After the Rain
CUBAN CHRONICLES
by Walter Lippmann
Good morning. The lights just went on. It’s just after 2:30 a.m. on Monday, January 28th. I am writing this from Havana Cuba. We had a heavy rain storm here last night, so heavy that the local authorities turn the electricity off until just now. So my phone is in the process of recharging but I thought I would share a few notes with you.
Thanks to everyone who sent me those birthday greetings. I’ve been looking forward to being 75 for quite some time now. Indeed, I planned my 75th birthday the day after I turned 74. Birthdays have never been of great significance to me.
The last time I had one that really mattered was when I turned 50. Amazingly I’m still in touch with some of those nice people that were at my 50th birthday party, although none of them came to the one here in Havana for my 75th. Maybe there will be an overlap, for the 80th birthday party, which I’ve been thinking about organizing now that I’m 75.
This is the first time that there’s been a blackout (apagon, in Spanish) in Havana since I got here on December 18th. Back in the 1990s, electricity blackouts were a common feature, because the government was trying to save electricity during the worst part of the so-called Special Period.
One step the Cuban government took after that time was to organize smaller and more decentralized power generation systems, so that one blackout would not necessarily hit the entire island. Though I can’t tell what’s going on in the rest of the island, it does seem that that strategy proved successful.
BIG TECHNOLOGICAL STEP FORWARD
The fact that I am writing this message to you, at 3 in the morning, represents a giant technological step forward for Cuba. A few months ago, the Cuban phone company, ETECSA and the Island’s cell phone provider, CUBACEL, began what I think we can reasonably call a Great Leap Forward in cell phone service for the Island’s population and everyone visiting here.
It’s home internet service for anyone with a cell phone, or, as I prefer to call them, a mobile phone. Snyone with a modern cell phone and a local phone number can access the internet with a single click.
Internet has been easily available, at least those who could afford it, through a network of internet-capable offices around the country. I have used these in different cities without difficulty for several years now. But these offices are typically only open from 8 30 in the morning to 7 p.m. in the evening.
Outside those hours, the only way you could get online would be through the network of Wi-Fi hot points, which typically are out of doors and don’t have offices with tables, desks, and places where and could anyone could do sustained serious written work. That is all changed now.
No longer is it necessary, for example, to go out in the rain and go to an internet cafe in order to get online. I’m doing this here lying on my back in bed at home. This service is available 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
As a matter of fact, during the blackout last night which began, I’m not sure, but maybe around 9 p.m. when the rain was at its heaviest, I was still fully able to access the internet check email make postings on Facebook and so forth.
In other words I was fully connected, but I sure wish I’d had a candle, or a small flashlight to provide myself with some illumination. But you do what you have to do.
By the way, they remark I made earlier about anyone who could afford internet access, might be a little bit misconstrued if you don’t keep in mind that it is also fully possible today for Cubans to receive the funding for their internet service, as well as for their long-distance phone service, from abroad.
Therefore, friends, family, and anybody who wants to help people here in Cuba to stay connected, can easily use such mobile telephone recharging services, which operate all over the world, to help people here to maintain their connections to friends, family, and people they wish to correspond with all over the world.
There are many such services in operation, and, by the way, they are completely legal under United States law. So anyone in the United States can fund the cell phone service and therefore internet access service through the Cuban phone company.
Ding.com is the company that I use, but there are many others. If you appreciate seeing the photographs that I send and reading the notes that I put out trying to give you some idea of what I’m seeing and doing here in Cuba, please feel free to put a little money on my cell phone. It would be greatly appreciated.
My phone here in Cuba is 535-388-5458 and so, all you would have to do is go to a company like fing.com and put some money on my account. I would appreciate it and I think if you appreciate the service that I’m trying to provide, I would be grateful to have you help me do it by providing me with this resource.
DEFENDING BOLIVARIAN VENEZUELA
In recent days, Washington’s efforts to overthrow the Boulevard and government in Venezuela have reached a fever pitch, with everything except direct military action already being put in play by Washington and all of its allies starting with Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and others that I can’t lift here, this morning.
Today’s Wall Street Journal includes two major articles one a news report and secondly an opinion column by the dreadful Mary Anastasia O’Grady which provide some of the details about some of the ways that Washington and its allies are trying to steal Venezuela’s resource.
Their goals include bringing the country back into the fold of those countries that are dominated economically and politically by the United States. they also want to break up the various steps toward Latin American integration such as ALBA, CELAC and so on.
In one sense, it’s all about oil, and in another sense it’s all about blocking the steps toward the creation of a broader Latin American Nation, the one that Jose Marti referred to as Nuestra America (Our America).
It’s ironic, it’s funny, it’s peculiar, it’s bizarre, that all of those forces in the United States that are so bitterly opposed to Trump, most of them are lining up fully behind Trump in Washington’s efforts to hijack the government of Venezuela, to steal its resources, and to roll back the various social games that have been made in Venezuela under the Bolivarian project.
So far, only a handful of good people in the United States Congress, such as Ilhan Omar, Tulsi Gabbard and Rashid Talib from Detroit have spoken out forcefully about these matters.
Bernie Sanders made a decent observation about how the United States has been on the wrong side of regime change operations in Latin America for a very long time, and shouldn’t get involved again. Alas, Sanders undercut his good criticism with all the same nonsensical criticisms of the Venezuelan government that we can read in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, these undercut a lot of the power of his observations.
Remember when only a tiny handful spoke up at the beginning of the Vietnam War, within the Congress, pointing to the futility of trying to roll back the tide of history, and the tide of third world countries striving for their own independence and self-determination.
We are at not dissimilar stage in history as we were in 1963 when Washington began its doomed to prevent Vietnam returning to the control of the Vietnamese people, which they finally achieved in 1975.
One big difference today is that there is an alternative media, thanks to the Internet, through it is possible to get a more complete and accurate version of the reality than the highly slanted version we are invariably given by the dominant corporate media in the United States and elsewhere. such Services as Telesur.
Please follow the news closely, try to read the articles in today’s Wall Street Journal, and follow as much of the Independent Media as you can. The dominant corporate media simply cannot be trusted today to tell us what’s really going on in Venezuela and then everything related to Venezuela.
From non-rainy Havana Cuba, Monday morning, January 28, 2019. Thanks for reading.
Originally posted on Facebook January 28, 2019
After the tornado
CUBAN CHRONICLES
After the tornado
by Walter Lippmann
January 28, 2019
The report below will give you a summary of where the damages were and what’s being done in its immediate aftermath. Friends living out in Guanabacoa tell me they STILL don’t have electricity nearly 24 hours after yesterday’s tornado. It’s strange to see that, while I’ve been posting many images of the damages there on my FACEBOOK page, to which I refer you for some of the graphic details, here in Vedado where I live there has been no damage at all. I live on Calle 15, between A and B, one block from the Cardiological Hospital.
The rains began here last night and, Probably as a preventative measure, the local electricity was turned off about 9 PM (sorry, not sure of the precise time) since there was nothing at all that I could do, so I just put myself to bed. Didn’t have any candles nor any flashlights, so I surrendered to the inevitable and put myself to bed.
Remarkably, since I now have Internet access through my cell phone, I was able to check mail and see reports for awhile as there was NO interruption in that service. Lights went back up around 3 AM, so I got up, checked mail and got busy collecting and sharing reports, mostly through Facebook. Stayed busy with that until about 10 AM when I decided to go to bed and just rest.
The rains were so heavy that chairs inside the house had to be moved because some windows only have bars, and the rain gets in. The rain can damage the wooden and leather furniture in the hallway between the stairs, the living room and kitchen, and two of the main bedrooms.
Finally got out of the house about an hour ago and began to walk around the neighborhood. The big agro market at 19th and B was closed by the time I got there. It closes up early on Mondays. Other local small businesses were also closed or closing down, but not due to the weather. There seemed to be fewer cars out on the street, but otherwise live appeared quite normal here, except for the cold weather.
It’s VERY cold here, so I’m wearing three layers including a heavy jacket. Forgot my umbrella, and so will probably leave here (the ETECSA at 17th and A) in hopes of being able to avoid the rain. I did have one local man whose picture I’ve taken several times. I’ll post that later through Facebook. Gee, I’m even wearing GLOVES. Walter Lippmann, live in un-tornadoed Havana. 5:58 PM
Originally posted to facebook January 28, 2019
Túpac Katari, five years of Bolivian sovereignty in telecommunications
Túpac Katari, five years of Bolivian sovereignty in telecommunications
By Lemay Padrón Oliveros *
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews
La Paz (PL) – When Evo Morales spoke of the possibility of Bolivia having its own space satellite, some thought he was joking.
Five years later, however, the first Bolivian satellite, Túpac Katari (TKSAT-1), is a reality and has enabled the South American country to enjoy true sovereignty over telecommunications.
Until then, Bolivia had been contracting foreign satellites for 35 years to use these facilities, with the consequent disbursement in dollars and the effect on the national economy.
Today, in addition to that function, TKSAT-1 has generated revenues of $102.2 million in its five years of operations, according to Iván Zambrana, manager of the Bolivian Space Agency (ABE).
Zambrana explained that the satellite’s annual turnover went from seven million dollars in its first year in orbit to 25 million dollars annually from 2016.
If we didn’t have a satellite of our own, that money would have gone outside,” said the director.
In addition, Zambrana recalled that the device managed to reverse the situation of ‘exclusion and inequality’ in access to telecommunications in the country, especially in rural areas, where more than three million Bolivians live.
This does not mean that we have now solved all the problems, but we have made significant progress in erasing this inequality that existed in the Bolivian population, he said.
According to the manager, there are only 50 countries in the world that operate telecommunications satellites, and four are Latin American: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuela.
Zambrana explained that in the first quarter of next year Bolivia will launch the service ‘Banda Ancha en tu Casa’ [Broadband in Your Home], which will offer internet service at low cost, with 30 percent of free space that still has the satellite Túpac Katari.
He also added that a service will be enabled that will allow people to visit the Amachuma earth station free of charge on the first Friday of each month.
The device, owned by the Plurinational State, was placed in orbit on December 20, 2013, from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China.
The vice-minister of telecommunications, Gustavo Pozo, recalled that when Evo had this idea he encountered much resistance, especially because of the high cost of the device, but the president was always clear that the benefits were much greater than the costs.
Currently, TKSAT-1 guarantees all Bolivians 30 television channels, six of them in high definition, and 26 radio stations totally free anywhere in the country.
In addition to its basic services, Túpac Katari has made it possible to transmit information via satellite to all corners of the Bolivian population, the reduction of the tariffs of the communications company Entel in calls, and that state satellite television has a price 80 percent cheaper than the others.
Among its fundamental benefits was the coverage of the Odesur Sports Games, which took place this year in Cochabamba (center), and were broadcast live and in high definition to the 14 participating countries.
It is located in a geostationary orbit, on the plane of the Earth’s Equator, 87.2 degrees west longitude and 36 thousand kilometers above the Earth’s surface, approximately on the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific Ocean.
The satellite is controlled from the Amachuma Earth Station in the city of El Alto, located 4,000 meters above sea level, about 20 kilometers from La Paz, and from the La Guardia Earth Station in the department of Santa Cruz (east).
In total, the Agency has 65 workers, all Bolivians, and is in charge of more than 2,500 telecenters, more than 600 new radio bases, an implemented telehealth network and an educational television, all thanks to the implementation of TKSAT-1.
ABE’s main clients are the state-owned Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Entel) and the private telephone companies Viva and Tigo, as well as other institutions such as Customs and the General Personal Identification Service of Bolivia.
Initially, ABE planned to work on another project for a second satellite, Bartolina Sisa, to support prospecting and natural resource management tasks, monitor agricultural projects and strengthen the search for water resources, but it has been deferred by a budget issue.
Túpac Katari and his wife Bartolina Sisa were indigenous leaders who were dismembered in retaliation for their uprisings against the Spanish colony in the 18th century.
Impossible for his executioners to imagine that three centuries later, the Aymara warlord would travel in the form of a satellite to give his compatriots sovereignty over telecommunications.
* Latin Press Correspondent in Bolivia.
Palestinian prisoners go on hunger strike against Israeli mistreatment
Palestinian prisoners go on hunger strike against Israeli mistreatment
The protest was seconded by thousands of Palestinian prisoners in various detention centres inside and outside the occupied territories.
Published: Wednesday 23 January 2019 | 09:09:46 pm.
Updated: Wednesday 23 January 2019 | 10:50:35 pm.
Author: Juventud Rebelde
digital@juventudrebelde.cu
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Israeli military policemen violently burst into the cells and even used the dogs of prey against the defenceless prisoners. Author: Free Palestine Published: 23/01/2019 | 09:02 pm
Ramallah, January 23.- More than 1,200 Palestinian prisoners held in the Israeli high security prison of Ofer went on an indefinite hunger strike in protest against the aggressions and mistreatment of military police, aided by dogs of prey, during violent searches carried out in their cells.
The protest was seconded by thousands of other Palestinian prisoners in various detention centers inside and outside the occupied territories, Middle East Monitor reported.
Ofer prison is the only Israeli prison built in Palestinian territory, located near the town of Beitunia, from which it is separated by an imposing concrete wall, and only three kilometers from Ramallah, in the West Bank.
The prison is governed by its own law and the hunger strike is considered a transgression of the rules, which carries severe punishments, sources of the Resistance recalled.
Ofer prison houses about 1,200 Palestinian prisoners, including a large number of young people and minors.
According to the Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer, there are about 5,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, including 230 children and 54 women. Of that number, 481 were held without trial under the pretext of an illegal practice known as “administrative detention”.
In all Israeli prisons tensions increased, as the prisoners solidarized with Ofer, and suspended their daily activities, even refusing to eat.
According to the Palestinian Prisoners Association, some 150 prisoners were injured when special forces of the Israeli military police stormed Ofer prison on Monday morning.
According to this organization, six prisoners suffered bone fractures, 40 were injured in the head and had to receive stitches, and several were injured as a result of the use of rubber projectiles and tear gas.
Cuba condemns aggressions
Meanwhile, at the United Nations, during the Security Council’s quarterly open debate, the Cuban representative, Ambassador Anayansi Rodríguez Camejo, reiterated her strong rejection of Israel’s use of disproportionate and indiscriminate force against Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories.
It also condemned the unilateral actions of the United States, such as the withdrawal of financial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East, the repeated obstruction of that country so that the Security Council does not condemn the escalation of violence, the tragic events that have occurred in the Gaza Strip since 30 March 2018, and the establishment of its diplomatic representation in the city of Jerusalem, which only contribute to the worsening of the situation.
NATO’S Cruel 70-Year History
NATO’S Cruel 70-Year History
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The ultra reactionary American writer, columnist, politician, and radio commentator Patrick (Pat) Joseph Buchanan recalled, on January 18th in his column widely circulated in several countries, that on this date, seventy years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. He did so with a memorable quotation from the undisputed French leader General Charles De Gaulle who said in 1966, when he was ordered to leave his headquarters in Paris: “Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.”
“NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.
“And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations, from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania, as an attack on the United States.
The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.”
“Apparently,” Buchanan writes, “President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans and suggested that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, should study the matter in the light of current events and ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, Germany joined NATO, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, the USSR was divided into several nations and Leninism expired in its place of origin.
As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that alleged Soviet threat should be allowed to fade away, and Europe should now provide for its own defense.
It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, US Ambassador to Moscow, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a “fateful error.”
Soon afterwards, the doctrine of “containment” became official U.S. policy, and even Kennan himself, whose policies he had helped launch, started criticizing them.
Before the end of the year 1948, Ambassador Kennan was convinced that negotiations could be initiated with the Soviet government, but his proposals were rejected by the Truman administration.
“But Kennan was right,” says Buchanan. “America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.”
“And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.”
“Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory,” says Buchanan
“Halfway into Trump’s term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home — or whether he is going to act upon his convictions,” says Buchanan.
Celebrated as “the most successful alliance in history,” NATO has had two histories.
The capitalist version is that in 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city. The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb equal in power to the ones that the United States – inhumanly and unnecessarily—had exploded in two densely populated Japanese cities causing a still uncalculated number of victims.
As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, Washington formed a new alliance to supposedly protect the crucial European powers and make sure that all of them remained at its service.
What remains of NATO today is twelve nations that, with more or less consistency, serve the interests of the greatest superpower which has not yet stopped aspiring to be the only one.”
January 21, 2019.
AMLO Practices what he preaches
AMLO Practices what he preaches
Published: Tuesday 25 December 2018 | 07:39:10 pm.
By Marina Menéndez Quintero
marina@juventudrebelde.cu
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The new President of Mexico delivers… and makes the most of the time. He could be seen as the other side of social plundering, which in other Latin American countries means the return of the ultra reactionary and extremist right.
The Mayan train will touch every ruin of the ancestors, and will bring tourism, estimated in those areas at about ten million visitors, to each place. He is confident that it will help create new jobs.
His awareness of the need to mitigate the differences between the north and south of the country was also reflected in next year’s budget, which prioritizes the south-southeast as “an act of justice, because it has been the most abandoned region of the country and its time has come”.
He also thought of the workers and decreed a minimum wage increase of 16 percent, convinced that if there are no revenues there is no internal market or income. In addition, he said, people will earn a decent wage, and an historic debt will be settled with the worst paid workers.
The increase is 50 percent in the border areas with the United States, a difference that may be due to the desire that their nationals stay in Mexico and not emigrate to the neighboring nation.
Precisely, the most transcendent action of these first days, because of the repercussions it must have for his country and Central America, is perhaps the materialization of his approach to stop illegal migration, and the decision by his own citizens and those of neighboring countries to go to another country.
Five billion dollars will be dedicated in 2019 to productive projects in Central America. He has already presented the plan to the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who said he would analyze the project. Hopefully he will support it… and forgets the wall. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is also being consistent in this regard.
Certainly, the doors of social development may be opening for Mexico after being closed for dozens of years, including the recovery of an economy where the neoliberal model had almost reprivatized its main conquest, won by Lazaro Cardenas when he nationalized oil.
The announced creation of a National Guard is in the works and almost ready to be submitted to popular opinion. This body will henceforth be in charge of the security of all Mexico, and leave the army and the rest of the armed forces, for other types of orders.
In order to make sure that his mandate will be enough, AMLO, who insists that he will not lrun for president again, works 16 hours a day so that his term will be doubled and six years will produce twelve years’ worth of work completed, as he said just two days ago to journalists. But time is time, and in real life he only has a six-year term.
Knowing that whoever comes after him can upset everything again, he wants to have a Constituent Assembly and, in fact, has already issued decrees so that each vindicatory step that he is taking is written in ink and in the form of laws.
He is today the opposite side of the right-wing and neoliberal processes that feed on the Argentine population under Cambiemos and Mauricio Macri and, above all, on the hardships and vicissitudes that arelikely to fall on the people of Brazil when, on January 1, the intolerant and reactionary Jair Bolsonaro takes over.
Let’s hope that the Mexican opposition, respectful until today of the popular roots that demonstrated AMLO’s crushing triumph at the polls, does not trip him up or boycott him. And also that the mafias that up to now have profited from public money do not turn against him.
Let Andrés Manuel López Obrador do his job. And may he help our sister nation of Mexico get safely into 2024. That could be a good wish for Latin America on the coming New Year’s Eve.
Bolivia: An Example of Economic Stability
Bolivia: An Example of Economic Stability
Published: Thursday 17 January 2019 | 10:12:09 am
By Hedelberto López Blanch
hedelberto@opciones.cu
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Who would have thought, 13 years ago, that with the arrival of indigenous president Evo Morales Ayma to the presidency of Bolivia, that this country, for the first time in its history, would begin a straight line period of political stability, economic impulse and social development that has benefited the vast majority of its inhabitants.
Skeptics and right-wing forces in Latin America still don’t want to understand, but as Evo recently stated, his country’s economic stability is an example for the world to follow.
During 2018, Bolivia consolidated its position as one of the countries in Latin America with the most advances in the economic-social sphere, after reaching a growth of 4.7 percent and a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 40 billion dollars.
It is extremely important that when aggressive neoliberal and privatization policies are imposed in Latin America, promoted from the United States with the backing of several international financial organizations, Bolivia’s Minister of Economy and Public Finances, Mario Guillén, says that the nationalization of natural resources has been the fundamental pillar to understand the success of his country’s economic model.
Guillén added that this model allowed the State to appropriate the economic surplus, whose resources are invested in the construction of a productive-based economy and redistributed through population bonuses, public investment, wage increases and cross-subsidies to eradicate poverty and reduce the gaps between rich and poor.
In this way, domestic demand was boosted, which in a context of international economic crisis of high volatility and uncertainty has become the main engine of economic growth.
And notice the relevance of the system adopted, since in 2005, four out of every ten people lived in extreme poverty, without satisfying their basic food needs, but today this index has reduced by half, that is, only two out of every ten people still live in these conditions.
When Evo took began of the first term in 2006, the characteristics in Bolivia were citizen political insecurity, with great poverty, lack of education and attention to the health of the people, while the economy suffered indiscriminate looting.
From that year on, a series of measures were taken to nationalize productive, mining and service companies and wealth, and a stage began to leave behind more than two centuries of exploitation by foreign governments and transnational companies with the consent of the Creole oligarchies.
Previously, its main energy products and public companies created by the 1952 revolution had been privatized or sold at auction prices. This process increased between 1985 and 2005 during the neoliberal governments. During that period, the State ceased to control 70 percent of the productive activity and its main industry, Yacimientos Petrolíficos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), received royalties of only 18 percent from the transnationals.
By May 1, 2006, the hydrocarbon industry was nationalized and a retention policy was established for the sector, divided into 50 percent royalties, seven percent in recoverable profits from operating companies, YPFB, and payment of taxes and patents. In this way it was ensured that the State and the people obtained an income in the first six years of $12,424 million dollars, an average of 2,000 million dollars annually.
In addition, in these 13 years, the recovery of wealth and resources was promoted as an act of social, economic and political justice. This allowed poverty to be reduced and the family economy to be revitalized; a modernization of transportation was carried out with the launch of the longest cable car in the world. It has seven lines, 20 kilometers of travel and 125 million passengers transported since its inauguration, contributing additionally to the development of tourism.
One of the first tasks undertaken by the Plurinational State was to implement a program to eliminate the extreme ignorance of millions of Bolivians, with the help of Cuban and Venezuelan specialists. In 2010, UNESCO declared the country free of illiteracy.
There are many benefits and one of the main ones is that at the regional level Bolivia is no longer one of the poorest countries. The urban open unemployment rate fell substantially, from 8.1 percent in 2005 to 4.5 percent in 2017. GDP grew since 2006 at an average rate of 4.3 per cent, while social programmes were broad and varied.
The progress made by the Plurinational State in just 13 years is instructive. It would be prudent for other poor countries in Latin America to stop looking north and begin to adopt economic and social policies that help their citizens, as Bolivia has done.
The U.S. War Against The Weak
The U.S. War Against The Weak
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
War Against the Weak is a well-documented book of more than half a thousand pages, written by Edwin Black. It describes a criminal operation planned by the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century and put into practice between the 1930’s and 1960s with the purpose of creating a dominant superior race.
That U.S. campaign, virtually ignored in the world today because of the media cover up to which it has been subjected, served as a model for the Holocaust of the Jewish population carried out by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Characters and institutions in politics and the economy that today are presented as respectable champions of democracy and respect for human rights, were involved in this genocide.
The book tells us that, in the first six decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Americans labeled as feeble minded –because they did not conform to Teutonic patterns– were deprived of their right to reproduce.
Selected in prisons, asylums and orphanages because of who their ancestorswere, their national origin, ethnicity, race or religion, they were sterilized without their consent, and prevented from procreating and getting married. They were separated from their partners by governmental bureaucratic means.
This pernicious white collar war was conducted by philanthropic organizations, prestigious professors in elite universities, wealthy businessmen, and senior government officials who formed a pseudoscientific movement called Eugenics Its purpose, beyond racism, was to create a superior Nordic race that would impose itself at global level.
The eugenics movement gradually built up a national legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to cleanse the United States of the “unfit.” Intelligence tests colloquially known as “IQ measurements” were invented to justify the exclusion of the “weak-minded”, who were often nothing more than shy people or persons who spoke another language, or who had a different skin color.
Forced sterilization laws were enacted in some 27 US states to prevent the persons so detected from reproducing. Marriage bans proliferated to prevent race mixing. Numerous lawsuits, whose real purpose was to impose eugenics and its tactics in everyday life, reached the Supreme Court of the United States.
The plan was to immediately sterilize 14 million people in the United States and several million more in other parts of the world so that, at a later stage, they could continue eradicating the rest of the “weak” and leave only the purebred Nordics on the planet.
In the 1930’s, some 60,000 people were coercively sterilized. and an incalculable number of marriages were banned by state laws stemming from racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, covered with a mantle of respectable science.
Eugenics, whose objectives were global, was spread by U.S. evangelists to Europe, Asia and Latin America forming a well-woven network of movements with similar practices. By means of lectures, publications and other means, they kept its advocates on the lookout for opportunities for the expansion of their ideas and purposes.
Thus it arrived in Germany, where it fascinated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. German National Socialism transformed the U.S. search for a “superior Nordic race” into what was Hitler’s struggle for a “dominant Aryan race.”
Nazi eugenics quickly displaced American eugenics because of its fierceness and speed, as well as by the scientific rationality applied by the murderous doctors of Auschwitz. The process had been previously rehearsed at the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenic Labs on Long Island, New York, with the financial support of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman foundations in whose laboratories the eugenics experiments, that culminated in Auschwitz, began.
When the extermination of Jews was described as genocide in the Nuremberg Trial, the U.S. institutions linked to the practice of eugenics, it was renamed “genetics” and continued its sinister projects for more than a decade.
Edwin Black’s book, a jewel of investigative journalism, provides the reader with the possibility of seeing the common kinship and features of this tragic history with the circumstances the U.S. population faces today.
For electoral purposes, from the beginning of his election campaign, Donald Trump raised the “America First” slogan, backed up with many of his own manifestations of xenophobia, rejection of immigrants and proven identification with white supremacists. He did this within the scenario of deep political fragmentation of a country whose ruling elite has been able to keep the population focused on the naïve alternative between Democrats or Republicans.
Any similarity is pure coincidencidental!
December 31, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Ernest Tate on Cuba
The pdf link below is chapter fifteen from volume one of Ernest Tate’s memoir, “Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s”, published by Resistance Books, London. In this chapter, using archival sources, he describes in detail how a small group of Canadian revolutionary socialists in the Socialist Educational League, S.E.L., later to become the League for Socialist Action, L.S.A., of which he was a leader, organized in 1960 to defend the early Cuban Revolution against a right-wing propaganda offensive inspired by American imperialism, designed to quarantine it from the Canadian people. Their campaign in defense of Cuba, he writes, was one of the most successful of its kind in the English-speaking world.
Constitution of the Republic of Cuba in PDF
In the course of next week, Correos de Cuba will put on sale in all its units and newsstands, the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba that was approved in the Second Ordinary Session of the IX Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power, at the price of one peso in national currency.
Correos de Cuba will put on sale in the course of next week in all its units and press stands, to the extent that it is available in the provinces, the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba that was approved in the Second Ordinary Period of Sessions of the IX Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power.
The document will have a 16-page tabloid format and will be marketed through the national postal network at the price of one peso (CUP).
As reported, the new constitution will be submitted to popular referendum for ratification on February 24, 2019.
Institutional Communication Direction
Correos de Cuba Business Group
5 January 2019
Constitution of the Republic of Cuba in PDF
This note translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
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