Cuba: 55 Years of Ideas and Truth

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/10/cuba-55-years-of-ideas-and-truth/

On January 1, Cubans 2014 marked the 55th anniversary of their revolution’s victory. Fidel Castro’s words spoken May 1, 2000 cropped up in President Raul Castro’s speech in Santiago de Cuba. Revolution, they said, is “to believe deeply there’s no force in the world capable of crushing the force of truth and ideas.”
Commentator Ángel Guerra Cabrera recalls one idea: “To understand the conflict between Cuba and the United States it’s necessary to study Latin American history. It shows the superpower has never tolerated our countries developing internal or external politics separate from its dictates.”

Raul Castro articulated another: “[N]ew generations of leaders … never will be able to forget that this is the socialist Revolution of the humble, by the humble, and for the humble. This is the essential premise and effective antidote for not falling for the siren songs of the enemy.”

Political talkers sometimes label ideas as utopian, among them that of ending the anti-Cuban U.S. blockade now. “Cuba [however] is still embracing utopia in year 55 of the triumph of its revolution,” affirms Guerra Cabrera.

U. S. defenders of Cuban independence could do with truth and ideas, or at least new ones. On their watch, “Cuba has suffered under the longest blockade in history.” Objective realities in the two countries may vary enough for Cuba’s U. S. friends to accept what they see as truth as allowing for small gains only, and waiting. By contrast, Cubans seem to take the realities they live with as encouragement for keeping on. Indeed, there are “55 reasons for a new anniversary,” says one observer. They would fit within Fidel Castro’s notion of the “truth.” A listing follows:

Cuba’s infant mortality rate is at a new low: 4.2 babies died during 2013 out of every 1000 births. Average rates for the region remain at around 30. Maternal mortality has dropped, and life expectancy at 77.9 years matches that of industrialized nations. Physician density in Cuba is one physician for 197 persons, one of the world’s top rates. That doesn’t include 40,000 Cuban physicians serving abroad in 70 countries.

Universal education and health care are intact; 1,993,300 students from preschool through university level will be enrolled in 2014, and eighty million physician consultations are anticipated, plus 22 million visits to dentists and 1.140.000 hospital admissions.

The United Nations Program in Human Development ranked Cuba 59th overall out of 187 countries. UNESCO’s 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report had Cuba as 14th in the world. Health care expenses consumed 22 percent of Cuba’s 2013 state budget, education 27 percent. Cuba’s 54 percent current budgetary allowance for social services is among the world’s highest. Only 30 countries share Cuba’s below-five percent unemployment rate.

Cuba maintains its outsized role in international solidarity. Two thousand teachers work abroad. Cuba’s “Yo sí puedo” literacy program has benefited eight million learners in 29 countries. “Operation Miracle” has restored sight for two million people worldwide. By 2011, the Latin American School of Medicine had graduated 9,960 new doctors from 58 countries. Tens of thousands of other medical students and graduate physicians study in Cuba.

Economic readjustment is proceeding. A new Labor Code became law following discussions among almost three million workers. State businesses, newly autonomous, are on track to increase exports and reduce imports. Mariel is the site of a new “Special Development Zone” directed at promoting foreign investment, exports, jobs, and fostering modern business technologies. New patterns of land use and agricultural marketing prevail.

Some 400,000 Cubans are recently self-employed without loss of social services. Over 250 new cooperatives are functioning. Cuba’s economy maintains a three percent rate of growth. Russia recently agreed to forgive 90 percent of Cuba’s $29 billion debt incurred during the Soviet era. Provision of electricity has improved through the use of new generator facilities.

Cuban diplomats joined the United Nations Council on Human Rights in 2013. Cuba that year served as president pro tem of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States that includes all Western Hemisphere nations save Canada and the United States. During 2013, Cuba hosted peace talks between the Colombian government and the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

These facts – these truths – suggest Cuba’s revolution is established and continuing. In Santiago, President Raul Castro once more called for “respectful dialogue” with the United States. “We don’t claim the United States has to change its political and social system, [but] we have to learn mutual respect for our differences, only that. [Otherwise] we are disposed to endure another 55 years in the same situation.”

Cuba’s real experiences and achievements demonstrate that big, utopian ideas can materialize. New realities add substance and serve to motivate. Fidel Castro’s must have presumed listeners on May 1, 2000 were ready “to challenge powerful forces dominating inside and outside boundaries of society and the nation … defend values in which we believe at the price of any sacrifice.”

That kind of commitment exercised within U.S. society could help convert utopian longings into existing facts. One would be the unrealized dream of U.S. acceptance of Cuba as a regular nation. Actually to fight to change existing U. S. realities would move that dream along, and others too.

Agrarian-based oligarchy controls post-coup Paraguay

http://www.peoplesworld.org/agrarian-based-oligarchy-exerts-control-over-post-coup-paraguay/

January 7, 2014

The so-called “legal” coup that removed progressive President Fernando Lugo from power on June 25, 2012 set the stage for large agricultural corporations, particularly soybean producers, to establish control over Paraguay’s government. The wealthy Horacio Cartes’ election to the presidency in April 2013 restored dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s Colorado party to power. Yet opposition forces remain active.

In a radio address on December 30 labor leader Bernardo Rojas declared that 2013 was a “hard, difficult” year because of persecution and austerity policies. He condemned “criminalization of social struggle” and announced a general strike set for March 26, 2014. Hundreds had rallied in front of the National Congress in Asuncion to mark four months of the Cartes presidency which began on August 1. The demonstration’s theme was “100 days that shouldn’t have been, of militarization and surrender, militarization and accusations.” In November, street demonstrations continued in San Pedro department a day after the police shoot and wounded two of some 200 activists protesting displacement of small farmers from land lost to private interests.

Crisis in Paraguay began on June 15, 2012 when 300 police forcibly removed 50 would-be occupiers from land without clear title in Curuguaty district. President Lugo’s political opponents exploited the violent fallout – 17 were killed and 20 wounded including police – to accuse the Lugo government of incompetence and engineer Lugo’s removal through parliamentary action. Plotters raised the specter of terrorism by identifying the Paraguayan People’s Army, leftist insurgents, as backing small farmer agitation. The Lugo government may have forced the hand of coup perpetrators by seeking to block agribusiness plans to import genetically modified seed corn.

Post – coup governments first headed by former Vice President Frederico Franco and Cartes later on went to work. The executive branch gained new powers under a modified Law 1337/99 to deploy the military and police for internal security purposes. Expanded police and military capabilities are being “financed by the landholding class and foreign capitalists,” one observer claimed. Agrarian rights activists confront security forces equipped with high- technology weapons and tools and advised by Israeli and US operatives.

Commentator Jose Carlos Lezcano points also to new “fiscal responsibility” legislation; Law 5.098/13 prescribes budgetary cuts and structural adjustment policies. A novel “law of public-private alliance” authorizes privatization of “strategic resources,” including state – owned enterprises.

The police assassinated eight agrarian rights leaders, supposedly for the purpose of “decapitating” opposition leadership. The fear-laden atmosphere and Colorado Party control of electoral processes resulted in the victorious Cartes gaining 45 percent of the presidential votes cast in April. The candidate of the left-leaning Guasú Front coalition took a mere 3.5 percent of the votes. Now, says Lezcano, power brokers have “surrendered the country to transnational gangsters.”

That would be Monsanto, Dow, Agrotec, and Syngent corporations. Within months of the coup, the Agricultural Ministry approved their use of transgenic corn blocked under the Lugo government. Lezcano claims Paraguay has suffered a “major loss of sovereignty and effective loss of civil rights,” along with diminishing state-sponsored social services.

The stage is thus set for Paraguay, the world’s sixth largest soybean producer, to maintain its role, along with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, as a soy juggernaut providing industrialized societies with the prime raw material for bio-diesel fuel and animal feeds. Current political arrangements, a legacy of the 35– year long Stroessner dictatorship, favor skewed land-owning patterns. Currently 2% of owners control 85% of Paraguayan farmland there; four percent of soybean growers control 60 percent of soy growing land. Foreigners, often Brazilians, own almost 20 percent of such land. .

Foreign sales of soybeans and beef yield sales worth $10 billion, yet producers and processors pay only two percent of the government’s revenue requirements.

Excluded from regular participation in governmental processes, agrarian rights activists point to harm done to natural and human environments. Accounts surface for example, of poisoned rivers, soil, and human beings through the extravagant use of pesticides and herbicides. Conversion of land for large scale agricultural use has led to tens of thousands of small-farmer families being displaced. They often end up living precariously on the edges of cities.

Deforestation in Paraguay is extreme. During the last half of the 20th century, 75 percent of the original forest cover disappeared. The trend has accentuated: In 2010 in western Paraguay forests of 580,000 acres were cut down. During the following year, the total mounted to 618,000 acres.

And irony of all ironies: despite annual soy exports amounting to 300,000 tones and meat products, to 200,000 tons, one fourth of Paraguayans are hungry, according to the United Nations Food Program. Some 20 percent of rural inhabitants live in extreme poverty.

Political prisoners, killings mount in Colombia – peace momentum slows

Jan 12, 2014

2014 had barely begun. Already assassins had killed activist rapper Gerson Martínez, community leader Giovanny Leiton, the latter’s life partner, and unionist Ever Luis Marin Rolong. A police projectile thrown at Sintraelecol union president Óscar Arturo Orozco gravely injured his left eye. He had been speaking at a union rally in Manizales, Caldas,

On January 4 in Cucuta, the Catatumbo epicenter of agrarian revolt in June, 2013, authorities detained academician Francisco Toloza. Leiton and Toloza are leaders of the two-year old Patriotic March grouping of social movements. Patriotic March is spearheading revived agitation for agrarian rights.

War in Colombia has long reflected opposed views of control and use of land. Land use was the first agenda item in peace talks underway in Cuba between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Killers of 25 Patriotic March activists murdered in 2013 are still at large. Assassins that year took the lives of 26 unionists associated with the CUT labor federation. Over 90 percent of those targeted were union leaders, The National Labor School reports that paramilitary groups accounted for 92 percent of the violations, the police or military, 19 percent.

News of deadly assaults against advocates for change is not new. Over the course of decades, tens of thousands of poor farmers, marginalized city dwellers, teachers, unionists, and political activists were murdered. The toll of murdered unionists since 1984 is estimated at 3000.

What may be new is the turn to filling jails with political adversaries, especially with leaders like Francisco Toloza. Jail time for him and detained counterparts may be advantageous for those in charge. They gain credit for using courts rather than killing. And hoopla surrounding such cases bolsters the image of the FARC as enemy and of opposition figures as loyal to the FARC.

The state alleges Toloza and many others belong to the FARC and are guilty of “aggravated rebellion.” Supposed evidence comes from computers retrieved, as the story goes, from sites ravaged by bombs that killed FARC leaders.

Toloza is a sociology professor and investigator at Colombia’s National University who, encouraged by peace negotiators in Havana, organized national forums allowing citizens to discuss issues covered in the talks. Olga Quintero, collaborator of Toloza in agrarian organizing in Catatumbo, describes the prisoner as “more than a leader, he has great intellectual capabilities and is committed to contributing to the social process and change the country requires.”

Fellow Patriotic March leader Lilia Solano explained that, “the persecution of dissident thought is not only a problem for Patriotic March, but is also one for thousands of Colombians who don’t accept the politics of hate and plunder they have imposed.

Toloza’s persecution follows the imprisonment earlier of similarly charged Huber Bellesteros, another Patriotic March member. The CUT unionist and vice president of the Fensuagro agricultural workers’ union was spokesperson for the MIA collective that in August 2013 organized a nationwide strike for agrarian rights and against Colombia’s “free trade” agreement with the United States. Authorities jailed Bellesteros at the strike’s onset.

After almost three years of incarceration, Fensuagro human rights director Liliany Obando is at conditional liberty as she awaits a Supreme Judicial Court ruling on her appeal. Convicted of rebellion, she was sentenced to house arrest for five years and fined the equivalent of $368,347 USD.

Political prisoner David Ravelo is serving an 18 year prison term because he publicized ex President Alvaro Uribe’s close ties with paramilitary chieftains who then and now were terrorizing Ravelo’s native Barrancabermeja. Their false accusation that Ravelo helped out with a 1991 murder led to his conviction in December 2012. Ravelo is a Communist Party leader, an educator, a union organizer, and an award – winning human rights human rights activist.

Such prisoners join 9500 other Colombians incarcerated for politics of resistance. The political prisoner population is rising along with a 70.4 per cent increase in the overall prison population between 1998 and 2009. Prisons are overfilled: 17.2 percent over capacity in 2007; 25.5 percent, in 2008; 35.8 percent, in 2009; and 41.7 percent in 2010.

Jailing of the two Patriotic March leaders has evoked outpourings of support and condemnation of governmental repression. Left political parties worldwide, unions, and human rights groups have come to Toloza’s defense. “We demand immediate freedom for Francisco Tolozo and end of persecution of Patriotic March,” wrote Carlos Lozano, editor of Colombia’s Voz weekly newspaper. “Huber Ballesteros and now Francisco Toloza: those are not gestures of peace.”

Surely commentator Sara Leukos’ concerns are widely shared: “Inside Colombia the peace talks express one reality and [President] Juan Manuel Santos’ constitutional powers establish another. Are they different languages?” She adds: “Incarceration of Professor Francisco Javier Toloza, just like the assassinations, political prisoners, persecution, and threats … generate open debate over the importance of real, structural changes required of the Colombian state. The people have called for popular rebellion, and necessarily so.”