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

Following Fidel Study Tour 2013

18 November - 03 December 2013

From £1,995.00

Special new tour visiting historic sites of revolution including Eastern provinces.

New tour led by Geoff Bottoms. This tour will embark on an exciting itinerary visiting the Eastern provinces including Santiago. We will visit the sites of the Granma landing, the campaign in the Sierra Maestra mountains and scenes of the final triumph of the Revolution in Havana.

At the same time, this tour is a wonderful opportunity to share experiences with the Cuban people in their neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools and local health care centres with plenty of time to relax and enjoy the vibrant Cuban culture.

Geoff Bottoms has led many successful group tours to Cuba including the 2012 tour 'In the footsteps of Che' and previous 'Revolutionary Route' tours. These tours are very popular and are often oversubscribed.

Book now for our fantastic ‘Following Fidel: The Cradle of the Revolution’ study tour. This thought-provoking study tour will examine Fidel Castro’s pivotal role in the Cuban Revolution and explore contemporary politics in Cuba’s central and Eastern provinces, including Santiago de Cuba and the Sierra Maestra.

Download the pack at here or contact tours@cuba-solidarity.org.uk for more details.

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

Cuba creates four anti-cancer vaccines, media ignores it

That Cuba has already developed four vaccines or inoculations against different types of cancer is without doubt important news for humanity. The World Health Organisation says each year about 8 million people die from this illness.

However, the international mainstream media have almost totally ignored this news.

Last year, Cuba patented the first therapeutic vaccine against advanced lung cancer in the world, called CIMAVAX-EGF. In January, the second one, called Racotumomab, was announced.

Clinical testing in 86 countries shows that these vaccines, although they don’t cure the illness, do managed to reduce tumours and allow for a stable stage of the illness, thereby increasing hope and quality of life.

The Molecular Immunology Centre of Havana, a Cuban state organisation, is the creator of all these vaccines.

In 1985 it developed the vaccine for meningitis B, the only one in the world, and later others that fight hepatitis B and dengue. For years, the centre has been conducting research to develop vaccines against AIDS-HIV.

The other Cuban state-run centre, Laboratories LABIOFAM, has developed homeopathic medicine for cancer such as VIDATOX, created from the blue scorpion’s venom. Cuba exports these medicines to 26 countries, and takes part in joint companies with China, Canada, and Spain.

All of this goes against the well-enforced stereotype, reinforced by the media silence regarding advances achieved by Cuba and other global south (so-called Third World) countries, that vanguard medical research takes place only in so-called developed countries.

Undoubtedly, the Cuban state obtains an economic benefit from the international sale of these pharmaceutical products. However, its philosophy of investigation and commercialisation is diametrically opposed to the business practices of the large pharmaceutical industry.

Nobel Prize for Medicine winner Richard J Roberts recently denounced the pharmaceutical industry for orienting its research not to curing illnesses, but to developing medicine for chronic ailments, which is much more economically profitable.

Roberts suggested the illnesses that are particular to poorer countries, because of their low profitability, simply are not researched. That is why 90% of the budget for research is aimed at illnesses suffered by 10% of the world’s population.

Cuba’s public medicine industry, even though it is one of the main sources of foreign currency for the country, is guided by radically different principles.

In the first place, its research is aimed at, in a large part, developing vaccines that prevent illnesses and as a consequence, reduce the population’s spending on medicine.

In an article in the prestigious magazine Science, researchers from Stanford University (California), Paul Drain and Michele Barry, said Cuba has better health indicators than the United States, despite spending up to 20 times less on the sector.

The reason for this is the absence, in the Cuban model, of commercial pressures and encouragement by pharmaceutical companies, and a successful strategy of educating the population about preventative healthcare.

Furthermore, traditional and natural therapies, such as herbal medicine, acupuncture, hypnosis and many others — practices that are not very profitable for the makers of medicine — have been integrated into the free public health system of the island for years.

Also, in Cuba, medicine is distributed via the national public hospital network as something that is either free or highly subsidised, thanks to the income from exporting it.

The Cuban medicine industry also barely assigns any of its budget to publicity. In the case of the multinationals, publicity spending is higher than what they invest in actual research.

Finally, Cuba promotes the production of generic medicine. These are made available in other poor countries and to the World Health Organisation at much lower prices than those offered by the global medicine industry.

But these measures, removed from market rules, generate a lot of pressure from the pharmaceutical industry.

Recently, the Ecuadorian government announced it would buy a large number of medicines from Cuba in exchange for scholarships for Ecuadorian students to study in Cuba and for the support provided by Cuban specialists.

Protests against the move by the Ecuadorian Association of Pharmaceutical Laboratories were immediately converted into a media campaign, spreading the message of the supposed bad quality of Cuban medicine.

On the other hand, many analysts see the international pharmaceutical industry as being behind the coup in Honduras in 2009. The elected government of Manuel Zelaya, in the framework of agreements made within the Cuba- and Venezuela-founded Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas to which Honduras then belonged, aimed to substitute Cuban generic medicine for imports from multinationals.

The US blockade against Cuba imposes big obstacles to the international commercialisation of Cuban pharmaceutical products, but it is also directly detrimental to US citizens. For example, each year the 80,000 diabetics in the US who suffer the amputation of their toes don’t have access to the Cuban vaccine Heperprot P, which would prevent such amputations.

The Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Peter Agre recently said: “Cuba is a magnificent example of how scientific knowledge and research can be integrated.”

Irina Bokova, general director of UNESCO, said she was impressed by Cuba’s scientific achievements and her organisation is willing to promote them to the rest of the world.

The inevitable question is, will she count on the essential collaboration of the international mainstream media to spread this information?

This article was written by Jo MacLean and translated for Green Left Weekly by Tamara Pearson

Walk for Cuba - Sunday 14 July 2013

Join a wonderful walk through the beautiful Chess Valley to raise funds for the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.

The Walk for Cuba is a sponsored event to raise much needed funds for the work of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. It also celebrates the 60th anniversary of the symbolic start of the Cuban revolution on 26 July 1953 when the revolutionaries made the famous and audacious assault on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba.

Each walker will be asked to raise a minimum sponsorship of £30 (£5 children) and will receive a special Walk for Cuba t-shirt and badge. CSC will organise some celebratory activities along the route and there will be a co-ordinated refreshment stop at one of the lovely historic public houses along the way.

The Walk for Cuba, starting at Little Chalfont, is a 6½ mile circular walk and will take 3 hours at a leisurely pace. A shorter walk of 3 miles is also offered for those that can’t manage the full route. 

Your journey begins and ends in the village of Little Chalfont near the Chalfont and Latimer tube station on the Metropolitan underground line. It takes in three beautiful villages and two imposing country houses as it weaves its way through the varied and unspoilt countryside in and around the Chess Valley.

The beautiful Chess River

There is something for everyone on this truly unique walk. Wildlife lovers will relish the chance to spot herons, woodpeckers and kingfishers; children will enjoy the chance to walk through fields of cows, horses and Shetland ponies; lovers of history will marvel at the ancient Tudor manor in Chenies and real-ale enthusiasts can find refuge in the wonderful pubs along the way. All this set within an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty across the rolling hills of the Chilterns.

Why not get a group of friends to sign up with you and enjoy a wonderful summer’s day out together and support Cuba and the work of CSC at the same time.

Exact start time and location will be sent out to participants six weeks before the Walk for Cuba.

For information and sponsorship packs please call CSC on 020 8800 0155 or email office@cuba-solidarity.org.uk today.

Alternatively, you can download Registration Form, Sponsorship Form and Fundraising Tips below.

Downloads:

• Registration Form
• Sponsorship Form
• Fundraising Tips 

Route Map

Please Join, Share and Invite friends to the Facebook Event for the Walk for Cuba

Food sovereignty: a long-term aim

More than 100,000 farms have now been distributed, covering more than 1 million hectares in total. Photo: Alice Mutasa

By Wendy Emmett and Lorraine Tillett

The recent devastation of agricultural areas in eastern Cuba by Hurricane Sandy is a tragically large but, hopefully, temporary setback to the slow progress towards food sovereignty in the country. Fortunately, over the past few decades, even despite the blockade and other natural disasters such as hurricanes, Cuba has been decreasing the amount of food imported into the country despite the image often portrayed of a country entirely and eternally dependent on others for sustenance. Since the 1990’s this progress has been of a noticeably different order as the Cuban government has officially recognised the significance of food sovereignty.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent disappearance of both the market for Cuba’s agricultural exports (sugar, tobacco and citrus), and the source of its food and agricultural imports, the situation was so bad that, for a time at the start of the ‘90’s (the ‘Special Period’), Cuba posted the worst growth in per capita food production in all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

 By contrast, and absolutely because of the socialist basis on which the country is organised, Cuba has rebounded over the following years to show the best performance in food production in the region: an annual growth rate of 4.2 % per capita from 1996 to 2005, where the regional average was 0 %.

As ever, detractors have tried to deny the progress Cuba is making in this area. One in particular, Denis Avery, (a climate-change denier working for the Hudson Institute, a conservative US think tank that runs the Centre for Global Food Issues, promoting  pesticides and biotechnology) has spread the myth of Cuba’s total dependency on imported food and continually detracts from the advances being made in the eco-agronomy movement in Cuba. In an article entitled “Cubans Starve on Diet of Lies,” written in 2007 he stated:

The Cubans told the world they had heroically learned to feed themselves without fuel or farm chemicals after their Soviet subsidies collapsed in the early 1990s. … Now, a senior Ministry of Agriculture official has admitted in the Cuban press that 84 percent of Cuba’s current food consumption is imported... The organic success was all a lie.

Avery has used such distortions to promote a campaign discrediting both academics and practitioners of Cuban eco-agronomy. The figure of 84% came from a statement from the Ministry of Economy and Planning in 2007 but referred only to basic food distributed via the ration card. The picture elsewhere is very different. In fact, in his ‘The Issue of Food Security in Cuba’ report for the University of Florida, José Alvarez states that, between 1980 and 1997, despite many setbacks, food imports fell from 71% to 42% overall.

According to statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations from 2003, while there were still high levels of imports in such foodstuffs as oils and cereals and nearly 50% of meat was brought in, there was negligible or no importation of  fish, starchy roots (a staple of the Cuban diet), other vegetables, fruit, eggs, and sugar. In fact, overall, there was a net importation of less than 20%.

Dependency rose again later in the 2000’s: after being hit by three especially destructive hurricanes. In 2008, Cuba satisfied national needs by importing 55% of its total food, (ironically much of this from the US which has permitted limited food exports to Cuba since 2000). However, as the world food price crisis drives prices higher, the Government has re-emphasised food self-sufficiency. Regardless of whether food has been imported or produced within the country, it is important to recognise that, since the Revolution, Cuba has been generally able to adequately feed its people, despite the blockade and external factors such as the fall of the USSR. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Cuba’s average daily per capita dietary energy supply in 2007 (the last year available) was over 3,200 kcal, much improved over the lows of the Special Period and now the highest of all Latin American and Caribbean nations.

How the changes have been achieved

Since the Revolution, as in most countries in the latter half of the 20th century, there has been a huge rural to urban migration. In Cuba much of the reason for this lay in the high levels of education achieved by its excellent and accessible education system which initially drew people away from the rural lifestyle. The Cuban government, recognising the need to move away from dependence on imports for their food and specifically following the USSR withdrawal, began in the mid-1990s to give over some farms to people with the proviso that they cultivated the land. More than 100,000 farms have now been distributed, covering more than 1 million hectares in total. Most of these new farmers are members of Credit and Service Cooperatives. The government is currently trying to accelerate the processing of an unprecedented number of land requests

The most important developments, following these moves were in this cooperative sector, which in 2006, while controlling only 25% of the agricultural land, produced over 65% of the country’s food. Production of vegetables fell drastically between 1988 and 1994, but by 2007 had rebounded to well over 1988 levels. This production increase came despite using 72% fewer agricultural chemicals in 2007 than in 1988. Similar patterns can be seen for other crops like beans, roots, and tubers, all Cuban staples.

Changes in crop production and agrochemical use

Crop	% production change		%change in agrochemical use
	1988 to 1994	1988 to 2007	1988 to 2007
General vegetables	-65	+145	-72
Beans	-77	+351	-55
Roots and tubers	-42	+145	-85

Source: Peter Rosset, Braulio Machín-Sosa, Adilén M. Roque-Jaime, and Dana R. Avila-Lozano, “The Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement of ANAP in Cuba,” Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2011): 161-91.

Thanks to the considerable input from highly-trained technicians with a scientific background working closely with the farmers themselves, the process of refining methods and practice in the field has been very successful and has brought extra benefits such as breeds and practices with resilience to climate change. All of this is closely followed by Cuba’s Alba neighbours, many of whom have benefitted from visits by Cuban technicians who have initiated some of the best practice procedures in countries such as Venezuela and El Salvador.

Hurricane Sandy

Sandy was the most devastating hurricane in the eastern part of Cuba for a century. A total of 2,695 hectares of banana and plantains were destroyed in Santiago de Cuba, also a significant number of hectares of coffee, potato, yucca, rice and other basic products of Cuban diet were seriously damaged by the floods and strong winds. Significant damage to industrial crops like sugar cane, plantain and others will affect the economy and employment in the short term. Substantial losses were registered also in individual farms and small plots of permaculture production suffered innumerable damage; these will impact on the food security in this region. In Holguin, 85% of plantain production was lost. As well as damage to crops, food and coffee processing units were damaged and the strong winds caused soil erosion.

Food and practical help were received from other parts of Cuba immediately and international solidarity began within days. Venezuela sent over 300 tons of non-perishable food, water, equipment and machinery. Bolivia sent two shipments of water and food totalling 120 tons of aid, noting the solidarity Cuba had shown in helping to eliminate illiteracy and train Bolivian doctors.

Of course a major obstacle to hurricane recovery is the 50-year old US economic blockade which has cost Cuba up to $1.07 trillion. However, despite the blockade, the hurricanes and other effects of climate change, Cuba is gradually making significant advances in self-sufficiency. Detractors of the gains of the Cuban revolution will always present false information and a negative view of what has been and continues to be achieved. La victoria in food sovereignty may not be just around the corner, but it is on its way.

This article draws heavily on a Monthly Review article by Fernando Funes-Monzote and Miguel A. Altieri to be found here. 

Fernando, who researches at  the Experimental Station Indio Hatuey, University of Matanzas, Cuba, visited the UK in 2010 and spoke at several CSC meetings on the topic of eco-agronomy.

This is a corrected version of the article that appeared in CubaSi magazine.