Cuba
Re: Cuba
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/
******
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.
*****
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/
*******
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
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
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/
******
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/
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/
******
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/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
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/
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/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
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/
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/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
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/
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/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
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/
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/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
Cuban military intelligence: structure, tasks, operations
May 4, 11:06 p.m
Cuban military intelligence: structure, tasks, operations
The Directorate of Military Intelligence (La Dirección de Inteligencia Militar, DIM) is a military command body within the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba (El Ministerio de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de la República de Cuba, MINFAR), responsible for collecting information about the armed forces of other countries and intelligence information based on the reception and analysis of electromagnetic radiation (electronic intelligence).
The headquarters of the Directorate of Military Intelligence is located in the MINFAR General Staff building, on the Plaza de la Revolution in Havana, on the 6th floor, where it is adjacent to the main part of the units of the Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (La Dirección de Contrainteligencia Militar) of the Cuban Defense Department. According to open source data, DIM is divided into 4 main sections and general departments:
Section I - combat intelligence. She is subordinate to the military and military intelligence units of the Cuban armed forces, including the intelligence units of the Order of Antonio Maceo of the Border Brigade, responsible for protecting the territory adjacent to the American base in Guantanamo Bay. The section is operationally subordinate to the elite air assault brigade "Black Wasps", designed to carry out combat and reconnaissance and sabotage missions on enemy territory, which particularly distinguished itself in the performance of international duty in the countries of East Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Section II – operational reconnaissance. It consists of the following departments: II-1 – headquarters, secretariat and special security regime; II-2 - the foreign intelligence department, responsible for operational officers of foreign stations, divided into geographic areas; II-3 - internal intelligence department, responsible for operational military intelligence activities in the country, the fight against counter-revolution, special reconnaissance missions aimed mainly at creating operational positions among the personnel and command of the American military base in Guantanamo Bay and performing tasks in the territory USA; II-4/5 - illegal operational departments involved in interdepartmental special missions abroad and on the island; II-6 – logistics department; II-7 – communications department. In 1998, the section was restructured, some of the employees were distributed to other intelligence agencies.
Section III – intelligence analytics. It consists of four groups: situational analysis, USA, Europe and the rest of the world (Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa-Middle East).
Section IV – electronic reconnaissance (ERI). Under her command is the electronic intelligence brigade, a strategically important unit responsible for monitoring American military intelligence communications on the island, in the region and in the United States.
Department of special security regime (ensuring secrecy in document flow and office work).
Information Technology Department (cybersecurity, cryptology).
Information processing department (classification and structuring of intelligence information).
Professional training and retraining of DIM employees is carried out within the framework of the regular academic course of military intelligence (Curso Académico Regular de Inteligencia Militar por Agentura, CAREMA).
The main threat and the main enemy
For more than 60 years, in the face of regular attempts by the American side to destabilize the situation on the island and change the political system of the Republic through economic, diplomatic, military and intelligence actions, Cuba has confidently defended its sovereignty and ensured national security by means and capabilities available to it.
The preservation of Cuba's political and socio-economic identity within the framework of the unipolar system of international relations formed following the Cold War against the backdrop of prolonged military-political pressure from the United States indicates the significant contribution of military intelligence agencies represented by the structural divisions of DIM to the national security system of the Republic.
The headquarters of the Military Intelligence Directorate is located on the 6th floor of the General Staff of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba.
After the Cuban Revolution of 1953-1959. The main opponent of the Cuban national intelligence community and DIM, in particular, remains the US aspirations to change the constitutional order in Cuba. The leading actors in this process are the US military intelligence institutions, which, on a planned and systematic basis, have been building destructive activities throughout the entire period of the island’s independence in the direction of undermining Cuba’s statehood, up to the elimination of the country’s political leadership.
This hostile policy of Washington forms the main threat-forming factors for the national security and stability of the political configuration of Cuba, and the well-being of the population of the Republic as a whole.
Following the transformation and collapse of the bipolar system of international relations in 1989-1991. a consistent aggressive line of permanent pressure against Havana, in the context of the American side’s claims to sole world domination, is aimed at preserving and maintaining regional influence and ensuring geopolitical dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
However, Cuban specialists have their own recipes for countering these threats.
Military intelligence sees and hears everything
Over decades of protecting revolutionary achievements from outside attacks, in the most difficult operational environment and troubled neighborhood, the Cuban intelligence services have developed a special organizational and executive culture, adapted to operating in conditions of permanently high risk.
Naturally, the activities of the DIM Military Intelligence Directorate are carried out in close cooperation with the Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia or DI) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Cuba, which has broad operational capabilities. At the height of the Cold War, DI established itself as one of the world's strongest intelligence services in the field of undercover work, deploying a layered architecture of a covert apparatus not only in South America, but also, through diaspora capabilities, in the United States itself.
Under the operational subordination of the DIM is the Order of Antonio Maceo airborne assault brigade, better known as the “Black Wasps” (Avispas Negras).
The colossal experience, established culture and special style of Cuban intelligence allowed the DI to maintain a strong position in the top league of intelligence services and in the temporary unstable structure of a unipolar world , after the end (rather of a pause) of the Cold War.
In addition to the traditionally strong intelligence work, the Cuban intelligence community and, in particular, the Directorate of Military Intelligence, is distinguished by a high level of efficiency in the use of electronic intelligence in all its modern forms and manifestations.
Havana's strategic and situational awareness of the hostile activity of the American military-intelligence community, the plans of the Pentagon, and in some cases Langley, which is the fruit of the successful convergence of the capabilities of human and electronic intelligence of the Republic, has more than once become the subject of hearings in the US Congress. The attention of American parliamentarians clearly highlights the concern of the hegemon's political establishment about the intelligence capabilities of Liberty Island. Cuban professionals (despite the obvious comparative disproportion of financial and personnel potentials) are able to repel the enemy, acting “not with numbers, but with skill.”
The island's location, due to a number of geographical and technical factors, is ideal for gaining access to most of the US communications with the outside world, including the main facilities of critical information infrastructure. In fact, Cuba, along with the headquarters of the US National Security Agency (Fort Meade, Maryland), is the most geographically convenient and technically capable location in the Western Hemisphere for large-scale electronic interception of data.
DIM operates one of the largest and most sophisticated electronic intelligence programs in the world. The range of ER facilities at Bejucal, 20 km south of Havana, allows Cuban military intelligence to cover the maximum available range of US communications of interest, both government and private, as well as satellite links between North America and Europe.
At the strategic level, priority targets for collecting intelligence information using DER DIM are the communications channels of the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America, key nodes of military infrastructure, NASA and US Air Force communications, where special attention is paid to missile telemetry systems and means.
In a broader intelligence context, DIM has the operational and technical capabilities to provide covert access to commercial communications services of US financial institutions, including stock exchanges.
At the tactical level, special attention is paid to tracking American geosynchronous satellites, as elements of the US global orbital network, and the possibilities of neutralizing their activity.
Cuba's military intelligence, in addition to the geographical factor of direct operational reach of the country's territory for military intelligence activities against the main enemy (as well as in the reverse order), faces direct military threats emanating from the 117 sq. km of the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay.
Guantanamo Bay “under the hood”
The notorious American naval base, the only one located in a socialist country, is located on the island on the basis of the agreement on relations between the Republic of Cuba and the United States signed under conditions of force following the Spanish-American War in 1903 (replaced by new in 1934), as well as agreements to lease land in Cuba to the United States for coaling and naval stations.
In accordance with these documents, “the lease of Cuban territory does not have a fixed duration and the agreement on it can be terminated either by Washington’s decision to leave the base, or by mutual agreement of the parties to terminate the lease.”
Thus, the American military presence on the island is of indefinite duration and is maintained thanks to the significantly predominant military and diplomatic power of the United States, supported by controversial and imposed international legal agreements of the first half of the 20th century with the pre-revolutionary authorities of the island.
The specified naval base is managed by the Southeast Naval Region of the US Naval Facilities Command (Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida). The garrison, as well as the Guantanamo Bay Joint Task Force, are subordinate to the US Department of Defense Southern Command (headquartered in Doral, Miami-Dade County, Florida). Up to 8,500 military personnel from the Navy, Marine Corps, US Army and civilian base personnel are stationed at the military facility at any one time. Air service to the outside world is provided by the US Naval Air Station Leeward.
On the territory of the base, outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system, there is a camp opened in January 2002 for detainees accused by the US authorities of committing serious crimes, which has gained worldwide fame due to numerous facts of human rights violations, cruel treatment and torture.
The military prison at Guantanamo Bay is actually a concentration camp, which currently continues to house about 30 prisoners. The true situation and the number of prisoners do not appear in the public space.
However, it is reliably known that the US Central Intelligence Agency has access to prisoners of particular interest to the American side and uses a separate prison infrastructure in the camp to carry out its operational tasks in the region.
American naval base Guantanamo Bay.
These include the kidnapping of CIA targets from among representatives of regional political forces, security forces, and left-wing movements opposed to Washington. In Guantanamo they are subjected to special psychological treatment and are recruited. “Enhanced methods” of interrogation, including the use of psychoactive substances, are actively used against those who disagree. Undesirables, after such forceful influence and psychological treatment, are often subject to liquidation.
In this context, let us recall direct historical analogies - public reports by human rights activists, including American ones, on the results of Operation Condor in the 1970s - 1980s, as a result of which, on instructions from Langley, about 60,000 fighters for the independence of the continent were killed.
Nothing has changed in the CIA's methods since then, and Guantanamo is likely to be actively used for similar dirty purposes to this day.
The Cuban side has repeatedly raised the issue of the need for an international investigation into massive violations of human rights and international conventions by the American authorities in Guantanamo at the UN level. But the crimes of the CIA, unfortunately, for the most part fall out of sight of human rights structures and international organizations. And anyone who begins to show excessive curiosity about such a fact may find himself in one of the many illegal American intelligence prisons scattered around the world.
As part of the implementation of a complex of electronic intelligence activities at the American base in Guantanamo Bay, under the special control of DIM are the branch of the Main Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station in the Atlantic Area (NCTAMS LANT) of the Naval Information Forces (NAVIFOR) of the US Navy Fleet Forces Command (component Naval Forces Northern Command and the functional maritime component of the joint command of the US Department of Defense Strategic Command).
NAVIFOR carries out the integrated use of the information capabilities of the Navy (electronic communications, telecommunication networks, cryptology, meteorology, oceanography, electronic reconnaissance and warfare, operations in cyberspace, space navigation) to weaken and destroy the enemy’s combat capabilities, discredit and misinform him, as well as enhance the effectiveness of operations allies in a multi-domain war.
NCTAMS LANT at Guantanamo Bay operates and maintains elements of the station's Naval Telecommunications System and Military Communications System, including core communications (networks, information infrastructure, and associated technical equipment), frequency management, and coordination of DoD Defense Information Systems Agency nodes at military base.
The data transmitted by NCTAMS LANT is valuable for the Cuban side both in terms of access to internal communications at the American base, and in terms of external communication channels in Guantanamo with higher authorities located 800-1300 km to the north, in Florida.
"Black Wasps": true
to international duty The operational subordination of the DIM is the Order of Antonio Maceo Air Assault Brigade, better known as the "Black Wasps" (Avispas Negras). Before fulfilling their international duty in Angola, Cuban military commandos were divided into landing and sabotage units. Personnel recruitment was carried out at the expense of fighters who took part in special operations during the Revolution, who had experience in guerrilla warfare in the troops of Ernesto Che Guevara.
In 1963, on the initiative of Fidel Castro, special forces groups (Grupos Destinos Especial), known as the “Tigers”, were formed, in 1974 - an airborne brigade. Their first serious baptism of fire took place in Angola.
During Reagan's US expansion in Central America, Cuban military intelligence provided advice to Nicaragua, Grenada and Panama in repelling American aggression.
MINFAR analyzed the actions of the Cuban Expeditionary Force in the Battle of Quifangondo in October-November 1975, where the participation of the Tigers, then special forces units of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, played a significant role in the battle.
During a large-scale operation in Angola, Cuban military intelligence special forces were coordinated and gained combat experience in confrontation with the South African armed forces, mercenaries from NATO countries and local armed groups subordinate to them.
The official history of the modern “Black Wasps” dates back to December 1, 1986, when a separate brigade of the same name was created within the structure of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. In 1989, the special forces of the Cuban Ministry of Internal Affairs were subordinated to MINFAR and merged into a single structure with the special forces of military intelligence.
Doctrinally, the brigade's training was mainly aimed at countering possible attempts at military intervention in Cuba by the United States. Accordingly, much attention is paid to the specifics of conducting combat operations in the Caribbean tropics.
Also, the “Black Wasps” are considered the most prepared and combat-ready unit for war in rural conditions. A special feature of the unit’s use is the use of tactics of small mobile autonomous groups of 5-6 fighters, capable of penetrating deep behind enemy lines and causing critical damage to key military communications.
Individual training is carried out at the National School of Special Forces. Here, special forces soldiers of the Cuban military intelligence undergo comprehensive, in-depth training in reconnaissance and sabotage activities, which goes far beyond the scope of traditional special operations forces training. In terms of combat training, the Black Wasps cooperate with special forces instructors from China, North Korea, Vietnam and Russia.
Significant operations of the Black Wasps occurred in the period before joining the MINFAR air assault brigade, when part of the unit was subordinate to the Cuban Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Cuban special forces achieved their greatest successes in Angola, in battles against the South African army and the UNITA movement. The main tasks performed by the “Black Wasps” in Operation Carlota are reconnaissance activities and penetration into enemy territory, searching and destroying columns, mining enemy movement routes, and organizing ambushes. Some episodes of this war demonstrated the heroism of the Black Wasps in the performance of their international duty.
In particular, during the Battle of Kangamba in August 1983, Angolan and Cuban forces, besieged by UNITA militants supported by the South African Air Force and Special Forces, faced the threat of operational encirclement and the destruction of the garrison, which was subjected to massive enemy rocket and artillery fire. The Cuban columns did not have time to reach the remote city in an acceptable time, and the supplies of unguided aircraft missiles, which allowed the Cubans to restrain the enemy with airstrikes, and the garrison's ammunition were running out.
At the most critical moment of the battle, the Cuban command in Angola ordered the destruction of special communications equipment in Cangamba, Fidel Castro personally addressed the defenders of the city: “Let Cangamba become a cemetery for mercenaries serving the hated interests of South African racists. Let Cangamba become an eternal symbol of the courage of Cubans and Angolans. Let Kangamba be an example that the blood shed by Angolans and Cubans for the freedom and dignity of Africa was not in vain. I believe in your unmatched courage and promise you that we will save you at any cost. Homeland or Death! We will win!". The only possible option for saving the garrison before the arrival of reinforcements was to strike the rear of the besiegers with special forces.
The first mixed Cuban-Angolan helicopter landing landed a few kilometers from Kangamba, but on the approaches to the city it suffered losses in a short, intense battle with superior enemy forces and was forced to retreat. Having launched another attack under heavy enemy mortar and artillery fire, the Black Wasps managed to turn the situation around through the active use of mobile automatic grenade launchers against UNITA positions and risky cover maneuvers with military helicopters.
The UNITA besieging forces suffered significant damage, the enemy was distracted by the actions of the Cubans in the northern direction from Cangamba, in their rear. Then a helicopter landing was carried out in the south-eastern direction, forcing the demoralized militants to retreat. The Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, Castro, kept his word - the garrison was saved, the enemy was defeated. Largely thanks to the heroic efforts of the Black Wasps.
Cuban experience is in demand in a multipolar world
More than six decades of confrontation with the American military-intelligence community, three of which fell during the period of American hegemony, have allowed the Cuban intelligence community to accumulate unique experience and knowledge that is in demand among colleagues from countries seeking to defend their sovereignty in a turbulent world. in the context of the transition to multipolarity.
The Cold War, common threats and challenges from the collective West, led to close interaction between the Cuban intelligence community and the intelligence and state security agencies of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries. During its formation, the MINFAR Military Intelligence Directorate distinguished itself, fulfilling its international duty in Algeria, and continued its combat path in Africa, which was freed from colonial oppression - Guinea-Bissau, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Alvaro Lopez Miera, participated in long-term Cuban military missions in Angola and Ethiopia, fulfilling his international duty.
In Angola, the Cuban contingent, as part of the large-scale and lengthy Operation Carlota, played a key role in defending the independence and sovereignty of Luanda. The operational and combat activities of DIM allowed the Cuban side to make a significant contribution to defeating the armed forces of the racist regime of South Africa and their proxy forces in Angola.
Including the decisive Battle of Cuito Cuanavle, during which Cuban special forces repeatedly staged successful sabotage behind enemy lines and ambushes elite South African units staffed by racist mercenaries from the United States and Western Europe.
The participation of Cuban military intelligence was crucial in repelling the invasion of Ethiopia by Somali forces during the Ogaden War. In the Middle East, DIM participated in the Cuban military mission to support Syria in the October War of 1973.
During the Reagan US expansion in Central America, Cuban military intelligence provided advisory assistance to Nicaragua, Grenada and Panama in repelling American aggression. The DIM electronic intelligence station until recently ensured its operation during the US invasion of Panama in 1989.
DIM had a significant influence on countering the terror deployed by the American military-intelligence community in South America as part of Operation Condor. The role of Cuban military intelligence in supporting the national resistance of the Argentines in the “Dirty War” and the Chileans to the regime of Augusto Pinochet is significant.
DIM has special, friendly relations with its Venezuelan colleagues. Cuban military intelligence has provided and continues to provide adequate support to Caracas in containing Washington's efforts to destabilize the situation in the country. This applies both to the electronic intelligence capabilities of the DIM, used to disavow the plans of the American side, and to operations to neutralize American agents. These actions turned out to be especially effective given Washington’s intentions to provoke a military invasion of Venezuela and the efforts of the US intelligence community to organize the so-called “armed opposition” in the country with the goal of violently overthrowing the constitutional order.
Cuba's strategically important geographic location in the Western Hemisphere and the island's unique conditions for electronic intelligence in relation to American communications made the operational capabilities of the Cuban Office of Military Intelligence extremely broad, reaching a global level in its significance.
If during the Cold War the USSR was Cuba's main ally, now, in addition to its legal successor, the Russian Federation, Chinese colleagues should also be considered among the priority partners of Cuban intelligence. Coupled with Havana’s strong commitment to rejecting the Western model of ultra-globalism and American hegemony, the potential for cooperation with the Republic in the field of technical intelligence attracts colleagues from other countries facing hostile actions from Washington, primarily Iran and the DPRK, to interact with DIM.
Russian-Cuban cooperation in the fields of security and intelligence received a new impetus in March 2023, when Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev paid an official visit to Havana, where he was received by Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and Revolutionary leader Raul Castro.
The parties held extensive interdepartmental consultations on security issues. Issues of bilateral cooperation between the intelligence services were discussed in detail. Particular emphasis is placed on the joint efforts of Russia and Cuba to counter “color revolutions” and the destructive activity of non-governmental organizations. In these matters, the operational and technical capabilities of the MINFAR Directorate of Military Intelligence are of key importance.
In February of this year. Nikolai Patrushev visited Havana again. During his meeting with the President of Cuba, among other issues, issues of interaction between Moscow and Havana in the field of security were discussed.
In June 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defense was visited by a large delegation of Cuban colleagues led by the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Army Corps General Alvaro Lopez Miera. At the negotiations, the parties discussed a wide range of issues in the military and military-technical field, including, probably, the continuation and development of cooperation in the field of electronic intelligence, interaction between military intelligence agencies of Russia and Cuba in countering common threats from the United States and NATO.
It should be noted that General Miera, a graduate of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR, participated in long Cuban military missions in Angola and Ethiopia, fulfilling his international duty. The joint historical experience of Russia and Cuba in the context of helping friendly African countries defend their sovereignty in the face of the challenges of the aggressive intentions of the United States and NATO will undoubtedly be in demand in the process of transition to a multipolar system of international relations.
It can be stated that with the emergence of new regional poles and the transformation of the geopolitical map of the world towards increasing the autonomy of the Global South from the influence of Western supranational governance institutions, countries with long-term experience in countering their destructive influence, including sanctions, are reaching a new level of cohesion and independence.
Regional connectivity is increasing, international communications are deepening, including in matters of military and military-technical cooperation. Moscow and Havana’s plans to conduct joint exercises and implement programs in the field of military education are becoming permanent.
Thus, during a long-distance navigational voyage in July 2023, the Russian Navy training ship Perekop arrived in the capital of Cuba. The first call in 40 years by a Russian training warship at the port of Havana and the passage itself to the Caribbean Sea through the Atlantic Ocean, 150 km from US territory, provided for coordinated actions of maritime electronic intelligence of the two countries.
The US military-intelligence community closely monitored the activity of the Navy ship and the interaction of Russian sailors with their Cuban counterparts, which indicates Washington's sensitivity to the development of Russian-Cuban cooperation in the areas of defense and security, especially in the Western Hemisphere, in close proximity to US territory.
The Pentagon views the intensification of strategic cooperation between Russia and Cuba as a clear challenge; the CIA is making efforts to discredit it in the media space, launching anti-Russian information campaigns in affiliated regional media.
It is obvious that in this context, Washington will continue attempts to restore American influence in the Western Hemisphere, increasing its military and intelligence activity in the region, actively using the methodology and tools of hybrid confrontation.
The main targets of the US destructive influence in the 21st century will continue to be Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua - perceived by the enemy as a bulwark of resistance to attempts to restore the Monroe Doctrine, promoted under the auspices of Washington.
Havana’s successful historical experience in defending its independence, the cohesion of regional allies and the restoration of the Russian military-political and economic presence in Latin America and the Caribbean, along with China’s gaining regional weight, leaves no chance for Washington to maintain its monopoly of influence in the Western Hemisphere.
(c) A. Stepanov, A. Hoffmann
https://oborona.ru/product/zhurnal-naci ... 5679.shtml - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9136583.html
Google Translator
May 4, 11:06 p.m
Cuban military intelligence: structure, tasks, operations
The Directorate of Military Intelligence (La Dirección de Inteligencia Militar, DIM) is a military command body within the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba (El Ministerio de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de la República de Cuba, MINFAR), responsible for collecting information about the armed forces of other countries and intelligence information based on the reception and analysis of electromagnetic radiation (electronic intelligence).
The headquarters of the Directorate of Military Intelligence is located in the MINFAR General Staff building, on the Plaza de la Revolution in Havana, on the 6th floor, where it is adjacent to the main part of the units of the Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (La Dirección de Contrainteligencia Militar) of the Cuban Defense Department. According to open source data, DIM is divided into 4 main sections and general departments:
Section I - combat intelligence. She is subordinate to the military and military intelligence units of the Cuban armed forces, including the intelligence units of the Order of Antonio Maceo of the Border Brigade, responsible for protecting the territory adjacent to the American base in Guantanamo Bay. The section is operationally subordinate to the elite air assault brigade "Black Wasps", designed to carry out combat and reconnaissance and sabotage missions on enemy territory, which particularly distinguished itself in the performance of international duty in the countries of East Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Section II – operational reconnaissance. It consists of the following departments: II-1 – headquarters, secretariat and special security regime; II-2 - the foreign intelligence department, responsible for operational officers of foreign stations, divided into geographic areas; II-3 - internal intelligence department, responsible for operational military intelligence activities in the country, the fight against counter-revolution, special reconnaissance missions aimed mainly at creating operational positions among the personnel and command of the American military base in Guantanamo Bay and performing tasks in the territory USA; II-4/5 - illegal operational departments involved in interdepartmental special missions abroad and on the island; II-6 – logistics department; II-7 – communications department. In 1998, the section was restructured, some of the employees were distributed to other intelligence agencies.
Section III – intelligence analytics. It consists of four groups: situational analysis, USA, Europe and the rest of the world (Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa-Middle East).
Section IV – electronic reconnaissance (ERI). Under her command is the electronic intelligence brigade, a strategically important unit responsible for monitoring American military intelligence communications on the island, in the region and in the United States.
Department of special security regime (ensuring secrecy in document flow and office work).
Information Technology Department (cybersecurity, cryptology).
Information processing department (classification and structuring of intelligence information).
Professional training and retraining of DIM employees is carried out within the framework of the regular academic course of military intelligence (Curso Académico Regular de Inteligencia Militar por Agentura, CAREMA).
The main threat and the main enemy
For more than 60 years, in the face of regular attempts by the American side to destabilize the situation on the island and change the political system of the Republic through economic, diplomatic, military and intelligence actions, Cuba has confidently defended its sovereignty and ensured national security by means and capabilities available to it.
The preservation of Cuba's political and socio-economic identity within the framework of the unipolar system of international relations formed following the Cold War against the backdrop of prolonged military-political pressure from the United States indicates the significant contribution of military intelligence agencies represented by the structural divisions of DIM to the national security system of the Republic.
The headquarters of the Military Intelligence Directorate is located on the 6th floor of the General Staff of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba.
After the Cuban Revolution of 1953-1959. The main opponent of the Cuban national intelligence community and DIM, in particular, remains the US aspirations to change the constitutional order in Cuba. The leading actors in this process are the US military intelligence institutions, which, on a planned and systematic basis, have been building destructive activities throughout the entire period of the island’s independence in the direction of undermining Cuba’s statehood, up to the elimination of the country’s political leadership.
This hostile policy of Washington forms the main threat-forming factors for the national security and stability of the political configuration of Cuba, and the well-being of the population of the Republic as a whole.
Following the transformation and collapse of the bipolar system of international relations in 1989-1991. a consistent aggressive line of permanent pressure against Havana, in the context of the American side’s claims to sole world domination, is aimed at preserving and maintaining regional influence and ensuring geopolitical dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
However, Cuban specialists have their own recipes for countering these threats.
Military intelligence sees and hears everything
Over decades of protecting revolutionary achievements from outside attacks, in the most difficult operational environment and troubled neighborhood, the Cuban intelligence services have developed a special organizational and executive culture, adapted to operating in conditions of permanently high risk.
Naturally, the activities of the DIM Military Intelligence Directorate are carried out in close cooperation with the Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia or DI) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Cuba, which has broad operational capabilities. At the height of the Cold War, DI established itself as one of the world's strongest intelligence services in the field of undercover work, deploying a layered architecture of a covert apparatus not only in South America, but also, through diaspora capabilities, in the United States itself.
Under the operational subordination of the DIM is the Order of Antonio Maceo airborne assault brigade, better known as the “Black Wasps” (Avispas Negras).
The colossal experience, established culture and special style of Cuban intelligence allowed the DI to maintain a strong position in the top league of intelligence services and in the temporary unstable structure of a unipolar world , after the end (rather of a pause) of the Cold War.
In addition to the traditionally strong intelligence work, the Cuban intelligence community and, in particular, the Directorate of Military Intelligence, is distinguished by a high level of efficiency in the use of electronic intelligence in all its modern forms and manifestations.
Havana's strategic and situational awareness of the hostile activity of the American military-intelligence community, the plans of the Pentagon, and in some cases Langley, which is the fruit of the successful convergence of the capabilities of human and electronic intelligence of the Republic, has more than once become the subject of hearings in the US Congress. The attention of American parliamentarians clearly highlights the concern of the hegemon's political establishment about the intelligence capabilities of Liberty Island. Cuban professionals (despite the obvious comparative disproportion of financial and personnel potentials) are able to repel the enemy, acting “not with numbers, but with skill.”
The island's location, due to a number of geographical and technical factors, is ideal for gaining access to most of the US communications with the outside world, including the main facilities of critical information infrastructure. In fact, Cuba, along with the headquarters of the US National Security Agency (Fort Meade, Maryland), is the most geographically convenient and technically capable location in the Western Hemisphere for large-scale electronic interception of data.
DIM operates one of the largest and most sophisticated electronic intelligence programs in the world. The range of ER facilities at Bejucal, 20 km south of Havana, allows Cuban military intelligence to cover the maximum available range of US communications of interest, both government and private, as well as satellite links between North America and Europe.
At the strategic level, priority targets for collecting intelligence information using DER DIM are the communications channels of the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America, key nodes of military infrastructure, NASA and US Air Force communications, where special attention is paid to missile telemetry systems and means.
In a broader intelligence context, DIM has the operational and technical capabilities to provide covert access to commercial communications services of US financial institutions, including stock exchanges.
At the tactical level, special attention is paid to tracking American geosynchronous satellites, as elements of the US global orbital network, and the possibilities of neutralizing their activity.
Cuba's military intelligence, in addition to the geographical factor of direct operational reach of the country's territory for military intelligence activities against the main enemy (as well as in the reverse order), faces direct military threats emanating from the 117 sq. km of the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay.
Guantanamo Bay “under the hood”
The notorious American naval base, the only one located in a socialist country, is located on the island on the basis of the agreement on relations between the Republic of Cuba and the United States signed under conditions of force following the Spanish-American War in 1903 (replaced by new in 1934), as well as agreements to lease land in Cuba to the United States for coaling and naval stations.
In accordance with these documents, “the lease of Cuban territory does not have a fixed duration and the agreement on it can be terminated either by Washington’s decision to leave the base, or by mutual agreement of the parties to terminate the lease.”
Thus, the American military presence on the island is of indefinite duration and is maintained thanks to the significantly predominant military and diplomatic power of the United States, supported by controversial and imposed international legal agreements of the first half of the 20th century with the pre-revolutionary authorities of the island.
The specified naval base is managed by the Southeast Naval Region of the US Naval Facilities Command (Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida). The garrison, as well as the Guantanamo Bay Joint Task Force, are subordinate to the US Department of Defense Southern Command (headquartered in Doral, Miami-Dade County, Florida). Up to 8,500 military personnel from the Navy, Marine Corps, US Army and civilian base personnel are stationed at the military facility at any one time. Air service to the outside world is provided by the US Naval Air Station Leeward.
On the territory of the base, outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system, there is a camp opened in January 2002 for detainees accused by the US authorities of committing serious crimes, which has gained worldwide fame due to numerous facts of human rights violations, cruel treatment and torture.
The military prison at Guantanamo Bay is actually a concentration camp, which currently continues to house about 30 prisoners. The true situation and the number of prisoners do not appear in the public space.
However, it is reliably known that the US Central Intelligence Agency has access to prisoners of particular interest to the American side and uses a separate prison infrastructure in the camp to carry out its operational tasks in the region.
American naval base Guantanamo Bay.
These include the kidnapping of CIA targets from among representatives of regional political forces, security forces, and left-wing movements opposed to Washington. In Guantanamo they are subjected to special psychological treatment and are recruited. “Enhanced methods” of interrogation, including the use of psychoactive substances, are actively used against those who disagree. Undesirables, after such forceful influence and psychological treatment, are often subject to liquidation.
In this context, let us recall direct historical analogies - public reports by human rights activists, including American ones, on the results of Operation Condor in the 1970s - 1980s, as a result of which, on instructions from Langley, about 60,000 fighters for the independence of the continent were killed.
Nothing has changed in the CIA's methods since then, and Guantanamo is likely to be actively used for similar dirty purposes to this day.
The Cuban side has repeatedly raised the issue of the need for an international investigation into massive violations of human rights and international conventions by the American authorities in Guantanamo at the UN level. But the crimes of the CIA, unfortunately, for the most part fall out of sight of human rights structures and international organizations. And anyone who begins to show excessive curiosity about such a fact may find himself in one of the many illegal American intelligence prisons scattered around the world.
As part of the implementation of a complex of electronic intelligence activities at the American base in Guantanamo Bay, under the special control of DIM are the branch of the Main Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station in the Atlantic Area (NCTAMS LANT) of the Naval Information Forces (NAVIFOR) of the US Navy Fleet Forces Command (component Naval Forces Northern Command and the functional maritime component of the joint command of the US Department of Defense Strategic Command).
NAVIFOR carries out the integrated use of the information capabilities of the Navy (electronic communications, telecommunication networks, cryptology, meteorology, oceanography, electronic reconnaissance and warfare, operations in cyberspace, space navigation) to weaken and destroy the enemy’s combat capabilities, discredit and misinform him, as well as enhance the effectiveness of operations allies in a multi-domain war.
NCTAMS LANT at Guantanamo Bay operates and maintains elements of the station's Naval Telecommunications System and Military Communications System, including core communications (networks, information infrastructure, and associated technical equipment), frequency management, and coordination of DoD Defense Information Systems Agency nodes at military base.
The data transmitted by NCTAMS LANT is valuable for the Cuban side both in terms of access to internal communications at the American base, and in terms of external communication channels in Guantanamo with higher authorities located 800-1300 km to the north, in Florida.
"Black Wasps": true
to international duty The operational subordination of the DIM is the Order of Antonio Maceo Air Assault Brigade, better known as the "Black Wasps" (Avispas Negras). Before fulfilling their international duty in Angola, Cuban military commandos were divided into landing and sabotage units. Personnel recruitment was carried out at the expense of fighters who took part in special operations during the Revolution, who had experience in guerrilla warfare in the troops of Ernesto Che Guevara.
In 1963, on the initiative of Fidel Castro, special forces groups (Grupos Destinos Especial), known as the “Tigers”, were formed, in 1974 - an airborne brigade. Their first serious baptism of fire took place in Angola.
During Reagan's US expansion in Central America, Cuban military intelligence provided advice to Nicaragua, Grenada and Panama in repelling American aggression.
MINFAR analyzed the actions of the Cuban Expeditionary Force in the Battle of Quifangondo in October-November 1975, where the participation of the Tigers, then special forces units of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, played a significant role in the battle.
During a large-scale operation in Angola, Cuban military intelligence special forces were coordinated and gained combat experience in confrontation with the South African armed forces, mercenaries from NATO countries and local armed groups subordinate to them.
The official history of the modern “Black Wasps” dates back to December 1, 1986, when a separate brigade of the same name was created within the structure of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. In 1989, the special forces of the Cuban Ministry of Internal Affairs were subordinated to MINFAR and merged into a single structure with the special forces of military intelligence.
Doctrinally, the brigade's training was mainly aimed at countering possible attempts at military intervention in Cuba by the United States. Accordingly, much attention is paid to the specifics of conducting combat operations in the Caribbean tropics.
Also, the “Black Wasps” are considered the most prepared and combat-ready unit for war in rural conditions. A special feature of the unit’s use is the use of tactics of small mobile autonomous groups of 5-6 fighters, capable of penetrating deep behind enemy lines and causing critical damage to key military communications.
Individual training is carried out at the National School of Special Forces. Here, special forces soldiers of the Cuban military intelligence undergo comprehensive, in-depth training in reconnaissance and sabotage activities, which goes far beyond the scope of traditional special operations forces training. In terms of combat training, the Black Wasps cooperate with special forces instructors from China, North Korea, Vietnam and Russia.
Significant operations of the Black Wasps occurred in the period before joining the MINFAR air assault brigade, when part of the unit was subordinate to the Cuban Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Cuban special forces achieved their greatest successes in Angola, in battles against the South African army and the UNITA movement. The main tasks performed by the “Black Wasps” in Operation Carlota are reconnaissance activities and penetration into enemy territory, searching and destroying columns, mining enemy movement routes, and organizing ambushes. Some episodes of this war demonstrated the heroism of the Black Wasps in the performance of their international duty.
In particular, during the Battle of Kangamba in August 1983, Angolan and Cuban forces, besieged by UNITA militants supported by the South African Air Force and Special Forces, faced the threat of operational encirclement and the destruction of the garrison, which was subjected to massive enemy rocket and artillery fire. The Cuban columns did not have time to reach the remote city in an acceptable time, and the supplies of unguided aircraft missiles, which allowed the Cubans to restrain the enemy with airstrikes, and the garrison's ammunition were running out.
At the most critical moment of the battle, the Cuban command in Angola ordered the destruction of special communications equipment in Cangamba, Fidel Castro personally addressed the defenders of the city: “Let Cangamba become a cemetery for mercenaries serving the hated interests of South African racists. Let Cangamba become an eternal symbol of the courage of Cubans and Angolans. Let Kangamba be an example that the blood shed by Angolans and Cubans for the freedom and dignity of Africa was not in vain. I believe in your unmatched courage and promise you that we will save you at any cost. Homeland or Death! We will win!". The only possible option for saving the garrison before the arrival of reinforcements was to strike the rear of the besiegers with special forces.
The first mixed Cuban-Angolan helicopter landing landed a few kilometers from Kangamba, but on the approaches to the city it suffered losses in a short, intense battle with superior enemy forces and was forced to retreat. Having launched another attack under heavy enemy mortar and artillery fire, the Black Wasps managed to turn the situation around through the active use of mobile automatic grenade launchers against UNITA positions and risky cover maneuvers with military helicopters.
The UNITA besieging forces suffered significant damage, the enemy was distracted by the actions of the Cubans in the northern direction from Cangamba, in their rear. Then a helicopter landing was carried out in the south-eastern direction, forcing the demoralized militants to retreat. The Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, Castro, kept his word - the garrison was saved, the enemy was defeated. Largely thanks to the heroic efforts of the Black Wasps.
Cuban experience is in demand in a multipolar world
More than six decades of confrontation with the American military-intelligence community, three of which fell during the period of American hegemony, have allowed the Cuban intelligence community to accumulate unique experience and knowledge that is in demand among colleagues from countries seeking to defend their sovereignty in a turbulent world. in the context of the transition to multipolarity.
The Cold War, common threats and challenges from the collective West, led to close interaction between the Cuban intelligence community and the intelligence and state security agencies of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries. During its formation, the MINFAR Military Intelligence Directorate distinguished itself, fulfilling its international duty in Algeria, and continued its combat path in Africa, which was freed from colonial oppression - Guinea-Bissau, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Alvaro Lopez Miera, participated in long-term Cuban military missions in Angola and Ethiopia, fulfilling his international duty.
In Angola, the Cuban contingent, as part of the large-scale and lengthy Operation Carlota, played a key role in defending the independence and sovereignty of Luanda. The operational and combat activities of DIM allowed the Cuban side to make a significant contribution to defeating the armed forces of the racist regime of South Africa and their proxy forces in Angola.
Including the decisive Battle of Cuito Cuanavle, during which Cuban special forces repeatedly staged successful sabotage behind enemy lines and ambushes elite South African units staffed by racist mercenaries from the United States and Western Europe.
The participation of Cuban military intelligence was crucial in repelling the invasion of Ethiopia by Somali forces during the Ogaden War. In the Middle East, DIM participated in the Cuban military mission to support Syria in the October War of 1973.
During the Reagan US expansion in Central America, Cuban military intelligence provided advisory assistance to Nicaragua, Grenada and Panama in repelling American aggression. The DIM electronic intelligence station until recently ensured its operation during the US invasion of Panama in 1989.
DIM had a significant influence on countering the terror deployed by the American military-intelligence community in South America as part of Operation Condor. The role of Cuban military intelligence in supporting the national resistance of the Argentines in the “Dirty War” and the Chileans to the regime of Augusto Pinochet is significant.
DIM has special, friendly relations with its Venezuelan colleagues. Cuban military intelligence has provided and continues to provide adequate support to Caracas in containing Washington's efforts to destabilize the situation in the country. This applies both to the electronic intelligence capabilities of the DIM, used to disavow the plans of the American side, and to operations to neutralize American agents. These actions turned out to be especially effective given Washington’s intentions to provoke a military invasion of Venezuela and the efforts of the US intelligence community to organize the so-called “armed opposition” in the country with the goal of violently overthrowing the constitutional order.
Cuba's strategically important geographic location in the Western Hemisphere and the island's unique conditions for electronic intelligence in relation to American communications made the operational capabilities of the Cuban Office of Military Intelligence extremely broad, reaching a global level in its significance.
If during the Cold War the USSR was Cuba's main ally, now, in addition to its legal successor, the Russian Federation, Chinese colleagues should also be considered among the priority partners of Cuban intelligence. Coupled with Havana’s strong commitment to rejecting the Western model of ultra-globalism and American hegemony, the potential for cooperation with the Republic in the field of technical intelligence attracts colleagues from other countries facing hostile actions from Washington, primarily Iran and the DPRK, to interact with DIM.
Russian-Cuban cooperation in the fields of security and intelligence received a new impetus in March 2023, when Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev paid an official visit to Havana, where he was received by Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and Revolutionary leader Raul Castro.
The parties held extensive interdepartmental consultations on security issues. Issues of bilateral cooperation between the intelligence services were discussed in detail. Particular emphasis is placed on the joint efforts of Russia and Cuba to counter “color revolutions” and the destructive activity of non-governmental organizations. In these matters, the operational and technical capabilities of the MINFAR Directorate of Military Intelligence are of key importance.
In February of this year. Nikolai Patrushev visited Havana again. During his meeting with the President of Cuba, among other issues, issues of interaction between Moscow and Havana in the field of security were discussed.
In June 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defense was visited by a large delegation of Cuban colleagues led by the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Army Corps General Alvaro Lopez Miera. At the negotiations, the parties discussed a wide range of issues in the military and military-technical field, including, probably, the continuation and development of cooperation in the field of electronic intelligence, interaction between military intelligence agencies of Russia and Cuba in countering common threats from the United States and NATO.
It should be noted that General Miera, a graduate of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR, participated in long Cuban military missions in Angola and Ethiopia, fulfilling his international duty. The joint historical experience of Russia and Cuba in the context of helping friendly African countries defend their sovereignty in the face of the challenges of the aggressive intentions of the United States and NATO will undoubtedly be in demand in the process of transition to a multipolar system of international relations.
It can be stated that with the emergence of new regional poles and the transformation of the geopolitical map of the world towards increasing the autonomy of the Global South from the influence of Western supranational governance institutions, countries with long-term experience in countering their destructive influence, including sanctions, are reaching a new level of cohesion and independence.
Regional connectivity is increasing, international communications are deepening, including in matters of military and military-technical cooperation. Moscow and Havana’s plans to conduct joint exercises and implement programs in the field of military education are becoming permanent.
Thus, during a long-distance navigational voyage in July 2023, the Russian Navy training ship Perekop arrived in the capital of Cuba. The first call in 40 years by a Russian training warship at the port of Havana and the passage itself to the Caribbean Sea through the Atlantic Ocean, 150 km from US territory, provided for coordinated actions of maritime electronic intelligence of the two countries.
The US military-intelligence community closely monitored the activity of the Navy ship and the interaction of Russian sailors with their Cuban counterparts, which indicates Washington's sensitivity to the development of Russian-Cuban cooperation in the areas of defense and security, especially in the Western Hemisphere, in close proximity to US territory.
The Pentagon views the intensification of strategic cooperation between Russia and Cuba as a clear challenge; the CIA is making efforts to discredit it in the media space, launching anti-Russian information campaigns in affiliated regional media.
It is obvious that in this context, Washington will continue attempts to restore American influence in the Western Hemisphere, increasing its military and intelligence activity in the region, actively using the methodology and tools of hybrid confrontation.
The main targets of the US destructive influence in the 21st century will continue to be Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua - perceived by the enemy as a bulwark of resistance to attempts to restore the Monroe Doctrine, promoted under the auspices of Washington.
Havana’s successful historical experience in defending its independence, the cohesion of regional allies and the restoration of the Russian military-political and economic presence in Latin America and the Caribbean, along with China’s gaining regional weight, leaves no chance for Washington to maintain its monopoly of influence in the Western Hemisphere.
(c) A. Stepanov, A. Hoffmann
https://oborona.ru/product/zhurnal-naci ... 5679.shtml - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9136583.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
Llanisca Lugo is a psychologist and popular educator. She serves as a Representative in Cuba’s Popular Power National Assembly and as the International Solidarity Coordinator at the Martin Luther King Center. (Venezuelanalysis)
Countering the impact of the U.S. blockade: A conversation with Llanisca Lugo
By Cira Pascual Marquina (Posted May 08, 2024)
Originally published: Venezuelananlysis on May 3, 2024 (more by Venezuelananlysis) |
Cuba has endured a criminal U.S. blockade for over six decades, while Venezuela is nearing a decade of life under sanctions. The stated aim of the blockades against both countries is to promote “regime change.” Although the policy has not achieved its goal, it has generated numerous economic, social, and political challenges. In this interview, Llanisca Lugo, the International Solidarity Coordinator at the Martin Luther King Center in Havana, explores the consequences of the imperialist blockade as well as the strategies available to counteract the political and ideological impact of such unilateral coercive measures.
Cira Pascual Marquina: In a recent address in Caracas, you delved into the Monroe Doctrine [1823] and its historical connection to imperialist sanctions. Could you elaborate further?
Llanisca Lugo: It’s important to delve into the historical backdrop of imperialist policies directed at Cuba, Venezuela, and the region as a whole. These policies can be traced back to the Monroe Doctrine, which explicitly asserts the U.S. intent to dominate the continent. Implicit in this doctrine is the US’ drive to maximize profits with the least effort possible.
Over time, U.S. attempts to exert control over the region have shifted and adapted. The shifting balance of power between our liberation projects and the imperialist forces has determined policy changes, but the objective remains the same.
Let’s take Cuba as a case study. When you look at our history, you can see that the imperialist methods have changed over time. Initially, the U.S. sought to purchase Cuba from Spain. Subsequently, the U.S. strategically intervened in our war of independence [1895-98], despite Cuba’s near victory. This intervention paved the way for Cuba’s de facto recolonization. While nominally a republic, the island was effectively tethered to the economic interests and political dynamics of the U.S.
Then, shortly after the triumph of the Revolution [1959], when the Cuban people became the architects of their own history, the U.S. began to pursue a policy of collective punishment.
The formula is simple: when a pueblo rebels against the dictates of the U.S. and the interests of capital, imperialism will use all means to discipline the society. Before the Cuban Revolution, Havana’s hotels, ferries, and businesses catered to the Miami bourgeoisie. In fact, the island was functional to the interests of U.S. capital. Shortly after the Revolution came into power, the blockade was set in place to discipline the pueblo. The blockade was (and is) economic and financial, but it also generated political isolation.
A country—be it Cuba, Venezuela, or any other—that attempts to build a socialist society in a world dominated by capitalism and neoliberal globalization will, sooner or later, be “sanctioned” by imperialism. I should clarify that when I talk about imperialism, I tend to focus on the U.S., but imperialism is constituted by a network of economic, political, and cultural forces driven by capital’s financial logic with the U.S. at its head.
CPM: Why have unilateral coercive measures become a weapon of choice in the imperialist arsenal?
Monroe Doctrine infographic. (Venezuelanalysis)
LL: The blockade does not feature in the story told by imperialism. Why? The idea is to transfer the responsibility for the problems in a blockaded country to its “bad” government. This is significant because, to the degree that the blockade diminishes the state’s efficacy, the institutions may seen as inept and incapable of governing and as exclusively accountable for the ongoing economic and financial crisis.
Of course, blockades never come alone. In Cuba, overt violence was deployed against the Revolution, but at present the blockade is the primary mechanism that imperialism uses. As a strategy, the blockade is a cultural and ideological mechanism that gives the U.S. an advantage.
CPM: You have argued that the blockade can, in some cases, sow division between the revolutionary project and the pueblo. Could you elaborate on this?
LL: Our situation is complex, because Cuba and Venezuela embarked on socialist projects in which the people are the protagonists. People’s power has been central, albeit in different ways, in both processes. Both Cuba and Venezuela recognize the pueblo as the subject of transformation, because it is understood that socialism is not possible any other way.
However, when the pueblo faces prolonged scarcity, then social fatigue, anomie, and apathy begin to emerge. This leads to a disconnect between the pueblo — the subject—and the revolutionary project. When this happens, tensions begin to emerge between the revolutionary power necessary for change and the project itself.
Since the state-as-a-revolutionary-power has to secure food for the people, produce essential goods, and assist vulnerable groups, that can weaken the strategic project. That’s why the situation requires constant monitoring.
In other words, we have to do everything possible so that the immediate problems don’t divert us from the strategic goal. That means that, while tackling scarcity and other economic problems, we also have to focus on the Revolution—which is always a work in progress—and address the shortcomings in our democratic processes. In short, we must pursue the project’s strategic objectives while addressing the immediate ones. Balancing both is crucial to prevent a gap from forming between the project and the pueblo.
The blockade restricts access to financial markets, hinders our relationship with banks, and delays vital deliveries of goods such as milk or even the fuel needed for hospital operations. When managing this complex situation, it’s difficult to sustain a political discourse about revolutionary construction, but it is imperative to do so.
In the Cuban case, which is the one I know best, significant efforts are made to engage in “what is to be done” discussions from a Marxist perspective—which is recognized as the ideological source of our revolution in the Constitution. Our debates also draw from the ideas of José Martí and Fidel. However, the blockade consistently obstructs progress, generating both economic and cultural pressures.
CPM: The stated objective of the blockades against our countries is “regime change.” Cuba has been subjected to a sanctions regime for over 60 years, while Venezuela has endured a nine-year blockade. Even so, our governments are still standing. So why does U.S. imperialism continue to pursue this policy?
LL: The blockade is deeply intertwined with U.S. domestic politics, particularly during election cycles. It transcends party lines, with both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party embracing the strategy. It should be noted, however, that Trump’s policies were perhaps the most draconian, because they hindered our capacity to get medical inputs and inflicted severe blows to our economy.
While the blockade has failed to topple our governments, it has effectively created a degree of social fatigue and apathy. Moreover, the blockade makes the younger generations more disconnected—the generations who didn’t experience the Revolution first-hand when the most profound social transformations were occurring and emancipatory epic and mystique were strongest.
It’s important to recognize that a revolution is never a finished product and can be reversed. A revolution is not always linear, it’s not in permanent ascent, and it can be undone. We have also learned that the downturns in a revolution can be much more painful, intense, and rapid than the advances, which are often slow because revolutionary transformations take strength and patience.
The disciplinary effects of the blockade have led some young people to entertain the notion that capitalism offers them better prospects, thereby eating away at their rebelliousness. Consequently, some Cuban youth aspire to enter a labor market defined by the logic of capital.
The logic of capital prevails when you think that you deserve more than the other person; that it’s normal to exclude some so that others can advance; that private enterprises work better; and that collective solutions wear you down.
Hence, we must engage in an ongoing debate about which societal model offers better living conditions for the pueblo. We have to show that a communitarian society will be better.
Why is this, from my point of view, so important? Because the blockade invisibilizes our history and our enemy. It creates a narrative in which the Revolution bears the blame for all woes, while successes and solutions seem to come from elsewhere.
If the youth, who haven’t experienced our revolutionary history firsthand, don’t have spaces to reflect, if they don’t have their organizations, if they don’t have a place to rekindle the mystique of the revolutionary spirit in their own terms… then we are at risk of losing sight of our collective struggle.
Finally, we cannot assume that our project is a finished one, that it is solid, homogeneous, and resistant in the face of imperialism. We are in a permanent struggle that must go hand in hand with permanent debate.
CPM: You have talked about the need to cultivate a revolutionary subjectivity among the youth. Beyond the ongoing debate that you encourage, which is crucial, what additional actions do you propose?
The impact of the U.S. blockade on Venezuela, an infographic. (Venezuelanalysis)
LL: Something that I often think about is that we should not imagine that there is a place full of perfect goodness, knowledge, and prophetic illumination. The idealized subject that we all dreamt of doesn’t exist. No individual has all the answers. Nor does anyone hold the perfect roadmap in their hands. Therefore, we must turn to the organized pueblo to find the way forward, but even the pueblo is not all-knowing.
We will make errors, and tensions and contradictions will inevitably arise, but that is the way forward. What lies ahead? We have to do more organizing and do it better. There was a time when the Cuban Revolution made huge strides because of widespread grassroots organization. That should be our model. We have to reactivate many of these organizations, nurture them, and help them advance.
But that is not enough. We must look for other ways to foster a collective subjectivity born out of rebelliousness. We should encourage a group of students who organize a congress or a bunch of barrio kids who gather to address a local problem. Such spaces should be allowed to flourish with autonomy, even if they are not following the exact paths that have been prescribed.
There are many ways of organizing; some are explicitly political, whereas others are not. Yet, we must refrain from discriminating against the latter. A group of young people organizing to play soccer may not be explicitly political, but their endeavor has a collective dimension that inherently goes against the logic of capital.
We have to inspire rebelliousness and enthusiasm among the youth, and we have to foster spaces that breathe life to our process. While doing this, we have to appeal to our history so that all merges into the revolutionary project… but each generation must forge its own path!
We have to debate and listen to each other, so that the diversity that emerges will also converge. It should not matter if it’s a party, a youth organization, or a commune; any organizational project that brings us together as a collective subject is emancipatory.
CPM: You recently visited Venezuela. Do you have any specific thoughts on the Bolivarian Process?
LL: Each process has its beauty. One of our pending tasks is to convey to the Venezuelan pueblo how important their process is for Latin America and the Caribbean. Indeed, the Bolivarian Process has had a huge impact on Cuba. When we listened to Chávez, we reconnected with our project in a new way, because he talked not only about national emancipation but also about continental emancipation.
We are also inspired by the Venezuelan communes. While they may not be perfect, it’s clear that when people organize themselves, collectively manage day-to-day affairs, and produce the goods they need, then a community of equals emerges. This is a fundamental step in transcending capitalism.
At the Martin Luther King Center, we are studying the Venezuelan communes and working to exchange experiences with communards. We want to learn about their processes of self-organization and self-management, about their interaction with the state, and about how they exert pressure, organize processes, and render accounts.
We have beautiful experiences in Cuba, but Venezuela’s communes can teach us a lot too.
As I said during a recent visit to Caracas, we should roll up our sleeves and go to the communes so that we may get to know and learn from each other. Nobody has all the answers; we can’t achieve emancipation alone. We must draw inspiration from every movement that aims to overcome capitalism and free our pueblos from the yoke of imperialism.
https://mronline.org/2024/05/08/counter ... isca-lugo/
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Leaders of Cuba and Russia honor Fidel Castro in Moscow
Díaz Canel will attend this Thursday the military parade and other commemorative activities for the 79th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War. | Photo: Presidency
Published May 8, 2024 (1 hour 13 minutes ago)
Cuba and Russia celebrate the 64th anniversary of the reestablishment of their diplomatic relations within the framework of the visit of the Cuban head of state to that country.
The president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, paid honors this Tuesday to the former president and leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, at the monument dedicated to his memory inaugurated by both leaders.
Before the statue that stands in the square that has been named after the Cuban leader since 2017 in the Sókol district, Díaz-Canel, accompanied by his Russian counterpart, laid a wreath with the phrase “To the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution of the people of Cuba.”
The sculpture represents Fidel Castro on a rock on which the map of Cuba is inscribed and aims to "reflect the heroic path of the man who defended the freedom of his country and the world," according to its designers.
Díaz-Canel asserted that Fidel Catro understood very well “the ties of brotherhood that have united both nations” and “admired the greatness of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), their humanism and the capacity for sacrifice to save to humanity from fascism.”
In turn, Putin stressed that "Fidel Castro is a symbol of an entire era, of the national liberation movements, of the fall of the colonial system and the creation of new independent States in Latin America and Africa."
Meanwhile, those responsible for the work, the architect Andrey Beliy and the sculptor Alexey Chebanenko, expressed that the sculpture group represents the heroic path of a man who defended the rights of the people in his country.
This is Díaz-Canel's fourth visit to Russia in his performance as head of state, after his trips to that country in 2018, 2019 and 2022.
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/rusia-cu ... -0016.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
Cuba is Anachronistic in Both Directions
MAY 14, 2024
A view of the Plaza de la Revolucion, Revolution Square, in downtown Havana. Photo: File photo.
By Paweł Wargan – May 12, 2024
In a few hours, I leave Cuba after two weeks in a land that seems to hover above time.
Cuba is anachronistic in both directions — towards both past and future. It exists in the past, because it has inherited the burden of underdevelopment. Like much of the world, it is haunted by the many shadows of colonial domination. Its cars are old. Its roads need mending. Its concessions to the world it inhabits tug at its people from different directions. Its northern neighbor — even in its advanced state of rot — refuses to lift its knee from Cuba’s neck. The longest-standing sanctions regime in human history is now compounded by the crippling and absurd designation of Cuba, a state-sponsor of hope, as a state-sponsor of terror.
It exists in the future, because it has built a project that, for most of us, remains in the realm of imagination. The 1959 Cuban Revolution overthrew the shackles of colonialism and, from the devastation it inherited, eliminated illiteracy; guaranteed free healthcare, housing and food for all; transformed the structure of land ownership; and built the most prosperous society in one of the world’s most overexploited regions.
Cuba has more hospitals than banks. It has more doctors than policemen — and has dispatched them to help as many nations as the United States has sanctioned. Cuba supported liberation movements from Angola to Bolivia, and played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa. Today, it stands firmly with the Palestinian resistance against the Zionist genocide. For six decades, the Cuban people have held the aspirations of the Third World on their shoulders. They are, to paraphrase a poem, exiles from the future, cast into an old world unprepared for their fellowship.
That old world has tried to expel Cuba as if it were a cancer. But it has failed, because the old world is the cancer; Cuba is the cure. The world of the colonizer and imperialist is the parasite that feeds on the body of humanity to sustain its grim futurelessness. The so-called Western world is the aberration — an anomaly so far past its due date, so deeply panicked, that it is prepared to kill children.
The genocide in Gaza and the blockade of Cuba represent violence different in form but identical in intent: to eradicate the very dream of defiance. They are warnings, commanding us to lower our chins and turn our eyes to the ground lest we catch a glimpse of the future from which the struggles for liberation visit us. But take a walk along the streets of Havana or Ramallah and you will see that the people of Cuba, like the people of Palestine, hold their heads up high. They are people who, to quote the Soviet soldier and poet Nikolai Mayorov, “rendered the word ‘humanity’ into flesh”.
Because they have not surrendered, we keep fighting.
https://orinocotribune.com/cuba-is-anac ... irections/
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Why Israel Is Not Punished But Cuba Is
MAY 14, 2024
Editorial note: Orinoco Tribune does not generally publish pieces older than two weeks. However, an exception is being made in this case, as the current article remains as relevant today as when it was first published.
By Marc Vanderpitte – Apr 22, 2024
Some believe and others like to proclaim that international politics is based on values and good intentions. The treatment that Israel and Cuba receive completely destroys that belief.
Where is the logic? Cuba, a country that harms no one and sends more doctors around the world than the World Health Organization, has been harshly sanctioned for over 60 years.
In contrast, the apartheid state of Israel is perpetrating genocide before our eyes, and yet, no economic sanctions are imposed against it. On the contrary, it receives billions of dollars in aid and a great deal of heavy weaponry to carry out these massacres.
What are the reasons for this scandalous double standard?
Punishing good examples
Despite its illegal nature, the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba has been the centerpiece of US policy toward the island since the victory of the revolution in 1959. This policy is what Noam Chomsky describes as “Washington’s hysterical obsession with crushing Cuba.”
There are several reasons for this obsession. At the end of the 19th century, Cuba was incorporated into the United States as a neocolony. From then on, the US controlled significant parts of the Cuban economy and did not want to lose that control.
Above all, it was unacceptable for a country located barely 180 km from the United States to take a progressive course, as this could encourage other countries to follow suit. Therefore, this revolution had to be nipped in the bud.
According to a 1960 US Foreign Ministry memorandum, “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” The objective was to “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government.”
Shortly thereafter, the Eisenhower administration imposed an embargo that would later become an economic blockade (in addition to pressuring other countries to end economic relations with Cuba). The first objective of the economic sanctions was to put an end to the revolution and, if that failed, to damage the country as much as possible so that Cuban socialism would not be an example for other countries.
That example applies not only to Latin America but also to the United States itself. A quarter of US citizens say that they or a family member postpones treatment for a serious illness because of the cost. Studying is reserved only for the very wealthy or for students willing to take on substantial debt.
In Cuba, such situations are unthinkable. There, being sick or studying is not a luxury. Purchasing power is much lower than in the United States, but health care and education are free. A black resident in the United States dies on average six years earlier than a Cuban, and infant mortality in Cuba is lower than in the “land of the free.”
By trial and error, Cuba has managed to build a different kind of society that does not focus on profit, but on the social, intellectual, and cultural development of its people. Despite severe economic sanctions, Cuba ranks around the average of the OECD, a club of rich countries, in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, education levels, etc.
Cuba achieves this high social score with a per capita income eight times lower than that of the United States. If Cuba is capable of achieving so much with so few resources and despite the blockade, what would the United States not be capable of?
Currently, 30,000 Cuban healthcare workers are working in 66 countries, including Italy. In the last 60 years, Cuban doctors have treated two billion people around the world. If the United States and Europe made the same effort as Cuba, together they would send more than two million doctors to the world and the shortage of health personnel in the South would be solved overnight.
The longest and most extensive economic blockade in history
Is that also why Cuba is in the spotlight so much? In any case, the US government itself declares the blockade against Cuba as “one of the most comprehensive US sanctions against any country.” The objective is to economically isolate the island from the rest of the world as much as possible and, thus, harm it as much as possible.
Under Trump, the isolation intensified to unprecedented levels with 243 new tough sanctions and the inclusion of Cuba on the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT), which excludes Cuba from international banking transactions and makes it increasingly difficult to purchase basic necessities such as fuel, food, medicine, and hygiene products.
Biden has kept these tightened sanctions fairly intact, with disastrous consequences. As a result, there are now shortages of food, medicine, and fuel in Cuba. During the pandemic, the US even prevented respirators from being supplied to Cuba at a time when the country urgently needed them, resulting in many deaths. According to the UN convention (Article II, b and c), the blockade can be qualified as genocide.
The extraterritorial nature of the blockade makes it impossible or risky for European companies and financial institutions to establish economic relations with Cuba. This is a flagrant violation of international law and an attack on European sovereignty. But the European Union submits to this slavery and, thus, becomes an accomplice to the US sanctions regime.
In November last year, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the US blockade against Cuba for the 30th consecutive year. The only country apart from the United States that refused to condemn the blockade was Israel.
It is, therefore, interesting to examine that country and its relationship with the United States.
One of the most destructive military campaigns in history
While Cuba has been in the US crosshairs for more than 60 years and is suffering the longest economic blockade in history, Israel can afford almost anything.
According to experts, the military campaign in Gaza is “one of the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.” Civilians are being killed, and entire neighborhoods are being leveled to the ground on a scale that could be described as industrial, and it is being done with the help of cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence.
In little more than four months, more children have died in Gaza than in four years of wars around the world. Similar figures have been recorded for the number of journalists killed.
In addition to these destructive carpet bombings, Israel is deliberately starving the Palestinian civilian population, according to a senior UN expert. Officially, Israel’s goal is to eliminate Hamas. However, the ferocity and cruelty of the operation show that it is an excuse to make Gaza uninhabitable and completely deport the population.
Without Egyptian resistance and international pressure, the population of the Gaza Strip could have been expelled to the Sinai desert.
In January the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ruled that, in any case, there is sufficient evidence to investigate Israel on charges of genocide. For Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, “the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide has been crossed.”
Racism and militarism
This mass slaughter is not an excess, but the offspring and perhaps the culmination of the ancient Zionist dream of ruling the region from “the sea to the Jordan valley,” as stated in Netanyahu’s party charter. This Zionist dream can only be realized through racism and militarism.
Israel has rightly been described as “the most racist state in the world.” The creation of the Jewish state in 1948 was accompanied by a mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing of about half of the Palestinian population. Thereafter, the Israeli state strove to have as few Palestinian people as possible in as much annexed territory as possible.
With the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel quadrupled its territory and thereafter began the active colonization of the West Bank, where the Palestinian population suffers humiliation and deprivation. Thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been abducted and held for years without trial in Israeli prisons.
But that is nothing compared to Gaza. Its population has been under a total blockade since 2007. The Gaza Strip has become nothing less than a concentration camp. It is not for nothing that Amnesty International called Israel an apartheid state.
Israeli tank instructors
Israel is also probably the most militaristic state in the world. After Qatar, Israel is the country that spends the most per capita on the military. Civil society is completely permeated by soldiers and military installations. With mandatory military service for all men and women and reserve service for the entire Jewish population until they turn 40, Israeli Jews constantly alternate between the role of civilian and soldier, and the line between the two is blurred.
The Israeli military industry is one of the most advanced in the world. Its success is based on two things. Firstly, it is based on compulsory military service, which selects the best scientific and technological minds for defense research and development units.
Secondly, it is based on the policy of colonization and regular military wars against Gaza. The Palestinian population is an excellent training target for the security industry. The latest security gadgets or attack techniques are tested on them. In other words, it is “battle-tested” weaponry. The wars in Gaza are excellent “practical exercises” for the Israeli military-industrial complex’s latest weapons and drones.
Israel currently has some 600 companies exporting security technologies and services. Annually, they export over $12 billion worth of weapons (equivalent to 2.6% of its GDP). The track record of these arms deliveries makes one’s blood run cold.
Israel sold arms to the South African apartheid government in 1975 and even agreed to supply nuclear warheads. Napalm and other weapons were supplied to El Salvador during the 1980-1992 counterinsurgency wars, which killed more than 75,000 civilians (out of a population of five million).
Israeli bullets, rifles, and grenades were used in the Rwandan genocide that killed at least 800,000 people. In September 2023, Israel delivered drones, rockets, and mortars to Azerbaijan for its campaign to retake Nagorno-Karabakh and displace 100,000 Armenians.
It is not just a matter of arms exports. Since its inception, Israel has supported a whole series of right-wing regimes and military dictatorships. The Israeli military put its accumulated experience and expertise at the disposal of the most brutal regimes in the last century: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, and Venezuela.
The bloodiest participation took place in Guatemala. Israel participated behind the scenes in one of the most violent counterrevolutionary campaigns that the western hemisphere has experienced since the colonization of the American continent. More than 200,000 people, mostly indigenous Guatemalans, died in the process.
During the Syrian proxy war, Israel collaborated with jihadist fighters from both Al Qaeda and Islamic State. Among other things, the terrorists could count on medical treatment in Israel.
Why are the West and Israel such close friends?
For all this disrepute, one would expect the United States and the West to treat Israel as a pariah state. But, in fact, it does just the opposite. Since its inception, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid. In total, it has received some $300 billion in economic and military aid.
In 1989, the US granted Israel the status of “major non-NATO ally,” which gave it access to extensive weapons systems. Israel was the first country to receive a US-made F-35 fighter jets, the most advanced in the world. The US also helped fund and produce Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system.
In any case, Washington’s extremely generous support has made Israel the strongest military power in the region, hands down. Not even genocide and one war crime after another stops the money coming in. On the contrary, after the war on Gaza, the White House approved a massive $14.5 billion aid package.
If the US exerts any political pressure on Israel, for example, to allow more humanitarian aid, it is purely for Biden’s electoral reasons and to save face as far as possible in the eyes of world public opinion.
Israel’s ties with Europe are also strong. Israel has an economic partnership agreement with the European Union, which is also its largest trading partner. Scientific collaboration is intense. “Horizon Europe” is the European Union’s main funding program for research and innovation in Israel, with a budget of €95.5 billion over a seven-year period.
After all, Europe is also a major supplier of arms to Israel. Nearly a quarter of all weapons imported by Israel come from Germany and Italy. After the 1956 Suez War, France provided nuclear assistance to Israel, enabling it to become a nuclear power.
After the murder of 224 aid workers, some 100 journalists, over 13,000 children, and 8,400 women, and the starvation of more than two million civilians, there is still no sign of sanctions from Europe. What other atrocities will Israel have to commit before Europe takes action?
Much ado about nothing from Europe continues. Weapons continue to leave European ports for Israel and the Zionist state can participate in the Eurovision Music Contest without any problem.
The question then arises as to why the United States and the West continue to unconditionally support a terrorist regime. The main reason is not far to seek and has to do with Israel’s highly strategic location. Israel is situated in the Middle East, a region where 48% of the world’s oil reserves and 40% of its gas reserves are located.
This region also connects Europe with Asia and is crucial for international trade. Around 30% of all the world’s maritime containers pass through the nearby Suez Canal. The region is also crucial for China’s New Silk Roads or its counterpart, the so-called India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).
Israel can be considered a US military base with a very reliable partner, helping to keep this strategic region under control. Recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, nephew of President John F. Kennedy, put it sharply: “Israel… is almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.”
Israel is the policeman of the region. Since its creation, Israel has successfully fought several wars against neighboring Arab states. The Israeli army regularly carries out raids or attacks against countries or groups unaligned to the West: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran.
In the past, Washington could rely on three other allies (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye) for its geopolitical agenda in the region. Since 1979, it has lost Iran’s support. And in recent years, Saudi Arabia and even Türkiye have followed an increasingly independent path. This leaves Israel as the only irreplaceable US ally left in this pivotal region. It should be remembered that Israel is also the only country with nuclear weapons in the Middle East. That explains why it can indulge in almost anything and act with almost total impunity.
Farce
If we are to believe Western leaders, their policies are based on values and good intentions. In his own words, Biden bases his foreign relations on “upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.” The Treaty of the European Union states that the Union is based on values such as “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.”
In light of how the United States and Europe treat Israel and Cuba, this is a farce. The so-called “rules-based international order” is a smokescreen to hide the reality: pure economic and geostrategic interests.
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim makes no bones about it: “The gut-wrenching tragedy that continues to unfold in the Gaza Strip has laid bare the self-serving nature of much valued, the much vaunted rules-based order.”
The vastly different treatment of Cuba and Israel illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the Western order, an order that is being taken less and less seriously in the Global South. North-South relations are tilting, not only economically but also ideologically. A new era is beginning.
(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)
https://orinocotribune.com/why-israel-i ... t-cuba-is/
MAY 14, 2024
A view of the Plaza de la Revolucion, Revolution Square, in downtown Havana. Photo: File photo.
By Paweł Wargan – May 12, 2024
In a few hours, I leave Cuba after two weeks in a land that seems to hover above time.
Cuba is anachronistic in both directions — towards both past and future. It exists in the past, because it has inherited the burden of underdevelopment. Like much of the world, it is haunted by the many shadows of colonial domination. Its cars are old. Its roads need mending. Its concessions to the world it inhabits tug at its people from different directions. Its northern neighbor — even in its advanced state of rot — refuses to lift its knee from Cuba’s neck. The longest-standing sanctions regime in human history is now compounded by the crippling and absurd designation of Cuba, a state-sponsor of hope, as a state-sponsor of terror.
It exists in the future, because it has built a project that, for most of us, remains in the realm of imagination. The 1959 Cuban Revolution overthrew the shackles of colonialism and, from the devastation it inherited, eliminated illiteracy; guaranteed free healthcare, housing and food for all; transformed the structure of land ownership; and built the most prosperous society in one of the world’s most overexploited regions.
Cuba has more hospitals than banks. It has more doctors than policemen — and has dispatched them to help as many nations as the United States has sanctioned. Cuba supported liberation movements from Angola to Bolivia, and played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa. Today, it stands firmly with the Palestinian resistance against the Zionist genocide. For six decades, the Cuban people have held the aspirations of the Third World on their shoulders. They are, to paraphrase a poem, exiles from the future, cast into an old world unprepared for their fellowship.
That old world has tried to expel Cuba as if it were a cancer. But it has failed, because the old world is the cancer; Cuba is the cure. The world of the colonizer and imperialist is the parasite that feeds on the body of humanity to sustain its grim futurelessness. The so-called Western world is the aberration — an anomaly so far past its due date, so deeply panicked, that it is prepared to kill children.
The genocide in Gaza and the blockade of Cuba represent violence different in form but identical in intent: to eradicate the very dream of defiance. They are warnings, commanding us to lower our chins and turn our eyes to the ground lest we catch a glimpse of the future from which the struggles for liberation visit us. But take a walk along the streets of Havana or Ramallah and you will see that the people of Cuba, like the people of Palestine, hold their heads up high. They are people who, to quote the Soviet soldier and poet Nikolai Mayorov, “rendered the word ‘humanity’ into flesh”.
Because they have not surrendered, we keep fighting.
https://orinocotribune.com/cuba-is-anac ... irections/
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Why Israel Is Not Punished But Cuba Is
MAY 14, 2024
Editorial note: Orinoco Tribune does not generally publish pieces older than two weeks. However, an exception is being made in this case, as the current article remains as relevant today as when it was first published.
By Marc Vanderpitte – Apr 22, 2024
Some believe and others like to proclaim that international politics is based on values and good intentions. The treatment that Israel and Cuba receive completely destroys that belief.
Where is the logic? Cuba, a country that harms no one and sends more doctors around the world than the World Health Organization, has been harshly sanctioned for over 60 years.
In contrast, the apartheid state of Israel is perpetrating genocide before our eyes, and yet, no economic sanctions are imposed against it. On the contrary, it receives billions of dollars in aid and a great deal of heavy weaponry to carry out these massacres.
What are the reasons for this scandalous double standard?
Punishing good examples
Despite its illegal nature, the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba has been the centerpiece of US policy toward the island since the victory of the revolution in 1959. This policy is what Noam Chomsky describes as “Washington’s hysterical obsession with crushing Cuba.”
There are several reasons for this obsession. At the end of the 19th century, Cuba was incorporated into the United States as a neocolony. From then on, the US controlled significant parts of the Cuban economy and did not want to lose that control.
Above all, it was unacceptable for a country located barely 180 km from the United States to take a progressive course, as this could encourage other countries to follow suit. Therefore, this revolution had to be nipped in the bud.
According to a 1960 US Foreign Ministry memorandum, “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” The objective was to “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government.”
Shortly thereafter, the Eisenhower administration imposed an embargo that would later become an economic blockade (in addition to pressuring other countries to end economic relations with Cuba). The first objective of the economic sanctions was to put an end to the revolution and, if that failed, to damage the country as much as possible so that Cuban socialism would not be an example for other countries.
That example applies not only to Latin America but also to the United States itself. A quarter of US citizens say that they or a family member postpones treatment for a serious illness because of the cost. Studying is reserved only for the very wealthy or for students willing to take on substantial debt.
In Cuba, such situations are unthinkable. There, being sick or studying is not a luxury. Purchasing power is much lower than in the United States, but health care and education are free. A black resident in the United States dies on average six years earlier than a Cuban, and infant mortality in Cuba is lower than in the “land of the free.”
By trial and error, Cuba has managed to build a different kind of society that does not focus on profit, but on the social, intellectual, and cultural development of its people. Despite severe economic sanctions, Cuba ranks around the average of the OECD, a club of rich countries, in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, education levels, etc.
Cuba achieves this high social score with a per capita income eight times lower than that of the United States. If Cuba is capable of achieving so much with so few resources and despite the blockade, what would the United States not be capable of?
Currently, 30,000 Cuban healthcare workers are working in 66 countries, including Italy. In the last 60 years, Cuban doctors have treated two billion people around the world. If the United States and Europe made the same effort as Cuba, together they would send more than two million doctors to the world and the shortage of health personnel in the South would be solved overnight.
The longest and most extensive economic blockade in history
Is that also why Cuba is in the spotlight so much? In any case, the US government itself declares the blockade against Cuba as “one of the most comprehensive US sanctions against any country.” The objective is to economically isolate the island from the rest of the world as much as possible and, thus, harm it as much as possible.
Under Trump, the isolation intensified to unprecedented levels with 243 new tough sanctions and the inclusion of Cuba on the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT), which excludes Cuba from international banking transactions and makes it increasingly difficult to purchase basic necessities such as fuel, food, medicine, and hygiene products.
Biden has kept these tightened sanctions fairly intact, with disastrous consequences. As a result, there are now shortages of food, medicine, and fuel in Cuba. During the pandemic, the US even prevented respirators from being supplied to Cuba at a time when the country urgently needed them, resulting in many deaths. According to the UN convention (Article II, b and c), the blockade can be qualified as genocide.
The extraterritorial nature of the blockade makes it impossible or risky for European companies and financial institutions to establish economic relations with Cuba. This is a flagrant violation of international law and an attack on European sovereignty. But the European Union submits to this slavery and, thus, becomes an accomplice to the US sanctions regime.
In November last year, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the US blockade against Cuba for the 30th consecutive year. The only country apart from the United States that refused to condemn the blockade was Israel.
It is, therefore, interesting to examine that country and its relationship with the United States.
One of the most destructive military campaigns in history
While Cuba has been in the US crosshairs for more than 60 years and is suffering the longest economic blockade in history, Israel can afford almost anything.
According to experts, the military campaign in Gaza is “one of the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.” Civilians are being killed, and entire neighborhoods are being leveled to the ground on a scale that could be described as industrial, and it is being done with the help of cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence.
In little more than four months, more children have died in Gaza than in four years of wars around the world. Similar figures have been recorded for the number of journalists killed.
In addition to these destructive carpet bombings, Israel is deliberately starving the Palestinian civilian population, according to a senior UN expert. Officially, Israel’s goal is to eliminate Hamas. However, the ferocity and cruelty of the operation show that it is an excuse to make Gaza uninhabitable and completely deport the population.
Without Egyptian resistance and international pressure, the population of the Gaza Strip could have been expelled to the Sinai desert.
In January the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ruled that, in any case, there is sufficient evidence to investigate Israel on charges of genocide. For Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, “the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide has been crossed.”
Racism and militarism
This mass slaughter is not an excess, but the offspring and perhaps the culmination of the ancient Zionist dream of ruling the region from “the sea to the Jordan valley,” as stated in Netanyahu’s party charter. This Zionist dream can only be realized through racism and militarism.
Israel has rightly been described as “the most racist state in the world.” The creation of the Jewish state in 1948 was accompanied by a mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing of about half of the Palestinian population. Thereafter, the Israeli state strove to have as few Palestinian people as possible in as much annexed territory as possible.
With the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel quadrupled its territory and thereafter began the active colonization of the West Bank, where the Palestinian population suffers humiliation and deprivation. Thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been abducted and held for years without trial in Israeli prisons.
But that is nothing compared to Gaza. Its population has been under a total blockade since 2007. The Gaza Strip has become nothing less than a concentration camp. It is not for nothing that Amnesty International called Israel an apartheid state.
Israeli tank instructors
Israel is also probably the most militaristic state in the world. After Qatar, Israel is the country that spends the most per capita on the military. Civil society is completely permeated by soldiers and military installations. With mandatory military service for all men and women and reserve service for the entire Jewish population until they turn 40, Israeli Jews constantly alternate between the role of civilian and soldier, and the line between the two is blurred.
The Israeli military industry is one of the most advanced in the world. Its success is based on two things. Firstly, it is based on compulsory military service, which selects the best scientific and technological minds for defense research and development units.
Secondly, it is based on the policy of colonization and regular military wars against Gaza. The Palestinian population is an excellent training target for the security industry. The latest security gadgets or attack techniques are tested on them. In other words, it is “battle-tested” weaponry. The wars in Gaza are excellent “practical exercises” for the Israeli military-industrial complex’s latest weapons and drones.
Israel currently has some 600 companies exporting security technologies and services. Annually, they export over $12 billion worth of weapons (equivalent to 2.6% of its GDP). The track record of these arms deliveries makes one’s blood run cold.
Israel sold arms to the South African apartheid government in 1975 and even agreed to supply nuclear warheads. Napalm and other weapons were supplied to El Salvador during the 1980-1992 counterinsurgency wars, which killed more than 75,000 civilians (out of a population of five million).
Israeli bullets, rifles, and grenades were used in the Rwandan genocide that killed at least 800,000 people. In September 2023, Israel delivered drones, rockets, and mortars to Azerbaijan for its campaign to retake Nagorno-Karabakh and displace 100,000 Armenians.
It is not just a matter of arms exports. Since its inception, Israel has supported a whole series of right-wing regimes and military dictatorships. The Israeli military put its accumulated experience and expertise at the disposal of the most brutal regimes in the last century: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, and Venezuela.
The bloodiest participation took place in Guatemala. Israel participated behind the scenes in one of the most violent counterrevolutionary campaigns that the western hemisphere has experienced since the colonization of the American continent. More than 200,000 people, mostly indigenous Guatemalans, died in the process.
During the Syrian proxy war, Israel collaborated with jihadist fighters from both Al Qaeda and Islamic State. Among other things, the terrorists could count on medical treatment in Israel.
Why are the West and Israel such close friends?
For all this disrepute, one would expect the United States and the West to treat Israel as a pariah state. But, in fact, it does just the opposite. Since its inception, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid. In total, it has received some $300 billion in economic and military aid.
In 1989, the US granted Israel the status of “major non-NATO ally,” which gave it access to extensive weapons systems. Israel was the first country to receive a US-made F-35 fighter jets, the most advanced in the world. The US also helped fund and produce Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system.
In any case, Washington’s extremely generous support has made Israel the strongest military power in the region, hands down. Not even genocide and one war crime after another stops the money coming in. On the contrary, after the war on Gaza, the White House approved a massive $14.5 billion aid package.
If the US exerts any political pressure on Israel, for example, to allow more humanitarian aid, it is purely for Biden’s electoral reasons and to save face as far as possible in the eyes of world public opinion.
Israel’s ties with Europe are also strong. Israel has an economic partnership agreement with the European Union, which is also its largest trading partner. Scientific collaboration is intense. “Horizon Europe” is the European Union’s main funding program for research and innovation in Israel, with a budget of €95.5 billion over a seven-year period.
After all, Europe is also a major supplier of arms to Israel. Nearly a quarter of all weapons imported by Israel come from Germany and Italy. After the 1956 Suez War, France provided nuclear assistance to Israel, enabling it to become a nuclear power.
After the murder of 224 aid workers, some 100 journalists, over 13,000 children, and 8,400 women, and the starvation of more than two million civilians, there is still no sign of sanctions from Europe. What other atrocities will Israel have to commit before Europe takes action?
Much ado about nothing from Europe continues. Weapons continue to leave European ports for Israel and the Zionist state can participate in the Eurovision Music Contest without any problem.
The question then arises as to why the United States and the West continue to unconditionally support a terrorist regime. The main reason is not far to seek and has to do with Israel’s highly strategic location. Israel is situated in the Middle East, a region where 48% of the world’s oil reserves and 40% of its gas reserves are located.
This region also connects Europe with Asia and is crucial for international trade. Around 30% of all the world’s maritime containers pass through the nearby Suez Canal. The region is also crucial for China’s New Silk Roads or its counterpart, the so-called India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).
Israel can be considered a US military base with a very reliable partner, helping to keep this strategic region under control. Recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, nephew of President John F. Kennedy, put it sharply: “Israel… is almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.”
Israel is the policeman of the region. Since its creation, Israel has successfully fought several wars against neighboring Arab states. The Israeli army regularly carries out raids or attacks against countries or groups unaligned to the West: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran.
In the past, Washington could rely on three other allies (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye) for its geopolitical agenda in the region. Since 1979, it has lost Iran’s support. And in recent years, Saudi Arabia and even Türkiye have followed an increasingly independent path. This leaves Israel as the only irreplaceable US ally left in this pivotal region. It should be remembered that Israel is also the only country with nuclear weapons in the Middle East. That explains why it can indulge in almost anything and act with almost total impunity.
Farce
If we are to believe Western leaders, their policies are based on values and good intentions. In his own words, Biden bases his foreign relations on “upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.” The Treaty of the European Union states that the Union is based on values such as “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.”
In light of how the United States and Europe treat Israel and Cuba, this is a farce. The so-called “rules-based international order” is a smokescreen to hide the reality: pure economic and geostrategic interests.
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim makes no bones about it: “The gut-wrenching tragedy that continues to unfold in the Gaza Strip has laid bare the self-serving nature of much valued, the much vaunted rules-based order.”
The vastly different treatment of Cuba and Israel illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the Western order, an order that is being taken less and less seriously in the Global South. North-South relations are tilting, not only economically but also ideologically. A new era is beginning.
(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)
https://orinocotribune.com/why-israel-i ... t-cuba-is/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Cuba
The Russian and Cuban delegations met for expanded negotiations • President of Russia, 2000 (Photo: K.)
Russia and Cuba, beyond warships
Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World on June 13, 2024 by Mi Cuba por Siempre (more by Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World) (Posted Jun 15, 2024)
While the international media only report on the arrival of a Russian naval detachment in Cuba, relations between the Russian Federation and Cuba go much further and are getting stronger. Unlike the policy of Joe Biden’s administration, which is focused on maintaining the economic and financial persecution measures against the island, the Russian government is working together with the Cuban government to reach mutually beneficial agreements, which you will evidently not read about in the major press chains.
Russian naval detachment docks in Cuba
Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, Minister of Foreign Affairs, visited Russia to attend a meeting of the BRICS Plus Forum and to hold official talks with his Russian counterpart. At the same time, several news reports confirmed the strengthening of economic ties between Havana and Moscow.
Within the framework of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum Sputnik news agency announced that the Russian Deputy Energy Minister, Evgueni Grabchak, said that there is an intention to build renewable energy facilities in Cuba.
He pointed out that they are working on the modernization of thermal power plants and specified that:
as regards the construction of power plants and networks, it is above all with Cuba, with which we maintain an intense collaboration (…) in relation to the energy projects that we are implementing, some of which are related to the construction of renewable energy facilities.
Likewise at the Forum, the Russian Ministry of Agriculture informed TASS news agency, that that country “has all the necessary resources to expand supplies of products of the agro-industrial complex to Cuba.”
Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs meeting with Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
“Russia and Cuba are historically united by close relations. Not only is political dialogue developing, but also economic-trade cooperation is gaining momentum,” the ministry officially reported, noting also that in 2023 the volume of Russian-Cuban trade in agro-industrial products increased twice compared to 2022.
On the other hand, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) announced the signing of a cooperation project with BioCubaFarma, to invest more than 11.2 million dollars in the development of innovative drugs against geriatric and oncological diseases.
On the subject, the general director of the fund, Kiril Dmitriev, informed the press that: “the BioCubaFarma company has become the first partner of RDIF in Cuba (…) investments in the biopharmaceutical industry will facilitate assistance to a greater number of patients and will significantly expand the capabilities of Russian medicine”. They also point out that the fund gives full priority to the health sector and the initial financing approved could increase tenfold, exceeding $100 million in the future.
Also, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko proposed the prompt issuance of Mir cards in the territory of Cuba, which would allow Cuban tourists to pay for goods and services in the territory of Russia and transfer money by card number, thus establishing a direct monetary flow between people in both countries.
“The next stage in the development of retail payments could be the issuance of Mir cards on the territory of Cuba. Taking into account the great social importance of this project, we propose to initiate its practical development,” the official said. This could be accomplished in the very short term due to the recent approval of a Russian bank branch in Havana.
Regarding the MIR, the Cuban state-owned Fincimex reported the execution up to May of at least 67,000 transactions in Cuba since the establishment of the system in December 2023, which means an incentive to tourism from Russia.
Finally and most importantly, the director of the Latin American department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Shetinin, declared that “there are advances” in the negotiations on the de-dollarization of trade with countries of this region and Russia, where the largest of the Antilles is included.
According to the note published by RT, there is a “process of negotiations between banking and business entities […] on the search for the most acceptable and comfortable forms of interaction to ensure trade and economic ties between our countries”.
The talks on the transition to alternative forms of financial transactions include the proposed use of national currencies or the use of the MIR system with direct payments; the latter seems to be the most promising option with tangible steps forward for Cuba.
Abandoning the use of the dollar in commercial exchange is a strategic step for both Cuba and Russia, due to the application of unilateral sanctions of all kinds to the financial sector of both countries by the U.S.
Taking into account all of the above, we can affirm that, while the Western media tries to sell Russia as that malevolent enemy that comes to invade your lands, unlike those who try to impose their interests with pure bombs, the Russian Federation maintains mutually beneficial relations of cooperation and complementation with Cuba, which go far beyond the simple arrival of warships to this Caribbean island.
Source: Razones de Cuba, translation by Internationalist 360°
https://mronline.org/2024/06/15/russia- ... -warships/
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Yegorov Of "Zvezda" Confirms...
... albeit using the older video of a surface launch, that Kazan officially carries 3M22 Zircon. Here is his report from Havana (in Russian), including some details which you will not find in Western media. The condition for both ships entering Havana was the absence of nuclear weapons on board.
Even without nukes, combination of weapons on both ships is strategic in nature. Also, pay attention to US buoys (hundred +) spent in attempts to track Kazan.
Another Zircon-Onyx-Kalibr-Otvet carrier Marshal Shaposhnikov together with RKR Varyag (this one, unlike sunk Moskva, is fully upgraded and digitized) was visiting Egypt. Well, will wait for Military Acceptance with more details of those visits.
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/06 ... firms.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."