5 Responses to “OAS Readmission of Cuba: With or Without Conditions? Norman Girvan”

• Connie Sutton on June 7th, 2009 at 11:05 pm

  Thanks so much for this…the clearest, cleanist statement of the event and its implications…Connie

• Alex Dupuy on June 7th, 2009 at 11:06 pm

  This is a great first step victory for Cuba indeed! It will be interesting to see how the second phase unfolds, but I agree with your reading of it.

  Alex

• Glenn Sankatsing on June 7th, 2009 at 11:18 pm

  These are wonderful days for our beloved Abya Yala (baptized into America by uninvited guests). Empire has lost its blackmail capacity, and that is about all that their hegemony was built upon for a century of horrors. You can isolate one country that does not obey, two countries, three countries, but when you isolate too many countries, they are not isolated anymore. It is to the credit of Cuba for being that one solitary country for decades that held firm the banner of dignity and audacity. Now that many hands have joined in at San Pedro Sula, history comes in another gear. In a pilgrimage to the sanctuary Havanna, crowds of statesmen and leaders are already lining up to see Fidel before it is too late. All still living guerrilleros, leftists, union leaders who were not killed, all who lived the traumas of half a century of horrors in Latin America, those who saw the bombardment of the Presidential Palace La Moneda in Santiago in 1973, all feel the different stream of the blood in in their veins, for what many thought was a failed project is still vividly there. Many, who did not do so already, will awaken from lethargy and bring the process in yet another gear.

  There is no room for OAS, because the place becomes crowded with better responses, UNASUR and ALBA. It will not be too difficult for the peoples and even the governments of the hemisphere to tell where their real interests and future lie. Will they line up with a discredited and unsmasked USA that has become a parriah among the countries, or will they explore new promising roads of our own that are already there? The OAS is already dead. It has only forgotten to fall. They were given a grace period to pack and prepare their funeral. Our intelligent historians should not lose time and wait, but already start to draft the obituary. What will follow is what Garcia Marquez would call “Cronica de una muerte anunciada.” We should already have a mindset of a hemisphere without OAS.

  Finally a human being became president in the USA. Obama is really different and it is easy to connect with him, but his discourse in unable to deal with such an impossible history of US of consistent and sustained aggression and intervention. His proposal: “We have to forget the past, and look to the future”, sounds friendly. But it is not that simple. Should we abolish all judicial systems? What if the judge would buy the kind words of defendants who would love to say to the judge: “Your Honor, we should constructively look to the future and let us, for that reason, in a new positive spirit, forget about the past.”

  [Forthcoming, quote] “Nobody is accountable, because guilt is not hereditary. They criticize the crimes of their ancestors, just as their offspring will criticize their faults, but that business has been going on in the Caribbean now for five hundred years now.”

  This is what Chavez had to say today about the victory at the OAS.

  http://www.abn.info.ve/noticia.php?articulo=185288&lee=15

  A last word on Obama. As the current Emperor he is supposed to defend the interests of the Empire. Two historical options are open for Obama:
  1. He becomes a good emperor.
  2. Obama becomes the Gorbachev of the United States.

  Let us hope he makes the right choice.

  Care,

  Glenn

• John McAuliff on June 8th, 2009 at 4:31 pm

  When Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon addressed the OAS Assembly on Wednesday afternoon after it had adopted by acclamation its historic resolution to end Cuba’s suspension, he received the longest and warmest applause for a government representative’s comment, 30 seconds. That happened because his words were those of a statesman and a partner.

  However, subsequent expressions by US officials threaten to undo his breakthrough in US-Latin American relations.

  For the rest of this comment go to http://thehavananote.com/2009/06/_eduardo_verdugo_ap_san.html

• Atilio Boron on June 10th, 2009 at 10:14 am

  After a 47-year ban, the OAS sealed an agreement by acclamation yesterday to revoke a 1962 measure suspending Cuba from that body. The resolution was taken without conditions, although it lays down a procedure to be set in motion in the (unlikely) event that Havana decides to join the group. However, there are some facts to be taken into account here…

  For the rest of this comment go to http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2467.html