In Bolivia gigantic march reveals socialist divide, elections are ahead / By W. T. Whitney

_{^{Hundreds of people take part in the so-called ‘March to Save Bolivia’ against leftist leader Luis Arce, on September 17, 2024. [Photo by Aizar Raldes / AFP]}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Beginning on September 17, marchers proceeded north for 118 miles from Caracollo in Oruro department to La Paz, Bolivia’s capital city, arriving there on September 24. Numbering from 5000 to 15,000 – estimates vary – they were supporting former President Evo Morales. They called their march a “National March to Save Bolivia; for Life, Democracy, and Revolution.” The had signs saying “Evo President” and “Lucho Traitor” – in reference to current Bolivian president Luis Arce.

The Movement against Socialism (MAS) Party, the party of both presidents, has split into two warring factions. Arce served for 12 years under Morales as minister of the economy and finances. Morales served three presidential terms, from 2006 to 2019. He had led a federation of unionized coca growers, was Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and been president of MAS since 1998.

Protesting shortages of food, fuel, and dollars and demanding that Morales be president, the marchers twice encountered resistance from hundreds of Arce loyalists. Security forces made arrests and dozens were wounded.

Meetings and attempts at dialogue in La Paz were inconclusive. Morales was no-show at one meeting. Speaking out elsewhere, he revived an old demand, insisting that Arce change his “corrupt, drug-trafficking, and racist” ministers if he wants to continue governing.”

The Arce government sought to forestall new mobilizations that might “prejudice the normal development of the country.” A Morales spokesperson confirmed that highway blockades would resume on September 30. His forces for two years had been carrying out blockades, strikes, and demonstrations – with 200 days of blockades in 2023.

On learning that the government would replace Justice Minister Iván Lima, the Morales side called off further blockades. Morales announced that “extreme poverty has returned and blockades will make it worse.” He also prioritized fire-fighting. The Morales side demanded that marchers who had been arrested be released.

Meeting in El Alto on September 27, the “Unity Pact” – the name given to government supporters – heard from social movement groups. Concerned about shortages, along with Morales’s partisans, they demanded a “response and solution” from the government. Arce, who was present, charged that he was being forced to resign.

If he did so, the Constitution would require that Senate President and Morales ally Andrónico Rodríguez be installed as temporary president. Then will come elections set for August 17, 2025, and Morales would be running.

From Cochabamba, Morales proposed a “great national meeting on October 12 where we will be making other decisions.” He accused Arce of “selling out to the rightwing, seeking to diminish the state, and following recommendations of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.”

In late 2019 Morales, having won the first-round in presidential voting, was heading for a fourth term. Then came a U.S. assisted coup; he was deposed and went into exile. The responsible parties were big landowners, oil and natural gas empresarios, and assorted racists in Santa Cruz and other eastern departments. Jeanine Áñez became provisional president. She’s now in prison,

From exile, Morales named Luis Arce as the MAS candidate in presidential elections in 2020. He scored a 55% plurality. Morales returned to Bolivia and signs of division emerged. Arce maintained popular support for a while, helped along by a successful response to an uprising in October, 2022 carried out by reactionaries in the eastern departments.

At a MAS Party Congress in October 2023, delegates expelled Arce from the party and endorsed Morales as a presidential candidate for the upcoming elections. The Constitutional Court ruled in December 2023 that Morales may not serve another presidential term.

In May, 2024, another MAS Congress took place, with a different set of delegates. It backed Arce as presidential candidate and named Grover García, government office-holder and former union leader, as president of the MAS Party to replace Morales.

President Arce blames Evo Morales’s ambition: “[T]he personal and individual appetite of one person cannot drag the Bolivian people into again violating the Constitution.” Arce’s approval rating fell from 42% to 22% between January and September, according to one poll. “The main reason is the economic; basically the increase in prices,” the report says.

Deterioration from an earlier state of affair is remarkable. From 2006 on, the MAS-led government carried out reforms that uplifted one of the most poverty-stricken populations in the Western Hemisphere.

According to one summary, Bolivia became a “Plurinational State” representing 36 indigenous cultures. Land was redistributed and the production of oil, natural gas, and electricity nationalized. The minimum wage and per capita income each tripled; roads, schools, and hospitals were built. The elderly, mothers, and children received generous social support. Health care expanded and schools multiplied. The economy grew at twice the average rate of Latin American countries. International currency reserves mounted to US$15 billion in 2014.

Then natural gas production fell. International reserve funds were down to US$139 million in 2024. According to a BBC report, these were the sources of funds used by governments under Morales and Arce to pay for social programs, including fuel subsidies. Now income from natural gas exports, paid in dollars, is short, more so because fuel imports are paid for in dollars. Bolivia imports 56% of the gasoline and 86% of the diesel fuel it uses.

Dollars were in short supply to pay for the needs of Bolivian society. Borrowing shot up. But shortages persist, and inflation. Foreign debt as a portion of GDP rose from 10% in 2008 to 30% in 2022.

Economics is not the whole story. According to one account, “The main cleavage between Arce and Evo is the increasing inequality of state resources between the factions they represent.” Informal employment in Bolivia is high. But “the government’s executive branch employs half a million people … Control over people and agencies represents power that is available to the Arce administration and not to the other side.

For commentator Luis Vega Gonzalez, racial identity is a factor. On one side of “the abyss that separates them” are the Morales forces who are largely indigenous. On the other side are the “white mestizos represented by those who govern in conjunction with those whose power comes from perks.”

He adds that, “[I]n three years the Indians were displaced from power … the economy was handed over to the market … and the collective aspirations of the plurinational state had to be replaced by individual entrepreneurship and social climbing.”

_{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.}

US misperceptions about Russia feed into war-making in Ukraine / By W.T. Whitney

_{^{Waving a Russian flag, Moscow, September 2023 Stringer / Reuters}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Indian peace advocate Bharat Dogra recently noted the near impossibility of raising the “issue of improving relations with Russia or stopping the disastrous, destructive Ukraine war.”He sees the Ukrainian people as “victims of an entirely avoidable proxy war that started way back in 2014 with a USA-instigated coup in Ukraine.” He condemns “[t]he mobilization of almost the entire military might of the West and the NATO to encircle and defeat Russia.”

Russia “has to be considered … in an unbiased way,” he insists. U.S. publicists have created “the devilish image of Putin” and “policymakers are forced to respond not to realties but to the false notions.”

The U.S. people and many public officials may indeed be uninformed generally about realities in Russia. The situation would be due to U.S. government actions, recent educational trends, and biases of a subservient media.

In penalizing Russian media personnel, the U.S. government interferes with the transmission of news from Russia to the United States. FBI agents recently raided the homes of Scott Ritter and Dimitri Simes. Ritter is a former United Nations weapons inspector who writes for the Russian news service Russia Today (RT). Simes, a U.S. resident born in Russia, hosts a Russian television talk show. They allegedly violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act

The Justice Department on September 4 indicted RT employees Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva under the same charge and issued sanctions against RT editor Margarita Simonyan and several colleagues. The New York Times in 2022 reported that its own journalists and those of other U.S. news outlets were being withdrawn from Russia.

On September 16 Rachel Maddow interviewed former Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on MSNBC. One topic was Russian interference in U.S. elections. Asserted Clinton: “I think it’s important to indict the Russians [and] I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. [Perhaps] they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.”

Schools and universities have skimped on teaching and research about Russia. An academicians’ group in 2015 reported that Russian studies in universities were in “unmistakable decline in interest and numbers in terms of both faculty and graduate students.” Enrollment levels are presently down by “30 to 50 percent.” College and university students studying Russian dropped 20% between 2007 and 2016.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, “U.S. policy toward Russia has largely ignored such crucial factors as Russia’s history, culture, geography, and security requirements—as they are seen from Moscow.”

Dogra laments that, “the space for hearing and considering differing points of views [is] shrinking fast in the West,” adding that, “[m]ature democracies are supposed to be keen to hear to hear all points of view, including those of opponents.”

The U.S. people, he notes, don’t realize that“Putin tried repeatedly earlier to avoid conflict and to find a place of self-respect for Russia within Europe, … [and] made huge investments in ensuring cheap energy supply to Europe. … [H]e repeatedly pleaded with the West to honor commitments made earlier regarding not moving the NATO and its weapon systems too close to Russia … [and] took the Minsk accords very seriously.”

Dogra asks, “What kind of democracy is this, what kind of free media? What is wrong with people hearing the views of a leader even though he is widely regarded to be hostile by the West?”

Opinion polls have demonstrated high approval ratings for Putin. The U.S. and European public, says Dogra, ought to appreciate the successes of Russian governments under his leadership. They need “to examine his role as a national leader of Russia, whether he has been good for Russia and for the welfare of Russian people.”

In the 1990s, “western advisers had been active in Russia, leading to sale of Russian assets to private businesses, including foreigners as well as Russian oligarchs, at cheap rates, resulting in huge profits for a few but also in terrible disruptions in the economy.” Life expectancy plummeted.

Dogra highlights a “remarkable recovery in terms of human development indicators, to the extent that some of these are now better than or almost equal to those of the USA.”He cites data:

· In 2021, child mortality under five years of age per 1000 live births “was 5.1 in the Russian federation, while it was 6.2 in the USA,” down from 20 deaths and 8 deaths, respectively.

· “Infant mortality under 1 year of age per 1000 births in Russia declined in a big way,” from 19 deaths in 2000 to 4.8 deaths in 2023, the comparable U.S. figures being 7.2 and 5.4, respectively.

· UN data indicates that, “In the case of maternal mortality rate (reported per 100,000 births), this declined … in Russia” from 52 in 2000 to 14 in 2020, “while that of the USA actually increased from 12 to 21” in those years.

· “During 2000-2019 according to UN data the life-expectancy in the Russian Federation increased significantly from 65.3 years to 73.2 years.”

· “The increase of income or GNI per capita in Russia during this period was very significant—from $1710 in year 2000 to $4450 in 2005 to $9980 in 2010 to $11,610 in 2021. The literacy rate for the Russian Federation is around 99% … The Human Development Index of Russia has improved from 720 in 2000 to 822 in 2021”.

There are two conclusions. One, U.S. citizens certainly need to know more about Russia. Two, information blockade accompanies the supplying of weapons as the U.S. prolongs Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Dogra presumes that with more U.S. appreciation of realities in Russia, U.S. prolongation of the war might lose its appeal. He overlooks key factors: the economic boost provided by war-spending, U.S. habituation over a century to anti-Russian hostility, the official view that Russia is ganging up with China against the U.S. and Europe, and the distracting effect of war in the face of seemingly unsolvable U.S. problems. These include an economy mired in debt, apparently intractable inequalities, and a dysfunctional system of democratic governance.

Haiti has disturbed U.S. ruling class for two centuries; Springfield is latest flare-up / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{Haitian Revolution: Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (March 24, 1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Ernst Hébert. | Public Domain}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates expressed horror a couple of weeks ago on apparently learning from social media that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats, “eating people’s pets,” as Trump put it. The reports, as we all know now, were false, but their fallout was quite real. Bomb threats followed, schools and public buildings closed down, and longtime African-American residents felt threatened.

A bit of backstory: Springfield’s economy lost jobs and industries over the years. Some 15,000 Haitians arrived, eager to work. Industry expanded, but social service providers were stressed. Most of the Haitians in Springfield are there under Temporary Protected Status. That governmental designation enables migrants forced out of their counties by serious crises to enter the United States legally.

The bizarre twist of political behavior stems in part from the migrants being Haitian. Haitians and their nation have been problematic for the United States’ ruling class for more than two centuries.

The fact of migration itself does not account for the exaggerated hostility, though. Almost nothing of that order happens to the one-third of New York state residents and 40.9% of Miamians who are immigrants, or to the foreign-born residents of nine other urban areas in the United States who comprise from 21.1% to 39.1% of the several populations.

Stresses and frustrations associated with Springfield’s economic decline logically enough could have stimulated hostility toward migrants, if we look at what has happened historically in other communities. But economist Franklin J. James rejects the idea “that immigration hurts U.S. natives by reducing job opportunities …[and] that immigrants displace natives from jobs or reduce earnings of the average worker.”

Being Black may indeed invite hostility in a racist society, however. But the disconnect is sharp between the rarity of unbounded disparagement at high political levels and the large numbers of African-descended people who never experience the like from anybody. Opportunities abound. In 2019 Black people made up from 21.6% to 48.5% of the populations of 20 U.S. cities. That year nine Ohio cities, not including Springfield, claimed between 32.0% and 11.2% Black people. In 2024, 17.4% of Springfield residents are Black.

The scenario in Springfield may itself have been toxic: A large number of Black people from abroad arrived together on an economically depressed small city. But Somali migrants arrived in Lewiston, Maine under similar circumstances, and their reception was different.

They showed up in 2001, and a year later numbered 2,000 or so. In January 2003, an Illinois-based Nazi group staged a tiny anti-Black rally; 4,500 Mainers joined in a counter-demonstration.

As of 2019, according to writer Cynthia Anderson, “Lewiston … has one of the highest per capita Muslim populations in the United States, most of it Somali along with rising numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers from other African nations.” Of Lewiston’s 38,404 inhabitants, 10.9% presently are “Black or African American.” Blacks are 1.4% of Maine’s population.

Anderson reports that with the influx of migrants, Lewiston “has struggled financially, especially early on as the needs for social services and education intensified. Joblessness remains high among the older generation of refugees.”

Lewiston is Maine’s poorest city. For generations, massive factories along the Androscoggin River produced textiles and shoes, but they are gone. The city’s poverty rate is 18.1%; for Blacks it’s 51.5%. In 2016, 50% of Lewiston’s children under the age of five lived in poverty.

Citing school superintendent Bill Webster, an AP report indicates “immigrant children are doing better than native-born kids” in school, and are “going off to college to get degrees, as teachers, doctors, engineers.”

Analyst Anna Chase Hogeland concludes: “The Lewiston community’s reaction to the Somalis demonstrated both their hostility and reservations, as well as the great efforts of many to accommodate and welcome the refugees.” Voters in Lewiston are conservative; the majority of them backed Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

The circumstances under which the two cities received Black immigrants differed in two ways. A nationwide upsurge in racist rhetoric and anti-immigrant hostility worsened conditions for migrants in Springfield. Lewiston’s experience had played out earlier.

Additionally, immigrants arriving in Springfield qualified for special attention. The aforementioned political candidates could have exercised their anti-migrant belligerence in many cities. They chose Springfield, presumably because the migrants there, objects of their wrath, are Haitian. Why are Haitians vulnerable?

**A mural painted on an alley wall this month in Springfield, Ohio. | Carolyn Kaster / AP**

Black people in what is now Haiti boldly rebelled against enslavement on French-owned plantations. Remarkably, they expelled the French and in 1804 established the independent nation they called Haiti.

Ever since, the United States has spelled trouble for Haiti. Pre-eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglas pointed out in 1893 that, “Haiti is black and we [the United States] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Long after “Haiti had shaken off the fetters of bondage…we continued to refuse to acknowledge the fact and treated her as outside the sisterhood of nations.”

Scholar and activist W.E.B DuBois, biographer of abolitionist John Brown, explains that “there was hell in Hayti (sic) in the red waning of the eighteenth century, in the days when John Brown was born … [At that time] the shudder of Hayti was running through all the Americas, and from his earliest boyhood he saw and felt the price of repression—the fearful cost that the western world was paying for slavery.”

DuBois’s reference was to the U.S. slavocracy and its encouragement of collective fear among many white people that Black workers—bought, owned, and sold—might rise up in rebellion. They did look to the example of Haiti and did rebel—see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts.

In the United States, from the Civil War on, the prospect of resistance and rebellion on the part of Black people has had government circles and segments of U.S. society on high alert.

That attitude, applied to Haiti, shows in:

S. instigation of multi-national military occupations intermittently since 2004.
Coups in 1991 and 2004 involving the CIA and/or U.S.-friendly paramilitaries.
Backing of the Duvalier family dictatorship between 1957 and 1986.
The brutal U.S. military occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934.
S. control of Haiti’s finances and government departments until 1947.
No diplomatic recognition of Haiti from its beginning nationhood in 1804 until 1862.
S. economic sanctions against Haiti for decades, until 1863.

Says activist lawyer Bill Quigley: “U.S.-based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.”

Ultimately, it seems, threads of governmental callousness, societal disregard for basic human needs, and outright demagoguery coalesced to thrust Springfield and Haitian migrants into the national spotlight. Molelike, the anomalous and little-acknowledged presence of Haiti asserts itself in the unfolding of U.S. history.

As with all op-eds and news-analysis articles published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

Abuse against Haitians in Ohio: examined with reference to Lewiston, Maine / By W.T. Whitney

_{^{Members of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, from left, Lindsay Aime, James Fleurijean, Viles Dorsainvil, and Rose-Thamar Joseph, stand for worship at Central Christian Church, on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024.Jessie Wardarski/AP/AP}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates expressed horror on learning from social media that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating dogs and cats, their pets. The reports were false. Bomb threats followed, schools and public buildings closed down. Longtime African-American residents felt threatened.

Springfield’s economy had lost jobs and industries. Some 15,000 Haitians arrived, eager to work. Industry expanded but social service providers were stressed. The Haitians are in Springfield mostly under Temporary Protected Status. That governmental designation enables those migrants forced out of their counties by serious crises to enter the United States legally.

The bizarre twist of political behavior stems in part from the migrants being Haitian. Haitians and their nation have been problematic for the United States.

The fact of migration itself does not account for the exaggerated hostility. Almost nothing of that order happens to the one third of New York state residents and 40.9% of Miamians who are immigrants, or to the foreign-born residents of nine other urban areas in the United States who comprise from 21.1% to 39.1% of the several populations.

Stresses and frustrations associated with Springfield’s economic decline logically enough could have stimulated hostility toward migrants. But economist Franklin J. James rejects the idea “that immigration hurts U.S. natives by reducing job opportunities …[and] that immigrants displace natives from jobs or reduce earnings of the average worker.”

Being Black may indeed invite hostility in a racist society. But the disconnect is sharp between the rarity of unbounded disparagement at high political levels and the large numbers of African-descended people who never experience the like from anybody. Opportunities abound. In 2019 Black people made up from 21.6% to 48.5% of the populations of 20 U.S. cities. That year nine Ohio cities, not including Springfield, claimed between 32.0% and 11.2% Black people. In 2024, 17.4% of Springfield residents are Black.They showed up in 2001 and a year later numbered 2000 or so. In January 2003, an Illinois-based Nazi group staged a tiny anti-Black rally; 4500 Mainers joined in a counter-demonstration.

**_{^{The Many and One rally in Merrill Gym on Jan. 11, 2003, sent a strong, unified message far and wide. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College, Lewiston, Maine.}}**

The scenario in Springfield may itself have been toxic: a large number of Black people from abroad descended together on an economically depressed small city. But Somali migrants arrived in Lewiston, Maine under similar circumstances, and their reception was different.

As of 2019, according to writer Cynthia Anderson, “Lewiston … has one of the highest per capita Muslim populations in the United States, most of it Somali along with rising numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers from other African nations.” Of Lewiston’s38,404 inhabitants, 10.9% presently are “Black or African American.” Blacks are 1.4% of Maine’s population.

Lewiston is Maine’s poorest city. For generations massive factories along the Androscoggin River produced textiles and shoes, but no more. The city’s poverty rate is 18.1%; for Blacks it’s 51.5%. In 2016, 50.0% of Lewiston’s children under five lived in poverty.

Analyst Anna Chase Hogeland concludes that, “The Lewiston community’s reaction to the Somalis demonstrated both their hostility and reservations, as well as the great efforts of many to accommodate and welcome the refugees.” Voters in Lewiston are conservative; they backed Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

Ever since, the United States has spelled trouble for Haiti. Preeminent abolitionist Frederick Douglas pointed out in 1893 that, “Haiti is black and we [the United States] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Long after “Haiti had shaken off the fetters of bondage … we continued to refuse to acknowledge the fact and treated her as outside the sisterhood of nations.”

Scholar and activist W.E.B DuBois, biographer of abolitionist John Brown, explains that “There was hell in Hayti (sic) in the red waning of the eighteenth century, in the days when John Brown was born … [At that time] the shudder of Hayti was running through all the Americas, and from his earliest boyhood he saw and felt the price of repression —the fearful cost that the western world was paying for slavery.”

DuBois’s reference was to the U.S. slavocracy and its encouragement of collective fear among many white people that Black workers – bought, owned and sold – might rise up in rebellion. They did look to the example of Haiti and did rebel – see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts. In the United States, from the Civil War on, the prospect of resistance and rebellion on the part of Black people has had government circles and segments of U.S. society on high alert.

That attitude, applied to Haiti, shows in:

· U.S. instigation of multi-national military occupations intermittently since 2004.

· Coups in 1991and 2004 involving the CIA and/or U.S.-friendly paramilitaries.

· Backing of the Duvalier family dictatorship between 1957 and 1986.

· The brutal U.S. military occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934.

· U.S. control of Haiti’s finances and government departments until 1947.

· No diplomatic recognition of Haiti from its beginning nationhood in 1804 until 1862.

· U.S. economic sanctions against Haiti for decades, until 1863.

Says activist lawyer Bill Quigley: “US based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.”

Call to action: Biden must end the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{An American classic car makes its way down a street in Havana, Cuba, Nov. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

Ignacio Ramonet, academician and former editor of Le Monde diplomatique, has written an open letter to President Joe Biden. It offers nations, organizations, and individuals a golden moment for getting rid of a critical piece of the U.S. system of economic blockade of Cuba. Ramonet argues in the strongest possible terms that the U.S. President must end the U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism (SSOT) and do it now.

Ramonet, originally from Spain, has long lived and worked in Paris, where he prepared. He teaches at Paris Diderot University and formally at the Sorbonne. In 2006, Ramonet praised Fidel Castro’s legacy in a series of articles in Foreign Policy journal. His book My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, written with Fidel Castro, appeared in the same year. It’s based on more than 100 hours of interviews with Castro.

The Casa de las Americas in Havana has sent out to the world an invitation for any and all to endorse Ramonet’s letter. Casa says:

“Our dear friend Ignacio Ramonet sent us this open letter to the President of the United States. Casa de las Americas supports this noble initiative and invites writers, artists, cultural promoters, academics, activists and social fighters, members of non-governmental organizations, and people sensitive to the daily suffering of the Cuban people to support it with their signatures.”

“Cuba’s income per person is probably 1/3 or 1/4 of what it would be without the bloqueo,” writes economist Jeffrey Sachs. The SSOT designation does its bit toward assuring that grim outcome. It provides for penalties against international financial institutions that handle Cuba’s borrowing and commercial transactions overseas, ones that involve dollars, which is usually the case.

Now is a crucial time. The SSOT designation is the one part of the far-reaching U.S. system of sanctions and commercial blockade that does not require action by the U.S. Congress to end or modify it. The U.S. president has sole responsibility for either authorizing or withdrawing the SSOT designation.

President Donald Trump reinstated the designation on January 12, 2021, within days of leaving office. President Obama had removed it in 2015. Right now, Biden could remove Cuba from that list of supposedly terrorist-sponsoring nations before a new president is installed, and without pain. The inevitable howls of outrage from defenders of U.S. domination of Cuba will bother neither him–who will be gone–nor the new administration–that was not there.

The point is that now is the time for a major campaign to persuade many individuals and organizations to sign on to Ignacio Ramonet’s open letter. The project would be part of a major push to get the job done.

After all, the U.S. State Department did remove Cuba from its list of countries “not cooperating fully” in U.S. anti-terrorism efforts in May 2024.

Here is what you do to sign on:

First, read Ramonet’s letter. It’s accessible at this link.
Second, access the Casa de las Americas invitation to endorse it. Do that by going to the same link.
Third, go to page three of the same communication to indicate who you are and the name of your group.

A job well done.

Honduras – next in line for US-imposed coup / By W.T. Whitney

_{^{Image: Honduras: Background and U.S. Relations | CRS Report}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

After narrowly losing elections in 2013 and 2017, Xiomara Castro and her social democratic Freedom and Refoundation Party (Libre) won the next set of elections such that, as of January 2022, she was Honduras’s new president. The defeated National Party had presided over worsening corruption, electoral fraud, poverty, and violent repression for 12 years – President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), for eight of them.

The U.S. government played a part in the military coup that in June 2009 removed President José Manuel Zelaya. He is President Casto’s husband and longtime “coordinator” of the Libre Party. Now the United States is promoting another coup.

Interviewed by media outlet HCH TV on August 28, U.S Ambassador in Honduras Laura Dogu stated that, “We are very concerned about what has happened in Venezuela. It was quite surprising for me to see the Minister of Defense (José Manuel Zelaya) and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (General Roosevelt Hernández) sitting next to a drug trafficker in Venezuela.”

The seat-mate was Venezuela’s Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino López. The occasion was the World Cadet Games of the International Council of Military Sports taking place in Caracas from August 16 on. The U.S. government had charged Padrino López with “conspiring with others to distribute cocaine” and on March 26, 2020 announced bounties for his capture and that of 14 other Venezuelan officials facing drug-related charges.

Responding, Castro immediately declared that “Interference and interventionism by the United States … is intolerable.” Denouncing “U.S. violation of international law,” she canceled Honduras’s 114- year-old extradition treaty with the United States. Honduras has extradited 40 or so individuals to the United States over 10 years for prosecution on drug-related causes. JOH, the best-known of them, was recently sentenced to a 45-year prison term.

Slippery slope

On August 29, President Castro told reporters, “I will not allow extradition be used as an instrument for blackmailing the armed forces … Yesterday they attacked the head of the armed forces and the minister of defense in our country… [such an] attack weakens the Armed Forces as an institution and makes the upcoming process of elections [in 2025] very precarious.”

In a television interview , Foreign Minister Eduardo Enrique Reina indicated Dogu’s comments could set off a “barracks coup” aimed at removing General Roosevelt Hernández. Schisms do exist. A year ago, for example, General Staff head José Jorge Fortín Aguilar’s warned four retired military chiefs to desist from their anti-government activities.

Reina claimed that the extradition treaty, long used as a “political tool to influence the country internal affairs,” could be used “to bring Roosevelt Hernández or Secretary of National Defense José Manuel Zelaya Rosales to trial in the United States, in order to disrupt the Libre Party’s electoral plans.”

Primary elections take place in April 2025 and elections for president and Congress on November 30, 2025. The Libre Party is vulnerable.

The attorney general is investigating secretary of Parliament and Libre Party deputy Carlos Zelaya following his recent acknowledgement that two narco-traffickers in 2013 offered him money for the Libre Party’s election campaign that year.

Implicated in other drug-related crimes, Carlos is the brother of former President José Manuel Zelaya and brother-in-law of President Castro. On August 31, Carlos Zelaya and Defense Minister José Manuel Zelaya each resigned. The latter is Carlos’s son; he and the former president share the same name.

President Castro replaced the resigned defense minister with lawyer Rixi Moncada. She is running for president in the 2025 elections. As such, she would “continue reshaping Honduras’s economic and financial apparatus to fit with the people’s revolution,” according to an admirer.

The situation for Castro and the Libre Party deteriorated even more after September 3 with wide publicity given to a video showing Carlos Zelaya conferring in 2013 with the narco-traffickers. Obtained by InSight Crime and allegedly leaked by the U.S. government, the video is accessible here. It shows the drug-traffickers “offering to give over half a million dollars” to the Libre Party. They mention “previous contributions” to former President José Manuel Zelaya.

On September 6, President Castro condemned Carlos Zelaya’s meeting with narco-traffickers where they “discussed bribes” as a “deplorable error.”  That day opposition politicians demanded her resignation. They were leading “more than a thousand Hondurans” in a march through Tegucigalpa.

Fallout and implications

The Libre Party’s loss of political power would jeopardize the already precarious lives of most Hondurans. Government data show a poverty rate of 73.6% in 2021 that fell to 64.1% in 2023. According to UNICEF, “Deprivations are highest in nutrition, followed by deprivations in sanitation, education, water, and overcrowding, respectively.” UNICEF reports that, “The homicide rate was 38.1 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, the highest in Central America and the second highest in Latin America.”

Honduran writer, lawyer, political commentator, and Libre Party partisan Milson Salgado outlines programs introduced by the Xiomara Castro government that promote national development and social rescue.

He cites these: public enterprises recovered from privatization; “high social investment … in the construction of hospitals, repair of educational centers, construction and reconstruction of recreation centers;” extension of the electricity network; and new highways.

The Castro government has funded rural development, provided “educational scholarships at all school levels,” “support[ed] the agricultural sector with loans at the lowest interest rates in history,” provided financial relief for small farmers, “recovered “65,000 hectares of forest,” and provided support for the elderly and disabled.

The U.S. – assisted coup in progress in Honduras is remarkable in two ways. First, it illustrates U.S. reliance on drug war as justifying military and other interventions in targeted Latin American countries. Salgado notes that the United States has “no interest in the fight against narco-trafficking other than to use it selectively as a weapon for blackmailing governments, countries, and people.”

As regards Colombia, the U.S. government invoked the pretext of narco-trafficking as cover for its direct role in combating leftist insurgents. In Peru, a burgeoning drug trade recently prompted the United States to send in troops, most likely out of solicitude for natural resources on tap there. Exaggerated concern about narco-trafficking in Venezuela has rationalized various kinds of U.S. intervention directed at regime change.

Secondly, U.S. strategists altered the device called lawfare that Latin American coup-plotters rely on these days to remove governments not to their liking. That happened in Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador through perverse manipulation of legal norms.

The U.S. gets credit for innovation. Treaties of extradition are legal instruments that, under international law, enable one country to ensure that its criminals staying in another country can be returned for prosecution. It’s a regular legal process that the United States has adapted for Honduras to bring about regime change there.

In any event, government supporters are planning a “big national mobilization” in Tegucigalpa on September 15 “in support of Honduras’s leader, in defense of the homeland’s independence and the building of democratic socialism, and in condemnation of interventionist activities.”

US Intervention and Neoliberalism Aggravate Political Upheaval inBangladesh / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{Anti-government protestors march towards Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s palace as army personnel (C) stand guard in Shahbag area, near Dhaka university in Dhaka on August 5, 2024. Protests in Bangladesh that began as student-led demonstrations against government hiring rules in July culminated on August 5, in the prime minister fleeing and the military announcing it would form an interim government | Photo by Munir Uz Zuman/AFP via Getty Images}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Weeks of student-led and often violent protests forced the resignation and exile on August 5 of Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina. Demonstrators were reacting to inflation, unemployment, governmental and banking corruption and a quota system that preferentially opens up government jobs to descendants of people participating in the national liberation struggle. Brutal police repression and killings recalled Bangladesh’s long history of recurring coups, protests, and lethal violence.

Sheikh Hasina’s Awami alliance won a large parliamentary majority in elections taking place in January 2024, and she remained as prime minister. She had served as such from 1996 to 2001 and again from 2008 on. Sheikh Hasina faced little opposition in the low-turnout election. The large Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) did not participate.

Her political party harks back to the Awami League, the central protagonist to the liberation struggle that in 1971 turned the former East Pakistan into an independent nation. Sheikh Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was an Awami leader and Bangladesh’s first president. He and most of his family were killed in a coup in 1975.

Here we consider economic factors contributing to people’s distress and dissent and the U.S. role in the country’s difficulties.

Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik suggests that Sheikh Hasina’s government was oblivious to both the country’s changing economic situation and deterioration of living conditions. He points out that until recently, “growth in Bangladesh’s garment exports [had been] so rapid that it was even suggested that within a very short time Bangladesh would be meeting as much as 10 per cent of the world’s garment demand.” In 2022-2023 that industry provided Bangladesh with 84.58% of its export earnings.

Now production and export are reduced. Patnaik points to “the rise in imported fuel prices after the start of the Russo-Ukraine war [that] has contributed to a serious foreign exchange shortage, given rise toprolonged power cuts, and also caused a rise in the price of power that has had a cost-push effect on the economy as a whole.”

Factors contributing to inflation include “depreciation in the exchange rate vis-à-vis the dollar” and “the growing fiscal squeeze that the government is compelled to enforce within a neoliberal setting.” The government is unable “to insulate the people from the effects of inflation.” Additionally, “A rise in the minimum wage, as a means of compensating workers in the face of inflation, is…[impossible] within the neoliberal setting;” “export markets” would suffer.

Patniak’s report appears in People’s Democracy, the website of the Communist Party of India (M). He suggests that, “The transcendence of neoliberalism requires the mobilization of people around an alternative economic strategy that gives a greater role to the State, focuses on the home market, and on national control over mineral and other natural resources.”

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus now heads a make-shift government backed by Bangladesh’s military. The army chief and representatives of three political parties are meeting to form an interim government made up of “advisors.” Preparations for elections are underway.

The Awami League is not participating. Patnaik observes that, “if the Awami League is not allowed to contest the elections that are to be held, then the right-wing parties would emerge as the main beneficiaries of the political upheaval; Bangladesh would be pushed to the right to the delight of imperialism and the domestic corporate oligarchy.”

The U.S. government is paying attention. Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu visited Bangladesh on May 17. Interviewed, he indicated that discussions covered Bangladesh’s role in U.S. strategy for the Indo-Pacific region. He denied reports that the United States wants to build anairbase in Bangladesh.

The US Department of State on May 20 announced sanctions against retired Army General Aziz Ahmed on grounds of “significant corruption.” Its statement testified to “U.S. commitment to strengthening democratic institutions and rule of law in Bangladesh.”

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina spoke at a meeting May 23 of leaders of political parties making up the Awami League. She reported that a foreign country, unnamed, was seeking her approval for an airbase to be built in Bangladesh and would reward her by protecting her tenure in office. The proposal, she said, came from a “white skin country.” She insisted that, “I do not want to gain power by renting or giving certain parts of my country to anyone.”

Hasina’s hold on power was insecure. At a follow-up meeting on June 4 independent Awami League candidates and heads of political parties associated with the League joined in vigorously disputing the results of the January, 2024 elections.

Hasina had earlier predicted that, “if the (opposition) BNP came to power, it would sell the island to the US.” She was referring to St. Martin’s Island, located in the Bay of Bengal at the southernmost tip of Bangladesh. It sits eight km west of the Myanmar coast.

In 2003, American ambassador to Bangladesh Mary Ann Peters rejected speculation about a U.S. airbase in the country. In Parliament on June 14, 2023. Deputy Rashed Khan Menon, president of the Workers Party –Bangladesh’s largest Communist Party– asserted that, “The US wants Saint Martin’s Island and they want Bangladesh in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). They are doing everything to destabilize the current government.”

The Bay of Bengal is crucial to marine commerce in the entire region. An Indian observer notes that, “The island is ideally positioned to facilitate surveillance in the Bay of Bengal which has gained strategic significance due to China’s assertive push in the Indian Ocean region.” A Myanmar analyst refers to China as “the most influential foreign actor in Myanmar [and] the biggest investor” there.

The U.S.-promoted “Quad” alliance, aimed at China, includes India, Japan, Australia and the United States. The U.S. government has long pressured Bangladesh to join, while China has urged Bangladesh to maintain its non-aligned status.

In his remarks, Menon condemned the visa policy announced by the U.S. State Department on May 24, 2023 as “part of their ‘regime change’ strategy.” The U.S. government would withhold visas from Bangladeshis (family members too) viewed as “undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh.”

Menon had more to say: “”During our Liberation War, [the United States] dispatched the Seventh Fleet, aiming to strip us of our hard-won victory. Amidst a severe famine, they rerouted a grain ship from the Indian Ocean, a calculated move to disrupt Bangabandhu’s administration.

Their clandestine influence was also involved in the assassination of Bangabandhu. Now, they are repeating such tactics, doing all within their power to undermine the existing government.” (“Bangabandhu” is the honorific of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Sheikh Hasina’s father.)

Under Sheikh Hasani’s leadership, U.S-Bangladesh relations have cooled, mostly in response to U.S. accusations of human rights abuses and U.S. economic sanctions. Visiting China on July 10 and seeking $20 billion in new loans, Hasani signed 28 bilateral agreements centering on trade and investments. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has upgraded the country’s infrastructure.

Bangladesh, it seems, is a small country attached to a worldwide economic system serving big powers but always close to social and economic catastrophe. Its plight is not unique.

Patnaik elaborates upon the theme: “Because of the world capitalist crisis, many third world countries pursuing neoliberal policies are being pushed into economic stagnation, acute unemployment and burgeoning/ external debt, which are going to make their prevailing centrist regimes that maintain a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis imperialism, unpopular; but this creates the condition for right-wing regimes supported by imperialism to topple these centrist regimes and come to power.”

In an authoritarian turn, security forces of the new government on August 22 arrested and detained Workers Party president Rashed Khan Menon, along with other cabinet ministers of the Sheikh Hasina government. They were blamed for deaths resulting from street protests prior to August 5. His defenders see a “political vendetta” on the way.

Awareness of capitalists’ use of colonialism invites rethinking of solidarity commitment / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{Mural by Dan Manrique Arias | Photo by Terence Faircloth, CC BY-SA 4.0}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Studying capitalism, Karl Marx examined the Industrial Revolution in Europe. He explored conflict between worker and employer. In their book Capital and Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, 2021), authors Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik emphasize that Marx’s followers believed that, with the onset of capitalism, “accumulation [has] occurred only on the basis of the generation of surplus value.” (Surplus value signifies that part of a product’s commercial yield which labor generates and employers keep.)

Many U.S. political activists oppose the overseas wars and interventions their government uses to maintain worldwide political and economic domination. More than a few know about stealing in the peripheral regions of the world at the hands of capitalism. They are aware of U.S. imperialism.

The stolen goods include: land, bodies, raw materials, food crops, forests, water, extractable underground resources, exorbitant interest on debt, and funding owed the world’s poor for subsistence. Non-payment for social reproduction is a kind of stealing.

The more these activists learn that capitalism from its start did call for oppression in the undeveloped regions of the world, the more likely might be their inclination to build an anti-capitalist international solidarity movement. The book authored by the Patnaiks contributes to this end by documenting that colonialism and, implicitly, imperialism have been essential to the development of capitalism.

In describing India’s colonial experience, their book – by no means reviewed here in its entirety – provides an explanation taken from Marx as to why capitalism needed colonialism. It details the workings of capitalist-inspired colonialism in India.

The Patnaiks declare that, “not only has capitalism always been historically ensconced within a pre-capitalist setting from which it emerged, with which it interacted, and which it modified for its own purposes, but additionally that its very existence and expansion is conditioned upon such interaction.” Capitalists sought “appropriation of surplus by the metropolis, under colonialism.” (“Metropolis” is defined as “the city or state of origin of a colony.”)

They explain that “Marx’s basic concept of capitalism [as expressed] in Capital is of an isolated capitalist sector … consisting only of workers and capitalists,” also that an isolated sector implies a capitalism “stuck forever in a stationary state or a state of simple reproduction … [and] with zero growth.” They insist that “a closed self-contained capitalism in the metropolis is a logical impossibility.”

There is “nothing within the system to pull it out of that state.” The economy “will necessarily get to that state in the absence of exogenous stimuli.”

The Patnaiks envision three kinds of exogenous stimuli: “pre-capitalist markets, state expenditure, and innovations.” The first of these represents the colonialism that would be essential to capitalists as they built the economies of European industrial centers.

Inflation a concern

Outlining how British capitalism dealt with colonial India, the authors highlight money as a device for holding and transferring wealth. The object has been to preserve its value. The system had these features:

· Officials in London used the surplus derived from Indian exports of primary commodities to finance the export of capital to other capitalist countries.

· British officials taxed the land of small producers in India, using the revenue to pay the colony’s administrative expenses and purchase commodities for export to Britain; some were re-exported to other countries.

· Britain exported manufactured goods. The flood of them arriving in India led to “deindustrialization of the colonial economy.” Displaced artisan manufacturers became “petty producers” of commodities.

· British officials dealing with “increasing supply prices” for commodities exported from the colonies, faced “metropolitan money-wage or profit margin increases.” Seeking to “stabilize the value of money,” they imposed “income deflation … [on Indian] suppliers of wage goods and inputs to the capitalist sector.”

· The claims of heavily-taxed agricultural producers in India were “compressible” especially because they were located “in the midst of vast labor reserves.”

Colonialism provided British capitalists the option of cutting pay or jobs in India so as to carry out the currency exchanges the system required and to “accommodate increases in money wages” in Britain, both “without jeopardizing the value of money.”

Global economy

The book outlines post-colonial developments. Colonial arrangements persisted throughout the 19^th century and collapsed after World War I, due in part, say the authors, to a worldwide agricultural crisis that peaked in 1926. The circumstances gave rise to the Great Depression. Spending for World War II led to recovery, mostly in the United States.

These were “boom years” for capitalism. The United States, confronted with increasing military expenses, turned to deficit financing. Western European countries took up social democracy and the welfare state. Some former colonies, now independent nations, sponsored agricultural and industrial initiatives aimed at relieving economic inequalities.

At that point, the centers could no longer impose income deflation on working people in the periphery to ward off loss of monetary value. Bank holdings increased and lending pressures mounted. In 1973 “the Bretton Woods system collapsed because of the emergence of inflation.” “The capitalist world of the stable medium of holding wealth …[through] the gold-dollar link” took a hit.

Next came worldwide take-over by global finance capital and neoliberalism. The Patnaiks explain that, with “barriers to capital flows” down, “state intervention in demand management becomes impossible.” “[A] regime of income deflation on the working people of the periphery” returned in order to “control inflation and stabilize the value of money.”

Concluding

This story is of continuities. One is capitalism at its start taking up with colonialism. Another is capitalism using colonialism to preserve the value of money in cross-border commercial and financial dealings. One more is the oppression and beggaring of the world’s working people to prevent inflation.

Karl Marx may have found data and other information on colonialism scarce as he studied capitalism. Additionally, his life of research and political activism may have been so full as to distract him from investigation of the colonial connection. Even so he championed international worker solidarity.

He and Engels supported India’s independence struggle. Marx defended “heroic Poland” beset by Czarist Russia. He writes to Engels that, “In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is, on the one hand, the movement among the slaves in America, started by the death of [John] Brown and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”

Addressing the International Working Men’s Association – the First International – in 1864, Marx reported that events “have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments.”

The wreckage of people’s lives caused by capitalism now extends widely. The venue of capitalism is global, by its nature. Political support for workers and their political formations in the Global South hits at the essence of capitalist power. The promise of basic change lies in that direction, and that’s so too with alternatives to the capitalist system.

Those struggles for social justice and equality that are confined to the world’s industrial centers do target aspects of capitalism, but without far-reaching expectations. The full effort consists of: pushing for reforms that ease burdens placed upon working people, building mass opposition, and – crucially – advancing the international solidarity movement.

US research stations in Peru and elsewhere prepare for biowarfare / by W. T. Whitney

_{^{DARPA: Some experts fear GM viruses could transform into a new class of biological weapons (Image: Getty)}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

The U.S. government began preparing for biological warfare during World War II. Biological weapons were employed during the Korean War against North Korea and China. President Nixon in 1969 ended the U.S. use of biological weapons for offensive purposes. The United States joined other nations in approving the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which took effect in 1975.

Even so, U.S. agents introduced microorganisms that devastated Cuba’s agriculture intermittently from the 1970s into the1980s. They introduced dengue virus in 1981, thereby provoking an epidemic that killed 169 Cubans. In 2001 the George W. Bush administration disavowed the Protocol that was essential for strengthening the BWC.

***_{^{A sugarcane plantation in rural Cuba | Wikipedia}}***

A 2017 report from the Latin American think-tank CEPRID tells of suspicious U.S. virologic research centers in Ecuador, of Brazilian soldiers dying of an unknown infectious disease, and “research centers located in countries like Brazil, Guatemala, Panama. Honduras, Costa Rica, República Dominicana, Haiti, [and] Guyana.” The report notes the existence in Peru of U.S. biological research laboratories operating under the façade of sponsorship by local universities.

“What’s certain,” the report says, “is that research is continuing and new viruses are being created or they are muting to become resistant to all the vaccines that are known.” Mention appeared in 2015 of a “laboratory [in Peru] for the development of bacteriologic war.” The reference was to one operated by a “Naval Medical Research Unit,” by NAMRU-6. Beginning with WWII or shortly thereafter, the U.S. has operated NAMRUs, numbers one through six, within the United States and in Ethiopia, Italy, Southeast Asia, and Peru. Their purposes varied according to location. Three of them have been discontinued.

Officially, NAMRU-6, also known as NAMRU South, “researches and monitors various infectious diseases with military and public health implications in Central and South America.” With a presence in Peru since 1983, NAMRU-6 occupies a large office building and laboratory in Lima and a smaller laboratory in Iquitos, on the Amazon River.

NAMRU-6 is in the news. In an article appearing on June 13, Brazilian journalist Tereza Cruvinel notes a big increase in dengue cases in Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina. She cites “an entomologist in a neighboring country” who describes unexpected resistance of the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, vector of the dengue virus, to usually effective insecticides. She points to the entomologist’s reference to “a fellow researcher” who abandoned the U.S. NAMRU-South laboratory in Peru, because of “experiments there with the participation of the Pentagon and the Peruvian military.”

She notes that investigators there are creating new strains of the dengue virus, “which spread more quickly among mosquitoes, with a very high viral load.” Cruvinel reports that, “Latin American doctors and scientists suspect scientific manipulation of the mosquito by powerful forces involving the US and the pharmaceutical industry.”

In his article “US biological weapons,” written in response to Cruvinel, Costa Rican journalist Jose Amesty claims that “the [current] outbreak of dengue fever, which is a record for sickness and death in Nicaragua, Honduras and Peru, is related to Pentagon experiments in 2023 aimed at creating a modified strain of the aforementioned pathogen.” He cites as his source a “scientist from Namru-South in Peru who, involved with experiments with dengue strains, is disillusioned by implications for the health of millions of people.”

Amesty notes that personnel working at NAMRU-6 in Peru, most of them Peruvians, have had to take on U.S. nationality so they could be prosecuted, if need be, under U.S. jurisdiction and “not be responsible to the Peruvian justice system.”

Amesty learned from Gabriela Paz-Bailey, dengue specialist at the Puerto Rican branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that a new strain of the dengue virus appeared in 2023 in Peru, one that “diffuses more rapidly among mosquitoes,” leaving them with an “an elevated viral load.” And, “the level of virus dosage sufficient to cause infection has diminished ten times.”

Presumably it’s Amesty himself who notes that, “a similar development of a virus over such a brief period would be impossible without human intervention.” He adds that, the “North Americans achieved a high degree of resistance to insecticides on the part of mosquitos, and that reduced the effectiveness of steps taken by national governments to eradicate the insects with fumigation.”

Paz-Bailey informed Amesty that the NAMRU-6 laboratory has long been relying on the “help of insects” in devising “mechanisms for the proliferation of the virus” both in Peru and elsewhere in the region.

_{^{DARPA: The controversial project involves infecting insects with viruses (Image: Getty)}}

In 2016 the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) presented its plan for mobilizing “Insect Allies” to protect farmers’ crops from disasters. As described, the program “is poised … [to use] targeted gene therapy to protect mature plants within a single growing season.” Insects would transfer genetically modified viruses to plants where they affect the behavior of a growing plant’s genes, for example, increasing its growth rate in conditions of drought, plant diseases, or pesticide use.

The advent of the CRISPR system in 2012 allowed for this program involving insects to be developed. CRISPR, a relatively simple and readily accessible tool, allows for selective modification of the DNA of living organisms.

DARPA’s project provoked criticism, beginning with a report published in the journal Science on October 5, 2018. The title was “Agricultural research, or a new bioweapon system?” The authors drew attention to the Biological Weapons Convention. Their associations were with the Max Planck Institute and the Institute of International Law, both in Germany, and Montpellier University in France,

A simultaneous statement on this report, from the Max Planck Institute, focused on dual use possibilities: “[T]the findings of the Insect Allies Program could be more easily used for biological warfare than for routine agricultural use.” The statement suggested that “[N]o compelling reasons have been presented by DARPA for the use of insects as an uncontrolled means of dispersing synthetic viruses into the environment.”

_{^{Research programm with potential for dual use: scientists fear that the Insect Ally program by the US could encourage other states to increase their own research activities in the field of biological warfare. © MPG/ D. Duneka}}

Journalist and peace activist Bharat Dogra maintains that, “[T]he DARPA program risks being perceived as a biological warfare research program that is justified on the basis of stated peaceful purposes … [That misperception] can start a trend of similar research with biological warfare implications by other countries as well.”

Dogra observes too that the mosquitoes themselves, the insect vectors, are being genetically modified along with the viruses they are carrying. He writes that, “According to a 2022 review by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, USA, since 2019 over a billion modified mosquitos have been released at world level, in several countries.”

The U.S. government maintains facilities across the world that are related to biological warfare. Fort Detrick in Maryland, the historic bio-weapons center in the United States, extends across hundreds of acres and is the workplace for almost 8000 military and civilian employees. A network of related U.S.-operated facilities shows up in nations bordering Western Russia. Their role in monitoring and facilitating insect transmission of infectious diseases has been documented. Similar centers exist in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

I suggest that the U.S. government and the U.S. military are very likely building offensive capabilities for biological war. The nature of the DARPA program, activities of NAMRU-6 in Peru, and the U.S. record of disregarding the BWC over recent decades are all consistent with this accusation. Also suggestive is the proliferation within the United States and abroad of U.S. installations dedicated to the study of noxious microorganisms and new ways for their transmission. Lastly, the simultaneous emergence of CRISPR technology and wide dispersion of these activities is more than a coincidence.

Vietnam Is Precedent as US Prepares for War with China / By W. T. Whitney

_{^{Near Da Nang, South Vietnam, Marines move through ankle-deep mud carry their poncho-covered comrade towards higher ground were, when the weather permits, he will be air-lifted to the rear areas, Jan. 16, 1968. (AP Photo/John T. Wheeler)}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Popular struggle for national independence under socialism has regularly provoked U.S. war or hostile interventions, as with Cuba, North Korea, China, Vietnam and other nations. We explore both the extreme danger of possible U.S. war with China and also the changing U.S rationale for fighting wars. This shows in the difference between why the U.S. war in Vietnam was fought and why U.S. war with China may be on the way.

Vietnam recently commemorated agreements reached 70 years ago in Geneva that on July 21, 1954 ended war between Vietnamese revolutionary forces and the French military, defeated two months earlier at Dien Bien Phu. According to official media, the object of a “scientific conference” held on July 19 was “to emphasize the historical importance of the agreements for the struggle for national liberation of the Vietnamese people and the peoples of the world.”

Also on July 19, Nguyen Phu Trong died. Once chairperson of the National Assembly and president of Vietnam, this paramount leader, a student and teacher of Marxist theory, had long served as general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. His death is a reminder, if such is needed, that for Vietnam revolutionary socialism and national liberation were kindred struggles.

To prevent the unification of Vietnam as a socialist nation, the U.S. government went the last mile, first diplomatically and then militarily – from the 1954 Geneva agreements that established Vietnam’s national independence to the departure of defeated U.S. troops on April 30, 1975. The U.S. leadership class, involved in spreading U.S. power and influence across the globe, created and then defended South Vietnam, while attempting to defeat Vietnam’s Revolution, all at enormous human and material cost.

The enclave remaining after a U.S. victory might have ended up as a beachhead for counter-revolution and U.S. control in Southeast Asia. In their various situations, that’s the role performed by South Korea, Taiwan, and even Ukraine in relation to Russia, and Israel vis-a-vis the rest of the Middle East.

U.S. planners, in thinking about what to do about Vietnam, were not entirely devoid of reason. For U.S. imperialists, to beat back Vietnamese Communists – think “domino theory” – and heat up the Cold War against the Soviet Union had a certain logic, according to their own lights.

After the Vietnam disaster, official U.S. planning for war has built upon a variety of ostensible reasons for fighting. Having emerged from World War II well-resourced and strong, the U.S. government consistently demonstrated limited tolerance for the risings of oppressed, colonialized peoples. However, once newly formed independent states showed signs of strength, regional prominence, or even strategic rivalry, U.S. strategists turned to action.

War materialized as the ultimate U.S. fix, no matter the circumstances and under a variety of pretexts, as shown with U.S. war-making in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The rationales for fighting were more diffuse. The threat of U.S. war now looms over Iran and, more ominously, over China. Each is under the gun because they are strong, assertive states.

Anti-communism was a safer kind of rationale. Vietnam won its “American War,” and the U.S. government backed off. That’s the story. Incidentally, the Vietnamese people scored a clear win. They live according to plans and socialist purpose in a free and independent nation.

Vietnam has established diplomatic relations with 190 countries. A Vietnamese writer cites “important achievements with infrastructure gradually meeting the needs of industrialization and modernization.” Since reforms in the 1980s, an economy resting mainly on foreign direct investment in manufacturing and tourism has expanded. Economic growth ranged between 9.5 and 5.5 percent between 1993 and 2022, save for sharp drops in 2020 and 2021. GDP rose 5.05 percent in 2023. By 2022, the poverty rate was down to 4.3%.

Vietnam’s government since 2008 has spent 20 percent of its budget on education. The same report mentions “high primary school completion rates, strong gender parity, low student/teacher ratios,” and school attendance rates that are high. The British medical journal Lancet indicates that, “Along with the economic growth, the health of the Vietnamese people has significantly improved between 1990 and 2020, whereby the life expectancy grew from 69 to 75 years, and the under-five child mortality rate decreased from 30 to 21 per 1000 live births.”

*_{^{Image credit: Friends of Socialist China}}*

Socialist China restored dignity to the vast majority of its citizens, has afforded them decent lives, and created a well-functioning state that responds effectively to the climate crisis and other challenges. It too warrants a pass from the U.S. government.

That’s not happening: the U.S. government, in the hands of a divided leadership class, deals only haphazardly with major problems afflicting U.S. society. It satisfies the material wants of the upper echelons, and presides over war preparations as part of what is, in effect, a new Cold War.

Indeed, the USA has accumulated over 750 bases in 80 countries and posted 173,000 troops in 159 counties. The U.S. share of global arms exports in 2019-23 was 42 percent, up from 34 percent during the previous four-year period, according to sipri.org.

*_{^{The US has two island chains around the coast of China. The stars indicate major US bases}}*_{^{| via solidarity.net.au}}

In the Pacific waters surrounding China, the United States has expanded the capabilities of its bases; it operates nuclear-equipped naval vessels, arranges for multi-national naval exercises, has vessels engaging in provocative “freedom of navigation exercises,” and will be introducing nuclear-powered submarines.

The idea of multiple and varied reasons for fighting wars, presented above, folds neatly into the overarching notion of a new Cold War, something that by nature is ambitious, far-reaching, and long term. Where is the justification for that?

Here is a guess: The United States decades ago turned to a great variety of activities related to military preparation, financing, and recovery. These now intrude massively in the U.S. economy and in society itself, so much so that, in theory, something has to happen to explain and justify such a state of affairs. War provides meaning, without which the whole apparatus might disappear. What then of the economy and of the collective experience of a U.S population variously oriented to the military?

The Costs of War Project of the Watson Institute of Brown University weighs in. Author Heidi Peltier points out that:

Federal spending on the military and on veterans makes up more than half of the federal discretionary budget. Employment in the federal government is dominated by civilian defense workers and uniformed military personnel. Because the majority of taxpayer dollars and federal resources are devoted to the military and military industries, and most government jobs are in the defense sector, the political power of this sector has become more deeply entrenched and other alternatives have become harder to pursue. Instead of having a federal government that addresses various national priorities … the U.S. has a government that is largely devoted to war and militarism.

Unfortunately, protecting both the U.S. economy and habituation to the military has its downside, specifically extreme danger to humanity itself. Writing in the most recent issue of Monthly Review magazine, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark explain, pointing to China. Discussing “Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific,” they state that:

“Most U.S. strategies for winning the New Cold War directed at China are aimed at a strategic-geopolitical defeat of the latter that would bring down Chinese President Xi Jinping and destroy the enormous prestige of the Communist Party of China, leading to regime change from within and the subordination of China to the U.S. imperium from without … (It) is the United States, which sees China’s rise as a threat to its own global preeminence, with the Indo-Pacific super-region increasingly being viewed as the pivotal site in the New Cold War, that is propelling all of humanity toward a Third World War.”

Economic Crisis in Cuba – Leaders’ Solutions Face Big Obstacle / by W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{Selling agricultural products in a wheelbarrow in Havana. Photo: Otmaro Rodríguez.}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

The Cuban economy is the worse it’s been since the “Special Period” following the end of the Soviet Union. The country is in the midst of a years-long economic contraction that’s affecting food production and the availability of medicines.

For the first time ever, the government has officially requested aid from the United Nations World Food Program. Inflation, meanwhile, is soaring, and there is massive emigration and power outages roll across the island. And unlike in the days of the socialist bloc, the country has major international allies to provide financial relief.

Cuba’s economy contracted 1.9% in 2023, and it’s infant mortality rate (IMR) – the number of infants dying in their first year of life per 1,000 live births – is inching upward. It was 4.7 in 2013, 5.0 in 2017, 6.2 in 2022, and 7.9 in 2023. The IMR is generally seen as reflecting a society’s social conditions.

**_{^{An ice cream street vendor counts his Cuban pesos in Havana, April 20, 2024. | Ariel Ley / AP}}**

The country’s leaders are working overtime to respond to the worsening crisis. Deliberations at a recent meeting of Cuba’s Council of Ministers and a plenary session of the Communist Party’s Central Committee shed light on how government and party officials are reacting and on the resources they have available.

In the Council of Ministers’ meeting, as reported on June 30, President Miguel Díaz-Canel called for a restraining state expenses, limiting pay-outs from the state to the non-state sector, increasing participation of state entities in providing services, and cracking down on tax evasion.

He lauded the “very good experiences of labor collectives…in doing things differently and moving ahead.” He condemned speculation and black marketeering as contributors to inflation.

Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz criticized “bureaucracy and ineffective control of our institutional system that are limiting creative work and promoting undesirable distortions in our society.” He called for increasing national production and export income, promoting direct foreign investment, capturing remittances for the economy, and identifying sources of financing.

Vice-Minister of Economy and Planning Mildrey Granadillo de la Torre referred to new but unspecified ways of attracting foreign currency; incentivizing national production, especially food products; improving management of non-state entities, and reducing tariffs on importation of raw materials.

She spoke of adjusting the budget to a “war economy” and warned of an expanding deficit. She anticipated “a single, inclusive and equal pricing policy…[on the way] for state and non-state sectors of the economy.” Vice-Minister of Finances and pPrices Lourdes Rodríguez Ruiz, joined in the assessment, reporting on plans for caps on prices for essential goods sold by non-state enterprises.

The Communist Party Central Committee’s Eighth Plenary Session took place on July 5-6. The agenda, as always, included a rendering of accounts from the Political Bureau and assessment of the implementation of earlier recommendations. The problems of reduced agricultural production, corruption, and crime received special attention.

Social misbehavior

Julio César García Pérez, head of the Justice Ministry’s “Office of Attention,” led a discussion of “crime, corruption, and social illegalities.” He recalled that the party had been called upon at its last congress to take on “strategic leadership” in this area. As regards “implementation and fulfillment, the results are insufficient,” he reported. Crime rates remain high, with “major incidents of attacks against our patrimony,” often committed by young people and “persons uninvolved in work or study.”

Among the most prevalent crimes: abusive pricing, “illicit commercialization of diverse products,” drug-trafficking, livestock theft, “speculation on goods and services,” hoarding, administrative corruption, tax fraud, marketing of stolen goods, “lack of discipline in public spaces,” damage to public property, and fighting.

Authorities are trying to get a handle on the situation, with García Pérez reporting that “responses on the part of the courts and the attorney general’s office are more rigorous than earlier.”

Having met with party officials at the municipal level, he found that preventative measures were inadequate, however, and follow-up of individual cases lax. Cuba’s attorney general, Yamila Peña Ojeda, assured the Plenary that criminal penalties remain severe while “citizens’ rights and guarantees are respected.”

Comptroller-General Gladys Bejerano Portela, recognizing that “the Party is…working to maintain the soul of the Cuban Revolution,” confessed that she “could not understand why” many party members “are indifferent to deeds of corruption,” adding that “to not fight [corruption] is counterrevolution.”

Food is short

The Plenary’s discussion of food shortages and low agricultural production focused on implementation of the 2021 Law of Food Sovereignty and Security.

Food and Agriculture Minister José Ramón Monteagudo Ruiz, returning to old themes, called for increasing national food production, reducing food imports, and generating competitive exports. Emphasizing the decisive role to be played by party members, he reported on consultations on agricultural production with mass organizations, provincial governing councils, and municipal assemblies.

Monteagudo Ruiz discussed follow-up of legislation of 2022 that prioritized local food production systems and local self-sufficiency. Party officials have interacted with companies, production units, cooperatives, and markets in 50 municipalities, he said.

The minister observed that the reforms of 2008 which gave individuals and cooperatives long-term use of what now amounts to 31% of all agricultural land have fallen short and not adequately bolstered production.

He attributed production deficits to the worsening economic crisis and adverse effects of the U.S. blockade. Cuban agriculture is being undone, he stated, by shortages of miscellaneous supplies, fuel, spare parts, pesticides, veterinary medications, fertilizers, and raw materials for animal feed.

Agriculture Minister Ydael Pérez Brito lamented that, “Harvests do not even approach 50% of what is needed,” despite various plans having been fulfilled. Consensus prevailed that levels of planting and harvesting are reduced, such that the population’s food requirements are not being met. Proposals re-emerged for enabling companies, organizations, and cooperatives to grow their own food for their own workers and members.

The president speaks

President Díaz-Canel, addressing the plenary, still found reason for optimism:

“If we work in all these areas simultaneously, in a decisive, organized, coherent manner, in a short time we will be managing fundamental issues such as the budget deficit, the excess of circulating cash, tax evasion, abusive prices; We will be managing the proper relations between the state sector and the non-state sector; We will be confronting crime and corruption more decisively…. Doing all this will indirectly and gradually influence changes in the exchange rate and in inflation.”

Aside from just recounting the list of challenges, though, he also elaborated on the job ahead:

“I call upon you to correct things on an ongoing basis with determination, effort, and imagination, and to confront those negative tendencies that emerge like weeds in difficult moments. The call now is to go out as combatants, which we know how to do and as we have done so many times before.”

He offered perspective: “Every day that we manage to subdue these great difficulties with tenacity, effort, creativity, talent, and with unity of purpose against the genocidal plan of our historical enemy is a victory.”

He praised the party’s “authentic commitment to the people” and said that party cadres have to lead by example. The Communist Party, the president declared, has “the enormous responsibility of preserving the Revolution… to preserve its conquests and keep on advancing on the path of perfecting society, working tirelessly.”

As regards goals: “The Party and its cadres have the mission to stimulate, inspire, mobilize, and engage with members and the people, aware that an ideal will triumph only as long as it exists for all of us.”

The president said that party members and government leaders had a responsibility to “guarantee a better and greater access to food.” Food production and self-sufficiency, he said, “are tasks of the first order, in which the entire population must participate.”

Díaz-Canel indicated the need to “implement concrete actions” and to ensure that decisions are fulfilled in adherence with a strict timeline.

‘We are here to save the homeland, the Revolution, and socialism,” he insisted. “In six decades, the blockade has not been able to defeat the dignity of the Cuban people nor the immense collective…work of the Revolution. Even as it intensifies now, the blockade will not succeed.”

No money

Words spoken in the meetings were mostly about plans and remedies already in place, about revolutionary values, and virtues of the Cuban people.

In contrast to deliberations of earlier years, the presentations offered no new remedies for fixing Cuba’s economic downturn and shortages. Perhaps something novel will emerge from the commissions and plenary sessions of Cuba’s National Assembly, which started its meeting on July 15.

International solidarity on Cuba’s behalf wasn’t mentioned, and there were indications that divisions disrupting the unity of Cuban society have cropped up. Their extent of and how they may differ from earlier fracturing are unclear.

Shortages, long the central element of ongoing economic crisis in Cuba, featured prominently. The role of the U.S. blockade in causing shortages of specific products from abroad was mentioned, but its importance was downplayed in comparison to past assessments.

Allusions to the fact that the country has essentially no money, and thus no purchasing power on the international market, surfaced in the form of sporadic mention of budget deficits and of non-payment on earlier loans. The basic message was that Cuba’s international credit is nil.

***_{^{Photograph Source: Susan Ruggles – CC BY 2.0}}***

U.S. power brokers do their bit toward this end. They designate Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT). Countries so designated may not benefit from transactions involving U.S. dollars, according to the enabling law. Fearing U.S. penalties, international financial institutions refuse to respond to Cuba’s credit needs.

Any reference to external causation of economic disaster in Cuba, U.S. aggression in particular, broadens the story. Cuba’s leaders, mindful of their revolutionary origins and persistently in search of solutions, and Cuba’s people, their basic unity intact, are not alone in struggle. The reality remains of Cuba’s multifaceted appeal to the wider world. Her people’s aspirations for national independence, socialist revolution, and justice for all working people still call forth strong international support.

The next chapter in the United States turns to continuing and enhanced solidarity activities. These would be humanitarian aid, the never-ending campaign to end the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, and, crucially, the fight against the SSOT designation. Recently, the U.S. Catholic Bishops called for removing that label. The story will continue.

How the Knowledge Economy and Science Bolster Cuba’s Socialist Revolution / By W. T. Whitney

_{^{via Radio Havana Cuba}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Cuba and Cuban science gained acclaim worldwide for producing their own very effective Covid-19 vaccines. The achievement stood out among nations of the Global South. The feat reflects Cuba’s development over decades of a formidable scientific establishment engaged in the development and marketing of biologic products oriented to healthcare mostly, and food production too.

The planning processes and strategizing involved were unique, and so too the resulting organizational forms. These special characteristics relate directly to Cuba’s version of socialism.

In a speech on January 15, 1960, a year after the Revolution came to power, Fidel Castro remarked that, “The future of Cuba will necessarily be a future of men (sic) of science.” The landscape would change dramatically.

The Cuban Academy of Sciences was reactivated in 1962. In succession came: the National Center for Scientific Research (1965), the Center for Biological Research (1982); the Center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (1986) with its 38 scientific institutions, the Immunoassay Center (1987), the vaccine-manufacturing Finlay Institute (1991), the National Center for Biopreparations (1992), and the Center for Molecular Immunology (1994).

The “Scientific Pole,” formed in the 1980s in Western Havana, now includes over 40 research centers that employ 30,000 workers employed. Established in 2012 to facilitate commercialization, BioCubaFarma exports some 164 products from 65 centers. It operates 19 units abroad, as joint ventures or Cuba-owned entities.

Dr. Agustín Lage-Dávila, longtime head of the Center for Molecular Immunology, writes of “whole cycle institutions” that carry out research, product development, commercialization, and export, all under single management. Export income goes toward funding each institution’s activities and contributes to the national budget.

Exported products have included vaccines against meningitis B, hepatitis B, Hemophilus Influenza type B, Covid-19, lung cancer (CIMAvax-EGF), and many other infectious agents. Other products are: interferons, erythropoietin, streptokinase, Heberprot-P (used to treat diabetic foot ulcers), diagnostic test kits, and six non-vaccine treatment modalities for Covid-19.

Lage’s book on the origins, development, and upkeep of Cuba’s immense bio-scientific network was published in Cuba in 2013 and again in 2016. Monthly Review Press recently issued a translated version of the book’s second edition titled The Knowledge Economy and Socialism – Science and Society in Cuba. The various chapters represent articles that Lage, an immunologist, biochemist, cancer expert, had written for Cuban journals. An additional chapter consists of Lage’s responses to questions provoked by first edition of the book. The clarity and readability of the book’s English translation is a plus.

The book overflows with information, opinions, analyses, historical references, and optimism balanced by ample recognition of big problems. Lage explains that, after the Revolution, Cuba at once embarked upon developing human capabilities and initiating social advances. There was no waiting for available funding, as is the practice of most nations.

As a result, circumstances were in place for the building of what Lage calls a knowledge economy. It would feature the export of scientific products, these in place of the natural resources and the industrial base that Cuba lacks. Lage notes that biologic products have to be new and novel in order to sell.

Cuba’s bio-technical industries function “without sterile fragmentation …[and] within inter-institution borders … [K]nowledge is captured and incorporated into negotiable assets.” Cooperation, according to Lage, works better than competition. Elimination of institutional boundaries promotes integration of knowledge. The system favors autonomy over centralized decision-making; it features “layered” decision-making, “crosspollination,” and a shared sense of responsibility.

The contrast with capitalist modes of bio-technical production is striking, he suggests. There, funding rests on venture capitalism. Products and their value end up in private hands through patents, intellectual-property protection, and regulatory barriers. Planning is for the short-term. Scientific creation is divorced from ownership of the results.

Lage repeatedly returns to the necessity of overcoming a contradiction pointed out by Karl Marx, that of the social character of production and the private character of appropriation of both the product’s value and the means of production. He refers to the “private appropriation of accumulated science and knowledge,” and to the appropriation of people in the form of brain drain.

As a socialist country, Cuba defends social ownership of the means of production and the accumulated value of products. Socialism is a prerequisite, he suggests, for science to be propelling a nation’s economy.

Lage emphasizes the contribution of Cuban culture and notions of sovereignty in bolstering the project. Culture shows in ethical values, motivation, solidarity, and inclination toward unity. There is an “indissoluble link between sovereignty and socialism” through which “our daily tasks are part of a larger historical task.”

He adds that, “We are getting closer … to the knowledge economy …[and] approaching Marti’s ideal of ‘whole justice’ daily through every social program we successfully implement … Thus we construct not only the spiritual and material well-being of our people but also the defense of national sovereignty.”

Lage discusses the knowledge economy as it manifests at the local level, specifically in Yaguajay, near Sancti Spiritus, the municipality he represents in Cuba’s National Assembly. He cites a “municipal socioeconomic developmental strategy” that, enlisting nearby universities and research centers in “knowledge management,” has led to “qualitative changes” in healthcare, tourism development, computing, housing promotion and agriculture.

The “levers of socialism” are helpful, in particular: massive state investment in creating human capital, integration among institutions, linkages with social programs, exports connected to Cuba’s international agreements and solidarity programs, the capacity to innovate in managing institutions, and workers’ “political and social motivation.”

He recognizes risks. Time is one; “building a knowledge economy … is today’s task, not tomorrow’s.” Rich countries use “their accumulated economic advantages … to enlarge those advantages and erect new development barriers in poor countries.” He cites residual damage from the Special Period, old habits of “centralized business management,” brain drain, and pressures exerted “by the most powerful empire that has ever existed.”

As regards U.S. aggression: “They know … the potential of socialism. A country that makes its material wealth grow based on the education and spiritual wealth of its people and on the equity that derives from the social ownership of the means of production and distributive justice would be too clear evidence that the solutions to the problems facing humanity today are not on the path of capitalism nor in the subordination to the interests of the developed capitalist countries. Thus, they need to show that our system ‘does not work,’ hence the blockade.”

A cautionary note: a report from Columbia Law School in 2021, eight years after Lage’s book was first published, cites Cuban statistics showing “a drop of almost 40% in exports of chemical products and related products between 2015 and 2019 … [And] medicinal and pharmaceutical products make up around 90% of the total exports of chemical products.” It seems that income derived from bio-technology exports is down.

Agustín Lage Dávila, The Knowledge Economy and Socialism: Science and Society in Cuba, (Monthly Review Press, NY, 03/31/2024), www.monthlyreview.org, pp320, $29.00 (PB) Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68590-042-7