“The Russian Revolution was the tangible proof needed by the earth’s damned, to be sure that Marx’s dream was not an illusion” - Español

An interview with Spanish writer Manuel Talens on the 92nd anniversary of the October Revolution

By Salvador López Arnal

English translation: Machetera

From its first day, the October Revolution was a reference point for the international and internationalist labor movement as well as the socialist organizations that hadn’t surrendered in the face of the militarism and longings for conquest demonstrated by the powerful of the earth. It was also a celebrated reference point. The acts that were organized in homage to that glorious date, November 7th, are still remembered by many revolutionary fighters. Since the disintegration of the USSR, since the savage capitalist counterrevolution’s victory in the land of Gorky and Mayakovsky, even here, at this red website, forgetfulness lives, an unjust and suicidal forgetfulness. To remember this date, to speak about the meaning of that socialist revolution, we conversed with Spanish writer, scientist, translator and militant Manuel Talens.

* * *

López Arnal: Not long ago you reminded me that your first novel, La parábola de Carmen la Reina, concluded with the following words:

[In Artefa, a small village on Granada’s Alpujarras, the trumpets of Apocalypse start to sound]… “María Espinosa was in the yard, tossing bird seed to the hens; she had dreamt that José Botines whispered his love to her with caressing words by candlelight, and she woke up with such high spirits that she forgot to open the window to air out the room, not realizing that the sky was covered by leaden clouds which had slowly arrived during the night; but she lifted her gaze when the snow began to dampen her silver hair, and then she saw the flash of lightning falling down on the cross of the steeple; she set off by the left side of her house for the village plaza; her eardrums exploding from the trumpet blasts; it smelled of burnt gunpowder and the flames were sparking through the church’s windows; she was already two steps from death but the thunder sounded to her ears like the beginning of a new hope; it was November 7th, 1917, and at that very same moment the liberating hordes jumped over the barricades to the sound of the seventh and last trumpet, and advanced victoriously through the opaque fog of the cannons to storm the Winter Palace.”

Now, almost one hundred years later, let me ask you precisely about that November 7th. You spoke here of a new hope, of liberating hordes. What happened on that November 7th, 1917? Why do you believe that it represented a new hope for the working class of the entire world?

Manuel Talens: Since your question mixes fiction with reality, and that is something very dear to me as a storyteller, let me first add some context to that extemporaneous quote from my novel, in order for the reader to understand what it is about. La parábola de Carmen la Reina takes place in the mountainous region of Granada’s Alpujarras, a spot in Andalucía where my mother’s family comes from, and it is about class struggle in an imaginary village, Artefa, throughout the entire 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th. The meticulous coincidence of dates between the apocalyptic outcome of events in Artefa and the assault on the Winter Palace — which gave birth to the USSR — was not casual, but a rhetorical trick I used to pay homage to that fundamental historical event that was the October Revolution.

As for the date of November 7th, let me clarify that czarist Russia was guided by the old Julian calendar, which is different from the Gregorian used everywhere today. According to the pre-revolutionary calendar, the Soviets’ victory took place on October 25th, which is November 7th by the Gregorian calendar. This is the origin of the apparent contradiction of an October Revolution which is celebrated in November.

I will add that even though the newly born Soviet Union immediately adopted the Gregorian calendar, it continued to refer to its revolution as the October Revolution. Later, the unforgettable Eisenstein movie set the confusion in stone. The world today is so globalized and uniform that these discrepancies seem illogical, but in those times, not so very distant from today, contrast — not similarity between countries and cultures — was the norm. Having said that, let’s return to your question.

Plenty has been written about both November 7th, 1917 and its historical importance, and the thoughts I could now add in this interview are only the insignificant personal opinion — I’m not trying to convince anyone — of someone who always looked at those facts in a positive way. I apologize beforehand if my comments do not rise to the occasion.

The Russian Revolution was the second in history, but the first won by the proletariat, because the French Revolution was bourgeois in character and didn’t touch capitalist private property as the means of production. On the other hand, the Russian Revolution was the tangible proof needed by the earth’s damned, to be sure that Marx’s dream was not an illusion. How could it not represent the beginning of a new hope? This time, exploitative capitalism was replaced by communism, a beautiful concept in spite of all the disinformation it has suffered for more than an entire century, and it meant equality of enjoyment of earthly goods.

The fact that such a building collapsed seven decades later doesn’t make its construction less sublime. At the most it confirms for us that dreams, once fulfilled, need daily care and tenderness for a lifetime so that they are not extinguished.

LA: So communism, that beautiful concept according to your words, would mean “equality of enjoyment of earthly goods.”

MT: Of course, this is a basic concept of historical materialism, a natural consequence of both classless society and public ownership of the means of production. Paradise — if it exists — is here on earth and it shouldn’t be restricted only to some people, but enjoyed by all. It’s called sharing, which is alien to the nature of capitalism. The evangelical message of Christianity is exactly the same as that of communism, although it wanders away into magical thinking in order to daydream about a hypothetical egalitarian enjoyment once life has ended.

LA: You have referred to a movie by Eisenstein. Which one?

MT: To October, a marvelous silent film dedicated to the Petrograd proletarians. Eisenstein filmed it in 1927 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Many of the veterans who had participated in the real struggle played themselves in the movie and this adds to its historical appeal, apart from the mastery that Eisenstein — an extraordinary film director — demonstrated in it. It is freely available through the internet, although these days fewer and fewer people appreciate cinematic language in its pure state, without any dialogue.

LA: Unfriendly views of the Russian Revolution have suggested that in fact it was merely a sudden attack by the Bolsheviks. What do you think about this opinion?

MT: Here we fully enter the land of propaganda, whose objective is disinformation. It is well known that any revolutionary undertaking has, clinging to it like a barnacle, the rewriting of its history by its enemies. We have very contemporary examples: Cuba has been enduring slander for fifty years now. As for Venezuela, not a single day passes without Western private mainstream media stating that anything Hugo Chávez’s government does is bad. We have to learn how to live with such a hindrance that today seems insoluble.

The suggestion of a sudden attack by the Bolsheviks doesn’t stand up to the slightest analysis; it is an insult to intelligence based upon the semantic falsehood that revolution is a messy and disorderly state, without any preconceived combat tactics, that ends up suffocating legal order as a step before chaos. With such a misleading premise it’s easy to make the sophist’s deduction that the assault on the Winter Palace — the last revolutionary skirmish, a prodigy of military tactics — was a sudden attack by several hundred intrepid Bolsheviks, who ended up fishing in a jumbled river.

This reductive thesis deliberately forgets ad infinitum the whole revolutionary process leading to the final assault, which had previously forced both the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in March and the formation of a weak provisional government of capitalist bourgeoisie. It leaves aside the fact that Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) was already under Soviet control and — above all — it ignores Lenin’s intelligence as a thinking leader when it came time to move the pieces on that chess board.

It is as if someone were to try to forget both Fidel Castro and the guerrilla warfare he designed from the Sierra Maestra, to focus instead on the battle at Santa Clara — another prodigy of military tactics — that gave the final victory to the Cuban Revolution. Who in his/her right mind would say that the latter was just a sudden attack by Che Guevara? It’s absurd, pure trickery.

LA: You just have referred to Lenin’s intelligence. Do you believe it to be an expression of his brilliant mind? Of his audacity? Of his courage? Of his unusual political analyses? Of his heterodoxy? Was there a different Lenin before and after the Revolution?

MT: Generally speaking, the greatest political leaders who have marked history, for good or ill — such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Hernán Cortés, or in the case we’re discussing, Lenin — are human beings with superior intelligence, practically indescribable courage and extraordinary strategic abilities.

Of course, this capacity is not a merit in itself; the merit comes when you put it to work exclusively for a noble and altruistic task as is the improvement of mankind. Lenin — and also Fidel, Ho Chi Minh or Nelson Mandela — belongs to that scarce gallery of extraordinary human beings. I believe I’ve answered the first five points of your question.

As for the last one, I think that unquestionably, there was a change from the leader who advocated revolutionary struggle to the statesman he became after seizing power. But that is normal, because the circumstances in both periods were radically different. One of the examples of this evolution was the changing role he assigned to the Party. From being at the beginning only an entity dedicated to popular education so that the masses could become the vanguard of the proletariat, it was transformed into the body in charge of power. It is a sad paradox that Stalin took advantage of this singularity to legitimate his crimes.

Popular education: "A book is your best company, teach yourself." (Soviet poster circa 1919)

LA: What was the attitude of the big powers of the day — England, France, also the US — before those new events? Did they allow the USSR to breathe free?

MT: As expected, those countries showed total hostility. The switch from capitalism to socialism is not something that can remain unpunished by concerted nations, because it supposes the loss of a market and, at the same time, opens the possibility for other people to catch the virus of revolution. England, France, the US and also Japan, Canada, Czechoslovakia and Germany, among other countries, hurried to finance an army of nationalist, Czarist, anticommunist and conservative mercenaries in the civil war that broke out in the USSR in 1918. These mercenaries — the so-called White Russians — were the worst of the worst from Russian society, very similar to the Cuban ultra right-wingers from Miami. But the Red Army smashed them and counterrevolution failed.

Curiously enough — or maybe not so much — such a hostile attitude from nations persists today: the slightest attempt by any country or continent to substitute the rules of the game for fairer ones always brings the same answer. Latin America has a long experience with this. What is happening now in Honduras is just the latest example of a long list of counterrevolutionary interventions arranged from abroad.

LA: Soon afterwards, in 1924, Lenin died. It has been said that he was depressed by the development of events, not only due to the difficulties of the process, but also to the attitudes of some of his comrades. Do you find it a reasonable conjecture?

MT: I personally find it silly, one more among the many fabrications that are there to deny a fact which is unacceptable for capitalism: that Lenin was incombustible, like Mandela, like Fidel, like most probably Chávez will be. When right-wingers can’t destroy a leader, they revile him/her. It has also been said that Lenin died from syphilis. Who cares if one dies from syphilis, from a stroke or after a hip fracture? Why it is so difficult to admit that Lenin died because his time had come? It is simply ridiculous to fabricate a late mental depression in somebody who had survived jail, deportations, exile and all kinds of ups and downs without deviating from his initial task.

Anyway, I’m not trying to suggest that Lenin was insensitive to suffering. Nobody is.

LA: Why do you believe that just a few years later the process took such an authoritarian character?

MT: That is the most painful part of the USSR, because it invites people to think of what could have been such a great internationalist motherland if Stalin had not been around, or if both the debilitation due to World War II and the arms race that swamped the country during the Cold War had not happened. It is like imagining a different destiny for Spain if Franco had never existed. The problem is that history doesn’t allow anybody to rectify errors.

The terrible truth is that Stalin was a cancer not only for the Soviet Union, but for the very idea of communism as a horizon. And the leaders who succeeded him, except for maybe Khruschev, were Stalin’s late metastases that ended up destroying Lenin’s legacy. But communism is not that. Luckily enough, for fifty years now Cuba has been showing the beautiful and compassionate face of communism.

LA: You have just mentioned Khruschev. How could it happen that Khruschev’s attempt at renewal, the self-criticism of Stalinism at the 20th Congress was not fruitful, or if it was, not for long?

MT: I’m no Kremlinologist at all, so I only can interpret what I sense. I believe that the 20th Congress arrived too late. If Stalinism had been short-lived everything could have been reversed, but no revolution can stand twenty-nine years of crimes, abuses and terror, even if simultaneously it produces things worthy of praise. I consider that Khruschev was not able to completely remove the cancer of Stalinism and, as a consequence, it relapsed.

A few years ago a friend in Moscow told me a beautiful anecdote about Khruschev that I later used in a short story. Please remind me to send you the passage.

(A few days later, Manuel Talens kindly sent me both the text and the picture that I reproduce below):

[…] And that was how the following day she took me to Novodevichy cemetery. Its landscaped sidewalks were covered with snow. We wandered between tombstones and I couldn’t resist my old habit of delivering my monologues to her, this time on the important men and women who are buried there about whom I knew a thing or two. She listened to me with attention and her gaze was turning ironic. We arrived at Khruschev’s grave. Then Mei-Ling opened her mouth to tell me that the former USSR President is not buried at the Kremlin because he died while out of power. Then, for the first time since I knew her, she directed more than a hundred words in a row at me. I learned that Khruschev’s mausoleum is by Ernst Neizvestny, a sculptor Khruschev had ordered brought before him when he was the CPSU’s First Secretary, in order to violently berate him for producing art contrary to socialism’s ideals. And that the then young artist, instead of being frightened, shouted back to him that even if he was Comrade First Secretary he didn’t know anything about sculpture. Apparently, after he fell from power, Khruschev and the sculptor initiated a certain friendship, so much so, that in his last will and testament Khruschev stated that he wanted Neizvstny to sculpt the monument at his grave. On either side of the old leader’s realistic face there are two big abstract angular figures, one in white marble and the other in black. According to Mei-Ling they symbolize two ears.

“At the end of his life,” she added as a conclusion, “Khruschev had learned how to listen.” [...]

Nikita Khruschev’s grave, Novodevichy cemetery (Moscow)

It is probable that the Soviet Union disintegrated because its leaders were autistic, they didn’t listen to anybody.

But I don’t want to give the impression that everything in the USSR’s trajectory is negative for me. It will always be remembered for the help it gave to the Spanish Republic during our Civil War, the Soviet people’s heroism during World War II (both things under Stalin’s command, all must be said) and its constant and unconditional support to Cuba until the last moment.

LA: Apart from this, during the Eighties there were several rectification attempts. First by Andropov, who was not by any means an idiot, and then by Gorbachev with his perestroika. What do you think of those attempts?

MT: None of the leaders who succeeded Khruschev were stupid, but I suppose that none of them believed as one needs to believe — with an unyielding conviction — in the survival and legacy of the Revolution. I don’t have the least sympathy for their memory.

The last one, Gorbachev, was a kind of Soviet Adolfo Suárez, suddenly catapulted by chance to an unexpected place: from being an austere servant of the apparatus he was, out of the blue, turned into a western-style frivolous democratic television figure. There is no doubt that he did what he could, he tried to open the window to let some fresh air in, but the USSR was already moribund. A cancer can’t be treated with half measures and Gorbachev had the unfortunate role of helplessly watching an agony that didn’t respond to any treatment.

There is a Jacques Brel song — “J’arrive” — that expresses the impotence Gorbachev should have felt as the situation was slipping out of his hands: C’est même pas toi qui es en avance, c’est déjà moi qui suis en retard. [It’s not even you who’s ahead, it’s me who’s behind.] And the unavoidable happened: one day Yeltsin — ambitious, a liar, thief, and treacherous drunk — showed up and delivered the coup de grace.

LA: You have already mentioned the Cold War. I’d like to go back to it. The Cold War was always very hot for the warmongering West, which wanted to drown the USSR from the first day. Didn’t it leave very little leeway for the USSR? Did the USSR have other possible paths to follow?

MT: In cases like that of the USSR, my grandmother used to say that “all of them killed her but she died alone.” There is no doubt that the Yankees had a lot to do with that harebrained arms competition and with the stupid space race that both the US and the USSR were fighting each other over, for decades.

I can understand Washington spending enormous sums of money (that it doesn’t have) on the conquest of space, because after all it is both a colonialist and invader empire and it cares very little about its high percentage of poor citizens without medical care. But what I don’t and won’t ever understand is that the USSR could accept the challenge of throwing down the pipe billions of rubles on sputniks, space trips and other whatchamacallits, while its citizens were facing hardships in its republics. Any housewife knows about priorities and none of them would buy a Rolls Royce if her children didn’t have a glass of milk. The leaders from the Kremlin, I’m sorry to say it, opted for the Rolls Royce. Those delusions of grandeur drained resources that should have been used to improve the well-being of the Soviet people instead of being tossed away.

I don’t live in that exclusive world; what I say is only my opinion as a bystander: I ignore Moscow’s real leeway, and whether it was really necessary to engage in that arms race — a leap in the dark toward bankruptcy — instead of having just organized its defense from possible USAmerican attacks. But I think that imperial politics, even if they are imposed from abroad, should not have a place in a revolutionary State.

If we can only take the comparison so far, Cuba’s policy seems a lot more logical to me: it puts its scarce economic resources into manufacturing vaccines, training doctors and teachers and social workers which it then puts at the disposal of its fellow countries.

LA: The USSR disintegrated in 1991. According to you, what was the most decisive element in its collapse?

MT: To Washington’s relentless hounding, it is necessary to add Moscow’s own mistakes: the loss of ideals, the perpetuation of a Party’s bourgeoisie alienated from the daily reality of the Soviet people, the economic and moral ruin, the corruption embedded at all levels. It is our everyday bread, nothing that we don’t see in our Western two-party democracies. Spain is a good example of such a decadence.

The narrative voice of the novel of mine that you mentioned above, soon after the words that you have reproduced for this interview and just before the end, adds: “… there is no doubt that men were created to be briefly free while fighting battles and then they return to slavery after touching victory with their hands.” Who knows if that is our destiny: to try, to fail, to try again, to fail again and so forth, without ever accepting failure. I am an active pessimist, full of optimism.

LA: To try, to fail and to try again, you’re telling me. To fight battles known to be lost in advance, to go to war, to be defeated and to go to war again. Isn’t it a little absurd? Isn’t it literarily brilliant, but politically unviable? Isn’t it a philosophy of history not only pessimistic/optimistic but, shall we say, very romantic?

MT: I go back to Lenin: one step forward, two steps back. Pure praxis. The absurd thing would be to give up. There is nothing romantic in this way of thinking. Romanticism leaves me cold.

LA: Putting things in perspective from our current position and keeping in mind the ten or more years of wild capitalism in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, do you believe that November 7th was worth the effort? Do you believe that the earth’s liberating movements should continue looking at that date as a reference? In short, should we continue identifying ourselves with that revolution?

MT: Yes, it was worth the effort. The approach to evaluating historical facts should never be their success or their failure, but the goodness or wickedness of their essence. And the essence of that revolution that was fought to improve the well-being of earth’s damned — I like to quote The International — was good.

The wild capitalism in present-day Russia has created multimillionaires overnight. That is what we see in Western press headlines while the lower-case type on the inside pages shows us the other face, much more sinister: that from 1990 to 2008 Russian life expectancy — a figure that measures quality of life and summarizes mortality rate for all ages in both sexes — has fallen, from 69 to 65 years. Those 4 years of difference seem like very little, but they are the statistical expression of a human tragedy of enormous proportions.

Concerning whether we should continue identifying ourselves with the October Revolution, I don’t know what to tell you. Nostalgia displeases me, because the past was never better than the present. I prefer to coldly analyze historical facts to preserve their positive aspects, but without hiding the negative ones. As well, nowadays things are very different than in 1917 and, at least for now and under certain social circumstances, it is possible to use the electoral system of democracy as a lever to make revolution through the vote, without weapons. Of course it is much more complicated, because votes don’t allow for complete neutralization of the enemy, which remains hidden in the vicinity.

LA: Allow me to conclude with a non-nostalgic question. How do you see 21st Century socialism? Where is it more likely to be adopted?

Also to conclude, and before giving you my point of view about 21st Century socialism, let me tell you that I have very much enjoyed discussing Marxism and the October Revolution with you, two matters so unexpected and disregarded in current public discourse. And I also like that this conversation will be published, because nowadays it looks frankly heterodox, a real virtue amid so many flat ideological EEGs [smile]. You know very well that post-modernity has wrought havoc in both the traditional left-wing parties and the political thinking of contemporary societies, and the single fact of speaking of these things sounds to many people like science fiction. What can we do?!

Let me finish: I think of 21st Century socialism as speaking Spanish, although not in Spain, but in Latin America. That’s where mankind’s future rests, if such a thing still does exist. We won’t see its culmination, but it has already started. In fact, its seeds were officially planted on January 8th, 1959, when the bearded guerrillas entered Havana. Without Cuba and its obstinate resistance over five decades, 21st Century socialism would not be possible today. Now the only thing it needs is that at least one of the three Latin American giants — México, Brazil or Argentina — find and elect a Chávez, an Evo or a Correa to suit them, so that the locomotive will get up to speed and become unstoppable. It is a question of time. That day, if I end up witnessing it, will be a happy one for me.

A dream that was not an illusion… “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, our task is to change it.” (Karl Marx’s grave in London’s Highgate cemetery, courtesy of Patricio Suárez)

About the author

Salvador López Arnal and Manuel Talens are members of Rebelión. Machetera and Talens are members of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author and translator are cited.

Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, like the rest of the Cuban Five, is being wrongfully held in a maximum security prison in California, under a double life sentence plus 15 years; Miami’s scapegoat for a tragedy he had nothing to do with.  If anything, he was working to prevent it.  And like his compatriots, he is a tremendously courageous, brilliant, dignified human being.  The U.N. has called their detention “arbitrary” and in addition to the sentences pronounced by the judge in their case – sentences remanded to that same judge for revision because of their inappropriate harshness – additional, unwritten, illegal sentences have been imposed upon them.  In Gerardo’s case, his mail is tampered with, arriving late, or sometimes not at all.  He is denied access to what passes for prison email; presumably because the United States of America would be rendered helpless in the face of some unspecified threat, were he able to access the costly, pitiful intranet set up for prisoners to communicate with the outside world.  His wife has been prohibited from visiting him during the entire period of his incarceration.  This has also been condemned by the U.N., and there is a word for it: torture.  And now, after a long illness, his mother has died in Cuba, and because of this sentence which will one day be overturned, Gerardo is being forced to grieve for her alone, thousands of miles away from the family remaining to him.  Again, torture.  Any condolence cards will arrive for him, at best, several weeks from now.  It is a punishment that stretches the imagination – the wound of losing one’s mother being insuperable on its own.

And what a mother Carmen Nordelo was.  Gerardo is her living proof; the testament to her achievement as a parent.  She was posthumously granted Cuba’s highest honor, the Order of Mariana Grajales.  The order was named for the almost impossibly fertile mother of Cuba’s independence hero, Antonio Maceo; Mariana Grajales Coello, who gave birth to the last of her nine children at the age of 52 and was an extremely active participant in the 19th century Cuban wars of liberation.  (Too many North Americans confuse the 1959 revolution which finally achieved Cuba’s liberation as a one-shot deal, without realizing that it was simply the successful culmination of nearly a hundred years of bloody struggle.)  Speaking of Grajales, Jose Martí famously said “Faciles son los heroes con tales mujeres” (It’s easy to be heroes with women such as these).

Nearly ten years ago, Gerardo composed this poem for his mother on her birthday.  In Spanish it is in rhyming verse, something that is almost impossible to achieve in translation without destroying the content.  Gerardo, our hearts and love are with you.

Longing

I’ll write you a poem that will touch the universe,

and still I worry that it will be too little praise for your love,

it’ll carry a thousand words of appreciation for your kisses,

those that healed my painful wounds.

I will try to tell you how much love I have for you,

love that shines within me and protects the truth,

and how I always ride through the world unscathed,

since part of my life is in your heart.

I’ll tell you how much your wakeful years mean to me,

your infinite silence and your immense courage,

and you’ll know how I long to return to you,

to be reborn in your arms and feel your warmth.

These words will have to come with tears of passion and joy

because I will keep the return hidden in my chest

and until that day arrives, how I want

for you, mother, to read these verses.

En español

Honduras: An Improbable Solution

By Atilio A. Boron
English translation: Machetera

Has the political crisis in Honduras been resolved?  Although a window of opportunity has opened, every indicator suggests that there is not a lot of room for optimism.  It’s worth recalling what we said here before when the coup d’etat took place: that Micheletti would only remain in power as long as he could count on the support, whether active or passive, of Washington.  It took four months for the White House to understand the high cost that a coup regime would exact in the region.  Beset by the various problems which he faces in his foreign policy, above all, by the rapid deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the miring of his troops in Iraq, Obama wrested the steering wheel from his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, the main architect of support for the putschists, and sent Thomas Shannon to Tegucigalpa with the task of restoring order in the tumultuous back yard.  Shortly afterward, Micheletti shelved his bravado and meekly accepted what had previously been unacceptable.  Of course, Shannon had just laid down the imperial mandate.  To sweeten the moment, he publicly expressed his admiration for the two leaders of Honduran democracy: the putschist and the deposed.

Zelaya proposes a three point program: restitution, amnesty and a government of national reconciliation. The first will be resolved by the Honduran Congress, the same which enthusiastically validated the coup d’etat and was unsparing in its insults and lies against him.  The outcome remains to be seen, but it will not be simple.  Amnesty, for whom?  For the civilian and military employees of a government which violated human rights and infringed upon every freedom?  Or for Zelaya, for crimes he did not commit, such as having the audacity to try to ask his people if they were in favor of holding a constitutional convention? And of the third, closely tied to the second, the less said the better.  Because under current conditions, isn’t a government of national reconciliation simply a passport to oblivion, to forgetfulness, to impunity?

A cursory review of the crisis and its apparent resolution reveals that the putschists can feel satisfied because they preserved their two main objectives: deposing Zelaya, even if he re-assumes the presidency for a few months until the end of his term; and having achieved international recognition for the flawed elections scheduled for November 29, something that Shannon took upon himself to assure.  For its part, the Honduran oligarchy removes itself from the danger of more aggressive action by the United States against its properties and privileges; something that might have occurred if an agreement had not been reached.  A stickier sort of control by Washington over their assets and funds in the United States caused them sleepless nights, and Micheletti’s intransigence had become an unnecessary threat to their interests.

For Zelaya, the balance is far more complex, and that is precisely what overshadows the Honduran landscape.  His restoration doesn’t remove the underlying causes that provoked the coup d’etat, not in the slightest.  Furthermore, as a result, would it not simply validate the results of elections plagued with extremely serious irregularities and a campaign that unfolded under the climate of violence and terror imposed by the putschists?  Micheletti has already been beating the war drums.  The agreement was barely sealed when he told CNN en Español that once restored to power, “Zelaya and the people who come with him are sure to undertake a campaign of retribution.  Only someone who is unaware of Zelaya’s attitude could believe that there will not be consequences.” What will the response be should the government be restored?  Amnesty for the putschists, reconciliation with them, hugs for Micheletti?

But Zelaya is far from being the only actor in this drama:  How may the heroic militants who risked their lives and their physical integrity to defend their legitimate government react, especially once the possibility of calling a popular referendum to reform the constitution has also been completely ruled out?  There are many dead and wounded, much imprisonment and humiliation along the way.  Will these men and women who won the streets in Honduras accept the forgetting of so many crimes and the pardon of their victimizers?  Also, the one lesson taken by the efforts of the people and social movements over the past four months of resistance is that if they organize themselves and mobilize their influence in the political juncture they can be decisive, much more than they realized before.  The crisis taught them, brutally, that they can stop being history’s objects and turn themselves into its protagonists.  And perhaps because of that, beyond what has taken place with this accord, they may decide to continue onward with their struggles for a different Honduras, one that does not come about with unjust amnesties or spurious reconciliations.

www.atilioboron.com

Argentinean sociologist and author Atilio Boron is a friend of Tlaxcala.

Machetera is a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translator are cited.

People say Cubans are hot-tempered but Machetera doesn’t believe it.  Not when she sees the current Cuban foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, in action.

Following the recent U.N. vote, where the entire world (save the two countries totally on the U.S. dole – Israel and Palau – and not counting the other two abstentions, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands) condemned the United States of America again for its ongoing genocidal blockade against Cuba, and where the completely miscast U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice (Susan, Vermont is calling!) weighed in with a nasty speech against Cuba lifted lock stock and barrel from the rhetoric of the Bush administration, Rodriguez spoke to the Associated Press:

Rodriguez told AP he was “a little bit surprised” by the vehemence of Rice’s initial comments, saying he knew and respected her and held her in high esteem.

“She is an articulate person, a decent and well-meaning person, like president Obama,” he said. “And we respect both of them for that.”

This just proves that Machetera could never have been a diplomat.

Rodriguez’s speech was a splendid counterpoint to that given by Rice, exposing the hollowness behind every single point made by the U.S. in its own pitiful and isolated defense.  But there is one point that Rice ought to have been especially embarrassed to make:

“…my delegation regrets that the delegation from Cuba continues to label inappropriately and incorrectly U.S. trade restrictions on Cuba as an act of genocide. Such an egregious misuse of the term diminishes the real suffering of victims of genocide elsewhere in the world.”

Let’s review:

Wikipedia says: The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260. The Convention came into effect in January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of years of campaigning by lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term by reference to the Simele massacre, the Holocaust, and the Armenian Genocide^[2]. All participating countries are advised to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and in peacetime. The number of states that have ratified the convention is currently 140.

Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as

…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Pay careful attention to (c). Cuba didn’t write that, nor did Machetera.  It’s U.N. policy, going on 60 years now.

Now let’s return to the concrete examples provided by Mr. Rodriguez:

Alexis García Iribar was born in Cuba, in the province of Guantánamo. He suffered from a congenital cardiopathy known as persistent arterial duct. At the age of 6 and after successive deferrals and hemodynamic complications, he had to be submitted to an open-heart surgery on March 9, 2009, because the government of the United States prevents the US companies NUMED, AGA and Boston Scientific from selling to Cuba the ‘amplatzer’ and ‘embolization coil’ devices required to perform a catheterization that will spare children from this type of surgery. I could mention another 12 cases of children between the ages of 5 months and 13 years who have had to undergo a similar procedure in the course of the last one and a half years –two of them underwent surgery after last January 20.

Cuban children suffering from lymphoblastic leukemia whose bodies reject traditional medicines can not be treated with the American product “Elspar” (Erwinia L-asparaginase), created specially to treat intolerance. Consequently, the life expectancy of these children is reduced and their suffering increases. The U.S. government forbids Merck & Co. to supply this medication to Cuba.

And this from Cuba’s foreign ministry:

In 2008, because of additional costs coming from the obstacles to transactions with the United States, ALIMPORT suffered losses of 154.9 million dollars.  With those resources and in the same American  market, at those year’s average prices, Cuba could have bought 339,000 tons of wheat, or 615,000 tons of corn, or 126,760 tons of chicken for the tables of the more than 11 million Cubans included in the “Canasta Básica” (basic shopping-basket) programme.

Let’s also remember that quietly, Obama’s OFAC has continued the policies of his predecessor, busily hunting down and fining companies such as Lactalis USA, the dairy producer, for having the temerity to engage in electronic wire transfers to Cuba, when they knew full well that when it comes to Cuba, they were supposed to ask papi for permission first, and then haul their cash in a suitcase.

Lactalis paid OFAC $20,959.38 in February, of 2009, to settle the allegations uncovered by OFAC sleuths, that it had made “six unlicensed wire transfer payments in which Cuba or Cuban nationals had an interest.”

The embargo/blockade, whatever you want to call it, does meet the definition established by Article II (c).

Which brings us to the final point.  Sigmund Freud postulated that denial was a defense mechanism (Wikipedia again), deployed when “a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. The subject may use:

• simple denial – deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether
• minimisation – admit the fact but deny its seriousness, or
• projection – admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility

It’s no secret that the former occupant of the White House had fallen off the wagon and was in serious need of an AA program.  What is Rice and Obama’s excuse?

“Tell Raúl [Castro] that if he does not take steps, neither can I.  We are making efforts, but if they do not make efforts, it will be very difficult for us to continue.” – Barack Obama, October 13, 2009

Español

A Blockade Against Humanity - Español

By Atilio A. Boron

English translation: Machetera

On October 28^th, the United Nations General Assembly will once again bring a resolution to a vote, requiring the United States to put an end to the blockade against Cuba in effect since 1961.  Just as has occurred each time since 1991 up until the present day, that resolution will be approved practically unanimously, ratifying the international community’s condemnation of the United States and reinforcing Washington’s tremendous isolation in the debate, due to a policy that has not only brutally chastised the Cuban people but also constitutes a threat to humanity as a whole.

Conscious that by its nature, it violates the most basic norms of international law and human rights, the empire’s publicists and their local spokesmen have unleashed, as on so many other occasions, a persistent semantic battle aimed at confusing and misleading worldwide public opinion.  To this end they resort to a euphemism: they refer to the blockade as an “embargo” and present it as though it were merely a commercial matter.  This is how they hide the far reaching U.S. blockade against Cuba: a blockade that is economic, commercial, financial and technological, but also international (penalizing as it does, companies in third countries who trade with Cuba, and hindering Cuba’s diplomatic relations with the rest of the world); informational (by preventing Cubans from gaining access to high-speed broadband internet); social (making the re-unification of Cuban families separated by emigration difficult or impossible); and cultural, by impeding the free movement of artists, writers, intellectuals and scientists between Cuba and the United States.[1]

It is a blockade that is not only illegitimate in light of civilization’s highest values but also a blatant infringement of international law,  designed to bring Cuba to its knees by causing hunger, illness and desperation among its people.  In short: it is a repeat of the barbaric policy of laying siege to a defenseless city by causing all sorts of hardships and misfortunes to its inhabitants, in the hope of weakening their resistance or bringing about a generalized insurrection against its legitimate leaders.  If anything, it is a cruel and inhumane policy which the empire applies solely and exclusively against Cuba, updating its old and unhealthy obsession of wanting to take over that island, even at the cost of violating international law a thousand times and trampling on the highest ethical norms that define the civilized co-existence of people and nations.

There are no precedents in worldwide history even remotely comparable to the blockade against Cuba, maintained without interruption by the United States over 49 years.  Nothing even remotely similar has been applied by Washington against many countries which for one reason or another, have (or used to have) serious conflicts with the United States: it never blockaded the Soviet Union or China, for obvious reasons, but neither did it blockade Vietnam, nor Qaddafi’s Libya (not even after blaming Libya for the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, killing 259 passengers in-flight, plus 11 on the ground) nor North Korea, nor Iran, nor any other country.  Only Cuba, a sweet American colonial dream that became – thanks to the glorious liberating campaign of the July 26th Movement – a painful nightmare that day and night shakes the minds of the imperialists.

Blinded by its pathological ambition to take over the unredeemed island it considers its own, the United States is in breach of Resolution 63/7, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on October 29, 2008, when 185 member states voted in favor of the immediate lifting of the blockade.[2] It is not only the George W. Bush administration which has ignored the U.N. General Assembly’s recommendation, but its successor as well – the current Nobel Peace Prize winner no less, who has continued with the same policy of maintaining the laws, regulations and administrative procedures which serve to support the blockade.

In effect, nothing’s been done, or even said, relative to the “Trading With the Enemy” or “Foreign Aid” laws which were the first pieces of legislation with which the blockade of Cuba began.  Not to mention the “Export Administration Law” or since we’re talking about euphemisms, the “Cuban Democracy Act,” better known as the Torricelli Law.  This infamous piece of legislation was enacted under Bush Sr., in 1992, and it enabled Washington’s strengthening of its economic measures against the island, as well as granting normative support to the blockade’s extra-territorial nature, given that the legislation prohibits foreign-based subsidiaries of U.S. companies from engaging in transactions with Cuba or Cuban nationals, and prevents ships from third countries which have docked in Cuba from entering U.S. territory for 180 days afterwards, among other restrictions.

The euphemistically named “Cuban Liberty and Solidarity Act,” better known as the Helms-Burton law deserves its own paragraph.  Enacted by the U.S. Congress and Bill Clinton in March of 1996, it aims to extend the extra-territorial scope of the blockade and put still more obstacles in the way of foreign investment in Cuba.  The law also limits the White House’s prerogatives to suspend the policy, while it establishes the possibility of bringing claims in U.S. courts against the managers of foreign companies (or their families) who invest in businesses or properties “confiscated” by the Cuban revolution.

In view of this background, it’s clear that the innocent “embargo” constitutes a criminal act: based on the provisions of Article II, paragraph “c” of the Geneva Convention of 1948 on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the blockade qualifies as genocide.  Furthermore, if the “Declaration Regarding Maritime War” (adopted by the London Naval Conference in 1909) is considered, the U.S. blockade against Cuba is an act of economic warfare.  Consequently, it is not an “embargo” but a set of rules and policies that international law regards as genocidal and criminal.  This is why the condemnation of the blockade is not a strictly Cuban concern, but something that worries the international community – a lot.  The attempt to grant extra-territoriality to U.S. legislation, as arrogant as it is absurd, is a threat to world peace and a vicious attack on the self-determination and national sovereignty of people and states.  In line with this policy, the White House has penalized plenty of U.S. and European companies for doing business with Cuba.  Because of this, patients from Cuba or any other country who are treated in Cuban clinics have no access to new diagnostic equipment, technology, or medicine, because even if they are produced (or made available) in third countries, the blockade’s laws prohibit their sale or transfer to Cuba if their components or programs, even if only in small part, originate in the United States.

From an economic point of view, the blockade has caused enormous damage to Cuba.  Extremely conservative estimates (which underestimate the true impact) show that in current dollar value, the total is something more than $236 billion dollars.  It’s an astronomical sum when the size of the Cuban economy is taken into account.  And not only that: it’s also very significant in itself, given that it is approximately double the expenditure of the Marshall Plan, spent by the United States in Europe to finance post-war recovery.[3] This figure does not include the direct damage caused by sabotage and terrorist acts encouraged, organized and financed from the United States.  Knowing the great strides made by the Cuban revolution in fields such as health, culture and education, it’s easy to imagine all that might have been achieved had it not been forced to deal with the enormous financial and economic hemorrhage generated by the blockade.  But this was exactly imperialism’s point: this policy has been applied in order to prove the non-viability of a non-capitalist development path and the incurable “inefficiency” of socialist planning, thereby provoking all kinds of illness and suffering among the people.  In their hallucinations, imperialism’s strategists hoped that such deprivations would trigger the long-awaited “regime change” in Cuba.  History refuted their expectations.  We saw this same destabilizing and incurably anti-democratic attempt in the decision taken by President Richard Nixon, the same night that Salvador Allende won the first plurality in the 1970 presidential elections in Chile: thwarting the Chilean economy so that later, on the basis of the frustration and resentment that this would produce, the conditions would be created that would pave the way for the military coup of 1973.

Has anything changed since the arrival of Obama to the White House?  Very little.  The new administration has introduced a modest easing of the blockade, but these measures simply modify certain marginal aspects which do not change the substance of the matter.  Nevertheless, a heavy propaganda campaign has been launched, trying to present Obama as the mentor of a new policy that overcomes the nefarious legacy of the ten U.S. presidents who preceded him.[4] But in fact, the innovations introduced were limited to the following:

a)     The elimination of restrictions on family visits for Cubans resident in the United States with blood relations on the island, up to the third-degree.

b)    The same for restrictions on remittances by Cuban-Americans to their family members in Cuba – still limited to third-degree blood relations and excluding members of the Cuban government and the Cuban communist party.

c)     An expanded range of items that may be sent as gifts.

d)    The granting of licenses for U.S. companies to expand certain telecommunication operations with Cuba.

In short, these are initiatives that, while partially repairing a serious injustice – returning to Cubans resident in the United States the right to visit their family members in Cuba; something taken from them by the government of George W. Bush – are insufficient and of very limited scope, given that they go no farther than returning to the situation existent in 2004, when the economic blockade was already being applied with full force.

Furthermore, and despite the complete repeal of the limitations on the frequency and duration of the abovementioned visits and an increase on the limit of daily expenditures allowed the visitors, Cubans resident in the United States without family in Cuba remain prohibited from traveling there, and the unusual abuse of the right of U.S. citizens to travel freely to Cuba remains.  It is the only country in the world they are prevented from visiting by their government.

What can be hoped for from Obama?  Regrettably, little or nothing, and not only on the subject of the blockade but in the most diverse areas of public policy.  The reason, described in detail in the already cited book, is that the current occupant of the White House only controls the marginal levers of the U.S. state apparatus while state power rests firmly in the hands of the “permanent government” of the United States, that framework that in its incipient form brought about a serious warning from President Dwight Eisenhower,- when in his farewell speech, he denounced the ominous role that what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex” was already beginning to play.  In our time, that complex has grown inordinately, to a degree that was hardly imaginable or thinkable just half a century ago.  It has not only grown in terms of its quantitative gravitation; its degree of articulation among the different members of its alliance and his capacity to determine public policy have also improved qualitatively, and not just in the United States, but through its allies, across the empire.  In any case, the declarations of Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden, at the so-called “Progressive Governance Summit” held in Santiago, Chile, in March of 2009, doesn’t feed very many expectations.  On that occasion, Biden assured that “The United States will maintain the embargo as a tool to apply pressure on Cuba.”  His words were not denied, neither by the White House nor the State Department.

The Cuban government is absolutely right when it points out that “The embargo violates International Law.  It is contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter.  It constitutes a transgression on the right to peace, development and security of a sovereign state.  In its essence and its aims, it is an act of unilateral aggression and a permanent threat against the stability of a country.  It constitutes a flagrant, massive and systematic violation of the rights of an entire people.  It is also in violation of the constitutional rights of the American people since it denies them the freedom to travel to Cuba.  Moreover, it violates the sovereign rights of many other states because of its extra-territorial nature.”[5]

Cuba is not alone in demanding an end to the blockade.  The overwhelming majority of countries support its petition.  However, despite the announced claims to initiate a “new policy” toward Cuba and Latin America, the Obama administration has given no indication whatsoever that it will try to lift the blockade.  This brings to mind the question that President Hugo Chávez formulated in the context of the recent U.N. General Assembly: Who is the real Obama? The one who says lovely phrases or the one who validates the coup d’etat in Honduras?  We might add: He who wishes to promote multilateralism and re-establish U.S. relations with Latin America on new terms, or he who persists in maintaining the blockade against Cuba?  Until now, history’s verdict says the latter.  It cannot be discounted that he may change, although it seems increasingly unlikely.  The passage of time plays against him.

[2] Of course, it’s not the only resolution ignored by Washington.  For a detailed examination of this matter, see Atilio A. Boron and Andrea Vlahusic, El lado oscuro del imperio. La violación de los derechos humanos por Estados Unidos [The Dark Side of the Empire. The United States’ Violation of Human Rights] (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Luxemburg, 2009)

[3] This, according to a study done by the Argentinean economist Alex Kicillof, “El Plan Marshall estuvo en la base de la Unión Europea,” [The Marshall Plan Was the Basis for the European Union] Página/12, June 21, 2007

[4] Actually, not all of them had the same attitude.  In one of his reflections, Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz maintained that “Of all the presidents of the United States, and those who aspire to that office, I only met one who, for ethical-religious reasons, was not an accomplice to the brutal terrorism against Cuba: James Carter. That assumes, of course, another President who forbade that United States officials should be used to assassinate Cuban leaders. That was Gerald Ford, who replaced Nixon after the Watergate scandal.” In September of 1977, Carter opened the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Cf. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Submission to Imperial Politics,” August 27, 2007. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2007/ing/f270807i.html

[5] See the already cited “Report by Cuba on Resolution 63/7 of the United Nations General Assembly.”

Argentinean sociologist and author Atilio Boron is a friend of Tlaxcala.

Machetera is a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translator are cited.

First, a brief word of apology to Jefferson Morley, whose excellent and meticulously researched book, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA was first mentioned here almost exactly one year ago, with the promise of a review to come…like so many other worthy projects, the review ended up on the back burner (the saltmine beckons and is unusually active at present), but it has not been forgotten.  In the meantime, Machetera will say this: the book is terrific – engagingly written, carefully corroborated, it is a must-read for anyone curious about the CIA’s long reach in Mexico, particularly during the period in the fall of 1963 when the CIA did and then didn’t know about Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in his failed search for a Cuban visa.  So get the book, now.

Second, José Pertierra has just published an exclusive interview with Morley at Cubadebate.  Normally Machetera resists translating articles written by those with a perfect grasp of English, such as that possessed by Pertierra, not least because translation is invariably an imperfect art and she dislikes second-guessing an interview that undoubtedly transpired in English to begin with.  But this interview is exceptionally interesting and important, and as yet, no English version has appeared.  So in the meantime, with additional apologies to Morley, and to Pertierra, here it is.  A bit of a filmed interview with Morley follows the interview.

Jeff Morley: “I’m only asking that the CIA obey the law” - Español

José Pertierra for Cubadebate

English translation: Machetera

Washington – The day that his brother was assassinated, the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, spoke by telephone with one of the leaders of the terrorist campaign against Cuba, Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams.  Kennedy said to him directly: “One of your men did it.” Bobby Kennedy didn’t ask him.  He told him.  It came from his gut, because he knew those people.  That’s how the journalist/researcher Jefferson Morley tells it in an interview he granted Cubadebate.

“The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 and the dirty war against Cuba organized by the Miami Cubans are intimately linked: they’re battles in the same war, “ said Morley.

“The anecdote about the conversation between Bobby Kennedy and Ruiz-Williams is well founded,” says Morley, “because the prestigious journalist Haynes Johnson was a witness.  He was with Ruiz-Williams during the conversation with Kennedy.”

Jefferson Morley has a long career as a well-known journalist in Washington.  He worked for 15 years for the Washington Post and has also been published in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, the New Republic, Slate, Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times.  Recently, he published a biography of the CIA station chief in Mexico, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Six years ago he filed suit (Morley v. CIA) against the CIA in order to force the Central Intelligence Agency to declassify documents dating from the period between 1962 and 1964, relative to George E. Joannides, a CIA official charged with many of the operations against Cuba in that period.  On November 16^th, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., will hold a hearing to listen to the arguments of both Morley and the CIA about the possible declassification of these documents.

José Pertierra: Why do you believe the CIA wishes to keep nearly 50 year old documents secret?

Jefferson Morley: Because they may contain something delicate or embarrassing for the CIA.  The story that we’re told about Joannides is a show.  A lie.  According to his own documents which I’ve gone over personally, the story that the CIA tells us now about Joannides doesn’t match reality.  The Agency tries to trivialize Joannides’ role in the operations that took place between 1962 and 1964, but history shows us the truth.  Furthermore, if the documents being hidden truly do not incriminate the CIA, why do they want them to be hidden?  Could it be because Kennedy was killed in 1963?  That conditioned reflex to keep this secret hides something.

JP: Who was George E. Joannides?

JM: He was a CIA man whose assignment was to control and direct the Miami Cubans who  were in charge of the operations against Cuba at the beginning of the 1960’s.  Specifically, he was charged with controlling the Directorio Revolucionario Esudiantil (DRE) [Revolutionary Student Directorate].  The CIA commended him in 1963 for his good work directing the DRE. After the missile crisis in October of 1962, Washington wanted to “reign in” the DRE’s activities, and the CIA put Joannides in charge of that assignment.  When the CIA gave him his evaluation in August of 1963, he was congratulated for having “controlled” the DRE.

JP: Who was the DRE?

JM: It was a Cuban organization headquartered in Miami.  A CIA analyst told me that the DRE came to be “the most militant of the Miami exile organizations at the beginning of the 1960’s.”

Its leaders were Alberto Muller, Ernesto Travieso and Juan Manual Salvat.  Salvat later started a bookstore on Miami’s Calle Ocho, called the Librería Universal [Universal Library].  One of its militants was the young Jorge Mas Canosa, who would later go on to found the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF).  The DRE operated from Miami under the direction of a couple of important CIA officers: David Phillips and Howard Hunt.

One of their most well-known violent operations against Cuba took place in August of 1962, when Salvat and a group of DRE militants headed to Cuba from Miami in a small boat and attacked the Hotel Rosita de Hornedo, known after the revolution as the Hotel Sierra Maestra, in Miramar (Havana), at midnight.  They attacked the hotel with a cannon, terrorized the guests, and fled.  Among the DRE militants who attacked the hotel that night was José Basulto, who would go on to found the Brothers to the Rescue organization in 1995.  Basulto told me personally that he was the one who purchased and shot the cannon that was used to attack the Hotel Sierra Maestra that night.  He said that he’d bought it in a Miami pawnshop.

(Translator’s note: Morley repudiates the word “terrorized” as it is attributed to him.)

In August of 1963, members of the DRE in New Orleans had a series of encounters with Lee Harvey Oswald.  After the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the members of the DRE spread a publicity campaign to insinuate that Castro had assassinated Kennedy, because Oswald was supposedly affiliated with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

JP: George E. Joannides’ official assignment was “Head of psychological warfare for JMWAVE.”  What were his responsibilities?

JM: The plan was to affect the psychology of the enemy.  To change their perceptions of reality in order to bring about a change in government.  The best example is that of Guatemala in 1954, when the CIA orchestrated false news bulletins about an opposition to the Arbenz government, in the Guatemalan jungle.  In the end, Arbenz confused fiction for reality and panic set in.  Something that never happened to Fidel Castro or Che Guevara.  They understood very well the difference between the fiction of psychological war, and reality.

Joannides paid the members of the DRE.  He gave them a lot of money.  We know that they received $50,000 a month.  In today’s currency that’s more than $150,000.  It was a lot of money.  He was Washington’s man in Miami in charge of the DRE.

The DRE members at that time were the CIA’s favorite Cubans.  Under Joannides’ direction, the DRE had four specific tasks:

1. Political action against Cuba.
2. Acquisition of intelligence against Cuba.
3. Distribution of propaganda against Cuba.
4. Distribution of its actions and propaganda toward Latin America.

JP: What is the connection between Lee Harvey Oswald, the individual who is said to have assassinated President Kennedy in November of 1963, and the DRE?  What might the CIA documents tell us about that?

JM: Four months before President Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald and members of the DRE met several times in New Orleans.  They had an altercation with him in the street.  The DRE sent a member to his house, making him seem like a follower of Fidel.  They debated about this on the radio and sent the tape of the debate to Joannides; they even wrote to Congress asking for an investigation of Oswald who at that point in time was an innocuous person.  You have to remember that at that time, the DRE had specific instructions to ask for the CIA’s authorization before making any kind of public declaration.

Scarcely an hour after Oswald’s arrest on November 22^nd, the DRE leaders published the documentation they’d accumulated against Oswald and in this way influenced the coverage of the assassination by insinuating that a Castro agent had killed the President of the United States.

The Warren Commission, who investigated the assassination, never realized the connection between Joannides’ employees in the DRE and Oswald.  Even in 1978, when the House of Representatives Committee on Assassinations hired Joannides as an advisor to its investigation, Joannides didn’t inform the Committee about his role in the events of 1963 and the DRE.

The attorney for the House Committee, Bob Blakey, says that Joannides obstructed the investigation by not divulging the role he played with the DRE.

JP: What are you asking of the CIA with this suit you filed in December of 2003?

JM: I’m only asking that the CIA obey the law.  The CIA has told me that it has more than 295 documents that it will not release for reasons of national security.  The documents I have show that Joannides traveled to New Orleans to complete tasks that the CIA charged him with in 1963 and 1964.  [They show] that the CIA entrusted him with delicate operations throughout 1962-64.  We don’t have any information about those operations.  Joannides can’t tell us, because he died in 2001.  Those are the only documents about what he did in that city with the DRE members.  The CIA has the legal obligation to declassify those documents, but it does not want to declassify them.  It’s locked them up.  I believe that the lockup sources from the CIA department in charge of Latin America.  They are hiding something.  The CIA tells us that Joannides had nothing to do with the DRE.  I know that’s not true.  The documents I have in my possession prove that indeed there was that relationship.  Why do they make these statements that are so openly false?  What are they hiding?

I hope that on November 16^th, Judge Richard J. Leon will support my motion to have the CIA declassify these documents, so that they may be studied.  This is the only way for us to know what really happened in those two mysterious CIA operations in which Joannides worked in 1963 and 1964.

JP: The CIA says that if these documents are declassified, the national security of the United States will be endangered.  Do you know what the danger is?

JM: There’s no danger.  Washington has a mistaken perception about what is truly national security.  I’m told that they cannot declassify nearly 50 year old documents for reasons of national security.  That’s not true.

I don’t know who killed Kennedy, I don’t pretend to know.  What I’m asking is that these documents be declassified which have to do with George E. Joannides during 1962 and 1964, in order to clarify the facts.  This is not a threat to the country, and the Freedom of Information Act says that they must be declassified.  I am only asking that the CIA obey the law.

Machetera is a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translator are cited.

For more about Wendy Elizabeth Ávila, see Avi Lewis’s report for Faultlines, embedded at the end of this post.

Wendy and Obama - Español

Peace as a medal rather than a principle

By Allan McDonald

English translation: Machetera

Wendy Elizabeth Ávila was born in Tegucigalpa on June 28, 1985, under a rain of melancholy ashes.

Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, under a carnival of Asiatic colors.

Wendy went to a public school, poor, like her comrades, and in her arms she always carried notebooks with the word “hope” written in upper case.

Obama went to the prestigious Harvard Law School with its hors d’oeuvres enriched by the protein of the judiciary.

Wendy grew up with an open smile, fresh with dreams.

Obama grew up in the mists of greed and public lies.

Wendy went every day to the sad outskirts of Tegucigalpa, to teach boys and girls to read and write.

Obama attended to the methodical campaigns where he was chosen as a Senator from the Thirteenth District of Illinois, in order to find the alphabet of power’s irrational force.

Wendy attended a university in Honduras in order to become a lawyer and help those who thirst for justice.

Obama was a professor of Constitutional Law on the law school faculty at the University of Chicago, to teach those with a hunger for demagoguery and marketing.

Wendy achieved her maximum honor upon seeing the happiness of children with a diploma for learning to read and write.

Obama achieved his maximum honor upon becoming the first black president, thereby inscribing his destiny and history for those in the empire who cannot read.

Wendy was in her house, looking out the window at an overcast sky and thinking of her birthday when she heard the bullets from the coup d’etat.

Obama was breakfasting on potatoes and peanuts when he became aware of the constitutional transition in Honduras.

Wendy closed her eyes, opened the door and went out in search of answers.

Obama opened the window of the Oval Office and flew out with Superman to invent questions.

Wendy immediately joined the National Front Against the Coup and went out in search of justice, democracy and above all, peace.

Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America and immediately joined the tide of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Wendy walked tirelessly every day in the face of the criminal curfew blockading the streets.

Obama walks through the White House gardens, untroubled about the criminal blockade of Cuba.

Wendy, in the heat of struggle, with peace as her only weapon, confronted the owners of the country and their weapons, who attacked her with grenade launchers and cannons.

Obama promised to send 40,000 men with grenade launchers and cannons to Afghanistan.

Wendy saw a fleet of barbarians before her eyes and asked for peace.

Obama orders the Fourth Fleet to continue.

Wendy continues on foot, day after day, with a peaceful struggle as her basis, searching for peace in the terror-filled streets.

Obama brings his military bases to Colombia.

Wendy doesn’t abandon hope for peace.

Obama doesn’t close Guantánamo out of horror.

Wendy runs into the smoky weapons once again.

Obama launches curtains of smoke.

Wendy falls, overcome by the toxic gases shot by Honduran soldiers to crack down on peaceful protesters.

Obama falls into his rocking chair, bored by talk of Honduras.

Wendy dies in search of the peace she sought every day; it was 10 p.m. on Saturday, September 26th in Tegucigalpa.

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize; it was 5 a.m. on Friday, October 9^th, in Washington.

Wendy was honored at a wake in a humble room at a union hall, by her comrades in the struggle.

Obama celebrated his medal in the gilded salons of the peaceful elite, with wines and cheeses to inspire gastronomic peace.

Wendy believed in her struggle.

Obama still doesn’t believe in his medal.

Allan McDonald and Machetera are members of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translator are cited.

Consolation Prize (Amended)*- Español

By Atilio A. Boron

English translation: Machetera

In an astonishing decision, the Norwegian Nobel Committee put an end to seven months of searching among the 205 nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize and conferred it upon Barack Obama.   Piedad Córdoba, the brave Colombian senator whose efforts in search of peace for her violence-ridden country largely deserved to be rewarded with the Nobel Prize was tossed to the wayside so that it might be granted to the American president. It is not a minor surprise to know that Obama’s nomination was submitted to the Norwegian Committee two months after his inauguration. What did he do in such a short period of time on behalf of the world peace? He delivered gentle speeches and made rather nebulous exhortations to end violent confrontations. The Colombian senator, on the other hand, has spent the last ten years in a tireless effort to put an end to armed struggle and to pacify her country. She put her own body and her actions on the line. But the Norwegian Committee did not share this appreciation and Piedad was once again passed over. A woman, black, leftist, and Latin American: too many flaws and defects for the cautious members of the Committee, always politically correct, forever sanctimonious, who only by mistake would it confer the prize upon a public figure whose struggles for peace were unacceptable to the empire. The Dalai Lama is acceptable; Piedad Córdoba is not. For him, the Prize; for her, the cold shoulder.

The Norwegian committee’s decision provoked very mixed international reactions: ranging from stupefaction to huge laughter.  The statement by the organization’s president, Thorbjørn Jagland got straight to the point: “It’s important for the Committee to recognize those people who are struggling and idealistic, but we cannot do that every year.  We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik.  It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world.”  The problem with Obama is that his idealism remains at the level of rhetoric, while in the world of realpolitik, his initiatives could not be more antagonistic to the search for peace in this world.

According to Robert Higgs, a specialist in military expenditures for the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, the way Washington prepares its defense budget systematically conceals the real total.  Upon analyzing the figures submitted to Congress by George W. Bush for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, Higgs concluded that they represented just over half of the figure that would actually be disbursed, therefore surpassing the previously unthinkable barrier of a trillion dollars, that is, a million times a million.  And this because, according to Higgs, one must add to the base sum originally designated for the Pentagon, the expenditures related to defense which are spent outside the Pentagon; the extraordinary funds demanded by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the interest associated with the indebtedness incurred by the White House to meet these expenses; and those arising from the medical and psychological attention for the 33,000 men and women wounded in the wars of the United States which require a hefty budget for the National Veterans Administration.  Obama has done absolutely nothing to stop this infernal machine of death and destruction whose total budget is now well over the one trillion dollar mark, and when through the mouthpiece of his Secretary of State he denounces arms purchases which “outpace all other countries,” instead of beholding the beam in his own eye, the target of his criticism is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela!

Obama increased the budget for the war in Afghanistan while pondering to increase the number of troops to be deployed in that country as the American forces continue its ruthless occupation of Iraq; he has given no sign of changing George Bush Jr.’s decision to activate the Fourth Fleet; he has moved ahead with a still secret treaty with Álvaro Uribe to open seven new U.S. military bases in Colombia, and it is said that there are five more that are about to be confirmed, through which he is preparing (or has become complicit in) a new wave of warmongering against Latin America; he maintains his ambassador in Tegucigalpa when practically all others have been withdrawn, thereby supporting the Honduran putschists; he maintains the blockade against Cuba and is not in the least perturbed by the unjust imprisonment of the five anti-terrorist Cuban fighters incarcerated in the United States.  Of course, the Norwegian Committee periodically suffers some delusions which translate into decisions as absurd as the present one – whether brought on by its ignorance of world affairs, opportunistic pressures, or the delights of Norwegian aquavit, no-one can be totally sure.  But if at one time it granted the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, correctly defined by Gore Vidal as the biggest war criminal wandering loose in the world, how could they have denied it to Obama, especially after the rebuff he suffered at the hands of Lula in Copenhagen?  Realpolitik demanded an immediate rectification of this error.  Because after all, as the very President of the United States stated upon learning of his prize, it represents a “reaffirmation of [U.S.] American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.”  And so, in a sudden attack of “realism,” the comrades on the Committee put forward their grain of sand to fortify the declining hegemony of the United States in the international system. Many people suspect that for this little help the members of the Committee will in due time be properly rewarded.

*Boron revised this piece slightly after the original English translation was posted.

Argentinean sociologist and author Atilio Boron is a friend of Tlaxcala.

Machetera is a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translator are cited.

Ah, fall.  The beginning of the university year.  New classes.  New students.  New professors.  New ideas.  Death threats.  Disappearance. Murder.

Welcome to Colombian public university, where for at least the last ten years, the Colombian armed forces and paramilitaries associated with the (U.S. puppet) government of Álvaro Uribe and that of Pastrana before him, have been rolling tanks, harassing, threatening and even killing students who dare to express their opposition to the regime.  Meanwhile Colombian corporate media and politicians mock dissenting students who as a result, wish to conceal their identity and the universities quietly hand the government the databases it desires.

The link which follows will take you to a video documentary (in 3 consecutive parts) which includes eyewitness accounts from the besieged Colombian university students.  The contrast between the story these students tell and that which is presented by the media subservient to Uribe couldn’t be clearer.  The documentary was translated and subtitled by, naturally, the Tlaxcala global network  of translators for linguistic diversity.  Please redistribute it everywhere.

Click Here to View: Freedom and Rights at Colombian Public Universities