Socialist Action /April 2002
Cuba Rejects Phony 'Aid' Plan at Mexico
Economic Summit
By JAIME GONZALEZ
MEXICO CITY-Fidel's sharp and short speech on March 21, at an international
conference held in Monterrey, Mexico, was very far from the courtly hypocrisy
accustomed at United Nations boondoggles.
"The current world economic order represents a system of plundering
and exploitation like no other in history," Castro said. He pointed
out that this system "has pushed 75 per cent of the world population
toward underdevelopment. Extreme poverty in the Third World has already
reached 1.2 billion people. The gap is widening, not shrinking."
The chairperson for the meeting, Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, pretended
not to listen. He should have, and very carefully, for Castro spelled the
only way out for semi-colonial countries like Afghanistan, Mexico, and Argentina,
as well as much more developed ones that are suffering in one degree to
another from stagnation and high unemployment:
"Rich countries should condone foreign debt and concede new loans
to finance development. Traditional aid offerings, always pitiful and often
ridiculous, are insufficient or are not truly carried out. What is needed
for a true economic and social development is oftentimes much more than
what is announced."
Then came the gesture worthy of the revolutionary leader we had missed
for many years: he asked the chairman for a 20 second extension, in which
he announced he was leaving the meeting because of a "special situation"
created by his presence. He raised his fist into the air as he left the
room, and clearly said "no" when asked whether Cuba was signing
the "consensus" document for the "Monterrey Summit".
The "special situation", of course, was created by the U.S.
government; it asked Mexico's government to press Castro to leave before
George Bush's arrival. This was one of many conditions put forward by Washington
before adding its signature to the meeting's product, which is a practically
useless document on "financing development."
The case of Argentina should be clear enough to anybody who has any illusions
on the "Monterrey consensus." In dire need of coordinated help
from the rest of the world, and in hope of turning the meeting's stated
intentions into something more substantial, Argentina's president, Eduardo
Duhalde, went through all the prescribed ceremony and courtesy.
But he left empty-handed, and upon his return found out that the International
Monetary Fund had actually hardened the conditions for an "aid"
package. (The IMF is supposedly a UN-controlled agency, but it is actually
run by the world's super-rich governments through secretive and very strict
procedures, some of which go back to the Bretton Woods agreements between
Great Britain and the United States when World War II was ending.)
Asking the "Monterrey consensus" to deliver is like asking
Nobel Price winner and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan to actually stop
a war, instead of giving his benediction every time the U.S. government
decides to carry out a gross violations of international legal standards.
"Call us servile, even traitors"
The Mexican foreign affairs secretary, Jorge Castañeda, vigorously
denied that Fox's government had applied any pressure to Fidel. The issue
is quite sensitive in Mexico, since for many years (long before Fox) relations
with revolutionary Cuba have been portrayed by governments here as a sign
of the country's independence from the U.S. and the president-in-turn's
aloofness from the cold war.
Keeping this make-believe has been a very complicated game, and past
governments have gone through all sorts of extremes to maintain it. For
example, Philip Agee's "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" (Bantam
Books) was strictly forbidden in Mexico because it revealed a former president's
ties to the CIA, as well as the brutal and secret battle waged in the unions
during the 1950s and '60s to thoroughly oust Communist sympathizers.
In recent days, Fox has gone through the routine of denying he has bent
to any U.S. pressure. But then, straight from the horse's mouth, legislators
for the PAN (the political party under whose ballot Fox ran for the presidency),
called a press conference.
In their minds, the PAN statement must have been a brave showing: "They
can call us servile and even traitors, but we are not going to sacrifice
our relation with the United States" (see "Pide Cámara
de Diputados informe sobre diferendo", El Universal, March 27, 2002).
Supposedly, they have gone through the risk of being called "servile
and even traitors" because "Mexico has 20 million compatriots
that we must defend" in the United States.
Just how the PAN is going to defend our paisanos is not clear at all.
What has been clear during the last months, however, is that the Bush administration
has launched a vicious campaign against immigrants, who are automatically
considered terrorist suspects. Mexican immigrants have lately been held
without trial, and subjected to the most ridiculous suspicions of ties with
terrorist organizations.
An average of one Mexican a day dies of exposure or dehydration while
attempting to cross into the United States. PAN legislators and Fox have
not only failed to defend these victims, but their discourse has been one
of total support to Bush's "war on terrorism."
"Ninth economic power in the world"
Since his ascension to the presidency, Fox has tried to project to the
world the image of a highly successful administration, transforming a Third
World country into an advanced and rich one. The expensive show he threw
at Monterrey, with support from the UN, was meant to consolidate his role
as a world star.
Mexico, our president constantly remarks, is now the "ninth economic
power in the world," and well on the way to becoming the eighth one.
But this is highly misleading; there is hardly any technological or industrial
achievement that Mexico can brag about on the world market. Its main sources
of foreign currency are crude oil and the earnings that our paisanos working
in the U.S. send back to their families back home.
Mexico's most dynamic industry for the past decades has not been a domestically
owned one, but the foreign-owned maquiladoras built to serve the U.S. market.
As a result of its complete dependency, the maquiladora industry is now
undergoing an alarming negative growth (see Jeff Mackler's article, "Capitalist
Plunder and the World Economic Crisis, in the January
2002 Socialist Action.).
Officially, Mexico's economy contracted at a rate of 0.3 percent during
2001. The figure for manufacturing, which contracted at 3.9 percent for
the year, gives a much better idea of what is going on.
Even more revealing, however, was the overall human development evaluation
that the UN released in 2001: in the composite index known as HDI, which
comprises life expectancy, education, and per capita earnings, Mexico came
out as number 51, way behind Barbados, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa
Rica. (The UN's "Human Development Report 2001" can be unloaded
from the internet at www. undp.org/hdr2001/.)
Cuba is quite a different story. In the UN's HDI report, Cuba came out
as number 4 for Human Poverty Index (HPI) in Latin America, behind Uruguay,
Costa Rica, and Chile, and well ahead of Mexico (number 10). This is startling,
considering the fact that Cuba suffers from a crippling embargo by the United
States and many of its allies, while Mexico has been officially rated a
darling of Wall Street's financial agencies.
In such critical indexes as child mortality rate and education Cuba is
a world superstar, with rates that exceed those of First World countries.
(The achievements of Cuba's education system were recently highlighted in
the New York Times article, "Cuba Leads Latin America in Primary Education,
Study Finds," published Dec. 14, 2001.)
The Cuban Revolution and the on-going social process that was ignited
by it is a much more serious and deep-going phenomenon than you would believe
if you just follow the media's account of what is going on in that country.
And that is precisely why the world should pay attention when Fidel Castro
refuses to sign something like the "Monterrey Consensus."
Socialist Action /April 2002 |