Tag: History

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.

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.

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.

New Cuban Report Confirms US Blockade is War / By W.T. Whitney Jr.

South Paris, Maine

Cuba’s foreign ministry on September 17 released the nation’s annual report on adverse effects of the lengthy U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. It does so ahead of the yearly vote in the United Nations General Assembly on a Cuban resolution stating the “necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States against Cuba.” Voting takes place on October 28-29.

For 32 years, member states have overwhelmingly approved Cuba’s resolution. At times recently, the U.S. and Israel have been alone inrejecting it.

The 55-page Report – accessible here – is remarkable for its detailed and far-ranging description of disarray and distress caused by the blockade. It exposes the cruelty and lawlessness of U.S. intrusion in the lives of a sovereign people.

This year’s version of the Report is convincing as to the urgency of opposing this U.S. policy. Showing that the blockade kills people, it casts the blockade as war. Struggle against the blockade might gain new strength with a new focus on the issue of peace over war.

The idea of the U.S. as war-maker is not new. Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the U.S. government has relied on military power as well as economic and political pressure to work its way in Latin America and the Caribbean area. Even now the U.S. wages war on Venezuela, Cuba’s close ally and fellow victim of U.S. economic sanctions.

A recent study adds precision to the notion of U.S. war against Cuba. The Lancet medical journal in August 2025 reported that economic sanctions imposed in 152 countries between 1971 and 2021 caused so many deaths annually as to exceed battle-related deaths and, often, to equal the annual toll of battlefield deaths plus civilian casualties.
This information removes any lingering surprise that the blockade might be lethal.

Awareness of that reality would be a big step toward recognition of the blockade as war against Cuba. The agenda here is to show the Report as backing these claims. The inquiry offers perspective as to Cuba’s place in the world system of wealth accumulation, conflict,
and oppression.

Big picture

The Report records damage affecting various sectors of Cuban society between March 2024 and February 2025. It surveys financial losses, shortages, and consequences. It shows that adverse effects themselves lead to far-ranging difficulties for individual Cubans and Cuban commercial and production entities.

Troubles stacked one upon another undermine strenuous efforts by Cuba’s government and people to encourage production and create living conditions that are sustaining and fulfilling. The Report is a story of institutions, production units, private enterprises, schools, healthcare entities, government agencies, and service organizations having to cope with frustrations and failed improvisations. A section appears on solidarity activities on Cuba’s behalf taking place in the United States and in the world.

The Report outlines two general categories of requirements under the blockade. Measures relating to Cuba’s finances make for low salaries, diminished flow of emittances, obstacles to investments from abroad, and inability to re-finance accumulated debt. Other measures block access to materials and commercial products. These include: food, hospital supplies, medicines, raw materials, new machinery, miscellaneous devices and tools, construction materials, replacement parts, fuel, chemicals, fertilizers, and more.

The categories overlap. According to the Report, “Dozens of banks suspended their operations with Cuba, including transfers for the purchase of food, medicines, fuel, materials, spare parts for the national power system, and other essential goods.”

The Report identifies the U.S. instruments that created regulations governing Cuba’s access to money and goods, among them:

  • Designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, whereby Cuba
    loses access to international loans and payments due from abroad.
  • Lawsuits filed in US courts under Title III of the Helms-Burton Act.
    These seek damages from those foreign businesses making use of
    nationalized properties. The effect is to discourage future investments.
  • Hundreds of U.S. measures devised for weakening Cuba’s tourism
    industry, that until recently was the country’s leading source of income.
  • New sanctions aimed at foreign officials who enable Cuban doctors to
    work in their countries. They block income that formerly supported
    Cuba’s own healthcare system.
    +Threats and sanctions mounted against “shipping companies, carriers,
    insurers or reinsurers involved in supplying fuel to Cuba.”
  • The 1992 U.S. “Torricelli Law” that requires third-country enterprises
    affiliated with U.S. corporations to never sell goods to Cuba containing
    more than 10% U.S. components.
  • The legacy of 1996 Helms-Burton Act stipulating that the blockade
    would be altered or ended only by Congress and not by the U.S.
    president.

Money talks

The Report records monetary data relating to shortages. The term “damages” that crops up. It signifies a combination of costs, loss of income due to the blockade, and potential gains stymied by theblockade. Damages recorded for various sectors are:

Biotechnology – $129.3 million
Energy and mining – $496.1 million
Information and communication – $78 million
Industry (goods and services) – $5.1 billion
Construction – $161.9 million
Transportation – $353.0 million
Tourism – $2.5 billion
Education – $89.9 million
Sports – $4.1 million
Culture – $195.1 million
Healthcare – $288.8 million
Food supply and processing – $932.3 million
Agricultural production – $51.9million

Total damages during the period under study were $7.6 billion. That amount exceeds damages by 49%. The total since the blockade’s onset is $170.7 billion. With inflation, “quantifiable damages” over the years become $2.1 trillion. There are these additional realities:

* Cuba’s GDP was down 1.1% in 2024. “The economy …has recorded an 11 per cent downfall since 2018.”

* Exports of goods and services achieved 92.5% and 101.6%, respectively, of anticipated goals. Export income was $770 million less than expected. Domestic revenues were down $900 million from 2023.

* Food production was so reduced during the year that 100% of the food provided under the rationing system was imported food.

* The term “geographic relocation of trade” refers to trade displaced because of the blockade. That necessity leads to elevated transportation costs and inflated prices. Added costs are $1.2 billion.

* The year’s inflation rate of 24.9% stems from shortages of supplies, diminished access to hard currency, and state spending to finance its budget deficit.

* Overall spending on tourism was $2.5 billion in 2024; tourism was down 9.6%.

Sanctions as war

Presenting the Report to the press on September 17, Cuban chancellor Bruno Rodríguez observed that, “It is impossible to quantify the emotional damage, anguish, suffering, and deprivation that the blockade causes Cuban families. This has been the case for several generations, with more than 80% of Cubans on the island born after the blockade began.”
According to the Report, “The unprecedented tightening of the blockade in recent years has had a particular impact on the public health sector.

The tense situation created in our economy, the financial persecution of Cuba and the denial of access to the US market … have hampered the ability of our health system to obtain … supplies when needed and provide quality service to the population. This has, in turn, led to the deterioration of several health indicators, including those related to
mortality.”

Indeed, the “blockade imposed by the US government against Cuba is an act of genocide.”
Hospitals and doctors have trouble finding, or may not find, “first line medicines,” cancer drugs, specialized drugs, key surgical supplies, respiratory therapy equipment, imaging equipment, diagnostic agents and test kits, dialysis machines, anesthesia gear, endoscopy equipment, insulin pumps, pacemakers, defibrillators, and pediatric ventilators.

According to the Report, 94,729 people are on surgery waiting lists, including 4507 cancer patients and 9913 children. A benign treatment device for aortic stenosis is available elsewhere but not in Cuba for 158,800 unstable patients. Survival rates for childhood cancer have fallen.

In a recent interview, Paul Jonas, a physician associated with the University of Leiden and admirer of Cuban healthcare, stated that, “In recent years, the Cuban healthcare system has deteriorated significantly…. This leads to untreated illnesses, unnecessary suffering,
and sometimes even death … [T]he quality of nutrition in Cuba is currently very poor … there are also shortages of medicines and other medical supplies.”

Cuba’s infant mortality rate (IMR), the number of babies dying in their first year of life per 1,000 births, was 4.2 in 2014 and presently is 8.2. Cuban economist and demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos, writing in 2023, notes that Cubans’ life expectancy registered a “decrease of 5.39 years” from 2012, also that the “decline … would not only have
continued, but would also have accelerated even if the [Covid-19] pandemic had not occurred.”

Food scarcity, mentioned in 2024 by Granma, the Cuban Communist Party’s newspaper, contributes to excess deaths. Blockade effects extend to food production. New machinery, livestock feed, credit, fuel, spare parts, fertilizer, veterinary supplies, and means of transportation are often lacking War characteristically disrupts societies and kills troops and/or civilians. Doing both, the U.S. blockade of Cuba is a weapon of war and manifestation of war.

What accounts for U.S. warmaking against Cuba? The U.S. has littlechoice. As chief honcho of the world capitalist order, the U.S. government must stick with capitalist rules. A big one requires that production always increase and expand. For that to happen, poorer and under-developed nations must cooperate and be subservient. Their job is to provide cheap labor and access to natural resources – and allow their wealth to be transferred to the centers. An outlier like Cuba is surely due for punishment.

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.

Trump’s Cuba Memorandum provokes strong criticism amid new US aggressiveness abroad / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Photo via Resumen Latinoamericano 

South Paris, Maine

The Trump administration on June 30 released its “National Security Presidential Memorandum 5” on U.S. plans for Cuba. Criticism from Cuba’s government and international commentators welled up, as if entirely new forms of anti-Cuba aggression were in the works. That may or may not be so. Actually, the recent Memorandum was a re-issue of the document put forth by the first Trump administration on June 16, 2017.

The eruption of an unusually forceful reaction to a Memorandum that says nothing new seems odd. It’s not. For one thing, the Memorandum creates an opening for U.S. government departments and agencies to fashion entirely new devices aimed at destroying Cuba’s economy. The 2017 Memorandum did exactly that, and what happened was disastrous.

And more: the international context of U.S. assaults on Cuba has drastically changed. U.S. foreign intervention now shows as war from the sky against Iran and as U.S. support and military hardware for genocide against Gazans. Is Cuba next in line for extreme measures?

Prescriptions

The Memorandum’s ostensible use is as a directive to heads of the various departments making up the U.S. government’s executive branch. It requires them to send President Trump reports on new tools they have devised for beating up on Cuba, and to do so within 30 days. They must “adjust the current Cuba regulations in order to ensure adherence, so
that unauthorized transactions with Cuba and impermissible travel to Cuba are effectively banned.”

The document attests to the authority already vested in the departments to take action against Cuba. It cites the 1996 Helms-Burton Law as having legitimized the U.S. purpose of regime change for Cuba.

The Memorandum sets forth various U.S. goals and various ways to implement them. These include promotion of free enterprise in Cuba, channeling funds to the Cuban people and not to their government, “restructuring certain travel arrangements and [US] travel,” and ending supposed human rights abuses in Cuba. This year’s Memorandum once more calls for depriving Cuba’s military and intelligence services of money derived from U.S. tourism.

This Memorandum, as with the other one, bans U.S. tourism to the island. All U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba for permitted reasons must keep records of their transactions in Cuba and for five years ensure that they are available for potential Treasury Department inspection.

The Memorandum directs U.S. officials to expand Cubans’ access to the Internet and to a “free press” and to oppose efforts at the United Nations and “other international forums” aimed at blocking U.S. policies on Cuba. Annually, the secretaries of the various departments of the executive branch must report to the president “regarding the engagement of the United States with Cuba to ensure that engagement is advancing the
interests of the United States.”

President Biden never disavowed Trump’s 2017 Memorandum. As a result, actions adverse to Cuba carried out under its authority remain in force.

Reaction

In discussion on July 2 with Randy Alonso Falcón, host of Cuban TV’s “Round Table” (Mesa Rotunda), Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío portrayed the recent Memorandum as a “political platform, a political document that is propagandistic, but also one that is a political declaration of U.S. intentions serving as a cover for actions it will take and others already in effect.”

As examples of the latter, he cited both sanctions applied to ships of third countries bringing fuel to Cuba and denial of access to the U.S. Visa Waiver program to those otherwise eligible citizens of 40 named countries who have visited Cuba. Now, potential travelers to Cuba often choose not to visit Cuba so as to preserve their eligibility. The intended result has been damage to Cuba’s tourism industry.

Cossio claimed that U.S. measures prompted by the recent Memorandum pose extra danger from “the hand of [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio … [and] of that clique that has made money and political careers out of hostility towards Cuba.” He laments harassment against individuals and businesses licensed to export goods to Cuba’s private sector, suggesting that the U.S. government seeks to harm Cuba’s private sector. He worries that some Cuban-Americans visiting in Cuba may be barred from returning to the United States.

The foreign ministry official pointed to a big change. Cubans have been “receiving privileged treatment on crossing the US border.” They are now vulnerable to “all [U.S.] anti-migrant actions including the alligator prison in Florida.”

International criticism of the recent Trump Memorandum erupted promptly and from many quarters, beginning in Cuba. Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel condemned the U.S. “purpose of inflicting the greatest possible damage and suffering.” National Assembly President Esteban Lazo, predicted their “vile purpose will fail in the face of Cubans’
unity and determination. “Cuba will defeat this new aggression,” pronounced Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz.

The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) judged the Memorandum to be “aimed at forcefully hitting at all sectors of Cuban society.” Argentina’s International Committee for Peace, Justice, and Dignity for the Peoples declared its support for U.S. opponents of the Memorandum. Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) on July 3
initiated an international fundraising campaign to send essential medicines to Cuba.

Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum on July 2 denounced the Memorandum, while declaring that “Mexico is the country that for decades voted against the blockade of Cuba and that will always be our position.” Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on July 2 stated that, “We exhort the USA to immediately raise the blockade and sanctions against Cuba, and eliminate the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.”

The most explosive and revealing reaction came from Rosa Miriam Elizalde, editor of Cubadebate.cu. She was echoing Vice Minister Cossio’s observation that “Perhaps U.S. officials imbued with this euphoria over a new U.S. foreign policy of imposing peace through force are demanding something similar with Cuba.”

Writing for Mexico’s La Jornada news service on July 5, Elizalde points to “[D]éjà vu: More than 20 years after the United States invaded Iraq under false pretexts, we are witnessing the same warmongering operetta in South Florida … During the spring of 2003, while the missiles were falling on Baghdad, the ultra-sector of Cuban emigration took to the streets of Miami with a disturbing slogan: ‘Iraq now; Cuba later’”.

She notes that, “[T]he Miami propaganda machine is once again waving the flag of armed intervention [in Cuba], while the U.S. and Israel are escalating their military offensive in Iran.” She highlights Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar’s remark that, “This is how tyrants are confronted, not only in Iran, but also satraps in Cuba, Venezuela and
Nicaragua. Peace through force. That’s the American way.”

Elizalde regards as ominous that “Trump invokes as an American military success the sad memory of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.” She describes a volatile situation in which “[i]mmigrants are hunted down like beasts, just like communists and Jews before World War II.”

She views the current political climate as recalling that of 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq: “The logic is the same: misinform, isolate, demonize, justify sanctions and, if conditions are right, authorize intervention in the “dark places of the planet.”

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 imperialist war against Haiti / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

South Paris, Maine

The Trump administration on June 27 announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) applying to half a million Haitians living in the United States will end on September 2. That total includes 300,000 people who, having fled unrest and violence, gained TPS in June 2024 under the Biden administration; 200,000 other Haitians who entered following a terrible earthquake in 2010 received TPS during Obama’s presidency.

Haitians not voluntarily returning to their country or not qualifying for legal immigration status otherwise face deportation. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security was reassuring: “The environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home.” That is not so.

A State Department travel advisory on Haiti in September 2024 tells U.S. citizens, “Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest … Crimes involving firearms are common in Haiti …” Lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council insists that, “This is NOT a safe place to send people. It’s a death sentence.”

Desperation

In truth, chaos and devastation are going to speed the deaths of many Haitians. According to a recent report from the International Organization for Migration of the United Nations, “Nearly 1.3 million people have been forced to flee gang violence in Haiti and seek refuge elsewhere within the Caribbean country … This represents a 24 per cent increase from December 2024.”

The report adds that, “Behind these numbers are so many individual people whose suffering is immeasurable; children, mothers, the elderly, many of them forced to flee their homes multiple times.” The gangs, unified under the name Viv Ansanm, engage in stealing, killing, extorsion, and destruction.

For a decade and more, Haitians have repeatedly protested and mobilized in the streets against high prices and shortages. Business owners and the wealthy have funded the gangs in order to protect their properties and interests against popular mobilizations. The U.S. government turns a blind eye to weapons entering Haiti from the U.S. Analyst Seth Donnelly speaks of “Death squads … financed by members of Haiti’s upper class and heavily armed by major weapons flowing into Haiti from Florida.”

This account of Haitians in distress and of the U.S. government covering up the truth points to U.S. domination there that that differs from the targeting of Gaza and Iran. However, each of these situations as varied as they are, have characteristics defining them as imperialist interventions.

Important here is the connection between imperialism and capitalism. It looks like this: at a certain stage in history, imperialism came to represent a way for nations to be able to improve the capabilities of corporations to generate wealth. Therefore, fight against imperialism is fight against capitalism, because imperialism derives from capitalism. It follows that opposition to the excesses of U.S. imperialism in Haiti fits within customary anti-capitalist struggle. But one needs to appreciate the imperialist nature of U.S. interventions in Haiti. That’s the object of what follows here.

Rule from afar

President Jovenel Moïse, wealthy and a major embezzler of public funds, was assassinated for uncertain reasons by US -organized mercenaries in 2021. Subsequently, a governing body appointed by the so-called Core Group has supervised Haiti’s affairs. The Core Group represents key North American and European governments.

Garry Conille, Haiti’s de facto prime minister, in June 2024 welcomed to Haiti 400 Kenyan troops who were the first contingent of the UN-authorized and partially-U.S.-funded Multinational Security Support Mission. They would be fighting the gangs.  Full funding and the full complement of 2500 troops sent by participating nations have fallen short. Meanwhile, killings and internal displacement continue.

According to the New York Times, Eric Prince has recently sent weapons to Haiti and will soon dispatch 150 mercenary troops there. He has introduced drones that have killed at least 200 people. Prince was a big donor to President Trumps’s 2016 campaign and is by far the lead U.S. empresario of mercenary warfare. Who pays Prince is unspecified.

As if Haiti’s government is the prime actor in this drama, the Times report portrays that government as “turning to private military contractors equipped with high-powered weapons, helicopters and sophisticated surveillance and attack drones to take on the well-armed gangs.” Haiti’s government, in fact, is on leave – is AOL.

History with a logic

Nothing about this train of grief is by chance. Powerful forces – imperialists abroad and oligarchs within – remain determined, it seems, that a people-centered government will never take root in Haiti. Once, there had been an opportunity.

Cooperating with Canada and France, the U.S. government in 2004 backed the paramilitaries who removed President Jean-Bertram Aristide from power, along with his progressive Lavalas political party. Earlier in 1991, CIA-affiliated paramilitaries did likewise.

President Aristide’s overwhelming electoral victory in 1990 and Lavalas presidential candidate René Préval’s victory in 1995 represented the first and second democratic elections, respectively, in Haiti’s history. They were the last ones, so far. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton engineered Michel Martelly’s election as president in 2010. Jovenel Moïse’s election in 2016 was marked by electoral corruption.  No elections of any kind have taken place since that year.

Following the U.S. coup against Aristide in 2004, the U.S. government, United Nations officials and the Core Group (of imperialist countries) together installed, the “United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti” (MINUSTAH).  Under Core Group supervision, MINUSTAH imposed a military occupation from 2004 until 2017.  Reports abounded of destruction, dying, disease – particularly cholera – and sexual violence on the part of occupying troops. The Haitian people’s real needs went begging.  

Enslaved workers in what would become Haiti rebelled in 1791 and established national independence in 1804. Between then and 1991, when Aristide first became president, Haiti was under steady assault from foreign powers. The result was foreclosure on the country’s political and social development.

France pressured independent Haiti into providing reimbursement for French plantation owners’ loss of enslaved labor. Haiti borrowed money to pay. Vast debt obligations continued into the 20th century. The U.S. government refused for decades to trade with Haiti or recognize her independence. It carried out a brutal military occupation from 1915 until 1934 and fully backed the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986).

A flexible imperialism

U.S. oppression of Haiti takes place in ways other than the devices imperialists usually rely on. Intent upon accumulating wealth, they go abroad to capture natural resources like oil and try to control strategically placed geographic locations. U.S. imperialists, partnering with Israel, are pursuing both of these objectives in Palestine and Iran.

Haiti offers nothing to compare. Low-wage industry beckons but garment manufacturing, active in Haiti, is only a weak draw. However, Haiti presents other attractions for imperialists that are very much in line with goals of extending control and generating wealth.

Haiti’s achievement of national independence surely represented a great upset of colonial trade arrangements, and these had prepared the way toward capitalist industrialization. Early U.S. capitalists condemned happenings in Haiti. That attitude undoubtedly assured Haiti a place on the U.S. blacklist.  Maybe the stigma remains.  

Karl Marx explains that, “direct slavery is as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery you would have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value, it is the colonies that created world trade, and world trade is the precondition for large-scale industry.”

One reason why U.S. imperialists make Haitians miserable is that, in doing so, they create a model image of massed people of color desperate to survive. That image, widely accepted, has possible use in projecting social precariousness as a constant in the underdeveloped world. The object would be to persuade northern exploiters that workers in such regions are so cowed as to accept poor working conditions and stay away from social revolution.

Additionally, the image of black people in great distress may be pleasing to the imperialists for its power of persuading non-Black victims of oppression living precarious lives to value what little remains of their self-regard and worldly possessions and to go it alone, and not join peoples of African heritage in common struggle. 

Lastly, old habits die slowly. The successful rebellion of enslaved people in Haiti stoked fear within U.S. political life and the wider community, both being under the sway of slave-owning interests. Fear persisted and Haiti’s image surely gained no favor during the Jim Crow era. And even now, crucially, racists and their ideas have their place within official Washington circles.

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 Trump circus has a logic and it’s dangerous / By W.T. Whitney Jr

Image via MR Online

South Paris, Maine

As startling and far-reaching as they are, actions taken by the Trump administration are most impressive at first glance for their circus-like quality of no central purpose. Realization dawns, however, that measures hitting at the rule of law and democracy itself and promoting war and turmoil in the wider world are so politically disastrous that by no means would they have appeared accidentally.

The idea here is that present situation reflects the U.S. government’s last-ditch response to a crisis of capitalism. If so, any useful defense against unfolding catastrophe has to center, it seems here, on what needs to be done about capitalism.

The term signifies arrangements in effect since feudalism that give full rein to ruling classes everywhere to organize economic and political affairs to their advantage. Capitalism is an evolving process that, stumbling now and then, requires adjustments to its functioning. Presently, the masters of U.S. capitalism seem to be carrying out a major fix of old and new problems that impede profit-taking. The measures being employed are disruptive.

To get the job done, capitalist decision-makers recruited the MAGA crew as agents to take on the unpleasant job, among other, of removing protections against exploitation and abuse of U.S. working people. Lower-order capitalists having reservations will probably join the project, while holding their nose.

Some basic assumptions introduce the discussion here:

· To fix what’s wrong, you look for the cause.

· Focus on impaired personalities running the show does not fully explain the turmoil triggered by the Trump government’s recent actions.

· Preexisting political rules and arrangements for how to govern did nothing to prevent the present catastrophe.

· Wide sectors of the U.S. population are silent, stunned, and without hope. They are generally unconvinced that an alternative way of doing politics exists or is possible.

· The Trump administration regards political opposition as inconvenient, irrelevant, and disposable.

· Actions of his government result from rational decision-making. They are not the products of random impulses.

Beginnings

Capitalists cross established boundaries. Beginning centuries ago in Europe, they have been plundering distant parts of the world. Along the way, they added an exploitative factory system, great industrial monopolies, and, lastly, a world system of markets, cheap labor, and plunder of natural resources.

Overcoming challenges and contradictions, capitalists took charge of faraway peoples, fought wars against rival capitalist powers, confronted socialist governments and suppressed resistance movements at home and abroad. Periodically, they had to recover from economic crashes prompted by the impossibility of impoverished workers buying goods that were produced. The point here is that capitalists are used to dealing with challenges.

Capitalists after World War I were experiencing unprecedented difficulties, and fixing them was fraught with uncertainty. European and the U.S. economies were highly unstable even before the Great Depression arrived. Plus, the Soviet Union was attending to people’s social needs, was industrializing, and was little affected by the Great Depression. A socialist alternative to the capitalists’ faltering system had abruptly asserted itself.

Many capitalists in Germany and Italy reacted by tolerating or actively supporting the fascist political parties fighting for power in each of those countries. They claimed to offer protection for capitalist economies and fightback against the Soviet menace. Their restrained U.S. counterparts accepted palliative reforms mediated through New Deal social democracy.

U.S. capitalism took on new life after World War II when the United States took charge of inserting free trade and other neoliberal policies into the world economy, over which it presided. The system allowed rich nations and their capitalists to exploit low-wage workers abroad, take advantage of poor nations’ debt dependency, and profitably extract their underground resources.

New Troubles

The good times were not so good. Beginning in the 1970s, worldwide economic growth lagged and inflationary tendencies persisted. The U.S. economy was experiencing “long-term stagnation and deindustrialization.” Financial activities and financial assets now loom larger in the U.S. economy than do commodity production and trade.

Manipulation of debt instruments misfired in 2008 leading to serious economic crisis. These adverse, long-developing realities represent one impetus for capitalist leaders to move toward extraordinary corrective measures. The Trump administration is carrying them out.

The other big element marking the current disruption of national politics would be the expected unpredictability of the Trump administration’s conduct of foreign affairs. On the theory that the administration’s major task is to shore up capitalism, it will surely be acting so as to align U.S. overseas activities with capitalist norms.

Lenin and other authorities had a lot to say about these, mainly the notion that aggressive foreign interventions are crucial for capitalism to be able to function.

U.S. imperialism, a bipartisan project, expanded after post-World War II. U.S. imperialists have carried out interventions, wars, proxy wars, and devastating economic sanctions in country after country, mostly in the Global South. These activities will undoubtedly continue under the Trump administration in order to further capitalist purposes. Random remarks on Trump’s part suggestive of easing up on this or that foreign adversary contribute only to the current volatility of political affairs.

Anti-communism had long inspired U.S. overseas adventures, but U.S. warmaking continued even after the Soviet Bloc was no more. The U.S. government and its capitalist junior partners, for example, engineered devastating regime-change operations against Yugoslavia (1999), Iraq (2003), and Libya (2011) The cover of anti-communism was gone, and antiterrorism as justification barely sufficed. Subsequent U.S. foreign interventions have represented imperialism, pure and simple.

China and a few other underdeveloped nations are now major manufacturing centers. China continues to attract significant foreign investment and is investing, building infrastructure, and extracting subsoil resources throughout the Global South, in the process outstripping the United States. The BRICS+ nations, competitive with the Global North in banking, manufacturing and science, are seeking to replace the U.S. dollar as the main international currency.

What to do

U.S. capitalists, seemingly worried about uncertainties surrounding foreign interventions and about weaknesses of the faltering neoliberal free-trade system, are on the way to building something new. The suggestion here is that Trump circus riling U.S. politics is no accident and that a new kind of capitalism is on the horizon.

Under Trump the government is assertive, aggressively nationalistic, and insulated from progressive social and political currents from abroad. The U.S. has disconnected from international agreements and international organizations, notably the 2015 Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization. High import tariffs are landing on goods arriving from almost everywhere, with the highest ones reserved for Chinese products.

U.S. working people are, or soon will be, coping with price hikes stemming from high tariffs; assaults on labor organizing, healthcare, schools, and universities; selective food shortages; aggravated racism; and cruel and illegal deportation proceedings. New grief is compounding earlier unmet social and economic needs.

The changes are so far-reaching that progressive reforms introduced by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s are at risk of disappearing. Breakdown of the New Deal consensus would be the crown jewel of the upcoming capitalist reformation.

Almost incidentally, war preparations are a major element of the new kind of capitalism. According to Monthly Review, “[R]earmament of U.S. allies, along with a massive increase in Pentagon spending and bellicose threats directed at designated enemies, could lead to the further proliferation of conflicts, heightening the chance of a Third World War.” A “Trump nationalist imperial policy” envisions a “New Cold War on China” involving a “limited nuclear war.”

Call in the specialists

A government embarking upon such far-reaching initiatives can expect troubles ahead. Vast numbers of U.S. Americans will be experiencing grief and abuse. They may rise up, prompting the need for their suppression and for maintenance of order. A major war would require the home front to be stabilized and controlled with vigor. A special brand of governance would come into play. Specialists are available for this kind of work.

They are MAGA crew, already on the job. Following a script, they hit at the rule of law, politicize the military, prepare for war, scapegoat immigrants and the racially oppressed as internal enemies, assault institutional centers of thought –universities, government research centers, and the independent press – and rip apart the fabric of democracy. Lying and disregard for the truth are nonstop.

You may have already made the association. Another bunch of fascists thugs almost a century ago in Germany and Italy did their reordering in ways similar to those adopted by the Trump administration in our era. Measures taken in both situations are similar, as are overall purposes.

The way out

Working-class resistance becomes important. Turning back the fascists – or protofascists, call them what you will – rests on alliances created between working people and other oppressed and marginalized sectors, especially in rural areas and among the lower ranks of the middle class, the so-called petit bourgeoisie. The MAGA movement’s electoral strength depends on support from both sectors and also, crucially, from elements of the working class.

The record shows that to defeat 20th century fascism, major elements of the Communist movement pursued the popular front strategy, the idea of worldwide alliance involving all democratic forces. That recipe fits today and, besides, no alternative political formation or remedy is waiting in the wings for rescue.

Communists are familiar through study and practice with the linkage between capitalism gone awry and the origins of fascism. Giving voice to that reality may be a first step in bringing unhappy, confused malcontents into political activism, and from there into mass mobilization, which is the essential tool for defeating fascism.

Communists and socialists will be educating and organizing, and asserting their places in public life. They would interact primarily, but not exclusively, with members of the working class. Their educational message would begin with the premise that capitalists unable to solve their big problems turn to fascism for rescue. They would highlight the connection between wars and imperialism.

Loose ends remain. First, U.S. capitalists’ reliance on the fascists is old hat for their kind. Business mogul Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh of America First fame greatly admired the Nazis. Senator Harry S. Truman in 1941, commenting on war in Europe, stated that, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” His message was that in the right circumstances Nazis are OK.

Secondly, U.S. capitalists, bent upon overcoming failures in how capitalism works, easily dismiss one of the greatest failures of worldwide capitalism, that of weak response to environmental crisis that threatens to destroy humankind and the natural world.

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.

President Biden, release Simón Trinidad from prison now! Let him return to Colombia! / By W. T. Whitney

Simón Trinidad, leader of the former guerrilla organization Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. File photo / via Orinoco Tribune

South Paris, Maine

President Biden recently pardoned his son Hunter Biden and commuted the sentences of 1499 drug offenders. Analyst Charles Pierce insists Biden should pardon Simón Trinidad also. Here we join this plea on behalf of the Colombian Ricardo Palmera, whose nom de guerre is Simón Trinidad. Biden indeed must release Trinidad and let him return to Colombia.

Trinidad, a former leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), has been imprisoned since 2008. U.S. agents arranged for his capture in Ecuador in 2003. Charged with drug-trafficking, Trinidad was extradited from Colombia to the United States in late 2004. Juries in two of his four trials there failed to convict him of narco-trafficking. Two trials were required to convict Trinidad of terrorist conspiracy to hold hostage three U.S. military contractors operating in Colombia.

The Peace Agreement of 2016 between Colombia’s government and the FARC offered a process for combatants to leave war behind. The Agreement produced the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), a device whereby Trinidad, once he arrives in Colombia, would be able to tell the truth about participating in civil war and possibly gain immunity from further punishment.

Trinidad’s defenders claim that his earlier experience as a negotiator on behalf of the FARC amply qualify him to help with overcoming difficulties still damaging prospects for peace in Colombia.

Trinidad is presently serving a 60-year sentence – 20 years for each of the captured North Americans.  Early release from prison for Trinidad would make partial amends for an excessively long sentence and relieve him of the cruelty marking his prison experience.

President Gustavo Petro’s Colombia’s government is now finally pressuring the Biden administration to return Trinidad to Colombia. A note sent from the Colombian Embassy on November 12 proposes that “in a humanitarian spirit and for the purpose of [Trinidad] contributing to Colombia’s peace agenda, we present a request for a presidential pardon.”

In a request first made in early 2023, Colombia still seeks “necessary technical facilities” provided for Trinidad so that he might participate in “virtual sessions” of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.  Once repatriated, he could then participate fully in “the search for total peace in Colombia.”

The U.S. government, ironically enough, has expressed support for the peace process in Colombia, both during four years of negotiation and subsequently after the Agreement was signed in 2016.

Simón Trinidad came from a wealthy, politically powerful, and landowning family in Cesar Department in northern Colombia. He prepared as an economist. Before he joined the FARC in 1987, he was managing an agricultural bank and his family’s estates, and teaching at a local university.

In reaction to accentuation of class-based bloody conflict in Colombia’s rural areas, ongoing for decades, his politics changed. Joining with others, he opposed the Colombian government’s tolerance of paramilitary killings of office-holders and adherents of the Patriotic Union electoral coalition, from 1985 on. They were Communist Party members, former FARC guerrillas, and other progressives. Well over 5000 of them would be massacred.

Within the FARC, Trinidad attended to political education, propaganda, and negotiations with foreign agencies and political leaders. He served as a lead negotiator and spokesperson during the failed FARC-Colombian government peace negotiations taking place in San Vicente del Caguen in 1998-2002.

Here are good reasons for Trinidad’s U.S. imprisonment to end, and for him to return to Colombia now:  

·        The federal prison in Florence, Colorado where Trinidad is held “is one of the strictest maximum-security prisons in the world.” He remained in solitary confinement for 12 years. Authorities restrict his outside communication to infrequent contacts with a very few family members. Visits are few and far between.

·        The conspiracy charge against him amounts to no more than membership in the FARC. That insurgency sought revolutionary social change. International law recognizes both the right of revolution, and rights for prisoners of war.

·        FARC guerrillas in 2003 shot down the plane carrying the three U.S. military contractors and took them hostage. They were “three retired military officers who provided intelligence services through private companies.” The FARC regarded them as enemy combatants. They went free in 2008. Simón Trinidad was far-removed geographically and command-wise from the decision to bring down their plane. In view of such circumstances, Trinidad’s 60-year jail sentence is wildly disproportionate.

·        Mind-reading has its hazards, but appearances may be suggestive. Pains taken to prosecute and persecute Simón Trinidad speak to his status as “trophy” prisoner for his U.S. captors – as indicated by Trinidad’s U.S. attorney Mark Burton. Under the pretext of drug war, the U.S. government in 2000 had introduced its “Plan Colombia” program of military assistance directed at ridding Colombia of leftist insurgents – to the tune eventually of $10 billion. Simón Trinidad’s prominent role in the recently failed Caguen peace talks showed off Plan Colombia as meeting expectations; an exalted prisoner like Trinidad was now in U.S. hands.

There would be the possibility too that Trinidad had earned the special ire of the entitled classes in both Colombia and the United States. Born with a silver spoon, he was indeed a traitor to his class. 

SimónTrinidad as a special case is clear on comparing his fate with that of major paramilitary boss Salvatore Mancuso, reliably accused of killing 1500 Colombians. Each faced trials in the United States after extradition on narco-trafficking charges. Mancuso served his 15-year sentence and in February 2024 was allowed to return to Colombia. President Gustavo Petro honored him through an appointment as “peace manager as part of’ [his] ‘Total Peace’ initiative.” Mancuso, but not Simón Trinidad, has testified before the JEP.

Attorney Mark Burton regards Trinidad as a friend: “To know him is to admire him, because he is an intelligent, human man, and also very firm in his political and social ideas. There are not many people like him in life. He is a person that in the worst prison in the United States they have not been able to break him. He is a person with firmness, ideas, and character. That alone is worth admiration.”

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.

In Bolivia gigantic march reveals socialist divide, elections are ahead / By W. T. Whitney

Hundreds of people take part in the so-called ‘March to Save Bolivia’ against leftist leader Luis Arce, on September 17, 2024. [Photo by Aizar Raldes / AFP]

South Paris, Maine

Beginning on September 17, marchers proceeded north for 118 miles from Caracollo in Oruro department to La Paz, Bolivia’s capital city, arriving there on September 24. Numbering from 5000 to 15,000 – estimates vary – they were supporting former President Evo Morales. They called their march a “National March to Save Bolivia; for Life, Democracy, and Revolution.” The had signs saying “Evo President” and “Lucho Traitor” – in reference to current Bolivian president Luis Arce.

The Movement against Socialism (MAS) Party, the party of both presidents, has split into two warring factions. Arce served for 12 years under Morales as minister of the economy and finances. Morales served three presidential terms, from 2006 to 2019. He had led a federation of unionized coca growers, was Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and been president of MAS since 1998.

Protesting shortages of food, fuel, and dollars and demanding that Morales be president, the marchers twice encountered resistance from hundreds of Arce loyalists.  Security forces made arrests and dozens were wounded.

Meetings and attempts at dialogue in La Paz were inconclusive.  Morales was no-show at one meeting.  Speaking out elsewhere, he revived an old demand, insisting that Arce change his “corrupt, drug-trafficking, and racist” ministers if he wants to continue governing.”  

The Arce government sought to forestall new mobilizations that might “prejudice the normal development of the country.” A Morales spokesperson confirmed that highway blockades would resume on September 30. His forces for two years had been carrying out blockades, strikes, and demonstrations – with 200 days of blockades in 2023.

On learning that the government would replace Justice Minister Iván Lima, the Morales side called off further blockades. Morales announced that “extreme poverty has returned and blockades will make it worse.” He also prioritized fire-fighting. The Morales side demanded that marchers who had been arrested be released.

Meeting in El Alto on September 27, the “Unity Pact” – the name given to government supporters – heard from social movement groups. Concerned about shortages, along with Morales’s partisans, they demanded a “response and solution” from the government. Arce, who was present, charged that he was being forced to resign.

If he did so, the Constitution would require that Senate President and Morales ally Andrónico Rodríguez be installed as temporary president.  Then will come elections set for August 17, 2025, and Morales would be running.

From Cochabamba, Morales proposed a “great national meeting on October 12 where we will be making other decisions.” He accused Arce of “selling out to the rightwing, seeking to diminish the state, and following recommendations of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.”

In late 2019 Morales, having won the first-round in presidential voting, was heading for a fourth term. Then came a U.S. assisted coup; he was deposed and went into exile. The responsible parties were big landowners, oil and natural gas empresarios, and assorted racists in Santa Cruz and other eastern departments. Jeanine Áñez became provisional president. She’s now in prison,

From exile, Morales named Luis Arce as the MAS candidate in presidential elections in 2020. He scored a 55% plurality. Morales returned to Bolivia and signs of division emerged. Arce maintained popular support for a while, helped along by a successful response to an uprising in October, 2022 carried out by reactionaries in the eastern departments.

At a MAS Party Congress in October 2023, delegates expelled Arce from the party and endorsed Morales as a presidential candidate for the upcoming elections. The Constitutional Court ruled in December 2023 that Morales may not serve another presidential term.   

In May, 2024, another MAS Congress took place, with a different set of delegates. It backed Arce as presidential candidate and named Grover García, government office-holder and former union leader, as president of the MAS Party to replace Morales.

President Arce blames Evo Morales’s ambition: “[T]he personal and individual appetite of one person cannot drag the Bolivian people into again violating the Constitution.” Arce’s approval rating fell from 42% to 22% between January and September, according to one poll. “The main reason is the economic; basically the increase in prices,” the report says.

Deterioration from an earlier state of affair is remarkable. From 2006 on, the MAS-led government carried out reforms that uplifted one of the most poverty-stricken populations in the Western Hemisphere.

According to one summary, Bolivia became a “Plurinational State” representing 36 indigenous cultures. Land was redistributed and the production of oil, natural gas, and electricity nationalized. The minimum wage and per capita income each tripled; roads, schools, and hospitals were built. The elderly, mothers, and children received generous social support. Health care expanded and schools multiplied.  The economy grew at twice the average rate of Latin American countries. International currency reserves mounted to US$15 billion in 2014.  

Then natural gas production fell. International reserve funds were down to US$139 million in 2024. According to a BBC report, these were the sources of funds used by governments under Morales and Arce to pay for social programs, including fuel subsidies. Now income from natural gas exports, paid in dollars, is short, more so because fuel imports are paid for in dollars. Bolivia imports 56% of the gasoline and 86% of the diesel fuel it uses. 

Dollars were in short supply to pay for the needs of Bolivian society. Borrowing shot up. But shortages persist, and inflation. Foreign debt as a portion of GDP rose from 10% in 2008 to 30% in 2022.

Economics is not the whole story. According to one account, “The main cleavage between Arce and Evo is the increasing inequality of state resources between the factions they represent.” Informal employment in Bolivia is high. But “the government’s executive branch employs half a million people … Control over people and agencies represents power that is available to the Arce administration and not to the other side.

For commentator Luis Vega Gonzalez, racial identity is a factor. On one side of “the abyss that separates them” are the Morales forces who are largely indigenous. On the other side are the “white mestizos represented by those who govern in conjunction with those whose power comes from perks.”

He adds that, “[I]n three years the Indians were displaced from power … the economy was handed over to the market … and the collective aspirations of the plurinational state had to be replaced by individual entrepreneurship and social climbing.”

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.

Haiti has disturbed U.S. ruling class for two centuries; Springfield is latest flare-up / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Haitian Revolution: Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (March 24, 1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Ernst Hébert. | Public Domain

Reposted from Peoples World

Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates expressed horror a couple of weeks ago on apparently learning from social media that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats, “eating people’s pets,” as Trump put it. The reports, as we all know now, were false, but their fallout was quite real. Bomb threats followed, schools and public buildings closed down, and longtime African-American residents felt threatened.

A bit of backstory: Springfield’s economy lost jobs and industries over the years. Some 15,000 Haitians arrived, eager to work. Industry expanded, but social service providers were stressed. Most of the Haitians in Springfield are there under Temporary Protected Status. That governmental designation enables migrants forced out of their counties by serious crises to enter the United States legally.

The bizarre twist of political behavior stems in part from the migrants being Haitian. Haitians and their nation have been problematic for the United States’ ruling class for more than two centuries.

The fact of migration itself does not account for the exaggerated hostility, though. Almost nothing of that order happens to the one-third of New York state residents and 40.9% of Miamians who are immigrants, or to the foreign-born residents of nine other urban areas in the United States who comprise from 21.1% to 39.1% of the several populations.

Stresses and frustrations associated with Springfield’s economic decline logically enough could have stimulated hostility toward migrants, if we look at what has happened historically in other communities. But economist Franklin J. James rejects the idea “that immigration hurts U.S. natives by reducing job opportunities …[and] that immigrants displace natives from jobs or reduce earnings of the average worker.”

Being Black may indeed invite hostility in a racist society, however. But the disconnect is sharp between the rarity of unbounded disparagement at high political levels and the large numbers of African-descended people who never experience the like from anybody. Opportunities abound. In 2019 Black people made up from 21.6% to 48.5% of the populations of 20 U.S. cities. That year nine Ohio cities, not including Springfield, claimed between 32.0% and 11.2% Black people. In 2024, 17.4% of Springfield residents are Black.

The scenario in Springfield may itself have been toxic: A large number of Black people from abroad arrived together on an economically depressed small city. But Somali migrants arrived in Lewiston, Maine under similar circumstances, and their reception was different.

They showed up in 2001, and a year later numbered 2,000 or so. In January 2003, an Illinois-based Nazi group staged a tiny anti-Black rally; 4,500 Mainers joined in a counter-demonstration.

As of 2019, according to writer Cynthia Anderson, “Lewiston … has one of the highest per capita Muslim populations in the United States, most of it Somali along with rising numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers from other African nations.” Of Lewiston’s 38,404 inhabitants, 10.9% presently are “Black or African American.” Blacks are 1.4% of Maine’s population.

Anderson reports that with the influx of migrants, Lewiston “has struggled financially, especially early on as the needs for social services and education intensified. Joblessness remains high among the older generation of refugees.”

Lewiston is Maine’s poorest city. For generations, massive factories along the Androscoggin River produced textiles and shoes, but they are gone. The city’s poverty rate is 18.1%; for Blacks it’s 51.5%. In 2016, 50% of Lewiston’s children under the age of five lived in poverty.

Citing school superintendent Bill Webster, an AP report indicates “immigrant children are doing better than native-born kids” in school, and are “going off to college to get degrees, as teachers, doctors, engineers.”

Analyst Anna Chase Hogeland concludes: “The Lewiston community’s reaction to the Somalis demonstrated both their hostility and reservations, as well as the great efforts of many to accommodate and welcome the refugees.” Voters in Lewiston are conservative; the majority of them backed Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

The circumstances under which the two cities received Black immigrants differed in two ways. A nationwide upsurge in racist rhetoric and anti-immigrant hostility worsened conditions for migrants in Springfield. Lewiston’s experience had played out earlier.

Additionally, immigrants arriving in Springfield qualified for special attention. The aforementioned political candidates could have exercised their anti-migrant belligerence in many cities. They chose Springfield, presumably because the migrants there, objects of their wrath, are Haitian. Why are Haitians vulnerable?

A mural painted on an alley wall this month in Springfield, Ohio. | Carolyn Kaster / AP

Black people in what is now Haiti boldly rebelled against enslavement on French-owned plantations. Remarkably, they expelled the French and in 1804 established the independent nation they called Haiti.

Ever since, the United States has spelled trouble for Haiti. Pre-eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglas pointed out in 1893 that, “Haiti is black and we [the United States] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Long after “Haiti had shaken off the fetters of bondage…we continued to refuse to acknowledge the fact and treated her as outside the sisterhood of nations.”

Scholar and activist W.E.B DuBois, biographer of abolitionist John Brown, explains that “there was hell in Hayti (sic) in the red waning of the eighteenth century, in the days when John Brown was born … [At that time] the shudder of Hayti was running through all the Americas, and from his earliest boyhood he saw and felt the price of repression—the fearful cost that the western world was paying for slavery.”

DuBois’s reference was to the U.S. slavocracy and its encouragement of collective fear among many white people that Black workers—bought, owned, and sold—might rise up in rebellion. They did look to the example of Haiti and did rebel—see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts.

In the United States, from the Civil War on, the prospect of resistance and rebellion on the part of Black people has had government circles and segments of U.S. society on high alert.

That attitude, applied to Haiti, shows in:

  • S. instigation of multi-national military occupations intermittently since 2004.
  • Coups in 1991 and 2004 involving the CIA and/or U.S.-friendly paramilitaries.
  • Backing of the Duvalier family dictatorship between 1957 and 1986.
  • The brutal U.S. military occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934.
  • S. control of Haiti’s finances and government departments until 1947.
  • No diplomatic recognition of Haiti from its beginning nationhood in 1804 until 1862.
  • S. economic sanctions against Haiti for decades, until 1863.

Says activist lawyer Bill Quigley: “U.S.-based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.”

Ultimately, it seems, threads of governmental callousness, societal disregard for basic human needs, and outright demagoguery coalesced to thrust Springfield and Haitian migrants into the national spotlight. Molelike, the anomalous and little-acknowledged presence of Haiti asserts itself in the unfolding of U.S. history.

As with all op-eds and news-analysis articles published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.

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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.

President Biden Must Remove the Designation of Cuba as Terrorist-Sponsoring Nation / By W. T. Whitney

Via Cuba Solidarity Campaign UK

South Paris, Maine

President Obama in 2015 removed Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism (SSOT). President Trump reversed that action in January 2020, thereby aggravating economic difficulties for Cuba. President Joe Biden needs to end the designation. The time is now for representatives, senators, and other elected officials to pressure him.

Cuba is no terrorist-sponsoring nation. In accusing Cuba of hosting terrorists, the Trump administration disregarded Cuba’s invitation to Colombian guerrillas to join representatives of Colombia’s government on the island to negotiate peace.

The SSOT designation requires that targeted nations not use dollars in international transactions. The U.S. Treasury Department punishes institutional offenders. Dollars are the world’s dominant currency, and in normal circumstances, banks would use them in transactions involving Cuba. Now, however, foreign lenders steer clear of Cuba. Payments for exported goods and services may not arrive. Cuba is financially paralyzed.

Cubans are suffering. Food is short, as are spare parts, raw materials for domestic production, school and healthcare supplies, spare parts, consumer goods, and cash.  The aim of U.S. policy, as specified by a State Department memo of April 1960, is to cause shortages, despair and suffering serious enough to induce Cubans to overthrow their government.

The labeling of Cuba as a terrorist-sponsoring nation is part of the decades-long U.S. policy of embargo, which is more accurately characterized as an economic blockade, this in recognition of its worldwide reach. Reasons for removing the SSOT designation are the same ones for ending the blockade.

After all, ending the blockade is the Cuba solidarity movement’s prime goal. The campaign to persuade congresspersons to pressure the president to remove Cuba from the SSOT list must refer to the blockade, even as it pursues the more limited goal.

Congresspersons know that, as per the Helms-Burton Law of 1996 congressional action is required for the blockade’s end. They know that current political realities are unfavorable for such action.  Were they to agitate for presidential action on the SSOT matter, they would, in effect, be preparing for a fight against the whole blockade. That’s why it makes sense to use the one rationale to back up each fight.

Ending the blockade (and SSOT designation) has its uses

·        Producers and manufacturers would sell goods in Cuba.

·        With despair and discouragement having diminished, fewer Cubans would be heading to the United States; 425,000 Cuban migrants arrived in 2022 and 2023.

·        U.S. citizens could visit Cuba for recreation, cultural enrichment, and education. Their exposure to Cuban artists, scientists, and educators visiting in the United States would be gratifying.

·        For the blockade to end would disappoint proponents.  They should have been disappointed by the results of the decades-long experiment showing that the blockade did not work. Regime change did not happen. Blockade apologists could reasonably enough move on to something else.

·        An end to the U.S. blockade (and SSOT designation) would gratify nations in the UN General Assembly that annually, and all but unanimously, vote to approve a resolution calling for the blockade’s end. Critics of U.S. interventionist tendencies, wherever they are, would be pleased. The U.S. government would earn some love.

Ideals and values

·        The blockade is cruel. It causes human suffering.

·        It violates international law: “Whatever view is adopted, either that of coercion or aggression, it is quite evident that the imposition of the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba constituted an illegal act … the blockade is a fragrant violation of the contemporary standard which is founded on … sovereign equality between states.” (Paul A. Shneyer and Virginia Barta, The Legality of the U.S. Economic Blockade of Cuba under International Law, 13 Case W. Res. J. Int’l L. 451 (1981)

·        The blockade is immoral. It contributes to sickness and deaths: “By reducing access to medicines and medical supplies from other countries and preventing their purchase from US firms, the embargo contributes to this rise in morbidity and mortality.” (Richard Garfield, DrPH, RN, commenting on Cuba’s “Special Period” of shortages following the fall of the Soviet Bloc – Am. J. Public Health 1997, 877, 15-20.)

·        The blockade exposes certain failings of U.S. democracy. U.S. political leaders remain oblivious to polling data showing strong support for normal U.S.-Cuba relations and for ending the blockade. Leaders of the Cuban exile community have long exerted undue influence in determining U.S. policies toward Cuba. The appearance is that of an important aspect of foreign policy having been farmed out to a strident minority. 

Contradictions

The U.S. government claims the blockade serves as punishment of Cuba for allegedly violating human rights. But the United States has easily co-existed with governments famous for disregarding human rights, like Nicaragua’s Somoza regime, Chile under Pinochet, Haiti ruled by the Duvaliers, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

U.S. policymakers see Cuba as a Communist dictatorship and, on that account, as deserving of economic blockade. Even so, the United States trades with Vietnam and China, where Communist parties are in power.

Vice President Joe Biden presumably backed President Obama’s action in removing Cuba from the SSOT list. Contradicting himself, he refuses to reverse former President Trump’s placement of Cuba back on the list.

Contradictions point to Cuba as special case in the history of U.S. relations with other countries. Only Cubans find an open door on arrival in the United States as irregular migrants. Such red-carpet treatment stands alone in the record of how the U.S. government handles immigration. 

The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 ensured that Cubans arriving in the United States without documents would at once receive social services and a work permit and a year later be granted permanent residence and the opportunity for citizenship.

The fact of U.S. hegemonic intent and actions regarding Cuba for 200 years must be extraordinary in the history of international relations. From Thomas Jefferson’s time until the 20th century, leaders in Washington sought to own or annex Cuba. They would later on find other modalities.

U.S.- Cuba relations have long been on automatic pilot. Pursuing justice and fairness, elected officials in Washington would be moving beyond that history. They would go against the grain as they pressure a U.S. president to no longer designate Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Persevering, they would fight to relieve Cuba of all U.S. harassment.

W.T. Whitney 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.