influenced by Washington to stop listing them as "terrorists." It all goes together if you're up on Latin American relations with the U.S. and its puppet regimes for the last several decades.
    Of course, the U.S. media (which, think about it, has never explained why it was the WTC that was hit on 9/11 '01, except to suggest that two such tall buildings were tempting and that the "terrorists" hate "us" because they're jealous of our "goodness") has its readers and listeners well prepared to assume that Chavez is one of the bad guys, and that in his speech Sunday he was uncharacteristically asking some other bad guys to get on the "free world" bandwagon and be good guys - a truly strange concept if all you read is comic books and U.S. media.
    But Chavez was speaking in the real world that is mainly unheard-of in America, because either AP writers and major U.S. newspaper headline writers in general are unbelievably uninformed or they are willing participants in the hoodwinking of Americans. Take your choice. All the evidence I encountered in Central America in the 80's and 90's suggests the latter.
    After all, the FARC IS a legitimate insurgency, given that Colombia is a fascist country with a huge oppressed population that needs relief from, above all, the U.S. sponsored capitalist system that guarantees even fewer big big winners and an even larger majority of horrible losers south of the Rio Bravo than it does here. The FARC champions the poor and the Colombian poor need champions.
    And Hugo wasn't asking them to stop championing the poor. He said, "At this moment, an armed guerrilla movement is out of place." This moment, another concept unknown or intentionally kept secret by U.S. media, is a reference to the very sudden elections of a bunch of champions of the poor all over Latin America in the context of unprecedented world-wide loss of patience with Washington. At this moment, a communist Colombian journalist's belief that "everything is going the right way" is NOT contradicted, as the AP implies, by an FARC demand for new elections "to oust Colombia's government."
    Hugo is suggesting a new revolutionary strategy for FARC that may work "at this moment." He's not changing his tune, as the AP tries to teach its readers. He's still for the FARC and wants them to assimilate into Colombian society at a time when they may be able to win an election and bring Colombia into line with all the other Latin American countries that Americans are strenuously being taught to "suspect of going Castro's way," because - guess what - champions of the poor have been winning elections in those countries. So "this moment" may be a window of opportunity, and the window may close when Bush is gone and Obama starts saludando nuestros amigos in more subtly insidious Donald Duck/Jose Carioca terms.
    I suspect Hugo already has an understanding with FARC leaders. Good for Hugo. But I disagree with him that "the empire" needs an outlaw FARC as an excuse to threaten Latin Americans. They've never had any trouble making up excuses, and, with the help of AP, the American people have always bought them.


    April 19 2008: Last week, AP and all its outlets certainly seemed to be reporting that Raul Castro had just "decreed" that Cubans could own their homes. Anyway, it seems to have so seemed to the Chronicle head writer who capped the story: "Raul Castro OKs private home titles for Cubans." So I could easily understand the bafflement of my readers who e-mailed me for clarification because they had thought Cubans already owned their homes, which they do. But here's what they had read or been told about by others who'd read it or heard about it:

    AP April 12: Thousands of Cubans will be able to take title to state-owned homes under regulations published Friday - a step that might lay the groundwork for broader housing reform.
    The measure is the first legal decree formally published since Raul Castro succeeded his brother Fidel as president in February. It comes a day after state television said the government also will do away with wage limits, allowing state employees to earn as much they can as an incentive to productivity.
    Together, housing and wage restrictions have been among the things that bother Cubans the most about their socialist system.
    The housing decree spells out rules to let Cubans renting from their state employers keep their apartments or houses after leaving their posts. They could gain title and even pass it on to their children or relatives.
    Thousands of Cubans could take advantage of this move, including military families, sugar workers, construction workers, teachers and doctors.
    Holding on to state housing originally designated for specific workers has been a widespread but usually informal fact of Cuban life. A 1987 law had foreseen transferring such housing to occupants, but the new measure should clarify their legal status.
    "This is like no-man's-land that they are legalizing," said Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a state-trained economist who became a critic of the government. "It gets rid of that insecurity many people had and alleviates bureaucratic pressure."
    By law, Cubans still cannot sell their homes to anyone but the government, though they can swap housing with government approval - a process that can take years to complete.
    Two officials at Cuba's National Housing Institute said the new law is likely the first in a series of housing reforms. Both asked not to be named, because they are not authorized to speak to foreign media. They said "thousands and thousands" of Cubans will be affected, but did not give exact figures.
     Home to 11.2 million people, Cuba has a severe housing shortage. Officials say they need half a million additional homes. Critics say the need is twice that.
    Economic commentator Ariel Terrero said a resolution approved in February but not yet published will remove the salary caps designed to promote social and economic equality.
    "For the first time, it is clearly and precisely stated that a salary does not have a limit, that the roof of a salary depends on productivity," Terrero said.
    The government controls more than 90 percent of the economy, and while the communist system provides most Cubans with free education, health care and heavily subsidized food rations, the average salary is just $19.50 a month.

       My reaction to that was that (1), as for the home-ownership part of the story, AP is letting its readers assume that some probably very specific and relatively minor bureaucratic reform affecting a few Cubans is general and a sign of major reform to come, and (2) an undoubtedly distorted story is being used, like always, as an excuse and a vehicle for some of the innuendos that make up the regular drip-irrigation brain-washing about Cuba that Americans are used to and expect. So I wrote a letter to the Chronicle (which about 50 years of experience told me would be ignored) making those points and promising to get back to them when I clarified what the specific facts were. By that time, I'd gotten e-mails from my own readers asking for clarification, so I assured them that Cubans do own their homes and promised to get back to them, too. Then I went to some sources in Cuba, got some of the facts, and was able to provide the following interpretation both to them and the Chronicle, which I again assumed (correctly) wouldn't print it.

       Translation: It has nothing to do with Fidel's recent retirement, and Raul does not issue decrees, but it may have been Raul who announced that some Cubans living exactly as if they owned them in homes connected to certain industries which had been habitually treated by the bureaucracy as company houses are now being routinely handed their paper titles, thereby simply clarifying that they have the same official home-owner status most Cubans have had since 1959, when rents were routinely transformed into payments - or longer, since a lot of Cubans who didn't abandon ship in '59 have owned their homes since before the revolution.
       Since the bottom-line purpose of the Cuban state is to make life good for Cubans, and, except during the depression of the early 90's, that project has gone slowly forward for half a century, life is always slowly getting better. So, though the AP tries to conjure everything Raul says into the surrender of the revolution (now that his supposedly evil brother is out of the way), it was just routine revolutionary progress when he announced a short time ago that it was time to snip and toss red tape and get rid of entrenched rules and glitches that were only nuisances. The AP colored that story as if it meant the Republican party and big business were surely about to be welcomed, but in fact it meant the bureaucracy was going to be more helpful and less in the way, and the overdue clarifying and equalizing of home-owner paper was an example, since a few Cubans who've changed jobs but couldn't easily move to their new work location can now do so by trading home titles.
       The quote from a dissident in the AP story shown above that "This is like no-man's-land that they are legalizing" is plain and simple nonsense, and the unquoted nearly tearful hope expressed by the AP itself that new title holders "could even pass (their homes) on to their children" is just propaganda, since Article 24 of the Cuban Constitution has clarified that since 1976. The heavy implication in the story that it is about property ownership (more important in America than human rights) should be ignored. In fact, Cubans can't sell their homes precisely because communism isn't about buying and selling, and entrepreneurs can't be permitted to accumulate multiple properties and become landlords.

       Now go back up and re-read the AP story to see how cunningly it's worded.
       So far, I've been unable to connect the story's allusion to "do(ing) away with wage limits" to anything any of my sources report really happening in Cuba, though I'm still trying (and I will get back to you). But I also told the Chronicle for the umpteenth time and am now telling you that (1) most Cubans aren't "bothered...by their socialist system." Few objective sources think so, and my 5-part document on this website, "Cubans Choose Socialism," clarifies why. Furthermore (2), that there are maybe half a million new homes still needed isn't bad; it's just a measurement of how close the long-time goal of the state to put all Cubans into good housing is getting, since the replacement of sub-standard homes, due to tourism revenues is speeding up. Nobody in Cuba is homeless, and what Cuba considers substandard is considered fine in all U.S. client states. (3) The tireless and tiresome claim that Cubans earn dollars (they used to say $8 a month and now they say $19.50) is simply not true. The pesos in a typical 300-400 peso Cuban salary are worth what they buy in Cuba, not how many dollars they buy, and their peso salaries, which actually have about the same buying power as the same number of dollars in America, are only a fraction of the benefits their participation in the system earns them. I direct you again to "Misconceptions about Cuba" on this website for total clarification of that point.

-Glen Roberts