Saturday, November 29, 2014

CUBA NEWSLETTER #3


OMNI
CUBA NEWSLETTER #3, November 29, 2014.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a CULTURE OF PEACE and Justice.
(#1 Feb. 4, 2011; #2 Oct. 21, 2012).


Blog:   War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters:
See OMNI’s many newsletters on US Imperialism.
Index:
See OMNI’s Bulletin “Happening”
Visit OMNI’s Library.

 


Contents of #3
US Terrorism Against Cuba (see newsletters 1 and 2)
US Terrorist Saboteurs Arrested in Cuba, Sign Petition
William Blum, US Attempts to Destroy Cuban Government
Lamrani, US Economic War/Blockade Against Cuba
LeoGrande, Covert Intervention, Regime Change

US Corporate Media vs. Cuba
Google Search
Lamrani, Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality
Blum, US Empire and Its Media

Ending US Persecution of Cuba
LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Efforts Toward Reconciliation
Free the Cuban 5
The Nation’s Exchange Programs with Cuba
Tom Hayden on Cuba, Forthcoming Book
Full Truth About Cuba: Cuba Leads World in International
    Medicine






US TERRORISM AGAINST CUBA

WHAT HAS THE US NOT TRIED TO OVERTHROW THE CUBAN SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT?


The following announcement was first circulated by the 
National Committee to Free the Cuban Five 
ALERT
Cuba announces arrest of four Miami terrorists who were planning to carry out terrorist attacks
Be sure and sign the petition below this message! 
Down with terrorism CubaOn May 7, Cuban authorities announced that on April 26, four Cuban right-wing exiles from Miami were arrested in Havana for plotting terrorist attacks in Cuban territory. Their names are José Ortega Amador, Obdulio Rodríguez González, Raibel Pacheco Santos and Félix Monzón Álvarez.
According to the report, the men have admitted that they planned to attack military installations and they had entered Cuba several times since 2013 to plot their actions.
The four men who are now detained in Cuba have also admitted that Santiago Álvarez, Osvaldo Mitat and Manuel Alzugaray were directing their terror campaign. They are long-time collaborators with CIA operative and terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.
The four men who are now detained in Cuba have admitted to Cuban authorities that Santiago Álvarez, Osvalto Mitat and Manuel Alzugaray were directing their actions.
Who is Santiago Álvarez Fernández Magriña?
Although he has long been identified in the Miami media as a Miami businessman, Álvarez is a terrorist with a long violent history. He has worked closely for years with CIA agents like Luis Posada Carriles.
He is most noted for financing Posada's bombing and assassination campaigns and helping him escape justice. Posada Carriles is responsible for engineering the bombing of a Cuban airliner, killing 73 people, in 1976. He lives as a fugitive from justice in Miami.
Here are just a few facts about the terrorist Álvarez:
·  Oct. 12, 1971, Alvarez and CIA agent Antonio Iglesias Pons machine-gunned the village of Boca de Sama, eastern Cuba from a speedboat, killing two men and injuring several people, including a young girl.
·  In 2000, he was involved in the plot to try to assassinate Fidel Castro in Panama, led by Posada Carriles. After Posada and three others were convicted, then illegally pardoned by pro-U.S. Panama president Mireya Moscoso, Álvarez flew three of the men into Miami on a Lear jet.
·  In 2001, he bought 8 assault rifles in Miami and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The weapons were later found on three men arrested in Cuba. Álvarez ordered them to explode the Tropicana nightclub in Havana with C-4 explosives, potentially threatening hundreds of people's lives.
·  Together with Osvaldo Mitat, he illegally sneaked Posada Carriles into Miami on a boat in March 2005. To this day Posada runs free in Miami, continuing to plot with his terrorist accomplices.
·  Álvarez and Mitat were caught with weapons caches in Miami (machine guns, C-4 explosives, grenade launchers) in 2005, yet they served less than two years.
We the people of the United States believe the U.S. government should not harborknown terrorists in Miami or anywhere. 
·  The U.S. government must stop harboring anti-Cuba terrorists, and instead prosecute them, to protect all potential victims of terrorism.
·  Free the Cuban Five now. They were on a life-saving mission in Miami, monitoring and preventing the plots of the Miami terrorists.
·  Extradite Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela to face trial for masterminding the Cubana airliner bombing that killed 73 people on Oct. 6, 1976.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition 
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org/ 
info@AnswerCoalition.org 
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
Boston: 857-334-5084 | New York City: 212-694-8720 | Chicago: 773-463-0311
San Francisco: 415-821-6545| Los Angeles: 213-687-7480 | Albuquerque: 505-268-2488

If this message was forwarded to you and you'd like to receiv

William Blum

The Anti-Empire Report #127

By William Blum – Published April 7th, 2014

Cuba … Again … Still … Forever

Is there actually a limit? Will the United States ever stop trying to overthrow the Cuban government? Entire books have been written documenting the unrelenting ways Washington has tried to get rid of tiny Cuba’s horrid socialism – from military invasion to repeated assassination attempts to an embargo that President Clinton’s National Security Advisor called “the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind”.  But nothing has ever come even close to succeeding. The horrid socialism keeps on inspiring people all over the world. It’s the darnedest thing. Can providing people free or remarkably affordable health care, education, housing, food and culture be all that important?
And now it’s “Cuban Twitter” – an elaborately complex system set up by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to disguise its American origins and financing, aiming to bring about a “Cuban Spring” uprising. USAID sought to first “build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then the plan was to push them toward dissent”, hoping the messaging network “would reach critical mass so that dissidents could organize ‘smart mobs’ – mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice – that might trigger political demonstrations or ‘renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society’.”  It’s too bad it’s now been exposed, because we all know how wonderful the Egyptian, Syrian, Libyan, and other “Arab Springs” have turned out.
Here’s USAID speaking after their scheme was revealed on April 3: “Cubans were able to talk among themselves, and we are proud of that.”  We are thus asked to believe that normally the poor downtrodden Cubans have no good or safe way to communicate with each other. Is the US National Security Agency working for the Cuban government now?
The Associated Press, which broke the story, asks us further to believe that the “truth” about most things important in the world is being kept from the Cuban people by the Castro regime, and that the “Cuban Twitter” would have opened people’s eyes. But what information might a Cuban citizen discover online that the government would not want him to know about? I can’t imagine. Cubans are in constant touch with relatives in the US, by mail and in person. They get US television programs from Miami and other southern cities; both CNN and Telesur (Venezuela, covering Latin America) are seen regularly on Cuban television”; international conferences on all manner of political, economic and social issues are held regularly in Cuba. I’ve spoken at more than one myself. What – it must be asked – does USAID, as well as the American media, think are the great dark secrets being kept from the Cuban people by the nasty commie government?
Those who push this line sometimes point to the serious difficulty of using the Internet in Cuba. The problem is that it’s extremely slow, making certain desired usages often impractical. From an American friend living in Havana: “It’s not a question of getting or not getting internet. I get internet here. The problem is downloading something or connecting to a link takes too long on the very slow connection that exists here, so usually I/we get ‘timed out’.” But the USAID’s “Cuban Twitter”, after all, could not have functioned at all without the Internet.
Places like universities, upscale hotels, and Internet cafés get better connections, at least some of the time; however, it’s rather expensive to use at the hotels and cafés.
In any event, this isn’t a government plot to hide dangerous information. It’s a matter of technical availability and prohibitive cost, both things at least partly in the hands of the United States and American corporations. Microsoft, for example, at one point, if not at present, barred Cuba from using its Messenger instant messaging service. 
Cuba and Venezuela have jointly built a fiber optic underwater cable connection that they hope will make them less reliant on the gringos; the outcome of this has not yet been reported in much detail.
The grandly named Agency for International Development does not have an honorable history; this can perhaps be captured by a couple of examples: In 1981, the agency’s director, John Gilligan, stated: “At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.” 
On June 21, 2012, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) issued a resolution calling for the immediate expulsion of USAID from their nine member countries, “due to the fact that we consider their presence and actions to constitute an interference which threatens the sovereignty and stability of our nations.”
USAID, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (and the latter’s subsidiaries), together or singly, continue to be present at regime changes, or attempts at same, favorable to Washington, from “color revolutions” to “spring” uprisings, producing a large measure of chaos and suffering for our tired old world.

Notes

1.      William Blum, America’s Deadliest Export – Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else, p.22-5
2.      Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (1986), p.158
3.      Washington Post, March 31, 2014
5.      Sandy Berger, White House press briefing, November 14, 1997, US Newswire transcript
6.      Associated Press, April 3 & 4, 2014
7.      Washington Post, April 4, 2014
8.      Associated Press, June 2, 2009
9.      George Cotter, “Spies, strings and missionaries”, The Christian Century (Chicago), March 25, 1981, p.321
Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.
← Issue #126
·         Books
·         The Anti-Empire Report
·         Essays and Speeches
·         About the Author
                         
William Blum is an author, historian, and renowned critic of U.S. foreign policy. He is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II andRogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, among others. Read more →
To rescue an old man from the clutches of the capitalist imperialist meanies …
 


The Economic War Against Cuba

A Historical and Legal Perspective on the U.S. Blockade
by Salim Lamrani; prologue by Wayne S. Smith; foreword by Paul Estrade; translated by Larry Oberg
The Economic War Against Cuba
142 pages
March 2013
It is impossible to fully understand Cuba today without also understanding the economic sanctions levied against it by the United States. For over fifty years, these sanctions have been upheld by every presidential administration, and at times intensified by individual presidents and acts of Congress. They are a key part of the U.S. government’s ongoing campaign to undermine the Cuban Revolution, and stand in egregious violation of international law. Most importantly, the sanctions are cruelly designed for their harmful impact on the Cuban people.
In this concise and sober account, Salim Lamrani explains everything you need to know about U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba: their origins, their provisions, how they contravene international law, and how they affect the lives of Cubans. He examines the U.S. government’s own official documents to expose what is hiding in plain sight: an indefensible, vicious, and wasteful blockade that has been roundly condemned by citizens around the world.
Salim Lamrani is a treasury of powerful factual information.
—Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
Lamrani brings forth valuable insight, much needed information, and honest judgment while exposing the economic aggression perpetrated by U.S. leaders against the people of Cuba.
—Michael Parenti, author, The Face of Imperialism
Professor Lamrani’s brilliant study provides the most comprehensive and systematic exposition and critique of Washington’s extraterritorial application of sanctions against Cuba—it documents the human cost and the criminal intent.
—James Petras, Bartle Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Binghamton University
An excellent summary of the American economic sanctions against Cuba, the manner in which they have been imposed for more than a half century and the harm they cause the Cuban people.
—Wayne S. Smith, senior fellow and director of the Cuba Project, Center for International Policy; former head, U.S. Interests 

USAID PROGRAM TO CUBA FOR REGIME CHANGE; AUTHENTIC EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL EXCHANGES NEEDED.

Washington’s Secret ‘Cuba Twitter’ Program Is the Same Old Policy of Regime Change”

Such covert operations are not sanitized by running them through USAID and wrapping them in the rhetoric of “democracy promotion.”
   |    This article appeared in the May 12, 2014 edition of The Nation.  [The title in my no. of May 12 is “’Cuba Twitter’ Scandal.’”  --Dick]
·         Share
·        
·        
Mobile phone user in Cuba
(Reuters/Enrique De La Osa)
In defiant defense of ZunZuneo, the Agency for International Development’s secret text messaging program in Cuba, USAID spokesman Matt Herrick declared the agency “proud” of its Twitter clone, which, at its height, reached more than 60,000 Cuban cellphone users. The aim of the program, according to Herrick, “was to create a platform for Cubans to speak freely among themselves, period.” US officials at first denied that it had any political intent or sent out any political messages. But AP, which broke the story, decisively refuted those claims by publishing the political tweets and interviewing a subcontractor who wrote them.
Administration officials nevertheless remained unapologetic. In a Senate hearing, USAID administrator Rajiv Shah insisted the program was not covert, merely “discreet,” and that it was just trying to “enable open communications” among Cubans. Shah’s defense was echoed by the usual suspects on Capitol Hill, with Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen arguing that USAID was simply promoting “God-given values like freedom, justice or liberty.” The Washington Posteditorial page jumped on the bandwagon, declaring that there was nothing wrong with “undermining a tyranny.”
But fomenting unrest in a country by trying to secretly manipulate its domestic politics violates US treaty obligations under international law. The charter of the Organization of American States declares, “No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State,” a prohibition that is not limited to the use of force. The UN Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States repeats the OAS language and recognizes “the sovereign and inalienable right of a State freely to determine its own political, economic, cultural and social systems.” And it imposes on all states the duty “to refrain from any action or attempt in whatever form or under whatever pretext to destabilize or to undermine the stability of another State.”
International law has never prevented Washington from covert intervention, especially in Latin America. But because destabilizing other governments violates US treaty obligations, these operations were conducted secretly by the CIA during most of the Cold War. ZunZuneo and USAID’s other “democracy promotion” schemes in Cuba remind Latin Americans that Washington still does not fully respect their sovereignty.
When Barack Obama took office, hopes ran high in the region that he would break the deadlock in US-Cuban relations. At the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009, he pledged a “new beginning” with Cuba. But when the Sixth Summit convened in April 2012, US policy was essentially unchanged, and Obama faced a solid phalanx of Latin American leaders tired of Washington’s intransigence. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos—a close US ally—and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff declared that they would skip the next summit if Cuba was not invited.
To his credit, Obama has restored people-to-people connections between the United States and Cuba. Educational, cultural and family travel is flourishing. But he has made little headway on state-to-state relations, nor has he reined in the foreign policy bureaucracy, which tries to exploit any relaxation of state control in Cuba to undermine its government. ZunZuneo is a perfect, albeit inept, example. When Raúl Castro legalized the sale of cellphones, USAID used that opening to build a social media platform it hoped would mobilize “smart mobs” reminiscent of Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising and Iran’s “Green Revolution.”
Covert operations designed to bring about regime change in Cuba are the direct descendants of the CIA’s political operations of yesteryear. They are not sanitized by running them through USAID, calling them “discreet” and wrapping them in the rhetoric of democracy. Three sitting presidents in Latin America—Rousseff in Brazil, Michelle Bachelet in Chile and José Mujica in Uruguay—suffered personally at the hands of military dictatorships that US covert operations helped install a generation ago. Policy-makers in Washington would rather not dwell on the deadly consequences those operations had for thousands of Latin Americans, but Latin America has not forgotten.
Washington’s relationship with the region is deteriorating, corroded by a policy toward Cuba that symbolizes a bygone era of US hegemony—a policy that no other country in the hemisphere supports. If Obama wants to build the “equal partnership” he originally promised, he cannot continue to ignore Cuba.
[What Pres. Obama should do.  –D]
Last November, talking to supporters in Miami about Cuba, Obama said, “We have to be creative. And we have to be thoughtful. And we have to continue to update our policies.” He could start by replacing USAID programs targeting Cuba with aboveboard initiatives to support authentic educational and cultural exchanges—exchanges without the hidden hand of government manipulation or a hidden agenda of regime change.
Read Next: Tom Hayden on normalizing US relations with Cuba
·         Share
·        

·        

CUBA AND CORPORATE MEDIA
isla.igc.org/Conexiones/conexiones3.html
The following essay is part of an extensive study by Mr. Prieto on the ways Cuba is represented in U.S. media. He uses the ISLA publication as a reference ...
www.roughguides.com/destinations/central.../cuba/media/
Rough Guides
All types of media in Cuba are tightly censored and closely controlled by the state. ... their entirety and the international news has a marked Latin American bias.
bigstory.ap.org/.../us-secretly-created-cuban-twitter-stir-...
Associated Press
Apr 4, 2014 - ... a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government. ... This was a program paid for and run by the U.S. Agency for ...
www.theguardian.com › World › Cuba
The Guardian
Apr 4, 2014 - Revelations of a secret US government programme to set up a cellphone-based social network in Cuba are being trumpeted in the island's ...
www.globalresearch.ca/the-economic-war...cuba...media...u.../5407704
Oct 13, 2014 - The US blockade against Cuba was intensified during President .... Themedia remains under state control and general elections are only held ...
www.nytimes.com/.../us-agency-defends-social-media...
The New York Times
Apr 8, 2014 - WASHINGTON — A Twitter-like social media site created and financed by the United States Agency for International Development for use in ...
www.nytimes.com/.../us-says-it-tried-to-build-a-soc...The New York Times
Apr 3, 2014 - By the standards of American efforts in Cuba, ZunZuneo was on the milder side. It did not involve poison cigars for Fidel Castro, or landings by ...
www.washingtonpost.com › Politics
The Washington Post
May 4, 2010 - U.S. government television and radio broadcasts to Cuba have failed to make "any discernible inroads into Cuban society or to influence the ...
Apr 6, 2014 - HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba said on Sunday the United States continues to use social media to subvert the island's government and that the ...
Lamrani, CUBA, AND THE CORPORATE MEDIA
www.huffingtonpost.com/...lamrani/cuba-the-corpor...
The Huffington Post
Nov 23, 2010 - But to the corporate media, it is only useful in the media war against theCuban government.... ... Next Story. Salim Lamrani Headshot.
www.huffingtonpost.com/...lamrani/cuba-and-the-rh...
The Huffington Post
Jul 7, 2010 - One must ask why there is such stigmatization by Western media, the ... .org/cuba-and-the-rhetoric-of-human-rights-1-of-2-by-salim-lamrani ...
www.voltairenet.org/auteur121290.html?lang=en
As one of the multiple reforms recently introduced by the Cuban Government that ... Salim Lamrani analyzes this protest - to which the mainstream media have ...
https://zcomm.org/.../cuba-and-the-rhetoric-of-human-rights-1-of-2-by-s...
Jul 6, 2010 - In the West, the name Cuba is inevitably associated with the issue of human ..... 1 Salim Lamrani, "Cuba, the Western media and the suicide of ...
axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_64454.shtmlApr 18, 2012 - Salim LamraniCuba Meets the Challenges of the 21st Century, ..... [Cuba : What the media will never tell you], ( Paris : Editions Estrella, 2009).

MONTHLY REVIEW  Subscriptions  Store/Account » Contact »  About »
Saturday November 29th, 2014
Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality
by Salim Lamrani; foreword by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Larry Oberg
e-book available!  Price: $16.00
In this concise and detailed work, Salim Lamrani addresses questions of media concentration and corporate bias by examining a perennially controversial topic: Cuba. Lamrani argues that the tiny island nation is forced to contend not only with economic isolation and a U.S. blockade, but with misleading or downright hostile media coverage. He takes as his case study El País, the most widely distributed Spanish daily. El País (a property of Grupo Prisa, the largest Spanish media conglomerate), has editions aimed at Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., making it a global opinion leader.
Lamrani wades through a swamp of reporting and uses the paper as an example of how media conglomerates distort and misrepresent life in Cuba and the activities of its government. By focusing on eight key areas, including human development, internal opposition, and migration, Lamrani shows how the media systematically shapes our understanding of Cuban reality. This book, with a foreword by Eduardo Galeano, provides an alternative view, combining a scholar’s eye for complexity with a journalist’s hunger for the facts.
Critics of the Cuban Revolution often point to a lack of freedom of the press as proof of totalitarianism. In this illuminating book, Salim Lamrani thoroughly demonstrates how Spain’s prestigious newspaper of record, El País, consistently misinforms about Cuba, vilifying its leaders and praising its most transparent detractors. Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality is brilliant and important—for understanding Cuba and for understanding the challenges to truth in information.  —Margaret Randall, author, Che On My Mind
Official website of the author, historian, and U.S. foreign policy critic.
The Anti-Empire Report #125
[BIASED COVERAGE OF FOREIGN POLICY]
By William Blum – Published February 4th, 2014
 “Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for ‘objectivity’. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.” – Michael Parenti
An exchange in January with Paul Farhi, Washington Post columnist, about coverage of US foreign policy:
Dear Mr. Farhi,
Now that you’ve done a study of al-Jazeera’s political bias in supporting Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, is it perhaps now time for a study of the US mass media’s bias on US foreign policy? And if you doubt the extent and depth of this bias, consider this:
There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Can you name a single paper, or a single TV network, that was unequivocally opposed to the American wars carried out against Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam? Or even opposed to any two of these wars? How about one? In 1968, six years into the Vietnam war, the Boston Globe surveyed the editorial positions of 39 leading US papers concerning the war and found that “none advocated a pull-out”. 
Now, can you name an American daily newspaper or TV network that more or less gives any support to any US government ODE (Officially Designated Enemy)? Like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela or his successor, Nicolás Maduro; Fidel or Raúl Castro of Cuba; Bashar al-Assad of Syria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran; Rafael Correa of Ecuador; or Evo Morales of Bolivia? I mean that presents the ODE’s point of view in a reasonably fair manner most of the time? Or any ODE of the recent past like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Moammar Gaddafi of Libya, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti?
Who in the mainstream media supports Hamas of Gaza? Or Hezbollah of Lebanon? Who in the mainstream media is outspokenly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians? And keeps his or her job?
Who in the mainstream media treats Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning as the heroes they are?
And this same mainstream media tell us that Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, et al. do not have a real opposition media.
The ideology of the American mainstream media is the belief that they don’t have any ideology; that they are instead what they call “objective”. I submit that there is something more important in journalism than objectivity. It is capturing the essence, or the truth, if you will, with the proper context and history. This can, as well, serve as “enlightenment”.
It’s been said that the political spectrum concerning US foreign policy in the America mainstream media “runs the gamut from A to B”.
Sincerely, William Blum, Washington, DC
(followed by some of my writing credentials)
Reply from Paul Farhi:
I think you’re conflating news coverage with editorial policy. They are not the same. What a newspaper advocates on its editorial page (the Vietnam example you cite) isn’t the same as what or how the story is covered in the news columns. News MAY have some advocacy in it, but it’s not supposed to, and not nearly as overt or blatant as an editorial or opinion column. Go back over all of your ODE examples and ask yourself if the news coverage was the same as the opinions about those ODEs. In most cases. I doubt it was.
Dear Mr. Farhi,  
Thank you for your remarkably prompt answer.
Your point about the difference between news coverage and editorial policy is important, but the fact is, as a daily, and careful, reader of thePost for the past 20 years I can attest to the extensive bias in its foreign policy coverage in the areas I listed. Juan Ferrero in Latin America and Kathy Lally in the Mideast are but two prime examples. The bias, most commonly, is one of omission more than commission; which is to say it’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. My Anti-Empire Report contains many examples of these omissions, as well as some errors of commission.
Incidentally, since 1995 I have written dozens of letters to the Post pointing out errors in foreign-policy coverage. Not one has been printed.
Happy New Year





US/CUBAN EFFORTS FOR RECONCILIATION
The University of North Carolina Press
·         LEOGRANDE AND KORNBLUH
·         Author Page
<SPAN STYLE= "" >Back Channel to Cuba</SPAN>
Approx. 536 pp., 23 halftones, notes, bibl., index  About the Book
·         Book Detail
The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and HavanaU of N. Carolina P, 2014.
Challenging the conventional wisdom of perpetual hostility between the United States and Cuba--beyond invasions, covert operations, assassination plots using poison pens and exploding seashells, and a grinding economic embargo--this fascinating book chronicles a surprising, untold history of bilateral efforts toward rapprochement and reconciliation. Since 1959, conflict and aggression have dominated the story of U.S.-Cuban relations. Now, William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh present a new and increasingly more relevant account. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a "new approach," LeoGrande and Kornbluh reveal a fifty-year record of dialogue and negotiations, both open and furtive, indicating a path toward better relations in the future.
LeoGrande and Kornbluh have uncovered hundreds of formerly secret U.S. documents and conducted interviews with dozens of negotiators, intermediaries, and policy makers, including Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter. The authors describe how, despite the political clamor surrounding any hint of better relations with Havana, serious negotiations have been conducted by every presidential administration since Eisenhower's through secret, back-channel diplomacy. Concluding with ten lessons for U.S. negotiators, the book offers an important perspective on current political debates, at a time when leaders of both nations have publicly declared the urgency of moving beyond the legacy of hostility.
William M. LeoGrande, professor of government at American University, is the author of Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992, among other books.
Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., is the author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, among other books.


 Tue Aug 6, 2013 6:30 pm (PDT) . Posted by:

The Popular Education Project to Free the Cuban 5
Email:  freethecuban5@gmail.com
Website:  www.freethecuban5.org
Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/NYC-Free-the-Cuban-5
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/freethecuban5
Telephone: 718-601-4751

For more information on the Cuban 5 go to:
http://www.freethecuban5.org



THE NATION’S EXCHANGE TO CUBA JUNE 2014
     During the “Cold War,” former Senator J. William Fulbright attempted to establish an exchange program with the Soviet Union, but was thwarted by Sovietphobes like Senator “Scoop” Jackson.  Above all else, exchanges with “enemies” should be the central purpose of faculty, student, citizen exchanges.   We need to improve understanding and relations with Denmark
      The crippling bigotry against the Soviet Union by influential US officials and  the majority public sheep has been iterated for fifty years against Cuba.   Again no attempt to be better acquainted through exchanges.  But private groups may, and The Nation is leading the way.  Working in conjunction with The Nation, Cuba Educational Travel organized an educational program June 1-8 bringing together US citizens and Cubans from many walks of life.  Hosts were Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive and author of several books on Cuba; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publishers of The Nation. 


TOM HAYDEN ON NORMALIZING RELATIONS WITH CUBA,

Tom Hayden, NEW BOOK ON CUBA 2014
Director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center
For 2014, I am committed to writing the unknown history of the Cuban Revolution and the New Left, and speaking everywhere I can on behalf of normalization of relations before President Obama leaves office. My intuition and experience tell me that it's doable at last. My new book on Cuba will be out next year, published by Seven Stories Press. 
Thank you,
Tom Hayden


Google Search, Nov. 29, 2014
www.thenation.com/.../moment-normalize-us-relations-cuba
The Nation
Apr 16, 2014 - With Senator Foreign Relations chairman and Cuba hawk Robert Menendez mired in scandal, the embargo could finally be lifted. Tom Hayden.
tomhayden.com/.../will-us-cuba-normalization-fail-again.ht...
Tom Hayden
Aug 15, 2014 - Fifty years ago, the OAS voted 15-4 to terminate all diplomatic relationsand trade with revolutionary Cuba. Uruguay was one of the four ...
www.latimes.com/.../la-oe-hayden-cuba-obama-castro...
Los Angeles Times
Dec 13, 2013 - There are still many obstacles to normalizing relations, of course, but they ... Tom Hayden is the author, most recently, of "Inspiring Participatory ...
www.nnoc.info/page/20/
Long a political land mine, normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba may be developing momentum. Tom Hayden Los Angeles Times 12/13/13... read more ...
www.courier-journal.com/.../tom-hayden...time...cu...
The Courier‑Journal
Dec 17, 2013 - By Tom Hayden, McClatchy-Tribune News Service 12:06 a.m. EST ... There are still many obstacles to normalizing relations, of course, but they ...
www.theragblog.com/tom-hayden-message-to-the-president/
Nov 6, 2014 - By Tom Hayden | The Rag Blog | November 6, 2014 .... as far as possible to the normalization of relations with Cuba, with the release of ... Even theCubans in Miami favor diplomatic relations and lifting the economic embargo.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd81cf9N6WE
Apr 26, 2013 - Uploaded by AnahuacSoul
Removal of Cuba from this list will allow the United States to take steps leading to normalized relations with ...
dwkcommentaries.com/tag/cuban-five/
Tom Hayden: Will U.S.-Cuba Normalization Fail Again? .... A long-planned improvement of relations between Russia, Cuba and Latin America is underway just ...
www.themilitant.com/2014/7824/782404.html
The Militant
Jun 23, 2014 - Tom Hayden, former Democratic state senator in California and director of ... “Normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba is already ...
www.goodreads.com/.../3404682-according-to-u-s-cuba-still-...
Goodreads
Dec 10, 2012 - If progress is made toward normalizing relations with Cuba in President Barack Obama's second term, one starting point will be a fight to ...

Saturday November 29th, 2014, 5:34 pm (EST)
Revolutionary Doctors
How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care
by Steve Brouwer, Monthly Review (2011).  http://monthlyreview.org/books/pb2396/
MONTHLY REVIEW    Subscriptions  Contact »  About »
topics: Marxism, Socialism  places: Latin America
Paperback, 256 pages
Also available as an e-book
Price: $18.95
Revolutionary Doctors gives readers a first-hand account of Venezuela’s innovative and inspiring program of community health care, designed to serve—and largely carried out by—the poor themselves. Drawing on long-term participant observations as well as in-depth research, Brouwer tells the story of Venezuela’s Integral Community Medicine program, in which doctor-teachers move into the countryside and poor urban areas to recruit and train doctors from among peasants and workers. Such programs were first developed in Cuba, and Cuban medical personnel play a key role in Venezuela today as advisors and organizers. This internationalist model has been a great success—Cuba is a world leader in medicine and medical training—and Brouwer shows how the Venezuelans are now, with the aid of their Cuban counterparts, following suit.

But this program is not without its challenges. It has faced much hostility from traditional Venezuelan doctors as well as all the forces antagonistic to the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions. Despite the obstacles it describes, Revolutionary Doctors demonstrates how a society committed to the well-being of its poorest people can actually put that commitment into practice, by delivering essential health care through the direct empowerment of the people it aims to serve.

Read an excerpt in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Read a review in People’s World

What a terrific book! I have been researching Cuban medical internationalism for several years, and found Steve Brouwer’s book an excellent, insightful first-person account of how Cuban medical cooperation (and not aid!) is changing the face of the developing world.

—John Kirk, Professor of Latin American Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada; author, Cuban Medical Internationalism: Origins, Evolution, and Goals

The Cuban medical education model, so eloquently described in this book, has not merely transformed health care in much of Central and South America. It has shown doctors and medical students who work in the unjust and dysfunctional U.S. health care system that another world is possible.

—Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH; professor of public health, CUNY; visiting professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School

Venezuela and Cuba clearly show that the basic human right of access to medical and health care in time of need is not dependent on the level of economic development. Venezuela and Cuba are not rich countries yet, and in spite of this, health care reaches the majority of their populations. They should be considered points of reference for poor countries that want to break with the underdevelopment of health. This book is a rigorous and balanced account of how they did it.

—Vicente Navarro, MD, PhD; professor of health policy, The Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University; editor-in-chief, International Journal of Health Services

Revolutionary Doctors tells the story of Cuba’s extraordinary medical personnel who leave their homes and families to support radical struggles for health care abroad. And it shows how this struggle is taken up in places like Venezuela, where poor communities are organizing to provide health care from the ground up. This is a story that deserves to be known.

—Sujatha Fernandes, assistant professor of sociology, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center; author, Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela

Steve Brouwer is one of the nation’s best front-line reporters from the ongoing class war.

—Barbara Ehrenreich, author, Nickel and Dime

Recent OMNI Newsletters 2014
Prisoners for Peace Day #3, 12-1
Cuba Newsletter #3  11-29
Day of Mourning and Apology (Thanksgiving Day) #5, 11-27
     (see US Imperialism, Continental Newsletters)
Police Violence #3, 11-25

Contents of Cuba Newsletter #1
Introduction by Dick
Spadoni’s Failed Sanctions
William Blum’s Empire Report on Cuba
Two Books on Pentagon Plans to Attack Again
   Jon Elliston and James Bamford

Contents of Cuba Newsletter #2 END THE BULLYING
US Against Cuba and the World: UN General Assembly 1959-
Chomsky, US/SU Nuclear Confrontation 1962
Bolender, Cuban Victims of US Terror 1960s to Present
Cuban Five 1998 to Present
Cuban Five Month, Stone’s South of the Border
Cindy Sheehan for Cuban 5
Franklin, Cuba/US 21st Century




END CUBA NEWSLETTER #3

No comments:

Dick's Wars and Warming KPSQ Radio Editorials (#1-48)

Dick's Wars and Warming KPSQ Radio Editorials (#1-48)