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ANGEL GUERRA CABRERA—It is clear that the blockade is the fundamental cause of the severe shortages of food and medicine, the power cuts and other daily suffering in Cuba. This, together with the frenetic subversive activity of the US, created the psychological conditions, in sectors where the revolutionary message has not been able to reach, to trigger the events of July 11.

The Trump administration took advantage of the pandemic and the economic crisis created by it to make it almost impossible for foreign currency to enter Cuba at a time when Havana is bleeding financially to cope with the disease. Contrary to his campaign promises, President Biden has maintained the economic asphyxiation as he inherited it from his predecessor, in addition to intensifying the subversive policy towards the island under great pressure from the extreme right in Miami.

In absolute unison with the revolutionary Cuban people, the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH) calls on the entire world to remain alert and oppose the interference that the U.S. government and its cronies intend to apply in Cuba. We send a warning about the implications of the recent campaign for a “humanitarian corridor” that the United States is promoting under the pretext of the pandemic, because Cuba is not only a unique country in the South, which, in addition to being among the first in the world in the vaccination ranking, thanks to its universal policies of humanistic health care and high professionalism, has one of the lowest death rates for the pandemic. Cuba has supported dozens of countries with their offering of humanity assistance to save lives, while the so called “humanitarian interventions” imposed by the United States are all about occupations, designed only to bring about destruction, misery and the most atrocious violations against the dignity of nations and individuals.

BRUCE LERRO—Earlier we said that what separates monotheism from polytheism is the expansionary, missionary zeal of monotheism. This tendency was also characteristic of many nation-building projects throughout history. Both monotheism and nationalism wish to expand. There is an exclusive commitment to either one religion or one nation; yet once that exclusive commitment is made, the religion or nation sometimes advocates for expansion around the world. We can see this with Western imperialism, which in many cases sends in the missionaries first. 

THE SAKER—There is a pattern here: western politicians make a lot of very loud statements; the Russians simply take whatever actions they deem necessary, which frees them from the need to make threats of roaring statements in the first place.

This approach has a problem: only highly specialized people in the West are fully aware of what the Russians are doing and even fewer people fully understand the implications of the Russian actions. Add to this a western media which lies for a living, and this results in a population in Europe which is almost totally unaware of the very real risks the reckless actions of their (supposed) representative governments engage in. How many Brits will realize that a grinning and apparently happy Boris Johnson has almost stumbled into a war with Russia? Very few I bet. If anything, the common folk in the West are told that (a) their military is the best and (b) that the Russian military is much weaker and the Russians understand that. Ergo: there is no risk.

Then there is the fact that while the general population is kept in total ignorance, western political elites are mostly composed of folks with very strong narcissistic tendencies combined with a total inability to learn from mistakes (both theirs and those of others). Needless to say, history does not inform these people either. Finally, since these folks can never admit a mistake, however minor or serious, they cannot change course; doubling down over and over is pretty much all they are capable of.

Gravel also made waves during the 2007 Democratic presidential debates, saying of his opponents on stage, including then-Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden: “Some of these people frighten me! They frighten me!”

“When you have mainline candidates that turn around and say that there’s nothing off the table with respect to Iran, that’s code for using nukes, nuclear devices,” Gravel said at the first debate of the 2008 campaign season. “[When] I’m president of the United States, there will be no preemptive wars with nuclear devices. To my mind, it’s immoral, and it’s been immoral for the last 50 years as part of American foreign policy.”