Category: UNCATEGORIZED

US Draws Venezuela into Petrodollar Rescue Operation / By W.T. Whitney Jr.

creativecommons.org

South Paris, Maine

A lightning U.S. military attack on January 3 succeeded in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, National Assembly member Cilia Flores. They are now lodged in a New York prison, awaiting trial on narcotrafficking and weapons changers.

Speculation based on the historical record suggesting that the U.S. military might overturn Venezuela’s government has not materialized. Until recently, the U.S. government has, in fact, worked strenuously to destroy Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, the political project led by President Hugo Chavez from its onset in 1999 until his death in 2013, and afterwards, until January 3, by President Maduro.

Under that banner, Venezuela’s government has taken on U.S. imperialism, collaborated with revolutionary Cuba, promoted regional unity, and moved toward socialism. Responding, the United States supported or financed a failed military coup in 2002; a strike against the state-owned oil company in 2003; violent, recurring street demonstrations; and countless dissident organizations. U.S. economic sanctions have been devastating. The U.S. in 2019 named Juan Guaidó as a puppet Venezuelan president.

Now, for the U.S. government, reaction to revolutionary stirrings in Venezuela fades into the background. The mission now is that of propping up U.S. economic hegemony in the world. This rests on the U.S. dollar continuing to serve as the world’s dominant currency. That lofty position is maintained through the dollar’s role in the marketing of oil.

Venezuela harbors vast oil reserves and is, therefore, an object of U.S. strategizing. U.S. planners, it seems, are relying upon an intact Venezuelan state – which is the case now, given an annual growth rate recently of close to 9%. The specter looms of regime change in the chaotic style of U.S. endeavors in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of Libya. In the case of Venezuela, the stakes are high and risk is to be avoided.

As 2025 closed, the destruction of small boats, the killings of crewmembers and a great U.S. naval fleet hovering off the coast did suggest the possibility of regime change. But narcotrafficking charges against Venezuelan leaders and the labeling of Maduro as a dictator qualify more as flimsy pretexts for the capture of Maduro than for replacing a
government.

That vast U.S. military presence still lingering in the area surely has use now in frightening Venezuelans into compliance with an evolving U.S. plan. They would be dreading horrendous consequences.

Moving toward collaboration

Evolving public statements of the U.S. president and of Venezuelan acting president Delcy Rodríguez suggest Venezuela’s government is safe. Rodríguez served as vice president in Maduro’s government. She is the daughter of a founder of the Marxist-oriented and long defunct Socialist League and sister of the current president of Venezuela’s National
Assembly.

In remarks on January 3 at an emergency meeting of the National Defense Council, Rodríguez turned to themes appropriate to the occasion. “There is only one president in this country and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros,” she declared. She called for the liberation of Maduro and of Cilia Flores. Taking note of pro-government, anti-U.S. demonstrations, Rodríguez insisted Venezuela “will never go back to being the colony of anyone.” She decried “regime change” aimed at “capturing our energy, minerals, and natural resources.”

President Donald Trump speaking on January 4 declared that, “We’re going to take our oil back” and “ “[W]e’re going to run everything. We’re going to run it, fix it.”

The next day, Rodriguez declared, “We extend an invitation to the government of the US to work jointly on an agenda of cooperation, aimed at shared development … [one] that strengthens lasting peaceful coexistence.” Even so, on Venezuelan TV she soon insisted that, “No external agent governs Venezuela,” and that, “Venezuela is on a painful course through the aggression we suffered.”

The two heads of state spoke on the telephone on January 14. Trump reported that, “This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be a spectacular one FOR ALL” and “Venezuela will soon be great and prosperous again.” Rodríguez stated that, “I had a long, productive, and courteous telephone conversation with the President of the
United States, Donald Trump, conducted in a framework of mutual respect.”

Two days later, speaking before the National Assembly, Rodríguez indicated she would “continue shaping energy cooperation” with the United States and that she and Trump were developing “a working agenda for the benefit of both peoples.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe conferred with Rodríguez in Caracas. Washington officials had been talking with interior minister Diosdado Cabello prior to January 3. U.S. State Department officers visited in Caracas on January 9 “to conduct technical and logistical assessments aimed at a potential reopening of the US embassy in Caracas.”

The impression here is of Venezuela being assigned a job description and of the United States applying pressure so that Venezuelans comply and cooperate. For what’s ahead, the United States needs partnership, specifically a cohesive and functioning Venezuelan government.

A plan in the works

President Trump has repeatedly declared that the United States wants Venezuela’s oil. Why would the world’s largest oil producer want more oil?

According to misionverdad.org, “The main target was not [Venezuela’s] oil reserves … but rather the currency in which they are traded. By breaking the commercial and financial blockade and negotiating crude oil outside the dollarized system, Venezuela opened a real breach in the petrodollar monopoly that had existed since 1974.”

A report from Francisco Delgado Rodríguez states that the United States “had no choice but to leave the entire [Venezuelan] government intact” and claims too that “controlling the world’s main oil reserve, in Venezuela, serves to sustain the dominance of petrodollars. Without that, everything else will go downhill sooner rather than later.”

According to middleeastmonitor.com, “Venezuela holds the highest proven oil deposits in the world, with a reserve of about 303 billion barrels,  or about 17 per cent of world reserves, far surpassing Saudi Arabia.” Plus, the fact of “Maduro selling oil in and avoiding the use of the dollar was a direct threat to the Petrodollar system, which had been the foundation of the American global economic hegemony over the past five decades.”

Realities intrude. One is that the U.S. government after 1971 was no longer setting the dollar’s value in terms of gold. Inflation emerged, and in 1974 Henry Kissinger struck a deal with Saudi Arabia, the world’s major oil producer and exporter. The U.S. government would protect the Kingdom militarily and require that Saudi Arabia demand dollars in payment for the oil it sells, also that Saudi Arabia invest 80% of its oil revenue in U.S.
Treasury and corporate securities and bonds.

The requirement that nations buy Saudi oil with dollars stimulated demand for dollars. Increased demand has enabled the U.S. government to borrow money at lower interest rates than do other borrowers.

Most importantly for purposes here, the dollar, the world’s dominant currency, fuels the commercialization of petroleum. The linkage of one to the other, the so-called petrodollar system, accounts for U.S. power over the world economy.

According to economist Michael Hudson, “Control over oil is one of its key methods for achieving unipolar control over the world’s broad trade and dollarized financial arrangements” He adds that “Venezuela … has been supplying 5% of China’s oil needs.”

Analyst Kasper Bjørkskov explains that, from 2018 on, “Venezuela has sold 100% of its oil exports to China, with transactions settled in yuan, not dollars. Moreover, Venezuela became an official BRICS+ partner nation in 2024, gaining access to the bloc’s alternative payment systems.”

As of January 2025, Saudi Arabia itself was selling oil to China in exchange for yuan.

Bjørkskov concludes that, “Venezuela represents an existential threat to the petrodollar system, and by extension, to American global power itself. … This is about the slow-motion collapse of the architecture that has supported American power for half a century: the dollar’s role as the world’s dominant reserve currency. And Venezuela, improbably, has become ground zero in the fight to preserve it.”

Ultimately, the U.S. government has every reason to promote a setting that favors the production and export of oil in great quantities – oil that will be sold in dollars. It will stick with Venezuela’s current government. The task of keeping a historically-disobedient Venezuela in line is left for another day.

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

Cold War Context for the Killings of Four US Political Leaders / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Image Source: Orbis Books

South Paris, Maine

The imperialist U.S. state stops at nothing. Anything goes. Really? After victory in World War II and with U.S. manufacturing in high gear, the United States in the 1960s dominated world finances, trade, and politics. One dark cloud was the Soviet Union. Its industrialization had greatly expanded before the War and afterwards was recovering. The USSR was mentoring nations emerging from colonization.

Other challenges were: a maturing Chinese Revolution, socialist revolution in neighboring Cuba, and the Soviet Union’s and China’s nuclear capabilities. Economic bounty at home was no panacea for the country’s rampant racial and social inequalities. War was looming in Vietnam.

Resistance was spreading: California’s Free Speech Movement; Black people’s fight for political participation and constitutional guarantees, women’s demands for equality, rejection of U.S war in Vietnam, and alternative lifestyles.

Four high-profile political figures were murdered: President John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy. Agents of the U.S. government were responsible. Individually or together, the victims had denounced war in Vietnam, possession and potential use of nuclear weapons, racial and economic oppression, and colonialism.

James Douglass reports on the assassinations. His JFK and the Unspeakable, first appearing in 2008, tells of the murder of President Kennedy. Douglass’s new book, Martyrs to the Unspeakable (Orbis Press), explores the killings of the other three leaders.

He states at the outset that, “Because they asked why, turned to create a better world, and were willing to die for it, they were shot down …They were targeted to keep us from realizing our movement for a more just and peaceful world.” Douglass regards them as witnesses and martyrs. They knew they would die.

He continues: “The method of those four movement-shattering assassinations of the sixties had its root in the criminal conduct of their nation in World War II. The leveling of cities by U.S. fire-bombings in Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, by nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki …devastated the hope of humanity for a better world … As leaders for change, [they] had to be stopped to prevent a rising countermovement from spreading across the world, ending the Cold War and initiating a new era of justice and peace. U.S. security agencies thought they had no choice.”

He writes that the nuclear attack in 1945, “turned me toward Mohandas Gandhi, who had said the Bomb (sic) had in fact continued the war in a more terrible form under the cloak of peace.” Douglass takes Gandhi’s “experiment with truth” as his model for non-violent political struggle. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. Douglass published Gandhi and the Unspeakable: his Final Experiment with Truth” (Orbis) In 2012.

Catholic Workers Movement founder Dorothy Day spoke at the college Douglass was attending. Her influence inspired his lifelong dedication to opposing war and nuclear weapons. He and his wife Shelley in 1993 founded a Catholic Worker hospitality house in Birmingham, Alabama. They live and work there still.

In his crowded, detail-filled new book, Douglass documents the doings and thinking of victims and their associates, U.S. intelligence and security operatives, Soviet officials, and many others. He gained information from his subjects’ speeches and writings, their colleagues’ recollections, news reports, commentary from biographers and observers, interviews he conducted, and declassified government documents, notably from the FBI.

The book has three sections: “The Witness,” “The Way,” and “The Why.” The first two of them offer historical segments on various episodes in his subjects’ lives. The pace quickens as their deaths draw near. He records the doings of government agents plus aspects of the wider political and international context. His third section deals with the convergence of Malcolm X and MLK – so alarming to government officials – and to the interaction among JFK, RFK, and Soviet officials that ended the October (1962) Missile Crisis.

Bits of each victim’s history crop up in all three sections. Repetitions helped this writer absorb and understand a complicated narrative extending across time and space. The book’s voluminous footnotes are essential reading.

Appearing below are summaries of key narratives in the book that are revealing as to how and why the three political leaders died. The aim is to highlight important themes and illustrate the kind of information appearing in the book.

Malcolm X at home and abroad

Fidel Castro came to New York in September 1960 for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Malcolm X arranged for Castro and his party to transfer from the Shelburne Hotel downtown to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. The first hotel charged excessively for “damages” and the State Department was restricting the Cubans’ movements.

Much to the delight of Harlem residents, Malcolm was soon conferring amiably with Castro at the Hotel Theresa. Some of the U.S. government’s most disliked foreign leaders were visiting Castro at the hotel, among them: Premier Khrushchev of the USSR, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Eisenhower government, whose agents were monitoring Castro, had been upstaged, and Malcolm X would pay.

Malcolm in 1964 made a pilgrimage to Mecca, which is obligatory for Muslims. At the time, he was shifting his focus from fighting U.S. racial oppression to advocacy for brotherhood among all peoples and for human rights for all. Having explained his ideas of African-American and African unity to the Algerian ambassador in Ghana, he heard the official say, “Brother Malcolm, that sort of leaves me out. I am a Muslim brother and a revolutionary, but I am not black.” Malcolm X was learning.

Touring Africa that year, always tracked by the CIA, he conferred with leaders of the newly independent nations. In July at an African Unity Summit in Cairo, Malcolm presented and gained approval for a proposal from his newly formed Organization of African-American Unity. It asked African nations to introduce a petition to the United Nations seeking judgment on human rights violations by the U.S. government.

Martin Luther King gets his revolutionary bearings

The FBI surveilled King and tapped his phone. The agency discovered embarrassing incidents calculated to provoke him to suicide. J. Edger Hoover learned that a member of the Communist Party USA was King’s most important outside advisor and that a current member was administering King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). U.S. officials, President Kennedy included, demanded that King dismiss the individuals. He took no action.

Speaking to the SCLC a month after his watershed Riverside Church address on April 4, 1967, King stated – as quoted by Douglass – that, “I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights … Now, when we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that …we have been in a reform movement … After Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution.”

Malcolm X, having joined the protest in Selma and now taking his human rights and brotherhood campaigns overseas, was moving closer to MLK, and the latter was reciprocating. Douglass asserts that, “Together Malcolm and Martin could lead the world to a human rights revolution … [They were] “revolutionary prophets.” The prospect of their alliance was anathema to the U.S. government.

Scapegoats

Government functionaries arranged for the killings of three of these four high-profile victims. In Malcolm’s case, they farmed out the job. Malcolm X, a minister at a mosque associated with the Nation of Islam (NOI), had criticized NOI’s leadership. The FBI, with New York Police Department assistance, aggravated the growing hostility through telephone surveillance, paid informers, and faked, accusatory letters to the NOI. Malcolm was eventually forced out. NOI assassins killed him in February 1965.

In the three other instances, the CIA and/or the FBI found and prepared substitute defendants, so-called patsies. Douglass documented the pains taken by the U.S. government to assure that James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Lee Harvey Oswald would be accepted as real perpetrators. That documentation by Douglass and others has contributed mightily to establishing the truth about the assassinations. Douglass’s findings on Oswald appear in his JFK book.

“Cold War agencies” had identified the imprisoned James Earl Ray’s potential as a patsy. They enabled his escape, equipped him with documents and a new identity, installed him across the street from the motel where MLK would be assassinated, placed a dysfunctional rifle close by, and arranged for the Memphis police to be far away. After the murder, in 1968, they delivered Ray to Montreal, organized his travel to Europe and finally to London, so he could be arrested.

Much information came to light in the assassination conspiracy trial that in 1999 delivered a verdict favoring the King family’s wrongful death law suit. Douglass, who attended the trial throughout, regards lawyer William Pepper, the family’s representative at the trial, as an emblematic witness to the truth.

Douglass later interviewed Glenda Grabow, witness at the trial. She had been a friend of “Raul,” who guided Ray in his wanderings in the United States and implemented arrangements in Memphis for King’s murder. She told the author about Raul’s criminal connections and of Raul’s confession to her of his role in the killing of King and of his part in the assassination of President Kennedy.

Palestinian refugee Sirhan Sirhan took the fall for the killer of Senator Robert Kennedy. Douglass indicates U.S. agents recruited Sirhan, subjected him to mind-control drugs, and prepared him both to adopt a hypnotic state on demand and to shoot while hypnotized. He was present in a Los Angeles hotel on June 5, 1968 as RFK celebrated his victory as a presidential candidate in California’s Democratic primary.

Witnesses cited by Douglass indicated Sirhan had been placed a few feet in front of Kennedy and that his pistol shots went astray and hit bystanders. Douglass regards that information as consistent with the opinion of psychologists who interviewed the imprisoned Sirhan after his trial. They indicated Sirhan had been hypnotized and that his inability to remember the shooting afterwards suggests exactly that.

Douglass regards as crucially important the pathologist’s report saying that the fatal bullet actually came from a gun fired only inches behind Kennedy’s head.

The CIA team, through trickery, had compromised defense attorney Grant Cooper’s integrity. As a result, Cooper cooperated with the prosecutors in order that he not be prosecuted himself. That was why, according to Douglass, that Cooper agreed not to present the full pathology report to the jury.

Douglass points also to the bullying of a witness by a former CIA operative as he conducted a polygraph interview. The witness ended up backing away from earlier testimony to the district attorney that she had seen the presumed shooter, the real one, arriving at the hotel. Her testimony was never made available to the defense.

RFK evolves

RFK devoted his inaugural Senate speech in 1965 to a call for elimination of nuclear weapons. Sympathetic to anti-colonialism, he believed independence forces would overcome U.S. forces in Vietnam just as African independence forces had neutralized the military power of French colonialism. As reported by Douglass, Daniel Ellsberg asked RFK why President Kennedy opposed “American ground combat in Vietnam … What made him so smart?” RFK replied that, “Because we there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it.” The brothers had visited Indochina that year.

NAACP lawyer Marian Wright in 1967 brought RFK to the Mississippi Delta where, first-hand, he saw the suffering of poor Black children. Wright would soon convey RFK’s message to Martin King that poor whites and Blacks together must bring their struggles to Washington and stay. Accordingly, King’s Poor People’s Campaign was to have gathered in DC shortly after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968.

Douglass explains that in the last year of his life, RFK “deepened in his resolution to do all he could for his people, ‘poor people coming to stay’ in Washington, coming from the urban ghetto and the Indian reservations and Appalachian coal mines.” He describes RFK as “a peace president need[ing] the people’s movement, marching ahead of the government for justice and peace, all the way. Where the people lead, as they were doing through Martin King and Malcolm X, a peace president … will have the strength to follow.”

In the end

The present volume and Douglass’s earlier book on JFK establish U.S. government responsibility for the deaths of four U.S. leaders who were oriented to peace and human equality. His documentation of U.S. agencies’ careful preparations for the assassinations makes the case. The book teaches that the U.S. government, when pushed, stops at nothing in pursuit of imperialist purposes and repression of progressive political causes. That message has revolutionary implications.

Here’s why. Left-leaning activists have a choice. They either compromise and perhaps gain amelioration of problems or else they go all out for fundamental change, thus inviting horrific consequences. But these are not inevitable. The outcome turns on who ends up with political power.

Douglass establishes that one or more of the murdered leaders had opted for peace, no nuclear weapons, human equality, and a world without oppression. These are exactly the causes that, to reach fruition, would be taken up by masses of people exerting political force. In these circumstances, the aforementioned activists would be gaining a measure of protection. They might even win.

Having accumulated and correlated information on a massive scale, Douglass offers a report that is very bad news, but not entirely. He writes that “awakening to reality – from our madness of empires, assassination, climate change and nuclear war – can offer hope to us all.” The drift of his message goes toward those masses of people working their way.

The aspirations of the doomed political leaders he writes about offer the promise of one or another kind of revolutionary change. Telling this story in the language of facts and historical inquiry amply qualifies Douglass as a practitioner of revolutionary journalism, a trade recently on display courtesy of George Burchett, son of “rebel journalist” Wilfred Burchett.

Lastly, former theology professor Douglass invokes moral values. He states that “initiating a nuclear war …[is] the darkest evil one can imagine.” He cites Martin King’s mention of both “life proceeding along the arc of the moral universe” and “a revolution of values.”

Ideas of right and wrong most certainly draw people into political action. They may sustain activists later on, as they gain experience and awareness of new realties, but not always. A call-out that something is wrong comes first – for Douglass now and for abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison long ago.

Their shared intensity of purpose manifests in Garrison’s call-out in the first issue of his Liberator magazine (1831): “I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Douglass’s approach to his work and beliefs mirrors that of Garrison, without the dramatic flourish.

Loose ends remain. Douglass inserts the word “unspeakable” in the titles of his books. He uses it in the sense given to the word by Thomas Merton – Trappist monk, writer, and implacable critic of U.S. wars. For Merton, unspeakable “is the void that contradicts everything that is said even before the words are said; the void … [that is] the hollowness of the abyss.” In his text, Douglass uses the term sparingly with no elaboration as to its meaning.

Douglass concludes with reference to Palestine and “an unspeakable life circling back to its beginning – Count Folke Bernadotte.” His book starts with a detailed look at President Kennedy’s strenuous but failed efforts to prevent Israel from developing nuclear weapons.

It ends with a description of Bernadotte’s work and fate as United Nations mediator for Palestine in 1948. He worked to place Jerusalem under UN protection, establish boundaries, protect Palestinian refugees, and ensure their “right to return home” – and was assassinated. The shooter later on became the “closest friend” of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founder and first prime minister.

James W. Douglass, Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Martin, Malcolm, and RFK, (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2025) ISBN 9781626986268, Pp 590, http://www.orbisbooks.com

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

US Pirate Attacks in the Caribbean Will Aggravate Emergency in Cuba / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

At least eight US warships have been deployed to the Caribbean Sea | Source: venezuelanalysis.com

South Paris, Maine

Hitting two birds with one stone, the U.S. government, top-level disturber of the peace now brandishing a Caribbean armada, strikes out against Venezuela – and Cuba too, indirectly. The U.S. military on December 10 seized a large oil tanker in the Caribbean bound for China. The ship carrying Venezuelan oil had previously offloaded 50,000 barrels of oil to a smaller ship for delivery to Cuba.

Cuba depends on oil supplied by Venezuela. High U.S. officials want to cut off Cuba’s access to oil from Venezuela and thereby deliver a decisive blow against Cuba’s government. Presently six other tankers sanctioned by the U.S. government and carrying Venezuelan oil are at high risk of being seized.

Cuba’s Foreign Relations Ministry issued a statement saying in part that, “This act of piracy and maritime terrorism … represents U.S. escalation against Venezuela’s legitimate right freely to use and to trade its natural resources with other nations, including hydrocarbon supplies to Cuba …[Such] actions have a negative impact on Cuba and intensify the United States’ policy of maximum pressure and economic suffocation, with a direct impact on the national energy system and, consequently, on the daily lives  our people.”

This reference to a “policy of maximum pressure” invites a look at ominous developments unfolding in Cuba as the maritime drama plays out.  Cuba’s government has recently resorted to measures that are extraordinary enough as to indicate worsening crisis in Cuba. The U.S economic blockade has led to shortages of supplies, food, and income. The impact over the course of decades has been wearing and cumulative. Now death rates are up and newer generations are decimated by migration.

Recent measures taken by Cuba’s government, explored below, strongly suggest Cubans face an emergency. U.S. activists responding to their government’s warlike preparations in the Caribbean – another emergency – have good reason to urgently build their solidarity not only with Venezuela but with Cuba too.  What follows here is a report on extreme measures recently taken by Cuba’s government. The object is to portray these measures as so unusual as to confirm the existence of Cuba’s last-ditch situation and, that way, motivate Cuba’s U.S. supporters toward action.

Dollarization

Cuba’s government recently introduced monetary regulations allowing citizens to buy and sell some goods and services using the U.S. dollar.  A report published by a government-oriented news service refers to a “pragmatic recognition of today’s reality” and to “a partial and controlled dollarization of [Cuba’s] economy.” The government will be “allowing certain economic actors to trade in foreign currencies under specific circumstances.”

The new regulations apply to transactions with foreign manufacturers, investors, traders, shippers, financial institutions – and to families abroad sending remittances. The immediate goal is “to directly incentivize the generation of foreign exchange earnings, allowing those who contribute to this generation to keep a significant portion of their earnings in hard currency.” 

The broader purpose is “to increase national production, improve the availability of goods and services, and create conditions for a future return to the strengthened Cuban peso.” Policy-makers want to stimulate exports, augment the supply of goods available in Cuba, and increase both national production and foreign investment. Another goal, referred to as “[r]eduction of distortions,” is elimination of informal or illegal foreign currency markets.

The new regulations allow “authorized commercial establishments … [and those] domestic suppliers supporting export or import substitution activities to use dollars and other foreign currencies in international transactions.” Parties permitted to use dollars are authorized self-employed workers, privately owned businesses, cooperatives, and state enterprises.

These parties have permission to deposit dollars in Cuban banks – dollars accumulated from exports of goods and services, from on-line sales and from sales realized through the Mariel Special Development Zone. Banks will accept dollars purchased from foreign currency traders and dollars sent as remittances from families abroad.

The government’s new authorization of the U.S. dollar as a national currency may well be unsettling to Cubans perceiving implications of a dependency relationship with the northern neighbor. The necessity to have done so reflects the urgency of Cuba’s current situation.     

Pressing needs

Overtones of a new situation entered into the decision of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee at its meeting on December 13 to postpone the 9th Party Congress set for April 2026. Party Congresses have taken place every five years.

Making the announcement, Leader of the Revolution Raul Castro emphasized the need to “dedicate all the country’s resources, as well as the effort and energy of the Party, Government, and State cadres, to resolving current problems, and to dedicate 2026 to recovering as much as possible.” 

Likewise, Cuba’s Council of State announced on December 10 that the upcoming session of the National Assembly of People’s Power set to begin on December 18 would be meeting for that day only, by video conference. In 2024, Assembly delegates met in person for two sessions for a total of  24 days.

A spokesperson explaining the shift stated that, as is “known by all, the electricity situation and the current state of the economy, and also difficulties with the [multi-virus] pandemic and the health situation … create a complex situation for carrying out the Assembly. There is the problem too of the rational use of resources.” 

The 11th plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee taking place on December 13 was also a one-day session; video conferencing provided access for members living outside Havana. Concluding the meeting, First Secretary Miguel Díaz-Canel, president of Cuba, mentioned particularly that:

At the end of the third quarter, GDP has fallen by more than 4%, inflation is skyrocketing, the economy is partially paralyzed, thermal power generation is critical, prices remain high, deliveries of rationed food are not being met, and agricultural and food industry production is not meeting the needs of the population. There are also the costly losses caused by the devastating passage of Hurricane Melissa …

Donald Trump has just launched his pirates onto a Venezuelan oil tanker, shamelessly seizing the cargo like a common thief. This was the latest episode in an alarming series of attacks on small boats and extrajudicial executions of more than eighty people, based on unproven accusations and amid an unprecedented and threatening military deployment in a declared Zone of Peace …

[However,] we are the children of a people who carried out a revolution 90 miles from the greatest imperial power on the planet and who have successfully defended it for more than six decades … Only a heroic people who defend a Revolution, who have the example of the history of that Revolution, are capable of enduring what we have been living through all these years.”

Henry Lowendorf of the U.S. Peace Council, queried for this article, highlights the central role of the U.S. government. He states via email that, “The U.S. has been trying to crush the Cuban revolution for over 60 years. So far it has failed. But with new intensity and the newly accelerated war on Venezuela, the U.S. is desperately working to cut off all life support to Cuba.”

A dark setting brightens a bit with good news out of California, as reported in the Cuban press. The Los Angeles Hands off Cuba Committee led in organizing a shipment from Los Angeles to Cuba by way of Jacksonville, Florida of a 40-foot container with medical supplies worth $1 million.  Participating were members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and International Association of Machinists, along with Global Health Partners and the PanAmerican Medical Association.

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

Fixing Healthcare Failures in the US and in Lewiston, Maine / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Photo credit: Tim Wheeler/People’s World

South Paris, Maine

Efforts to reform U.S. healthcare fall short. Preventable deaths are excessive, access to care is often impossible, costs are high, and profiteering thrives. Individual solutions replace common purpose. Hope lies with an activated working class fighting for equitable, accessible, humane, and effective healthcare.

Maine people are now collecting signatures for a petition on the 2026 ballot demanding that the state promote universal healthcare. The campaign coincides with costs of Medicare insurance premiums increasing after January 1, 2026. That’s when subsidies provided under the Affordable Care Act are reduced. The campaign will react also to recent federal legislation that removed a million or so low-income Americans from Medicaid coverage.

The precariousness of current healthcare arrangements is evident to Maine voters who are aware of a painful transition taking place in Lewiston, Maine’s second largest city, population 39,187. Lewiston’s Central Maine Healthcare corporation (CMH) has been losing $32.5 million annually over five years. California-based Prime Healthcare, the fifth largest U.S. profit-making health system and owner of 51 hospitals in 14 states, is buying CMH.

Takeover

Serving almost half a million people in its region, CMH operates Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC), two smaller hospitals in the area, and also physicians’ practices, urgent care offices, nursing homes, and counselling centers in 40 locations. CMMC, established in 1891, has 250 beds and employs 300 physicians representing most specialties. The agreement to change ownership, announced in January 2025, is about to be finalized.

Prime Healthcare will invest $150 million in CMH over 10 years, while assigning CMH to its Prime Healthcare Foundation, a supposedly non-profit entity with $2.1 billion in assets. Prime Healthcare has a record. 

The corporation has periodically faced charges of overcharging, services dropped and safety standards ignored. After 2008, accusations surfaced in California of underfeeding hospital patients, allowing for post-surgery infections, and hospitalizing emergency room patients to increase revenues. Prime Healthcare in 2018 paid $65million in fines to settle accusations of Medicare fraud, over $35 million in 2021 for kickbacks and overcharging, and $1.25 million for false Medicare claims submitted by two Pennsylvania hospitals.

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, recently warned against private equity companies owning health centers and controlling practitioners. It cited “unmanageable debt”, “increased costs for patients and payers,” poor patient care, and distressed healthcare workers.

Maine’s legislature on June 22 enacted  legislation establishing a one-year moratorium on private equity companies (and real estate investment trusts) owning or operating hospitals in the state.

Troubles in city and state

Other Maine health systems are also experiencing big financial troubles. Northern Light Health, with debt of $620 million, recently closed an acute-care hospital in Waterville and announced a new partnership with the Harvard Pilgram system in Massachusetts. Lewiston’s St. Mary’s Health System closed its obstetrical services, sold off properties, and is laying off employees. The New England-wide Covenant Health system, owner of St. Mary’s since 1990, indicates covering the hospital’s unpaid bills amounting to $88 million is not “sustainable.”

One media report suggests Maine people aware of layoffs, health institutions’ financial troubles and diminishing services are “wondering about the future of their health care.”  Medicaid funding reductions, shortages of primary care providers, and trimmed-down health centers have led to lengthy wait-times for appointments, long travel distances to new providers, and no care for many.

Lewiston, once a textile and shoe manufacturing center with a large population of French-speaking workers, migrants from Quebec, is “the poorest city in Maine.” Fallout from CMMC’s financial problems and reduced federal funding threaten the healthcare of people whose lives are already precarious.

Eleven percent of Lewiston residents are migrants from Africa, mostly from Somalia. The 2023 poverty rate for the city’s Somali people was 32%. For Lewiston it was 17.7% and for Maine  10.4%. Poverty for Androscoggin County, which includes Lewiston, was 13% in 2023; child poverty was 16.6%.  Life expectancy in Lewiston was 75.5 years in 2020, in Maine, 77.8 years.

Neither Maine or Lewiston is bereft of resources. Apart from remote rural and forested areas, Maine has well-functioning hospitals and competent practitioners.  Experienced and concerned agencies and organizations provide social services and support for health-impaired Mainers.

Maine ranks 17th  among the states in “cost, access, and quality of Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) coverage for low-income individuals.” Another survey has Maine in 23rd place in “per person state public health funding” for 2023. A ranking of “states most supportive of people in poverty” puts Maine in 12th place.

Maine with its healthcare difficulties is not an outlier within the United States. Nevertheless, uncertainties prevail statewide, and Lewiston is in low-grade crisis mode. Planning is incremental, limited to localities, and accepting of the status quo. Collective action is not a consideration for those dealing with the crisis –providers, hospitals, recipients of care, and the general public. Individual initiative is the rule, as per U.S. habits.  

Wider perspective

Those healthcare flaws and difficulties evident in Maine exist throughout the United States. Awareness of the consequences is crucial to building support for necessary change.  

Too many people die. US infant mortality in 2021 ranked 33rd among 38 countries belonging to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the world’s wealthiest countries. U.S. life expectancy in 2025 ranked 48th in the world. U.S. maternal mortality rate in 2023 was in 59th..

Inequalities are pervasive, as reflected in the poverty and life-expectancy variations in Maine. The huge flow of money through the system highlights inequality; it takes place at levels far removed from the depths of U.S. society. U.S. health expenditures per person in 2023 were $14,885; the average in other countries comparable by wealth was $7,371. Health expenditure as percent of GDP in US was 17.6% in 2023; the figure for all other wealthy countries was lower than Switzerland’s 12.0%.

Incentives for profiteering are many. While administrative costs represented only 3.9% of total Medicaid spending in 2023 and only 1.3% of all traditional Medicarespending in 2021, they accounted for “about 30%” of the cost of private health insurance in 2023. Presumably, profit-taking is embedded within those high administrative costs.

Critics of US healthcare, writing recently in Britain’s Lancet medical journal, assert that “profit-seeking has become preeminent.” They add that:

“Health resources of enormous worth … have come under the control of firms obligated to prioritize shareholders’ interests … The potential for profits has attracted new, even more aggressive corporate players—private equity firms … [These have] a single-minded focus on short-term profit” … The US health-care financing system makes profitability a mandatory condition for survival, even for non-profit hospitals.” 

Realization dawns that adverse social and economic factors are tearing apart the benevolent purposes of healthcare. They make people sick. A report of the American Academy of Actuaries issued in 2020 says that, “30% to 50% of health outcomes are attributable to SDOH (social determinants of health), while only 10% to 20% are attributable to medical care.” A public health study shows that, “Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance.”

There is a way

That which has led to a floundering care system belongs to no one and weighs upon everyone, more so on the dispossessed and marginalized. It’s an epidemic, in the original Greek meaning of that word, “upon the people.”  Corrective action would therefore derive from and apply to all people all together. Healthcare itself supplies the model.

For many, physician John Snow is the “father of public health.” In London in 1854, Snow investigated an outbreak of cholera, a water-borne infectious disease. Suspecting that water from the Broad Street pump was the culprit, he removed the handle. The epidemic stopped. He had acted preventatively on behalf of the many, not for individuals.

Comes the Cuban Revolution and preventative and curative medical care are joined in one public health system. Political change allowed for that.

Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), pathology giant and one of the founders of scientific medicine, was on the case almost two centuries earlier.  This leader of the Berlin Revolutionary Committee was behind the barricades in the revolutionary year of 1848. In 1847-1847, Virchow studies a typhus epidemic killing inhabitants of Upper Silesia. He notes in his report that:  

“A devastating epidemic and a terrible famine simultaneously ravaged a poor, ignorant and apathetic population. … No one would have thought such a state of affairs possible in a state such as Prussia, … we must not hesitate to draw all those conclusions that can be drawn. . . I myself …  was determined, … to help in the demolition of the old edifice of our state. [The conclusions] can be summarized briefly in three words: Full unlimited democracy.”

Virchow writes that, “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale… The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor.”

If democracy was the fix then for an epidemic, it’s the fix now for the current epidemic of disordered healthcare. The people themselves would rise to the occasion. And how are they going to do that?

The role of profiteering in U.S. healthcare is a reminder of the capitalist surroundings of the struggle at hand. Aroused working and marginalized people are on one side and the rich and powerful on the other.

Does capitalism need to go in order that healthcare changes? Not yet, suggests international health analyst Vicente Navarro. In explaining U.S. failure to achieve universal healthcare, he observes that, “The U.S. is the only major capitalist developed country without a national health program, and without a mass-based socialist party. It is also one of the countries with weaker unions, which is to a large degree responsible for the lack of a mass-based working-class party.”

That clarifies. The working class is crucial to repairing a dismal situation. Its partisans will work on strengthening the labor movement in size and militancy. Working class political formations will have their day.

Martin Luther King has the last word. Speaking to health workers in 1966 King remarked that, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane because it often results in physical death.”  His reference to “forms of inequality” implies the existence of the capitalist system giving rise to such forms. Capitalism fosters early deaths as well as racism.

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 and lives in rural Maine.

Electoral Coup Surfaces in Honduras amid Signs of US Intervention / By W.T. Whitney Jr.

Photo: Xiomara Castro de Zelaya/X

South Paris, Maine

Elections taking place November 30 in Honduras will decide the country’s next president and make-up of the national assembly. Current President Xiomara Castro of the democratic socialist Party of Liberty and Refoundation (Libre), in office since 2022, is limited to one term. Libre Party presidential candidate Rixi Moncada was finance minister and then defense minister in Castro’s government.

The mantra circulates that ten families rule in Honduras and hold most of its wealth. Their influence is such that left-leaning opposition forces can count on the most forceful kind of pushback.

Businessman Manuel Zelaya turned progressive politician was Honduras’ president from 2006 until June 2009, when a military coup deposed him, with U.S. help. He had called for a minimum wage, mild agrarian reform and a constituent assembly. Zelaya is now general coordinator of the Libre Party, founded in 2011 in reaction to the coup. He is President Xiomara Castro’s husband.

Xiomara Castro’s unsuccessful candidacies for president in 2013 and 2017 encountered electoral fraud and violent attacks orchestrated by the well-ensconced National and Liberal Parties. Her overwhelming electoral victory in 2021 resulted from the association of incumbent president Juan Orlando Hernández and his National Party with corruption and narcotrafficking. Hernández and his brother, convicted on narcotics and weapons charges, are serving long prison terms in the United States.Hernández’s second term was constitutionally illegal.

Current polls give the Libre Party candidate Rixi Moncada an even chance for victory, or a small majority. A plot emerged a month ahead of the voting.

On October 29, Attorney General Johel Zelaya reported he had transferred leaked audio recordings, with transcriptions, to the Public Minister for investigation. Libre Party’s Marlon Ochoa, one of three members of Honduras’ National Electoral Council, discovered them. Each councilor represents a political party. Voices on the recordings allegedly are those of Councilor Cossette López of the National Party; Tomas Zambrano, head of the National Party’s congressional bench; and an unnamed military officer.

According to Johel Zelaya, the conversations told of plans for hiring transportation companies and personnel to transfer voting results on election day, inserting agents among election observers, interrupting data transmission, prematurely announcing rightwing Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla as the winner, sowing suspicion in the media about voting processes, and announcing favorable partial results as a potential “alibi for impugning and suspending the process.”

According to an observer, “The recordings revealed … a plan to pressure external actors, notably the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, not to recognize any victories by Libre. This would turn an internal dispute into an international recognition crisis.” The report has councilor Cossette López-Osorio exclaiming, “We’ll use the tools that the people at the Embassy gave us.”

One Honduran observer says Salvador Nasralla is the “choice of the most reactionary spheres in Washington,” another that he has promised to “implement a security plan” similar to that of dictatorial Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Nasralla spent one third of the pre-election period traveling in the United States and Spain, presumably seeking support.

The Libre party on October 13 announced a “permanent mobilization … [against] the bipartisan plan to manipulate the coming elections.” The Party’s general coordinator Manuel Zelaya declared, “We must prepare ourselves to defeat the electoral coup … They know that we already reversed the coup in 2009 and that we will never go back!”

Rixi Moncada, speaking at a rally on November 9, reviewed gains achieved during Castro’s presidency, described her own program for governing, and highlighted a new twist in the coup saga. The National Election Council that day had carried out a nationwide simulation of election day processes. Only 1556 of 4362 voting locations actually transmitted voting records to a central location. Only 23.7% of biometric devices functioned. The results mirror the scenario presented by the recordings.  

Moncada outlined plans; 12 Libre Party activists from each of Honduras’s 18 departments would remain in Tegucigalpa until election day. They would constitute a “commission … our battlefront in defense of victory.” Party activists on that day would transfer voting records to the various Party headquarters where votes would be counted.

Context is important.  The U.S. government has long maintained hundreds of troops and several military units at Honduras’ Soto Cano airfield. They constitute the largest U.S. base in Central America, which facilitates U.S. interventions in regional affairs, as when the U.S. government in the 1980s sent supplies to Contra paramilitaries fighting in Nicaragua.

U.S. economic interests center on the mining, tourism, and agricultural export sectors. Honduras, regional center for narcotics transfer to the United States, qualifies as a target of U.S. drug war activities, but also as staging area for military interventions, for which drug war is a frequent pretext.  

President Castro has irritated U.S. officials. She cut ties with Taiwan in favor of the People’s Republic of China and supported Venezuelan President Maduro against U.S. accusations that his 2024 election victory was fraudulent.  Accusing the U.S. ambassador of meddling with Honduras’ military forces in August 2024, she mentioned cancelation of the binational extradition treaty.  Reacting to U.S. plans for massive deportation of migrants from Central America, Castro in January 2025 threatened to expel U.S. troops.

Her Libre Party government scored successes:  new highways, new hospitals, reforestation, subsidized electrical power, electricity for rural households, educational scholarships, loans for thousands of farmers, seeds and fertilizers for 450,000 of them, community orchards, 5000 refurbished education centers, and land redistribution.

Honduras’ murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants dropped from an average of 41.7 during President Hernández last term to 27.2 under Castro. Families living in poverty dropped from 73.6% to 62.9%. The previous government had promoted so-called “zones for employment and economic development.” Castro ended the scheme that gave control of municipalities to foreign investors and deprived residents of self-government and legal rights.

Candidate Rixi Moncada, 60 years old, came from a working-class family, taught in rural and city schools, studied law and became a practitioner and teacher of criminal law. She served the government of President Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009) as secretary of labor and social security. She managed the government-owned electric company.

Moncada indicated that, as president, she will “defend workers and state sovereignty and democratize the economic system.” She would “transform the justice system, combat impunity, reform the public ministry and strengthen the courts … [and revive] “strategic state enterprises.” She would support public healthcare and education – “without privatization.”

On November 12, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau indicated  the U.S. government “will respond rapidly and firmly to any attack on the integrity of the electoral process in Honduras.” At once the U.S. Embassy broadly disseminated Landau’s message.

Interviewed on television that day, Salvador Nasralla asked “What would happen if these people (from the Libre Party) tried to steal votes?” His response: “Those ships that are soon going to take over Venezuela are going to come and target Honduras.”

“U.S. interference in Honduras’ electoral processes is nothing new,” says veteran reporter Giorgio Trucchi. Quoting activist Luis Méndez, he adds that, “We are facing the old traditional politics, allied with US interference, large corporations, and business sectors attached to the neoliberal agenda with its project of dispossession and dismantling of the public sector …For Libre to continue governing is a setback for the geostrategic goals of U.S. domination in Latin America. We will somehow see this reflected in the elections.”

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 and lives in rural Maine.

The United Arab Emirates Enables Human Catastrophe in Sudan, with the US in Tow / By W. T. Whitney, Jr.

Photo credit Z

South Paris, Maine

Beginning in April 2023, war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has caused humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. Some 150,000 people have died and 14 million Sudanese – Sudan’s population is 51 million – are displaced internally or in neighboring countries. Over 24 million suffer acute food insecurity. Famine is rampant in Darfur, the district in northwestern Sudan most afflicted by war and hunger.

We look at causes, foreign intervention in particular. The Sudanese people are victims of top-down oppression inflicted by big imperialists, lesser ones, and Sudan’s elite.  

The Bashir government in 2013 created the Rapid Support Forces from the Janjaweed formations and installed General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti,” as leader.

Protests by democratic forces beginning in December 2018 led to joint civilian-military rule. A coup in April 2019 removed Bashir from power. Subsequently, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the armed forces and now the country’s president, and deputy military commander Hemedti became co-leaders of a transitional military council.

Turmoil continued, as did agitation for democratic change. In October, 2021, the two generals, having instigated another coup, established themselves as the country’s sole rulers. Al-Burhan and Hemedti subsequently disagreed on how to incorporate the RSF into Sudan’s army and on who would command the RSF. Reacting, Hemedti in April, 2023 provoked yet another coup. The RSF was soon occupying Khartoum, Sudan’s capitol city.

The Sudanese army recaptured a devastated Khartoum in March 2025. The RSF, having laid siege to El Fasher for 18 months and defeated the Sudanese army, took over that city of 700,000 inhabitants in October, 2025. Killings skyrocketed.

As of November 6, the Rapid Support Forces have agreed to a “humanitarian ceasefire” for three months proposed by the U.S., Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The Sudanese army rejected the truce, demanding  that the RSF withdraw from civilian areas and surrender their weapons.

Origins

African nations emerging from colonialism endured varying degrees of continuing oppression and differing kinds of instability. Even so, humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan and the killings seem to be unprecedented.

The country’s vulnerability shows in a destitute, divided population, military rule, and societal collapse. It stems from a long history of autocratic rulers and recurring coups before independence and afterwards, division between an Arab-oriented North and non-Arab South (leading to an independent South Sudan in 2011), and susceptibility to manipulation by outside actors.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has interests in Sudan. Mohammad Khansa, writing for al-akhbar.com, mentions that, “Sudanese gold fuels the RSF, and the UAE.” Newly discovered gold deposits account for 60% of the country’s exports. The UAE imported $2.29 billion worth of Sudanese gold in 2022. Ninety percent of the gold Sudan produces goes to the UAE.

Sudan, the “leading agricultural producer in both Africa and the Middle East” is the “breadbasket of the Arab world.” The UAE imports 90% of its food. UAE investors have fostered land grabs in Sudan and industrialized Sudan’s agricultural production.

Other UAE interests are:  management of key Sudanese ports on the Red Sea, UAE control of many Sudanese banks and the UAE’s use of the RSF as its proxy in competing with Saudi Arabian influence in Africa.

UAE intrusion

Explaining the UAE’s relationship with Sudan and the RSF, Husam Mahjoub, writing in Spectre Journal, states that, “The UAE’s role in Sudan is … part of a coherent, well-financed, and regionally expansive project: a sub-imperialist agenda that combines economic extraction, authoritarian alliance-building, and counterrevolutionary politics.” The UAE “viewed the Arab Spring [of 2011] as an existential threat to both the authoritarian regimes in the region and its own model of governance. …[The] UAE became an active counterrevolutionary force.”

The Sudanese people’s uprising in December 2018, prior to Bashir’s removal, continued “even after the October 2021 coup.” It was “democratic, civilian-led, and explicitly antimilitary.” Demands were “freedom, peace, social justice, civilian governance, and accountability.” According to Mahjoub, this “grassroots resistance posed a threat to both Sudan’s own elites and regional powers like the UAE.”  

The RSF has helped the UAE in two ways: its “capacity for violence—that is, a force willing to suppress protests, fight wars, and eliminate rivals” and “economic access, especially to Sudan’s lucrative gold trade, which the RSF increasingly controlled.”

“[N]ow the regional leader in the defense sector,” according to the Simpson Center, the UAE imports weapons and makes its own. UAE support for the RSF shows in weapons transferred to the paramilitaries.  Gold from the RSF allows the UAE to buy weapons from many countries, with a portion of them ending up with the RSF.

The weapons enter Sudan by irregular means across several borders, and the gold arrives in the UAE the same way.

The UK’s Campaign against Arms Trade points out that, although the UAE allows the RSF to commit genocide by providing weapons, “there have been no efforts to pressure the UAE or hold it to account, and massive US and French arms supplies to the Gulf dictatorship continue unabated.”

Back in the US

The Biden administration in January 2025 accused the Rapid Support Forces of genocide. In March, New York Representative Gregory Meeks introduced legislation prohibiting arms sales to countries supplying arms to the RSF or the Sudanese Army. The bill has 27 co-sponsors.

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen and California Representative Sara Jacobs reintroduced legislation in March prohibiting U.S. arms sales to the UAE for as long as that country sends arms to the RSF. There are no co-sponsors.

The Trump administration in May announced a $1.4 billion sale of weapons and military equipment to the UAE. In 2024, the UAE received U.S. weapons worth $1.2 billion.

Husam Mahjoub explains that the UAE, as a “strategic partner of the West, … a buyer of arms, a major collaborator with Israel’s genocidal regime, a conduit for intelligence, and a financial hub, … is too useful to punish.”

Useful indeed! Reporter Dan Alexander claims the UAE “has become a hub for the Trump Organization’s international expansion. …[The] president and his family have entered into at least nine agreements with ties to the gulf nation. Together, the ventures … will provide an estimated $500 million in 2025—and about $50 million annually for years into the future …The president’s offspring are plotting novel ways to use crypto mania to squeeze more money from their real-estate assets.”

Alexander quotes Eric Trump: “The UAE is the developers’ greatest dream because they never say ‘no’ to anything, …. There’s no place that has been more fun to work in than the UAE. I mean, if you want to build it, if you can dream it up, they allow you to do it.” Alexander’s article is titled “This Gulf Nation Is Powering Trump’s Moneymaking Machine.”

The Sudanese Communist Party issued a statement on October 29. Speaking for the victims, it says in part:

“Our Party stands clearly and decisively against the horrifying massacres being committed against civilians in the cities of El Fasher and Bara … [We] always affirm that what is happening is not merely a military struggle for power; rather, it represents a complex scene of conflict between the parasitic wings of capitalism within the country over power and resources …  The war is, at the same time, a regional/international/imperialist scheme aimed at weakening the Sudanese state and creating conditions for disintegration and division to deplete the capabilities of the people, the wealth of the country, and violate national sovereignty.” 

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 and lives in rural Maine.

Brazilian Workers Lead in Offering Solidarity to Venezuelans under US Attack / By W.T. Whitney Jr.

The leader of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), João Pedro Stédile, declares solidarity with the Venezualan government and people as they are threantened by a U.S. military intervention | Photo credit: brasildefato.com

South Paris, Maine

Since August, U.S. warships, fighter planes, and troops have deployed in Caribbean waters off Venezuela and in Puerto Rico. Venezuela’s neighboring countries in Latin America and the Caribbean area are reacting variously. Many oppose U.S. aggression, but at a distance.  Others are either non-committal or accepting.

Colombia and Brazil are backing Venezuela – or soon will be –  in very different ways. Recent remarks of João Pedro Stédile, co-founder and a director of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), warrant special attention.

U.S. attacks from the air have killed dozens of crew members of boats alleged to be carrying illicit drugs. U.S. accusations against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that he is a top-level drug dealer, serve as pretext. The U.S. government now offers a $50 million reward for his capture. The allegation that he heads the drug-dealing Cartel de los Soles is false. The cartel doesn’t exist, according to a United Nations report. A U.S. coup plotter recently claimed the CIA created the cartel.

President Trump recently indicated the CIA would be operating inside Venezuela. It’s widely assumed that the U.S. government wants control of Venezuela’s oil and other resources and is contriving to remove a government heading towards socialism.

Venezuela’s government is training militia troops by the millions. Venezuelan defense minister Vladimir Padrino López announced on October 21 that Venezuela’s’ military will cooperate with Colombian counterparts to fight narcotrafficking. Relations between the two nations are quickly improving.

They had deteriorated after Colombia’s government backed accusations that Venezuela’s 2024 presidential elections were fraudulent. But on August 10, Colombian President Gustavo Petro stated on social media that, “Colombia and Venezuela are the same people, the same flag, the same history. Any military operation that does not have the approval of our sister countries is an act of aggression against Latin America and the Caribbean.” Petro recently announced the Colombian military will be sharing military intelligence with Venezuela.

U.S. vilification extends to Petro who, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, condemned U.S. support of Israel’s war on Gaza and U.S. imperialism generally. He railed against the U.S. at a rally outside the UN Headquarters. In response, the U.S. government revoked his visa.  Petro had previously refused to accept Colombian deportees sent handcuffed from the United States in a military plane.

International solidarity

On October 18, Petro accused the United States of killing a Colombian fisherman and violating Colombian sovereignty. Responding, President Trump called Petro “an illegal drug dealer … [who] does nothing to stop” drug production. He imposed import tariffs and suspended subsidies granted Colombia for drug-war activities. Petro recalled Colombia’s ambassador in Washington.

Colombia may be on Venezuela’s side, but that’s not clear with other countries in the region. Colombia, president pro tempore of the CELAC group of nations, arranged for a virtual meeting of CELAC foreign ministers to reach a common position. In 2014, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States – CELAC –had declared the entire region to be a “zone of peace.”  

At the meeting taking place on September 1, representatives of the 23 CELAC nations present (out of 33) considered a general statement that filed to mention the U.S. -Venezuela confrontation. It expressed support for “principles such as: the abolition of the threat or use of force, the peaceful resolution of disputes, the promotion of dialogue and multilateralism, and unrestricted respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Most of the countries voting approved, but Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, Perú, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago did not.

Member nations of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America–Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) did condemn US military action in the Caribbean. The CARICOM group of Caribbean nations, meeting in late October, expressed support “for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of countries in the region,” again without reference to  the United States and Venezuela. Trinidad and Tobago was an outlier: Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar insisted that, “I have no sympathy for traffickers; the US military should kill them all violently.”

Regional presidents spoke out against U.S. intervention, specifically: Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum; Honduras’s president  Xiomara Castro, Daniel Ortega, co-president of Nicaragua, and Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Brazilian workers, especially those associated with Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) are taking matters into their own hands. Their leader João Pedro Stédile was interviewed October 16 on Rádio Brasil de Fato. (The interview is accessible here.)  He points out that:

“The United States has been threatening Venezuela for quite some time. The process was accelerated by the Trump administration, a mixture of madness and fascism. He thinks that, with brute force, he can overthrow the Maduro government and hand it over to María Corina [Machado] on a silver platter. Part of this tactic was awarding her the Nobel Prize …The United States is making a tragic mistake because it is basing its actions solely on information from the far right….

“Never before has the Maduro government had so much popular support … It is time for Lula’s government to take more decisive action and show more active solidarity with Venezuela.

“If the United States is exerting all this military pressure to try to recover Venezuela’s oil, and … [if] María Corina … comes to power after the invasion, her first act will be to privatize PDVSA [Petróleos de Venezuela] and hand over other Venezuelan resources—I imagine iron, aluminum, gold, which they have a lot of—to American companies for exploitation. …

“At this event I attended in Venezuela, the World Congress in Defense of Mother Earth, … we agreed … to organize, as soon as possible, internationalist brigades of activists from each of our countries to go to Venezuela and place ourselves at the disposal of the Venezuelan government and people.

“We want to repeat that historic epic that the global left achieved during the Spanish Civil War of 1936, when thousands of militants from around the world went to Spain to defend the Republic and the Spanish people.”

The MST webpage testifies to the class consciousness and anti-imperialism inspiring MST solidarity with the Venezuelans:

“Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement was born from the concrete, isolated struggles for land that rural workers were developing in southern Brazil at the end of the 1970’s. … Brazilian capitalism was not able to alleviate the existing contradictions that blocked progress in the countryside … Little by little, the MST began to understand that winning land was important, but not enough. They also need access to credit, housing, technical assistance, schools, healthcare and other needs that a landless family must have met…. the MST discovered that the struggle was not just against the Brazilian latifundio (big landowners), but also against the neoliberal economic model.”

The MST “is the largest social movement in Latin America with an estimated 1.5 million landless members organized in 23 out 27 states.”

Stédile himself articulates a rationale for calling the U.S. government to account. In a recent New Year’s greeting, he noted that, “The world and Brazil are experiencing serious crises, such as the structural crisis of capitalism, the environmental crisis and the crisis of the bankruptcy of states that are unable to solve the problems of the majority … A good 2024 to all Brazilian people!”

His recent interview with Monthly Review is revealing:

“The MST has drawn on two key concepts from the historical experience of the working class in general and campesinos in particular: mass struggle and solidarity.

“Our strength does not come from our arguments or ideas; it comes from the number of people we can mobilize … I believe there has been a process of integration and mutual learning among Venezuelans, Brazilians, and Latin Americans in general. … The MST … has promoted brigades in various countries … and a permanent brigade here in Venezuela.”

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 and lives in rural Maine.

José Martí Exposes U.S. Designs on Cuba / Prepared by W.T. Whitney

Photo: Fidel Castro, center, at the May Day 1960 parade in Havana at the Jose Marti Monument. | AP

South Paris, Maine

Introduction

While living in exile in the United States, José Martí dedicated the time between 1880 and 1895 to preparations for Cuba’s Second War for Independence from Spain, which ran from 1895 to 1898. Martí died as a martyr in Cuba on May 18, 1895. Our interest here is in Marti’s ideas on Cuba’s independence from the United States.

His writings are full of criticisms of the United States and U.S. pretentions for control of Cuba. Our object in presenting Martí’s ideas on the United States is to show that U.S. assault on Cuba, ongoing now for six decades as economic blockade, is hardly new. The U.S. has in fact sought domination over Cuba since the beginning of the 19 th century.

What follows is a sampling of Martí’s observation on the United States, written while he was living in New York between 1880 and early 1895. Martí, born in 1893, traveled frequently to Florida and even to Central America and the West Indies to educate, recruit, and raise funds for the coming independence struggle. In 1892, he founded the Cuban
Revolutionary Party and its newspaper Patria.

The Spanish colonial government arrested Martí for his writings in 1869 early in the course of Cuba’s First War for Independence (1868-1878). After one year in prison, Martí in 1871 left for exile in Spain where he remained for three years. Subsequently he was teaching and writing in Mexico and Guatemala until he returned to Cuba in 1878, only to be
exiled again to Spain. He moved on to New York, where, except for a six-month stay in Venezuela in 1881, he would remain until he left for Cuba in 1895.

Two themes dominate in his writings about the United States. He projected the idea of the idea of “our America,” which for him was all the territory lying between the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande) and Tierra del Fuego. That region had its own cultures, traditions, and history rather than those of North America and Europe. His essay “Our America” was published in
New York in 1991.

Warning about the U.S. threat to Cuban independence, Martí also mentioned the terms annexationism and annexationists to signify longings by U.S. Americans and by Cubans for U.S. possession of the island.

Excerpts of Martí’s writings follow:

José Martí’s letter to NY Evening Post, March 25, 1889 –

“It is probable that no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation where the leaders of opinion share towards him the prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism or rampant ignorance. There are some Cubans who … would like to see the island annexed to the United States. But those who have fought in war and learned in exile
… do not desire the annexation of Cuba to the United States. They do not need it; …they cannot honestly believe that excessive individualism, reverence for wealth, and the protracted exultation of a terrible victory are preparing the United States to be the typical nation of liberty.

José Martí’s letter to Gonzalo de Quesada on December 14, 1889 mentions this:

“On our land, Gonzalo, there is another [U.S.] plan even more sinister than what we have seen so far, and that is the wicked plan to force the island into war, to precipitate it, in order to have a pretext to intervene in it, and with the credit of mediator and guarantor, to take it over. There is nothing more cowardly in the annals of free peoples: nor any more cold- blooded evil.

The Washington Pan-American Congress — José Martí provided La Nación newspaper in Buenos Aires with a report (December 19-20, 1889) on the First International Conference of American States that took place in Washington from October,1889 to April,1890. Marti attended as consul for Uruguay. On the agenda were U.S. plans for bolstering commercial ties to the region and establishing a customs union.

“The parade of delegates is ending and the sessions of the Pan-American Congress are about to begin. Never in America, from its independence to the present, has there been a matter requiring more good judgment or more vigilance … than the invitation which the
powerful United States (glutted with unsaleable merchandise and determined to extend its dominions in America) is sending to the less powerful American nations (bound by free and useful commerce to the European nations) for purposes of arranging an alliance against Europe and cutting off transactions with the rest of the world. Spanish America
learned how to save itself from the tyranny of Spain; and now, after viewing with judicial eyes the antecedents, motives, and ingredients of the invitation, it is essential to say, for it is true, that the time has come for Spanish America to declare its second independence.”

The Inter-American Monetary Commission convened in Washington between January 7 and April 8, 1891. Its object was to fulfill instructions from the recent Pan-American International Conference to form an international monetary union and adopt a common silver currency. The Latin American delegates chose Martí, attending as Uruguay’s
representative, to present a report on their views.

“In every invitation among nations, one must look for hidden motives. No nation does anything against its interest; … Lesser nations, which are still in the throes of gestation, cannot safely join forces with those who seek a union with weaker nations as a solution for the excessive production of a compact and aggressive population, and a vent for their restless masses … They believe in the incontrovertible superiority of “the Anglo-Saxon
race over the Latin race”. They believe in the inferiority of the Black race, which they enslaved yesterday and continue to oppress today, and of the Indian race, which they are exterminating. They also believe that the peoples of Spanish America are composed principally of Indians and Blacks. … Does a political and economic alliance with the United States benefit Spanish America?

“Whoever says economic union, says political union. The nation that buys, rules. The nation that sells, serves.….

The Truth about the United States – Martí published this article in Patria, newspaper of the Cuban Revolutionary Party on March 23, 1894. “But it is certainly true that … in the United States, the reasons for unity are weakening, not solidifying; [that] the various localities are dividing and irritating national politics, not uniting with it; [that] democracy is
being corrupted and diminished, not strengthened and not saved from the hatred and wretchedness of monarchies … From the standpoint of justice and a legitimate social science it should be recognized that … the North American character has gone downhill since the winning of independence, and is today less human and virile; whereas the Spanish- American character today is in all ways superior, in spite of its confusion
and fatigue, to what it was when it began to emerge from the disorganized mass of grasping clergy, unskilled ideologists and ignorant or savage Indians.”

José Martí’s article “The Third Year of the Cuban Revolutionary Party” appeared in Patria on April 17, 1994. It contains this segment:
“Glory does not belong to those who look back, but to those who look forward. It is not merely two flower-covered islands (Cuba and Puerto Rico) … that we are going to bring forth, but we will save and serve them in such a way that the skills and vigor of their peoples, less isolated than those of the resentful and hungry European societies, ensures the independence of the happy archipelago that nature placed at the center of the world – despite the greed of a strong and unequal neighbor. … On the side of America are the Antilles, which, if enslaved, would be a mere pontoon in the war of an imperial republic against a jealous and superior world that is already preparing to deny it power—a mere fort of American Rome. If they were free … they would be the guarantee of balance between the continents, of independence for Spanish America, now under threat, and of honor for the great republic of the North.”

Martí’s article “Honduras and the Outsiders” appeared in Patria onDecember 15, 1894. There he explains that, “In America there are two peoples, and no more than two, with very
different souls due to their origins, backgrounds, and customs, and similar only in their fundamental human identity. On one side is our America, and all its peoples are of a similar or identical nature and background, and of an identical prevailing mix; on the other side is the America that is not ours, whose enmity it is neither sensible nor viable to foster, and with which it is not impossible, and indeed useful, to be friends, with firm decorum and shrewd independence. But we must live from our soul, cleansed of the evil church and the habits of mastery and undeserved luxury.”

José Martí’s letter to Manuel Mercado of May 18,1895
Mercado, living in Mexico, was Martí’s friend of many years. Martí, General Maximo Gomez and four others came ashore in eastern Cuba on April 11 1895. They had traveled from the Dominican Republic. Accompanied by rebel troops, they proceeded westward. Mari died in
battle on May 18, 1895, a day after writing this unfinished letter.

My dearest brother: Now I can write, now I can tell you how tenderly and gratefully and respectfully I love you and that home which I consider my pride and responsibility. I am in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty. For I understand that duty and have the courage to carry it out – the duty of preventing the United States from spreading
through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence and from overpowering our lands of America with that additional strength. All I have done so far, and all I will do, is for this purpose. … I have lived in the monster and I know its entrails; my sling is David’s. …

I am doing my duty here. The war in Cuba to prevent … the annexation of Cuba to the United States has come at the right time in America. It’s a reality greater than the vague and scattered desires of the annexationists among the Cubans and Spaniards, whose alliance with the Spanish government would only give them relative power.

Unless otherwise noted, Martí’s writings are taken from “Our America”, José Martí and Philip S. Foner, Monthly Review Press, 1977.

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 and lives in rural Maine.

U.S. war on China, a long time coming / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

A still image from John Pilger’s documentary, “The Coming War on China”

South Paris, Maine

Movement toward war with China accelerates. The public, focused on troubles currently upending U.S. politics, does not pay much attention to a war on the way for decades. The watershed moment came in 1949 with the victory of China’s socialist revolution. Amid resurgent anticommunism in the United States, accusations flourished of “Who “lost” China.”

Loss in U.S. eyes was in China the dawning of national independence and promise of social change. In 1946, a year after the Japanese war ended, U.S. Marines, allied with Chinese Nationalist forces, the Kuomintang, were fighting the People’s Liberation Army in Northeast China.

The U.S. government that year was delaying the return home of troops who fought against Japan. Soldier Erwin Marquit, participant in “mutinies” opposing the delay, explained that the U.S. wanted to “keep open the option of intervention by U.S. troops … [to support] the determination of imperialist powers to hold on to their colonies and neocolonies,” China being one of these.

These modest intrusions previewed a long era of not-always muted hostility and, eventually, trade relations based on mutual advantage. The defeated Kuomintang and their leader, the opportunistic General Chiang Kai-shek, had decamped to Taiwan, an island China’s government views as a “breakaway province.”

Armed conflict in 1954 and 1958 over small Nationalist-held islands in the Taiwan Strait prompted U.S. military backing for the Nationalist government that in 1958 included the threat of nuclear weapons.

Preparations

U.S. allies in the Western Pacific – Japan and South Korea in the North, Australia and Indonesia in the South, and The Philippines and various islands in between – have long hosted U.S. military installations and/or troop deployments. Nuclear-capable planes and vessels are at the ready.  U.S. naval and air force units regularly carry out joint training exercises with the militaries of other nations.

The late journalist and documentarian John Pilger in 2016 commented on evolving U.S. strategies:

“When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia’, announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States’s new enemy…. [Presently] 400 American bases surround China with ships, missiles and troops.”

Analyst Ben Norton pointed out recently that, “the U.S. military is setting the stage for war on China. … The Pentagon is concentrating its resources in the Asia-Pacific region as it anticipates fighting China in an attempt to exert U.S. control over Taiwan.” Norton was reacting to a leaked Pentagon memo indicating, according to Washington Post, that “potential invasion of Taiwan” would be the “exclusive animating scenario” taking precedence over other potential threats elsewhere, including in Europe.  

New reality

Norton suggests that the aggressive trade war launched against China by the two Trump administrations, and backed by President Biden during his tenure in office, represents a major U.S. provocation. According to Jake Werner, director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute, “Trump’s top military and economic advisers are almost without exception committed to confrontation with China.”

He adds that, “In a context of mounting economic pain on both sides, with surging nationalism in both countries becoming a binding force on leaders, both governments are likely to choose more destructive responses to what they regard as provocations from the other side. A single misstep around Taiwan or in the South China Sea could end in catastrophe.

Economic confrontation is only one sign of drift to a war situation. Spending on weapons accelerates. U.S. attitudes shift toward normalization of war. Ideological wanderings produce old and new takes on anticommunism.

Money for weapons

The annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, released in April, says that in 2024 the world’s military spending increased by 9.4% in one year to a $2718 billion; it increased 37% between 2015 and 2024.

U.S. military spending in 2024 was $997 billion, up 5.9% in a year and 19% since 2015. For China, the comparable figures are $314 billion, 7.0%, and 59%, respectively; for Russia, $149 billion, 38%, and 100%; for Germany, $88.5 billion, 29% and 89%. The U.S. accounts for 37% of the world’s total military spending; China,12 %; Russia, 5.5%; and Germany, 3.3%. They are the world’s top spenders on arms.

In the United States,competition from new weapons manufacturers threatens the monopoly long enjoyed by five major defense contractors. These receive most of the $311 billion provided in the last U.S. defense budget for research, development, and production of weapons. That amount exceeds all the defense spending of all other countries in the world.

A new species of weapons manufacturer appears with origins in the high-tech industry. Important products are unmanned aircraft and surveillance equipment, each enabled by artificial intelligence.

Professor Michael Klare highlights one of them, California’s Anduril Industries, as providing the “advanced technologies … needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.” Venture capital firms are investing massively.  The valuation of Anduril, formed in 2017, now approaches $4.5 billion.

Palmer Luckey, the Anduril head, claims the older defense contractors lack “the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need.” Multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, investor in Anduril and other companies, funded the political campaigns of Vice President J.D. Vance and other MAGA politicians. Klare implies that Theil and his kind exert sufficient influence over government decision-making as to ensure happy times for the new breed of weapon-producers.

Giving up

Waging war looks like a fixture within U.S. politics. Support for war and the military comes easily. Criticism that wars do harm is turned aside. Broadening tolerance of war is now a blight on prospects for meaningful resistance to war against China.    

Recent history is not encouraging. After the trauma of the Vietnam War subsided, anti-war resistance in the United States has been unsuccessful in curtailing wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya – and proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza –despite massive destruction in all of them and more dead and wounded than can be accounted for.

Official language testifies to routinization of U.S. military aggression. Defense Secretary Hegseth, visiting at the Army War College in Pennsylvania, started with, “Well, good morning warriors. …We’re doing the work of the American people and the American warfighter. [And] the president said to me, I want you to restore the warrior ethos of our military.”

Hegseth traveled recently in the Pacific region, presumably with war against China on his mind. In the Philippines, he remarked, “I defer to Admiral Paparo and his war plans. Real war plans.” In Guam, he insists, “We are not here to debate or talk about climate change, we are here to prepare for war.” In Tokyo, he spoke of “reorganizing U.S. Forces Japan into a war-fighting headquarters.”

Ben Norton writes that, “In his 2020 book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, Hegseth vowed that, if Trump could return to the White House and Republicans could take power, “Communist China will fall—and lick its wounds for another two hundred years.”

Ideas as weapons

Proponents and publicists of off-beat ideas have long disturbed U.S. politics. Brandishing fantasies and myths, the Trump administrations have fashioned a new brand of resentment-inspired politics. Even so, familiar ideas continue as motivators, notably anticommunism.

Writing in Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster recently explored ideology contributing to Donald Trump’s hold on to power. Much of it, he reports, derives from California’s Claremont Institute, its office in Washington, and Hillsdale College in Michigan. A leading feature is a kind of anticommunism that targets so-called cultural Marxism. But China and its Communist Party are not immune from condemnation.

Michael Anton is a “senior researcher” at the Claremont Institute and director of policy planning at the State Department. According to Foster, Anton suggested that “China was the primary enemy, while peace should be made with Russia [which] belonged to the same ‘civilizational sect’ as the United States and Europe, ‘in ways that China would never be.’”

Former Claremont Institute president Brian Kennedy, quoted by Foster, notes that, “We are at risk of losing a war today because too few of us know that we are engaged with an enemy, the Chinese Communist Party … that means to destroy us.”

The matter of no ideas comes to the fore. Recognized international law authority Richard Falk, writing on May 6, states that, “I am appalled that the Democratic establishment continues to adopt a posture of total silence with regard to US foreign policy.” Viewing the Democrats as “crudely reducing electoral politics to matters of raising money for electoral campaigns,” he adds that, “I find this turn from ideas to money deeply distressing.”

The Democrats’ posture recalls a 1948 message from Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenburg, a Republican. During congressional debate on President Truman’s Marshall Plan, Vandenburg stated that, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” This U.S. tradition lapses only occasionally.

Will resistance to war against China end up stronger and more effective than earlier anti-war mobilizations in the post-Vietnam War era?  A first step toward resisting would be to build awareness of the reality that war with China may come soon. General knowledge of relevant history would be broadened, with emphasis on how U.S. imperialism works and on its capitalist origins. Anyone standing up for peace and no war ought to be reaching out in solidarity with socialist China.  

John Pilger, moralist and exemplary documentarian and reporter, died on December 23, 2023. His 60th documentary film, The Coming War on China, first appeared in 2016. Pilger’s website states that, “the film investigates the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation.” Please view the film on his website.

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, and lives in rural Maine.

Unionized Maine Nurses reject reactionaries’ push for Medicaid cuts / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Nicole Ogrysko / Maine Public

South Paris, Maine

U.S. healthcare, chronically afflicted with inequalities, has taken an acute turn for the worse. A proposal has emerged out of the U.S. government’s budget reconciliation process to reduce funding for healthcare and other national programs by $880 billion over the course of 10 years. Alleging fraud, proponents want to clear the way for “4.5 trillion in tax cuts through 2034.” Mostly the very wealthy would be benefitting.

Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program established in 1965 to guarantee healthcare for low-come and/or disabled Americans, would take a big hit.

In Portland Maine on March 20, unionized nurses at Maine Medical Center, a big regional hub for sophisticated specialty care, staged a rally in defense of Medicaid outside Senator Susan Collins’s office. Their union, the Maine State Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (MSNA/NNOC), made arrangements.

Emergency room nurse Kirsten Lane told the several dozen supporters on hand that, “People with chronic illnesses would not be getting the preventative care they need … We would see a lot of people showing up to the hospital sicker. We would see a lot of hospital crowding. We would see long wait times in the emergency room.”

Intensive care nurse Julianna Hansen remarked that, “The patients we see every day are some of the most vulnerable people in our state … “Our seniors, those with disabilities, and our young people are the ones who would most be hurt by cuts to MaineCare and CubCare … Union nurses stand against any cuts to our patients’ access to Medicaid.”  

(Medicaid in Maine is known as MaineCare; CubCare refers to children’s services provided under MaineCare.)

Some supporters of the nurses also spoke, including Dr. Julie Pease, longtime president of Maine AllCare, the Maine affiliate of Physicians for a National Health Program. The nurses then led the crowd in a march to Senator Collins’ office. They requested the senator’s surprised and grumpy staff to deliver their four-foot-long fake check to her.

According to pre-rally publicity, the check was “made out to the ‘Billionaire Class’ paid for by ‘Working People’ totaling $4,182,453,166 – the amount of Medicaid funding in Maine at risk if Sen. Collins votes to gut Medicaid to fund tax cuts for billionaires.”

The Maine Care program provides coverage for almost 400,000 Maine people─ 25% of the population ─ including two-thirds of Maine’s nursing home residents and half of Maine’s children. Nationally, 20% of all Americans and 40% of children receive healthcare through Medicaid. Medicaid covers 42 % of all births in the nation ─ almost 50% in Maine.

Maine has a Medicaid crisis of its own. The state government in early March was facing a $118 million shortfall in payments to providers for care covered under MaineCare. Many payments would be late in arriving. Spending on MaineCare consumed 32% of the state’s budget in 2023.

A supplemental budget aimed at meeting the shortfall did not survive Republican opposition in the legislature; a two thirds majority was required. The legislature then approved a two-year budget that provides for a one-year extension of MaineCare funding.

Apprehension exists that, if Medicaid funding is reduced, states will have to reduce expanded Medicaid services that were authorized under the Affordable Care Act, approved in 2014. Maine would have to remove 25,000 people enrolled in MaineCare, or else find $117 million more to replace lost federal funding.

According to the National Rural Health Association in February ─ Maine is a rural state ─“Medicaid funding is critical for sustaining rural healthcare systems, including hospitals, clinics, and community health centers.” The financial balances of almost half of rural hospitals are in the red.  Diminished flow of Medicaid funding threatens those hospitals’ existence. Their demise would lead to both preventable deaths in rural areas and significant job loss. All sorts of social and healthcare services of a preventative nature would disappear.

According to the KFF health policy news service, Medicaid in 2023 covered 80% of children in poverty (and almost half of poverty-stricken adults). Medicaid also covers “nearly half of children with special health care needs.” Analyst Bruce Lesley reports that, “For millions of children with disabilities and chronic illnesses, Medicaid is the difference between survival and suffering.”

Studies of infant mortality in those states that chose expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act show significantly reduced deaths of Black and Hispanic infants.  Mortality rates for them have been notoriously high in the United States for years.

Pressure on Senator Collins from the nurses’ union, MSNA/NNOC, reflects a wide vision. Indeed, the mission statement of National Nurses United starts out this way: “Through energetic advocacy we are organizing to: Win health care justice; accessible, quality health care for all, as a human right.”

Under the heading of sober reporting (we insist): the rally in Portland, Maine carried out by the unionized nurses represented something far beyond good news. Our collective prospects for the short and long terms took a sharp, upward turn.  

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, and lives in rural Maine.

Readings (and films) on Cuba for the Comrades / Compiled by W.T. Whitney Jr.

Material following the “++” identification is of special importance

General aspects

++ Chronology and origins, US blockade. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-
book/cuba/2022-02-02/cuba-embargoed-us-trade-sanctions-turn-sixty

Survey of US – Cuba relations — https://cri.fiu.edu/us-cuba-relations/chronology-of-us-cuba-relations/

++ Helen Jaffe — https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/31/the-state-of-cuba-us-relations-an-interview-with-dr-jose-ramon-cabanas/

Origins

US intervention and the Platt Amendment — chronology — https://leftlibrary.net/archives/2420

Historian Howard Zinn speaks in Maine on Cuba (2000) – film-
https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/tam_542/video/69p8d9k1/

Personalities

Julio Antonio Mella — https://jacobin.com/2024/12/julio-antonio-mella-cuba-communism

Che Guevara — https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/the-legacy-of-che-guevara-his-
significance-in-the-americas/ —https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/che-guevara-and-
cubas-battle-of-ideas/

Fidel Castro — https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/08/13/fidel-castro-a-life-of-revolution/

++ Jose Marti and Cuban Revolution — https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/jose-marti-soul-of-the-cuban-revolution/ — https://mronline.org/2018/01/29/the-soul-of-the-revolution/

US Blockade —Adverse effects

++ In Cuba’s report, U.S. blockade comes off as weapon of war — https://peoplesworld.org/article/in-cubas-report-u-s-blockade-comes-off-as-weapon-of-war/

The US Blockade and Its Effects on Cuban Medicine — https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/the-us-blockade-and-its-effects-on-cuban-medicine/

U.S. policy implicated in the economic crisis driving Cuban protests — https://cpmaine541537399.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=30911&action=edit

Cuba’s problems multiply, but proposals for what to do are in short supply — https://peoplesworld.org/article/cubas-problems-multiply-but-proposals-for-what-to-do-are-in-short-supply/

Miscellaneous

++ Democracy in Cuba — https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/cubasi/article/187/all-in-this-together-cubarsquos-participatory-democracy

Environment (Helen Jaffe)

People First: Cuba’s State Plan to Confront Climate Change –https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/02/people-first-cubas-state-plan-to-confront-climate-change/ –https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/cuba-has-a-plan-for-responding-to-climate-change/

Cuba has a plan for responding to climate change –https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/cuba-has-a-plan-for-responding-to-climate-change/

Cuba in Africa — https://jacobin.com/2022/05/cuba-castro-angola-namibia-us-soviet-union

Obama reforms — https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/17/fact-sheet-charting-new-course-cuba

++ Cuba Defeats Covid-19 with Learning, Science, and Unity — https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/12/16/cuba-defeats-covid-19-with-
learning-science-and-unity/

++ Cuban Teachers and Students Make the Revolution –https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/06/cuban-teachers-and-students-make-the-revolution/

Cuban science — https://monthlyreview.org/press/how-the-knowledge-economy-and-science-bolster-cubas-socialist-revolution/

Healthcare

++ Vaccines — https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/cuba-develops-covid-19-vaccines-takes-socialist-approach/

Latin American School of Medicine — https://peoplesworld.org/article/cuba-s-wonder-of-the-modern-world-latin-american-school-of-medicine/

++ John Kirk — https://johnriddell.com/2020/04/08/cubas-unique-model-of-medical-
internationalism/

++ Helen Jaffe — https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/10/cuban-medical-science-in-the-service-of-humanity/

A few books

The History of Cuba Vol. 2, 1845-1895

Antonio Maceo: The “Bronze Titan” of Cuba’s Struggle for Independence

https://monthlyreview.org/product/spanish-cuban-
american_war_and_the_birth_of_american_imperialism_1895-1898_vol_1/

https://monthlyreview.org/product/our_america/ (Jose Marti, ed.by Philip Foner)

Films

Go to the Belly of the Beast media outlet to see films on Cuba, especially the three-part “War on Cuba” here: https://www.bellyofthebeastcuba.com/the-war-on-cuba

Or, Catherine Murphy’s (wonderful) film on literacy campaign, Maestra. at
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/maestra/160157747 51 minutes, cost $4.99

W. T. Whitney Jr.

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, and lives in rural Maine.

Book Review – Truth-Telling about Nicaragua’s Long Revolution for Liberation and Democracy / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Photo : nicaraguasandino.com/vida-y-revolucion-my-name-is-daniel-kovalik/

Daniel Kovalik, Nicaragua, a History of US Intervention & Resistance, (Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2023), ISBN; 978-1-949762-64-8, www.claritypress.com, 303 pages.

Prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves, speaking in Nicaragua in 2022, points out that the United States “is 350 million people [and is] the strongest military force in the world. Nicaragua is 6.2 million people, a country in Central America seeking to develop itself and its people.”

And so, “Why in God’s name, with a country so large, with so many resources, with such military strength, why would [the U.S.] want to pick on a small country like Nicaragua? I ask myself that question every day.”

Clarity Press, 2023
9781949762600

Peace activist and Vietnam War veteran S. Brian Willson, speaking in South Paris, Maine, on September 13, 1998, had answered the question: “This neoliberal economics, the latest stage of capitalism, does not allow for alternative political or economic ideas or values. We already knew that any country that seriously threatened our model either had to assimilate or be eliminated.”

Willson had acted. On September 1, 1987 in Oakland, California, he put himself in front of a train to prevent a weapons delivery to U.S.- backed “Contra” mercenaries fighting revolutionaries in Nicaragua. The train did not stop and Willson lost two legs.

Daniel Kovalik’s valuable new book “Nicaragua, A History of US Intervention & Resistance” demonstrates the truth of Willson’s insight. Kovalik is a labor lawyer, human rights activist and teacher, and prolific author (his other books are here).

In that summer of 1987, college student Kovalik was part of a reforestation project in Nicaragua. The Contra war was in progress, and he heard machine gun fire “nearly every night.” The suffering was “simply shocking.”  He writes that photos he took of children there “makes me want to cry.” The “Veterans Peace Convey” of humanitarian aid to Nicaragua, which he joined in 1988, was “possibly the most profound experience of my life.” Kovalik’s book is immensely appealing, not least because of personal experience that he relates.

He makes effective use of extended quotations from various reports, other histories, analyses from international agencies, and commentary from participants. Kovalik states that the object with his book was to present “the realities of U.S. intervention [in Nicaragua,] past and present,” highlight Nicaraguans’ abilities to overcome U.S. “assaults,” and promote solidarity with Nicaraguans in their struggle for self-determination.

The book’s first sections review Nicaragua’s history prior to the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s (FSLN) accession to power. It covers Tennessean William Walker’s attempt to set up his own slavocracy in 1855, U.S. Marines’ occupation of Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, U.S. formation of Nicaragua’s oppressive National Guard, and U.S. support after 1936 for the brutal Somoza-family dictatorship. 

Kovalik reports on Augusto Cesar Sandino’s guerrilla army that fought the Marines from 1927 until their departure. He writes about the struggle of the FSLN rural insurgency after 1960 to bring down the Somoza regime. Over 50,000 Nicaraguans died in the year preceding its collapse on July 17, 1979.

Most of the book is about the FSLN in power, their electoral defeat in 1990, the U.S.-led Contra counter-revolution in the 1980s, the “Dark Days” of neoliberal rule after 1990, and the Sandinistas in power again after 2007. There are these points:

·        Until recently, the Sandinistas, originally an alliance of three factions, governed with allies including Catholic Church representatives, business leaders, capitalists, Marxists, and rural collectives.

·        Women’s lives have improved in equality, political participation, and leadership opportunities.

·        Sandinista approval ratings have remained high, even in stressful times, for example, 80% in 2018 prior to the protests of that year and up to 90% before the 2021 elections.

·        Dissent within FSLN ranks and FSLN differences with its opposition have reflected divisions between city and countryside and between intellectual callings and manual work.

·        The Catholic Church, now far removed from liberation theology, has consistently harassed the Sandinistas.

·        Kovalik inveighs against U.S. leftists who have abandoned the Sandinistas. They “claim to know better about the nature of Daniel Ortega and the FSLN than the Nicaraguan people,” he points out.

·        Sandinistas in power have accomplished much: nutritional gains, agrarian reform, food sovereignty, housing access, widespread electrification, increased literacy, more jobs, youth programs, universal access to schools and healthcare, infrastructure improvements, and lowered mortality rates.

Until 2020 or so, far fewer Nicaraguans were migrating north than were the peoples of other Central American countries. Their reduced numbers testify to the benefits of change in Nicaragua.

Kovalik finishes his book with a look at the interplay of recent anti-government protests, harsh penalties exacted by the government, and mounting criticism of the FSLN government by sectors of the U.S. and European left.

Anti-government protests with street actions and barricades prevailed in mid-2018. In his afterword that concludes Kovalik’s book, Orlando Zelaya Olivas indicates that 198 civilians and 22 police officers were murdered. Mainstream news reports uniformly blamed the police for killing peaceful demonstrators. The truth was otherwise.

Kovalik, citing sources, shows that the protesters had been paid and prepared, that many had criminal records, that snipers rather than the police did most of the killing, and that lethal violence continued even after the police were withdrawn. These were fake protests programmed toward destabilization and eventually a coup.

Kovalik shows the U.S. hand in creating turmoil. The U.S. government had funded opposition NGOs, youth groups, religious organizations, and dissidents who included former Sandinistas. U.S. agents and funding were behind the anti-government messaging on social media that played a prominent role. 

Nicaragua’s government arrested and jailed many of those who in 2018 had violated laws against terrorist activities and against unauthorized service to a foreign government. In June 2019, the government amnestied hundreds of those caught up in the coup attempt. Dozens of jailed coup plotters were released on promising that they would no longer conspire against the government.

Criticism exploded again in 2021 after those who had promised to give up on plotting were imprisoned again on grounds that they were aiming to destabilize upcoming elections. Kovalik states that, “the first duty of a Revolution is to defend itself, for if it cannot meet this most essential goal, it obviously cannot serve and defend the people as they deserve.”

There was the added element of the imprisonments supposedly constituting interference in the elections of November 7, 2021 that gave Daniel Ortega a fourth consecutive presidential term.

Writing from Nicaragua, Stephen Sefton explains that the jailed opposition leaders were not opposition candidates. The political opposition in 2011 had split into regular political parties and “an extra-parliamentary opposition based in local NGOs.” The latter sector had “mounted the violent, US designed coup attempt” of 2018 and were arrested according to Nicaraguan Law. The opposition’s contending political parties had no part in planning a coup in 2021, according to Sefton

After Daniel Kovalik’s book was published, solidarity with the Sandinistas took a big hit. On February 9, 2023, the government released 222 prisoners, mostly those who had been arrested in 2021. It expelled all but a few to the United States. The government took away their citizenship and that of a 100 or so others, and confiscated their properties. Criticism has resounded, for example, from the Economist magazine, the United Nations, to the left-leaning Colombian government.

Taking away someone’s citizenship surely is an extraordinary step, certainly in the United States, and only slightly less so in the U.K. The grounds would be treason. A rationale for such a judgment emerges out of Kovalik’s book.

One imagines a favored few in Nicaragua who are oblivious to decades of U.S. military attacks, violence, pay-offs, trickery and manipulations. They spurned the government’s long efforts at collaboration and coalition building. One equally imagines the grief attending decades of popular resistance against the U.S.-backed dictatorship and, afterwards, the U.S.-backed opposition.

What’s left is desperation, especially what with population elements who reject the idea of justice and dignity for all Nicaraguans and who once more are shown to be dependent on the U.S. government. Meanwhile, U.S. economic sanctions are non-stop.

The book’s basic point is that rescue and recovery of oppressed, marginalized, and poor Nicaraguans have required a very long process. It’s no wonder that some counterparts today of Tom Paine’s “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” have dropped out.

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.