Book Review: The Economic War Against Cuba by Salim Lamrani

Salim Lamrani - French academic and expert in US-Cuban relations - will be touring the UK in May to discuss his new book The Economic War Against Cuba. Full details of the tour can be found here and you can buy a copy of his excellent academic study ahead of his visit online now.

Salim Lamrani presents a comprehensive and systematic study of the United States’ economic sanctions against Cuba and the harm they cause the Cuban people. Lamrani delicately combines a heart-rending catalogue of human suffering with robust analysis – including the examination of official U.S. government documentation – as he considers the origins, provisions and legality of the blockade. He exposes the farcical nature of blockade legislation, one example being that the export of pianos to Cuba was deemed detriment to the interests and security of the United States.

The introduction expertly shows that the blockade is unique in terms of its length, thoroughness and sophistication. Whilst Washington has normalised relations with China and Vietnam, the blockade has been strengthened and applied retroactively and extra-territorially.

Lamrani exposes the ideological nature of the blockade and demonstrates how it originates from the United States’ historical desire to subjugate Cuba. The blockade’s initial justification was a dispute over compensation following the nationalisation of U.S. multi-national corporations after the triumph of the Revolution. Cuba agreed compensation with France, the UK, Canada and Spain – only the U.S. rejected the compensation process which adhered to all international standards and laws.

Throughout its fifty-year history, the validation for the blockade has changed. Reasons cited include: issues over compensation, Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union, Cuban intervention in African liberation movements and fabricated concerns over democracy and human rights. The chapter on economic sanctions from Eisenhower to Obama – which considers each President’s tenure individually – skilfully shows how the blockade has evolved and multi-layered sanctions have been imposed despite growing international condemnation. 

Further chapters consider the impact of sanctions on Cuban healthcare – which documents how the blockade causes the deaths of thousands of Cubans every year – and the extra-territorial application of the blockade. Lamrani references numerous examples of foreign banks and businesses being fined by the U.S. for trading with Cuba and showcases the various cases where U.S. law has superseded domestic law which makes it illegal to discrimination on grounds of race and nationality.

The extra-territorial nature of the blockade means an American tourist that smokes a Cuban cigar or drinks Havana Club anywhere in the world, “could be fined a million dollars and sentenced to ten years in prison” whilst a Cuban living abroad “cannot, theoretically, eat … at McDonald’s”. 

Finally, Lamrani highlights the growing American opposition to the blockade – whilst recognising the continuing influence of the vitriolic Cuba-American lobby – and considers the Cuban claim that the blockade is a “genocidel policy” with reference to supporting Articles from the Geneva Convention.

Lamrani’s book presents the concealed reality of an economic blockade which has cost the Cuban economy more than $751 billion and which particularly affects the most vulnerable people in Cuba. Over 70% of Cubans have lived in a climate of permanent economic hostility and the blockade remains “the main obstacle to Cuba’s national development as well as contrary to the UN Charter and international law”. 

At just under 100 pages, Lamrani’s study is accessible and engaging, however its relevance and erudition make it a timeless reference book and compulsory read for all activists. Lamrani expertly demonstrates that sanctions have totally failed in their objective, which is nothing less than the overthrow of the Cuban government.

Buy the book online now for just £12:45  (inc. p&p)

Work for the Cuba Solidarity Campaign

Two vacancies for Campaigns Officer and Admin/Finance Officer

Don’t miss a great opportunity to work for the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and join the campaign against the US blockade

Campaigns Officer, full time (4 or 5 days), £21,000 - £25,000 pro rata.
You will need sound administrative and written communication skills to organise participation at trade union conferences, build on strong union and parliamentary relations, write briefings, press releases, journal articles and manage contact databases.

Administrative and Finance Officer full or part time (4 or 5 days), £21,000 - £25,000 pro rata.
The Administration and Finance posts could be two part time posts, one job share, or one full time post.

Administrative - You will need good administrative skills and experience, computer literacy and the ability to work under pressure and on your own initiative. Interest in project management and marketing skills desirable.

Finance - You will need accurate book keeping skills and be able to use computerised financial packages.

Please use the Job Application Form (below). If you need a Word Document version so you can type into it, please request it immediately from office@cuba-solidarity.org.uk.

If you would like a hard copy, send a SAE to CSC, c/o Unite the Union, Woodberry, 218 Green Lanes, London N4 2HB

For further information contact: office@cuba-solidarity.org.uk or 0208 800 0155

The deadline for CSC to receive applications is midday Thursday 6th June 2013. We accept applications by email.

• Download the Application Form
• Download the Campaigns Officer  Job Description and Person Specification
• Download the Admin/Finance Officer Job Description and Person Specification

Economic sanctions against Cuba under the Obama administration

The coming to power of President Obama in the United States in 2008 marked a departure in style from the previous Bush administration toward Cuba. However, with the exception of the lifting of some restrictions on travel, economic sanctions continue to apply, including those of an extraterritorial nature. French academic Salim Lamrani gives some recent examples ahead of a nationwide speaking tour this month.

During his election campaign in 2007, then-candidate Barack Obama made a lucid observation on the outdated US policy toward Cuba. Once elected, he declared his willingness to seek "a new beginning with Cuba".

"I think we can take the relationship between the US and Cuba in a new direction and launch a new chapter of engagement that will continue during my tenure, " he said.

Obama had denounced his predecessor's policy toward Cuba, which had severely restricted the travel of the Cuban community in the United States. "This is both a strategic and humanitarian issue. This decision [...] has had a profoundly negative impact on the welfare of the Cuban people. I will grant Cuban Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island," he pledged.

Obama kept his word. In April 2009, he announced the lifting of some restrictions affecting those Cubans who lived in the United States and who had relatives on the island, which came into force on 3 September 2009. Since then, Cuban-Americans can travel to their home country without any hindrance (instead of for just fourteen days every three years) and send unlimited remittances to their families (instead of USD $100 per month).  

Extraterritorial application of economic sanctions against Cuba

However, Washington has not hesitated to apply economic sanctions, including extraterritorial, seriously violating international law. Indeed, extraterritorial blockade laws provide that national legislation can be offshore, i.e. outside the country applied. Thus, Brazilian law does not apply in Argentina. Similarly, Venezuelan law can not be applied in Colombia. But the US law of economic sanctions against Cuba is applied in all countries of the world.

Indeed, in June 2012, the Dutch bank ING had the largest penalty ever handed down since the beginning of economic siege against Cuba in 1960. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Treasury Department sanctioned the financial institution with a fine of 619 million dollars for making dollar transactions made with Cuba through the US financial system between 2002 and 2007.

The Treasury Department also forced the Dutch bank to sever its commercial relations with Cuba and announced that “ING assured the Office of Foreign Assets Control, that it had put an end to practices that led to today's settlement." So, Washington effectively banned a European bank from having any commercial transactions with Cuba.

The Cuban government denounced this new extraterritorial application of economic sanctions, which, besides preventing all trade with the United States (except limited raw food products), constitutes the main obstacle to the development of trade relations between Cuba and the rest of the world.

"The US government unilaterally fined ING bank for handling, in conjunction with its subsidiaries in France, Belgium, Netherlands and Curacao, financial and commercial transactions with Cuban entities, prohibited by the criminal policy of blockade against Cuba," said an official statement.

Szunin Adam, Director of OFAC, used the occasion to warn foreign firms about trade with Cuba. This penalty "should serve as a clear warning to anyone considering taking advantage of evading US sanctions," he said, reaffirming that Washington would continue to implement its extraterritorial measures.

Other foreign firms were also sanctioned for trade relations with Cuba. Thus, the Swedish multinational Ericsson, specialising in the field of telecommunications, had to pay a fine of $1.75 million for repairing, through its subsidiary based in Panama, Cuban equipment worth $320,000 in United States. Three employees involved in the case were also dismissed.

On 10 July 2012, the Treasury Department imposed a fine of $1.35 million on the US firm Great Western Malting Co. for selling barley to Cuba, through its foreign subsidiaries between August 2006 and March 2009. However, international humanitarian law prohibits any embargo on food commodities and drugs, even in wartime. Now, officially, Cuba and the United States have never been in conflict.

In France, Mano Giardini and Valérie Adilly, two directors of the US travel agency Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT), were fired for selling tour packages to Cuba. The company runs the risk of receiving a fine of $38,000 per trip sold, angering some employees who could not understand the situation. "Why did Carlson not withdraw the Cuba tours from our reservation system if we had no right to sell them," asked an employee.

CWT directors commented on the matter: "Under these conditions, we must apply the US rule that prohibits journeys to Cuba, even for subsidiaries." Thus, a US subsidiary based in France is required to abide by US law on economic sanctions against Cuba, ridiculing the national legislation in force.  

Google censored and a budget of $20 million for the "digital democracy"

More unusual economic sanctions prohibit Cubans from using some functions of Google search engine, such as Google Analytics (that calculates the number of visits to a website and its origin), Google Earth, Google Desktop Search, Google Toolbar, Google Code Search, Google AdSense and Google AdWords, depriving Cuba of access to these new technologies and many downloadable products. The US company provided an explanation by his representative Christine Chen: "We had it written in our terms and conditions. Google Analytics can not be used in countries subject to embargoes ".

Meanwhile, at the same time that Washington imposes restrictions on the use of Google’s digital services in Cuba and prohibits Havana from connecting to its fibre optic cable for Internet, the State Department announced that it would spend, via the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the sum of $20 million on "human rights activists, independent journalists and independent libraries on the island", for the purpose of disseminating "digital democracy".

The Obama administration, far from adopting "a new beginning with Cuba", continues to impose economic sanctions affecting all categories starting with those most vulnerable, women, children and the elderly. It does not hesitate to punish foreign companies violating international law by applying extraterritorial measures. It also refuses to hear the unanimous demand of the international community, which condemned in 2013 for the twenty-first consecutive year, the imposition of an anachronistic, cruel and ineffective state of siege which is the main obstacle to the development of the nation.

For full details of Salim Lamrani’s speaking tour, please visit the Cuba Solidarity Campaign website.

You can also order Lamrani’s book The Economic War Against Cuba

Cuban video game recreates revolutionary history

Cuban programmers have unveiled a new 3D video game that puts a distinctly revolutionary twist on gaming, letting players recreate decisive clashes from the 1959 uprising in which many of their grandparents fought.

Fight your way through swamps shoulder-to-shoulder with bearded guerrillas clad in the olive green of Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Your mission: topple 1950s Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Out to foil you are Batista soldiers and police who pop out from behind trees and fire from trucks and farmhouses. You pick them off with a vintage Colt .45 or Springfield rifle. If you're hit three times, it's revolution over.

"The player identifies with the history of Cuba," said Haylin Corujo, head of video game studies for Cuba's Youth Computing Club and leader of the team of developers who created Gesta Final – roughly translated as "Final Heroic Deed". "You can be a participant in the battles that were fought in the war from '56 to '59."

The game begins with the user joining the 82 rebels who in 1956 sailed to Cuba from Mexico aboard the Granma.

After a brief description of the landing – a spectacular disaster that very nearly derailed the rebellion when three-quarters of the Granma's passengers were killed – you find yourself wading through the wetlands of south-eastern Cuba surrounded by fellow guerrillas identifiable by the black and red armbands of the revolutionary movement.

The keyboard-operated game has five levels, most named after battles like La Plata and El Uvero, and the scenery is full of ancient vehicles and the ferns, canebrakes and mountain trails typical of the Cuban countryside. A soundtrack of gunshots and explosions accompanies the action.

The gamer never reaches the palace to take on Batista, as the main goal is to survive through to level five, which recreates the key second battle of Pino del Agua months before Batista's departure.

The game lets you pick from three player profiles, one in an olive hat similar to the one Fidel Castro was known for, another wearing a Guevara-style beret and the last with the kind of helmet worn by the ill-fated Camilo Cienfuegos in many revolution-era photographs. Programmers said that they're not meant to be exactly like the three famed rebel commanders.

"We didn't want the characters to identify any revolutionary leader, but we did want it to frame the moment," Corujo said.

This article originally appeared in the Guardian

Going over the top because of a visit to Cuba

Beyonce with Cuban school children

If you typed "Cuba" into your browser last night, you might have thought that by mistake you'd entered "beyonce jay z cuba," given the pages and pages of media reports on the power couple's visit to the island. It appears to be, for the media, the most important event this year concerning US-Cuba relations; not because of the fame of the visitors, but because some ultra-right denizens of Miami went over the top in chastising the pair.

If you guessed that we mean Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, you're right. They are among the many whose careers depend on maintaining the blockade. They were joined by the similarly blockade-dependent professor Jaime Suchlicki, of the University of Miami.

The scholar compared Cuba to Nazi Germany, without explaining the parallel. Ros-Lehtinen decried the torture going on in Cuba, without mention of a single particular.

A few opinions on the Web did mention that the blockade itself is what is wrong in this picture, or pointed out the immense hypocrisy of those who are wringing their hands over the trip. And there is plenty of hypocrisy.

For example, Cuba has not ever launched a blitzkrieg like the one the US unleashed against Iraq (at the time, it was called proudly "shock and awe"), without justification and contrary to international law. To our knowledge, Prof. Suchlicki has not challenged the war against Iraq or the decade-long occupation of the country. Not one of Cuba’s neighbouring countries is afraid of being attacked by Cuba, and all of them except the US oppose the blockade.

Neither Suchlicki nor the Congresswoman have spoken out against the tortures that the US applied around the world as standard procedures, in secret sites and in blatant violation of the International Convention Against Torture. Neither she nor Diaz-Balart have demanded an investigation of the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike who are being kept in prison in Cuba, perhaps for the rest of their lives, even after being cleared for release. Torture has indeed taken place in Cuba, and massively, but that was in Guantanamo Base, and it was applied by the CIA and the Pentagon. The force-feeding of the desperate captives is taking place there also, now.

The personalities mentioned claim the moral standing to sustain the blockade against Cuba after more than half a century. Even Diaz-Balart, who never mentions that his father was a close associate of dictator Fulgencio Batista, or that his father and his uncles became rich from working with the dictator and the Las Vegas mafia.

Fortunately, theirs is not the only opinion on the matter. More and more people from the US are visiting Cuba in person to see what it's like. Thanks to Beyoncé and Jay-Z, millions of people who had not followed previously the issue of the blockade are now discovering it. They are also discovering the people who want to keep other people of the US from travelling to the island where the famous entertainers were received warmly, not at all like enemies.

This article originally appeared at La Aborada

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Why Cuba's sustainability is not an accident

Goldman Environmental Prize

Cuba gets a lot of attention for sustainable practices it has adopted over the last few decades, but they're often framed as accidental choices—that embargo restrictions have made it difficult to get things like pesticides and traditional building materials and so has ended up with sustainable architecture and agriculture because it had no other choice.

Although that's true to some degree, it's an unfair generalization in many ways.

Cuba is home to the Caribbean's largest and best-preserved wetland area, the Cienaga de Zapata Biosphere Reserve, and some statistics show that Cuba's protected lands overall have grown by 43 percent since 1986.

A bicycle culture has taken hold, and whether or not that started accidentally, Havana officials have worked to make the streets safer for cyclists by adding bike lanes and offering a bus to take cyclists to and from the center of downtown so that they don't have to ride along cars and trucks on busy roads.

And while deforestation is said to be Cuba's most pressing environmental problem, there have been some impressive reforestation efforts, including one in a low-income neighborhood in Havana that "used to be a garbage dump" and is now an extensive woodland area.

Writing the Environment Into the Laws

These are individual examples of specific efforts—but the government deserves credit for integrating sustainability, very intentionally, into policy initiatives.

GreenLeft summarizes the policies and initiatives that unfolded after 1992, when Fidel Castro delivered a strongly pro-environment speech to the Earth Summit in Rio:

Between 1992 and 1998, the National Assembly of People's Power amended the Cuban constitution to entrench the concept of sustainable development; the National Environment and Development Program was developed (outlining the path Cuba would take to fulfil its obligations under the Rio summit's Agenda 21); CITMA was established; an overarching environment law passed; and a national environment strategy was launched.

Other major initiatives included a national strategy for environmental education; a national program of environment and development; projects for food production via sustainable methods and biotechnological and sustainable animal food, as well as a national scientific technical program for mountain zones and a national energy sources development program. Each of these program are composed of smaller projects and initiatives, involving local communities, People's Power bodies, universities, schools and mass organisations.

Authors Daniel Whittle and Orlando Rey Santos explain in a research paper on Cuba's environment that CITMA, the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment, became the first cabinet-level agency devoted to the environment when it was established in 1994—and that it almost immediately began assessing Cuba’s air and water quality, land degradation, biodiversity resources, and human settlements, among others.

The paper continues that the National Assembly formally approved in 1997 the Law of the Environment (Law 81), which would affirm CITMA's role as the lead environmental agency:

Among the six stated objectives in Law 81, there are two that expressly provide for a new and meaningful role for the general public in environmental decision making. The law tracks Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration by establishing the public’s legal right to access to information, access to participation, and access to justice. If faithfully implemented, these provisions promise an unprecedented role for nongovernmental organizations, trade associations, and the general public in the realm of policymaking and decision making on particular projects and activities of government agencies, state-owned entities, and foreign investors.

Cuba is also home to a 2010 Goldman Prize winner, a biodiversity researcher whose work with farmers has helped to increase crop diversity and ultimately encourage Cuba’s agricultural shift away from a dependency on chemicals and toward sustainability.

Article written by Rachel Cernansky for TreeHugger