The three battles of 2021
The three battles of 2021
By Agustín Lage Dávila
December 28, 2021
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Photo: AP
This (No. 25) is the last note of 2021 and it is unavoidable to use it to summarize the message of what we appreciate has been essential in this difficult but also glorious year.
Cubans, each one from his or her position, with his or her ideas and values, but essentially all of us, have been involved in three great battles that will decide our future:
The control of the COVID epidemic.
The confrontation of the media and cultural aggression against our project of society.
Economic development, even in the context of the blockade.
These posed enormous threats to us: the first one threatened our health, the second one, our thinking, the third one, our material sustenance. The three together threatened our Nation.
In the first two we won, unquestionably. We must consolidate them and project them into the future, because they can continue, but they are essentially victories. In the third one, we managed to resist, which is no small thing, and it is the indispensable step to win, but the great victory still requires a lot of effort and intelligence.
The control of the epidemic of COVID-19 was achieved this year with biotechnology, science, the strength, and the experience and universality of our health system, and the educated participation of the people and their institutions. It validated the fertility of the scientific development strategy implemented by the Revolution for decades, and the importance of the connections between science and production that were built since the founding moments of the Scientific Pole, under Fidel’s leadership.
It validated the concept that health cannot be merchandise, and that the budgeted or entrepreneurial institutions on which health services depend have to be the socialist property of all the people. This is not only for moral reasons (which is the main thing) but also for reasons of efficiency. This battle will leave experiences for the improvement and development of both actors, industry and the health system, which we must apply immediately because the global pandemic context will continue in 2022.
The media and cultural aggression, with which, especially this year, an attempt was made to divide the people and erode their collective capacity to respond to the challenges of the moment, was defeated. Its implementation and financing (we know well by whom), in combination with the reinforcement of the blockade, precisely at a time when we were facing a dangerous epidemic, will go down in history as one of the greatest political immoralities of this century. It will be remembered in the gallery of shame, together with the Weyler reconcentration, the Nazi holocaust, the nuclear bombing, the Vietnam war, the support to the dictatorships of the South American cone, the South African apartheid and the murders of teachers by counterrevolutionary gangs in Cuba. History will not absolve its articulators.
The media and cultural aggression against Cuba is a war of thought. We defeated it, as Martí wanted “with thought”. The encouragement of violence, the promotion of selfish appetites, the distrust in the future of the country, and the dissemination of intellectual superficialities, crashed against the wall of Cuban culture, now solidified by six decades of massive and free access to education. They gambled on finding many influential fools in Cuba, and it turned out that there were very few.
This battle also leaves us experiences for the improvement and development of political and cultural work, which must be well analyzed because this episode of 2021 is part of an historical dispute of more than two centuries.
The third battle, that of economic development, has not yet been won. And it would be superficial to attempt a simplifying analysis in the space of 4 pages of a blog. But there are some things to say:
The first is that we have resisted the longest economic onslaught in world history (60 years), articulated by the largest economic and military power in world history; and we continue to resist 30 years after the collapse of the allies we had in Eastern Europe. And here we are, our people without hunger, without mafias, without housing evictions, with all their children in school, with our people’s government functioning under the socialist Constitution that we made and approved ourselves. This capacity dor resistance makes us proud, not only because of the resistance itself, but also because it indicates our capacity for development. Without sovereignty and national unity, no economic strategy, no matter how “technically brilliant” it might be, could work.
The second is that we are not frozen in old economic strategies, which worked at the time but have already fulfilled their historical role and exhausted their capacity to adapt to the changes in the world economy. We are in a moment of legislative and organizational creativity to adapt our development model to the new realities, without ceasing to be sovereign, equitable, educated and socialist.
The third is that the road to economic and social development must be traveled in a world context that is not the one that existed in the 1960s, when the Revolution made its first plans for economic take-off. We must now work in a globalized economy, which depends much more on the external economic balance, and on the capacity for international insertion, especially for small countries. It is also in an economy of rapidly changing technologies, which demands a higher dynamic of creation of diverse enterprises and connections between enterprises and scientific and educational institutions, as well as a higher dynamic of diversification of products and services of high added value.
All this requires managerial as well as technological creativity, and it is necessary to create the regulatory context that allows and stimulates it; and to train the young cadres who will play a leading role in it.
The fourth is that, with few natural resources and scarce domestic demand, and with a blockade that will continue (because our historical adversaries do not know how, nor can they do otherwise), our audacity to build material prosperity based on social justice and access to knowledge is essentially a cultural challenge. It will be culture, ethical, legal, scientific and technical, that determines our capacity to decouple economic growth from the expansion of inequalities, that expands the space of the possible, and establishes the speed of our progress.
The battles of this year 2021 prepare us to continue building the possible country that we Cubans want. Not the one that others want to impose on us, but the one we Cubans want.
Agustín Lage Dávila is a prominent Cuban scientist. He was the Director of the Center of Molecular Immunology in Havana for 25 years. Advisor to the President of BioCubaFarma. He has received numerous national and international distinctions. He was Deputy to the National Assembly for several legislatures.
Desmond Tutu Dies at age 90
Desmond Tutu, South African archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, dies at the age of 90
For his fight against the brutal racist oppression of apartheid, Tutu is considered one of the key figures in South Africa’s contemporary history
Author:
Juventud Rebelde |digital@juventudrebelde.cu
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. Autor: EFE Publicado: 26/12/2021 | 09:36 am
This Sunday, at the age of 90, died South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner for his activism against the Apartheid racist segregation regime, in Cape Town, said in a statement issued by the South African government, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who sent his condolences to the Tutu family.
“The death of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of loss in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,” the president said in the text.
The president described Tutu as a “peerless patriot” and a “man of extraordinary intellect” who maintained his integrity in the fight against the “forces of apartheid.”
Even in a democracy, Ramaphosa stressed, Tutu maintained the “vigor” and “vigilance” of leadership to hold institutions accountable.
“On behalf of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, the entire faith community and, dare I say, on behalf of millions (of people) across South Africa, Africa and the world, I send our deepest condolences to his wife, Nomalizo Leah, his son, Trevor Tamsanqa, and his daughters, Thandeka, Nontombi and Mpho,” Makgoba said in a statement.
The voice of the voiceless
“Apartheid, separate development or whatever it is called, is evil (…) It is anti-Christian and unbiblical. If anyone proves me otherwise, I will burn my bible and cease to be a Christian,” Tutu protested to apartheid officials in 1982.
For his tireless struggle, Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, two years before he became the first black head of the Anglican Archbishopric of Cape Town (southwest).
For his struggle against the brutal racist oppression of apartheid, Tutu is considered one of the key figures in contemporary South African history.
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At the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), September 5, 2001. Photo: Reuters
He was at the helm until 1996, when apartheid was dismantled and South Africa became a democracy led by Mandela.
As president, Madiba – Mandela’s local nickname, who described the archbishop as “the voice of the voiceless” – gave Tutu the difficult task of chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body charged with bringing to light the atrocities committed during apartheid.
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Desmond Tutu with Mandela. Photo taken from the Internet
Tutu and Mandela, in fact, had resided on the same street in Soweto, which is today one of Johannesburg’s major tourist attractions, to the pride of South Africans, who boast that no other country has a street with two Nobel Peace Laureates.
His career has been marked by a constant defense of human rights, something that led him to dissociate himself on numerous occasions from the church hierarchy to openly defend positions such as gay rights or euthanasia.
In recent years he had stayed away from public life due to his advanced age and the health problems he had been suffering from for years, including prostate cancer.
His last public appearance had been in a few brief video images broadcast on his 90th birthday (last October 7), an anniversary that his foundation celebrated with a virtual conference in which participated, among others, the highest Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, the Mozambican activist and widow of Nelson Mandela Graça Machel or the former Irish president Mary Robinson.
(With information from EFE)
Freedom, Inc.
Freedom, Inc.
They have commodified the symbol of freedom so much that they don’t even know what it means anymore. But the worst thing is not that. The worst thing is that, consciously or unconsciously, this commodified counterrevolution has become one more “pillar” of socialism in Cuba. Because if the Revolution falls… what the hell are they going to live on?
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Image: Granma
A good capitalist finds everything a profitable business. It is the maxim of the successful bourgeois: make profit. With this liberal logic, let us not doubt it, human civilization has advanced considerably, although this advance has not been homogeneous. It cannot be questioned that leaving behind slavery or vassalage were substantial improvements for humanity as a whole, although there continued to exist (logically) oppressed and oppressors, people who had too little and people who had too much. And people who, even though they had too much, wanted even more.
The champions of capitalism have never ceased in their eagerness to accumulate property and wealth, wrapped in an ideological plot in which they feel themselves owners of land, resources, real estate, other people’s work… But finding as a limit not only the development of the productive forces themselves, but also nature and the real world itself, they sought to make money from symbols. Profiting from imaginaries was the new horizon of mercantile liberalism.
Today, when people in many countries celebrate Christmas, we cannot overlook the fact that December 25 is alleged to be the date of the birth of Jesus, a man who died crucified for advocating a different ideal for humanity and society, based on values such as mercy, austerity and love. However, the date has become an occasion to buy gifts, spend money on frivolities and reward consumerism. The symbolic-religious has become symbolic-mercantile.
It is not surprising then that the staunchest detractors of socialism practice the same, while promoting the capitalist system as the highest stage of social development. And finding that there is a solvent demand to finance their anti-communist crusade, they turned into profit what once, perhaps, was an honest, though misguided, commitment. It is hard to be honest when you pay obeisance to Don Money.
Battling for federal funds or for sums that are “laundered” through third parties, which may be foundations or other organizations, the champions of capitalist restoration in Cuba spare no effort to show themselves as “the best bet”. They have made the symbol of freedom their most profitable business.
According to the current, they mutate their discourse, to show themselves to be tougher or more peaceful. He who pays, rules: they only offer a service. With YouTube channels, where they talk about freedom, justice and the American way, while they sell you the best hamburger in Miami or the best beauty salon in Florida. Then there are sites that talk about national emancipation and transparency while they receive money from abroad through PayPal, with no declared patron. Then we have the counterrevolution has made preaching against the Cuban government a very attractive option from a financial point of view.
The same people who criticize so much the inequalities that we have not eradicated in our country, or who live by publishing any excess or luxury that a relative of a Cuban leader has, make thousands and even millions of dollars, with which they buy apartments, houses, travel around the world, are published in the most famous sites and media, receive prizes and gifts for the fact of continuing to breathe (before, during or after suffering the terrible Castro-communist dictatorship)…. Everything is possible if you belong to that financial and media corporation that has found an inexhaustible vein of gold in opposing the Revolution.
Meanwhile, there are useful fools who, poisoned by their hate speech, who continue contributing money, time and effort to a sterile cause. They are those who were deceived by a character who said he was going to come to Cuba from Spain, to free us from the “tyranny” of Diaz-Canel, with the infallible strategy of freezing the funds of the “dictatorship” abroad. Or those who believed that a certain playwright would fight to the last consequences because he believed in what he preached, and that he was not just another one of those who seek to facilitate a visa and a comfortable stay in Europe or the U.S. They are those who applaud, forgetful, any initiative, however puerile and inconsequential it may be.
The gesture is more important than anything else. That is why we are not alarmed when we read about the proposal to create a “Free Republic of Cuba”, nothing more and nothing less than at the naval base in Guantanamo, a territory illegally occupied by a foreign power. They have so commodified the symbol of freedom that they no longer even know what it means. But the worst thing is not that. The worst thing is that, consciously or unconsciously, this commodified counterrevolution has become one more “pillar” of socialism in Cuba. Because if the Revolution falls… what the hell are they going to live on?
“Excess enthusiasm when facing frustrations”
PENSAMIENTO [THOUGHT]
“Excessive enthusiasm is a difficulty when facing frustrations.”
Hopefully, the empire will listen to its psychologists, and sometime understand that only new frustrations await it here, if it continues to trust advisors like Juan Gonzalez, Antony Blinken and the Miami haters.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The United States has failed despite using all its unconventional warfare weapons against Cuba during the last two years. Photo: Taken from the Cuba Vive campaign.
Watching the events of the last few weeks in Cuba, it is easy to see the degree of frustration that must be gripping the U.S. power circles. They jumped, belly-first and with enthusiasm, into the waterless pool in which they found the intensive deployment against the island of all the weapons of unconventional warfare. During the last two years these included: economic, media and psychological warfare, terrorism, cyberwarfare, diplomatic pressure….
Those who for more than a decade have woven and financed in Cuba a dense network of media aimed at the most diverse sectors of society, collaborators in foreign correspondents, agents of change in the world, together with other forms of articulation, journalism and academia, leadership training courses, so-called thinking events in the United States, Latin America and Europe…, along with other forms of articulation, have had to see, I imagine not without sadness, how the current U.S. administration has thrown overboard all their patient work.
Juan Gonzalez, advisor for the Western Hemisphere of the National Security Council, and Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, violated, in their constant references to Cuba, what Niccolo Machiavelli suggested in the Prince: Never confuse desire with reality. The result is plain to see: the public exposure of U.S. interference in Cuba, the disarticulation of a good part of its internal subversion machinery and the discrediting before the Cuban people of those who have participated in it.
If one reviews the cable from the then-U.S. Interests Section in Havana, dated April 15, 2009, where its chief, Jonathan Farrar, described the failure of the traditional counterrevolution and suggests working with new actors such as bloggers, rappers and young visual artists, it is not difficult to understand how much the empire has lost in November 2021 in Cuba: at least 12 years of work!
But it is not triumphalism that should guide the work of Cuban revolutionaries after this 21st century Bay of Pigs. Washington lacks the humility to self-criticize its failures. Biden, even though he belongs to the same party, is not Kennedy, who had the courage to say to the mercenaries exchanged for compotes, when receiving them in a Miami stadium: “Victory has many fathers, defeat is an orphan”. Kennedy even attempted a secret rapprochement with Cuba that many believe is part of what cost him his life. And after the imperialist defeat at Playa Giron came the arch-terrorist Mongoose Plan, led at pencil point by the president’s brother, Robert Kennedy. Sobering, both Kennedy’s, John and Robert, were executed, not by the communism they fought so hard against, but by “lone assassins”, whose strings lead to the establishment they tried so hard to reform.
This time the decisive thing, again, has not been what our enemies have done, but what we have done. The key has been in the return to the people as the key factor, not only in processes such as the intervention of reality through the transformation of neighborhoods where numerous problems have accumulated. The key has been timely information about the war being waged against us, its characteristics and modes of operation. The latter -a missing element in our communicational work in previous years- assuming that a people capable of organizing itself in arms to defend its Revolution cannot be massively taught the weapons of the new war. We also underestimated the importance of broadly and deeply preparing all sectors of society for the not-so-new digital scenario, not only as critical receivers but, above all, as active participants.
It has been demonstrated, in recent months, that the media, state institutions, political and mass organizations, and the educational system weave a web that makes us invincible, if we are able to adapt it to the new circumstances and connect it with everyone who can be an ally in the anti-imperialist struggle, inside and outside our borders.
It’s a situation in which disinformation intoxication, through the growing use of digital social networks, serious economic shortages, shortages and consequent inflation, are joined by serious economic shortages, shortages and consequent inflation. It is necessary -in addition to the essential measures to stimulate the growth of the supply of goods and services, in addition to the successful control of the pandemic and the fact that blackouts are becoming less frequent, as is already happening, [to strengthen] ideological activity and, in particular, communications, as compañero Díaz-Canel has insisted, must be perceived by all revolutionaries as fundamental issues.
There are, to illustrate it, the material prosperity of Yugoslavia and Libya, razed to the ground with bombs after demonizing their governments, or more recently, the coups in countries like Bolivia and Nicaragua, with high economic performance indexes. Others believe that if we give institutional political space to the counterrevolution (multi-partyism it is called), the United States would begin to forgive us, but Antony Blinken’s response to the most recent multiparty elections in Venezuela should shake them out of their illusions: “it was not a free election”, he said, and, therefore, they will continue to support Juan Guaidó, who was indeed freely elected… by the Trump administration.
Not to rest in the battle for the truth, [we must] face decisively in confronting inequality where the disadvantages for the most humble have accumulated very significantly. [We must] create and enhance new economic, social, legal and cultural instruments against any inequality and discrimination, to intensely involve the people, and especially the youth, in the new and old fights. [That] has been the Fidelista response of the revolutionary leadership to the challenges of the present. And it has done so by listening to many, accepting criticism and speaking modestly, while working with intensity and transparency.
As the recently-deceased essayist, Juan Valdes Paz said in one of his last public appearances, the Cuban nation “does not have a solution vis-à-vis the US as we conceive it: independent, sovereign, self-determining”. But neither does Latin America and the world: independence, sovereignty and self-determination are obscene words in the empire’s dictionary.
The tribute paid by Washington and its allies to the last Human Rights Day was the announcement of the extradition of Julian Assange, to settle accounts with him for revealing, not State secrets, but war crimes and strategies of imperialist domination such as those exposed in the aforementioned cable, dated April 15, 2009.
It is the world upside down, where a Prometheus of our time must be tied to the rock so that the eagle devourer of entrails avenges, with exemplary punishment, the offense of exposing the Olympus of the dollar in its unspeakable crimes. Meanwhile, cardboard characters, in the tableau of dollars and technology paid by Wall Street, are applauded as heroes.
This is how the enthusiastic handlers of the N15 face their frustrations when there is no sovereignty to stop them. What would await the people of Cuba if they ever had the opportunity to impose on us what they understand by justice?
The social leaders shot and tortured en masse in our lands of America would be a colorful brushstroke for the hate-filled vengeance and bloodbath that the “military intervention” so often demanded from Miami in the last year would [actually] mean.
In the second season of the already old -and increasingly less outdated- Cuban series En silencio ha tenido que ser [It Had to Be in Silence], there is a scene in which the State Security agent, now a CIA prisoner, responds to a CIA psychologist, sent on a softening mission, with the advice she herself had given him during a training session when he and she were apparently on the same side: “Excessive enthusiasm is a difficulty when it comes to facing frustrations”.
Hopefully, the empire will listen to its psychologists, and at sometime [come to] understand that only new frustrations await it here, if it continues to rely on advisors like Juan Gonzalez, Antony Blinken and the Miami haters.
In the meantime, the signs are going in the opposite direction, so only the broadest culture and the most intense work can be our vaccines against an empire that, in its decadence, and worried about losing its hegemony at the global level, wants to gain a foothold in a territory it considers its backyard.
MININT news release on rescue operation
News release from the Ministry of the Interior
Surface units of the Border Guard Troops provided assistance to the castaways of a semi-sunken speedboat
Author:
Web Editor | digital@juventudrebelde.cu
Published: Saturday 11 December 2021 | 06:16:01 pm.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
At 21:30 hours on December 10, 2021, the Coast Guard Troops Maritime Search and Rescue Coordination Center received a distress call from a vessel in distress in the vicinity of the town of Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque province.
Surface units of the Coast Guard Troops with the participation of a private boat, provided assistance to the castaways of a semi-sunken speedboat, with registration FL 7176SU of the United States, overloaded with people, in adverse hydrometeorological conditions with sea force three.
As a result of these actions, 2 minors, 7 women and 14 men were rescued, including two deceased.
Today, December 11, the search for possible missing persons continues, with the participation of naval units and other forces of the Ministry of the Interior, in the vicinity of the coast.
Once again, Cuban citizens are victims of the policy of the United States Government, which stimulates irregular emigration, which is taken advantage of by human traffickers, who, for profit, put the lives and deaths of human beings at risk.
Ministry of the Interior
MINREX on virtual “Democracy Summit”
A summit as unreal as the “democracy” it defends
Declaration by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The virtual summit convened by the U.S. government on December 9-10, with pre-recorded speeches of the invited guests and a totally manipulated agenda, was a demagogic exercise, with no benefit for the international community and without any proposal to solve the most pressing problems of the world we share.
As a political artifice, it only served to show the growing isolation, alienation and loss of influence of the most powerful nation on the planet. In a practical sense, the only apparent result is the commitment of $400 million to the political subversion of sovereign states in blatant violation of international law.
A few hours have passed since the end of the event and few are able to explain or remember what happened there.
The U.S. government missed the opportunity to convene an inclusive meeting, promoting cooperation and the search for solutions to any of the problems that most urgently and seriously impact the lives of the majority of the world’s population.
It did not have the will to join efforts to face hunger, malnutrition, poverty and growing inequalities, unhealthy conditions, migratory problems, drug trafficking, organized and cross-border crime, the arms race or climate change. It did not even conceive the idea of convening world leaders to discuss and articulate a concerted response to the COVID-19 pandemic and other communicable diseases. The fact is that the United States cannot provide solutions as long as its policies are an essential part of such serious problems.
With great demagogy, IT called the unreal meeting under the theme of “democracy”, which it assumed as the defense of capitalism and applicable only to governments that do not challenge the hegemonic authority of the United States. Such a fabrication clearly shows the true divisive purpose and the interest in diverting world attention from the serious problems facing U.S. society and the U.S. political system today.
A country where money outweighs the popular will of its citizens, where the free sale and irresponsible use of lethal weapons, intervention and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states is promoted, where racism is systemic and war is the most lucrative business, has nothing to teach the international community.
As Cuba has been warning, the U.S. government is leading a dangerous campaign aimed at creating an international schism, dividing the planet and punishing countries that defend progressive projects or do not accept the models imposed by the United States.
To try to impose a single acceptable recipe for a political system on all countries is, in itself, profoundly anti-democratic. It is contrary to the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed in Havana by all the countries of our region, which establishes the commitment to fully respect the inalienable right of every State to choose its political, economic, social and cultural system, as an essential condition to ensure peaceful coexistence among nations.
This twisted vision is what leads them to act on the margins of the United Nations, where they suffer increasing isolation due to their repeated challenges to the principles of civilized coexistence, respect for multilateralism and the self-determination of peoples and sovereign equality among its Member States, concepts that today are unacceptable to the U.S. rulers.
More than 80 countries, including Cuba, were not invited, and this is not surprising, because we are a nation that for almost 63 years has successfully rejected the U.S. attempt to subjugate it and has effectively defended its inalienable right to self-determination. In a summit aimed at promoting capitalism, and the central and dominant role of the United States in its promotion, the presence of socialist Cuba should not be expected.
In the cooperation to find solutions to the serious problems of the world, the international community can always count on our support, on the constructive, active and supportive contribution of Cubans in the search for consensus, to unite wills, to enrich and benefit from diversity and to privilege what unites us instead of what separates us. The international trajectory of the last 60 years supports this affirmation.
The world demands peace, development, justice, solidarity, cooperation and mutual trust. It does not benefit from division, selectivity and unilateral impositions.
Caravanistas visit Denunciation Memorial
Members of Pastors for Peace caravan visit memorial in Cuba
The visitors learned historical facts about Washington’s aggressiveness against the Caribbean nation, and rejected that power’s interference in the island’s internal affairs.
Author:
Juventud Rebelde | digital@juventudrebelde.cu
Posted: Tuesday 16 November 2021 | 03:35:42 pm.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Members of Pastors for Peace caravan visit memorial. Autor: PL Publicado: 16/11/2021 | 03:34 pm
Members of the U.S. interfaith organization Pastors for Peace arrived today at the Denunciation Memorial , in this capital, as part of its program of activities in solidarity with Cuba.
The visitors learned historical facts about Washington’s aggressiveness against the Caribbean nation, and rejected the interference of that power in the internal affairs of the largest Antillean island. In declarations to local television, the caravanistas recognized Cuba as an example and ratified their support to the socialist project.
The day before, the activists arrived at the capital’s José Martí International Airport. Upon their arrival, the director of that group, Gail Walker, stated that the 75 visitors from 20 U.S. states joined the 31st edition of these initiatives to show the majority feeling of the U.S. people with respect to Cuba.
She pointed out that her companions are especially interested in learning about the achievements of this Antillean nation in confronting the COVID-19 pandemic, in the midst of the tightening of the economic, commercial and financial blockade and other aggressions by the U.S. government.
During their stay until November 26, the members of Pastors for Peace will carry out an intense agenda in the provinces of Havana and Matanzas (western Cuba), which includes meetings with women’s and workers’ organizations, and tours of educational institutions of historical and social interest, according to PL.
US seeks a reason for war against Cuba
U.S. seeks to fabricate a reason for war against Cuba
The U.S. Government threatened Cuba on Monday with the application of new sanctions.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
U.S. seeks to fabricate a cause of war against Cuba Photo: Taken from Prensa Latina
The U.S. government threatened Cuba on Monday with the application of new sanctions “if repression and human rights abuses do not cease”, days before the provocation orchestrated from Washington for November 15.
In recent days, one after another, high-ranking officials of that government -this time it was the turn of State Department spokesman Ned Price- have publicly brandished the cudgel, recalling the era of the gunboats and the Platt Amendment, when a slight gesture from their proconsuls was enough for the presidents of the neo-colony to rush to comply with the orders of the White House.
None of this is casual. A veritable machinery of infamy, lies and provocations is at work against Cuba with the aim of fabricating a casus belli.
The general director of Press, communication and image of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios, denounced the use of social networks, especially Twitter, in the manipulation campaign promoted from the United States with the aim of destabilizing the country.
“A powerful machinery of communicational toxicity in the digital space greases its army of bots and trollers for the frontal attack to which they have set a date,” said the Cuban official from his Twitter account.
Mr. Agustín Antonetti, political operator and “expert” in black campaigns financed by the continental and U.S. right-wing, announced on Monday on Twitter: “All those who fight for the freedom and democracy of the Cuban people, get ready for what we are going to release tomorrow, it is going to be a news item that will be covered by the main international media”.
The hate campaign has no limits. They announce actions against the Cuban government in more than 90 cities around the world, they need to build a negative image of the Revolution that will clear the way for them to commit any ignominy.
They need to achieve through a systematic campaign of motivational influence, pure and simple, a psychological war; to turn Cuba into a prostrate nation, broken in its foundations, without joints, without a soul. But little do they know the Cubans, here they will find a people erect over the yoke they want to impose on us, proud to exhibit to the world, girded on their foreheads, the star that illuminates and kills.
Nicaragua goes to the polls
Nicaragua goes to the polls for general elections
In a true civic celebration, calm and safe, more than 4,478,334 Nicaraguans will elect the presidential formula that will head the Executive Power during the 2022-2027 five-year term.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
More than 4,478,334 Nicaraguans will have to elect the presidential candidate. Photo: Prensa Latina
In a true civic, calm and safe celebration, more than 4,478,334 Nicaraguans will have to elect the presidential formula that will head the Executive Power during the 2022-2027 five-year term, in addition to renewing the members of the National Assembly (unicameral) and the deputies to the Central American Parliament (Parlacen).
For this purpose, 3 106 voting centers and 13 459 Voting Boards (JRV) were set up in the 103 municipalities, 3 106 voting centers and 13 459 Voting Boards (JRV). They must guarantee the votes and issue a final result among the six political parties that participated in the contest, including the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) with Daniel Ortega, who will seek his fifth mandate, the fourth consecutive and the second together with his wife, vice-mandate Rosario Murillo.
Prensa Latina reported that the Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC), the nation’s second political force, has accumulated in its contemporary history the mandate of two presidents: Arnoldo Alemán, and Enrique Bolaños and presents, in this opportunity, National Assembly deputy Walter Espinoza and Mayra Argüello.
Camino Cristiano Nicaragüense -founded in 1995 and ally of the FSLN in the 2011 and 2016 elections- intervenes with the evangelist pastor and deputy to the Parlacen, Guillermo Orozco, linked for more than two decades to politics, and Violeta Martínez de Moncada.
The Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance Party (ALN), created in 1999 under a liberal ideology, is running two candidates: lawyer Alfredo Montiel and business administrator Jennifer Espinoza; and the Independent Liberal Party (PLI) is running deputy Mauricio Orúe and Zobeida del Socorro.
Telesur reports that since the early hours of this November 7, in most of the voting centers the first citizens have been lining up to cast their vote.
The newspaper La Voz del Sandinismo reported that the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), showed citizens that 232 electoral accompaniers from 27 countries and 600 Nicaraguan journalists and other nationalities will be present at the elections, after their accreditation.
The accompaniers come from the United States, Canada, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Russia, Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama, Venezuela, England, Russia, Cuba, Spain, Italy, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, among other nations.
The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) indicated in a press release that the delegation is made up of deputies Julio Chávez, Marelis Pérez Marcano and Fernando Soto Rojas.
Meanwhile, the National Police of Nicaragua reiterated security during the electoral process and in all tourist, recreational, sports, commercial establishments, cafeterias, restaurants and meeting and recreational places, which will work and operate normally.
The former president of Bolivia Evo Morales sent a message on Twitter to the Nicaraguan people: “I salute the democratic vocation and revolutionary conviction of the Nicaraguan people. We wish the greatest success in the development of the general elections to be held tomorrow”.
Nicaragua: the past counts
Nicaragua: the past counts
The Sandinista authorities have called for general elections today, but the U.S. and its allies will not want to recognize them.
Author:
Marina Menéndez Quintero | marina@juventudrebelde.cu
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The Sandinista authorities have called for general elections today, but the US and its allies will not want to recognize them. Author: CSE published: 06/11/2021 | 09:33 pm
New sanctions against Nicaragua approved this week in the U.S. Congress, draw the real scenario in which today’s presidential elections take place: a scenario of harassment and undeclared war, which would seek to use the elections as a springboard for full interference.
The Renacer (Reinforcing Compliance with Conditions for Electoral Reform in Nicaragua) Act has just been approved by the House of Representatives and has already passed through the Senate, so it only awaits the approval of President Joe Biden.
Its harmful nature seeks to involve the European Union, Canada and Latin American and Caribbean neighbors in further cutting off loans from international financial institutions to Nicaragua, review its participation in the free trade pact between the United States, Central America and the Dominican Republic (Cafta-DR), and selective sanctions against Nicaraguan officials considered by the North to be “violators” of human rights, among other measures.
Its rapid passage through the lower house a few days before the presidential elections, confirms the presence on the proscenium of an invisible “candidate” whose determination is to overthrow a model that has given citizens more satisfaction than pain since the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, which meant the end of the murderous dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.
A decade later, that same phantom actor was the real protagonist of the defeat of Sandinismo at the polls on February 25, 1990, by promoting and financing an alternative personified as a solution to the naval blockade and the “contra” war -that is how the counterrevolutionary gangs were known-, which that same hegemonic intruder promoted and armed.
In search of peace, the votes then lost by the FSLN went to the so-called National Opposition Union represented by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro: the White House had made it clear that the presence of Sandinismo in power would mean more aggression.
There followed 16 years of corrupt and complicit executives allied with US decisions, which led to the extinction of all the measures implemented by the FSLN to alleviate the social backwardness enthroned by Somocismo, and the minimal but important steps taken in the economic field.
These anxieties, and a policy of alliances that untangled traditional entanglements with key sectors of society, such as the upper hierarchy of the Catholic Church and private enterprise, made possible the return of the FSLN to power in 2007.
It was necessary to launch another literacy campaign because a new generation had grown up without the facilities to learn to read and write, restore access to public health, and reimplement measures to support the peasantry, where the majority of the social base is located.
Stability and results in the economic sphere through a mixed economy system, accompanied by a policy of regional cooperation in a Latin America where similar models of solidarity and social justice had emerged, characterized the work of an FSLN that changed its image from red and black to fuchsia, but has kept the essence of its ideals unchanged.
By April 2016, the IMF, the watchdog of international financial policies, and propitiator of onerous indebtedness, would ratify the recognition it had made to Nicaragua seven years earlier: “The Nicaraguan economy continues to register high growth rates and sustainable macroeconomic policies. In 2015, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew 4.9 percent and the average of the last five years (5.2 percent) is one of the highest in the region.”
But the bonanza would last until the next boom. By 2017, together with the third consecutive reelection of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and in the run-up to the November municipal elections that year, the U.S. Congress was already preparing the Nica Act, the first in a series of sanctions that would follow.
Finally approved in 2018, the law officially named the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act sought to block loans from international financial institutions to Managua, among other punitive measures, unless it took “effective measures to hold free, fair and transparent elections,” argued its promoters of the Cuban-born Floridian ultra-right, as deceptively as it is done against Venezuela or against Nicaragua itself, again, right now.
Daniel Ortega’s response was consistent with the circumstances. It was, he denounced, “the continuity of historical policies of US imperial interference in Nicaragua”, which is what we see today.
History that is present
That, however, was not the only flank of aggression. In April 2018 itself, the unusual and massive demonstrations with which hundreds of Nicaraguans took to the streets after the triggering of a social security reform that had immediately been repealed, constituted the implementation in Nicaragua of a chapter of unconventional warfare that had already been tested in Eastern Europe and in some countries of the Middle East: “color revolutions” that are really very dark, and plunged Nicaragua into months of instability with its share of arrested, dead and wounded.
Money sent from the U.S. to foment opposition and subversion had been flowing through subway channels for some time, as in the late 1980s.
According to investigations cited by the site Misión Verdad, only to support a communication network that would sustain the media strategy against Sandinismo, some ten million dollars have been channeled through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) since 2009. Seven million of that total went to the so-called Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation for Reconciliation and Democracy between 2014 and 2021.
The article calls the Foundation “a central vehicle for Washington’s massive financial, technical and logistical support to the Nicaraguan opposition, acting as what the CIA calls a “staging post”: a third-party organization that serves as an ostensibly independent channel for giving U.S. government funding to foreign political groups and media outlets.”
In total, it is estimated that since the Sandinista return to power, Washington has channeled tens of millions of dollars to the same cause.
However, the country is now accused of being a flawed democracy that disrespects human rights, a term that has been politicized and manipulated for decades. It is the same justification used to demonize and attack models of change in the face of the status quo of unbridled capitalism, which the right-wing powers would like to maintain globally.
Such background is essential to understand what is happening this Sunday around an electoral race for president and deputies which is questioned by the absence of right-wing candidates accused of corrupt management and of facilitating US interventionism; among them, two bear the last name of Chamorro.
In spite of the fact that some headlines are propagating that “there are no candidates” -a false assertion which could have penetrated part of the electorate since some of the polls, which were already wrong in Nicaragua in 1990, announce high abstention- five opposition candidates are competing against the FSLN and Daniel Ortega. Some of them are nominated by long-standing and experienced groups such as the Constitutionalist Liberal Party and the Independent Liberal Party.
The registry, the tables and ballots have been ready for some time now, and some 200 international observers will act as observers to attest to the transparency.
Everything seems to be in order. But that is not what the United States would like.
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