Category Archives: Uncategorized

Take action for Cuba this Christmas

by Jim Hodgson

As Beth Baskin, my friend and former colleague at the United Church of Canada, wrote in an email Wednesday to several Canadian churches, unions and solidarity groups:

“Unfortunately, the people of Cuba will be experiencing a Christmas without sufficient power and having spent 70 per cent of their income on food to feed their family this month. They may be missing family members at the table as they suffer from increased disease or have left the country seeking a better life. All of these realities existed before Hurricane Melissa struck earlier this fall affecting 3.5 million people and damaging homes, schools, and healthcare centres.” 

You might have been doing this (or something like it) over the past few years – or for more than 65 years since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, sparked the ire of the United States. Maybe you have written letters like the one we suggest here and below. Or maybe you have contributed funds to one of the organizations that support workers, churches, women and farmers in Cuba. Or perhaps you contributed goods to send in a container to Cuba, or took an extra suitcase with medicine or milk powder to leave with friends when you last travelled there.

Thank you!

The government of Canada has contributed at least $6.5 million to several agencies carrying out relief actions in response to Hurricane Melissa. But there are longer term requests that we have of our government. 

Canada should take these actions:

  • Continue to scale up efforts to provide immediate food, medicines and medical supplies and ongoing development assistance to Cuba;
  • Strengthen Canada’s commitment to an independent foreign policy with Cuba based on dialogue, constructive engagement and respect for self-determination rather than punitive measures such as sanctions that only hurt the Cuban people;
  • Work with other countries, including from Latin America, the Caribbean and others, to prevent U.S. measures that isolate and harm the Cuban people from interfering with the delivery of humanitarian assistance by other countries, including Canada.

You are invited to raise your concerns with our Canadian government through this Take Action link.

And thanks for sharing this request as you are able. 

From the text of our Take Action request:

What’s Happening in Cuba
Cuban partner organizations and recent visitors say conditions in Cuba today are much more difficult than in the early 1990s when the implosion of the Soviet Union led to a massive deterioration in living standards. The pandemic shuttered the tourism industry, a main source of revenue used to acquire food, medicines and fuel from abroad. Cuba has also suffered a series of hurricanes, droughts and floods, leading to lost crops and food shortages. Energy shortages limit public transit and even the collection of garbage. Punitive U.S. measures under both Biden and Trump have also reversed the many gains delivered by the easing of such measures by the Obama administration.

The return of Trump in 2025, and appointment of Marco Rubio, a vocal proponent of increased sanctions on Cuba, as U.S. Secretary of State, has meant additional pressure. U.S. measures not only restrict U.S. citizens and businesses from providing support to the Cuban people, they also interfere with the delivery of humanitarian aid by other countries because banks limit transactions; suppliers face risks of U.S. retaliation; shipping of freight becomes more complicated and costly.

Again, here’s a way to write to Canadian government ministers and your Member of Parliament: https://petition.web.net/CanadaActNowOnCuba

Thanks! ¡Feliz Navidad!

The Monroe Doctrine never went away

by Jim Hodgson

Beyond the constant babbling of That Man Next Door is a real plan for U.S. domination of the Americas. 

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) says it will discourage Latin America and Caribbean nations from working with each other and with countries from outside the hemisphere. Overtly racist and nationalist, it also presses European countries to take “primary responsibility” for their own defence.

New York Times headlines in recent days.

The document was released Thursday night (Dec. 4) and neatly summarized Friday night (Dec. 5) by U.S. historian Heather Cox Richardson:

In place of the post–World War II rules-based international order, the Trump administration’s NSS commits the U.S. to a world divided into spheres of interest by dominant countries. It calls for the U.S. to dominate the Western Hemisphere through what it calls “commercial diplomacy,” using “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” and discouraging Latin American nations from working with other nations. 

“The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” it says, “a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.” …

It went on to make clear that this policy is a plan to help U.S. businesses take over Latin America and, perhaps, Canada. “The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program,” it said, “including but not limited to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy; the Small Business Administration; the International Development Finance Corporation; the Export-Import Bank; and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.”

Should countries oppose such U.S. initiatives, it said, “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.”

Think of it. The tariff fights with Canada, Mexico and Brazil. The stepped-up sanctions against Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. The mass murders of alleged “drug-traffickers” by exploding their boats in the open sea. Overt threats of “land strikes” in Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela. Trump’s interventions in national elections in Argentina and, most recently, Honduras. These are all part of the same strategy for renewed U.S. dominance.

Resistance grows and is not futile.

I take my title today from the headline over La Jornada’s lead editorial Sunday, Dec. 7:  Monroe nunca se fue. Trump’s policy (“Donroe”) rejects the polite notion of a “good neighbour policy” towards Latin America and the Caribbean promoted after 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt and others. But that approach was betrayed repeatedly by presidents from both parties who involved themselves in coups in Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Honduras and elsewhere, along with invasions of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Grenada and Panama – and the wars in Central America in the 1980s and U.S. support for paramilitary death squads in Colombia.

The people of Honduras went to the polls Sunday, Nov. 30. Before the vote, Trump did two things: he pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted last year in the United States for trafficking cocaine; and he endorsed the candidate of Hernández’s National Party, Nasry Asfura (known as “Tito” or “Papi”). A week after the vote, Asfura is in what election officials called a “technical tie” with a slightly more centrist candidate, Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party. Those two parties represent different factions of Honduran family oligarchs. 

Whichever of them is ultimately declared the victor (a process that could take until Dec. 30), the ruling Libre party has been pushed aside. President Xiomara Castro had led the country for the past four years; her party’s candidate, Rixi Moncada, has only about 20 per cent of the official count – although many aspects of the election remain in dispute – including U.S. interference.

Key here is the coup On June 28, 2009, that ousted the elected government of Mel Zelaya, not quite a half-year into the administration of Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Their machinations brought about more than 12 years of rule that facilitated drug-traffickers, mining, corrupt land sales and human rights abuse – only partly subdued after the election of Castro four years ago.

“The abuse of force,” concludes La Jornada’s editorial, “is not, as [Trump] pretends, a sign of strength, but the recourse of one who cannot attract his neighbours with technological innovation, productive investment, exemplary institutions or a viable model of civilization.” 

The “feminist foreign policy” is dead. What next?

by Jim Hodgson

A decade of promises and at least a measure of good will were flushed away with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s declaration that his government does not have a feminist foreign policy.

Speaking in Johannesburg at the end of the G20 summit, he said issues such as gender equality and reducing gender-based violence are an “aspect” of his government’s foreign policy. “But I wouldn’t describe our foreign policy as feminist foreign policy.”

Frankly, it was always hard to reconcile proclamations of feminist foreign policy (FFP, as it came to be known) by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his foreign ministers with Canada’s efforts to sell weapons abroad, inaction in Gaza, and preference for threats and sanctions over dialogue in Venezuela. After all: wouldn’t a truly feminist foreign policy veto arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of its suppression of women’s rights? 

House of Commons finance committee chair Karina Gould, who served in several cabinet posts under Trudeau and ran against Carney for the Liberal leadership, told the Canadian Press that Carney’s words “certainly” mark a departure from the previous government. But she insisted the policy the prime minister described remains feminist.

“The ideals that he was talking about continue to be feminist, and I think that what it means is that as Canadians, we expect that we’re going to stand up for gender equality around the world and here in Canada,” she said.

“Prime Minister Carney is making it very clear he is no friend to women and he is no friend to gender equality in this country,” NDP MP Leah Gazan told reporters Nov. 24.

International Women’s Day march, Guatemala City, March 8, 2023 (Jim Hodgson photo)

Feminist aid policy

The Trudeau government did somewhat better with its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP). Beyond policy documents, FIAP seemed to produce some results across the development cooperation sector with promotion of gender equity, empowerment of women and girls, and rights and inclusion for 2SLGBTQIA+ people. 

Even so, there were calls for more. Canada’s ecumenical justice coalition KAIROS said FIAP was “sound policy” but that its funding priorities needed “to align the advancement of human rights and women, peace and security with economic empowerment.”

After the Harper government in 2009 refused to support the KAIROS international assistance work, funding was restored by the Trudeau government to a revamped KAIROS Women, Peace and Security program. 

Now Trudeau is gone, his “sunny ways” undermined by the SNC Lavalin affair and his treatment of cabinet ministers who were women. And international development cooperation is being buried in favour of investment regimes, eternal debt and oceans that rise along with temperatures.

“Inside/outside strategies”

And so I find myself thinking in different ways. Sometimes I feel that I placed too much faith in the official spaces, even as I always identified most strongly with social movements. Sometimes we used “inside/outside” strategies: those who could talk to the politicians would do so; the rest of us would march in the street outside. I think of anti-free-trade demonstrations in Québec City in 2001 or the protests at the Toronto G7/G20 meeting in 2010.

Today in Mexico City’s La Jornada newspaper, Raúl Zibechi has a column in which he decries the “pyramids” of power we build within our progressive movements even as we denounce the pyramids of power in our capitalist “democracies.” He points to an event the Zapatistas will hold in San Cristóbal de Las Casas,  Chiapas, Dec. 26-30 this year. Zibechi and others will offer their “analyses on pyramids and on how histories are handled within the economic system, bad governments, laws and the judicial structure, resistance movements, the left and progressivism, human rights, the feminist struggle, and the arts.”

I can’t attend this year, but I will pay attention. As the new accord between Carney and the premier of Alberta showed this week, we can’t trust conventional power to make good choices on behalf of the people. We need to propose alternatives and press to make them reality.