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Radio Havana Cuba's Top Stories of 2004 - Part 2
December 30, 2004

Celebrating the 46th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution

TOP STORIES OF 2004 - Part 2

* US Economic Measures against Cuba and Cuba's Response: Currency Change
* Cuban Economy 2004: Challenges and Responses
* Venezuela: Bolivarian Revolution Consolidates Power
* US Torture
* Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

* US Economic Measures against Cuba and Cuba's Response: Currency Change

Over the past 45 years, the United States government has violated the
principals and objectives of the World Trade Organization, rolling over
Cuba's rights and harming other members of that entity with the application
of an economic, commercial and financial blockade against the island,
placing serious obstacles in the way of Cuba's economic, social and cultural
development. The material damages of more than 70 billion dollars caused by
the economic blockade against Cuba, are the results of a group of coercive
mechanisms including the Torricelli Law, passed in l992 and the
Helms-Burton, of l996. These measures are characterized by clear
extraterritorial dispositions aimed at strangling the island's development
and reducing to a minimum, monetary resources needed to satisfy the
country's basic necessities.

Frustrated in its attempts to force Cuba's political and economic system
into collapse, despite the application of a broad spectrum of sanctions, the
United States government announced last May 6th, new measures aimed at
systematically blocking the flow of currency entering and leaving Cuba.

As part of that policy, Washington exerted pressures and threatened foreign
banks into restricting relations with the island. The aim was to block Cuban
money deposits, money that Cuba had earned through tourism and sales in hard
currency shops and other services. Among the financial entities under this
extraterritorial attack, was the Union of Swiss Banks, that nation's most
important financial institution.

To achieve its new mandate, the US Treasury Department created a "Group for
the Prosecution of Cuban Assets" made up by US government agency officials,
with the purpose of identifying and stopping the flow of dollars to and from
Cuba; another aggression, this one unprecedented in the history of
international relations.

A report drafted for president George W. Bush, entitled, Commission for
Assistance to a Free Cuba, proposed new strategic economic measures which
tightened restrictions on travel to Cuba by US residents and citizens,
reduced tourism to Cuba from third countries, reduced the numbers of
possible recipients of money sent from abroad and beefed up prosecution of
foreign business executives for sustaining trade or other relations with
Cuba or Cuban enterprises.

Faced with these new pressures, the Cuban government decided to substitute
use of the US dollar in Cuba for the Cuban convertible peso, starting
November 8, 2004, and placed a ten percent fee on the use of dollars in
cash.

That decision deprived the United States government of one of the few
weapons that remained in its anti-Cuba arsenal while at the same time giving
Cuba monetary sovereignty. The measure in no way penalized the holding of
the dollar or any other convertible currency, but rather, simply stopped
circulation of US currency in Cuban shopping centers that operate in hard
currency.

As for the other hard currencies, like the Euro, the Swiss Franc, the
British Pound and Canadian Dollars, no tax was imposed. The ten percent fee
is applied exclusively to the dollar in cash, in virtue of the situation
created by the new US government measures aimed at strangling the Cuban
economy

The monetary changeover was successfully made and completed on October 28,
2004, just 18 days after it began. The measure was given wide coverage in
the international press. The banks that work with Cuba expressed their
understanding of the measure and of the graves risks which Cuba's new system
helps to avoid. What's more, the new regulations allow the island's Central
Bank to better control circulating currency, to increase savings accounts,
to make the creation and execution of monetary policy more effective and to
facilitate Cuba's exploration of new forms in its foreign financial
relations.

Cuba's Convertible Peso, as President Fidel Castro noted, is aimed at
generating confidence and credibility in a hegemonic world marked by
corruption, speculation and financial fraud,. It is also a guarantee from a
country whose economy, without foreign assistance and subjected to fierce
blockade by the most powerful nation on earth, has been able to sustain the
Third World's most successful system of health and education.

* Cuban Economy 2004: Challenges and Responses

Cuba has come to the end of 2004 with five percent economic growth, in spite
of strong challenges faced by the country.

The country's economic performance met its major objectives and translated
into important contributions to social development, while conditions were
created as well for further advancement, said Economy Minister Josi Luis
Rodrmguez in his annual report to the Cuban Parliament, which held sessions
last week.

The huge effort made by Cubans, which had a direct impact on the island's
GDP, proved how much can be done with a limited number of resources when
used to pursue social well-being and advancement.

Though the industrial production sector underwent several setbacks, 10 out
of 22 branches of that economic field experienced growth, including mining,
non-ferrous metal processing, electronics, sugar, construction and
communications.

Other sectors that reported growth were the nickel industry and goods
exports which increased by 32.2 percent, which translated into more than 2
billion dollars.

Tourism also increased by 7.6 percent with the number of foreign visitors
surpassing 2 million by the end of 2004.

The average income-including salaries and benefits-reached 354 pesos and
unemployment dropped to 1.9 percent.

All efforts undertaken by Cubans this year took place amidst hardships and
natural disasters, power cuts, high oil prices on the world market and new
anti-Cuba measures implemented by the George W. Bush administration in a
further attempt to topple the Cuban Revolution.

Economic losses were calculated at more than 2 billion dollars due to the
damage inflicted by hurricanes Charley and Ivan and severe drought that hit
western Cuban territories.

The Cuban reality, permeated with new social and economic initiatives, poses
a contrast to that faced by other nations. According to the Food and
Agriculture Organization's annual report, some 852 million people go hungry
in the world, 53 millions of whom live in Latin American countries. In its
report the FAO recognizes Cuba as one of the nations that has made the most
significant advancement in fighting malnutrition.

Cuba's economic priorities for the coming year include the reinforcement of
the country's defense capabilities, food production - particularly further
support of the subsidized food distribution system - and the purchase of
fuels.

The nation's energy policy is expected to be fine-tuned in support of
ongoing social programs, and a strengthening of national preparedness to
face natural phenomena is also planned for 2005.

In 2004 Cuba signed important protocols with China and Venezuela, while the
oil sector was happy to announce a new oil field discovery off the northern
Cuban coast - good economic news to round off the year.

* Venezuela: Bolivarian Revolution Consolidates Power

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his revolutionary Bolivarian movement
definitively consolidated power in 2004 following more than two years of
destabilization efforts by the mostly white, middle-class, business and
media-owning rightwing opposition. Chavez not only survived an
opposition-sponsored recall referendum in August, but, with 59 percent of
the vote, emerged with an even stronger mandate to carry on his revolution
for the poor during his second term - which ends in January, 2007. In his
victory speech to tens of thousands of cheering supporters, Chavez said that
his triumph is now irreversible, that Venezuela has changed forever and that
there is no turning back. He also called on the US government to finally
show some respect for his administration.

The stunned opposition lamely cried fraud. But international election
observers, including former US President Jimmy Carter and the Organization
of American States, endorsed the results. Colombian and Brazilian observers
affirmed that Venezuela's electoral process had given an example to the
world, saying they saw no irregularities. And the Bolivarian movement went
on to further consolidate its power base in regional elections in September,
in which Chavez supporters took 22 of the country's 24 governorships. These
victories also set the tonic for congressional elections in 2005. Chavez's
allies, already in control of the National Assembly, are expected to
significantly broaden their majority.

The consolidation of a government that for the first time in Venezuela's
history has launched a war against the country's widespread poverty and
illiteracy threw the opposition into disarray and sparked a violent reaction
from its most extremist sectors. In November, a car bomb killed the federal
prosecutor investigating the April, 2002 coup attempt against Chavez.
Prosecutor Danilo Anderson was investigating some 400 rightwing opposition
leaders and businessmen who supported the coup.

The terrorist attack only intensified government efforts to prosecute those
involved in the brief coup, whose leaders dissolved the Supreme Court and
the National Assembly, and launched a campaign of persecution against Chavez
supporters. In late December, Venezuelan authorities slapped a travel ban on
30 people involved in the attempted overthrow of the country's
constitutionally elected government, including some who accepted posts in
the de facto authority that lasted less than 48 hours before hundreds of
thousands of Chavez loyalists put the coup leaders on the run.

The attack also rekindled the controversy over the US government's
involvement in the effort to oust Chavez. Documents declassified under the
US's Freedom of Information Act had already demonstrated Washington's close
ties with the rightwing opposition, detailing the millions of dollars with
which the US government financed diverse groups using the guise of
"democracy-building" organizations. But in late 2004, further declassified
documents revealed that the Bush administration knew well ahead of time
plans to overthrow Chavez, and failed to warn the Venezuelan government of
those plans. The revelation led to further suspicion, with many asserting
that previous knowledge of the coup plan indicates a certain level of
participation.

* US Torture

Washington's battered image following the unilateral invasion of Iraq took a
further beating in 2004 with revelations of the practice of torture against
Iraqi prisoners in US custody. Evidence of the use of torture by American
military and CIA personnel not only quickly surfaced beyond Baghdad's Abu
Ghraib prison to the entire US-run detention center in Iraq, but also to
American detention facilities in Guantanamo and Afghanistan. And the
revelations, and subsequent condemnations, continued mounting throughout the
year - up to the report in mid-December in The Washington Post affirming
that the CIA has been running a secret jail in Guantanamo where torture was
almost certainly the primary interrogation technique.

December also saw news reports of a leaked confidential investigation
warning top US military brass of Iraqi prisoner abuse one month before Army
investigators received the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. The US military has
insisted that it didn't learn of the abuse until those photos reached them
in January. The internal investigation, completed in December, 2003, also
found that members of a joint Special Operations and CIA mission searching
for weapons of mass destruction and high-value targets had been using a
secret interrogation center.

These are just the latest in an endless string of similar revelations that
led to widespread condemnation, particularly in the face of, at best, a
reluctance to assign responsibility and, at worst, a cover-up. In late
November, the Center for Constitutional Rights and four Iraqi citizens filed
a criminal complaint with Germany's Federal Prosecutor's Office in what was
called a historic effort to hold high-ranking US officials, including
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, accountable for the brutal acts of
torture at Abu Ghraib and other facilities. The New York-based civil
libertarian group said German law allowing for the prosecution of war
criminals wherever they may be living, under the doctrine of universal
jurisdiction, was the last resort in the face of an unwillingness in the
United States to seriously investigate the abuses and look unflinchingly up
the chain of command.

The criminal complaint followed a series of condemnations that included a
United Nations study in early November blasting any country attempting to
justify torture, the humiliation of prisoners or the violation of
international conventions in the guise of fighting terrorism. In October,
Amnesty International charged that the United States has not upheld
obligations to reject torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading behavior in
the war on terror, renewing a call for an independent probe into the abuse
of Iraqi prisoners. And in August, nearly 130 influential US jurists,
including 12 former federal judges and a former FBI director, signed an open
letter denouncing Bush administration memoranda justifying the use of
torture. The signatories, who also included eight past presidents of the
American Bar Association and the heads of several US-based international
human rights groups, called on the Bush White House to release all other
memoranda relating to the treatment of detainees - which the administration
has refused to do.

* Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Following the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and subsequent
speculation concerning a revival of the Middle East peace process, Israel
was back to business as usual as 2004 was coming to a close, with another
deadly military incursion in the Gaza Strip's Khan Younis refugee camp. Thus
ended the bloodiest of the four years of the Intifada, during which
Palestinians with rocks, assault rifles and homemade bombs and rockets have
faced off with Israel's F16 fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters and
entire armored battalions. And despite Israel's overwhelming military
superiority, the Israeli army has laid waste to immense stretches of
Palestinian infrastructure including schools and government buildings,
roads, and water and sewage systems, destroyed thousands of acres of
Palestinian citrus and olive groves and targeted numerous Palestinian
civilians.

Indeed, 2004 may well have set a record in the number of scathing
denunciations against Israeli abuse in occupied territories, particularly
regarding the demolition of Palestinian homes and the soaring toll of
civilian casualties including women and children. The last such denunciation
came in late November when the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem called
for the resignation of army Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon for what it called
"a culture of impunity over Palestinian civilian deaths." B'Tselem publicly
asked Yaalon why "at least 1,369 Palestinian civilians were killed since the
beginning of the Intifada when only 22 troops were accused of illegally
opening fire and only one actually charged." The group said that 529
children were among those civilians killed.

In an eloquent reaction to this abuse, a group of more than 70 Israeli
reserve soldiers opened last summer an exhibit of photographs and videotaped
testimony narrating their experiences in occupied territories, which they
said temporarily dehumanized them. There were photos of Israeli soldiers
proudly posing over the bodies of dead Palestinians, and videotapes of young
troops expressing anguish over their behavior as they described the
humiliation and abuses suffered by Palestinian civilians at their hands. The
exhibit echoed the previous year's unprecedented breaking of ranks in the
Israeli security forces when reservists from the military's most elite
commando unit, respected pilots, four former chiefs of Israel's powerful
domestic security service and hundreds of soldiers went public with concerns
over the lack of ethics within the Israeli military.

Meanwhile, 2005 does not seem to hold any promise for the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite the death of the Palestinian leader
who both Tel Aviv and Washington insisted was an obstacle to peace.
Prospects for a negotiated settlement received in April the most
far-reaching setback ever when US President George W. Bush reversed decades
of US policy by supporting illegal Jewish settlements in occupied
territories and rejecting the right of return of Palestinian refugees. A New
York Times editorial called the move a "costly blow" to the US's credibility
in the Middle East peace process, while The Los Angeles Times asserted that
it's a guarantee of deeper conflict.

compiled by NY Transfer News from http://www.radiohc.cu

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