Ron Ridenour, the celebrated writer on Cuban and Central American politics, has published a new expanded edition of his book, Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads. Tje book has been updated to cover Fidel Castro's withdrawal from power during his long illness in 2007. His other books include Cuba: A "Yankee" Reports, Backfire: The CIA's Biggest Burn, Cuba at the Crossroads and Yankee Sandinistas. A committed revolutionary, anti-war activist, and supporter of the Cuban revolution, Ridenour's book gathers report and accounts of his extended journey in Cuba in 2006, together with up-to-date analysis of Cuba today. It has already generated widespead controversy. The selections below give a flavour of the book. "Regardless of whether of not Cuba has achieved socialism - it is a long process, after all - the Cuban people and its government are more than worthy of our love and support. They have done no harm to the world and they have helped many millions of people in many lands. They have held out against "the enemy of humanity" to quote from the Sandinista anthem. In so doing, they have held out hope for billions of us." "The main hindrance to worker control, to real socialism, is the world domination by capitalism and imperialism. The fact that the United States lays but 150 kilometers away is the greatest hindrance. I believe, however, that if the Cuban leadership had had more trust in the working class back in the mid-60s, once US military attacks were turned back and the internal counter-revolution defeated, it would have gradually turned over to the workers significant say in productive relations and in making local and national policies."

Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads. New Expanded Edition

History

Ridenour, Ron

Americas

IMG Publications

As a long-term writer about matters Cuban, Ron Ridenour's reporting is exemplary in its thoroughness and attention to detail. His intimate insight into the day-to-day life of Cuban citizens and of the strenuous steps taken by the government to make sure that every Cuban has a basically sound quality of life, suggests that he has lived and worked in Cuba for ages, at various ground-level jobs, and is highly supportive of the social policies prevailing there. Ron is not a political theoretician, but his devotion to revolutionary Cuba cannot be doubted. Some of his comments are deeply resonant of comments that you frequently hear Cubans coming out with on building sites. They bespeak a guarded tendency to belittle high ideals with mordantly humorous asides about low-level corruption. In Ron's case, it gives his writing the salty bite of authenticity in a Damon Runyan sort of way, but it is obvious that he regards the Cuban Revolution as a pearl of great price. His sort of provocative and knowledgeable writing, if widely enough circulated, could do much to counter the routinely uninformed knee-jerk hostile coverage usually accorded Cuba by the media.

Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads

MacDonald, Theodore

Img Pubns

Yankee Sandinistas: Interviews With North Americans Living and Working in the New Nicaragua

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Curbstone Pr

Backfire is the first book written about the 26 Cuban and one Italian moles, who infiltrated the CIA for Cuba's Department of State Security, and came out in unision in 1987. The 50,000 book presents testimonies of three of the double agents, including the dean, who led a triple life for 21 years, a summary of the others, revels some of the major crimes and covert action efforts of the Agency, and elucidates the collaborative role the US mass media plays for the covert warriors. Cuba's counterintelligence proves that the CIA never stopped attempting to murder Fidel Castro nor did it give up the vain hope of destroying the Cuban socialist revolution despite U.S. congressional investigations of CIA terrorist activities.

Backfire: The CIA's Biggest Burn

Editorial Jose Marti

<p>Ron Ridenour’s book, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert, a true historical page-turner, is destined to endure and inform future readers, writers and researchers about both what has been reported—mainly malicious propaganda—and what truly took place in the one hundred years from the 1917 Russian Revolution until the eruption of the distinct harbingers of the collapse of the US empire in the early twenty-first century. Events often just seem to happen, caught up in the swirl of history. But still, we try to interpret them and to understand. And then, in many cases, take a stand for or against. Understanding is like discovering a new world, like converting to a new faith. Revolt invades your life and everything is different from what it once was. Ridenour’s book helps us along the way to first remembering the historical facts so that we can then understand. His new work documents clearly facts about the early years of the Soviet Union’s relations with the West, its difficult steps toward socio-political maturity and Communism, and its enormous sacrifices along the way: its defeat of Western intervention during the revolutionary and civil war period; its regulation of state economic planning and the reforms required for the industrialization of the nation; its defeat of the German Nazi military juggernaut at the gates of Russia’s major cities and the coup de grace in the ferocious battle in Stalingrad, defeating German invaders and crushing Nazi Germany before the USA even entered the war; and finally the arduous salvation of Russia after the collapse of the USSR under US post-WWII economic firepower and the most treacherous anti-Russian policies since the early 1900s. Those Western policies continue to determine US-Russian relations today. Throughout this long work Ridenour recalls and clarifies diverse significant historical details, obscured by time and by Western propaganda, facts that are so easily forgotten or that were never learned: such ignored truths as the importance of the USSR in the defeat of Japan in WWII and the timing of the US use of the atomic bomb in Japan. Not many people are aware of the extent of the destruction of many Japanese cities which the author details here. He points out that the Soviet Union kept its word to help the United States by its intervention against Japan, the decisive reason why Japan was defeated even before the atomic bombs fell. A stunning but little known fact is that in response to the Russians' sacrifice the Anglo-American leaders—first Churchill and later Truman— were hatching Operation Unthinkable and Operation Pincher to launch a surprise war against Soviet forces in Europe. These military plots included the potential use of nuclear bombs. This is a book that no well-informed Western reader should be without, especially those inhabiting the homeland of the new empire, the dangerously brainwashed United States.</p>

The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert

Europe

Punto Press, LLC

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