Poor Cuba: So Far from God, So Close to the United States

While studying abroad at the University of Havana in 2003, I had a conversation with a Cuban student who expressed to me some mocking trepidation that the U.S. embargo (or "blockade," in Cuban parlance) would soon be lifted.

"Then we're in real trouble," he related. "All the computer software we have down here is pirated, and if the U.S. finds out, they'll take it away from us."

Four years later, he clearly still has nothing to worry about.

Stumbling into its 46th year, the beleaguered U.S. policy of "stand[ing] with the Cuban people as they stand up for their liberty" shows no signs of fading away any time soon - indeed, in spite of opposition from virtually the entire world (minus the usual dependencies of Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands, per a 2006 UN vote), agricultural interests in the U.S. who want to increase trade with the island, and many members of Congress, U.S. policy towards Cuba has taken an even more draconian turn in recent years.

In 2004, Washington implemented changes preventing Cuban Americans from visiting anyone but immediate family members on the island, and limiting how often they can do so (curiously, sans protest from Focus on the Family or other "family values" crusaders). Study abroad programs for U.S. university students were mostly banned.

In 2006, the U.S. announced "more vigorous investigations and more aggressive prosecutions" of embargo-violators, real scum of the earth who dare to visit the island to deliver humanitarian aid, or, say, because they don't think that the government has the right to tell them where not to travel. Tellingly, a 2004 investigation by the Associated Press found that "The Treasury Department agency entrusted with blocking the financial resources of terrorists has assigned five times as many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to track Osama bin Laden's and Saddam Hussein's money."

Though critiques of U.S. policy towards Cuba are obvious, and accepted by basically every nation in the world - Cuba isn't quite a "tropical gulag," and it's wrong in principle to force food and medical scarcities on a population for geopolitical gain - it is especially significant in this case the extent to which U.S. policy contradicts U.S. policy goals.

While its deleterious effects are very real, the U.S. embargo/blockade functions, in essence, as Cuba's "War on Terror": a blanket excuse Havana can use for any related or unrelated problem in the country (dissidents? food shortages?), and an automatic justification for whatever repressive measures the government proposes.

One could argue that Washington simply doesn't get the point - that its policies are propping up the Cuban government - though the political establishment in the U.S. clearly understands the idea of fear mongering to beat its own population into submission.

In reality, the embargo/blockade's endurance is better explained by the fact that there is a potential outcome for U.S. imperial interests that is far more dangerous than strengthening the hand of the Cuban government - it's admitting that the embargo/blockade against Cuba hasn't worked, and in the process giving other poor nations the idea that they too can outlast or overcome superpower assault.

Though the embargo/blockade clearly strengthens the Cuban government in the ways mentioned above, it will thus stick around as long as the price for getting rid of it is the empire's aura of invincibility.

Outhawking the Republicans - Democrats and Darfur

While the Bush administration has taken very little action on Darfur (unless "action" can be defined by empty rhetorical flourishes, coddling members of Sudan's intelligence apparatus, and castrating aid organizations and the African Union deployment), the major Democratic presidential contenders have staked out highly bellicose ground in their "solutions" to the conflict, seeking to play to Save Darfur activists who are rearing for confrontation with Khartoum and prove their own meddle in managing the ever-invoked "War on Terror."

Far from consideration for the candidates is how this militant posturing, if actually carried out, would affect the masses of suffering Darfurians.

Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama (amongst others), all support a no-fly zone for Darfur - a potentially catastrophic idea (see our previous post on the topic) with little possible upside for suffering Darfurians, as the majority of attacks against civilians are carried out not from the air, but on the ground. Instead, the imposition of a no-fly zone is likely to provoke Khartoum into unleashing its wrath on Darfurian civilians and the AU deployment, and worsen the already dire circumstances in which aid organizations operate in the region.

Others of the candidates' stances plunge further into the depths of dangerousness and irrationality.

Clinton, for one, has floated the idea of blockading the Port of Sudan, a measure that is at least tantamount to an act of war.

Like Clinton, who pledged to "work with NATO to take military action” in Sudan if Khartoum does not allow a UN-AU deployment into the country, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE), evidently seeking to make an already calamitous situation even worse, proposes unilaterally sending US troops into Sudan, a "humanitarian intervention" that conjures (at best) the disastrous US-led deployment in the early 1990s to Somalia.

The direct involvement of NATO or even US troops in a potential "peacekeeping" force in Sudan, as suggested by some, would in all probability lead to Sudanese groups "start[ing] a jihad against it," in the words of Jan Pronk, former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Sudan.

While the Democratic frontrunners toy with Darfurian lives for the sake of pandering and bolstering their jingoist credentials, less sexy but more helpful measures remain on the table for actually attempting to mitigate the crisis, the same ones that have been around all along and have been consistently ignored by politicians and many Darfur activists alike: funding aid organizations, pushing an expansion in the size of (and a broadened mandate for) the AU deployment, and seeking a political settlement through promoting a common rebel negotiating front for talks with Khartoum.

Though less conducive to projecting US military might, these are the demands that activists should be pushing for from the potential heirs to the throne of "leader of the free world."

Unfortunately, should their saber-rattling come to fruition, the powers that be of the future instead seem intent on destroying Darfur in order to "save" it.

New Article on Darfur Divestment

We have a new Darfur piece entitled "Divestment: Solution or Diversion?" published in Foreign Policy in Focus - accompanied by an opposing viewpoint piece, authored by Daniel Millenson. Our response to his article should be up soon.

Tallying Death in Darfur

Darfur is regularly called the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster.” Google returns 13,100 hits for a search of the phrase with “Darfur”; pairing it with "Iraq," a much larger killing field, yields only 544 results.

As a politically useful bloodbath which can be used to demonize Arabs and Muslims, exaggerated fatality estimates in Darfur are generally not subjected to serious scrutiny. In contrast, the most serious mortality estimates for Iraq, in particular the 2006 Lancet study, are disparaged and far lower estimates are regularly circulated in the commercial press.

A recent op-ed in the New York Times by Time Magazine's Africa writer Sam Dealey regarding a ruling of the British Advertising Standards Authority broke the pattern. The case concerned ads placed by the Save Darfur Coalition in Britain and the United States in 2006 claiming that 400,000 innocent people had been killed in Darfur.

The subsequent ruling ordered Save Darfur to alter the ads to present the 400,000 figure as opinion rather than fact and “concluded that there was a division of informed opinion about the accuracy of the figure contained in the ad and it should not have been presented in such a definitive way.”

Death toll estimates as high as 400,000 are often cited (though a much lower figure of 200,000 is most common; there is rarely any attempt to explain the discrepancy). As early as April 2006, Eric Reeves ventured that excess mortality in Darfur “significantly exceeds 450,000.”

As the Times piece points out, there is considerable justification for skepticism of the higher estimates. Reviewing a Government Accounting Office study that convened a panel of experts to review six prominent estimates, Dealey concludes that the current death toll is probably around 200,000, which, as he notes, is “just half of what Save Darfur claimed a year ago in its ad and still claims on its Web site.” A September 2006 article in the prestigious journal Science provided a range of 170,000-255,000 total deaths (including natural causes; counting only deaths attributable to the violence would yield a somewhat lower figure).

Alex de Waal, a respected expert on the region, wrote of the numbers controversy, “there is no certainty in these figures. The reality could be different. But the pattern is both clear and familiar, and the best guess is approximately 200,000 excess deaths, plus or minus.”

The debate is not academic. Dealey points out:

Inaccurate data can also lead to prescriptive blunders. During the worst period of violence, for example, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster estimated that nearly 70 percent of Darfur’s excess deaths were due not to violence but to disease and malnutrition. This suggests that policy makers should look for ways to bolster and protect relief groups — by continuing to demand that the Sudanese government not hamper the delivery of aid, to be sure, but also by putting vigorous public pressure, so far lacking, on the dozen rebel groups that routinely raid convoys.

As de Waal observes, “In Darfur, the figures have become more politicized than any in recent history.” Inflating the death toll in Darfur does not further the cause of those seeking an end to the crisis but rather brings discredit to the movement. Moreover, it provides further illustration of the ease with which Darfur activists draw favorable attention and support while activists with causes of no utility to establishment interests or, worse, that are opposed to those interests are by turns ignored and ridiculed.

Weekly Commentary - A No-Fly Zone for Darfur

The chattering classes of liberal politics have spoken. From all the front-runner candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, to the Save Darfur Coalition, important political figures and organizations are publicly advocating a "no-fly zone" as a means to alleviate suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Yet before more ink (and money) is spent on urging the U.S. government to implement such a measure, activists must consider the potential consequences of a no-fly zone in Darfur - beyond the feeling it may give us that we are "doing something" - and the distinct possibility that it could make the situation on the ground even worse.

First, it is important to understand what is being called for in regards to a no-fly zone. By declaring one, the responsible party or parties (likely the U.S. and/or France, due to their nearby air bases) are obliging themselves to "shoot down their [Khartoum's] planes" if they enter into the restricted airspace. Aside from the concern that planes being used for humanitarian purposes could be mistakenly targeted in the no-fly zone, as they are "indistinguishable" from the planes used by Khartoum, the actual shooting down of one of Khartoum's planes could lead the Sudanese government to unleash their fury on the AU presence in Darfur, or the supposed AU/UN contingent that may be deployed in the future.

Yet what will a no-fly zone accomplish for Darfurians, to whose plight the West claims such steadfast commitment?

• In the immediate short-term, Sudan could very well respond to the implementation of a no-fly zone by turning Darfur's long-running tragedy into an outright catastrophe. As noted by the International Crisis Group, "Khartoum might respond by escalating its actions on the ground against civilians, not unlike what happened in the initial days of NATO's actions in Kosovo in 1999."


• Though Khartoum does still drop bombs on Darfur, "the vast majority of attacks are executed by forces on the ground." Accordingly, a no-fly zone "would only weaken a very small piece of Khartoum's killing machine."
  


• A no-fly zone may very well pull the plug on Darfur's massive relief operations. As the Sudan specialist Julie Flint argues,
  

  In the last three and a half years, humanitarian aid has stabilized conditions for the more than 4 million people who currently depend on relief. Mortality and malnutrition have fallen, significantly. If a no-fly zone were imposed, Khartoum would not go belly up. It would in all likelihood retaliate by grounding humanitarian flights. Its proxies in the Janjaweed militias would show their displeasure in the only way they know. Relief workers might be expelled or forced to evacuate the region. People who are now being kept alive would die.
  
  The current emphasis on coercive measures conceals the fact that the US and its friends have no clear plan of political action, no sensible project for peace to go hand in hand with pressure on the Khartoum regime.

Moreover, there is a clear double standard involved in the question of funding a no-fly zone vis-à-vis other measures. As the Sudan analyst Eric Reeves notes, enforcing a no-fly zone would be "extremely resource-consumptive." On the other hand, tellingly, the African Union (AU) mission in Darfur has been severely underfunded, its troops enduring months without pay.

Where are the calls from the crème de la crème of the Democratic Party and the Save Darfur Coalition for ramping up funding the AU - with 7000 troops actually on the ground in Darfur - instead of a financially costly no-fly zone that knowledgeable commentators predict would have even costlier effects in terms of human lives?

Indeed, while it may make activists feel better to think that their advocacy for a no-fly zone is "doing something" for Darfur, the most likely outcome of their activism may be a severe deterioration in the conditions on the ground in Darfur.

Weekly Commentary - Haiti: Surviving the Saviors

Photo: A UN tank looms behind an obviously dangerous Haitian woman, Thony Belizaire/AFP © Getty


Since becoming the world's first independent black republic in 1804, born from history's only successful national slave rebellion, Haiti has suffered more than two centuries of abuse at the hands of Western powers. From France's initial crippling of the Haitian economy, to decades of U.S. military occupation, and subsequent support for the brutal Duvalier dictatorships, Haiti has long been a focal point for Western imperialism. Given this past, and the country's status as "the victim of [the] most US intervention[s] in the 20th century by a long shot," it is unsurprising that Haiti is the Western hemisphere's poorest nation.

It is a long-running storyline that continues largely unabated to the present.

In 1990, the Haitian poor majority experienced a brief period of actual hope, having voted into office Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest and proponent of liberation theology who had become well-known for his devotion to the Haitian masses. Turning to the present, some 17 years later, Aristide finds himself in forced exile in South Africa, the country's social ills continue unaddressed, and an unpopular UN force continues its military occupation of the country.

The question of how the Haitian people have gone in these past 17 years from joy to despair (and there and back again, several times over) is an instructive one, revealing at every turn Washington's continued insistence on crushing moves towards meaningful independence for the country.

From the moment of Aristide's 1990 election - Haiti's first ever popularly elected president - the U.S. "did what it could to undermine him and to funnel support to the Haitian military," an institution almost universally reviled in Haiti for its brutality and servile role to U.S. interests. In 1991, the military overthrew Aristide, triggering public denunciations from Washington that were difficult to take seriously given longstanding U.S. ties to the coup plotters. However, as the governing military regime plunged Haiti further into chaos, threatening the investment climate and swelling the number of Haitian refugees fleeing to the U.S. to escape the carnage, Washington threatened to invade the country in 1994 in order to reinstall Aristide.

Despite misgivings about U.S. motives, most Haitians were glad to see the U.S. take action, and heaped praise on the U.S. soldiers who oversaw the transition back to civilian government. As noted in The Progressive, the majority of Haitians wanted the U.S. "to come in and obliterate the Haitian army."

Whatever the initial feelings of euphoria, it was also clear that the U.S. exacted a heavy price from Aristide in return for his being permitted to reassume the Haitian presidency. As reported in the same piece, Washington pressured the Aristide government to:

...put its name to a "structural adjustment plan" of the sort usually advanced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—namely, the cutting of gov­ernment bureaucracies and public programs, the privati­sation of publicly-owned utilities, the promotion of exports, and an "open-investment policy" that would slash tariffs and eliminate any import restrictions that might trammel investors, especially those of the foreign variety. Haitian-American scholar Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, speaking of the Paris agreements, complained that "the Haitian delegation to the World Bank signed away the economic independence of the country."

After serving out his presidency, and sitting out for a term as required by the Haitian constitution, Aristide was nevertheless again elected in 2000, buoyed by the new Lavalas political party, which he had founded to combat privatization and the role of international financial institutions.

In confronting the same powerful groups and nations as before, Aristide was again overthrown in 2004. In what he describes as his "modern kidnapping" by the U.S. military, Aristide was taken - without his consent or knowledge - to the Central African Republic; he remains in exile in South Africa, still unable to serve the remainder of his second term as president.

Shortly after Aristide's overthrow, a UN force (MINUSTAH) deployed in Haiti, initiating an indefinite occupation. Though a supposed example of "humanitarian intervention" aiming to bring stability to Haiti, MINUSTAH has demonstrated a servile attention to the U.S. (as well as Canadian and French) agenda by supporting the political and economic status quo in Haiti and failing to call for the return of the president-in-exile.

MINUSTAH's supposed role in halting violence in Haiti is also far from laudatory, indeed it often does quite the opposite, perpetuating carnage instead. According to a Harvard law report, "MINUSTAH has been the midwife" of the Haitian police in their serious human rights abuses, providing them with "the very implements of repression."

It is quite clear that the UN mission in Haiti is intended to pacify a restive population; indeed, the UN “peacekeeping” force’s behavior is hard to distinguish from that of an occupying army. On two separate occasions, July 6, 2005 and December 22, 2006, the UN troops entered the Port-au-Prince slum of Cité-Soleil in force and killed scores of bystanders. MINUSTAH appears to have intentionally targeted civilians with lethal shots to the head.

There is some evidence to indicate that the UN fired into civilian residential areas from helicopters during the July 6, 2005 attack. In the December 22, 2006 attack, UN forces denied the Haitian Red Cross entry to the area they were attacking and refused to permit the Red Cross to treat injured children.

Given the current buzz surrounding a potential "humanitarian intervention" in Darfur, the poor human rights record of the Haitian incarnation, as well as its servility to Western power, should not soon be forgotten.

Weekly Commentary - The U.S. and Ethiopia: Undermining Stability in Somalia

For the last decade and a half, Somalia has existed without a central government. The 1991 fall from power of the dictator and U.S. ally, Siad Barre, left the country with a power vacuum that would be filled by rival militias. For many Somalis, life for most of this post-1991 period has been defined by chaos and violence.

Stepping into the void, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) began in May 2006 to expand and consolidate its influence, capturing the capital Mogadishu, and establishing a governing authority that would displace the ineffectual transitional government - a body that is widely seen as the creation of foreign powers designed to serve international constituencies instead of the Somali people.

As noted by the International Crisis Group, the UIC, for all its faults, brought "a degree of peace and security unknown to the south for more than fifteen years. Mogadishu was reunited, weapons removed from the streets and the port and airport reopened." Mogadishu residents commented that the UIC liberated the city from the militias and numerous “roadblocks that had functioned like a hundred Berlin Walls.” Such were the restrictions on movement "that some residents had not seen friends and relatives in years, and children living only minutes from the crashing Indian Ocean had never laid eyes on the turquoise water.”

Following the U.S.-Ethiopian ouster of the UIC Islamists in December 2006, Somalia again began to slide into chaos.

What is especially noteworthy in this saga is how the U.S. role has been decisive in squashing these moves towards stability.

Leading up to the invasion, U.S. private military firms operated in Somalia in support of the transitional government, violating a UN arms embargo with the knowledge of the CIA. In the spring of 2006, Washington itself was “bankrolling an alliance of warlords, the same people whose armed gangs are keeping Somalia ungovernable,” in a futile attempt to prevent the UIC from gaining power.

More direct has been Washington's critical support for Ethiopia in its invasion of Somalia.

The U.S.-Ethiopia alliance itself is not new, and nor is Ethiopia's pitiful human rights record. Yet the shared goal of taking out the UIC further strengthened the ties between the two countries.

Demonstrating the closeness of the U.S.-Ethiopian collaboration, in preparation for the invasion Washington sent General John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, to meet with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Veteran journalist Nicola Nasser noted that the U.S. violated its own UN Security Council Resolution (1725) by “providing training, intelligence and consultation to at least 8,000 Ethiopian troops” that entered Somalia in advance of the full invasion, and, as reported, by "mounting air raids on militia targets and stationing a U.S. Navy carrier battle group off the Somali coast."

Somalis were “opposed to foreign intervention” and displayed an “outpouring of popular support” for the UIC and in defense of the country’s sovereignty, though the U.S.-backed Ethiopian forces were able to unseat the UIC in short order.

Initial reports estimated the invasion may have killed about 1,000 people outright, with some 400,000 displaced. In the midst of the invasion, the African Union, UN Secretary-General, and European Union all demanded (to no avail) that Ethiopia withdrawal.

The results of the invasion have been clear. With the warlords returned to power, Mogadishu has seen "a steady breakdown of law and order," while the World Food Program reported that the invasion forced the organization to halt deliveries of food aid serving as many as a half million Somalis suffering from food shortages as a result of flooding.

Though it has managed to evade the careful eyes of Western media, a report from the Secretary-General of the UN estimates that over one third of those killed and injured in 2006 during the fighting were children, and that the transitional government has recruited and used child soldiers.

Nevertheless, in a disgraceful display of fealty to the world superpower, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in his first formal press conference, refused to call the U.S.-Ethiopian aggression towards Somalia illegal under international law (though it clearly was).

However, the Security Council itself is “complicit” in the attack upon Somalia, as pointed out by former UN spokesperson Salim Lone. Aside from its silence regarding Ethiopian aggression, the Council passed in November a resolution supporting the very weak transitional government, a body devoid of popular support. As noted, the resolution came at a time when Somalia was experiencing more peace and security, thanks to the UIC, than it had seen in many years. Qatar, supported by the Arab League, sponsored a non-binding Security Council resolution demanding that “all foreign forces immediately withdraw from the territories of Somalia and cease their military operations inside Somalia.” The resolution was killed as a result of opposition by the U.S. and others to the phrase.

Yet if the invasion was bad, its aftermath has been catastrophic.

In a particularly bloody period starting in March, some 1,300 people were killed, representing the worst violence that Mogadishu had seen in 16 years. In May 2007, John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, said the crisis of displaced persons and refugees in Somalia had become a worse than that of Darfur, and accused the warring parties of violating international law. Since February, 340,000 people were displaced - in addition to the 400,000 who fled following the invasion, though some may indeed have been forced to abandon their homes more than once.

Further, as acknowledged by the German ambassador to Sudan, the foreign-backed Somali government is also guilty of “indiscriminate use of air strikes and heavy artillery in Mogadishu's densely populated areas, the raping of women, the deliberate blocking of urgently needed food and humanitarian supplies, and the bombing of hospitals. This is a relentless drive to terrify and intimidate civilians belonging to clans” opposed to the occupation.

Such is the "complicated legacy" of the U.S. in Somalia, in the delicate phrasing of the New York Times. Less complicated has been the both initial and ongoing U.S. support for the destabilization of Somalia at the hands of its Ethiopian allies.