I can remember clearly the rush of joy I felt when I heard the almost unbelievable news that the last three members of the Cuban Five, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino, had landed in Havana on December 17th, 2014, after 16 years of unjust incarceration in U.S. prisons. (The other two members of the Five, Fernando González, and René González, had been released previously at the end of their prison terms.) I had corresponded with Gerardo while he was in prison and seeing the pictures of him embrace his wife, Adriana Pérez, who was about to give birth to their daughter Gema, made it all seem even more miraculous.
I was in Cuba (again) during the first week of December. I traveled with a delegation of members of the National Single Payer organization, which is working to achieve a national healthcare system in the US that would fully cover everyone under a single, comprehensive, government-funded program. We visited a variety of healthcare institutions in the cities of Havana and Matanzas, the capital of the province of the same name.
One of the most memorable interactions took place at the University of Medical Sciences in Matanzas. After receiving a presentation about the organization and curriculum by one of the leaders of the institution, I asked the assembled academic and clinical professors how many of them had participated in international medical missions.
“President Biden, take Cuba off the infamous list!” exclaimed the over half a million Cubans who marched on Havana’s malecón to the US Embassy. The mass march was called for by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel earlier this week to demonstrate the absolute and total rejection of the Cuban people to the six-decade US-imposed blockade on the island as well as the inclusion of Cuba to the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list (SSoT) which together have wreaked havoc on the island’s economy.
The march was led by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and General Raúl Castro who were flanked by over half a million Cubans from all sectors of life including students, doctors, construction workers, artists, and more.
From December 9th to the 13th, the 240 delegates, coming from 30 nations from four continents, gathered for the International Conference “Cuba 2024 Decade for People of African Descent. Equality – Equity – Social Justice”, that took place in the cities of Havana and Matanzas.
Attended by 103 delegates from Cuba and 137 from the following geographical áreas:
From the Americas: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, United States, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico and Panama.
From the African continent: Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Comoros, Ghana, Niger, Senegal, Somalia, Togo and Kenya.
The 24th Summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Treaty ( ALBA-TCP ) ended with the unanimous approval of the Declaration of Principles and Commitments by the heads of state and government of the regional cooperation bloc.
The declaration was agreed upon by the leaders and high-ranking representatives who attended the summit held in Caracas, Venezuela. At the closing ceremony on Saturday, December 14, it was issued under the name “Special Declaration of the 24th ALBA-TCP Summit: Reaffirmation of the Principles, Objectives, Commitments and Banners of Struggle of ALBA-TCP,” 20 years after its founding.
This November, US president Joe Biden will leave office with the world in turmoil and US fingerprints on the bodies of untold thousands across the globe: in Gaza and Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, Pakistan and Haiti, and elsewhere.
While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.
In that vein, the US is still trying to suffocate the model of socialist Latin American integration forwarded by Cuba and Venezuela. Washington is still arming the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Lebanon, and other Israeli aggressions against “Axis of Resistance” forces in the region, namely Iran. On top of this, the US is still supporting or carrying out airstrikes against Yemen and Syria, still hoping to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine, still backing a Pakistani military dictatorship imposed with US backing, still engineering the re-invasion of Haiti, and still plotting an economic war (and perhaps a hot one) against China.
The Biden administration genuinely believed it could remake the world in its vision, and particularly the Middle East à la the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush administration. A Nation article by Aída Chávez laid out Biden’s disturbing plan for the Middle East and wider world, a plan that relies on Israel successfully carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:
One goal of the “Biden doctrine,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it, is to achieve the “global legitimacy” necessary to “take on Iran in a more aggressive manner.” With Hamas out of the picture and a demilitarized Palestinian state under the influence of the Gulf regimes, the thinking goes, the US will have Arab cover in the region to be able to counter Iran – and the cheap drones they’re worried about – and then put all of its energy toward a confrontation with China.
Following Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, US officials jumped at the chance to push “a much wider agenda – including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions.” This “next stage” includes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the signing of a US-Saudi defence treaty, and the Gulf monarchies leading Gaza’s so-called “reconstruction” as a pro-US “emirate,” in the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
Following the killing of Sinwar, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated, “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.” Lindsey Graham elaborated on the “historic opportunities” of which Washington hopes to take advantage. “MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza,” he said in a recent interview. “[They will] create an enclave in the Palestine.”
According to Bob Woodward’s new book War, Graham reportedly told Biden, “It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.” To which Biden responded, “Let’s do it.”
While Washington aims to violently remake the Middle East to serve its geopolitical aims – a stark contrast to China’s recent peacemaking between Saudi Arabia and Iran – other targets of imperialism continue to suffer as well.
In April 2022, the Biden administration helped engineer the removal of popular Pakistani president Imran Khan from office. The US wanted Khan ousted because he entertained positive relations with China and Russia, two powers that Washington views as a threat to its hegemony. As Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu stated in a now infamous cypher to the Pakistani military, “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington.”
Since the US-backed coup against Khan, the Pakistani military has taken extreme measures to prevent the ousted president’s return to power, including legal onslaughts, the arrest of thousands of supporters, crackdowns on social media activists, the imprisonment and torture of independent journalists such as Imran Riaz Khan, the decimation of Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the rigging of an election earlier this year.
In other words, a de facto military junta has seized total power in Pakistan, and Washington backs them because they have reversed Khan’s non-aligned position and returned the country to the US orbit.
Meanwhile, Haiti has become a target of Washington once more. Earlier this year, the Biden administration courted Kenya’s President William Ruto to lead a US-funded invasion force into Haiti, which is wracked by violence after over a century of exploitation and underdevelopment by the US and allies, including Canada. The mission’s ostensible goal is to free Haiti from warring paramilitary gangs – however, the invasion force and its backers ignore the reality that the paramilitaries are a consequence of the brutally unequal political, economic, and social hierarchies imposed on Haiti by Global North powers. In reality, Haiti requires sovereignty and respect, not a new spiral of bloodshed and misery.
Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, have also endured immense suffering due to Biden’s imperialist policies. Cuba and Venezuela have long been targets of US imperialism – Cuba for over sixty years, Venezuela for twenty-five – and the Biden era continued this brutal interventionism. In the case of Cuba, Biden kept in place the hundreds of additional sanctions and the egregious “state sponsor of terrorism” designation imposed by Donald Trump. The Trump-Biden sanctions are harsher than any previous president’s, depriving the small Caribbean nation of billions of dollars per year. “The sanctions today,” says political scientist William LeoGrande, “have a greater impact on the Cuban people than ever before.” People are going hungry, hundreds of thousands hope to migrate, and most recently, the country’s power grid collapsed under the weight of Biden’s coercive measures.
As Drop Site news contributor Ed Augustin wrote in early October:
Government food rations [in Cuba] – a lifeline for the country’s poor – are fraying. Domestic agriculture, which has always been weak, has cratered in recent years for lack of seeds, fertilizer, and petrol, forcing the state to import 100 percent of the basic subsidized goods. But there’s not enough money to do that. Last year the government eliminated chicken from the basic food basket most adults receive. Last month, the daily ration of bread available to all Cubans was cut by a quarter. Even vital staples like rice and beans now arrive late. Food insecurity on the island is rising, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Vulnerable groups – older people, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illnesses – are most affected by the knock-on effects of US policy.
In all the cases described above, the Biden administration has taken extreme measures to snuff out challenges to its imperialist hegemony – measures that manifest first and foremost in the physical destruction of Palestinians and Lebanese by US-made weapons, the imposition of hunger, desperation, and migration crises on Cuba and Venezuela, the US-backed occupation of Haiti, the violent repression of Pakistanis’ desire for sovereignty and non-alignment, and more. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s nations – and 60 percent of poor countries – face some type of US sanctions for having displeased the imperial hegemon.
The prevailing world system, a system defined by US imperialism and the imposition of the neoliberal Washington Consensus around the globe, is facing an array of challenges, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Palestine to East Asia.
How is Washington responding? Through the economic strangulation of countries like Cuba and Venezuela that present an alternative model; through a “day after” plan in the Middle East that would reduce Gaza to a neocolony of Washington and the Gulf monarchies; through coups against popular non-aligned leaders like Imran Khan; through the re-invasion of Haiti, a nation whose sovereignty has long been subverted by imperialism; through pressuring the Ukrainian government to lower the draft age so Kyiv can continue sending its young people into the meat grinder on behalf of Washington’s geopolitical aims; and through continuing to trudge the path toward war with China.
Ironically, the US empire’s violent response to its waning hegemony is expediting the emergence of an alternative world order, one marked by the de-dollarization and South-South cooperation of the BRICS group. As Biden leaves office and Trump returns to the White House, we can safely assume that the violence of imperialism will continue, perhaps intensify, and at the same time, the global majority will continue its efforts to forge new relationships outside the umbrella of US unilateralism.
Rubio and Trump during a break in the 2016 presidential debate. AP photo.
Of all Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington, and the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China.
The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine, where Rubio has come close to Donald Trump’s position, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but recognizing that the U.S. is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.”
But in all the other hot spots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones.
1. His obsession with regime change in Cuba will sink any chance of better relations with the island.
Like other Cuban-American politicians, Marco Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve into submission the people of his parents’ homeland.
It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the Revolution, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose executioners, secret police and death squads killed an estimated 20,000 people, according to the CIA, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.
When President Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio reiterated his zero tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the U.S. and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the U.S. blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition… Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.”
In 2024 Rubio also introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the U.S.-dominated Western banking system.
These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the U.S. Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his Secretary of State wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the United States.
2. Applying his anti-Cuba template to the rest of Latin America will make enemies of more of our neighbors.
Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home in Cuba has served him so well as an American politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, and rails against progressive ones, from Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva to Mexico’s popular former President Lopez Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.
In Venezuela, he has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.
In March 2023, Rubio urged President Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting leaders of a 2019 U.S.-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people.
Rubio also condemned the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the United States this past August, in response to decades of U.S. interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence and mass emigration, until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in 2022.
Rubio’s major concern about Latin America now seems to be the influence of China, which has become the leading trade partner of most Latin American countries. Unlike the U.S., China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics, while American politicians like Marco Rubio still see Latin America as the U.S. “backyard.”
While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the U.S. government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for U.S. relations with the region.
3. He believes the US and Israel can do no wrong, and that God has given Palestine to Israel.
Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still perpetuates the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberated placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”
When asked by CODEPINK in November 2024 if he would support a ceasefire, Rubio replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”
There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio said that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Hitler.
In a letter to Secretary of State Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank.
“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.
No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The United States will find itself extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of U.S. policy.
4. His deep-seated enmity toward Iran will fuel Israel’s war on its neighbors, and may lead to a U.S. war with Iran.
Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He claims that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He says that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”
He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including a call for more and more sanctions. He believes the U.S. should not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”
Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says that the goal of U.S. policy should be regime change in Iran, which would set the stage for war.
While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Donald Trump about the perils of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.
5. He is beholden to big money, from the weapons industry to the Israel lobby.
Open Secrets reports that Rubio has received over a million dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single largest campaign contributor over the last 5 years. When he last ran for reelection in 2022, he was the third largest recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.
Rubio was also the fourth largest recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his Congressional career.
Rubio is clearly beholden to the US arms industry, and even more so to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda, making it unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland.
6. He’s so antagonistic towards China that China has sanctioned him–twice!
Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today, the challenge that will define this century and every generation represented here, is not climate change, the pandemic, or the left’s version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China.”
It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the U.S. to bar Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses, abuses that China denies and independent researchersquestion. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.
On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese independence — a dangerous deviation from the US government’s long-standing One China approach.
The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice–once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first U.S. secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.
Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the U.K.’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told Reuters, “If that doesn’t work, then I think we’re going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”
7. Rubio knows sanctions are a trap, but he doesn’t know how to escape.
Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under international law, and which the UN and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”
The United States has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now impact a third of the world’s population. U.S. officials, from Treasury Secretary Yellen to Rubio himself, have warned that using the U.S. financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.
And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate, including new sanctions on Iran in January 2024 and a bill in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.
So, while other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal U.S. sanctions, the nominee for Secretary of State remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.
8. He wants to crack down on U.S. free speech.
Rubio wants to curtail the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In May, he described campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.”
Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at American universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” said Rubio.
The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.
And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for National Review, in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed, and instead blamed Iran, Biden and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.
Marco Rubio expects Americans to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.
Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he alleged that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of China connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights.
Conclusion
On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the “straw man” he has falsely set up.
Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in American politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as U.S. secretary of state.
His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the United States must get its way or else, and that other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Antony Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve U.S. relations with other countries or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the UN Charter requires.
For the thirty-second time in so many years, the US blockade of Cuba was globally condemned at the UN General Assembly’s annual vote in October. Only Tel Aviv joined Washington in defending the collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.
For the vast majority of Cubans, who were born after the first unilateral coercive measures were imposed, life under these conditions is the only normalcy they have known. Even friends sympathetic to socialism and supporters of Cuba may question why the Cubans have not simply learned to live under these circumstances after 64 years.
The explanation, explored below, is that the relatively mild embargo of 1960 has been periodically intensified and made ever more devastatingly effective. The other major factor is that the geopolitical context has changed to Cuba’s disadvantage. These factors in turn have had cumulatively detrimental effects.
Cuba in the new world order
The Cuban Revolution achieved remarkable initial successes for a small, resource-poor island with a history of colonial exploitation.
After the 1959 revolution, the population quickly attained 100% literacy. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates soon rivaled far richer countries, through the application of socialized medicine, prioritizing primary care. Cuba also became a world sports powerhouse and made noteworthy advances in biotechnology. At the same time, Cuban troops aided in the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, among many other exercises of internationalism.
Cuba did not make those advances alone but benefitted from the solidarity of the Soviet Union and other members of the Socialist Bloc. From the beginning of the revolution, the USSR helped stabilize the economy, particularly in the areas of agriculture and manufacturing. Notably, Cuba exported sugar to the Soviets at above-market prices.
The USSR’s military assistance in the form of training and equipment contributed to the Cuban’s successfully repelling the US’s Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. In addition, the Socialist Bloc backed Cuba diplomatically in the United Nations and other international fora. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, for example, also assisted with economic aid, investment, and trade to help develop the Cuban economy.
The implosion of the Socialist Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s severely impacted Cuba.
No longer buffered by these allies, the full weight of the US-led regime-change campaign sent Cuba reeling into what became known as the “Special Period.” After an initial GDP contraction of about 35% between 1989 and 1993, the Cubans somewhat recovered by the 2000s. But, now, conditions on the island are again increasingly problematic.
A new multipolar world may be in birth, but it has not been able to sufficiently aid Cuba in this time of need. China and Vietnam along with post-Soviet Russia, remnants of the earlier Socialist Bloc, still maintain friendly commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuban but nowhere the former levels of cooperation.
Ratcheting up of the US regime-change campaign
The ever-tightening US blockade is designed to ensure that socialism does not succeed; to strangle in the cradle all possible alternatives to the established imperial order.
The initial restrictions imposed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 banned US exports to Cuba, except for food and medicine, and reduced Cuba’s sugar export quota to the US. Shortly before the end of his term in 1961, the US president broke diplomatic relations.
He also initiated covert operations against Cuba, which would be significantly strengthened by his successor, John Kennedy, and subsequent US administrations. Since then, Cuba has endured countless acts of terrorism as well as attempts to assassinate the revolution’s political leadership.
John Kennedy had campaigned in 1960, accusing the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of failing to sufficiently combat the spread of communism. Kennedy was determined to prevent communism from gaining a foothold in America’s “backyard.” He made deposing the “Castro regime” a national priority and imposed a comprehensive economic embargo.
After Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year, he initiated Operation Mongoose. The president put his brother Robert Kennedy in charge of attempting to overthrow the revolution by covert means. This CIA operation of sabotage and other destabilization methods was meant to bring to Cuba “the terrors of the earth.”
Post-Soviet era
Subsequent US administrations continued the policy of blockade, occupation of Guantánamo, and overt and covert destabilization efforts.
Former CIA director and then-US President George H.W. Bush seized the opportunity in 1992 posed by the implosion of the Socialist Bloc. The bipartisan Cuban Democracy Act passed under his watch. Popularly called the Torricelli Act after a Democratic Party congressional sponsor, it codified the embargo into law, which could only be reversed by an act of congress.
The act strengthened the embargo into a blockade by prohibiting US subsidiaries of companies operating in third countries from trading with Cuba. Ships that had traded with Cuba were banned from entering the US for 180 days. The economic stranglehold on Cuba was tightened by obstructing sources of foreign currency, which further limited Cuba’s ability to engage in international trade.
The screws were again tightened in 1996 under US President Bill Clinton with the Helms-Burton Act. Existing unilateral coercive economic measures were reinforced and expanded.
The act also added restrictions to discourage foreign investment in Cuba, particularly in US-owned properties that had been expropriated after the Cuban Revolution. The infamous Title III of the act allowed US citizens to file lawsuits in US courts against foreign companies “trafficking” in such confiscated properties.
Title III generated substantial blowback and some countermeasures from US allies, such as the European Union and Canada, because of its extraterritorial application in violation of international trade agreements and sovereignty. As a result, Title III was temporarily waived.
Later, US President Barack Obama modified US tactics during his watch by reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba and easing some restrictions, in order to unapologetically achieve the imperial strategy of regime change more effectively.
But even that mild relief was reversed by his successor’s “maximum pressure” campaign. In 2019, US President Donald Trump revived Title III. By that time, the snowballing effects of the blockade had generated a progressively calamitous economic situation in Cuba.
Just days before the end of his term, Trump reinstated Cuba onto the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) after Obama had lifted it in 2015. The designation has had a huge impact on Cuba by reducing trade with third countries fearful of secondary sanctions by the US, by cutting off most international finance, and by further discouraging tourism.
President Joe Biden continued most of the Trump “maximum pressure” measures, including the SSOT designation, while adding some of this own. This came at a time when the island was especially hard hit by the Covid pandemic, which halted tourism, one of Cuba’s few sources of foreign currency.
In the prescient words of Lester D. Mallory, US deputy assistant secretary of state back in 1960, the imperialists saw the opportunity to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
US siege on Cuba perfected
In addition to the broad history outlined above of incessant regime-change measures by every US administration since the inception of the Cuban Revolution, some collateral factors are worthy of mention.
Major technological advances associated with computer technology and AI have been applied by the US to more effectively track and enforce its coercive measures. In addition, the fear of US fines for violation of its extraterritorial prohibitions on third-country actors has led to overcompliance.
Uncle Sam has also become ever more inventive. Visa-free entry (VWP) into the US is no longer available to most European and some other nationals if they stopped in Cuba, thereby significantly discouraging tourism to the island.
The internal political climate in the US has also shifted with the neoconservative takeover of both major parties. Especially now with the second Trump presidency, Cuba has fewer friends in Washington, and its enemies now have even less constraints on their regime-change campaigns. This is coupled by a generally more aggressive international US force projection.
Under the blockade, certain advances of the revolution were turned into liabilities. The revolution with its universal education, mechanization of agriculture, and collective or cooperative organization of work freed campesinos from the 24/7 drudgery of peasant agriculture. Today, fields remain idle because, among other factors, the fuel and spare parts for the tractors are embargoed.
Cuba’s allies, especially Venezuela, itself a victim of a US blockade, have been trying to supply Cuba with desperately needed oil. Construction of 14 oil tankers commissioned abroad by Venezuela, which could transport that oil, has been blocked. Direct proscriptions by the US on shipping companies and insurance underwriters have also limited the oil lifeline.
Without the fuel, electrical power, which run pumps to supply basic drinking water, cannot be generated. As a consequence, Cuba has recently experienced island-wide blackouts along with food and water shortages. This highlights how the blockade is essentially an economic dirty war against the civilian population.
Cumulative effects on Cuban society
Life is simply hard in Cuba under the US siege and is getting harder. This has led to recently unprecedented levels of out migration. The consequent brain-drain and labor shortages exacerbate the situation. Moreover, the relentless scarcity and the associated compromised quality of life under such conditions has had a corrosive effect over time.
Under the pressure of the siege, Cuba has been forced to adopt measures that undermine socialist equality but which generate needed revenue. For example, Obama and subsequent US presidents have encouraged the formation of a small business strata, expanding on the limited “reforms” instituted during Raúl Castro’s time as Cuba’s president.
The Cubans will surely persevere as they have in the past. “The country’s resilience is striking,” according to a longtime Cuba observer writing from Havana.
Besides, the imperialists leave them little other choice. A surrender and soft landing is not an option being offered. The deliberately failed state of Haiti, less than 50 miles to the east, serves as a cautionary tale of what transpires for a people under the beneficence of the US.
Now is an historical moment for recognition of not what Cuba has failed to do, but for appreciation of how much it has achieved with so little and under such adverse circumstances not of its making.
The people of the United States and most of the rest of the world woke up this week to the last news they wanted to hear.
Not only had Donald J Trump presiding over a proto-fascist Maga mass movement been elected president of the United States, he will enjoy a comfortable Republican majority in the Senate, and he also may have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.
He obtained about the same number of votes as in 2020, 74 million, and he scored an electoral victory because the Democrat candidate, Kamala Harris, got well over 10 million votes less than Joe Biden in 2020.
If one adds the strong political identification of the US Supreme Court with Trump’s overall political views, he will enjoy few obstacles from the key institutional structures of the United States to implement his cherished aim, the establishment of a strongly authoritarian government that would endeavour to turn all existing institutions into instruments of his political movement, his ideology and his government plans.
Throughout the election campaign and since he lost the 2020 election, Trump has projected a government programme of wholesale retribution against his political opponents including what he perceives as a hostile media, which he has labelled “the enemy within.”
He also intends to expel millions of — principally Latino — immigrants, who he accuses of “poisoning the blood of the country.”
His strategic plan for the US has been systematised in a 900-page document by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, which, if fully implemented, will erase most of the existing mechanisms and practices that, despite its gross imperfections, broadly qualify the US as a democracy.
Many have exhaled a premature sigh of relief when Trump in his victory speech promised “no more wars” in his coming administration. However, during his 2016-20 government he conducted a mutually damaging “trade war” against China, a country he harbours a deep hostility to.
Hostility to China is likely to become the centre of his concerns on foreign policy, for which he can escalate the intense cold war and the massive military build-up around the South China Sea, including arming Taiwan, already developed by Biden.
Open US hostility to China began with president Barack Obama’s “Pivot to East Asia” in 2011, which prepared the militarisation of US policy towards the Asian giant. US military build-up 8,000 miles away from the US is stirring trouble in the region.
There ought to be little progress to be expected from the coming Trump government on the Middle East and on Palestine-Gaza. In December 2017, less than a year in office, reversing nearly seven decades of US policy on this sensitive issue, Trump formally recognised Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel and moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. There was worldwide dismay, including in substantial sections of the US Establishment, because it “shattered decades of unwavering US neutrality on Jerusalem.”
About Latin America, the 2016-20 Trump government specifically targeted what his national security adviser, John Bolton, called the “troika of tyranny” — namely, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — which he also referred to as “a triangle of terror.”
Bolton in outlining Trump’s policy accused the three governments of being “the cause of immense suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism.”
In 2018, Trump’s state secretary, Rex Tillerson, affirmed the Monroe Doctrine because it had asserted US “authority” in the western hemisphere, stating that the doctrine is “as relevant today as it was when it was written.” Tillerson’s was a strong message to Latin America that the US would not allow the region to entertain building links with emerging world powers such as China.
It was during Trump’s 2016-20 administration that, after several years of careful and methodical preparations, the US orchestrated and financed the 2018 coup attempt against Nicaragua. It convulsed the small Central American nation for more than six months of vicious levels of violence, leading to wanton destruction of property, massive economic losses, and nearly 200 innocent people killed. The Biden administration, under pressure from cold warriors in the US, has continued its policy of aggression against Nicaragua by applying an array of sanctions.
Trump inflicted hundreds of sanctions on Venezuela with horrible human consequences, since in 2017-18 about 40,000 vulnerable people died unnecessarily. Venezuela’s economy was blockaded to near asphyxiation. Its oil industry was crippled with the double purpose of denying the country’s main revenue earner and preventing oil supplies to Cuba. Trump repeatedly threatened Venezuela with military aggression; Venezuela (2017) was subjected to six months of opposition street violence; an assassination attempt against President Nicolas Maduro (August 2018); Juan Guaido proclaimed himself Venezuela’s “interim president” (January 2019, and he was recognised by the US); the opposition tried to force food through the Venezuela border by military means (February 2019); the State Department offered a reward of $15 million for “information leading to the arrest of President Maduro” (March 2020); a failed coup attempt (May 2019); a mercenary raid (May 2020); and in 2023 Trump publicly admitted that he wanted to overthrow Maduro to have control over Venezuela’s large oil deposits.
Although Cuba has endured the longest comprehensive blockade of a nation in peace time (over six decades, so far), under Trump the pressure was substantially ratcheted up. In 2019 Trump accused the government of Cuba of “controlling Venezuela” and demanded that, on the threat of implementing a “full and complete” blockade, the 20,000 Cuban specialists on health, sports culture, education, communications, agriculture, food, industry, science, energy and transport, who Trump falsely depicted as soldiers, leave.
Due to the tightening of the US blockade, between April 2019 and March 2020, for the first time its annual cost to the island surpassed $5 billion (a 20 per cent increase on the year before).
Furthermore, Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” against Cuba meant, among other things, that lawsuits under Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, were allowed; increased persecution of Cuba’s financial and commercial transactions; a ban on flights from the US to all Cuban provinces (except Havana); persecution and intimidation of companies that send fuel supplies; an intense campaign to discredit Cuban medical co-operation programmes; USAid issued a $97,321 grant to a Florida-based body aimed at depicting Cuban tourism as exploitative; Trump also drastically reduced remittances to the island and severely limited the ability of US citizens to travel to Cuba, deliberately making companies and third countries think twice before doing business with Cuba; and 54 groups received $40 million in US grants to promote unrest in Cuba. Besides, Cuba has had to contend with serious unrest in July 2021 and more recently in March 2024, stoked by US-funded groups in as many cities as they could. The model of unrest is based on what has been perpetrated against Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Trump’s final act of sabotage, just days before Biden’s inauguration, was to return Cuba to the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list by falsely charging it with having ties to international terrorism. The consequences have been devastating: between March 2022 and February 2023, 130 companies, including 75 from Europe, stopped any dealings with Cuba, affecting transfers for the purchase of food, medicines, fuel, materials, parts and other goods.
Trump, despite being so intemperate and substantially discredited worldwide due to his rhetorical excesses, threats and vulgarities, leads a mass extremist movement, has the presidency, the Senate and counts on the Supreme Court’s explicit complicity, and is, therefore, in a particularly strong position to go wacko about the “troika of tyranny,” especially on Cuba. In short, Trump’s election as president has a historic significance in the worst possible sense of the term.
From his speeches one can surmise he would like to make history and he may entertain the idea of doing so by “finishing the job” on Cuba (but also on Venezuela and Nicaragua). If he does undertake that route, he has already a raft of aggressive policies he implemented during 2016-20. Furthermore, he will enjoy right-wing Republican control over the Senate foreign affairs committee.
Worse, pro-blockade hard-line senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are leading members of this committee and have a fixation with Cuba. Trump got stronger support in Florida, where the anti-Cuban Republicans in Florida bolstered his support and election victory. He also has a global network of communications owned by his ally, billionaire Elon Musk. Furthermore, no matter who the tenant in the White House, the “regime change” machinery is always plotting something nasty on Cuba.
So, buckle up! Turbulent times are coming to Latin America. Our solidarity work must be substantially intensified by explaining the increased threat that a second Trump term represents for all Latin America, but especially for Cuba.
Cuba is in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian crisis, and October’s widespread power outages are only adding to the Cuban people’s troubles. For the last six decades, Cuba has been on the receiving end of myriad sanctions by the United States government. This blockade has proved devastating to human life.
Reporting on Cuba’s blackouts have either omitted or paid brief lip-service to the effects of US sanctions on the Cuban economy, and how those sanctions have created the conditions for the crisis. Instead, media have focused on the inefficient and authoritarian Communist government as the cause of the island’s troubles.
Pulping the economy
Michael Galant (The Hill, 1/5/24): “Businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves for association with ‘a sponsor of terror.’”
One of President Donald Trump’s final acts in office was to re-designate Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, after President Barack Obama had removed them from the list in 2015 as a part of his Cuban thaw. Inclusion on the list subjects a country to restrictions on US foreign aid and financing, but, more importantly, the SSoT list encourages third-party over-compliance with sanctions. “Businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves,” The Hill (1/5/24) reported.
Trump reportedly added Cuba to the list for harboring members of FARC and ELN, two left-wing Colombian armed movements. However, Colombian President Gustavo Petro later “noted that Colombia itself, in cooperation with the Obama administration, had asked Cuba to host the FARC and ELN members as part of peace talks,” the Intercept (12/14/23) wrote. Indeed, if Cuba deported the dissidents, they would have been in violation of the protocols of the peace talks, which they were bound to by international law (The Nation, 2/24/23).
President Joe Biden has not begun the process of reviewing Cuba’s inclusion on the list, despite his campaign promises to the contrary.
The terror designation, plus the many other sanctions imposed by Trump and continued by Biden, are no small potatoes. Ed Augustin wrote at Drop Site (10/1/24) that
the terror designation, together with more than 200 sanctions enacted against the island since Obama left office, has pulped the Cuban economy by cutting revenue to the struggling Cuban state…. The combined annual cost of the Trump/Biden sanctions, [economists] say, amounts to billions of dollars a year.
Augustin argued that the economic warfare regime is a root cause of the rolling blackouts, water shortages and mass emigration that have plagued Cuba in recent years. Even imports that are ostensibly exempt from sanctions, like medication, are caught in the dragnet as multinational companies scramble to cut ties with the island. Banks are so reluctant to run afoul of US sanctions, Augustin wrote, “that often, even when the state can find the money to buy, and a provider willing to sell, there’s simply no way of making the payment.”
Cuba’s pariah status as a SSoT has put a stranglehold on its economy, and its government’s ability to administer public services. However, US restrictions on Cuba are almost never mentioned in US coverage, and reporting on the recent blackouts is no exception.
Cash-strapped Communists
Reuters (10/10/19): “Tougher US sanctions against Cuba have led international banks to avoid transactions involving the island, while prospective overseas investors put plans on hold.”
Coverage has emphasized the inability of Cuba’s government to pay for necessary fuel imports. The New York Times (10/19/24) reported “the strapped Communist government could barely afford” to pay for fuel. Elsewhere, the Times (10/18/24) claimed “a severe economic crisis and the cash crunch it produced made it harder for Cuba to pay for those fuel imports.”
The Washington Post (10/18/24) made broadly similar arguments, chalking the blackouts up to “a shortage of imported oil and the cash-strapped government’s insufficient maintenance of the creaky grid.”
The “cash crunch” referenced by the Times is not just the result of an abstract economic crisis, as is implied. Instead, it is a direct effect of US sanctions on financial institutions. During the Obama administration, European banks, including ING and BNP Paribas, were fined to the tune of over $10 billion for transacting with Cuba (Jacobin, 3/27/22). Even before Cuba was choked further as a result of their SSoT designation, reporting by Reuters (10/10/19) showed the extent to which banks were terminating operations with Cuba and Cuban entities:
Many Western banks have long refused Cuba-related business for fear of running afoul of US sanctions and facing hefty fines.… Panama’s Multibank shut down numerous Cuba-related accounts this year and European banks are restricting clients associated with Cuba to their own nationals, if that.…
Businessmen and diplomats said large French banks, including Societe Generale, no longer want anything to do with Cuba, and some are stopping payments to pensioners living on the Caribbean island.… For the first time in years, the island has had problems financing the upcoming sugar harvest. Various joint venture projects, from golf resorts to alternative energy, are finding it nearly impossible to obtain private credit.
This de-risking by financial institutions manufactures a cash-scarce economy. Cuba’s inability to procure cash for imports is not a function of financial mismanagement, or a lack of credit-worthiness. Instead, it is a deliberate effect of American foreign policy. By omitting the actions of the most powerful government on earth, mainstream coverage allows only that only Cuban failures could be the cause of a shortage of cash.
‘Terrorism’ cuts off tourism
Britain’s ambassador to Cuba told the Telegraph (11/6/23), “Those who come are profoundly shocked at what the SSOT designation is doing to the people here.”
Cuba has historically used tourism as a way of bringing money into the economy, but lately the Cuban tourism industry has been severely depressed. The explanation employed by corporate media for the decline of this industry is to blame the extended effects of the pandemic recession (New York Times, 10/19/24; Washington Post, 10/18/24).
This explanation, however, is incomplete. Cuba has indeed had a lackluster rebound in their tourism industry, but the Times and the Post fail to explain why Cuba has faltered while other Caribbean islands have more than re-achieved their pre-pandemic tourist numbers.
Travelers from Britain, Australia, Japan and 37 other countries do not need to procure a visa for travel to the United States. Instead, they can use ESTA, an electronic visa waiver. This greatly reduces the cost and the annoyance of obtaining permission to visit the US. However, since Cuba’s 2021 listing as a SSoT, any visit to the country by an ESTA passport-holder revokes the visa waiver, for life (Telegraph, 11/6/23). In other words, any Brit (or Kiwi, or Korean, and so on) who visits Cuba must, for the rest of their lives, visit a US embassy and pay $180 before being able to enter the United States. US policy, not a Covid hangover, is hamstringing any possibility of a resurgence in tourism to Cuba.
Blame game
During Cuba’s most recent energy crisis, the New York Times published three stories describing the blackouts. Two of these stories mention the US blockade only as something that the Cuban government blames for the crisis.
The New York Times (10/21/24) presented the idea that the US is punishing Cuba’s economy as a Communist allegation: “The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the US trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration.”
The headline on the Times website (10/21/24) read: “A Nationwide Blackout, Now a Hurricane. How Much Can Cuba Endure?” The paper was right to report on the humanitarian crisis ongoing in Cuba, but it chose to downplay the most important root cause: the decades-long US blockade on Cuba’s economy and its people.
That same story described Cuba as “a Communist country long accustomed to shortages of all kinds and spotty electrical service.” Why is the country so used to shortages? Eleven paragraphs later, the Times gave an explanation, or at least, Cuba’s explanation:
The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the US trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration, which severely restricts the Cuban government’s cash flow. The US Department of the Treasury blocks tankers that have delivered oil to Cuba, which drives up the island’s fuel costs, because Cuba has a limited pool of suppliers available to it.
Earlier coverage by the Times (10/18/24) similarly couched the effects of the blockade as merely a claim by Cuba. The Washington Post (10/22/24) also situated the blockade as something that “the Cuban government and its allies blame” for the ongoing crisis.
To report that Cuban officials blame the US sanctions for the energy crisis is a bit like reporting that fishermen blame the moon for the rising tide. It is of course factual that US trade restrictions–which affect not just US businesses, but also multinational businesses based in other countries–are a blunt weapon, with impact against not just a government, but an entire people.
At the very least, it is incumbent upon journalists to do at least minimal investigation and explanation of the facts concerning the subject of their reporting. None of the coverage in either major paper bothered to investigate whether this was a fair explanation, or even to report generally the effects a 60-year blockade might have on an economy.
Brief—and buried
“Cuban economists and foreign analysts blamed the crisis on several factors,” the New York Times (10/19/24) reported; 18 paragraphs later, the story gets around to mentioning US sanctions.
On October 19, the Times gave its most complete explanation of the relationship between the US sanctions regime and the Cuban blackouts:
Cuba’s economy enjoyed a brief honeymoon with the United States during the Obama administration, which sought to normalize relations after decades of hostility, while keeping a longstanding economic embargo in place. President Donald J. Trump reversed course, leading to renewed restrictions on tourism, visas, remittances, investments and commerce.
This explanation can be found in the 31st paragraph of the 37-paragraph story. Only once the Times has painted a picture of all the ways the Communist government has gone wrong can there be a brief mention of the role of US sanctions. And how brief it is; the Times chose not to detail the extent of blockade against Cuba, nor how Cuba was wrongfully placed on the SSoT list, nor the failure of Biden to reevaluate Cuba’s status as he promised on the campaign trail.
Describing the US starvation of Cuba’s economy in abstract terms like “economic crisis” provides cover for deliberate policy decisions by the US government. By reporting on the embargo only as something that the Cuban government claims, it is easy for readers to dismiss that explanation as simply a Communist excuse. Instead of asking why the United States is choosing to enforce a crippling sanctions regime on another country, outlets like the New York Times find it easier to repeat the line that Cuba’s government has only itself to blame for its problems.
Since 1962, the US has maintained a crushing blockade of Cuba that has severely impacted the lives of its people. For the past 32 years, the UN General Assembly has passed annual resolutions calling for an end to the embargo. In collaboration with Belly of the Beast, The Real News reports from the UN, where a recent 187-2 vote to lift the blockade passed once again—only opposed by the US and Israel.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Liz Oliva Fernández: We are in the UN General Assembly where Cuba presented for the 32nd time a resolution calling for an end to US sanctions.
Speaker: Those who are in favor please signify… those who are against and abstentions…
The results of the vote is 187 votes in favor, 2 against, and 1 abstention.
Liz Oliva Fernández: The United States and Israel voted against the resolution presented by Cuba, with Moldova abstaining.
For over 30 years, the vast majority of the General Assembly has overwhelmingly condemned US sanctions on Cuba.
Mauro Vieira, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil: Hoy como tantas veces antes, Brasil reitera su firme y categórica y constante oposición al embargo económico y comercial impuesto a Cuba…
Umej Bhatia, Representative of Singapore: Asean adds its voice to the chorus of this assembly…
Kereeta Whyte, Representative of Barbados: Barbados reaffirms its strong opposition to the use of unilateral coercive measures, especially those with extraterritorial reach that violate international norms.
Sophia Tesfamariam Yohannes, Representative of Eritrea: Every day the blockade continues to exist represents a shame on the moral authority of this organization, a shame on the purposes and principles of the UN charter, and this shame on multilateralism itself.
Liz Oliva Fernández: The United States and Israel have always voted against the resolution. Except in 2016, when the U.S. abstained.
Samantha Power, US Ambassador, 2016: After 50-plus years of pursuing the path of isolation, we have chosen to take the path of engagement, because as President Obama said in Havana the future of Cuba relies on the hands of the Cuban people…
Liz Oliva Fernández: A path that the Biden Administration seems uninterested in following.
Reporter: Were you aware the UN General Assembly votes on Cuba tomorrow?
Matthew Miller, US Department of State Spokesperson: I was not tracking this on my bingo card.
Reporter: How is the U.S. going to vote?
Matthew Miller: I doubt we’ll be voting to condemn ourselves. [laughs]
It is difficult to think about Cuba without engaging emotionally. I couldn’t get back to sleep the other night, distressed over the tragic blackout of nearly the entire country with a hurricane approaching.
Yes, the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon evokes similar fits of emotion and sleeplessness; the actions of the Israeli government are obscenely bestial and criminal. Yet Cuba, because of its over six decades of defiance of US imperialism and its enormous sacrifices for other peoples, holds a special place for me.
No country with so little has done so much for others.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the example of the selfless support for the struggling Spanish Republic defined solidarity with others as well as internationalism. The Soviet Union sent weapons and advisors, defying the great-power blockade and confronting German Nazi and Italian Fascist support for the military insurrectionists. Tens of thousands of volunteers, largely organized by the Communist International, came to Spain clandestinely, overcoming closed borders, to defend the nascent Republic.
Millions rallied in support of the Republic– though it fell, in significant part because of the indifference and active hostility of the so-called democracies. How was it– many came to see for the first time– that democracies would not defend an emerging democracy?
For the last sixty years, tiny Cuba has been the beacon of solidarity and internationalism for later generations. Cuban internationalists have aided and fought alongside nearly every legitimate liberation movement, every movement for socialism in Asia, Africa, and South America. Cuban doctors and relief workers have rushed to disasters in uncountable countries. Wherever need arose, Cubans were the first to volunteer, including in the US (Hurricane Katrina), the country where the government has been most damaging to Cuba’s fate.
It was not so long ago that Cuba organized assistance to the Vietnamese freedom fighters.
Even more recently, we should remember, as well, those heroes sacrificing life and limb helping liberate the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Cubans heroically gave their lives fighting and defeating the racist military of Apartheid South Africa and the US’s surrogates, inflicting one of the most significant blows against US imperialism since the Vietnam war. The US ruling class has never forgotten this humiliating defeat.
Undoubtedly, Apartheid would have eventually fallen, but those tens of thousands of Cuban volunteers hastened that end by many, many years.
But Cubans were sacrificing for others’ freedom before that remarkable struggle and after. Paraphrasing the song about Joe Hill, wherever people were struggling, you would find Cuban internationalists — from Lumumba’s Congo to Allende’s Chile, from Bishop’s Grenada to Chavez’s Venezuela.
Some will remember that when Nelson Mandela was freed, he chose to first visit Cuba to thank the Cuban people for their contribution to African liberation.
Of course, Cuba alone lacked the material resources to confront the well-armed Apartheid military and their Western-armed African collaborators. Beside Cuba and behind Cuba was the material and military support of the Soviet Union. This legacy of Soviet internationalism, combined with the inspiring selflessness of Fidel’s Cuba, gave hope to many millions fighting to free themselves from the yoke of imperialism and capitalism.
Without a doubt, the overarching cause of Cuba’s ongoing pain is the United States and its closest allies. The great powers have never forgiven Cuba for mounting the first and only socialist revolution in the Americas, as they have never forgiven Haiti for showing that African slaves could rise and defeat a great power and free an enslaved people. The US blockade of Cuba has done irreparable harm to a people hoping to develop and follow an independent political course. Imperialism punishes a people that values its sovereignty with the same uncompromising integrity as it demonstrates with its passionate commitment to solidarity with others and its selfless internationalism.
Yet the Cuban people persevere. It does not go unnoticed by the plotters at the CIA and other nefarious agencies and the State Department that — even in its most weakened state, its most challenging moments — the Cuban people keep the torch lit that was passed on to them by Fidel. Despite the best efforts of the capitalist behemoth to the North, Cuban socialism endures.
In better times, the Soviet Union generously aided Cuba on its chosen development path. Lacking few industrially desirable resources and despite the stultifying effects of centuries of imperialist exploitation, Soviet aid enabled Cuba to integrate into the socialist community’s Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) on an equal, even privileged, footing. The capitalist media often compared CMEA aid to Cuba to the US’s robust aid to Israel. Ironically, Cuba used the aid to become a force for global social justice, while Israel has used the US subsidy to make mischief, to become a force for genocidal campaigns to create a “greater” Israel.
But Soviet aid is gone.
It is a source of sorrow, and not a little shame, that no country avowing the socialist road or benefitting from Cuba’s sacrifices has stepped up to even partially fill the void. Sure, countries thought to be “friends” of Cuba have made strong statements condemning the blockade, have made “fraternal” gestures, and have sent token shipments of basic foodstuffs, but not nearly enough to allow Cuba to step away from the dire economic disaster that has been multiplied a hundred-fold by the US blockade.
Lands where Cuban internationalist fighters are buried in the soil, lands with abundant energy resources, lands with modern economies that dwarf the former Soviet economy, fail to remember Cuba’s selfless sacrifices with pledges to help or to organize help at this particularly difficult moment. It may be presumptuous to expect the recipients of Cuban friendship and solidarity to make similar sacrifices for Cuba– that is what makes the legacy of Fidelismo so special in the annals of socialism. But surely, those countries could individually or collectively repair and guarantee Cuba’s basic infrastructure without great sacrifice– to give Cuba the minimal means to survive the punishment that imperialism has imposed.
It must be said that “socialism with national characteristics” seems to exclude the internationalism so central to socialism in the twentieth century.
In truth, what kind of socialism fails to sacrifice little to aid a struggling socialist country strangling from a capitalist blockade?
On a personal note, I remember well passing back through Checkpoint Charlie– the famous portal between German socialism and German capitalism. Tourists and others from the West, seeking to visit East Berlin had to return via the checkpoint. They learned on their return that they could neither exchange nor keep remaining GDR currency used while in the German Democratic Republic. Guards helpfully offered the often-unhappy returnees an option. They pointed to a large vessel brimming with cash with a sign in several languages: “Help rebuild Vietnam.”
I felt pride in knowing that I was a small part of a global movement determined to help rebuild what imperialism had torn down.
I see that pledge to internationalism again honored in the refusal of workers to load ammunition bound for Israel in the port of Piraeus, Greece.
I can only hope that the socialism of the twenty-first century will restore the internationalism that was a signature of the socialism of the twentieth century.
A group of Cubans, including human rights activist defenders, unfolded a large banner this Thursday under the iconic Eiffel Tower in Paris, in support of the 1,113 political prisoners in Cuba. The banner displays the faces of many of those imprisoned on the island for expressing their discontent with the Castro regime, criticizing communist policies, or demanding respect for human rights.
Meanwhile, activist Avana de la Torre joined this peaceful demonstration in the French capital, while the NGO Prisoners Defenders presented its latest report on political prisoners in Cuba. The report highlighted that all these detainees face sentences imposed without judicial oversight, which violates international standards.
During 2024, repression and human rights violations against political prisoners in Cuba have intensified. On August 4, two Cuban activists were sent to prison accused of “propaganda against the constitutional order” after being detained in Villa Marista. Subsequently, on August 29, the UN condemned the forced labor that political prisoners suffer on the island, supporting a report from the organization Prisoners Defenders on systematic human rights violations. At the beginning of September, the platform Justicia 11J reported that at least ten political prisoners attempted suicide in Cuban prisons due to the harsh conditions of confinement.
The majority of Cubans support Castro…every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba…to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
Despite draconian coercive measures by the US – overwhelmingly condemned every year by the UN General Assembly, with the next vote slated for October 29-30 – the Cuban Revolution has had extraordinary successes. This small, impoverished, formerly colonized island nation has achieved levels of education, medical services, and performance in many other fields, including sports, that rival the first world, through the application of socialist principles.
Cuba has rightly become a model of internationalism and an exemplar of socialism. As a consequence, every US administration for over six decades has targeted this “threat of a good example.” Back in its early days, the Cuban Revolution was bolstered by socialist solidarity, particularly from the Soviet Union.
The contemporary geopolitical situation is very different. Most notably the socialist bloc is defunct. Meanwhile, Cuba continues to be confronted by a still hegemonic US. In turn, the Yankee empire is now challenged by the hope of an emergent multipolar order. Cuba has expressed interest in joining the BRICS trade alliance of emerging economies and will attend their meeting in Russia, October 22-24.
Successes turned into liabilities
Today, Cuba is confronting perhaps its greatest challenge. The ever intensified US blockade is designed to perversely turn the successes of the revolution into liabilities.
For example, the revolution achieved one hundred percent literacy, created farming collectives and cooperatives, and mechanized cultivation, thus freeing the campesinos from the drudgery of peasant subsistence agriculture.
But now, most tractors are idle, in need of scarce fuel and embargoed spare parts. Agricultural production has subsequently contracted. In May, I was on a bus that traveled the length of the island. Mile upon mile of once productive agricultural fields lay fallow.
Historical yields of key crops are down nearly 40% due to lack of fertilizers and pesticides, according to a Cuban government statement. The daily bread ration has been slashed, Reuters reports.
In order to feed the nation, the state has had to use precious hard currency to import food; currency which otherwise could be used to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Broken pipes have caused widespread shortages of drinking water.
Under siege, some 10% percent of the population, over a million Cubans, have left between 2022 and 2023. This has, in turn, led to a drain of skilled labor and a decrease in productivity, contributing to a vicious cycle driving out-migration.
Le Monde diplomatique cautions: “Cuba is facing a moment that is extraordinarily precarious. While numerous factors have led to this…US sanctions have, at every juncture, triggered or worsened every aspect of the current crisis.”
The Obama engagement
Of the some 40 sovereign states sanctioned and slated for regime-change by Washington, Cuba is somewhat unique. Until recently, the island did not have the domestic social classes from which a counter-revolutionary base could be recruited.
In Cuba, most bourgeoisie under the Batista dictatorship left the country shortly after the revolution. The large US corporations that they had operated were expropriated. Similarly, when the government nationalized many small businesses in the 1960s, others fled to US shores.
By 2014, then-US President Obama lamented that Washington’s Cuba policy had “failed to advance our interests.” Obama’s new strategy was to engage Cuba in the hope of fostering a counter-revolutionary class opposition.
Obama reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba after a hiatus dating to 1961. Travel and some trade restrictions were lifted. And more remittances from relatives living in the US could be sent to Cuba.
In his famous March 2016 speech in Havana, Obama proclaimed to rousing applause: “I’ve called on our Congress to lift the embargo.” This was an outright lie. The US president had only remarked that the so-called embargo (really a blockade, because the US enforces it on third countries) was “outdated.”
Obama lauded the cuentapropistas, small entrepreneurs in Cuba, and pledged to help promote that stratum. He promised a new US policy focus of encouraging small businesses in Cuba. “There’s no limitation from the United States on the ability of Cuba to take these steps” to create what in effect would be a potentially counter-revolutionary class, Obama promised.
Obama warned the Cubans, “over time, the youth will lose hope” if prosperity were not achieved by creating a new small business class.
While normalizing relations with Cuba, Obama took a more adversarial stance toward Venezuela. He declared the oil-rich South American nation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and imposed “targeted sanctions” on March 2015. The successes of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution in promoting regional integration were challenging US influence in Latin America, prompting Washington to adopt a “dual-track diplomacy” of engagement with Cuba and containment with Venezuela.
Obama spoke of the “failed” US policy on Cuba, which had not achieved “its intended goals.” Often left unsaid was that the “goal” has been to reverse the Cuban revolution. Obama’s intent was not to terminate the US regime-change policy, but to achieve it more effectively.
His engagement tactic should not be confused for accord. Obama still championed the three belligerent core elements of the US policy: a punishing blockade, occupation of the port of Guantanamo, and covert actions to undermine and destabilize Cuba.
Trump undoes and outdoes Obama
Donald Trump assumed office at a time when the leftist Pink Tide was ebbing. Taking advantage of the changed geopolitical context, the new president intensified Obama’s offensive against Cuba’s closest regional supporter Venezuela, while reversing his predecessor’s engagement with Havana. His “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela devastated their oil sector, thereby reducing Cuba’s petroleum subsidies from its ally.
Trump enacted 243 coercive measures against Cuba. He ended individual “people-to-people” educational travel, banned US business with military-linked Cuban entities, and imposed caps on remittances. In the closing days of his administration, he relisted Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, which further cut the island off from international finance.
Biden continues and extends Trump’s policies
Joe Biden, while campaigning for the presidency, played to liberal sentiment with vague inferences that he would restore a policy of engagement and undo Trump’s sanctions on Cuba.
By the time Biden assumed the US presidency, Cuba had been heavily impacted by the Covid pandemic. Temporary lockdowns reduced domestic productivity. Travel restrictions dried up tourist dollars, a major source of foreign currency.
Once in office and Cuba ever more vulnerable, Biden continued and extended Trump’s policies, including retaining it on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.
At the height of the Covid pandemic, Belly of the Beastreported how scarcities in Cuba fueled anti-government demonstrations on July 11, 2021. Eleven days later, Biden imposed yet more sanctions to further exacerbate the scarcities.
As an article in the LA Progressiveexplained, “Cuba’s humanitarian crisis – fueled by the sanctions maintained by Biden – seems to have only encouraged his administration to keep tightening the screws,” concluding “his policy remains largely indistinguishable from that of Trump.”
Biden, however, continued the Obama policy of empowering the Cuban private sector. He allowed more remittances, disproportionately benefiting Cubans with relatives in the US (who tend to be better off financially). He also facilitated international fund transfers involving private Cuban businesses. Amendments to the Cuban Assets Control Regulations enhanced internet access to encourage development of private telecommunications infrastructures for “independent entrepreneurs.”
What about Democratic Party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris?
“When evaluating the impact of a possible Kamala Harris electoral victory on the United States’ Cuba policy,” On Cuba Newsadmits, “the first thing that should be recognized is the lack of evidence or antecedents to form a well-founded forecast.” Likewise, the Miami Herald finds Harris’s current Latin American policies a mystery with “few clues and a lot of uncertainty.”
Going back to when she was on the vice-presidential campaign trail in 2020, Harris commented about the possibility of easing the blockade on what she called the “dictatorship.” She said that won’t happen anytime soon and would have to be predicated on a new Washington-approved government in Cuba.
Alternative for Cuba
If Cubans want to see what an alternative future might be like under Yankee beneficence, they need only look 48 miles to the east at the deliberately made to fail state of Haiti.
As the US Peace Council admonished: “No matter how heroic a people may be, socialism must provide for their material needs. The US blockade of Cuba is designed precisely to thwart that and to discredit socialism in Cuba and anywhere else where oppressed people try to better their lot…The intensified US interference in Cuba is a wakeup call for greater efforts at solidarity.”
Miami, October 11, 2024—CPJ is alarmed by reports that since mid-September, Cuban state security agents questioned at least eight journalists and media workers from non-state media outlets, many in connection to alleged crimes against the state, leading several to flee the country.
“The Cuban government appears to be engaged in a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the country’s non-state media to force them into silence or exile,” said Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ’s U.S., Canada, and Caribbean program coordinator, from Washington, D.C. “CPJ calls on the Cuban authorities to respect the rights of journalists to freely express themselves and report the news.”
Cuban news website El Toque, which operates from exile, reported that the journalists were summoned as part of investigations into accusations that the journalists engaged in “mercenary” activities, including receiving foreign funding in violation of state security. If convicted, the journalists face prison sentences of 4-10 years.
CPJ confirmed eight cases of journalists being questioned and is investigating more than a dozen others. Four journalists publicly confirmed they were summoned and questioned by Cuban authorities:
Jorge Fernandez Era, a freelance writer and satirical columnist who works with El Toque, was summoned and questioned twice for an hour, reporting that authorities “expressed concern” about his writings in El Toque.
Maria Lucia Exposito, a freelance reporter, posted on a colleague’s social media that authorities questioned her for more than 6 hours and confiscated US$1,000 and her cell phone.
Alexander Hall, a freelance essayist who works with El Toque.
Katia Sanchez, a freelance communications strategist who has collaborated with El Toque and SembraMedia, a nonprofit that supports digital media entrepreneurs, was questioned and threatened with prosecution by representatives from the Ministry of the Interior for receiving a U.S. embassy grant to train journalists, she told CPJ. Sanchez subsequently left Cuba on September 13.
A representative of the Cuban government’s International Press Center (CPI) told CPJ by text message that he recommended investigating whether the U.S. government financed these media outlets and pointed to U.S. law that imposes a public disclosure obligation on persons representing foreign interests. “Investigate and you will find Hypocrisy,” he wrote.
In some cases, the questioning occurred in unofficial locations by plainclothes officers, who pressured the journalists to sign confessions admitting to “subversive” acts under threat of criminal proceedings, according to four journalists who spoke to CPJ. Two journalists told CPJ they faced intense psychological pressure to confess.
Several journalists told CPJ that officers warned them to stop working as journalists outside of official state media and told them it was a crime to participate in foreign-funded training and support programs, or to receive grants from foreign governments.
One journalist told CPJ they were pressured to become a state security informant and spy on other media and foreign governments. In return, they would be free to continue work outside the state sector.
Miami, October 3, 2024—Cuban authorities should re-examine the case of journalist Yeris Curbelo Aguilera, who was sentenced to two years in prison on September 24, and consider dropping all charges against him, said the Committee to Protect Journalists on Tuesday.
“The Cuban government continues to be nothing short of draconian in its efforts to squash independent reporting on the island,” said CPJ U.S., Canada, and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen in Washington, D.C. “Cuban authorities must release journalist Yeris Curbelo Aguilera and should stop harassing Rafa Escalona.”
Curbelo Aguilera, a 39-year-old journalist and civil rights activist with the non-state media outlet Palenque Visión, was arrested June 16 and released on bail June 18 following a physical altercation with local youths, whom his family alleged were acting as government agents in the confrontation. One of the youths was also prosecuted for the incident but was acquitted at trial, his wife claimed.
In a separate incident, the local music news outlet, Magazine AMPM, announced in an online statement that it was suspending publication and taking “an indefinite pause” due to Cuban counterintelligence agencies “increasing pressure and harassment” of its editor, Rafa Escalona. According to AMPM, Escalona was interrogated and threatened with legal action by Cuban state security agents over grant money recently awarded to the magazine.
In recent years, Cuba’s non-state journalists have come under intense pressure from the government, which does not legally recognize the rights of news outlets outside official state media. Cuban law prohibits news outlets from receiving foreign funding and journalists who receive foreign funding can be accused of an act of “subversion.”
A Cuban government representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment about either case.
36-year-old Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is a Afro-Cuban self-taught artist. He comes from a poor and marginalized neighbourhood in Havana and uses sculptural and performance art to protest violations against freedom of expression. He has been arrested multiple times for his art and activism and is currently in prison.
Otero Alcántara is the general coordinator of the San Isidro Movement – a constellation of artists, journalists and academics promoting freedom of expression. It was established in 2018 as a reaction to Decree 349. The decree requires artists to obtain advance permission for public and private exhibitions and performances. Decree 349 is one of the legal instruments used to silence artists, musicians and performers who are critical to the Cuban government.
Otero Alcántara’s artivism has come at a high personal cost. Since 2016 he has been the subject of interrogations, political persecution and arrests, and his art has been confiscated and destroyed by state security officers.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara creates sculptures, drawings, and performative art. He is currently serving a five-year sentence in the high-security prison Guanajay outside of Havana.
Expressing oneself through art: A basic human right
Despite this, he continued his artivism through performance pieces to raise awareness of Cuba’s ongoing repression of independent artists and activists. Otero Alcántara was detained on July 11, 2021, after posting a video online of his planned participation in the protests. In 2022, he was convicted for “contempt, public disorder and insults to national symbols”. He is currently serving a five-year sentence in Guanajay maximum security prison outside Havana.
The Rafto prize 2024 aims to highlight the importance of the work of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the basic human right to expressing oneself through art. We call upon the Cuban government to stop the persecution of artists and human rights defenders. We also urge them to free Otero Alcántara and all political prisoners in Cuba.
The peoples around the world have looked to Venezuela as a vanguard leading Nuestra América in its second independence struggle, against the US. The US rulers operate as the inheritor of the European colonial empires, assuming the right to interfere in other countries’ elections, and dictate who are the winners. No other country – save US underlings in Europe, and Israel – dares to violate international law so brazenly.
The Venezuelan right-wing had no real plan to win a democratic election, but instead prepared for a coup d’etat even before the polls closed. Working with the US government and corporate media, they allege President Maduro stole the July 28 presidential election, then committed human rights abuses to crush protests. This opposition declares it beat President Maduro 70% to 30% but refuses to present their “evidence” to the National Electoral Council (CNE) or Supreme Court. The opposition claimed fraud in every election during the 25-year period of Chavista rule – except twice, when they won.
The attempted coup bears much in common with recent US coup attempts in Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (2013, 2014, 2017, 2019). If the US-backed candidates lose, the election is “fraudulent.” This scheme drove Evo Morales from power in Bolivia. The US even appointed its own president for Venezuela after its 2018 presidential election, and then proceeded to steal tens of billions of dollars of Venezuela’s resources held overseas.
US coup attempts use new tools besides the US-trained military as in the past
First, the US crushes a country with sanctions and economic blockades, causing scarcities and shortages, leading to discontent among the people over worsening living conditions. National Security gangster John Bolton said: “Sanctions are a means of repression and coercion between military warfare and diplomacy.” Richard Nephew, Treasury deputy secretary, adds: “Over the past decade, the most important tool for enforcing American power is the sanctions mechanism.” To justify sanctions, the US relies on its media, intellectuals, universities and think tanks, to make them seem humane to the public. In Venezuela, US sanctions caused government revenue to collapse by 99%, requiring dramatic cuts in the many social programs. The sanctions killed over 100,000 civilians, Venezuelans knew that voting for Nicolas Maduro would mean a worsening of the US-EU economic warfare they face.
Second, corporate media and social media now play a coup-making role similar to that of Pentagon-trained generals in the past. Supervised by the CIA, this media blanketed a targeted country and the world with disinformation against its government, seeking to foment a “regime change” mass movement.
Six corporations control over 90% of the US media and so own the news. They dominate the world media just as the US dollar dominates the world financial system. The all-important weapon, social media, which saturates billions of mobile phones, are in the hands of Elon Musk (X, formerly Twitter), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram). Working with the CIA, they can impose an alternative reality, seen in Nicaragua in 2018, Bolivia during the 2019 coup, and Venezuela today.
Corporate media describe the elected Maduro government – and the elected ones in Nicaragua and Cuba – as dictatorships.
Delegitimizing Venezuelan elections in advance followed a pattern used in Bolivia (2019) and Nicaragua (2021). The US created automated networks of thousands of fake social media accounts to swamp the public with fake news. These accounts generate streams of posts in a coordinated manner, creating the appearance of popular repudiation of Evo Morales, Nicolas Maduro, or Daniel Ortega.
Bots were used in a massive way against Evo’s government. The two main coup leaders created 95,000 twitter accounts before the coup to spread the election fraud story and call for violent protests. Over 68,000 false accounts were set up to legitimize the army’s overthrow of Morales and justify killing those protesting the coup.
US social media control in these countries drowns out pro-government and independent voices not just by saturating the online conversation, but by shutting them down. After the US annointed Juan Guaido the Venezuela president, Twitter closed thousands of Chavista accounts to foster the impression that most Venezuelans supported Guaido.
Governments in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia cannot respond effectively to the US media disinformation warfare against them any more than to the US blockades imposed on them. It takes them years to build up national media networks, and even then, their resources are minor compared to what the US commands.
Third, the US relies on cyberwarfare to incapacitate its opponents. In Bolivia in 2019 a cyberattack of the electoral system’s computers disrupted the vote count, preventing the authentic results being issued. The US-backed opposition then claimed Evo delayed the vote count because he was fixing it.
After the July 28 election, 126 digital platforms of the Venezuelan state suffered cyberattacks, the most significant being the CNE, the constitutional agency recording the vote. Hacked over 100 times that night, it could not operate normally, delaying for days the release of the results. Again, this was used to claim the vote totals were being fixed.
At times 30 million cyber attacks per minute occurred between July 28 and August 9th. Such an attack disables Venezuelan government computer systems and paralyzes operations. These large-scale cyberattacks generated hundreds of gigabytes per second (your laptop system memory may have 16 gb).
These attacks falsified IP links, duplicated links, reconfigured government portals and hijacked information. Names and addresses of government workers were released on social media to “comanditos” (opposition gangs), creating physical threats for those affected.
The US powerful media and cyber weapons, able to swamp a country’s airwaves with CIA concocted “news,” while disrupting the country’s response, open the door to violent protests against the government.
Fourth, having created the conditions for opposition leaders to assert the Maduro government stole the election, they then called people into the streets to protest and create chaos or guarimbas. “Comanditos” (small groups paid to instigate violence), caused destruction and violence, killed 25 and injured 192, burned buildings, sacked several regional CNE headquarters, blocked roads, attacked police and military, beat up people who “looked” Chavista, attacked local community leaders, food distribution centers, public schools, hospitals, offices, ransacked warehouses, the transportation system, the electrical grid, all to paralyze the country. The US media could portray to the world a picture of national chaos, inviting military intervention to restore order, meaning a US neo-colonial regime.
These protests (as in Bolivia in 2019 and Nicaragua in 2018, Cuba in 2021) are portrayed in the corporate media as peaceful democracy rallies. When police forces and mobilized Chavista organizations attempt to stop the violence, the corporate media charges democracy protests are being repressed. This has been a habitual corporate media scam in US regime change operations, yet people still fall for it. In fact, the strategy was first used in the coup against the democratic government of Iran in 1953.
National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez noted the comanditos were financed entirely by NGOs. “When the actions and financing of these groups were investigated, it was discovered that they were financed by organizations of dubious origin from Europe or by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)”
Eva Golinger wrote years ago, “Wherever a coup d’etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there…The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, National Endowment for Democracy [NED], International Republican Institute [IRI], National Democratic Institute [NDI], Freedom House, Albert Einstein Institute [AEI], and International Center for Non-Violent Conflict [ICNC].”
Fifth, US coup attempts count on funding NGOs to carry out “regime change.” Besides the CIA-controlled USAID, NED, NDI, and IRI, NGOs receive millions from Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and others. The US uses them to buy an internal opposition, similar to AIPAC in the US – except here AIPAC works to disenfranchise we the people.
NED funds NGOs worldwide to incite color revolutions against those the US empire finds not properly subservient. Between 2016-2019 1600 NGOs received NED grants, highlighting the value the US places on the NGO coup-making tool. Needless to say, the US does not tolerate foreign countries funding NGOs pressing for political change here.
From 2000-2020, the US spent $250 million funding “regime change” NGOs in Cuba. Tracey Eaton wrote, “An extensive network of groups financed by the US government sends cash to Cuba to thousands of ‘democracy activists,’ journalists and dissidents every year.” Since 1996, the US spent $20-$45 million dollars a year to fund these Cuban groups. These NGOs created the CIA Cuban social media ZunZuneo, and even infiltrated the Cuban hip-hop scene, laying the basis for the 2021 protests.
From 2017 through 2019, USAID admitted giving nearly $467 million to the Venezuelan opposition. USAID committed another $128 million to US appointed president Juan Guaidó. In 2006, Ambassador William Brownfield in 2006 revealed the goals of USAID funding: “1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital U.S. business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.” The NED disclosed in 2010 that agencies funded the opposition $40-50 million annually.
Venezuela and Nicaragua recently passed laws controlling NGOs – which the US painted as a sign of their dictatorial nature.
How Venezuela Defeated this Five-Pronged CoupAttempt
The Maduro government had campaigned for months educating and warning the people of opposition schemes to disrupt the election, refuse to recognize the results, create new guarimbas, and that united popular action could stop this. They succeeded. The violent coup attempt on July 29-30 failed; on July 31 the terrorists were being rounded up, and calm restored. On August 3, more than half a million Chavistas marched to support President Maduro and peace.
Internationally, the Maduro government benefited from the considerable prestige it had gained standing up to everything the US rulers threw at it. The US has likewise lost much credibility, especially over its full support for the endless massacres in Gaza. It could not even get the subservient OAS to condemn Maduro.
Venezuela, like Cuba, has developed a strong civic-military union supported by thousands of voluntary militias that has been a bastion against the war – economic, military, propaganda, and cyberwar – against the country. Moreover, the Venezuelan military command, like in Cuba and Nicaragua, is dedicated to defending the constitutional order, denying US coup-plotters an opening. A people’s militia in Bolivia, which did not and still does not exist, could have maintained order in October 2019 after the police and military commands declared they would not stop right wing violence.
Besides the mass civic-military union, the Venezuelan government, like Cuba, relies on mobilizing the people. President Maduro’s closing campaign rally culminated in over a million marching on July 25th. Right after the July 28 election, hundreds of thousands of Chavistas took to the streets of Caracas and other cities. This was an antidote to the coup attempt and violence, since these mobilizations vastly outnumbered the capacity of the opposition.
After 25 years of the US forcing the Chavista leadership live under pressure cooker conditions, it has been unable to divide them and overturn the revolution as it has so often elsewhere, such as Grenada, Burkina Faso, Algeria, the Soviet bloc, and now threatens Bolivia.
The Maduro government maintains broad popular support because of its commitment to the people. The oil industry was nationalized and its income, while curtailed due to the US blockade, benefits the people. Mass literacy campaigns ended illiteracy. Over 5.1 million homes have been built for the poor. Venezuela has become almost self-sufficient in food production. The CLAP program distributes discounted or free food to 7.5 million families every month. Free health care and education through university are provided to all. Venezuela is overcoming the US blockade with the economy expected to grow 10% in 2024, and has the lowest inflation rate in 14 years. In recognition, about one million Venezuelans have returned home.
Chavismo defeated this coup because of its organic connection with the people, because of the class consciousness that has matured in its citizens since Hugo Chavez initiated the Bolivarian process, and because of the political clarity and determination of the Chavista leadership. Their victory is one for the peoples of the world.
On 16 August 2024, the Organisation of American States (OAS), whose 1948 formation as a Cold War institution was instigated by the United States, voted on a resolution regarding the Venezuelan presidential elections. The nub of the resolution proposed by the US called upon Venezuela’s election authority, the National Electoral Council (CNE), to publish all the election details as soon as possible (including the actas, or voting records, at the local polling station level). This resolution asks the CNE to go against Venezuela’s Organic Law on Electoral Processes (Ley Orgánica de Procesos Electorales or LOPE): since the law does not call for the publication of these materials, doing so would be a violation of public law. What the law does indicate is that the CNE must announce the results within 48 hours (article 146) and publish them within 30 days (article 155) and that the data from polling places (such as the actas) should be published in a tabular form (article 150).
It is pure irony that the resolution was voted upon in the Simón Bolívar room at the OAS headquarters in Washington, DC. Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) liberated Venezuela and neighbouring territories from the Spanish Empire and sought to bring about a process of integration that would strengthen the region’s sovereignty. That is why the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela pays tribute to his legacy in its name. When Hugo Chávez won the presidency in 1998, he centred Bolívar in the country’s political life, seeking to further this legacy through initiatives such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA) that would continue the journey to establish sovereignty in the country and region. In 1829, Bolívar wrote, ‘The United States appears to be destined by providence to plague [Latin] America with misery in the name of liberty’. This misery, in our time, is exemplified by the US attempt to suffocate Latin American countries through military coups or sanctions. In recent years, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have been at the epicentre of this ‘plague’. The OAS resolution is part of that suffocation.
José Chávez Morado (Mexico), Carnival in Huejotzingo, 1939
Bolivia, Honduras, Mexico, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines did not come to the vote (nor did Cuba, as it was expelled by the OAS in 1962, leading Castro to dub the organisation the ‘Ministry of Colonies of the United States’, or Nicaragua, which left the OAS in 2023). Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) described why his country decided not to appear at the OAS meeting and why it disagrees with the US-proposed resolution, quoting from article 89, section X of the Mexican Constitution (1917), which states that the president of Mexico must adhere to the principles of ‘non-intervention; peaceful settlement of disputes; [and] prohibiting the threat or use of force in international relations’. To that end, AMLO said that Mexico will wait for the ‘competent authority of the country’ to settle any disagreement. In Venezuela’s case, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice is the relevant authority, though this has not stopped the opposition from rejecting its legitimacy. This opposition, which we have characterised as the far right of a special type, is committed to using any resource – including US military intervention – to overthrow the Bolivarian process. AMLO’s reasonable position is along the grain of the United Nations Charter (1945).
Many countries with apparently centre-left or left governments joined the US in voting for this OAS resolution. Among them are Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Chile, even though it has a president who admires Salvador Allende (killed in a US-imposed coup in 1973), has displayed a foreign policy orientation on many issues (including both Venezuela and Ukraine) that aligns with the US State Department. Since 2016, at the invitation of the Chilean government, the country welcomed nearly half a million Venezuelan migrants, many of whom are undocumented and now face the threat of expulsion from an increasingly hostile environment in Chile. It is almost as if the country’s president, Gabriel Boric, wants to see the situation in Venezuela change so that he can order the return of Venezuelans to their home country. This cynical attitude towards Chile’s enthusiasm for US policy on Venezuela, however, does not explain the situation of Brazil and Colombia.
Pablo Kalaka (Chile), Untitled, 2022, sourced from Lendemains solidaires no. 2.
Our latest dossier, To Confront Rising Neofascism, the Latin American Left Must Rediscover Itself, analyses the current political landscape on the continent, beginning by interrogating the assumption that there has been a second ‘pink tide’ or cycle of progressive governments in Latin America. The first cycle, which was inaugurated with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and came to an end following the 2008 financial crisis and US counter-offensive against the continent, ‘frontally challenged US imperialism by advancing Latin American integration and geopolitical sovereignty’, while the second cycle, defined by a more centre-left orientation, ‘seems more fragile’. This fragility is emblematic of the situation in both Brazil and Colombia, where the governments of Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva and Gustavo Petro, respectively, have not been able to exercise their full control over the permanent bureaucracies in the foreign ministries. Neither the foreign minister of Brazil (Mauro Vieira) nor Colombia (Luis Gilberto Murillo) are men of the left or even of the centre left, and both have close ties to the US as former ambassadors to the country. It bears reflection that there are still over ten US military bases in Colombia, though this is not sufficient reason for the fragility of this second cycle.
In the dossier, we offer seven explanations for this fragility:
the worldwide financial and environmental crises, which have created divisions between countries in the region about which path to follow;
the US reassertion of control over the region, which it had lost during the first progressive wave, in particular to challenge what the US sees as China’s entry into Latin American markets. This includes the region’s natural and labour resources;
the increasing uberisation of labour markets, which has created far more precarity for the working class and negatively impacted its capacity for mass organisation. This has resulted in a significant rolling back of workers’ rights and weakened working-class power;
the reconfiguration of social reproduction, which has become centred around public disinvestment in social welfare policies, thereby placing the responsibility for care in the private sphere and primarily overburdening women;
the US’s increased military power in the region as its main instrument of domination in response to its declining economic power;
the fact that the region’s governments have been unable to take advantage of China’s economic influence and the opportunities it presents to drive a sovereign agenda and that China, which has emerged as Latin America’s primary trading partner, has not sought to directly challenge the US agenda to secure hegemony over the continent;
divisions between progressive governments, which, alongside the ascension of neofascism in the Americas, impede the growth of a progressive regional agenda, including policies for continental integration akin to those proposed during the first progressive wave.
These factors, and others, have weakened the assertiveness of these governments and their ability to enact the shared Bolivarian dream of hemispheric sovereignty and partnership.
Antonia Caro (Colombia), Colombia, 1977.
One additional, but crucial, point is that the balance of class forces in societies such as Brazil and Colombia are not in favour of genuinely anti-imperialist politics. Celebrated electoral occasions, such as the victories of Lula and Petro in 2022, are not built on a broad base of organised working-class support that then forces society to advance a genuinely transformative agenda for the people. The coalitions that triumphed included centre-right forces that continue to wield social power and prevent these leaders, regardless of their own impeccable credentials, from exercising a free hand in governance. The weakness of these governments is one of the elements that allows for the growth of the far right of a special type.
As we argue in the dossier, ‘The difficulty of building a political project of the left that can overcome the day-to-day problems of working-class existence has unmoored many of these progressive electoral projects from mass needs’. The working classes, trapped in precarious occupations, need massive productive investments (driven by the state), premised on the exercise of sovereignty over each country and the region as a whole. The fact that a number of countries in the region have aligned with the US to diminish Venezuela’s sovereignty shows that these fragile electoral projects possess little capacity to defend sovereignty.
Daniel Lezama (Mexico), El sueño del 16 de septiembre (The Dream of September 16th), 2001.
In her poem ‘Quo Vadis’, the Mexican poet Carmen Boullosa reflects on the problematic nature of pledging allegiance to the US government’s agenda. Las balas que vuelan no tienen convicciones (‘flying bullets have no convictions’), she writes. These ‘progressive’ governments have no conviction regarding regime change operations or destabilisation efforts in other countries in the region. Much should be expected of them, but at the same time too much disappointment is unwarranted.
Even before South Korea and Cuba established bilateral relations earlier this year, K-pop had gained a following in the communist island.
The spread of K-pop worldwide is often characterized by the somewhat outdated term “Hallyu” or the “Korean Wave,” crashing into audiences in countries where Korea, or its pop culture had previously not been on the mainstream radar.
It was a term well suited for the early 2000s in South Korea’s neighboring Asian countries, and the post Gangnam-style 2010s in Europe and the Americas.
But in the current era ruled by acts like BTS and NewJeans, it is reasonable to say that the wave has already crashed everywhere it possibly could have.
Cuban K-pop fans rehearse ahead of a festival in April 2024, in Havana, Cuba. (RFA Korean)
When RFA Korean traveled to Cuba to gauge reactions to Seoul and Havana redefining their relationship, they also found that K-pop had already made inroads into the Americas’ socialist stronghold.
With no official relations between the two countries, the fanbases in Cuba developed organically, owing in large part to the open internet policy enjoyed by Cuban citizens and the government’s less stringent control over what the people can watch or listen to, a stark contrast to South Korea’s rival, socialist North Korea.
Pyongyang has often touted its relationship with Havana as that of two socialist brethren bound by an ongoing struggle against U.S. imperialism.
Though Cuba’s new relationship with South Korea may have North Korean officials bristling, many in Cuba welcome warmer ties with the South and like the crash of the Korean Wave years ago, they see it as a completely natural development.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Eugene Whong for RFA.
For the past six years on this show, we’ve talked to working people from across the United States, from virtually every walk of life, about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles. But today, we’re going to talk about what it’s like to live and work in a country that has been designated a political enemy of US empire, a country that sits only 90 miles away from the US, a country that American politicians have resolved to strangle into oblivion for the past 60 years. In this episode, we speak with Liz Oliva Fernández from Cuba. Liz is an award-winning Cuban journalist with Belly of the Beast, an independent outlet covering Cuba and US-Cuba relations, and she is the presenter of two new documentaries, Hardliner on the Hudson and Uphill on the Hill. In addition to exposing the sinister interests behind, and the devastating real-world impacts of, the Cold War Cuban policy of Joe Biden’s administration, pushed by powerful hardliners like Senator Bob Menendez, former Chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the films also document Liz’s experience as a Black journalist from the Global South coming to the US to confront the predominantly white politicians and interests waging economic war on her country. We talk about Liz’s new films, and we talk about growing up in Cuba, becoming a journalist, and life for woking people in Cuba under the US-imposed blockade and designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
Liz Oliva Fernández: Hi, my name is Liz Oliva Fernández. I’m a Cuban journalist and also an activist.
Maximillian Alvarez: All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share these episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to on the show.
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My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I am very excited about today’s episode. I could not be more honored to have Liz Oliva Fernández on the call today, calling in from Cuba. Liz is an award-winning Cuban journalist with Belly of the Beast, an independent outlet that covers Cuba and U.S. Cuba relations, and she’s the presenter of two incredible new documentaries, Hardliner on the Hudson and Uphill on the Hill. Now listen, everyone should watch these documentaries and everyone should support the work that Liz and Belly of the Beast are doing and we have linked to those documentaries in the show notes and we’re going to be talking about them in today’s episode.
In addition to exposing the sinister interest behind and the devastating real world impacts of the Cold War Cuban policy of Joe Biden’s administration pushed by powerful hardliners like Senator Bob Menendez, former chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, these films also document Liz’s experience as a Black journalist from the Global South coming to the U.S. to confront the predominantly white politicians and interests waging economic war on her country. Now listen, for the past six years on this show, you guys have heard me talk to working people from across the United States from virtually every walk of life about their lives, their jobs, their dreams, and their struggles through their stories. You’ve heard firsthand how people here struggle to live with dignity, to pursue their happiness and to provide for themselves and their families while navigating the brutal realities of living and working in the gut of the world’s capitalist superpower in the heart of empire.
But today we’re going to talk about what it’s like to live and work in a country that has been designated a political enemy of U.S. empire, a country that sits only 90 miles away from the U.S., a country where people like you and me live and grow and dream where people fall in love and fall out of love where people have birthdays and play sports. A country that politicians here in the U.S. have resolved to strangle into oblivion for the past 60 years. In an article for The Guardian examining the two new documentaries that Liz and Belly the Beast released this year, Andrew Buncombe writes,
“A Cuban journalist is looking to spread awareness of the U.S. trade embargo in two illuminating documentaries arriving in early 2024, Liz Oliva Fernández says whenever she covered news or events on the island, be it the push for democratic reforms or the private businesses springing up after the Castros loosened their grip on power, they always intersected with the sanctions.
“Oliva Fernandez, who traveled to the U.S. to promote the film she co-created, says the sanctions have a huge impact. ‘We’re not talking about a small country in the Caribbean sanctioning another one.’ She said, ‘We’re talking about an empire like the United States that not only stops Cuba having normal relations with the United States, but also stops it having normal relations with the rest of the world. If you can’t do business with any country,’ Oliva Fernandez continues. ‘If you have to pay three or four times the regular cost of everything because you’re buying from far away countries, if you can’t use dollars, if you can’t create bank accounts, if you can’t pay with credit cards, there is nothing you can do.’ She explained the sanctions were first imposed by President John F. Kennedy in February, 1962, three years after Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries came to power in an armed uprising that ousted the dictator Fuglencio Batista.
“Almost a year earlier, the CIA had tried to kill the nascent revolution in the military debacle known as the Bay of Pigs. It had been one of dozens of attempts to kill Castro. The sanctions have had a devastating impact. Cuba’s current GDP per capita is less than $10,000 twice that of Jamaica, but a lot less than in the US where it is $70,000. Because the sanctions are so wide reaching countries across the world who choose to trade with Cuba can find themselves punished. The UN General Assembly has voted many times for the sanctions to be lifted outside a brief period when they were loosened as part of a diplomatic breakthrough with Barack Obama. They remain more pervasive than ever to widespread outcry on the island. Donald Trump added Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism during his administration. President Joe Biden has barely changed that policy.
“‘When you talk about the US’ Cuba policy, you’re really talking about the Trump Biden Cuba policy because they’re the same,’ says Oliva Fernandez.”
Again, I’m honored to have Liz with us today to talk more about these important documentaries and we’re going to talk about the process of making them and we’re going to talk about her reflections on visiting the U.S. last year while they were filming these, but as we always do here at Working People and on The Real News, we want to help show y’all what all of these big political forces and what history itself looks like told through the eyes and lives and stories of regular working people. And so Liz, with all of that upfront and knowing all the kind of things we want to talk about regarding the documentaries, I wanted to ask if we could start a lot further back and talk a little more about you and how you grew up in the very conditions that you are now reporting on as an adult. I wanted to ask for many people who are listening to this who may, you may be the first Cuban that they heard from at this length. I just wanted to ask if you could tell us a little bit more about yourself, where you grew up, what it was like growing up, and let’s walk our way along that path that took you to becoming a journalist, making documentaries in the 2020s. But let’s go back to the start.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Yeah, well I grew up in a really small town outside of the city of Havana called Manawa. I have to say that I had one of the most wonderful childhoods. I was really happy, and this is something that a lot of tourist parents are asking, wondering how it is possible that with so many difficulties in Cuba, children are so happy. And I think because when you are a child, at least that’s my experience, as an adult, okay, I need to figure out what is going on. I need to put a plate on the table, I need to put food on the table. We’re not thinking about that stuff. We were just being kids and having fun and running in the neighborhood with other kids our age and playing and going to school, learning how to play an instrument because we had a particular thing when I was growing up, there is a thing called Casas de Cultura.
It’s like a culture house. They’re in all communities, all kinds of communities, and you can go there and learn how to play an instrument, how to sing, how to paint a painting, whatever you want. They’re free and they’re open to all the public children, but also although they want to improve their ability or be more close to arts. So I was, I dunno, playing games as they’re so basic, we just need a can, when we just crush the can and just play with the can ping pong and everything. We don’t need so much and we’re fairly happy and we embrace. We are not worried about whether we are eating eggs for lunch or if we have chicken or rice. My favorite food, I’m going to say my favorite food is rice, like white rice with fried egg and banana.
That’s my favorite dish and that brings me a lot of memories about my childhood, about the way that I grew up, and listening to the radio. So all the memories listening to the radio with my grandma, I dunno, I just was really happy. And when you are a child, it’s rare because I remember the first time that I had a fancy candy or snack like that, I’m talking about chocolates that are not from Cuba, that are coming from … I was in high school, I think, but when you don’t know those things, you don’t think that you need it at all. I don’t need any fancy chocolates. So I was, for me it was really strange because for example, right now that I have experience of going to the United States, when people ask you if you want some food, they are not asking for the food they’re asking by the brand.
And for me that was really bizarre because if I want crackers, it’s just crackers. I don’t eat the specific brand of crackers that you like and maybe that’s the kind of thing that you are used to doing. But for me, I just want crackers, basic salad crackers or whatever. But I’m not thinking about brands because we don’t have all that kind of brand of stuff, we just have crackers. I enjoy eating the crackers that are for sale in the neighborhood, the supermarket or whatever. But we are not thinking about brands when we think about drinking a soda. We are not thinking in terms of Coca-Cola or Pepsi or Fanta, Sprite, Seven Up; we are just thinking lime, orange, cola. That’s all. So it’s quite different and I don’t know, maybe I can’t explain why because of course as the time passes and you are getting older, you realize certain things that you weren’t able to in your childhood.
But now I remember that my mom, mom is a doctor, so she went to Venezuela when I was 10 years old and she brought me a baby when I was 12 years old, like a baby for playing for games because she wasn’t able to buy a doll, but they made a baby doll that cries and everything. But for 12 years my mom wasn’t able to buy me that kind of expensive doll and she’s a surgeon, she was unable to do that because it was really expensive. It is a really rare thing in Cuba. So I have another kind of doll, but I don’t know the real Barbie. I knew about Barbie when I was 10, 11. I don’t know, but that’s the kind of thing that we are not exposed to. Also, I think that the world is different because we are not posting on social media or the internet and bombing you with buy this and buy that, you can’t live without this. They are pushing people to buy a lot of stuff that at the time you don’t need at all. But I don’t know, I think it was simple, if I have to describe it, I had a simple, happy and really sweet childhood in a really, really faraway town inside of Havana.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and I mean this is one of the many things I love about your work, right? Because of course you’ve been working to produce great video documentaries with Belly the Beast before these two documentaries that came out this year and it’s been really important to you to show people what life looks like inside Cuba and for working people to hear from working people, not just about how hard life is living under the U.S. imposed sanctions, though you do an incredible job of showing that, but you’re always trying to also show stuff like this, the moments of joy, the humanity, the relationships, the life that is worth living, that a lot of people, especially here in the U.S. don’t think about or don’t see. And so that’s why I think it’s so important for folks to hear what you’re saying and I hope you will forgive me for asking a little more about it because I wanted to just ask if you can go back to that happy time in your childhood.
And like you said, it was a different world. It was before the internet, but still the Cold War is unquote ending. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the eighties and nineties that you and I didn’t, it was kind of in the background because we were just kids. But if you go back to that time as a kid, I was wondering if you could just sort of try to paint a picture for people about what a week looked like for you, going to school, playing with friends, what the adults were doing, just any more that you can do to help take people there to understand what daily life looks like for a kid like you growing up at that time.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Well, I was born in the nineties in the middle of something that the government called special periods. I would just wake up really early in the morning because my grandma was obsessed with punctuality at school. So I just woke up really early in the morning. I come from a mixed family. So it was really difficult for my grandma to try to understand my hair, she was a white girl, so I spent 20 minutes combing my hair or more having breakfast coffee, cafe con leche, like milk and coffee, something else with the bread and something like that, to go to school.
My mom would be on her way to the hospital by then because public transportation at that time was terrible. As I said, we used to live well. We lived far away from the city, so she had to go 30 kilometers to go to her work. It was a really difficult time for her in terms of transportation and commuting from work to home. On the other hand, I just had to go to school, spent most of my time there. My grandma picked me at noon because I would have lunch at home and come back. I had lunch, took a nap and came back to school at 2:00 PM for a double session. And when I come back from school I just have to do homework and everything before being able to go out and just spend time with friends. And I remember that my mom used to ride really tired studying because the weather is so hot in the summer.
It’s always summer in Cuba and I remember the blackout, but I didn’t suffer because I just fell asleep because it was too hot and I was too tired. And I remember my grandma or my mom using a piece of paper like a fan for me because of mosquitoes and everything. When I think about that I can think about difficult moments or problems that we had or we have. To my knowledge she may answer differently, but growing up I didn’t have any worries. I remember that sometimes I had to go to cafe de cultura in the afternoon and have dance classes or singing classes or something like that and I just spent time there.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I mean I love hearing about this though because it reminds me of a conversation I had with Ana Kopi who’s a Slovenian labor organizer today, but we were talking about her childhood in the eighties and nineties growing up in again at this time when the Cold War is ending and the world is changing, she’s still a kid and she was talking about, it was like what she said was very similar to what you said was like, I didn’t know. “I was just trying to live my life and have friends and go to school,” and it’s just, I don’t know, there’s something really beautiful about that. It reminds us that life is life wherever you are in the world and that’s a beautiful sacred thing. And childhood can look like childhood in such different contexts because kids just want to play and have fun and explore. And I think that’s something, it’s so simple, but we lose that sense as adults.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Yeah, we have the freedom to do that because it was just the freedom to play with your friends. There was any danger or anything even when the situation in the country was tense. You can’t feel that on the streets with the people. Of course a lot of people were struggling with the crisis with food, medicine, but still they’re like, “you can be happy.” And I also remember that the most important thing at the time was bikes. Everybody was riding a bike because public transportation was so bad that people had to bike for miles and while you going to go to the point A to point B, and I remember I started to learn how to ride a bike as an adult because of course we didn’t have the money to buy for children, for kids. So I remember that my dad put, I don’t know what to call it, it kind, I forget the name, but my dad put something in his bike and I was sitting there and just with the point of my toes trying to ride the bike. And it was funny. It was funny. I wasn’t riding a bike worried about, okay, “I need to ride a bike because this is the only transportation that we had.” No, I was riding a bike for fun.
Maximillian Alvarez: And I know for folks who are listening to this who have grown up with all the propaganda about Cuba here in the U.S., they may be wondering like, oh “Well, when you went to school were you just learning about communism and how bad America is? And was it just blasting from loudspeakers in the streets or were you guys learning about other basic things and talking about baseball?” Again, it’s a very basic question, but I’m just asking because you know how some people think about this stuff and I just wanted to ask how big of, tell us a little more about the culture, I guess is what I would say that you remember for people who were there thinking that you grew up in a Soviet other world.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Well, we received a lot of information about imperialism and the U.S. government being the enemy, but it’s interesting because they always talked about U.S. government imperialism. They don’t talk about people, they talk about government structures, they talk about sanctions, they talk about the missile crisis that we call the October crisis. We talk about sovereignty, we talk about how they can respect the way that we choose to live. They talk about, I remember some books and talk about, I don’t know how to translate it in English, but the way that civilians came to armed defense from the enemy militia. They talk about, of course, the whole story of the revolution and why it was so important to defend that, because that allowed us to be our own, to be the owners of our destiny. They talk about self-defense. Yeah, of course. We received a lot of information about that, history classes and also, civic education, but we also learned a lot of stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with confrontation, war, U.S.-Cuba relations or U.S. policy on Cuba. We learned about history, work history, we learned about arts, we learned about sports, we learned about sexual education, we learned about HTAs, I dunno the acronym is in English.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Yeah, STI’s, we learned about pregnancy, about autonomy, we learned about abortion rights, we learned about Black people. We learned about so many things. That wasn’t the main thing. Of course we have a lot about that because we were in the middle of the war. It wasn’t like the typical war, but it was an economic war. It was still in the middle of that. So we learned a lot of that.
I don’t want to brag about this stuff, but I’m pretty sure that we have one of the highest education levels in the population in Cuba in all the world. So we learned about so many things, math, science, culture, whatever you want. Because Cuban education is one of the best for sure.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. I mean it’s one of the most remarkable achievements in human society. The amount of literacy and education that was brought to the people of Cuba through the revolution, to say nothing about the healthcare advances that y’all have made and the advances in your education system. But we never hear about that. We only hear about how awful and terrible Castro is.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Yeah, it is for me, it’s ridiculous how people, if they know about Cuba, they know all the negative things that we have, but there is no one single journalist trying to tell positive stories about Cuba. Maybe it’s a question for them, for reporters in the U.S. because it’s not only Cuba, it’s also Mexico, Columbia, El Salvador. They just say that we live in chaos and the U.S. is the most wonderful country in the world. The rest of us are trying to get to the U.S. , the promised land because we’re not capable enough to be a better country. Instead of talking about the role that U.S. has been playing in Latin America in general, forcing us to migrate to the United States trying to follow the American dream that they still are selling me.
Maximillian Alvarez: That’s the part of the story that so many of us don’t hear is that so many Latinos come to the US chasing the American dream because Americans have stolen our dreams in our home countries and our ability to pursue that.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Yeah, I’ll say it’s not the American dream. Yeah, it’s an American nightmare. I always say that because it’s not a trend.
Maximillian Alvarez: No. And sister, we can talk about that all day because that’s how this show got started is the very first interview I ever did on this show was with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, who grew up in a shack in Tijuana, came to the United States when he was eight after his dad abandoned him, his mom died. He lived that American dream and then we lost everything including the house. I grew up in the global recession in 2008, and so he was the first person I interviewed. Like I’m interviewing you now to sort of talk through that because our American dream had become the American nightmare that you’re talking about and that’s a very hard reality for many, many people to confront. And we’ll get to that more in a second when we talk about these documentaries. But I wanted to ask just two more questions before we got there. One, did you think much about kids like me in the U.S., in what we were doing and what we were thinking? Did that enter your mind at all? If not, it’s okay. I’m just curious if you guys thought about what other kids in the U.S. were going through while you were going through everything we’ve been talking about.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Well, I never had relatives or family when I was a kid in the United States. So for me, the United States only existed on the news when they talked about the U.S. government. So I never talked about U.S. kids. I remember that the only kids that I was thinking about was in the kids of the world that don’t have any food to eat because when I don’t want to eat my food, my grandma always tells to me, you need to eat because there is a lot of kids out there that they don’t have any food to eat, so you have to eat. And it was like, I’m feeling guilty because I have this food, this display on the table and there is a little kid that doesn’t have anything, but that kid doesn’t have any citizenship. When my grandma was talking about them, it was like kids out there that didn’t have any food. But yeah, right now I can’t think about it specifically. In other cases just my work was my neighborhood, my block, my school. It sounds simple, but that’s the way I was making it.
Maximillian Alvarez: No, I mean again, I think it’s beautiful because my parents pulled the same thing on us if we didn’t eat, it was like, “You guys should be thinking about the kids around the world who don’t get this, so you’re going to sit at the table and finish it.” Exactly. So again, there’s something beautiful about that. We didn’t know the other existed, but our parents were telling us the same things in such radically different countries. And again, I think that’s one of the common themes of this show and one of the common themes you guys are going to hear about throughout this episode is that when it comes to working people, we are not as different as we are made to feel. We have so much in common and all the things we don’t have in common, we have so much to learn from each other and so much to experience together. And it really is more about the kind of structures of power and domination that are fucking all of us over across the world that we need to be focusing on. God, I could talk to you about this for days, but I know I want to get us to the documentaries into going from there to how you became a journalist. I wanted to ask, was that something you always wanted to do and how was that tied to you developing your consciousness about the United States and Cuba? And so how were those two paths kind of connected?
Liz Oliva Fernández: I never have been thinking about this, but I suppose that because when I was a child I wanted to be a prosecutor and people were really like, this kid wants to be a prosecutor? Do you mean a lawyer and I’d say, no, no, no, prosecutor, I want to be a prosecutor. And I was five. And people were like, what’s wrong with this girl? She won’t be a teacher, she won’t be a dancer and she wants to be a prosecutor. That’s rare. And I think it’s because now I’m thinking and I think that it’s because my grandma and the sense of justice that she was pushing me all the time, we need to do the right thing. We need to thank others because this is something that she can’t develop in Cuba a lot. The feeling of if you are okay, but the rest are not okay, you are not okay because we need to think in a collective way.
We need to embrace others. My grandma always says the neighborhood is also your family. In fact your closest family. So I grew up going to the beach because the parents rented a bus and put all the kids on the bus and took us to the beach. We don’t have money to buy food at the beach, so all the parents cooked one meal for all the kids who wanted them to spend the day at the beach. So I grew up, if I have three blouses but there is a kid in the school that doesn’t have any, I’m going to pick one. And I always remember this lesson from my grandma, if you’re a kid, you want to save the one you like the most.
So every time that I choose the thing that I like the most for me, my grandma says, okay, we can give them it. She’s like, yes, that’s my favorite. She would say, “That’s why we need to give it to them because I’m pretty sure they’re going to love it too.” And I was like, what? No. And those kind things that my grandma taught me during my entire life, that was something that was right inside of me to talk a lot about justice and social justice. That’s why I wanted to be a prosecutor when I was a kid. But how I became a journalist, I think it’s because of my mom, and I always have something to say at a school in meetings. That was the kind of child I was.
So at some point my mom’s like, maybe you need to be a journalist. I say, oh, but I want to be a biologist and study the letters of the language. And everyone’s like, no, no, no be a journalist first. And I go through the old tests that you need to do here in order to be a journalist. But I wasn’t expecting, I wasn’t dreaming of it in university, I became really an activist, like trying to talk about racism in Cuba to talk about all the problems that we have, the Black people to talk about feminism, to talk about LGBTQ rights. So I became more active because again, grandma has taught me about the sense of justice that we need to, and also to stand out for myself the way that I am doing for others. At some point I just was hungry. I just want to make my journalism work for my activism and I dreamed about the fact that I can make it possible and also to talk to a Cuban audience. So that is how I ended up talking to a U.S. audience, I have to say that the job chose me. I didn’t choose the job.
I remember that I just, someone called my phone, a friend called me, saying, “okay, there is a US journalism director that is looking for a Cuban to do a documentary about the impact of the sanctions on the Cuban people.” And I was like, “oh, okay. I dunno.” Maybe because we are tired of hearing about the sanctions and I think that we in Cuba, we are really tied to hearing all that about the sanctions. And also I think the government hasn’t managed to communicate well about the sanctions. I was a journalist, I was tired too. I couldn’t find the angle per se. Okay, someone wants to do a documentary about that. And I start the whole process and at the end they select me, they choose me and we start to do the documentary. It was, I remember only a three month job, okay, I am doing this.
So I was trying to just finish university. I was trying to rent a place, everything. So I need money. So I was happy to do it. But the most, I was learning about the Che on the part of the Cuban people the most, I just discovered the most, my eyes were open. So what I didn’t know is how it is possible that I didn’t know that. That’s my whole process inside of Belly of the Beast, the most we dig in, the most I learned the most angry, I realize the most that I need to pay attention to that before to pay attention to the rest because there are not enough people paying attention to this is not because when we talk between Cubans about the problems and the issues that we have in Cuba and then we need to find a solution everybody agrees with.
But when we talk about the sanctions, people don’t understand how big and crashing they are. So that’s why just for a while I hope that I can put the most effort that I can to talk about this topic because this is something that is outside of Cuba. So I realized that I need to pay attention to that. I need to do journalism work about that. I need to show to the people and visualize the working class people that has been suffering the most, the impact of the sanctions during this 60 years and more because the sanctions affect all of Cubas if you are in Cuba or outside of Cuba, but affect you more or less depending on your race, gender, your geographical situation if you live in a city or rural area, depending if your family is in Cuba or live outside of Cuba, if you are Black and white, if you’re mixed race.
So all these things, the harm of weddings more or less depends on the level of vulnerability that we have.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well I just wanted to ask about that because like I said at the beginning on this show I interview workers largely from the U.S. and Canada, but increasingly around the world and we have conversations like this, but we talked about their lives but then we talk about their jobs and trying to make a living as a working adult and I don’t know, we should definitely team up and do more of those with folks in Cuba. So people listening to this can hear more about that. But I guess I just wanted to ask you, if we were to do that now, interview a bunch of working people in Cuba, I just wanted to ask if you could impress upon them how much the sanctions impact their lives as working people trying to get by?
Liz Oliva Fernández: It depends. I think it depends because for example, if you talk with a doctor or scientist, it’s going to be easier for them to talk about the sanctions and how they affect their lives and their work. But I think that most normal people in Cuba don’t understand how these affect them because it is not something you have to understand that is against you and against a country. And when they talk about this, they always say this just only affects the government. This only affects the government. The rest is a lie of the Cuban government. Well it is not only affecting the government, if you talk with a person, they’re going to tell you differently. But if it was affecting the government, the majority of the people, the population in this country works for the government and the majority of people who work for the government, the most of them are Black.
So it directly impacts Black people. It’s true, it’s certainly true. Also the sectors impacted the most by the sanctions, healthcare, social security and by technology, all the sectors, the majority women. So imagine being the head of your family. So you have to face all the things that scar in your work. So you have to be resilient and try to recreate and reimagine all the kinds of things or solutions that you are inventing to try to solve your problems because you have patients, you need medicine. So imagine all the energy that requires that and then go home and try to do the same, trying to be resilient. You reinvent it. What kind of food you are bringing to the table, okay, the children have grown up, I need to buy clothes but I don’t have a way to buy it because it’s all stress all the time.
But this is not something simple. And I know now because I understand better s but I didn’t know four years ago. So for me it was okay, my mom is a doctor, I knew about the impact of sanctions on healthcare, but I didn’t know about the rest. I didn’t know how the sanctions affected me or my friends. For us now it’s not just sanctions, it’s being on the list of a state sponsored list of terrorism. How could that affect my possibility to go out to the country or to need a visa to go around? I’m coming from a country who supposedly is a sponsor of terrorism and on top of that I’m Black, so I’m in danger. So there are a lot of things that people are not considering. For example, when Cuba has its own vaccines against COVID-19, I just remember being a collective taxi and someone was so angry about it, angry about the fact that he wants to travel to Spain or he’s going to, I don’t remember where it was. I think it was in Spain or the United States. Yeah, it wasn’t the United States because he was talking about the reunification process with his family in the United States.
He was facing a few obstacles because the United States didn’t recognize Cuban vaccines as legitimate and he was talking shit about the Cuban government like you are responsible because the vaccines, the vaccines that you made, whatever. And he was so angry and he was all the time pointing the finger at the government and he never stopped for a second to say, “Wait a minute, we have a vaccine that is pretty amazing. Why are you not recognizing our vaccines as good enough and pushing me to delay my reunification process? I have to face more obstacles because it’s the United States.” For many people it’s like a savior. So you need to find guilt around you because this is the dream, this is the point that I want to reach at some point, so I can’t go against that. Also the sanctions are too big and at the same time are not specific. So it’s pretty easy to lose the details and point with the finger to the person that you have just in front of you, that is your government. The rest is something that is so far away from you and you don’t have any ideas on it. And it’s pretty difficult to do that kind of reconciliation because of course our government is not perfect. They have a lot of faults. But that thing, that specific thing that you’re angry about, that’s not because you’re the government, it’s because of another government.
Maximillian Alvarez: Preach sister. And again, I stress to everyone listening to this that you got to watch Liz’s work, you got to watch the Belly the Beast documentaries if you want to learn more about this, right? Because they go into it, they show the different kinds of products and amenities that we take for granted here in the United States that are just frankly not available to regular working people in Cuba. Not because the evil Castro or communist government won’t allow them, but because the US has been strangling this country for 60 plus years, imposing when Liz calls it an economic war, that’s what it is. They have been under economic war imposed by the US limiting every facet of life, what they can trade, what can come in and out of the country, the dollars that they use to buy them. I mean the kind of medical equipment that they can get in the country.
Every delegation of people that I’ve known here in the United States that’s gone to Cuba, the main thing that they say they’re collecting to try to take into the country is ibuprofen. Because I just say that to save for people listening, think about how much you take for granted, being able to go and just buy a bottle of ibuprofen, ibuprofen, Advil, and just how much that helps when you’ve got a kid who’s sick or you yourself have a headache. Imagine just not having that because a country 90 miles to your north hates you so much that they want to make it impossible for people in that country to access things like that. If you want to know more about how deep that goes and how much it affects regular working people, again, you got to watch Liz’s work and we’re going to link to that in the show notes so you can watch it after listening to this conversation, but we’re not going to be able to sum up all of that.
She gets across that work here in the conversation. But I really encourage folks to check it out, especially after hearing this conversation now. And I wanted to ask Liz, with the time that we’ve got left, if we could talk about putting together these two new documentaries, how you tackled that process of trying to communicate how big and impactful these sanctions are and what we can do to fight them. Just talk to us about the process of making these two documentaries and coming to the United States to try to address these issues that are impacting life in your country across the board.
Liz Oliva Fernández: Well, that was really hard for me because I was traveling to the United States for the first time, being exposed to the United States for the first time. For someone who is coming from the outside, I think that I can really relate to, I’m also coming from, there is no different culture between you and the United States. And also we have a lot of things in Ghana. I was really hoping to talk to the politicians. I was really hoping that they were open to talk to the Cuban journalists because I was in the country of freedom of speech. And I get really frustrated when I realize that they are not open to having any conversation with someone who thinks differently than him. And it was like this is not supposed to be. And for me it was really bizarre and new.
I have to be at peace with myself because we tried all the things we could in order to get access to them. The people who actually are pushing for the US policy on Cuba who are pushing for more sanctions, who are pushing from more isolation to Cuba because I have so many questions to ask them that I feel so relieved when our director of photography said, okay, I grew up in the city in DC so I know the people. Let’s talk to them. Let’s try to think about what they think about Cuba, what they think about U.S. policy on Cuba. And I feel so relieved when I talk to people from DC that I didn’t know that DC was a Black city. So talk about my country because of the answers that I found then and also the empathy that I found with them. It wasn’t something that I just felt about Congress or in the State Department or places like that. And that makes me feel that there is hope.
It’s also a confirmation that the United States is not its government, that there are a lot of United States inside of the United States. There are a lot of people that feel empathy not just for Cuba but also in Latin America and Canada and for the war. And there are a lot of people in the United States that feel change when they know about U.S. foreign policy around the world and on top of that in the Global South. And they want to do it better and maybe they have the possibility to leave the country to start living in a new country, but they should stay there because they actually believe that they can win change. Because in fact, I believe that there is a change in the United States. In the United States, there is going to be a change in the world and the way that we relate with each other.
Maximillian Alvarez: I want to ask you a little more about that because again, these two new documentaries which we talked about at the top and folks can watch by following the links in the show notes, the first which really kind of tracks Senator Bob Menendez from New Jersey and his role in maintaining and worsening the US policy towards Cuba for many years amidst all of his many, many, many corruption scandals. And it’s a really important documentary that I would encourage folks to watch. But even in that documentary, Liz has a great moment where again, you’re seeing her and her crew struggle to get Menendez to talk to them, let alone address these issues. And of course Menendez never does. But then there’s a beautiful moment where Liz goes to Menendez as constituents and goes walking around talking to people about what they think about the Cuba policy and how even Cuban expats are not for the sanctions, even if they’re anti-Castro.
They say, we know that these sanctions hurt our people, not the government so that we should stop doing them. And yet the senator who’s representing us is not listening to us and going full bore into increasing sanctions and keeping Cuba on the state sponsors of terrorism list. And then you have another moment like that, which is incredibly beautiful. Frankly, it was the moment that impacted me the most in the other documentary as well. The moment you’re talking about where you’re trying to get politicians in DC to talk to you and talk openly about U.S.-Cuba policy, and they don’t say maybe one or two folks who do, but then you go to the constituents, you go to the working people, you go to Black people on the streets in DC and talk to them and you see just how vast the disconnect is between regular people and the ways that we talk and think and feel about Cuba and the people in power and the ways they talk and think and feel about Cuba.
I wanted to ask you if you could talk about that a little more. I could sense even though it was a beautiful thing to experience and see that we’re not all terrible, we’re not against you and your country and in fact, yeah, we don’t want this economic war on our fellow working people in Cuba, but I have to imagine it was still very hard for you to talk to people living in the country that is trying to kill your country and has been doing so for 60 years and still a lot of people don’t know about it or don’t think about it a lot. Was that tough to grapple with?
Liz Oliva Fernández: I don’t think, for me it’s about difference, honestly. I get that people have different experiences about different topics and different issues and also experience about that because for example, if I talk with a Cuban American, I just want, first I want to listen to his experience or her experience about Cuba or with Cuba. Secondly, I want to understand his position and why they think in that way specifically. But we can make it if you talk to me about it or whatever. But the most difficult thing for me is when someone that doesn’t have any experience in Cuba, that never puts food in Cuba that doesn’t know Cuba or is Cuban people and they call and say Cuba, that they want the best things for Cuba, but they never been here. And they talk to me with anger. So a lot of resentment about people, whatever was a lot of anger and hate, how it’s possible that you want the best for us, how the sanctions are helping to get the best.
So that doesn’t make any sense to me. So that’s the moment that I struggle with the most, but with different experience, with different perspective, I can get it and the most of that, this is something that I experience in your support him, for example, that there is a lot of people that have different experience that have to live Cuba in the eighties, on sixties with the crisis and everything. They don’t have hate for Cuba. They’re sad, they want to come back, they want to be here again, they want to die here, but they don’t do it because they promised to their relatives, father, everything, that they never put it back in Cuba until the regime fell. And I get it and I get the sad thing. That’s why I am thinking that we need a reconciliation process between Cubans in both eyes. We need to start to talk more about the things that we have in common rather than our differences.
And that’s the most sweet part and also the most sad part because there is a lot of contradiction. There is a lot of back and forth. There are a lot of feelings because this is an emotional thing and that’s the most difficult part for me. I put away my emotions too because this is not just my job, this is also my life, my family’s life, my friend’s life, the part of my friend’s life too. So there are a lot of people, there is a lot of pressure on me. There is a lot on my shoulders. That’s why I don’t talk about the name of Cubans. I’m talking about my own experience. I’m talking about my perspective as a journalist, but also someone who lives in Cuba who suffers and also enjoys Cuba.
And that’s the most difficult part when someone talks to me who is totally disconnected to this, wants to teach me about democracy or the regimes or whatever. They think that the sanctions and unlike me about how the sanctions are good for the Cuban people. In what way? Tell me about people who have been in Cuba but also doing this job. I have been interviewing people that are coming to Cuba at different moments for different reasons. Republicans, Democrats, liberals, independents, most of them are against, but I want to know 90% of them are against essentials because they have been here. They understand Cuba for different reasons, not because it’s injustice. Some of them want to do business because they’re worried about money. They see here as a market, some of them because they have family and they want better lives for different reasons where they’re against sanctions.
It doesn’t have anything to do with their government, just their opinion about their own government and what is going on with my contract. So how is it possible that you being a Cuban, them being against it, that’s crazy. But it’s also an industry of hate that was created in Miami and has been maintained today. And it’s sad because you can watch it like you are being vocal. And that’s another thing that the United States loves perfect victims. The U.S. loves perfect victims. But if you are not the perfect victim, and when you point the finger, and that’s why Cuba is so polarizing of a topic.
They’re starting. They don’t care about what Cuba is. Let’s talk about what we are doing in Cuba. That should be the beginning of all these conversations. But sometimes it’s difficult because if you talk positively about them, you’re a communist. You’re a communist or a socialist, and that’s a bad word. The United States for example, being in the United States and having conversations with people, when they talk about communism, socialism, they talk about that. They say, “Okay, what is socialism for you? What does it mean? Explain it to me. Do you think that having access to public goods, public healthcare system is socialism?” Yeah. Some of them say, “Yeah, that’s socialism.” And I say, “But do you know that U.S. Congressperson or U.S. Congress people if they serve one period in Congress, they have access to free public and the quality healthcare system?” Well, now you know that the U.S. government and U.S. Congress is enjoying socialism too, but you don’t.
And that’s the role of the media and how badly they have been doing their work because there is a lot of misinformation about Cuba. There is a lot of misinformation about socialism and also the stigma that we have been carrying our entire life. They always say that we are in a state of hunger, crisis, desperation, scarcity. But if socialism or the kind of system that we are trying to build here is all of that, what is the point of the sanctions? We don’t need them. We don’t need help. So what is the point of sanctions? What is the point of persecution, what is the point of all of that?
Maximillian Alvarez: It’s funny because there’s a very capitalist mentality that I hear interviewing workers around the country who are trying to unionize and say, when I’m interviewing Black workers in Alabama who are trying to unionize at Amazon, and they are trying to organize so that they can improve their lives and improve their wages and all that stuff. And so Amazon will hire these outside consultants to come in and tell the workers why a union is bad for them and they should not vote for one. And what they’ll always say is they’ll say like, look, you guys don’t want a union because the union could come in here and they could get you a contract where you’re earning less than you’re making now. And so workers will say, well, if that’s the case, then why don’t you just let ’em come in? You would benefit. It’s kind of like you’re saying, it’s like they keep saying it, like they’re trying to benefit the workers and save them from how much the union’s going to hurt them.
But it’s really just scare tactics to try to get people to believe lies. And like you said, if socialism is this bad, then just let us do it. If a union’s this bad, then just let us have one because then you’ll have to pay us less. So clearly someone’s lying about something. And I wanted to just turn that into a final question because I’ve had such an incredible time talking to you, but I want to be, I’ve kept you longer than I said I would, and I know I’ve got to let you go, but I wanted to kind of zoom out and ask if you had final words for working people here in the United States, because in so many ways, I am the kind of person you’re talking about. I grew up as a first generation Mexican American. I grew up very conservative. I was an American capitalist.
That was our family. We thought that socialism was bad, that capitalism was good, that America was the greatest country on earth, and that if we worked hard, we could make a good life for ourselves and our family. And when I was a kid, one of the things that pop culture and adults would say to try to justify that is they’d say, well, here in America you have all this consumer choice. You can go to the grocery store and you have a million different brands that you can choose from. And in Cuba they have bread lines and they don’t have any brands to choose from, and so that’s why we’re good and they’re bad. And now I’m living in 2024 in Baltimore and I go to the CVS down the street and the shelves are empty and the medicines are barely there. And all the brands are owned by the three same companies and people who maybe once believed that they could work hard and make a good life for themselves have kind of given up on that dream.
After 20 years of the United States making life harder and more impossible for working people, while a few billionaires get richer, all of our tax dollars go to war, like the cost of living goes up. So it feels like all the things that we were told about capitalism when I was a kid and all the ways that people used Cuba and countries like Cuba as examples for why socialism was bad, it’s like, well now most of us are just living in the world that capitalists were describing in the nineties, but when they were talking about Cuba, and I guess I just wanted to ask if I hear this in the conversations that I have with people every week, people who tell me, I used to love this country and then after the government deregulated the railroads and the railroads are making more billions than they ever have. One of them derailed in my backyard and blew up and poisoned me and my family and now we’re fucked. People in this country are getting pushed into the bottom of society and the capitalist society we grew up believing in is crushing us. So I wanted to ask if you saw much of that or what your impressions were of that when you came here and what messages you would have for working people in the United States who are living through that right now?
Liz Oliva Fernández: It’s difficult because I’m pretty sure that, as I said, the war has changed. The war has changed also from the United States. I just witnessed this in the United States because if you say because you have more freedom, because you have more brands to choose, I do really have more freedoms. It’s not that you have many options, all healthy, for example, for food, and you can choose whatever you want, the one that you like the most. It’s not like that. It’s like the one that you can pay for, the one that you can buy, and that’s different.
But if this is the kind of capitalism or the system or the freedom that you want and you got it, I’m happy for you. But in my case, that’s not the thing that I want for me or for my country or for my people because I understand that that’s not actually freedom. That’s not actually the thing that I worry the most. If I have to say something to someone who right now is struggling from working class, that they have a family or specific situation, I just say that the most important thing for me is stop the thinking. Just one person, just one family to stop thinking like that and start to think about collectively, what we can share together, how we can become stronger together, how we can get more wealthy together, how we can work less instead of spending more time with family, friends.
That’s the kind of life that I want. That’s not the kind of life that I got right now, but that’s the kind of life that I want to achieve in a way that we, in a life that we can all live together, being okay together and also start to focusing how be mentally more healthy, but also physically having time for do my own thing, but also to spend time with family, friends, partners, to dedicate time to your children instead of they spend the most of the time just with the face in front of their phones. So it’s a different thing and this is something that you can’t achieve alone.
And that’s difficult because in a society like the United States, individuals are getting the most of the focus. If you are always thinking about yourself, your family, that your family is also your wife or your husband or your partner and your children, that’s all. Forget about all the old generations that came from before you. That’s something quite different from us in Cuba and also in Latin America, families, our cousins are family too, and we’re trying to get as close as them as possible because we are thinking in a collective way in some way. If there is something that kept us alive until today, it is that we think like a family, like a group of people that is not just linked by blood, that were linked by empathy, by experience that we have been going through together and that’s the most important thing for survivors in my opinion.
Maximillian Alvarez: All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guests, Liz Oliva Fernández, for taking the time to have that incredible conversation with me and I want to thank Liz and the whole Belly of the Beast Crew for the important work that they’re doing. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring and I want to encourage y’all one more time to go check out Liz’s two new documentaries, hardliner on the Hudson and Uphill on the Hill, which you can watch on YouTube using the links that we provided in the show notes. You can also find all of Liz and Belly of the Beast work at belly of the beast cuba.com and you can also donate and support their work there, which you definitely should do because these stories need to be told and Liz and the whole crew are working their butts off to tell them the right way and they need our support.
We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People and if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve got there for our patrons and go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
South Korea and Cuba announced on Wednesday that they have finalized plans to open embassies in Havana and Seoul, and will send diplomats within the week.
The development came as Cuba sent its first delegation to South Korea since the two countries agreed to normalize relations in February, a decision that took North Korea by surprise.
North Korea has traditionally regarded Cuba as one of its closest “socialist brethren,” with state media often characterizing the Caribbean island as a success story despite the challenges it faces under the U.S.-enforced trade embargo.
The delegation, led by Carlos Miguel Pereira, director general of bilateral affairs at the Cuban foreign ministry, visited South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held discussions with the Korean side led by Deputy Minister for Political Affairs Chung Byung-won.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Seoul and Havana agreed to cooperate on several different international and regional situations and to set up embassies as soon as possible, Lim Soo-suk, a South Korean foreign ministry spokesperson, told a news briefing.
Carlos Miguel Pereira, Director General of the Bilateral Affairs at the Cuban foreign ministry, speaks on a panel at the 2024 Korea-LAC Future Cooperation Forum, June 10, 2024 in Seoul. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Korea via Youtube)
Deputy Minister Chung elaborated, saying that a temporary office would be opened within the first half of this year, with diplomatic staff to be dispatched to Havana later this week.
Director General Pereira, meanwhile, said that Cuban personnel began working in South Korea last month, and will open the Cuban Embassy soon.
Mario Alzugaray Rodriguez, deputy head of mission of the Cuban Embassy in China, visited South Korea in May to discuss the embassy opening with the South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was also part of the delegation and had the title “acting ambassador to South Korea.”
Chung reported prior to the meeting that discussions would also include inter-Korean relations.
Checkmate?
Cuba’s sudden overtures to South Korea should not necessarily be taken at face value because Havana still remains close to Russia, David Maxwell, vice president for the Center of Asia Pacific Strategy, told RFA Korean.
Maxwell noted that at the same time as the meeting in Seoul, four Russian warships, including a nuclear-powered submarine, had entered Havana harbor in Cuba.
“I worry about political warfare. Is Cuba really breaking from the axis of dictators?” Maxwell said. “What if Cuban relations with South Korea will be exploited over time to receive South Korean exports, particularly of high tech and dual use goods, that could then be transhipped to North Korea?”
Maxwell likened the geopolitical situation between North and South Korea to that of opponents in the Korean stone-capturing game baduk, known as go in Japan and weiqi in China.
“It appears that South Korea has captured a North Korean stone,” he said. ”But does this ‘diplomatic terrority’ really benefit South Korea in the long run? Only time will tell.”
But the establishment of relations between Havana and Seoul will not have any effects on inter-Korean relations, the Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner told RFA.
“Cuba did not provide assistance to North Korea nor had significant trade with Pyongyang,” he said. “While Havana’s shift in relations between the Koreas was an embarrassment for Pyongyang as a loss of a socialist compatriot, the North Korean populace may not have been informed of the event.”
Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hong Seung Wook and Kim So Young for RFA Korean.
Miami, April 30, 2024—Cuban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release jailed local freelance journalist José Luis Tan Estrada and allow reporters to work without fear of reprisal, said the Committee to Protect Journalists on Tuesday.
On April 26, Tan was arrested in the Cuban capital of Havana and has since been detained in the Villa Marista prison, according to several mediareports. The journalist confirmed his arrest and detention in a phone call to local activist Yamilka Lafita, according to La Hora de Cuba, an independent media outlet in Tan’s hometown of Camagüey.
“We are gravely concerned by the detention of Cuban freelance journalist José Luis Tan Estrada,” said CPJ U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Journalists should never be imprisoned for doing their jobs and covering matters of public importance, and Cuban authorities should immediately and unconditionally release Tan.”
A former journalism professor, Tan, 26, was fired from his job at the public University of Camagüey in 2023 for openly criticizing the Cuban government. Tan has also contributed freelance reports to several independent Cuban media publications based outside of the country, including Yucabyte, CubaNet, and Diario de Cuba, writing about living conditions in Camagüey and digital media issues.
Tan was previously detained for questioning several times in Camagüey in connection with social media posts and articles he wrote for several media outlets, according to his Facebook page.
On April 16, he received his second police summons in less than 72 hours, regarding his alleged “subversive activity,” he said.
During questioning, Tan said police used a folder full of his posts on Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, as evidence against him, which included his reactions to comedic posts about Cuban authorities.
“Once again, the repressive and harassing hands of the Cuban regime try to silence all those of us who raise our voices against their constant violations of human rights,” Tan wrote in an April 16 Facebook post.
Later, Tan posted that he was fined 3,000 pesos ($10) for violating Decree-Law #370, which prohibits the dissemination of information “contrary to the social interest, morals, good manners and integrity of people.” Previously, Cuban authorities have used the law to interrogate and fine journalists and critics and confiscate their working materials, according to Human Rights Watch.
The island of Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A few weeks ago, the government in Havana officially requested powdered milk for children under the age of 7 from the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP). By mid-March, as noted by CBS News, “small groups of protesters took to the streets in the eastern city of Santiago” criticizing…
Protests against shortages of food and fuel in Cuba’s eastern provinces on March 18 brought the corporate media spotlight back to the island, which is currently experiencing a major economic crisis. True to form, much US reporting on the protests attempted to construct a familiar narrative of Cuba as a failed state on the brink of collapse, with no mention of the 62-year US blockade. This is particularly striking given how Cuba’s current crisis is a direct outcome of the intensification of the blockade under Trump—which President Biden has upheld throughout his term despite promises to relieve the strangulation of Cuba.
So what’s really going on in Cuba today? How severe is the crisis, and where did it come from? What sort of future do the Cuban people envision for themselves, and what role does the US have to play in it? To address these questions and more, The Real News speaks with Manolo de los Santos of The People’s Forum, and Liz Oliva Fernandez of Belly of the Beast.
Studio Production: Ju-Hyun Park Post-Production: Alina Nehlich, Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Ju-Hyun:
Welcome back one and all to The Real News podcast. My name is Ju-Hyun Park, engagement Editor here at The Real News and your host for today’s episode where we’ll be talking about the current challenges facing the Cuban Revolution with two very special guests, Liz Olivia Fernandez of Belly of the Beast and Manolo De Los Santos of The People’s Forum. Before we proceed, I want to begin as always by offering my heartfelt thanks to all you listeners and readers on behalf of the entire team here at The Real News. The Real News is a totally not-for-profit independent news outlet dedicated to bringing you the real stories of working people fighting for a better world. From Bangladesh to Baltimore. I can’t tell you enough how proud your support makes us. Our sole purpose in doing the work we do is to arm you with the information you need to comprehend and transform our world.
We want to be a compass on your journey and if you appreciate the direction we’re pointing you in, head over to therealnews.com/donate to become a monthly sustainer of our work. And if you want to stay in touch and get regular updates about the latest and greatest stories from us, then sign up for our free newsletter at therealnews.com/sign-up. Since the COVID pandemic, Cuba has been thrust into an acute economic crisis that is among the worst in its history. The economic turmoil of the pandemic was intensified by the isolation imposed on Cuba by the decades-long US blockade, which then-President Trump strengthened by slapping Cuba with an additional 243 sanctions during his first term. The Biden administration has refused to loosen the noose that’s been placed around Cuba. The result for the people of the island has been years of crisis, oil and food shortages, power outages, shocks to the medical system, and a crisis of emigration that is steadily draining Cuba of talented youth.
On March 17th, a rare series of protests broke out in Cuba’s eastern provinces. In typical fashion, the international media shone a harsh spotlight on the protests as a rare visible sign of dissatisfaction with the socialist government. Little has been done however to explain the roots of the crisis in the US’s Long War on the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban people, or to highlight the ways that Cuba continues to try and provide for its people while advancing its socialism. Today we’re fortunate to be joined by two deeply knowledgeable guests, both of whom can be described as among the leading public communicators on Cuba in the English-speaking world.
Liz Olivia Fernandez is an award-winning Cuban journalist with Belly of the Beast, a US-based outlet dedicated to covering Cuba’s untold stories. Manolo De Los Santos is a popular educator and organizer as well as the founding director of The People’s Forum, a movement incubator in New York City for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. He also collaborates as a researcher with the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. Liz, Manolo, welcome back to The Real News.
Manolo De Los Santos:
It’s a pleasure. I’m happy to join back with Liz.
Liz Oliva Fernández:
The same here.
Ju-Hyun:
Amazing. Thank you so much again for joining us. Let’s start with the basics. Could you give our audience a very brief overview of what happened during the recent protests and what the issues were that were at the center of these mobilizations?
Liz Oliva Fernández:
Well, recently Cuba has facing the different protests by the situations. Most of them are because of blackouts, scarcity of food and medicine. This is not new. This is something that is starting in 2019, even before the pandemic with Trump administration sanctions against Cuba, that went from bad to worse and this situation is going to be like that from that. After that, we have facing the Covid pandemic and Cuba has been trying to survive from there to now and the situation is going to getting worse and worse with the time. So even in, well in the city I live in Havana, so you can feel in the sensation of desperation and frustration that people have. So in rural areas that this is where the most recent protests break down was the situation is worse because we barely have access to fuel. They have facing blackout for more than 18 hours.
Some of them have 20 hours of blackout in a day. The scarcity of food is getting worse because the government barely have access to buy the most basic food. I was reading the other day the report that they have about the sanctions on Cuba and they say that even because… I don’t know if you know about the rationalized food, the Cuban government give to the people in order to have… They have the basic. Well even in that kind of things has been delayed because the government is not allowed, they don’t have access to food or card or credit or nothing because of the sanctions. So the situation of the food and the medicine, of the fuel in Cuba and basic things has getting worse on worse with the time.
Ju-Hyun:
Thank you for that. Manolo, I’m curious if you want to jump in here and add anything to Liz’s addressing of the situation.
Manolo De Los Santos:
No, I would think I would start from the same place as Liz that protests in Cuba are not something new. They’re not like an exceptional phenomenon. That’s actually something that’s happening quite regularly. It doesn’t often make it to the news, but people are protesting across the island in different ways, in different moments over what is the continuous pressure of what US sanctions mean in people’s lives on the island. It’s not about the numbers. Yes, we could cite that Cuba loses about 4.8 billion a year due to sanctions and due to the US blockade, but concretely in terms of people’s lives right now it means major shortages that are essentially creating a food crisis in the fact that Cuba not only is it able to import major food commodities, but it’s not even able to import raw materials that allow them to produce basic things like bread for example.
Eastern provinces like in Santiago, but also in Guantanamo and others, you have the added element that because of also the scarcity of fuel, it becomes even harder for the country to transport most of the food that does come in and the supplies that do come in that arrive usually through the port of Mariel, transporting them to the other side of the island is already a major endeavor that makes it even difficult. So it affects the rationing system. It affects even just the basic life, daily life of millions of people on the island.
Ju-Hyun:
Thank you. I think this background context of the blockade and the multi-level crisis that Cuban society is undergoing currently as a result of that is some pretty crucial information for us to have before proceeding further. I think focusing in on that a little more finely, it’s often said by supporters of the US embargo or the blockade against Cuba that because it doesn’t officially include food and medicine, therefore the reality of food crisis in Cuba is not something that can be attributed to the blockade. How would you respond to or counter these claims?
Manolo De Los Santos:
Well, I think the US often claims several things. One, that food and medicine are exempted and at the same time they claim that the US is one of the largest exporters of food to Cuba. And I think there’s not just a question of the fine print that is missing in these declarations, but I would say overall context. I mean the reality is, and I can share a personal experience about it in a few, but the gist of it is that even with certain exemptions, the conditions on which Cuba is allowed to purchase food or medicine in the US are quite onerous. Primarily Cuba is the only country that is forced to purchase goods from the United States directly having to pay fully in advance with no guarantees or security of being able to receive the product that they’ve paid for. This is one major element and we have to raise it that this is an anomaly on the international trade.
No other country on the planet has to actually engage in trade on these terms. Most of it is done through credit. Most of this is done through legitimate banks that are able to guarantee to both the vendor and the customer that goods will arrive. And in the case of Cuba, it’s almost like a lottery. Cuba is forced to pay in cash many times and then left wondering if they will receive what they paid for. That happens often in the case of Cuba-US economic exchange. But then there’s another element which I think is even more prevalent in the last five years, which is that because Cuba was placed on the state sponsors of terrorism list, most banks around the world are very much unwilling to do the financial transactions necessary for Cuba to make these purchases. Automatically seeing Cuba in any transaction already creates a series of red flags that banks are in fact required to investigate and look deeper into and often stalls the process of any purchases.
And I’ll just tell you from a very personal experience, for the last four weeks I’ve reached out to 16 different grain distributors in the United States asking them we’re willing to buy at market price over a thousand tons of flour, of wheat flour to send to Cuba and not one of them was able to give a positive response to our requests. Most of them mentioned immediately the limitations that they face and the fear that they face of engaging in any trade of this type of Cuba. Even if there could be an exemption, just the state of paranoia and the state of fear that even if they were to do this somehow they would be fined like many companies have been by the US government is enough to impede this so-called exemption from actually allowing Cubans to buy.
Liz Oliva Fernández:
And I would like to act is because it’s funny. They say, okay, food and medicines, they are under sanctions. Have you tried to send food and medicine from United States to Cuba? The people who said this have been trying to send food and medicine to Cuba, it’s easy, but they have to hire someone from a Cuban-American enterprise in Miami who are making a lot of money, a lot of profit with that kind of business. I’m asked to the people that are trying to send to Cuba medicines equipment, to trying to give a little bit of solidarity. A lot of groups are trying to get food and medicine in Cuba are facing so many stuff. Also, senators and congress people in the US to say, “Okay, but Cuba spent 3 million dollars in 2023 for just food in Cuba.” Okay, that’s true. $300 million, that’s true, but how much percent? How much represent that kind of money in terms? And this is because as Manolo said and explained a few minutes ago, is because exemptions. Why give any exemptions to processing food or medicine or whatever to the United States?
But for example, DR. In the same period of time, 2023, DR spent 1.3 thousands, millions of dollars for such in food in the US. And just in food, and this is just in food. What is the difference between $300 million and 1,300 thousands million dollars? That’s DR. Guatemala, just in food and also I’m trying to remember the data, 70,000 millions of dollars just in for the same, and these are countries that they have even less population like Cuba. So what that kind of money represents to a government in order to get food to all the families in Cuba to all the people who live in Cuba, that’s nothing. They use the number and this is the things that people in US doesn’t know about math. What percent that in a country that have the populations of 11 million Cubans living in the same place. So okay, you can get food and sometimes medicine to the United States, but at what cost?
What cost? Because it’s not about money, it’s about time, it’s about obstacles. It’s about overcoming things the entire time. So what… Ask the farmers in the US, it’s easy for them to try to sell food or whatever to Cuba? Chicken, everybody’s talking about how Cuban people are consuming US chickens. It’s not US chickens, it’s blacks. It’s because in the US doesn’t like legs. You enjoy more breasts. So the kind of chicken that is so cheap for Cuba to buy that kind of chicken in the US, they don’t have any popularity at all to pursue that kind of things. And we can pay it, but we can pay it and we have to pay in advance for a product that we haven’t seen and for a product that is going to take maybe two weeks to ship to Cuba. So the people who already said that kinds of thing, they really understand the complexity of everything. They really understand how difficult is the amount of obstacles that people have to face in order to deliver or to ship to Cuba food or medicines or they just are repeating as usual.
Ju-Hyun:
Thank you. I think you’ve both really effectively demonstrated how the sanctions’ regime is not about just a simple list of products that are not allowed in Cuba. It’s really attacking Cuba’s ability to make any transactions at all to be able to engage in trade in a timely and smooth way which is required in order to maintain its systems, in order to have inputs that are going to go into the mouths of the people, into their cars, into generating power and things of this nature. I want to pivot a little bit to talking a little about the political situation, particularly with the Biden administration, which has made several promises on different occasions to reverse Trump sanctions on Cuba, particularly reconsidering Cuba’s placement on the state sponsors of terrorism list.
That’s a promise that is yet to be fulfilled and with time running out in the Biden administration, it doesn’t seem like it’s something that’s going to be a priority for this presidency. Liz, I know that you and Belly of the Beast are coming out with some new documentaries that approach this topic, so I’m wondering if you can educate our audience a little bit on why exactly the Biden administration has adopted the stance as it has and Manolo, I’m curious as well if you can speak a little bit from your experience in attempting to get this current administration to change its policies.
Liz Oliva Fernández:
Well, I can’t talk about why the administration is keeping Cuba in the states sponsor of terrorism list because I don’t know why, because they haven’t explained why. They say the thing is on their review, but has been on the review since the beginning of the Biden administration. And also they don’t have any proof, any evidence that Cuba actually sponsored terrorism. And the excuse that they give to journalists, they’re really big and they’re talking about US political prisoners that Cuba gave them asylum in the 80s. And Cuba as any other country around the world is privileged to give asylum, whatever citizen and asking for, we consider that this is the right things to do. And we did in the 80s. So back of now, from them to now we haven’t given asylum to any other US citizens and they never explained.
But in fact, it is something that is funny and I say funny because the last year I was covering the cooperation between Cuba and the United States, I have the opportunity to interview the Coast Guard, the person who represent the US Coast Guard and US Embassy here in Havana, and they talk wonderful about Cuba. In fact, if you review the documents from the state department to talk about the counterterrorism support cooperation between Cuba the United States they have, they give Cuba excellent qualifications because Cuba is the main allies to the United States in the Caribbean, the South America in order to fight terrorism, drug trafficking and human trafficking smugglers, everything.
So how is possible that you start collaboration and cooperation with a country that supports terrorism is the same country that are helping United States to fight terrorism? Is not an irony of this? Is not something that is lack of argument when you asking someone what is going on, you are collaborating, you have cooperation with someone that you say that is terrorism and support terrorism but are helping you to fight against terrorism? I think the biggest question that Biden administration has to answer in some point, but because so far we haven’t listened a single argument that really put an evidence about why is Cuba in the states sponsor of terrorism list.
Manolo De Los Santos:
Well, I think that the US to begin with has over two centuries long obsession with dominating Cuba. It has been a premise for almost every US president in one way or another to seize Cuba, dominate Cuba, occupy Cuba, control Cuba, confront Cuba, all on the basis that it’s seen to be as a territory that should always be in the sphere of influence of the United States, if not directly a part of it. I mean there’ve even been attempts at annexation in these last 200 years. But if we were to look at what’s been happening in the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, I think there was this false idea that the Cuban revolution was on its last legs, that if there was enough of a push, the Cuban government would fall. And again, 200 years of dreams of dominating Cuba could be finally realized. And therefore there’s been for the past five years, I would say a bipartisan consensus on maintaining harsh, I would say quite cruel and inhumane strength in sanctions against Cuba.
I don’t think anyone in Washington on either side of the bench Republicans or Democrats really believe that Cuba actually belongs on the state sponsors of terrorism list. I don’t think anyone actually, even people who hate Cuba or anti-Cuba within Congress don’t actually believe that Cuba is engaging in any activity that supports terrorism. But ultimately the state sponsors of terrorism list, not just from regards to Cuba but to any of the countries that are listed on it, has always been used as a political tool in order to campaign publicly against the so-called enemies of US interests. The bigger question I think that’s yet to be seen is regardless of what Biden does in this new period is when will us politicians realize that the Cubans do not want to give up on their political independence?
That no matter every attempt that the US has made over the last six decades to overthrow the Cuban government, to starve its people, to create so much deprivation and so much suffering that people have no other option. Even in those circumstances, even among Cubans who do not agree with the Cuban revolution, who do not agree with the socialist project, there’s a strong fervor for maintaining their political independence, and that should always be the basis for any serious conversation between the Cuban government and the US government. When will the US government actually wise up to this? That is the question that is yet to be seen.
Ju-Hyun:
Thank you both so much for setting that up for us. I want to briefly detour to bringing up this memorandum from the State Department from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Interim American Affairs, Mallory to his colleague [inaudible 00:22:19]. This was outlining the program for the sanctions regime or the beginning of the blockade against Cuba. This is a memo from 1960 and it very clearly states out that the goal of the blockade was to decrease monetary and real wages to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. So really just highlighting that last point that you’re making here Manolo, that this is part of a longstanding political project with very specific goals from the United States in terms of establishing influence over Cuba in terms of undermining its independent project. I want to pivot a little bit as we reach a good halfway point in this conversation to talk about what the efforts of the Cuban people and government look like in the face of these challenges.
We’ve outlined what exactly the challenge is, where it comes from in the form of the blockade and talked a bit about how it’s quite unlikely that we’re going to see a sudden and about face from the US government given the conditions that are prevailing at this time. So can you tell us a little bit more about the efforts that are being made by the Cuban people, by the Cuban government to establish resilience to resolve the issues of hunger and energy that they’re facing and maybe if you can also tie in some of the work that you are doing as well to support those efforts, that would be great.
Manolo De Los Santos:
So I think considering the difficult circumstances that the Cuban people and the government face in which essentially their hands are being tied behind their backs to be able to respond to any of these challenges is incredibly difficult. But what I have noticed consistently, and I think it is remarkable when you compare to other countries around the world who have gone through similar situations is that the first premise of the Cuban government and its people has been to not engage in any internal neoliberal package to dismantle the state of social welfare that has existed on the island for 60 years. The pressure always in these circumstances is to privatize. The pressure is always to leave as many people out of a project that has prided itself on including everyone in its provision of healthcare, of education, of housing and so on for so many people.
Of course Cuba has had to deal with all these provisions but with many severe limitations. But you could say for the most part that it has provided for the well-being of its people, and I think the fact that it wants to continue doing that at all costs, even with the delays, even with the severe limitations under these cruel sanctions is remarkable. I think the other challenge that it faces is finding partners on the world stage that are willing and able to take sacrifices and actually challenge US hegemony in providing alternative sources of development for Cuba. And I think this is the case of countries like China and Russia that are actively now working with Cuba to build alternative sources of renewable fuel that allow Cuba to sustain itself without having to depend as much on the import of diesel and oil and other source of fuels.
There are other areas which is on self-sustainability of its agriculture. There are many partners around the world, again, China Russia but many others including movements including the landless workers movements of Brazil who are actively working with the Cuban people to develop the capacity, for example, for Cuba to produce its own fertilizers rather than have to continue to import at such a high cost from other parts of the world. These are many things that ultimately do not fix the whole scenario, but that begin to allow Cuban people to develop at their own pace under these extreme pressures.
And I think our responsibility of people living in the United States is not to provide charity to the Cuban people, but on the contrary to help them in their process of standing up on their own two feet. I think the Cuban people are a proud people. There are people who have proven to the world not once but many times over their incredible capacity to create, to build, to actually show us what an alternative in a future society could look like. But they need our support to get there and any effort of solidarity, whether we’re sending food aid to support, but at this moment but also supporting their biotechnological development and many other areas of their development is crucially important.
Liz Oliva Fernández:
And I come back to the beginning when you talk about to protest, if you want to know about what is the situation in Cuba looks like, just see the protest when the people are asking for food and electricity during the process. I think that that shows you the scenario. Also, I can talk about the government, but I can talk about me and my neighbors how it’s difficult even having an incredible healthcare system like we have in Cuba, access to treatments. We have the best doctors and physicians and nurses and all the physicians that we can… We teach and we grow here in Cuba and we can’t have access to treatment. Why? Because we don’t have access to medicines because the biggest pharmacists are in the United States or belongs to someone that is related to the United States. It’s illegal to Cuba to have access to biotechnology.
That’s why we start to develop our own biotechnology in the 90s. And we did it quite a success because we were able to create not one but two vaccines against Covid-19 during the Covid-19 pandemic. I think like for me it’s about why we were paying… For example, why the protest in Cuba make it to the mainstream media outlets? Why the protest in Cuba, even when they’re small or big or medium, no matter the size, make it to the mainstream media? Why they are so hungry about this scarcity and the necessities that we have in Cuba? Why they’re covering that instead of covering Palestine? What is happening there or what is covering what is happening in Haiti and the role that the United States has been playing in Haiti and [inaudible 00:28:48] DR or whatever? Because the situation in Cuba is no different in so many aspects of the situation, the rest of Latin America or the Caribbean. But why they care? Why they cover the protests, but they never care about the sanctions.
They never report about how the sanctions affect us or how these group of Cuban Americans that they have a powerful group in the Congress trying talk about Cubans, but they haven’t put a foot in Cuba so far and they don’t understand our reality here. So why? And I think I don’t have again just one answer for that, but for me it is about the way that they want to portray us. They don’t care about freedom or what is a freedom speech or whatever in Cuba. They don’t care. It’s the same people that are trying to criminalize social justice in Florida. They’re criminalized Black protesting the United States. They’re supporting. They have access to gun and NRA in the United States. They don’t care about social justice or equality or whatever. They’re just trying to portray us as a failed state. They need to portray, and the media is helping a lot about this.
For example, why the ministry are not covering what is happened with the Havana syndrome? Two new studies, two new studies from the NIH say that there is no evidence that these people that were part of the US diplomats here in Havana has brain damage. That’s throw apart the whole theory that they have brain damage and that’s the beginning of a serial of sanctions, increase of sanctions on the Cuban people and on Cuba, and they never are covering that. And we have to watch 60 minutes from the last week and then say that they have new evidence. New evidence from what? New evidence from where? Why media are covering that instead of doing journalists for the beginning and trying to get what is behind of all these policies that United States have been wanting for more than 60 years now on Cuba?
Ju-Hyun:
Thank you so much for those explanations. For our audience members who may be unfamiliar Havana syndrome, what Liz was referring to was a theorized syndrome that was exclusively afflicting US diplomatic personnel stationed in Havana. And at the time that this was reported, the State Department alleged that the Cubans were using an unknown sonic weapon to specifically target their personnel. In repeated medical examination since then, it’s been proven time and again that there likely were no such actual physical symptoms that people were experiencing, and consequently, there’s just no basis that these US diplomatic staffs were the victims of a Cuban sonic attack as was described at the time. I want to close us out by looking at this headline from Bloomberg Media, from Juan Pablo Spinetto.
It says Communist Cuba is on the brink of collapse. I wanted to bring this in because this is the dominant narrative that we’re seeing from corporate media in this moment that the crisis in Cuba is reaching a point of no return. Shortly after the protests on March 17th or 18th, there were a number of social media accounts alleging that the protests were specifically targeted at getting rid of the socialist system altogether, and some of the other media coverage has also tied in recent price hikes, which were announced in Cuba earlier this year in response to the crisis of food and fuel that is currently taking place. I’m wondering if you two can provide us with a little bit more information, shine a little light on the real situation. What is the real level of political thinking and satisfaction in Cuba at the moment despite all these challenges, and is there any merit to the claims that we are seeing in US-based media that the Cuban government is reneging on socialism, it’s pursuing austerity and that it’s ultimately going to be unable to fix this economic crisis or preserve itself politically?
Liz Oliva Fernández:
Well, the level of satisfaction is really low, but I just want to come back to the title because they say like Communist Cuba is about to collapse or something like that. I can’t remember exactly the words that they use. And I say, but I’m so sorry, but I have an opportunity to read the entire article. But I don’t know if they explain why. I always say the situation in Cuba is very bad. People are really frustrated and angry. You can see the numbers of migration, people trying to leave the country if they have the opportunity. If they know they just are angry, we don’t know about the future. We don’t know about what is going on in Cuba and what has happened, is going to happen in the next few years because the most of these answers we can’t answer back here. The most of this question we can answer here in Cuba because it not depends on us.
The situation in Cuba nowadays is not just depend on us. The most of them depends on the United States, on the United States policy on Cuba. That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole question. That was people, and it’s curious because maybe when you go down here and you talk to the people and you ask them, “Okay, what do you think about what is going on? What do you think about US sanctions?” And the most of them, maybe, I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about percent, but maybe small percent of people, they want to talk to you about, okay, this is the way the sanctions affect us because the sanctions is too far away from us. You can point with your finger to the sanctions, you can point with your fingers to someone that is not against Manolo. The sanctions not against Manolo, it’s not against Liz Oliva.
So you need to have the big picture, have the big understanding that how the sanctions affect you and your family. Because they don’t want to point. They want solutions and the solutions, many of them are not in Cuba. They don’t depend on Cuba. So how did you feel if your entire life is someone else because of the actions of someone else? Depends on the actions of someone else. How do you feel? Frustrated, angry? I can’t understand the whole thing. I just want solutions. I just want to start to survive. People now used to say we were happy and we didn’t know. We were happy and we didn’t know because the situation is getting worse. We have always we have been a scarcity of so many things. I think that we live in a [inaudible 00:36:06] because we always have been access to basic things, small things, but is there things that we need to survive, to live, to live a happy life?
Not with many things, with many material things, but we are people that we have a strong spirit and we take care of each other even with the hard menu to offer to the other one. But we are happy. That’s why you understand that so many children in the US have mental problems and so many children in Cuba, even when they don’t have candies or chocolate or whatever or toys, they’re so happy and they laugh the whole time because we have a different society. And to understand that you need to be able to live and to experience Cuba and the whole thing, so now we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s the reality and that’s sad.
And everybody is like the people who have the privilege like me to having traveled to the United States and study, taking time to dedicate to study how the sanctions were, how the sanctions has been affecting not just me and my family, but the whole country. Everybody is paying attention to the next elections in the US, who is going to win? Because most of the people, they think that Biden is going to do something in the second term if they have a second term. But oh, is Biden going to win the second term? Is Donald Trump win the second term? What is going on in the United States and how the elections in the United States is going to affect the life of 11 million of people in Cuba?
Manolo De Los Santos:
Well, I fully agree with Liz. I mean, I would just add that headlines like that are a sign of Washington’s wishful thinking, but it also has dangerous connotations and it’s a connotation that we have to defeat in many ways. One, the idea that the crisis that Cuba is facing is Cuban made. It is of their own doing. I think that has to be corrected in as much as possible because always these headlines, but generally US mainstream media always seeks to hide the hand of how the empire works day and night to destroy the livelihoods of the Cuban people. And we know of it through US documents. We know it through the Mallory Memorandum, but we see it concretely in the policies that US government takes. The other element that I think is important to clarify is that this is not the first time that the US government and the US media talk about a collapse in Cuba.
They were saying the same thing in the early 90s when I would say Cuba faced an even worse scenario because they had effectively lost their major trading partners in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, they lost most of their income overnight. The country was reduced in what we now describe as a peak oil crisis, meaning very little to no fuel was entering the country. I mean, in fact, a level of food crisis unprecedented, and yet the Cuban people survived, and I think they survived in part to what Liz mentions, which is a different ethic, a different approach to collective well-being.
A society that ultimately puts human beings first and is despite all the odds and all the challenges, is trying to figure out how to maintain a certain quality of life within the possible for the majority of its people without sacrificing anyone. And I think that makes a difference. I don’t know if in the United States we would be able to respond to a crisis of this type if all of a sudden millions of people in the United States lost access to food, fuel, and medicine at major scale. Talking about, let’s say more than half of the US population, would our society be able to respond so collectively, so calmly, so grounded in their humanity to such a level of crisis? I would think not.
Liz Oliva Fernández:
I just want to add that you have your own crisis to resolve, and there is still [inaudible 00:40:23]. Just look at the situation of the Black people in the United States in general, the access to food, to real food, not just snack food, to medicines, to healthcare system, to everything. The mortality of Black moms in the United States. That’s another point you have to face off. That’s the thing for me when people say, “Okay, but what kind of things the United States have to do in order to help Cuba?” And I always respond the same. We don’t need help. We just need that… Leave us alone. That’s the only thing that United States have to do. We have to deal with our own problems or our stuff, but you can’t intervene with us, not for good, not for bad, just don’t intervene at all.
Ju-Hyun:
Precisely. And as you’re both saying, we can look at the state of the United States today and see a number of crises that are already taking place. There is a crisis of hunger, there is a crisis, black maternal mortality, there is a crisis of education, of healthcare. And we can also see the ways that our government is actually responding, which is in most cases to simply leave people out in the cold. For regular listeners of The Real News, you’ll be familiar with our coverage of the recent bridge collapse in Baltimore, of the Train derailment in East Palestine, all the ways that the workers and communities that are left behind after those catastrophes have been left to twist in the wind. And that really speaks to the different ethical social approaches that the two of you are talking about. Now, before we say goodbye, I’m hoping that you can close us out by just talking about the work that you’re currently engaged in, how listeners can continue to support you and stay involved.
Manolo De Los Santos:
Well, out of The People’s Forum, we’re actively engaging in political education about what’s taking place in Cuba and overall trying to build awareness, not just about Cuba itself, but obviously the history and the context that comes into what we know as US-Cuba relations today. We’re also engaging in major initiatives to support the Cuban people. One of the most latest examples of that is our Let Cuba Live Bread for our Neighbors campaign, which has the goal of sending 800 tons of wheat flour to Cuba within the next month with the aspiration of being able to give at least 5 million Cubans a piece of bread every day for a month in order to help support them through this difficult moment. Not as a sign of charity, but actually as a sign of encouragement to their people as they continue to struggle and fight, but also to raise light on what the Marco Rubios of our world are constantly saying and raising as truth, but that we know are actually lies when it comes to the extent of this blockade and how it affects the Cuban people on a day-to-day basis.
Liz Oliva Fernández:
Well, in the case of Belly of the Beast, and Belly of the Beast we are coming with two new documentaries. Hardliner on the Hudson that is focuses Bob Menendez and the role that he played during the Biden administration to support the sanctions against Cuba and all the corruption scandals that are involve him. On the other one is UpHill on the Hill that is focuses in Biden administration and the politics that are having place in Washington. They’re trying to maintain the sanctions in Cuba. We interview Congress people, we interview the people who actually live in Washington DC and what they think about. Not about the sanctions against Cuba, also about Cuba being the states sponsor of terrorism. And what does that mean? If you want to know more about these two new documentaries, you can stay tuned and subscribe to Belly of the Beast Cuba future channel, and you have the premiere in the upcoming months, May.
Ju-Hyun:
Wonderful. We’ll make sure to share the links to both of those initiatives that you mentioned in the show notes. So if you’re listening to this, go ahead and jump into the podcast description and you’ll be able to find a link to help support the drive to deliver much needed flower to our comrades in Cuba, and also to keep up with Belly of the Beast in anticipation of their soon to be released documentaries. That’ll be all for today. Thank you so much again, Manolo and Liz. Before we close, I’d like to give a shout-out to The Real News Studio team, Cameron Granadino, David Hebden and Caleb Rivera for making this episode possible. And finally, to you, our audience. Thank you for listening, and we’ll catch you next time here on The Real News.
North Korean state-run media outlets have minimized their coverage of Cuba after the longtime ally since the Cold War established diplomatic ties with South Korea on Feb. 14.
The Rodong Sinmun, the North’s state-run daily, for instance, has not reported anything about Cuba since Feb. 15 when it briefly covered the Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez’s condemnation of Israel’s attack on Palestinians, as part of a summary of international news items.
Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency has also not mentioned Cuba for more than a week.
Cuba was not even mentioned in KCNA reports on Feb. 23 and 24 on celebrations at diplomatic missions and U.N. representations in 26 countries and a series of congratulatory visits by dignitaries to mark the 82nd birthday of the former leader Kim Jong Il.
It is usual for North Korean media to omit Cuba when reporting national events such as the former leader’s birthday.
South Korea’s presidential office said on Feb. 15 that the country’s move to establish diplomatic relations with Cuba would deal a “political and psychological blow” to Pyongyang, whose diplomatic footing is largely dependent on a small number of Cold War allies.
South Korea did not have diplomatic ties with Cuba for 65 years.
Meanwhile, Cuba continues to maintain close relations with North Korea, which were established in 1960, with their shared socialist ideology and their hostility towards the United States. Cuba maintains an embassy in Pyongyang.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro a “comrade-in-arms,” as cited by its state media. North Korea even observed three days of official mourning in 2016 when Castro died at the age of 90.
Edited by Elaine Chan.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
Upon assuming the US presidency, Joe Biden asserted in his first major foreign policy address, “America is back!” For Latin America and the Caribbean, this has meant an “aggressive expansion” of the US military in the region.
In just the last year, US Marines and special forces landed in Peru in May 2023, brought in by the unelected rightwing government to address internal unrest. In October, the US got the UN Security Council to approve the military occupation of Haiti using proxy troops from Kenya. Also in October, the rightwing government of Ecuador resorted to deploying US troops to deal with their domestic insecurities. This month, Mexico and Peru joined the annual US naval exercises in mock war against China. And that just scratches the surface of US military engagement in the region.
Militarizing diplomacy
The Pentagon, along with the National Security Council and even the CIA, have taken on an increasingly pronounced role in diplomatic relations formerly the purview of the State Department. Former CIA agent and current US ambassador to Peru Lisa Kenna, for instance, was implicated in the overthrow of the elected leftist president there a year ago.
This drift in diplomatic function to the military became more pronounced with the appointment of Laura Richardson as head of the US Southern Command in October 2021. When asked about her interest in the region, she unapologetically admitted that the US seeks hegemony over the region and possession of its rich resources.
In January 2022, General Richardson signed a bilateral agreement with Honduras. She met with Brazilian and Colombian military brass last May. Previously, she had visited Argentina, Chile, Guyana, and Surinam. From August to September 2022, US and Colombian militaries conducted joint NATO exercises, while Richardson made a five-day visit to meet with the newly elected Colombian president. This week, she is meeting with the president of Ecuador, who declared his country is under a state of “internal armed conflict.”
Status of US military forces in the region
Washington is by far the largest source of military aid, supplies, and training in the region. The US has twelve military bases each in Panama and Puerto Rico, nine in Colombia, eight in Peru, three in Honduras, and two in Paraguay, along with military installations in Aruba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Cuba (Guantanamo), and Peru.
In total, the US has 76 bases in the region as of 2018, plus numerous “unconfirmed operational bases.” All function as military centers as well as cyberwarfare posts. Among the problems associated with these bases are displacement of resources that otherwise would be used for social programs. These installations are notorious for their lack of transparency and accountability. In addition, they cause ecological damage with little or no provisions for environmental cleanup.
The US also has, in addition to bases, major military operations in Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Mexico. Colombia is a “global NATO partner” and Brazil is an “extra-NATO preferential ally.” The State Partnership Program of the US National Guard joins eighteen states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia in active partnerships with militaries in 24 regional countries.
Evolving US military mission
The post World War II mission of the US military has evolved: first, the fight against communism ending around 1991; then the “drug wars” continuing to the present; followed by the “war on terror” and combatting transnational criminal networks of the early 2000s; and now great power competition.
Thus, US regional military strategy has pivoted from fighting communism, terrorism, and drugs to containing China and, to a lesser extent, Russia and even Iran. China is now the leading trading partner with South America and the second largest with the region as a whole, after the US. Some 21 or 31 regional countries have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Southern Command’s budget, which had declined in the 2010s, is now ballooning as the US gears up to confront China.
The Latin American “theater” is pitched by the Southern Command as a “nearby test bed” and “prime location for experimenting with and testing new technologies” to be used particularly against China. General Richardson warns that China is “a communist country that’s spreading its tentacles across the globe so far away from its homeland.”
The Southern Command has especially targeted Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua because of their friendly relations with China and Russia. Key to the command’s strategy is disrupting regional unity in the Americas.
Development of US military tactics
In the bad old days of 1898-1934, Washington simply and nakedly sent its troops to take over the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama. In the post-World War II years, the US still overthrew governments not to its liking the old fashioned way in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. But for the most part, the US has developed more sophisticated means of asserting its control.
Proxy armies using mercenaries were deployed against Cuba in 1961 in the Bay of Pigs invasion and in Nicaragua in the 1981-1990 contra war– both unsuccessful.
Increasingly in the last 75 years or so, covert operations have been employed. The CIA was created in 1947. By 1954, the agency helped engineer the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in what has become known as the first of many CIA coups in the Americas.
From 1975 to 1980, the US-coordinated Operation Condor installed military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the US sponsored “dirty wars” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Then in 1991 and again in 2004, Washington backed coups in Haiti, followed by coups in Honduras in 2009 and Boliva in 2019.
The US also fomented numerous unsuccessful coup attempts against Venezuela, most notably in 2002, but continuing to the present. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro revealed that four assassination plots were made against him and other high-ranking officials in 2023; the CIA and the DEA were accused. The US has posted a $15M bounty on Maduro’s head. Nicaragua, too, has been targeted, including a major coup attempt in 2018. Cuba, as well, has noted a recent uptick of US terror attacks.
Expanding scope of military missions
Combatting forest fires and other climate-driven disasters have recently been incorporated into the expanding US military scope. The militarists are not so much concerned about the environment as they are about perturbances that can upset the existing political order.
In October 2022, Colombia invited US and NATO military forces into the Amazon on the pretext that they could be repurposed to protect the environment. These new ecological tasks are best understood not as non-military functions but as the militarization of environmentalism. These environmentally “woke” missions operate under such cover as the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program and even the UN Environmental Program, which cooperates with NATO.
So-called “humanitarian missions” have also been incorporated into the expanding military scope. Former head of the Southern Command, Admiral Craig S. Faller, described such missions as an important component in strengthening military ties with “partners” in the region. He boasted of 25 countries participating in the US military’s regional “warfighting-focused exercises” in 2021. By the next year, his successor General Richardson referenced 28 regional “like-minded democracies.”
Perhaps the prime non-traditional mission for the US military in the region is “counter-narcotics.” A US military Security Force Assistance Brigade was sent to Panama and Colombia last May to curb drug smuggling as well as migration. The US troops work with other US agencies already in the region, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security.
Hybrid warfare
In addition to the explicitly military exercises, described above, the US has increasingly employed “hybrid warfare” to try to maintain its dominance in an emerging multipolar geopolitical context. Unilateral coercive economic measures are now imposed on over a quarter of humanity. Also known as sanctions, these tactics can be just as deadly as bombs.
Sanctions on Venezuela – started by Obama, intensified by Trump, and seamlessly continued by Biden – have taken their toll: over 100,00 deaths, 22% of children under five stunted, and over 300,000 chronic disease patients without access to treatment. Despite the UN nearly unanimously condemning the US blockade of Cuba for its devastating effects on civilians and as a violation of the UN Charter, ever-tightening economic warfare has left the island in crisis. Washington is also escalating the hybrid war against Nicaragua.
Return to gunboat diplomacy
With the new year and with Washington’s blessings, a British warship cruised into waters contested between Venezuela and Britain’s former colony, Guyana. The disputed Essequibo territory between Venezuela and Guyana became an international flashpoint in December.
The US Southern Command announced joint air operations with Guyana. US boots are already reportedly on the ground in Guyana. What is in essence an oil company landgrab by ExxonMobil is disrupting regional unity and is a Trojan horse for US military interference.
Waters at the southern end of the continent are also troubled with US-NATO nuclear submarine exercises around the Malvinas and the Southern Ocean. The US Army is working on the Master Plan for the Navigability of the Paraguay River.
With the new presidency of devotedly pro-Yankee Javier Milei in Argentina a month ago, the US is again pushing to install new military bases in the strategic triple border region of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. The Wall Street Journalreports: “Milei has maintained strong support since taking office…as Argentines so far embrace austerity measures.” [emphasis added] The WSJ is referring to the financially secure elites who are not among the 40% below the poverty line in Argentina. The trade unions mounted a general strike on January 24.
In conclusion, the enduring extra-territorial protection of Yankee military power has always been for the purpose of controlling its southern neighbors, but has become more sophisticated and pervasive. In this two-hundred-first year of the Monroe Doctrine, Simón Bolívar’s words are ever more prescient: “The United States appears to be destined by providence to plague America with misery, in the name of freedom.”
A brief note from the author on the accelerated border crisis: In the few months that I was putting together the information for this article, things have spiraled out of control in Texas which is getting the majority of refugees. Texas Governor Greg Abbott in addition to bussing tens of thousands of refugees to sanctuary cities like New York and Chicago has deployed the state National Guard and other state employees to police the border. In revenge for making a mockery of the Democrats ‘lets make President Trump look like a racist’ sanctuary city gimmick, the Biden Administration has used the Supreme Court to over-rule the Governor, remove concertina/razor wire and other barriers that the state has set up and in addition, and has blocked the export of liquified natural gas from ports in Texas which has exacerbated nations like Germany which is suffering from the results of the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline and the switch to liquified natural gas from cheap natural gas from Russia. In response, 25 state governors have backed Gov. Abbott and have deployed their own state National Guard units to assist Texas. As the Texas AG Ken Packton told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview, “we’re in uncharted territory”.
The Ghost of United Fruit Still Haunts Latin America (Part 1)
Of all the campaign issues that conservatives like to be overheard talking about, illegal immigration is among the top 6 or 7th in importance behind boycotting Bud Light, 2nd Amendment issues, and trolling abortion fanatics.
Beyond AOC conducting a staged photo-op crying next to an empty parking lot in order to try and make President Trump look like a racist for separating children from parents, (a policy that was a carry-over from the Obama presidency oddly enough), Democrats tend to avoid discussing the absolute flood of undocumented refugees currently awaiting processing, mostly because they don’t want to upset their sugar daddy George Soros or make President Biden look bad.
For the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2022, Customs and Border Protection Administration CBP stopped migrants more than 2,766,582 times, compared to 1.72 million times for fiscal 2021, the previous yearly high. The 2022 numbers were driven in part by sharp increases in the number of Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans making the trek north, according to CBP. The major source of immigration is listed as Brazil, Columbia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with 1,535,492 so far attempting to enter this year and 2,217,141 last year. LINK
US-run color revolutions and coups, economic warfare, sanctions, narco-terrorism, Communist/Maoist terrorism, natural disasters, and severe poverty caused by policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank all make up the major reasons that people flee their countries of origin.
However, despite the utterly disgusting record of the United States throughout the 20th Century and the 23 years of this century in imposing grinding poverty, usurious debt payments, and virtual colonial economic conditions, too many Americans parrot the “illegal immigrant” line which is the favorite boogeyman scapegoat now that “Muslim terrorism/extremist” is not being repeated endlessly on cable news, or worse, state that “it’s not their concern” as one of my taxi customers stated recently when I described the topic of this article.
A surprising opinion given that there is group of 300 refugees being warehoused at an auditorium in Portland Maine from Algeria who are protesting their conditions and discussions are under way to bring refugees to my locality despite there being absolutely no means of supporting them. A brief glance at the latter half of the 20th century shows why such opinions are utterly immoral. After WW1, the US has conducted wars, coups, and other military operations of various kinds in the Western Hemisphere mostly using the cover of “fighting Communism.” Because of the complexity of Communist/Socialist/Maoist history, its strange relationship with the old British Empire, and how they fit into the perpetual conflict schemes of various geopoliticans and used to terrible effect on the lives of untold numbers of souls, that subject will be gone over at length in part 2.
For most of the 19th and 20th century up until the passing of statesman James G. Blaine, the assassination of President McKinley, and ascendancy of anglophile freak Teddy Roosevelt, the US policy of support for our “sister republics” via the Monroe Doctrine was subverted into a colonial policy.
One company in particular, exemplified exploitation and looting of Central America and the Caribbean, The United Fruit Company, often called “The Octopus” because of its dominance over entire countries from which the term “Banana Republic” came.
I thought that you should get to see both the approved and sanitized narrative that is generally shown on numerous websites and videos that describe its history and then the ugly reality which brand x historians won’t touch with a hundred foot pole.
Birth of the Octopus
1870: The Boston Fruit Company was established by sailor Lorenzo Dow Baker when he started purchasing bananas in Jamaica.
1899: Minor C. Keith’s company Tropical Trading and Transport Co. merges with rival Andrew W. Preston’s Boston Fruit Co. to form the United Fruit Company. It engaged in the production, transportation, and marketing of bananas, sugar, cocoa, abaca, and other tropical agricultural products. Preston brought to the partnership his plantations in the West Indies, a fleet of steamships, and his market in the U.S. Northeast. Keith brought his plantations and railroads in Central America and his market in the U.S. South and Southeast. Within weeks, UFCo acquires seven independent companies that have been operating in Honduras. Preston is made president and Keith is vice-president. Preston’s lawyer Bradley Palmer is made permanent member of the executive committee and director and from a business point of view, Palmer was United Fruit.
1910: UFCo rival Samuel Zemurray conspires with the newly exiled General Manuel Bonilla and masterminds a coup d’état against Honduran President Dávila. On Christmas Eve, Samuel Zemurray, U.S. General Lee Christmas, and General Bonilla use Zemurray’s yacht “Hornet” with a gang of New Orleans mercenaries and attacks the ports of Trujillo and La Ceiba forcing President Dávila to step down. Bonilla becomes dictator and awards UFCo tax breaks and huge land grants.
1928: 25,000 banana workers in Columbia went on strike demanding a 6-day work week, payment with money rather than company coupons, compensation for work accidents, & increase in wages for workers earning less than 100 pesos per month. With the bottom line threatened, the strikers are branded Communists and UFCo gets the U.S. Government to threaten to invade, using the U.S. Marine Corps that were stationed off the shores of Ciénaga should the Colombian government not act to protect United Fruit’s interests. Dec. 6, 1928, Columbian troops gun down protesters outside of UFCo headquarters. The number killed is disputed, but a month later, the U.S. Ambassador to Bogotá, Jefferson Caffery, sent a dispatch informing Washington: “I have the honor to report…that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded one thousand.”
1929: After an unsuccessful price war against Samuel Zemurray’s Cuyamel Fruit Company which he had purchased in 1910, United Fruit decides to buy Zemurray out. He eventually becomes its biggest stockholder.
1930: UFCo. has absorbed more than twenty rival firms and is the largest employer in Central America. It owned or leased property in Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Cuba, Jamaica, and numerous other Central American, South American, and West Indies countries.
1933: Members of UFCo’s board of directors vote to name Zemurray general director of the company.
1938: Zemurray becomes President of UFCo.
1947: United Fruit’s net worth is in excess of $250 million, and the company controlled nearly a half-mile of dock space in the Port of New Orleans for loading and unloading of its passengers, bananas and general freight.
June 1954 President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala became the first Latin American leader overthrown in a coup organized by the US government [SIC!]. On taking power, President Arbenz had proposed land reforms that were considered a threat to the interests of United Fruit Company despite the fact that only 15% of their land was being utilized. Arbenz was labelled a communist by Washington and the US company lobbied for his removal. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07d3wkz BBC interview with President Jacobo Arbenz’s son.
1958: UFCo acquires the rights to explore petroleum and natural gas in Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. During the 1950’s, UFCo. starts acquiring numerous companies such as A&W Root Beer and Foster Grants.
1959: Fidel Castro begins his agrarian reform and seizes the sugar plantations of United Fruit in Cuba.
United Brands (1970–1984)
Corporate raiderEli M. Black bought 733,000 shares of United Fruit in 1968, becoming the company’s largest shareholder. In June 1970, Black merged United Fruit with his own public company, AMK (owner of meat packer John Morrell), to create the United Brands Company.
1974: Central American governments began levying a large export tax on bananas. In September hurricane Fifi hit Central America, wiping out 70% of the company’s Honduran plantations and causing losses of more than $20 million. Rising feed costs puts Morrell $6 million in the hole. Black sells UFCo to Foster Grant for almost $70 million.
1975: Black commits suicide by jumping from his office in the Pan-Am building in New York. The investigations following his death reveal a multi-million-dollar bribery scandal in which Black and United Brands pay off Central American countries in exchange for reduced taxes.
Chiquita Brands International
After Black’s suicide, Cincinnati-based American Financial Group, one of billionaire Carl Lindner, Jr.‘s companies, bought into United Brands. In August 1984, Lindner took control of the company and renamed it Chiquita Brands International. The headquarters was moved from New York to Cincinnati in 1985.
2014 Chiquita Brands International conducts an all stock merger with the Irish Fruit Company Fyffes for $1.07 Billion and controls 29% of the global banana market. As of 2017 Fyffes is owned by the Japanese Sumitomo Corporation.
2019 The company’s main offices leave the United States and relocate to Switzerland.
“Chiquita Brands International operates in 70 countries and employs approximately 20,000 people as of 2018. The company sells a variety of fresh produce, including bananas, ready-made salads, and health foods. The company’s Fresh Express brand has approximately $1 billion of annual sales and a 40% market share in the United States.” Global corporate structure LINK
Corporatism Writ Large In Mountains of Corpses
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
– Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (retired)
When one brings up terms like corporatism, Mussolini or Hitler is referenced because of the overt relationship between financiers, industrial corporations and the government/ dictatorships. Long before any of that existed, there was the East India Company, a crown chartered company which plundered China and the Indian subcontinent for 300 years from 1600 to 1874 after which it was merged into the British Empire. In America, one finds around the Boston area, very old families that are given the descriptive moniker of blue bloods or Brahmins. LINK Sociologist Harriet Martineau visited Boston in the 1830s and concluded its Brahmins were “perhaps as aristocratic, vain, and vulgar a city, as described by its own “first people,” as any in the world.”
Typically, these were merchant families who got filthy rich off of the slave and opium trade (or clipper trade). Among the American patrician families who have played key roles in both United Fruit and the British East India Company are the Forbes, Higginsons and Lees. Other old-line Episcopalian families involved with UFCo are the Peabodys of Morgan-Peabody, whose patriarch, J. Endicott Peabody, established Groton prep (the American Eton) to brainwash generations of U.S. policymakers in British Empire worship. In 1899, these and other Anglophile families arranged the merger of the Boston Fruit Co.’s “Great White Fleet” with International Railways of Central America (a railroad crisscrossing the region) to form the United Fruit Company. Sons of opium war Perkins Syndicate agent Joseph Coolidge, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge & Thomas Jefferson Coolidge II merged their Old Colony Trust Company with the First National Bank of Boston so that the boards of the Bank of Boston and the UFCo around 1929 were the same.
Also involved was the Swiss Iselin family through Central Trust Bank of New York, controller of railroads from New Orleans up to the midwest. The Bank of Boston will later play a part in helping organized crime take over Hollywood. In 1988 The Bank of Boston was caught laundering $2.5 million of drug money in connection with the infamous Columbian Medellin drug cartel connected BCCI bank, yet, got off with a $500,000 fine because of Attorney General William Weld, whose family also got filthy rich on the China Clipper Trade. LINK
For further information about this long ignored aspect of treason, please consult Anton Chaitkins ground breaking history research in “Treason In America”
The other side of United Fruit came from Sicilians Joseph Macheca and his successor Charles Matranga, the mob bosses of New Orleans, the original organized crime organization in the US beginning in the Civil War era. LINK
Macheca was a protege of Anarcho-Revolutionary Guiseppi Mazzini, who in turn was an agent in the employ of Lord Palmerston, the 19th century architect of Britain’s opium wars. LINK
Macheca owned a small shipping company that shipped cargo from New Orleans to Central America starting in 1874. The Macheca Brothers firm eventually sold its shipping assets to United Fruit. His 1943 obituary lists Matranga as merely a retired stevedore for the United Fruit Company, and for Standard Fruit & Steamship Company but his funeral was attended by the business elite of New Orleans and the corporate board of UFCo.
The aforementioned Samuel Zemurray, also a mobster in New Orleans, had come to the U.S. as part of the same wave of immigration (sponsored by the Baron de Hirsch Foundation) LINK that brought the Bronfmans, Jacobs, Fishers and others to this country. With Rothschild backing from London, they welded together a nationwide organized crime network during Prohibition, and then, in the mid-1930s, shifted their profitable business fronts from bootleg liquor to narcotics. According to past U.S. drug enforcement authorities, an estimated 25 percent of the cocaine that entered the United States annually was smuggled on United Brands’ ships.
To its “credit”, United Fruit in the last century has engineered two Marine invasions of Nicaragua, a war between Honduras and EI Salvador, an attempted Nicaraguan invasion of Costa Rica thirty years ago, and more than a dozen coups d’etat. In the bloodbath that followed the Company’s 1954 coup against the republican Arbenz forces in Guatemala, 35,000 people were murdered by death squads.
In 1929, the Justice Department demanded that Zemurray sell out to UF in order to stave off a war that the two companies had helped foment between Guatemala and Honduras. Another 40,000 to 50,000 have been killed by repressive rampages in EI Salvador and Honduras. When added to the deaths suffered under Anastasio Somoza García, Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle who ruled Nicaragua from 1933 to 1979, it is safe to estimate that United Fruit’s commitment to preserve “banana republics” and obliterate all potential for the development of sovereign nations modeled on America’s own founding principles has taken hundreds of thousands of lives during the last 100 years alone. This is the story of United Fruit: it is the anathema of everything the American republic ever stood for. It is the story of dope pushers, assassins, and mass murderers hired to keep Central America as a backward fiefdom of an Anglo-American “empire.” A deadly relationship of blue blood families setting policies, mobsters providing the muscle, and ruthless local dictators to keep the slaves in line.
True to its nickname El Pulpo or “The Octopus” one finds central figures like John Foster Dulles, who represented United Fruit while he was a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell – he negotiated the crucial United Fruit deal with Guatemalan officials in the 1930s and was Secretary of State under Eisenhower; his brother Allen, who did legal work for the company and sat on its board of directors, was head of the Central Intelligence Agency under Eisenhower and Kennedy.
The law firm and both brothers were on the company payroll for 38 years; Henry Cabot Lodge (whose family ancestors were involved in the West Indies slave trade) who was America’s ambassador to the UN, was a large owner of United Fruit stock; Ed Whitman, the United Fruit PR man, was married to Ann Whitman, Dwight Eisenhower’s personal secretary. Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays was hired in 1941 as consultant.
His 1928 book Propaganda argued “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… It is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically. In the active proselytizing minorities, in whom selfish interest and public interest coincide, lie the progress and development of America.” His method was used during the 1954 Guatemala coup by having reporters make up lurid stories of “communist terror” and that Arbenz was “going communist”. With such high powered American interests involved, to say that UFCo. was mixed up in the Bay Of Pigs incident, the Kennedy assassination, was involved in Israeli terrorist organizations, or promoted Malthusian depopulation schemes shouldn’t be a stretch.
In the late 1940s through Sam Zemurray and other employees, UFCo became engaged in a massive project to smuggle weapons to the Haganah and Irgun terrorist groups in Israel using puppet Central American governments. As one result of this project, the Israeli Mossad was created. Israel, in return was among the leading arms suppliers to UFCo’s puppet Central American dictatorships, particularly Anastasio Somoza. For the Haganah project, Sam Zemurray was co-opted by Edmund de Rothschild to the board of the Palestine Economic Commission (PEC) LINK which would shortly evolve into the state sector of the Israeli economy. Co-sponsoring him for this high-level Zionist post was Sen. Herbert H. Lehman of the investment house, Lehman Bros., who headed the U.S. side of the PEC. Lehman Bros., which acquired its initial fortune running cotton and slaves past the Union blockade of Charleston and New Orleans, was the first bank brought onto UFCo’s board. JSTOR Article (you need a password for this or library access)
Dr. Carlos Gutierrez of the post Somoza Government of National Reconstruction (GNR) gave an interview with Executive Intelligence Review about the recent history of Nicaragua in 1979 Q: Doctor Gutierrez, one of the facts we have been able to verify is that Zionism is in many ways supporting Somoza’s dictatorship. It’s well known that Israel supplies arms to Somoza. But that’s not all. United Brands formerly the famous United Fruit – is directed by a Zionist leader and it is known that Zionist networks involved in drug trafficking are intimately associated with Somoza and the National Guard. What can you tell us about that?
A: Well, the United Fruit problem has been reduced somewhat in Nicaragua. Many years ago we were a “banana country”; Nicaragua lived through a sorry experience. It was a country which produced bananas in fearful quantities. It produced tuberculosis in the same proportion. A member of the Group of Twelve made a documentary in the United States which includes 400 photographs showing the history of Nicaragua … with the whole process in which the United States has intervened since William Walker, a Filibuster from New Orleans who made himself president of Nicaragua [for 10 months in 1853- ed.], was recognized in less than 48 hours by the United States, and wanted to annex our territory to the slave states. In some of those photos, we see the homes – if you can call them homes – made of straw, of palm leaves, in the midst of water and mud, belonging to the banana workers.
Truly lamentable conditions of life. … And, on the other side, we see the mansions because they truly were mansions – lived in by the United Fruit executives. The production of bananas in Nicaragua fell as a result of the political ambitions of Somoza and the use of methods of exploiting current production without bothering to replant the banana trees. Naturally we still have plantations. Many, in fact, belong to Somoza and many of the fruit growing and fruit processing activities in Nicaragua are represented by U.S. companies or U.S.-owned companies associated with Somoza.
As far as Israel is concerned, we have simply this to say: it is unimaginable for a nation for which the word “genocide” was invented to be an accomplice in committing genocide. This is a tremendous incongruity and, believe me, I’m not saying that out of hatred, but out of anger. I, personally, and the Nicaraguans in general, cannot applaud the Nazi crimes against the Jewish people in any way. Like all humanity, we condemn them. For civilized man, it is impossible to accept things like that. But, at the same time that we condemn Hitler for his crimes against the Jews, we Nicaraguans have the painful obligation of condemning Israel for complicity in the genocide, in the massacre, of the people of Nicaragua. You know that there have been several proven cases of Israeli support for Somoza – not for Nicaragua, but for Somoza. It ranges from supplies of arms, munitions, rockets, mustard bombs to unconfirmed reports that the Israelis are testing certain arms in Nicaraguan territory.”
When Somoza helped sponsor the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro’s Cuba, it was launched from Nicaragua’s Swan Island on land owned outright by UFCo. along with a radio signal tower run by the CIA. Plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion became utterly fantastic: Cuban exiles trained in Guatemala under protection of Castillo Armas were to be transported to Cuba on two United Fruit Co. ships; hit teams trained at a camp provided by the New Orleans mafia were to infiltrate Cuba and assassinate Castro; agents of mobster Meyer Lansky’s casinos and drug rings in Cuba were to proclaim a “national liberation struggle;” and the U.S. Naval fleet was to invade in support of these “patriotic” forces. The entire operation failed miserably because of President Kennedy’s staunch opposition to playing along with the British Empire’s manipulated Cold War intrigue despite the fact that his father Joseph Kennedy had made his initial fortune selling bootleg whiskey from exclusive British liquor franchises to the same gangster elements involved with UFCo.
Historian Anton Chaitkin describes the European groupings that General Lemnitzer inherited upon being fired and joining NATO; “a covert apparatus of Mafia killers, Hitler Nazis, Mussolini Fascists, French colonial diehards, and white mercenaries fuming about the loss of Africa.”
The close connections between the United Fruit Co. and the networks named by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as being behind Kennedy’s assassination shortly afterward is graphically illustrated in the case of William Gaudet, publisher of the UFCo funded Latin American Report in the 1950s and early 1960s.
At the time of his employment by UFCo, Gaudet worked out of the International Trade Mart (ITM), a New Orleans branch of the Permindex Corp., established in 1958, nominally as an international trading company arranging trade expositions and managing real estate projects housing corporate management offices. The founder of Permindex was Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, a personal protege of British Special Operations Executive head Sir William Stephenson. Bloomfield, in addition to having a pivotal position within the FBI Division Five and the Office of Naval Intelligence, was a leading financial conduit for the Meyer Lansky – run International narcotics cartel. Among the leading shareholders in Permindex were mob attorney Roy M. Cohn; George Mantello, an attorney for the Italian Black Nobility House of Savoy; Ferencz Nagy, the former pro-Hitler President of wartime Hungary; and Tibor Rosenbaum, the 1960s director of Israeli Mossad operations in Western Europe (based out of his Meyer Lansky – connected Geneva bank). Permindex had been expelled in 1962 from both Italy and Switzerland, and had also been identified as responsible for trying to organize the assassination of French President de Gaulle. Sharing offices with Gaudet was Lee Harvey Oswald’s “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” and many others named by Garrison as being involved with Oswald in the Kennedy assassination. Among these were Clay Shaw, who headed ITM with Zemurray’s successor in the New Orleans mob, Carlos Marcelo.
Also involved was Edward Bannister, Southeastern Regional Director of Division Five (Counterintelligence) of the FBI, for which Bloomfield served as the chief recruiter and agent-handler at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Bannister was named by Garrison as being in charge of providing Oswald with a credible Communist cover. When Oswald traveled to Mexico on his notorious trip to visit the Soviet and Cuban Embassies there, UFCo agent William Gaudet’s signature appeared directly below his in the registry of the American Embassy during an unexplained side-trip. Curiously, the Warren Commission never looked at Gaudet’s connection to Oswald, nor at Garrison’s other evidence.
At least three Warren Commission members had close personal or family ties to United Fruit Co. primarily the Dulles brothers but also prominent persons like John J. McCloy “Chairman of the Establishment”. An honorary Rockefeller family member, McCloy was chairman of the board of David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, a director of the Rockefeller Foundation and United Fruit. His pedigree can be summed up by his attitude on the interning of Japanese-Americans in 1942: “If it is a question of safety of the country . . . why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”
McCloy, along with Allen Dulles, Whitney Shephardson, John Foster Dulles, William Draper, and Averell Harriman schemed to purge the wartime and postwar intelligence services and postwar German occupation authority of any Franklin Roosevelt loyalists who were committed to eliminating all forms of colonialism. At the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, John J. McCloy, ostensibly a private citizen but still serving as chairman of the President’s Arms Control and Disarmament Board, was abruptly recalled from a business trip in Europe and flown back to Washington. When first briefed on the existence of nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, McCloy’s response was to call for immediate air strikes to take out the weapons.
Another top Wall Street oligarch, William F. Buckley, Sr., who worked with Standard Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Morgan-Lamont interests to stage multiple countercoup attempts against the Mexican Revolution until he was thrown out of the country in 1921 as a “pernicious foreigner” and his oil holdings confiscated. Buckley next moved to Venezuela, where he gained control over two-thirds of the country’s oil deposits as a junior partner of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Buckley, Sr. personally trained Nelson Rockefeller who worked with him at Standard’s Venezuelan subsidiary, Creole Petroleum, to carry out a series of revolving-door coups that used networks of Buckley, Sr.’s close associate Argentine dictator Juan Peron and Spanish corporatist dictator Francisco Franco. Creole Petroleum was later to provide cover for operations run by the Dulles brothers in the Caribbean, working with the United Fruit Company to orchestrate the 1953 Arbenz coup in Guatamala and the 1963 Bay of Pigs invasion. Coudert Brothers, the law firm for the Buckleys’ estimated $110 million oil empire, also had a fascist pedigree as the legal counsel to Vichy France. LINK
The Buckleys are associated with the Permindex networks. George De Mohrenschildt, a White Russian aristocrat who was assassinated before he could testify on his role as a “controller” of Lee Harvey Oswald, maintained close ties with the family. De Mohrenschildt worked for Nelson Rockefeller, then Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs, during World War II; later, he joined the Buckleys’ Pantepec oil firm in Venezuela which was integrated into Standard Oil’s Caribbean intelligence operations. When De Mohrenschildt left Pantepec, he developed several joint ventures with the Schlumberger Corporation, which is represented by the Buckleys’ law firm, Coudert Brothers. Schlumberger is not only a major part of the United Fruit/Creole Petroleum, private intelligence operation that virtually ran the Bay of Pigs, but Jean de Menil was on the board of Permindex, and his wife was an international sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood terrorists. You might remember the central role Schlumberger played as Vice President Dick Cheney’s choice for looting Iraq while he was on the board of directors, a major stockholder and receiving $100,000 in deferred salary while his wife Lynne was a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a recipient of a “charity donation”.
An aside is necessary at this point because of the nature of discussing the Kennedy assassination and the problem of how the majority of historians replicate the methods of Sherlock Holmes when going through the minutia of what the main suspects were wearing, what did they eat for lunch that day, the spot they were standing on the day of November 21 at 3:32pm, and similar distractions. It should be obvious from what is discussed in the material that Kennedy was facing organizations that had no compunction about conducting high level assassinations when economic interests were threatened which was the ultimate theme that played out all during the administration’s existence. An excellent study is Battling Wall Street by Donald Gibson, a unique approach at exposing the fundamental battle between government “of, by, and for the people” and a government that serves selfish private interests before anything else. This has played out throughout our nation’s history whenever presidents have been murdered openly such as Presidents Garfield and McKinley or more secretly as in the case of Presidents Taylor or Harding and the result has been fundamental changes in national and economic policies. LINK Cui bono? Who benefits? LINKLINK Donald Gibson was interviewed by EIR editor Michelle Steinberg in May 5 2000. LINK
“EIR: You go into this in the final chapter in “Assassination Cover-Up” — the Wall Street Journal, Time-Life, Luce, etc. Bitter opposition.
Gibson: When I was finishing the first book, and I was getting a sense that Kennedy was, in fact, in deep conflict with Wall Street and other interests, I then looked at the cover-up process. People involved in creating the Warren Commission were essentially agents of the same powers who opposed Kennedy. So, that really set me off again, in terms of a new round of investigation and research.
EIR: There’s always some opposition. What do you think was so unique about what Kennedy represented, that would have made the Establishment take such drastic steps?
Gibson: What bothered them about Kennedy—Kennedy was aggressively threatening almost all of the broad strategies that the upper class was in the process of adopting, and in fact, he and, especially if his brother had followed him, would have gotten in the way of everything from post-industrialism to globalization. JFK’s nationally oriented, pro-development, pro-growth policies, not only for the United States, but also for other countries, would have been at odds with two of the central thrusts of the last 25 years: that is, the post-industrial society and globalization.”
Gibson interestingly brings up the role of Lord Bertrand Russell and his creation in early 1964, of the “Who Killed Kennedy Committee” LINKLINK months before the Warren Commission issues its report and his friendship with Warren Commission critic Mark Lane and his 1966 book Rush to Judgment, the first of roughly 400 books that have been produced, in which Gibson pinpoints Russell’s role in leading what “became a vast industry of misdirection about the assassination.” Adding to the obfuscation was the 1975 Rockefeller Commission On CIA Domestic Activities that was headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller, LINK which featured Lyman Lemnitzer, the former lunatic head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was the most vocal for an invasion of Cuba and for suggesting in “Operation Northwoods” that the government use fake Cubans to carry out terrorist incidents in the US in order to terrify the public into supporting an invasion. You can read more about this in James Bamfords “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency”.
Chief Investigator for the Warren Commission, David Belin, provided Sen. Richard Schweiker (D-Pa.) with CIA documents that implied a possible link between Castro and the Kennedy assassination based upon the statements of a Cuban defector. In leaking the documents to AP, Belin indicated that the Warren Commission had access to the same documents but had ignored them. Ironically, Belin, had just written an absolution of the Warren Commission’s “lone assassin” and magical “single bullet theory” for William F. Buckley’s National Review Magazine of Feb. 6, 1976.
UFCo.’s leading agronomist William C. Paddock became part of a group of neo-Malthusians calling for wartime style “triage measures” for Mexico and Central America in order to radically reduce populations. Paddock received training in plant biology at Cornell and began a career in tropical agronomy in the late 1940s. For the decade of the 1950s he lived in Central America, primarily Guatemala and Honduras, and took frequent trips to Mexico. In the 1960s, he established a private consulting firm in tropical agronomy, Paddock and Paddock, and devoted increasing portions of his time to work with his brother, Paul Paddock, in researching the issue of world population growth.
Paul Paddock (deceased in the early 1970s) was a career State Department officer serving in Mexico in the late 1930s. William served as the President of the Escuela Agricola Panamericana (Pan American Agricultural School), near Tegucigalpa, Honduras LINK. This school, founded by United Brands, has for decades been their flagship “research” center in the area, and is funded to this day by the United Brands Foundation. The Environmental Fund LINK, created in 1973 was to promote forced abortion and sterilization as opposed to the more mainstream family planning groups. Its statement of purpose described it as “an effort to stimulate thinking about the unthinkable.”
Zero Population Growth (now Population Connection LINKPC Critique) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) LINK were similar population reduction movements Paddock sat on the board of directors of and was a financier. His famous book Famine, 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? (1967) explicitly calls for coercive family planning, William Hardin, University of Chicago-trained biologist, issued a 1968 manifesto LINK for the American Academy for the Advancement of Science which for the first time openly stated that the voluntary birth control programs were insufficient to halt world population growth and for the urgent need of “lifeboat economics”, and Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, popularized Paddock and Hardin’s work. It became a national bestseller across the United States. “Many apparently brutal and heartless decisions will have to be made,” Ehrlich wrote. This seminal work by Paddock, Hardin and Ehrlich took place during the same years, under the broad direction of a larger effort: the creation of the Club of Rome by the planning agencies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO.
The Club of Rome, officially created in 1969 based on organizing efforts in which Zbigniew Brzezinski played a prominent role, immediately launched the umbrella concept within which triage and lifeboat ethics found their place: Limits to Growth. Similar themed policy papers such as Global 2000 (1977) which recommends reducing the world population by 2 billion people by the turn of the century, Henry Kissinger’s National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM200) completed in Dec. 1974 specified population reduction as the means of controlling resources, the 1974 Rockefeller led Bucharest Conference on Population from which the global warming lie was birthed, the “controlled disintegration” economic wrecking job of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and other measures such as the genocidalist Pol-Pot regime in Cambodia all borrowed from Paddocks theories and made them real. LINK
Out of the Fire and Into the Microwave
Once we reach the 1970s, the UFCo. begins a new chapter with the 1970 takeover by Eli Black, the merger into United Brands, the mysterious “suicide” of Black 5 years later and the ascension of Max Fisher, at the time a junior “Zemurray” as head of both a small Israeli oil refining company (PAZ) and Detroit’s Purple Gang; one of the prohibition eras most violent Jewish extortion and booze smuggling operations in collaboration with the Bronfman family in Canada.
Fisher’s early career was shaped by his association with Purple Gang member Jack Rothberg, who helped him get started in the oil refinery business. If you have a strong enough stomach, you can browse the poorly coded worship website The Max Fischer Archives that has “Respected Leader” and “The Legacy of a World Citizen” at the top. LINK
In February 1975, United Brands (UB) Chairman of the Board Eli Black walked out of a window on the 4th floor of the Pan-American building in New York City. Within two months of his mysterious death, Max Fisher (who had threatened the release of incriminating evidence on Black’s various bribery schemes) was appointed acting chairman of the company, and subsequently became its new Chairman of the Board.
By 1975, Fisher and two of his close associates, Carl Lindner of Cincinnati and Seymour Milstein of New York City, held a total of 48 percent of the stock of UB and its subsidiary companies. Fisher’s appointment was sponsored by two individuals: Sol Linowitz and Donald R. Gant, a Goldman Sachs partner and Henry Kissinger associate. The Carter administration’s special envoy for Panama Canal treaty negotiations, Linowitz was an international policy adviser to Maritime Fruit Company, the Israeli counterpart to United Brands, and sat on the board of Marine Midland Bank, which in 1979 merged with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, long the central clearinghouse bank for the Golden Triangle Far Eastern heroin trade since the Opium Wars. One of Fisher’s first actions as board chairman was to appoint Bert C. Reiss as Vice-President in charge of transportation. Reiss came from National Bulk Carriers Corporation (NBC), a firm involved in shipping and construction throughout Latin America.
NBC was owned by Daniel K. Ludwig, an associate of Meyer Lansky, who was responsible for the harbor-dredging project that led to the building of the scandal-ridden Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Once at UB, Reiss excluded all non-company cargo from United Brands ships and from its New Orleans port facilities, throwing a shroud of total secrecy around the company’s Caribbean/Central American shipping activities. Through his Paz holdings, Fisher next bought into a significant piece of the Israeli state sector, and gained half ownership in Zim Shipping Company, the largest line in the Middle East, one of who’s ships was exposed in 1978 by the Jerusalem Post as carrying millions of dollars worth of liquid hashish into New York. LINK
Between 1959 and the late 1980s, Charles Keating was the business partner of Carl Lindner, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based financier who would be one of the central figures in the $200 billion Savings and Loan collapse and taxpayer bailout in 1989. In 1959, Lindner and Keating co-founded American Financial Corporation (AFC). Keating served as the mortgage and insurance company’s general counsel, and later as vice president. Between 1974 and 1976, Lindner and Keating engineered a series of stock purchases and mergers with some of the leading figures in the Lansky crime syndicate—who had followed the Bronfman family recipe, and gone from “rags, to rackets, to riches, to respectability.”
In 1975, Lindner’s AFC allied with Detroit financier Max Fisher; Detroit real estate developer Alfred Taubman (a Fisher associate); and Paul and Seymour Milstein, to grab a 50% controlling interest in the United Fruit/Brands Company. Drug Enforcement Administration officials had confirmed to Executive Intelligence Review, that United Fruit was a major force in the Latin American cocaine trade—a business that skyrocketed following the Lindner-Fisher, et al. takeover. At the same time that Lindner, Fisher et. al. were grabbing United Fruit, Lindner’s AFC simultaneously allied with a group of other Lansky-linked entities to establish a formidable pool of interlocking companies that would collectively form the core of the infamous 1980’s era of junk-bond raiders, featured in books like Predators Ball by Connie Bruck or the “Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power and Profits” by Sarah Bartlett.
As Lindner and Keating were forging their corporate alliances with Steinberg, Tisch, Fisher, Riklis, and Posner, two of the leading Anglo-American financial groups—JP Morgan and the banking and brokerage empire of Baron Edmund de Rothschild Banque Lambert de Bruxelles were sealing their own alliance. These top bankers transformed the relatively small investment bank/brokerage house of Drexel Harriman Ripley, during the 1970s, into Drexel Burnham Lambert. Baron Edmund de Rothschild personified the intersection of the overworld of high finance with the underworld. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the Geneva-based Rothschild had bankrolled the careers of Max Fisher; pyramid swindler Bernie Cornfeld of Investors Overseas Services (IOS) infamy; pioneer drug-money launderer Robert Vesco; and hedge fund pirate George Soros.
The newly built Drexel Burnham dispatched hotshot bond trader Michael Milken to his newly established Beverly Hills, California office to begin the era of Junk Bonds and hostile takeovers. In 1979, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker began driving interest rates up over 20%, gutting America’s productive agro-industrial sector.
You almost have to picture the strategic bombing campaign of WW2 to imagine the leveraged buyouts and looting of auto plants, steel companies, foundries, machine shops and similar heavy industries being destroyed systematically and former prosperous cities and towns transformed into drug infested hell holes. The passage of the Staggers Act in 1980, Garn-St Germain in 1982 along with other deregulation measures turned the once productive economy into a post-industrial wasteland that is dominated by the FIRE (Finance Insurance Real Estate) companies and the increasing amount of entertainment and drugs used to keep most of the population who’s living standards were becoming worse and worse, occupied and pacified.
At age 96, Max Fisher died on March 3, 2005, at his home in the Detroit suburb of Franklin. His fortune was estimated at $775 million in Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of the nation’s 400 wealthiest individuals. The fawning picture of a successful businessman and generous philanthropist to important causes is what you find online in Wikipedia WIKI or other websites like The Jewish Historical Society of Michigan website. JHSM “Business and financial success was just part of Max Fisher’s global impact. He firmly believed that his success obligated him to give back to the causes he supported. Fisher became a giant in philanthropy. Education, Jewish and secular, was a priority for his generosity. He focused on Israel and the support available from American Jewry. He became Chairman of the United Jewish Appeal and then the United Israel Appeal. He chaired the board of the Jewish Agency for Israel for many years, serving as a shadow diplomat between the Israeli and U.S. governments. In 1977, President Carter invited Fisher to watch Israel’s prime minister and Egypt’s president sign the Camp David accords.”
Communists, The Invention of Imperialist Mass Murderers
Communist/Maoist movements. The perfect excuse for endless bloodshed. If anyone still remembers the Iran Contra scandal, who would have thought it a good idea to finance a guerilla war against “Godless Communists” with the proceeds of drug sales provided by Narco-terrorists which allow you to imprison large numbers of the poorest sections of society in privatized prisons that double as virtual slave labor camps?
Welcome to the Bizarro world of Cold War logic. The network of Cubans trained by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion was under the supervision of Theodore G. Shackley, who became famous during the Iran-Contra scandal for being the head of the “secret team” charged with ferrying weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in CIA airplanes, and returning the airplanes with cargos of cocaine from the Medellin Cartel. LINK Apart from Shackley, the “team” was put together by his longstanding aide Thomas Cline and by Gen. Richard Secord. Among the leading Cuban operatives in the project were Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez, and Luis Posada Carriles, former official of Venezuela’s DISIP (the intelligence and counter intelligence agency created in 1969).
In 1960, CIA director Allen Dulles put Shackley in charge of Operation 40, as the plan to invade Cuba was called, and to carry out sabotage and assassination operations with the collaboration of Meyer Lansky, Santos Trafficante, and others, who controlled smuggling and drug-trafficking in the Caribbean. Under Shackley’s supervision, the plan’s name was changed to Operation Mongoose, for which two bases were established, one in Miami and the other in Guatemala, the latter being referred to by Figueres above.
In 1965, Operation Mongoose was closed down, and Shackley and Cline were transferred to Laos. Ted Shackley was named assistant CIA station chief in Laos, and Cline his assistant.
Accompanying them were various Cuban operatives they had trained. The same operation was repeated in Laos: training locals for terrorist operations and to link up with the drug-traffickers to finance their operations. Upon arrival in Laos, they established contact with Vang Pao, an opium trafficker, to whom they provided aerial support. LINK
Pao’s competitors mysteriously disappeared. In 1971, Shackley was transferred to America as chief of western hemisphere operations. In 1973 he returned to Southeast Asia as CIA station chief in Vietnam, where he carried out Operation Phoenix between 1974 and 1975, whose mission was to eliminate the entire administrative elite of Vietnam to prevent its functioning after the U.S. evacuation. During that period, he joined with Richard Armitage who was in charge of the financial operations of the Secret Team. Between 1976 and 1979, various corporations and subsidiaries were established to hide the operations of the Secret Team. In Switzerland three were created: Lake Resources, Inc.; The Stanford Technology Trading Group, Inc.; and the most notorious of all, Compagnie de Service Fiduciaire (CSF), founded by Willard Zucker, also director of the legal department of Investors Overseas Services (lOS) of Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Vesco.
CSF had a Central American subsidiary: CSF Investments, Ltd. In 1978, they went to Central America, beginning their operations, and in 1981, Lt. Col. Oliver North put the Secret Team in charge of support operations for the Nicaraguan Contras.
In that effort, the Cubans Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez, and ex-DISIP commissioner Luis Posada Carriles actively participated.
Cuba: Tierra Del Mal
Since Cuba is central in much of the drama we’ve been discussing, a brief history might be needed. From the time of the landing of Christopher Columbus up until the Spanish American War, Cuba was a Spanish colony.
Freemasonry was abolished in 1824, but secret lodges sprang up nonetheless, to agitate for the island’s phony “independence,” often in collusion with U.S.-based Freemasons, among other things to ensure the continuation of the institutions of slavery and free trade.
In the 1850s, Mazzini’s Young America and Young Cuba movements fomented revolution on the island against Spain, while simultaneously organizing the invasion of mercenaries from New York—the “filibusters”—who hoped to seize control of the island, and annex it to the Union as a slave state. A bloody conflict that would last for 10 years. The career of Filibuster William Walker of New Orleans and the Knights of the Golden Circle which formed the core of what would become the Confederacy and then the Ku Klux Klan in his invasions of Mexico and Nicaragua can be seen as the prelude to the later depredations of United Fruit LINK.
Following the defeat of the Spanish by America in 1898, Cuba became a protectorate and in 1902 is granted independence with Guantanamo Bay base leased to the US. In 1906 with the collapse of the government, the US invaded to defend the sugar plantations and remained as an occupier until 1909. In 1912, the US invades to assist UFCo. in suppressing the Afro-Cuban revolt.
In 1917, the US invades again to defend the sugar plantation system from leftist rebels who were challenging the contested election of President Menocal and remained as an occupying force until 1933 when they gain independence again under President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. With the election of Fulgencio Batista (son of a United Fruit employee) in 1944 and his military dictatorship in 1952, Cuba becomes the headquarters of organized crime, most notably, Meyer Lansky BIO (chairman of the crime syndicate for 50 years), Morris “Moe” Dalitz BIO the mob boss of Cleveland for the Purple Gang, owner of casinos in Las Vegas and Miami, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel BIO.
Their business: gambling, narcotics, money laundering and sex tourism.
After Fidel Castro ousts Batista in 1959, the Cuban government passes a law to nationalize U.S. businesses in 1960: the Cuban Electricity Company, the telephone company (ITT), petrol refineries, and 36 sugar refineries with an approximate value of 800 million pesos. The mob similarly was forced off the island and Lansky set up operations in the Bahamas with the complicity of British authorities. The US places an embargo on sugar and restricts exports of anything except food and medicine.
After the abortive invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Castro calls on the Russians to assist in defending Cuba from the United States which leads into the Cuban Missile Crisis.
After 13 terrifying days of a naval blockade, the Russians pull their nuclear missiles out and the US pulls their nuclear weapons out of Turkey. Castro holds the title of Premier until 1976 when Cuba becomes a one party dictatorship with Castro as the sole leader until health concerns made him relinquish power in 2008. However, unlike the popular romantic story told by clueless Commies, Castro and Che didn’t lead a lone revolution in the mountains slowly gathering disgruntled Cubans to his cause until he emerged victorious. Like anything we’ve talked about, the story is far more complicated than is usually told and requires that you suspend your preconceived ideas.
Like Batista, Castro’s father worked a sugar plantation for UFCo. and then owned his own plantation in the Mayari province giving him a relatively decent middle class living standard. Fidel went to Jesuit run schools throughout his youth and upon his 1946 graduation from Colegio de Belén, in Havana Father Amando Llorente wrote “You could see this … That he was to do great things … That he is for great things, not for ordinary things.” [see Appendix A]
In 1947, while in college, Castro began being radicalized by an attempt of the recently formed Caribbean League LINK to overthrow Rafael Trujillo the dictator of the Dominican Republic. The members of the league were ex-communists like Venezuela’s Carlos Andrés Pérez BIO and Rómulo Betancourt; Costa Rica’s Pepe Figueres; Cuba’s Carlos Prío Socarrás; and Peru’s Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. LINK Carlos Prío Socarrás in particular, while using the term Social Democrat, when elected president of Cuba in 1948 gave his full blessing for Meyer Lansky’s takeover and until his death was a board member of Permindex.
It’s estimated that he spent $5 million to finance terrorist operations against Batista and gave $250,000 to Castro’s guerrilla movement. The relationship didn’t last very long however since most of them broke with Castro after 1961. The Caribbean Legion was sponsored at the time by “State Department socialists” like Jay Lovestone, David Dubinsky, Serafino Romualdi, and Adolf Berle – all bankrolled by Nelson Rockefeller. UFCo./UB maintained Figueres as one of their chief assets in the region through the years.
For example, during his second presidential term in the early 1970s, Figueres arranged the amicable government purchase of UFCO holdings in Costa Rica, a deal by which Figueres profited handsomely through his son-in-law, Danilo Jimenez Nevia, who became a UB stockholder according to reliable Central American diplomatic sources. It should also be noted that indicted financier Robert Vesco was granted asylum and residence in Costa Rica during this period-by President Figueres personally, in exchange for Vesco putting money into Figueres’ farm, “La Lucha.” It was during this same period that Figueres also permitted the opening of a large, well-staffed Soviet embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica. Meanwhile Figueres told the New Republic magazine of April 23, 1977: “I did everything possible to involve the United States and the CIA in Central American politics, in an era when the special democrats of the region were threatened by the communists on the one hand, and the military on the other.”
Of particular importance is Peru’s APRA and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as the spreading of nominally communist leaning terrorist movements throughout central and south America that will be discussed later.
In 1971, Robert Vesco fled the United States to escape embezzlement charges regarding IOS to set up shop in the Bahamas and Costa Rica. He had a new assignment: to direct the founding of a cocaine “cartel,” organizing the disparate operations of traffickers into an integrated, Americas-wide “industry,” operating under centralized production, transport, distribution, financing, and protection.
The results transformed the Western Hemisphere into the greatest drug production region in the world, a region bled by marauding narco-terrorist armies. Media stories that Vesco joined Colombia’s Carlos Lehder and Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the dope trade somewhere along the way, invert reality. In three central areas, Vesco played a critical role in creating the Medelin and associated Cali cartels, as institutions:
• He picked up small-time Colombian thug and ex-convict, Lehder, providing him with the political protection and financial backing he required to set up the cocaine transport pipeline between Colombia and the United States;
• He set up the cartel’s first sophisticated money laundering schemes; and
• He brokered the provision of political and military protection for spreading drug plantations across the region, by Cuba-aligned terrorist forces-protection continued today by the members of the Sao Paulo Forum.
‘New instruments of chance’ When he first fled the United States, Vesco found assured protection in two Caribbean countries which had long served as operations bases for the Meyer Lansky mob and the “men above suspicion” which deployed it: the British Crown Colony and offshore banking center of the Bahamas (whose prime minister, Lynden Pindling, was in Lansky’s hip pocket), and Costa Rica. Vesco went first to the Bahamas, and then in 1972, moved to Costa Rica, where he lived until 1978, under the personal protection of President Jose “Pepe” Figueres. From the time he first seized power in 1948 in a farcical five-week “guerrilla war,” Figueres had run Costa Rica as a regional deployment center for the Caribbean Legion, a Social Democratic political machine linked to the Lansky mob and backed by the Rockefeller and J. Peter Grace interests.
The Legion, using exiled communist fighters from the Spanish Civil War, trained various guerrilla operations over the decades; its most famous operation was its sponsorship of Castro’s 1957 expedition back to Cuba on the Granma. Figueres sent a letter in 1972 to President Richard Nixon, reporting that Vesco “has been visiting Costa Rica with a view to helping us establish some new instruments of finance and economic development.” Figueres promoted Vesco’s financial schemes-which included plans to turn the Caribbean and Central America into a “Hongkong West” arguing that this was vital for regional “development.”
He wrote, “I am impressed by his ideas, his group of business leaders, and the magnitude of the anticipated investments. He may provide the ingredient that has been lacking in our plans to create, in the middle of the Western Hemisphere, a showpiece of democratic development.”
When a new Costa Rican President took office in 1978, he expelled Vesco, who returned to the Bahamas, where he had already established operations. In 1977, Lehder had begun setting up drug transshipment headquarters on a small Bahamian island, Norman Cays, later owned in its entirety by Vesco and Lehder together. Lehder associates, turned government informants, later reported that Lehder considered Vesco a “financial genius,” and told them that Vesco was “schooling him in the use of offshore banks to launder money,” according to the book Kings of Cocaine, by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leon (1989). Lehder also bragged that it was Vesco who had introduced him to both Bahamian Prime Minister Pindling and Castro.
When heat from the United States ran him out of the Bahamas in 1981, Vesco began moving between the British colony of Antigua and Sandinista Nicaragua.
By 1983, however, he settled in Havana, Cuba. As an adjunct of the dope trade, Vesco provided the Castro regime aid in smuggling into Cuba high-technology goods banned by the U.S. embargo. On Aug. 4, 1985, Castro made Cuba’s protection of the cartel architect official. He told foreign reporters: “Is it just, that the country where people speak so much of human rights [the United States] … goes after someone said to have evaded paying taxes?” He announced that he had told Vesco, “If you want to live here, live here.”
From the outset of the Medellin cartel, Castro’s most critical role in the transformation of the Americas into a drug empire has not been through the extensive logistical support the cartel has provided on the island of Cuba nor the shipments allowed through Cuban territory. Rather it has been Cuban deployment of narco-terrorism, directing allied terrorist forces in other Ibero-American countries, both to defend the drug trade and to assault government and political forces seeking to suppress it.
Today, despite their protestations to the contrary, Cuba and its allies in the Sao Paulo Forum remain intensely involved in the drug trade. The best known exemplars of Cuban-allied narco-terrorism from the 1980s are Colombia’s M-19 and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. Lehder’s alliance with the M-19 was publicly hailed by Lehder and M-19 leaders alike. The M19’s most devastating blow for the drug trade was the 1985 seizure and destruction of Colombia’s Justice Palace and the resulting murder of 12 members of the Supreme Court.
Likewise, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, whose 1978-79 “revolution” was financed in part by Vesco partner Pepe Figueres, were in on the drug trade from the beginning. Vesco was a frequent visitor in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s; U.S. government sources identified Vesco as the boss of Federico Vaughn, the ex-vice minister of the interior filmed by DEA undercover agents in 1984 loading cocaine on a plane waiting at a Nicaraguan military air base. His 1995 arrest for fraud involving Castro’s brother Raul and Richard Nixon’s son Robert over a laboratory experiment to investigate an anti-cancer treatment put him in jail until he passed away in 2007, although his associate, “ex” CIA agent Frank Terpil claims he escaped to Sierra Leone in Africa. LINKLINK
The reason for Lansky’s and Vesco’s preference for using the Bahamas has to do with the 300-year criminal history which unites all the different strands of money laundering and the drug trade, revealing how the British orchestrate that trade. Its story could be repeated for each of the other exotic offshore British financial centers. In 1973, the Bahamas was granted nominal independence. Even though the country elects a prime minister, King Charles is the head of state of the islands, and the Kings Privy Council’s “say so” is final in all legal matters. The population is impoverished, while banking and tourism constitute a huge portion of the Bahamas’ fragile economy. The Bahamas has a dual function: It is both a drop spot and transshipment point for drugs, and a drug-money-laundering center. The Bahamas is an archipelago of 700 islands, of which the closest is 50 miles away from Florida.
Since only 40 of the 700 islands are populated, the others make perfect drop points for drugs. During the 1980s, according to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports, up to 75% of the drugs that reached the United States from Ibero-America went through the Bahamas first. American authorities, fearful of the drug flow into the United States, forced the Bahamas to take measures to cut back the drug flow.
The June 7, 1996 London Financial Times reported, “It is guessed that no more than 10-15% of illegal drugs shipments to the U.S. now go through the islands.” That may be an underestimation, and the Financial Times admits that the drug flow is increasing, now that U.S. radars to monitor drug trafficking were taken down in Grand Bahamas, Exuma, and Great Inagua, in a cost-saving measure.
This is part of the Bahamas’ historic profile. During the American Revolutionary War (1775-83) and the War of 1812, when Britain invaded America, the British used their colony of the Bahamas as a base for naval assaults on the United States. Because of this, in 1776, the American revolutionaries occupied the Bahamas. After the Revolutionary War, Tory sympathizers fled to the Bahamas, and became part of the establishment. During the British-backed Confederate uprising of the American Civil War, the British used the Bahamas as a base to run ships through the North’s shipping blockade against the South. A successful blockade running voyage could earn $300,000.
During World War II, the pro-Nazi Edward VIII Duke of Windsor was exiled to the Bahamas, but was placed in the very important post of Bahamian governor general. During this time, the duke used Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish eugenicist and Nazi agent, to launder money to Mexico. During the 1960s, organized crime godfather Meyer Lansky built the Resorts International casino on Paradise Island (the location of Axel Wenner-Gren’s mansion) as an international money-laundering center. The money-laundering Canadian banks dominate the Bahamian banking scene, hiding behind Bahamian bank secrecy and lax Canadian banking laws to shelter drug money. In the Dec. 24, 1985 Montreal Gazette, in an article entitled, “How Canadian Banks Are Used to ‘Launder’ Narcotics Millions,” William Marsden wrote that drug money is “hauled to Canadian banks [in Nassau, Bahamas] in huge stacks of small bills sometimes millions of dollars at once stuffed into suitcases, duffle bags, paper bags and boxes by narcotics smugglers … Trusted drivers and security guards ensure that their cash gets into the banks safely. And once the money is deposited, laws that forbid Bahamian bankers to disclose bank records ensure that it’s safe from investigation by foreign narcotics and tax agents …”
Canadian banks, which handle 80% of banking business in the Bahamas, have become key instruments in ‘laundering’ illicit money-giving it a clean history-for smugglers hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. and Canadian narcotics agents. “By taking these huge cash deposits, which is not illegal, the Canadian banks are facilitating criminal activity …” In the past four years, Bank of Nova Scotia twice stonewalled U.S. investigations by refusing to hand over bank records of drug smugglers to a [U.S.] grand jury. The bank finally yielded after paying nearly $2 million in fines.” Under U.S. pressure, the Bahamian banking system has made changes in its money acceptance practices, but during the past decade, the volume of laundered drug money has gone up. LINK The Caribbean British and Dutch money laundering centers
When we reach the 1980’s and beyond, we now enter the era of globalization and the economic hitman. President Nixon, under the direction of Milton Friedman, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger brings an end to the gold-reserve fixed exchange rate system of the post WW2 Bretton Woods monetary system in 1973. With currencies fluctuating, it becomes child play for international financiers like George Soros to use vast amounts of money from British offshore money laundering centers to speculate against currencies in combination with pressures from the international lending agencies like the International Monetary Fund IMF and World Bank to make governments devalue their currency, privatize services and sell off national assets.
As John Perkins recalled in his expose “Confessions of An Economic Hitman”, the global debt-masters employ “economic hit men,” like himself, to trap targeted nations in bankruptcy, and then force them to turn over their national patrimony of raw material wealth and labor power. When a particular nationalist head of state resists, the debt-masters next bring in the “jackals,” the professional assassins, to arrange an airplane crash “accident,” or some other convenient “tragedy” to eliminate the misguided leader and serve notice on his successors that such behavior is not to be tolerated.
In the exceedingly rare case in which the jackals fail in their mission, pretexts are arranged and imperial wars of conquest like the 1989 invasion of Panama, and the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq—take place. In the next chapters, we’ll go through the examples of each of the countries listed as sources for much of the immigration/migrants coming into the United States and the role that both the International Monetary Fund and Communist/Maoist linked narco-terrorism have played in the utter disaster of the human tidal wave hitting the United States, due solely to the apathy and disregard for the effects the policies of the United States has on other people.
However, with the mass imprisonment of the narco-terrorist gangs in Nicaragua, the explicit endorsement of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal by Mexico’s president Manuel Lopez Obrador and Daniel Ortega banning the Jesuits from Nicaragua, LINKLINK there are signs of life in addition to the growing number of nations deciding to participate in the international development oriented policies of the BRICS nations. BRICS in Nicaragua.
End Of Part 1 Appendix A:
For those not familiar, The Society of Jesus is a paramilitary order nominally inside the Catholic Church but traditionally operating outside papal control. For a 40 year period beginning in 1763 it was officially condemned by the Papacy. Throughout its history, since its founding as a branch of the inquisition, its hallmark has been a process of indoctrination or brainwashing and the creation, penetration, and deployment of religious cults and of particular note, assassins who swear an oath of loyalty to the order above the Pope or any temporal power. Their most notable feature is their practice of regicide (murder of a king). With funding from United Fruit/United Brands, the Loyala Center in New Orleans became a training center for thousands of labor leaders that showed up as leaders of terrorist gangs on both sides. According to Malachi Martin, Vatican reporter for William Buckley’s National Review “Q: Well I’ve noticed that the Theology of Liberation is very much talked about in certain orders – the Jesuits seem to be very active. M: Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans. But they go much further, I mean, they actually trained the Marxist guerrilla in their military tactics. And we have photographs of nuns in Guatemala shouldering machine-guns in the jungles, in the scrub. They have gone that far.” The influence of the order can be seen during a visit to Chile in 1972, where Castro met for 6 hours with a Jesuit group “Christians for Socialism” claiming an alliance of revolutionary Christians and Marxists could be strategic, a movement known as Liberation Theology of which we’ll hear about later.
