Obama's Cuba Policy Legacy: Normalizing relations with an Abnormal Regime

 A shameful legacy

Why December 17, 2014 Cuba policy changes failed, and shouldn't be repeated

From CubaBrief 

President Barack Obama's rapprochement with Cuba began in 2009 with the unilateral loosening of sanctions, it followed the same failed pattern of other Administrations, opposition leaders killed, increased repression, and hostile actions against U.S. interests abroad. This did not prompt a change in policy, but a doubling down. It did not help that secret negotiations on Washington's side were led by Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who is a former fiction writer with no foreign policy experience. Senior U.S. diplomats at the State Department were kept in the dark. His counterpart on Havana's side was Raul Castro's son, Fidel's protege and senior Ministry of the Interior official, Colonel Alejandro Castro Espín. His colleagues in the New York Times profile describe the Deputy National Security Adviser as "having no poker face", leading the negotiations versus some of the most seasoned and manipulative intelligence officials in the world. 

 Ben Rhodes with Rodolfo Dávalos León, a Cuban oligarch living in South Florida.  When protests erupted in Cuba in July 2021, Mr. Dávalos León tweeted: "If the revolution falls you will find me in Cuba, with my father, knee on ground, rifle in hand, defending the work of Fidel. Long live Cuba, long live Raul, & long live Fidel!" 

Nine years ago, on December 17, 2014, this thaw was elevated and formalized when President Barack Obama, and Cuban dictator Raul Castro announced the intent to normalize diplomatic relations. Obama freed three Cuban spies the same day, including Gerardo Hernandez, who was serving two life sentences, one of which was for conspiracy to murder four members of the Brothers to the Rescue in return for aid worker Alan Gross, who had been abducted by Havana in 2009, and an unidentified Cuban intelligence agent. This was a great propaganda victory for the Castro regime.

Following Obama’s announcement the Cuban military expanded its control over the national economy during the 2014-2017 detente. 

This was followed by an exodus of over 120,000 Cubans through Central America who entered the United States between 2014-2016, regine influence expanded with their client state Nicaragua becoming a full blown dictatorship under Daniel Ortega, and more hostile actions. In the midst of this on March 20, 2016 President Obama, with his family, arrived in Cuba for a state visit. On August 22, 2016 the Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mohammad Javad Zarif visited Cuba, and said Iran wants to forge a “new path” in its relations with Cuba by tightening ties. Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Nikolay Pankov said on October 7, 2016 that Moscow was considering plans to return to Cuba where it had a military base in the past. 

Calder Walton, of the Harvard Kennedy School, in his article "A US ambassador working for Cuba? Charges against former diplomat Victor Manuel Rocha spotlight Havana's importance in the world of spying" published in The Conversation on December 15, 2023 reviews the Russian and Chinese presence in Cuba.

"Putin’s government reopened a massive old Soviet signals intelligence facility in Cuba, near Havana. This facility had been the Soviet Union's largest foreign signals intelligence station in the world, with aerials and antennae pointed at Florida shores just 100 miles away. Soviet records reveal that Moscow obtained valuable information from U.S. military bases in Florida. Russia may well still be trying to try to eavesdrop on U.S. targets today from Cuba, although the U.S. government is doubtless alert to such efforts and is likely undertaking countermeasures. Cuban intelligence today is also collaborating with China, which reportedly plans to open its own eavesdropping station in Cuba. Beijing has significant influence over Cuba as its largest creditor and, following in Soviet footsteps, views the island as a valuable intelligence collection base and a “bridgehead” — the KGB’s old code name for Cuba — for influence in Latin America."

Beginning in November 2016, U.S. and Canadian diplomats stationed in Havana began suffering brain injuries, and on January 2, 2017, Raúl Castro presided over a military parade in which Cuban soldiers chanted: “Obama! Obama! With what fervor we’d like to confront your clumsiness, give you a cleansing with rebels and mortar, and make you a hat out of bullets to the head.”

This was a failed policy that did not understand what motivates Havana. The Communist regime in Cuba is anti-American and over the past 64 years it has sought to end the post-1945 U.S. led world order by seeking out alliances with regimes hostile to the United States, and coordinating efforts to undermine it.  This is the strategic context that too many have ignored.

Proponents of constructive engagement with the Cuban dictatorship are asking policy makers to do three things: disregard the past, dismiss current actions by Havana, and get ready for their own country's taxpayers to foot the tab.

Richard Nixon met Fidel Castro in April 1959 and sought a detente with him in 1974

1. Disregard the past
Multilateral sanctions against Havana worked to contain communist expansion in the Western Hemisphere until Kissinger lifted them.

The Ford administration provided Havana with a number of inducements without expecting anything in return, believing that they could restore relations with the Castros. Initially, the United States supported the OAS resolution on July 29, 1975, which essentially put an end to the multilateral economic and diplomatic sanctions against Cuba. On August 19, President Ford went further loosening the US embargo, removing the sanctions against foreign aid to nations that conducted business with the regime in Cuba and enabling ships traveling to the island to refuel in the US. This was an initiative led by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Rather than the "easing of tensions" that was anticipated, the Ford Administration found itself looking foolish.  Havana’s response was to send thousands of Cuban troops to Africa, first to Angola. Secretary Kissinger was so angered by the Cuban intervention in Angola, and the failure of detente that he entertained the idea of air strikes on Cuba.  Multilateral sanctions were not reimposed and Communist Cuba's influence would expand in the region. Subsequent administrations ( Carter 1977, Clinton 1993 and 2000), Obama (2009-2017) attempted rapprochements with Havana, and endured the same cycle. Carter's opening coincided with plunging Central America into civil war, with the establishment of communist rule in Nicaragua with Daniel Ortega in 1979 and a mass exodus in 1980 which Fidel Castro personally seeded with murderers, rapists, and psychiatric patients. The Clinton Administration's normalization efforts coincided with massacres of Cubans, the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, another exodus, the expansion of Cuban influence in Venezuela and the take over of Hugo Chavez in 1999.

2. Dismiss current actions by Havana

Lessons from Europe's constructive engagement

Although the European Union (EU) has and continues to pursue a policy of constructive engagement, and was Cuba’s top trading partner in the 1990s it did not curb its international outlaw behavior. Venezuela became Cuba's top trading partner in 2001, and was eclipsed by China in 2016 However, when Europe de-linked human rights considerations from economic engagement with Havana trade shot up. As of 2019, the EU was Cuba's top trading partner for both imports and exports. It was also Cuba’s top development partner and source of foreign investment. In 2019, a quarter of all tourists visiting Cuba, which relies on its tourism sector for income, were from the EU.This did not alter Havana's hostile posture towards Europe. Cubans are in Russian uniforms fighting to advance Moscow's objectives in the illegal war in Ukraine, and Havana is conducting military training in Belarus. Terrorists continue to be harbored in Cuba, and the Cuban dictatorship refuses to extradite them. Cuban diplomats have held high level meetings with Hamas in 2023, and Hezbollah maintains a base in Cuba. Cuba’s communist dictatorship and Iran’s Islamist regime are closely allied and coordinating efforts against Israel.

3. Get ready for taxpayers to foot the tab.

"One of the best-kept secrets of our 40-year-old trade embargo with  Cuba is that it has saved millions of dollars for U.S. taxpayers. Due to the embargo, there are no U.S. banks in the ``Paris Club'', a  consortium of Cuba creditors. (The Paris Club is currently owed between $10 and $15 billion in debt from Cuba.) Otherwise, U.S. banks now would  be hitting U.S. taxpayers to cover their losses in Cuba. If the U.S. begins to subsidize trade with Cuba--estimated at $100  million a year--five years from now, U.S. taxpayers could be holding, or paying off a $500 million tab." - Senator George Allen, May 21, 2002, Hearing on U.S. Trade Policy with Cuba

Cuba scholar Jaime Suchlicki at the Cuban Studies Institute on April 10, 2023 published an important analysis titled “The Folly of Investing in Cuba” that outlines a number of pitfalls both economic and moral to doing business with the Castro dictatorship that is a must read.

Existing U.S. sanctions have protected American taxpayers from having to shell out billions of dollars to subsidize the Castro dictatorship.

Others have not had the benefit of this policy.

China canceled $6 billion dollars in Cuban debt in 2011, On November 1, 2013 the government of Mexico announced that it was ready to waive 70 percent of a debt worth nearly $500 million that Cuba owes it. The former president of Mexico Vicente Fox protested the move stating: “Let the Cubans get to work and generate their own money…They’re normally like chupacabras.  The only thing they’re looking for is someone to give them money for free.” In December 2015 it was announced that Spain would forgive $1.7 billion that the Castro regime owes it. In December of 2013, Russia and Cuba quietly signed an agreement to write off $32 billion of Cuba's debt to the former superpower. Western governments pursued Cuban maritime debts seizing Cuban vessels and negotiating payment through Canadian courts.

The 2015 debt restructuring accord between Cuba and the Paris Club, according to Reuters, "forgave $8.5 billion of $11.1 billion, representing debt Cuba defaulted on in 1986, plus charges."

The Paris Club is made up of the following permanent members: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France,Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States. Thanks to existing U.S. sanctions, none of the $11.084 billion in debt has been left for U.S. taxpayers to pay off.

Carmelo Mesa-Lago is Distinguished Service Professor emeritus of economics and Latin American studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and in his work CUBA’S ECONOMY IN TIMES OF CRISIS: 2020–2022 AND PROSPECTS FOR 2023 provided the following table which lists debt forgiven, and remaining debt owed by the Cuban dictatorship.

 

European Union honors memory of Iranian martyr Mahsa Amini

Mahsa Amini

Morality police in Iran beat Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, to death for not complying with Tehran's hijab regulations. Mahsa was arrested on September 13, 2022 badly beaten, left in a coma, and she died from her injuries on September 16, 2023.

Today she was posthumously awarded the European Union's Sakharov Prize.

Saleh Nikbakht, Mahsa Amini’s family lawyer and Iranian activists Afsoon Najafi & Mersedeh Shahinkar

Her murder at the hands of Islamic regime agents sparked the  #WomanLifeFreedom movement.

Her family was barred by Tehran's mullahs from traveling to attend the event.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the forgotten man, and Cuba's human rights legacy

Seventy five years ago on December 10, 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly. In 2008 in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of this important milestone, Mary Ann Glendon, the United States Ambassador to the Holy See, highlighted Latin American and Catholic contributions to human rights, and made special mention of the contribution made by Cuba that was documented in a diplomatic cable.

“The principal leader of the Latin American group in 1948 was a charismatic young Cuban representative named Guy Perez Cisneros. His son, Pablo Perez-Cisneros, attended the conference and recounted his father's contributions to the UDHR, noting the gap between the Cuba of his father's day and the deplorable state of human rights under the present regime. The work of Guy Perez-Cisneros and other delegates was captured in a 12-minute video presentation featuring archival footage of Eleanor Roosevelt and Guy Perez-Cisneros' UN speech in support of the UDHR.”

However, Perez Cisneros was not the architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and until The Washington Post journalist David Hoffman explored this chapter of Cuban history in his 2022 book, Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and his Daring Quest for a Free Cuba, this information was only available in some archives, and obscure blogs. 

 

Hoffman found that the 1940 Cuban Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 88g of the 1992 Cuban Constitution that made the Varela Project possible were largely the result of one talented Cuban who over the course of his career had been a diplomat, jurist, and scholar, but you’ve never heard of him. In fact, he has been called the “forgotten man”.

 

Gustavo Gutierrez Sanchez (1895 - 1959)

His name was Gustavo Gutierrez Sanchez and he was born in Camajuani, in the Province of Santa Clara, Cuba on September 20, 1895, and he died in exile in Miami on July 17, 1959 at age 63. In 1916, at just 21 years of age he had obtained doctorates in Civil and Public Law, and became Assistant Professor of International Public Law in the University of Havana, and in 1919 became the department head at age 24.

Carlos Márquez Sterling, a Cuban historian and statesman who led the drafting of the country’s 1940 Constitution, in 1976 wrote an article in Diario de las Americas where he highlighted Gustavo Gutierrez’s role in the drafting of the 1940 Constitution. 

"Gustavo had formed part of the Bicameral Commission which drafted the project of the Constitution and I can assure you that many of the institutions that later found expression in our original document were based on previous works created by Gustavo Gutierrez." 

Hoffman in “Give Me Liberty” reported that the 1940 Constitution had a provision that had been drafted years earlier by Gustavo Gutierrez, and became “Article 135, Section F, which provided that laws could be proposed by congressmen and senators, government officials, courts, - and by citizens. ‘In this case,' the constitution declared, ‘it will be an indispensable prerequisite that the initiative be exercised by at least ten thousand citizens having the same status of voters.”

The Cuban jurist believed that this clause would have given Cuban citizens a voice in public affairs that could have acted as a brake on Machado’s slide into dictatorship, or led to an earlier repeal of the Platt Amendment, or prevented Batista becoming a strong man. This provision somehow was recycled into the 1992 Cuban Constitution, and was the basis for the Project Varela that challenged totalitarian rule in Cuba beginning in 2002.

 

Chapultapec Castle in Mexico City

Less than five years later in February 1945, with World War Two still underway, at the Chapultapec Castle in Mexico City twenty Latin American countries and a large delegation from the United States participated in the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace. Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez presented on behalf of Cuba “two detailed proposals for consideration, a Draft Declaration of the International Rights and Duties of the Individual and a "Draft Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Nations." These two drafts were written by Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez in his book La Carta Magna de la Comunidad de Naciones. Later that year the Cuban delegation in San Francisco would present his draft for consideration in the creation of a universal declaration of human rights.

French jurist René Cassin and Guy Perez-Cisneros argued strongly in the discussion over the drafting of the declaration that the right of individuals to petition “for redress of alleged human rights abuses to ‘the public authorities of the State of which he is a national or in which he resides, or with the United Nations.” was an essential human right that should be included. This was objected to by the Soviet Union, and Mexico that argued that it “violated the principle of national sovereignty and violate provisions of non-interference.” It would not end up in the declaration, but be recognized later by some states. The spirit of this clause that individuals could petition to have injustices committed against them all the way to the UN is consonant with  Gutierrez’s advocacy for giving citizens a voice in public affairs.

Canadian legal scholar John P. Humphrey is credited with preparing the first draft for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947, but in his memoirs published in 1983, Humphrey credited Gustavo Gutierrez for presenting the model that inspired the draft.

“I was no Thomas Jefferson and, although a lawyer, I had had practically no experience drafting documents. But since the Secretariat had collected a score of drafts, I had some models on which to work. One of them had been prepared by Gustavo Gutierrez (Sanchez) and had probably inspired the draft Declaration of the International Duties and Rights of the Individual which Cuba had sponsored at the San Francisco Conference.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an initiative by Latin American nations, in which Cuba played an important role proposing it, assisting to draft the document, and successfully lobbying for it.  

The Cuban diplomats that played this historic role in bringing into existence this “Magna Carta of the Community of Nations” have been erased to make way for one of the great lies of the Castro dictatorship that the political concepts of liberty, equality, and justice are not universal but differ based on geography. This is also why the communist dictatorship in Havana views the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as enemy propaganda.

This is why Cubans across the island risked everything to be heard by the international community in 2002, 2004, and 2021 in their demands for freedom and an end to dictatorship. In 2002 and 2004 this demand was made in the Project Varela petition by tens of thousands of Cubans, and in July 2021 by hundreds of thousands of Cubans across the island shouting for it at the top of their lungs. Currently there are over 1,000 political prisoners in Cuba, and on international human rights day 2023, the 75th anniversary of the signing of the declaration we call for their freedom, and the freedom of all Cubans.

Can Cuba’s Human Rights Legacy Be Recovered?

We have memory.

Dec. 1945. Ex-PM Winston Churchill invited to lunch at the Cuban Embassy in the UK.

Human rights are an intrinsic part of Cuban history that the current dictatorship has spent decades systematically trying to erase, denigrate, and deny, but every day Cubans for decades have stood up for the defense of human rights and dignity at great cost to themselves.There are over 1,000 political prisoners today in Cuba, more than in the rest of Latin America combined for demanding the restoration of human rights and democracy.

One of the great lies of the Castro regime, and there are many, is the claim that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains rights that are alien to Cubans. 

Fidel Castro in a 1986 interview claimed that "[y]our political concepts of liberty, equality, justice are very different from ours. You try to measure a country like Cuba with European ideas. And we do not resign ourselves to or accept being measured by those standards." 

However the now dead Cuban dictator omitted that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an initiative led by Latin Americans, and Cubans in particular. Furthermore that language placed in the Declaration was taken from the 1940 Cuban Constitution. 

Beginning in 1945 Cuba took part in lobbying for and participating in the drafting of the declaration and submitted nine proposals of which five made it into the final document.  

Cuban diplomats invited Winston Churchill to lunch at the Cuban Embassy in London in December of 1945 and proposed the creation of a human rights commission for the United Nations.  

Cuban Ambassador Willy De Blanc hosted the former British Prime Minister with other Cuban diplomats (including delegates to the U.N. Preparatory Commission Dr. Guy Pérez-Cisneros y Bonnel and Cuban jurist Dr. Ernesto Dihigo y López Trigo) where they requested his assistance in the creation of a human rights commission for the United Nations.

Churchill recommended that the Cubans lobby Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and they followed his advice. Eventually the former First Lady was selected as chairwoman to the Human Rights Commission.

The first meetings of the General Assembly and the Security Council took place in London on January 10, 1946. On December 10, 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was voted on, and a Cuban diplomat played a high profile role that day.

On December 10, 2017 in the Miami Herald's letters to the editor section, Pablo Pérez-Cisneros Barreto, the son of Guy Pérez-Cisneros y Bonnel, wrote of his family's and Cuba's legacy in drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    My late father believed that the declaration is the fruit of the great efforts of our civilization and human progress, a unique moment in which humanity came of age in its civic education; that it is also a source of inspiration for the formation of today’s citizens, and not cause for divisions among them. [...] Cuba had the distinction of being the country that proposed the finished declaration be put up for its final UN vote on Dec. 10, 1948. Hard to believe now but Cuba was once a leader when it came to human rights. And it is important to note that nine initiatives proposed in 1945’s Cuba became part of the final declaration, and that Cuba was the country that entrusted the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in San Francisco to prepare the declaration as early as 1946. The third preamble of the declaration is a copy of one of the articles of the famed 1940 Cuban Constitution, and Cuba had the initiative to include in the declaration the right to honor one’s human rights and reputation, as well as protect citizens against arbitrary government interference in their private lives.  Cuba presented the first amendment to the draft declaration which was accepted, adding the right of citizens of any member country to follow the vocation they choose. Cuba presented a second amendment which was also accepted — the right of every worker to receive an equitable and satisfactory payment for their work.

 Last month Cuba underwent a universal periodic review of its human rights record at the UN Human Rights Council. On the eve of this examination, a UN side event was held with witnesses testifying on the human rights violations committed by Castroism over the past five years.

Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, November 28, 2023

Can Cuba’s Democratic Legacy Be Recovered? 

By John Suarez  

Communist Cuba underwent its fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on November 15, 2023, at the UN Human Rights Council, a process Havana repeatedly subverted since 2009 by using front groups to drown out critical human rights reports by established human rights organizations.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez began the UPR session attacking Israel, went on to blame the Cuban dictatorship’s shortcomings on U.S. sanctions, and turned the review into a politicized circus.

Over 20 years, I’ve witnessed Cuban diplomats undermine international human rights standards, first at the United Nations Human Rights Commission and later at the UN Human Rights Council, making a mockery of human rights.

• On April 15, 2004 when the UN Human Rights Commission decided by a single vote to censure Cuba for its human rights record, a Cuban human rights defender attending the session, Frank Calzon, was physically attacked by a Cuban diplomat. 
• On March 28, 2008 the Castro regime’s delegation, together with the Organization of Islamic Congress, successfully passed resolutions that turned the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression into an investigator policing “abuses” of freedom of expression. 
  
• On Feb. 2, 2009 during the Universal Periodic Review of China, Cuban Ambassador, Juan Antonio Fernandez Palacios, recommended that China repress human rights defenders with more firmness.
  
• On March 17, 2014 at the UN Human Rights Council, Cuban diplomats defended the North Korean regime’s human rights record. 
  
• On Sept. 21, 2018 Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta, during the Universal Periodic Review on Cuba at the UN Human Rights Council stated that “our country will not accept monitors. Amnesty International will not enter Cuba and we do not need their advice.” Less than a month later, Cuban diplomats led an “act of repudiation“ at the UN shutting down a discussion on political prisoners in Cuba.
• On July 1, 2020 the Cuban dictatorship introduced a  resolution at the UN Human Rights Council endorsing the death of a free Hong Kong and praising China for passing the Hong Kong National Security Law.  

What the diplomats of Cuba’s communist dictatorship do in Geneva is horrible, but it pales compared to what they do to Cubans on the island.

Human rights defenders Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero were killed on July 22, 2012. On June 12, 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights confirmed that the two Cuban pro-democracy leaders were assassinated by Castro regime operatives.

On July 11, 2021 when Cubans across the island protested in huge numbers called for freedom, and an end to dictatorship. Raul Castro’s hand picked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel went on national television and gave the “order of combat.” Regime agents opened fire on unarmed Cubans, the number killed remains unknown due to regime repression, and lack of transparency, but the video of 36 year old singer Diubis Laurencio Tejeda shot in the back by police, and dying in his friends’ arms is devastating.

Artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez are imprisoned in Cuba today for authoring a song about “homeland and life.” The dictatorship has severely restricted artistic freedoms, passed laws outlawing criticism of the regime on the internet, and passed an even more draconian penal code that expands the death penalty.

Human rights defenders Felix Navarro and his daughter Sayli Navarro, who sought to ascertain the plight of detained Cuban protesters, were themselves arrested and sentenced to long prison terms. There are over 1,000 prisoners of conscience in Cuba. 

It was not always this way. 

A democratic Cuba helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 75 years ago. Carlos Prío Socarrás, Cuba’s last democratic president, was elected in free and fair elections and took office on October 10, 1948. President Prío valued human rights, as seen by the activities of his diplomats during the United Nations’ founding.

Cuba, Panama, and Chile were the first three countries to submit full drafts of human rights charters. Latin American delegations, especially Mexico, Cuba, and Chile inserted language about the right to justice into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in what would become Article 8. 

Cuban delegate Guy Pérez-Cisneros addressed the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948 proposing to vote for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Cuban Ambassador celebrated that it condemned racism and sexism, and addressed the importance of the rule of law: 

“My delegation had the honor of inspiring the final text, which finds it essential that the rights of man be protected by the rule of law, so that man will not be compelled to exercise the extreme recourse of rebellion against tyranny and oppression.” 

Fulgencio Batista overthrew this democratic Cuba on March 10, 1952, Guy Pérez-Cisneros died of a stroke in 1953, and hopes for democratic restoration were dashed by the Castro brothers in 1959 when they imposed a communist dictatorship.

This shared democratic Cuban heritage that in 1948 made world history must be restored, and Cuban communism dumped on the garbage heap of history.

John Suarez is Executive Director of the Center for a Free Cuba.

https://victimsofcommunism.org/can-cubas-democratic-legacy-be-recovered/

Holodomor Remembrance Day: Memory and witness for the victims of Stalin's 1932-33 Ukrainian Famine 90 years ago, and calling out Putin's genocide today

 "In the future, there will be fewer but better Russians." - Greta Garbo, Ninotchka, 1939

#HolodomorRemembranceDay

Holodomor Victims Remembrance Day is held on the fourth Saturday of November, at 4:00pm, the memory of more than 10,5 million Ukrainians killed during Stalin's genocide is commemorated with a moment of silence and lighting of candles.

The genocide in Ukraine is known as the Holodomor and took place ninety years ago between 1932 -1933. Millions of children died in an artificial famine. This crime was ignored by the United States as it formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933.  The Economist in 2012 reported on the 80th anniversary of this man-made famine:

Holodomor literally means death by hunger. In 1932 and 1933, a vast famine in Soviet Ukraine killed three to seven million people, according to estimates. While people starved, the grain was shut away in barns for export.

The deadliest famines in the 20th century were not in Africa but in Europe (Ukraine) and China.
Social science research has demonstrated that famines "happen only with some degree of human complicity."  Human decisions "determine whether a crisis deteriorates into a full-blown famine."

 According to Felix Wemheuer, professor of Modern China Studies at the University of Cologne, in his book Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union," during the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union." 

Millions starved to death under brutal famine imposed by Joseph Stalin

However, to understand the nature of famine politics in communist regimes the monograph of Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn in the East/West: Journal of Ukranian Studies titled "Communism and Hunger" is required reading. Consider the following:

"In fact, with the exception of the 1943 Bengal famine with its approximately two million victims, all of the other major famines of the twentieth century are directly connected to socialist "experiments": in 1921 and 1922 in Russia and Ukraine ( 1million - 1.5 million deaths); in 1931, 1932, and 1933 in the USSR (6.5 million - 7.5 million deaths, of which 4 million were in Ukraine and 1.3 million - 1.5 million in Kazakhstan); in 1946 and 1947 in the USSR (1 million - 1.5 million deaths); from 1958 to 1962 in China (30 million - 45 million deaths); from 1983 to 1985 in Ethiopia (0.5 million - 1.0 million deaths); and from 1994 to 1998 in North Korea ( estimates vary from a few hundred thousand to more than 2 million deaths)."

This was not due to poor central planning and socialist inefficiencies, but a deliberate policy of genocide against targeted population to consolidate political control by eliminating those who do not support their regime. The percentage of victims in the USSR and China relative to their respective overall populations were the same (5%). In the case of the USSR that meant around 7 million deaths out of a population of 160 million and in the case of China  estimates between 30 million and 45 million deaths out of a population of 600 million. The Ukrainian Research and Documentary Center on the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor released the documentary Harvest of Despair.

 We must also remember those who bore witness and spoke truth, and those who covered it up. Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist broke the story on the Ukranian famine on March 29, 1933 despite official denials. Walter Duranty of The New York Times wrote an article a day later rebutting Jones's claims that was published in the paper of record on March 31, 1933. Duranty knew that what Jones published was true, but he sought to appease his Soviet hosts, and remain in the country.

 The Russians, under the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin, are engaging in genocide again. People of goodwill cannot remain silent, or worse try to minimize what is taking place.

Olena @ZelenskaUA and I joined the commemoration of the Holodomor genocide.

Today, the Ukrainian people are united in their prayers, desire for justice, and the flame of our national memory.

Ukraine will never forget the millions of our people who were killed by starvation. pic.twitter.com/YlOYJvGmzS

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) November 25, 2023

It also saddens me that the Castro regime in Cuba is not siding with the little country being invaded by a superpower, but is instead siding with the aggressor, sending Cuban soldiers to fight for war criminal Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

If you are in the Washington DC area today then please consider joining in a nonviolent act of remembrance marking 90 years since this Russian act of genocide.