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During 7-13 December, three supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Group will be in Quito, Ecuador at the 18th World Festival of Youth and Students
As the capitalist crisis bites in Britain, spreading war, poverty, austerity and despair worldwide, To successfully resist the war on welfare and peoples abroad we must support the war for welfare and for people’s freedom taking place across Latin America.
We will be blogging from the festival, putting you in contact with activists from all over the globe, gaining an insight into the citizens’ revolution in Ecuador and the movement towards socialism across Latin America today.
Visit the blog at:
Please share widely. We will organise report-back meetings in January, details will be posted here soon.
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www.venezuelanalysis.com 30 October
Venezuela condemned the United States embargo against Cuba on Tuesday, as the United Nations General Assembly again called for an end to the 53 year-old trade restrictions.
The UN General Assembly (UNGA) voted for the 22ndconsecutive year to reject the US embargo, with 188 nations opposed the embargo and three abstentions. Only the US and Israel voted in favour of the continuation of the embargo, which has been in place since 1960. The UNGA resolution is non-binding.
“Such measures are in violation of the right to peace, development and security, while contravening the rules of the multilateral trading system,” Venezuela's permanent ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada, stated. Moncada also argued that the embargo is impeding the pursuit of the UN Millennium Development Goals.
Moncada called on the US to comply “with the resolutions that the General Assembly has overwhelmingly adopted since 1991, that lead to immediate and definitive lifting of this inhumane blockade implemented for more than fifty years”.
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Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 235 October/November 2013
Arnold August, Zed Books 2013, £16.99
In Cuba and its neighbours: democracy in motion, Canadian journalist Arnold August demolishes the bourgeois propaganda that socialist Cuba is somehow ‘undemocratic’ by examining the very idea of what we mean by democracy.
The first part of this comparative study, ‘Cobwebs around democracy’, is an analysis of the US system. August exposes the deceptive character of the US two-party system as a cover for what he describes as an ‘oligarchic’ state but we would call imperialist. Using Barack Obama as a case study, he shows how a cautious ‘benefit of the doubt’ attitude towards Obama by Latin America faded in the face of a military coup in Honduras, perpetrated with US backing. August points out that ‘a new face’ changed nothing in US relations with Cuba: ‘His role, based on the illusion created regarding the two-party system, was to change tactics because they had failed to reach the same goal of regime change.’
August argues that Obama recreates the chimera of the American Dream at home, while promoting war abroad. The two-party system ‘constitutes the lifeline of maintaining the status quo and averting a crisis in the US political system.’ August shows that this system excludes up to half the voting age population, including convicted felons – the majority black – and those without official papers, such as many Latino immigrants. Thus large numbers of the most oppressed sections in US society are disenfranchised.
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Article by Fernando Molina. Introduction and translation by Richard Fidler, Life on the Left
Bolivia’s achievements in recent years have inspired interest and solidarity among many on the left outside that country, and not just in Latin America. Conversely, the government of Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) has produced corresponding hostility from Washington and its allies. But some of the harshest criticism has also come from some left critics, including a few foreign academics and Bolivia-based NGO activists. Readers of their accounts might wonder how it is that the Morales government still gets the popular support it clearly does in Bolivia.
The following article by a leading Bolivian journalist sheds considerable light on the matter. He focuses on the domestic scene — more particularly, the government’s economic and social reforms — and astutely explains both the accomplishments of the administration and the reasons for discontent on both the left and the right within the country.
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Cuba and Venezuela maintain their anti-imperialist principles, condemning Britain and the US's war drive in the Middle East and their latest threats to bomb Syria. Quotes taken from www.dailystar.com and www.venezuelanalysis.com
Cuba warned on Wednesday 28 August that an attack on Syria would have serious consequences for an already unstable Middle East and be in 'flagrant violation' of the United Nations charter.
In a statement, the Cuban foreign ministry condemned the use of chemical weapons but called for a political solution to the crisis in Syria.
'An aggression against Syria would provoke very serious consequences in the already convulsed Middle East, would constitute a flagrant violation of the principles of the U.N. charter and international law, and increase the dangers to peace and international security,' it said.
'It needs to be remembered that those advocating the most for military action against Syria are the same ones who launched bloody wars without a U.N. Security Council mandate, under cover of the deliberate lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction or under the pretext of protecting civilians,'
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CUBA STANDARD — In a move that considerably broadens Cuban health service exports and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, the Brazilian health ministry and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) agreed Aug. 21 to contract 4,000 Cuban doctors as a backbone for a fast-expanding medical program in needy regions of Brazil.
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Opening the door for Cuba’s pharmaceutical and medical industry to a common market of 70 million people with a GDP of $636 billion, the members of the ALBA bloc officially announced the launch of ALBAmed, a multinational body that includes a regulatory institution and a central registry for pharmaceutical and medical products.
ALBAmed is expected to trigger concerted regional planning for pharmaceutical production and save participating governments — Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua — between 20 and 50 percent in medical purchases, an Ecuadorian foreign ministry official told Spanish news agency efe.
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8 August Presna Latina
Hundreds of new doctors graduated in Cuba will return to Bolivia starting this weekend to start offering medical attention in their country's rural areas.
Bolivian director of health services, Ruben Colque said that 780 new physicians, who graduated at the Havana-based Latin American School of Medicine are returning home to first offer an initial land compulsory service in rural areas before they get to their final places of work. The preliminary stage, known as social service, will be coordinated with regional health offices in different departments, Colque said.
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Juventud Rebelde
More than three million patients have recovered vision thanks to the Operation Milagro. The second phase will expand the attention to the African peoples without decreasing the number of operations on patients from Latin America and countries of ALBA
