Oscar Niemeyer – the architect who signed off the UN Headquarter building that is now in the process of its first renovation – died in Rio de Janeiro December 5, 2012 at 10 days short of 105 years of age.

He gave Brasílian Architecture Its Flair – tall buildings and curves. Earlier this year, Niemeyer supervised the renovation of the iconic Sambadrome, the “temple of Samba” which he designed 30 years ago, and where the raucous parades of Rio’s Carnival are held each year. He also had worked on building Brasilia – the capital of Brazil while standing up for the communist party of Brazil.

The Brazilian Congress in Brasilia, designed by Oscar Niemeyer (AFP/File, Evaristo Sa)

Major news today – in all media – is the passing away of Master Builder Niemeyer of Brazil. It first came to my attention in a great  article in the New York Times written by a past architectural critic of his.

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho -  known as Oscar Niemeyer – lived in his beloved Rio de Janeiro  (December 15, 1907 – December 5, 2012)  was one of six children of a typographer and his wife.  His father owned a graphic arts business, and a grandfather was a judge on the country’s supreme court.  A precocious talent, Mr. Niemeyer was trained at the National School of Fine Arts, where he soon drew the attention of its dean, Lucio Costa. Costa was at the center of a small group of architects working to bring the message of Modernist architecture to Brazil.

The timing was ideal. Costa was then designing the Ministry of Education and Health’s headquarters in Rio, and he invited Mr. Niemeyer to join his firm as a draftsman. In 1936, the ministry hired the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier to contribute ideas for the design. Le Corbusier was already a legend in architecture, and the building would become the first major public project by a Modernist architect in Latin America.

Mr. Niemeyer, one of several draftsmen assigned to the project, absorbed Le Corbusier’s vision of a modern world shaped by the myth of the machine, and drew on the master’s belief in an architecture of abstract forms enlivened by a sensitive use of light and air.

But Mr. Niemeyer was also a self-confident apprentice with a vision of his own; under Costa’s supervision, he made significant changes to Le Corbusier’s scheme. The columns supporting the building’s main office block were more than doubled in height, giving the structure a more slender profile. An auditorium that Le Corbusier had envisioned as a separate structure was tucked under the office block, creating a more compact urban composition.

Shielded from the sun behind rows of elegant baffles, the building had a clean, stripped-down style that made it a sparkling example of classical Modernism while heralding Brazil’s emergence as a vibrant center of experimentation.

Mr. Niemeyer’s name soon became synonymous with the new Brazilian architecture. In 1939, he collaborated with Costa on the Brazilian Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair. Three years later, he completed his first house, a simple modern box resting on slender columns on a mountainside overlooking the magnificent Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon. In these and other early projects, Mr. Niemeyer was beginning to develop a distinctive architecture of flowing lines, structural lightness and an open relationship to natural surroundings.

At the same time, he was becoming politically outspoken. Reared in a quiet upper-middle-class Rio neighborhood by his maternal grandparents, Mr. Niemeyer joined the Communist Party.

When the Brazilian government released hundreds of political prisoners, including Communists, as a gesture of good will in the 1940s, Mr. Niemeyer turned over the first floor of his Rio office to the party for use as a headquarters. To him, architecture’s social impact had its limits. “Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out,” he once said. “If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.”

Yet the project that established him as a major architectural force was essentially a playground for the nouveaux riches in a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, an industrial city. Commissioned in 1940 by a local mayor, Juscelino Kubitschek, who later, as president of Brazil, would hire Mr. Niemeyer to design Brasília’s major buildings, the project included a casino, a yacht club, a dance hall and a church arrayed around an artificial lake.

The casino was particularly striking. A concrete-and-glass shell, it was conceived as part of an architectural promenade that fused the complex with the natural landscape. The dance hall was distinguished by its free-form canopy made of cast concrete, its contours meant to suggest the flowing movements of the samba.

That project never functioned as planned. The casino was transformed into an art museum soon after gambling was outlawed by the Brazilian government in 1946. And the Roman Catholic authorities were offended by the church’s unusual curved concrete form and refused to consecrate it until 1959.

The complex’s bold, sweeping lines and snaking walkways, gently echoing the surrounding hills, suggested a subliminal hedonism that was at odds with the public’s image of mainstream Modernism as determinedly functional and emotionally cool. The design also heralded Mr. Niemeyer’s war against the straight line, whose rigidity he saw as a kind of authoritarian constraint.

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THE UN BUILDING IN NEW YORK

Mr. Niemeyer’s international status was confirmed by the Brazil Builds exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943, a show that also introduced his work to an American audience. Four years later, he joined Le Corbusier again, this time as an equal, when the two were selected to take part in designing the United Nations complex in Manhattan.

Supervised by Wallace K. Harrison, the United Nations design was a collaboration that also included international luminaries like the Soviet architect Nikolai D. Bassov and Max Abramovitz of New York. The final design was a compromise of sorts between Mr. Niemeyer’s concepts and those of his aging idol Le Corbusier and its final signature was by Oscar Niemeyer.

Set amid gardens and plazas, the slim, glass-clad Secretariat tower and the sculptural concrete General Assembly building remain testaments to the belief in rationalism as a means to resolve international disputes and disparities.

The United Nations Headquarters complex was constructed in New York City in 1949–1950 beside the East River, on 17 acres (69,000 m²) of land purchased from the foremost New York real estate developer of the time, William Zeckendorf.  Nelson Rockefeller arranged this purchase, after an initial offer to locate it on the Rockefeller family estate of Kykuit was rejected as being too isolated from Manhattan. The US$8.5 million purchase was then funded by his father,  John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,  who donated it to the city. The lead architect for the building was the real estate firm of Wallace Harrison, the personal architectural adviser for the Rockefeller family.
and a board of design consultants was nominated by member governments. The board consisted of N. D. Bassov of the Soviet Union,  Gaston Brunfaut (Belgium),  Ernest Cormier (Canada),  Le Corbusier (France),  Liang Seu-cheng (China),  Sven Markelius (Sweden),  Oscar Niemeyer (Brazil),  Howard Robertson (United Kingdom),  G. A. Soilleux (Australia),  and Julio Vilamajó (Uruguay). Le Corbusier and Niemeyer together submitted the scheme which was built and is what can be seen brfore the remodeling that goes on now. The building was occupied in 1952.

The – History of the Le Corbusier – Niemeyer cooperation:  Right after his arrival in New York, Niemeyer met Corbusier on his demands. He requested Niemeyer not to submit a scheme, but rather to collaborate with him on a project, on the basis that he could ‘create a commotion’. It was Wallace Harrison who tried to convince Niemeyer to move on his own.

50 designs were evaluated by the team, and Niemeyer’s project 32 was finally chosen. As opposed to Corbusier’s project 23, which consisted of one building containing both the Assembly Hall and the councils in the centre of the site (as it was hierarchically the most important building), Niemeyer’s plan split the councils from the Assembly Hall, locating the first alongside the river, and the second on the right side of the secretariat. This would not split the site, but on the contrary, would create a large civic square. George Dudley latter stated:

It literally took our breath away to see the simple plane of the site kept open from First Avenue to the River, only three structures on it, standing free, a fourth lying low behind them along the river’s edge. …He [Niemeyer] also said, ‘beauty will come from the buildings being in the right space!’. The comparison between Le Corbusier’s heavy block and Niemeyer’s startling, elegantly articulated composition seem to me to be in everyone’s mind…

Latter on the day, Corbusier came once again to Niemeyer, and asked him to reposition the Assembly Hall back to the centre of the site. Such modification would destroy Niemeyer’s plans for a large civic square. However, he finally decided to accept the modification:

I felt he [Corbusier] would like to do his project, and he was the master. I do not regret my decision.

Together, they submitted the scheme 23–32, which was built and is what can be seen today.

Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s

UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in front of the General Assembly building (1950s)

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BRASILIA

In his designs for Brasília, the capital city built in the vast undeveloped lands of the Brazil’s central region, Mr. Niemeyer got the opportunity to create his own poetic vision of the future on a monumental scale.

The city’s cross-shaped master plan, with repetitive rows of housing set around a formal administrative center, was designed by Costa, Mr. Niemeyer’s old mentor. But it was Mr. Niemeyer who gave Brasília its sculptural identity.

Slide Show – A Legendary Modernist

The speed with which the city was created, between 1956 and 1960, reinforced its image as a utopian dream that had sprouted magically out of a primitive landscape. Its crisp, abstract forms seemed to sum up the aspirations of much of the developing world: the belief that modern architecture and the faith in technological progress that it embodied could help create a more egalitarian society.

Arranged along a vast, grassy esplanade, Mr. Niemeyer’s buildings acquire a certain grandeur in their isolation. The most spectacular is the Metropolitan Cathedral, a circular, crownlike structure that splays open at the top to let light spill into the main sanctuary.

Yet much of Brasília’s beauty lay in an architectural balancing act. The simple twin towers of its secretariat, for example, play off the geometric bowl-like forms of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies. The entire complex suggests a world in perfect harmony, even if the politicians and bureaucrats who work there are not. The languorous sensuality of Mr. Niemeyer’s designs are underscored in early sketches for Brasília. They often depict naked young women sunbathing on a vast empty plaza as his buildings recede in the background. It’s an image of romantic alienation that has more in common with the films of Michelangelo Antonioni than with the utopian aspirations of early Modernism.

“For me,” Mr. Niemeyer said years later, “beauty is valued more than anything — the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity.”

Brasília was considered his greatest triumph, but he had little time to glory in it. In 1964, after a coup put the country in the hands of a military dictatorship, he was repeatedly questioned by the military police about his Communist associations. Although he was never imprisoned, commissions dried up.

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YEARS OF INTELLECTUAL EXILE

With the generals in charge of Brazil and the anti-communism rampant in the US, he could work by proxy or limit himself to communism in Western Europe. He was chosen to design a business center on Claughton Island near Miami. But the United States, still in the grip of the cold war, denied him a visa. (Around the same time, he also designed a house in Santa Monica, Calif., one he never saw.)

Unable to find work in Brazil, Mr. Niemeyer fled to Europe, where he received commissions to design the Communist Party headquarters in Paris, completed in 1980, and the House of Culture in Le Havre, France (1982), with its low conical dome and a spectacular concrete ramp corkscrewing into the earth.

Modernism was by then falling out of favor with the architectural establishment. Brasília soon became a symbol of Modernism’s failure to deliver on its utopian promises. The vast empty plazas seemed to sum up the social alienation of modern society; surrounded by slums, the monumental government buildings of its center exemplified Brazil’s deeply rooted social inequalities.

Mr. Niemeyer addressed the criticism in a profile by the critic Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times Magazine in 2005. “You may not like Brasília,” he told Mr. Kimmelman, “but you can’t say you have seen anything like it — you maybe saw something better, but not the same. I prefer Rio, even with the robberies. What can you do?” He added: “But people who live in Brasília, to my surprise, don’t want to leave it. Brasília works. There are problems. But it works. And from my perspective, the ultimate task of the architect is to dream. Otherwise nothing happens.”

In 1965 Niemeyer  traveled to France for an exhibition in the Louvre museum.In 1966, at 59, he moved to Paris – he travelled to the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, to design the International Permanent Exhibition Centre. Despite completing construction, the start of the civil war in Lebanon prevented it from achieving its utility.

He opened an office on the Champs-Élysées, and had customers in diverse countries, especially in Algeria where he designed the University of Science and Technology-Houari Boumediene. In Paris he created the headquarters of the French Communist Party, Place du Colonel Fabien, and in Italy that of the Mondadori publishing company.
In Funchal on Madeira, a 19th-century hotel was removed to build a casino by Niemeyer.

The Brazilian dictatorship lasted until 1985. Under João Figueiredo‘s rule it softened and gradually turned into a democracy.  At this time Niemeyer decided to return to his country. During that decade he made the Memorial Juscelino Kubitschek (1980), the Pantheon (Panteão da Pátria e da Liberdade Tancredo Neves Pantheon of the Fatherland and Freedom, 1985) and the Latin America Memorial (1987) (dubbed by The Independent of London to be “…an incoherent and vulgar construction”). The memorial sculpture represents the wounded hand of Jesus, whose wound bleeds in the shape of Central and South America.

In 1988, at 81, Niemeyer was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious award in architecture. From 1992 to 1996, Niemeyer was the president of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). As a lifelong activist, Niemeyer was chosen as a powerful public figure that could be linked to the party at a time when it appeared to be in its death throes after the demise of the USSR. Although not active as a political leader, his image helped the party to survive through its crisis, after the 1992 split and to remain as a political force in the national scene, which eventually led to its reconstruction. He was replaced by Zuleide Faria de Mello in 1996.

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OSCAR NIEMEYER AND ISRAEL – A NATURAL LOVE STORY.

In 1964 – thus before he settled in Paris – Niemeyer spent six months in Israel where he was brought by developer Yekutiel Federman and as per HAARETZ of today - www.haaretz.com/print-edition/bus… – he  left behind at least two executed projects – the Kikar Hamedina  – the large round-about in what was then North-Tel Aviv, and  and the Haifa University, but the most interesting proposal was the planned city that was never built.

Niemeyer, who as a declared communist, was excited about the socialist settlements in Israel, and described the Negev city of his planning, undoubtedly with a certain amount of naivete, as “a new type of metropolitan kibbutz that grew, became broader and more up-to-date, without losing its human values – enthusiasm, solidarity and idealism.”

Niemeyer’s work in Israel is the subject of historical research conducted by the architect Zvi Elhayani for his master’s degree in architecture at the Technion. Among the central issues in the study, which Elhayani concluded last year, is an analysis of Niemeyer’s critical assessment of planning concepts in Israel. In Niemeyer’s proposal for the Negev city, Elhayani sees a clear expression of this critical outlook. According to the study, Niemeyer already identified the low and sparse construction in new cities, and multitude of small communities, as a mistake that Israel would pay for in the future with a loss of open spaces.

During his stay in Israel, which is described in detail in Elhayani’s study, Niemeyer toured the newly constructed cities in the Negev: Yeruham, Dimona, Kiryat Gat, Eilat and the new neighborhoods of Be’er Sheva. According to Elhayani, Niemeyer was impressed by the desert vistas and construction boom, but expressed his disappointment “from the spatial spread and wastefulness that characterized the new cities, and he began to formulate a completely different urban concept.”

The sketches for the new Negev city, as presented in Elhayani’s study, show that the city was planned as a compact and crowded community, where the residents could take a short walk of no more than 500 meters to get from their homes to their jobs, schools and places of entertainment. Covered and shaded walkways were planned along the roadways, with pedestrian traffic separated from vehicular traffic. Niemeyer declared that he was seeking “to create optimal conditions for people to communicate and appropriate environments for work, culture and recreation, with the help of technological advances.”

From the outset, Niemeyer was aware of the radical nature of his concept of the Negev city and the controversy it would stir in Israel. Still, he hoped that his plan would not be summarily rejected, “but rather would be stored for a time on the shelf and reexamined after a number of years … then I’m sure that the reasons we cite today will be accepted and it will be proven that this city is the inevitable result of progress, of technology and of the life force itself.”

Niemeyer’s plan envisioned a new city somewhere in the heart of the Negev, but no specific site was selected. A model of the plan, as presented at the time, was photographed on the Tel Aviv beach opposite the Dan Hotel, where Niemeyer stayed. Like most of his work in Israel, the Negev city was never built. Elhayani believes that its construction was unfeasible at the time for technological, cultural, social and economic reasons, and that even today it can only serve as an idea for critical review.

Nonetheless, Elhayani writes, the issues Niemeyer raised nearly 40 years ago are at the center of the debate on national planning in Israel today. The question of whether the Negev missed out on – or was saved from – Niemeyer’s ideas remains open.

The proposal by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the 1960s to build a Negev city with 40 skyscrapers of 30 to 40 stories for tens of thousands of residents is the complete opposite of the settlement project for the Halutza dunes. While Nitzanit, Shlomit and other Halutza communities are planned to be built close to the ground, with low density and spread over a relatively large area per number of residents, Niemeyer’s utopian city was to be vertical, tall, crowded and succinct.

Haifa University

Kikar Hamedina, Tel Aviv

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HIS REPUTATION RESTORED AND LIFE EXTENDED TO ITS FULLEST

Mr. Niemeyer is survived by his wife, Vera Lúcia Cabreira, whom he married in 2006; four grandchildren; 13 great-grandchildren; and six great-great-grandchildren, according to the newspaper O Globo. A daughter, Anna Maria, died this year at age 82, and his first wife, Annita Baldo, died in 2004, after 76 years of marriage.

Mr. Niemeyer lived long enough to see his international reputation recover and flourish.

After his return to Brazil in the early 1980s, his office was soon overflowing with new commissions.

At 89, his Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói, near Rio, which opened in 1996, was celebrated for its bold saucer-shaped form. The building is cantilevered out from sheer rock hovered on a cliffside overlooking Guanabara Bay and the city of Rio de Janeiro.

A decade later, on his 99th birthday, he celebrated the opening of his National Museum and National Library along the Monumental Axis in Brasília, near his cathedral.

In his last years he e designed at least two more buildings in Brasilia, the Memorial dos Povos Indigenas (“Memorial for the Indigenous People”) and the Catedral Militar, Igreja de N.S. da Paz.

A growing number of people had begun to re-examine the legacy of postwar Modernism and appreciate his purist vision as a throwback to a more optimistic time.

In celebrating both the formal elements and social aims of architecture, his work became a symbolic reminder that the body and the mind, the sensual and the rational, are not necessarily in opposition. Yet he also saw sensuality and the brightness of dreams against a darker backdrop. “Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence,” he once said, “even if only for an instant.”

MASTER BUILDER Mr. Niemeyer was among the last of Modernist true believers. More Photos »

foto: reuters/moraes

A recent photo of Niemeyer looking out from a window in his office in Rio.

“Brazil lost today one of its geniuses,” Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, said in a statement issued Wednesday night.
“Few dreamed so intensely, and accomplished so much, as he did.”

Allied with the far left for most of his life, he suffered career setbacks during the rule of Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorships of the 1960s and ’70s, and he was barred from working in the United States during much of the cold war. As Modernism later came under attack for its sometimes dogmatic approach to history, his works were marginalized.

Still, Mr. Niemeyer never stopped working; he churned out major new projects through his 80s and 90s. And as the cold-war divide and architecture’s old ideological battles faded from memory in recent years, a younger generation began embracing his work, intrigued by the consistency of his vision and his ability to achieve voluptuous effects on a heroic scale.

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Niemeyer was a close friend of Fidel Castro, who often visited his apartment and studio whilst in Brazil. Castro was once quoted as saying “Niemeyer and I are the last communists on this planet.” Niemeyer was also regularly visited by Hugo Chavez.  Niemeyer was an  atheist  throughout his life, basing his beliefs both on the “injustices of this world” and on cosmological principles: “It’s a fantastic Universe which humiliates us, and we can’t make any use of it. But we are amazed by the power of the human mind … in the end, that’s it—you are born, you die, that’s it!”. Such views never stopped him from designing religious buildings, which span from small Catholic chapels, through to huge Orthodox churches and large mosques. He also catered to the spiritual beliefs of the public who facilitated his religious buildings. In the Cathedral of Brasília, he intended for the large glass windows “To connect the people to the sky, where their Lord’s paradise is.”

21st century and death

Oscar Niemeyer, December 2010

The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum

Oscar Niemeyer Museum (NovoMuseu), Curitiba, Brazil

Brazilian National Museum, Brasilia, D.F.

Municipal Library in city center Rio de Janeiro -  Duque de Caxias, RJ, Brasil

Óscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre Asturias, Spain

Niemeyer maintained his studio in Rio de Janeiro well into the 21st century. In 2002, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum complex was inaugurated in the city of Curitiba, Paraná.

In 2003, at the age 96, Niemeyer was called to design the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion in Hyde Park London, a gallery that each year invites a famous architect, who has never previously built in the UK, to design this temporary structure. He was still involved in diverse projects at the age of 100, mainly sculptures and readjustments of previous works.

On Niemeyer’s 100th birthday, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship. Grateful for the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts received in 1989, he collaborated on the 25th anniversary of these awards with the donation to Asturias of the design of a cultural centre. The Óscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre (also known in Spain as Centro Niemeyer), is located in Avilés and was inaugurated in 2011.

In January 2010, the Auditorium Oscar Niemeyer Ravello was officially opened in Ravello, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast. The Auditorium’s concept design, drawings, model, sketches and text were made by Niemeyer in 2000 and completed under the guidance of his friend, Italian sociologist Domenico de Masi. The project was delayed for several years due to objections arising from its design, siting and clear difference from the local architecture; since its inauguration the project has experienced problems and, after one year was still closed.

After reaching the age of 100, Niemeyer spent several periods of time in hospital. In 2009, after a four-week period of hospitalisation for the treatment of gallstones and an intestinal tumour, he was quoted as saying that hospitalization is a “very lonely thing; I needed to keep busy, keep in touch with friends, maintain my rhythm of life.”
His daughter and only child, Ana Maria, died of emphysema in June 2012, aged 82.

Niemeyer died of cardiorespiratory arrest on December 5, 2012 at the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro, ten days before his 105th birthday. He had been hospitalised with a respiratory infection prior to his death. The BBC‘s obituary of Niemeyer noted that he “built some of the world’s most striking buildings – monumental, curving concrete and glass structures which almost defy description”, also acclaiming him as “one of the most innovative and daring architects of the last 60 years”.
The Washington Post described him as “widely regarded as the foremost Latin American architect of the last century”.

We have watched with astonishment the following happen actually some seven years ago. I say with astonishment because I did eat in what was recommended to me as a private restaurant – in an apartment of private people that did not call it a business. They made me feel of being a guest, and the menu had no marked prices. Instead I was expected to leave money as a present. I thought of it as a ploy that gave returns to the proprietor that were higher then what he could have noted on the menu. On the other hand, the private driver, that would take you in his sputtering 50s long Chevy, was overpricing it and left me with the feeling that he was government connected – sort of the Cuban version of FBI surveillance. Was it a private thing to make sure you did not miss the official highlights, and you did not go out of town to places not on the tourism list?

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News Analysis

How Capitalist Are the Cubans?

Greg Kahn/Getty ImagesA market sells dresses and other items in Havana.

By DAMIEN CAVE

Published: December 1, 2012 – The New York Times online. In print December 2, 2012.

IT was just a small sign, red, round and electrified, advertising homemade pizza — the kind of thing no one would notice in New York or Rome. But in Havana? It was mildly amazing.

Cuba, after all, has been dominated for decades by an all-consuming anticapitalist ideology, in which there were only three things promoted on billboards, radio or TV: socialism, nationalism, and Fidel and Raúl Castro. The pizza sign hanging from a decaying colonial building here represented the exact opposite — marketing, the public search for private profit.

And it wasn’t just tossed out there. Unlike the cardboard efforts I’d seen in the same poor neighborhood on a visit to Cuba last year, the sign cost money. It was an investment. It was a clear signal that some of Cuba’s new entrepreneurs — legalized by the government two years ago in a desperate attempt to save the island’s economy — were adapting to the logic of competition and capitalism.

But just how capitalist are Cubans these days? Are they embracing what Friedrich Hayek described as the “self-organizing system of voluntary cooperation,” or resisting?

“It’s a combination,” says Arturo López Levy, a former analyst with the Cuban government now a lecturer at the University of Denver. “When more people get more proactive and more assertive, then other people — whether they like it or not — have to do the same. They have to compete. I think that’s the dynamic.”

Indeed, like Iraq, Russia, Mexico or other countries that experienced decades of dictatorial rule that eventually ended, Cuba today is a society marked by years of abuse, divided and uncertain about its future. The changes of the past few years — allowing for self-employment, freer travel, and the buying and selling of homes and cars — have been both remarkable and extremely limited. The reasons small things like signs matter so much here is because everyone is concerned with momentum, and no one seems to know whether Cuba is really on the road to capitalism, as The Economist asserted in March, or if the island is destined to simply sputter along, with restrained capitalism for a few and socialist subsistence for the rest.

The debate is all the more complicated because the same leaders who rejected capitalism for so long are now the ones trying to encourage people to try it out. Raúl Castro was notoriously the revolution’s most loyal Communist; now, as the country’s president, he is the main booster for free market reforms. On one hand, a recent gathering of Cuba’s Communist Party earlier this year included a session on overcoming prejudices against entrepreneurs; on the other, Raúl Castro has said he would “never permit the return of the capitalist system.”

“They are kind of schizophrenic,” says Ted Henken, a Cuba expert at Baruch College. “They are saying they are changing, but they treat these things as gifts and not as rights.”

And yet, there is no longer any denying that pockets of controlled capitalism are emerging in Cuba. In Havana, in particular, small businesses are everywhere. Entire urban industries, including taxis and restaurants, are being transformed through a rush of new entrants, who are increasing competition for customers, labor and materials. Even the most elemental tasks that used to be managed by the state — such as buying food — are increasingly in the hands of a private system that sets its own prices based on supply and demand.

Though the initial burst of activity has slowed, some experts say the explosion in commerce showed just how capitalist Cubans were all along. Of the roughly 350,000 people licensed to be self-employed under the new laws by the end of 2011, 67 percent had no prior job affiliation listed — which most likely means they were running underground businesses that then became legitimate.

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs are optimistic about Cuba’s becoming more open to free market ideas. Héctor Higuera Martínez, 39, the owner of Le Chansonnier, one of Havana’s finest restaurants (the duck is practically Parisian), says that officials are “starting to realize there is a reason to support private businesses.” He has given people work, for example, and he brings in hard currency from foreigners, including Americans.

“Before, we had nothing,” he said. “Now we have an opportunity.”

He is doing everything he can to make the most of it. When we met one night at the restaurant, he had already written up several pages of notes and charts explaining what his industry needed to grow — from wholesale markets to improved transportation for farmers to an end to the American trade embargo to changes in the Cuban tax code. In an ingeniously cobbled-together kitchen, in which only one of three ovens worked, he mostly seemed to salivate at the thought of vacuum packing so his meals could be delivered more efficiently.

He was about as capitalist as it gets. But will his ideas ever be adopted? Like everyone else, he faces severe limits. He can hire no more than 20 employees, for example. He does not have access to private bank loans, and the government has shown little inclination to let people like Mr. Higuera succeed on a grand scale.

Instead, when success arrives, the government seems to get nervous. This past summer, officials shut down a thriving restaurant and cabaret featuring opera and dance in what had been a vacant lot, charging the owner with “personal enrichment” because he charged a $2 cover at the door.  A news article from Reuters had described it as Cuba’s largest private business. A few days later, it was gone, along with 130 jobs.

The Castro government has tried to keep a lid on innovation in other ways, too. It has not allowed professionals like lawyers and architects to work for themselves. And its efforts at political repression have focused over the past few years on innovative young people seeking space for civil discourse in public and online — the blogger Yoani Sánchez, or Antonio Rodiles, director of an independent project called Estado de Sats, who was arrested in early November and released last week after 18 days in jail.

So for now, what Cuba has ended up with is handcuffed capitalism: highly regulated competitive markets for low-skilled, small family businesses. What economic freedom there is has mostly accrued to those whose main ambition is making and selling pizza.

Which again raises the question: is Cuba really heading toward capitalism or not? Skeptics are easy to find. “Every place in the world that has had real change, it has changed because the regime itself has allowed some significant openings and the door has been pushed wide open,” says Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey. “That’s not what’s happening here.”

Many Cubans say they are hesitant to let go of a reliable system summed up by a common joke: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” Taxi drivers told Mr. López Levy that they were working harder for less money because of increased competition. A farmer I met at the wholesale market outside Havana equated capitalism with higher prices, and said that the government needed to intervene.

But mostly, this is an aging crowd and Mr. López Levy — who still has friends and relatives in government — says that even among Cuban bureaucrats, the mentality is changing. If so, more capitalism may be inevitable. Because with every new entrepreneur it licenses, Cuba becomes less socialist, less exceptional, less of a bearded rebel raising its fist against the horrors of Yankee capitalism. In the eyes of some Cubans, the jig is already up.

“The government has lost the ideological battle,” said Óscar Espinosa Chepe, a state-trained economist who was sent to jail in 2003 for criticizing the government. “The battle for ideas was the most important battle, and they’ve lost.”

Venezuela Votes…and Latin America Catches a Cold.

By Estrella Gutiérrez

CARACAS, Oct 4 2012 (IPS) – Sunday’s elections in Venezuela will determine whether the era of President Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution will continue or come to an end. The result will have an impact not only on this country but on the rest of Latin America.

In the first decade of this century, Latin America saw “a nontraumatic epochal change, sometimes manifested as constituent assemblies (to rewrite a constitution), which sought to respond to the demands of the majority and bring about political change. Chávez is its most radical expression,” said Manuel Felipe Sierra, an analyst from the traditional left and a critic of the Venezuelan president.

“This trend, which Chávez claims to have authored although it has roots and leadership in each country, has already passed, and most governments have taken a more conventional democratic route with left-wing overtones,” he told IPS.

Bolivia and Ecuador are other examples of this current, which has as its political integration mechanism the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), led by Venezuela and made up of eight Latin American and Caribbean countries, including Cuba and Nicaragua.

But the regional reform movement has another major reference point, less ideological and radical: the process led by former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), whose programme was based on economic growth with social inclusion and a strengthening of democracy.

Both self-described left-wing and right-wing governments have expressed their support for the Brazilian model, including Venezuela’s opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, who declares himself an “admirer and imitator” of Lula.

Capriles, supported by a variegated mix of 29 groups ranging from right to left, points as proof to the Zero Hunger plan he implemented as governor of the northwestern state of Miranda, modelled on Brazil’s anti-hunger strategy.

Most of the latest polls tip Chávez as the favourite to be re-elected for a third time. But growing support for his rival has made the election result uncertain.

Chávez’s style of diplomacy in Latin America has been one of confrontation with right-wing presidents, which polarised countries, governments and summits ever since he took power in February 1999, said experts consulted by IPS, including several close to the president.

“The export of the Bolivarian model, supported by the abusive use of Venezuela’s oil wealth, as well as Chávez´s style, are in decline, whatever happens on Sunday,” said Sierra.

“Furthermore, there is ‘Chávez fatigue’ in the region because of the behaviours and manners that stress even his allies, and that ceased to be useful for the collective interest,” he said.

But Roy Chaderton, Venezuela’s ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), said that if Chávez exits the stage, “it would threaten Latin American independence,” especially from the United States, which Chávez refers to as “the empire.”

Chaderton said Venezuela had created in the region “a diversity of dependences, that make us more independent of others and more interdependent among ourselves.”

“In Latin America we created oxygen valves that help us breathe more freely, and that would close off” if Chávez loses, he said.

“These are not just any elections, for Venezuela or for the continent, because of the ideological primacy and polarisation promoted by Chávez, and because if he loses the elections it would confirm the demise of the left-wing neo-populist experiment he was trying to export,” said Teresa Romero, an expert in international relations.

In Romero’s view, even if Chávez is re-elected, “the regional climate has shifted towards the centre,” and within it “Brazil has won the leadership role, with progressive positions that are less strident and more efficient.”

Michael Shifter, the head of the Inter-American Dialogue, a U.S. think tank, said if Chávez left the government it would have “an enormous effect on the regional political scenario, because he has been the most aggressive and polarising voice in the hemisphere over the last decade.”

If change comes to Venezuela, “ideological conflicts will not disappear, but they will be less acute and better channeled,” he told IPS. In his view, Capriles would maintain normal relations with left-wing governments like those of Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua, “but not, as the phrase went in the 1990s, such carnal relationships.”

In addition to ALBA, the Chávez government promoted the foundation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), made up of the region’s 12 countries, and the oil aid organisation Petrocaribe. It also helped create the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) as an alternative to the OAS, which it considers to be dominated by Washington.

In August the government began a process of withdrawal from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which hands down binding rulings on human rights violations committed by states. The only precedent for withdrawal from the OAS human rights court was that of Peru, 20 years ago, during the regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

Capriles announced that, if he were elected, one of his first steps would be to reverse the process of withdrawal from the Inter-American Court. He also said Venezuela would rejoin the Andean Community, the regional bloc that this country belonged to since the 1960s, which the Chávez administration pulled out of in 2011. It is currently made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Chávez’s efforts in the past six years were directed towards Venezuela becoming a full member of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade bloc, which he finally achieved in June, after Paraguay’s temporary suspension from the group, made up also of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.

“These are changes of alliances based on political and ideological foundations, not on economic reasoning or geographical location,” Sierra said.

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And from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) backgrounder:

Stakes Are High for Venezuelan Presidential Elections

The October 7 presidential election between Hugo Chavez and Henrique Capriles Radonski holds significant implications for the direction of the country’s “socialist revolution,” its economy, and foreign policy.       Read the Backgrounder »

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Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times

How Hugo Chávez Became Irrelevant

By FRANCISCO TORO

Published: October 5, 2012

AS Hugo Chávez, the icon of Latin America’s left, struggles to hang on to his job, it’s tempting to read tomorrow’s closely contested election in Venezuela as a possible signal of the region’s return to the right. That would be a mistake, because the question that’s been roiling Latin America for a dozen years isn’t “left or right?” but “which left?”

Outsiders have often interpreted Latin America’s swing to the left over the last dozen years as a movement of leaders marching in ideological lock step. But within the region, the fault lines have always been clear.

Radical revolutionary regimes in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua joined Cuba, the granddaddy of the far left, in a bloc determined to confront the capitalist world, even if that meant increasingly authoritarian government.

A more moderate set of leaders in Brazil, Uruguay and Guatemala put forth an alternative: reducing poverty through major social reforms without turning their backs on democratic institutions or private property rights.

As Fidel Castro’s favorite son, Mr. Chávez has always been the leader of the radical wing. And Brazil’s size and economic power made it the natural leader of the reformist wing.

Outwardly, the two camps have been at pains to deny that any divisions exist. There have been many pious words of solidarity and lots of regional integration accords. But behind closed doors, each side is often viciously dismissive of the other, with Chávez supporters seeing the Brazilians as weak-kneed appeasers of the bourgeoisie while the Brazilians sneer at Mr. Chávez’s outdated radicalism and chronic incompetence.

As recently as five or six years ago, there was a real ideological contest. A wildly unpopular American president prone to military adventurism helped Mr. Chávez rally the continent against Washington. One country after the next joined the radical axis. First Bolivia, then Nicaragua, Honduras and Ecuador, joined a growing roll call of radicals in 2005 and 2006.

Now the political landscape is almost entirely transformed. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory badly undermined the radicals’ ability to rally opposition to gringo imperialism. Meanwhile, the alternative was becoming increasingly attractive.

Brazil’s remarkable success in reducing poverty speaks for itself. Building on a foundation of macroeconomic stability and stable democratic institutions, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, oversaw the most remarkable period of social mobility in Latin America’s living memory.

As millions of Brazilians rose into the middle class, Mr. Chávez’s autocratic excesses came to look unnecessary and inexcusable to Venezuelans. Mr. da Silva and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, have shown that a country does not need to stack the courts, purge the army and politicize the central bank to fight poverty. Brazil proves that point, quietly, day in and day out.

It isn’t just democratic institutions that have suffered from Mr. Chávez’s radicalism; it’s the economy, too. Venezuela’s traditional dependence on oil exports has deepened, with 96 percent of export revenue now coming from the oil industry, up from 67 percent just before Mr. Chávez took office. Nationalized steel mills produce a fraction of the steel they’re designed for, forcing the state to import the difference. And nationalized electric utilities plunge most of the country into darkness several times a week. The contrast with Brazil’s high-tech, entrepreneurial, export-oriented economy couldn’t be more stark.

For all of Mr. Chávez’s talk of radical transformation, Venezuela’s child mortality and adult literacy statistics have not improved any faster under his government than they did over the several decades before he rose to power.

With oversight institutions neutered, the president now runs the country as a personal fief: expropriating businesses on a whim and deciding who goes to jail. Judges who rule against the government’s wishes are routinely fired, and one has even been jailed. Chávez-style socialism looks like the worst of both worlds: both more authoritarian and less effective at reducing poverty than the Brazilian alternative.

And the region has noticed. The key moment came in April 2011, when Ollanta Humala won the Peruvian presidency. Long seen as the most radical of Latin America’s new breed of leaders, Mr. Humala had run on a Chávez-style platform in 2006 and lost. By last year, he’d seen the way the wind was blowing and remade himself into a Brazilian-style moderate, won and proceeded to govern — so far, successfully — in the Brazilian mold.

Now, in a final indignity, Mr. Chávez is facing a tight re-election race against Henrique Capriles Radonski, a 40-year-old progressive state governor who extols the virtues of the Brazilian model.

Although Mr. Chávez’s government has done its best to paint a caricature of Mr. Capriles as an old-style right-wing oligarch, he is unmistakably within the Brazilian center-left mold: Mr. Capriles pitches himself as an ambitious but pragmatic social reformer committed to ending the Chávez era’s authoritarian excesses.

The rest of Latin America has already been through the ideological battle in which Venezuela remains mired. By and large, other nations have made their choices. The real question in this election is whether Venezuela will join the hemispheric consensus now, or later.

The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) was established December 2011 in Caracas, as all three pre-existing organizations of Latin America prove to be behind the times – this mainly because of the US push to keep still Cuba outside the international system.

The Organization of American States does not include Cuba and similar problems are facing the Caribbean CARICOM and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

With China becoming more important in the Western Hemisphere – now CELAC – that includes all States except the US and Canada – becomes a more appropriate conversation partner to China – replacing ECLAC which is viewed as a tol of the US.

We have here a series of articles from THE GUYANA TIMES that show this evolution in changing inter-Western Hemisphere States around the time of the RIO+20 meeting, June 2012.

Chile is the linchpin to this Latin American reorganization – hosting both ECLAC and CELAC. The latter brought along also the members of CARICOM. How long will it take to the US to realize that its economic relations in the region are at stake?

Chinese premier proposes high-level cooperation forum with Latin America, Caribbean

ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao enter the ECLAC building in Santiago, Chile

In order to deepen strategic relations with the region, today the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao proposed the creation of a China-Latin America cooperation forum and the establishment of a regular dialogue mechanism with the troika of foreign ministers from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) – with a first meeting due to be held during 2012.
The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, welcomed Wen Jiabao on behalf of the commission.  From ECLAC, he then sent out a message to the Latin American and Caribbean region on the occasion of his official visit to Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.
In his ECLAC speech, the Chinese Premier put forward concrete proposals for cooperation in areas such as food security, innovation, science and technology and sustainable development.
Wen Jiabao announced the creation of a cooperation fund for the region with an initial input of US$5.0 billion to promote, inter alia, the development of the manufacturing industry, as well as a credit line of US$10 billion dollars to boost infrastructure cooperation through the Bank of China. He proposed creating various forms of intergovernmental consultation mechanisms, broadening contacts among legislative institutions, political parties and territorial governments and strengthening the exchange of experiences in terms of state governance and the handling of administrative matters. He also suggested the creation of a forum for agriculture ministers and another forum for Scientific and Technological Innovation.
He mentioned that his country will give active consideration to ECLAC’s proposal to hold periodic meetings with the region’s heads of state and government. In the context of the visit by Wen Jiabao, today ECLAC launched the document The People’s Republic of China and Latin America and the Caribbean: Dialogue and cooperation for the new challenges of the global economy, which examines recent trade and investment trends.
According to the report, trade between China and the region is strikingly interindustrial, which means that China exports manufactured goods to the region, while Latin America and the Caribbean exports mainly raw materials. The document states that this reduces the potential for possible Chinese-Latin American business partnerships, and hampers a more effective integration of the region’s countries into the production chains of Asia-Pacific. Only four of the region’s countries (all in South America) posted surpluses in their trade with China in 2011: Brazil, Chile, Venezuela and Peru. In all cases, this was due to sales of a smaller number of commodities.
At the other extreme there is Mexico’s trade deficit with China: while less than two per cent of Mexican exports in 2011 went to China, 15 per cent of Mexico’s imports that year came from China. With this in mind, Wen Jiabao stated that China does not seek to have a trade surplus, but rather that it wishes to have balanced trade with the region by increasing future imports of products with greater added value from Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the country’s premier, China expects the volume of trade with the region to be worth more than US$400 billion in the next five years.
According to Bárcena, “Latin America and the Caribbean’s growing economic and trade ties with China raise opportunities and concerns”, and it was therefore essential to set up an agenda for dialogue and cooperation between the two parties. The opportunities of the relationship with China mentioned by Bárcena included improved terms of trade, higher growth rates and additional resources to invest in education, infrastructure and innovation. The concerns related to the reprimarisation of exports, deindustrialisation, Dutch disease, land access and immigration.
Wen Jiabao proposed deepening the friendship between the peoples of China and Latin America, while promoting mutual respect and peaceful coexistence. He said that, although China had experienced dramatic changes, it was still a developing country and its cooperation policy and feelings of solidarity with Latin American and Caribbean countries remained unchanged. China will definitely continue its path of peaceful development.  Quoting a Chilean saying, he stated that “friends are like stars: they are far away but you know they are there”.

Final Declaration of Caracas unanimously approved by CELAC.

Center of gravity in oil world shifts to Americas.

LOMA LA LATA, Argentina — In a desertlike stretch of scrub grass and red buttes, oil companies are punching holes in the ground in search of what might be one of the biggest recent discoveries in the Americas: enough gas and oil to make a country known for beef and the tango an important energy player.

The environment is challenging, with resources trapped deep in shale rock. But technological breakthroughs coupled with a feverish quest for the next major find are unlocking the door to oil and natural gas riches here and in several other countries in the Americas not traditionally known as energy producers

Graphic

A tectonic shift in oil supply

That is quickly changing the dynamics of energy geopolitics in a way that had been unforeseen just a few years ago.

From Canada to Colombia to Brazil, oil and gas production in the Western Hemisphere is booming, with the United States emerging less dependent on supplies from an unstable Middle East. Central to the new energy equation is the United States itself, which has ramped up production and is now churning out 1.7 million more barrels of oil and liquid fuel per day than in 2005.

“There are new players and drivers in the world,” said Ruben Etcheverry, chief executive of Gas and Oil of Neuquen, a state-owned energy firm that is positioning itself to develop oil and gas fields here in Patagonia. “There is a new geopolitical shift, and those countries that never provided oil and gas can now do so. For the United States, there is a glimmer of the possibility of self-sufficiency.”

Oil produced in Persian Gulf countries — notably Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq — will remain vital to the world’s energy picture. But what was once a seemingly unalterable truth — that American oil production would steadily fall while the United States remained heavily reliant on Middle Eastern supplies — is being turned on its head.

Since 2006, exports to the United States have fallen from all but one major member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the net decline adding up to nearly 1.8 million barrels a day. Canada, Brazil and Colombia have increased exports to the United States by 700,000 barrels daily in that time and now provide nearly 3.4 million barrels a day.

Six Persian Gulf suppliers provide just 22 percent of all U.S. imports, the nonpartisan U.S. Energy Information Administration said this month. The United States’ neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, meanwhile, provide more than half — a figure that has held steady for years because, as production has fallen in the oil powers of Venezuela and Mexico, it has gone up elsewhere.

Production has risen strikingly fast in places such as the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and the “tight” rock formations of North Dakota and Texas — basins with resources so hard to refine or reach that they were not considered economically viable until recently. Oil is gushing in once-dangerous regions of Colombia and far off the coast of Brazil, under thick salt beds thousands of feet below the surface.

A host of new discoveries or rosy prospects for large deposits also has energy companies drilling in the Chukchi Sea inside the Arctic Circle, deep in the Amazon, along a potentially huge field off South America’s northeast shoulder, and in the roiling waters around the Falkland Islands.

“A range of big possibilities for oil are opening up,” said Juan Carlos Montiel, as he directed a team from the state-controlled company YPF to drill while a whipping wind brought an autumn chill to the potentially lucrative fields here outside Añelo. “With the exploration that is being carried out, I think we will really increase the production of gas and oil.”

Because oil is a widely traded commodity, analysts say the upsurge in production in the Americas does not mean the United States will be immune to price shocks. If Iran were to close off the Strait of Hormuz, stopping tanker traffic from Middle East suppliers, a price shock wave would be felt worldwide.

But the new dynamics for the United States — an increasingly intertwined energy relationship with Canada and more reliance on Brazil — mean U.S. energy supplies are more assured than before, even if oil from an important Persian Gulf supplier is temporarily halted.

The fracking ‘revolution’

Perhaps the biggest development in the worldwide realignment is how the United States went from importing 60 percent of its liquid fuels in 2005 to 45 percent last year. The economic downturn in the United States, improvements in automobile efficiency and an increasing reliance on biofuels all played a role.

But a major driver has been the use of hydraulic fracturing. By blasting water, chemicals and tiny artificial beads at high pressure into tight rock formations to make them porous, workers have increased oil production in North Dakota from a few thousand barrels a day a decade ago to nearly half a million barrels today.

Conservative estimates are that oil and natural gas produced through “fracking,” as the process is better known, could amount to 3 million barrels a day by 2020.

“We have a revolution here,” said Larry Goldstein, director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation in New York. “In 47 years in this business, I’ve never seen anything like this. This is the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane.”

All of this has happened as exports from Mexico and Venezuela have fallen in recent years, a trend analysts attribute to mismanagement and lack of investment at the state-owned oil industries in those countries. Even so, there is a possibility that new governments in Mexico and Venezuela — Mexico elects a new president July 1, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has cancer — could open the energy industry to the private investment and expertise needed to boost production, analysts say.

“There’s a lot of upside potential in Latin America that will boost the oil supply over the medium term,” said RoseAnne Franco, who analyzes exploration and production prospects in the region for the energy consultant Wood Mackenzie. “So it’s very positive.”

Political elements

Much of the exploration, though, will not be easy, cheap or, as in Argentina’s case, free of political pitfalls. Price controls on natural gas and import restrictions have made doing business in Argentina hard for energy companies. And last month, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s populist government stunned oil markets by expropriating YPF, the biggest energy company here, from Spain’s Repsol.

But the prize for energy companies is potentially huge. Repsol estimated this year that a cross section of the vast Dead Cow formation here in Neuquen province could hold nearly 23 billion barrels of gas and oil. That followed a U.S. Energy Information Administration report that said Argentina possibly has the third-largest shale gas resources after China and the United States.

“All the top-of-the-line companies are here,” said Guillermo Coco, energy minister of Neuquen province, including ExxonMobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell. Although only about 200 wells have been drilled, Coco said companies here talk of drilling 10,000 or more in the next 15 years.

Wells on the horizon

On a recent day here in a dusty spot called Loma La Lata, German Perez oversaw a team of 30 technicians from the Houston-based oil- services giant Schlumberger as they prepared to frack a well.

The operation was huge: Trucks lined up with revving generators. Giant containers brimmed with water. Hoses used for firing chemicals into wells littered the ground. Cranes hoisted huge bags of artificial sand into mixers. Then, 1,200-horsepower pumps blasted water, chemicals and sand nearly 9,000 feet into the earth. “This is a hard rock, so we create countless cracks and fissures, for the gas and oil to flow,” Perez said.

Staring at the stark landscape, broken up here and there by oil rigs, Perez said he thought many companies would one day arrive in search of oil and gas. “The projections are pretty good,” he said. “In our case, we have been here a year and a half and we have tripled the equipment we have. And we think we will double that in another year.”

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Jorge Castaneda Gutman, in short Jorge Castaneda, is a Mexican intellectual, an author and politician. He was Mexico’s Foreign Minister 2000-2003 and fought to become a candidate for the presidency in 2006.

Castañeda’s political career began as a member of the Mexican Communist Party but he has since moved to the political center. He served as an advisor to Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas during his failed presidential campaign in 1988, and advised Vicente Fox during his successful presidential campaign in 2000. After winning the election, Fox appointed Castañeda as his Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Following a number of disagreements with other cabinet members he left the post in January 2003 and began traveling around the country, giving lectures and promoting his ideas.

On March 25, 2004, Castañeda officially announced his presidential campaign by means of a prime-time campaign advertisement carried in all major Mexican television stations. Castañeda presented himself as an independent “citizens’ candidate,”  a move contrary to Mexico’s electoral law – that gives registered parties alone the right to nominate candidates for election.

In 2004 Castañeda started to seek Court authorization to run in the country’s 2006 presidential election without the endorsement of any of the registered political parties. In August 2005 the Supreme Court of Mexico ruled against Castañeda’s appeal. The ruling essentially put an end to Castañeda’s bid to run as an independent candidate, however soon after this ruling he took his case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in order to defend his political rights; as of 2008, the case is pending before the IACHR.

He graduated from the Lycée Franco-Mexicain in Mexico City. Then after receiving his B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Economic History from the University of Paris (Panthéon-La Sorbonne) he worked as a professor at several universities, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, New York University, and the University of Cambridge. He was a Bernard Schwartz fellow at The New America Foundation. Castaneda feels comfortable in the company of young intelligent students and seems to enjoy the life in the academe more then anything else. Seeing him and listening to his words he reminds us of the way intellectuals used to debate the world in the glory days of Paris.

Castaneda wrote a highly readable assessment of leftist politics, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (Vintage Books, 1993). The book has had a wide readership in Latin America and elsewhere for its intelligent, sometimes controversial, overview of leftist politics in Latin America, after the fall of the Soviet Union; see History of the Soviet Union (1982–1991). The book provides a reliable historical account of leftist movements in Latin America, often spiked with lively anecdotes. The main theme is a shift from politics based on the Cuban Revolution to broad-based new social movements, from armed revolutions to elections. Another well known work of his is Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, which offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the Argentine Marxist revolutionary.

It is remarkable that  this highly unusual politician was the choice of the Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation for being the 2012 Visiting Professor at the NYU School of Arts and Sciences, and Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University.

New York Senator Jacob Koppel Javits was himself a great Liberal-Republican politician. The man with vision in whose days the party was, thanks to him and his wing of the party, in the center of American politics beholden to all of America’s citizens, and kept the United States open to the world at large. Mr. Javits was Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 21-st District, 1947 – 1954; New York State Attorney General 1955-1957 under Governor W. Averell Harriman – his opponent was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. running as a Democrat; United States Senator from New York, 1957-1981 –  His  opponent was the popular Mayor of New York, Robert F. Wagner.

Javits liked to think of himself as a political descendant of  Theodore Roosevelt‘s  Progressive Republicanism. As attorney general, Javits promoted a liberal agenda, supporting such measures as antibias employment legislation and a health insurance program for state employees. In the Senate Javits was in effect the most outspoken Republican liberal in Congress.  Increasingly concerned about the erosion of congressional authority in foreign affairs, Javits is best remembered for his sponsoring the 1973 War Powers Act, which limited to sixty days a president’s ability to send American armed forces into combat without congressional approval.

Mrs. Javits and two of her three  children, Joshua and Carla (Joy was not there), were present at NYU, along with a room-full of students and candidates for higher degrees, listening to Jorge Castaneda speaking of “BRICs, HUMAN RIGHTS, and the INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ORDER.” The program note that I received from the Foreign Press Club of the US Department of State noted that Jorge Castaneda will deliver the 2012 Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship Lecture – and that “Castaneda contends that a retooled international order would be far more representative of the distribution of power in the world today, but it is not clear whether it would be better.”

The lecture started by Professor Castaneda introducing the term BRICs  - big letters for Brazil, Russia, India and China, and a small “s” for the fact that this was a plural group. He told us that this was an invention in April 2002 – or about exactly ten years ago, by a Golman-Sachs economist who was saying that those four States will become good places for investment.           At start this was thus not a political grouping at all. The economics factor starts with the observation that two of these states hold 2.5 billion people out of the global population of 7 billion, another State, Russia, is a previous well organized State that enters now the global economy anew, and the fourth member, Brazil, is a newly organizes State after the departure of the generals. Urbanization, literacy campaign etc. are fast moving Brazil to its potential in the global economy – this was the new kid on the bloc – as he put it in terms of trade, internal consumption, growing clout etc.

The big “S” in BRICS came in later when the subject became political That is when under UN General-Secretary Kofi Annan, an effort was started first with the Millennium Development Goals, followed fast with efforts to restructure the UN and specifically the UN Security Council.

Theoretically the 5 winners of World War II formed the group of 5 Permanent Members of the SC which granted to themselves the powers of being able to Veto what they do not like.

Castaneda said that the US and the Soviet Union were the winners indeed, and to some extent also the UK, but even then France and China were questionable members of the small list of so called winners in the war itself. Then, to make things worse, China had its internal war and the UN recognized till 1972 the China of Chiang Kai Shek.

As new economic post-war powers evolved, take Japan and Germany, then demands by an India, as large as China, became more vociferous, and we like to add something that Mr. Castaneda did not say – the fact that the original Permanent 5 were the only original nuclear power States was broken by India and Pakistan – led to demands to let in to that club of leaders also India, Germany, Japan and Brazil – that is a group of four pretenders – the new P4. Looking around, that left Africa still out – so, going not just by size of population, as that would have favored Nigeria, but by sympathy for a State that evolved well under global solid attention – here came in the “S” for South Africa.

The only changes in the Security Council were the enlargement from 12 to 15 in order to make place for newly decolonized Nations in Asia and Africa, and the switch of the China seat from Taiwan to Mainland China (With the brake-up of the USSR – similarly the seat at the UNSC was given to Russia – but these are not real changes). Besides of this – the only change that really happened to our BRICs narrative in economic terms – now also political terms – is that the BRICs become BRICS out of which China and Russia are already part of the Permanent five, so that this requires further consideration only for Brazil and  India, the obvious Germany and Japan, and the new addition of South Africa.

Professor Castaneda did not touch the subject of the EU and the open question of three of its members as part of the now – leading ten. But the lecture’s direction was now moving to the inclusion of concepts of Human Rights that go beyond the question of economics.

The questions of equity move from the Security Council to the World Bank and the IMF and considering that the money is with China, India, Brazil,  and hardly with Belgium, here you must consider how it is  that Belgium had higher clout in those institutions then the real money States?

Now – thinking of BRICS also in political and Human Rights terms – will the larger inclusion of these States help the Human Rights / Democracy issues in a fairer global strategy? But besides the Western Definition of Human Rights, we find that Russia, China, even Brazil and others, have their own definition of Human Rights. Yes, India, South Africa, and Brazil are democracies, but will their understanding of Human Rights help in the global context? True enough – nobody has a perfect record on Human Rights, not even the US when you think about Guantanamo – and the President of Brazil Ms. Dilma Rouseff  just mentioned this particular view in her presentation at Harvard.

Latin America and others, are against interventionism. There was experience they had – specially with the United States. Brazil is an exponent of this point of view. South Africa has fought apartheid for 30 years with the help of public opinion abroad and with their own struggle at home.

Other issues with global importance – such as Climate change and Global Warming have to be solved  in a multilateral approach. These new potential members of the global leadership are also not well positioned for cooperation – and Professor Castaneda said that at Copenhagen they were not really cooperative. The same is true for Nuclear non-Proliferation.  The obvious question he put before us was – why is it OK for India and Pakistan to have such weapons and not for Iran? And he told us of Turkey and Brazil having tried to tone down the fears of allowing for a nuclear Iran – this with the obvious conclusion that allowing for more power to these important States is no guarantee that these important global problems will be easier to deal with.

The Indians are easy on Iran because they want the gas that comes through a newly constructed pipe-line.  Then the Responsibility-to-Protect – the R2P – is something that they accept – but only if it is not an excuse for interventionism. The Libyan experience now holds them back from cooperation on Syria. President Rousett said at Harvard that she has respect for Hugo Chavez and does not like intervention. What if military deposes the Chavez faction in Venezuela?

Rousett said that – “yes, I will protect Human Rights but I cannot stop police violence in my country,” quoted Mr. Castaneda. She continued “I cannot defend Guantanamo – but I know that there is something of it in every country.”

But then, in the 1970′s her predecessor and mentor – Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - was in prison and was being tortured – it was all over the world and there were demonstrations that put pressure on the Brazilian generals. It is the international civil society that can influence governments. Yes, Brazil used to say that it owns the Amazonas and can do with them as they please, but now they have to level of with the outside world. Brazil may want to have a missile like other States – this to prove a point that they can do as they please – this will not help non-proliferation – but it is my hope – and that it is this writer saying so - Brazil may find then that there are other areas that they can relent from going overboard in insistence of sovereign rights. India has changed her position in relation to Sri Lanka for example.

President Correa Faces a Challenge from ‘El Hermano Mayor’.

March 16, 2012

This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Ekow Bartels-Kodwo

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador recently emerged as victor in a libel suit that he brought against two journalists from the Ecuadorian paper El Universo at the National Court of Justice in Quito.

He sued the journalists for USD 5 million apiece, and was awarded USD 1 million from each of the defendants, although he later pardoned both editors.  His litigious victory is among the few positive developments for Correa of late, as he faces a number of newly-emerging challenges as Ecuador’s president. In one such instance, he is being forced to defend his decision to award mining contracts in Ecuador’s jungle without first conferring with the directly-affected communities that live on the land. His hasty decision has incited massive protests among Amazonian indigenous communities.

To make matters worse, President Correa is also facing a challenge for his job from none other than his very own brother.

In an interview published on March 13, 2012 in the Uruguayan newspaper El Pais, Fabricio Correa, President Rafael Correa’s older brother, explained his motivations for trying to unseat his own brother.

Speaking from Montevideo, Fabricio Correa lamented the rampant corruption and increasing insecurity due to the activities of drug cartels, while also accusing his brother of clamping down too hard on press freedoms. “We are constantly living in fear [in Ecuador],” he maintained.

Fabricio Correa, is controversial in his own right, he has been in the national spotlight since his relationship with the younger Correa went sour in 2009 following the termination of government contracts awarded to his companies.

More recently, Fabricio came to the attention of the Ecuadorian national media after the president sued the two El Universo journalists. Rafael Correa levied legal action against the two after they in part based new revelations on accounts given by Fabricio.

Certain investigative chapters, later revealed in their book El Gran Hermano, unearthed corrupt deals made by Fabricio’s companies. The piece reiterated Fabricio’s claims that his brother, the president, was well-aware of the corrupt bidding process used in awarding government contracts.

The court case, which was tried before the Ecuadorian National Court of Justice (CNJ) in Quito, led to the brothers accusing and counter-accusing each other of corruption. This cat-and-mouse game of claim and counterclaim culminated in Fabricio Correa submitting the necessary 158,000 signatures and requisite paperwork to make official his candidacy for the presidential election, which is set to take place in 2013.

Unlike the Miliband brothers in the United Kingdom, who are both running for the leadership of the Labour Party in the U.K. with each other’s blessings, the relationship between these two brothers is quite fierce. They are constantly engaged in a highly-publicized war of words with each other; Rafael called his big brother a greedy “big shot,” while Fabricio retorted by accusing his brother of “lacking manliness.”

Until now, the political opposition in Ecuador has been largely disorganized. A number of discussions aiming to unify the country’s biggest opposition factions have proven to be futile, as the deep-seeded ideological divisions continue to thwart attempts at temporary alliances and mergers to run against President Correa. This has created a unique opportunity for Fabricio Correa and his new EQUIPO Party to mount what looks like the only viable challenge to the president, who has governed the country since 2007.

For now, Fabricio Correa has submitted the requisite documents to run for the country’s highest office, but it remains to be seen whether the National Electoral Council can act independent of the president’s influence and confirm the elder Correa’s candidacy for the presidency. Regardless of how things turn out, one thing is clear: the next meeting of the two brothers may not be the pleasant.

GENERAL ASSEMBLY CALLS AGAIN FOR END TO US EMBARGO AGAINST CUBA
The General Assembly today renewed its call, for the 20th consecutive year, for an end to the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States against Cuba for the past half century.
In a resolution adopted by 186 votes in favour to two against (Israel and the US) and three abstentions (Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Palau), the Assembly reiterated its call to all States to refrain from promulgating and applying laws and measures not conforming with their obligations to reaffirm freedom of trade and navigation.
It also urged them to repeal or invalidate such laws and requested the Secretary-General to report on the implementation of the resolution at the Assembly’s next session, which begins in September 2012.
Introducing the text, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Foreign Minister of Cuba, stated that the US has never hidden the fact that the objective of the embargo – which he said has caused more than $975 billion in damage to the Cuban people – is to overthrow his country’s Government.
“What the US Government wants to see changed will not change,” he stated, declaring that the Cuban Government will continue to be “the government of the people, by the people and for the people.
“Our elections shall not be auction sales. There shall not be $4 billion electoral campaigns nor a parliament supported by 13 per cent of voters,” he added.
The US representative, Ronald Godard, said that for yet another year, the Assembly is taking up a resolution designed to confuse and obscure.
“But let there be no confusion about this: the United States, like most Member States, reaffirms its strong commitment to supporting the right and the heartfelt desire of the Cuban people to freely determine their future.
“And let there be no obscuring that the Cuban regime has deprived them of this right for more than half a century,” he stated.
Mr. Godard added that the economic relationship between the US and Cuba is a bilateral issue and is not appropriately a concern of the Assembly.
“The embargo represents just one aspect of US policy towards Cuba whose overarching goal is to encourage a more open environment in Cuba and increased respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, principles to which this Organization is also dedicated,” he said.

to open the UN General Assembly. “It is with personal humility, but with my justified pride as a woman, that I meet this historic moment,” said Rousseff as she opened the general debate. “I share this feeling with over half of the human beings on this planet who, like myself, were born women and who, with tenacity, are occupying the place they deserve in the world. I am certain that this will be the century of women.”   —-    Rousseff can also be found on the cover of this week’s Newsweek, with a profile by Mac Margolis.

—-

l aunched the Open Government Partnership (OGP) while in New York on Tuesday. The OGP’s goal is to give citizens tools to monitor   elected leaders and achieve more transparent governance. Mexico is one of the additional six founding members and other Latin American countries that have pledged to sign on to the partnership are: Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Uruguay.
“This is a smart program for U.S. policy in the hemisphere and a great leadership role for Brazil to play,” reports Bloggings by Boz, who links to commitments and plans from Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.

—-

Colombia, a member of the Security Council, is very important in this because an attempt is being made to negate to the Palestinians a simple majority in the SEcurity Council in order to avoid a US veto.
This attempt revolves around three Member States and Colombia is one of them.  Rather then attending President Obama’s speech to the General Assembly, Mr. Netanyahu  was at that time in a meeting with the President of Colombia promoting such a move.

—-

drilling for oil in the Florida Straits between the Florida Keys and Cuba as early as mid-December. It is estimated Cuba may hold anywhere from 5 billion to 20 billion barrels of oil in offshore reserves.

In a piece for CNN’s Global Public Square program and blog, Fareed Zakaria warns: “Our trade embargo on Cuba not only prevents us from doing business with our neighbor but it also bars us from sending equipment and expertise to help even in a crisis. So, if there is an explosion, we will watch while the waters of the Gulf Coast get polluted.”

We watched that program on Sunday, September 18th and it is crystal clear that the US has now to end the embargo on Cuba. We know that election season in the US has just started – but it seems that moves by President Obama on this issue would be right in place and would improve relations within the Western Hemisphere where all countries now side with Cuba.

 The prime minister of Turkey –  Recep Tayyip Erdo?an - accepted the “Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights” in Tripoli, Libya, on Dec. 1, 2010, for his “distinguished service to humanity.”   … OK – this is the service of Mr. Edogan as judged by Mr. Gaddafi.

In his acceptance speech, Erdo?an said that the award will further encourage him to fight for human rights and that “Islamophobia” is a crime against humanity.

After receiving the award, Erdo?an reported on his meeting with Qaddafi, indicating that ties between the two countries are growing.

The slogan of the “Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights” is “As the sun shines for everyone, freedom is a right for everyone.” Lovely, no, especially at a moment when Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi’s war planes are raining down death and destruction on his own subject people, and when foreign mercenaries are brutalizing the population?

The prize description  of the Al-Gaddafi Prize includes:

The prize is awarded every year to one of the international personalities, bodies or organizations that have distinctively contributed to rendering an outstanding human service and has achieved great actions in defending Human rights, protecting the causes of freedom and supporting peace everywhere in the world. …

The Prize categorically believes that freedom is an indivisible natural right for Man - it is not a gift or grace from anybody, and that safeguarding it is a general human responsibility.

Past recipients of the prize have also included Nelson Mandela (1989), “The Red Indians” (1991), Louis Farrakhan (1996), Fidel Castro (1998), and Hugo Chavez (2004). Will at least Nelson Mandela declare now that the acceptance of that prize was based on misconceptions about the man who funded it?

Is above really incomprehensible if remembering that quite a few countries used to overload the UN with personnel as a convenient way to put their intelligence operatives within the borders of the US? In the days of the cold war these were mainly East-bloc operatives, today they can be various Middle Easterners and even plants from business interests.

The imagination can let you run wild and the host country may love to get more information of what some individuals with UN appointments do in their vastly available extra-time.

–

The US text we picked up says:

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 24 STATE 080163

NOFORN, SIPDIS, E.O. 12958: DECL: 07/31/2034

TAGS: PINR KSPR ECON KPKO KUNR

SUBJECT: (S) REPORTING AND COLLECTION NEEDS: THE UNITED NATIONS   REF: STATE 048489

Classified By: MICHAEL OWENS, ACTING DIR, INR/OPS. REASON: 1.4(C).

1. (S/NF) This cable provides the full text of the new National HUMINT Collection Directive (NHCD) on the United Nations (paragraph 3-end) as well as a request for continued DOS reporting of biographic information relating to the United Nations (paragraph 2).

…Reporting officers should include as much of the following information as possible when they have information relating to… credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information.

…Information about current and future use of communications systems and technologies by officials or organizations, including cellular phone networks, mobile satellite phones, very small aperture terminals (VSAT), trunked and mobile radios, pagers, prepaid calling cards, firewalls, encryption, international connectivity, use of electronic data interchange, Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), Worldwide interoperability for microwave access (Wi-Max), and cable and fiber networks.

===============

Foreign Policy wrote about this:

WikiLeaks reveals vast U.S. information-gathering operation at the U.N.
Posted By Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy,  Sunday, November 28, 2010

The United States and other big powers have spied on the United
Nations as long as it has existed. But WikiLeaks’ disclosure Sunday of
the first batch of a massive trove of internal U.S. diplomatic cables
and directives gives a sense of how voracious America’s appetite for
information at the U.N. has grown.

A sweeping State Department directive — the 2009 National HUMINT
Collection Directive — instructs U.S. diplomats to collect
information on everything from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s
views on the Middle East to the frequent-flyer account numbers of
foreign delegates to the personal relationships between the U.N.
representatives in Iran and North Korea and top officials in those
governments. (HUMINT is shorthand for Human Intelligence Collection).

The directive, which was signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
identifies five top near-term intelligence priorities: Sudan, the
conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Somalia, Iran, and North Korea.
But the State Department also expressed interest in a wide spread of
other issues, from U.N. bureaucratic turf battles and revelations of
U.N. corruption to possible financial links between U.N. staff,
foreign governments, and terrorist organizations to voting practices
of third-world countries in the U.N.’s myriad committees.

Most of the directive’s information requests involve standard
diplomatic reporting about foreign governments’ positions. For
instance, it places a high priority on obtaining information about the
positions of the four other permanent members of the Security Council
– Britain, China, France, and Russia — toward Iran, North Korea, and
the Middle East. The directive urges American diplomats to discern the
“views of members states on the next SYG [Secretary General] race, to
include preferred candidates and candidates lacking U.N. member
support.” That phrase provided the first indication that the United
States is at least considering the possibility that Ban may not be
assured a second term when his first 5-year term expires at the end of
2011.

In most cases, the directive simply seeks to use American diplomats to
gauge international attitudes towards a broad spectrum of U.S. and
U.N. policies. For instance, how does the U.N. community view the role
of the U.S. military in resolving conflicts in Africa? What are the
prospects of China and Russia taking a tougher stance on human rights
in Burma or Zimbabwe? How is international sentiment toward the
International Criminal Court evolving?

But it also flags U.S. suspicions about the intentions of its foreign
counterparts, citing concern that countries like China, France, and
India may seek to “gain influence in Africa via U.N. peace
operations.” (China, for instance, now provides more U.N. peacekeepers
than any other major power). It also voices concern about efforts by
the European Union to secure additional voting rights in the U.N. and
its various agencies, a move that could potentially dilute American
influence.

Carne Ross,  a former British diplomat, said that it’s hardly news
that countries spy on one another at the U.N. “More harmful is the
reality that U.S. cables can be publicized in this devastating
manner,” he told Turtle Bay. “Diplomats may think twice before sharing
confidences with U.S. diplomats — at least until WikiLeaks is
forgotten.”

Perhaps the most surprising detail to emerge so far from the leaks is
the extent to which U.S. diplomats in New York and abroad have been
tasked with activities traditionally associated with intelligence
gathering; i.e., collecting personal or financial information from
their sources.

According to the directive, American diplomats are instructed to
collect detailed biographical information, including business cards,
cell-phone numbers, pagers, faxes, email listings, Internet or
Intranet handles, credit-card and frequent flyer account numbers, and
work schedules. It also calls on U.S. diplomats to collect “biographic
and biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats,” as well
as on diplomats from China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, South
Africa, Sudan, and Syria.

The new revelations were first divulged Sunday as part of a
coordinated disclosure by WikiLeaks of nearly a quarter of a million
sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables by several international news
organizations, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Der
Spiegel, and Le Monde. WikiLeaks released a selection of the actual
documents on its website Sunday afternoon EST.

The State Department cables are suspected of having been passed on to
WikiLeaks by a 22-year-old intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning,
according to the Guardian. Last spring, Manning was charged with
leaking sensitive materials to WikiLeaks, including a video of an
Apache helicopter killing two Reuters employees in 2007. He is facing
court martial.

In a statement, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley denied
American diplomats had been instructed to conduct espionage: “Our
diplomats are just that, diplomats. They represent our country around
the world and engage openly and transparently with representatives of
foreign governments and civil society. Through this process, they
collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what
diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for
hundreds of years.”

A spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations did not respond
to a request for comment. Farhan Haq, a spokesman for the U.N.
secretary-general, said the U.N. was “not in a position to comment on
the authenticity of the document” but noted that the U.N. is “by its
very nature a transparent organization that makes a great deal of
information about its activities available to the public and member
states.” One U.N. official said that the organization had requested an
explanation from the U.S. government on the allegations, but has not
received an answer.

International treaties prohibit spying at the United Nations, but it
is widely practiced by many states. A British intelligence analyst
once revealed that U.S. and British spies listened in on the
conversations of then Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the eve of U.S.
led invasion of Iraq.

“The UN has previously asserted that bugging the secretary general is
illegal,” the Guardian reported, “citing the 1946 UN convention on
privileges and immunities which states: ‘The premises of the United
Nations shall be inviolable. The property and assets of the United
Nations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from
search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of
interference, whether by executive, administrative, judicial or
legislative action.’”

Other U.S. intelligence targets identified in the State Department directive:

*The U.S. solicits information on “plans and intentions” of U.N.
Security Council members, especially the permanent members, in
considering additional sanctions against North Korea. Also calls on
U.S. diplomats to determine North Korea’s position on “WMD-related
issues” at the United Nations.

*The U.S. seeks information on Ban’s “plans and intentions” regarding
Iran, and wants to known whether the secretary-general or any member
states intend to “pressure” the U.S. to take a particular course in
the Middle East peace process.

*Foreign NGOs with influence on a range of issues, including human
rights, globalization, justice and reproductive health. The U.S.
directive voices concern at the capacity of some NGOs to “undermine
U.S. policy initiatives” at the U.N. or to share “confidential”
information with U.N. staff.

*The U.S. seeks information on any possible U.N. plans to expand,
reinforce, or replace the U.N.-backed peacekeeping mission in Somalia.

*The U.S. directive also seeks the views of all key parties, including
Hamas, in influencing the debate on the Middle East at the United
Nations. For instance, it highlights the importance of deciphering the
“views, plans and tactics of Hamas to gain support in the UNSC [U.N.
Security Council] or UNGA [U.N. General Assembly] for its strategies
and positions.”

*The U.S. intelligence community is not only out for itself. The
directive seeks information about possible threats against U.N.
personnel and humanitarian aid workers in Iraq. It also seeks
information on possible financial irregularities in a variety of U.N.
agencies and international funds, including the World Health
Organization and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and
Malaria.

*Solicits information on the views of the Security Council and other
U.N. members toward Cuban, Iranian, and Syrian bids for U.N.
leadership position, presumably in an effort to block them from
succeeding.

We are extremely gratified by the following article I just received as this is about one of the tenets we put forward many years ago: It is Israel’s self interest to be a leader in efforts to decrease the WORLD’S dependence on oil – not just because it improves air quality and helps combating climate change – but it also decreases the funds that are made available to its enemies. In past years, because of US politics being driven by Washington lobbyists for Big Oil, the Israelis kept very low on these topics – seemingly now – because of open disagreements on Middle East policy with the United States – they seemingly feel free to do the right thing and step closer to the leadership position in energy technologies that they are so capable of.

Back in 1959 – then again in 1974 – we suggested Israel develop its oil-shale resource for supply reasons. We got off that track when we moved our interest to biofuels – which we suggested  the Israel Refinery become the global example and start using ethanol as an octane enhancer to replace lead compounds – that would have created an 8 – 15% replacement of the gasoline used in the global market. Some in Israel understood the argument, but others looked to the non-forthcoming US leadership.

Then we trumpeted on www.SustainabiliTank.info technologies being developed by Israeli academic institutions – advances in electric batteries, algae, cellulosics, solar energy, geothermal installations, mini-turbines, the “Better Place” management concept. We spoke with some Israeli politicians and found an echo with the budding Green Party representatives in the Tel Aviv municipality, and some of Israel’s representatives at the UN. Our argument was – “Yes you can” – you can innovate and make technologies available free to the global market – free in the sense that you do not charge patent fees – as the country will get repaid by the decrease in military expenditures. The world’s attention to climate change allows you a leadership position because of your high level of scientific research. The following article shows that things-are-changing and Centers of Diplomacy and Communication – not just Science – are being created in Israel in order to promote these ideas. Would it not be nice to see other countries, i.e. India, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, New Zealand,  join with Israel in promoting these ideas and push as well the UN institutions that deal with sustainable development and climate change?
——–

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The emergence of China as a major oil importer is feeding geopolitical tensions with the United States over the securing of oil supplies. Russia’s oil resources – a significant source of that country’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy – are also of concern to the US, as is the expected depletion of oil resources over the coming decades. The solution to this problem lies in the ending of oil’s monopolistic status by promoting the use of biofuels and electricity for transportation, something in which Israel can assist thanks to its technological lead in electric cars and second-generation biofuels.

More than any other source of energy, oil is at the core of global geopolitical tensions because of its monopoly as an energy source for transportation (land, sea and air). US dependence on oil is not related to power generation. Only 1-2 percent of the electricity used in the US is generated by oil. Similarly, only 4% of the EU’s electricity is produced from oil. Since industrialized economies no longer generate electricity from oil, promoting nuclear power or renewable energy would have no effect on reducing oil dependency. Building more nuclear plants, solar panels and wind farms would only reduce the use of coal and gas in power production. This would have a positive impact on the environment, but virtually no impact on oil consumption. The US is nearly self-reliant for power generation but entirely dependent on imported oil for transportation. In fact, America is more dependent on oil imports today than it was 40 years ago, because of declining domestic production. In 1973, the US imported 35% of its oil consumption, in contrast to 60% in 2007.

The only way to really reduce oil dependency in a country like the United States is to change the energy consumption of engines. There are two realistic alternatives: electricity and biofuels. While hydrogen appears on paper to be a third alternative, it is too impractical and too expensive. Hydrogen is not available in nature in a usable form and must therefore be separated from the materials of which it is an element (such as water, natural gas or coal) in order to be used as a fuel.

Incidentally, Israeli technology is revolutionizing the use of electric transportation and biofuels. Israeli scientist Yitzhak Barzin founded GreenFuel, a company that produces biological fuel from seaweed, in 2002. Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi founded Better Place in 2007, with the purpose of spreading the use of electric cars worldwide.

In January 2008 Better Place signed a partnership agreement with Renault-Nissan to launch a new electric car project. Renault-Nissan is building the vehicles while Better Place is building the electric recharge grid, which will enable its customers to recharge their cars wherever they park. More significantly, battery switching stations will enable drivers to switch their car battery in less time than it would take to fill a gas tank. These stations will be spread out just like gas stations, and switching batteries will not involve any extra cost for the customer since the customer is charged only for kilometrage.

While Israel is among Better Place’s first and leading “trial countries” (the company is also implementing its model in Denmark and Hawaii), the Israeli government has done too little to promote biofuels. By contrast, the EU and US have adopted policies that make the use of biofuels mandatory. The European Commission’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED) requires 10% of fuels in the EU to be composed of biofuels by 2020. Many of the light planes manufactured in Europe now use bio-diesel, both for cost and air quality reasons. The US Air Force is introducing the use of synthetic fuels made from gas derived from coal or biomass. Its target is to use a 50:50 blend of synthetic and traditional jet fuel for half of its aviation requirements by 2016. As for the US Navy, it is testing biofuels in ship turbines. It also recently launched an amphibious assault ship that runs on an electric motor at low speed. The Navy’s ambition is to ultimately develop all-electric ships.

Israel is certainly aware of the need to dethrone the monopolistic status of oil, and it has recently taken initiatives in that regard (such as the launching of the yearly international renewable energy conference in 2007, the establishment of the Institute for Renewable Energy Policy at the IDC in 2008 and the setting-up of a national commission for the replacement of fossil fuels in 2009). In September 2010, the Israeli government decided to invest nearly NIS 200 million over the next ten years in R&D projects aimed at creating alternatives to oil. (The plan also calls for government money to be supplemented by donations from the private sector to the tune of NIS 180 million a year).

To avoid the risky dependency on electric cars exclusively (an electric blackout caused by natural disasters could cripple transportation for entire regions), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), which run on electricity and automatically keep running on liquid fuel (including biofuel) when the electrical charge is used up, are most likely to become the most widespread vehicles in the future. Moreover, replacing gasoline cars with electric cars would only partially reduce the world’s dependency on oil because of the massive use of petroleum by ships and airplanes (both civil and military). Hence, the importance of biofuels.

The controversy over biofuels is too wide and complex to be discussed here. One important remark though is that biofuels do not need to be produced from crops. “Second generation” biofuels are produced from waste, algae and non-food vegetation. One example is cellulosic ethanol. Another example is algae. Algae double their mass in a few hours and produce 30 times as much oil per acre as sunflowers. Most significantly, algae devour carbon dioxide, the primary culprit in global warming. Growing algae like a crop enables the production of biofuel.

It remains an intriguing fact, however, that biofuels are virtually nonexistent in Israel’s transportation landscape. The Israeli government must be more proactive in that regard. By contributing to the breaking of oil’s monopoly over transportation, Israel will not only strengthen its strategic value vis-à-vis the United States and Europe, it might also provide its oil-producing neighbors with a good reason to be more pragmatic.

Dr. Emmanuel Navon is a lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s Abba Eban Graduate Program for Diplomacy Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for International Communication at Bar-Ilan University.

U.S. And Cuba Discuss Alliance To Save Sharks

A team of U.S. scientists and environmentalists met with Cuban officials this week to discuss a proposed alliance, including Mexico, to protect the Gulf of Mexico’s declining shark population.

Opinion: It’s a WikiLeaks World, Get Used to It.

by Jim Harper, Director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute.
Special to AOL News
 www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/o…

(Aug. 5) – No matter where right or wrong lie in the posting of classified military reports on WikiLeaks.org, one lesson should be clear: This is how it’s going to be. Technology will continue to undercut secrecy — not just in the military, but in all large organizations.

Government and corporate leaders who aren’t ahead of this problem may already have trouble on their hands they don’t know about.

When 90,000 pages of documents chronicling the Afghan war went online last week, their potential effects on military planning and security caused the White House to strongly condemn their posting as “irresponsible.” Differing more than slightly, Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald praised WikiLeaks.org as “one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world.”

Culture: Cultural trends are coming into play as well. Military service-members today live in a culture of information sharing that might baffle their senior officers. They expect to be in touch with the outside world during their tours. Their service is long and difficult enough without quarantining them in a communications bubble for protracted periods. Indeed, doing so would undermine military effectiveness by cutting deeply into the morale of young men and women whose stateside lives are “always connected.” This is the generation that knows the value and power of sharing information.

Doubling down on information security is an option, but there are better approaches than to hunker in the secrecy corner.

Information technology is a strong and growing adversary, and it is better to turn its strengths to one’s advantage than to waste resources trying to fight against it.
————————————————–

Pentagon Wants WikiLeaks to Return Classified War Documents.

by Christopher Weber, aol Correspondent
 www.politicsdaily.com/2010/08/05/…

A week after WikiLeaks dumped 92,000 classified military documents online, the Pentagon is ordering the whistle-blower Web site to give them back.

“The Defense Department demands that WikiLeaks return immediately to the U.S. government all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly from the Department of Defense databases or records,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters Thursday.

The Pentagon also ordered WikiLeaks to delete all the documents, most of which relate to military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, from its Web site and records, The Associated Press reported.

Morrell didn’t say what efforts, besides asking firmly, the Defense Department might be able to take to ensure WikiLeaks complies. Right now, Morrell said, the Defense Department hopes WikiLeaks will “do the right thing.”

WikiLeaks has not responded to the Pentagon request.

The Web site posted the reports, mostly raw intelligence reports, July 25, 2010.

Wikileaks is a 3-year-old nonprofit founded by Julian Assange that allows anonymous sources to upload private documents so anyone can read them online.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Extraordinary times in Cuba

Laura Pollan, leader of Las Damas de Blanco, marches along Quinta Avenida in Havana on Sunday.

There has been a flurry of news in Cuba. First came the Cuban government’s decision to release 52 political prisoners over the next three months. Then came the extradition of Francisco Chavez Abarca, a Salvadoran accused of carrying out violent attacks against Cuba.

More news came today when Fidel Castro’s photographer son Alex posted photos showing the former Cuban president visiting a research center in Havana. Alex Castro shot the pictures last week at the National Center for Scientific Investigation in Havana. One news report said Castro used a cell phone camera to take the pictures; I haven’t confirmed that.

Photos by Alex Castro. Source: CubaDebate

News of Fidel Castro’s rare public appearance comes days after the Cuban government said it would free 52 prisoners held since a government crackdown on dissidents in March 2003.
Guillermo Fariñas announced he’d end his 134-day hunger strike after Cuban authorities announced the release. Fariñas is a dissident and independent journalist in the central town of Santa Clara. He began his protest after dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died in February after an 86-day hunger strike.

About Along The Malecón

The Malecón is the famed avenue stretching for more than four miles along Havana’s seawall. People go there every day: Blacks, whites and mulattoes – people of every hue. Young and old, they all go, die-hard revolutionaries and those who are fed up with the revolution. They take in the ocean air, dance and look for romance. They sip rum and stare at the water.

More than a dozen reporters and photographers showed up to cover the Damas’ march on Sunday. The women marched without any interference. A passing motorist yelled something like, “Those people aren’t news.” Another shouted, “Mariconas,” which means lesbians.

The Damas kneeled in front of Santa Rita Church and prayed after finishing their march, then they chanted “Freedom! Freedom!” A few minutes later as they gathered at a nearby park and some of them repeated the chant. A man who was shooting video missed that shot and asked the Damas to repeat it. One prominent member of the group refused, saying that these chants “come from the soul” and aren’t meant to be repeated just because someone asks.

The cameraman asked if, well, the Damas could please be inspired again to feel it “from the soul.” More than a half dozen of the women complied, chanting “Freedom! Freedom!” once again, then told the cameraman that they hoped he was satisfied.

Social Media and Information Technology in Cuba: Recommendations for the Public and Private Sectors.

Empowering the Cuban People through Technology.

In collaboration with the Cuba Study Group & The Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
Welcoming Remarks:

• Christopher Sabatini, Senior Director of Policy, Americas Society/Council of the Americas

Presenters:

• Carlos Saladrigas, Co-Chairman of the Board, Cuba Study Group
  
• Theodore Piccone, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Foreign Policy, the Brookings Institution
• Christopher Sabatini, Senior Director of Policy, Americas Society/Council of the Americas

Discussant:

• Brett Solomon, Executive Director, AccessNow

This event is free of charge and open to the press.

Further event information: Please contact Matthew Aho at maho@as-coa.org or 212-277-8389.
Press inquiry: Please contact Alex Andrews at aandrews@as-coa.org or 212-277-8384.

New report makes policy recommendations for expanding online and IT access in Cuba.

New York, NY, July 15, 2010—The U.S. can help improve access to information in Cuba and lay the groundwork for future long-term economic growth if it relaxes contradictory regulations governing telecommunications investment in Cuba, says a report published today by the Americas Society and Council of the Americas in collaboration with the Brookings Institution and the Cuba Study Group.

Empowering the Cuban People Through Technology: Recommendations for Private and Public Sector Leaders shows how Washington can ease restrictions on the telecom industry, improving the private sector’s ability to invest while helping Cuba close its technology gap.

“Expanding the opportunity for U.S. telecom investors and companies to provide cell phone and Internet service to the island will help ensure that Cuban citizens possess the tools to become productive economic citizens once the shackles of political and economic state control are removed,” concludes the paper, drawing on recommendations from over 50 information technology and telecommunications executives and other experts.”

Access the report online.

Press Inquiries: Contact Alex Andrews at (212) 277-8384 or aandrews@as-coa.org.

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Some of the main points from the presentations:

Before technology was a by-product of economic development, but today it is that technology is a pre-requirement for economic development.

Cuba, because years of embargo,  has one of the most embryonic technologies; we, the US, have technologies and they need it for economic development and the closing of the gap. If the Cuban regime embarks on this we see what we can do. For technology to grow there must be a basic human security.

The US economy could work with Cuba. There are products that can be produced right in the neighboring Cuba. It could become like Hong Kong is to China.

All of the above based on the case of the cellular phone in Cuba. In one year they grew last year from 43,000 to over one million. All this because there was a liberalization by the government. This followed the November 13, 2009 liberalization by the Obama Administration. US law says that what is important to the PEOPLE has been liberalized – this includes cell-phone services. Now they need more efficient energy use and phone cards. It calls for more activity from the private sector.

Most interesting was the comment from the co-chairman of the Cuba Study Group – Mr. Carlos Saladrigas who among other positions is also member of the Hispanic Advisory Board of Pepsi Co., told us that he was on the trip with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when in Krakow she spoke of Freedom and Democracy and said that this has three elements: the Government, Business & Enterprise, Civil Society. He then said that it is the Civil Society that can do it with Cuba – to bring them to deal with their own future and the catch here is technology.

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SEE ALSO FOREIGN POLICY ARTICLE BY CHRISTOPHER SABATINI:
 www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/20…

That is a longer article to the point.

Fidel is back. In a one hour television appearance this week, his first since intestinal surgery four years ago, the 83-year old head of the Cuban Communist party appeared neither hale nor hearty. But neither did he look like El Cid, the Spanish warrior who was so inspiring that even after death his body, strapped to a horse’s saddle, cowed the Saracen hordes.

Mr Castro’s pre-recorded show coincided with Havana’s pledge to release 52 political prisoners, a decision unlinked to reciprocal US action, although it may encourage change. Legislation in Congress, for example, seeks to end the US travel ban, while leaving the broader embargo intact.

Cuba, in fact, has two embargoes. The first Cubans call the “internal embargo”; the thicket of bureaucracy and socialist antipathy to individual enterprise that has ruined the economy. The second is the US embargo. Contrary to common perception, this is not a monolith. It is more like an onion, with multiple layers, although the last one, normalisation of relations, effectively requires regime change.

Some of those layers have already been peeled off. The US is now Cuba’s fifth-largest trade partner, due to cash sales of food and medicine. Despite the travel ban, up to 200,000 US citizens also visit Cuba every year, illegally via Mexico or on direct Miami flights on educational or cultural exchanges. The US president has scope to expand ties further, for example by allowing business travel, as happened in Vietnam prior to ending that embargo in 1994. Travel would put more money into Cuba’s economy – and most likely the regime’s pockets, too. But it would also help ease ordinary Cubans’ plight and remove a scapegoat Havana has used to excuse its many ills.

Cuba has long ceased being a dagger in the heart; it can hardly even be called a thorn in the side. Its ties with Venezuela may worry some. But this relationship is qualitatively different from Cuba’s African or Central American campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. It remains a repressive regime, and yet, while the judgment is fine, the time is right for the US to open up more to Cuba.

Doing so is risky as it may not speed the regime’s end. But any measure that reduces the possibility of Cubans streaming across the Florida Straits in the event of a chaotic transition from the Castro regime is sensible.
Barack Obama has called the current US policy “failed”. Most dissidents agree; and, when their blood is not up, perhaps even most exiles, too.

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The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.

COHA is formulating a series of analyses of the breaking news from Havana that Cuba is in the process of releasing 52 political prisoners.

In immediate response to the latest news from Cuba – COHA released the following report by Staff Member Sara Nawaz.

COHA Staff Memorandum: Cuba Pledges to Release Political Prisoners.

State Department Must Seize Golden Opportunity to Utilize Momentum to Change its Cuban Strategy, and not Duck Behind Shallow Platitudes.

On Wednesday, July 7, Cuba vowed to release fifty-two political prisoners, five immediately and forty-seven in upcoming months. If successfully carried out, this would mean that about one-third of current political detainees on the island will have been released, leaving approximately one hundred still in custody. This is the first large-scale prisoner release by Havana since 1998, when upwards of 100 political prisoners were released following Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba. Spurred on by E.U. pressure, the current release was negotiated by the energized Archbishop of Havana Jaime Ortega, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos, and Cuban president Raúl Castro. The Obama administration, which so far has failed to live up to its campaign rhetoric of broadening ties with Cuba, would be wise to seize this opportunity to warm up its outdated and unproductive Cuban strategy.

Despite promises to shift U.S. policy toward Cuba in the direction of greater flexibility, the Obama administration has so far only managed to reverse some of the more extremist policies implemented by President George W. Bush. While the current administration removed the limit on remittances to Cuba, as well as the cap on travel that prevented Cuban Americans from traveling to the island more than once every three years, its Cuban policies otherwise have been lame, listless, and bereft of imagination. While necessary, these have ultimately been only token steps that have failed to ignite much enthusiasm in Latin America because of their limited nature. Furthermore, despite Obama’s orders for the CIA to close Guantanamo Bay last year, the prison will now remain open for the next two years.

For full article click here

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COHA Previous Releases on Cuba:

• Disparities in U.S. Immigration Policy toward Haiti and Cuba: A Legacy to be Continued?
by COHA Research Associates Alice Barrett & Kelsey Cary

• Travel to Cuba Legislation Mired by Scandal, Fierce Opposition
by COHA Research Fellow Katya Rodriguez and Research Associate Carl Patchen

• Cuba-U.S. Rhetoric Timeline: Hope for a Basic Shift in Policy Disintegrates into Continued Polarization
by COHA Research Associate Katya Rodriguez

• Cuba’s Health Politics: At Home and Abroad
by COHA Senior Research Fellow Julie Feinsilver

• Cuba – Russia Now and Then
by COHA Research Associate Evgenij Haperskij

• No “Common Policy,” as Europe Grapples over its Future ties with Cuba
by COHA Research Associate Evgenij Hapers

• ¿Cambio?The Obama Administration in Latin America: A Dissapointing Year in Retrospective
by COHA Research Fellows Guy Hursthouse and Tomás Ayuso

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Clinton “Encouraged” by Cuba’s Prisoner Accord.

WASHINGTON, Jul 8 (IPS) – In the most positive U.S. statement on developments in Cuba in recent memory, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday said the reported agreement between President Raul Castro and the Cuban Catholic Church regarding the release of 52 political prisoners was “very welcome”. At the same time, independent analysts here said the accord, in which Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos also played a role, should bolster chances that Congress will approve pending legislation that would end the ban on U.S. citizens travelling to Cuba.

“All of this will strengthen the chances of passage (of the bill) by the House of Representatives,” said Geoff Thale, a Cuba specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). “To the extent the (Congressional) debate will be about the human rights situation in Cuba,” he told IPS, “this will provide evidence that the situation is improving and that engagement is more likely to produce results than isolation.”

Indeed, anti-Castro Cuban Americans expressed concern about the possible political implications here of a major prisoner release. “Those who perish in Castro’s dungeons deserve better than to be used as ploys by the Castro apparatus to extract concessions and financial rewards that will enable the regime to extend its stranglehold on the Cuban people,” said Cuban-born Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as the Archdiocese of Havana announced the accord in Havana.

“We must not be fooled. Until all political prisoners are liberated; all political parties, labour unions, independent media are legalised and allowed to operate freely; until the Cuban people are able to exercise their universal rights free of coercion and intimidation, maximum pressure must be exerted on the Cuban tyranny,” she added. Under the accord, which was the lead story in Thursday’s Washington Post, the Castro government will release 52 political prisoners over the next several months. Five of the prisoners are to be released immediately and sent to Spain, while six others are to go to prisons closer to their homes.

The 52 prisoners were among 75 dissidents – 23 of whom have already been released – who were rounded up during a major crackdown in March 2003 and sentenced to as much as 20 years for anti-state or counter-revolutionary activities. It is not yet clear whether any or all of them will be required to leave the country as a condition of their release, although published reports have quoted Spanish government sources as indicating that Madrid will take them in. The State Department said Thursday they would also be “welcome” in the U.S. but that “those released should be free to decide whether to remain in Cuba and those who do leave should be able to return to their country.”

The Havana-based Cuban Commission for Human Rights said the number of political prisoners held in the country’s prisons currently stands at 167, the lowest number since former President Fidel Castro took power in 1959. Release of the 52 would reduce their population by about one-third, according to Elizardo Sanchez, the Commission’s long-time president.

Amnesty International, which uses narrower criteria in determining who qualifies as a “prisoner of conscience”, said the release of the 52 would leave only one such prisoner, Rolando Jimenez Posada, in confinement. Posada, a lawyer who publicly protested the 2003 crackdown, was himself arrested in April of that year and is serving a 12- year sentence for “disrespecting authority and revealing secrets about state security police”.

“We welcome the commitment to release these prisoners, but there is no reason why all 53 prisoners of conscience held in Cuba should not be released immediately, said Susan Lee, director of Amnesty’s Americas Programme. “Forcing them to leave the country would be yet another attempt to suppress freedom of expression and movement in Cuba,” she added.

Key Congressional Committee Votes to Lift Travel Ban.
Jim Lobe*
 ipsterraviva.net/UN/currentNew.as…

WASHINGTON, Jun 30 (IPS) – In a major victory for anti-embargo forces, a key Congressional committee voted here Wednesday to lift restrictions on travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba. If passed by both houses of Congress, the Travel Restriction Reform and Export Enhancement Act will also ease restrictions on U.S. agricultural exports to the Caribbean island that were imposed by former President George W. Bush.

“I am proud to say that today, the House Agriculture Committee took a courageous vote to end the short-sighted and failed policy that limits American agriculture’s access to the Cuban market,” said Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee of the House of Representatives who, along with a Republican colleague, Rep. Jerry Moran, was the bill’s chief sponsor.

“An unprecedented coalition of agriculture, business, religious and social organisations have endorsed (the bill), and today’s vote demonstrates that Congress is ready to change our nation’s approach on this issue,” he added. “We have tried to isolate Cuba for more than 50 years, and it has not worked. As it has in other countries, perhaps increasing trade with Cuba will encourage democratic progress.”

The bill, which was approved on a 25-20 vote that broke mainly along party lines, will now go to the House Democratic leadership which will decide whether to send it to the House floor.

Sources on Capitol Hill told IPS they believe the decision is likely to be affirmative and that a floor vote could take place by the end of July.

If it passes, the bill, entitled “The Travel Restriction Reform and Export Enhancement Act”, would go the Senate where pro-embargo forces – mainly Republicans, but also a handful of anti-Castro Democrats – are in the minority but can resort to a number of procedural moves that could delay or even prevent a vote from taking place.

Still, supporters of lifting the travel ban and facilitating more trade with Cuba were jubilant about Wednesday’s Committee vote, depicting it as a major breakthrough in the decades-long battle to end the 49-year-old embargo.

“A committee that comes from a pro-trade, pro-business, and politically very centrist perspective has now called on Congress to lift the ban on travel,” said Geoffrey Thale, a Cuba specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

“That’s an important political message in itself to the Senate, certainly to President (Barack) Obama, and also to the Cuban government, which last month opened a promising dialogue with the Cuban Catholic Church,” according to Thale, who noted that two political prisoners have recently been released and a number of others have been moved to detention facilities closer to their homes. “This should encourage that dialogue,” he added.

“We commend the House Agriculture Committee for favourably reporting (the bill),” said Jake Colvin, vice president for Global Trade Issues of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), a lobby group representing more than 300 major U.S.- based companies engaged in international business.

“Today’s vote is the first step towards a more rational foreign policy towards Cuba, and one that the business community strongly supports,” he added.

He noted that the NFTC, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Farmers Union, has included the bill on their scorecards for rating lawmakers on their legislative records before the November elections due its importance as the only major trade-related bill on which the House will have voted this year.

That will add to pressure on pro-business incumbents – mostly Republicans – to vote in favour of the bill if and when it reaches the floors of either house.

U.S. farmers have been eager to increase their exports to Cuba since then president Bill Clinton relaxed the embargo in 1999, and Congress followed with its own reform bill the following year. Despite severe conditions imposed on their sale and shipment to Cuba by the Bush administration, however, exports continued to climb during his administration. Since 2000, more than four billion dollars in agricultural goods have been sent to Cuba.

Under the Peterson-Moran bill, the Bush conditions would be substantially eased. Cuban importers, for example, would no longer have to pay for the goods in advance of their actual shipment. In addition, U.S. banks, which were barred by Bush from handling such transactions, may now participate in their financing.

“Prior to the embargo, the United States accounted for nearly 70 percent of Cuba’s international trade. Cuba was the seventh-largest market for U.S. exporters, particularly U.S. farmers and ranchers,” noted Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a letter to lawmakers before Wednesday’s vote.

He cited a March study by Texas A&M University that found that “easing restrictions on agricultural exports and lifting the travel ban, as proposed by (the bill), could result in up to 365 million dollars in additional sales of U.S. goods with a total economic impact of 1.1 billion dollars and create 6,000 new jobs in the United States.”

Like the business sector, the U.S. tourism industry has tried for years to ease the ban on travel. First imposed in 1961, the ban was lifted under President Jimmy Carter, only to be re-imposed by his successor, Ronald Reagan.

Clinton, who sought to encourage “people-to-people” exchanges, eased the ban, only to be reversed by Bush, who also severely limited the frequency of visits that Cuban Americans could make to the island to visit their families.

At various times under Bush, majorities in both houses of Congress approved provisions in larger bills that would have denied funds to the Treasury Department to enforce the travel ban. But each time the administration and anti-Castro lawmakers succeeded in having those provisions deleted before final passage of the underlying bills.

In that respect, the Peterson-Moran bill marks the first- ever “free-standing bill” to end the travel ban, and most political observers believe that majorities in both houses will vote for it if given a chance to do so.

In the upper chamber, however, several influential senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, have opposed lifting the ban and may resort to procedural methods to prevent it from reaching the floor.

Still, anti-embargo forces, who have been disappointed by Obama’s failure so far to take more aggressive steps to ease the embargo, said the Committee’s action gave them hope that Washington’s approach toward Havana was indeed changing.

“The U.S. needs a new Cuba policy, and the Peterson-Moran bill is a decisive change in the right direction,” said Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas.

“By increasing food exports and repealing the travel ban, this legislation will provide more jobs for Americans and Cubans, and move our country from ‘helpless bystander’ to supporting Cubans as they debate and decide the future for themselves.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe//.

Energy Use in the US & Global Agri-Food Systems: Implications for Sustainable Agriculture.

by Shirin Wertime

June 05, 2010

www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/652/1/

Was received from Jan Lundberg of Culture Change <info@culturechange.org>

During the 20th century, access to cheap and abundant sources of energy helped transform the world in countless ways. Extraction of fossil fuels led to a massive expansion in economic growth and agricultural production, and was one of the bases of a six-fold increase in human population. Petroleum, the most sought after fossil fuel, had the largest role in this transformation. Because of its versatility and liquid form, oil is today the world’s primary transportation fuel (Heinberg 1) and leading source of energy (Brown 27).

Less than 200 years ago, however, all of the planet’s food energy was derived from the sun through photosynthesis (Pimentel, Pimentel & Karpenstein-Machan 3) and almost all work was done by human or animal muscle power (Heinberg 2). Practically all of our energy presently comes from non-renewable resources whose stocks are being depleted at an ever-faster rate.

The benefits we derive from oil are so numerous and of such great convenience that we have built our entire way of life around its use.

Now we are entering a period of declining oil supplies and rising prices that threaten not only food security for increasing numbers of people globally, but also many aspects of political and economic stability as well — a new phenomenon for a world that became accustomed to growing supplies of oil and relatively stable prices. Unless we begin quickly to a move away from fossil fuel dependence to a different energy regime and a radical lifestyle and societal change, the transition to a post-petroleum world could be devastating for Americans and people throughout the world. Food, the basis of all life, will be at the forefront of this upheaval.

Agriculture is one of many features of modern life that have been drastically altered by the availability of cheap and abundant oil. The American and most other agri-food systems are almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel energy for everything from food production to transportation to food preparation and storage. The structure of industrialized agriculture under a capitalist system, aided and abetted by government policies, including that of the United States, has spurred the expansion of farm specialization and consolidation, monocultures, the delocalization of agricultural production, and the adoption of industrial farming practices (Altieri 78-9). The technological innovations of the Green Revolution drastically reduced a farmer’s labor input time and greatly increased agricultural yields. Thanks to modern mechanization, the time input necessary to raise a hectare of corn is 110 times less than that required by hand-produced crops (Pimentel 464). Since 1950, the world grain harvest has more than tripled. This growth in productivity resulted from a ten-fold increase in fertilizer use, a near tripling of land irrigation, and the development of high yielding crop varieties (Brown 36-7). Countering the benefits of modern industrialized agriculture is the massive amount of fossil energy needed to power the petroleum-fueled farm machinery and to produce indispensable fertilizers and pesticides. Increases in production notwithstanding, the shift to industrialized agriculture has brought about a host of ecological and social problems in its wake.

The increase in globalized food production, which has come at the expense of local production, is possible only for as long as cheap energy supplies can subsidize the transportation of goods across long distances. The price of food will inevitably climb as oil becomes more and more expensive and drives up the cost of production and transportation. This will disproportionately impact the world’s poor, especially those who depend on food assistance and cheap North American grain. Only by taking steps toward creating a sustainable food system of a radically new kind can we hope to attenuate the looming crisis in agri-food systems in this country and abroad. As Patricia Allen argues, any effort to create a truly sustainable food system must take into account the relationships humans have with each other as well as with their environment, which they have molded and influenced in many significant ways (1). Agricultural dependence on fossil fuels is a man-made problem. It will take not just scientific and ecological solutions but also deep-rooted structural and institutional changes as well as lifestyle changes on the part of individuals, their governments, and societies to transition to a more sustainable, non-petroleum based food system which oil depletion and rising costs will inexorably force on us. Before dealing with the implications of oil depletion and rising costs for the agri-food system and human survival, a closer look at the dominant role oil plays in the agri-food system is in order.

Oil is a finite natural resource whose global rate of production will eventually peak and begin an inevitable decline. According to petroleum geologist Colin Campbell, the peak of oil production is passed when about half of the total resources have been extracted. Richard Heinberg notes that the basic concept of Peak Oil is derived from observations over the past 150 years of all older oil fields which have peaked and then declined in output (12). Indeed, the United States, once the world’s biggest producer of oil, reached its peak of oil extraction in 1970 and has since experienced declining output (Heinberg 12). Today, 90 percent of the United States’ oil deposits have been extracted and the country, once a net exporter of oil, now imports over 65 percent of its oil (Pimentel 459).

Worldwide, the discovery of new oil deposits peaked in the 1960s and since 1981 the amount of oil extracted has surpassed the amount discovered by an increasing margin (Campbell). According to the oil giant ChevronTexaco, 33 of the world’s 48 major oil-producing nations are already experiencing declining production (Heinberg 13). There is uncertainty, however, as to when exactly global oil production will reach its peak. Some experts believe we have already reached Peak Oil while almost all agree that it will occur sometime during the first half of this century.

Although other sources of energy exist, such as nuclear, coal and wind power, none of these can produce liquid fuels. Some have hailed crop-based ethanol as a replacement for petroleum, but the negatives of ethanol production seriously outweigh any potential benefits. In 2007, one-fifth of the United States’ entire grain harvest was transformed into ethanol, but the 8.3 billion gallons of ethanol produced that year could only supply less than 4 percent of the country’s automotive fuel (Brown 39). Moreover, it takes 65 percent more energy to produce 1000 liters of ethanol than the energy that is derived from those 1000 liters. Thus, ethanol production has a negative energy balance (Pimentel et al. 15-6). Diverting a large portion of the U.S. grain harvest to ethanol production has serious ramifications for the world’s poor. Worldwide, grain prices have increased dramatically, with the price of wheat more than doubling in 2007, setting off food riots in countries across the globe that same year (Brown 40). Ethanol production in its current form has no place in sustainable agriculture because it actually presents a net energy loss and because it is pricing food out of reach for the world’s poorest people.

{Pincas Jawetz comment – We have a 30 year old feud with David Pimentel on this particular subject – the energy balances and the place of ethanol in an energy policy – so let us say I disagree with the author and her source of information on above point.}

In 2002, the U.S. food system consumed 17 percent of the country’s total fossil fuel use (Eshel & Martin 2). The availability of seemingly unending fossil fuel resources has led to the highly unsustainable situation whereby “the U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy” (Pfeiffer 4). Much of the food system’s heavy dependence on fossil fuels stems from the capitalist structure under which it operates. United States government policies have also encouraged the expansion of large corporate farms and farm specialization by subsidizing over production and the export of goods to international markets. Although large specialized farm owners benefit from economies of scale, they must in turn increase their use of synthetic chemical inputs and petroleum fueled farm machinery, creating a serious dependence on fossil fuels. The use of synthetic fertilizers accounts for 20 percent of energy use on American farms (Brown 34), and annually one billion pounds of pesticides are applied to farms across the nation (Pimentel 463). The dramatic increase in urbanization over the past century, coupled with a move away from mixed farming systems in favor of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) has deprived farms of natural sources of fertilizer and resulted in the massive expansion of commercial fertilizer use (Pimentel 464). The capitalist system encourages the food system’s unhealthy reliance on fossil fuels because as long as oil is cheap and plentiful, large profits can be made by ensuring the system remains unsustainable.

Farming itself is the least profitable and least energy intensive segment of the entire economy of agriculture. Of the roughly 2,000 liters of oil required per year to feed each American (Pimentel 459), only one-fifth of that energy is actually used for agriculture, with the rest going toward transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and food preparation and storage (Brown 35). The transformation of farm products into consumer commodities, along with the provision of farm inputs, are the biggest moneymakers in the American food system, and not surprisingly, the sectors dominated by large agrifood corporations. Farmers operating under the capitalist system must sell their products on the open market, which usually means selling to the large transnational corporations that dominate the market. Similarly, there are a handful of large companies that produce the fossil fuel-dependent farm inputs purchased by American farmers. Today, farming only accounts for 10 percent of the total food dollar, while 25 percent pays for farm inputs and 65 percent for transportation, processing and marketing (Lewontin 95). A century ago, the value added by farming was closer to 40 percent of the food dollar and most farm inputs were produced by the farmers themselves by using draft animal power, storing seeds, and using animal manure for fertilizer (Lewontin 95).

The dramatic rise in monocultures and the increasingly globalized scale of agricultural production have essentially destroyed the localized food infrastructure in the United States. For example, in 1870 almost all the apples consumed in Iowa were produced locally, but a little over a century later that number had dropped to 15 percent (Pfeiffer 25). In the United States today, less than five percent of food is locally produced (Pfeiffer 68), and so our food travels an average of 1,500 miles before being consumed (Pimentel 467). The transportation of food from farm gate to dinner plate constitutes 14 percent of the energy used in the entire food system (Brown 35). Transporting a head of lettuce from California to New York City by refrigerated truck requires 4,140 kcal of fuel per head of lettuce, while actually growing the head of lettuce consumes only 750 kcal of fossil energy (Pimentel 467-8).

Given that 90 percent of global transportation is fueled by oil or oil by-products (Heinberg 4), declining oil supplies will most likely impede the transportation of produce internationally, and even across the United States. Fresh produce imports from the Southern Hemisphere will likely be one of the first casualties of rising fuel prices. Ultimately, higher transportation costs will be reflected in the price of goods, placing many of the items we enjoy today out of the reach of a majority of people. On the surface, the United States might appear to be food secure, but a cutoff in transportation would lead to serious local shortages of food and other goods.

Oil production will inevitably decline and eventually come to a halt once all accessible oil deposits have been exploited. As this trend intensifies, industrial agriculture in its current form will become impossible. Already, since 1985, fertilizer production worldwide has declined by 23 percent because of fuel shortages and high prices (Pimentel et al. 12). This downward trend will likely continue as petroleum becomes increasingly expensive. Sadly, much of the world’s soil has been so degraded by the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that without the continued use of these synthetic inputs, the land cannot produce yields large enough to feed the world’s population (Heinberg 5). One study has shown that in the United States, soil is being lost at a rate 10 times faster than it can naturally be replaced (Hough). Fossil fuel fed irrigation is leading to water scarcity as countries overpump their underground aquifers to the point of depletion. Irrigation currently accounts for 70 percent of all water use and 19 percent of farm energy use in the United States (Brown 69). Once groundwater sources are largely depleted, the amount of land available for cultivation will diminish substantially.

Another limiting factor of post-peak agricultural production is population growth. Over the past decade the per capita availability of cropland has declined by 20 percent worldwide (Pimentel 461), and still, 78 million people are added to the planet each year. It will prove increasingly difficult to feed the world with diminishing fertile land and water resources.

Ironically, while 862 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, another approximately 1.6 billion people suffer from excessive caloric intake (Brown 107). In the United States, it is usually the most marginalized among us, the poor and minority groups, who experience obesity and a lack of nutritious food in their diets. The sale of processed food, which makes up 82 to 92 percent of food sales, is entirely subsidized by fossil fuels. By exploiting the availability of cheap energy, the agri-food industry has created a situation in which the most processed, energy intensive food is also the cheapest. The average American consumes a diet of 3,747 kcal a day, which is greatly in excess of the FDA recommended intake of 2,000 to 2,5000 kcal per day (Pimentel 459). By simply reducing their caloric intake and consuming less processed food, Americans could greatly reduce the fossil fuel energy used in food production. Of course, in order to be able to start eating healthier, everyone must have access to nutritious foods, which is not the case in the current agri-food system. Another potential energy savings could come from a transition to diets that are lower in meat and dairy consumption and more seasonally based. Currently, one third of the calories in a typical American diet come from animal sources (Pfeiffer 22). A strictly vegetarian diet of equivalent caloric intake, however, consumes 33 percent less fossil fuel energy (Pimentel 459). These are only a few of the simple lifestyle changes that Americans could adopt to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.

On small farms across the country, agricultural techniques are being implemented to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Harking back to the days of pre-industrialized agriculture, some people have advocated a return to the use of draft animals as a replacement for fuel powered farm machinery. In a post-petroleum world, animal and human muscle power could very well be the most accessible forms of agricultural labor power. Although one horse can help manage 25 acres of farmland a year, that one horse in turn requires one acre of pastureland and 1.5 acres of hayland for its maintenance (Pimentel 464). Furthermore, the additional land that would be required to grow food for draft animals is currently being cultivated to produce food for humans. This needed cropland for draft animals will come from that presently reserved for humans.

Nevertheless, an increasing number of farmers across the country are choosing to adopt organic farming techniques. In the organic farming system, the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is replaced by the use of crop rotation and leguminous cover crops, which naturally replenishes nutrients back into the soil. The application of compost and manure produced on the farm can replace the need for synthetic fertilizers to a large degree. Moreover, a shift to minimum and no-till agricultural practices on about two fifths of U.S. cropland has helped reduce direct use of petroleum based fuel on American farms by 3.5 billion gallons from 1973 to 2005 (Brown 34).

Although the knowledge needed to transition to localized, sustainable agriculture exists, the current structure of power relations and resource control in the United States prevents the widespread move away from fossil fuel based agriculture. Those in positions of power within the United States government and in agribusiness have no interest in altering a system from which they greatly benefit. Without a change in the status quo, however, small local and sustainable producers will have a difficult time competing against the fossil fuel subsidized overproduction of agribusiness which finds its way into our grocery stores. The adoption of sustainable agriculture can only be truly transformational if we broaden its scope to focus on the relationship between social, economic and ecological factors within the agri-food system. In order to move away from conventional agriculture, it is necessary to understand why it functions the way it does and who are the winners and losers in the equation. Sustainable agriculture is not just about practicing organic farming techniques, but rather it is a way to address the structural inequalities in the current agri-food system and to guarantee that all people have access to nutritious and affordable food. Although this vision of sustainable agriculture might seem Utopian and unrealistic given the current nature of things, it is the only acceptable way to ensure the wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants.

The fact of the matter is that the present agricultural system cannot be maintained for much longer. Decreasing oil production and rising oil prices will effectively bankrupt the American agri-food system. Without petroleum and all of its benefits, there will be little choice but to revert to a system of local, organic production and consumption. The experience of Cuba with peak oil could possibly serve as a model for a transition to post-peak agricultural production. Cuba, which lost the majority of its oil imports and half of its food imports with the collapse of the USSR, now produces almost all of its food organically (Pfeiffer 56). Urban gardens are an important source of produce, providing over 60 percent of the vegetables consumed by Cubans (Pfeiffer 61). The example of Cuba shows that it is possible to feed an entire nation with organic agriculture, but it also demonstrates the hardships involved in moving away from fossil fuels. In the first few years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the average Cuban’s daily caloric intake decreased by 36 percent and protein consumption by 40 percent, while undernourishment increased by 15 percent (Pfeiffer 57). It must be noted that Cuban government policies played a critical role in helping to ensure that the collapse of industrialized agriculture did not turn catastrophic. There has also been a change in attitude towards farming amongst the Cuban people. Cubans now see farming as an important and profitable endeavor and many families have migrated to rural areas to become farmers or have started urban gardens (Pfeiffer 60).

Peak oil is a real phenomenon with the potential to turn our entire world upside down. Modern industrialized agriculture is headed for disaster and unless we begin immediately to change our patterns of agricultural production and consumption, many people will suffer. At the individual level, a lifestyle change is needed whereby we start to consume local products, rely less on oil-powered modes of transportation, eat lower on the food chain, have fewer children and reconnect with the land by participating in the growing of our own food. Structurally there ought to be a return to localized, small-scale photosynthesis-based, appropriate-tech agricultural production and an end to the domination of economic and power structures that place profit above all else. Broad based culture change will be a necessary component of any successful transition to a post-petroleum world. We can no longer afford to live isolated from one another and from nature. Of course, the rate of oil depletion is an unknown variable, and as Richard Heinberg observes the time interval before peak oil occurs will likely be too short to painlessly adapt to a new energy regime and way of life (3). However, if the United States, which is the world’s top oil consumer, can drastically reduce its use of oil, we might be able to buy time for the world to transition to a post-petroleum era (Brown 45). Clearly, weaning ourselves off of our addiction to oil will not be easy, but the alternative will be much worse.
Shirin Fatemeh Wertime, a 2010 Boren Scholarship winner, wrote this report for a sociology class at College of William and Mary, course # SOCL 440, on 5/11/10. She is the daughter of John Wertime, whose review of Robert Engelman’s book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want appears on Culture Change.

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