The recent visit of the Pope to Cuba has again focussed upon the island and the economic and political changes it is under-going. Ahead of his visit, Pope Benedict had suggested Cuba’s “Marxist” structure ”no longer corresponds to reality” and called for the adoption of a ”new model”. Pope Benedict XVI has urged Cubans to build an ”open and renewed society”. His prayers at the island’s holiest site included a plea for ”those deprived of freedom.” but Cuba is not Poland, where the catholic church was an important influence upon the opposition to the state-capitalist regime. Although around 60% of Cubans are baptised as Catholics,...
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The earthquake in Haiti and similar misfortunes are presented as unavoidable natural disasters. To some extent, this is true. But it ignores the consequences of the deliberate pursuit of profit at the expense of environmental protection. It is not a coincidence that the number of victims of recent disasters such as the Asian tsunami and the Katrina hurricane and now Haiti are clearly related to the degree of their poverty. The reality with earthquakes is they kill only if we let them. They are inevitable, but the death toll is not. It is collapsing buildings that take lives, not...
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Earlier this year, when in June the Cuban government, now under Fidel Castro’s brother Raul, announced a new system of wage payments, the Guardian (13 June) wrote that Cuba had “abandoned its egalitarian wages system”. This brought a response (20 June) from Helen Yaffe, author of Ermesto Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution: “In reality, there has never been an ‘egalitarian wage system’ (i.e. one where every worker was paid the same): Che Guevara himself devised a new salary scale, introduced in 1964, with 24 different basic wage levels, plus a 15% bonus for over-completion”. In other words, Cuba...
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On this day in 1965 the United States sent more than 22,000 troops to the Dominican Republic in order to prevent the establishment of what President Lyndon Johnson described as a ‘communist dictatorship’. Utter nonsense of course. The Socialist Standard of June that year explains why: •••••• “In yet another flare-up in the endless round of minor conflicts, the focus of attention swung last month to the Western Hemisphere. Once again the United States Marines landed in that trouble spot of the centuries; the island of Hispaniola. This time it was the Eastern half of the Dominican Republic; not...
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This article was recommended to us by a Haitian friend of the WSP. We reprint it for the information contained – the on the ground conditions as our contact in haiti confirms them. It doesn’t reflect the WSP policies. •••••• America’s Role in Haiti’s Hunger Riots By Bill Quigley Monday 21 April 2008 Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people. There have also been food riots worldwide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. The Economist, which calls the current crisis the...
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