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Boycott Money and Save Your Soul - Launching the Goodwill Revolution
by Michael I Phillips

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Not just a book but an invitation to join the Goodwill Revolution against an unfair, unjust and deceptive system that keeps the world poor and without hope. Find out how you can do this, quit the rat race, and achieve a happier more meaningful life for yourself and others through goodwill to all  
For more book info see
     goodwillie.org

May 2008  UNDILUTED Vol 14

Jamaica's famous journalist, John Maxwell, is right on target again and in his own incisive way as he sums up Cuba and the US contributions.

Return of the floating barracoons?
Last Monday, May 26. was the 45th anniversary of Cuba’s first venture into what it calls its ‘internationalism’ On that date in 1963 Cuba dispatched a medical brigade to Algeria, then still bleeding from a successful but incredibly bloody war of independence against France. Fortuitously on the same date in 2008, a consignment of 4.5 tons of serum, medicines and sanitary materials donated by Cuba arrived in the earthquake ravaged capital of the Chinese province of Sichuan to help some of those injured in the May 12 earthquake.
In the 45 years between those events the Cuban people have sent abroad as many health workers as US troops in Iraq--140,000 of them – to more than a hundred foreign countries, some considerably richer than Cuba but all in need of help. They range from Nicaragua to Pakistan, Venezuela to Vietnam, Haiti and Jamaica to Angola and Bolivia. There are more than 10,000 Cubans in Venezuela, teachers, doctors and nurses. In Haiti they were helping the Haitians establish a medical school before they were rudely interrupted by the US Marines – arriving in aid of terrorists and drug-dealers who called themselves Freedom Fighters – coming to kidnap the democratically elected president of Haiti .
The Cubans are also hosts to more than 10,000 young foreigners in Cuban institutions learning everything from building construction to ophthalmology and organic farming.
The Cubans have achieved these and other advances despite having been for half a century the target of unremitting hostility from the world’s only superpower. I happened to be in Cuba on the very day in 1960 the US – having already sponsored various outrages designed to destroy the Cuban revolution – declared an embargo against them, an Act of War in international law.
The casus belli was Cuba’s decision to nationalise with compensation, the oil refineries, the sugar refineries and the enormous plantations owned by US corporations. If it were true that the US hostility was based on its desire to promote human rights in Cuba there is no way the American could have simultaneously protected and promoted such bloodthirsty tyrants and terrorists as the Duvaliers (Haiti), Stroessner (Paraguay), Somoza (Nicaragua), Rios Montt (Guatemala) Mobutu (Congo), Jonas Savimbi (Angola), the Cuban terrorists Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch and Santiago Alvarez and the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
And, if human rights were the motive, there would not now be five Cubans in American jails whose only crime was to try to warn the US against the activities of exiled Cuban terrorists in Miami. Nor would there now be living free in Miami notorious Cuban terrorists including those who blew up a Cuban airliner en route from Barbados to Jamaica in 1976 killing nearly a hundred young people. As Mr Bush has said, those who harbour terrorists are themselves terrorists.
These perverted policies have allowed the US to wreak billions of dollars worth of damage on the Cuban economy and to kill or maim thousands of Cubans.
The Cubans have within the last two weeks exposed new US mischief against their country. This involves official US behaviour which is illegal in international law, in US law and in Cuban law. Briefly, the Cubans have submitted proof that the chief American diplomat in Cuba has acted as a banker and conduit for money and other contraband, between convicted terrorist Santiago Alvarez in Miami and so-called human rights activists in Cuba. He also intervened with a federal judge to secure a lighter sentence for Alvarez then awaiting sentencing in Miami.
One sinister collateral disclosure is that there is or was, a plan to create some provocation in Cuba, backed up by American ships parked offshore various Cuban ports. I can imagine that if some agency were able to provoke some hysterical panic among Cubans the Americans would no doubt be willing to undertake a ‘humanitarian’ intervention by the US navy with ships offshore to rescue Cubans ‘fleeing’ their country.
It is a plan which, if applied in Jamaica, would depopulate the country within hours. Remember the ‘Russian ships’ panic of 1962?
Such a plan to provoke a Cuban exodus a la Mariel would of course, require the assistance of the Jamaican government to allow our ports to be used as temporary staging posts. Which may be why it is a good thing that Mr Golding has not yet been able to visit Mr Bush.
Of course, such a scenario is unthinkable. The Bush administration is much too scrupulous to try to destabilise the Cuban government. And George Bush I am certain, is perfectly content to allow the Revolution to survive its tenth American President.
He has no taste for defeat.
Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com