Tribute to Fidel Castro on His 90th Birthday

by Dan Kovalik

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/12/tribute-to-fidel-castro-on-his-90th-birthday/

On Saturday, August 13, the world will celebrate the 90th birthday of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro Ruz, the only individual ever to be acknowledged by the UN as a “World Hero of Solidarity.” It is very hard to think of a more important world leader than Fidel. The contribution he has made to the world socialist movement, to the Third World liberation struggle and to social justice has been monumental – especially when one considers that he has been the leader of a tiny country with roughly the same population as New York City.

At the current time, the Colombian government and leftist FARC guerillas are engaged in a peace process in Havana, and are very near to reaching a final peace accord, in large part due to Fidel’s efforts.

As Nelson Mandela himself has acknowledged, South Africa is free from apartheid in no small measure due to Fidel’s leadership in militarily aiding the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, especially in Angola and Namibia, against the South African military which was then being supported by the United States.

In addition, The Latin American Medical School (ELAM) in Cuba, which trains doctors from all around the world, but particularly from poor countries, was Fidel’s brainchild. Today, 70 countries from around the world benefit from Cuba’s medical internationalism, including Haiti where Cuban doctors have been, according to The New York Times, at the forefront of the fight against cholera.

As we speak, Cuba has hundreds of doctors working in the slums of Caracas, Venezuela where Venezuelan doctors fear to tread. There are Cuban-trained doctors in remote parts of Honduras which are otherwise not served by the Honduran government. Patients from 26 Latin American & Caribbean countries have traveled to Cuba to have their eyesight restored by Cuban doctors. Among this list is Mario Teran, the Bolivian soldier who shot and killed Che Guevara. The Cubans not only forgave Mario, but also returned his eyesight to him.  Cuba even offered to send 1,500 doctors to minister to the victims of the Hurricane Katrina, though this kind offer was rejected by the United States

As Piero Gleijeses, a professor at John Hopkins University, wrote in his book Conflicting Missions about Cuba’s outreach to Algeria shortly after the Cuban Revolution:

It was an unusual gesture: an underdeveloped country tendering free aid to another in even more dire straits. It was offered at a time when the exodus of doctors from Cuba following the revolution had forced the government to stretch its resources while launching its domestic programs to increase mass access to health care. ‘It was like a beggar offering his help, but we knew the Algerian people needed it even more than we did and that they deserved it,’ [Cuban Minister of Public Health] Machado Ventura remarked. It was an act of solidarity that brought no tangible benefit and came at real material cost.

These words are just as true today as they were then, as this act of solidarity is repeated by Cuba over and over again throughout the world. And, it has been done even as Cuba has struggled to survive in the face of a 55-year embargo by the United States which has cost it billions of dollars in potential revenue, and even as it has endured numerous acts of terrorism by the United States and U.S.-supported mercenaries over the years.

Just recently, I was reminded of the fact that, for the past 25 years, Cuba has been treating 26,000 Ukrainian citizens affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident at its Tarara international medical center in Havana. Cuba has continued to do so, it must be emphasized, though even the potential for any help for this effort from the Soviet Union passed long ago.

According to Hugo Chavez, when he came to power in Venezuela in 1999, “the only light on the house at that time was Cuba,” meaning that Cuba was the only country in the region free of U.S. imperial domination. Thanks to the perseverance of Fidel and the Cuban people, now much of Latin America has been freed from the bonds of the U.S. Empire.

That Cuba not only stands 25 years after the collapse of the USSR, but indeed prospers and remains as a beacon to other countries, is a testament to Fidel’s revolutionary fervor and fortitude. Indeed, Fidel’s very life at this point – one that the U.S. has tried to extinguish on literally hundreds of occasions – itself constitutes an act of brave deviance against wealth, power and imperialist aggression. Incredibly, Fidel has survived 12 U.S. Presidents, a full quarter of all the U.S. Presidents since the founding of our nation.

I join the world in honoring Fidel Castro Ruz on his birthday, and hope that he continues to live and to lead for some time to come.

Daniel Kovalik lives in Pittsburgh and teaches International Human Rights Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Žižek: The Hillary Clinton Consensus Is Damaging Democracy

 

By Slavoj Žižek On 8/12/16 at 1:22 PM

http://www.newsweek.com/slavoj-zizek-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-us-presidential-election-bernie-489993?rx=us

Alfred Hitchcock once said that a film is as good as its villain—does this mean that the forthcoming U.S. elections will be good since the “bad guy” (Donald Trump) is an almost ideal villain? Yes, but in a very problematic sense. For the liberal majority, the 2016 elections represent a clear-cut choice: the figure of Trump is a ridiculous excess, vulgar and exploiting our worst racist and sexist prejudices, a male chauvinist so lacking in decency so that even Republican big names are abandoning him in droves. If Trump remains the Republican candidate, we will get a true “feelgood election”—in spite of all our problems and petty squabbles, when there is a real threat we can all come together in defence of our basic democratic values, like France did after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015.

But this cosy democratic consensus is not healthy for politics and the Left. We need to take a step back and turn the gaze on ourselves: what is the exact nature of this all-embracing democratic unity? Everybody is in there, from Wall Street to Bernie Sanders supporters to what remains of the Occupy movement, from big business to trade unions, from army veterans to LGBT+, from ecologists horrified by Trump’s denial of global warming and feminists delighted by the prospect of the first woman-president, to the “decent” Republican establishment figures terrified by Trump’s inconsistencies and irresponsible “demagogic” proposals.

But what disappears in this apparently all-embracing conglomerate? The popular rage which gave birth to Trump also gave birth to Sanders, and while they both express widespread social and political discontent, they do it in the opposite sense, the one engaging in Rightist populism and the other opting for the Leftist call for justice. And here comes the trick: the Leftist call for justice tends to be combined with struggles for women’s and gay rights, for multiculturalism and against discrimination including racism. The strategic aim of the Clinton consensus is to dissociate all these struggles from the Leftist call for justice, which is why the living symbol of this consensus is Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple who proudly signed the pro-LGBT letter and who can now easily forget about hundreds of thousands of Foxconn workers in China assembling Apple products in slave conditions—he made his big gesture of solidarity with the underprivileged, demanding the abolition of gender segregation.

This same stance was brought to the extreme with the U.S.’s first female secretary of state Madeleine Albright, a big Clinton supporter who served in her husband’s administration from 1997 to 2001. On CBS's 60 Minutes (May 12, 1996), Albright was asked about that year’s cruise missile strikes on Iraq known as Operation Desert Strike: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright calmly replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” Let’s ignore all the questions that this reply raises and focus on one aspect: can we imagine all the hell that would break out if the same answer would be given by somebody like Putin or the Chinese President Xi? Would they not be immediately denounced in western newspapers as cold and ruthless barbarians? Campaigning for Hillary, Albright said: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” (Meaning: who will vote for Sanders instead of Clinton.) Maybe we should amend this statement: there is a special place in hell for women (and men) who think half a million dead children is an affordable price for a military intervention that ruins a country, while wholeheartedly supporting women’s and gay rights at home.

Trump is not the dirty water that should be thrown out to keep safe the healthy baby of U.S. democracy, he is himself the dirty baby who should be thrown out in order to shine a light on the uneasy nature of the Hillary consensus. The message of this consensus to the Leftists is: you can get everything, we just want to keep the essentials, the unencumbered functioning of the global capital. President Obama’s “Yes, we can!” acquires now a new meaning: yes, we can concede to all your cultural demands without endangering the global market economy—so there is no need for radical economic measures. Or, as Todd McGowan, professor of film theory and history at the University of Vermont, put it (in a private communication): “The consensus of ‘right-thinking people’ opposed to Trump is frightening. It is as if his excess licenses the real global capitalist consensus to emerge and to congratulate themselves on their openness.”

And what about poor Bernie Sanders? Unfortunately, Trump hit the mark when he compared his endorsement of Hillary to an Occupy partisan endorsing Lehman Brothers. Sanders should just withdraw and retain a dignified silence so that his absence would weight heavily over the Hillary celebrations, reminding us what is missing and, in this way, keep the space open for more radical alternatives in future.

Learning Palestine through Shakespeare

 

https://electronicintifada.net/content/learning-palestine-through-shakespeare/17666?

Bayan Haddad The Electronic Intifada 12 August 2016

Romeo and Juliet in Palestine recounts the five months that Bristol University lecturer Tom Sperlinger spent teaching English literature at a Palestinian university in the occupied West Bank.

The memoir, the author’s debut book, is made up of 13 episodic chapters narrating his encounters with students and faculty at Al-Quds University and his grappling with its political and social environment.

Sperlinger is mainly concerned with pedagogical strategies to effectively teach Palestinian students living under Israeli occupation. He finds that his experience with the British education system does not necessarily lend itself to its Palestinian counterpart, so he embarks on a journey to expand his outlook to accommodate the needs of his students in Abu Dis.

The challenges Sperlinger faces are those that many local lecturers can relate to: small rooms with a large number of students and pupils’ dependence on rote memorization as opposed to critical thinking.

Sperlinger also encounters skepticism about the importance of literature and its relevance to learning the English language. He attempts to cut through this by asking his students to reflect upon their experiences in relation to works by authors ranging from Kafka to Malcolm X.

Sperlinger has his students produce their own versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. One pupil imagines the Montagues to be a Palestinian family and the Capulets as Israeli, and wonders if they would ever join hands. Another sets the love story between a Palestinian holder of a West Bank ID card and another with a Jerusalem ID — an inextricable situation lived by many under Israel’s regime of movement restrictions.

The result is that not only are the students more engaged with the literature, but Sperlinger also has a better understanding of how political and cultural realities shape his students’ lives.

Sperlinger finds that it is impossible to avoid the reality of the Israeli occupation, which impacts his students in complex and profound ways. Indeed, the first thing one sees from the main gate at Al-Quds University is Israel’s massive concrete wall severing the town from Jerusalem.

“If you stand on the road, Jerusalem appears as a thin line, with the dome of the al-Aqsa mosque at its center, caught between the horizon above and the wall below,” the author writes.

“The city should be a 20-minute drive away, but it takes students who live there up to an hour and a half to get to class,” he adds.

Sperlinger — with a certain level of discomfort, given that his grandparents on his father’s side were committed Zionists — listens to his students describe their experiences with the occupation that is “playing havoc with their lives, one way or another.”

He does not divulge his own family background to his students, finding that he “could not connect Israel’s behavior with the Jewish traditions” of social justice and alleviating the suffering of others. He also fears that doing so would change his relationship with his students: “It would mean making a claim on them — asking them to acknowledge my family’s history, for example — before I had understood or acknowledged their situation, before I knew them.”

This journey to understand is the ultimate purpose of the book. Early on, Sperlinger states that his narrative is about “the particular students and colleagues I encountered and is not intended as a general account of life in Palestine or at the university.” He provides his readers with enough historical context while allowing them to come to an understanding of the situation in Palestine through his own struggle to do so.

Sperlinger is constantly rereading the situation, feeling unsure about his own view of it, and he admits that he “lack[s] local insights.”

When Sperlinger first visited Al-Quds University, for example, he couldn’t find it on a map. “I established that I would be visiting the campus in the West Bank but my guidebook made only passing mention of Abu Dis,” he recounts.

And, at the end of his trip, when he accepted an invitation for dinner with his relatives, “Only when I looked up the address they had given me did I realize that Givat Ze’ev was a settlement.”

The author’s self-doubts extend to whether he has been useful to his students and how he wishes he had “more practical skills to offer.” But he finds moments of “naive delight” during his teaching in Abu Dis and is grateful that Shakespeare’s plays offer students a space to reflect on their lives. He describes this as “the alchemy between what we read and the students’ experiences.”

Sperlinger writes that it would be “easy to patronize the students of Al-Quds … [and] to mistake inarticulacy for lack of feeling.” But he rejects this and instead appreciates the “extraordinary creativity, courage and humor” his students have shown in their daily lives.

Sperlinger also thinks that these students have “practical knowledge of ideas that we too often study as abstract concepts in the humanities.” Here Sperlinger is critical of the British higher education system that “ignore[s] or exclude[s] certain kinds of experience routinely and structurally” and has reinforced the belief that “educational attainment is the only measure of intelligence.”

Sperlinger believes that his Palestinian students have much to teach their counterparts in the UK — as well as those who read this short but informative memoir.

Bayan Haddad studied comparative literature at the University of Edinburgh and currently teaches introductory courses to literature at Hebron University. Twitter: @BayanHaddad