#Cuban economy

[minnesotafollower]

Another Indictment of the Cuban Economy

Cuba Siglo 21 has published a new dossier by economist Emilio Morales that provides a statistical x-ray of the collapse of the regime’s system on the island. [1] “The Cuban economy is in a critical phase due to the drastic fall of more than 50% of its main sources of income: export of medical services, remittances and tourism. This financial collapse has accelerated the countdown of the…

[thenewdemocratus]

Foreign Affairs: Carlos W. Fernandez & Eric Lorber: Opening Cuba to Telecommunications Investment

Source:Foreign Affairs I agree that opening up the Cuban telecommunications industry and allowing for others to be involved there outside of the Castro Regime is a way to not only open up Cuba and open up a better relationship between America and Cuba, but the two government’s, is not only a good way to open up Cuba, but also a good way to open up the Cuban economy. The Castro Regime decided in…

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil to Send Business Leaders to Cuba in Push to Rebuild Ties

A delegation of at least 30 Brazilian business leaders will travel to Havana on Monday in search of opportunities to boost trade with Cuba, the latest step in President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s push to repair relations between the two nations.

The four-day mission will take place ahead of Lula’s own trip to the Caribbean island, where he will meet with Cuba leader Miguel Diaz-Canel and take part in the Group of 77 meetings, a United Nations economic summit of developing countries.

Brazil’s ties with Cuba deteriorated under right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, although they were never fully severed. Since taking office in January, Lula has sought to rebuild relations with both Havana and Venezuela, and met with Diaz-Canel on the sidelines of a global finance summit in Paris earlier this year.

That has created an opening for industry leaders eager to bolster trade relationships, according to Jorge Viana, the head of the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency, or Apex, which is leading the trip.

Continue reading.

[msclaritea]

"MUSLIM WOMAN BELIEVES MUSLIM MIGRANTS ARE SOLDIERS THAT ARE HERE TO SLAUGHTER BRITAINS, HIRED BY THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT !

This is a theory circulating in the Muslim community who whisper of usurping the UK all together.

I pray that this lady is just a conspiracy theorist, posting this content is in no way attempting to stir up hate ..this is merely reporting rumours in the Muslim community.

In my opinion It does seem that the government are actually trying to incite a civil war, surely nobody can be this incompetent. They are telling Muslims the EDL are trying to kill them in their communities when the EDL were disbanded a decade ago.

The government and MSM are telling the Muslim community that the EDL are launching random acid attacks on Muslim women (not true)

The government also seem to be deliberately antagonising white and none Muslim citizens with two tier policing…something dosent seem quite right.

ANGRY MANIPULATED MUSLIMS PREPARE FOR THE ARRIVAL OF THE NONE EXISTENT EDL.

Who the F*ck is EDL !

The EDL disbanded over a decade ago, why would our government and MSM deliberately stir up tensions between our communities ?

Because of government and MSM misinformation, Muslims think they need time to guard their communities from a none existent EDL ?

My message to anyone from any community is …

DO NOT FIGHT EACH OTHER

We are both being played by dark forces.

They want us to fight to enslave us all, dont fall for it.

The government seem to be deliberately antagonising the public."

The British government is playing mind games with citizens, the same way the U.S. government plays us, by pitting Immigrants against Natural born citizens. There is no EDL but there are foreign soldiers in the #UK disguised as Immigrants pictures and video are in the link, along with the news that the Cuban economy collapsed months ago. They went Digital and woke up to find their bank accounts EMPTIED!

[governmentjobsworld]

தேர்வே இல்லாமல் - தேசிய விசாரணை நிறுவனத்தில் வேலை வாய்ப்பு..!

NIA Recruitment 2022 – Apply Offline For 49 DSP & ASP Posts #NIA #Centralgovtjobs #govtjobs #jobrascals

தேசிய விசாரணை ஆணையத்தில் (ASP & DSP) பணியிடம் நிரப்புவதற்கான அறிவிப்பு வெளியாகியுள்ளன. மத்திய அரசு இந்த அதிகாரப்பூர்வ அறிவிப்பினை  வெளியிட்டுள்ளது. தேசிய விசாரணை ஆணையத்தின் பணிக்கு விண்ணப்பிக்க ஆர்வமுள்ளவர்கள் 14/11/2022 முதல் 14/01/2023க்குல் அஞ்சல் மூலமாக விண்ணப்பிக்கவும். இப்பணிக்கு விண்ணப்பிக்கும் நபர்கள் விண்ணப்பிக்கும் முன்பு கீழே கொடுக்கப்பட்டுள்ள பணிக்கான கல்வித் தகுதி , வயது விவரம் , …

[zvaigzdelasas]

[H]undreds of legal experts and groups on Monday urged the global community—and the United States government in particular—"to comply with international law by ending the use of broad, unilateral coercive measures that extensively harm civilian populations."

In a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, the jurists and legal groups wrote that "75 years ago, in the aftermath of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, nations of the world came together in Geneva, Switzerland to establish clear legal limits on the treatment of noncombatants in times of war."

"One key provision... is the prohibition of collective punishment, which is considered a war crime," the letter continues. "We consider the unilateral application of certain economic sanctions to constitute collective punishment."

Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild—one of the letter's signatories—said in a statement that "economic sanctions cause direct material harm not only to the people living on the receiving end of these policies, but to those who rely on trade and economic relations with sanctioned countries."

"The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare and hold the U.S. Government accountable for violating international law every time it wields these coercive measures," she added.[...]

"Hundreds of millions of people currently live under such broad U.S. economic sanctions in some form, including in notable cases such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela," the letter notes. "The evidence that these measures can cause severe, widespread civilian harm, including death, is overwhelming. Broad economic sanctions can spark and prolong economic crises, hinder access to essential goods like food, fuel, and medicine, and increase poverty, hunger, disease, and even death rates, especially among children. Such conditions in turn often drive mass migration, as in the recent cases of Cuba and Venezuela."

For more than 64 years, the U.S. has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that had adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island's economy and severely limited Cubans' access to basic necessities including food, fuel, and medicines. The Cuban government claims the blockade cost the country's economy nearly $5 billion in just one 11-month period in 2022-23 alone. For the past 32 years, United Nations member states have voted overwhelmingly against the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Last year's vote was 187-2, with the U.S. and Israel as the only dissenters.

According to a 2019 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., as many as 40,000 Venezuelans died from 2017-18 to U.S. sanctions, which have made it much more difficult for millions of people to obtain food, medicine, and other necessities.

"Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent," the new letter asserts. "A 1960 State Department memo on the embargo of Cuba suggested 'denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.'"

"Asked whether the Trump administration's sanctions on Iran were working as intended, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded that 'things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we're convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime,'" the signers added.

12 Aug 24

[reddest-flower]

Cuba broke through its colonial domination into freedom. From the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and from the cities came the torrential power of the people against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. ‘The revolution is made in the midst of danger’, said Fidel Castro as he led his band of peasant-soldiers from the hills into the cities. They had triumphed against remarkable odds. Quickly, the revolutionaries passed a series of decrees – just as the Soviets had – to draw the key classes to their side. To draw in the urban Cubans, the revolutionaries cut rents by half – sending a strong signal to the bourgeoisie that they had a different class outlook. Then, the revolutionaries took on the United States, whose government held a monopoly over services to the island. Telephone and electrical companies – all American – were told to reduce their rates immediately. Then, on May 17, 1959, the Cuban government passed its agrarian reform – the keystone of the revolutionary process. Land holdings would be restricted so that no large landowners could dominate the landscape and so that the US sugar industry could not strangle the hopes of the island. The most radical part of the reform was not the land ceiling itself, but the logic that agrarian reform would transform the stagnation of the Cuban economy and its dependence upon the United States. The law clearly stated that, from a socialist standpoint,

«The agrarian reform has two principal objectives: (a) to facilitate the planting or the extension of new crops with the view of furnishing raw materials to industry, satisfying the food requirements of the nation, increasing the export of agricultural products and, reciprocally, the import of foreign products which are essential to use; (b) to develop the interior market (family, domestic) by raising the purchasing power of the rural population. In other words, increase the national demand in order to develop the industries atrophied by an overly restrained consumption, or in order to create those which, for lack of customers, were never able to get started among us.»

The revolutionaries wanted to diversify their sugarcane island, produce food security for their people, remove people from desperation, increase the ability of people to consume a range of goods and engineer a people-centred rather than an export-centred economy. Long before Castro announced his commitment to communism, the regime had already developed a carefully thought out socialist platform.

The United States of America, having overthrown the radical nationalist government in Guatemala in 1954, was eager to repeat the task in Cuba in 1959. An embargo came swiftly, as did every form of humiliation possible against the Cuban people. The Cuban economy was structured around dependency to Washington, with the sugar bought by the US firms and with the island turned into a playground for American tourists. Now, the US decided to squeeze this little island, only ninety miles from the US shoreline. Gunboats were readied, a failed invasion tried in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. Cuba was vulnerable but also protected by the deep roots of its revolution. But would this protection be sufficient? Could Cuba, alone, be able to survive the onslaught from the United States?

On February 5, 1960, a leader in the USSR and an Old Bolshevik – Anastas Mikoyan – came to Havana to join Fidel Castro at the opening of a Soviet scientific, cultural and technical exhibition. A week later, Mikoyan and Castro signed an agreement for the USSR to buy Cuban sugar at the world market price (in dollars) and provide credits for the Cubans to buy Russian goods. The USSR would subsequently buy almost all the Cuban sugar harvest, even as the Russian consumer market could very well have been supplied by beet sugar from within the USSR. Prices fluctuated, but, on balance, the Cubans were able to find a regular buyer to take over from the United States. The Russians also provided over a $100 million in credits toward the construction of Cuba’s chemical industry as well as trained Cuban technical and scientific workers in the USSR. Diversification of Cuba’s economy remained on the cards, although it became clear that it would not be an easy task. In August 1963, Castro announced that diversification, as well as industrialization, would be postponed. Cuba needed to concentrate on its sugarcane harvest to earn the means to survive the embargo.

On February 24, 1965, Che Guevara addressed the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity in Algiers, Algeria. He had come to talk about the economic problems for a revolution in a post-colonial country. Overthrowing the former colonizer was not enough, Che said, since ‘a real break’ is needed from imperialism for the new state to actually flourish and not remain in dependency. How could the post-colonial state survive a hostile economic climate? Who would buy its goods – mainly primary, unprocessed goods – at a fair price, and who would lend it capital at fair terms to develop? Capitalist banks and countries would not provide the post-colonial state, particularly a socialist state, with the means to break out of the trap of underdevelopment. Banks would lend money to a post-colonial state at rates higher than it would lend to a colonial power. Expensive money would only put the post-colonial state into further difficulty, as it would find it hard to service its debt and see its debt multiply out of hand. To prevent this situation, Che argued, the ‘socialist countries must help pay for the development of countries now starting out on the road to liberation’. Trade between socialist countries must not take place based on the law of value of capitalism, but through the creation of fraternal prices. ‘The real task’, Che said, ‘consists of setting prices that will permit development. A great shift in ideas will be involved in changing the order of international relations. Foreign trade should not determine policy, but should, on the contrary, be subordinated to a fraternal policy toward the peoples.’

China, in 1960, offered Cuba credit of $60 million without interest and without a timeline for repayment. This was an enviable loan. But the scale was much smaller than the Soviet assistance. By 1964, the USSR had provided Cuba with economic assistance valued at over $600 million, while the Eastern European countries offered several hundred million more in aid and assistance. The USSR had also trained over 3,000 Cubans in agronomy and agricultural mechanization as well as 900 Cubans as engineers and technicians. Che recognized the value of the Soviet ‘fraternal policy’ both in terms of the training and in the prices offered. ‘Clearly, we could not ask the Socialist world to buy this quantity of sugar at this price based on economic motives’, he had said in 1961, ‘because really there is no reason in world commerce for this purchase and it was simply a political gesture’.

Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2019

[lilithism1848]

Atrocities US committed against AFRICA

In early 2017, the US began conducting drone strikes in Somalia against Al Shabab militants. An attack on July 16th killed 8 people.

In 1998, the US bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, killing one employee and wounding 11. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use. The US had acted on false evidence of a VX nerve agent from a single soil sample, and later used a false witness to cover for the attack. It was the only pharmaceutical factory in Africa not under US control.

In June 1982, with the help of CIA money and arms, Hissene Habre , dubbed Africa’s Pinochet, takes power in Chad. His secret police, use methods of torture including the burning the body of the detainee with incandescent objects, spraying gas into their eyes, ears and nose, forced swallowing of water, and forcing the mouths of detainees around the exhaust pipes of running cars. Habré’s government also periodically engaged in ethnic cleansing against groups such as the Sara, Hadjerai and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members en masse when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to the regime. Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre. In May 2016 he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison.

In the 1980s, Reagan maintains a close relationship with the Apartheid South african government, called constructive engagement, while secretly funding it in the hopes of creating a bulwark of anti-communism and preventing a marxist party from taking power, as happened in angola. Later on, in the wars against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, in which cuban and anti-apartheid forces fought the white south african government, the US supplied south africa with nuclear weapons via Israel.

In 1975, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola, backing the brutal anti-communist leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi, against Agostinho Neto and his Marxist-Leninst MPLA party, creating a civil war lasting for 30 years. The CIA financed a covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa. Congress continues to fund UNITAS, and their south-african apartheid allies until the late 1980s. By the end of the war, more than 500,000 people had died and over one million had been internally displaced.

In 1966, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows he widely popular Pan-Africanist and Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, inviting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a lead role in managing the economy. With this reversal, accentuated by the expulsion of immigrants and a new willingness to negotiate with apartheid South Africa, Ghana lost a good deal of its stature in the eyes of African nationalists.

In 1965, a CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko, described as the “archetypal African dictator” in Congo. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.

In 1962, a tip from a CIA spy in South Africa lead to the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, due to his pro-USSR leanings. This began his 27-year-long imprisonment.

In 1961, the CIA assists in the assassination of the democratically elected congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, throwing the country into years of turmoil. Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch.

In 1801, and again in 1815, the US aided Sweden in subjugating a series of coastal towns in North Africa, in the Barbary Wars. The stated reason was to crack down on pirates, but the wars destroyed the navies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, and secured European and US shipping routes for goods and slaves in North Africa. US Representatives stated: “When we can appear in the Ports of the various Powers, or on the Coast, of Barbary, with Ships of such force as to convince those nations that We are able to protect our trade, and to compel them if necessary to keep faith with Us, then, and not before, We may probably secure a large share of the Meditn trade, which would largely and speedily compensate the U. S. for the Cost of a maritime force amply sufficient to keep all those Pirates in Awe, and also make it their interest to keep faith.” Thomas Jefferson echoed and carried out the war, saying that war was essential to securing markets along the Barbary Coast.

[1solone]

For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were born in 1900. When you are 14, World War I starts, and ends on your 18th birthday with 22 million people killed. Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until you are 20. Fifty million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million.

When you're 29, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, global GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy. When you turn 39, World War II starts. You aren’t even over the hill yet.

When you're 41, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war and the Holocaust kills six million. At 52, the Korean War starts and five million perish.

At 64 the Vietnam War begins, and it doesn’t end for many years. Four million people die in that conflict. Approaching your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, could well have ended. Great leaders prevented that from happening.

As you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends. Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How do you survive all of that? A kid in 1985 didn’t think their 85 year old grandparent understood how hard school was. Yet those grandparents (and now great grandparents) survived through everything listed above.

Perspective is an amazing art. Let’s try and keep things in perspective. Let’s be smart, help each other out, and we will get through all of this. In the history of the world, there has never been a storm that lasted. This too, shall pass.

[beardedmrbean]

Growing evidence makes this clearer by the day: Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) does not help American institutions attain progress or profit.

It’s time for all institutions to get back to their basic duties and stop pushing extreme agendas on the American people. This is especially important for American corporations that have a fiduciary obligation to make decisions in the best financial interests of their shareholders.

A growing chorus of Americans recognizes the acute challenges of DEI. Even the co-founder and CEO of a prominent DEI consulting firm laments assuming the role of “moral authority” on the subject and regrets labeling people who disagree with DEI as “bad” people.

The controversy over DEI has also captured the attention of two well-known businessmen, Mark Cuban and Bill Ackman, both of whom have engaged in a tense exchange on X, formerly Twitter.

Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and star of “Shark Tank,” wrote, “Diversity—means you expand the possible pool of candidates as widely as you can. Once you have identified the candidates, you hire the person you believe is the best.”

“That’s exactly what I thought until I did the work,” said Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management and Democrat mega-donor. “I encourage you to do the same and revert. DEI is not about diversity, equity or inclusion. Trust me. I fell for the same trap you did.”

In the same post, Ackman explained that DEI is “a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.”

In simplest terms, what Ackman and others critical of DEI have identified is the inherently flawed nature of the ideology. By insisting that our institutions are irredeemable and cannot escape past wrongs or that people groups should be divided into two camps — oppressed and oppressor — the adherents of DEI are compelled to use the levers of those very same institutions to manipulate outcomes based on identity rather than merit. 

This conduct is dangerous when you consider its effects on our economy and our public corporations.

Good business is ultimately about producing a good product, not pushing an agenda. DEI unnecessarily complicates that winning American formula. Rather than focus on improving production and goods, companies are now choosing to divert resources and attention to internal race and identity-based policies that neither improve return on investment to shareholders nor result in better products for consumers. 

Corporations adopting policies that prioritize social engineering over corporate responsibility do not serve the interests of all Americans. Instead, they appease the extreme desires of a few, thereby eroding confidence in the ability and competency of our institutions. 

It is neither profitable for businesses nor sustainable for the American people.

Along the same lines, those in the financial services industry must understand that fiduciaries must have a single-minded purpose in the returns on their beneficiaries’ investments.

State and federal law have long recognized fiduciary duties for those who manage other people’s money. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act, for example, demands that a fiduciary “discharge that person’s duties with respect to the plan solely in the interests of the participants and beneficiaries, for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries …”

As attorney general of Kentucky, I was one of 22 state attorneys general who signed a letter warning financial services companies that they may be violating their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders by agreeing to radical activism in their environmental proposals. I also issued a legal opinion outlining why government-sponsored racial discrimination and so-called “stakeholder capitalism” was unlawful.

We’ve collectively witnessed some of the consequences of extreme ideology taking priority over responsible corporate governance. After Bud Light’s infamous foray into the culture wars, its sales collapsed, forcing one of its executives to step down. We’ve also seen prominent fund managers like Vanguard drop ESG-driven investments — another ideological blunder at the corporate level — because they have not been profitable and have exposed their investors to greater losses.

DEI objectives have moved some of our business so far from their purpose that even those on the left like Ackman are compelled to speak out, underscoring that the adverse reaction to DEI is not a partisan issue. 

Most Americans want our corporate institutions to move away from extreme ideologies. It’s time to return to the American formula of producing great products and services, not pushing agendas.

Daniel Cameron is the former attorney general of Kentucky and the current CEO of the 1792 Exchange.

[fatehbaz]

While sugarcane has defined Caribbean islands since the onset of European settler colonization, a little-known African species, guinea grass, has invaded sugar plantations from within. Cultivated to intensify sugar production, guinea grass ironically became a weed of the plantations while providing material and spiritual resources to enslaved and marooned Africans and their descendants. [...]

While sugarcane was imported from Austronesia, guinea grass hails from the western coast of Africa. Sugar was the principal crop of many Caribbean plantations; guinea grass was imported as fodder for the oxen that labored in the fields and for the cattle that fed the planters. [...]. A 1707 account by Hans Sloane, whose collections would form the core of the British Museum, describes the grass (then known as “Scotch grass”) as widespread in Barbados and Jamaica [...].

The imported grass was celebrated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century planters for its high grazing quality. Bryan Edwards sang its praises in Jamaica, writing that it may be considered as next to the sugar-cane, in point of importance; as most of the grazing and breeding farms or pens throughout the island were originally created, and are still supported, chiefly by means of this invaluable herbage. For Edwards, guinea grass had an almost equal status to sugar cane because it could feed “the plenty of horned cattle both for the butcher and planter.” [...] By 1786, the African grass had become naturalized in Guadeloupe, and, by 1813, it had reached Mississippi, writes Parsons. It spread widely throughout Central and South America [...].

Indeed, one observer in New Granada (modern-day Colombia) was so enthusiastic as to argue that whoever had introduced the plant deserved a statue “as high as New York’s Statue of Liberty” [...].

In Cuba, the grass appears in an 1816 report of José Antonio de la Ossa, the first director of the Botanical Garden of Havana, who wrote: “It is an abundant and convenient pasture grass, because it multiplies its stalks in the same way as Sugar cane[.]” 

Like Sloane and Edwards, Ossa compares guinea grass to sugarcane. The two foreign grasses seemed to them similar in morphology and function, because they both [...] promoted the economic development of the islands’ cash crop societies. [...] While sugar was introduced to Cuba long before guinea grass, it was guinea grass that allowed for the intensification of Cuban sugar cultivation with large herds of oxen.

---

Yet something strange happened in the history of this ostensibly symbiotic relationship. 

Although guinea grass was meant to support the sugar economy by feeding its beasts of burden, ironically, it became a virulent weed to the sugarcane plants. By 1977, guinea grass was rated the number one weed to sugarcane in Cuba. In 2012, the journal of the National Botanical Garden of Cuba (Revista del Jardín Botánico Nacional) listed it as [...] an invasive species of greatest concern. In this way, the two imported grasses became stalky antagonists in the daily competition for light, water, and soil nutrients.

Their cultural meanings, however, had long since diverged. If sugarcane supported the economic interests of European planters, guinea grass was appropriated by enslaved and marooned Africans across the Caribbean for practical and religious purposes. 

Diasporic Africans in the Virgin Islands used the dried grass to make masquerade costumes for Carnival and other festivals. In Cuba, priests used it to make omiero, [...] of the Afro-Cuban Reglá de Ochá religion. 

Moreover, some of the enslaved canecutters used an ancestral West African technique to thatch their mud huts with guinea grass. [...] In fact, the famed maroon Esteban Montejo described using this method of thatching during his escape from a Cuban sugar plantation in the late nineteenth century: [...] I had never left the plantation before. I walked uphill, downhill, in every direction. [...] My feet were blistered and my hands were swollen and festering. I camped under a tree. I made myself a shelter of guinea grass in a few hours and I stayed there four or five days. [...]

Guinea grass has continued to take on new meanings for Caribbean writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Alejandro Aguilar’s 1997 short story “Landscape of Clay,” [...] [t]he untamed grass, like the cadets’ expressions of sexuality, subverts the rigid structure of the institution.  Likewise, the storyteller in the 2002 play In the Time of the Revolution by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé bemoans the fact that “people’s dreams are not made to grow freely like guinea grass on the banks and highways. Some people try to pull them up, to mow them down, to dry them out, to burn them and see them go up in smoke.” [...] In undermining the economic ambitions of the plantation system, guinea grass has come to represent acts of subversion [...].

---

All text above by: Hannah Rachel Cole. “Plant of the Month: Guinea Grass.” JSTOR Daily. 1 December 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[minnesotafollower]

Cuban Government Official Admits That Its Inefficient Political-Economic Model Is Responsible for Cuba’s Economic Problems

Manuel Marrero, Cuba’s Prime Minister, has admitted that many of the consumer prices at its state-owned Foreign Currency Collection Stores (TRDs) are more expensive for the same products sold in the privately owned stores (MSMEs).[1] Nevertheless, Marrero asserted, “It is unfair to make that analysis. Our TRDs are faced with a complex scenario, they do not buy those resources, chicken, oil, in…

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Arthur Gonzalez

The new U.S. plan is centered on the upcoming visit to the UN in September of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, where he will intervene as the current president of the Group 77 plus China, something that the Yankees could not prevent and which gives the Island an important role in the international arena, and something that counteracts the lies fabricated against the Revolution.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil intends to restore trade and political ties with Cuba

Brazil wishes to re-establish its trade and political ties with Cuba, said a top foreign aide to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Friday (August 18), after a meeting with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel in Havana. 

"We want to make the relationship between Brazil and Cuba one of great friendships," Lula's adviser Celso Amorim said during the trip to Havana.

"That will contribute to peace in our region, and that's the greatest goal of diplomacy, alongside economic growth," said Amorim, who previously served as foreign minister under both Lula and former President Itamar Franco.

He also said that health expert groups and representatives from Brazil's agricultural sector will soon travel to Cuba.

Continue reading.

[mesetacadre]

tell me about uhhhhh. hm. what you'd like the education system to be like ideally. sorry my mind is wiped so this is all I have

Post-revolution it should serve a dual purpose, primarily to facilitate the intellectual and personal developmemt of all workers. Once education is decoupled from the economic pressures placed on it by the capitalist mode of production, that demand education, as a part of the superstructure, be a factory of educated employees, educational institutions can place as many resources as are needed into subjects that don't generate any direct economic growth. Of course, we can't forget that socialism exists in a context, and the freedom of education from economic demands is necessarily limited by the finite resources on hand. Still, the capacity of education to serve workers will, almost in every case, be greater than that of education in capitalism, due to the more efficient and democratic administration.

Secondarily, education can also serve to promote communist theory and principles. The mother of my Cuban comrade told me that in university she had to have a subject in political economy, even though she studied engineering. This is analogous to how we have to study bourgeois economic theory (very basic keynesianism and other concepts) in highschool here, for example. I do think this is less effective in its objective than promoting participation in the Party and in democracy, for example.

[bouncinghedgehog]

For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were an American born in 1900. When you are 14, World War I starts, and ends on your 18th birthday with 22 million people killed.

Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until you are 20.

Fifty million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million.

When you're 29, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, global GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are

33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy. When you turn 39, World War ll starts. You aren't even over the hill yet.

When you're 41, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war and the Holocaust kills six million.

At 52, the Korean War starts and five million perish.

At 64 the Vietnam War begins, and it doesn't end for many years. Four million people die in that conflict. Approaching your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, could well have ended. Great leaders prevented that from happening.

As you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends. Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How do you survive all of that?

A kid in 1985 didn't think their 85 year old grandparent understood how hard school was. Yet those grandparents (and now great grandparents) survived through everything listed above.

Perspective is an amazing art. Let's try and keep things in perspective. Let's be smart, help each other out, and we will get through all of this. In the history of the world, there has never been a storm that lasted. This too, shall pass.