FIDEL CASTRO HAS PASSED

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Fidel Castro: A Latin American story
The death of the revolutionary leader is being mourned and celebrated in equal measure.

Fidel Castro giving a speech with the national flag of Cuba in the background [Keystone/Getty Images]

When Fidel Castro and his barbudos (the bearded ones) entered Havana on January 2, 1959, having defeated the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Latin America was in turmoil.

In the Andean region of South America, a feudal system of land ownership prevailed. Indigenous people worked for very low wages and owed lifelong loyalty to their masters. In Central America, the United Fruit Company (UFC), an American multinational, owned much of the land and railroads.

Any attempts to address such inequalities were crushed in their infancy. In 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala tried to implement a land reform. A coup d'etat promoted by the UFC and Washington put an end to Arbenz's reformist programme.


The United States also actively supported dictatorial regimes in Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.


By the end of the 1950s, according to the Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre, life expectancy in the region was 47 years.

Fidel Castro was aware of the impact that his movement had in Latin America. In one of his first addresses to the Cuban people after his victory in 1959, Castro said: "Compañeros, the revolution is not our exclusive property, nor is it only here on the island. Our brothers in Latin America cannot fail to join us."

It was a call to arms that many middle-class intellectuals and activists took seriously.

In the mid-1960s, Latin America saw the emergence of guerrilla groups, many of whose members were trained in Cuba. In Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador, units of badly armed guerrillas tried to repeat the Cuban experience, mainly in the countryside.

They were mercilessly crushed by national armies, many of whose officers had been educated in the dubious art of counter-insurgency by the US at the School of the Americas in Panama.

By 1967, when Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia after he failed in his efforts to form a guerrilla group to invade his native Argentina, armed struggle as an instrument of change had fizzled out.

Argentine Communist revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara speaking at the World Commerce and Development Conference at the Palace des Nations at Geneva [Keystone/Getty Images]


However, some governments in the region understood that the guerrillas were not a bunch of cattle rustlers; in fact, those rebels reflected a genuine anger at the levels of injustice that existed in their societies. In 1968, Peru's military government led by General Juan Velasco implemented a land reform. "If we don't carry out this reform, the Castroists will, and we don't want that, do we?" quipped a minister in 1969. Ironically, Velasco re-established diplomatic relations with Castro's Cuba. The General and the Comandante became good friends.

In Panama, General Omar Torrijos also took power in 1968. In 1976, during a visit to Cuba, Torrijos said that Fidel was "a symbol of the efforts for continental unity in the fight for its identity and its final integration ... and a consistent, loyal and dignified friend". Military governments in Ecuador and Bolivia followed the same pattern.

In 1970, a socialist doctor, Salvador Allende, was elected president of Chile. Allende wanted to prove that it was possible to conduct a revolution within a multiparty system. Fidel Castro visited Chile in 1971. He spent three weeks in the South American country.



This was Castro's longest ever state visit. The coup d'état on September 11, 1973, during which Allende died defending democracy, put an end to the pacific uprising that he thought was possible.

In a tribute to Allende in the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana, on September 28, 1973, in the presence of Allende's widow, Castro expressed, in the kindest possible way, his reservations about the peaceful path to revolutionary changes. "[Allende's victory] did not mean a victory of a revolution," said Castro, "but access to important positions by legal and peaceful means."

After a period of revolutionary stagnation in Latin America, Fidel Castro's influence dwindled; but in 1979, his ideological standpoint got a new boost.

In Nicaragua, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) defeated the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Although the Sandinista movement got its main inspiration from Augusto Cesar Sandino, a guerrilla general who fought against the US-sponsored dictatorship of Anastasio's father in the 1930s, many of the FSLN comandantes had trained in Cuba. Unlike Cuba, the FSLN adhered to the concept of multi-party democracy.

The Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, won a general election in 1984, at the height of revolutionary fervour. His government implemented a series of reforms modelled on the Cuban system: land redistribution, nationalisation of industries, popular participation.

However, the proxy war executed by then US President Ronald Reagan against the Sandinistas had a demoralising effect on the population. A well-armed gang known as the contras conducted a violent campaign against the government.

The US government openly supported, armed and trained the contras. In the 1990 elections, the FSLN lost power. People just wanted peace and voting the Sandinistas out of power was the best way to achieve that. And Cuba lost an ally.

Nicaraguan presidential candidate Daniel Ortega greets supporters on the last day of the campaigning [Max Trujillo/Getty Images]

Hard times
Cuba paid a heavy price for the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The island could no longer rely on the support of Moscow and by the early 1990s, the island experienced hardship and suffering. Many forecast the end of the Cuban Revolution. They were wrong.

But by the mid-1990s, Cuba started to recover. In the rest of the continent, the traditional parties that had dominated the political landscape in Latin America for decades believed that their grip on power could not be challenged. Then, in Venezuela in 1999, Lieutenant-Colonel Hugo Chavez, who had unsuccessfully tried to depose the government of Carlos Andres Perez in 1992, was elected president.

As a young officer, Chavez had two big influences: Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Venezuela during the anti-colonial wars in the 19th century, and Fidel Castro. Afterwards, a succession of left-wing governments was elected: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua (the return of Daniel Ortega), Uruguay. They all claimed to be inspired by the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro's leadership.

The Cuban Revolution has endured and Latin America has learned to live with it. The same can be said about its leader because Fidel Castro personified the revolution, its accomplishments and also its shortcomings.

In 2010, the countries of the region decided to create the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). They excluded the United States and Canada. Cuba was invited to join.

For the first time since 1962, when Cuba was expelled from the Organisations of American States, the island became a member of a regional body.

In January 2014, the island hosted the second CELAC summit. In December of the same year, Washington and Havana announced that they were going to re-establish diplomatic relations. Every single government in the region welcomed the decision. In March 2016, Barack Obama became the first American president to visit Cuba in almost 90 years.


Fidel Castro helped to shape the history of Latin America since the second half of the 20th century. For his followers, he was a father figure who inspired the struggle for change.

For his enemies, he was a communist tyrant. During his trial for the failed attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953, in his final plea before sentencing, Castro ended his speech saying: "Condemn me, it does not matter, history will absolve me." His absolution may be, for some people, debatable. But the history of Latin America will have to include chapters with Fidel Castro's name at the very top of the page.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, left, and his Cuban counterpart Fidel Castro joke after joining their medallions, given by medical graduates, at Havana's Karl Marx theatre,REUTERS/Claudia Daut/File Photo [Daylife]

Javier Farje is a Peruvian-born British journalist based in London. He is an analyst with TV networks from Latin America and the Middle East.

 

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Castro: The making of a legend

How Fidel Castro went from being a law student to revolutionary leader, communist figurehead and polarising global icon

 

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When Afghanistan Called Fidel and Cuba Answered

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  U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has stunted the growth of the country.

One of the lesser known facts of 20th-century world history is Cuba's military help in Afghanistan during the critical years of the Saur Revolution of 1978.
One of the most striking world historical beacons in the 20th century is revolutionary Cuba's meaningful, spartan, and heroic internationalism. While Cuba's internationalist solidarity still exists in many forms, its military component is what stands out.



Cuban military aid in Ghana, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Congo and Bolivia under Che Guevara, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Iraq, Syria during the October War of 1973, Western Sahara, Yemen, and South Africa — the latter Cuba helped liberate from apartheid — shaped the history of Africa and Latin America. It is an exceptional and unprecedented record for a small Caribbean island making it almost too surreal to be true.

Is it bewildering then, that Cuba proudly amassed the rage of the "Empire" in the form of the decades-long genocidal blockade?

However, one of the lesser known facts of 20th-century world history is Cuba's military help in Afghanistan during the critical years of the Saur Revolution of 1978. Cuba was among a small number of countries who voted against a resolution by the Non-Aligned Movement at the United Nations General Assembly which condemned the Soviet union's intervention in Afghanistan in 1979.

Cuba was engaged in the fight against Western imperialism on the Afghan front from 1980 to 1986. These years were decisive for the Afghan Revolution. It was during this timespan that the Afghan army inflicted decisive blows against imperialism's foot soldiers — Afghans and some 50,000 non-Afghans.

The successes achieved at this time were largely due to the presence in Afghanistan of over 5,000 Cuban military personnel who shared their expertise in guerrilla warfare with the Afghan and Soviet armies that were built for conventional warfare. The Cubans also served in combat roles. It is incredibly ironic that years later some of the United States' "freedom fighters" whom the Cubans fought in the 1980s would be imprisoned as terrorists on southeastern Cuban territory — Guantanamo Bay — occupied by the U.S.

The Cuban help turned the tide of war in Afghanistan. For all strategic purposes, the counter-revolution was defeated. The revolutionary government was able to consolidate power. The revolution became sustainable from a strategic point of view. It had gained the momentum and the upper hand. Western propaganda perniciously labeled the situation a "strategic stalemate." The West, suffering a humiliating defeat on the battlefield, was now desperately looking to other options to sustain its ultimate agenda — regime change in Afghanistan.

The West resorted to complementing its war efforts with pursuing war by other means. Using the United Nations, the so-called Geneva Talks which had been initiated by Afghanistan in 1984 from a position of strength, was now used to serve the imperialist agenda. It culminated in the Geneva Accords of April 14, 1988, and were meant to facilitate an "honorable" exit for the Soviets.

Immediately afterward the U.N. launched its so-called Five-Point Peace Plan which was a plan for the surrendering of Afghanistan to imperialism. The latter, in the meantime, never gave up on the military option to effect regime change in Afghanistan, break up state institutions, and destroy the all powerful Afghan army. It was, of course, the military option that finally materialized.


One significant strategic shift occurred to the West's advantage. By 1985, Gorbachev came to power and initiated what would become the end of the Soviet Union and its revolutionary legacy, which would also ultimately decide the fate of the ill-fated Saur Revolution. Gorbachev decided to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan to the dismay of his Afghan and Cuban counterparts and against the advice of his generals who believed they needed one more year to completely eliminate the counterrevolution.

Fidel Castro and Afghan President Babrak Karmal, who was forced by the Soviets in 1986 to relinquish power, firmly opposed Gorbachev's policies. The Soviets chose to leave. Afghanistan which had sacrificed so much in blood to defend itself — and the Soviet Union — against imperialism's encroaching on Soviet borders was left to fight a hugely asymmetric war on its own.

It was bound to break up into pieces. The U.S. "freedom fighters" did not stop in Afghanistan. The Soviets were made to pay for their historic mistake — and the Russians to this day — in the form of the wars in Tajikistan, the North Caucasus republics of Chechenya, Dagestan, etc.

And Afghanistan? Well, it never ceased bleeding under imperialist experiments.


Western imperialism which was engaged in a dangerous geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union for control of Afghanistan, which it saw as geostrategically, finally succeeded in establishing its outposts in the country — military bases included. It officially took charge of the country in 2001 and has since been preparing to project power over Iran, China, and gradually but firmly pushing its way towards Central Asia with Russia being the main target. That geopolitical competition never ceased to exist.

Recent developments in the strategically-located Kunduz province to the north of Afghanistan bordering Tajikistan is an ironic reminder that Russia might be forced to enter into the Afghan war theater, now more complex, to fight a war it left unfinished. But this time, it probably needs a million soldiers as Karmal had warned Gorbachev in the spring of 1985. And without Cuba and Fidel.

Fraidoon Amel is an Afghan writer and activist.

When Afghanistan Called Fidel and Cuba Answered

 

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Fidel Castro: More Than a Friend of Palestine, Much More

Cuba’s solidarity with the Palestinian and other struggles in the Middle East and North Africa began only months after the 1959 revolution.
Under the leadership of Comandante Fidel Castro and his comrades, Cuba has played an outsized role in supporting revolutionary and progressive movements around the world, far greater than might be expected from a relatively small country. Some of Revolutionary Cuba’s actions are well-known, such as the its role in defeating the CIA/South African attempt to conquer Angola in the 1970s and 80s. The decisive Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was not only a victory for the Angolan people, it was also a key factor in the downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa itself. Cuba’s solidarity with numerous movements in Latin America is widely documented.


Less known, is the long history of Cuba’s solidarity with the Palestinian and other struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, a history that began only months after the 1959 revolution. A few months after the triumph, Raul Castro and Che Guevara visited Cairo, making contact with African liberation movements based there, and also visited Gaza, then under Egyptian administration, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

Cuba saluted the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, and established ties with the FATAH movement the following year. A close alliance was developed between Cuba and the leftist government of Syria in the late 1960s, and at the time both supported FATAH after it became the dominant force in the PLO. Cuba provided political, educational and military support to FATAH, as well as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front (DFLP), the second and third largest organizations in the PLO.

The 1966 Havana-based Tricontinental Conference called for uniting the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in a united struggle against “colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism.” In his closing speech Fidel spoke of “the warm support of the conference” for the Palestinian people.

Following the October 1973 war, Cuba broke diplomatic relations with Israel. The next year, Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the PLO was received as a head of state when he visited Havana, and later an Embassy of Palestine was established in Cuba.

In 1975, Cuba was one of the sponsors of UN Resolution 3379 that branded Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination,” and passed by a vote of 97-35-32.

Following the 1978 Camp David Accord, which split Egypt away from the other Arab states and dealt a severe blow to the Palestinians, Cuba supported the “Steadfastness Front” made up of Syria, Libya, Algeria and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen). Camp David paved the way for Israel’s murderous assault on Lebanon and the Palestinian refugee camps, which left over 30,000 people dead, and was condemned by the Cuban government.

Cuba gave strong support to the mass Palestinian Intifada that began in late 1987.

During Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, killing more than 1,460 Palestinians and wounding over 10,000, Fidel wrote, “Why does the government of this country (Israel) think that the world will be impervious to this macabre genocide that is being committed today against the Palestinian people?”

The major Palestinian organizations issued statements of mourning, and manifestations of solidarity took place across Palestine. The PFLP’s message, said much about Fidel Castro’s historic role:

“From Angola to South Africa, Palestine to Mozambique, Bolivia to El Salvador, Castro’s legacy of international revolutionary solidarity and struggle continues to serve as an example in practice that transcends borders toward revolution, democracy and socialism.”

Fidel Castro: More Than a Friend of Palestine, Much More

 

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Cuba’s Agricultural Revolution: Vanguard for Global Food System

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The agricultural revolution in Cuba can offer important lessons as a vanguard of the food system transformation needed in the age of climate change.

The Cuban revolution was forced to take on new challenges in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a turning point that sparked a radical overhaul of the island’s agricultural model that now stands as an example of the kind of food system transformation that is urgently needed around the world to slash fossil fuel dependency and mitigate the impacts of climate change.


The Soviet bloc had been a fundamental trading partner to Cuba in the early decades of the revolution following the 1959 fall of the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Caught in the crosshairs of Cold War tensions and strapped by the United States' 1962 economic blockade against the island, Cuba turned to the other side of the Iron Curtain for key imports, including over 90 percent of its oil and nearly two thirds of its food. Cuba’s agricultural sector was largely focused on sugarcane production — with the help of Soviet chemical fertilizers and machinery imports — to trade at a premium with the USSR.

While the fall of the Soviet Union sparked a grave economic crisis in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, it also kickstarted a new revolution, this time in agriculture, led by campesino movements determined to transform the island’s food system to make it work in the face of a stark new reality. It meant a near total shift to organic or semi-organic agriculture, decentralization of farmland management into the hands of cooperatives, and new urban gardening initiatives that together amounted to a radical ecological transformation — a transformation that desperately needs to scale up, and beyond Cuba, to slash the global food system’s carbon footprint and make it more sustainable and resilient as climate change increasingly threatens resources.



After the revolution, Cuban agriculture was organized on the Soviet model of collective, large-scale, industrial production and followed the so-called “Green Revolution” that relies on oil-guzzling farm machinery and a host of petrochemical inputs including fertilizers and pesticides — products that suddenly disappeared after being abundant under the Soviet-era Comecon economic bloc. So as tractors became idle without fuel, the agricultural revolution turned the Cuba’s countryside away from vast monocultures of chemical-intensive sugarcane and toward a sustainable model based on agroecology.


Put simply, while modern industrial agriculture tries to fight and control nature, agroecology recognizes nature as a complex system and applies ecological principles to it, in order to fulfill its farming needs. Cultivating together a variety of plants that are mutually beneficial eliminates the need for chemical inputs and can also boost production. For example, different kinds of flowers can attract beneficial insects or repel pests, beans can fix nitrogen in the soil, and intercropping taller vegetables with groundcover crops can squeeze out weeds from the garden. Not only are agroecological farming practices more sustainable and resilient, they also produce a greater variety of agricultural products compared to an industrial farming system focused on export production. For Cuba, facing a blockade and the loss of its main source of food imports, figuring out how to meet the basic food needs of the population was the key question.

Fidel Castro’s government implemented wartime-like measures aimed at boosting production and creating jobs to kickstart the process of the transition. But campesino movements also rose to the challenge, urging the government to give them greater control over farmland and push ahead with the necessary agricultural transformation. Agrarian reform, which had nationalized the country’s farming resources, turned decentralized land into the hands of farmers organized in cooperatives. Between 1993, the peak of the crisis known as the “Special Period” in Cuba, and 2008, state ownership of farmland fell from 56.5 percent to 23.2 percent. But, importantly for the development of food sovereignty, land didn’t shift into private hands. Instead, agricultural cooperatives ballooned to manage more than three-quarters of the island’s arable land.

The reorganization of land management through food-producing cooperatives was also increasingly accompanied by a grassroots farmer-to-farmer movement that helped spread knowledge about ecological farming techniques to help each other learn from collective experiences and ease the transition. The same movement has played an important part in the spread of agroecological practices across Central America. In Cuba, scientists working on questions of how to substitute imported agricultural inputs for local products were also part of the network of figuring out new ways of doing agriculture — which sometimes meant going back to old ways — and sharing that knowledge as widely as possible.

Another central pillar of the agricultural revolution was the expansion of urban farming to dedicate as much land as possible to food production to meet domestic needs, becoming a world leader in urban agriculture. In Havana alone, more than 87,000 acres have been dedicated to urban agriculture, including food production, animal husbandry and forestry. In 2005, the city’s urban gardens produced 272 metric tons of vegetables. The Cuban innovation of organoponics, an organic urban agriculture system, has fueled the transition to becoming a world-class example of urban farming. Facing fears of a total blockade, Fidel Castro’s government had already been exploring the development of organoponics a few years prior to the Soviet Union dissolving. But it wasn’t until the fall of the Iron Curtain that organoponics popped up in the streets.


According to the food policy and development institute Food First, the agricultural changes in Cuba were “rapid and broad-reaching.” Along with breaking away from the dependence on agro-chemicals, the agricultural revolution also resulted in “increasing domestic production (and) tackling hunger” that spiked at the beginning of the so-called Special Period. The extent of success in slashing overall food import dependency remains unclear, but University of California-Berkeley researcher Miguel A. Altieri has argued that the bottom line is that “Cuba has been generally able to adequately feed its people.” And there’s no question that Cuba has increased its food harvests — including a more than 350 percent increase in the production of beans, a staple crop, and 145 percent increase in vegetables between 1988 and 2007 — while cutting the use of agro-chemicals for up to 85 percent for some crops.

Researchers of agroecology and food security have argued that Cuba’s agricultural revolution can offer an example to follow for other countries, especially in the Global South, aiming to boost their food sovereignty and self-dependency.

But Cuba’s agricultural revolution, though an anti-imperialist exercise in national sovereignty, goes far beyond political lines as climate change increasingly threatens agricultural production on a global scale.

Cuba has already weathered extreme climatic effects like tropical storms that are expected to increase in frequency and intensity with climate change, a reality the movement to sustainable agriculture was forced to contend with. The country was also all but cut off from petroproducts for more than a decade — it’s since had easy access to oil again over the past decade thanks to good relations with Venezuela’s socialist government, a fact that could chip away at the organic revolution — offering a rare glimpse at what a transition away from fossil fuels can look like.

And it's a transition that’s urgently needed to keep global warming below a catastrophic increase of 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels and ensure the viability and sustainability of the food system for future generations.

Cuba’s Agricultural Revolution: Vanguard for Global Food System

 

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[satam55]

For half a century, Fidel Castro held an iron grip on Cuba, defying a CIA-backed invasion, numerous assassination attempts, a U.S. trade embargo, and economic collapse.

Castro came to power in 1959 after overthrowing the American-backed President Fulgencio Batista, who ran an authoritarian government and was viewed by many as corrupt.

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America, Castro met publicly with Malcolm X, and sent Cuban troops to Angola to fight against the apartheid government of South Africa at a time when the U.S. still supported it. His support of the Civil Rights movement in America and African independence movements abroad has complicated his story.

On Monday’s edition of NewsOne Now, Roland Martin spoke with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., founder of Rainbow PUSH, Soledad O’Brien, CEO of Starfish Media, and Bill Fletcher, Jr., a writer and activist, about the complexities of Castro’s legacy.

 

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Miami v Cuba: Mixed reactions to Castro death

 

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Dictators support by the U.S/West:



Videla junta and Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. Noriega. Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela. Franco fascists in Spain. Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Bin Laden. Abu Bakr. Reza Pahlavi. Sukarno. Suharto. Marcos. Hissène Habré. Pahlavi of Iran. Suharto, Shah of Iran, Marcos, the Argintine Junta, Somoza, Carlos Castillo Armas, the El Salvador Junta, Brail , Iranian monarchy, Jimenez in Venezuela, the dirty War in Argentina, (CIA installed puppets). Iranian monarchy. Jimenez in Venezuela. the dirty War in Argentina. Pinochet. Brazil in the 1970s. Apartheid Namibia, Colonial Angola Mozambique. Opposed Stalin until he switched sides.....list goes on



as of now authoritarian Saudi Arabia (Saudi - Qatar tyranical families) & Egypt + apartheid Israel, Kazakhstan Kuwait, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti (occupied )last president and current one backed by the US etc.... shyt you can put Putin on the list

 

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Guess which countries aren't invited to Cuba for the funeral

 

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Castro and Nasser in Harlem

 

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