Gross: What Happened Between March and August?

by Arnold August

Cartoon by Latuff

On August fifth it was announced that the fifteen-year sentence arising out of the March fourth Provincial Court trial against Alan Gross, a US AID contractor, was upheld by the Cuban Supreme Court. The American citizen appealed the decision of the Provincial Court in Cuba's highest level of the judiciary on June 22, the result of which was made public on August fifth.

Regarding this issue, since March fourth to date the international media, especially based in Miami, Washington and Madrid, are concentrating on Havana, the Gross trials and legal challenges.

For those who may be puzzled by the Supreme Court decision, it would be useful to examine briefly what has happened in the United States — not Cuba — between March fourth to date in order to perhaps shed some light onto the Supreme Court's confirmation of the lower court's resolution. In this five-month period, the Obama Administration has on many occasions repeated its policy of interfering in the internal affairs of Cuba under the guise of "democracy promotion". For example, the Congress has recently ratified once again the decision to spend 20$ million in the next year explicitly dedicated to subversion in Cuba, including the type of activities that Gross had carried out and for which he has been arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced. On many occasions the Obama Administration in collaboration with their mercenaries on and off the island did not reduce, but rather reinforced, their provocative activities against the sovereignty of Cuba, one of the legal principles violated by Gross as a US agent contractor.

While Obama visited Chile on March 21, 2011, not long after the original trial and sentencing of Gross, the US President spoke about the need to defend "democracy and human rights within our borders [USA and Chile], let us recommit to defending them across our hemisphere.... And yes, that includes the people of Cuba."

How do readers think that the Cuban government and judiciary had taken this? By adding insult to injury, Obama stated in an interview to a Chilean newspaper as a prelude to his visit to Santiago de Chile that "The Chilean experience, and more particularly its successful transition to democracy and its sustained, growing economy, is a model for the region and the world."

When the news was released on August fifth regarding the Cuban Supreme Court decision, it was the same day that those of us who follow the news through Telesúr and other alternative media were able to bear witness to how the Chilean police violently attacked the students and professors demanding education, economic and political rights. There were according to official sources 874 arrests and hundreds wounded. Is this the example that Obama meant of Chile being a model of democracy and economic development for Cuba? The scenes of Chilean state brutality resembled more the emblematic steps (Escalanita) of the University of Havana before the January 1, 1959 Triumph of the Revolution, when the US-backed Batista dictatorship unleashed their forces so many times against the youth, professors and workers. Many students were killed in these assaults in Havana, but so far at the time of writing in any case, there has been no deaths in Chile during the course of the current confrontations.

Despite the demands to Obama from around the world declared by Nobel Prize winners, individual parliamentarians, parliaments and personalities for the release of the Cuban Five, what has Obama done between March fourth and today? He has done nothing, and we are heading into a most crucial period for the soon-to-be concluded Habeus Corpus process for Gerardo Hernández Nodelo, with nothing yet positive in sight at this time. The Cuban Five are imprisoned since 1998 because they attempted to curb US-backed terrorist interference in the internal affairs of Cuba.

Given all these provocations and repeated confirmations from the White House and the US Congress that they have every intention to continue their program of attempting to subvert Cuba's constitutional order, how else can the Cuban government and judicial authorities react? They have no choice but to make it clear that they will continue to defend their sovereignty as it is the right of every country to do so, big or small.

Allan Gross and his family should blame their own government for their predicament. The White House got him into it in the first place. By carrying out the same policies against Cuba since March fourth to date, it has given no reason for the Cuban judiciary to decide otherwise.

WFDY on riots in Britian

WFDY condemns the reckless violence and widespread criminality of recent nights, however we understand it as a direct product of the capitalist system and of the resulting dangerous lack of stability and rights for the youth of today, accompanied by disenfranchisement and exacerbated by unprecedented levels of alienation.

It is clear that the anger of the youth is derived from a number of factors including police brutality, the massive reduction in public spending on youth and other services, and a general frustration at a future with little prospects.

Furthermore, WFDY notes that the cuts in public spending have had a disproportionate impacton both the youth and ethnic minority groups. The first and main responsible for the wave of violence that now is taking place is the system under which the British people live, responsible for massive unemployment, huge rates of precarity, extremely expensiveaccess to the higher levels of education and almost impossible access to proper housing, mainly for the young generations.

It is also important to remind that it is this system that engages the British youth in wars just to satisfy the greed for profit of the big national and international monopolies. We admit these concerns along with our member organizations in Britain, especially with comrades of YCL Britain, demanding to address the root causes of unrest and violence and by supporting the genuine concernsof young people in the street and their frustration while outright rejecting their way of vandalizing, looting andcreating chaos without certain goal of socio-economic transformation.

In this extremely sensitive moment, WFDY calls upon all the young people in Britain to organize themselves and find the best ways to revolutionary transform their country, which will surely be through the overthrown of this dominant order and not through the destruction of public or private goods, for a Britain and a world of peace, solidarity and social transformation.

Solidarity Statement on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Day

A Cuban poster for peace on display at the
17th World Festival of Youth and Students 

The World Federation of Democratic Youth would like to extend its solidarity with victims of use of Nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on this sad commemoration of 66th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Day. On this sad occasion we remember that the first festival of WFDY, held in a village near Prague, highlighted two issues where there were devastated consequences of Nazi war.

The first issue was how fascism and its alliances did its barbaric acts to the people of weaker nations, different ideology and races; the second issue was on the use of nuclear bomb by the United States against the civilian people of Japan.

No logic can justify such use of nuclear weapons in the cities, or any moral war, and there is no reason such as safety and retaliation to any aggression that can justify the use of nuclear weapon against any civilians and, in the case in which the bomb was used by the USA against Japan, it is worth underlining that the country had, in fact, already surrendered and stopped hostilities.

Because of dropping these nuclear weapons in August 6th and August 11, 1945, 90000- 160000 people in Hiroshima and 60 to 80 thousand people in Nagasaki died, of which 60 percent were killed at the first flash burns. WFDY has always held a clear stance and condemned the imperialist war policy of Japan that inflicted great suffering to the people of Korea, China, and Indo-China and making an alliance with fascism; people’s resisting for their liberation and freedom in their countries always deserve victory. In fact, the war policy of Japan pushed and misused the peace loving, dedicated and patriotic common people of Japan for war and aggression against neighbours.

At the same time, we have our all respect and solidarity to the common people of Japan that they are great opponents of nuclear weapons, and defenders for any violation against their constitution of non-aggression and for the promotion of peace and harmony in the world. The third and fourth festival of WFDY highlighted the issue of nuclear weapons and their need to be abolished from the world; many times we took up serious campaigns against disarmament.

The world is stepping into the 21st century and our tragic sadness of using nuclear weapons has matured by 66 years. However, the accumulation of nuclear weapons in this world (with the capacity to destroy this world many times in every corner) is hidden, demonstrating the idiotic spending of billions of dollars while people in other world are dying from hunger, starvation and the AIDS pandemic.

Finally, we express our commitment to fight against the accumulation of nuclear weapons on this planet and to fight for the cause of disarmament in which the imperialist world order is first and foremost responsible, pushing the whole humanity into the brink of disaster. The world needs full denuclearization and disarmament, not the hypocritical measures that the USA (the only country that has actually ever used the bomb) and its imperialist allies demand from other countries (Iran, DPRK, etc.) while they keep developing aggressions and occupations and more higher technological and precise nuclear weapons. Further, we express our solidarity with the struggles carried out by our member organizations in Japan JLSY, KYLJ, DYLJ, as well as all other members of WFDY, in those fronts.

WFDY CC, Headquarters
Budapest, Hungary August 6, 2011

Remembering Hiroshima - the largest terrorist act in history

By Darrell Rankin
People's Voice Newspaper, August 1st, 2006



HUMANITY WILL FOREVER remember how hostilities ended in the Asia-Pacific theatre of the Second World War, because on August 6, 1945 the United States used an atomic bomb to kill more than 80,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan, a number that increased to 200,000 by 1950 because of the continuing effects of radiation.

Rivalries between the U.S., Japan and European empires were the cause of the "Asia-Pacific" war, which broke out when Japan attacked Hawaii, a U.S. possession, in December 1941. Japan's government, a military dictatorship nominally headed by an emperor, had banned the Japanese Communist Party since its formation in 1922, crushed democratic dissent and pursued an aggressive foreign policy. (Canada's Conservative government banned the Communist Party here in 1931, preceding Hitler's ban on the German Communist Party in 1933.)

By 1941 Japan had occupied and committed serious war crimes in much of coastal China, Korea, French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), and Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Rival imperialist powers were guilty of similar atrocities. Despite early victories, Japan was a defeated empire in 1945. Japan's oil stocks were gone and its naval fleet was destroyed. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan's greatest ally, had surrendered in May.

Japan's government communicated its desire for peace in June, 1945 to Sweden, Switzerland and the Soviet Union, requesting only that the emperor be kept as head of state, a condition allowed after Japan's surrender.

Despite these facts, many people still believe U.S. President Harry Truman's lie for using the atomic weapon. On August 9, 1945, Truman said "We have used (the atomic bomb) to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans." But when Truman first heard that an atom bomb had destroyed Hiroshima City, he had no noble aim. He simply said "This is the greatest thing in history."

Instead of avoiding further casualties, U.S. political leaders used Hiroshima to signal their aim to achieve world domination. Three days later they repeated this barbaric and racist crime on Nagasaki City, Japan. Rather than trying the bomb on a less-populated area of Japan, Truman killed over 300,000 people, mainly civilians.

Since 1945, U.S. imperialism has led the nuclear arms race, imposing a terrible danger on humanity and all life on earth. It has consistently opposed proposals to ban nuclear weapons. For example, the 1946 U.S. "Baruch plan" set out unacceptable conditions for achieving nuclear disarmament, such as a seven-year monopoly on U.S. possession of the weapon and removing veto power from the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

The United States used nuclear weapons after the War as a strategic threat to dominate world politics and to crush revolutionary and democratic movements. The terrifying threat of nuclear weapons and other U.S. military inventions such as intercontinental missiles created a burdensome arms race with the Soviet Union for much of the post-War period.

Despite the fact that a new capitalist class has overthrown socialism in the former Soviet Union in the largest act of robbery and privatization in world history, the U.S. is still creating deadlier ways to dominate the earth. The far-right Bush administration's latest creation is the so-called "war on terror," wrongly used to justify endless aggressions around the world - a permanent state of war where it is only a matter of time before the U.S. actually uses a nuclear weapon.

Nuclear weapons are still at the core of U.S. imperialism's political strategy and military doctrine. The U.S. has a nuclear weapons "first strike" doctrine, a doctrine shared by Canada and other U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. By contrast, the Soviet Union had pledged never to be the first in a conflict to use nuclear weapons.

The U.S. leads all other imperialist countries in arming itself, carrying out foreign aggressions and occupations, and preparing for a world-scale war against Russia and China. The U.S.-India nuclear pact and U.S. military bases in Central Asia all bring the military threat closer to China and Russia. The U.S. military budget of over $455 billion is more than the combined total of the next 32 largest military spenders.

The dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed a vital block to imperialism's use of military might to impose global domination. The Soviet Union's leading role in the defeat of fascism in the Second World War and its popular and principled foreign policy led to great achievements in arms control and disarmament and restrictions on war as a tool of foreign policy.

Imperialism is ignoring virtually all these achievements, including a ban on space weapons, non-proliferation of nuclear weapons to new countries, test bans for nuclear weapons, and the obligation of countries with nuclear weapons to disarm.

Most alarmingly, the U.S. is acting in open defiance of the United Nations Charter which bans war as an unrestricted tool of foreign policy, the most important progressive and democratic legacy of the Second World War. The U.N. Security Council authorized few recent U.S.-led wars, and all violated the Charter - Panama (1989), Iraq (1991, 2003), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Haiti (2004).

This list suggests that imperialism is at the stage of using war to impose corporate globalisation by violent means. It is using war to crush so-called "failed" governments and people's movements that resist global corporate rule, promoting the plunder of oil and other resources in weaker countries.

But U.S. imperialism is preparing to use far more of its huge military potential, making plans to weaponize space, adopting the doctrine of "preventive war" and lowering thresholds for the use of nuclear weapons. All these developments signal that the U.S. is preparing for far greater wars than those already underway.

Catastrophes like Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti will continue to mount in number and severity unless imperialism is blocked. Imperialism has caused enough recent death and destruction to justify its replacement by a socialist society many times over. But for the moment imperialism has the historic initiative, especially since the setbacks to socialism in the 1990s.

Our main effort today must be to unite people and nations against imperialist aggressions and militarism as a whole. This can be accomplished through the mobilization of the world's peoples against imperialism with the aim of preventing war, ending occupations, and achieving general disarmament, especially abolishing nuclear weapons.

(Darrell Rankin is the chair of the Communist Party of Canada's Peace and Disarmament Commission.)