Today's Stories

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Posada, the Exiles and the CIA Failed

Cuba Will Live

By SAUL LANDAU

At a May 2 dinner in Miami hundreds of Cuban exiles, the vast majority of them in the Viagra generation, feted Luis Posada Carriles. This homage to the man suspected of masterminding the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that blew up over Barbados in October 1976 attracted a well known, aging radio personality. Tomas Garcia Fuste described Posada as “a real hero who has spent his life fighting for the freedom of Cuba.” Fuste, who attended the dinner, said “Posada saw from the beginning that Fidel was a communist and began his heroic fight against him.”

One of the dinner’s organizers called Posada “a great Cuban ... a great patriot who has suffered a lot.” Several of those interviewed denied Posada had authored the airplane sabotage that killed all 73 passengers and crew members, even though the actual perpetrators of the bombing identified him to police. Other evidence pointed directly to Posada. His adorers also discounted facts showing he had orchestrated bombings of Cuban tourist centers in the late 1990s. One tourist died; scores of others suffered injuries. Posada lovers in Miami blamed the Cuban government for destroying its own airplane “to create martyrs” and “staging” the tourist bombings “to get sympathy.”

If Posada didn’t plan these events, does he deserve the “combatiente legendario” honor only for his failed assassination plots against Fidel?

Posada and the crowd of retired lawyers, businessmen and professionals in Miami spoke of fighting to restore freedom to Cuba. Did no one recall that Posada worked as a Batista police agent? Had the crowd at the Posada fete forgotten that Batista staged a coup to grab the presidency in 1952? That his repressive forces killed 20,000 until the revolutionaries overthrew them?  Posada’s vision of a good society means returning to the good old Batista days –without internal turmoil. What a gap between their perspective and the Cuba that exists 90 miles from the Florida coast!

After fifty years, aspirations of those who still want to recover their property, perks and privileges grow ever dimmer. Posada, slurring his words badly as a result of damage done by a gunman who shot him in the face fifteen years ago, said: “We are coming to the end of a terrible stage. The end of our struggle is near.” Applause! -Since the 1991 Soviet collapse, Cubans have lived through a “special period,” the euphemism that meant drastic decline in living standards. Cuba lost its annual Soviet aid of billions of rubles and its advantageous trade with Soviet bloc nations. The state had to break its part of the social contract: it could no longer provide Cubans with sufficient food and clothing. Even the fabled health care and education deteriorated. Rations were reduced and most Cubans experienced a social morph from communism (sharing) to individualism (dog eat dog) – for survival.

Seventeen years of “special period” cost the revolution. Despite signs of recovery, however, spurred by foreign investment, the soaring price of nickel and the discovery of oil deposits, thousands of Cubans – mostly young people -- continue to leave their island in rafts or smugglers’ boats to seek more opportunity in Florida. Engineers, scientists and PhDs in literature choose not to spend their work lives making pizzas or paper boxes, or teaching grade school.

By 2007, Cuban leaders began to address some problems developed in the post-Soviet period. The leadership, however, had no intention of going into the Chinese or Vietnamese models. On July 26, 2007, Raul Castro spoke of solving pressing issues like daily adversity, shortage of food and low agricultural productivity, within a socialist model.

The government has responded to popular discontent, alienation, and downright cynicism and over the last two years imported 35% more food. Raul also admitted that “wages are clearly insufficient to meet people’s needs.” This statement does not mean what U.S. journalists report or sneer at when they report that the average Cuban wage comes to $20 a month. They don’t factor in free health care and education from nursery school to PhD; no rent or taxes; practically free transportation, entertainment, and subsidized food. But it is still a long way from the cradle-to grave security Cubans experienced before the Soviet demise.

Allowing more goods for sale will not mean a mass rush of sales because most Cubans do not possess excess foreign cash. Cubans will have to choose between the new items available – including stays at posh hotels. Cubans who receive remittances from family members abroad or get paid in hard currency continue to enjoy buying privileges – institutionalized inequality – that grate at much of the population. But freedom to shop cannot sustain a socialist country – especially a third world nation built on the twin themes of justice and equality.

The new mood has extended to artists and intellectuals who declared they would not tolerate censorship. The leadership agreed. But ending censorship does not relate to several thousand Cubans fleeing the island monthly for Florida. They don’t leave because of censorship, but for freedom to practice their professions and earn a better living.

Fidel Castro warned Cubans they could lose their own revolution. In his April 3, 2008 letter to Artists and Writers Union President Miguel Barnet, Castro wrote: “Everything that ethically fortifies the Revolution is good; everything that weakens it is bad.” In 1961 he told Cuba’s intellectuals: “Inside the revolution, everything; outside the revolution; nothing.” If one agreed and sympathizes, one also winced when Cuban leaders acted in ways that seemed to contradict this statement.

“The Cuban revolution was born to be different,” the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once wrote  “Assailed by the incessant hounding from the empire to the north, it survived as it could and not as it wished. The people, valiant and generous, sacrificed a great deal to stay on their feet in a world of rampant servility. But as year after year of trials buffeted the island, the revolution began to lose the spontaneity and freshness that marked its beginning.” New Internationalist July 2003

No kidding. In 1960, I watched creative chaos dominate everyday life. Like Galeano, I have seen, over 48 years, “revolutionary virtue” turned into “obedience to orders from above.” Loss of initiative is an ironic result of almost fifty years of US punishing Cuba for disobedience. Washington blocked “the development of democracy in Cuba, feeding the militarization of power and providing alibis for bureaucratic rigidity,” Galeano continued. “The revolution which was capable of surviving the fury of 10 American presidents and 20 CIA directors needs the energy that comes from participation and diversity to face the dark times that surely lie ahead. I say with sadness: Cuba hurts.”

Cuba resisted 638 assassination attempts against Fidel. The CIA says this is slightly exaggerated, but it admits launching thousands of attacks against Cuba. For half a century, the United States maintained a blockade, alongside psychological and possibly biological and chemical  warfare, survived and got wounded in the process. In March 2008, however, a change began. Beyond offering freedom to buy electronic appliances and cell phones and own their own houses free and clear, Cuban leaders signed the UN covenants on civil and political rights, which means that unions cannot be part of government and free speech, press, and politics must be respected.

A citizen told Vice President Carlos Lage at a conference that the government lacked sensitivity to people’s social needs and psychological problems, stuff money can’t fix. Lage apologized. Cubans watched it on TV. Earlier this year, in Juventud Rebelde, an official newspaper, the government was ripped for fudging statistics on unemployment. Changes have begun, but the smugglers remain. The boats remain full as well.

The Cuban revolution succeeded. It achieved independence and sovereignty, educated and made healthy its population, provided them with basic needs and educated its people to dance on the stage of world history. Cubans altered the destiny of southern Africa when its troops helped defeat the apartheid South African armies at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-8. Mandela hugged Fidel at his inauguration. “You made this possible,” he said for the world to hear. Cubans played a vital role in helping Angola maintain her independence and for Namibia to get hers. They played roles in the Vietnam War, the Yom Kippur war, and led the charge to slay the Monroe Doctrine.

Fifty years ago, Washington controlled Latin America; not one leader dared challenge its hegemony or its economic policies. Today, four of Fidel’s ideological sons run countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua) and several of his cousins direct others (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Panama).

Cuban doctors and scientists, artists and dancers, writers and filmmakers have etched their names in the honor rolls of countless countries through their sterling performances. The Cuban revolution created them. Although Cuban doctors continue to save eyesight throughout the third world and perform other humanitarian tasks, the question now is: can Cuba overcome the legacy of the special period, when individualism eroded the collective spirit, and can she transcend the three decades of the Soviet model that she had to adopt for survival? Her leaders have lived for the revolution and imparted its values to the population. Can Cubans respond and grab the initiative to maintain the enormous gains or succumb to the shiny lure of mass consumerism?

No matter what happens, Luis Posada “el combatiente legendario” will not return to Cuba as one of its new rulers, gracias a Dios!

Saul Landau received the Bernardo O’Higgins award from Chile. He is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and author of A Bush and Botox World (AK/CounterPunch).

 

 

 

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