This picture is from a presentation that Atlantic members did on their solidarity delegation to the Colloquium to Free the Cuban Five. Very proud of our Union for all their work on the campaign to Free the Five. In particular, huge thanks to Don Foreman who has kept this struggle in the forefront for CUPW, as well as Jeff Callaghan, Beatrice Douglas, Scott Gaudet Anita Bock. However, all of our work on Cuba would not have happened if it were not for Sister Ruth Collins Larson (member of Nova Scotia Cuba Association) and many others who have been working in solidarity with Cuba for years. So congrats to you all for your dedication to this struggle.
Thank you all for your work on this! Solidarity!
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Sunday, December 14, 2014
For Moment, the World Embraces the Cuba Model – and
Slaps the Empire
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“For Cuba, service to oppressed and exploited
peoples is a revolutionary act of the highest moral caliber.”
Revolutionary
Cuba has always been a miracle and gift to all humankind. This week, the
nations of the world – with two savage exceptions – instructed their emissaries
at the UN General Assembly to tell the world’s self-designated “indispensable”
country to end its 54-year-long trade embargo against Cuba[1]. The virtually unanimous global rebuke to the American superpower, in
combination with the extraordinary breadth and depth of acclamation accorded
Havana, tells us that it is Cuba, not the U.S., that is the truly “exceptional”
nation on the planet.
It was
the 23rd time that the United Nations has rejected the embargo. The outcome was
identical to last year’s tally, with only the United States and Israel voting
against the non-binding resolution. Although the list of American allies on the
Cuban embargo issue could not possibly get any smaller – Israel, after all, can
only exist if joined at the U.S. hip – this year’s political environment was
even less deferential to the reigning military colossus. In recognition of its
singular commitment to the fight against Ebola in Africa, Cuba soared, once
again – the hero nation.
Despite
having suffered cumulative economic damages of more than $1 trillion at U.S.
hands over the last half-century, the island nation of 11 million people has
made itself a medical superpower that shares its life-saving resources with the
world. No country or combination of nations and NGOs comes close to the speed,
size and quality of Cuba’s response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. With
461 doctors, nurses and other health professionals either already on site or
soon to be sent to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, Cuba sets the standard for
international first-response. The Cuban contingent of medical professionals
providing direct treatment to sick people outnumbers that of the African Union
and all individual countries and private organizations, including the Red
Cross. (Few of the 4,000 U.S. military personnel to be deployed in the region
will ever lay a well-protected hand on an Ebola patient. Instead, the troops
build field hospitals for others to staff.)
“No country or combination of nations and NGOs
comes close to the speed, size and quality of Cuba’s response to the Ebola
crisis in West Africa.”
Doctors
Without Borders is second to Cuba in terms of health professionals. But the French
NGO is a swiftly revolving door, churning doctors and nurses in and out every
six weeks because of the extreme work and safety conditions. Cuba’s health
brigades are made of different stuff. Every volunteer is expected to remain on
duty in the Ebola zone for six months[2]. Moreover, if any of the Cubans
contract Ebola or any other disease, they will be treated at the hospitals
where they work, alongside their African patients[3], rather than sent home. (One Cuban died of cerebral malaria, in Guinea,
last Sunday.)
It goes
without saying that the Cubans are committed for the duration of the Ebola
crisis; they have been at Africa’s service since the first years of the
revolution. President Raul Castro reports that 76,000 Cuban medical specialists
have served in 39 African countries over the years. Four thousand were
stationed in 32 African countries when the current Ebola epidemic broke out.
(Worldwide, Cuba’s “white-robed army” of care-givers numbers more than 50,000,
in 66 countries – amid constant U.S. pressures on host countries to expel
them.)
In sheer
numbers, the Cuban medical posture in Africa is surpassed in scope only by the
armed presence of AFRICOM, the U.S. military command, which has relationships
with every country on the continent except Eritrea, Zimbabwe and Sudan. The
governments of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone collaborate militarily with
AFRICOM, but the heavily-armed Americans were of no use when Ebola hit.
(According to a Liberian newspaper account, the Americans caused the epidemic[4], a widely held belief in the region.)
Indeed,
the Euro-American legacy in Africa, from colonialism (Liberia has been a de
facto colony of the U.S. since the days of President Monroe) to western-imposed
financial “structural adjustments” that starved public health systems, is the
root reason Liberia and Guinea have only one doctor for every 100,000 people,
and Sierra Leone has just two.
Cuba
knows colonialism well, having seen its independence struggle from Spain
aborted by the United States in 1898, followed by six decades as a U.S.
semi-colony. For Cuba, service to oppressed and exploited peoples is a
revolutionary act of the highest moral caliber. That’s why, when the call went
out, 15,000 Cubans competed for the honor to battle Ebola in Africa. As
reported in The Guardian[5], doctors like Leonardo Fernandez
were eager to fulfill their moral and professional mission. “We know that we
are fighting against something that we don’t totally understand,” he said. “We
know what can happen. We know we’re going to a hostile environment. But it is
our duty. That’s how we’ve been educated.”
In the
same way and for the same reasons, 425,000 Cubans volunteered for military
service in Angola, from 1975 to 1991, leaving only after Angola was secure,
Namibia had held its first free elections and South Africa was firmly on the
road to majority rule. These Cubans were preceded by the doctor and soldier Che
Guevara and 100 other fighters who journeyed to Congo in 1965 to join an
unsuccessful guerilla war against the American-backed Mobutu regime.
“In sheer numbers, the Cuban medical posture in
Africa is surpassed in scope only by the armed presence of AFRICOM, the U.S.
military command.”
Cuba has
been selfless in defense of others, whether against marauding microbes or
imperial aggression. “We never took any natural resources,” said Rodolfo Reyes Rodriguez[6], Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations and a veteran of the war
against white-ruled South Africa’s army in Angola. “We never took any salary,
because in no way were we to be perceived to be mercenaries or on any kind of
military adventure.”
For the
United States, military adventure and the imperative to seize other countries’
natural resources or strangle their economies, are defining national
characteristics – in complete contrast to Cuba. The U.S. embargo of its island
neighbor is among the world’s longest-running morality plays, with Washington
as villain. On this issue, the world’s biggest economic and military power
could neither buy nor bully a single ally other than the Zionist state
deformity.
Even
Djibouti, the wedge of a nation between Eritrea and Somalia that hosts the
biggest U.S. (and French) military base in Africa, spoke against the embargo on
behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Lithuania, a rabidly anti-Russian
Baltic state, voiced the European Union’s objections to the embargo. Ethiopia,
Washington’s henchman in the Horn of Africa, nevertheless opposed U.S. policy
toward Cuba on behalf of the UN’s “Africa Group.” Tiny Fiji articulated the
Group of 77 and China’s opposition to the trade blockade. Venezuela, Cuba’s
major health partner in Latin America, voiced the anti-embargo position of
Mercosur, the Common Market of the South.
Cuba’s
neighbors in CARICOM, the Caribbean Economic Community, were represented by
Saint Kitts and Nevis, whose ambassador pointed to Cuban-built hospitals and
clinics throughout the region; the hundreds of Cuban doctors that have provided
the only medical services available to many of Haiti’s poor before, during and
after the catastrophic earthquake of 2010; and the thousands of Caribbean
students that have benefited from free university education in Cuba.
Cuba’s
exemplary conduct in the world has made the yearly UN vote on the U.S. embargo
a singular opportunity for all the world body’s members, except one, to
chastise the superpower that seeks full spectrum domination of the planet. It
is the rarest of occasions, a time of virtual global unanimity on an evil in
which the Empire is currently engaged. Once a year, the world – in both effect
and intent – salutes the Cuban model. For a moment, humanity’s potential to
organize itself for the common good illuminates the global forum.
This
year, the model glows brightly in the darkness of microbial pestilence. When
15,000 Cuban health care workers do not hesitate to step into the Ebola pit,
the New Man and Woman may already exist – and there is hope for the rest of us.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
