The Scarlet Pimpernel

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - Retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro will play the role of elder statesman after nearly 50 years of absolute rule of Cuba, leaving the stage clear for his brother Raul Castro to assert himself.

Fidel Castro, who stepped down on Tuesday as president and commander-in-chief of Cuba’s armed forces, stays on as first secretary of the ruling Communist Party and will continue to hold forth on domestic and world affairs in articles.

“We will continue waiting for the ‘Reflections of Comrade Fidel’, which will be a powerful arsenal of ideas and guidance,” the party newspaper Granma said on Wednesday.

Castro, 81 and in poor health, will now be known as “comrade Fidel” instead of “El Comandante”, as he has long been called, an indication that times are changing half a century after the bearded revolutionary seized power in 1959.

Castro’s retirement appeared to be the final stage of a carefully laid transition to Raul Castro, dashing the hopes of their enemies that Fidel Castro’s end would send thousands of Cubans onto the streets to demand democratic reforms.

“Raul is the man of the hour. He is firmly in charge. Fidel is off-stage. The Fidel era is over,” said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst and author of a book on Cuba’s next leader called “After Fidel”.

Raul Castro has provisionally held power since his brother underwent emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006. He is expected to be chosen as president when the rubber-stamp National Assembly meets on Sunday.

Cuba faces big problems from a weak economy to decrepit transportation and a frustrated younger generation, Latell said in Miami, adding that Raul Castro would address them in a diligent way.

“He’s a problem solver. Fidel couldn’t admit to problems in the first place. There’s no doubt that Raul is running Cuba,” Latell said.

HOW MUCH OF A REFORMER?

It is unclear how much of a reformer Raul Castro will be.

He has been his brother’s closest advisor since they were guerrilla fighters in the Sierra Maestra mountains and had a reputation as a hardliner who could be brutal with his enemies. But he is also seen as a good manager and delegator.

Analysts say Fidel Castro’s continued presence behind the scenes will ensure a certain caution as his brother considers economic reforms.

University student and Communist Youth leaders said on Wednesday they would continue studying and applying Fidel Castro’s ideas as “the leader of the Revolution” if not the head of state anymore.

“We young Cubans, above all, believe in Fidel and trust his decision. Even though it is painful to accept, it could be best for the country,” Patricia Flechilla, head of the University Students Federation, said on a state television newscast.

But Raul Castro should be able to rule without too much interference, said Uva de Aragon of Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute.

“Fidel sees himself as playing the role of the great statesman, the grandfather, comforting the people. There was a hint of nostalgia in his resignation letter,” she said.

“Raul has a space to make some changes … not that I expect significant change right away.”

The National Assembly meeting will be important to see what roles are given to vice-president Carlos Lage, seen as a pragmatist, and to reformers, the experts said.

Even if Raul Castro does not take on both of the posts vacated by his brother, he will wield significant power.

“You have to see this as part of a process that started a long time ago,” de Aragon said.

U.S. President George W. Bush, who has tightened a decades-old U.S. economic embargo against Castro’s government, said his retirement should begin a democratic transition.

The reaction from Cubans has been subdued. Some were saddened by Castro’s retirement and others hoped it would herald economic changes, but no one was predicting major changes to Cuba’s one-party rule.

“I wish it were so, but I don’t believe it,” said Pedro, a 74-year-old retiree who was lining up outside a bank at dawn on Wednesday to collect a monthly pension of 164 pesos ($7).

“This is not enough to live on. A pound of pork costs 40 pesos,” said Pedro, who supplements his pension working as a night watchman. “A man my age should not have to work.”

(Additional reporting and writing by Angus MacSwan in Miami, Editing by Michael Christie and Kieran Murray)

From Reuters

As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as a society that has transcended racism to elevate principles of fairness, equality and opportunity over skin color. Sure, we recognize racial implications in our government’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. But overall, we see ourselves as a society that has moved beyond race.

This conviction of color-blindness is especially true in our attitude towards work: We have laws against race discrimination at work, so we think everyone has an equal chance to prosper. This view overlooks, however, an unfortunate reality: Our system of workplace protections is riddled with holes that have a decidedly harmful racial undertone. Through exclusions, exemptions and lax enforcement, our labor laws deny basic protections to millions of Latino and African-American immigrant workers.

Because we believe we have eschewed racism, we refuse to examine the reality of a 2.4 million strong mostly-Latino agricultural workforce, that is exempted from core labor protections like overtime pay and the right to collectively bargain. We are blissfully unaware that home health care workers, largely women of color, are not entitled to even the federal minimum wage. We don’t see the immigrant dishwashers at our favorite restaurants whose employers may pay them as little as $2.13 an hour under a sub-minimum wage that has been frozen since 1991. We don’t even see the workers who clean our offices and hotel rooms, members of a burgeoning service sector where a majority of employers violate wage and hour laws. And while we do notice day laborers congregated on our street corners looking for work, few of us realize that about half of them will be cheated of their wages at the end of their workday.

We simply don’t see the strands of racism that tear at our worker protection safety net. Most Americans would be shocked to know the unfortunate role that race has played throughout the history of our immigration and labor laws. How, not so long ago, official governmental policy was to build the United States as a “white nation.” How the exclusions from core minimum wage and overtime protections of domestic workers and agricultural workers, jobs that largely employed African Americans in the 1930’s, was a trade-off to get the votes of Southern “Dixiecrat” Congressmembers to support the minimum wage laws.

Many Americans might be shocked to know that many of the guestworkers who clean their hotel rooms at Mardi Gras in Louisiana have mortgaged their families’ land to purchase a job in the US. Many arrive here to find they have been ripped off, their passports may have been confiscated by their employers, and further, that they are legally obligated to continue working for the same outfit that ripped them off, or face deportation — a form of indentured servitude that would give rise to a huge public outcry, were it practiced against native-born workers.

This is not, we think, who we are as a country. Americans value hard work, and believe that hard work pays off.

Next week in Geneva, Americans have the opportunity to take a good look at ourselves, a chance to hold our government accountable for the policy failures that deny hardworking people a fair chance. Our government will face a review by the United Nations of its compliance with the Convention on Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. This treaty requires a biennial report of the US’ attempts to remedy racial discrimination, including efforts to address the racial impact of policies that may be neutral on their face but in practice fall heavily on workers of color. The Bush administration submitted the most recent US report in 2007, but said not a word about denial of protection to workers of color in these industries, or its failure to enforce the labor rights of vulnerable immigrant workers. It did not talk about the nearly 2 million immigrant workers who are denied minimum wage every year, earning less than the paltry sum of $11,700 yearly for a full time worker.

Since our government refused to talk about these issues, the communities affected by these policy failings are doing so. A “shadow report,” assembled by the United States Human Rights Network and hundreds of organizations across the United States, was submitted to the UN in late 2008. Next week, restaurant workers, guestworkers and day laborers will travel to Geneva to tell the stories of those who work hard, but have no chance to get ahead.

If we really believe we are beyond racism — or at least aspire to be — then all Americans, as well as policymakers and political candidates, need to pull off our blinders and listen to the voices of these disenfranchised workers. It’s time for America to live up to its promise of equal opportunity. It’s time to pull all sectors of industry, and all workers, within the protection of basic labor rights. American labor laws and their enforcement should reflect American values and human rights principles. Anything less belies our commitment to equal rights and equal opportunity for all.

The United States CERD report may be found here. and the full “shadow report” may be found here.

From The Huffington Post

Posted February 19, 2008 | 12:40 PM (EST)

This week’s news that the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia has repeatedly asked Peace Corps volunteers and then a Fulbright Scholar to spy on people there is much more serious than it has so far been treated. In fact, together with other activities funded there by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and National Endowment for Democracy, there are grounds for a Congressional inquiry.

These actions reinforce Bolivian officials’ claims that Washington seeks to destabilize and even topple their democratic government. This has potentially severe consequences in a region where in recent years approval of the United States, and especially its foreign policy, have reached the lowest levels in the non-Muslim world.

These interventions are also morally reprehensible, and put the United States on the wrong side of a struggle for civil rights, justice, and equality that has much in common with our own civil rights movement of the 1960’s. It is perhaps not surprising that the Bush administration, whose party was on the wrong side of that struggle, too, would be intervening against the government of Evo Morales.

Morales, an Aymara Indian, broke more than 500 years of tradition by being elected Bolivia’s first indigenous president at the end of 2005. While vowing to end centuries of discrimination against Bolivia’s indigenous majority, who are much poorer than their compatriots of European ancestry, most of the government’s measures have benefited the vast majority of Bolivians — of all ethnic groups. For example, the government’s re-nationalization of its hydrocarbons industry — mostly natural gas — has brought more than a billion dollars of additional revenue to the government. (This would be equivalent to more than $1.4 trillion dollars in the United States). The government has begun to use this revenue to build hospitals and schools, promote land titling and land reform, and to increase social security payments for the elderly — a major anti-poverty initiative.

All of this has run into opposition from Bolivia’s traditional elite, and especially opposition governors who want to keep the gas revenues in the provinces where the gas is located, rather than sharing more of it nationally. It is ironic that the United States ostensibly supports the national sharing of such revenues in Iraq, but not in Bolivia.

USAID has a special “Office of Transition Initiatives” (OTI) that is operating in Bolivia, funneling millions of dollars of training and support for right-wing opposition governments and movements, and trying to influence other political actors as well. According to USAID, “OTI intervenes rapidly and undertakes quick-impact interventions through short-term grants that catalyze broader change.” The OTI also claims to support democracy, but they appear to be mostly supporting the “white separatist movement” that has already had four governors declare their provinces autonomous, threatening to break up the country.

Unfortunately, some elements of the Bush administration have adopted a “Cold War” attitude toward Bolivia. In this new Cold War, Venezuela is the equivalent of the old Soviet Union (never mind that it has a democratically elected government and a capitalist economy) and governments such as Bolivia and Ecuador are seen as client states. Hence the Peace Corps volunteers and Fulbright scholar were asked to report on any Venezuelans or Cubans that they saw in the country.

But there is no evidence that Venezuela — despite the billions of dollars of aid and loans it dispenses throughout the region — has influenced government policy in Bolivia. This is in sharp contrast to the twenty years prior to Evo Morales’ government, when Bolivia operated under IMF agreements for virtually the entire two decades. There is a whole paper trail of agreements showing Washington’s clear influence over major economic decisions, including macroeconomic policies, privatizations, and trade policy. These policies were also a disastrous failure on their own terms — income per person in Bolivia ended up less than it was 27 years prior.

Since Bolivia has become independent of these institutions, and its democratic government is attempting to deliver on its promises, President Bush has stated that he is “concerned about the erosion of democracy” there — and his administration is intervening. Now they have put Peace Corps volunteers and Fulbright scholars at risk. Congress should investigate these abuses.

This op-ed was published by AlterNet on February 16, 2008.

From The Huffington Post