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Half a Century of Lies
By
John Maxwell
"First they ignore
you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then
you win."
It is one of my
favourite apothems and is credited variously to Mohandas
Gandhi and to a spokesman for the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers of America. Whoever said it clearly understood
the nature of struggle like my illustrious colleague
Fidel Castro who has now turned journalist after 50
years inventing a civilisation.
Fidel does not
often lose his temper in public, but this week it was
obvious he was sorely tried by the results of the
Americas Summit in Port of Spain. In a piece of biting
sarcasm Fidel questioned the fitness of the
Organisation of American States to be the guarantor of
any new and just dispensation in the Western hemisphere.
In a reflection
entitled "Delirious Dreams" Fidel lets rip:
"Is the OAS
perchance the guarantor of the sovereignty and integrity
of the peoples of Latin America? Always!
"Did it at any
point intervene in the internal affairs of any country
in the hemisphere? Never!
"Is it true that it
has always represented a docile instrument of the United
States? Never!
"Did one single
Latin American or Caribbean die on its account? Not one!
Those are calumnies of Castro-Communism emanating from
Cuba, a country expelled from the OAS because its
government proclaimed Marxism-Leninism, a country where
there was never an election, nobody votes or is elected,
and in which a dictatorship reigns that has had the
effrontery to confront a country as weak, defenseless
and poor as the United States throughout half a
century."
Even from those who
claim to be least biased in the ideological contention,
it is impossible to get a fair hearing for anyone but
the United States. So-called journalists, like Robert
Novak and Judith Miller, Wolf Blitzer, Lou Dobbs and
Glenn Beck, to name only the most grotesque, have made
it almost impossible for the “average American” to
discover what's happening in his own country much less
the world outside.
And since the
mainstream media determine what most people believe, US
politicians are among the most ignorant in the world.
The Council on
Hemispheric Affairs, one of the better informed think
tanks in the US was constrained to comment on Fidel's
reflection on the Summit:
"Fidel’s latest
interjection follows the almost scientific pattern of
Cuban authorities of shooting themselves in the foot at
precisely the moment that meaningful dialogue appears
achievable with the U.S. For Fidel to spell out
restrictions to discussions with the U.S. at this early
stage is premature."
The unspoken
assumption is that President Obama was justified in
saying that the US had shown willing, now it was Cuba's
turn.
Fidel Castro is the
only political figure in history of whom it can be said
that he fulfilled every promise he made to his people. I
am not aware of anyone else whose actions have been at
all times guided by the highest principle, by a sense of
justice and honour.
If you don't
believe me go read his speech in his defence against the
charge of treason at Santiago in October 1953.
I wrote about that speech in my
column “History will Absolve Fidel” in December 2005.
Among other things I said:
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Looking
back at the speech today, more than fifty
years later, I am struck by two things: the
idealism of the aims and the fact that most
of those aims have, in fact, been achieved.
There have been mistakes made, many of them
serious, but overall, if one compares Cuba
to its nearest neighbors, Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Jamaica,
it is clear that Cubans enjoy a far better
quality of life than citizens of the others.
And in World Bank terms it is poorer than
all except Haiti.…
…The
care given to the weakest and most
vulnerable is extraordinary and Cuban health
care is recognized as among the very best in
the world. The same is true of education,
and just as Cubans now have a doctor in
every neighborhood (1 doctor to every 100
Cubans) they are getting university-level
centers set up in every borough. And
education is almost completely free. |
What is most
extraordinary about the Cuban achievement is that it was
done while Cuba was (and is) in a state of war—declared
by the United States, invaded, infiltrated by gangs of
terrorists, bombed and sabotaged, its people and economy
attacked by biological warfare agents, hemorrhagic
dengue, thrips, tobacco mosaic and other plagues, and
its leader subject to at least 637 known conspiracies to
murder him.
Some of the leading
terrorists against Cuba, Orlando Bosch and "Bambi'
Posada Carriles are at this moment under the protection
of the government of the United States. These noxious
creeps were responsible for murdering Cubans abroad and
in Cuba, from fishermen to diplomats, and most
horrifically, the destruction of a Cubana plane with 73
people, including the young Cuban Olympic fencing team.
In addition, the US
is illegally squatting on Cuban property at Guantanamo
Bay and to add injury to insult has used that property
as a base to attack Cuba and worse, to set up camps for
the criminal denial of human rights to people accused,
but never convicted of crimes against the United States.
A bizarre footnote
to all this is that while providing aid and protection
to known and notorious terrorists the US has imprisoned
five Cubans in solitary confinement and in circumstances
which constitute cruel and unusual punishment. This,
despite the fact that the United States admits that the
men have done nothing to injure the interests of the
United States.
Meanwhile, the
people responsible for killing innocent people by
bombing hotels and nightclubs enjoy protected status in
the US.
In January 2000,
the Cuban government and people launched a lawsuit
against the USA claiming $121 billion in damages for,
among other things, the killing of nearly 4,000 Cubans
and the maiming of thousands more, the damage or
destruction of 294 fishing boats, 78 airplanes, 135
urban and rural schools, and 63 Cuban embassies and
consulates—targets of terrorism and sabotage, encouraged
and financed by the United States.
Against all this,
the American press demands that Cuba should open up,
introduce “democracy” and freedom of the press. It is
claimed that there are dozens of prisoners of
conscience, people the Cubans say are proven paid agents
of the US and criminals under Cuban law.
Unlike the American
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay the Cuban “dissidents” have
been charged and tried.
Of course, Fidel
Castro and the Cubans do not have a case. Their claims
have never been reported by the free American press. On
the other hand anti-Castro apparatchiks like John
Bolton, Otto Reich, Roger Noriega and Luigi Einaudi, all
official representatives of the United States, have
between them claimed that Cuba is preparing bio-warfare
against the US, that Cuba was supplying Nicaragua with
Soviet MIGS to bomb California and have helped to rescue
terrorists like Bosch and Posada from the justice they
deserve.
Perhaps, just to clear the air, the
United States should present Cuba with its own list of
grievances.
Copyright©2009
John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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posted 26 April 2009
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