FRFI 164 December 2001 / January 2002
‘The war in Afghanistan must be stopped…this war has targeted children, the civilian population and International Red Cross hospitals and facilities as well as enemies…an endless slaughter, with the most sophisticated weaponry, of a dispossessed, starving, helpless people. This war will never be justified from the point of view of ethics and international law. Those responsible for it will one day be judged by history.’
Cuban Foreign Secretary Felipe Perez Roque, demanding a United Nations debate on the war in Afghanistan, 13 November 2001
Immediately after the 11 September attacks on the US, when Cuba was amongst the first countries to offer aid and support to the victims, Fidel Castro warned that ‘the tragedy should not be used to unleash an endless carnage of innocent people’ whose first victims would be ‘the billions of people living in the poor and underdeveloped world.’ Ever since, Cuba’s opposition to the war in Afghanistan has been resolute.
Against US terrorism
‘Terror has always been a weapon of the worst enemies of mankind bent on suppressing and crushing the people’s struggle for freedom.’ Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Bruno Rodriguez. Cuba condemns the deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians as serving only the causes of reaction – ‘whatever the underlying causes, the economic and political factors and the major players guilty of bringing terrorism into the world’. This definition of course excludes, as Perez Roque emphasised at the UN, those oppressed forces in the world struggling for self-determination or against imperialist aggression. What it includes, as Fidel Castro makes plain, is the relentless terrorist activities of the USA. It was the USA which introduced the world to nuclear holocaust, to carpet bombing, to phosphorous and napalm bombs; which today funds the racist violence of Zionism against the Palestinian people; which is directly responsible for the death of up to a million Iraqi children through continuing sanctions and which has armed and trained murderers, torturers and death squads throughout the world at a cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.
Cuba has itself, as Castro points out, been for 40 years the victim of terrorism sponsored by successive US administrations and perpetrated by terrorist groups like Alpha 66, Brothers to the Rescue and the Cuban American National Foundation, operating with impunity out of US territory. Attacks have ranged from all-out invasion to assassination attempts, plane hijackings, biological warfare and acts of sabotage in addition to the crippling US blockade. So yes, Cuba is against ‘terrorism’ and has ratified all 12 anti-terrorist instruments of the UN and called for an international definition of and solution to terrorism to be agreed there.
Against imperialist war
The Cubans have no doubt that the so-called ‘war against terrorism’ is a pretext for further imperialist domination, thought out well in advance and just waiting for an excuse to begin. ‘Those who after the so-called end of the cold war continued a military build-up and the development of the most sophisticated means to kill and exterminate human beings were aware that the large military investments would give them the privilege to impose an absolute and complete dominance over the other peoples of the world. The ideologists of the imperialist system knew very well what they were doing and why they were doing it’. (Fidel Castro, 22 September)
The war, explains Castro, is ideologically driven. The war in Afghanistan is fraught with dangers for the US and risks undermining the governments of unstable countries in the region. No country would embark on such a hazardous venture if it were simply, as some have claimed, a war for oil – when the US has access to all the Russian gas and oil it needs. Rather, Castro places the war within the USA’s overall geo-strategic concept of subduing the globe to its interests and containing potential troublespots at a time when imperialism is threatened by an overwhelming economic crisis. And in this war, it is the poorest and most oppressed who are the chief victims. It is ‘a war of the former colonisers against the formerly colonised, of the richest against the poorest, of those who call themselves civilised versus those whom the “civilised” consider backward and savage. The battles will be against the people of the country not the terrorists. It is a war in favour of terrorism. A cure worse than the disease.’ (Fidel Castro, 22 September)
Imperialism in crisis
Castro mocks those who blame the world economic crisis on the events of 11 September and its aftermath. 11 September has undoubtedly exacerbated the crisis, but the events of that day were in themselves a product of the inexpressible poverty, misery and despair which deepening economic chaos has created in the underdeveloped world. In a lengthy televised speech on 2 November, he placed the war in Afghanistan squarely in the context of the world economic crisis. ‘The economic crisis is not a consequence of the 11 September attacks and the war on Afghanistan…the crisis is a consequence of the resounding and irreversible failure of an economic and political conception imposed on the world: neoliberalism and neoliberal globalisation.’
The balloon of speculation, in which trillions of dollars passed through the world’s stock exchanges daily and huge fortunes were made, and which the capitalists seemed to think could inflate to infinity, has burst. IMF growth predictions for all countries have been revised downwards. The rolling tide of economic crisis, which started in southeast Asia in 1997 and swept through Russia and Latin America has finally reached Europe and the United States. Industrial production in the United States has shrunk; its August 2001 budget deficit was $80bn, its exports have shrunk by $13.9bn and stocks have plummeted with the loss of trillions of dollars. There have been nine interest rate cuts in the USA this year alone. Even before 11 September, US unemployment was at 5.1% – a rate which Castro points out has always coincided with the start of a recession in the past. Within weeks it had risen to 5.4%.
The worst effects of the crisis are felt, inevitably, by the poor and working class of the world, aggravating an already desperate situation. Castro lists just some of the urgent issues to be tackled
• Poverty, hunger and disease which kill tens of millions of people in the world every year
• Illiteracy, lack of education, unemployment and the exploitation of millions of children through child labour and prostitution
• The lack of drinking water
• The scarcity of housing, hospital, communications, schools and education facilities
• The destruction of the environment
• The genocidal effect of diseases like AIDS on whole continents
These are, as he points out, issues that affect all of humanity. ‘Humanity must now confront three extremely serious problems which feed off one another: terrorism, the war and the economic crisis.’ There is no doubt that Cuba will play a leading role in this.
Cat Wiener and Andrew Orphanoudakis
