by Walter Lippmann
February 12, 2019
In these last days of my current 2-month visit, I engage in a mad dash of running around to stores to buy books and gifts for friends and family. Yesterday I went to one of the very best Cuban bookstore is in which everything is new and for sale in moneda nacional, the prices there are a ridiculous low for a person from United States. The stack of books you’re looking at in this picture, cost me slightly over $5.00 CUC for the entire stack.
Literally 135 Cuban pesos moneda nacional. The large format book at the bottom of which I bought to contain mental exercise to help people to maintain their mental agility as they age the three light blue covered books is a relationship manual, there is a book of Puerto Rican short stories, a book on the history of psychoanalysis in Cuba, and finally, the pleasure syndrome a history of pleasure in human sexuality.
Originally posted to facebook February 12 at 10:56 PM
by Walter Lippmann
February 12, 2019
This is a workstation at what is probably the best copyshop I have ever found in Cuba, it is called InkPression and it is located on Jay Street between 25 and 27 and if you look right below the flat panel screen, you will see a tray with 10 USB slots. When I went in there yesterday for of those slots were filled with connection cables for external hard drives. looking carefully underneath the monitor, you will see four external hard drives all plugged into this computer.
People walk into this place which has a big catalog of bootleg movies videos TV series and so forth which you can have copied on your external hard drive for $0.25 a piece. I’m usually at this workstation because I have the shop print the portraits which I have taken, and many of which you have seen on my Facebook page. I have a habit whenever, whenever possible, of having prints made of the portraits I take of various people and I really had a lot of fun, handing these individuals their own pictures. It’s my impression that very few of them have pictures like this of their own, and so I derive a lot of pleasure as well as the recipients do. You already know how much I enjoy doing portraits.
Originally posted to facebook February 12 at 10:50 PM
by Walter Lippmann
February 12, 2019
This is the ETECSA office at 17th and S streets in Vedado. This is the main place where I do the great bulk of my written online activity. There are 20 computers in this office of which 17 or so are usually in working, functional condition. Going online here costs only one CUC per hour. It is nicely air-conditioned and it is a quiet place most of the time. There used to be long lines for people getting into this place but in this past year, with the beginning of home base to internet through your cell phones, there are almost never a line to get into the office. The only line they have are to get into buy more internet or cell phone cards. The man with the baseball hat, looking at the camera, is, of course, yours truly. The security guard kindly agreed to my request to take my picture, showing me working. Never a day goes by when I’m not in this office.
Originally posted to facebook February 12 at 10:56 PM
by Walter Lippmann
February 12, 2019
Small private stand outside of a big hotel at a very busy intersection, 17th Street and A in the Vedado area. She is selling various kinds of crackers, bars of guava paste, turron de mani, a deadly sweet confection made of ground peanuts and sugar. and other sugar-laden goodies (or baddies!).
Originally posted to facebook February 12 at 10:40 PM
by Walter Lippmann
February 12, 2029
Yours truly, just coming back from one of my last dash. As you know, I like bright colored garments. Lili, my landlady, took this photograph. I really do not like having my picture taken and you can tell that by the fact that my smile here is a little bit forced. In my left hand is a little shopping bag filled with goodies from the store CLANDESTINA, a shop which was celebrating its 4th anniversary today.
They specialize in garments, shopping bags, and other items made of 2nd or 3rd generation recycled Cloth of various kinds. Interestingly, if you look on their website, they have received help, from the local Google operation here in Cuba as well as from the Norwegian Embassy. Their prices are someone out of League of ordinary Cubans, but for foreigners with disposable in incomes oh, they’re not too much and they are charming and attractive.
And so I spent a total of $63 for which I obtained a couple of shopping bags a couple of t-shirts an apron for my next door neighbor in Los Angeles, and for printed guides to the city produced by the shop. They also do a considerable online business and I will give you their web address.
Originally posted on Facebook February 12 at 10:32 PM
by Walter Lippmann
February 10, 2019
These are some pictures I took yesterday at the Havana book fair. There are captions along with each of these images giving some context.
Originally published on facebook February 10 at 3:55 AM
The reality of the doctors who decided to stay in that South American nation is that they can no longer exercise their profession after the end of the More Doctors program.
February 5, 2019.
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Faced with the attempt by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to sully the work and honor of the Cuban doctors working in the More Doctors program, Cuba responded with customary dignity. The Ministry of Public Health announced the withdrawal of our doctors.
The decision implied the return to Cuba of the more than 8,000 doctors working in Brazil on the program that began in August 2013.
Since his election in October 2018, Bolsonaro repeatedly attacked Cuba and the More Doctors program.
In addition to repeating his questioning of the quality and training of Cuban professionals and requiring them to carry out an examination to revalidate their degrees. Bolsonaro was thus undertaking it against the PAHO-Brazil-Cuba agreements.
Of the 8,332 professionals who were in Brazil, the majority decided to return to the Island, the dignified gesture of the Cuban doctors awakened the admiration of the world and made visible once again the validity of the internationalist character of the Cuban Revolution.
But what has been the fate of the Cuban doctors who stayed in Brazil?
A paper published by EFE on February 3 describes the desperate situation in which Cuban doctors find themselves in the face of unfulfilled promises and the latent reality of a system that is not interested in the health of the poorest and that used them as a disposable tool in the machinery of manufacturing lies and manipulation.
According to EFE, from Sao Paulo, Brazil, the doctors who did not return to the island after the end of the More Doctors program can no longer practice their profession in the South American country.
Some of those who stayed were granted the status of “refugees”, so as not to lose their status as residents and be able to obtain a job portfolio, “a procedure that takes time while they do not receive any income”.
The hope of re-entering Más Médicos as a way to obtain the necessary employment is fading, “to achieve this they must wait at the end of a long line, because the competition launched by the government to fill the vacancies made Brazilian doctors a priority.
Initial applications surpassed the number of vacancies, 8,517, but there are some 800 not filled because “some of the Brazilian doctors chosen gave up their positions because they were in areas that were difficult to access or lacked resources.
Meanwhile, the Cuban doctors who remained in Brazil are trying to obtain one of the 800 places, as soon as they have the right to access the competition, a possibility that has been delayed time and time again.
Getting a job in “anything” becomes the only possibility, the other is waiting for a revalidation exam to be held in order to compete in the labor market on equal terms with Brazilians, but the bad news is that since 2017 there are no exams, it can take years for one to be called.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The growing hostility of Western governments towards China has more to do with the interests of Western investors than with legitimate security fears, according to Stephen Gowans, a Canadian political analyst, who regularly publishes in the Voltaire Network, Global Research and other progressive media.
The U.S. National Defense Strategy for 2018 ranks China at the top of the world’s external threats to the United States, even above Russia, North Korea, Iran, and “various terrorist groups with global reach”.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo describes China as the “great long-term threat to the United States” and the Trump administration, according to the Washington Post, considers China to be “the real enemy.”
What has China done to deserve so many “distinctions”? The answer –according to Gowans– is that China has developed a state-led economic model that limits the profit opportunities of the U.S. investors and defies their control over high-tech economic sectors that include artificial intelligence and robotics, which are essential to U.S. military supremacy.
“Washington is immersed in a multi-faceted war to prevent Beijing from going ahead with plans to become world leader in10 broad areas of technology, including information technology, aerospace and electric vehicles”. Washington seeks to “curtail China’s plans to develop advanced technology ” and “force China to allow US companies to sell their products and operate freely” in China, in conditions that will allow the United States to maintain its economic and military supremacy.
For its part, “China seeks to alter a global economic system that only allows them to manufacture t-shirts while the US is in charge of high-tech productions,” according to Yang Weimin, senior economic advisor to Chinese President Xi Jinping. But now Xi is “determined to have China dominate its own microchips, systems, and other basic technologies” in order to become “technologically self-sufficient.”
But self-sufficiency in industries such as aerospace, telecommunications, robotics and artificial intelligence means taking China –a huge market– out of the scope of US high-tech companies.
In addition, given that the supremacy of the West has always depended on technological superiority, China’s efforts to challenge the monopoly of high technology directly generate a renewed challenge to Washington’s capacity to utilize the Pentagon as an instrument to obtain advantages in trade and investment opportunities for U.S. entrepreneurs.
China’s economic model is called state capitalism or “market socialism.”
Both terms refer to the two defining factors of the Chinese model: the presence of markets, for materials, products and labor force, and the role of the State, in charge of the industrial planning and corporate ownership.
The “pillar of the economy” is made up by the more than 100,000 state-owned enterprises of China. The State has a strong presence in the higher echelons of the economy.
“Key sectors, such as banking, are dominated by companies controlled by the State”. State-owned enterprises “represent about 96% of the telecommunications industry, 92% of energy and 74% of automobiles”.
Beijing is the largest shareholder of the country’s 150 largest companies.
The state National Commission of Development and Reform is in charge of industrial planning. The Commission uses a variety of means to foster Chinese industry in key sectors, and develops plans to give preferential treatment to Chinese companies in strategic areas.
Beijing is counting on state-owned companies to become leaders in semiconductors, electric vehicles, robotics and other high technology sectors and finances them by means of subsidies and funding by state-owned banks.
The Planning Commission also guides the development of steel, photovoltaic energy, high-speed trains and other critical industries.
Beijing has closed the door to foreign ownership in sectors it considers strategic or vital to national security. These include “finance, defense, energy, telecommunications, railways and ports”, as well as steel.
All the steel companies are state owned and are all financed by state owned banks.
In total, China has restricted or closed foreign investment in 63 sectors of its own economy, such as stem cell research, education and training, satellites, prospection and exploitation of numerous minerals, the media, as well as research institutes in the humanities and social sciences.
January 24, 2019.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In late November, President Donald Trump announced that Washington had withdrawn its recognition of Nicolas Maduro as the President of Venezuela, and has now given it to the Head of the National Assembly in contempt, José Guaido.
In this way, the United States will openly support the regime change in Caracas This has been the dream of the Neo-cons for a long time and can become a nightmare for Trump.
“Why does the American President act like this?” Ronald “Ron” Paul wonders on his blog. Paul, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, member of the Republican Party and former representative to the House in the U.S. Congress, who holds the largest record of conservative votes for a representative in Congress since 1937.
He has been called the “intellectual godfather” of the Tea Party. He has achieved notoriety for his libertarian positions on many political issues, often clashing with the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties. Paul has run for the Presidency three times: in 1988 as candidate of the Libertarian Party, and in 2008 and 2012 as a Republican.
“According to the U.S. State Department, the Administration is acting to help enforce the Venezuelan Constitution… As if the Administration were so anxious to enforce its own Constitution!” Paul ironically wrote on January 29.
It’s also ironic that Trump — a president who has spent his first two years in office fighting accusations that a foreign country interfered in U.S. elections– not only meddles in a foreign election, but also grants himself the right to appoint the president of a foreign country.
“How would we react if the Chinese and the Russians decided that President Trump is not upholding the U.S. Constitution and recognized Nancy Pelosi as President of the United States?” asks Paul.
Even those who would like to see a change of government in Venezuela should reject any notion that such change must be “helped” by the United States. According to news reports, Vice President Mike Pence was so involved in Venezuelan internal affairs that in fact he urged Guaido to name himself president and pledged America’s support. This is not just foolish but also very dangerous. A Venezuelan civil war would result in massive death and even more economic misery.
Regime change has long been the U.S. policy for Venezuela. The United States has been waging an economic war against it practically since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, was first elected in 1998. The objective of the U.S. sanctions and other measures against Venezuela and other countries targeted by Washington’s is to make life so miserable for the average citizen that it would make them stand up and throw out their leaders. But, of course, once they do, they must replace those leaders with someone approved by Washington.
“Remember,” writes Paul,” after the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, when the people rose up and overthrew their leader, the “wrong” candidate was then elected. The army moved and deposed the elected president and replaced it with one approved by Washington. The then Secretary of State, John Kerry, called that “restoring democracy.”
“It’s tragicomic,” says Ron Paul, “that Trump appointed the convicted criminal Elliot Abrams, as his key person to “restore democracy” in Venezuela. Abrams played a key role in the Iran-Contras scandal and became one of the main architects of the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. His role in the promotion of the horrible violence in Latin America in the decade of the 1980’s should disqualify him from returning to any public office.
“Instead of this coup d’état, a better policy of ours to relate to Venezuela in the last 20 years should have been one of commitment and trade. If we really believe in the superiority of a free market system, we must also believe that we can only preach by example, not by forcing our system on others,” stresses Paul.
Just four months ago, President Trump said at the UN that he respected “the right of every nation to practice its own customs, beliefs and traditions. The United States cannot tell others how to live, work or worship. In return, we should only ask respect for our sovereignty.”
“Unfortunately, it seems that these were just empty words. We know from what happened in Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. that this will not end well for Trump… or for the United States. We must leave Venezuela in peace!” concludes Ron Paul whom no one can accuse of being a defender of Socialism.
January 31, 2019.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“Contrary to what Venezuelans believe, the objective of the United States is not to overthrow President Maduro but to apply in the “Caribbean Basin” the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski doctrine, and to destroy the state structures in the countries of the region. This requires the elimination of Nicolas Maduro, but also of Juan Guaidó”.
That’s how Thierry Meyssan, founding president of the Damascus-based Voltaire Network, and a brilliant specialist on Middle East topics, sees it.
This scheme was already used in 2011 to make the internal issues that took place in Syria appear as an external aggression perpetrated by an army of mercenaries.
In the case of Venezuela, the Organization of American States (OAS) — known around the world as the Yankee Ministry of Colonies, and whose Secretary General immediately recognized Guaidó as President – undertook the role that the Arab League had in the case of Syria. The role of the so-called Friends of Syria’s (which in fact were of Washington’s) was played by the Lima Group, also under U.S. control.
Burhan Ghalioun, an old collaborator of the American National Endowment for Democracy ( NED), played the part of leader of the opposition in Syria. He was soon replaced by another little character, who, in turn, was replaced by another, then by another, and again for yet another; so many times that no one remembers their names anymore. You can assume that Juan Guaidó will be quickly discarded in the same way.
But the Syrian scheme of the United States worked only in part because: in the first place, Russia and China opposed it in the UN Security Council repeatedly; secondly, because the Syrian people supported their government and gave evidence of exceptional resistance; and, finally, because Russia managed to support and equip the Syrian Arab Army in time for its confrontation with NATO and the foreign mercenaries.
It is known that Washington, knowing that the Pentagon will not be able to continue using the jihadists to weaken the Syrian state, is now proposing to place the Syrian case in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Department who, in turn, will do everything possible to prevent the reconstruction of the Syrian country and state.
The idea is for the self-proclaimed Interim President Guaidó to head a parallel administration that focuses its objective on: obtaining oil money in various lawsuits; “settles” the territorial dispute with Guyana; “satisfactorily” negotiates the question of refugees; “agrees” with Washington on all the foreign policy issues, and manages to imprison in the United States the Venezuelan Chavista leaders under various pretexts.
Based on the experience of the last eight years in the Middle East, what is happening in Venezuela cannot be compared with what happened in Chile in 1973. The United States was then trying to control the Americas and close the way to all forms of Soviet Union influence. They wanted to exploit the natural riches of that part of the world, leaving the least possible control in the hands the national governments… at the lowest attainable cost.
Today, on the contrary, the United States persists in considering the world as uni-polar. It has no friends or enemies. According to its vision, every population integrated into the globalized economy or living in a territory that has natural resources that the United States wants to control (not necessarily exploit immediately), these must be under the shared control of the Pentagon in the nations where they are located.
Therefore, Washington is trying to prevent the proper functioning of the state structures of those countries.
“It is possible that Juan Guaidó believes he is really capable of solving the crisis and serving his country by proclaiming himself interim president. But in fact it would actually have the opposite effect, because it would create a situation similar to a civil war. He, or his successors, will ask for help from Brazil, Guyana and Colombia, which will deploy “peace keepers” with support of Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States. And the violence would continue until entire cities are in ruins.
It doesn’t matter if the Venezuelan government is Bolivarian or liberal, whether their relations with Washington are good or not. The goal is not to achieve a “regime change” as in Syria, but to weaken the Venezuelan state as much as possible. That process would begin in Venezuela and immediately extend to other countries in the region –such as Nicaragua– until there remains no real political power in the region as a whole”, predicts Thierry Meyssen.
“This situation is very clear for many Arabs whose countries already fell into that trap. But now, it does not seem to be seen with enough clarity in Latin America”, warns the expert.
“Of course, it is also possible that Venezuelans may become aware of the manipulation, put aside their divisions and save their country,” concludes Meyssen.
January 28, 2019.
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