OMNI
CUBA ANTHOLOGY #11
November 6, 2022
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
https://Omnicenter.org/donate/
What’s at Stake: The Long, Unjustified, Cruel US War against Cuba, and Cuban Resistance and Achievements.
CONTENTS #11
US Meddling, Intervention, Subversion (of Cuba and US Constitution), Blockade, Propaganda, Armed Invasion, Kidnapping, Murder
McAdoo. Embargo.
Landau. “Punish Cuba” Bill.
The Nation Editorial.
Wayne Smith. Overthrowing Castro a “Costly Cuba Policy.”
Peter Kornbluh. UN v. US Embargo.
The Nation Editorial.
Peter Kornbluh and William Leogrande v. Embargo.
Margaret Flowers. “Biden’s Disastrous Foreign Policy.”
Cubaminrex. “Cuba Responds” re Biden and Trump.
Cuban Resistance (and International Allies)
Dunn. “Beginning of the Cuban Revolution.”
Ben Norton. 185 to 2 World Votes v. Blockade of Cuba
Peter Kornbluh. “60 Years of a Brutal, Vindictive, Pointless Embargo.” Et al.
Manolo De Los Santos. Cuba’s “Foreign Policy of Peace and Socialism.”
Cuban Achievements
Medical
Prashad and de Los Santos. Cuba “Eradicating Child Mortality and Banishing Diseases.”
Martinez and León. New Vaccine 92.28% Efficacy.
Laura Giráldez. Cuba’s Improving Medical Technology.
Jake Johnson. Contrast Vaccine for Profit: “Big Pharma’s Vaccine Profiteering.”
General
Cuba’s Post-Revolutionary Architecture.
Energy Revitalized and Carbon Emissions Reduced.
Assata Shakur. Refuge in Cuba for Political Prisoners.
“The Code of Families” Democratically Revised.
TEXTS Cuba #11
US Meddling, Intervention, Subversion, Blockade, Propaganda, Armed Invasion, Kidnapping, Murder (in roughly chron. order from 1962 to 2022)
EMBARGO
Maisie McAdoo. “An Embargo That Serves No Purpose: Twenty Years of ‘El Bloqueo,’” Dec. 4, 1982.
Among its other efforts to dismantle the Cuban revolution, the United States has imposed one of the longest, most strictly enforced and extensive trade embargoes on record. That embargo, twenty years old this year (1962), has produced endless bitterness but has failed to accomplish its original purpose: the economic isolation of Cuba…. Obviously the United States has everything to gain by lifting the trade ban and nothing perceptible to lose. The market is there, the currency is there, the desire is there. Ultimately, Washington will gain more influence not only in Cuba but throughout the hemisphere by re-establishing trade and diplomatic relations with the island than by perpetuating a retaliatory embargo that long ago lost its punch.
Aída Chávez. THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S SANCTIONS REVIEW IS A JOKE
Saul Landau. “Tightening the Chokehold on Cuba,” June 15, 1992.
Under the fashionable label of “promoting democracy,” Representative Robert Torricelli is propelling a new “punish Cuba” billthrough Congress…. Torricelli’s missionary passion is directed toward tightening the already strict U.S. embargo on Cuba, so as to, in his words, “shorten the suffering of the Cuban people by isolating Castro and forcing him out.” Despite recent polls showing that a significant sector of Cuban-Americans oppose tightening the embargo,Torricelli claims to speak for that community. This presumption has led to some dramatic exchanges with those Cuban-Americans who call his bill a “new Platt Amendment,” referring to the 1901 act that said the United States had the right to intervene at will in Cuban affairs.
Editorial, “Freeing Cuba,” Jan. 26, 1998.
In a 1992 letter to the Bush Administration, protesting the tightening of the Cuba embargo, the U.S. Catholic Conference noted that embargoes “are acts of force…morally unacceptable, generally in violation of the principles of international law, and always contrary to the values of the Gospel.”
The Cuba embargo is all of the above and worse. Put in place by President Kennedy’s executive order in 1962, it is a fossilized relic of an era that refuses to recede into cold war history. Since its inception, the trade embargo has become, as the Bay of Pigs invasion was once called, “a perfect failure” in all ethical, political and economic respects. It hurts the Cuban people but has failed to shake the government.
Still, the “wreak havoc” crowd [in Congress], financed by Miami’s hard-line exile community, has managed to keep opposition to the embargo at bay. The logic of their position—to squeeze Cuba until it implodes into civil war—runs directly counter to U.S. national interests in the Caribbean. More than one major Pentagon study has pointed out that destabilization of Cuba will generate hundreds of thousands of refugees and extreme political pressure for U.S. military intervention—a prospect the Southern Command, and presumably the U.S. public, would rather avoid.
Wayne S. Smith. “Washington’s Costly Cuba Policy,” July 3, 2000.
The Administration frequently says that it wishes to see a “peaceful transitional process” in Cuba. And yet, if the objective is to get rid of Castro, then one cannot expect the process to be peaceful, for the hard fact is that Castro will not simply resign or fade away because the United States wants him to; rather if need be, he would fight, and many Cubans would fight with him. Thus, if one aims to remove the Castro government, then one must be ready for a bloody civil war—a war which would result in tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Cuban refugees on our shores. Is that what the Administration wants?
Peter Kornbluh. “Cuban Embargo-Busters?” Dec. 13, 2001
Since the end of the Cold War, the embargo has proved a serious embarrassment for Washington. Instituted as part of a broad set of punitive measures designed to isolate the Castro regime, the trade sanctions have succeeded only in isolating the United States. Every year for the past decade the United Nations has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US blockade; the last vote, on November 27, was a 167-to-3 defeat for the United States, with only the Marshall Islands and Israel supporting Washington….
Editorial. “Changing Course on Cuba,”May 14, 2007.
What do you call a US policy that…detains and fines a class of New York high school students for taking a study trip over spring break? A policy that has been repudiated at the United Nations by virtually every other country in the world? A policy that, after forty-eight years of abject failure, is still based on the false assumption that success—in the form of “regime change”—is just around the corner? Imperial? Illogical? Irrational? Insane? As Wayne Smith, former chief of the US Interest Section in Havana, has observed, Cuba seems to have “the same effect on American administrations that the full moon has on werewolves.”
MOREhttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/cuba-embargo-60-years/
William M. Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh, 2014-2021
Cuba: 60 Years of a Brutal, Vindictive, and Pointless Embargo
https://www.thenation.com › Article
Jan 26, 2022 — For fifteen years we have tried to bring down the Cuban Government, by an airtight trade embargo, by diplomatic boycott, and even sordid ...
Cuba Embargoed: US Trade Sanctions Turn Sixty - National ...
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu › briefing-book › cuba-embarg...
3 days ago — According to Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive's Cuba ... It has evolved over the sixty years since President John F. Kennedy put it ...
Sixty Years After the Revolution, Is a 'New Cuba' Emerging?
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com › articles › sixty-y...
Jan 14, 2019 — Change is in the air as Cuba celebrates the anniversary of the 1959 revolution. ... Is the Cuban Revolution reinventing itself at age 60?
Biden says US stands with Cuban protesters, but officials deflect
https://www.latimes.com › politics › story › biden-says-...
Jul 12, 2021 — Biden pledges to stand with Cuban protesters and calls on Havana to refrain from a violent crackdown. But U.S. officials deflect criticism ...
U.S.-Cuba Relations | Council on Foreign Relations
https://www.cfr.org › backgrounder › us-cuba-relations
The United States and Cuba have had a strained relationship for more than sixty years, rooted in Fidel Castro's overthrow of a U.S.-backed government.
Peter Kornbluh | National Security Archive
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu › about › staff › peter-kornbl...
Peter Kornbluh, Senior Analyst, has worked at the Archive since April 1986. He currently directs the Archive's Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects.
Peter Kornbluh (born 1956) is the director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project and Cuba Documentation Project.
Education: Pioneer High School
Peter Kornbluh | The United States & Cuba: 60 Years After the ...
YouTube · WorldOregon Apr 19, 2021
Peter Kornbluh: Cuba and the US: It's Time to Be Bold
YouTube · World AffairsDec 29, 20141:02:53
Peter Kornbluh: Cuba: Ending the Embargo?
YouTube · World AffairsNov 14, 2014
Peter Kornbluh | The Nation
https://www.thenation.com › Authors
Peter Kornbluh, a longtime contributor to The Nation on Cuba, is co-author, with William M. LeoGrande, of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of ...
The United States & Cuba: 60 Years After the Bay of Pigs
https://www.worldoregon.org › united_states_and_cuba...
Apr 16, 2021 — Peter Kornbluh has worked at the National Security Archive since 1986. He currently directs the Archive's Cuba and Chile Documentation ...
Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations ...
https://www.amazon.com › Back-Channel-Cuba-Negoti...
LeoGrande and Kornbluh have uncovered hundreds of formerly secret U.S. documents and conducted interviews with dozens of negotiators, intermediaries, and policy ...
Back Channel to Cuba | William M. LeoGrande - UNC Press
https://uncpress.org › book › back-channel-to-cuba
History is being made in U.S.-Cuban relations. ... William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh here present a remarkably new and relevant account, ...
William M. Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to ...
https://www.jstor.org › stable › intejcubastud.8.2.0361
by S Ludlam · 2016 — What this book demonstrates is that, despite the decades of relations characterised by Cuba's revolutionary internationalism and. US aggression through invasion ...
William M. Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh - The American ...
https://www.academyofdiplomacy.org › Recipients
William M. Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh. Back Channel to Cuba. The 2015 Dillon Award for a book of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy went to
Post Fidel Cuba and its Future with the US - Peter Kornbluh
https://wachouston.org › blog › post-fidel-cuba-and-its-...
Mar 29, 2021 — '-by Everardo Castro. The World Affairs Council had the honor of having Peter Kornbluh speak about the relations between the U.S. and Cuba ...
Disaster In Cuba Highlights Biden’s Disastrous (And Illegal) Foreign Policy
By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Popular Resistance.org (8-23-22). On August 5, lightning caused a fire at an oil supertanker base in Matanzas, Cuba. The fire caused the collapse of three large oil tanks, killed 16 people and wounded 146 people. Immediately, friendly nations sent aid, including $70 million in oil from Russia, but the United States only provided technical advice to the neighboring Caribbean nation that has been crippled by six decades of the US’ economic blockade. Clearing the FOG speaks with Arturo Lopez-Levy of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs about the fire, the Biden administration’s... - more
BIDEN v. TRUMP
Cuba Responds To Biden's Announcement On Economic Blockade.
By Cubaminrex. Havana, Cuba – PopularResistance.org (5-18-22). Today, the government of the United States announced several measures, which are positive but of a very limited scope, regarding Cuba associated to the granting of visas, regular migration, flights to Cuban provinces, remittances and adjustments to the regulations governing transactions with the non-state sector. Taking into account the nature of such measures, it would be possible to identify some of the promises made by President Biden during the electoral campaign of 2020 to alleviate the inhumane decisions adopted by President Trump’s administration, which tightened the blockade to... -more-
Cuban Resistance (and International Allies)
Ed Augustin. THE LATEST ROUND OF PROTESTS IN CUBA ARE A BUST—FOR NOW
William M. LeoGrande. CUBA’S PROTESTS ARE DIFFERENT THIS TIME
|
which intensifies capitalism’s voracious greed above the needs of the people.
The 26th of July Movement holds tremendous lessons in the subject of struggle and the role of the working class and democratic forces in the liberation struggle.
Cuba continues to be a bulwark among developing countries struggling to rid their respective countries from the choke-hold of global capitalism and U.S. imperialism in particular. […]
The post July 26 Marked the Sixty-Nine Year Anniversary of the Attack on the Moncada Barracks—the Beginning of the Cuban Revolution appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.
Ben Norton. “Entire world votes 185 to 2 against blockade of Cuba–U.S. and Israel are rogue states at UN.” MR Editor. Posted Nov 05, 2022.
Originally published: Multipolarista on October 3, 2022 .
Contexts: Empire, Imperialism, State Repression, StrategyAmericas, Cuba, United StatesNewswireillegal U.S. blockade, UN resolution A/76/405
For the 30th year in a row, almost every country on Earth voted at the United Nations General Assembly to oppose the illegal six-decade US blockade of Cuba. 185 nations voted against just two: the United States and Israel.
During the past six decades, The Nation has consistently opposed the US embargo against Cuba.
Peter Kornbluh. “Cuba: 60 Years of a Brutal, Vindictive, and Pointless Embargo.”
Where Obama was willing to try “engagement,” Biden administration policy remains mired in Cold War clichés. The Nation has always believed there is a better way. By Peter KornbluhTwitter . JANUARY 26, 2022.
In mid-December, some 114 members of Congress sent a forceful letter to President Joe Biden calling for “immediate humanitarian actions” to lift the economic sanctions “that prevent food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance from reaching the Cuban people.” With Cuba struggling to emerge from a dire, Covid-generated economic crisis, the congressional representatives are pushing the White House to end the restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on remittances and travel and restore the Obama-era policy of engagement with the island nation. “Engagement,” the members concluded, “is more likely to enable the political, economic, and social openings that Cubans may desire, and to ease the hardships that Cubans face today.”
Full engagement with Cuba, of course, would require lifting the US embargo—a demand the congressional letter conspicuously fails to make. As the embargo approaches its 60th anniversary, terminating it would require not only White House action but a vote in Congress that the Democratic leadership has neither the political capacity nor the moral courage to prioritize. Indeed, the humanitarian measures that these members of Congress are asking of President Biden are intended to soften an economic crisis that, for decades, the embargo has explicitly attempted to create.
THE SECRETS OF THE SO-CALLED “HAVANA SYNDROME.. November 17, 2021.
CUBA MOVES INTO THE POST-CASTRO ERA. April 16, 2021.
BIDEN MUST REVERSE POMPEO’S ‘TERRORIST’ MOVE AGAINST CUBA. January 22, 2021.
Imposed by the proclamation of John F. Kennedy on February 3, 1962, and codified into law during the Clinton administration, the “embargo on all trade with Cuba” has evolved through many manifestations of punitive economic sanctions and commercial restrictions over the past 60 years. “The embargo is outdated and should be lifted,” Barack Obama declared during his dramatic but short-lived effort to normalize US-Cuba relations. Instead, this “mold-encrusted relic” of the Cold War, as The Nation once described it, remains in place—the framework of a protracted, and failed, US endeavor to promote regime change, as well as an enduring symbol of the perpetual hostility of US policy toward the Cuban revolution.
During the past six decades, The Nation has consistently opposed the US embargo against Cuba. The magazine has published editorial after editorial, story after story, with titles like “Endless Embargo,” “Tightening the Chokehold on Cuba,” “An Embargo That Serves No Purpose,” and “The Stupid Embargo.” The arguments for ending el bloqueo, as the Cubans refer to it, and adopting a sane, humanitarian, and normal US posture toward Cuba remain as relevant today as when they were published.
Cuba’s economy…depended on the United States for such essential items as trucks, buses, bulldozers, telephone and electrical equipment, industrial chemicals, medicine, raw cotton, detergents, lard, potatoes, poultry, butter, a large assortment of canned goods, and half of such staple items in the Cuban diet as rice and black beans…. A nation which had been an economic appendage of the United States was suddenly cut adrift; it was as if Florida had been isolated from the rest of the country, unable to sell oranges and cattle or to bring in tourists, gasoline, automobile parts, or Cape Canaveral rockets.
—“Cuba Today: An Eyewitness Report,” by Samuel Shapiro,
Sept. 22, 1962
CURRENT ISSUE The nation
We are antagonizing allies and enemies alike, and giving to others a market which geographically has been and should be ours. All this in the name of isolating Castro, but all we are doing is isolating ourselves.
— Editorial, “The Inertia of Folly,” March 2, 1964
At the heart of the United States policy toward Cuba is the economic embargo. It was laid on to make things hard for the Cuban people in the expectation that they would recognize Fidel Castro as the man responsible for their hardship and throw the rascal out. The scheme has not worked; such schemes rarely do. Instead, the Cubans identified the cause of their troubles as the government of the United States. They rallied to Castro and he, for more than a decade, has used us as a whipping boy. —“Cuba: Policy of Malign Neglect,” by Richard O’Mara,
Nov. 22, 1971
For fifteen years we have tried to bring down the Cuban Government, by an airtight trade embargo, by diplomatic boycott, and even sordid efforts apparently organized by the CIA to assassinate Prime Minister Castro and other Cuban leaders. With both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Ford making highly publicized missions to Peking and Moscow…one wonders why we maintain our unyielding stand toward Cuba….
From the vantage point of common sense, economics and diplomacy, we should be moving to normalize our relations with Cuba—not because we are looking for a love affair but because it is the only reasonable course for two neighboring nations…. —“Common Sense and Cuba,” by Senator George McGovern,
Feb. 6, 1976
Take down this wall: Chang-Emelia Fernandez, a Cuban American, holds a Cuban flag as she protests against the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. (Rhona Wise / AFP via Getty Images)
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“Cuba’s non-alignment: A foreign policy of peace and socialism.” Manolo De Los Santos. Mronline.org (6-3-22).
In Cuba, ‘non-alignment’ has never meant being neutral, and has always meant being opposed to attempts to divide humanity, writes MANOLO DE LOS SANTOS
“Mexico's President AMLO Condemns US Blockade Of Cuba.” By Ben Norton, Multipolarista. Popular Resistance.org (6-12-22). Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has condemned the illegal US blockade of Cuba as a “type of genocide” and “tremendous violation of human rights.” At his daily press briefing on the morning on June 6, López Obrador was asked about his decision to boycott the US government’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, California. The Mexican president, known popularly by the acronym AMLO, explained that he refused to attend in order to protest Washington’s exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. -more-
Cuban Achievements
Medical
How Cuba Is Eradicating Child Mortality And Banishing Diseases. 2022.
By Vijay Prashad and Manolo de los Santos, Black Agenda Report. The drastic reduction in infant mortality rates is yet another testimony to the Cuban Revolution’s attention to the health of the country’s population. Palpite, Cuba, is just a few miles away from Playa Girón, along the Bay of Pigs, where the United States attempted to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Down a modest street in a small building with a Cuban flag and a large picture of Fidel Castro near the front door, Dr. Dayamis Gómez La Rosa sees patients from 8 AM to 5 PM. In fact, that is an inaccurate sentence. Dr. Dayamis, like most primary care doctors in Cuba, lives above the clinic that she runs. “I became a doctor,” she told us as we sat in the clinic’s waiting room, “because I wanted to make the world a better place.” -more-
Leticia Martínez and René Tamayo León. “Abdala [vaccine], with three doses, demonstrates 92.28% efficacy.”
Originally published: Granma English on June 22, 2021 by Leticia Martínez and René Tamayo León (more by Granma English) (Posted Apr 28, 2022)
Health, Movements, Socialism, StrategyAmericas, CubaNewswireAbdala, Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), COVID-19, pandemic, vaccine, World Health Organization (WHO)
A three-dose regimen of the Abdala candidate vaccine has demonstrated an efficacy of 92.28 percent, placing it well above the World Health Organization (WHO) requirement of at least 50 percent, to be recognized as an anti-COVID-19 vaccine.
Over the course of 48 hours, from Saturday to Monday, Cuba, a small, poor country, has shaken the world, noted Party First Secretary and President of the Republic Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, in a meeting, yesterday afternoon, with researchers at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), where Abdala was developed.
The President decided to meet with the scientists after learning about the efficacy analysis of Abdala at Monday’s meeting of the government’s COVID-19 prevention and control group.
He had visited the Finlay Vaccine Institute on Saturday, after learning that its Soberana 02 candidate vaccine, with just two doses, had demonstrated 62% efficacy – without a third booster dose of Soberana Plus, which should produce an superior response.
Abdala’s efficacy places it among vaccines with the best results in the world, which have all been produced in the principal laboratories of the most developed countries with financing of hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, something that for Cuba is impossible, even more so given the tightening of the economic, commercial and financial blockade during the pandemic.
Dr. Marta Ayala Avila, CIGB director, explained that efficacy is the most important objective of any vaccine. “It is its effect in real life,” she stated.
In presenting the findings, she highlighted the work of the teams of scientists who conducted Phase I/II and III clinical trials in Santiago de Cuba, Bayamo, Guantanamo and Havana, and thanked the 48,000 volunteers who participated in the study. MORE https://en.granma.cu/cuba/2021-06-22/abdala-with-three-doses-demonstrates-9228-efficacy/
Originally published: Granma English on January 26, 2022 by Laura Mercedes Giráldez (more by Granma English) | (Posted Jan 31, 2022) “Replacing imports to guarantee greater biotechnological sovereignty in the production of medicine. Editor. Mronline.org (2-1-22).
Interview with president of Cuba’s leading pharmaceutical enterprise group, BioCubaFarma, working to strengthen the country’s technological sovereignty and contribute to the population’s quality of life.
CONTRAST VACCINE FOR PROFIT
Global Actions Condemn Big Pharma's Vaccine Profiteering
. By Jake Johnson, Commondreams. PopularResistance.org (4-30-22). As major pharmaceutical executives and investors convened virtually on Thursday for their annual shareholder meetings, campaigners took to the streets in the U.S., the U.K., India, South Africa, and elsewhere to condemn major drug companies for hoarding technology and prioritizing profits over equitable distribution of coronavirus vaccines. Outside Pfizer's U.K. headquarters, activists dropped mock sacks of money and positioned wheelbarrows full of fake cash near the building's entrance to denounce the New York-based company's opposition to tech transfer initiatives and... -more-
Sample of Cuba’s General Aspirations
Cuba’s post-revolutionarchitecture offers a blueprint for how to build more with less.
Editor. Mronline.org (8-30-22).
Around the world, there’s a conjoined crisis of climate change and housing shortages—two topics at the top of the list of discussions in the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
“How Cuba revitalised its energy sector while significantly reducing carbon emissions. Editor. Mronline.org (4-4-22) .”
Cuba has been revitalising its energy sector for the past 25 years. As a result, there has been a demonstrable rise in overall efficiency and a significant reduction in emissions.
Assata Shakur. “Black Liberation Struggles and the Cuban Revolution.” Editor. Mronline.org (8-26-22).
Former political prisoners have found refuge in the Caribbean-Island socialist state.
“The Code of families, a document built among all Cubans.” Editor. Mronline.org (2-8-22). See #10.
This week, Cuba began a historic process as Cubans started to going to more than 78,000 meeting points to discuss the new draft of the Family Code, a broad, complex, but very important process for Cuban families.
CONTENTS CUBA ANTHOLOGY #10, January 29, 2022
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2022/01/omni-cuba-newsletter-10-january-30-2022.html
Probably very little pertaining to Cuba is not affected by the long US intervention to overthrow its government—from blowing up an airplane to unceasing blockade and hostile propaganda. So the following subject groupings of the essays should be understood as my perception of the main topic(s) of each.
US Intervention
Whitney, Corporate Media’s Negative News about Cuba
Satire of US Reporting of Cuba
Guantanamo
MacLeod. Cuba, Protests v. Government
Havana Syndrome a Hoax.
US Inciting Opposition to Cuba Globally
Cuban Resistance and Its Allies
Cooperation with China
Support in US via ANSWER Coalition
Cuba Today
Special Number of Monthly Review: 8 Articles
Cuba Today continued
New Code of Families
Pres. Diaz-Canel and Red Bandana Collective
Cuba in Latin America
Ajamu Baraka. “Class Warfare and Socialist Resistance.”
Contents #9: US v. Cuba
END CUBA ANTHOLOGY #11