notes on the G8 and ALBA:
Economically the G8 countries are still very significant: although they represent under 14 % of the world population, they account for nearly two-thirds of the world's economic output measured by gross domestic product. In fact, Russia is the only G8 country not in the World Bank's 2006 listing of the top ten economies, coming in at number 14. Significantly, the Peoples Republic of China and Brazil are in the top ten (numbers 4 and 10 respectively), and even India at number 12 outranks Russia.
(...) These "Bolivarian" principles draw their inspiration from Simon Bolivar, the symbol of Latin American independence: they are based on cooperation and complementarity, national sovereignty, resource transfer and redistribution, and support for small farmers, cooperatives, family, and small-scale producers. For example, the first Peoples Trade Agreement (TCP) signed between Cuba and Venezuela in December 2004 facilitates the exchange of medical resources and petroleum between both nations: Venezuela delivers about 96,000 barrels of low-cost oil per day from its state-owned petroleum operations to Cuba and Cuba, in exchange, sent 20,000 state-employed medical staff and thousands of teachers to Venezuela's slums.
(...) While the ALBA is the anti-thesis of the FTAA, the Washington Consensus or economic domination by the G8, there are still problems with its orientation, not least that it is being driven by the personal vision of Chavez and the oil wealth of Venezuela. In so far as the ALBA is an anti-imperialist project, it is a great success but to the extent that it is anti-capitalist, (or, to put it another was, an experiment in socialism for the 21st century) it is still largely oriented towards large scale projects, industrialization and resource extraction -- such as the controversial proposal for an 8,000km pipeline to carry gas from Venezuela, across the Amazon, to the South - albeit in an anti-imperialist frame.

castro on a yellow submarine:
What a feat for the British! The intelligent and tenacious people of that nation will surely not feel any sense of pride. What is most amazing is that with such an amount of money, 75 thousand doctors could be trained to care for 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States. You could build 3 thousand polyclinics, outfitted with sophisticated equipment, ten times what our country possesses.
(...) Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba has been engaged in training doctors, teachers and other professionals; with a population of less than 12 million inhabitants, today we have more Comprehensive General Medicine specialists than all the doctors in sub-Saharan Africa where the population exceeds 700 million people.
(...) We must bow our heads in awe after reading the news about the English submarine. It teaches us, among other things, about the sophisticated weapons that are needed to maintain the untenable order developed by the United States imperial system.