[News] Cuba & Venezuela - No Threat Will Stop the Relationship of Solidarity between Our Countries
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue May 28 11:04:17 EDT 2019
https://www.resumen-english.org/2019/05/no-threat-will-stop-the-relationship-of-solidarity-between-our-countries/
“No Threat Will Stop the Relationship of Solidarity between Our Countries”
By María Fernanda Barreto on May 25, 2019
A few days before Chapter III of the Helms-Burton Act came into force,
we had the opportunity to talk with Rogelio Polanco, ambassador of the
Republic of Cuba in Venezuela, about it. We discussed with him the
reasons for this measure, its geopolitical implications and the
possibility that this U.S. law fulfils the objective that the United
States has set for itself; to pressure Cuba to break the deep
relationship that Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez woven between the two
countries.
/Ambassador, what is Title III of the Helms-Burton Act that is now in
effect?/
This law is a nefarious U.S. legislation adopted in 1996 by the U.S.
Congress which seeks the recolonization of Cuba. That is why our people
have rightly called it, “The Law of Slavery”.
It is the most complete attempt to establish in a single legal norm the
entire historical intention of the American power to subject our country
to its designs. With it, they take away the executive power of the US
president to carry out the foreign policy towards Cuba, and codifies all
the previous laws into a single legislation that has a distinct
extraterritorial character, and therefore illegal from the point of view
of international law. It consists of four titles in which establishes in
detail all the actions that the U.S. should develop in order to
guarantee the overthrow of the Cuban Revolution, the submission of the
current government of Cuba to the jurisdiction of the U.S. and thus,
establish a so-called transitional government that would certify when
the properties nationalized by Cuba would be compensated in order to end
the objective of this law. Title III is the one that allows the
activation of courts in the U.S. to receive lawsuits from U.S. citizens
against companies and citizens of third countries that have invested in
properties that were nationalized by the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s.
This sets a very negative precedent, first because it would question a
country’s right to establish its own nationalizations and, on the other
hand, it would allow a country to take legal action against events that
occur in a foreign nation.
Until now, all administrations prior to Trump – and even in the first
year of this administration – had suspended the implementation of this
title because it entails legal risks and in turn implies serious
confrontations with other allied countries.
/Hadn’t Cuba offered compensation for these nationalizations many years
ago?/
Yes, Cuba carried out a series of nationalizations in 1959 as part of
the fulfilment of the objectives of the Revolution that was to make Cuba
a truly sovereign and independent nation that would return to the people
its natural resources that had been in the hands of foreign companies
and citizens of other countries, mainly the United States. One of the
first laws that was enacted was the Agrarian Reform Law, which fulfilled
a dream of our people and that was the land could not be controlled
outside of the one who works it. This involved a conflict with numerous
U.S. companies that owned the most fertile lands and in turn the
Revolution passed another series of laws that confronted U.S. hegemony
in Cuba. Sugar mills, banks, mines, electric companies and other
companies owned by U.S. citizens were nationalized. That was a big part
of the class struggle that took place at the beginning of the
revolution. Let’s remember that the U.S. refused to refine oil from the
U.S.S.R. and then, in another arbitrary action, stopped receiving part
of the so-called sugar quota of exports from Cuba to its country, which
dealt a serious blow to our economy and in turn to the well-being of our
people. So legally, our government took the decision to nationalize the
refineries and sugar mills, and finally all U.S. companies in Cuba. We
then offered compensation equal to that offered to five European
countries and Canada.
With the governments of Spain, France, Great Britain, Switzerland and
Canada, it was possible to reach fair compensation agreements in a
dialogue of equality. The U.S. government, in an arrogant manner, did
not agree to take part in any negotiations and instead broke off
relations with our country and in 1962 established a blockade against
our country. The compensation process established deadlines, costs under
international law, and even the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the
nationalizations made by Cuba at that time had been in accordance with
the law. However, the U.S. government prevented an agreement from being
formally reached.
/What companies are expected to sue? I ask because lately people have
been declaring in the U.S. press that they are descendants of Cuban
families who at the time owned banks, hardware stores and other
businesses, that is, families of the Cuban bourgeoisie and not U.S.
businessmen. /
For many years a U.S. entity determined the number of potential
plaintiffs, which according to that list are about six thousand. This
issue has been permanently open to negotiation, the United States has
even raised amounts. On that list were those who at the time were U.S.
citizens. But the Helms Burton Act opened the possibility for citizens
who were Cuban at the time of nationalization and who later acquired
U.S. citizenship to be included in these lawsuits. This is even more
arbitrary and would further complicate the process of solving an
eventual negotiation on compensation for those who were actually
citizens of that country at the time of nationalization and to whom Cuba
has always been willing to engage in a comprehensive negotiation process
that also includes the demands of the Cuban people for the damages
caused by the blockade during all these years. These demands were
introduced in 1999 and 2000 in Cuban courts, and therefore they are
obligatory for the Cuban government to comply with in any process of
negotiations with the United States, these damages are around 300
billion dollars. In fact, during the Obama administration there were
conversations on this complex issue as a gesture of mutual goodwill to
address this issue.
Since 1996 several of the countries that can be harmed by the scope of
Title III of the law established so-called antidotes laws that prevent
the application of the law Helms´-Burton in their jurisdictions. It is
for this reason that the rapid and forceful declaration of several
countries of the European Union and Canada was given, which established
that they would defend their companies with investments in Cuba and that
they would bring lawsuits before the World Trade Organization.
/How will all this benefit Donald Trump?/
I think that there is an obvious error on how to proceed with this and
also in diagnosing the current administration’s foreign policy towards
Cuba. Such an action goes against the interests of the United States in
the international arena and of its citizens. In 2018, for example,
650,000 Americans and 500,000 Cubans residing in the United States
travelled to Cuba.
Any action that seeks to limit relations with Cuba goes against the
interests of its own citizens, and at the same time this title of the
Helms-Burton law goes against its allies and against the freedom of
navigation, the freedom of trade, that is to say, the very fundamental
laws of capitalism. This administration has had unpredictable actions in
its foreign policy, it has acted against multilateralism, isolating
itself from important multilateral agreements.
/But don’t you think this activation could come from an electoral reason?/
Of course, we have only one element left to take into account to
understand this senseless action of the Trump administration, the
domestic politics, and electoral outreach of Florida. Once again,
foreign policy towards Cuba becomes an element of internal politics,
especially electoral politics. In the conflict between the parties of
that country, some consider that an aggressive action against Cuba would
give political advantage to the Republican Party and President Trump for
their re-election. This is far from the reality because President Obama
won in Florida precisely with a change of vision of politics by
attempting to interpret the generalized feeling of the Cuban community
and in general, of U.S. society in relation to our country.
/Last September Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine at the UN, now one of
the arguments being given to justify this tightening of the blockade to
exert pressure on Cuba in order to stop supporting Venezuela. Does it
seem likely that the Cuban government will yield to this blackmail? Or
that the Cuban people, feeling pressured by this measure, will demand
that their government move away from Venezuela?/
They know that’s never going to happen. The foreign policy of the Cuban
Revolution has always been based on solidarity, internationalism and
loyalty to the values we defend. Our people and our revolutionary
government have never yielded to blackmail of this nature by any foreign
government and in particular by the United States.
It is the historical course of imperialism that has always sought to
subdue other peoples by force. The reality is that from the beginning of
the Cuban Revolution, the United States has tried to hamper any
improvement in bilateral relations with Cuba ceasing to comply with its
foreign policy of solidarity or making concessions in its domestic
policy. Cuba never gave in to blackmail. Let’s remember the solidarity
of the Cuban people with the peoples of Africa, the people of Vietnam,
the support for Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence and the support
for the national liberation struggles of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Our people have always refused to accept pressure to surrender any of
their sovereign, independent and supportive policies.
The current US administration’s attempts to use Cuba’s solidarity aid to
Venezuela as a pretext are doomed to failure. In addition, we take this
opportunity to denounce that the United States pretends to justify its
actions on the basis of slander, saying that Cuba has an occupying army
in Venezuela. Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton has even
gone so low to call our worthy doctors, who render their
internationalist service on Bolivarian soil “thugs”.
We reject this type of malicious slander and reiterate our total
solidarity with the Bolivarian government headed by President Nicolás
Maduro and we also emphatically reiterate that no threat will impede the
relationship of solidarity between our countries.
/On May 2, there are also new measures against Iran. Do you think it is
a coincidence or is this evidence that both measures are part of the
same geostrategic plan?/
This administration has been attacking international law since it came
to power. The withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change,
from the nuclear agreement with Iran, from UNESCO, from the UN Human
Rights Council and from all the main multilateral economic agreements
of which it was a part of, has, of course, brought them in conflict with
the whole world by trying to use these elements as a weapon of pressure.
The fact that these measures coincide on the same date is only part of
an aggressive escalation against any government and any country that
does not submit to it. The United States is threatening international
peace and security, because we remember that the UN Charter establishes
the prohibition of the threat of the use of force, non-interference in
the internal affairs of other nations and the sovereign equality of
states. These are fundamental elements of international law that are
being trampled underfoot and that act constitutes a threat to peace.
/Cuba has sixty year of resisting the political and also military
pressure of the United States. Is it really likely that the current U.S.
government will dare to take direct military action or support a new
attempt by the Miami based Cuban-American lobby like the failed invasion
of the Bay of Pigs?/
The US has based its foreign policy on permanent aggression against
other countries and the use of force, with its most blatant act being an
invasion of other countries, on the basis of the most unusual pretexts.
It is part of its unilateral, militaristic geopolitical vision. That is
why they have 800 military bases in 80 countries with more than 250,000
troops. Their foreign policy is based on the use of force in
international relations, so nothing can be ruled out and that is why in
Cuba we have always maintained our military preparation based on the
doctrine of “All People’s War”.
We are a small country only ninety miles from the greatest economic,
military and technological power in the contemporary world. We have been
subject to a criminal blockade for decades, we have been subjected to
violent actions of all kinds, and as you mentioned we were also subject
to a direct military invasion of our country, funded by the U.S. government.
During all these years Cuba has been threatened. However, we have
maintained our conviction that the unity of our people and the
preparation to face any imperialist aggression is our life insurance. We
know that to the extent that an action of this nature is more costly,
they will think about it several times before committing the most
serious mistake of a military action against Cuba.
/What about a military aggression against Venezuela?/
All U.S. spokespeople have repeated as their mantra over the past few
months that “all options are on the table”. This arrogant phrase is the
recognition that they are making use of the threat of using force
against an independent and sovereign country like Venezuela. Many times
Cuba denounced, in a timely and firm manner, the movement of troops and
means necessary for military action against Venezuela.
The threat against the Bolivarian nation remains latent. That’s why it’s
important for the whole world to denounce it, reject it and prevent an
action of that nature from taking place.
/Do you think that these political, economic and military pressures on
Cuba and Venezuela could lead to the definitive imposition of the Monroe
doctrine?/
We totally reject that possibility. Despite the fact that the US has
invoked the Monroe Doctrine, and security advisor Bolton, to the group
of the defeated at the Bay of Pigs in Miami, said that the Monroe
doctrine is alive and well, this does not correspond to reality. They
have had to recognize that they are facing a different world, a Latin
America that will not allow the aggressions and invasions that for
decades the U.S. government carried out.
It is true that historically Latin America and the Caribbean have been
considered “their backyard” and numerous theories have been invoked for
more than two centuries to try to justify that purpose. However, today’s
Latin America is not the same as it was two hundred years ago. It has
lived through a process in which in recent years progressive, left-wing,
revolutionary governments came to power. Although today we are seeing a
regression of this process, that regression is circumstantial. We have
to view it in a strategic perspective.
The fact that we have had these recent experiences gives the
revolutionary and progressive movements in this region lessons of
mistakes that could become experiences for new victories in the future
because what is clear is that the predatory nature of capitalism has no
future in our region. This is demonstrated by the fact that the
right-wing governments that have recently come to power in the region
are far from consolidated and far from secure in their continuity in power.
Looking at the long term, it will be increasingly difficult for the
hegemonic power of the United States to take the history of Latin
America back to the periods in which, through military power and other
instruments of domination, they tried to make Latin America an integral
part of their territory.
https://correodelalba.org/2019/05/25/polanco-ninguna-amenaza-impedira-la-relacion-solidaria-entre-nuestros-paises/
Source: Correo del Alba, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North
America bureau
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20190528/d72df344/attachment.htm>
More information about the News
mailing list