Who Is Frank Calzon?

An overview of Frank Calzon, member of the Miami Mafia. Also reviews Freedom House, an organization that is more or less run by the CIA and the US State Department as a pure propaganda arm of the state. In addition, we look into some of the most corrupt of the US rightwing labor organizations which spent years fighting against workers in the US and abroad. Warning: Long, 57 pages on the web.

Cuban Blackmail, 50 Years After the Missile Crisis

By JEB BUSH AND FRANK CALZON* (see notes below)

WALL STREET JOURNAL
OPINION
October 23, 2012

The past decades have shown that the Castro brothers’ behavior in October 1962 was perfectly characteristic.

With this week marking the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, Americans are recalling the 13 days in October 1962 when the Soviet Union and Cuba’s Fidel Castro [sic --but not the USA?] brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

But in assessing the crisis, and President John F. Kennedy’s decisions over those 13 days, it is equally important to consider what has happened since. Using what the late U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called the “politics of deception,” Cuba’s Castro brothers have maintained power through international deceit, blackmail and hostage-taking.

The past decades have shown that the behavior of the Castro brothers in 1962 was perfectly characteristic. Fidel Castro has never shied away from a political gamble such as deploying secret Soviet missiles and then lying about them. He assured other governments that he would never do such a thing, just as the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States told the Kennedy administration that rumors about missiles were false. But the missiles were there, and their deployment was an effort to intimidate and blackmail America.

Today, Havana’s intimidation and blackmail are of a different magnitude, but there are plenty of examples.

Days ago, a Cuban court sentenced young Spanish [rightwing] politician Angel Carromero to four years in prison for committing manslaughter in the death of Oswaldo Payá, one of Cuba’s most prominent human rights leaders. Payá died while a passenger in a car Mr. Carromero was driving, when it veered off the road and hit a tree under suspicious circumstances.

Payá’s family says that Mr. Carromero has sent text messages saying that a vehicle (presumably driven by Cuba’s state security police) was attempting to force him off the road. The family was prevented from attending the trial and is calling for an international investigation.

[Note that not only did Mr. Carromero not say any such thing in his trial, but his other passenger --a Swedish political activist who returned to Sweden after the accident -- contradicted this, along with witnesses along the road who all confirmed that Carromero's car was speeding way over the speed limit, passed signs warning of road construction, and that no other car was remotely involved. This would not be surprising given that Carromero's license in Spain was revoked for numerous incidents of excessive speeding. klw]

For years, state security had tried to intimidate Payá and his foreign visitors, part of a larger effort to discourage democracy advocates from visiting or contacting Cuban dissidents.

Havana similarly tries to intimidate other countries—such as Spain, whose nationals have business interests in Cuba—into accepting its routine violations of human rights, including the beatings of dissidents. [This is of course insulting not only to Cuba but also to Spain, but then, a country that routinely puts business over human rights would hardly find it strange to assume another country would do the same. klw]

Joining Mr. Carromero as a hostage in Cuba is Alan Gross, an American development worker held since December 2009.

His supposed crime: giving a laptop computer and satellite telephone to a group of Cuban Jews. [For those who haven't been following the Gross case, the USAID subcontractor went to Cuba five times, supposedly as a tourist but handing out to people the US hoped would support its efforts to change the Cuban form of government, sophisticated hi-tech satellite phones with special chips commonly used by spy agencies. klw]

Mr. Gross has lost some 100 pounds in prison, according to his wife, who also reports that he has a growth on his shoulder that may be cancerous. The Castro regime intends to keep him in prison until the U.S. government releases five Cuban spies from prison in the U.S.

There is long history here. In 1962, Fidel Castro wrung $53 million from Washington in exchange for releasing the prisoners he had taken after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion [Untrue. The US was supposed to provide baby food and medicine, but never did. klw].

Before that, during the guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship, Raúl Castro extorted thousands of dollars from owners of sugar mills, threatening to burn down their homes and mills unless they aided the guerrillas. In June 1958, he tried to force negotiations with Washington by kidnapping 29 American sailors and marines; when word got out that Washington might send U.S. Marines to rescue the hostages, the Castros freed them.

In dealing with Cuba’s regime, the Obama administration has too often sent contradictory signals of U.S. resolve. Though Raúl Castro (who now heads the Cuban government) has refused to allow Mr. Gross to return to the U.S. to visit his seriously ill mother, the Obama administration allowed a Cuban spy to leave an American halfway house to visit his sick mother.

While Mr. Gross remains in prison, the Obama administration last year issued visas to Raúl Castro’s daughter and her retinue so they could visit America and attack its Cuba policy. [It should be noted that the former Bush administration also gave a visa to Mariela Castro "and her retinue" but nobody seemed to protest that visit except perhaps the ultra-rightwing Florida Cuban legislators. klw]

The lessons of October 1962 must not be forgotten. President Kennedy showed fortitude and resolve in forcing the Soviet Union to stand down. Whoever wins the Nov. 6 election ought to deal similarly with today’s intimidation and deception from the Castro regime.

Mr. Bush is a former governor of Florida. Mr. Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C. [read all about Calzon and his center below--klw]
*

As reported in SourceWatch:

In 2007 Calzon noted that: “I am a Cuban refugee who has spent most of my life advocating human rights for Cubans and others. From l986 through 1997 I was Freedom House’s Washington representative. I have testified before the U.N. Commission for Human Rights in Geneva and for the last ten years I’ve been the executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.”

Frank has a tendency to deny he ever had anything to do with CIA, even threatening Counterpunch through his attorney to force them to retract their statements on his CIA employment.

We merely note that, according to The Freedom House Files by Diana Barahona at HaitiAnalysis.com, Freedom House alone is a notorious den of Agency types, even employing a former CIA Director, R. James Woolsey, who joined Freedom House in 2000. As for his various anti-Cuban operations (Center for a Free Cuba, Free Cuba Foundation), they were not exactly staffed by choirboys…

According to TerrorFileOnLine’s U.S. Terrorism in the Americas – Standard Encyclopedia, developed out of Venezuela:

Born 1947 in Cuba. Emigrated to the U.S. in 1960. Graduated from the University of Georgetown, where he was president of the Association of Cuban Students. Recruited by the CIA during his time as a university student.

From a very young age, Calzon became involved in Miami terrorist organizations of Cuban origin like Alpha-66 and Abdala. In Abdala Calzon held leadership positions and took part in subversive activities against Cuba.

During the 1970s, he co-founded, along with counterrevolutionaries Elena Mederos, Siro del Castillo and Humberto Medrano the Of Human Rights organization. Through this organization he maintained a systematic and intense defamatory campaign against Cuba, based fundamentally on supposed human rights violation and the state of counter-revolutionary prisoners.

During this period he became part of the board of directors of the Miami-based counterrevolutionary organization Committee of Intellectuals for the Freedom of Cuba. During these years, Calzon directed his attacks against groups that promoted a policy of understanding with the Cuban Revolution such as Areito magazine.

In 1981, Calzon founded the American National Foundation, along with Jorge Mas Canosa, Francisco Jose “Pepe” Hernandez and other emigrés of Cuban origin known for their terrorist activities against Cuba. In CANF, he was executive secretary, a position he used to promote laws against Cuba in the U.S. Congress, as well as to set up the well-known subversive radio station Radio Marti.

During this time he was also responsible for spearheading a number of aggressive press campaigns against the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) of Cuba.

Calzon left the CANF in 1987, after a power struggle with president Jorge Mas Canosa.

Afterward, he joined the New York based nongovernmental organization Freedom House. Founded in 1941 by conservative sectors, Freedom House is dedicated to launching campaigns, under the guise of human rights, against countries that don’t share their ideologies. Calzon has used this organization to launch defamatory campaigns against Cuba, to lobby against Cuba at the UN Human Rights Commission and promote subversive activities against Cuba.

With the fall of the socialist camp, Freedom House intensified the development of programs directed to subverting Cuba, fomenting the creation of counterrevolutionary organizations and ringleaders in the national territory. Between 1995 and 1997, Calzon directed the Cuban Program of Freedom House, using the same methods employed against former socialist states in Eastern European. His long history with the CIA, beginning at a young age, was a perfect reference point for this post.

As part of the Cuban Program, Calzon has sent numerous collaborators to Cuba for several different illegal missions related to supplying and financing counterrevolutionary groups.

In August 1997, David Norman Dorn, a U.S. labor activist traveling in Cuba under a tourist visa, was detained in Cuba, for delivering money to counterrevolutionaries ringleaders under the orders of Frank Calzon.

These subversive activities committed against Cuba by Frank Calzon, through the posts he occupied at Freedom House and the Center for a Free Cuba, have been financed by the U.S. government via the Agency for International Development (USAID).

The first funds provided by USAID to Freedom House were announced in October 1995 by then president William Clinton, to the amount of half a million dollars; a figure that has steadily increased proportionately to escalating U.S. aggressions against Cuba.

Frank Calzon systematically attended sessions of the UN Human Rights Commission, in Geneva, where he organized anti-Cuba campaigns and supported U.S. anti-Cuba resolutions. — Link.

The Freedom House Files, 2007

By Diana Barahona – HaitiAnalysis.com

“Freedom House is an independent non-governmental organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world.” – Freedom House

Freedom House is a small but influential organization based in Washington and New York with more than 120 offices around the world and an annual budget of US$19 million.1

Calling itself “America’s oldest human rights group,” it is best known for its yearly “Freedom in the World” report, which rates countries as “free,” “partly free” and “not free.” What it is not known for is the high percentage of its funding that comes from the State Department—an average of 95% between 2000 and 2003—or its list of trustees, a Who’s Who of neoconservatives from government, business, academia, labor and the press.

In 1940 a liberal New Yorker named George Field and some friends formed the National Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies to build support for the U.S. entering WWII. The group attracted prominent figures in the arts, journalism and government—including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—and “within a year it was drawing thousands to rallies at Madison Square Garden and making headlines.”2

A month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Field joined with Republican presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie and some anti-Nazi groups to found Freedom House “as a counterpoint to the Nazi Braunhaus, Hitler’s propaganda center in Munich.”3

After the war Freedom House joined with other government agencies such as the CIA and State Department to combat “Soviet and Chinese Communism, anti-Semitism and the suppression of human rights in Eastern Europe and Asia.”4

It championed NATO abroad but supported liberal causes at home, condemning the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism and sharing its New York headquarters, the Wendell Willkie Memorial Building, with the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League and the Metropolitan Council of B’nai B’rith.

Field retired as executive director in 1967 but served as secretary to the board of trustees until 1970. In the 1970s and ‘80s Freedom House lobbied at UNESCO against the New World Information and Communications Order, an attempt by Third World countries to create media systems that weren’t dominated by First World corporations and governments.

During the 1980s the organization began to receive a majority of its grant income from the newly created NED (founded by Congress in 1983), and contracts for Latin America far surpassed those for Eastern Europe.5

Under the Reagan-Bush administrations Freedom House continued to promote the foreign policy objectives of the United States in Central America, “supporting the death squad-linked ARENA party in El Salvador while attacking the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, championing Contra leaders like Arturo Cruz, and serving as a conduit for funds from the National Endowment for Democracy.”6

Considered “neoconservative” even at that time, the group’s trustees and associates were affiliated with the State Department, the National Security Council (Jeane Kirkpatrick), the CIA (through front groups), the U.S. Information Agency, the Trilateral Commission (Zbigniew Brzezinski), the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Committee on the Present Danger, Accuracy in Media, the American Enterprise Institute, Crisis, The New Republic and PRODEMCA, a group that raised funds and lobbied for the Contras.

During the 1980s Freedom House also formed the Afghanistan Information Center, one of several NED-funded groups supporting the mujahedin. This was to complement the government’s US $3,000 million covert funding program for the anti-Soviet groups.7

According to Freedom House’s IRS Form 990, prior to 1997, its government funding was in the form of “government fees and contracts,” presumably for work performed on behalf of the State Department. After that year, however, the funding was qualified as “grants.”

But with neoconservatives such as Kenneth Adelman, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Otto Reich, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Malcolm Forbes Jr. on the board of trustees, there was no danger the organization would change its ideological course.8

Freedom House’s government-linked trustees have traditionally shared seats in the boardroom with corrupt, right wing union bosses.

In the 1980s and 1990s there were cold warriors Lane Kirkland, William Doherty, Albert Shanker and Sol C. Chaikin. Doherty, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, was executive director of the CIA-linked AIFLD.

Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was also on the board of the Committee on the Present Danger, the NED and the NED-funded Free Trade Union Institute. He served on a private sector committee which advised the U.S. Information Agency on labor, “help[ing] the USIA enhance its programming through increased use of the ‘international activities’ of U.S. labor organizations.”9

Sol Chaikin was president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and he followed the lead of his predecessor, 30-year president David Dubinsky, in embracing “piece-rate wages, no-strike pledges, five-year contracts, opposition to the minimum wage, and opposition to government aid” in an attempt to keep the garment industry in New York City.10

He also embraced corruption and racketeering. By 1997, according to longtime union activist Robert Fitch, “New York City’s mostly unionized garment industry, with about 35,000 workers, had become a mob-dominated racket that made a mockery of collective bargaining while pushing wages down and hours up to the limits of human endurance.”11

Chaikin never tried to clean up the racketeering or better the third-world working conditions of the union’s largely immigrant garment workers, but he was a crusader against communism in other countries, joining the Committee on the Present Danger and the board of the Free Trade Union Institute. Chaikin was succeeded as ILGWU president by Jay Mazur, who served from 1986-1995.

Mazur is president emeritus of UNITE, the ILGWU’s successor, where he banked over half a million dollars in his last year in office while representing New York sweatshop workers who earned an average of $7,000 annually.12

Mazur likewise succeeded Chaikin on Freedom House’s board of trustees. Like Chaikin, Mazur allowed high levels of corruption in his union but took a hard line on international communism, chairing the AFL-CIO’s International Affairs Committee from 1996 to 2001 and overseeing the Solidarity Center during that time. As of 2004 Mazur was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, according to the Wilson Center.13

Trustees Terence O’Sullivan Sr. and Jr. come out of labor’s “mob monolith,” the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA). In 1975 Sullivan Sr., who was secretary-treasurer “was forced into early retirement as punishment for disrupting” a mobster’s funeral “with his importunate demands for higher office.”14

His son, Terence O’Sullivan Jr., had better manners: as top assistant to Genovese mob puppet Arthur Coia Jr., he was next in line to become the union’s president when Coia was removed by the Justice Department in 2000.

Adrian Karatnycky has been a prominent fixture at Freedom House since 1993, when he served as executive director. He served as president from 1996 to 2003, and then became a senior scholar. Karatnycky’s links to labor seem to stem from his political work with the AFL-CIO, which in the 1980s and early 1990s continued its implacable decline in the United States but was eager to exercise its influence abroad in the fight against communism.

Karatnycky supervised AFL-CIO’s programs of assistance to the Polish union confederation, Solidarity, as well as to independent labor unions in Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern-bloc countries. From 1991 to 1993 he was assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO. He is listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has contributed to its magazine, Foreign Affairs, as well as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Washington Times.15

Freedom House has also traditionally had journalists on its board of trustees. Currently these include Mara Liasson of National Public Radio, P.J. O’Rourke of Rolling Stone, and former Reagan aide and Bush Sr. speechwriter Peggy Noonan, now a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

NPR Vice President for Communications Andi Sporkin said in an email to the author that Liasson, NPR’s national political correspondent since 1985, is no longer a Freedom House trustee; however she is listed as one from at least 1997 to the present.16 IRS 990 forms from 1999 show that Paul Wolfowitz, Otto Reich, Donald Rumsfeld, and Steve Forbes were all together at one time listed as officers, directors, and trustees.

Target Cuba

In 1995, at the same time Miami exiles and their friends in government were predicting the rapid fall of the Cuban revolution, Freedom House began its USAID and State Department-funded Cuba Program to “provide assistance to Cuba’s civil society” and to “raise awareness among international audiences regarding the need for a peaceful transition process in Cuba.” From 1995-1997 this program was run by Frank Calzon, a Freedom House principal since 1989.17

It is currently run by Xavier Utset in Washington, DC. Journalist Walter Lippmann says Freedom House was granted US$2.1 million for its Cuba program in 2004.18

On May 11, 2001, the Permanent Representative of Cuba to the UN lodged a complaint with the NGO Committee, alleging that Freedom House engaged in activities that violated its consultative status, objecting to “those NGOs that were being used as agents by certain governments to violate the sovereignty of other States.”19

The organization was “a machinery of subversion, closer to an intelligence service than an NGO,” he said. “Documents showed receipt of money by illegal groups in Cuba and evidence of clandestine activities. The current Cuba program of Freedom House involved the recruitment and training of journalists from Eastern Europe and sending them to Cuba for subversive activities.”20

Cuba said that during the 57th session of the Commission on Human Rights, “the NGO had accredited as its representatives members of terrorist organizations. Also, accredited Freedom House representatives had lent their badges to non-accredited persons of Cuban origin in order to enter the Palais de Nations, which was not only illegal but put diplomats at risk.”

New York librarian, Robert Kent, expelled from Cuba in 1999 for espionage, told the New York Times that Freedom House paid for “some of his 10 trips” to Cuba21 and he dropped Frank Calzon’s name while he was there meeting with paid “dissidents.”22

But Amanda Abrams, press officer for the organization, says that nobody at Freedom House knows Kent.

Haiti and Venezuela in the Sights

The State Department and Freedom House have also targeted Haiti and Venezuela for regime change. The organization reacted favorably when President Hugo Chavez was briefly overthrown in 2002,23 claiming on its website that “in Venezuela, it worked with those seeking to stem the authoritarian direction of the Chavez government.”

But Abrams claims that Freedom House has only been supporting opposition groups in Venezuela since 2004, funded by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives. 24

IRS 990 documents from July 1, 2003 to June 30, 2004 show that Freedom House received 95.6 percent of its funding from the United States government.

On March 17, 2004, days after the coup against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, The Washington Post published an editorial by Adrian Karatnycky, titled, “Fall of a Pseudo-Democrat, “25 which rationalized Aristide’s ouster.

Karatnycky called Haiti and Venezuela “pseudo-democracies” to justify the overthrow of democratic governments that were not to Washington’s liking. This stratagem—saying that the target government wasn’t a true democracy—was used previously by Dr. Jennifer McCoy of the Carter Center, who told a U.S. subcommittee on March 15, 2000, that the Chavez government was an example of “new, subtler forms of authoritarianism through the electoral option.”26

McCoy invented the term, “hybrid democracies, ” to describe democracies that produced results the United States disagreed with.

In “Fall of a Pseudo-Democrat,” Karatnycky charged that President Aristide had “squandered his democratic mandate by tampering with elections, intimidating the opposition and tolerating widespread corruption.”

If in fact any of these charges were true, and there is no evidence that they are, as the spokesman of an organization which claims that it’s mission is to promote democracy, Karatnycky should know that the democratic way to change the government is not through a military coup, but through elections. This is true especially, as in the case of Haiti, when the leaders of the coup are known human rights violators.

The coup was predictably followed by a bloodbath and widespread persecution of supporters of the elected government, who when not executed with their hands tied behind their backs were imprisoned without charges.

According to a study published by the medical journal Lancet, under the interim government installed with the coup, 8,000 people were murdered and 35,000 women and children were raped in the greater Port Au Prince area alone. Haitian Death squads, made up of criminals from the disbanded Haitian military rampaged across Haiti opening jails and targeting supporters of the elected government.

Using a fallacious comparison, Dr. McCoy likened the Chavez government to the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori in Peru in her testimony before Congress. Karatnycky put both Aristide and Chavez in the category of undemocratic leaders: “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, having survived a coup attempt in 2002, faces mass discontent and intense growing civic pressure because he has strayed from the democratic path.”

An even more outrageous attack on Chavez by Freedom House was published in the Miami Herald in August 2006.27

Today Freedom House continues to serve as both a think tank and a “civil society” funder as part of the State Department’s modern “democracy promotion” complex. Frequently cited in the press and academic works, the reports and studies produced by Freedom House and its affiliates promote the neoconservative ideology of its trustees and government sponsors.

Although some names and affiliations have changed, the group is still dominated by neocons. Brzezinski and Forbes are still on the trustees list, as well as Liasson, O’Rourke and Noonan. Trustee Ken Adelman is a contributor to the Project for a New American Century, along with former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who joined Freedom House in 2000.

Adelman was an assistant to Rumsfeld from 1975-1977, U.N. ambassador and arms control director under Reagan, and is currently a member of the Defense Policy Board. He wrote an article for The Washington Post in 2002 titled, “Cakewalk in Iraq”28 in which he said: “I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”

Another trustee, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, is the U.S. author of the Trilateral Commission report, The Crisis of Democracy and The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order (1996).

1 Freedom House, “Freedom House Statement on the Passing of George Field,” June 1, 2006.

2 Robert D. McFadden, “George Field, Defender of Human Rights, Is Dead at 101,” New York Times. May 30, 2006. Proquest database.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Michael Flynn, “Freedom House” Interhemispheric Resource Center, Right Web Profile. July 2005. Total income for Freedom House during fiscal year 1987 was $2,108,320. Its total income from grants and contributions was $1,315,759.

Assuming that the fiscal years for both NED and Freedom House overlap for the most part, that means that Freedom House received a full 35 percent of its total income from the Endowment during 1987. Of its total grant income, the figure becomes a staggering 57 percent.”

6 International Relations Center, “Freedom House,” Group Watch Profile. March 1990.

7 Jim Lobe and Abid Aslam, “Afghanistan” Foreign Policy in Focus. Nov. 20, 2003.

8 Freedom House IRS Form 990, 1997.

9 IRC, 1990.

10 Robert Fitch, Solidarity for Sale (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 200.

11 Ibid, p. 193.

12 Ibid, p. 197.

13 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Feb. 26, 2004).

14 Fitch, p. 143-144.

15 Yuri Shevchuk, “INTERVIEW: Adrian Karatnycky Speaks on Ukraine’s Internal and Foreign Affairs,” The Ukrainian Weekly, No. 43, Vol. LXXI, Oct. 26, 2003.

16 Freedom House, 2006. Board of Trustees.

17 IRC, 1990.

18 Walter Lippmann, “Overt U.S. Government Funding for Cuban ‘Dissidents’ 2004.”

19 Scienceblog.com.

21 Felicia R. Lee, “A Library In Cuba: What Is It?” New York Times, June 28, 2003, p. B.7. Proquest database.

22 Eliades Acosta Matos, “The Truth About Robert Kent,” Cuban Libraries Solidarity Group, June 20, 2005.

23 Diana Barahona, “Uneasy Standoff in Venezuela’s Media Wars,” Counterpunch.org, Aug. 16, 2005.

Steve Chapman was the author of a pro-coup editorial published on August 14, 2002, in the Chicago Tribune. He said in a telephone conversation that he wasn’t knowledgeable about Venezuela and that in order to write the editorial he had made phone calls to Freedom House, as well as consulting clips from the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the New York Times. He said he didn’t know FH was funded by the State Department until I told him.

24 Amanda Abrams, 2006. Email response to query by author: “Freedom House has had a Venezuela Program for human rights defenders since 2004. The program is funded by USAID, the Office of Transition Initiatives. Freedom House’s Venezuela program is a regional effort to tie human rights defenders throughout Latin America with one another, sharing best practices and lessons learned, through targeted exchanges and workshops focused on important human rights issues.

The program is designed to strengthen the capacity of Venezuelan human rights defenders to do their job, and to tie them to counterparts in other countries.”

25 Adrian Karatnycky, “Fall of a Pseudo-Democrat,” The Washington Post, March 17, 2004.

26 Justin Delacour and Diana Barahona, “The Carter Center’s Jennifer McCoy: Can She Be an Impartial Observer of Venezuela’s Referendum?” Counterpunch.org, Aug. 14, 2004.

27 Walker, C. and Tatic, S. (Aug. 3, 2006). “Eroding Democracy.” The Miami Herald.

28 Kenneth Adelman, “Cakewalk in Iraq,” The Washington Post, Feb. 13, 2002.

If you want more of a refresher course on US-backed counterrevolutionary terrorists, for whom Calzon and all of the Bushes had the highest regard, read on:

REICH-POSADA-BOSCH: The Axis of Deceit

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD (Granma International staff writer)

4/5/2005, Granma

While five Cuban patriots remain imprisoned in five different penitentiaries throughout U.S. territory for having counteracted the terrorist plans of Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles and others of their ilk, these two terrorists, the most dangerous in the hemisphere, receive high-level support from Otto Reich.

THROUGHOUT their lives they have pursued their personal interests, within the CIA and its networks, displaying total disdain for their adopted country, which they systematically discredit and deceive. They form the most dangerous axis that has ever penetrated the United States of America, the Axis of Deceit, and one of the many symptoms of a cancer which is slowly but surely leading that country down the road to perdition.

One of them works in the White House. He is Otto Reich, currently assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs – in other words, the U.S. government’s Number One man in Latin America.

The second is “Dr. Death” Orlando Bosch, the “capo” of the most fanatical terrorist grouplets in Miami and the “godfather” of the Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), the extremist secret society responsible for more than 50 murders in the United States, Cuba and other nations. He was “liberated” from a Venezuelan jail and absolved thanks to Number One.

The third, Luis Posada Carriles, is now in a Panamanian prison along with four accomplices in murder. He is another former “godfather” of CORU and guilty of innumerable attacks, was once the head of Venezuela’s political police, is a proven drug trafficker involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and a buddy of all the Miami and Central American mafiosos, and he now awaits his release – announced by his drug-dealing lawyer and financed by dirty tricks conceived by Number One and Number Two.

Of course, they have one common characteristic: in the early 1960s they fell into the clutches of the CIA and became the most rabid of that agency’s Cuban contacts. At the same time, through “the Company” they made fortunes from working for the million-dollar Cuban-American counterrevolutionary cartel, utilizing an impressive set of contacts established through deceit, extortion and terror.

They evolved in different ways: Reich, wearing a coat and tie, concentrated on penetrating the circles of power and palling around with the various capos of the Miami mafia; while Posada and Bosch guided the activities of their murderous organizations from Buenos Aires to Santo Domingo, from Montreal to Madrid and Luanda.

DISCOVERED BY CIA AGENT FRANK CALZONE, A MASTER OF DISINFORMATION

Born “accidentally” in Cuba, as a commentator once put it, of an Austrian father and a Cuban mother, Otto Reich was taken from the island when he wasn’t yet 15 years old, and his family took up residence in Charlotte, North Carolina, a considerable distance from the Caribbean.

He hooked up with the CIA while at the university, having been selected by Frank Calzón, who would become the CIA’s trusted agent in various disinformation operations. Later on, he would collaborate with Calzón on the Freedom House project, a supposedly pro-democratic invention of the CIA. A master of disinformation, Calzón recognized Reich as an able and willing student.

After getting his degree, Reich was anxious to act on his newly declared U.S. citizenship, so he went into the army for two years and was stationed in – guess what? – Panama, the mecca of the counterinsurgency movement.

Otto Reich moved to Miami in 1972, very consciously linking himself to the right-wing Cuban-American circles that were already imposing their terrorist dominion on the city. Moreover, the CIA maintained its most active center of operations there, especially aimed at Cuba and the continent it planned to dominate.

ALL IS FAIR WHEN COVERING UP DIRTY TRICKS

Reich came into the public eye in the United States during the era of Ronald Reagan and the dirty war in Nicaragua. At that time he was chosen to head the Office of Public Diplomacy, conceived by the CIA to carry out officially – under the cloak of the State Department – the cover-up and disinformation he had already been doing covertly.

At that time, former CIA agent and former CIA Director George Bush was Reagan’s vice president and confidant. He took charge of sponsoring Reich’s entrance into those high levels of government, with the same determination he had used as CIA director to approve the creation of the strongest anti-Cuba terrorist organization, CORU, whose chain of crimes is almost endless.

Under the title of State Department Special Counsel for Public Diplomacy, he worked furiously on matters that later helped provoke what is known as the Iran-Contra Scandal, although it should have been called the Narco-Contra Super-scandal.

In Reich’s eyes, any action was justified in the effort to support the mercenary Nicaraguan contras, and of course to cover up the dirty tricks carried out by CIA operatives in that effort.

Today, the whole world knows that the arms sales to Iran were just the tip of an iceberg that included – in much larger proportions and multi-million-dollar profits for the contras – the transfer and sales of drugs (mostly marijuana and cocaine) from South American producers to the U.S. market.

This monstrous drug trafficking operation, engineered entirely by the CIA, utilized the network created in U.S. territory by the members of Operation 40, following the Bay of Pigs invasion. (For more information, see Jerry Meldon, The CIA’s Dope-Smuggling Freedom Fighters, available on the Internet.)

THE SAME OPERATION, FROM WASHINGTON TO ILOPANGO

From his office in Washington, Reich was in constant contact with two Cuban-Americans who were directing the whole operation: Félix Rodríguez (alias Max Gómez) and Luis Posada Carriles, both of whom worked out of the Ilopango air base in El Salvador.

Rodríguez was a Watergate burglar and a trusted confidant of George Bush Sr. In fact, years later, Bush officially received him in the White House, despite his criminal record, with full protocol.

Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch are the terrorists responsible in 1976 for blowing up a Cubana Airlines passenger plane in mid-flight, thereby killing all 73 persons on board. Posada Carriles has also carried out more than 50 assassination attempts, both successful and unsuccessful.

After the CIA and the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) helped him escape from the Venezuelan jail where he was being held in relation to the Cubana airplane bombing, Posada returned to his dirty work, and the CIA recognized his great talent in such activities.

For years, Reich energetically backed the efforts of these two Cuban-Americans with innumerable lies. He knew perfectly well that they were terrorists who had been specially trained by the CIA and utilized in that utterly illegal operation.

A report by the General Accounting Office would later expose to the U.S. Congress the nature of the deceitful maneuvers feverishly perpetrated by Reich, utilizing his government position.

As a result, the U.S. public discovered how, with taxpayers’ money, Reich had fabricated news items, with the objective of disinforming both the citizenry and the politicians, claiming that the Sandinistas were persecuting the Misquito Indians [something that the late Russell Means and other unwitting Native Americans bought into for a time -klw], that they had purchased MiG-29s from the Soviet Union and that were preparing attacks on U.S. territory.

To promote these official lies, Reich expressly ordered that false letters of denunciation be written, signed with the names of the mercenary contra leaders.

Refining his methods, Reich used (illegally, of course) government funds to publish requests for donations to the contras. The purpose of this maneuver was to justify the existence of the money that really came from drug trafficking, collected by his cohorts in Ilopango and deposited in bank accounts, in Grand Cayman and Switzerland, belonging to anti-Sandinista mercenaries.

Reich’s collaboration with arch-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was maintained until the Ilopango operation was exposed in October 1986, when a light aircraft belonging to the CIA was shot down. The pilot, Eugene Hasenfuss, not only denounced the drug trafficking operation, but also identified Félix Rodríguez and Luis Posada Carriles, the latter a fugitive from Venezuelan justice.

FOR ORLANDO BOSCH, REICH IS LIKE A BROTHER

Given this situation, the Reagan-Bush administration ushered Reich out the back door, suddenly appointing him U.S. ambassador to Venezuela.

In Caracas, Reich was so diplomatic that he was able to continue his activities of official deceit in Washington. Clearly, he was in Venezuela for one purpose: to find a solution, whatever the method, to the case of Posada’s buddy Orlando Bosch Avila, a CIA agent and also imprisoned for the bombing of the Cubana flight. Reich also serviced the Cuban exile mafia, also conspiring to get its piece of the U.S. pie.

Otto Reich was like a brother to Orlando Bosch. Using who knows what subterfuge, he obtained a court order for Bosch’s release, after having prepared his departure to his adopted land, Miami.

But Bosch’s case remained delicate: like Posada Carriles, Bosch had a terrible reputation in the United States. Despite his “exemplary” behavior in the CIA, the killer pediatrician had a long criminal record in that country, identifying him as a terrorist leader and eliminating his chance of being granted a visa.

What’s more, in an interview published in the May 3, 1977, issue of New Times, Bosch admitted to having responsibility for more than 50 attacks executed by CORU.

Having arrived from Cuba on July 28, 1960, with a 30-day visa, Bosch created the Insurrectional Movement for Revolutionary Recovery (MIRR), later identified by a representative of the Attorney General’s Office as “an anti-Castro terrorist organization. “

On September 16, 1968, Bosch led a bazooka attack on a Polish merchant ship, the Polanica, in Miami harbor. On November 15, 1968, as punishment for that crime and for having sent letters containing death threats to the president of Mexico, the Spanish head of state and the British prime minister, the South Florida federal court sentenced him to 10 years imprisonment.

In 1972, Bosch violated parole by leaving the United States and reappearing in the Dominican Republic, where he and Posada Carriles took the lead in creating CORU. It goes without saying that there, he received not only the CIA’s blessing, but its total assistance.

AS IF LYING WERE AN INFALLIBLE METHOD

Otto Reich took recourse once again in deceit, as if lying were an infallible method.

He told State Department officials that a special team of Cubans were going to Venezuela to kill Bosch and that therefore Bosch had to be taken out of that country as soon as he was released from prison.

But those officials – apparently doubting the word of their former special counsel for public diplomacy – continued to refuse Bosch a visa. So Reich resorted once again to illegal methods.

He organized his protégé’s exit from jail and sent him directly to the United States, where he was arrested on May 17, 1988, for violating his parole.

Reich, by now a true believer in the power of deception, had to get Bosch out of jail again. It wasn’t so hard for him: he just asked President George H. Bush to spring him.

Even for the man then occupying the White House, and no less a former director of the CIA, obtaining the release of such a confirmed criminal – of a killer who had demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that he had no remorse for his actions, no matter what the outcome – isn’t an easy task.

An astute politician, Bush knew what was politically correct.

If he freed Bosch from prison, he ran the risk of provoking another scandal. But on the other hand, he had to worry about appeasing the Miami mafia, which could even decide the presidency, as Bush’s son proved a few short years later.

In July 1990, after consulting with the CIA and listening to the remarks of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen – always ready to support anti-Cuba terrorism, no matter what the consequences – George Bush Sr. signed the papers releasing the killer pediatrician.

Behind the scenes, “lobbyist” Otto Reich, the man truly responsible for this absurd decision, applauded Bush’s action.

Twelve years later, Orlando Bosch continues to endorse violence as a political solution and doesn’t lose a single opportunity to fan the flames of terror from within the Miami mafia.

In August 2001, three weeks before the criminal attack on the Twin Towers, Orlando Bosch and the most criminal elements of the Cuban-American community published a call to terrorism in the Miami Herald.

And just a few days ago, the man responsible for the destruction of a passenger plane in full flight and the resulting deaths of 73 people, along with more than 50 assassination attempts, several of them fatal, appeared once again on a public tribunal, as the guest of honor of 60 mafia groups and grouplets meeting to share their nostalgia for the Bay of Pigs.

These same terrorist groups hysterically demand the release of Luis Posada Carriles and his accomplices from their Panamanian jail. And just last week they celebrated the White House’s official appointment of Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere!

Through all this, five Cuban patriots remain under lock and key at five U.S. penitentiaries, for having risked their lives, fighting to counteract the terrorist plans of Bosch and Posada Carriles. What an irony that the two terrorists who belong to the Axis of Deceit can depend on the total support of that government’s top authorities.

Links

Terror File Online

SourceWatch

Silk Gloves to Kill the Revolution

By Nicanor Leon Cotayo

Prensa Latina, 30 August 1996

One of the front organizations utilized by the U. S. government to carry out subversive plans against Cuba is the Washington-based Freedom House Foundation. Its leader is the Cuban exile, Frank Calzon, has since his arrival in the US in 1960 has specialized in propaganda campaigns against Cuba under the sponsorship of CIA.

Spy vs. Spy – Cuban Dissidents March to Orders of U.S.

8/5/2008 Machetera

Frank Calzon 4/16/04 Cuba Socialista:

“Another ex CIA agent and former director of the terrorist groups ABDALA and the National Liberation Front of Cuba. He also was one of the first directors of the CANF. Presently he is one of the directors of Freedom House and Cuban Committee of Human rights.

Both of these organizations amply financed by the US government. He also receives substantial amounts of money from the International Development Agency in Washington. He is also the director of Free Cuba Center; a center financed by Washington. Calzon finances the activities of Gustavo Arcos and other counterrevolutionaries in Cuba.”

Center for a Free Cuba - Calzón is Director

Free Cuba Foundation – founded by Calzón

“Washington and the Cuban Revolution Today: Ballad of a Never-Ending Policy. Part II: Triumph and Reaction,” by Ike Nahem

Part 2 of a great 3-part series by Ike Nahem. Warning: long, runs to 47 pages on the Net.

The Triumph of the Cuban Revolution

On January 1, 1959 Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro, swept into power and established a provisional revolutionary government across the length of the island, overthrowing the exceedingly venal, military regime of Fulgencio Batista.

The revolutionaries (including such remarkable figures as Juan Almeida, Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Ernesto Che Guevara, Armando Hart, Celia Sanchez, and, Haydee Santamaria) marched into Havana culminating a three-year campaign that combined rural guerrilla war with a vast urban revolutionary underground.

The revolutionary struggle was led by a highly disciplined, politically centralized combat organization, the July 26th Movement.

Drawing behind it the support and sympathy of the vast majority of the Cuban population, and with a dedicated, self-sacrificing young cadre of men and women at its core, the Cuban revolutionaries wore down, demoralized, and defeated the neocolonial Cuban army, which vastly outnumbered them – at least on paper – in troops, military equipment, and firepower, courtesy of the United States government.

The military dictator Batista, backed by Washington almost to the bitter end, fled to the Dominican Republic while many of the personnel in his vast machinery of repression and pillage escaped to Miami with their loot. It was an astonishing turn of events that captured the imagination of the world.

The great US film, The Godfather Part II, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, portrays the fall of Batista and the triumph of the July 26th Movement with an uncanny verisimilitude via the prism of Batista’s alliance with US Mafia families.

Justice

Upon arriving in Havana and consolidating revolutionary power, the provisional government quickly moved to dissolve what remained, after the revolutionary war, of the police, army, and courts of the neocolonial Cuban state.

With enthusiastic mass participation, armed bodies of workers, peasants, and youth were established. These became the nucleus of a new National Revolutionary Police Force, and, alongside the veteran guerrilla commanders and troops, the new Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Tribunals were established in response to mass demands for justice for the killers, torturers, and thugs of the Batista dictatorship (over 20,000 Cubans were murdered by Batista’s cops, goons, and death squads during the revolutionary struggle), and also to counter the unchecked, spontaneous retributions carried out in the streets. The tribunals prepared the foundations of a new judicial system.

In my 2007 essay Our Che, I wrote:

Che [Guevara] was assigned the task of establishing a just and fair, but also transparent and certain, [system] to bring the process under revolutionary control, ensuring due process, defense lawyers, and fair proceedings. This was done in an exemplary way. Popular, public tribunals were organized.

Volumes of public testimony were given, with horrific testimony of the most vile tortures and bestial murder recorded and made public. Some 200 of the worst torturers and murderers of the US-backed Batista tyranny were shot by firing squads. No one has ever offered a shred of evidence that anyone innocent was executed.

Whatever one’s opinion of the death sentences that were implemented, backed by the great majority of the population, no one can say, or has ever shown, that the guilt of those executed was not established beyond the shadow of a doubt. Batista’s cops and thugs were, after all, known to all.

In their glory days, prior to the revolutionary victory, those brought to justice strutted their power and brutality over what they thought would be forever helpless victims; they never dreamed they would face their victims and their victim’s families in a legal proceeding.

This process of bringing to justice the worst criminals of the hated Batista regime led to an orgy of hypocrisy and phony moral outrage in the big-business press and among Democratic and Republican politicians in the United States.

The highly orchestrated propaganda campaign was the pretext for turning public opinion, which had been very sympathetic to Fidel Castro and the rebel cause, against the Cuban Revolution as radical social reforms began to be implemented which affected US business interests and US economic and financial domination of the island…

Washington and the big-business media’s crocodile tears for Batista’s torturers and murderers stands in sharp contrast to their approval or silence towards the mountains of corpses piled up by US-backed military regimes and death squads in Latin America and the Caribbean before and especially after the Cuban Revolution from Trujillo and Somoza to Pinochet and the Argentine generals.

All of these developments planted the seeds of a new state, with a distinct working class character. The new personnel staffing governmental and state bodies registered the social ascendancy of the formerly oppressed classes: the working people of the city and countryside, as well as Afro-Cubans, women, and youth.

Gone was the old social order where the cops, army, courts, and prisons of the old, neocolonial Cuban state manifested the class rule of landlords, capitalists, gangsters, racists, and the super-exploiters of women.

Despite warnings, pressures, and threats from Washington, the Cuban revolutionaries began to implement economic and social measures that came up against, and impacted adversely on, the economic domination of US monopoly capital on the island. These measures included rent and utility cost reductions and the closing and expropriation of Havana’s vast organized-crime enterprises from casinos to brothels.

Agrarian Reform

But front and center was the radical land reform and distribution that both greatly expanded small, private holdings for family farming, and liberated the large, seasonally employed, and particularly oppressed agricultural workforce that was permanently in debt to Cuba’s latifundia. (The Rebel Army had implemented rudimentary land reforms and social policies such as organizing schools and clinics in the territories liberated during the armed struggle.)

The “Law on Agrarian Reform” broke the social domination and political power of Cuba’s landlord class and included vast US holdings. The law stipulated that sugar plantations could not be under foreign ownership.

The agrarian reform was at the center of the social and economic transformations heralded by the Revolution. Deliberations to codify in law, and implement in practice, a comprehensive agrarian reform began within the central July 26th Movement leadership almost immediately after the military victory and the establishment of the provisional government.

The most profound direction and input came from contributions and collaboration between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The agrarian reform was seen as the necessary foundation and catalyst for Cuba’s industrial development.

Che Guevara gave a major speech less than a month after the January 1, 1959 seizure of power in Havana indicating the centrality of land reform to the program of the revolutionary government:

[S]ince the revolution’s triumph, [the peasants] have earned the right to freedom. They can use that freedom to…move forward, backed by law, to a true and broad agrarian reform.

We have begun to put the Rebel Army’s social aims into effect; we have an armed democracy. When we plan out the agrarian reform and observe the new revolutionary laws to complement it and make it viable and immediate, we are aiming at social justice.

This means the redistribution of land and also the creation of a vast internal market and crop diversification, two cardinal objectives of the revolutionary government that are inseparable and that cannot be postponed since they involve the people’s interest.

All economic activities are connected. We must increase the country’s industrialization, without overlooking the many problems accompanying such a process. But a policy of encouraging industry demands certain tariff measures to protect nascent industry, as well as an internal market capable of absorbing the new commodities.

We cannot increase this market except by giving the great peasant masses broader access to it. Although the guajiros have no purchasing power, they do have necessities to meet, things they cannot purchase today.

We are well aware that the ends we are committed to demand an enormous responsibility on our part, and we know that these are not the only goals. We must expect a reaction against us by those who control over 75 percent of our commercial trade and our market.”

To implement the Agrarian Reform Law, that is, the lever for the entire economic and social transformation of Cuba, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform was organized, with Fidel Castro as its President. Che Guevara was appointed head of the Department of Industrialization, with the central political and administrative responsibility within INRA, on October 8, 1959.

Che organized and trained an INRA militia of 100,000 which seized control of expropriated land, supervised distribution, and helped set up farm cooperatives. Nearly 500,000 acres of confiscated land was owned by US corporations. INRA, under Guevara’s direction, financed highway construction, built housing for peasants and farming cooperatives, and other industrial projects, including resorts for tourists.

Complementing these economic measures were a series of implemented radical policies and laws that fundamentally altered and transformed social relations on the island to the benefit of the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority.

These included the abolition of racist Jim Crow-style segregation and discrimination policies; huge blows against the oppression of women including the right to abortion, the establishment of day-care facilities, equality in pay, greater access to education and professional training, and the eradication of organized prostitution with job training for ex-prostitutes (it is estimated that one out of three women in Havana were super-exploited in the gangster-run “sex industry.”); a massive, successful campaign to wipe out illiteracy; and, particularly annoying to foreign and domestic big-business owners, progressive labor laws that greatly expanded labor union membership and facilitated struggles for higher wages and better working conditions.

These measures were not yet explicitly socialist; banking, manufacturing, and large-scale wholesale and retail distribution remained in private hands.

However, the anti-capitalist tendency was clear and the encroachments on the prerogatives of domestic and foreign capital were intolerable to the ruling classes. Moreover, the evaporation of the old neocolonial state and its repressive apparatus left a vacuum in political and social relations, into which stepped the highly radicalized, organized, and mobilized Cuban working people and youth led by the team around Fidel Castro.

This was a leadership team of exceptional political and personal audacity and courage, who knew where they wanted to go and were not afraid of the dangers and consequences.

Washington Fights Back

The implementation of the land reform and the other measures described above set off alarms in Washington and could never be tolerated by the US ruling class. The US government as a whole was, above all, anxious that the victorious Cuban example would resonate in a Latin American soil fertile for revolutionary struggle and change.

Within months, and with an intensity that mounted exponentially, Washington, in the last two years of the Dwight Eisenhower Administration, set in motion bipartisan plans and programs to discredit, undermine, subvert, and destroy the Cuban Revolution. These included cutting off US markets for sugar and other Cuban products and refusing to refine Cuban oil, the first steps towards the generalized, sweeping economic sanctions that remain in force today.

Attempts at economic strangulation were complemented by more directly violent methods. Widespread terrorist violence and economic sabotage was directed by the CIA of the Eisenhower and (elected in 1960) John Kennedy Administrations, with their legions of recruited counter-revolutionary Cuban exiles.

Facing the US assault head on, the Cuban workers and peasants government sought and received military and economic assistance from the Soviet Union, Soviet-allied governments in Eastern Europe, and China. The Soviet government agreed, crucially, to buy Cuban sugar and refine Cuban oil.

Washington’s assault culminated in the April 1961 mercenary invasion defeated at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Giron to the Cubans). The Cuban revolutionaries did not retreat under the withering violent assault, but instead directed and led a mobilized and armed citizenry in a conscious socialist revolution that was openly declared after Washington’s Bay of Pigs debacle.

Capitalist property relations were overturned and private property in the means of production, finance, and large-scale wholesale distribution were abolished. By 1962, Cuba had become what Marxists call a “workers state.” That is, the old ruling landowning and capitalist classes were expropriated.

Major industries and banking became nationalized state property, where conscious economic planning began to gain predominance over “market forces.” Concurrently, a state monopoly over foreign trade was established. Decisively, this process would never have been possible without the prior dissolution of the old neocolonial state and its repressive apparatus, that is, its army, police, and judiciary.

Private enterprises directly tied to the officials and cronies of the Batista dictatorship, most of whom had fled Cuba, were expropriated without compensation.

Others, including foreign capitalists, were compensated, in negotiations with them and their governments. The US capitalist monopolies, on the same page as the US government, rejected, with contempt, negotiations and compensation, fully expecting that “Castro” and Cuban sovereignty could not survive long facing Washington’s full-throated hostility.

None of this could have been driven through without the political class-consciousness and mass participation of the Cuban working class and its allies, who had to learn how to operate and manage the industry and finance that was now “public.” This radicalization and transformation developed under both the blows of the intensifying Washington-driven counter-revolutionary drive and the collective organization and consolidation of the revolutionary vanguard.

This latter factor was inevitably accompanied by a class-political polarization and differentiation inside the July 26th Movement, as a more right-wing layer formed and organized in opposition to the radical measures outlined above.

The most prominent figure in this layer was the former Camaguey province guerrilla comandante Huber Matos. (Matos was in late-1959 convicted of treason and sedition for establishing links with counter-revolutionary armed groups connected to the CIA, sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, released in 1979, and lives in Miami today.)

In actual fact the divisions and splits within the July 26th Movement, the forces that went over to the US-led counter-revolution, were relatively small in numbers and political significance, due to the great popularity and political authority of the Castro leadership. Nevertheless, the voices of those “democrats” and “freedom fighters” who left the July 26th Movement were highly amplified with Washington’s giant megaphone at their disposal.

Not Aiming for a Third World “Welfare State”

What occurred in Cuba from 1959 to the beginning of 1962 was a dynamic process that went far beyond the most progressive and radical reforms and constitutional restructuring of existing state structures and juridical forms by progressive, populist, anti-imperialist, or left-wing governments in other national political upheavals.

There have been many examples, up to the present day, of such governments coming into power in Latin America (and other so-called Third World countries) through coups, mass struggles, or elections taking place under the institutions of the existing capitalist state which remain essentially in place and intact.

In Cuba, on the contrary, the revolutionary government, which came to power in an armed struggle, pulverized the old state structures, starting with its repressive machinery of police, army, prisons, and courts, establishing entirely new institutions in social composition and political content.

Cuba’s socialist revolution did not aim for a better “welfare state” under a capitalist “mixed economy,” with benefits for the working people dependent on the vicissitudes of world capitalist markets dominated by the richest imperialist powers (Washington, London, Paris) under conditions of unequal exchange (that is, cheap prices for “Third World” export commodities and raw materials, high prices for “First World” finished products, machinery and technology).

The Revolution fought rather to elevate the oppressed classes to political power and social predominance in the new state and forge entirely new social relations and new human beings.

Of course, the policies and practice of the Cuban Revolution in “social welfare” categories of medical-care access, education, pensions, maternity benefits, and so on are unsurpassed in any capitalist Third World country and even in many rich, advanced capitalist powers, who are all, in any case, working today to gut such conquests of past working-class struggles. But in Cuba such measures are not seen as “welfare,” but as the inherent rights and prerogatives of the working class.

Internationalists in Power

Cuban revolutionary theory and practice was animated by a strong anti-bureaucratism articulated in the speeches and writings of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, that was bound together by a profound internationalist spirit of solidarity.

This entire perspective and outlook was a return to – and spurred the revival of in a new generation of revolutionary-minded youth – a creative, and human-being centered, Marxism after decades of stultification and dogma in theory, as well as horrible crimes and betrayals in its name in practice, by the government led by Joseph Stalin and his acolytes in the Soviet Union and the so-called “socialist camp.”

See especially Socialism and Man in Cuba by Che Guevara, Pathfinder Press edition and Fidel Castro’s 1962 speech on sectarianism and bureaucracy.

The consolidation of the Cuban Revolution as a workers’ state meant that for the first time since the opening years of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, revolutionary internationalists were in the leadership of a workers’ state.

They not only held domestic power but, in their foreign policy, had the political perspective of extending the Revolution and using the political authority and material resources of the workers’ state – within the limits of the possible – to collaborate with and aid fellow revolutionists.

In the case of the Cuban revolutionaries this primarily meant in the arena of Latin America, which was in a state of permanent political turmoil and intensifying class struggle under conditions of massive poverty, social inequality, and foreign, mainly US, economic and political domination.

Since the 1898 Spanish-American War, which marked the origins of the modern American Empire, Washington engaged in frequent overt and covert violent invasions, interventions, and subversion across the Americas, over the subsequent decades.

US interventionist policy has continued into the 21st Century, albeit with more political limitations and counter-pressures …and less success. The US-backed April 11, 2002 military coup against Hugo Chavez’s anti-imperialist government in Venezuela was reversed and defeated following massive demonstrations in support of Chavez.

In September 2008 ultra-right forces in Bolivia, backed covertly by Washington, attempted to split the country on regional lines and bring down the government of President Evo Morales.

The big-business and large landowning-led forces were centered in oil and gas producing regions and furiously opposed Morales’s progressive policies of nationalizing Bolivian vast mineral, oil, and gas resources, promoting the interests of Bolivia’s indigenous Indian majority, and his close alliances with Cuba and Venezuela. This all failed ignominiously.

On February 4, 1962, Fidel Castro read the “Second Declaration of Havana” to a crowd of one million in Havana’s Revolution Square. The manifesto, drawn up by the Cuban leadership, was essentially a call for revolutionary struggle against US imperialism and the dependent capitalist-oligarchic order extant across the Americas.

World politics had seen nothing like this language, backed up with action, since the Bolshevik team around V.I. Lenin and the Communist International they founded, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the end of the inter-imperialist bloodletting of World War I:

What is Cuba’s history but that of Latin America? What is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa, and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the cruelest exploitation of the world by imperialism?

At the end of the last century and the beginning of the present, a handful of economically developed nations had divided the world among themselves subjecting two thirds of humanity to their economic and political domination Humanity was forced to work for the dominating classes of the group of nations which had a developed capitalist economy.

The historic circumstances which permitted certain European countries and the United States of North America to attain a high industrial development level put them in a position which enabled them to subject and exploit the rest of the world. What motives lay behind this expansion of the industrial powers? Were they moral, “civilizing” reasons, as they claimed? No. Their motives were economic…

Wherever roads are closed to the peoples, where repression of workers and peasants is fierce, where the domination of Yankee monopolies is strongest, the first and most important lesson is to understand that it is neither just nor correct to divert the peoples with the vain and fanciful illusion that the dominant classes can be uprooted by legal means which do not and will not exist.

The ruling classes are entrenched in all positions of state power. They monopolize the teaching field. They dominate all means of mass communication. They have infinite financial resources. Theirs is a power which the monopolies and the ruling few will defend by blood and fire with the strength of their police and their armies.

The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution. (From The Second Declaration of Havana, Pathfinder Press edition)

The Cuban revolutionaries also supported revolutionary armed struggle in Algeria against French colonialism and in the Congo against the pro-imperialist neocolonial regime there that had come to power after the assassination of the Congolese freedom fighter and first President of an independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

Confrontation

These incredible events on a small Spanish-speaking Caribbean island shook up world politics. Not only did Cuba establish relations of economic and military alliance with the Soviet Union and the “Warsaw Pact” governments and states, but, much more significantly, revolutionary Cuba in the 1960s became the political and organizing center across the Americas for revolutionary struggle against US domination and the rule of the oligarchies – two things that were hand in glove.

This was an obvious challenge to US policymakers. If Havana became the Mecca for revolutionaries across Latin America, Miami became the counter-Mecca for those tied to the existing oligarchic order that was becoming unglued, a process accelerated by the presence and impact of the Cuban Revolution.

In the early years after the triumph of the Revolution, the CIA set up in Miami the largest base operation in its history. Daily operations were spun and run into Cuba involving plans for sabotage, terrorism, assassination, and so on. Organized, trained, funded, and directed from Washington, the operatives – by and large – were Cuban exiles. Thousands of Cuban citizens lost their lives as result of such actions over the years.

Many millions of dollars, and no doubt hundreds of personnel hired, were spent on so-called “psychological-warfare operations” (psy-ops) to spread “disinformation” and “misinformation” – that is, LIES – in the form of gossip, innuendo, and rumors made up out of whole cloth, on the theory that if you throw enough bullshit against a wall, some is bound to stick.

The modus operandi in the CIA’s factories of falsification were the spreading of conspiracy theories fabricated to cause confusion and, hopefully, cause divisions and splits in the revolutionary leadership. Among the most notorious lies spread far and wide:

Revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos didn’t really die in a plane crash after a mission to counter anti-revolutionary activity centered around Huber Matos in Camaguey, but was actually killed by Fidel Castro. Che Guevara did not really go out of public view to organize anti-imperialist struggles in Africa and Latin America, but was actually imprisoned and even killed by Fidel Castro.

When that Big Lie was no longer operative, the new mendacity was that Fidel refused to “rescue” Che in Bolivia and “allowed” him to die, still peddled to this day.

Former CIA operatives like the ubiquitous Brian Latell, a top figure for decades on the CIA’s “Cuba desk,” has recently resurfaced to peddle the lie that Fidel Castro knew beforehand that President John Kennedy was going to be assassinated. As they say, old habits are hard to break and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

In the end, however, the ability to find a platform to spew lies and half-truths, is, for the Latells of the world, a small consolation prize that hardly makes up for the fact that their life’s work of destroying the Cuban Revolution, despite all their ingenious, inventive, creative lying has been a shameful, spectacular bust.

The role of the defeated Cuban businessmen, landowners, branch managers of US corporations, and gangsters was strictly to help “Uncle Sam” and do what they were told. It is laughable to think that these defeated bumblers would be calling the shots politically or in any other way.

But that is not to say that, like most clients and lackeys, the defeated remnants of the old Cuban ruling class did not chafe at their dependent position and the limits placed on their freedom of action. In fact, they were very resentful and sought to leverage their position and knowledge to maneuver within the framework of internal, tactical Washington divisions, to take relatively independent initiatives.

For example, over the years, CIA-trained operatives like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles have “independently” carried out terrorist activities that were not under the concrete direction of the CIA and the US government, such as the blowing up of Cuban Flight 455 in October 1976 that departed from Barbados, killing all 73 people on board.

Bosch died in 2011 having been allowed to live unencumbered in the US since 1990 by decisions of the George Bush, Senior (the director of the CIA during Bosch’s most “productive” terrorist period) White House. Posada Carriles remains a free man in Miami today. And the US State Department has the temerity to put Cuba on a list of “nations supporting terrorism!”

Recriminations

The policy of overturning and destroying the “Castro revolution” was a unanimous one across the board in Washington, uniting Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. This was true despite the tactical divergences which naturally emerged.

These differences actually led to recriminations among top US politicians and policymakers – and their media and academic clones – which became quite vicious at times, especially in the period after the CIA-trained mercenary army was crushed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. “Who Lost Cuba?” cried the US right wing. President Kennedy was blamed for the Bay of Pigs humiliation because he held back as the debacle unfolded from unleashing direct US bombing of the island.

Legions of conspiracy theorists, on the basis of these recriminations, concocted a plausible factoid asserting that “rouge” elements of the CIA using “embittered” Cuban exiles were behind Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination.

This is backed up by the false assertion that Kennedy was seeking a “rapprochement” with the Cuban government, and, with even flimsier evidence, that he was planning to abort US intervention in Vietnam. Not a few novels and films, some even brilliantly done, have come out of these fantastic conspiracies. See James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, Don DeLillo’s Libra, and Oliver Stone’s film JFK.)

Kennedy chose – no doubt wisely and prudently given the overall situation at hand – to cut US losses rather than double down on what was a real-time Washington political and military disaster. In making the choice to retreat and concede the defeat of the mercenary forces, Kennedy understood fully that the Cuban people had become armed to the teeth and were full of revolutionary enthusiasm and fighting will.

The political consequences of dropping bombs on Cuban territory, after the defeat of an operation the US government had been claiming publicly it had nothing to do with, would certainly have been politically and militarily catastrophic for Washington.

Who knows how many tens of thousands of US troops would have been necessary to gain control of the island? What would have been the reaction in Latin American and world capitals to any sustained bombing of Cuban territory and cities? In the Soviet Union and China?

Indeed, what would have been the reaction inside the United States, where a significant degree of sympathy with Cuba existed and where the mass Civil Rights Movement that was exploding across the South and North had many Black leaders and activists attracted to revolutionary Cuba and its sweeping anti-racist policies?

From the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis

In any case, the Kennedy Administration chose to bow to a difficult reality, lick its wounds, emphasize that the origins of the scheme were with the previous Eisenhower Administration, and prepare for another round.

It quickly established, under the direct leadership of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the infamous Operation Mongoose program of stepped-up anti-Castro propaganda and “psychological warfare,” economic sabotage, assassinations (literally hundreds of plots were hatched to murder Fidel Castro, which included collaborating with US Mafia families) and terrorism.

All in preparation, and to lay the foundation for, the next round of a direct US invasion, without, this time, the “leading” wedge of the Cuban exile mercenaries.

It was these plans, and this dynamic, barely hidden and, in any case, fully known by the Cuban and Soviet governments, that led to the so-called “Cuban Missile Crisis” of October 1962.

Earlier that year Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev talked a reluctant Fidel Castro into allowing the installation of nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles on Cuban territory. Castro has said publicly that Khrushchev’s appeal was two-fold: first, as a defense against the US invasion of Cuba everyone knew was coming, and, second, as an act of “socialist solidarity” with the Soviet Union, since US missiles were in Turkey, an equivalent distance from Soviet territory.

Castro felt that he was not in a position to refuse, especially given the indispensable role of Soviet economic and military aid at that point in Cuba’s defense from Washington’s multi-front assault.

Nevertheless Castro strongly objected to the secret installation of the missiles. He felt this would inevitably be exposed – as, of course, it was – and would likely give Washington the moral high ground. Better to be upfront and declare the policy openly on the grounds of defense of Cuba and create political pressure for a mutual draw-down of missile deployments near each power’s land mass.

But Castro’s advice and warnings were rejected, if not ignored altogether, by the Soviet leadership. When US spy planes revealed the missile sites, and with more missiles en route on Soviet ships, Kennedy effectively took the political offensive.

Kennedy organized a naval quarantine of Cuba and threatened to confront Soviet naval vessels approaching Cuban waters. This sequence of events nearly led to direct US-Soviet military engagement and an invasion of Cuba by the United States, not to speak of devastating nuclear exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union and untold millions of deaths.

The crisis was resolved when the Soviet leadership removed the nuclear weapons from Cuba and turned their ships back. In return, the Kennedy Administration agreed, in a secret protocol, to remove the US nuclear missiles from Turkey. The deal supposedly included an informal (that is, not written down and signed in a formal document) pledge that the United States would not directly invade Cuba.

US government documents declassified since the “Missile Crisis” reveal that Washington policymakers fully understood that a US invasion of Cuba would have met truly massive, popular resistance – the entire population was armed to the teeth and in a state of full territorial mobilization.

The secret documents projected that the first days and weeks of an invasion would lead to 10,000 or more US casualties (in nearly ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, US combat deaths are under 7,000).

It was this reality – as much as any supposed “statesman-like cool” – that restrained President Kennedy from ordering an invasion and negotiating, without the participation of the Cuban government, a mutually agreeable settlement with an equally anxious, and politically and diplomatically outmaneuvered, Soviet government which had overplayed its hand.

Relative US Failure

Washington failed in its intense efforts in this period to overturn the revolutionary Cuban government, destroy the Cuban workers’ state, and restore capitalist property relations and the neocolonial order on the island.

That failure continues to this day and is often cited by Establishment dissenters as a reason to dump what is called an “ineffective” anti-Cuba policy. They fantasize that “engagement,” normalization, and the subsequent “exposure” to “American ideas” will actually undermine and do more to eventually defeat the Cuban Revolution than the US embargo, travel restrictions, and threats.

This argument is usually accompanied by the assertion that “Castro” and the Cuban government actually want and need US hostility as an “excuse” to avoid “democracy,” “human rights,” blah-blah-blah, so as to divert and manipulate mass discontent.

Of course this is all complete and utter nonsense. The dominant consensus among US policymakers, and in this they are completely correct, is that any unilateral dropping of US sanctions without a Cuban surrender and capitulation would not only be a historic political victory for Cuba and humiliation for Washington.

It would also be a tremendous boost to Cuba’s economic development and prosperity to have the legal ability to buy, sell, and trade in the US market. It would also create the conditions for rapid internal political relaxation and the further institutionalization of democratic rights and civil liberties. All of which would strengthen Cuban socialism and make it all the more attractive and resonant across the Americas and internationally.

But Washington’s failure to defeat the Cuban Revolution is not the end, but more like the beginning of the question. The failure is relative and must be qualified, aside from the obvious price Cuba has paid, in blood and economic development, from US sanctions and hostility.

That is, it must also be said that the US government and its allies in the Latin American oligarchies have been successful, for many decades, in the larger question of preventing the extension of the Cuban socialist revolution in the Americas. That “success”, of course, set up the nightmare decades in Latin America of brutal and murderous military-oligarchy rule.

The Nightmare Decades

In 1964 in Brazil, the progressive government of Joao Goulart, which favored friendly relations with Cuba, was overthrown and replaced with a military dictatorship backed by the US which lasted nearly 20 years; in September 1963 the Kennedy Administration’s CIA overthrew the elected left-wing government of Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, establishing a military junta.

After a Constitucionalista uprising led by Colonel Francisco Camano seized and held the capital of Santo Domingo, the Lyndon Johnson Administration ordered a US invasion in April 1965 which smashed the revolutionary process on the island in the name of preventing a “second Cuba”; in 1967 the revolutionary guerrillas led by Ernesto Che Guevara were defeated in Bolivia.

Subsequent guerrilla movements inspired by the Cuban Revolution were also everywhere defeated; in June 1973 a military coup replaced a civilian dictatorship in Uruguay aimed at crushing the revolutionary Tupamaros movement and militant trade union and student organizations.

Military dictatorship lasted twelve years until 1985 in Uruguay; in September 1973 the elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende in Chile was overthrown in a US-backed coup consolidating a murderous military regime that lasted 17 years; in 1976 the weak, elected Peronist government in Argentina was overthrown in a US-backed coup, ushering in vicious repression, killing some 30,000, until the military regime collapsed after the Malvinas Islands war fiasco in 1982-83.

For a number of years all of these military regimes established in the 1970s worked together, and, directly and indirectly, with US government intelligence agencies, in an international program of kidnapping, murder, and assassination called “Operation Condor.” (See The Condor Years by John Dinges, The New Press, 2004)

Washington succeeded in preventing the extension of the Cuban Revolution, and by the late-1970s Latin America was dominated by US-backed brutal military regimes upholding the naked rule of the oligarchies. But this rule was fragile and already beginning to unravel.

A political earthquake shook Central America with the triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution in July 1979 and the intertwined rise in revolutionary armed struggles in neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala. A new reality and template for Washington’s policies in the Americas, and its confrontation with the Cuban Revolution, was set.

Part III of this essay will take up Washington’s Central America bloodbath, the demise of the Nicaraguan Revolution, the rise and fall of the “Neoliberal” decade in Latin America, and the Cuban Revolution’s remarkable resistance and survival.

Ike Nahem is the coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York a member of the National Network on Cuba. Nahem is an Amtrak Locomotive Engineer and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the Teamsters Union. These are his personal political opinions. He can be reached at: ikenahem@mindspring.com.

“Peace In Colombia,” by Fidel Castro

Excellent piece on the civil war in Colombia and the prospects for peace by Fidel Castro. Castro has been writing these rambling articles on this and that ever since he retired.

In this piece, he also discusses the Salvadoran revolution. The party of the Salvadoran revolution, the FMLN, recently won the elections in El Salvador, and they now hold power. However, they are pretty limited in what sort of reforms that they can carry out, and Salvadoran society is still extremely divided between Left and Right, almost as bad as US society.

In the 1980′s, I used to contribute money to the FMLN’s weapons fund. That’s probably illegal now with all the anti-terrorism laws. I understand I could get up to 10 years for that now, but at the time, I think it was pretty much legal. If I want to support some Left revolutionaries in some far-off continent, what business is that of my government? How am I a “supporter of terrorism,” and what does it matter to the US state anyway, since such “terrorism” has no effect on the US whatsoever?

Castro tells about how he advised the Salvadoran rebels to release all of their non-criminal POW’s. Otherwise, Castro said, the enemy will never want to surrender. This is exactly what the FMLN did. They would give the non-criminal soldiers a chance to join the rebels, and if they did not want to, they would release them to the Red Cross.

Meanwhile any rebel in Salvadoran military custody, would, under the advise or US advisers, torture any FMLN captives to death. If they were wounded, they would be denied medical care and tortured to death. Hence a number of FMLN wounded committed suicide rather than be captured.

Castro said he always opposed the FARC taking Colombian army soldiers captive in brutal conditions in the jungle because, he said, that way, hardly any soldiers would surrender. Castro’s advice seems to be excellent. Castro also said he opposed capturing noncombatants. Such tactics have given the FARC a black eye in the eyes of many.

Castro also pointed out that the FARC was never able to defeat a large Colombian force with artillery and air power, while the Cuban rebels were. While the FARC did many amazing things militarily, this weakness implied tha they would not be able to seize power Manuel Marulanda, the former leader of the FARC, always had hopes for an army of 30,000 rebels being sufficient to seize power. Castro did not feel that an army that size would be enough to seize power in Colombia.

Castro also casts doubt on the murder of Roque Dalton, the famous FMLN revolutionary and poet, but Dalton was almost surely murdered by his fellow rebels as a suspected CIA spy. Dalton was probably innocent however.

All in all, a nice, albeit rather rambling, piece by Castro. He has a nice, chatty style. I rather like. Plus he is one my all-time heroes!

Peace in Colombia

By Fidel Castro

This is a topic I promised to write about. It was not easy to do. Other responsibilities have taken up my time. Now I am fulfilling my promise.

Was my analysis of Marulanda and the Communist Party of Colombia published in my Reflection of July 5, 2008, objective and fair? No one can ever be certain his point of view is completely free of subjectivity; one always runs the risk of seeming to be unfair. Whoever affirms anything must be willing to demonstrate what he says and why he says it.

My disagreement with Marulanda’s conception is based on living experience, not as a theoretician but as a political person who confronted and had to resolve very similar problems, both as a citizen and a guerrilla, although Marulanda’s problems were more complex and difficult.

It would be incorrect to think that Colombia and Cuba began with the same set of conditions.

We did share an initial absence of a revolutionary ideology—since nobody is born with it—and of a program to later bring about the construction of socialism. I do not question at all the integrity either of him or of the Communist Party of Colombia; to the contrary, they are worthy of respect because they were revolutionaries, anti-imperialist fighters, a cause to which they devoted dozens of years of struggle. I will explain.

When the respected and popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán1 was assassinated on April 9, 1948, Pedro Antonio Marín, a poor peasant who later took the name Manuel Marulanda in honor of a Colombian who died in the Korean War, joined the Liberal Party’s guerrilla movement. He was only eighteen years old.

There are few accounts of his life, although enough to satisfy the curiosity of a reader who wants to get a rough idea of the facts. I have looked into various sources.

The most systematic treatment was by Arturo Alape, the famous Colombian historian, whose investigative rigor I can attest to, owing to his relations with me. It is difficult to imagine even a single detail escaping him. He met with Marulanda and the guerrilla forces many times. He spent months with them scrutinizing the motives and objectives of their difficult struggle. I can vouch for the accuracy of his information.

But that is not the only source. We also have the accounts of Jacobo Arenas, an intellectual and Communist leader assigned by his party to the peasant sector, which is an essential component of the revolution in Colombia.

The Communist Party of that sister country, like the other Communist parties in Latin America, large or small, were disciplined members of the International while it formally existed. They followed the line of the Communist Party of the USSR. During the Cold War they continued suffering repression on account of their ideas. The imperialist and oligarchic media unleashed its fury on them.

The rise of the Cuban Revolution, with absolutely no ties to the USSR but based on the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, stirred up contradictory, although not antagonistic feelings. In our country we overcame these and forged a unity, although not without contradictions or sectarian feelings between the members and sympathizers of the old party with advanced political education, and sectors of the petty bourgeoisie who were radicalized but were permeated with the phantom of anticommunism.

The victories of the Rebel Army, as the guerrilla forces were initially called, were the decisive factor in the subsequent phase of the revolution. This explanation is necessary for understanding the essence of the relations between Cuba and the revolutionaries of Latin America.

We who organized the movement that sought to take power on July 26, 1953, had a clear idea of our objectives, and this remained constant. The combatants came from the poor layers of our people, and none of them were opposed to our aims; the old party was our friend, even before that attack. Everyone who fought against the tyranny contributed to a common cause.

Out of the singular experience on a small island 90 miles from the United States, with a military base imposed on its own territory, came our viewpoints regarding Latin America. We did not have, however, the right to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country apart from the inevitable impact of events.

Unfortunately, the governments of the other countries—with the exception of Mexico, still under the influence of its social revolution at the beginning of the century and the brilliant patriotic and anti-imperialist role of Lázaro Cárdenas—under U.S. pressure, broke both moral standards and legal principles to join in the aggression against Cuba.

They exploited the existence of revolutionary Cuba in order to get crumbs from imperialism. Anyone who resisted was simply overthrown without further ado.

The United States organized armed groups and terrorist groups supplied by air and sea. They planted bombs, burned social and economic installations, including theaters, child-care centers, factories, sugar plantations, warehouses, department stores and other targets, snuffing out lives or maiming Cubans through their traitorous actions. Even teachers and young literacy instructors were tortured and murdered.

This isn’t just my opinion; they are recounted in declassified CIA documents.

One outstanding and notorious fact, known to all, is that on April 15, 1961, combat aircraft and installations of our air force were attacked by planes with Cuban insignia; two days later, mercenary forces backed by the U.S. Navy—including an aircraft carrier—and the Marines, landed at the Bay of Pigs. What did the governments of the Americas, with the exception of Mexico, do? They supported the United States in its genocidal war against the Cuban people.

Later the CIA launched viral and bacteriological attacks against our population and our plantations. What did the governments of our sister countries do?

The U.S. government pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war, because they refused to give up the idea of a direct attack on Cuba, using its powerful military. That would have cost an incalculable loss in lives and destruction, since the Cuban people, as is well known, would have resisted to the last drop of blood.

When the Dominican Republic was invaded in April 1965, the governments of Latin America again supported the aggressors.

It is not necessary to add anything more in order to understand that this was the conduct of the military dictatorships that tortured, murdered, and disappeared hundreds of thousands of people in this hemisphere, in complicity with the empire that encouraged them.

From the earliest days, in mass rallies, the Cuban people sent their message, in the First and Second Declarations of Havana, to the fraternal peoples of Latin America. Starting from this reality, one can understand the interest with which we follow political developments in every country in Our America.

I have reviewed numerous notes, reports, and documents relating to Colombia, among them summaries of conversations with individuals who visited Cuba, with whom we had extensive exchanges on the question of peace in Colombia.

In 1950, when a Communist guerrilla made contact with him, Marulanda, who came out of a Gaitanist Liberal group made up in part by his relatives, had evolved toward positions close to the Communists; he criticized them for excessive military formalism and for specific sectarian tendencies in their conception.

Our idea of the guerrilla force as the developing embryo of a force capable of taking power is not based only on the Cuban experience but also on that of other Latin American countries. In all of them the struggles would be carried out by the poor, independently of their level of education, which everywhere, as the exploited classes—worker or peasant, simple day laborers or even soldiers—it was very low.

In Central America, a region victimized by interventions by U.S. filibusterers or soldiers at many different times, nearly all the countries were governed by bloody dictatorships at the time of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Without exception, they were accomplices and instruments of imperialism against Cuba.

In their struggle, the revolutionary groups in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala were divided. Sooner or later members of the Communist Party joined the armed struggle of the peasants and the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie. In all of them, with their specific and inevitable characteristics always present, tendencies arose that held to a conception of excessively prolonged struggle.
Cuba’s efforts were aimed at achieving unity.

The meetings and photos of the historic moments in which unity was achieved attest to this. There were guerrillas who wasted years planning victories for the Greek calends. This was a conception that never entered our minds. It is equally true that the eternal fanatical advocates of capitalism, managed by the Yankee intelligence services, planted extremist ideas in the minds of some revolutionaries.

Central America was the site of a clash of ideas.

I remember that during the Carter years, Bob Pastor, a representative of his who made numerous visits to our country, more than once when meeting with me exclaimed, in a way that seemed naive, “And why do you insist so much on unity, unity, unity?” I smiled to myself when I observed the allergic reaction of this young U.S. official to the unity of Latin Americans.

Carter, nevertheless, was an unusual U.S. president, with ethical principles rooted in his religious faith and did not plan assassination attempts against me. That is why I always treated him with respect. Under his presidency, Torrijos succeeded in winning sovereignty over the Canal, avoiding the kind of massacre that Bush Senior later carried out.

The history of Central America would require a book that perhaps someone will write one day. The revolution triumphed in Nicaragua, which meant hope. Reagan launched the dirty war that cost thousands of lives in that country; in Europe he killed the Siberian gas pipeline project in complicity with Thatcher and the rest of NATO; he put the USSR into an irremediable crisis and liquidated the socialist camp. An entirely new situation was created.

A short time ago I was listening to Tarek William, an outstanding Venezuelan poet and today governor of Anzoátgui, the richest of Venezuela’s petroleum states, and he said that they had named one of their social projects after Roque Dalton, prestigious poet and revolutionary, member of the ERP [Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo—Revolutionary People’s Army], assassinated under strange circumstances in El Salvador.

With sadness he gave the name of the presumed assassin. “It causes me great pain,” he stated, “when the Yankees send him here to tell us how we should do things in Venezuela.” I really knew nothing about the shameful act that Tarek accused him of.

I knew this individual when he was a militant and leader of the ERP, a noted revolutionary organization, combative and firm, with magnificent fighters from the people. The allusions to the death of Roque Dalton had seemed to be simple slanders. I personally devoted dozens of hours to transmitting experiences, ideas, tactics and principles of war to him. He did not waiver in applying them.

The units of the ERP fought Salvadoran battalions trained in the United States using the most advanced techniques. I insisted to them: do not execute prisoners, do not finish off the wounded, overcome these stupid and sterile practices because otherwise not one of them will ever surrender. I should add that the arms with which the Salvadoran revolutionaries fought had been seized in Saigon and given to Cuba by Vietnam after the victory.

As will be seen in chapter 9, revolutionary militants of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) carried out feats unprecedented in the liberation struggles in Latin America, if one takes into account the number of men and the firing capacity of modern arms.

With the USSR and the socialist camp gone, with the Nicaraguan Revolution defeated electorally because of the bloody dirty war imposed by Washington, the time came for the other Central American movements to make a decision.

They asked my opinion. “Only you can decide,” was my answer, “I only know what Cuba would do.” I will add here that the previously mentioned head of the ERP received a scholarship to Oxford to study political science and economics. From what the governor of Anzoátegui said, he is now a Yankee adviser on the art of revolutionary governing.

The Cuban people withstood the disappearance of the USSR without surrendering and were willing to fight to the end, in order that—as Rubén Martínez Villena said—their children won’t have to beg on their knees for what their parents conquered on their feet.

From the material that has been collected and analyzed, a short book has emerged. Its chapters are about of equal length, although some are longer and some are shorter. We did not want the form to determine the content. Texts that are essential for understanding the problems are included. I use the method of selecting basic ideas as found in the documents.

Making available the basic data is a responsibility of those who really struggle for a better and fairer world.

*****

EPILOGUE

The objective realities of which Belisario Betancur spoke led Pastrana to what he no doubt did not desire when he assumed the presidency of Colombia for his four-year term between 1998 and 2002.

The United States is not a friend of the peoples of Latin America. For more than a century and a half it intervened in Latin America’s internal affairs, stole its territory, robbed its natural resources, attacked its culture, imposed unequal trade, sabotaged unity efforts going back to the era of independence, promoted conflicts between our countries, exploited the great differences in the heart of our societies.

The nations of Latin America have suffered waves of inflation and economic crisis while other parts of the world developed. Despite emigration, the number of people in extreme poverty rose, as has the number of children compelled to beg in the big cities.

During the last fifty years, military coups and bloody tyrannies, supported and encouraged by the United States, have meant hundreds of thousands of “disappeared,” tortured, and murdered in Central and South America. The coup plotters and torturers were trained in U.S. military schools.

Despite the seriousness of the crime committed against the people of the United States by the terrorist act in New York on September 11, 2001 — putting aside the responsibility of the President for his negligence and the deficiencies of his government’s security bodies—there is no justification for supporting the war Bush declared against “sixty or more dark corners of the world,” among which Latin American countries could be included.

Pastrana, who met often with the guerrilla commander, no doubt could sense the difference between Marulanda’s sincerity and Bush’s cynicism. Peace with Bush and war against Marulanda are two completely opposite things.

The problem of drugs, which today causes so much pain to the peoples of Latin America, in reality originates with the enormous demand in the United States, where the authorities have never decided to combat it energetically while assigning this task solely to the countries where poverty and underdevelopment push masses of peasants into cultivating the coca leaf or poppies instead of coffee, cacao, or other products undervalued in the U.S. market.

It was not in vain that Raúl Reyes told Arbesú that the State Department contacted the FARC, interested in collaborating with it in the fight against drugs. “It was the only thing that interested them,” said Reyes. We can add that when they wanted their “collaboration” the FARC weren’t terrorists!

Marulanda advocated replacing these crops with others, along with social programs and economic compensation. With great realism, he did not see any other way to eliminate them.

This is what Cuba did with illicit crops when the Revolution triumphed. For many months when we were still in the mountains we did not even know what a marijuana plant looked like. The few who grew it were the most adept at going back and forth across enemy lines.

Some extremists on our side wanted to begin putting the growers on trial. I recommended waiting until the war was over. That was how these kinds of crops were eradicated, although there did not exist, of course, the serious and complex problem that Colombia faces today.

Raúl Reyes and Manuel Marulanda are no longer alive. They died in the struggle. One, in a direct attack using new technology developed by the Yankees; the other from natural causes.

I disagreed with the head of the FARC over the pace he assigned to the revolutionary process in Colombia. Over his idea of excessively prolonged war. Over his conception of first creating an army of more than 30,000 men; from my point of view this was neither correct nor economically feasible as the means to defeat enemy ground forces in an irregular war.

He did extraordinary things with guerrilla units that, under his personal direction, penetrated deep into enemy territory. When someone failed to complete a similar mission, he was always ready to show it was possible. He once spent two years traveling over half of Colombia with a unit of 40 men.

The FARC, because of its operational conceptions, never surrounded or forced the surrender of a full battalion backed by artillery, armored units and air power. This is an experience we did have, thus defeating even larger units of elite troops. This is not what happened with the FARC, despite the tremendous quality of its fighters.

My opposition to holding prisoners of war, to applying policies that humiliate them or subject them to extremely harsh jungle conditions, is well known. With these policies troops will never lay down their arms, even if the battle is lost.

Nor was I in agreement with capturing and holding civilians who have nothing to do with the war. I must add that prisoners and hostages make maneuvering more difficult for the combatants. I admire, however, the revolutionary firmness that Marulanda showed and his willingness to fight to the last drop of blood.

The idea of surrendering never passed through the minds of any of us in the guerrilla struggle in our country. That is why I said in one of my Reflections that truly revolutionary fighters should never lay down their arms. That is what I thought 55 years ago. That is what I think today.

I invested more than 400 hours of intense labor in this effort. I revised it carefully following the two hurricanes that hit Cuba with such extreme violence. I am satisfied having done it. I learned much. I have kept my promise.

Fidel Castro Ruz
16 September 2008

The Shining Path in the Universities

An absolutely stunning documentary, unfortunately all in Spanish, with never before seen footage of the chaos that reigned in Peru’s universities in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s. We see footage of violent riots on campus, fights with the riot police, heavily armed police and soldiers arresting students, students setting fires, university dormitory walls that are covered nearly every single inch with radical graffiti, radical graffiti covering the walls inside the universities and even inside classrooms, many huge marches of radical students with fists raised.

Any revolutionary movement that hopes to get anywhere is going to have to penetrate the cities, and then the universities. This is how the NPA is failing in Philippines. Previously, there were so many students volunteering that they nearly had to turn people away. As of 10 years ago, that flow had dried to a trickle. The Maoist movement in India has barely penetrated the cities, much less the universities. The Colombian guerrillas have little urban presence, and they have a lot of problems at the universities, though you can often seen guerrilla graffiti.

But the insurgency in El Salvador also took over the universities.

As of now, Peruvian universities are calm. Students are frightened of the years of turmoil and many are apolitical.

Peru’s such a pile of crap. Everyone is overjoyed that Fujimori defeated Sendero. Ok, that’s great. But is Peruvian society even 1% better 20 years later? I don’t think so. So what was so great about beating Sendero then? What exactly was accomplished. I never liked Sendero (way too vicious), but part of me almost wishes they would have won just to see how things would have shaken out.

A shocking documentary of what happens when a kickass insurgency turns society upside down and turns universities into bases and battlegrounds.

Good News from Colombia

Here.

As I pointed out earlier, the Colombian government is suffering the worst casualties since the height of the conflict in 2002. Government casualties have been rising about 20% per year for the last three years. All of this has been going in since the rebels are on the verge of defeat and declining towards total annihilation.

I don’t agree with estimates of the FARC’s strength. I believe it is around 18,000. But in the last few years, an urban militia of about 30,000 members has developed. These are just regular folks, and they don’t wear uniforms. They live in their homes and go to their jobs by day. But they have weapons in their homes, and they carry out attacks from there. They are very hard to catch, and the government knows little about them.

There are cities of around 20,000, particularly on the coast, where the whole city is pretty much with the FARC in one way or another. If you’re against them, you can’t trust anyone.

There are areas in the countryside where everyone is in the FARC too. The men working in the fields all have sidearms (pistols). They are all part of a rural militia. That peasant woman in that house over there cooks food for guerrillas and lets them stay in her place. She’s part of it too. Pretty much everyone in the area is part of the FARC in one way or another. This is the old FARC base in the countryside, but like the NPA in the Philippines, they have had a much harder time moving into the cities.

I believe the FARC have also done a poor job of penetrating the universities, once again like the NPA in the Philippines, where student support has declined over the years.

The Shining Path and the FMLN in El Salvador did an excellent job of taking over the universities. I remember during the 1989 offensive in San Salvador, the rebels took over some colleges and turned them into bases. Some universities in Lima and Ayacucho in 1991 and 1992 were almost taken over by the Shining Path. There was Sendero graffiti everywhere, and students would stand up in class and shout down professors. The classrooms were full of government spies. You could not trust a soul.

When Fujimori  took over, he closed down many universities, partially destroyed them, and in particular ransacked the libraries. They stayed closed for the better part of a decade. When they reopened recently, they were still partly destroyed with ruined libraries. The government hasn’t even bothered to rebuild the schools.

However, support for Sendero at the universities is now very small, a shadow of its former self. Most students are either apathetic or frightened.

A Look at Some Spanish Dialects

One thing that is interesting once you learn to speak Spanish fairly well is that you can start to pick up the differences in various Spanish dialects. I am told that people who don’t know Spanish well can’t pick up the differences at all. Hearing a divergent Spanish dialect is a very strange experience. You hear Spanish words, but the accent is so off and weird that you think that they can’t possibly be speaking Spanish. A frequent mistake it to think that they are thinking some closely related Romance language like Catalan, French, Portuguese or Italian.

I’ve written about this before, but now that we have more Hispanics and even Mexican nationals reading the blog, maybe we can get some good feedback.

Mexican Spanish is fairly uniform at least around these parts. However, there are some differences.

Oaxacan Spanish: I have heard older Oaxacan Indians speaking a very strange and harsh form of Spanish. I assume it was some Oaxacan Indian Spanish.

Morelos Spanish: Spoken in the state of Morelos near just south of Mexico City. I heard a woman speaking this to her kid. She looked very White, and for some reason I thought she was Iranian. I listened to her for several minutes and I was sure she must have been speaking Farsi. However, she told me she was speaking Morelos Spanish. I looked it up on the Net and it is a distinctive dialect.

Jalisco Spanish: Spoken in the coastal state of Jalisco. This does seem different from the other varieties of Mexican Spanish. I heard a White looking guy speaking it in the store and I asked him what language he was speaking. He was speaking Jalisco Spanish. It had a very European sound to it – like Castillian or Catalan.

Veracruz Spanish: I was in a store and there was a guy on the phone speaking some strange language. There were Spanish words but the accent was insane. After a bit, I said, “No way are you speaking Spanish.” The guy practically fell over himself laughing and he said he was indeed. He looked sort of South Indian, so I thought he was speaking some Indian language like Hindi.

He said he spoke regular Spanish, but he came from the Caribbean coast of Mexico, and he was talking to someone from there, and he was speaking Mexican Caribbean Spanish. This is the most whacked version of Mexican Spanish I have ever heard.

Guatemalan Spanish: A neighbor speaks this. It’s Spanish all right, but it’s not Mexican Spanish at all. Has an odd but recognizable accent. And she speaks incredibly fast and slurs her words together in the worst way.

Salvadoran Spanish: Different from Mexican Spanish, but not dramatically so. It’s immediately identifiable as Spanish.

Puerto Rican Spanish: Caribbean Spanish in general is just nuts. I heard a group of mixed race folks speaking it at a store. I listened for a while, very confused. Then I walked over to them and asked if they were speaking Portuguese, because that was what it sounded like. They said they were speaking Puerto Rican Spanish. The mixed race group had not a trace of racism, and among them were some of the most dignified looking Blacks or mulattoes I have ever seen. A quiet dignity you rarely see in US Blacks.

Colombian Spanish: One of the strangest Spanishes of them all. I knew an upper class Colombian woman from the Zona Rosa in the north of Bogota. She spent about half her time in Spain. She had the sexiest, most breathiest Spanish I have ever heard, almost like a super sexy French accent. It was also very European sounding. It had a very Castillian and almost French flavor to it. I heard her sister talk too, and she talked exactly the same way.

She used to write me emails, and I couldn’t make heads or toes of the Spanish because it was so full of figures of speech, slangs and colloquialisms. Running it through a translator was useless. For all intents and purposes, she wasn’t even writing in Spanish.

I was at a store and a group of Colombians was in line, all young adults. I heard Spanish words, but the accent was so whacked that I thought it had to be something else. I approached them and asked if they were speaking Italian, because that is what it sounded like. They laughed and said they were speaking Colombian Spanish.

Once again, this was a very sensual language. The 30-something beauty talking to me seemed like she was openly flirting with me, but finally I thought that was just how she talked. They were all talking like they were either heading to an orgy or just got back from one, but once again, I think that was the way they talked all the time. These people live in their bodies, fully sensual, and the language pumps right out of their emotional heart. The words seem to sway and move with their bodies. One sexy language!

I recently heard another woman speaking Colombian Spanish, this time from the Caribbean coast. A fruity, delightful language with words that sway in the sun on the golden sands. A sound as juicy as papayas, mangoes and bananas. You want to reach out and grab the words as they fly through the air and take a bite of them.

Peruvian Spanish: I knew some Peruvian women and used to talk to them a lot. The Spanish is not too crazy accentwise, but it has a ton of slangs in it. They didn’t really speak English, so they couldn’t explain what the slangs meant. One thing was that they spoke very, very fast! I kept telling them to slow down, but they could not seem to slow it down no matter how many times you asked. Peruvian has only one speed – very fast.

Chilean Spanish: Sounds very Castillian, but it’s immediately recognizable as Spanish. One problem is the mountain of slang in this dialect. I don’t think there is any Spanish that has as much slang as Chilean. It’s literally chock full of all kinds of weird slangs. They are also the pickiest Spanish speakers I have ever met. Almost like the French, almost correcting your Spanish. Most Spanish speakers are very gracious, but Chileans want you to speak it right!

Argentine Spanish: This is one weird Spanish. You hear it spoken and you hear Spanish words, but the people speaking it look like Europeans and the accent sounds Italian! Or sometimes it sounds like some other European language – Catalan, French or Castillian. This is one insanely whacked out Spanish!

Catalonian Spanish: I heard a group speaking this, and I thought no way is that Spanish. I asked them what they were speaking, and they said Spanish. They said they were from Catalonia. Their Spanish sounded like Catalan! It didn’t sound like Spanish at all. This was one of the bizarrest Spanishes I have ever heard.

Naomi Klein On the Debt Ceiling Charade

Naomi Klein:

Using a trumped up crisis to raid the public purse and attack the basic rights and benefits is a very old trick – but rarely is the shock doctrine tactic wielded as brazenly as in the pseudo debate about the debt ceiling. This is naked class war, waged by the ultra rich against everyone else, and it’s well past time for Americans to draw the line.

This whole thing is fake, a phony crisis, a charade, Kabuki theater. And Klein hits it right on the head when she ties it in with the Shock Doctrine. Klein’s Shock Doctrine theory holds that one of the latest tricks of imperialist capitalism is how it deliberately creates crises or catastrophes, then uses those calamities to push through radical rightwing changes that are beneficial to Global Capital. For instance, Iraq was deliberately destroyed in order that US capitalist mass murderers and vultures could make money off rebuilding the very place that they wrecked!

Greece was deliberately driven into debt by the venal and wicked banksters who control the world so that its public institutions could be sold off and Greece itself could be bought by the rich. Capitalism created a worldwide economic collapse. Whether  it did so deliberately or not is debatable, but students of history know that unregulated capitalism causes periodic horrible economic collapses, recessions and depressions.

They then used this collapse, which they had augmented for decades by a careful policy of massive tax cuts and deliberately running up huge deficits under Republican Presidents with the expressed purpose of create a debt and deficit crisis down the road, to force through radical class war against the vast majority of working Americans and undo the New Deal, the Great Society and all progressive change for the last century in an effort to take us back at least to the 1920′s, or, as Karl Rove put it, to take us back to the 1890′s.

The crisis was created deliberately. The rightwing is simply using the debt issue as an excuse to destroy most of government. Why? Because the modern Right has a deep and profound hatred for the state. They wish to eviscerate the state on all levels in order to create a Third World type Libertarian state characterized by a starved, minimalist and ineffective state ruled by venal elites who wage permanent and savage class war on the poor, the workers and much of the middle class.

The assault on government will not end with this debt ceiling debate. Obama thinks he can fix this debt debate and then move on to other things. But that’s not possible. The Right will not stop hammering away at government and slashing it like a crazed serial killer hacking at his dying rape victim until the state is nearly eviscerated on a 3rd World level.

However, even then, the Class War will be continuous and ongoing. That’s because in almost all human socieites, there is always something still left for the Rich to steal from the rest of us. We are never so poor that they can’t take more stuff from us.

I told you previously that I followed Salvadoran politics for a while. I used to give money to the arms fund of the FMLN guerrillas, so I got daily updates via phone about Salvadoran politics.

I understood Salvadoran politics to be that the population was divided into 2% rich who owned most everything, an 8% battered middle class who barely scraped by, and the rest, 90%, were poor, often without even enough food to eat.

But those daily updates about the Salvadoran state were enlightening. Every single day, the fascist ARENA state tried to steal more and more money, land and stuff from the other 98% of the population. I was amazed because I thought there would not be anything left to steal! In the absence of a direct return to feudalism with its lords and serfs, one has to presume that rightwing class war in the modern era will be neverending and they will never run out of money, land and stuff to steal from the rest of us.

Another thing that amazed me was that the Salvadoran rich, the 2%, clearly never had enough. Every day they had to steal more and more. It was then that I realized that a rich man never has enough money. He always needs more and more. He never says he’s had enough and it’s time to quit. Greed is not like hunger. Hunger can be sated, at least for a bit. The rich man apparently never reaches a state of satiety, which implies right there that there is something pathological, inhuman and just wrong about greed itself.

Greed is as instiable as the healthy desire to survive. One never has his fill of it.

Jewmerica Threatens Flotilla Participants

The United States of Jewmerica, or, more properly, “USreal,” which is the US and Israel combined into a single nation for all intents and purposes, is threatening USreali citizens with long imprisonment terms if they deliver aid to Gaza via a flotilla. The charges would include proving material aid to a terrorist group, Hamas, which violates a new USraeli law. Alice Walker is on that boat. I dare this punk Obama to throw her in prison, I really do.

The flag of Usrael. Usrael is not yet recognized by the UN, because USrael itself, as an international scofflaw and outlaw state, does not recognize UN sovereignty. USrael does what it wants, always has and always will, the Hell with the rest of the world.

Honestly, USraeli citizens ought to be free to provide material aid, or any other aid, or even to go fight for, any armed group on Earth that is not engaged in hostilities against the US. If some USraeli ally then wants to extradite the USraeli citizen for working for the group, then Usrael has a right to extradite them. But why is it against USraeli law to give money or other aid to, or to train or go fight for, some guerrilla group that has nothing whatsoever to do with USrael in any way, shape or form?

When I was a student at USC in 1983, a professor I knew pointed out one of the other professors in the Education Department. He was a young Hispanic guy. The professor told me that the prof periodically took time off his job to go down to El Salvador, where he actually took up arms and fought alongside the FMLN rebels. And what was wrong with that? It was his life, right? It was between him and the Salvadoran government.

But a recent fascist law would have sentenced this guy to 10 years in prison for fighting for his conscience. What of the US fighters for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Franco’s fascists? The present fascist USraeli government would obviously call the Republicans (the only Republicans I’ve ever supported besides the IRA) a terrorist group. Obviously, all of the anti-Nazi guerrillas of WW2 were terrorists too. Anyone who takes up arms against any state, except, whoops! Enemies of the US, is automatically a terrorist.

However, for some reason, the KLA, the Syrian rebels, the Libyan rebels, and the Ahwaz, Kurdish and Baloch rebels in Iran are automagically not terrorists, because if they were, the whole US government would have to go down on the fascist law about support for terrorism, because USrael is supporting all of those groups to the hilt.

The truth is that in general, the whole “terrorist group” designation is complete shit. If you’re a guerrilla group fighting a US enemy, you’re a freedom fighter. If you’re a guerrilla group fighting a US ally, you’re a terrorist. The designation is garbage, and it’s pitiful that the vast majority of Moronicans have fallen for this sick lie.

Onto the Gaza flotilla. All of these flotillas have been repeatedly inspected, and I suspect it’s no different with this one. So the idea that the flotilla members are providing material aid to a terrorist group is nothing but a twisted lie.

This shows once again who controls America, and it’s not ordinary Americans.

If we are looking for someone to blame here, let’s not blame the elites. The fault is Americans themselves. Truth is that the vast majority of Americans are perfectly content to turn America into Jewmerica, such is their overwhelming and idiotic Judeophilia. The majority of Americans are overjoyed at the joining of two nations at the hip to form the USrael entity, such is their passionate and fanatical Zionism.

In that case, then USrael surely must reap what it sows then, from endless wars to burning and collapsing towers. Cause and effect is still a law of the natural world, and men are part of that world.

Is this America or Jewmerica? Which will it be?

Is this the US or is Usrael? Which will it be?

Wikipedia Jews Attack James Petras

Repost from the old site.

James Petras is a fine man of the Left who has long been interested in Latin America and especially revolutionary movements down there. He has long supported the FARC revolutionaries in Colombia (as does this blog) and lately he has been supporting the Movement of the Landless in Brazil.

He’s a great labor organizer who goes down to Latin America and works with the people, getting his hands dirty with the workers and peasants themselves. He’s a towering intellect, and has often criticized Left movements from a Far Left perspectives, accusing them of being sellouts. For instance, he has gone after the FMLN in El Salvador lately for pursuing a half-hearted effort at reform.

I believe he was going after Evo Morales in Bolivia lately. He’s great for tearing the masks off these Latin American Leftists who the US press is screaming Commie Bloody Murder about, showing us that many of them are not even very far to the Left and the proposals they are offering are quite moderate and unlikely to seriously shake up socioeconomic relations in these places.

It’s always great to read him on anything having to do with the Latin American Left.

Lately he has sort of gone off on a bender against US Jews and particularly the Israeli Lobby and Israel. He has received some criticism for this from the Left, especially the anarchist Left (see Three Way Fight) and Maoists. Maoists and anarchists (Three Way Fight critique here) are among those on the Left who are particularly sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism and go to great lengths to avoid such.

This despite the recent rightwing Jewish – Zionist rewriting of history that shows the entire 20th Century Left as being anti-Semitic. See Why the Jews? The Reasons for Contemporary Anti-Semitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin for more on that – it’s actually an excellent read and I recommend it.

The ADL has recently weighed in against Petras, accusing him of fomenting some kind of “New Anti-Semitism” (this means an anti-Semitism focused mostly on Israel). All of this crap is a rather minor sideshow to Petras’ excellent corpus and career, but as you can see in his Wikipedia entry, most of the entry is given over his tussle with the Jews.

On the discussion page, the Wikipedia Jews have gone nuts, accusing him of being an “anti-Jewish racist” and other bullshit. There’s the usual crap about Israel Shamir on there, straight from the UK Spotlight Trotskyite antifa loonie-tunes accusations – Shamir as a Swedish neo-Nazi living in Norway.

In fact, Israel Shamir, whatever one thinks of him (and he surely has his anti-Semitic moments) is a Russian Jew, son of a famous rabbi, who immigrated to Israel, fought in the Israeli military, wrote for some Israeli papers, moved to Japan where he translated Japanese haiku books, moved back to Russia where he got involved in some dubious anti-Semitic far right Russian publications, moved back to Israel, where he currently resides in Jaffa (in fact, you can probably even visit him there – lots of folks do).

It’s really sad that this “Swedish neo-Nazi” bullshit has been allowed to gain as much traction as it has. Yes, his Wikipedia page says that too. I know what you were thinking. Chip Berlet is one of the leaders of the Israel Shamir Lynch Mob. Berlet, the strange “Marxist” who is in deep with the radical right libertarians that rule Wikipedia.

Looks like the Wikipedia Jews got pretty much thwarted on this one. Maybe someone is finally starting to reign them in over there. Note that “Humus Sapiens” is one of the most notorious Wikipedia Jews, active for years now. Still at it, I guess.

Check out the article history. Real food fight.

Links to some Wikipedia nasties.

Wikipedia Jews: Jayjg, one of the worst Jewish POV-pushers on Wikipedia. Humus Sapiens, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US. Izak, one of their sidekicks.

Slim Virgin , one of the worst ones of all. I understand that SV is not even Jewish (!); she’s just some Gentile philosemite. She’s obsessed with 1. The Jews, 2. 9-11. SV is one of the most horrible and abusive administrators on Wikipedia. She was so abusive that the Wikipedia Review undertook an investigation of her.

She was very hard to track down as she covers her tracks very well, but they eventually determined that she is a former Cambridge University graduate student named Linda Mack who was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger and John K. Cooley to investigate the Lockerbie bombing.

Two Libyans were eventually convicted of the bombing, and Ghaddafi was ordered to pay a huge fine, but there is good evidence that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing. There is also evidence that UK law enforcement knew this but went after Ghaddafi anyway because they hated him and wanted to wrap up the case.

It is still not known who was behind the bombing, but the Iranian regime was probably the author of the attack. The attack was probably a payback for the US shooting down of an Iranian airliner during the Iran-Iraq War, an act that the US said was accidental. Iran refused to accept the accidental shootdown theory.

Linda Mack was instrumental in steering Salinger and Cooley towards the Libyans. Salinger and Cooley eventually decided that Mack was a spy with the UK’s notorious MI5 intelligence agency (the British CIA). Linda Mack is now reportedly living in Alberta, Canada under the name Sarah McEwan.

Antifascist, who uses the same handle and has the same obsessions as a notorious Jewish Zionist who used to stalk anti-Zionists on Indymedia, often issuing them horrible death threats. He’s obsessed with Wendy Campbell and Gilad Atzmon.

His name is Ketlan Ossowski ( blog here) and he is described as an obsessive Jew who uses Leftism and anti-fascism as a cover to promote Zionism. I strongly suspect that he is the same guy who stalked and threatened Wendy Campbell. Zeq, long-notorious, the lone Wikipedia Jew busted in the CAMERA fiasco, now banned.

Others: Roland Rance, a Jewish Marxist (Jewish first, Marxist far distant second) from London, famous from the wars over Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo’s Peace Palestine blog, apparently active in the Socialist Workers Party and in with the Lenin’s Tomb crowd. I’m not going to comment on this guy much as he’s written me civilly via email.

Just another frothing Trot about sums it up though.

When Is It Going to Start Working Anyway?

A commenter asks:

I know there’s probably a lot of info on the web about the various armed conflict/s in Latin America, but do you have any good websites (in English) that are specifically about the rhetoric of the Latin American Rich? And about their actual policies that lead to so many people trying to revolt against them?

I know you’ve mentioned them in your posts, but not all that much. It would be great if you had links to a detailed, extensive database of such information.

Hi, Upside Down World  in the blogroll is an excellent resource, just off the top of my head. You know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 30 years ago, 10 years ago, yesterday, Latin America was mired in the most horrific poverty amid the most wild wealth. I’m not sure what the rich were saying then. Now here it is, up to 100 years later, and nothing much has changed.

I think in the past it was just “Kill the Commies!” The rich ran the show, had pro-rich military dictatorships for years to decades, when that didn’t work stole elections, and controlled all the media. The masses were utterly downtrodden, but what could you do?

Every now and then the peons would get restless, and the Marines would be sent down there to repress the overwhelming majority of the people and reinstate rich rule. In Haiti, the US stayed for decades. Cuba was nearly a US colony. We invaded the Dominican Republic. Sometimes people fought back. You had the anti-US Sandino rebellion against the Marines in Nicaragua.

Anytime the people got the least bit uppity, there would be a coup or a US invasion, followed by mass death squad terror. This happened in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Dominican Republic in 1965, Bolivia in 1970, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1978, and Peru in 1992. This would often be followed by years to decades of state terror, the purpose of which apparently was to say, “Don’t even think of trying this again!”

In 1932 in El Salvador there was a peasant uprising led by Farabundo Marti. It was crushed, and 2% of the population, 30,000 people, were murdered in only about a month in something called the Matanza. Whole towns and villages were slaughtered. US warships patrolled off the coast the whole time to help things go smoothly. After that, people got rid of their Indian clothes, quit speaking Indian and turned into Ladinos, because the Indians were specifically targeted in the massacre. That was enough to keep the people down for about 40 years or so.

The Western provinces, where the Matanza took place, were still very conservative even during the Civil War 50 years later. Mass terror works.

But things have changed now. Now they say that neoliberal capitalism (the rule of the rich) is the way to prosperity for everyone. Socialism or rule of the poor is a dictatorship and leads to mass poverty.

Now the rich say that the way of the rich will “lift all the boats.” A rising tide lifts all boats and all of that. It’s supply side economics. Problem is that Latin America has been engaging in supply side economics and the politics and economics of the rich since Day One. Who is it lifting out of poverty, anyway?

Main thing is that they don’t want to spend one dime to help the poor the in any way whatsoever. Doing so will ruin the economy, and we can’t have that. You can’t raise taxes, tax the rich or the corporations, raise the minimum wage or engage in any state spending. All of this is Communism, and it will “ruin the economy.”

They also engage in a lot of capital strikes now. With the election of Humala in Peru the other day, the stock market lost 20% of its value. Most of those countries are under IMF austerity programs and are limited in what they can do. Also, they need foreign investment, and the foreigners (the West) demand a neoliberal, economics of the rich, climate in the country. If you put in pro-poor policies, the investors bail. It’s hard to get much progressive policy done. Even the new Left leaders down there have their hands tied.

But the economics of the rich isn’t working down there. They’ve been doing it for 200 years.

When is it supposed to start working anyway?