[News] A Bit of Hope That Doesn’t Come from Miami
Anti-Imperialist News
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Thu Apr 22 12:31:49 EDT 2021
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*A Bit of Hope That Doesn’t Come from Miami: The Sixteenth Newsletter
(2021)*
Mohsen Taasha Wahidi (Afghanistan), Rebirth of the Red, 2017.>
Mohsen Taasha Wahidi (Afghanistan), /Rebirth of the Red/, 2017.
�
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research
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After twenty years, the United States government – and the forces of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – will depart from
Afghanistan. They said that they came to do two things: to destroy
al-Qaeda, which had launched an attack on the United States on 11
September 2001, and to destroy the Taliban, which had given al-Qaeda a
base. After great loss of life and the further destruction of Afghan
society, the US departs – as it did from Vietnam in 1975 – in
defeat: al-Qaeda has regrouped in different parts of the world, and the
Taliban is set to return to the capital, Kabul.
The speaker of Afghanistan’s parliament, Mir Rahman Rahmani, warns
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that the country is poised to enter a new period of civil war, a repeat
of the terrible civil war that ran from 1992 to 2001. The United Nations
calculates
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that in the first quarter of 2021, civilian casualties rose by 29%
compared to last year, while the number of women casualties increased by
37%. It is unclear if there will be further talks between the Taliban,
the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, the Turks, the Qataris,
the United States, and the United Nations. Afghanistan sits on the brink
of further violence, whose impact can so aptly be described by the words
of the poet Zarlasht Hafeez:
The sorrow and grief, these black evenings,
Eyes full of tears and times full of sadness,
These burnt hearts, the killing of youths,
These unfulfilled expectations and unmet hopes of brides
‘Saving’ Afghan women, advancing the cause of human rights: these
words have lost meaning after two decades. As Eduardo Galeano put it,
‘Every time the US “saves” a country, it converts it either into a
madhouse or a cemetery’.
�
Alicia Leal (Cuba), Un soldado de América, 1997.
Alicia Leal (Cuba), /Un soldado de América/, 1997.
�
The US government calculates that this war, which would enter its
twentieth year, is the longest US war in the modern period (the US
engagement in Vietnam lasted for fourteen years, from 1961 to 1975). But
this war in Afghanistan is not the longest war prosecuted by the United
States government. There are two US wars that continue: a war against
the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK (since August 1950)
and against Cuba (since September 1959). Neither of these conflicts have
ended, with the US continuing to execute hybrid wars against both the
DPRK and Cuba. A hybrid war
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does not necessarily require the full arsenal of a military to come into
force; it is a war fought through the control of information and
financial flows as well as the use of economic sanctions and illicit
means such as sabotage. There is no question that the longest and
unfinished US wars have been against Korea and Cuba.
Sixty years ago, on 17 April 1961, the CIA’s Brigade 2506 landed at
Cuba’s Playa Girón (‘Bay of Pigs’). The Cuban people resisted
this invasion as they would six decades of hybrid war against their
sovereign revolutionary processes. Cuba has never threatened the United
States; it never has violated the UN Charter of 1945. The United States,
on the other hand, has routinely threatened the Cuban people. In October
1962, when the Soviets sent a missile cover to protect Cuba, General
Maxwell Taylor, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned
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for a full-scale invasion. In this now-declassified memorandum, Taylor
pointed out that such a military venture might result in 18,500
casualties on the US side because of the determination of the Cubans to
protect their land and their political project. The plot was to
reinstate the old Cuban oligarchy that had sought refuge in Miami and
turn Cuba back into a gangster’s paradise.
After the Cuban government sent troops to assist the national liberation
project in Angola in November 1975, US Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger told
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his team on 24 March 1976, ‘if we decide to use military power, it
must succeed. There should be no halfway measures – we would get no
award for using military power in moderation. If we decide on a
blockade, it must be ruthless, rapid, and efficient’. The US planned
to mine Havana’s harbour and bomb Cuba’s cities. ‘I think we are
going to have to smash Castro’, Kissinger told
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US President Gerald Ford. Ford replied, ‘I agree’. Such is the
attitude of the US government, from 1961 to the present.
�
Carlos Garaicoa (Cuba), Puzzle la Malenka, 2009.
Carlos Garaicoa (Cuba), /Puzzle la Malenka/, 2009.
�
Before he left office in January 2021, US President Donald Trump placed
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Cuba on the US government’s ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ list.
Seventy-five US lawmakers asked
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his successor, President Joe Biden, to reverse this decision. On 16
April, Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki told
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the briefing room that ‘A Cuba policy shift or additional steps is
currently not among the President’s top foreign policy priorities’.
Biden, in other words, has decided to passively continue Trump’s
policy, dictated to him by the likes of Republican Senators Marco Rubio
and Rick Scott from Florida and Senator Ted Cruz from Texas (as well as
Democratic Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey). Biden has opted to
persist in this cruel six-decade long policy to suffocate the Cuban people.
Just after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the US government made it clear
that it would not tolerate a sovereign Cuba only 145 kilometres from
Florida’s coast. Cuba’s commitment to people over profit is a
standing rebuke of the hypocrisies of the United States rulers. This has
been clarified once more during this pandemic, during which the
infection and death rates per million are strikingly higher in the US
than in Cuba (recent figures indicate
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the US has recorded 1,724 deaths per million, whereas Cuba stands at 47
deaths per million). While the US locked itself into vaccine
nationalism, Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade of doctors continued with
their work amongst the world’s poorest people (for this, of course,
they deserve
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the Nobel Prize for Peace).
Unable to successfully invade Cuba, the US has persisted with a tight
blockade of the island. After the fall of the USSR, which had provided
Cuba with ways to circumvent the blockade, the US attempted to tighten
its grip on the island. US lawmakers then attacked Cuba’s economy
through the Cuban Democracy Act (1992) and the Cuban Liberty and
Democratic Solidarity Act (1996) – both laws with names that demean
the words in them. From 1992 onwards, the UN General Assembly has voted
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overwhelmingly for the United States to end this blockade. A group of UN
Human Rights Council Special Rapporteurs wrote a statement
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calling on the US to withdraw these measures, which have only made
Cuba’s attempt to fight the pandemic harder.
The Cuban government reported
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that between April 2019 and March 2020, Cuba lost $5 billion in
potential trade due to the blockade; over the past almost six decades,
it has lost the equivalent of $144 billion. Now the US government has
deepened the sanctions against shipping companies that bring oil to the
island. The head of US Southern Command, Admiral Craig Faller, described
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Cuba’s medical internationalism as a ‘regional corrosive
influence’. There is cruelty in Washington.
�
�
Far from the bitterness of the US government, the Cuban communists held
their eighth Party Congress, where the discussion
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was on how to improve the state enterprises and how to innovate to meet
the aspirations of the Cuban people. Deputy Prime Minister Inés María
Chapman said that the party members must be active in their communities
to build and defend socialism. Rafael Santiesteban Pozo, president of
the National Association of Small Farmers, said that working people must
produce more with what resources are available. Minister of Economy and
Planning Alejandro Gil pointed to the need for greater efficiency in the
state enterprise system, the expansion of self-employment, and the
expansion of cooperatives.
These are serious people who recognise the problems but are not
overwhelmed by them; they are part of a project that has fought to
defend its sovereignty against enormous odds since 1959. Defeat is not
in their vocabulary. Their agenda is hopeful, unlike the bilious agenda
that comes from the US government and the Miami-based Cuban oligarchy.
At this Congress, Raúl Castro stepped down from his post. Castro, one
of the original Cuban revolutionaries, had been imprisoned for his role
in the Moncada uprising of 1953. Upon his release, he went to Mexico
with his brother Fidel and then returned on the /Granma/ to lead the
rebellion against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. After the
victory of the Revolution, Castro served in the government and as a
leader in the Communist Party, guiding it alongside Fidel and others
through the difficult Special Period (1991-2000) and then continuing to
lead it after Fidel’s death in 2016. His quiet role in defending and
elaborating the Cuban Revolution has been immense.
�
José Rodríguez Fuster (Cuba), Granma, 2013.
José Rodríguez Fuster (Cuba), /Granma/, 2013.
�
After the Playa Girón attack by the CIA, the Spanish poet Jaime Gil de
Biedma wrote a poem about Cuba called ‘During the Invasion’
(collected in /Moralidades/, 1966). The Venezuelan poet Diego Sequera
translated this poem for us as we celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the
defeat of the US on those beaches:
The morning newspaper is open on
the tablecloth. The sun glows in the glasses.
Lunch at the small restaurant,
a working day.
Most of us remain silent. Someone speaks with an elusive voice;
these are conversations with special sorrow
about the things that always happen and
that never end, or that end in disgrace.
I think that at this time of day, the sun rises in Ciénaga;
nothing is yet decided, combat doesn’t stop,
and I look in the news for some hope
that doesn’t come from Miami.
Oh, Cuba in the distant dawn of the tropics,
when the sun is simmering, and the air is clear:
may your land sow tanks and your broken sky
be grey from the wings of airplanes.
With you are the people of sugar cane,
the man of the streetcar, those from the restaurants,
the thousands of us that today search in the world
for a bit of hope that doesn’t come from Miami.
�
Hope comes from the warm sun of Cuba.
Warmly,
Vijay
�
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