Stripping away all of the American Corporate Empires flowery
misdirection, announcing a new policy aimed at ending the isolation of
Cuba, US President Barak Obama stands tall on behalf of Exploitation.
Obama, the current lackey of the ACE, begins a new approach to the
eventual control of this balky little nation. Nothing would please
the American Corporations more than to see Cuba become another Puerto
Rico.
It's interesting to note that the Empire uses the same failed approach
in its international relations as it does within its own borders.
Eternal punishment for those who do not knuckle under. The Empire
only knows how to punish. From its powerful position, the Empire
makes up its own rules and then punishes anyone who resists them.
This policy goes from top, excluding the 1%, to the lowliest of the
low. Even convicted felons who have served their time and paid their
debt to society, are faced with eternal punishment. Their crimes are
never truly forgiven.
This is exactly the same approach Obama's Masters take toward Cuba.
Those bad little Cubans disobeyed the Empire, and they must be
punished forever. The Empire has decided to exploit Cuba, and so it
has, "Forgiven", or pardoned Cuba's uprising. But in the Empire's
history books, Cuba will always be the bad guy, the disrupt er of the
Empire's plans. The Empire will say what it needs to say in order to
slither back into Cuba, but it will never accept its role in the
abject poverty that caused the Cuban People to rise up.
Capitalism has put the cart before the horse, so to speak. We need to
put people ahead of profit, and the Planet's well being ahead of all
else. Our future depends upon it.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/3/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2016/8014/801402.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 14 April 11, 2016
(front page)
Castro, Cuban people answer ‘sugar-coated’ words
of Obama
BY SETH GALINSKY
The U.S. government “is continuing the game of the carrot and the
stick,” wrote Elier Ramírez in the March 26 issue of Juventud Rebelde,
daily paper of the Union of Young Communists of Cuba. “There is no
change in their strategic objective of regime change.”
Ramírez was responding to President Barack Obama’s March 20-22 visit to
the island. Despite many “sugar-coated” words — as Cuban revolutionary
leader Fidel Castro described Obama’s comments — Washington’s goal of
overthrowing the Cuban Revolution and restoring capitalist exploitation
came through loud and clear. Numerous articles in the Cuban press have
answered aspects of the U.S. rulers’ shift in methods.
In his March 22 speech, broadcast on Cuban TV, Obama said the U.S.
government was leaving behind “the last remnant of the Cold War” because
“what the United States was doing was not working.”
He didn’t spell out what it was that didn’t work: years of terrorist
operations, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, assassination attempts, as
well as attempted diplomatic isolation and the unparalleled economic
embargo that remains in place to this day, more than 55 years after it
began.
And the commander in chief of U.S. imperialism conveniently left unsaid
the failed goal: overturning the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the workers
and farmers government it brought to power, taking land away from small
farmers and giving it “back” to capitalist landlords, and bringing back
the so-called free market so that Cuba’s working people and the island’s
resources can be a source of superprofits for U.S. capitalists.
In an article in Granma, the paper of the Communist Party of Cuba,
Enrique Ubieta Gómez pointed out that “during these decades of
harassment, U.S.-based terrorists caused 3,478 deaths and left 2,099
people disabled.” Luis Posada Carriles, “the intellectual co-author of
the blowing up of a civilian Cuban plane in mid-flight who is
responsible for the death of all its passengers and crew, is living
comfortably in Miami” to this day, he noted.
And “on the territory occupied against our will in Guantánamo for a
century not a single word” from Obama, Ubieta said, referring to the
U.S. naval base that U.S. imperialism forced down Cuba’s throat at
gunpoint in 1903.
One of the most outlandish statements by Obama was his claim that “we
took different journeys to our support for the people of South Africa in
ending apartheid. But President [Raúl] Castro and I could both be there
in Johannesburg to pay tribute to the legacy of the great Nelson Mandela.”
“I don’t know what support he is referring to,” Ubieta wrote, “because
the government that jailed Mandela was a strategic ally of Washington.”
Under the U.S-backed white supremacist regime in South Africa blacks —
who were some 80 percent of the population — could not vote, change jobs
at will, own land, or travel from one side of a town to the other
without permission.
“Cuba paid tribute to Mandela with the blood spilled by its men and
women in the African jungle, while together with Angolan combatants they
repulsed the invasion by racist South Africa,” Ubieta said, referring to
the nearly 400,000 Cuban internationalists who voluntarily fought in
Angola from 1975 to 1991.
Heart of Washington’s new tactics
To weather the storm created by the world capitalist economic crisis and
challenges Cuba faces as the only country where the workers hold state
power, the revolutionary government has implemented measures that
increase the influence of the world capitalist market, while defending
workers control, a planned economy and the social values of solidarity.
The measures include promoting the growth of small businesses —
cuentapropistas or self-employed in Cuban parlance — and encouraging
more foreign investment in Cuba.
The U.S. rulers see this as an opportunity to create pressure from
below, to create a capitalist class and get the Cuban government to make
more concessions to U.S. and other capitalist businesses.
Throughout his trip Obama pushed the Cuban leadership to allow direct
employment by foreign enterprises operating in Cuba. He wants those
capitalists to have the right to hire and fire workers directly.
Currently they must hire through a government-run employment agency.
With more control, foreign capitalists —limited to a maximum 49 percent
control of joint ventures with the Cuban government — can begin to
undermine union protections and workers control of job conditions.
One day before Obama’s visit, Starwood Hotels & Resort Worldwide
announced it had signed agreements to invest in and manage Hotel
Inglaterra and Hotel Quinta Avenida in Havana and a letter of intent to
manage the Santa Isabel, a “boutique” hotel. It becomes the first U.S.
company since 1959 to do so.
Starwood “will be advocates for change; they will be forceful,” said
John Kavulich of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council in New York.
In his speech to an entrepreneurship and opportunity event in Havana,
March 21, Obama told participants that being a small businessman means
“if you’re willing to work hard, you can make your own way and improve
your situation in life, for the next generation. It’s the spirit of
youth.” In other words, “look out for number one” — the “me first” ethos
that characterizes capitalism as opposed to the solidarity that is the
product of the proletarian socialist revolution in Cuba.
Obama wants “to seduce the youth, stimulate selfishness within them and
a desire for purely individual improvement to present capitalist growth
as the universal panacea and not the cause of the crisis,” Darío Machado
wrote in the March 25 Granma. “It’s our turn to explain this.”
“Nobody should be under the illusion that the people of this dignified
and selfless country will renounce the glory, the rights, or the
spiritual wealth they have gained with the development of education,
science and culture,” Fidel Castro wrote in the March 28 Granma. “We are
capable of producing the food and material riches we need with the
efforts and intelligence of our people. We do not need the empire to
give us anything.”
Related articles:
Cuba anti-Zika fight shows difference revolution makes
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