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Cuban President Spoke with Solidarity Activists Who Traveled for International Workers’ Day

Editor’s Note: The following Prensa Latina article was originally published in Granma.
HAVANA, MAY 1—The President of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, spoke here today with nearly 300 friends of the island from the United States and accompanying the fight against the blockade.
At the Palace of the Revolution, the participants spoke about their commitment to Cuba, to fight with more force against the inhuman U.S. blockade, to add more young people to this battle, about socialism and the example that the island represents.

During the dialogue, U.S. activist Manolo de los Santos said that the experience of these days in Cuba has been wonderful, because they live the truth of the people, in the midst of the difficult economic times they are going through, detailed the Presidency of the Republic on Twitter.

“We have witnessed the great strength of the Cuban people, how they resist and bring out the best of their creativity,” stressed the co-executive director of The People’s Forum.

Our commitment upon returning, he said, will not only be to raise our voice, but to organize a different political project in the United States, and we will always be by Cuba’s side.

Since April 24, one of the largest delegations to visit the country in decades has been in the Caribbean nation, with the aim of renewing the ties of solidarity between the people of Cuba and the United States despite the aggressive foreign policy of U.S. President Joe Biden.
It is made up of young people who are visiting Cuba for the first time and others with a long history of solidarity and accompaniment towards the Cuban Revolution.

Kenya’s Deadly Land Tussles Make Forest Safer Than Houses

MITHIINI, Kenya—Families in a rural Kenyan village have been risking their lives spending most nights in the bushes with snakes and creeping insects to avoid beatings from a group dubbed “The Society.”
“Nobody will attack you in the bush as they will not know where you are,” said Sarah Kanini, who lives in Mithiini village in Murang’a County in central Kenya. The bushes look like a forest mainly consisting of acacia trees. “But in the house, they will just notice when you’re in and when you’re out. We live like wild animals and that is our life.”
Villagers said a private entity called the Mutidhi Housing Cooperative Society has been trying to evacuate the Mithiini families from land they inherited from their ancestors, who had retrieved it from European settler-colonizers. About 2,200 people have been squatting on this land.
Mithiini families lamented to Toward Freedom they have been attacked while struggling for the land since the 1960s. Making matters worse has been what they call a collaboration between government authorities and the Society. Land struggles between squatters and deed holders have continued unabated since Kenya’s 1963 independence from the British empire.

‘I Fear Sitting In My Own House’
Kanini built a house in the village using an aesthetically pleasing combination of varying soils, but she hasn’t been able to enjoy it.
“Even during the day, I cannot spend the time in the house because these people come without a notice,” Kanini told Toward Freedom, adding she was forced last year to bury her mother during odd hours. “I fear sitting in my own house.”
Villagers said the Society burns down houses, uproot plants and beats people. The perpetrators are said to still enjoy their freedom. Villagers provided the name of a senior police officer named Resbon Wafula, who they say collaborates with the Society. Wafula postponed meeting with Toward Freedom a few times. Eventually, this reporter could not reach him by phone. Meanwhile, when an area administrator realized he was speaking with a reporter, he cut off the phone conversation.
Squatters depend on mangoes as a cash crop. However, this reporter witnessed squatters’ trees have been cut down, and stumps either have been uprooted or killed permanently using special chemicals. Grass inside the squatter’s compound the cattle feed on reportedly have been sprayed with herbicide.
“One woman who was a vendor was preparing herself to go to the market,” Kanini said. “But, unfortunately, the attackers cornered her and burned her alive in her own hut—it was shocking.”
When this reporter reached out to area administrator Simon Kinuthia, he denied the issue, saying all squatter cases are taken seriously. He also said he would not comment because court cases are pending and investigations are being conducted. He directed this reporter to the deputy county commissioner, who did not answer his phone.
“Many people have been killed around here, but no action has been taken just because we’re squatters,” said James Mungai, a squatter and a grassroots representative of Defenders Coalition, a Kenya-based non-governmental organization that supports human-rights defenders, including squatters in Mithiini village. “But we’re wondering, even if we’re squatters, still we’re human beings and our rights have been protected by the law.”
Defenders Coalition Director Kamau Ngugi said the group has been working around the clock to ensure squatters’ human rights. However, he said who has the right to the land has remained unclear.

‘Fake’ Deeds and Court Orders
Villagers said the 7,600 acres remain under the name of a European settler named Tom Frazier, who left the country in 1976, leaving the land to the squatters’ ancestors. Some of their ancestors had lived in parts of the land even before Kenya’s independence in 1963.
For instance, Mungai said his mother died in 2015 at the age of 127, having lived on the land her whole life.
According to squatter Francis Kioko, the Society is using “fake” title deeds and “fake” court orders. The squatters have attempted to verify all of the documents the Society has put forth. They have found no basis for the land claims.
Mate Githua, chairperson of the Society, said the Kenyan government had sold the land to the society in 1964. He said a commission under then-president Daniel Moi provided documents stating the land belonged to the Society. After buying the land, Githua said it remained fallow.
“Some people from different areas of Murang’a and Machakos counties started coming in and later claimed that the land belongs to them,” Githua said.
He said the society began dividing the land among Society members in 1988. In 1999, all members were issued title deeds. As a consequence, he said the Society itself doesn’t own land anymore.
“If there is a land problem, then it is between the squatters and members who are now the owners of the land.”
However, Githua said the Society is awaiting a court order to evacuate all squatters from Mithiini.
He denied sending people to beat squatters, saying he had no reason to do that. He declined to disclose the names of the members, saying the Society is a private entity.
‘Only God Will Salvage Us’
For now, the squatters rely on human-rights groups and the media to air their grievances.
Both formerly European settled areas and community settled areas have been lost in the struggle.
Priscilla Wangoi, a squatter and a grassroots representative of Defenders Coalition, said she has visited the country’s highest agencies, such as the Director of Public Prosecution and the Independent Police Oversight Authority IPOA. She said the community awaits a reply from these offices, while this reporter could not reach anyone at the IPOA.
“Only God will salvage us, we’ve nowhere to go and this is the only place that we know as our home,” Kioko said. “We’ve nobody to complain to and we don’t know what they’re planning for us.”
Shadrack Omuka is a freelance journalist based in Kenya. He writes about human rights, climate change, business and education, among other topics. His work has appeared in several publications around the world, such as Equal Times, Financial Mail, New Internationalist, Earth Island and The Continent, among others.

U.S. Waging ‘Unilateral’ Economic and Tech War to Halt China’s Rise, Washington Insiders Say Openly
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Multipolarista.
The U.S. government has imposed aggressive sanctions that aim to “kneecap” China’s tech sector and halt the country’s rise, Washington policymakers and industry analysts have admitted.
The Joe Biden administration took the extraordinarily aggressive action this month of blocking China from importing most semiconductors, machines to create chips and supercomputer parts.
A former Pentagon official acknowledged that this was a “disproportionate” and “unilateral” attack, amounting to a “form of economic containment.”
He said this in an article in Foreign Policy, the magazine of the D.C. political class, titled “Biden Is Now All-In on Taking Out China.”
Jon Bateman, an ex-analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who served in several important policy roles in the Pentagon, wrote that U.S. officials have “imposed disproportionate measures” and “strong-armed others into compliance.”
Washington’s “mindset all but guarantees a continued march toward broad-based technological decoupling,” he concluded.
Bateman stated that the “increasing boldness of U.S. unilateral actions, and Washington’s open embrace of a quasi-containment strategy” reflect the U.S. government’s new cold war goal: “China’s technological rise will be slowed at any price.”
Today, Bateman is a senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a powerful Washington-based think tank that helps Washington craft policy – with plentiful funding from the U.S. government, its allies, large corporations and banks, and billionaire oligarch family foundations.
Bateman is by no means a pro-China advocate. In April, he published a report for Carnegie called “U.S.-China Technological ‘Decoupling’: A Strategy and Policy Framework.”
In the lengthy document, Bateman “offered a concrete picture of what centrist decoupling might look like and how implementation could work at the agency level.”
Bateman wrote the Foreign Policy article as part of a debate with more hard-line hawks in elite Washington policy-making circles. He warned that their “maximalist” strategy could backfire and hurt the U.S. and its allies, and instead promoted a more cautious, incrementalist approach.
“America’s restrictionists—zero-sum thinkers who urgently want to accelerate technological decoupling—have won the strategy debate inside the Biden administration,” he warned.
“More cautious voices—technocrats and centrists who advocate incremental curbs on select aspects of China’s tech ties—have lost,” Bateman lamented.
He acknowledged that Washington’s new cold war on China has been completely bipartisan, but “Donald Trump’s scattershot regulation and erratic public statements offered little clarity to allies, adversaries, and companies around the world,” whereas “Joe Biden’s actions have been more systematic.”
“The United States has waged low-grade economic warfare against China for at least four years now—firing volley after volley of tariffs, export controls, investment blocks, visa limits, and much more,” he wrote.
Bateman said the Biden administration’s new sanctions, however, “more so than any earlier U.S. action, reveal a single-minded focus on thwarting Chinese capabilities at a broad and fundamental level.”
“Although framed as a national security measure, the primary damage to China will be economic, on a scale well out of proportion to Washington’s cited military and intelligence concerns,” he wrote.
He added, “The U.S. government imposed the new rules after limited consultation with partner countries and companies, proving that its quest to hobble China ranks well above concerns about the diplomatic or economic repercussions.”
Bateman noted that the United States is trying to pressure allies to join its new cold war on China, leading an international campaign to economically isolate Beijing by building a “Chip 4” alliance with South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan – which control the vast majority of the global semiconductor industry.
Bateman’s fears that these aggressive new cold war policies could backfire have already come true. Washington’s rapid attempt to decouple the U.S. economy from China is taking a toll on U.S. universities.
At least 1,400 scientists of Chinese descent have left U.S. research institutions and instead gone to China, according to a report published this October by academics at Harvard, Princeton, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The South China Morning Post reported that the “high number illustrates a ‘chilling effect’ resulting from U.S. government policies deterring research and academic activity by scientists of Chinese descent and suggests American research could suffer.”
The tech press has sounded similar alarm bells about Washington’s bellicose attacks on Beijing.
Electronics industry website EE Times quoted a corporate analyst who said the U.S. “sanctions put a temporary checkmate on China developing their foundry industry at more advanced nodes.”
The website also used cold war rhetoric to refer to the aggressive U.S. policies, writing:
The latest U.S. salvo in the chip war against China will set back its domestic chipmakers by generations, while global suppliers of semiconductors and fab tools will incur billions of dollars in lost sales because of a giant dent in demand out of China, analysts told EE Times.
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has strengthened Cold War measures from longer than 40 years ago. In its new rivalry, the U.S. aims to freeze China’s advancement on a new front: chip technology that is critical for economic development and military superiority.
Wired magazine came to the same conclusion, reporting that the U.S. sanctions aimed to “kneecap” China’s tech industry.
Wired said Washington’s “sweeping new controls are designed to keep [China’s] AI industry stuck in the dark ages while the U.S. and other Western countries advance.”
The tech magazine quoted Gregory Allen, director of the AI governance project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), an influential neoconservative think tank in Washington that is bankrolled by the weapons industry, U.S. government, and Washington’s allies.
Allen summed it up: “The United States is saying to China, ‘AI technology is the future; we and our allies are going there—and you can’t come.’”
Benjamin Norton is founder and editor of Multipolarista.