Cuba

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Sun Jul 25, 2021 1:42 pm

Washington Beats the Drum of Regime Change, but Cuba Responds to Its Own Revolutionary Rhythm: The Twenty-Ninth Newsletter (2021)

JULY 22, 2021

Image
Préfète Duffaut (Haiti), Le Générale Canson, 1950.



Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In 1963, the Trinidadian writer CLR James released a second edition of his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. For the new edition, James wrote an appendix with the suggestive title ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’. In the opening page of the appendix, he located the twin Revolutions of Haiti (1804) and Cuba (1959) in the context of the West Indian islands: ‘The people who made them, the problems and the attempts to solve them, are peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history’. Thrice James uses the word ‘peculiar’, which emerges from the Latin peculiaris for ‘private property’ (pecu is the Latin word for ‘cattle’, the essence of ancient property).

Property is at the heart of the origin and history of the modern West Indies. By the end of the 17th century, the European conquistadors and colonialists had massacred the inhabitants of the West Indies. On St. Kitts in 1626, English and French colonialists massacred between two and four thousand Caribs – including Chief Tegremond – in the Kalinago genocide, which Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre wrote about in 1654. Having annihilated the island’s native people, the Europeans brought in African men and women who had been captured and enslaved. What unites the West Indian islands is not language and culture, but the wretchedness of slavery, rooted in an oppressive plantation economy. Both Haiti and Cuba are products of this ‘peculiarity’, the one being bold enough to break the shackles in 1804 and the other able to follow a century and a half later.



Image
Osmond Watson (Jamaica), City Life, 1968.



Today, crisis is the hour in the Caribbean.

On 7 July, just outside of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, gunmen broke into the home of President Jovenel Moïse, assassinated him in cold blood, and then fled. The country – already wracked by social upheaval sparked by the late president’s policies – has now plunged even deeper into crisis. Already, Moïse had forcefully extended his presidential mandate beyond his term as the country struggled with the burdens of being dependent on international agencies, trapped by a century-long economic crisis, and struck hard by the pandemic. Protests had become commonplace across Haiti as the prices of everything skyrocketed and as no effective government came to the aid of a population in despair. But Moïse was not killed because of this proximate crisis. More mysterious forces are at work: US-based Haitian religious leaders, narco-traffickers, and Colombian mercenaries. This is a saga that is best written as a fictional thriller.

Four days after Moïse’s assassination, Cuba experienced a set of protests from people expressing their frustration with shortages of goods and a recent spike of COVID-19 infections. Within hours of receiving the news that the protests had emerged, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel went to the streets of San Antonio de los Baños, south of Havana, to march with the protestors. Díaz-Canel and his government reminded the eleven million Cubans that the country has suffered greatly from the six-decade-long illegal US blockade, that it is in the grip of Trump’s 243 additional ‘coercive measures’, and that it will fight off the twin problems of COVID-19 and a debt crisis with its characteristic resolve.

Nonetheless, a malicious social media campaign attempted to use these protests as a sign that the government of Díaz-Canel and the Cuban Revolution should be overthrown. It was clarified a few days later that this campaign was run from Miami, Florida, in the United States. From Washington, DC, the drums of regime change sounded loudly. But they have not found much of an echo in Cuba. Cuba has its own revolutionary rhythms.



Image
Eduardo Abela (Cuba), Los Guajiros (1938).



In 1804, the Haitian Revolution – a rebellion of the plantation proletariat who struck against the agricultural factories that produced sugar and profit – sent up a flare of freedom across the colonised world. A century and a half later, the Cubans fired their own flare.

The response to each of these revolutions from the fossilised magnates of Paris and Washington was the same: suffocate the stirrings of freedom by indemnities and blockades. In 1825, the French demanded through force that the Haitians pay 150 million francs for the loss of property (namely human beings). Alone in the Caribbean, the Haitians felt that they had no choice but to pay up, which they did to France (until 1893) and then to the United States (until 1947). The total bill over the 122 years amounts to $21 billion. When Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide tried to recover those billions from France in 2003, he was removed from office by a coup d’état.

After the United States occupied Cuba in 1898, it ran the island like a gangster’s playground. Any attempt by the Cubans to exercise their sovereignty was squashed with terrible force, including invasions by US forces in 1906-1909, 1912, 1917-1922, and 1933. The United States backed General Fulgencio Batista (1940-1944 and 1952-1959) despite all the evidence of his brutality. After all, Batista protected US interests, and US firms owned two-thirds of the country’s sugar industry and almost its entire service sector.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 stands against this wretched history – a history of slavery and imperial domination. How did the US react? By imposing an economic blockade on the country from 19 October 1960 that lasts to this day, which has targeted everything from access to medical supplies, food, and financing to barring Cuban imports and coercing third-party countries to do the same. It is a vindictive attack against a people who – like the Haitians – are trying to exercise their sovereignty. Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez reported that between April 2019 and December 2020, the government lost $9.1 billion due to the blockade ($436 million per month). ‘At current prices’, he said, ‘the accumulated damages in six decades amount to over $147.8 billion, and against the price of gold, it amounts to over $1.3 trillion’.

None of this information would be available without the presence of media outlets such as Peoples Dispatch, which celebrates its three-year anniversary this week. We send our warmest greetings to the team and hope that you will bookmark their page to visit it several times a day for world news rooted in people’s struggles.



Image
Bernadette Persaud (Guyana), Gentlemen Under the Sky (Gulf War), 1991.



On 17 July, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets to defend their Revolution and demand an end to the US blockade. President Díaz-Canel said that the Cuba of ‘love, peace, unity, [and] solidarity’ had asserted itself. In solidarity with this unwavering affirmation, we have launched a call for participation in the exhibition Let Cuba Live. The submission deadline is 24 July for the online exhibition launch on 26 July – the anniversary of the revolutionary movement that brought Cuba to Revolution in 1959 – but we encourage ongoing submissions. We are inviting international artists and militants to participate in this flash exhibition as we continue to amplify the campaign #LetCubaLive to end the blockade.

A few weeks before the most recent attack on Cuba and the assassination in Haiti, the United States armed forces conducted a major military exercise in Guyana called Tradewinds 2021 and another exercise in Panama called Panamax 2021. Under the authority of the United States, a set of European militaries (France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) – each with colonies in the region – joined Brazil and Canada to conduct Tradewinds with seven Caribbean countries (The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago). In a show of force, the US demanded that Iran cancel the movement of its ships to Venezuela in June ahead of the US-sponsored military exercise.

The United States is eager to turn the Caribbean into its sea, subordinating the sovereignty of the islands. It was curious that Guyana’s Prime Minister Mark Phillips said that these US-led war games strengthen the ‘Caribbean regional security system’. What they do, as our recent dossier on US and French military bases in Africa shows, is to subordinate the Caribbean states to US interests. The US is using its increased military presence in Colombia and Guyana to increase pressure on Venezuela.



Image
Elsa Gramcko (Venezuela), El ojo de la cerradura (‘The Keyhole’), 1964.



Sovereign regionalism is not alien to the Caribbean, which has made four attempts to build a platform: the West Indian Federation (1958-1962), Caribbean Free Trade Association (1965-1973), Caribbean Community (1973-1989), and CARICOM (1989 to the present). What began as an anti-imperialist union has now devolved into a trade association that attempts to better integrate the region into world trade. The politics of the Caribbean are increasingly being drawn into the orbit of the US. In 2010, the US created the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, whose agenda is shaped by Washington.

In 2011, our old friend Shridath Ramphal, Guyana’s foreign minister from 1972 to 1975, repeated the words of the great Grenadian radical T. A. Marryshow: ‘The West Indies must be West Indian’. In his article ‘Is the West Indies West Indian?’, he insisted that the conscious spelling of ‘The West Indies’ with a capitalised ‘T’ aims to signify the unity of the region. Without unity, the old imperialist pressures will prevail as they often do.



Image



In 1975, the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón published a landmark poem called Mujer Negra (‘Black Woman’). The poem opens with the terrible trade of human beings by the European colonialists, touches on the war of independence, and then settles on the remarkable Cuban Revolution of 1959:

I came down from the Sierra

to put an end to capital and usurer,
to generals and to the bourgeoisie.
Now I exist: only today do we own, do we create.
Nothing is alien to us.
The land is ours.
Ours are the sea and sky,
the magic and vision.
My fellow people, here I see you dance
around the tree we are planting for communism.
Its prodigal wood already resounds.




The land is ours. Sovereignty is ours too. Our destiny is not to live as the subordinate beings of others. That is the message of Morejón and of the Cuban people who are building their sovereign lives, and it is the message of the Haitian people who want to advance their great Revolution of 1804.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... and-haiti/

Hate that the images didn't 'take', view them at link.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 26, 2021 1:42 pm

Image
Cubans take part in a mass rally in defence of the Cuban Revolution and calling for an end to U.S. sanctions, July 2021. Photo: Helen Yaffe

What’s actually going on in Cuba?
Posted Jul 26, 2021 by Helen Yaffe

Originally published: Novara Media (July 20, 2021 ) |

On Sunday 11 July, dozens of anti-government protests, apparently coordinated via social media, took place simultaneously throughout Cuba. In several places, including in San Antonio on the outskirts of Havana and in Matanzas, where COVID-19 cases have been surging, protests turned violent, with windows smashed, shops looted, cars overturned, rocks thrown and people assaulted.

The international media has exaggerated and manipulated these events to depict mass opposition to the Cuban government, police repression of peaceful protests and a regime in crisis. Meanwhile, the role of external forces, the existence of a concerted social media war on Cuba, the pernicious impact of U.S. sanctions and the mobilisation of thousands of Cubans in support of the revolutionary government have been deliberately downplayed or ignored.

In most of the Americas, including in the U.S., such social disturbances are common, and often involve serious casualties and multiple arrests. In Cuba, however, the last violent protest was the Maleconazo uprising in 1994–the worst year of the so-called ‘special period’ of economic crisis in which Cuba’s GDP fell by 35% after the collapse of the socialist bloc which accounted for nearly 90% of Cuba’s trade. Hoping to push the country over the edge, the U.S. government enacted the Torricelli Act in 1992 and Helms Burton Act in 1996, tightening U.S. sanctions and obstructing Cuba’s trade with the rest of the world. While scarce resources were harnessed to prioritise welfare, Cubans faced shortages in every sector: food, fuel, medicines, housing, industry, transport, and so on. Life was tough.

These conditions are returning to Cuba today as a direct result of U.S. sanctions. Reversing Barack Obama’s tentative rapprochement, the Trump administration tightened the U.S. blockade to unprecedented levels, adding 243 new actions, measures and sanctions to cut off Cuba’s trade with the world, fine ships carrying fuel to Cuba, scare away foreign investors, block remittances and family visits, and prevent Cuba’s access to the international financial system which is dominated by U.S. dollars.

Over 50 of those coercive measures have been taken since the beginning of the pandemic, severely impacting Cuba’s capacity to import medical ventilators, spare parts, syringes, medicines and their raw materials, food and fuel. Even international donations of medical supplies to Cuba are blocked. This creates an agonising dichotomy: thousands of Cuban medical specialists have treated COVID-19 patients in 40 countries and the island of Cuba has the only domestically developed COVID-19 vaccines in Latin America, and yet Cubans face exhausting daily queues for basic goods. Their frustration should not surprise anyone.

Image

With the combined impact of sanctions and the pandemic, Cuba’s GDP fell by 11% in 2020; tourism fell 75% and imports fell 30% compared to 2019, hence the unfilled shelves and long queues. At the same time, the social media campaign, oiled with millions of U.S. Congress-approved dollars and orchestrated from Miami, blames the Cuban government for these hardships and dismisses U.S. sanctions as an excuse or a lie. It seeks to channel the Cuban people’s frustrations into political opposition.

Since late 2020, Miami-based social media ‘influencers’ and YouTubers have urged Cubans to take to the streets, with some even offering money, or phone credit, to anyone who carries out, films and uploads acts of violent disorder and arson.

At an international press conference on 13 July, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez presented evidence of a new media campaign. On 15 June, the hashtag #SOSCuba was launched by a U.S. company, the same day it was authorised to receive state funding. On 5 July, hashtags appeared calling for a “humanitarian corridor” in Cuba, with bots and troll farms being used to disseminate messages on Twitter through fake accounts–one doing five retweets per second on 10 and 11 July. Twitter users changed their geolocations to look like they were in Cuba, and images of both a huge protest in Egypt and of Argentinians celebrating their America Cup victory were credited as mass mobilisations in Havana. The following Friday, a video claiming to show Cuban police shooting a man dead at his home was exposed by Cuban media when the same man was interviewed in good health.
Helen Yaffe
@HelenYaffe
·
Jul 16

Cuban news just exposed a video circulating of a man apparently being killed in his home by Cuban police. The man was arrested at his home for violent disorder & footage shows him walking out calmly in handcuffs. He was interviewed today. The blood stained floor was a lie.
The Trump sanctions and the social media war are the contemporary versions of the ‘two track’ policy pursued by the U.S. since the Cuban Revolution: economic sanctions and the promotion of an internal opposition. The objective is ‘regime change’, as articulated in the secret memorandum of 6 April 1960 written by Lester Mallory, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Recognising popular support for the revolutionary government, he advised measures to “weaken the economic life of Cuba […] to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel responded to events on 11 July in a similar manner to Fidel Castro during the Maleconazo in 1994. He went to San Antonio to speak to local people, recognised their legitimate frustrations, and then led a march through the community in defence of the Cuban Revolution.

Hours later, he appeared on television to inform the public about the events, acknowledge Cubans’ daily difficulties and give an fervent denunciation of U.S. imperialism and the social media campaign. He declared: “The streets belong to the revolutionaries!”. At that signal, thousands of Cubans mobilised in towns and cities around the country to defend Cuban socialism.

The following days have seen a tense calm, with one violent protest in Arroyo Naranjo on the outskirts of Havana in which one person died and more sustained injuries, including police. Small skirmishes have taken place since. Internet access was temporarily suspended, presumably to prevent social media being used to coordinate more protests. Car radios and workplace televisions were tuned into a four-hour broadcast by the president and government ministers who discussed the events, analysed the country’s situation, and denounced U.S. intervention. From Florida, there were threats of a naval flotilla and calls for military intervention.

With mind-boggling hypocrisy, Joe Biden expressed his concern about the situation, and called on the Cuban government to listen to the people. But if Biden were actually concerned, and listening to the Cuban people, he would lift the sanctions. This was a demand I heard from every Cuban I spoke to at a rally of 200,000 in Havana on 17 July, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets around the island.

Cuban authorities have made it clear that violent disorder will be punished through the legal system. There may be more conflict ahead, but as the lines are drawn, no-one should underestimate the resilience of the Cuban Revolution.

https://mronline.org/2021/07/26/whats-a ... n-in-cuba/

*************************************

Transparency and legality in criminal proceedings after the riots (+ Video)
So far, the municipal courts of justice have heard 19 cases related to the recent riots, involving 59 people.

Author: Yudy Castro Morales | yudy@granma.cu

July 24, 2021 16:07:05

Image
Photo: José Manuel Correa

Although the investigations related to the recent riots are still ongoing, the municipal courts of justice have processed, so far, 19 cases, which involve 59 people, as reported this Saturday, at a press conference, by Rubén Remigio Ferro, president of the People's Supreme Court.

These are, he said, cases related, fundamentally, to public disorder, instigation to commit a crime, contempt, damages and other lesser criminal figures, which may include penalties of up to one year of deprivation of liberty.


He reiterated that, currently, these criminal proceedings are in full swing and final sentences have not yet been decreed, while insisting on the right of those involved to establish an appeal in the courts of second instance, say the provincial courts.

In his speech, he recalled that Cuban courts are structured in a system of bodies that function independently, and only owe obedience to the Constitution and the laws.

Remigio Ferro drew attention to the discrediting campaigns launched these days, which are intended to denigrate the legitimacy and transparency of the actions of the judges.
Image
The family and its responsibility when minors are employed in illegalities and crimes
They have also wanted to sow the idea that we are facing very summary processes, which is not true, he said.

In this sense, he explained that these matters processed after the riots, which have been the competence of the municipal courts, are settled by procedures, according to our laws, more agile and expeditious, but not exempt from compliance with all guarantees, including the right to the defense.

SEVERITY IN THE FACTS AIMED TO SUBVERT THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

During the conference, the Attorney General of the Republic, Yamila Peña Ojeda, elaborated on the role of the prosecutors after the disturbances that, as in the rest of the processes, has been oriented to evaluate, from the individuality, the facts committed and the people who have been detained.

Image
Photo: José Manuel Correa

He added that an important group of defendants presented for a precautionary measure of provisional imprisonment has been interviewed; A group of non-detentive measures has been reviewed, some have received administrative sanctions, and other citizens, after investigations, have been released without charge.

However, he stressed, there is a group of acts of extreme violence, which due to their connotation has provided the continuity of the investigation in preparatory phase files, which takes more time, in order to determine the responsibility of each of the participants .

He recalled that, during the disturbances, extremely serious acts took place against persons, authorities and property, both state and personal, and these are the facts that are being investigated today.

Peña Ojeda also pointed out that, as part of the functions of the Prosecutor's Office, with respect to these cases, more than 90 people have been attended, through all the available communication channels, many of whom have requested guidance and others have filed complaints, that are being investigated.

Likewise, he emphasized the work of the prosecutors, engaged in deepening the individualization, participation, probative material, in the fulfillment of all the guarantees and rights of the people, contemplated as part of the due process.

Yamila Peña affirmed that, within the law, they will act with severity in the most serious cases, in which it is shown that the people organized, promoted and financed the most notorious events that affected collective and legal security and citizen tranquility, and which as their motivation was to try to subvert the constitutional order of the country.

During the press conference, Lilia María Hernández, president of the National Organization of Collective Law Firms, emphasized the work of the lawyers, who have professionally defended the alleged defendants and have also attended to the relatives who have sought legal representation.

Now, he said, we are at the time of appeals. We have dozens of legal services contracts, mainly in Havana, Matanzas and Santiago de Cuba, where many relatives and some of those who have been sanctioned have attended, as they are dissatisfied with the rulings.

In this regard, reiterated Rubén Remigio, the most important thing is to process complaints through the channels established for that purpose.



http://www.granma.cu/cuba/2021-07-24/tr ... 1-16-07-05

Google Translator

Funny, en.granma.cu is still not available. Actually not funny, actually the future.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:08 pm

Washington needs to "erase the legitimacy and credibility of the Cuban Revolution"
The current White House administration follows the strategy of the inherited agenda for Cuba

Author: Daily Pérez Guillén | internet@granma.cu

July 28, 2021 11:07:11 PM

If there could be any doubt about the redesign of the political communication of the United States Government towards Cuba, to launch it on digital platforms, a direct one recently transmitted with the presence of the director for the Western Hemisphere of the National Security Council and principal adviser to the president Joe Biden on issues of Latin American politics, Juan González, and artists bent to the counterrevolution, erase any uncertainty.

It is the most extensive statement by a US official in relation to Cuba since Joe Biden took the reins of the White House. For almost half an hour and as a dialogue between "brothers", with tutelage included, Juan González listened and followed the script in which both parties left their lines of messages very well defined. Although the "moderators" echoed the most extreme requests to the US government after the events of July 11, the official pointed out that his government is exploring "what else it can do outside of military action."

"Pressuring, sanctioning and opening a democratic space so that artists, journalists and ordinary Cubans who are not involved in politics continue to demand their rights," has been the option reiterated by González through the live broadcast on Instagram and the YouTube channel of a young Cuban influencer, with more than two million views since its creation in December 2019, who begins his programs with a theme of urban music, young people dancing, women in bathing suits and a call to follow the "gossip" of the Cuban celebrity. The message of the US Government is also directed through these channels today. uu Cubans inside and outside the island.

And while the Director of National Security for the Western Hemisphere assures that Biden is up-to-date on what is happening in Cuba, and that Senators Bob Menéndez and Marcos Rubio have been heard, he communicates that the President's orientation is to do "everything we can as a government to respond to the needs of the Cuban people. This while an economic, commercial and financial blockade was intensified with 243 measures in unison of the worst epidemic that humanity has known, and that also adds sick, deceased and convalescent in Cuba. But Mr. González insists on calling it an embargo and exonerating him from taking away any rights from the people who suffer from it.

Of course, Biden will use "all the tools that we have at our disposal to be able to guarantee access to information." At that point, the advisor recalls, without mentioning them by name, initiatives already put into practice when the current President occupied the second rung of the government in the White House: cell phone and could communicate. I would add the blocking of sites and applications described here: http // www.juventudrebelde.cu / supplements / informatica / 2021-05-26 / communications-in-cuba-putting-bits-and-bytes-to-block.

An allusion to the Zunzuneo and Piramideo applications, unsuccessful attempts to disguise, with non-controversial information or messaging network, the purpose of reaching audiences of thousands of users and managing mass calls through them to "renegotiate the balance of power between the State and society. This is how a document from the International Development Agency defined it, which paid for the expenses of one of these digital operations and also of the tasks of the contractor Alan Gross, in charge of installing an illegal telecommunications network in Cuba and who was tried and convicted. for violating national laws.

Meanwhile, the current administration's agenda for Cuba follows the inherited strategy, as can be seen from this dialogue. "To continue supporting those artists, those independent journalists, those who are demanding their rights," words of President Biden's advisor who also corroborate public reports on the destination of the funding that organizations called to bring "democracy. »From the United States to the rest of the world –the NED and the USAID– publish on their official internet sites.

But Washington has another very clear objective: it needs to "erase the legitimacy and credibility of the Cuban Revolution internally and on the international scene." To do this they will pressure their allies against the "regime." With total impudence, González has challenged Cuban diplomacy: «That is something that after 62 years they have been able to handle internationally very well. You have to close that space.

At that point the exchange, the spokesmen of the counterrevolution collaborated with the current administration suggesting, even, incriminating the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, before the International Criminal Court, but as the United States withdrew In order not to be held accountable for the war crimes of its military in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, González responded that other countries would have to do that.

Before concluding, he insisted: "the focus has to be on Cuba, not between the debate between the United States and Cuba." With that ending, no longer have to wait for the results of a review. This seems to be the policy of the current administration: to expect a violent outcome favorable to its interests in an internal situation marked by the health crisis, an economy of war and the constant incitement through digital platforms.

http://www.granma.cu/cultura/2021-07-28 ... 1-23-07-11

Google Translator

*************************************

The Cuban Cultural Counterrevolution: US Government-Backed Rappers and Artists Gain Fame as "Catalysts for Current Unrest"
The San Isidro Movement, which presents itself as a popular collective of artists who fight for freedom of expression, has become a key weapon in the US government's assault on the Cuban revolution

Author: Max Blumenthal | internet@granma.cu

July 28, 2021 7:07:57 PM

Image
Photo: Taken from the Internet

"My people need Europe, my people need Europe to point out the abuser," proclaimed Yotuel, a Cuban rapper living in Spain, in an act of the EU Parliament called by right-wing legislators before handing over the microphone to the Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó . Days later, Yotuel held a Zoom call with State Department officials to talk about “Patria y Vida,” the anti-communist rap anthem of which he was the author.

As the dust of a day of protests in Cuban cities clears, the Wall Street Journal has described "Patria y Vida" as the "common war cry" of opponents of the Cuban government, while Rolling Stone has described it as "the anthem of the protests in Cuba."

In addition to Yotuel, the two rappers who collaborated on the song are part of a group of artists, musicians, and writers called Movimiento San Isidro. The American media have credited this group with "being the catalyst for the current riots."

Over the past three years, as economic conditions worsened under the escalation of the US economic war, while Internet access expanded as a result of the Obama Administration's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, the San Isidro Movement has invited an open conflict with the State.

With provocative performances in which its most prominent figures have paraded through Old Havana waving American flags, and with blatant displays of contempt for Cuban national symbols, San Isidro has fallen out with the authorities, causing frequent arrests of its members and international campaigns to release them.

By settling in a predominantly Afro-Cuban area of ​​Old Havana and working through media such as hip-hop, San Isidro has also maneuvered to challenge the racially progressive image that the left-wing Cuban government earned with its historic military campaign against apartheid South Africa and the asylum it offered to black American dissidents. In this case, the San Isidro Movement appears to follow a model articulated by the US pressure group for regime change.

Over the past decade, the United States government has spent millions of dollars cultivating anti-government Cuban rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in an explicit attempt to weaponize "desocialized and marginalized youth." The strategy implemented by the United States in Cuba is a real-life version of the fantasies that anti-Trump Democrats entertained when they worried that Russia was covertly sponsoring Black Lives Matter and Antifa to wreak havoc on American society.

As this investigation will reveal, the main members of the San Isidro Movement have received funding from organizations for regime change such as the National Foundation for Democracy and the United States Agency for International Development, while meeting with officials from the State Department, with staff from the United States embassy in Havana, with right-wing European parliamentarians and with Latin American coup leaders, from the Venezuelan Guaidó to the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro.

San Isidro has also received the support of a network of free market fundamentalist think tanks that make no secret of their plan to transform Cuba into a colony for multinational corporations. Days after protests broke out in Cuba, the San Isidro leadership accepted an award from the Memorial Foundation for the Victims of Communism, a right-wing Republican think tank in Washington that includes Nazi German soldiers in its tally of historical deaths to hands of communism.

Behind their brand as cosmopolitan intellectuals, renegade rappers, and avant-garde artists, San Isidro has openly embraced the extremist politics of Miami's Cuban lobby. Indeed, its most prominent members have expressed effusive support for Donald Trump, backed US sanctions, and called for a military invasion of Cuba.

However, the cultural collective has made inroads into the progressive circles of the American intelligentsia, working to weaken the traditional ties of solidarity between the Cuban revolution and the American left. As we will see, the rise of the San Isidro Movement is the latest chapter in the emerging playbook of intersectional imperialism.

http://www.granma.cu/cuba/2021-07-28/la ... 1-19-07-57

en.granma.cu is still not available ...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 30, 2021 1:41 pm

Image

he US has No Business Lecturing Cuba About ‘Free and Fair’ Elections
July 29, 2021
By Peter Bolton – Jul 27, 2021

In the weeks following the protests in Cuba on July 11 questions about how US President Joe Biden would react have dominated headlines. On July 22, Biden seemingly put speculation to rest by announcing that his administration will add a further set of sanctions to the already existing economic embargo. The new sanctions will apply to various figures in the Cuban armed forces as well as Cuba’s Special National Brigade, which is alleged to have engaged in heavy-handed tactics against protesters. The move represents a stunning rebuke to his party’s small progressive wing, which had hoped that he would at least return Cuba policy back to the Obama era by reversing the 243 additional Trump-era sanctions, or perhaps even dropping the embargo altogether. Evidently, however, Biden and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party that he represents are now seizing on the protests as an opportunity to court the right-wing Cuban-American vote in Florida. In the wake of the protests, Politico reported that some Democrats are viewing the situation as a “golden opportunity” to try to win back the former swing state, which went for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

Inevitably, the protests have also served as a convenient tool for the US government and its allies in the Cuban-American exile community to reinvigorate their decades-long campaign to impose “regime change” on the beleaguered Caribbean island nation. Needless to say, at the forefront of calls for an even more aggressive US stance toward Cuba have been hardline representatives of this community. The mayor of Miami, the Babylon of militant anti-Castro agitation, has even called for direct US military intervention to “liberate” the island. In an interview with Fox News, Suarez even refused to rule out US airstrikes against Cuba, stating that this “has to be explored and cannot be just simply discarded as an option that is not on the table.” As would be expected, amongst the justifications for such aggressive measures is the demand for “free and fair elections,” which features prominently in the pronouncements of these figures. An open letter from Marco Rubio, the Florida exile hardliner Senator, and co-signed by House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and 143 other members of congress, for example, states: “Freedom-loving nations must make clear our full and unwavering support for Cuba’s pro-democracy movement, and for free and fair elections, with international supervision.”

To the politically naïve, this might seem like a perfectly reasonable sentiment. After all, according to the prevailing political mentality within Western nations, the holding of “free and fair elections” is perhaps the most basic prerequisite that a country must meet in order to be accepted into the family of “freedom-loving nations.” The implicit corollary, of course, is that the US is perfectly entitled, if not duty-bound, to punish those countries that fail to meet this most fundamental of requirements. The reality, however, is that the US doesn’t have a shred of credibility when it comes to lecturing others about “free and fair elections,” let alone imposing punitive measures on those who fail to hold them. Because an investigation into the US’s behavior on the global stage reveals its stunning hypocrisy when it comes to Cuba and other US adversaries. And this hypocrisy is no accident, but rather plays an important part in providing a false veneer of credibility to the US’s self-serving foreign policy goals.

First of all, there’s the issue of Washington’s flagrant double standards. Because when we look at US relations with other countries it becomes obvious that the US couldn’t care less whether or not another country holds “free and fair elections.” That is simply not, nor ever has been, the criteria by which it predicates its treatment of other nations. Rather, administrations in Washington of both parties base their stances toward the rest of the world’s countries on whether or not they are obedient to US interests. Countries deemed insufficiently obedient are singled out for “regime change,” which can include sanctions, destabilization campaigns, covert support for coups or even direct military intervention. And to be clear, this applies irrespective of whether the target country holds “free and fair elections.” For those countries that are obedient to US interests, on the other hand, there is practically nothing that Washington won’t overlook. Again, that, of course, includes failure to hold “free and fair elections.” Examples include Washington’s alliance with the Wahhabist royal family in Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy where elections are held for only a handful of minor local government positions, and the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina during the second half of the twentieth century.

Note the cruel irony when it comes to the latter two examples. The US not only issued no punitive measures whatsoever against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile or the military junta in Argentina, but rather propped them up by providing generous financial support and recognition on the world stage. And this was taking place at the very same time that Washington was escalating the embargo against Cuba. There is an even further layer of irony in the case of Chile given that the Pinochet dictatorship, which murdered thousands of political opponents and tortured many more, came to power via a US-backed and CIA-orchestrated coup that removed the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.

This brings us to the second reason why the US has no credibility when it comes to pontificating about “free and fair elections.” And that is that Washington only accepts the results of elections in other countries when it approves of the outcome. The most salient example of how this has played out in recent memory is undoubtedly Venezuela, where every single election that has been won by the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) has not been recognized as legitimate by the US on spurious grounds of fraud. But when Washington’s favored parties, which make up the Venezuelan opposition, won the National Assembly elections of 2015, on the other hand, accusations of vote rigging and irregularities were miraculously forgotten – conveniently enough, just in this one instance.

The contrast between Venezuela and the narco-state of President Juan Orlando Hernández’s Honduras is also illustrative in this regard. Because at the same time that it was denouncing PSUV election victories in Venezuela as fraudulent, Washington completely ignored allegations of fraud in elections taking place in Honduras, in spite of a much greater preponderance of evidence. Even the pro-Washington Organization of American States (OAS) denounced the 2018 election that returned Hernández to power as fraudulent. Yet Washington nonetheless recognized the result as legitimate.

There’s a further level of duplicity to this when you consider that the US shamelessly sides with its favored right-wing parties all over the region. Examples are too numerous to exhaustively enumerate, but the case of Nicaragua provides what is perhaps the most paradigmatic contemporary illustration. Ever since the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) returned to power via a democratic election in 2006, Washington has funneled tens of millions of dollars to opposition parties. The result of this is that the left in Latin America operates at a huge structural disadvantage given that their political opponents get financed by the US, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, lest we forget. So the US government demanding “free and fair” elections in Latin America is a bit like a gangster who has spent his entire criminal career fixing boxing matches showing up on fight night and demanding a clean bout.

As if this weren’t enough, in some countries left-wing political organizing translates into literally taking one’s life into one’s own hands. Colombia, for instance, has in various years been deemed the most dangerous country in the world to be a union activist. This is in large part owing to a concerted campaign of murder and intimidation of social movement leaders during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, a close US ally, and continuing today under the presidency of Iván Duque. As would be expected, Uribe received millions in US aid for so-called “counter-narcotics” operations that provided a smokescreen for these violent actions on the part of right-wing paramilitaries, such as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). The deep intertwinement of Uribe’s political faction with these groups was exposed by the 2006 Parapolitics scandal, which led to the conviction of over 30 Colombian political figures for collusion. Many of those convicted were close political allies of Uribe, including his cousin Mario Uribe.

To be clear, US election meddling has happened far beyond Latin America. Research conducted by political scientist Dov Levin found that the US has intervened in over 80 elections in 47 separate countries since the end of the Second World War. In a cruel irony, this includes meddling in the 1996 election in Russia in which Boris Yeltsin went from polling in the single digits to winning the election after the US injected millions of dollars into his campaign and pressured the International Monetary Fund to provide Russia with what was then the biggest loan in its history. Incidentally, Levin’s figure of over 80 cases does not even include examples of direct US intervention such as the CIA-orchestrated 1954 coup in Guatemala, which removed the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Árbenz, or cases of covert support for coup attempts such as that against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 2002.

Given these facts, the Cuban government could quite reasonably argue: Why should we hold multiparty elections when the US will fund our opponents to the point that it will be practically impossible for us to win? In any case, even if the Cuban Communist Party or some other socialist party did win an election in Cuba, the US wouldn’t accept the outcome anyway. This attitude was best summed up by the notorious war criminal Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state during some of the US’s worst atrocities abroad. He once quipped in the run up to the election in Chile that Salvador Allende went on to win: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

In light of these facts, Cuba’s revolutionary leaders make the argument that, since multiparty “liberal democracy” in Latin American inevitably leads to the US rigging the contest by funding its preferred parties (and then intervening anyway if that doesn’t work), the Cuban revolution should instead aspire to transform the country into a grassroots “participatory democracy” that puts power in the hands of workers and communities. Whatever one may think of the merits of such a system, it’s difficult to deny that the reasoning makes sense at least in the context of the US’s flagrant partiality toward allied right-wing parties all over Latin America and its prolific record of electoral meddling all across the world.

The third and final reality that exposes the US’s hypocrisy in demanding “free and fair elections,” which delivers the final blow to any remaining vestige of its pretense to credibility, is the US’s own significant democratic deficits. Though US leaders present the country as the “birthplace of democracy,” the “shining city on the hill” or whatever other kitsch and conceited slogan they might conjure, the US’s own status as a democracy is, in fact, highly dubious. To take the most obvious example, the US doesn’t even directly elect its president, who serves as both head of government and head of state. Successive governments of both parties have failed to replace the electoral college despite the fact that it has twice this century led to the loser of the popular vote entering the White House – in both cases reactionary Republicans who presided over two of the most disastrous administrations in recent memory.

But the paltriness of the US’s claim to be a democracy, in fact, runs much deeper than this. In addition to the patently undemocratic nature of the electoral college, there is also rampant voter suppression; widespread corruption of elections by the influence of campaign contributions; brazen corporate influence over elected officials; pre-selection of candidates within the two major parties’ primaries; and an aggressive marginalization of third political forces that provide an alternative to the bipartisan capitalist/imperialist consensus for endless war abroad and crushing austerity at home. And far from being some kind of distant relic consigned to a less noble past, all of these factors are as much a problem today as they have ever been, if not more so. Republicans, for example, are currently going into overdrive in their use of state-level legislation to drastically reduce the number of people that can vote. Democrats are no saints in this respect either. In fact, they are often worse than their Republican rivals when it comes to efforts to keep third parties off the ballot. In August 2020, for example, The Texas Tribune reported that “State and national Democrats are waging a legal offensive to kick Green Party candidates off the ballot in some of Texas’ highest-profile races this fall — and they are seeing success.” Citizens United and similar Supreme Court rulings, meanwhile, have enabled completely unlimited campaign contributions as well as a shrouding the process of political fundraising in a veil of secrecy.

Closely linked to this has been the corporate buying of influence with elected officials of both parties, which is beginning to resemble state capture. Perhaps the most revealing example of this dynamic is in the area of healthcare. Despite polls showing consistent majority support for some kind of public universal healthcare system, the US still has the privatized monstrosity in which millions are left without care, tens of thousands die per year owing to lack of access, and hundreds of thousands more end up bankrupt due to inability to pay incurred healthcare costs. In February 2019, The Intercept reported on a leaked slideshow revealing that Nancy Pelosi and other establishment Democrats planned to torpedo plans by their party’s small progressive wing to implement a single-payer system because “stakeholders are against.” That is, because private health insurance companies contribute to their political campaigns.

Speaking of the progressive Democrats, the failure of Bernie Sanders to win the party’s nomination twice was on both occasions the result of a deliberate effort on the part of establishment figures to derail his campaign. Victor Tiffany of Revolt Against Plutocracy has amassed considerable evidence that Democratic primaries were rigged against him in both 2016 and 2020. As then DNC chair Donna Brazile put it: “If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead.” Clearly, candidates in the US are largely pre-selected by their respective parties’ hierarchies, with primary elections often serving as little more than a formality.

Also to consider is the role of the media. Just as the corporate-owned media subjected Sanders to an effective blackout, so too has it systematically deprived third parties of the crucial airtime and column space that they need to communicate their policies to voters and expand their name recognition. In 2012, for example, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was arrested at Hofstra University after appearing with her running mate in the hope of getting a space on the debate stage with then-president Barack Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney. This wasn’t the first time, either; during the 2000 election cycle, for example, the party’s presidential candidate Ralph Nader was systematically excluded from debates despite showing significant public support. 2020, meanwhile, saw deliberate attempts to keep Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins off the ballot in states across the country. The Green Party’s efforts to provide an alternative to the two-party duopoly have been further weakened by restrictive ballot access laws that require a party to either win a certain percentage of the vote in order to maintain ballot status or else go through an onerous signature collection process all over again.

Clearly, the US has not a shred of credibility when it comes to criticizing Cuba’s, or any other country’s lack of “free and fair elections.” If the US really cared about democracy, it would stop its habitual meddling in elections taking place elsewhere and get its own house in order by addressing the myriad deficits in democracy that exist within its own borders. We shouldn’t hold our breath, however. Neither the US’s foreign policy stances nor its electoral system at home have anything to do with promoting democracy or ensuring fairness in elections. Rather, both exist to uphold the rapacious imperialist capitalist global economic system that immiserates the majority of humanity while upholding the power of the multinational corporations and billionaires that now essentially rule the world. Those who truly care about the future of humanity and the earth that sustains it should focus their ire on that reality, rather than on misplaced concerns about the purported democratic deficits of an impoverished Caribbean island nation. Astonishingly, this country has had to survive under the jackboot of that system yet has simultaneously been at the cutting edge of resisting it and providing an attempt at an alternative.


Featured image: Long line and long waiting for voters at The Mark Apartments in Ridgeland, Mississippi (US) on November 3, 2020 presidential elections. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today

https://orinocotribune.com/the-us-has-n ... elections/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 04, 2021 1:20 pm

Image

Eye-Witness Account of US Attempts to Destabilize Cuba
August 3, 2021
By Kathryn Guerrera – Jul 29, 2021

As a Canadian with family members that live in Cuba, who was in Cuba during the anti-government protests that occurred on July 11, I found myself in a unique and disturbing position where I could see and feel the disconnect between what was being reported by the mainstream media back home and what was really happening on the ground in Cuba.

Approximately two weeks after Father’s Day, the COVID-19 Delta variant began to take hold, particularly in the province of Matanzas. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are important social celebrations in Cuban culture and, coupled with the level of contagion of the Delta variant, this led to a rapid escalation in new COVID-19 cases. Cuba had recently fully vaccinated a large portion of the population in La Habana province with their first approved vaccine candidate, Abdala. From there, the Cuban Ministry of Health (MINSAP) began focusing on Matanzas because it is the most popular province for tourism and this puts the population there more at risk. Abdala has an efficacy rate of 92 percent, putting it in the same league as the most effective vaccines, BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna.

At the same time that the number of daily reported new COVID-19 cases was spiking, we began hearing from many friends in the city of Cárdenas, Matanzas (a current hotspot for COVID-19) that their vaccination appointments were being cancelled due to a lack of syringes and needles. The government responded swiftly with a lockdown, allowing stores to only be open in the mornings so that people would be at home for the rest of the day. At the same time, the number of hospital admissions was increasing and health care workers and the hospital infrastructure itself were becoming overwhelmed. A large electrical power plant in Matanzas was operating at reduced capacity due to outstanding maintenance (the US blockade affects Cuba’s ability to import parts and supplies) and the government had to resort to rationing electricity to households in order to keep people in the hospitals alive. This meant only a few hours per day to cook or turn on your fan or air conditioner in the July heat. No public pools were open and going to the beach was not permitted due to the lockdown.

So, nearly a year and a half into the pandemic and economic crisis, you can imagine the heightened level of frustration, fatigue and despair.

Since the onset of the pandemic, Cuba’s GDP has rapidly fallen by over 11 percent. The economy was already struggling before the pandemic. Since the Donald Trump administration tightened sanctions from 2017 to 2020, Cuban exports fell by 82 percent and imports by 85 percent. Trump attacked Cuba’s sources of currency, cutting back commercial flights and eventually even banning charter flights in the summer of 2020. The US also imposed sanctions on tanker companies that delivered petroleum from Venezuela to Cuba which affected movement and logistics on the island.

With the huge losses to the tourism sector in 2020 because of the pandemic, the island has lost one of its most important sources of hard currency, plunging it into one of the worst food shortages since the Special Period in the 1990s. Basic hygiene products have become increasingly difficult for Cubans to find in stores – as have over-the-counter medications like Tylenol, Advil and antibiotic ointments. Pharmacies now lack vital prescription medications for manageable conditions like hypertension, diabetes and cancer as well as treatable, but potentially harmful infections. A 250-tablet bottle of Acetaminophen costs $50 USD or more on the underground market.

With many medications currently unavailable, scarce and expensive personal hygiene products and 2 to 3-hour lineups for groceries with a 50/50 chance the store will run out that day before you make it inside, the Cuban people are suffering and generally exasperated and miserable under the current conditions. This is exactly what the sanctions are designed to do.

At the beginning of July, in response to the rising number of COVID-19 cases in Matanzas province, we started seeing the #SOSCuba hashtag coming from Cuban American celebrities living in South Florida. This was less than 3 weeks after the Abdala vaccine was found to contend with the top vaccines in the world (with Soberana, Cuba’s second candidate vaccine, not far behind) and right after 184 countries voted at the United Nations for the US to end the blockade. The #SOSCuba hashtag was an obvious smear campaign and meant to spread the idea that the Cuban government has “mismanaged” the pandemic.

Miami is home to 1.2 million people of Cuban heritage – many of whom are descendants of exiles that fled the Revolution. They have strong counterrevolutionary and anti-communist views and constitute a wealthy and politically powerful community. There is a multimillion-dollar counterrevolutionary industry based in South Florida with politicians, YouTubers, actors and artists whose entire careers are propped up by telling lies about the Cuban government and lobbying Washington to maintain and tighten its blockade. Tens of millions of dollars are spent every year by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID to fund “democracy” projects in Cuba. This is code for funding political interference, fake journalism, dissenters and protestors – all to promote regime change.

After the anti-government protests, Spanish social media expert Julian Macias Tovar spoke on the Cuban television news show Mesa Redonda (“Roundtable”) and explained that the figures around the #SOSCuba hashtag are more than a little odd. Macias Tovar stated that between July 5, when the hashtag was first used, and July 8, there were just 5,000 tweets. This figure then exploded exponentially with 100,000 Tweets on July 9, 500,000 on July 10, 1.5 million the next day and two million on the July 12. Cuban TV journalists did an excellent job debunking the lies and fake photos and videos around the protests as they were being created and disseminated to keep Cubans correctly informed. Unfortunately, of course, this was not seen by anyone outside of Cuba. We now know that thousands of fake social media accounts were created in the days leading up to the protests and that bots were used to send out thousands of tweets per day and hundreds of retweets per minute on July 10 and 11. The purpose was to tarnish the Cuban government’s reputation and to prepare and encourage anti-government demonstrations.

On July 11, there were not thousands of anti-government protestors in any Cuban city at any point in time. There were barely hundreds in a country of over 11 million people.

In Cárdenas, where I was, the participants were not working professionals such as doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, lawyers, licensed business owners or workers in factories or the tourism sector. Most of the protesters were those who choose to be unemployed and live off remittances from family living abroad. Many are well-known delinquents and are not positive contributors to the community. We personally know of the woman and her husband who created a widely circulated and entirely fake video – using pig’s blood and tomato sauce – of a Cuban police officer shooting their child. The couple confessed to being offered “Moneda Libremente Convertible” (MLC, meaning freely convertible money rather than Cuban pesos) from someone in the United States to do this. Another individual, who was also offered money to participate in the Cárdenas protest, created a staged video and has a history in town of running an illegal, unlicensed business and not paying taxes.

Protest participants are generally not respected in the community and are not known for their civic engagement. Nor do they seem to be interested in peaceful dialogue with the government. Compensation appears to be their primary motivating factors. These anti-government protests were also not ongoing as mainstream media claimed in the days that followed.

I want to note that most Cuban police officers do not have guns with bullets. They usually have blank guns, similar to starting pistols, that merely emit smoke and sound. There were multiple false claims on social media and in the Western mainstream media of police murdering Cuban adults and youth – especially people of colour. Many of these “deceased” people later went on Cuban public television to prove that they were in fact alive and well.

The Cárdenas protests were not characterized by police brutality and there are no missing people. There were however stores completely trashed by rioters who threw rocks through windows and at unarmed police officers, toppled police vehicles and stole things like kitchen stoves and electronics. To make matters worse, some individuals even went into the Cárdenas hospital and vandalized the pediatric ward. Health care workers reportedly needed police to provide security from these rioters who were threatening them.

Several protestors, after demolishing stores and the hospital ward, gathered at Cárdenas Bay where they expected boats from Florida that would take them to the United States. They themselves were victims of US lies and manipulation – no boats came to take them away and most have been arrested for clear-cut violations of the law. Many of them have already gone public with the communications they received from abroad that offered to transfer MLC to their bank account if they carried out destructive or deceptive tasks to create civil unrest, provoke law enforcement and fabricate videos or make false claims to foreign media and on social media. The Western mainstream media has not reported on this.

The Western media has also not given enough attention to significant human rights violations by governments and paramilitary forces in countries like Colombia, Chile and Haiti where massive anti-government uprisings have occurred and hundreds of civilians have been abused, murdered or gone missing. But the same media was instantly ready to cover, exaggerate and downright lie about what happened in Cuba. Politicians in the US immediately called for “humanitarian” or military intervention in Cuba – including airstrikes. Media in the United States, Canada and other Western countries deceitfully published a photo of the Cuban May Day march photo in 2018, claiming it was of the anti-government protests. Facebook determined that their “community standards” were not violated by the countless comments calling for armed invasion and bloodshed, assassination of elected Cuban government officials, nuclear war against Cuba and gun running from Miami to Cuba.

In response to the July 11 protests, thousands – actual thousands – of Cubans came out in cities across the island to support their government and the Revolution. On July 17, pro-revolutionary and pro-government demonstrators, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, gathered at dawn in Havana. There was zero coverage of this on CNN or CBC. The huge pro-government turnout in Camagüey was described on social media as being anti-government protestors who had “liberated” Camagüey from the “dictatorship.” This was completely false.

Days after the protests, cyberattacks originating in the US targeted the websites of public institutions in Cuba such as MINSAP as well as Cuban news sites like Cubadebate through Denial-of-Service attacks. The foreign powers apparently did not want people being informed by the Cuban Ministry of Health during a health crisis or seeing on the news the disinformation that was being exposed and Cuban people describing how they had been offered money to cause civil unrest.

Most Cubans – even those who may be unhappy with the current administration – are vehemently against violence, vandalism, looting and foreign interference in their country. Almost everyone that we spoke with in Cárdenas was angry at the destruction in their town and ashamed of the behaviour of those who would sell out and smear their homeland and ask for humanitarian and military intervention from the United States. Many Cuban civilians took it upon themselves to observe, record and report to authorities those involved in the destructive July 11 protests. Cubans have long been resisting imperialism and most know that foreign intervention and neoliberalism would make them worse off and not improve their material conditions.

I do not know of any Cuban living in Cuba who does not want above all else an end to the repressive and dictatorial US blockade. This which would have an instant impact on every aspect of their wellbeing.

This situation has made it easy to see who the real allies of the Cuban people are. The majority of Latin Americans gave their support to Cubans and their government, affirming their right to sovereignty and self-determination. While US President Joe Biden chauvinistically offered to send vaccines to Cuba after the protests, knowing full well that Cuba has its own vaccines, Mexico’s president sent 800,000 syringes and needles to Cuba on a Mexican Air Force plane.


Featured image: In response to US provocation, thousands of Cubans rallied across the island on July 11 in support of their Revolution and government.

https://orinocotribune.com/eye-witness- ... lize-cuba/

To be honest, I ain't so sure about the 'blank gun' contention. When I visited Cuba about 15 years ago some of the police were armed with .38 spl revolvers, old Smith and Wessons or Brazilian Taurus. Perhaps things have changed... We might compare this with US cops, who carry semi-automatic pistols with 15 round magazines and deploy long arms at the drop of a hat. I did witness an altercation, bunch of guys were hanging out at a gas station where we stopped . They were a little rowdy, a few perhaps a little drunk, and when a couple of cops pulled in they began haranguing them in a rough/playful sort of way. The police responded with talk, humor, and after a few minutes everybody was buddies. And none of the strutting arrogance so typical of US police.

Do you think it would go down like that in the freedom-loving USA? Fat chance. Most likely DEFCON 5! CODE 13! And people gonna get hurt.

As always the question is, "Whose authority?"
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 10, 2021 11:58 am

THE GOOD PEOPLE WHO WILL GIVE THE INTERNET TO CUBA
Rosa Miriam Elizalde

9 Aug 2021 , 1:24 pm .

Image
The blockade against Cuba is also expressed in cyberwar (Photo: AP Photo)

Users of GitHub, the largest free software platform in the world, have published an incomplete list of 60 computer programs , sites and services restricted for Cuba due to the unreasonableness of the US blockade, which according to Senator Marco Rubio does not exist. There they appear from the most popular videoconferencing platform in these times of pandemic, Zoom, to most of the Google applications, such as Code, Cloud, Maps and Play Publics.

The list is partial because there are no services blocked a few weeks ago, such as Wetransfer, which allows anyone who does not live in Cuba to transfer computer files over the Internet and that journalists used to send photos, audios or videos to our newsrooms. Wetransfer is a company based in Amsterdam, which suddenly decided to abide by the laws of the United States and deny that access to Cubans.

The paradox is that this occurs when the White House, such good people always with those from the south, has focused on two axes of the same interventionist discourse: it will dialogue with the Cubans (understand Miami) to decide what new sanctions to endorse the island, and it has decided to provide Cuba with a new free Internet infrastructure so that we can be very happy.

The dialogue with the Cubans (of Miami), who do not want to talk with Biden, for whom they did not vote and still believe that he stole the election from Donald Trump, is seen as an extravagance of US foreign policy. David Brooks, a correspondent for the newspaper La Jornada in the United States, referred a few days ago to Biden's meeting with a small group of Cuban-Americans at the White House to hear opinions about what is happening on the island, although most of those who were present did not. they have set foot in our archipelago in a long time. Senator Robert Menéndez , for example, has only seen a Cuban palm in photographs, while businessman Emilio Estefan has not known what the Morro de Santiago de Cuba lamp looks like for 58 years, the land where he was born.

However, as Brooks affirms, experts in foreign policy and bilateral relations have confirmed that the case of Cuba is unique, in which Washington, under both parties, consults with the diaspora of a country within the United States to elaborate the policy towards that nation.

The Internet thing is even stranger. Washington accuses the Cuban government of being an enemy of the Internet, but blocks applications in common use anywhere on the planet. It promises a new infrastructure with stratospheric balloons and other surrealist variants, but these days it has subjected Cuba to every possible variant of information warfare in networks and direct cyberwarfare.

THE BLOCKADE AGAINST CUBA HAS VARIANTS OF WAR IN NETWORKS AND DIRECT CYBERWAR

Cuban users have seen an unprecedented increase in the deployment of false news, photos and videos from junk sites in Florida, which even transnational media outlets replicate. They have endlessly repeated videos of July 11 as if they were new, a deceptive tactic to give the impression that the protests have continued until today, although the country is completely calm. The use of electronic gateways (VPN) is encouraged to circumvent the national public network and, in particular, the use of Psiphon , a technology developed and financed by the United States Agency for Global Media, Washington's propaganda agency, is publicized.

The Cuban media and institutional websites have received hundreds of denial of service attacks from US soil, where domain names have also been registered with rude words that redirect to pages of the national network. And as if that were not enough, we live under the harassment of organized cyber troops from Miami who use troll and robot farms to generate on Twitter and Facebook the perception of chaos in Cuba and insult and threaten even death the main leaders, journalists, artists and other public figures, in addition to ordinary citizens who dare to criticize the riots, call for common sense against the alleged military intervention or simply do not express explicit rejection of the Cuban government or join the fascism with gossip that floods the networks.

There are numbers, data and systematized records of events that get lost amid so much daily flash and so much anti-communist scream in the ears of the White House. But the height of all these operations can be heard in a podcast between Miami experts, intelligence community brains, and very high-ranking officials from the US Federal Communications Commission. There, publicly, these gentlemen speak of pressuring the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to commit violations of international law (for example, to turn a blind eye if the balloons are installed over Cuba); they acknowledge that they have introduced satellite phones for espionage and organizing protests on the island; They admit that Psiphon is paid by them and they promise money in abundance to telecommunications companies to violate Cuban law, among other niceties.

The great argument is that this makes the United States see the good of the movie, although the subject drops when a young Cuban wants to update his phone or download a video game. Then the boy gets a very educational poster on the screen: you live in a blocked country.

This article was originally published in the newspaper La Jornada on August 5, 2021 .

https://misionverdad.com/opinion/la-bue ... ernet-cuba

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 17, 2021 1:10 pm

Image

5 Ways Paid Hacks of the Cuban-American Exile Lobby try to Mislead us About Cuba
August 15, 2021
By Peter Bolton – Aug 13, 2021

In the month that has now passed since protests erupted across Cuba, much media commentary has focused on how President Biden would react. Earlier this year Biden’s press secretary had said that “a Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” However, the Biden administration is now clearly shifting policy, but not in the direction that Cubans in Cuba and US progressives had been hoping. On August 10, The New York Times published an article titled Biden Ramps Up Pressure on Cuba, Abandoning Obama’s Approach. The article states that, far from pivoting back to the Obama-era normalization process, “Mr. Biden is taking an even harder line on Cuba than his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump, who tightened restrictions on travel and financial transactions.”

Throughout this time corporate media accounts have been loyally parroting Washington’s line that the protesters were primarily motivated by the “authoritarianism” of the Cuban “regime.” As was the case in the run up to the Iraq War, the purpose of these reports is to manufacture consent for Washington’s coercive foreign policy and obscure its self-serving and hypocritical agenda. As would be expected, these reports also ignore growing evidence suggesting that the protests were in part orchestrated by Washington as part of its ongoing plan to destabilize the country and, in turn, bring about regime change. In a competitive field, one essay in particular stands out for its shamelessly tendentious propagandizing. Published at the online journal The Conversation, the article is condescendingly titled 5 ways Americans often misunderstand Cuba, from Fidel Castro’s rise to the Cuban American vote.

In a bizarre inversion of reality, the article’s author, one Caroline McCulloch, claims that the US public has been fed not an overwhelmingly pro-Washington narrative for the last six decades, but rather a steady diet of pro-revolutionary, anti-imperialist talking points. Fortunately, McCulloch has been sent from the heavens to correct these delusions that supposedly possess the minds of the zombified, Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing masses of North America. McCulloch’s article purports to address “five common areas of confusion about Cuba, Cuban Americans and the U.S.-Cuba relationship.”

The first of the “myths” that she wishes to debunk is about Cuban Revolution itself. She states: “The revolution was a nationalist revolution for most Cubans… not a communist one. When Castro installed a socialist economy and a one-party political system, many fellow revolutionaries felt betrayed.” True enough, the disparate parts of the revolution were not consolidated into the Cuban Communist Party until 1965, a full six years after the multi-tendency 26th of July Movement toppled the US-backed Batista dictatorship. What McCulloch leaves out, however, is that Cuba immediately found itself under foreign attack from the Western Hemisphere’s hegemon, the US. In the final months of the Eisenhower administration, Washington imposed a trade embargo that since then has largely isolated Cuba from the global economy. In 1962, the Kennedy administration then launched the CIA-orchestrated Bay of Pigs invasion, which had a similar, if not worse, effect on the island than the 9/11 attacks had on the US.

In the midst of this dire situation, a dialectical relationship emerged in the aftermath of Batista’s toppling between the US and liberal bourgeois factions within Cuba on the one hand, and revolutionaries on the other. This relationship ultimately had the effect of pushing the revolution to the left out of necessity, rather than as a cynical attempt by communists to manipulate the post-Batista era to their liking. Before 1959, the majority of Cuba’s economy was controlled by US corporate interests. And Batista’s government was backed by the US because it obediently facilitated this process. The post-Batista government was initially dominated by liberal sectors of the Cuban bourgeoisie. But as their benefactors in corporate America began to pull out, they were increasingly eclipsed by more radical factions who wanted to move transition Cuba toward socialism. As the government began bringing the economy into public ownership, large sections of the bourgeoisie who had overseen US economic imperialism began to flee abroad. This sudden loss of technical expertise along with the embargo translated into a society that was increasingly both in crisis and under siege. This situation meant that revolutionary leaders needed to reorganize society along more collectivist lines in order to maintain national sovereignty and provide for the common good in the face of extreme US hostility.

The Cuban Communist Party, meanwhile, far from being some kind of crude Stalinist replica, became a big tent party that encompasses all of the socialist factions that were in opposition to the Batista dictatorship. It was, in fact, formed through a merger of two already-existing political parties, the 26th of July Movement and the Popular Socialist Party, along with a student movement called the Revolutionary Directory. McCulloch also claims that: “Cubans fought to form a government that would answer to the Cuban people, rather than foreign interests. They got Castro’s Soviet-backed regime.” This misrepresents the relationship that Cuba had with the USSR. The reality is that there were considerable tensions between the Cuban government and Soviet leaders and major figures of the Cuban revolution, including Che Guevara, were critical of the Soviet model of socialism. Moreover, the revolution’s turn to the east came only after its leadership was rebuffed and then openly threatened by Washington.

Point #2 in McCulloch’s article addresses purported myths about the embargo, which, of course, is more accurately described as an economic blockade because it can penalize third countries. Though she concedes that the blockade has caused significant damage to the economy, she nonetheless claims that: “The Cuban government blames the United States for poverty on the island, but many of Cuba’s economic problems are homegrown.” To support this claim, she blames “political repression and fiscal mismanagement,” without giving details as to what form this takes or how it might harm the economy, and government control over “who may obtain state-issued licenses to start their own businesses.” She also claims that economic problems can be attributed to the government “ban[ning] independent labor unions, which would protect workers from exploitation.” This is pretty bizarre given that people of her ideological orientation are forever telling us how harmful organized labor is to economic performance.

But what most discredits her claim that the blockade is not the primary reason Cuban people are struggling” is her failure to attach any kind of figures or quantitative analysis to her supporting arguments. The reason for this is very straightforward – doing so would reveal that the blockade is, in fact, the primary cause of suffering in Cuba. The United Nations estimated in June that the blockade has caused over $147.8 billion in damage to the island’s economy throughout its decades of existence. Does anybody seriously believe that any of the factors that McCulloch desperately tries to characterize as the major causes of suffering amount to anywhere near $147.8 billion of economic damage?

In myth #3 of her article, McCulloch turns to US interference in Cuba more broadly. Though she concedes that the US “upheld Cuban dictators – before Castro – and employed wide-ranging coercive sanctions against the country,” she nonetheless claims that this has nothing to do with the July 11 protests. Instead, she claims that ultimately “the Cuban government’s long record of human rights abuses and repression created the current political instability” that led to the protests, rather than US interference. But as James Peck documents in his book Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights, human rights discourse has been hijacked by Washington to provide a false veneer of credibility to its regime change efforts towards foreign governments that are insufficiently obedient to US interests. The two hyperlinks McCulloch provides as sources for her claim about human rights abuses in Cuba are also instructive. One is Human Rights Watch, a Washington-based outfit notorious for its pro-US line in Latin America that even has former State Department officials on its board of directors. The other is the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), a supposedly independent local Cuban NGO that hasn’t been active since early 2019. Note that the very existence of CCDHRN undermines the claim that Cuba is an unusually repressive country since a dyed-in-the-wool dictatorship would surely not allow such an organization to operate in the first place.

McCulloch adds that “Cuba has a well-documented history of harassing, intimidating and imprisoning activists and dissidents.” What she leaves out is that many of these “dissidents” are on Washington’s payroll, including US media darling Yoani Sánchez. So, Cuba is actually more tolerant of dissent than is usually understood but draws the line at those who receive money from Washington. This can hardly be characterized as unreasonable given that the US criminalizes such behavior itself via the FARA Act. McCulloch adds: “Over 700 Cuban protesters have been detained or disappeared since July 11, according to the human rights organization Cubalex.” What she fails to mention is that some of those detained in Cuba were engaging in acts of violence. In any case, many have already been released.

Incidentally, the “human rights organization” that McCulloch cites, Cubalex, has received money from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was described by its own co-founder Allen Weinstein as existing to “do today what was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” According to the Cuba Money Project, during the Trump administration the NED channeled $149,945 to Cubalex in 2019 alone. A comparison with the treatment of protesters in Colombia, meanwhile, is instructive. Hundreds have gone missing while state security forces of Iván Duque’s government are believed to be responsible for scores of deaths. Of course, we won’t hear anything about that from the likes of Caroline McCulloch because Colombia is a staunch US ally that has even been dubbed “the Israel of Latin America.”

For myth #4, McCulloch turns her attention to the Cuban-American exile community in the US. She states: “The media often stereotypes Cuban Americans as overwhelmingly conservative. But they are a racially, economically and politically heterogeneous community.” Here she is perfectly correct. Some polls have even shown that a majority of Cuban-Americans would support a move by the US government to lift the blockade. But the media distortion is even worse than she makes out. Because in addition to being more diverse than is usually understood, in its totality the Cuban-American exile community is still not remotely representative of the views of Cubans generally when you include the Cubans who still live in Cuba. This is for the rather obvious reason that those who decided to leave are more likely to be critical of the government and Cuba’s political and economic systems.

The reality is that there is good reason to believe that amongst Cubans in Cuba support for the revolution is considerable. Shortly after the 1959 ousting of Batista, one authoritative public opinion poll found that 86% of the population supported the revolution. It’s possible that as the decades have passed this proportion has declined. But keep in mind that the revolution has nonetheless survived for over 60 years in spite of systematic immiseration caused by the blockade and continuous US attempts at regime change, including generous funding of internal “dissidents” who agitate against the government. Membership of the Cuban Communist Party numbers in the hundreds of thousands, while membership of Cuba’s National Revolutionary Militia numbers in the millions. This doesn’t seem like a “regime” that exists in spite of considerable opposition, but rather survives as a result of considerable support.

This support is likely predicated on the fact that many, if not most, people elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean region rightly envy the social protections and access to public services that Cubans have as a result of the revolution. And Cubans only need to look across the water to neighboring Haiti to see what happens to a country that dutifully follows Washington’s neoliberal economic model and the dictates of its preferred international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Even during the July 11 protests there were signs of support for the revolution. Corporate media accounts of the protests largely left out the fact that in addition to those who took the streets to oppose the government, counterprotests in support of the government took place that according to some reports were even larger in number than those in opposition to the government.

The fifth and final “myth” that McCulloch addresses is “Race and equality in Cuba.” She starts off by conceding that “Castro’s Communist revolution brought disadvantaged Cubans greater access to education and universal health care. Many poor Cubans became world-class doctors, scholars and scientists.” So far, so good. But she then goes on to state: “However, Cuba is not an egalitarian society. Its political leaders are overwhelmingly white and male, and the government does not treat all Cubans equally.” The quip that revolutionary leaders are mostly white and male is something of a cheap shot. Because the reality is that they have consistently made a priority of making Cuba more inclusive and have also instituted many pro-active measures to increase diversity, all the while maintaining a healthy self-criticism about this process. Keep in mind that the starting point for this process was a profoundly racist colonial social system that the revolutionary leaders inherited upon Batista’s toppling from power.

Furthermore, Cubans of color have consistently been one of the major pillars of support for the revolution. This is in large part because one of the first things the revolutionary leaders did in 1959 was to overturn racial discrimination in employment, schooling and the use of public facilities that had been legal during the Batista dictatorship. Fidel Castro said in March 1959 speech: “We are going to put an end to racial discrimination at work centers by waging a campaign… to end this hateful, repugnant system with a new slogan: work opportunities for every Cuban, without racial or sexual discrimination.” Note that he spoke these words in 1959, several years before Jim Crow was formally ended in the US.

The hyperlink that McCulloch uses to support her claim that “the government does not treat all Cubans equally,” meanwhile is a Washington Post article that makes much of anti-government rap groups. She later herself references this purportedly homegrown phenomenon, stating: “Black and brown Cuban artists are leading the current protests. The rap song “Patria y Vida” – which means “Homeland and Life,” a word play on the revolutionary slogan “Homeland or Death” – has become an anthem for Cuban government opposition.” But as Max Blumenthal has pointed out at The Grayzone, these groups are largely an artificial creation of Washington and its allies in the hardline Cuban-American exile community in order to ferment anti-government agitation. He states: “Over the past decade, the US government has spent millions of dollars to cultivate anti-government Cuban rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in an explicit bid to weaponize “desocialized and marginalized youth.””

McCulloch adds that “Afro-Cubans, who comprise at least one-third of Cuba’s 11.3 million people, experience widespread discrimination. As a result, they have higher poverty rates, less access to stable currency and low rates of property ownership.” What she leaves out is that much of this stems not from socialism, but rather from the rather recent market reforms introduced during the presidency of Raul Castro. In a strange irony, the younger Castro did what the US has long been demanding of Cuba by “liberalizing” the economy and allowing greater private sector economic activity. Yet this had the effect of increasing class divisions within Cuban society, which partly manifests itself in terms of race. She also leaves out that racial injustice was much worse during the Batista dictatorship and is arguably worse in the US even to this day. Batista himself wasn’t even permitted to join certain social Cuban social clubs. The wealth gap between black and white people in the US, meanwhile, has been well documented.

All of the above leads to the inevitable question: Why would this person write such obviously misleading and easily debunkable nonsense? The answer can be best answered by Lenin’s famous quote: “When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: Who stands to gain?” Naturally enough, McCulloch has impeccable pro-Washington credentials. Her editors at The Conversation were good enough to mention that she is fresh from an internship at the State Department, which has been at the forefront of regime change efforts against Cuba, but were also keen to stress that she is “not currently affiliated.”

They left out, however, that she is currently affiliated with Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute. This pseudo-academic propaganda outfit has been funded by some of the most extreme sectors of the hardline Cuban-American exile lobby. The building that houses the institute even received a $5 million grant from Jorge Mas, the founder of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). CANF has been linked to violent exile extremists such as Luis Posada Carriles, who effectively admitted to bombing an airliner full of Cuban civilians, and also bombing a hotel in Cuba that led to the death of an Italian tourist, during interviews with journalist Ann Louise Bardach. Bardach along with fellow investigative journalist Larry Rohter reported that Posada himself said that the “hotel bombings and other operations had been supported by leaders of the Cuban American National Foundation.”

With the internet making finding such information so easy, one might wonder whether the article’s author and publisher take the public for a bunch of idiots. But the reality is that with pro-Washington and anti-revolution coverage being so predominant, they don’t have to. As political theorist Antonio Gramsci put it: “Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously born in each individual brain: they have had a center of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion – a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.”



Featured image: A group of Cuban-Americans chant pro Trump slogans as they demonstrate their support for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Miami. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)

https://orinocotribune.com/5-ways-paid- ... bout-cuba/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 20, 2021 2:02 pm

Cuba updates legal framework on Telecommunications

Image
Referring to key points about protecting the telematics system from possible cyber attacks, the minister emphasized that the measure contributes to the respect of the rights of Cubans. | Photo: EFE
Published 18 August 2021

The Minister of Communications emphasized that the new Law contributes to the technological development of Cuba.

The Minister of Communications of Cuba, Mayra Arevich Marín, cataloged this Wednesday as a contribution to the development and stability of the country the approval of the Decree-Law on Telecommunications, Information and Communication Technologies and the use of the Radioelectric Spectrum.

"The approval of Decree-Law 35/2021 contributes to the political, economic and social development of the country, as well as to the security of its networks and services," said Minister Arevich Marín.

Referring to key points regarding the protection of the telematic system from possible cyber attacks, the minister emphasized that the measure contributes to the respect of the rights of Cubans, "is part of the creation of values ​​of adequate civic conduct, of respect, discipline and contribution to the well-being of the citizen, "he added.

Image

What does Decree-Law 35/2021 consist of?

The measure that was published in the Official Gazette is a legal norm of higher rank, which aims to protect the right to communication of citizens, likewise, allows the early detection of cases such as cyberbullying, massive blockades, pornography, cyberterrorism and subversion .

With the Decree-Law, Cubans who are victims of defamatory messages that incite hatred and xenophobia, as well as of any type of incidents alluding to cybersecurity, will have an authority where they can report and wait for a timely response.

In addition, among its resolutions, the Law establishes regulations for the use of satellite radiocommunication services and interconnection, as well as access and essential facilities for telecommunications networks. Measures that also promote rights and protection of the Cuban telecommunication system against the illegal blockade imposed by the United States (USA) on the island for 60 years.


"Consequently with the implementation of these guidelines, the country has worked on the computerization program of society that has allowed the deployment of the internet (...) All this in the midst of a scenario of blockade that does affect the sector hard since It prevents us from accessing technologies, updates, all services are made more expensive, and access to various sites is blocked, "Arevich Marín said.

For his part, the Director of Regulations of the Ministry of Communications Wilfredo López Rodríguez, told local media that the new Law, in addition to guaranteeing internet access, also favors the strengthening of national security, "satisfies the general needs of the State and the Government. and those related to national security and defense, internal order and civil defense in telecommunications matters, "he added.

It is the first time that Cuba has enacted a Law associated with cybersecurity incidents and ramifications that exceed technological limits, which are arranged by categories and subcategories.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/cuba-act ... -0032.html

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 21, 2021 2:17 pm

Cuban medical brigade treats victims of the earthquake in Haiti

Image
Cuban doctors have traveled to the most affected rural communities to treat the injured. | Photo: Prensa Latina

Published 20 August 2021

Cuban doctors have adapted a hospital to perform emergency surgeries and thus provide the care required by patients.

The medical brigade sent by Cuba to Haiti continues to care for the victims in the areas most affected by the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that occurred on August 14.

One of the medical specialists present in the country, Dr. Pérez Morales, described the situation as a catastrophe. "We have received several injured, some were taken to emergency surgery; and others received medical attention because they were slightly injured."

"At the transcendental moment that the country is living, several new lives came to the world, we had to do some caesarean sections. All have been favorable. The patients we have treated have been discharged with favorable evolution," said the Cuban doctor.


The teleSUR correspondent, Deisy Toussaint, indicated that Cuban health personnel adapted a hospital to perform emergency surgeries and thus provide the care required by patients.

For his part, the director of the General Hospital of Los Cayos, department of Sur, one of the areas most affected by the earthquake, said that "many people want to help" and thanked the presence of Cuban doctors in the area.

In the department of Nippes, another area seriously affected by the earthquake, there is a Cuban medical team that cares for the people who were injured.

"We had hardly put on the gown and patients began to arrive (...) we stayed practically all day, there was no time for breakfast or lunch," said nurse Aliosca Asencio, quoted by Prensa Latina.


On the same day of the earthquake, the president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, stressed that the island maintains its "eternal solidarity towards the noble Haitian people. In these hard times, as in others for many years, our health personnel are saving lives. there". Work that continues in the most affected areas.

The last balance of Haitian Civil Protection reported that, so far, 2,189 people have died and 12,268 were injured, while 322 are missing.

The Haitian authorities continue to search and rescue possible survivors, while humanitarian aid sent by various governments continues to arrive in the country to help care for the victims.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/haiti-br ... -0026.html

Google Translator

**************************************

Soberana 02, Soberana Plus Vaccines Approved by Cuban Agency

Image
Vicente Verez Bencomo, director of the Finlay Institue for Vaccines, hold a giant capsule celebrating the announcement on August 20, 2021. | Photo: Twitter/ @FinlayInstituto

Cuban authorities aim to immunize all populations by the end of 2021.


The Cuban State Center for the Control of Medicines and Medical Devices (Cecmed) approved on Friday the emergency use of Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus vaccines to advance the immunization against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Cedmed highlighted that "it has been confirmed that the established requirements are met and based on the data obtained in Phase I, II and III Clinical Trials, showing an efficacy in the prevention of symptomatic forms of the disease of 91.2%, as well as an adequate safety profile."


"Emergency use authorization for the Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus vaccines After concluding a rigorous process of evaluation of the file presented before the
@CecmedCuba and having carried out the inspections of the production process."


The Soberana 02 vaccine has been tested in the subject who have not been infected with COVID-19, while Soberana Plus was administered to patients recovering from COVID.

The Cedmed approval paves the way for the commercialization of the vaccines abroad and its administration to the rest of the population. Cuban authorities aim to immunize all people by the end of 2021.+

Published 20 August 2021 (13 hours 31 minutes ago)

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Sob ... -0016.html

********************************

Cuba: 85% of Havana Residents Got COVID-19 Vaccines

Published 3 August 2021

Image
Woman gets a COVID-19 vaccine, Havana, Cuba, August 2, 2021. | Photo: Twitter/ @dpshabana

Advances in the vaccination process will soon generate herd immunity in a city with 2 million inhabitants.


On Monday, Cuban authorities announced that 1.7 million people living in Havana have already received three doses of any of the domestically produced vaccines.

"Vaccines will not only help us be protected from the virus, but also prevent our relatives and friends from getting infected," said Liudmila Perez, who expects the epidemiological situation on the island would improve in the coming weeks.

Along with a dozen of neighbors, she waited in line to receive an Abdala vaccine at a health center near home. In the area where she lives, some 12,400 people have already received three doses of Cuban vaccines.

The April 19 Clinic Director Ainadis Alfaro said that the COVID-19 sanitary intervention will bring herd immunity in the country's most populous city with 2 million inhabitants. "I have no doubt, people will improve their immune response against new variants of the virus circulating across the island," she said


In addition, new protocols in handling the pandemic have been implemented in Havana, including home hospitalization due to beds shortage in hospitals and isolation centers.

"I strongly believe that the vaccination campaign, along with more restrictive COVID-19 measures, will contain the spread of the pandemic nationwide," health worker Marilyn Curbelo said.

Currently, doctors, medical students, and nurses are working on a vaccination campaign to immunize pregnant women. Cuban nurse Nitza Diaz, 57, has administered about 50 doses of locally-made COVID-19 vaccines on a daily basis since last May, when the health intervention started in Havana.

"I feel very satisfied," she said. "The Cuban vaccines could very much reduce the number of hospitalizations and deaths."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/__export ... 483346.jpg
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Cuba

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 21, 2021 2:17 pm

Cuban medical brigade treats victims of the earthquake in Haiti

Image
Cuban doctors have traveled to the most affected rural communities to treat the injured. | Photo: Prensa Latina

Published 20 August 2021

Cuban doctors have adapted a hospital to perform emergency surgeries and thus provide the care required by patients.

The medical brigade sent by Cuba to Haiti continues to care for the victims in the areas most affected by the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that occurred on August 14.

One of the medical specialists present in the country, Dr. Pérez Morales, described the situation as a catastrophe. "We have received several injured, some were taken to emergency surgery; and others received medical attention because they were slightly injured."

"At the transcendental moment that the country is living, several new lives came to the world, we had to do some caesarean sections. All have been favorable. The patients we have treated have been discharged with favorable evolution," said the Cuban doctor.


The teleSUR correspondent, Deisy Toussaint, indicated that Cuban health personnel adapted a hospital to perform emergency surgeries and thus provide the care required by patients.

For his part, the director of the General Hospital of Los Cayos, department of Sur, one of the areas most affected by the earthquake, said that "many people want to help" and thanked the presence of Cuban doctors in the area.

In the department of Nippes, another area seriously affected by the earthquake, there is a Cuban medical team that cares for the people who were injured.

"We had hardly put on the gown and patients began to arrive (...) we stayed practically all day, there was no time for breakfast or lunch," said nurse Aliosca Asencio, quoted by Prensa Latina.


On the same day of the earthquake, the president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, stressed that the island maintains its "eternal solidarity towards the noble Haitian people. In these hard times, as in others for many years, our health personnel are saving lives. there". Work that continues in the most affected areas.

The last balance of Haitian Civil Protection reported that, so far, 2,189 people have died and 12,268 were injured, while 322 are missing.

The Haitian authorities continue to search and rescue possible survivors, while humanitarian aid sent by various governments continues to arrive in the country to help care for the victims.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/haiti-br ... -0026.html

Google Translator

**************************************

Soberana 02, Soberana Plus Vaccines Approved by Cuban Agency

Image
Vicente Verez Bencomo, director of the Finlay Institue for Vaccines, hold a giant capsule celebrating the announcement on August 20, 2021. | Photo: Twitter/ @FinlayInstituto

Cuban authorities aim to immunize all populations by the end of 2021.


The Cuban State Center for the Control of Medicines and Medical Devices (Cecmed) approved on Friday the emergency use of Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus vaccines to advance the immunization against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Cedmed highlighted that "it has been confirmed that the established requirements are met and based on the data obtained in Phase I, II and III Clinical Trials, showing an efficacy in the prevention of symptomatic forms of the disease of 91.2%, as well as an adequate safety profile."


"Emergency use authorization for the Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus vaccines After concluding a rigorous process of evaluation of the file presented before the
@CecmedCuba and having carried out the inspections of the production process."


The Soberana 02 vaccine has been tested in the subject who have not been infected with COVID-19, while Soberana Plus was administered to patients recovering from COVID.

The Cedmed approval paves the way for the commercialization of the vaccines abroad and its administration to the rest of the population. Cuban authorities aim to immunize all people by the end of 2021.+

Published 20 August 2021 (13 hours 31 minutes ago)

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Sob ... -0016.html

********************************

Cuba: 85% of Havana Residents Got COVID-19 Vaccines

Published 3 August 2021

Image
Woman gets a COVID-19 vaccine, Havana, Cuba, August 2, 2021. | Photo: Twitter/ @dpshabana

Advances in the vaccination process will soon generate herd immunity in a city with 2 million inhabitants.


On Monday, Cuban authorities announced that 1.7 million people living in Havana have already received three doses of any of the domestically produced vaccines.

"Vaccines will not only help us be protected from the virus, but also prevent our relatives and friends from getting infected," said Liudmila Perez, who expects the epidemiological situation on the island would improve in the coming weeks.

Along with a dozen of neighbors, she waited in line to receive an Abdala vaccine at a health center near home. In the area where she lives, some 12,400 people have already received three doses of Cuban vaccines.

The April 19 Clinic Director Ainadis Alfaro said that the COVID-19 sanitary intervention will bring herd immunity in the country's most populous city with 2 million inhabitants. "I have no doubt, people will improve their immune response against new variants of the virus circulating across the island," she said


In addition, new protocols in handling the pandemic have been implemented in Havana, including home hospitalization due to beds shortage in hospitals and isolation centers.

"I strongly believe that the vaccination campaign, along with more restrictive COVID-19 measures, will contain the spread of the pandemic nationwide," health worker Marilyn Curbelo said.

Currently, doctors, medical students, and nurses are working on a vaccination campaign to immunize pregnant women. Cuban nurse Nitza Diaz, 57, has administered about 50 doses of locally-made COVID-19 vaccines on a daily basis since last May, when the health intervention started in Havana.

"I feel very satisfied," she said. "The Cuban vaccines could very much reduce the number of hospitalizations and deaths."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/__export ... 483346.jpg
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply