November 27 - Will Raul Castro Emerge from Under His Brother's Shadow? A Fox News Political Hack for the National Security Council: Russia's Fake News Offensive

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the death of Fidel Castro at the age of 90 and speak with Arturo Lopez Levy, a former political analyst with the Cuban government who is now a lecturer at the University of Texas on Latin American Politics and U.S. Foreign Policy. The author of "Raul Castro and the New Cuba: A Close-up View of Change", we discuss the speculation that Fidel Castro’s younger brother Raul, who took over the family rule of Cuba in 2006, has been restrained from introducing the necessary reforms to revive Cuba’s ailing economy because it involves dismantling the sclerotic system of state power that Fidel constructed. We will also look into what might happen to the historic rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba brokered by the Pope and whether a President Trump will undo the progress made by Raul Castro and Barack Obama.

Part 2

Then we assess the 50 year-long U.S. embargo and countless assassination attempts on Castro’s life which just ended with him having outlived ten U.S. presidents. Roger Morris, who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under presidents Johnson and Nixon and is the author of a comparative history of the inner politics of the U.S. and the USSR, “Kindred Rivals: America, Russia and Their Failed Ideals”, joins us. We also discuss the makeup of Trump’s new national security team with the addition of a Fox News political hack, K.T. McFarland as the Deputy National Security advisor.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the role of fake news manufactured by Russian Intelligence that was inserted into the U.S. media during the election campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton and stoke fears among the American left that the two nuclear-armed rivals were heading towards a nuclear confrontation. A former Russian journalist Sufian Zhemukhov, a visiting scholar attheInstitute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, joins us to discuss Putin’s announced desire in a pep-talk to the employees of RT, Russian Today, to “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams”.