More than 10,000 Moroccans also protest against US embassy move to Jerusalem
Palestinians carry man wounded by Israeli forces near border between Gaza and Israel last week (AFP)
Sunday 20 May 2018
Hundreds of Palestinian Israelis demonstrated on Saturday evening in Haifa in solidarity with Gaza, where more than 60 Palestinians have died from Israeli fire in recent days, an AFP reporter said.
Protesters shouted "down with the occupation, stop fascism" and denounced the arrests on Friday of 19 people during a previous rally held in solidarity with Gaza residents.
Palestinian Israelis, the descendants of Palestinians who remained on their land when Israel was created in 1948, compose about 17.5 percent of the Israeli population.
Happening NOW in Haifa: hundreds of Jews and Arabs demonstrating together against the #Gaza shooting and the police violence. "Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies" is the most repeated slogan here.@omdimbeyachad@AyOdeh
They waved four large letters in bright red, making up the word "Gaza" and chanted slogans including "Jews and Arabs, we are not enemies".
A total of 62 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli gunfire on Monday, when thousands of Palestinians protested as the US officially moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after recognising the disputed city as the capital of Israel.
They were among 119 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel since mass demonstrations started on 30 March, according to authorities in Gaza, which is run by the Islamist movement Hamas.
The Israeli army insists its actions are necessary to defend the border and prevent mass infiltrations.
It accuses Hamas of using the demonstrations to approach and damage the border fence, including laying explosive devices and attacking soldiers.
Casablanca protests
More than 10,000 Moroccans chanting "Death to Israel" took to the streets of Casablanca on Sunday to protest against the US decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
The marchers carried Palestinian flags and placards that read "Jerusalem, Palestine's eternal capital". Most appeared to be Islamists, with women wearing headscarves and marching separately from men.
The Casablanca protest had been called by a coalition of four parties including the Islamist opposition group al-Adl Wal Ihsan, which is seen as Morocco's most powerful opposition group in terms of rallying supporters on the street.
Heart attack
Palestinian and Israeli sources on Sunday said a Palestinian prisoner had died of a heart attack while in Israeli custody.
Aziz Ewisat had been serving a 30-year prison sentence since 2014 and had suffered a heart attack earlier this month, the Palestinian Prisoners' Club said.
Israeli prison authorities said he had heart failure after attacking a guard, adding that Ewisat was a member of Hamas.
Israel has generated global outrage by picking off demonstrators – holding flags, slingshots, stones and incendiary kites, using burning tires, mounds of sand and improvised gas masks as defenses against heavily fortified soldiers armed with US-made Remington M24 sniper rifles – during weeks of protest in Gaza.
Now Israel is trying to spin away the damage by claiming that many of those killed were members of Hamas, and therefore deserved to die.
But as international law experts and international officials have stressed, the political affiliation of those killed on Monday is irrelevant when it comes to the legality of Israel’s actions.
More than 100 Palestinians have been killed and thousands more injured during the Great March of Return protests. Only one Israeli, a soldier, has reportedly suffered an injury, a minor one, in the context of the protests.
The disparity in casualties – and the photos and videos showing Israeli forces firing on protesters, medics and journalists who pose no conceivable danger – speak for themselves.
As Amnesty International documented in recent weeks, “Eyewitness testimonies, video and photographic evidence suggest that many were deliberately killed or injured while posing no immediate threat to the Israeli soldiers.”
In most of the fatal cases analyzed by Amnesty International prior to last Monday’s massacre, “victims were shot in the upper body, including the head and the chest, some from behind.”
Canadian emergency doctor Tarek Loubani told The Electronic Intifada Podcast he was shot in the leg when everything was quiet around him: “No burning tires, no smoke, no tear gas, nobody messing around in front of the buffer zone. Just a clearly marked medical team well away from everybody else.”
An hour later, a paramedic who was part of his team, and who had rescued Loubani, was himself shot and killed.
“For many, especially those who lost a loved one, who will now suffer a permanent disability or who will need intensive rehabilitation, the impacts of recent violence will be felt for months and years to come,” United Nations humanitarian coordinator Jamie McGoldrick stated on Thursday.
Israel has meanwhile been triaging the damage done to its international standing. It too may feel the impact of the violence for years to come.
A top Israeli military spokesperson acknowledged its public relations disaster during a briefing with the Jewish Federations of North America this week.
The spokesperson granted that the crisis was borne of the deadly violence that Israel warned it was prepared and planning to use both before the launch of the Great March of Return on 30 March and before Monday’s protests.
Both the bloodshed and the global backlash against Israel were preventable and predictable.
Seeking to deflect calls for accountability, Israel’s professional spin doctors have been pushing a video clip in which Hamas official Salah Albardaweel claims 50 of those killed on Monday belonged to the Islamist group.
Moments ago, in what seem to be the dumbest ever #Palestinian TV interview, #Hamas official Salah Al-Bardawil confirmed what Israel was saying all along: "50 of the 62 deaths (80%) on the #Gaza border in May 14แตสฐ were of Hamas operatives". The work of the just is done by others! pic.twitter.com/KHUuiPLFnq
Israel’s military and political leadership have sought from the beginning to portray the Great March of Return as a Hamas stunt exploiting civilian protests as a cover for “terror” activities which pose an existential threat to Israeli communities near the Gaza boundary.
Israel seeks to obscure the reality that the Great March of Return is a popular mobilization that includes the participation and leadership of Palestinians of all political stripes who seek an end to the siege and to exercise their right to return to lands just over Gaza’s boundary from which their families were expelled 70 years ago.
Several of those killed on Monday were buried in Hamas’ green flag, but not all. Fadi Abu Salmi, a double amputee, was shrouded with the flag of Islamic Jihad. Ahmad al-Adaini was buried in the flag of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Argentina’s president promised the world he had the business savvy to jump-start the country's economy. He’s ended up begging for a bailout.
Mauricio Macri arrives to the 7th anniversary ceremony of the Metropolitan Police in Buenos Aires on October 28, 2015. (JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images)
Argentine President Mauricio Macri rose to power in 2015 promising to be a different kind of leader. He emphasized a message of economic competence alongside a pledge to undo the policies of his predecessor, Cristina Fernรกndez de Kirchner, including heavy social spending, currency controls, and economic protectionism. Macri’s message was burnished by a high-profile business career, family connections to Argentina’s financial aristocracy (he is the son of Italian-Argentine tycoon Franco Macri), and stints at Columbia Business School and the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. All of this has made Macri a darling of Wall Street and the Trump administration, and the great hope of the international community for restoring Argentina to its former economic glories. In 2016, Time magazine named Macri one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Less than three years after his election, having failed to deliver on his promises, Macri finds himself in a position far too familiar to Argentine presidents: negotiating with the International Monetary Fund for a loan to stabilize the economy.
News of the loan, estimated at $30 billion, rocked the international financial community and caused a ruckus at home by bringing back painful memories of the harrowing financial collapse of 2001 to 2002 that left millions of middle class Argentines poor and destitute, the political system in tatters, and more than 20 people dead in protests and looting. Many blame IMF-imposed policies for the disaster, and those who don’t blame the IMF nonetheless hold the international organization responsible for having failed to forestall the crisis. Not surprisingly, opposition leaders from the Peronist party were quick to denounce the negotiations with the IMF. Many of them put up signs on their desks in Congress that read “IMF OUT!” Even members of the president’s governing coalition have warned that if Argentina turns to the IMF, “the remedy could prove worse than the disease.”
The Argentine public, which has an intense loathing of the IMF, wasted no time in showing its disapproval of the Macri-negotiation loan. Many took to the streets of Buenos Aires in impromptu demonstrations reminiscent of the ones that erupted in 2001. Public opinion surveys reported that 75 percent of respondents said that they would not support a government request for assistance from the IMF, including 58 percent of those who voted to put Macri in office. It was not just the bitter memories of the 2001 crash that distressed the public. Older Argentines remember the country’s long and tortured history with the organization. The IMF’s first loan to Argentina dates to 1957, and the organization has been involved in all of the many economic crisis that have since befallen the country.
Sensing the high political stakes of the negotiations and the emotions surrounding the IMF among ordinary Argentines, Macri felt compelled to address the nation last on May 8. In a somber televised speech, he stressed that the loan (whose value has not been made public) will allow the nation to “face the new global scenario and avoid a crisis like the ones we have faced before in our history.” He was also speaking to investors at home and abroad, in the face of distressing economic news. The Argentine peso has dropped by more than 18 percent so far this year, and in the days before Macri’s speech, his government had raised interest rates three times to 40 percent, one of the world’s highest. To boost Macri’s message, and increase confidence in Argentina, his economic team stressed that the country’s problems are strictly of a liquid nature (a lack of cash) and not related to solvency, or the inability to pay its financial obligations.
For its part, the IMF is on a mission to atone for its past sins in the hope of restoring its reputation in Argentina by emphasizing that this is not the same IMF that the Argentine people remember from more than 15 years ago. In a recent trip to Argentina, aimed at normalizing relations with the country that is angriest toward the organization, IMF chief Christine Lagarde was asked by Spain’s El Paรญs “What was the IMF’s greatest mistake during those great Latin American and Asian crises of the late 1990s?” She responded that: “We underestimated societies and economies’ ability to absorb such tough, frontal treatments. … At times we went in too deep and too fast for society to deal with it.”
Where did things go wrong for Argentina this time? Some of the blame certainly resides with the previous administration. Fernรกndez and her late husband, former President Nรฉstor Kirchner, are rightly credited with bringing Argentina back to economic stability after it defaulted on a debt obligation of more than $100 billion in 2002. They did so, in part, by resolutely embracing, despite pressure from international investors, a mixture of economic strategies they inherited, including de-linking the Argentine peso from the U.S. dollar (a measure adopted in the 1990s to deal with hyperinflation), and devaluing the peso as a means to boost exports. By 2007, Argentina was able to pay its debt in full to the IMF, and by the time Fernรกndez left office in 2015, the country had made considerable progress reaching settlements with private lenders. Macri concluded those negotiations in 2016, shortly after entering office.
But the Fernรกndez administration did not prepare Argentina for the economic slowing-down that began in 2012, with the cooling off of the demand from China for Argentine commodities. It was China’s seemingly insatiable thirst for commodities, especially soybeans, that underwrote Argentina’s economic recovery. To make matters worse, the Fernรกndez administration was less than candid in disclosing the state of the economy after 2012. For this, the IMF censured Argentina in 2013; the censure was lifted in 2016 after the Macri administration improved transparency standards. In keeping with the populist strain that fuels the Peronist movement, Fernรกndez spent lavishly on social programs and the nationalization of numerous companies; her government was also plagued with rampant corruption. Shortly after leaving office, Fernรกndez was indicted for scheming with her public works minister to steal millions of dollars intended to improve the public infrastructure.
But Macri also shares some of the blame. He has been dependent on foreign investment, which has taken a big hit since last year, to finance economic growth and fuel employment. He has also relied on high-yield debt bonds to lure foreign investors and provide a questionable sense of confidence in the Argentine economy. Just last year, Argentina sold $2.75 billion of U.S. dollar-denominated 100-year bonds at an effective yield of 8 percent, quite remarkable considering that the country has defaulted on its national debt eight times in the last 200 years. Macri has also failed to deliver on his promises to cut public spending (by being unable to eliminate some the popular social programs put in place by the previous administration to help in the post-2001 economic meltdown), to rein in corruption, and to bring down inflation. This was all part of Macri’s electoral pledge to “make Argentina normal.”
Despite the emotions surrounding Argentina’s “return” to the IMF, it is unclear what impact this will have on the Argentine economy and on Macri’s future. A lot will depend on the loan itself. The type of loan being negotiated by Argentina — a flexible credit line — is reserved for nations whose economic fundamentals are basically solid and that are pursuing IMF-approved policies. Countries are expected to repay the money in three to five years. In the best-case scenario, the loan will serve to calm markets, to reassure investors that things are under control, and to restore financial stability. All of this, in turn, could set Macri for a successful re-election. This is certainly the hope of analysts on Wall Street, who welcomed the news of the IMF loan as a “bold and determined move” intended to boost investors’ confidence in Argentina’s ability to pay the debt it already has.
If, by contrast, the loan fails to work its magic and serves to usher in another era of economic uncertainty and crisis, followed by austerity measures and bailouts, Macri’s re-election will seriously be jeopardized, and Argentina will once again find itself adrift. It will also prove that the end to the cycle of booms and busts that many thought had been relegated to the dustbin of history with the economic crash of 2001 and a seemingly miraculous post-crisis recovery was all but a mirage. Update, May 18, 2018, 10 p.m.: This article was updated to clarify several points.
BERLIN — Since Jan. 20, 2017, European leaders have managed U.S. relations with one eye on the clock, anxiously counting down the hours until President Trump’s term is up and hoping the core of the Western alliance isn’t too badly damaged in the meantime.
But as Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward America’s closest allies has evolved into hostile action this spring, a new fear has swept European capitals.
Trump may not be an aberration that can be waited out, with his successor likely to push reset after four or eight years of fraught ties. Instead, the blend of unilateralism, nationalism and protectionism Trump embodies may be the new American normal.
“It is dawning on a number of European players that Trump may not be an outlier,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “More and more people are seeing it as a larger change in the United States.”
Even before Trump was elected, Europeans sensed that Washington’s traditional role as guarantor of the continent’s security and stability was slipping away, and that post-World War II ties were fading along with the generations that forged them.
But Trump’s seeming delight in smashing transatlantic bonds — and the lack of domestic constraints on his ability to do so — has signaled, Janning said, that the basis for Western strength and peace for 70-plus years “probably won’t come back.”
U.S.-European relations have worsened since President Trump met with other NATO country leaders in Brussels in May 2017. (Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg News)
That carries serious implications for how Europe responds to Trump. Until now, key leaders have avoided open conflict with the U.S. president, trying instead to placate him or, at best, subtly persuade him. Above all, they have sought to preserve strong relationships at various levels within the U.S. government, if not with the man at the top of it, so there’s a foundation to build on after he is gone.
That is still the prevailing strategy. But a succession of adverse moves culminating in Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal has brought transatlantic relations to their lowest point since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, if not far longer.
If Trump is succeeded by a more traditional Democratic or Republican administration, the wounds could still heal. But, even then, it could take a long time, given the extent of the damage.
And close European observers of the United States are not optimistic about a reversion to the mean.
They study the increasing polarization of U.S. politics and see less enthusiasm for transatlantic ties at either end of the political spectrum. They have also been repeatedly disappointed as one supposed brake after another on Trump’s most extreme foreign policy impulses — Congress, the president’s own advisers and popular opinion — has fallen away. Trump, they note, is alienating America’s closest allies, and the American public doesn’t seem to mind.
European Council President Donald Tusk said May 16 that President Trump made Europe realize that "a helping hand" can only be found "at the end of your arm."(Reuters)
Europeans have begun to wonder aloud whether they need to respond accordingly.
One sign of the evolving stance toward the United States was the unusually biting commentary this past week from European Council President Donald Tusk, whose job in Brussels is to channel the ids of the 28 nations in the European Union. A mild-mannered former Polish prime minister, his statements are typically gentle efforts toward consensus, not international rallying cries.
Not this time.
“With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Tusk told reporters as he readied a summit of E.U. leaders largely focused on Trump-ignited brushfires. The faltering Iran nuclear agreement, the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip and the specter of a transatlantic trade war were all on the agenda.
Tusk denounced “the capricious assertiveness of the American administration,” using terms that just 16 months ago would more typically have been applied to international rogue nations such as North Korea and Russia.
His sharp tone matches the public mood. In Germany, a country that rebuilt itself after World War II in America’s image and with American money, polls show that Trump is seen as a bigger threat than Russian President Vladimir Putin.
More than two-thirds of Germans describe their country as moving away from the United States, and an equal number describe the relationship as “tense,” according to a survey released this past week by the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
After the U.S. pullout from the Iran deal, the influential weekly Der Spiegel called on Germany to become part of the “resistance against America” and pictured Trump on its cover as a yellow-haired middle finger to the continent.
Some of Europe’s anger reflects a long-standing current of anti-Americanism. But even fans of the United States say they are losing faith now that the country that built the liberal democratic order seems intent on dismantling it.
Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, who oversees the German Marshall Fund’s office in Berlin, said that up until recently, it was popular for defenders of close American ties to console themselves with the mantra “watch what they do, not what they say.”
But that was before Trump canceled U.S. participation in the Iran deal, threatened European businesses with sanctions and launched steel and aluminum tariffs that could hit Europe as soon as next month.
“Now the actions are piling up,” he said. “You keep thinking it doesn’t get any worse. But boy, we’re being educated.”
Kleine-Brockhoff, a former presidential adviser, still counts himself among the defenders of the transatlantic bond. But he said he — and Europe — will have to seriously reevaluate if Trump wins reelection.
Others in Europe aren’t waiting that long.
“The mood in the country is that we can’t let the U.S. run the world, especially if it’s run by someone like Trump,” said Franรงois Heisbourg, a former French presidential adviser on national security and defense. “When an ally treats its allies like enemies, you have a problem.”
Heisbourg said the current strain on the transatlantic relationship is greater than in previous periods of tension.
In the 1990s, there were disagreements over the U.S. and NATO bombardment of Kosovo. Western Europe bitterly opposed President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq in 2003. Even under President Barack Obama — who was extremely popular in Europe — European policymakers first complained about being ignored, then smarted when then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates slammed them in 2011 for not taking their own defense seriously enough.
But in part because of that evolving estrangement, Trump’s actions look all the more concerning.
“There are trends underway that began before Trump and will continue after Trump,” said Tomas Valasek, the head of the Carnegie Europe think tank and a former Slovak ambassador to NATO. Trump “believes this is a dog-eat-dog kind of world in which one country’s gain is another’s loss. And that applies to the allies as much to the Chinas and Russias of the world.”
For all the transatlantic tiffs in the first year of the Trump administration, the U.S. pullout from the Iran nuclear agreement and the tariff threats have the potential to be far more explosive, because they could lead to Europe and Washington actively trying to undermine each other.
In Brussels, some are trying to reframe the strained relations as an opportunity.
“We’re not going to live in a world of U.S. hegemony that we can all hide behind,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Italian International Affairs Institute and a top adviser to E.U. diplomat-in-chief Federica Mogherini.
“We love the United States,” she said. “But when the United States takes a decision that is contrary to our interests, then we should be able to do our own thing and pursue our own policies. The relationship of dependence has to change.”
Still, there are skeptics of Europe’s ability to split from the United States. Europe remains deeply dependent on the U.S. security umbrella, with Germany’s military so rusty that its helicopter pilots are losing their certifications because they don’t have enough working aircraft to practice.
And despite Trump’s angry rhetoric that Europeans aren’t doing enough to defend themselves, he has poured money into U.S. military involvement on the continent, unveiling a budget proposal this year that would build on a previous increase to nearly double spending compared with Obama’s final year in office.
“Europeans are going to be unwilling to push things to a crisis point with Washington or to pick very serious fights,” said Adam Thomson, director of the European Leadership Network, a London-based think tank, and a former senior British diplomat.
But there are steps Europe can take. Thomson recently co-wrote a paper calling for Europe’s militaries to make themselves better able to operate independently from the United States — not out of spite, but because improved European defenses would serve both sides.
Jรถrg Lau, foreign editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit, said such steps are long overdue, and need to take account that the United States isn’t coming back as the steadfast protector it once appeared to be.
Whether it’s Trump in office or any other American president, he said, “U.S. priorities have changed, and why shouldn’t they? It’s not something we should complain about. It’s a fact we have to acknowledge.”
Europe is peaceful, it’s wealthy, and it’s time, he said, for the continent to take care of its own security.
“We can almost be thankful to Trump,” Lau said. “He’s made it clear to Europe that we need to wake up.”
Birnbaum reported from Brussels. James McAuley contributed to this report from Paris.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan listens to the media during a news conference in Riga, Latvia February 22, 2018. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins/Files
MAY 20, 2018
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - The United States will not recognize the result of Venezuela’s presidential election on Sunday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan told journalists.
The United States is actively considering oil sanctions on Venezuela and Sullivan said a response to Sunday’s vote would be discussed at a G20 meeting in Buenos Aires on Monday.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was seeking a six-year term in a Sunday election boycotted by the opposition and condemned by foes as the “coronation” of a dictator.
“We need to make sure we adhere to our goal which to target corrupt regime officials and not the people of Venezuela,” Sullivan said. “We don’t want to damage the country in a way that makes it difficult to repair after democracy is restored.”
He called oil sanctions “a very significant step.” “They are under active review,” he said.
Sullivan also said he knew of no plan to withdraw U.S. assistance from northwest Syria.
CBS news reported on Friday the Trump administration had withdrawn all assistance from northwest Syria, a move it said demonstrated the administration intended to leave quickly once Islamic State is fully defeated.
“I’ve not heard of any decision by this administration to withdraw assistance from northwest Syria,” he said in comments to Reuters and Bloomberg.
“The U.S. government... is committed to the enduring defeat of ISIS and protecting U.S. interests in the region in Syria and Iraq.”
Reporting by Caroline Stauffer; Additional reporting by Hugh Bronstein; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Sandra Maler
For the first time in sixty years, Cuba is without a Castro at the helm. For fifty years after the revolutionary government first took power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro held the reins of power. For the next ten years, from 2008 when Fidel Castro stepped down, younger brother Raul Castro ran the show. Now Raul Castro has retired and is succeeded by Miguel Diaz-Canel, a 58-year old electronics engineer and senior leader of the Cuban Communist Party. Exactly a month ago on April 19, Diaz-Canal was elected by the National Assembly as Cuba’s new President. Raul Castro will remain as the all-powerful Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party until 2021, when Miguel will slide into that position as well.
This is the first peaceful civilian succession in Cuban history, and the first in sixty years that does not have a Castro assuming power. Born in 1960, the new President belongs to the first post-revolutionary generation of Cubans. The smooth succession might be seen as a testament to the stability of the Cuba’s one-party political system. At the same time, it has raised questions and speculations about Cuba’s future without a Castro at the helm. There is apparently a Cuban refrain that may seem to echo the national anxiety is: "No es facil" (It’s not easy).
Quite by happenstance I spent a week in Cuba from May 13 to 20, and what follows is a summary of what I heard and observed during that time. Cubans seemed quite free to talk about their country, its leaders, its past and its prospects for the future. Equally, visitors to Cuba are now free to travel freely within Cuba and interact with Cuban citizens. This was not the case when Cuba started its tourism industry in the 1990s, when tourists were confined to their beach resorts and were allowed out only under organized and supervised excursions.
The circumstance of my visit was the 2018 Conference of The Canadian Anthropology Society that was held in joint sponsorship with the Cuban Oriental University (Universidad de Orient) in Santiago de Cuba. My wife, Amali, was a participant and I tagged along just to see Cuba. There is nothing like being in a universe of Anthropologists to appreciate the unity of human experience amidst the diversity of human cultures. We also learnt that visitors from Canada are received especially well in Cuba.
The Castro era
The friendship between Canada and Cuba goes back to the personal friendship between former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Fidel Castro, much to the chagrin of the Americans. The Cubans also appreciate Canada’s support of the Cuban economy, since the 1990s, to withstand the double whammy of the post-Soviet Russian withdrawal and the American sanctions. Cubans call the period after the Russian withdrawal, the "Special Period", when Cuba was gutted and left isolated in global economic storms. During the Special Period the GDP fell by 35%, and the economy is yet to recover fully from that fall. Canada helped by re-launching the nickel and cobalt mining industries, by starting a new national beer brewery, and by providing large numbers of snow-bird tourists who leave wintry Canada for the warm Cuban beaches.
The Obama presidency sparked a ray of hope and seemed set to fulfill a 1976 prophesy attributed to Fidel Castro, that the US-Cuban relationship will be normalized only when there is a Black President in the White House and a Latin Pope in the Vatican. What seemed a lasting breakthrough two years ago under President Obama has now suffered a serious setback under the tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump. In the face of Trump’s capitulation to the Cuban diaspora in Florida and his undoing of the diplomatic and co-operational initiatives of President Obama, Cuba is courting Russia once again and the now mighty China to fill the new void created by Trump’s America.
One week might be a long time in politics, as Prime Minister Harold Wilson memorably said, but it is hardly enough time to study or experience a country. And our visit did not include Havana, the nation’s capital and its largest City of 2.2 million people. We spent half our time in the Holguin Province, in a beach resort, and the other half in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second largest City of 400,000 people. Yet, there are enough connections to fuel if not inspire my Sunday column. Writing about Cuba is also an occasion to reflect on Sri Lanka.
The town of Biran where Fidel and Raul were born is in the western part of Holguin Province and not far from Santiago de Cuba; the tour bus from the Holguin resort to Santiago passed by Biran. The impressively articulate and politically informed tour guide pointed to the giant portraits of Fidel and Raul erected at the junction to Biran. Santiago is Cuba’s heroic City. On May 19 there were celebrations in honour of Jose Marti, Cuba’s national hero who was killed in battle on May 19, 1895, while fighting for independence against the Spanish army. Fidel Castro’s ashes are also interned in the Provincial Cemetery in Santiago. We visited Castro’s grave. The epitaph on his gravestone is just one word: "Fidel". For a man known for making fiery speeches running into hours, Mr. Castro wanted just his first name as epitaph.
At the folk level, going by what our tour guide said, Fidel Castro is remembered as the son of a rich sugar plantation owner who sent his son to private Catholic schools in Santiago de Cuba and in Havana to be anchored in the family’s Catholic faith. After high school, he was sent to the university in Havana to study law to protect the family interests. The son repudiated the father in regard to both expectations. Not only did Fidel Castro become an atheist, but he also made Cuba an officially atheist country. And he not only nationalized the land in Cuba, but also included in it his father’s property.
People refer to the Castros by their first names: Fidel or Raul. Everyone, that is the few I was able to talk with and the tour guide, is nostalgic about the Castro era and not sure how effective or successful the new President will be. They recall Fidel’s charisma, and are aware of Miguel’s lack of it. They are also critical of the many missteps that were taken during the Castro era and recognize that change is necessary.
The recognition of change is also one of the official party lines. Especially in Agriculture, there is official admission, by Raul Castro himself, that a different revolution is necessary. The Soviet-inspired collectivisation program in agriculture has turned what once was a copiously producing country into a country wholly dependent on imports for its food staples. There seems to be a new determination to reverse the disastrous process of collectivisation.
After Fidel’s retirement, there was consensus between the brothers on the number of reform measures that were undertaken by Raul. Earlier, Fidel Castro was known to take responsibility for some serious failures in setting production targets and misallocation of resources, especially in regard to sugar production. While taking responsibility, Fidel would also publicly lament the failure of experts to give more objective advice.
From what I was able to hear and observe, it is fair to describe the legacy of the Castro era as a period of commendable achievement in social welfare and social infrastructure, but disastrous failure in physical infrastructure. Education and Health Services are two areas of Cuba’s greatest accomplishments. But both sectors bear the brunt of dilapidated facilities and total lack of physical infrastructure to match the impressive advances in knowhow and technical expertise. Notwithstanding all their travails, Cuban doctors and medical scientists were the first in the world to develop a treatment to prevent HIV and syphilis infection from being transmitted from the pregnant mother to her fetus. The WHO commended them for this achievement.
Trains apparently first ran in 19th century Cuba, the colony, before they did in Spain, the metropolis. Now there are no trains in Cuba, and the joke is that Cubans still look either way before crossing a track just in case a train might be running in from nowhere. A national network of highways was started with Soviet help but when the Russians withdrew the road system was left half done. 1950s American cars and Soviet era Ladas mingle with more modern German and Japanese tour buses and taxi cabs on Cuban roads. Motor cycles double up as taxis and the Chinese seem to be taking over the supply of buses for local transport.
The ubiquitous national mode of transportation is really the horse and buggy on tire-mounted wheels. The buggies are permitted to travel on all roadways and the speeding motor vehicles have to slow down and wait for their turn to overtake the slow-moving buggies. Road rules are observed scrupulously even though the traffic on the road is not that heavy. Local roads where people live are typically unpaved and often rutted. But the road system and road allowance are firmly established and serve as corridors for power transmission. Electric power supply would seem to cover the entire country, while water supply and sewage facilities seem woefully inadequate. Overall cleanliness is clearly observable and there is no littering or garbage heaps along the roadside or in public areas.
Sri Lanka’s fascination with Cuba
As islands go, Cuba is about twice as large as Sri Lanka in area, but with half the population of Sri Lanka. The Cuban revolution and the names of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara inspired a whole generation of Sri Lankan leftists born in the 1940s and 1950s. At the state level the centre-left governments in Sri Lanka maintained close ties with Havana. The two countries were leading members of the Non-Aligned group of countries. Fidel Castro visited Sri Lanka along with Marshal Tito and Indira Gandhi to attend the 1976 Non-Aligned summit gathering in Colombo that Sri Lanka hosted. In 1977, Sri Lanka turned its back on two decades of state-led economic development to gamble on the fortunes of a free market economy. The transition was neither thorough nor well executed, and it has turned out to be rather haphazard and uneven, often times reinforcing the vices of the state and the market rather than their virtues.
Sri Lanka’s liberalization of the economy was part of a broader political agenda – to re-orient Sri Lanka firmly in the western camp where it was for the first eight years after independence (1948-1956) and away from the non-aligned family of nations where it was trying to establish a prominent presence for the next twenty years (1956-1976). It may not be known widely now that the architect of this shift, President Junius Richard Jayewardene (called ‘Yankee Dick’ by his detractors on the Left), wanted to demonstrate his global inclinations rather dramatically by walking out of the 1980 Non-Aligned Summit hosted by Cuba in Havana. Only the special pleadings of President Jayewardene’s more circumspect Foreign Affairs Minister, ACS Hameed, saved Sri Lanka from what would have been a global embarrassment for the country.
Apart from politics and statistics, the Cuban landscape and climate, its flora and fauna and fruits, and its beaches have much in common with Sri Lanka. We even saw a fully grown murunga tree in a small house garden. Apparently, Cubans use the murunga leaves and flowers for medicinal purposes. Murunga fruits are not cooked and eaten but used as a cure for stomach ulcer.
Familiar fruits range from papaya to mangoes to large and delicious guavas. Sea food has much in common including the seer fish that goes as sierra. But as in Sri Lanka, food is a lot cheaper and much more readily available to tourists than to the local people. Although the exchange rate to USD is much lower in Cuba than in Sri Lanka, the people’s purchasing power is abysmally low and limits consumption to bare minimum levels.
At the same time, Cuba’s social welfare net protects people from the perils of private poverty and the threat of starvation. People are generally healthy with average life expectancy that matches that in the first world. There is no homelessness, and education and health services are universally accessible. Universal access to education is also the window to economic and employment opportunities. In the tourism sector, it is said that frontline workers must be fluent in at least two European languages besides Spanish. Language training is provided in schools, and recruitment to jobs is based on merit and not family contacts. There is no denying that connections to the Communist Party would always help, but only if the basic qualifications are satisfied.
Wages appear to be higher in sectors that are more critical to the economy than others. Anecdotally, it is often said that people in the tourism sector might be earning more than what Cuban doctors and engineers might be making. This might be criticized as extreme state regulation, but contrast this with jurisdictions in North America where systems of health insurance, public and private, are often forced to cut back on health services to pay back the doctors.
There are those who still insist that Cuba’s social welfare advancements in the Castro era are a myth because in 1959, when Castro’s revolutionaries captured power, Cuba’s health and education sectors were already well advanced relative to other Latin American countries and even by world standards. At the time of the revolution, Havana was one of the more glittering cities of Latin America to those who wanted a haven for gambling, golfing and sunbathing. Cuba was the most popular destination for American tourists and the Cuban economy was in the palms of American industrial and agricultural corporations.
On the other hand, a third of the Cuban society was seriously deprived from what was available to the upper two-thirds of society. Outside Havana, there was widespread resentment against the exploitative status quo and the Batista dictatorship that protected it. It was this resentment that Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries harnessed to overthrow Batista from power and establish a new revolutionary government.
Initially, both the US government and the Castro regime were quite interested in developing a friendly relationship. But the new government’s land reform measures angered the American corporations, and the wealthy Batista beneficiaries who fled to Florida became an implacable constituency within America insisting on the US government doing everything to eradicate the Castro regime root and branch. Even now, the Cuban Americans in Florida, who voted for Trump to spite President Obama, would want Trump to do nothing less than what the Eisenhower Administration set out to do in 1959. It’s never easy, as Cubans might say.
Mauricio Macri arrives to the 7th anniversary ceremony of the Metropolitan Police in Buenos Aires on October 28, 2015. (JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images)
One week might be a long time in politics, as Prime Minister Harold Wilson memorably said, but it is hardly enough time to study or experience a country. And our visit did not include Havana, the nation’s capital and its largest City of 2.2 million people. We spent half our time in the Holguin Province, in a beach resort, and the other half in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second largest City of 400,000 people. Yet, there are enough connections to fuel if not inspire my Sunday column. Writing about Cuba is also an occasion to reflect on Sri Lanka.