Justice Unbound

Last Saturday, Northwest SDS chapters broke away from the confines of the Oct. 27th End The War March and spread the message of the protest to the Pike Place Market area in downtown Seattle. The aim of the short march was to bring the anti-war message of the march to areas of greater pedestrian presence, such as the Pike Place district near the downtown area. The organizers from AnswerCoalition.org had made arrangements with the city for the larger march, but this confined the message to small streetways on Beacon Hill and in the Chinatown district, clearly out of the way from the majority of pedestrian areas. No arrests were made, and our group felt the actions we took were necessary to affect change and cause a small disruption in the daily lives of urban-dwellers and shoppers. The group chanted, "While you're shopping bombs are dropping" to remind the city that the War in Iraq has not ended after nearly five years, and to urge action to be taken.

Protested spots included Wells Fargo for its involvement and funding the detention of migrant workers and families in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, and Starbucks for its Walmart-style union-busting and salaries which are lower than the cost of living, especially in cities such as New York. Protests at these sites weren't planned, but chanced upon, and the opportunity seized.

Most pedestrians seemed surprised and glad to see SDS marching. Yet there were a small number who gave the group quizzical looks, perhaps misunderstanding the importance of democracy in the streets. To them, I must say that exposing, dramatizing, and creating tension is the very heart of direct action, since this is necessary for growth and change. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create a kind of crisis and foster such a tension that the community and the government--constantly refusing to negotiate or discuss with those whom they represent--are forced to confront the issue. We sought to dramatize the issue in the streets that it could not be ignored. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that his fellow Athenians could rise from the bondage of myths and ignorance to the realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent "gadflies" to create the kind of tension in society that will help us, as Dr. King wrote in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, "Rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood."

The Microeconomics of Fertility

The carrying capacity of the earth is continually increasing, due to technology enhancements and advances in gene selection, such as the Green Revolution of the 1970s. The earth can carry much more people than was thought by Thomas Malthus, who assumed that populations grow at a rapid rate unless checked by limited supplies of food and other subsistence goods. The notion that subsistence goods increase arithmetically and population increases exponentially needs to say something about the increase in the carrying capacity which in turn increases the human populations which are able to scavenge the earth.

Jan van der Veen's work (drawing on other work) shows that population is now increasing at a decreasing rate since the 1985—1990 period. Moreover, there is a 15% probability that in a hundred years population will be less than that of today.

Population growth has some obvious positive impacts on the economy. First of which is the contingent growth in the labor supply, and the even more contingent growth in gross domestic product. Labor supply growth is merely a means to economic growth, which is merely a means to rising standards of living. At each point there are contingencies involved, and we should be doubtful about any “necessary” connections implied in the pro-natalist argument. There is also the argument that each person added to the population has the potential for genius, and that increases in population increases the number of baby-geniuses in the world.

On the other hand there are profound negative macroeconomic consequences of the microeconomic decisions made in the sphere of the family. The economics of the family can for example give rise to environmental degradation problems, strains on public services such as health and education, decreasing savings rates, and various other externalities on, say, negative externalities on other members of the totem or joint family, negative externalities on members of the community, and wage depression due to an overabundance of labor. And to state the obvious, children necessarily consume resources, drawing on the family’s income and societies’ natural capital. These points make clear that the family’s private cost and benefits do not match up with social and natural costs and benefits.

Diagrammatically, this is captured by the fact that the social cost is graphed steeper than the private costs. It may also be possible that there is no difference in costs, yet social and private benefits diverge greatly. The negative impacts of population growth are much more sufficient for negative outcomes than the positive impacts are sufficient for positive outcomes.

The microeconomic theory of fertility is useful here because it asks the question why a family would decide to rear children in the first place. The economics of the family asks what kinds of incentives are involved. After all, the decisions being made are often not based on society’s natural capital, or local wage levels. Family decisions are often made at the microeconomic rather than the macroecnomic level.

These are salient microeconomic behaviors based on things like private prices, tastes and preferences, incomes, and especially the expected marginal benefit from having children and so on. To frame this discussion, children in regions of high-income (correlated with low fertility) often are considered “consumption goods”, whereas in regions with low-income (correlated with high fertility) they are often considered “investment goods”. The difference will be clear in a moment.

We can also ask lots of other interesting economic questions about fertility. Such as whether children are substitute goods or complimentary goods for any other good or activity. Or, dare we ask the striking question of whether children are normal or inferior goods. That question is actually quite relevant, since if a child were an inferior good, it would imply that the family that there are clear substitutes to having children that are available—such as owning a boat or a helicopter if children are consumption goods, or such as viable savings or insurance markets if children are investment goods.

We can use the micro theory to explain the behavior of families in developing countries, where children are seen as an investment good, in the absence of markets for insurance and institutions like social security schemes. The first calculation is, of course, the direct costs of rearing children, i.e. the private costs in this activity, first of which are the costs of food and other subsistence goods. The other sort of costs is, more obviously, the opportunity costs. The family must reach a verdict on the trade-off between, say, raising children or enrolling in community college.

The opportunity costs, however, pervade the decision-making process at every level, even down to the trade-off between sleep and sleeplessness. We can also identify methods of decision-making in relation to certainties about life expectancy. If children are expected to die in infancy, and 15% of infants die within a year in developing countries, the parents may be expected to target children, choosing to wait until the child lives to have another child. If the uncertainty resides in the overall probability that a child will look after the parents in old age, they may be expected to hoard children as an appropriate insurance policy.

It is often assumed that the reason why families in developing countries have so many children is due to the lack of education. This seems to be a blatant myth, and the microeconomic theory spells this out in terms of the rational decision-making that a family goes through. In non-welfare states, families often prefer to invest in children as a form of old-age security and insurance rather than rely on money savings or social security programs that provide these benefits in other societies.

Families will often engage in mutual insurance networks, such as marrying off their children in distant villages, to minimize the risk of flood or disaster and thus of not having anyone provide for them in their old age. This is the problem of missing markets in developing countries, which need to develop in order for strong negatively external micro fertility issues to be mitigated. These can easily be provided in the market -- and developing countries have clear examples in developed countries and access to capital to achieve these ends.

However, there are some problems with the microeconomic theory of utility that I wish to briefly explain. It is arguably too simplistic, although it dispels the simplicity of earlier scholarship. If women do not have reproductive rights in these societies, then arguably there is no basis for the calculation. If decisions are made unequally in the households, then there is going to be some obvious bias that will tend toward having more children than the micro calculations would deem rational. These can also be explained by gender biases and social norms that are not accounted for in the model.

However, this problem is much more a case for a welfare state approach rather than a problem of the market itself. Markets do in fact provide these programs, yet developing countries often lack the infrastructure involved. For example, a functioning legal system is integral to the development of an insurance scheme, in order to validate claims made by injured parties.

Insomnia and Film and Society

Last weekend I participated in Apple's Insomniac Film Festival, where participants are instructed, with the use of props and plot devices, to create a short film in 24 hours. And this prompted me to think about the connection between insomnia and film.

Consider the metaphor that film states are structurally like dreaming states. In film we see a dynamic exchange between values and representations through the official language of universal separation. What we witness when watching a film, or what we are doing when creating a film, is exploring the surfacing and resurfacing of cultural spectacles within our societies. And we notice that the architecture of the dream is like the architecture of the film. Things basically "pop up" in film as they would in a dream, we make dramatic jumps in plot, we reorder sequences, we squeeze time into a picture that we both perceive and real and experience as real for the time being.

I am taking this metaphor to the extreme. It would seem then that when there is no film, there is no sleep. Or perhaps that films are substitutes for sleep. What, then, for the chronic insomniac? Can films be like his insomnia? In some sense, yes, because he is always watching films in the Cartesian theater of the mind, where consciousness "happens". But in another sense, no, if we reject the Cartesian view of the mind. The film of the insomniac would be exactly like his reality. It would be, in effect, a reality television show. Films brought about by insomnia have no potential for fantasy, no potential for metaphor.

This metaphor itself which I am using is apt to explain the various forms of insomnia-induced phenomena in our present spectacle. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, where sleep disorders and insomnia are common, we see films that imitate the state of insomnia, the state of constant application of caffeine, the circadian rhythm of chaos and disorder. The individual insomniac's film is one with no context, no framing device to explain the disorder of the environments in which we, subjects, live. This sugggests that the societies we live in are societies of insomnia. I should say what I mean by this, because it appears I'm creating a new metaphor for modern society. The insomniac society is a feature of societies bent on performativity (as Lyotard would say about modern society) -- it does not mean everyone literally never sleeps. The deprivation is built into the creation of the society itself.

Descartes says in the Meditations on First Philosophy that if he were dreaming, then in some sense, any mathematical truths he happened to think up would still be true. This is the nature of mathematics. While the caffeinated filmmakers who participated in the 24-hour Insomnia Film Festival may share the creativity and imagination that comes with a good night's rest (the night before), the insomnia embedded into our society gives rise to all sorts of new discoveries and creations that would still be true whether we slept or not. This is the nature of human creativity and imagination, and this is what insomnia means for society. In a sense, life for us is presented as immense accumulation of the products of insomnia.

Now, to say something about the future of awake-ness, which is ultimately what the insomniac cannot live without: if we are truly on the verge of a post-human singularity point, perhaps sleep is something that can be mimicked or obtained in some other way. The limits of human creativity and imagination are bound by the sleep cycle. It has been suggested that sleep is more important to mammals than nutrition, in the sense that a Scientific American study found that mammals die quicker from sleep-deprivation than from lack of food energies. If we surpass this barrier with biological technology, allowing us to live in a constant state of awareness and insomnia and restfulness, we have surpassed not only the limitation of the human body but the limitation of the mammalian impulse to, in fact, sleep. And if this analysis is true, then in this vein of understanding, insomnia is a method and a profound feature of transhumanity.

Total Information Awareness

There has been an enormous shift in Anglo-Saxon law. Our criminal legal system is, or used to be, based on warrants from individualized suspicion. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution is based on individualized suspicion and individualized warrants. General warrants were part of the reason for the American Revolution. The King's agent could search a house everywhere, or an entire neighborhood with one warrant. The American colonists said they would not put up with that, they said we'll fight you, and we'll have a tea party about it. The picture below is an engraving of John Wilkes Booth commemorated in his struggle against general warrants and the liberty of the press, in 1768. This is our legal tradition.

And in our tradition there is an idea that there is a sphere of privacy around and individual for the individual's house, his "papers" as it says in the Constitution, which the government cannot breach without meeting a certain level of individualized suspicion. What we have seen in the development of information technology is that the sphere of the individual is getting smaller and smaller. We -- (everyone!) -- is allowed much more access to information and our consoles are ubiquitous. And while the government cannot actually breach the sphere of the individual physically, they are making this much more easy by building an Orwellian apparatus to fix themselves to the information gateways and peer into our online "papers". Our legal tradition has an understanding that this is not aligned with our principles of justice, while positive law regarding the individual's sphere is scarcely articulated nor is it protected. The apparatus can get around the individual's privacy, discover his papers and spy on them without consent, probing the contours of one's daily life through information technology.

These are not isolated incidents of poorly trained FBI agents doing this work. This is a systemic and systematic enterprise of privacy violations. This work is paving the way for a future society in which government have complete and total access to all papers, pictures, genetics, identity, transactions, voIP data, and all other encrypted data. The work of the "dataveillance" system has been set in motion since the 80s, with the development of the enterprises that have been slowly accumulating the technology, the infrastructure, the capital, and the legal privileges to access private data. One of these enterprises is the elite intelligence community at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The FBI is hardly alone in mining the mountains of commercial data now available through the informatics of the apparatus. The Government Accounting Office found 199 data mining projects in more than 50 government agencies. The largest of these programs originated inside the mind of DARPA, the program known as Total Information Awareness. This program was to use predictive data-mining to detect suspicion patterns of terrorist operations. TIA's controversial logo is a seeing-eye in the sky, a big brother-ish symbol. Their thesis was that the set of transactions across space, time, and by some number of people, will create a "unique signature". Total Information Awareness can then use this signature to correlate and scale the potential for terrorist attacks and other threats. Some of their mad-hatter projects include programs like asymmetric wargaming environment clients, which model and predict terrorist behavior by aggregating all sorts of disconnected data; scalable social network analyses, which will most likely soon straddle and penetrate social software and tools like facebook and myspace; programs like Genisys, which enables "ultra-large, all source information repositories" to track terrorist suspects; and humanID (human identification at a distance), which -- like the name -- identifies humans based on biometric data -- and this would no doubt suggest and then require a sweeping panopticon of infrastructure in order for it to develop effectively.

In 2003, TIA changed its name from Total Information Awareness to Terrorist Information Awareness, giving the program another reason and a greater duty to exist given the circumstances. The program was already extensive before 2003, and it seems unlikely that TIA only data-mines for terrorist suspects--its infrastructure is too broad to be used only for that purpose. Under pressure from civil libertarian groups, Congress in 2003 also cut funding for Total Information Awareness. However, there was a "black budget" in which the TIA programs were funded, and these were moved to the National Security Agency (NSA) office in Maryland. There were elements of TIA at DARPA that Congress felt was valuable and decided transition them to another agency within the intelligence community. The fund cuts in 2003 appear not to matter, since the technology explosion has made it inevitable that powerful states and governments will want to use this information and invasive technologies to its advantage and its power. As the motto of the total information contractor, Narus, says "scientia est potentia" -- knowledge is power.

Actually, Cuba owns Guantánamo

The third topic in the United Nations General Assembly, 3rd Committee on Human Rights, will be the use of torture in the War on Terror. Now, in representing Cuba, I have found some interesting positions the Cuban government has taken over the years with respect to not only the use of torture in Guantánamo but also the legality of the territory and how it was annexed by the United States government. At the Model United Nations conference in Washington D.C. next month, I will do what I can to put this topic at the top of the agenda. Cuba's position on Guantánamo has not been given adequate attention by the American media, and to find it I had to do what any good delegate would do, and that is peruse Cuba's Mission the United Nations website, read previous statements at the UN body and uncover the data. Cuba's position is very cogent, as I have found.

The position of Cuba's UN delegates on this matter has, however, dissipated over the last few years. Perhaps they are losing interest, or perhaps have shifted their energies into the Cuban Five campaign, or been hushed or bribed by the US government, but I have preserved the original vigor and outrage of the Cuban government in this position paper, and I intend to speak out in the same manner.

On January 11, 2002, the US transferred the first detainees to the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Five years later, despite widespread international condemnation, hundreds of people of more than 30 nationalities remain there.

Cuba believes the U.S. administration chose Guantánamo as the location for this detention facility in an attempt to hold detainees beyond the reach of U.S. and international law. The legality of the U.S. jurisdiction in Guantánamo Bay has been disputed ever since the U.S. gained control of it in 1901. Cuba maintains that Guantánamo Bay was gained by the United States in violation of the Vienna Convention governing the laws of treaties, and that legally the territory belongs to the Republic of Cuba due to the abusive measures taken by the United States government.

The Platt Amendment in 1901 granted the United States the right to intervene in Cuba, and was imposed upon the text of our 1901 Constitution as a prerequisite for withdrawal of the American troops from the Cuban territory after the Spanish-American War. This has been a clear violation of the Vienna Convention, and Cuba thus calls for its abrogation. In the subsequent Agreement on Coaling and Naval Stations, the right was literally granted to the United States to do “all that is necessary to outfit those places so they can be used exclusively as coaling or naval stations, and for no other purpose.” Yet the United States today uses the territory in violation of its own laws, and in violation of the treaty originally set forth to govern its use.

Twenty-one years after the Agreement on Coaling and Naval Stations, in the spirit of the American “Good Neighbor” policy under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a new Treaty of Relations was subscribed between the Republic of Cuba and the United States of America that abrogated the previous 1903 Treaty, thereby abrogating the Platt Amendment. The new Treaty set out to sustain the American military presence in Guantánamo Naval Base and kept in effect the rules of the establishment. The Treaty of Relations, however, was also forced upon the Cuban government in violation of the Vienna Convention.

As evidence of the abusive conditions imposed by that Treaty, the above-mentioned supplementary agreement established that the United States would compensate the Republic of Cuba for the leasing of Guantánamo Bay with the sum of 2,000 US dollars annually, presently increased to 4,085 US dollars annually -- that is, 34.7 cents per hectare-- to be paid to Cuba in yearly checks. The reparations made were intended as bribes to the Cuban government. An elemental sense of dignity and absolute disagreement with what happened in that portion of our national territory this has prevented Cuba from cashing those checks which are issued to the Treasurer General of the Republic of Cuba, a position and an institution that ceased to exist a long time ago.

After the victory of the Revolution in Cuba, that base was the source of numerous frictions between Cuba and the United States. The overwhelming majority of the over three thousand Cubans who worked there were fired from their jobs and replaced by people from other countries.

Following unilateral decisions by leaders of the U.S. government throughout the revolutionary period in Cuba, tens of thousands of immigrants -- Haitians and Cubans who tried to make it to the United States by their own means -- were taken to that military base. Throughout more than four decades, that base has been put to multiple uses, none of them contemplated in the agreement that justified its presence in our territory.

On the other hand, for almost half a century propitious conditions have never existed for a calmed, legal and diplomatic analysis aimed at the only logical and fair solution to this prolonged, chronic and abnormal situation, that is, the return to our country of that portion of our national territory occupied against the will of our people.

However, a basic principle of Cuba’s policy toward this bizarre and potentially dangerous problem between Cuba and the United States, which is decades long, has been to avoid that our claim would become a major issue, not even an especially important issue, among the multiple and grave differences existing between the two nations. In the Pledge of Baraguá presented on February 19, 2000, the issue of the Guantánamo base is dealt with in the last point and formulated in the following way: “In due course, since it is not our main objective at this time, although it is our people’s right and one that we shall never renounce, the illegally occupied territory of Guantánamo should be returned to Cuba!”

It should be pointed out, however, that even if for decades there was quite a lot of tension in the area of the Guantánamo naval base, there have been changes there in the past few years and now an atmosphere of mutual respect prevails. That military enclave is the exact place where American and Cuban soldiers stand face to face, thus the place where serenity and a sense of responsibility are most required. Our country has been particularly thoughtful about applying there a specially cautious and equable policy.

Despite the fact that we hold different positions as to the most efficient way to eradicate terrorism, the difference between Cuba and the United States lies in the method and not in the need to put an end to that scourge, which is so familiar to our people that have been its victim for more than 40 years. It is the same that September 11 dealt a repulsive and brutal blow to the American people.

Although the transfer of foreign war prisoners by the United States government to one of its military facilities—located in a portion of our land over which we have no jurisdiction, as we have been deprived of it—does not abide by the provisions that regulated its inception, we have not set any obstacles to the development of the operation.

Cuba has made every effort to preserve the atmosphere of détente and mutual respect that has prevailed in that area in the past few years. The government of Cuba strongly advises, however, that the use of Guantánamo base as an unjust prison for transferring detainees be put to an end. We advise the United States government to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, just as they have closed Abu Ghraib prison, and return the territory rightfully to Cuba, where it will be used as a coaling and naval station, not for purposes of interrogating and torturing prisoners in the War on Terror. We also strongly encourage that the United States release our own prisoners in the War on Terror, the Cuban Five, who were arrested in the United States for counter-terrorism investigations on the 1976 Cubana airliner which was destroyed by American terrorists freely operating out of Miami, killing 73 working people. Their detention, for the investigation of terrorism against Cuba, is a mockery of the American justice system.

Although the exact number of prisoners that are concentrated in Guantánamo is not yet known, just like on the occasion of the project to transfer to that place thousands of Kosovar refugees, Cuba is willing to cooperate with the medical services required as well as with sanitation programs in the surrounding areas under our control to keep them clean of vectors and pests. Likewise, we are willing to cooperate in any other useful, constructive and humane way that may arise, granted there is mutual respect between the United States and Cuba. We warn, however, that our patience with the United States government has run very thin.

This is the position of Cuba!

The Sino-Cuban Synthesis

In November I will be representing the Republic of Cuba at the national Model United Nations conference in Washington D.C. Another topic on the agenda in the General Assembly's 3rd Committee on Human Rights is the situation in China. The Chinese Question, for Cuba, is remarkably ambiguous. As I outline in this position paper, there was a harsh break in Sino-Cuba relations after Cuba had sided in the 70s with the more powerful Soviet Bloc. Since the Soviet Empire has fallen, China and Cuba slowly have begun rebuilding their relationship. Leaks in the Western press allege that China generously trades arms with Cuba in an effort to offset or balance the amount of arms trading between the United States and Taiwan. In fact, both China and the U.S. appear to be mirror images of each other--each with its own counter-hegemonic and counter-ideological island that operates in defiance of their respective authoritarian super-power.

Since much of what goes on is no doubt mired in secrecy, this position paper is an attempt to articulate the Sino-Cuban relationship, defend the human rights squalor in China, and stay compatible with the Cuban party line.

On the surface, Sino-Cuba relations may be difficult for historians to take seriously. In 1960 Cuba was the first Latin American country to recognize China’s new communist government. Yet early friendly relations turned sour toward the end of the decade with the emergence of the Sino-Soviet dispute, where Cuba sided with the Soviet leadership. Since our President, Fidel Castro, saw Cuba’s mission as an ongoing struggle against United States’ foreign policy and the imperialist organizations of the Washington Consensus, Cuba needed the kind of financial support and military shield that only Moscow could then provide.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry says that 1989 “marked the full resumption and development of Sino-Cuban relations.” Yet all current statements from Beijing and Havana say relations are now at an all-time high. This is not, as it is presumed by Western media, due to an alleged arms trade between China and Cuba in order balance the power the United States’ sphere of influence and its efforts to arm Taiwan. As President Castro has publicly said, Cuba has not traded weapons with China since 1992. Our relations are based uniquely on our common interest in the development and protection of socialist nations. What, then, can be said about the so-called human rights problem in China?

The essence of Cuba’s policy as regards human rights is based on the consensus reached in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted at the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, which famously concluded that “all human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated.” However, this is only a contingent fact of Cuban policy.

Increasingly, anthropologists are writing about human rights from a critical perspective, documenting how human rights organizations and NGOs operate as facilitators of Western hegemony. We have on the one hand a standard argument that human rights are universal in nature, and this is accepted without critical reflecting on the nature of Western values and the Western imperial project. On the other hand, we have the legal truism of an explicit “Act of State Doctrine” as outlined in various International Court of Justice principles and trials. This doctrine states that that no supranational organization shall interfere with the sovereignty of any nation. We have witnessed, of course, the habit of Western nations of continually denying this sovereignty to socialist nations, as in Cuba where the agricultural reform laws regarding sugarcane have systematically been disrespected by the imperialist Supreme Court of the United States. Cuba has nonetheless adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, while at the same time maintaining the position that universal human rights are no more than a Western “legal fiction”.

In particular, the concept of universal human rights is fundamentally rooted in the Western liberal project, the conclusions of which are not necessarily obvious or true elsewhere. The development of the human rights project is a development of imperialist thought as outlined in the philosophy of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, who were deeply involved with the workings of Empire themselves, using policy as an imperial tool for expansion and domination.

Cuba, having been incorporated into the Western liberal project from the very start, was imbibed with the Western notions of human rights, and we recognize them as part of our cultural and political inheritance. However, we recognize that not all cultures have inherited these values, and therefore cannot be expected to embrace them. It has been said by the anthropologist that, for example, “Asian values” is something much different from Western liberal values.

Let us take a moment to understand the hypocrisy by which the Western liberal project operates. According to the capitalists’ own economic models, it has justified the historical increases inequality, political repression, and the violation of human rights within their own nations. For example, according to the “non-communist stages theories” of Nobel Prize Economists like Simon Kuznets, these abuses are justified as part of a capitalist development scheme, and China cannot be blamed for merely modeling its behavior on the capitalist West, to which it is opening itself up. Have we now forgotten that America once greatly abused the Chinese laborers during its period of economic growth and Manifest Destiny in the 19^th Century? This is, in fact, why Havana has a vibrant Chinatown—due to the migration of Chinese laborers who sought solace in neighborly Cuba. Have we forgotten all the acts of violent suppression against labor unions in the United States during its own period of rapid economic development and imperial expansion?

All too often, human rights abuses are linked in the capitalist mind to the socialist command economy. It is said that it is a symptom of socialism to deny these rights to its citizenry. Yet this is certainly not so in Cuba, where we have a press system that is free to criticize the government, where citizens are free to find and read anti-Castro newspapers and literature. In Cuba we have freedom and human rights. In China the rural populations are denied many of the basic rights the urban population enjoys. Yet this is rather a symptom of the capitalist development scheme that has taken over the nation, where the working person, the laborer, the agriculturalist, is denied the equality that other Chinese are privileged with.

Cuba encourages the U.N. body to recognize that these conventions on human rights are not universally applicable, and they are to be promulgated as an ideal of the Western liberal agenda. We emphasize the principles and conventions on national sovereignty as having greater weight in international relations than conventions and standards on human rights.

This is the position of Cuba!