By Blanche Petrich
The United States and the Rene Preval government see the private sector as constituting the “spine” of post-earthquake reconstruction. According to a document, Haiti Tomorrow, $9 billion will be put into infrastructure works such as roads and ports to “relaunch” the economy. One of the first roads will lead north from the capital Port-au-Prince to what will be a new township in Cabaret, just the place where Papa Doc Duvalier had thought of constructing his own Brasilia – Duvalier Ville. Experts from the organisation assessing the damage say it amounts to 120% of the GDP, $8 billion, something they have never encountered on this magnitude using the same methodology in the past 35 years.
Women Victims: The earthquake dealt a hard blow to Haitian feminism. Three of its principal figures died on January 12: Myriam Merlet, advisor to the Ministry for Women, Magalie Marcelin of the organisation Kay Fanm, and Anne Marie Coriolan, founder of the organisation SOFA. Women’s conditions were, and are, totally neglected, says Jesi Chancy, feminist activist. The first survey by these organisations found more than 7,000 pregnant women in these camps. Very rarely in the camp committees are there women representatives. Women do not have the privacy even for taking a bath. Not only are there cases of sexual harassment but also trade in sex. Girls and mothers have to trade their body for food or a piece of canvas.
Warnings Ignored: The first thing that documentary maker Arnold Antonin thought of when the earthquake struck was, it’s come: the catastrophe foretold, the warning unheard. In 2004, the geologist Claude Prepetit handed over a technical study to Jean Bertrand Aristride, the then President, warning him that fault lines below Haiti made an earthquake likely between two and ten years. Prepetit had been warning of this risk since 1996. The environmental movements, Moun pu un Aiyti Bel (People for a Beautiful Haiti) and Free Forum, organised a march in July 2009 after a poorly constructed school building collapsed in 2008, killing about 30 students. Their banner read: No to collective suicide.
Crime Nightmare: The flight of some 5,000 dangerous criminals from four prisons in the capital after the earthquake is a “real nightmare”, says Alix Fils Aime, the anti-mafia czar. The four prisons of Puerto Principe emptied of prisoners on the night of January 12. The guards fled and left behind the arms. It wasn’t accidental. Someone ordered the gates to be opened. Among the thousands of fugitive prisoners, says Aime, are 500 truly dangerous men – leaders of kidnap, rape and murder gangs.
Homeless: In the 34 seconds that the earthquake lasted, 313,000 houses collapsed. Half of them were completely destroyed and the rest could be repaired, leaving 15% of the urban population homeless. Among these were those on the top of the hills surrounding Port-au-Prince, exquisite homes with terraces and swimming pools and with a view of Gonave Bay, and shanties on the slopes built in the past three decades.
Forgotten Ones: The newly disabled, whose numbers have risen drastically, run the risk of the becoming the “forgotten ones” of the earthquake, the United Nations has warned. Take the case of Marie Michelle, 16-years-old, homeless and living in a hospital courtyard with her surviving siblings, attended to by the Cuban health brigade and visited twice a week by a psychologist. She was studying in a room when the earthquake struck. She wanted to run but was paralysed with fear, watching the walls dance. She was stuck in a heap of rubble for 25 hours, rescued, brought to hospital and had to have her right leg amputated. It is estimated that there have been between two and four thousand major amputations.
Evangelist Invasion: It’s market day at Kenscoff, a mountain village half an hour from the capital and the pastor Joe sets up state-of-the-art audio and video equipment for his evangelical show. Thousands of such missionaries from New York, Boston, Tampa and Miami are at work in Haiti. Anthropologist and Voodoo priest Rachelle Beauvoir-Dominique says these sects have been at work for decades with help from USAID. Her father Max Beauvoir, Voodoo head priest in Haiti, says if the evangelists want war, they will have war. Recently Baptists attacked a voodoo ceremony in remembrance of the dead, says Rachelle. Voodoo has been under attack since the very beginning, she says, from the days of Toussaint Louverture. Initially, the 19th-century French missionaries were tolerant, themselves product of the French revolution, but a new and aggressive group from Breton was sent in the middle of the century after a pact with the Vatican and they attacked Voodoo temples. The religion was banned during the U.S. occupation from 1915-34. In 1942, a million Haitians were forcibly converted to Catholicism and after the end of the Duvalier regime, when a distorted form of Voodoo was used to oppress the people, the religion came under attack again from the military and the Catholic Church. Then came the evangelical offensive.
Source: La Jornada
19 May 2010
Haiti: The Open Wounds
8 May 2010
Honduras: What A Resistance
By Angel Guerra Cabrera
The popular movement against the coup d’etat in Honduras has, in ten months, consolidated the struggle as a national political force of the first magnitude, capable of aiming for an important social and political transformation of the country. Facing growing repression and the demagogy of [Porfiro] Lobo, the new visible head of the pro-coup tendency imposed by a farcical election, the National Front of Popular Resistance [FNRP in its Spanish acronym] has managed to rope in the most diverse social forces and people, including the indigenous people and the Afro-descendants, appreciably increase the political consciousness of its members and ally its principled positions to tactical flexibility that allows it to advance in very adverse conditions in the political battle facing it.
The resistance has grown in the complex and treacherous situation created by the [U.S.] Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in imposing the mediation of her buddy, Óscar Arias [President of Costa Rica], to consolidate the coup which, till this moment, has been directly rejected by the United Nations and the European Union, which demand the “immediate and unconditional” restitution of Manuel Zelaya as President. It has grown again in the media silence imposed by the United States regarding the crimes and grave violations of human rights in Honduras while the State Department is employed in the background to make it seem that the country is returning to democratic normality. It is hardly worried by the killings of journalists and social activists, the military occupation of the agricultural zone El Aguán; in sum the death threats or disappearance for all those who condemn the dictatorship. In the heat of the battle, the FNRP has turned out to be one of the most combative and promising popular force of our region in the struggle for the second independence and the unity and economic and political unity of Latin America.
The imperial elite of the United States and the native oligarchy never imagined the spark that would be lit in people’s conscience by that the flowering of sensitivities and social commitment in a large landowner like Zelaya, who came to presidency from within the anti-people rules of the Honduran political system but in a tectonic Latin American epoch. Neither did it cross their minds the radicalisation and the redoubling of the will to fight which the coup nourished among the popular sectors. They had calculated that the resistance would last just a few days or weeks and, while it crumbled, the coup would be consolidated. I remember having read an honest anti-coup analysis from Honduras immediately after the military putsch which doubted the possibility of keeping up the fight for more than a few days.
And resisting the forcible regime appeared to be the curse of Sisyphus. It has demanded of the FNRP members that they fight against a singularly obstinate and selfish oligarchy – with its massive economic power, its ancestral cultural hegemony and political terrorism facilitated by the ownership of the large communication media – at risk of being beaten up or assassinated by an army and security forces servile to the empire and of emblematic anti-people progeny. All this in a country that is hugely impoverished by oligarchic and imperial plunder, whose budget depends a lot on Washington’s contributions, which maintains a military base there well known for its interference in internal matters.
In various recent marches all over the country, the FNRP raised the slogan of getting 2.5 million signatures demanding the convening of a Constituent Assembly for June 28, the first anniversary of the coup. This is a work that has already started and demands gigantic political work and organisation but there does not appear to be anything more important in continuing with the creation of counter-power than denouncing the Constitution and the anti-democratic social regime in power, children of the United States’ dirty war against the Sandinista revolution and the revolutionary movements of Central America. The coup in Honduras should underscore the first step of Obama’s farcical strategy against the people and progressive governments of Latin America, of which the current media campaign against Cuba is a cornerstone.
[The May Day rally in Honduras was joined by at least 500,00 to 700,000 people, surpassing the expectations of the organisers and is considered the most important event in the country after the 1954 strike by the banana workers against the Standard Fruit Company. Argenpress]
Source: La Jornada
26 January 2010
Haiti: Two Competing Aid Approaches
Two very different visions of disaster aid and reconstruction are playing out in Haiti. Manuel Medina, a Caracas fire officer who was part of the first Venezuelan team, spoke of his country’s “historical debt” to Haiti. In 1815, President Alexandre Sabes Petion gifted Simon Bolivar hundreds of elite fighters, ships, arms, money and a printing press at a time Venezuela’s liberator was down and out. Now, Haiti and Venezuela have agreed on setting up a Petion-Bolivar Solidarity Brigade to focus on the country’s reconstruction. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, said his country had no intention of occupying Haiti: “our deployment is that of solidarity, not of military force”.
The theme of solidarity extends beyond a pending historical debt. Venezuela, Cuba and other countries of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America) see the Haitian people as protagonists of the reconstruction. The Haitian people are hard-working and honest and we will work together with them in reconstruction, says Maduro. The first Venezuelan rescue team refused bodyguards, and nobody attacked them. They were, however, impeded once while moving concrete slabs from a collapsed sweat shop with hundreds of dead in it. As they dragged bodies out of the rubble, the factory owner interrupted their work demanding that heavy equipment be used to demolish the structure so that it could be built over.
Venezuelan aircraft and Navy ships have been offloading supplies in neighbouring Dominican Republic and driving into Haiti. The food supplies are shifted by Venezuelans and Haitians together. The aid convoys also bring in pick-ups and small vehicles destined for Haitian community organisations. Aid from the people goes straight to the people. The earthquake has prompted spontaneous community organisation in Haiti. While the state sank without a trace, the people were on the feet, burying the dead, organising themselves into camps and handling the little relief that reached them efficiently. The ALBA aid is aimed at them.
More than 400 Haitian medical students in Cuba have gone back to their country to help. Venezuela’s 15,000-odd Haitians, many of them street vendors, have been included in the relief mobilisation. Venezuela is constructing health centres in each of Haiti’s 10 departments. Cuba pitches in with literacy programmes. The two countries have a programme of boosting rice production and creating popular markets. Ships from Caracas are bringing in small vehicles to be given direct to the community organisations. President Hugo Chavez says his country will contribute to setting up community media outlets in Haiti managed by the Haitians.
The Other Approach
On the other side of the divide is an aid and development doctrine self-consciously tied to the strategic interest apron. Hillary Clinton, in a platitudinous speech on January 6, revealed the core of Washington’s thinking:
“… development was once the province of humanitarians, charities, and governments looking to gain allies in global struggles. Today it is a strategic, economic, and moral imperative – as central to advancing American interests and solving global problems as diplomacy and defense.” Development will be the “central pillar” of foreign policy; USAID will be used to “advance global stability, improve our own security, and project our values and leadership in the world”. She mentioned Haiti, “ravaged by poverty and natural disaster”, as a country “where the odds of success are long but the cost of not doing anything is potentially far greater”.
Mrs Clinton’s honesty on that day could not be faulted. She spoke of integrating development, defence and diplomacy, leveraging “the expertise of our diplomats and our military on behalf of development, and vice versa” and aligning “overseas development efforts with our strategic objectives and national interests” so that some time in future the world would applaud “American knowhow, American dollars, American caring, and American values”.
This is not a new thinking and neither is her State Department the sole purveyor of policy. The Pentagon is in the driver’s seat, with President Obama making it the lead agency in the Haiti operations. Among the troops to arrive were the 82nd Airborne Division which was involved in the invasions of the Dominican Republic, Granada and Panama. A day before the earthquake, on January 11, the U.S. military’s Southern Command, rehearsed a disaster scenario in Haiti, involving a hurricane. Some of the communication systems went live two days later linking “non-government organizations with the United States [government and military] and other nations for tracking, coordinating and organizing relief efforts".
International NGOs which do not wish to be sucked into the military orbit and governments considered inimical to U.S. interests will be shut out of the loop in future scenarios. This can achieved relatively simply by the U.S. military taking over key installations like ports and airports, armed checkpoints being set up in the name of security and denying communication space to others. In diplomacy, the United Nations will be bypassed for bilateral deals with weak national governments desperate for help and client states happy to have U.S. troops stave off civilian anger. The presence of armed American soldiers and contractors means that Haiti for now will not have a repeat of the Nicaraguan uprising of 1972 after a devastating earthquake. In the longer term, a residual U.S. military presence will make sure that pesky nay-sayers cannot make too much trouble when privatisation and deep cuts takes hold.
It is not that Venezuela and Cuba do not have strategic interests in Haiti. As with Mrs Clinton, President Chavez has been saying publicly that no revolution is safe in Latin America until the continental bourgeoisie has been defeated. But the doctrines have different consequences for Haiti and everywhere else: military boots on the ground versus hospitals and schools, community organising versus disaster capitalism, privatisation, wage freezes and enormous loans versus public ownership, independence versus servitude.
15 January 2010
Haiti: Sad, Sad Facts
Haiti has some 9 million inhabitants
More than half the population is rural; 95% are black and the rest mixed race and white
The official languages are French and Creole. Almost half the population over 15 years’ age (47.1%) is illiterate
The GDP is $7 billion. In terms of purchasing power parity, the per capita GDP is the lowest in Latin America (followed by Nicaragua) and only just abouve the countries of Africa and Nepal
Remittances from Haitians living abroad, mostly in New York and Miami, represent 40% of the GDP
Haiti is one of worst countries in the world in terms of income distribution. The poor receive only 0.7% while the richest 10% takes in 47.7%
80% of the population lives below the poverty line, with an “income” of less than a dollar a day
Almost 75% of the houses are of mud and wood and have no sanitation
Less than 40% of the population has access to drinking water
There is no garbage collection centre
80% of the population is unemployed. The average monthly salary is less than $50
Only 24% of the births are attended to by qualified medical personnel
Life expectancy fell from 52.6 years in 2002 to 49.1% in 2005. This is the lowest in Latin American and only just higher that the African countries, Bangladesh, Laos and Afghaistan
About 120,000 people, 2.2% fo the population, is affected by AIDS, one of the highest in the world
There are hardly 108,000 fixed telephone lines.
Source: Rebelion
Related Article: Galeano on Haiti: The White Curse
12 December 2009
Cuba's Daltonic Racism: José Steinsleger
The answer was not late in coming. A group of prominent Cuban intellectuals felt that such an exhortation “… would appear to be a delirious reflection were it not that behind those fictions was a malicious intent to add respectable voices from the Afro-North American community to the anti-Cuban campaign that tries to undermine our sovereignty and identity”.
This time the stage was not occupied by those who live the business of freedom for Cuba but by personalities like Cornel West, preacher and professor of Princeton University, the veteran actress Ruby Dee Davis or pastor Jeremiah Wright, who was convinced that god cursed his country “… for treating our own as second class citizens” and someone that Barack and Michelle Obama wanted to erase from their family album after he married them and baptised their daughters.
Racism in Cuba? In ophthalmology, the irregularity of one eye in relation to the other is called squint, presbyopia is straining of the eye and Daltonism is a defect which hinders distinguishing colours. I do not know if in matters of ideology, politics, history and sociology analogous terms exist to name similar deficiencies.
Manning Marable, historian at Columbia University and biographer of the leader, Malcolm X, seems not to have found them. In a research on racism, Marable says that the “new racial control” in the United States would be a lethal or diabolical triangulation of structural racism: massive unemployment, massive imprisonment and massive deprivation of the right to vote.
Marable called this triangular cycle “of economic marginalisation and exclusion which culminates in civil and social death” Daltonic racism. That is, a variety of racism oriented at dismantling the ethno-racial Manichean (dualistic) signposting, remodelling language and dealing with race in neutral and Daltonic form.
Is there no racism in Cuba? A categoric ‘yes’ would be equivalent to believing in a confusion as deliberate as intentional and a categoric ‘no’ runs the risk of being underestimated by frivolity (blah, blah), ignoring a reality which needs to be approached without presbyopia, squint or a Daltonic look.
A century ago, the celebrated Cuban thinker Enrique J. Varona said: the colony is alive in the Republic. In 1959, the revolution demonstrated that the Republic was colonial and headed for the road to Socialism. But, half a century later, paid libertarians claim that racism is daily bread of the revolution.
Well, what percentage of Whites manifest it and what percentage of Blacks suffer it: 90%, 50, 20 or 10%? It is of no interest. For the sociologist Charles Moore, all Cuban Whites are racists and, more than that, the leaders of the revolution are “White supremacists”. This delirium sells. And more so when accompanied by the “academic seriousness” of figures like Enrique Patterson, former professor of philosophy at the Department of Marxism-Leninism at Havana University.
Franz Fanon said racism was not a constant in the human spirit but a disposition written onto a certain determined system. But would ideology be enough to end racism in Cuba? Intellectuals like Professor Marable have to be realists and, inevitably, fatalists at the same time. In contrast, Professor Desiderio Navarro, one of the most complex and diligent intellectuals of Cuba, maintains that in place of worrying about the colour of the past we have to see the colour of the future.
Marable lives in a directionless capitalist system and Navarro in a Socialist society that turns the issue over. And we are in a colonised and alienated society, in which 80% of the population is poor and 90% of this population is indigenous, negroid or mestizo. And that the first abolitionist cry in America was launched in 1811 by the Mexican Deputy Guridi Alcocer before the Court of Cadiz.
The Cuban revolution has to face up to the challenge. Nevertheless, it remains to be known how clear its thinkers are that racism is not a mere epiphenomenon of class struggle or something written in a “determined system” as Fanon thought.
Racism, as I understand it, is a sentiment. The most slippery, terrible, hypocritical and twisted of sentiments. It can be used by counter-revolution and can be used by revolution. Julius Lester, activist and lucid thinker of the U.S. Black movement, wrote a brief article suggestively titled, ‘The White radical as revolutionary’ (1967): “What the Blacks feel in the guts, the Whites feel with their head”.
Source: La Jornada
12 October 2009
Honduras Coup Boss Pays Out To Lobbyists
The de facto government of Honduras spares no expenses in its “defence of democracy”. It has signed an agreement with a lobbyist firm to clean up its image in Washington and handed over public resources to business organisations for its executives to travel to the United States and Europe (those that still have visas) to defend the coup.
Deputy Marvin Ponce still cannot shake hands properly after the police broke his arm in a demonstration. But with the left he shows two notes signed some days ago by the minister of the presidency of the de facto government, Rafael Pineda Ponce. In the first order to the Central Bank is the transfer of 2.5 million lempiras (a little more than $130,000) to the private account of the National Association of Industries, headed by the businessman Adolfo Facussé, an enthusiastic promoter of the return of President Manuel Zelaya to power (only for an hour, to go straight to justice and house arrest). The resources, according to the text, “will be destined to financing of activities directed at strengthening democracy and national dialogue”.
The second orders the transfer of a little more than $130,000 from the budget of the Commission for Strengthening Institutions, to the lobbyist firm Chlopak, Leonard, Schecter and Associates, with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. The first payment is contracted for an amount of $292,000.
The contract hopes to “count on the consultancy services of a public relations business specialised in managing special political situations, with the end of implementing a strategic communication plan to achieve a better position for the government before world public opinion”, according to the copy of a document sited by the agency, AFP. The document was registered by the U.S. firm with the Department of Justice division of lobbyists for foreign governments on 18 September, says the agency.
Facussé was detained at Miami airport in the middle of September and sent back to Honduras. This is how it came to be known that the U.S. government had cancelled the visa. Others, who can travel, have spent the government’s dollars to go to the United States and Europe, perhaps to return the money spent by businessmen in the campaign against Zelaya before the coup and later in organising the “white marches” in favour of the coup government.
The investment has borne fruit. According to a report in the New York Times, Micheletti’s government has already spent some $400,000 on lawyers and lobbyists, which has had the effect of forcing “the Obama Administration to send contradictory signals about its position in relation the de facto government, which has interpreted them as encouraging signals. It has also delayed two important State Department appointments for the region”.
In the campaign, the newspaper goes on, “are linked law firms and public relations agencies with close links to the Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Senator John McCain” (former Republican candidate and an important figure in the Senate Foreign Relations committee).
According to the Honduran newspaper, Tiempo, Facussé accepted having received the funds and said that these could not be reimbursed “because these are for promoting democracy, unless the government is against democracy”.
Marvin Ponce says that, in any case, the government “can spend people’s money in what it wants”, but in the case of an international contract it is obliged to have a tender “and it was a direct allocation” destined to “show the coup in a good light”.
Source: La Jornada
23 February 2009
Havana Book Fair '09: To Read Is To Grow
More than 80% of those who attended the fair participated in one of the many presentations, lectures or events. There were special events for children. The San Carlos de la Cabaña fortress was the venue for the fair with the Tres Reyes del Morro castle serving as a store selling books and handicrafts from different countries.
A thousand Cuban and foreign authors presented their books and participated in the events. The Havana book fair’s fame has spread throughout Latin America. 43 nations were represented this year, including 165 Cuban exhibitors and 183 from other nations, as well as 266 publishing houses. This year’s fair was dedicated to Chile and President Bachelet inaugurated it along with Cuban Raul Castro. There were homage musicals to Violeta Parra and Victor Jara, emblematic Chilean musicians. Next year’s book fair theme is Russia.
Before the fair itself started on 12 February, 46 book stores in Havana were offering some 200 new titles and the book fair is taken to all manner of events, including agricultural fairs. After curtains at Havana, the fair moves to 16 other Cuban cities in the provinces and concludes at Santiago de Cuba on 8 March. That about 90% of the new books published in Cuba are by Cuban authors must surely have something to do with the book fair.
15 January 2009
Galeano on Haiti: The White Curse
There is nothing new about this slight of
Revolutions, certain specialists have concluded, lead straight to the abyss; others have suggested, if not stated outright, that the Haitian tendency to fratricide derives from its savage African heredity. The rule of the ancestors. The black curse that engenders crime and chaos.
Of the white curse, nothing was said.
The French revolution had abolished slavery, but Napoleon revived it.
"Which regime was most prosperous for the colonies?"
"The previous one."
"Then reinstate it."
To reinstate slavery in
The new country was born with a rope wrapped tightly around its neck: the equivalent of $21.7 billion in today's dollars, or forty-four times
In exchange for this fortune,
Not even Simon Bolivar recognized
In 1915, the Marines landed in
The guerrilla chief, Charlemagne Peralte, was exhibited in the public square, crucified on a door to teach the people a lesson.
This civilizing mission ended in 1934. The occupiers withdrew, leaving a National Guard, which they had created, in their place to exterminate any possible trace of democracy. They did the same in the
And so, from dictator to dictator, from promise to betrayal, one misfortune followed another.
Aristide, the rebel priest, became president in 1991. He lasted a few months before the
But the international experts are far more destructive than invading troops. Placed under strict orders from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,
Today
On the border between
Down that road, everyone is a sculptor. Haitians have the habit of collecting tin cans and scrap metal that they cut and shape and hammer with old-world mastery, creating marvels that are sold in the street markets.
1943:
A little grain of salt
In a bar, surrounded by kids with bloated bellies and skeletal dogs, Hector Hyppolite paints gods with a brush of hens' feathers.
Hyppolite portrays the gods who paint through his hand. These Haitian gods, painted and painters, live simultaneously on earth and in heaven and hell: Capable of good and evil, they offer their children vengeance and solace.
Not all have come from
Zombies--dead people who walk or live ones who have lost their souls--have a look of hopeless stupidity. But in no time they can escape and recover their lost lives, their stolen souls. One little grain of salt is enough to awaken them. And how could salt be lacking in the home of the slaves who defeated Napoleon and founded freedom in
1937: Dajabón
Procedure Against the Black Menace
The condemned are Haitian blacks who work in the
1937:
Two weeks later, the government of
In the name of continental security, the government of the
The White House congratulates itself on an agreement reached within the framework of established inter-American treaties and procedures. Secretary of State Cordell Hull declares in
The indemnity duly paid in cash, the presidents of the
21 November 2008
Why You Will Not Be Told Of This Miracle
“Operación Milagro” (Operation Miracle) is the largest medical solidarity programme in history. Through this, people of modest means in Third World countries have been operated upon for free for vision impairments such as cataract, glaucoma and squint. Between 2004 and October 2008, 1,314,000 people from 33 countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia were operated upon and for 2014 the objective is to arrive at a figure of six million.
Reasons for the news blackout: Nevertheless, almost none of the large communication media, press, radio or television, has reported any of this gigantic solidarity initiative. Why? The explanation is simple: Operation Miracle is not financed by any First World country, is not supported by World Bank funds and neither does it count on the sponsorship of any business or private foundation.
It has been taken forward by two governments of the South who contribute for the people who benefit, without any charge, their public health infrastructure, thousands of doctors, the necessary medicine and even transport them by air to the hospitals of the two countries. The names of the two countries who organise and finance Operation Miracle explains, at once, why the media giants have decided on silence: Cuba and Venezuela.
Marketing solidarity: The paradox is that, while the largest medical solidarity project ever known has been disappeared from the news agenda, the media reserves more space each day for humanitarian projects of minimum impact financed by ophthalmology clinics or distributors of optical products.
These initiatives, which benefit at most a few hundred people in the nations of the South, are integrated within the so-called “corporate social responsibility” of these businesses and developed by their marketing departments. Many of these companies, it is clear, are prominent advertising clients of the communication media.
Oxfam report shut out: A study by the international organisation Oxfam reported that pharmaceutical company patents had impeded access to affordable medicines for the treatment of sight problems, this being the cause for the blindness for more than 30,000 people the world over. This report, which advocated generic medicines and therefore acted against the interests of the pharmaceutical companies, potential advertising clients for the media, did not have the impact in keeping with its importance
A few desertions: Some of the media, nevertheless, have certainly reported on Operation Miracle. But not to narrate the experience of some of the thousands of people, marginalised and forgotten for years, who have regained their vision thanks to the solidarity of Cuba and Venezuela. The only thing to have been picked up as news item is that some Cuban doctors have decided to boost their salaries working in private clinics in Latin America or the USA. It has to be remembered that there is a system of entrapping Cuban doctors directed by organisations in Miami and from U.S. embassies and consulates. A system which has worked out to be a complete failure if we look at the trifling number of entrapped doctors.
Cuba has close to 42,000 aid workers in 110 countries, of which 75% are health personnel. The web page ‘Barrio afuera’, created in Miami for entrapping Cuban medical aid workers with money, speaks of scarcely a “hundred Cuban professionals (who) have arrived in the United States from third countries”. Despite this, large circulation newspapers dedicate features to the very few cases of doctors who have deserted.
Protests by medical elites: The media also turn into news item the protests of medical associations and professional bodies in countries benefiting from Operation Miracle. This professional and business elite pressure their governments against these solidarity programmes, since the free Cuban ophthalmology service endangers their economic interests.
A subversive project: Operation Miracle is a huge challenge for the Latin American elites and for the large international communication media. It demonstrates that the ideology of solidarity can triumph over the ideology of individualism and of money. And solidarity is incompatible with the business interests or huge fortunes. It is a profoundly subversive project.
For this, the large companies which control information flow in the world have decided to censure one of the most important and encouraging news at the start of the twenty-first century: Operation Miracle.
Total data of patients operated upon from 2004 till 28 October 2008:
Venezuela: 566,704
Cuba: 171,183
Rest of the Caribbean (15 countries): 54,801
Rest of Latin America (14 countries): 511, 358
Mali: 6,714
Angola: 2,453
Total (33 countries): 1,313,213
Source: CubaDebate
Related Article: Operation Miracle restores a million eyesight
5 July 2008
Cuba Wants Internet Democratised
[This is an abridged and slightly edited version of the speech by Felipe Pérez Roque, Cuban Foreign Minister, at a recent summit of Information Ministers of the Non-Aligned Movement in Caracas.]The unjust and anti-democratic international order is responsible for the chasm separating North and South in the production, access and flow of information. It violates the rights of our people to receive true and objective information.
The monopolistic control of information and communication constitutes a strategic component of imperial domination. The growing concentration and transnationalisation of proprietorship of major mass media and advertising control, already running into more than a billion dollars annually, has substituted public opinion for fabricated opinion. More than 90 per cent of the news belongs to a group of transnational businesses. Proprietorship declines and therefore also the diversity of the sources of information.
We are bombarded continually with false allegations… our achievements are often distorted or simply silenced. Falsehood happens daily. It tries to interpret and write history from the lens of the powerful. It tries to justify discrimination and xenophobia. Conditioned reflexes are created through the media. Victims are turned into victimisers. It dumbs down and lies.
The political manipulation of information and the complicity of the communication media have reached extreme levels. They articulate campaigns with multi-million funds and the most sophisticated media. It is about media terrorism, the most effective arm in the 21st century in the hands of the powerful.
Cuba knows its effects well. For almost five decades, it has confronted electronic aggression. Almost two thousand hours are broadcast weekly at Cuba through 30 different frequencies using 19 radio and TV channels. These transmissions call for violence and assassination, falsify and twist facts and promote the destruction of the legally established constitutional order.
Before an energy and food crisis of global reach, the idea of consumerism as synonymous with well being is being encouraged. News, advertising and practically all of the so-called entertainment industry imposes only one model of society, degrading the environment and impoverishing the majority, demonising at the same time any alternative proposal to the existing order.
How can the objective of an informed society, participatory and inclusive, be reached if in the underdeveloped world almost 800 million people remain illiterate and 80 million children don’t go to primary school? There are no miracle technologies to eradicate poverty and underdevelopment. It needs change in the world order. It needs political will of those who, more than being responsible and beneficiaries of this unjust and unsustainable situation, count on the resources that today are wasted on arms, luxuries and extravagances.
The Internet offers the possibility of placing at low cost information which the media domination hides. But the Internet is also invaded by big businesses. The vat difference in Internet access between the nations of the South and of the industrialised North puts us at a disadvantage. Today more than half the Internet users in the world are from North America and Europe though the population in these regions does not exceed a sixth of the world population. They also own three-quarters of the Internet infrastructure.
The contents that circulate in cyberspace are overwhelmingly produced in the countries of the North, 95% of these in only ten languages. It is imperative to put the Internet under the governance of an international democratic institution that promotes international cooperation and equal access to technology for all nations.
There is growing use of spying against our countries and for war on the part of the largest powers in information and communication technology. A massive electronic intelligence network, better known as Red Echelon, operates with the complicity of the transnational corporations. The use of these technologies for the proliferation of nuclear arms is a source of great worry. The USA announced a couple of weeks ago that it had operationalised a supercomputer baptised as ‘Road Runner’ that will be dedicated to maintaining its nuclear arsenal and of its military hegemony.
Let us join forces to defend our right to truth, a just and equitable international order and international solidarity.
Source: Rebelión
5 June 2008
Hondurans Protest Negroponte Visit
By Dick Emanuelsson
John Vladimir Negroponte, Assistant Secretary of the (U.S.) State Department, arrived in Honduras on the night of June 3. His past as Ambassador in the first half of the Eighties is stained with blood in the dirty war and the hundreds of disappearances in the Central American country in that time.
He was met with a large demonstration by the families of the disappeared organised by the Committee of the Families of the Detainees Disappeared in Honduras (Cofadeh) who took to the street in front of the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa without the police intervening.
“I feel indignant when a terrorist, a fascist is being received, someone responsible for so many disappearances, not only in Honduras but also at the Latin American level. Because though he was ambassador in Honduras in the Eighties, he also managed Central America. How is it that a terrorist and assassin is being received in our country when light has not yet been shed on the cases of the disappeared?”
These are the angry words of Noemí Pérez whose brother disappeared on January 24, 1982. Samuel Pérez was only 19 and was one of the many victims of the clandestine bands created by the Honduran armed forces but managed in the final instance by U.S. ambassador Negroponte. And though scores of bodies have been dug up in former U.S. bases in Honduras, the authorities of the Central American country have never had enough courage to demand justice for Negroponte’s war in Honduras.
It is odd that Negroponte, perhaps the most detested U.S. citizen in this country, dares to arrive in Honduras so brazenly, aware that his visit reopens the deep wounds this man caused to the families of the victims. Negroponte waged war with Nixon as his boss and was the spider man in the low and high intensity war in Central America planning, organising, financing and running Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries on Honduran soil or directing the death squads of the armed forces of El Salvador.
“Today, we are forced to re-live 25 years into the past and we face again outside the interventionist U.S. embassy an emissary of death directing the policy of terror in the world, who snatched our sons and daughters, siblings, spouses and companions,” Cofadeh said in its call to the Honduran people asking them to maintain vigil outside the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa.
Telesur reports: In Honduras’ "trial of the century", a judge has sentenced 20 soldiers and policemen who participated in a 2003 killing of 68 prisoners in the El Porvenir jail, 500 km north of Tegucigalpa, to 740 years in prison. Honduran law allows for a maximum of 30 years’ jail for murder, so this is a moral sentence and the exact tariff will be set out later.
Sources: Argenpress and Telesur
28 March 2008
Dear President Zapatero, What About Some Solidarity With the Cuban Five?
By Pascual Serrano
Dear José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, President of Spain:
I checked in the Press that you sent a letter of solidarity to the wife of a Cuban prisoner subjected to trial in my country.
In it you expressed that (she) “can have the confidence that Spain will do everything possible for the liberation of political prisoners”. You also showed your admiration of the work of the so-called “Women in White”, wives and mothers of the prisoners on the island. Your letter of solidarity, by chance, coincided with that of George Bush.
I’m not going to detail the reasons for that imprisonment, based on Cuban penal code that establishes, just like the Spanish one, the crime of working for an enemy power. But I certainly like to express my sadness at not having received from you any letter of solidarity for the detention of my husband or his four companions imprisoned since ten years in the United States.
We cannot demonstrate in the country where they are serving their prison terms because they either rarely grant us visas or they would extradite or imprison us just for demonstrating in Washington asking for their liberty. Two of us have never been able to visit them in prison or travel to the United States.
The five Cubans of whom I speak to you are condemned to long or life imprisonment only for trying to know of terrorist plans that some organisations in Florida were plotting against Cuba, such as they have been doing for many years. I do not believe you think that this mission is reason for them to spend the rest of their life in prison, as your companion in sending the letters of solidarity, George Bush, thinks.
Neither do I want to be selfish and seek only your solidarity for my husband and his four companions. At Guantánamo base, there are hundreds of prisoners without legal assistance, family visits or legal guarantees. It is a pity not to take advantage of the post to Cuba to include some letters to the wives and mothers of those detained.
Take into account that even seeking justice can be unjust when it is sought in an uneven manner. Hypocritical even if motivated by reasons not strictly humanitarian.
I expect, therefore, your letter of support as a sign that the reasons that have moved you to write to that Cuban wife are truly that of solidarity.
Sincerely,
The wife of one of the Cuban Five imprisoned in the United States.
Note: My apologies to Rosa, Adriana, Olga and Elizabeth for the simulation.
Source: PascualSerrano.net
21 January 2008
Operation Miracle Restores A Million Eyesight
More than a million patients from 31 countries of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa have recovered their vision after the intervention of Operation Milagro (Miracle), a free ophthalmologic programme launched in 2004 by Cuba and Venezuela.
At the close of 2007, Operation Miracle “made possible operations on 1,328,000 patients in 49 ophthalmologic centres in 31 countries in three continents,” said Juventud Rebelde (Cuban youth paper), stressing that the programme foresees “intervening surgically by 2016 on 6 million with sight problems”. The official (Cuban) newspaper, Granma, said the programme had “49 ophthalmologic centres, 82 surgical positions and 876 professionals”.
Medical associations and institutes of countries like Bolivia, Uruguay and Honduras have protested against the presence of the Cuban doctors… but the Cuban government projects the social aim of the programme and claims that those who criticise Operation Milagro are the ophthalmologic “rich”.
Thousands of Venezuelans arrived to the island to be operated upon, which allowed Cuba to pay for the petroleum imports from Caracas with its professional service. Venezuela supplies petroleum at preferential prices while Cuba has the option of repaying it with professional service in health, education and sports.
La Jornada editorial: The devoted work by the Cuban and Venezuelan governments through Operation Miracle is praiseworthy for several reasons. It constitutes a display of international solidarity and recognition of the social conditions that prevail in the least developed countries. The principal beneficiaries of the programme are people – in their majority adults – of countries whole public health systems show great deficiencies and limitations… where private medicine, for its high costs, is inaccessible to large sections of the population.
It is to recognise, moreover, the fact that Cuba and Venezuela direct an important quantum of public resources to education, training and developing technology in the field of medicine. The case of Cuba is particularly praiseworthy…we should salute the efforts of the Cuban doctors in areas where adverse logistical, economic and social conditions persist.
Something that needs to be drawn to attention about the functioning of Operation Miracle is that it practically do publicity, contrary to what happens in the majority of governmental programmes in Mexico, above all something with such popular acceptance as this.
The Latin American School of Medicine: More than 4,500 students from some 30 countries have graduated from the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Havana, Cuba. Conceived by Fidel Castro, the project was developed as an answer to the terrible hurricanes, George and Mitch, which lashed Central America in 1998 and left in its wake a large number of victims and incalculable material damage.
After the arrival on February 27, 1999, of the first Nicaraguan students, the facilities of the one-time Granma naval academy, in the west of the Cuban capital, was transformed into ELAM, which was inaugurated by Fidel, in the presence of other heads of state, on November 15 that year.
The project prepares the students to return to their communities to provide attention primarily to health and continue the preventive and promotional work of the Cuban medical brigades in the area. With approximately 1,500 admissions a year, the school will turn out between 1,200 and 1,300 specialists in medicine, who will contribute significantly to the the integration of the (Latin American) people.
Links:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/01/13/index.php?section=mundo&article=029n1mun
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/01/13/index.php?section=opinion&article=002a1edi
http://www.aporrea.org/tecno/n107563.html
14 December 2007
Cuba Regrets 'Past Homophobia'
Gerardo Arreola
Cuba considers the official homophobia of the past decades “an error” but this period still needs discussing: ”what happened has to be analysed,” says sexologist Mariela Castro Espín. The director of the National Centre of Sex Education (Cenesex) announced at the start of last year a legal initiative to recognise the rights of the transsexuals to identity and to clinical attention, a proposal that has been reformulated through discussion. The project, which still awaits legislative passage, has incorporated among other points the rights of free sexual orientation… and of adoption for same sex pairs, comparable to heterosexual unions. Mariela (is) daughter of the stand-in President, Raúl Castro, and Vilma Espín, the late defender of gender rights.
A controversy broke out last January about the ‘quinquenio gris’ (refers to a gray period, variously interpreted as being of five to fifteen years), as the censorship and homophobic discrimination of the Seventies is remembered. Mariela, who participated in the debate, was asked if the discussion would have to extend to other aspects of the past like penalisation of “ostentatious” homosexuality or the agricultural camps where people of that orientation were interned.
She points out that “in the history of a human being, errors are made and one has to go on learning and taking lessons from those mistakes. But institutions also commit errors and have to be capable of recognising why it was a mistake and what it is going to do so that the mistakes are not repeated, what laws have to be established, which values have to be instituted”.
“The errors which Cuba committed were very similar to those that were and still are committed in many countries. Cuba was a reflection of the world. The same happened here that happened in other places, only that much more got out because it was expected that a Socialist revolution could not commit those errors because it was a revolution for the emancipation of man. The ideology at that time was permeated with homophobia and prejudices. The Communist parties were very homophobic. It is recently that they have more inclusive attitudes.”
Reviewing the achievements and obstacles in overcoming the decades of discrimination, Mariela considers that the Cuban media “still timidly approaches” sexual diversity. “They are losing the fear”: last year a telenovela which tackled male bisexuality caused an intense social controversy; the newspaper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) has a section on sex; television approaches the theme in a comedy programmes and a short drama was broadcast about a lesbian pair.
But prejudice is still deep-rooted in society and in the government: “There still are institutions that take the right to decide if a lesbian, gay or transsexual person can or not occupy a post.” In the educational sector “we have achieved very little”: schools turn down transsexuals who wish to dress according to their real sex… they are vulnerable to mockery and rejection and abandon studies. Cenesex speaks with the police about how to behave in public spaces with homosexuals or transsexuals: “there are people very grateful for that conversation though others are not so receptive”.
A group of transsexuals work at the centre getting ready to become health promoters “ so that society sees them that way and not as a curse”; there is another group of lesbians and in both cases they discuss common problems, at times with the participation of families. Hoping that the initiatives with reach their legislative passage, at a still to be determined date, Cenesex works to “educate the public that deserves to be informed before a thing like this is set on them from the blue. Because if not, the people will feel upset and broken”.
Published in La Jornada, Mexico, on December 10, 2007. Link:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/12/10/index.php?section=mundo&article=035n1mun
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4 December 2007
Impunity for Salvadoran Killer
Decio Machado Flores
Sixteen years after the assassination of the Basque volunteer, Begoña García Arandigoien in El Salvador, the main person implicated in the crime visits the Spanish state with absolute impunity...
“It was 10 September, 1990, in the foothills of the Santa Ana volcano (in north-east El Salvador). Two days ago guerrillas had held meetings and acts of publicity in the territory and consequently a unit of the Popular Revolutionary Army (ERP) was still in the area,” said Domingo, using an alias of at that time by former guerrilla combatants of the ERP, one of the five groups that made up the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
“Early in the afternoon the guerrilla column in which Alba (the name by which Begoña was popularly known) was present was ambushed by the army; she was injured and captured by the soldiers. It was a hard blow because all who had the good fortune to know her, loved her a lot”. Two days later, the rebel radio station, Venceremos, announced: “Begoña García was savagely assassinated by the army in a field hospital in the department of Santa Ana, hours after her capture.”
Begoña was a young medic born in Navarra. She arrived in Nicaragua and just a year later went to El Salvador as a health worker for the FMLN guerrillas. The official version was that she died “in combat” as a result of a crossfire between the guerrillas and the army. After efforts by the Spanish embassy, her body was exhumed four days later and the autopsy at the Hospital of Navarra, where Begoña worked before leaving for Central America, did not leave room for doubt: the young woman had been assassinated with a shot with “the barrel touching the nape”.
Moreover, before that she suffered five other shots in different parts of the body and fractures in the femur and both arms. Everything indicates that before being shot point-blank, she had been tortured by the Salvadoran army.
The Truth Commission that was formed in 1998 to investigate the human rights violation and crimes against humanity that took place in the conflict that buffeted El Salvador between 1980 and 1991, studied the case of the young volunteer. According to the commission, Begoña García “was executed extra-judicially by the fourth company of the Second Infantry Brigade under the immediate command of Lieutenant Roberto Salvador Hernández and the higher command of Lieutenant-Colonel Jose Antonio Almendáriz Rivas”. The general amnesty of 1993, which were “pardoned” thousands of crimes against humanity in El Salvador, allowed Almendáriz to be exonerated for the crimes committed during the war.
Vicente Neto, communal leader and once a combatant of the Popular Liberation Front, another of the armed organisations which made up FMLN, said: “José Antonio Almendáriz Rivas is a Deputy of the National Conciliation Party and is currently placed to head the party’s list for the presidential elections that will take place in 2009. Moreover two years ago he publicly acknowledged his responsibility in Alba’s assassination, going on to say he committed the crime in a moment of hate”.
Almendáriz formed part of a delegation of Salvadoran Deputies which travelled to Spain in October to study the Spanish transition as a possible model applicable to El Salvador. Guillermo Garcia, the victim’s father, contacted the External Affairs Ministry with little luck with the demand that the Salvadoran Deputy be detained and stopped from leaving Spanish territory. Asked about the crime, Almendáriz limited himself to saying: “I asked pardon for it”.
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Abridged. Published in the November 29, 2007 issue of DIAGONAL. Link: http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/article4919.html
Related article: El Salvador Turn Left Again
28 November 2007
El Salvador Looks Left Again
A recent study reveals a deep underlying discontent among Salvadorans who, between economic crisis and crime, are starting to look at the heirs of the Leftist guerrillas of the past as a “possibility of change”, though there will not be elections till 2009.
The vice-chancellor of the Central American University of El Salvador (UCA), the Jesuit priest Jose María Tojeira, explained the results of an opinion poll carried out by one of its institutes and pointed out “there is a deep discontent with the situation in the country, much more than with their own family situation”. The data of the University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP) speak for itself: 63.5% of the respondents considered that the economic situation had worsened; 82.2% that the prices of everyday living had increased a lot; 65.5% think that next year this Central American country will be worse off. More than half the Salvadorans blame “dollarisation” – in 2001 the national currency was changed from the colón to the U.S. dollar – for the current crisis and for generating unemployment, migration and crime, as Tojeira explained in analysing the statistics.
The poll was carried out between October 26 and November 6 on 1,301 people, adults and residents of all Salvadoran regions, and also covered questions relating to violence. Fifty-two point four per cent of Salvadorans think that crime increased, moreover 19.4% of those consulted said they were victims of it. In this country there are between 9 and 10 murders daily; the rate of homicide is more than 60 per 100,000, the highest in Latin America. Moreover, the IUDOP study found a growing sympathy for the Leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), against the official Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena). The FMLN obtained 34.5% of voting intention for the presidency and Arena 27%.
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Published on November 28, 2007 in El Pais. Link:
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/salvadorenos/violencia/crisis/economica/elpepuintlat/20071
27 November 2007
Cuban War Games
With the concept that preparing for war is a way of avoiding it, Cuba is immersed in military exercise ‘Moncada 2007’ directed towards gearing up and perfecting the country’s defence mechanism. Regular troops, territorial militias and a part of the population together with tanks, planes and helicopters (recently participated) in the five-day manoeuvres in the western and central regions of the island.
This war simulation will be further carried out in the western region which is still recovering from the passing of the tropical storm, Noel, which left one dead and damages of almost $ 500 million, according to official sources. Analysts consider that the military manoeuvres are a message to the United States government to abstain from launching an invasion to overthrow the Socialist government of Cuba.
The government considers that the military exercises tweak the cohesion and actions of the diverse units to confront any enemy. The authorities claim that Moncada 2007 is an opportunity to exhibit new combat technologies and to check the state of the reserve forces, the militias, transportation, services, material resources and economic organisations. The concept of the manoeuvres was ‘war of all the people’ to face any external aggression against Cuba, the authorities said. Cuba faces an ever-growing hostility on the part of its political and ideological enemy, the United States, 150 km north of the island.
In 1961, Cuba repelled an invasion blessed by the CIA at Bay of Pigs. Since then, the Cubans never rule out the danger of another military attack from the United States that increased in 1980 with the coming to power of President Ronald Reagan. In 1980, Cuba came up with a large-scale military manoeuvre, Bastion, which improved on the concept of national defence, linking together the armed forces and society. Bastion-1980 was followed by ones in 1983, 1986 and 2004, which had as its principal theme the country moving into a war time situation and actions to confront a military blockade, systematic wearing down and invasion by the enemy.
In Bastion-2004, the largest manoeuvre realised in the island for 20 years, almost four million people participated apart from 1,200 military order and command centres, according to official data. Those followed the announcement of the Bush plan to intensify hostility against Cuba and which contemplated an armed aggression, according to the island authorities. In October President Bush spoke of trying to “liberate” the island and asked Cuban officials to rise up against Fidel Castro who was convalescing from an intestinal operation. The interim head of state, Raul Castro, first vice-president and defence minister, considered Bush’s words as an ‘invocation’ to violence. Raul Castro has reiterated that if the United States invaded Cuba it would find a ‘terrible nest of wasps’ which would increase troop casualties which the American public opinion would reject.
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Abridged. Original report by Xinhua. Published on November 23, 2007 in Argenpress Link:
http://www.argenpress.info/nota.asp?num=049578&Parte=0
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