Nedburn Thaffe, Gleaner Writer
With the exchange rate expected to reach the dreaded J$100 to US$1 mark this week, consumers who have over the past few years done their fair share of belt tightening will be forced to buckle up even further and continue to hold strain.
Those consumers' dilemma results from the continued dwindling effect the sliding dollar is having on their ability to purchase goods and services.
Already the mumbling at cashier counters in supermarkets in the Corporate Area have become more pronounced.
Upset and outraged over the amount of money they have had to fork out for basic necessities, even religious zealots who scope out supermarkets to spread the 'good news' have been changing the tone of their message in keeping with the times.
"Jesus warned of condition like this. That was the reason why He said we should pray for our daily bread. It was only under the rule of (King) Solomon that everybody was satisfied," one Jehovah's Witness shared with a consumer outside one supermarket The Gleaner visited in the Corporate Area recently.
Verbal attacks directed at politicians for their management of the economy over successive decades were common on the lips of several persons who emerged from the supermarket in the early afternoon.
With plastic bags in hand, one shopper, who asked not to be named, was obviously not in a good mood after realising that she spent more than she bargained for.
"Three thousand-odd dollars and mi nuh get half a weh mi want yet," the Seaview Gardens resident lamented. "Mi did waan three sardines and a only one mi could afford. You nuh see seh the country mash up?"
The elderly woman reflected on a time when she was able to take J$40 to any supermarket and take home "one box a grocery with chicken and everything".
Those days, she recalled, were in the 1980s and during that period trading of the Jamaican currency did not escalate beyond the J$6.50 to US$1 mark, according to information gleaned from the Bank of Jamaica website which documents the history of the exchange rate.
"That time mi used to do domestic work in Havendale (St Andrew) and every weekend mi would buy grocery fi carry go give mi children dem down di country (Clarendon)," she said.
She recounted how in 1988 she bought a "five-draw, good-size dresser" for J$1,000. The record shows that year the dollar trade highest at J$5.54 to US$1.
Additionally, in 1991, with just J$1,500, the Seaview Gardens resident purchased a brand new divan bed which she possesses to this day. That year trading of the currency started showing signs that there was trouble on the horizon, with the dollar ending the year at J$21.57 to US$1.
Twenty-two years later, she would have to take no less than $18,100 to a furniture store to purchase a similar bed.
"You caan go nowhere with that kind of money now. The amount of things this J$3,500 weh mi just spend could give mi. Mi would have to call taxi and truck fi remove them," she said.
"See it deh, all now no meat kind, no flour, no sugar not in mi bag."
Rose Plummer, who lives alone, said shopping for items once every week has worked out better for her.
According to Plummer, all Jamaicans will have to learn to "cuff and curve" in this time whether they like it or not.
"I can remember paying J$100 for bread, now it's J$250," she said.
"What is going on in the country is sin why all these things happening. We, as a nation, have to go back to God. Portia Simpson cannot solve this problem; this bigger than her. Andrew Holness cannot solve our problem. The dollar flowing like it's at Caymanas Park or stadium and is only Jesus can help us. We have to turn back to Jesus," Plummer charged.
For J$1,597, with discount included, 45-year-old Samuel Wilson was able to stock up on a few snacks which he expected to be enough for his daughter who attends basic school.
"Before the end of the week, I have to come back. Ten years ago, mi could a carry home more than a trolley of grocery with di said amount of money but right now things gone way out of proportion," he said.
"Right now, when mi a buy snack for my daughter, it's no less than J$2,000. It's because mi have a discount card why I get it for this price. It's just by the mercies of God mi survive but it could be worse. God is taking care of me and my family."
nedburn.thaffe@gleanerjm.com
April 08, 2013
Jamaica Gleaner
An International Caribbean Online Log about the news and opinions in the Americas and World. This Caribbean Blog of global reach and appeal is maintained by Bahamian Blogger - Dennis Dames with all readers and subscribers in mind.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Saturday, April 6, 2013
The duty to avoid a war in Korea
Reflections
of Fidel
(Taken from (CubaDebate)
A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is
currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000
years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.
This is not to confuse intelligent life with the existence of life
which, from its elemental forms in our solar system, emerged millions of years
ago.
A virtually infinite number of life forms exist. In the
sophisticated work of the world’s most eminent scientists the idea has already
been conceived of reproducing the sounds which followed the Big Bang, the great
explosion which took place more than 13.7 billion years ago.
This introduction would be too extensive if it was not to explain
the gravity of an event as unbelievable and absurd as the situation created in
the Korean Peninsula, within a geographic area containing close to five billion
of the seven billion persons currently inhabiting the planet.
This is about one of the most serious dangers of nuclear war since
the October Crisis around Cuba in 1962, 50 years ago.
In 1950, a war was unleashed there [the Korean Peninsula] which
cost millions of lives. It came barely five years after two atomic bombs were
exploded over the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which, in a
matter of seconds, killed and irradiated hundreds of thousands of people.
General Douglas MacArthur wanted to utilize atomic weapons against
the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Not even Harry Truman allowed
that.
It has been affirmed that the People’s Republic of China lost one
million valiant soldiers in order to prevent the installation of an enemy army
on that country’s border with its homeland. For its part, the Soviet army
provided weapons, air support, technological and economic aid.
I had the honor of meeting Kim Il Sung, a historic figure, notably
courageous and revolutionary.
If war breaks out there, the peoples of both parts of the
Peninsula will be terribly sacrificed, without benefit to all or either of them.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was always friendly with Cuba, as Cuba
has always been and will continue to be with her.
Now that the country has demonstrated its technical and scientific
achievements, we remind her of her duties to the countries which have been her
great friends, and it would be unjust to forget that such a war would
particularly affect more than 70% of the population of the planet.
If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the
government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of
images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of
the United States. The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people
of the United States.
Fidel Castro Ruz
April 4, 2013
11:12 p.m.
Granma.cu
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution: Legacy and Challenges
By
The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has prompted the international left to acknowledge two key features about him and Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution. The first is Chávez's commitment to fighting for the poor and oppressed. Plenty of statistics demonstrate this. Literally millions have been lifted out of poverty and given new opportunities to improve their lives. Examples from daily life abound. I remember speaking to an upper class anti-Chavista once who was complaining about how, since Chávez came to power, it had become difficult to find maids. Many of the poor women she used to hire, she explained, had enrolled in a free education program provided by the government, one of the highly successful ‘missions.’ Another time, an empanada maker who lived with his son in the same 10-foot by six-foot stand he cooked out of told me how, since Chávez arrived, his community became emboldened to organize themselves into a cooperative with the mission of fighting the hotel and restaurant chains in the area, and create a community controlled tourist zone.
A second feature about the Bolivarian Revolution also cannot be elided: the political impasse in addressing corruption, bureaucracy, political clientalism and finding an alternate model of economic management. When workers organize to take over a factory (for example, Sidor in 2008), they have to fight not only the capitalist owners, but often also the local or provincial government (even at times Chavista ones). If they win the fight, workers then have to struggle with government supervision, which often seems more concerned with meeting technocratic goals, rather than developing a genuine participatory democracy in the workplace. And, as the latest round of currency devaluation shows, unless added measures are forthcoming, it is the poor who will bear the burden of reduced living standards (through inflation) for the problems of economic management without compensatory gains in increased workers’ power in workplaces (Lebowitz, 2013).
This top down tendency is also expressed in the area of foreign policy. When the ‘Arab Spring’ erupted, rather than supporting those struggling in the streets of Egypt and Syria, a one-dimensional anti-imperialism had Chávez aligning Venezuela with the oppressors, rather than siding with the poor and workers and against imperial interventions. There is also the alliances with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that go beyond the necessities of finding support against Western imperialism and U.S. empire.
Socialism in the 21st Century
However, hidden within these two opposing developments is a third, potentially more vital one. As a result of the Bolivarian Revolution, we can now begin to think of what in recent decades had become unthinkable, namely a socialism in the 21st century. In the 20th century, socialist politics predominantly took two forms. The first was the path taken by social democratic parties that sought social transformation by populating the state with reform-minded officials and proceeding to attempt to manipulate the economy from above through a variety of technocratic measures. At best, this would eliminate the worst abuses of capitalist markets. ‘Cast your vote and leave it to us’ was the technocratic message to the working classes.
A second strategy was some version of Lenin's theory of dual power in which the exploited and oppressed were to build toward a counter power parallel to the capitalist state. At a decisive juncture, the old state would be ‘smashed’ and old rulers overthrown; the masses formed via a vanguard party would then replace the old state with a new one built in opposition to it, and buttressed by new organs of working-class power. A political elite in the vanguard party would then grab hold of the reins of this new state and lead the transition to a new society. Unfortunately, as the experiences of socialism across the 20th century tells us, both these paths failed. For they both insulated the masses from genuine democratic participation in the state. If the technocratic message was ‘leave it to us,’ the vanguard's message ended up being ‘do as we say.’
Venezuela's path, which has confused the majority of commentators, has been neither one of the above. It is both. Communities and workers have been organizing from below; and technocrats and bureaucrats have been passing laws from above. Each fights and cooperates with the other in an uneasy alliance. In a way, over the last decade Venezuela resembles the political theorist Nicos Poulantzas' (1978) alternative to the above two paths, what he called a “democratic road to socialism,” where struggle for a transition necessarily has to take place through, against and apart from the state. Similarly, more contemporary thinkers (such as Ciccariello-Maher, 2007) have conceptualized this path as having features of dual power through, rather, than against the state.
This is not, however, all that is happening in Venezuela. If it were, all Venezuela would demonstrate is how it is not possible to take two seemingly incompatible paths at the same time; and that the forces of bureaucracy, because of their institutionalized power, are likely to win out over time in a lengthy battle of attrition. But Venezuela is also showing that something new is being created. Venezuela's co-managed ‘socialist enterprises,’ an initiative Chávez was central in developing, perhaps best illustrate this point.
Socialist Enterprises
In these relatively new enterprises, the class relation expresses itself most forcefully in the struggles between workers and state managers. Although at first it appears that this is the same old capital-worker relationship, but with a different name, upon closer inspection, something more complex is happening. Unlike workers in unions that tend to struggle for things like higher wages or labour rights, workers in these enterprises tend to struggle for things like equal wages, genuine democratic participation, and the elimination of a rigid social division of labour within the plant.[1] In other words, this is a more developed form of the class relation, a sharper form, one that Poulantzas was able to hint at, but was not quite able to fully articulate. Thus herein lies the importance of Venezuela. As workers struggle against managers in these state-owned enterprises, we begin to see a glimpse of what 21st-century socialism might look like. In other words, we get a glimpse of the future. In this future, it is new workplace relations centered on participatory democracy that stand on the side of progress, while it is the state that, paradoxically, becomes the guarantor of the class relation, and therefore the sight of the next rupture.
There is so much more to be learned from the Bolivarian Revolution. Here, I've only been able to barely scratch the surface. The communal councils, the struggle to build the new communes and communal cities, the experiences with participatory budgeting, the Bolivarian universities; all these and the many other innovations in Venezuela represent pieces of the revolutionary puzzle. A puzzle out of which a new future can be seen right here in the present. A puzzle that, as we are reminded of with his passing, Hugo Chávez played an important role in, opening up the political space and encouraging self-organization of the poor and workers. No revolution can be built by a single person or by decrees from above, no matter how well intentioned. Yet, at his best, Chávez, from the presidential palace, was like an activist in the streets: he told the truth, he risked his life and sung a song of hope. Hope for a better world. Indeed, for another world. Chávez, presente!
Challenges Ahead
It is widely expected that Nicolás Maduro, now interim President of Venezuela, will win the upcoming Presidential elections on April 14. If elected President, he has promised to take up the five priorities set out by Chávez in his final strategic proposal, Plan de la Patria 2013-2019: multipolarity; national independence; Bolivarian socialism; environmentalism; and economic development.
What is far from clear, however, is how the contradictions evident in these five priorities can be reconciled by the existing state. For example, the priority to preserve the planet and save the human species (environmentalism), stands in sharp opposition to the government's plan to further strengthen the extractive industries in the country, including natural gas, mining and the development of the Faja del Orinoco, which contains the world's largest known reserves of heavy and extra heavy crude oil, or tar sands. The document does mention the need to develop new technology with low environmental impact, but no further details are provided.
In addition, the goal of deepening participatory democracy as the central mechanism behind ‘Bolivarian Socialism’ clashes with the goal of achieving national independence and ‘multipolarity,’ that is, a world with multiple poles of power that is free of imperialism. Although a worthy enough pursuit in theory, in practice, multipolarity has in some cases translated into open support for leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, hardly models of participatory democracy and 21st-century socialism. It is worth mentioning that it was indeed Maduro, as Minister of foreign-policy, that played an important role in developing and maintaining these alliances.
In spite of these contradictions, the five priorities outlined also contain a path forward, namely that of strengthening the ‘popular economy.’ That is the building up of the constellation of organizations, such as cooperatives, co-managed enterprises and communal councils found throughout the country. It is these organizations that have the most potential for resolving the above-mentioned contradictions.
Consider Pedro Camejo, one of the co-managed ‘socialist enterprises’ located in the city of Carora. With its mission to contribute to the achievement of ‘food sovereignty’ in the country, this enterprise has been providing small and medium local farmers agricultural technology and technical assistance at below market price. As a result, agricultural production in the area has increased considerably in recent years. At the same time, workers within the enterprise have been learning new capacities, skills and values, such as collective management and solidarity, largely as the result of the practice of participatory democracy. In addition, the technology comes from PAUNY, one of Argentina's ‘recuperated enterprises’ that builds tractors. As part of an agreement, workers from PAUNY traveled to Carora to train the Venezuelan workers and share their experiences in a spirit of international solidarity.
Although far from perfect, this one example does demonstrate how the five priorities outlined can be met in a more positive way. The challenge for militants within state agencies and institutions will be figuring out how to strengthen this sector of the economy without suffocating it with bureaucracy. The challenge for workers and communities will be to figure out how to enter these spaces while retaining enough autonomy so that struggles can be launched against the state when needed, as is frequently done. Indeed, workers and communities know something the state doesn't, namely that participation within these new democratic spaces, although crucial, is only half the equation. The other half is continued organization and struggle from below.
It remains to be seen what direction a Maduro government will lean in the post-Chavez era. The impasse of the Bolivarian revolution over the last few years is about to be broken. The future is uncertain. But more than ever it is contingent on how the workers and poor that have been empowered by the Bolivarian revolution over the last decade organize and push toward the promise of a 21st century socialism. •
Manuel Larrabure is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research is on Latin America's “new cooperative movement” and “21st-century socialism.” During 2013, he will be conducting fieldwork in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.
References:
1.For a more detailed analysis of this phenomenon, see my forthcoming article in Historical Materialism, “Human Development and Class Struggle in Venezuela's Popular Economy: The Paradox of 21st-century Socialism.”
The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has prompted the international left to acknowledge two key features about him and Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution. The first is Chávez's commitment to fighting for the poor and oppressed. Plenty of statistics demonstrate this. Literally millions have been lifted out of poverty and given new opportunities to improve their lives. Examples from daily life abound. I remember speaking to an upper class anti-Chavista once who was complaining about how, since Chávez came to power, it had become difficult to find maids. Many of the poor women she used to hire, she explained, had enrolled in a free education program provided by the government, one of the highly successful ‘missions.’ Another time, an empanada maker who lived with his son in the same 10-foot by six-foot stand he cooked out of told me how, since Chávez arrived, his community became emboldened to organize themselves into a cooperative with the mission of fighting the hotel and restaurant chains in the area, and create a community controlled tourist zone.
A second feature about the Bolivarian Revolution also cannot be elided: the political impasse in addressing corruption, bureaucracy, political clientalism and finding an alternate model of economic management. When workers organize to take over a factory (for example, Sidor in 2008), they have to fight not only the capitalist owners, but often also the local or provincial government (even at times Chavista ones). If they win the fight, workers then have to struggle with government supervision, which often seems more concerned with meeting technocratic goals, rather than developing a genuine participatory democracy in the workplace. And, as the latest round of currency devaluation shows, unless added measures are forthcoming, it is the poor who will bear the burden of reduced living standards (through inflation) for the problems of economic management without compensatory gains in increased workers’ power in workplaces (Lebowitz, 2013).
This top down tendency is also expressed in the area of foreign policy. When the ‘Arab Spring’ erupted, rather than supporting those struggling in the streets of Egypt and Syria, a one-dimensional anti-imperialism had Chávez aligning Venezuela with the oppressors, rather than siding with the poor and workers and against imperial interventions. There is also the alliances with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that go beyond the necessities of finding support against Western imperialism and U.S. empire.
Socialism in the 21st Century
However, hidden within these two opposing developments is a third, potentially more vital one. As a result of the Bolivarian Revolution, we can now begin to think of what in recent decades had become unthinkable, namely a socialism in the 21st century. In the 20th century, socialist politics predominantly took two forms. The first was the path taken by social democratic parties that sought social transformation by populating the state with reform-minded officials and proceeding to attempt to manipulate the economy from above through a variety of technocratic measures. At best, this would eliminate the worst abuses of capitalist markets. ‘Cast your vote and leave it to us’ was the technocratic message to the working classes.
A second strategy was some version of Lenin's theory of dual power in which the exploited and oppressed were to build toward a counter power parallel to the capitalist state. At a decisive juncture, the old state would be ‘smashed’ and old rulers overthrown; the masses formed via a vanguard party would then replace the old state with a new one built in opposition to it, and buttressed by new organs of working-class power. A political elite in the vanguard party would then grab hold of the reins of this new state and lead the transition to a new society. Unfortunately, as the experiences of socialism across the 20th century tells us, both these paths failed. For they both insulated the masses from genuine democratic participation in the state. If the technocratic message was ‘leave it to us,’ the vanguard's message ended up being ‘do as we say.’
Venezuela's path, which has confused the majority of commentators, has been neither one of the above. It is both. Communities and workers have been organizing from below; and technocrats and bureaucrats have been passing laws from above. Each fights and cooperates with the other in an uneasy alliance. In a way, over the last decade Venezuela resembles the political theorist Nicos Poulantzas' (1978) alternative to the above two paths, what he called a “democratic road to socialism,” where struggle for a transition necessarily has to take place through, against and apart from the state. Similarly, more contemporary thinkers (such as Ciccariello-Maher, 2007) have conceptualized this path as having features of dual power through, rather, than against the state.
This is not, however, all that is happening in Venezuela. If it were, all Venezuela would demonstrate is how it is not possible to take two seemingly incompatible paths at the same time; and that the forces of bureaucracy, because of their institutionalized power, are likely to win out over time in a lengthy battle of attrition. But Venezuela is also showing that something new is being created. Venezuela's co-managed ‘socialist enterprises,’ an initiative Chávez was central in developing, perhaps best illustrate this point.
Socialist Enterprises
In these relatively new enterprises, the class relation expresses itself most forcefully in the struggles between workers and state managers. Although at first it appears that this is the same old capital-worker relationship, but with a different name, upon closer inspection, something more complex is happening. Unlike workers in unions that tend to struggle for things like higher wages or labour rights, workers in these enterprises tend to struggle for things like equal wages, genuine democratic participation, and the elimination of a rigid social division of labour within the plant.[1] In other words, this is a more developed form of the class relation, a sharper form, one that Poulantzas was able to hint at, but was not quite able to fully articulate. Thus herein lies the importance of Venezuela. As workers struggle against managers in these state-owned enterprises, we begin to see a glimpse of what 21st-century socialism might look like. In other words, we get a glimpse of the future. In this future, it is new workplace relations centered on participatory democracy that stand on the side of progress, while it is the state that, paradoxically, becomes the guarantor of the class relation, and therefore the sight of the next rupture.
There is so much more to be learned from the Bolivarian Revolution. Here, I've only been able to barely scratch the surface. The communal councils, the struggle to build the new communes and communal cities, the experiences with participatory budgeting, the Bolivarian universities; all these and the many other innovations in Venezuela represent pieces of the revolutionary puzzle. A puzzle out of which a new future can be seen right here in the present. A puzzle that, as we are reminded of with his passing, Hugo Chávez played an important role in, opening up the political space and encouraging self-organization of the poor and workers. No revolution can be built by a single person or by decrees from above, no matter how well intentioned. Yet, at his best, Chávez, from the presidential palace, was like an activist in the streets: he told the truth, he risked his life and sung a song of hope. Hope for a better world. Indeed, for another world. Chávez, presente!
Challenges Ahead
It is widely expected that Nicolás Maduro, now interim President of Venezuela, will win the upcoming Presidential elections on April 14. If elected President, he has promised to take up the five priorities set out by Chávez in his final strategic proposal, Plan de la Patria 2013-2019: multipolarity; national independence; Bolivarian socialism; environmentalism; and economic development.
What is far from clear, however, is how the contradictions evident in these five priorities can be reconciled by the existing state. For example, the priority to preserve the planet and save the human species (environmentalism), stands in sharp opposition to the government's plan to further strengthen the extractive industries in the country, including natural gas, mining and the development of the Faja del Orinoco, which contains the world's largest known reserves of heavy and extra heavy crude oil, or tar sands. The document does mention the need to develop new technology with low environmental impact, but no further details are provided.
In addition, the goal of deepening participatory democracy as the central mechanism behind ‘Bolivarian Socialism’ clashes with the goal of achieving national independence and ‘multipolarity,’ that is, a world with multiple poles of power that is free of imperialism. Although a worthy enough pursuit in theory, in practice, multipolarity has in some cases translated into open support for leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, hardly models of participatory democracy and 21st-century socialism. It is worth mentioning that it was indeed Maduro, as Minister of foreign-policy, that played an important role in developing and maintaining these alliances.
In spite of these contradictions, the five priorities outlined also contain a path forward, namely that of strengthening the ‘popular economy.’ That is the building up of the constellation of organizations, such as cooperatives, co-managed enterprises and communal councils found throughout the country. It is these organizations that have the most potential for resolving the above-mentioned contradictions.
Consider Pedro Camejo, one of the co-managed ‘socialist enterprises’ located in the city of Carora. With its mission to contribute to the achievement of ‘food sovereignty’ in the country, this enterprise has been providing small and medium local farmers agricultural technology and technical assistance at below market price. As a result, agricultural production in the area has increased considerably in recent years. At the same time, workers within the enterprise have been learning new capacities, skills and values, such as collective management and solidarity, largely as the result of the practice of participatory democracy. In addition, the technology comes from PAUNY, one of Argentina's ‘recuperated enterprises’ that builds tractors. As part of an agreement, workers from PAUNY traveled to Carora to train the Venezuelan workers and share their experiences in a spirit of international solidarity.
Although far from perfect, this one example does demonstrate how the five priorities outlined can be met in a more positive way. The challenge for militants within state agencies and institutions will be figuring out how to strengthen this sector of the economy without suffocating it with bureaucracy. The challenge for workers and communities will be to figure out how to enter these spaces while retaining enough autonomy so that struggles can be launched against the state when needed, as is frequently done. Indeed, workers and communities know something the state doesn't, namely that participation within these new democratic spaces, although crucial, is only half the equation. The other half is continued organization and struggle from below.
It remains to be seen what direction a Maduro government will lean in the post-Chavez era. The impasse of the Bolivarian revolution over the last few years is about to be broken. The future is uncertain. But more than ever it is contingent on how the workers and poor that have been empowered by the Bolivarian revolution over the last decade organize and push toward the promise of a 21st century socialism. •
Manuel Larrabure is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research is on Latin America's “new cooperative movement” and “21st-century socialism.” During 2013, he will be conducting fieldwork in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.
References:
- Chávez, H. (2012). Propuesta del Candidato de la Patria para la Gestion Bolivariana Socialista 2013-2019. Retrieved from: www.chavez.org.ve/programa-patria-venezuela-2013-2019 [December 12, 2012].
- Ciccariello-Maher, G. (2007). “Dual power in the Venezuelan Revolution,” Monthly Review, 59(4), 42-56.
- Lebowitz, M. (2013). “Working-Class Response to Devaluation Measures in Venezuela,” The Bullet No. 773, Feb. 2013.
- Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, Power, Socialism. New York: Verso.
1.For a more detailed analysis of this phenomenon, see my forthcoming article in Historical Materialism, “Human Development and Class Struggle in Venezuela's Popular Economy: The Paradox of 21st-century Socialism.”
Source: The Bullet
Monday, April 1, 2013
CUITO CUANAVALE 25TH ANNIVERSARY: The battle which put an end to apartheid
Piero Gleijeses (*)
We do not fight for glory or honors,
but for ideas we consider just.
—Fidel Castro Ruz
THIS year marks the 20th anniversary (written in 2007) of the opening of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, in south-eastern Angola, which pitted the armed forces of apartheid South Africa against the Cuban army and Angolan forces.
General Magnus Malan writes in his memoirs that this campaign marked a great victory for the South African Defense Force (SADF). But Nelson Mandela could not disagree more: Cuito Cuanavale, he asserted, "was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid".
Debate over the significance of Cuito Cuanavale has been intense,
partly because the relevant South African documents remain classified. I have,
however, been able to study files from the closed Cuban archives as well as many
US documents. Despite the ideological divide that separates Havana and
Washington, their records tell a remarkably similar story.
Let me review the facts briefly. In July 1987, the Angolan army
(Fapla) launched a major offensive in south-eastern Angola against Jonas
Savimbi’s forces. When the offensive started to succeed, the SADF, which
controlled the lower reaches of south-western Angola, intervened in the
south-east. By early November, the SADF had cornered elite Angolan units in
Cuito Cuanavale and was poised to destroy them.
The United Nations Security Council demanded that the SADF
unconditionally withdraw from Angola, but the Reagan administration ensured that
this demand had no teeth.
US Assistant Secretary for Africa Chester Crocker reassured
Pretoria’s ambassador: "The resolution did not contain a call for comprehensive
sanctions, and did not provide for any assistance to Angola. That was no
accident, but a consequence of our own efforts to keep the resolution within
bounds." [1] This gave the SADF time to annihilate Fapla’s best units.
By early 1988, South African military sources and Western
diplomats were confident that the fall of Cuito was imminent. This would have
dealt a devastating blow to the Angolan government. But on November 15 1987,
Cuban President Fidel Castro had decided to send more troops and weapons to
Angola—his best planes with his best pilots, his most sophisticated
anti-aircraft weapons and his most modern tanks. Castro’s goal was not merely to
defend Cuito, it was to force the SADF out of Angola once and for all. He later
described this strategy to South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo: Cuba
would halt the South African onslaught and then attack from another direction,
"like a boxer who with his left hand blocks the blow and with his
right—strikes". [2]
Cuban planes and 1,500 Cuban solders reinforced the Angolans, and
Cuito did not fall.
On March 23 1988, the SADF launched its last major attack on the
town. As Colonel Jan Breytenbach writes, the South African assault "was brought
to a grinding and definite halt" by the combined Cuban and Angolan forces.
Now Havana’s right hand prepared to strike. Powerful Cuban columns
were marching through south-western Angola toward the Namibian border. The
documents telling us what the South African leaders thought about this threat
are still classified. But we know what the SADF did: it gave ground. US
intelligence explained that the South Africans withdrew because they were
impressed by the suddenness and scale of the Cuban advance and because they
believed that a major battle "involved serious risks". [3]
As a child in Italy, I heard my father talk about the hope he and
his friends had felt in December 1941, as they listened to radio reports of
German troops vacating Rostov on the Don—the first time in two years of war that
the German "superman" had been forced to retreat. I remembered his words—and the
profound sense of relief they conveyed—as I read South African and Namibian
press reports from these months in early 1988.
On May 26 1988, the chief of the SADF announced that "heavily
armed Cuban and Swapo [South West Africa People’s Organization] forces,
integrated for the first time, have moved south within 60km of the Namibian
border". The South African administrator general in Namibia acknowledged on June
26 that Cuban MIG-23s were flying over Namibia, a dramatic reversal from earlier
times when the skies had belonged to the SADF. He added that "the presence of
the Cubans had caused a flutter of anxiety" in South Africa.
Such sentiments were however not shared by black South Africans,
who saw the retreat of the South African forces as a beacon of hope.
While Castro’s troops advanced toward Namibia, Cubans, Angolans,
South Africans and Americans were sparring at the negotiating table. Two issues
were paramount: whether South Africa would finally accept implementation of UN
Security Council Resolution 435, which prescribed Namibia’s independence, and
whether the parties could agree on a timetable for the withdrawal of the Cuban
troops from Angola.
The South Africans arrived with high hopes: Foreign Minister Pik
Botha expected that Resolution 435 would be modified; Defense Minister Malan and
President PW Botha asserted that South Africa would withdraw from Angola only
"if Russia and its proxies did the same." They did not mention withdrawing from
Namibia. On March 16 1988, Business Day reported that Pretoria was "offering to
withdraw into Namibia—not from Namibia—in return for the withdrawal of Cuban
forces from Angola. The implication is that South Africa has no real intention
of giving up the territory any time soon."
But the Cubans had reversed the situation on the ground, and when
Pik Botha voiced the South African demands, Jorge Risquet, who headed the Cuban
delegation, fell on him like a ton of bricks: "The time for your military
adventures, for the acts of aggression that you have pursued with impunity, for
your massacres of refugees ... is over." South Africa, he said, was acting as
though it was "a victorious army, rather than what it really is: a defeated
aggressor that is withdrawing ... South Africa must face the fact that it will
not obtain at the negotiating table what it could not achieve on the
battlefield."[4]
As the talks ended, Crocker cabled Secretary of State George
Shultz that they had taken place "against the backdrop of increasing military
tension surrounding the large build-up of heavily armed Cuban troops in
south-west Angola in close proximity to the Namibian border ... The Cuban
build-up in southwest Angola has created an unpredictable military dynamic."[5]
The burning question was: Would the Cubans stop at the border? To
answer this question, Crocker sought out Risquet: "Does Cuba intend to halt its
troops at the border between Namibia and Angola?" Risquet replied, "If I told
you that the troops will not stop, it would be a threat. If I told you that they
will stop, I would be giving you a Meprobamato [a Cuban tranquillizer]. ... and
I want to neither threaten nor reassure you ... What I can say is that the only
way to guarantee [that our troops stop at the border] would be to reach an
agreement [on Namibia’s independence]."[6]
The next day, June 27 1988, Cuban MIGs attacked SADF positions
near the Calueque dam, 11km north of the Namibian border. The CIA reported that
"Cuba’s successful use of air power and the apparent weakness of Pretoria’s air
defenses" highlighted the fact that Havana had achieved air superiority in
southern Angola and northern Namibia. A few hours after the Cubans’ successful
strike, the SADF destroyed a nearby bridge over the Cunene River. They did so,
the CIA surmised, "to deny Cuban and Angolan ground forces easy passage to the
Namibia border and to reduce the number of positions they must defend." [7]
Never had the danger of a Cuban advance into Namibia seemed more real.
The last South African soldiers left Angola on August 30, before
the negotiators had even begun to discuss the timetable of the Cuban withdrawal
from Angola.
Despite Washington’s best efforts to stop it, Cuba changed the
course of Southern African history. Even Crocker acknowledged Cuba’s role when
he cabled Shultz, on August 25 1988: "Reading the Cubans is yet another art
form. They are prepared for both war and peace. We witness considerable tactical
finesse and genuinely creative moves at the table. This occurs against the
backdrop of Castro’s grandiose bluster and his army’s unprecedented projection
of power on the ground."[8]
The Cubans’ battlefield prowess and negotiating skills were
instrumental in forcing South Africa to accept Namibia’s independence. Their
successful defense of Cuito was the prelude for a campaign that forced the SADF
out of Angola. This victory reverberated beyond Namibia.
Many authors—Malan is just the most recent example—have sought to
rewrite this history, but the US and Cuban documents tell another story. It was
expressed eloquently by Thenjiwe Mtintso, South Africa’s ambassador to Cuba, in
December 2005: "Today South Africa has many newly found friends. Yesterday these
friends referred to our leaders and our combatants as terrorists and hounded us
from their countries while supporting apartheid ... These very friends today
want us to denounce and isolate Cuba. Our answer is very simple: it is the blood
of Cuban martyrs—and not of these friends—that runs deep in the African soil and
nurtures the tree of freedom in our country."
1) SecState to American embassy, Pretoria, Dec. 5
1987, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
2) Transcripción sobre la reunión del Comandante en
Jefe con la delegación de políticos de Africa del Sur (Comp. Slovo), "Centro de
Información de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (CIFAR)", Havana
3) Abramowitz (Bureau of Intelligence and Research,
US Department of State) to SecState, May 13 1988, FOIA
4) "Actas das Conversaciones Quadripartidas entre a
RPA, Cuba, Estados Unidos de América e a Africa do Sul realizadas no Cairo de
24-26.06.988", Archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba,
Havana
5) Crocker to SecState, June 26, 1988,
FOIA
6) "Entrevista de Risquet con Chester Crocker,
26/6/88", ACC
7) CIA, "South Africa-Angola-Cuba", June 29, 1988,
FOIA; CIA, "South Africa-Angola-Namibia", July 1, 1988, FOIA
8) Crocker to SecState, Aug. 25, 1988, FOIA
(*) Italian political scientist and historian, professor of
U.S. Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced
International Studies, in Washington, D.C.
March 28, 2013Granma.cu
Friday, March 29, 2013
Gay marriage and the natural law
BY BROTHER HAYDEN AUGUSTINE
GAY marriage has become a hot topic, a burning issue. Some time ago, on the front pages of our dailies, two women are captioned in matrimonial embrace. As we continue perusing the news, more captions, more divergent opinions and viewpoints, columns and letters are expressed on this most elemental of traditions. One journalist even feared for her life in the firestorm of opinions.
Marriage has been a noble institution that virtually all cultures have embraced. It is the substratum of civilisation, the most fundamental unit of human society. By definition, it is the state of union between a man and a woman, a permanent and affective relationship of a husband and his wife that generates and educates its offspring.
All religions, not just Christianity, have denounced homosexuality and see no reason for it in marriage. That is to say, it is part of natural law. Christianity, which is Jamaica's bedrock religion, has pronounced unequivocally on the nature of marriage as the exchange of vows between a man and a woman, equally made in the image and likeness of God, and joined together in harmonious unity to "be fruitful and multiply, and (to) fill the earth and subdue it".
Thus, marriage is part of the natural order of the universe, the pristine and constitutive ingredient uniting man and woman in their joint stewardship of creation and as progenitors of the human race. Marriage is thus a primordial commandment, a natural law.
Is it now God's will that two women marry each other? Would the Creator unite two men in marriage? And to what end? We cannot now throw out the natural laws of God uniting man and woman, laws which have made possible the posterity of the race, the creation of family life and the guarantee of social cohesion, for this anomalous situation.
It is irrational and against natural law for two men or two women to marry each other. If they fall into sexual relationship, it is sinful and they can be forgiven. But they must control their passions and transform their relationship into friendship.
Indeed, its foundation is noble. It is friendship, but friendship which does not require marriage. Friendship oftentimes grows deeper than marriage. Friendship is created for the sake of brotherhood or sisterhood, people get united to achieve one purpose or common cause. Companionship and fellowship are time-honoured joys of civilisation.
These must continue, be nurtured and allowed to flourish. Friendship is found in the myriad ways in which man relates with his fellow man in all the aspects of his life. Oftentimes it leads to heroic expressions of love and commitment far surpassing that of marriage, such as happened between Jonathan and King David: "They loved each other more than husband and wife......even unto death."
In the Christian dispensation, friendship without Eros is the highest form of love. Jesus said that "a man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friend." For the Christian, friendship is one of the foundation stones that builds the kingdom of God.
Friendship is also based on feelings. Feelings are beautiful and give power to our actions. They are part of the expression of our humanity, our personality, and they flavour our interpersonal relationships. But often they go awry unless we rein them in.
Feelings can be like an unbridled horse. If we don't control them, they will control us. Sometimes we must reject them, otherwise they create irreparable damage.
If we love God, we will obey His commandments, no matter how difficult. Life and love are difficult, requiring risk, trust in another, constant self-sacrifice, a veritable dying on the cross with Christ, so that something honourable and noble and beautiful is birthed in all our relationships -- with our friends, with our wives and husbands, our children, and our neighbours, without carnality, but in the love of God.
— Brother Hayden Augustine is a member of Missionaries of the Poor
March 26, 2013
Jamaica Observer
Is sexual expression a human right? Could opposition to homosexuality be considered a hate crime? Would homophobia be one day declared a mental sickness? These are some of the thoughts that run through my mind as I reflect on this ongoing impassioned debate about same-sex marriage.
Marriage has been a noble institution that virtually all cultures have embraced. It is the substratum of civilisation, the most fundamental unit of human society. By definition, it is the state of union between a man and a woman, a permanent and affective relationship of a husband and his wife that generates and educates its offspring.
March 26, 2013
Jamaica Observer
Saturday, March 23, 2013
...The Bahamas had done an “ass backwards” job in negotiations with the Bahamas Petroleum Company (BPC)... ...the country should receive “no less than 60 per cent” of the proceeds ...if commercial quantities of oil were discovered
Bahamas 'Ass Backwards' Over Oil Negotiations
By NEIL HARTNELL
Tribune Business Editor
Nassau, The Bahamas
A well-known attorney yesterday said the Bahamas had done an “ass backwards” job in negotiations with the Bahamas Petroleum Company (BPC), arguing that the country should receive “no less than 60 per cent” of the proceeds if commercial quantities of oil were discovered.
Craig Butler, head of the C. F. Butler & Associates law firm, told Tribune Business that the 12.5-25 per cent ‘sliding scale’ royalties agreement negotiated with BPC was similar to arrangements “Third World” states had reached with oil explorers.
Recalling the research he conducted on the matter in the run-up to the May 2012 general election, Mr Butler said most countries had negotiated terms where they received between 25 per cent to 90 per cent of the proceeds from any oil exploration/production.
He added that BPC was being “disingenuous” and seeking to recover all its development and exploration costs upfront, the moment commercial oil quantities were found, whereas most such deals allowed exploration firms to recover such costs over the lifetime of their leases.
And Mr Butler called for the Bahamas to create a non-political National Commission to re-negotiate the deal with BPC, and introduce more “transparency” into the process.
“All the countries that aren’t good at negotiating deals got the thin end of the stick,” Mr Butler said of the findings produced by his research. “The more developed countries tend to take a larger part of the pie in terms of the profits.”
Simon Potter, BPC’s chief executive, told Tribune Business yesterday that the financial agreement was effectively a 50/50 split between the company and the Government.
Based on oil selling at $80 per barrel, BPC presentations have shown that while half that revenue sum - $40 - would cover costs, with the remaining 50 per cent or $20 each going to the company and the Government respectively.
Yet Mr Butler argued: “BPC is being disingenuous, making it seem as if they are taking an amazing risk. They are, but that is what business is all about. They’re looking to recoup their costs right away.”
He suggested that typical oil exploration deals allowed companies to indeed recover their costs, but over the lifetime of their lease agreements.
Mr Butler said that if BPC’s development costs worked out to be $20 billion, it seemed to want to recover that “off the bat” if commercial oil quantities were found, based on its agreement with the Government.
As a result, the Bahamas would not see any benefits for three-four years.
“With the greatest respect to these negotiators, we are still enamoured that we possibly have oil, natural gas, and this money is coming in,” Mr Butler said.
“We’re looking at it as if the country is benefiting by $10 billion, $20 billion, and we’re salivating. We’re not thinking long-term, thinking this is the Bahamas’ last opportunity to become the first world country it wants to be.”
He added that Trinidad & Tobago had also squandered its oil and natural gas inheritance, with the financial terms benefiting the explorers, and proceeds concentrated in the hands of a few.
“If this is a national resource, if we are putting our tourism industry at risk, the Bahamas as a whole needs to benefit from this,” Mr Butler told Tribune Business.
“My research has shown that generally, the initial financing is paid back over a period of time, 10-20 years at a reasonable interest rate. Profits are then split. Going rates are anywhere from 25 to 90 per cent. Clearly, the better your negotiating team, the better the country’s deal.
“In other places, companies pay a large fee to come in and prospect. All the burden is theirs. And their licenses have determinable periods,” he added.
“It appears as though in the Bahamas we’re always ass backwards. We should be receiving no less than 60 per cent, and all infrastructural and economic costs should be paid back over 20 years at 3 per cent. Take it or leave it. If it were put that way, they’d [BPC] jump to take it.”
Describing 25 per cent and 90 per cent as the respective low and high ‘ends of the scale’ in terms of what sovereign countries received, Mr Butler said the Scandinavian nations received the latter.
“Twenty-five per cent tends to be the Third World places like Belize that have no idea how to negotiate a contract,” he added. “Nigeria has 70 per cent. If Nigeria has 70 per cent, why can’t the Bahamas negotiate 60 per cent?”
Asked about the way ahead, Mr Butler told Tribune Business: “What I would like to see is a National Commission appointed, not just PLPs but a cross-section of respected people in society, 15-20 of them, who can go in and negotiate these contracts on our behalf.
“It’s the only way we can go to have any transparency. It it’s completely political appointees, we’re doomed.”
He urged that ‘new faces’ be appointed to this Commission, along with several experts on the international oil industry.
March 22, 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Hugo Chavez' legacy in Haiti and Latin America
By
Tens of thousands of Haitians spontaneously poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince on the morning of Mar. 12, 2007. President Hugo Chavez had just arrived in Haiti all but unannounced, and a multitude, shrieking and singing with glee, joined him in jogging alongside the motorcade of Haiti’s then President René Préval on its way to the National Palace (later destroyed in the 2010 earthquake).
There, Chavez announced that Venezuela would help Haiti by building power stations, expanding electricity networks, improving airports, supplying garbage trucks, and supporting widely-deployed Cuban medical teams. But the centerpiece of the gifts Chavez brought Haiti was 14,000 barrels of oil a day, a Godsend in a country that has been plagued by blackouts and power shortages for decades.
The oil was part of a PetroCaribe deal which Venezuela had signed with Haiti a year before. Haiti had only to pay 60% for the oil it received, while the remaining 40% could be paid over the course of 25 years at 1% interest. Under similar PetroCaribe deals, Venezuela now provides more than 250,000 barrels a day at sharply discounted prices to 17 Central American and Caribbean countries, including Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.
The cost of the program is estimated at some $5 billion annually. But the benefits to, and gratitude from, PetroCaribe recipients are huge, particularly during the on-going global economic crisis. In short, Caracas is underwriting the stability and energy security of most economies in the Caribbean and Central America, at the same time challenging, for the first time in over a century, U.S. hegemony in its own “backyard.”
Washington’s alarm over and hostility to PetroCaribe is layed bare in secret diplomatic cables obtained by the media organization WikiLeaks. Then U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson rebuked Préval for “giving Chavez a platform to spout anti-American slogans” during his 2007 visit, said one cable cited in an article which debuted in June 2011 a WikiLeaks-based series produced by Haïti Liberté and The Nation.
Reviewing all 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables which were later released, one realizes that Sanderson wasn’t the only U.S. diplomat wringing her hands about PetroCaribe.
“It is remarkable that in this current contest we are being outspent by two impoverished countries: Cuba and Venezuela,” noted U.S. Ambassador to Uruguay Frank Baxter in a 2007 cable released by Wikileaks. “We offer a small Fulbright program; they offer a thousand medical scholarships. We offer a half dozen brief IV programs to ‘future leaders’; they offer thousands of eye operations to poor people. We offer complex free trade agreements someday; they offer oil at favorable rates today. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Chavez is winning friends and influencing people at our expense.”
We can now expect the Washington’s “contest” with Venezuela to escalate dramatically as it attempts to take advantage of the Bolivarian regime’s vulnerability during the transition of power. Already Vice President Nicolas Maduro, whom Chavez asked Venezuelans to make his successor, has sounded the alarm. "We have no doubt that commander Chavez was attacked with this illness," Maduro said on Mar. 5, repeating a suspicion voiced by Chavez himself that Washington was somehow responsible for the fatal cancer he contracted. "The old enemies of our fatherland looked for a way to harm his health."
Maduro also announced on national television on Mar. 5 “that a U.S. Embassy attache was being expelled for meeting with military officers and planning to destabilize the country,” the AP reported. A U.S. Air Force attaché was also expelled.
In short, just as the imperative to secure oil has driven the U.S. to multiple wars, coups, and intrigues in the Mideast over the past 60 years, it is now driving the U.S. toward a major new confrontation in Latin America. With Chavez’s death, Washington sees a long awaited opportunity to roll back the Bolivarian Revolution and programs like PetroCaribe. In recent years, Chavez has led Venezuela to nationalize dozens of foreign-owned undertakings, including oil projects run by Exxon Mobil, Texaco Chevron, and other large North American corporations. The future of the hydrocarbon resources in Venezuela’s Maracaibo Basin and Orinoco Belt, recently declared to be the world’s largest, will soon reveal itself to be the central economic and political issue, and hottest flashpoint, in the hemisphere.
In the case of Haiti, Hugo Chavez often said that PetroCaribe and other aid was given “to repay the historic debt that Venezuela owes the Haitian people.” Haiti was the first nation of Latin America, gaining its independence in 1804. In the 19th century’s first example of international solidarity, Haitian revolutionary leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Alexandre Pétion provided Francisco de Miranda and Simon Bolivar, South America’s “Great Liberator,” with guns, ships, and printing presses to carry out the anti-colonial struggle on the continent.
And this was the dream that inspired Hugo Chavez: a modern Bolivarian revolution sweeping South America, spreading independence from Washington and growing “21stcentury socialism.” PetroCaribe was Chavez’s flagship in that “contest,” as Ambassador Baxter called it.
Ironically, it was former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide who first foiled U.S. election engineering in Latin America in December 1990, but his electoral victory was cut short by a September 1991 coup. Hugo Chavez was the next Latin American leader to successfully carry out a political revolution at the polls in 1998. His people defeated the U.S.-backed coup that tried to unseat him in April 2002. Due to his strategic acumen, his popular support, and the goodwill created with PetroCaribe, Chavez’s prestige grew in Venezuela and around the world during his 14 years in power up until his death today, which will bring a huge tide of mourning across Latin America.
The eulogies will be many, but former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who personally knew and worked with Chavez, made a prescient observation in January that stands out: “In my opinion, history will judge the contributions of Hugo Chavez to Latin American as greater than those of Bolivar.”
March 17, 2013
Source: Canada Haiti Action Network
Venezuelanalysis
Tens of thousands of Haitians spontaneously poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince on the morning of Mar. 12, 2007. President Hugo Chavez had just arrived in Haiti all but unannounced, and a multitude, shrieking and singing with glee, joined him in jogging alongside the motorcade of Haiti’s then President René Préval on its way to the National Palace (later destroyed in the 2010 earthquake).
There, Chavez announced that Venezuela would help Haiti by building power stations, expanding electricity networks, improving airports, supplying garbage trucks, and supporting widely-deployed Cuban medical teams. But the centerpiece of the gifts Chavez brought Haiti was 14,000 barrels of oil a day, a Godsend in a country that has been plagued by blackouts and power shortages for decades.
The oil was part of a PetroCaribe deal which Venezuela had signed with Haiti a year before. Haiti had only to pay 60% for the oil it received, while the remaining 40% could be paid over the course of 25 years at 1% interest. Under similar PetroCaribe deals, Venezuela now provides more than 250,000 barrels a day at sharply discounted prices to 17 Central American and Caribbean countries, including Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.
The cost of the program is estimated at some $5 billion annually. But the benefits to, and gratitude from, PetroCaribe recipients are huge, particularly during the on-going global economic crisis. In short, Caracas is underwriting the stability and energy security of most economies in the Caribbean and Central America, at the same time challenging, for the first time in over a century, U.S. hegemony in its own “backyard.”
Washington’s alarm over and hostility to PetroCaribe is layed bare in secret diplomatic cables obtained by the media organization WikiLeaks. Then U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson rebuked Préval for “giving Chavez a platform to spout anti-American slogans” during his 2007 visit, said one cable cited in an article which debuted in June 2011 a WikiLeaks-based series produced by Haïti Liberté and The Nation.
Reviewing all 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables which were later released, one realizes that Sanderson wasn’t the only U.S. diplomat wringing her hands about PetroCaribe.
“It is remarkable that in this current contest we are being outspent by two impoverished countries: Cuba and Venezuela,” noted U.S. Ambassador to Uruguay Frank Baxter in a 2007 cable released by Wikileaks. “We offer a small Fulbright program; they offer a thousand medical scholarships. We offer a half dozen brief IV programs to ‘future leaders’; they offer thousands of eye operations to poor people. We offer complex free trade agreements someday; they offer oil at favorable rates today. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Chavez is winning friends and influencing people at our expense.”
We can now expect the Washington’s “contest” with Venezuela to escalate dramatically as it attempts to take advantage of the Bolivarian regime’s vulnerability during the transition of power. Already Vice President Nicolas Maduro, whom Chavez asked Venezuelans to make his successor, has sounded the alarm. "We have no doubt that commander Chavez was attacked with this illness," Maduro said on Mar. 5, repeating a suspicion voiced by Chavez himself that Washington was somehow responsible for the fatal cancer he contracted. "The old enemies of our fatherland looked for a way to harm his health."
Maduro also announced on national television on Mar. 5 “that a U.S. Embassy attache was being expelled for meeting with military officers and planning to destabilize the country,” the AP reported. A U.S. Air Force attaché was also expelled.
In short, just as the imperative to secure oil has driven the U.S. to multiple wars, coups, and intrigues in the Mideast over the past 60 years, it is now driving the U.S. toward a major new confrontation in Latin America. With Chavez’s death, Washington sees a long awaited opportunity to roll back the Bolivarian Revolution and programs like PetroCaribe. In recent years, Chavez has led Venezuela to nationalize dozens of foreign-owned undertakings, including oil projects run by Exxon Mobil, Texaco Chevron, and other large North American corporations. The future of the hydrocarbon resources in Venezuela’s Maracaibo Basin and Orinoco Belt, recently declared to be the world’s largest, will soon reveal itself to be the central economic and political issue, and hottest flashpoint, in the hemisphere.
In the case of Haiti, Hugo Chavez often said that PetroCaribe and other aid was given “to repay the historic debt that Venezuela owes the Haitian people.” Haiti was the first nation of Latin America, gaining its independence in 1804. In the 19th century’s first example of international solidarity, Haitian revolutionary leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Alexandre Pétion provided Francisco de Miranda and Simon Bolivar, South America’s “Great Liberator,” with guns, ships, and printing presses to carry out the anti-colonial struggle on the continent.
And this was the dream that inspired Hugo Chavez: a modern Bolivarian revolution sweeping South America, spreading independence from Washington and growing “21stcentury socialism.” PetroCaribe was Chavez’s flagship in that “contest,” as Ambassador Baxter called it.
Ironically, it was former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide who first foiled U.S. election engineering in Latin America in December 1990, but his electoral victory was cut short by a September 1991 coup. Hugo Chavez was the next Latin American leader to successfully carry out a political revolution at the polls in 1998. His people defeated the U.S.-backed coup that tried to unseat him in April 2002. Due to his strategic acumen, his popular support, and the goodwill created with PetroCaribe, Chavez’s prestige grew in Venezuela and around the world during his 14 years in power up until his death today, which will bring a huge tide of mourning across Latin America.
The eulogies will be many, but former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who personally knew and worked with Chavez, made a prescient observation in January that stands out: “In my opinion, history will judge the contributions of Hugo Chavez to Latin American as greater than those of Bolivar.”
March 17, 2013
Source: Canada Haiti Action Network
Venezuelanalysis
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)