FRFI 216 August/September 2010

The lion roars: Fidel Castro warns of danger of US and Israeli aggression

On 12 July, Fidel Castro, commander-in-chief of the Cuban Revolution, made his first live television appearance in five years. HELEN YAFFE reports from Havana.

In an interview on the daily live current affairs programme, Mesa Redonda (‘Round Table’), Fidel analysed current US and Israeli hostilities against Iran, warning that they could result in a brutal and possibly nuclear conflagration. This has been the recent focus of his regular Reflections, which are read around the world. Fidel has also been highly visible on visits to research centres and the Havana aquarium, talking to workers, scientists, economists and enthusiastic supporters.

When Fidel roars the world listens, including his enemies in Washington and Miami. Despite stepping down from government in 2005, Fidel has felt impelled to alert the world to the dangerous machinations underway as part of US imperialism’s strategy to maintain global military supremacy, exploiting that force, and the threat of force, as a basis for economic and political domination. This gunboat diplomacy is augmented as the US’s economic situation deteriorates. Israel, ‘a country which has turned into a nuclear power within a few years,’ is its firm ally in the Middle East, and according to Fidel, exercises influence over the US (Fidel Castro, Mesa Redonda, reported in Granma 13 July 2010).

Cubans listened attentively to the analysis and commented with pride on seeing the Revolution’s leader stronger and healthier than in the previous five years: ‘He’s recharged his batteries!’ Fidel’s June Reflections addressed the accusation by South Korea, and its puppet masters in the White House and the Pentagon, that a North Korean torpedo had sunk a South Korean ship, killing 46 of its crew. Fidel cast doubts on how North Korea’s 50-year-old torpedoes could destroy such a modern sophisticated ship, produced by the US industrial military complex with ‘materials which are not sold to North Korea’ which, like Cuba, is subject to a US trade blockade.

While many around the world were distracted by the World Cup, Fidel warned that the US and Israeli war ships were heading for Iran and alerted the world to the dangerous outcome of such a provocation. He used his Mesa Redonda appearance on 12 July, to point out that Iran would not submit to US and Israeli pressure and threats. ‘To calculate on the basis that [Ahmadinejad] will go running to the Yankees ask for forgiveness is absurd’ he said. Citing the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Fidel detailed the grotesque increment of military spending in the US, which in 2009 was $1,531 billion, an increase of 49% since 2000.

The ‘nuclear ambitions’ pretext for aggression against Iran was risible, said Fidel, given the world’s nuclear powers have an arsenal of 20,000 such weapons. Fidel pointed out that Cuba had experience of the threat of nuclear attack, having lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 as well as the very real fear in the 1980s that apartheid South Africa had nuclear weapons and was prepared to use them against Cuban forces in Angola.

On 7 July, Fidel visited the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNIC), which investigates biomedical and technological solutions to economic and social problems in Cuba, produces internationally traded products and has trained 20,000 specialists in its 45 years. Workers rushed over to greet him and take photographs on their mobile phones – images emailed around the world.

On 13 July, Fidel visited the Centre for Research into the World Economy where he discussed with Cuban economists the threat to humanity resulting from the destruction of the environment and the danger of a new war in the Middle East. He called on them to carry out an intensive study to analyse the response of ‘the countries of our America’ in the event of such a scenario. On 14 July, Fidel went to the aquarium in Havana, meeting trainers, vets and other workers there – including a daughter of Che Guevara – and their children.

Fidel is taking the threat posed by imperialist aggression in the Middle East and against North Korea extremely seriously, and we would be wise to take note. He has taken up again his position in the trenches, ready to do his part in defending Cuban socialism and humanity from the rapacious destruction wreaked by capitalism in crisis.

News in brief

US increases funding for subversion

On 7 June 2010, the US Congress agreed to release $15 million to finance subversive operations in Cuba, funds which had been retained in early 2009 following the discovery by the US Government Accountability Office of a multimillion dollar fraud involving well-known members of the Cuban-American mafia. Examples of the corruption include one government aide, Felipe Sixto, who ‘disappeared’ half a million dollars provided for his organisation by the US Agency of International Development (USAID).

According to the Miami press, over the next few months, the Department of State and USAID will distribute these funds within Cuba to agents employed by the US Interest Section, using ‘contract’ intermediaries. (Jean-Gay Allard, El Nuevo Herald). President Obama has named Mark Feierstein as Latin America director of USAID. Feierstein has form for managing campaigns of political subversion. In 2002, he acted as campaign strategist for murderous Bolivian president Gonzalo ‘Goni’ Sanchez de Lozada, responsible for a bloody massacre during the gas war the following year. As ‘project manager’ for the National Endowment for Democracy in Nicaragua, he worked on the dirty operations that eventually helped overthrow the Sandinista government in 1990.

Spain calls for end to EU sanctions

On 7 July the Cuban government announced, after holding talks with Cuba’s Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, that it would release 52 so-called ‘political prisoners’. The announcement triggered a field day for the bourgeois press to attack Cuba on the manufactured issue of ‘human rights. In the lead was The Guardian, which never misses an opportunity to take a potshot at the socialist island.

On 8 July it described the majority of prisoners as having been imprisoned after ‘an anti-democratic crackdown in 2003’: the article fails to mention that they were in fact convicted of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the US to carry out subversive activities against the state. Nor does the article point out that ‘dissident’ Orlando Tamayo, who died on hunger strike earlier this year, was in prison for a non-political violent crime in 2004, and had never carried out anti-government activities until he found himself in prison. Guillermo Farinas, described as a ‘prisoner’ on hunger strike, in fact launched his protest from his home in Santa Clara.

Seven of those released have arrived in Spain with their families – where anti-Cuban activists have been lining up to meet them, promote their counter-revolutionary propaganda and oppose calls by the Foreign Minister for the EU to normalise relations with Cuba. ‘I think there is no reason to maintain a Common Position any longer,’ Moratinos said. ‘I expect my European colleagues to now respond.’

Mobile phones

Cuba now has more mobile phone lines than landlines, according to the Telecommunications Enterprise ETECSA. There are 1,004,000 landlines in Cuba, serving a population of over 11 million, compared to 1,007,000 mobile phone lines, the majority of which were set up in 2008 when access was opened up to Cuban nationals. The cost of registration has been reduced by 80% since then and call charges have also fallen. More investments in telecommunications will continue to reduce the costs of registration and mobile phone calls.

Drought hampers import substitution plans

Since November 2008, drought has severely affected water supplies to half a million people and damaged food production, leading to scarcity and price rises in certain staples, fruits and vegetables. The drought has coincided with the planned reduction of imports, as part of a strategy to reduce the balance of payments deficit and Cuba’s vulnerability to volatile world market prices, particularly for food and fuel.

In mid-July water reservoirs were at 57% of their capacity nationwide although recent, much needed rain has now improved the agricultural outlook.

Goods imports were reduced by 37% in 2009 from 2008. Imports from Canada fell almost 49%, and by around 36% from both Spain and Venezuela. Imports from the US, which totalled $675,420 in 2009, saw a reduction of 30% on the previous year. As a result of the US blockade, trade with the US is one-way and limited to agricultural products which were permitted as a ‘humanitarian’ exception following a hurricane which hit the island in 2000. Today the US is Cuba’s fifth most important source of imports behind Venezuela, China, Spain and Canada.

The liquidity crisis resulting from Cuba’s balance of payments problems was exacerbated by three destructive hurricanes which battered the island in late 2008, costing the country $10 billion.