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June 2, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
June 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
The
Strange Math of Roberto Carlos: Brazil v. Turkey
Gavin Keeney
Bush and Mies van der Rohe:
Architecture and Ideology
Jeff Halper
Sharon's
Post-Incursion Plan:
Incarceration or Transfer?
Walt Brasch
Crumpling the Constitution
May 31, 2002
Rev. Sandra Olewine
Land Grabs and Occupation:
Silent Destruction of Palestine
James Dunlop
Russian
Colonel:
"Insane But Fit for Duty"
Chomsky / Bennett
Debating "Terrorism"
May 30, 2002
Steve Perry
Jim Carrey:
"Love Me!"
Tom Turnipseed
Sex Among the Sacred
George Monbiot
Corporate
Phantoms
Web of Deciet over GM Foods
Robert Jensen
Are You a Journalist
or a Patriot?
Gary Leupp
Georgia
and the War on Terror
May 29, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Age of Inequality
Philip Farruggio
The
Cleaning Lady
Bill Christison
Disastrous US Foreign Policy:
Part 2, Globalization
May 28, 2002
Michael Leon
Lincoln
Brigades Memorial
Scott Lucas
Christopher Hitchens:
No Longer an Authentic
Voice of Dissent
Nelson P. Valdes
Castro,
Bioterrorism and
the State Department
Harvey Wasserman
What Does the White House Know
About Atomic Terror?
Norman Madarasz
France,
Brazil, the Politics
of the World Cup
May 27, 2002
Dave Marsh
Why I Voted for Nader:
Ticketmaster's Stranglehold
on Music and Politics
Robert Fisk
The Coming
Firestorm:
Bush's Crazed Remarks
May 26, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Diary of a Northwest Trip:
Why Reds Live Longer
May 25, 2002
Chris Floyd
General
Principles:
Unmasking Colin Powell
Gavin Keeney
All Politics is Local? The Unbearable
Lightness of NGO's
Jeffrey St. Clair
A Hero
of Our Time:
Stephen Jay Gould
May 24, 2002
Edward Hammond
Documents Prove Pentagon Violated
Bioweapons Act
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
Beginning of the End?
Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
CIA Analyst:
Big Changes Needed in
US Intelligence Agencies
May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
The Real Bush is Back
Susan Abulhawa
Israel
and South Africa:
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
of a Middle Eastern Migrant: Accosted at the Border
May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
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Cockburn
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The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
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The New Intifada:
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June 2,
2002
From FDR to
Mister "W.":
Cuba, the US and Democracy
by Fidel Castro
On May 20, the day of the shameful show in Miami,
it was ironic to listen to Mr. W. Bush claim strongly for independence
and freedom, not for Puerto Rico but for Cuba; and to talk much
about democracy, not for Florida but for Cuba. Mr. W. made a
special point of defending private property, as if it did not
exist in Cuba.
I then realized that years pass. The
days are really far now when a man spoke from his wheelchair
with a soft voice and a persuasive accent. He spoke as a President
of the United States of America and he inspired respect. It
was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He did not speak like a showoff
or a thug, nor was the United States the hegemonic hyperpower
it is today. At that time, Ethiopia had been occupied. The bloody
Spanish Civil War had begun. China was being invaded and nazi-fascism
was a threat to the world. Roosevelt, who I think was a real
statesman, was striving to steer his country away from a dangerous
isolationism.
I was then a sixth or seventh grader.
I was 12 or 13 years old. I had been born deep in the countryside,
where there was no electricity. Sometimes the only way to get
there was riding a horse through very muddy dirt roads. Back
then, I spent most of the year in a rigid and segregationist
boarding school in Santiago--that is, in sexual apartheid,
where the boys were kept at great distance from the girls, in
schools that were light-years away from each other- with several
interspersed holidays and a longer vacation in summer time when
I came to Biran.
Those of us who were privileged could
have shoes, clothes and be well fed; however, a sea of poverty
surrounded us. I don't know how large is Mr. W's Texas ranch.
I do remember that my father had over 24,700 acres of farmland.
Of course, that meant hardly anything as extensive areas, between
272,710 and 284,245 acres, surrounded the family land owned
by the West Indies Sugar Company and the United Fruit Company.
I remember that when it was announced
that the President of the United States would speak it was tantamount
to saying that God would speak. And it was only natural, since
everything came from there: the beautiful, the good and the
useful things, from a razor blade to a locomotive; from a postcard
of the Statue of Liberty to one of those Western films, which
fascinated both children and adults.
Moreover, "it was from there that
our freedom and independence had come". That was what the
dozens of thousands of farm laborers and farmers with no land
of their own were told in those areas where they could only
work part of the year cleaning or cutting sugar cane. They went
hungry and barefoot, dressed in rags and lived in terror of
the 'rural guard' --a special force created by the administrators
of the country and armed with Springfield rifles and long and
thin machetes that became famous. They also used to wear big
hats and ride seven-foot-Texas horses that scared with their
imposing sizes our undernourished workers ruthlessly suppressed
by those guards, if they as much as threatened to revolt or
go on strike.
In those immensely extensive fields,
where there were huts, thatched-roof shacks, impoverished villages
and sugar mills, it was hard to find a single very poor classroom
for the 200 or 300 children who lived in the area; there were
no books, very few school materials and sometimes not even a
teacher. It was only in the hamlets that sprang up around the
big sugar mills that there were one or two physicians who basically
cared for the families of the foreign sugar companies' local
managers and senior operatives.
On the other hand, a rather strange character
could be easily found everywhere. He had no more than a third
or a fourth grade of grammar school, but that meant being practically
a wise man as compared to the masses of illiterates. He was
often a godfather of somebody's child and an occasional visitor
of the families living in the countryside. He was in charge
of things related to elections. He obtained the peoples' ID
cards and the promise of their votes; he was the politician's
crony. The people in the countryside did not intend to sell
their votes, but rather help "their friend". With
few exceptions, the candidates with most money in their chests,
who could hire more political cronies, won the races either
for national legislative office or for other county or provincial
elective positions. If any of those elections was intended
to change the President, --never the political or social system,
which was unthinkable-- and if there was any conflict of interests,
it was the rural guard that decided who the new leaders would
be.
Most of our people were either illiterate
or semi-illiterate and they depended on a miserable job arbitrarily
handled by an employer or an elected official. The people had
no choice, as they even lacked the minimum indispensable knowledge
to decide on the increasingly complex issues of this world.
As for the history of our homeland, they
only knew the legend passed down by the grandparents and the
parents about past heroic struggles fought in the colonial days;
eventually, it was fortunate that it was that way. As for the
traditional political parties, where the oligarchies that served
the empire prevailed, how could our people understand them?
Who could teach them?
Where could they read about it? With
what alphabet? How could that information be passed on?
The brilliant and heroic effort of the
leftist intellectuals of the time, who made remarkable progress
under those circumstances, clashed with the insurmountable walls
of a new imperial system and the centuries old experience of
the ruling classes to keep the peoples oppressed, exploited,
confused and divided.
The only property right known by most
Cubans before 1959 was the right of the big foreign companies
and their allies of the national oligarchy to own enormous amounts
of farmland in our country, as well as the country's natural
resources and biggest factories, the crucial public services,
the banks, the storage facilities, the ports, the hospitals
and the private schools that served with excellence a negligible
minority of privileged population.
As fate would have it, I was honored
to be born precisely in the territory of this province, in a
place that is 33.5 miles in a straight line from this Plaza,
but which is very close to my memory, hardly ten millimeters
or ten seconds from my mind.
In those enormous sugar cane fields,
I could only see dozens of thousands of farmers with no land
to till or sharecroppers paying huge rents but without any contracts
to back the arrangement, and constantly threatened and evicted
by those riders of Texan horses.
In the cities, very few owned their dwellings
for which they had to pay very high rents. I never saw hospitals
or schools for ordinary people and their children; I did not
see brigades of doctors and teachers. I only saw extreme poverty,
injustice and hopelessness everywhere. The Cuban people had
been confiscated and stripped of any property.
It was imperative to resume the struggle.
The chains had to be broken. A deep revolution was indispensable.
We had to be willing to either win or die for it. And we decided
to fight.
The socialist revolution has created
in Cuba more property owners than all those created by capitalism
throughout centuries. Today, hundreds of thousands of peasant
families own their land, for which they do not even pay taxes.
Others have it in usufruct, free of charge, and they exploit
it either individually or in cooperatives; they are the owners
of the machinery, the workshops, the livestock and other goods.
But, most important of all is that the Revolution gave the people
the property of their own country. What the Revolution eradicated
was the property of the basic means of production, of the financial
institutions and of other crucial services which were in the
hands of those who plundered and exploited the people --and
made fortunes on the workers' sweat-- or that only served the
rich and the privileged, leaving the poor and the black people
out.
The nostalgia over their property that
the leader of an imperial government might feel could be overcome
by seeing that, in addition to the farmers, millions of families
in the cities presently own their dwellings, for which they
do not even pay taxes.
Out of a historical necessity to leave
behind a legacy of underdevelopment, Cuba shares with foreign
companies those productions that it would not have access to
with its own technologies and funds, but no international financial
institution or foreign private capital can determine over our
destiny.
Nor does a single penny end up in Castro's
pockets or those of his followers. No senior Cuban revolutionary
leader has a dollar in a bank, or a personal bank account in
hard currency in Cuba or anywhere else. None of them can be
bribed. The hundreds of foreign companies doing business in
Cuba today know that very well. None of our leaders is a millionaire
like the President of the United States, whose monthly wage
is almost twice that of all the members of the State Council
and the Council of Ministers in a year. None can be included
in the long list of Mr. W's neoliberal friends in Latin America
who are Olympic champions of misappropriation and theft since
the few who do not steal from the public coffers and State taxes
steal from the poor and the hungry the surplus value of their
work while killing hundreds of thousands of Latin American children
every year whose lives could be saved. That is the system that
Mr. W. longs to impose on Cuba as a model. His insults are
unwarranted, thus, he should not complain from our tough responses.
The end of the exploitation of human
beings and true equality and justice is, and will be, the objective
of a Revolution that will never cease to be what it is.
The work of the Revolution has been remarkable
all over the country, and huge in the dear and heroic eastern
region, which was the poorest and most backward. Of the five
eastern provinces, the hree --Holguin, Granma and Las Tunas--
that have sent more than 400,000 combative and enthusiastic
people to this rally, have attained in a few years social and
human achievements unparalleled in the world.
Some data of what they had before and
what they have after the triumph of the Revolution:
Infant mortality rate: before, over 100
per one thousand live births; today, 5.9, well below the United
States. Life expectancy at birth: before, 57 years; today, 76.
Number of doctors: before, 344; today, 10, 334. Health units:
before, 46; today, 4,006. Hospital beds: before, 1,470; today,
over 12,000. Schoolteachers: before, 1,682; today, 77,479.
Universities: before, 0; today, 12. Illiteracy rate: before,
40.3%; today, 0.2%. Grammar school graduates: before, 10% of
only 34 percent of children in school age who attended public
school; today, one hundred percent of children attend grammar
school and 99.9% graduate. TV sets for audiovisual education:
before, 0; today, 13,394. PCs for computer science education
from kindergarten to sixth grade: 5,563 that benefit 237,510
children.
Over 27,000 youths between the ages of
17 and 29, who had no jobs, are studying middle and higher education
in recently established Schools for the Comprehensive Education
of the Youth, for which they receive remuneration.
These three provinces have 62 museums,
62 cultural centers, 21 art galleries and 72 libraries.
Every child in Cuba, regardless of his
parents' income and the color of his skin, has high quality
health care services ensured from his birth until the end of
his life. The same applies to education, from kindergarten up
until graduation as a PhD, and that absolutely free of charge.
No other country in Latin America gets
even remotely close to Cuba in any of these indicators. In Cuba,
there is not one single child begging in the streets or working
to make a living instead of attending school. Nor are there
narcotics that poison and destroy teenagers and young people.
This is not a tyranny, as Mr. W. has
claimed. It is justice, it is true equality among human beings,
it is general learning and culture without which there is not,
there cannot be nor will there ever be true independence, freedom
and democracy anywhere on Earth.
Mr. W. should be ashamed to call those
societies where corruption, inequality and injustice prevail,
and which are being destroyed by the neoliberal model, examples
of independence, freedom and democracy!
For Mr. W. democracy only exists where
money solves everything and where those who can afford a $25,000
a plate dinner --an insult to the billions of people living
in the poor, hungry and underdeveloped world-- are the ones
called to solve the problems of society and the world, the same
that will determine the fate of a great nation like the United
States, and the rest of the planet.
Don't you be a fool, Mr. W. Show some
respect for the minds of people who are capable of thinking.
Read some of the 100 thousand letters sent to you by our children.
Do not insult Jose Marti. Do not invoke his sacred name in vain.
Stop using his phrases out of context in your speeches. Show
some respect for others and for yourself.
The criminal blockade he has promised
to tighten will only multiply the honor and glory of our people
against which their wicked plans will smash, I assure you.
Compatriots: In the face of dangers and
threats, long live today more than ever the Socialist Revolution!
Patria o muerte!
Venceremos!
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