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Showing posts with label Marxist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marxist. Show all posts

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Russia had no stomach for the Grenadian revolution

By EVERTON PRYCE

Grenadian revolution Grenada

IT is often said that the marginal Marxist-Leninist Caribbean state of Grenada under Maurice Bishop's New Jewel Movement (NJM) of 1979-1983 was a satellite of Russia. But many readers of this column may be surprised to learn that Moscow had no desire to aid the spice island economically or otherwise, at levels the native revolutionaries expected.

Shortly after seizing power on March 13, 1979, the NJM's expectation of fraternal assistance from Moscow went into overdrive based on the assumption that communist countries had a greater concern than the West for the plight of Third World peoples.



BISHOP… seized power on March 13, 1979
And given the large cache of Russian-made guns, ammunition and military hardware that found their way in the control of the People's Revolutionary Army (PRA), the outside world also formed the impression that Russia was backing, unconditionally, the aims and objectives of the revolution.

But documents on Grenada-Russian relations released by the United States, after the 1983 invasion which it dubbed 'Operation Urgent Fury', tell an interesting story: Moscow did not want, nor could it afford, any more Cubas in the Caribbean.

Though somewhat dated, the documents referenced the deep involvement in the revolution of several prominent middle-class Jamaicans who are today comfortably ensconced in academia and the private sector with possible knowledge of how Bishop and some of his Cabinet colleagues were murdered and the location of their remains.

The documents also show Moscow's reluctance to commit itself to the Grenadian revolution to the same extent it did for the Cuban revolution 20 years earlier. This means that the Grenadian revolution was running on ideological fumes only for much of its existence.

"The Soviet Union is very careful, and for us sometimes maddeningly slow, in making up their minds about who to support," the Grenadian ambassador to Russia at the time is quoted as saying in the documents.

We can only imagine how disappointed Bishop and his band of revolutionary leaders must have been on learning of this Russian foreign policy attitude towards their country, given that in capturing State power they clearly felt that they qualified for Russian aid and support far beyond the levels that were actually forthcoming.

After all, the NJM had modelled itself on the Soviet Communist party even before it took State power, and in the United Nations, Grenada's voting pattern under the NJM favoured Moscow on important issues, more than other Third World Socialist-oriented states.

Even the NJM's party structure followed a Leninist pattern: a Politburo, Central Committee and the rest. The ruling party also had overriding control over the army, and imposed strict censorship on the media.
So, what could have prevented a major injection of Russian aid and support for revolutionary Grenada? Why wasn't Grenada benefiting from Russian developmental aid to the same extent as Cuba, which was estimated then at US$6 million per day?

Truth be told, the Grenada revolution came about at the wrong time, because the cost of Cuba was a price Moscow paid as a result of Russian policies in the Third World under Kruschev. In the post-Kruschev era in the early 1980s, the Russian leadership was far more cautious and selective in choosing the recipients of Russian economic aid and had become increasingly more cost-conscious and economically more self-interested. On reflection, Russian foreign policy was about concentrating on the problem of protecting established Soviet positions.

Russia's lack of involvement in the construction of the Point Salines International Airport (renamed appropriately the Maurice Bishop International Airport in 2009) bears this out. The airport project was the NJM's major economic preoccupation, and was the priority heading on the agenda of most Central Committee meetings, as well as being the main plank of the first Five-Year plan. The ruling party had hoped that the airport would go a long way in boosting the island's tourism trade and foreign exchange reserves.

But when Bishop, in a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in April 1983, appealed for a Russian grant of US$6 million toward the airport project, the Russians turned down the request. Ultimately, the NJM had to turn to western donors for the funds to boost construction of the airport.

Bishop had even expected the Russians to purchase 1,000 tons of nutmeg on an annual basis. But the Russians replied that Moscow was only willing to import what it consumed each year, about 200-300 tons, and then "only at the world market price or below".

What is clear from all of this is that post-Kruschev Russia was not prepared to bail out the Grenadian economy, despite the fact that trade relations between the two countries had increased slightly. Neither was Grenada, under Bishop, blessed with observer status in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) — a status Mexico had enjoyed for a number of years.

Kruschev clearly had global ambitions for Russia in a practical sense: he considered the support of nationalist Third World leaders as a way of increasing Russia's role in the international political system outside Eastern Europe. Hence, by 1956, Moscow had begun to establish diplomatic relations with all Latin American states on the basis of non-interference in each other's domestic affairs and to develop a broad range of economic relations on the principle of equality and mutual advantage.

In the final analysis, Russia did not support hardline policies in Grenada during the period of the counter-revolution when Socialism became equated with murder and mayhem.

To be sure, it did not condemn the Bernard Coard faction, as explicitly as did Castro, for its part in provoking the split in the NJM's leadership and putting Bishop under house arrest.

Such was the character of Russian foreign policy towards Grenada in the early 1980s. Moscow was able to provide loose political and ideological support for the NJM while not committing itself to providing assistance in the reconstruction of the Grenadian economy or in defence of the revolution from counter-revolutionary forces — home-grown and foreign.

December 08, 2013

Jamaica Observer

Saturday, February 13, 2010

The Bolivarian Revolution and the Caribbean

Reflections of Fidel

Taken from CubaDebate




I liked history, as most boys do. Wars as well, a culture that society sowed in male children. All the toys offered us were weapons.

In my childhood they sent me to a city where I was never taken to a movie theater. Television did not exist then, and there was no radio in the house in which I lived. I had to use my imagination.

In the first boarding school, I read with amazement about the Universal Flood and Noah’s Ark. Later on I came to the conclusion that maybe it was a vestige that humanity retained of the last climate change in the history of our species. It was possibly the end of the Ice Age, which is thought to have taken place thousands of years ago.

As one might imagine, later I avidly read the histories of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Hannibal, Bonaparte and, of course, any book that came into my hands on Maceo, Gómez, Agramonte and other great soldiers who fought for our independence. I did not possess sufficient culture to understand what lay behind history.

Later on, I centered my interest in Martí. In reality I owe my patriotic sentiments to him and the profound concept that "Homeland is humanity." The audacity, the beauty, the value and the ethics of his thinking helped to convert me into what I believe I am: a revolutionary. Without being a follower of Martí one cannot be a follower of Bolívar; without being a follower of Martí and Bolívar, one cannot be a Marxist and, without being a follower of Martí, Bolívar and a Marxist, one cannot be anti-imperialist; without being those three things a Revolution in Cuba in our epoch could not have been conceived.

Almost two centuries ago, Bolívar wanted to send an expedition under the command of Sucre to liberate Cuba, which really needed it, in the 1820s, as a Spanish sugar and coffee colony, with 300,000 slaves working for their white owners.

With its independence frustrated and converted into a neo-colony, the full dignity of human beings could never be attained without a revolution that would end the exploitation of people by other people.

"…I want the first law of our republic to be the veneration of Cubans for the full dignity of human beings."

With his thinking, Martí inspired the valor and conviction that led our [26th of July] Movement to the assault on the Moncada Garrison, which would have never entered our heads without the ideas of other great thinkers like Marx and Lenin, who made us see and understand the very distinct realities of the new era that we were experiencing.

Throughout centuries, the odious latifundia ownership and its slave workforce, preceded by the extermination of the former inhabitants of these islands, was justified in the name of progress and development.

Martí said something marvelous and worthy of Bolívar and his glorious life:
"…what he did not leave done, remains undone to this day: because Bolívar has still much to do in America."

"Let Venezuela show me how to serve her: she has a son in me."

In Venezuela, as others did in the Caribbean, the colonial power planted sugar cane, coffee, and cacao, and likewise took men and women from Africa as slaves. The heroic resistance of its indigenous peoples, using nature and the vast Venezuelan soil, prevented the annihilation of the original inhabitants.

With the exception of one part of the northern hemisphere, the vast territory of Our America remained in the hands of two kings of the Iberian Peninsula.

Without fear it can be affirmed that, for centuries, our countries and the fruits of the labor of our peoples have been plundered and continue being plundered by the large transnational corporations and the oligarchies that are in their service.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries; in other words, for almost 200 years after the formal independence of Ibero-America, nothing changed in essence. The United States, starting with the Thirteen English colonies that rebelled, expanded west and south. It purchased Louisiana and Florida, snatched more than half of its territory from Mexico, intervened in Central America and took possession of the area of the future Panama Canal, which would link the great oceans east and west of the continent via the point where Bolívar wished to create the capital of the largest of the republics that would be born from the independence of the nations of America.

In that epoch, oil and ethanol were not traded in the world, nor did the WTO exist. Sugar cane, cotton and corn were cultivated by slaves. Machines were still to be invented. Industrialization based on coal was strongly advancing.

Wars gave impulse to civilization, and civilization gave impulse to wars. These changed in nature, and became more terrible. They finally became world conflicts.

Finally, we were a civilized world. We even believed in it as a question of principles.

But we do not know what to do with the civilization attained. Human beings have equipped themselves with nuclear weapons of unbelievable accuracy and annihilation potency while, from the moral and political point of view, they have ignominiously retrogressed. Politically and socially, we are more underdeveloped than ever. Automatons are replacing soldiers; the mass media, educators, and governments are beginning to be overtaken by events without knowing what to do. In the desperation of many international political leaders one can appreciate an impotency in the face of the problems that are accumulating in their offices and steadily more frequent international meetings.

In those circumstances, an unprecedented disaster is taking place in Haiti, while on the other side of the planet, three wars and an arms race are continuing their development, in the midst of the economic crisis and growing conflicts, which is consuming more than 2.5% of the global GDP, a figure with which all the Third World countries could be developed in a short period of time and possibly evade climate change by devoting the economic and scientific resources that are essential to that objective.

The credibility of the world community has just received a harsh blow in Copenhagen, and our species is not demonstrating its capacity for surviving.

The tragedy of Haiti allows me to expound on this point of view based on what Venezuela has done with the countries of the Caribbean. While the large financial institutions vacillate over what to do in Haiti, Venezuela did not hesitate for one second to cancel that country’s economic debt of $167 million.

Throughout close to one century the major transnationals extracted and exported Venezuelan oil at infinitesimal prices. Over the decades, Venezuela became the largest world exporter of oil.

It is known that when the United States spent hundreds of billions on its genocidal war on Vietnam, killing and mutilating millions of the sons and daughters of that heroic people, it also unilaterally broke the Bretton Woods Agreement by suspending the conversion of gold into dollars, as the agreement stipulated, and launching the cost of that dirty war on the world. The U.S. currency was devalued and the hard currency income of the Caribbean countries was not sufficient to pay for oil. Their economies are based on tourism and exports of sugar, coffee, cacao and other agricultural products. A stunning blow threatened the economies of the Caribbean states, with the exception of two of them that are exporters of energy.

Other developed countries eliminated preferential tariffs for Caribbean agricultural exports, like bananas; Venezuela made an unprecedented gesture: it guaranteed the majority of those countries secure supplies of oil and special payment facilities.

On the other hand, nobody was concerned about the destiny of those peoples. If it were not for the Bolivarian Republic a terrible crisis would have hit the independent states of the Caribbean, with the exception of Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. In the case of Cuba, after the USSR collapsed, the Bolivarian government promoted an extraordinary growth in trade between the two nations, which included the exchange of goods and services, which permitted us to confront one of the harshest periods of our glorious revolutionary history.

The finest ally of the United States and, at the same time the basest and vilest enemy of the people, was the fraudster and simulator Rómulo Betancourt, president-elect of Venezuela when the Revolution triumphed in Cuba in 1959.

He was the principal accomplice of the pirate attacks, acts of terrorism, aggressions against and the blockade of our homeland.

When Our America most needed it, the Bolivarian Revolution finally broke out.

Invited to Caracas by Hugo Chávez, the members of the ALBA committed themselves to lend maximum support to the Haitian people at the saddest moment in the history of that legendary people, who carried out the first victorious social Revolution in world history, when hundreds of thousands of Africans, in rising up and creating in Haiti a republic thousands of miles away from their native lands, undertook one of the most glorious revolutionary actions of this hemisphere. In Haiti, there is African, Indian and white blood; the Republic was born from the concepts of equality, justice and liberty for all human beings.

Ten years ago, at a point when the Caribbean and Central America lost tens of thousands of lives during the tragedy of Hurricane Mitch, the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) was created in Cuba to train Latin American and Caribbean doctors who, one day, would save millions of lives, but especially and above all, would serve as an example in the noble exercise of the medical profession. Together with the Cubans, dozens of young Venezuelans and other Latin American graduates of ELAM will be in Haiti. News has arrived from all corners of the continent of many compañeros who studied at ELAM and now want to collaborate with them in the noble task of saving the lives of children, women and men, young and old.

There will be dozens of field hospitals, rehabilitation centers and hospitals, in which more than 1,000 doctors and students in the final years of medical school from Haiti, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile and other sister countries will be providing services. We have the honor of already being able to count on a number of American doctors who also studied in ELAM. We are prepared to cooperate with those countries and institutions which wish to participate in these efforts to provide medical services in Haiti.

Venezuela has already contributed tents, medical equipment, medicine and foodstuffs. The Haitian government has given full cooperation and support to this effort to bring health services free of charge to the largest possible number of Haitians. It will be a consolation for everybody in the midst of the greatest tragedy that has taken place in our hemisphere.



Fidel Castro Ruz
February 7, 2010
8:46 p.m.

Translated by Granma International

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