1959. It pursues the aim of repairing a historic injustice and is a vindication for the Cuban people and peoples of the Americas.
Despite the last-minute consensus achieved, that decision was adopted against Washington’s will and in the face of intensive moves and pressure exerted by governments in the region. In that way, it dealt imperialism a defeat using its very own instrument.
Cuba welcomes with satisfaction this expression of sovereignty and civic-mindedness, while thanking those governments which, with a spirit of solidarity, independence and justice, have defended Cuba’s right to return to the organisation. It also understands the desire to free the OAS from a stigma that has remained as a symbol of the organisation’s servility.
However, Cuba once again confirms that it will not return to the OAS.
Since the triumph of the Revolution, the Organisation of American States has played an active role in Washington’s policy of hostility against Cuba. It made the economic blockade official, ruled on the embargo of weapons and strategic products, and stipulated member countries’ obligatory breaking off of diplomatic relations with our revolutionary state. Despite the exclusion in place, over the years it even tried to keep Cuba under its authority and to subject it to its own jurisdiction and that of its specialised agencies. This is an organisation with a role and a trajectory that Cuba repudiates.
The Cuban people were able to resist the aggressions and the blockade, overcome the diplomatic, political, and economic isolation, and face, on their own, without yielding, the persistent aggressiveness of the most powerful empire known to the planet.
Today our country enjoys diplomatic relations with all the countries of the hemisphere apart from the United States. It is developing broad links of friendship and cooperation with the majority of them.
Moreover, Cuba has won its full independence and is marching unstoppably toward a society that is more just, equitable, and full of solidarity every day.
It has done so with supreme heroism and sacrifice, and with the solidarity of the peoples of the Americas. It shares values that are contrary to those of neoliberal and egotistical capitalism promoted by the OAS, and feels that it has the right and the authority to say ‘no’ to the idea of joining a body in which the United States still exercises oppressive control. The peoples and governments of the region will understand this just position.
Today it can be understood more clearly than in 1962 that it is the OAS that is incompatible with the most pressing desires of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, that it is incapable of representing their values, interests and genuine yearning for democracy; it is the OAS that has been unable to solve the problems of inequality, disparities in wealth, corruption, foreign intervention, and the predatory actions of transnational capital. It is the OAS that has remained silent in the face of the most horrendous crimes, communes with the interests of imperialism, and conspires against and subverts governments genuinely and legitimately constituted with demonstrable popular support.
The speeches and declarations of San Pedro Sula have been more than eloquent. Well-founded criticisms of the organisation’s anachronism, given its divorce from continental realities and its disgraceful record, cannot be ignored.
The demands to end, once and for all, the criminal US blockade of Cuba reflect the growing and unstoppable sentiment of an entire hemisphere. The spirit of independence represented there by the many that spoke is the one with which Cuba identifies.
Aspirations for the integration and coordination of Latin America and the Caribbean are increasingly manifest. Cuba is actively participating in, and proposes continuing to do so, the representative regional mechanisms of what José Martí called “Our America”, from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, including all of the Caribbean islands.
Strengthening, expanding and harmonising those bodies and groups is the path chosen by Cuba; not the outlandish illusion of returning to an organisation that does not allow reform and that has been condemned by history.
The response of the people of Cuba to the ignominious 8th Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the OAS was the Second Declaration of Havana, approved in a mass assembly on 4 February 1962 by more than 1 million Cubans in the Plaza de la Revolución.
The declaration textually affirmed:
“Great as was the epic of Latin American independence, heroic as was that struggle, today’s generation of Latin Americans is called upon to engage in an epic which is even greater and more decisive for humanity. For that struggle was for liberation from Spanish colonial power, from a decadent Spain invaded by Napoleon’s armies. Today the call for struggle is for liberation from the most powerful imperial metropolis in the world, from the most important force in the imperialist world and to render humanity an even greater service than that rendered by our predecessors.
“… For this great humanity has said, ‘Enough!’ and has begun to march. And its march of giants will not be halted until they conquer real independence, for which they have died in vain more than once.”
We will be loyal to these ideas, which have made it possible for our people to maintain Cuba free, sovereign and independent.
Havana, 8 June 2009
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Yesterday I referred to what was funny about the “Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain”.
Today I could refer to what is tragic about it. I hope our friends do not take any offence in this. There were some differences between the draft that we received, which was going to be submitted by the hosts of the Summit, and the document that was finally published. In all that last-minute haste, there was hardly any time for anything. Some items had been discussed at long meetings held some weeks previous to the Summit. At the very last moment, proposals such as the one submitted by Bolivia, complicated even more the whole picture. The Bolivian proposal was included as a note in the document. It stated that Bolivia considered that the implementation of policies and cooperation schemes aimed at expanding the use of bio-fuels in the western hemisphere could affect and have an impact on the availability of foodstuffs, the increase of food prices, deforestation, the displacement of populations as a result of the land demand, and that consequently this could make the food crisis to be even worse, which will directly affect low income persons and, most of all, the poorest economies among developing countries. The note added that the Bolivian government, while recognizing the need to look for and resort to environmentally friendly alternative sources of energy, such as the geothermal, solar, and eolic sources of energy, and to small and medium size hydro-power generators, it advocates for an alternative approach, based on the possibility of living well and in harmony with nature, in order to develop public policies aimed at the promotion of safe alternative energies that could ensure the preservation of the planet, our ‘mother land’.
When analyzing this note submitted by Bolivia please bear in mind that the United States and Brazil are the two biggest producers of bio-fuels in the world, something that is opposed by an increasing number of persons in the planet, whose resistance has been growing since the dark days of George Bush.
Obama’s advisors published in the Internet their version -in English- of the interview the US president granted to some journalists in Port of Spain. At one point, he asserted that there was something he found interesting –an added that he had known of it in a more abstract way but that he found it interesting in more specific terms- which was listening to these leaders who, when speaking about Cuba, did so referring specifically to the thousands of doctors Cuba is disseminating throughout the region, and finding how much these countries depended on them. He said this reminded them in the US of the fact that if their only interaction with many of these countries was the war on drugs; that if their only interaction was of a military character, then it was possible that they would not be developing connections that, with time, could enhance their influence with a positive effect when they may find it necessary to advance policies of their interest in the region.
He said he thought that was the reason why it was so important -for the sake of their interaction, not only here in this hemisphere, but in the whole world- to recognize that their military power was just part of their power, and that they have to resort to diplomacy and their aid to development in a more intelligent way, so that peoples could see concrete and practical improvements in the life of ordinary citizens, based on the foreign policy of the United States.
Jake, one of the journalists, said thanks to the President and added that in Port of Spain the President had listened to many Latin American leaders who want the US to lift the embargo against Cuba. The journalist reminded the President he had said that was an important influence that should not be eliminated. But he added that in 2004 the President did support the lifting of the embargo. He reminded the President he had said that the embargo had not managed to raise the standards of living, that it had squeezed the innocent, and that it was high time for the US to recognize that that particular policy had failed. The journalist wondered what made the President change his opinion with regards to the embargo.
The President responded that the year 2004 seemed to be thousands of years ago, and wondered what he himself was doing in 2004.
The journalist answered that back then he was running for the Senate. The President added that the fact that Raul Castro had said his government was ready to talk with the US government not only about the lifting of the embargo but also about other issues, namely, human rights and political prisoners, was a signal of progress. He said there were some things the Cuban government could do. He added that Cuba could release the political prisoners, reduce the surcharge imposed on remittances, which will correspond with the policies that they have applied, whereby Cuban-American families are allowed to send remittances. He said that it so happened that Cuba applies a very high surcharge. He said that Cuba is exacting significant profits. He added that this would be an example of cooperation where both governments would be working to help the Cuban family and improve the living standards in Cuba.
There is no doubt that the President misinterpreted Raul’s statements.
When the President of Cuba said he was ready to discuss any topic with the US President, he meant he was not afraid of addressing any issue. That shows his courage and confidence on the principles of the Revolution. No one should feel astonished that Raul spoke about pardoning those who were convicted on March, 2003, and about sending them all to the United States, should that country be willing to release the Five Cuban Anti-Terrorism Heroes. The convicts, as was already the case with the Bay of Pig’s mercenaries, are at the service of a foreign power that threatens and blockades our homeland.
Besides, the assertion that Cuba imposes a very high surcharge and obtains significant profits is an attempt by the President’s advisors to cause trouble and division among Cubans. Every country charges a certain amount for all hard currency transfers. If those are made in dollars, all the more reason we have to do it, because that is the currency of the country that blockades us. Not all Cubans have relatives abroad that could send them remittances. Redistributing a relatively small part of them to benefit those more in need of food, medicines and other goods is absolutely fair. Our homeland does not have the privilege of converting the money minted by the State into hard currency -something the Chinese very often call “junk money”- as I have explained on several occasions, which has been one of the causes of the present economic crisis. With what money the US is bailing out its banks and multinationals, while plunging future generations of Americans into indebtedness? Would Obama be ready to discuss those issues?
Daniel Ortega stated it very clearly when he remembered the first conversation he had with Carter, which today I will once more repeat:
“I had the opportunity to meet with President Carter, and when he told me that now, after the Somozas’ tyranny had been ousted, and the Nicaraguan people had defeated the Somozas’ tyranny, it was high time ‘for Nicaragua to change’, I said: ‘No, Nicaragua does not need to change; you are the ones that need to change. Nicaragua has never invaded the United States. Nicaragua has never mined the US ports. Nicaragua has never launched a single stone against the American nation. Nicaragua has not imposed any government on the United States. You are the ones that need to change, not the Nicaraguans.’ ”
At the press conference, as well as in the final meetings of the Summit, Obama looked conceited. Such attitude by the US President was consistent with the abject positions adopted by some Latin American leaders. Some days ago I said that whatever was said and done at the Summit will be known anyway.
When the US President said, in answering to Jake, that thousands of years had elapsed since 2004 until the present, he was superficial. Should we wait for so many years before his blockade is lifted? He did not invent it, but he embraced it just as much as the previous ten US presidents did. Should he continue down that same path, we could predict he would face a sure fiasco, just as all his predecessor did. That is not the dream entertained by Martin Luther King, whose role in the struggle for human rights will ever more illuminate the American people’s path.
We are living in a new era. Changes are unavoidable. Leaders just pass through; peoples prevail. There would be no need to wait for thousands of years to pass by; only eight years will be enough so that a new US President –who will no doubt be less intelligent, promising and admired in the world than Barack Obama- riding on a better armored car, or on a more modern helicopter, or on a more sophisticated plane, occupies that inglorious position.
Tomorrow we shall have more news about the Summit.
Fidel Castro Ruz
April 21, 2009
5:34 p.m.
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Letter received from Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez, one of the five Cuban intelligence officers illegally imprisoned in Miami (read more about their case on the main CPGB-ML site.
Dear comrades in the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist),
Many thanks for your revolutionary greetings and for your support in the struggle for justice. A better world of solidarity is possible. Best wishes in your important tasks.
Unidos venceremos (together we will win)!
Greetings from the 5.
Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez.
If you would like to write to the Miami Five, here are the addresses (Cuba Solidarity Campaign website).
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Via Press TV.
Bolivia is seeking to take Tel Aviv to International Criminal Court over the brutal atrocities the Israeli forces have committed in Gaza.
The Andean state says it is intended to make regional allies take a unified stance against “the Israeli political and military leaders responsible for the offensive on the Gaza Strip” and make it to stand trial at the international body in the Hague, said Sacha Llorenti, whose portfolio covers civil society.
Moves to begin the legal process will begin “probably next week,” Bolivia’s deputy justice and human rights minister Wilfredo Chavez told journalists during the visit to Geneva, AFP reported on Friday.
Bolivia followed in the steps of its ally Venezuela and severed diplomatic ties with Israel over its massacre of the Gazans and snubbing the international calls for an ‘immediate’ and ‘durable’ truce, said the Latin American governments.
The Bolivian president Evo Morales told a group of diplomats in the administrative capital of La Paz that he will request the International Criminal Court (ICC) to file genocide charges against Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The ICC is competent to adjudicate war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed after 2002.
Israel and its closest ally, the United States, are not among the 108 signatories of the Rome Statute creating the Hague-based court in 2000 to investigate and prosecute war crimes.
After 21 days of non-stop bombardment and aggression, the Israeli invasion of Gaza has left 1,133 Palestinians killed and more than 5,200 wounded.
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Via Xinhua.
HAVANA, Jan. 2 (Xinhua) — Child mortality rates in Cuba dropped to 4.7 out of every 1,000 newborns in 2008, the lowest in history, the Health Ministry said Friday.
The figure places Cuba among the nations in the world which have the lowest death rates for children under one year of age.
According to the ministry, there were 122,556 births in 2008, 10,184 more than in 2007 when the mortality rate was of 5.3 out of every 1,000 newborns.
A total of 579 newborn babies died in Cuba last year, due mainly to perinatal causes, congenital anomalies and infections.
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Esteemed Comrade Fidel Castro Ruz
Esteemed Comrade Raul Castro Ruz
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba
Havana
Cuba
Dear Comrades
It is with the greatest joy and the warmest and most militant feelings of solidarity that we wholeheartedly offer you our congratulations and best wishes on the 50th anniversary of the historic triumph of the Cuban revolution.
The victory of the Cuban revolution half a century ago, and its triumphant subsequent consolidation and development, is a matter of the utmost importance not only for the Cuban people, but for the whole of the Caribbean, the whole of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the whole of the international working class, the global socialist cause and the international communist movement.
In advancing to nationwide victory, the heroic revolutionaries, led by Fidel and Che, not only liberated the Cuban people – for the first time the Great October Socialist Revolution had been extended to the western hemisphere. As the great Korean revolutionary leader Comrade Kim Il Sung observed in 1968:
“The Cuban revolution is the first socialist revolutionary victory in Latin America, and it is a continuation, in Latin America, of the Great October Revolution. With the triumph of the Cuban revolution, the red banner of socialism now flies high over Latin America, which was regarded until quite recently as the hereditary estate of US imperialism; thus the socialist camp has been extended to the western hemisphere and has grown much stronger. Today the Republic of Cuba, marching firmly at the forefront of the Latin American revolution, is the beacon of hope for the fighting people of Latin America and it casts its victorious beam along the road of struggle. The triumph of the Cuban revolution shook the US imperialist colonial system to its very foundations in the western hemisphere and has thrown the whole of Latin America into revolutionary turbulence, dramatically arousing the people to join in the dedicated struggle for independence and freedom. Indeed, the triumph of the Cuban revolution marked the beginning of the disintegration of the system of US imperialist colonial rule in Latin America; it sternly judged and sentenced to destruction that imperialism which had exploited and oppressed the people in this area for so long.”
Over five decades of socialist revolution and construction, the Cuban working class and people, under the leadership of the Communist Party and Comrade Fidel, have overcome one difficulty after another, including the decades-long, illegal US embargo and blockade, the Special Period occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries due to revisionist betrayal, repeated armed aggression by US imperialism and its lackeys, and repeated natural disasters, to build a genuine socialist homeland. Today, despite all adverse circumstances and challenges, Socialist Cuba provides all her people with food, clothing and shelter. Cuba’s achievements in healthcare and education, in particular, are not only a precious gain of your working class, but also are rightly the envy of the people of the whole world, including, not least, the working people in the United States of America and elsewhere in the imperialist heartlands.
Socialist Cuba has from its very inception been synonymous with internationalism. From Ireland in the North Atlantic to Timor Leste in the South Pacific, no theatre of anti-imperialist struggle has been too small or too far away to be separated from the care and concern of the Cuban revolution. The bequest that the immortal revolutionary Che Guevara left his children not to be indifferent to the plight of a single oppressed person anywhere on earth has truly become an article of faith for your entire people. How fitting, therefore, that your Young Pioneers take as their motto: “Let us be like Che!”
In Africa, from virtually the first day that the patriots of Algeria and Guinea Bissau raised the banner of armed revolution, Cuban internationalists were at their side. Today, thousands of Cuban doctors and medical workers are to be found in nearly every African country, often attending to the needs of the poorest and most marginalised communities. Above all, we can never forget how your intervention in Angola, one of the most glorious pages in the glorious history of proletarian internationalism, not only saved that newly liberated country from apartheid slavery, but also played a decisive role in the ensuing liberation of Namibia and South Africa and the extirpation of that crime against humanity, racist apartheid.
Above all, as Comrade Kim Il Sung observed:
“Consolidation of the triumph of the Cuban revolution is not only an important question on which the life or death, the rise or fall, of the Cuban people depends. It is also a key factor in influencing the general development of the Latin American revolution.”
Today, thanks not least to the example and inspiration of the Cuban revolution, the US imperialist schemes to maintain Latin America as its “backyard” have imploded and lie in tatters. It is not Socialist Cuba but US imperialism that is isolated. Most importantly, with Cuba as the socialist fortress, today you are joined by Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua as countries that are aspiring to socialism and which are taking the first steps towards the socialist transformation of the state and society and the building of a new life for working people. All this is a priceless gain and the greatest defence of your revolution.
Our party attaches the greatest importance to our work to support and defend Socialist Cuba, which we see as an integral part of our own revolutionary work. We highly value our fraternal relations with your party, which have been developing on very good terms during this last year in particular and it is our firm desire and steadfast determination to consolidate them further in this jubilee year of your revolution.
We take this opportunity to extend our special good wishes to Comrade Fidel and to express our ardent hope that he continues to make a full recovery from illness.
Please be assured of our full support and solidarity at all times.
LONG LIVE THE CUBAN REVOLUTION!
Yours fraternally
Harpal Brar, Chairman
Zane Carpenter, General Secretary
Ella Rule, International Secretary
