by Walter C. Uhler
I won't be watching President Bush's "State of the Union" speech tonight. And I'll studiously avoid reading about it tomorrow. Not because Bush is a lame duck - thank God for that. But, because he a megalomaniac and a pathological lair.
You know how it works. Whether it's your friend, relative or acquaintance; whenever you've reached the conclusion that he/she is an inveterate liar, you simply stop listening to him/her, because he/she has lost all credibility and respect.
Actually, Bush never had my respect. Instead, I marveled over how a punk child of privilege could drink and bluff his way through mediocrity and failure - whether it be in college, the Texas Air National Guard, private enterprise (oil, baseball) or as governor of Texas - and still emerge with the belief that "God wants me to be President."
Once in office, America's psychopathic president began to plot the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Why? Because, Saddam was "the guy who tried to kill my dad." Unfortunately, while obsessing about Saddam the psychopath blew off intelligence indicating that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists were preparing to strike the United States.
Of course, the psychopath then concealed his own personal negligence ("As a leader, you can never admit a mistake."), behind a puerile vow to "rid the world of evil" and a barrage of lies about Saddam Hussein. Thus, in the two years following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration made some 935 false statements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda. Bush made 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction and 28 about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda.
Unfortunately, behind his lies was a psychopathy feeding off willful self-delusion. Thus, according to Rev. Pat Robertson, who met with Bush in Nashville on the eve of the invasion, Bush "was the most self-assured man I ever met in my life…like a contented Christian with four aces."
Robertson had deep misgivings about the war ("The Lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and B, messy."). Thus, he told Bush: "Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for casualties." To which the psychopathic president responded: "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties." [Alan Cooperman, "Bush Predicted No Iraq Casualties, Robertson Says," Washington Post, Oct. 21, 2004]
Moreover, only a psychopath would pump his fist, as if kicking a game winning field goal, just moments before announcing that he had given the order to send America's sons and daughters into harm's way in Iraq. "Feels good," Bush said.
What the psychopath didn't know, however, was that the other psychopath, Saddam Hussein, was making his own plans for Bush's invasion. He ordered the reproduction of "more than three thousand copies of the film, Black Hawk Down" - the film documenting the chaos in Somalia that caused American forces to flee from that country. Saddam had the copies distributed "among senior figures in the military, the Baath, the Mukhabrat, and a new home guard, the Fedayeen Saddam." The tape was accompanied by some very simple instructions: "Create chaos." [Geoffrey Perret, Commander in Chief, p. 352]
Shortly after the invasion, Senator Biden questioned Bush's smug optimism about events in Iraq: "Mr. President, how can you be so sure when you don't know the facts?" Bush put his hand on Biden's shoulder and responded: "My instincts. My instincts."
Notwithstanding such instincts, widespread looting ravaged Iraq in April 2003. It was a critical indicator. According to George Packer, the looting told Iraqis "that they could fight against us and we were not a serious force." [Packer, The Assassin's Gate p.138]
Yet, within weeks of the looting, America's psychopathic president was standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln telling the country that, as far as Iraq was concerned, it was "Mission Accomplished." Proud of his accomplishments, on June 4, 2003, the psychopath even boasted to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas: "God told me to strike at Al Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." [Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies, p. 1] As the military historian, Geoffrey Perret, has observed: "This is the language of no other commander in chief in American history." [.p 375]
In July, the psychopath would feel compelled to challenge the insurgents. "Bring 'em on," he told them from the safety of his office in Washington DC. Accepting the challenge, in August the insurgents blew up the Jordanian Embassy and the UN headquarters in Baghdad.
The blossoming insurgency caused the gloves to come off, which meant that torture became the order of the day. According to Professor Perret, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld "were making sure that torture would become inevitable and systematic." [p. 371]
Predictably, our psychopathic president denied that the U.S. was engaged in torture. But, a November 14, 2005 edition of Frontline, showed an army interrogator, Anthony Lagouranis, who asserted that torture occurred all over Iraq. "The infantry units are torturing people in their homes. They are using things like burns. They smash people's feet with the back of an ax head. They break bones, ribs … serious stuff." [Ibid, p. 372]
By November 2003, America's defeat in Iraq had become so etched in concrete that Israel's former prime minister, Ehud Barak, gave Cheney the benefit of his experience as a career soldier: "You cannot win an occupation. All you can do now is choose the size of your humiliation," [p. 377]
Obviously, choosing the size of his humiliation comes easy to a psychopath. Bush has pulled it off by trumpeting so-called "turning points" - one after the other.
The first turning point was the fall of Baghdad, with its staged toppling of Saddam's statue. The second was the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003. The third was the election of January 2005 and the installation of a new government tasked with writing a new Constitution. The fourth was the referendum on that constitution in December 2005 and the fifth was the election of a permanent government in early 2006. [p. 382]
And that's precisely what America's psychopathic president will do this evening, when he proclaims that turning point number six - the surge - has finally allowed America and Iraq to turn the corner.
Yet, were you to read Geoffrey Perret's recent book, Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America's Future, you'd find that he believes that Bush's invasion of Iraq constitutes "the greatest strategic blunder by a leader of a Western democracy in nearly two hundred years." [p. 363]
It strengthened Iran's position in the Middle East while enhancing China's throughout the world. It has rendered the U.S. incapable of dealing with the world's environmental problems and has taught developing countries that they do not need nuclear weapons now to deter the U.S. - just the wide distribution of assault weapons and explosives, the creation of an embryonic network of insurgents and a willingness to create chaos.
Finally, "nobody wants to be dependent on an America that talks loudly about how indispensable it is, yet stages coups, makes threats, overthrows governments, democratic or not, and kills many of the world's poorest people, to the amusement of some generals." [pp. 388-89]. Such is the state of our union.
_______
ABOUT AUTHOR
Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).
waltuhler@aol.com
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
State of the Jews and state of denial
jews sans frontieres
AN ANTI-ZIONIST BLOG - BROWSING THE MEDIA
AN ANTI-ZIONIST BLOG - BROWSING THE MEDIA
State of the Jews and state of denial
I've had this lengthy essay on the Lawrence of Cyberia blog drawn to my attention. It starts on Israel's state of denial of what it has done to the Palestinians and then runs through some of the implications of Israel being a Jewish state. It even quotes Amos Oz (yuk!) at one point. Here's the opening:
Years ago I read some words of Edward Said that seemed at the time rather innocuous but which I think, in retrospect, really lie at the heart of the I/P conflict and help to explain why it has remained unresolved so long: "Until the time comes when Israel assumes moral responsibility for what it has done to the Palestinian people, there can be no end to the conflict".
I think the reason I have come to appreciate the importance of what Said was saying is that throughout the peace process, Israel's policies - and the tortured justifications it uses to defend them - have repeatedly seemed to have less to do with hammering out a peace agreement than with evading having to really come to terms with why there is no peace in the first place. The Israeli historian, Tom Segev, remarked on this Israeli preference for avoidance - and the negative effect this has on resolving the conflict - when he wrotejust last month:
Most Israelis still find it hard to acknowledge that they bear historical responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The Zionist vision is based, among other things, on the assumption that its fulfillment need not cause injustice to anyone: If only the Arabs would relinquish their nationalist yearnings and agree to the fulfillment of our dream, it would be good for everyone, including them.
This historical fiction is very harmful because as long as we convince ourselves that we have no part in the responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian tragedy, we have no real reason to try to correct the injustice. This is the importance of acknowledging our responsibility.
This really goes to the heart of the cultural unpleasantness of Israel and of a great many Jews today, particularly those in the public eye. Leaving aside that the state of denial serves notice that the zionists don't intend that any of their wrongs be righted, a culture of deceipt pervades Israeli Jewish society and dominates organised Jewish communal life.
So much for that. Now the Jewishness of Israel and the problems that causes for democratic life and for peace:
Amos Oz has written that the concept is absurd, for "A state cannot be Jewish, just as a chair or a bus cannot be Jewish". Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Knesset, describes the definition as inflammatory and suicidal, saying: "To define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite". Israel's former Minister of Education, Shulamit Aloni, does not accept that Israel is a "Jewish state", as the term makes second-class citizens of Israelis who are not Jews. Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman finds it "nonsensical" that non-Jews should be expected to acknowledge the multi-ethnic state of Israel as existing for only one of its peoples. The late Israel Shahak, formerly Professor of Chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote that declaring a "Jewish state" is not only discriminatory against Israel's non-Jewish citizens, but also incompatible with the democratic rights of its Jewish ones:
The principle of Israel as 'a Jewish state' was supremely important to Israeli politicians from the inception of the state and was inculcated into the Jewish population by all conceivable ways. When, in the early 1980s, a tiny minority of Israeli Jews emerged which opposed this concept, a Constitutional Law (that is, a law overriding provisions of other laws, which cannot be revoked except by a special procedure) was passed in 1985 by an enormous majority of the Knesset.
By this law no party whose programme openly opposes the principle of 'a Jewish state' or proposes to change it by democratic means, is allowed to participate in the elections to the Knesset. I myself strongly oppose this constitutional principle. The legal consequence for me is that I cannot belong, in the state of which I am a citizen, to a party having principles with which I would agree and which is allowed to participate in Knesset elections. Even this example shows that the State of Israel is not a democracy due to the application of a Jewish ideology directed against all non-Jews and those Jews who oppose this ideology.
The article looks at all those little rhetorical tricks that zionists like to play to dodge and close down debate. Here's a good and informative one:
If you can just reduce every unsympathetic comment about Israel to "anti-semitism", then Israel and Zionism can never be criticized. For example, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem would disappear from the pages of time. He's not a Zionist. He doesn't think the pre-existing people and culture of Arab Palestine should be destroyed to make way for a Zionist state populated by an overwhelmingly immigrant population of Jewish people from all over the world. To him, the creation of a minority, sectarian regime in the Muslim-dominated land of Palestine raises all sorts of questions, like: What is the justification for it, and how do you expect the disenfranchised majority population will react to it? Why should Jewish people anywhere in the world have greater rights to Palestine than native Palestinian Christians and Muslims? Is a regime like that sustainable, or will it go the same way as the Soviet regime in the USSR, the rule of the Shah in Iran, and Saddam's regime in Iraq? But once you translate his original words as "wiping Israel off the map", and hammer it into people's heads that he was threatening to nuke Israel and "kill the Jews", you don't have to answer any of those questions. Once you have successfully framed the debate in terms of "Ahmedinejad wants to wipe out the Jews, just like Hitler; you surely don't support Hitler, do you?", you have closed down the possibility of debate.
I think there's a similar dynamic at work among at least some of the people who profess outrage over the PLO's rejection of Israel as a "Jewish state". The PLO has legitimate misgivings over recognizing Israel specifically as a "Jewish state". If you really don't want those misgivings to be aired, because they raise questions that are difficult for you to answer, you can simply pretend that in rejecting a "Jewish state" the PLO is actually rejecting "a state populated by Jews". Once you have managed to misrepresent the Palestinian position as simply wanting to "drive the Jews into the sea", a position which has no legitimate defenses, then you have again preempted the danger of rational debate.
And closed down the possibility of peace and maintained a culture of deceipt.
The antithesis of ethics: The State of the Union Speech by George Bush - Reflections by Cuban President Fidel Castro
The antithesis of ethics: The State of the Union Speech by George Bush -
Reflections by Cuban President Fidel Castro
Reflections by Cuban President Fidel Castro
Reflections of President Fidel Castro
The antithesis of ethics
ON the day when hundreds of intellectuals coming from every continent are meeting in Havana to take part in an International Conference for World Equilibrium on the date of José Marti’s birth, on that same day, by some strange quirk, the President of the United States spoke. In his last State of the Union address to Congress, making use of the teleprompter, Bush tells us more with his body language than with the words arranged by his advisors.
If to the three speeches that I mentioned in my words to delegates at the Meeting of January 29, 2003 we added the one he gave yesterday on the 28th, translated into Spanish by CNN –accompanied by the raising of eyebrows and peculiar gestures– recorded and immediately transcribed by qualified staff, this one is the worst of them all on account of its demagoguery, lies and total absence of ethics. I am speaking of the words that he probably added, of the tone he used and which I personally observed; that is the material I worked with.
“America is leading the fight against global poverty, with strong education initiatives and humanitarian assistance (…) This program strengthens democracy, transparency and the rule of law in developing nations, and I ask the members of this Congress to fully fund this important program.”
“America is leading the fight against global hunger. Today, more than half the world’s food aid comes from the United States. Tonight, I ask Congress to support an innovative proposal to provide food assistance by purchasing crops directly from farmers in the developing world, so we can build up local agriculture and help break the cycle of famine.”
At the beginning of this paragraph he is referring to old commitments taken on by the United States in the past with the FAO and other international agencies, one drop of water in the sea of the agonizing present needs of humankind.
“America is leading the fight against disease. With your help, we’re working to cut in half the number of malaria-related deaths in 15 African nations. And our Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is treating 1.4 million people. We can bring healing (…) to many more (…) And I call on you (...) to approve an additional $30 billion over the next five years.”
“America is a force for hope in the world because we are a compassionate people (…)”
“Over the past seven years, we’ve increased funding for veterans by more than 95 percent (...) also to meet the needs of a new war (...) so we can improve the system of care for our wounded warriors."
“So I ask you to join me in (…) creating new hiring preferences for military spouses (…)”
“By trusting the people, succeeding generations transformed our fragile young democracy into the most powerful nation on Earth (…) our liberty will be secure and the state of our Union will remain strong.”
He states all this calmly, but from the beginning of his speech, where he avoids all the thorny problems, he goes along brick by brick laying the foundations of that false liberty and prosperity, without even the slightest mention of the American soldiers who have died or been wounded in the war.
He had begun the speech by pointing out that “most Americans think their taxes are high enough (…)”. He threatens Congress: “(…) [you] should know (…) if any bill raising taxes reaches my desk, I will veto it.”
“Next week I’ll send you a budget that terminates or substantially reduces 151 wasteful or bloated programs, totaling more than $18 billion. The budget that I will submit will keep America on track for a surplus in 2012.”
Either he made a mistake with the figure, or the collecting of $18 billion means nothing to a budget that totals $2.8 trillion.
The most important thing is to distinguish between the deficit of the State budget which totaled $163 billion, and the deficit of the current account of the balance of payments that totaled $811 billion in 2006, and the public debt is calculated at $9.1 trillion. His military spending totals more than 60 percent of the total invested in the world for that reason. Today, on the 29th, one ounce of gold broke a record at 933 dollars. This mess results from the unrestricted issuing of dollars in a country whose population spends more than it saves and in a world where the purchasing power of United States currency has been extraordinarily reduced.
The formula his government usually employs is to express confidence and assurance in the economy, by lowering the bank interest rates, throwing more bills into circulation, worsening the problem and postponing the consequences.
What does the price of sugar mean today, as it stands now at 12.27 cents a pound? Scores of poor countries dedicate themselves to its production and export. I mention this example just to illustrate that Bush deliberately entangles and mixes everything up.
The President of the United States carries on like this in his Olympian stroll through the problems of a planet lying at his feet.
“Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, modernize the Federal Housing Administration, and allow state housing agencies to issue tax-free bonds to help homeowners refinance their mortgages (…)”
“We share a common goal: making health care more (…) accessible for all Americans (…). The best way to achieve that goal is by expanding consumer choice, not government control (…)”
“(…) we must trust students to learn if given the chance, and empower parents to demand results from our schools."
“African-American and Hispanic students posted all-time highs (…) Now we must work together to increase accountability, add flexibility for states and districts and reduce the number of high-school dropouts (…)”
“Thanks to the (…) Scholarships you approved, more than 2,600 of the poorest children in our Nation’s Capital have found new hope at a faith-based or other non-public school. Sadly, these schools are disappearing at an alarming rate in many of America’s inner cities (…). And to open the doors of these schools to more children, I ask you to support a new $300 million program (…)”
“Today, our economic growth increasingly depends on our ability to sell American goods and crops and services all over the world. So we’re working to break down barriers to trade and investment wherever we can. We’re working for a successful Doha Round of trade talks, and we must complete a good agreement this year.”
“I thank the Congress for approving the (…) agreement with Peru. And now I ask you to approve agreements with Colombia and Panama and South Korea.”
“Many products from these nations now enter America duty-free, yet many of our products face steep tariffs in their markets. These agreements will level the playing field. They will give us better access to nearly 100 million customers. They will support good jobs for the finest workers in the world: those whose products say ‘Made in the USA’.”
“These agreements also promote America’s strategic interests.”
“Our security, our prosperity, and our environment all require reducing our dependence on oil (…) generate coal power (…)
“Let us create a new international clean technology fund, which will help (…) to slow (…) and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.
“To keep America competitive into the future, we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers and empower them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow (…) So I ask Congress for (…) federal support (...) and ensure America remains the most dynamic nation on Earth (...)"
Always appealing to chauvinism, he continues his flight of fancy to other subjects:
“Tonight...America honors (…) the resilience of the people of this region [the Gulf Coast]. We reaffirm our pledge to help them build stronger and better than before. And tonight I’m pleased to announce that (…) we will host (…) the North American Summit of Canada, Mexico and the United States in the great city of New Orleans (…)”
“The other pressing challenge is immigration. America needs to secure our borders –and with your help, my administration is taking steps to do so. We’re increasing worksite enforcement, deploying fences and advanced technologies to stop illegal crossings (…) and (…) this year, we will have doubled the number of border patrol agents.” This is one of the sources of well-paid jobs that Bush has in mind.
He does not wish to remember that Mexico was robbed of more than 50 percent of its territory in a war of conquest, and he would like nobody to recall that on the Berlin Wall, during its almost 30 years of existence, fewer people died trying to gain access to the "Free World" than Latin Americans are dying today --no less than 500 each year--trying to cross the border in search of employment, with no Adjustment Act to grant them privileges and motivation as it does for Cuban citizens. The numbers of illegal immigrants arrested and traumatically deported every year totals in the hundreds of thousands.
Straightaway, the speech leaps to the Middle East from which he has just returned after a "Veni, vidi, vici” diplomatic junket.
After mentioning Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, he states: “And that is why, for the security of America and the peace of the world, we are spreading the hope of freedom (…) In Afghanistan, America, our (…) NATO allies and 15 partner nations are helping the Afghan people defend their freedom and rebuild their country.”
He makes no mention whatsoever that this was exactly what the USSR tried to do when it occupied the country with its powerful armed forces that ended up defeated in the clash with that country’s different customs, religion and culture, independent of the fact that the Soviets had not gone there to conquer raw materials for their great capital and that a socialist organization that never did any harm to the United States attempted to change the course of the nation in a revolutionary manner.
Right away Bush leaps to Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks on September 11, 2001, and which was invaded because that was what Bush, president of the United States, and his closest collaborators decided to do, with nobody in the world harboring any doubt that the aim was to occupy the oilfields; this action has cost that people hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of people uprooted from their homes, or forced into emigration.
“The Iraqi people quickly realized that something dramatic had happened. Those who had worried that America was preparing to abandon them instead saw tens of thousands of American forces flowing into their country. They saw our forces moving into neighborhoods, clearing out the terrorists, and staying behind to ensure the enemy did not return (…) Our military and civilians in Iraq are performing with courage and distinction, and they have the gratitude of our whole nation (…)”
“A year later (…) we've captured or killed thousands of extremists in Iraq (…) Our enemies in Iraq have been hit hard. They are not yet defeated, and we can still expect tough fighting ahead.”
“Our objective in the coming year is to sustain and build on the gains we made in 2007, while transitioning to the next phase of our strategy. American troops are shifting from leading operations to partnering with Iraqi forces, and, eventually, to a protective overwatch mission (…)”
“(…) this means more than 20,000 of our troops are coming home.”
“Any further drawdown of U.S. troops will be based on conditions in Iraq and the recommendations of our commanders.”
“Progress in the provinces must be matched by progress in Baghdad.”
“(…) still have a distance to travel. But after decades of dictatorship and the pain of sectarian violence, reconciliation is taking place –and the Iraqi people are taking control of their future.”
“The mission in Iraq has been difficult (…). But it is in the vital interest of the United States that we succeed.”
“We’re also standing against the forces of extremism in the Holy Land (…) Palestinians have elected a President who recognizes that confronting terror is essential to achieving a state where his people can live in dignity and at peace with Israel.”
Bush says not one word about the millions of Palestinians stripped of their lands or driven away from them, victims of an apartheid system.
Bush’s formula is well-known: 50 billion dollars in weapons for the Arabs, from the industrial-military complex, and $60 billion for Israel in 10 years. We are talking of dollars that maintain a real value. Someone pays for it: the hundreds of millions of workers producing cheap goods with their hands and being paid a minimum wage, and hundreds of millions more who are undernourished.
But the speech does not end here: “Iran is funding and training militia groups in Iraq, supporting Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and backing Hamas’ efforts to undermine peace in the Holy Land. Teheran is also developing ballistic missiles of increasing range, and continues to develop its capability to enrich uranium, which could be used to create a nuclear weapon.”
“Our message to the leaders of Iran is also clear: Verifiably suspend your nuclear enrichment, so negotiations can begin.”
“America will confront those who threaten our troops. We will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the (…) Gulf.”
We are not talking about the Gulf of Mexico, but the Persian Gulf, in waters that are only 12 miles away from Iran.
There is a historical fact here: in the days of the Shah, Iran was the best armed power in the region. When the Revolution triumphed in that country, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the United States encouraged Iraq and provided support for the invasion. That was the beginning of a conflict which cost hundreds of billions and untold numbers of dead and maimed, and today is being justified as part of the cold war.
Really, we don’t need other media to inform us about the speech made by the president of the United States; all we need to do is to let Bush speak for himself. For people who know how to read and write, people who think, no-one can make a more eloquent criticism of the empire than Bush himself. I’m responding to him on behalf of the country in question.
I have worked hard.
I hope that I have been impartial.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 29, 2008.
Reflections by Cuban President Fidel Castro on President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva
By Fidel Castro Ruz
He spontaneously decided to visit Cuba for the second time since he became President of Brazil, even though the state of my health did not guarantee that he would be able to meet with me.
In the past, as he himself said, he visited the Island almost every year. I met him on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution at the home of Sergio Ramírez who at that time was the Vice President of that country. By the way, I would say that Ramírez fooled me, in some way. When I read his book, Divine Punishment "an excellent narrative" I came to believe that it was a real case that had happened in Nicaragua, with that legal nuisance so common in the former Spanish colonies; he himself told me one day that it was pure fiction.
Cuban President Fidel Castro. AFP PHOTO
There I also met with Frei Betto who today is a critic, but not an enemy, of Lula, as well as with Father Ernesto Cardenal, a militant leftist Sandinista and, today, an adversary of Daniel. The two writers were part of the Theology of Liberation, a progressive trend which we always saw as a great step towards unity between revolutionaries and the poor, beyond their philosophy and their beliefs, in accordance with the specific conditions of struggle in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Nonetheless, I must confess that I perceived in Father Ernesto Cardenal, unlike others in the Nicaraguan leadership, an image of sacrifice and privations resembling that of a medieval monk. He was a true prototype of purity. I leave aside others less consistent, who were at one time revolutionaries, including militants of the far left in Central America and other areas, who later, anxious about their well-being and money, crossed over, part and parcel, to the ranks of the empire.
What does all this have to do with Lula? A lot. He was never a left-wing extremist, nor did he become a revolutionary through philosophical studies but rather he came from very humble working class roots and Christian beliefs, and he worked hard creating surplus value for others. Karl Marx saw the workers as the ones who would bury the capitalist system: "Workers of the world unite," he proclaimed. He presents us with reasons and demonstrates this with irrefutable logic; he takes pleasure and makes fun of the cynical lies used to accuse Communists. If the ideas of Marx were just at that time, when everything seemed to depend on the class struggle and the growth of the productive forces, science and technology, that supported the creation of essential goods to satisfy human necessities, there are absolutely new factors which say that he was right and which at the same time clash with his noble aims.
New necessities have arisen which could destroy the aims of a society with neither exploiters nor exploited. Among these new necessities we have that of human survival. No one had even heard about climate change in Marx?s day and age. He and Engels surely knew that one day the sun would be extinguished as it consumed all of its energy.
A few years after the Manifesto was written, other men were born who made inroads in science and knowledge about the laws of chemistry, physics and biology ruling the Universe and unknown then. Into whose hands would this knowledge fall?
Although it continues in its development and even improves, and again partially denies and contradicts its own theories, new knowledge is not in the hands of the poor nations who today make up three-quarters of the world's population. It is in the hands of a privileged group of wealthy and developed capitalist powers, associated with the most powerful empire ever to exist, built on the bases of a globalized economy, governed by the very laws of capitalism described by Marx and thoroughly studied by him.
Nowadays, as humankind still suffers from these realities due to the very dialectics of events, we must confront these dangers.
How did the revolutionary process in Cuba develop? Quite a bit has been written in our press in recent weeks about different episodes of that period. Great respect has been shown for various historical dates on the days corresponding to anniversaries that commemorate years ending in a five or a zero. That is fair, but we must be careful, in the sum-total of so many occurrences described in each newspaper or article, according to their criteria, lest we lose sight of them in the context of the historical development of our Revolution, despite the efforts of all those excellent analysts that we have.
For me, unity means sharing in the struggle, the risks, the sacrifices, the aims, ideas, concepts and strategies, assumed after discussion and analysis. Unity means a common struggle against annexationists, quislings and corrupt individuals who have nothing in common with a militant revolutionary. It is to this unity revolving around the idea of independence and against the empire as it advances over the peoples of the Americas that I always referred to. A few days ago, I once again read it when Granma published it on the eve of our election day, and Juventud Rebelde reproduced a facsimile of my thoughts on the idea, in my own handwriting.
The old pre-revolutionary slogan of unity has nothing to do with the concept, because in our country today we do not have political organizations seeking power. We have to avoid that, in the enormous sea of tactical criteria, strategic lines become diluted and we imagine nonexistent situations.
In a country invaded by the United States while involved in a solitary struggle for independence as the last Spanish colony, together with our sister Puerto Rico, "birds of a feather" nationalist feelings ran very deep.
The real producers of sugar who were the recently freed slaves and the peasants, many of whom fought in the Liberation Army, transformed into squatters or completely lacking any land of their own, who were pitched into the sugarcane harvests in the great estates created by United States companies or Cuban land-owners who inherited, bought or stole land, were adequate material for revolutionary ideas.
Julio Antonio Mella, founder of the Communist Party together with Baliño who knew Martí and who, with him, created the party that would lead Cuba to independence- took up the banner, brought to it all the enthusiasm derived from the October Revolution, and gave this cause his own blood, that of a young intellectual conquered by revolutionary ideas. The Communist blood of Jesús Menéndez would join that of Mella 18 years later.
We, teenagers and youths, studying in private schools had not even heard of Mella. Our class or social group, having incomes greater that those of the rest of the population, condemned us as human beings to be the selfish and the exploiters of society.
I had the privilege of coming to the revolution through ideas, escaping the boring fate that life was leading me to. I explained why at another moment; now, I remember this only in the context of what I am writing.
Hatred for Batista's repression and his crimes was so great that nobody paid heed to the ideas I expressed in my defense at the Court in Santiago de Cuba, where there was even a book by Lenin printed in the USSR "coming from the credit I had at the People's Socialist Party bookstore at Carlos III in Havana" found among the combatants' belongings. "Whoever hasn't read Lenin, is an ignorant", I blurted out during the interrogation at the first sessions of the oral hearing when they brought it up as a damning bit of evidence. They were still trying me together with all of the surviving prisoners.
It would be hard to understand what I am saying if one doesn't keep in mind that at the time we attacked the Moncada, on July 26, 1953, --an action made possible by the organizational efforts of more than a year, with nobody on our side other than ourselves-- the policies of Stalin, who had died suddenly a few months earlier, prevailed in the USSR. He was an honest and devoted Communist, who would later make serious mistakes leading him to extremely conservative and cautious positions.
If a Revolution like ours had succeeded at that time, the USSR would not have done for Cuba what the Soviet leadership did years later, liberated by then from those murky and tortuous methods, and enthused by the Socialist Revolution that burst on the scene in our country. I understood that very well in spite of the fair criticisms I made of Khrushchev as a result of events that were well known at the time.
The USSR had the most powerful army among all those contending in World War II, but unfortunately it was purged and demobilized. Its leader underestimated Hitler's threats and bellicose theories. From the very capital of Japan, an important and prestigious Soviet intelligence agent had communicated the imminence of the attack on June 22, 1941.
This surprised the country which was not in combat readiness. Many officers were on leaves. Even without their most experienced unit leaders --who were replaced-- if they had been alerted and deployed, the Nazis would have clashed with powerful forces from the very first second and they wouldn't have destroyed most of the fighter planes as they sat on the ground. Even worse than the purge, was the surprise.
The Soviet soldiers did not surrender when they were told about enemy tanks in the rearguard, the way the other armies from capitalist Europe did. In the most critical moments, with sub-zero temperatures, the Siberian patriots started the lathes in the weapons factories that Stalin had far-sightedly moved to the inner reaches of Soviet territory.
As the leaders of the USSR themselves told me when I visited that great country in April 1963, the revolutionary Russian combatants --well seasoned against foreign interventions aimed at destroying the Bolshevik Revolution, which was left blockaded and isolated-- had established relations and exchanged experiences with German officers, those with a Prussian militarist tradition, humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles which put an end to World War I.
The SS intelligence services devised schemes against many who were, in their vast majority, loyal to the Revolution. Motivated by suspicions that turned pathological, Stalin purged 3 of his 5 Marshals, 13 of the 15 Army Commanders, 8 of the 9 Admirals, 50 of the 57 Army Corps Commanders, 154 of 186 Division Commanders, one hundred percent of Army Commissars, and 25 of 28 Army Corps Commissars of the Soviet Red Army in the years preceding the Great Patriotic War.
The USSR paid for those serious mistakes with enormous destruction and more than 20 million lives lost; some claim it was 27 million.
In 1943, with some delay, the last Nazi spring offensive was launched at the famous and tempting Kursk Bulge, with 900 thousand soldiers, 2700 tanks and 2000 planes. The Soviets, experts in enemy psychology, laid in wait in that trap for the sure attack, with one million and 200 thousand men, 3300 tanks, 2400 planes and 20,000 artillery pieces. Led by Zhukov and Stalin himself, they destroyed Hitler's last offensive.
In 1945, Soviet soldiers advanced unstoppable to capture the German Reich Chancellery in Berlin where they hoisted the red flag stained with the blood of the many fallen.
I observe Lula's red tie for a minute and I ask him, Did Chávez give you that? He smiles and answers: Now I am going to send him some shirts because he is complaining that the collars on his shirts are too hard, and I am going to look for them in Bahía so that I can make him a present of them.
He asked that I give him some of the photos I took.
When he said that he was very impressed with my health, I told him that I spent my time thinking and writing. Never in my life had I thought so much. I told him that, at the end of my visit to Córdoba, Argentina, where I had attended a meeting with many leaders, and he had been there as well, I came back, and then I took part in two ceremonies for the July 26th Anniversary. I was checking over Ramonet's book. I had answered all his questions. I had not taken the thing too seriously. I had thought that it would be a quick thing, like the interviews with Frei Betto and Tomás Borge. And then I became a slave to the French writer's book, when it was at the point of being published without my going over it, with some of the answers being a bit off the cuff. I barely slept during those days.
When I fell gravely ill on the night of the 26th and in the early morning of the 27th of July, I thought that would be the end, and while the doctors were fighting for my life, the head of the Council of State Office was reading me the text, at my insistence, and I was dictating the pertinent changes.
REFLECTIONS OF PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO
Lula
(Part Two)
Translated by ESTI
LULA warmly reminded me of the first time he visited our country in 1985 to take part in a meeting organized by Cuba to analyze the overwhelming problem of the foreign debt; participants representing a wide spectrum of political, religious, cultural and social tendencies presented and discussed their opinions, concerned about the asphyxiating drama.
The meetings took place throughout the year. Leaders of worker, campesino, student and other groups assembled to examine the various subjects. He was one of these leaders, already well known to us and abroad for his direct and vibrant message, that of a young worker leader.
At that time, Latin America owed $350 billion. I told him that in that year of intense struggle I had written long letters to the President of Argentina, Raúl Alfonsín, to persuade him discontinue the payments on that debt. I knew the position of Mexico, unmoved in the payment of its enormous debt, but not indifferent to the outcome of the battle, and the special political situation of Brazil. The Argentine debt was sufficiently large after the disasters of the military government to justify an attempt to open up a breach in that direction. I did not succeed. A few years later, the debt with the interests rose to $800 billion; it had doubled and it had already been paid.
Lula explained to me how that year was different. He says that Brazil has no debt today either with the International Monetary Fund or with the Paris Club, and that it has 190 billion US dollars in its reserves. I assumed that his country had paid enormous sums in order to comply with those institutions. I explained to him about Nixon's colossal fraud on the world economy, when in 1971 he unilaterally suspended the gold standard that had limited the issuing of paper money. Until then the dollar had maintained a balance in relation to its value in gold. Thirty years earlier, the United States had almost all the reserves in that metal. If there was a lot of gold, they bought it up; if there was a shortage, they sold. The dollar played its part as an international exchange currency, under the privileges granted to the United States at Bretton Woods in 1944.
The most developed powers had been destroyed by the war. Japan, Germany, the USSR and the rest of Europe had barely any of this metal in their reserves. One ounce of gold could be bought for as little as 35 dollars; today you need 900 dollars.
The United States, I told him, has bought up assets all over the world by minting dollars, and exercises sovereign privileges over such properties acquired in other countries. Nevertheless, nobody wants the dollar to devaluate any further, because almost all countries accumulate dollars; that is, paper money, that devaluates constantly as a result of that unilateral decision made by the President of the United States.
Presently, the currency reserves of China, Japan, Southeast Asia and Russia combined amount to three trillion dollars; an astronomical figure. If you add the dollar reserves of Europe and the rest of the world, you will see that all that is equivalent to a mountain of money whose value depends on what the government of one country decides to do.
Greenspan, who for more than 15 years was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, would have died in a panic had he been faced with such situation. How high can U.S. inflation climb? How many new jobs can this country create this year? How long will its machinery to mint paper money last before its economy collapses, besides using war to conquer other nations’ natural resources?
As a result of the harsh measures imposed on the defeated German state at Versailles in 1918, when a republican regime came to power, the German mark devaluated to such an extent that you needed tens of thousands of them to buy one dollar. Such a crisis fed German nationalism and contributed extraordinarily to Hitler’s absurd ideas. He was looking for a scapegoat. Many of the most important scientific and financial talents as well as writers were Jewish. They were persecuted. Among them was Einstein, the author of the theory stating that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light; it made him famous. Also Marx, who was born in Germany, and many of the Russian Communists were of Jewish descent, whether or not they actively practiced the Hebrew religion.
Hitler did not lay the blame for the human drama on the capitalist system; rather he blamed the Jews. Based on crude prejudices, what he really wanted was "vital Russian space" for his Teutonic master race, dreaming of building a millennial empire.
In 1917, through the Balfour Declaration, the British decided to create the state of Israel within its colonial empire, located on territory inhabited by the Palestinians, who had a different religion and culture; in that part of the world, other ethnic groups coexisted for many centuries before our era, among them the Jews. Zionism became popular among the Americans, who rightly detested the Nazis, and whose financial markets were controlled by representatives of that movement. That state today is practicing the principles of apartheid; it has sophisticated nuclear weapons and it controls the most important financial centers in the United States. It was used by this country and its European allies to supply nuclear weapons to that other apartheid, the one in South Africa, to use them against the Cuban internationalist combatants who were fighting the racists in the south of Angola if they crossed the Namibian border.
Immediately afterwards, I spoke to Lula about Bush’s adventurous policies in the Middle East.
I promised to send him the article that was to be published in Granmathe next day, on January 16. I would personally sign the copy he would be getting. Before he left, I would also give him the article written by one of the most influential U.S. intellectuals, Paul Kennedy, about the connection between food and oil prices.
You are a food producer, I added, and you have just discovered important reserves of light crude. Brazil has an area of 5,333,750 square miles and 30 percent of the world’s water reserves. The planet’s population needs increasing amounts of food, and you are great food exporters. If you have grains rich in proteins, oils and carbohydrates – be they fruits like the cashew nuts, almonds, or pistachio; legumes such as peanut; soybean, with more than 35% protein, and sunflower seeds; or grains like wheat and corn – you can produce all the meat or milk you want. I didn’t mention others on a long list.
I continued with my explanation saying that in Cuba, we had a cow that broke the world record in milk production, a Holstein-Zebu hybrid. Right away Lula named her: "White Udder!" (Ubre Blanca), he exclaimed. He remembered her name. I went on to say that she would produce 110 liters of milk per day. She was like a factory, but she had to have more than 40 kilograms of fodder, the most she could chew and swallow in a 24-hour period, a mixture in which soy meal, a legume that is very difficult to grow in Cuban soil and climate, is a basic ingredient. You now have the two things: safe supplies of fuel, raw food materials and manufactured food products.
The end of cheap food has already been announced. I stated: "What do you think the dozens of countries with many hundreds of millions of inhabitants who have neither the one nor the other will do?" This means that the United States has a huge external dependency which is also a weapon. It could use all its reserves of land, but the people of that country are not ready for that. They are producing ethanol from corn; therefore, they are taking a great amount of this caloric grain off the market, I added, continuing my argument.
On the same subject, Lula tells me that Brazilian producers are already selling the 2009 corn crop. Brazil is not as dependent on corn as Mexico or Central America. I think that the United States cannot keep up fuel production from corn. This, I say, confirms a reality with regards to the sudden and incontrollable rise of food prices which will affect many peoples.
You, on the other hand, can rely on a favorable climate and loose soil; ours tends to be clayish and sometimes as hard as cement. When we received tractors from the Soviets and the other Socialist countries, they would break down and we had to buy special steel in Europe to manufacture them here. In our country we have lots of clay-based black or red soil. Working it with dedication, they can produce for the family what the campesinos in the Escambray call "high consumption". They were receiving food rations from the state and also consuming their own production. The climate has changed in Cuba, Lula, I said.
Our soil is not suitable for the large-scale commercial production of cereals, as required to meet the necessities of a population of almost 12 million people, and the cost in machinery and fuel imported by the nation, at today’s prices, would be very high.
Our media prints news about oil production in Matanzas, reductions in costs and other positive aspects. But nobody says that the prices in hard currency must be shared with foreign partners who invest in the necessary sophisticated machinery and technology. Besides, we do not have the required labor force to intensively take part in cereal production as the Vietnamese and Chinese do, growing rice plant by plant and often reaping two or even three harvests a year. It has to do with the location and the historical tradition of the land and its settlers. They did not first go through the large-scale mechanization of modern harvesters.
In Cuba, for quite a while now, the sugarcane cutters and the workers in the mountain coffee plantations have abandoned the fields, logically. Also, a large number of construction workers, some from the same origins, have abandoned the work brigades and have become self-employed workers. The people are aware of the high cost of fixing up a home. There is the cost of the material, plus the high cost of the manpower. The first can be solved, the second has no solution – as some would believe – throwing pesos into the street without their due backing in convertible currency, which would not be dollars anymore but euros and yuans, increasingly expensive, if all together we succeed in saving international economy and peace.
Meanwhile, we have been creating and we should keep on creating reserves of foods and fuel. In case of a direct military attack, the manual work force would be multiplied.
In the short time Lula and I spent together, two and a half hours, I would have liked to summarize in just a few minutes the almost 28 years that have gone by, not since the time he first visited Cuba, but since I met him in Nicaragua. This time he was the leader of an immense nation whose fate, however, depends on many aspects that are common to all the peoples on this planet.
I asked his permission to speak about our conversation freely and at the same time, discreetly.
As he stands in front of me, smiling and friendly, and I listen to him speaking with pride about his country, about the things that he is doing and those he plans on doing, I think about his political instincts. I had just finished quickly looking over a 100-page report on Brazil and the growth of relations between our two countries. He was the man I met in the Sandinista capital, Managua; he was someone who connected closely with our Revolution. I neither spoke to him, nor would I ever speak to him, about anything that could be construed as interfering in the political process of Brazil, but he himself, right at the beginning, said: "Do you remember, Fidel, when we spoke at the Sao Paulo Forum, and you told me that unity among the Latin American left wing was necessary if we were to secure our progress? Well, we are now moving forward in that direction."
Immediately he speaks to me with pride about what Brazil is today and its great possibilities, bearing in mind its advances in science, technology, mechanical industry, energy and other areas, bound up with its enormous agricultural potential. Of course, he includes the high level of Brazil’s international relations, which he describes enthusiastically, and the relations he is ready to develop with Cuba. He speaks vehemently about the social work of the Workers' Party which today is supported by all the Brazilian left-wing parties, which are far from having a parliamentary majority.
There is no doubt that it was a part of the things we discussed years ago when we spoke. Back then time flew by quickly, but now every year is multiplied by ten, at a rate which is difficult to follow.
I wanted also to talk to him about that and about many other things. It’s hard to tell which one of us had the greater need to communicate ideas. As for me, I supposed that he would be leaving the next day and not early that same evening, according to the flight plan that had been scheduled before we met. It was approximately five o’clock in the afternoon. What happened was a kind of contest as to how we would be using the time. Lula, astute and quick-witted, took his revenge at a meeting with the press, when, mischievously smiling as you can see in the photos, he told the reporters that he had only talked for half an hour and Fidel had talked for two. Of course, with the privilege of seniority, I used up more time than he did. You have to discount the time taking photographs of each other, since I borrowed a camera and became a reporter again: he followed suit.
I have here 103 pages of dispatches reporting what Lula said to the press, the photos taken of him and the confidence he communicated about Fidel’s health. Truly, he left no space for the reflection published on January 16 that I had just finished writing the day before his visit. He took up the entire space and this is equivalent to his enormous territory, compared to the miniscule land surface of Cuba.
I told him how happy I was that he had decided to visit Cuba, even without the assurance that he would be able to see me. As soon as I knew that, I decided to sacrifice anything, like my exercises, rehab and recovery, just so I could be with him and talk extensively.
At that moment, even though I knew that he would be leaving that same day, I was unaware of the urgency of his departure. Evidently, the health condition of the vice president of Brazil, according to his own statement, urged him to take off so that he could arrive in Brasilia at around dawn the next day, in the middle of spring. Yet another long and hectic day for our friend.
A strong and persistent downpour fell on his residence while Lula waited for the photos and two other bits of material, together with my notes. He left that night for the airport in the rain. If he had seen the front page ofGranma: "2007, the third rainiest year in more than 100 years," that would have helped him to understand what I had told him about climate change.
Well then, the sugar harvest in Cuba has begun, along with the so-called dry season. The sugar crop yield is only at nine percent. How much would it cost to grow sugar for export at 10 cents per pound, when the purchasing power of one cent is almost fifty times less than at the triumph of the Revolution in January of 1959? Reducing the costs of these and other products to fulfill our commitments, to satisfy our consumption, to create reserves and develop other production, is highly commendable; but not even in our wildest dreams can we find easy solutions to our problems; the solutions are not just around the corner.
Among many other topics, we discussed the inauguration of the new president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom. I told him that I had seen the ceremony in its entirety and the social commitments made by the newly-elected president. Lula mentioned that what we can see today in Latin America was born in 1990 when we decided to create the Sao Paulo Forum: "We made a decision here, in a conversation we had. I had lost the election and you came to lunch at my home in San Bernardo."
My conversation with Lula was just beginning, and I still have many things to relate and ideas to offer, which might perhaps be useful.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 23, 2008
Translated by ESTI
Reflections of President Fidel Castro
Lula
(Part Three)
THE demise of the Soviet Union was to us like there were no more sunrises; a devastating blow for the Cuban Revolution. Not only did this translate into a total cessation of supplies of fuel, materials and foods; we lost markets and the prices that we had attained for our products in the difficult struggle for our sovereignty, integration and principles. The empire and the traitors, full of hatred, were sharpening their daggers with those who wanted to put the revolutionaries to the sword and recover the country’s riches.
The Gross Domestic Product progressively plummeted to 35 percent. What country could have withstood such a terrible blow? We were not defending our lives; we were defending our rights.
Many left-wing parties and organizations became discouraged in the wake of the collapse of the USSR after its titanic effort to build socialism during the course of more than 70 years.
The reactionaries’ criticisms coming from all platforms and mass media were ferocious. We did not add our voices to the chorus of capitalism’s apologists, beating a dead horse. Not one statue to the creators or followers of Marxism was demolished in Cuba. Not one school or factory had its name changed. And we decided to press ahead with unchangeable steadiness. That was what we had promised to do under such hypothetical and unbelievable circumstances.
Nor had we ever practiced personality cults in our country, something that we had taken the initiative to prohibit right from the first days after the triumph.
In peoples’ history, it has been subjective factors that have brought forward or delay outcomes, independently of the leaders’ worth.
I spoke to Lula about Che, briefly outlining his story for him. Che used to argue with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez about the self-financed or the budgetary method, things we didn’t consider that important then as we were involved in the struggle against the U.S. blockade, its aggression plans and the 1962 October Missile Crisis, a real survival issue.
Che studied the budgets of the big Yankee companies whose managers lived in Cuba, not their owners. He drew from this a clear idea about how imperialism worked and what was happening in our society and this enriched his Marxist ideas and led him to the conclusion that in Cuba we couldn’t use the same methods to build socialism. But this didn’t mean we were dealing with a war of insults; these were open exchanges of opinions that were published in a small magazine, with no intention of creating rifts or divisions among ourselves.
What happened in the USSR later would not have surprised Che. While he held important posts and carried out his duties, he was always careful and respectful. His language grew tougher when he collided with the horrible human reality imposed by imperialism; he became aware of this in the former Belgian colony of the Congo.
He was a self-sacrificing, studious and profound man; he died in Bolivia with a handful of combatants from Cuba and other Latin American countries, fighting for the liberation of Our America. He did not survive to experience the world of today, where problems unknown to us then have since come into play.
You didn’t know him, I told him. He was disciplined in voluntary work, in his studies and behavior. He was modest and selfless, and he set an example both in production centers and in combat.
I think that in building socialism, the more the privileged receive, the less will go to the neediest.
I repeat to Lula that time measured in years was now flying by very quickly; each one of them was multiplying. One can almost say the same about each day. Fresh news is published constantly, relating to the situations anticipated in my meeting with him on the 15th.
With plenty of economic arguments, I explained to him that when the Revolution triumphed in 1959, the United States was paying for an important part of our sugar production with the preferential price of 5 cents per pound; for almost half a century this would be sent to that country’s traditional marketplace which was always supplied, at critical moments, by a secure supplier just off their shores. When we proclaimed the Agrarian Reform Act, Eisenhower decided what had to be done, and we hadn’t yet nationalized their sugar mills – it would have been premature to do so – nor had we yet applied the agrarian law of May 1959 to the large estates. Because of that hasty decision, our sugar quota was suspended in December 1960, and later redistributed among other producers in this and other regions of the world as punishment. Our country became blockaded and isolated.
Worst of all was the lack of scruples and the methods used by the empire to impose its domination over the world. It brought viruses into the country and destroyed the best sugarcane; it attacked the coffee, potatoes and also the swine herds. The Barbados-4362 was one of our best varieties of sugar cane: early maturity, a sugar yield that sometimes reached 13 or 14 percent; its weight per hectare could exceed 200 tons of cane in 15 months. The Yankees resorted to pests to wipe out the best. Even worse: they brought in the hemorrhagic dengue virus that affected 344,000 people and took the lives of 101 children. We don’t know whether they used other viruses – perhaps they didn’t because they were afraid of the proximity of Cuba.
When due to these problems we couldn’t send to the USSR the sugar shipments under contract with that country, it continued sending us the goods we had agreed upon. I remember negotiating with the Soviets every cent of the sugar price; I discovered in practice what I had previously only known in theory: unequal exchange. It was securing a price that was above the world market price. The agreements were planned for five years; if at the beginning of the five-year period you were sending X amount of tons of sugar in payment for goods, at the end of that period the value of their products, in international prices, was 20 percent higher. It was always generous in negotiations: once the world market price temporarily shot up to 19 cents, we latched on to that price and the USSR accepted. Later this served as a basis for the application of the socialist principle which says that the more economically developed should support the less developed as they build socialism.
When Lula asked me what was the purchasing power of 5 cents, I explained that with one ton of sugar at that time we could by 7 tons of oil; today, the reference price of light oil, 100 dollars, will only buy one barrel. The sugar we export, at current prices, would only suffice to import oil that would be used up in 20 days. We would have to spend about 4 billion dollars per year to buy it.
The United States subsidizes its agriculture with tens of billions every year. Why does the U.S. not allow the ethanol you produce freely into the country? It subsidizes it brutally, thus denying Brazil income for billions of dollars every year. The wealthy countries do the same, with their production of sugar, oleaginous products and cereals for the production of ethanol.
Lula analyzes figures on Brazilian agricultural products that are of great interest. He tells me that he had a study made by the Brazilian press showing how world soy production will grow 2 percent annually until 2015, which means an additional production of 189 million tons of soy. Brazil's soy production would have to grow at a pace of 7 percent annually to be able to meet the world’s needs.
What is the problem? Many countries already don’t have any more land available for crops. India, for example, has no more available land; China has very little and neither does the United States to grow more soy.
I add to his explanation that what many Latin American countries have are millions of people earning starvation wages and growing coffee, cacao, vegetables, fruits, raw materials and goods at low prices to supply U.S. society, which no longer saves and consumes more than it can produce.
Lula explains that they have set up an EMBRAPA research office –Agriculture and Livestock Research Company of Brazil– in Ghana, and he goes on to say that in February they are going to also open an office in Caracas.
“Thirty years ago, Fidel, that area of Brasilia, Mato Grosso, Goiás, was considered a part of Brazil that had nothing, it was just like the African savannah; in the course of 30 years, it was transformed into the major grain producing region in all of Brazil, and I think that Africa has an area that is very much like this region in our country; that's why we set up the research office there in Ghana and we also would like to become associated with Angola.”
He told me that Brazil is in a privileged position. They have 850 million hectares of land; of these 360 million are part of the Amazon state; 400 million of good soil for agriculture, and sugarcane takes up only one percent.
I make the comment that Brazil is the largest coffee exporter in the world. For this product, Brazil is paid the same as the value of a ton in 1959: around 2,500 of today’s dollars. If in that country then they charged 10 cents a cup, today they charge 5 dollars or more for an aromatic cup of espresso, an Italian way of preparing coffee. That is GDP in the United States.
In Africa they cannot do what Brazil is doing. A large part of Africa is covered by deserts and tropical and subtropical areas where it is difficult to grow soy or wheat. Only in the Mediterranean region, to the north – where rainfall totals some eight inches a year or the land is irrigated with the waters of the Nile – in the high plateaus or in the south, in the lands wrested away by apartheid, cereals production is abundant.
Fish in the cool waters that mainly flow around its western coast feed the developed countries that sweep into their nets all the large and small species that feed on plankton in the ocean currents coming in from the South Pole.
Africa, having almost 4 times the surface area of Brazil (18.91 million square miles) and 4.3 times more population than Brazil (911 million inhabitants) is very far from being able to produce Brazil’s surplus foods, and its infrastructure is yet to be built.
The viruses and bacteria affecting potatoes, citrus, bananas, tomatoes, and livestock in general, swine fever, avian flu, foot-and-mouth disease, mad cow disease, and others that in general affect the livestock of the world, proliferate in Africa.
I spoke to Lula about the Battle of Ideas that we are waging. Fresh news arrives constantly that demonstrates the need for that constant battle. The worst media of our ideological enemies are bent on spreading throughout the world the opinions of some nasty gusanillos (worms) who cannot even stand to hear the term “socialism” in our heroic and generous country. On January 20, five days after the visit, one of these papers published the story of a young ne’er-do-well who, thanks to the Revolution, had attained a good level education, health and employment situation:
“Don’t even mention socialism to me”, he said, and went on to explain the cause of his anger: “many people were pawning their souls just to get a few dollars. Anything new that happens in this country, whatever it is, they should give it another name," he declares. Quite the little wolf dressed up as a granny.
The very same reporter, who prints this, gleefully goes on: “Official propaganda telling the Cubans to go to the polls talks more about the Revolution than about socialism. For a start, Cuba is no longer a country in a bubble, like it was until the end of the 1980’s. The insular viewpoint is changing towards a global vision and the country, especially in the capital, is living through an accelerated mutation towards modernity. And one of its effects is that socialism, imported decades ago, is tearing at the seams.”
We are dealing with imperial capitalism’s vulgar appeal to individual egoism, as it was preached almost 240 years ago by Adam Smith as the cause of the nation’s wealth, meaning everything should be handled by the market. That would create limitless wealth in an idyllic world.
I think of Africa and its almost one billion population, victim of the principles of that economy. Diseases, flying at the speed of airplanes, proliferate at the speed of AIDS, and other old and new diseases are affecting its population and its crops, with not one of the former colonial powers being really capable of sending them doctors and scientists.
It is about these issues that I spoke with Lula.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 26, 2008
He spontaneously decided to visit Cuba for the second time since he became President of Brazil, even though the state of my health did not guarantee that he would be able to meet with me.
In the past, as he himself said, he visited the Island almost every year. I met him on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution at the home of Sergio Ramírez who at that time was the Vice President of that country. By the way, I would say that Ramírez fooled me, in some way. When I read his book, Divine Punishment "an excellent narrative" I came to believe that it was a real case that had happened in Nicaragua, with that legal nuisance so common in the former Spanish colonies; he himself told me one day that it was pure fiction.
Cuban President Fidel Castro. AFP PHOTO
There I also met with Frei Betto who today is a critic, but not an enemy, of Lula, as well as with Father Ernesto Cardenal, a militant leftist Sandinista and, today, an adversary of Daniel. The two writers were part of the Theology of Liberation, a progressive trend which we always saw as a great step towards unity between revolutionaries and the poor, beyond their philosophy and their beliefs, in accordance with the specific conditions of struggle in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Nonetheless, I must confess that I perceived in Father Ernesto Cardenal, unlike others in the Nicaraguan leadership, an image of sacrifice and privations resembling that of a medieval monk. He was a true prototype of purity. I leave aside others less consistent, who were at one time revolutionaries, including militants of the far left in Central America and other areas, who later, anxious about their well-being and money, crossed over, part and parcel, to the ranks of the empire.
What does all this have to do with Lula? A lot. He was never a left-wing extremist, nor did he become a revolutionary through philosophical studies but rather he came from very humble working class roots and Christian beliefs, and he worked hard creating surplus value for others. Karl Marx saw the workers as the ones who would bury the capitalist system: "Workers of the world unite," he proclaimed. He presents us with reasons and demonstrates this with irrefutable logic; he takes pleasure and makes fun of the cynical lies used to accuse Communists. If the ideas of Marx were just at that time, when everything seemed to depend on the class struggle and the growth of the productive forces, science and technology, that supported the creation of essential goods to satisfy human necessities, there are absolutely new factors which say that he was right and which at the same time clash with his noble aims.
New necessities have arisen which could destroy the aims of a society with neither exploiters nor exploited. Among these new necessities we have that of human survival. No one had even heard about climate change in Marx?s day and age. He and Engels surely knew that one day the sun would be extinguished as it consumed all of its energy.
A few years after the Manifesto was written, other men were born who made inroads in science and knowledge about the laws of chemistry, physics and biology ruling the Universe and unknown then. Into whose hands would this knowledge fall?
Although it continues in its development and even improves, and again partially denies and contradicts its own theories, new knowledge is not in the hands of the poor nations who today make up three-quarters of the world's population. It is in the hands of a privileged group of wealthy and developed capitalist powers, associated with the most powerful empire ever to exist, built on the bases of a globalized economy, governed by the very laws of capitalism described by Marx and thoroughly studied by him.
Nowadays, as humankind still suffers from these realities due to the very dialectics of events, we must confront these dangers.
How did the revolutionary process in Cuba develop? Quite a bit has been written in our press in recent weeks about different episodes of that period. Great respect has been shown for various historical dates on the days corresponding to anniversaries that commemorate years ending in a five or a zero. That is fair, but we must be careful, in the sum-total of so many occurrences described in each newspaper or article, according to their criteria, lest we lose sight of them in the context of the historical development of our Revolution, despite the efforts of all those excellent analysts that we have.
For me, unity means sharing in the struggle, the risks, the sacrifices, the aims, ideas, concepts and strategies, assumed after discussion and analysis. Unity means a common struggle against annexationists, quislings and corrupt individuals who have nothing in common with a militant revolutionary. It is to this unity revolving around the idea of independence and against the empire as it advances over the peoples of the Americas that I always referred to. A few days ago, I once again read it when Granma published it on the eve of our election day, and Juventud Rebelde reproduced a facsimile of my thoughts on the idea, in my own handwriting.
The old pre-revolutionary slogan of unity has nothing to do with the concept, because in our country today we do not have political organizations seeking power. We have to avoid that, in the enormous sea of tactical criteria, strategic lines become diluted and we imagine nonexistent situations.
In a country invaded by the United States while involved in a solitary struggle for independence as the last Spanish colony, together with our sister Puerto Rico, "birds of a feather" nationalist feelings ran very deep.
The real producers of sugar who were the recently freed slaves and the peasants, many of whom fought in the Liberation Army, transformed into squatters or completely lacking any land of their own, who were pitched into the sugarcane harvests in the great estates created by United States companies or Cuban land-owners who inherited, bought or stole land, were adequate material for revolutionary ideas.
Julio Antonio Mella, founder of the Communist Party together with Baliño who knew Martí and who, with him, created the party that would lead Cuba to independence- took up the banner, brought to it all the enthusiasm derived from the October Revolution, and gave this cause his own blood, that of a young intellectual conquered by revolutionary ideas. The Communist blood of Jesús Menéndez would join that of Mella 18 years later.
We, teenagers and youths, studying in private schools had not even heard of Mella. Our class or social group, having incomes greater that those of the rest of the population, condemned us as human beings to be the selfish and the exploiters of society.
I had the privilege of coming to the revolution through ideas, escaping the boring fate that life was leading me to. I explained why at another moment; now, I remember this only in the context of what I am writing.
Hatred for Batista's repression and his crimes was so great that nobody paid heed to the ideas I expressed in my defense at the Court in Santiago de Cuba, where there was even a book by Lenin printed in the USSR "coming from the credit I had at the People's Socialist Party bookstore at Carlos III in Havana" found among the combatants' belongings. "Whoever hasn't read Lenin, is an ignorant", I blurted out during the interrogation at the first sessions of the oral hearing when they brought it up as a damning bit of evidence. They were still trying me together with all of the surviving prisoners.
It would be hard to understand what I am saying if one doesn't keep in mind that at the time we attacked the Moncada, on July 26, 1953, --an action made possible by the organizational efforts of more than a year, with nobody on our side other than ourselves-- the policies of Stalin, who had died suddenly a few months earlier, prevailed in the USSR. He was an honest and devoted Communist, who would later make serious mistakes leading him to extremely conservative and cautious positions.
If a Revolution like ours had succeeded at that time, the USSR would not have done for Cuba what the Soviet leadership did years later, liberated by then from those murky and tortuous methods, and enthused by the Socialist Revolution that burst on the scene in our country. I understood that very well in spite of the fair criticisms I made of Khrushchev as a result of events that were well known at the time.
The USSR had the most powerful army among all those contending in World War II, but unfortunately it was purged and demobilized. Its leader underestimated Hitler's threats and bellicose theories. From the very capital of Japan, an important and prestigious Soviet intelligence agent had communicated the imminence of the attack on June 22, 1941.
This surprised the country which was not in combat readiness. Many officers were on leaves. Even without their most experienced unit leaders --who were replaced-- if they had been alerted and deployed, the Nazis would have clashed with powerful forces from the very first second and they wouldn't have destroyed most of the fighter planes as they sat on the ground. Even worse than the purge, was the surprise.
The Soviet soldiers did not surrender when they were told about enemy tanks in the rearguard, the way the other armies from capitalist Europe did. In the most critical moments, with sub-zero temperatures, the Siberian patriots started the lathes in the weapons factories that Stalin had far-sightedly moved to the inner reaches of Soviet territory.
As the leaders of the USSR themselves told me when I visited that great country in April 1963, the revolutionary Russian combatants --well seasoned against foreign interventions aimed at destroying the Bolshevik Revolution, which was left blockaded and isolated-- had established relations and exchanged experiences with German officers, those with a Prussian militarist tradition, humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles which put an end to World War I.
The SS intelligence services devised schemes against many who were, in their vast majority, loyal to the Revolution. Motivated by suspicions that turned pathological, Stalin purged 3 of his 5 Marshals, 13 of the 15 Army Commanders, 8 of the 9 Admirals, 50 of the 57 Army Corps Commanders, 154 of 186 Division Commanders, one hundred percent of Army Commissars, and 25 of 28 Army Corps Commissars of the Soviet Red Army in the years preceding the Great Patriotic War.
The USSR paid for those serious mistakes with enormous destruction and more than 20 million lives lost; some claim it was 27 million.
In 1943, with some delay, the last Nazi spring offensive was launched at the famous and tempting Kursk Bulge, with 900 thousand soldiers, 2700 tanks and 2000 planes. The Soviets, experts in enemy psychology, laid in wait in that trap for the sure attack, with one million and 200 thousand men, 3300 tanks, 2400 planes and 20,000 artillery pieces. Led by Zhukov and Stalin himself, they destroyed Hitler's last offensive.
In 1945, Soviet soldiers advanced unstoppable to capture the German Reich Chancellery in Berlin where they hoisted the red flag stained with the blood of the many fallen.
I observe Lula's red tie for a minute and I ask him, Did Chávez give you that? He smiles and answers: Now I am going to send him some shirts because he is complaining that the collars on his shirts are too hard, and I am going to look for them in Bahía so that I can make him a present of them.
He asked that I give him some of the photos I took.
When he said that he was very impressed with my health, I told him that I spent my time thinking and writing. Never in my life had I thought so much. I told him that, at the end of my visit to Córdoba, Argentina, where I had attended a meeting with many leaders, and he had been there as well, I came back, and then I took part in two ceremonies for the July 26th Anniversary. I was checking over Ramonet's book. I had answered all his questions. I had not taken the thing too seriously. I had thought that it would be a quick thing, like the interviews with Frei Betto and Tomás Borge. And then I became a slave to the French writer's book, when it was at the point of being published without my going over it, with some of the answers being a bit off the cuff. I barely slept during those days.
When I fell gravely ill on the night of the 26th and in the early morning of the 27th of July, I thought that would be the end, and while the doctors were fighting for my life, the head of the Council of State Office was reading me the text, at my insistence, and I was dictating the pertinent changes.
REFLECTIONS OF PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO
Lula
(Part Two)
Translated by ESTI
LULA warmly reminded me of the first time he visited our country in 1985 to take part in a meeting organized by Cuba to analyze the overwhelming problem of the foreign debt; participants representing a wide spectrum of political, religious, cultural and social tendencies presented and discussed their opinions, concerned about the asphyxiating drama.
The meetings took place throughout the year. Leaders of worker, campesino, student and other groups assembled to examine the various subjects. He was one of these leaders, already well known to us and abroad for his direct and vibrant message, that of a young worker leader.
At that time, Latin America owed $350 billion. I told him that in that year of intense struggle I had written long letters to the President of Argentina, Raúl Alfonsín, to persuade him discontinue the payments on that debt. I knew the position of Mexico, unmoved in the payment of its enormous debt, but not indifferent to the outcome of the battle, and the special political situation of Brazil. The Argentine debt was sufficiently large after the disasters of the military government to justify an attempt to open up a breach in that direction. I did not succeed. A few years later, the debt with the interests rose to $800 billion; it had doubled and it had already been paid.
Lula explained to me how that year was different. He says that Brazil has no debt today either with the International Monetary Fund or with the Paris Club, and that it has 190 billion US dollars in its reserves. I assumed that his country had paid enormous sums in order to comply with those institutions. I explained to him about Nixon's colossal fraud on the world economy, when in 1971 he unilaterally suspended the gold standard that had limited the issuing of paper money. Until then the dollar had maintained a balance in relation to its value in gold. Thirty years earlier, the United States had almost all the reserves in that metal. If there was a lot of gold, they bought it up; if there was a shortage, they sold. The dollar played its part as an international exchange currency, under the privileges granted to the United States at Bretton Woods in 1944.
The most developed powers had been destroyed by the war. Japan, Germany, the USSR and the rest of Europe had barely any of this metal in their reserves. One ounce of gold could be bought for as little as 35 dollars; today you need 900 dollars.
The United States, I told him, has bought up assets all over the world by minting dollars, and exercises sovereign privileges over such properties acquired in other countries. Nevertheless, nobody wants the dollar to devaluate any further, because almost all countries accumulate dollars; that is, paper money, that devaluates constantly as a result of that unilateral decision made by the President of the United States.
Presently, the currency reserves of China, Japan, Southeast Asia and Russia combined amount to three trillion dollars; an astronomical figure. If you add the dollar reserves of Europe and the rest of the world, you will see that all that is equivalent to a mountain of money whose value depends on what the government of one country decides to do.
Greenspan, who for more than 15 years was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, would have died in a panic had he been faced with such situation. How high can U.S. inflation climb? How many new jobs can this country create this year? How long will its machinery to mint paper money last before its economy collapses, besides using war to conquer other nations’ natural resources?
As a result of the harsh measures imposed on the defeated German state at Versailles in 1918, when a republican regime came to power, the German mark devaluated to such an extent that you needed tens of thousands of them to buy one dollar. Such a crisis fed German nationalism and contributed extraordinarily to Hitler’s absurd ideas. He was looking for a scapegoat. Many of the most important scientific and financial talents as well as writers were Jewish. They were persecuted. Among them was Einstein, the author of the theory stating that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light; it made him famous. Also Marx, who was born in Germany, and many of the Russian Communists were of Jewish descent, whether or not they actively practiced the Hebrew religion.
Hitler did not lay the blame for the human drama on the capitalist system; rather he blamed the Jews. Based on crude prejudices, what he really wanted was "vital Russian space" for his Teutonic master race, dreaming of building a millennial empire.
In 1917, through the Balfour Declaration, the British decided to create the state of Israel within its colonial empire, located on territory inhabited by the Palestinians, who had a different religion and culture; in that part of the world, other ethnic groups coexisted for many centuries before our era, among them the Jews. Zionism became popular among the Americans, who rightly detested the Nazis, and whose financial markets were controlled by representatives of that movement. That state today is practicing the principles of apartheid; it has sophisticated nuclear weapons and it controls the most important financial centers in the United States. It was used by this country and its European allies to supply nuclear weapons to that other apartheid, the one in South Africa, to use them against the Cuban internationalist combatants who were fighting the racists in the south of Angola if they crossed the Namibian border.
Immediately afterwards, I spoke to Lula about Bush’s adventurous policies in the Middle East.
I promised to send him the article that was to be published in Granmathe next day, on January 16. I would personally sign the copy he would be getting. Before he left, I would also give him the article written by one of the most influential U.S. intellectuals, Paul Kennedy, about the connection between food and oil prices.
You are a food producer, I added, and you have just discovered important reserves of light crude. Brazil has an area of 5,333,750 square miles and 30 percent of the world’s water reserves. The planet’s population needs increasing amounts of food, and you are great food exporters. If you have grains rich in proteins, oils and carbohydrates – be they fruits like the cashew nuts, almonds, or pistachio; legumes such as peanut; soybean, with more than 35% protein, and sunflower seeds; or grains like wheat and corn – you can produce all the meat or milk you want. I didn’t mention others on a long list.
I continued with my explanation saying that in Cuba, we had a cow that broke the world record in milk production, a Holstein-Zebu hybrid. Right away Lula named her: "White Udder!" (Ubre Blanca), he exclaimed. He remembered her name. I went on to say that she would produce 110 liters of milk per day. She was like a factory, but she had to have more than 40 kilograms of fodder, the most she could chew and swallow in a 24-hour period, a mixture in which soy meal, a legume that is very difficult to grow in Cuban soil and climate, is a basic ingredient. You now have the two things: safe supplies of fuel, raw food materials and manufactured food products.
The end of cheap food has already been announced. I stated: "What do you think the dozens of countries with many hundreds of millions of inhabitants who have neither the one nor the other will do?" This means that the United States has a huge external dependency which is also a weapon. It could use all its reserves of land, but the people of that country are not ready for that. They are producing ethanol from corn; therefore, they are taking a great amount of this caloric grain off the market, I added, continuing my argument.
On the same subject, Lula tells me that Brazilian producers are already selling the 2009 corn crop. Brazil is not as dependent on corn as Mexico or Central America. I think that the United States cannot keep up fuel production from corn. This, I say, confirms a reality with regards to the sudden and incontrollable rise of food prices which will affect many peoples.
You, on the other hand, can rely on a favorable climate and loose soil; ours tends to be clayish and sometimes as hard as cement. When we received tractors from the Soviets and the other Socialist countries, they would break down and we had to buy special steel in Europe to manufacture them here. In our country we have lots of clay-based black or red soil. Working it with dedication, they can produce for the family what the campesinos in the Escambray call "high consumption". They were receiving food rations from the state and also consuming their own production. The climate has changed in Cuba, Lula, I said.
Our soil is not suitable for the large-scale commercial production of cereals, as required to meet the necessities of a population of almost 12 million people, and the cost in machinery and fuel imported by the nation, at today’s prices, would be very high.
Our media prints news about oil production in Matanzas, reductions in costs and other positive aspects. But nobody says that the prices in hard currency must be shared with foreign partners who invest in the necessary sophisticated machinery and technology. Besides, we do not have the required labor force to intensively take part in cereal production as the Vietnamese and Chinese do, growing rice plant by plant and often reaping two or even three harvests a year. It has to do with the location and the historical tradition of the land and its settlers. They did not first go through the large-scale mechanization of modern harvesters.
In Cuba, for quite a while now, the sugarcane cutters and the workers in the mountain coffee plantations have abandoned the fields, logically. Also, a large number of construction workers, some from the same origins, have abandoned the work brigades and have become self-employed workers. The people are aware of the high cost of fixing up a home. There is the cost of the material, plus the high cost of the manpower. The first can be solved, the second has no solution – as some would believe – throwing pesos into the street without their due backing in convertible currency, which would not be dollars anymore but euros and yuans, increasingly expensive, if all together we succeed in saving international economy and peace.
Meanwhile, we have been creating and we should keep on creating reserves of foods and fuel. In case of a direct military attack, the manual work force would be multiplied.
In the short time Lula and I spent together, two and a half hours, I would have liked to summarize in just a few minutes the almost 28 years that have gone by, not since the time he first visited Cuba, but since I met him in Nicaragua. This time he was the leader of an immense nation whose fate, however, depends on many aspects that are common to all the peoples on this planet.
I asked his permission to speak about our conversation freely and at the same time, discreetly.
As he stands in front of me, smiling and friendly, and I listen to him speaking with pride about his country, about the things that he is doing and those he plans on doing, I think about his political instincts. I had just finished quickly looking over a 100-page report on Brazil and the growth of relations between our two countries. He was the man I met in the Sandinista capital, Managua; he was someone who connected closely with our Revolution. I neither spoke to him, nor would I ever speak to him, about anything that could be construed as interfering in the political process of Brazil, but he himself, right at the beginning, said: "Do you remember, Fidel, when we spoke at the Sao Paulo Forum, and you told me that unity among the Latin American left wing was necessary if we were to secure our progress? Well, we are now moving forward in that direction."
Immediately he speaks to me with pride about what Brazil is today and its great possibilities, bearing in mind its advances in science, technology, mechanical industry, energy and other areas, bound up with its enormous agricultural potential. Of course, he includes the high level of Brazil’s international relations, which he describes enthusiastically, and the relations he is ready to develop with Cuba. He speaks vehemently about the social work of the Workers' Party which today is supported by all the Brazilian left-wing parties, which are far from having a parliamentary majority.
There is no doubt that it was a part of the things we discussed years ago when we spoke. Back then time flew by quickly, but now every year is multiplied by ten, at a rate which is difficult to follow.
I wanted also to talk to him about that and about many other things. It’s hard to tell which one of us had the greater need to communicate ideas. As for me, I supposed that he would be leaving the next day and not early that same evening, according to the flight plan that had been scheduled before we met. It was approximately five o’clock in the afternoon. What happened was a kind of contest as to how we would be using the time. Lula, astute and quick-witted, took his revenge at a meeting with the press, when, mischievously smiling as you can see in the photos, he told the reporters that he had only talked for half an hour and Fidel had talked for two. Of course, with the privilege of seniority, I used up more time than he did. You have to discount the time taking photographs of each other, since I borrowed a camera and became a reporter again: he followed suit.
I have here 103 pages of dispatches reporting what Lula said to the press, the photos taken of him and the confidence he communicated about Fidel’s health. Truly, he left no space for the reflection published on January 16 that I had just finished writing the day before his visit. He took up the entire space and this is equivalent to his enormous territory, compared to the miniscule land surface of Cuba.
I told him how happy I was that he had decided to visit Cuba, even without the assurance that he would be able to see me. As soon as I knew that, I decided to sacrifice anything, like my exercises, rehab and recovery, just so I could be with him and talk extensively.
At that moment, even though I knew that he would be leaving that same day, I was unaware of the urgency of his departure. Evidently, the health condition of the vice president of Brazil, according to his own statement, urged him to take off so that he could arrive in Brasilia at around dawn the next day, in the middle of spring. Yet another long and hectic day for our friend.
A strong and persistent downpour fell on his residence while Lula waited for the photos and two other bits of material, together with my notes. He left that night for the airport in the rain. If he had seen the front page ofGranma: "2007, the third rainiest year in more than 100 years," that would have helped him to understand what I had told him about climate change.
Well then, the sugar harvest in Cuba has begun, along with the so-called dry season. The sugar crop yield is only at nine percent. How much would it cost to grow sugar for export at 10 cents per pound, when the purchasing power of one cent is almost fifty times less than at the triumph of the Revolution in January of 1959? Reducing the costs of these and other products to fulfill our commitments, to satisfy our consumption, to create reserves and develop other production, is highly commendable; but not even in our wildest dreams can we find easy solutions to our problems; the solutions are not just around the corner.
Among many other topics, we discussed the inauguration of the new president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom. I told him that I had seen the ceremony in its entirety and the social commitments made by the newly-elected president. Lula mentioned that what we can see today in Latin America was born in 1990 when we decided to create the Sao Paulo Forum: "We made a decision here, in a conversation we had. I had lost the election and you came to lunch at my home in San Bernardo."
My conversation with Lula was just beginning, and I still have many things to relate and ideas to offer, which might perhaps be useful.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 23, 2008
Translated by ESTI
Reflections of President Fidel Castro
Lula
(Part Three)
THE demise of the Soviet Union was to us like there were no more sunrises; a devastating blow for the Cuban Revolution. Not only did this translate into a total cessation of supplies of fuel, materials and foods; we lost markets and the prices that we had attained for our products in the difficult struggle for our sovereignty, integration and principles. The empire and the traitors, full of hatred, were sharpening their daggers with those who wanted to put the revolutionaries to the sword and recover the country’s riches.
The Gross Domestic Product progressively plummeted to 35 percent. What country could have withstood such a terrible blow? We were not defending our lives; we were defending our rights.
Many left-wing parties and organizations became discouraged in the wake of the collapse of the USSR after its titanic effort to build socialism during the course of more than 70 years.
The reactionaries’ criticisms coming from all platforms and mass media were ferocious. We did not add our voices to the chorus of capitalism’s apologists, beating a dead horse. Not one statue to the creators or followers of Marxism was demolished in Cuba. Not one school or factory had its name changed. And we decided to press ahead with unchangeable steadiness. That was what we had promised to do under such hypothetical and unbelievable circumstances.
Nor had we ever practiced personality cults in our country, something that we had taken the initiative to prohibit right from the first days after the triumph.
In peoples’ history, it has been subjective factors that have brought forward or delay outcomes, independently of the leaders’ worth.
I spoke to Lula about Che, briefly outlining his story for him. Che used to argue with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez about the self-financed or the budgetary method, things we didn’t consider that important then as we were involved in the struggle against the U.S. blockade, its aggression plans and the 1962 October Missile Crisis, a real survival issue.
Che studied the budgets of the big Yankee companies whose managers lived in Cuba, not their owners. He drew from this a clear idea about how imperialism worked and what was happening in our society and this enriched his Marxist ideas and led him to the conclusion that in Cuba we couldn’t use the same methods to build socialism. But this didn’t mean we were dealing with a war of insults; these were open exchanges of opinions that were published in a small magazine, with no intention of creating rifts or divisions among ourselves.
What happened in the USSR later would not have surprised Che. While he held important posts and carried out his duties, he was always careful and respectful. His language grew tougher when he collided with the horrible human reality imposed by imperialism; he became aware of this in the former Belgian colony of the Congo.
He was a self-sacrificing, studious and profound man; he died in Bolivia with a handful of combatants from Cuba and other Latin American countries, fighting for the liberation of Our America. He did not survive to experience the world of today, where problems unknown to us then have since come into play.
You didn’t know him, I told him. He was disciplined in voluntary work, in his studies and behavior. He was modest and selfless, and he set an example both in production centers and in combat.
I think that in building socialism, the more the privileged receive, the less will go to the neediest.
I repeat to Lula that time measured in years was now flying by very quickly; each one of them was multiplying. One can almost say the same about each day. Fresh news is published constantly, relating to the situations anticipated in my meeting with him on the 15th.
With plenty of economic arguments, I explained to him that when the Revolution triumphed in 1959, the United States was paying for an important part of our sugar production with the preferential price of 5 cents per pound; for almost half a century this would be sent to that country’s traditional marketplace which was always supplied, at critical moments, by a secure supplier just off their shores. When we proclaimed the Agrarian Reform Act, Eisenhower decided what had to be done, and we hadn’t yet nationalized their sugar mills – it would have been premature to do so – nor had we yet applied the agrarian law of May 1959 to the large estates. Because of that hasty decision, our sugar quota was suspended in December 1960, and later redistributed among other producers in this and other regions of the world as punishment. Our country became blockaded and isolated.
Worst of all was the lack of scruples and the methods used by the empire to impose its domination over the world. It brought viruses into the country and destroyed the best sugarcane; it attacked the coffee, potatoes and also the swine herds. The Barbados-4362 was one of our best varieties of sugar cane: early maturity, a sugar yield that sometimes reached 13 or 14 percent; its weight per hectare could exceed 200 tons of cane in 15 months. The Yankees resorted to pests to wipe out the best. Even worse: they brought in the hemorrhagic dengue virus that affected 344,000 people and took the lives of 101 children. We don’t know whether they used other viruses – perhaps they didn’t because they were afraid of the proximity of Cuba.
When due to these problems we couldn’t send to the USSR the sugar shipments under contract with that country, it continued sending us the goods we had agreed upon. I remember negotiating with the Soviets every cent of the sugar price; I discovered in practice what I had previously only known in theory: unequal exchange. It was securing a price that was above the world market price. The agreements were planned for five years; if at the beginning of the five-year period you were sending X amount of tons of sugar in payment for goods, at the end of that period the value of their products, in international prices, was 20 percent higher. It was always generous in negotiations: once the world market price temporarily shot up to 19 cents, we latched on to that price and the USSR accepted. Later this served as a basis for the application of the socialist principle which says that the more economically developed should support the less developed as they build socialism.
When Lula asked me what was the purchasing power of 5 cents, I explained that with one ton of sugar at that time we could by 7 tons of oil; today, the reference price of light oil, 100 dollars, will only buy one barrel. The sugar we export, at current prices, would only suffice to import oil that would be used up in 20 days. We would have to spend about 4 billion dollars per year to buy it.
The United States subsidizes its agriculture with tens of billions every year. Why does the U.S. not allow the ethanol you produce freely into the country? It subsidizes it brutally, thus denying Brazil income for billions of dollars every year. The wealthy countries do the same, with their production of sugar, oleaginous products and cereals for the production of ethanol.
Lula analyzes figures on Brazilian agricultural products that are of great interest. He tells me that he had a study made by the Brazilian press showing how world soy production will grow 2 percent annually until 2015, which means an additional production of 189 million tons of soy. Brazil's soy production would have to grow at a pace of 7 percent annually to be able to meet the world’s needs.
What is the problem? Many countries already don’t have any more land available for crops. India, for example, has no more available land; China has very little and neither does the United States to grow more soy.
I add to his explanation that what many Latin American countries have are millions of people earning starvation wages and growing coffee, cacao, vegetables, fruits, raw materials and goods at low prices to supply U.S. society, which no longer saves and consumes more than it can produce.
Lula explains that they have set up an EMBRAPA research office –Agriculture and Livestock Research Company of Brazil– in Ghana, and he goes on to say that in February they are going to also open an office in Caracas.
“Thirty years ago, Fidel, that area of Brasilia, Mato Grosso, Goiás, was considered a part of Brazil that had nothing, it was just like the African savannah; in the course of 30 years, it was transformed into the major grain producing region in all of Brazil, and I think that Africa has an area that is very much like this region in our country; that's why we set up the research office there in Ghana and we also would like to become associated with Angola.”
He told me that Brazil is in a privileged position. They have 850 million hectares of land; of these 360 million are part of the Amazon state; 400 million of good soil for agriculture, and sugarcane takes up only one percent.
I make the comment that Brazil is the largest coffee exporter in the world. For this product, Brazil is paid the same as the value of a ton in 1959: around 2,500 of today’s dollars. If in that country then they charged 10 cents a cup, today they charge 5 dollars or more for an aromatic cup of espresso, an Italian way of preparing coffee. That is GDP in the United States.
In Africa they cannot do what Brazil is doing. A large part of Africa is covered by deserts and tropical and subtropical areas where it is difficult to grow soy or wheat. Only in the Mediterranean region, to the north – where rainfall totals some eight inches a year or the land is irrigated with the waters of the Nile – in the high plateaus or in the south, in the lands wrested away by apartheid, cereals production is abundant.
Fish in the cool waters that mainly flow around its western coast feed the developed countries that sweep into their nets all the large and small species that feed on plankton in the ocean currents coming in from the South Pole.
Africa, having almost 4 times the surface area of Brazil (18.91 million square miles) and 4.3 times more population than Brazil (911 million inhabitants) is very far from being able to produce Brazil’s surplus foods, and its infrastructure is yet to be built.
The viruses and bacteria affecting potatoes, citrus, bananas, tomatoes, and livestock in general, swine fever, avian flu, foot-and-mouth disease, mad cow disease, and others that in general affect the livestock of the world, proliferate in Africa.
I spoke to Lula about the Battle of Ideas that we are waging. Fresh news arrives constantly that demonstrates the need for that constant battle. The worst media of our ideological enemies are bent on spreading throughout the world the opinions of some nasty gusanillos (worms) who cannot even stand to hear the term “socialism” in our heroic and generous country. On January 20, five days after the visit, one of these papers published the story of a young ne’er-do-well who, thanks to the Revolution, had attained a good level education, health and employment situation:
“Don’t even mention socialism to me”, he said, and went on to explain the cause of his anger: “many people were pawning their souls just to get a few dollars. Anything new that happens in this country, whatever it is, they should give it another name," he declares. Quite the little wolf dressed up as a granny.
The very same reporter, who prints this, gleefully goes on: “Official propaganda telling the Cubans to go to the polls talks more about the Revolution than about socialism. For a start, Cuba is no longer a country in a bubble, like it was until the end of the 1980’s. The insular viewpoint is changing towards a global vision and the country, especially in the capital, is living through an accelerated mutation towards modernity. And one of its effects is that socialism, imported decades ago, is tearing at the seams.”
We are dealing with imperial capitalism’s vulgar appeal to individual egoism, as it was preached almost 240 years ago by Adam Smith as the cause of the nation’s wealth, meaning everything should be handled by the market. That would create limitless wealth in an idyllic world.
I think of Africa and its almost one billion population, victim of the principles of that economy. Diseases, flying at the speed of airplanes, proliferate at the speed of AIDS, and other old and new diseases are affecting its population and its crops, with not one of the former colonial powers being really capable of sending them doctors and scientists.
It is about these issues that I spoke with Lula.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 26, 2008
The state of the (Iraqi) union By Pepe Escobar
I say this to the evil Bush - leave my country.
We do not need you and your army of darkness.
We don't need your planes and tanks.
We don't need your policy and your interference.
We don't want your democracy and fake freedom.
Get out of our land.
- Muqtada al-Sadr, Iraqi Shi'ite leader
The George W Bush-sponsored Iraqi "surge" is now one year old. The US$11 billion-a-month (and counting) Iraqi/Afghan joint quagmire keeps adding to the US government's staggering over $9 trillion debt (it was "only" $5.6 trillion when Bush took power in early 2001).
On the ground in Iraq, the state of the union - Bush's legacy - translates into a completely shattered nation with up to 70% unemployment, a 70% inflation rate, less than six hours of electricity a day and virtually no reconstruction, although White House-connected multinationals have bagged more than $50 billion in competition-free contracts so far. The gleaming reconstruction success stories of course are the Vatican-sized US Embassy in Baghdad - the largest in the world - and the scores of US military bases.
Facts on the ground also attest the "surge" achieved no "political reconciliation" whatsoever in Iraq - regardless of a relentless US corporate media propaganda drive, fed by the Pentagon, to proclaim it a success. The new law to reverse de-Ba'athification - approved by a half-empty Parliament and immediately condemned by Sunni and secular parties as well as former Ba'athists themselves - will only exacerbate sectarian hatred.
What the "surge" has facilitated instead is the total balkanization of Baghdad – as well as the whole of Iraq. There are now at least 5 million Iraqis among refugees and the internally displaced - apart from competing statistics numbering what certainly amounts to hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. So of course there is less violence; there's hardly any people left to be ethnically cleansed.
Everywhere in Iraq there are myriad signs of balkanization - not only in blast wall/partitioned Baghdad. In the Shi'ite south, the big prize is Basra, disputed by at least three militias. The Sadrists - the voice of the streets - are against regional autonomy; the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC)- which controls security - wants Basra as the key node of a southern Shi'iteistan; and the Fadhila party - which control the governorate - wants an autonomous Basra.
In the north, the big prize is oil-rich Kirkuk province, disputed by Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Turkmen; the referendum on Kirkuk has been postponed indefinitely, as everyone knows it will unleash a bloodbath. In al-Anbar province, Sunni Arab tribes bide their time collaborating with the US and controlling the exits to Syria and Jordan while preparing for the inevitable settling of scores with Shi'ites in Baghdad.
Obama and Hillary vs Iraqis
Meanwhile, in the Democratic party presidential race, Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war on Iraq, viciously battles Kennedy clan-supported Barack Obama, who opposed the war, followed at a distance by John "can a white man be president" Edwards, who apologized for his initial support for the war. Obama, Edwards and Clinton basically agree, with some nuance, the "surge" was a fluke.
They have all pledged to end the war if elected. But Edwards is the only pre-candidate who has explicitly called for an immediate US troop withdrawal - up to 50,000, with nearly all of the remaining out within a maximum of 10 months. Edwards insisted Iraqi troops would be trained "outside of Iraq" and no troops would be left to "guard US bases".
For their part, both Clinton and Obama believe substantial numbers of troops must remain in Iraq to "protect US bases" and "to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq". This essentially means the occupation grinding on. Both never said exactly how many troops would be needed: they could be as many as 75,000. Both have steadfastly refused to end the "mission" before 2013.
It's hard to envision an "occupation out" Obama when among his chief advisers one finds former president Jimmy Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski - the "grand chessboard" ideologue who always preached American domination of Eurasia - and former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who always fought for Israel's dominance of the "mini-chessboard", the Middle East.
So far Obama has not given any signs he would try to counter the logic of global US military hegemony conditioned by control of oil; that's why the US is in Iraq and Africa, that's the reason for so much hostility towards Venezuela, Iran and Russia. As for Clinton - with the constant references to "vital national security interests" - there's no evidence this twin-headed presidency would differ from Bush in wanting to install a puppet, pliable, perennial, anti-Iranian, peppered-with-US-military-bases regime in Iraq.
But more than US presidential candidates stumbling on how to position themselves about Iraq, what really matters is what Iraqis themselves think. According to Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad, apart from the three provinces in Iraqi Kurdistan, more than 75% of Sunnis and Shi'ites alike are certain Washington wants to set up permanent military bases; this roughly equals the bulk of the population in favor of continued attacks against US troops.
Furthermore, Sunni Arabs as a whole as well as the Sadrists are united in infinite suspicion of the key Bush-mandated "benchmark": the eventual approval by the Iraqi Parliament of a new oil law which would in fact de-nationalize the Iraqi oil industry and open it to Big Oil. Iraqi public opinion as a whole is also suspicious of what the Bush administration wants to extract from the cornered, battered Nuri al-Maliki government: full immunity from Iraqi law not only for US troops but for US civilian contractors as well. The empire seems to be oblivious to history: that was exactly one of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's most popular reasons to dethrone the Shah of Iran in 1979.
Too many fish in the sea
It's impossible to overestimate the widespread anger in Baghdad, among Sunnis and Shi'ites alike, for what has essentially been the balkanization of the city as negotiated by US commanders with a rash of militias; the occupiers after all are only one more militia among many, although better equipped. Now there are insistent rumors - again - in Baghdad that the occupation, allied with the government-sanctioned Badr Organization - is preparing an anti-Sadrist blitzkrieg in oil-rich Basra.
The daily horror in Iraq has all but been erased from US corporate media narrative. But in Baghdad, now virtually a Shi'ite city like Shiraz, Salafi-jihadi suicide bombers continue to attack Shi'ite markets or funerals - especially in mixed neighborhoods, even those only across the Tigris from the Green Zone. Sectarian militias - although theoretical allies of the occupation, paid in US dollars in cash - continue to pursue their own ethnic cleansing agenda. And the "surge" continues to privilege air strikes which inevitably produce scores of civilian "collateral damage".
The Sunni Arab resistance continues to be the "fish" offered protection by the "sea" of the civilian population. All during the "surge", the Sunni Arab guerrillas always kept moving - from west Baghdad to Diyala, Salahuddin, Nineveh and Kirkuk provinces and even to the northern part of Babil province. After the collapse of fuel imports from Turkey used to drive the Iraqi power grid, Baghdad and other Iraqi major cities are most of the time mired in darkness. Fuel shortages are the norm. In addition, the Sunni Arab resistance makes sure sabotage of electricity towers and stations remains endemic.
Contrary to Iraqi government propaganda, only very few among the at least 1 million Iraqis exiled in Syria since the beginning of the "surge" - mostly white-collar middle class - have come back. They are Sunni and Shi'ite alike. People - mostly Sunni - are still fleeing the country. The Shi'ite urban middle class fears there will inevitably be a push by the Sunni Arab resistance - supported and financed by the ultra-wealthy Sunni Gulf monarchies - to "recapture" Baghdad. This includes of course the hundreds of thousands of Baghdad Sunnis forced to abandon their city because of the "surge".
As for the Sadrists, they are convinced the 80,000-strong Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils" - al-Sahwah, in Arabic - gathered in Anbar province are de facto militias biding their time and practicing for the big push. It's fair to assume thousands still keep tight connections with the Salafi-jihadis (including most of all al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers) they are now supposedly fighting.
Considering the sectarian record of the US-backed Maliki government - which, as well as the Sadrists, considers the Awakening Councils as US-financed Sunni militias - there's no chance they will be incorporated into the Iraqi army or police.
One of the Awakening Council leaders, Abu Marouf, a Saddam Hussein "security officer" before the 2003 invasion and then a commander of the influential Sunni Arab guerrilla group the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades, all but admitted to The Independent's Patrick Cockburn the consequences will be dire if they are not seen to be part of the so-called "reconciliation" process. All this amounts to a certainty: a new battle of Baghdad is all but inevitable, and could happen in 2008.
Occupied of the world, unite
As the occupation/quagmire slouches towards its fifth year, it's obvious the US cannot possibly "win" the Iraqi war - either on a military or political level - as Republican presidential pre-candidate John McCain insists. Sources in Baghdad tell Asia Times Online if not in 2008, by 2009 the post-"surge" Sunni Arab resistance is set to unleash a new national, anti-sectarian, anti-religion-linked-to-politics offensive bound to seal what an overwhelming majority of Iraqis consider the "ideological and cultural" US defeat.
Already now a crucial Sunni-Shi'ite nationalist 12-party coalition is emerging - oblivious to US designs and divorced from the US-backed parties in power (the Shi'ite SIIC and Da'wa and the two main Kurdish parties - the Kurdish Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party ). They have already established a consensus in three key themes: no privatization of the Iraqi oil industry, either via the new oil law or via dodgy deals signed by the Kurds; no breakup of Iraq via a Kurdish state (which implies no Kurdish takeover of Kirkuk); and an end to the civil war.
The 12-party coalition includes almost all Sunni parties, the Sadrists, the Fadhila party, a dissidence of Da'awa and the independents in the Iraqi Parliament. And they want as many factions as possible of the Sunni Arab resistance on board - including the crucial tribal leaders of Awakening.
The ultimate success of this coalition in great measure should be attributed to negotiations led by Muqtada al-Sadr. The Sadrists are betting on parliamentary elections in 2009, when they sense they may reach a non-sectarian, nationalist-based majority to form a government. This would definitely bury Iraq's Defense Minister Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim's recent estimate that a "significant" number of US troops would have to remain in Iraq at least for another 10 years, until 2018.
Even barring a possible Dr Strangelove-like attack on Iran, Bush is set to leave to Obama or Clinton, apart from a nearly $10 trillion black hole, a lost war in Afghanistan, total chaos in Pakistan, an open wound in Gaza, a virtual civil war in Lebanon and the heart of darkness of Iraq.
Both Obama - still unwilling to defend progressive ideas on progressive grounds - and drowning-in-platitudes Clinton owe it to US and world public opinion to start detailing, in "the fierce urgency of now", how they realistically plan to confront such a state of (dis)union.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
American Liberty Teetering on Edge of Abyss By Paul Craig Roberts
“Your papers please” has long been a phrase associated with Hitler’s Gestapo. People without the Third Reich’s stamp of approval were hauled off to Nazi Germany’s version of Halliburton detention centers.
Today Americans are on the verge of being asked for their papers, although probably without the “please.”
Thanks to a government that has turned its back on the US Constitution, Americans now have an unaccountable Department of Homeland Security that is already asserting tyrannical powers over US citizens and state governments. Headed by the neocon fanatic Michael Chertoff, the Orwellian-sounding Department of Homeland Security has mandated a national identity card for Americans, without which Americans may not enter airports or courthouses.
There is no more need for this card than there is for a Department of Homeland Security. Neither are compatible with a free society.
However, Bush, the neocons, Republicans and Democrats do not want America to any longer be a free society, and they are taking freedom away from us just as they took away the independence of the media.
Free and informed people get in the way of power-mad zealots with agendas.
It is the agendas that are supreme, not the American people, who have less and less say about less and less.
George W. Bush, an elected president, has behaved like a dictator since September 11, 2001. If “our” representatives in Congress care, they haven’t done anything about it. Bush has pretty much cut Congress out of the action.
In truth, Congress gave up its law making powers to the executive branch during the New Deal. For three-quarters of a century, the bills passed by Congress have been authorizations for executive branch agencies to make laws in the form of regulations. The executive branch has come to the realization that it doesn’t really need Congress. President Bush appends his own “signing statements” to the authorizations from Congress in which the President says what the legislation means. So what is the point of Congress?
As for laws already on the books, the US Department of Justice (sic) has ruled that the President doesn’t have to abide by US statutes, such as FISA or the law forbidding torture. Neither does the President have to abide by the Geneva Conventions.
Other obstacles are removed by edicts known as presidential directives or executive orders. There are more and more of these edicts, and they accumulate more and more power and less and less accountability in the executive.
The disdain in which the executive branch holds the “separate and equal” legislative branch is everywhere apparent. For example, President Bush is concluding a long-term security agreement with the puppet government he has set up in Iraq. Prior to September 11, 2001, when the President became The Decider, a defense pact was a treaty requiring the approval of Congress.
All that is now behind us. General Douglas Lute, President Bush’s national security adviser for Iraq says that the White House will not be submitting the deal to Congress for approval. Lute says Bush will not be seeking any “formal inputs from the Congress.”
“There is no question that this is unprecedented,” said Yale Law School Professor O. Hathaway.
Bush can do whatever he wants, because Congress has taken its only remaining power--impeachment--off the table.
The Democratic Party leadership thinks that the only problem is Bush, who will be gone in one year. Besides, the Israel Lobby doesn’t want Israel’s champion impeached, and neither do the corporate owners of the US media.
The Democrats are not adverse to inheriting the powers in Bush’s precedents. The Democrats, of course, will use the elevated powers for good rather than for evil.
Instead of having a bad dictator, we’ll have a good one.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Today Americans are on the verge of being asked for their papers, although probably without the “please.”
Thanks to a government that has turned its back on the US Constitution, Americans now have an unaccountable Department of Homeland Security that is already asserting tyrannical powers over US citizens and state governments. Headed by the neocon fanatic Michael Chertoff, the Orwellian-sounding Department of Homeland Security has mandated a national identity card for Americans, without which Americans may not enter airports or courthouses.
There is no more need for this card than there is for a Department of Homeland Security. Neither are compatible with a free society.
However, Bush, the neocons, Republicans and Democrats do not want America to any longer be a free society, and they are taking freedom away from us just as they took away the independence of the media.
Free and informed people get in the way of power-mad zealots with agendas.
It is the agendas that are supreme, not the American people, who have less and less say about less and less.
George W. Bush, an elected president, has behaved like a dictator since September 11, 2001. If “our” representatives in Congress care, they haven’t done anything about it. Bush has pretty much cut Congress out of the action.
In truth, Congress gave up its law making powers to the executive branch during the New Deal. For three-quarters of a century, the bills passed by Congress have been authorizations for executive branch agencies to make laws in the form of regulations. The executive branch has come to the realization that it doesn’t really need Congress. President Bush appends his own “signing statements” to the authorizations from Congress in which the President says what the legislation means. So what is the point of Congress?
As for laws already on the books, the US Department of Justice (sic) has ruled that the President doesn’t have to abide by US statutes, such as FISA or the law forbidding torture. Neither does the President have to abide by the Geneva Conventions.
Other obstacles are removed by edicts known as presidential directives or executive orders. There are more and more of these edicts, and they accumulate more and more power and less and less accountability in the executive.
The disdain in which the executive branch holds the “separate and equal” legislative branch is everywhere apparent. For example, President Bush is concluding a long-term security agreement with the puppet government he has set up in Iraq. Prior to September 11, 2001, when the President became The Decider, a defense pact was a treaty requiring the approval of Congress.
All that is now behind us. General Douglas Lute, President Bush’s national security adviser for Iraq says that the White House will not be submitting the deal to Congress for approval. Lute says Bush will not be seeking any “formal inputs from the Congress.”
“There is no question that this is unprecedented,” said Yale Law School Professor O. Hathaway.
Bush can do whatever he wants, because Congress has taken its only remaining power--impeachment--off the table.
The Democratic Party leadership thinks that the only problem is Bush, who will be gone in one year. Besides, the Israel Lobby doesn’t want Israel’s champion impeached, and neither do the corporate owners of the US media.
The Democrats are not adverse to inheriting the powers in Bush’s precedents. The Democrats, of course, will use the elevated powers for good rather than for evil.
Instead of having a bad dictator, we’ll have a good one.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
ALBA, an Economic Alternative for Latin America
by Medea Benjamin
The sixth conference of the Latin American alternative trade alliance known as ALBA-which stands for the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and means "Dawn" in Spanish-was held in Caracas on January 25-26. The brainchild of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, ALBA was founded by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004 as a fair trade alternative to US-backed free trade policies and is made possible thanks to Venezuela's oil money.
When Evo Morales was elected in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, they too joined ALBA, which Chavez has nicknamed the Club of "Chicos Malos", or bad boys, because of its opposition to U.S. domination. At this weekend's meeting, the Caribbean island of Dominica also joined, and representatives attended from Ecuador, Honduras, Uruguay, Haiti and several other Caribbean nations.
Chavez opened the session talking about the need for a trade system that addresses people's needs, not corporate profits. His railed against the "dictatorship of global capitalism", and encouraged Latin American countries to withdraw their international reserves from United States banks, warning of a looming US economic crisis. "Why does that money have to be in the north?", he asked. "We should start to bring our reserves back home."
His thoughts were echoed by Daniel Ortega, who blamed the capitalist system for the environmental crisis. "The capitalist model of development is simply unsustainable," Ortega declared. "If your economy is controlled by speculative capital that only cares about profits, you can't solve the huge problems affecting humanity. Once we renounce the free trade model, we can begin to address the massive problems of unemployment, poverty and global warming."
Bolivia's Evo Morales, who is facing fierce opposition in part because of his efforts to nationalize natural gas and oil, insisted that key public resources such as land, water and energy should not be for private profit but for the common good. He also insisted that Latin America should not look to the United States for solutions, since U.S. aid always comes with strings designed to increase its hegemony.
"In 1990s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed their disastrous policies, and then the U.S. tried to impose the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas-which should really be called the Free Profits Agreement of the Americas because it is meant to increase the profits of US corporations," said Morales. "But people of the hemisphere rejected that agreement, so now the U.S. is trying-country-by-country-to get bilateral trade agreements. They are always trying to divide us, but we salute the great resistance to empire that we see throughout the hemisphere."
The leaders noted that it was no coincidence that just at the time of the ALBA summit, Condoleezza Rice was visiting neighboring Colombia to promote a U.S.-Colombia Free Trade pact. Chavez, who recently called Colombia's President Urribe a "sad peon of the empire", laughed at U.S. accusations that he, Chavez, was facilitating the flow of Colombian cocaine through Venezuela.
The talk of drug-smuggling turned into comic relief, however, when Chavez launched into a discourse on the benefits of the coca leaf, which, he insisted, was very different from cocaine. U.S. officials have long tried to eradicate coca cultivation, which has been grown and chewed by Andean Indians for centuries.
"Speaking of drugs," Chavez turned to Bolivian President Evo Morales, who is himself a former coca farmer and is a strong defender of the coca leaf, "where are the coca leaves you used to bring me?"
A Bolivian Indian sitting behind Morales got up and offered up his personal stash of coca leaves. Delighted, Chavez took a leaf and put it in his mouth. "The sacred leaf of the Inca, the Aymara Indians," he declared. "Thank you, brother." Emphasizing the great qualities of coca, Chavez said that he had become used to chewing the leaves every morning and invited the other heads of states to try some.
The laughter reached new heights when Chavez welcomed Prime Minister Ralph Gonzalez of St. Vincent and Grenadines to the Club of the Bad Boys and asked, in broken English, "Do you want some coca?" Imagining the headlines back home, the Prime Minister politely declined. "I'm a good Catholic boy who only occasionally associates with bad boys," he joked.
The meeting turned serious, however, when it came time to sign economic agreements. Nicaragua, for example, pledged to help supply milk, corn, beans and beef to Venezuela, while Venezuela will sell Nicaragua oil under preferential terms to Nicaragua. Cuba has an agreement to send doctors to Venezuela in exchange for oil discounts.
The most significant moment of the summit was the announcement of the creation of a regional development bank intended to strengthen their alliance and promote independence from U.S.-backed lenders like the World Bank. The ALBA Bank will be started with $1 billion to $1.5 billion of capital. Venezuela, with its plentiful oil earnings, will be the leading financier. The funds will go toward joint efforts from farming projects to energy ventures, such as hydroelectric energy using Dominica's abundant rivers and Nicaraguan technology.
Chavez and the leaders of six other South American countries last month launched a similar venture, the Bank of the South, which is projected to have as much as $7 billion in startup capital and offer loans with fewer strings attached than those given by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.
A major question about the future of ALBA is whether more countries will join to give it more clout. Ecuador and Haiti, for example, would like to join but are facing strong internal opposition. Several small Caribbean nations attending the meeting mentioned how difficult it is to counter attacks by the conservative media. "The principles of ALBA-solidarity, non-interference, respect for independence, complementarity instead of competition, fair trade-they are like motherhood. You can't be against them," Prime Minister Ralph Gonzalez of St. Vincent and Grenadines reasoned. "But when you start to add names-Chavez, Castro, Ortega-people get scared. So we have to educate our people before we can become full members."
Dominica, a nation that defied elite pressure by joining ALBA, was already facing the backlash. "While we are here talking about ways to improve the lives of our people, the conservative media is talking about economic ruin, communist influence, Iranian takeovers, an end to tourism," tourism minister Ian Douglas told me. "We will weather the storm, but it's not going to be easy."
One way to get around such government pressure is to allow the participation in ALBA of social movements throughout the hemisphere. At last year's summit, the ALBA Council of Social Movements was formed with representatives from farmers groups, women, environmentalists, unions and other civil groups. But there were unresolved questions over how to structure the Council, so this year, only the social movements in the four member countries were invited. The Council, however, proposed expanding membership.
"The best way to strengthen ALBA is to include social movements from throughout the hemisphere," said Joel Suarez of Cuba's Martin Luther King Center, one of the five movement reps from Cuba to attend the Summit. "Governments may be pressured not to join, but the social movements are anxious to be part of an alliance that promotes fair trade over free trade." Indeed, the proposal is to even include social movements from the United States. Venezuela is already working with U.S. groups and local governments to provide discount heating oil to poor U.S. communities.
With ALBA countries, particularly Bolivia and Venezuela, facing strong internal opposition, improving the population's economic well-being is critical. The future of progressive victories in Latin America rests on turning the rhetoric of fair trade and sustainable development into concrete gains. This year will be a critical test of whether Venezuela's oil money can indeed be used to develop an alternative economic model.
_______
Medea Benjamin
ABOUT AUTHOR
Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace
The sixth conference of the Latin American alternative trade alliance known as ALBA-which stands for the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and means "Dawn" in Spanish-was held in Caracas on January 25-26. The brainchild of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, ALBA was founded by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004 as a fair trade alternative to US-backed free trade policies and is made possible thanks to Venezuela's oil money.
When Evo Morales was elected in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, they too joined ALBA, which Chavez has nicknamed the Club of "Chicos Malos", or bad boys, because of its opposition to U.S. domination. At this weekend's meeting, the Caribbean island of Dominica also joined, and representatives attended from Ecuador, Honduras, Uruguay, Haiti and several other Caribbean nations.
Chavez opened the session talking about the need for a trade system that addresses people's needs, not corporate profits. His railed against the "dictatorship of global capitalism", and encouraged Latin American countries to withdraw their international reserves from United States banks, warning of a looming US economic crisis. "Why does that money have to be in the north?", he asked. "We should start to bring our reserves back home."
His thoughts were echoed by Daniel Ortega, who blamed the capitalist system for the environmental crisis. "The capitalist model of development is simply unsustainable," Ortega declared. "If your economy is controlled by speculative capital that only cares about profits, you can't solve the huge problems affecting humanity. Once we renounce the free trade model, we can begin to address the massive problems of unemployment, poverty and global warming."
Bolivia's Evo Morales, who is facing fierce opposition in part because of his efforts to nationalize natural gas and oil, insisted that key public resources such as land, water and energy should not be for private profit but for the common good. He also insisted that Latin America should not look to the United States for solutions, since U.S. aid always comes with strings designed to increase its hegemony.
"In 1990s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed their disastrous policies, and then the U.S. tried to impose the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas-which should really be called the Free Profits Agreement of the Americas because it is meant to increase the profits of US corporations," said Morales. "But people of the hemisphere rejected that agreement, so now the U.S. is trying-country-by-country-to get bilateral trade agreements. They are always trying to divide us, but we salute the great resistance to empire that we see throughout the hemisphere."
The leaders noted that it was no coincidence that just at the time of the ALBA summit, Condoleezza Rice was visiting neighboring Colombia to promote a U.S.-Colombia Free Trade pact. Chavez, who recently called Colombia's President Urribe a "sad peon of the empire", laughed at U.S. accusations that he, Chavez, was facilitating the flow of Colombian cocaine through Venezuela.
The talk of drug-smuggling turned into comic relief, however, when Chavez launched into a discourse on the benefits of the coca leaf, which, he insisted, was very different from cocaine. U.S. officials have long tried to eradicate coca cultivation, which has been grown and chewed by Andean Indians for centuries.
"Speaking of drugs," Chavez turned to Bolivian President Evo Morales, who is himself a former coca farmer and is a strong defender of the coca leaf, "where are the coca leaves you used to bring me?"
A Bolivian Indian sitting behind Morales got up and offered up his personal stash of coca leaves. Delighted, Chavez took a leaf and put it in his mouth. "The sacred leaf of the Inca, the Aymara Indians," he declared. "Thank you, brother." Emphasizing the great qualities of coca, Chavez said that he had become used to chewing the leaves every morning and invited the other heads of states to try some.
The laughter reached new heights when Chavez welcomed Prime Minister Ralph Gonzalez of St. Vincent and Grenadines to the Club of the Bad Boys and asked, in broken English, "Do you want some coca?" Imagining the headlines back home, the Prime Minister politely declined. "I'm a good Catholic boy who only occasionally associates with bad boys," he joked.
The meeting turned serious, however, when it came time to sign economic agreements. Nicaragua, for example, pledged to help supply milk, corn, beans and beef to Venezuela, while Venezuela will sell Nicaragua oil under preferential terms to Nicaragua. Cuba has an agreement to send doctors to Venezuela in exchange for oil discounts.
The most significant moment of the summit was the announcement of the creation of a regional development bank intended to strengthen their alliance and promote independence from U.S.-backed lenders like the World Bank. The ALBA Bank will be started with $1 billion to $1.5 billion of capital. Venezuela, with its plentiful oil earnings, will be the leading financier. The funds will go toward joint efforts from farming projects to energy ventures, such as hydroelectric energy using Dominica's abundant rivers and Nicaraguan technology.
Chavez and the leaders of six other South American countries last month launched a similar venture, the Bank of the South, which is projected to have as much as $7 billion in startup capital and offer loans with fewer strings attached than those given by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.
A major question about the future of ALBA is whether more countries will join to give it more clout. Ecuador and Haiti, for example, would like to join but are facing strong internal opposition. Several small Caribbean nations attending the meeting mentioned how difficult it is to counter attacks by the conservative media. "The principles of ALBA-solidarity, non-interference, respect for independence, complementarity instead of competition, fair trade-they are like motherhood. You can't be against them," Prime Minister Ralph Gonzalez of St. Vincent and Grenadines reasoned. "But when you start to add names-Chavez, Castro, Ortega-people get scared. So we have to educate our people before we can become full members."
Dominica, a nation that defied elite pressure by joining ALBA, was already facing the backlash. "While we are here talking about ways to improve the lives of our people, the conservative media is talking about economic ruin, communist influence, Iranian takeovers, an end to tourism," tourism minister Ian Douglas told me. "We will weather the storm, but it's not going to be easy."
One way to get around such government pressure is to allow the participation in ALBA of social movements throughout the hemisphere. At last year's summit, the ALBA Council of Social Movements was formed with representatives from farmers groups, women, environmentalists, unions and other civil groups. But there were unresolved questions over how to structure the Council, so this year, only the social movements in the four member countries were invited. The Council, however, proposed expanding membership.
"The best way to strengthen ALBA is to include social movements from throughout the hemisphere," said Joel Suarez of Cuba's Martin Luther King Center, one of the five movement reps from Cuba to attend the Summit. "Governments may be pressured not to join, but the social movements are anxious to be part of an alliance that promotes fair trade over free trade." Indeed, the proposal is to even include social movements from the United States. Venezuela is already working with U.S. groups and local governments to provide discount heating oil to poor U.S. communities.
With ALBA countries, particularly Bolivia and Venezuela, facing strong internal opposition, improving the population's economic well-being is critical. The future of progressive victories in Latin America rests on turning the rhetoric of fair trade and sustainable development into concrete gains. This year will be a critical test of whether Venezuela's oil money can indeed be used to develop an alternative economic model.
_______
Medea Benjamin
ABOUT AUTHOR
Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace
Puerto Rican Independence Movement under Attack in New York and San Juan
by Jan Susler
An unexpected knock on the door . . . men in trench coats handing you a grand jury subpoena . . . . If you're involved in the movement for the independence of Puerto Rico, this isn't just a not-so-fond memory of the COINTELPRO era. It's 2008 in New York City, and you are Christopher Torres, a young social worker; Tania Frontera, a young graphic designer; or Julio Pabón Jr., a young filmmaker from the Bronx.
Their subpoenas have aroused vigorous support for them, not just in New York, but in cities across the U.S. and in Puerto Rico. On the island, over forty organizations united to condemn this latest wave of repression and convened a demonstration on January 11 where over a thousand people participated under the theme "In the Face of Repression, Unity and Struggle," with placards and banners calling for the FBI and the federal courts to leave the island. Simultaneous activities took place in Brooklyn, Hartford, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Orlando, Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and Cleveland. As resolutions condemning the repression emanated from the National Lawyers Guild New York City Chapter, the American Association of Jurists, the Interfaith Prisoners of Conscience Project, and the Latin America Solidarity Coalition, the New York Spanish language daily El Diario/La Prensa published an editorial ringing the alarm bell, and U.S. congressman José Serrano telephoned FBI director Mueller to voice his concern.
Why the subpoenas? Why now? And why the resounding, unified denunciations?
Dating back to the era of Spanish colonial control over Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican people have organized to wrest their sovereignty from foreign domination. That resistance continued after the U.S. invasion and occupation in 1898. When the colonizers repressed and criminalized public organizing for independence, clandestine organizations formed, including the Popular Boricua Army -- Macheteros in the 1980s. In 1985, the FBI arrested and almost killed its leader, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, accusing him of participation in the 1983 expropriation of $7.5 million U.S. government insured dollars from a Wells Fargo depot in Hartford, Connecticut. After his release on bail, Ojeda returned to clandestine existence. In spite of the FBI's ever-increasing reward for information leading to his capture, he remained underground for some fifteen years. On September 23, 2005, however, a squad of FBI assassins circled his home, shot him, and left him to bleed to death.2 The assassination outraged the entire nation, and the FBI became a pariah.
Hoping to distract public attention from their own criminal conduct and justify their presence on the island, particularly in the post-911 era, the FBI soon went on the offensive. On February 10, 2006, allegedly in a continuing investigation of the Macheteros, they raided the homes and businesses of several independence activists and in the process pepper-sprayed the nation's journalists who were covering the FBI's paramilitary incursions. Again, the entire country expressed its outrage. Since then, activists have been stopped, searched, and harassed, with the homes and offices of many others, including attorneys and movement leaders, mysteriously broken into in events reminiscent of the infamous black-bag COINTELPRO jobs: computers, digital cameras, and cell phones are taken, while other valuable items remain untouched.
Recent rumors are that the head of the FBI in San Juan, Luis Fraticelli, is close to the end of his tenure and has given instructions to accelerate efforts to neutralize the remains of the clandestine group.3
For Fernando Martín, a leader of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, the FBI "wants to clean up its image after the assassination of Filiberto (Ojeda Ríos), because they want to be able to say that in Puerto Rico, they investigate people of all parties (and) somehow salvage their image after their selective attacks."4
Julio Muriente, a leader of the National Hostos Independence Movement, stated, "The legal facade of this repressive operation is directed against the Macheteros, but the real intention is against the entire independentist movement, including against the people of Puerto Rico," calling it "an attack which is not against any particular organization, but against a political, social, patriotic movement, and against a people."5
U.S. Congressman José Serrano (D-NY), who was instrumental in getting the FBI to disclose thousands of pages of records documenting its illegal surveillance of and intervention in the independence movement6, said of these subpoenas, "It certainly appears to be a fishing expedition,"7 which, he noted, harkens back to the days when, according to FBI director Freeh, the agency engaged in "egregious illegal action, maybe criminal action."8
The subpoenas, initially returnable on January 11, were continued to February 1. Attorneys announced they would file motions to quash the subpoenas. Frontera's attorney, Martin Stolar, noted that "if the motion is denied, Tania will have to appear before the grand jury, and may decide not to testify, invoking her constitutional rights."9
Organizations in Puerto Rico have announced they will protest in various towns of the island on February 1 in defense and support of the three young people subpoenaed, with the themes "Wake Up, Boricua, Defend Your Own!" and "the Grand Jury Is illegal!" Additional protests are being planned in U.S. cities as well.
The consequences of not collaborating with the grand jury are well known to those who support independence. Norberto Cintrón Fiallo, whose home was searched during the February 10, 2006 FBI incursion, and who participated in the January 11 protest in San Juan, refused to collaborate with various grand juries investigating the independence movement in both Puerto Rico and New York in 1981 and 1982 and served close to three years in prison as a result.110 Julio Rosado, who participated in the January 11 protest in New York, resisted grand juries investigating the Puerto Rican independence movement, serving nine months for civil contempt in 1977, and later much of his three year sentence for criminal contempt. "They have always been there, whenever they want to intimidate," he said, adding that he is convinced there will be more subpoenas to come.111
A New York daily Spanish language newspaper expressed editorial concern over the political witch hunt, in words which should give usall pause:
Because of laws initiated by the Bush Administration and passed by our Congress, the legal protections that would give political dissidents a right to due process have been eroded. The net is wide for casting someone with "suspicious" political beliefs, without having been charged, tried or convicted of a crime, as a threat. [ . . . ] Because the attacks on civil liberties and human rights and the historical intimidation and repression of Puerto Rican independence supporters are interrelated, activists must make those links.
That's all the more urgent considering the silence of most elected leaders and the virtual media blackout on the subpoenas. In the context of secret prisons, torture, detention without trial, and warrantless wiretapping, the FBI's fishing should be a concern for anyone interested in rescuing this country from a rising police state.112
1 José Delgado, "Habla con el jefe del FBI," El Nuevo Día, January 9, 2008.
2 In the white papers designed to avoid criminal liability, the government blamed some of the errors in the operation on Luis Fraticelli, the Puerto Rican special agent in charge of its San Juan field office. Not coincidentally, Fraticelli had also participated in the 1985 near assassination of Ojeda Ríos. See: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, "A Review of the September 2005 Shooting Incident Involving the Federal Bureau of Investigations and Filiberto Ojeda Ríos," August 2006, available atwww.usdoj.gov/oig/special/index.htm.
3 José Delgado, "El caso de Nueva York," El Nuevo Día, January 14, 2008.
4 Combined Services, "Denunciation of persecution of independentists:Fernando Martín criticized the newspaper El Nuevo Díafor articles published December 23," El Nuevo Día, January 4, 2008.
5 AP, "Repudio independentista a citaciones a Gran Jurado," El Vocero, January 7, 2008.
6 The disclosed documents are being classified at Center for Puerto Rican Studies of the City University of New York at Hunter College. See: www.pr-secretfiles.net/.
7 José Delgado, "Habla con el jefe del FBI: José Serrano le expresó a Robert Mueller el malestar que existe entre los boricuas en Nueva York por la citación de tres jóvenes," El Nuevo Día, January 9, 2008.
8 Matthew Hay Brown, "Puerto Rico Files Show FBI's Zeal; For Decades, Secret U.S. Dossiers Targeted Suspected," Orlando Sentinel, November 06, 2003.
9 Ruth E. Hernández Beltrán/Agencia EFE, "Posponen citación a independentistas de Nueva York," Primera Hora, January 11, 2008.
10 José "Ché" Paralitici, Sentencia Impuesta: 100 Años de Encarcelamientos por la Independencia de Puerto Rico, Ediciones Puerto Histórico (San Juan, Puerto Rico: 2004), pp. 339-341.
11 Ruth E. Hernández Beltrán/ Agencia EFE, "Posponen citación a independentistas de Nueva York," Primera Hora, January 11, 2008. Rosado was one of five supporters of independence so imprisoned. Ricardo Romero, Steven Guerra, María Cueto, who are Mexican, and Rosado's brother Andres, simultaneously served time for criminal contempt of the same grand jury. See: United States v. Rosado et al., 728 F.2d 89 (2nd Cir. 1984).
12 "Constructing an Enemy," Editorial, El Diario/La Prensa, January 17, 2008.
Jan Susler is a partner with the People's Law Office in Chicago, which she joined in 1982 after a six year stint at Prison Legal Aid, the legal clinic at Southern Illinois University's School of Law. Her long history of work on behalf of political prisoners and prisoners' rights includes litigation, advocacy, and educational work around USP Marion and the Women's High Security Unit at Lexington, KY. Her practice at PLO focuses in addition on police misconduct civil rights litigation. For several years she was an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Northeastern Illinois University and has also taught at the University of Puerto Rico. Representing the Puerto Rican political prisoners for over two decades, she served as lead counsel in the efforts culminating in the 1999 presidential commutation of their sentences. She continues to represent those who remain imprisoned.
"It appears to us to be a reinitiation of the harassment of independentists."1 -- U.S. Congressman José Serrano, speaking to FBI director Robert Mueller
An unexpected knock on the door . . . men in trench coats handing you a grand jury subpoena . . . . If you're involved in the movement for the independence of Puerto Rico, this isn't just a not-so-fond memory of the COINTELPRO era. It's 2008 in New York City, and you are Christopher Torres, a young social worker; Tania Frontera, a young graphic designer; or Julio Pabón Jr., a young filmmaker from the Bronx.
Their subpoenas have aroused vigorous support for them, not just in New York, but in cities across the U.S. and in Puerto Rico. On the island, over forty organizations united to condemn this latest wave of repression and convened a demonstration on January 11 where over a thousand people participated under the theme "In the Face of Repression, Unity and Struggle," with placards and banners calling for the FBI and the federal courts to leave the island. Simultaneous activities took place in Brooklyn, Hartford, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Orlando, Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and Cleveland. As resolutions condemning the repression emanated from the National Lawyers Guild New York City Chapter, the American Association of Jurists, the Interfaith Prisoners of Conscience Project, and the Latin America Solidarity Coalition, the New York Spanish language daily El Diario/La Prensa published an editorial ringing the alarm bell, and U.S. congressman José Serrano telephoned FBI director Mueller to voice his concern.
Why the subpoenas? Why now? And why the resounding, unified denunciations?
Dating back to the era of Spanish colonial control over Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican people have organized to wrest their sovereignty from foreign domination. That resistance continued after the U.S. invasion and occupation in 1898. When the colonizers repressed and criminalized public organizing for independence, clandestine organizations formed, including the Popular Boricua Army -- Macheteros in the 1980s. In 1985, the FBI arrested and almost killed its leader, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, accusing him of participation in the 1983 expropriation of $7.5 million U.S. government insured dollars from a Wells Fargo depot in Hartford, Connecticut. After his release on bail, Ojeda returned to clandestine existence. In spite of the FBI's ever-increasing reward for information leading to his capture, he remained underground for some fifteen years. On September 23, 2005, however, a squad of FBI assassins circled his home, shot him, and left him to bleed to death.2 The assassination outraged the entire nation, and the FBI became a pariah.
Hoping to distract public attention from their own criminal conduct and justify their presence on the island, particularly in the post-911 era, the FBI soon went on the offensive. On February 10, 2006, allegedly in a continuing investigation of the Macheteros, they raided the homes and businesses of several independence activists and in the process pepper-sprayed the nation's journalists who were covering the FBI's paramilitary incursions. Again, the entire country expressed its outrage. Since then, activists have been stopped, searched, and harassed, with the homes and offices of many others, including attorneys and movement leaders, mysteriously broken into in events reminiscent of the infamous black-bag COINTELPRO jobs: computers, digital cameras, and cell phones are taken, while other valuable items remain untouched.
Recent rumors are that the head of the FBI in San Juan, Luis Fraticelli, is close to the end of his tenure and has given instructions to accelerate efforts to neutralize the remains of the clandestine group.3
For Fernando Martín, a leader of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, the FBI "wants to clean up its image after the assassination of Filiberto (Ojeda Ríos), because they want to be able to say that in Puerto Rico, they investigate people of all parties (and) somehow salvage their image after their selective attacks."4
Julio Muriente, a leader of the National Hostos Independence Movement, stated, "The legal facade of this repressive operation is directed against the Macheteros, but the real intention is against the entire independentist movement, including against the people of Puerto Rico," calling it "an attack which is not against any particular organization, but against a political, social, patriotic movement, and against a people."5
U.S. Congressman José Serrano (D-NY), who was instrumental in getting the FBI to disclose thousands of pages of records documenting its illegal surveillance of and intervention in the independence movement6, said of these subpoenas, "It certainly appears to be a fishing expedition,"7 which, he noted, harkens back to the days when, according to FBI director Freeh, the agency engaged in "egregious illegal action, maybe criminal action."8
The subpoenas, initially returnable on January 11, were continued to February 1. Attorneys announced they would file motions to quash the subpoenas. Frontera's attorney, Martin Stolar, noted that "if the motion is denied, Tania will have to appear before the grand jury, and may decide not to testify, invoking her constitutional rights."9
Organizations in Puerto Rico have announced they will protest in various towns of the island on February 1 in defense and support of the three young people subpoenaed, with the themes "Wake Up, Boricua, Defend Your Own!" and "the Grand Jury Is illegal!" Additional protests are being planned in U.S. cities as well.
The consequences of not collaborating with the grand jury are well known to those who support independence. Norberto Cintrón Fiallo, whose home was searched during the February 10, 2006 FBI incursion, and who participated in the January 11 protest in San Juan, refused to collaborate with various grand juries investigating the independence movement in both Puerto Rico and New York in 1981 and 1982 and served close to three years in prison as a result.110 Julio Rosado, who participated in the January 11 protest in New York, resisted grand juries investigating the Puerto Rican independence movement, serving nine months for civil contempt in 1977, and later much of his three year sentence for criminal contempt. "They have always been there, whenever they want to intimidate," he said, adding that he is convinced there will be more subpoenas to come.111
A New York daily Spanish language newspaper expressed editorial concern over the political witch hunt, in words which should give usall pause:
Because of laws initiated by the Bush Administration and passed by our Congress, the legal protections that would give political dissidents a right to due process have been eroded. The net is wide for casting someone with "suspicious" political beliefs, without having been charged, tried or convicted of a crime, as a threat. [ . . . ] Because the attacks on civil liberties and human rights and the historical intimidation and repression of Puerto Rican independence supporters are interrelated, activists must make those links.
That's all the more urgent considering the silence of most elected leaders and the virtual media blackout on the subpoenas. In the context of secret prisons, torture, detention without trial, and warrantless wiretapping, the FBI's fishing should be a concern for anyone interested in rescuing this country from a rising police state.112
1 José Delgado, "Habla con el jefe del FBI," El Nuevo Día, January 9, 2008.
2 In the white papers designed to avoid criminal liability, the government blamed some of the errors in the operation on Luis Fraticelli, the Puerto Rican special agent in charge of its San Juan field office. Not coincidentally, Fraticelli had also participated in the 1985 near assassination of Ojeda Ríos. See: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, "A Review of the September 2005 Shooting Incident Involving the Federal Bureau of Investigations and Filiberto Ojeda Ríos," August 2006, available atwww.usdoj.gov/oig/special/index.htm.
3 José Delgado, "El caso de Nueva York," El Nuevo Día, January 14, 2008.
4 Combined Services, "Denunciation of persecution of independentists:Fernando Martín criticized the newspaper El Nuevo Díafor articles published December 23," El Nuevo Día, January 4, 2008.
5 AP, "Repudio independentista a citaciones a Gran Jurado," El Vocero, January 7, 2008.
6 The disclosed documents are being classified at Center for Puerto Rican Studies of the City University of New York at Hunter College. See: www.pr-secretfiles.net/.
7 José Delgado, "Habla con el jefe del FBI: José Serrano le expresó a Robert Mueller el malestar que existe entre los boricuas en Nueva York por la citación de tres jóvenes," El Nuevo Día, January 9, 2008.
8 Matthew Hay Brown, "Puerto Rico Files Show FBI's Zeal; For Decades, Secret U.S. Dossiers Targeted Suspected," Orlando Sentinel, November 06, 2003.
9 Ruth E. Hernández Beltrán/Agencia EFE, "Posponen citación a independentistas de Nueva York," Primera Hora, January 11, 2008.
10 José "Ché" Paralitici, Sentencia Impuesta: 100 Años de Encarcelamientos por la Independencia de Puerto Rico, Ediciones Puerto Histórico (San Juan, Puerto Rico: 2004), pp. 339-341.
11 Ruth E. Hernández Beltrán/ Agencia EFE, "Posponen citación a independentistas de Nueva York," Primera Hora, January 11, 2008. Rosado was one of five supporters of independence so imprisoned. Ricardo Romero, Steven Guerra, María Cueto, who are Mexican, and Rosado's brother Andres, simultaneously served time for criminal contempt of the same grand jury. See: United States v. Rosado et al., 728 F.2d 89 (2nd Cir. 1984).
12 "Constructing an Enemy," Editorial, El Diario/La Prensa, January 17, 2008.
Jan Susler is a partner with the People's Law Office in Chicago, which she joined in 1982 after a six year stint at Prison Legal Aid, the legal clinic at Southern Illinois University's School of Law. Her long history of work on behalf of political prisoners and prisoners' rights includes litigation, advocacy, and educational work around USP Marion and the Women's High Security Unit at Lexington, KY. Her practice at PLO focuses in addition on police misconduct civil rights litigation. For several years she was an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Northeastern Illinois University and has also taught at the University of Puerto Rico. Representing the Puerto Rican political prisoners for over two decades, she served as lead counsel in the efforts culminating in the 1999 presidential commutation of their sentences. She continues to represent those who remain imprisoned.
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