Abby Martin, host of Empire Files, discusses the multitude of dirty tricks and maneuvers deployed by the CIA in its decades-long regime change operation against Cuba.
ROSA MIRIAM ELIZALDE—More than 800,000 U.S. troops have been deployed in Afghanistan since 2001. The Department of Defense has recognized 2,443 casualties and some 20,589 wounded. This military institution, together with the State Department and the Agency for International Development (USAID), not including other entities such as the CIA or the Department of Veterans Affairs, have spent 2.26 billion dollars since 2001, according to estimates by the Human and Budgetary Costs of the War on Terrorism project of Brown University, Rhode Island.
The Costs of War project also estimates that 241,000 Afghans have died as a direct result of military intervention. These figures do not include deaths from disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure and other indirect consequences of the war.
With the CID-201, Cuba was ahead of the region in the technological world. Fidel overcame “the poor situation” in which the Latin American countries found themselves in amidst the information and Internet boom the rest of the world was experiencing.
“That brilliant world of knowledge and image exchange is still strange and forbidden to our countries,” the leader said in 1999 when the island had already created dozens of scientific centers, a minicomputer factory, and the Computer Palaces.
RENE GONZALEZ—In the trial, we saw the prosecutors threaten an American general that his pension would be taken away if he testified in favor of the defense. We saw all kinds of violations, mockeries of due process. … It had nothing to do with what we see in the movies where the accused has every right to defend himself.
Really, I think the trial taught us to better understand why an individual like Joe Biden, who is painted, presented or sold as liberal and moderate, can stand in front of a camera and say no to reopening family remittances because the Cuban government is supposedly going to appropriate them. Why he can then stand before a camera and suddenly offer us vaccines, but insist that an international organization has to come to distribute them among the population because the Cuban government — the only one in Latin America that has created a vaccine — supposedly isn’t going to.
Cuba’s anti-imperial foreign policy helped end apartheid in South Africa and sustain liberation movements worldwide. Historian Piero Gleijeses says that’s one of the main reasons why the US has terrorized the island nation through today. “There are very few examples [in history] of the idealism demonstrated by the Cuban government in its foreign policy in Africa,” Gleijeses says. Guest: Piero Gleijeses. Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Author of “Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976” and “Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991.”