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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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