RSN: FOCUS: In the CIA's 1st Plot Against the Castros, Fidel Wasn't the Target

 

04 May 21

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FOCUS: In the CIA's 1st Plot Against the Castros, Fidel Wasn't the Target

Greg Myre, NPR
Myre writes: 

xploding cigars. Poisoned pens. Booby-trapped seashells. These were just a few of the outlandish CIA plots to kill former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who died of natural causes in 2016 at age 90.

Yet new details have emerged of the first such plan, which was actually directed against Castro's brother Raúl Castro, in July 1960, just a year and a half after the Castros had come to power in a revolution.

The key figure was a pilot for the national airline, Cubana: José Raúl Martínez.

Martínez was secretly working for the CIA — and his airline chose him to pilot a chartered flight to pick up Raúl Castro, who was on a visit to Prague, the capital of the communist nation of Czechoslovakia at the time.

Martínez immediately shared this information with the CIA's man in Havana, American William Murray, who relayed this to CIA headquarters outside Washington.

According to CIA documents, the "possible removal" of the top three leaders in Cuba — Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro and Che Guevara — was "receiving serious consideration at [headquarters]."

The agency was looking for an opportunity to eliminate all three at once. Still, the prospect of killing Raúl Castro, the head of the military, prompted an almost immediate CIA response to the agency's Havana station: Tell the pilot to arrange an "accident."

The CIA offered $10,000, and possibly more if requested, to be paid upon completion of the job. "It was a plot of opportunism that fell into the CIA's lap," said Peter Kornbluh, who runs the Cuban Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, a private research group in Washington. Kornbluh uncovered the details of the story in declassified government documents last month and published them on the archive's website.

A rush job

This first plot was a rush job in the extreme. Martínez learned just three days in advance that he would be going to pick up Raúl Castro. As he was driving his car to the Havana airport for the flight, Murray was also in the car, discussing possible options.

"Murray only had one opportunity to convey the $10,000 offer and the mission that the CIA wanted the pilot to undertake," said Kornbluh.

Martínez raised the possibility of crashing into the Atlantic Ocean but knew this would be suicidal. How could he harm only one person on the plane?

"He actually said, 'If I die, will you make sure that my two sons have their college education paid for?' " Kornbluh said.

The CIA agreed to pay.

As Martínez went wheels up in Havana, it wasn't clear what he might do. Shortly after he left, CIA headquarters sent updated instructions to the Havana station: "Do not pursue. Would like to drop matter."

This was problematic, because now there was no way to contact the pilot.

These half-baked CIA plots to kill the Castros have been thoroughly documented and are part of the larger anti-communist crusade the U.S. government waged at the time in Latin America and elsewhere.

"It's like a combination of extreme American paternalism, combined with racism and disdain and contempt for Latin Americans. And so that drives their inability to see things," said professor Lillian Guerra, the head of Cuban and Caribbean studies at the University of Florida.

"The United States constantly discredited anybody who was an opponent of U.S. foreign policy," she added.

Hints of a plot

Kornbluh has researched these CIA schemes for decades with great zeal. He calls himself an "activist archivist." When asked how his day was going, he said: "I woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning dreaming of CIA assassination plots in Cuba."

A congressional investigation led by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, produced a voluminous report in 1976 on the CIA's activities around the world. The report included a brief, tantalizing reference to this first CIA attempt to kill one of the Castros, noting it targeted Raúl. But all the details were redacted.

It turns out that Murray, the CIA officer in Havana, wrote to the CIA's inspector general in a 1975 document he titled "Questionable Activities." Murray had reservations about his role, and his memo included original documents from his exchanges with CIA headquarters in the 1960 episode.

This information was redacted in the 1976 Senate report but was declassified in 2000. While details of the plot against Raúl Castro have been public since then, they were hidden among thousands and thousands of other declassified documents.

Then one month ago, as Raúl Castro prepared to retire, Kornbluh returned to the declassified documents that have been digitized at the National Security Archive.

He searched for possible stories about Raúl Castro that had not been fully explored, and that's when he came across the "plane accident" plot.

"Very few people are aware of the details of this incredible plot against Raúl Castro, a plot that deserves to be known in its entirety," Kornbluh said.

The pilot's decision

This brings us back to the pilot, José Raúl Martínez. So what did he do?

Ultimately, he delivered Raúl Castro back to the Cuban capital safe and sound. Afterward, he told Murray that he had no opportunity to arrange an "accident."

Then, a few months later, Martínez defected to the United States.

Meanwhile, Raúl Castro was the No. 2 figure in the Cuban government for decades. He became president when Fidel Castro stepped down in 2008, and Raúl Castro gave up his final post, as chief of the Communist Party of Cuba, in mid-April at age 89.

Kornbluh doesn't know for certain, but he suspects Raúl Castro had never heard the specifics of the airplane plot until now.

"I would imagine that Raúl Castro is reading these stories and looking at these documents for the first time and marveling over what the CIA tried to do," Kornbluh said.

The CIA was not deterred by this aborted effort in 1960. Shortly afterward, the agency began work on a much larger operation that also didn't go as planned — the Bay of Pigs invasion.

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RSN: FOCUS: Jon Lee Anderson | Cuba After the Castros

 

 

30 April 21

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FOCUS: Jon Lee Anderson | Cuba After the Castros

Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "Sixty years after the Bay of Pigs, the Castro brothers are gone from the main stage, and Cuba is a threadbare place facing an uncertain future."

ince 1975, Cuba’s ruling Communist Party has periodically convened a congress at which, in keeping with the arcane rituals of socialist states during the Soviet era, the Party makes public official policy guidelines. This year, the eighth congress ended after a four-day session that was arguably its most momentous: it coincided not only with the sixtieth anniversary of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which led to the breakdown in relations with the United States and helped to precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but also with a historic curtain call for the Castro era.

At the opening session, on April 16th, Raúl Castro, the younger brother of the late Cuban jefe máximo, Fidel Castro, confirmed his plans, as he had promised he would, to step down as the First Secretary of the Communist Party. This was the last senior post he held, since he vacated the Presidency, in 2018, to make way for his handpicked Party loyalist, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who now also succeeds him as First Secretary. Raúl, who will turn ninety in June, has held the position for ten years, just as he held the Presidency for two five-year terms, after succeeding his ailing brother, in 2008. (Raúl had, in fact, served as Cuba’s de-facto leader for the previous two years, after Fidel nearly died from a bout of diverticulitis.)

Fidel had been Cuba’s undisputed strongman since January, 1959, when the Castros, their Argentine friend Ernesto (Che) Guevara, and several hundred guerrilla comrades overthrew the regime of a gangsterish dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and seized power. For most of the subsequent decades, Raúl served as his brother’s defense minister, and remained in the shadows. Now, he returns to them. It is believed that Raúl intends to retire to Santiago, Cuba’s second city, which is at the opposite end of the seven-hundred-and-forty-mile-long island from Havana, and near where he and Fidel grew up. He has already prepared his final resting place, a mausoleum alongside his former guerrilla comrades in the Sierra Maestra, at the site of their old base camp. (Fidel’s ashes are interred in a Santiago cemetery, next to the mausoleum of the nineteenth-century independence hero José Martí.)

Ushered in by Fidel’s defiant proclamation of “the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution” exactly sixty years ago, just as the C.I.A.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion got underway, Cuba’s radical transformation made the country a dynamic player in the Cold War. Cuba sponsored covert guerrilla missions to dozens of countries in Latin America and Africa, and dispatched troops to fight in wars in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. For the past thirty years, however, since the implosion of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of most of the world’s other Communist states, the narrative has changed, and Cuba’s story has been mostly one of pluck and survival, while the rest of the world has changed around it, not necessarily for the better.

That, at least officially, is how the Communist Party wants Cuba to be seen today. The slogan of the congress at which Raúl bade farewell was Somos continuidad—We are continuity. And indeed, there is much that is unchanging in Cuba. It remains a single-party socialist state that exists in eternal counter-position to the United States, the capitalist superpower—or “the Empire,” as it is known to Cuba’s Communists—just ninety miles away, across the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico. In his speech, while lambasting the United States for its long-standing trade embargo, which Donald Trump extended with more than two hundred measures, Raúl called for “a respectful dialogue to build a new relationship with the United States, but without renouncing the principles of the Revolution, or of socialism.”

The formal end of the Castro era has elicited polarized reactions among Cubans, with Party loyalists expressing unquestioning faith in the system, and disbelievers signalling cynicism about the future. Requesting anonymity for fear of official retaliation, a Cuban friend told me that the revolutionary government is “just a big theatre piece that made its début sixty years ago and continues today. They’re not going to change anything and will do whatever they want as long as they can maintain control of things. There’s a lot of need on the street, and discontent too, but people won’t be able to do anything about it, because, if they try, they’ll just send in more police to keep a lid on things.”

The “discontent” he referred to is the San Isidro Movement, a loose alliance of dissident rappers, artists, journalists, and academics who, assisted in recent years by access to the Internet, have become increasingly active, staging protests in public and on social media. Last November, after one of them was arrested, the movement organized a sit-in and hunger strike in Havana, which was broken up by the police after ten days, and was followed by an unprecedented street protest of hundreds of people outside the ministry of culture. Both actions garnered widespread media attention, and the government has responded with police harassment of activists, occasional arrests, and a vituperous trolling campaign by commentators on state media.

When I asked Carla Gloria Colomé, a thirty-year-old independent journalist, whether she felt that the San Isidro Movement was the seed of a new restlessness, she said, “When its activists carried out their hunger strike, many of us observers thought that their headquarters had been turned into a free and democratic experiment—democratic space. I believe it has given back to us something we Cubans had lost: our civicism. We had forgotten that we had the right to protest and had the right to demand freedoms. If Díaz-Canel’s slogan is Somos continuidad, the movement’s is Estamos conectados: We are connected. It has also allowed us to imagine another thing we had forgotten—that we have a country and that it is possible to recover it.”

Another friend, the novelist Wendy Guerra, expressed blunt skepticism about the significance of Castro’s departure from power. In a Whatsapp message, she wrote, “I don’t think Raúl has really packed his bags. After living in Cuba for forty-nine years, this narrative seems familiar to me, one in which there is always an attic, a second floor, or a basement, where the government decisions are concealed. Raúl is like the abusive husband who has nowhere else to go, nor wants to go. He has separated but hasn’t left home.”

Indeed, at the end of the Party congress, Díaz-Canel promised to “consult with Raúl Castro on strategic decisions about the future of the nation.” The lack of clear signposts to Cuba’s future intrigues Ada Ferrer, a Cuban-American scholar at New York University who is the author of a forthcoming book, “Cuba: An American History,” and a Personal History, “My Brother’s Keeper,” which recently appeared in The New Yorker. “There’s no script for a post-Castro Cuba. Maybe it will end up being anticlimactic, as was Fidel Castro’s departure from power—his death. That seems to be the point of the Somos continuidad, right? But it feels less like a motto than a prayer sometimes. I think the leaders realize that, whatever continuity they seek, in terms of retaining power, everyone is seeking, needing some change.”

What other changes are in the offing? Not many, at least on the surface. At the Party congress, it was announced that, in addition to Raúl Castro, three other members of the seventeen-person Politburo, the governing council of the Communist Party, were leaving—including two other veterans of the Revolution who had fought in the Sierra, José Ramón Machado Ventura, who is ninety, and Ramiro Valdés, who is eighty-eight—and five new members were sworn in. Among them is Luís Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, a sixty-year-old general who was once married to Raúl’s daughter, Deborah, and who in recent years has been the influential boss of the anodynely named Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., or GAESA, a conglomerate that oversees the island’s many military-owned businesses, which include tourist resorts, hotels, supermarket chains and retail stores, financial-services institutions, gas stations, shipping and construction companies, and ports. Lopez-Calleja’s addition to the Politburo sends an important message that the Communist Party and the military will remain the ultimate stewards of economic affairs, even if, as Díaz-Canel recently promised, there is to be an increase in private-sector opportunities.

The moment is an important crossroads for Cuba, languishing as it is in an economic downturn precipitated by a chronic lack of productivity; fuel shortages caused by the economic collapse of Venezuela, the island’s main benefactor and oil supplier; the Trump Administration decrees, which reduced cash remittances from the United States, banned U.S. cruise ships from Cuban waters, and further restricted travel to Cuba. In both substance and tone, the past four years have seen a sharp souring of the brief honeymoon that accompanied the Obama Administration’s historic overture, announced in December, 2014, after nearly two years of secret negotiations, which restored diplomatic relations between the two countries, and was followed by a surge in American tourism and a sharp increase in foreign investment. That rapprochement came to a halt after Trump’s election, in November, 2016, and Fidel Castro’s death later that month. Within a few weeks, a series of bewildering “sonic attacks” began affecting C.I.A. and State Department personnel stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Havana. The atmosphere of fledgling good will that had characterized the Obama era was replaced under Trump by one of open hostility.

The evidence available suggests that Cuba has weathered the coronavirus pandemic quite well, with an official count of five hundred and ninety-one deaths, in a population of eleven million, but the lockdown measures hit the economy hard. With virtually no outsiders allowed in for most of the past year, the economy shrank a staggering eleven per cent in 2020, while imports dropped by around forty per cent, because the state did not have the money to pay for them. As a result, Cubans are facing scarcities of basic food items, medicines, and household essentials—as they did in the early-to-mid nineties, during the so-called special period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union—and many people are forced to spend several hours each day seeking the means of daily survival. Earlier this month, in a sign of the times, the government announced key agricultural reforms, overturning decades-old laws that prohibited people from slaughtering their own cattle or selling beef and milk without state permission.

Part of the problem has been the government’s cumbersome two-tier currency system, which was formally ended in January, although the phase out is not yet complete. Under that system, Cubans who are fortunate enough to have access to U.S. dollars, through remittances, for instance, have been able to buy most of what they need—though they, too, have been standing in line for hours, owing to the import shortages—while those who only have Cuban pesos are finding it difficult to purchase adequate food for their families in the mostly empty government-owned stores and undersupplied fixed-price produce markets.

Yet, amid the shortages and general belt-tightening, the biopharmaceutical industry has entered final-phase trials at home and in Iran and Venezuela, with several of its own COVID-19 vaccines. (The vaccines have been given patriotic names, such as Mambisa, for the guerrilla group that fought for independence from Spain in the nineteenth century.) The government has announced hopes to vaccinate more than half the population by August, and to begin exporting vaccines by the end of the year. If the program is successful, and there is every likelihood that it will be, given the government’s continued and significant investment in its health-care system and biotech industry, Cuba will be far ahead of its Latin American neighbors, most of which have negotiated deals with vaccine manufacturers in China and Russia, or have received donations from them and a few other countries. Cuba could become a regional savior and earn some badly needed money from the commercial vaccine market.

Despite widespread pessimism, there are hints that Díaz-Canel will move forward to free up the economy for private-sector entrepreneurs and investors. His government recently legalized a tranche of previously restricted professions for so-called cuentapropistas, people working for themselves, outside of the state sector. One prospective investor, the Cuban-American entrepreneur Hugo Cancio, told me that he believed that long-standing restrictions on investments by Cuban-Americans would soon be lifted. When I asked him why Raúl Castro hadn’t instituted such changes before he left power, he said, “Raúl has been an iconic figure during all these years and, even if he knows the changes need to be done, it’s not for him to execute them. So he is leaving as he came in, as a revolutionary, handing off to a new leadership that is more in tune with the new Cuba reality and a changing world. He’s like the father who says to his son, ‘Kid, you take it from here.’ ”

Beyond the pandemic and the economy, Cuba faces other existential questions, which, as ever, revolve around its relationship with the United States. Despite expectations that a Biden Presidency would reverse many of the Trump-era strictures and return to the détente of the Obama era, the messaging from the White House has been lukewarm. At a press conference on April 16th, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters, “A Cuba policy shift or additional steps is currently not among the President’s top foreign-policy priorities.”

In January, shortly after Biden’s Inauguration, his adviser on the Western Hemisphere for the National Security Council, Juan S. González, forecast the new Administration’s approach. “It’s no longer 2015,” he told me. He indicated that the U.S. would free up remittance levels and reduce travel restrictions for Americans, but that the new Administration was not going to rush into an energy-sucking round of talks aimed at restoring trade and other blandishments for Cuba. “Two things I’m conscious of with this President is time and political capital,” González said. “With the historic burden he and the Vice-President are carrying on their shoulders, the first priority has to be the pandemic, migration, and rebuilding frayed relationships with regional partners.” González also, as other U.S. officials have done, alluded to electoral considerations in Florida, where the Cuban-American voter turnout went hard for Trump, and which remains a source of worry for Democrats.

As something like a new Cold War approaches, this time with China, but accompanied by increasingly hostile chessboard maneuvering from Russia, the U.S. is assessing its options. Countries such as Cuba—and, for that matter, Venezuela and Nicaragua—have entered the realm of the known perturbables: places of concern that need keeping an eye on, but which, amid all the other crises in the world, feel containable. González told me that in the Western Hemisphere the top priorities are Mexico, along with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala (the Northern Triangle countries of Central America that are the sources of most of the migrants arriving at the southern border), and Brazil, because of the Amazon Basin and the climate crisis, which is a foremost item on Biden’s to-do list.

González noted that the Administration would be taking a diplomatic approach to these issues, including overtures to President Jair Bolsonaro, of Brazil—an extreme anti-environmentalist who has actively incited Amazonian forest destruction by loggers, miners, and ranchers. At last week’s virtual Earth Day summit, Bolsonaro pledged to protect the Amazon, in return for large financial commitments from the U.S. and other wealthy countries. John Kerry, Biden’s climate czar, applauded Bolsonaro’s apparent change of heart, but environmental watchdog groups and indigenous leaders questioned his sincerity and warned the Biden Administration against entering into any deal that would legitimize him.

Recent inroads made by China to the region are also a preoccupation. Earlier this month, González, on his first trip to South America for President Biden, travelled to Argentina, where he discussed China’s COVID diplomacy and, he told me this week, “reports of talks with the Chinese government regarding potential refurbishment of a military base in Ushuaia,” a port city in Patagonia. President Alberto Fernández, González said, told the U.S. envoy “that he would not allow a Chinese military base on Argentine soil.”

Six decades after the missile crisis, then, there are new sources of geostrategic tensions in the hemisphere, and they no longer necessarily involve Cuba. The Castro brothers are gone from the main stage, and the Caribbean island they dominated for so long is a threadbare place, still paying a price for its temerity in standing up to “the Empire.” In the Empire itself, meanwhile, Cuba is mostly forgotten, no longer relevant except in helping determine U.S. elections in Florida. As Joe Garcia, a former Democratic congressman from Florida and a Cuban-American, explained it to me, “In the same way that the assault on the Capitol on January 6th ended the myth of American exceptionalism, what Cuba is slowly coming to terms with is the reality that they are not the center of the universe anymore, as Fidel always told them they were. . . . They’re no longer a country engaged in revolutions and fighting anticolonial wars in Africa. They’re a country that has national challenges that are more pressing than its former aspirations.”

Garcia, like his fellow Cuban-American Hugo Cancio, maintains relationships with some Cuban officials, and occasionally serves as a behind-the-scenes messenger between Havana and Washington. He told me he believes that a dramatic transformation from a stagnant state-run economy to one led increasingly by the private sector—albeit one ultimately under Communist Party control, as in China—is essential. “There is going to be a restructuring,” Garcia said. “I could call it a retreat, and it is, really, from everything they’ve tried to do for sixty years, but the fact is that this is a way forward. The alternative is chaos.” Garcia added, “Raúl is going, and he’s saying: ‘After me this is what we’re doing.’ He’s not saying: ‘After me the flood.’ He’s got to do this. But what he can’t say is, ‘We’ve failed.’ ”

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CC News Letter 17 April - Fight against Covid-19: Incompetence or deliberate negligence

 

Dear Friend,

The second wave of Corona-virus has stuck hard in India particularly states such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar-Pradesh and Delhi have seen alarming rise in the cases and the governments have been caught by surprise. Was the Corona wave surprising or we allowed this to happen. Let us go to the latest figures. As per reports 14.5 millions cases of Covid 19 registered in India, in which 12.7 million recovered. 15, 69, 743 cases are still active and total death till date is 1,76000. In the last 24 hours 2,17,353 new cases have come in and death during this period is 1,185 as on April 16th evening and the numbers are now increasing exhorbitantly

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together as one family! You can subscribe to our news letter here http://www.countercurrents.org/news-letter/.

In Solidarity

Binu Mathew

Editor

Countercurrents.org

Fight against Covid-19: Incompetence or deliberate negligence

by Vidya Bhushan Rawat

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/fight-against-covid-19-incompetence-or-deliberate-negligence/

The second wave of Corona-virus has stuck hard in India particularly states such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar-Pradesh and Delhi have seen alarming rise in the cases and the governments have been caught by surprise. Was the Corona wave surprising or we allowed this to happen. Let us go to the latest figures. As per reports 14.5 millions cases of Covid 19 registered in India, in which 12.7 million recovered. 15, 69, 743 cases are still active and total death till date is 1,76000. In the last 24 hours 2,17,353 new cases have come in and death during this period is 1,185 as on April 16th evening and the numbers are now

increasing exhorbitantly

Thrissur Pooram – 2021

by K P Sasi

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/thrissur-pooram-2021/

Thrissur pooram is on the move. This festival attracts millions of people. People flock themselves in the heart of Thrissur without leaving an inch of space for another person. Forget one meter distance from each other as per COVID regulations.

Raul Castro steps down, next generation of anti-imperialist leaders take responsibility

by Countercurrents Collective

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/raul-castro-steps-down-next-generation-of-anti-imperialist-leaders-take-responsibility/

Raul Castro, leader of the Communist Party of Cuba, has announced that he is stepping down and handing leadership to a younger generation “full of passion and anti-imperialist spirit.” Fidel Castro and Raul Castro have led the Communist Party of Cuba party since 1961.

Empire’s Afghan War: A lost war, a profitable war

by Farooque Chowdhury

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/empires-afghan-war-a-lost-war-a-profitable-war/

Imperialism has limits and weak joints, which the system and the system’s theoreticians can’t rectify. The weak joints appear from its economic interests, and get manifested in political moves appearing checkmate and in standstills, scraps between factions, and within political arrangement and within ruling machine. The Empire’s Afghan War was not beyond this reality of imperialism’s limit; and is a manifestation of the crisis of imperialism.

U.S. Joins Past Empires In Afghan Graveyard

Written by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/u-s-joins-past-empires-in-afghan-graveyard/

We must hope that, in the coming months, the U.N. will find a way to bring the warring parties in Afghanistan together and craft a ceasefire and a workable peace process based on power sharing. After so many decades of war and intense suffering, much of it perpetrated by the

United States and its allies, the Afghan people desperately need—and deserve—an end to this war.

India should welcome the end of US occupation of Afghanistan

by M K Bhadrakumar

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/india-should-welcome-the-end-of-us-occupation-of-afghanistan/

To be sure, the “forever war” in Afghanistan is ending on a sombre note. The US has barely managed to avoid a humiliating defeat. The final legacy will be that there are limits to American power. India will do well to bear this mind as it consorts with the Quad.  In the final analysis, India’s Afghan policy failed due to the ruling elite’s obsessive enmity toward Pakistan. The international community recognises that Pakistan has legitimate interests in Afghanistan and accepts that it has a crucial role to play in the peace process. Thus, India got marginalised due to its zero-sum mindset. There is no one to blame but itself. 

The Myth of Peace in the Middle East: Deconstructing the

Naturalization Narrative

by Mohamed El Metmari

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/the-myth-of-peace-in-the-middle-east-deconstructing-the-naturalization-narrative/

This critical essay deconstructs the political narrative surrounding the naturalization agreements that have occurred between some Arab countries and Israel formally known as the Abrahamic Accords or Jared Kushner’s plan for peace in the Middle East. It offers unique perspectives and analysis of these accords and their true geopolitical intentions. Primarily, it argues how the peace promised by these newly established ties remains just a myth as it explores the true objectives behind them. Interestingly enough, it also highlights the true goals behind the U.S’ mediations in these Accords.

The Dirty Campaign Underlying Ecuador’s “Free and Fair” Election

Written by Medea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/the-dirty-campaign-underlying-ecuadors-free-and-fair-election/

Ecuador’s April 11 election that led to a 5-point victory by conservative banker Guillermo Lasso over progressive candidate Andrés Arauz was not what it appeared to be. On the surface, it was a surprisingly clean and professional election, as our CODEPINK official observer delegation witnessed. But a fraud-free process for casting and counting ballots does not mean that the election was free and fair. Behind the scenes was a monumentally unequal playing field and dirty campaign designed to quash an Arauz win.

Ultimate Success

by Tom Murphy

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/ultimate-success/

Is the 10,000-year-old human civilization in its infancy, or nearer its end than its beginning?

Does Historiography Transcend Anachronism?

by K M Seethi

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/does-historiography-transcend-anachronism/

Can historians avoid anachronism in their narratives of the past? This has been a major question in the debates of/in historiography, and noted

historian Prof. Rajan Gurukkal addressed this question in the context of the project of ‘reinventing nation’ in historical writings in a fortnightly “Scholars of Eminence Web-Lectures” (SEW-L) organised by the Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University.

Centre’s ordinance: A big blow to cinema

by Dr Madabhushi Sridhar

https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/centres-ordinance-a-big-blow-to-cinema/

After imposing executive controls over the Over The Top (OTT) streaming media, the Centre has inflicted yet another blow on cinema medium… Either the producer must silently suffer or move to High Court and wait years for ‘justice’. This is a new kind of censorship of effective medium, a burden on producer and a blow to cinema.

RSN: RSN: Mort Rosenblum | On the Rez, What's in a Name?

 

17 April 21

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We are way behind where we should be at this point in the month. Really because only a precious few of you are donating. The rest are not but can.

Now would be a great time.

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16 April 21

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RSN: Mort Rosenblum | On the Rez, What's in a Name?

Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
Rosenblum writes: "The 574 indigenous tribes across the United States define themselves with their own words."

INDOW ROCK, Arizona – Patty Dimitriou smiled down at 4-year-old Wynter, contented in her lap on a break from raising hell. “This,” she said, tucking strands of long black hair from behind his copper-toned ear, “is what America now looks like.”

Exactly. These days, that is easy to forget as meaningless ethnic labels distort a new reality: the American melting pot has cooked down into a savory fusion of home-grown flavors seasoned with every exotic spice a big world has to offer.

Inspiring “diversity” is unmissable up among the dramatic high red rocks of the Navajo Nation, where tribalism means unity, not division. For a sense of it, try to pigeonhole Patty and her husband, Rob Day.

Patty’s mother, Flora, grew up in a dirt-floor hogan with no electricity or plumbing. She slept in her first bed at 11 in boarding school. As a secretarial student in San Francisco, Flora bedazzled Nicholas Dimitriou, an enterprising Macedonian immigrant from Canada. He pursued her back to the reservation and married her.

With a University of Arizona degree, Patty built a thriving public relations firm in Phoenix, hobnobbing with clients in Washington and Europe. When her father became ill in 2015, she moved to Window Rock to manage her parents’ properties.

In heels and a smart dress, Patty drives a Cadillac Escalade with plates that read “RezDiva.” In hot-babe mode (she doesn’t mind the term), she puts on leathers to roam the West with Rob on her monster motorcycle. An Indian Chieftain.

Rob sums himself up with a laugh: “I’m a half-breed.” In fact, he goes back five generations to the first Sam Day, an Irishman who, bored with life in Ohio, took a job surveying the reservation. He founded a dynasty with Irish, Dutch and Navajo wives.

The Days built some of the first trading posts and discovered ancient ruins. An old family treasure is an aging photograph signed, “To my friend, Sam Day. Theodore Roosevelt.” That was Sam III, who fired up the visiting president’s fondness for Indian heritage.

Rob’s passion is creating artful big bikes, but Day Customs Mechanical can fix or build just about anything. He wakes before dawn to direct far-flung crews but makes it home for dinner with the kids.

Wynter’s face reflects dominant Indian genes. His little sister Rebel is, as her Grandma Flora jokes, “white as a sheet of paper.”

Patty just smiled when I asked my usual question in tribal territories. Is she Indian or Native American? Whatever. The 574 indigenous tribes across the United States define themselves with their own words. The Navajo are simply Diné, the people.

“Whatever” pretty much says it. We are each something specific that defies catchall labels. Yet all earthlings trace back to the same gorges in East Africa. Today, as we face looming common calamities, we had better get it together fast.

Partisan politics and polemics obsess on the present with little sense of how we got where we are. Republicans exploit Donald Trump’s racist tropes, but racism is too vague a word for societal disconnects behind so much fear and loathing.

Black Americans suffer the most. George Floyd’s murder shed glaring light on brutality and injustice that date back to slave days. It sparked a critical mass into action, which in turn triggers white supremacist backlash. And, even in Minneapolis, police keep on killing.

We need laws and norms to entrench equality, along with reforms not only in law enforcement but also in school curricula to help kids see beyond skin tones. Of course, “infrastructure” is about more than roads and bridges.

These are urgent problems for today and tomorrow. The past is past. But if indelible history can’t be rewritten or reduced to simplicities, we can learn from it.

Slavery, reprehensible by any measure, has always been with us humans, and it still is. The pyramids in Egypt were not built with union labor. Before American settlers intruded, warring indigenous tribes — the Navajo, for one — enslaved captives.

Some American whites kept slaves. Others died fighting to set them free. As with our drug habits today, there was a demand, and people of all colors responded. Today, such demands as across-the-board reparations would likely lead to acrimonious deadlock.

One black writer, in a New York Times op-ed, heaped blanket blame on “white people,” imagining himself in Ghana, during earlier days, in a princely Ashanti palace. If so, his minions would have been marching prisoners from other tribes to ships at Elmina Castle.

I went to Accra in the 1970s after Alex Haley’s Roots inspired back-to-Africa tourism. Ghanaian friends were bemused by American strangers calling them brother. Back then, authenticity seekers studied Swahili, the lingua franca of Arab slavers.

Times change. A wise old hand who edits the Associated Press Style Book ruled black should be capitalized in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense to convey “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community … in the African diaspora and within Africa.”

He has a point, but I respectfully demur. Black, like white, is a color with too many human shades to be a community. Americans focus on Africa, but that leaves out Tamils, Pacific Islanders and all the rest.

Blacks predominate in America’s underclass because so much is stacked against them. They are a collective target of ignorant bigots, who overlook the opposite extremes, which include an ex-president I wish could return for a third term.

Isabel Wilkerson, a former Times reporter, comes closer to it in her brilliant book: Caste. Actual Indians are bound by a rigid pecking order that neither education nor hard work allows them to escape. Social justice can break down America’s informal castes.

In any case, racial, ethnic and cultural bias goes far beyond black and white.

I was lucky at the outset, a minority Jewish kid at Tucson High among Latinos, Asians and much else. Once a red-haired, freckled tough with the Mexican name of Tellez gave me shit about Hanukah. Florence Chandler, a black fullback friend, loomed up behind him, and he slithered away.

Today, even we lapsed Jews who shrug off slurs watch vicious identity politics with alarm. When some fool flaunts a “six million aren’t enough” t-shirt, I think of how many Rosen-somethings were exterminated during my life span. “Germans” aren’t to blame. Hitler was. But why did so many people blindly follow a depraved despot?

My toes curl when some hypocrite not-really Christian calls me a bad Jew for thinking others also have rights in the unholy land. In fact, condemning Palestinians to apartheid squalor is an existential threat to Israel.

In the Navajo Nation, these labels blur. I’m a native American, lower-case “n,” born in Wisconsin. But I’m a parvenu to indigenous people whose roots within America’s boundaries run 35 generations deep.

The Navajos’ disparate clans still share a common respect for the Blessing Way, elaborate rituals that honor their creator and the four sacred mountains that delineate their rugged lands. But these are divisive times.

Social media, television and a consumer mentality tug at old roots. Casinos and tourism bring in new revenue (or will, if Covid-19 finally subsides) but also destructive elements. A troubling number of Navajo Trumpers want to privatize trust lands.

But Indians finally have a voice in Washington. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland from nearby Laguna Pueblo is wresting back hallowed land that her plundering predecessor opened to miners and drillers. Young people are rediscovering their languages and lore. Congress earmarked $1.7 billion to help tribes weather the pandemic.

Patty Dimitriou is hopeful. “Between technology, a huge chunk of money and emerging leadership, it could make for some interesting times,” she said. “We’ll see.”

Little Wynter Day, beaming up from her lap, made the point. His polyglot parents teach him Navajo along with English. He’ll likely pick up Spanish. But mostly, they’re giving him solid instruction in basic humanity and love for the natural world.

However he turns out, no misconceived label will define him.

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Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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Jon Ryan Schaffer, a 53-year-old from Indiana, pleaded guilty to obstruction of an official proceeding and entering a restricted building with a deadly or dangerous weapon. (photo: DOJ)

Oath Keeper Becomes First Capitol Insurrectionist to Rat Out Fellow Rioters
Pilar Melendez, The Daily Beast
Melendez writes: "A heavy metal guitarist and self-described 'lifetime member' of the Oath Keepers has become the first Jan. 6 insurrectionist to plead guilty and cooperate with the feds, prosecutors revealed Friday."
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Senator Bernie Sanders on Capitol Hill on January 27, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Graeme Jennings/Getty)

Bernie Is Right. We Should Immediately Expand and Improve Medicare.
Michael Lighty, Jacobin
Lighty writes: "Bernie Sanders is pushing to lower the eligibility age for Medicare and boost its coverage by adding dental, hearing, and vision benefits. Bernie's plan would be a huge step toward Medicare for All."
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Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August. (photo: Reuters)

US Police and Public Officials Donated to Kyle Rittenhouse, Data Breach Reveals
Jason Wilson, Guardian UK
Wilson writes: "A data breach at a Christian crowdfunding website has revealed that serving police officers and public officials have donated money to fundraisers for accused vigilante murderers, far-right activists, and fellow officers accused of shooting black Americans."

Officers and officials also donated to fundraisers for far-right activists and fellow officers accused of shooting black Americans

 data breach at a Christian crowdfunding website has revealed that serving police officers and public officials have donated money to fundraisers for accused vigilante murderers, far-right activists, and fellow officers accused of shooting black Americans.

In many of these cases, the donations were attached to their official email addresses, raising questions about the use of public resources in supporting such campaigns.

The breach, shared with journalists by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets, revealed the details of some donors who had previously attempted to conceal their identities using GiveSendGo’s anonymity feature, but whose identifying details the website preserved.

The beneficiaries of donations from public officials include Kyle Rittenhouse, who stands accused of murdering two leftwing protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August. Rittenhouse traveled from neighboring Illinois to, by his own account, offer armed protection to businesses during protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Rittenhouse, who became a cause célèbre across conservative media throughout late 2020, and was even supported by then president Donald Trump, held a fundraiser on GiveSendGo billed as a contribution to his legal defense. According to data from the site, he raised $586,940 between 27 August last year and 7 January .

Among the donors were several associated with email addresses traceable to police and other public officials.

One donation for $25, made on 3 September last year, was made anonymously, but associated with the official email address for Sgt William Kelly, who currently serves as the executive officer of internal affairs in the Norfolk police department in Virginia.

That donation also carried a comment, reading: “God bless. Thank you for your courage. Keep your head up. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

The comment continued: “Every rank and file police officer supports you. Don’t be discouraged by actions of the political class of law enforcement leadership.”

Another Rittenhouse donor using an official email address was Craig Shepherd, who public records show is a paramedic in Utah. This donor gave $10 to Rittenhouse on 30 August.

Donations also came to Rittenhouse associated with official email addresses for Keith Silvers, and employee of the city of Huntsville, Alabama, and another $100 was associated with the official address of Michael Crosley, an engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a body which is charged with maintaining the US’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

Meanwhile, several Wisconsin police officers donated to a fundraiser, “Support Rusten Sheskey”, held for the Kenosha police department officer whose shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, led to the protests that drew Rittenhouse to the city.

Two $20 donations to Sheskey’s fund were associated with email addresses of a pair of lieutenants in Green Bay, Wisconsin’s police department. One, given under the name, “GBPD Officer”, was tied to an address associated with Chad Ramos, a training lieutenant in the department; another anonymous donation was associated with Keith A Gehring, who is listed as a school resources officer lieutenant.

Another donation to Sheskey was associated with the official email address of officer Pat Gainer of the Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin police department. Given under the screen name “PPPD Motor 179”, the donation also carried the comment: “Stay strong brother.”

About 32 more donations, totaling more than $5,000, came to Sheskey from private email addresses associated with Kenosha officers, but under badge numbers rather than names.

More anonymous donations on the site came from city employees of Houston, Texas, who were objecting to the actions of the then police chief, Art Acevedo, who fired four Houston police officers after they shot and killed a man, Nicolas Chavez, who was on his knees, and in an apparent mental health crisis.

One anonymous donation of $100 was associated with the official address of that city’s fire chief, Samuel Peña, who has himself faced recent employee revolts over cost-cutting, but who has been publicly supportive of Acevedo, describing him in a tweet as a “brother & partner in Public Safety” in March, when Acevedo announced that he would be taking up an appointment as Miami’s chief of police.

Another anonymous donation of $400 was attributed in site data to an email linked to Chris Andersen and carried the comment: “I think that Chief Acevedo is part of the ‘unrecognized form of police corruption’ that Chris Anderson [sic] wrote about in his book’. Hang in there guys!!!”

Andersen’s book, The Sniper: Hunting A Serial Killer – A True Story, purports to tell the story of the hunt for a serial killer by Houston police at a time when “the United States was experiencing a wave of civil discontent regarding the unwarranted shootings (either true or perceived) of black men by law enforcement (the Black Lives Matter era)”.

In his Amazon bio, Andersen describes himself as a “39-year veteran of the Houston police department”, and as having worked in roles including homicide detective, supervising a Swat team and internal affairs.

In an email, the Green Bay police chief, Andrew Smith, wrote of the donations that “we are looking into the matter”, but added on Sheskey’s actions that his department “does not take a position on other agencies use of force”.

Lynda Seaver, director of public affairs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote in an email that Michael Crosley had made “an honest mistake”, and had “never intended to use his Lab email on this matter”.

All other agencies and individuals who were included in the Guardian’s reporting did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Guardian previously reported on the use of the site for fundraising purposes for far-right groups like the Proud Boys, who have been banned from other crowdfunding platforms after violent incidents including the alleged participation of members of the group in an attack on the United States Capitol building on 6 January.

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An Afghan man and children, suffering hardships from suicide bombings and war, pose for a portrait in Kabul, Afghanistan, March 19, 2021. (photo: Haroon Sabawoon/Getty)

The US Could Have Left Afghanistan Years Ago, Sparing Many Lives
Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept
Hussain writes: "America will depart without having accomplished its goals and with more Afghan suffering ahead."

resident Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw most U.S. troops from Afghanistan marks a significant reduction in America’s participation in the war. But it is unlikely to mean peace for Afghans themselves, who remain caught between a weak and corrupt central government long propped up by U.S. military might and a resurgent Taliban movement that is stronger than at any time since the United States invaded.

The question of timing hung heavily over Biden’s announcement Wednesday that America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan would soon come to an end, with the remaining 2,500 American troops in the country scheduled to come home on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The violent disintegration of Afghan society began with the 1979 Soviet invasion of the country, but the decision in the early years of this century to occupy Afghanistan and try to transform it into a liberal democracy at great cost in lives and resources has made America a key force in Afghanistan’s fate.

The U.S. will leave without having accomplished its goals and with more Afghan suffering ahead. It also doesn’t seem that America’s own “forever war” is actually ending. Biden reserved the right to carry out airstrikes and raids against suspected threats in Afghanistan indefinitely — washing America’s hands of its involvement in inter-Afghan conflict, while signaling that the United States would still be killing people in the country when it deems necessary.

This “light footprint” approach could have been adopted by the U.S. government from a position of greater strength in 2002, or at many points since. Having achieved the baseline goal of responding to the 9/11 attacks and scattering Al Qaeda’s networks in the country, there was a genuine chance to declare victory in the conflict. Instead, successive administrations chose to become permanent parties to an Afghan civil war that began with the Soviet invasion and has raged ever since. The net result has been to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Biden’s somber words reflected the undeniable fact that the U.S. did not win the war in Afghanistan. While no one else really won either, the Taliban make perhaps the most compelling case for having achieved victory after successfully enduring 20 years of pressure from a coalition of the most powerful militaries on the planet.

The American public tuned out of from the war in Afghanistan years ago. But putting the entire endeavor into perspective, a damning picture of futility and waste emerges. The U.S. squandered resources and lives on an epic scale, while backing local Afghan allies looking to settle their own scores in a long-running civil war. The ultimate goal of eradicating the Taliban proved impossible years ago, as for better or worse they have proven themselves to be deeply embedded in Afghan society and to have significant political support that has been continually bolstered by the presence of U.S. forces and the failures of the Afghan government.

The costs of waging this war of choice have been high. In addition to roughly 2,400 U.S. service members who have died in Afghanistan, roughly 157,000 Afghans have lost their lives, according to the Costs of War Project run by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, including tens of thousands of civilians. The number of wounded and displaced is unknown but is believed to run into the millions. In addition to civilian casualties inflicted directly by U.S. raids and airstrikes, a network of death squads and militias built with American support seems likely to continue terrorizing Afghans for years to come.

The current talks between Afghans themselves being held in Doha, Qatar, seem unlikely to generate a sustainable peace agreement or even prevent an increase in violence once the U.S. withdraws. In recent years, even with thousands of American and NATO troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban has managed to increase its hold on territory and inflict staggering losses on poorly trained Afghan security forces, who may entirely collapse once foreign troops leave the country. While the U.S. is signaling that it is largely done with Afghanistan, a Fall of Saigon moment still threatens in the future, similar to the Soviet withdrawal that led a few years later to the violent collapse of its puppet government in Kabul.

In his speech announcing the U.S. withdrawal, Biden said, “We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result.” In many ways Biden is correct: The U.S. cannot and should not act as a permanent occupier of Afghanistan. That said, a collective decision by four successive presidents to keep the war going has prolonged Afghan suffering while wasting American lives and resources. After 20 years, the U.S. is leaving Afghanistan in favor of a minimal counterterrorism footprint. Many haunting questions remain, including why this change in America’s approach wasn’t made decades ago, what has been accomplished by the huge loss of life and resources, and who is responsible for the ultimate failure of the U.S. project in Afghanistan.

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Then-Cuban president Fidel Castro, left, joins hands with brother Raúl in Havana in February 1986 after the two were reelected during the 3rd Cuban Communist Party Congress. (photo: Charles Tasnadi/AP)

Cuba's Castro Era to End as Raúl Expected to Step Down From Communist Party Post
Anthony Faiola, The Washington Post
Faiola writes: "Sixty-two years after a band of revolutionaries set Cuba down the path of confrontation with Washington - and unleashed waves of exiles that reshaped American cities - the last of the Castro brothers, towering figures of the Cold War, is poised to surrender official power."
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Amazon fulfillment facility. (photo: iStock)

Amazon Warehouses Linked to Environmental Injustice in Southern California, Report Finds
Emily Denny, EcoWatch
Denny writes: "Over the past year, Amazon has significantly expanded its warehouses in Southern California, employing residents in communities that have suffered from high unemployment rates. But a new report shows the negative environmental impacts of the boom."

ver the past year, Amazon has significantly expanded its warehouses in Southern California, employing residents in communities that have suffered from high unemployment rates, The Guardian reports. But a new report shows the negative environmental impacts of the boom, highlighting its impact on low-income communities of color across Southern California.

The report, from the People's Collective for Environmental Justice (PCEJ) and students from the University of Redlands, shared with The Guardian, is meant to serve as an "advocacy tool to help raise awareness related to the warehouse industry's impacts on Southern California's air pollution issues," Earthjustice noted.

California's Inland Empire, 60 miles east of Los Angeles, has emerged as one of the largest "warehousing hubs" in the world in just the past few decades, according to Grist. Since establishing its first warehouse in the region in 2012, Amazon has become the largest private employer in the region, where 40,000 people now work in Amazon warehouses, picking, packing, sorting and unloading, as well as driving trucks and operating aircrafts, The New York Times Magazine reported.

"The company is so enmeshed in the community that it can simultaneously be a TV channel, grocery store, home security system, boss, personal data collector, high school career track, internet cloud provider and personal assistant," The New York Times Magazine added.

In just the last year, Amazon has tripled its delivery hubs in the region due to the demand for online shopping during the COVID-19 crisis. But despite the economic boom, heavy air pollution mainly from trucks going in and out of the warehouses infects nearby communities, the new research showed, according to The Guardian.

The research found, for example, that the populations living within a half-mile of the warehouses are 85 percent people of color, while California's overall population is 64 percent people of color, The Guardian reported. The research also found that communities with the most Amazon warehouses nearby have the lowest rates of Amazon sales per household.

"Amazon has boomed in 2020 and tripled the amount of money it's making, and it is happening at a cost to the folks who live in these communities," Ivette Torres, a PCEJ environmental science researcher and analyst, who helped put the research together, told The Guardian.

The research also demonstrated that the top 10 communities with the most warehouses in the region also experience pollution from other facilities, like gas plants and oil refineries, Earthjustice wrote in a statement.

"The Inland Empire, probably more than any region in the United States, has disproportionately [borne] the brunt of the environmental and economic impact of goods movement, and Amazon is driving that now in the Inland Empire," Jake Wilson, a California State University, Long Beach, professor of sociology, told Grist.

Last year, the San Bernardino International Airport Authority ratified a decision to allow an air cargo facility development at the airport, allowing Amazon to operate more flights out of the region, Grist reported.

Among the local residents to oppose the decision was Jorge Osvaldo Heredia, a resident of San Bernadino in Southern California since 2005. "This whole region has been taken over by warehouses," Heredia told Grist, and commented on the "horrible" air quality in the city on most days. "It's really reaching that apex point where you can't avoid the warehouses, you can't avoid the trucks," he added.

Advocates who published the research are pushing on the South Coast Air Quality Management District, a local air pollution regulatory agency, to move forward with the Warehouse Indirect Source Rule, which would require new and existing warehouses to take action to reduce emissions locally each year, The Guardian reported. Some solutions include moving towards zero-emissions trucks and mitigation fees.

"Last year, we saw some of the worst air quality, with wildfires adding to it, and the trucks were still in and out of our communities. So this is a huge change that we need right now, and that we actually needed yesterday," Torres concluded, according to The Guardian.

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