Cuba

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Cuban Flag, Museum of the Revolution, Havana, Cuba, 2012. (Photo: Terry Feuerborn / Flickr)

The Cuban Revolution through the eyes of the women of my life
Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World on December 12, 2023 by Alejandra Garcia (more by Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World) (Posted Dec 27, 2023)

This January 1st Cuba will celebrate 65 years since the triumph of the Revolution of 1959 led by Fidel and a group of valuable men and women, for whom the gratitude of the Cuban people remains intact. Today, Resumen Latinoamericano honors that victory through three women whose lives, although they lived in different historical periods, have the Revolution as a common thread. They are my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother.

……


Photo: Bill Hackwell

My great-grandmother Zoyla Martinez did not forget that May downpour when the rural guard threw her out of her house, back in 1931. Until the last day of her 104 years, she remembered the same image, standing with five children clutching her sack, a few wooden belongings, and a mattress on a mud puddle in Jaguey Grande, Matanzas. It was the image of her worst nightmares.

After that day in May, when she was still in her 20’s, she knew the same thing she suspected when she looked out of the window of her former home and saw her parents working from sunrise to sunset at the plow when she was still very young: in the Cuba of “before” (before 1959), honest people, poor people, were not worth a penny.

She decided to work, to make her own home, never again to go through the humiliation of seeing herself and her small and sick children in the muddy streets of Jagüey. She sold slippers knitted by her own hands, cleaned and ironed the laundry of the wealthiest families in the area from Monday to Monday.

Years later, after paying the price of sugar at her neighborhood grocery store, she stood in front of the vendor waiting for her change. The man, with disdain, told Zoila how could she expect him to give her back a single cent, which was all that was left over from her purchase. Without saying much, she pointed to the white-columned house halfway down the block. “That house is mine, and I built it penny by penny,” she said without a muscle trembling in her face.

Homelessness was not the only painful experience my great-grandmother lived through. Her eldest daughter Mercedes died in her arms when she was only five years old, when they were returning on horseback from the only medical center within several kilometers.

The doctor who saw her, without much examination, told her that the girl’s fever was probably a cold and gave her a couple of pills to reduce it. Zoila was suspicious that it was just that, she had already heard about the diphtheria that plagued Jagüey, and feared the worst. “Don’t worry,” said the doctor, paying no attention to her concern, “with these pills she will feel better. Thirty minutes later, the little girl died.

Then, during the seventh of her pregnancies, labor pains came in the seventh month. Zoila’s mother was the midwife for this and her other six children, once again in the living room of her home. This is how she gave birth to Sergio.

I can almost see her describing the size of the baby to me, with the old woman’s hands joined together to form a shell. “He was so tiny,” she told me, “that he fit in the shoebox that I lined with white sheets, where he slept for only two nights, and then he died, because in those days doctors did not take care of premature babies, especially if they were born to poor parents.

Another of her sons, Lázaro, died later of leukemia, also at the hands of Zoila, who accompanied him in his last hours of agony. Another of her sons, Oscar, hanged himself at the age of 20 because of the depression caused by seeing a friend die while being a victim of forced labor in the Zapata Swamp. Lazaro sang like the gods, but whose poverty could not take him very far in the singing industry.

The Revolution came to Zoila on January 1, 1959, and the children who survived the Cuba of “before” were able to study beyond sixth grade. She even managed to see her grandchildren graduate from the university. She hid the pain of the preceding years with the strength of her hands. She planted avocados, mangoes and lemons in her backyard, and then sold them on the streets of the neighborhood, which gradually turned from dirt to asphalt.

She spent her last days in the hospital of her town, built after 1959, attended by a dozen doctors who did not believe that she could remain so lucid at 104 years of age. One of them, in the last consultation Zoila would receive, in March 2015, wanted to know what kept her alive in the hardest years of her existence. “I never stopped working,” she answered.


The author with her mother and grandmother.

Mirta Ramirez, my grandmother, arrived in Havana in 1959 to become a nurse when she was about to turn 24. She brought from Jagüey Grande a half-filled briefcase and, within it, the memories of a childhood of sacrifices. Her mother, Zoila, instilled in her since she was a child that life must be faced with hard work. That is why, since her adolescence, she helped her take care of the house and the rest of her siblings, cleaned houses and ironed clothes for the wealthiest in her hometown, and was for a while the maid of a hostile family that, on more than one occasion, when she was ready to leave, threw buckets of water on the clean floor just for her to dry everything again.

She became a nurse two years later, in 1961, thus fulfilling a possible dream. She had a son and kept her upbringing together with her housework and the areas she worked in to assist and check the health condition of the inhabitants of several communities in the capital.

At 90 years old, photos of her mother, her son, her granddaughters, her nursing days, are the only few luxuries that hang on the walls of her house. She overcame the pain and after-effects of a recent heart attack, thanks to the will and attention of the island’s health system. A few years earlier, when she was strong and healthy, she used to sew and read for fun, and went out every day to the streets, both to buy bread and to tell anyone who would like to hear what the Cuba of “before” was like, the Cuba of her childhood and early youth.

“There are a lot of ungrateful people out there,” she sometimes grumbled after arriving from the grocery store or market. “Whoever thinks they can come to speak to me against the revolution is mistaken. Everything in life has cost me sacrifices, but I owe a lot to it. When something seems impossible, my grandmother Mirta remembers her mother:

If she could be useful at 100 years old, then I too have the strength for more.

***

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the smell of the newspapers and boxes from the archives of the state-run newspaper Juventud Rebelde, the dust stirred up by the air conditioning, the narrow, dark hallway, and the rows of metal shelves. As a little girl, many times, when my mother, along with other journalists, assembled the next day’s pages of that newspaper, I hid to play in that place that was a world of indecipherable words and thoughts for me at that time.

From those days at the end of the 90s, I also remember the times I slept between two chairs in the newsroom, while she typed non-stop on a typewriter, with which I also sometimes played on, without her noticing. She helped, from her space, to build and maintain a country that at that time was going through the greatest of crises, which many of us children were protected from and barely noticed.

And I grew up, we grew up, accompanying each other later in other press media outlets, making sacrifices to be together. And so we continued, without ceasing to believe in the country that made it possible for my mother to become a journalist, for my grandmother to feel immortal and for my great-grandmother to see the Revolution with a new home and new hopes. Like like them I too will prevail and so will our revolution that has been built by and for the dispossessed.

https://mronline.org/2023/12/27/the-cub ... f-my-life/

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Cuba emphasises connection between culture and revolutionary patriotism

‘In the multiplicity of forms in which our culture manifests itself, beyond the artistic and literary, lies the powerful force that sustains Cuba.’
Barbara Montalvo

Tuesday 5 December 2023



Not for nothing did Comrade Fidel Castro emphasise the importance of culture during the difficult decade following the fall of the USSR.

The following speech was given by Ambassador Bárbara Montalvo Álvarez of Cuba at a celebration in London of the Day of Cuban Culture, 2023.

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HE Iván Romero Martínez, Ambassador of the Republic of Honduras and Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, dear colleagues
Distinguished and esteemed guests
Cubanos

I thank the ambassador of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Rocío Maneiro, for hosting us in this emblematic Bolivar Hall.

Thanks to all our guests for joining us. I would like to especially thank the Cubans living in Britain, those present and those who, wishing to share this moment, were unable to attend.

One hundred and fifty-five years ago, on 10 October 1868, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the Father of the Homeland, freed his slaves and invited them to join the struggle for our independence.

Later, on 20 October, the Cuban lawyer and patriot Perucho Figueredo wrote the lyrics of what would become our national anthem, on horseback, shortly after the Mambi troops under the command of Céspedes liberated the city of Bayamo. Amid the euphoria of the rebel troops, mixed with the jubilant crowd, the national anthem was sung for the first time.

After some time, and faced with the military superiority of one of the most powerful armies of the time, the people of Bayamo preferred to set fire to their houses and properties rather than to surrender. The rich, educated and cultured Creoles were the first to do so, and they were joined by the rest of the population.

The Day of Cuban Culture remembers and celebrates these important events in our history.

The moment when our national anthem was sung for the first time definitely marked the birth of a rebellious nation and its identity.

It is also the artistic manifestation of that profound and irreversible act that shaped the Cuban consciousness.

It is the highest and most genuine expression and symbol of our national culture. That is why the 20th of October was declared the Day of Cuban Culture.

It is a day of celebration, of reaffirmation of our roots, and to pay tribute. This year, it is dedicated to the work of young artists, to the 220th birthday anniversary of Santiago de Cuba poet José María Heredia. And to the 75th anniversary of the founding of the National Ballet of Cuba, which is a fusion of Cuban history and culture.

It is not possible to understand our history without taking into account the indissoluble link between culture and the defence of the nation, without knowing that culture is the shield and the sword of the Cuban nation.

This explains why, in 1992, when more than a few wondered whether we would survive, Fidel, in a memorable meeting with Cuban artists and intellectuals, reminded us: “Culture is the first thing we must save!”

In the multiplicity of forms in which our culture manifests itself, beyond the artistic and literary, lies the powerful force that sustains Cuba. That island, small and powerful at the same time, that we carry within us, that we feel wherever we are, that inflames our souls and for which we would give our lives before seeing it enslaved again.

Cuba, which always reminds us the most beautiful verses of its anthem: “For to die for the homeland is to live.”

https://thecommunists.org/2023/12/05/ne ... -day-2023/

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Urban agriculture, a safe and productive alternative

Army General Raul Castro Ruz sent a greeting to the members of the Urban Agriculture Movement

Author: Ventura de Jesús | informacion@granma.cu

december 28, 2023 10:12:44



Cárdenas, Matanzas -Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, leader of the Cuban Revolution, sent his greetings to those who promote the Urban Agriculture Movement in the country, an idea of which he was the promoter and driving force 36 years ago.

This was made known by the member of the Political Bureau and Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, at the national event of that program, held at the Zeoponico in this city, which highlighted the results of this province in the current year.

Marrero recognized the decisive role of the Movement, for its integrality and economic dynamics, and for obtaining healthy and innocuous products, in addition to the impact on the municipality's scenario.

Although he appreciated the progress, with the incorporation of new areas in exploitation, higher yields and the incorporation of more families in food production, the Prime Minister called to consolidate in 2024 those initiatives undertaken this year, as well as to increase the number of organopónicos, flower beds, and yards and plots.

The six outstanding provinces, outstanding producers, experts and founders of the Movement were recognized at the ceremony.

The Head of Government was accompanied by the Deputy Prime Minister, Jorge Luis Tapia Fonseca; by Major General Eliecer Velázquez Almaguer, head of the Youth Labor Army; by Major General Andrés Laureano González Brito, head of the Central Army; by Susely Morfa González, first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party, and by other leaders of the Government, the FAR, the Ministry of the Interior and Agriculture.

During the event, it was ratified that urban, suburban and family agriculture contributes to the availability of food, and is an increasingly popular, safe and productive alternative.

https://en.granma.cu/cuba/2023-12-28/ur ... lternative

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THE TERROR RETURNS: CUBA DISCLOSES LATEST US ATTACKS
Posted by W. T. Whitney, Jr. | Jan 22, 2024


BY W.T. WHITNEY JR.

January 16, 2024

When the U.S. government launched its so-called “Global War on Terror” after the al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S.-led terror attacks against Cuba had already been ongoing for over 40 years.

They included: military invasion (1961), CIA-sponsored counter-revolutionary paramilitaries in the countryside (1960s), a fully loaded Cuban airliner brought down by U.S. agents (1976), attacks on coastal towns and fishing boats, biowarfare, hundreds of killings in Cuba and abroad, sabotage, and bombings of hotels and tourist facilities (1997).

With the new century, however, violence and terror seemed to be on vacation. The Cuban media and sympathetic international media were reporting little or nothing about U.S.-based terror attacks that had been their stock in trade.

On Dec. 17, 2023, Cuban Chancellor Bruno Rodríguez released a statement harking back to the violent past. He insisted that the “U.S. government is very aware of the official, public, and repeated denunciations by the Cuban government of the assistance, protection, and tolerance that promotors and perpetrators of terrorist acts against Cuba enjoy in the United States.”

He added, “Recently Cuba’s Interior Ministry has reported on the dismantling of destabilization plans developed in the United States by terrorists of Cuban origin in a security operation that led to the detention of several persons tied to this conspiracy.”

Rodríguez’s statement followed a report appearing in the Communist Party’s Granma newspaper on Dec. 9, 2023. A Florida resident, traveling on a jet ski, came ashore near Matanzas on Cuba’s northern coast in late 2023; no date was specified. Carrying pistols, ammunition, and loading clips, the individual headed for Cienfuegos, his province of origin, and was arrested.

The unnamed man “contacted several people in order to recruit them.” He allegedly had ties in South Florida with “terrorists who publicly promote violent actions against Cuba … [and who] have received military training with weapons, have the physical equipment … and other resources to carry out their plans.”

Granma stated that “the terrorists, with their plans for actions aimed at undermining internal order, go beyond a virtual setting; they concentrated on promoting violence so as to cause pain, suffering, and death at the year’s end.”

These “instigators of hate and death … appear on [Cuba’s] National List … [Cuban security officials] have investigated actions they’ve taken in the national territory or in other countries.”

A report on Jan. 4 from Mexican journalist Beto Rodríguez discusses the Interior Ministry’s “National List of persons and entities … associated with terrorism against Cuba.” Since 1999, they “have planned, carried out, and plotted acts of extreme violence in Cuban territory.’’

The List first appeared on Dec. 7 in Cuba’s Official Gazette as Resolution 19/2023. It names 61 individuals and 19 terrorist organizations, all based in the United States, presumably most of them in South Florida. One of the names on the List belongs to the jet skier, but which one is unspecified.

According to Beto Rodríguez, criminal investigations in Cuba revealed that some of the listed persons targeted “governmental and tourist installations and carrying out sabotage, illegal incursions, human trafficking, and preparations for war.” They “made plans for assassinating leaders of the revolution.”

He also reported that the arrested jet skier “intended to recruit Cubans for burning sugarcane plantations, provoke disturbances, disturb tourist centers, and hand out propaganda.” “[C]itizen denunciation” led to his arrest.

Appearing on the List is Alexander Alazo Baró, who shot at Cuba’s embassy in Washington with a semiautomatic weapon on April 30, 2020. He is still “under investigation.” Two Molotov cocktails exploded at the embassy on Sept. 24, 2023. The perpetrator is unknown.

Beto Rodríguez notes that on Nov. 24, 2023, the U.S. State Department, warning prospective travelers to Cuba of “potential terrorist actions … against the United States,” advised them to avoid “sites commonly used for demonstrations.”

A day earlier, a large pro-Palestinian march headed by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel passed by the U.S. embassy in Havana. Journalist Rodríguez surmises that “Washington already knew beforehand that anti-Cuban groups were planning to enter onto the island to commit acts of terrorism.”

Hernando Calvo Ospina, veteran analyst of U.S. terror against Cuba, reported on Jan. 10 that Cuba’s government referred the National List to the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), which deals with crime extending across borders.

Describing the activities of the listed persons, Calvo Ospina highlights their new use of social media to communicate propaganda and to “incite internal violence, the assassination of State personalities, the destruction of common goods and all kinds of sabotage.”

Ospina states that “the objectives now being pursued are similar to those of the so-called ‘historical exile group.’ Only the method has changed. Both have one thing in common: they use terrorist methods.” Some of those whose names appear were carrying out terrorist activities in the 1990s.

He indicates that “Many received direct funding from the U.S. State Department, and also from the CIA, which uses various entities and NGOs to deliver it.”

According to the Congressional Research Service, the government’s so-called “democracy and human rights funding” for Cuba, a reference to support provided for interventionist programming, amounted to $20 million annually from 2014 to 2022. In July 2023, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee, sought “to boost funding by 50% for democracy promotion efforts in Cuba.”

What looks like a revival of the U.S. government’s former anti-Cuba terror campaign may point to one or more of several possibilities:

*Terror attacks had actually continued during the past two decades, but Cuba’s government, for unknown reasons, opted not to publicize them.

*Terror attacks did continue, but at a low ebb, and now the Cuban government, at a difficult time, seeks to inform world opinion of illegal and dangerous U.S. actions, the object being to promote multi-national mobilization against prolonged U.S. all-but-war against Cuba.

*The U.S. government, taking advantage of Cubans’ discouragement aggravated by a terrible economic crisis, has successfully recruited dissidents and once more is capable of mounting terror attacks.

*The U.S. government, true to its ideologic core, to its imperialist self, stops at nothing while dominating or beating up on lesser peoples of the world.


This article appeared in the Peoples World.

https://mltoday.com/the-terror-returns- ... s-attacks/

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Cuban Tourism and Its Pending Issues
JANUARY 23, 2024


A vintage car in the historic part of Havana. File photo.

By Luz Marina Fornieles Sánchez – Jan 19, 2024

Tourism continues to be essential to alleviating the difficulties derived from the war economy that Cuba is going through. These are times to correct distortions and reinvigorate the economic panorama.

Cuba starts on a new path for its development this year, after the government announced a series of measures with this aim last year. Now we are working on its careful implementation in 2024. We steer back into the path, and we are looking for solutions with the conviction that in the face of complexity in the current situation, we must act in order to resolve it, we must encourage citizen participation and have rigorous control.

We have to aim at sectors consistently contributing to the lack of financial liquidity, a problem that hits everywhere, in order to confront the criminal unilateral blockade of the United States, which is increasingly twisted and whose framework of legislation “watches” us 24 hours of every day, of all weeks and months of the year, in this case leap year with 366 days, to “strangle” us.

That may be a strong word but it carries the weight of truth: more than 80% of the Cuban population is living in hardship because of the blockade. And as we have lived with that ongoing hostility, we did so during COVID-19, and we survived. We were able to alleviate the colossal challenge that 2023 represented, and now, in this new year, we are analyzing alternatives.

In 2023 there were good indicators in tobacco, seafood, and biotechnology, and the recreation industry was reactivated, but far from the expected and necessary pace.

Creative initiatives and capacities to meet deadlines must be developed, otherwise they become simple goals that, for one reason or another, could remain half-fulfilled.

Apart from the exports of professional services abroad, the sphere of recreation is a leading sector due to its condition of dynamically capturing foreign currency, while at the same time it is linked with other activities, which like wagons are driven by the locomotive for its requirements of supplies.

Without ignoring the backlash of events like the strong media war, the hegemonic global crisis—present equally in markets and tourism, and the fierce harassment of Cuba by the White House, Cuba plans to receive 3,100,000 tourists this year, in a plan adapted to our context.

In 2023, Cuba received around 2,450,000 tourists, according to figures from the Ministry of Economy and Planning, out of an initial plan of 3.5 million, which from the beginning seemed extremely exaggerated, in the vain illusion of getting closer to the more than 4.2 million tourists of 2019.

Among the pending issues of tourism are palpable realities such as the lack of airport connections that impact international tourist flows, prioritizing the potential of Latin America and Russia; creation of new products derived from other attractions, and lack of taking advantage of foreign tourism markets to promote Cuba.

The quality of the service, with a multi-skilled and language-dominant employment, is a quality that adorns Cuba beyond its many attributes, sometimes with a certain similarity to its main competition in the area, the Caribbean, only that their access is not restricted to travelers from the US. In fact, 90% of those who vacation in the Caribbean are Americans.

The blockade does harm, and this is a simple example: Washington persecutes both people and companies that trade with “the enemy,” that is, Cuba. The US reduced the arrival of cruise ships to zero with its brutal blockade. It hit right where it hurts because the US knows that there is interest in the “Cursed Island,” which has also been put on the list of alleged states sponsoring terrorism, by successive United States administrations.

Being displaced from the natural market, that is, the US, we had to look elsewhere, and so vacationers from Eastern Europe and China are becoming common in these parts, clearly at the moment in the rescue process after the consequences of the pandemic, which still weigh upon us.

We cannot start from preconceived ideas that we have the best natural environment and a high-quality and diverse hotel and non-hotel infrastructure. Our competitive neighbors such as the Mexican Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, Central America, and Puerto Rico also exhibit their vacation proposals, and their US clients are assured, which is why the forces of the national industry are called upon to develop creative activities to get more and more parts of the pie. It would not be easy, that is for sure. It never has been.

During a speech at the International Fair of Tourism of Cuba (FITCuba 2023), held in Varadero in May 2023, Tourism Minister Juan Carlos García Granda said that the sector “has a leading role, because it represents the sector that contributes the most income to the national economy and is one of the strategic axes of the development of the Archipelago.”

Well, knowing its role, it only remains for each person to do their job efficiently. Cuba has preserved natural benefits, more than 600 kilometers of beach, a human capital of recognized qualifications, colonial heritage cities, nine World Heritage sites, a broad historical-cultural legacy, around 80,000 hotel rooms and 14 tourist centers possessing of a potential for 400,000 rooms, of which close to 20% has been executed.

The greatest investment dynamic in the country in the last two decades has occurred, precisely, in this area, so it is urgent to respond to this effort with superior results.

With such guarantees we have the tools to fight, especially when Cuba constitutes a safe, politically stable destination and with foreign partners who have backed us up, which certainly speaks of a determined commitment with Cuba; and we have a people with a well-earned reputation for being hospitable and supportive. In the midst of the demands of today’s challenging context: the field is called to demonstrate that: Yes, it can be done.

In March 2022, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, asked for a review of the organization to work with creativity. We need, he said then, more innovative tourism.

As we understand, this exhortation is still valid, taking into account the turbulent scenario Cuba is experiencing, where the sector has its state mandate defined. There is no other option: Cuban tourism must broaden its horizons and solve pending issues.

(¡Ahora!)

https://orinocotribune.com/cuban-touris ... ng-issues/

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Biden Administration Prolongs Economic Warfare on Cuba
By Dario Calvisi - February 9, 2024 0


[Source: codepink.org]

No Significant Change in U.S. Policy Toward Cuba As the Biden Administration Concedes That It “Has Not Even Begun the Review Process” to Remove Cuba from the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism

The U.S.-enforced embargo on Cuba is now more than 60 years old. First introduced by the Kennedy administration in February 1962, it remains one of the most anachronistic and cruel legacies of the Cold War, with no credible rationale supporting it today.

As CovertAction Magazine reported, President Biden, who had “long courted the vote of the Cuban-American lobby,” unnecessarily prolonged the suffering of the Cuban people on September 14, 2023, by extending the embargo by one more year, claiming that the blockade “was in the national interest of the United States.”

The Obama administration had raised some hopes of improved relations with Havana, restoring diplomatic relations, relaxing travel restrictions and at least considering a gradual normalization of economic relationships.


The renewed Cuban Embassy’s inaugural ceremony in D.C. on July 20, 2015. [Source: time.com]

That door was brutally shut by the Trump presidency, which largely reversed the normalization initiatives by hardening the embargo on Cuba, restoring tighter travel restrictions and, more consequentially, by officially designating Cuba a State Sponsor of Terrorism (“SSOT”) based on highly controversial claims, which prompted a new wave of economic sanctions against the people of the island.

President Reagan had first designated Cuba a terrorism-sponsor state in 1982, due to Cuba’s support to revolutionary movements in Central America, but that designation had been removed by the Obama administration in 2015, based on an intelligence review that ruled out that Cuba was actually sponsoring terrorism.


Deputy Assistant Secretary Eric Jacobstein [Source: State.gov]

The Biden administration had promised to initiate the process to reverse Trump’s decision, but it has utterly failed to do so. As The Intercept revealed, in December 2023 “State Department official Eric Jacobstein stunned members of Congress” in a private briefing (almost three full years after Biden was sworn in) “by telling them that the department [had] not even begun the review process” necessary to reconsider the SSOT designation.

While Biden eased some of the economic and travel restrictions introduced by the Trump administration, he has retained the core measures of the economic embargo.

The SSOT designation triggers a broad set of sanctions, including “restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance” and other financial and defense export limitations, but also sanctions against “persons and countries engaging in certain trade” with SSOT.

As economist Michael Galant noted in The Hill, “the worst impacts are felt through over-compliance; businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves for association with ‘a sponsor of terror.’”


U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announces the SSOT designation on January 11, 2021. [Source: France24.com]

The SSOT designation, imposed just nine days prior to the expiration of the Trump administration, has compounded an already unsustainable situation, as Cuba faces a deepening economic emergency, causing “the exodus of more than 400,000 Cubans leaving for the United States in the last two years.”

“U.S. policy is exacerbating the growing humanitarian crisis,” leading scholar William LeoGrande remarked in The Nation. U.S. economic sanctions enacted by Trump and largely retained by Biden “drastically reduced Cuba’s foreign exchange earnings,” which are desperately needed as Cuba imports the vast majority of its food supply, while “the Covid-19 pandemic closed the tourism industry, the central pillar of the economy, and it has yet to recover. These two massive external shocks struck an economy already vulnerable.”

The 2021 exchange rate reform resulted in sharp inflationary trends, devaluing the salaries of workers paid in Cuban pesos. In Cuba, currently, “the average monthly salary is about 4,200 pesos. In 2021, that was worth $162 US; today, it is worth just $16 on the informal market.”

The UN Population Fund reported that “the intensification of the blockade imposed on Cuba by the United States in 2020 has complicated access to medicines, health supplies and technologies.”

“The impact of the economic crisis is visible everywhere,” LeoGrande notes ominously. “There are fewer cars on the streets and long lines at gas stations because of the fuel shortage. Tourist hotels stand half-empty and the once bustling streets of Old Havana are quiet. The shelves in state stores are mostly bare, often lacking even the limited basket of goods that Cubans receive at subsidized prices on their ration book.”


Cubans in line to buy chicken at a government-run grocery store in Havana. [Source: cpj.org]

The author was able to visit Cuba repeatedly in the past years and observe firsthand the crisis’ devastating consequences in people’s daily life. Crowds of Cubans standing in line for food and other basic supplies, with no guarantee of actually getting them, was indeed the most common sight in Havana.

In my last visit in 2023, Cubans appeared to have completely lost the resilience and positive attitude which had been so striking, amid such harsh circumstances, in previous trips to the island. Exhausted by the compounding crises, more and more Cubans see the prospect of fleeing the country as the only way out of an unsustainable humanitarian and economic conundrum.

The longest war: decades of U.S.-backed covert warfare on Cuba

The latest “developments” in U.S. foreign policy on Cuba hardly take place in a vacuum. They are part of a consistent pattern of U.S.-backed subversion against the island, aimed at overthrowing the government while resorting to the most extreme measures to achieve that goal.

The historical record of U.S. covert warfare against Cuba is overwhelming, yet subservient legacy media and academia continue to withhold or understate it.

Starving the Cuban people into ultimately revolting and overthrowing their government, for instance, has been a stated policy goal. In January 1960, pondering a possible quarantine of the island, President Eisenhower is on record as saying that “If they (the Cuban people) are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”

More than 60 years later, under the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policy, U.S. aims had not significantly changed. “By systematically cutting off Cuba’s major sources of foreign exchange currency, the administration intended, as [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo told a European diplomat, to ‘starve’ the regime out.”[1]


Former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Donald Trump. [Source: CNN]

Both mainstream media and academia also continue to ignore or under-report the multiple assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, even though former CIA Director Richard Helms admitted openly in congressional hearings to U.S.-backed plans to “get rid of Castro,” which are now a matter of official record.


Former CIA Director Richard Helms [Source:theatlantic.com]


Fidel Castro. [Source:theguardian.com]

A most notorious case is the covert warfare contingency plan known as “Operation Northwoods.” In early 1962, i.e., months before the missile crisis originated, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted to the Secretary of Defense proposals for a series of highly destabilizing actions explicitly aimed at providing “justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba.”[2]


The JCS memo on “Operation Northwoods.” [Source: nsarchive.gwu.edu]

Code-named “Northwoods,” the plans included a “series of well coordinated incidents” to be staged against the U.S. military in Guantanamo “to give genuine appearances of being done by hostile Cuban forces.”

For that purpose, “a ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms…We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” the Northwoods documents state, with the proposed plans progressively growing more appalling: “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized,” to name only some of the most outrageous actions envisaged.


Lyman Lemnitzer, JCS Chairman in March 1962. [Source: jcs.mil]

While there is no evidence that these particular contingency plans were ever approved or implemented, they certainly disclose, in the most frightening manner, to what insane extremes U.S. government actors would go to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban government.

However, there is extensive evidence that U.S. covert plans, including biological warfare against Cuba, went well beyond planning. The official government record, substantial as it is in the case of U.S. policy toward Cuba, is still inadequate to fully expose the most sensitive covert operations.

We owe it to intelligence insiders and whistleblowers if the true nature and actual extent of U.S. destabilizing operations against Cuba can finally be disclosed.

A notable case is that of Verne Lyon. Completely unknown to the general public, Lyon should be regarded as one of the most significant CIA whistleblowers.

In the 1960s, as an aerospace engineering student at Iowa State University (ISU), Lyon was recruited by the CIA within the controversial “Operation Chaos,” in order to spy on fellow ISU students. Lyon was ultimately framed by the CIA on bogus terrorism charges and compelled to move to Cuba as a deep undercover operative to subvert Castro’s government.


Verne Lyon in his youth. [Source: freedommail.us]


Verne Lyon today. [Source: TruthandShadows]

Lyon has devoted his later life to exposing the excesses of the CIA and the criminal nature of U.S.-backed activities in Cuba.

In the documentary Secrets of the CIA, which featured former CIA officers and whistleblowers such as Philip Agee, as well as prominent Cuba scholar Peter Kornbluh, Lyon recounted his experience with the Agency, recalling the shocking episode when, once in Cuba as a CIA asset, his group persuaded a truck driver to allow them to put cement in milk bottles destined to children’s schools.

In 2018, Lyon published his autobiographical work Eyes on Havana,[3] unsurprisingly one of the most ignored and under-reported books of our time, where he also confirmed previous disclosures, reported by CovertAction Magazine, pointing to CIA responsibility for introducing the African swine flu into Cuba in 1971.


[Source: McFarlandBooks]

According to Lyon, CIA assets “delivered a vial of African swine flu virus to one of the many anti-Castro groups still operating under CIA auspices,” which eventually smuggled the virus into Cuba, provoking the “first ever outbreak of swine flu in the Western Hemisphere.

The Cubans, ultimately, slaughtered 500,000 pigs to try to stop the epidemic, causing severe food shortages across the island, as pork serves as a staple of the Cuban diet. Even the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, alarmed that the virus could spread to other countries, sent representatives to look for the cause of the outbreak. The U.S. never told them what happened.”[4]

The testimony of Lyon has been reinforced by recently declassified records from the JFK Assassination Collection, which include evidence of U.S. plans to unleash biological warfare on Cuba, with one memorandum explicitly considering the causation of “crop failures by the introduction of biological agents which would appear to be of natural origin.”

As the historical quest carries on, the picture of the U.S. covert warfare against Cuba only turns darker.

The U.S. has also protected and harbored on U.S. soil known anti-Castro terrorists, most notably Luis Posada Carilles[5] and Orlando Bosch, who reportedly participated in the planning of the attack on Cubana Airlines Flight 455 on October 6, 1976, which killed 73 people, and were involved in many other acts of terrorism against Cuban targets, including bombings of hotels and diplomatic facilities, as well as numerous attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Carriles and Bosch were members of the “Coordinacion de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas” (“Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations”) that FBI files identified as “an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization.”


Orlando Bosch, left, and Luis Posada Carriles. [Source: Havanatimes.org]

Shielded by the United States government, which also denied extradition requests from Cuba and Venezuela, neither Carriles nor Bosch ever faced any serious criminal punishment for their actions, both living a comfortable life and dying free men in Florida.[6]

It was actually to watch and attempt to prevent the plots of anti-Castro terrorists that the “Cuban Five,” a group of intelligence officers working for the Cuban government, operated in the U.S. under cover in the 1990s, before being arrested in 1998 and convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms in 2001 on highly contested espionage and related charges, only to be finally freed after serving their sentence or as a result of the Obama administration’s normalization efforts in 2014.[7]


The “Cuban Five.” [Source: workers.org]

After the 9/11 attack, President George W. Bush, who consistently protected Carriles and Bosch, famously said that the U.S. would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” As Cuba scholar Wayne Smith pointed out in 2004, by its own standards, then, the U.S. would fit the definition of terrorist.

Washington continues to designate Cuba as a terrorism sponsor. Based on the available record, it turns out that it is Cuba which has been on the receiving end of a long-term terror campaign run by and from the United States.

This is not 1962: It is time for a new course with Cuba

The above is not to suggest that the long, complex relationship between the United States and Cuba can be reduced to confrontation and subversion. Several U.S. administrations, from Kennedy’s to Ford’s and, more recently, Obama’s, did pursue serious negotiations toward normalization, which are now well documented.[8]

However, it is inevitable to note that, with the partial exception of the Obama administration’s, such efforts have so far failed, albeit they could set useful precedents for future initiatives.


[Source: uncpress.org]

The international isolation of the United States in its policy toward Cuba is increasingly embarrassing, to say the least. In November 2023 the UN General Assembly regretted that, “despite its resolutions dating back to 1992 (Resolution 47/19), the economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba is still in place,” and worried “about the adverse effects of such measures on the Cuban people and on Cuban nationals living in other countries.”

In the 2022 and 2023 resolutions, virtually the entire General Assembly condemned the U.S.’s unilateral embargo and called for its repeal, with respectively 185 and 187 countries voting in favor and only the U.S. and Israel in opposition (Ukraine was the only abstention in 2023, joined by Brazil in 2022).


The final count of the UN General Assembly’s 2023 vote to end U.S.’s Cuba embargo. [Source: United Nations]
The main pretexts invoked by the Trump administration to place Cuba back on the SSOT list have been largely debunked, beginning with the alleged protection of the Colombian guerrilla group National Liberation Army (ELN), that the Cuban government refused to extradite further to accusations of terrorism.

As Michael Galant noted, “the ELN members first came to Cuba to take part in peace talks with the Colombian government, brokered by Cuba at Colombia’s request.” The negotiations provisionally collapsed after a terror attack from a dissenting faction of the ELN, but “it would have been a violation of Cuba’s legal role as a guarantor of the peace talks to extradite a party to those talks. Norway, another guarantor, agrees.”

Since those events, a new President has been elected in Colombia, Gustavo Petro, “who has withdrawn the extradition request and personally called to remove the SSOT designation.”


Rep. Jim McGovern [Source: mcgovern.house.gov]

In an urgent letter to President Biden, prompted by the infuriating disclosure that the administration had not even started the process to review the SSOT decision, prominent members of Congress, including Representative Jim McGovern and Senator Elizabeth Warren, also endorsed the international community’s call to withdraw Cuba from the SSOT list.

LeoGrande concludes poignantly that “there is no longer any legitimate rationale whatsoever for Cuba being designated a state sponsor of terrorism. Cuba stays on the list because the Biden administration does not have the political courage to remove it,” under circumstances that could not be more paradoxical, considering that, as Congress members also noted in the letter to President Biden, “Cuba and the United States have a Memorandum of Agreement and active dialogue on counter-terrorism cooperation.”

As to the U.S. embargo, humanitarian considerations aside, the best argument against it remains that it does not work. Both Fidel and Raul Castro stayed in power until the end. Castro resigned as late as 2008 and was succeeded by his brother Raul who resigned as president in 2018 and as head of the Cuban Communist Party only in 2021.


Fidel and Raul Castro in Havana. [Source: caribbeannationalweekly.com]

As CovertAction Magazine noted, current Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has vowed defiance, and he is not going to capitulate any time soon.

Newer generations of Cuban Americans are increasingly frustrated with travel and other limitations currently in place, which was one factor behind the Obama administration’s reforms.

The embargo has not achieved anything other than—literally—starving Cuban civil society and undermining U.S. standing in the global community. Keeping the U.S.’s Cuba policy prisoner of the Cuban-American lobby or narrow-minded Florida electoral politics is profoundly immoral, unnecessary and counterproductive.

It is high time to end it and to start with a clean slate in U.S. relations with Cuba.


1.Mervyn J. Bain and Chris Walker, Eds., Cuban International Relations at 60: Reflections on Global Connections (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), 42. ↑

2.The documentation concerning “Operation Northwoods,” declassified by the U.S. National Archives, is extensive. The ensuing quotes are taken from the “Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense” and its attachments, dated March 13, 1962, and signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer. A copy of the memorandum is readily available on the National Security Archive’s website.

3.Verne Lyon, Eyes on Havana: Memoir of an American Spy Betrayed by the CIA (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018). ↑

4.Ibid., 103-104. ↑

5.The National Security Archive of George Washington University deserves credit for the discovery and declassification of the most sensitive records on Carriles. The author contributed to the archival research that produced part of the “Posada file.” ↑

6.Bosch died in 2011 at age 84, while Carriles passed in 2018 at 90. ↑

7.The case of the “Cuban Five,” known in Cuba as the “Five Heroes,” was highly controversial, particularly in regard to the unfairness of the charges and imprisonment, and sparked a debate in the U.S., involving activist and human rights organizations. Their story was recently told in the 2020 documentary Castro’s Spies. ↑

8.See William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015). It is perhaps surprising that Henry Kissinger, hardly a dove on communism, considered pursuing détente with Cuba. However, that initiative quickly collapsed when Castro had the audacity to dispatch Cuban troops to back up anti-colonial guerrilla movements in Angola in 1975. Kissinger is on record as saying that, if Cubans extended their actions in Namibia or Rhodesia, he “would be in favor of clobbering them.” The interaction of the U.S. and Cuba in Africa is actually quite enlightening, of both the respective foreign policies and the true motives behind Washington’s persistent hostility toward Havana, as prominent scholar Piero Gleijeses shows in his indispensable Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003). ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... e-on-cuba/

[blindpig]

How unjust and cruel US sanctions impact Cuba’s health provision

The US’s inhumane blockade has severe impacts on the right to life and wellbeing of the Cuban people.


A rural health clinic in Cuba. Despite every obstacle thrown in its path, Cuba’s socialist system has continued to provide free education, health care and essential services to all its people. The vindictiveness of the imperialists can be seen in their determination to strangle Cuba’s economy and make the lives of its people unbearable. Only the resilience of a socialist planned economy has enabled the country to survive under the cruel blockade, which went so far as to deny syringes during the pandemic, even after Cuba had developed five of its own vaccines.
Cuba Embassy

Sunday 17 March 2024

The following presentation was made by Aymee Díaz Negrín of the Cuban embassy in London to the annual Latin America Conference on 27 January 2024.

*****

I think when we talk about the US blockade against Cuba, many times we think only about the illegal and unilateral sanctions against a country or a government with a political system completely different from the USA, but the blockade is not only against the Cuban government. It has a devastating impact on the Cuban population, especially in the education and health sectors, despite the Cuban government’s huge efforts to provide high quality medical services.

Just to give you an idea about the impact of the US policy: between March 2022 and February 2023 the blockade cost the Cuban health sector almost $240m.

I am going to give some examples to better explain what this means:

During the period March 2022 and February 2023, MediCuba, the Cuban medical products importer, made 69 requests to US companies for access to resources and supplies needed by the national health system. Three replied in the negative and 64 did not reply.
There are currently 20,000 Cuban families waiting for diagnoses of genetic diseases to whom it has not been possible to provide adequate care because the necessary technology uses over 10 percent US components and is inaccessible.
JASCO, a Japanese company that manufactures spare parts for laboratory equipment, has refused to sell to Cuba because of her inclusion in the US list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism’.
Three Swiss banks refused to transfer donations to Cuba from the solidarity organisation MediCuba-Switzerland, which were intended for the purchase of surgical instrumentas for the burns and reconstructive surgery unit at Havana’s Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital.
In the most difficult moments of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the number of cases had peaked and our intensive care wards were overstretched, Cuba was prevented from importing pulmonary ventilators under the pretext that the European suppliers were subsidiaries of US companies, which is undoubtedly a cruel and inhumane act and also a gross violation of trade rules and international law. Cuba had to develop its national production of pulmonary ventilators from its own prototypes.
When our main medical oxygen production plant broke down at the peak of Covid-19 cases in our country and two US companies tried to supply Cuba with medical oxygen, it was demonstrated that a specific licence was required from the US government, even in times of pandemic and despite the United Nations’ call to waive sanctions during that period.
Cuba also has evidence of actions taken by US government agencies to prevent the sale of medical oxygen to our country by foreign companies from two Latin-American countries.
According to the UN, Cuba was the only country to which AliExpress could not make and distribute donations to face Covid, owing to the effect of the USA’s unilateral sanctions.
In Cuba, about 450 new cases of cancer are diagnosed in children each year. Many of them lack the drug of choice because of the impossibility of acquiring it.
All these examples are inhumane and affect the right to life and wellbeing of the Cuban people, the majority of whom, more than 80 percent, have never experienced life without the blockade.

The harm is very real, to be honest, and undermines the quality of public services, causing delays, waiting lists for specialist consultations, and shortages of medicine and medical supplies.

All the examples I cited above are caused by three fundamental measures implemented by the United States:

The inclusion of Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The impossibility of acquiring medicines and medical technology of US origin or with more than ten percent US components.
The ruthless persecution of Cuba’s financial transactions.
All these measures could be removed by the president of the United States if there were political will and a genuine desire to help the Cuban people.

Until that day arrives – we don’t know when – Cuba will continue to make enormous efforts to maintain the free health services for all that is one of the main achievements of the revolution.

Just to give an example: in 2022, despite the country’s difficult economic situation, 73 percent of Cuba’s national budget was allocated to the sectors of greatest implications for the population, including public health, education and social security.

In addition to Cuba’s efforts, we have received solidarity support from organisations and thousands of people like you around the world. I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you, individuals Cuba Solidarity members and trade unionists who supported the Covid medical appeal which raised thousands of pounds to send syringes, cryotubes and butterfly needles to Cuba for use in vaccinating the Cuban population.

We highly value the launch of a CSC new appeal ‘Cuba Vive’ jointly with NW, Northern Ireland and Scotland regions of Unison to fundraise to buy medicines, surgical supplies and medical equipment.

It is true that a country cannot sustain itself through donations, but you can be sure that every medicine, every supply, every piece of medical equipment will be helping to save a life.

I am going to close with a sentence from the general secretary of the Cuban health workers’ union: “The Cuban people are very grateful for every action of support. You show that the unjust and illegal policies of the US government cannot and will not be able to block solidarity.”

https://thecommunists.org/2024/03/17/ne ... provision/

[blindpig]

Workers Parliaments Saved Cuban Revolution After Collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and Can Save it Again
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - April 3, 2024 0


[Source: bbc.co.uk]

Cuba is currently facing what National Public Radio (NPR) called its worst economic crisis in decades, fueled in part by diminished access to Venezuelan oil and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Power cuts, due to the lack of oil supplies, are common and can sometimes last up to 8 hours. The shortage affects the food sector, making it increasingly difficult for Cuban households to find basic necessities.

The U.S. has sought to take advantage of this crisis by ratcheting up its blockade and financial war on Cuba, and inciting insurrection through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot which supported groups that staged anti-government protests in July 2021.

Pedro Ross’s book, How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution: Reviving Socialism after the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), is timely in providing a blueprint for how the Cuban Revolution can reinvigorate itself today.


[Source: barnesandnoble.com]


Pedro Ross [Source: trabajadores.cu]

Ross was a teacher during Cuba’s great literacy campaigns of the 1960s who served three terms as General Secretary of Cuba’s Labor Federation, the Confederation of Cuban Workers, and was afterwards appointed as Cuban ambassador to Angola.

In the 1990s, he helped avert a national catastrophe by establishing workers’ parliaments where workers debated and developed solutions to the pressing economic crisis that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc in 1991.

Ross compares the situation in which Cuba found itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union to that of a “house painter who suddenly has the ladder pulled out from under him and is left hanging.”[1]

Abruptly, Cuba suffered from an immense loss of supplies, markets and sources of financing, which the U.S. deliberately compounded by intensifying its blockade. Cuba’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by nearly 35% in what became known as the “Special Period” and the country lost more than 70% of its foreign markets.[2]

All of a sudden the Cuban Revolution—which had freed Cuba from U.S. neo-colonialism and had improved living standards considerably—was in jeopardy.


Residents of Havana cling to bus during the Special Period, when economic conditions became desperate after the collapse of the Soviet Union. [Source: translatingcuba.com]

Cuba’s revolutionary government responded, among other ways, by a) developing non-traditional economic sectors, including tourism, biotechnology, communications, and information technology; b) promoting the bicycle as a means of public transport to offset the rising price and scarcity of fuel; c) promoting urban agriculture; d) trying to revitalize traditional economic sectors such as tobacco, coffee, seafood, sugar, and nickel, and e) establishing the workers’ parliaments in the summer of 1994, in which more than three million workers participated.

In Cuban 1961 literacy campaign 250,000 mostly young people taught workers and peasants to read and write, including in the remotest regions. “Although the aggressiveness of the U.S. began very early ­— through pressure and threats, attacks, bombings, financing armed gangs, and a fierce media campaign ­— the revolutionary government did not neglect to advance Cuban culture,” Abel Prieto, former Minister of Culture, wrote in Granma Dec. 4.


Literacy campaign in Cuba after the Cuban Revolution. [Source: themilitant.com]

Working closely with Fidel Castro, the workers’ parliaments provided a platform for workers to relay their concerns and suggest solutions to economic problems, many of which were adopted.[3] Ross writes that “a fundamental principle of the workers’ parliaments was that the workers are the owners. Therefore, solutions should be based on labor consensus.”

More than 80,000 workers’ parliaments were held during the “Special Period” and 261,859 proposals were discussed. According to Ross, the workers were almost always selfless in putting the needs of the country ahead of their own. They developed plans for restructuring various industries, for boosting production and lowering costs, and helped in the development of national economic strategy. The parliaments were further significant in that they helped to build solidarity and enthusiasm for new projects and revitalized the Cuban Revolution.

Reading Ross’s account one is struck by the dichotomy between the popular demonology of Cuba as a totalitarian dictatorship in U.S. political discourse, and the radically democratic functioning of the workers’ parliaments.

Rooted in Cuba’s Revolutionary Tradition
The second half of Ross’s book provides a history of the Cuban Revolution whose democratic character the workers’ parliaments embody.

The history was rooted in resistance to Western colonialism, which started with Taino Chief Hatuey, who was burned at the stake by Cuba’s Spanish colonizers after waging a guerrilla war that preceded Castro’s rebellion by more than 450 years.

José Antonio Aponte drew on Hatuey’s legacy in leading a slave revolt in Havana in the 1800s, as did a Black woman named Carlota Lucumi who, in 1843, led a revolt against the Spanish at the Triunvirato sugar plantation in Matanzas.


Statue of Taino Chief Hatuey in Baracoa, Cuba. [Source: mronline.org]


José Antonio Aponte [Source: blackthen.com]


Carlota Leading the Slaves in Matanzas by Lili Bernard. [Source: blackpast.org]

In October 1868, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a planter from Manzanillo, issued a manifesto that triggered a 30-year independence struggle resulting in the end of Spanish colonial rule.

José Martí emerged as a key leader of the Cuban independence struggle against Spanish colonialism—inspiring Castro and his supporters fifty years later with anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, internationalism, and a deep commitment to social justice.


Carlos Manuel de Céspedes [Source: smoketreemanor.com]


José Martí [Source: cubainesieme.com]

Martí warned Cubans about the United States, who then covertly, during the Spanish-American war, sank their own ship, the USS Maine, as a pretext to intervene, dislodge the Spanish and then stay on as occupiers. After dividing Cuba into seven administrative areas, the first U.S. military governor oversaw the creation of a Cuban Rural Guard to protect the interests of big landowners and suppress dissent.


American sailors in Havana at the turn of the 20th century. [Source: monovisions.com]
In February 1901, the U.S. Congress approved the Platt Amendment, which helped secure U.S. dominance over Cuba, including intervention rights, for the next half century.[4]

Cuba’s first president, Tomás Estrada Palma (1902-1906), entered into a treaty with the U.S. which gave the U.S. control over Cuban markets and set preferential customs rates for U.S. products with minimal benefits for Cuban exports.[5]


Orville Platt [Source: voltaire.net]


Estrada Palma [Source: latinamericanstudies.org]

This accentuated an unequal exchange between the two countries and stagnation of Cuban agriculture and industry, which was only overcome following the triumph of 1959/1960 Cuban Revolution.


Fidel Castro following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. [Source: telesurenglish.net]

Ross concludes his book by writing that “we Cubans will keep striving to achieve a socialist society, prosperous and sustainable, based on a profound revolutionary conscience and sense of duty, by working with efficiency and efficacy, making the best, most rational use of our human and material resources.”[6]

Indeed, Cuba can serve as a model for the rest of humanity in its efforts to build a society guided by humane principles—in contrast to capitalist dystopias like the U.S. whose internal pathologies (high crime, homeless and suicide rates and vast inequality) and forever wars reflect a warped value system and unjust ruling structure.


1.Pedro Ross, How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution: Reviving Socialism after the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 21. ↑

2.Ross, How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution, 29. ↑

3.Ross, How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution, 47. ↑

4.One of the stipulations was that the Cuban government would sell or lease to the U.S. lands deemed necessary for the establishment of coal mines and naval stations. ↑

5.Ross, How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution, 104, 105. The treaty also gave the U.S. the right to military intervention which led to a second period of U.S. occupation from 1906 to 1909 when, Ross writes, “the Cuban Congress was suspended, the militias created by Estrada Palma were dissolved and U.S. supervisors were appointed for the Rural Guard. Misuse of public funds was common, and political and administrative corruption was pervasive. The Cuban Republic suffered from indebtedness and bribery…Public works projects were fruitful sources of embezzlement. Workers and their demands were repressed, and armed uprisings against the occupation were crushed.” ↑

6.Ross, How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution, 153. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... -it-again/

[blindpig]

Che Guevara: “I Came to Communism Because of Stalin”
OCTOBER 11, 2019



Editorial note: We do not publish outdated opinion pieces but sometimes we make exceptions. This piece was initially published in April 2016 and we consider it relevant this week when the world honors Che on the 52nd anniversary of his assassination.

By Nikos Mottas

Ernesto Che Guevara is undoubtedly a historical figure of the 20th century’s communist movement who attracts the interest of people from a vast range of political ideologies. The years followed his cowardly assassination in Bolivia, Che became a revolutionary symbol for a variety of Marxist-oriented, leftist and progressive parties and organizations- from Trotskyists to militant Leninist and from Social Democrats to anarcho-libertarians. A significant number of those who admire the Argentine revolutionary identify themselves as “anti-Stalinist”, hate and curse Stalin while they often refer to the so-called “crimes” of Stalin’s era. What is a contradiction and an irony of history is the following: Che Guevara himself was an admirer of Joseph Stalin.

On the occasion of the 63 years since the death of the great Soviet leader, let us remember what Che thought about Joseph Stalin, taking into account Guevara’s own writings and letters.

In 1953, in Guatemala, the 25 years old then Che noted in his letter to aunt Beatriz: “Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated” (Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, 1997).

A few years after his letter from Guatemala- in the midst of the revolutionary process in Cuba- Guevara would re-affirm his position towards Stalin:

“In the so called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Series of things that are very good.”

While praising Stalin’s leadership, Che was always pointing out the counter-revolutionary role of Trotsky, blaming him for “hidden motives” and “fundamental errors”. In one of his writings he was underlining: “I think that the fundamental stuff that Trotsky was based upon was erroneous and that his ulterior behavior was wrong and his last years were even dark. The Trotskyites have not contributed anything whatsoever to the revolutionary movement; where they did most was in Peru, but they finally failed there because their methods are bad” (Comments on ‘Critical Notes on Political Economy’ by Che Guevara, Revolutionary Democracy Journal, 2007).

Ernesto Guevara, a prolific reader with a developed knowledge of Marxist philosophy, was including Stalin’s writings in the classical Marxist-leninist readings. This is what he wrote in a letter to Armando Hart Dávalos, a Trotskyite and prominent member of the Cuban Revolution:

“In Cuba there is nothing published, if one excludes the Soviet bricks, which bring the inconvenience that they do not let you think; the party did it for you and you should digest it. It would be necessary to publish the complete works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin [underlined by Che in the original] and other great Marxists. Here would come to the great revisionists (if you want you can add here Khrushchev), well analyzed, more profoundly than any others and also your friend Trotsky, who existed and apparently wrote something” (Contracorriente, No.9, Sept.1997).

The revisionist route that the Soviet leadership followed after the CPSU 20th Congress became a source of intense concern for Che. The policy of the so-called “De-Stalinization” and the erroneous, opportunist perceptions about the process of building socialism that the Khrushchev leadership introduced after 1956 had their own critical impact on Guevara’s view on Revolution and Socialism.

One of Guevara’s biographers, the Mexican politician Jorge Castañeda wrote (adding an anti-communist flavor): “Guevara became a Stalinist at a time when thousands were becoming disillusioned with official “Communism”. He rejected Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing the crimes of Stalin as “imperialist propaganda” and defended the Russian invasion of Hungary that crushed the workers’ uprising there in the same year” (J. Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, 1997).

che

Four years after the beginning of Khrushchev’s “de-stalinization”, on November 1960, Ernesto Che Guevara was visiting Moscow as an official representative of the Cuban government. Against the advise of the then Cuban ambassador to avoid such an action, Che insisted on visiting and depositing a floral tribute at Stalin’s tomb at the Kremlin necropolis.

Che had a deep admiration for Joseph Stalin and his contribution in building Socialism. And that is because, as Che himself said, “ You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves […] in that particular historical context”. That historical context and the extremely adverse and difficult social, economic and political environment in which Stalin led the Soviet Union are muted by the votaries of antistalinism. They hush up and deliberately ignore the fact that the process of building Socialism in the Soviet Union was taking place within a frame of fierce class-struggle, with numerous – internal and external (imperialist encirclement)- threats, while the massive effort of industrialization faced reactions and extensive sabotages (the collectivization process, for example, faced the negative stance of Kulaks).

Joseph Stalin, as a personality and leader, was the product of the action of the masses within a specific historical context. And it was Stalin who guided the Bolsheviks’ Party (AUCP-B) and the Soviet people for 30 years, based on Lenin’s solid ideological heritage. As a real communist, a true revolutionary- in theory and in practice- Ernesto Che Guevara would inevitably recognize and appreciate that historical reality.

https://orinocotribune.com/che-guevara- ... of-stalin/