From Granma, an Editorial note
(What
follows is Cuba’s reaction to a New York Times editorial published
on Friday, Sept. 12, which appears below.)
Cuba
has not "foolishly rejected" aid from the government of the
United States. What it has done is to reaffirm its inviolable ethic
and moral principles. And it will never accept any conditions.
As
the Foreign Relations Ministry stated on Sept. 6, the only correct
and ethic action, in line with International Law and the almost
unanimous will of the United Nations General Assembly, would be to
totally and definitely eliminate the iron-clad and cruel economic,
commercial and financial blockade applied for almost half a century
against our motherland. Cuba has not asked the United States
government for any giveaways. Simply to allow it to buy.
It
is not possible to accept conditional "humanitarian aid" —
something that is ridiculous considering the terrible impact the
Cuban nation has suffered, devastated by two powerful hurricanes in
one week — from the same government that for 50 years has tried to
exterminate its population through hunger and disease.
Paradoxes
of U.S. policy: the United States Agency for International Aid
(USAID) now offers $100,000 in "humanitarian aid" to the
people of Cuba, while last year it earmarked $45 million from the
U.S. government budget for subversion against the same people.
***********
Help
for Cuba and Haiti
An
editorial by The New York Times
The
devastating string of tropical storms and hurricanes that rushed
through the Caribbean in the last month — Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike
— left hundreds dead and tens of thousands of people hurt and
displaced in Haiti. The country’s crops appear to be destroyed. In
Cuba, Gustav and Ike destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of
homes. A fifth of the population was evacuated to higher ground.
The
scale of devastation calls for an extraordinary assistance effort
that is, so far, not happening. While the United States has offered
some emergency aid to Haiti, it has not done enough for an
impoverished nation that Americans have a moral responsibility to
help. And the Bush administration’s peculiar fixation with an
obsolete trade embargo and deep-pocketed anti-Castro hard-liners in
Miami is standing in the way of dispatching desperately needed
assistance for Cuba.
In
the last week, Washington has announced $10 million in aid for Haiti.
It sent the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge, which carries
helicopters and airplanes, to assist in the relief effort. It is a
good start. But Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,
will need more. Only half the American aid is new money — the rest
is being diverted from less urgently needed programs. And the United
Nations has asked for more than $100 million to help those stricken
by the storm.
Aid
to Cuba is being complicated by outdated cold-war politics. The
United States has, so far, offered only $100,000 in aid, with a
promise of more if Cuba allows an American team in to assess the
damage. Havana has foolishly rejected it. And the United States is
refusing to temporarily ease core aspects of the longstanding trade
embargo to help Cuba deal with the emergency.
The
Treasury Department increased the dollar limit that organizations
authorized to work with Cuban dissidents may send to Cuba. But
Washington is refusing Cuba’s request to buy American construction
materials to rebuild homes and repair the mangled electricity grid.
It won’t allow Cuba to buy American food on credit, and it has, so
far, refused to lift restrictions on the money that Cuban-Americans
may send back to their relatives.
We
believe the embargo against Cuba is about as wrongheaded a policy as
one can devise. It gives credibility to the regime in Havana while
contributing to the misery of ordinary Cubans, all for the sake of
some votes in Florida. But we are not even asking the Bush
administration to lift the embargo forever. The right thing to do to
alleviate the crisis wrought by the storms is to temporarily lift all
the restrictions on private remittances and private aid flows to
Cuba.
