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Cuba, like every other country on the planet, is struggling with the impact of COVID-19. This small island of 11 million people has created five vaccine candidates and sent its medical workers through the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to heal people around the world. Meanwhile, the United States hardens a cruel and illegal blockade of the island, a medieval siege that has been in place for six decades. In April 2020, seven United Nations special rapporteurs wrote an open letter to the United States government about the blockade. “In the pandemic emergency,” they wrote, “the lack of will of the U.S. government to suspend sanctions may lead to a higher risk of such suffering in Cuba and other countries targeted by its sanctions.” The special rapporteurs noted the “risks to the right to life, health and other critical rights of the most vulnerable sections of the Cuban population.”

On July 12, 2021, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel told a press conference that Cuba is facing serious shortages of food and medicine. “What is the origin of all these issues?” he asked. The answer, he said, “is the blockade.” If the U.S.-imposed blockade ended, many of the great challenges facing Cuba would lift. Of course, there are other challenges, such as the collapse of the crucial tourism sector due to the pandemic. Both problems—the pandemic and the blockade—have increased the challenges for the Cuban people. The pandemic is a problem that people all over the world now face; the U.S.-imposed blockade is a problem unique to Cuba (as well as about 30 other countries struck by unilateral U.S. sanctions).

Origin of the Protests

On July 11, people in several parts of Cuba—such as San Antonio de los Baños—took to the streets to protest the social crisis. Frustration about the lack of goods in shops and an uptick in COVID-19 infections seemed to motivate the protests. President Díaz-Canel said of the people that most of them are “dissatisfied,” but that their dissatisfaction is fueled by “confusion, misunderstandings, lack of information and the desire to express a particular situation.”

On the morning of July 12, U.S. President Joe Biden hastily put out a statement that reeked of hypocrisy. “We stand with the Cuban people,” Biden said, “and their clarion call for freedom.” If the U.S. government actually cared about the Cuban people, then the Biden administration would at the very least withdraw the 243 unilateral coercive measures implemented by the presidency of Donald Trump before he left office in January 2021; Biden—contrary to his own campaign promises—has not started the process to reverse Trump’s designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” On March 9, 2021, Biden’s spokesperson Jen Psaki said, “A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” Rather, the Trump “maximum pressure” policy intended to overthrow the Cuban government remains intact.

The United States has a six-decade history of trying to overthrow the Cuban government, including using assassinations and invasions as policy. In recent years, the U.S. government has increased its financial support of people inside Cuba and in the Cuban émigré community in Miami, Florida; some of this money comes directly from the National Endowment for Democracy and from USAID. Their mandate is to accelerate any dissatisfaction inside Cuba into a political challenge to the Cuban Revolution.

On June 23, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said that the Trump “measures remain very much in place.” They shape the “conduct of the current U.S. administration precisely during the months in which Cuba has experienced the highest infection rates, the highest death toll and a higher economic cost associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.”

 

Costs of the Pandemic

On July 12, Alejandro Gil Fernández, Cuba’s minister of economy and planning, told the press about the expenses of the pandemic. In 2020, he said, the government spent $102 million on reagents, medical equipment, protective equipment and other material; in the first half of 2021, the government spent $82 million on these kinds of materials. This is money that Cuba did not anticipate spending—money that it does not have as a consequence of the collapsed tourism sector.

“We have not spared resources to face COVID-19,” Fernández said. Those with COVID-19 are put in hospitals, where their treatment costs the country $180 per day; if the patient needs intensive care, the cost per day is $550. “No one is charged a penny for their treatment,” Fernández reported.

The socialist government in Cuba shoulders the responsibility of medical care and of social insurance. Despite the severe challenges to the economy, the government guarantees salaries, purchases medicines and distributes food as well as electricity and piped water. That is the reason why the government added $2.4 billion to its already considerable debt overhang. In June, Cuba’s Deputy Prime Minister Ricardo Cabrisas Ruíz met with French Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire to discuss the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. France, which manages Cuba’s debt to the public creditors in the Paris Club, led the effort to ameliorate the debt servicing demands on Havana.

Costs of the Blockade

On June 23, 184 countries in the UN General Assembly voted to end the U.S.-imposed blockade on Cuba. During the discussion over the vote, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Rodríguez reported that between April 2019 and December 2020, the government lost $9.1 billion due to the blockade ($436 million per month). “At current prices,” he said, “the accumulated damages in six decades amount to over $147.8 billion, and against the price of gold, it amounts to over $1.3 trillion.”

If the blockade were to be lifted, Cuba would be able to fix its great financial challenges and use the resources to pivot away from its reliance upon tourism. “We stand with the Cuban people,” says Biden; in Havana, the phrase is heard differently, since it sounds like Biden is saying, “We stand on the Cuban people.”

Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said that those who took to the streets on July 11 “called for foreign intervention and said that the [Cuban] Revolution was falling. They will never enjoy that hope,” he said. In response to those anti-government protests, the streets of Cuba filled with tens of thousands of people who carried Cuban flags and the flags of the Cuban Revolution’s 26th of July Movement. Cruz said, “The people responded and defended the revolution.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Manolo De Los Santos is a researcher and a political activist. For 10 years, he worked in the organization of solidarity and education programs to challenge the United States’ regime of illegal sanctions and blockades. Based out of Cuba for many years, Manolo has worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations. In 2018, he became the founding director of the People’s Forum in New York City, a movement incubator for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. He also collaborates as a researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and is a Globetrotter/Peoples Dispatch fellow.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

The practice of “thengapalli” has helped one forest in India.

Groups of 4 or 5 women have taken turns carrying wooden sticks to guard their community forest against theft and poaching. This practice has helped the once-devastated forest in the state of Odisha to regenerate.

“Nature is the source of identity, culture, language, tradition and livelihood for an Indigenous community and, thus, they have been protecting it,” said Archana Soreng, an Indigenous activist and researcher from Odisha. “Unlike how the contemporary development framework sees nature as a commercial entity.”

A new report more than 20 Asian Indigenous organizations have authored warns Western conservation models governments and organizations worldwide have adopted threaten the rights of Indigenous communities and local people.

This report, “Reconciling Conservation and Global Biodiversity Goals with Community Land Rights in Asia,” comes ahead of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference. To be held next month in Kunming, China, the conference is expected to adopt the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Conservation Framework (GBF), which includes placing under protection 30 percent of the world’s land and water by 2030.

Why Isn’t ‘30 By 30’ Enough?

Posang Dolma Sherpa said such spatial targets are simplistic and do not translate into actual progress.

“For many of the Indigenous peoples and local communities already safeguarding the planet’s natural resources and biodiversity without outside help, the catchphrase ‘30 by 30’ belies the many complex considerations required to ensure truly sustainable conservation,” said Sherpa, executive director of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples and Research and Development (CIPRED), based in Kathmandu, Nepal.

As an example, she explained that in Nepal, generations of Indigenous customary institutions and self-governance systems that contributed to sustainable management of biodiversity and ecosystem were ignored. Instead, new land and forest management processes were superimposed, causing injustices and marginalization that exacerbated the issues that were meant to be rectified.

“When countries gather in Kunming in April to finalize the post-2020 Biodiversity Framework, it is imperative that the draft targets are modified to explicitly recognize human rights-based approaches to conservation on a global scale,” she added.

Sherpa said this can be done by:

1. Changing Target 2 in the framework to include the appropriate territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and their right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC);
2. changing Target 3 to include the appropriate territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities, the equitable governance of these territories and resources, and their appropriate legal recognition within the target;
3. including the “devolution of authority and broad-based alliances with Indigenous peoples and local communities” within the GBF’s enabling conditions, paragraph 17; and
4. ensuring a due diligence mechanism and an accountability process.

Living In Constant Fear of Evictions

A huge gap exists in the recognition and legal status of tenure rights. Between 1.65 billion to 1.87 billion Indigenous peoples and local communities live in important biodiversity conservation areas globally, but legally own only 10 percent of the lands they customarily manage.

Sherpa said for the GBF to achieve its goals for a better and harmonious future, it must support and initiate drastic transformations that facilitate environmental and social justice. “Failing to uphold international standards of human rights or erect due diligence mechanisms to ensure human rights are being implemented will only enable the continuation of the same processes that are destroying the environment and causing human rights violations at the same time.”

Already, several communities have lost access to local, ecological and cultural resources, and have undergone trauma due to eviction. In many areas, their rights are still not recognized. Even when legal rights are afforded, such as India’s 2006 Forest Rights Act, many of these rights are subverted. During the 2020 lockdown, land belonging to tribes in the states of Telangana and Odisha were reportedly grabbed under the pretext of afforestation.

Neither the forest departments of the Indian government nor the Odisha state responded to this reporter, as of press time. The Indian Ministry of Tribal Affairs also did not reply.

Prudhviraj Rupavath, researcher with New Delhi-based data research agency Land Conflict Watch, who contributed to the report, said many Indian states have neglected to implement the Forest Rights Act. “Awaiting legal titles for their cultivating land, indigenous people are constantly living with the fear of evictions.” He added that though Indigenous communities help protect and restore forests, Indian state governments are prioritizing displacing people rather than securing tenure rights.

Aside from being an Indigenous activist and researcher, Soreng is a member of the UN Secretary General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. She said when an Indigenous community is displaced, they lose their identity, culture, language, and traditional knowledge and practices of forest conservation. That makes not only the humans, but the ecosystem, vulnerable to the climate crisis.

Soreng added Indigenous communities have been using twigs to brush teeth, and building dining plates, mats, chairs, and small tables using leaves.

Moving Toward Collective Ownership

The increasing focus on commodity-driven development threatens one-quarter of Indigenous peoples’ land, according to the report.

“Due to a systemic lack of formal legal recognition, the lands customarily occupied and owned by Indigenous peoples and local communities are seen as ‘available’ or property of the government,” said Thomas Worsdell, editor of the report.

In India, several large areas are classified as wastelands although they customarily belong to tribal communities. This opens them to environmentally destructive industries and human rights abuses, he said.

“Examples are the coal sector in India and the fossil fuel industry, more broadly, agricultural expansion (e.g., palm oil), mining, renewable energy (hydroelectric dams and wind turbines) and even the carbon offsets market,” Worsdell told Toward Freedom. “These industries are expanding into the lands and territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities who do not have collective ownership.”

These threats on territories are often encouraged and even enabled by the state, he added. In Indonesia, the recent Omnibus bill was enacted to attract business investments, but weakened both environmental and human rights protections.

To prevent these threats, the report states governments should embrace human rights-based strategies, and recognize the land, forest, water, and territorial rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.

Worsdell said supporting Indigenous and local movements is key to creating legal transformations at the national level that support capacity and funds. Capacity in this instance can include trainings, workshops, supporting knowledge sharing, participatory mapping, among other steps to ensure the human rights of Indigenous and local peoples are upheld.

‘Why Have We Lost What Was Ours?’

Indigenous and local community organizations are already providing solutions for human rights-based approaches. They have proposed laws and amendments, created the frameworks for nationally recognized Indigenous institutions and agencies, and are conducting research that proves the environmental benefits of human rights-based conservation.

For example, the Tsumba and Nubriba Indigenous groups in Nepal renewed in 2012 the practice of a Shagya (non-violence) customary institution to protect nature, biodiversity and their cultures. This practice involves the establishment of a committee made up of representatives from 10 villages to ensure no killing, hunting, harvesting of wild honey, forest fires, flesh trading, trapping and sale of animals, and trading of domestic animals take place during various timeframes.

Worsdell said, however, this practice lacks legal recognition, which is often the case in many Asian countries, where the legal climate does not favor human rights-based approaches to conservation.

“Governments must first recognize Indigenous identities, bring an immediate end to criminalizing and killing of Indigenous peoples and local communities defending their lands, and put in place a national accountability and reparation mechanism for past and present human rights violations,” Worsdell explained.

He said Indigenous peoples must have a seat at the decision-making table as leaders instead of as symbolic representations. He added governments must endorse and commit to the ‘Land Rights Standard,’ a set of emerging best practices for recognizing Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ land and resource rights in landscape restoration, management, conservation, climate action, and development projects.

A song created by groups of Indigenous people aptly captures the essence of the report:

“…Nature was taken from Indigenous people again and again, betrayed, they lost their forest wealth. We had knowledge of the forest then, why have we lost the knowledge now. Indigenous people lived with freedom in the forests, today we are oppressed by the ruling class. We used to have everything, Now, why have we lost what was ours…”

Deepa Padmanaban is a Bangalore, India-based freelance journalist, who writes about the environment, conservation and climate change. She can be followed on Twitter at @deepa_padma.

As anger over incoming tax hikes boils over in Kenya, African Stream takes a deep dive into the role the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played in ramming austerity down Africans’ throats. It boils down to neocolonial debt slavery, a system designed to oppress Africans, while oiling the wheels of otherwise faltering Western economies. African Stream’s Kenneth Kaigua breaks down this complex issue.