Delegates to the Havana Congress on the New International Economic Order—a gathering organized by the Progressive International and attended by more than 50 scholars and policymakers from 26 countries across all six inhabited continents—agreed over the weekend on a declaration that outlines a “common vision” for building an egalitarian and sustainable society out of the wreckage of five decades of neoliberal capitalism.
“The crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities,” the declaration asserts, or it can “embolden” popular movements throughout the Global South to “reclaim” their role as protagonists “in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace.”
Delegates resolved to focus their initial efforts on strengthening the development and dissemination of lifesaving technologies in low-income nations.
“Delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty.”
This decision comes one year after Cuban officials announced, at a press conference convened by the Progressive International (PI), their plan to deliver 200 million homegrown Covid-19 vaccine doses to impoverished countries abandoned by their wealthy counterparts and Big Pharma—along with tools to enable domestic production and expert support to improve distribution.
It also comes as Cuba assumes the presidency of the Group of 77 (G77), a bloc of 134 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where “the combined crises of food, energy, and environment” are escalating, PI
noted.
“What is the common vision to guide the Global South out of this crisis?” the coalition asked. “What is the plan to win it? What is the New International Economic Order for the 21st century?”
“After two days of detailed discussions about how to transform our shared world, delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty,” PI general coordinator David Adler said Sunday at the conclusion of the Havana Congress. “From pharmaceuticals to green tech, from digital currencies to microchips, too much of humanity is locked out of both benefiting from scientific advances and contributing to new ones. We will, as today’s declaration calls for, work to build ‘a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North’ to liberate knowledge and peoples.”
Speaking at the January 12 ceremony during which Cuba ascended to the G77 presidency, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla emphasized the need for coordinated action across the Global South on science and tech, arguing that “scientific-technical development is today monopolized by a club of countries that monopolize most of the patents, technologies, research centers, and promote the drain of talent from our countries.”
The G77 Summit on Science, Technology, and Innovation, scheduled for September in Havana, seeks to “unite, complement each other, integrate our national capacities so as not to be relegated to future pandemics,” said Parrilla.
During his speech on the first day of the Havana Congress, meanwhile, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called for a new non-aligned movement to “end the legalized robbery of people and Earth fueling climate catastrophe.”
\u201cAt the Havana Congress on the New International Economic Order, @yanisvaroufakis calls for a New Non-Aligned Movement to “end the legalised robbery of people and Earth fuelling climate catastrophe.”\n\nRead his full speech here: https://t.co/P8zdht8FD9\u201d
— Progressive International (@Progressive International)
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Read the full Havana Declaration on the New International Economic Order:
The Havana Congress,
Recalling the role of the Cuban Revolution in the struggle to unite the Southern nations of the world, and the spirit of the 1966 Havana Tricontinental Conference that convened peoples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to chart a path to collective liberation in the face of severe global crises and sustained imperial subjugation;
Hearing the echoes of that history today, as crises of hunger, disease, and war once again overwhelm the world, compounded by a rapidly changing climate and the droughts, floods, and hurricanes that not only threaten to inflame conflicts between peoples, but also risk the extinction of humanity at large;
Celebrating the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle, and the victories won by combining a program of sovereign development at home, solidarity for national liberation abroad, and a strong Southern bloc to force concessions to its interests, culminating in the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO);
Acknowledging that the project of decolonization remains incomplete, disrupted by concerted attacks on the unity of the South in the form of wars, coups, sanctions, structural adjustment, and the false promise that sovereign development might be won through integration into a hierarchical world system;
Emphasizing that the result has been the sustained divergence between North and South, characterized by the same dynamics that defined the international economic order five decades prior: the extraction of natural resources, the enclosure of ‘intellectual property,’ the plunder of structural adjustment, and the exclusion of the multilateral system;
Recognizing that despite these setbacks, the flame of Southern resistance did not die; that the pursuit of sovereign development has yielded unprecedented achievements—from mass literacy and universal healthcare to poverty alleviation and medical innovation—that enable a renewed campaign of Southern cooperation today;
Stressing that this potential for Southern unity is perceived as a threat to Northern powers, which seek once again to preserve their position in the hierarchy of the world system through mechanisms of economic exclusion, political coercion, and military aggression;
Seizing the opportunity of the present historical juncture, when the crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities or embolden the call to reclaim Southern protagonism in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace;
The Havana Congress calls to:
Renew the Non-Aligned Movement: In the face of increasing geopolitical tensions born from a decisive shift in the global balance of power, the Congress calls to resist the siren song of the new Cold War and to renew the project of non-alignment, grounded in the principles of sovereignty, peace, and cooperation articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference, 1961 Non-Aligned Conference, 1966 Tricontinental Conference, and beyond.
Renovate the NIEO: To accompany the renewed non-aligned movement, the Congress calls to renovate the vision for a New International Economic Order fit for the 21st century; a vision that must draw inspiration from the original Declaration, but also account for the key issues—from digital technology to environmental breakdown—that define the present conditions for sovereign development; and to enshrine this vision in a new U.N. Declaration on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.
Assert Southern Power: The Congress recognizes that economic liberation will not be granted, but must be seized. As the original call for a New International Economic Order was won through the exercise of collective power in the coordinated production of petroleum, so our vision today can only be realized through the collective action of the South and the formation of new and alternative institutions to share critical technology, tackle sovereign debt, drive development finance, face future pandemics together, as well as coordinate positions on international climate action and the protection of national sovereignty over the extraction of natural resources.
Accompany Cuba in the G77: The Congress recognizes the critical opportunity afforded by Cuba’s presidency of the Group of 77 plus China to lead the South out of the present crisis and channel the lessons of its Revolution toward concrete proposals and ambitious initiatives to transform the broader international system.
Build a Planetary Bloc: The Congress calls on all peoples and nations of the world to join in this struggle to definitively achieve the New International Economic Order; to build a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North, whose peoples recognize their obligation to resist the crimes committed in their names; and to bring the spirit of this Havana Congress into the communities that we call home.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
A group of 160 mostly American lawyers on Friday urged President Joe Biden to remove Cuba from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list, a designation acknowledged as meritless and politically motivated by critics and proponents of the policy alike.
Noting that numerous former Latin American and Caribbean heads of state, as well as “hundreds of civil society organizations and thousands of citizens” have asked the Biden administration to lift Cuba’s State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) status, the attorneys called on the president “to immediately initiate a review and notification process to remove Cuba from the SSOT list.”
“There is no legal or moral justification for Cuba to remain on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list,” the attorneys argued in an Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE) letter. “Given the tremendous economic, social, humanitarian, and commercial effect placement on the SSOT list has had for the Cuba people, maintaining it for such pretextual reasons continues to be a stain on U.S. foreign policy.”
\u201cThere is no legal or moral justification to list Cuba as a state sponsor of terror. This important letter signed by 160 lawyers makes that clear. We\u2019re proud to have helped gather signatures! #LetCubaLive\u201d
In 2015, then-President Barack Obama removed Cuba from the SSOT during a promising but ultimately short-lived rapprochement between the two countries that abruptly ended when former President Donald Trump took office in 2017. The lawyers’ letter is a point-by-point refutation of the criteria cited by then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when the outgoing Trump administration re-listed Cuba as an SSOT in January 2021.
These include Cuba’s refusal to extradite members of the National Liberation Army, a leftist rebel group from Colombia, who traveled to Havana for peace negotiations with the Colombian government. Such an extradition, the lawyers noted, would have violated Cuba’s obligation to ensure the safety and well-being of all participants in the peace talks.
Pompeo also cited the fact that Cuba harbors U.S. fugitives wanted for acts of political violence committed nearly half a century ago, even though no other country has been placed on the SSOT list for such a reason. Aside from ignoring all the Cuban exile terrorists who enjoy not only citizenship but sometimes even heroic status in the United States, the lawyers note that “international law clearly prohibits extradition for acts of political violence.”
As the letter states:
To the extent that the 1904 extradition treaty between Cuba and the United States remains in effect and continues to be honored by both parties, it contains a standard political offense exemption. This exception is premised upon a concept familiar to the United States, which is that “individuals have a right to resort to political activism to foster political change.” Indeed, this is precisely the sort of “activism” that the United States designates millions of dollars to each year for regime change in Cuba.
“Policy—and electoral—concerns appear to have always kept Cuba on the SSOT list, rather than actually meeting the legal requirements to be on there,” the lawyers’ letter contends, citing a former Clinton administration Cuba expert who admitted that “frankly, I don’t know anyone inside or outside of government who believes in private that Cuba belongs on the terrorist list.”
“People who defend it know it is a political calculation,” the expert added. “It keeps a certain part of the voting public in Florida happy, and it doesn’t cost anything.”
Much of that “certain part of the voting public in Florida” consists of Cuban-Americans, who—especially among the older generations—vehemently support isolating Cuba as long as it remains socialist.
“Frankly, I don’t know anyone inside or outside of government who believes in private that Cuba belongs on the terrorist list.”
Earlier this month, Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.)—the daughter of Cuban exiles who believes that even the sort of democratic socialism found in many of the world’s freest and most developed nations brings “misery, oppression, and exile”—introduced the FORCE Act. The proposed legislation would bar Biden from removing Cuba from the SSOT list “until the regime grants basic human rights protections.”
Cuba was first placed on the SSOT list by the Reagan administration in 1982. By that time, the island nation and its socialist government had endured a decadeslong campaign of U.S.-backed exile terrorism, attempted subversion, failed assassination attempts, economic warfare, and covert operations large and small in a fruitless policy of toppling longtime leader Fidel Castro. Cuba says U.S.-backed terrorism has killed or wounded more than 5,000 Cubans and cost its economy billions of dollars.
There is no comparable—or any—history of Cuban terrorism against the United States.
In stark contrast, the Reagan administration removed Iraq, then ruled by the dictator Saddam Hussein, from the SSOT list just days before Cuba was added. This was so that the U.S. could supply Hussein’s forces with weaponry used to kill both Iranians and Iraq’s own restive Kurdish and Shi’a people. Top officials in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations knew that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons—some of whose components came from the United States and its allies—against both Iranians and against Iraqi Kurds in the genocidal Anfal campaign, but gave Hussein diplomatic cover until he ordered an invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
\u201cThe resolution by the Berkeley City Council (CA) marks 1 of the 65 different docs passed across the US, demanding the withdrawal of #Cuba from the SSOT list & the lifting of the blockade.\n\nWe thank the ppl of the US, which each day expresses its solidarity through these efforts.\u201d
More than 100 progressive groups and over 10,000 people have signed petitions and open letters urging Biden to lift Cuba’s SSOT designation.
Last October, leftist Colombia President Gustavo Petro asked U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to end the “injustice” of Cuba being listed as a sponsor of terrorism.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The Golden Rule anti-nuclear sailboat, crewed by US veterans and friends, has successfully completed an historic voyage to Cuba. The 34-foot wooden ketch, which in 1958 was sailed toward the Marshall Islands to interfere with US nuclear testing, is owned by Veterans For Peace, and carries out an important part of its mission, “to end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons.”
Five crew, including several members of Veterans For Peace, sailed the Golden Rule from Key West, Florida and, after 22 hours at sea, arrived at Havana’s Marina Hemingway on December 31, just in time to celebrate New Years and the 62nd anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
The Golden Rule was sailed to Havana under a General License issued by the US Treasury Dept. that allows US residents to travel to Cuba for educational and people-to-people purposes.
The Golden Rule crew was joined by seven others who flew into Havana to participate in a week-long educational program. The Proximity Cuba tour agency organized an Arts & Culture program that highlighted many facets of the rich and diverse Cuban culture, including Afro-Cuban music and dance. The Golden Rule delegation also held a well-attended press conference that was featured on the top of the Cuban TV news and in other Latin American media.
“We are on an educational mission,” says Golden Rule Project Manager Helen Jaccard. “We are four months into a 15-month, 11,000 mile voyage around the “Great Loop” of the midwestern, southern and northeastern United States.
“When we saw we would be in Key West at the end of December, we said, ‘Hey, Cuba is only 90 miles away, and the world almost had a nuclear war over Cuba,’” said Helen Jaccard.
Sixty years ago, in 1962, the world came perilously close to a civilization-ending nuclear war during what became known as the “Cuban Missile Crisis.” How did that happen? Many of us will remember that the Kennedy administration discovered that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, within easy striking distance of U.S. cities. This was of course unacceptable, but it was a response to the US placing nuclear missiles in Turkey near the USSR. And the CIA had recently organized the “Bay of Pigs” invasion, a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, leading to a nuclear standoff with the USSR. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev then successfully negotiated to avoid a nuclear war that neither man wanted.
Without US hostility to an independent, socialist Cuba, we would not have come so close to nuclear war in 1962. There are a lot of lessons to learn from the Cuban Missile Crisis. But have they been learned? Some people think that the US prevailed because of Kennedy’s get-tough policy. They do not know of the secret deal Kennedy made with Kruschchev – Kennedy quietly had US missiles removed from Turkey several months later.
The US seems to be making the same mistakes in Ukraine today. This time it is the US and NATO that have moved hostile military forces, including nuclear weapons systems, close to Russia’s borders.” Veterans For Peace is part of the Peace In Ukraine Coalition, which is calling for Diplomacy to End the War in Ukraine, Not Weapons to Prolong It.
Veterans For Peace has been calling for an end to the US blockade of Cuba for many years. Now some in the US are calling for at least a temporary suspension of the blockade, to allow Cuba to rebuild after Hurricane Ian, which destroyed as many as 10,000 homes in the western province of Pinar del Rio.
“We carried humanitarian aid and delivered it to Pinar del Rio,” said Anthony Donovan, a member of New York City Veterans For Peace, who flew to Cuba to greet the Golden Rule. “We also witnessed the economic suffering that is being caused by the cruel 60-year US blockade of Cuba. We will be telling people about this wherever the Golden Rule sails. When people learn about the suffering that the US government is causing normal Cuban citizens, they will join Veterans For Peace in calling for the US blockade to finally end.”
The primary message of the Golden Rule is the urgency of stepping Back from the Brink of nuclear war, and of abolishing nuclear weapons altogether. The VFP Golden Rule Project encourages local communities to pass resolutions calling on the US to sign the historic Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was approved by the General Assembly in July 2017 by a vote of 122-1.
It is hard to imagine the US taking serious steps toward nuclear disarmament without a sea change in the thinking among its political elites and real change in its posture toward the rest of the world. Activist efforts to restrain US militarism and intervention around the globe, to cut the military budget, and to encourage mutual respect and diplomacy among nations must therefore go hand-in-hand with efforts to reduce and eliminate all nuclear weapons.
This is why the VFP Golden Rule Project will now be calling for an end to the US blockade of Cuba. Nuclear disarmament will only be achieved in tandem with a peaceful US foreign policy, and we must organize simultaneously for both.
On December 9, the beautiful wooden boat, her red sails emblazoned with a white peace sign and Veterans For Peace logo, sailed along the famed Malecon sea wall of Havana, and were later greeted by members of Cuba’s Quaker community. On the following day, the Golden Rule and her intrepid crew sailed out of Marina Hemingway and made a 43-hour transit to Miami, arriving on the morning of January 12.
On Sunday, January 22, the second anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons going into effect, the Golden Rule anti-nuclear sailboat will set sail for Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Jacksonville, among other Florida stops, before continuing further north on its “Great Loop” educational voyage – another year to go. See schedule here.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The development and the deployment of nuclear weapons are usually based on the assumption that they enhance national security. But, in fact, as this powerful study of nuclear policy convincingly demonstrates, nuclear weapons move nations toward the brink of destruction.
The basis for this conclusion is the post-World War II nuclear arms race and, especially, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At the height of the crisis, top officials from the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union narrowly avoided annihilating a substantial portion of the human race by what former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, an important participant in the events, called “plain dumb luck.”
The author of this cautionary account, Martin Sherwin, who died shortly after its publication, was certainly well-qualified to tell this chilling story. A professor of history at George Mason University, Sherwin was the author of the influential A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies and the co-author, with Kai Bird, of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which, in 2006, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Perhaps the key factor in generating these three scholarly works was Sherwin’s service as a U.S. Navy junior intelligence officer who was ordered to present top secret war plans to his commander during the Cuban missile crisis.
In Gambling with Armageddon, Sherwin shows deftly how nuclear weapons gradually became a key part of international relations. Although Harry Truman favored some limitations on the integration of these weapons into U.S. national security strategy, his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, significantly expanded their role. According to the Eisenhower administration’s NSC 162/2, the U.S. government would henceforth “consider nuclear weapons as available for use as other munitions.” At Eisenhower’s direction, Sherwin notes, “nuclear weapons were no longer an element of American military power; they were its primary instrument.”
Sherwin adds that, although the major purpose of the new U.S. “massive retaliation” strategy “was to frighten Soviet leaders and stymie their ambitions,” its “principal result … was to establish a blueprint for Nikita Khrushchev to create his own ‘nuclear brinkmanship.’” John F. Kennedy’s early approach to U.S. national security policy―supplementing U.S. nuclear superiority with additional conventional military forces and sponsoring a CIA-directed invasion of Cuba―merely bolstered Khrushchev’s determination to contest U.S. power in world affairs. Consequently, resumption of Soviet nuclear weapons testing and a Soviet-American crisis over Berlin followed.
Indeed, dismayed by U.S. nuclear superiority and feeling disrespected by the U.S. government, Khrushchev decided to secretly deploy medium- and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles in Cuba. As Sherwin observes, the Soviet leader sought thereby “to protect Cuba, to even the balance of nuclear weapons and nuclear fear, and to reinforce his leverage to resolve the West Berlin problem.” Assuming that the missiles would not be noticed until their deployment was completed, Khrushchev thought that the Kennedy administration, faced with a fait accompli, would have no choice but to accept them. Khrushchev was certainly not expecting a nuclear war.
But that is what nearly occurred. In the aftermath of the U.S. government’s discovery of the missile deployment in Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff demanded the bombing and invasion of the island and were supported by most members of ExComm, an ad hoc group of Kennedy’s top advisors during the crisis. At the time, they did not realize that the Soviet government had already succeeded in delivering 164 nuclear warheads to Cuba and, therefore, that a substantial number of the ballistic missiles on the island were already operational. Also, the 42,000 Soviet troops in Cuba were armed with tactical nuclear weapons and had been given authorization to use them to repel an invasion. As Fidel Castro later remarked: “It goes without saying that in the event of an invasion, we would have had nuclear war.”
Initially, among all of Kennedy’s advisors, only Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, suggested employing a political means―rather than a military one―to secure the removal of the missiles. Although Kennedy personally disliked Stevenson, he recognized the wisdom of his UN ambassador’s approach and gradually began to adopt his ideas. “The question really is,” the president told his hawkish advisors, “what action we take which lessens the chance of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure.” Therefore, Kennedy tempered his initial impulse to order rapid military action and, instead, adopted a plan for a naval blockade (“quarantine”) of Cuba, thereby halting the arrival of additional Soviet missiles and creating time for negotiations with Khrushchev for removal of the missiles already deployed.
U.S. military leaders, among other ostensible “wise men,” were appalled by what they considered the weakness of the blockade plan, though partially appeased by Kennedy’s assurances that, if it failed to secure the desired results within a seven-day period, a massive U.S. military attack on the island would follow. Indeed, as Sherwin reveals, at the beginning of October, before the discovery of the missiles, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were already planning for an invasion of Cuba and looking for an excuse to justify it.
Even though Khrushchev, like Kennedy, regarded the blockade as a useful opportunity to negotiate key issues, they quickly lost control of the volatile situation.
For example, U.S. military officers took the U.S.-Soviet confrontation to new heights. Acting on his own initiative, General Thomas Power, the head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, advanced its nuclear forces to DEFCON 2, just one step short of nuclear war―the only occasion when that level of nuclear alert was ever instituted. He also broadcast the U.S. alert level “in the clear,” ensuring that the Russians would intercept it. They did, and promptly raised their nuclear alert level to the same status.
In addition, few participants in the crisis seemed to know exactly what should be done if a Soviet ship did not respect the U.S. blockade of Cuba. Should the U.S. Navy demand to board it? Fire upon it? Furthermore, at Castro’s orders, a Soviet surface-to-air battery in Cuba shot down an American U-2 surveillance flight, killing the pilot. Khrushchev was apoplectic at the provocative action, while the Kennedy administration faced the quandary of how to respond to it.
A particularly dangerous incident occurred in the Sargasso Sea, near Cuba. To bolster the Soviet defense of Cuba, four Soviet submarines, each armed with a torpedo housing a 15-kiloton nuclear warhead, had been dispatched to the island. After a long, harrowing trip through unusually stormy seas, these vessels were badly battered when they arrived off Cuba. Cut off from communication with Moscow, their crews had no idea whether the United States and the Soviet Union were already at war.
All they did know was that a fleet of U.S. naval warships and warplanes was apparently attacking one of the stricken Soviet submarines, using the unorthodox (and unauthorized) tactic of forcing it to surface by flinging hand grenades into its vicinity. One of the Soviet crew members recalled that “it felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel while somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.” Given the depletion of the submarine’s batteries and the tropical waters, temperatures ranged in the submarine between 113 and 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The air was foul, fresh water was in short supply, and crew members were reportedly “dropping like dominoes.” Unhinged by the insufferable conditions below deck and convinced that his submarine was under attack, the vessel’s captain ordered his weapons officer to assemble the nuclear torpedo for action. “We’re gonna blast them now!” he screamed. We will die, but we will sink them all―we will not become the shame of the fleet.”
At this point, though, Captain Vasily Arkhipov, a young Soviet brigade chief of staff who had been randomly assigned to the submarine, intervened. Calming the distraught captain, he eventually convinced him that the apparent military attack, plus subsequent machine gun fire from U.S. Navy aircraft, probably constituted no more than a demand to surface. And so they did. Arkhipov’s action, Sherwin notes, saved not only the lives of the submarine crew, “but also the lives of thousands of U.S. sailors and millions of innocent civilians who would have been killed in the nuclear exchanges that certainly would have followed from the destruction” that the “nuclear torpedo would have wreaked upon those U.S. Navy vessels.”
Meanwhile, recognizing that the situation was fast slipping out of their hands, Kennedy and Khrushchev did some tense but serious bargaining. Ultimately, they agreed that Khrushchev would remove the missiles, while Kennedy would issue a public pledge not to invade Cuba. Moreover, Kennedy would remove U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey―reciprocal action that made sense to both men, although, for political reasons, Kennedy insisted on keeping the missile swap a secret. Thus, the missile crisis ended with a diplomatic solution.
Ironically, continued secrecy about the Cuba-Turkey missile swap, combined with illusions of smooth Kennedy administration calibrations of power spun by ExComm participants and the mass communications media, led to a long-term, comforting, and triumphalist picture of the missile crisis. Consequently, most Americans ended up with the impression that Kennedy stood firm in his demands, while Khrushchev “blinked.” It was a hawkish “lesson”―and a false one. As Sherwin points out, “the real lesson of the Cuban missile crisis … is that nuclear armaments create the perils they are deployed to prevent, but are of little use in resolving them.”
Although numerous books have been written about the Cuban missile crisis, Gambling with Armageddon ranks as the best of them. Factually detailed, clearly and dramatically written, and grounded in massive research, it is a work of enormous power and erudition. As such, it represents an outstanding achievement by one of the pre-eminent U.S. historians.
Like Sherwin’s other works, Gambling with Armageddon also grapples with one of the world’s major problems: the prospect of nuclear annihilation. At the least, it reveals that, while nuclear weapons exist, the world remains in peril. On a deeper level, it suggests the need to move beyond considerations of national security to international security, including the abolition of nuclear weapons and the peaceful resolution of conflict among nations.
Securing these goals might necessitate a long journey, but Sherwin’s writings remind us that, to safeguard human survival, there’s really no alternative to pressing forward with it.
The Biden administration has called the Trump-era Title 42 policy “obsolete” and urged the U.S. Supreme Court to strike it down, but on Thursday President Joe Biden announced a significant expansion of the migrant expulsion program in an effort to deny entry to Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border.
NBC Newsreported that under the new policy, which rights groups and experts decried as a cruel attack on asylum-seekers, the Biden administration “will be sending up to 30,000 migrants from each of the three countries back into Mexico per month while allowing 30,000 asylum-seekers from each of the three countries admittance to live and work in the U.S. for two years.”
“Those accepted through the application process must show they have a U.S.-based sponsor to support them, much like Venezuelans and Ukrainians have done through programs the Biden administration established for those countries,” the outlet explained.
The Young Center, an immigrant rights group, called the changes “unacceptable” and argued that “cherry-picking people from specific countries undermines the rule of law that guarantees people, regardless of country, race, ethnicity, or language, the right to seek protection through a fundamentally fair proceeding.”
“This proposal, like the current program denying asylum to most Venezuelans, would cap the number of Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Haitian migrants eligible to seek asylum while expelling all others to Mexico,” the group added. “It is also a flagrant violation of all people’s right to seek asylum by excluding people from protection if they do not have a supporter with financial means in the United States or if they traveled ‘irregularly’ through Mexico or Panama to reach the United States… This proposal is discriminatory and dangerous.”
Karen Tumlin, an immigrant rights lawyer, agreed, calling Thursday’s announcement “a new low from the Biden administration with respect to protecting the legal right for those fleeing persecution to seek asylum.”
“Let’s be clear: Nothing requires the administration to expand Title 42 while it claims to be preparing for its ending.”
Biden and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiled the Title 42 expansion just weeks after the administration asked the Supreme Court to strike down the policy, which uses the coronavirus pandemic as a justification to rapidly expel migrants.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Title 42 must remain in place until it hears arguments next month in a case brought by Republican-led states hoping to uphold the program, which the Trump and Biden administrations used to deny millions of people regular asylum proceedings.
In a press release, DHS said that in addition to the Title 42 expansion—which the agency acknowledged could soon be struck down—it is “increasing and enhancing the use of expedited removal under Title 8 authorities for those who cannot be processed under the Title 42 public health order.”
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Biden said, “I don’t like Title 42, but it’s the law now and I have to operate within it.”
But immigrant rights advocates noted that although Title 42 is still in effect, the Biden administration is under no obligation to expand its scope.
“Title 42 expulsions were already an unjustifiable misuse of the public health laws; this knee-jerk expansion of Title 42 will put more lives in grave danger,” said Jonathan Blazer, director of border strategies at the ACLU. “Let’s be clear: Nothing requires the administration to expand Title 42 while it claims to be preparing for its ending. There is simply no reason why the benefits of a new parole program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians must be conditioned on the expansion of dangerous expulsions.”
“President Biden correctly recognized today that seeking asylum is a legal right and spoke sympathetically about people fleeing persecution. But the plan he announced further ties his administration to the poisonous anti-immigrant policies of the Trump era instead of restoring fair access to asylum protections,” Blazer continued. “And previously, President Biden explicitly condemned Trump’s asylum ban against people who travel through other countries and made a campaign promise to end it and restore our asylum laws. But today the White House announced that he plans to bring a version of that ban back.”
Amy Fischer, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for the Americas, also expressed outrage over the administration’s policy announcement, calling it an “attack on the human right to seek asylum.”
“Today, the Biden administration fully reversed course on its stated commitment to human rights and racial justice by once again expanding the use of Title 42, announcing rulemaking on an asylum transit ban, expanding the use of expedited removal, and implementing a new system to require appointments through a mobile app for those desperately seeking safety,” said Fischer. “Amnesty International previously found that the cruel treatment of Haitians under Title 42 subjected Haitian asylum seekers to arbitrary detention and discriminatory and humiliating ill-treatment that amounts to race-based torture. The United States has both a legal and moral obligation to uphold the right to seek asylum, and over the holidays, we once again saw communities mobilize to welcome asylum seekers with dignity.”
“The Biden administration must reverse course and stop these policies of exclusion, and instead uphold the right to seek asylum and invest in the communities that are stepping up to welcome,” Fischer added.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
“[T]he current U.S. government, the one of Joseph Biden, of all those that the Cuban Revolution has known, is the one that has most aggressively and effectively applied the economic blockade,” Carlos Fernández de Cossío, vice minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, declared in a speech on December 14. “It is the one that punishes the most, the one that causes the most damage to the daily life of…
A surging Pink Tide has brought left electoral victories in Latin America and the Caribbean protesting the neoliberal model imposed by the US and its collaborators. Neoliberalism has failed to meet the needs of the peoples of the region and is losing its legitimacy as a prototype for development.
However, the countries of the region must of necessity engage in a world financial order dominated by the US, which limits the possibilities of developing their economies successfully.
Troubled waters
US and other western central banks – what Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega calls the “gang of assassins who control the global economy” – maintained low interest rates for much of the last decade which encouraged countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to take out large loans.
Starting around 2021, interest rates were slowly raised. Coincident, the pandemic hit and developing countries were forced to go further into debt to fund Covid measures and cushion the effects of the economic dislocation. In these volatile times, the value of the US dollar has increased on international markets.
For developing nations, this has meant higher interest payments coupled with capital flight to US financial markets in particular. Inflation, fueled by US and allied sanctions on Russia, have disrupted international supply chains, making goods less available and more expensive. In addition, large corporations have extracted excess profits.
The Pink Tide meets a right-wing counter current
Paradoxically those very problems which the left-leaning governments protested about, now have become theirs to solve once in power and at a time of growing economic distress. What Reuterscalls the now “orphaned right” in Latin America and the Caribbean may be down but not dead.
Mexico. In Mexico, AMLO is termed-out for the 2024 presidential race. The popular president is currently advocating contentious electoral reforms and expanded welfare. Economic growth is stagnating, and the country continues to be plagued with horrific drug cartel violence. The US is heavily pressuring Mexico to accept GMO crops, energy sector privatization, and measures to prevent immigrants for crossing the border into the “land of the free.”
Argentina. Argentina, a major global supplier of grains and soybeans, is in the third year of a draught. The economy is in shambles with inflation running at nearly 100%, wages stagnant, and an enormous debt incurred by the former rightist administration.
Current vice president and former president (2003-2007) Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) is the likely left candidate in the upcoming presidential race in October. She may be pitted against former right-wing president Mauricio Macri in what would be a polarizing contest. CFK, who narrowly escaped death when the assassin’s gun jammed, is facing major legal “lawfare” challenges for corruption. Presently, the right is favored to win in the polls.
Bolivia. President Arce faced a month-long coup attempt in the Santa Cruz department of Bolivia. Right-wing forces set up blockades and violently attacked unionists and campesinos, causing considerable damage to the national economy before an agreement was reached. The timing of the next national census was the ostensible point of contention, but the larger and continuing purpose was to destabilize the leftist administration.
Peru. The ever-mercurial Peru has had five presidents in three years. After winning by a razor thin margin, the majority right-wing legislature has so hounded President Castillo that he has literally been unable to govern. They have even blocked his ability to leave the country while he is being investigated on multiple corruption charges. Castillo is hanging in there by his fingernails, having survived two impeachment attempts (and another in progress) and some five cabinet reorganizations.
Honduras. After over 12 years of US-aligned governments in Honduras, President Castro has inherited a strongly entrenched rightist judiciary, military, and police and a weak economy. A state of emergency was imposed at the end of November to address widespread extortion by gangs.
The new president has proceeded cautiously given her constrained options. The legislature passed her repeal of the ZEDE free trade zones. But the US ambassador has interfered in Honduran affairs, opposing the repeal.
Chile. Gabriel Boric has tried to position himself as the “good” non-authoritarian left. On the campaign trail and in office, he criticized Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, creating disunity among the left-leaning Latin American states. Maduro of Venezuela returned the compliment by labelling him the “cowardly left”; Ortega of Nicaragua called him a White House “lapdog.”
While he may ingratiate himself to the US, President Boric’s popularity ratings have plummeted. He surfed into office on the popular wave for a new constitution to replace the Pinochet-era one, but which went down in a referendum on September 4 with only 38% approval. The economy is in decline and the indigenous Mapuche people are in revolt.
Colombia. The new progressive president has to carefully triangulate with the entrenched right and the colossus of the north. Colombia is the only NATO “global partner” in Latin America, and President Petro has proposed bringing NATO into the Amazon. The congenitally anti-communist, neoliberal Soros foundation is also working closely with the new government.
Despite these constraints, President Petro has reopened relations with Venezuela, reversing Colombia’s previous role as the US surrogate to attack its neighbor. Petro has forged ahead with his Total Peace initiative with the ELN and other armed guerillas, based on the 2016 Peace Agreement. Further, the new administration seeks to negotiate peaceful settlements with right paramilitaries and drug cartels. Meanwhile, illicit cocaine production in Colombia, the world’s largest supplier, is on a record increase.
Petro has also been successful in getting his tax reform enacted to fund his ambitious social programs. Nevertheless, his energy policies present problematic choices between extraction for profit and retrenchment for the environment.
Brazil. Lula beat Bolsonaro by 1.5%. Given the unexpected closeness of the vote and Bolsonaro’s extreme right-wing positions, not to mention his bungling of the Covid crisis and general mismanagement, some analysts considered the election more of a rejection of Bolsonaro than an affirmation of Lula. A significant proportion of the electorate believe, without evidence, that Lula is a corrupt criminal who stole the election.
For over three weeks after Bolsonaro lost, right-wing truckers blocked Brazil’s highways in protest, and evangelicals preyed outside military bases calling for the army to overturn the vote. Bolsonaro neither conceded, nor commented, nor even appeared in public. His Vice President Hamilton Mourão offered the excuse that his chief had a skin disease preventing him from wearing pants!
Finally, Bolsonaro called for annulling over half the votes because of a supposed bug in the electronic system, which would allow him to remain president of Brazil. The independent election authority reaffirmed Lula’s legitimate victory.
Lula’s Workers’ Party lost some of the major cities and states and lacks an effective majority in the national legislature, immediately forcing Lula to moderate his economic agenda after his initial proposal set financial markets plunging. Lula’s running mate and now VP Geraldo Alckmin is a center-right politician, who was included on the ticket to attract that constituency. Lula will take office on January 1.
Prognosis for the Pink Tide
The recent left successes of the Pink Tide have been considerable, but may be transient, subject to the ebb and flow of the electoral arena. Further, this Pink Tide is limited by social democratic politics ideologically tied to accommodating their own bourgeoisies, which inhibits how far social change can be achieved.
Significantly, no new revolutions accompanied this current wave of left electoral victories. Nor are any new revolutions currently on the horizon. The existing socialist countries of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have been engaged in defensive struggles against the regime-change campaigns of the US. Their futures are more constrained than they were a decade ago. And their continued survival is by no means guaranteed.
Overarching the hemisphere is the continued presence of US. Globally, Washington has become more aggressive in asserting its dominance and more unified in its imperialist mission now that the Democrats have become the leading party of war.
Meanwhile, recessionary clouds are gathering over the world economy which will impede the left-leaning administrations’ social programs. Unlike the previous Pink Tide of 2008, this one won’t be buoyed by a comparable commodities boom.
Nevertheless, looking into the new year, Venezuelan President Maduro observed at a meeting of the São Palo Forum of regional left parties: “We are facing a favorable wave for the peoples, for the anti-neoliberal model, for the advanced pro-independence model.”
The US has long considered Latin America and the Caribbean to be its “backyard” under the anachronist 1823 Monroe Doctrine. And even though current US President Biden mistakenly thinks that upgrading the region to the “front yard” makes any difference, Yankee hemispheric hegemony is becoming increasingly volatile. A “Pink Tide” of left electoral victories since 2018 have swept Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Chile, Columbia, and Brazil. At the same time, China has emerged as an economic presence while tumultuously inflationary winds blow in the world economy.
In this larger context, the socialist triad of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are addressed below along with the importance of Haiti.
Henry Kissinger once quipped: “To be an enemy of the US is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” He presciently encapsulated the perilously precarious situations in the “enemy” states targeted for regime change by the imperial power – Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – as well as the critical consequences for Haiti of being “friended.”
Out-migration from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua
While accommodation and cooption by Washington may be in order for social democracies such as the new administrations in Colombia and Brazil, nothing but regime ruination is slated for the explicitly socialist states. Looking pretty in pink is begrudgingly tolerable for Washington but not red.
The Democratic Party speech writers may lack the rhetorical flourish of John Bolton’s “Troika of Tyranny,” but President Biden has continued his predecessor’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The result has been unprecedented out migration from the three states striving for socialism, although the majority of migrants entering the US are still from either the Northern Triangle (consisting of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) or Mexico.
US immigration policy is cynically designed to exacerbate the situation. The Biden administration has dangled inconsistent political amnesties jerking Venezuelan and Nicaraguan immigrants around. The Cuban Adjustment Act, dating back to 1966, perversely encourages irregular immigration.
With Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the pull of economic opportunities drives people to leave in the face of sanctions-fueled deteriorating conditions at home. These migrants differ from those from the Northern Triangle, who are also fleeing from the push of gang violence, extortion, femicide, and the ambiance of general criminal impunity.
Socialist states red-lined
US sanctions, which have literally red-lined Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, are more lethal than ever. The electronic technology for enforcing the coercive measures has far advanced since the days over six decades ago when JFK first visited what is called the “blockade” on Cuba. Further, the effect over time of sanctions is to corrode socialist solidarity and cooperation. And in recent times, cyber warfare using social media is effectively wielded by the imperialists.
Natural disasters have a synergistic effect aggravating and amplifying the pain of sanctions. An August lightning strike destroyed 40% of Cuba’s fuel reserves. Then Hurricane Ian hit both Cuba and Nicaragua in October, while Venezuela experienced unprecedented heavy rainfall, all with lethal consequences.
The Covid pandemic stressed these already sanctions-battered economies, presenting the unenviable choice of locking down or working and eating. Cuba was forced to suspend tourism, which was a major source of foreign income. Venezuela chose an innovative system of alternating periods of lockdown. Nicaragua, where three-quarters of the population work in small businesses and farms or the informal sector, implemented relatively successful public health measures while keeping the economy open.
Venezuela has made remarkable progress turning around a complete economic collapse deliberately caused by the US sanctions, but it still has a long, long way to recovery. For example, poor people are getting fat in Venezuela, not because there is too much food, but because there is not enough. Consequently, they are forced to subsist on high caloric arepas made of fried corn flour and cannot afford more nutritious vegetables and meats.
Nicaragua is bracing for more US sanctions, while the situation in Cuba is more desperate than ever. But with international support and solidarity, the explicitly socialist states have continued to successfully resist the onslaughts of imperialism.
Haiti made poor by imperialism
Compared to Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, Haiti is suffering even more. It is the poorest country in the hemisphere, made so by imperialism. Few countries in the hemisphere have had as intimate a relationship with the hegemon to the north as Haiti…unfortunately. Presently civil society has risen up in revolt and for good reason.
Haiti achieved independence in 1804 in the world’s first successful slave revolt and the first successful anti-colonial revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean. For those Afro-descendants, the price of freedom has been stiff. The former colonial power, France, along with the US have been bleeding Haiti dry ever since. Over $20 billion has been extracted for “reparations” under the force of arms for the cost of the slaves and repayment of the consequent “debt.”
Under US President Bill Clinton – he has since apologized after the damage was done – peasant agriculture was destroyed with an IMF deal. Since then, Haiti has gone from being a net exporter of rice to an importer from the US. The consequent population shift from the land to the cities conforms to the designs for Haiti to be a low-wage manufacturing center for foreign capital.
The treatment of Haitian immigrants and would-be immigrants on the US southern border by the overtly racist and anti-immigrant Donald Trump has been even worse by his supposedly “woke” Democratic successor. Tellingly, Biden’s special envoy quit in protest because he found the administration’s policy, in his words, “inhumane.”
Haiti has been without an elected president. Ariel Henry, the current officeholder, was simply installed by the Core Group of the US, Canada, and other outside powers after his also unelected predecessor, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in July 2021. The Haitian parliament doesn’t meet, most government services are non-functional, rival armed groups control major swarths of the national territory, and cholera has again broken out.
The US has proposed a return of a multi-national military force like the previous disastrous MINUSTAH effort by the UN, which left the country in the state it is now. Little wonder that the peoples of the hemisphere aspire to alternatives to the US aiding their development.
Chinese tsunami and the Russian rip tide
China has emerged as an alternative and challenger to US dollar dominance of the hemisphere. China has provided vital life support for the socialist states targeted by US for regime change. During the Covid pandemic, China supplied the region with medical equipment and vaccines, literally saving lives.
The Chinese economic presence has been like a tsunami wave from the east building up as it approached the American landmass. In 2000, China accounted for a mere 2% of the region’s trade. Economic exchanges began to swell when China joined the World Trade Association in December 2001. Today, China is the number one trading partner with South America and second only to the US for the region as a whole.
China has expanded its political, cultural, and even military ties with the region, while Taiwan’s fortunes have receded. Over twenty Latin American and Caribbean countries have joined the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), offering more diverse commercial and financial options.
Russia, too, has been a salvation as when Cuba was caught in the pandemic peak with the Delta strain and their oxygen plant broke down. Russia airlifted life-saving oxygen and later brought vital fuel after the fires at Matanzas crippled the Cuban energy grid.
To be continued…
• The inflationary blowback from western sanctions on some one third of humanity present an increasingly volatile global context.
• Part III concludes with the challenges ahead for countries striving for independence from US dominance.
This was the most important election in American history, as was the previous one, the one before that, and all previous exercises of marketing that pose as democratic rule in our great example of how to fool most of the people most of the time. Of course, this election, as all others, cost more money than the previous marketing fiasco, when more than 14 billion dollars were spent on the 2020 purchase of the white house and congress which rose to more than 16 billion for this cycle of shopping center lesser evilism that cost even more just to purchase congress. Clearly, democracy survived its most serious assault in the history of marketing, at least according to our mind managers and consciousness controllers who make pimps and sex workers seem like poets of love. The only thing that is consistent in our one corrupt system with two corrupt parties is the rising profit margin as all manner of advertising, insurance, polling and other marketplace hustlers feast on the profits available in marketing capitalist democracy while claiming to stand for truth, beauty and other forms of mass hallucinations.
The entire world was recently being shamed by any claim to international democracy when the United Nations once again voted overwhelmingly to end the murderously cruel American boycott of Cuba by a vote of 185 -2, as usual to no avail. Despite more than 95% of the world’s nations voting against the vicious policy, two shining democracies outnumbered by a global margin of hundreds of millions of people and seen as the most dreaded nations in the world according to numerous polls, the USA and Israel, gave examples of how democratic freedom flourishes the way pus flows through healthy veins. This foreign disaster mimics the national one in which 8% of American wealth rules 92% of non-wealth and people who might as well be stoned, drunk or otherwise mentally disabled incur a national debt by borrowing more than 31 trillion dollars from private finance in order to defend ourselves from thinking and assure that we send plenty of money to the Ukraine to kill Russians, to Israel to kill Palestinians and other incredibly murderous methods of defending ourselves from having health care, housing and other luxuries that might make survival more comfortable and life more worthwhile for most of us.
Of course, we do offer heartfelt democratic rights to raving American maniacs who can stride into any weapons shop in the nation or use mail order and buy a gun, bullets and then march off to a school, movie theater or shopping center and murder as many un-defended Americans as possible before either killing themselves or being killed by a relatively helpless-to-defend Americans from Americans’ police force. To be sure, all the freedom loving participants in our great democracy were, and are, very well protected from any foreigners who would attack us, especially China and Russia who have no such plans but are necessarily geared up to retaliate if and when one of our ruling class lunatic servants to the warfare state rich bring on a nuclear war that destroys most of us while most of them hide in some lead-lined shelter hoping to regovern the ruins that remain if anything does, which is unlikely.
Of course, there were elements, as in every election, on which localities and specific identity groups were able to achieve victories, in the way that the house Negros of slavery days were able to achieve Saturday night fish fries and Sunday morning church services to alleviate the incredible pain of the field negroes who picked the cotton and absorbed most of the physical abuse. Just as an antidemocratic supreme court made abortion legal fifty years ago a new anti democratic court made it illegal again and voters expressed their opposition to one form of anti-democracy by supporting another. But we still have no relief for the much maligned minority of disabled Polish American gay Jews of color who remain unrepresented in congress, the white house or perhaps in reality.
Lesser evilism has passed for democracy among most people for so long it now passes for the real thing and voting for polio rather than cancer while forgetting they are both diseases has set people against one another in a national state of disgrace and contempt which finds many needing letters to Santa calling for death and destruction for those who dare to vote for what they are manipulated to see as the worst disease while making good health available only to those who can afford it. While marketing sets up investments depending on the cost of votes our shopping mall that passes for democracy among poor souls who might find some pig who upon finding out his wife or girlfriend was pregnant would demand she immediately abort and thus be cheered as being pro-choice. Are we confused? Does a snake have wings?
In the desire and desperate need for real democracy and the majority of Americans taking control of our country out of the hands of a warfare state owned and operated by a minority rich, we need a political party that represents the 92% of us who are not millionaires. We work hard to survive – with millions holding two jobs and dependent on credit cards in order to pay rent, eat and have shelter thereby incurring crippling personal debt with attention paid to the disgrace of student loans but still forgotten when it comes to survival among the great majority who are not attending college unless they are employed to clean its toilets or deliver food to its cafeterias. How about a party, not simply a lone voice unable to get on the ballot for lack of wealth, demanding that, say, all debt incurred by the vast majority living on much less than 100k be cancelled? Difficult to achieve while the market forces of capital profit from creation of the armed forces of mass murder while the incredible loss to humanity is alleged to be the work of evil demons like Hitler, Putin, Trump, Clinton, Gore, and more, all of whom are paid employees of rich capital.
Ultra rich donor-investors purchase the votes of their working subjects in “our democracy”, a phrase entertained by good people still having some food, clothing and shelter to show for their labors and who would have referred to their hovels in time of slavery as “our plantation”. As largely corrupt representation in the employ of minority capital still get away with preaching more private profits as the way to save a crumbing natural environment from continued economic rape and plunder, the vast majority reduced to gasping for breath and survival need to activate and not simply repeat as a prayer a form of global and not simply national democracy that confronts the threat to all of us and not just some in one or another poverty-stricken-by-colonialism nation. Americans have a long way to go but so does the rest of the world and it will only be able to do so if the threat of continued marketing of everything necessary to survival so that only a shrinking minority and grossly expanding and unpayable debt for the rest enable some form of material comfort for the few while the vast majority suffering ends, once and for all. That means capitalism, whether in its idiotic reactionary form here or in relatively progressive attempts being made in China. Ending capitalism will not end all of humanity’s problems but it certainly will end most of them, while its continuation will guarantee increasing all of them until nothing is left. That calls for real democracy of a global nature and not the criminal sham which makes most religious mythology sound like critically arrived at material analysis of reality. We need to stop acting like pathetic children begging Santa for peace, clean air and a thriving environment and actually create those things and more by voting for democracy with our bodies, minds and souls. Before it’s too late.
For the 30th consecutive time, dating back to 1992, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has overwhelmingly voted in favor of a Cuban-sponsored Resolution on the “Necessity of Ending the Economic, Commercial, and Financial Embargo by the United States of America Against Cuba” [N2263517.pdf]. It was accompanied by a thorough, country-by-country damning official report by the UN Secretary General [N2128802.pdf].
International Moral and Political Shield
This 30th consecutive UNGA vote is obviously “non-binding.” That is, it carries no punitive measures of enforcement against the US government and has no counter-measures to deter or block the implementation of the illegal – by the UN’s own unenforced standards — extraterritorial US blockade measures. Nonetheless – within the framework of the heroic resistance of the Cuban people, state, and government plus the work of international Cuba solidarity forces – the annual UN action is an important part of the international moral and political shield that is a key obstacle to direct US aggression and military intervention.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 saw – to the disgust of the entire world – the deepening of the US anti-Cuba blockade under the Republican Trump and Democratic Biden Administrations that has carried on from 2017 to the present day.
Looking at the current international political calculus we must also add the impact of the brutal Russian Federation-Ukraine war on world politics and “geo-political” world alignments. Revolutionary Cuba has, through its carefully formulated statements and in interviews with Cuban representatives in platforms and media worldwide, consistently underlined both its opposition to the Russian Federation’s violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the unacceptable provocations of NATO towards the Russian Federation leading up to the now-raging military action.
Utter Washington Isolation as Brutal Blockade Carries On
Washington has long since abandoned any pretense of trying to win over or convince anyone of its position or rationalizations for its punitive anti-Cuba campaign. Its UN spokesperson went through the motions of “explaining” the US vote with a stew of lies and half-truths, dripping with sophistry.
The handful of nations that vote with Washington (only Israel in the last two votes) or abstain (Ukraine and Brazil this year) never take the floor in solidarity with Washington or utter a peep.
There has been a common anti-Cuba perspective and policy continuity from Trump to Biden. Both are animated by the prospect of using the deepening of the blockade –in the face of the pandemic! –to asphyxiate the Cuban nation-state (which happens to be a socialist-workers state). The aim of successive US Administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to Joseph Biden —with a brief pause and some limited advances toward normalization in 2015-16 under Barack Obama‘s White House and State Department — and bipartisan Congresses for over six decades now — has been to create the conditions for social and economic collapse in Cuba and expedite the installation of a neo-colonial government subservient to US imperialism.
Bellicose bipartisan Washington remains far from this goal. Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken have so far been unable to shift and retreat and carry out any significant steps towards US-Cuba normalization, as was done in the 2nd half of the 2nd Barack Obama Administration.
Top US policymakers seem convinced — at least in public — that they can tough out the mounting international pressure and that revolutionary Cuba will somehow disappear from the face of the earth if they can only apply the pressure on its throat for just a little longer. Wishful thinking and self-delusion have always, and necessarily, accompanied US anti-Cuba policies since the 1959 triumph of the July 26th Movement and the Cuban Revolution.
It was in 1991 that the revolutionary socialist Cuban government first attempted to bring such a Resolution before the United Nations as a whole. A furious US campaign of threats and blackmail, directed primarily against Latin American governments and other countries who were members of the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations, succeeded that year in getting them to pressure the Cuban UN delegation to withdraw it (The Cuban delegation produced a communiqué which Washington had dispatched to regional capitals stating: “We urge you to instruct your ambassador in Havana and/or your UN permanent representative to approach the Cubans in an effort to have the resolution withdrawn. The Cubans should understand that their insistence that you support them threatens your good relations with the US and could damage their bilateral relations with your government.”) The next year [1992] the Resolution did get to the General Assembly floor with a vote of 59-3 in favor and 71 abstentions.
In 1992, Cuba was reeling from the economic cataclysm of the ‘Special Period,’ when its economy contracted virtually overnight by 35% following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allied so-called ‘socialist camp.’ Its revolutionary diplomats in New York City at the United Nations took advantage of an inadvertent lapse in the attentiveness of US UN personnel – who, in any case were cooling the champagne in anticipation of socialist Cuba’s imminent implosion and evaporation under deepening US sanctions and stepped-up US-based terrorist attacks – to slip onto the General Assembly agenda the first Resolution “Opposing the Economic, Commercial, and Financial Embargo Imposed by the United States Against Cuba.” Precedent established, and unable to be blocked by US veto. Every year since then…Washington has been utterly isolated in this annual vote in the General Assembly.
Since 1992 nearly all the abstentions turned to votes in favor of Cuba reaching the current overwhelming consensus.
The Blockade Carries On Despite Washington’s Political Isolation and Moral Defeat
Unable to retreat in the face of overwhelming opposition, all that is left for Biden’s Washington is a policy guided by inertia…and the prospect that the entire policy could become unsustainable, face material consequences, implode, and even collapse under the pressure of events and changing world circumstances.
Washington under Biden has painted itself into such a corner politically – in the Americas and in the world as registered in the 2022 UNGA vote — that any significant shift or signal becomes exceedingly difficult to control and contain. For example, Biden could easily accede to the universal demand for the removal of Cuba from the US State Department list of ”sponsors of state terrorism.” This obscene addition was added to US blockade measures in the waning days of the Trump Presidency, and shamefully maintained by the Biden White House and State Department.
Biden and Blinken fully realize that such an action would quickly translate overnight into big new openings for capital investment and trade for Cuba, from countries, businesses, and institutions too timid or cowardly to defy Washington and its bogus terrorism list. Governments, businesses, and institutions will generally be loathe to fight for their access to the tiny Cuban “market,” if the consequence is to being shut out from the huge US “market.”
This is precisely why such a seemingly easy move is so resisted by Biden and Blinken. (At a recent meeting with groups organizing humanitarian aid to Cuba, where the issue of the terrorism list was raised by activists, the stonewall reply from the State Department bureaucrat rolled out was that eliminating Cuba’s inclusion on the terrorism list was not a “priority” at this time for the busy State Department. This is, of course, nonsense since obviously “regime change” in Cuba remains a central bipartisan US policy “priority.”) In any case the historical record shows that Cuba has been the recipient over many decadesto the present day of individual and state-sponsored terrorism, most-often carried out with impunity from US territory, in formal contravention of US law for what it’s worth (which is not much).
Still, the blockade and its mounting, accumulated blows against Cuban living standards continues. And has been exacerbated by a series of disasters in Cuba since May 2022: the deadly Saratoga Hotel explosion from a gas leak; the August 2022 lightening-induced explosion and destruction of oil-storage facilities in Matanzas, Cuba; and the September 2022 widespread destruction of homes, productive agricultural lands, and industrial facilities in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
This series of disasters came as Cuba was barely able to savor the victory of its heroic containment and conquest of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island with the production of several highly efficacious, domestically designed and produced, vaccines and the successful mass inoculation of the entire population. This included being the first nation to vaccinate all children two-years and up. Nevertheless, the pandemic dealt devastating blows to Cuban tourism, a major source of the foreign exchange so central in countering the pressures from the US blockade.
Delegate after delegate, in tones often sharp and angry, spoke of the human deprivation, distress, reduction of living standards, shortages, and death that is the ongoing impact of the US blockade on the Cuban people as a whole. Leading UN ambassadors and diplomats underscored this contradiction between the utter political isolation of the cruel and brutal US blockade and its continuation and deepening under the Biden Administration. Some expressed, in the dismay that accompanies disillusion, the busted expectation that the Democrat Biden was bound to be an incremental, ameliorative improvement or advance from the hated reactionary Trump with his purported Miami base among rightist Cuban-American forces.
Roll Call of Solidarity
Some 52 speakers mounted the UN podium (or spoke from their seats in pre- and post-vote “Explanations”), as per UN choreography, to denounce US policy and express support and solidarity for Cuba. This went on for several hours each day culminating in a powerful speech by Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodriguez
Presentations were given representing specific UN member states as well in the name of distinct UN blocs and associations within the General Assembly. These groupings included: the African Group; the Association of South East Asian Nations; the Caribbean Community (CARICOM); the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC); the Group of 77 plus China; the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations (NAM); the Organization of Islamic Unity; and the more newly organized, with the leading participation of Cuba, the Friends in Defense of the UN Charter. Most speakers opened their remarks by aligning themselves with several of the different blocs and giving warm greetings to Cuban Foreign Minister Rodriguez.
As previously stated, Cuba’s inclusion of the US State Department’s “terrorism list” drew the wrath of most speakers, with Mexico’s top UN diplomat calling it “clearly absurd.” The Mexican representative then sharply pointed out that the US policy of “starving civilian populations is against international law” and that US anti-Cuba policy “must not only cease, but the US must repair the damage done.”
South Africa’s representative said his homeland will be “forever grateful for the decisive assistance from Cuba in the liberation of South Africa.”
As in past anti-blockade votes, speakers from the Caribbean island nations – organized in CARICOM — were particularly outspoken in solidarity with Cuba in some of the most stirring words of the two days. Like other nations that have benefitted from Cuba’s medical internationalism and the world-renowned Henry Reeve Brigades, Caribbean states spoke of the reality of Cuban medical solidarity in contrast to the US blockade which aims at causing economic destruction and human suffering.
Referring to the UN Secretary General’s report accompanying the Resolution and presented documents, numerous speakers referred to massive financial loss of $3.8 million from the blockade in less than one year over the course of 2021-2022.
I found the tone in the debate this year registering mounting “concern,” “disappointment,” “frustration” and quite notably indignation at the failure of Washington to act on such an overwhelming and clearly expressed view of the so-called “international community.” This is the same “international community” Washington appeals to and implores to condemn the Russian Federation invasion of Ukraine and its moves to unilaterally alter Ukraine’s legal UN-ratified territorial integrity. Of course, the overwhelming majority of UN member-states, did not need any such pressure from Washington to take independent positions directly against (or declining to support) the Russian Federation invasion. The UNGA vote against the Russian Federation actions was 143 to 5 with 35 abstentions that included a number of African states, China, Cuba, India, and Vietnam.
I was able to watch this unfold from the Visitors Gallery looking down on the panoramic view of the General Assembly Hall with dozens of Cuba solidarity and anti-blockade activists from New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts who observed the proceedings over two days as an expression of solidarity, closing a week of actions against the blockade organized by the ad hoc UNVote4Cuba Coal across the US, Canada, Quebec, and Puerto Rico.
Cuba is a Beacon
It is hard to imagine any significant, contentious political issue in world politics with so much consensus than opposition to the US anti-Cuba blockade. Uniting so many disparate states and other institutions and entities often in significant conflict with each other: capitalist parliamentary democracies and capitalist dictatorships; theocracies and secular states; the “Sunni” Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the “Shi’ite” Islamic Republic of Iran; India and Pakistan; “North” Korea and “South” Korea; and so on across the spectrum from the most industrialized capitalist ex-colonial powers in Europe and Japan to their most “underdeveloped” ex-subjects in the so-called Third World? In the past even regimes installed directly or indirectly by US military force such as Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, Iraq, and Libya, could not stomach being identified with Washington’s anti-Cuba policy.
And, it has to be emphasized, that this universal vote is in defense of Cuba, a socialist government led by conscious revolutionary Marxists, ruling over a state where capitalist property relations have been overturned since the early 1960s and which has renounced nothing of its revolutionary legacy, heritage, and program of socialist internationalism, even as it maneuvers and navigates in the reality of a crisis-ridden capitalist world order.
But, beyond governments and states, let us also speak of the public opinion of the peoples of the world, especially the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity, for whom revolutionary Cuba remains a beacon and political and struggle inspiration. This is expressed not only in political affinity but in the direct encounter of working people worldwide with Cuban medical internationalism and Cuban international solidarity.
No direct solidarity with Washington from UN Floor: Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Ukraine, and Israel
Because of wrangling with UN authorities – undoubtedly under the prod of Washington and EU pressure – ostensibly over non-payment of dues – Venezuela was unable to be the 186th vote for Cuba, but its UN Ambassador spoke from the floor in strong solidarity.
In 2021 the conservative Ivan Duque government in Colombia abstained in the UN vote in deference to its Washington military ally, even as Duque praised Cuba for its hosting of peace talks in Havana with Colombian guerrilla organizations who have long been ready to end the armed conflict with the Colombian army and state. The newly elected government of Gustavo Petro – decidedly more progressive in its domestic programs and policies — is sharply critical of US foreign policy in the Americas and the US anti-Cuba blockade in particular – and its UN diplomatic team voted “Yes” this year. Furthermore, this year Colombia’s new UN Ambassador gave one of the most eloquent and blistering condemnations of the US policy, singling out the obscenity of including Cuba on Washington’s “terrorism” list, especially given Cuba’s exemplary part in hosting an facilitating Colombians peace talks. The inclusion of Cuba on the outrageous US list was mentioned and stressed by nearly every one of the some 52 nation-states and UN blocs who took the floor to denounce US policy and solidarize with Cuba over the two days of blockade bashing.
In 2019 Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing “populist” government in Brazil UNGA voted with Washington and later abstained, as it did in the 2021 and 2022 votes. But this was, of course, the rump Bolsonaro government’s last hurrah! There is no doubt that the incoming government of President-elect Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva will be a solid and enthusiastic vote in favor of Cuba. The election of Lula is a further blow to the US blockade in the Americas. Lula will join Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as two powerful longstanding, Hemispheric public opponents of the blockade. Both are certain to not shut up on the question of the blockade but rather press Biden in public and private. This is not good news for Biden and bipartisan Washington, still dominated by policymakers bristling with bitterness and hatred for the Cuban Revolution and its socialist government that survives, carries on, and still deals blows to US machinations and exposes them and their isolation to the world. Unforgivable! (Lopez Obrador has already brought in Cuban doctors to serve working-class communities in Mexico; hopefully Lula will bring back the heroic Cuban medical internationalists – kicked out by Bolsonaro and never replaced! – to Brazil.)
Ukraine is obviously politically and militarily dependent on Washington, NATO, and the EU in the ongoing battlefield of a serious land, air, and sea war that has killed thousands, with great economic and infrastructural devastation and human displacement since the Russian Federation invasion began the fierce hostilities. Kyiv could have voted “No” openly with the US, contrary to NATO members (except the US, of course) and European Union (EU) members – political bodies the Ukrainian government looks to politically — who voted with Cuba. Instead, the Ukrainian delegation abstained and chose not to speak. It should be added that Havana has maintained normal relations with Kyiv under war conditions and that Cuban diplomats have remained in the Ukrainian capital.
Even the knee-jerk vote with Washington from Israel is contradicted by the actual status of trade and travel between Cuba and Israel. Notably, Israel has had significant two-way economic trade and commercial relations with Cuba and there is fully legal travel from each country to the other, without sanctions or restrictions.
Israel and Cuba maintain indirect diplomatic ties which were downgraded after the 1973 Middle East war. Of course, Cuba has been for decades an eloquent, honest, and steadfast supporter in words and deeds of the Palestinian freedom struggle and right to self-determination; Cuban diplomacy and foreign policy supports the “two-state” program of a contiguous, sovereign, independent Palestinian state out of the occupied Palestinian territories with East Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of UN Security Council Resolution 242.
On the annual Cuba UNGA vote, Israel is just a marionette voting in lockstep with its US ally which, through its veto power in the UN Security Council, shields the Israeli state from regular formal condemnations stemming from Israeli repression, brutality, and “excesses” in the Palestinian “territories,” as well as blocking any political movement in the direction of Palestinian statehood. (Security Council Resolutions can and do often have enforcement mechanisms unlike General Assembly votes.)
In the final days of the Obama Administration in 2016 when Washington “abstained” (against itself!) in the UNGA vote, so did the Israeli delegation and they went back to “No” under Trump and Biden.
The EU Dance
The European Union (EU) is the political bloc of capitalist parliamentary “democracies” – part of the so-called “West” — legally constituted with headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and at least nominally subordinate to a legislative body. Its leading member states (plus the UK which left the EU in 2020), France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, and secondary others such as Portugal are the contemporary nation-state descendants of the European colonial empires of the 19th and 20th Centuries with their horrific and contradictory deeds and legacy.
Every year the EU manages to keep together its fractious grouping to vote in favor of the Cuban-sponsored Resolution, and opposition to US extraterritorial sanctions. This is despite the EU’s – with some Eastern European government’s particularly hostile to revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and socialist Cuba — overall political contentious and adversarial relation to the Cuban Revolution or the socialist Cuban government and, in particular how Cuba defends itself against US aggression, which EU formulations dilute and diminish. The EU spokesperson generally insists on a separate presentation under the speaking category of “Explanation of Vote,” so they can carve out an “identity” distinct from both Washington’s cruel and hated sanctions and also to throw some jabs at Cuba (in usually anodyne language) over “human rights” and “civil liberties.”
The EU is also at pains to differentiate themselves from the US blockade while also delivering carefully formulated attacks on Cuba’s right to defend itself. The EU statement opposed the US blockade and recognizes its “damaging impact on the economic situation of the country and negatively affects the living standards of the Cuban people.” It rejects Cuba’s inclusion on the “terrorism” list “without presenting any new facts.” The EU statement is strong on the rejection of the “extraterritoriality” of the US blockade that are “in violation of commonly accepted rules of international trade. We cannot accept that such measures impede our economic and commercial relations with Cuba.” Furthermore, “the EU strongly rejects the US activation of Title III and IV of the Helms-Burton Act in April 2019…We will draw on all appropriate measures to address the effects of the Helms-Burton Act, including in relation to our WTO rights and through the use of the EU Blocking Statute, which protects against the extra-territorial application of those US sanctions to EU citizens, businesses and NGOs operating in Cuba.” These are fine words, but there is no evidence of any concrete implementation in ways that actually counter US extraterritorial illegality.
The EU statement then goes on to express its “concern” about the “human rights” situation in Cuba and –without acknowledging that revolutionary Cuba is under siege by Washington and has the right to defend itself — “reiterate[s] our call on the Cuban Government to fully grant its citizens internationally recognised civil, political and economic rights and freedoms, including freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and free access to information, to release all political prisoners.” Outside the framework of Washington’s economic and political war against Cuba, and the vast resources allocated openly and covertly towards that end, it is nothing but arrogant, patronizing, ahistorical sophistry to pose questions of “democracy” in this manner.
Washington’s pathetic rejoinder
The US was in full stonewall mode in their pathetic response to complete and utter isolation and humiliation at the UNGA.
I couldn’t help but wonder how the flunky US spokesperson, “Political Director John Kelly” given his unenviable assignment – his boss US UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield decided that discretion was the greater part of valor and was nowhere to be seen – managed to keep a straight face as he read the line: “we are focused on the political and economic wellbeing of the Cuban people” or “our support for the Cuban people is unwavering [the] embargo includes exemptions and authorizations relating to exports of food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods to Cuba” or “we stand with the Cuban people and will continue to seek ways to provide meaningful support to them.” Does he even believe such nonsense and twaddle himself? What Kelly did was present a line. Now a “line” can contain some or even full veracity, but in the case of Kelly’s statement-line it can said that “every word is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’” (apologies to Mary McCarthy).
Cuban Deputy Ambassador Yuri Gala Lopez gave an outstanding rebuttal to Kelly on the UN floor, one of the top highlights in a day of many.
The main contradiction in this period is between the Biden Administration’s inability to gain any political traction for its brutal and hostile anti-Cuba policy and its utter isolation on-the-one-hand and — despite this worldwide unanimity in opposition — on-the-other the continued deepening of the blockade and the horrific and devastating consequences for the Cuban people as a whole – industrial and agricultural workers, small business owners, professionals, including doctors and nurses, teachers – compounded by the subsequent disasters noted above through Hurricane Ian.
Whether this can or will take on a material challenge with any real-world consequences for Washington remains to be seen. What is very clear after the UNGA vote – following the isolation and semi-humiliation over the anti-Cuba blockade at the July 2022 Summit of the Americas hosted by the Biden Administration – is that political momentum is on the side of opponents of the US blockade and therefore must be pressed forward on all fronts in an unrelenting manner. We must move beyond the blah-blah-blah of rhetorical eloquence and verbal solidarity to deeds and consequences for bipartisan Washington’s criminal deeds.
In his intervention, the representative from Namibia, whose struggle and triumph of independence and sovereignty was decisively tied to the Cuban-led military defeat of apartheid South Africa in the late-1980s, spoke forcefully against “US aggressive actions” and “campaigns of subversion” and “media manipulations.” He asked, in closing, if “all the fine words expressed here, will they prove empty again?”
For the 30th year in a row, the United Nations General Assembly (GA) overwhelmingly condemned the United States’ embargo on Cuba and called on Washington to end its wide-ranging punitive sanctions, reports Ian Ellis-Jones.
For the 30th consecutive United Nations vote, the US again lost. A landslide margin of 185 to 2 condemned its blockade of Cuba on November 3. Only the apartheid state of Israel voted with the US, while Brazil and Ukraine abstained.
Since 1960, the bipartisan policy of the US has been to overthrow the Cuban Revolution by fomenting “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” According to the US State Department, punitive economic measures are imposed to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.”
The US blockade daily costs Cuba $15 million; $6.3 billion since Biden took office. Cuba’s income for the first quarter of 2022 exceeded $493 million, but imports of goods amounted to more than $2 billion. A report from Cuba admonishes: “It is a dilemma for Cubans to make ends meet. Wages are not enough to face the very high prices that the lack of offers, real inflation, and speculation bequeath to us.”
Most recently on September 26, Hurricane Ian battered Cuba temporarily shorting electricity island-wide. In August, a lightening fire incinerated 40% of the island’s fuel reserves, exacerbating an existing energy crisis. Covid had already impacted domestic commerce and international tourism. For Cuba these were natural disasters; for the imperial hegemon these were opportunities as Biden continued Trump’s maximum pressure regime-change campaign.
Given advances in technology, Joe Biden’s ability to tighten the screws makes sanctions much more effective and lethal than they were when John Kennedy first imposed an “embargo on all trade with Cuba” over sixty years ago. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez commented that the current US administration “has escalated the siege around our country, taking it to an even crueler and more inhumane dimension, with the purpose of deliberately inflicting the biggest possible damage on Cuban families.”
Incredible Lightness of the Liberal’s Lament
Onetime trenchant critic of US imperialism, the social-democratic NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) has been “reporting on the Americas since 1967.” Though in recent years, it has increasingly degenerated into cheerleading for US-instigated regime change in Nicaragua and other countries striving to socialism.
NACLA commented on the US blockade just before the UN vote in an article by academic Louis A. Pérez. He made 22 references to “sanctions,” but never once acknowledged that these unilateral coercive measures were illegal or, because secondary measures target third parties, that they constituted a “blockade.”
Along with NACLA, author Pérez is a longtime and sincere critic of the US blockade. His article has good information, recognizing that US humanitarian aid is intended to “relieve the very conditions to which sanctions have been dedicated to creating.” But with morally bankrupt ivory-tower equanimity, he criticizes both US imperialism and the Cuban Revolution for not achieving some liberal democratic ideal.
Pérez comments: “To recognize the baneful consequences of US sanctions is not to disregard or otherwise dismiss the failures of the Cuban government [emphasis added].” He continues: “But much of what is not well in Cuba can also be attributed to official policies and practices…with ill-conceived economic policies that fail to remedy want and need.” That is, the victim bears responsibility for the economic effects of the blockade.
According to Pérez, the fundamental failure of US policy is that the Cuban people are so consumed with the daily struggle for survival that they don’t have the time (that the more enlightened souls in academia have) to address “political freedom.” He quotes the angst of a Cuban colleague: “First necessities, later democracy.” For such elevated minds, the tragedy of US imperialist domination is that the higher pursuits for democracy are sacrificed on the altar of banal survival.
This recalls the counsel of the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral: “Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children.”
The “irony” of Cuban migration
Pérez repeatedly laments the “tragically ironic” US blockade; irony being a favorite word of the intelligentsia. He explains, the “irony” of the current record surge of Cuban migration is “not lost on informed observers,” such as himself: “Those sectors of the population most likely to constitute themselves as a political opposition [emphasis added] are often the very people most inclined to emigrate.”
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel provides context: “…we are the only country in the world for which a law was written, called the Cuban Adjustment Act, which guarantees the automatic entry into the US anyone who declares himself politically persecuted; this psychologically conditions an attitude of denial of the real causes for emigration, fundamentally economic and conditioned by the iron blockade of the same country that forces the emigrant to declare himself persecuted.”
Pérez continues: “Ironic too…US policy serves to add to the woes of a people for whom emigration to the US offers the most immediate remedy to hardship.” However, the US policy of encouraging illegal immigration and preventing legal is not just ironic, it is deadly.
“Land of the free” compared to Cuba
For Pérez, the “most egregious failure of sanctions” is that they “encumber…legitimate political change” to some imagined liberal Shangri-La.
So, what state in this hemisphere meets his lofty liberal litmus test? Could it be that “exceptional” land of the free where he resides? There’s no free lunch in the land of free where nearly one in four households experience food insecurity. Unlike Cuba, besieged by the blockade creating genuine shortages, the US has obscene wastage of massive food surpluses; an estimated 30-40 percent of the entire US food supply.
Nor is there free higher education or medical care in the land of the free, which experienced an estimated 500,000 excess deaths during Biden’s first year in office. Despite the blockade, Cuba has not only provided these social benefits gratis, but has sent 42 medical brigades to 35 countries since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile The Wall Street Journalcarps: “Most poor countries put all hands on deck in this crisis. Havana exports its doctors.” The Cuban view of internationalism is that “we share what we have and not just what we have leftover.”
Nor are politicians free in the land of the free, where every candidate comes with a price tag and running for office necessitates vast sums of money. Here, buying political influence is constitutionally protected as free speech and corporations are legally considered “people.” In contrast, Cuba stands out for its experiments to eliminate access to wealth as the determining success factor in running for political office.
With its board chaired by the program director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, NACLA has a different ideological bias on what constitutes political democracy than Cuba, where housing, health care, and education are constitutionally considered human rights.
Not a time for complacency
After over six decades of imperialist siege against Cuba, only the elderly know life without sanctions. The agonizing material deprivation caused by the blockade, the endless shortages, the interminable standing in line for basic necessities of life, all have a corrosive effect on the moral fiber of the Cuban people subverting the spirit of socialist solidarity.
Leftists worry about cascading effects to the entire region of the precarious situation in Cuba.
Cuba solidarity activist W. T. Whitney warns: “Thanks to the US blockade, Cuba’s economic situation is more desperate than ever.” TeleSURreports, “The Cuban economy continues to be gripped by rising tensions amid the tightened US embargo.”
Political unrest is undeniably mounting as conditions deteriorate. For the first time, Cuba is facing social media penetration from the US, which has managed to mobilize certain sectors of the Cuban population against the revolution.
As the US Peace Council cautioned: “No matter how heroic a people may be, socialism must provide for their material needs. The US blockade of Cuba is designed precisely to thwart that and to discredit socialism in Cuba and anywhere else where oppressed people try to better their lot…. Cuba is being attacked precisely because that small island nation promises a humane alternative to the decaying neoliberal order of present-day capitalism and its pending crisis of legitimacy. If a critical spotlight is needed, it is not on how the Cubans with so little should have done better, but on how the imperialists with so much must be defeated.”
That Cuba has successfully not only persisted but has been an international model for the accomplishments of socialism does not mean that it will always be so. Cuba is a small resource poor island, defending socialism against a very powerful foe. The Cubans can resist, but socialist internationalist solidarity must support Cuba and compel the US to end the siege. This is not a time for complacency.
How do you bury responsibility for a decision inspired by a pilfered idea? Blame someone else, especially if that person came up with the idea to begin with. This tried method of distraction was used with invidious gusto by US President John F. Kennedy, who recast his role in reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
The stationing of Soviet nuclear capable missiles in Cuba, and the response of the Kennedy administration, took the world to the precipice of nuclear conflict. Its avoidance, as things transpired, involved dissimulation, deception and good, old-fashioned defamation.
In a crucial meeting on October 27 between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the first intimations were made that a quid pro quo arrangement could be reached. If the Soviets were to pull out their missiles in Cuba, the US would return the favour regarding their missiles in Turkey. That part of the agreement would, however, remain secret. RFK, as the administration’s emissary, informed Dobrynin that his brother “is ready to come to agree on that question with N.S. Khrushchev.” For the withdrawal to take place, however, some four to five months had to elapse. “However, the president can’t say anything public in this regard about Turkey.”
Time was pressing. A U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Cuba that day; the hawks in the administration were baying for blood, demanding US military retaliation. “A real war will begin,” warned RFK, “in which millions of Americans and Russians will die. We want to avoid that any way we can, I’m sure that the government of the USSR has the same wish.”
In his subsequent account of the meeting with the Soviet ambassador, documented in a report to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, RFK ducks and weaves. Recalling the urgency with which he impressed upon Dobrynin on removing the Soviet missiles, he also offered a slanted reading. When the ambassador had asked about the US missiles in Turkey, “I replied there could be no quid pro quo – no deal of this kind could be made.” Mention is made to the elapse of four to five months, by which time “these matters could be resolved satisfactorily.” (In the draft version, that reference is scrawled out by RFK.)
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s response on October 28 to President Kennedy did acknowledge, in an uncharacteristically subtle way, “the delicacy involved for you in an open consideration of the issue of eliminating the US missile bases in Turkey.” He appreciated the “complexity” involved and thought it right that it should not be discussed publicly. Any mention of the quid pro quo agreement would be kept secret, to be only communicated via RFK. The Soviet Premier then made intimations about “advancing the cause of relaxation of international tensions and the tensions between our two powers”.
Within hours of Khrushchev’s announcement that he would be ordering the dismantling and withdrawal of the missiles in Cuba, Kennedy made a call to former president Herbert Hoover. The message is distinctly, to use that immortal phrase from the charmingly slippery Alan Clark, economical with the actualité. Moscow had supposedly gone back “to their more reasonable position” in accepting a pledge that Cuba would not be invaded in return for the withdrawal of the missiles.
The train of fibbing continued chugging in another call made that same day to former president Harry Truman. To Truman, Kennedy suggests, falsely, that his administration had “rejected” trading the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet withdrawal of their missiles in Cuba.
On October 30th, Robert Kennedy returned the quid pro quo letter to Ambassador Dobrynin instead of conveying it to his brother. Brother Jack had not been “prepared to formulate such an understanding [regarding the missiles in Turkey] in the form of letters, even the most confidential letters, between the President and the head of the Soviet government, when it concerns such a highly delicate issue.”
Such an attitude could hardly be explained as noble or even reasoned; the Kennedys were concerned that any moves seen as conciliatory towards Moscow could ruin their electoral fortunes and those of the Democratic Party.
Dobrynin’s own summary reveals a political animal contemplating his future prospects. RFK was against transmitting “this sort of letter, since who knows where and when such letters can surface or be somehow published”. The reasons had little to do with averting nuclear catastrophe or preserving the human species. Such a document, were it to appear, “could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future. This is why we request that you take this letter back.”
With such manoeuvrings achieved, the Kennedys went to work on covering their tracks and scrubbing the fingerprints. On December 6, 1962, Stevenson received a letter from JFK about a story soon to be published by the Saturday Evening Post titled “In Time of Crisis”. The article, authored by Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett, promised an insider’s overview of how Kennedy and his circle resolved the Cuban missile crisis. In the true tradition of insiders, the overview was utterly compromised.
The decorative account came with the baubles and splendour of Camelot, depicting the president as calm and collected in the face of crisis. He only ever “lost his temper on minor matters” but never his nerve. “This,” the authors remark, “must be counted a huge intangible plus.”
The very tangible plus, for the Kennedys, came in the form of former Democratic presidential candidate and US ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson had, according to a “non admiring official” – later identified as National Security Council staffer Michael Forrestal – “wanted a Munich.” His heretical proposal entailed trading Turkish, Italian and British missile bases for Soviet missiles in Cuba. Forrestal had himself been urged by the Kennedys to feed that version to Bartlett and Alsop, despite their embrace of the idea.
Alsop’s brother, Joseph, went so far as to argue in a column that this revealed a president keen on finding some basis to fire Stevenson. Special aide McGeorge Bundy, on being made aware of the article in advance, had talked him out of doing so.
As things transpired, the origins of the “Munich” slur against Stevenson came from the president himself. As historian Gregg Herken noted in his book, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, “The president had pencilled in the ‘Munich’ line when he annotated the typescript of the draft article”. Alsop’s son, Joseph Wright Alsop VI, also claimed that his father had told him “that it had actually been JFK who added the phrase ‘Adlai wanted a Munich’ in his own handwriting.”
In Alsop’s correspondence with his editor at the Saturday Evening Post, Clay Blair Jr., there is a pungent warning: the president’s role was to remain concealed and had to “remain Top Secret, Eyes Only, Burn After Reading, and so on.” If Alsop “so much as hinted that JFK was in any way involved, I’d be run out of town.”
In his delightful, if severe, dissertation on presidential mendacity, Eric Alterman makes the admirably radical suggestion that the US commander in chief should not lie. Doing so triggers “a series of reactions in the political system that builds on itself and can easily spiral out of the control.” One lie becomes many; the drop becomes an ocean. And Kennedy showed not only a willingness to be mendacious but a certain aptitude for it.
Protesters gathered in Sydney to demand the United States government end its 60-year-old illegal blockade of Cuba, as part of international pressure before another UN vote on November 3. Jim McIlroy reports.
Cuba’s tourism industry has been picking up after the COVID-19 pandemic brought it to a halt, but the United States’ latest aggressive action seriously threatens its viability, reports Ian Ellis-Jones.
Cuba’s world-leading disaster management system sprang into action when Hurricane Ian struck the country’s western province of Pinar del Río, on September 27, report Vijay Prashad and Manolo De Los Santos.
Roberto Matta (Chile), Cuba es la capital (‘Cuba Is the Capital’), 1963.
In 2002, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro Ruz visited the country’s National Ballet School to inaugurate the 18th Havana International Ballet Festival. Founded in 1948 by the prima ballerina assolutaAlicia Alonso (1920–2019), the school struggled financially until the Cuban Revolution decided that ballet – like other art forms – must be available to everyone and so must be socially financed. At the school in 2002, Castro remembered that the first festival, held in 1960, ‘asserted Cuba’s cultural vocation, identity, and nationality, even under the most adverse circumstances, when major dangers and threats loomed over the country’.
Ballet, like so many cultural forms, had been stolen from popular participation and enjoyment. The Cuban Revolution wanted to return this artistic practice to the people as part of its determination to advance human dignity. To build a revolution in a country assaulted by colonial barbarism, the new revolutionary process had to both establish the country’s sovereignty and build the dignity of each of its people. This dual task is the work of national liberation. ‘Without culture’, Castro said, ‘freedom is not possible’.
Enrique Tábara (Ecuador), Coloquio de frívolos (‘Colloquium of the Frivolous’), 1982.
In many languages, the word ‘culture’ has at least two meanings. In bourgeois society, culture has come to mean both refinement and the high arts. A property of the dominant classes, this culture is inherited through the transmission of manners and higher education. The second meaning of culture is the way of life, including beliefs and practices, of a people who are part of a community (from a tribe to a nation). The Cuban Revolution’s democratisation of ballet and classical music, for instance, was part of its attempt to socialise all forms of human life, from the economic to the cultural. Furthermore, the revolutionary processes attempted to protect the cultural heritage of the Cuban people from the pernicious influence of the culture of colonialism. To be precise, to ‘protect’ did not mean to reject the entirety of the coloniser’s culture, since that would enforce a parochial life on a people who must have access to all forms of culture. Cuba’s Revolution adopted baseball, for instance, despite its roots in the United States, the very country that has sought to suffocate Cuba for six decades.
A socialist approach to culture, therefore, requires four aspects: the democratisation of forms of high culture, the protection of the cultural heritage of formerly colonised peoples, the advancement of the basic elements of cultural literacy, and the domestication of cultural forms that come from the colonising power.
Violeta Parra (Chile). Untitled (unfinished), 1966.
In July 2022, I delivered a lecture at Cuba’s Casa de las Américas, a major institution in Havana’s cultural life and a heartbeat of cultural developments from Chile to Mexico, that centred on ten theses on Marxism and decolonisation. A few days later, Casa’s director, Abel Prieto, also a former minister of culture, convened a seminar there to discuss some of these themes, principally how Cuban society had to both defend itself from the onrush of imperialist cultural forms and from the pernicious inheritance of racism and patriarchy. This discussion provoked a series of reflections on the process of the National Programme Against Racism and Racial Discrimination announced by President Miguel Díaz-Canel in November 2019 and on the process that led to the 2022 Family Code referendum (which will come to a popular vote on 25 September) – two dynamics that have the capacity to transform Cuban society in an anti-colonial direction.
Dossier no. 56 (September 2022) from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Casa de las Américas, Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, contains an expanded version of that lecture with a foreword by Abel Prieto. To give you a taste of it, here is thesis nine on the Battle of Emotions:
Antonio Berni (Argentina), Juanito Laguna, n.d.
Thesis Nine: The Battle of Emotions. Fidel Castro provoked a debate in the 1990s around the concept of the Battle of Ideas, the class struggle in thought against the banalities of neoliberal conceptions of human life. A key part of Fidel’s speeches from this period was not just what he said but how he said it, each word suffused with the great compassion of a man committed to the liberation of humanity from the tentacles of property, privilege, and power. In fact, the Battle of Ideas was not merely about the ideas themselves, but also about a ‘battle of emotions’, an attempt to shift the palate of emotions from a fixation on greed to considerations of empathy and hope.
One of the true challenges of our time is the bourgeoisie’s use of the culture industries and the institutions of education and faith to divert attention away from any substantial discussion about real problems – and about finding common solutions to social dilemmas – and towards an obsession with fantasy problems. In 1935, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called this the ‘swindle of fulfilment’, the seeding of a range of fantasies to mask their impossible realisation. The benefit of social production, Bloch wrote, ‘is reaped by the big capitalist upper stratum, which employs gothic dreams against proletarian realities’. The entertainment industry erodes proletarian culture with the acid of aspirations that cannot be fulfilled under the capitalist system. But these aspirations are enough to weaken any working-class project.
A degraded society under capitalism produces a social life that is suffused with atomisation and alienation, desolation and fear, anger and hate, resentment and failure. These are ugly emotions that are shaped and promoted by the culture industries (‘you can have it too!’), educational establishments (‘greed is the prime mover’), and neo-fascists (‘hate immigrants, sexual minorities, and anyone else who denies you your dreams’). The grip of these emotions on society is almost absolute, and the rise of neo-fascists is premised upon this fact. Meaning feels emptied, perhaps the result of a society of spectacles that has now run its course.
From a Marxist perspective, culture is not seen as an isolated and timeless aspect of human reality, nor are emotions seen as a world of their own or as being outside of the developments of history. Since human experiences are defined by the conditions of material life, ideas of fate will linger on as long as poverty is a feature of human life. If poverty is transcended, then fatalism will have a less secure ideological foundation, but it does not automatically get displaced. Cultures are contradictory, bringing together a range of elements in uneven ways out of the social fabric of an unequal society that oscillates between reproducing class hierarchy and resisting elements of social hierarchy. Dominant ideologies suffuse culture through the tentacles of ideological apparatuses like a tidal wave, overwhelming the actual experiences of the working class and the peasantry. It is, after all, through class struggle and through the new social formations created by socialist projects that new cultures will be created – not merely by wishful thinking.
It is important to recall that, in the early years of each of the revolutionary processes – from Russia in 1917 to Cuba in 1959 – cultural efflorescence was saturated with the emotions of joy and possibility, of intense creativity and experimentation. It is this sensibility that offers a window into something other than the ghoulish emotions of greed and hatred.
Nicolás Guillén honours Alicia Alonso at the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), Havana, 1961.
In the early years after 1959, Cuba convulsed with such surges of creativity and experimentation. Nicolás Guillén (1902–1969), a great revolutionary poet who had been imprisoned during Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, captured the harshness of life and the great desire for the revolutionary process to emancipate the Cuban people from the wretchedness of hunger and social hierarchies. His poem ‘Tengo’ (‘I Have’) from 1964 tells us that the new culture of the revolution was elemental – the feeling that one did not have to bow one’s shoulders before a superior, to say to workers in offices that they too are comrades and not ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’, to walk as a Black man into a hotel without being told to stop at the door. His great anti-colonial poem alerts us to culture’s material foundations:
I have, let’s see,
I’ve learned to read,
to count.
I’ve learned to write,
and to think,
and to laugh.
I have, yes, I have
a place to work
and earn
what I have to eat.
I have, let’s see,
I have what I have to have.
At the close of his foreword to the dossier, Abel Prieto writes, ‘we must turn the meaning of anti-colonial into an instinct’. Reflect on that for a moment: anti-colonialism is not just the ending of formal colonial rule, but a deeper process, one that must become ingrained at the instinctual level so that we can build the capacity to solve our basic needs (such as transcending hunger and illiteracy, for instance) and build our alertness to the need for cultures that emancipate us and do not bind us to the flashy world of unaffordable commodities.
Don Fitz explores the intertwined reasons behind why life expectancy in the United States dropped almost three years between 2019–21, while, in Cuba, it rose by 0.2 years.
Recent data shows that between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy (LE) in the US plunged almost three years while for Cuba it edged up 0.2 years. Yet, in 1960, the year after its revolution, Cuba had a LE of 64.2 years, lower by 5.6 years than that in the US (69.8 years). As I document in Cuban Health Care, the island quickly caught up to the US and, from 1970 through 2016, the two countries were nip and tuck, with some years Cuba and other years the US, having a longer LE. But neither country was ever as much as one year of LE ahead of the other.
This continued through the beginning of Covid, which sharply changed the pattern. LE in the US suddenly dropped behind that in Cuba. Bernd Debusmann Jr. of BBC Newswrote, LE in the US fell “to the lowest level seen since 1996. Government data showed LE at birth now stands at 76.1 compared to 79 in 2019. That is the steepest two-year decline in a century.” From 2019 to 2020, “LE declined in all 50 states and the District of Columbia”.
How could a country with all the problems of Cuba, actually have LE almost three years greater than the US? There were enormous differences between the way the countries responded to Covid.
The Covid Contrast
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data confirmed that “Covid-19 was the main contributing factor [to changes in LE]. The statistics show that Covid-19 accounted for 50% of the decline between 2020 and 2021. Between 2019 and 2020, the pandemic contributed to 74% of the decline.”
A critical divergence between the two countries is that Cuba guarantees health care to all as a human right while the US system is based on profit and political grandstanding. When Covid hit, the US dawdled for months as Cuba mobilized for medical action.
The Ministry of Health developed a national strategy before the island’s first victim had succumbed to the disease. Cuban TV carried daily press conferences with detailed info on the status of new patients, results of cabinet meetings on Covid, and announcing the best way for citizens to protect themselves and others. Social distancing, masks and contact tracing were universally accepted.
Each day Cuban medical students knocked on doors to ask citizens how they were. Students’ tasks included obtaining survey data from residents and making extra visits to the elderly, infants and those with respiratory problems. Clinic staff dealt with issues that doctors were unable to cope with and sent patients they could not care for to hospitals. Medical data was used by those in the highest decision-making positions of the country. In this way, every Cuban citizen and every health care worker, from those at neighborhood doctor offices through those at the most esteemed research institutes, had a part in determining health policy.
This inclusive approach resulted in Cuba’s having 87 Covid deaths by July 21, 2020, when the US had experienced 140,300. While the US population is 30 times that of Cuba, it had 1613 times as many deaths.
Two aspects of Cuba’s response to Covid stand out. First, Cuba does NOT have more money to spend on health care. It actually spends less than a tenth as much per person per year than does the US, but it spends that wisely on a holistic system. Second, Cuba’s health care is global – it continued its practice of sending thousands of medical staff to other countries during Covid.
Over the past six decades more than 400,000 Cuban medical professionals have worked in 164 countries and improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. In addition to providing Cuban doctors with experience coping with diseases and medical issues they do not see at home, this action is positive global diplomacy. US diplomacy, on the other hand, seems to focus on threatening to harm people and/or actually harming them.
In Addition to Covid
News stories also mentioned other factors associated with the shorter LE in the US: drug overdoses, heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis and suicides. The corporate press also acknowledged racial disparities.
There had been progress in reducing LE differences between Black and white Americans. This was reversed during 2018 – 2020 when LE went down 1.36 years for whites, 3.25 years for Hispanics, and 3.88 years for Blacks.
The fall in US life expectancy was even more pronounced among Native Americans and Alaska Natives. Since 2019, it “dropped by 6.6 years, more than twice that of the wider US population.”
The US has multiple groups who reject government attempts to vaccinate or wear masks. Most loud-mouthed, of course, are the right wingers who lividly despise the very idea of public health campaigns. While their thought processes are hallucination-based, people of color have reality-based fears of being ignored, lied to, and used for government experimentation, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. There is a strong connection between vaccination hesitation and racism.
What They Did Not Look At
Among factors with increasing US Covid rates ignored by corporate media in the US are poverty, an acute rise in misinformation, abortion, the embargo against Cuba and preparation for climate change.
Poverty. The first task of the Cuban revolution was to simultaneously address poverty, food, sanitation, literacy, education, racism and housing, which the rebels saw as parts of unitary whole. During the Covid crisis, many US corporations were determined to force low wage workers to stay at their jobs, spreading the disease. Cuba told those with Covid to stay home.
Misinformation. Discussions of Covid deaths must not ignore the deadly role of science denial. At the same time Trump was foolishly downplaying mounting dangers of Covid, Cuba was far along developing its “Novel Coronavirus Plan for Prevention and Control.” Trump was not and is not an isolated individual – he manifests a life-threatening movement toward lunacy. Cuba has no significant group which confronts Covid with a bottle of Clorox or expects a cure brought by Q Anon on a flying saucer.
Abortion. Cuba also does not have a “Women’s Lives Don’t Matter!” movement seeking to eliminate abortion rights. Those who do not want an abortion do not get one and people do not seek to impose their religious and spiritual beliefs on others. The Supreme Court’s allowing states to criminalize abortion will cause many women to die, due both from self-attempts at abortion and lack of its availability. LE averages are impacted more by deaths of young than elderly; so, we can expect many abortion-induced deaths in US will be among teenagers and young women, which will affect LE.
Embargo. The “trade sanctions” or “blockade” or “embargo” have a special relationship with LE in Cuba: one might expect it to decrease LE; but it has not done so. When Cuba was reeling from the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, the US passed laws intending to punish those who continued to trade with it. This raised prices in the already impoverished country and has prevented or slowed the arrival of much life-saving medical equipment. Yet, due to its prioritizing health care during the 1990s, Cuba’s infant mortality decreased while its LE showed a slight increase.
International solidarity movements have stepped in to help Cuba overcome many embargo effects. Lack of essential material prevented Cuba from performing liver transplants in children. But, during May 2022, Puentes de Amor (Bridges of Love) delivered the vital chemical compound to the William Soler Pediatric Hospital.
Resilience. Avoiding the use of fossil fuels and enormous hydro-, solar- and wind-projects, as Cuba does, will cut down on global destructiveness but have very little effect on reducing climate change on the island. However, preparing for resilience in the face of climate change can hugely affect its quality of life.
In March 2022 (p. 8) Scientific American editors wrote that most important in preparing for the next pandemic is “building new systems.” Unfortunately, this is what the US is avoiding as it becomes absorbed in making minor tweaks to outmoded, inadequate systems of environmental protection.
Cuba has been holding Bastión (bulwark) events involving as many as four million citizens who carry out food production, disease control, sanitation and safeguarding medical supplies. When a policy change is introduced, government representatives go to each community, including the most remote rural ones, to make sure that everyone knows the threats that climate change poses to their lives and how they can alter behaviors to minimize them. They include such diverse actions as conservation with energy use, saving water, preventing fires and using medical products sparingly.
Another energy positive being expanded in Cuba is farms being run entirely on agroecology principles. Such farms can produce 12 times the energy they consume. Biodigesters break down manure and other biomass to create biogas (very different in Cuba than the US) which is used for tractors or transportation. Vegetable and herb production in Cuba exploded from 4000 tons in 1994 to over four million tons by 2006. This is why Jason Hickel’s “Sustainable Development Index” rated Cuba’s ecological efficiency as the best in the world in 2019.
Where Are We Headed?
The connection between LE and climate change is becoming increasingly evident. US media stories typically focus on a given disaster such as a flood and mention how aging infrastructure is being neglected. The implication is that if infrastructure were updated to its status of 50 or 100 years ago, that would be adequate. It would not be adequate because climate change means that storms will be more frequent, more intense and more deadly in the future.
By 2017, Cuba had become the only country with a government-led plan (Project Life, or Tarea Vida) to combat climate change which includes a 100 year projection. While Cuba is looking ahead and planning how to protect people from increasingly devastating storms, US politicians feverishly bury their heads in the sand in subservience to corporate interests, subjecting future generations to ever greater catastrophes.
This causes LE in the US to plunge down while LE in Cuba climbs slowly upward. Covid did not create the LE divide between the US and Cuba. Covid exacerbated trends which have become increasingly intertwined for decades. The best guess is that these trends will continue well into the future.
A delegation of the Colombian government, headed by Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva Durán, visited Cuba on Thursday, August 11, and was received by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez in the capital Havana. The purpose of the visit was to establish contact with the leadership of the National Liberation Army (ELN), the largest leftist guerrilla group active in Colombia, in order to advance towards peace negotiations.
Following a meeting between the Colombian government’s delegation, the ELN leaders, and the Cuban government’s representatives at the El Laguito Protocol Hall, Colombian Foreign Minister Leyva announced that the government will resume peace talks with the ELN in Havana. Leyva also confirmed that Cuba and Norway would be guarantors of the peace dialogues, which were interrupted in 2018 by the former conservative president Iván Duque.
By now, the images of the oil explosion that erupted in the Cuban province of Matanzas on Friday, August 5 and continues blazing have become international news. When lightning struck an oil tank in Cuba’s largest oil storage facility, it quickly exploded and began to spread to nearby tanks. As of now, four of the eight tanks have caught fire. Dozens of people have been hospitalized, over 120 have been reported injured, at least 16 firefighters are still reported missing and one firefighter has died.
This latest disaster – the largest oil fire in Cuba’s history – comes at a time when Cuba is currently undergoing an energy crisis due to soaring global fuel costs, as well as over-exploited and obsolete infrastructure. The raging fire will undoubtedly further exacerbate the electricity outages that Cubans are suffering from as a result of the on-going energy crisis that is occurring in the middle of one of the hottest summers on record globally.
Almost immediately, the Cuban government requested international assistance from other countries, particularly its neighbors that have experience in handling oil-related fires. Mexico and Venezuela responded immediately and with great generosity. Mexico sent 45,000 liters of firefighting foam in 16 flights, as well as firefighters and equipment. Venezuela sent firefighters and technicians, as well as 20 tons of foam and other chemicals.
The U.S., on the other hand, offered technical assistance, which amounted to phone consultations. Despite having invaluable expertise and experience with major fires, the U.S. has not sent personnel, equipment, planes, materials, or other resources to its neighbor that would actually help minimize the risk to human life and the environment. The U.S. Embassy in Havana instead offered condolences and stated on day four of the blazing fire that they were “carefully watching the situation” and that U.S. entities and organizations could provide disaster relief. They even posted an email, vog.etatsnull@nairatinamuHabuC, for people who want to help, saying “our team is a great resource for facilitating exports and donations of humanitarian goods to Cuba or responding to any questions.” But people who have contacted that email for help receive an automated response in return, telling people to look at their fact sheet from a year ago.
Contrast this to Cuba’s response to Hurrican Katrina in 2005, when the Cuba government offered to send to New Orleans 1,586 doctors, each carrying 27 pounds of medicine—an offer that was rejected by the United States.
While the U.S. government pays lip service to helping in Cuba’s emergency, the truth is that U.S. sanctions on Cuba create real and significant barriers to organizations trying to provide assistance to Cubans, both in the United States and abroad. For example, Cuba sanctions often require U.S. organizations to get Commerce Department export licenses. Another obstacle is the lack of commercial air cargo service between the U.S. and Cuba, and most commercial flights are prohibited from carrying humanitarian assistance without a license. Cuba’s inclusion in the State Sponsor of Terrorism List means that banks, in both the United States and abroad, are reluctant to process humanitarian donations. And while donative remittances (which can be sent for humanitarian purposes) have been recently re-authorized by the Biden administration, there is no mechanism in place to send them, as the U.S. government refuses to use the established Cuban entities that have historically processed them. Moreover, payment and fundraising platforms such as GoFundMe, PayPal, Venmo and Zelle, will not process any transactions destined or related to Cuba due to U.S. sanctions.
In any case, the response to this disaster should come primarily from the U.S. government, not NGOs. An Obama-era Presidential Policy Directive specifically mentions U.S. cooperation with Cuba “in areas of mutual interest, including diplomatic, agricultural, public health, and environmental matters, as well as disaster preparedness and response.” Despite the 243 sanctions imposed by the Trump administration – and overwhelmingly maintained by the Biden White House – the Policy Directive appears to remain in effect. In addition, Cuba and the United States signed a bilateral Oil Spill Preparedness and Response Agreement in 2017 prior to Trump taking office, which the U.S. noted means both countries “will cooperate and coordinate in an effort to prevent, contain, and clean up marine oil and other hazardous pollution in order to minimize adverse effects to public health and safety and the environment.” The agreement provides a roadmap for bilateral cooperation to address the current humanitarian and environmental disaster. In addition, the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, which is part of USAID, “is responsible for leading and coordinating the U.S. government’s response to disasters overseas,” including sending technical experts as they have in more than 50 countries. Neither OFDA nor any other part of USAID, which spends approximately $20 million annually in regime change funding in Cuba (primarily to Florida-based groups), have offered humanitarian aid thus far.
As Congress takes important steps to advance legislation to address climate change and disasters, the Biden administration is watching a potential ecological disaster 90 miles from the U.S. coastline without offering meaningful assistance to contain it, both to protect the Cuban people but also to mitigate any potential marine damage to the narrow strait that separates the two countries.
Withholding assistance at this critical time indicates to Cubans, Cuban Americans and the world that the Biden Administration is not really interested in the well-being of the Cuban people, despite statements to the contrary. This is an opportunity to show compassion, regional cooperation, environmental responsibility, and, overall, to be a good neighbor. It is also an opportunity for the Biden administration to finally reject the toxic Trump administration policies towards Cuba and restart the broad bilateral diplomatic engagement that was so successfully initiated under the Obama administration.
At least one person has died, 17 firefighters are missing, and 121 people have been injured in a huge fire that broke out on Friday, August 5, in a fuel depot in Matanzas, in western Cuba, 60 miles east of Havana.
The fire started on Friday evening after a lighting hit a fuel tank in Matanzas, and then in the early hours of Saturday it spread to a second tank, causing a big explosion around 5:00 A.M. while government officials and firefighter teams were trying to control the first explosion. All throughout Saturday Cuban authorities worked tirelessly to prevent the fire from reaching a third tank. The storage facility consists of eight storage tanks overall.
The governments of Mexico and Venezuela have already sent expert teams to help the Cubans in the midst of the catastrophe that has shaken the island nation subjected to more than 60 years of an illegal US blockade.
As the Cuban government celebrates the July 26 Day of the National Rebellion–a public holiday commemorating the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks that is considered the precursor to the 1959 revolution–U.S. groups are calling on the Biden administration to stop its cruel sanctions that are creating such hardship for the Cuban people. In particular, they are pushing President Biden to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Being on this list subjects Cuba to a series of devastating international financial restrictions. It is illegal for U.S. banks to process transactions to Cuba, but U.S. sanctions also have an unlawful extraterritorial reach. Fearful of getting in the crosshairs of U.S. regulations, most Western banks have also stopped processing transactions involving Cuba or have implemented new layers of compliance. This has hampered everything from imports to humanitarian aid to development assistance, and has sparked a new European campaign to challenge their banks’ compliance with U.S. sanctions.
These banking restrictions and Trump-era sanctions, together with the economic fallout from COVID-19, have led to a severe humanitarian and economic crisis for the very Cuban people the administration claims to support. They are also a major cause of the recent increase in migration of Cubans that has become a major political liability for the Biden administration.
At the beginning of Biden’s presidency, he stated that Cuba’s designation on this list was under review. Eighteen months later, with the administration obviously more concerned about Florida politics than the welfare of the Cuban people, the results of this review have still not been revealed. Cuba remains on the list, with no justification and despite Biden hailing diplomacy – not escalation of tension and conflict – as his administration’s preferred path.
During the Obama administration, when there was a warming of bilateral relations with Cuba, the Obama-Biden White House undertook its own review and certified that the government of Cuba was not supporting terrorism and had provided the U.S. with assurances that it would not do so in the future. As a result, Cuba was taken off the infamous list.
When Donald Trump became president, he not only imposed over 200 new, harsh sanctions on the island, but in the last days of his administration, in a final move to curry favor with anti-normalization Cuban-Americans, he added Cuba back onto this list. The only other countries with this designation are Syria, Iran and North Korea.
The addition of Cuba to the list by then Secretary of State Pompeo curtailed a process of congressional consultation and avoided conducting any actual formal review of Cuba’s supposed actions to justify its addition to the list again.
The nonsensical rationale by Pompeo to add Cuba back to the list was that Cuba was granting safe harbor to Colombian terrorists. But these Colombian groups were in Cuba as part of an internationally recognized process of peace negotiations that the United States, Norway, Colombia and even Pope Francis supported.
Trump specifically cited Cuba’s refusal to extradite ten members of the ELN (National Liberation Army), as requested during Colombia’s Ivan Duque administration. However, Cuba was under no obligation to extradite anyone as they have no extradition treaty with the United States, nor is the failure to extradite someone based solely on the United States’ desires an act of “terrorism.” In addition, Colombia’s Constitution states that “extradition shall not be granted for a political crime.” Moreover, Gustavo Petro, a former member of another rebel group called M-19, will soon be inaugurated as the next president of Colombia. He has said to the ELN and all existing armed groups that “the time for peace has come”—a message the Biden administration should embrace.
The other reason stated by the Trump administration for adding Cuba to the list is that Cuba harbors U.S. fugitives from justice. The 2020 State Department report cited three cases, all involving incidents that occurred in the early 1970s. The most famous is the case of Assata Shakur (born Joanne Chesimard), who has become an icon of the Black Lives Matter movement. Shakur, now 75 years old, was a member of the Black Liberation Army. In a trial that many deemed unfair, she was convicted of killing a state trooper when, in 1973, the car she was traveling in was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike for a broken tail light. Shakur escaped from prison and was granted political asylum in Cuba. Fidel Castro called her a victim of “the fierce repression against the Black movement in the United States” and “a true political prisoner.” Her co-defendant Sundiata Acoli, now in his mid-80s, was granted parole this year. Given how old the claims are and that these considerations were already previously reviewed by the Obama-Biden administration and not found to be sufficient to justify designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, it’s certainly time for the Biden administration to remember that and bury the hatchet.
In any case, U.S. attorney Robert Muse insists that providing asylum to U.S. citizens does not justify putting Cuba on a terrorist list. U.S. law defines international terrorism as “acts involving the citizens or the territory of more than one country.” None of the U.S. citizens residing in Cuba committed a terrorist act that was international in nature.
Using this terrorist list for purely political reasons undermines the legitimacy of the terrorism designation itself. As Sen. Patrick Leahy said, “This blatantly politicized designation makes a mockery of what had been a credible, objective measure of a foreign government’s active support for terrorism. Nothing remotely like that exists [in Cuba].” On the contrary, Cuba has often been praised for its international cooperation and solidarity, especially in providing free or low-cost healthcare and medical support to poor countries worldwide, including throughout the global pandemic.
If anything, it is Cuba that has been the victim of international terrorism emanating mainly from the United States. This ranges from the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and hundreds of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro to the downing of a Cuban civilian airplane (while the United States provided actual cover to the terrorist, who lived out his life peacefully in Miami) and the bombing of Cuban hotels. Just last April, the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C., came under an armed attack by a U.S. citizen. The United States continues to provide millions of dollars in taxpayer funding every year to organizations engaged in defamation and smear campaigns, and to directly undermine the sovereignty of another government with little to no oversight.
Removing Cuba from the terrorist list would facilitate the island’s ability to receive loans, access critical foreign assistance and benefit from humanitarian aid. You can join the campaign to tell Biden to reverse the outrageous Trump-era designation that is unjust, harmful to the Cuban people, and damaging to U.S.-Cuban relations.
While the political balance between progressive and reactionary states south of the Rio Grande continues to tip to the left, even the corporate press pronounced Biden’s June Summit of the Americas meeting in Los Angeles a flop. Most recently, Colombia elected its first left-leaning president, following similar victories in Chile, Peru, and Honduras, which in turn followed Bolivia, Argentina, and Mexico. And the frontrunner in Brazil’s presidential contest slated for October is a leftist. However, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and especially Cuba – countries led by explicitly socialist parties – are critically threatened by US imperialism, subjected to severe sanctions. In short, the geopolitical situation in the Western Hemisphere remains volatile. What does this portend for US hegemony and for socialism?
Ebb and flow of the class struggle in Latin America
The tidal metaphor describes the shifting constellations of governments in what Washington long considered its exclusive domain ever since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The Pink Tide is a reaction to, and a struggle against, neoliberalism, which is the contemporary form of capitalism. The Pink Tide first entered its flow phase in 1998 with the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela. What followed was truly a sea change with a developing expression of sovereignty and independence. An alphabet soup of regionally integrated entities arose: ALBA, UNASUR, MERCOSUR, Petrocaribe, CELAC, etc.
Upon assuming state power, the emerging left governments paradoxically inherit the very problems that precipitated the popular discontent that had led to their ascendence. And that is not to mention the looming presence of the Colossus of the North whose official policy is zero tolerance of insubordination to the empire.
The Pink Tide went into an ebb phase around 2015 with the election of hard-right Mauricio Macri in Argentina. A US-backed coup in Honduras had already deposed Manuel Zelaya’s leftist government in 2009 and foreshadowed a later US-instigated regime-change operation in Bolivia, overthrowing Evo Morales in 2020. “Lawfare” coups in Paraguay and Brazil along with electoral defeats of leftists in Chile and Uruguay shifted the balance right. In Brazil, frontrunner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known colloquially as “Lula”) was forced to sit out the presidential election in prison on trumped up charges, allowing Jair Bolsonaro, the “Trump of the Tropics,” to win in 2018.
Mexico kicks off the second left wave, July 2018
Prospects for hemispheric progressivism again began looking bullish with Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) victory in July 2018 after two previous attempts at the Mexican presidency, which were widely considered fraudulently stolen from him. A left turn by the second largest economy in Latin America, eleventh in the world, and the US’s second largest trading partner was not insignificant after decades of conservative rule. AMLO, whose MORENA party swept the 2018 national elections, has since shown fortitude in standing up to Washington.
After it became apparent that Biden would not invite Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua to his Summit of the Americas in June of this year, AMLO led a boycott of the summit to be joined by Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. El Salvador and Uruguay also purposely missed the party, albeit for different reasons.
AMLO pointedly made a state visit to Cuba and previously had conspicuously welcomed Venezuelan President Maduro as an honored guest. AMLO stayed firm, even after Biden sent a special delegation to Mexico City apparently to remind him about the career prospects of others – such as Qaddafi, Noriega, and Hussein – who similarly failed to heed imperial summons.
Then on July 4th, the Mexican president facetiously launched a campaign to take down the Statue of Liberty, “no longer a symbol of liberty,” because of the US prosecution of Julian Assange.
A new president is anointed in Venezuela, January 2019
Tempering any initial leftist euphoria over the ending of conservative rule in Mexico were the continuing US regime-change efforts against Venezuela designed to bring down the leading left state in the region. In one of the more bizarre examples of imperial hubris, US Vice President Pence called a person unknown to over 80% of the Venezuelan public and one who had never run for national office. Pence asked Juan Guaidó if he would like to be president of Venezuela. The next day, on January 23, 2019, this US security asset declared himself “interim president” of Venezuela on a Caracas street corner. US President Trump immediately recognized Guaidó as the legitimate chief-of-state followed by some 60 of the empire’s loyal vassals.
Three years later, barely a baker’s dozen of states currently recognize Juan Guaidó as president of Venezuela. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who once gushed how “thrilled” she was with the puppet president, now doesn’t even recognize his name. The hapless Guaidó, by the way, failed to secure an invitation to Biden’s summit in Los Angeles last June now that he is such an embarrassment.
After Obama first sanctioned Venezuela in 2015, the illegal measures were intensified by Trump and continued for the most part by Biden. After deliberately targeting Venezuela’s cash cow, the oil industry, the economy was devastated. Today, those fortunes are being reversed. With assistance from China, Russia, and Iran along with adroit economic planning and some concessions to garner support of the domestic bourgeoisie, the Venezuelan economy revitalized by 2022.
Venezuelan President Maduro stood firm against repeated coup attempts by Juan Guaidó and military incursions from Colombia acting as a US proxy. Last November, the municipal and regional elections were a double triumph for Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution: the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) won significantly while the extreme right opposition (including Guaidó’s party) was compelled to participate, implicitly recognizing the Maduro government.
A major sticking point blighting relations between the US and Venezuela is the extradition of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab and his imprisonment in Miami. Saab had been instrumental in legally helping Venezuela circumvent the illegal US blockade. Apparently, the empire believes it has the prerogative to decide who other countries may appoint as their diplomats and to persecute those they do not like. This is despite the Vienna Convention, to which the US is a signatory and from which absolute diplomatic immunity is provided even in the time of war. However, under Mr. Biden’s “rules-based order” – as opposed to international law – the US makes the rules, and the rest of humanity must follow the orders.
Rightist replaced in Argentina and a coup in Bolivia, Fall 2019
The Pink Tide again began to rise when, on October 27, 2019, Alberto Fernández replaced Mauricio Macri, whose neoliberal policies had wrecked the economy in Argentina. The new president is aligned with more conservative elements within Peronism compared to his vice-president. The two Peronist factions have continued to wrangle over how to extricate Argentina from the debt-grip of the IMF and international finance, with the more progressive side recently gaining the upper hand.
Then the Pink Tide suffered a major reversal only two weeks after its success in Argentina, when a US-backed coup overthrew leftist President Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia. With the connivance of the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), Evo had to flee for his life. Rightist Senator Jeanine Áñez then entered the Bolivian presidential palace with a bible in her hand – I am not making this up –exorcized the building of indigenous paganism and declared herself temporary president. Major popular protests by the largely indigenous and poor populace followed, only to be brutally repressed with many fatalities.
Almost precisely a year after the initial coup, Evo’s former minister of finance and a member of his Movement for Socialism (MAS) Party, Luis Arce, ran for the presidency. His landslide win vindicated Evo’s initial president victory in 2019.
Marxist-Leninist assumes presidency in Peru, June 2021 – for now
After four presidents in three years, in the ever mercurial and unpredictable Peru, a rural teacher and peasant leader from the Marxist-Leninist Perú Libre Party led the presidential primary election. Pedro Castillo faced far-right Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of an imprisoned former president and convicted human rights violator. Castillo was so unknown that the major press services had to scramble to find a photograph of him.
Castillo was eventually declared the winner of the runoff on June 6, 2021, after a protracted vote count, but by a razor thin margin. With only a minority in the legislature, Castillo has been clinging to elected office by this fingernails ever since. Right off, he was pressured to remove his leftist foreign minister. Since then, he has survived two impeachment attempts, four cabinets, and his banishment from his own political party.
The capital city of Peru, it should be noted, gave its name to the ill-fated Lima Group, a cabal of US client states aligned against Venezuela. Even before Peru voted red, the Lima Group had drowned in a rising Pink Tide.
Left victories in Central America, November and December 2021
The US deemed Nicaragua’s presidential election an undemocratic fraud nearly a year in advance as part of a larger regime-change campaign against left-leaning governments. Disregarding Washington’s call to boycott, a respectable 65% of the Nicaraguan electorate went to the polls on November 11, 2021, and 76% of the voters re-elected Sandinista President Daniel Ortega. The landslide victory was a testament to the Sandinistas’ success in serving Nicaragua’s poor and a repudiation of the 2018 coup attempt fomented by the US.
Following the left reaffirmation in Nicaragua was the long-awaited and much savored victory in what was once called the USS Honduras, alluding to that country’s role as a base for US counter-insurgency operations during the “dirty wars” in Central America. Xiomara Castro, the first female president, was swept in by a landslide on November 28. The slogan of the now triumphant resistance front was: “They fear us because we have no fear.”
It had been twelve years since a US-backed coup overthrew Manuel Zelaya, who was the democratically elected president and husband of Castro. The country had devolved into a state where the former president, Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), was an unindicted drug smuggler, and where the intellectual authors who ordered the assassination of indigenous environmental leader Berta Cáceres ran free, Afro-descendent people and women were murdered with impunity, gang violence was widespread, and state protection from the pandemic was grossly deficient. Once the US government’s darling, JOH will likely spend the rest of his days behind bars given that he has been extradited to the US to face drug trafficking charges.
Leftists win in Chile and Colombia with Brazil maybe next
Last December 19, Gabriel Boric won the Chilean presidential election by a landslide against far-right José Antonio Kast. The 35-year-old Boric was a leader in the massive protests in 2019 and 2020 against corrupt President Sebastian Piñera. The slogan of the protests was: “If Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, then it will also be its graveyard!” The victory was a repudiation of the Pinochet legacy.
A constituent assembly, where the left won the majority of the delegates in a May election, has rewritten the Pinochet-era constitution. But current polls suggest that the electorate may reject it. With a 59% disapproval rating and severe unrest in the territory of the Mapuche indigenous people, Boric has hard times ahead.
Then, on June 19, history was made in the leading client state of the US in the Americas when Gustavo Petro became the first leftist president-elect ever, and his running mate, Francia Márquez, the first Afro-descendent vice president-elect. Petro, a former leftist guerilla and onetime mayor of Bogotá, had since shifted toward the center politically. But in the comparison to the far-right rule of former President Álvaro Uribe and his successors, Colombia has dramatically and decisively shifted to the left. Relations with Venezuela are being normalized and the Monómeros chemical plant, which was handed over to the Guaidó clique and run into the ground, may get returned to Caracas and restart producing needed fertilizers.
Even more portentous than the left victory in Colombia would be one in neighboring Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America and the eighth in the world. That may happen with the October 2 presidential election where the frontrunner, Lula, has a substantial lead In the polls.
Troubled waters ahead as the Pink Tide surges
In conclusion, the surging Pink Tide is symptomatic of the increasingly manifest inability of neoliberalism to address the fundamental needs of the populace. Popular upheavals in Latin America are not isolated, but are indicative of a reaction to increasing inflation, poverty, crime, and drug-related violence. Demonstrations in July in Ecuador led by the indigenous CONAIE organization almost toppled the government of right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso over grievances regarding fuel prices, debts, and illegal mining. Panama is in “permanent strike.”
The living standards of poor and working people globally are dramatically being eroded by a world order where the US and its imperial allies have imposed sanctions – what the UN calls unilateral coercive measures – on a third of humanity.
The US may still be the hemispheric hegemon, but the edifice is corroding. While the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation falters, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has made major inroads in Latin America as it has in Asia and Africa. Argentina joined the BRI last February, following 19 other regional states including Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The BRICS summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa was held virtually in June, representing some 30% of the world’s economy and 40% of its population. Argentina attended and is slated to become the next member of an expanded group along with Iran and possibly others such as Indonesia, Niger, and Egypt.
China has become the region’s largest creditor and second-largest trading partner after the US. China’s trade with Latin America and the Caribbean grew 26-fold between 2000 and 2020 and is expected to more than double by 2035. China has provided a vital lifeline for states attacked by the US and room for newfound independence from the hegemon. Particularly when the US weaponized the Covid pandemic by increasing pressure on left states, China filled in.
Despite a resurgent Pink Tide, the US hybrid warfare measures against the explicitly socialist countries in Latin America has created a precarious and critical inflection point. Cuba solidarity activist W. T. Whitney warns: “Thanks to the US blockade, Cuba’s economic situation is more desperate than ever.”
[T]he heroism of normality in Cuba does not generate headlines. — Cuban revolutionary journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde
July 11, 2021 in Cuba quickly went from legitimate, valid, peaceful street protests to violent provocations and destructive acts directed by US clients in Cuba. Thousands of people in many cities, towns, and working-class neighborhoods took to the streets in response to harsh, deteriorating conditions — the worst of the Covid Delta infections, hospitalizations, and deaths on the island before the application of the Cuban-vaccines; the electricity blackouts in the scorching Cuban summer; on top of the existing shortages of food, gasoline, and medicines — and perceived shortcomings in government measures and action. This was accompanied by the highly orchestrated, parallel activation of longstanding counter-revolutionary networks, catalyzed and coordinated by US “social media” platforms with clear, documented threads leading to Washington and its minions. Of course, these counter-revolutionary networks are financially sustained and politically directed by US government agencies.
While most of the protests remained peaceful, there were significant levels of violence in numerous neighborhoods, including assaults on police and other citizens; the destruction and looting of public and private homes, properties, and businesses; and overturning cars and dumping garbage in the streets. Some 1300 Cuban citizens were initially arrested and detained, with most subsequently released. Hundreds have been charged and tried over recent months in judicial proceedings that are ongoing, around 70 on relatively minor charges. Heavy sentences have been handed down for those convicted so far – based on documented evidence with the right to defense council and due process – of the violent crimes referred above.
Fizzle and Collapse
As the July 11 anniversary comes and goes, its ephemeral character became apparent within days — if not hours — as the “unprecedented uprising against communist tyranny” and for “freedom” fizzled out and collapsed.
The first line of defense for the Cuban revolutionary socialist government, under the leadership of President Miguel Diaz-Canel, was not “repression” (of course, the violent riots perpetrated directly and indirectly by US clients had to be quickly contained and stopped by force) but was political, on two intertwined levels, in the historic traditions of the Cuban Revolution and the undefeated legacy of Fidel Castro and his extraordinary leadership team in defense of Cuban sovereignty and socialism.
Within hours and days of the July 11 protests and subsequent counter-revolutionary violence, the Cuban revolutionaries and working class vanguard took to the streets in mass counter-mobilizations which made crystal clear what the actual political and social relationship of forces on the island is.
Part of this revolutionary mobilization was the initiatives of the Diaz-Canel government to directly go to neighborhoods and communities and cities where protests erupted. President Diaz-Canel was continually present on the ground, not behind legions of heavily armed police and military, not before a staged, hand-picked audience, but rather to listen to grievances and project advances and solutions within the limitations of the asphyxiating blockade.
The political tone taken by the Cuban president and government was not to castigate and demonize those who took to the streets on July 11 as participants, but to differentiate between legitimate and valid grievances and demands and the US-directed counterrevolutionary subversion and violence. This was complemented and intertwined with the actions of the mass organizations – the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR); Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), and the mass organizations of small farmers, students, artists and intellectuals, and more — that are the grass-roots mass expressions of Cuba’s participatory, socialist “democracy,” which is, of course, distinct from the forms and practice of capitalist parliamentary “democracy,” a subject of great theoretical and practical-political importance (and for a different essay I would like to take up in the future.)
Since the protests a year ago, Cuba has taken steps to try to address discontent relating to conditions in the island, including renovating about 1,000 impoverished neighborhoods. President Miguel Díaz-Canel has also stressed the ‘urgent effort’ of addressing ‘opportunity’ — rather than ‘assistance’— aimed at the country’s youth, including tackling issues of employment, training and housing.
After July 11, 2021 bipartisan Washington and the capitalist media oligopolies unleashed a propaganda blitzkrieg against the Cuban government. This campaign unrealistically (wildly so!) raised expectations and illusions across the board in Washington; this was especially the case with right-wing Cuban-Americans energized under the Donald Trump Administration. (President Joseph Biden’s policies and broken campaign promises to alleviate or reverse Trump’s deepening of the blockade also accelerated the growth of Puentes de Amor-Bridges of Love and the inspiring Caravan movement of Cuban-Americans against the blockade, which have spread across the US, Canada, and worldwide.)
The Biden Administration instead shamelessly used the July 11, 2021 events as a cover for continuing and deepening the very same Trump measures. From Trump to Biden there was a seamless transition in these stepped-up “regime change” programs and economic asphyxiation.
Perhaps most critical in this further imperialist turning-of-the-screws under Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was their decision to keep Cuba on the US State Department list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” reinstated in the last days of the Trump Administration. This obscenity is a stunningly bogus and two-faced fabrication that reversed the Barack Obama-Biden Administration’s removal of Cuba from the notorious list in May 2015. Revolutionary Cuba has been a historic and contemporary recipient of terrorism, mostly US-based, including directly and indirectly, from the US government. Inclusion on the lists makes state and private economic entities wary of economic exchanges with Cuba in fear of extraterritorial US sanctions.
“Repression”
Faced with the political debris from the post-7-11 failure of what had been the most concerted and coordinated stab at “regime change” in decades, Washington politicians and the capitalist media are settling on a common “explanation” for the actual course of events. The “explanation” comes down to the “exceptional” efficacy of Cuban government and state “repression.” That is, the ability of Cuba’s government and mobilized majority to defend itself and their sovereign workers state from the US blockade and US subversive projects, policies, and programs which are longstanding and well-funded. This is bipartisan Washington’s political line and rationalization for the collapse and routing of their client base and agencies…and they’re sticking to it!
A typical account in the NBC News online piece cited above quotes Juan Pappier, a “senior Americas researcher” at “Human Rights Watch”: “Over decades, the Cuban government has been able to develop a machinery of repression, which is unique in its sophistication in the Western Hemisphere,” said Pappier. What Human Rights Watch means by “unique in its sophistication” is that the Cuban Revolution and its revolutionary Marxist leadership has been particularly effective in defending itself against ongoing US bellicosity over many decades. That is fairly unique in the contemporary history of Latin American, Central American, and Caribbean revolutionary processes which necessarily come up against US subversion and intervention.
(See my article for a description of this notoriously anti-Cuban, Washington-echoing Human Rights Watch outfit.)
It is an illusion and a diversion to frame the failure of Washington and its clients inside Cuba to gain serious political traction and political momentum as the result of “repression.” It is, of course, the duty and obligation of the revolutionary socialist Cuban government to counter and defeat Washington’s permanent, subversive, “regime change” schemes. And the Cuban revolutionaries are damn good at it from experience! After all, necessity is the mother of invention.
What does not exist in Cuba for the counter-revolutionary forces under the direction of Washington is a mass base with a united organization and program. Their base is in Washington and part of the polarized Cuban-American community in Miami and elsewhere. Otherwise, inside Cuba what these forces have left are just various networks and money-laundering operations with threads that all lead to Washington. These groups do not exist to lead a mass counter-revolutionary movement for which they have no significant mass base, but to be points of support for any potential direct US military intervention and invasion under the “right” conditions of economic and social collapse from the US economic and political war.
Anyone with the slightest familiarity with Cuba’s mass participatory decision-making political forms and electoral processes – certainly distinct from the parliamentary democratic forms of many capitalist states — knows that freewheeling debate and contention within the Revolution is a norm that exists alongside necessary and voluntary revolutionary unity under the conditions of permanent economic, financial, and political siege by the US imperialist superpower. Within that crucible – not at all what any revolutionary Marxist would consider ideal – “socialist democracy” advances and flourishes. A stunning example today is the rich and sometimes contentious, nationwide debates, within a mass deliberative process, over modernization and updating of Cuba’s renamed Families Code that includes issues of same-sex marriage, the rights of children, and much more.
The caricature of a cowed and tyrannized Cuban population anxious to be “liberated” by a benevolent Uncle Sam is nonsense that has gained little political traction beyond the Washington and Miami policymaker’s bubble. Do most of them even believe it themselves?
Cracks in the Blockade’s Armor?
It is never easy for a bully to back down. Under some pressure to avoid a united boycott of the June 2022 US-hosted Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles Summit from numerous countries – including perhaps the entire bloc of Caribbean states constituting CARICOM – the Biden Administration made some limited concessions – easing family remittances (although mechanisms have yet to be established; loosening travel restrictions and allowing new airline routes; and liberalizing “people-to-people” exchanges (although normal tourist travel remains banned and hotel access for US citizens and legal residents is severely restricted) – that cushioned the Summit from a humiliating debacle. CARICOM, with the honorable exception of PM Ralph Gonsalves of the St. Vincent and the Grenadines – ended up in the room – although, once there, the remarks of CARICOM members blasted the exclusions of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and US anti-Cuba policies from the floor.
At the same time the Biden Administration is under mounting pressure from the growing numbers of Cubans who are emigrating under the accumulating harshness of economic conditions that Biden’s blockade has maintained in continuity with Donald Trump’s policies. This is an inevitable consequence of the US economic war against Cuba. These numbers are up to over 140,000 leaving Cuba aiming to enter the US, the largest numbers since the so-called Mariel boat lift of 1980 that reached 125,000.
The Primary Contradiction
The triumph of the mobilized Cuban people and revolutionary socialist government over the Washington-directed “soft coup” was already apparent in the immediate aftermath of the July 11, 2021 events. This political triumph was intertwined with the successful development and production of Cuban vaccines against COVID-19 and the highly successful mass vaccination efforts, including for children two-years and up. November 15, 2021—the announced day that Cuban schools, tourism and much else officially reopened — was touted by Washington and its counter-revolutionary networks to be a day of renewed protests, with the banging of pots in the streets and from home windows, with all the hyperbole they could muster. But the “heroism of normality” triumphed on that day and the retreat and isolation of the US-directed counter-revolutionary network again fell flat.
We should add the incredible mobilizations – 6.5 million in the streets across the country, some one million in Havana – for the May Day celebrations which brought out the organized Cuban working class and fighting people as a whole. This was the first May Day held for two years because of COVID and the enthusiasm and determination of the marchers was evident to anyone there (as I was privileged to be).
May Day 2022 in Havana
All of this has also led to negative political consequences for the bipartisan US anti-Cuba aggressive policy implemented by Biden and Blinken in their first 18 months in the White House and “Foggy Bottom.” Their policy has failed to gain traction and remains isolated in the Americas, as registered at the Los Angeles Summit. This will be further registered worldwide in the annual Fall vote in the UN General Assembly – this will be the 30th such vote since 1992! – to overwhelmingly oppose the US extraterritorial commercial, financial, and economic embargo, the blockade. (Washington, of course, has appealed for the UN General Assembly to condemn the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation government of Vladimir Putin but has tried to put its head in the sand over 30 consecutive UN condemnations!) But for now bipartisan Washington is carrying on amidst the growing political wreckage.
At the same time, the economic (and thereby social) crisis in Cuba continues to deepen with a horrific, devastating impact. The US blockade is a sadistic policy, insofar as its authors are conscious of the human consequences of the tightening of the US asphyxiation policies under Trump and Biden.
In summary, we can say that the primary contradiction at this conjuncture in the fight for the normalization of US-Cuba relations is between the political isolation of bipartisan Washington and the political defeat – after such raised expectations and the anti-Cuba, anti-communist propaganda blitzkrieg – from July 11 to November 15, 2021 on one hand and the continuing and deepening material pounding from the blockade on the Cuban economy and people on the other.
It is clear from eyewitness reports from recent visitors to Cuba from the US solidarity movement that we are approaching a reality where Cuban people are going to die from shortages in medicines such as insulin and many other life-saving medications and medical equipment that the blockade prevents Cuba from purchasing. (And let us never forget – or forgive – that the blockade was deepened by the Trump and Biden Administrations during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.)
Everything in the next period flows from this primary contradiction which is also the primary political dynamic. There is no question that the resistance of the Cuban workers state, elected government, and fighting people will continue on every front. Biden and Blinken are going into a period where their anti-Cuba policy is more, not less, isolated. The October 2022 parliamentary elections in Brazil seem set for the ignominious ouster of the Jair Bolsonaro regime and the election of Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva. Lula da Silva, like President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, is an historic friend of Cuba and a strong opponent of the US anti-Cuba blockade.
If elected, Lula, like other newly elected left-wing governments in Honduras, Chile, and Colombia, may or may not be able to effectively counter the resistance of the capitalists and large landowners, backed by the capitalist states (military, police, courts, prisons) they will be governing, to any progressive reforms in the interests of the working class, landless peasants, oppressed nationalities, women, and youth or anti-imperialist policies they aim to carry out to significantly diminish the neoliberal capitalist order in the current, mounting world capitalist economic crisis with its permanent political volatility and instability.
Nevertheless, none of these governments, even Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, who has tossed out some anti-Cuba boilerplate while also speaking out against the blockade, will be an ally to Biden and bipartisan Washington, in pursuing the criminal blockade.
The remaining months of 2022 will see the UN vote, the Brazilian presidential and parliamentary elections, and the mid-term Congressional elections in the United States.
The Cuba solidarity and anti-blockade movement must build on our significant advances in the next period to step up our solidarity aid and our political work against the blockade. Out of many fronts of struggle let us unite in one fist against the blockade. Let us support the many solidarity caravans and brigades traveling to Cuba in the coming days, weeks, and months. Support and donate to the Saving Lives Campaign for US-Cuba-Canada Collaboration and the Global Health Partners Campaign to send critically needed anesthesia machines and sutures to the Calixto Garcia Hospital main surgical trauma center in Havana. Let us unite in mass actions in New York City, across the US, Canada, and worldwide to mark the Fall UN vote!
There are significant parallels between the international crises in Cuba in 1962 and Ukraine today. Both involved intense confrontations between the USA and the Soviet Union or Russia. Both involved third party countries on the doorstep of a major power. The Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to lead to WW3, just as the Ukraine crisis does today.
Cuban Missile crisis and the current crisis in Ukraine
In 1961, the US supported an invasion of Cuba at the “Bay of Pigs”. Although it failed, Washington’s hostile rhetoric and threats against Cuba continued, the CIA conducted many assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Cuba, seeking to defend itself, or at least have a means of retaliating in case of another attack, sought missiles from the Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed and began secretly installing the missiles. As a sovereign nation having been attacked and under continuing threat, Cuba had the right to obtain these missiles.
US President JF Kennedy thought otherwise. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, he said the missiles endangered the US and must be removed. He imposed an air and sea quarantine on Cuba and threatened to destroy a Soviet ship traveling in the high seas to Cuba. The world was on edge and there was global fear that World War 3 was about to erupt. In my homeland Canada, we went to bed seriously worried that nuclear war would break out overnight.
Fortunately for humanity, cooler heads prevailed, and there were negotiations. The Soviets agreed to withdraw the missiles in Cuba. In return, JFK agreed to withdraw US missiles in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. The Cubans were furious, thinking they had been betrayed and lost their means of defense. But the Soviets had the bigger picture in mind, along with a US commitment to not invade Cuba.
The situation now in Ukraine has similarities. Instead of missiles in Cuba being a threat to the US, NATO in Ukraine is seen as a threat to Russia. NATO has steadily expanded east and installed missiles in Poland and Romania. Since 2008, Russia has explicitly said that Ukrainian militarization by NATO was a red line for them. Kyiv is much closer to Moscow than Havana is to Washington. If it were justifiable for JFK to give the ultimatum regarding missiles in Cuba, is it not justifiable that Russia would object to Ukraine being a part of a hostile military alliance?
Different Responses
In 1962 the US and Soviet Union realized that escalating tensions and hostilities must be avoided, and they turned to negotiations. They found a mutually acceptable compromise.
The situation seems more dangerous today. Instead of seeking an end to the war, the US and NATO are pouring in weapons and encouraging more bloodshed. It appears to be a proxy war with the US prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian. There are calls to escalate the conflict.
Ukraine Background
Knowing the background to the current crisis is essential to understanding Putin’s actions. Unknown to most Americans, a crucial event came in 2014 when a violent US supported coup overthrew the democratically elected Ukraine government. US State Department official Victoria Nuland handed out cookies as Senator John McCain encouraged the anti-government protesters. In a secretly captured conversation with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland selected who would run the government after the pending coup. In the final days, opposition snipers killed 100 people on both sides to inflame the situation and “midwife” the coup. Oliver Stone’s video “Ukraine on Fire” describes the background and events.
On the first day in power, the coup government issued a decree that removed Russian as a state language.
Within weeks Crimea organized a referendum. With 85% participation, 96% voted to leave Ukraine and re-unite with Russia. Why did they do this? Because most Crimeans speak Russian as their first language and Crimea had been part of Russia since 1783. When Soviet premier Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian republic in 1954, they were all within the Soviet Union.
In Odessa, anti-coup protesters were attacked by ultra-nationalist thugs with 48 killed including many burned alive as they sought escape in the Trade Unions Hall. In eastern Ukraine, known as the Donbass, the majority of the population also opposed the ultra-nationalist coup government. Civil war broke out, with thousands killed.
With the participation of France, Germany, the Kiev government, and eastern Ukraine rebels, an agreement was reached and approved by the United Nations Security Council. It was called the Minsk Agreement. Russia has repeatedly encouraged the implementation of this agreement. Instead of negotiations and peace, the Kyiv government and NATO have done the opposite. Since 2015, there have been more weapons, more threats, more NATO training, more encouragement of ultra-nationalism plus NATO military exercises explicitly designed to threaten and antagonize Russia. This is not speculation; it is described in a 2019 Rand report about “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia”.
Endangering the world
The Biden administration appears to want to prolong the conflict in Ukraine. President Biden declared in a “gaffe” that Putin must be replaced. Defense Secretary Austin has said the US goal is to “weaken Russia”. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinks Afghanistan in the 1980’s is a “model” to follow in Ukraine by bogging Russia down in a protracted war. Republican and Democratic senators Graham and Blumenthal visited Kyiv on July 7 and called for sending even more weapons. There is evidence that the US and UK have been advising Ukrainian president Zelensky to NOT negotiate.
The Need for Courage and Compromise
With war and bloodshed happening now, we need cooler heads to prevail as in 1962. We can have a LOSE – LOSE situation, endangering the whole world, or a compromise which guarantees Ukrainian independence while providing security assurances to Russia.
JFK had the courage and wisdom to resist the CIA and military generals who wanted to escalate the crisis. Does Joe Biden? There is a huge difference between the two presidents. JFK knew war first hand. He was injured and his brother died in WW2. He became an advocate for peace. It may have cost him his life, but millions of people were saved. In contrast, Joe Biden has been a proponent for every US war of the past three decades. Not only that, he was a major player in the 2014 Ukraine coup and aftermath.
Since Biden appointed the chief architect of the Ukraine coup, Victoria Nuland, to be the third top official at the State Department, one cannot realistically expect a change in policy from this administration. Neo-cons are in charge.
If we are to avoid disaster, others must speak up and demand negotiations and settlement before the situation spirals out of control.
One of the gains of Cuba’s revolutionary process has been the high level of participation of women in political and public life, reports Ian Ellis-Jones.
Last week (June 8-10) there were two summits in Los Angeles, California: the Summit of the Americas hosted by the US State Department and the Peoples Summit hosted by US and international activist organizations. The two summits were held in the same city at the same time but could not be otherwise more different.
Summit of SOME of the Americas
Begun in 1994, in the heyday of US international dominance, the Summit of the Americas is officially a function of the Organization of American States. It is meant to coordinate and consolidate US economic, political and cultural interests. The first summit, held in Miami, served this goal well. The Soviet Union had broken up, severely hurting allies such as Cuba. Neo-liberalism was on the march, even in countries such as Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had been voted out of power. The US had recently invaded Panama, making a murderous example of any country or leader that defied US dictates.
Since 1994, there have been Summits of the Americas every three or four years. The summits in Canada (2001) and Argentina (2005) had large anti-summit protests against capitalist globalization. In Panama in 2015, Cuba was invited to the summit for the first time after a group of countries threatened to boycott the summit if Cuba was again excluded. President Obama met and shook hands with Cuban President Raul Castro. There was widespread agreement and pleasure at the US beginning to normalize relations with Cuba.
In 2018, the US hostility to Cuba resumed under President Trump. The White House administration referred to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela as a “troika of tyranny”.
The policy of exclusion continues under the Biden administration and this became a major feature of the just concluded Summit of the Americas. Despite threats to boycott the gathering by many Latin American and Caribbean presidents, the US chose to exclude Cuban, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This resulted in seven country presidents choosing not to attend: Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, St Vincent, Antigua, Guatemala, El Salvador. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) said simply, “There cannot be a summit of the Americas if all the countries of the American continent do not participate. Or there can be, but …. it is just a continuation of the old policy of interventionism, or disrespect of nations and their peoples.”
As it turned out, the absence of three excluded and seven allied leaders became a predominant feature of the Summit. The ghost of the ten hung over all events. The summit accomplished little with the lack of preparation being compared to a “privileged but lazy student” who does not prepare for a test. The Atlantic analyzed the situation: “The Summit of the Americas, hosted this year by Joe Biden, offers a measure of how far the U.S. has fallen.” The attendance was small and resolutions filled with platitudes with little substance. Criticisms of the US exclusion of countries were openly aired.
The NY Times described the Summit by quoting a former Mexican ambassador who said many countries are “challenging U.S. influence, because U.S. influence has been diminishing in the continent.”
At the Summit of the Americas, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and OAS leader Luis Almagro spoke at a panel about “ Journalistic Freedom“. Journalist Walter Smolarek exposed the farce as he boldly confronted Almagro because of his complicity in the 2019 Bolivian coup and more.
There was a plea from many countries to get beyond conflict and cold war, to genuinely work together to address the looming and already dangerous results of climate change.
The Summit of the Americas was expensive. Just the LA police security cost over $15 million.
Peoples Summit 2022
Two miles away from the Summit of the Americas, the Peoples Summit was held at the Los Angeles Technical Trade College. The Peoples Summit included art and poster pavilion, a huge hall for panel discussions and speeches, and an outdoor pavilion featuring dozens of activist organizations and craftspeople. There was live music and dancing later at night. Over a thousand people attended and spirits were high.
The complex affair was organized by over ten convening organizations. These included the Answer Coalition, International Peoples Assembly, CodePink and unions SEIU 721 and AFT 1521. There were over a hundred individuals providing support and organization for the event. Many activists flew or drove to Los Angeles from across the US. In contrast with the Summit of the Americas, the Peoples Summit operated on a shoestring based on volunteers.
A wide array of domestic and international issues were addressed at the Peoples Summit. They included Health as a Human Right, Gender Violence, Food Sovereignty and Climate Justice, Cultural Resistance, Youth Organizing Strategies, Justice for TPS and Undocumented Community, Lessons from Below and Organizing Unhoused Communities. Plus many more.
In 2020, Los Angeles counted over 66,000 homeless people in the city. The latest survey, from January this year, is going to be released June 22. These and other issues were explored by activists at the Peoples Summit.
A major component of the Peoples Summit was international affairs and the connection to struggles at home. While the US spends well over $800 billion annually on the military, there are virtually no homes being built by the US government. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development offers rental assistance and advice. In contrast, Venezuela has constructed 4 million homes for Venezuelan families.
US censorship and attacks on media critics were further revealed at the Peoples Summit where Julian Assange’s father and brother talked about the world’s most famous imprisoned journalist and publisher. The Wikileaks founder has been imprisoned for ten years, with over three years at Belmarsh maximum security prison. He is now threatened with extradition to the US, a kangaroo court and life imprisonment. His only “crime” has been to reveal the real crimes of the US military and government.
There was an outstanding lineup of speakers each of the three days of the Peoples Summit. These included local activists and indigenous leaders and noted international leaders such as Honduran Bertha Zuniga and Puerto Rican Oscar Lopez Rivera.
The presidents of Cuba and Venezuela, plus Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, sent eloquent messages of support to the Peoples Summit.
On Friday June 10 there was a mass march and rally from the Peoples Summit at the community college to the street in front of the Summit of the Americas. The streets of downtown Los Angeles echoed with calls, chats and songs as the march proceeded.
Conclusions
There is growing criticism of US presumptions of supremacy and US foreign policy promoting division and conflict. This was expressed by leaders who stayed away from the Summit of Americas and also many leaders who attended. The Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, said frankly,
It’s wrong that Cuba and Venezuela and Nicaragua are not here, because as you heard from Bahamas, we need to speak with those with whom we disagree….There’s too much narrow-casting instead of broadcasting. There’s too much talking at, instead of talking with…. And the simple priority must be people, not ideology.
US exceptionalism and the exclusion of countries is increasingly being challenged. This matches the global criticisms of US unilateral sanctions. At the last UN General Assembly, the vote was 184-2 in denouncing US embargo on Cuba. Seventy percent of world nations believes US sanctions violate international law.
The Summit of the Americas showed the US attempting and failing to impose its will on the hemisphere. The Peoples Summit showed a different vision which is in accord with the wishes of most countries and people.
