By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for daily Por Esto! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
We live in a world with all provisions set for the benefit of the owners of money: from electoral procedures and government structures to the smallest details of public and private relations. Everything has been oriented to the buying and selling mechanisms so they favor the owning classes who have the wealth.
In Latin America, not even Cuba –with its socialist revolution but also heir to countless of the methods, traditions and practices of capitalism– escapes this global reality. Except that in Cuba, by virtue of the deep socialist revolution that began half a century ago, the role previously held by the dominant wealthy classes is now exercised by society as a whole.
In the case of Cuba, a political organization –based on the most advanced revolutionary doctrine humanity has produced: Marxism– as society’s vanguard, protects its unity and ensures the legitimacy of truly democratic relations in all areas of society.
If we fail to consider that the mechanisms which freed Cuba from the evils of capitalism are still being created, tested, or waiting to be instituted to serve a social system that is also in the process of emerging fully, we are at risk of making serious mistakes. The Cuban revolution is not a copy of any other and, like other models that proclaim themselves Socialist, Cuba to find its own way.
Globally, journalism has become –for a long time now– an essential element of power, along with the three classic powers of the State (legislative, executive and judicial). Hence the media is often identified as the fourth power.
With this as its starting point, the ruling classes have succeeded in making the mainstream media (in print, radio, television and, more recently the Internet) a commodity and a tool aimed at convincing people and promoting compliance with capitalist ideas. They have done this with such effectiveness that they have succeeded in imposing their media dictatorship worldwide.
Advertising has become the lawful resource for those with money to defray cost of operating the media and thus controling it or exercise influence over its content proportional to the potential of their own economic and political interests.
Historically, big capitalists have not been satisfied with the ascendency they can get through their ads and have moved to partial or wholly ownership of the media, often using more or less publicly-identifiable fronts.
The ideological domination of oligarchies in Latin America –who often act as figureheads for the hegemonic domination of large US corporations– has been acquiring such a high level on the continent that no one doubts that a social revolution is not feasible without destroying the counterrevolutionary control of the media.
Confirmation of this conception is the fact that today in Latin America, the media under control of the ruling classes are playing the role that, in the last century, was played by the Latin American military hierarchy. The military carried out the coups –promoted by the United States– which plunged the region into the most nefarious situation of inequality, crime and misery.
However, according to recent experiences in the hemisphere, we could say that a coup may occur with the military or without it, with parliament or without it, with the media or without it, but always with the financial resources that move the wheels.
Although the laws of technological development tend to make the media increasingly social, the owners of capital have managed to always put communications and the media in a place outside the control of centers of democratic power. Thus, they facilitate their control by the owners of financial resources: the capitalists.
The Cuban experience –with its virtues and its many flaws that today are hotly debated by journalists in the island– shows that the social ownership of communications and the media with the widest popular participation, in a society with social ownership of the major means of production and distribution, opens the possibility of the use and effective enjoyment of these media by the majority… and safeguards it from the insatiable greed of capital.
Other mechanisms could be valid, but are yet to be tested and confirmed by practice.
September 19, 2016.
Later this morning I’ll be off to Havana via Interjet, a Mexican airline which flies regularly. “Father, forgive me, for I have sinned:” It’s been nine months since my last time down, in December 2015. I’m looking forward to seeing whatever changes have taken place. I’m hoping to spend another three months, and plan to post regular reports of things done, places seen and people met.
Therefore my reports and the CubaNews translations will continue to go out through the Yahoo News group to which I’ve posted most materials for over fifteen years. You can subscribe, to the news group here: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CubaNews/info
By Manuel E. Yepe
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
On September 11th, the anniversaries of multiple misdeeds by the US government in recent years coincide.
On that date in 1973, the coup d’état against the constitutional government of Salvador Allende in Chile took place. It was organized, financed and led by the Pentagon and the CIA, in a conspiracy with the worst elements of the Chilean armed forces.
Between that fateful day and March 1990, Chile lived under a horrible dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), who led the coup against Allende’s legitimate government and headed the military junta that ruled the country. Pinochet was proclaimed president of the republic in 1974 and, in 1981, was confirmed in that position by the pseudo-constitution designed by the tyrant.
In 1988, after being defeated in a plebiscite, Pinochet announced he would retain the presidency until 1990. Although the 1989 elections forced him to give up the presidecy, the dictator remained as supreme commander of the army. In 1998 a warrant was issued for him by Spain’s judicial system for his crimes.
Between 1973 and 1990, human rights in Chile were systematically violated by the fascist military dictatorship, with the support of the country’s upper classes. Repression included arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, imprisonments, killings, forced disappearances, exile and clandestine cemeteries. Torture was both physical and psychological. The used electric shocks, sexual violence, beatings, drugs, burns, waterboarding, and even the rape of women by trained dogs.
Between 1973 and 1975 there were some 42,500 political arrests. In addition, there were 12,100 individual arrests and 26,400 mass arrests between 1976 and 1988. Then there were more than 4000 harassment and intimidation situations between 1977 and 1988 with a balance of a thousand missing prisoners and 2100 assassinated for political reasons.
Some 3200 people died or disappeared between 1973 and 1990 in the hands of repressive state agents. Of these, about eleven 1100 people are considered missing apart from the above-mentioned 2100 dead.
On September 11, 1980, in New York City, Cuban diplomat Felix Garcia, accredited to the Cuban Mission to the United Nations, was gunned down in the street by a member of a group of Cuban exiles organized, financed and directed by the CIA. The Cuban diplomat became the first foreign representative accredited to the United Nations to be killed in the United States.
According to an FBI report, hours after the crime, the Cuban-born counterrevolutionary gunman Pedro Remon made a call to New York media and took responsibility for the murder on behalf of “Omega 7”, one of the Cuban exile terrorist organizations operating in the United States under the umbrella of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Despite his long terrorist record, the murderer was not taken to trial until the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, the Cuban UN mission, its officers and families remained systematically harassed.
But for the US people the most painful September 11th was the one of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. It left a balance of about three thousand deaths, including firefighters and other participants in the immediate rescue, who were affected by the toxic gases.
The definition of this act remains pending, given the inappropriateness of classifying the action as a classic terrorist attack due to the abundance of evidence suggesting it could have been an act of official self-aggression.
Evidence refuting the official version that was presented and used to justify the passage of USA PATRIOT Act is unquestionable. The PATRIOT Act has been seen as a state terrorism project derived from the attack which has brought horrible consequences worldwide reaching to the present.
Finally, as Néstor García Iturbe, A Cuban journalist and expert in the fight against terrorism, has rightly pointed out, the US government seemed interested in linking the date of September 11th with ignominious acts, President Barack Obama chose that very day, in 2015, to renew the inclusion of Cuba in the list of nations it sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act –enacted by Washington in 1917– to punish countries whose relations are incompatible with US foreign policy. This absurd list today has a single member in the whole world: Cuba.
August 27, 2016.
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