Atilio Boron with Fidel, March 2009

An interview with Fidel Castro in early March 2009 by the Argentine sociologist Atilio Boron. Fidel and Boron discussed the G-20 meeting, and the motives for inviting Argentina, Brazil and Mexico to dine with the ‘adults’.  And he talked about the recent cabinet changes.

Fidel doesn’t rest. He remains steadfast in the gap. He hasn’t abandoned, nor will he abandon the struggle. Warrior of so many battles, he continues his relentless hounding of imperialism. His will is indomitable, and as with the best steel, the passage of time, far from nicking it, has only made it harder. He knows that to build a better world, a decisive battle must be won: the battle of ideas…

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Paper presented at the XI Conference on Gloablization and Problems of Deverlopment, Havana, 2-6 March, 2009. Used as the basis for Reflections of Fidel, 9 March 20

Atilio Boron

09.

(The Bush) Administration has left as an inheritance a true economic and financial tsunami on a global scale: an “infinite crisis” whose reach defies our imagination. In the following pages, we would like to share some ideas about the current capitalist crisis, its probable “solutions” and the role that a renewed socialist option might play in the present juncture. Given time restrictions we’ll avoid unnecessary technical jargon and will try to express things plainly, yet without resorting to oversimplifications…

Click here for full paper

A commentary on C.L.R. James’s classic work by a Cuban scholar who specialises in the intelletual history of the Anglophone Caribbean and its relationship with Cuban thought.

Graciela Chailloux

For the author of a book published in 1938, entitled The Black Jacobins, Hugo Chávez’s revolutionary endeavors and the resulting highly innovative energy consortium that he has sponsored, flow directly out of the Caribbean’s potential to forge its own destiny. The author of that book is one of those outstanding teachers of history that the Caribbean and the Americas have spawned in such abundance, one of those who have, with such consummate skill, reworked paradigms of the universal culture in order to more fully understand our realities. This teacher was Cyril Lionel Robert James, known to all as C.L.R. James…

Read Graciela’s commentary

At the beginning of March, political and labour union representatives from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia set out on a tour of the French, Belgian, British, German and Spanish capitals to meet with government officials and farmers’ unions.

Catherine Kimura

The delegation - among which were Catherine Kimura, chairperson of the trade committee of the East African legislative assembly, and Mary Sakala who represents the Eastern and Southern Small Scale Farmers in Zambia - had a simple message: in Africa, the economic and financial crisis has already turned into a food crisis, and EPAs will make it worse..

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David Martin, MEP

Glenys Kinnock, MEP

On March 25 2009 the European Parliament gave its assent to the economic partnership agreement between the Cariforum States andthe EU. MEPs insist that a real review clause and that extra aid for trade are included in the agreement. The EPA should contribute, through development goals, poverty reduction and respect for fundamental human rights, to the achievement of the MDGs. MEPs voted 460 votes in favour to 82 with 43 abstentions.

For full Press Release click here

The President of Brazil says the global economic crisis was not created by the poor, blacks or indigenous people but by ‘white people with blue eyes who appeared to know everything and now show that they know nothing’. Click here  for report.

Caricom Heads have approved a Negotiating Brief on a Trade and Development Agreement with Canada, subject to the proviso that it may have to be re-examined “in the light of the continuing global financial and economic situation”. In fact there are several reasons to question the widsom of rushing to conclude an FTA with Canada at this time…

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Caricom-Canada FTA: A Premature Trade Decision Anthony Gomes

Below is a very interesting and provocative review of new book by a Zambian author, Dambisa Moyo, called ‘Dead Aid’. The arguments in the book might be

Dambisa Moyo

seriously flawed if one is to go by this review, but I do agree with the author’s basic premise that international “Aid“, as currently conceived and implemented, does more harm than good. I have always wondered why so few development economists from the South have not tackled this important issue. They have, by and large, left unchallenged the North’s basic assumption that an effective way to tackle underdevelopment in the South, especially in Africa, is to increase “aid” (and private investment) rather than substantially decrease or remove all those unfair subsidies to their agricultural  exports as well as those from their livestock industry, which enter countries of the South at “dumping” prices thereby destroying whole swathes of their agricultural sector -countries where  the majority of the population live off the land.

Thus, at every G-7, G-8, or G-20 meeting, Northern NGOs, who apparently share that assumption, press for an increase in “aid” to the South. UNDP has regularly published statistics showing that the quantity of “aid” (I always put that word in quotation marks because genuine aid means help or assistance and international “aid” is anything but that) delivered to countries in the South is but a fraction of the considerable sum of money of which their highly subsidized agricultural exports deprive those countries. I see that Obama has decided to reduce government subsidies to the U.S. cotton industry, the subsidized exports of which have ravaged cotton farming in West Africa on which millions of families depend for their livelihod. When added to the host of non-tariff barriers (on which development economists from the South have admittedly done a great deal of work) which countries of the North insist on imposing on the South’s exports, such “aid“, even if it might occasionally provide some real relief, is no more than a band-aid.

Mervyn

http://zambian-economist.blogspot.com/
Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo
A Zambian Economist Blog Review

The question of international aid to developing countries is one of the most controversial subjects in modern development literature. One simply needs to look at any local bookshop under the “current affairs” section and you are hit with many large and often time consuming volumes on the subject. So when I stumbled on Dambisa Moyo’s book at my favourite bookshop (Waterstones Charing Cross Station), I felt a mixture of delight and nervousness…

Full review

See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/14/aid-africa-dambisa-moyo
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/dead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4121b1fa-ee5a-11dd-b791-0000779fd2ac.html

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/economic/moyod.htm

The UWI-CARICOM Institutional Relations Project announces  the launch of  The Integrationist Quarterly (IQ). The magazine will be offered on-line as well as in hard copy. It will dedicate space to accommodating the perspectives of the youth of the Caribbean Community and the diaspora on a range of development and integration issues; providing a forum for expression of thoughts and ideas on issues of interest to the 21st century generation of Caribbean youth…

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A Critique of Carlos Moore’s “Castro, the Blacks, and Africa”
By Lisa Brock and Otis Cunningham
Cuban Studies 21, (1991) University of Pittsburgh Press. Sourced from AfroCubaWeb

For many years, there has been a need for rigorous scholarship on the question of race in revolutionary Cuba. Intellectuals on the left have traditionally praised Cuba as a nation free of all aspects of racism. From the right have come a small number of blacks, such as Carlos Moore and John Clytus, who portray Cuba as a dogmatic Marxist country thriving on racism against a population that is largely black.¹ Historically grounded research has generally been lacking, especially in English, even though a number of scholars have acknowledged both the material and cultural advances of blacks and the continuation of white supremacist attitudes.² Carlos Moore’s Castro, the Blacks and Africa is interesting reading because of its anecdotal style but projects no light into the general confusion. Moore can, however, be credited with making the need to carefully study race in Cuba all the more apparent…

Click here for full review