Category Archives: Colonialism and Resistance

“Cuba does not live in peace. Cuba lives with permanent aggression.”

The Mexico City daily newspaper, La Jornada, published an interview May 9 with Cuba’s vice-minister of external relations, Carlos Fernández De Cossío.

Cuba’s lack of peace, he emphasized, is caused by Washington’s policies against the people of Cuba, characterized by economic coercion with the blockade. He warned that while practically the whole world has been the object of tariff threats by the administration of Donald Trump, “towards Cuba, the onslaught is already underway, and only military aggression is lacking” to complete the siege.

In the face of new global geopolitics, with Trump in power, he warned that the White House now attacks several countries: “you see this in Panama, Greenland, Canada;” the focus could also be the progressive governments elsewhere in Latin America.

“There are threats against several governments, and the United States will attempt, through force, economic pressure, and other methods, to influence the political processes of our countries. Venezuela is a country under attack. It’s evident that the region faces that reality….  The absence of armed conflict does not mean living in peace.” He also said that there is pressure on nations in the hemisphere to adopt measures to “reduce the ‘harmful influence’ of China.”

Over the past two-and-a-half years, I have worked with my former colleagues at The United Church of Canada, other churches, several trade unions and international development organizations to draw attention to the impact of U.S. sanctions (“the blockade”) on the Cuban people. Now that Canada’s new cabinet ministers are confirmed, we’ll likely launch a new call to “take action” in solidarity with Cuba.

Fernández de Cossío was in Mexico City for meetings May 8 with Mexico’s External Relations department (SRE) to talk about migration issues. 

With a long career in diplomacy, Fernández de Cossío has served as director for the United States in the Cuban foreign ministry. He also served as ambassador in Canada (2004-05) and South Africa, and was Cuba’s representative in the peace process between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

He said spaces like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) are key to creating a counterweight to Washington. “They must move beyond declarations and formality. Getting there is not easy.” What follows is a lightly-edited translation of his interview with La Jornada writers, Emir Olivares and Arturo Sánchez Jiménez.

Migration challenges

Q: What are the challenges to the region from the new anti-migration policies of Trump?

R: If the great gap between the industrialized, developed countries and the countries in processes of development is not reduced, it’s natural that there will be a growing flow from the south toward the north to seek better living conditions. That goes on in Africa, in Asia and in our continent, where the flow toward the United States, whether it be regular or irregular. The reality varies by each country.

Q: And for Cuba?

R: The case of Cuba is unique. The United States has applied a dynamic against it that both pushes and pulls migration, whether regular or irregular. Washington’s official policy is economic coercion. The blockade, aimed at depressing and making living conditions as difficult as possible, provokes a migration drive.

Furthermore, since the 1960s, Cuban immigrants have been privileged, regardless of how they cross the border, by sea or by land. They are assimilated, granted refugee status, protected, and provided with employment. Additionally, there is the Cuban Adjustment Act, which means that regardless of how they entered the United States, Cuban migrants can acquire residency within one year of arriving in the United States. No citizen of any other country in the world has that privilege. If Washington does not put an end to this reality, the irregular flow will continue.

Q: What do you think of the U.S. propaganda shared in mass media and internet platforms against migration, headed by the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem?

R: It’s media opportunism that seeks support in the population. They unfairly criminalize all immigrants. To a certain extent, society has been polarized since its inception, with cultural and racial prejudices. And it’s not difficult for these politicians to try to stir up those feelings to promote a policy of rejecting immigrants and blaming them for many of the problems: drug use, unemployment, crime, and social polarization. If some migrants participate in crime and social unrest, it’s because these phenomena already exist in the United States.

Historically, the United States has believed that Cuba belongs to them, but in reality, it is an inability to accept that Cuba is, and has the right to be, a sovereign state.

Medical students at the University of Medical Sciences in Matanzas come from around the world. (Photo: Jim Hodgson, 2007)

Campaign against the health brigades

Q: The campaign against Cuba’s medical brigades is within these new coercive measures?

R: Yes. Since February, they have threatened that countries that continue medical cooperation programs with Cuba, their officials and family members will lose their visas and their ability to travel to the United States. Today, around 60 nations have these programs. They provide care to thousands of people. It is a historic project, for which Cuba has been praised by governments, several UN secretaries-general, and even a US president (Barack Obama).

The campaign seeks two things: to discredit this symbol of the success of Cuban society, since one of the priorities of anti-Cuban sectors is to prevent recognition of Cuba’s successes. The second is to cut off a legitimate source of income obtained from agreements with countries that are more favourable (such as Mexico), although historically these are services for which not a cent has been received.

Q: Do Trump’s new geopolitics bring additional pressures to the hemisphere?

R: It’s part of the US government’s hostile and imposing behavior toward the region, and it’s a challenge not only for Cuba but for the entire region. There’s pressure to adopt measures to reduce “China’s harmful influence.” We find it absurd. In a recent congressional hearing, they showed alleged Chinese military bases in Cuba (they used to say they were Russian, during the Cold War). They presented images of what could have been a soccer field or a rice field to say: “This is evidence that there are Chinese military bases in Cuba,” but there wasn’t a single military officer there, no one from the Pentagon or the CIA, from the institutions that are supposed to bear witness to this.

There’s threatening behavior that tries to impose their will on the hemisphere. We saw this in Panama. We see it in Greenland (even though it is not part of the region) and with Canada. It’s a challenge for us all and it’s dangerous.

Q: What have been the errors of the revolutionary regime?

R: Fidel Castro once said that the biggest mistake was thinking that anyone knew how to build socialism and that it would be easy to do so. In Cuba, specific errors may have been made in some aspects of economic policy, in elements of social policy, but it’s very difficult to judge if one takes into account the challenges posed by the aggression of a power like the United States.

Q: Are the ideals of Martí, Castro and others still valid?

R: The ideas of Martí, Fidel, Marx, Engels, Lenin and other Marxists remain relevant and continue to shape our thinking. The challenge we face with youth is enormous, due to the communication influence that large corporations have exerted, a monopoly that is difficult to break. This, combined with a very depressed economic situation, has a serious and dangerous impact on the population. We are working with this; we accept it as a challenge, a very great challenge facing Cuban society.

Empathy: a basic element of human decency

by Jim Hodgson

Back in the late 1990s, I travelled frequently by bus over the mountains between my home in Cuernavaca and my job in Mexico City. Even when the traffic was bad, the trip usually took less than two hours. The bus company almost always showed a film.

When not working or looking at the views, including the Popocatepetl volcano, I watched the movies. I can’t guess how many movies I saw without ever seeing how they ended. My friends and I joked about organizing a Pullman de Morelos film festival, renting or borrowing some of the movies, and just watching the last half hour of all of them to see how they ended.

Among those movies was a favourite of mine, Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Bille August, 1997). The shocking death of a small boy in Copenhagen opened a tale of conflict between corporate greed and the Inuit people of Greenland. But I never saw how it ended. 

Years went by and then, in a used bookstore in Strathroy, Ontario, I found the novel by Peter Høeg on which the film was based. It’s an excellent book with a satisfying ending. 

Among parts that have stayed with me was this:

“…[W]e read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. It was a book I grew quite fond of. For its trembling, feminine empathy and its potent indignation. I know of no other book with such a strong belief in how much you can accomplish if you simply have the will to change.” *

Hmm. Empathy as a feminine virtue? Let’s see. Google offers this definition: “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” 

To me, it’s a basic element of human decency. A measure of empathy is vital in action to transform the plight of those made miserable by any who abuse their power. To empathize doesn’t mean you have to agree with someone: just recognise their different circumstances. Maybe some of us would rather say solidarity.

“In a time when empathy is increasingly treated as a vice, we must not turn our backs on the world’s most impoverished,” wrote Andy Harrington after a recent visit to South Sudan. Harrington is the executive director of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB), a Winnipeg-based NGO that enables food aid to reach people in need and communities to move toward food sovereignty. He said people are already dying because of Trump’s cuts to USAID, adding that Canadian support is more essential than ever. (Eight people in South Sudan, including five children, died as they tried to walk for three hours to seek treatment for cholera after U.S. cuts forced local health services to close, Save the Children said April 9.)

Elon Musk said recently that empathy is killing Western civilization. But it seems the far-right has been attacking empathy for a long time now. And it does so with some masculine archetypes.

“MAGA influencers have begun to talk of the tariffs as a way to make the United States ‘manly’ again, by bringing old-time manufacturing and mining back,” asserts historian Heather Cox Richardson in her Substack post on April 8. In these first three months of the disastrous Trump regime in the United States, she has found her way into my daily reading as she sets current events in historical context. She adds: 

In a larger sense, Trump’s undermining of the global economy reflects forty years of Republican emphasis on the myth that a true American man is an individual who operates outside the community, needs nothing from the government, and asserts his will by dominating others.

Associated with the American cowboy, that myth became central to the culture of Reagan’s America as a way for Republican politicians to convince voters to support the destruction of federal government programs that benefited them. Over time, those embracing that individualist vision came to dismiss all government policies that promoted social cooperation, whether at home or abroad, replacing that cooperation with the idea that strong men should dominate society, ordering it as they thought best.

The Trump administration has taken that idea to an extreme, gutting the U.S. government and centering power in the president, while also pulling the U.S. out of the web of international organizations that have stabilized the globe since World War II. …

Now Trump is demonstrating his power over the global economy, rejecting the conviction of past American leaders that true power and prosperity rest in cooperation.

In less than 100 days, the Trump regime has dismantled that “liberal consensus” that at least regulated corporate excess, provided very basic social welfare, and promoted infrastructure. (This is not to ignore some of the United States’ greatest failures. Among them: slavery and Indigenous genocide, of course. But also not providing universal health care and maintaining racial segregated schools by underfunding the public education systems.)

* Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, 1997, pp.144-45.

Tomorrow: Karl Marx in the Rose Garden

Dismantling USAID: Yes, No, Maybe?

In late 1980, more than a year after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, the administration of President Jimmy Carter was still funding infrastructure in Nicaragua through USAID. By November 1984, with President Ronald Reagan’s “Contra War” well underway, your future bloguista was amused by this left-over sign at a road rebuilt near Matagalpa.

by Jim Hodgson

Back on launch day of Trump 2.0, the president issued an executive order that suspended international aid programs for 90 days, including those of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The move came with a lot of over-the-top rhetoric and outright lies: that USAID spent “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” and that it “bankrolled” the Politico digital news company. “It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics. And we’re getting them out,” Trump told reporters on the evening of Feb. 2.

There are, of course, dozens of issues about which to criticize the Trump regime. But this is a blog that sets out to unwrap development issues, so let’s get into it.

Congress established USAID in 1961 to bring together programs that were administering foreign aid. Focusing on long-term social and economic development, USAID disbursed about $72 billion in 2023, less than 1% of the U.S. annual budget. It is one of the largest aid agencies in the world. 

You’ll remember, of course, that the United Nations target for spending on Official Development Assistance is 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product. Only five countries meet or exceed that goal: Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany and Denmark. In 2023, Canada contributed 0.37 per cent of GDP; the United States contributed just 0.24 per cent, seventh lowest among 31 OECD countries. 

Trump’s order, carried out by his government efficiency hatchet-man, Elon Musk, chopped humanitarian programs around the world: famine relief in war zones; programs to stall malaria in 22 African nations; vaccinations in vulnerable areas; and access to medications by people living with HIV and AIDS. Several U.S. government websites also removed resources on HIV. (That also happened when Trump first took office in 2017).

Newsweek reported Feb. 6 that just months before Musk shut down USAID, the agency was investigating its relationship with Musk’s Starlink satellite company.

In days since the order, enough voices were raised in alarm to get funding for HIV and other essential medicines restored—though it wasn’t clear if that included preventative drugs like PrEP. For more than 20 years, PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) worked within and alongside the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

Also, a federal judge on Feb. 7 temporarily blocked the administration from placing 2,200 USAID employees on paid leave, siding with workers who argued Trump and Musk lack the authority to immediately dismantle an agency created by congressional legislation.

The Trump regime blames “migrants” for much of what supposedly ails the United States, but in this time of unparalleled worldwide migration of people, the USAID cuts hit the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration (IOM)—two agencies that are critical in managing and measuring the flows of people.

No one should argue against humanitarian aid, although Musk and Republican members of congress who see empathy as a character flaw will do so. In a world still suffering from massive inequality, such aid is urgently needed. The U.S. Christian magazine Sojourners offered a strong defence of the humanitarian work of USAID.

What happens after the 90-day review? My guess is that some functions will be folded into the State Department and thus more susceptible to narrow political goals, like subversion of other countries’ governments. I feel badly for beneficiaries of the humanitarian programs and for many well-intentioned employees; not so much for the vast array of U.S.-based independent contractors who get rich from the misery of others.

Sheinbaum: “It’s better they close it”
As noted above, USAID was created in 1961—just two years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. There was no artifice: USAID was to counter the influence of Soviet Union. In recent years, USAID has been at the heart of U.S. challenges to the growing influence of China, which has a successful “Belt and Road” foreign aid program of its own.
My venerable Mac laptop computer tells me that I have 226 files that mention USAID. Almost all of the documents are about the ways that USAID is used as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, especially its work alongside other U.S. institutions that promote—or subvert—democracy in other countries: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and even the Central Intelligence Agency.

USAID even had an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) that gained infamy in 2014 over its covert “Cuban Twitter” (ZunZuneo) social media program that was aimed at overthrowing the Cuban government was revealed by Associated Press. 

Sheinbaum (left): USAID must be transparent; in Mexico, it has funded the opposition. Right: USAID still in the headlines Feb. 8.

In her morning news conference on Feb. 4, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, breaking away from the dispute over tariffs, lashed out at the overt political activity of USAID. “This agency has funded research projects and groups opposed to the government. That’s the case with Mexico.”
She mentioned an organization that she called, “Mexicans for Corruption.” (She was only half-joking: it’s Mexicans against Corruption. The group actively opposed her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s effort to reform the judicial system, and it had support from USAID.) 
“And how is it that they get involved in politics, those agencies that are about aid. In that sense, if the United States wants to help with development, it should be transparent,” she continued.  “The truth is that there are so many things USAID does that in truth it is better they close it.”
In a similar vein, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said some U.S. help is not welcome and has to go. “Hundreds of immigration officials who guard our borders were paid by the United States. This aid is poison,” he said during a Feb. 3 cabinet meeting. “That should never be allowed. We are going to pay with our money.” In 2024, the agency paid nearly $385 million to Colombia.

Haïti chérie

Which brings me to Haiti, a country whose heartbreak I know well. For more than 45 years, it has been particularly afflicted by HIV and AIDS. The ongoing political crisis, worsened by uncontrolled activity by criminal gangs, continues to hamper relief efforts including support to people living with HIV and AIDS. 

Repeated U.S. interventions have made things worse. From 2011, with the presidencies of Michel Martellyand Jovenel Moïse and then the unelected leadership of Prime Minister Ariel Henry through early 2024, the United States and the local elites had the leaders they wanted: men close to the business sector who had close ties in the United States.

That fruitless model was finally shoved aside last June 11 with the installation of a transitional council (CPT). It’s wobbly but hope persists that it can finally organize new elections that produce leaders that Haitians want. A truth commission and an electoral council have been named.

In the meantime, the problem of gang violence is being addressed (though ineffectively) with the addition of the Multinational Security Support Mission (known as MMAS), led by police from Kenya and bolstered with police from El Salvador and Guatemala. Despite UN backing and many promises, it is underfunded and understaffed.

Feb. 4: U.S. aid to the security mission is frozen. Feb. 6: aid is renewed

A new blow came Feb. 4 when the UN announced that the shutdown of USAID meant funds for the MMAS were frozen. But two days later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that MMAS would be protected despite the USAID cut, adding to speculation that Rubio, Musk and Trump are not all operating from the same playbook.

In the wake of the axing of USAID, the best piece that I have read about its activities in Haiti is by a long-time observer, Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR). At the end of a Feb. 4 essay about the agency’s work in Haiti, he writes:

The term “aid” encompasses many different things: humanitarian assistance and development programming, contracts and grants, support to local organizations and multimillion dollar contracts to DC-area firms. 

There are many parts of the US foreign aid industry that can and should be stopped or significantly reformed. But that doesn’t mean that shutting down USAID, or making its assistance even more overtly political by placing it under the umbrella of the State Department, is going to be a good thing, either in the short or long term. 

The reality is that, where foreign assistance is least effective, it is largely because it is designed to promote US interests rather than address the needs of those ostensibly on the receiving end. The changes announced by the Trump administration are not likely to truly disrupt US soft power abroad. If anything, it will make political interventionism an even more explicit aim of US foreign assistance.