Position paper - CUBA

[Bisera]

Human rights education in post conflict societies, especially in the view of the conflicts in the Caucus

One of the challenges of promoting human rights in post conflict peace building is that the efforts are not always compatible and mutually reinforcing. The human rights task, in post-conflict institution building, aims at guaranteeing that human rights are not violated by the authorities when exercising their powers, whereas the promotion of a human rights culture aims at the sustainability of the protection of human rights within society at large.
The human rights in Cuba are a subject of much debate. Cuba is a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its constitution has a section outlining the "fundamental rights, duties and guarantees" of the Cuban people. However, possessing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a punishable and the regime destroys copies of it. In practice, repression is "is written into Cuban law" according to Human Rights Watch. Human rights education is difficult because human rights are critical by nature. Human rights education elucidates conditions under which human rights are violated. It enables us to measure policies and actions against human rights standards. Human rights education is about education for taking action, is becoming a powerful approach and is going to become a success story. Human rights in the context of post-conflict peace building is a term refers to a wide range of activities that aim at consolidating peace and preventing a relapse into violence. It is a process of conflict transformation that stresses the gradual change from a state of war to a sustainable peace.
The concept of peace building is important for two reasons. Firstly, it is a concept used within the United Nations system. Secondly, peace building is a broader concept than ‘state building’ or ‘international governance’, which often focuses on administration and institution building issues. The international community’s approach tends to be dominated by political, economic, and security structures based on the assumption that conflicts can be solved peacefullyby creating the necessary structures and institutions. The domestic violence, while taking place in all societies, has been observed to be high in post-conflict societies. Large groups of uprooted people, whether they are internally displaced or refugees returning to their home villages may increase social tension, especially in situations where land and property ownership is unclear. Former combatants and unemployed youths gather in cities contributing to the risk of increased social unrest, street violence, and organized crime.

Global financial crisis

It is a crisis that goes far beyond financial and banking aspects and is affecting the real economy in every department. It is affecting the global economy, and goes far beyond the borders of the United States. Other sources of the propagation of the crisis in the periphery include the fall in prices for commodities exported by Latin American and Caribbean countries, with their recessive consequences and higher unemployment. Drastic diminishment in remittances from Latin American and Caribbean emigrate in the developed countries. This crisis coincides with growing awareness of the catastrophic scope of climate change. Why would we now come out of the current crisis in a matter of months, as some Wall Street publicists and ‘gurus’ predict?
If there is any test of their radical incapacity to solve the crisis, it is the response of the world’s stock markets after each announcement or each law passed for a new bailout: invariably, the response of ‘the markets’ is negative. A long period of tug-of-war and negotiations is opening up to define how to get out of the crisis, who will benefit and who will pay the price. Capitalism does not fall without a social force that makes it fall. That social force today is not present in the societies of metropolitan capitalism, including the United States. Today hegemony and domination are clearly in the hands of the USA. It is the only guarantee of the capitalist system on a world scale. If the USA fell, it would produce a domino effect that would cause the collapse of almost all metropolitan forms of capitalism, let alone the consequences in the system’s periphery. If Washington were to see itself threatened by a popular insurgency, they would all rush to its rescue, because it is the last bastion of the system and the only one that, in case of necessity, can help the others. We are in the presence of a crisis that is much more than an economic or financial crisis. It is an overall crisis of a model of civilization that is economically unsustainable; politically unsustainable, without appealing increasingly more to violence against the peoples; environmentally unsustainable, too, given the destruction, in almost all cases irreversible, of the environment; and socially unsustainable, because it degrades the human condition to unimaginable limits, and destroys the very fabric of social life.
The answer to this crisis, therefore, cannot just be economic or financial. The ruling classes will do exactly that: use a vast arsenal of public resources to socialize the losses and set the great oligopolies afloat again. Occupied with defending their most immediate interests, they lack even the vision to conceive of a more comprehensive strategy.