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Cuba and Computer Technology
Cuba and Computer Technology
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
After several years of U.S. military occupation, Cuba lived a period as a pseudo-independent republic under U.S. tutelage. The island served as a model semi-colony that would attract former Spanish possessions already independent and new acquisitions to be captured for that status.
During that period, until the triumph of the liberating revolution in 1959, Cuba experienced technological advances propitiated by North American companies. They used the introduction of infrastructural and technological advances for their own expansion and for experimental and advertising purposes. That was why Cuba became the leader in Latin America in terms of the introduction and diffusion of new technologies in the mass media and telecommunications.
One of the first objectives of the revolutionary process begun in 1959 in Cuba had to be the extension of public services throughout the country. Sectors such as electricity and the mass media received a high priority in order to extend their coverage to almost the entire population of the island.
This was not the case with telephone service, which was not identified as a priority sector in the same way as radio, television and the print media, considered to be of greater social significance. It is estimated that until the early 1990s, around 40% of telephone installations were manufactured in North America before 1960. Its infrastructure became obsolete and without authentic spare parts because of the blockade imposed by the United States and showed problems of compatibility with the technology of countries that could dodge it to trade with the Island.
From 1959 to 1994, telecommunications in Cuba fell below the level of the other Latin American countries. National security and defense issues had to be given high priority in the face of constant aggressiveness by Washington and its agencies of terrorist subversion and domination.
Paradoxically, the situation changed substantially when the U.S. Congress passed the Torricelli Act (“Cuban Democracy Act”) in 1992. It reinforced the policy of trade sanctions against the island in “Track One” but, in “Track Two”, supposedly favored the democratization of Cuba through an active policy of promoting communications and contacts with the island. It explicitly included the lifting of sanctions on telephone and postal communications.
Cuba had denounced this “Track Two” as a weapon of ideological subversion in Washington’s war against the island. But the Cuban government did not put obstacles in the way of the re-establishment of telephone communications between the two countries.
Finally, in October 1994, the US Federal Communications Commission gave the green light for the agreements that Cuba had negotiated with a number of U.S. telephone companies on the distribution of revenue from calls. On November 25, 1994, direct telephone communication between the two countries was officially reopened.
Due to the imperative of its reintegration into the capitalist world economy, Cuba had to carry out a restructuring of its productive apparatus including a greater opening to foreign investment. Cuba had to modernize its telecommunications, an enormous task given the existing infrastructure backlog and, above all, the tight economic and financial blockade that it still suffers to this day.
The Cuban government, placed great hopes in information technology since 1964, when Che Guevara, Minister of Industry, inaugurated an automation department. In 1969, the Center for Digital Research was founded. In 1970, the Center built the first Cuban computer, the so-called “CID-201”.
As a result of bilateral agreements of 1973 and 1976, the USSR committed itself to supporting Cuba in the creation of a computer industry, and in 1978 the first computer assembly plant on the island came into service. In 1980, the Second Congress of the Communist Party stressed the need to encourage the development of information technologies, and in 1982 an automated national and international data exchange centre was created.
In 1983, the first international satellite connection was established, giving Cuba access to some 50 Soviet data banks. In August 1994, Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba, S.A. (ETECSA) was created as a monopoly for fixed telephony, with the character of a public limited company and a mixed company.
Cuba’s official adhesion to the Internet took place in October 1996. In 1999, the National Information Policy was formulated. It took up Strategic Guidelines and the Program for the Informatization of Society, announcing their technological convergence in the same Ministry of Electronics, Informatics and Telecommunications.
September 17, 2018.
Secrets of the Twin Tower
Secrets of the Twin Towers Revealed
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The U.S. CIA and the Saudi Arabian monarchy conspired to keep secret the details of the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and other targets in the United States on September 11, 2001, according to a documented book by journalists John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski that will soon be released.
The authors achieved in 2009 an astonishing interview with Richard Clarke, antiterrorist advisor of the White House during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, whose publication enraged the CIA, especially its director, George Tenet, who had hidden crucial information about the plans and movements of Al-Qaeda, including the arrival in the United States of the future participating kidnappers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
The CIA and the NSA, with Saudi complicity, articulated a false cartoon to cover up the U.S. government’s involvement in the affair.
But for hundreds of family members and an increasing number of former FBI agents, this year’s September 11 ceremony fanned a calmed, but not extinguished, rage over the conspiracy of silence maintained by senior former U.S. and Saudi Arabian officials.
For many former national security officials, the unanswered questions about the events leading up to the September 11, 2001 attacks overshadow those of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because September 11 changed the whole world. Not only did it lead to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the fracture of the Middle East and the advance of Islamic militancy, but it also brought the United States closer to its virtual conversion into a repressive national security state. This is manifested, according to the authors of the book, in that U.S. foreign policy has endowed itself with a strategy for the extermination of popular movements in Latin America.
According to the new book, Mark Rossini, one of the two FBI agents assigned to the CIA’s “Osama bin Laden” unit, said he was sad and depressed because the agency’s managers mysteriously prevented them in 2000 from informing their headquarters about the presence in the United States of the future Al Qaeda conspirators who would execute the great terrorist act, and again in the summer of 2001. “It is clear that the attacks did not need to occur and that there has been no justice,” Rossini said, according to the book.
In 2002, Tenet swore to Congress that he was not aware of the imminent threat because that information came on an unmarked urgent cable and “nobody read it. But five years later he learned the truth when Senators Ron Wyden and Kit Bond forced him to disappear an executive summary of the CIA’s 9/11 investigation, which stated that no fewer than 50 people read one or more of the Agency’s six communications containing travel information related to these terrorists.
Until then, Clarke had trusted Tenet, his close colleague and friend. Claiming desperation for not having the means to spread the astounding revelation, in 2009 the former anti-terrorist aide wrote a book he titled, Your Government Failed You, which was largely ignored.
Clarke says he long believed that it was a small group of low-level officials who obtained this information and did not realize its importance. But it turned out that more than fifty CIA officials knew, including Tenet. Tenet and two of his “anti-terrorist” aides, Rich Blee and Cofer Black, issued a statement calling Clarke’s theory “reckless and deeply wrong.
But now Clarke is not alone. Duffy and Nowosielski found other former agents and key FBI officials who have developed deep doubts about Tenet’s history. The only element on which they disagree is what officials were responsible for the alleged subterfuge.
John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski’s book relates many other aspects that add gravity to their denunciation: Saudi complicity with kidnappers; Saudi government support for al-Qaeda in recent years; the discovery of the role of monarchy agents surreptitiously funding public relations efforts to derail a congressional bill that would allow a group of family members to sue the kingdom for 9/11 damages; that officials from the Saudi kingdom’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs were actively helping kidnappers settle in California.
The ghost of September 11, 2001 continues to haunt the White House as one of its greatest historical excesses.
September 6, 2018
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Conspiracy Against Venezuela
The Actors in the Conspiracy Against Venezuela
By Eduardo Andrade Bone*, Resumen Latin Americano Summary, August 7, 2018.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
https://walterlippmann.com/conspiracy-against-venezuela/
The recent assassination attempt against Nicolás Maduro, whose drone operation was neutralized by members of the Bolivarian National Armed Force, is part of a long-standing plan to end the process of change in Venezuela, known as the Bolivarian Revolution. But it was also an attempt to warn the armed forces, with the aim of dividing them and adding a sector to promote a coup d’état.
Now the U.S. offensive to end the Maduro administration dates back to the administration of Barack Obama, who issued the executive order (decree 2015) declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy. Subsequently, US President Donald Trump ordered a one-year extension of the “National Emergency” against Venezuela. This has also taken the form of economic sanctions, sanctions against government officials and the armed forces. The US government has also promoted the blockade of food products and various medicines, all within the destabilising plans of the White House.
Attempts to destabilize the Venezuelan government have many sides and also many actors who, directly or from the shadows, constantly conspire against Venezuelan democracy. Venezuelan U.S. lackeys, foreign plotters, U.S.-funded NGOs, organizations of diverse professionals, the national plutocracy and the most reactionary and conservative section of the Catholic Church are often the main plotters in the Caribbean country.
Among these various actors, who play a leading role in putting an end to the Bolivarian revolution, is the Organization of American States, whose Secretary General Luis Almagro is a good vassal of U.S. interests for the region and one of the leaders leading the conspiracy, as well as coordinating actions with the European Union and some NATO member countries (Colombia).
The new Colombian president, Iván Duque, also insisted that the region should support the secretary of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, in his efforts to continue to plot against the Maduro government before the International Criminal Court (ICC). Duque met with Almagro last July 1, during his visit to the United States after his election.
We also have the so-called Lima Group, made up of right-wing governments whose presidents are mostly members of the ranks of the presidents linked to corruption (Odebrecht+-), among them the Macri family (Argentina), bank swindler Sebastián Piñera (Chile), Juan Manuel Santos (Colombia) and Peña Nieto (Mexico), who have almost completed their terms. The corrupt and de facto president of Brazil, Michel Temer. In addition to countries traditionally servile to U.S. policies such as Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay and Peru, also with leaders questioned for corruption.
Recently and before the end of his term in office, Juan Manuel Santos told the press that… “I see the fall of the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela coming,” said the outgoing president of Colombia, and then added that Maduro would fall, hopefully in a “peaceful way”. However, Santos insisted, “I wish that tomorrow” Maduro’s government would end, exposing him as one of the main plotters against Venezuela.
Now the successor of Juan Manuel Santos (Colombia), the already president of Colombia, Uribe’s Ivan Duque, agreed in his visit as president-elect with the White House with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (July 5, 2018), to continue pressuring the Venezuelan government. “We talked about the situation in Colombia, about our security agenda, we also talked about the situation being experienced in the continent by the dictatorship in Venezuela,” Duque told the press.
For his part, Pence told a Tweet that he had spoken to Duque about the bilateral “strategic alliance“”in the fight against drug trafficking” and that they had “reiterated the need to maintain pressure on the regime of (Venezuelan President Nicolás) Maduro to face the tragic collapse of democracy in Venezuela”.
Duque gave Pence a glimpse of a possible military route in Venezuela after the White House confirmed to the Efe agency that U.S. President Donald Trump asked his team last year about an invasion of the Caribbean country and, although he never really planned for it, that option has not been ruled out.
But that wasn’t all, as Duque concluded his trip to Washington where he met with other U.S. officials including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CIA Director Gina Haspel and National Security Advisor John Bolton. Also with the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, and the directors of the World Bank, all this happened on July 5 of this year.
He later stated that he had invited Pence to his inauguration on 7 August and hoped that “the US would have the highest possible representation”. Now, in the act of assassination of Duque, he has been considering a coordination meeting with Mike Pence and Luis Almagro, as well as with some representatives of the opposition to the Maduro government, with the aim of refining and coordinating the way in which they are trying to put an end to Nicolás Maduro and his government, whose final objective is none other than to appropriate Venezuela’s natural resources, especially one of the largest oil reserves in the world, which the Caribbean country has.
Hence, all the cards are already out on the table and they are none other than the economic suffocation, the assassination attempt as has happened during these days, the possibility of creating conditions for a coup d’état by dividing the armed forces, promoting terrorist actions that disconcert the population, unleashing a civil war or producing a direct military intervention, whose cannon fodder first is the paramilitaries and drug trafficking cartels of Colombia, and then continuing with the U.S. military personnel who are based in the eight military bases that the United States has in Colombia.
It is also worth noting that the Empire has an important ally for its destabilizing attempts, the various radical left-wing groups that do not support and do not contribute anything to the process of change and that from certain media through the Internet, are dedicated to ranting against the Bolivarian revolution by playing into the hands of the coup plotters, a factor that must also be taken into account when analyzing Venezuela’s domestic policy.
Hence, the story of the humanitarian crisis, the human rights problems and the character of dictatorship are elements that are exploited by the Western media with the aim of creating all the propitious conditions to facilitate and justify the destabilization of the government of Nicolás Maduro and the process of change in Venezuela.
For the Venezuelan oligarchy, the big businessmen and the geopolitical interests of the U.S. in the region, anything goes, including plunging Venezuela into a bloodbath, where the big losers will be the working class, the social sectors that support the process of change, the members of the armed forces that support the Bolivarian revolution and the loss of control over its natural resources, as simple as that.
Eduardo Andrade Bone is an AIP/MP press correspondent.
Ahed Tamimi, Rebel With a Cause
LEADING FIGURES
Ahed Tamimi, Rebel With a Cause
With her, Palestine found what the media had long ago not allowed to be seen in those parts of the world: rebellion, beyond resistance.
———————————————————————————————–
Author: Darcy Borrero Batista | darcy@granma.cu
August 7, 2018 17:08:03
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Palestinian teenager arrives at a press conference with her mother Nariman (right) in her hometown. Photo: El Clarin
She entered the Israeli prison of Hasharon at the age of 16, with abundant curly hair, uncovered, and rebellion scattered among her belongings. Eight months passed from that day until the last Sunday in July, when Palestinian Ahed Tamimi, now 17, regained her freedom from the Israeli occupiers.
With it, Palestine found what the media had long ago not allowed to be seen in those parts of the world: rebellion, beyond resistance.
The teenager did not stand idly by in the face of the abuse of her family. The video, in which she is frankly dissatisfied with the Israeli violence against her brothers, was shown as a trophy of war, as if responding to the violence were, in this case, a peaceful exercise and not an act of rebellion.
Because of the way they act, it is not possible to speak of the symbolic as something common. In a thinner and thinner strip, Tamimi gets up the way flags do and while some want to make it look like they’re touching the ground, the airs of real struggle make them rise to the top of the flagpole.
Her adolescent face then emerges as a challenge to the status quo, even if the Israeli regime seeks to grab the pole with no other limit than to lower the Palestinian flag and keep the territory on the other side of the line.
Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel – a state conceived for the Hebrew vindication after the racist anti-Semitic war unfolded by fascism – sets in motion the conflict in which Tamimi emerges as the voice of an urgent humanitarian cause: the cessation of extortion against the Palestinians, who are increasingly losing their land, their freedom and even their right to a dignified life.
Since she was imprisoned, Tamimi’s videos – the last of them slapping and kicking an occupying soldier in her village, the occupied West Bank, and the first threatening to punch a soldier after her older brother was arrested – have been manipulated in many ways. There are those who call them “Pallywood” in a mocking tone and say that the teenager is exploited by her family, who are accused of using her to try to provoke the Israeli soldiers.
The difference between the two videos is several years. The most recent was recorded on December 15 and the oldest when Tamimi was 11 years old.
Three out of four Palestinians detained by Israel are youth or adolescents. PHOTO: palestinalibre.org.
Tamimi seems to have plenty of hope despite all that she experienced at her young age. In a certain way, she reflected this when she said: “power is in the people and the people are the masters of their destiny and their future”. Her followers responded with applause.
The young woman also showed her solidarity with the Bedouin people of Khan al-Ahmar, who are awaiting demolition by Israel, and refused to answer questions from the Israeli media. Instead, she expressed appreciation for the media support received during the months of her imprisonment and hoped that the campaign for her release would be extended to the rest of the Palestinian adolescents who remain in Israeli jails.
Remember that this girl was arrested in December and sentenced on March 21, after accepting a suffocating agreement with the Office of the Prosecutor and assuming the charges of aggravated incitement and aggression, among others. Thus they condemned the rebellion with Tamimi’s cause. It would be necessary to see in which court it is condemned to the Israeli soldiers, the “defenseless” ones that take to jail to these adolescents, only to give them a slaps full of dignity and love to theirs.
IN CONTEXT:
– The Government of Israel applies the age of criminal responsibility for Palestinians to 12 years. In addition, children can be imprisoned for up to five years for just throwing stones.
– Every year, between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in the West Bank are arrested and interrogated by Israeli forces before being tried in military courts. Most of them are accused of throwing stones.
– Since 2000, some 7,500 Palestinian children aged 12 and over have been detained and tried by this judicial system.
– According to a report by Defense for Children International, a total of 210 children and one girl are currently in prison in Israel, 34 of them under the age of 16.
– Nearly two-thirds of Palestinian children and minors detained by the Israeli regime in 2017 were abused by their captors, according to a report by the Palestinian non-governmental organization Military Court Watch.
– International law prohibits the use of the death penalty for crimes committed by persons under 18 years of age.
Cuban Journalists Elect New UPEC President
New President for UPEC
Ricardo Ronquillo Bello, deputy editorial director of our newspaper, was elected on Saturday as the new president of the Union of Cuban Journalists.
Published: Sunday 15 July 2018 | 01:32:49 AM
By Juventud Rebelde
digital@juventudrebelde.cu
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Ricardo Ronquillo Bello, deputy editorial director of our newspaper, was elected on Saturday as the new president of the Union of Cuban Journalists.
In this responsibility, and by decision of the delegates to the meeting, he will be accompanied, as first vice-president, by Rosa Miriam Elizalde Zorrilla, member of the presidency of the trade union organization during the previous period, as well as Ariel Terrero Escalante, director of the International Institute of Journalism José Martí, and Jorge Legañoa Alonso, deputy director of the Cuban News Agency, as vice-presidents.
Raúl Garcés Corra, dean of the Faculty of Communication at the University of Havana; Arleen Rodríguez Derivet, journalist for the television program Mesa Redonda; and Ana Teresa Badía, Angélica Paredes López and Minoska Cadalso Navarro, all from Radio Rebelde, were also elected as non-professional members.
World Trade War Has Begun
World Trade War Has Begun
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
With a strong response from Beijing to the offensive actions of the United States in the field of markets, the most colossal world trade war in history has been unleashed.
“By imposing tariffs of 25% on hundreds of products imported from China worth US$34 billion a year on Friday, July 6, the United States has violated the rules of the World Trade Organization and launched the largest trade war in the world’s economic history,” a statement by China’s Commerce Ministry declarae.
Beijing claims that it was committed to not firing the first shot, but has been forced to take action in response to the situation created by the United States and has notified the World Trade Organization.
“U.S. actions affect global supply and value chains, but they are also opening fire on everyone, including themselves,” said a spokesman for the Asian nation’s trade ministry.
The Chinese agency has denounced the mercantile “bullying” with which Washington is putting pressure on its trading partners by means of tariff threats that go against the conduct demanded today.
China called on all countries of the world to join forces against trade protectionism and to support multilateralism. The Asian giant claims to have wanted to avoid the trade war that the United States has provoked, but has been forced to fight this war as much as necessary to protect the interests of the nation and its people.
In retaliation, Beijing announced the introduction of an identical tariff rate for the same monetary value for several U.S. goods, some of which would begin to be taxed as of the date set by Washington.
A trade war between the US and China, the two largest economies in the world, could affect not only both nations, but the world economy as a whole, according to a projection by economists at Pictet Asset Management in London, one of Europe’s leading independent asset and wealth managers.
Some of the most immediate effects that are predicted in the war that is just beginning for U.S. consumers are the 25% increase in the price of products imported from China. These include technological products such as semiconductors and chips that are assembled in China, needed for the manufacture of consumer products such as televisions, computers, cell phones and vehicles, not to mention a wide variety of other products, from plastics to nuclear reactors.
Obviously, the US and Chinese economies will be the hardest hit, but they won’t be the only ones.
More than 90% of the products that will be damaged by US tariffs are intermediate productions or capital goods: that is, they are products that are needed to obtain other types of production.
U.S. tariffs will likely impact other goods not necessarily traded exclusively in the United States. In turn, China gets components from many other countries that end up in its finished products so any change in China’s export flow would inevitably disrupt these countries. About 91% of the 545 U.S. products that China, in retaliation, is taxing belong to the agricultural industry sector affect U.S. farmers, President Trump’s stronghold.
Companies such as Tesla and Chrysler, which manufacture in the United States and ship their products to China, will be hit in the automotive industry.
Among the economies that could be most vulnerable to a trade war are those that are most closely integrated into global value chains. This is how the process by which a product, for its manufactur, goes not only along the production line in a nation, but is added in more than one country until it reaches its final result is identified.
Many experts believe that Trump’s punitive measures against China, based on the unfounded allegation that the Asian nation is stealing U.S. technology, will somehow affect the impressive progress of the Chinese economy but will have an even greater negative effect on the lives and finances of U.S. citizens.
It will be necessary to know what are the calculations of profits and losses that can be derived from the trade war against China carried out by Wall Street’s corporate system. The survival of Donald Trump’s regime, with its constant outbursts and upheavals, will probably depend on these calculations.
July 12, 2018.
The Evil of the “Four Cats”
The Evil of the “Four Cats”
Explaining the reason why things happened, their meaning and importance, with solid arguments, were reasons that were countlessly laid out during the 9th Congress of the organization at the Technological University of Havana José Antonio Echeverría (Cujae).
By Yuniel Labacena Romero
Posted: Thursday 14 June 2018 | 10:57:52 PM
digital@juventudrebelde.cu
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
We must banish apathy and increase participation. Author: Juventud Rebelde Published: 14/06/2018 | 10:36 pm
It is necessary to explain to the students the reason for things, their meaning and importance, and to do it with solid arguments, so that they know why they should attend the activities or be part of the processes or movements that the University Student Federation (FEU) has.
This was reiterated countless times during the 9th Congress of the organization at the Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana José Antonio Echeverría (Cujae).
As Felipe Alejandro Pérez, a student at the School of Automatics and Biomedicine, explained, apathy must be banished, increasing participation. And that can only be achieved by “infecting young people with the desire to do, with perseverance and personal example, having brigade leaders who motivate, convince, take on any sacrifice and strip themselves of inertia and formalism,” he said.
There were not a few participants who, like this young man, alluded to the fact that many times in the brigade, in the department and even in the university, activities are organized or certain tasks are called for and only three or four cats go, as they say in good Cuban. Faced with this reality, the student said, we have to better organize our processes.
In the same vein, Danhiz Díaz Pereira, president of the FEU in Cujae, stressed that the brigade is the essential cell of the organization and “in all our actions it has to be the most effective”. She added that the commitment of the members of the Federation is to make it more like them, through conscious and real participation in all processes.
Another topic of analysis was the Educating for Love initiative. It has been involving university students in alleviating teacher shortages in a number of provinces for several years. Yeslaisy Grandales Ferrales, a student at the Department of Mechanics, referred to this task as the most humane, far-reaching and socially-influential one in which she has participated, which means educating the new generations.
Olga Lidia Tapia Iglesias, a member of the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee, said that this task of impact, like others carried out by the FEU, demonstrates her concrete contribution to the economic and social development of the country. “Every day, she stressed, we have to think about how to become more useful, how to continue training a competent professional, who carries feelings, values and principles in keeping with the Revolution.
Not a few agreements emerged from the discussion: to promote university-industry relations that make it possible to train students in their skills. To propose to the departments that they hold a workshop on job placement, to analyze the need for the years in which the student is an assistant to be counted as seniority in the teaching category process and to strengthen other aspects of political-ideological work with new communication codes.
At the end of the meeting, Raúl Alejandro Palmero, president of the FEU, called on the students to act with the example and commitment of José Antonio Echeverría, and above all, to participate, because where it is not possible for the young person to get involved, share and motivate himself, the FEU loses its meaning, while if the opposite is achieved, the organisation becomes green.
“These are times to have a living Federation, which will continue to represent its members and do for the country,” he said.
TRANSLATION NOTE:
“Four cats” is a Cuban slang expression used when only a few people or none show up for an organized event. I’ve no idea what significance, if any, the number “four” has in this context.
Venezuela: A Liberating Vote
A Liberating Vote, Against All Odds
This Sunday’s presidential elections in Venezuela are being held under a rarely seen siege, and will once again test the foresight and courage of those who oppose foreign intervention.
Posted: Saturday 19th May 2018 | 08:51:34 PM
By Marina Menéndez Quintero
marina@juventudrebelde.cu
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Chavista legacy will also be present at the polls. Author: Héctor Planes/Latin American Summary Published: 19/05/2018 | 08:34 pm
NOT in vain Nicolás Maduro, a candidate of the Bolivarian forces who seeks re-election, has said that the main task of another term will be in the economy.
This Sunday’s elections in Venezuela are taking place under a foreign siege rarely seen, largely responsible for the narrow economic and financial situation, while the lack of supplies, rising prices and emigration are being manipulated to blame the Bolivarian executive for a crisis that it has not created, but that other war.
In addition to the U.S. sanctions, which have been preventing transactions with the main Venezuelan company – PDVSA – since August. There has been pressure from a European Union that is questioning the presidential elections along with more than a dozen Latin American nations, which are also following a political strategy forged in Washington: to ignore and illegitimize the elections, the only way which the Bolivarians can peacefully defeat the conspiracy against their political, economic and social system.
And the age-old U.S. gamble to justify armed aggression has been defeated, so far. Thus, the falcons also have their sights set on the elections.
At the international level, their appetites found a fence in the countries of the Caribbean and the members of ALBA which, within the framework of the OAS, have prevented the completion of the interventionist stratagem based on the allegation of a “lack of democracy” in Venezuela.
That speech was later accompanied by questioning of the calling of these presidential elections, under the argument – equally invalid and interfering – that they were premature. After using the issue to attack Latin American and Caribbean unity with the formation of the anti-Venezuelan Lima Group, ago the OAS three weeks ago still called for an extraordinary meeting of its executive council to implement new measures of punishment against Caracas.
Of course, such a position used as a breeding ground the most twisted right-wing opposition within the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD). Their leader, Julio Borges, served the diners a snack on a plate with the frustration of the dialogue he had with the government in the Dominican Republic at a time when, as he said, the agreements were ready.
It could not be surprising that these U.S. acolyte parties, after the lists of candidates for the presidency came out, were absent. It was the only way they had of calling the electoral tournament illegitimate. Now they now accuse it of being fraudulent, since three opposition candidates (Henry Falcón, from Avanzada Progresista-AP, Movimiento al Socialismo-MAS and the Partido Socialcristiano-Copei; Reinaldo Quijada, from Unidad Política Popular 89-UPP89; and Javier Bertucci, independent) inflicted a defeat on them when they registered [to participate] in the electoral battle against Maduro.
But their reluctance to nominate candidates could also have another cause: the division of positions in the face of some elections that some of the MUD parties rejected and others wanted to embrace, which is why they could not be able to run with a single candidate either.
Meanwhile, the imperial desire for intervention encountered decisive obstacles, from Venezuela’s borders inwards. These included in the lucidity and courage of the more than eight million citizens who, in July 2017, came to vote for the Constituent Assembly and in whom, later, they gave a large majority to the candidates of “Chavismo” during the gubernatorial elections, and in that of mayors.
They stopped the Manichean discourse of imperialism and those who join it, about the alleged political isolation of Nicolas Maduro within the country. What “dictatorship” was that?
It is that same long light that must be present today to that part of the electorate that wants peace and stability, but also a better life for Venezuela.
To understand it in the midst of so much media harassment and daily narrowness will be as compelling a test of consciousness as the vote for the Constituent Assembly was.
If it then threatened a violence that the Bolivarians had the courage to stoically endure, so as not to create chaos and offer a stepping stone to intervention, the scenario today, amidst economic scarcity and the financial crisis, is equally overwhelming.
Community social programs such as the Local Councils for Supply and Production (Clap) have been the government’s alternative for alleviating the lack or increase in the price of basic food products, at the mercy of right-wing entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, in the external area, Caracas was seeking respite with a new currency: the Petro, whose digital character allows it to carry out the necessary transactions and circumvent the banks supervised by the powerful OFAC (U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control).
However, this has not been enough to stop an aggression that will only be satisfied with the overthrow of the Bolivarian Revolution. Until 15 days ago, US Vice President Mike Pence called on the countries of the region to “sanction” Nicolas Maduro.
Hence the necessary role of the masses, and the importance of these elections. No “dictation” of foreign powers can have more force and more weight than the vote of the people. Don’t those who attack claim to defend democracy?
However, the political elites of the hemispheric right and the State Department will try to disregard any outome that may be the result of the Bolivarian victory.
It will be necessary to see how the nations captured by the White House in its campaign react if the vote in favor of Maduro and the Revolution were as profuse as the polls showed.
Attendance at the polls will also be crucial to certify the popular support of these elections. The last call of the most reactionary in the divided and almost non-existent MUD has been to abstain, while the Bolivarian forces said they aspired, in principle, for ten million votes; a figure, in fact, high, taking into account that the historical level of the Bolivarian forces in elections is just over eight million votes.
Of course, the electoral roll has increased since Bolivarian leader Hugo Chávez obtained 8.1 million votes in 2012 against right-wing Henrique Capriles Radonski. In those historic elections, just over 18 million Venezuelans were eligible to vote. Today, more than 20 million people are registered. Only they can attest to their democracy.
Against all odds, the presidential elections are being held this Sunday to assert national sovereignty and, like so many other times in that country, morer than its future will be decided.
Ultimately, achieving the defeat of the Bolivarian Revolution is the “turning point” that right-wing hemispheric forces are seeking to achieve. They aim to ensure, as in the “golden times” of Francis Fukuyama, that the end of history has come and that in Latin America the “backwards march” has taken place… Even if once again it is the wrong prediction.
This election
More than 200 personalities from institutions and different countries around the world are part of the Accompanying Mission that will testify to this Sunday’s elections.
Today, the members of the legislative councils of the various states and municipalities are also elected and nominated by various political organizations at the national and territorial levels.
This is the 24th election in Venezuela in the last 18 years.
Maduro’s massive closing of the campaign showed the united strength of the Revolution. Photo: News front
Putin Unmasks Anti-Russia Manipulation
Putin Unmasks Anti-Russia Manipulation
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
What would Russia have gained from the murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripel and his daughter Yulia? This is the question asked by Argentine-Canadian international information analyst Alberto Rabilotta. He praises the equanimity and impeccable realism that Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated to show the falsity of the accusations without aggravating tensions that are the goal of the United States and its allies in this and similar conflicts.
The poisoning of the former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain on 4 March occurred when the fable of “Russiagate”, with which Putin allegedly manipulated the US elections in the name of Trump’s victory, was beginning to fall apart.
Anyone who knows about the behavior of the rulers and intelligence services of London and Washington, throughout history, and especially in recent times, knows that there is very good reason to believe that what happened to Skripal and his daughter happened when British Channel 4 journalists were about to reveal that the manipulation of the election in the United States and the Brexit referendum in Great Britain had been the work of the British company Cambridge Analytica (CA), which has offices in London, New York and Washington and which used data from Facebook.
Cambridge Analytica is an “offshoot” of the Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), a company that has manipulated elections in numerous countries – including some in Latin America. This necessarily implies that it had strong links in the political world related to Washington and their structures of government and intelligence. Further proof of this is the fact that one of its main shareholders is the American billionaire Robert Mercer who has financed, among other reactionary campaigns, including that of a number of Republicans, including Donald Trump.
On March 19, TV Channel 4 in Great Britain broadcast a report on CA made with recordings -some of them secretly made- between the end of 2017 and January 2018, in which executives and collaborators of CA exposed the type of manipulation that this firm used in the Brexit referendum in Great Britain and in the United States elections that gave the victory to Donald Trump. On the basis of these, major propaganda campaigns were carried out to show that these events had been manipulated by Moscow.
Interestingly, before Channel 4 broadcast its report, CA founder and director Alexander Nix resigned. This shows he knew what was about to be revealed and what their consequences for the firm and its owners would be. Rabilotta notes that on December 15, 2017, the Wall Street Journal had written that Robert Mueller, special advisor to the Justice Department, had asked CA to submit documents from its investigation “on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.” From this it’s evident that even then the U.S. intelligence services were aware of CA’s role in that electoral process.
Moreover, The Times of Israel revealed that CA worked with Israeli companies and that, in addition to using Facebook data, it carried out classic blackmail operations with honey traps, which are Ukrainian prostitutes who specialize in recording situations that encourage blackmail, using former British and Israeli spies.
With the information available and beginning to emerge, it is clear that this entire operation, as well as those who participated in it and those who benefited from it, were known to the US intelligence services and their allies well before 19 March, the date when British Channel 4 broadcast its report. Thus, long before March 19 and the fateful March 4 – the poisoning of Skripel and his daughter – the key figures in London and Washington knew that Russiagate at the Capitol in Washington was destined to collapse permanently and disastrously. Not only that, but that the political and diplomatic cost of that campaign against Russia, forged from the beginning by millionaires, politicians and companies from the United States and Great Britain, would have to be borne, Rabilotta reiterates.
With the information available and beginning to come to light, it is clear that this whole operation, as well as those who participated in it and benefited from it, were known to the US intelligence services and their allies, long before March 19, when British Channel 4 broadcast its report.
Mr Rabilotta recalls that, on March 1, President Putin announced Russia’s progress on strategic arms and Syria launched an offensive to liberate strategic areas near Damascus controlled by financed and armed terrorist forces financed and armed by imperialism and its allies, who were preparing an operation using chemical weapons that would be blamed on the Syrian government to justify military intervention by the US and its allies.
May 7, 2018.
Fake News as Washington’s Weapons
Fake News as Washington’s Weapons
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Let no one think that using falsehoods as a pivot for the projection and execution of U.S. foreign policy is an innovation or a novel contribution by Donald Trump. This has been a tradition in Washington’s foreign policy since the explosion of the Spanish battleship Maine in 1898 in Havana, which led to the U.S. declaring war on the Spanishmonarchy and whose aftermath was the rise of U.S. imperialism.
In 1997, the release of the feature film WAG THE DOG, a free adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s novel “American Hero”, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro and directed by Barry Levinson, was very successful in the United States.
The film is about a spin doctor and a film producer who are inventing a war to distract voters’ attention from a sex scandal that would hamper the re-election of the President of the United States. The film was released a month before the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory by the Clinton administration and generated numerous comparisons of reality with the film.
On tape, the President is caught falling in love with a young minor in the Oval Office two months before the election. The spin doctor decides to draw the public’s attention with a fictitious war against Albania in order to draw its media attention to this conflict by diverting it from the White House.
The deception initially takes effect by moving the election statistics in favor of the President. But then this clashes with the interests of the CIA, which favors the opposition candidate. All this then is complicated by a succession of dirt and perversions typical of American politics.
Fake news has become a “fourth generation” weapon. Inserted into the new information technology scenarios, it surpasses them widely in scope and validity, given that the scenario in which it is poured exponentially surpasses the level of dissemination of content through the computer media of social networks, where the false becomes true.
An example of recent false news used as weapons of war has been the case of acoustic attacks against U.S. embassy officials in Cuba.
This fake news was denied in many ways, including by an investigation conducted at the University of Michigan by researcher Kevin Fu. He determined that the alleged attacks “were caused by interference between two ultrasound sources very close to those affected: one, a listening and spying device; the other, an ultrasonic blocker of the device. In other words, it was the very espionage activities that the Americans carried out inside their embassy that caused the acoustic attacks that affected their own diplomatic officials.
A large number of previous verifications had confirmed the fallacy, but the aim of this fake news was not to rectify something, but to provoke tension and break ties between Washington and Havana in line with the political objectives of the Trump regime.
Another recent case was that of the poisoning in England of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The Russian government was automatically accused, allegedly the only producer of a chemical known as Novichok, which – it became known – is not only produced by Russian laboratories, but can be produced in several British laboratories. This showd that the treacherous accusation sought to discredit the Kremlin.
Worse still, there has been the alleged chemical attack by Syria on the city of Douma, recently liberated by the Syrian Arab Army from occupation by terrorist forces supported by the United States. A team of journalists from the U.S.-based One America News Network (OAN)-which is a purely conservative source of guidance and audience and supports Donald Trump-visited Douma. They publicly stated that it had found no evidence of the chemical attack which allegedly took place on April 7, making a mockery of its President.
The self-esteem of the US superpower’s foreign policy must be in a very bad way when it has to resort over and over again to falsehoods and manipulations to try to keep the idea of the invincibility of the US empire in the collective imagination.
May 3, 2018.