US and Panama collude against Cuba

in August with just a week left in office, right-wing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso freed four international terrorists who had attempted to blow up the university amphitheatre where Fidel Castro was speaking in November 2000. While on the one hand pursuing its phony 'war on terrorism', the US has been pulling strings to secure the release of four convicted terrorists with a long history of death squads, assassination plans and torture behind them.

In August 2000, two high-ranking members of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANE) travelled to El Salvador to meet Posada Carriles, a known terrorist, to plot with him the assassination of Castro during the Iberoamerican Summit in Panama. With their money and fake documents, Posada Carriles travelled to Panama and Honduras to meet Rafael Nodarse, the aims trafficker now sheltering him.

In Costa Rica Carriles selected his accomplices, all known to the FBI. (Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo, wanted by the Mexican police, is the murderer of a Cuban fishing technician; Guillermo Novo Sampol killed Chilean chancellor Orlando Letelier, on orders from Pinochet, and Pedro Remon Rodriguez was the assassin of Cuban diplomat Felix Garcia. All were under the command of Posada. a CIA-trained, longterm terrorist responsible for blowing up a Cuban civil aeroplane in 1976, killing all 73 passengers aboard. Posada escaped, on CIA advice, to El Salvador, from where he directed narcotraffic operations to fund weapons for the US-backed Nicaraguan contras. In January 1994, with funding from CANF, Posada launched a failed assassination attempt on Castro in Honduras. Between 1994 and 1996, he set 44 bombs and plotted two further assassination attempts on Castro. He made a number of subsequent assassination attempts in 1997 and 1998. In a 1998 interview, he admitted that be had recruited Central American mercenaries who, with CANF funding, smuggled 14 bombs in Cuba. Eight exploded and an Italian tourist was killed.

On 17 November 2000, he and his accomplices were arrested in Panama carrying over 100lbs of plastic explosives and jailed. Yet this year President Moscoso decided to go above Panamanian law and release the four men, despite huge demonstrations in Panama protesting against her decision.

While in office, Moscoso introduced unpopular neoiberal measures in Panama, robbed the country's international development funds and slavishly followed US policies. Her sister is a personal friend of Posada's. The releases took place shortly before Panama's 1 September elections and may have contributed to Moscoso losing to Torrijos, son of the famous left-wing nationalist General Omar Torrijos. He immediately condemned the releases 'shameful'.

In the run-up to the November presidential elections in the US, George W Bush needs to secure Florida's key exiled community vote and the generous donations from its Cuban-American lobby. Hence its new measures against Cuba and hence the release of the four men - who were received with joy by the reactionary exile community when they flew briefly into Miami on a private jet while the administration turned a blind eye.

Juanjo Rivas

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 181 October/November 2004

Cuba in brief

Education

  Cuba's new school year started on 6 September, after important changes to the educational system. Cuba is launching a high school model with classes of no more than 15 pupils, each with a multi-disciplined teacher. In elementary classes the focus has been on maintaining one teacher to no more than 20 pupils. There will be 350,000 students enrolling this year in higher education centres - 40,000 more than ever before.

Efforts at all educational levels will target the strengthening of household-school relationships, the formation of collective social values in pupils and social discipline and behaviour.

Health

  On 11 July, World Population Day, Cuba will be launching a programme prioritising medical care for ante- and post-natal mothers. Cuba continues to have one of the lowest infant mortality rates in Latin America, 6.3 per 1,000 live births. And life expectancy continues to grow. Between 1995 and 1998 life expectancy grew from an average of 74.83 to 76.15 years and is expected to continue to rise. Despite Cuba being a third world country, HIV and AIDS is under control with one of the lowest infection rates of 0.1% of the population aged 15-49 years old.

Hurricane damage

  Hurricane Charley caused the collapse of 2,916 buildings and 70,000 homes in the City of Havana and Havana provinces. One person died and five people were injured. Worse casualties were prevented by high levels of organisation and commitment to the safety of the Cuban people. No one was killed by the even more devastating force of Hurricane Ivan a month later, although tobacco plantations were destroyed. Richard Boucher, acting spokesperson for the US State Department, saying the US Interests Section in Havana would offer the Cubans a paltry $50,000, via so-called independent non-governmental organisations, to help with damage caused by the hurricane. Such organisations are little more than a front for US plots against Cuba. Vice president Carlos Lage made it clear that Cuba had its own resources to confront hurricane damage. In the first week 1,400 homes were repaired. Fidel Castro has said that whatever the damage Cuba will not accept aid from any country that wants to see the overthrow of the Revolution.

Luke Curham

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 181 October/November 2004

Gay rights in Cuba

Homophobia exists in Cuba as it does all over the world. But those who assert that widespread repression of homosexuality exists in Cuba rely on statements made in the 1960s when homosexuality was a criminal offence (as it was in Britain). While there have been instances in Cuba in recent times when gays have been subjected to harassment, this has been due to individuals? backward ideas and prejudice. But the idea of Cuba as a repressive regime where gays face constant persecution is constantly brought up by Trotskyists and opportunists in Britain as a stick to beat the Revolution, and needs to be countered, as RICHARD ROQUES shows.

Before the Revolution, when Cuba was an offshore casino and brothel for the idle rich of the US, homosexuality was outlawed. Repression and poverty forced many gay men into prostitution. The anti-homosexual 1930s Public Ostentation Law, remained after the Revolution triumphed. Between 1965 and 1968, homosexual men were amongst those incarcerated in austere Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), labour camps set up to counter bourgeois and individualistic elements who were resisting the Revolution. The camps were closed down in 1968 following bitter protests to the government by the Cuban Writers and Artists Federation. A year later, meanwhile, in the United States, after years of persecution, homosexuals fought pitched battles with the police after a routine raid in the Stonewall bar.

In 1979 homosexual acts were decriminalised in Cuba (unlike in many capitalist countries; some states in the US retain outdated sodomy laws). In 1987 the offence of ?homosexual acts in public places? was removed from Cuba?s penal code. The age of consent for homosexuals in Cuba is 16 years, the same as for heterosexuals. In 1993 sex education workshops on homo- sexuality were run throughout Cuba to explain that homophobia is a prejudice. At the same time Castro declared:

'I don't consider homosexuality to be a phenomenon of degeneration... [I consider] it to be one of the natural aspects and tendencies of human beings which should be respected. I am absolutely opposed to any form of repression, contempt, scorn or discrimination with regard to homosexuals.'

In the same year Strawberry and Chocolate, the first Cuban film to deal openly with homosexuality, was hugely popular in Cuba, It was the only film funded by the government that year.

In 1995 the May Day march, one of the most important events in the social and political calendar, was led by drag queens who were cheered along the whole route. Imagine trannies at the state opening of parliament or Trooping the Colour. Only one queen at those. And she doesn't salsa.

In 1996 Pablo Milanes, a singer adored by his fellow Cubans, who had himself been incarcerated in a UMAP in the 1960s, dedicated a song about gay men to all Cuban homosexuals. Recently a play produced by El Teatro Sotano ran in Vedado entitled Muerte en el bosque (A Death in the Woods). Based on the investigation of the murder of a Havana drag queen, through the investigation of the crime, Cuban attitudes towards and prejudices against gays are examined and challenged at every level of society. In December 2000, at the film festival in Havana, easily half of the Latin American films shown had gay themes.

AIDS: Another stick to beat Cuba with

The policy of enforced detention in sanatoria for HIV/AIDS sufferers initially introduced in Cuba was contentious, but an effective way of dealing with a then little-understood and potentially devastating disease. The policy of compulsory quarantine ended ten years ago. Cuba is today in the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS - a fact met with deafening silence from Cuba?s enemies.

Those diagnosed with HIV are given an eight-week education and drug support programme in a sanatorium and then have the choice to stay (gay couples live together) or return to their homes. Dr Byron Barksdale, director of US charity Cuban AIDS Projects pointed out that people in the US 'may get five minutes worth of education'. Infection rates in Cuba are 0.1%, the lowest in the region, with 3,200 cases out of a population of 11 million. Anonymous testing is available and most HIV cases are diagnosed within six months of exposure. Cuba now produces generic anti-retroviral treatment. Multinational pharmaceutical companies make fantastic profits out of anti-retroviral drugs and deny them to the poor. In the US people with HIV/AIDS who do not have health insurance are denied the latest drugs. In contrast, Cuba has sent thou- sands of doctors and nurses to almost every part of the world to help in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. In Botswana, with the highest proportion of people in the world with HIV/AIDS, Cubans work in clinics and hospitals and the Cuban government has offered to train, at no cost, nurses and doctors from other Caribbean countries to fight the pandemic.

In a capitalist society if you are gay and rich and you live in a city, life can be good. But capitalism hasn?t abolished homophobia. On 6 October, 1998 in Wyoming, Matthew Shepherd was tied to a fence and beaten within an inch of his life. He died several days later. He had been beaten up on two previous occasions because he was gay. In one of the attacks his jaw was broken. In the aftermath US organisation The National Youth Advocacy Coalition published Facts about gay youth which included the statistics that 80% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people report verbal abuse and 66.7% of gay, lesbian and bisexual youth were threatened/injured with a weapon at school in the past year. Only a few miles from Cuba, gays in Jamaica are regularly murdered, raped and brutalised with the apparent acquiescence of the police and legal system. Assaults on homosexuals are up 15% in Britain from last year. I was queer-bashed in London a few years ago and ended up in casualty. That?s what over 40 years of gay rights has achieved under capitalism. Socialist Cuba, meanwhile, has constantly shown itself able to learn from the mistakes of the past; today it has a visible and thriving gay and lesbian community and is moving towards an ever-more tolerant and inclusive society, valuing all its people for their contribution to society, regardless of sexual orientation.

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 181 October/November 2004