Back to Fidel!

Source:  Resumen; LatinoAmericano and the Third World

November 25 2019

By Carlos Aznarez, on November 25, 2019

Going back to Fidel Castro’s passion of transforming politics into something feasible regardless of having to face a thousand adversities on the way.

Back to his boldness when up against enemies a thousand times more powerful than him and not giving up in his attempt.

Back to his determination to continue advancing in the hardest of circumstances, as it was after the assault on the Moncada Barracks or the complicated landing of the Granma yacht.

Back to his intelligence when defending the ideas that inspired him to enter into the difficult task of defeating tyrant Fulgencio Batista and to defend himself during his Moncada trial, claiming that Jose Marti was the one to be blamed for this assault.

Back to his harshness without abandoning his fondness, evidenced in every combat, every decisive moment in which the slightest doubt would have cost his own and his comrades’ lives.

Back to his lessons about the necessary combination between mass struggle and armed struggle to achieve conclusive victories as the one reached by Cuba during these sixty years of existence. Sound victories that are not taken out with coups or conspiracies, as the U.S. imperialism has always desired.

Back to his military strategist’s sagacity that allowed him to overcome, as in the Sierra Maestra as in hard years in government; moments that foretold of impending defeats but were instead turned into victories thanks to his coherence and fighting spirit.

Back to that of the foresight, together with his brother in arms Ernesto Che Guevara, that as soon as the dictator was defeated—the significance and necessity of building a tool to fight the disinformation and misrepresentation of their ideals and transformations. The two of them, together with another warrior in Jorge Ricardo Masetti, were the masterminds of Prensa Latina news agency, which continues triggering accurate information to this day.

Back to giving the constant example so that the entirety Cuba could understand that weapons ready for combat are as important as voluntary work, in order to boost production and generate a self-sufficient economy.

Back to his endless patience to teach, train and foster knowledge among those who had always been marginalized, excluded, humiliated. Literacy as a starting point and then, throughout the entire Revolution, training and studying were among his greatest concerns in order to achieve an educated nation willing to continue growing in this sense.

Back to his huge humanity, devising tools to ensure public health for all men and women in Cuba but then doubling the bet by creating an army of white coats bringing solidarity to faraway places around the world.

Back to his brightness when determining that U.S. imperialism was the enemy to be fought and to not leave a day without denouncing it as the opposite to a society in which life is always defeating death.

Back to his brightness when realizing that Cuba’s women were as valuable as its men, helping from the beginning to create the female guerrilla group Mariana Grajales and then, when building the revolutionary government, “collaborating as necessary to create, together with Vilma Espin, the Federation of Cuban Women, an essential agency for training and struggle of the spirit.

Back to his understanding of socialism and communism, in which society becomes a world of equals without a chance for variants of capitalism, neither shortcuts aimed at deceiving the peoples, including reformism or social democracy.

Back to his understanding of internationalism, in which the struggle of any nation in the world facing imperialism is the same as Cuba’s struggle, something clearly evidenced during these sixty years.

Back to Fidel, the hero of a thousand battles but also the thoughtful statesman a step ahead of the future, predicting that this Humanity shall be saved among all of us or it will perish.

Back to Fidel, who contrary to other fake leaders made humbleness his lifestyle, avoiding unnecessary self-worship and elitist behaviors. He was always ready with his people for whatever would come, always ready to lead them to victories in the hardest battles.

Now, three years after he passed away, his revolutionary legacy continues enlightening this tough moment for the American continent and the world. But these new insurgencies awaking among our people evidence that he was not wrong when predicting that beyond its brutality and uncontrolled ambition, U.S. imperialism is going to collapse this century.

Going back to Fidel is to continue imagining a socialist Revolution as the one he built to prove that the path is already marked. The only thing we have to do, as Uruguayan folk singer Daniel Viglietti would sing, is start walking.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation North America bureau

China Deal & Lithium Reserves Behind Coup in Bolivia

Source:  RT TV

November 12 2019

 

Deposed Bolivian President Evo Morales is more popular than the last six US presidents. So why did his reelection lead to violent riots and his eventual ousting? Rick Sanchez explains how Morales had spurned Western interests wishing to exploit his country’s lucrative lithium resources and turned to China instead. Coincidence? RT America’s Michele Greenstein joins with the details. She discusses the skyrocketing demand for lithium and points out that Bolivia is estimated to hold half of the world’s reserves.

Evidence Talks: US Government Propelled Coup in Bolivia

Source:  Global Research

November 25 2019

 

A coup on November 10 removed the socialist government of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The U.S. government made preparations and orchestrated the final stages of the coup. It was in charge. In power for almost 14 years, Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera had won elections taking place on October 20. The two leaders would each have been serving a fourth term in office.

Evidence of the U.S. crime appears below.  It’s about money, U.S. influence within the Bolivian military, and U.S. control of the Organization of American States (OAS):

1. For many years the Santa Cruz Civic Committee and its proto-fascist Youth Union received funding from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. According to analyst Eva Golinger some years ago, the USAID provided $84 million to Bolivian opposition groups.

U.S. Embassy officials conspired with and paid the “civic committees” of Bolivia’s four eastern departments. Representing the European- descended elite of Bolivia’s wealthiest region, these groups promoted racist assaults. They concocted a separatist movement and tried to assassinate Morales. In response, the Bolivian government expelled the U.S. ambassador, Drug Enforcement Agency, and U. S. Agency for International Development.

2. Bolivian armed forces commander in chief Williams Kaliman Romero on November 10 “suggested” that Morales resign. That was the coup de grace. Within three days, Kaliman himself resigned and moved to the United States. Sullkata M. Quilla of the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis explains that Kaliman and other military chiefs each had received $1 million and that top police officers received $500,000 apiece. U.S. Chargee d’affaires Bruce Williamson allegedly arranged for monetary transactions that took place in Argentina’s Jujuy Province under the auspices of Governor Geraldo Morales. The story first appeared on the website www.Tvmundus.com.ar.

3. Money flowed freely prior to Morales’s departure. Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations Sacha Llorenti – a Morales supporter – reported that, “loyal members of [Morales’s] security team showed him messages in which people were offering them $50,000 if they would hand him over.”

4. According to the respected Argentinean journalist Stella Calloni, Ivanka Trump arrived in Jujuy on September 4-5 ostensibly to honor a small group of women entrepreneurs. Some “2,500 federal agents” and Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan accompanied her. At the same time, Governor Gerardo Morales was informed that the United States would be delivering $400 million supposedly to pay for improvements to a big highway in Argentina. Cattaloni suggests that a freight train running through Jujuy en route to Santa Cruz, the center of anti- Morales plotting in Bolivia, was transporting military equipment to opposition groups.

US Is Again Complicit in an Illegal Coup, this Time in Bolivia

There’s media speculation as to how Governor Morales may have facilitated the transfer of U.S. money to Luis Camacho, leader of the coup and head of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee. He may have done so in Santa Cruz, where he visited on September 4, or in Jujuy Province where Camacho may have showed up later that day or the next.

5. According to analyst Jeb Sprague:

“At least six of the key coup plotters are alumni of the infamous School of the Americas, while [General] Kaliman and another figure served in the past as Bolivia’s military and police attachés in Washington.”

For decades, Latin American military personnel have received training and indoctrination at that U.S. Army school now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Sprague notes also that the top commanders of police that mutinied had received training at the Washington-based Latin American police exchange program known by its initials in Spanish as APALA.

6. The OAS played a crucial role in the coup. Votes were being tallied on October 20 when the OAS, having audited preliminary results, announced that they showed irregularities. The U.S. government echoed the findings and street protests intensified. On October 24 the Supreme Electoral Tribunal declared first-round victories for Morales and García Linare. Protests mounted. The government, under stress, requested another OAS audit.

The OAS made its conclusions public on November 10, earlier than expected:

The OAS couldn’t “validate the results of this election [and called for] “another electoral process [and] new electoral authorities.”

This was the tipping point. Morales convoked another election but shortly thereafter General Kaliman forced him to resign.

The OAS findings were false. Walter Mebane and colleagues at the University of Michigan, having examined voting statistics, indicated that fraudulent votes in the election were not decisive for the result. The Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research performed its own detailed study and reached the same conclusion.

The OAS served as U.S. handmaiden. Headquartered in Washington, the organization took shape under U.S. auspices in 1948 with the assigned task of protecting Latin America and the Caribbean from Communism. More recently the OAS, under Secretary General Luis Almagro’s guidance, has spearheaded U.S. efforts to expel President Nicolas Maduro’s progressive Venezuelan government.

Paradoxically, Almagro in May 2019 gave Morales the go-ahead for a fourth presidential term. That was despite a referendum having been defeated that would have allowed the extra term. Almago’s intention may have been to lull Morales into cooperating with OAS overview of the election results.

7. Other signs of U.S. coup preparations are these:

• Prior to the October 20 elections President Morales charged that U.S. Embassy officials bribed rural residents to reject him at the polls. They traveled, for example, to the Yungas region on October 16 with pay-offs to disaffected coca farmers.
• According to Bolpress.com, the National Military Coordinator (Coordinadora Nacional Militar), an organization of reserve military officers, received and distributed money sent from the United States to create social crisis prior to October 20. The United States also used embassies in Bolivia and the evangelical church as facades to hide its activities. Mariane Scott and Rolf A. Olson, U.S. Embassy officials in La Paz, met with counterparts in the embassies of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina to coordinate destabilization efforts and to deliver U.S. financing to opposition forces inside Bolivia.
• Weapons shipments from the United States arrived at the Chilean port of Iquique on their way to the National Military Coordinator group inside Bolivia.
• The State Department allocated $100,000 to enable a company called “CLS Strategies” to mount a disinformation campaign through social media.
• The CIA station in La Paz assumed control of Bolivia’s Whatsapp network in order to leak false information. More than 68,000 fake anti-Morales tweets were released.
• In mid-October “political consultant” George Eli Birnbaun arrived in Santa Cruz from Washington with a team of military and civilian personnel. Their job was to support the U.S. – preferred presidential candidacy of Oscar Ortiz and to destabilize the country politically after the elections. They provided support for Santa Cruz Civic Committee’s youth organization – specialists in violence – and supervised the U.S. – financed “Standing Rivers” NGO, engaged in spreading disinformation.
• Sixteen audio recordings of the plotters’ pre-election conversations were leaked and showed up on the internet. Several of the voices mentioned contacts with the U.S. Embassy and with U.S. Senators Ted Cruz, Robert Menendez, and Marco Rubio. Sprague reports that four of the ex-military plotters on the calls had attended the School of the Americas.

This presentation focuses entirely on the evidence. In a criminal investigation, evidence is central to determining guilt or innocence. Considerations of motive and context are of lesser importance, and we don’t deal with them here. But when and where they are attended to, they would logically fall into categories that include the following:

1. A socialist experiment was showing signs of success and capitalists of the world were facing the threat of a good example.

2. A people once held hostage by colonial powers was able to claim sovereign independence and in that regard had endeavored to retain much of the wealth provided through natural resources, lithium in particular.

3. Throughout its existence the Morales government, headed by an indigenous president, was up against anti-indigenous prejudice, racist in origin, and social-class divisions.

4. All the while, that government was the target of hostility, plotting, and episodic violence at the hands of the entitled classes.

So the evidence is clear. It points to a controlling U.S. hand in this coup d’état. The U.S. government bears heavy responsibility. There were Bolivian instigators, of course, but the U.S. plotters fall within the range of our own political processes. That’s why our accusing finger points at them.

In this instance, the U.S. government, as is its custom, disregarded international law, morality, respect for human life, and common decency. To stifle popular resistance the U.S. government evidently will stop at nothing, other than force in the hands of the people. What kind of force remains to be seen.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist with a focus on Latin America and health care issues. He is a Cuba solidarity activist who formerly worked as a pediatrician.

Featured image is from Peoples Dispatch

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © W.T. Whitney Jr., Global Research, 2019

Race is Central to Both Revolution and Reaction in Latin America

Source:  Black Agenda Report
November 14 2019

Glen Ford, BAR executive editor

Race is Central to Both Revolution and Reaction in Latin American

The world birthed in the near extinction of one-fifth of humanity still exists, in the social relations bequeathed to the Americas by conquistadors and enslavers.

“In Latin America, U.S. influence means White Power.”

The events in Bolivia lay bare the central role that racial subjugation has always played in the “New World,” a hemisphere whose “discovery” by Europeans resulted — within the span of only 50 years — in the death by genocide and pandemic of fully a fifth of the Earth’s human population. The Conquistadors frenzied “primitive accumulation” of precious metals, mined by enslaved Natives who died quicker than they could be replenished, created a demand for the capture and importation of millions of Africans with immunities to both European and tropical disease. For centuries, until deep into the 1700s, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere’s population was Indigenous and Black, with African slaves comprising the great bulk of newcomers to the New World. Thus was laid the material basis for the rise of Europe, the beginnings of capitalism and the global supremacy of whiteness.

“My crime is to be a union leader, to be indigenous…and anti-imperialist,” said Evo Morales, the three-time elected president of South America’s most indigenous nation as he entered exile in Mexico. Bolivia is roughly two-thirds native. Morales’ election victory, October 20 – his fourth since 2005 — was aborted in the ensuing weeks by rampaging gangs of thugs employed by oligarchs based in the whitest – and most fossil fuel-rich – regions of the country who terrorized, beat and kidnapped  government and Movement for Socialism party officials and their families and eventually laid siege to the capital in La Paz, with no resistance from the police and army. Unable to protect his comrades or kinfolk, Morales resigned, and was quickly replaced as president by the leader of the white-dominated minority legislative party. Morales’ party had won absolute majorities in both houses of the legislature, but was left leaderless and terror-struck by the coup. The white rump prevailed.

“Morales’ election victory was aborted by rampaging gangs of thugs employed by oligarchs based in the whitest – and most fossil fuel-rich – regions of the country.”

The United States did not immediately recognize the new government of Senator Jeanine Añez Chavez, but will doubtless soon do so, having schemed incessantly for regime change ever since Morales joined Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (1998) and Brazil’s Lula da Silva (2003) to set in motion Latin America’s “pink tide.” When Argentina (Cristina Fernández de Kirchner), Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega) and Ecuador (Rafael Correa) elected leftish presidents in 2007, US imperial power sank to its nadir in the hemisphere. But the CIA never sleeps, and neither do the white oligarchs who remained at the commanding heights of the economy and media in the “pink”-led nations of the hemisphere. One by one, the anti-imperialist presidents were removed, with U.S. assistance, in Brazil (2016), Ecuador (2017) and Argentina (2015), for a time leaving only Venezuela and Nicaragua in the anti-imperialist camp – along with, of course, Cuba, which has not had a U.S.-allied oligarchic class to contend with since the revolution of 1959.

Luckily for Morales, in 2018 Mexico elected leftish president Lopez Obrador, who quickly facilitated asylum for Morales – as Mexico had done for countless political exiles throughout its history. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was also returned to power in Argentina, this year . And Brazil’s “Lula” was released from prison earlier this month  pending appeal of his conviction on corruption charges, reinvigorating a demoralized left in the hemisphere’s biggest country.

“The CIA never sleeps, and neither do the white oligarchs.”

Of the U.S. presidential candidates, only Bernie Sanders expressed alarm over the forced ouster of the democratically elected president in Bolivia. “I am very concerned,” Sanders tweeted, “about what appears to be a coup in Bolivia, where the military, after weeks of political unrest, intervened to remove President Evo Morales. The U.S. must call for an end to violence and support Bolivia’s democratic institutions.”

Given that Sanders once called Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez a “dead dictator ” and slandered current president Nicholas Maduro as a “vicious tyrant ” as recently as last September’s presidential debate, that’s a great improvement. But a president Sanders might find himself seeking asylum in Mexico if he tried to radically reform U.S. policy in Latin America, which is intimately allied with the maintenance of white elite rule in the region in collaboration with multinational capital. In Latin America, U.S. influence means White Power.

When white secessionists began a drive to form their own nation in the natural gas fields of eastern Bolivia, they were befriended by the U.S. ambassador , who had previously been a key player in prying the province of Kosovo from Serbia.

“Sanders might find himself seeking asylum in Mexico if he tried to radically reform U.S. policy in Latin America.”

In Brazil, where the African-descended majority won affirmative action in public higher education and unprecedented recognition under presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouusseff, the U.S. contributed the espionage underlying the prosecution and impeachment, respectively, of both Workers Party leaders. The grand scheme between the Obama and, later, Trump administrations and the white Brazilian elite culminated in the election of ultra-racist Jair Bolsonaro, who dismantled protections for Amerindians and their lands, threatened to reduce racial “quotas,” and declared that the police did not “kill enough” — in a nation where one out of every 12 encounters with police ends in death, and where hundreds of young Black men are killed by cops in a month in the megacities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janiero. Under the “Trump” of Latin America, indigenous rights workers in Amazonia are now fair game for assassination by land grabbers. Brazilian politics is all about race, and is a perfect match with U.S. imperialism.

In Ecuador, indigenous protesters forced the neoliberal successor to leftish president Correa to withdraw an International Monetary Fund-imposed economic austerity program , after shutting down the capital city and forcing president Lenin Moreno to flee to the coast. That’s the second time in this century that Ecuadorian natives, who number about a quarter of the nation’s mostly mestizo population, have forced the government to retreat. Back in 2005, indigenous protests led to the ouster of president Lucio Gutiérrez when he tried to impose an IMF austerity regime. Indigenous leaders vow that they’ll return to the streets if Moreno reneges on the agreement.

“The grand scheme between Obama and, later, Trump and the white Brazilian elite culminated in the election of ultra-racist Jair Bolsonaro.”

Colombian politics also revolves around race – although neither the left nor the right will acknowledge it. Colombia has the highest number of displaced persons in the world : 7.7 million, according to the United Nations – even more than Syria, with 6.2 million. The majority of Colombia’s displaced people are Afro-descendants and indigenous, displaced by war and corporate land grabbers that operate in league with paramilitaries. The government refuses to enforce agreements recognizing the traditional land rights of both Blacks and indigenous people, and Afro-Colombians say FARC anti-government guerillas have never respected native and Black land rights, either. If the war in Colombia is a fight over land, then it is a war against Blacks and natives.

One glimpse at photos showing the racial composition of pro- and anti-government legislators in Venezuela, is enough to tell the tale. The violent opposition that has been trying to bring down the government for 20 years, with U.S. help, is overwhelmingly white, while the socialist government legislators look like the nation as a whole: largely Black, brown and native — like the late president Hugo Chavez, himself. Oligarch-owned newspapers brazenly published cartoons depicting Chavez as a monkey, and got away with it. U.S.-subsidized, mostly white rioters burned a young Black man alive in the streets of Caracas, assuming he was a Chavista. Racists in Venezuela don’t bite their tongues – nor do expatriate white Venezuelans in the U.S., a mob of whom, reinforced by racists from elsewhere in Latin America, surrounded the Venezuelan embassy in DC, last spring. American friends of Venezuela had occupied the building, with the blessing of the government in Caracas, to safeguard it against takeover by Donald Trump’s choice as pretend-president, Juan Guaido. The mob screamed racist and sexist threats  and taunts, day and night, for weeks, while the (largely Black) DC police stood by or abetted them. The U.S. American occupiers were eventually arrested, and face possible imprisonment .

There were Cubans, or the sons and daughters of exiled Cubans, in the mob, too, a reminder that Cuba is believed to have lost half her white population after the revolution – which is the best evidence that pre-revolutionary Cuba was a profoundly racist society.

The rest of Latin America has not undergone anything so sweeping – including Mexico, whose 1910-1920 revolution failed to achieve transformative results. The world birthed in the near extinction of one-fifth of humanity still exists, in the social relations bequeathed to the Americas by conquistadors and enslavers – and which U.S. imperialism is determined to preserve and defend.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

A (Re)Born National “Black and Left-led” Organization Fights for Community Control of Police

Source:  Black Agenda Report
November 28 2019

A (Re)Born National “Black and Left-Led” Organization Fights for Community Control of Police

On the momentum of Chicago’s vibrant anti-police movement – the most advanced in the nation – the city’s Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression has gone national after a highly successful conference.

“This movement will be ‘black-led and left-led.’”

Eight-hundred organizers from 28 states gathered last weekend at the Chicago’s teachers union hall to “re-found” the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an organization initially launched in 1973  by Angela Davis and fellow Communists to resist state destruction of what remained of the 1960s radical movement. Davis, a university professor who became a fugitive and political prisoner when the FBI attempted to entangle her in the 1970 Marin County shootout , was on hand to help restore the Alliance to national status. “We might say that we have acquired more complex approaches to issues of repression that refused to go away,” said Davis, age 75, in her keynote to a spirited rally of mostly young, overwhelmingly non-white activists.

As reflected in the multi-racial and heavily female faces in the crowd, the movement is no longer a primarily Black and heterosexual male-led struggle. And these activists, like Davis, are committed to abolishing the police and prison system, altogether.

“I remember when Huey Newton and Bobby Seale began that process of patrolling the community with a gun and a law book,” said Davis. She called on the new organization to “address the causes of harm rather than rely on the failed institutions of punishment.” People shout the demand: “’indict killer cops.’ I totally understand,” she said. “It makes people feel powerful,” but that means “using the very structure and strategies that are responsible for what we are fighting against.” It’s a contradiction – but life is filled with contradictions. Abolition is the goal, but in the meantime, the police must be brought under the control of the communities that they have always brutalized and sought to suppress.

“We might say that we have acquired more complex approaches to issues of repression that refused to go away.”

The fight to make the Chicago cops accountable to a democratically elected board of community residents began in 2012, the year Trayvon Martin  was killed by white vigilante George Zimmerman and two years before Mike Brown  was shot down by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, ushering in a “Black Lives Matter” movement. Frank Chapman, now 77, had kept the Chicago chapter of the Alliance going after the dissolution of the national organization in 1991; the chapter in Kentucky also hung on as an independent organization. The campaign to establish CPAC, the Civilian Police Accountability Council, began with 150 supporters that met “in a small room in the Englewood section of Chicago,” said Chapman. CPAC eventually amassed 60,000 supporters, the result of years of organizing against police atrocities, culminating in huge protests against the “16 shots” Laquan McDonald murder, the attempted cover-up of which led to Rahm Emanuel foregoing another run for mayor, the resignation of the Cook County state’s attorney, and a murder conviction of the cop.

“The campaign to establish CPAC began with 150 supporters eventually amassed 60,000.” 

Chapman and his comrades thought the army of protesters could be strategically converted into an electoral force to push CPAC through the 50-member city council (Board of Aldermen). Before last February’s elections, only eight city council members even paid lip service to CPAC, and only one — Carlos Ramirez-Rosa – could be counted on in a crunch. Chapman recounts how CPAC supporters ran 80 candidates; 63 got on the ballot, and 19 won. “They used to call us the ‘lunatic fringe,’” Chapman chuckled.  “Well, the lunatic fringe is now 40 percent” of the city council.

Jazmine Salas, who co-chairs the Alliance with Chapman, believes that “if there had not been big demonstrations” the Alliance might not have mounted a huge electoral push for CPAC.

City Council passage requires a 26 vote majority, but 34 votes are needed to override the veto that is expected from Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s first Black woman mayor. As a former head of the city’s Police Board, Lightfoot was a staunch defender of cops and the status quo, although she now mouths words favoring police accountability and reform. “The Police Department cannot do its job effectively if it’s not viewed as legitimate in the community,” Mayor Lightfoot told  a Chicago Police Board meeting, last summer.

“If there had not been big demonstrations” the Alliance might not have mounted a huge electoral push for CPAC.”

CPAC bears no resemblance to the numerous – and wholly ineffective – community police review boards that have existed in cities around the nation since the late Fifties. The CPAC handout puts it succinctly:

“Democratic civilian control of the police means the community tells the police what to do. It means empowering the people to hold the police accountable for crimes. It means enhancing true public safety through authentic police accountability to our people. And this can only happen when the community writes the rules and regulations governing the police.”

The actual legislation calls for :

A Police Control Council consisting of elected representatives from each of the Wards in Chicago, emphasizing that the Council should represent the racial, ethnic, and economic structure of the City of Chicago,  All Council meetings will be public.

§   Establishing a budget for the Council in order to compensate councilors and meet Council expenses and administering the Police Department budget.

§   The Chief of Police will be appointed by the Council.  Affirmative action will end racial, gender, and ethnic imbalances in the ranks of the Police.

§   Standards for police conduct and proscription of acts of Excessive Force, Assault, Battery and Homicide by a police officer, as distinct offenses will be adopted and enforced by the Council.  There will be a ban on racial profiling.

§   The Council will be the final authority regarding discipline in the Chicago Police Department.

§   The Police Control Council shall have a General Counsel, who will establish an Excessive Force Review Panel.  The General Counsel will have authority to receive, investigate and litigate, all complaints concerning the operation and functioning of the Chicago Police Department. The General Counsel will investigate each complaint and report on its investigation to the Police Control Council within 30 days.  It will have full subpoena power.  All hearings on all complaints will be public.  The Council will also pay for at least two investigators in every police district.

§   Simple complaint forms will be available to anyone at City Hall, all public libraries, and all Police Department District Headquarters.

§  The Council will be empowered to act to secure the appointment of a Special Prosecutor and a Grand Jury limited to investigating and prosecuting brutality and civil rights violations charged against Police Officers.  The Special Prosecutor can be made a permanent position upon request of the Council, charged by the Court to notify the Police Control Council about Information, or indictments, regarding Police Officers recommended for criminal prosecution.

Residents would cast votes for candidates for the Police Control Council, regardless of citizenship status.

“The Council will be the final authority regarding discipline in the Chicago Police Department.”

The Alliance sees “stopping police crimes as a vital strategic facet of the struggle for the abolition of penal slavery and the liberation of Black and Brown communities.” The cops view (Black and Brown) civilian intrusion into their behavior and prerogatives as anathema, and have wielded the huge political influence of the 346,000-member Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) union to ban elected police boards in a growing number of states. Organizers from Utah at the Alliance re-founding conference reported that their Salt Lake City Civilian Police Accountability Council was thwarted by FOP-led legislation .

Unperturbed by legislative pitfalls, the conference moved with the velocity of energized organizations (see a partial listing, here ), for whom voting is but one “strategy,” not the be-all and end-all of struggle. Mass action is what brought them to the teachers union hall in Chicago, and mass action would fuel the movement to abolish mass incarceration, root and branch. “Now we’re fighting for a complete change in who runs society,” said Mike Sampson, of the Jacksonville Community Action Committee.

“The system will refuse to shrink itself, so we have to shrink it,” said Tanya Watkins, of Chicago’s Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation (SOUL). “Police have virtually been trained to kill Black people and terrorize our community. They act as an occupying army. They have bamboozled us into believing that these slave camps keep us safe. The only path forward is community control of the police,” with the goal of Abolition.

“Now we’re fighting for a complete change in who runs society.”

Solidarity was the watchword. “Zionism is white supremacy, a colonial offshoot,” said Nazel Sankari, of the US Palestinian Community Network. “There is no way that you could be for Black liberation if you’re not for Palestinian liberation, because we’re all connected.” In the same way, said Sankari, “How can we talk about Palestinian prisoners and not the two million prisoners in the United States?”

All the delegates spoke the language of anti-imperialism, as inherent in global solidarity.

This movement will be black-led and “left-led,” as delegates repeatedly emphasized. And the political prisoners and unjustly incarcerated will never be forgotten. “We can’t build a movement if we allow them to kill or imprison or deport” our leadership, said Jess Sundin, a grand jury resister and anti-war activist from Minneapolis.

The Chicago formula for community control of the police calls for an elected board of police overseers. However, the conference also heard from organizers from Washington, DC that are pushing for civilian boards selected randomly in every police precinct. Max Rameau, of Pan-African Community Action (PACA), contends that elections are vulnerable to corruption by money-power under capitalism. As Rameau explained, PACA has begun the first phase, “winning people over to the concept of power over the police.” The goal is to hold a referendum on a community control board with powers “substantially” like Chicago’s CPAC. He believes people will be eager to “vote out the police,” and defends the random selection of board members: “If randomly selected people cannot choose which people should be walking around our neighborhoods with guns, then we should immediately empty the prisons,” because juries are randomly selected.

What’s most important, is that people take ownership of, and responsibility for, their community – and not rely on the cops. Folks must envision how an empowered community would provide its own security. “We ask people to imagine that we had 100 organizers with cars and walkie-talkies. What would you do” with them to make your community safer?

“People will be eager to ‘vote out the police.’”

There was no bickering over the various approaches to the eventual abolition of policing as we know it, and of prisons. “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” said Mike Sampson of Jacksonville’s Dream Defenders. “Whatever works, let’s go with that.”

As the conference closed at midday Sunday, Frank Chapman, the grand old man that had kept the Alliance going over the years, told the crowd of mostly young people, “You are the new leaders of this movement. I’m going to use this position to ‘pass-on.’” He warned against sectarianism (without using the term). “You cannot unite people into a mass organization if you’re just talking about ideas,” he said. “Don’t call for a united front and then start fighting with people about their ideas. We need united action to defend our ability to fight this system.”

The re-founded National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression sees itself as a fighting united front. By acclamation, it was decided that a continuations committee meet by early spring with the aim of organizing a full convention the following year.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

This article previously appeared in Portside .

 

Three keys of Fidel’s party

Source:  Granma
November 27 2019

Three key concepts, that sustain the essential political instrument that is our Party, are unity, providing an example, and sacrifice, as confirmed by notable historians, philosophers, writers, and journalists

Author: Alejandra García | internet@granma.cu

As Fidel and Raúl have taught us, in our society and in our Party, one principle must prevail: the example, which means merit, ability, and modesty. Photo: Granma Archives

Fidel’s great work, says Brazilian theologian Frei Betto, is the Cuban Revolution, which did not begin January 1, 1959, but much earlier, and it has not concluded. But the backbone of this monumental project, underway just 90 miles from the most powerful empire in history, could not be explained without its Party.

This is confirmed by notable historians, philosophers, writers, and journalists, who highlight, among others, three keys that support this essential political instrument.

UNITY

Fidel’s obsession was unity. He was timid, he seemed to almost request permission to be who he was, “despite all his genius, of all the history he embodied,” Frei Betto noted. He was transformed when a challenge arose or when he explained to the multitudes “the art of building a correlation of social, political, and military forces that allows current conditions of the struggle to be changed, making possible, in the future, what at the present time appears impossible,” adds Chilean sociologist Marta Harnecker.

He understood, as few others, that unity is not achieved with sermons, but with action, and that in this effort we must be willing to do everything. “He bared his chest to the bullets when the invasion came,” Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano recalled, “faced hurricanes as an equal, one hurricane to another, survived 637 attacks. It was not the work of Mandinga’s spell, or a miracle from God, that this new homeland would survive ten U.S. Presidents (currently 12), who had set the table for lunch with knives and forks.”

To confront such powerful forces as U.S. imperialism and local oligarchies, the main task of a revolutionary of these times, Fidel insisted again and again, was to build unity of the revolutionary forces. A broader effort should be considered, only after making an effort in this regard. However, he was not rigid in this objective, Harnecker clarifies. When the goal was not achieved immediately, the leader of the Cuban Revolution did not give up on progress toward broader unity. He insisted, “We should not start by setting the highest goals, but rather the minimum ones.”

But of all Fidel’s accomplishments, one of his most important legacies was the creation of the Party, the main instrument for unity. He knew that every revolution is a war and to face it in better conditions, essential is “a single command capable of guiding the fight, clearly defining the strategic enemy and the immediate enemy, the form the fight must take, and the current situation, as well as the policy to continue gaining supporters against the immediate enemy,” states Harnecker, reflecting on the political legacy of the Comandante en jefe.

October 3, 1965, the first Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) was established, reflecting the consolidation of the political instrument of unity. In the formal act, Fidel read Ernesto Che Guevara’s farewell letter, which bore double symbolism: the Heroic Guerrilla had gone to continue the revolutionary project in “other lands of the world demanding the contribution of my modest efforts.” It was also a message sent by an archetypal Communist, who in another letter to Fidel, that same year, had written:

“The Party and every member of the Party must be in the vanguard … The moral standing of Communists is their most precious award, they must take care of individual morality …” (letter from Che to Fidel, March 26, 1965, before leaving to complete his internationalist mission in Congo).

If the key to the vanguard party is unity, inclusion is its essence. “There is no revolutionary, social sector that is not represented,” Fidel would explain when he announced the newly founded Central Committee, insisting that the Revolution must be above all that members had done in the past. The important thing was what all these forces would do together in the future. That is why, adds Harnecker, the Cuban leader did not “enforce his copyrights and, although the July 26 Movement was recognized by the vast majority of the people as the architect of the victory, he abandoned the flag of his movement to assume the flag of the Revolution.”

Fidel himself explained that via union and ideas, unity and doctrine, in the crucible of a revolutionary process, “this Party has been formed. And we must always be protective of these two things, because they are our fundamental pillars.”

EXAMPLE

The Communist Party of Cuba was assigned the task of assuring and defending the Revolution of the entire people, with the participation and organization of workers, peasants, technicians, professionals, students, and the rebel youth.

The logic of organizing people’s power was closely linked to the failure of all attempted coups, invasions or sieges, which would be tested over more than half a century, in the face of repeated aggression by imperialism and the economic blockade, which would have brought down any government that did not have the support of the vast majority of an organized people.

“But the Party would not have survived without a moral component, the example,” says Mexican intellectual Pablo González Casanova.

Cuba was, and is, the only country that maintains its socialist project as a “moral world,” or “another possible world,” as is often said, or “another way of organizing work and life in the world,” González explains.

Many times Fidel was heard saying: “In our society and in our Party, one principle must prevail: the example, which translates into merit, ability, modesty.” Fidel’s greatest concern was that the Party never lose its virtue, that affectionate respect, that fraternal respect and affection the masses feel for it. Let there be sacrifice and work, self-denial, honor, “but never privilege,” Fidel would insist in 1974, speaking before a PCC accountability assembly in the province of Oriente.

Both the practice of confrontation and that of reaching consensus imply measures to organize collective morality, conscience, and will, and that is the Party organized by Fidel, Pablo González Casanova states.

The Cuban Communist Party takes the approach that agreement can be reached amidst conflict and class struggle, which continues even when consensus seems to predominate. “Cuba’s experience in this respect is immense, and not only in defense of its own Revolution and the many confrontations and agreements with the United States, but for having participated in the war in Angola against the army of the former colonialist, racist country of South Africa – the most powerful on the continent – and having helped defeat it, and sit at the negotiating table until reaching a compromise for peace,” concludes González.

SACRIFICE

“He had a chivalrous sense of honor, based on sacrifice,” says Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. While Armando Hart, Cuban revolutionary thinker and former Cuban Minister of Education and Culture, interpreted the selfless vocation of the Party as a value ​​that cannot be separated from the life of its principal leader: “The man who intelligently conceived, led, and defended, without hesitation, the gigantic work of the Cuban Revolution was called upon to be an uncommon, prime example of ethics, culture, confidence, experience, and firmness of principles: all in one.”

As early as 1962, while concluding the Seventh National Conference of Revolutionary Instruction Schools, Fidel stated: “The Party is not an extra benefit. The Party is sacrifice. The Party is not looking for anything. Above all, let us teach every revolutionary that one joins the Party to give everything…”

And on March 14, 1974, at the abovementioned assembly in Santiago de Cuba, he would add: “The Party must have authority before the masses, not because it is the Party, or because it has power, or because it has the strength or the authority to make decisions. The Party must have authority before the masses based on its work, its connection to those same masses, its relations with the masses; the Party is in the masses, the Party is with the masses, but never above…”

And he concluded: “…May the Party never lose this virtue, may the Party never lose the affectionate respect, the fraternal respect and affection the masses feel for it; may the Party be sacrifice, may the Party be work, may the Party be disinterest, may the Party be honor, but never privilege.

Socialism must be anti-racist

Source:  Granma

November 22 2019

Steps taken after the triumph of the Revolution, in January of 1959, dealt a devastating blow to the structural supports of racism • The other great battle is to implement educational and cultural methods that contribute to a new subjectivity

Author: Pedro de la Hoz | pedro@granma.cu

 

Work by Cuban artist Raúl Martínez. Photo: Granma

Sitting on a book fair shelf, the writing on a t-shirt caught my attention: Races do not exist; racism yes. In 1946, Fernando Ortiz wrote The Deception of Race, a key essay in the evolution of anthropological thought that led him to describe the Cuban ethnos in terms of full integration. He scientifically and conceptually dismantled the application of racial standards to classify human beings, and attempt to justify the superiority of one over another on the basis of skin color.

Half a century later, when the vanguard of the scientific community deciphered the human genome, the precocious assertion made by Ortiz was once again confirmed: there is only one race, the human race. External physical traits are determined by only 1% of our genes, thus it is absolutely unscientific and fallacious to attribute intellectual abilities or aptitudes to women and men of a certain pigmentation.

By that time, genetic studies of the Cuban population had advanced in the investigation of factors that affect human health. A rigorous investigation, led by Dr. Beatriz Marcheco, yielded, beyond the proposed initial objectives, a revealing result: “All Cubans,” emphasized the doctor after reporting the irrefutable data, “without a doubt” are mixed race, regardless of the color of the skin we have.”

Racism is a cultural construction that, in the Cuban case, is based on the heritage of a colonial past and the exploitation of African slave labor, forcefully brought to the island. The European white, who occupied the apex of the social pyramid, in the plantation economy, not only exploited and oppressed slaves, but also promoted the myth of racial inferiority of Blacks and their descendants. A myth that was accepted by most light-skinned Creoles and marked social practices during the colonial era, and later in the years of the neocolonial republic, a phenomenon linked to class divisions.

In a 1950 lecture, Ortiz also said, “In Cuba the most serious racism is undoubtedly against Blacks. Racisms are more aggravated against Blacks, in places where they are, or were, socially suppressed and some want to perpetuate this dependent condition. The blackest thing about being black lies not in the darkness of one’s skin, but in one’s social condition. The definition of black as a human type, as it is generally known and considered as the target of prejudice, departs from anthropology to enter politics. This must be done more for its social impact than its congenital nature. Blacks owe their blackness less to their dark ancestors, and more to their white contemporaries. Black is not so much about being born black but rather about being socially deprived of light. Being black is not only being black, but eclipsed and denigrated, as well.”

The revolutionary transformations that began after the January 1959 victory addressed this situation and largely reversed it. Many of the measures taken in those years dealt a devastating blow to the structural supports of racism.

On several occasions, Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro publicly aired the issue. On March 29, 1959, when speaking during an event in Güines, he said: “We are a people of all colors and of no color; a people constituted of different racial components; how are we going to commit the stupidity and absurdity of harboring the discrimination virus? Here, in this crowd, I see whites, and I see blacks, because this is our people. The people are white, black, yellow, and this must be Cuba. This is what should prevail among us.”

However, the destruction of the foundation that gave rise to institutionalized and structural racism in the pre-revolutionary era was not accompanied by a transformation of subjectivity. It is not enough to proclaim equal rights and equal opportunity, to condemn acts of discrimination, if work is not done to change the mentality.

There are two discriminations

The historical leader of our Revolution, in the essential book One Hundred Hours with Fidel (2006), stated much later to Ignacio Ramonet: “We were naive enough to believe that establishing total, absolute equality before the law would put an end to discrimination. Because there are two discriminations, one that is subjective and one that is objective… The Revolution – despite the rights and guarantees achieved for all citizens of any ethnicity or origin – has not achieved the same success in the fight to eradicate differences in the social and economic status of the country’s black population. Blacks do not live in the best houses, they are still performing difficult and sometimes lower paying jobs, and fewer are receiving family remittances in foreign currency than their white compatriots. But I am satisfied with what we are doing to discover the causes, which, if we do not resolutely fight them, could tend to prolong marginalization in successive generations.”

The other great battle is to utilize educational and cultural methods that contribute, sooner rather than later, to this new subjectivity. At the same time, we cannot live with attitudes that, consciously or unconsciously, reveal the persistence of prejudices, evident in various areas of daily life, from work environments to television programs.

It is not possible to allow, for example, that in the essential non-state service sector, the hiring of young white women obviously predominates. In this case, sexism and racism join hands.

Nor is it possible to ignore, in a dialogue broadcast on television, that a black dancer is referred to as “blue” or that the presence of dancers of various skins colors in the country’s principal companies is described as “mulattocracy,” because when such things are taken lightly – irresponsibly, without thinking -sensibilities are injured.

The road is long, we know this, but it must be traveled step by step, without pause. On more than one occasion, over the years, Army General Raúl Castro has addressed the need to stimulate and promote the role of women and blacks and mixed race Cubans in the political, social and economic life of the country, and in the improvement of our social model. In the constitutive session of the National Assembly of People’s Power Ninth Legislature, April 18, 2018, after noting progress, he insisted that work must continue, and made a call to definitively resolve inherited problems related to the issue: “Things must be thought out,” he stated, “not just said and left to God’s goodwill. They are implemented or they are not implemented, insisting, looking for new methods, avoiding mistakes so we are not criticized in such a noble effort, and going back to think again and again, about another solution when we fail to solve the problem.”

Let us think and act accordingly. Let us recall a central concept expressed by that remarkable revolutionary intellectual who was Fernando Martínez Heredia: “The struggle for the deepening of socialism in Cuba must be anti-racist.”

Jamaica Welcomes Cuban Health Professionals

November 26 2019,

Cuban Ambassador, Inés Fors Fernández, Jamaica’s Chief Nursing Officer, Patricia Ingram-Martin and Cuban Health Professionals

Authorities at the Ministry of Health and Wellness of Jamaica along with Cuban Ambassador to Jamaica, Inés Fors Fernández, officially welcomed at the office of this institution in New Kingston, St. Andrew, a group of forty Cuban health professionals who will render their services in Jamaica for the next three years.

The medical professionals will help to ease the problems created by the shortage of health care professionals in the country, especially doctors, nurses and technicians, including imaging technologists and will be assigned in different localities across the island.

In June, the ministry confirmed that it would process 212 nurses, 108 doctors, and 24 technicians. It also said a further 30 doctors would be given lessons in English to see whether or not they would also be processed, while nine technicians would do additional English lessons to see if they qualify.

At the welcoming ceremony, the Cuban ambassador to Kingston, Inés Fors, urged the doctors to keep up the ethical and professional values of medicine in the Greater Antilles.

Some 18 specialists are part of the “Miracle Mission”, within which some 16,000 operations have been carried out to improve or restore sight to Jamaicans with few resources.

The integration of Cuban professionals in Jamaica began in the 1970s when Cuban doctors and nurses joined their Jamaican counterparts in the healthcare sector of the country; when Cuban builders and engineers joined Jamaican workers and engineers in the construction of educational institutions and micro-dams, and when Jamaica/Cuba co-operation in sports and culture was birthed.

In 1976, the first medical brigade of 14 doctors arrived in Jamaica under a technical cooperation agreement.  According to official data, in more than 40 years of work in Jamaica, Cubans have saved 2,541 lives, have applied 73,331 doses of vaccines, performed 30,761 surgical interventions and have offered more than 1.4 million consultations.

This latest importation of Cuban medical personnel will mark the largest number of medical recruits at any one time in Jamaica’s history.

To Fidel: We will fulfill your legacy!

Source:  Santiago Arde

Author:  Elson Concepción Pérez  | internet@granma.cu

We have been privileged with the teachings of Fidel and the other members of the historical generation. Photo:  Roberto Chile

I pondered what might be the best tribute to Fidel, three years after not being physically with us, and I am sure that “being continuity” is the answer.

Of course, it is not a word without content or repeated without feeling. It is the conviction of the great majority of Cubans, to continue «at the foot of the canyon» and know how to use it and defend it in the present, to sow a future as the Commander conceived it and dedicated his life to building it.

These two words have a very large dimension. It is to be an example, to be ethical, firm, to carry that phrase from Martí that “doing is the best way to say.”

The work conceived and undertaken by Fidel is a colossal feat, of committed men and women, inclusive and nourished by the feedback of every citizen, every place in the country, every opinion, every complaint.

It is a work to not be afraid to perfect it and strength to lift it to its maximum creation.

It is not about justifying the mistakes that are still made, nor the imperfections of human beings. Neither of regrets and lacerating phrases when we are wrong.

The Revolution is a permanent task and what has been done must represent the guidance and the conviction of how much we have left to do.

And it is precisely in this continuity that there is the guarantee that the legacy left by Fidel will be fulfilled.

As President Miguel Díaz-Canel has expressed, continuity is the commitment of young people who are now traveling along the path already cleared by previous generations.

We have been privileged with the teachings of Fidel and the other members of the historical generation. Many of them, with their example and their determination, still occupy the vanguard in the contingent of millions of Cubans.

It is up to the youth to carry on their shoulders, with facts, the conduct of the work, polish their imperfections and change everything that has to be changed, as Fidel left us in his concept of Revolution.

Today’s enemy – make no mistake – is the same one that blocks the country in order to suffocate the population. The one who organized and financed the mercenary invasion by Playa Girón.

But it is not invincible. Precisely in Girón our town, always with Fidel in front, crushed the invasion in less than 72 hours. It was the first major defeat of US imperialism in Latin America.

It is the enemy that does not get used to having men and women capable of resisting and defeating, of not giving up, and of not giving in even a tantico, before the arrogant pretensions of the empire.

The word continuity, now with a higher dimension, we must assume when Fidel is no longer physically. We must feel that from the heart of that stone taken to Santiago de Cuba from the Sierra Maestra itself, the Commander encourages us, drives us, checks us, encourages us and guides us.

However difficult current times are, they are not contemplations or “flirting” with those who want to destroy us. These are moments of confronting, with all the truth and strength, those who try to confuse and weaken us.

Every problem, of the many we have, must have an answer. Each difficulty must be assumed with “the ear at ground level” of those who have the responsibility – each in its place – to continue channeling and perfecting the great work.

If we are continuity, we are honoring Fidel. And, I am sure, the Commander will be happy when a generation of reinforcement, of committed young people and revolutionaries, complies with giving continuity to the work he devised and raised with his genius, his ethics and his example.

If today’s youth is continuity and complies, Fidel feels secure, in whatever dimension, that no one can destroy the Revolution, conceived for the present and even better for the future.

 

Fidel Castro and his ideal of integration for Latin America

Source:  La Santa Mambisa
November 25 2019

“What is the history of Cuba but the history of Latin America ? And what is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the most ruthless and cruel exploitation of imperialism in the entire world? These words formed the speech of the then young Fidel Castro in 1962 when the revolution was just a girl and Cuba had been expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS).

He then said: “In many Latin American countries, the revolution is inevitable today. That fact is not determined by anyone’s will; it is determined by the appalling conditions of exploitation in which the American man lives, the development of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, the world crisis of imperialism and the universal movement of struggle of the subjugated peoples. ”

Almost 60 years later, these words echo in the ears of those who listen again to the speech and reflect that history of struggle and resistance shared by the peoples of Latin America .

Integration

For Fidel Castro it  was very clear the path to be taken to change the face of misery and dispossession that the region looked and still sports. Achieving unity and integration were fundamental in their strategic vision and gave continuity to the proposals of important independence leaders such as Simón Bolívar and José Martí.

His thesis on the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean, affirmed that the political and economic union between their nations would contribute to seek their own development and avoid the influence of the United States in the region.

“Yesterday we were huge colony; we can be tomorrow a great community of closely united peoples. Nature gave us insurmountable riches, and history gave us roots, language, culture and common bonds as no other region of the Earth has, ”said the Commander in Chief on one occasion.

The president of the Institute of History of Cuba, Yoel Cordoví Núñez said that in Latin America and the Caribbean, Fidel Castro Ruz reaches a relevant place for his critical thinking towards capitalism, neoliberalism and anti-imperialism.

This researcher points out that there is no politician who, like Fidel, exemplified in the twentieth century the foundations of a Latin American emancipatory thought and considered the faithful legacy of vital importance when the ideology of nations between neoliberalism and socialism is redefined in the area.

For Fidel, unity was always an indispensable factor in achieving any victory: “These peoples of America know that their internal strength is in the union and that their continental strength is also in the union. These peoples of America know that if they do not want to be victims of tyranny again, but want to be victims of aggressions again, we must unite more and more, we must increasingly strengthen ties from town to town. ”

Under these principles of unity and integration, Fidel devised the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), in December 2004, which gave way to the founding summit, in Caracas seven years later, of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) This first was followed in 2005 by Petrocaribe, in 2007 the Union of South American Nations (Unasur).

Internationalism

Another of Fidel’s principles was “not to give what we have left over but to share what we have.” Relevant are the achievements that the Commander in Chief promoted in Latin America with the modest help of Cuba in the fields of health, sports and education.

Internationalism was configured as a practice of the foreign policy of the Cuban Revolution. The medical aid of the Island has been in various natural disasters such as Hurricane “Jean” in Nicaragua, floods in Bolivia, the passage of Hurricane Mitch through Honduras and Guatemala, the cholera epidemic that hit Peru, among many more.

Another of the projects devised by Fidel was the creation in 1999 of the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), allowing thousands of humble young people from Latin America to train as professionals.

On the other hand, in 1999, Haiti asked Cuba to collaborate for the literacy of its inhabitants. In that occasion a total of 150,000 Haitians learned to read and write. Then, with the creation of the audiovisual method “I can do it” in 2001 millions of people in the region have been literate. Thanks to its application, countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia declared themselves free from illiteracy.

For Fidel being internationalists “is paying off our own debt to humanity. Who is not able to fight for others, will never be capable enough to fight for himself. ”

For the political scientist, Atilio Borón without the Revolution led by Fidel Castro, the history of Latin America and the Caribbean would have been completely different, which shows the impact of fidelist thinking in the region.

“We would not have had Lula, Dilma, Chávez, Maduro, Nestor, Cristina, Lugo, Rafael, Evo,” Mel “, Daniel, Sánchez Serén, Tabaré, the” Pepe. ” And before they had not had Allende, Velasco Alvarado, Juan J. Torres, Goulart, Torrijos, Roldós, on a list that would be endless if we included the popular and revolutionary leaderships that sprouted throughout the region under the influence of the Revolution Cuban. “