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 News from Around the Americas | February 2006 
Mexicans Bash US at Havana Office
 Mike Fuller - Prensa Latina
| | Cuba's longserving president Fidel Castro won't be able to excuse himself from physical exercise after he was given a bike by Belgian cycling Eddy Merckx. (AFP/BELGA) |
Havana - Right under the nose of their object, five outstanding Mexican academics put forth in front of the US Interests Section in Havana a solid platform of reasons to defend Cuba and their own dignity against US meddling.
Well-ordered throngs of Cuban and foreign participants carefully filed into the space between the US Interests Section in Havana (USINT) and the Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Tribune to listen to Gilberto Lopez Ribas, Gustavo Iruegas, Carlos Fazio, Martin Hernandez and Miguel Alvarez.
At the event titled "Intellectuals for Sovereignty and against the Empire," these academics challenged extra-territorialism from a stage next to a space recently appropriated by Cuba from a parking lot of the Interests Section of the United States.
A week before the beautiful area was designed, that US-directed office had installed a meter high billboard on one of its upper floors, providing the city with promises not to take Cuban homes in case of an intervention or Martin Luther King quotes taken out of context.
The Cuban answer was poetic, an in-your-face lightning response in the form of a sculpture of billowing black flags to commemorate victims of US terrorism. The wind blasts the banners into a wall of counter-discourse that effectively hushes the pathetic claims from the North.
Now called Dignity Plaza, what was previously a highly guarded parking area and diplomatic grey area has become a nodal point of intellectual debate with frequent events.
The US messages still glow across the nighttime sky, proclaiming fantasies like the possibility of Hugo Chavez not winning the next Venezuela election.
The five Mexicans sat on the stage with the audience between them and a banner dedicated to five other Cuban intellectuals who have given the last seven years of their lives for ideals and may be about to be freed.
Lopez Ribas and Irruegas are members of the Benito Juarez Tribunal, a group "tasked with judging, from an ethical and judicial standpoint, the activities of the United States of America in the international arena."
They and their three compatriots criticized the recent Sheraton hotel incident, linking it to a permanent history of interventionism that includes what Irruegas called "a systematic attitude of the US applying its laws on other countries."
These five were all miffed about the recent ouster of a group of Cuban businesspeople from a Sheraton hotel in Mexico, which included confiscation of their deposit. But they were not without resources and discussed reactivation of "antidote laws" to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future.
The glowing red letters on the USINT quietly rolled past the fifth floor of that building, offering links to blogs supporting the Cuban "journalists" who were imprisoned here after being proven to have accepted money from the USINT to write destabilizing material against the island, a constitutional offense.
Quite a different situation from the Cuban Five, who were working against terrorism to save lives and not against the US.
The Mexicans said the US attitude is worse than ever, and the border wall under construction is tantamount to humiliation.
Carlos Fascio said the US won't really block out Mexicans because it needs their cheap labor, and compared the situation to the apartheid between Israel and Palestine.
Throughout the pleasant evening, the US billboard continued to pump out important information for Cubans, like a website whose main advertisers are the National Security and Central Intelligence Agencies, an "essential job board for Hispanic and bilingual professionals."
Martin Hernandez, a warmhearted member of a solidarity group based on teachings of murdered Salvadorean Archbishop Arnulfo Romero said he brought Christian greetings against the "bullets of the Empire." He said "to defend Cuban dignity is to defend Mexican dignity," and that for the USINT to misappropriate quotes from Martin Luther King is like the Roman emperor quoting the bible while slaying Christians.
He pointed out that Cuba and Mexico share the condition of foreign remittances playing a large part in the national economy, and made an appeal for "the poor of the earth."
Miguel Alvarez, from an NGO linked to Chiapas, spoke of a new sense of resistance and construction of alternatives, with Zapatism as a reference. He said that movement has proven it is possible to "step out and build a new identity based on collectivity, and hope is now key in construction of actors from within and without."
Alvarez praised the new ways of creating society, fresh from Cuba, and expressed deep solidarity with this country.
As he spoke, perhaps one of the most cynical messages floated across the USINT message board. An advertisement for a website for orders of US food through the internet, complete with dream prices of 10 times more than what the same pork would cost here.
The irony is that all of the Mexican participants began their interventions with a reference to the expulsion of Cubans from one of their country´s hotels, but the meeting was organized by the US - Cuba Trade Association, something the former doesn't really seem to want. |
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