Conn Hallinan, “Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget”

Nice piece on Chavez.

Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed.”

Conn Hallinan
Dispatches From The Edge: March 11, 2013

Paying Last Respects

In early December 2001, I was searching through my files looking for a column topic. At the time I was writing on foreign policy for the San Francisco Examiner, one of the town’s two dailies. A back page clip I had filed and forgotten caught my attention: on Nov. 7 the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the U.S. State Department had convened a two-day meeting on U.S. policy vis-a-vis Venezuela. My first thought was, “Uh, oh.”

I knew something about those kinds of meetings. There was one in 1953 just before the CIA and British intelligence engineered the coup in Iran that put the despicable Shah into power. Same thing for the 1963 coup in South Vietnam and the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.

Chavez had reaped the ire of the Bush administration when, during a speech condemning the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he asked if bombing Afghanistan in retaliation was a good idea? Chavez called it “fighting terrorism with terrorism,” not a very good choice of words, but, in retrospect, spot on. The invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent Iraqi War have been utterly disastrous for the U.S. and visited widespread terror on the populations of both countries. Upwards of a million Iraqis died as a direct and indirect effect of the war, five million were turned into refugees, and the bloodshed is far from over. Much the same-albeit on a smaller scale-is happening to the Afghans.

Would that we had paid the man some attention.

But for the Bush administration, Chavez’s statement presented an opportunity to rid itself of a troublesome voice. In came the White House’s Latin America “A Team.”

The top gun in that odious outfit was Otto Reich, assistant secretary of state for western hemispheric affairs and former Reagan Administration point man for the 1981-87 Contra War against Nicaragua. The General Accounting Office had nailed Reich during the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal for “prohibited convert propaganda,” planting false stories and opinion pieces in newspapers. A Cuban exile, Reich had helped spring Orlando Bosch in 1987 from a Venezuelan prison where Bosch was in jail for bombing a civilian Cuban airliner and killing 73 people.

Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for western hemisphere affairs, also a Cuban exile and former chief of staff for the Contras, was the Pentagon side of the team.

While Reich met with civilian opponents of Chavez and conservative businessman Pedro Carmona, Pardo-Maurer huddled with military leaders, including Gen. Lucas Romero Rincon. Carmona and Rincon would play a key role in the April 11, 2002 coup against Chavez. The National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development were also supporting Chavez’s opponents with money and advice, and both organizations have long histories of subversion and covert operations.

I had no special information about the possibility of a coup but it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that the armies of the night were on the move. So I wrote a column titled “Coup in the Wind” that laid out the meetings, identified the actors, and reminded readers that the U.S. has a long and sordid history of organizing and supporting coups in Latin America.

A little more than three and a half months later, the plotters struck, arrested Chavez, suspended the constitution, dissolved the legislature, dismissed the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the National Election Commission, and fired provincial governors. We had seen this all before, and I flinched at what I thought would inevitably follow: executions, death squads, “disappeared” opponents, smashed unions, and a cowed population.

But April 11, 2002 was not 1954 in Guatemala, 1964 in Brazil, 1973 in Chile, or 1976 in Argentina. Chavez had lifted millions of people out of poverty, opened schools, increased literacy, and tackled malnutrition. In vast numbers those people rose up, and, for the first time in Latin American history, a coup was overturned.

Three days after Chavez was returned to office, Martha Honey at Foreign Policy In Focus sent me an email saying she liked the coup column and would I consider writing a follow-up for the think tank? I knew all about Martha Honey and her husband, Tony Avirgan. As reporters for the Costa Rican Tico Times, they had uncovered much of the Iran-Contra plot and were legends among those of us in the alternative press. I also knew about FPIF. It is hard to write sensible things about U.S. foreign policy without it. So I did a piece called Anatomy of a Coup, detailing U.S. support for the plotters. Since then I have written over 200 columns, so in a way it was Hugo Chavez that landed me at FPIF.

Chavez became the president of a country where 70 percent of the population was considered “poor,” in spite of $30 billion in yearly oil revenues. It was a country where two percent of the population owned 60 percent of the land, and where the gap between rich and poor was among the widest on the continent.

Today, according to the Gini Coefficient, Venezuela has the lowest rate of inequality in Latin America. Poverty has been reduced to 21 percent, and extreme poverty from 40 percent to 7.3 percent. Illiteracy has been eliminated and, proportionally, Venezuela is number two in Latin America for the number of university students. Infant mortality has dropped from 25 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000, the same as it is for Black Americans.

Chavez’s government increased the number of health clinics by 169.6 percent and hands out free food to five million Venezuelans. Take a moment to read The Achievements of Hugo Chavez by public health experts Carles Muntaner, Joan Benach, and sociologist Maria Paez Victor in CounterPunch.

Comparing the man’s accomplishments to his U.S. obits was like taking a trip through Alice’s looking glass. Virtually none of the information about poverty and illiteracy was included, and when it was grudgingly admitted that he did have programs for the poor, it was “balanced” ; with claims of soaring debts, widespread shortages, rampant crime, economic chaos, and “authoritarian ism.”

Venezuela’ s debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is lower than that of the U.S. and Europe. Inflation has fallen to a four-year low. There is crime, but neighboring Colombia is far more dangerous, particularly if you happen to be a trade unionist. And more people in Venezuela are eating better than they have ever eaten in the history of the country. Over the past decade growth has averaged 4. 3 percent, and joblessness dropped from 11.3 percent to 7.7 percent. Americans would kill for those figures.

As for being an “authoritarian ,” most the country’ s media is venomously anti-Chavez and publishes regularly, and his opponents hold weekly rallies and protests. Want to try that in U.S. ally Honduras (or Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, etc.)?

The old Venezuelan elites-aided by the U.S.-will now attempt to turn the clock back to 1997, the year before Chavez took over. But that will not be easy. Quite literally millions of people have been brought into the democratic process and they will not cede power without a fight. Once people have better housing, schools, nutrition, jobs and health care, it is very difficult to take those things away. Chavez handed a better life to the vast majority of Venezuelans, and, as they demonstrated in April 2002, they are perfectly able to defend those gains.

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed,” is the way former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva put it.

He will be missed, indeed.

Greg Palast on Hugo Chavez

This article shows exactly how US imperialism works in the world today. It also shows just how evil US foreign policy really is. Now whether the behavior portrayed below is evil or good is a value judgment. I say it’s evil. Someone else may feel it’s the right thing to do.

But one thing for sure, the true story, as Greg Palast lays out below, is one you will never hear on US TV or radio or read in any US newspaper or magazine. The US media won’t even bring up charges like this even to deny them. Can you imagine if every day in the US you could turn on your TV to a debate on whether or not the US is an imperialist country? That’s a debate they don’t want you to have, even to deny it.

Problem is that no matter how hard they deny it, they don’t want you to hear the other side at all. There is too much risk that no matter how hard they ridicule the other side, a few people might decide to side with the opposition. A few Americans here and there might decide that, yes, the US is an imperialist country.

That the US is an imperialist country and that US capitalism is based on imperialism is beyond a doubt. There’s nothing to debate. It’s obviously true. Even the scores of US military bases and the huge US military are the armed faction of that imperial system. When you go enlist in the US military, you are joining as a foot soldier for imperialism, in general. You are carrying a weapon for Heinz, the Koch Brothers and Chevron more than you are defending US soil from shadowy enemies.

Almost all supporters of US capitalism (and we have many here on this blog) refuse to acknowledge that US capitalism is based on imperialism. Imperialism is its bread and butter.

It’s fine and dandy to support capitalism (I am not completely against the market myself), but I think if you support US capitalism, you ought to at least agree that it’s based on imperialism. That would be the brave and principled thing to do. And now do you support this system, this particular US capitalism buttressed by imperialism as laid out below. To me, that is a much harder thing to do, but supporters or US capitalism need to do that. They need to take a stand on imperialism. You either support US imperialism or you oppose it. Which will it be? No more dodging the question and pretending that imperialism doesn’t exist.

It is also interesting that we have Blacks on this board who hated Hugo Chavez. Yet Chavez was the great champions of the Blacks and Browns of Venezuela, as laid out below. Venezuelan capitalism, as is the case with capitalism in many parts of the world, was racially based. The Whites took all the money and left the Blacks and Browns with crumbs – starving, sickened, squatting in hovels with sewage running down the steep gutters. Why US Blacks would support such a racial spoils system is beyond me.

There is much talk that Chavez and other Latin American Leftists were all given cancer by the US. It’s an interesting theory, but there is no evidence for it at the moment.

I had an Argentine girlfriend once. We talked about the Dirty War in Argentina, supported to the hilt by the US (Henry Kissinger notoriously backed them to the hilt), in which 30,000 mostly unarmed and peaceful Leftists were murdered by a rightwing military dictatorship.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully. “The Latin American Left dreamed of a better world. And in Latin America, that is a dangerous thing.”

So it is with Hugo Chavez, so it is with the Americas, of which we in the north are increasingly a part.

“But why the GW Bush regime’s hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela? Reverend Pat wasn’t coy about the answer: Its the oil. This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.”

Vaya con Dios, Hugo Chàvez, mi Amigo

By Greg Palast

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: Its the oil. And its the Koch Brothers and its the ketchup.

Reverend Pat Robertson said, Hugo Chavez thinks were trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.

It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush’s State Department. Despite Bush’s providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we’ll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular.

But why the Bush regime’s hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela? Reverend Pat wasn’t coy about the answer: It’s the oil. This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.

A really BIG pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela hold a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.

If we didn’t kill Chavez, we’d have to do an Iraq on his nation. So the Reverend suggests, We don’t need another $200 billion war…. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush’s attacks: Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton.

So what made Chavez suddenly “a dangerous enemy”? Here’s the answer you wont find in The New York Times:

Just after Bush’s inauguration in 2001, Chavez congress voted in a new Law of Hydrocarbons. Henceforth, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70% of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela. Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel.

But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezuela’s prior government into giving them 84% of the sales price, a cut to 70% was no bueno. Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty just one percent on heavy crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they’d now have to pay 16.6%.

Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil.

On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of the nations Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela giving a whole new meaning to the term, corporate takeover.

U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed President and the leaders of the coup détat.

Bush’s White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, democratically elected, but, he added, Legitimacy is something that is conferred not by just the majority of voters. I see.

With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the Presidential Palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona, the Pretend President from Exxon returned his captive Chavez back to his desk within 48 hours.

Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. Its what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela’s One Percent to violence.

In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed down the hill to the ranchos, the slums above Caracas, where shacks, once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes of cinder blocks and cement.

He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of course. She was disgusted by them, the 80% of Venezuelans who are negro e indio (Black and Indian)and poor. Chavez, himself negro e indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela’s history, shifted the oil wealth from the privileged class that called themselves Spanish, to the dark-skinned masses.

While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into a local, Arturo Quiran, a merchant seaman and no big fan of Chavez. But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,

Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The oil boom we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn’t see it.

But then came Hugo Chavez, and now the poor in his neighborhood, he said, get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also. People who never knew how to write now know how to sign their own papers.”

Chavez Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who told me, We are no longer an oil colony, went further…too much further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.

Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions and unused land by the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of plantation owners squatted. Chavez congress passed in a law in 2001 requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program long promised by Venezuela’s politicians at the urging of John F. Kennedy as part of his Alliance for Progress.

Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn’t like that one bit. In retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin and fired all the workers. Chavez seized Heinz plant and put the workers back on the job. Chavez didn’t realize that he’d just squeezed the tomatoes of Americas powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz husband, Senator John Kerry, now U.S. Secretary of State.

Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn’t give a damn.

Chavez could survive the ketchup coup, the Exxon presidency, even his taking back a piece of the windfall of oil company profits, but he dangerously tried the patience of Americas least forgiving billionaires: The Koch Brothers.

How? Well, that’s another story for another day.

Elected presidents who annoy Big Oil have ended up in exile or coffins: Mossadegh of Iran after he nationalized BP’s fields (1953), Elchibey, President of Azerbaijan, after he refused demands of BP for his Caspian fields (1993), President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador after he terminated Occidentals drilling concession (2005).

Its a chess game, Mr. Palast, Chavez told me. He was showing me a very long, and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator. And I am, Chavez said, a very good chess player.

In the film The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight bets his life on a game of chess with the Grim Reaper. Death cheats, of course, and takes the knight. No mortal can indefinitely outplay Death who, this week, Chavez must know, will checkmate the new Bolivar of Venezuela.

But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster played a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the ranchos. The One Percent of Venezuela, planning on Chavez’s death to return them the power and riches they couldn’t win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro.

Chavez sent Maduro to meet me in my downtown New York office back in 2004. In our run-down detective digs on Second Avenue, Maduro and I traded information on assassination plots and oil policy.

Even then, Chavez was carefully preparing for the day when Venezuela’s negros e indios would lose their king but still stay in the game. Class war on a chessboard. Even in death, I wouldn’t bet against Hugo Chavez.

“War’ s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good at the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”
–Ray Bradbury, from the short story, The Time Machine, 1957

Great Song for the Election

Leonard Cohen, “Democracy.”

It’s coming through a hole in the air,
From those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel
That this ain’t exactly real,
Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
From the sirens night and day,
From the fires of the homeless,
From the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all.
It’s coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay,
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It’s coming to America first,
The cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
And it’s here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It’s coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we’ll be making love again.
We’ll be going down so deep
The river’s going to weep,
And the mountain’s going to shout Amen!
It’s coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway,
Imperial, mysterious,
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight,
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Unfortunately, this country is getting less democratic, not more. With the emergence of a corporate oligarchy, a squashed and declining middle class and a huge and increasingly desperate poor and near poor lower class, this country is looking more and more like a Latin American banana republic shithole.

The flood of corporate and oligarchic cash into our money based and increasingly debased electoral process is particularly disturbing. Face facts. When you have money-based elections, you have no democracy. You can’t have democratic money-based elections – it’s oxymoronic.

This campaign was particularly disturbing in terms of democracy. The unbelievable amount of lying and distortion on one side – seldom corrected by an increasingly oligarchic and supine corpulent corpse of a corporate media – bodes particularly ill for democracy. When political campaigns become lying contests, and the media refuses to correct candidates’ lies, democracy goes right out the window.

The truth is that capitalism is pretty much incompatible with democracy. Capitalists are great at one thing: making really cool products and filling the shelves with overproduction of this, that and the other. They aren’t any good for anything else. In fact, in most other areas, capitalists are worse than useless – they’re downright toxic.

Marxists say that the culture of any capitalist country is the bourgeois culture of the ruling class. This is correct. The oligarchs own the media and the producers of culture, buy off the church and set the tone of the culture of the land. Gramsci talks about the rich creating a “cultural hegemony” under capitalism.

What you end up with in capitalist countries is a tiny oligarchic ruling class group and a vast section of the masses whose minds have been colonized and who frankly think like a rich person or even think they are rich or will be quite soon.

Under capitalism, the media is typically controlled by the 1% and serves to brainwash the 99% into going along with the projects of the 1%. The media is inherently undemocratic under capitalism.

I’m not sure what the solution is.

My opinion is that capitalists need to be kept out of politics and herded into the corner of the room where they can make stuff or fill the stores or whatever they do best. The market must be subordinated to society and not the other way around – the capitalists, the market, must serve the interests of society, of the masses, not or the ruling class, the 1%.

What to do with capitalists who refuse to serve the interests of society? I would say that they should be expropriated.

Hugo Chavez has done a great job of that. There’s a lot of money to be made as a capitalist in Venezuela as long as you go along with the popular project and serve the interests of society. Chavez routinely threatens the capitalists who won’t play along with expropriation, and a number have already been expropriated already. Well, that’s one way to get them to go along!

Venezuela: The Future of ‘21st Century Socialism’ after the Poll

Sunday, October 28, 2012
By Federico Fuentes

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s re-election on October 7 with more than 55% of the vote was vital for two reasons.

First, the Venezuelan people blocked the return to power of the neoliberal right. Had they won, these US-backed forces would have worked to roll back important advances for the poor majority won since Chavez was first elected in 1998.

These include a huge expansion in government providing basic services (such as education, health and housing), the nationalization of previous privatized strategic industries, and the promotion of popular participation in communities and workplaces.

Second, Chavez’s re-election provides a new mandate for arguably the most radical, anti-capitalist project under way in the world today.

Having emerged as a response to the crisis the country found itself in under neoliberalism, and at a time when socialism appeared moribund, Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution has radicalized to the point where it has explicitly stated its goal to be “socialism of the 21st century”.

The ability to further advance this project in Venezuela will depend on the impact of ongoing US intervention and regional integration, the intensifying class struggle within the pro-Chavez camp, and the political fate and health of Chavez.

Background

Understanding the rise of the Bolivarian revolution requires placing it within the country’s oil-rich history.

The rise of oil production in the 1920s fueled a dramatic transformation in Venezuela’s economy. Agricultural production, until then the main pillar of the economy, slumped as capital poured into the oil sector.

As oil’s contribution to state revenues rapidly rose, power and wealth became fused within the state. The result was a parasitic capitalist class that primarily sought to enrich itself by appropriating state resources.

These developments also shaped the formation of Venezuela’s popular classes. People fled the countryside en masse, flocking to the cities for their share of the oil rent.

They came to create a huge belt of barrios (shanty towns) where impoverished informal workers tried to eke out an existence. State funds were used by different political interests to win the loyalty of these sectors.

These factors underpinned Venezuela’s pervasive culture of “clientalism” and corruption.

This political set-up was sent into crisis by the economic crises and the gyration of oil prices that hit the world economy from the 1970s onwards.

Venezuela’s 1976 oil nationalization only deepened this trend. The state oil company PDVSA came to operate as a “state within the state”, operating largely independently of any governmental control.

Within PDVSA, private appropriation of public resources continued unabated, while US-based corporations kept control over oil production.

State income instead experienced a steep decline, falling from US$1500 per person in 1975 to $350 per person in 1999 (in 1998 US dollars).

International financial institutions advised Venezuela’s rulers to resolve the state’s fiscal crisis by shifting the burden onto the people.

A February 1989 International Monetary Fund austerity package caused fuel prices to skyrocket overnight. This was the trigger for an explosion of mass discontent: an immense uprising that rocked Caracas for four days, extending outwards to several other cities and towns.

Although quelled by brutal repression, the Caracazo marked a point of no return for a society reeling from a deep economic slump and a crisis of the state and political system.

Throughout the next decade, about 7000 protests took place as new dynamic forms of local organization began to emerge in the barrios.

Given the state’s role in controlling the nation’s wealth, the state became the focus of a steady stream of demands that progressively became an unstoppable wave.

Rise of Chavez

Within this context, the leader of a clandestine dissident current within Venezuela’s armed forces — Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez — captured the collective imagination of the poor majority when he led a failed military rebellion in 1992.

Jailed after the rebellion, Chavez emerged two years later resolved to stand in the 1998 presidential elections.

He began campaigning across the country, arguing the only way to achieve real independence and eradicate poverty was by giving power to the people.

Alongside setting up a new electoral party, the Movement for a Fifth Republic (MVR), Chavez called for the formation of a Patriotic Pole (PP) to unite all those parties and organizations that supported his candidature.

Chavez’s message enabled him to tap into the deep discontent among Venezuela’s popular classes and unify the various strands of the left.

On December 6, 1998, Chavez was elected as president, winning 56.2% of the vote.

However, from the beginning it was clear that winning elections was not the same as taking state power. PDVSA remained tightly under the control of the traditional business elites and the allegiance of large sections of the military to any project for radical change remained unknown.

The new government was also conscious that its mass popularity was not rooted in well-organized social organizations. The dispersed and unorganized nature of “chavismo” meant the center of gravity lay with executive power.

As such, the pace and course of reforms has tended to be driven almost exclusively by initiatives taken from above. Critically, with each advance, Chavez sought to organize and consolidate the social base.

Chavez’s first move was to convene a democratically-elected constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. The aim was to shift the rules of a game that had been traditionally stacked in favor of the old political class.

In opposition to the corrupt “representative” democracy that had allowed the same elites to monopolize power for decades, the new constitution proposed a “participatory and protagonist” democracy, where power resided among the people.

The challenge for the Bolivarian forces was to turn this novel idea into reality, which would require an inevitable showdown with the traditional elites, backed and funded by Washington.

Over the next three years, these two competing blocs faced off in three decisive battles. Each time, the pro-revolution forces came out victorious, and consolidated their military, economic and political hegemony.

Showdowns

The first major showdown occurred on April 11, 2002, when an opposition rally against Chavez morphed into a military coup that overthrew him and installed the head of the country’s chamber of commerce.

The coup was defeated by a civic-military uprising. Hundreds of officers who supported the coup were later removed, taking control of the armed forces out of the hands of the old elites.

The second major bid to bring down Chavez took place at the end of the same year, when an alliance between PDVSA management, capitalist elites, the corporate media and corrupt trade union officials sought to halt production in the strategic oil sector.

In response, loyal PDVSA workers, soldiers, and community activists mobilized to break the back of the bosses’ strike.

This mobilization from below enabled the Venezuelan government to purge PDVSA of its right-wing bureaucracy, and placed the company firmly in the hands of the government.

The leaps forward in worker and community organization that occurred during this struggle proved crucial to defeating the third major offensive by the opposition: the August 2004 recall referendum on Chavez’s presidency.

Chavez’s victory, in a poll made possible because of democratic reforms introduced by the new constitution, consolidated his democratic credentials.

With the military and PDVSA under control, and resting on an increasingly organized social base, the Chavez government was able to launch a range of experiments during 2003-2005 aimed at deepening peoples’ power.

These included initiatives such as the social missions that provide free health and education, and economic enterprises such as cooperatives and worker-run factories. These helped tackle poverty while simultaneously increasing the organizational capacity of the masses.

By the time of Chavez’s re-election bid at the end of 2006, the Bolivarian revolution could also count on a growing alliance of progressive and left governments in the region. This opened the way to greater regional cooperation and integration, a key objective of the Bolivarian revolution.

However, it was also clear the revolution had not decisively broken the resistance of corporate power and replaced the old, corrupt state that served corporate power with a new power built from below.

Anti-capitalist offensive

After winning the December 2006 presidential elections, Chavez unleashed a new anti-capitalist offensive.

At his January 8 inauguration ceremony, Chavez explained that the goal of this new term was to “transfer political, social, and economic power” to the people. To do so it was vital to dismantle the old state.

Chavez said the goal of 21st century socialism required advancing on three fronts at the same time: increasing social ownership over the means of production, encouraging greater workplace democracy, and directing production toward social needs.

To achieve this ambitious agenda, Chavez called for all revolutionaries to help form a united party of the revolution, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Four-and-a-half million people joined the PSUV in its initial recruitment drive, a clear sign of the level of support for the initiative.

Over the next six years, the Chavez government carried out a wave of nationalizations in the oil, electricity, telecommunications, banking, steel, cement, and food production sector as it tried to reassert national sovereignty over the economy.

The overall result was that the state had the necessary weight across strategic sectors of the economy to dictate production goals. The threat of expropriation loomed for those that refused to cooperate.

The spate of nationalizations was more the result of government initiatives (in response to the needs the poor) than workers’ struggle, and Chavez continuously emphasized that nationalization alone did not equate with socialism.

To help stimulate worker participation, the government initiated a process of workers’ control in the state-owned steel, aluminum and electricity companies.

The promotion of grassroots communal councils, and later communes (made up of elected representatives from communal councils), was also an important focus of the Chavez government during this term.

These councils were aimed at building upon and linking the various forms of existing community groups. The communal councils were charged with diagnosing the main problems facing their communities and creating a plan to resolve them.

Funding for these projects came from the state, but all major decisions were made in citizen’s assemblies. This was a unique experiment in democratizing the redistribution of oil revenue while promoting community empowerment.

In 2009, the government took a further step by promoting the communes. These aim to encompass several communal councils within a self-defined community to collectively tackle problems on a larger scale.

These new forms of organization have involved unparalleled numbers in community organizing. They have come to be seen as the building blocs of a new state.

Internal class struggle

This simultaneous push for nationalization, workers control and community councils also brought to the fore the class struggle that existed within chavismo.

A 2009 banking crisis led to several banks being nationalized and their owners jailed. This process revealed the existence of a sector within the revolutionary process that had enriched itself through its connections to the state, popularly referred to as the boliburguesia (“Bolivarian bourgeoisie”).

Moves to transfer greater power to workers and communities faced mounting resistance from within the existing state bureaucracy.

Along with the persistent problems of corruption and clientalism, worker and community activists increasingly complained that company and state officials sought to defend their positions of power.

By early last year, Chavez was also denouncing the vices that plagued the PSUV. He warned: “The old way of doing politics is devouring us, the corruption of politics is devouring us … the old capitalist values have infiltrated us from all sides.”

The party needed to return to its principles, otherwise it risked following the path of the MVR, which only really operated as an electoral vehicle.

Recognizing these problems, Chavez launched the Great Patriotic Pole (GPP) in October last year, calling on all pro-revolution social movements and parties to unite to ensure a decisive victory in the 2012 presidential elections.

More than 30,000 different groups signed up. In the end, the votes of the non-PSUV parties (which numbered around 1.7 million) and social movements that did not appear on the ballot (as they were not electoral registered) and therefore called for a vote for the PSUV despite not being involved in the party, were decisive in securing Chavez’s victory.

Challenges

As Chavez prepares to start a new term in government, Venezuela’s revolution faces three main challenges.

The first is the threat from the US, which has recently made some gains in the region such as the coup against progressive Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo, and the Venezuelan opposition it backs in its bid to oust Chavez.

The second is the revolution’s ability to deal with the twin problems of corruption and bureaucratism. Overcoming these challenges will require greater popular participation through initiatives such as the communes and the push for workers’ control.

Consolidating the unity achieved through the GPP could help lead in this regard.

The third challenge, which has become ever more apparent since Chavez’s diagnosis with cancer, is the need to create a collective leadership.

History will record that the Bolivarian revolution succeeded in rolling back neoliberalism and laying the foundations for a transition to 21st century socialism.

The dynamic relationship that has existed so far between Chavez and the masses has been a key factor in ensuring this.

Chavez has played a dominant leadership role in the Venezuelan revolution. This has been criticized in some quarters, but his role must be placed within the historic context outlined: one of a Venezuela marked by intense ferment from below but varying organizational strength of the social movements.

At each step, Chavez has launched initiatives to encourage the self-organization of the people. Through this process the Venezuelan people have increasingly taken the destiny of their country into their own hands.

His role as the key figure in the revolution and the trust placed in him by the poor majority make Chavez, for now, irreplaceable.

His re-election to the presidency in the face of a reinvigorated opposition, demonstrated once again that most Venezuelans believe he is the sole figure capable of leading the country forward.

The future of the process will depend on increasing the self-organization of the masses and the development of a collective leadership that can support, and be capable of substituting for Chavez’s singular role.

[Federico Fuentes is a Socialist Alliance and Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network activist. He has lived in Venezuela as part of Green Left Weekly’s Caracas bureau. With Michael Fox and Roger Burbach, Fuentes is the co-author of the forthcoming book Latin America Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First Century Socialism.]

“How the U.S. Played Russian Roulette with Nuclear War,” by Noam Chomsky

Great article by Chomsky shows just how sickening US imperialism really is. The Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by the US, which was threatening to invade Cuba since the Bay of Pigs operation was defeated. The purpose of Operation Mongoose, a series of often-terrorist attacks and sabotage, was to prepare for a US invasion of Cuba.

In order to ward off the invasion, the Cubans asked for the missiles to be installed there. The only reason it was resolved was because Khrushchev backed down agreed to Kennedy’s outrageously one-sided terms. However, the US did agree to remove missiles from Turkey and to not attack Cuba. The Pentagon wanted to attack Cuba several times during the crisis, but Kennedy turned them down. He is to be commended for this.

The Soviets pointed out that the US reserved the right to place nuclear missiles anywhere on Earth targeting the USSR, China and anyone else, including right up on their borders (the US put missiles on the USSR’s borders in Turkey), but the USSR and its allies had no right to reciprocate by placing defensive missiles in Cuba.

As usual, the hypocrisy of US imperialism won out. The US has a right to target anyone on Earth with whatever weapons it has, and place those weapons anywhere, even right on country’s borders, but not one nation on Earth has the right to fight back against US imperialism by responding in kind.

US imperialism is one sick, depraved monster!

One thing that Kennedy was worried about was not that the Cuban missiles would attack the US (the lie that was portrayed to gullible American fools) but instead that the missiles would serve to deter the murderous meddlings of US imperialism elsewhere in the Hemisphere. Kennedy worried that the missiles might deter a US invasion of Venezuela that Kennedy was then planning.

We see the same thing with Iran. The US and Israel are presently targeting Iran with nukes. If Iran got a bomb, they might be able to even the score and defend themselves against US and Israeli hegemony. This cannot be tolerated.

Prior to that, Kennedy had run for President on a platform involving a “missile gap” with the US and the USSR. The Soviets supposedly had many more missiles than we did, and it was all Eisenhower’s fault. However, this was a complete lie, and Kennedy knew it at the time. It was disgusting of Kennedy to lie his way into office like that.

During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the US threatened nuclear war again against the USSR while authorizing Israel to break a cease-fire that had been imposed on both sides.

Again in 1983, Reagan threatened the USSR again by placing Pershing missiles on 5 minute launch and instituting massive US air and naval probe attacks on the USSR. This led to a major war scare.

India and Pakistan have also had a few nuclear war near misses and scares.

Chomsky concludes the article by noting that nuclear war probably cannot be held off forever, and some day, someone won’t back down, or a scare will turn into a launch. He finishes by saying that nuclear missiles are incompatible with the survival of mankind.

How the U.S. Played Russian Roulette with Nuclear War

by Noam Chomsky

The American attacks are often dismissed in U.S. commentary as silly pranks, CIA shenanigans that got out of hand. That is far from the truth. The best and the brightest had reacted to the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion with near hysteria, including the president, who solemnly informed the country that:

“The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong … can possibly survive.”

And they can only survive, he evidently believed, by massive terror though that addendum was kept secret, and is still not known to loyalists who perceive the ideological enemy as having “gone on the attack” the near-universal perception, as Kern observes.

After the Bay of Pigs defeat, historian Piero Gleijeses writes that JFK launched a crushing embargo to punish the Cubans for defeating a U.S.-run invasion, and “asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the ‘terrors of the earth’ on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him.”

The phrase “terrors of the earth” is Arthur Schlesinger’ s, in his quasi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility to conduct the terrorist war, and informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries “the top priority in the United States Government all else is secondary no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared” in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime.

The Mongoose operations were run by Edward Lansdale, who had ample experience in “counterinsurgency” a standard term for terrorism that we direct. He provided a timetable leading to “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime” in October 1962.

The “final definition” of the program recognized that “final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention, ” after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that US military intervention would take place in October 1962 when the missile crisis erupted. The events just reviewed help explain why Cuba and Russia had good reason to take such threats seriously.

Years later, Robert McNamara recognized that Cuba was justified in fearing an attack. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too,” he observed at a major conference on the missile crisis on the 40th anniversary.

As for Russia’s “desperate effort to give the USSR the appearance of equality”, to which Stern refers, recall that Kennedy’s very narrow victory in the 1960 election relied heavily on a fabricated “missile gap” concocted to terrify the country and to condemn the Eisenhower administration as soft on national security. There was indeed a “missile gap”, but strongly in favor of the US.

The first “public, unequivocal administration statement” on the true facts, in his authoritative study of the Kennedy missile program, was in October 1961, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric informed the Business Council that “the U.S. would have a larger nuclear delivery system left after a surprise attack than the nuclear force which the Soviet Union could employ in its first strike.”

The Russians, of course, were well aware of their relative weakness and vulnerability. They were also aware of Kennedy’s reaction when Khrushchev offered to sharply reduce offensive military capacity and proceeded to do so unilaterally when Kennedy failed to respond: namely, Kennedy undertook a huge armaments program.

In Retrospect

The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are how it began, and how it ended. It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962.

It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would undermine the fundamental principle that the US has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else, and right on their borders; and the accompanying principle that Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an imminent US invasion.

To establish these principles firmly, it was entirely proper to face a high risk of war of unimaginable destruction, and to reject simple, and admittedly fair, ways to end the threat.

Garthoff observes that “in the United States, there was almost universal approbation for President Kennedy’s handling of the crisis.” Dobbs writes that “the relentlessly upbeat tone was established by the court historian, Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, who wrote that Kennedy had ‘dazzled the world’ through a ‘combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated’.”

Rather more soberly, Stern partially agrees, noting that Kennedy repeatedly rejected the militant advice of his advisers and associates who called for military force and dismissal of peaceful options.

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour. Graham Allison joins many others in presenting them as “a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general”. In a very narrow sense, that judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal that the president stood apart from others, sometimes almost all others, in rejecting premature violence.

There is, however, a further question: how should JFK’s relative moderation in management of the crisis be evaluated against the background of the broader considerations just reviewed?

But that question does not arise in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture, which accepts without question the basic principle that the U.S. effectively owns the world by right, and is, by definition, a force for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, so that it is plainly entirely proper for the U.S. to deploy massive offensive force all over the world, while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that direction, or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon.

That doctrine is the primary official charge against Iran today: it might pose a deterrent to US and Israeli force. It was a consideration during the missile crisis as well. In internal discussion, the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that Cuban missiles might deter a US invasion of Venezuela then under consideration. So “the Bay of Pigs was really right,” JFK concluded.

The principles still contribute to the constant risk of nuclear war. There has been no shortage of severe dangers since the missile crisis. Ten years later, during the 1973 Israel-Arab war, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert (Defcon 3) to warn the Russians to keep hands off while he was secretly authorizing Israel to violate the ceasefire imposed by the US and Russia.

When Reagan came into office a few years later, the US launched operations probing Russian defenses and simulating air and naval attacks, while placing Pershing missiles in Germany with a five-minute flight time to Russian targets, providing what the CIA called a “super-sudden first strike” capability.

Naturally, this caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., has repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first strike minutes before launch, after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the sources of the conflict remain.

Both have refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty, along with Israel, and have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs until today, in the case of India, now a U.S. ally. War threats in the Middle East, which might become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever. It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein , almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable”:

Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?

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.

“Washington and the Cuban Revolution Today: Ballad of a Never-Ending Policy: Part I – The Myth of the Miami Lobby, by Ike Nahem

Very nice piece on Cuba on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The first of a 3-part series. Warning: long, runs to 50 pages on the Net.

The Obama Administration, consistent with the approach of the Bush Administration, has made a political decision to subordinate foreign policy and national interest-based decisions to domestic politics with respect to its Cuba policy.

There is a bipartisan group of members of Congress – Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate – who represent Florida, a state where there are many swing votes that deliver the electoral votes for any president.

These individuals not only deliver votes, but they deliver campaign finance, and generally make a lot of noise, and that combination has persuaded the White House that reelection is more of a priority than taking the heavy lifting to set the United States on the path of -normalization with Cuba for now.

– Julia Sweig, Director for Latin American Studies, US Council on Foreign Relations

The essential continuity of US anti-Cuba policy under the Barack Obama Administration has been a source of mystery and confusion to many who oppose US sanctions. Within the US academic, think-tank, and media meritocracies – who often go in and out of government office – many are frustrated, even embarrassed, by Washington’s continued pariah status over Cuba in Latin America and internationally as registered in annual lopsided, humiliating votes against the US policy in the United Nations.

So why does Washington’s economic and political war against Cuba – the longest unchanged foreign policy in US history, entering its sixth decade – persist? Why is Cuba such an outsize question in US politics?

Why does Washington continue a policy that is utterly isolated in world and regional forums, holding up US diplomats and policymakers to derision and contempt?

The stated reasons given – the supposed lack of “democracy” and “human rights” in Cuba – reek with such misinformation, half-truths, obvious hypocrisy and arbitrary selectivity that they cannot be taken seriously and must be dismissed out of hand. I will comprehensively take up the question of democratic rights, human rights, civil liberties and the Cuban Revolution in Part III of this essay.

The most common explanation for these questions is expressed in the quotation by Julia Sweig that opens this essay.

Sweig is a scholar with the super-Establishment Council on Foreign Relations and is their Director for Latin America Studies. She is the author of the excellent book Inside the Cuban Revolution and is a very informed observer and analyst of Cuban history and politics. She is unquestionably a strong opponent of US sanctions against Cuba and in favor of normalized diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana.

Sweig and other dissenters within Establishment circles, as well as many elected officials purportedly opposed to US policy, point to, or at, the Cuban-American population and elected officials who form in Washington a so-called, and supposedly so-powerful, “Miami Lobby.” Some even go so far as to say US policy and “national interest” is being held “hostage” by this “Lobby.” Such nonsense crosses over into virtual conspiracy theories.

This argument and explanation turns political reality on its head. It has never been true and, in today’s world, it has never been less credible. It is a myth and an illusion that the Cuban-American community and Cuban-American office-holding politicians are the driving, determining force behind US policies toward Cuba. US foreign policy in general, and Cuba policy in particular, is driven by the interests of the US ruling capitalist class of bosses, bankers, and bondholders.

It is primarily mediated through its two political parties and state institutions and secondarily through its big-business media, think tanks, and academic minions. Cuban-American bourgeois politicians are part of that mix, prominent, but far from decisive.

Washington has never, and does not now, need the aging representatives of the ex-ruling powers of Cuba, or their descendants, to explain to them why they should oppose the Cuban Revolution and the domestic and international policies of the revolutionary socialist Cuban government.

The actual political affect of the “Miami Lobby” myth (which through endless repetition has become almost a mantra) is to take the political focus off the US government and place it on the Cuban-American community and a handful of Cuban-American elected officials. It puts the cart before the horse, the caboose at the head of the train

Such politicians of Cuban origin in the US Congress as Republican Florida representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, and Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio can be useful as a cover or a foil for a US policy that is so unpopular. Cuban-Americans can be blamed and chided by those opposed to the policy and praised and defended by those in favor of the policy. But they do not make the policy.

The myth of the “Miami Lobby” cuts across building a broad protest movement and the kind of effective action that can actually force a change in the policy. By homogenizing (or worse, demonizing) the contradictory and increasingly polarized Cuban-American community, the myth of the “Miami Lobby” has become an obstacle to winning over more Cuban-Americans to oppose US sanctions.

The fact is that for over five decades now there has been a bipartisan policy and a common goal of defeating and eradicating the Cuban Revolution. None of this has ever been, or is it now, primarily motivated by the interests of the Cuban-American exile community in Miami.

The origins and continuity of Washington’s hostility to the Cuban Revolution is homegrown. It flows out of the politics, policies and example of the Cuban Revolution – both inside Cuba and in its resonance across the Americas and internationally in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and even inside the advanced capitalist powers.

The Impact of the Cuban Revolution on US Politics

Cuba appears, and is presented as, a minor question in US politics and foreign policy. This is all the more so since the end of the so-called “Cold War” and its decades-long conflict and clash between Washington and Moscow. In those days Washington’s lurid propaganda painted Cuba’s revolutionary government as a “client” and “puppet” of the former Soviet Union.

While this was always consciously insulting and factually absurd, the alliance of Cuba with the Soviet bloc was used to fabricate a Cuban “threat” to the US and the American people. (October 2012 will be the 50th anniversary of the traumatic “Cuban Missile Crisis, which was used to convince many working people in the United States on the “threat” from Cuba.)

Independent of the Soviet Union, the “Cuba Question,” that is the political dynamics and impact of the Cuban Revolution, has always had major weight and importance in US politics and foreign policy, especially in the Americas. This remains the case today even though Cuba is a small island of less than 12 million people and the United States is a globe-straddling economic, financial, political, and military superpower, albeit in relative decline today on all these fronts.

The end of the “Cold War” and the political disappearance of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies over 20 years ago has not seen any easing up of US anti-Cuba policy. On the contrary, it has essentially deepened.

The consensus of the US ruling class and central policymakers remains that Washington’s economic and political war against Cuba must remain and continue in today’s post-Cold War. That world reality has developed into a new era, if not historical epoch, defined by the worst generalized economic and financial crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In public US politicians mock, deride, and denigrate Cuba, it is clear that both ruling parties in Washington continue to see Cuba as a formidable political force with significant moral and political authority, especially in the Americas, but worldwide. There is virtual unanimity in both parties that the revolutionary Cuban government needs to be confronted and defeated, not reconciled with on the basis of respect for Cuban sovereignty.

From Washington’s point of view, the Cuban government promotes anti-imperialist (or, as they falsely put it, “anti-American”) revolutionary action, has not renounced the program of international socialist revolution, and, short of that, supports any policies and struggles that defend the interests of workers, peasants, and youth.

Such a perspective clearly impacts negatively on the economic interests of US capital and Washington’s political and “strategic” prerogatives in defense of those interests.

Tactical Divisions Over Cuba Policy

It is common on the “US Left” to become politically disoriented and disarmed (and safely in the hands of “lesser evil” liberals and Democrats) by the intense and even brutal forms expressed over what are in actual substance relatively minor tactical differences over policy between the two imperialist parties and within the ruling class in the United States. Cuba is a classic case in point.

Every year in the United Nations there is a lopsided (in 2011 it was 186 for and 2 against with 3 abstentions) anti-Washington vote on the “Necessity of Ending the Economic, Commercial and Financial Embargo Imposed by the United States against Cuba” that gets bare mention in the US corporate media.

Across the Americas, Washington’s anti-Cuba policies are routinely ridiculed and opposed in every Hemispheric and regional forum, including “Summits” of the Organization of American States, traditionally a servile tool of US policy and Hemispheric domination.

Cuba’s strong defense of its sovereignty, its revolutionary ideas, and its practice of international solidarity with oppressed and exploited humanity, has given the socialist island important political and moral authority and weight in world politics – way out of proportion to its size, numbers, economic strength, or military firepower.

This is a cause of great irritation and consternation for the US rulers and their acolytes of the “Miami Lobby.” But it is a great testament to the power of ideas in the world. In truth there is no greater power on earth than when progressive and revolutionary ideas inspire and grip millions and become a material political force.

How to achieve the common goal of overturning the Cuban government in real political time naturally leads to furious tactical differences within the US government and within and between the Democratic and Republican parties who share and exercise power in the US capitalist state. This is inevitable given how isolated and unpopular the US anti-Cuba policy is in the Americas, in the world, and even inside the United States.

Maneuvers, shifts, and concessions occur from one year to the next, and from one White House to the next, all reacting to the pressure of events. It’s all aimed at positioning Washington off the defensive in order to more effectively disorient, undermine, and overwhelm the Cuban Revolution.

Obama vs. Bush

President Obama has made some shifts and even partial retreats from the anti-Cuba rules enforced by George W. Bush. These are objectively positive. It’s good that some Cuban musicians, artists and scholars have been allowed into the US at the invitation of universities and cultural institutions.

It’s good that Cuban-Americans are allowed to travel to their country of origin without the previous insulting bureaucratic restrictions. It’s better than before that rules for licenses allowing limited travel to Cuba by other US citizens have been relatively loosened.

These moves by the Obama Administration are in no way a shift away from the basic US policy of “regime change,” that is, destroying the Cuban Revolution. They basically move US rules back to the norms under the Clinton Administration and the first period of the George W. Bush Administration, before they were tightened up with the triumphalist hubris that followed the US invasion of Iraq.

At that time Bush selected Otto Reich as his Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, along with other important figures among the counter-revolutionary exile groupings such as Roger Noriega, a former top staffer for ultra-right, notoriously racist North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Such were the personnel directing the Hemispheric policies of Bush’s Administration.

But this did not work out well for US policy and position in Latin America, particularly after Washington’s (and Reich’s) fingerprints were found all over the failed April 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela against the popular, elected government of Hugo Chavez. Bush was forced to remove both Reich and then later his successor Noriega and retreat from the hyper-arrogant rhetoric and posturing toward Latin America that became politically costly to Washington.

What Obama has done is shift away from the more bellicose language and Bush-style bombast around Cuba by making minimal adjustments in policy around travel and visa rules to try and undo the political damage of the Bush years.

Nevertheless, Obama has been quite strikingly unsuccessful in winning any support for the US anti-Cuba position in the Americas, which remains completely isolated, excepting the right-wing Stephen Harper government in Ottawa. Canada still continues to be the largest source of tourism to Cuba and carries out considerable commercial exchange with the island.

Under Obama, the Treasury and Justice Departments have stepped up harassment and prosecutions of US or foreign businesses deemed to “violate” US “rules” and sanctions against commercial and financial exchange and collaboration with Cuba. Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon recently stated, in an interview with French academic and journalist Salim Lamrani:

…[T]he Obama administration has been considerably more consistent in the imposition of fines and sanctions against foreign companies who violate the framework of sanctions against Cuba, that engage in business transactions with us…

A number of banks have been fined several millions of dollars, more than 100 million in one case, for conducting dollar-based business transactions and for having opened dollars accounts with Cuban companies.

On June 12, 2012 it was announced by the US Department of Justice that the Dutch Bank ING agreed to a $619 million fine for violating the US “Trading with the Enemy Act,” by moving US currency from trades with Cuba (and also Iran) through US financial networks. According to the online Guardian Express Newspaper, “The fine is considered to be the largest ever in the history of the US financial system.”

Since the Obama Administration took office in 2009 major European banks Credit Suisse, Barclays, and Lloyds have reached similar settlements with the US government over financial dealings with Cuba.

The Obama Administration continues to support and promote State Department and CIA overt and covert programs that aim at subverting and undermining the Cuban government, and which landed State Department agent Alan Gross in a Cuban prison.

The idea that Gross’s conviction and incarceration is the impediment to improved US-Cuban relations which Obama wants to pursue is a very bad joke.

Washington’s actions in dispatching agents like Gross – just one instance of a large-scale policy of unremitting economic and political war against Cuba funded to the tune of many dozens of millions of dollars in openly budgeted allocations, not counting resources used for covert programs – represents the real impediment to improved and normalized relations.

Obama’s State Department continues to keep Cuba on its list of “nations supporting terrorism,” a huge lie and vile slander. Obama continues to ignore Cuban diplomatic initiatives for bilateral cooperation around issues such as drug trafficking and hurricane response coordination. Obama continues to resist the unanimous opinion of Latin American and Caribbean member states of the Organization of American States to end the exclusion of Cuba.

Obama continues to dismiss and resist any attempts to negotiate mechanisms, including any “exchanges,” that would release the Cuban Five, four of whom are in their 14th year of incarceration, while one, Rene Gonzalez, was released after serving his full term, but is not being allowed to return home to Cuba.

Another clear sign of the essential continuity in Obama’s anti-Cuba policy from the Bush Administration – and really all previous White Houses since Eisenhower – is in Obama’s appointment of Ricardo Zuniga as “Director for Western Hemispheric Affairs” for the White House National Security Council. Zuniga was formerly a key player in the US Interests Section in Havana under Bush, organizing the extreme provocations against Cuba led by Interests Section Chief James Cason.

Looking at the balance sheet of Obama’s policies toward Cuba compared to that of George W. Bush, recalls the classic line of Groucho Marx: “I’ve worked myself up to nothing from a state of extreme poverty.”

Waves and Patterns of Cuban Emigration to the US

There have always been Cuban workers who emigrated to, lived, and worked in the United States. However, the origin and formation of a mass Cuban-American “community” began with the large-scale emigration after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

Like all genuine social revolutions, the Cuban Revolution was marked by deep-going and irreversible class struggle and polarization. In the first period after the Cuban Revolution some 5% of the then Cuban population of 6 million made its way to Florida and the US where it was received with open arms and special privileges as “refugees from communism,” obviating regular immigration requirements.

The first wave of exiles were overwhelmingly from the Cuban ruling classes, their supporters, hangers on, and enforcers in the military and police apparatuses, as well as the extensive organized–crime networks – narcotics marketers, brothel owners and pimps, casino magnates, and so on – that flourished in the Batista era.

As the Cuban Revolution began to implement radical economic and social policies that benefited peasants, agricultural and industrial workers, and the impoverished majority in general, large layers of the relatively small Cuban middle and professional classes followed the largest landowners, capitalists, army officers, cops, and gangsters into exile.

While a small minority, it was nevertheless hundreds of thousands of people.

One example of this pattern was in the over 50% of the 6,000 doctors in Cuba who left the country after the Revolution. These doctors overwhelmingly served the Cuban upper and middle classes. The average Cuban rarely, if ever, saw a doctor their entire life. Life expectancy was in the low 50s. Infant mortality was over 60 per 1000, among the world’s highest.

Today Cuba graduates 10,000 new doctors every year; life expectancy is approaching 80 and infant mortality is 4.5 per 1000, among the world’s lowest.

Additionally it should be noted that these first waves of emigrant-exiles were overwhelmingly Caucasian; among the most far-reaching policies of the revolutionary Cuban government was the smashing of Jim Crow-style segregation laws and policies on the island. Cubans of African origin were among the strongest and most enthusiastic supporters and protagonists of the Revolution, which was echoed in the wide support for the Cuban Revolution among African-Americans in the United States.

Of course, there was no mechanical one-to one political correspondence in the class polarization that accompanied the Cuban Revolution. Not every middle-class Cuban opposed the Revolution and split to Miami; a good number were in support or ambivalent but patriotic.

For an excellent portrayal of this early period of the Revolution from the vantage point of an alienated middle-class Cuban, see the masterful, world-acclaimed Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea.

And there were a small number of workers, peasants, and Afro-Cubans who actively supported the counterrevolution. Nevertheless, it is an indisputable fact that the large majority of the Cuban population at the time, and overwhelmingly so among working people, peasants, youth, and Black Cubans, embraced the Revolution as their own work and actively defended it.

Many thousands of Cuban exiles were recruited by the US military and intelligence apparatus for covert action against Cuba. Business and financial opportunities were established for the Cuban ex-bourgeoisie in south Florida by their US government and business benefactors.

The US Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, which allowed for quick permanent residency and expedited citizenship for declared opponents of the Revolution. Over $1.3 billion, nearly $10 billion in current dollar value, was allocated for direct financial assistance to exiles.

The Mariel Boatlift

Over several months in 1980, a series of provocations against Cuba by the James “Jimmy” Carter Administration, working with the conservative Peruvian military government, led to gatherings of up to 10,000 Cubans at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana wanting to leave the country. (Millions of Cubans mobilized at this time in support of the Revolution.)

The death of a Cuban police guard at the Peruvian Embassy led the Cuban government to declare a policy of allowing all Cubans who wanted to leave the island to bypass existing legal processes. Cuban-Americans were invited to come pick up their relatives at the Mariel Harbor. Some 125,000 additional Cubans arrived in the US during the so-called Mariel Boatlift.

Today the Brazilian government and companies are working with Cuba in a major industrial project to make Mariel a state-of-the-world port for freight and trade which, when completed and operational, will be a major boost for the Cuban economy.

This wave of exiles was of a much different social and class composition than the first waves.

They were more on the margins of Cuban society, unassimilated into the working class, indifferent or hostile to the revolutionary process in Cuba. Many had histories of petty criminal activity in areas with no operating space or “market” in Cuba such as gambling, loan sharking, commercial sex, and narcotics trafficking.

Most simply wanted to leave Cuba and go to the United States to join relatives or friends and pursue perceived business opportunities. They thought that the United States would be a far more fertile arena and market for their social and business – and criminal – proclivities.

US propaganda accused the Cuban government at the time of emptying its prisons and even mental hospitals and shoving “the dregs of Cuban society” onto boats bound for the US. Cuban authorities vehemently denied this and demanded proof of such deeds, which was never delivered, although the slander lived on.

For Fidel Castro’s passionate explanation of the entire affair and response to US slanders see, An Encounter With Fidel: An Interview With Gianni Mina, Ocean Press, pages 61-67.

The “Special Period” Wave

In the 1990s, under the severe economic conditions of what was called in Cuba the “Special Period,” following the collapse of the governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern European “socialist camp,” thousands more Cubans left the island lured by the Cuban Adjustment Act and the refusal of the US to implement agreements for legal, organized immigration.

The relative improvement of the Cuban economy in recent years and the ending of travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans under President Obama, combined with the onset of economic depression and crisis in the US and Europe, has reduced the volume and political volatility of Cuban emigration to the United States.

There are higher proportions of Irish and Israeli emigrants to the United States than Cubans, and this without either the expedited privileges of the Cuban Adjustment Act or the accompanying demonization and propaganda attacking those countries from the US government and big-business media.

Given the economic catastrophes currently gripping Greece, Spain, Portugal, and other “Eurozone” economies millions of working people have been displaced and forced to consider emigration. It would be interesting to look at immigration statistics in those countries compared to Cuba today. Many from Spain and Portugal are today even emigrating to Latin America.

In any case what stands out is that the large majority of Cuban working people continue to stand their ground in Cuba and to fight for their revolution despite the Cuban Adjustment Act, despite unremitting US threats, sanctions, and a sense of siege, and despite often grinding economic conditions. Today these Cubans are debating and fighting to improve and change what has to be changed

Elian Gonzalez

The case of Elian Gonzalez in the 1990s was a political turning point that highlighted the developing and roiling contradictions within the Cuban-American community. It set in motion politically centrifugal tendencies.

Public opinion in the US at the time overwhelmingly favored the right of Elian’s father to return to Cuba with his son. The right-wing counter-revolutionary circus in Miami acted out by Elian’s distant relatives, manipulated by right-wing Cuban American organizations, was viewed as distasteful and inhumane.

Washington tried every lure and trick to keep Elian in this country and – in what would have been a real propaganda coup – to entice his father to “defect.” But eventually they had to face the reality that this was not going to happen and that Cuban, Latin American, and US public opinion was becoming indignant.

Father and son were finally let go. The issue had riveted US politics for many months and was a real blow to the authority and political standing of the counter-revolutionary exile organizations and personalities.

The Cuban-American Community Today

Over 1.5 million people whose family origins are in Cuba are now citizens of the United States. Cuba’s current population is nearly 12 million people. Cuban-Americans are 4-5% of the Spanish-speaking US Latino population of over 40 million people.

Accurate figures are hard to specify given the large layers of undocumented working people who have migrated to enter a vast, illegal “black market” in labor to work in the fields, factories, and cities of the United States when such jobs were relatively plentiful.

These Spanish-speaking (or English, French, or Creole-speaking from the Caribbean, or Portuguese-speaking from Brazil) immigrants seeking to labor in the US came from every country and nationality, but only those of Cuban origin, under the Cuban Adjustment Act, get a very fast track to US citizenship and a legal existence to work and live.

Over three-fourths of Cuban-Americans live in Florida, 1.2 million people according to the 2010 US census. The next four states see a large numbers drop to a little over 80,000 in New Jersey and a little less than 80,000 in New York, some 75,000 in California and 35,000 in Texas. Florida is the fourth most populous US state with 18.8 million people; Cuban-Americans are less than 10% of that total.

Cuban-Americans are 30% of Florida’s Latino population. African-Americans are around 16% of Florida’s population, figures that in most counts include Black immigrants from the Caribbean. The Haitian population of south Florida is between 100-200,000 including many undocumented workers. Cubans make up 32 percent of eligible Latino voters, Puerto Ricans 28 percent, and Mexicans 9 percent.

It is absurd to extrapolate out of the size of the Cuban-American electorate an assertion that this “bloc” is decisive in “delivering” Florida’s electoral votes to a future President who must therefore “pander” to “extreme anti-Castro” positions. By manipulating statistics this could be said about any group, grouping, religious denomination or sect.

In a close race between Republicans and Democrats, don’t the 3% of Florida’s Jews become “decisive?” What about the 725,000 Puerto Ricans?

Why aren’t the Presidential campaigns pandering to the “pro-Aristide” views of Florida’s large Haitian population who by a large majority support the former Haitian President who was ushered out of country by the US military after a coup? (The anti-Aristide campaign was directly led by the above-mentioned Roger Noriega.)

The absurdity is further underscored by the fact that Florida’s Jews, Puerto Ricans, Haitians and the 70% non-Cuban Latinos are more preponderantly Democratic in their voting tendencies (if they bother, like a near-majority of eligible voters in general, to vote at all given the dismal choices), and opposed to US sanctions against Cuba than Cuban-Americans are supposedly preponderantly Republican and obsessively, knee-jerkedly, “anti-Castro.”

The truth is that, once given the legal right to do so, Cuban-Americans are defying the threats and admonitions of the Ros-Lehtinens, the Diaz-Balarts, the Menendezes, and the Rubios, that is, the Congressional faces of the “Miami Lobby,” and flocking to Cuba and reconnecting with their homeland and families.

Flights are packed and leave every day from Miami and weekly in a growing number of cities. They also rush to buy tickets and fill concert halls to see popular Cuban musicians like Los Van Van, who happen to identify with the Cuban Revolution. (On April 27, 2012 a fire was set at the company Airline Charters, one of the companies that arranges legal flights to Cuba.)

The fact is that the political domination of the old Batistaite ruling oligarchy and Cuban ex-bourgeoisie that became ensconced in South Florida and some enclaves in northern New Jersey is sputtering to the end of its era of sway. That ex-bourgeoisie was set up and established comfortably in business and with a cozy niche in US bourgeois politics over the broader Cuban-American community, and enjoyed a degree of immunity from US law by the US government

Very important, if not decisive, in this dynamic is the broader development and growth of the Latino population in the US that is not of Cuban origin and with a very different history and relationship to the “Cuba Question.”

Over decades there has been a growth and accumulated political weight in US society and politics of this broader Latino community, with a mass component of undocumented workers who were a needed source of cheap labor and high profits for US capitalists.

This broader Latino community comprises peoples of many national origins: Mexicans, Central Americans, Haitians (also concentrated in Miami as well as New York City) none of whom share the views toward Cuba, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban Revolution of the surviving first waves of immigrant-exiles from the 1960s.

The fact is that among many Latinos living and working in the United States there exists a significant degree of pride and respect, if not solidarity and affection, toward Cuba for standing up to the Yanquis with dignity, even among those far from agreeing with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Marxist views.

In fact, it can be said that the children and grandchildren of the first waves of Cuban émigrés, who, in general, are hardly partisans of the Cuban Revolution, are nevertheless more objective and curious about Cuba, and more generally in favor of normalized relations and an end to US sanctions.

This generation of Cuban-Americans has undoubtedly been shaped as much by their experiences as Latinos in the US and by their interaction in the workplace with other Latino workers and other workers, Black and Caucasian, than by their status as second or third generation exiles from Cuba and the Cuban Revolution with all that political baggage.

The ex-bourgeoisie of Cuba, although many have prospered in business and bourgeois politics from their connections and status, is in no way integrated into the US ruling class.

The bulk of Cuban-Americans today are wage workers, professionals, and small business owners. Their political views are shaped and developed primarily by the broad issues of class politics in the United States and much less, and certainly not decisively, by the imperatives of “anti-Castro” exile politics. This is all the more true as so many Cuban-Americans visit the island and become familiar with the economic and political discussions and debates dominating Cuban society today.

The ultra-right grip of the ex-Cuban bourgeoisie, and the violent terrorists trained by the CIA, on Cuban-American political viewpoints regarding US-Cuba relations is unraveling.

Ever-growing numbers, at or near majority levels, of Cuban-Americans favor normal relations with the island and an end to economic and travel sanctions. It is precisely the growing pressure from Cuban-Americans that led the Obama Administration to lift the travel restrictions on that (and only that) section of the US population.

It is of great political significance that Washington finds it more difficult to credibly hide behind the Cuban American community to justify or rationalize its anti-Cuba policy. The “Miami Lobby” has always been the directed not the directors, the puppets not the puppeteers. Hopefully the purveyors of the false “Miami Lobby” line will catch up with political reality.

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

Four Left Latin American Governments Quit OAS Defense Treaty

Four leftwing Latin American nations quit the OAS defense treaty, asking for changes in the document. The OAS has always been the whore of the US, a sickening and reactionary organization. They threw Cuba out for no good reason long ago. These heroic Latin American nations are doing what should have been done long ago. The OAS is just shit, a Cold War creation of the Yankee dogs. Get rid of it already.

Yankee go home!

The nations are Nicaragua, led by the Sandinista hero Daniel Ortega, Venezuela, led by Hugo Chavez, Ecuador, led by Rafael Correa and Bolivia, led by Evo Morales.

I am reminded of the words of the former Sandinista national anthem:

America, enemy of mankind!