A group of congressional Democrats from Massachusetts is urging the Biden administration to reverse a Donald Trump-era decision to place Cuba on the list of governments that support supposed terrorism. In a letter sent to President Joe Biden last month and made public this week, the lawmakers spoke out against Cuba’s designation on the State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) list, a move that Trump made…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, with a few notable exceptions, have been critical of Israel’s ongoing campaign of genocide in Gaza. Perhaps more than any other region, they have expressed their solidarity with Palestine. Most recognize that the partnership between US imperialism and Israeli Zionism applies not only to Palestine, but also to Israel’s role as attendant to US domination in this hemisphere.
President Gabriel Boric of Chile condemned Israeli’s attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. The largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East (more properly West Asia) resides in Chile. Belize and Peru, likewise, joined the denunciation of Israel. Bolivia, meanwhile, has severed diplomatic relations with Israel, while Honduras and Colombia recalled their ambassadors.
Cuba had cut relations back in 1973 and Venezuela in 2009. Except for Panama, almost all of the region’s states recognize Palestine. Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela all have sent aid to Gaza. Even Argentina, with the largest Jewish population in the region, censured Israel over its violations of international law when hostilities first flared up.
Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the General Assembly on November 23: “It is repugnant to see how, despite the cruelty…the government of the United States of America and its satellites aim to justify the unjustifiable.”
Cuba and Iran called for a global coalition to protect the rights of Palestinians on December 4, noting that the world community has failed to stop the US-backed genocide.
A month before the October 7 offensive by Hamas, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia had presciently taken the occasion of the opening of the United Nations session to call for a united world effort at achieving peace in Israel-Palestine (along with Ukraine).
Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador and ironically of Palestinian heritage, stood out in his support of Israel among the regional heads of state. That is, until the militantly pro-Zionist Javier Milei assumed the presidency of Argentina two months after the most recent eruption of aggressions.
Henchman for the hegemon
The head of Colombia publicly criticizing Israel would have been unthinkable until Gustavo Petro won the presidency in 2022. The former M19 guerilla turned center-left politician was the first president from the portside in the entire history of Colombia. Pre-Petro, Colombia was known as Washington’s closest client in the region, the largest recipient of US military aid, and the only NATO global partner in Latin America.
Back in 2013, then Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos reflected on his country’s status as the regional equivalent to the US’s proxy state in the Middle East. He proclaimed that he was proud that Colombia is considered the “Israel of Latin America.” Indeed, Israel had an extensive role as henchman for the US hegemon in Colombia. The right-wing linked Colombian military and paramilitaries had long been closely intermeshed with the Zionist state.
The United Self-Defenses of Colombia (AUC in its Spanish initials), a drug trafficking cartel with a reputed 10,000-20,000 combatants at its peak, was one of the largest paramilitary groups in South America. The AUC was used by the US-allied official Colombian military to do its dirty work against left campesino and worker organizations. AUC militaries were trained by Israeli operatives. Some fifty of its most promising cadre received “scholarships” to Israel. Operating out of Guatemala, the Israeli arms supplier GIRSA sold Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition to the AUC paramilitaries in Colombia.
Another Latin American country with a closely intertwined relationship with Israel was Nicaragua before the Sandinista revolution. During the long US-backed Somoza dictatorship, Israel maintained a “special relationship” with this dynasty of ruthless autocrats. In the last days of the dictatorship, the US cut off arms supplies in response to public revulsion over atrocities committed by Somoza’s forces. Undaunted, Israel continued to supply them with military equipment. Then, when the US instigated the counterinsurgency after the successful Sandinista-led national liberation, Israel again served as supplier of the contras. Paralleling the Somoza-Israel bond were the Sandinista-Palestine ties, which continue to this day.
Israel’s partnership with US imperialism in the region
For the 31st time in November, the UN nearly unanimously condemned the US blockade of Cuba for its devastating effects on civilians and as a violation of the UN Charter. The vote would have been unanimous except for “no” votes cast by the US and Israel along with an abstention from Ukraine. The latter, which is now essentially a US dependency, is a newcomer. But Tel Aviv, on the other hand, has consistently stood with Washington in support of its coercive and illegal economic measures that have created a dire crisis in Cuba.
In fact, Israel has served as Washington’s partner in training reactionary death squads and supplying repressive militaries throughout the region for decades. Al Jazeera reported that Israel has trained, supplied, and advised militaries in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela in addition to Colombia and Nicaragua.
Not only was Israel entangled with the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, but it had a similar relationship to the 29-year Duvalier dynasty in Haiti, selling arms for the dictators’ repressive forces. Ditto for the 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and the military dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil. Likewise, Israel was the supplier of arms and trainer of death squads in the “dirty” wars in Guatemala and El Salvador. In all these grisly ventures, Tel Aviv was joined at the hip with Washington.
The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) explains that many right-leaning Latin American countries see a “close military relationship with Israel as a political asset in restoring or maintaining military and political ties with Washington.”
When reactionary regimes in the region need coercive muscle for hire, Israel is a prime choice. After right-winger David Noboa won the Ecuadorian presidency last month, he called in Israel to help restore government control of its prison system, which had been taken over by criminal gangs. Israel is also being tapped to design maximum security prisons in Ecuador.
According to Israeli psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi’s The Israeli Connection, “Israel is generally admired in Latin American military circles for its macho image of firmness, ruthlessness, and efficiency…Latin American military establishment is where most of Israel’s friends are found and where Israel continues to cultivate support.”
Case in point is the far-right Javier Milei, who assumed the presidency of Argentina on December 10. He campaigned on the promise to realign the second largest economy in South America with the US and Israel and away from its largest trading partners Brazil and China. On his first trip abroad after his election victory, Milei went to the US where he made what was described as a pilgrimage to the grave of an ultra-orthodox Jewish rabbi and announced his intention to convert from Catholicism to Judaism. The self-described anarcho-capitalist had accused the Argentina-born pope of being a communist and a false prophet.
Palestine’s friends and foes
Support of Israeli Zionism is a unifying issue for the fractious far right in the region, where virulent antisemites buddy up with Jewish nationalists, wrapping themselves – literally as in the case of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro – in the Israeli flag.
When the now disgraced and exiled Juan Guaidó first got the nod from the US to self-declare himself “interim president” of Venezuela in 2019, he staged the announcement on a street corner in Caracas with an Israeli flag flying behind him. Just as the red flag has been adopted as the banner for the left, the pennant of Israeli has become the insignia of the right. That blue and white banner can be seen at right-wing political rallies and at market stands owned by evangelicals throughout the region.
A growing evangelical Christian movement views Israel as a crucial part of their theology of the “end times” and is becoming an influential political force in the electorates of Guatemala (42%), Costa Rica (26%), Brazil (25%), Venezuela (22%), and elsewhere. The evangelicals have yet to exert a significant pro-Zionist political influence in the region. But that potential should not be discounted as events unfold.
On December 12, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a ceasefire in Gaza. Only Guatemala and Paraguay in Latin America voted “nay,” joining the US and Israel, while Uruguay, Argentina, and Panama abstained. The rest of the region united with the world supermajority of 153 nations supporting the resolution.
For now, Latin America and the Caribbean remain a bastion of support for Palestinian freedom. Palestine’s cause is popular with countries striving for independence from the US. Factors contributing to that stance are large Arab diasporas in the region, small pro-Zionist Jewish populations, and no powerful lobbies like AIPAC. For many, the struggle to assert national self-determination under US hegemony finds a kindred affinity with the cause of Palestine.
The post Latin America and the Caribbean stand with Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A sharp sound. Followed by body numbness. Difficulty speaking. Extreme head pain. Since 2016, U.S. officials across the world – in Cuba, China and Russia – have reported experiencing the sudden onset of an array of eerie symptoms. Reporters Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson try to make sense of this confusing illness that has come to be called Havana syndrome. This episode is built from reporting for an eight-part VICE World News podcast series by the same name.
The reporters begin by tracking down one of the first people to report Havana syndrome symptoms, a CIA officer working in Cuba. This “patient zero” explains the ways Cuban intelligence surveil and harass American spies working on the island and his own experience of suddenly being struck with a mysterious, painful condition. When he reports the illness to his bosses at the CIA, he learns that other U.S. officials on the island are experiencing the same thing.
A CIA doctor sees reports from the field about this strange condition happening in Cuba. He’s sent to Havana to investigate the cause of the symptoms and whether they may stem from a mysterious sound recorded by patient zero. But during his first night on the island, the CIA doctor falls ill with the same syndrome he is there to investigate.
In the third segment, the reporters head to Havana to visit the sites where people reported the onset of their symptoms, looking for answers. The team shares reporting-informed theories about who and what could be causing Havana syndrome.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in April 2023.
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This post was originally published on Reveal.
Rachid Koraichi (Algeria), One Plate, from A Nation in Exile, c. 1981.
More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli armed forces in Gaza since 7 October, nearly half of them children, according to the most recent report by spokesperson for the Gaza Ministry of Health Dr Ashraf Al-Qudra. Over 25,000 others have been injured, with thousands still buried under the rubble. Meanwhile, Israeli tanks have begun to encircle Gaza City, whose population was 600,000 a month ago but whose neighbourhoods are now largely vacant due to the desperate flight of its inhabitants to Gaza’s southern shelters and due to Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in their homes. Israel has cut off the city and begun to raid it, going door to door to bring the terror of the occupation from the skies to the streets. Those who await these raids in their homes might whisper the poem of Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), which is addressed to the Israeli soldier ready to kick down the door of a Palestinian home:
You there, by the threshold of our door,
come in and drink Arabic coffee with us
(you may feel that you are human like us)
You there, by the threshold of our door,
get out of our mornings
so that we may be assured that
we are humans like you
When Israeli soldiers begin going door to door there will be no time for coffee, not only because there is no coffee or water left, but because Israeli soldiers have been told that Palestinians are not human. They have been told, instead, that Palestinians are terrorists and animals. In the eyes of the occupying forces, the only treatment Palestinians deserve is to be assaulted, shot, killed, and eradicated altogether. A hunger for genocide and ethnic cleansing colours senior Israeli officials’ statements and has influenced their conduct in this war. Talk of civilian casualties is brushed off, and so are calls for a ceasefire. The spokesperson of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) James Elder said of this situation: ‘Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else’.
Laila Shawa (Palestine), Target 2009, 2009.
Even when high-ranking US officials talk about a ‘humanitarian pause’, they continue to find billions of dollars and more weapons systems for the Israeli military. This idea of a ‘humanitarian pause’ is legalese that means nothing for the survival of Gazans: the pause would end the bombing for a short period of time, possibly only a few hours, to allow the wounded to be removed and some aid to enter Gaza City before giving Israelis a green light to resume their murderous bombardment. Thus far, Israel has dropped a higher tonnage of explosives on Gaza than the combined weight of the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The denial of both a ceasefire and the possibility of political talks sponsored by the UN is not a policy that the US is pushing in Palestine alone; it is the same policy that the US, alongside its partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), have insisted upon in Ukraine. A new supplemental spending bill that totals $105 billion (in addition to the – likely underreported – $858-billion military budget for 2023) includes $61.4 billion for the grinding war in Ukraine and $14.1 billion for the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Though peace talks opened between Ukrainian and Russian authorities in both Belarus and Turkey days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, these talks were hastily scuttled by NATO, fuelling the conflict that has resulted in nearly 10,000 civilian deaths so far. The civilian death toll in Ukraine during one year and eight months of the conflict has already been surpassed by the civilian death toll in Palestine in merely four weeks.
Belkis Ayón (Cuba), La cena (‘The Supper’), 1991.
It is not a coincidence that these three countries – the US, Ukraine, and Israel – are the only ones that did not vote in favour of this year’s annual UN General Assembly resolution to end the six-decade-long US embargo on Cuba (which was imposed formally by US President John F. Kennedy on 3 February 1962 but began in 1960). The US has not only enforced this blockade on Cuba as a country, but on the Cuban Revolution as a process. When the Cuban Revolution of 1959 emphatically declared that it would defend the sovereignty of Cuban territory and advance the dignity of the Cuban people, the US saw it as a threat not only to its criminal interests on the island but also to its ability to maintain its grip over global affairs, which the potential contagion of the revolutionary process threatened to fracture. If Cuba could get away with looking after its own people, and even extending solidarity to others fighting for their right to do the same, before submitting to the demands of US-owned transnational corporations, then perhaps other countries could adopt a similar attitude. It was this fear of sovereignty that set the policy of the blockade in motion.
Though the blockade has cost the Cuban Revolution hundreds of billions of dollars since 1960, it has not been able to stop the revolution from building up people’s dignity. For example, the World Bank reported that in 2020, despite the harsh blockade and the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuba’s government spent 11.5% of its Gross Domestic Product on education, while the US spent 5.4%. Not only are all schools free for Cuban children, but all Cuban children receive meals at school and are given their uniforms. Medical education is also free in Cuba, creating a high doctor-to-patient ratio of 8.4 physicians and 7.1 nurses for every 1,000 Cubans. At the UN General Assembly, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla said that “attention to the human being has been and will continue to be the priority of the Cuban government”. The blockade might be “economic warfare”, he said, but the Cuban Revolution – which has faced this “economic siege” for decades – will not wilt. It will stand firm.
Raúl Martínez (Cuba), Rosas y Estrellas (‘Roses and Stars’), 1972.
The blockade is cruel. Foreign Minister Rodríguez Parrilla offered some examples of that cruelty, such as when the US government prevented Cuba from importing pulmonary ventilators and medical oxygen (including from other Latin American countries). In response, Cuba’s scientists and engineers developed their own ventilators, just as they produced their own COVID-19 vaccines. During the pandemic, Rodríguez Parrilla said, the US government offered humanitarian exemptions to other countries but denied them to Cuba. “The reality”, he said, “is that the US government opportunistically used COVID-19 as an ally in its hostile policy toward Cuba”.
Darwish asks Israeli soldiers of humanity, of whether they are capable of seeing Palestinians as human. The same should be asked of US government officials who promote and prosecute the blockade on Cuba: do they see Cubans as human?
Tings Chak (China), Palestine Will Be Free, 2023.
In June of this year, the Paris Poetry Market invited the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón to be its 2023 honorary president. Just before the event, the organisers of the poetry festival cancelled this honour, saying that they were responding to ‘pressures’ and ‘rumours’. The Cuban foreign ministry condemned this cancellation as part of the ‘siege of fascist hatred of Cuban culture’, another kind of blockade. Here is Nancy Morejón’s Réquiem para la mano izquierda (‘Requiem for the Left Hand’), as if in conversation with the humaneness of Darwish’s poetry and with the rhythms of the Cuban musician Marta Valdés (to whom this poem is dedicated):
On a map you could trace all the lines
horizontal, vertical, diagonal
from the Greenwich meridian to the Gulf of Mexico
that more or less
belong to our peculiarity
There are also big, big, big maps
in your imagination
and endless globes of the Earth,
Marta
But today I suspect that the tiniest, most minute map
sketched on school notebook paper
would be big enough to fit all of history
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
At the United Nations this week, the world community has overwhelmingly spoken out against the relentless U.S. embargo on Cuba. Yet President Biden remains unmoved, stubbornly clinging to the anachronic policies that are deliberately and systematically causing harm to the well-being of more than 11 million Cubans. Despite the world’s condemnation of the blockade every year since 1992, the U.S. government continues to act in complete isolation from the international community.
In this solitary corner, the United States was joined only by Israel, a country that relies on the United States for billions of dollars, money that is now set to increase by an additional $14.5 billion to intensify the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
But President Biden is not only turning a deaf ear to the international community, he is also ignoring the democratic voice of his own people. Over a hundred resolutions condemning the blockade have been passed across the U.S., representing about 55 million Americans calling for an end to the inhumane unilateral siege on Cuba that has persisted for over 60 years.
The U.S. embargo has a negative impact on all sectors of Cuba’s economy and has unquestionably worsened the quality of life of Cubans by limiting their access to basic necessities, including medicines, food, and fuel. According to the Cuban government, from March 2022 to February 2023, the blockade caused an estimated $4.8 billion in losses to Cuba, representing more than $555,000 for each hour of the blockade. The inclusion of Cuba in the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism on January 12, 2021 exacerbates the impact of the economic embargo. This has led to an massive increase in the number of Cubans migrating to the United States in search of economic opportunities.
The embargo is unjust and hinders Cuba’s inalienable right to development. It is also illegal and violates the United Nations charter and the principles of international law. The embargo’s extraterritorial provisions have not only prevented humanitarian aid from reaching Cuba through third-party countries, but have also prevented foreign companies from doing legitimate and lawful business in Cuba.
While Cuba prioritizes healthcare and solidarity, the U.S. persists in causing harm and inflicting pain on the Cuban people in its failed, 60-year-old effort at regime change. We, at CODEPINK, will not stand idly by. We pledge to continue advocating for justice and tirelessly demanding that our government change its hostile policy towards Cuba by lifting the economic, commercial and financial embargo. We will persist in our call for the immediate removal of Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism—a designation that should never have been imposed in the first place.
U.S. policymakers must abandon their outdated Cold War mentality towards Cuba, and instead listen to the world and start being a good neighbor.
A year after being suspended from the body, Russia will not be returning to the UN Human Rights Council in January, despite its best efforts. Running for one of two seats allocated to countries from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia received only 83 votes, significantly less than competitors Albania (123) and Bulgaria (163).
‘With this vote, States have acted in line with General Assembly resolution 60/251 and stopped Russia’s brazen attempt to undermine the international human rights system,’ said Madeleine Sinclair, co-director of ISHR’s New York office. ‘Russia must answer for a long list of crimes in Ukraine and for its ruthless and longstanding crackdown on civil society and individual liberties at home. We’re relieved voting States agreed that it could not have legitimately held a seat at the UN’s top human rights body,’. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/russia/]
In the only other competitive race, between States from Latin American and the Caribbean, the General Assembly re-elected Cuba, one of Russia’s most consistent allies. Cuba ran for one of three seats for Latin America and the Caribbean, facing three competitors and coming in first, with 146 votes, ahead of Brazil (144), the Dominican Republic (137) and Peru (108).
Results for Asia and Africa were as disappointing as they were predictable, with the election of China and Burundi. Both States ran in uncompetitive races, with only as many candidates as seats available, thus all but assured to win. They were elected with 154 (China) and 168 (Burundi), finishing bottom of each of their respective regional slates with noticeably fewer votes than their direct competitors.
Both countries are objectively and manifestly unsuitable for the Human Rights Council in view of their domestic records, their past actions as Council members, and the very criteria that nominally governs membership of the Council.
ISHR has been campaigning to call on States at the General assembly to vote in accordance with resolution 60/251 and to use their votes to ensure a strong and principled Human Rights Council. ISHR produced a series of individual and regional scorecards examining the records of all 17 candidates running this year.
For more on scoring, see: https://www.universal-rights.org/2023-elections-to-the-human-rights-council-did-ga-members-vote-according-to-human-rights-criteria/
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
People-to-people exchanges between the people of Cuba and the US are rare due to the over 50-year US blockade against the island. But this August, a group of Cuban youths traveled to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to participate in the Little League World Series. Daniel Montero, a filmmaker with Belly of the Beast Cuba, released a special documentary on the stories of the Cuban Little League team and their families earlier this year. Montero joins Edge of Sports TV for a special look at the making of the film, and some updates on the Cuban team’s experience of the tournament, as well as their lives since.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
The story of the first Cuban team of kids to be invited to the Little League World Series, what makes Dion Sanders so special, how sports helped smash Jim Crow, all of it today on Edge of Sports. (singing)
Welcome to Edge of Sports TV, only on The Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. This week, we talk to Daniel Montero, the director of the amazing short film Little League Dreams from Cuba to Williamsport. It’s all about the journey of the first Cuban team to be invited to the Little League World Series, and this is not a historical documentary. The invite did not come until 2023.
Then I have choice words about how Deion Sanders is upsetting the apple cart that is college football and, finally, in ASCA Sports Scholar, I’m talking to one of the most prominent influencers about how we understand race and sports, Professor Lou Moore, and we’re going to discuss his work covering how sports challenged Jim Crow and about the history of the Black quarterback, but, first, Cuba’s journey to the Little League World Series. Let’s talk about it with the director of Little League Dreams, Daniel Montero.
Daniel Montero, thank you so much for joining us here on the show.
Daniel Montero:
Oh, no, thanks to you for having me.
Dave Zirin:
Absolutely. First and foremost, what attracted you to this story, the story of Cuba, Little League Baseball and the first trip to Williamsport?
Daniel Montero:
Well, at the Belly of the Beast, we usually focus on Cuba-US relations and, honestly, in the last five, six, seven years, there hasn’t been much positive to talk about when it comes to it. When we heard that, for the first time ever, a Cuban team, a Little League team was going to the US, we thought how could we not do something about this? We were sure that whichever team ended up winning the series here in Cuba would have great stories to tell and would have just a positive thing in the midst of a lot of bad stuff going on between the two countries. That was the first thing that got us involved with the project, honestly.
Dave Zirin:
How were you able to get so close to the families of the Little Leaguers themselves?
Daniel Montero:
We went to the finals. It was Bayamo’s team that ended up winning and the team from East Savannah. We went there and just started talking to all of them, the coaches, the families, the kids just so that, whichever team ended up winning, we already had a relationship. Honestly, Cuban people tend to be very open once you get to know them. I think we just earned their trust by telling them what the project was, and they were just excited, especially the parents, of having their kids taking the center stage for something like this. It was also what we just witnessed throughout the championship and throughout all the process of training. It was just a process of mutual trust for which I’m eternally grateful, honestly.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, a lot of trust clearly on display in the film, but among the families, among the coaches, among the players themselves, was this project welcomed by everybody?
Daniel Montero:
Honestly, yes. I mean, I think we expected a little bit of resistance maybe from some people in the German institutions or something like that, but, no, it was a great experience in that sense. Everyone understood that this was a positive thing and so everyone helped out especially the ones that had to, meaning, the entire success of that team is based on the coaches, the parents and the kids. The rest is hardly a secondary character to it all, and they welcomed it. If they welcomed it, it meant the project was going to work.
Dave Zirin:
Help us out a little bit, Daniel. What’s the same and what’s different in your mind about youth sports in Cuba compared to the United States?
Daniel Montero:
Well, first off is I think it’s what kids look up to do in the future. You got to understand that the way sports have happened in Cuba for a long time is it’s not a professional field. For a long time, the goal for any kid starting to play sports was to represent their province, the province team at the national series if it comes to baseball. That’s the way sports have worked for a long time, but, of course, in the last years, a lot more Cuban players have ended up playing in top baseball or other sports around the world. That has changed a little bit. It would start with aspirations, I think, also, obviously, the conditions. We are a poor country and we are in the midst of a crisis. A lot of the times, the kids don’t have all the implements and everything they need for the game, so it comes down to each of the parents really stepping up and making every sacrifice possible for their kids to fulfill their dreams. I think those might be the two main differences.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. What about pressure? I’m again thinking in terms of comparing and contrasting with youth sports in the United States. What are the stakes for these kids to do well, and did you get a sense that they carried a heavy load going into the tournament?
Daniel Montero:
Oh, yeah, I think, in that sense, it’s no different at all. The pressure is very high. You got to understand, in Cuba, baseball is just as big as in the United States, if not bigger I would dare say. For a long time, we’ve been used to Cuban teams being successful all around the world, even though the last decade has not been the same. For a long time, Cuba dominated international baseball amateur level, of course. That means that that’s still very much present for every baseball fan in Cuba. You expect your team to win, and that’s it. The kids very much feel that pressure, let me tell you, but I think they’ve handled it better than most adults. I would say that. They’re pros. I mean, those kids are really pros and excellent human beings.
Dave Zirin:
From my very outsider perspective just watching the film and not being very familiar with Cuban youth sports, but very familiar with US youth sports, I found the atmosphere in Cuba to be, I don’t know how else to put it, but more cooperative. It almost sounds like a cliche, but I felt like the families in terms of what they were sacrificing, how they were looking out for one another, the feel, I mean it did feel different to me than a lot of the high pressure, high level US sports where sometimes it feels like these kids are discarded if they’re not useful to the product.
Daniel Montero:
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I lack some of the references. I’m Cuban enough and, honestly, I haven’t been very familiarized with the way kid sports work in the US, but I do know that, here, what I witnessed was a big family. Every one of the parents realized that it wasn’t just about their kid, that if the other kids were not doing well and if they were not feeling well and happy, the team could not be successful. I think that was the essential moment for the team to get to where they ended up being.
Obviously, in a team of 14 kids, you have some that have a little more money than others and some have really vulnerable situations in their home lives and the rest carry the load, and the coaches, too. Those coaches are not just teaching them baseball. They’re teaching them about life and they never stop worrying about the kids. I was there with them, and the coach was at 10:00, 11:00 PM calling, “Hey, how is this kid doing? I knew he had a fever yesterday. Is he getting better?” I don’t know how it is in the US, but it really made me admire the work those coaches were doing and the sacrifice the parents were making for their kids.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. My son plays a lot of youth sports and haven’t gotten a lot of late night phone calls. The film, I got to tell you, I’m telling everybody I know, I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s beautiful. It’s very moving. It also ends, of course, before the actual Little League World Series in Williamsport and the experience by the Cuba team in Williamsport. Was that by choice as a filmmaker or were there barriers in place that prevented you from doing a part two?
Daniel Montero:
Well, the original idea honestly was to do one film that would cover the finals in Cuba, the whole training process and then the actual tournament in Williamsport, but, of course, as you said, problems appeared along the way. One thing was funding. It was much more expensive to actually travel with the team to the US and be with them during that time. Also, the Little League tends to have a tight control over who films and who has access to the tournament. Honestly, we didn’t even get credentials for our team to go to Williamsport. That meant that, one hand, funding and, the other hand, access, so we couldn’t film in Williamsport. Once we knew that, we just said, “Okay, so we might not be able to do that, but we can still do something very special about how this got to that point.” Honestly, sometimes, what happens ends up making an even better film or even better idea, and I think I’m extremely happy with what we were able to show.
Dave Zirin:
I really want to underline that point you just made though. You are documenting the first Little League team from Cuba to ever have access to the Little League World Series, and yet the Little League World Series denied you the ability to document that journey. That’s, frankly, very disturbing. I’ll just say that.
Daniel Montero:
Well, it is what it is. I don’t know how it works, honestly. I just know we got the no, so I’ll leave it at that, too.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. Now, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by telling the world what took place at the Little League World Series. This team, this team of incredibly charismatic, incredibly charming kids, they lost a heartbreaker to Japan, one to nothing, that incredible young pitcher, Gurriel, throwing a one-hitter for goodness’ sakes. Were you able to follow up and find out how the near-victory was affecting the kids and their families? Have you been able to speak and reach out to anybody in the aftermath?
Daniel Montero:
Oh, yes. Actually, to most of the parents and particularly the coaches, we were in contact with the team and the coaches while they were playing which for me was special. To me, I did the film, but I consider mostly myself a fan. That’s the team in Cuba that I’ve ever felt more excited about because I got to know them all, and then afterwards, of course with the parents. When that game with Japan was taking place, I was calling Gurrielito’s father, Gurriel, and he was shaken and he couldn’t even speak and like, “We’ll talk later. I can’t talk right now.” It’s that kind of a parent. They’re proud. The aftermath for them is they’re proud of what their kids did. They couldn’t get far in the tournament, but the two games that they lost, they lost by one run and they got a no count out of Australia. I think they did great. I think it was a great beginning for Cuba in the Little League World Series and, hopefully, it’s the beginning of many other appearances by that team, other Cuban teams.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. Absolutely. There was a swirl of news when in Williamsport one of the Cuban coaches defected. Is that anything you can speak to either in terms of the defection, but also in terms of how it’s affected the team?
Daniel Montero:
Well, yes. One of the assistant coaches left the delegation while they were in the tournament after they lost that last game with Panama. The aftermath, I think it was a bit of a shock for the kids and the families and all. I can’t speak for the rest of the country and all. I think we have a history of defection when it comes to Cuban delegations going abroad, so in that sense, not much of a shock, but for the kids mostly. It’s a complicated subject obviously. I think mostly for them, it’s like they’re happy that the coach didn’t do it while they were still playing, which has happened before in other tournaments and, hopefully, it doesn’t affect the team moving forward.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. All right, so the film is Little League Dreams from Cuba to Williamsport. How can people best see it?
Daniel Montero:
Well, the documentary as well as every video we produce at Belly of the Beast is on YouTube. We go straight to social media with everything we do. It’s our concept that everything is free and accessible for the audience. That’s the way to see it. I mean, we were happy enough that other media have shared it. During ESPN’s coverage of the event, the documentary was showed, but yeah, to see the full film, it’s on Belly of the Beast Cuba. It’s our YouTube channel, and the name, as you said, is Little League Dreams.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. What’s the next project for Daniel Montero?
Daniel Montero:
Well, right now, we’re actually just getting started with a new documentary film about a cutting-edge medicine that’s being created in Cuba for Alzheimer’s disease. We’re following the scientist that leads the team, and she has a very personal story with the disease because her mother suffered from it, and that was her inspiration to start researching how to treat it. We’re just diving in completely to do this. I mean, as a media, as a film project, we want to show a different face of Cuba to the United States which is our audience. Most of what goes on mainstream media or most everybody that gets to an American audience to talk about Cuba talks about the bad and talks about cliches, and every video is showing 1950s Chevys. There’s so much more to Cuba than those few images and those few negative stories, so we’re just trying to show a different side to it.
Dave Zirin:
Well, you certainly accomplished that mission with Little League Dreams. Daniel Montero, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.
Daniel Montero:
Oh, no, no, thanks a lot to you for having me for real. It’s an honor.
Dave Zirin:
Now, I’ve got some choice words about Deion Sanders and the joys of the Hype Machine. Okay, look, a couple Sundays back, 60 Minutes, the great-grandfather of television news whose slogan might as well be “get off of my lawn”, was hyping two exclusive interviews. The first was a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The second announced just as breathlessly was another exclusive conversation. This one with the head football coach in a Colorado college town, a town perhaps best known for snowboarding and hacky sack and whose team last year went one in 11. That coach is, of course NFL Hall-of-Famer Deion “Primetime” Sanders.
The publicity and water-cooler curiosity that Sanders has generated after just a few games leading the University of Colorado at Boulder speaks to the team’s turnaround. A year ago, this squad was ranked 128th out of 131 teams and had been an afterthought for years. Then, from historically Black University Jackson State came Coach Prime, bringing with him his two incredible football playing sons, Shedeur and Shilo.
He ruthlessly remade the operation, engineering a massive roster turnover with little regard for anything beyond reimagining a lost program. While so many other coaches have whined tiresomely about the new rules that govern college football like players having access to name, image and likeness, money or being able to rapidly transfer from one school to another, Sanders has taken advantage of them. While others pine for the past, Coach Prime has decided that the present is a fine and even fun place to be. Instead of sneering at the game and begging their old buddy, the openly racist Auburn-coach-turned Senator Tommy Tuberville, to step in legislatively and turn back the clock.
Sanders has brought something absent from college football. The joy of hype and the hype that comes with joy. Sanders haters are legion, yet the hate is not solely because of his sunglasses or his hat or his attitude or whatever other racist dog whistles various coaches and commentators are throwing in his direction. The root cause of the hate is that he has stepped into this world and is doing it not just differently, but better, and that drives the minders of the game into fits.
For decades, college football coaching has been a mausoleum of elderly, square, overwhelmingly White coaches working out their issues on teenagers by barking at them as if they’re about to storm Normandy. The only requirement for this job has seemed to be the ability to pair ulcers with high blood pressure. Sanders has smashed the stain glass windows of this mausoleum and led in some damn oxygen. It’s a culture shift that will eventually drag the sport into the present and out of its revanchist past.
As longtime Colorado hip-hop community radio host Dave Ashton said to me, it’s 2023 and 50 years after hip-hop’s birth, hip-hop attitude, culture and unapologetic Blackness are finally part of the world of college coaching. Yes, it’s true, and it’s wildly ironic, the presence of hip-hop as a cultural force in college football has at last found a home in, of all places, Boulder, Colorado, and it’s playing out in front of a crowd of mostly White students gawking at the spectacle that’s been laid at their feet. The crowd is like the 1950s kids in Back to the Future when they hear Marty McFly play rock and roll. It’s a brand new scene that few saw coming.
The hip-hop component is not just the presence at games of people like Lil Wayne and Offset. It’s not just his son, the quarterback, Shedeur, wearing a gold chain thick enough to use on your tires during a snowstorm. It’s making these games feel young and alive instead of stultifying and grim. The Colorado Colorado State game a couple of weeks back was emblematic of the colliding of these worlds. Colorado State Coach Jay Norvell attempted to the thrill of the sports right-wing commentariat to turn it into the State Farm Tostito’s respectability politics bowl.
Norvell, who’s one of the few Black coaches in college football, said to Sports Illustrated the Wednesday before the game, and I quote, “I don’t care if they hear it in Boulder. I said when I talk to grownups, I take my hat off and my glasses off. That’s what my mother taught me.’” It was a statement that juiced up every old-school commentator on the right-wing toilet that is now Twitter. Then Norvell showed us what old school looks like on the football field, targeting opponents playing ugly and committing 17 penalties for 187 yards. Yes, they kept it close and should have had the upset victory especially after violently knocking Colorado’s best player, Travis Hunter, out of the game. Look, if this is what old school looks like, please, bring on the new.
This is also not to say that there are no critiques to be made of how Sanders has operated since becoming a college coach. His early statements that he went to Jackson State because “God called collect and told him to go to a historically Black college” only to leave Jackson State as soon as the Colorado job became open is not exactly a feel-good story. The way he badmouthed the former Colorado players that he showed the door as part of his roster torn over is really messed up, but that being said, it is college football that’s dirty, not Sanders. It’s an amoral game whose immorality has been called out since the days of W. E. B. Du Bois. Look, sometimes, cliched advice is right. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. Don’t hate Deion just because he understands the landscape and, like in his playing days, has left his competition eating the dust.
Now, on ASCA Sports Scholar, we talk to Professor Louis Moore about his groundbreaking work on sports and the smashing of Jim Crow as well as his forthcoming book on the history of the Black quarterback.
Professor Lou Moore, thank you so much for joining us on the show.
Louis Moore:
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Dave Zirin:
Okay. I’ve always wanted to ask you this because I’ve read your book, We Will Win the Day, on more than one occasion, and you show how sports was integral to ending Jim Crow’s segregation and that many cities and small towns were first integrated through sporting events, and so many stories in your book were new to me. I wanted to ask you, in your research, were you surprised to find so many examples of sports being this kind of vehicle for change?
Louis Moore:
Yes. I would say yes and no. Yes, because, as you say, those stories don’t get told off. It’s always the big stories, it’s always Jackie Robinson, and so all those small stories at those small towns get missed. If we understand the history sport in America, we understand how important it is. Once you see how important it is to society, to raising your children, and so even today people freak out when something is going wrong, oh, my gosh, everybody’s sitting down, they’re not playing sport, then you realize how big sport can be to the impact of ending Jim Crow just because sport was essential to the US society.
Dave Zirin:
Does it blow the minds of students or people you’ve spoken to that sports was able to succeed as this tool of desegregation sometimes with comparatively little conflict when other kinds of boycotts were either lost, other kinds of demonstrations were preyed upon by violence? You see less of that, at least that’s what I get from your book, than when sports was the central entry point to fight for desegregation. Am I even reading this right? I feel like the stories that we hear are so often about stories where people are preyed upon by violence and by White supremacist violence. The sports stories you tell, I mean, oftentimes, it doesn’t quite play out in the same kind of way.
Louis Moore:
Yeah, and I think it’s because sports makes us feel good. A lot of the stories that we tell in sports are feel-good stories. I don’t know if I’m guilty of that or not, but I think it’s also regional, too. If you’re in the south, it’s a lot different. It is clear that by the ’50s, especially after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it was clear that they saw sport as the enemy because of how quickly it was integrating things. The Sugar Bowl had one Black player and so people in Louisiana had to freak out. What is this going to mean for the schools?
I think the other part about it is we get back to that first part of making us feel good. People tell these stories so they don’t really have to talk about all the racism beforehand. One of the things, like Penn State, that whole “We Are Penn State”, that comes from integrating the Cotton Bowl in the late 1940s, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to talk about racism on campus or what other folks had to face. They get to feel good about that one Cotton Bowl experience.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Yeah. Similarly, you can integrate a sporting event. People feel great for three hours, and you don’t have to deal with the realities in the small town Dixie South in terms of voting rights, economic oppression and the rest of it. This is what I’m getting from what you’re saying. It’s progress, and it’s important to recognize it can also act as an almost what we now call a sportswashing effect on the reality of the situation.
Louis Moore:
Yeah. No. You’re exactly right. The more sportswashing comes into our lexicon, the more you realize that’s what’s happening. We had Willie Mays here, but what about the school integration? What about integrating the restaurants? It’s okay. Willie Mays played here, and so you can move beyond all that.
Real quick, I don’t want to ruin your show, but I did get asked a question today about sportswashing in Saudi Arabia in class. That conversation is happening real time. It just thrilled me, and I thought about you in real time during that class.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing, and that doesn’t surprise me because, as we’re having this conversation, Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, said in an interview that he quite proudly is a sportswasher and he does sportswashing, and he was basically like, “What of it?” and that really took a lot of people back
Louis Moore:
That’s the exact quote my student read to the class, and he wanted to know more about it, and then so I just stole from you and all your beautiful work and act like I do everything.
Dave Zirin:
Good gracious. Speaking of beautiful work, I’ve always admired your ability, and I’ve learned a lot from your ability, to research the Black press and pull out the historical common threads that often come through publications like the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News, among many, many other papers. For young researchers out there, what do you find when you look in the Black press? Why is it such an important source of information for you in your research?
Louis Moore:
You get the sense that they have the pulse of their community a lot better now. To be clear, it’s very middle class for most of them unlike the people’s voice. Now, the people’s voice, the Black newspaper is very Black labor heavy, but a lot of them are Black middle class, but you do get the voice of the Black newspaper or the Black community to understand what they think about sports, what they think about integration, but also what’s going on locally.
You miss so much of that if you look at the Detroit News instead of the Michigan Chronicle. The Michigan Chronicle lets you know what’s going on with softball or local high school at these Black schools where the Detroit News or the Free Press will completely miss over it. You get a very good localized view of what’s going on, and then my favorite part is when they go to the barbershop and they ask that person, “Hey, what do you think about Jackie Robinson? What do you think about this?” and then you get even a more localized working class view of what’s going on in the realm of sports.
Dave Zirin:
We’ve established that you know how to research. You’re an ace researcher of the first order, and that’s why I’m so interested that you’ve now turned your eye to the history of the Black quarterback. Why is that your newest target of research and writing?
Louis Moore:
Because I think, when you look at it, especially in the terms of modern professional football, it’s really telling a story not only of the sport of football, but it’s still the story about race in America. So much of these conversations that we have about Black quarterbacks are also conversations that are being had every day as Black people try to push through Jim Crow as the civil rights movement is going on. They’re looking at the Black quarterback as a barometer. If they’re not going to give this guy a shot at leadership, how am I going to get a shot at leadership? You even have this term called the Black quarterback syndrome, which is really not necessarily about the quarterback, but everyday Black folks who continuously get passed over for opportunities simply because of all these racial stereotypes.
Dave Zirin:
There have been other books, other writings about the history of the Black quarterback. Clearly, you think something has been missing in those volumes or you wouldn’t be doing all this research. What’s been missing in the scholarship, in the analysis of how we understand this history of the Black quarterback?
Louis Moore:
Yeah. I think there’s a couple of things. One, it’s understanding the history of the sport of football in general and how it shifts, how it moves from a predominantly heavy single wing office, and I’ll try to get into it, but a modern T formation and where the quarterback becomes everything. That happens right at World War II, right at the beginning of integration. If you think about it, to be brief, as football is reintegrating, the position of quarterback is changing.
Before that, you had single wing quarterbacks like Kenny Washington. Those guys aren’t going to get a shot to play the position because now, as the position switches, as integration comes, the position is all about leadership. It’s all about intelligence, and these are things that we’re hearing in real time about Black folks, not just athletes, but black folks in the military that they lack. Again, it gives us this mirror into society, and I’m able to touch on that.
The other thing, as you mentioned about research, my advantage of being a professor is access to newspapers not only just online, which we all have access to, but being able to have time to sit through microfilm. I’m what I call a two-newspaper guy. Look, if I’m going to study Marlin Briscoe with the Denver Broncos, I’m getting both the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, and I’m looking at every single sports section from the moment that football season started until it ended, and then I’m able to use my historical skills of just analysis and understanding and then being able to talk about that via sports and football.
Dave Zirin:
One quarterback of African descent who I feel is not discussed nearly enough is Randall Cunningham. Randall Cunningham comes into the National Football League I believe in 1984 as a second round draft pick. He gets in the games pretty soon in place of the old warhorse Ron Jaworski. I just learned yesterday that his big brother was Sam “Bam” Cunningham. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know that. The runner who, of course, played a very direct role in how the Southeastern Conference was integrated when he went there, and correct me if I’m wrong with the story, he goes in with USC and embarrasses the Dixie South and, all of a sudden, coaches like Bear Bryant are like, “Yeah, we might have to take integration more seriously if we ever want to have a decent football team again.”
I’m so surprised I did not know that Randall Cunningham’s big brother was Sam “Bam” Cunningham. I can’t believe I didn’t know that. Your thoughts, sir?
Louis Moore:
That you didn’t know that.
Dave Zirin:
I want to know the whole thing. I mean, who was Randall, Sam Bam’s connection?
Louis Moore:
Right. Randall, Sam Bam, the USC team.
Dave Zirin:
It’s just wild to me. Yeah.
Louis Moore:
Right. One thing we forget about that USC team in 1970 is that they had a Black quarterback, Jamie Jones, and in fact, he’s the first Black quarterback on the cover of Sports Illustrated the previous year. USC’s coach, John McKay, who’s famous for the I formation because he has someone like Jimmy Jones and his team is half Black. I mean, think about it, when he starts a decade earlier, that’s stuff I talk about in my book, there’s four Black guys. By the end of the decade, it’s half Black, and he has a Black quarterback. He’s also going to be the coach of Vince Evans. He’s going to be the coach of Doug Williams and the pros. He gets put in this mold of a branch Rickey of football because of his relationships with Black quarterbacks. It’s not just Sam Bam going to Alabama. It’s also Jimmy Jones who’s a really good I formation rollout quarterback who winds up having to go to Canada.
On that note, on the relationship to Randall, he’s from the Santa Barbara area, has an opportunity to go to USC, but between talking to his brother and other folks, he doesn’t go there because he doesn’t think a Black quarterback is going to get a chance. That’s why he goes to UNLV, one, for the chance, but, two, because he realizes early on that if a Black quarterback is going to make it in the league, he has to play in this right pass heavy system.
USC is still running a variation of the I formation, and then other Black quarterbacks, too, you’ll see a lot of in the mid to late ’70s, in the early ’80s. They’re running systems that the NFL is not taking, the fear, the wishbone, all these other things that rely on the running quarterback, but Randall realizes that you have to be able to pass. Those ULB teams are very pass heavy. Now, Randall is a four four guy at six four so he has incredible speed, but he’s still in an offense that allows the NFL teams to being able to imagine him as a quarterback.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. We talk about understanding the United States by looking through the lens of the position of the Black quarterback in society. What does it say that today there’s a record number of starting Black quarterbacks in the NFL, that you could have Black quarterbacks picked one and two in the NFL draft and it doesn’t really make that much of a ripple, that Patrick Mahomes could square off against Jalen Hurts in the Super Bowl, first time two Black quarterbacks have ever squared off in the big game and it didn’t dominate the coverage when I remember it was a huge story 15 years ago when Michael Vick squared off against Donovan McNabb in the NFC championship game? What does that tell us that you have this number of Black quarterbacks that just, frankly, dwarf the number of even a decade ago?
Louis Moore:
Yeah. It lets me know a couple of things. One, we’re moving in a direction where we’re more acceptable of that, where I think a lot of franchises, almost half of the franchises, are okay with having that Black face in charge. There are many variations. There’s the classic drop back quarterback. There’s the gun slinger. Your Baltimore Ravens has Lamar Jackson who’s young. He’s a runner. He could throw. He’s an amazing thrower, right? Off the field, he’s not classic. He comes as he is, and that’s very rare for a lot of young people who probably at a young age like, “No. You have to speak like this. You have to be like this.” Lamar brings his full self.
On the one hand, you can see the league opening up. It’s also opening up because that’s what they’re getting at the college ranks and just the way contracts operate in the NFL. They want to get these guys early on an early contract while is pretty cheap before they have to pay a lot of money. That’s what the colleges are bringing them. I think, at the same time, we’re still stuck. I think, if we really look at, say, the Justin Fields narrative, I’m in the Midwest, and so we get Justin Fields, Justin Fields, Justin Fields, it’s dominating this whole week of football and it’s about his thinking. It’s about does he have what it takes upstairs to be a quarterback?
I get it. He’s a little bit slower on some of these reads, but when we look at it, that’s what all the Black quarterbacks have to face. Do they have it upstairs? I don’t know that we could separate the fact that Justin Fields is Black from that constant conversation about him more so than, say, somebody like Zach Wilson. Zach Wilson always can’t cut it. I don’t think anybody is questioning his intelligence. There’s not people sitting there going on all 22 or whatever every second and just showing frame by frame of, “Oh, I can’t believe he missed this. How did he miss that?”
I think what’s happening here, too, with Justin Fields is part of it is I think he understands that he’s a Black quarterback and, as a Black quarterback, he’s not going to get as many chances. I think that might be playing on him a little bit. If I throw this pick, what’s going to happen to me now? You see he came out recently and just said, “I’m just going to go out and ball,” and I hope he can do that. I hope he can just put everything aside.
Before Justin Fields, it was Dak, right? We spent like three weeks before the NFL, “Dak, Dak, Dak,” right? Now, part of that, he’s on Dallas, but the other part about it is people I don’t think are necessarily giving him the benefit of the doubt that he’s a really good quarterback, and I think it partly is because Dak is positioned as a Black quarterback.
Dave Zirin:
I remember when I first started sports writing lo the many decades ago that it was a live discussion, “Why aren’t there more Black coaches in the NBA?” That was a hot topic of conversation. Now, it’s not. It’s never news when a Black coach is hired to head an NBA team, and yet it is so clearly in my mind, and you just made the case, still an issue when it comes to a team with a Black, particularly a young Black quarterback. Could you ever see us getting to a space where it becomes like the equivalent of NBA coaching, or is there something specific about being a quarterback in US culture that will mean this is just something eternal that we’re going to have to keep an eye on?
Louis Moore:
I would say yes and no. Yes in the sense that I think the NFL is not really going to have a choice. There’s going to be so many Black quarterbacks that it’s just going to be normal. If you look at this draft, three of the top four are Black, right? Next draft, you’re going to have Caleb, maybe Shedeur the kid from Washington. We’re going to get into this pattern where, for the next few years, probably these top 10 quarterbacks, a number of them are going to be Black, and it’s just going to kind of go away. I think the idea about the quarterback not being that guy is false. I think he’ll always be that guy just because the quarterback is the position, and it’s been that way since post World War II. Since the position changed, he is supposed to be the smartest person on the field. He has to know all his plays, what other 10 guys are doing, what the defense is doing. He has to be the face of the franchise.
I think, because of that, just the way we see Black folks compared to White men in society, I think that standard quarterback will always be this kind of Tom Brady, Peyton Manning. At the same time, as these young guys are just going to be pushing the narrative and pushing for change, whether it’s Lamar, whether it’s Caleb Williams, whether it’s Shedeur, there’s going to be, “Here’s the set standard quarterback,” but also you have these young guys, and I think within a couple of years, we might be at 18, and then 20 starters.
Dave Zirin:
You just said it, the face of the franchise, and that’s what makes this still something that we need to discuss since the NFL is the closest thing we do have in this country to a national religion or a national language. Who is going to be the face of your franchise and who will White people accept as the face of their franchise is something that I think is going to be a discussion as long as we’re talking about racism frankly. Can you name a single person in your QB research that you would love to see one full length biography about either for you to write or for someone else to write?
Louis Moore:
Me selfish only, so the plan of the book, the book is about Doug Williams and Vince Evans, right? Doug makes sense because everybody knows Doug, and so partly what I’m doing is writing this football biography of Vince Evans, too, from Greensboro all the way to Chicago and the LA Raiders and his struggle at USC, too. I think beyond that, James Harris, James Harris, who went to Grambling and then is an eighth-round draft pick in 1969 and starts the first game of the season for Buffalo Bills that only starts three more over the next three years might be one of the most important quarterbacks in the history of the game. We rarely talk about him just because of the position he was put in. He was early on picked as that guy like Eddie Robinson mid-1960s said, “I’m going to get me a professional quarterback, a Black professional quarterback,” and the reason why he’s doing that is because he believed the quarterback was the most important position, and that would really fuel integration in America, not just civil rights, but Black folks having an opportunity if they can see someone like a James Harris succeed.
James Harris continued to struggle throughout his career, whether he’s in Buffalo or Los Angeles and then, later on, with the Chargers, but really in those first two places. At the same time, he spent so much time mentoring everybody. All those Black quarterbacks got mentorship from James Harris, whether it’s Warren Moon who was there when he was in Los Angeles because Moon was a local guy, Vince Evans, Doug Williams. These people who, when we think about pioneers, they’re all touched by this guy, and then after his career he continues to do that work. There’s not a Black quarterback today who hasn’t been touched by James Harris.
Dave Zirin:
Some of the stories that I’ve heard you speak about in terms of Black quarterbacks, Professor Moore, have been these stories of triumph, but far too many of them are stories of heartbreak. Can you tell us one example of a story that frankly just breaks your heart in terms of what was imposed upon these athletes?
Louis Moore:
Yeah. The one I go to is Joe Gilliam, Jr. Joe Gilliam, Jr. was probably the best Black quarterback until Doug Williams that a HBCU produced. He goes to Tennessee State. He plays for head coach John Merritt, and John Merritt when he retires in, what, 1983, he’s the third all-time winningest coach. John Merritt, as I said on Twitter last week or whatever it’s called now, was Deion before Deion. It’s sunglasses. It’s cowboy hats. It’s cigars on the sidelines, right? It’s Cadillacs. It’s bragging, and it’s past heavy outfits. When Joe Gilliam gets selected by the Steelers in 1972 in the 11th round, he’s that guy. For a while, in 1974, he started over Terry Bradshaw. He beats him out for that position, starts six games. I believe he goes, I want to say, he’s like four, one and one as a starter, undefeated in the preseason. In the preseason, he has one of the highest pass rater ever and then he loses his job. Part of the reason why he loses his job is because that racism in Pittsburgh is so intense, right?
Dave Zirin:
The face of the franchise.
Louis Moore:
Not only do they have a Black quarterback, right, face of the franchise, he gets over a hundred pieces of hate mail. His wife, his daughter, young baby, which wound up being a, I want to say, joy. If you remember that Goodie Mob days, I believe she was married to Big Gipp or whatever his name is. They’re hearing all this stuff and, to cope, he turns to drugs, from heroin to cocaine, and pretty quickly he becomes an addict.
Now, the narrative about him is always about drugs destroyed his career, but I argue that it’s the racism. In order to cope with the racism, he turns to drugs and, unfortunately, he can never really get clean. When he does get clean, it’s too late. It’s up and down, and he winds up dying, I want to say, in 2000, Christmas day. They find him under a bridge in Nashville, Tennessee.
It’s just one of these sad stories because he could have been the greatest. I mean, if you ever look at these highlights, he’s a classic drop back quarterback. I mean, he’s a four seven guy, so he’s pretty fast for his time, but when it’s time for training, he runs like a five one, he says, “So that teams don’t switch them to another position.” He stands in there to the last minute to deliver his pass. He has a faster release than Terry Bradshaw that’s measured by the coaches. He’s cool. He is like, the way I explained it, a Superfly played quarterback. That would be Joe Gilliam. He could just revolutionize the position, what we thought about Black quarterbacks, but unfortunately he doesn’t get his shot, a legitimate shot, and he turns to drugs. To me, that’s one of those sad stories.
Dave Zirin:
Terry Bradshaw is still making millions doing that Southern corn-pone routine as the face of the network for Fox football. It’s unbelievable.
Louis Moore:
Right. Right. Yeah, the Black quarterbacks don’t. The other point about it’s that Black quarterbacks aren’t allowed to be dumb, right? It’s no knock to Terry Bradshaw, but the knock about him was that he wasn’t that smart even though he wins four Super Bowls. If Black quarterbacks aren’t allowed to kind of be stereotyped that way, they’ll never get that opportunity.
Dave Zirin:
Exactly. Exactly. The last question for you is titles are so important to books. When I told my mom I was interviewing somebody who wrote We Will Win the Day, the first thing she said was, “Ooh, great title.” What’s your title for your book about the history of the Black quarterback?
Louis Moore:
All right, so I’m going with the Battle of the Black Bombers, Doug Williams, Vince Evans, and the Making of the Black Quarterback. The reason why I call it the Battle of the Black Bombers is because, when they faced each other for the first time, so it’s September 30th, 1979, the first time two Black quarterbacks in modern-day football star against each other, CBS labeled it the Battle of the Bombers. Here they have two Black guys. I’m like, “Well, they’re Black here.”
The reason why, at that time, they had the best arms. They’re the fastest quarterbacks. Even though Vince is more of a runner, Doug is classic kind of pocket quarterback even though he’s still a powerful runner. That’s the title. That’s the working title. If anyone wants to give a deal and change it, money talks.
Dave Zirin:
That’s awesome.
Louis Moore:
I’ve loved every minute of research you get and really digging down into who these guys were, where they’re really from and just how hard it is to get there, so the making part is that this idea that Black quarterbacks had to be made. They had to be produced to be professional quarterbacks. They’re two different types, and they go two different places. One’s from the south goes to USC. One’s from the South stays home, HBCU, one place for a White coach, one place for the Black coach and just what that means and everything?
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Well, pardon the mix sports metaphor, but this book sounds like an absolute slam dunk. Professor Moore, thanks so much.
Louis Moore:
A Dominique Wilkins.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, Dominique Wilkins, the, oh, my God… I want to do this alternative history with you sometime of what if the Lakers had drafted Dominique, what would the NBA world look like? Maybe that’s for another conversation, but, Professor Moore, thanks so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.
Louis Moore:
All right. Thank you for having me.
Dave Zirin:
Thank you so much to everybody who’s on the show today. Thank you so much, Daniel Montero. Thank you, Professor Louis Moore. Thank you to the entire team here at The Real News Network doing the best work on news and media in the country particularly on issues that matter to you. For everybody out there listening, please stay frosty. I’m Dave Zirin. We are out of here. Peace.
Speaker 4:
Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. We need your help to keep doing this work, so please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
When Cubans began telling stories of being lured into Russia with promises of jobs and instead being sent to the front lines in Ukraine, many US media outlets seemed eager to report the story. But what might on the surface seem like journalism to expose the plight of the powerless was really just another exercise in bolstering official US narratives and whitewashing US complicity.
Reports emerged that Cuban recruits were promised citizenship and a monthly salary far higher than what most Cubans could ever hope for in their native country, in exchange for what some described as support work for the Russian military—things like construction or driving. Once they arrived in Russia, however, they found themselves sent to the front lines.
The Cuban government blamed a “human trafficking network,” and soon announced that they had arrested 17 people in connection with the scheme. FAIR could find no news reports confirming whether those involved in luring the Cubans were working for Russian or Cuban authorities.
US corporate media were happy to comment on Russia’s military weakness, speculate about the role of the Cuban government and paint a picture of bleak economic conditions in Cuba. But they were almost entirely silent on one of the key causes of that bleakness, which made the victims so susceptible in the first place: the US embargo on Cuba, ongoing now for more than 60 years and ramped up under Trump.
Reuters (5/8/18): “The United States has lost nearly all international support for the embargo since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
The US imposed an embargo on Cuba in 1962 and has steadfastly maintained it since then, in a failed attempt to overthrow the Communist government. President Barack Obama began normalizing relations with Cuba in 2016, but Donald Trump sharply reversed course. He issued a series of new sanctions over the course of his presidency, including curtailing remittances from relatives in the US, barring US tourism and designating Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism—which, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, helped send Cuba’s economy into a tailspin. Despite campaign promises to restore diplomatic relations, Joe Biden has largely maintained Trump’s sanctions on Cuba.
The purpose of the embargo is precisely to inflict economic hardship on civilians so that they rise up against the government. As the State Department argued in 1960, recognizing that the Castro government had the support of the Cuban people, “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” Therefore, “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba” and “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
While the embargo has been a miserable failure at its end goal of regime change, it has been much more effective at its intermediary goals of hunger and desperation. In 2018, the UN estimated that the sanctions had cost the country $130 billion (Reuters, 5/8/18); last year Cuba reported that number had risen to $154 billion (UN, 11/3/22). With the tightened Trump-era sanctions and the added impact of the pandemic, Cuba’s economy has nosedived in recent years, crucial context for a story of the exploitation of Cuban citizens.
This New York Times piece (9/5/23) doesn’t mention the economic hardships that would make enticement by Russia effective, but does quote a Miami-based analyst who says that it is “not possible” that the Cuban government would not know about efforts to traffic its citizens.
The New York Times‘ first story (9/5/23) didn’t mention economic conditions in Cuba, let alone the US embargo. In a followup article, the Times (9/8/23) again elided any US role, but did note that “US officials have said that Russia has struggled to attract recruits for its war effort.”
The Washington Post (9/5/23) offered a more in-depth report that included the tale of two victims of the scheme who had been featured on Telemundo (9/3/23). The Post quoted one: “Given the situation in Cuba, we didn’t think twice.” The article then offered an explanation of Cuba’s “crippled” economy, pointing to a list of causes: “the coronavirus pandemic, lackluster tourism, US punitive action and inefficient policies.”
What “punitive action” might that be, and for what? The Post didn’t bother to clarify.
NPR‘s Morning Edition (9/6/23) chose to cover the story by interviewing Chris Simmons, described as “an expert in Cuban spycraft.” Simmons, who has not worked in counterintelligence in over ten years, and did not claim to have any inside information about the case at hand, nevertheless asserted confidently that “this is just the latest in a long series of criminal enterprises run by the Cuban government.” The Cuban government denies involvement, but aside from noting that perfunctorily, anchor Leila Fadel did not challenge Simmons’ speculation or offer any other perspectives.
Fadel asked if Cuba needs Russia, noting that Cuba “is a relatively isolated place. It’s one of the few remaining Communist countries. It’s facing its worst economic crisis in decades.” Simmons responded: “They absolutely do need Russia. The Cuban economy remains devastated, and the Russians have been their biggest and most generous supporter.” But neither Fadel nor Simmons made any effort to explain why Cuba is isolated, or why its economy is devastated.
A report on NPR‘s website (9/5/23) was more circumspect, offering a brief summary of the facts without “expert” commentary like that of Simmons, but provided only this explanation of the economic context:
Cuba is facing the worst economic crisis in decades. The government is struggling to keep the lights on and Cubans are struggling to keep food on their tables. If already bad relations with the United States deteriorate, things could get worse.
A Newsweek headline (9/5/23) describes Cuba as “America’s backyard.”
Newsweek published an article (9/5/23) explaining that “Russian forces have been badly mauled in 18 months of combat in Ukraine.” Its only mention of US sanctions came in an explanation of Cuba/Russia relations: “Both have been under US sanctions for years and have generally aligned against its foreign policies in the Americas and beyond.”
A second Newsweek piece (9/8/23) cited Luis Fleischman of the Palm Beach Center for Democracy and Policy Research as its only expert source. Fleischman suggested that the Cuban government was involved, and argued that “Cuba’s economy is in dire straits, mainly because Venezuela’s oil bonanza is over.”
Fleischman did mention sanctions, but without reference to who imposed them or how they impact civilians, only the state: “Remember, both countries are under sanctions,” he said. “In other words, there is no reason for both countries to break such a convenient relationship.” Newsweek offered no further context.
In fact, FAIR only found two explicit references in US news coverage to the US embargo as a cause of economic crisis in Cuba. A CNN.com article (9/19/23), headlined “Why Cubans Are Fighting for Russia in Ukraine,” explained in its second paragraph:
Across much of Cuba, the economy has ground to a standstill as the Communist-run island reels from a sharp drop in tourism, spiking inflation and renewed US sanctions.
Time (9/18/23) reported that “Cuba has been crippled by a 60-year US embargo, island-wide blackouts and a hunger crisis.” It gave a sense of why these recruits were such easy targets:
The recruits’ social-media accounts underscore the hardship of their lives in Cuba, with posts begging for medicine and selling everything from cell phone parts to rationed meat on black market sites. “With the money you’ll pay me,” one Cuban man said in a video on WhatsApp addressed to Russian recruiters, “if I’m killed or not, at least I’ll be able to help my family.”
Time also spent most of its lengthy article attempting to establish the Cuban government’s complicity.
Meanwhile, when both Cuba and Brazil denounced the US embargo at the UN General Assembly in New York last week, none of those outlets saw fit to mention it.
Not a big enough story? How about when the General Assembly voted for the 30th year in a row to condemn the US embargo, 185–2, with only the US and Israel opposing. (Brazil and Ukraine abstained.) The only one of the above outlets we could find covering the vote was Newsweek (11/5/22).
The US sanctions on Cuba are an act of war, condemned globally and with immense impact on the lives of the Cuban people. US reporting on the plight of Cuban civilians that does not provide that context is little more than state propaganda.
Featured image: A Telemundo report (9/3/23) on Cubans who say they were recruited to Russia’s war effort under false pretenses.
The post US Sanctions Missing From Coverage of Russia’s Cuban Soldiers appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In Part 3 of our interview with leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro, he describes how hard-line U.S. policies are preventing the Americas from addressing issues like migration, calling on the Biden administration to “open up a plural dialogue” to bring the region closer together. He notes many people moving through Latin America to seek asylum in the United States are from Venezuela…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch on Sept 20, 2023. It is shared here under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
The 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly began on Tuesday, September 19. On the opening day, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who is also the Chairman of the G77+China bloc, delivered a powerful speech critiquing the current global order and listing out the structural changes needed to address pressing challenges such as hunger, poverty and climate change. The following is a transcript of his speech.
Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, Excellencies,
I am bringing to this Assembly the voice of the “exploited and the humiliated,” as was said by Che Guevara in this same room almost 60 years ago.
We are a diverse group of nations sharing the same problems. We have just confirmed that in Havana, which was honored to host the Summit of leaders and other high representatives of the G-77 and China, the most representative, broad, and diverse representation that exists in the multilateral arena.
During those two virtually tireless days, more than 100 representatives from the 134 nations making up the Group, raised their voices to call for changes that can no longer be postponed in the midst of the unjust, irrational and abusive international economic order that year after year, has deepened the enormous inequalities between a minority of well-developed nations and a majority that has not managed to get rid of the euphemism of “developing nations.”
Worst still, as was recognized by the UN Secretary General [Antonio Guterres] at the Havana Summit, the G-77 was founded six decades ago to repair “centuries of injustice and abandonment, and in today’s convulsive world they are entangled in a host of world crises, where poverty is on the rise and hunger is even greater.”
The countries represented in the G-77 and China, where more than 80% of the world population lives, not only have the responsibility of development, but also the responsibility to modify the structures that marginalize us from global progress.
We are united by the need to change, which has not been resolved, and the condition of being the principal victims of the current global multidimensional crisis; the abusive unequal exchange; the scientific and technical gap and the degradation of the environment.
But we have also been united, for more than half a century now, by the inescapable challenge and the determination to transform the current international order, which is also exclusionary, irrational and unsustainable for the planet and non-viable for the well-being of all.
The countries represented in the G-77 and China, where more than 80% of the world population lives, not only have the responsibility of development, but also the responsibility to modify the structures that marginalize us from global progress and make many peoples of the South into laboratories of renewed forms of domination. A new and more just global contract is imperative.
Mr. President,
Only 7 years ahead of the deadline established to implement the promising 2030 Agenda, the panorama is discouraging. This respected institution has already recognized it. At the current pace, none of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals will be achieved and more than half of the 169 agreed targets will not be met.
In the midst of the 21st century, it is offensive to the human condition that almost 800 million persons suffer from hunger in a planet that produces enough to feed all.
Equally outrageous is the fact that in the era of knowledge and accelerated development of information and communications technology, more than 760 million people — two thirds of them women — do not know how to read and write.
The efforts of developing countries are not enough to implement the 2030 Agenda. They must be supported by concrete actions to provide access to markets, financing under fair and preferential conditions, technology transfer and North-South cooperation.
We are not begging for alms or asking for favors.
The G77 demands rights and will continue to demand a profound transformation of the current international financial architecture, because it is deeply unjust, anachronistic and dysfunctional. Because it was designed to profit with the reserves of the South; to perpetuate a system of domination that aggravates underdevelopment, and to replicate a pattern of modern colonialism.
We need and demand financial institutions within which our countries can have real decision-making capacity and access to financing.
A recapitalization of Multilateral Development Banks is imperative to radically improve their lending condition and meet the financial needs of the South.
Most of the G77 nations are forced to allocate more resources to servicing the debt than to health or education. What sustainable development can be achieved with that noose on their necks?
The member countries of this Group were forced to allocate 379 billion dollars from their reserves to protect their currencies in 2022, almost twice as much as the amount of Special Drawing Rights that they were allocated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
A rationalization, review, and role change of credit qualifying agencies is needed. Equally imperative is to establish criteria that would go beyond the GDP to define the access of developing countries to financing under favorable conditions and adequate technical cooperation.
While the richest countries fail to meet the commitment to allocate at least 0.7% of their NGP to Official Assistance for Development, the nations of the South need to spend up to 14% of their incomes to pay the interests associated with foreign debt.
The Group today reiterates its call on public, multilateral, and private creditors to refinance the debt with credit guarantees, lower interest rates, and longer expiration deadlines.
We insist on the implementation of a multilateral mechanism to renegotiate sovereign debt with an effective participation of the countries of the South, that will allow for a fair, balanced, and development-oriented treatment.
It is imperative to re-design, once and for all, the debt instruments and include activation provisions to alleviate and restructure, as soon as a country is affected by natural catastrophes and problems that are so common among the most vulnerable nations.
Mr. President,
No one in his right mind is denying now that climate change is threatening the survival of all with irreversible effects.
It is also no secret that those who are less responsible for climate change are the ones suffering the most from their effects, particularly Small Island Development States. Meanwhile, industrialized countries, which are the voracious predators of resources and the environment, elude their biggest responsibility and fail to comply with their commitments under the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] and the Paris Agreement.
Just to mention one example, it is profoundly disappointing that the goal of mobilizing no less than 100 billion dollars a year until 2020 as climate financing, has never been fulfilled.
On the eve of the 28th COP 28, the G77 countries will prioritize the exercise of the Global Stocktake; the implementation of the Loss and Damage Fund; the definition of the framework for the Adaptation Goal and the establishment of the new climate financing goal;p fully abiding by the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities.
The G77 is convening a Summit of South Leaders to be held on December 2 in the context of COP28 in Dubai. This initiative, unprecedented in the context of a Conference of the Parties (COP), will be a forum to articulate positions within our Group at the highest level, in the context of climate negotiations.
COP 28 will show whether or not, beyond speeches, there is a real political will on the part of developed nations to achieve the agreements required in this field that can not be postponed for any longer.
It is profoundly disappointing that the goal of mobilizing no less than 100 billion dollars a year until 2020 as climate financing, has never been fulfilled.
Mr. President,
The priority of the G77 is to change, once and for all, the paradigms of science, technology, and innovation, which is limited to the environment and perspectives of the North, thus depriving the international scientific community of considerable intellectual capital.
The successful Havana Summit launched an urgent appeal to concentrate science, technology, and innovation around the sustainable development goal, which can not be renounced.
There we decided to resume the work of the Consortium of Science, Technology and Innovation for the South (COSTIS) with the purpose of promoting joint research projects and promoting the production chains that may reduce the dependence on the markets of the North.
We also agreed to promote a call for convening, in 2025, of a High Level Meeting of the UN General Assembly on Science, Technology and Innovation for Development.
The 17 cooperation projects that Cuba has designed in the context of its chairmanship of the G77 will contribute to channel the potential of South-South and triangular cooperation.
We call on the richest nations and international bodies to participate in these initiatives.
Cuba will not cease in its efforts to promote the creative potential, influence and leadership of the G77. Our Group has a lot to contribute to multilateralism, stability, justice and the rational that the world requires today.
Mr. President; Excellencies,
Added to the problems and challenges that characterize the reality of our nations and impact our peoples, are the unilateral coercive measures, euphemistically called sanctions, which have become a practice of powerful States that intend to act as universal judges to weaken and destroy economies and isolate and submit sovereign States.
We reject the unilateral and coercive measures imposed against Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, among many others who suffer their negative impact.
Cuba is not the first sovereign State against which measures of that sort are applied, but is the one that has put up with them for the longest period of time, despite the world condemnation that every year is expressed almost unanimously in this Assembly, which is disrespected and unheard by the government of the biggest economic, financial and military power in the world.
We were not the first and have not been the last. Pressures to isolate and weaken economies and sovereign States are also affecting today Venezuela, Nicaragua and, both before and after, these have been the prelude of invasions and the overthrowing of uncomfortable governments in the Middle East.
We reject the unilateral and coercive measures imposed against Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, among many others who suffer their negative impact.
We reiterate our solidarity with the Palestinian cause. We support the right to self-determination of the Sahrawi people.
Let us all struggle for a world of peace, without wars or conflicts.
Five years ago I spoke for the first time from this podium, where the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution, Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, and Army General Raúl Castro Ruz once stood, to speak these truths and the ideals of peace and justice of a small archipelago that has resisted and will continue to resist, living up to the dignity, the courage and the unbreakable firmness of its people and history.
And I can not stand in this world tribune without denouncing, once again, the fact that for 60 years now, Cuba suffers an asphyxiating economic blockade, conceived to depress its income and living standards; promote a continued scarcity of food, medicines and other basic inputs and damage its potential for development.
That is the nature and those are the objectives of the economic coercion and maximum pressure policy applied by the US government against Cuba in violation of International Law and the UN Charter.
Cuba has not implemented a single measure or action aimed at hurting the US, its economic sector, its trade, or social fabric.
Cuba has not engaged in any action threatening US independence, harming their sovereign rights, interfering in its internal affairs or affecting the well-being of its people. The US behavior is absolutely unilateral and unjustified.
The Cuban people are resisting and overcoming isolation day after day in the face of the merciless economic warfare which, since 2019, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, was opportunistically escalated to an extreme, cruel, and inhumane dimension. The impacts are brutal.
With surgical and vicious precision, they have calculated, both in Washington and in Florida, how to inflict the greatest possible damage to Cuban families.
The US government lies and greatly damages international efforts to fight terrorism when accusing Cuba, without any grounds, of being a country that sponsors that scourge.
The US persecutes and has tried to prevent the supplies of fuel and lubricants to our country, an action that may seem unthinkable in times of peace.
In a globalized world, to prohibit access to technologies, including medical equipment with more than 10% of US components, is not only absurd but criminal.
Their actions against Cuba’s medical cooperation in numerous countries is shameful. They openly threaten sovereign governments for asking for that contribution and responding to the public health needs of their peoples.
The US deprives its citizens of the right to travel to Cuba, challenging its own Constitution.
The tightening of the blockade has had an impact on migration in our country in recent years, which presupposes a painful cost for Cuban families as well as adverse demographic and economic consequences for the nation.
The US government lies and greatly damages international efforts to fight terrorism when accusing Cuba, without any grounds, of being a country that sponsors that scourge.
Based on that fraudulent and arbitrary allegation they extort hundreds of banking and financial entities everywhere in the world and force them to choose between continuing their relations with the US or maintaining their links with Cuba.
Our country suffers a true siege, a cruel and silent extraterritorial economic warfare. It is accompanied by a powerful political campaign of destabilization, with millions of dollars of funds, approved by the US Congress, with the purpose of capitalizing on the scarcities caused by the blockade and undermining the country’s constitutional order and citizens’ tranquility.
Despite the hostility of their government, we will continue building bridges with the US people, as we do with every other country in the world.
We will further strengthen our links with Cuban migration anywhere on this planet.
Mr. President,
The promotion and protection of human rights is a common ideal that demands a genuine spirit of respect and constructive dialogue among States.
Unfortunately, 75 years after the adoption of the Universal Human Rights Declaration, the reality is quite different. This issue has become a political weapon in the hands of powerful nations looking to subjugate independent nations, particularly from the South, to their geopolitical designs.
Cuba will continue to strengthen its democracy and socialist model which, despite being under siege, has proved how much a developing country, with scarce natural resources, can do.
No country is exempted from challenges, just as none has the authority to rise up as a paradigm in the field of human rights and stigmatize other sovereign models, cultures and States.
We advocate dialogue and cooperation as an effective way to promote and protect human rights, without politicization or selectivity; without double standards, preconditions or pressures.
In that spirit, Cuba has presented its candidacy to the Human Rights Council for the period 2024-2026 at the elections to be held on October 10 this year. We appreciate beforehand the confidence of the countries that have already given us their valuable support.
If we were elected, the voice of Cuba will continue to be raised with a universal vision, always from the perspective of the South, in favor of the legitimate interests of developing countries, from a constructive commitment and the irrevocable responsibility towards the full realization of human rights for all.
Cuba will continue to strengthen its democracy and socialist model which, despite being under siege, has proved how much a developing country, with scarce natural resources, can do.
We will keep on with our transforming efforts, looking for a way out of the siege imposed by US imperialism, as well as ways to achieve the prosperity with social justice that our people deserve.
In that effort, we will never renounce our right to defend ourselves.
Mr. President,
Distinguished heads of delegations and other representatives;
I will conclude by extending an invitation to all to work in order to overcome differences and cope together with our common challenges with a sense of urgency.
For that, the UN and this Assembly, even with its limitations, are the most powerful instrument we have.
You may always count on Cuba to defend multilateralism and promote peace and sustainable development for all.
It will always be an honor to fight for justice, sharing difficulties and challenges with the “exploited and humiliated”, ready to change history. We are more, And we shall overcome.
Thank you very much.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
There can be little question that the grim prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which still shows no sign of closing anytime soon, is a key legacy — in the worst sense imaginable — of America’s post-9/11 forever wars. I’ve been covering the subject for decades now and that shameful legacy has never diminished. Last month, in response to a column I wrote for TomDispatch — one of dozens, I’m sad to say…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Nothing on the horizon now threatens the end of the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. Critical voices inside the United States and beyond fall flat; nothing is in the works, it seems. Recently, however, the United Nations put forth a denunciation that carries unusual force, mainly because of the UN’s legal authority and its practical More
The post UN Forcefully Hits at US Blockade of Cuba and Prison in Guantanamo appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.
My guest this month on Literary Dialogs with Nina Serrano is Lea Aschkenas, author of “Arletis, Abuelo and the Message in a Bottle.” My interview is presented in this video and on my monthly radio series. Literary Dialogs features writers and poets who read and discuss their own works. Lea’s book takes place in Cuba […]
This post was originally published on Estuary Press.
In the repertoire of foreign policy combatants in Washington’s corridors of power, there is a time-tested ploy: Conservatives in the military or intelligence bureaucracy leak damaging information to force the (usually Democratic) president into a more confrontational approach with a foreign adversary, derailing any effort to reduce tensions. The bureaucrats’ allies on Capitol Hill immediately…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On the heels of China’s weather/spy balloon downed by a US F-22 comes a report of the construction of a Chinese listening post in Cuba. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., supports the Biden administration’s claim that China is setting up a spy station in Cuba. Gaetz calls it a “stationary aircraft carrier right off the coast of Florida.”
That is pretty rich given that the US is arming Taiwan (which the present US administration confirms is a province of the People’s Republic of China), and certainly Taiwan’s location makes an excellently situated listening post for the CIA. Thus it appears more so, using Gaetz’s analogy, that Taiwan is being made to serve as a stationary US aircraft carrier right off the coast of Fujian. Nonetheless, China’s presence in Cuba does not violate American sovereignty. Contrariwise, the US’s meddling in Taiwan is viewed as objectionable and provocative by Beijing.
And where is the evidence for Gaetz’s claim?
Western media asked Wang Wenbin, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for comment on 9 June 2023:
AFP: Reports by US media outlets say that China and Cuba have agreed to set up a Chinese spy facility capable of monitoring communications across the southeastern part of the US. Officials in Washington and Havana have said these reports are not accurate. Does the Chinese foreign ministry have a comment?
Wang Wenbin: I am not aware of what you mentioned. It is well known that the US is an expert on chasing shadows and meddling in other countries’ internal affairs. The US is the global champion of hacking and superpower of surveillance. The US has long illegally occupied Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay for secretive activities and imposed a blockade on Cuba for over 60 years. The US needs to take a hard look at itself, stop interfering in Cuba’s internal affairs under the pretext of freedom, democracy and human rights, immediately lift its economic, commercial and financial blockade on Cuba, and act in ways conducive to improving relations with Cuba and regional peace and stability, not otherwise.
And again on 13 June 2023:
Prensa Latina: Although China and Cuba denied the recent reports, the US government said over the weekend that it had information about this alleged spy center that they say China has been operating in Cuba. What is your comment about it?
Wang Wenbin: I made clear China’s position on this last week. Over the past few days, we have seen self-conflicting comments from US officials and media on the so-called allegation of China building “spy facilities” in Cuba. This is another example of “the US negating the US.”
What is true can never be false, and what is false can never be true. No matter how the US tries with slanders and smears, it will not succeed in driving a wedge between two true friends, China and Cuba, nor can it cover up its deplorable track record of indiscriminate mass spying around the world.
Thus, Gaetz has once again revealed the absurdity/mendacity of American politicians. Besides, what does it matter if China is building a listening post in Cuba? Is there any country on the planet that believes that the US is not spying on them? What is it that the Five Eyes are doing? What are all those eyes in the sky doing? Do US embassies and consulates not function as intelligence gathering bases? The US collects intelligence on friends and foes alike.
It even surveilles its own citizens. Don’t Americans know this? That is why Edward Snowden faces arrest should he return home. It is a moral contradiction that a whistleblower who exposes government illegality would be arrested by that same government for exposing its illegal actions.
This plays into another US narrative of the Threat of China. (See Paolo Urio, America and the China Threat: From the End of History to the End of Empire, 2022. Review.) Fox News cites an unnamed Biden administration official on the awareness
of a “number of” efforts by the People’s Republic of China “around the world to expand its overseas logistics, basing, and collection infrastructure.” These outposts would allow the People’s Liberation Army “to project and sustain military power at a greater distance.”
That is the rules-based order writ large. The US can do whatever it pleases. It can build military bases around the world and listen in on whoever it wants. But there are rules for the rest of the world to obey.
What does Gaetz propose doing? He supports “an Authorization for Use of Military Force to take out the Chinese assets in Cuba.”
I support an Authorization for Use of Military Force to take out the Chinese assets in Cuba.
We should be a lot more concerned that China is functionally turning Cuba into a stationary aircraft carrier right off the coast of Florida. pic.twitter.com/rH0WIpU5rV
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) June 22, 2023
Is this what American citizens need now, another war with a powerful country their government chooses to regard as an adversary — all this while the US and its NATO minions are going down to ignominious defeat in Ukraine?
One hundred and fifty young people from the United States and Canada arrived in Cuba in late April 2023, just days before International Workers Day. As members of CODEPINK’s youth cohort, our goal was to understand the Cuban political system, the US blockade and its impacts on everyday life. We sat in a room upon our arrival, listening to our trip hosts explain the issue of fuel shortages on the island. Before they were done talking, the microphones went silent. The power had gone out. The rest of the presentation sounded like faint whispers to the delegates sitting in the back of the room. We tried our best to hear, trying to silence all the background noise to no avail. Thinking of it now, there was no better way to understand how dire the situation was than to see it for ourselves.
In 1960, following the Cuban Revolution that propelled Fidel Castro to power, a memorandum from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs was written and later declassified. It stated that a majority of Cubans supported Fidel, and if the US wanted to counter the rise of communism in its backyard, it would have to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and an overthrow of the government.”
The US imposed a blockade which still restricts necessary items from entering Cuba and prevents other countries from selling them to the island. On top of the embargo, the Biden Administration keeps Cuba on a state-sponsor of terrorism list, further restricting economic development. The goal of these policies are explicit in the 1960 memorandum: the US is trying to starve socialism out of Cuba. The purpose of the US policy towards Cuba is to create misery, and it’s proudly displayed on the State Department website.
And we certainly saw misery with our own eyes. Usually for May Day, millions of Cubans rally in Havana, celebrating socialism and workers. May Day was scaled down this year due to fuel shortages – Cuba has to conserve the fuel it has for farming and other necessities. US media certainly reported on it, but without any mention that it was the US government that was causing shortages of all kinds in Cuba.
Leading up to May Day, a massive storm swept through the island, causing emergencies that the Cuban government couldn’t effectively deal with because of the lack of fuel. We sat through multiple power outages, even in a hotel that had decent fuel access. We toured neighborhoods in transformation, learning how Cubans were developing their own communities to have better access to medical care, food and other life affirming services. Even those tours, full of hope and self determination, were plagued by outages. Tourism is a huge industry that helps sustain the Cuban economy, so tourists like us are usually shielded from occurrences like this. We had no way of truly grasping the day to day effects that these power shortages were having on Cubans outside of Havana.
Even though the people we met in Cuba had a thorough understanding of what our country was doing to theirs, they welcomed us with open arms. Not only were they kind to us, they were also hopeful for the kind of future we would build together – one where our two countries can base foreign policy on the person-to-person relationships we build rather than deferring to the dinosaurs in Washington who value the victory of their ideologies over millions of Cuban lives.
Our cohort visited the Blas Roca Contingent where we were warmly welcomed with fresh coconuts, t-shirts, and hats. We joined delegations from all over the world: Switzerland, Australia, Uruguay, Panama, just to name a few. It was amazing to see union leaders and organizers from all over the world come to Cuba to show support for the Cuban project. It was also transformative to see how well Cuban workers are taken care of. The entire facility we were in was a place for the workers and their entire families to come for food, community, and fun. The union even obtained 3 farms in the area in order to grow food for the workers and their families.
Later, a smaller group of us took a tour with a worker at the facility. He told us how his father had grown up very poor before the revolution and how much his family’s life changed for the better after the revolution. He spoke of the hardships of the blockade, especially not
having access to fertilizers for farming which could easily double their yields. He also mentioned how he has had family emigrate to the USA and while he doesn’t fault them for leaving, he himself could never leave the Cuban revolutionary project behind. He is a revolutionary through and through. His story is the kind that the policy makers in the US choose to ignore. Cubans on the island are charting their own course outside US hegemony and it is clear that the US’s policy is to try and deny them that right.
All of us, like the delegations that have gone before us and the countless ones who will go after, returned to the US with a deeply held commitment to end our country’s blockade on the Cuban people.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This story originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch on June 9, 2023. It is shared here under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
On June 8, the US media added to its long storybook of tales to scare people away from normal relations with Cuba. The Wall Street Journal published an article on that day claiming that China has plans to set up a “spy base” in Cuba, to “eavesdrop” on the United States and “identify potential strike targets.” WSJ has already published two more pieces since rapidly ramping up its narrative against the Cuban state and fermenting more paranoia as the news spreads across mainstream news outlets in the United States.
Meanwhile, Cuban officials held a press conference on June 8 to completely deny the allegations. Cuba’s Vice Foreign Minister Carlos de Cossío stated that “All these are fallacies promoted with the deceitful intention of justifying the unprecedented tightening of the blockade, destabilization, and aggression against Cuba and of deceiving public opinion in the United States and the world.” Even John Kirby, National Security Council spokesman who was the former press secretary for the Pentagon, has denied the WSJ report, calling it “inaccurate.”
This is just one new addition to the long legacy of lies that the United States has been spinning in an attempt to further alienate the Cuban people. One just has to remember the “Havana syndrome” that mysteriously affected diplomats in Cuba; it was first blamed on foreign powers as an attack but was later revealed to have no basis. Or maybe the claims about 20,000 Cuban soldiers supposedly based in Venezuela to maintain the government there, when in reality, the vast majority of Cubans present in Venezuela were medical workers. Or perhaps the idea that Cuban doctors sent across the world are enslaved, when it is simply their understanding that their duty to humanity is to provide health care to those who need it. All of these lies have been told just in the past few years alone.
These falsified stories all swirl into fomenting the atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion that prevents normal US-Cuba relations. In the wake of the Havana syndrome myth, Trump was able to interrupt the path Obama set toward normalization, setting 243 additional and comprehensive sanctions, and further preventing the island from meeting its basic needs. The United States continues to live out its Cold War fantasies through these lies, at the cost of the Cuban people’s lives and well-being.
And yet, it maintains its hypocrisy. Cossío was careful to point out that Cuba would never allow a foreign military base on their island, as it is a signatory of the Declaration of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace. Cuba is also currently sponsoring and hosting peace talks between Colombia and the National Liberation Army (ELN). As of today, they have agreed to a cease-fire, ending decades of violence in the country. Cuba already suffers from the illegal US occupation of Guantanamo, to further rub salt in the wound. The United States has its infamous military base there, which is known for the inhumane treatment and torture it deals out to its prisoners. While it accuses China of military expansion, the United States has hundreds of military bases all over the globe.
Cuba has demonstrated that it desires nothing but peace in the region, and normal relations with its neighbor, the United States. But the United States refuses to accept this proposal. Instead, it maintains the most comprehensive sanctions in history against the small island. Instead, it falsely places Cuba on the state sponsors of terrorism list, even though it is in fact a sponsor of peace. Instead, the US government and its media apparatuses choose to fabricate myths and legends, painting Cuba as the evil monster under the bed. It chooses to scare the US people away from the possibility that normal relations and ending the blockade against Cuba could be good for people from both countries.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Chinese state media has reacted forcefully to reports of an alleged Chinese “electronic eavesdropping facility” on Cuba, claiming that the “smearing” of China jeopardizes an anticipated Beijing visit by U.S. top diplomat Antony Blinken.
A Wall Street Journal story on Thursday last week claimed that China has invested in Cuba with the purpose of establishing a listening post there.
The report was first denied by White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby as “not accurate” but later confirmed on Saturday, by an anonymous Biden administration official, who told Politico that China has operated a spy base out of Cuba since at least 2019, adding, “This is an issue that this administration inherited.”
The unnamed official said that the base, which can pick up U.S. military and commercial signals, is “an ongoing issue … not a new development.”
China pushes back
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in a press conference on Friday he was “not aware” of any such arrangement.
“It is well known that the US is an expert on chasing shadows and meddling in other countries’ internal affairs,” he said, adding that the U.S. has “long illegally occupied Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay for secretive activities and imposed a blockade on Cuba for over 60 years.
“The US is the global champion of hacking and superpower of surveillance,” Wang said.
Chinese media claimed that the “media hype” and “smearing” of China put the thawing of Sino-U.S. relations at risk.
“The U.S. had unilaterally announced that top diplomat Antony Blinken planned to visit China in February of this year, but it was postponed due to the so-called ‘balloon incident,’” the online version of state mouthpiece the People’s Daily said.
“This time U.S media once again claims Blinken may soon be visiting China, while broadcasting ‘fake news’ that China intends to build an eavesdropping facility in Cuba.”
Blinken’s visit is tentatively scheduled for June 18 with hopes it might bring about a thaw in China-U.S. relations, but China has yet to agree to the visit and has rebuffed many recent overtures from Washington.
‘U.S. politics to blame’
Chinese press continued that it was difficult not to suspect that “some forces in the U.S. political arena … do not want Sino-U.S. relations to ease [and] are constantly undermining the relationship between the two countries.”
The English-language tabloid Global Times added that the latest U.S. developments recalled “the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 – one of the fiercest scenes of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union – [and] could be a new farce staged by the media and some U.S. politicians as ‘good cop, bad cop’ with the purpose of gaining the ‘upper hand’ and pressuring China in any possible dialogue,” a reference to Antony Blinken’s possible visit to China.”
Improving Sino-U.S. relations still faces great challenges, Chinese media chorused.
Han Yang, a former Chinese Foreign Ministry diplomat now in Australia, told RFA that the U.S. had left itself open to the Chinese move by allowing itself to be held hostage by the exiled Cuban community, providing Beijing with an opportunity to set up operations on Florida’s doorstep.
“I think … the embargoes have been proved counterproductive and created opportunities for China to invest in Cuba,” Yang said. “The sanctions don’t make any foreign policy sense as the U.S. trades with many nations with worse human rights records than Cuba.”
Two leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee released a joint statement Thursday, even before the spy base was anonymously confirmed, reported Politico.
“The United States must respond to China’s ongoing and brazen attacks on our nation’s security. We must be clear that it would be unacceptable for China to establish an intelligence facility within 100 miles [160 kilometers] of Florida and the United States, in an area also populated with key military installations and extensive maritime traffic,” senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio said.
An expert on the U.S. told the Global Times on Sunday that while China is open for talks and will not put up barriers to communication, it was still possible that the Biden administration and US politicians could trip over themselves.
“It’s a highly controversial topic in the US about how to deal with China, and obviously, the Biden administration’s decision-making on the topic is under heavy impact of the U.S.’ internal politics,” said Lu Xiang, an expert on U.S. studies and research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
“By spreading groundless accusations, the Biden administration is actually trying to legitimize its close reconnaissance missions and spy activities around China’s territorial waters and airspace,” Lu said.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chris Taylor for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
To most countries, particularly fellow nations in the Global South, Cuba is a sovereign nation recognized for its leadership in healthcare, diplomacy, and human development. The US government, however, has a different, and quite unique, view: Officially, Cuba is categorized as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.”
Only four countries on earth are currently designated by the US as State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSTs): Iran, Syria, Cuba, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
NNOC plans to follow up with an action in Washington, DC, on June 25, and are calling on supporters to join a rally in front of the White House. Advocates say that Cuba’s SST designation is unwarranted, unjust, and ultimately harmful to the people of the island.
Cuba was first placed on this list under the Reagan administration in 1982. In 2015, the Obama administration rescinded Cuba’s SST status as part of a broader push for normalization of relations. However, a lame duck maneuver by the Trump administration in January 2021 placed Cuba back on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. This designation has continued under President Biden.
Now, 57 member organizations of the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) have launched the #OffTheList campaign to remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List.
Following a campaign launch on Valentine’s Day 2023, activists across the country made hundreds of calls to the White House on March 14 and 15. NNOC plans to follow up with an action in Washington, DC, on June 25, and are calling on supporters to join a rally in front of the White House. Advocates say that Cuba’s SST designation is unwarranted, unjust, and ultimately harmful to the people of the island.
Beyond the use of social media and direct action, the NNOC campaign is also urging participants to pass resolutions in their trade unions, schools, and local municipalities: “We encourage you to initiate a resolution to expand public support for removing Cuba from the U.S. ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ List.”
“It’s critical for those of us in the United States to speak up about it—and for people around the world to speak up,” Shaquille Fontenot, an NNOC co-chair, told The Real News. “It’s a humanitarian issue at this point, not just a political issue. It’s way beyond that.”
Upon announcing its decision to place Cuba back on the State Sponsors of Terrorism List, the Trump administration made it pretty clear that the decision was rooted in longstanding, Cold War-era hostility towards Cuba for being a sovereign socialist nation—and, as such, being a source of political and economic influence in Latin America that runs counter to the influence and hegemonic dominance of the US. “The Trump Administration has been focused from the start on denying the Castro regime the resources it uses to oppress its people at home,” a Jan. 11, 2021, memo issued by the US Embassy in Havana stated, “and countering its malign interference in Venezuela and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.”
That being said, the stated pretext for the Trump administration’s fateful decision allegedly stemmed from the island’s role in hosting peace negotiations between the Colombian government, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army (ELN).
Colombia has been locked in an ongoing civil war for decades, but in 2016 a peace deal was struck between the government and the FARC guerrillas. Negotiations with the ELN began shortly after, with Cuba stepping in as a guarantor and host of the peace process.
Although the consequences of a country finding itself on the SST list have global implications, Washington is under no obligation to demonstrate the substance of its accusations to the world—or even to courts within the US.
In 2018, Ivan Duque was elected president of Colombia on a platform that pledged to “correct” the peace process, which he claimed did not impose harsh enough penalties upon former FARC combatants. As the ceasefire began to crumble, a faction of the ELN bombed a police academy in Bogota in 2019, killing 22 and injuring dozens more. Duque unilaterally ended the peace talks in response and demanded the Cuban government extradite 10 ELN peace negotiators.
The Cuban government refused, noting that complying with the extradition order would violate the negotiation protocols based on international norms previously agreed to by the ELN and the Colombian government. The government of Norway, another key player in the peace process, backed up Cuba’s stance. Colombia’s recently elected President Gustavo Petro has since rescinded Duque’s extradition order and resumed peace talks with the ELN.
Two years after the Colombian peace talks in Cuba fell apart, and just nine days before Trump himself left office, the Trump administration slapped Cuba with the SST label, citing both the extradition orders against the ELN and Cuba’s longstanding commitment to providing asylum for US political refugees, including former Black Panther Assata Shakur. A number of former intelligence and diplomatic officials decried the move.
Despite promises to the contrary, the Biden administration has yet to significantly alter the sanctions against Cuba instituted by Trump, including its designation as an SST.
Although the consequences of a country finding itself on the SST list have global implications, Washington is under no obligation to demonstrate the substance of its accusations to the world—or even to courts within the US. The decision to label a country an SST is entirely at the president’s discretion. No process to regularly review or appeal states’ inclusion on the list exists. “We know the State Sponsors of Terrorism List is maintained solely by the US… that already makes it unfair because there aren’t any checks or balances,” noted Fontenot.
Cuba is not the only country with an SST designation that seems more motivated by fickle political considerations than any clear or consistent definition of terrorism. In the 1980s, for instance, Iraq had its designation removed to facilitate US arms transfers during the Iran-Iraq War—only to be placed back on the list once the First Gulf War began. Other states, including Sudan and North Korea, have been shuffled on and off the list depending on the status of their relations with Washington.
Cuba’s ongoing SST designation continues to obstruct relations between Washington and Havana. In March, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla tweeted: “the State Department qualifying lists are nothing but instruments for political and economic coercion that are totally alienated from issues so sensitive as terrorism, religion, human rights, drug trafficking and corruption, among others.”
When the US government designates a country a State Sponsor of Terrorism, it triggers a series of sanctions against the targeted country designed to restrict its ability to engage in international banking and trade. Contrary to the euphemistic explanations offered by Washington (that such sanctions are “targeted,” that they only affect the government or certain industries, that they are a “more peaceful” alternative to war, etc.), such measures inevitably and directly affect the lives and livelihoods of everyday citizens in sanctioned countries.
“Right now, the effects of the blockade and the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation have created conditions in Cuba that many scholars and Cuban people are comparing to the Special Period.”
Shaquille Fontenot, NNOC co-chair
In the case of Cuba, the effects of being designated an SST compound the effects of Washington’s decades-long blockade. For more than 60 years, the blockade has severely restricted Cuba’s ability to engage in international trade, provide for its people, and advance its own development. A State Department memo circulated in 1960 clearly spelled out Washington’s ultimate goal with the blockade: “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
The blockade’s effects became particularly pronounced after the fall of the Soviet Union—a time remembered in Cuba as the “Special Period.” Previously, the overwhelming majority of Cuban imports and exports had flowed through the Soviet Union, enabling the former to develop in spite of the US-imposed blockade, but the sudden collapse in trade starved the island of fuel and capital, sending agricultural and industrial production tumbling. Although wages and caloric intake plummeted, historian Helen Yaffe notes, the state continued to do everything it could to meet basic needs. Not a single school or hospital closed.
The succeeding decades have been a period of recovery and reorientation to a changed world. Tourism, medical services, pharmaceuticals, and mining exports have become important new industries for Cuba’s survival. While the thaw in relations with the US during the Obama era seemed to brighten Cuba’s prospects, recent years have proven harsher for the country and its people.
That’s precisely why Fontenot says the NNOC #OffTheList campaign is so urgent. “Right now, the effects of the blockade and the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation have created conditions in Cuba that many scholars and Cuban people are comparing to the Special Period.”
Once in office, the Trump administration dedicated itself to reversing whatever progress had been made on a myriad of policy issues under Obama, including imposing 243 new sanctions against Cuba. Then, to make matters worse, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the Cuban government closed its borders to tourists out of the necessity to save lives.
Washington ignored international calls to lift the blockade during the pandemic, even going as far as to block flights delivering humanitarian aid. Despite manufacturing its own domestically developed vaccines, Cuba lacked sufficient needles to administer them for a number of months. When the delta variant wave of the coronavirus struck in the summer of 2021, the country’s sole oxygen plant failed due to a shortage of supplies caused by the blockade.
It’s a certain fact that the US blockade directly contributed to the 8,500 deaths from COVID-19 in Cuba. In spite of these challenges, Cuba’s medical response was objectively superior to that of the US, both in terms of proportion of the population served and lives saved
This is the crucial background that throws the barbarity of the Trump administration’s SST label into relief. During the darkest days of a novel pandemic that gripped the world, as the Cuban people wrestled with mass human suffering, death, and fear, the United States chose to tighten the screws rather than extend a hand in solidarity, or at least mercy.
It’s a certain fact that the US blockade directly contributed to the 8,500 deaths from COVID-19 in Cuba.
International banks were already reluctant to engage in business with Cuba due to the blockade, and they were right to be: the US has not shied away from prosecuting even non-US banks that violate its dicta. In 2012, British bank HSBC forfeited $1.2 billion—and in 2015, French bank BNP Paribas surrendered $8.9 billion—after being targeted by US prosecutors for conducting transactions on behalf of individuals in a number of sanctioned countries, including Cuba. The US government’s ability to enforce its sanctions internationally, a function of the dollar’s supreme position in global trade and banking as the world’s international currency reserve, is precisely what has made the blockade against Cuba so powerful.
Once Cuba was redesignated an SST, banks doubled down on their restrictions, and the few that had once been willing to do business with Cuban nationals stopped doing so. In 2021, dozens of Cuban entrepreneurs addressed an open letter to President Biden describing the ongoing, US-imposed restrictions on travel, banking, and electronic transfers as both harmful to their businesses and “cruel.” Cuba’s Foreign Ministry estimates that the blockade costs Cuba as much as $15 million a day.
In another letter delivered to President Biden this March, over 20 faith-based organizations in the US cited the SST designation as a direct impediment to their efforts to deliver humanitarian aid:
In response to relisting on the SST, banks, financial institutions, and international vendors ceased helping facilitate both regular trade and cooperation with faith groups seeking to provide humanitarian and development support to Cuba. Overnight our denominational partners in Cuba began to face shortages of necessary items, including a lack of access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene articles, and materials essential for public health, such as medicines and medical devices. It has become increasingly impossible for our denominations and faith-based organizations to get much-needed aid and funds to our Cuban partners. Banks have frozen our funds for permitted religious and humanitarian activities, demanding additional licensing. They perceive the risks of fines and so insist on over-complying with the current restrictions.
Even Cubans living abroad have felt the sting. According to Spanish media, dual citizens of Cuba and Spain have been unable to open personal bank accounts and have even had their existing accounts frozen since the SST designation.
For everyday Cuban people, the blockade alone was bad enough before the implementation of additional restrictions tied to the SST List. Cuba’s efforts to survive in spite of the blockade are a testament to its people’s ingenuity and determination; however, there are limits to what can be achieved without access to global markets and production. A recent Oxfam report titled Right to Live Without a Blockade found substantial impacts on sectors as diverse as education, agriculture, and biotechnology stemming from the blockade—owing to limitations imposed by lack of access to computers, fertilizers, and other technologies and inputs that could transform existing industries.
In 2022, the UN General Assembly voted for the 30th consecutive year to approve a resolution calling for an end to the blockade against Cuba. Yet, as of now, the blockade continues.
Last May, the Biden administration announced a series of measures to support the Cuban people, including the restoration of remittance deliveries. However, none of these measures included substantial changes to the comprehensive blockade against Cuba, nor did they involve changing its designation as a State Sponsor of Terror.
Time is running out for the Biden administration to act. A new Congressional bill, HR 314: Fighting Oppression until the Reign of Castro Ends (or FORCE) Act, would seek to prohibit Cuba from ever being removed from the SST List “until the President makes the determination that a transition government in Cuba is in power.” (Given the bill’s name, it ought to be noted that Castro has not been in power in Cuba since the election of current President Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2019.)
Biden, however, doesn’t appear to be making any significant moves on Cuba any time soon, and with the 2024 election cycle officially in full swing, that is unlikely to change. When asked in March by Florida Republican Rep. Maria Salazar if the Biden administration had any plans to remove Cuba from the SST List, Sec. of State Anthony Blinken denied any such plans existed.
For Fontenot, the significance of the blockade extends to its effects on people living in the US. “Being able to see what Cubans have decided for themselves is a major wake-up call for young people in America. We don’t have free education or free healthcare in the United States.”
Indeed, despite being a blockaded nation, Cuba’s socialist healthcare system and highly innovative medical industry put the US’s extortionately inaccessible system to shame. As of 2022, average lifespans in the US are three years shorter than those in Cuba. Fontenot also referred to several Cuban medical innovations that US patients are largely unable to access due to the blockade, such as an internationally recognized lung cancer vaccine.
“We’re in a moment here where people [in the US] are seeing the parallels between our own experiences and what’s done in our name to people abroad. People here need food, water, shelter—and people in Cuba need those things too…That’s why it’s critical for us in America to speak up about it. People around the world need to see the truth.”
Shaquille Fontenot, nnoc co-chair
Fontenot didn’t stop there. She also gestured towards the Cuban democratic process itself as something Americans might envy, if they only knew. “Look at the 2022 Cuban Family Code referendum,” she noted, referring to the passage of what many legal experts have recognized as the world’s most progressive set of laws on gender equality and the rights of children, the elderly, and LGBTQ people. “Compare that to what we’re seeing in the United States right now—this massive attack against queer and trans people, and ultimately against access to education.”
By all indications, the US government is not keen on US citizens learning about all that Cuba’s socialism has to offer. In May, activists with two separate youth delegations returning from Cuba were detained and interrogated by US Customs and Border Patrol—including members of a 60-person delegation organized by NNOC. In a public statement released by NNOC, the organization remained defiant, “Solidarity is not a crime—the US blockade is!”
“There are so many cultural, environmental, and educational exchanges that could happen if relations were normalized,” Fontenot says. “We’re in a moment here where people [in the US] are seeing the parallels between our own experiences and what’s done in our name to people abroad. People here need food, water, shelter—and people in Cuba need those things too. The same institutions are keeping those things from all of us. That’s why it’s critical for us in America to speak up about it. People around the world need to see the truth.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
A sharp sound. Followed by body numbness. Difficulty speaking. Extreme head pain. Since 2016, U.S. officials across the world – in Cuba, China and Russia – have reported experiencing the sudden onset of an array of eerie symptoms. Reporters Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson try to make sense of this confusing illness that has come to be called Havana syndrome. This episode is built from reporting for an eight-part VICE World News podcast series by the same name.
The reporters begin by tracking down one of the first people to report Havana syndrome symptoms, a CIA officer working in Cuba. This “patient zero” explains the ways Cuban intelligence surveil and harass American spies working on the island and his own experience of suddenly being struck with a mysterious, painful condition. When he reports the illness to his bosses at the CIA, he learns that other U.S. officials on the island are experiencing the same thing.
A CIA doctor sees reports from the field about this strange condition happening in Cuba. He’s sent to Havana to investigate the cause of the symptoms and whether they may be caused by a mysterious sound recorded by patient zero. But during his first night on the island, the CIA doctor falls ill with the same syndrome he is there to investigate.
In the third segment, reporters Entous and Anderson head to Havana to visit the sites where people reported the onset of their symptoms, looking for answers. The team shares reporting-informed theories about who and what could be causing Havana syndrome.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
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Rohima Miah reports from Washington DC that on the 20th anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq, thousands of peace and antiwar activists rallied in the nation’s capital under the banner Fund People’s Needs, Not the War Machine!
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Even before the attack on the homeland of the weather balloons,
the Havana Syndrome tested America’s mettle.
The Havana Syndrome was first reported in Cuba in 2016. The mysterious malady initially afflicted US embassy staff in Havana, especially those attached to intelligence missions. It then spread to Canadian embassy officials. The sudden headaches, debilitating dizziness, and hearing excruciatingly painful sounds struck both at work and at home. Oddly, the Cubans themselves appeared immune to the pathology.
Soon other cases of what the US Defense Department called “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs) were reported in Russia, China, Colombia, Uzbekistan, and then even in the US. This mass psychogenic illness was experienced mostly by US government spies, diplomats, and military personnel all over the world, according to Wikipedia. A “government-wide response” was precipitated with “support groups” established.
The US State Department announced that it considered attention to the Havana Syndrome “an absolute priority.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken believed “there’s nothing we take more seriously.”
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) concluded in a December 2020 report that the most likely probable cause of the AHIs was pulsed microwave energy.
Inferring blame to Cuba and Russia for the “sonic attacks”
White House chief of staff John Kelly commented: “We believe that the Cuban government could stop the attacks on our diplomats.” In September 2017, non-emergency US embassy personnel and family members were evacuated from Cuba.
President Trump blamed the Cubans and in retaliation for the alleged attacks expelled most of their embassy staff from Washington. His Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the expulsions were “made due to Cuba’s failure to take appropriate steps to protect our diplomats.”
The Cubans, who had no incentive to provoke their powerful neighbor, denied any culpability. They offered to fully cooperate with US authorities in their investigation of the syndrome.
The Cubans deployed 2,000 scientists and law enforcement officials in their investigation, which was hampered by the refusal by the US government to share medical information on those supposedly afflicted by the Havana Syndrome. Access to residences in Cuba that were purportedly targeted by the “sonic attacks” was also blocked.
But the Yankees had bigger fish to fry. Could the evil foreign adversary beaming the invisible energy waves be none other than the one blamed for stealing Hillary Clinton’s election victory? The so-called “free press,” exemplified by this message from CNN, incessantly reminded us regarding the Havana Syndrome: “The list of known, and suspected, aggressions Russia has carried out against US democracy and American personnel is vast.”
In May 2021, Politico breathlessly reported that unnamed US government officials believe “a notorious Russian spy agency [GRU] may be behind alleged attacks.” “It looks, smells and feels like” the Russians, according to an anonymous “former national security official involved in the investigation.” What more conclusive evidence could one possibly want?
The New Yorker, meanwhile, warned that the Havana Syndrome had spread to the White House. “Top officials in both the Trump and the Biden Administrations,” they reported, “privately suspect that Russia is responsible for the Havana Syndrome.”
CIA chief William Burns called the incidents “attacks.” When the bipartisan HAVANA (Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks) ACT of 2021 unanimously passed, the incidents were officially designated as “attacks.”
CNN reported on the act: “Its signing comes as cases continue to rise worldwide,” floating the theory that “Russia is behind” these attacks. In September 2021, the CIA even recalled one of its station chiefs for expressing “skepticism” about the veracity of the “attacks.”
Mysterious sounds associated with the Havana Syndrome
Top State and CIA officials who had gone to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health with the Havana Syndrome complained that the doctors treated them as if they were “crazy.”
Recordings of sounds associated with the Havana Syndrome were publicly released after the noise analysis by the US Navy could not “significantly advance US knowledge about what is harming diplomats.”
Former MIT researcher and sound expert Joe Pompei told NBC News that the reported sound waves could not cause the alleged symptoms. “Unless they had transducers in the bathtub and had the diplomats submerge their heads for a long time, it’s just not possible.”
Biologists Alexander Stubbs at UC Berkeley and Fernando Montealegre-Z at the University of Lincoln scientifically analyzed the recordings, which they identified as the song of a cricket (Anurogryllus celerinictus). Even the New York Times, reporting on the scientific findings, admitted “the sounds linked to the initial complaints may have been a red herring.”
An earlier panel of Cuban scientists similarly concluded that stressful conditions, not a “sonic weapon,” sickened the Yankees. They too identified crickets as a possible source of the mysterious noises.
Case cracked: cognitive impairment is an occupational hazard for US cold warriors
A little over a year ago in January 2022, an interim assessment by the CIA suggested that the Havana Syndrome was NOT a product of “a sustained global campaign by a hostile power.” Stress, environmental conditions, and cognitive impairment were the more likely culprits in the 1000 cases investigated with “analytic rigor, sound tradecraft, and compassion,” in the words of CIA Director William Burns.
However, the interim investigation continued. Finally this month, all seven US intelligence agencies found “available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents.”
Still, anti-Cuba zealots did not accept this explanation for the selective pandemic. Senator Marco Rubio rejected the intelligence community’s assessment, tweeting, “it’s hard to accept…it didn’t happen.”
US’s Cuba policy
Cuba may have been exonerated for the Havana Syndrome, but the socialist country is still targeted by the empire for regime-change. The 61-year-old asphyxiating US blockade continues, which puts Washington at odds with the 185 countries that voted in the UN against the unilateral coercive measures with only Uncle Sam and apartheid Israel voting in favor.
In a parting gesture of ill will, Trump re-designated Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” eight days before he left the presidency. Obama had rescinded the designation in 2015, originally imposed in 1982 by Reagan.
In 2021, Biden renewed Trump’s designation, ironically citing Cuba’s efforts to broker a peace in Colombia between the government and a guerilla insurgency. Biden backtracked on his campaign promises to reverse Trump’s harsh sanctions against Cuba and return to a process of normalization of relations.
Inclusion on the terrorist list bars Cuba from access to most international finance. “The real purpose of slandering Cuba as ‘terrorist’ is to justify the criminal blockade on Cuba,” according to the National Network on Cuba (NNOC).
Among the grassroots organizations working to get Cuba off the terrorist list are ACER and the NNOC. The latter observes: “Despite the devastating impacts of the US economic blockade, Cuba still has a longer life expectancy, lower infant and maternal mortality rates, better health outcomes, higher literacy, more education, and less violence than in the US.”
The Havana Syndrome, used to falsely accuse Cuba of attacking US personnel, exemplifies how distorted US policy is. Like drug peddlers hooked on their own supply, the spooks and cooks who populate the US governmental apparatus suffered literal physical damage believing the paranoic false propaganda that they push on the populace to justify the empire’s forever wars and brutal regime-change intrigues.
The post The Havana Syndrome Case Cracked first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Sixty years ago, a crowd of us young people anxiously massed around a black-and-white TV in my college student union building. The US and the USSR were in an existential standoff. The US had deployed ballistic nuclear missiles in Turkey. When the Soviets responded by placing missiles in Cuba, the US demanded their removal or face dire consequences.
We all breathed an enormous collective sigh of relief when Nikita Khruschev publicly agreed to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba. John F. Kennedy secretly reciprocated by removing US missiles from Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. The whole world rejoiced. A close encounter with a war, which could have threatened civilization, had been avoided.
In the aftermath, a robust international peace movement demanded and achieved some successes including the Anti-Ballistic Missile and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. Those halcyon days are now over. The US is largely responsible for scrapping those disarmament treaties. The last remaining Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) expires in February 2026 and has faint prospects of being renewed.
Back in 1962, in the midst of the Cold War, it would have been unfathomable to think that we were living in hopeful times of relative security. But such was the case, compared to the current situation. The US and the USSR were both willing to step back from the brink of nuclear conflict in 1962. Both sides sought accommodation; neither sought victory. Now the US and its allies seek a mortal defeat of Russia.
No Exit Strategy
History has shown wars either end in a negotiated peace or in victory for one side.
The world was fortunate that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with both sides willing to seek accommodation rather than victory. In contrast, the currently raging and indeed escalating Ukraine War could be the prelude to World War III because neither side appears to have an exit strategy; one by choice, the other because its back is to the wall.
The US’s intent is victory by “overextending and unbalancing” Russia in the words of the 2019 position paper by the semi-governmental Rand Corporation. As analyst Rick Sterling pointed out, this was the playbook for the US to provoke Russia into the current conflict. Bombers have been repositioned within striking range of key Russian strategic targets, additional tactical nuclear weapons deployed, and US/NATO war exercises have been held on Russia’s borders.
German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel recently revealed that the western powers never intended to make peace with Russia. That admission explicitly articulated what had been long enshrined in US foreign policy. Sooner or later the mounting provocations by the US and its allies deliberately threatening its existence would have had to be addressed by Russia.
Expansion of NATO
NATO was founded in 1949 at the onset of the Cold War against the then Soviet Union and later against Russia. NATO was from the beginning not so much an “alliance” as it was a military extension of the US empire where all members had to be integrated with and under US military command.
From its initial 12 members, NATO had expanded east toward the USSR with the addition of Greece, Turkey, and West Germany, by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After that crisis and despite assurances to the Soviets and then the Russian Federation, NATO has expanded to the very borders of what is today Russia with a full membership of 28 hostile states.
Nuclear proliferation
The horrendous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 marked the dawn of the nuclear era with the US holding a monopoly of this ultimate weapon of mass destruction. The Soviet Union defensively developed its own capacity by 1949, followed by the UK in 1953. Since 1962, the nuclear club expanded to France, China, Israel, rivals India and Pakistan, and finally North Korea.
Currently, the US has 1644 deployed strategic nuclear warheads compared to 1588 by Russia. The only other powers with strategic warheads deployed on intercontinental missiles or bombers are France and the UK.
All of today’s nuclear powers, according to the Federation of American Scientists, “continue to modernize their remaining nuclear forces at a significant pace, several are adding new types and/or increasing the role they serve in national strategy and public statements, and all appear committed to retaining nuclear weapons for the indefinite future.” The danger of nuclear war is ever greater, exacerbated by potential unintentional or accidental triggers.
US hegemony threatened
Especially with the rise of China as a world economic power, US hegemony is being challenged. Washington has not adjusted to an emerging multilateral world graciously.
The one third of humanity that has failed to be sufficiently subservient to what President Biden calls his “rules-based order” have been placed under asphyxiating unilateral economic sanctions. Western Europe, a would-be natural trade partner with their neighbor to the east, has been pressured to sever their economic ties with Moscow. And if there is a hint of hesitancy, the US simply uses force as it did to end the export of Russian gas to Germany via the Nord Stream pipelines.
However, the US has found that it cannot always prevail. Pentagon Plan B, accordingly, is a plague of chaos as has been the fate for Afghanistan, Libya, Haiti, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, etc. For the hegemon, a failed state is better than an independent one. Given the alternative of chaos, one that would make the fire-sale Yeltsin period look like a picnic (and one in which Putin was complicit), Russia sees no alternative but to try to prevail at whatever cost.
Normalization of nuclear war
Adding to the present danger is the normalization of war. When I was in elementary school, the US government’s policy was to bring home the fear of nuclear war in order to justify the post-WWII expansion of the empire’s military. So, us children were terrorized with “duck-and-cover” drills. Families were to sequester in their own private bomb shelters.
Now the prevailing propaganda from Washington is that nuclear war can be “won.” Dr. Strangelove is no longer satire. This planning to fight a nuclear war as if it were not an existential threat is institutionalized insanity. Symptomatic is the Smithsonian Magazine’s reassurance: “Today we live in a vastly different world…the threat of global thermonuclear war has mostly faded.”
However, Robert Kagan, spouse of the US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, asks: “Can America learn to use its power?” The neo-con then argues in favor of a vigorous nuclear confrontation with Russia on the grounds that Putin will most likely back down.
As if in response, the inimitable Caitlin Johnstone retorts: “It’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.”
A pathway to a negotiated peace settlement is lacking
The Rand Corporation recently floated the perspective that: “The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the US.” Rand not only reflects, but also leads ruling class opinion. So, this analysis is significant because it backs off from advocating complete victory in Ukraine against Russia.
Unfortunately, not only does the Biden administration have no exist strategy to its wars without end, but it also faces little domestic opposition to this policy compared to former times.
While a handful of Republicans – mainly for narrow partisan reasons – have questioned the ever-expanding US war efforts, there is absolute war unanimity among Democrats. The Democrats have become the full-throated party of war. United with the neoconservatives, the “pimps of war” are charting the course of our future. Even some putative leftists in the US are beating the war drums to “support Ukraine’s victory against the Russian invasion.”
How I long for those days gone by when the choice of “better red than dead” was an option.
The post Nuclear War Is No Exit for the Ukraine Crisis first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Ian Ellis-Jones takes on the Cuban right-wing internet trolls.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
