By spending this money, the bourgeois regime in Washington tries to corrupt the whole proletarian society and proletarian democracy in Cuba.
U.S. regime wants to reduce an element of the Cuban population to mercenaries and parasites, constantly holding their hand out before US imperialists and eager to obey any orders from U.S. spies.
Fortunately for the Cuban people, Cuban American opportunists steal a lot of the money and blow the cash on their personal needs in the USA.
The rotten and two-faced bourgeois regime in the USA insists on this kind of aggression against Cuba but this vile regime prohibits other countries from implementing similar programs against the United States.
About a third of the US people who are known as reactionaries or conservatives feel irrepressible joy when they see their rotten regime behave in this unethical manner.
The State Department, the Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy have spent $304,300,000 on Cuba-related democracy programs since 1996.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Radio & TV Marti, has spent another $700 million or so. That brings the total to around $1 billion.
USAID and the State Department have spent nearly 90 percent of the Cuba money since 2004. That was a year after then-President George W. Bush created the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba and declared that he was ready for “the happy day when the Castro regime is no more.”
Fidel Castro was president of Cuba back then. Roger Noriega, then assistant secretary of state, said, “The United States..will not accept a succession scenario.”
More than a decade later, the democracy programs endure. The State Department plans to spend $20 million on the programs in 2016. That’s a tiny fraction of the federal government’s proposed $1,168 trillion discretionary budget, which excludes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
But the money has outsized impact in Cuba, where the socialist government demands that the U.S. end such programs as the two nations restore diplomatic ties.
When I traveled to Cuba in December, some Cubans asked me how it is that the U.S. government runs democracy programs that Cuban officials see as provocative and illegal while negotiating to restore diplomatic relations.
I tell them it’s democracy in action. Strong political interests demand that the U.S. pressure Cuba to adopt democratic reforms. At the same time, many Americans press for normalized relations with Cuba. The U.S. government’s response is to push for both democracy and restored ties.
Some Cubans have told me the U.S. approach seems contradictory and maybe it is, but it’s also an example of the squeaky wheel getting the grease.
It reminds me of what I saw while covering immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border in the ’90s. The U.S. beefed up border enforcement while failing to crack down on employers who hired undocumented immigrants. It was a schizophrenic approach, but it underscored how the political system responded both to employers who wanted cheap labor and citizens who demanded an end to illegal immigration.
The U.S. government operates Cuban democracy programs under Section 109 of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act.
The act seeks a transitional government that would lead to “a democratically elected government in Cuba.”
It also forbids the U.S. president from ending sanctions unless he decides that Cuba has met a series of requirements. These include:
Agreeing to free and fair elections within 18 months after a transitional government takes power.
Forming a government that does not include Fidel or Raul Castro.
Legalizing all political activity.
Dissolving its state security forces.
Releasing all political prisoners and opening prisons to human rights investigators.
Allowing multiple independent political parties equal access to the media.
Ending jamming of Radio and TV Marti broadcasts.
Taking steps to return property seized from U.S. citizens after the 1959 revolution.
Supporters of U.S. policy tell me that the American government has the right to impose its will because the Cuban government is a dictatorship that has no moral authority and no right to deprive its citizens of universal human rights.
Critics of U.S. policy say that the U.S. has always tried to control Cuba’s fate. They cite then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s first report to the Free Cuba commission in May 2004. It showed U.S. officials were planning every last detail of Cuba’s future. The report said that if Cuba’s transitional government requested help, the U.S. government was prepared to:
Provide dam safety training, in Spanish
Simplify the sale of refurbished U.S. locomotives to Cuba
Help map coral reef systems and assess fish habitat
Give advice on how to add trails and other infrastructure to prime bird watching spots
As the U.S. and Cuba negotiate, I wonder what has become of the U.S. government’s many transition plans for Cuba.
USAID’s Cuba programs are scheduled to end in September. The agency has three current partners:
Grupo de Apoyo a la Democracia
International Republican Institute
New America Foundation
The Pan American Development Foundation finished its work in March, according to USAID. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for information on PADF’s work 1,278 days ago and still have not gotten a response from USAID.
Following the money isn’t easy. USAID’s partners funnel 40 percent of their funds, on average, to subcontractors.
USAID does not reveal the names of subcontractors, despite President Obama’s promise that the U.S. government would begin naming subcontractors.
USAID’s partners use an average of 12 subcontractors each. One partner had 38 subcontracts for a single Cuba contract.
The partners pay subcontractors anywhere from $5,000 to $300,000.
From 1996 to 2012, USAID and the State Department awarded 111 Cuba-related contracts and grants to 51 partners.
If there were 12 subcontractors for each contract and that’s the average that means there were 1,332 Cuba-related programs from 1996 to 2012.
USAID’s penchant for secrecy makes me wonder whether the agency will try to keep a hand in Cuba off the books, perhaps through its Office of Transition Initiatives. (See “Another window of opportunity for OTI?“).
The State Department has not been any better than USAID in responding to FOIAs. The department passes along most of its Cuba money to the NED, which recently stopped disclosing its grant recipients. (See “Sudden Secrecy at NED“).
USAID and the State Department spent $264,300,000 on Cuba programs from 1996 to 2014. They set aside $20 million for 2015. The NED spent another $20 million or so from 2006 to 2014. That totals $304,300,000.
Add the $20 million planned for 2016 and it’s $324,300,000.
Less than 15 percent and that’s a generous estimate reaches the hands of Cuban dissidents and human rights activists who put their lives and their freedom at risk.
Most of the money goes toward salaries, office expenses and travel, tax records show.
Senator Bernie Sanders was on the road during the first week of the Senate spring recess. His message: that we need to end the obscene level of income and wealth inequality that now exists; that we need to create millions of new jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure; that we need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage; that corporations and the rich need to start paying their fair share of taxes – met with strong support as he spoke to overflow crowds in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Austin and Chicago.
Saturday, March 28
Los Angeles
Bernie delivers the keynote address to 800 attendees at Marianne Williamson’s Sister Giant conference in Los Angeles, California.
Sunday, March 29
Los Angeles
At a union hall in Los Angeles, 500 turn out for a town hall meeting with Bernie.
Monday, March 30
San Francisco
Bernie delivers a speech and takes questions from a capacity crowd at the Commonwelath Club in San Francisco.
Read more about Bernie’s speech at the Commonwealth Club at Business Insider.
Tuesday, March 31
Las Vegas
More than 300 turn out at 10 a.m. to hear Bernie at a Las Vegas town meeting with the Culinary Workers Union.
Cuba Denounces Presence of Anti-Cuban Mercenaries in Panama
Panama, Apr 7 (Prensa Latina) The representatives of Cuba attending the parallel forums of the VII Summit of the Americas here today denounced the presence of mercenaries paid by the historical enemies of the Cuban Revolution in the meetings of Panama.
According to the statement issued by the delegation of the island, these mercenaries make up a tiny “opposition” formed from abroad, lacking any legitimacy and propriety.
Several of these mercenaries have even been publicly linked to recognized terrorists that have caused infinite pain to the Cuban people, said the text read by the young deputy Liaena Hernandez.
Additionally, the journalist Iroel Sanchez stressed that while such people were received at the Civil Society Forum, that same space excluded representatives of the Workers’ Central Union of Cuba (CTC-Spanish acronym).
Sanchez recalled that in 2000, when the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, was in Panama to participate in the X Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government, a terrorist plot orchestrated by Luis Posada Carriles attempted to assassinate the Cuban President.
If the attack had succeeded, he said, it would have claimed the lives not only of the Cubans participanting, but also of dozens of young people who were at the University of Panama.
According to the analyst, the organizers of the event allowed the participation of these counter-revolutionaries because they respond to the US policy.
The Cuban delegation consideres offensive the participation of those who have turned treason against their homeland a properly paid work and thus shamefully usurp the name of their own country, a country they slander and offend every day.
It is unacceptable the acceptance here of the worst kind and low moral people, concludes the statement of Cuba’s representatives in the forums of the Summit of the Americas.
Please notice (in the article below) that these progressive groups in Panama raise the issue of compensation for the death and destruction wreaked by the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. See my homepage for the historical context of that invasion: Panama: Background to the U.S. Invasion of 1989
Panamanian social organizations denounced today that Venezuelan and Cuban counterrevolutionaries aim to use the Panamanian nation as a platform to plot against those nations during the 7th Summit of the Americas.
During an open letter sent to Foreign Minister Isabel de Saint Malo, members from 15 union, student, grass-roots and solidarity groups expressed their deep concern for “the meetings, activities and mobilizations of protests convened by opposition sectors and dissidents from the Republics of Cuba and Venezuela.â€
With this acting, they aim to use the country as a platform to coordinate actions to interfere in the internal affairs of these two nations, in addition to offend and denigrate the dignity of the heads of States and the official delegations from Cuba and Venezuela.
The text also refers to the dialogue started between Cuba and the United States for the possible restoration of diplomatic relations, “a process all international community approves and waits, at least, the lifting of the disgraceful economic blockade on Cuba.â€
Another issue that captures the attention is the U.S. presidential decree stating Venezuela as a threat for its national security and that of the continent, a measure rejected by all Latin American and Caribbean peoples, the document states.
However, there are some people who seek to plot to become environment rarefied and produce an interventionist statement against the South American nation. Infamous figures of the Cuban counterrevolution and Venezuelan opposition, sponsored by the United States and other extreme rightwing sectors from the continent and Europe, are already arriving for such effects, the letter states.
Despite we will not carry out demonstrations against President Barack Obama, as the national government requested, we will send the demand for the just compensation to the victims of the 1989 invasion, cleaning and decontamination of former military bases, the signatories say.
For such purposes, we respectfully request the national government, to take the appropriate measures, otherwise, Panamanian grass-roots organizations will respect our country, while we held them responsible for any lamentable situation that may arise, the letter concludes.
The Cuban Workers Federation denounced yesterday the exclusion of which it was subjected by the organizers of the Civil Society Forum, one of the four events taking place prior to the Summit of the Americas.
The Communist Party of Canada condemns the Harper government’s one-year extension of Canada’s participation in the latest imperialist war in Iraq, which will expand this military mission into neighbouring Syria without the agreement of the elected government of that sovereign country. This is a clear violation of international law and the UN Charter. As with […] Read in browser Vous voulez en savoir plus ? Â
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