AUDIO The Insanity of the African American Racial ‘Critique’ of Cuba

Black Agenda Report:The 60 signatories to a letter denouncing racism in Cuba seem to consider themselves extensions of Barack Obama's State Department. The logic of their action, as articulated by Dr. Ron Walters, is to encourage the United States to “make the Black condition in Cuba 'part of any negotiations on the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba.'” Then maybe the Cubans can negotiate with the U.S. on behalf of African Americans.

 "Late last year, a group of 60 prominent African Americans circulated a letter denouncing racism in, of all places, Cuba ..."

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Original audio source (20100310_gf_CubaRace.mp3)

AUDIO Haiti: Haiti Info-thon: Cuban Doctors in Haiti, Segment 1

While the world sat around and wondered what they could do to support Haitians after the earthquake, Cuban doctors were already at work. Since the late 1990's Cuban doctors have had a presence in Haiti, and have also been training Haitian doctors. At the time of the earthquake in Haiti, 402 Cuban internationalists, 302 of them medical personnel, had already been helping Haitians. These together with many of the 500 Haitian doctors who had been trained in Cuba free of charge formed the essential early group of lifesavers, attending to 1,102 Haitian patients in the first 24 hours after the earthquake. They have continued their work, boosted by an additional medical brigade which arrived promptly from Cuba. In this interview, Omme speaks with Nin Paglicia from the Canada Network on Cuba about the work of Cuban doctors in Haiti and the international Cuban doctors program.

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Original audio source (2070-1-cuba_doctors_in_haiti.mp3)

VIDEO Haitian/Cuban doctors offer medical expertise; not guns and soliders

Haitian and Cuban doctors help to bring some sense of humanity to the Haitian tragedy. Instead of guns and soldiers they’re offering their medical expertise.

 

Since the election of President Obama, there has been no change whatsoever in the implementation of the blockade

SPEECH BY FOREIGN MINISTER BRUNO RODRÍGUEZ PARRILLA AT THE UNITED NATIONSGENERAL ASSEMBLY UNDER THE ITEM "NECESSITY OF ENDING THE ECONOMIC, COMMERCIAL AND FINANCIAL EMBARGO IMPOSED BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AGAINST CUBA".

(NEW YORK, OCTOBER 28, 2009)

Mr. President,

Permanent Representatives and Delegates,

Alexis García Iribar was born in Cuba, in the province of Guantánamo. He suffered from a congenital cardiopathy known as persistent arterial duct. At the age of 6 and after successive deferrals and hemodynamic complications, he had to be submitted to an open-heart surgery on March 9, 2009, because the government of the United States prevents the US companies NUMED, AGA and Boston Scientific from selling to Cuba the ‘amplatzer’ and ‘embolization coil’ devices required to perform a catheterization that will spare children from this type of surgery. I could mention another 12 cases of children between the ages of 5 months and 13 years who have had to undergo a similar procedure in the course of the last one and a half years –two of them underwent surgery after last January 20.

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AUDIO: The Cuban Five

Steal This Radio #91

Attorney Leonard Weinglass discusses the trials and tribulations of the Cuban Five. The show first aired on Tuesday August 11.

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Original audio source (10.07.09.STR.91.mp3)

Learning from Cuba's Footprint [ Robyn Francis]

Robyn Francis’ presentation at the Climate Emergency Conference, Adelaide, October 2008. The article contains a selection of slides from the accompanying visual presentation.

This presentation shares observations from a 40-day exchange visit to Cuba, Apr 28-Jun 6, 2008, visiting 40 permaculture and related projects throughout Cuba. The visit was funded by the Cuba-Australia Permaculture Exchange) CAPE, a project of Erda Institute in Australia and my Cuban host organisation was the Foundation for Nature & humanity, based in Havana.

The 2007 State of the Planet report from the World Wildlife Fund identified Cuba as the only nation on earth living within its ecological footprint and at the same time achieving a high standard in the United Nations Human Development Index. I was curious to see and experience ‘first hand’ a society living within its ecological footprint . Hence this presentation is titled Target One Earth – living within our footprint, what we can learn from Cuba.

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Fidel Castro: A revolution is being born there

By Fidel Castro Ruz

ON July 16, I stated textually that the coup d’état in Honduras "was conceived of and organized by unscrupulous individuals on the extreme right, dependable officials of George W. Bush and promoted by him."

I quoted the names of Hugo Llorens, Robert Blau, Stephen McFarland and Robert Callahan, yanki ambassadors in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, appointed by Bush in the months of July and August of 2008, the four of them following the line of John Negroponte and Otto Reich, both of a shady history.

I indicated the yanki base of Soto Cano [Palmerola] as a central support point for the coup d’état and that "the idea of the a peace initiative from Costa Rica was transmitted to the president of that country from the State Department when Obama was in Moscow and stated, in a Russian university, that the only president of Honduras was Manuel Zelaya." I added that "the Costa Rica meeting called into question the authority of the UN, the OAS and other institutions which had committed their support to the people of Honduras and that the only correct thing to do was to demand that the United States should end its intervention in Honduras and withdraw the Joint Task Force from that country."

The response of the United States in the wake of the coup d’état in that Central American country has been to draw up an agreement with the government of Colombia for the creation of seven military bases, like the one in Soto Cano in that sister country, which are a threat to Venezuela, Brazil and all the other nations of South America.

At a critical moment, when the tragedy of climate change and the international economic crisis is being discussed in a summit meeting of heads of state of the United Nations, the coup perpetrators in Honduras are threatening to violate the immunity of the Brazilian embassy, where President Manuel Zelaya, his family and a group of his followers who were forced to take shelter in that building are to be found.

It has been confirmed that the government of Brazil had nothing whatsoever to do with the situation that has been created there.

It is therefore inadmissible, moreover inconceivable, that the Brazilian embassy should be assaulted by the fascist government, unless that government is attempting to be the instrument of its own suicide by dragging the country into a direct invasion by foreign forces, as was the case in Haiti, which would signify a direct invasion of yanki troops under the flag of the United Nations. Honduras is not a distant and isolated country in the Caribbean. An intervention by foreign forces in Honduras would unleash a conflict in Central America and create political chaos in all of Latin America.

The heroic struggle of the Honduran people after almost 90 days of incessant battling has placed in crisis the fascist and pro-yanki government that is repressing unarmed men and women.

We have seen a new awareness emerge in the Honduran people. An entire legion of social fighters has been hardened in that battle. Zelaya fulfilled his promise to return. He has the right to be reestablished in government and to preside over the elections. New and admirable cadres are standing out among the combative social movements, capable of leading that nation along the difficult roads that await the peoples of Our America. A revolution is being born there.

The UN Assembly could be a historic one, depending on its correct decisions or errors.

World leaders have expounded issues of great interest and complexity. They reflect the magnitude of the tasks that humanity has ahead of it and how scant the time available is.


September 24, 2009

Cuba Undertakes Reforms in Midst of Economic Crisis

By Roger Burbach

September 20, 2009

Carlos picks me up with his dated Soviet-made Lada at the Jose Marti International Airport on a hot sweltering day in Havana. It’s been eight months since I’ve seen him, last January to be precise, when I came to the island on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. “How’s it been?” I ask him as we begin the 20 minute drive to central Havana. With a scowl, he replies: “Not so good, nothing seems to get easier.” He goes on to say that foodstuffs are as difficult as ever to come by, necessitating long waits in line for rationed commodities.

I am not surprised, as I had been reading in the international press that Cuba has been compelled to curtail its food imports. Hit by the global economic crisis, spending by tourists dropped off while the price of nickel, Cuba’s main mineral export, fell by more than half. This meant that Cuba has no choice but to cut agricultural imports from its main supplier, the United States. Credit purchases are not an option, as the U.S. legislation in 2000, opening up agricultural sales to Cuba, requires immediate payment in hard currency.

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Graph-- Cuban figures:Source: EarthTrends, 2008

CRIME FICTION: Havana Red -- Padura's quest for meaning

Havana Red by Leonardo Padura Fuentes

Unfortunately I'm still missing one volume in Padura's Havana Quartet so I cannot make a ruling on the 'set' overall. However, Havana Red -- the first in the series -- is the most thoughtful.

Leonardo Padura is a remarkable novelist not only in the way he engages his themes but also in the way he constructs his stories.

Superficially, the Havana Quartet is made up of 4 stories about the Havana police inspector, Mario Conde, who is depicted as a contemporary hard boiled investigator, a la Philip Marlowe. He even comes across as a bit of a gender dinosaur fueled by plenty of Cuban machismo (and rum). But this impression, seductive as it may be in delivering to your hands some Latin pulp fiction exotic, is deceptive.

For one thing Padura doesn't write to rule. The plot and the murder that justifies the plotting is really a frame to hang a discourse on about Cuban society. To do this Padura utilizes some creative effects which turn his novels into drama and like some ancient Greek play, you get treated to these long monologues articulating much more that what supposedly is a record of a police interrogation .

Padura does indeed call his novels 'metaphors' and after you've read a few of them you get the meaning of the fictional journey much sooner than if you were only reading with relaxation in mind.

In that regard, Havana Red is the most sophisticated of the three I've read from the quartet. While it certainly deserves its numerous literary prizes, Padura also has a mission other than a purely literary one. He deploys the 'Count' -- Conde's nickname -- as a excuse to explore the Cuban approach to homosexuality and creative freedom.

In the novel, a gay character had suffered much for his sexual preference and his avant-garde approach to the theatre. This tragedy, which reflects the actual impact of some approaches that were pursued in the early seventies, is the montage that deepens the political and social meaning of the murder of a young transvestite.

Anyone familiar with the history of homophobia in Cuba should recognize that "Latin machismo, Catholic bigotry, and anti-gay Stalinism combined in the early years of the Revolution to limit specific legal reforms for lesbians and gays." What Padura does is try to draw up an accounting of that as it relates to , what was, when the novel was published, the early nineties. This quest for meaning in the context of the actual revolution as is -- warts and all -- is the most exciting and , I think, creative feature of Padura's writing.

I think a lot of readers may miss this insightful approach to these topics and read Padura's works as throwaway paper backs. But there's real artistry here, and there is a lot more than story telling being told. I think Padura has been able to take the crime novel into the realm of a broader significance without being in the least bit polemical about it. In doing that he launches into a discussion with his generation of Cubans.

This isn't the intense outcry of angry young men and women, in the protest way we are used to in our capitalism. Mario Conde's mission -- one fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, sex and an obsessive sense of righteousness-- is a quest for identity.

Cuba's organiponicos -- it's cool to dig!

The BBC has a interesting short presentation on Permaculture in Cuba: The vegetable gardeners of Havan

Havana has almost 200 urban allotments - known as organiponicos - providing four million tonnes of vegetables every year - helping the country to become 90% self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables...

If you check out the permaculture Label here on Leftclick You'll access much more about this phenomenon.

But hey! The Cubans have made so radically chic to be a red green thumb as my a refit of my own kitchen garden (pic above) attests. I call it Little Havana.

It's now so very cool to dig!

CRIME FICTION:Leonardo Padura Fuentes: the imperialist vulture and the making of Havana Noir

Havana Black: A Lieutenant Mario Conde Mystery by Leonardo Padura Fuentes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I intend to write a more general review of the crime fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes on another occasion.While I'm no expert on Cuban literature I'm going back and forth between Padura and those fellow crime writes, unlike Padura, such as José Latour, who have turned their back on the revolution in order to get a feel for the fictional dialogue that is in motion.

And it is fascinating -- almost, in its own way, unique. If there is indeed a Havana Noir driven by evil and violence -- where is that coming from? What's its root source? I mean, what's the motivation for the criminal deeds?

If you are going to write crime fiction set in Cuba what crimes do you invent to tell your story?

I'm not suggesting that Cuba is free of crime but you'd expect the crime pattern to be a little different from what we may be used to in our comfortable capitalisms. What's also fascinating is how politically engaged these novels are in the way that their narratives are played out within the chronology of the Cuban experience -- the 1959 revolution, the relentless blockade, the Angolan war, Marielistas and the exile community in Miami, etc.

And bearing down, investing the cultural context with a very dark noir, is the impact of "the Special Period" and the consequential growth of income disparities and the Black Market.

So in a remarkable way, Cuba today is ripe for crime fiction because it is ripe for crime in the plebeian way it has not been for some time.

While we so often associate crime fiction with a sort of decayed cynical capitalism, wherein the state op or the PI explores crime as a symptom of a broader decay, in Cuba the same etiology prevails. And inasmuch as I've read enough stuff to make a ruling, inevitably the criminal experiences there -- both for real and in the writer's imagination -- are skewed by the refraction of Cuba's experience of the festering sore of imperialism which bears down upon the island like an opportunistic vulture -- performing at one and the same time the role as promised land and as brutal master who can so often only be embraced through some form of corruption.

This isn't so very hard to comprehend. Any Cuban knows that to survive in the belly of the neighbour to the north, you'll need gringo dollars and to accumulate those in Cuba ain't an easy ask.So what you see is this back and forth ambivalence in regard to the US threat and the US promise. It aint easy to primitively accumulate capital in Cuba so exile isn't a easy or necessarily clean way out of the rigors and deprivations of the "Special Period".

But embedded among all this is, in the case of Leonardo Padura Fuentes at least, is the frustrated aspirations of Cuba's 'lost generation' -- those like the post war baby boomers who enjoyed the fruits of the 59 revolution, only to yanker for more of what they cannot quite put their finger on. In that sense, Havana Noir -- esp Padura's novels of the Inspector Conde quartet -- panders to the frustrations and pessimism of a revolution now stuck in a sort of historical idle mode.

The Conde quartet -- the four seasons comprise:

• Pasado perfecto ("Havana Blue", 2007), 1991
• Vientos de cuaresma ("Havana Yellow", 2008)), 1994
• Mascaras ("Havana Red", 2005), 1997
• Paisaje de otoño ("Havana Black", 2006), 1998.

CRIME FICTION:Cuba: crime fiction and free health care

Detectives Beyond Borders: A Forum for International Crime Fiction --Peter Rozovsky's self evident musings on crime fiction has some interesting comments about the Cuban crime writer, Jose Latour.

I've not read any of this Cuban exile's novels but Rozovsky digs up a quote from his latest, Comrades in Havanna that's worth a hearty scoff :

"Under capitalism, many nations had achieved what he had been led to believe only communist societies could: free education and health care."

Cuban artists (and sportspeople) who high tail it outter there for big bucks elsewhere always play up to the role assigned to them by the US ideological template -- while always failing to note that their experience of recognition and encouragement of their achievements relied so much on the conditions of the very process they now professionally denigrate.

This actual situation is touched on in a comment and interview with Leonardo Padura, in the ShotsMag crime fiction zine, who is referred to as Cuba's Hammett -- and the Godfather of crime fiction on the island:

For those who tend to support the revolution blindly and those who tend to attack it from a position of ideological ignorance, this book should be particularly challenging. For it is clear that Padura is a critical voice from within. At times the sarcasm and behaviour of his policeman indicates an almost heretical attitude. Yet Padura remains in Cuba and is celebrated, certainly by the artistic community and the general population, as one of the nation’s greatest authors.

Padura’s presence in the island and his novels are a great achievement because they illustrate that Cuban socialism is not as repressive as its enemies claim it to be, while at the same time showing that Cuba is perhaps not as perfect as some of its friends might want us to believe.

Padura’s Havana is a heterogeneous place, where the macro politics of the Cold War, the blockade and the confrontation with the United States is not mentioned but broods ominously behind the text where the characteristic scarcities and contradictions of the 1990s are ever present. Padura’s reality is thus carefully nuanced and not easily bracketed into any ideological point of view.

In a sense therefore, Padura exemplifies the maturity of Cuban socialism in that it has been able to produce an author of such ability and education (his influences are wide-ranging - from Shakespeare to Salinger, Cervantes to Montalban, Mozart to Lennon) who is able to create a credible fictional Cuban world that is recognisable to visitors and Cubans alike and which is relevant to the times we are living through.

Some Cuban politicians might feel uncomfortable reading these stories, but then that is precisely the kind of popular literature that Gramsci called for. True art, said Gramsci, is about depicting life as it is now - whereas politics is always about some great future that is going to be. For that reason, he explained, the politician would always be at loggerheads with the artist.

Padura is such an artist. He makes the reader sit up and think, using the medium of the detective story not to propagandise but to philosophise. His novels might be described as morality tales for the post-Soviet era.

In case you are thinking that I'm too black and white, Rozovsky notes another segment of Latour's novel as a reflection on what's on offer for Cubans from the outside 'forces of democracy' if they retake the country:

One of the defectors, a central figure in the novel:"`But we've reflected on the excesses of democracy and the shortcomings of communism a hundred times. Are we going to do something about it? No, right? So leave it to the naive dissidents who risk their freedom, maybe even their lives. They haven't figured out that when communism falls, Cuban-Americans will give them a medal and a pension before rigging the elections and taking charge. Politics sucks, Victoria."

VIDEO:Urban food growing in Havanna, Cuba

A clip from the BBC's "Around the World in 80 Gardens" (2008) showing some of the urban food gardening in Havana, Cuba. This series began last Tuesday night on ABC TV. Its' a fascinating series but the Havanna segment is especially potent.

I shared this a year ago, but if you missed the segment here it is.

FLEXABLE POLITICAL WILL

The biggest enabling factor for the success and eventual integration of the work was flexable political will. This is especially true when it comes to land-use policy. Support for sustainable food systems came direct from the top (Fidel) and laws were altered and practises adapted that suited the development of urban agriculture. Roberto noted that this type of change is not so easy in a capitalist system where land has, what he described as, 'different value'. A good example of this flexability is the clearing and cleaning of vacant lots in Havana. As is common in Britian, vacacnt city lots in Havana gathered rubbish and debris (especially in the 1980s). Masses of red tape and petty quarrels between neighbours often kept these lots in a state of dis-repair. Changes in policy allowed these lots to be cleared and used for gardens. Roberto says that in other countries this would probably never happen. In other countries we often see vacant lots gathering rubbish with chain link fences around them preventing any useful use! In Cuba land only has value related to its usefulness, rather than speculative value.

--Robeto Perez

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil --great documentary on the Cuban experience.

about “The Power of Community: How Cuba Surv…“, posted with vodpod

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Cuba's Energy Revolution

A new revolution is sweeping the island of Cuba, which is making massive progress on energy efficiency and renewable generation. Indeed, such is the success of the two-year old programme on this small island of 11 million people, that many other countries could learn from its efforts to be energy independent and curb climate change. Laurie Guevara-Stone reports

Tip: Left I on the News