Image is of Cuba’s National People’s Power Assembly.

The most recent geopolitical news around Cuba is the arrival this week of four Russian vessels, including a nuclear submarine - not carrying any nukes, (un)fortunately - to Havana. This will, in Putin’s words, merely be a visit celebrating historical ties and no laws are being broken. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to imagine how American politicians and analysts are taking the news, especially as it comes shortly after Russia promised an “asymmetrical” response to further NATO involvement in Ukraine (notably, officially allowing the use of US weapons such as missiles in Russia, albeit in a small part of Russian territory, near the border).

Meanwhile, China has been increasingly co-operating with Cuba to overcome the economic hardship created by American sanctions. China has recently re-allowed direct flights to Cuba and has recently donated some small photovoltaic plants as part of an initiative to eventually boost the Cuban energy grid by 1000 MW - and any electrical expansion helps as Cuba is plagued by blackouts which last most of the day. Additionally, the EU has made meaningful contributions to Cuba’s energy situation too, with large solar installations. Hopefully, the Belt and Road Initiative will help preserve the Cuban revolution against reactionary forces as the power of US sanctions wanes. The proximity of Cuba to the United States makes this much more challenging than it would be for countries elsewhere, however. Similarly to the situation in Mexico, it seems unlikely that the US’s influence over Cuba will massively diminish for decades to come unless there is a catastrophic internal collapse in the American authoritarian regime.

The Havana Syndrome will continue until American morale declines.

The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Country of the Week is Cuba! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful. Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.

  • 小莱卡English
    4·
    17 days ago

    Well, let’s look at what difference it makes whether China and Saudi Arabia do their oil trade in yen or dollars.

    If you’re doing your oil trade and other foreign trade in dollars, then you have to save up dollars to have the money to pay for the oil. You have to have a U.S. bank account. You have to hold U.S. dollars.

    And that means you take your domestic currency, your domestic yen or whatever the currency is, and buy dollars, buy dollars, and that supports the dollars exchange rate.

    And it provides the United States central bank with the foreign exchange coming in so that it can afford to pay for the military balance of payments costs of keeping military bases all around the yen countries that use the yen or the ruble or other foreign currencies.

    So it makes a very big difference. If Saudi Arabia pays for its oil in Chinese yen, then it’s going to have to save in Chinese yen, and it will have to accumulate yen, which indeed it’s doing in its foreign reserves.

    And China will hold Saudi Arabian currency in its foreign reserves instead of holding the dollar. So there will be a mutual inflow of savings into each other’s currency in order to finance their own savings investment.

    And this inflow will not go into Silicon Valley Bank or Chase Manhattan or other banks to be turned over to the U.S. Treasury as part of its foreign exchange reserves. That’s the difference.

    It seems that you are the one that do not get it, this was written by Michael Hudson himself. Everything is connected, when we talk about the importance of the petrol-dollar, we are not trying to isolate things, it is about seeing all the picture.

    The US famously bombed iraq and lybia precisely for trying to move away from the petro-dollar ffs.

    • Droplet [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      17 days ago

      My question is, what does that have to do with challenging the dominant position of the dollar?

      Hudson was talking about countries bypassing using the dollars for their trade so they cannot be seized by the US banking system like what happened to Russia, Venezuela and Afghanistan.

      Again, you need to read Super Imperialism to understand what Hudson was saying here: the US treasuries are just “sinks” to absorb all the surplus dollars the US had spent overseas. So when the US spent billions and billions of dollars on building military bases overseas (and all the expenditures of the US military overseas), a lot of those dollars entered the world’s economy from US soldiers/military spending their dollars in those regions. The local vendors earned those dollars, then stored it in their banks, and the banks then turned the dollars to the central banks of their own countries. The central banks then use the very same dollars to import stuff in USD (say, purchase oil from Saudi Arabia), and for the remaining surplus, the central banks used to purchased US treasuries, because there is nowhere else to go, effectively completing the circular flow of the US dollar spending -> overseas economy -> back to US treasuries. This allows the US to spend unlimited amount of money overseas to build up their military bases. Similarly, Saudi Arabia also used the USD earnings from oil sale to purchase US treasuries.

      This is what Hudson meant by the foreign exchange paying for US military spending overseas. In the case of “petro dollar”, the only thing that is changed is that China is not actively using returning the dollars they had earned to the US treasuries to “fund US military spending” (in quotation marks because you really have to think of the US treasuries as a “sink”, it doesn’t really need others to “pay” for it since the US government creates its own money).

      Here’s what Michael Hudson said about what I have been saying above, literally linking to the same NC article I just posted:

      KF: So what is happening in terms of the percentages of trades? In terms of these bilateral deals, how much trade has moved away from the USD to these more multilateral currency exchanges?

      MH: Well, even when trade moves into foreign currencies, it’s still related to the U.S. price of goods and services. [So, really, they’re just] using non-U.S. banks and trading in their own currency, but it’s still based on the USD, and USD pricing. Payments in many cases have to be made by using an intermediary or at least a reference point to the USD, so that’s the problem that Asian countries have to face. I think in the last week or so Yves Smith on [naked capitalism] had a whole series of articles3 saying how really difficult it is [for other countries] to have an alternative [transactions currency] to the USD. You can’t simply just bypass it when the basic pricing of so many raw materials [is denominated] in U.S dollars.

      https://michael-hudson.com/2023/01/systemic-sponsors-of-self-interest/

      • 小莱卡English
        2·
        17 days ago

        My question is, what does that have to do with challenging the dominant position of the dollar?

        The sum of these quantitative victories, however small and insignificant you think they are, is what leads to qualitative changes. Dedollarization is a process.