Activism for Cuba ramping up in Southern California / by Eric Gordon

_{^{Dayramir González}}

_{Posted in the Peoples World on September 1, 2023}

LOS ANGELES — The L.A. chapter of the U.S. Hands Off Cuba Committee (LAHOC) is gearing up for its fall calendar. A stunningly affecting concert performance on Sun., Aug. 27 in San Pedro, on the intimate stage of Alvas Showroom, was for many of those lucky enough to be attending that afternoon, their introduction to the work of this anti-imperialist group.

LAHOC’s mission focuses on three clear demands toward normalizing relations between the U.S. and Cuba: The removal of Cuba from the bogus list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT); the end of the blockade and the sanctions on trade and travel; and the return of the Guantánamo Naval Base to Cuba.

This concert was billed as a fundraiser for Medical Aid for Cuba—in the light of the pernicious, punitive blockade the U.S. has imposed on the island nation—and the final report was that the full house, standing room only, raised an impressive $2500 for Global Health Partners, the receiving agency.

The principal concert organizer was Angelica Cardona, with whom the Cuban trade union newspaper, Trabajadores, ran a full-page interview leading up to the performance. The two emcees were Guadalupe Cardona, president of La Raza Educators Association, and Mwezi Odom, an African People’s Socialist Party Defense Committee coordinator and a leader in LAHOC.

The main draw was the enormously talented young Afro-Cuban educator, pianist, and composer Dayramir González, multiple winner of Cubadisco awards for his 2007 debut album, and star of the Havana Jazz Festival, who came on after intermission. In the first part of the proceedings, the emcees greeted the audience with their gratitude for supporting LAHOC and its medical aid project. They introduced the drumming and dance ensemble Omo Aché, an Afro-Cuban cultural arts project featuring music and dance, based in San Diego. Omo Aché offered mesmerizing drumming and stories told in a women’s dance about enslaved and escaped African Cubans resisting Spanish colonial rule. An added highlight of this half was the solo male interpretation of the rumba, described as originally a display of virility meant both to ward off attack from other men and to show off as a means of courtship with women.

Dayramir González began his appearance with some timely remarks to the audience that came out to hear him. First, he reflected on his own musical education, growing up poor and Black in Cuba. Despite those factors, which in a country like the U.S. could spell severe limitations on a child’s exposure to music, to the right teachers, to parental ability to support a youngster’s interest in the arts, in Cuba he had every opportunity available to him. At the same time, Cuba is still a poor country with the heavy burden of the U.S. blockade around its neck. He shared the story of his brother who died of a rare cancer in his 20s a decade or so ago and speculated that perhaps, just maybe, a certain promising drug used in the U.S., if his brother could have gotten hold of it, might have saved his life.

After each number that he played, one of González’s two small children would walk over to the piano and give his papá a big hug. His wife and family were able to come to L.A. for this intimate performance. The pianist began his set with a 10- or 12-minute fantasy on Cuba’s famous song, “Guantanamera.” Although everyone in the audience was familiar with the tune, in González’s arrangement he seemed to guide his listeners on a journey through every phase of modern jazz, and even classical techniques, to expand and flesh out the iconic melody, elevating it, as Frederic Rzewski did with his variations on the Chilean revolutionary anthem “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” into an otherworldly realm.

González exploited the native Cuban repertoire in his reinterpretations of Ernesto Lecuona’s music, once again taking a well-known standard and remaking it in his own distinctive, inimitable image. I was unable to catch the names of all the numbers González included in his program, but he is known for his own compositions as well. The songs played in a compilation video (see below), are “Sencillez,” “Smiling,” “Camello Tropical in NY,” “Situaciones en 12/8,” “Blood Brothers,” and “La Teresita.” Some of these compositions are featured in his most recent album, The Grand Concourse, named for the thoroughfare that runs through The Bronx. He currently is based in New York.

At the end, he played one entrancing encore, then posed with his kids for photos. A grand time was had by all—and for a worthy cause!

An almost 7-minute-long video of González appearing at Grand Performances 2021 can be viewed here. Another video showing him at Grand Performances, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Havana’s Teatro Nacional, can be viewed here. Hear him speak about his life, his early mentors such as Chucho Valdéz and his education at the Berklee College of Music, other aspects of his career and art in this video. A search for his name will also bring up other videos of him in performance.

If you happen to be in or traveling to Spain, he’ll be appearing in Madrid Sept. 6, Barcelona Sept. 12-13, Eixample Sept. 13; also the Havana Jazz Festival Jan. 21-28, 2024, and in La Jolla (San Diego Calif.) on April 19.

_{^{At Alvas Showroom, August 27, 2023 (courtesy of LAHOC)}}

Remember, Readers, if it’s People’s World where you heard of him first! Of course, if you are a reader of The Wall Street Journal, you may have read their admission that “Mr. González is a stunningly gifted composer and arranger.” Downbeat and JazzTimes have reviewed him ecstatically.

LAHOC’s efforts do not go unrecognized. The chapter chair received a note of thanks from the CTC (Cuban Workers Central) International Affairs Director, Miguel Ángel, saying, “Excellent brother, together we can do more, in unity is strength. Success in everything you propose. Very grateful everyone for the actions you have managed to do in favor of the Cuban population and the trade union movement.” A congratulatory note came from Kenia Serrano, former North American ICAP director (Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples), and from Global Health Partners director Bob Schwartz. In summation, Mickey Chavez, President of the Southern California District Council of the ILWU, said: “It was a great show, had a wonderful time. Keep up the good work and we will for sure continue supporting this great cause.”

Cubana 455

In its ongoing work, LAHOC will screen this newly edited documentary film on Sat., Sept. 30. It tells a compelling story that the world needs to know about. On October 6, 1976, a civilian flight, Cubana 455, was bombed in flight off the coast of Barbados, killing 73 civilians. This barbaric act happened 25 years before 9/11 and was the first terrorist act against a civilian airliner in flight.

This diverse coalition reexamines the sabotage and exposes what happened, who was behind the crime, and how the terrorists were treated favorably, especially by the U.S. government. LAHOC is screening Enrique Berumen García’s feature-length documentary Cubana 455: Chronicle of October 6 as an educational tool to create a U.S.-based movement which will support the observation of October 6 as an International Day Against Terrorism to honor all victims of terrorism around the world. The Caribbean region will have its first Day Against Terrorism this year on October 6.

Cubana 455 screens on Sept. 30 at 6 p.m. at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore, 12677 Glenoaks Blvd., Sylmar, CA 91342. For further information call (818) 939-3433 or contact: docuCubana455@gmail.com.

For further details go to: the U.S. Hands off Cuba website or email LA.US.Handsoffcuba@gmail.com. The Instagram account is: @ushandsoffcuba, and the WhatsApp and cell is (310) 350.7515.

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

_{Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People’s World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.}

‘Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class’ in review / by Joel Wendland-Liu

_{^{A sleeping car porter employed by the Pullman Company at Union Station in Chicago, January 1943 / Library of Congress (Jack Delano, photographer), public domain.}}

_{Originally published in the People’s World on August 18, 2023}

Last summer, the American Historical Association’s former president, James H. Sweet, issued an apology. Expressing regret for “the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends,” Sweet walked back a claim he had earlier made that characterized as “anachronistic” and essentially clout-seeking those historians who mixed the personal with the historical. Good historians, he had incorrectly insisted, don’t judge past atrocities, and they don’t try to explain how past oppressions continue to influence present-day society.

Sweet, who is Euro-American and teaches African history, felt obliged to say “sorry” specifically to Black historians after many stated that his comments seemed complicit with anti-Black racism. Historian Keisha N. Blain wrote that “Black historians have long recognized the role of the present in shaping our narratives of the past. We have never had the luxury of writing about the past as though it were divorced from present concerns. The persistence of racism, white supremacy, and racial inequality everywhere in American society makes it impossible to do so.”

There simply is no such thing as a values-free, objective history. History is always written and read within the ideological constructs of the present, including how historians themselves experience social relations of production and oppression. And, yes, social systems of oppression continue to twist and demean the lives of workers and racially and nationally oppressed people today, despite enduring struggle and even some important changes in the system. Pretending that there is some clear dividing line between past and present is itself bad historical thinking. Denying the very real connection between personal experience and the abstract power of a social system is ideological work that hides reality.

*Author Blair LM Kelley / Phillip MacDonald*

The arrival of Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, through its successful writing, its painstaking documentation, and exceptional narrative structure, provides a stunning example of what Blain was talking about. Though Blair LM Kelley probably never planned this book as a reply to Sweet’s poorly considered claims, her blending of personal history and her revelatory links between past and present exemplify a better way to study and write about history.

Black Folks opens with a story about how and why some of her ancestors chose to leave their Southern homes in the early 20th century, a story that serves as a narrative thread throughout the book. Her great-grandfather Solicitor Duncan, a minister and sharecropper, left his Georgia home after becoming fed up with a system of debt peonage. That system, governed by racist white supremacy, denied compensation for his family’s hard work while enriching the landowners who controlled the agricultural market, the credit system, and the local stores. Like many hundreds of thousands of Black people, Duncan brought his family to a Southern city, looking for work and the safety an urban Black community might provide.

They left in advance of the six million Black people who would leave the South between 1910 and 1970. By the 1950s, mass migration had radically changed the composition of the former agricultural-based class of sharecroppers and farm laborers into a class of urban, industrial, government, and domestic service workers. Many never left the South, while millions followed well-worn paths to Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles, among scores of other cities and towns. They relied on networks of family, friends, and Black-controlled media for information about where to find jobs and housing.

Black Folks is a study of the struggles of Black men and women who found jobs as Pullman porters, laundresses, maids, and postal workers. In detailing the personal experiences of workers such as letter carrier Hartford Boykin, domestic worker Minnie Savage, washerwoman Sarah Hill, porter C. L. Dellums, and several others, Kelley also links them to members of her family, John Dee Duncan, Brunell Raeford, Henry Rucker, and Joseph Rucker, who also had similar occupations.

Even though much of the book is based on personal accounts gathered from oral histories, Kelley embeds them in the historical context that shaped so much of their typicality. With each portion of the book, she effectively knits the historical, structural, and personal with detailed accounts of the collective struggles of African-American workers for self-defense, better work and conditions, fairer treatment in society, and political power. Each section also relates those personal experiences to a larger struggle to organize unions.

For example, C.L. Dellums’s confrontations with racism as a Pullman porter ripen into an account of the years-long battle to win the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ Union’s first contract in 1936. Minnie Savage’s struggle to win personal respect and fair pay from her overbearing employer flows into an account of the eventually fruitful struggle for the Domestic Workers’ Union that same decade.

This book’s loving reconstruction of the aspirations and struggles of the people is founded on Kelley’s assertion that though they were almost exclusively seen as the work they were tasked with or as stereotypes that lived in the imaginations of white employers, Black people were more than their jobs. Black people’s labor power was desired, and the things they made brought huge wealth to Euro-Americans who controlled land, industry, and resources. But these same employers did not value Black lives. To protect and uplift their humanity, Kelley shows, Black people made communities “informed by care for themselves and others, shaped by a dignity that could be shaken despite the circumstances.”

Kelley teaches us that even in the nadir of Jim Crow, Black people always resisted, despite the danger to their lives and their property. The Black people of Onancock, Va., a community of farmers and fishing people, are a good example. In the 1890s, Samuel L. Burton and James D. Uzzle opened businesses there that threatened the power of the white landowners who dominated the eastern peninsula of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. Burton started a grocery store that gave sharecroppers fairer credit terms and lower prices than white-owned stores that typically collaborated with landowners to keep sharecroppers in debt and tied to the place year after year. Uzzle started a newspaper that directly linked Black farmers with the outside world, often encouraging independent political action and economic strategies.

By 1907, Burton’s and Uzzle’s efforts had led to wide resistance against racist exploitation. The story about Black resistance in Onancock made the New York Times, which lamented waning white power. Perhaps out of a mix of revenge and an attempt to restore white power, gangs of Euro-American thugs roamed through the Black section of the town threatening and beating Black community members. When the people armed themselves to fight off the gangs, the landowner-backed mob with support from the cops descended on the town with fresh waves of escalated violence. Many Black people were forced to flee permanently, and the store and newspaper were destroyed.

Black Folks also recovers a submerged history of Black postal workers, such as Hartford Boykin, Hermann Marion Sweatt, and Amzie Moore, who struggled with their union siblings in the postal workers’ unions for workers’ rights. They translated their victories into political agitation for Southern Black voting rights, years before the SNCC-led Freedom Summer of 1964 began finally to break the back of Jim Crow apartheid.

The book’s in-depth research, absorbing narrative, and deeply personal approach reveal the inherent error of trying to divorce history from present realities. This study of Black workers’ aspirations and struggles paints a vivid picture of the deep impact of racial capitalism’s exploitation and oppression. It also celebrates the enduring tenacity and audacity of the African-American community in the face of systemic harm. This book testifies to the fact that Black history is not just a study of the past but an ongoing narrative. All of us—perhaps especially those of us of Euro-American heritage and working-class origin—have a duty to learn and internalize how these events continue to shape the present and may inform our aspirations for a more just future.

_{^{Blair LM Kelley
Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
Liveright Publishing, 2023
352 pages, $30
ISBN: 978-1-63149-655-4}}

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

_{Joel Wendland-Liu is the author of Mythologies: A Political Economy of U.S. Literature, Settler Colonialism, and Racial Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth Century (International Publishers) and The Collectivity of Life (Lexington Books).}

Socialist Eugene V. Debs celebrated in a graphic biography / by Eric A. Gordon

_{Originally published in the People’s World on June 21, 2023}

Bernie Sanders called him “the most effective and popular leader that the American working class has ever had… one of the most important Americans of the 20th century.” Yet his face has never appeared on a U.S. postage stamp, an achievement emblematic of having “made it” in the American history books. We speak of the longtime Socialist Party leader and many-times candidate for the presidency, Eugene Victor Debs.

It might be hard, in a long life of militant activism, to single out a unique defining moment of the man and his party, but surely among the most salient is Debs’s outspokenness in leading the Socialists (many of them anyway) to public opposition to World War I—for which he was sent to prison. What virtue would accrue to the global working class for it to “fall upon each other and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory” of Europe’s—and America’s—ruling classes? Would that more of our ostensibly most forward-looking political leaders in our own day might have enough courage to apply this same principle to the ever-greater war budgets that are sapping our social and spiritual wealth!

Though Debs himself was never elected to public office, dozens of the Socialists he inspired went on in the early decades of the 20th century to historic careers in federal, state, and municipal governance. Their terms, some decades-long, were often marked by honesty and transparency, and success in what people referred to as “sewer socialism”—attention to the nitty-gritty of local policy that brought integrity and peace of mind to millions of taxpaying citizens. Many municipally owned energy departments today owe their existence to those days of public ownership of the means of production.

Debs’s name is permanently embedded into the story of epic labor battles in industrializing America. If he manifested a socialist politics emerging directly out of the populism of the American Midwest heartland, and elaborated a distinctly American vision of socialism that put down deep roots not just in America’s great immigrant cities but in agricultural states like Oklahoma, Ohio, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, his brand of socialism also had its weak links. It was a movement almost entirely of the male persuasion, and in most places, it tended to defer the great unspoken issue of racial discrimination to some later, more enlightened future.

As radical as the Socialists’ message was on many points, on these critical questions other groups showed greater awareness—the anarchists, the syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and in the immediate post-WWI and post-Russian Revolution period, the newly established Communist Party.

Why now for Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography? It’s a mostly illustrated comic book-style treatment of Debs’s life geared toward inspiring a new generation of resisters appalled and frightened by the rise of Donald Trump. With the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, the rise of mass movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and the Wall Street Crash of 2008, socialism once again made itself felt in American politics.

Indeed, this biography is published in collaboration with Democratic Socialists of America, whose membership rolls skyrocketed after the 2016 election to heights not seen among American socialist parties since the 1920s. DSA members are now sitting City Council members in any number of American cities. The long final chapter treats “The Debs Legacy,” with a quick summary of the Socialist fate under leaders such as Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington, and Sanders himself.

Noah Van Sciver’s illustrations are geared to a script by Paul Buhle, noted historian of the U.S. left, with Dave Nance and Steve Max, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society. The volume features a Time Line of Debs’s Life, an Introduction, five generously worded essays framing each chapter, and appreciative blurbs by socialist superstars Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ben Katchor, Bhaskar Sunkara, Eric Foner, Trina Robbins, John Nichols, and Samuel Norich.

The sheer amount of text, and the information it conveys, duplicates much of what will be illustrated, suggesting that from a conceptual point of view, an uncertain level of trust existed among the writers, artists, and editors as to the proper balance between word and image. After Buhle’s terse, fact-filled chapter lead-ins, many a reader might well find the illustrations redundant. On all too many pages, the composition of images jams together scenes whose relatedness is remote.

In their zeal to build up the Socialist brand, the authors cut certain corners. For example, a chart (p. 109) compares “The Socialist Platform of 1932” to “Programs Adopted by the Roosevelt Administration,” purporting to show how much FDR borrowed from Norman Thomas and his movement. But many of those programs (unemployment relief, pensions, health care, housing construction, etc.) were also the demands of the burgeoning labor movement in the early Depression years, as well as the Communist Party. Having said which, Buhle is generally fair and even-handed as to the role of the CPUSA.

Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography is a thing of its moment with much enduring appeal, especially for those who might not be drawn to read a formal biography or, for example, the extensive writings of Philip S. Foner.

Paul Buhle, Steve Max, Dave Nance
Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography
Art by Noah Van Sciver
Brooklyn: Verso, 2019, 140 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-687-4

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