Capitalism turns everything it touches into merchandise, even the risk of death. This is what has happened with hunger strikes.

The Irish nationalists turned voluntary fasting into a weapon of struggle against British domination, an example to which Cuban Communist leader Julio Antonio Mella turned to in his confrontation with the pro-American dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. Mella, of an Irish mother, had assumed as a strong example the mayor of the South Irish city of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, who died in a voluntary fast in 1920, after being condemned to jail for conspiring in favor of independence. But what was once a method of anti-colonialism and of popular and anti-imperialist struggles has become, thanks to imperial control over the media, a fraudulent propaganda tool to, as a humanitarian alibi, damage the image of governments that are not to the liking of the dominators of this world.

Thus, we read that anti-colonialist fighter and fighter for the humble, Mr. Luis Almagro, declaring his support for his colleague, like him a U.S. government employee, who claims to be on hunger strike while Cuban television shows him clandestinely receiving abundant loads of food. Almagro, who knows that his employers are the fathers of State Terrorism all over the planet, speaks about his colleague’s “State Terrorism” of the Cuban government, coincidentally on the eve of the publication of a report by the State Department accusing Cuba of torture and extrajudicial executions without any proof, while he supports those who shoot young Chileans in the eyes and murder social fighters in Colombia with chilling frequency. That this is done by the government whose President was second in command of an executive that kept open a lawless prison in Guantanamo inaugurated remote-controlled assassinations by drones, exercising simultaneously as court and executioner, and whose Secretary of State laughingly expressed “I went, I saw and he died” upon learning of the dismemberment of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is a minor detail, worthy of appearing as a footnote in the Universal Encyclopedia of Infamy.

Weeks before, another “hunger strike” to which the Chargé d’Affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba served as driver and puppeteer, demanded the freedom of someone who proudly proclaims to belong to the “Lone Wolves”, an organization from Miami has financed terrorist acts in Cuba against schools and other social facilities. We now know that those “strikers”, far from endangering their lives, only increased the thickness of their pockets. A contract of one thousand dollars a month for their leader, from the National Democratic Institute, which is run with U.S. federal money by the hawkish Madeleine Albright has also come to public light on Cuban television, but the press, which claims to be free and independent, cannot address the issue. Nor can they refer to the two issues that unite Cubans these days: the demand that the new U.S. administration eliminate the economic blockade along with the more than 240 measures with which the government of Donald Trump tightened it, and the pride in the development of five vaccine candidates against Covid-19.

The construction of a humanitarian alibi to justify a military intervention, loudly demanded by another of the false strikers of last November in Havana has a bitter memory in Mrs. Albright’s administration. It was she, from the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, the Secretary of State who justified, with manipulations and lies, the extensive NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that cost thousands of civilian lives and targeted such criminal targets as hospitals, television plants, and embassies. At the helm of the holy Atlantic alliance was another militant democrat, more precisely a social democrat, the Spaniard Javier Solana, who in his role as Iberian Chancellor was the midwife of a cultural war operation against Cuba by creating and financing, together with the Open Society Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Ford Foundation, the now-defunct magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana

Now, in Cuba, in the name of culture and at the gates of the Ministry of the same name, they have tried to defend contractors of Albright and the “Lone Wolves”, and the “free press” hide the strings on the stage from its readers. It is no coincidence that the heirs of Solana and Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, who under the auspices of Open Society and the Norwegian government of the social democrat Jens Stoltenberg, current Secretary-General of NATO was part of the also defunct “laboratory of ideas” Cuba Possible. With a fleeting commoner articulation, they sought to turn the San Isidro farce into a velvet revolution and give birth to an extemporaneous remake of Carta de Los 77, in the best style of Czechoslovakia, Mrs. Albright’s homeland. However, in this country, humanitarianism is not an alibi. In spite of deficiencies, blockades and challenges, a palpable reality testifies to it: it is in the thousands of Cubans saved from Covid-19 by a lethality rate that is several times lower than that of the country that finances fake hunger strikers, in the thousands of doctors who have traveled to other lands to offer their solidarity work is a scientist who steals hours and hours of rest to defeat the pandemic and the economic war. That war that the fake hunger strikers say does not exist, but – in the name of human rights – they ask that it be intensified even more.

source La Pupila Insomne