Financial Problems Galore!!
This week -- on January 9th, 2017 -- the United Nations held dire hearings concerning Puerto Rico's massive economic crisis. The UN's top expert on Debt and Human Rights, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, dominated the session. He said, "Austere measures to correct Puerto Rico's economy could trigger even more poverty for most Puerto Ricans. It will aggravate the already intolerant levels of poverty in the country and threaten human rights." Puerto Ricans are U. S. citizens and the U. S. Congress has constructed a Supervision and Financial Administration to solve the nation's financial doldrums. But Mr. Bohoslavsky seemed to suggest that the U. S. Congress was more concerned with helping Puerto Rico's millionaires and America's hedge fund billionaires who epitomize the vast disparity between the rich and poor in Puerto Rico. Indeed, "austere measures" that Mr. Bohoslavsky referenced have closed schools and health clinics in Puerto Rico even as a recent documentary showed a hedge fund billionaire showing off a new "6-star hotel" and the Caribbean's "largest display of yachts in one place." Mr. Bohoslavsky stressed that "The first guarantees should be the protections of the rights of health, food, education, housing and social security for the majority poor." The age-old and ever-expanding disparity between the rich and poor is playing out around the world, including Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, more so today than ever before in history.
An ever-expanding human disgrace.
The U. S. & worldwide mantra: "Greed is Good."
Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, and Puerto Rico, a much smaller island, both came under U. S. dominance after the Spanish-American War in 1898. The infamous Platt Amendment quickly gave the U. S. military control of Cuba, U. S. military occupation of Cuba's Guantanamo Bay "in perpetuity," etc. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico emerged as a U. S. Territory that includes U. S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans, quite a divergence from Cuba's fate. Cuba in the late 1800s had fought two brave but ill-fated wars trying desperately to gain independence from Spain but finally, in 1959, the Cuban Revolution's victory over the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship provided Cuba its first taste of sovereignty, which Revolutionary Cuba famously defended with its dynamic Bay of Pigs victory over the attacking U.S.-Cuban exile forces in April of 1961. Since then, the U. S. has employed a massive economic embargo-blockade against Cuba, which somehow has managed to hang on, if barely, for all these embargoed decades. MEANWHILE, at the UN the worldwide condemnation of the U. S. embargo against Cuba currently has a resounding unanimity vote of 191-to-0, which confirms that all of America's best international friends oppose it...but to no avail because a few hardline Cuban-Americans can dictate to the Republican-dominated Congress and to Republican presidents. AND MEANWHILE, this second week of January-2017 finds the UN as direly concerned about the massive poverty in Puerto Rico as it is about the U. S. embargo of Cuba that impacts so severely on Cuba's majority poor. AND MEANWHILE, U. S. laws for decades have massively encouraged and rewarded Cubans who defect to the U. S. but in January-2017 more Puerto Ricans, already armed with U. S. citizenship passports, are flocking to Florida than instantly rewarded Cubans. Is the Cuban-Puerto Rican conundrum an offshoot of a bought-and-paid-for contingent in the U. S. Congress? Uh, just asking, and please note that the previous sentence was a question, not a statement. THANK YOU for the indulgence.
Cuba's Interior Minister, Garlos Fernandez Gondin, has died at age 78. He was one of the youngest rebels in both the Revolution and the Bay of Pigs. But he was also a top General in Angola where Cuban forces played a controversial but pivotal role in the defeat of Africa's long-dreaded apartheid affliction.
South Africa's international Civil Rights icon, Nelson Mandela, always gave Cuba's revolutionary icon, Fidel Castro, the most credit "for providing Africans whatever measures of independence and sovereignty we finally attained after centuries of being African slaves and pawns at the behest of foreign oppression." Mandela spent 27 years in an apartheid prison with a bucket for a toilet before gaining his freedom and becoming South Africa's democratically elected President. "Democratic elections that finally emerged in waves across Africa and Latin America owe Fidel and the Cuban Revolution the most," Mandela said. Such an analysis made Mandela a pariah in certain circles, such as when he was rudely treated on a visit to Miami.
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Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro remained the best of friends for the last four decades of their long lives. They even co-authored the book "HOW FAR WE SLAVES HAVE COME." Mandela died at age 95 in Johannesburg on December 5, 2013. Castro died at age 90 in Havana on November 25, 2016. Reviled by many and beloved by many, both men are enshrined as giants in the pantheon of history as legends of survivability.
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