Posted by Pothik Ghosh January 27, 2009 at 12:25 pm in International Relations, Israel, Marxism, Palestine, Self-Determination, Working Class
The Original Article by Pothik Ghosh
Is there really a Palestinian bourgeois class, which shares socio-political interests with its Israeli counterpart? For the very same reason that explains the absence of a working class movement in Palestine, there is no capitalist solidarity in that region as well. There have been working class leaders who have failed their class without being bourgeois themselves.
There is greater out-migration from Israel than there is immigration into the country. There is no material pressure to expand territory. After all, Israel did vacate Gaza. You are willing to compromise with Hamas’s Islamicism. Why can’t the Hamas accept Israel in the same spirit? - TK Arun
Dear TK,
I will attempt to address only the fundamental theoretical questions you have raised in your response to my piece on Palestine here. I’ll leave out some of the more empirical details that you have brought up.
To begin at the beginning, capitalist solidarity does not necessarily preclude struggle within capitalism among various sections of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the hegemonic social logic of capital, which would be constitutive of such solidarity, is of competitive socialisation. Capitalist solidarity is, therefore, not without stratification, and domination of one or more sections of the bourgeoisie by others. Capitalist solidarity can never, precisely because of this constitutive logic, be truly envisaged as absolutely horizontal. To that extent, there is no equality, even within the bourgeoisie, in capitalism. And to my mind solidarity among various sections of capitalists cannot, unlike socialist solidarity, be conceptualised (repeat conceptualised) as an absolute state. It exists, provisionally if you like, only in relation to their domination of the working class. I have, if you go back to my piece, said that the PLO-PA – and the Palestinian social groups embodied by them – also pose a Palestinian identity of struggle against Israel. But the decline in the radical tenor of resistance as posited through this ‘secular’ identity, seen in conjunction with its rejection by the Gazan underclass and the ascendancy of Hamas and its Islamism as the principal idiom of Palestinian resistance, indicates that there is a Palestinian bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie, even as it poses a struggle (competitive) against the Israeli state, and the Jewish bourgeoisie it embodies, for a better position within the larger regional capitalist hegemony, also seeks to protect and preserve its own interests against the assault of the Palestinian underclass. The PLO-PA’s collaboration, ever since Oslo, with the Israeli state to marginalise and even crush Hamas on one hand, and continuing to pose a Palestinian identity of struggle against Israel, on the other, is symptomatic of this strange capitalist paradox called competitive solidarity of the bourgeoisie. You will surely agree, and I have adduced examples to that effect in my article, that the Palestinian question posed by PLO-PA, post Oslo, is an apology of resistance in that it has been perfectly amenable to and even a participant in Israel’s insidious undermining of the Oslo Accords. Or, how else does one explain the failure of the Mahmoud Abbas-led group’s failure to forge a solid solidarity between West Bank and Gaza and conduct resistance against Israel with the same doggedness that Al Fatah, the Yasser Arafat-led main faction of the PLO, did in its heyday. That is something that Hamas has been doing. If anything, Abbas has used the PA security forces, and wonder of wonders Fatah fighters, to quell anti-Israeli dissent within Palestinian society not only in Gaza but also sometimes in West Bank.
If you argue that Hamas too is posing the question of self-determination in the idiom of competition I would certainly not disagree. Given that it’s not a self-conscious proletarian subjectivity, it sure is not self-reflexively aware that the question of political autonomy it’s raising cannot really be resolved unless it’s informed by a politics that shifts the horizon of socialisation from competition (capitalist) to non-alienated association and dialogue (trans- or counter-capitalist). Yet, at this moment this competitive posing of the ‘Islamised’ national Palestinian identity of Hamas – given that it is located in that section of Palestinian society (underclass) that is disenfranchised, dispossessed and dominated by a constellation of various institutionalized and alienated configurations of socio-political power formed by the PLO-PA and the Zionist state together as also separately – objectively poses the decimation of the competitive social logic of capitalism and its hegemony in the region. A hegemony that is, at this moment, precisely, the root cause of this dispossession and domination of a section of Palestinians. By the same token, the PLO-PA’s competitive ‘struggle’ against Israel, considering that it simultaneously seeks to collaborate with it, is an attempt to keep certain sections of Palestinian society at bay and, therefore, seeks to preserves and perpetuate the hegemony of capitalism and its competitive social logic and ideology.
I would, of course, join you in ruing the fact that working class forces have grasped this objective conjunctural situation neither in their theoretical analyses nor political practice. For, only that would break and displace the conjuncture towards a more ideologically proletarianised situation. And yet, that will not be any reason for me to simply reject a political subjectivity, which foregrounds this objective autonomy-association question sharply, merely because it’s not self-conscious of what its subjectivity actually amounts to in the objective realm. Of course, Hamas, or any such agency, will have to be critiqued for its deficit on those terms of self-consciousness. But that to my mind is not accomplished by painting it with the same moral-secular brush of Islamism that is used to taint forces like Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Toiba.
Coming back to a problem that has often cropped up in most of our discussions and debates, class for me is, in its essence, not a social identity or group. Though it can appear in that form sometimes. (Hegel’s “the essence must appear” or Marx’s “Class qua class”.) Class, for me, is a logic of relation. When competition happens, as is capitalism’s wont, in its moments of circulation (social) and distribution/regulation (political), we have to see in totality, by retroactive location in the moment of production (economic), what is the point from which absolute extraction of value occurs. The social group or identity that occupies that point at that moment is the form that the working class takes at that moment. In other words, politico-cultural identities have to be located within this matrix of social relations to figure out which class position they hold in themselves. And that would be irrespective of whether or not they display a subjective consciousness of their objective class location (or position) in positing their respective identities.
Your analysis seems to be informed by an economistic view of Marxism and class politics, which conflates the working class with workers and the bourgeoisie with a specific section among them: the industrial capitalists. But in my analysis West Asia, particularly Israel-Palestine, does not need to have heavy-duty industrialisation and thus industrial capitalists and industrial workers, for us to find either the working class or the bourgeoisie in that region. Capital, if I may repeat myself, is a certain configuration of social power.
Therefore, your assertion that there is no working class movement in the region is right. But not for the reasons you seem to imply. This absence is because, as I state above, the left forces in the region, which had some significant presence there once, have not been able to grasp, either in theory or in political practice, the conjuncture of Hamas’s emergence and critically engage with that conjuncture and thereby the Palestinian movement that has engendered a force like Hamas. If that sounds a tad voluntaristic and utopian, let me complete the dialectic, which will dissolve this subjective voluntarism into its objectivity, by saying the same thing from a different angle: only if Hamas succeeds in enabling a truly nationally (repeat nationally) self-determined Palestinian state would the Palestinian society have taken yet another step towards founding such a working class movement. The institutionalisation of Hamas, which the founding of such a nation-state would entail, would lead to the emergence of a new elite and bureaucracy from the currently struggling sections of Palestinian society, its concomitant alienation from the masses and the complete instrumentalisation of its Islamism, something that is at times visible now as fascism at the Palestinian community level.
All that would further deepen the objective conditions for the emergence of a significant working class politics in Palestine. Of course, subjective intervention to seize this objective moment would still be required. And we, who do politics in the shadow of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the elimination of the Tudeh Party by Khomeini’s band of Islamists, know all too well the heavy price to be paid for not seizing the objective moment through subjective ideological intervention. After all, only that can rupture the conjuncture. Similarly in Palestine. Hamas’s success and institutionalisation, going by the current configuration of political forces, could well lead to the emergence of more radical outfits such as the Islamic Jihad as the principal agency of Palestinian resistance. But Hamas’s marginalisation through military force, precisely what Israel has been trying to accomplish, would surely compel large sections of the beleaguered Palestinian underclass to vest their despair in the pernicious chimera of a hope that the pan-Islamism of Al Qaeda offers. Such perils in political struggles cannot, clearly, be pre-empted. They have to be faced even at the risk of making grave mistakes. For, if people eschew struggles for fear of the perils such struggles are likely to produce there would be no hope of them emancipating themselves. We would do well to recall Mao, who in his peculiarly Chinese Jacobin style used to say, “A revolution is not a dinner party.”
By the way, an aside: revolutionary forces in Palestine might be down but they are not out. Fighters of George Habbash’s Popular Front have reportedly been fighting the Israeli incursion shoulder to shoulder with the guerrillas of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The opportunity for a socialist revolutionary subjective intervention has not exactly been lost in Palestine.
Pothik Ghosh
Posted by Radical Notes January 13, 2009 at 12:11 am in Economy, India
Saswat Pattanayak
When Enron conveniently declared its bankruptcy in 2001, it not only resulted in rendering more than 5000 employees jobless, and relegating more than $1billion in employee retirement funds to vacuum, but the corporation also succeeded in eventually evading recovery of more than $40 billion of its assets. Enron’s corruption was neither pathbreaking nor unique. Financial bunglings are necessary features of market capitalism resulting in widespread unemployment, continuation of class society and dependence of world majority on the corporate minority.
All criticisms being hurled at Ramalinga Raju – the disgraced former boss of India’s leading software giant Satyam – is pure travesty. The fact is Raju is merely unlucky, and in this present instance, a victim of his beleaguered conscience that arose too late. For, his scandal is neither as consequential as Enron’s, nor as dangerously implicit as PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Any focus on eliminating Raju and his business from the world capitalistic map only shall help strengthen the businesses of his former rivals. Reducing India’s largest financial scam to the alter of accusations against one man merely shall undermine the necessity to examine the canons of capitalism.
Raju’s attempts at salvaging his son’s companies have nothing to do with personal corruption scandals. It has to do with the very nature of how “free market” capitalism works. The same investors who objected to the $1.6 billion scam orchestrated by Raju were the ones who have been supporting him throughout the series of deception, fraud and financial misappropriations committed by Satyam over the years. The same auditors – PricewaterhouseCoopers – who have suddenly hogged the headline for the wrongdoings have been heralded by Market Capitalism as one of its most informed wings. The corporate media conglomerates that are now singling out Raju as the fraud that deserves jail term are the gatekeepers of news and opinion that had been awarding Raju variously, including as “Corporate Citizen of the Year” (by CNBC in 2002). Not just the endorsement of PricewaterhouseCoopers, even its rival – the other big financial auditor – Ernst & Young has only recently bestowed upon Raju the award of “Young Entrepreneur of the Year” (in 2007).
If the world has been forced to embrace market capitalism as the dominant economic base, the superstructure for such foundation has comprised investors, auditors, deregulators, and the corporate bosses. In case of Satyam Computers Services, all these elements have been exposed threadbare. And this is hardly the first instance of corruption in capitalism. Quite the contrary, corruption is inherent in capitalism, in its essence of profit drives at the cost of ethical responsibilities, in its essence of satisfying investors at the cost of customers, in its essence of exploiting workforce at the cost of amassing disproportionate wealth.
The market economy approach which India has embraced necessarily must produce Harshad Mehtas and Ramalinga Rajus. Any elements of surprise speaks to the lack of confidence in understanding of capitalism’s contradictions. A free-for-all umbrella must cloud the levels of competition and turn them instead into monopolistic collaborations among giants. Giants who must exhibit their capability to stay in top (or, perish) must necessarily employ unlawful, illicit and unethical means to hoodwink the consumers, clients and society at large.
What Raju has resorted to is not a sign of failure in his conscience. Rather, what most of the media are perceiving in his character of late is a failure on their part to understand how capitalism functions. This is what Fidel Castro calls “Economic Illiteracy” prevailing in the present age.
Posted by Satyabrata January 11, 2009 at 1:12 am in Communalism, India, Media, Orissa, State Repression
Lenin Kumar, editor of a progressive peoples’ magazine in Oriya, Nisan, was arrested and sent to jail on charges of writing provocative literature. The fact is that his magazine took a stance against the anti-Christian pogrom in Kandhamal district after the killing of Laxmananda Saraswati. His arrest was an attempt by the government of Orissa to silence the voices of the oppressed, and could be seen as corroborating the ongoing McCarthyization process in India. After much struggle, Lenin is free on bail now.
Satyabrata: You have been convicted for possessing inflammatory materials. What, according to you, is being regarded as inflammatory in your booklet, Dharma Namare Kandhamalare Raktanadi (Kandhamal’s River of Blood in the Name of Religion) and why?
Lenin Kumar: Is it inflammatory, to identify the communal and brahminist forces and their agenda? The riot affected people in the relief camps have already pointed at the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal men as responsible for violence in the name of religion. In the book, Dharma Namare Kandhamalare Raktanadi they are unmasked. But, they are in power in the state. So using the police they wanted to silence the voice, which is ‘inflammatory’ to them. It is ridiculous to say that the book disturbed communal harmony because it exposed them who really disturbed it.
Satyabrata: Why is Nisan being targeted? What is your expectation from other progressive people, intellectuals on this assault on Nisan?
Lenin Kumar: Nisan stands for janabadi (democratic) literature. Its basic trend is against Brahminism and imperialism. Unlike mainstream journalism, we have focussed on the ongoing peoples’ movements (including the Maoist among others) and their roots in genuine popular desire for liberation from brahminical and imperialist domination. The magazine is not yet banned. There is no question of bowing in front of the anti-people forces. When they sent me to jail, people protested throughout the state – writers came on the streets in a manner quite unimaginable in a region like Orissa. I think this is due to our commitment. All these developments inspire us. So there is no question of leaving the battlefield. And how can one repress an ideology?
Satyabrata: What reaction do you expect from other newspapers and journalists?
Lenin Kumar: Unfortunately in Orissa, most newspapers are in the hands of the ruling classes. They are simply bourgeois party leaflets. It is very difficult for a genuine reporter to take his position. Some reporters blindly act like representatives of the state. In my case, I have seen my name as ‘Mao writer”. What does it mean, till date I do not understand. Professionally they are expected to be above the outlook of the ruling classes, which are openly becoming the agents of international capital. Otherwise, there will be no space for democracy.
Satyabrata: You were arrested because of touching the Kandhamal issue. What is your personal view regarding the recent incidents in Kandhamal?
Lenin Kumar: Anti-dalit, anti-minority agenda is in the air. The Sangh Parivar is openly challenging the democratic values. The state is keeping silence. The Maoists in Kandhamal have showed us that the communal forces are building their second laboratory in the region after Gujarat’s. They have opposed these forces in their own way. We should not forget that Laxmananda Saraswati in Kandhamal was not a saint or a representative of the Hindu religion, but a leader of VHP. And frankly, I have no respect to their riot-politics.
Satyabrata: What is your message for fellow journalists, writers, intellectuals and progressive people?
Lenin Kumar: For getting the bail, I heartily thank the writers, journalists, intellectuals who stood for freedom of expression and protested my arrest. I thank my wife Rumita for her camaraderie in this process. If a person like me coming from a middle class family living in the state capital can be targeted, one can only imagine the extent of state terrorism and violation of human rights in the remote villages of Orissa, which hardly get noticed. We must stand united against any undemocratic, exploitative, anti-people actions.
Posted by Radical Notes January 1, 2009 at 9:39 pm in Cuba, Fidel Castro, History, Imperialism, Latin America, Self-Determination, USA
Lázaro Barredo Medina, GRANMA
“THE dictatorship has been defeated. The joy is immense. And yet, there still remains much to do. We won’t deceive ourselves by believing that everything will be much easier from now on; perhaps it will be much more difficult.”
This is what Commander in Chief Fidel Castro told the people on January 8, 1959, the day of his entry into Havana. Many people could never imagine the immense challenge that they would live to experience.
Suffice it to say that just a few days later, Fidel proclaimed the right to self-determination in terms of relations with the United States and immediately, the aggressions, attempts on his life and anger on the part of U.S. politicians began, evidence of which can be seen in speeches and articles of the time, as in an editorial of Time magazine, the mouthpiece of the most conservative sectors, entitled: “Fidel Castro’s neutralism is a challenge for the United States.”
But the Cuban people could not be neutral in the face of the United States. The triumph of the Revolution that January 1959 signified for the Cuban nation, for the first time in its history, the real possibility of exercising the right to self-determination. From that moment on, neither the U.S. president, Congress nor its ambassadors could continue making decisions on what could or could not be done in Cuba. The bitter dependence had been brought to an end; a dependence that saw U.S. governors and ambassadors enjoying a degree of power in Cuba that was far greater than the actual power that they had – with respect to decision-making – within the U.S. federal government or in relation to any of the 50 states that make up the U.S.A.
When full national independence was achieved, the Revolution began to exercise that right by immediately applying the program that Fidel had announced during the Moncada trial of 1953 and which is contained in his historic self-defense speech History Will Absolve Me.
Cuba established the economic and social regime that it believed was most just and established a socialist state with participatory democracy, equality and social justice.
The country’s economy was characterized by limited industrial development, essentially depending on sugar production and a latifundia agricultural economy, where landowners controlled 75% of the total arable land.
Most of the country’s economic activity and its mineral resources were managed by U.S. capital, which controlled 1.2 million hectares of land (a quarter of the productive territory) and most of the sugar industry, nickel production, oil refineries, the electricity and telephone services and the majority of bank credits. Likewise, the U.S. market controlled approximately 70% of Cuban imports and exports, within a system of highly dependent volumes of exchange: in 1958, Cuba exported products worth 733 million pesos and imported 777 million pesos worth of goods.
The prevailing social picture was characterized by a high unemployment and illiteracy, a precarious healthcare, social assistance and housing system for the vast majority of the population, as well as abysmal differences in living conditions between urban and rural populations. There was a high degree of polarization and unequal distribution of income; in 1958, 50% of the population earned just 11% of total income, while a 5% minority controlled 26%. Racial and gender discrimination, begging, prostitution and social and administrative corruption were widespread.
Addressing the social and economic problems in Cuban society could no longer be put off and could only be resolved if the Cuban people had control of their own wealth and natural resources. Thus, using the 1940 Constitution and in line with international law, Cuba exercised its right to take control of these resources and assumed total responsibility for this action. The island paid compensation to all nationals from third countries (Canada, Spain, Britain, etc.) with the exception of U.S. nationals, given that that government rejected the provisions outright and transformed the Cuban government’s decision into a pretext for unleashing a war unprecedented in the history of bilateral relations between the two nations.
Not only did the Revolution hand over land to campesinos who, up until then, had been subjected to semi-feudal conditions of production and forced to live in extreme poverty, but it also determined that that all the country’s resources should be allocated to national economic development and improving the material and living conditions of the population. To give just one example, in the 1980s alone, approximately 60 billion pesos were allocated to the construction of productive and social facilities.
The process of industrialization underway paved the way for economic and productive diversification. Under the Revolution and up until the economic crisis which began with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist bloc between 1989 and 1991 – what we in Cuba call the Special Period – the country’s capacity for producing steel grew 14-fold, fertilizer increased six-fold, the oil refining industry quadrupled (not counting the new refinery in Cienfuegos), the textile industry grew seven-fold, tourism three-fold, to mention but a few. The state also created complete ranges and new industries such as machinery, mechanics, electronics, the production of medical equipment, a pharmaceutical industry, construction materials, a glass industry and ceramics, as well as making investments to increase and upgrade the sugar, food and light industries. In addition to these endeavors, we have the development of biotechnology, genetic engineering and other branches of science.
The country has also made great efforts in terms of improving its infrastructure. Electricity generation has risen eight-fold and water storage capacity has increased 310 times, from 29 million cubic meters in 1958 to nine billion-plus cubic meters today. There has been diversification with respect to roads and freeways and modernization of ports and other areas. Social needs have been covered fairly well, except for housing, which has been Cuba’s biggest problem.
The progressive growth and diversification of productive potential and the application of a widespread social program has allowed the nation to confront the problem of unemployment. In 1958, with a population of six million inhabitants, approximately one third of the economically active population was unemployed. Of this figure, 45% of the unemployed lived in rural areas while, out of 200,000 women in work, 70% were employed as domestic servants. Today, with 11 million inhabitants, the number of people in work is in excess of 4.5 million. Over 40% of workers are women and today they represent more than 60% of the nation’s technical and professional sectors.
In 1958, the number of illiterate and semi-illiterate people in Cuba stood at two million. The average academic level of 15-plus year-olds was third grade, more than 600,000 children did not attend school and 58% of teachers were unemployed. Just 45.9% of school-age children were enrolled and half of them did not attend classes. Only 6% of those enrolled finished elementary education. Universities were available to just 20,000 students.
The education sector received immediate attention from the revolutionary government. Its first task was to develop a masse literacy campaign with the participation of the population. An extensive network of schools was constructed throughout the country and more than 300,000 teachers and professors were in fulltime employment in this sector. The average academic level for those aged 15-plus year-olds rose to ninth grade. One hundred per cent of school age children are enrolled in schools, some 98% complete elementary education and 91% complete junior high. One in every 11 citizens is a university graduate and one in eight has technical-professional qualifications. There are 650,000 students in the country’s universities today and all education is free of charge. Education and vocational skills are also guaranteed for 100% of children with physical or mental disabilities, who attend special schools.
The precarious situation in 1958 with respect to public health was characterized by an infant mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births and a maternal mortality rate of 118 per 10,000. The mortality rate for those suffering from gastroenteritis was 41.2 per 100,000, and from tuberculosis, 15.9 per 100,000. In rural areas, 36% of the population suffered from intestinal parasites, 31% from malaria, 14% from tuberculosis and 13% from typhoid. Life expectancy at birth was estimated at 58.8 years.
Around 61% of hospital beds and 65% of the nation’s 6,500 doctors were concentrated in the capital. In the other provinces, medical coverage was one doctor for every 2,378 inhabitants and there was just one hospital for all the country’s rural areas.
Today, healthcare is free of charge and Cuba has more than 70,000 doctors, providing coverage of one for every 194 inhabitants. Almost 30,000 of them are providing services in over 60 different countries. A national network of more than 700 hospitals and polyclinics has been created. Thanks to a widespread vaccination campaign (every child currently receives vaccines against 13 different illnesses) diseases such as polio, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, rubella, mumps and hepatitis B have been almost entirely eradicated. The infant mortality rate is 5.3 for every 1,000 live births and life expectancy exceeds 77 years.
There is also a series of advanced medical services that are not considered as “basic” in the international arena, and are provided completely free of charge, such as intensive care units in pediatric and general hospitals, cardiovascular surgery, transplant services, special perinatal care, treatment for chronic renal failure, and special services for occupational and physical rehabilitation.
The revolutionary state did not focus its attention solely on economic and social measures. It also embarked on efforts to establish an internal legal system to facilitate the right to self-determination via the population’s direct participation in discussions, analyses and the passing of the country’s principal laws. The most notable of these was the 1976 Constitution, supported by 97% of Cubans aged 16 and over through a referendum, as well as other momentous laws like the Penal Code, the Civil Code, the Family Code, the Children and Young People’s Code, the Labor and Social Security Code and many others.
Likewise, the self-determination of the Cuban people is expressed through the right to defend the nation against foreign aggression. Today, more than four million Cubans – workers, campesinos, and university students – are organized in militia groups have access to weapons in their campuses, factories and in rural areas.
However, since 1959, Cuba has had to confront the hostility of 10 U.S. administrations that have attempted to limit its right to self-determination through the use of aggression and the unilateral imposition of a criminal economic, commercial and financial blockade.
One of the universally accepted principles of international law is that state cannot be allowed to coerce another in order to deny it the right to exercise its sovereign rights. Article 24 of the UN Charter states that, in the context of international relations, nations must refrain from using threats or force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
Over the past 45 years, the United States has prohibited any trade with Cuba, including foodstuffs and medicines; it cancelled the Cuban sugar quota; prohibited its citizens from traveling to Cuba via the imposition of heavy sanctions; prohibited the re-export of U.S. products or items containing U.S. components or technology to Cuba from third countries; prescribed that banks in third countries should maintain Cuban bank accounts in dollars or use that currency in their transactions with the Cuban nation; has systematically intervened to prevent or hinder trade with or financial assistance to Cuba on the part of governments, institutions and citizens from other countries and international organizations.
In the 1960s these reprisals forced Cuba to structurally reconstitute its economic relations when and establish its essential markets in countries in the former East European bloc – specifically in the Soviet Union – which meant that the country had to embark on an almost total re-conversion of its industrial technology, means of transport, and provisions, etc.
When Cuba lost its natural markets in Eastern Europe, the U.S. government intensified its blockade via the 1992 Torricelli Act, which used the pretext of “democracy and human rights” to prohibit U.S. subsidiaries located in third countries and subject to the laws of those nations from engaging in commercial or financial operations with Cuba (particularly in respect to food and medicines), and punishing these by prohibiting the entry into U.S. ports for 180 days of vessels transporting goods to or from Cuba or on behalf of Cuba, measures that – given their extraterritorial nature – do not just prejudice Cuba but also harm the sovereignty of other nations and the international freedom of transportation.
On March 12, 1996, the U.S. government passed the Helms-Burton Ac, further aggravating relations between the two countries and assuming the right to sanction citizens of third countries in U.S. courts, as well as determining their expulsion or denying them and their families entry visas into the United States, with the aim of hindering Cuba’s efforts to recover its economy and hampering its possibilities of securing a greater insertion in the international market. That was also a way of attempting to pressure the Cuban people into relinquishing their efforts of self-determination.
More recently, it has adopted the Bush Plan, an attempt to transform Cuba into a colony through an annexationist program and the sibylline intention to intervene via a pretext of “transition,” a scenario in which the State Department would entrust one of its leaders as “governor,” when the Cuban revolutionary state disappears. This plan, with which George W. Bush decided “to precipitate the day when Cuba becomes a free country,” has intensified the blockade and pressure on the Cuban people by repressing family relations between Cubans resident in the United States and their families on the island; grants million-dollar resources to terrorist groups in Miami, as well as to mercenary subordinates in the U.S. Interests Sections in Havana; and promotes formulas to destabilize the country and redouble international pressure on the island.
That hostility on the part of the U.S. has included other notorious manifestations of aggression, ranging from the military aggression through the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the dirty war carried out by counterrevolutionary gangs heavily supplied by the U.S. CIA, bacteriological warfare on agricultural crops (sugar, tobacco, and citric fruits), animals (swine fever), and humans (hemorrhagic dengue), to sabotage plans, bombings using pirate planes, and assassination attempts on the country’s principal leaders.
The actions of terrorist organizations executing military attacks on Cuba from U.S. territory are notorious, and are publicized and fomented by the Miami media. Groups are constantly recruiting adventurers who are willing to head off to Cuba as agents and saboteurs, who openly declare that they have no fear whatsoever of being brought to justice in U.S. courts.
That is why Cuban patriots have had to leave aside their personal interests to serve those of the nation, even sacrificing their family relationships, in order to infiltrate the ranks of those terrorist groups in order to discover their activities and, with this information, prevent the bloodshed of Cuban and U.S. people. They are willing to pay the price of the political irrationality of the U.S. government, as is the case of the five Cuban heroes unjustly incarcerated in U.S. jails for combating terrorism.
The above is compounded by the heavy military mechanism created by the United States around Cuba and its constant tension-generating activities, as well as the illegal occupation of the Guantánamo Naval Base on Cuban territory (today converted into a horrific prison camp), a part of Cuba rented out by force to the United States in the early 20th century and which the U.S. government refuses to return.
In the early 90’s, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, isolated and reviled by the international reaction, Cuba absorbed the terrible blow of losing the bulk of its markets in a matter of months and an abrupt descent in its gross domestic product. But the island confirmed that it shone with its own light and that it had never been a satellite of anyone, given that it was able to face that juncture on account of the extraordinary resistance of the majority of Cubans, who have acted on the basis of authentic motivations, values and ethical principles.
The Cuban people have made a conscious decision to support the country’s leadership, not only because they identify the system with their own interests, but also because of the responsible manner in which the state took on the crisis, reorganized its forces and designed a recovery strategy, despite the U.S. blockade and conditions imposed by its European allies.
The sacrifices provoked by that situation have been hard, but it has been possible to endure them because of the undisputed social advances attained, because of the confidence deposited in the country’s leading institutions and because of people’s appreciation that their government is not a decadent one or one that is in management crisis or lacking in strategies, but has confirmed that the population has remained at the center of all its work, even in the most difficult circumstances.
Fifty years have gone by and the liberation process has reached this point following the same direction indicated that night, 50 years ago, when Fidel, speaking to the huge crowd awaiting him in what was the dictatorship’s headquarters, affirmed that everything could be more difficult in the future, because we would have to fight to make the Revolution.
That is the challenge of the struggle currently underway to eradicate vices and exalt virtues, with Fidel as a soldier of ideas serving as a compass in the fight for freedom and independence.
Cuba’s enemies are backing their all on the opposite of that. In this world, where politics is a caricature, they cannot comprehend that, in its thinking and action, this Revolution is a process of continuity, and that Fidel will continue to be the leader of the Revolution of today and tomorrow, because, beyond responsibilities and titles, he will continue to be the counselor of ideas to which we will always have recourse, because he has transcended political life to insert himself in an intimate way in the family life of the vast majority of Cubans.
Courtesy: GRANMA
