Havana

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ifteen years ago today two fishermen plucked an exhausted, frightened five-year-old tied to an inner tube out of the waters off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale.

Elian Gonzalez, less than two weeks short of his 6th birthday, was the young Cuban boy whose rescue set off an international custody battle and reverberated in the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign.

Now nearly 21 and out of the public eye, Gonzalez is studying industrial engineering at the university in his home province of Matanzas in Cuba. His attendance last year at a world youth festival in Ecuador was one of the rare occasions on which he has spoken to the press since a 2005 interview with Bob Simon for CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

In that interview he recalled from a child’s perspective the harrowing nighttime voyage in a rickety, cobbled-together craft with 14 other people that sunk under the battering of storm waves. His mother and her boyfriend were among the eleven who drowned. Apart from Gonzalez, the only survivors were an unrelated couple.

There is nothing in today’s Cuban media recalling the date, although Cuban

TV’s political talk show, La Mesa Redonda (The Round Table,) marked the 15th anniversary Monday by running footage of the Elian saga that comprised its initial programming.

---

WHAT MADE WASHINGTON AGREE TO THE THAW IN RELATIONS WITH CUBA? CLICK ON THE BAR BELOW.

---

[learn_more caption=”Washington’s turn toward Havana”]

The Prospects for Improving U.S.-Cuban Relations

WILLIAM M. LEOGRANDE, MAR 3 2014
SOURCE: e-international relations

Image by @Doug88888

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter more than fifty years of trying to bring Cuba’s revolutionary government to heel, the United States finds itself isolated internationally by a policy of hostility toward Havana that is remarkable for its lack of success. Policy-makers from President Barack Obama down to mid-level foreign policy officials recognize the futility of Washington’s current stance and purportedly want to change it. The Cuban American community, once a bulwark against reconciliation with Cuba, now favors it, as does a majority of the U.S. public. Only a handful of recalcitrant members of Congress appear to stand in the way. In Havana, Raúl Castro is offering an olive branch to Washington while he pursues the most far-reaching reorganization of the Cuban economy since 1959. In short, a growing chorus of critics at home and abroad, inside and outside the U.S. government, is challenging traditional U.S. policy. Has the moment of change finally arrived?

On February 10, the European Union’s foreign ministers agreed to begin negotiations with Cuba on a political and economic cooperation agreement to replace the 1996 Common Position that made normal relations contingent on democratic reforms. Adopted at a moment when the Cuban government was cracking down on dissent, the Common Position has hobbled the ability of Europe to engage constructively with Cuba because Havana regards it as an unacceptable interference in its internal affairs. As the process of economic change unleashed by Raúl Castro gathers force, Europe is set to remove this barrier to deeper involvement, thereby abandoning the last vestige of European cooperation with Washington’s policy of hostility and isolation.

Latin America rejected U.S. policy toward Cuba a long time ago, and in recent years has welcomed Cuba back into the hemispheric community. In 2013, the Latin American states chose Cuba as president of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), an exclusively Latin American international forum that excludes the United States and Canada. At the Sixth Summit of the America’s in Cartagena, Colombia, Latin American heads of state pilloried President Obama for insisting on Cuba’s exclusion. Even close U.S. allies like Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos made it clear that the future of the summit process was in doubt unless Washington agreed to accept Cuban participation, which Washington has yet to do.

Around the world, Cuba has normalized its relations with everyone except the United States. Every year for the past 22 years the United Nations has voted overwhelmingly for a Cuban resolution demanding that the United States end the economic embargo. The most recent vote, in October 2013, was 188 to 2 (only Israel voted with the United States, even though Israel itself has normal commercial relations with the island).

[/learn_more]

 

---

REGULAR ARTICLE RESUMES HERE

However, on Gonzalez’ 20th birthday in December of last year, which coincided with his trip to Ecuador, he told the Cuban state-run web site Cubadebate: “I’m a little shy, so when I stand up somewhere and know that the whole world is looking at me and I’m perhaps the center of attention…it’s pretty tough.”

He also reaffirmed his admiration for Cuba’s iconic leader Fidel Castro.

“He always came for my birthday. I always looked forward to that moment,” Gonzalez said.

In 2005, he went further and told “60 Minutes” he saw Castro as a “father”.

The now-retired Cuban president not only backed Gonzalez’ real father Juan Miguel’s efforts to get the U.S. government to send the boy home, he virtually led the campaign, appearing at the boy’s house in the small town of Cardenas nearly every day and on La Mesa Redonda.

It became a face-off between Castro, the boy’s father and grandparents on the island, and Cuban-American lawmakers Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart with the backing of Miami’s hard-line exiles that encouraged Gonzalez relatives there to refuse to give the boy back. In Miami, the boy was showered with gifts, including a Labrador puppy from Diaz-Balart, and draped in an American flag by Ros-Lehtinen. An outraged Cuban public staged massive marches headed by a sneaker-clad Castro.

The case did not culminate until armed U.S. Federal Agents raided the Miami home where he was being held, and in June 2000 he flew home along with his father, stepmother and baby brother, who had travelled to the United States in their efforts to reunite the family.

Cuban officials stress that dangerous adventures such as the one that killed Gonzalez’s mother and nearly killed him are encouraged by a 1966 U.S. law, the Cuban Adjustment Act, and the “Wet foot, Dry Foot” policy that allows those who reach land to stay. Unlike other undocumented immigrants, Cubans are given preferential treatment and do not face deportation.

A 1994 migration accord signed by Washington and Havana sends Cubans picked up at sea back to the island but commits the U.S. to annually issue a minimum of 20,000 migrant visas to Cubans wishing to leave the island. In Fiscal Year 2013 a total of 24,727 such visas were issued.

In addition, U.S. government figures show that some 25,000 undocumented Cubans arrived either by land or by sea in the fiscal year ending last September 30th.

Smuggling rings have played a part in this, dropping their customers off at Texas border crossings where their Cuban documents get them a green light to enter the country. This method has become more viable under Cuba’s new relaxed travel regulations implemented by President Raul Castro last January.

Still, Cubans take to the seas in flimsy crafts like the one in which Elian Gonzalez travelled. The U.S. Coast Guard spotted 3,722 Cubans in 2013, nearly double the number intercepted in 2012. There are no statistics to show if these were people who had been refused visas by the U.S. or who, for a myriad of reasons, had simply not applied.

Nor are their accurate statistics on how many have lost their lives at sea in pursuit of dry foot status. Only the lucky survivors can be counted for certain.

NOTICE: YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS (SIGNUPS TO THE GREANVILLE POST BULLETIN) ARE COMPLETELY FREE, ALWAYS. AND WE DO NOT SELL OR RENT OUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASES—EVER. That’s a guarantee.

OPEDS

In 1971 Germaine Greer shook the feminist camp with her book The Female Eunuch, a witty, passionate but ultimately too personal account of politics that remained safely within the bounds of bourgeois rebellion. 

By Batu Caliskan

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here exists no Left in the West in the modern age; Leftists are extant in small, isolated enclaves, but there is no genuine Leftist movement. The absence of the Left has terrible implications, not only for the future of Western nations, but also for the nations still subjected to Western hegemony through the mechanistic workings of the world governments and the duplicitous narrative of Liberalism.

I. Devolution of the Western Left

There, at one critical point in history, existed a genuine Left, a Left that was unequivocally committed to the ideals of self-determination and liberation for all peoples. For all intents and purposes, the Left, and with it the promise of an emergent revolutionary class, is gone. The historic Left, composed of dissident communists, “red” anarchists of the syndicalist persuasion, radical socialists, and the like, has been replaced by the New “Left”, a political scam of a movement that perpetuates globalism, New Class managerialism, entrenching capitalism, and atomistic individualism, all under the guise of freedom for the downtrodden. What exists now, in modern Western society, is not the Left, in any meaningful sense, but rather, a flimsy simulacrum that vaunts the rhetoric of the historic Left without understanding or committing to it.

II. The Composition of the New “Left”

In the United States, in particular, the New Left came into prominence within the late decades (60s and 70s, noticeably) of the twentieth-century. When describing the New Left, it is important not only to describe the general composition of the movement, but also the personalities that it attracts. The champions of the New Left, prime examples being disillusioned university youth, wayward pseudo-political liberal bohemians, libertine hedonists, and other marginal, effete deviants, were largely a product, and continuation, of a conservative post-war American society.

CLICK IMAGES TO EXPAND

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, during the heady days of the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 70s. Vietnam served as a uniting force and inspiration for many leftists but the tactics and strategies for genuine revolution remained painfully elusive. 

[dropcap]At the end of the World War II[/dropcap], the world was witness to the transformation of America into a global empire; it escaped relatively-unscathed from the horrors of the war, and was free to pursue its own trajectory of unprecedented economic prosperity at the dawn of the “Golden Age”. The financial security that this prosperity birthed facilitated the gradual entrenching of the New Class, a conglomeration of social engineers, white-collar managerialists, planners, technocrats, and professionals entirely detached from the realities of the working-class¹. The crass materialism (in a non-philosophical sense) of suburban New Class lifestyles, and the rigidity it carried, propelled a whole generation towards a rebellion which, in a kind of tragic irony, preserved the conservative impulses of the era in a more implicit fashion.
CLICK ON IMAGES TO EXPAND

Germaine at 75. She has aged gracefully, and some say mellowed, but her revolutionary contribution shrinks with each passing year.

All the attempted rebellion of the New Left amounted to was a re-packaging of reactionary ideals into different forms. The energy directed towards the liberation of American racial minorities was diverted into support for the abomination of affirmative action, a policy intended to assimilate the racial underclasses into the White, Liberal majority’s institutional pathology by means of entrance into the university system, which remains as the primary point of access to a managerialist, upper-class lifestyle. The danger and intrigue concomitant to revolutionarism, particularly that of anarchism, was bottled like a commodity and sold en masse to the public in the form of the “anarchist” punk-rock bands of the late twentieth century. Women’s demands for liberation from male dominance in the private and public spheres manifested in the rise of the “sexual liberation” of the 1970s², which only furthered women’s traditional oppression by disguising sexual humiliation as the epitome of sexual liberation.

III.   The Institutional Pathology of the New Left

The Left has collapsed into a sad state of degeneracy; it is now possible for any political illiterate to advance a claim to Leftism. The reason for this is that the New Left is apolitical, non-committal, and highly unserious; it reduces politics to recreational lifestylism. This pathology is inherent not only to communist circles, but to anarchist ones, an observation the late political theoretician, Murray Bookchin, expounded upon in several of his works against the post-Left anarchists³.

The ideology of the New Left is dangerous precisely because it subdues all radical consciousness, usurps genuine Leftist movements, and monopolizes all claims to the revolutionary traditions of the historic Left. For the recreational “Leftist”,  politics is just another game to indulge in.  He is not interested in constructing the myth of revolutionary violence (used in the Sorelian sense⁴) necessary to liberate the working-class nor is he interested in serious subversion of the existing politico-economic structure that permeates through the Western world so thoroughly. He may complain of the excesses of capitalism here and there, but not only does he lack a reasoned, cohesive insight into the intimate workings of corporate capitalism, he is also not willing to relinquish the crass consumerism (and the lifestylism it produces) that capitalism nurtures so effectively. He touts the rhetoric of violent resistance without understanding its implications on the personal, and is content to spout any denunciations against the existing capitalist order, as long as his personal comfort and state of mind remain intact. The irony lies in the fact that the recreational Leftist who clings to this lifestylism, and who putatively champions for the underprivileged, oppressed, etc., is the bitterly-hated class enemy of the downtrodden, including revolutionaries of the criminal (and non-criminal) working class, lumpenproletariats, the racial “underclasses”, and other supposed dregs of society.

IV. A March Backwards

Never before has there been a worse historical cycle to inherent. Whatever the cause of this decline may be, one thing can be noted; the post-Left era is upon us. The New Left was never the Left, is not the Left, and will never be the Left, contrary to the shrill insistences and reckless conflations of Right-wing ideologues. It has no potential, no vision, and no spirit; it is the shell of the former Left, a crude imitation that is extant due to its intimate association with the conservative forces of modern Western hegemony and Liberal capitalism.

V. A Much-Needed Revival

This morass exists because we, those unfortunate enough to witness the emergence of this historical trend, are not serious; we were not serious when cries of “Make love, not war” substituted the slogan of “Make jobs, not war”, when anti-capitalist rhetoric was reduced to exosemantic gang-signs for pseudo-Leftists to flash on whim, or when the ravings of the post-Leftists were in vogue among the self-proclaimed “anarchist” milieu.

It is time to abandon the New Left; it is no accident that it ended up in its current state. Whatever ideological praxis may dominate after its collapse, it is clear that the intellectual stagnation we witness today is no step forward.

References

² Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax a Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. North Melbourne, Vic.: Spinifex, 2011. Print.

³ Bookchin, Murray. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Edinburgh: AK, 1995. Print.

⁴ Sorel, Georges, T. E. Hulme, and J. Roth. Reflections on Violence. Glencoe, IL: Free, 1950. Print.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Batu Caliskan is a Turkish writer who has written for various journals, including Attack the System and RADIX, on the question of decentralization, anti-statism, race relations, and the modern Left.

NOTICE: YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS (SIGNUPS TO THE GREANVILLE POST BULLETIN) ARE COMPLETELY FREE, ALWAYS. AND WE DO NOT SELL OR RENT OUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASES—EVER. That’s a guarantee.

First published in our sister site, Cyrano’s Journal Today

[“Isolation” by Neriak.]

NOTICE: YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS (SIGNUPS TO THE GREANVILLE POST BULLETIN) ARE COMPLETELY FREE, ALWAYS. AND WE DO NOT SELL OR RENT OUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASES—EVER. That’s a guarantee.

DAVE LINDORFF

The barricades outside the Donetsk regional administration building are plastered with anti-fascist posters. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne searches almost in vain for honest reporting on the Ukraine conflict in the US corporate media, which is simply parroting the US government position, which is that the rebels in eastern Ukraine are simply tools of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Yet the murderous shelling of the people of the rebel regions of Lugansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine is almost certainly wholly the work of an aggressive Kiev-government led Ukraine military, which has been ramping up its forces in the east in preparation for a renewed assault on the two separatist states of Lugansk and Donetsk.
Each time there is a report of shelling of either city, Lugansk or Donetsk, the US media either completely fail to mention who might be responsible, or they report that “both sides” accuse each other of being responsible, though this is clearly absurd, since even those same media also refer to Donetsk and Lugansk as “rebel-held” or “separatist-held,” or as “rebel strongholds.” Why, one ought to ask, would the rebels shell their own territory, much less the capitals of their respective rebel regions?

---

The US media is not alone in its outrageous lies. The British sidekick does exactly the same, enlisting the now completely untrustworthy BBC in their mutually-reinforcing campaigns of disinformation. Click on the bar below and judge for yourselves, as the onetime gold standard of international journalism peddles the same propaganda memes emanating from Washington. Incidentally, the bombardment of Donetsk and other rebel cities by Kiev’s army has been going on for many months. A cursory look at this page of YouTube videos suffices to gauge the magnitude and persistence of this criminal tactic. —Editors

---

[learn_more]

Ukraine crisis: Heavy bombardment in rebel-held Donetsk

Unmarked military vehicles were spotted in a rebel area on Saturday.

---

Ukraine crisis
BBC News Europe
•

Shelling has resumed in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, just hours after an intense artillery bombardment throughout the night.

An eyewitness said the overnight shelling was the worst in more than a month, lasting almost eight hours.

It appeared to be coming from both rebel and government positions. (sic)

The fighting comes a day after monitors saw large numbers of military vehicles in rebel areas. Ukraine says it thinks the rebels get equipment from Russia.

Moscow denies this, although in the past it has said that Russian soldiers on leave were fighting among the rebels.  [/learn_more]

---

RESUME READING REGULAR TEXT

The model for how such incidents are to be reported was set on Oct. 6 by America’s version of Pravda, Voice of America. In its article that day, headlined NATO Concerned about E. Ukraine Cease-Fire Violations, it states:

The new head of NATO said the Western military alliance is concerned about the large number of violations of the cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, which he indirectly blamed on pro-Russian separatists.

Following in lockstep with that approach, here’s what the US media had to say about the conflict in recent weeks:

The New York Times (Nov. 9):

A shaky cease-fire in eastern Ukraine looked ever more tenuous on Sunday as European monitors confirmed reports of unmarked military vehicles driving through rebel-held territory while Donetsk, the region’s biggest city, endured a nightlong artillery battle.

The monitoring group, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that long columns of unmarked military vehicles, some towing howitzers, were spotted over the weekend. The monitors did not speculate as to the origins of the trucks or the people inside them, but Ukrainian officials said the statements bolstered their claims that Russia was again arming and training separatists.

…On Sunday, after what journalists in Donetsk described as the heaviest night of artillery shelling in and around the city in at least a month, the O.S.C.E. observers saw two more unmarked military columns. The observers noted 17 trucks in each column, some equipped with Grad ground-to-ground rocket launchers and others towing more howitzers.

Comment: Notice the focus here on the unidentified military vehicles, but not a word about who would have been firing that heavy artillery barrage into rebel-held Donetsk. A real news organization — as opposed to a propaganda organ — would have asked that question and would have sought answers. Clearly the rebels weren’t bombarding their own capital city, but the Times didn’t mention that absurdity.

Fresh volleys of artillery fire were heard across many parts of the separatist stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, a Ukrainian government statement said, after Kiev warned again of rebel preparations for a fresh offensive.

A Reuters witness in central Donetsk heard several dozen blasts of artillery fire, although it was unclear who had launched them or what was under attack.

Shelling from both sides has repeatedly punctured a ceasefire, agreed in a deal signed on Sept. 5 to end a war that has killed more than 4,000 people since April. Government forces and rebels have accused each other of violating the terms of the truce, raising fears it could collapse entirely.

Ukraine’s pro-Western leaders and NATO have accused Russia of sending soldiers and weapons to help pro-Russian rebels launch a possible new offensive, a charge the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.

Before the latest reports of shelling, a Ukrainian military spokesman said on Sunday the weekend had been calmer than in previous days, but warned again of a buildup in separatist forces.

“Compared with previous days, the number and intensity (of shelling) fell, but there are signs of rebels and Russian forces preparing for an offensive,” Andriy Lysenko said in a briefing in Kiev.

Comment: Once again nowhere does Reuters (now a US news organization, after its merger with Thompson Corp to form Thomson Publishing Group, headquartered in Philadelphia), mention that the shelling of Donetsk would inevitably have been the work of the Ukraine military, not of the separatists who are headquartered there. Instead, the article keeps mentioning the claim that the eastern Ukraine rebels are backed by Russia (no crime, and certainly something the US does militarily to countless countries).

---

Demonstrators wave revolutionary flags at a major pro-Russia rally in Lenin Square in central Donetsk.

Time Magazine (November 6):

Two teens were killed and four others wounded when an artillery shell hit a school in Ukraine’s war-torn Donetsk region on Wednesday as a two-month truce between Kiev and pro-Russian militants appeared to be in collapse.

The BBC reports that the shell struck a school sports field where children were playing soccer, near Donetsk airport. The four teens who survived the attack are being treated in an intensive care unit at a local trauma center.

The renewed clashes appear to have been spurred by the widely condemned elections held in Ukraine’s rebel-held southeast over the weekend. Both Kiev and separatist forces are reportedly preparing for all-out conflict once again, with troops being mobilized.

Comment: Again, we see no information or even speculation as to who would have fired a shell into a Donetsk schoolyard, but it seems obvious that unless it was an errant shell fired by rebels, they would not have been targeting a playing field used by their own people.

To get any real idea as to how this conflict — really a civil war, or war of secession by a part of Ukraine populated largely by Russian speakers — one has to forget US media and turn to something like Al Jazeera. Here’s an Al Jazeera report on the conflict, headlined Moscow says Kiev ‘crudely violated’ ceasefire and dated November 6:

Russia has accused the Kiev government of violating the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, saying it has intensified its military offensive against rebels.

The accusation came as Ukraine announced the introduction of passport controls around areas held by pro-Russian separatists and heavy artillery fire erupted in Donetsk.

“It is obvious today that these agreements have been crudely violated by the Ukrainian side,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

“In place of de-escalation, Kiev has intensified the hostilities in the southeast of the country with the use of heavy equipment, which has led to thousands of casualties and large-scale destruction.”

…It was not possible to verify which side was responsible for the fire, AFP reported.

The fragility of the situation was underlined on Thursday when the Kiev government and the rebels traded blame over the shelling of a school the day before, which left two teenagers dead and four others injured.

Andriy Lysenko, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said that preliminary information indicates the shells flew into the schoolyard in Donetsk from a location controlled by separatist forces.

But the rebels blamed Ukrainian forces for Wednesday’s deadly attack, saying government troops indiscriminately target residential areas in eastern Ukraine.

Lysenko said that in the latest shelling across the conflict zone, nine Ukrainian soldiers had been wounded. The separatists rarely release casualty figures.

He also repeated accusations that “Russian units and mercenaries” continued to cross into Ukraine.

Russian denies directly aiding the rebels, although Russia soldiers and equipment have been frequently spotted by journalists in the conflict zone.

Comment: Notice how differently this Al Jazeera report covers the shelling of the playground, from the way it was handled by Time Magazine. Here, the Ukrainians are quoted as blaming the rebels, but the rebels deny responsibility and point to the widespread “indiscriminate” shelling of civilians in their territory by Ukrainian forces.

That is good journalism.

The stuff being published by the US corporate media isn’t journalism at all. It is rank propaganda in support of the US government’s goal, which attempting to drive, at all costs, a wedge between America’s vassal states in Europe, and the Russian Federation.

The American public need to know that, but as long as they just obtain their news from the corporate media, whether that’s Fox or CNN or the vaunted New York Times, they’re not going to get it.

---

 

About the author

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

NOTICE: YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS (SIGNUPS TO THE GREANVILLE POST BULLETIN) ARE COMPLETELY FREE, ALWAYS. AND WE DO NOT SELL OR RENT OUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASES—EVER. That’s a guarantee.