April 6, 2018 5

Far Right Running US Cuba Policy

7 years ago CubaDebate

 cuba-debate

Ex-diplomat Vicki Huddleston points out that the extreme right has taken over US policy towards Cuba

By: Cubadebate Editorial Staff
April 5, 2018

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.

The former head of the U.S. Interests Office in Cuba between 2001 and 2005, Vicky Huddleston, has just published a book of her authorship entitled “Our Wife in Havana”, in which she points out that the extreme right-wing forces, opposed to any rapprochement, have taken into their hands the course of the Trump administration’s relations with Cuba. 
Vicky Huddleston, a career diplomat who was head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, has written a book about her visions and experiences with Cuba. 
In his particular account of his stay in Cuba, Huddleston gives space to analyze the most recent events that have undermined the rapprochement between the two countries. He writes: “For some months after President Donald Trump’s speech in Miami in June 2017, there was hope that the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Cuba would survive, even if it did not prosper. But that expectation was crushed by the bizarre case of injuries sustained by U.S. and Canadian diplomats. In August 2017, the media revealed that U.S. diplomats had suffered hearing loss, nausea and traumatic brain injuries from some kind of sonic attack. Several of the incidents occurred in the homes of diplomats responsible for security and intelligence between November 2016 and January 2017. However, some took place after February, including the one made public in August. According to the State Department, the injuries also occurred at the Hotel Nacional and the Hotel Capri. None of the attacks, which now total 24 against US diplomats and five against Canadian diplomats, were directed at the US embassy. 
“When the injuries first occurred, the U.S. and Cuban governments tried to address them responsibly. Raúl Castro sought out the embassy’s Chargé d’affaires, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, to assure him that Cuba was not responsible, and invited the FBI to visit Havana, which he did several times to investigate. The State Department expelled two diplomats from the Cuban embassy in Washington D.C., presumably to balance the staff, as U.S. diplomats were forced to leave their post in Havana as a result of their illness. “When the diplomats’ injuries were made public in August 2017, Cuban-American conservatives led by Senator Marco Rubio used the incidents to demand that the United States retaliate against Cuba. Ignoring the American Foreign Service Association’s public statement that the diplomats were prepared to stay in Cuba and continue their work, the Trump administration cut the U.S. embassy staff by more than half and sent all the dependents home. Faced with Rubio’s demands, the government ordered the Cuban embassy to reduce its staff by an equivalent number of diplomats. In addition, the State Department issued an aggressive travel warning, advising U.S. visitors to avoid the island, even though only diplomats had been affected by the sonic incidents. 
“On October 16, 2017, President Trump added his voice to the growing tensions. At a new Rose Garden conference, he said, “I think Cuba is responsible. I do believe that. “He did not cite any evidence of his belief. The State Department continues to claim that it does not know who is responsible for the attacks or the type of device that caused the ailments. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Padilla rejected Trump’s accusation, saying that “there is no evidence, no evidence whatsoever, of the occurrence of the alleged incidents or the cause or origin of these ailments reported by U.S. diplomats. He then added: “There is also no suggestion that these health problems were caused by an attack of any kind during his stay in Cuba”. 
Elsewhere in the text dedicated to the incidents, in her autographical book, the former diplomat Huddleston proposes: 
“The Senate hearing on January 9, chaired by Marco Rubio, further politicized the issue. Acting Secretary of State Francisco Palmieri intensified Rubio’s demonization of Cuba by declaring that “Cuba is a state of security. The Cuban government, in general, has a very closed lid on everything and anything that happens in that country. Her boss, Under Secretary of State Steve Goldstein, was more circumspect in pointing out that “we’re not much further ahead than we were in finding out what happened. “However, he insisted that Raul Castro knows what happened.” These statements by U.S. government officials reinforce the idea that the Cuban government should explain what happened before semi-normal relations are restored. 
“…. the conservative Cuban Americans who have now gained ground in U.S.-Cuban relations will not voluntarily give up control of politics. Instead, they will use their power to demand that embassies continue with only basic personnel and that the U.S. government tighten the embargo. As former Secretary Gutierrez said, “The conservative diaspora does not like stability in our relationship. For them it means that we accept the regime. 
“Senator Rubio and Representative Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) have already complained that the new embargo regulations (NR blockade) issued on November 8, 2017, are insufficient. As Trump promised in his Miami speech, regulations further restrict travel by individual Americans, but visits by groups of people to people engaged in cultural, religious or humanitarian activities are still permitted. 
“We can expect Rubio, Diaz-Balart and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to continue to press their lead, insisting that the Treasury Department issue additional sanctions, further limiting contact with Cuba. Once again, as during the George W. Bush administration, conservative Cuban-American lawmakers will try to force regime change by reducing U.S. contact with the island to an absolute minimum. Your next focus will probably be on face-to-face visits and educational trips. As in the past, they may also seek to reduce the travel and money transfers of the Cuban diaspora, many of whom are U.S. citizens, who visit family and friends and provide more than $1 billion in remittances. Even the two dozen bilateral agreements will not be immune to efforts to restrict cooperation between the U.S. and Cuban governments. 
“As has been the case in the past, the Cuban people will suffer more with these new measures. The travel warning has already reduced the number of U.S. visitors, harming the small family businesses that emerged as a result of Castro’s privatization reforms and the influx of U.S. visitors. The closure of the consular section of the U.S. embassy means that Cubans can no longer obtain visas to travel to the United States, whether to visit friends, to receive medical care, to conduct business, or for cultural, religious and sporting exchanges. Although the State Department has said it will provide a means for family reunification, since January 16, 2018, the U.S. embassy in Havana is not issuing visas of any kind, either for those who hope to join the family in the United States or escape persecution, or for those who simply wish to visit or participate in cultural exchanges. concludes the former US ambassador in her analysis of the current state of relations between Cuba and the United States.

Beyond Racism

7 years ago CubaDebate, ,

 cuba-debate

Graphic Opinion: Beyond Racism

By Adán Iglesias ,
Renowned Cuban cartoonist. Director of the humorous publication DDT.

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump was the candidate of several supremacist groups. Since his rise to power he has come to declare that among the supremacists there are “good people”.

From James Monroe to Marilyn Monroe

7 years ago Granma

From James Monroe to Marilyn Monroe: America for the Americans

American cinema is one of the most powerful weapons of the culture and symbol war that threatens us today.

April 4, 2018 20:04:06

A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.

The industry turned the beautiful blonde Marilyn Monroe into a glamorous sex symbol, an object of collective desire. Photo: MOMA

Rene Greendwald, a veteran CIA official, said in a preparatory meeting for the Genesis project, aimed at the cultural war against Cuba, that they had been more successful in Latin America with Marilyn Monroe than with the Monroe Doctrine. The CIA specialist, who also said that the scenario of a conventional war was well interpreted by the Cubans, whom he believed were capable of facing and defeating any attempt at military occupation, was right, but he always raised the question: And when the enemy is in your living room? How do you identify in a series of your choice, in a film, in a sports programme, in a raeality show or a talk show, an action of the enemy? 

American cinema has effectively contributed, on our continent in particular and in the world in general, to the efficient “selling” of the American way of life, to instilling in people’s minds the image of the superiority of Americans, the invincibility of their army and the inferiority of the peoples of the southern hemisphere. It has helped to distort history, to sell us its products, to impose its fashions, its national symbols.

AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS 
The Monroe Doctrine, developed by John Quincy Adams (the sixth President of the United States) in 1823, was part of the annual message of American President James Monroe to Congress. Since its inception, the United States has sought to expand into the American continent “with extraordinary determination of purpose”. Territorial expansion was considered an exclusively internal matter, and not a foreign policy issue, it was the esteemed “Manifest Destiny”.
The phrase “America for Americans” assumed that Americans were North Americans, that is, white, Saxon and Protestant. This mystique justified the extermination of the American Indians, the conquest of the West, the invading war against Mexico and intervention in the process of independence of Spanish and Portuguese America. 
The fruits of the Doctrine were not long in coming…., American troops have intervened in Latin America hundreds of times. The empire has imposed dictatorships, occupied lands, threatened governments, snatched territories. 
The method used is repeated in history over and over since the conquest of the West: denigrate the opposite, slander, diminish their self-esteem, create and finance opponents, foment internal disturbances, create chaos, and then occupy and if necessary exterminate.

THE GREAT DREAM FACTORY

U.S. cinema, in the midst of a process of expansion and development, reached Europe and spread throughout Latin America after the First World War. These were the happy 1920s, which corresponded to the period of economic prosperity in the United States from 1922 to 1929. 

Hollywood cinema is becoming an efficient tool for “Americanizing”, or simply transmitting the values of the American way of life, spreading the stereotypes outlined by psychology in its prestigious universities, to the cultures and ways of being of the people of the rest of the countries of the world. 

Hollywood cinema is becoming an efficient tool for “Americanizing”, or simply transmitting the values of the American way of life, spreading the stereotypes outlined by psychology in its prestigious universities, to the cultures and ways of being of the people of the rest of the countries of the world.

The cinema quickly created its own legend, associated with the names of the great stars. A whole legion of stars that dazzled the public. The industry turned the beautiful blonde Marilyn into a glamorous sex symbol, an object of collective desire.
People would go into the large darkened room like a church, sit in front of the screen and Hollywood movies would tell them how to dress, how to behave, how to make men fall in love with women and how to make women love men, how to be a hero. Hollywood established patterns of beauty, pointed out what was right and wrong, who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
The role of American cinema in the symbolic construction of capitalism has been essential; the promotion and sale of the American way of life had its main manager in the cinema. No other art surpasses the great dream factory in this endeavor. 
The United States exports 250 000 hours of programming per year, more than 75% of the world total. American cultural products are the only ones that have a level of distribution that reaches all continents, all countries and almost all languages. 
How do we get rid of the Americanization of our habits, tastes, customs and thought? It’s really hard. How do we deprive people of their life-long tastes and practices, syncretized, amalgamated, often substitutes for indigenous ones? Sports, fashion, games, entertainment, language, music, shows, are part of our way of being, of living. How can we give up the way we dress, the TV series we like, the music we listen to, the sports we watch? To all that which gives us pleasure, that we desire when we are crowded into the living room of our house in front of the television, we wait for a while to “distract” ourselves, to rest, to “disconnect”? 
The American cultural product or its substitutes, scientifically elaborated, cause pleasure and entertain, and at the same time facilitate not thinking, oversimplify the thought proceses, of analysis of reality; they think for us. They make us live in a reality made according to our desires, or rather, according to the desires sown for years in our unconscious. 
The battle begins in the living room of the house: the fun, the glamour, the sentimentality, the action, the sex, the brightness, the drama, the morbid, the ridiculous, the simple. 
The examples are countless. The Santa Fe I Document, written in May 1980, provides guidance on the need to engage the Latin American intellectual elite through radio, television, books, articles and brochures, job boards, scholarships, awards and donations. 
If we study the documents of Santa Fe I and II and the Initiative for the Americas, we will notice that the success of this strategy depends, according to both, on achieving a change of culture in Latin America in the first place, that is, the success of the Monroe Doctrine depends on the success of Marilyn Monroe (with the pardon of the beautiful actress victim of this system). 
Today they are trying to expose the club, while slander, defamation of the contrary, the penetration of the symbols of American power, the club, carrot and perhaps less honey are intensifying to achieve their usual purposes: America for Americans.

Martin Luther King

7 years ago CubaDebate,

 cuba-debate

Martin Luther King: 50 Years Can’t Kill a Dream

April 4, 2018

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.

The speech that American activist Martin Luther King is remembered for today was entitled “I have a dream”. The three words became a milestone. Hundreds of politicians and presidents from around the world have used that same phrase at public events. But none has been as powerful as the one Luther King starred in on August 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. However, last Saturday, March 24th, the story of this phrase began a completely new chapter.

Yolanda Renee King, granddaughter of the leader of the civil rights movement in the United States, repeated her grandfather’s words very close to where he first spoke them 55 years ago. At just nine years of age, Yolanda stepped onto the stage with the confidence of a leader who knows the legacy that precedes her and the power of words.

Yolanda Renee King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., speaks on “The March for Our Lives” in support of gun control. Photo: Andrew Harnik/ AP

“My grandfather had a dream that his four young children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” said little King, evoking the exact same phrase used by Dr. King in 1963. 
“I have a dream where we’ve had enough and where this world is one free of weapons. Period,” exclaimed the little girl.  
The reflection of Martin Luther King can be seen in Yolanda, in his voice speaking out against weapons; in the loud fists of the people, in the victims of racial crimes who have shouted words, in the vilified people of happiness who have said “enough is enough!” 
Death invites people to take to the streets. Sadness is contagious, but it becomes a shield and a weapon of combat. The injustice continues half a century later, but fifty years does not kill a dream.
VIDEO: https://twitter.com/AMarch4OurLives/status/977625892745658368
 

Capitalism and Democracy

7 years ago Manuel E. Yepe,

Capitalism and Democracy are Opposites

YepeBy Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico. 

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.

The capitalist socio-economic order is synonymous with freedom only for those who accept that the first freedom must be for capital and that money must be free to buy everything. When the capacity of money to acquire the goods that sustain life in society is restricted or when it is prevented from behaving in the manner of another commodity that can be bought and sold, it is restricted to capitalism.

That is why it is so important for capitalism that popular consciousness has been manipulated by the system and won over to the idea that “capitalism” equals “democracy” and that any attack on the freedom of money to acquire any of the earthly and moral goods of society is an attack on democracy.

Can you imagine what your country, and this planet, would be like if doctors, educators, courts, governments, the means of production and services, information, cultural expressions and even the conditions for making love were equally available to everyone in a society where money cannot determine differences in the quality and urgency of benefits?

But this would distort the precarious asymmetrical balance present in almost every society on the planet, because capitalism needs such ideas to continue on the fringes of citizen aspirations.

Because, for capitalism, it would be terrible if a person with many economic resources were condemned to the same quality of life and the same conditions of treatment and possibilities of cure in cases of illness as those who lack sufficient money.

Because, from a capitalist point of view, it cannot be considered logical that the descendants of the wealthy should have to share the same classrooms and quality of education with children from poor families.

Because it does not seem rational to a good bourgeois that the poor and the rich should be judged, in the case of crime, by the same standards, nor that they should share galleys in prison with corrupt millionaire and hungry common criminals.

Because in the electoral systems of capitalism, it should not happen that elected leaders should dispense with the donations made by the richest, most influential and responsible individuals and entities of society in their campaigns for office. In their future performance as leaders, they may consider themselves obliged to protect the security of corporate capital and that of the nation’s most important and powerful layer.

Because, in the capitalist order, the media is only free if private capital can buy radio and television stations, magazines, newspapers, news agencies or any other means of communication. This is so that they may be in a position to efficiently ensure that what is published serves their own interests, which are the determining factors in bourgeois society as a whole.

Because the capitalist system needs the best of national and international art and culture to be exhibited or imported for the enjoyment of society’s educated elite, which has the resources to pay for the costs involved through advertising.

Because in a capitalist society it is considered healthy that everything is structured in such a way that the main attraction for gender relations is money and economic position. Thus, the most beautiful men and women are attracted to other beautiful men and woman with greater wealth, without peculiar considerations such as understanding, kindness, sensitivity or other sentimental or otherwise subjective arguments.s.

For capitalism, stimulating competitiveness and the struggle for profit as engines of progress, at every level of the economy, brings the greatest dividends and any other consideration – moral, ethical or patriotic, for example – limits the development of the nation.

When any of the above conditions are missing or are threatened by the misunderstanding that they are inherent to capitalism and that this is the same as democracy, we must act with haste and without mercy.

This is how modern capitalism does it systematically, through the government of the United States and the oligarchies that are submissive to it, anywhere in the world.

The erratic hegemonic performance of the United States in recent years has contributed greatly to the discrediting of the capitalist way of life on a global scale. Capitalism has shown that its model is not in line with the aspirations of the dispossessed classes of the rich countries, nor with those of the peoples of the Third World, who are eager to live in a less cruel and more equitable system.

April 5, 2018.