HAVANA, NOVEMBER 4, 2021
The United States government is the real organizer of November provocation
Plans hatched by the U.S. government and its internal operators to overthrow the Revolution and their pretensions to hold marches in several provinces across the countrywere discussed recently by Rogelio Polanco Fuentes, member of the Communist Party of Cuba Secretariat and head of its Ideological Department
Author: Gladys Leydis Ramos López | internet@granma.cu
november 4, 2021 12:11:25
Plans hatched by the U.S. government and its internal operators to overthrow the Revolution and their pretensions to hold marches in several provinces across the country were discussed recently by Rogelio Polanco Fuentes, member of the Communist Party of Cuba Secretariat and head of its Ideological Department.
In the presence of representatives from youth and student organizations, Polanco explained that his statement was among the many public condemnations made in the wake of comments by Party First Secretary and President of the Republic Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, during the closing of the Central Committee’s second plenum.
Polanco recalled that between September 20 and 27, a small group of citizens submitted similar documents in which they announced the decision to hold supposedly peaceful marches to the headquarters of provincial and municipal governments in eight territories of the country.
This decision, he underlined, was more than a request since those submitting it were certain the march, conceived with national scope and in evident coordination with its promoters, would take place; meanwhile, the answer given by the authorities on October 12 provided precise arguments on the illegal nature of this act in relation with items 56, 45 and 4 de of the Constitution.
Among the reasons given to decline the request, he added, it was clarified that the public projections of the promoters and their links with subversive organizations and agencies financed by the U.S. Government have the clear intention to promote a change of the political system in Cuba, therefore, the announced march is another provocation related with that strategy, which has been previously mounted by the United States in other countries.
He recalled that, upon its announcement, the march received the support of U.S. legislators, political operators and the media that encourage actions against the Cuban people, promote destabilization and call for a military intervention.
Warning: This has been tried before
It is obvious that we are witnessing a new episode of the unconventional war, soft coup or the nonviolent struggle manual that the United States has executed during contemporary times in several countries such as Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, said the member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee.
According to the circular 18-01 (tc-1801), one of the main doctrinal documents of the U.S. Army Special Forces on unconventional warfare, some of the elements of this kind of warfare include taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of the government they wish to overthrow, to make it distant from the population, turn the citizens with a neutral standing against the government, and to exploit these elements through subversion, he detailed.
Furthermore, he added, if these methods do not bring the desired results, they would resort to armed conflict, by promoting insurgence.
The most notorious example, he said, is the guarimbas in Venezuela, violent actions of the opposition of that country held during the years 2013, 2014 and 2017 to try to overthrow the Bolivarian government and, in that endeavor, the cause countless economic and human damages in that sister nation.
The evidences are collected in a report of the Venezuelan government entitled “Venezuela’s truth against infamy. Data and testimonies from a country under siege,” published in September 2020, where it is informed that the total toll of the violent protests in February 2014 reached the total number of 43 people, meanwhile, in the ones that took place from April to June, 2017, causing 21 deaths and 1,958 injuries.
Moreover, the U.S. State Secretary in 2014, John Kerry, issued a statement in which he said that the protests taking place in Venezuela that year were peaceful and accused the government of Venezuela of using the force to confront protesters, he continued.
However, a detailed examination showed that most of the protests in 2017 broke international and national laws in force and they all ended up in actions of extreme violence.
In this sense, Polanco continued, three unprecedented practices in the recent history of the country were registered: the burning alive of people identified as followers or supporters of the national government; the use of children and teenagers to prepare incendiary bombs, guard the barricades and attack security forces and the combination of religious and patriotic symbols with high levels of violence.
Regarding the financing of subversive actions in other countries as a periodical practice of the U.S. government, Polanco referred to the organizations created for that purpose, with millions in funding, including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the US Agency for International Development.
There are plenty of references of NED financing events, courses and even organizations, especially the Center for Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL), which is part of the wide network of non-governmental organizations used by the United States to channel the financing and training of its political operators.
He gave the example of NED’s funding of CADAL to the tune of $107,000 in 2017 and $100,000, earmarked for the project entitled “A regional approach to promote democratic values in Cuba.” Two Cuban citizens, Manuel Cuesta Morúa and Yunior García Aguilera, signatories of the letters announcing the intention to hold the marches in November, travelled to Argentine in 2018 to take part in the event organized by CADAL and coordinated by the project “Times of change and the new role of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba.”
Moreover, CADAL and its director Gabriel Salvia have been actively supporting the provocation set to take place in November in Cuba, he denounced.
Those two promoters, he clarified, would also continue their preparation in 2019 in a workshop sponsored by the Universidad San Luis Campus Madrid, where they received lessons from Richard Youngs, an expert in public protests as a method of political change.
Regarding the financing, he stressed out that the U.S. Agency for International Development has granted, at the end of September, $6,669,000 for subversive projects in Cuba, out of a total of 18 million that it can allocate for these projects through 2023.
Among the beneficiaries are the digital media DNA, which received $2,031,200 and Cubanet, which received $708,003, in addition to an organization called Cuban Democratic Directorate, which received $617,500. The latter is headed by Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, who has called time and again for military intervention in Cuba, and now publicly supports the marches as well.
Summing up, Polanco noted that more than 70 million were reserved for subversion during the Trump administration, in addition to more than one hundred million dollars to the Office of Broadcasting for Cuba, which operates Radio and TV Martí. It should be added, he pointed out, the millions of dollars that the intelligence community and the U.S. military apparatus devote every year against Cuba.
“The U.S. government is the real organizer of the provocation staged for November. The facts and statements prove it. High government officials are directly involved in its promotion. The U.S. government threatened new measures against Cuba if its local operators are not allowed to act with impunity. Cuba does not accept threats, nor does it allow itself to be intimidated; our history of resistance and dignity confirms this. Keep your threats to yourselves, we are not afraid,” he said.
It is not surprising either, he added, the support of anti-Cuban right-wing organizations and the hate-generating media nucleus in Miami, as seen in tweets, publications, resistance assemblies, as if the march were to be held in that city.
Another of the enthusiasts, informed the head of the Ideological Department, is the Cuban American National Foundation, which has provided plenty of guidance on how to attend and what to do in the supposedly peaceful and independent march; while one of the promoters of the demonstration, Saily González Velázquez, acknowledged the support of the foundation through its director of Human Rights, Omar López Montenegro.
Terrorist Ramon Saul Sanchez is also encouraging the march, added Polanco, and showed evidence of his toes with one of the main promoters of the actions planned for November.
Category Archives: Fake Protest
The Trump administration, organizes fake protest received no response
The never-ending, lucrative search for a Cuban Euromaidan
This July 1, popular streets corners in Havana and provincial capitals, were to have been the scene of protests against police violence, orchestrated by paid counterrevolutionaries, who once again received no response whatsoever from the Cuban people
Iroel Sánchezjuly 6, 2020 12:07:54
This is a demonstration. This is a strong police presence.
Photo: Composition by Javier Gómez
This is not a déjà vu, it is the obstinate search for a Cuban Maidán, which never tires of failure.
On December 30, 2014, the international corporate media came to cover what would be an “open microphone” allowing the censored Cuban people to express in the Plaza de la Revolución all that, according to the conveners, they had not been able to say aloud in more than 50 years. The call – disguised as an artistic performance – was launched from Miami, that paradise of freedom of expression, where raising a dissident voice when it comes to Cuba can mean, at best, unemployment, while finding ways to communicate from outside the dominant ruling class is practically impossible. The objective was obvious: to create an incident that would derail the process of normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba, announced just two weeks before.
Cuban authorities prevented the arrival to the Plaza of a small group, who, financed from abroad, intended to turn the political and administrative center of the Cuban capital into a tropical Maidán, while the fact that the island’s population, allegedly eager to finally express themselves freely, did not flock massively to the Plaza was explained by the media as a consequence of “fear of repression” and the limited access to the Internet in Cuba at that time, although over previous days cell phone users on the island were bombarded with text messages from the U.S. announcing the event.
Almost six years later, the alliance between the ultra-right wing in Miami and the Trump administration has clouded memories hope for normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba. The economic blockade Washington imposes on the island has reached new heights and the same forces dream that the effects of a blockade intensified with more than 80 anti-Cuban actions by the current administration, combined with the harsh economic blow dealt by the COVID-19 pandemic, will facilitate what they could not achieve in December 2014. As the blockade’s tightening screws have almost lost their thread, new economic sanctions must be justified by “the regime’s repression” and pressure exerted to weaken Cuba’s relations with Europe and other Western nations.
For the haters, anything goes. Those who attempt to equate a regrettable but exceptional incident in Cuba with systemic and daily violence in the United States have no scruples. Perhaps they believe that a non-conformist and critical people like Cuba’s, with an acute political culture, will allow ourselves to be swayed by a crude manipulation financed from the North.
This July 1, the popular corner of 23rd and L in the Havana neighborhood of Vedado, and other busy sites in the national and provincial capitals, were to have been the scene of a protest against police violence in Cuba, called by the same individuals who failed on December 30, 2014. The “regime’s troops” were already advancing on the capital to repress the protests, as evidenced by a photo published on one of the “free” press sites. But oh, the license plates on jeeps driven by the repressive forces appearing in the post – with their tops down and no weapons or facemasks in sight – expired years ago, while the background was that of Santiago de Cuba, not Havana, and the buildings visible in the image no longer even exist. The troops, yes, were moving, but only in a time machine and on the Internet highway.
“Once again, more of the same, linking anyone protesting in Cuba with the U. S. government,” someone might say. But check the Twitter accounts of the embassy’s chargé d’affaires in Havana, the OAS Secretary General, Cuban-American Congressmen pushing for new sanctions against Cuba, or the website of the government’s Radio-Television Martí and the “independent” media, financed by the sponsor of “colorful” revolutions and financier of the Ukrainian Maidan, George Soros, and the National Endowment for Democracy -which even The New York Times recognizes as a screen for the CIA – to see who is behind this call, amplified by media such as the BBC, which in spite of being a British public press outlet ignored Cuba’s humanitarian rescue of hundreds of citizens of that country onboard a cruise ship, in danger of becoming a floating morgue. This is the same source that contributed months ago to the history of yellow journalism by telling the world that an armored car security guard was a regular police officer controlling lines on the island with a high caliber rifle.
In Cuba, without a doubt, channels of communication need to be expanded, representative bodies and spaces for political participation to be perfected, and mechanisms of transparency, accountability and popular control to be improved. I am not saying anything new; the Cuban government has recognized this and this reality is reflected in the spirit of the new Constitution, which was overwhelmingly approved by popular referendum. But this path is heading in the opposite direction, away from the power of money in politics and the acceptance of U.S. interference, which are common currency in capitalist democracies. There is consensus among Cubans that those who serve a foreign agenda of regime change, and are paid to do so, lack legitimacy.
There is no historical basis to say that Cubans are afraid to overthrow their government , when you are talking about a people who, at the end of the 19th century, raised machetes against modern rifles to win independence, and in the 20th century, overthrew two dictators supported by Washington, and went to Africa to defeat apartheid South Africa, which was armed with nuclear weapons. At a time when the United States said there was a democratic government in Cuba, those opposed it defied the police, who tortured and murdered citizens, and dared to struggle in the streets despite gunshots, beatings and water cannons. Thousands of deaths attest to this fact.
Now that the United States claims that there is a dictatorship here, those who, with the support of our northern neighbor, claim to oppose such tyranny, insist that the police do not allow demonstrations, but not a single one of them is willing to do what those who, without asking permission, confronted the “democracy” that tortured and killed thousands, supported by the country that claims to defend freedom of expression and information in Cuba, but viciously persecutes those who exercise it, if it cannot silence them. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden can testify to this.
Despite the fact that there are more than seven million Cubans connected to the Internet, bombarded everyday with propaganda manufactured in fourth-generation psychological warfare laboratories – on the U. S. government payroll – this call for protest went nowhere. On July 1, in the rain, the island’s streets were filled to receive members of the Henry Reeve Contingent returning home after battling COVID-19 and saving lives in the Principality of Andorra.