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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The top recipients of NED funds were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph Source: Phillip Pessar – CC BY 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neighboring Cuba has by no means forgotten this agreeable message.

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

_Notes.

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

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

_{The author translated.}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

_{^{Yolanda Diaz, the popular Communist Minister of Labor in Spain, a nationally admired figure in the country | Press pool photo}}

Spanish Communist Yolanda Díaz presently serves as minister of labor and social economy in the coalition government headed by Pablo Sanchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE). It includes the United Podemos (UP) formation, with which Díaz’s own Communist Party of Spain (PCE) is associated. (Podemos is “Yes, we can!)

UP leader Pablo Iglesias in early 2021 resigned from his post as the government’s second deputy prime minister – also referred to as “second vice-president.” Díaz replaced him there and also as leader of the UP.  Polling suggests that Díaz now is “Spain’s most highly regarded politician.”

Yolanda Díaz is in the news.  She recently criticized the strong-arm tactics of government security forces in confronting an eventually successful strike in Cadiz involving 20,000 metalworkers. “The key role of the UP in the government in blocking repression and confronting liberal sectors of the PSOE” was clear, according to the PCE’s Mundo Obrero news service.

Díaz on November 13 joined four other political leaders, all women, before an audience in Valencia. They were exploring what they called “Other Politics.” She told listeners that, “We are you,” [and we] … “know that my country wants to move, advance and guarantee equality.” Her appearance prompted enthusiastic applause and, in reference to her political future, shouts of “President! President!”

As labor minister, Díaz has gained recognition for leading negotiations aimed at repealing or reforming anti-worker labor laws. She has worked with unions and business groups to secure furloughs and monetary support for workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She resists Iglesias’s preference for early national elections, an idea opposed by Prime Minister Pablo Sanchez.  She states that, rather than deal with elections, she wants “to govern, to govern, to govern.”  She is angling for an electoral coalition, a broad front, that would eventually include the PSOE.

Díaz speaks out. Pablo Casado currently heads the rightwing People’s Party (PP), which has long served as the main conservative force opposing the PSOE in national elections. On November 20, Pablo Casado attended a mass celebrated at Granada’s Cathedral for dictator Francisco Franco, who died on that day 46 years ago.

Responding, Díaz told reporters that “Casado must immediately provide explanations  and rectify what he has done,” adding that, “Catholics and believers in this country do not understand this type of performance.”

Conservatives have castigated Díaz since the publication in mid-September of a new edition of The Communist Manifesto that contains a prologue she authored. (It appears below in English translation). The PCE republished the Manifesto as part of its centennial celebrations.

The People’s Party bench in the Chamber of Delegates called upon the PSOE government to take responsibility for Díaz’s prologue.  PP spokesperson Edurne Uriarte denounced Díaz’s portrayal of the Manifesto, pointing to her reference to a “magical and timeless book” and her praise for its “impassioned defense of democracy and freedom.”

Defending Díaz, former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias noted that “the PP was founded by seven ministers of the dictatorship.”  He suggested that “the PCE and [the workers movement] have a lot more democratic credentials than does the Spanish right.” The socialist government of Pablo Sanchez has evaded the issue.

After her legal education, Díaz studied urban planning, labor relations, and human resources. She worked as a labor lawyer, was a municipal councilor, and served in Galicia’s parliament. Since 2016, voters have repeatedly returned her to Spain’s Chamber of Deputies. From 2005 to 2017, she coordinated the Galician federation of the United Left. She served as an advisor for Pablo Iglesias when he formed Podemos in 2012.

Díaz’s current role as tribune of Spain’s radical left is no accident. At age one, she was held in the arms of her imprisoned father Suso Díaz. As a Communist Party member necessarily working underground, he had resisted measures of the Franco dictatorship. Suso Díaz and his brother Xosé were prominent Galician labor leaders, and Suso has remained such. Suso Díaz remarked recently that people used to refer to Yolanda as “the daughter of Suso.” Now he is “the father of Yolanda.”

Yolanda Díaz’s prologue accompanying The Communist Manifesto:

The thinking of Karl Marx appears to have been written, in indelible ink, on the wind of history. It always resurfaces in a context of social and economic crisis, with all of its clarity and its capacity for stimulating reflection. His look at the mechanisms of capitalist production still illuminates and helps us understand the major problems of our world and our time.

There are many Marxisms in Marx, many dissenting views, many rescues. There are post-colonialist viewpoints and orthodox views, condemnations of his patriarchal leanings, and celebrations of his affinity with nature and the environment. Whatever the case, as social theorist Marx disrupted the ideologic framework of the bourgeoisie, of capitalism. He pulled apart the seams and pitfalls of their language and, at the same time, their capability for dominating.

In Galicia, we use the expression “moving the boundaries” in referring to how we get angry, as if it were treason, at the practice of, in the dead of night, changing boundary lines and physical markers that enclose tracts of land or an agricultural section. Sometimes these markers no longer physically exist – the stone, the tree, the little stream bordering the property that dried up. But this ancestral knowledge of boundaries survives in memories of the spoken word, almost in our collective consciousness.

Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto have shifted the invisible boundaries of western thought, doing so in broad daylight, with the world watching. Together they began a new conversation that, with an optimistic and revolutionary spirit, shook up conventions and denounced prehistoric injustices.

Marx has been caricatured and over-simplified innumerable times. The very language he used for dismantling things played a big trick on him. The translations from the original German carried out over many years, for example, have introduced phrases and clichés – “dictatorship of the proletariat being one of them – that don’t correspond to the real core of his thesis. The metaphors of Marx and Engels also, on occasion, obscure the categories they are referring to.

The Communist Manifesto, we must not forget, is a political text, is propaganda. And yet its literary soul, clear and assertive, is surprising. It’s brilliant that way; the four hands of the two friends intertwine their judgments and their preferences. It’s a text for brotherhood, not only for its accessible style but also for its essence as an open letter to humanity, to people at the grassroots level.

Marx, who was a scholar speaking several languages, regularly read Homer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Dante also. He could recite entire passages of The Divine Comedy, a passion for which he shared with Engels, who paid homage to that poet in the prologue of the Italian edition of the Communist Manifesto in February 1893. There, Engels asks, “Are we offering Italy a new Dante who is announcing the birth of the proletarian era?”  And Marx certainly admired Balzac’s capacity for exploring the depth of the human soul and the social transformations of his time.

Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, author of that visionary essay “The Right to Laziness,” once mentioned old Karl’s predilection for Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, a story where the philosopher of Trier miraculously finds reflections of himself. Lafargue says: “In this work, a brilliant painter is so tormented by his determination to reproduce things exactly as they appear in his mind that he continually works on his paintings and retouches them to the point that he ends up with a formless mass of colors. Nevertheless, with his blurred vision, it represents a most perfect rendition of reality.”

Perhaps from this same viewpoint, that of a work perpetually growing and being transformed, it may be quite appropriate today for us to approach our reading of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto this way: not as static, impassive, and monochromatic dogma, anchored in its own frame of reference, but as a key for interpretation, as sketchy as it is exact, allowing us over and over again to sharpen and tinker with our visions of the world and its affairs.

In this sense, The Communist Manifesto is one of those magical and limitless books, born to last, that succeeds in portraying reality and, at the same time, transfiguring it. I believe that Marx and Engels themselves were conscious of the transformational nature of their work, or at least of the unforeseeable variability of the equation presented there which, in the name of communism and of a revolutionary ideal, gets resolved through invalidating eternal truths and achieving true democracy. This process is also reflected in the different prologues of the international editions of the book. Taken together, they are like a set of Russian dolls that, inside, hide the sub-texts and the para-texts making up its content.

To approach this genealogy of different interpretations with my own prologue is both a responsibility and a source of pride stemming from my profound respect and admiration for the voices and contributions of those responsible for the edition and the translation: Marta Sanz, Wendy Lynne Lee, José Saramago, Santiago Alba Rico, Iván de la Nuez and José Ovejero.

In 1872, José Mesa y Leompart, editor of La Emancipación — a weekly magazine in Madrid with which Pablo Iglesias de Ferrol, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party founder, was involved— translated the first version of The Communist Manifesto to be published in Spain. This was a translation not from the original German but instead entered our language by way of the English and French versions of The Communist Manifesto.

The editorial offices of El Socialista on Calle Hernán Cortés in Madrid, #8, was where in 1886 another of the early editions of The Communist Manifesto was published. That building no longer exists. And nothing exists on this narrow street, perpendicular to Calle Fuencarral, that commemorates Marx and Engels’s declaration of worker solidarity. Reclaiming such memory is a political task, something apparently unthinkable in a capital troubled by amnesia. Its municipal authorities didn’t think twice about removing plaques in a public space honoring the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero [Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War].

There’s poignance in thinking about those first copies: sheets of paper moving from hand to hand. They are there hidden in rows, like gold over cloth, under someone’s work clothes, or in the folds of a skirt.  These are words imprinted for a lifetime in a student’s mind, and in the hearts of those men and women whose hopes we must respond to today. After all, their hopes are, first and foremost, our hopes too.

The “now-moment,” declared Walter Benjamin, is that specific moment in which the past collides with the present. It reappears there — like a great wave taking shape far from the shore, where we cannot see it, in the middle of the sea, and then breaking on the rocks under our feet. Now.

In this sense, the new installment of the Manifesto is an act of memory and redemption that, happily, joins the celebration this year of the centennial of the Communist Party of Spain. The PCE, founded in 1921, has suffered wars, repression, exile, and underground existence throughout its troubled life.

The programmatic character of the Communist Manifesto has continued to develop according to the rhythm of a century full of global economic crises and great revolutions. Capitalism has always been in charge in all of the century’s diverse and voracious mutations, ready to swallow up, corrupt, and disintegrate the very reality on which it was built. But it has never been able to escape the theories of Marx and the transforming power of this text. This is a book that speaks to us of utopias coded into our present existence, our being, in which pulses, today and yesterday, a vital and impassioned defense of democracy and freedom.

_{^{Source: https://aaymca.com/este-es-el-prologo-que-escribio-yolanda-diaz-para-el-manifiesto-comunista-ideas/}}

_{^{W.T. Whitney Jr. translated.}}

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

_{Source: People’s World, November 29, 2021, https://peoplesworld.org/article/communist-playing-a-leading-role-in-spains-governing-coalition-gains-attention/}

_{Photograph Source: Rodrigo Fernández – CC BY-SA 4.0}

The 1973 U.S.-supported military coup against Chile’s socialist government, and the murder of president Allende, may be old history. The Pinochet dictatorship may have ended in1988 and democratic forms – elections, political parties, debate – are in place. And Chile’s economy, recovering from the pandemic, is booming. For the U. S. State Department, Chile is now “a leader in promoting respect for the rule of law, economic stability, education, environmental protection, human rights, and sustainable development.”  Besides, “Bilateral trade in goods and services between the United States and Chile were worth approximately $31.1 billion in 2020.”

But turmoil and volatility prevail, as evidenced in presidential elections taking place on November 21, continuing street demonstrations, and preparations for a new Constitution.

Elections at hand

Gabriel Boric, narrowly favored to win Chile’s presidency, was a leader in the student uprisings of 2011-2012. He’s been a parliamentary deputy since 2014 and the first to enter parliament without party affiliation. In 2016 Boric founded the Autonomous Movement.

Boric is the candidate of the newly formed Social Convergence party that absorbed the Autonomous Movement and three other small left-leaning parties. Social Convergence seeks a “socialist, democratic, libertarian, and feminist society.”

Boric scored a 60% plurality in primary elections in July. The Broad Front coalition, which supported Boric, was competing with the Communist Party-led coalition behind Daniel Jadue, mayor of Recoleta.  Jadue led in opinion polls during most of the campaign.  The Communist Party now supports Boric, candidate for Approve Dignity, a new and enlarged leftist coalition.

Presently Boric registers 29% approval in opinion polls. The extreme rightwing candidate José Antonio Kast has advanced rapidly to a 25% favorability rating, overcoming the conservative Sebastián Sichel, who has fallen to 14% approval.

A lawyer and former parliamentarian, Kast is said to be homophobic, an opponent of women’s rights, and a climate-change denier.  He supposedly admires Brazilian president Bolsonaro and former U.S. president Trump. Critics regularly characterize Kast as fascist or neo-fascist.

His father Miguel Kast, a German Army officer in World War II, emigrated to Chile, established a large family and, with his sons, founded a restaurant chain, a food-manufacturing company, and accumulated large landholdings. Family members have been politicians, economists, and bankers.

In 2006 lawyers in Panama, a so-called “fiscal paradise,” assisted the Kast family in reconstituting their assets.  José A. Kast departed from the family businesses with a “patrimony” of $4 billion.

Reports have surfaced alleging that immediately after the Pinochet-led military coup of 1973, Kast’s father and brother Miguel participated in, or failed to stop, the disappearances of leftist agrarian-rights agitators active in Paine, the Kasts’ rural home base.

Presumably the 20% of Chileans who accounted for 51% of income generated in 2017 overlap with the 20 % of the electorate who think favorably about the former dictatorship.  Presidential candidate Kast fits into at least one of these categories, maybe both.

Street Heat

On October 18, student-led demonstrations burst forth nationwide; 20,000 demonstrators gathered in Santiago and thousands more in 50 other cities. The carabineros, Chile’s notoriously brutal national police force, arrested 450 people, killed two, and wounded 56. The carabineros have enjoyed virtually free rein since the Pinochet dictatorship.

The demonstrators were memorializing October 18 in 2019. That day over a million people filled newly-named Dignity Plaza in Santiago. Large demonstrations took place throughout Chile. Violence at the hands of carabineros led to 34 deaths, and, bizarrely, 450 or so serious eye injuries. Onset of the Covid-19 pandemic ended regular protests five months later, although they’ve continued sporadically.

Then and now, demands center on social and economic opportunities for young people, women, and indigenous peoples, on pension reform and the release of political prisoners. Protesters have denounced neoliberal changes introduced during the dictatorship such as privatization of education, healthcare, and pensions, austerity, deregulation, and sell-offs of water rights and publicly-owned mineral, fishery, and forest resources.

All along, they’ve condemned the abuse of Chile’s indigenous peoples, a prime cause of instability in Chile. The Mapuche people, excluded from Chilean society, have suffered oppression since the late 19^th century, when Chile’s military invaded the four southern provinces where they have lived. Oppression accentuated recently as corporations commandeered natural resources and carabineros cleared the way.

President Sebastian Piñera on October 12 announced a state of “emergency” as troops occupied Mapuche regions. The Mapuche demand autonomy and return of their land.

Protesters have called upon Piñera to resign. Piñera in mid-November, 2019 met with representatives of political parties. Rattled by the massive street demonstrations of the previous few weeks, he agreed to preparations for a new constitution, a longstanding demand.

New Magna Carta

In October, 2020, Chileans voted in favor of a constitutional convention. They elected delegates in May, 2021. The constitutional convention began its work in July, 2021, mainly on procedural matters. Deliberation on substance began in mid-October. There will be a referendum on approving a new constitution in 2022.

From the viewpoint of progressives, the Convention’s main burden is to remove or replace provisions of the Pinochet-era constitution. Targeted particularly are provisions authorizing neoliberal reforms. The hope also is that a new constitution will no longer enable the harsh policing and judicial measures used now to repress political dissent.

Delegates are divided equally between men and women.  A Mapuche woman, Elisa Loncón, is presiding. Seats are reserved for indigenous peoples. In elections in May, the center-right gained 37 seats; the leftist Approve Dignity coalition, 28 seats; a center-left coalition, 25 seats; and independents and the indigenous, 65 seats.

Opinion polls in Chile have shown massive popular distrust of political parties. Unaffiliated activists and others associated with social movements participated hugely in preparing for the referendum authorizing the Constitutional Convention. Insofar as a two thirds majority is required for approval of new constitutional provisions, and what with the unpredictability of unaffiliated delegates, it’s far from certain that the new constitution will bring about much progressive change.

Whether a new constitution leads to significant change or not, troubles won’t soon disappear. As harbinger of things to come, the “Reject” voting bloc, losers in the referendum authorizing the Convention, has launched a social media slander-barrage against delegates and the Convention’s president.

Class conflict will be continuing. The undiminished political strength of the extremely wealthy makes that so.

Incriminating information recently emerged from a new investigation of the “Pandora Papers” scandal involving money stored in various tax-free havens.  According to alainet.org, president Piñera during his first presidential term, in 2010, “sold his 33% ownership share in the Domino [mining] project to his friend, convict Carlos Alberto Délano, for $152 million …  He received $14 million which was deposited in his account in Santiago. The balance, $138 million, was deposited in a Virgin Islands fiscal paradise, along with most of his fortune.”

The amount included a of $10 million payment conditioned on “there being no modifications in environmental legislation that would reduce production.”

Mr. Piñera’s net worth as of October 27 was $2.8 billion. Chile seemingly incorporates two worlds different enough as to be irreconcilable. One is the world of students, unionists, teachers, women, indigenous people, and others protesting in the streets. The other is that of Piñera, J.A. Kast, the Harvard Economics Department, and the University of Chicago.

But why the Harvard Economics Department? The title of Piñera’s Ph.D. thesis presented there was: “The Economics of Education in Developing Countries: A Collection of Essays”. According to a biography produced by Chile’s government in 2013, the president “understood that this social science (economics) was a formidable tool to help improve the quality of life of the less fortunate.”

And why bring in the University of Chicago?  That was where graduate student Miguel Kast, J.A. Kast’s brother, learned about saddling Chile with neoliberalism; he was a “notable Chicago boy.”

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

_{Source: CounterPunch, October, 29, 2021, https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/29/prospects-for-chile-new-president-new-constitution-continuing-turmoil/}

_{In this Oct. 24 2019, file photo, a man holds a sign that reads in Spanish “Hurray for those who fight” as he sits in front of a street blocked by a burning barricade, during a protest to demand the resignation of President Juan Orlando Hernández, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. | Elmer Martinez / AP}

Chilean author and human rights advocate Ariel Dorfman recently memorialized Orlando Letelier, former Chilean President Salvador Allende’s foreign minister. Agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet murdered Letelier in Washington in 1976. Dorfman noted that Chile and the United States were “on excellent, indeed obscenely excellent, terms (like they are today, shamefully, between the United States and the corrupt regime in Honduras).”

The Honduran government headed by President Juan Orlando Hernández does have excellent relations with the United States. The alliance is toxic, however, what with the continued hold of capitalism on an already unjust, dysfunctional society. Hondurans will choose a new president on Nov. 28.

Honduras, a dependent nation, is subject to U.S. expectations. These center on free rein for businesses and multi-national corporations, large foreign investment, low-cost export goods, low wages, foreigners’ access to land holdings and sub-soil resources, and a weakened popular resistance.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government casts a blind eye on Hernández’s many failings. These include: fraud and violence marking his second-term electoral victory in 2017, an illegal second term but for an improvised constitutional amendment, testimony in a U.S. court naming him as “a key player in Honduras’ drug-trafficking industry” and lastly, his designation by U.S.  prosecutors as a “co-conspirator” in the trial convicting his brother Tony on drug-trafficking charges.

Some 200 U. S. companies operate in Honduras. The United States accounted for 53% of Honduras’s $7.8 billion export total in 2019. U.S goods, led by petroleum products, made up 42.2% of Honduran imports.

Honduras’s Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDE) reflect planners’ exuberant imagination. They envision privately owned and operated “autonomous cities and special investment districts” attracting foreign investment and welcoming tourist and real estate ventures, industrial parks, commercial and financial services, and mining and forestry activities.

Banks and corporations active in the ZEDEs will appoint administrative officers, mostly from abroad and many from the United States. They, not Honduras’s government, will devise regulations and arrangements for taxation, courts, policing, education, and healthcare for residents.

The first ZEDEs are taking shape now. The idea for them cropped up following the military coup in 2009 that removed President Manuel Zelaya’s progressive government. Hernández, as congressional leader and as president from 2014 on, led in promoting them. Honduras’s Congress in 2013 amended the Constitution to legitimize legislation establishing the ZEDEs. The recent end of litigation before the Supreme Court resulted in their final authorization.

For most Hondurans, who are treated as if they were disposable, capitalism has its downside.

Honduras’s poverty rate is 70%, up from 59.3% in 2019. Of formally employed workers, 70% work intermittently; 82.6% of Honduran workers participate in the informal sector. The Covid-19 pandemic led to more than 50,000 businesses closing and almost half a million Hondurans losing their jobs. Some 30,000 small businesses disappeared in 2020 owing to floods caused by hurricanes.

Violence at the hands of criminal gangs, narco-traffickers, and the police is pervasive and usually goes unpunished. Victims are rival gang members, political activists, journalists, members of the LGBT community, and miscellaneous young people. According to insightcrime.org, Honduras was Latin America’s third-most violent country in 2019 and a year later it registered the region’s third-highest murder rate. Says Reuters: “Honduras has become a sophisticated state-sponsored narco-empire servicing Colombian cartels.”

Associated with indiscriminate violence, corruption, and narco-trafficking, Honduras’s police are dangerous. President Hernández eight years ago created the “Military Police for Public Order” (PMOP), the Interinstitutional National Security Force, and the “Tigres” (Tigers). These are police units staffed either by former soldiers or by “soldiers…specializing in police duties.” Police in Honduras numbered 13,752 in 2016 and 20,193 in 2020.

Honduras’s military has grown. Defense spending for 2019 grew by 5.3 %; troop numbers almost doubled. For Hernández, according to one commentator, “militarism has been his right arm for continuing at the head of the executive branch.” The military forces, like the police, are corrupt, traffic illicit drugs, and are “detrimental” to human rights. The looming presence of security forces is intimidating as they interfere, often brutally, with voting, protest demonstrations, and labor strikes.

According to Amnesty International, “The government of…Hernández has adopted a policy of repression against those who protest in the streets.… The use of military forces to control demonstrations across the country has had a deeply concerning toll on human rights.”

The U.S. government has provided training, supplies, and funding for Honduras’s police and military. Soto Cano, a large U.S. airbase in eastern Honduras, periodically receives from 500 to 1500 troops who undertake short-term missions throughout the region, supposedly for humanitarian or drug-war purposes.

Not only does serious oppression exist but, according to Reuters, severe drought over five years has decimated staple crops. “Nearly half a million Hondurans, many of them small farmers, are struggling to put food on the table.” The UN humanitarian affairs agency OCHA reports that as of February 2021, “The severity of acute food insecurity in Honduras has reached unprecedented levels.”

For the sake of survival, many Hondurans follow the path of family and friends: they leave. Among Central American countries, Honduras, followed by Guatemala and Mexico, registered the highest rate of emigration between 1990 and 2020. The rate increases were: 530%, 293%, and 154%, respectively. Between 2012 and 2019, family groups arriving from Honduras and apprehended at the U.S. border skyrocketed from 513 in 2012 to 188,368 in 2019.

The undoing of Honduras by U.S. imperialism follows a grim pattern but is also a special case. Rates of migration from Central American countries to the United States correlate directly with levels of oppression and deprivation in those countries. As regards hope, the correlation is reversed.

Differing rates of apprehension of Honduran and Nicaraguan migrants at the U.S. southern border are revealing: Capitalist-imbued Honduras specializes in oppression, while optimism is no stranger in a Nicaragua aspiring to socialism.

Department of Homeland Security figures show that between 2015 and 2018 the yearly average number of Nicaraguans apprehended at the border was 2292. The comparable figure for Hondurans was 63,741. Recently the number of Nicaraguan migrants has increased; 14,248 presented themselves at the border in 2019—as did 268,992 Honduran refugees. The difference cannot be explained by the two nations’ populations: This year the Honduran population reached 10,104,920, and the Nicaraguan population 6,724,836.

Recent reflections of Carlos Fonseca Terán, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) international secretary, show why hope has persisted in Nicaragua. He points out that since 2007, poverty, inequality, illiteracy, infant mortality, and murders have dropped precipitously. Citizens’ safety, electrification, renewable energy sources, women in government, healthcare funding, and the minimum wage have increased markedly. Fonseca adds that the “percentage of GDP produced…under associative, cooperative, family and community ownership went from less than 40% to more than 50%.”

As they taught us in school, contrast and compare.

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

_{Source: People’s World, October 13, 2021, https://peoplesworld.org/article/u-s-intervention-and-capitalism-have-created-a-monster-in-honduras/}

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. | Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Fabián Escalante helped establish Cuba’s state security services. He headed Cuba’s Department of State Security from 1976 to 1996, served as vice minister of the Interior Ministry, and after 1993 led the Cuban Security Studies Center. His views on threats from the U.S. government and on protecting Cuba’s Revolution carry weight.

Writing Sept. 23 on Cuba’s Pupila Insomne website, Escalante notes that “the internal counterrevolution is reorganizing its forces and is on the offensive.” They were “calling for a ‘national strike’ for October 11…to secure the ‘liberation of political prisoners.’” He insists that, afterwards, “a group of ‘activists,’ presumably counterrevolutionaries,” will be seeking authorization from Havana municipal authorities “for a peaceful march against ‘violence’ in November.”

He regards the timing as crucial, inasmuch as Cuba will be reopening its borders to international tourists in November; they’ve been excluded due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At issue is revival of Cuba’s economy.

Escalante cites a Miami periodical’s report asserting that “marchers will be calling for rights for all Cubans, liberation of political prisoners, and democratic and peaceful solutions of differences.” The story portrays island-wide marches as challenging Cuba’s government to honor a constitutional right to “public protest.”

He observes that “lies and half-truths, swarming around via social media, are disparaging government leaders, especially Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Accusations center on “failing to improve living conditions in deprived, vulnerable urban districts.”

Escalante notes that in Miami, “a sector of the Cuban community, manipulated by fundamentalist congresspersons Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar, and their acolytes, are readying their weapons, coordinating and paying local peons.” These are “in close touch with counterparts on the island and will assist in creating an environment of social destabilization.”

Adding substance to a grim scenario is the reality of long-term and bipartisan U.S. funding of counter-revolutionary activity in Cuba. Journalist Tracey Eaton reports that presently “the U.S. Agency for International Development is offering up to $2 million for new democracy-promotion programs in Cuba. USAID’s goals are to advance the effectiveness of independent civil society groups… [and to] develop broader coalitions to expand civil society’s impact.”

In July, the House Appropriations Committee “approved a bill that would authorize the State Department to spend $20 million on democracy promotion projects in Cuba during fiscal 2022…. Nearly half the money—$9.98 million—would go toward civil society; $4.78 million would be spent on independent media and free flow of information, and $5.24 million would be used to promote human rights.”

Regime-change fervor in official Washington is always intense. Miami congressperson Mario Diaz-Balart recently issued a statement praising “the many activists who have suffered or perished for simply daring to speak against the regime.” He recently introduced a resolution seeking international support for counterrevolution in Cuba.

Fabián Escalante is alarmed. He declares that “In circumstances like those at present—pandemic, escalation of the blockade, scarcities, etc.—we must not underestimate the enemy and if we want to transcend the impasse, we must accept the challenge, with MORE REVOLUTION, as Fidel taught us.”

Escalante calls for mass action, “local political and patriotic mobilizations.” And, “we will do what we know to do, which is to mobilize the people.” We will “strengthen the bases of our organizations with ‘new ideas’ [and] with concepts exceeding tired prescriptions for ‘change in style and working methods.’”

He calls upon “communists occupying the superstructure to come down…to organizations at the base and other area-based centers and, from there, [move on] to leadership elements of the remaining revolutionary forces.” They must “dialogue and hear about conflicts and local necessities and [then] undertake a counter-offensive.”

He believes that the “enemy of humanity, the U.S. government…is preparing to deliver the final blow to the Revolution.” He suggests that the Biden administration, presuming Cuba to be weakened, wants a “consolation prize” in view of recent U.S. defeats. Now, therefore, “The street belongs to the revolutionaries, as Díaz Canel has alerted us.”

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

_{Source: People’s World, October 12, 2021, https://peoplesworld.org/article/cuban-intelligence-chief-says-u-s-government-preparing-final-blow-to-revolution/}

_{Presidents Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba and Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador, Mexico | Photo: Twitter/@GerardoArreola}

The independence of Mexico and of Cuba, got a big hearing in Mexico City on September 16.  On that day in 1810, in Dolores, Mexico, Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo called upon parishioners to join him in rebelling against Spain’s viceregal government. Mexico finally gained independence in 1821. Every year, at 11 PM on September 15, and on September 16, Mexicans and their presidents pay homage to Hidalgo’s iconic Cry of Dolores (Grito de Dolores).

This year, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commemorating that important day, had a surprising guest. Cuba’s president Miguel Díaz-Canel was at his side and they both spoke. Shared goals and strong friendship were evident. The extraordinary encounter may portend new substance and heightened commitment for efforts to free Cuba, at long last, from aggressive U.S. interference with Cuba’s sovereignty.

The Cuban president later joined president López Obrador in reviewing Mexican armed forces assembled in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s central plaza. No visiting foreign president had ever done so.

Excerpts of their remarks appear below. What they actually said may more readily communicate concepts, reasoning, convictions, and deep feelings than would have been the case with summarization. The object here is to enhance appreciation of the nature and strength of the two nations’ friendship now and into the future.

To begin: President López Obrador observes that “[Hidalgo] who initiated independence matters more to Mexicans than Iturbide, who consummated it. The priest defended the common people while the royalist general represented the higher-ups … [But] his adversaries never forgave [Hidalgo’s] audacity in wanting to make poor people the equals of the most favored classes.”

“We Mexicans.” he adds, “feel pride in this hero and others, because here, like nowhere else, the independence movement did not begin by simply reaccommodating with the power elite, or act solely through nationalist feelings, but it was the fruit of a craving for justice and freedom. Indeed, the call for liberty and justice preceded the call for political independence.”

López Obrador turns to Cuba:

“Today we remember that heroic deed [of Hidalgo] and we celebrate it with the participation of the President of Cuba. He represents a people who resolved, like few others in the world, to defend with dignity their right to live free and Independent, without allowing the interference of any foreign power in their internal affairs. I have already said and I repeat: we may or may not agree with the Cuban Revolution and Cuba’s government, but to have resisted 62 years without surrender is a historical feat, undoubtedly.

“I believe, therefore, that through their struggle in defense of their country’s sovereignty, the people of Cuba deserve a prize for dignity. That island has to be considered as the new Numantia for its example of resistance. And I think for the same reason that the country has to be declared a patrimony of humanity. Now I only add that the government I represent respectfully calls upon the government of the United States to raise its blockade against Cuba, because no state has a right to subjugate another people, or another country. … ”

(Numantia was a hill fortress in northern Spain contested by Roman soldiers and the native Spaniards between 154 B.C. and 133 B.C. The latter did not surrender. Finally, Roman general Scipio Aemilianus and 60,000 soldiers surrounded the fortress with entrenchments. After 15 months, all 6000-8000 Iberian soldiers inside were dead of starvation.) 

The Mexican president continues: “I say with complete frankness: It looks very bad that the U.S. government uses the blockade to hurt the people of Cuba with the purpose of having them be forced by necessity to confront their own government. If this perverse strategy achieves success – something that doesn’t appear likely given the dignity we referred to – it would be a Pyrrhic victory, a vile and scoundrelly one. A stain like that is not washed away by all the water of the seas.

“Let President Biden, who possess much political sensitivity, take a wider view and put an end, for always, to the politics of grievances against Cuba. In the search for reconciliation, he must also help the U.S. Cuban community and put aside electoral and partisan issues …It’s a time of brotherhood and not of confrontation. As Jose Martí pointed out: “to avoid shock, we rely upon exquisite political tact that derives from the majesty of disinterest and the rule of love.”

President Miguel Díaz-Canel speaks:

“Among all the brothers Our America gave to us, Mexico counts for Cuba as one of the dearest ones, for many reasons. The affection that unites our lands begins with amazement at its diverse and deep traces in the literature and history of America.” Diaz Canel cites Cuban authors José María Heredia and particularly José Martí. He reads Martí’s portrayal of Hidalgo.

Díaz-Canel remarks that, “Through its characteristics, the independence process in Mexico … showed a remarkable component of social demands, on behalf of indigenous peoples especially. It differed in that way from other processes typical of the era of independence struggles. Without question, its impact on the freedom and anti-colonialist struggles of our region, particularly in Cuba, was extraordinary.”

He points out that Mexicans joined Cuba’s first War for Independence from Spain (1868-1878) that Mexico extended recognition to that leader’s insurgent government.  He mentions Cubans fighting with Mexicans in their wars against Texan Anglos and U.S. invaders in 1846-1848. Díaz-Canel refers to Martí, who “joined our two nations eternally in all his work, but especially in letters to his great Mexican friend Manuel Mercado.”

On the eve of Cuba’s Second War for Independence (1895-1898), Martí communicated to Mercado his idea of “Using the independence of Cuba to stop the United States in time from extending throughout the Antilles and falling with even more force upon our American lands.”

Díaz-Canel mentions the murder in Mexico City by Cuba’s Machado dictatorship of the young Cuban Communist leader Julio Antonio Mella in 1929. He praises Mexicans’ assistance to preparations there for the Granma expedition led by Fidel Castro in 1956. And, recalls the Cuban president, “faithful to its best traditions, Mexico was the only country in Latin America that did not break relations with Cuba when we were expelled by the OAS by imperial mandate.”

Díaz-Canel emphasizes that, “Mexico’s solidarity with Cuba has awakened in our people a greater admiration and the deepest gratitude … the decision to invite us has an immeasurably greater value, at a time when we are suffering the onslaught of a multidimensional war, with a criminal blockade, opportunistically intensified.” Because we are “under fire in a total war …Cuba will always remember your expressions of support, your permanent demand for the lifting of the blockade and for the annual United Nations vote to be converted into concrete deeds.”.

The Mexican-Cuban alliance has value for Cuba.  Mexico’s government has a U.S. ear, if only because disruption of amicable U.S.-Mexican relations might significantly destabilize aspects of life in the United States. Additionally, Mexico does provide material aid to Cuba and has the potential for promoting support for Cuba throughout her Latin America.

An analyst writing for Almayadeen.net offers perspective: “Mexico, during López Obrador’s presidency, has begun a process of winning back its regional influence… The U.S. – Cuba conflict is another relevant factor in Mexico’s position … [Already] documented is the mutual love between the Mexican and Cuban peoples … [Therefore,] the building of a new relation of the region with and Washington cannot exclude Havana, and on that López Obrador has been strong.”

Cuba’s friendship with Mexico hardly matches the importance of its alliance with the Soviet Bloc. Material aid from that source helped assure the revolutionary government’s survival. Soviet military might and worldwide influence discouraged U.S. excesses in regard to Cuba. But activated friendship with Mexico now may add tangible benefits for Cuba’s cause that are lacking with other solidarity efforts, for example: pro-Cuba votes in the United Nations, hit-and-miss material aid, various solidarity statements, and assistance from NGO’s.

Meanwhile reality intrudes. In front of Cuba’s Mexico City Embassy on September 16, a few anti-government activists, having arrived from Cuba, tussled with Cubans living in Mexico who support their government. The Mexican media carried critiques of Díaz-Canel’s presence in Mexico that López Obrador’s own political opposition had generated.

More significantly, the entire region on September 18 missed a fragile opportunity of gaining some independence from U.S. domination. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a regional organization to which the United States and Canada do not belong, was holding a summit meeting in Mexico City that day, The CELAC group refused to consider a proposal put forth by President López Obrador and others that member states abandon the Organization of American States (OAS) or alter its functioning. The U.S. government is accused of using OAS as a tool for controlling the region.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.

_{Source: Counterpunch, September 23, 2021, https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/23/cuban-and-mexican-presidents-strengthen-solidarity-in-remarkable-display/}

Longshore union backs Cuba’s fight against U.S. blockade / Carlos Latuff, Mint Press News

Marx and Engels asked workers to unite and thereby lose their chains. (Communist Manifesto) Nevertheless, according to a People’s World commentator in 2017, “organized labor in the U.S. has … steered clear of the issue of improved relations with Cuba.” On the whole, U.S. labor has remained hands-off in regard to the cruel and illegal U.S. economic blockade. Over the course of 60 years, the blockade has devastated the lives of Cuban workers. 

Presently, the San Francisco Labor Council and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union are seemingly alone among U.S. unions in protesting the blockade. The situation is different elsewhere: the British and Irish Unite federation, the French General Confederation of Labor, the Portuguese FEVICCOM union, the Building and Woodworkers’ International, and The World Federation of Trade Unions recently issued denunciations.

An overwhelming majority of nations voting in the United Nations General Assembly, various regional alliances, religious leaders worldwide and in the United States, 19 U. S. municipal councils, and Cuba solidarity groups in the United States and abroad condemn the blockade.

The anomaly of the U.S. labor movement in regard to Cuba needs explaining. Marxist thinkers, primarily Lenin, lend a hand. Looking at the nature of unions, their internal workings, and situations within capitalist societies, Lenin found that trade unions are quiescent by and large as regards big political issues aggravating society.

In his What Is to Be Done (1909), Lenin looks at how union members gain political consciousness, whether through their own trade-union experience or as the result of outside influences. He proposes that for the most part, trade unionists’ exclusive attention to wages and working conditions leaves them with a stunted political awareness, so much so that their zeal for changing the factory system itself or fighting governmental oppression is weakened.

Lenin inveighs against the “traditional striving to degrade Social Democratic politics to the level of trade union politics.” (The reference is to the Russian Social–Democratic Workers’ Party of which Lenin was a leader.) Instead of seeking economic reforms affecting only workers on the job, Lenin calls for “presenting to the government, not only demands for all sorts of measures, but also (and primarily) the demand that it cease to be an autocratic government.”

He adds that, “Revolutionary Social-Democracy has always included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities, but it … subordinates the struggle for reforms, as the part to the whole, to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for socialism.” The danger lies in “strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers.” Indeed, the “Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression.”

Attitudes of the “economists” targeted by Lenin resemble those of U.S. unionists today; they too may be leery of engaging in political problems outside of their own living and working circumstances. The U.S. blockade of Cuba is a prime example. Nevertheless, the precedent of “economism,” the name often assigned to the kind of union leadership criticized by Lenin, applies to unions other than those in the United States. Something more must be at work to explain U.S. unions’ silence on the blockade issue.

Describing a “labor aristocracy,” Lenin suggested that many labor leaders compromise and collude with the masters of society on the assumption that, as high union officials, they can share in the wealth their nation derives from imperialism. The concept suggests that U.S. labor leaders’ response to the blockade of Cuba reflects their more general approach to imperialism. 

Writing to Karl Kautsky in 1882, Frederick Engels exclaims, “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here … and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.”

Lenin in 1916 (Imperialism and the Split in Socialism) left little to the imagination: “The capitalists [in England] can devote a part (and not a small one, at that!) of these superprofits to bribe their own workers, to create something like an alliance … between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries.”

British historian Eric Hobsbawm elaborates, noting that: “the European proletariat has partly reached a situation where it is not its work that maintains the whole of society but that of the people of the colonies who are practically enslaved. . . . In certain countries these circumstances create the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat of one country or another with colonial chauvinism.”

He adds that, “the aristocracy of labor … arises when the economic circumstances of capitalism make it possible to grant significant concessions to the proletariat, within which certain strata manage, by means of their special scarcity, skill, strategic position, organizational strength, etc., to establish notably better conditions for themselves than the rest [of the proletariat].” 

The message conveyed in these commentaries on “is that U.S. union leaders may be so attentive to their own union affairs and to their members’ interests as to ignore developments abroad, like the U.S. blockade. They may think that the labor movement benefits by accepting U.S. imperialism’s methods and purposes. In neither case is their attitude unique to the U.S. labor movement. Counterparts in other industrialized countries undoubtedly share similar priorities.

Some clarity emerges on our realizing that racial oppression, a matter of special U.S. experience, is an integral part of imperialism. In 1920, in “The Soul of White Folks,” W. E. B. Du Bois asks: “How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good.”

Du Bois sees a weakening of capitalism: “The day of the very rich is drawing to a close, so far as individual white nations are concerned. But there is a loophole. There is a chance for exploitation on an immense scale for inordinate profit, not simply to the very rich, but to the middle class and to the laborers. This chance lies in the exploitation of darker peoples. It is here that the golden hand beckons. Here are no labor unions or votes or questioning onlookers or inconvenient consciences.”

Formerly European nations bore most responsibility for injecting racial oppression into imperialist practice. These days the U.S. government is an imperialist giant, and the admixture of racism and imperialism is mostly a U.S. phenomenon.

U.S. anti-imperialists, mindful of consistency, might see, or worry about, an obligation to be fighting racial oppression as they fight imperialism. Battlelines are blurred, and frustration is in store for many U.S. unionists joining anti-imperialist efforts such as the blockade. To begin with, they have to be aware, as noted by one observer, that “the AFL-CIO [has] its own ugly history of assisting US imperialism.” Some of them might take comfort by recalling their fight against racism in their own unions.

Annoyance would be the least of their troubles. Fighting imperialism, U.S. union workers would also be taking a stand against capitalism itself. That’s the logic of studies pursued by sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox. According to a recent observer, Cox “argued that racial antagonism and exploitation had only arisen in modern times, and developed along with the rise of capitalism in Europe and North America.”

According to Cox, (Race, a Study in Social Dynamics, MR Press, 2000) “racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is essentially political-class conflict. The capitalist, being opportunistic and practical, will utilize any convenience to keep his labor and other resources freely exploitable. He will devise and employ race prejudice when that becomes convenient.”

Cox continues: “The slave trade was simply a way of recruiting labor for the purpose of exploiting the great natural resources of America. This trade did not develop because Indians and Negros were red and black … but simply because they were the best workers to be found for the heavy labor in the mines and plantations across the Atlantic.  … This then is the beginning of modern race relations. It was not an abstract, natural, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups, but rather a practical exploitative relationship with its social-attitudinal facilitation.”

Proposing that racial oppression, capitalism, and imperialism are kindred phenomena, Cox tells us that fight against one is fight against the other two. If so, U.S. labor unions would be only too aware of the explosive potential of a scenario requiring them to oppose the capitalist system. The anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and other assaults have already sensitized them to accusations of “soft on communism.”

Definition of a slippery slope: first oppose the U.S. blockade of Cuba, then turn against imperialism, then take on racism, and ultimately oppose capitalism itself. And then what? Far better to leave ending the blockade to someone else.

_{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.}

_{Photo: Felix Pierre Genel, 36, whose arm was amputated after he was injured in the earthquake, is treated at a hospital in Les Cayes, Haiti, Aug. 25, 2021, a week after a 7.2 magnitude quake. The disaster was just the latest in a string of catastrophes that have struck the Haitian people. | Matias Delacroix / AP}

Plotters in Florida employing Colombian mercenary soldiers arranged to kill Haitian President Jovenel Moïse on July 7; rivalry among Haitian oligarchs may have played a role. A deadly earthquake followed and then flooding from a tropical storm. Amid the chaos, relief services are lacking in rural areas. U.S. Marines intruded, as the U.S. military had likewise done after the 2010 earthquake that killed some 230,000 people. Adverse effects of all these linger.

The marginalized descendants of rebellious slaves who founded independent Haiti in 1804 are resisting, however. Stirrings of socialist ideas and practice are evident.

The assassination of Moïse marked the end of ten years of corrupt and despotic rule. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shoehorned President Michel Martelly into Haiti’s presidency in 2011. Moïse, his protégé, became president in 2017 on the strength of 500,000 votes drawn from six million eligible voters. Haitian political parties and their candidates serve a corrupt oligarchy.

Moïse had been ruling by decree, having refused to authorize parliamentary elections. His term was to have ended in February 2021, but supported by the U.S. government and the “Core Group,” he remained in office, thus defying Haiti’s 1987 constitution. He was calling for a new constitution that would allow agricultural conglomerates to swallow up small landholdings. Though he’s gone, the proposal is still alive.

Consisting of the U.S., Canadian, French, and Brazilian ambassadors and representatives of the United Nations, OAS, and the European Union, the Core Group came together in 2004, immediately after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s progressive government was removed by a U.S.- engineered coup. Aristide had been elected in 2000 with a 92% majority.

The Core Group supervises governance in Haiti and monitors political activities generally. Together with a United Nations military occupation force that remained until 2017, the entity is all about maintaining a Haitian status quo satisfactory to foreign powers.

For three years, aggrieved Haitians have periodically staged large protests. As described by economist and socialist Camille Chalmers, they have demanded, in succession: relief from shortages of fuel and other goods due to neoliberal-inspired withdrawal of subsidies, no more plunder of billons in funds derived from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program, Moïse’s resignation, an end to U.S. interventionism, and cessation of Core Group backing of Moïse’s autocratic regime.

In August 2019, Haitian progressives drawn from 62 organizations met to discuss constitutional change and aspects of a transitional government. The business at hand, according to participant Chalmers, was to “establish the revolutionary left as a united force” and to develop a transition program for dealing with current political problems. They deliberated for three days and established the Patriotic Forum.

The Patriotic Forum gave rise to the “People’s Political Front” (PPF), which is now a potential vehicle for a six-party alliance prepared to compete in elections. The alliance includes the socialist party Rasin Kan Pèp La. (“Roots of the People’s Camp”) Functioning since 2015, that party has organized street mobilizations and released statements and analyses remarkable for their anti-imperialism.

Interviewed in 2018, party member Guerchang Bastia characterized his party’s role as “being present with the masses…developing real popular education…. So that when the masses are in the streets, they will recognize you as a leader [with] a proposal for a new society.” The purpose of the leftist organization, Bastia said, “is creating a new relationship with the masses [and] building the strength to fight against the capitalist system.”

Surveying Haiti’s situation prior to a March 2021 virtual meeting of international supporters, Chalmers outlined tasks ahead for the socialist cause and the PPF. A founding member of Rasin Kan Pèp La and a frequent spokesperson, he stated that “the Haitian people need to take their destiny into their own hands [with] a redefinition of the of the boss-slave relationship maintained between the international community and Haiti, and particularly between Haiti and the United States.”

Chalmers regards international solidarity as an “overriding necessity [required] for the success of the Haitian people in their struggle for radical change of the mafioso system installed to guarantee…the political, economic, and social interests of the imperialist powers, the multinationals, and the corrupt local elites.”

According to sociologist Lautaro Rivara, a member of the Dessalines Brigade in Solidarity with Haiti: “The history of class struggle in Haiti is a history predominantly of rural workers, as seen presently in the protagonism of peasant organizations…in convening and organizing the Patriot Forum. Now, as the People’s Patriotic Front, it’s the best advocate for the popular classes in the country.”

Rivara indicates that more than half of the Haitian people live in rural areas and are engaged in subsistence farming. Rates of Illiteracy remain high and healthcare and schooling for them are rudimentary or absent. Great numbers of needy and fearful Haitians have moved to cities or, most recently, to countries like Chile, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic.

Following the lead of U.S. military occupiers (1915-1934) in combating a guerrilla insurgency, paramilitary enforcers allied to the Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986), and to U.S. intelligence agencies later on, carried out massacres in the Haitian countryside. The now-ended United Nations occupying force likewise carried out an anti-insurgency mission, according to Chalmers. Privatized paramilitaries accounted for many killings during the Moïse era.

In regard to international solidarity, Chalmers extolled the contributions of Cuba’s government and people; Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution; Jubilee South, based in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the Dessalines Brigade formed by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement and by Via Campesina.

Via Campesina recently published a report on grim Haitian realities. Accessible here in English, it describes factional fighting between adherents of former presidents Martelly and Moïse over disposition of funds stolen from PetroCaribe and from foreign reconstruction funds following the 2010 earthquake. Clearly, such politicians would work overtime to defeat any popular mobilization.

The U.S. government is similarly inclined. The report blames U.S. agencies for complicity with corrupt sections of Haiti’s government in turning a blind eye to profits from narco-trafficking. It claims that “imperialism wants a new Haitian Constitution for allowing transnationals to buy land legally and openly in Haiti so as to squander and steal the natural resources of the state.”

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

_{Source: People’s World, September 1, 2021, https://peoplesworld.org/article/socialism-in-the-mix-as-haitians-react-to-catastrophe/}

Colombian Army commandos on May 17, 2021 killed Jesús Santrich, a 30 -year veteran of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The ambush took place in Zulia Province, in northeastern Venezuela; six others died.  Santrich was a spokesperson for the FARC negotiating team in the talks in Havana with Colombia’s government that led to a peace agreement in 2016.

Because former FARC combatants were being killed despite the Agreement and because Colombia’s government and US agents were trying to extradite him to the United States on drug charges, Santrich went into hiding in 2019. He joined the “Second Marquetalia” offshoot of the original FARC insurgency, which was returning to armed conflict.

Santrich’s  22-page essay, written in 2009 in honor of legendary FARC commander Manuel Marulanda, carries the title:  “Bolivarianism and Marxism – a Commitment to the Impossible” (Bolivarismo y marxismo, un compromiso con lo imposible.) Santrich examines the utopian underpinnings of the Marxist movement and the liberation struggles of Simón Bolívar.

With his essay, Santrich challenges our own modes of anti-imperialist struggle and of creating socialism, impeded in both instances, we suggest, by a lack of long-term, visionary aspirations. That’s clear, for example, in the blunted response of progressives and radicals to recent developments in U.S. hybrid war involving Colombia, Haiti, and Cuba. With an expansive view, Santrich insists upon political leadership and political mobilization that attend to the future, embrace great purposes, and fight with determination and commitment.

His words

In his essay, Santrich writes about Simon Bolivar; the fight for independence from Spain; the FARC’s early years; leadership qualities of Manuel Marulanda, pioneer socialists of the French Revolution; Bolivar’s teacher Simón Rodríguez, an early socialist; and more. Along the way, Santrich provides ideas that, taken seriously, might greatly strengthen the revolutionary project in our own era.

For example: “Marxists must keep utopia foremost in their consciousness. It drives mass actions. They must assume that a revolutionary movement, whatever its origins, doesn’t qualify as such if it lacks that component manifesting as irrepressible effort towards change categorized as “impossible.” But utopia must always take off from a basis in realty. We humans have the duty to regard the world we want as another world that’s possible. Paraphrasing Bolívar, we are looking for the “impossible,” while leaving the possible up to everyone else, every day …

He continues: “To declare oneself Bolivarian and, as such, declare oneself a revolutionary on the Marxist path implies lifelong motivation derived from the hope of transforming society and finding justice. This is a constant and is strong enough with its broad vision as to point to utopia as a characteristic of political consciousness and the natural result of rational belief.”

He adds: “Utopia is a higher goal of commitment. That’s so because even at the beginning, the matter of possibility or impossibility is already uncertain due to extreme difficulties ahead, or uncertain survival of purpose as historical implementation evolves. But like history itself, utopia does not end.”

Moreover, “In the hopeful quest for realization of the “impossible,” the process calls upon a mixture of illusions, realism, magic, and love for people as a reason for life … The essential interest of the utopian is preservation of man and nature in absolute equilibrium, thus displaying the potentials of historical memory, faith, dignity, and our identity as vital factors for existence.

“Confronting oppression and marching on the path of utopia, the revolutionary no longer is resigned. He or she is unconditionally, permanently, and creatively committed to the poor people of the world … Let’s say then that the Marxist-Bolivarian idea of a revolutionary is of someone who fixes on an ideology that, while encompassing reality, is not yet solidified and is perhaps uncertain. The goal is set of becoming absolutely convinced that this reality will be fulfilled, “impossible” though it may seem….

“The author of the Communist Manifesto, appealing to selfless purpose, was calling for struggle offering the possibility of risks. … Marx was calling for action needing to pass a test of fire in the face of historical commitment prompted by circumstances, even at the risk of death. He was clarifying a concept of living, whose own ethics intermeshed with the dialectics of reality that was moving, but always toward the future. …”

Santrich goes farther afield: “This kind of thinking envisions Marxists and Bolivarians alike as rising up, in our world, to the level of magical realism. And why not? Magical realism goes beyond mere rationalism. We have symbols, imagination, and creativity – all based on rich traditions rooted in indigenous experience in the Americas. It’s founded also on the syncretism of our mixed and oppressed mestizo peoples. Playing out, this proposition looks toward installing social justice, that is to say, accomplishes what’s ideal for the benefit of humankind.”

The stakes are high:“Perhaps one of the most fateful legacies for revolutionaries is apprehension on facing the danger that imperialism poses for the very existence of the planet with its catastrophic kind of developmentalism. In the face of great challenges, great resolve is necessary, really a triple boldness: action that overcomes determinism; recovery of the role of subjectivity, passion, audacity, and recklessness; and faith in the initiative of the masses, as they face the immediate prospect of “defeat.” In such circumstances, uncertainty and silence are worth nothing. …

“What’s in play is the very survival of the human species, of life, of nature in general, all put at risk through the destructive power of capitalism. But we will not idle around patiently waiting for an automatic end to capitalism and for a communist alternative automatically to flourish. Humanity’s conscious intervention is necessary. It’s our immediate duty. Revolutionaries must connect utopia with liberation practice, at whatever cost …”

Meanwhile, on the ground

Next on our agenda is a survey of recent developments in Haiti, Colombia, and Cuba that are significant for the weak response they generated from anti-imperialists. Fragmentation and dwarfed ambitions seem to have paralyzed their fight against exploitation, plunder and militarization. We think the far-reaching aspirations of Santrich point to the alternative approach we need.

President Jovenal Moïse of Haiti was assassinated on July 7, presumably the result of rivalry among Haitian oligarchs, encouraged perhaps by leaders in Washington. All but two of the 28 perpetrators were former Colombian army regulars, now employed as mercenary soldiers. Many had received U.S. training. Colombia mercenaries have engaged militarily in the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Afghanistan and Dubai, Honduras, Venezuela and elsewhere.

CTU Security, a Florida company owned by right-wing Venezuelan émigre Antonio Intriago arranged for the assassination.  Miami – based Intriago has ties to regressive Colombian President Ivan Duque; to Juan Guaidó, the U. S. puppet  president of Venezuela; and to Christian Sanon, a Haitian physician living in Florida and seeking to be president of Haiti. Intriago’s company in 2018 carried out a drone attack against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

The Cessna four-passenger plane owned by Helidosa company in the Dominican Republic is emblematic of imperialism’s convoluted presence in the region.  Intriago, Sanon, and two others traveled to Haiti on that plane to be on hand at the assassination. After surgical care in Florida for wounds suffered during the attack, Martine Moïse, the assassinated president’s widow, returned to Haiti on the same airplane. In 2019, it transported right-wing Venezuelans to Barbados for negotiations with President Nicolas Maduro’s representatives, and did so again the following year with Juan Guaidó aboard.

The U.S. blockade of Cuba comes into view. Campaigning in 2020, President Biden assured voters he would ease blockade-related restrictions on Cuba imposed by Donald Trump. Biden has added new sanctions. For 60 years, the U.S. government has blockaded Cuba in order to cause suffering there. Suffering is mounting now due to sanctions and adverse health and economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic

On July 27 Biden met with Cuban-American elected officials in his office. He stated that, “I want Cuban Americans to know that we … hear the cries of freedom coming from the island … We’ve brought to bear the strength of our diplomacy, rallying nations to speak out and increase pressure on the regime.”

Correlations

The opportunistic Biden seeks electoral advantage in Florida. Bipartisan consensus remains as to replacing Cuba’s government. Opposition to the blockade is at the margins of U.S. politics.  No U.S. hand or hierarchy of control is evident in the assassination of Haiti’s president. Marking both cases is a mélange of private interests, transactional relationships, and profit-making opportunities.

The unpleasant details reported here likely will soon be forgotten. Many already distracted and pessimistic progressives probably prefer not to be reminded of politicians’ corrupt and faked behavioral patterns.

It could have been otherwise. A narrative might have been developed that, absorbing the incidents noted here, might have contributed to shaping a powerful indictment against the power structures. That in turn might have helped set the stage for a return of sustained political counter-attack – if, that is, a large and powerful movement actually existed.

That’s the contribution of Jesús Santrich. He traces out characteristics of political leadership and permanent mobilization needed now for fightback and revolutionary optimism. His prescription calls for a movement that satisfies the subjective needs of oppressed peoples. License would be created for great longings and dreams of fulfillment, for these to be normalized.

Santrich draws upon a world that now for many is off-limits. We honor his contribution, a rarity, as it seems, in our own time. But he is not alone. We remember:

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, 1871 – “The Commune, they explain, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!… Yes, gentlemen, the Commune [aims] at the expropriation of the expropriators … But this is communism, “impossible communism! …  [But] “if cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system …[W]hat else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism.”

José Mariátegui, founder of the Peruvian Communist Party, 1928 – “We certainly don’t want socialism in America to be a copy or tracing. It must be a heroic creation. We have to give life to Indian-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language.”

Ernesto Che Guevara, Socialism and Man in Cuba, 1965 – “[I]n moments of great peril it is easy to muster a powerful response with moral incentives. Retaining their effectiveness, however, requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values. Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school.”

Fidel Castro (as recalled by Raul Castro) – “in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, on Dec. 18, [1956], with seven rifles and a fist full of combatants, [he] stated, ’Now we have won the war!’”

_{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.}

_{The author translated the excerpts appearing here. Santrich’s entire essay may be read, in Spanish, at https://rebelion.org/bolivarismo-y-marxismo-un-compromiso-con-lo-imposible/}

_{Source: Marxism-Leninism Today / The Electronic Journal of Marxist-Leninist Thought, Aug 15, 2021  | https://mltoday.com/jesus-santrich-outlines-the-utopian-fundamentals-of-marxist-and-bolivarian-ideologies/}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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