The JvL Bi-

The JvL Bi-Weekly

James van Luik

Publisher & Editor

Thursday, May 15, 2003

Volume 2, No. 9

5 Articles

The Favored State and Enemy States

Some Voices of Guidance

The Resurrection of Dr. Strangelove Bodes Ill for Cuba

Statement Supporting Cuba Against Bush’s Attack

Executions Are Extraordinary Measures

1.THE FAVORED STATE AND ENEMY STATES

NOAM CHOMSKY

Question: Noam, people often attack you as a political commentator for focusing your criticism against the activities of the United States, and not so much against the Old Soviet Union, or Vietnam, or Cuba and so on—the official enemies. I’d like to know what you think about that kind of criticism?

Well, it’s true that’s one of the standard things I get—but see, if that criticism is meant honestly (and most of the time it’s not), then it’s really missing the crucial point, I think. See, I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the main component of international violence in the world. But much more importantly than that, it’s because American actions are the things that I can do something about. So even if the United States were causing only a tiny fraction of the repression and violence in the world—which obviously is very far from the truth—that tiny fraction would still be what I’m responsible for, and what I should focus my efforts against. And that’s based on a very simple ethical principle—namely, that the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated consequences for human beings: I think that’s kind of like a fundamental moral truism.

So for example, it was a very easy thing in the 1980s for people in the United States to denounce the atrocities of the Soviet Union in its occupation of Afghanistan—but those denunciations had no effects which could have helped people. In terms of their ethical value, they were about the same as denouncing Napoleon’s atrocities, or things that happened in the Middle Ages. Useful and significant actions are ones which have consequences for human beings, and usually those will concern things that you can influence and control—which means for people in the United States, American actions primarily, not those of some other state.

Actually, the principle that I think we ought to follow is the principle we rightly expected Soviet dissidents to follow. So what principle did we expect Sakharov [a Soviet scientist punished for his criticism of the U.S.S.R.] to follow? Why did people here decide that Sakharov was a moral person? I think he was. Sakharov did not treat every atrocity as identical—he had nothing to say about American atrocities. When he was asked about them, he said, “I don’t know anything about them, I don’t care about them, what I talk about are Soviet atrocities.” And that was right—because those were the ones that he was responsible for, and that he might have been able to influence. Again, it’s a very simple ethical point: you are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, you’re not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else’s actions.

Now, we understand this perfectly well when we’re talking about dissidents in the old Soviet Union or in some other enemy state, but we fail to understand it when we’re talking about ourselves—for obvious reasons. I mean, commissars in the old Soviet Union didn’t understand it about dissidents there either: commissars in the old Soviet Union attacked Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents because they weren’t denouncing American crimes. In fact, an old joke fifty years ago was that if you went to a Stalinist and criticized the Soviet slave-labor camps, the Stalinist would say, “Well, what about the lynchings in the American South?” Alright, in that case the dishonesty’s obvious, and we can easily understand why.

Now, just personally speaking, it turns out that I do spend a fair amount of effort talking about the crimes of official enemies—in fact, there are a number of people now living in the United States and Canada from the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who are there because of my own personal activities on their behalf. But I don’t take great pride in that part of my work, particularly: I just do it because I’m interested in it. The most important thing for me, and for you, is to think about the greater consequences of your criticisms: what you can have the most effect on. And especially in a relatively open society like ours, which does allow a lot of freedom for dissent, that means American crimes primarily.

Well, that’s the main point here, I think. But there’s also another consideration which is important—and which simply can’t be ignored, in my opinion. Honest people are just going to have to face the fact that whenever possible, people with power are going to exploit any actions which serve their violent ends. So when American dissidents criticize the atrocities of some enemy state like Cuba or Vietnam or something, it’s no secret what the effects of that criticism are going to be: it’s not going to have any effect whatsoever on the Cuban regime, for example, but it certainly will help the torturers in Washington and Miami to keep inflicting their campaign of suffering on the Cuban population [i.e. through the U.S.-led embargo]. Well, that is something I do not think a moral person would want to contribute to.

I mean if a Russian intellectual had started publishing articles denouncing very real atrocities committed by the Afghan resistance forces at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, knowing that his accurate criticism would have helped enable the Kremlin to mobilize popular support for further atrocities by the Red Army, I do not think that would have been a morally responsible thing for that person to do. Of course, this often creates difficult dilemmas. But again honest people have to recognize that they are responsible for the predictable consequences of their acts. So perfectly accurate criticism of the regime in Cuba, say, will predictably be used by ideologists and politicians in the Untied “States to help extend our absolutely barbaric stranglehold on Cuba. Your criticism could be perfectly correct—though obviously much of what we do hear today is in fact false. But even so, an honest person will always ask, “What are the likely consequences of this going to be for other people?” And the consequences in that case at least are clear. Well, making decisions in these circumstances can often be difficult—but these are just dilemmas that human beings have to face in life, and all you can do is try to deal with them the best way you can.

2.SOME VOICES OF GUIDANCE

ABBIE HOFFMAN

Ending involvement with SNCC and civil-rights activities by no means meant walking away from the movement. Help was needed in the mushrooming antiwar committees.

A community of full-time organizers was evolving around a loft at 5 Beekman Street—people like A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming and David McReynolds. I respected their pacifist beliefs, but something in their approach jarred my American heartland upbringing. I practiced nonviolence as a tactic, but was far from a follower of Gandhi. Confrontation always demanded surprise and uncertainty. By saying “If you punch me in the face, I’ll turn the other cheek,” you could often get hurt more than if you kept a threat of returning the blows. While Gandhi was fasting in jail, guerrillas blew up trains throughout India. When Martin Luther King, Jr., prayed, blacks rioted, and armed groups formed in the ghettos. Violence and the threat of violence have a good track record when it comes to changing the minds of people in power.

Pacifism could never sound convincing to workers who knew the labor movement’s history. Yet it was foolhardy at the time to advocate any strategy that went beyond the nonviolent stance of the antiwar movement. Besides, its base lay in churches and universities; for five years now, they had been my stomping grounds, and I knew what strategies and language to employ there.

In the East Village new turf was opening up. Young runaway kids were flocking to the streets—longhaired, broke, on dope. There were thousands of them already; “hippies,” the papers were beginning to call them. People were transforming themselves into living demonstrations of the struggle against bureaucracy. There was work to be done on the street, but I’d like to interrupt our story to briefly mention some influential thinkers at the time.

I have always found Norman Mailer fascinating as a thinker. I first encountered him in the last days of the fifties, swaggering like some tousle-haired Hebraic James Dean—seated on a podium belting scotch from a bottle, and firing out insults and insights like body punches at a Brandeis audience. Wailing out at technocracy, craving for some primitive intellectual engagement, he lambasted the institutions of learning and culture. Exhorting the crowd to fan out from the hallowed grounds of academe, he predicted a New Age would be born in the gutters and back streets of America’s bohemian underworld.

He saw America as the spawning ground for a new musician, a new poet, even a new politician, all heavily influenced by black culture—hip to drugs and sex, educated on a new set of principles. He codified this vision in an illuminating essay called “The White Negro.” A cultural manifesto calling for youth rebellion as well as an analysis of their society’s pathology, it struck a resonant chord in the heart beneath my leather jacket.

In “An American Dream,” in his articles on the heavyweight fights, in his agonizing over sexual identity, Mailer became a yardstick to continually measure my own thought. “Armies of the Night” is still the best book about sixties protest.

I recall one brilliant speech Mailer delivered at a Berkeley antiwar rally, circa ’65, in which he portrayed the US rôle in Southeast Asia as an extension of Johnson’s Texas-rancher mentality. A wickedly accurate satire of Johnson at his most vulgar. Mailer showed how you can focus protest sentiment effectively by aiming not at the decisions themselves but at the gut of those who make them. He ended that speech with a call for national vilification of Johnson, suggesting we turn all photos of LBJ upside down—a sort of politics-by-disrespect.

At midpoint in the sixties, Herbert Marcuse published another important essay, called “Repressive Tolerance.” In it, he successfully demolished the myth of the US as the free marketplace of ideas. By oversaturation, the ruling class maintained its control over the minds of the people. Free speech meant a great deal when the founding fathers drew up the constitution—now, however, the distribution of speech was of paramount importance. The constitution had been passed from hand to hand, but now could radical concepts be exchanged now? It wasn’t enough to leaflet on street corners when three networks maintained a nonstop thought barrage directed at millions. The implication of Marcuse was clear: to publicize radical ideas, you needed prime-time access. No one would volunteer the space. It would have to be stolen.

Marcuse was, with the exception of Maslow, the teacher who had the greatest impact on me. I studied with him at Brandeis, and later attended his lectures at the University of California. In the spring of ’67, I saw him speaking—of all places—at the Fillmore East. There he was, this statuesque, white-haired seventy-year-old European Marxist scholar, following the Group Image acid–rock band onto the stage, accompanied by the thunderous foot-stomping cheers of America’s most stoned-out, anti-intellectual generation.

In “Eros and Civilization” and “One-Dimensional Man”, Marcuse had managed to bridge the gap between Marx and Freud and in one mighty intellectual effort make their thinking relevant to the post-industrial age. He recognized alienation from one’s labor as the chief illness of our time. But instead of fixing the blame for the anxiety, the sense of dread, in some primeval battle of fathers and sons (Freud) or a netherworld of the devil (the church), Marcuse put the blame on the competitive economic system. Capitalism forced man to perform rather than experience pleasure. Sexuality was repressed in order to create manpower hours. Thus, while all his contemporaries were scolding the young for their excesses in politics, sex and drugs, Marcuse alone cheered us on. For to him the hippie ethic or “ polymorphous perversity,” as he termed it, was both a return to the origins of health and a push forward to a society in which alienation and repression could be contained.

“DE only proper response to dis von-dimensional machine of destruction can be total and complete rrrrrrefusal!” cried the philosopher, standing on the Fillmore stage. The joint went crazy. Ben Motherfucker, leader of the Lower East Side’s most nefarious street gang, spat on the floor, raised his fist, and exclaimed, “Dat cat’s duh only fuckin’ brain worth listnin’ to in de cuntree!”

Marcuse allied with the strangest of bedfellows—the Motherfuckers.

Another key thinker at this time was the Canadian Marshall McLuhan. “Understanding Media” became a guide for comprehending the electronic world. I wasn’t sure I understood McLuhan any more than I did Marcuse, but his thinking made me focus on those flashing psychedelic news images that instantaneously seemed to penetrate our fantasy world. “This is reality,” TV said. “Seeing is believing.” Magic really. Through teleportation one could transport oneself bodily into the homes of strangers.

America has more television sets than toilets. I began to study those little picture tubes. If the means of production were the underpinnings of industrial society, then the means of communication served that function in a cybernetic world. And, if labor was the essential ingredient for production, then information was that ingredient for mass communication. A modern revolutionary group headed for the television station, not for the factory. It concentrated its energy on infiltrating and changing the image system. I suppose like cave people we have returned to ikons and symbols for idea identification.

But information was more than news show: it was punches on an IBM card, scratches on magnetic tape, music, sex, family, schools, fashions, architecture. Information was culture, and change in society would come when the information changed. We would make what was irrelevant relevant. What was outrageous, commonplace. Like freaked-out Wobblies, would build a new culture smack-dab in the burned–out shell of the old dinosaur.

There were other writers of importance. Paul Goodman’s greatest contribution was his dissection of the mass educational system. He urged us to smash the barrier between classroom and society. More than a theoretician, Goodman would help build (with hammer and nails on the Lower East Side) the counterinstitutions to come. Robert Theobold, a new–age economist, crossed the barrier of academia to write in the underground press. That summer he was to hint:

(“The only way out of the dilemma of our society is to say that in the short run, everyone is entitled to a guaranteed income, and then very rapidly move into a society in which you simply go into a store and take what you want.”)

This seemingly utopian vision was shared by someone quite different from Theobold. Fidel Castro had stated on several occasions that the goal of the Cuban revolution was the abolition of money. Fraternal barter was seen by both Theobold and Fidel as the economic basis of humanism. In Cuba, on the Isle of Pines, Fidel was to welcome the youth movement’s idealism by inaugurating a moneyless society.

This chapter would not be complete (it isn’t anyway) without mention of one more crucial thinker. C. Wright Mills had kept his hand on the plow throughout the difficult fifties. His book “The Power Elite”, remains, two decades later, the best indictment of the new, corporate ruling class. In it he traced the history of those who run America, destroying the myth of “leaders rising out of the masses.” If Mills did not invent the concept of the “New Left,” he certainly popularized it. In an essay called “The New Left,” he uncannily predicted the changing revolutionary strategy. Realizing that rapprochement between organized labor and capitalism had stymied traditional working-class struggle, he advocated an attack on the “cultural apparatus” to be led by the young. Much of the so-called New Left seemed to overlook this important essay while still honoring Mills.

I did not.

The blending of all these ideas, filtered through the experience of everyday life, was the theoretical basis of what was to come. Halfway into the decade, the word “revolution” slowly crept into our vocabulary. And it wasn’t thinkers that we sought out, it was doers. The time for study had passed. We no longer felt the need to justify decisions in intellectual terms.

3.THE RESURRECTION OF DR. STRANGELOVE BODES ILL FOR CUBA

DOREEN MILLER

Witnessing the unfolding of present-day events is like watching something out of a grade-B, Hollywood, science-fiction horror flick, a lá Dr. Strangelove. However, the truly frightening part is that it’s not a movie. The main character is a xeno- and ideophobic, hyperparanoid, power-hungry, self-delusional, trigger-happy leader run amok. He and his administrative warriors have convinced themselves that they have the right to launch nuclear missiles from their huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction not only in response to a chemical or biological attack, but also (more shockingly) in first, “pre-emptive” strikes against nations who are allegedly plotting terrorist attacks against their country. After all, according to their logic, nuclear bombs are really no different form conventional weapons. Besides, with its high-tech wizardry, know-how, and precision, their military would easily be able to minimize the consequences of a nuclear fallout.

Welcome to the wonderful world of George W. Bush, et al.

Caught up in this maniacal zeal to take on and rule the whole world, US President Bush’s number three man, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, made public on May 6, in his “beyond the Axis of Evil” speech to the Heritage Foundation, Washington’s intentions to extend military action to three additional countries including, of all places, the small island-nation of Cuba. Therein, he boldly charges Cuba with developing bacteriological weapons and of selling to rogue nations “dual-use” biotechnologies which could theoretically be used against the USA in future terrorist acts.

In fact, his wild accusations are merely that, unsubstantiated suspicions. His speech amounts to a heap of propaganda whose sole purpose is to stir up anti-Cuban sentiments by manipulating and exploiting the post-September 11 fear factor in US citizens in order to justify any future military incursions against that tiny country.

If the truth be known, under the guidance of Fidel Castro, Cuba has invested a great deal of resources and energy (10% of state spending) into medical research with the result that it boasts a sophisticated and well-developed health care system that covers ALL of its citizens (which is more than can be said for the United States). It has especially made progress in biotechnologies associated with treating heart attacks, viral diseases and the development of vaccines against meningitis, hepatitis B and other serious, life-threatening illnesses, according to a May 08 article in the BBC. Cuba has actively shared these technologies with a number of countries especially third World countries – some of which have more recently been arbitrarily designated as “rogue” nations by the Bush administration.

Time and again disgruntled Cuban defectors have raised the same false accusation of Cuba’s supposed biological warfare research and development programs. However, investigators from the “Miami Herald”, top officials at the US State Department, and Dr. Raymond Zilinskas, a senior scientist at the Center for Non-proliferation Studies at the Monterrey Institute of International Studies each time have separately come to the same conclusion: “There’s been no evidence they’re doing anything; there’s never been evidence; the stuff simply doesn’t check out.”

The Center for International Policy quotes a US official interviewed in 1999 by Juan Tamayo of the “Miami Herald: “Stuff that sophisticated always has dual use [medical and military], no way around it…. But none of what we know adds up to Cuba having offensive biological warfare capabilities.” After a current inspection of Cuba’s medical research facilities, even former President Jimmy Carter vouches for Cuba’s innocence of Bolton’s far-fetched allegations.

So, what could possibly be the ulterior motive behind Bolton issuing a threat against Cuba? I suggest that the statement directly prefacing Bolton’s allegation strongly hints at a more probably, underlying reason for threatening US Military aggression: “Cuba leads in the production of pharmaceuticals and various vaccines that are sold worldwide”. Hmm, it sounds as if Cuba is unacceptably cutting into the sacred profits of US pharmaceutical companies!

Another point that bears worthy consideration is that Castro has been a thorn in the side of the United States ever since his successful ouster in 1959 of the highly corrupt regime of “Washington’s-most-favored-son,” Batista.

Shortly after his rise to power, Castro earned the enmity of the US by nationalizing US owned enterprises, one prime example being the Bacardi Rum distilleries. Unhappy with its loss of hegemonic influence, the US initiated a series of terrorist actions against this struggling nation – unabated acts still being carried out today – that would claim the lives of thousands of Cubans over the next 42 years.

The infamous Bay of Pigs blunder in 1961 was backed, financed, planned, and carried out by CIA personnel with the blessings of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. This failed coup was followed by the largest assassination campaign in modern history against Fide Castro, who is reputedly said to have survived over 630 attempts on his life.

Throughout the sixties, Cuba repeatedly suffered hundreds of acts of sabotage, terrorism and psychological warfare including sea and air commando raids by exiles; damage to oil refineries, chemical plants, railroad bridges, cane fields, sugar mills and warehouses; and pirate attacks on Cuban fishing boats and merchant ships.

In October 2001, Executive Intelligence Review exposed a horrifying account of the recently declassified CIA “Operation North woods” documents which were drawn up in 1962 in conjunction with officers within the highest level of the Pentagon whose arm of the project they named “Operation Mongoose.” The top brass proposed and were ready toe execute the idea of using US military personnel to carryout pseudo-Cuban terrorist acts against the US and US military facilities in order to deceptively win over unconditional, US public support and to create a pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro.

In an eerily familiar-sounding “wag the dog” scenario, some of the proposals included carrying out terror campaigns in Miami, other Florida cities and even Washington; blowing up ships, exploding plastic bombs, harassing and hijacking civil air and surface craft, the “simulated or real” sinking of boatloads of Cuban refugees, and the simulated shooting down of a chartered civil airliner in Cuban airspace.

All this was to be accompanied by arrests of“Cuban agents” and the release of carefully prepared “documents” proving their guilt. If it weren’t’ for the somewhat greater moral compass of President Kennedy, who refused to entertain such a diabolical plan, this nightmare perpetrated against unsuspecting US citizens might have actually become a reality.

Throughout the past 40 years, the US government has not only balked at taking steps to deter Miami-based Cuban exiles and terrorist organizations from carrying out acts of aggression against Cuba, but in fact, knowingly continues to harbor them. In 1976, Orlando Bosch, a CIA operative and Cuban exile was arrested in Venezuela for blowing up a Cuban airline in which 73 people were killed. A comment from “The Guardian” on February 08, 2002, unveils the very real hypocrisy between US foreign and domestic policy, “Amazingly, Bosch was granted a pardon by George Bush senior in 1990 and is now in Florida, apparently untroubled by the current president’s commitment to rooting out terrorism in all it forms…he remains…protected by the same government that warns other countries that they are either for or against terrorism.”

In 1984 while being tried on a homicide charge, Eduardo Arocena, leader of the Omega 7 terrorist group, admitted to having participated in a 1980 operation to introduce viruses as part of the war on Cuba. This offers a logical explanation for the four vastly destructive epidemics that emerged between 1979 and 1981 and seriously beleaguered the island: hemorrhagic conjunctivitis and dengue fever which afflicted over 340,000 people, resulting in the deaths of 158 people, 101 of them children, and sugarcane rust and tobacco blue mold which all but wiped out the island’s two major export crops.

Only 5 years ago, Raul Ernesto Cruz León was arrested in Havana for a series of bombings in various hotels and in the famous Bodeguita del Medio restaurant that killed one Italian youth. As the “New York Times” stated in 1997, he confessed to being paid $3,000 for each bomb he planted by the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) – another Cuban exile terrorist organization based in the US.

Just a year ago in April 2001, three members of Miami’s Alpha 66, an anti-Castro terrorist organization were caught trying to land on Cuban soil. At the time of their arrest, they had in their possession a rather curious assortment of harmless tourist paraphernalia: four AK-47 assault rifles, one M-3 rifle with a silencer, there Makarov pistols, night goggles and communications equipment. They claim they were sent on a mission to indiscriminately kill Cuban civilians and sow terror on the island.

Castro’s appeals for US cooperation in rooting out the terrorist acts directed against Cuba from US soil have constantly fallen on deaf ears. For years, Cuba has handed over detailed, well-documented information to various US government agencies, up to the highest levels, complete with names and conclusive evidence of criminal acts of terrorism, yet US officials have chosen to cast a blind eye – neither a single arrest has been made nor any investigation ever been initiated.

Instead, in June 2001, a Miami court convicted on trumped-up espionage charges five Cuban undercover agents who were monitoring Miami-based, right-wing terrorist groups in an effort to protect their homeland against future attacks. They were sentenced from 15 years to life in prison as a result of a controversial, highly-biased, political trial based on pure speculation, out-of-context excerpts of manipulated documents, and phony “expert” testimony. In a travesty of justice, the prosecutors in this mock trail used every means possible to successfully suppress over 90 percent of the defendants’ documentation of innocence and the true purpose of their mission.

The US’s unrelenting assault on Cuba includes a series of punitive trade embargoes in food and medicine that have been in effect since 1960. When Cuba refused to roll over and die after the collapse in 1989 of its main trading partner, the USSR, the US government enacted additional, more intensive trade embargoes in 1992 through the Torricelli Act and again in 1996 through the Helms-Burton Act. The Latter not only attempts to extend US sanction against Cuba to a global level by threatening legal action, fines, and economic sanctions against American or US-friendly industries that continued to do business with Cuba, but also allocates no less than $5 million to finance and support the activities of counterrevolutionary groups.

These latest rounds of US sanctions have been universally condemned, with the UN having issued numerous resolutions calling for an end to the embargo against Cuba, first during 1992-95, and again in 1999. The words of world-renowned Dr. Benjamin Spock highlight the more insidious intentions of US policy towards Cuba: “I believe very few Americans realize what our country is trying to do down there – starve people into submission and deprive children and old people of medicine.” What could be more representative of a genuine act of terrorism and an international war crime than withholding and blockading life-essential food and medicine for a civilian population?

In his defense, René González Sehweret, one of the five Cubans recently convicted of “espionage,” describes Cuba as “a nation of people whose only crime is having chosen their own path, and having defended that choice successfully, at the cost of enormous sacrifices….”

He goes on to issue a warning against ignorance and complacency within the American public towards US foreign policy and unchecked military might: “…the hatred and ignorance we have seen here towards a small country, which nobody here knows, can be dangerous when combined with a blinding sense of power and false superiority.”

For the US government and its citizens, however, the most politically and morally significant question was posed by Ramón Labañino Salazar, a second of the five convicted Cubans, who defended his actions carried out within the US, a country not only unempathetic and unresponsive to, but, in essence, complicit in the continued assault on and suffering of the Cuban people: “How many more deaths of innocent human being must we witness before this insane and absurd policy towards -Cuba is ended?

4.STATEMENT SUPPORTING CUBA AGAINST BUSH’S ATTACKS

STOP BUSH’S NEW AGGRESSION AGAINST CUBA

THE INTERNATIONAL A.N.S.W.E.R. COALITION

We, the undersigned individuals and organizations, view with great concern the intensifying campaign of subversion and aggression against Cuba, directed by the US government.

We in the US progressive and anti-war movement recognize our obligation to expose and organize against the Bush administration’s plans to overthrow the government of Cuba. Under the rubric of the “war against terrorism” the Bush administration has aggressively embarked on a campaign to carry out the overturn of governments that seek to maintain independent control over the their own land and resources. At stake in Cuba are the considerable social and economic gains of the people made in spite of overwhelming opposition from the government representing the most militarily powerful country in the world.

On April 7, James Cason, chief of the US Interests Section in Havana and the top US diplomat in Cuba, declared, “all of our allies agree that their policy goal in Cuba is, ultimately, the same as ours: the rapid and peaceful transition to a democratic government characterized by strong support for human rights and an open market economy.” He stated on the same day, “the Administration’s top priority is to promote a rapid, peaceful transition.”

Coming from a US government representative, the meaning is clear: “transition” translates to overthrow.

In the wake of the war on Iraq, there is no corner of the world that is safe today from US aggression. This is especially the case for Cuba, part of whose national territory remains under US military occupation. US diplomats have warned Cuba, along with Iran, Syria and North Korea, to “learn the lessons of Iraq.”

Over the past 43 years Cuba has suffered the loss of 3,478 of its citizens from numerous acts of terrorism, invasions, assassinations, assassination attempts, biological warfare and blockade. The government of one country has perpetrated these illegal acts against Cuba: the government of the United States.

The US government has imposed an economic and political blockade on the island nation for more than 40 years, causing $70 billion damage to Cuba’s economy, and inflicting unnecessary suffering on the most vulnerable in Cuban society. The US military has continued to maintain and expand its naval base at Guantanamo Bay, a legacy of colonialism. Today hundreds of people from the Afghanistan war– including children under the age of 16 years – are being imprisoned and interrogated by the US at Guantanamo with no recourse whosoever to due process.

Recently, a coordinated campaign of aggressions and foreign subversion against Cuba has been revealed, indicating the US may be setting the stage for renewed confrontation with Cuba.

The trial of the 75 Cuban individuals arrested in March uncovered the directing rôle of the US Interests Section in guiding, financing, and organizing subversive actions against the Cuban government. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has funneled some $20 million in support to anti-government organizations in Cuba as a part of this counter-revolutionary campaign. After the popular revolution that overthrew the US-backed dictatorship of Batista in 1959, the US government has resorted to invasion, nuclear threats, biological and chemical attacks, assassination attempts and murders, CIA financed and organized “opposition,” and economic destabilization. For forty years the overthrow of the Cuban government has been a priority of US policy makers. The Bush administration’s goal is to carry out regime change and replace the Cuban government with a puppet regime. It is a testament to the popular support of the Cuban government and its ability to stand up and confront US aggression that the people of Cuba have successfully repelled overt and covert attempts to recolonize their country.

Over the past seven months, a series of seven armed airplane and boat hijackings have occurred in Cuba – an exceptionally high number in such a short time. The hijackings have together endangered the lives of hundreds of people. Thus far, the Justice Department has failed to prosecute any of the hijackers who arrived in the US. Despite having committed the terrorist crime of air piracy, several have been released on bail.

At the same time, the US Interests Section has virtually stopped granting visas to Cubans applying for admission to the United States. Under the 1995 US-Cuba Migratory Agreement, the US agreed to grant 20,000 entry visas to the US annually. The purpose of the 1995 agreement was to assure a safe, legal and orderly immigration process.

However, from October 2002 to Feb. 2003, the first five months of the accord’s calendar year, only 505 visas were granted to Cubans wishing to enter the US. This fact must be understood in conjunction with the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) of 1966, a law which uniquely accords Cuban immigrants the right to US residency and financial assistance if they set foot on US soil. Cutting off legal channels for immigration while the CAA remains in effect, serves as open invitation to Cubans to immigrate illegally to the US . Non-prosecution of even those individuals who hijack planes to get to the US , means that the US government is openly encouraging the most dangerous forms of terrorism against Cuba.

As a fact of international law, which recognizes the rights of states to defend their sovereignty, Cuba is exercising its legal right and responsibility to defend and protect its people against foreign government subversion, terrorism, and other forms of US aggression.

In Light of these developments, and understanding the real dangers that Cuba faces from the US government:

A. We demand that the Bush Administration cease and desist from the current campaign of attacks on the Cuban people and government.

B. We call on the US government to end its blockade against Cuban, to lift restrictions on travel, and to end its ongoing multi-faceted war against the Cuban government.

C. We further call upon the Bush Administration to free the five Cubans who are imprisoned in the US for trying to stop Miami-based terrorism against their people.

Initiated by the International A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition

To add your name to this statement in solidarity with the people of Cuba, go to

http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/cuba/sign.html

5.EXECUTIONS ARE EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES

FROM A PUBLIC ADDRESS

FIDEL CASTRO

(Castro calls executions ‘extraordinary measure’ to avert US aggression.)

In his first public address since launching a crackdown, Cuban President Fidel Castro said the recent execution of three ferry hijackers was an exceptional measure aimed at avoiding US military aggression against Cuba.

In a “special appearance” on Cuban television, Castro said three men who tried to hijack a ferry April 2 to get to the United States were executed nine days later to prevent a wave of hijacking that could provoke a crisis with Washington and serve as a pretext of a military action against the island.

“We had to pull the evil out by the roots,” Castro said in his almost four-hour address late Friday.

He condemned seven hijackings in Cuba in as many months, including two commercial airlines diverted to the US and the foiled ferry plot.

No one on the boat was harmed in the attempt, but the 11 hijackers were given summary trials and their three leaders were sentenced to death and shot at dawn on April 11, sparking an international outcry.

Since the ferry hijacking Cuban security agents have thwarted 29 other armed plots to hijack boats and aircraft, Castro said, predicting a “migration crisis” with far-reaching consequences.

The US and the anti-Castro Cuban exile community of Florida have a “warped plot” to create a crisis with Cuba that could lead to military action against the island, he said.

“We had to stop short this wave of kidnappings,” he said, issuing a stern warning to any potential hijackers.

“Hijackers and hostage-takers will be submitted to summary judgments and should not expect clemency from the Council of State,” Castro said.

Although it shares some of the same “sensibilities” of “many of our friends” worldwide who oppose the death penalty, Cuba cannot renounce it for now, due to the threat posed by the US, Castro said.

The crackdown sparked international outcry but Cuba nevertheless avoided censure from the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which on April 17 passed a motion that merely urged the communist nation to accept a visit from a UN human rights envoy.

Until the recent execution, Cuba had observed, since May 2000, something of a moratorium on capital punishment despite death sentences issued in that time, he said.

“Capital punishment was not applied, but it was not renounced,” he said.

An invasion of Cuba by the US government would involve Washington in a prolonged war destined for failure, Castro said.

Cuban exiles and dissidents who want to end Cuba’s “revolution… will last no longer than a meringue in a schoolyard” during any such confrontation, he said.

More than 40 years of failure after failure should persuade any government in the US that the most sophisticated weapons cannot crush the resistance of the Cuban people,” Castro said.