June 2021 – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

In voting on June 6, Pedro Castillo, candidate of the Perú Libre(Free Peru) political party, defeated three-time presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori. Five days later, with all votes counted, Castillo claimed a victory margin of 69,546 votes, or 50.2 % of the votes. Keiko Fujimori, who gained 49.8% of all votes, is charging fraud and demanding that 200,000 votes from rural areas be recounted.

Castillo’s narrow victory, yet to be officially validated, represents an abrupt shift from Peru’s norm of corruption, right-wing ascendency, and political instability (such that in one week in November 2020, three presidents took office, one after the other.) Castillo’s unexpected first-round victory on April 11, with 18.5% of the votes, was unsettling enough to his competitors that almost all of them backed Keiko Fujimori in the recent voting. Each of Peru’s two Communist parties backed Castillo (as evidenced here and here).

In office, Castillo will face formidable obstacles: a hostile national press, a Congress that overwhelmingly opposes him, business and financial establishments in panic mode, and retired military figures threatening revolt. Additionally, Peru’s total of deaths attributed to climate change is the third highest in Latin America and its rate of deaths due to COVID-19 infection is tops in the world.

Under the auspices of dictator Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), Peru turned to undiluted neoliberalism characterized by foreign profiteering from mining and oil and gas extraction and by privatization of healthcare and education. A long-established rural-urban gulf widened. Rural disadvantage, affecting Peru’s indigenous population in particular, provided the boost accounting for the victory of Pedro Castillo and his party.

The divide separates Lima, with 40% of Peru’s population, from rural districts, where Castillo scored overwhelming pluralities, some in the 80-90% range. Political attention to rural life from national centers of power, from Lima, has been sparse. Candidate Fujimori campaigned only fitfully in Peru’s countryside.

Pedro Castillo, born in 1969 of illiterate parents, has taught in a rural elementary school since 1995. In 2002, he was an unsuccessful mayoral candidate. Earlier, Castillo had taken a leadership role in autonomous peasant patrols (known as “ronda campesina”) responding to thievery and political turmoil. He gained prominence in 2017 for his part in a teachers’ strike. He and his family operate a small subsistence farm.

The Perú LibreParty, established in 2012, calls for nationalization of extractive industries, a new constitution, and respect for women’s rights, including reproductive rights. It claims to be Marxist, socialist, and anti-imperialist – but not Communist. Campaigning, Castillo called for “No more poor people in a rich country.” Keiko Fujimori based her campaign on fear as she associated Castillo with terrorism, communism, and Cuban and Venezuelan socialism. She extolled her father’s success in corralling the Shining Path guerrillas.

According to the Party’s website, Perú Libre “originates from the provinces, represents Deep Peru, and is committed to people who are most in need … Perú Libre has governed in the regions and [small] cities … and firmly defends decentralization … We are internationalists … The Party condemns all types of imperialism … interventionism, and foreign dependency.”

Perú Libre calls for the departure of USAID and closure of U.S. military bases. Castillo supports solidarity alliances such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and the Union of South American Nations.

Vladimir Cerrón, a neurosurgeon educated in Cuba and Peru, founded Perú Libre’s predecessor party in 2012. He has served as governor of Junim Province, was briefly a presidential candidate in 2016, and continues as Peru Libre’s secretary general. Charged with corruption, Cerrón entered prison in August 2020. A judge annulled the charges against him on June 9, coincident with the election of Pedro Castillo.

Defeated presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori was imprisoned briefly in 2018 on charges of taking bribes from Brazil’s Odebretch corporation to finance her presidential run in 2011. Presently she is under investigation on charges of money-laundering and obstruction of justice. From age 19 on, she served as “first lady” for her father who, having abandoned his presidency in 2000, is serving a 25-year presidential term on charges of corruption and human rights abuses.

The Perú Libre Party adopted the thinking of José Carlos Mariátegui, founder in 1928 of Peru’s Communist Party. Mariátegui endeavored to adapt Marxist thought to the rural and indigenous realities of Latin America. As explained by Gilberto Calil, whose report appears on rebelion.org, Mariátegui held that Peru’s elite, concentrated in Lima, despised and oppressed indigenous peoples. The divide was such, according to Mariátegui, that Peru lacked a “national project” and a bourgeois revolution. Only indigenous peoples based on the land were potentially ready to advance social and democratic demands.

Mariátegui insisted that any socialist revolution in Peru and Latin America would have rural and indigenous origins. Accordingly, Calil regards Perú Libre’s program as “coherent … in centering on concrete demands of Peru’s rural population: agrarian reform, social rights, education and healthcare.”

Photo: Pedro Castillo’s supporters took to the streets in the capital, Lima. From: Reuters.

Editorial note

US stubbornness in hanging on to its economic blockade against Cuba annoys us. Sixty years is enough, don’t you think? We are joining the Let Cuba Live Committee of Maine as it collaborates with IFCO/Pastors for Peace of New York in the project of that group heading to Cuba this Fall.

Pastors for Peace will be taking aid material to Cuba and visiting there, both against US rules for its blockade. We want some Maine people once more to be on this trip.

Every year, for 30 years, these two groups undertake civil disobedience in order to mobilize wider support for ending a policy that, by any definition, is cruel, immoral, and illegal.

Go to these websites to learn more: www.letcubalive.org and https://ifconews.org/.

The article below reviews aspects of this grim situation and reports on a new horror. We also post the CPUSA’s recent condemnation of President Biden’s failure to remove Cuba from the US list of terrorist sponsoring nations. Your dog presents as much national threat as does Cuba.

Cuba, the first Latin America country to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines, presently is short of syringes for immunizing its population against the virus. It’s not feasible for Cuba to make its own syringes. The U.S. blockade prevents Cuba from importing them from abroad.

Syringes are lacking all over. The New York Times estimates an overall need of between “eight billion and 10 billion syringes for Covid-19 vaccinations alone.” Manufacturing capabilities are increasing, but that’s of no use to Cuba.

According to Global Health Partners, “Cuba needs roughly 30 million syringes for their mass Covid vaccination campaign and they’re short 20 million.” Solidarity organizations are seeking donated funds to buy syringes and ship them to Cuba. (Readers may donate by contacting Global Health Partners or visiting here.)

The shortage of syringes poses great hardship for the Cuban people. That’s not new. Calling for economic blockade in 1960, State Department official Lester Mallory was confident that making Cubans suffer would push them toward overthrowing their government.

The U.S. blockade causes shortages of basic materials. Buses lack fuel and spare parts; bus routes have been dropped. Food supplies are precarious. Cuban laboratories and production facilities have developed five kinds of COVID-19 vaccines despite short supplies of reagents and laboratory materials.

Cuba can’t buy ventilators needed for critically ill COVID-19 patients. Two Swiss manufacturers stopped selling ventilators to Cuba after a U. S. company purchased them. But Cuban technicians devised their own ventilator model which is in production now.

The impact of the blockade is by no means haphazard. Institutionalized processes aimed at asserting U.S. domination involve laws, administrative decrees, regulations, officials’ interpretations of regulations, and caution on the part of third-country traders and financiers.

Authority for the ban on U.S. sales of goods to Cuba stems from legislation accumulating over many years. Then the Cuba Democracy Act of 1992 ensnared foreign companies into the blockade system. That law authorized the Treasury Department to license the foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to export goods to Cuba. It actually created an opening for almost all applications for licensure to be denied.

Since then, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), enforcer of the blockade, has found leeway to regulate the foreign corporations themselves. Foreign corporations contemplating sales to Cuba contend with U.S. sanctions if they have branches in the United States, partner with U.S. corporations, or handle U.S. dollars.

Most of the world’s syringes are manufactured by three U.S. companies and five companies elsewhere. Each of the latter has ties with a U.S. entity and is prohibited from exporting syringes to Cuba

For example, Germany’s B. Braun Melsungen Corporation partners with Concordance Healthcare Solutions, “one of the largest independent, healthcare distributors in the U.S.” Tokyo-based Terumo Corporation has a headquarters in New Jersey. Osaka-based Nipro Corporation recently “announce[d] the creation of a Vascular Division in the U.S.” “Healthcare heavyweight Cardinal Health” is headquartered in both Ireland and the United States.

Hindustan Syringes and Medical Devices, in India, came under OFAC purview in January 2021 by virtue of associating with Envigo Global Products as its “digital marketing partner.” Envigo is headquartered in Indianapolis.

Officers of foreign companies presumably seek legal advice. One lawyers’ group maintains that, “OFAC has long held that if a non-U.S. company engages in business transactions in U.S. dollars, the foreign party is availing itself of the U.S. financial system and hence becomes subject to the U.S. sanctions laws.”

Another indicates sanctions are likely, if “the foreign party has a requisite level of contacts with the U.S., such as engaging [with] U.S. products, software or technology.” The National Law Review recommends that, “Foreign companies … need to be aware of board members, directors, or employees who hold U.S. citizenship or U.S. green cards.”

President Barack Obama eased many blockade regulations and re-established U. S. diplomatic relations with Cuba. He never pushed to end the blockade. The Biden Administration chooses not to prioritize improved relations with Cuba. Biden recently upheld the Trump Administration’s reassignment of Cuba to the U.S. list of terrorist-sponsoring nations.

The Helms-Burton Law of 1996 required, for the first time, that Congress determine the fate of the blockade. Except for legislation in 2000 allowing U.S. food products to be exported to Cuba, Congress has protected that policy.

In February Oregon Senator Ron Wyden introduced his “United States-Cuba Trade Act of 2021,” which would end the blockade. The bill has four co-sponsors. SenatorsAmy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont on May 20 reintroduced the “Freedom to Export to Cuba Act.” That bill would facilitate U.S. exports to Cuba, especially agricultural products; allow some Cuban goods to enter the United States; and would retain sanctions imposed because of alleged human rights violations.

In March, 80 congresspersons sent a letter to President Biden urging him to use executive action to reverse restrictions imposed by President Trump.

The U.S. economic blockade of Cuba is calculated, systematic, all-encompassing, and savage. Opponents offer varying pleas. For some, the blockade is cruel and illegal. Others call for defending Cuba, because it’s a model both of human solidarity and of how to provide health care and education. Many insist on respect for Cuba’s sovereignty.

These arguments are disconnected, one from the other. Blockade critics appear to lack a central focus on root causes. Having such would be essential, it seems, for fashioning a cohesive strategy. Were that in place, new possibilities might exist for recruitment and unity. Anti-racism struggle in the United States displays similar dynamics, and maybe offers lessons.

Reacting to various symptoms of oppression, defenders of racial equality have gone from pillar to post opposing police killings, an unjust criminal justice system, and Black people’s high poverty and death rates. Now, increasingly, analysts link manifestations of racial oppression with durable systems of repression involving capitalism. Writing about a notorious slave-trading firm, historian Joshua Rothman captures that association in the title of his new book, The Ledger and the Chain.

Similarly, if the campaign against the blockade paid more attention to the long history of U. S. ambition to dominate Cuba, it might gain strength by going to the heart of the matter. The premise would be that the European powers and the United States have long sought to draw Cuba and other dependent Latin American territories into their capitalist orbit.

The syringe story reflects U.S schemes in the 19^th century to absorb Cuba, U.S. control of Cuba after Spain’s departure in 1902, and U.S. determination after 1959 to restore hegemony lost to the Revolution.