The United States Uses and Abuses Migration from Cuba and Elsewhere / by W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{A Cuban national walks along a road after crossing the Mexico-Texas border at the Rio Grande, Sept. 23, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas. | Julio Cortez / AP}

Presently 3.6% of the world’s people live in a country other than their own. They move to escape wars, oppression, poverty, hunger, climate-change effects, or to find new work, or because they were forced to move. The story is also about nations weaponizing or exploiting migration.

After a decade or so of relatively few Cubans arriving in the United States, their numbers are up. Between 2018 and 2021, some 2,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States. But in January almost 15,000 Cubans crossed the U.S. southern border; the daily average in February was 1500. U.S. border officials are seeing “a twelvefold increase over 2020,” according to the Washington Post.

Contributing to migration is the increasingly dismal state of Cuba’s economy. At work has been U.S. economic blockade, fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, and unresolved domestic issues including: inflation, corruption, cumbersome implementation of reforms, shortfalls in domestic food production, and fallout from converting two currencies into one.

U.S. officials deported only 20 arriving Cubans in the past five months, and only 95 during 2021. That’s because Cuban immigrants arriving without papers are privileged, thanks to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA). That law enables unauthorized Cuban migrants automatically to gain permanent residence after a stay of two years, which in 1976 became one year. By contrast, non-Cuban arrivals have to apply for permanent residence and then wait.

President Obama in January 2017 repealed an administrative regulation allowing those Cuban migrants who entered the United States after sea-travel to stay, while sending Cubans apprehended at sea back to Cuba. No longer could Cubans arriving by water remain. Migrants reacted by resorting to the arduous Central American land route to the U.S. border.

When the migrants of other countries travel that route, cross the border, and are apprehended, they are either quickly deported, allowed to wait in Mexico or in immigration prisons for asylum decisions, or are released to await court appointments. By contrast, Cubans crossing the border usually gain so-called “humanitarian parole” and are released. Or they are released after brief detentions to await immigration-court rulings on asylum requests. After a year they become eligible for permanent residence, as per the CAA.

The CAA-mediated enticement of early permanent residence has served the U.S. purpose of encouraging a flood of Cuban immigrants who, by fleeing, are living proof of alleged Communist oppression. Maybe the purpose of a relatively relaxed treatment of a new generation of Cuban migrants, who also arrive after great travail, is to revive that salutary example of escape from Communism.

But paradoxically, the U.S. government acts also as if to impede travel by Cubans to the United States, as if to keep them away. For example, the U.S. government in 2017 removed personnel from its Embassy in Havana. This was in response to the neurologic syndrome, still unexplained, that afflicted diplomats stationed there. Doing so, the State Department deprived Cubans of consular services needed for legal travel to the United States.

They’ve been forced to visit U.S. embassies elsewhere to obtain entry visas, in Bogota, Colombia and in Guyana. The travel costs are prohibitive for most travelers. The U.S. government indicated in March that its Havana Embassy would soon be processing visas for entry into the United States, but only for parents of U.S. citizens.

The two governments agreed in 1994 on a mechanism for legal emigration of Cubans to the United States. The U.S. government would authorize at least 20,000 lottery-chosen Cubans every year to move permanently to the United States. But U.S. immigration officials almost never issue the required number of entry visas.

Cubans without papers who want to reach the U.S. border via the Central American land route must start their trek in a country not requiring an entry visa. Now Nicaragua remains as the only visa-free country for Cubans. That’s because Panama, Colombia, and Costa Rica recently began demanding them, possibly at the behest of the U.S. government.

Why does the U.S. government try to keep Cubans away from the United States even as it encourages them to establish permanent residence? Maybe officials want to show off the difficulties Cubans put up with so as to highlight Cubans’ ardor to leave a country that, in the official U.S. version, is troubled and oppressive. Or maybe they want distressed Cubans to remain at home so they will end up joining destabilization campaigns there.

But U.S. unease does prevail over the possibility of large numbers of Cuban migrants arriving and overwhelming U.S. abilities to absorb them. Tens of thousands of Cubans did present that still-remembered threat as they departed for the United States via the “Mariel boatlift” (1980) and the “Cuban rafter crisis” (1994).

One aspect of Cuban migration is shared with worldwide migration patterns, as explained by Cuban scientist and close political observer Agustín Lage. In regard to increasing Cuban emigration to the United States, Lage emphasizes “the emigration of young people with university education.”

That phenomenon reflects “changing migratory processes during the twentieth century” that affect economies and jeopardize “states with compromised social and economic development.” He is alluding to underdeveloped societies in the Global South and presumably to the legions of scientists and physicians Cuba has prepared over many years. They are “human capital” and are a major resource for Cuba’s economy.

Lage points out that immigrants of the “professional” classes entering the United States have increased from 3% in 1930 to 40% now, at which point most have been educated in Asia and Latin America. One third of all scientists prepared in the under-developed world now live in developed nations. What’s crucial is that “the segment of migrants with a university education grows more rapidly than the quantity of migrants in general.”

The United States is the “principal beneficiary of this migratory flow.” Of all scientists who emigrated from under-developed countries, 76% are in the United States. Lage cites U.S. legislation favoring migrants with “academic degrees” as indicative of U.S. purpose.

“The countries of the South invest in the formation of human capital. But part of that human capital emigrates.” Economies in the North gain “value-added” benefit. Underdeveloped countries lose twice. They pay the cost of educating qualified people who leave and pay for “high-technology products they must import,” and which represent “an undeniable contribution from those same migrants.”

For Lage, the United States shapes immigration policies according to economic self-interest and readily subjects the needs of lesser countries to its own requirements. Clearly, U.S. manipulation of Cuban migration for counter-revolutionary purposes is in the same vein.

Lage concludes: “Against us has been operating economic aggression for more than six decades that has affected the population’s material living conditions. In any historical moment and in any place on the planet, prolonged economic difficulties have given rise to migratory pressures. And Cuba is on this planet. “But our history and our culture are in our favor. The Cuban national consciousness is the basis for our capacity of resistance. Our culture and our history are deeply rooted here and also in the consciousness of Cubans who don’t live here.” Nevertheless, “our project of a socialist society, one ‘with all and for the good of all’ (Jose Marti’s words), is at real risk. We must not underestimate that.”

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}

_{People’s World, April 12, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/}

Book Review: The Struggles and Travail of Anti-Colonialist W. Alphaeus Hunton / by W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{Alphaeus Hunton, second from left in the foreground, along with Petitioners Julian Mayfield, Alice Windom, W.A. Jeanpierre, and Maya Angelou Make, deliver a petition to the U.S. Embassy in Accra, Ghana, in 1963. | New York Public Library}

Tony Pecinovsky, Edited by and Introduction by; The Cancer of Colonialism – “W. Alphaeus Hunton, Black Liberation, and the Daily Worker, 1944-1946;” (International Publishers, New York, 2021); https://www.intpubnyc.com; ISBN- 9780717808816, pp 355, $19.99

Political movements and activists seeking to serve the people move toward unity of purpose and action. Separate struggles come together. Beginning in the mid-1930s, W. Alphaeus Hunton was constantly widening the scope of his work and teaching. From a grounding in labor activism and fight for racial and economic equality, he embraced national liberation in Africa and peace and cooperation among nations.

Hunton grew up in Brooklyn, his family’s refuge from racist violence in Atlanta. As professor of English literature at Howard University, he organized a faculty labor union. Anticipating the National Negro Congress (NNC), Hunton arranged for a large meeting at Howard. Anti-communists attacked him. That was in 1935.

Alphaeus Hunton addressing four thousand people at Abyssinian Baptist Church to open the famine relief campaign. Josh Lawrence, Paul Robeson, Rev. Shelton Bishop, and Adam C. Powell Sr. are seated behind the cans and bags of food. | Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Hunton joined the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1936. That year he organized the first national conference of the NNC, an offshoot of the Party. As suggested by historian and labor educator Tony Pecinovsky, “The CPUSA was the only organization on the left to make Africa -American equality a centerpiece of its work.”

The central theme of Pecinovsky’s new book is Hunton’s contribution, now mostly forgotten, to ongoing resistance against economic and political oppression of Africans and African Americans alike. His internationalist perspective was exemplary. The book, The Cancer of Colonialism, is clearly written, well-organized, and full of information. Detailed footnotes are a side-benefit.

The book’s first section, modestly labeled “Introduction,” is a stand-alone resource. It covers intersecting historical features of the inter-war, wartime, and post-World War II periods. Figuring prominently are national liberation struggles playing out in Africa, and also in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Korea. The author traces the twists and turns of U.S. Communists in dealing with racism at home and independence struggles abroad.

The reader learns how the Communist International, and later the Soviet Union, stimulated, prodded, facilitated, and provided material support for national liberation struggles. The author cites the complicity of U.S. imperialism with mass murders, take-downs of newly independent governments, harassment of liberation movements, and anti-communist provocations. He touches upon the prolonged debate within the CPUSA as to whether African Americans constitute an oppressed nation.

Spreading the word

The second section of Pecinovsky’s book tells about Hunton’s political life. From 1936 on, he organized national conventions for the NNC, edited its publications, and planned education programs. Hunton gained recognition nationwide and in Washington as a leader in opposing racial discrimination and police violence against Black people.

With chapters in 26 cities, the NNC established the Southern Negro Youth Congress that would set up chapters in 11 southern states and recruit more than 10,000 members. Both organizations were typical of “popular front” groups promoted by the CPUSA. Joining were Communists and, according to the author, “anyone willing to fight for workers’ rights and African American equality.” The Communist International had launched its popular-front strategy in 1935 in order to fight fascism.

Under fire from anti-communists, Hunton in 1941 was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities (“Dies”) Committee. He resigned his professorship at Howard in 1943. The NNC merged with the CPUSA-backed Civil Rights Congress (CRC) in 1947, and disappeared.

Alphaeus Hunton was “the administrative and intellectual mainstay” of the Council on African Affairs (CAA) between 1942, when it began, until its demise in 1955. Paul Robeson was the organization’s co-founder and chairperson and W.E.B DuBois, its vice-chairperson. According to Pecinovsky, The CAA “brought together African Americans fighting for equality with Black liberation movements in Africa while both sought allies within ascendent socialism.” Historian Gerald Horne regards the CAA as “the vanguard organization in the U.S. campaigning against colonialism.”

Hunton was the CAA’s education director. He edited and wrote for its publications, organized events, mentored young activists, arranged for humanitarian aid deliveries to Africa, and, with Paul Robeson, was a “fixture” at the United Nations. Time and again, he returned to South Africa’s freedom movement.

Anti-communist harassment was a constant. Having refused to provide federal investigators the names of donors to the CRC bail fund, Hunton went to prison for six months in 1951. Rather than turn over CAA correspondence to the government in 1955, Hunton dissolved the organization.

Hunton in 1957 published his book Decision in Africa. He traveled to Ghana, to the Soviet Union, and to Guinea, where he taught and wrote. He moved to Ghana in 1962 to work on DuBois’s Encyclopedia Africana. A CIA-assisted coup forced Hunton to leave Ghana in 1966 for Zambia. He died there in 1970 at the age of 67.

Daily Worker

“The Cancer of Colonialism” concludes with a collection of columns Hunton wrote for the Daily Worker from July 20,1944 to January 19, 1946. A present-day reader of the columns becomes his or her own historian in tracing a transition from optimism to frustration.

Vice President Henry Wallace is quoted as anticipating “freedom everywhere … under just and democratic principles.” Hunton applies the example of the Soviet Union to the problem of colonies. What Britain failed to do in 100 years, he notes, the USSR did in 25 years.

Hunton expects that the United States, Britain and Soviet Union would collaborate in shaping a new world and the new United Nations. The worldwide labor movement in the works would help out.

He praises Churchill and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter agreement (1941) and the outcome of the Teheran and Yalta conferences in 1943 and 1945, when Stalin joined the other two. He assumes that agreements on the right of all nations to self-government and on collaboration in securing world peace would last.

Hunton lauds conferences in 1944 at Dunbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods where new trade and financial arrangements were fashioned that, as he expected, would assure the development even of small nations.

He reports on the 1945 San Francisco conference and the agreement there on a United Nations Charter. He offers several columns on South Africa, where the job remained of “liquidating fascism.”

Now Hunton is uncertain. He sees colonialism returning to Korea, Indonesia, Malaya, and Indochina (think Vietnam). He critiques U.S. aggressiveness in demanding to exercise UN-sanctioned trusteeship over Japanese islands and the Pacific islands that had hosted allied bases. Signs crop up of U.S. anti-Soviet hostility. The Cold War is beginning.

Finally, Hunton comments on a Daily Worker article on “Leninism” by William Z. Foster. Having returned to head the CPUSA, Foster, as quoted by Hunton, mentions “dangerous illusions as to exaggerated possibilities” associated with “New Dealism” (Hunton’s term). Hunton cites “reformist illusions [that] act as, [in Foster’s words], a ‘barrier to the movement to socialism.’”

Hunton’s world had shifted. CPUSA leaders had shared his optimism, so much so that they had taken the CPUSA out of commission – which Foster’s return had remedied. And Hunton’s expectation of continuing amity between the capitalist powers and the Soviet Union was splintering.

Ultimately, Pecinovsky’s narrative testifies to the commanding role of anti-communism in Hunton’s political life. Pecinovsky borrows from analyst Michael Parenti to say that anti-communism is “the most powerful political force in the world.”

Concluding, we recognize the contribution of International Publishers for not only having presented The Cancer of Colonialism, but also for having republished Alphaeus Hunton’s 1957 book Decision in Africa and Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant, Dorothy Hunton’s 1986 biography of her husband.

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.}