Sumber: Tricontinental
After twenty years, the United States government – and the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – will depart from Afghanistan. They said that they came to do two things: to destroy al-Qaeda, which had launched an attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, and to destroy the Taliban, which had given al-Qaeda a base. After great loss of life and the further destruction of Afghan society, the US departs – as it did from Vietnam in 1975 – in defeat: al-Qaeda has regrouped in different parts of the world, and the Taliban is set to return to the capital, Kabul.
Speaker parlimen Afghanistan, Mir Rahman Rahmani, memberi amaran bahawa negara itu bersedia untuk memasuki tempoh baru perang saudara, mengulangi perang saudara yang dahsyat yang berlangsung dari 1992 hingga 2001. Pertubuhan Bangsa-Bangsa Bersatu mengira that in the first quarter of 2021, civilian casualties rose by 29% compared to last year, while the number of women casualties increased by 37%. It is unclear if there will be further talks between the Taliban, the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, the Turks, the Qataris, the United States, and the United Nations. Afghanistan sits on the brink of further violence, whose impact can so aptly be described by the words of the poet Zarlasht Hafeez:
Kesedihan dan kesedihan, malam-malam hitam ini,
Mata yang penuh dengan air mata dan masa yang penuh dengan kesedihan,
Hati yang terbakar ini, pembunuhan para pemuda,
Harapan yang tidak kesampaian dan harapan pengantin yang tidak tercapai ini
‘Saving’ Afghan women, advancing the cause of human rights: these words have lost meaning after two decades. As Eduardo Galeano put it, ‘Every time the US “saves” a country, it converts it either into a madhouse or a cemetery’.
The US government calculates that this war, which would enter its twentieth year, is the longest US war in the modern period (the US engagement in Vietnam lasted for fourteen years, from 1961 to 1975). But this war in Afghanistan is not the longest war prosecuted by the United States government. There are two US wars that continue: a war against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK (since August 1950) and against Cuba (since September 1959). Neither of these conflicts have ended, with the US continuing to execute hybrid wars against both the DPRK and Cuba. A perang hibrid does not necessarily require the full arsenal of a military to come into force; it is a war fought through the control of information and financial flows as well as the use of economic sanctions and illicit means such as sabotage. There is no question that the longest and unfinished US wars have been against Korea and Cuba.
Sixty years ago, on 17 April 1961, the CIA’s Brigade 2506 landed at Cuba’s Playa Girón (‘Bay of Pigs’). The Cuban people resisted this invasion as they would six decades of hybrid war against their sovereign revolutionary processes. Cuba has never threatened the United States; it never has violated the UN Charter of 1945. The United States, on the other hand, has routinely threatened the Cuban people. In October 1962, when the Soviets sent a missile cover to protect Cuba, General Maxwell Taylor, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, dirancang for a full-scale invasion. In this now-declassified memorandum, Taylor pointed out that such a military venture might result in 18,500 casualties on the US side because of the determination of the Cubans to protect their land and their political project. The plot was to reinstate the old Cuban oligarchy that had sought refuge in Miami and turn Cuba back into a gangster’s paradise.
After the Cuban government sent troops to assist the national liberation project in Angola in November 1975, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger memberitahu his team on 24 March 1976, ‘if we decide to use military power, it must succeed. There should be no halfway measures – we would get no award for using military power in moderation. If we decide on a blockade, it must be ruthless, rapid, and efficient’. The US planned to mine Havana’s harbour and bomb Cuba’s cities. ‘I think we are going to have to smash Castro’, Kissinger memberitahu US President Gerald Ford. Ford replied, ‘I agree’. Such is the attitude of the US government, from 1961 to the present.
Before he left office in January 2021, US President Donald Trump diletakkan Cuba on the US government’s ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ list. Seventy-five US lawmakers Ditanya his successor, President Joe Biden, to reverse this decision. On 16 April, Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki memberitahu the briefing room that ‘A Cuba policy shift or additional steps is currently not among the President’s top foreign policy priorities’. Biden, in other words, has decided to passively continue Trump’s policy, dictated to him by the likes of Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott from Florida and Senator Ted Cruz from Texas (as well as Democratic Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey). Biden has opted to persist in this cruel six-decade long policy to suffocate the Cuban people.
Just after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the US government made it clear that it would not tolerate a sovereign Cuba only 145 kilometres from Florida’s coast. Cuba’s commitment to people over profit is a standing rebuke of the hypocrisies of the United States rulers. This has been clarified once more during this pandemic, during which the infection and death rates per million are strikingly higher in the US than in Cuba (recent figures menunjukkan the US has recorded 1,724 deaths per million, whereas Cuba stands at 47 deaths per million). While the US locked itself into vaccine nationalism, Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade of doctors continued with their work amongst the world’s poorest people (for this, of course, they berhak Hadiah Nobel untuk Keamanan).
Unable to successfully invade Cuba, the US has persisted with a tight blockade of the island. After the fall of the USSR, which had provided Cuba with ways to circumvent the blockade, the US attempted to tighten its grip on the island. US lawmakers then attacked Cuba’s economy through the Cuban Democracy Act (1992) and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (1996) – both laws with names that demean the words in them. From 1992 onwards, the UN General Assembly has mengundi amat menggalakkan bagi Amerika Syarikat untuk menamatkan sekatan ini. Sekumpulan Pelapor Khas Majlis Hak Asasi Manusia PBB menulis a kenyataan calling on the US to withdraw these measures, which have only made Cuba’s attempt to fight the pandemic harder.
Kerajaan Cuba dilaporkan that between April 2019 and March 2020, Cuba lost $5 billion in potential trade due to the blockade; over the past almost six decades, it has lost the equivalent of $144 billion. Now the US government has deepened the sanctions against shipping companies that bring oil to the island. The head of US Southern Command, Admiral Craig Faller, digambarkan Cuba’s medical internationalism as a ‘regional corrosive influence’. There is cruelty in Washington.
Far from the bitterness of the US government, the Cuban communists held their eighth Party Congress, where the perbincangan adalah tentang bagaimana untuk meningkatkan perusahaan negara dan bagaimana untuk berinovasi untuk memenuhi aspirasi rakyat Cuba. Timbalan Perdana Menteri Inés María Chapman berkata bahawa ahli parti mesti aktif dalam komuniti mereka untuk membina dan mempertahankan sosialisme. Rafael Santiesteban Pozo, presiden Persatuan Peladang Kecil Kebangsaan, berkata bahawa orang yang bekerja mesti menghasilkan lebih banyak dengan sumber yang ada. Menteri Ekonomi dan Perancangan Alejandro Gil menunjukkan keperluan untuk kecekapan yang lebih besar dalam sistem perusahaan negara, pengembangan pekerjaan sendiri, dan pengembangan koperasi.
These are serious people who recognise the problems but are not overwhelmed by them; they are part of a project that has fought to defend its sovereignty against enormous odds since 1959. Defeat is not in their vocabulary. Their agenda is hopeful, unlike the bilious agenda that comes from the US government and the Miami-based Cuban oligarchy.
Pada Kongres ini, Raúl Castro berundur dari jawatannya. Castro, salah seorang revolusioner asal Cuba, telah dipenjarakan kerana peranannya dalam pemberontakan Moncada pada tahun 1953. Selepas dibebaskan, dia pergi ke Mexico bersama abangnya Fidel dan kemudian kembali pada Granma to lead the rebellion against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. After the victory of the Revolution, Castro served in the government and as a leader in the Communist Party, guiding it alongside Fidel and others through the difficult Special Period (1991-2000) and then continuing to lead it after Fidel’s death in 2016. His quiet role in defending and elaborating the Cuban Revolution has been immense.
After the Playa Girón attack by the CIA, the Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma wrote a poem about Cuba called ‘During the Invasion’ (collected in Akhlak, 1966). Penyair Venezuela Diego Sequera menterjemah puisi ini untuk kami semasa kami merayakan 60 tahunth anniversary of the defeat of the US on those beaches:
Akhbar pagi dibuka
alas meja itu. Matahari bersinar dalam cermin mata.
Makan tengah hari di restoran kecil,
hari bekerja.Kebanyakan kita berdiam diri. Seseorang bercakap dengan suara yang sukar difahami;
ini adalah perbualan dengan kesedihan yang istimewa
tentang perkara yang selalu berlaku dan
yang tidak pernah berakhir, atau yang berakhir dengan kehinaan.Saya berpendapat bahawa pada waktu siang ini, matahari terbit di Ciénaga;
belum ada keputusan, pertempuran tidak berhenti,
dan saya melihat dalam berita untuk sedikit harapan
itu bukan datang dari Miami.Oh, Cuba di fajar jauh di kawasan tropika,
apabila matahari menggelegak, dan udara cerah:
semoga tanah anda menabur kereta kebal dan langit anda yang rosak
menjadi kelabu dari sayap kapal terbang.Bersama anda adalah orang tebu,
lelaki kereta, mereka dari restoran,
beribu-ribu kita yang hari ini mencari di dunia
untuk sedikit harapan yang tidak datang dari Miami.
Hope comes from the warm sun of Cuba.
ZNetwork dibiayai semata-mata melalui kemurahan hati pembacanya.
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