http://socialistaction.org/cuban-official-tours-bay-area/
Cuban official tours Bay Area
Published April 11, 2016.
April 2016 Miguel
By NICK BAKER
— SAN FRANCISCO — Miguel Fraga, first secretary of the Cuban Embassy,
which opened last year in Washington, D.C., came to the Bay Area in
March for a week-long tour, speaking to students and community members
about life in Cuba, renewed U.S.-Cuba diplomatic relations, and the need
to end the U.S. embargo of Cuba. The Northern California tour was
organized by the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity.
In his talks at several colleges and universities around the Bay Area—as
well as in the city council chamber in the working-class city of
Richmond, Calif.—Fraga presented basic information about Cuba meant to
counter the long disinformation campaign by the United States. Citing
statistics from the World Bank (see data.worldbank.org), he noted Cuba’s
100% literacy rate, low infant mortality rate of 4/1000 (the U.S. rate
is 6/1000), and the highest rate of investment in education in the
world, 12.8% of GDP in 2010.
He highlighted Cuba’s systems of free higher education and free medical
care. The Cuban health system, which is the first in the world to
eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis, also
provides over 50,000 health-care workers to 68 countries.
Fraga also pointed out that, far from being isolated internationally,
Cuba has diplomatic relations with 191 countries, including 190 of the
193 members of the United Nations. He also listed Cuba’s major
international trade partners, which include Canada, China, Venezuela,
Brazil, Spain, and the Netherlands.
But the main goal of Fraga’s tour was to win support for ending the U.S.
economic embargo of Cuba. Since it was imposed in 1960, the embargo has
done and continues to do incredible damage to the lives of the Cuban
people. Fraga noted that the United Nations annually votes to condemn
the embargo.
Last October, the UN voted 191-2 against the embargo; only the U.S. and
Israel were opposed. A UN report released ahead of that vote showed that
Cuba estimates the embargo has cost its economy over $800 billion during
the past half-century. To put in perspective just how large an amount
that is for Cuba, the country’s GDP in 2013 was $77 billion.
However, the embargo is not as popular with the American bourgeoisie as
it used to be. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have come out in
favor of getting rid of it. Clinton has said that, in her opinion, the
embargo “no longer serves U.S. interests” in Cuba, or in Latin America
in general. As Secretary of State, Clinton served those same interests
by supporting a coup against the democratically elected government of
Honduras. So it is not the injustice of the embargo that makes her want
to get rid of it. She just thinks there are more effective ways to
achieve the goals of U.S. imperialism.
Despite renewed diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba, the
Obama administration continues to spend tens of millions of dollars
every year on programs to undermine the Cuban government. In one
example, begun under Obama, the U.S. created a fake social media company
in Cuba called ZunZuneo, a “Cuban Twitter,” that was intended to provoke
unrest by spreading U.S. propaganda to users and operated from 2009 to
2012. The U.S. also continues to operate the radio and TV stations Radio
Martí and TV Martí, which broadcast U.S. propaganda in Cuba.
And these are only the mildest offenses. They are in addition to the
U.S. government’s long history of training and funding terrorist groups
of Cuban exiles based in Miami, whose most notorious attacks include the
1997 Havana hotel bombings and blowing up Cubana Flight 455 in 1976,
killing all 73 people on board. One of the leaders of these attacks,
Luis Posada Carriles, lives freely and comfortably in Miami today.
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reported that Obama aide Ben
Rhodes, the point man in U.S. negotiations with Cuba, told a town hall
meeting in Miami that the U.S. was “no longer in the business of regime
change in Cuba.”
That’s an interesting phrase—“the business of regime change.” To
paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, the last president to visit Cuba before
Obama in 1928, when it was still a U.S. colony, the business of U.S.
capitalists is business. And when a government doesn’t want their
business, their business becomes regime change. In Coolidge’s words,
“they are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling,
investing, and prospering” in Cuba, as they did before the revolution,
when U.S. capitalists owned the vast majority of Cuba’s rural land and
controlled all of its major industries. Moreover, capitalists in the
United States are seeking compensation on their own terms for the
industries, hotels, and other property that Cuba nationalized during the
revolution.
The United States is not experiencing rapprochement with the Cuban
Revolution. Nor is it resigned to a socialist government in Cuba, giving
up its attempts to destroy it by reconsidering the embargo. It is only
changing tactics.
Miguel Fraga found sympathetic audiences in the Bay Area. At his talk at
Sonoma State University, several older audience members, wanting to
educate the young people in the room, prodded him to contrast the
benefits to workers of Cuban socialism with the deprivations of American
capitalism, and he had to decline each time, saying, “You must
understand, I am a diplomat.” But the answer was plain to see in the
statistics he had already given.
When asked whether increased trade with the U.S. would become a foothold
for U.S. imperialism, he asked that people trust Cuba to maintain its
revolution. He said that Cuba would only trade for what it needed and
what benefited Cuba. He pointed out that the Cuban Revolution has faced
many challenges, from the Bay of Pigs to the fall of the Soviet Union,
its major trade partner, and survived them all.
Socialist Action stands in solidarity with the Cuban people and their
revolution. We support the continued success of the revolution and the
continued health of Cuban socialism. End the embargo! Long live the
Cuban Revolution!
Photo: Miguel Fraga speaking at a Bay Area forum. By Bill Hackwell.
Posted in Caribbean, Cuba, International, Latin America, San Francisco
Bay Area. | Tagged Cuba, Miguel Fraga.
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