The Cuba Embargo: Isolating America

 

by Ted Snider Posted on November 21, 2022

 

Once a year, Cuba raises its head above the fence around America’s backyard and calls out to the world to condemn its imprisonment. And, once a year, the US, despite all its lofty rhetoric of international order and democracy, ignores the voice of the United Nations General Assembly and goes on starving the people of Cuba.

In thirty consecutive votes since 1992, the UN General Assembly has overwhelmingly condemned the US embargo of Cuba. 

Last year the vote against the US was 184-2. The US and Israel voted against ending the embargo and Ukraine, Colombia and Brazil abstained.

This year, on November 3, the condemnation of the US was even stronger. The US lost one of its abstaining allies and was condemned by the world by a vote of 185-2. Only Israel voted with the US, and only Ukraine and Brazil abstained. 

William LeoGrande, Professor of Government at American University and a specialist in US foreign policy toward Latin America, told me that "The recent UN vote represents the most complete repudiation of the US embargo by the world community since the annual resolution was first introduced 30 years ago."

In all the world, only Israel voted with the US. "Ukraine," LeoGrande explained, "abstained in deference to the support it receives from Washington in its war with Russia."

Changes in the voting patterns of Brazil and Columbia are telling forecasts for future UN condemnations of the US. In 2021, Colombia abstained. But this year’s election of Gustavo Petro as president ended a long line of presidents who swore fealty to the US. Columbia has long been the key to US projection into Latin America. Biden had “said many times that Colombia is the keystone of U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean.” He has called the relationship between the two nations “the essential partnership we need in this hemisphere,” and Colombia “the linchpin . . . to the whole hemisphere.”

In this year’s General Assembly vote, Petro’s Colombia broke lose and voted against the US. A month earlier, in October, Petro asked US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to remove Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism."

Petro has also returned Colombia’s ambassador to Venezuela, fulfilling his election promise to fully restore diplomatic relations with Venezuela. Petro and Venezuela’s President Maduro recently discussed the strengthening of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, of which Cuba is a member.

In 2019, Brazil, under Jair Bolsonaro, became the first Latin American country to vote with the US and against condemning the embargo. The break from Latin American consensus seemed to be the product of Bolsonaro’s calculated desire to improve relations with Donald Trump and the US. LeoGrande called this year’s Brazilian abstention "a parting ideological shot from Bolsanaro." It will be Brazil’s last.

With the recent election of Lula da Silva as president of Brazil, Brazil will return to a policy of breaking free of US hegemony in the region and stressing regional integration. Celso Amorim, Lula’s foreign minister in his first round as president and his current foreign policy advisor, says that Latin American integration is still crucial to Lula’s foreign policy. 

The elections of Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Lula DA Silva in Brazil forecast an even stronger repudiation and isolation of the US in future General Assembly votes condemning the embargo.

Though usually attributed to Kennedy, the genesis of the US embargo on Cuba goes back to the Eisenhower administration. On January 25, 1960, President Eisenhower suggested that the US navy “quarantine” Cuba. “If they are hungry,” the President fumed, “they will throw Castro out.” His ambassador to Cuba, Philip W. Bonsal, chided him with a moral reminder: “We should not punish the whole Cuban people for the acts of one abnormal man.”

Less than a year later, that moral restraint had disintegrated. In October, the US banned exports to Cuba except food and medicine, planting the seed of the embargo that grips Cuba to this day. In February 1962, Kennedy would water that seed and lock the people of Cuba under a full economic embargo. With growing cruelty, in January 1964, Johnson moved to include food and medicine in the embargo. By 2018, that embargo had cost Cuba $130 billion, according to the UN.  

Though, campaigning to be president in March 2020, Biden promised that he would "promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights," he did not. 

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez has said that the first fourteen months of the Biden administration has cost Cuba $6.35 billion, or more than $15 million every day. This year, speaking before the General Assembly, he called the embargo "a deliberate act of economic warfare with the purpose of preventing financial income to the country, destroying the government’s ability to meet the needs of the population, causing the economy to collapse and creating a situation of ungovernability." He wondered aloud "What would Cuba be like today, if it had had those resources?"

The US has strangled the people of Cuba for sixty years in an attempt to maintain hegemony in its backyard and to strangle alternative forms of government. But it also, LeoGrande told me, "continues to oppose the annual resolution partly out of inertia – a policy once in place tends to stay in place." Electoral cynicism also plays a role. LeoGrande said Biden’s policy is also "partly because abstaining, as the Obama administration did in 2016, would be denounced by Florida Republicans as Biden being soft on communism on the eve of the mid-term elections."

UN General Assembly votes are not legally binding. But the US has recently insisted, in other contexts, that the votes reflect world opinion and carry moral and democratic weight. If that’s true, then the US has a moral and democratic responsibility to follow the international order it claims to defend and end the embargo on Cuba.

 

Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.

 

READ MORE:

https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2022/11/20/the-cuba-embargo-isolating-america/

 

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MERRY CHRISTMAS, JULIAN....

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“The war in Ukraine is not a Call of Duty fantasy. It is an enlargement of the human tragedy that NATO’s eastward expansion created. The victims do not live in North America. They live in a region that most Americans can’t find on a map. Washington urged the Ukrainians to fight. Now Washington must urge them to stop.” Colonel Douglas MacGregor, The American Conservative

 

BY MIKE WHITNEY

 

Volodymyr Zelensky did not fly across the Atlantic so he could deliver a speech to the US Congress. That was not the purpose of his trip. The real objective was to produce a galvanizing event that would create the illusion of broad-based public support for the war. That is why the speech was broadcast on all the mainstream media channels and that is why Congress repeatedly greeted Zelensky with raucous applause. Once again, the cadres of voracious elites who control the political levers of power in America, are determined to drag the country to war, which is why they portray a cross-dressing “thug in a gym suit” as a Churchillian figure of unshakable principles. It’s all public relations. It’s all an attempt to garner support for a conflict which will soon involve young American men and women who will be asked to die so that wealthy elites can maintain their grip on global power.

Zelensky’s trip to Capitol Hill was timed to coincide with Putin’s winter offensive, which is expected to crush the Ukrainian Armed Forces and bring the war to a swift end. The Biden administration understands the situation but does not have weaponry or manpower to impact the outcome. That doesn’t mean, however, that Washington doesn’t have a plan for prolonging the conflict or beefing up its combat forces. It does have a plan, that is evident by the way the administration has rejected negotiations at every turn. What that tells us is that Washington is still committed to defeating Russia whatever the cost. In practical terms, that means that the US must create an incident that will serve as a justification for escalation. The incident could be related to Zelensky’s unexpected trip to Washington or, perhaps, it could be linked to the detonation of a nuclear device somewhere in Ukraine. Check out this excerpt from an article at RT:

The risk of Kiev attempting to build a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ remains, a senior Russian diplomat has said….

“Ukraine has the potential necessary to make a ‘dirty bomb,’ it doesn’t take much effort. Especially since Ukraine has been a nation advanced in nuclear technology since the Soviet times, [and] has many technologies and expertise,” Mikhail Ulyanov told journalists on Wednesday, as quoted by RIA Novosti…

General Igor Kirillov, the commander of the Russian military branch responsible for protecting troops from weapons of mass destruction, claimed in October that Kiev was “at the final stage” of producing a dirty bomb.” (https://www.rt.com/russia/568659-ukraine-dirty-bomb-ulyanov/" href="https://www.rt.com/russia/568659-ukraine-dirty-bomb-ulyanov/">“Radioactive threat from Kiev persists – Moscow“, RT)

The means by which a false flag is carried out, is completely irrelevant. What matters is that — according to political analyst John Mearsheimer– “The United States is in this to win”, that is, the US foreign policy establishment is not prepared to let the Russian army prevail in Ukraine and impose its own settlement. They’re going to find a way to intensify the conflict and bring foreign troops into the theater. That’s the objective, and that’s what they’ll do once they’ve figured out an excuse for escalation. Bottom line: The US is not going to throw in the towel and call it quits. This is a long-term project that could drag on for years if not decades.

 

Political analyst Kurt Nimmo thinks that NATO might join the fighting. Here’s a short blurb from Nimmo’s latest at Global Research:

If Olga Lebedeva and Pravda.ru can be believed, NATO is on the verge of entering the war in Ukraine.

“Such announcements were heard from officials of the Polish Ministry of Defence, the General Staff of the NATO alliance, officers of the French army and (of course) the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence,” according to Lebedeva.

“The main reason would be the very next Russian general offensive that NATO is planning and which according to it would decimate the Ukrainian army not only in the Donbass but also on the Kiev side (many Russian units are in combat situation in Belarus at the borders with Ukraine),” explains Rusreinfo.ru, a Russian website.

But NATO has always been very clear: Ukraine CANNOT LOSE. For Washington, the only solution would therefore be for NATO forces to enter Ukraine, hoping that this will end the Russian offensive. The calculation is that Vladimir Putin will not want to directly face NATO with the possible (nuclear) consequences, and will therefore then retreat.” (“NATO Decides to Attack Russia in Ukraine– Ukraine is unable to defeat Russia. The next step is for direct NATO involvement“, Kurt Nimmo, Global Research)

Nimmo could be right but, maybe not. It appears to me that NATO is hopelessly divided on the issue. A number of NATO countries will not join in a war against Russia regardless of the circumstances or the amount of pressure from the White House. The more likely scenario was presented by Colonel Douglas MacGregor who laid it out in an article at The American Conservative on Tuesday. Here’s what he said: .

The Biden administration’s unconditional support for the Zelensky regime in Kiev is reaching a strategic inflection point not unlike the one LBJ reached in 1965… Like South Vietnam in the 1960s, Ukraine is losing its war with Russia… The real danger now is that Biden will soon appear on television to repeat LBJ’s performance in 1965, substituting the word “Ukraine” for “South Vietnam”:

“Tonight, my fellow Americans I want to speak to you about freedom, democracy, and the struggle of the Ukrainian people for victory. No other question so preoccupies our people. No other dream so absorbs the millions who live in Ukraine and Eastern Europe… However, I am not talking about a NATO attack on Russia. Rather, I propose to send a U.S. led coalition of the willing, consisting of American, Polish, and Romanian armed forces into Ukraine, to establish the ground equivalent of a “no-fly zone.” The mission I propose is a peaceful one, to create a safe zone in the Western most portion of Ukraine for Ukrainian Forces and refugees struggling to survive Russia’s devastating attacks…”

NATO’s governments are divided in their thinking about the war in Ukraine. Except for Poland and, possibly, Romania, none of NATO’s members are in a rush to mobilize their forces for a long, grueling war of attrition with Russia in Ukraine. No one in London, Paris, or, Berlin wants to run the risk of a nuclear war with Moscow. Americans do not support going to war with Russia, and those few who do are ideologues, shallow political opportunists, or greedy defense contractors.” (“Washington is Prolonging Ukraine’s Suffering“, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, The American Conservative)

This, I think, is the much more plausible scenario. The Biden Administration will enlist a handful of countries that agree to troop deployments to west Ukraine ostensibly for humanitarian reasons. At the same time, they will allow disparate Ukrainian forces to continue the random shelling of Russia-controlled areas as well as locations on Russian soil. There will undoubtedly be an effort to control the skies over west Ukraine (no-fly zone) and to conduct attacks on Russian formations in the east. Most important, vital supplylines from Poland will remain open to accommodate the flow of men, munitions and lethal weaponry to the front. MacGregor appears to anticipate these developments given his comments at the beginning of the article. Here’s what he said:

During a speech given on November 29, Polish Vice-Minister of National Defense (MON) Marcin Ociepa said: “The probability of a war in which we will be involved is very high. Too high for us to treat this scenario only hypothetically.”The Polish MON is allegedly planning to call up 200,000 reservists in 2023 for a few weeks’ training, but observers in Warsaw suspect this action could easily lead to a national mobilization.

Meanwhile, inside the Biden administration, there is growing concern that the Ukrainian war effort will collapse under the weight of a Russian offensive. And as the ground in Southern Ukraine finally freezes, the administration’s fears are justified. In an interview published in the Economist, head of Ukraine’s armed forces General Valery Zaluzhny admitted that Russian mobilization and tactics are working. He even hinted that Ukrainian forces might be unable to withstand the coming Russian onslaught.”(“Washington is Prolonging Ukraine’s Suffering“, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, The American Conservative)

The plan to lure Russia into a war in Ukraine goes back at least a decade. And what we know now from comments by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is that Washington never sought a peaceful resolution to the conflict but worked tirelessly to install a Russia-hating regime in Kiev that would help it to prosecute its war on Russia. The gathering of nearly 600,000 Russian combat troops in or around Ukraine threatens to derail Washington’s strategy and end the war on Russia’s terms. Washington can’t allow that to happen. It cannot allow the world to see that it was beaten by Russia. Thus, Washington must pursue the only option left to them, the deployment of US troops to Ukraine. 

Perhaps, cooler heads will prevail and the administration will pull back from the brink, but we think that is highly unlikely. We think the decision has already been made: We think the United States is going to war with Russia.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/why-putins-winter-offensive-will-prompt-us-entry-into-the-war/

 

 

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SEE ALSO:

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

russia seeks arms control agreements to prevent dangerous escalation. the US empire wants shit........

 

imagine a world without capitalism......

 

avoiding war....

 

LET'S HOPE THE IDIOTS IN WASHINGTON DIE FROM BLOATED FARTS, BEFORE THEY DO ANYTHING..... THIS IS GETTING SERIOUS AND, UNFORTUNATELY, 99 PER CENT OF THE PEOPLE IN THE WEST ARE ASLEEP, WHEN THEY SHOULD GO IN THE STREET AND PROTEST AGAINST FEEDING WEAPONS TO THE UKRAINIAN TURD, ZELENSKAKA.... GO BACK TO DICK-PIANO PLAYING, VOLODYMYR, YOU'RE A SAD DANGEROUS POX ON THE PLANET!

HOPE FOR A PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT. NOTE: RUSSIA CANNOT ABANDON THE DONBASS REGIONS. THIS IS A GIVEN. SO JOE, PLEASE COME TO YOUR SENSES: IT'S CHRISTMAS AND COMING TO TERMS WITH THE RUSSIANS DEMANDS WOULD BE A MAGNIFICENT XMAS GIFT TO THE WORLD. PLEASE JOE! PLEASE!

 

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By Paul Collins

 

As we end 2022, we seem besotted with rumours of war. In contrast, the central message of Christmas is God’s gift in Christ of peace, justice, humility and joy. 

There’s been much commentary in Pearls and Irritations lately on the somewhat overblown rhetoric in official circles, both here and overseas, about China’s intentions regarding Taiwan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US bellicosity generally, cyber warfare and Australia’s one-day-in-the-future acquisition of nuclear submarines.

The result is that nowadays we confront the precise question that the Basso asks in the aria from Handel’s Messiah: ‘Why do the nations so furiously rage together: and why do the people imagine a vain thing?’ The text is from Psalm 2 and he answers the question, singing: ‘Let us break their [rulers] bonds asunder, and cast away their yokes from us.’ The Tenor takes-up the theme: ‘He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them [rulers] to scorn: the Lord shall have them in derision’ (Psalm 2:1-4).

I love the notion that God laughs at the powerful. This applies to all warmongers; God holds them ‘in derision,’ in utter contempt. The Tenor then outlines their fate: ‘Thou shall break them with a rod of iron; thou shall dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’ (Psalm 2:9).

And then, as though celebrating the defeat of powerful warmongers, the chorus immediately breaks into the greatest of all musical triumphs: ‘Hallelujah: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth…The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever…King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. Hallelujah!’ (Revelation 11:6,15,16; 19:16).

I thank God every Christmas for George Frederick Handel and for the man who assembled The Messiah texts from the King James Bible, Charles Jennens.

The great Oratorio notwithstanding, when confronting Realpolitik of rumours of war, it’s easy to sentimentalise Christmas with vague humanistic references to ‘goodwill’, ‘peace’ and ‘joy’, while draining the season of its radical Christian meaning. Beyond the commercial kitsch and secular squeamishness about offending multicultural sensibilities with too much Christianity, lies the fact that this season is explicitly a commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ, God with us.

Fear not, I’m not going-off on a diatribe about putting Christ back into Christmas. But I’m saying that this is an explicitly Christian celebration focused around the belief that, as John’s gospel says, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…that the world might be saved’ (3:16-17). With Christ as the focus and link, Christmas commemorates the intimate interconnection between God and creation, the material natural world with all its beauty, biodiversity and complexity.

The Christian belief underpinning this interconnection is called the incarnation, the belief that God in Christ is one with us ‘in the flesh.’ A fundamental characteristic of Christianity is the importance it places on matter, on that which roots us in the history and processes of the earth. For Christianity, matter really matters. Jesus is not an abstraction, a mere appearance of the divine in an adopted and disposable body. He is fully and completely one of us.

In biblical anthropology the word ‘flesh’ is fundamentally important. God alone is ‘Spirit’. Everything else is flesh, σάρξ, sarx in Greek, בשר, basar in Hebrew. These biblical words don’t just refer to the ‘meat’ of the person, the material in contradistinction to the spiritual. For the Bible a person isn’t a soul inhabiting a body; a person is a body, a psycho-spiritual unity.

In this sense ‘the Word became flesh’ in Jesus born to a homeless family in a stable with animals as companions. The vulnerability of Jesus’ infancy symbolises God’s commitment to the world.

The most fundamental heresy Christianity faces is spiritualising the sheer materiality of the incarnation which embraces humankind and the natural world. This temptation came early in Christian history with Gnosticism, followed by Neo-Platonism with its claim that immortality was achieved by despising the body and returning to the supposedly pure, limpid life of the soul, corrupting Christian theology ever since.

The incarnation means that Jesus embraces the entire human experience, including the struggle to comprehend suffering. Charles Jennens understood this when he included texts from the ‘Servant’s Song’ in Isaiah’s prophecy (52:13-53:12). God’s faithful servant ‘was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53:3). But the prophet grasped the redemptive value of suffering: ‘For the transgressions of thy people was he stricken’ (53:8).

But the story of Jesus doesn’t end with death. As the magnificent Soprano aria says: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’ (Job 19: 25–26); ‘For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep’ (I Corinthians 15:20).

And just in case you missed it, the Chorus sings: ‘Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (I Corinthians 15:21-22). The Mezzo and Tenor repeat this theme: ‘Since by man came death, by man [Jesus] came also the resurrection of the dead’ (I Corinthians 15:21).

Finally, the Basso sings: ‘The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed’ (I Corinthians 15:52). In the resurrection ‘Death is swallowed in victory’ (I Corinthians 15:54).

Put simply, Christmas is about the birth of the eternal life for all creation that transcends war, power-mongering and human stupidity.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/christmas-war-and-peace/

 

UNFORTUNATELY, NONE (NONE: ZERO, NADA, NOT ANY, НИКТО) OF THE LEADERS OF THE WORLD REALLY BELIEVE IN GOD, CHRISTMAS, OR IN THE SEASONAL GOODWILL — THOUGH PUTIN COMES CLOSE TO BEING THE SAVIOUR OF THE RUSSIANS LIVING IN THE DONBASS REGION...

ZELENSKY HAS DEMONISED THE ORTHODOX CHURCHES OF UKRAINE. WHILE ZELENSKY IS WINNING THE AMERICAN PROPAGANDA P.R. (WHO WOULD NOT COMPARED WITH A DITHERING SENILE PRESIDENT DREAMING OF CROSSING THE RUBICON SOON AND WISHING TO BE SEEN GENEROUS WITH THE MONEYS OF ORDINARY AMERICANS), ZELENSKY IS LOOSING THE "WAR" (RUSSIAN INTERVENTION TO CLEAN UP UKRAINE — HOW GENEROUS OF PUTIN).

 

SEE:

corrupt volodymyr as a replacement for his dead son and a match to the other one — the corrupt hunter......

 

PLEASE NOTE THERE IS NO ETERNAL LIFE. SEE:

when la madonna gave birth to a gun.....

 

GUS LEONISKY

CARTOONIST SINCE 1951 AND RABID ATHEIST.

 

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