The new U.S. financial counter-revolution

The best response is to communicate the Revolution
The new U.S. financed counter-revolution hopes to manipulate sensitive issues and create the conditions for a social confrontation, for conflict and destabilization of the country

Author: Karima Oliva Bello | informacion@granmai.cu
october 30, 2020 14:10:31

Photo: La Demajagua.
Checking out the World Bank’s website, the first thing we will find is a slogan announcing that the institution’s fundamental mission is fighting poverty. Nonetheless, the World Bank has been one of the principal international financial institutions, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), responsible for the implementation of neoliberal policies that have aggravated poverty in a large part of the world. Although the World Bank knows this better than anyone, they will never say so.

Instead, it funds rigorous research to describe how the poor live, the causes of their poverty, and what must be done to eradicate these. The World Bank obviously does not need to investigate these issues; it knows full well that in the regions where it has helped impose neoliberalism, poverty is extremely harsh, with no guarantees or protection of any kind. It also knows that poverty would be eliminated with structural changes, moving in the opposite direction of the policies it promotes, that is, the creation of decent jobs with labor rights and guarantees for the exploited, plus free access to make a reality of the universal, inalienable right to health and education, for example.

But such changes will not be promoted by the World Bank. So why does it address poverty? In order to manage the social discontent that poverty generates, to prevent it from leading to political action against the neoliberal status quo. The bank helps to produce poverty and manages the ways in which it should be perceived and confronted, neutralizing any analysis or social action that implies class struggle and criticism of capitalism.

This method is not exclusive to the World Bank. For a long time, the U.S. capitalist elite has been developing, in the territories it wishes to dominate politically and economically, ways of interfering in internal affairs with a markedly interventionist character, making use of governmental and non-governmental organizations, which, like the banks, operate under a façade, in this case, that of defending democracy, human rights and civil liberties.

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Cuba withstands most costly year in the blockade’s history

Cuba withstands most costly year in the blockade’s history
For the first time, damages caused by the genocidal U.S. blockade of Cuba surpassed five billion dollars in a year’s time

Nuria Barbosa Leónoctober 29, 2020 10:10:58

Photo: Falco
For the first time in the history of the genocidal U.S. economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba, the damages and losses caused surpassed a total of five billion dollars in a year’s time, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla reported, October 22.

In the annual report prepared by the Ministry describing the magnitude of damage suffered as a result of this extraterritorial policy, to current and future prospects for development o the island, the Foreign Minister denounced, in an online press conference, the increasing aggressiveness of the U.S. government, which, showing no concern for the COVID-19 pandemic, imposed more sanctions on Cuba, in a flagrant violation of all norms governing foreign trade and investment.

On the occasion of the submission to the United Nations General Assembly of a resolution entitled “The necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba,” Rodríguez reviewed the impact of this hostile policy on various sectors of society, during the period between April 2019 and March 2020.

He noted that, since President Donald Trump took office, more than 90 restrictive measures have been adopted in just one year, practically one per week, indicative of the administration’s intention to cause greater suffering to the Cuban people and negatively impact the country’s efforts to implement our updated socio-economic strategy.

“The blockade is applied in an extraterritorial manner, violating the sovereignty of third states, companies and citizens of other countries,” the Minister stated, and urged the international community to once again overwhelmingly reject the cruel interventionist policy and approve the proposed resolution for the 29th time, at the UN General Assembly in May of 2021.

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Cuba is well, Camilo!

Cuba is well, Camilo!
Camilo Cienfuegos was stolen from us forever, October 28, 1959, but he left us the hero and the memories, already etched in the essence of the Revolution, the one to whom we can say today: Cuba is doing well, Camilo!

Author: Mailenys Oliva Ferrales | informacion@granmai.cu
october 28, 2020 08:10:31

Photo: Ilustrativa

There is a man of the people that the homeland will never let die, because he left an eternal footprint everywhere he went. A man who lives on in his example.

He won the affection of a nation with his personal sacrifice, simplicity, his smile, and impeccable character forged in the Sierra and during a few months of Revolution following the victory.

He is ours forever, because Camilo Cienfuegos was more than a rebel and Granma expeditionary, more than the unconditional friend of Che and Fidel’s man of confidence; he was more than the leader of the Antonio Maceo Column 2, and the Hero of Yaguajay. Camilo was, is and will be “the image of a people” who found, in this young man of 27 years, the paradigm of a revolutionary committed to honor, truth and a sensitivity very much his own, which won him the hearts of all.

History tells us of the complete guerilla who would not fire on the barracks of the dictatorship’s troops because there was a young girl inside; who gave whatever money he had to a few young rebels so they would not be obliged to visit their mothers empty-handed, and loved culture as the Homeland itself, being the first to take the ballet out of the theater and into the mountains, and the promoter of the Revolution’s first documentary, Nuestra Tierra, exposing the outrages of the rural guard against the peasantry.

Loyal to the ideas of Maceo, Martí and Fidel until the last day of his physical presence, before getting on the plane that took him to eternity, that fateful October 28, 1959, Camilo never stopped surprising us, even leaving us in the least suspected way, when no one was ready for his departure.

Fifteen days of exhaustive, but fruitless search, left us without a last farewell to the Comandante of the wide-brimmed hat. That October afternoon he was stolen from us forever, but he left us the hero and the memories, already etched in the essence of the Revolution, the one to whom we can say today: Cuba is doing well, Camilo!

Cuba in the empire’s geopolitics

Cuba in the empire’s geopolitics
Regardless of who becomes President of the United States, the solution to the U.S.-Cuba conflict will only be possible when the empire recognizes that our island is a free, sovereign and independent nation

Jorge Casals Llanooctober 20, 2020 10:10:57

After 1959, U.S. policy toward Cuba took a hostile turn, regardless of the party that ran the government.
Although geopolitics as a field was not born until the end of the 19th century and the early 20th, in Europe, beginning with its ” crusades” and “discoveries,” and the conquest later, capitalism and the European kingdoms expanded, taking over more and more territory, which they appropriated by brutal force, in the name of God, from the people living there.

Along the same lines, but this time for purely “religious” reasons, the Mayflower pilgrims reached what is now Virginia, in the Anno Domini of 1620, the date recorded in history as the birth of a nation. Ten years later, a missionary would affirm that, by a special design of heaven, if the natives acted unjustly, the newcomers would have the right to legally wage war and subdue them.

Then the great property owners, slave holders and traders, gave themselves a Constitution that would create a republic, a government and institutions capable of serving those who held the wealth; that expanded their power stealing and massacring the native population and those they enslaved under the disguise of a model of democracy, adopting a name that explicitly expressed its destiny: the United States of America.

By 1845, the “divine mandate” bequeathed from the days of the Mayflower, would include the idea of Manifest Destiny for the country born in 1787, which did not include among its citizens either Indians, or slaves, the poor, or women, but assumed the right, the obligation, to expand, to bring freedom and progress to the entire continent, as a New York magazine columnist would affirm at the time, to become a symbol and a principle repeated generation after generation, to this very day. Continue reading Cuba in the empire’s geopolitics