The White House denounced the action in Honduras as “illegal.” But that call requires Washington to cut off all but humanitarian aid and could jeopardize the big Soto Cano base outside Tegucigalpa.
Posts Tagged ‘Fidel Castro’
Tate Liverpool honours Picasso
July 15th, 2009 |
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Picasso’s cold war career as a highly political painter, peace campaigner and tireless fundraiser for leftwing causes will be revealed in an exhibition at Tate Liverpool next spring that will include letters from world leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Ho Chi Minh, as well as a telegram from Fidel Castro congratulating the artist on being awarded the Soviet Union’s international peace prize.
Christoph Grunenberg, the gallery’s director, said the exhibition would explode the myth that Picasso was “a playboy extrovert … more concerned with chasing women than world politics”.
Picasso himself said: “I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt war is in these paintings.”
The exhibition begins in 1944, the year he joined the French communist party. He remained a member until his death in 1973, and Lynda Morris, the curator, said the legend that he was the party’s largest individual donor is probably true.
He rarely gave money, but gave innumerable works to be reproduced as fund raising calendars, Christmas cards, silk scarves or limited edition prints, so many that the Communist journal l’Humanité had a full time staff member working with him on producing them.
She found dozens of boxes of political correspondence in the archives of the Picasso Museum in Paris, showing that he was in constant touch with peace groups, refugee aid schemes and women’s groups, in Europe, north and south America, and Israel. He also supported hospitals and homes in France sheltering refugees from the Spanish civil war.
The exhibition opens with a painting last seen in Britain half a century ago, the 1944 Charnel House, with echoes of his famous Guernica, inspired by the first horrific images from the liberated concentration camps, and newspaper accounts of a Spanish Republic family killed while sheltering in their kitchen.
It will include several versions of his dove drawings, originally modelled on the fan tailed pigeons given him as a present by the painter Henri Matisse.
His doves became symbols recognised across the world of the peace movement, after one was chosen as the emblem of the first international peace congress in Paris in 1949 – the same month he named his daughter Paloma, the Spanish for dove. He produced new versions of the design for posters for each of the later peace congresses including the Sheffield gathering, planned at the height of the Korean war, when Picasso himself was held by immigration for several hours, and which was abandoned after the Labour government of the day refused entry to hundreds of delegates including the American singer Paul Robeson, and the writers Pablo Neruda, and Louis Aragon.
The exhibition will not be seen in London, and builds on the success of the Liverpool gallery’s success with its major Gustav Klimt show, one of the hits of last year’s European Capital of Culture. Lynda Morris said it never occurred to her to approach a gallery in the south – the radical tradition of the north made it the right place for the show.
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Cheney ‘hid plans to kill al-Qaida’
July 13th, 2009 |
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• Ex-CIA officials say foreign leaders were also in dark
• Investigation demanded into post-9/11 strategy
Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.
Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.
The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme.
A former intelligence official said the plan was hatched in the cauldron of the September 11 attacks when officials were pushing various forms of unilateral action and some settled on the Israelis as an example.
“One of the most sensitive areas has been what we do in friendly countries that don’t want to co-operate or maybe we don’t have enough confidence to entrust them with information. If you have an al-Qaida guy wandering around certain bits of the world we might decide that we need to deal with that ourselves, directly, without making a lot of noise,” he said. “There was a plan to deal with that. It was much talked about in the CIA and the military had its own operation.”
Another former senior intelligence official responsible for dealing with al-Qaida said that assassination plans were reined in after similar covert operations by the military were botched and proved to be embarrassing, particularly the killing in Kenya. He did not give details of the operation.
The official said he believes from conversations with serving members of the CIA that the area of real concern in Congress is that the planned operations may also have involved the covert surveillance of American citizens.
There appears to be common agreement among knowledgeable former intelligence officials that the controversy goes beyond the immediate question of assassination and capture of al-Qaida operatives as there have been numerous killings and detentions since the 9/11 attacks.
One former official said that the Bush administration discussed assassinations in the context of a ban introduced in the 1970s that responded to several failed CIA attempts to murder Fidel Castro, and concluded that as the US had declared itself at war with al-Qaida and the Taliban, this ban did not apply.
Peter Bergen, a senior security analyst at the New America Foundation, said that the secret operation must have gone further than that to have created such a backlash in Congress: “If it’s an assassination programme of al-Qaida leaders that is hardly surprising. Clinton had an assassination programme against bin Laden. There have been 27 drone missile strikes against al-Qaida alone this year.”
The CIA has declined to comment and members of Congress who were finally briefed about the issue by the CIA director, Leon Panetta, last month are bound by confidentiality.
Some former intelligence officials and Republicans have attempted to portray the programme as barely getting out of the planning stages but others in the intelligence community have said it is highly unlikely that the CIA would have kept such an operation going for eight years without advancing it.
The evident anger in Congress is fuelling demands for a full blown investigation in to the CIA’s failure to disclose the programme and Cheney’s role in the cover up. The Senate majority whip, Dick Durbin, said the programme could have been illegal: “The executive branch of government should not create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark. To have a massive program that was concealed from the leaders in Congress is not only inappropriate, it could be illegal.”
Anna Eshoo, a senior Democrat on the House of Representatives intelligence committee, is also calling for a probe. “We, by no means, have the full story. We don’t know who gave the order. We don’t know where the money came from. We don’t know all the people who were involved,” she told Politico. “We need a full investigation. My preference is that we hire an attorney to come in and run this, someone that is known for their prosecutorial knowledge as well as their knowledge of this particular area of the law.”
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Havana welcomes Royal Ballet
July 13th, 2009 |
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Visits will be among most high-profile cultural exchanges since Fidel Castro took power in 1959
Cuba has blended diplomacy and art by inviting two flagship western cultural institutions, Britain’s Royal Ballet and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, to perform in Havana.
The visits will be among the most high-profile cultural exchanges with the west since Fidel Castro’s guerrillas seized power in 1959, turning the island into a communist outpost which has outlasted the cold war.
Royal Ballet dancers are due tomorrow to start a five-day programme which the Cuban government has billed as a landmark cultural event. Tickets are sold out and at least three of the performances will be shown on big screens outside the Gran Teatro in central Havana. Officials from the New York Philharmonic visited the city in recent days to investigate performance venues and logistics following an invitation from the culture ministry, a rare opening to a high-profile US institution.
“With these invitations the Cuban leadership is indicating a desire to expand the field of contact with musical and cultural leaders from the US and EU, which may lead to greater diplomatic contact down the road,” said Dan Erikson, author of the Cuba Wars and an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue.
The Obama administration has responded in kind by granting the orchestra an exemption from the draconian US embargo, a four-decade old policy designed to isolate the island. Vice-president Joe Biden said the proposed trip was a “wonderful project”, Zubin Mehta, the orchestra’s president, told the New York Times.
That marked a departure from the Bush-era policy of “squelching” cultural contacts and could presage further relaxations, said Erikson. “There is likely to be a reopening of cultural exchanges as occurred during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Obama will certainly be more open to initiatives with ‘ping-pong’ diplomacy, and we may soon see the administration support basketball diplomacy.”
Cuba, once an international pariah, has been welcomed back into the diplomatic fold by Latin America and has been courted by Chinese, Russian and European governments and corporations, not least because of its offshore oil reserves.
Since succeeding his ailing older brother last year President Raúl Castro has mooted economic reforms and cultural openings to break the Caribbean island’s sense of stagnation. Economic reforms have stalled and renewed austerity mean less fruit, vegetables and electricity for an impoverished population.
But European diplomats in Havana said there was marginally more cultural tolerance. “It’s a bit more relaxed,” said one. Despite the financial crunch arts subsidies still support selected performers and keep opera, cinema and theatre available to almost all. The irony is that Fidel Castro has a tin ear and is one of the few Cubans who cannot sing or dance.
The Royal Ballet’s 150-strong team of dancers and technicians is reportedly the first ballet company to visit Havana since the Bolshoi, emissaries from the government’s Soviet ally, performed almost three decades ago.
The shows, three in the Gran Teatro, two in the Teatro Karl Marx, are part of a tribute to the legendary grand dame of Cuban dance, Alicia Alonso, who at 88 remains head of the National Ballet of Cuba.
Carlos Acosta, Cuba’s globetrotting ballet star, helped broker the visit and will perform alongside his British colleagues. The programme will include Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Wayne McGregor’s Chroma and Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon.
With Havana and Washington both giving the green light the New York Philharmonic said it hoped to accept Cuba’s invitation within weeks after inspecting concert halls and nailing down details such as budgets and equipment storage.
Mehta said there were provisional plans to perform on 31 October and 1 November at the 900-seat Teatro Amadeo Roldan, with the philharmonic’s incoming music director, Alan Gilbert, conducting.
The institution made history last year by performing in Pyongyang, one of the most striking examples of “orchestra diplomacy”.
Relations between the US and North Korea did not then improve – actually they nosedived – but the visit continued a tradition of classical music leaping political barriers.
In 1956 the Boston Symphony Orchestra became the first major US ensemble to visit the Soviet Union during the cold war. The New York Philharmonic, under conductor Leonard Bernstein, followed three years later. London’s Philharmonic Orchestra brought Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak and Haydn to capacity crowds in Mao’s China in 1973.
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