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

_{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.

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.}

US Intervenes as Indigenous Guatemalans Back President-elect Arévalo / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{Image: Los Angeles Times}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Bernardo Arévalo’s victory in first round of presidential voting on June 25 surprised Guatemalans, as did the emergence of his Seed (Semilla) political party. Roadblocks engineered by established political forces threatened his candidacy in the second round of voting, on August 20, and now may keep him from taking office, on January 14, 2024.

Arévalo and the Seed Party seek to remove corruption from Guatemalan politics. They and others oppose “the Pact of the Corrupt,” individuals with criminal associations that for decades, they say, have occupied all levels of government, national and local. They are, “former military people …sophisticated businessmen, judicial functionaries, legislators, mayors, communications people, bankers, and liberal professionals, the facilitators of business deals worth millions.”

From shortly after Arévalo’s first-round victory until now, their operatives in the government of outgoing President Alejandro Giamattei have alleged voter fraud. The attorney general, a couple of prosecutors, and a few judges of the Supreme Court of Justice and Constitutional Court have forced the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to take measures that would prevent Arévalo from becoming president.

It decreed that ballot boxes be seized and the Seed Party no longer qualify as a political party. It voided the election of congressional deputies. President Giamattei has rejected widespread demands that Attorney General Consuelo Porras, the offending prosecutors, and a couple of judges be dismissed.

Another surprise was on the way. A national strike of indigenous peoples erupted on October 2. For one commentator, this represented “the discovery of a forgotten and marginalized country, that didn’t exist in the national imagination … [and].came from the provinces, where the Seed Party, with its basically urban and middle-class origins, did not exist.”

Sit-ins and blockades of highways spread nationwide, peaking at 130 or more. Up to 60% of Guatemala’s commerce halted. Schools, colleges, and some local government offices closed. The demands were: no more corruption, remove Attorney General Porras, and Arévalo will become president on January 14.

Indigenous leaders referred to as the “48 Cantons of Totonicapán” had called the strike. They and indigenous officials nationwide were in charge. Guatemala’s European-descended leadership class had bestowed administrative authority on the “48 Cantons” in the 19^th century. Now, somehow, they seem to set the course for indigenous authorities in municipalities nationwide.

News reports cite the “Ancestral Indigenous Authorities” as representing indigenous participation in Guatemalan politics. The Accord on the Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, formulated in 1995, had enabled such. It was part of the Peace Agreement that ended decades of armed conflict during which some 200,000 people died, most of them indigenous.

Partisans of the current strike staged a rally in Guatemala City on October 20 to mark the 79^th anniversary of Guatemala’s “October Revolution.” On that day in 1944, a three-person “revolutionary junta” replaced the long dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. Voters in 1945 elected Juan José Arévalo, father of Bernardo, as president and Guatemala experienced its so-called “Democratic Spring,” which ended in 1954 thanks to a CIA-instigated coup.

Bernardo Arévalo spoke at the rally on October 20:

“The ancestral authorities have opened the way to students, community leaders, professionals, unions, … business leaders. … Look around. We are located in the center of citizens’ life in the country. The legacy of the October Revolution of 1944 is before our eyes. The Guatemalan Institute of Social Security is an instrument of solidarity… and source of tranquility for many families … [and the] Bank of Guatemala guarantees economic stability and supports … an economy whose benefits extend to everyone.”

In Guatemala, however, the poverty rate was 59% in 2020, 80% in rural areas; half of the population have limited access to food. That the average adult income in 2022 was $13,412 testifies to a well-resourced sector of the population. Indeed, 10% of Guatemalans owned 61.7% of the nation’s wealth in 2021.

Journalist Víctor Ferrigno points out the limited ambitions of the national strike: its indigenous leaders claim not to represent a political party but merely to be defending democracy and opposing corruption. Analyst Ollantay Itzamná adds that Guatemala’s government will emerge unscathed and will “certainly continue being racist and lethal for indigenous peoples.”

He argues elsewhere that the Seed Party, attentive mostly to the urban middle class, is responding to concerns that the government, a big source of employment, might disintegrate because of corruption, racist though it may be.

The U.S. government backs Arévalo, the Seed Party, and the campaign against political corruption. Itzamná points out that USAID finances projects of the 48 Cantons and of NGOs siding with the Seed Party. Indigenous leadership groups in Guatemala have gained U.S. trust, he indicates, by not “questioning the racist nature of the state or disputing the power of the rich.”

The U.S. government, he explains, is willing to “try out a progressive government in Guatemala as long as it is obedient to U.S. interests.” That government now gains U.S. favor by accepting an indigenous mobilization that serves to “hide the emergence of the pluri-national, anti-neoliberal, or anti-imperialist social subjects that do exist in Guatemala.” Radical indigenous movements, such as the ones active in Peru and especially Bolivia, are to be squelched.

One would be Committee of Campesino Development (CODECA), formed in 1992 as a “class-based organization” defending farm workers. CODECA announced its own national strike to begin on September 19. Demands were those of the current strike with the addition of a “people’s and pluri-national constituent assembly.”

Calling for a constituent assembly and basic change, Thelma Cabrera, presidential candidate of CODECA’s political party,The Movement for Liberation of the Peoples, won 456,114 votes, or fourth place, in the 2019 elections. She was ranking in fourth place in 2023, according to opinion polls, when the Supreme Electoral Tribunal rejected her candidacy.

In an interview on February 19, 2023, Mauro Vay Gonón, the CODECA founder, recalled that “state terrorism, mainly at the hands of Guatemala’s military, had cost the lives of 25 CODECA activists.” Tereso Cárcamo, killed on December 5, 2022, had taken part “in different peasant struggles such as the Popular and Pluri-national Constituent Assembly process.”

Vay Gonón, a guerrilla insurgent during the armed conflict, lamented that, “The entire Peace Agreement” [of 1996] is for nothing. They are walking all over it. This is a sad truth for the Guatemalans, because we sincerely don’t want to go back to a war.”

_{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.}

A Plea for Simón Trinidad / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{“Simon Trinidad” and Piedad Cordoba (Image: Piedad Cordoba)}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

The title recalls the title of Henry David Thoreau’s essay “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Trinidad, like John Brown, is remarkable for his implacable resolve and regard for justice.

Trinidad was 58 years of age when a U.S. court in 2008 sentenced him to 60 years in prison. His alleged crime was that of conspiracy to hold hostage three U.S. drug-war contractors operating in Colombia. In effect, he is serving a life sentence. He had nothing to do with the hostage-taking.

The contractors, captured in 2003, went free in 2008. U.S. drug war in Colombia has obscured the big U.S. role in Colombia’s war against leftist insurgents, primarily the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Simón Trinidad was a FARC leader. The FARC and Colombia’s government signed a peace agreement in 2016 and Trinidad and other ex-combatants expected to be part of a peace process. Now he is a prisoner in a super-max prison in the United States and is confined to his cell for all but two hours per day, receives no mail, and is allowed very few visitors.

On July 27, Simón Trinidad unexpectedly was a featured item in the news in Colombia. An undated letter he had written to Colombian chancellor Álvaro Leyva requesting repatriation to Colombia had appeared on social media. News reports were reproducing it.

Observers associated Trinidad’s letter with the U.S. government’s announcement the day before that the bloodthirsty former paramilitary chieftain Salvatore Mancuso, also jailed in the United States, soon would be extradited to Colombia. President Gustavo Petro designated Mancuso as a “promotor of peace.”

Trinidad, not so favored as this, in his letter wrote of his determination to testify before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, as other former FARC combatants have done, and Mancuso too, virtually. This court, established under the Peace Agreement of 2016, offers former combatants an opportunity to tell the truth about crimes they may have committed during the civil war and, having done so, to be pardoned or punished.

Trinidad apparently hopes not only that that Chancellor Leyva will inform the U.S. Secretary of State of his request to be repatriated but also that his message will be passed on to President Biden, who has the power to release him from prison.

Progressive Colombian Senator Iván Cepeda, “one of the people who speaks of peace on behalf of President Gustavo Petro,” welcomed “Simón Trinidad’s proposal [and] sent it directly to Chancellor Álvaro Leyva.”

Trinidad had joined the left-leaning Patriotic Union (UP) electoral coalition after it formed in 1985. A year later, paramilitaries began their massacre of UP adherents that, with impunity from Colombia’s government, lasted for years. In response, Trinidad in 1987 joined the FARC and, in the process, dropped his name Ricardo Palmera Pineda. For the FARC, Trinidad was responsible for political education and propaganda and was a negotiator.

The U.S. government in 2000 introduced its “Plan Colombia” through which Colombia’s military secured U.S. weapons and training assistance; U.S. troops and military contractors were deployed in Colombia. The appearance of Plan Colombia doomed peace negotiations between the FARC and Colombia’s government that were in progress at the time.

As a lead FARC negotiator in those talks, Simón Trinidad became known to international observers. His course with the FARC ended abruptly on January 2, 2004, when Colombian military personnel and the CIA seized him in Quito. Trinidad was there seeking UN assistance for a proposed prisoner exchange.

Colombia’s government extradited Trinidad to the United States on New Year’s Eve, 2004. According to his U.S. lawyer Mark Burton, Trinidad’s U.S. captors regarded him as a “trophy prisoner.”

Trinidad’s U.S. handlers had to stage four trials for them to finally gain a conviction. His capture and his multiple appearances in U.S. courtrooms from 2005 to 2008 served as real-time advertising that testified to U.S. commitment to anti-insurgency war and drug war in Colombia.

Trinidad’s misfortune was to have fallen into the clutches of a nation whose record on prisoners is horrific. After all, “The United States stands alone as the only nation that sentences people to life without parole for crimes committed before turning 18.” (No wonder: of 196 countries, only the United States has yet to ratify the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.)

As a U.S. political prisoner, Simón Trinidad harks back to the Scottsboro Boys, who in Alabama faced death penalties in the 1930s; to Communist Party members jailed under the Smith Act; to Black Panther Party members caught up in the U.S. government’s COINTELPRO project. Simón Trinidad is also representative of prisoners gathered up in U.S. wars and other interventions abroad. They include: Ricardo Flores Magón, Mexican revolutionary who died in Leavenworth Federal Prison in 1922; the “Cuban Five” prisoners who resisted U.S. hostilities against Cuba; and the unfortunates ending up in the U.S. prison in Guantanamo during and after the Iraq War.

Despite the Peace Agreement, paramilitaries or other thugs have since killed almost 400 former FARC fighters; 300 FARC prisoners of war are still in prison almost seven years later.

Violence in the countryside persists. Colombia’s military is unable or unwilling to suppress a new breed of paramilitaries. One report highlights the paramilitaries’ “symbiotic relationship with Colombian state actors.” Declassified State Department and CIA documents from George Washington University’s National Security Archives say the same. The plot thickens: the tight relationship between the U.S. and Colombian militaries and the U.S. alliance with Colombia’s government together suggest U.S. complicity with a violence that Colombia’s Army and state are unable or unwilling to control.

The bad news for Simón Trinidad is that the U.S. government is betting not on peace in Colombia, but on continuing war. For that reason, Simón Trinidad confronts formidable barriers in satisfying his need to join Colombia’s peace process. Mark Burton’s words end this report: “Simón Trinidad is a man with a clear vision for a new Colombia, a Colombia in peace and with social justice. Colombia needs to listen to his voice, his vision, his proposals for peace. His continued imprisonment in the United States on false charges is an insult to Colombia, its history, and its people.”

Burton’s comments appear in a remarkable new eBook, accessible here. It contains commentary, in Spanish, from activists, writers, and intellectuals seeking Trinidad’s repatriation. The announcement of this book offers a video presentation, here, of reflections and documentary material.

Fighting for Land and Independence in Jujuy, Argentina / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{South Paris, Maine, June 27, 2023}}

In Jujuy province, in Argentina’s extreme Northeast, poor people’s discontent, the provincial government’s overreach, and popular resistance recently contributed to a crisis that portends grief and struggle ahead. Setting the stage were: free rein for local reactionaries, indigenous peoples’ oppression, foreign plundering of natural resources, and a U.S. eye over the whole affair.

June was a month of turmoil. Governor Gerardo Morales had proposed reforming the province’s Constitution. Teachers’ unions were agitating for higher salaries.

Discussion for 50 days that should have preceded the Constitutional Convention never happened. The Convention, presided over by Morales himself, played out over three weeks. He had timed the electing of delegates to coincide with provincial government elections and thereby assure enough voter turnout to elect delegates who backed constitutional reform.

The proposed changes included new provisions for criminalizing public protests and new restrictions on “freedom of expression, petition, and association.” There would be revised legal mechanisms for regulating access to land, this so as to deliver land to lithium-producing multi-national companies. Indigenous peoples would face the probability that untitled plots of land crucial to their survival, for generations, would no longer be available. Jujuy province is the center of lithium extraction in Argentina, the world’s fourth largest lithium producer.

Elected in 2015, Morales cut back governmental support for education, and teachers lost jobs. Teacher salaries in Jujuy are the lowest in Argentina. Teachers’ unions in nearby Salta province had recently carried out strikes and won pay increases.

On June 5, a Jujuy teachers’ union struck for better pay. On June 9, several teachers’ unions and the municipal employee union marched on Jujuy city, population 375,000. Soon healthcare workers and a miners’ union would join the mobilization. Morales decreed “increased penalties against individuals and organizations participating in any protests or social mobilization.”

On June 14 indigenous people marched on the city “to demonstrate their rejection of the [constitutional] reforms … being devised behind closed doors.” City streets were teeming with protesters on June 15 when word came that agreement was near on constitutional reforms. Soon indigenous groups and others were maintaining roadblocks on highways throughout the province. Police, assisted by unidentifiable enforcers using unmarked vehicles, stepped up arrests of demonstrators and journalists. Calls went out for Morales’s resignation.

The Constitutional Convention on June 20 approved alterations of 66 of the provincial Constitution’s 212 articles. Street pressure had caused two reforms involving indigenous rights and access to land to be withdrawn temporarily. Restrictions on protesting and free expression remained. The Constitution now provides for “automatic majority in the legislature for the governing party” and no longer requires that provincial elections be held every two years.

Massed demonstrators responded by assaulting the Government House with projectiles. Police turned them back using tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests.

The provincial government’s repressive methods elicited criticism from elsewhere in Argentina and from the Inter -American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Governor Morales exceeds boundaries. Early in his first term, for example, he enlarged the top provincial court from five to nine judges. Consequently, provincial courts have endorsed illegal searches, illegal evictions, and persecution of social leaders. By 2018, 25 family members were serving as provincial government officeholders.

One presumes that the governor’s evident lack of restraint is bad news farther afield. He leads Argentina’s rightwing Radical Civic Union party and now is a vice-presidential candidate on one of two tickets aiming to represent the rightwing Unite for Change electoral coalition in upcoming elections.

It’s clear: he stops at nothing. Morales’s government in 2016 arrested Milagro Sala, leader of the Tupac Amaru Organization that at the time was assisting indigenous families as they looked for food, housing, basic education and more. The government was interfering and the Organization resisted. The police arrested Sala on flimsy pretexts and seven years later she is still detained.

Continuing his efforts to waylay indigenous independence, Gerado Morales took part in the November 2019 coup that deposed Bolivian President Evo Morales. That Morales was an indigenous president of a multi-national republic. Governor Morales was instrumental in arranging for U.S. assistance.

Around September 4, 2019, Gerardo Morales supposedly joined a meeting in Jujuy held to organize the coup against Evo Morales. Present was Luis Camacho who, based in Santa Cruz in Bolivia, was leading the coup in progress. Later on, Governor Morales himself traveled to Santa Cruz to confer with plotters.

On that September 4, Ivanka Trump and State Department, CIA, and USAID personnel arrived in Jujuy ostensibly to support local women’s initiatives. Trump had brought $400 million. A Hercules C 130 aircraft was deployed on the runway close to the recently arrived U.S. plane. Almost at once that plane departed for Santa Cruz, without a flight plan. Camacho was on board.

He may have been conveying the U.S. funds that would be used to bribe the senior Bolivian Army officers who pressured Evo Morales to resign. Later on, Gerardo Morales surely was not blind to that same airplane carrying weapons to plotters in Santa Cruz.

The governor’s zeal in serving U.S. interests shows up now as he cultivates U.S. official representatives for the sake of U.S. investment in the extraction and processing of lithium. He met with U.S. ambassador Marc Stanley in May 2022, and later Stanley was in Jujuy as Morales acquainted him with “a portfolio of projects in development.” Stanley and his family attended an indigenous festival.

Together with governors of other lithium-producing provinces, Morales in 2022 visited European countries and the United States. There he met with Washington officials, bankers, and industrial leaders, among them Elon Musk, owner of Tesla Corporation.

Morales’s friendship with Argentinian-government economic minister Sergio Massa is surprising – President Alberto Fernandez’s government is on the other side of the political divide – but understandable: Massa is a favorite in U.S. official circles, a lead promotor of foreign investment in Argentina’s natural resources, and a likely presidential candidate in elections later this year.

The story here centers on Morales’s doings as an individual. But people respond to circumstances collectively and engage collectively in social change. Morales is representative, it seems, of that class of well-paid intermediaries who have long arranged for the transfer of wealth from wherever to a waiting set of plunderers.

The history of the Americas has them freeing up land so as to get at wealth that is there. They must dispose of the set of people living on the land. Military force is made available. Morales becomes an updated conquistador.

Writing for the Argentinian Club of Journalist Friends of Cuba (capac-web.org), Alberto Mas provides specifics. In a report entitled “Jujuy is the North American Laboratory for Argentina,” he states that, “The visit of General Laura Richardson of the U.S. Southern Command [on April 17, 2023] did not in the least hide intentions of controlling the production and exportation of Argentina’s lithium. This is part of a strategic plan for the region which they have implemented over the course of time: the coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia had the smell of lithium.”

Birthday Celebration – “Fidel is a country, is this people.” / by W. T. Whitney Jr.

_{^{Credit: rebelión.org}}

Many people here in Maine have traveled to Cuba. Together with our Cuba solidarity group Let Cuba Live, some of them celebrate on August 13. That’s today; it’s the 96^th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s birth. But we hear you saying: “isn’t a social revolution supposed be to something collective and not a cult of personality?”

True, we would reply, revolutions do need masses of people who, amid hardship and oppression, have visions of decent lives and can come together. But revolutions are not spontaneous. There is a place for leaders, someone like Fidel Castro. Just as with Jose Martí, Cuba’s great leader in an earlier era, Fidel Castro communicated goals and hope and offered strategic insight and plans. So it’s OK.

Some reflections on this anniversary date make the point. In her article appearing August 13 on cubadebate.org, Daily Sánchez Lemus claims that, “Fidel is a country, is this people, who see in him the architect of their highest dreams.” She asks, “How can we explain what it meant [for him] to be close to the humblest people, to feel them, interpret them and share the same fate?”.

She cites a long letter Fidel wrote on July 21, 1957 to Frank País, his martyred young comrade based in Santiago de Cuba in the early days of the Revolution. She states that Castro’s “concept of people” is displayed there. At that time Castro and his band of guerrilla insurgents, were fighting in the Sierra Maestro mountains. Castro writes:

“Now I do know what a people is: I see it in that invincible force that surrounds us everywhere. I see it in those caravans of thirty and forty men, with torches for light, going down muddy slopes, at two and three in the morning, with seventy pounds of weight on their shoulders, bringing supplies for us.

Where did they come from? Who organized them so marvelously? Where did they get so much skill, so much cunning, so much courage, so much self-sacrifice? Nobody knows! … They organize themselves, spontaneously! When the animals get tired and lie down on the ground, unable to keep on, men appear everywhere and bring the stuff along. [Deadly] force can’t do anything against them. They would have to kill them all, down to the last peasant, and that’s impossible. No tyranny can do that and the people realize it, and are more and more aware of their immense strength.”

From Spain’s Basque region, Paco Azanza Telletxiki, wrote in 2008 about Fidel Castro’s decision then not to seek Cuba’s presidency. He cites Haydée Santamaría’s remarks spoken at the University of Havana in 1967. That hero of Cuba’s Revolution declared that, “for me, being a communist is not being a member of a party: for me, being a communist is having an attitude towards life. Fidel is a communist with an attitude; he is more than a Party member. Fidel is the unequivocable communist who is so scarce today and who is needed to bring to fruition the just causes of the whole world.

She adds that, “In the 80’s Fidel commented that if one day the USSR disappeared and Cuba was alone, Cuba would still be socialist. Then came 1991, and the Soviet Union collapsed. When that happened, many “friends” of Cuba disappeared. In this new and complicated situation, the color red was fading. The reds of some countries faded little by little; others, devoid of shame, did so quickly. …Fidel and his Revolution continued walking along the same ideological path as always, flying the same flag.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a political prisoner serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania jail, in 2008 also weighed in on Fidel Castro’s withdrawal from political life. In his comments, Mumia Abu-Jamal points out that:

“Fidel’s nearly 50 years as Cuba’s head of state have had a far-reaching impact not only in Cuba, but in Latin America, and beyond. … Latin America, in large part due to Cuba’s strong and tenacious example, has distanced itself from the draconian governments of U.S.-supported generals and is opting for democratic governments and populist leftists.

“In the field of education, Cuba’s achievements have been exemplary. In Central and South America, the average literacy rate is 86.4 percent. Cuba’s average literacy rate is 98 percent …

“Under its socialist system, education in Cuba is free. Indeed, Cuba is the school of choice for thousands of students from all over the world, especially in higher education and medicine. … In fact, in 1961 more than one million Cubans (mostly from rural areas of the nation) were illiterate. More than 100,000 children over the age of 10 voluntarily participated in “literacy brigades” and spread throughout the country to teach the poor and peasants to read and write …

“In foreign affairs, Cuba brought its considerable military power to the fore in the struggle against South Africa’s racist apartheid system. Cuba, supporting the Angolan armed forces, …caus[ed] such losses to the South African army that it ushered in a long road of negotiations, compromise, and [eventually] the dissolution of apartheid.”

Lastly, Patricio Montecinos offers reflections that appear today on rebelion.org:

These days Cubans are paying special tributer to the historical leader of their Revolution, Fidel Castro. They speak of him with a mixture of admiration, respect, and longing, but for them, he is always present, even now when, physically, he is gone.

For millions of admirers on the island, Fidel – the Commander in Chief, as they always will always call him – lives on, inside all of them. He is there in every part of the Island where he used to show up to plant ideas and hopes, and listen to his people.

Most Cubans have an anecdote they tell of their maximum leader and guide, and now on his 96^th birthday celebration, this August 13, they are proud to have him with them in their various activities. Many say they still talk with Fidel, ask his advice and help with their personal decisions. Sometimes, one hears them saying this in tears, as if he were their closest and most beloved family member

He is the man the CIA tried to assassinate more that 600 times and that successive U.S. administrations tried to being down but couldn’t do so. He is present in every moment of happiness and victory for Cubans and there too in moments of adversity and sadness.

The leader of Cuba’s Revolution of January 1, 1959 is with his people always, and will be for generations, including people who never knew him. For most young people and children, he is a guardian angel and the idol of the island that deserves the name “island of dignity.”

Fidel is also remembered on every continent. He always extended hands of solidarity to the dispossessed peoples of this world, and never asked for anything in exchange. He taught his compatriots to continue on that path and always lend a hand to anyone who needs help.

_{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.}