After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came last August.
A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.
What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden on Sunday and concluded one of history’s most extensive and frustrating manhunts.
American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him.
For nearly a decade, American military and intelligence forces had chased the specter of Bin Laden through Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.
Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated.
Still, it was not until August when they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium-sized city about an hour’s drive north of Islamabad, the capital.
C.I.A. analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound, and a senior administration official said that by September the C.I.A. had determined there was a “strong possibility” that Bin Laden himself was hiding there.
It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains where many had envisioned Bin Laden to be hiding. Rather, it was a mansion on the outskirts of the town’s center, set on an imposing hilltop and ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire.
The property was valued at $1 million, but it had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. Its residents were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather putting it on the street for collection like their neighbors.
American officials believed that the compound, built in 2005, was designed for the specific purpose of hiding Bin Laden.
Months more of intelligence work would follow before American spies felt highly confident that it was indeed Bin Laden and his family who were hiding in there — and before President Obama determined that the intelligence was solid enough to begin planning a mission to go after the Qaeda leader.
On March 14, Mr. Obama held the first of what would be five national security meetings in the course of the next six weeks to go over plans for the operation.
The meetings, attended by only the president’s closest national security aides, took place as other White House officials scrambled to avert a possible government shutdown over the budget.
Four more similar meetings to discuss the plan would follow, until President Obama gathered his aides one final time last Friday.
At 8:20 that morning, Mr. Obama met with Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser; John O. Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser; and other senior aides in the Diplomatic Room at the White House. The president was traveling to Alabama later that morning to witness the damage from last week’s tornadoes. But first he had to sign off on the final plan to send intelligence operatives into the compound where the administration believed that Bin Laden was hiding.
Even after the president signed the formal orders authorizing the raid, Mr. Obama chose to keep Pakistan’s government in the dark about the operation.
“We shared our intelligence on this compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” a senior administration official said.
It is no surprise that the administration chose not to tell Pakistani officials. Even though the Pakistanis had insisted that Bin Laden was not in their country, the United States never really believed it. American diplomatic cables in recent years show constant American pressure on Pakistan to help find and kill Bin Laden.
Asked about the Qaeda leader’s whereabouts during a Congressional visit to Islamabad in September 2009, the Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, replied that he “’had no clue,” but added that he did not believe that Bin Laden was in the area. Bin Laden had sent his family to Iran, so it made sense that he might have gone there himself, Mr. Malik argued. Alternatively, he might be hiding in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, or perhaps he was already dead, he added, according to a cable from the American Embassy that is among the collection obtained by WikiLeaks.
The mutual suspicions have grown worse in recent months, particularly after Raymond Davis, a C.I.A. officer, shot two men on a crowded street in Lahore in January.
On Sunday, the small team of American military and intelligence operatives poured out of helicopters for their attack on the heavily fortified compound.
American officials gave few details about the raid itself, other than to say that a firefight broke out shortly after the commandos arrived and that Bin Laden had tried to “resist the assault force.”
When the shooting had stopped, Bin Laden and three other men lay dead. One woman, whom an American official said had been used as a human shield by one of the Qaeda operatives, was also killed.
The Americans collected Bin Laden’s body and loaded it onto one of the remaining helicopters, and the assault force hastily left the scene.
Obama administration officials said that one of helicopters went down during the mission because of mechanical failure but that no Americans were injured.
It was 3:50 on Sunday afternoon when President Obama received the news that Bin Laden had tentatively been identified, most likely after a series of DNA tests.
The Qaeda leader’s body was flown to Afghanistan, the country where he made his fame fighting and killing Soviet troops during the 1980s.
From there, American officials said, the body was buried at sea.
Tag Archive for 'Cuba'
Yet more evidence that Washington is a law unto itself:
The Bush administration was so intent on keeping Guantanamo detainees off U.S. soil and away from U.S. courts that it secretly tried to negotiate deals with Latin American countries to provide “life-saving” medical procedures rather than fly ill terrorist suspects to the U.S. for treatment, a recently released State Department cable shows.
The U.S. offered to transport, guard and pay for medical procedures for any captive the Pentagon couldn’t treat at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba, according to the cable, which was made public by the WikiLeaks website. One by one, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Mexico declined.
The secret effort is spelled out in a Sept. 17, 2007, cable from then assistant secretary of state Thomas Shannon to the U.S. embassies in those four countries. Shannon is now the U.S. ambassador in Brazil.
At the time, the Defense Department was holding about 330 captives at Guantanamo, not quite twice the number that are there today. They included alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two other men whom the CIA waterboarded at its secret prison sites.
The cable, which was posted on the WikiLeaks website March 14, draws back the curtain on contingency planning at Guantanamo, but also contradicts something the prison camp’s hospital staff has been telling visitors for years — that the U.S. can dispatch any specialist necessary to make sure the captives in Cuba get first-class treatment.
“Detainees receive state-of-the-art medical care at Guantanamo for routine, and many non-routine, medical problems. There are, however, limits to the care that DOD can provide at Guantanamo,” Shannon said in the cable, referring to the Department of Defense.
The cable didn’t give examples of those limits. But it sought partner countries to commit to a “standby arrangement” to provide “life-saving procedures” on a “humanitarian basis.”
It’s unclear what prompted the effort. The cable said then Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte had approved making the request at the behest of then Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who at the time oversaw Guantanamo operations.
Negroponte said Wednesday that he had “no recollection” of the request but that it would have been unrealistic to expect the Latin American nations to agree to it, “because anything to do with Guantanamo was always so politically controversial for any of these countries.” England didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Don’t you get the feeling that we’ll be reading these kinds of stories for years as it becomes clear Washington treated terror suspects little better than stray dogs?
The Defense Department has claimed it took the unprecedented step of forcing all “war on terror” detainees sent to Guantanamo in 2002 to take a high dosage of a controversial anti-malarial drug known to have severe side effects because the government was concerned the disease could be reintroduced into Cuba by detainees arriving from malaria-endemic countries Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But hundreds of contractors who were hired by Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services firm formerly headed by Dick Cheney, from malaria-endemic countries such as the Philippines and India and tasked with building Guantanamo’s Camp Delta facility in early 2002 did not receive the same type of medical treatment, calling into question the government’s rationale of mass presumptive treatment of detainees with the drug mefloquine, a Truthout investigation has found.
These were the good old days; 2005:
As it struggles to combat Islamic terrorist networks, the Bush administration has quietly built an intelligence alliance with Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, a onetime bitter enemy the U.S. had tried for years to isolate, topple or kill.
Kadafi has helped the U.S. pursue Al Qaeda’s network in North Africa by turning radicals over to neighboring pro-Western governments. He also has provided information to the CIA on Libyan nationals with alleged ties to international terrorists.
In turn, the U.S. has handed over to Tripoli some anti-Kadafi Libyans captured in its campaign against terrorism. And Kadafi’s agents have been allowed into the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba to interrogate Libyans being held there.
These stories, via Wikileaks, if true are rather curious for a few key players. Western states are proven once again to largely ignore human rights (money is the key factor). And Michael Moore, for a film that certainly glorified the Cuban health system, is looking a little sheepish.
One:
Australia, Canada and several European countries have stopped pressuring Cuba over human rights in the hope of winning commercial favours from Havana, according to confidential US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
The western governments continued to pay lip service to concerns about political prisoners and censorship, but in reality were appeasing the island’s communist rulers, said Jonathan Farrar, the US head of mission.
The diplomat made scathing remarks about his colleagues shunning democracy activists, “kowtowing” to the Castro regime and joining what he scornfully termed the “best friends forever” camp.
“The Cuban government has been able to stonewall its independent civil society from foreign visitors who have, for the large part, been all too ready to give in to Cuban bullying and give up on these encounters,” Farrar said.
He named and shamed the countries Washington considers offenders in its battle, started half a century ago by JFK, to keep an international squeeze on the island.
“The Australian foreign minister, Switzerland‘s human rights special envoy and the Canadian cabinet level minister of the Americas not only failed to meet with non-government Cubans, they didn’t even bother to publicly call for more freedoms after visiting Cuba in November,” Farrar wrote.
Two:
Cuba banned Michael Moore‘s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.
The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.
But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.
Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”
Sicko investigated healthcare in the US by comparing the for-profit, non-universal US system with the non-profit universal health care systems of other countries, including Cuba, France and the UK.
UPDATE: Actually, writes Mike Moore, Sicko was never banned in Cuba and this proves how unreliable US diplomats can be.
“This isn’t about ideology. It’s about oil spills,” said Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors, a trade group that is trying to broaden bilateral contacts to promote drilling safety. “Political attitudes have to change in order to protect the gulf.”
Yes, muscling in on potentially massive reserves of oil near the Cuban coast has nothing to do with greed.
Credit where it’s due. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg may have spread propaganda about Saddam, Iran and Israel, but he can write and his latest dispatch about meeting Fidel Castro (here’s the first) is fascinating:
There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro’s level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats (I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats) but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis (you can read about what he said toward the end of my previous post - but he said, in so many words, that he regrets asking Khruschev to nuke the U.S.).
Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. We were seated around a smallish table; Castro, his wife, Dalia, his son; Antonio; Randy Alonso, a major figure in the government-run media; and Julia Sweig, the friend I brought with me to make sure, among other things, that I didn’t say anything too stupid (Julia is a leading Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations). I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat – it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.
“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said.
This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, “Never mind”?
I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”
Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg – a man fond of war, Israel and conflict with Iran – is invited to Havana to meet and converse with Fidel Castro.
There is much to digest but this is especially interesting:
He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. “This went on for maybe two thousand years,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.” The Iranian government should understand that the Jews “were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation.” He continued: “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. “I am saying this so you can communicate it,” he answered.
Fidel Castro during his first TV appearance in many years:
US foreign policy is better described as the policy of total impunity.
This is what liberal Zionism has come to. Asking, almost begging, for understanding about Israel but nothing like demands for one person, one vote. Palestinians should be given equal rights in Israel? Perish the thought. Here’s American Jewish writer JJ Goldberg in New York a few days ago:
I’m beginning to feel like Amos Kenan…[who in 1969 wrote] a Letter to all good people, in which he said I have been rejected by the left that I belonged to all my life. I love Cuba, I believe in Fidel Castro, but I am not allowed to love Cuba because I’m an Israeli and a Zionist. I’m frozen out of the left because I believe in supporting my own people.
And I will begin to feel like that. No I won’t support dismantling the Israeli state. Again, your goal is to have Israel stop being a Jewish state. Israel aspired, originally aspired, to be as Jewish as France is French. That is, it should have a culture that reflects its majority–aspirationally the majority will remain Jewish–[and] that all citizens should be full citizens. And again it has not lived up to that. It’s gone better and it’s gone worse. But the goal is not to deprivilege the people who aren’t Jewish but to make a state that adheres by what we regard as traditional Jewish values in which all citizens are equal.
If it doesn’t go there, then I will be very very sad, and I will feel my life’s work essentially to have been a failure. But I don’t think it will get that far. Because if Israel launches another operation and kills 5,000 or 10,000 people, the pressure in the world community will be so great that it will be forced, it will be forced to sit down and negotiate to withdraw to the 67 borders. That’s what the world wants, the European union wants, the Arab League wants.
I recently debated in Sydney on the motion that governments shouldn’t censor the internet. ABC TV broadcast the discussion and our team included a robust explanation on the principles of free speech.
An edited version of the debate was broadcast tonight on ABC Radio National Big Ideas:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
My following article is published today by the Sydney Morning Herald/Age online:
We live under the illusion that governments can protect us from the evils of the world.
Paedophilia, extreme violence, lessons in self-harm and suicide, race hatred and terrorism. We have every right to expect governments to monitor hate and terror sites and arrest and prosecute those who aim to do harm to others.
But censoring the internet will have no effect on insulating us from these horrors. It’s false security, comforting election-cycle rhetoric to convince fearful parents and scared teachers.
And that’s just in the West.
Having spent time in numerous repressive states, such as Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China, there is no indication that these nations are any better at protecting their citizens from the darkest recesses of the internet or the mind. Millions of users find ways around filtering services provided by Western multinationals.
Besides, tell me how trying to ban YouTube videos of men kissing or women driving – both illegal acts in brutal, US-backed Saudi Arabia – proves anything other than officials will filter material that suits their political agenda? Who here trusts our government, of any stripe, to transparently only block content that is harmful to children?
Already in Europe there are debates about banning websites that allegedly endorse terrorism. But who decides? Resistance movements that oppose American and Australian actions in Iraq and Afghanistan? Elected Palestinian parties such as Hamas backed by millions of Arabs? The powerful Lebanese group Hezbollah, regarded as a terrorist organisation in many Western capitals, but lionised across the Muslim world?
We are not far from the day in this country when shrieking voices will advocate the filtering of political content that offends certain sensibilities, ethnic groups, racial minorities or political parties. This does not mean it’s good public policy designed to improve social harmony. Censorship is always about a form of control. No society has complete freedom of speech but we should be very mindful of any governments that tell us filtering will be painless and cost-free.
Although tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and mobile phones are invaluable in connecting dissidents, activists and protesters, as we saw in Iran last year during the post-election uprising, authorities can equally use the same technology to monitor and find perceived enemies. This is censorship on heat, killing any chance of web utopia.
Democracy doesn’t arrive through the net; it comes through people power. Government censorship merely reinforces the fear of change and shows citizens how afraid dictatorships are of true democracy and public engagement. If anything, it can harm democratic aspirations of the oppressed by giving unprecedented insight into people’s private lives and movements.
Social ills are not reversed. For example, in Iran heroin addiction is soaring due to its easy accessibility from a chaotic neighbouring Afghanistan. Blocking websites that either celebrate its use or provide information how to find the drug of choice has had no effect on the problem.
The internet is unlike any other medium. Books, films and art can be relatively easily banned, mass distribution stopped with the flick of a pen. Websites can move, evolve and re-emerge days, weeks or months later.
Respecting the intelligence of a parent to monitor a child’s activities is seemingly beyond the capability of many Western states, including Norway, Finland, the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand, nations that have all blocked sites said to contain child pornography but impacts on limiting access to the obscene content has been minimal.
We don’t oppose schools, teachers and parents implementing methods to help protect children from harmful online content but the Rudd government appears incapable of understanding that imposing a draconian system only brings suspicion and resistance. In a modest sign of self-policing, Facebook UK recently announced increased online safety, including a 24-hour police hotline and education campaign to manage cyber-bullying and stalking.
Let’s look at some classic overseas examples. The implementation of internet censorship in Iran is comical. Type the name of former American vice-president Dick Cheney into a search engine and you’ll be blocked from going any further. “Dick” is a supposedly sexual word for repressed Iranian officials. But Richard Cheney is fine. Also “teen”, “oral”, “cock”, “Asian” and thousands of others are banned. Even singer Bruce Springsteen was inaccessible during my visit in 2007 because it contained the word “teen”. The word “woman” was sometimes filtered. “Queer” and “wanker” are OK words but many gay and trans-gender sites are blocked. Unsurprisingly, enterprising individuals are designing software to bypass these rules.
The Islamic Republic is an extreme case – aided and abetted in their censorship by companies such as Nokia and Siemens who sold a monitoring centre to Tehran in 2008 – but growing numbers of countries see Iran and China as the model of “stability”. Market freedom but political repression.
Perhaps it’s time to admit in the West that we don’t know what we’re doing. While internet use is booming across the world – in the past year alone, more than 21 million Indonesians from fewer than a million 12 months before now use Facebook, making it the world’s third largest Facebook community – many non-democratic nations are using similar arguments to Western states in monitoring the web. In late April, the United Arab Emirates announced that the interior ministry would check the identity of anyone using the internet in public places to fight cyber-crime and child pornography. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy surely gave the UAE his talking points.
The web is as powerful as its users and as influential as we all want it to be. It’s not infallible or perfect and any democracy should care what content is available. But for governments to be trusted to censor content, with the churches riding bareback alongside their ideological colleagues, should worry us all.
This is an edited version of a speech given as part of the affirmative panel at Tuesday night’s iQ2 debate on the proposition that governments should not censor the internet. Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.
The US embargo remains insane and counter-productive but aging dictators are equally killing their country:
Parque Trillo used to be a lively pocket of Havana. A small open space bounded by four streets, it was where Cubans came to gossip, shop, play baseball and dance.
On the surface little has changed. Pensioners chat on benches, housewives trawl the food market, teenage boys take turns swinging a bat, and the Palacio de la Rumba nightclub throbs after dusk.
Things are gritty – buildings are dilapidated, grass is strewn with rubbish and the park’s blue pillars are discoloured and peeling – but that is hardly new. Jaime Valdés, however, has noticed one big change. “It’s a lot quieter these days. Young people are disappearing. The ones in their 20s and 30s, they’ve left.”
From his bench the retired chemist pointed to San Rafael street. “Fifteen from there, gone.” He pointed to San Miguel street. “There, another nine or 10, gone.” From Aramburu street, another eight, and from Hospital street, about a dozen, said Valdés. “It’s an exodus.”
Neighbourhoods across Havana report the same phenomenon. Young people, especially well-educated professionals, are fleeing the island. Tens of thousands have emigrated in the past two years. The exodus has alarmed the communist government but remains largely unreported, a taboo topic for state media.
“It’s a sign that the revolution has failed, so they don’t want to talk about it. We are losing our future,” said Ricardo Martinelli, a university professor who has seen many of his students and his only child, a 23-year-old technician, emigrate in recent months.
What’s the problem with this story (via The Cable)?
The U.S. government-sponsored television and radio stations aimed at bringing objective news into communist Cuba aren’t doing the job and need new leadership and direction, according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In a new report by the committee’s majority staff, led by John Kerry, D-MA, lawmakers are calling out Radio Marti and TV Marti, both of which are funded by Congress, for a lack of quality programming and for failing to uphold the standards of a free and fair journalistic enterprise.
The aim is to bring “objective news” into Cuba? Please. It’s to replace one form of propaganda (pro-Castro rants) with pro-Washington diatribes.
I was interviewed this weekend on Radio New Zealand National Saturday Morning with Kim Hill on issues of Israel, Zionism, Jewish identity, blogging and internet censorship. It was a long interview (over 40 minutes) and offered a rare opportunity to explore key areas of Zionist responsibility for occupation in Palestine and why blogging and journalism can be a good mix:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I was interviewed recently by Michael Hershman of Radio Free Europe about the civil situation in Cuba. My main message is that democracy in some form may well come to Cuba one day but at the moment both the insane US embargo and authoritarian Havana regime makes this very unlikely:
Civil society in Cuba, long-embattled, appears to be gaining new momentum following the death of a political prisoner and fresh support from the Catholic Church.
Recent events have focused attention on Cuba’s imprisoned opposition activists. On February 23, jailed activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a hunger strike lasting more than 80 days. Classified as a political prisoner by Amnesty International after his arrest in 2003, Tamayo had launched his fast to protest prison beatings and other abuses.
The day after his death, another jailed dissident, Guillermo Farinas, began his own hunger strike.
Farinas’s health has since deteriorated, and he has been kept alive through periodic intravenous feedings. Should Farinas die, another activist has already announced he will take up the hunger strike.
Cuba’s Cardinal Jaime Ortega has appealed to Farinas to end his hunger strike.
But earlier this week, the Catholic prelate, in an outspoken interview with a local Catholic newsletter, said Cuba was facing its deepest crisis in years. He urged the communist authorities to free all political prisoners and said there was a national consensus that the government must change — and change “quickly.”
Difficulties Facing Government, Opposition
The Caribbean island state is facing its deepest economic slowdown since the Soviet Union collapsed. Three hurricanes, the global financial crisis, and the continuing trade embargo by the United States have piled further pressure on the authorities.
The Ladies in White take part in a protest march in Havana on March 18.The wives and mothers of Cuban political prisoners have redoubled protests of their own, hoping to keep the focus on their jailed relatives. This group, called the “Ladies in White” because of their white dress, has been harassed by the authorities.
After years of peaceful Sunday demonstrations, the group was informed two weeks ago that it will need official permission for future protests.
“Not only the hunger strike but the gatherings of the women [Ladies in White], I believe, will have a very powerful political impact,” says Jose Botafogo Goncalves, a longtime Brazilian diplomat and former minister.
“And with international communications today making censorship difficult, news [of what is happening in Cuba] will disseminate through the world media. I believe this will accelerate political transformation in Cuba.”
According to Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a scholar at the California-based Independent Institute and the son of one of Latin America’s leading intellectuals, the Cuban authorities are feeling increasingly under threat at home.
Vargas Llosa says that the effect of recent events have been “so powerful that you’ve seen for the very first time in half a century Castro — in this case Raul Castro — publicly speaking against a domestic opposition. Until now they had even refused to recognize that there was such a thing as a domestic opposition.”
Whatever its international reach, Cuba’s opposition still struggles with its own internal communications.
Due to government policy, less than 5 percent of Cubans are online — one of the lowest rates in Latin America. Journalist Antony Loewenstein says Cuban dissidents have relied on photocopiers more than the Internet to spread their message.
“Their main form of getting information out was through using a photocopier,” Loewenstein says. “Now in many other countries these days you may as well put up flyers around the city, but again most people communicate or get information out — like in Iran, say — by the web, via blogs, via Facebook, via Twitter, whatever it may be. But in Cuba that is simply not the case.”
Not In Vain
Despite these difficulties, Cuba’s opposition seems to have gained new resolve.
Veteran National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten, who has covered Cuban events as well as dissident movements in the former communist world, says he does not expect change to happen quickly.
“Unfortunately I think that the dissident movement in Cuba, unlike the dissident movement in the former Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe, is very weak. People largely are unfamiliar with the dissidents, they don’t have much of a following in Cuba,” Gjelten says.
“I think there is a tremendous amount of alienation and cynicism in Cuba, but I think when the end of that regime comes it’s likely going to come more from people within the regime itself.”
Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, is more optimistic, saying that “the dynamics that destroyed other communist regimes in the last three decades have clearly not been in play with the same force inside Cuba.”
“But for the first time you begin to see something that wasn’t there before which is a certain level of organization, a certain level of resistance, and the willingness to take the sacrifice all the way to actually a life and death situation,” Vargas Llosa adds.
Vargas Llosa says the Cuban hunger strike, at the very least, could redefine the current concept of martyrdom. He says young people today tend to associate the concept of martyrdom with terrorism.
“So the notion that [in] this tiny corner of the world in the Western Hemisphere called Cuba, suddenly a group of people [are] willing to sacrifice their lives,” he says, “not in order to cause harm to anybody else and not for a cause that is delegitimized but is actually quite legitimate — which is the cause of freedom in a country that has been under oppression for 50 years — is really quite remarkable.”
The LA Times notes a small change in Cuba (but in reality, the island will stay remarkably similar until either the Castro brothers die or reform or the Obama administration removes the insane and counter-productive embargo):
So, a Cuban walks into his neighborhood barbershop for a trim and a shave on a Havana afternoon. In all likelihood, haircutter and customer argue about baseball. Maybe they discuss CompaneroCompanero Fidel’s latest column in Granma. When they finish, the newly coiffed client pays for the services in Cuban pesos; about 15% goes to the state for taxes, and the owner legally pockets the rest.
Private profits in communist Cuba? This is no joke. It’s Havana’s latest, limited experiment with the free market. The government is divesting itself of hundreds of state-run barbershops and beauty shops with three workstations or less, turning people who have been wage-earners for decades into small-time entrepreneurs who will pay the state 15% of average revenues in the area for the right to operate. Like some Cuban growers who are allowed to rent stalls from the government in farmers markets, and some cooks who run modest restaurants out of their homes, these hairstylists and manicurists will be entering the world of free-market competition. They will be allowed to set their own prices and presumably will succeed or fail on the quality of their cuts and mani-pedi services. Now, imagine that.
Since the 1959 revolution, Cuba has privatized most of its economy, with about 90% of legal activity now concentrated in government hands. President Raul Castro appears committed to the basic model, at least as long as his big brother is alive. But the latest shift is driven by necessity. In addition to the U.S. trade embargo, Cuba is suffering the same hardships as most other countries in the global recession. Tourism, nickel exports and remittances from the U.S., all of which are key sources of foreign currency, have fallen off. Cuba’s elderly are living longer and the young need jobs. Castro recently declared that the government has a million employees too many on its payroll.
The cautious measures appear designed to relieve some of the pressure on the state without risking political challenge or creating significant private wealth. Furthermore, they are meant to limit opportunities for corruption, to encourage people to work harder and to draw some cash from the illegal, underground economy into government coffers; officials also have approved new licenses for private taxis while cracking down on unauthorized so-called gypsy cabs.
The changes are less ambitious than we’d wish and aren’t irreversible. The government legalized self-employment in several retail services in 1993, then strictly limited the number of licenses available. But for Cubans, who deserve a better standard of living, these are positive steps — profit-making jobs and free-market pedicures.
Fox News interviews reporter Judith Miller recently on the Anat Kamm case. Host Shep Smith seems outraged that supposed democratic Israel would censor information and put an individual under house arrest. “This is very Fidel Castro”, he says. He tells viewers that when anybody says anything even mildly critical of Israel they are accused of anti-Semtism. Miller quickly says that she’s not “anti-Israel” for writing about the case:
A report in the Israeli press says that Israel is looking to push United States to apply the ‘Cuban model’ to Iran.
On the ground reports from Iran are hard to obtain these days. Western journalists are largely writing stories about the political chaos in the country.
So I’m publishing this exclusive report from a friend currently in Tehran. He’s an Australian traveling around the country. Names and identifiable places have been removed to protect all concerned:
Been a bit out of touch with the world the last couple of weeks while here in Iran. I don’t have satellite TV where I’m staying (although most of *** relatives do have it) and internet access isn’t always easily accessible especially given the proxies are so unreliable. Did you know the government has satellite jamming equipment from Panasonic? That’s what I heard from *** cousin anyway. I don’t know how he knows. I’ll have to look into that one.
Anyway, it’s been an amazing experience so far. I was in Tehran for one week, took a short trip to Mashad and Esfahan, and now I’m back in Tehran staying at *** grandmothers house. Iranian hospitality is awesome. *** family have been so kind and generous towards me. I literally haven’t spent a cent while here! They don’t let me pay for anything. In fact, I think I’ve made money with all the gifts of gold I’ve received! There is a feast everyday. I usually have two dinners. Unbelievable.
This house is never quite. There is always someone stopping by – auntys, uncles, cousins, friends – with whom I’ve been having incredibly interesting and varied conversations with about life here. *** seems to have the whole political spectrum of opinion covered within her family! Ahmadinejad supporters, Mousavi supporters, critics of the whole Islamic regime, religious, secular, low-middle class, highly educated upper class, old and conservative, young and party going… everything! One of her cousins is even in the basijis! (well kind of anyway).
Actually, that’s an interesting story. This cousin of *** is in her early 20s and is no supporter of the regime, but she’s part of this sports club which is owned by the basijis and in order to participate and compete you’re forced to sign up with them. If at anytime you don’t comply with their orders you lose your membership. During the pro-government demonstrations a couple of weeks ago, she got a call ordering her to attend the protest. She managed to wiggle her way out of it, but most of her friends went and they told her they were all given batons and pepper spray to “protect” them from reformists who might attack them. Of course, they never collected the weapons from them after the demonstration. So all her girlfriends went home with batons and pepper spray for souvenirs!
The whole demonstration was a farce of course. Schools were closed down and universities had their fire alarms ring just as the procession was passing by so they were forced to spill out onto the street. Those who had government jobs were given the day off if they attended. There was free food and drink and many other incentives to attend. These are just a few of the ways the government conjured up the impression of a great and popular pro-government protest. Some people here did buy it hook line and sinker like one of *** uncle’s I was talking to. But many others saw it for what it was.
There are little untold expressions of dissent that happen all the time and go unreported. Just last week *** cousin was at one of the azad (private) universities where the students got wind of a planned pro-government demonstration that was to take place on the university grounds by the basij. They quickly organised a counter demonstration, cunningly got the police to block off the street by telling them they wanted to have a pro-government demonstration of their own, and chanted very religious slogans. When the 50-60 basij members arrived, they couldn’t do anything. In other words they stole their thunder.
One of *** Uncles and his wife are very well respected university professors at Amir Kabir University (you might have seen the you tube video of the students ripping the gate down there?). *** uncle said that many of his students were arrested and the rest refused to sit their exams as a sign of protest. His wife said a little while ago that she along with many other professors were asked to sign a letter of support for the government. She was called for 12 days straight from some department very high up in the government pestering her to sign. She managed to wiggle her way out of it with a bit of luck, but every time you refuse requests such as these you get a cross next to your name. Next time you apply for a new government job or promotion, you’ve got no chance. Even one of *** cousins who just finished her teaching degree can’t get a job because she failed to convince her employers in the interview that she was “religious” enough. Religiosity of course has nothing to do with it. *** aunty I was just speaking of is VERY religious. She wears a complete black chador by choice. It’s political attitudes they screen for.
Luckily I haven’t had any intense encounters with the authorities yet. I kind of blend in here. We saw three basij last night at a pizza restaurant where young people hang out – they were just watching us. Apparently, the night before, *** friend was pulled over by the basij and his car completely stripped and searched. He wasn’t doing anything wrong – it was just pure intimidation. The other week we were at the park for a picnic and a police car rocked up because they saw one of *** cousins dancing. It’s moharam now and the whole county is supposed to be in mourning (which really sucks for me coz there’s no X-party’s happening and I’m dying to check one out!). Somehow they overheard we were from overseas and they asked what religion we were. Luckily *** dad spoke to them and reassured them we were all faithful and law abiding muslims. It’s such a stifling environment. Kind of like Cuba in that you can always feel the government watching you.
***
Just an update…. I spoke to *** cousin last night about the satellite jamming. He said he had a friend who used to work as some kind of engineer; designing geo-stationary satellites for the government’s communications department (his exact occupation got lost in translation). Anyway, he had told him that the government had bought jamming equipment from Panasonic (Japan) about 4-5 years ago. Had you heard of this before? Apparently it’s not public knowledge.
Coincidentally, *** cousin actually owns a small internet company here selling high speed internet to businesses. He is also studying and he has a project coming up about how the internet is filtered in Iran! Anyway, one other interesting point – he hasn’t sent an sms in 6 months as a sign of protest to the government who keeps disconnecting the service whenever it suits them. He said many of his friends are doing the same.