By Rosa Miriam Elizalde

 Dateline: August 19, 2021

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Twenty years of lies from Washington, but only 10 days were enough for the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan. Joe Biden has finished it off by stringing together a pathetic excuse, again a lie: “Our mission in Afghanistan was not to build a nation, not to create a united democracy. Our only national interest in Afghanistan has been and continues to be to prevent a terrorist attack on the United States.”

Who believes him? The Washington Post compiled some 2,000 pages of notes from more than 400 interviews with Afghan military, diplomats, aid workers and officials a year and a half ago. They believed they were testifying on condition of anonymity and talked their heads off about the mistakes of the U.S. military and the deliberate deception of the Afghan population (and the world) to sustain the “regime change” project in Afghanistan at all costs. Lessons learned, they called this an unusual piece of paper.

“Every piece of data was altered to present the best possible picture…. The polls, for example, were totally unreliable, but they reinforced the idea that everything we did was the right thing to do,” said Bob Crowley, the colonel who served as counterinsurgency adviser from 2013 to 2014. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of the U.S. Cyber Army, added: “I don’t have any visibility into who the bad guys are.”

More than 800,000 U.S. troops have been deployed in Afghanistan since 2001. The Department of Defense has recognized 2,443 casualties and some 20,589 wounded. This military institution, together with the State Department and the Agency for International Development (USAID), not including other entities such as the CIA or the Department of Veterans Affairs, have spent 2.26 billion dollars since 2001, according to estimates by the Human and Budgetary Costs of the War on Terrorism project of Brown University, Rhode Island.

The Costs of War project also estimates that 241,000 Afghans have died as a direct result of military intervention. These figures do not include deaths from disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure and other indirect consequences of the war.

Politician Rubio: Florida has long been a haven for some of the worst reactionary scum from Latin America, but even in that unsavory crowd Cuban fundamentalist Marco Rubio stands out.

It is impossible to ignore the similarities of this data with the regime change plans for Cuba and the continuous threats from Florida politicians. Nearly $250 million in federal funds have been invested in the last two decades by U.S. federal agencies for “regime change” on the island. It should be clarified that these are the public funds documented by the Cuba Money Project, by researcher Tracey Eaton. No one knows how much money has traveled through clandestine and secret channels, while military intervention is always an option on the table for Senators Marco Rubio and Robert Menendez, and Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, to cite those who head the anti-Cuban fundamentalist wing in Washington.

In addition to regime change and money, what links US imperial history with Afghanistan and Cuba are video movies. The ones we have seen these days on the networks resemble the one narrated and lived by writer Eduardo Galeano. The Uruguayan was a member of the international tribunal that judged in Stockholm (1981) the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

According to the official explanation, the invasion was to defend the secular government that was trying to modernize the country. “I will never forget the climax of those sessions,” Galeano wrote. A high-ranking religious leader, representing Islamic fundamentalists, gave a long dissertation full of anti-communist rage. The US government’s freedom fighter – now terrorist – thundered, “The communists have disgraced our daughters! They have taught them to read and write!”

I think Galeano would agree with me that the cry of that gentleman could be exchanged for those emitted, day in and day out, by the legislators of the crusade against Cuba in Washington.

Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist. 

Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

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Cuba’s New Operation Truth 

By Alejandra Garcia on August 19, 2021 from Havana

Art: Maisel Lopez

 

On January 22, 1959, three weeks after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro summoned journalists from throughout the world to thwart a US campaign against the island related to the trials of dictator Fulgencio Batista’s henchmen.

Operation Truth, as Fidel called it, was Cuba’s first confrontation with the false facts, fake news and slander that befell on the country since day one of the triumph of the Revolution.

“We have seen this story repeated a thousand times in more than 60 years. The only thing that has changed is the era, hand in hand with the socio-technological Revolution led and controlled by the United States,” Cuban journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde explained during an event organized by the Casa de las Americas, Resumen Latinoamericano, the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), and other institutions in the country.

During the session “Cuba Trending Topic: what happened?”, Elizalde explained how the July 11 riots on the Caribbean island were not fortuitous. The background and causes of the revolt, which was incited from Florida through social networks, date back to the first decades of Revolution.

“Since the administration of Bush’s father (who promoted the Torricelli Act, that allowed Cuba’s access to the Internet but banned us from taking advantage of all of its potentialities), until today, Washington has taken advantage of the so-called information highway with the aim of destroying the Cuban government,” the academic reflected.

Information and evidence abound as to how early the U.S. think tanks saw in digital glasnost an opportunity to achieve their strategic objectives in Cuba, she added.

Successive White House administrations set up two structures of communicational intoxication against the island. The first one was created during the Barack Obama era (2009-2017), aimed at professional and academic sectors. Although the audience is small, the impact is considerable because they are sectors that help build consensus in society.

The second structure emerged during the Donald Trump administration (2017-2021) and was characterized by the proliferation of junk websites that do not respect the traditional values of journalism. They follow the school of Steve Bannon, who was an advisor to the former president during his 2016 campaign and is the great guru of the so-called alternative right, deeply anti-communist.

“Those sites manage the fragmentation of audiences; they tap into Cuba’s identity and focus on popular sectors marginalized or self-marginalized from our institutions. Social networking platforms are their main space of expression and articulation,” the also first vice president of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) added.

During the meeting, the journalist clarified that “both groups respond to laboratories that have studied the communication gaps we have and know in depth what they think, what are the expectations and interests of Cubans who are on social platforms.”

The leaders of these structures have access to data that are forbidden to the Cuban government and that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google and other private companies sell to the highest bidder.

“The Cuban communicative public space is characterized by having a very cohesive nucleus that trusts the institutional systems. Outside this group, numerous dispersed bubbles can be seen – they come together when there is an emotion in which they coincide, rather than rational discourses – whose relationships of trust are anchored in the unregulated space of the digital environment, as also occurs in other societies,” the expert explained.

These are two very polarized worlds trapped in analogical practices, and it is this gap that Florida’s toxic machinery is targeting, she commented.

Another reality joins with these problems, as experienced by the whole world during the pandemic: for example, isolation, increased technological dependence; further synchronization of the transnational right-wing, which is moving at the speed of a click.

“The world is also experiencing an increase in the battle to capture the attention of users, the predominance of emotion over reason, and the emergence of a new media architecture that further empowers the hegemonic media: those who frame the agendas, resignify reality, and model the political scenarios,” clarified the expert. 

As if this were not enough, Cuba is facing an unprecedented wave of viral Fake News, which is actually part of an information war that using military tactics targets the civilian population.

In the midst of this reality, we can affirm that the July 11 riots did not begin on that day, but much earlier. In February 2020, the toxic machinery in Florida focused on two strands of the same cause: the reelection of Trump and the end of Cuban socialism, with the support of the allies of the transnational right-wing.

That month, when Cuba still did not have a single case of COVID-19, a campaign began to unfold, changing its name as it went along, but reduced to a few semantic ammunition: Cuba in crisis, hunger, repression, and coronavirus, highlighted Elizalde.

“Today Cuba is unleashing a new Operation Truth. It is unfair and unacceptable that, with all these elements, a nation under siege and communicational warfare would not be expected to defend itself”, she concluded.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English 

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