Free the Cuba Five, Mr. President
Printer-friendly version
Send to friend
PDF version
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford 
<!–break–>
Cuba, the US and the OAS
Printer-friendly version
Send to friend
PDF version
by John Maxwell
Even though both Castro brothers repeatedly stated that Cuba has no desire to rejoin the Organization of American States (OAS), Latin America demanded that the ban against Cuba be dropped. “For them the OAS has been a yanki weapon against all of them, from Arbenz to Allende to Aristide to Fidel, Chavez and Morales. It does not end.” The U.S. tried to find a graceful way to accept its diplomatic defeat, and avoid further isolation in the hemisphere it once overlorded like a caudillo.
<!–break–>
Cuba, the US and the OAS
by John Maxwell
This article originally appeared in the Jamaica Observer.
“The so-called dissidents that Cuba is accused of persecuting are in fact paid agents of the United States.”
The older I get the more evidence seems to accumulate that the greatest enemy of world peace and popular enlightenment may be the profession of journalism.
Somebody once said that generals are always prepared to fight the last war but the truism seems to fit at least as well when applied to journalists.
Take the New York Times editorial on Thursday; it begins, portentously:
"For 50 years, the Cuban people have suffered under Fidel Castro’s, and now Raúl Castro’s, repressive rule. But Washington’s embargo — a cold war anachronism kept alive by Florida politics — has not lessened that suffering and has given the Castros a far-too-convenient excuse to maintain their iron grip on power."
Anyone who knows anything about the history of the last 50 years might be forgiven for total bafflement.
Let us leave aside the statutory abuse and go to the embargo – which the NYT describes as a Cold War anachronism which had not ‘lessened the suffering … etc.’
In the first place the embargo was originally designed and has been periodically reinforced specifically to make the Cuban people suffer and to punish them for not rising up and overthrowing their government. The embargo is – in terms of international law – an act of war, and it has always been meant to have that effect on the Cubans. If any nation had declared war on the US, would the US expect that to improve the conditions of the US population?
The embargo is so punitive that it even bans medicines and vaccines for children from the Cubans. It was and is an attempt to make the Cubans grovel in their misery and cry "Uncle" – as in “Uncle Sam.” The fact that the opposite has happened is not a matter for inquiry by the NYT. Instead, says the Times:
"So we are encouraged to see President Obama’s tentative efforts to ease the embargo and reach out to the Cuban people. At the same time, we are absolutely puzzled and dismayed by this week’s frenzied push by many Latin American countries to readmit Cuba to the Organization of American States.
"Cuba, which says it has no interest in joining, clearly does not meet the group’s standards for democracy and human rights."
The writer is obviously not aware that in the world outside of the United States, in the United Nations, the margin of support for ending the embargo has grown steadily since 1992, when 59 countries voted in favor of the resolution. The figure was 179 in 2004, 182 in 2005 and 184 in 2007.
“The embargo is – in terms of international law – an act of war.”
Last year apart from the US, only Israel and one or two other superpowers like Palau voted against the resolution, while Micronesia and the Marshall Islands abstained.
The delegate speaking on behalf of the European Union, France’s UN deputy ambassador Jean-Pierre Lacroix said the 27-member bloc rejects "all unilateral measures against Cuba which are contrary to common accepted rules of international trade." The Antiguan representative, speaking on behalf of the 132-nation Group of 77 and China, said the alliance renewed its call on Washington to lift the embargo which not only undermines the principles enshrined in the UN Charter and international law, but threatens the [now sacred] principles of free trade and investment.
The New York Times is unaware that the Iberian/Latin American nations long ago welcomed Cuba in from the cold, even holding their 1999 Summit in Havana. There, the Spanish, Portuguese and Mexican heads of government criticised what they called Cuba’s lack of democracy, but did not see their differences as unbridgeable.
At that meeting, attended by the King of Spain, among others, the leader of the Cuban revolution defiantly declared that it was “an impossible task to persuade Cuba that it should abandon the ways of revolution and Socialism,” Fidel Castro said.
“Almost nobody thought Cuba could survive the fall of the Socialist bloc … but we thought differently and were determined to fight,” said Castro.
But even before that, when the revolution was only 25 years old, I happened to be in Havana during the Malvinas (Falklands) War, when streams of Latin American diplomats came to Cuba to ask advice from and to pay homage to Cuba and to Fidel, who had condemned the Thatcher Reagan aggression – as they saw it – against hemispheric political integrity.
And when the US condemns the Cubans for their lack of democracy there is an unconcealed irony in their position, not to say hypocrisy. The so-called dissidents that Cuba is accused of persecuting are in fact paid agents of the United States, whose motives may be as innocent as saints, but who are in fact, under Cuban and international law, working for a foreign power with whom their country is at war, in a war declared not by Cuba but by the United States.
“In the United Nations, the margin of support for ending the embargo has grown steadily.”
The New York Times, like the people Castro calls the Miami Mafia and like other anti-Cuban forces, does not apparently believe the Cubans have any right to defend themselves from American attack.
"We understand the desire to fully reintegrate Cuba into the main regional organization. But as Human Rights Watch argued this week: ‘Cuba is the only country in the hemisphere that repudiates nearly all forms of political dissent. For nearly five decades, the Cuban government has enforced political conformity with criminal prosecutions, long- and short-term detentions, mob harassment, physical abuse and surveillance.’”
The people the NYT and HRW are defending are the foreground players in a multilevel criminal assault on the Cuban polity. Over the years this assault has included terrorist bombings such as the sabotage of the arms ship La Coubre which exploded in the Havana docks in 1960, killing and maiming hundreds, terrorist campaigns in the Escambray and other parts of Cuba, targeted assassinations, biological warfare killing Cuban children with imported strains of hemorrhagic dengue fever for instance; economic biological warfare targeting sugar cane, tobacco and citrus, among others with exotic diseases; terrorist bombings of hotels, targeting tourists, plots to blow up the Tropicana, the world’s most famous nightclub and its audience and cast of hundreds; and the unremitting campaign to kill Fidel Castro with more than 600 known attempts on his life.
And while we talk about Cuba let us not forget about the US attempts to spread democracy in Guatemala, Honduras,Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua and Haiti, among others, leaving the landscape littered with the corpses of men, women, children, nuns, priests and journalists.
No one can convince me that the Cubans have no right to defend themselves and their revolution. Had Maurice Bishop taken their advice he might still be alive. But for some people, for me to say that the Cubans may have a case is a demonstration of moral and intellectual depravity.
So be it.
Posada Carriles
I happened to be in Havana in 1960 shortly after the ammunition ship La Coubre had been blown up with huge loss of life. Everybody I knew tried to discourage me from going. I was sure to be killed.
I wasn’t injured or in any real danger, although the night I arrived some gunmen in a speeding car sprayed the main shopping street with sub-machine gunfire. The air was charged. The day after I arrived I went for a walk with my camera and ran into a black Cuban on Monserrate street, where he lived. On discovering I was Jamaican and a journalist he told me that he was a communist, a trade unionist and that though the revolution was not communist, he approved of it. We walked to the Parque Central, where the permanent tiled chessboards may have witnessed the genius of Capablanca and where, on that day – May 20, 1960 – Cuba’s official independence Day and my own 26th birthday, various patriotic things were happening. Among them a group of Pioneros – the revolutionary equivalent of Boy Scouts were practicing for a parade. I began to take some pictures and was quickly stopped by a tall young main in civilian clothes who made it plain that I was under arrest.
Monserrate accompanied us to the nearby police station.
I quickly discovered I was in difficulties because I’d left my passport behind in my hotel, the nearby Siboney. But they had no one to go with me to get it. How to prove who I was?
Because I spoke English I was an American! Monserrate convinced me to scour my wallet for some form of ID. All I could find was a temporary press pass to the United Nations from the year before. Monserrate took one look at it and jumped for joy. See, he exclaimed (in Spanish of course) my friend is Ingles (English) because the pass said I was a British subject. The Brits were friends of Cuba.
The week before I arrived Life magazine had published a spread on Cuba, featuring the very troop of young Pioneers I had set my sights on.
The photographer had been a black American.
The photo spread had been titled: "Fascism in Latin America?"
As we say in cricket, the Americans had already begun rolling the wicket. The sugar quota was cut while I was there. The revolution was not even 18 months old.
A quarter of a century later I was on the steps of Jamaica House, chatting with Michael Manley, having just interviewed him for some European radio station. Somebody burst out of the house with the news that a Cubana airliner on its way to Jamaica from Barbados had been bombed out of the sky.
Manley’s reaction was shock and horrified disbelief. He went inside to phone his friend Fidel. The horror was palpable. Most of those on the plane were little more than children, the Cuban junior fencing team, some young Guyanese en route to medical school in Cuba and others.
“Somebody burst out of the house with the news that a Cubana airliner on its way to Jamaica from Barbados had been bombed out of the sky.”
Two of the culprits were soon discovered, tried and imprisoned. Another, one Luis Posada Carriles, alias “Bambi” – the mastermind, has since that day 33 years ago been under the protection of the United States of America. American agents engineered his release from a Venezuelan jail and later from a Panamanian jail after a failed plot to blow up Fidel Castro along with several other Latin American leaders and thousands of Panamanian students in a concert hall.
This terrorist, a CIA asset from the time of the Kennedy assassination, lives, protected in Miami in a country whose last president promised to go after terrorists wherever they were and regardless of who protected them. No question of moral or intellectual depravity here, of course. In addition to the Cubana bombing he was responsible for some hotel bombings, one of them fatal to an Italian tourist.
Meanwhile, five Cubans who had infiltrated the Miami Mafia and were supplying information about the terrorists the US said it was committed to hunt down – people like “Bambi” – were given long prison sentences in solitary confinement for taking George W. Bush at his word.
Fidel Castro has long made it plain that Cuba has no wish to rejoin the OAS. Latin America knows this, despite which the OAS members decided to rescind the 1964 decision. It will mean nothing, practically, but for the Latins it is a matter of honor.
For them the OAS has been a yanki weapon against all of them, from Arbenz to Allende to Aristide to Fidel, Chavez and Morales. It does not end.
Their pilgrimages to Havana 25 years ago may have served no practical purpose either, but for Latin America it helped restore their self-respect.
John Maxwell a veteran Jamaican journalist. He has covered Caribbean affairs for more than 40 years and is currently a columnist for The Jamaica Observer. He can be contacted at jankunnu@gmail.com.
Copyright©2009 John Maxwell
Revolutionary Haitian Priest Gerard Jean-Juste, Presente!
Printer-friendly version
Send to friend
PDF version
by Bill Quigley<!–break–>
Haiti’s Great White Hope?
Printer-friendly version
Send to friend
PDF version
Ban Ki Moon is playing another macabre joke on Haiti. In naming Bill Clinton as his "special envoy" to Haiti, the United Nations Secretary General has chosen a man that has already betrayed Haiti’s people several times over. "President Clinton made several pledges to Aristide and to Haiti, but history does not seem to record that any were kept." Partly because of Clinton’s depraved policies, "Haitians are still scooping water to drink from potholes in the street and stave off hunger with "fritters" made from earth and cooking fat."
<!–break–>
Haiti’s Great White Hope?
John Maxwell
This article originally appeared in Jamaican Observer.
”Neither Haitian democracy nor Bill Clinton’s reputation will survive this appointment.”
History is littered with treachery. In the noisome Slough of Dishonor are mired thousands of reputations, most of those who betrayed their own countries, like Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, Jonas Savimbi and Augusto Pinochet. The deepest pits though, the most purulent sinks, are reserved for those who have ranged abroad to betray and sabotage strangers, to inflict unnecessary suffering on people who have never given them cause for complaint. People like Leopold of Belgium, Neville Chamberlain, Hitler, Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush spring readily to mind.
Last week, former President Clinton announced that he would accept an invitation from the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, of South Korea, to become the SG’s personal envoy in Haiti. It is an appointment that will end in disaster.
I mention Ban Ki Moon’s nationality because I believe that the disaster that already exists in Haiti is the result of a culture clash which is entirely incomprehensible to most people outside the Western hemisphere and not easily understood by most people outside the international crime scene that has been created in Haiti.
Ground Zero for Modern Civilization
It is my contention that the modern world was born in Haiti.
When you understand that the modern rotary printing press is a direct descendant of mills made to grind sugar you may begin to get the drift of my argument. Since I am not a historian my arguments will not be subtle and nuanced. I am simply presenting a few crude facts which, however you interpret them, will I believe lead inexorably to the conclusion that modern ideas of liberty and freedom, modern capitalism and globalization of production and exchange, would have spent much longer in gestation had it not been for the black slaves of Haiti who abolished slavery and the slave trade. In the process they defeated the armies of the leading world powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, destroyed the French empire in the western hemisphere, doubled the size and power of the United States and incidentally promoted the European sugar beet industry and revolutionized European farming.
“Nowhere was freedom taken more seriously than by the Haitians.”
The problem with all this, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is that had the Haitians been ethnically European their achievements would now suffuse the world narrative; conversely, had Spartacus been black, he would long ago have faded into the mists of barbarian myth. 
The Haitians and all the other blacks of the Western hemisphere were uprooted from their native grounds, their civilizations laid waste, and they themselves transported to unknown lands in which they were forced to create unexampled riches and luxury for their rapists and despoilers.
For reasons lost to history, the blacks in Haiti and Jamaica were, for most of their captivity, the most unwilling subjects and continued to fight for their freedom for more than three centuries.
The Enlightenment and its prophets and philosophers popularized the ideas of freedom and liberty, the rights of man. Nowhere was freedom taken more seriously than by the Haitians, who, described as Frenchmen, fought valiantly for American freedom in that nation’s Revolutionary War of Independence. When Revolution convulsed France in turn, the Haitians threw their support to those they thought were fighting for freedom. When that proved a false trail, the Haitians continued to fight, defeating the French, British and Spanish armies sent to re-enslave them.
“The fact of Haitian freedom frightened the Americans and other world powers.”
Although the Americans and the French said they believed in freedom, they formed an unholy combination to restrict Haiti’s liberty. The fact of Haitian freedom frightened the Americans and other world powers. Haiti promised freedom to any captive who set foot on her soil and armed, provisioned and supplied trained soldiers to Simon Bolivar for the liberation of South America. Nearly 200 years before the United Nations (and France and the USA), Haiti proclaimed Universal Human Rights, threatening the slave societies in America and the Caribbean.
Haiti’s freedom was compromised by French and American financial blackmail, and as I’ve said before, what the Atlantic powers could not achieve by force of arms they achieved by compound interest. Haiti was the first heavily indebted poor country, and the United States, Canada, France and the multilateral financial organizations, the World Bank, the InterAmerican Development Bank and the IMF have worked hard to keep her in that bondage.
Eventually, 93 years ago, the Americans invaded Haiti, destroyed the constitution, the government and their social system. American Jim Crow segregation and injustice destroyed the Haitian middle-class, enhanced and exacerbated class distinctions and antagonisms and left Haiti a ravaged, dysfunctional mess, ruled by a corrupt American-trained military in the interest of a small corrupt gang of mainly expatriate or white capitalists, ready to support any and every murderous dictator who protected their interests.
”What the Atlantic powers could not achieve by force of arms they achieved by compound interest.”
Finally, twenty years ago, the Haitians rose up and overthrew the Duvaliers and the apprentice dictators who followed. In their first free election the Haitians elected a little, black parish priest, the man whose words and spirit had embodied their struggle. But the real rulers of Haiti, the corrupt, bloodthirsty capitalists with their American passports and their bulletproof SUV’s, had no intention of letting Haitians exercise the universal human rights their leaders had proclaimed two centuries before.
When Jean Bertrand Aristide was deposed after a few months in office it was with the help of the CIA, USAID, and other American entities. Then ensued one of the most disgraceful episodes in the long unsavory history of diplomacy. Bill Clinton – elected President promising to treat the Haitian refugees as human beings – elected instead to observe the same barbarous policies as George Bush I, and when the refugees became a flood Clinton’s answer was more illegality. He parked two massive floating slave barracoons in Kingston Harbor where refugees picked up in Jamaican waters were, with the craven connivance of the Patterson government, denied asylum, captured and processed and 22% of them selected for the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp while the rest were returned to their murderers in Haiti.
Eventually, largely due to pressure from black pressure groups in the US and crucially, a fast to the death begun by Randall Robinson, Clinton agreed to restore Aristide while General Colin Powell talked grandly of the soldier’s honor he shared with Haiti’s then murderer in chief, a scamp called Raoul Cedras.
“Bill Clinton – elected President promising to treat the Haitian refugees as human beings – elected instead to observe the same barbarous policies as George Bush I.”
President Clinton made several pledges to Aristide and to Haiti, but history does not seem to record that any were kept.
Had even a few been kept, Haiti may have been able to guarantee public security and to install some desperately needed infrastructure. Instead Haitians are still scooping water to drink from potholes in the street and stave off hunger with “fritters” made from earth and cooking fat.
The Haitian Army, the most corrupt and evil public institution in the western hemisphere, was abolished by Aristide, to the displeasure of the North American powers. Now that the Americans have deposed Aristide for the second time, security is in the hands of a motley mercenary army, a UN peacekeeping force.
Security in Haiti is so good that three years ago, the then head of this force, a Brazilian general was found shot to death after a friendly chat with Haitian elites.
The rapes, massacres, disappearances and kidnappings continue unabated and the only popular political force, the Fanmi Lavalas, has been effectively neutered.
President Clinton "will aim to attract private and government investment and aid” for the poor Caribbean island nation, according to Clinton’s office and a senior U.N. official.
"A U.N. official said that Clinton would act as a cheerleader" for the economically distressed country, cajoling government and business leaders into pouring fresh money into a place that is largely dependent on foreign assistance.
It all sounds so nice and cozy, a poor, black “hapless” nation under the tutelage of the rich and civilized of the earth.
I am prepared to bet that neither Haitian democracy nor Bill Clinton’s reputation will survive this appointment. Democracy is impossible without popular participation and decision making.
In Haiti democracy is impossible without Lavalas and Aristide.
If Haiti itself is to survive, the UN General Assembly needs to seize this baton from the spectacularly unqualified and ignorant Security Council and its very nice and affable Secretary General, even less attuned to Haitian reality than the last SG, Kofi Annan and his accomplices, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, P.J. Patterson and Patrick Manning.
John Maxwell a veteran Jamaican journalist. He has covered Caribbean affairs for more than 40 years and is currently a columnist for The Jamaica Observer. He can be contacted at jankunnu@gmail.com.
Copyright ©2009 John Maxwell
A Sincere and Painful Apology to the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus
by Alberto N. Jones<!–break–>
Raul Castro, Barack Obama, Hugo Chavez: Who Are The Big Men?
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford
Click the flash player above to hear or the mic to download an MP3 copy of this Black Agenda Radio commentary.
 |
What does putting "everything on the table" mean, in discussions among nations? Cuba’s Raul Castro says he means literally everything, including exchange of political prisoners, as long as talks are held on the basis of equality. Barack Obama claims the next move is up to Cuba, but it appears Raul has already made an authentic offer. Besides, there is something fundamentally wrong when the nation that continues to commit crimes against its neighbor - the U.S. - asks for concessions before it will cease and desist.
<!–break–>
Obama, Raul and Hugo: Who are the Truly ‘Big Men?’
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford
“The U.S. holds pose no threat to the U.S., while the prisoners Havana holds may well pose a threat to Cuba.”
U.S. President Barack Obama says the next move is up to Cuba, to improve relations between the two countries. This statement is both typically Obama, and vintage American imperialist. Obama, just like his American presidential predecessors stretching back more than two centuries, thinks the United States has the right to decide when it’s time for other countries to forgive America’s own crimes – even when the Americans continue to commit those crimes. Obama tried to run that game at the Summit of the Americas, in Trinidad, this weekend, when he spoke of setting aside "stale debates and old ideologies." That’s the same language he uses, here in the U.S., when people want to talk seriously about curbing the power of money or creating a single-payer health care system. Obama pretends that everything he says is fresh, rather than stale, even when its old as dirt, or stolen from somebody else. He claims to have no ideology, while practicing imperialism, backed up by the biggest military budget in history, 24 hours a day. Since Obama smiles when he utters this kind of nonsense, he is called a statesman and a cool dude.
But let’s return to Cuba and the “next move.” President Obama has made concessions mostly to Cuban exile families who would like to visit their relatives and send more money, more often. Obama has not undone the historic U.S. economic, political, diplomatic and cultural blockade of Cuba, but only some of George Bush’s more egregious barriers, and mostly for the benefit of Cuban Americans. Cuban leader Raul Castro has offered to put “everything” on the table for discussion, including exchanges of political prisoners. That’s a much bigger concession for Cuba than for the United States. Cuba holds scores of prisoners that Havana says have sought to undermine the state and serve the interests of foreigners, meaning, the Americans. The United States holds only the Cuban Five, Cubans sent to infiltrate exile groups in Florida that were breaking the laws of the United States by carrying out operations against Cuba. Although convicted of espionage, the Cuban Five were not spying on the United States, but instead, spying on rightwing Cubans in the United States. In other words, the Cuban prisoners the U.S. holds pose no threat to the U.S., while the prisoners Havana holds may well pose a threat to Cuba. It is Cuba that would give up the most in an exchange. Yet Obama plays it coy, and noncommittal, while claiming that ideology and the preservation of the imperial big stick have nothing to do with it.
“Fidel and Chavez ask only for relations on the basis of equality.”
Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez are the bigger men in this story. Raul would be perfectly justified in demanding that the United States first clear out of Guantanamo Bay, sovereign Cuban territory, before any further talks could be held on contact between relatives in Cuba and Miami, or on political prisoners. Raul could ask, on behalf of his brother, for an apology for the innumerable U.S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Venezuelan President Chavez could demand the same on behalf of himself, for George Bush’s 2002 attempted coup against his government, in which Chavez came very close to being killed. But Fidel and Chavez ask only for relations on the basis of equality. Unfortunately, equality among nations is a pill no imperialist will swallow, including Barack Obama.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Haitians Shun Senate Elections
by Al Jazeera English
<!–break–>
