Category Archives: Peace

The struggle over the new world (dis)order

by Jim Hodgson

The first hours of the annual parade of world leaders at the UN General Assembly Sept. 22 showed again the sharp disagreement between the leader of the United States and many other leaders over multilateral cooperation and unilateral abuse of power.

In his speech, Donald Trump threatened to “annihilate” Iran, proclaimed his nation’s supremacy, and declared that “to the victor go the spoils.” He also called Cuba “a failed state,” though any “failure” is due to his country’s decades of interference, embargo and sanctions.

Trump’s speech followed those of UN Secretary General António Guterres (left) and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva (centre), who both emphasized the need for multilateral cooperation in the face of the ecological, political and humanitarian crises that confront humanity. Guterres also called for debt relief that is timely and effective.

“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together. The defiance of hope.”

Lula, who seeks re-election in October, warned that countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. In the current campaign, Trump has openly backed Flávio Bolsonaro, son of a disgraced former president. Trump previously interfered in elections in Honduras, Argentina and Colombia.

Lula urged world leaders to take stronger action in response to intensifying global conflicts and called on the UN to recover its capacity for dialogue and mediation. He added that it is time to choose between multilateralism or global fragmentation.

“Concessions to the law of the stronger have surpassed all limits. This is not idealism, but pure realism,” he said. “War is not the continuation of politics by other means; it’s the complete breakdown of politics.”

In his speech, Trump said Mexico was the “epicentre” of drug-trafficking in Latin America and that it had ceded some of its territory to the cartels. 

A day later, President Claudia Sheinbaum responded with irony: 

“I could say that it is very difficult to live next to a country with such a high level of consumption of illegal drugs. Or I could say that it is very difficult to live next to a country that produces so many weapons. But I won’t say that because we have a good relationship.”

(Sheinbaum did not attend the General Assembly; Mexico’s remarks were delivered Friday by Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco, who emphasized collaboration with other countries and reform of UN structures.) 

Trump gathers his “Shield of the Americas”

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the United States has tried to dominate its neighbours in the Western Hemisphere. The early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine (now dubbed “Donroe”) is revived to limit perceived threats in the region.

Over the past 13 months, the U.S. military has killed at least 230 people in about 70 air strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean. In January, U.S. forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his spouse Cilia Flores, and now holds them in a prison in Brooklyn across the East River from the United Nations building.

In April, U.S. and Ecuadoran soldiers launched an effort to dismantle a drug-trafficking group. On Sept. 24, U.S. troops and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration assisted Ecuadoran authorities in arresting more than 30 people with alleged ties to Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

During the high-level General Assembly session, Trump gathered leaders of the 14 countries allied with him in his so-called “Shield of the Americas.” 

They pledged coordinated action against 24 organizations designated as “narco-terrorist.” The declaration calls for sanctions, intelligence sharing, security cooperation and a commitment to invoke the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, or Rio Treaty, to consider collective military action against the groups.

New Canadian aid to Palestine and Haiti (but not Cuba)

Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, also emphasized multilateral collaboration in her speech. Canada’s foreign policy, she said, is guided by establishing autonomy in strategic fields to limit superpower coercion, along with aspirations to lead middle powers.

“Great powers are walking away from global economic co-operation, dismantling economic integration,” Anand said. State sovereignty “has been treated with disdain.”

“We are facing serious challenges in the global order,” Anand said.

“We will lead other middle powers to act collectively and decisively, because middle powers are playing a key role in building the framework for the new international order — which is being established as we speak.”

Earlier in the week, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged $100 million in aid for Palestine in an effort to preserve “the possibility of a two-state solution.”

The funding includes $80 million in humanitarian aid, while the rest is development funding for security initiatives, including top-up funds for a multi-year project to train police in the West Bank. 

Anand announced $25.4 million in new Canadian funding for Haiti to support security, governance and community resilience in Haiti. But there have been no new funding announcements for Cuba since commitments earlier this year of $13.5 million to the Pan-American Health Organization, the World Food Program and UNICEF for programs in Cuba.

(Images: http://www.lajornada.com.mx)

We say “no” to the U.S. war on Cuba. Why won’t Canada?

by Jim Hodgson

Today, Canadian churches, labour unions, development agencies and solidarity groups are calling on our government to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Cuba – cornerstone rights of all states guaranteed in the United Nations Charter. 

The statement (reproduced below) appears as an ad in the Hill Times, a newspaper in Ottawa whose audience is made up of politicians, public servants and those of us who try to influence them. Look at them: 28 organizations, representing millions of Canadians.

For more than three years, I have worked as a volunteer among a loose network of civil society groups to press the government of Canada for action. We began with a letter April 17, 2023, sent to the ministers of foreign affairs and international development. 

We followed up with other letters and statements, and I wrote or co-wrote several opinion pieces: Hill Times in 2023, Canadian Dimension in 2024 and at rabble.ca a few weeks ago. Sometimes, I wrote these together with John Kirk, retired from teaching at Dalhousie University but still, like me, pressing our government for the sake of our many friends and co-workers in Cuba – and in favour of a different way to live together on our planet.

Several times, our inter-agency group called on Canadians to send letters to our politicians. (We’re still doing so, here.) Some of us met with members of Parliament and with staff at Global Affairs Canada and at the Embassy in Havana.

Earlier this year, we were joined by an ad hoc group of trade unionists who used a series of labour conventions and other gatherings to lift the campaign to a whole new level, with hundreds of postcards sent to the prime minister.

The government’s response, to put it mildly, has been feeble. A few million dollars here and there for humanitarian relief delivered through UN bodies or Canadian NGOs, but no calls to end the vicious U.S. sanctions, no shiploads of supplies (like those sent by Mexico, Colombia and other countries, and no fuel. Not even support for a humanitarian corridor so that fuel can be supplied to those agencies that are providing aid. No protest to the United States over its extraterritorial measures that harm Canadians who have worked alongside Cuban state enterprises in mining and tourism.

This afternoon, Canada’s parliamentary Subcommittee on International Human Rights (SDIR) is holding a Briefing on Human Rights in the Caribbean Region with a focus on Cuba. But, like the Feb. 26 Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development hearing before it, the witness list is tilted in favour of right-wing exile groups, raising concerns about the balance of views brought forward to the committee. This time, fortunately, the Canadian Network on Cuba is being allowed to share a more progressive perspective.

It’s pretty clear now that the Carney government will not speak up for Cuba so long as its talks to renew Canada’s free trade deal with the United States and Mexico continue.

At risk here is not just Cuba’s sovereignty, but Canada’s too. What many of us warned about in the free trade debates of 1998 and 1993 was the loss of Canada’s sovereignty. The long U.S. history of invasions, coups, electoral interference and sanctions has been made more acute in this second Trump administration. 

The Canadian government must be bold and defend Cuban sovereignty, international law and the lives of Cubans.

Please write (again) to the prime minister and to your member of parliament. If you are in a country other than Canada, please write to or call your representatives to ask for their solidarity with the people of Cuba.

Hey Canada! Just say NO to U.S. threats against Cuba

by Jim Hodgson

“The U.S. government is going crazy with its shameful war on Cuba,” writes Medea Benjamin of CodePink. “Every week, there’s a new sanction, a new restriction, a new way to punish the Cuban people.” She goes on to describe measures directed against U.S. travellers and solidarity groups. 

Here, I want to focus on the measures that are forcing foreign investors to abandon holdings in hotels, mines and other joint ventures – and forcing cancellations by still more airlines and abandonment of Cuba by the credit card duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. All of these actions hurt the Cuban people, directly or indirectly.

Unilateral sanctions applied by the United States are reaching new levels of cruelty in Cuba. The latest wave is rooted in the U.S. International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that allows a president to regulate international trade after declaring a national emergency in response to some extraordinary threat. It’s the law Trump used to apply his tariffs in early 2025, a move the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in February. Now he’s using the same law to punish Cuba. Milton Feng outlines Trump’s use of IEEPA to back his newest sanctions on Cuba in an essay here.

On May 1, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order, effective June 5, that freezes U.S. assets of foreign companies and people that conduct business with the Cuban government.

A week later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced more details: the U.S. would impose additional sanctions on Cuban state-owned businesses that manage joint operations with foreign companies across tourism, retail, mining and distribution. The move had an immediate impact on Canadian investment in Cuba, notably nickel-miner Sherritt’s surrender to Gillon Capital LLC, the family office linked to Ray Washburne, a former adviser and appointee of Trump himself. 

Montreal-based Royalton Hotels (which includes Blue Diamond, above) and Spanish hotel companies Melia and Iberostar ended their management and licensing operations in Cuba. Air Canada, WestJet and Air Transat have indefinitely suspended flights and vacation packages in Cuba. They had previously planned to resume service to Cuba this fall.

Many of the U.S. measures were aimed at partnerships with GAESA, a company linked to Cuba’s military. On June 2, the Cuban government defended GAESA, saying its joint ventures had funded housing, schools, clinics, and infrastructure.

The Spanish foreign minister said the moves against the hotel companies would aggravate the “humanitarian hardship” faced by the Cuban people in the wake of other U.S. sanctions and the fuel blockade underway since early this year. Church leaders from Canada and other parts of the world saw first-hand the impact of the U.S. blockade on ordinary people when they visited earlier this year.

But Canada has said nothing. 

Like the European Union, Canada has law to protect its companies from the kind of extraterritorial reach demonstrated by Trump’s executive order. Amendments in the 1990s to its Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act (FEMA) explicitly prohibit Canadian corporations from complying with US extraterritorial measures that affect trade and commerce with Cuba. 

Nick Gottlieb’s op-ed comment in The Hill Times, Ottawa.

“If the Canadian government refuses to invoke FEMA at the precise moment it was designed for, then the legislation becomes little more than symbolic theatre,” wrote Dalhousie University’s Isaac Sainey in a Facebook post May 20. “Worse still, Canada effectively concedes that Washington possesses the right to determine Canadian economic policy and punish Canadian firms at will. This is not sovereignty. It is subordination.”

But CUSMA. Under Mark Carney’s leadership (not that he has said so yet), it seems Canada will not support Cuba as long as its free trade relationship with the United States is facing re-negotiation. In 2019, when Justin Trudeau was prime minister and Chrystia Freeland his foreign minister, Canada strongly defended the interests of Canadians doing business in Cuba.

When Trump threatened Canada last year, most of us joined with Carney in saying “#ElbowsUp.” That defiance needs to extend in solidarity with people in Cuba and in other parts of this hemisphere threatened by resurgent U.S. imperialism.

Please write (again) to the prime minister and to your member of parliament. If you are in a country other than Canada, please write to or call your representatives to ask for their solidarity with the people of Cuba.