BY JOHN STEELE
TORONTO - Taking their lead from the federal government,
which recently decided to freeze high-level contacts between
Canadian and Cuban government officials, media and sports
commentators across Canada have launched a campaign
encouraging members of the Cuban delegation to the Pan
American Games in Winnipeg to defect and seek refugee status
in Canada.
In the eighth inning of a baseball game between Canada and Cuba August 1, an anti-Cuba protester entered the field with a hand-lettered sign reading "Human Right First." Two Cuban players carrying a Cuban flag took on the trespasser, subduing him with their fists. He was taken away by the police in handcuffs and later released.
In response to this incident, the Cuban delegation issued a statement criticizing lax security arrangements made by Pan Am officials for the delegation, the hostility of the media to the Cubans, and efforts by professional agents - particularly from the major league baseball industry - to get Cuban players to leave Cuba and sign lucrative contracts. "Cuban athletes will not permit anyone or anything to humiliate them...if their dignity is at stake," read the statement. "From now on we will react with full energy to provocations."
Pan Am Games Society chairman Don Mackenzie confirmed that "in the village there has been some breach," as scouts have constantly been driving along the perimeter fence trying to talk to Cubans. He reported some people have been shining lights in windows at 3:00 a.m. The harassment of the Cuban delegation was condemned by the 42 heads of missions representing all the sports delegations at the games.
Speaking to thousands of workers and farmers in Cienfuegos, Cuba, on July 26, Cuban president Fidel Castro devoted a portion of his speech to the Pan American games. July 26 is the anniversary marking the 1953 attack against the Moncada army barracks by the young revolutionaries led by Castro. The attack launched the armed struggle that led to the defeat in 1959 of the armed forces of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship and the taking of power by the revolutionary forces of the July 26 Movement.
Castro sharply condemned the "dishonesty," and "traps and tricks" being used against the Cuban athletes. He charged they were operating in a "hostile environment...on a field that had been turned into enemy ground."
On August 4, Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor, who is a world record setter, was stripped of his gold medals by the Pan Am officials, who claimed he had tested positive for cocaine.
In an interview with Sotomayor published in the August 5 issue of the Cuban daily Granma, the athlete rejected the charges, saying that he had been the victim of a plot, although he did not know how it happened. The leadership of the Cuban delegation issued a statement backing him. We are "convinced of his total innocence" said Dr. Mario Granda, the director of Cuba's Sports Medicine Institute.
Media reports claim that up to eight members of the Cuban delegation have defected.
Ottawa sharpens its hostility
On June 29 the Canadian government announced it was
suspending high-level official contacts with Havana, in the
name of punishing the Cuban government for the conviction and
sentencing to jail in March of four opponents of the
revolution for collaborating with counterrevolutionary
organizations in the United States. During his official visit
to Cuba in April 1998, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien spoke out
in defense of the four, who were facing charges and a trial at
the time, asking Castro to intercede on their behalf.
"After pursuing `constructive engagement' with Cuba for years, Canada has finally recognized that our `engaging' with the island dictatorship has been lopsided," applauded the editors of the Globe and Mail, Canada's main English-language big-business daily. They advised Ottawa "that it is in Canada's power to impede Cuba's desperate attempts to gain international legitimacy. As the host of the general assembly of the Organization of American States next summer in Windsor, and the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, Canada controls the precious invitations to attend these important meetings."
Cuba's new ambassador to Canada, Carlos Fernández de Cossio Domínguez told reporters that the trial and conviction of the four individuals in Cuba "was not a mistake whatsoever. We are very clear that what we did is what we had to do to protect our country, and we are sure that Canada and Canadians can learn to appreciate Cuba through its social and human achievements it's gained and not by the measures it has to take to protect those achievements from foreign hostility," he said.
Decades of hostility to workers' power
"Constructive engagement" is the description Canada's
imperialist rulers give to their foreign policy in relation to
the Cuban revolution. Their aim is to advance their commercial
interests in Cuba and Latin America in competition with the
United States and other imperialist powers, while backing the
decades-long effort of world imperialism led by Washington to
overthrow the Cuban workers' state and once again make Cuba a
profitable place for the exploitation of its toilers.
The ruling rich package their counterrevolutionary policy in Canadian-nationalist anti-Americanism, raising criticism of Washington's more than 40-year-long economic embargo against Cuba. They also disagree with Washington's claim that its embargo legislation applies to Canada.
"We can have different approaches to a common goal, and I do think we have common goal," said U.S. President William Clinton following Chrétien's visit to Cuba last April.
Before the 1959 revolution Canadian banks and insurance companies played a major role in the exploitation of Cuban labor power and the oppression of Cuba as a nation under the imperialist boot.
Over the last four decades trade between Canada and Cuba has expanded significantly. Today, Cuba is Canada's fourth largest trading partner in the Caribbean and Latin America, with bilateral trade topping Can$700 million (US$470 million). A number of Canadian corporations have significant investment in Cuba and tens of thousands of tourists from Canada visit Cuba each year. Canada is also the second biggest foreign market for Cuba, accounting for 11 percent of its exports.
Canada's capitalist rulers try to use their economic ties with Cuba not only to generate profits, but to put pressure on Havana to carry out "reforms" in the direction of the reestablishment of the capitalist market and a bourgeois parliamentary system that would register the end of workers and farmers' power in Cuba. The code words they cynically use to campaign against the revolution and its conquests are defense of "human rights."
In 1997 Canada's foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy stepped up this campaign when he visited Cuba to launch a "human rights" dialogue and to help Cuba build a "civil society."
Ottawa's deepening hostility to Cuba was announced at the same time the Chrétien government, as a NATO member, joined the U.S.-led bombing of the Yugoslav workers' state. This is the first time since the Korean war that Ottawa has taken military action on behalf of imperialism without the cover of a United Nations "peacekeeping" operation. As the world capitalist system becomes more and more unstable the class character of Ottawa's foreign policy in relation to Cuba is becoming clearer. It is the flip side of its austerity and antiunion drive against workers and farmers at home.
Last April Fidel Castro had a fitting answer to Chrétien's call for change in Cuba. "The revolution is the biggest change in history," Castro said, "and we aren't going to give it up."
John Steele is a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in Toronto.