Anti-communist Cuban-Americans ask for U.S. military intervention in against Cuba, July 26, 2021, at Lafayette Park near the White House in Washington | J. Martin / AP

Remarkably, the U. S. economic blockade of Cuba is 60 years old. It began with President John Kennedy’s executive order signed on February 3, 1962 that broadened existing restrictions on U.S.-Cuba trade. When the blockade reached its35-year milestone, it was already “the longest embargo in modem history”, according to one observer.

Equally remarkable is the zeal with which the blockade is still being enforced. Two recent news reports, selected as coinciding with the blockade’s 60-year anniversary, testify to the U.S. government’s still-remaining commitment and serious purpose.

Argentinian Graciela Ramírez works in Cuba as a correspondent for resumenlationameriano.org, an important Buenos Aires news outlet. She directs both the Cuba branch of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity and its English language website. Ramírez is co-coordinator of the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity, based in Oakland, California. She is a public figure whose undoing would gratify U.S. reactionaries.

Ramírez also operates the cubaenresumen.org website. She reports that on “January 27, while we were preparing different notes on national and international affairs, our [website] was silenced. We could not upload any information.” Replying to her inquiry, the server, Linode LLC in Canada, indicated that that, “this account may be being used in connection with a country that is subject to the embargo laws of the U.S.”

Ramírez is outraged: “The absurd attempt to silence us lays bare the lies and hypocrisy about the much-manipulated freedom of press and information that we hear ad nauseum from the imperialists.”

The other report of interest concerns Cuba’s BioCubaFarma company, which exports Cuban-produced vaccines and other bio-medical products. Dr. Eduardo Martínez, the company’s president, told reporters on January 31 that foreign banks have yet to transfer funds owed to BioCubaFarma by purchasers abroad.  The banks are motivated by fear of incurring U.S. fines for violating blockade regulations that prohibit them from handling payments denominated in U.S. dollars.  Martínez laments the “accumulation of millions [of dollars] in receivables” and BioCubaFarma “lagging on its commitment to pay providers for raw materials.”

The two reports attest to the persisting dedication and diligence of blockade enforcers.  After 60 years, they still harass a solitary anti-blockade activist like Graciela Ramírez who is little known to the U.S. public and hardly a threat to U.S. national security. Even now the U.S. government pursues its blockade with such determination as to reject norms of international humanitarian law: they interfere with BioCubaFarma’s distribution of lifesaving coronavirus vaccines.

Almost two years before it was launched, the U.S. State Department defined the blockade’s main purpose to be that of getting rid of Cuba’s revolutionary government. The year was 1962, and the blockade decisively took on an anti-communist mission. Apologists of the anti-communism of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who died in 1957, occupied positions of power. The Vietnam War, with its anti-communist mission, had hardly begun, leaving an anti-communist void to be filled.

No mental gymnastics are required to appreciate overlap in motivation between blockade aimed at Cuba’s government and blockade as war on communism. Blockade operatives leaning toward the latter, perhaps the very ones hitting at Graciela Ramírez and BioCubaFarma, very likely have a special view of their work.

The motivations of individual operatives are divided, qualitatively. On the one hand, there are strategies, priorities, isolated grievances, external pressures, and passing enthusiasms to be dealt with; they change over time. Responding to these factors becomes motivation according to circumstance.

A co-existing impulse, motivation as sense of mission, has to do with far-reaching principles and has an eye to a supposed greater good, for all time. It crystalizes as a set of ideas, particularly those that inspire anti-communism. Ideas fuel the blockade, bestowing upon its defenders a missionary-type zeal. They are steadfast in preserving the blockade in all of its rigidity.

In any case, high-level commitment to implementing the blockade does remain. It stems from the enforcers’ mission of fighting communism, a mission that is no stranger to historical experience in the United States.

U.S. governments and opinion shapers have long taken advantage of anti-communism; it’s useful.  With anti-communist ideas and deeds having been mobilized against the Soviet Union, the way was clear for the United States to build a capitalist world order after World War II. Anti-communism became a battle-flag in U.S. interventionist ploys throughout the global South. It prompted formation of the anti-communist Organization of American States in 1948 and rationalized all kinds of skullduggery and regime-change projects.

Anti-communism has riled U.S. politics. Often, rightwing spokesperson freely, falsely, and even randomly label political opponents as “socialist,” or “communist.” Fear of communism has terrified far too many U.S. citizens, leaving them silent and accepting. Mainstream politicians regularly have manipulated that fear to weaken or block progressive political initiatives.

Over time, the U.S. government has experienced difficulties in extending its war on communism overseas. Communist-led nations ripe for harassment are in short supply.

Vietnam and China are U.S. trading partners. As for China and North Korea, power politics takes precedence over anti-communist needling Communist Laos, small and far away, attracts little notice. But close neighbor Cuba, long the object of acquisitive U.S. ambitions, comes to the rescue. It qualifies.

It’s as if the United States needs Cuba. Beating up on Cuba can be an advertising ploy. The word spreads: “Watch out for those leftist politics brewing in your country. You don’t want to mess with the United States.” The U.S., government is always game to manipulating public opinion to its advantage, at home and abroad. Regarding Cuba, the United Nations General Assembly helps out.

For almost 30 years, nations of the world annually vote on a Cuban resolution denouncing the blockade. They massively vote their approval; only the United States, Israel, and the rare straggler disapprove. The message goes out near and far: for reliable anti-communism, one can count on the U.S. government.

The anti-communism that is key to prolonging the blockade figures into what Fidel Castro called a battle of ideas. The implication for us is that fighting the blockade on the basis of contingencies and balance of forces is necessary and commendable. But what counts, ultimately, is attention to ideology, basic principles, and a sense of our own mission.

_{Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine}

_{Source: Counterpunch, February 11, 2022, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/11/battle-of-ideas-anti-communism-prolongs-already-long-us-blockade-of-cuba/}

Campaigning in Colombia began January 15 for congressional elections on March 13, and for first-round voting for a new president on May 29. Gustavo Petro, leader of the progressive Humane Colombia movement, will likely be the Historical Pact coalition’s presidential candidate.

A former urban guerrilla, congressional representative, mayor of Bogota, and now senator, Petro ran for president in 2010 and in 2018, when he lost to current president Iván Duque in second-round voting. Duque is not running for re-election.

Petro led the opposition against former president and extreme right-winger Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) who is accused of corruption, narcotrafficking, and ties with paramilitaries. Duque is Uribe’s protégé.  As president, Uribe prioritized war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and later opposed the government’s peace agreement with the FARC.

The Historical Pact is a coalition of left-leaning and centrist parties and of “social movements, indigenous people, feminists, environmentalists,” according to Petro. Coalition partners include the Communist Party and the affiliated Patriotic Union on the left, the Alternative Democratic Pole and Humane Colombia representing social democracy, and centrist anti-Uribe groups. Joining these are politicians who backed Juan Manuel Santos, who succeeded Uribe as president and promoted the Agreement.

Observer Felipe Pineda Ruiz suggests that, “most of those voting for the Historical Pact … are more to the right than are the activists and candidates.”  Also, “as traders and small business people, they gained real economic benefits from the commodities bonanza … that sustained economic growth when Santos and Uribe were in power.”

Gustavo Petro registers 34% approval in a recent opinion poll, down from 40% in October. The favorability ratings of the other top-polling candidates range from 32% to 7%.

The Historical Pact’s election campaign follows more than two years of seesawing protests and repression. The associated turmoil has shaped the constituency Petro is appealing to and leaves an aftermath the next government will be dealing with. It has exacerbated Colombia’s longstanding rural-urban divide, a major impediment to a just society there.

On November 21, 2019 major demonstrations broke out in cities. For weeks afterwards, hundreds of thousands of students, unionists, environmentalists, pensioners, LGBT activists, workers of all sorts, and social movement activists filled streets throughout Colombia. They were demanding pension reforms, revised labor legislation, improved access to healthcare and education, income support, and no more police violence.

Along the way, 200,000 troops and riot police wounded and/or arrested, and killed, protesters. Demonstrations continued intermittently in cities well into 2020. The government’s inept handling of the Covid -19 pandemic was a new grievance.  

The Bogota police, reacting to the burning of their facilities, killed taxi-driver and law student Javier Ordoñez on September 9, 2020. Huge crowds assembled the next day. The police killed 14 young people and wounded hundreds more. Demonstrations culminating September 21 in a “national strike” would continue intermittently for the rest of the year. A government tax increase was a further provocation.

National strikes erupted in May, July, and August, 2021. Now indigenous groups and even sports organizations were involved. International agencies and human rights organizations weighed in against the government.  Polling in May, 2021 showed 75% of Colombians as supporting the national strikes.

Colombian historian Renán Vega Cantor notes that, “State terrorism in the Colombian style became visible to the world.” For him, the “extraordinary national strike was the most important social protest in Colombian history in terms of duration … and the diversity of social sectors that participated.”

Attitudes were changing. Before the protests, “the bombings, massacres, torturing, disappearances were of little interest for residents of middle-class districts. For the rich and powerful they simply did not exist and did not matter.” For “the urban middle classes, state and parastate violence” was faraway and “to some extent was justified to confront security threats or insurgent movements in the countryside.”

Now there was violence in the cities. Vega Cantor mentions “80 Colombians killed by agents of the state, hundreds wounded, dozens disappeared, and a score of women raped.” He describes armed civilians protected by the police showing up in districts of the wealthy and “acting as if to protect their interests from intruders, Indians, Blacks and the poor.”

Observer Fernando Dorado states that the Historical Pact campaign “has to maintain the people’s enthusiasm expressed in the social explosion … and in parallel fashion must attract sectors of the so-called ‘center’ in order to isolate and defeat recalcitrant right-wing forces.”

As the campaign looks for votes from urban population sectors, it shows no sign of attending to injustices, resistance, and longstanding repression in rural areas. That approach may end up reinforcing Colombia’s rural-urban divide.

For Petro, the politics of class struggle is for somebody else. He told an interviewer that, “I don’t divide politics between right and left … My divide is the politics of death and the politics of life. In Colombia a politics of death has governed for two centuries.”  

Historical Pact officials have fixed it so that voters are not readily exposed to class-oriented political views. The coalition is using the “closed list” voting system for the congressional elections in March. There, each candidate of a partnering group appears on a list, with preferred candidates at the top. Voters need only select the coalition of their choice; they don’t get to choose a candidate.  

The object ostensibly is to assure an equal number of female and male candidates and allow for indigenous and African-descended candidates. Voting arrangements for Historical Pact candidates de-emphasize ideological differences among their parties such as, for example, a center-left party pitted against socialist ones like the Communist Party or the Patriotic Union. 

Electoral politics that doesn’t involve working-class power that would challenge  plunder by oligarchs will likely be irrelevant to the realities of Colombia’s countryside.  There, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people relate in one way or another to struggle between rich and poor over the use and control of land. Vast numbers were killed in the 1950s in the wake of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s assassination in 1948, and again from the 1960s on as the Colombian state reacted to the founding of the FARC, an agrarian insurgency.

That phase ended with the government’s Peace Agreement with the FARC in 2016, following which a “Third Cycle of Violence” commenced. Writer Horacio Duque points to more than 1300 mainly rural community leaders and some 300 former FARC combatants killed between then and now.

Blame, he states, lies in part with the government’s failure to carry out agrarian reforms as specified in the Peace Agreement. The Historical Pact’s program mentions agrarian reform, but a Petro government’s likely priority given to cities anticipates neglect of the countryside.

Similarly, Colombia’s military will probably remain untouched, despite the coalition’s promise of “structural reform.”  With much to protect, Colombia’s landowning elites, leery of agrarian revolt, have long sought military capacity.  Now the country’s military consumes 12% of the government’s budget. With 295,000 troops, it’s the second largest military force in Latin America. With no working-class power at the center of governmental decision-making, military control over rural Colombia will likely continue.

The coalition’s statement on “New International Politics” rejects foreign intervention, but is silent on the U.S. role as the Colombian military’s senior partner. The brazen nature of current arrangements reflects the bullying power of U.S. interventionism nourished by global capitalism. An outmatched Petro government probably will acquiesce.

Current U.S. activities include: an annual monetary contribution ($461.4 million in 2021), air bases distributed throughout Colombia, U.S agents there charged with destabilizing Venezuela, and preparation of Colombian troops for special tasks. Some of these are: training the security forces of U.S.-allied nations, fighting their wars (in the Middle East, for example), and performing dirty work, such as assassinating Haiti’s president on July 7, 2021.

This note finishes on a note of tragedy. Much-needed restoration of rural life in Colombia is a distant dream. The rural poverty rate in 2019 was 34.5%, in the cities 12.3%. Learning levels between same-grade children in urban and rural areas differ by three years. Illiteracy in rural areas is more than twice that in cities.  In rural areas in 2016, stunted growth in children (as a measure of chronic malnutrition) was almost twice the rate for urban zones. The 1% of persons individually controlling the largest landholdings in Colombia together own more than 80% of all land there. Colombian inequality in land ownership is the greatest in Latin America.   

And a touch of ambiguity: We’ve been harshly critical of the Historical Pact. But the election of Gustavo Petro as president of Colombia would be good news, or at least as much as is possible now.  He would be Colombia’s first progressive head of state. That’s no small matter.

_{Author: 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.} 

Viral propaganda: In the social media age, the U.S.’ anti-Cuba efforts have to keep up with the way people get their information (and disinformation). Here, protesters in Key West, Fla., use their phones to photograph and video a flag reading ‘SOS Cuba’ from atop the Southernmost Point buoy, July 13, 2021. | Rob O’Neal/The Key West Citizen via AP

The cruder U.S. methods for destroying Cuba’s revolutionary government—military attacks, bombings of hotels and a fully-loaded airplane, violent attacks on officials, biological warfare—did not work. Nor has economic blockade, which of course continues. A more subtle approach also exists. Like the blockade, its purpose is to cause despair and then dissent.

U.S. officials pay for the collection of bad news about Cuba’s revolutionary government and for its dissemination within Cuba and to news outlets abroad. U.S. paymasters provide money to agents for delivery to opponents of Cuba’s government, real or imagined, in Cuba and elsewhere. The recipients find or devise information unfavorable to Cuba’s image and spread it. Cubans’ well-founded complaints about shortages, bureaucracy, low wages, and living with the pandemic become news items.

The groups transferring the money from the United States to disgruntled elements in Cuba and elsewhere are key to the entire operation. One recalls the “bagman” who in certain U.S. cities deliver pay-offs from point to point within a criminal network. These groups transferring money—as authorized by the Helms Burton law of 1996—are bagmen for imperialism.

An odor of criminality is sensed. To interfere with Cuba’s conduct of its own affairs violates norms of international law relating to national sovereignty. And it turns out that, as of 2011, “Accusations of fraud, reckless distribution of funds, and diversion of monies to stateside anti-Cuban groups have prompted temporary stays in disbursement of funds.”

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is one of two big U.S. paymasters. Founded in 1983, it’s a non-governmental organization funded exclusively by the U.S. Congress. The projects funded by the NED are similar to those formerly undertaken by the CIA.

The Cuban Communist Party’s Granma newspaper on Jan. 18, 2022 presented a list published on the NED website on Feb. 23, 2021. Groups are named “which received funding to intervene in Cuba during the year 2020, with sums ranging from 20,000 to 650,000 dollars.”

The list includes 42 groups; the total amount dispensed was $5,077,788. Below appears a short list. It contains the names of groups receiving $146,360 or more, the amount of money each one did receive, its home base, and the supposed shortcoming in Cuba needing to be fixed.

The top recipients of NED funds were:

• Cubalex: $150,000 – Memphis, Tenn. (human rights)
• National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI): $500,000 – Washington, D.C. (gender rights)
• Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos: $150,000 – Madrid (human rights)
• Asociacion Diario de Cuba: $215,000 – Madrid (access to information)
• Instituto Cubano por la Libertad de Expresion y Prensa: $146,360 – Hialeah, Fla. (access to information)
• Cuban Democratic Directorate: $650,000 – Miami (access to information)
• Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE): $309,766 – Washington, D.C. (private sector needing support)
• Clovek v tisni, o.p.s. (People in Need): $150,882 – Prague (access to information)
• Grupo Internacional para la Responsabilidad Social Corporativa en Cuba: $230,000 – Miami (labor rights)

The State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is another paymaster. On Oct. 23, 2021, journalist Tracey Eaton’s “Cuba Money Project” website reported on disbursements USAID announced during the previous month. The total being delivered to 12 organizations was $6,669,000. The list, constructed like the list above, includes:

• International Republican Institute: $1,006,895 – Washington, D.C. (human rights)
• Pan American Development Foundation: $800,000 – Washington, D.C. (labor exploitation)
• Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba: $717,000 – Miami (medical workers exploited)
• Digital News Association: $604,920 (military abuse)
• Grupo de Apoyo a la Democracia: $625,000 – Miami (political prisoners)
• International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights: $546,00 – Washington, D.C. (human rights and racism)
• Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation: $545,573 – Washington, D.C. (democracy)
• Directorio Democrático Cubano: $520,179 – Miami (tourist workers exploited)
• Outreach Aid to the Americas: $500,000 – Miami (humanitarian crisis)
• Cubanet News: $408,003 – Coral Gables (tourist workers exploited)
• Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos: $250,000 – Madrid (political prisoners)
• Libertatis: $166,430 – Houston, Texas (human rights)

Cubans in many cities, predominantly young people, took to the streets on July 11, 2021. They were protesting shortages of medical supplies, food, and other goods; the failure of remittances from abroad to arrive; and, in some instances, racial discrimination. Arrests and detentions followed and, more recently, trials and prison sentences. Social media played a major role in mobilizing the protesters and subsequently in disseminating news of arrests, injuries, property damage, and reaction from abroad.

As with social media trial runs in earlier anti-Cuban propaganda campaigns, some of the U.S. government funds delivered by the intermediaries were undoubtedly earmarked for expanding the role of social media in recruiting protesters and in publicizing adverse fallout.

As bad news from Cuba makes its way to anti-Cuban politicians in the United States and Europe, it takes on added value. New pretexts crop up for administrative actions and legislation that, aimed at destabilization in Cuba, imposes sanctions and tightens blockade rules. These in turn generate reports of new grief in Cuba.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently responded to the trials of some of the July 11 protest leaders and the resulting prison terms by announcing visa restrictions against eight Cuban officials. A legislative proposal recently introduced by South Florida congresspersons calls upon President Joe Biden to urge the United Nations to issue sanctions against Cuba. The bill’s title is “Atrocities and Genocide in Cuba.”

The story here is about siege socialism. In his Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti shows Russian revolutionaries under Lenin cutting back on their aspirations due to pressures of civil war and invasion by capitalist nations: “[I]n May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled…to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party.”

Fidel Castro once offered a vivid characterization of a socialist society faltering under enemy attacks while being advertised, by those enemies, as the best that socialists can do—as if peaceful circumstances did prevail. He declared that, “For 40 years you try to strangle us. And then you criticize us for the way we breathe.”

_{Author: 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.}

_{Source: People’s World, January 25, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/u-s-government-pays-big-money-for-bad-news-about-cuba/}

Photograph Source: Phillip Pessar – CC BY 2.0

Education is central to Cuba’s brand of socialism. The revolutionary government’s dedication to scientific knowledge and healthcare for all shows up now as Cubans cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. The United States is not so lucky.

Cubans have wholeheartedly carried out masking, social-distancing, testing and quarantining. Cuba’ s bio-medical research and production facilities created five anti-Covid vaccines. As of December 3, 90.1 percent of Cubans had received their first dose; 82.3 percent of them were fully vaccinated. Only seven other countries have higher rates. (1) Trials showed that Cuba’s workhorse Abdala and Soberana 02 vaccines were protective for over 90 percent of vaccine recipients.

Cuba’s Covid vaccines don’t need extremely low-temperature refrigeration as is the case for major U.S. vaccines. In that regard they are particularly useful in poorly resourced countries. Cuba has sent, or is preparing to send, vaccines to Vietnam, Venezuela, Iran, and Nicaragua. Cuban scientists are elaborating a version of their Soberana Plus vaccine that will protect against the Omicron variant.

Cuba’s achievement in producing anti-Covid-19 vaccines is remarkable in the face of shortages of equipment, reagents, and supplies due to the U.S. economic blockade.

U.S. and Cuban assumptions regarding vaccination programs and other public health measures are different. Vaccine production in Cuba is a matter of the common good, pure and simple. In United States, government-subsidized manufacturers will be making huge profits – $18 billion for Moderna in 2021. U.S. government scientists and their pharmaceutical company counterparts collaborated in developing vaccines, but the companies now are claiming intellectual-property and patent rights for themselves.

Rejection of scientific facts and expert opinion is widespread in the United States. Myth-making leads to vaccine refusal. Political and cultural frictions frustrate consensus on mask-wearing and social distancing. The upshot is that the prevalence of Covid-19 infection in the United States is 14.9 per 100,000 persons; in Cuba it’s 8.5. The two countries’ Covid-19 mortality rates are, respectively, 240.18 and 73.31 per 100,000 persons

The message here is that a society coping with a major pandemic must draw upon reserves of unity and learning. Cuba’s recent experience shows that long attention paid to schooling and science is bearing fruit.

In the 19^th century, according to one account, Felix Varela, a Catholic priest, “introduced Cuba to the principles of scientific thought, the first independence ideals, and the pursuit for national identity.” Jose Martí, Cuba’s national hero and independence leader, was teaching in Guatemala in 1878. There he wrote that, “Knowing how to read is knowing how to act. Knowing how to write is knowing how to ascend. Those first lowly school books put at man’s disposal feet, arms, and wings.” (2). He later suggested that, “to study the forces of nature and learn to control them is the most direct way of solving social problems,”

Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro attacked Santiago’s Moncada Barracks in 1953. In honor of Martí, born in 1853, they called themselves the centennial generation. Martí’s educational mission was in good hands.

Fidel Castro on December 16, 1960 told a meeting of spelunkers (explorers of caves) that, “We teach about accidents of nature but we don’t teach about tremendous accidents of humanity.” Calling for the study of nature, he declared that, “The future of our country must necessarily be a future of men of science, it must be a future of men of thought.” He noted that “many of our people had no access to culture or science” and “only 5% of farm-worker children have reached the 5th grade.”

A pre-revolutionary national census revealed almost 26 percent of Cubans to be illiterate. A major literacy campaign took place in 1961, the “Year of Education.” Some 100,000 young people, barely into their teens, and most of them raised in towns and cities, received instruction on teaching literacy. They went into rural areas and taught marginalized farm people how to read and write. The teenagers lived in their houses and did farm work.

Midway, goals were not being met. Taking up the slack were 20,000 volunteer factory workers and large numbers of regular teachers. Soon Cuba’s literacy rate was among the highest in the world.

Fidel Castro on December 22, 1961 spoke to literacy-campaign volunteers massed before him in Havana: “I will begin. [T]here are many jobs, jobs for all and we’re going to see if we can fill them … pay attention to these choices …”

He outlined scholarship opportunities for tens of thousands of the students to become teachers of those who would teach in primary schools, basic secondary schools, pre-university schools, schools for domestic workers, and art and music schools.

Castro also urged the literacy volunteers to serve as “technicians … language professors, engineers, physicians, economists, architects, educators, specialized technicians. “We are converting fortresses into schools” and “filling the island with teachers, so that in the future the homeland can count on a brilliant galaxy of men of thought, of researchers, of scientists.”

On being interviewed 60 years later, Dr. Agustin Lage spoke of “another literacy campaign.” He asks for “a massive penetration of the scientific method in our general culture.” Science would “be converted into a national culture for Cubans.”

Lage, head of Cuba’s Center of Molecular Immunology (CMI) since its founding in 1994, praises young scientists working in Cuba’s bio-medical institutes for their “moral values, social commitment, and a vision of what the world must be.” “Young people,” he explains, “led in confronting the challenge of Covid and making the vaccine[s].”

Lage surveys Cuba’s large biomedical research and production institutes, mentioning the National Center for Scientific Investigations (formed in 1965), the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (1986), the Finlay Vaccine Institute (1991), and his own CMI. Each of these centers, on its own premises, carries out research, development, production, and marketing of products. BioCubaFarma, created in 2013, serves 34 such entities by facilitating worldwide commercialization of vaccines, immunologic agents, chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, tests, medical equipment, and more.

Lage observes that in Cuba “science is a social process,” that “human societies, not individuals, make science.” He envisions “freely available and universally accessible healthcare, scientific and biotechnological development, and the pharmaceutical industry as a base of social cohesion.”

He suggests that economic development, “material well-being, and protection of our kind of social construction are possible only in a high-technology economy.” Without “internal demand or natural resources to drive our economy,” Cuba relies upon “science and technology.”

For Lage, social context matters. For example, when “an innovative laboratory of a multinational [corporation] sells its vaccine abroad, prices and the cost of healthcare go up, and inequalities are greater.” The process “helps to enrich those private companies.”

“Inequalities are now expanding in the world” he points out, “and we have to defend our achievements. We do that by connecting culture, scientific thought, and science with the economy so that social conquests can provide leverage for economic development.”

Lage had earlier stated on his blog that, “Cuba’s scientific culture always promotes analyzing with data, generating new hypotheses about reality, submitting hypotheses to criticism… and rejecting improvisation, superficiality, pseudoscience and superstition.” Ultimately, “we need science and technology to develop our economy, but also to preserve and solidify its socialist character.”

Concerned about vaccine rejection, a physician and sociologist writing recently in The New York Times point out that “governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services and people are unlikely to trust institutions that do little for them.” And “public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation.” They seek “policies that promote a basic, but increasingly forgotten, idea: that our individual flourishing is bound up in collective well-being.”

Neighboring Cuba has by no means forgotten this agreeable message.

Cuba, of course, is the model practitioner of what they are preaching.

_Notes.

_{1. None of those seven countries – Chile, United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Cayman Islands, Singapore, Brunei, and North Cyprus – produced their own Covid vaccines.}

_{2. Philip S. Foner, ed., On Education by Jose Martí, (Monthly Review Press, NY, 1978), p.68}

_{The author translated.}

_{Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.}

_{Source: Counterpunch, December 16, 2021, https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/12/16/cuba-defeats-covid-19-with-learning-science-and-unity/}

_{Supporters of Chile’s President-elect Gabriel Boric celebrate his victory in the presidential run-off election, in Santiago, Sunday, Dec. 19, 2021. Above the crowd wave several flags belonging to the Communist Party of Chile, which supported Boric’s candidacy in the run-off. | Matias Delacroix / AP}

Chileans on Dec. 19 were facing a defining moment as they voted for a president to replace right-wing billionaire Sebastián Piñera, whose second term is ending. Their choice of 35-year-old Gabriel Boric, social democratic candidate of the left-leaning Approve Dignity coalition, deflected the threat from devotees of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship. They were backing billionaire José Antonio Kast, candidate of the Christian Social Front.

At stake were prospects for overcoming leftovers from the Pinochet dictatorship that ended in 1990. Policies in place under Piñera had prompted massive protests in October 2019 and for weeks afterwards. Demonstrators demanded rights for youth, labor, pensioners, and Indigenous people. They called for a new constitution to replace the one imposed by the old dictatorship and still in force today. Under fire, the Piñera government prepared for a Constituent Assembly, which voters authorized in May 2021.

Delegates to that Assembly are at work now presumably removing constitutional protection for Pinochet-era laws and regulations, most of which are neoliberal in nature. With Kast as president, approval of a new constitution and then implementation would likely have been problematic.

Kast had secured 27.9% of the votes in the first round of presidential elections on Nov. 21. Second-place Boric had gained 25.8%. In the just-completed second round, however, Boric won 55.7% of the vote to Kast’s 44.3% of the total. Crucially, 55% of eligible Chileans voted; only 47% had done so in the first round. On that occasion, seven political parties presented candidates.

Voter participation was the highest since the authorization of voluntary voting in 2012. Since then, low attendance at the polls has been routine. Massive distrust of political parties is said to contribute to potential voters staying away. Political participation has overwhelmingly taken the form of involvement with social movements.

Social movements represented the main force behind both the watershed demonstrations that began in 2019 and the student-led mobilizations of 2008 and 2011. It’s likely that on Dec. 19 politically unaffiliated activists voted in large enough numbers to give the presidency to Boric.

The new president, who grew up in extreme southern Chile, drew attention in 2011 as one of the student leaders responsible for nationwide protests. He has served in the Chamber of Deputies in Chile’s Congress since 2014, having been the first to legislate there without party affiliation.

Speaking after his victory, Boric promised to defend the Constituent Assembly, to protect Indigenous rights, support pension reform and public education, introduce universal healthcare, and work toward reducing wealth inequalities.

Primary elections in July 2021 established Boric as a front-runner presidential candidate. Running on behalf of a center-left coalition that included his new “Social Convergence Party,” he defeated Daniel Jadue, the Communist mayor of Recoleta and candidate of a leftist coalition led by the Communist Party. The two coalitions quickly merged to form the now victorious Approve Dignity formation.

Campaigning, candidate Kast based his appeal on anti-communism and condemnation of abortion. Family ties burnishing his ultra-right credentials came to the fore. His brother had served the Pinochet dictatorship as economist, labor minister, and Central Bank head; his immigrant father was a member of Germany’s Nazi Party.

The disaster in store for Chile, had Kast been elected, was clear in a pre-election survey of his proposals for governing. Promising to “restore order,” Kast wanted to “grant legal immunity to the armed forces and fund the legal defense of police officers accused of using excessive force; give the President sweeping powers to crack down on dissent; establish an International Anti-Radical Left Coalition; identify, arrest, and prosecute radicalized troublemakers…[and] exit the United Nations.”

_{Author: 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.}

_{Source: People’s World, December 20, 2021, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/chileans-elect-gabriel-boric-president-reject-ultra-conservative-candidate/}