“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

Europeans invaded the Americans and stole the lands and wealth held by native peoples for thousands of years. They enslaved black Africans who they held as slaves and even after slavery ended they kept them as second-class citizens.

Black people developed various forms of struggle including civil disobedience, sit-ins, pickets, mass rallies, propaganda, and voting for equality where possible. Another form of struggle was the Black Panther Party’s armed self-defence when attacked by Ku Klux Klan and the ruling class’ police. Another form was the Gravey Movement that called for separation from the United States, demanding territory in the south. Very much like the Tamils after the 1976 Vattukottai resolution.

In the United States millions of blacks and whites fought this racist discrimination for over a century and eventually won most basic rights but not before millions were arrested, imprisoned for long times, and many murdered. Many thousands of black people were lynched, burned alive, mutilated, tortured to death until the 1980s.

Fidel Castro: “Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are out enemies…Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.” “To be internationalist is to settle our debt with humanity.”

Che Guevara from Socialism and Man: “The revolutionary is the ideological motor force of the revolution. If he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution, which he heads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.”

I believe that these principles apply to the Tamils of Sri Lanka. I believe Che would agree with your struggle for equality and when not possible to achieve within the Sri Lankan chauvinist context, he would understand your fight for your own nationhood.

I think this is also what Lenin meant in his 1916 thesis, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”:

“Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realize the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination, that is, the right to free political separation.”

I am hurt and deeply disappointed that the government of Cuba—where I have lived and worked side by side with the people and government for eight years—as well as the socialist-progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American governments have not understood that those principles must apply to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. I got involved in solidarity with your people’s struggle because you have been so brutally treated, and because of these righteous principles expressed by Lenin, Fidel and Che. I have written critically about these governments siding with the Sinhalese governments of Sri Lanka while it denies the Tamil people those basic principles and rights, and commits genocide.

Perhaps Cuba+ have not understood the history of struggle that Tamils have undergone to win full equal rights before taking up arms. For 30 years you fought peacefully but you were met with brutal force, with pogroms/massacres of hundreds and thousands of people—even worse than that used against blacks in the US, and against Palestinians by Israelis. And, unfortunately, it was not only the governments that have done this against Tamils but also misguided Buddhist monks who betray the peaceful, coexistence values of Buddhism.

Your people’s organizations must meet and discuss these realities with the communist and socialist parties and with people’s grass roots and indigenous organizations in Latin America and elsewhere. You must explain to them your history, why you had to take up arms and fight for separation, for an independent nation. They have to hear of your suffering, of your struggles, why Tamil Eelam is a NECESSITY. You must remind them what they say about international solidarity, about what Lenin meant about political separation when the ruling powers will not grant a people their basic democratic and equal rights.

The progressive governments have won majority votes for new constitutions in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela that grant equal rights to their indigenous peoples. In Bolivia, for instance, under the new constitution there are four official national languages, three of them are indigenous ones as well as Spanish. The same equalitarian development is happening in several progressive, pro-socialist governments in Latin America. If these people could know you simply want these same rights, they would listen to you and stop backing Sri Lanka. But they have been misguided because when they hear the worst terrorist in the world—the United States of America government—raise a little finger of possible criticism that maybe the Sri Lanka government should investigate itself to find some official scapegoat for violating human rights, Cuba should react against this hypocrisy. But they must know that in this case the Sri Lanka government is a terrible violator of human rights, and not just against the Tamils, but also against Muslims, the indigenous tribes, and it also exploits Sinhalese workers and the poor, and castes.

We must understand that Cuba, and so many governments and peoples, has been victimized by the United States false accusation that it commits “human rights abuse”. Cuba has been blockaded by the US since its victory in 1959. The US tried to overthrow the new revolution in April 1961. It brought the entire world to the brink of a nuclear war in October 1962. The US has sabotaged Cuba, murdered and handicapped thousands of its citizens; it even infiltrated bacteriological diseases in its livestock, its grains and sugar cane.

What has Cuba done to “deserve” this murderous aggression? It has done what Big Capital does not do, what imperialists will not do. It has introduced full and free education and health care. It has assured every citizen food and shelter. No one starves. 80% of its people own their own homes after paying the state simply what it actually costs to build them.

It has organized an excellent system of disaster management in which people and their animals are evacuated before hurricanes hit the island nation. And more often than not no one is killed, and their livestock is saved. That is not what happens in the United States especially in the areas where blacks and poor people live and are struck by natural disasters.

Cuba came to the aid of Angola when attacked by apartheid South Africa. Cuba, alongside with the new Venezuela, comes to the aid of tens of millions of people in scores of land around the world with their medical care, curing even blindness, and educating people to read and write, offering sports and technical assistance. Cuba has more doctors serving the international arena than is offered by all the governments in the United Nations. Cuba does not export war and torture, disease and starvation. It exports “human capital”.

Tamils in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka Tamil refugees here and in the Diaspora should not rely on the greatest terrorist in the world to help them. The Yankees offer no help without humiliating costs. We must be aware that since World War 11, the US has invaded/intervened militarily 160 times in 66 countries. We must understand that now with a black-faced puppet president of Big Capital, the imperialists are at war in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and now Uganda. They kill tens of millions; they torture hundreds of thousands; they starve hundreds of millions.

US’s staunch ally, Zionist Israel commits genocide against the Palestinian people. It offered Mossad intelligence, great amounts of weaponry, killer aircraft and even pilots to Sri Lanka, in order to murder the Tamils. After the end of the war, May 2009, Sri Lanka sent its military chief-of-staff, Donald Perera, to Israel as its ambassador, a reward for Zionist assistance. He told the largest Zionist daily, Yedioth Abornoth: “I consider your country a partner in the war against terror,” thus coupling terrorism with the Palestinians’ struggle for their homeland and the Tamils’ simple right to exist in peace and equality.

Perera spoke proudly of having “a great relationship with your military industries and with Israel Aerospace industries.”

Perera spoke about the murder, on May 31, 2010, of nine Turkish solidarity activists bound for Gaza with survival supplies: “I can understand that Israel had to protect itself.”

Perhaps because of the complexity of geo-politics, the history of standing for sovereignty of the member nations of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), the leaders of Cuba and ALBA lands (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America) cannot support the goal of a separate nation within Sri Lanka. But they could be convinced to chastise the Sri Lankan government for its atrocities against the Tamil people, and the other oppressed people under the chauvinist Sinhalese leadership. They could see within the context of their moral ideology that it is only right that Tamils must have equality and the basic right to exist without fear of murder and takeovers of their homes and lands. Your peoples’ organizations should remind these pro-Palestinian governments that it is only Israel that supports the US blockade against Cuba; that it is the US and Israel that lead the tiny opposition to Palestine’s right to be a member of the United Nations.

Regardless of whether Cuba has achieved socialism—it is a long process after all and there is so much destruction and subversion coming from the Yankee imperialists—the Cuban people and the government are still worthy of our love and support. They have conducted no wars or torture against any people and they have helped many millions. It is now time that they are approached by all your organizations and become convinced to come to the aid of their natural brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka—the oppressed Tamil people.

We have wandered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes; we are many races and nationalities. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together to live in peace and harmony.

We must unite around the world and struggle for an independent international investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity against Sri Lanka government leaders.

We must call for a worldwide Boycott of Sri Lanka. Che Guevara would be on our side today!

A positive sign of recognition for Tamil rights is the dramatic Channel 4 UK documentary, Sri Lanka Killing Fields, shown first at a June Human Rights Council session and then worldwide.

Rudrakumaran is Prime Minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE), and a prominent activist in the Diaspora. He earned law degrees from the University of Colombo and Southern Methodist University. He later studied and wrote articles about self-determination at Harvard Law School

Upon the end of the long civil war in Sri Lanka, May 2009, Rudrakumaran saw the need for international representation of Tamils’ right to sovereignty. He and other Tamil professionals held meetings in Malaysia and Switzerland to initiate the TGTE on the basis of nationhood, a homeland and the right to self-determination.

As these Tamil leaders in exile were gathering forces, they were surprised and disconcerted that Cuba and other new progressive governments in Latin America sided with Sri Lanka at the May 2009 sessions of the Human Rights Council, and not only against the guerrilla movement but also against the Tamil population interests

“Tamils always looked upon Fidel and Che as heroes,” the PM said. “Our people are shocked by Cuba’s position since May 2009. Perhaps it is due to poor communication. We want to send a delegation to Cuba, to Venezuela and other ALBA [Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America] governments to explain our position and to engage in dialogue.”

PM Rudrakumaran maintains that his Transnational Government is not tied to any government or international power. “We are not at the mercy of any power, but will accept support for our cause from whoever cooperates with us.”
The TGTE stresses democratic forms of decision making. In the spring of 2010, elections for delegates to the TGTE were held in 12 countries. In some cases, the proposed candidate met no competition and so there was no election. Tens of thousands participated.

Fifty-six elected delegates gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA) to officially form the Transnational Constituent Assembly on May 17-19, 2010. Thirty more delegates participated via video conference from London and Geneva. On November 3, the TGTE announced its first cabinet. Of the 10 ministers and 10 deputy ministers, five are women.
The TGTE is not to be confused with a “government in exile”, as there had been no independent state with a government that later sought relocation. It is a transnational government in transition and campaigns for nationhood through diplomacy and education. The real government will be established in the homeland when that is physically possible.
TGTE strategy is to work with all existing local, national and international Tamil organizations in the Diaspora, and to create a power centre for diplomacy with all governments possible. It also seeks to work in partnership with Tamil leadership inside Sri Lanka but has not been able to establish ties, at least not officially, given the belligerent nature of the S.L. government.
Getting to this point started following independence from Britain, in 1947-8. “Our people were conservative in many ways,” PM Rudrakumaran explained.
“We were nationalistic, not revolutionary. We had castes and women were not treated equally. We sought equal rights with the majority Sinhalese by using peaceful, non-violent means. But the Sinhalese governments and racist monks and other extremists beat and killed us. They conducted several pogroms in which thousands of Tamils were killed in terrible ways.
“Finally, in 1976, all the Tamil political parties in and out of parliament, from conservative to the most radical and revolutionary decided to struggle for an independent nation in the North East homeland,” Rudra, as he is known, continued.
“When the liberation struggle took up arms, all the barriers were broken. In fact, women played an important role in the armed struggle.

“The Tigers [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] gave us the dignity and strength to fight. Today, however, the struggle is on the diplomatic plane. We look forward. We are not mired in the past or in speculation about whether the Tigers committed terrorism.”

TGTE Guiding Principles

1. Commitment to achieve Eelam, an independent, sovereign State—nationhood, homeland and right to self-determination.
2. Tamil Eelam will be a secular state.
3. TGTE shall assist in establishing health facilities in the homeland, homes and refuges for those affected by the war; promote cultural activities stressing Eelam Tamil distinctiveness. Much of this work will have to be done indirectly as the TGTE cannot be in Sri Lanka.
4. Promote education in the homeland.
5. Promote economic welfare.
6. Conduct foreign relations through lobbying.
7. Seek prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
8. Protect the equality of women and all Tamils.
9. Provide welfare of families of martyrs, former combatants and families affected by the war. One practical project is to establish monuments for martyrs in the Diaspora since their memorials and graves have been destroyed by the Sri Lankan government.

PM Rudrakumaran said that the TGTE has good relations with the two other international organizations fighting for Tamil sovereignty: Global Tamil Eelam and the Council of Eelam Tamil in Europe.

“We all agree to the same goals and our means are the same—not armed struggle but peaceful protests and diplomacy. We are different in that the TGTE has elected representation in the form of a transnational government, a rather special breed of government,” Rudra said.

“We are encouraged about our future prospects. We see it favorable for us that a referendum was held for South Sudan [in 2005], in which 98.3% voted for secession. The TGTE attended the inauguration ceremony in Juba, July 10, as government guests of the new nation.”

TGTE deputy foreign minister Kanaganthram Manickavasagar and PM spokesperson Jeyaprakash Jeyalingam were among the guests when Salva Kiir signed the new constitution and was sworn in as president.

World leaders were present, including Sudan President Omar al-Bashir and UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon. Sri Lanka sent a minor envoy, Tissa Vitharana, senior minister of scientific affairs.

Prime Minister Rudrakumaran’s message to the newest nation, number 193 recognized by the UN, read: “We salute [you] for [your] sacrifices to become free and admire [your] courage and determination.”

“Our strategy is similar to that of the Republic of South Sudan,” the PM said. “We want the international community to press for and supervise a referendum on Eelam as occurred in South Sudan. Our peoples have undergone similar fates: genocide, followed by struggles for independence met by war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Tamil guerrillas had called for ceasefires and a peace deal leading to a referendum for independence. Finally, in 2001, a ceasefire was achieved but only after the guerrillas had decimated much of Sri Lanka’s military might. However, when Mahinda Rajapaksa won the presidency, in 2004, he established a family fiefdom bent on annihilating all Tamil opposition. He smashed the ceasefire and took warring advice and technical-surveillance aid from the US Bush regime; massive weapons, communication infrastructure, boats and fighter aircraft from China; fighter aircraft, intelligence agents and technology from Israel; boats, missiles and moneys from India; moneys for oil and weapons from Iran; weapons from Pakistan; arms and patrol boats from UK and France; and technology and loans from Japan.

Rudrakumaran has no illusions about the interests of major governments representing former and current colonialists and empires. “How does one play the game and not allow a big power to decide? Our skills and our dedication to our united goal of sovereignty determine how we act. We won’t compromise sovereignty. Ours is a struggle for nationality and not one based on ideological or economic grounds.”

Rudrakumaran hopes that India will change its pro-Sri Lanka attitude towards one of support for Tamils. He sees the geo-political wind turning toward both China and India’s interests. As China’s influence grows in Sri Lanka, India is confused about how to act. He does not believe that India is currently acting in its long term interests by sidling up to the Rajapaksa government and thinks that India will soon realize that.

The Tamil leader is also encouraged by recent developments in the 18th session of the Human Rights Council just completed (September 12-30). It appears that the report by an expert panel appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on “accountability in Sri Lanka” now has a chance to be discussed by the HRC at its 19th session. At least that is proposed by Ki-moon and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

The report was delivered last March and is quite critical of the Sri Lanka government for possible human rights abuse of Tamil civilians and combatants in the last months of the war, which ended May 2009. The report calls for an independent investigation into credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In this HRC session, unlike in that of other sessions, neither India nor any of the Latin American countries expressed verbal approval of the Sri Lanka government when it denied any wrong doing.

See TGTE’s website: http://govtamileelam.org/gov/.

I was taken aback by her forthright question. I hadn’t been to the US for a dozen years and had just arrived the night before from Denmark where one is not asked such an intimate question by strangers. I had come to visit my friend Dave and partake in a reunion of the 1970s alternative weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard, and the new online newspaper.

“Not so well; kinda sad,” I ventured timidly.

The questioner’s jaw dropped. The three women customers stopped talking and looked at me inquisitively.

“Why’s that?” asked the clerk.

“Do you really want to know?” I asked incredulously.

The clerk nodded her head. “Yes, I do.”
“Well, I’m sad about this country killing so many people in the world through their wars of aggression.”

The three customers immediately rushed out the door, one waving her gloved hand to the clerk while averting her eyes from my perplexed face.

I’d already witnessed some disconcerting signs on the early morning walk that had led me to this mall. It bothered me to see so many US flags flying just about everywhere, including at this little gift shop. What is the meaning with so much attention being given to Old Glory?

“We’re patriotic. We’re more principled than Muslims,” explained the car wash business owner on at a nearby corner. His business was displaying a dozen flags in three sizes. The largest was about 10X17 feet, around the size of the 1820s Old Glory flag sown for a seafaring whaler, Captain Driver. This car wash business flew three flags on tall poles. A dozen smaller ones were stuck into the ground around the building site, as if marking off its territory.

“Oh? You seem really obsessed about your flag,” I replied.

The small businessman in his 40s glared at me with arms crossed.

“Hrumph! You Europeans are socialists, softies,” he said, with a wry grin.

“Not at all,” I replied. “Europe runs on a capitalist economy just like here, but there is a better social network for its workers, because they fought for such.”

“Well, social welfare is the same,” he retorted. “It all boils down to state control and we don’t want that here. We fly our flag to show our patriotism for freedom, for private property. The flag is flown more since 9/11. It shows us and the world that we are proud to be Americans. We stand strong, united in patriotism.”

With the tenth anniversary of 9-11 in the air, I decided to walk on without jumping onto my soapbox. Thus, I averted telling off a probable supporter of the war culture (the default United States method for dealing with conflict and for advancing business interests). Just two days after September 11, 2001 explosions, the local daily Philadelphia Inquirer had headlined its response to the terror attack (whose authors, polls suggest, one-third of U.S. citizens believe may well have included members of the Bush/Cheney administration) “Give War a Chance”.

And that is just what President George W. Bush did by invading first Afghanistan and then his main target, Iraq. With Obamba’s six wars, including Bush’s two, the US has invaded or intervened militarily in 66 countries 160 times since World War II, killing several millions of people, torturing tens of thousands and creating millions of refugees.

The tallest of flag poles in this shopping center stood close by the car wash. It was six stories high and housed communication cables and hidden cell-phone antennas. On top flew one of the largest of flags imaginable. This contraption was located on the property of a barber shop. The barbers didn’t want to talk about it much but admitted that the property’s owner did receive economic “compensation” from the Maple Glenn township for allowing the pole there. One neighbor said the compensation amounted to $10,000 annually.

It was time to shop for wine and food. Wine and spirits are sold separately in state-owned stores (socialism?), and inside, at every cash register, stood a small U.S. flag on a stand. The cashiers said this was normal. At the nearby Safeway-owned Genuardi chain food store more flags stood guard. In fact, the store sold small flags for everyday home decoration.

Incidentally, all the clerks and cashiers were super polite and asked me how I was. But I was already leery of answering truthfully.

Walking back to Dave’s, I passed other stores and three banks all flying the stars and stripes.

This flag fetish was most fetching on the side streets where the large wooden and stone houses were owned by upper middle class families. Flags were glued to house windows. Some signs beside the flags read: “Proud to be an American” or “United we Stand”. Flags were embossed on mail boxes, on the backs of car mirrors and body sides, even on bicycles. Flags were screwed or hammered into trees, into electric and telephone poles. They guarded the steps up to front doors.

On one street corner, a huge lot was empty of buildings. Multiple signs were stuck into the earth and hammered into trees, warning: “Posted Private Property—No trespassing.” Mansions stood on the opposite corner flying Old Glory in an expression of respect private property or else!

Right next door to Dave’s home was one of numerous protestant churches in this area. Between its buildings stood a six foot pole with a large flag on top, in defiance of the democratic notion of “separation of church and state.”

But the most impressive of all patriots in this neighborhood was the nearest house to Dave on the other side of the church.

In front of this house up a hill from the road stood two gigantic flag poles with large flags flying. In front of the large house were two campers and five cars. There were small flags stuck into the grass. But best of all was the split-rail wooden fence dividing the property from the street. A flag flew on each post about every six feet apart along the three-railed fence. There were about 20 of them in all. There was also room to fly flags supporting the POWs (prisoners of war) and MIAs (missing in action) from four decades ago when the US was murdering millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. Despite the fact that there are no longer any POWs or MIAs, these house owners, and many more I was to see in the coming weeks, flew such symbols of loyalty for their invading warrior “heroes” of yore.

Flag Day-Veterans Day Sidebar

Some Flag history is appropriate here.

June 14 was designated as “National Flag Day” by the Second Continental Congress, in 1777, honoring the creation of the American Continental Army, in 1775. U.S. citizens are urged to fly the American flag during this week. The flag should also be displayed on all government buildings.

Another day associated with flying the flag is Armistice Day, established by President Woodrow Wilson in 1918, as November 11, the day armistice was signed by WWI warring parties.

On June 4, 1926, Congressional Resolution 18 was approved, stating:

Whereas the 11th of November, 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far-reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed; and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations;

(Resolved) Officials [are] to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 …ceremonies expressive of our gratitude for peace and our desire for the continuance of friendly relations with all other peoples.

An Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U. S. Code, Sec. 87a) approved May 13, 1938, made the 11th of November in each year a legal holiday—a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as “Armistice Day.” On October 8, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed November 11 as Veterans Day, honoring all US military veterans.

Since these proclamations, the flag is now flown everyday at every government building and, as shown above, is revered by tens of millions of Usamericans in something akin to worshiping some totem. However, the declared noble intention to “perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations” has, to say the least, been long forgotten.

As of June 8, 2011, Wikipedia ascertained that Veterans Day “Honors the 24.9 million military veterans in the United States”.

These veterans were used to perpetuate the wars against “peace and good will and mutual understanding”.

In fact, all through the three-week long election campaign none of the parties spoke of war, the most essential aspect of societal action: do we kill other people who do not attack us.

There were eight political parties in the 179-member parliament before election day. The right-wing coalition of Liberals (Venstre, middle-to-large farmers’ traditional party) and Conservatives (Konservativ, businessmen’s traditional party) held power for a decade but for a majority had to rely on the far right, racist People’s Party (DF).

These eight parties form two blocs: red (center left) and blue (center right).Two in the red bloc declare themselves to be socialist: the People’s Socialists (SF) and the Red Green Alliance (Enhedslisten/Unity List or EL). Another is the traditional majority party, Social Democrats (SD). The fourth “red” party, which shifts between blocs, is the Radical Liberals (Radical Venstre/RV, small business employers and self-employed).

In this election, significant shifts in numbers of parliamentarians (MPs) occurred. EL went from 2.2% of the vote to 6.7% for a gain of eight MPs, 12 in all. The Conservatives lost ten of its 18 (from 10.4% to 4.9%), most of which went to the RV (from 5.1% to 9.5%) from nine to 17 MPs, and the laissez faire, libertarian capitalist party, Liberal Alliance, which went from five to nine MPs (from 2.8% to 5% of the vote).

The red bloc now has 89 MPs and the blue 86. Semi-autonomous Greenland and the Faroe Islands each have two MPs in the Danish parliament. These four are usually divided between the two blocs. So the red bloc, despite lacking one vote for a majority, can rule IF the Red Green Alliance does not oppose its three new partners over principled anti-war morality or pro-socialist economic policies, which is not likely to happen. In the past ten years, several billions have been used for war and new billions are slated to buy more killing machines. Other billions have been used to bail out the banks here just as in the US. ELs new partners have supported these policies and continue to do so.

Since its founding, in 1989, EL has opposed aggressive wars. But in this election, it decided to join the red bloc and negotiate with it, if victorious, for a state budget based on a capitalist economy.

This strategy led its leaders to ignore the fact that Denmark has 600 well-paid mercenary soldiers fighting Afghans; had dropped 855 bombs on Libya destroying much of its infrastructure as of election day and had used ca. $1 billion for “government change,” and it is still using money and military advisors to back up the USA’s Quisling government in Iraq.

SF was founded in 1959. Its initiators broke out of the traditional Denmark Communist Party due to opposition to the Soviet Union military action against Hungary. SF has long since shifted from being anti-war and pro-socialist to being just another social democratic pro-capitalist party. Although SF originally voted against war in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has since voted for financing US-NATO occupation and was a early supporter for bombing Libya.

SF came into the parliament in 1960 with 11 parliamentarians. It high point was in 1987 with 27. Before this election it held 23 seats. For the first time the “People’s Socialists” was accepted by the SD to campaign for a coalition government. This caused many voters to abandon it for the Red-Green Alliance.

In this democratic bourgeois state, political parties need only 2% of the national vote, in order to gain access to parliament. The minimum number of MPs for a party is four.

EL formed as East Europe was falling apart. The initiative was taken by the DKP as it was splitting up, and included Left Socialists (VS) and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SAP). EL started as a socialist party with anti-imperialist tendencies. It first came into the parliament in 1994 with 3% of the vote and six MPs. Since then it has vacillated in its politics, and its numbers of MPs has swung from six to four.

For three years, the Red-Green Alliance has ignored anti-war actions, the few there have been. It refuses to support any armed uproar group in the world including resistance fighters to US-NATO invasions. Its leaders, several of whom are former communists of various stripes, have decided to “make a difference” by coming into a government instead of using their parliamentary platform solely as one of several educating-organizing arenas.

The same reformist course taken by the French Communist Party, in 1968, was aimed at putting a stop to a potential revolution by millions of workers and students who took to the streets. The French CP gambled for capitalism and won. Most “leftist” parties—communist, trotskyist or socialist—once adopting a parliamentary strategy give up the idea of grassroots work building a large base that could win state power for socialist policies.

To my meaning all these parties are immoral. I say so not because I am an anarchist but a revolutionary socialist who judges aggressive war to be the worst of human action.

The main cause for failure was a missing vehicle with their heavy weaponry. Nevertheless they were able to cause three times the numbers of casualties that they suffered. Nearly one-half of the rebels were killed but most of them died under or following torture.

After being held for 76 days in isolation without access to reading material, Fidel Castro, the 26-year old leader, came into a courtroom filled with 100 soldiers. He gave a rousing defense of the need for revolution to topple the dictator and change the corrupt and brutal socio-economic system so that all could be fed, obtain education and health care, so that farmers could own land and all have a voice.

In his five-hour speech, Fidel said, “The right of rebellion against tyranny, Honorable Judges, has been recognized from the most ancient times to the present day by men of all creeds, ideas and doctrines.”

Instead of asking for acquittal, he demanded to be with his brother and sister rebels in prison. “Condemn me, it does not matter, history will absolve me!”

Fidel Castro considers ethics and morality to be essential for revolutions. In My Life: Fidel Castro, the 2006 interview book with Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel speaks of these highest principles on numerous occasions. He asserts that “especially ethics” is what he learned most from the national liberation hero, José Martí.

After following liberated Cuba for half-a-century, having lived and worked there for eight years, I find that during its guerrilla struggle, from December 2, 1956 to January 1, 1959 the revolutionaries acted in a moral manner. Cuba’s revolutionary armed struggle was exceptional in this way. As Fidel told Ramonet, “We did not kill any prisoners,” “not even one blow” was dealt. That is “our principle.” “All revolutionary thought begins with a bit of ethics.”

I think that is also the key reason why so many millions of people the world over love and respect Che Guevara: his moral stance, his example as a just revolutionary leader. This from Socialism and Man:

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love…Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, the most sacred cause, and make it one and indivisible…one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

I agree with Fidel and Che. Revolutionaries must be ethical in vision and use morality in practice, both at home and in solidarity with the oppressed everywhere. As Fidel told Lee Lockwood in Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel:

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.

I define ethics in this way: Life shall not be abused or destroyed by our conscious hand—without being attacked or oppressed beyond limits of toleration. A moral person, organization, political party or government acts in daily life and in the struggle for justice with that ethic in mind. These are my thoughts on morality:

1. We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.
2. In combat against oppressors and invaders, we do not kill non-combatant civilians nor forcefully recruit them, or use them as hostages.
3. We struggle to create equality for all.
4. We abolish all profit-making based upon the exploitation of labor or the oppression of any person, group of people, class or caste. Instead, we build an economy based upon principles of justice and equality, one in which no one goes hungry, sharing equitably our resources and production.
5. We struggle to create a political system based upon participation where all have a voice in decision-making about vital matters with relation to local, national and international policies.
6. We struggle to eliminate alienation in each of us.

Ethics and Sri Lanka Tamils

True solidarity activists have no choice. We must support a people under attack by aggressors wherever in the world. That is what I see as our task as anti-war activists concerning Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine…just as we did in the wars against Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia and the South Africans…

For us solidarity activists, and governments viewing themselves as progressive-socialist-communist-revolutionary, I believe our task must be to press for the very lives and rights of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka where governments have systematically oppressed and repressed them for half-a-century.

As a solidarity activist—who advocates the right to resist and the necessity to conduct armed struggle once peaceful means fail to change oppressive governments from terrorizing us—I denounce all perpetrators of terrorism, no matter the party or cause, and demand they change tactics to ones that are morally in accordance with our ideology embracing fellowship with justice and equality.

I find that most armed movements commit acts of atrocities, even acts of terror in the long course of warfare. This has sometimes been the case with the Colombian FARC and Palestinian PFLP, for instance. But I support them in their righteous struggle. They are up against much greater military and economic forces that practice state terror endemically. The ANC in South Africa’s war for liberation also committed horrendous acts of terrorism.

Most of the dozens of Tamil groups that took up arms, at one time or another, considered themselves Marxists, and many looked up to Che Guevara and Cuba’s revolution as an ideal. But they nearly all became terrorists in much of their actions. Hear what Che Guevara meant about the use of violence.

There are always laggards who remain behind but our function is not to liquidate them, to crush them and force them to bow to an armed vanguard, but to educate them by leading them forward and getting them to follow us because of our example, or as Fidel called it ‘moral compulsion.’ (Speech “From somewhere in the world”)

This Sri Lanka Tamil ‘story’ is a tragedy especially for the Tamils; also for the world of humanity. Most people not directly involved, however, do not react because they don’t know what they can do. There are so many tragedies going on at the same time. Cynical brutality is constantly unleashed by major capitalist enterprises and their governments in the ‘first’ world, much of the former ‘second’ world as well as by national capitalists in the ‘third’ world. We live in what I call the Permanent War Age. Brutality—surveillance—suffering is the norm.

In those countries where there is little brutality, in comparison, and no aggressive war-making (I speak here of the governments of Cuba and other ALBA—Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America—countries) the leaders see the necessity of having political ties  with some war criminal governments, such as Sri Lanka. I gather that this leads them to ignore their moral solidarity principles and abandon the oppressed Tamils.

On this July 26 day of celebration, I call upon the Cuban government, as well as all members of the ALBA alliance, to return to the moral principles expressed by Fidel and Che and do the right thing by the Tamil people. Call for an independent international investigation into the war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan government, and use your moral clout, your revolutionary record to demand an end to the genocide against this people.

If morality does not become integral to our struggles, I’m afraid we are headed for a worldwide moral collapse, which is already underway due to the intrinsic immorality of capitalism and its imperialism; the foundering of contemporary socialism; and the rise of fascism throughout much of the world.

The “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” was delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on March 31 concerning: 1) alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the last phases of the 26-year old civil war, September 2008 to May 19, 2009; 2) consequences for approximately 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) and, by extension, for 2.7 million Sri Lankan Tamils, 13% of the 21 million population.

After receiving the report, which calls for investigations into these allegations, Ban Ki-moon stated that he did not have the power alone but one of three UN bodies had to request such action, either the General Assembly or the Security Council or the Human Rights Council.

The panel—chairman Marzuki Darusman (Indonesia), Steven Ratner (US), and Yasmin Sooka (South Africa)—was commissioned by the Secretary General, June 22, 2010, after Sri Lanka’s government had failed to rehabilitate or reconcile with the Tamils affected by the brutal war, which, according to the Panel, caused up to 40,000 civilian deaths in those eight months, plus several thousand combatants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and government soldiers.

The Panel began work in September 2010 but had to conduct its research outside Sri Lanka as the government refused this United Nations body permission to enter its country. The Panel could interview many eye witnesses, however, who were eventually released from military camps after months of detention—many of whom bribed their way out—or who were able to escape the war zone towards the end on boats provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Several ICRC workers and other humanitarian employees were killed by government military shelling.

Of the dozens of recommendations proposed by the panel, the last two concern the United Nations.

“A. The Human Rights Council should be invited to reconsider its May 2009 Special Session Resolution (A/HRC/8-11/L. 1/Rev. 2) regarding Sri Lanka, in light of this report.”

The above cited resolution had been proposed by the Sri Lankan government to praise its behavior in the war and condemn only the LTTE for war crimes and terrorism. Not a member of the HRC, Sri Lanka got Cuba, then the Non-Aligned Movement president, to introduce it. It passed with 29 voting in favor and 12 against with six abstentions.

The Panel determined that, “the Human Rights Council may have been acting on incomplete information”.

“B. The Secretary-General should conduct a comprehensive review of actions by the United Nations system during the war in Sri Lanka and the aftermath, regarding the implementation of its humanitarian and protection mandates.”

The Panel criticized the UN’s role in this conflict. “During the final stages of the war, the United Nations political organs and bodies failed to take actions that might have protected civilians.”

The Panel recommended that the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) should “commence genuine investigations”, and an independent international mechanism established by the UN Secretary-General should also investigate what did occur.

The Panel recommended that GOSL should also “issue a public, formal acknowledgement of its role in and responsibility for extensive civilian casualties.”

In its summary, the Panel wrote:

The Panel’s determination of credible allegations reveals a very different version of the final stages of the war than that maintained to this day by the Government of Sri Lanka. The Government says it pursued a ‘humanitarian rescue operation’ with a policy of ‘zero civilian casualties’. In stark contrast, the Panel found credible allegations, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law were committed both by the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity (author emphasis). Indeed, the conduct of the war represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace.

Especially the Panel found credible allegations associated with the final stages of the war. Between September 2008 and 19 May 2009, the Sri Lanka Army advanced its military campaign into the Vanni using large-scale and widespread shelling causing large numbers of civilian deaths. This campaign constituted persecution of the population of the Vanni. Around 330,000 civilians were trapped into an ever decreasing area, fleeing the shelling but kept hostage by the LTTE. The Government sought to intimidate and silence the media and other critics of the war through a variety of threats and actions, including the use of white vans to abduct and to make people disappear.

The Government shelled on a large scale in three consecutive No Fire Zones, where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate, even after indicating that it would cease the use of heavy weapons. It shelled the United Nations hub, food distribution lines and near the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) ships that were coming to pick up the wounded and their relatives from the beaches. It shelled in spite of its knowledge of the impact, provided by its own intelligence systems and through notification by the United Nations, the ICRC and others. Most civilian casualties in the final phases of the war were caused by Government shelling.

The Government systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines. All hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery, some of them were hit repeatedly, despite the fact that their locations were well-known to the Government. The Government also systematically deprived people in the conflict zone of humanitarian aid, in the form of food and medical supplies, particularly surgical supplies, adding to their suffering.

The Panel’s full text of 214 pages lists details of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity on both sides in paragraphs 246-252:
The government is accused of: murder, extermination, mutilation, arbitrary imprisonment, rape, torture, persecution founded on race, religion or politics, and disappearances.

The LTTE is accused of: violence to life and person, torture, mutilation, forced labor and forced recruitment of children, and shooting civilians trying to flee the war zone.

The IDP Tamils were brutally confined and treated. Tamils in their traditional Northern and Eastern “High Security Zones” are militarized, denied normal rights, intimidated and made victims of violence.
The Panel therefore recommended that GOSL end all state violence, release all displaced persons and facilitate their return to their homes or provide for resettlement. [Thousands of Tamil homes have been taken over by soldiers and other Sinhalese.] It should also repeal the Emergency Laws that deny democratic and civil rights.

The Mahinda Rajapaksa family regime continues to deny any wrong-doing, contending that NO civilians were killed and were later well treated in IDP camps. It claims it only attacked the LTTE. If there were civilians killed, according to government logic, it is their own fault for being there. The Panel cites international law that “an attack remains unlawful if it is conducted simultaneously at a lawful military object and an unlawfully-targeted civilian population” (paragraph 199).

The GOSL says it has established a transparency process to address the past from the 2002 ceasefire agreement to the end of the conflict, the so-called Lessens Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC).

While the Panel views this as a “potentially useful opportunity to begin a national dialogue”, the “LLRC fails to satisfy key international standards of independence and impartiality, as it is compromised by its composition and deep-seated conflicts of interests of some of its members.”— Three were government officials; one an Attorney-General.

The Panel also points to the history of conflict between the government and Tamils seeking full rights. For decades the Tamils used Gandhian civil disobedience, non-violent tactics before many took up arms in several groups. The Tamils have suffered half-a-dozen pogroms, with government backing, in which thousands were brutally murdered, including mutilation and being burned alive.

In the few instances in which governments have set up commissions of inquiry to examine human rights abuses, they have “failed to produce a public report and recommendations have rarely been implemented”.

The fact is, states the report (paragraph 28):

After independence [from Great Britain in 1948], political elites tended to prioritize short-term political gains, appealing to communal and ethnic sentiments, over long-term policies, which could have built an inclusive state that adequately represented the multicultural nature of the citizenry. Because of these dynamics and divisions, the formation of a unifying national identity has been greatly hampered. Meanwhile, Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism gained traction, asserting a privileged place for the Sinhalese as protectors of Sri Lanka, as the sacred home of Buddhism. These factors resulted in devastating and enduring consequences for the nature of the state, governance and inter-ethnic relations in Sri Lanka.

The first pogrom took place in June 1956 as the new Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike (Sri Lanka Freedom Party/SLFP—the same party to which the Rajapaksas belong) backed the “Sinhala Only” bill, one of several discriminatory measures against the Tamil people. Because some Tamils conducted sit-ins, Buddhist monk-led mobs rampaged for ten days, murdering 150 Tamils and burning their homes and businesses. Ironically, because Bandaranaike was willing to engage in dialogue with Tamil leaders he was murdered by a “pacifist” Buddhist monk, September 29, 1959.

Bandaranaike’s widow, Sirimavo, became PM in July 1960 and continued discriminatory policies against Tamils. She sat as PM or President four terms spread over 40 years, for a total of 13 years. She was the world’s first female PM and brought Sri Lanka into the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as a founding member, in 1961. NAM, now with118 state member, stands against imperialism, interference from foreign nations, bloc politics, and against racism. Cuba and other progressive governments, as well as reactionary ones in the “Third World”- based NAM have, therefore, backed Sri Lanka in international issues.

In 2004, Cuba and Venezuela launched ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America) as an alternative to capitalist economic and political coalitions. Today there are eight Latin American government members, including Ecuador, which is now on the HRC along with Cuba. In 2009, Bolivia and Nicaragua, both in ALBA, were members of the HRW supporting Sri Lanka.

These socialist leaning governments have better human rights records than the previous capitalist governments of their countries, which were for many decades under the dictates of US imperialism and before that under European colonialism. ALBA partners now have a chance whether on the Council or not to help the Tamil people in some way, also by calling for an investigation.

This is the challenge that the countries of NAM on the HRC now face with the Panel’s recommendations for an international investigation into alleged war crimes. Will they resist criticizing a member for its racist and terrorist actions against an entire people, or will they take sides with a clearly oppressed people? The latter choice might place them voting alongside the rich, Western nations that will probably call for some sort of an investigation. (See my piece on this dilemma.)

As I view the possible thinking of socialist Cuba and other NAM countries, the dilemma is between supporting sovereignty for Third World countries confronted with interference from imperialist and former colonialist states, a legitimate issue, and conducting national policies in such a way that no section of the population is systematically discriminated against or subject to genocide.

Since the 2009 HRC resolution, there are 15 new countries on it, among them the US. One must ask: just what is the game plan of the US and its European allies, who make sounds of protest against Sri Lanka’s abuse of human rights while they are the worst offenders, constantly engaging in aggressive wars against NAM members and others: now warring against the sovereign government of Libya, the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Palestine.

One can also ask why one of the Panel members, Ratner, participated in such an elaborate, comprehensive and just report. As a legal expert of international law he advised the US State Department (1998-2008), which is the major political aggressor in the world and has backed Sinhalese nationalist governments against Tamil’s liberation efforts, providing armaments, intelligence, finances, military training, propaganda. (See my article.)

But then most governments of both “blocs” have done the same: China, Russia, India, the UK and other European states, even Iran and also and especially Israel.

Clearly victims of US permanent war aggression, such as Cuba, react against its hypocritical “support” for “human rights”, and side with the “victim” Sri Lanka. Not in all cases, however, is the “victim” innocent. There are more offenders of human lives and civil rights than the imperialists. And the Sinhalese majority has been whipped up by Buddhist supremacist clergy and Sinhalese nationalist chauvinism by all the governments in Sri Lanka since 1948. Unfortunately, and without comprehension from my viewpoint, most of the Sinhalese-led Communist, Trotskyist, and Maoist parties have immorally allied themselves with the two major parties to keep the Tamils down.
The United Nations is comprised of 192 nations, only three in the world are not in it: Kosovo—a separatist state creation of the US-EU; Taiwan, a separated part of China; and 771 people in the state of the Vatican City. The member states of the HRC, with China and Russia and other large countries represent more than one-half the world’s citizens.

Third World countries comprise the majority on the HRC. They have many ethnic peoples long oppressed and brutalized by others. Let us remember Rwanda and how the UN failed to intervene and prevent genocide of one million people. The UN again failed in a similar debacle in Sri Lanka. Let us hope that the Human Rights Council will redeem these tragedies regardless of motives.

Libya exports 80% of its oil: 80% of that to several EU lands (32% Italy, 14% Germany, 10% France); 10% China; 5% USA.

2. Gaddafi has been preparing to launch a gold dinar for oil trade with all of Africa’s 200 million people and other countries interested. He has been working with this since 2002 together with Malaysia. As of recently, only South Africa and the head of the League of African States were opposed. Before the invasion of Iraq, Hussein was in agreement as was Sudan, Burney, then Indonesia and United Arab Emirates, also Iran.

French President Nickolas Sarkozy called this, “a threat for financial security of mankind”. Much of France’s wealth—more than any other colonial-imperialist power—comes from exploiting Africa.¹

3. Central Bank of Libya is 100% owned by state (since 1956) and is thus outside of multinational corporation control (BIS-Banking International Settlement rules for private interests). The state can finance its own projects and do so without interest rates, which reduce the costs by half of private banks. Libya’s central bank (with three branches in the east including Benghazi) has 144 tons of gold in its vaults, which it could use to start the gold dinar. (China, Russia, India, Iran are stocking great sums of gold rather than relying only on dollars.)

4. Gaddafi-Central Bank used $33 billion, without interest rates, to build the Great Man-Made River of 4,000 kilometers with three parallel pipelines running oil, gas and water supplying 70% of the people (4.5 of its 6 million) with clean drinking and irrigation water. This provides adequate crops for the people making it a competitive exporter of vegetables with Israel and Egypt.

The Central Bank also financed Africa’s first communication satellite with $300 million of the $377 cost. It started up for all Africa, December 26, 2007, thus saving the 45-African nations an annual fee of $500 million pocketed by Europe for use of its satellites and this means much less cost for telephones and other communication systems.

5. The opposition led by former Gaddafi ministers and some Eastern clan leaders set up a central bank in Benghazi to replace Libya’s central bank even before they have set up a government or an organized army. It was immediately recognized by Paris stock exchange and soon other Westerners. This is the first time in history rebels have set up a bank before victory or before having a government.

6. There is evidence from Gaddafi defectors (especially Nouri Mesmari), under France protection that France started preparing a Benghazi based rebellion against Gaddafi from November 2010, in order to stop his plans to switch from the dollar to a new gold currency. US politician, Rep. Dennis Kucinich confirms this.²

On December 23, 2010, Libyans Ali Ounes Mansour, Farj Charrant and Fathi Boukhris met with Mesrami and French officials in Paris. Those three are now part of the Benghazi-based leadership.

US General Wesley Clrak (ret.) told Democracy Now (2007) that ten days after September 11, 2011 another general had told him that the Bush government was planning to invade: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. What they have in common is that they were not members of banks within the BIS, and most of them have lots of oil. Hussein had agreed with France President Jacques Chirac to switch from dollars to Euros in oil trading six months before Bush invaded.

7. While Gaddafi had turned much of his oil sales toward the West, inviting in many of the major oil companies for great profits (BP, EXXON Mobil, Shell, Total, etc), he did not join the US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq as did most of the oil rich Middle Eastern governments. Nor did he sign on with AFRICOM, a US-inspired pact oriented towards US economic and military benefit in Africa also oriented to isolate China from Africa’s natural resources. In fact, China has 50 major economic projects going in Libya with $18 billion investment. Before the US-NATO invasion, there were 30,000 Chinese workers on these and other projects. Much of China’s investment is destroyed.

8. Human Rights Watch (which some call an imperialist-oriented NGO) reported that there has been no civilian bloodbath by Gaddafi. In Misurata, for example, with 400,000 population (second largest city), after two months of war only 257 people were killed, including combatants. Of 949 wounded, only 22 (3%) were women.³

9. As France took the lead, along with UK, to threaten Gaddafi militarily, Gaddafi threatened (March 2) to throw western oil companies out of Libya. With more blustering from the west, Gaddafi invited (March 14) Chinese, Russian and Indian oil companies to take their place. On March 17, the US-France-UK got want they wanted for starters from the UN. Resolution 1973, calling only for a no-fly strategy and not a regime shift or troop landings, was not backed by key big powers: China, Russia, Brazil, India and Germany. Of the 28 NATO countries, only 14 are involved in the Libyan campaign and only six of those are in the air war.

Denmark is one of those six. It spent 70 million kroner ($12 million) in the first two weeks of bombing. By April 30, it had dropped 297 bombs on Libya. Denmark’s 2011 defense-war budget is $4 billion annually (22.4 billion kroner) out of $130 billion (671 billion kroner) budget. It uses more money than ever for wars: $250 million annually in Afghanistan, three times 2008 expenditures–$14 billion total in nine years. It used $½ billion in five active years at war in Iraq and continues there with less.

What the US-NATO-EU hopes to achieve is to eliminate the half-reliable partner Gaddafi and replace him with a neo-liberal oriented government that will do their bidding: sign on AFRICOM, kick China out, reverse the government central bank to a BIS private enterprise, continue using dollars of course, and have the lackey leaders join in their permanent war age throughout the Middle East and Africa.

New neo-liberal socio-economic policies would eliminate what the Gaddafi government has provided the entire population through state subsidies funded with oil export sales: the highest standard of living in Africa with free, universal health and education care, and the possibility of studying abroad at state expense; $50,000 for each new married couple to get started with; non-interest state loans; subsidized prices of cars much lower than in Europe; the cheapest gasoline and bread prices in the world (similar to Venezuela); no taxes for those working in agriculture.

This is not to say that Gaddafi is all that one would want in a leader, but he is definitely not as bad as most of US-NATO allies, such as dictators in the Middle East and some in Africa, Asia, and certainly Israel. Their friendly governments in Saudia Arabia—which sent troops to good neighbor Bahrain to murder hundreds of unarmed protesters condoned by the US—Yemen, Oman, Jordon where the governments murder hundreds of unarmed protestors. In fact, the only armed insurrection occurring in the Arabic countries is in Libya. It seems the US doesn’t like supporting non-violent demonstrators and would rather see them dead. And that is yet another, and one of the most important, reasons for US-NATO taking over Libya: to stop the progressive, dynamic uproar throughout the Arabic world. If these mostly youth-led revolts could actually win, which would mean replacing the imperialist-backed system and not just a dictator here or there, it might lead to an anti-capitalist revolution.

1. See: “The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System” by Peter Dale Scott; “Bombing of Libya – punishment for Gaddafi for his attempt to refuse US dollar” as cited by Ellen Brown in “Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking.” For this and other points see also: “Euro-US War on Libya: Official Lies and Misconceptions of Critics” by James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya; plus other articles on the subject.
2. See: “French plans to topple Gaddafi on track since last November” by Franco Bechis.
3. Boston Globe, April 14.

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.

– Che Guevara in Socialism and Man

“Castillo de MORAL” read the label. Wine named Moral, that’s what Carsten gave me.

That was big of him, a strident Marxist-Leninist who sides 100% with the victims of invasions by imperialists. For him that means no criticisms of those who resist these invasions, such as the current ones in the Middle East and Libya. No admonishment of Taliban, al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and his Baath party and Iraqi soldiers combating the invaders and their Iraqi collaborators.

Incidentally, among the first collaborators was the Iraqi Communist Party, followers of the old Moscow line. They returned from exile to support the US occupiers in its lackey government. They live in its “green zone”. This contradiction has not swayed the Moscow-oriented Communist parties of several countries from backing them—that includes, the Communist Party In Denmark, the US and UK communist parties and others. One cannot be opposed to imperialism and its invasion in Iraq and support one of the main culprits.

Yet we anti-imperialists cannot remain silent about brutal crimes committed by some of the resistance groups against innocent, unarmed civilians who are nearby when a suicide bomber lets go; or those women and girls who are raped and then punished for being raped; or, with some groups, the denial of women to enjoy sex by removing part or the entire clitoris; and, in the case of some, the denial of women to have the same rights as men, or…

This attitude of covering eyes is common among many hard-core leftists. So was it also for most Communists and anti-imperialists when Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe Communist parties were jailing and killing their own critics, many of whom were true communists and anti-imperialists.

Most of the readers of these pieces know this history. Some of us remember the hateful words and wrongful deeds committed by one group against another within our own camps: the Stalinists, the Maoists, the varying shades of red purer than the next. Today, there is less of that but at the same time there is less activity, less passion in support for those the imperialists attack.

We don’t see a Ho Chi Minh, a Fidel, or Che in the Middle East struggles to regain their sovereignty; and we are all too few who are motivated to fight for them, and when fighting do so quite mildly, not like when we fought alongside the Vietnamese.

I contend that this difference is not only because capitalism has won the battle (for now) over most bodies and minds, especially in the rich capitalist countries and not only in the “Christian” West. I contend that the Cuban revolution, and the Vietnamese revolution and their fight for sovereignty against the French and Usamericans were conducted on moral principles.

They fought without torturing the enemy, without killing and manhandling prisoners, and after victory, down to this day, the Cuban government and police authorities do not murder people on the streets or torture criminals in jail, nor torture the political “dissidents” who, more than not, have been paid with US government funds to join its side against Cuba’s government.

Some US soldiers in Vietnam, who later came over to our side, have said that some torture did occur at the hands of Vietnamese communists. If this is true, it was the exception to the rule—don’t believe for a minute that John McCain was actually tortured. Whereas with the Yankees and their European allies, and their allies in the Middle East today, or in nearly all of Latin America yesterday and today in Colombia and Honduras, or in Indonesia yesterday, or the African dictators and Zionist Israelis (the list is long) torture, rape, and wanton murder was and is normal.

Look, if we are to fight this immoral system of profit-making motivated brutality, this disregard for human worth, then we must be different. We must be moral! We must offer a hopeful future for people else why should they join us. We have lost millions of supporters and millions more potential ones because of immoral Soviet-Comecon state leaderships, the wanton slaughter and crimes of humanity committed by Cambodia’s Pol Pot “communists”, the forced recruitments and murder of civilians by the “Maoist-Guevarist” Shining Path guerrillas…

Few leftists place morality on their struggle agenda. I believe it may be so, partially, because Marx and Lenin, certainly Stalin and Mao, did not make “the ethical question” a priority. No, the working class, the masses will fight because they must, in order to survive the dictates of exploitative capitalism. It is an objective, dialectical matter not one of morality, they meant.

Yet these leaders did speak of the subjective need for consciousness, that is: objective conditions may be ready for revolution but if the individual and working class do not see it, do not feel it then revolution does not happen automatically. I contend that the lack of consciousness is a major problem in today’s world—especially among the video war game fanatic youth and their consumer hungry parents (workers) in this era of individualism, in this age of permanent war.

What is ethics and morality?

Morality is rules we apply to live by, in order to be ethical: that is, to care for one another, to live in harmony, in fellowship and peace. Ethics is necessary for our collective survival and that of our surroundings, the earth and the elements. To accomplish this universal ethic, we must share what we make, share natural resources, assure that the planet breathes life and not chemical death. It is immoral to take from others—don’t we parents tell our children that when we send them to nursery school—to make systems that favor some and exploit and destroy others, that require war-making, that destroy other life forms.

Moral rules are necessary for people to cooperate so that we can achieve goals, which we would not be able to dream of if each of us were left on our own. And morals prevent groups’ needs and goals from colliding. If there were no enforced moral rules to decide disputes, we would end in chaos, and no one would be able to achieve any goal.

So what do we put in place of gripper capitalism and its individualism “morality”? I think George Orwell said it well in his essay, “Can Socialists Be Happy?”

The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood… Men [and women] use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars [Spain, for instance], or tortured in secret prisons of the Gestapo [or Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or a myriad other secret torture chambers in many countries not the least of which are prisons in the US], not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love,” is the way that Che put it.

Many Christians, who read what the Bible says anyway, should identify with these views. Isn’t that what Jesus Christ is supposed to have stood for?

We must know by now that that is not the philosophy of the self-styled “democracies” of the West. We can’t really call it loving people when, for instance, the nation I was born in has invaded/intervened/conducted humanitarian operations 160 times in 66 nations since World War II.

We must act against our governments’ terrorist wars, “humanitarian operations”, else accept the consequences of shared blame. If we don’t stop the madness it will soon lead to world destruction.

Is it “humanitarian” to arm and aid some Libyan clans who want Gaddafi to go so that they can put in other powerful men, some of whom were Gaddafi’s sidekicks all these “successful” years of cooperation with the rich oil-thirsty governments? Unfortunately, the original massive uproar movement there has been taken over by these power hungry men. We should support the people’s uproar without being beguiled into backing the erstwhile leftist Gaddafi. The distinction is admittedly not easy to act upon.

Nevertheless, we must fight against the aggressive wars wherever they are. We must fight on the public streets and before their offices and bases, and we must support the invaded resistance fighters. Yes, I want the resistance to win over “us”. Some of them may not be the best people or have the best ways of relating to one another or the best laws—I refer to bin Ladin types here—but it is their world that “we” invade to take from them what they have. “We” don’t invade them to bring about “democracy”. No serious person can possibly believe that today.

Beyond condemning the US and its allies’ crimes against humanity, we must be even-handed if we are to be revolutionaries, or just decent people. I do not believe it to be “foolish consistency”, as Abraham Lincoln is so often cited for saying, to look all evil in the eye and call it by its name: evil. And not all the evil is deposited at the Pentagon, White House, Langley, or at Downing Street.

If we want a socially just economy and equality in human relationships (socialism, communism, anarchy…) then we must place love/solidarity/morality in the center.

There was a time following World War II when the Nuremberg Tribunal’s conclusion was widely accepted as a moral principle: “Individuals have international duties, which transcend the national obligations of obedience… Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

That is what Bradley Manning did when he leaked internal cables to the world showing war crimes committed systematically by his government. He should get the Medal of Humanitarian Honor for that not life in a chamber submitted to daily psychological torture. And so must we also back another hero, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks for making available to us the secret information about US+ war crimes, on-going torture, and US diplomats’ take on the world. I have added my solidarity, this time in the form of half my pension fund for Wikileaks defense and existence.

The moral concept of responsibility, the Nuremberg code, is what the “guilty innocent” citizens of the United States need to understand about their governments’ constant wars, and what caused September 11, 2001. Too many American Dreamers have been “good Germans” for too long. Whoever it was who conducted those wrongful acts of terror—and I do not doubt that some elements in the Bush regime were accomplices—they should not be applauded as heroes. But the world that was threatened by those acts has to understand WHY they unleashed their terror, if Arab foreigners were, in fact, the perpetrators or co-perpetrators. They acted as they did because they, and millions and millions more across the Third World, have been and are being subjected to terror and Big Time thievery by all United States governments. Unfortunately, the governments are aided by most of their working class citizens, those who join in the murder and torture as soldiers and secret agents, and mercenaries, and those who turn their heads in the hope of living the life of “ignorance is bliss.”¹

They didn’t stop with Afghanistan, purportedly seeking bin Ladin and gang—I knew from the first cry for his blood that they would never find him because they need him wherever he is or isn’t—no they went on to the main target, Iraq, then extended to Pakistan and now Libya.

While writing this series, I have been interrupted to join in small and mild demonstrations in support of the Arabic peoples’ struggles in Tunisia and Egypt, and against the empire’s bombings in Libya. Wikileaks played an important part in this popular movement beginning in Tunisia. The leaks showing how corrupted Tunisia’s Ben Ali government had been was not news to the citizenry, but when it became world known it did encourage people to rebel. They saw the opportunity, sparked by one of their own—Mohammad Bouazizi—in his suicide protest, and felt that they could pull it off with the world’s sympathy. And they were right.

Arabic despots and dynasties and Western imperialists are frightened of the contagious wave of authentic democratic rebellion throughout the Arabic world. The people want an end to their lack of power, and end to the elite’s thievery of their wealth, an end to their endemic corruption and their repression. The West was caught off guard by the rebellion, but now sees the chance to make a populist score by bombing one of the despots, a lesser one than their strongest allies in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahraini where the US Navy is entrenched. The West demands stability=passivity; it must stop the rebellion from becoming successful, which could lead to anti-capitalist movements, too. We must act in solidarity with these people and not the new governments that still back the exploitative system.

Act as we speak

Our world is ruled by one economy, capitalism. We know that capitalism is avaricious by nature; to grow it must become imperialist. That logic fits the good guys too. It is fitting the shoe of the Chinese Communist party and, to a lesser extent, our former Vietnamese comrades—our brothers and sisters victimized by U.S. crimes against their humanity. Both systems’ leaders are today exploiting their own workers. This process also has too good a start in Cuba.

It was wrong politically/morally of the governments of Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua to let down the Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka by extending unconditional political support to the Mahinda Rajapaksa government that had just massacred tens of thousands of Tamil civilians in its efforts to destroy the Tiger army (LTTE-Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam).

The long civil war ended in May 2009, and the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) voted, 29 to 12 with 6 abstentions, to applaud Sri Lanka for its victory against the terrorism of the Tigers. The majority resolution was proposed by Sri Lanka itself and introduced by Cuba, at that time the rotating leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of which Sri Lanka is a member.

OK, what is wrong with this scenario? First, Sri Lanka is neither democratic nor socialist. The economy is capitalist based with a good deal of multinational corporation enterprises.

The government murders journalists (at least 34 in seven years) who expose government crimes and discrimination against the minority Tamil population. Discrimination is codified by law and in practice in a variety of ways: language, religion, lack of equal rights to education and jobs. The majority Sinhalese have, on several occasions, conducted murderous pogroms against Tamils, usually led by Buddhist monks and with self-proclaimed leftist parties’ backing. Several thousands of unarmed Tamils have been so slaughtered. Some of the murdering political parties have claimed to follow the paths of Che, Mao, or Moscow’s CP. Today, they partake in the coalition government—United People’s Freedom Alliance—alongside the Rajapaksa family of corrupted mass murderers in the largest party, Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

This murderous racism cannot be tolerated by true internationalists. The betrayers of Che and internationalism in Sri Lanka include: Janatha Vimukthi Peramana (JVP), which ironically lost about 20,000 of its rebelling young members in attacks against them by Sri Lanka governments, in the 1970-80s; the Communist Party of Sri Lanka; the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party.

The Tigers started off in the late 1970s as Marxists, shouting Che’s name to the heavens. They later murderously eliminated other Tamils in the struggle for independence and sovereignty because of differences over tactics or personalities. They bombed areas and vehicles where Sinhalese civilians were without regard to innocent lives. And they abandoned any Marxist program. They righteously fought for a homeland with sovereignty, which most Tamils wanted, but they forgot all about socialism, people’s democracy, Che’s principles.

The big capitalists on the HRC wanted a resolution that, while applauding Sri Lanka and only condemning the Tigers just like the Cuba-led resolution, asked the Sri Lanka government to look into the possibility that some war crimes might have been committed by some of its own. If so, then the government should deal with it. Rather mild, I’d say.

There was no voice inside the HRC condemning the terrorist Sri Lankan government or the greatest terrorists: the United States and Israel, with China, Pakistan, Iran, Japan, India and many more tagging along. China, though, does more than tag along. It is after big influence and is getting it.²

Then there is the moral contradiction of the Bolivian government of Evo Morales—an indigenous person whose people have long been oppressed by the same forces which have suppressed and oppressed the Haiti black people—backing the 2004 US-France-led coup against the only decent, democratically elected president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Both Aristide and Venezuela’s socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez called his ouster for what it was: a rich-backed local rebellion supported by the superpower-led coup.

After Aristide’s ouster, the US got UN support to occupy the country with 7000 troops, officially led by Lula’s Brazilian government, another contradiction in morality and history. US, France, and Canada had their troops there, too. But when enough Latin American governments sent in collaborating soldiers, the big powers mostly moved out. Since 2007, Bolivia has had 300 soldiers there. They—along with troops from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and, guess who? Sri Lanka—are paid by the UN. In Bolivia’s case, the government receives $1,028 for each soldier but only spends about $300 per solider. Is it money that takes priority over solidarity amongst continental brethren?

It is positive that fellow ALBA governments in Venezuela and Cuba send real aid to the hungry people, who are the poorest in that hemisphere, and all the more so since the last earthquake with over 300,000 killed, a like number injured and over one million homeless.

Praising Cuba for its systematic “human capital export” solidarity should not keep us from real concern about its future now decided by the Communist party leadership at its 6th congress. The new economic package does not deepen socialism and people’s democracy (one in the same), rather it deepens petty-bourgeois production relations and individualistic mentality—worker-capitalists in the making. This so-called “market socialism” will lead to more market capitalism, in reality, with big foreign investors, and tourism, still getting priority.

Communist leaders still lack trust in the working class to run the economy and set political policy.

Workers power should include oversight committees staffed on a rotating basis by actual workers across the country. I firmly support what James Petras wrote:

What especially requires reform is a new system of public accountability based on independent accounting authorities, consumers’ and workers’ oversight commissions with the power to ‘open the books’. Workers and professional control will not eliminate corruption altogether but it will challenge the authorities through independent periodic reviews…Greater accountability within the leadership is necessary but not sufficient. There must be control and vigilance by authorized commissions from below and by a parallel independent general accounting office…a new system of elected representatives to oversee the allocation of the budget to the various ministries and the power to summon responsible officials to televised hearings for a strict public accounting.³

When revolutionary, communist, anarchist organizers are engaged in workers struggles under capitalism, one of their best arguments when confronted by management that their demands are not economically possible is the demand: “Open the books.” So when they are told they now have their own economy, their own Marxist state why can they not see the books?

It is difficult to know why Communist governments in this past century never rely on their citizenry to run things. Even the best of them apparently do not truly trust their own ideology. Maybe they know more than I; maybe they know that if workers held the reigns of real power they would not go the collective way of socialism. If that is so, then what are we fighting for?

Live Well vs. Live Better

I, too, say let us be like Che. For example, when his wife called to ask for use of his government car to take their sick daughter to the hospital, his morality led him to reply that she should take the bus like every other Cuban mother with a sick child.

On a world scale when Che realized that the Soviet CP leadership did not commit itself to a forceful policy of solidarity with the Third World, he criticized them publicly as foreign policy opportunists. I am certain that he would have qualms with his comrade leaders in today’s world for similar opportunism, for lack of fulfilling the promises put forth by communist ideology.

In my opinion, what is worth fighting for is what Evo Morales and the indigenous peoples’ movement stands for in Bolivia: live well, not live better. We discussed this at length during the People’s world climate conference in Cochabamba. I excerpt here from what the Bolivian delegation to the UN presented during that time.

Faced with so much disproportion and wealth concentration in the world, so many wars and famine, Bolivia proposes Living Well, not as a way to live better at the expense of others, but an idea of Living Well based on the experience of our peoples. In the words of the President of the Republic of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, Living Well means living within a community, a brotherhood, and particularly completing each other, without exploiters or exploited, without people being excluded or people who exclude, without people being segregated or people who segregate.

Living Well is not the same as living better, living better than others, because in order to live better than others, it is necessary to exploit, to embark upon serious competition, concentrating wealth in few hands. Trying to live better is selfish, and shows apathy, individualism. Some want to live better, whilst others, the majority, continue living poorly. Not taking an interest in other people’s lives, means caring only for the individual’s own life, at most in the life of their family.”
“The construction of a Living Well vision to counteract Global Crisis in this era of climate chaos and diminished resources in our finite planet, means ending consumerism, waste and luxury; consuming only what is necessary, achieving a global economic ‘power down’ to levels of production, consumption and energy use that stay well within the environmental capacities of the Earth.

In order to adapt ourselves to the true reality of a post carbon era, we will have to satisfy our fundamental needs such as food, housing, energy, production, and means of support from local systems and resources. This means encouraging regional and local self-sufficiency, sustainability and control; economic localization and community sovereignty, local production for local consumption, local ownership using local labor and materials.

Furthermore, Living Well means reallocating the trillions of millions destined for war in order to heal Mother Earth who is injured by the environment issue.

Waking up the ethical and moral values of our peoples and cultures, we can make this new millennium, a millennium of life and not of war, a millennium for Living Well, for balance and complementarity. Together we can build a culture of patience, the culture of dialogue and fundamentally the Culture of Life, a way of life that is not dependent on excessive consumption of non-renewable energy that emits greenhouse gases but is based on the harmonious relationship between man and nature.

“Hagamos lo imposible!” We’ll do the impossible! Che predicted.

Notes and an acknowledgement: I thank the daughter of a preacher for inebriated brainstorming, and more thanks for the most thoughtful of gifts: a bronze sculpture of a fist gripping an angry pen.

1. See my piece, “The Guilty Innocent.”
2. See my November 2009 series on the Sri Lanka-Tamil conflict. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
3. “Cuba: Continuing Revolution and Contemporary Contradictions”, August 12, 2007.

Grethe and I decided to separate and I moved to an ecological agricultural collective in northern Denmark called Svanholm. It was a totally new experience for me living with 100 people and working on a farm full time. For two of the three years I lived there, I was the chicken farmer raising 2000 at a time for their meat and eggs.

But I couldn’t stay away from the real world of politics for long. The United States and capitalist Western Europe decided to divide and conquer Yugoslavia. Serbia was invaded, and the terrorist drug dealers in Kosovo became the new heroes of a “humanitarian operation.” I initiated a local anti-war committee in a nearby city. No one at the collective wished to partake in “politics”.

My answer to those who refuse to partake in “politics” when their government attacks another people/nation without being attacked is that this is tantamount to aiding and abetting the killing. To fight against aggressive-making war is a moral obligation of all.

My raised index figure, however, only irritates people, so I grew more and more isolated from the collective and left it in 2000.

I worked at odd jobs, gave talks about “My America”, and took up writing on the Internet. I fell in love with another Danish woman, Charlotte Borup. Charlotte is a fine poet but does not struggle to get published, which is quite difficult in the little market there is for the Danish language.

I tried to find a place in the small solidarity/anti-war groups in Denmark, even in the Danish Communist party, but all efforts were unfulfilling and ineffectual. Ten years away from the fervor of Cuba was too long so I returned for a five-month exploratory visit in 2006-7. Cuba was playing a progressive role in creating and expanding the new coalition of several Latin American and Caribbean countries: ALBA.

ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América) is an international cooperation organization based on social, political, and economic integration between member countries, using barter trade as much as possible, endeavoring to lift all their peoples out of poverty and eliminating illiteracy and healing the sick. Another important goal is to gradually transform the economies into a socialist one.
Venezuela and Cuba started ALBA in December 2004. It currently has six other members: Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Conservative and rich, Manuel Zelaya took a left turn sometime after becoming president of Honduras, January 2006. Hugo Chavez and other ALBA leaders influenced him. Zelaya signed Honduras into ALBA, in 2008, which was a main reason why right-wing politicians and military generals conducted a coup d’ètat with United States political-economic support, naturally. The illegal government then withdrew from ALBA.

I was glad to be back in Cuba. I visited old friends and colleagues and worked some days at my favorite coop farm. There was greater efficiency than before yet the workers still did not have significant decision-making powers. The incentive for greater efficiency was money. Where it was possible to earn more by working harder there was more productivity, the same as under capitalism. In those areas where a normal peso wage was all one could expect production remained low.

When I returned to Denmark, I wrote a series of 22 articles for the Morning Star and collected them into a book, Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads. My description of Cuban society was supportive and constructively critical, I thought, yet many Cuba solidarity activists, especially leaders, took umbrage at my critiques.
Now a pensioner, I had ample time on my hands to fight against the capitalists’ wars. But, as the years of wars in the Middle East for oil and total global control dragged murderously on, protests in Denmark, the US and elsewhere, subsided to null. And this, despite the fact that international capitalism crashed to an all time low. Capitalists’ politicians steal more and more wage taxes and social benefits from the working classes around the world, in order to bail out their rich patrons, yet the people do not rise up. Passivity could hardly get lower. Time to return to Cuba, I thought. It would also be exciting to be there during their 50th victory anniversary on January 1, 2009. Maybe I could get Cuba at Sea published there as well.

Veronica, a former colleague at Editorial José Martí, had put me in touch with Omar Pérez López, whom I engaged to translate Cuba at Sea, hoping to finally get it published in Cuba. I owed it to the merchant marines I had sailed with so long ago.

Omar turned out to be a superb translator. He is fluent in Spanish, English, Italian, and nearly so in Dutch. Omar had graduated from the University of Havana, in 1987, in English language and literature. He wrote for the youth-oriented, social-literary magazines El Caíman Barbudo, and La Naranja Dulce. He spent a couple years in Holland, studied Italian in Italy, and traveled around Europe translating, writing, and reading poetry at literary gatherings. Back in Cuba, Omar was making his living mainly by translating. His language skills are so keen that he has translated Shakespeare and Dylan Tomas into Spanish. Some of the Shakespeare is a first translation into Spanish.

At midnight, November 20, 2008, a taxi cab left me off at Omar’s three-story apartment building, which faces the malecón, Havana’s tantalizing seawall coastline. No door bell and a locked gate led me to shout for Omar, nothing unusual in Cuba.

A tanned white man of medium height and shoulder-length black hair met me at the wrought iron gate. His dark eyes shone friendly into mine. His open expression and quiet voice put me at ease. There was something magnetic about this man, something familiar far away.

I followed the bare-chested, sinewy man up to the second floor past two apartments on the ground. His mother, Lily Rosa López, a nationally known radio announcer, lived on the top floor.

Omar’s apartment was huge, elongated. There were five or six large rooms, a small bathroom with shower, a narrow kitchen and, best of all, a balcony with a lovely sea view. The place was spartanly furnished. Paint and plaster were falling down here and there. One must not lean up against a wall as it might break apart into powder—typical of much housing here, especially central Havana where Omar lived.

Omar showed me to a room where I would be sleeping. He lived most of the time with his girl friend further out of town, in Miramar, where she had a large house. During our months-long correspondence, Omar had let me know that I could use his apartment and he insisted that I not pay anything. This was highly unusual. But I felt it was OK to accept the generous offer given that he didn’t need the apartment now and I had paid an adequate sum for his translation.

The bed was a board placed upon the tile floor. There were two sheets/blankets between the wood and my back. Omar was sleeping that night in the next room on a wooden bunk bed he had built close under the high ceiling. A wooden ladder was attached. It too was without mattress. There were no sofas or stuffed chairs, just a simple table and a few wooden chairs. Omar believed in living frugally, part of his Zen Buddhist philosophy.

I broke out a bottle of seven year-old Havana Club, which I had bought at the airport. The dark smooth spirit must only be drunk straight, which we proceeded to do standing on the balcony. For the rest of the night, we conversed without stop. Omar spoke slowly and clearly. My tempo even wound down from its normal fast pace when excited.

We hit it off immediately. This was a fascinating, unassuming man; and honest, unusually so! His humor ranged far and wide, from jesting to ironic but never snubbing. His wit made me laugh unabashedly. We exchanged political thoughts, too, of course. While he was not a Marxist, he thought like a revolutionary—gently urging humans he could reach to develop egalitarian and harmonious forms of living.

Omar—carpenter, poet, translator, musician, teacher—combined various philosophies, from Marxism to Buddhism, existentialism and atheism.
“The issue is to become aware. Facts and literacy is not the essential. But awareness! That can occur with anyone, literate or not, if you search,” he said. And he viewed laughter as a release from the foolishnesses man commits, from the absurdities of reality.

As the first rays of sun sparkled on the sea, we were exchanging personal information. I told him of my disunited background; the meaning his homeland had for me—a revolution for justice, the Bay of Pigs, Che Guevara. Omar spoke of his mother but did not mention his father. I asked about that.

“Now that you ask, I must tell you the truth. He was Che,” Omar replied straight away, his eyes dancing with mine aglow.

You’re kidding. No I’m not. It can’t be. Yes, it can. The smile, the eyes and brows! How on earth?

I had quickly grown to like and admire this man, and that was a big reward. I loved his father for his thoughts and actions without having ever met him, and I had taken his morality to me, too. And now, the wizard of coincidence had brought me to his son’s house. Yet another reward!

Later I realized that Omar was shy about speaking of his father. Veronica, for instance, who worked with him off and on for years, did not know. Omar wanted to be seen for him self, of course, yet it must have been difficult not to share his father with others, and not to have known him personally.

Lily was married when she met Che, as was he. They had an affair and Omar was born on March 19, 1964. It was not spoken about publicly. Che did not come to know his 6th child. He gave Lily a copy of Omar Khayyam’s “Rubaiyat”, and she gave the poet’s name to her son. Omar came to poetry on his own without knowing this paternal background.
Lily’s husband gave Omar his surname and helped raise him as his own. Omar did not learn who his real father was until he was 25 years old, in 1989. Lily told me that the Mexican author, Jorge G. Castañeda, had written about this, but she was not interested in “publicity”.² Nor was the government or Che’s widow. Aleida March was into denial. But Che’s daughter, Hilda, by his first wife—both now dead—embraced Lily and Omar as her brother.

One of the few writers to whom Omar has spoken about his father is Kristin Dykstra. He gave her permission to write about the connection in, “Omar Pérez and the Name of the Father”.

“Concluding a 2005 essay, Omar Pérez made his own remark on strange meetings between revolution and marketing: ‘Revolution: today they name you in advertisements at the four corners of the world: alleluia!’” Dykstra quoted Omar.

I gathered that this was Omar’s way of criticizing the commercialization of his father.

“The longest story I’ve been told featuring Omar Pérez” continued Dykstra, “also includes a command from the Revolutionary government to make oneself over in the image of the martyr, but this tale imagines the moment when Pérez learns his father’s name. The story begins in the late ‘80s when the son is in his twenties and knows nothing of his father. He works as a journalist and participates regularly in events of all kinds — music, poetry readings, theater, performance art. When he chooses to speak, he is charismatic. He works with an accomplished circle of writers and artists in Havana.

“Participants in a cultural and political movement known as Paideia, they are idealistic, given to experiment, and increasingly vocal in their dissidence. Representing a generation raised within the institutions of the revolutionary government, they demand active leadership roles in the nation’s social experiment — roles promised to them throughout their education. Pérez finally crosses a line in his public statements.
“Seen by authorities as a dangerous force, he is relieved of his job in journalism and assigned to work at a farm in the Cuban countryside. It is to be a lesson in revolutionary discipline….”

“Pérez … thought he was treated reasonably well there, as mandatory work camp situations go, since he was not in fear for his life; he understood the point of the exercise. He specifically stated that he did not think that his case was the sort of extreme example that merits the strictest condemnation of governments on the world stage.”

When colleagues in the “Paideida” suggested to Omar that his father might be el Che, Omar confronted his mother, who then told him the truth. I never did get to know exactly how Omar took this extremely unique fact; I did not want to probe too much nor give him the impression that I was mostly interested in him because of his father. I loved the man himself.

Back in 1989, Omar’s writings had been viewed as too rebellious especially by the head of the Communist Party ideological department, Carlos Aldana, who censored him. It was Aldana who, three years later, granted me permission to sail to Europe. Within weeks thereafter, Aldana was fired from his posts for advocating greater liberalization of the economy, which is now accepted and being codified at the 6th CP Congress.

Now, the sun was fully aflame and ecstatic or not, I had to sleep and so did Omar. In the following days, I got to know Lily. She lived alone upstairs and we helped each other out. She went to work daily, still announcing on the radio after half-a-century. Lily, like many others I knew, felt that she was still a revolutionary but did not wish to be a member of the Communist party, which she saw as responsible for stifling bureaucracy, general inefficiency, and increasing corruption.

Omar and I maintained regular contact as I went about comparing how Cuba was developing since my last visit. There was more greed for money; more real poverty, too, although begging for food was rare unlike the rest of Latin America. Worst of all was the escalating disinterest in revolutionary thought and values. One livid example for this old man is what I see as youths escaping into loud and meaningless reggaeton noise. This is definitely not the socially critical Jamaican reggae of my youth rather deafening escapism, which often blared through decaying walls into my very essence.

I flew with other foreign and national journalists on a government provided aircraft to Santiago de Cuba to attend the 50th anniversary of the revolution. No one expected Raúl Castro to hold a Fidel-like speech; that is not his forte. But I was unexpectedly disappointed at how low key he was. There was no honey to offer only belt-tightening warnings. There were no parities in the streets. Austerity was the sign of the times. It was understandable, somewhat, because Cuba had just suffered several harshly destructive hurricanes, and money was short.

“We have transformed dreams into realities…Our revolution is a permanent struggle, which continues today and will for the next 50 years…Today the revolution is stronger than ever,” Raul said. Then, he immediately referred to the famous speech that Fidel made to students on November 17, 2005. Fidel had said that the enemy cannot destroy the revolution but that Cubans can—because of lack of revolutionary morality and poor production—and it would be their fault.

To place these two views in proximity seemed an overt contradiction: stronger than ever yet on the brink of falling apart!

When I told Omar how distressed I was at what I had witnessed in Santiago de Cuba, and generally—the continual neglect of upkeep, the chronic waste of resources and utilities, the rampant attitude of despair and non-revolutionary feelings, the poor state of work—he said:
“You’re suffering it, living it. Digest it and write about it.” I did. I wrote several descriptive-analytic pieces that were published on many websites, but have not done another book, which Omar thought would be a good idea.

My take was: Cuba’s economy is falling apart yet the government-party will not take the giant necessary step to place the working class in power at job sites and in political policy-making. No government ever has, no matter what it has called itself. But one could expect that a self-declared Marxist-Leninist government could, after half-a-century, begin to bring the workers into real power.

I had tried to find a publisher for Cuba at Sea. None of the six I approached was either interested or felt there were enough potential sales to make it worth while. I needed a break from the hustle of the city, so I took to “my” coop farm but found no better revolutionary vibrations there either. Production for money without power was even more extant than two years before.

Then I visited the solemn mausoleum in Santa Clara for Che and the 29 other killed comrades whose remains had been sent from Bolivia. They had been laid to rest on October 17, 1997. An eternal flame burns beside them.

In the last days of my stay, I read some of Omar’s poetry. I found it oftentimes obscure and complex, almost always philosophical and challenging. Omar resists staid thinking.

Omar is Everyman. In that sense: like father like son. Omar inspires and enlivens. He urges us on to feel good, to think positively, to take steps we might be hesitant to take. He would ask me, “Ron, could you not wait a day or so to save humanity?” And, instead of criticizing me for my pointing finger, he would say, “Ron, you are a very good policeman of error…Do not eat the heart!”

Hasta la Victoria Siempre! Til Victory Always!

1. “Kuba, Ein ‘Yankee’ Berichtet”, in German. Published by Pappyrosa, 1997.
2. Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, Knopf, N.Y., 1997.

It took a lot of insistence but I final obtained the high level approval necessary to travel abroad on a Cuban ship. Cuba does not have passenger ships. I was assigned to the Giorita. It was an eventful month-long trip across the Atlantic. You can find out more about this by reading Cuba at Sea.

While on tour in England, I attended a publishers’ book launching in London where I met Jon Lee Anderson. He had recently signed a contract to do the “definitive” Che book (Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life). Jon was not a revolutionary but he was a thorough researcher-interviewer and had admired Che in his youth.

After sailing back to Cuba on another Cuban container ship, Rose Island, a couple months later, I met Jon again, and his family. They lived in Cuba for three years while Jon worked on the book. He had unique access to Aleida March, Che’s widow, and to many government archives. Jon and I spoke a lot about Che, the Cuban revolution, where Cuba was heading and other worldly matter.

When Jon’s book came out in early 1996, I wrote a favorable review in English and in Spanish. Some solidarity activists with Cuba did not like the book. I suppose because it was too “objective”. I later met Aleida again and asked her opinion. She was disappointed with Jon for not having taken up Che’s economics seriously enough and for having revealed too many intimate aspects of his life. The intimacy was necessary, I thought, to show the real person. I agreed that there was too little about the economics, but still it is the most thorough book of the many on Che’s life. I quote from the epilogue to give a taste of the conclusion Jon came to.

Che’s unshakable faith in his belief was made even more powerful by his unusual combination of romantic passion and coldly analytical thought. This paradoxical blend was probably the secret to the near-mystical stature he acquired, but seems also to have been the source of his inherent weaknesses—hubris and naïveté—he consistently failed to understand how to alter the fundamental nature of others and get them to become ‘selfless Communists’. But along with his mistakes, what is most remembered about Che is his personal example, embodying faith, willpower, and sacrifice.

As the veteran Cuban intelligence official ‘Santiago’ observed recently:
‘Toward the end, Che knew what was coming, and he prepared himself for an exemplary death. He knew his death would become an example in the cause of Latin American revolution, and he was right. We would have preferred him to remain alive, with us here in Cuba, but the truth is that his death helped us tremendously. It’s unlikely we would have had all the revolutionary solidarity we have had over the years if it weren’t for Che dying the way he did.’

I agree with both Jon and “Santiago’s” assessment of Che and his significance for Cuba and revolution generally. I excerpt from my review of Anderson’s book.

Three decades after the murder of the legendary revolutionary Che Guevara, not one country is guided by the martyr’s social ideals or economic theories, yet his legend grows.

“Marxist guerrillas in Asia, Africa and Latin America, who were anxious to revolutionize their societies, held his banner aloft as they went into battle. And, as the youth in the United States and Western Europe rose up against the established order over the Vietnam War, racial prejudice, and social orthodoxy, Che’s defiant visage became the ultimate icon of their fervent if largely futile revolt,’” writes Anderson.

The author reveals that Che, not Raúl Castro as believed, played the main role in bringing [Cuba and the Soviet Union] together. Yet Che became the first of Cuba’s leaders to openly criticize the direction that the Soviet revolution had taken, which was also guiding Cuba toward making some of the same state-elitist and bureaucratic mistakes.

Cuban “spymaster and keeper of its secrets” Manuel Pineiro Losada—Red Beard—gave his first interview to an author…it was Guevara who stood behind the “exportation of revolution”. Pineiro said that Che encouraged Nicaraguans and Guatemalans, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Argentines and others to take up armed struggle.

He foresaw creating the “new man” –an individual not motivated by power or greed and material objects but by ideals that would lead one to consciously sacrifice for society.

This biography of “the most complete human being of our age,” as Jean-Paul Sartre said of Guevara, was made possible because Che’s widow and state leaders believed that the time was right to bring it out and that Anderson possessed the personal integrity to treat him honestly.¹

Not only did Jon treat Che honestly but he put his meaning in perspective for history and for me personally. The essence of that was well put in an interview with Jon.

What makes Che so fascinating to me is that he was unusually a man for his time. There was something that happened in the post-war world and especially for a brief time in the 60s which Che is now indistinguishable in our minds from—and that’s right and as it should be because Che saw that at that very moment the world was in an optimum state to be revolutionized. It didn’t work out, but it was possible. He was right, and he went for it.

He was inspired by a strong sense of indignation about what he saw around him. I think there were mistakes made in the end in Bolivia, but he wasn’t wrong in the idea that it could be the locus for a continental revolution, and he wasn’t wrong in assuming that Argentina could fall, or that Bolivia could fall. Evo Morales is in power now…

Che had founded Prensa Latina (PL), which hired me when I returned to Cuba, in early 1993. I was to translate and write features and other articles for Latin America’s largest news agency. An Argentine journalist friend of Che’s, Jorge Ricardo Masetti, was PL’s first director. He got well known foreign writers to contribute. Among them were: Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Wright Mills, Waldo Frank, and Gabriel García Márquez.

It was a privilege to work for Prensa Latina, especially being the only “Yankee”. I wrote on many themes, most of which I chose: from cultural to archeological finds, from interviews with Cuban philosophers to solidarity activism. However it was difficult to write about Cuban politics and economy, nearly impossible, in fact, if one wished to be forthright and analytical.

During the three years I worked there, several story ideas I proposed were turned down: notions about how the economy actually works, how workers do or do not make real decisions, and the criminal case of Robert Lee Vesco, a notorious fugitive financier. The director was a decent guy and a competent journalist but he told me that he would be in trouble if he allowed publication of such pieces. He wouldn’t bring the ideas further up the line either for fear that simply proposing them would reflect badly upon him.

I had experienced censorship in the US, Great Brittan and Denmark’s MSM, the so-called heartlands of free press and democracy. Nevertheless, it was disturbing that censorship was a routine element of Cuban policy, especially so because without adequate information and exchange of ideas the population cannot have a real opportunity to shape policy.

In the last period in Cuba, I engaged in an act of solidarity with my inspirer. Through my contacts as Morning Star’s correspondent, I learned of an enterprise in England to commercialize a “Che Fruta” beer. A young admirer of Che’s came up with the idea for a “solidarity” beer. It would be brewed and bottled in Cuba and sold abroad as a joint venture.

Various media were mocking the hypocrisy. Firstly, Che did not drink beer. It agitated his asthma. Secondly, he would have croaked at the notion that the country he loved most would be commercializing his name.

I don’t know if it was due to my efforts, but I got this information to top officials who castigated lower echelon people who were cooperating with the enterprise, and it got stopped. Since then, however, hundreds of products are sold (even in Cuba) using Che’s name and face. Many consumers don’t even know anything about “the pop star”.

Had my consciousness not bothered me so much, I could have worked for PL forever and had a great time in Cuba. But it felt exceptionally painful living in a nation whose government declared it was driven by Marxist-Leninist principles, yet one could not be a Marxist activist. I did not return to live there after I took a leave, in spring 1996, to attend my brother’s funeral in the US and then visit my wife in Denmark, and her newly born grandchildren. I can’t say that I was better off living in capitalist Denmark. In those Cuban years, I had often felt useful writing and working voluntarily. In Denmark, I am nobody and there is no hope for socialism or anything radical.

1. “Impelled to fight”, my review published by the Morning Star, July 10, 1997.

As Che noted in his Bolivia Diary, April 13, 1967: “Maybe we are attending the first episode of a new Vietnam”, he wrote after learning that US army “advisors” were in Bolivia to assist in his capture.

President Evo Morales, an admirer of Che, had initiated the people’s climate conference as a response to the failed United Nations COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009. The Copenhagen Accord was strongly biased in favor of the rich governments and transnational capitalist corporations that continue business as usual: extracting unlimited profits from human labor and natural resources while contaminating Mother Earth with its gaseous emissions and devastating wars.

I knew personally that President Morales was seriously upset with the lack of attention given to diminishing the poisoning of the earth, because I had worked with him as a media advisor during the Copenhagen conference. He was furious with capitalism’s greed and unconcern for life.

A friend from California, Jaime Smith, and his girl friend, Lorena, joined me at Cochabamba in central Bolivia where Evo had been a leader of the coca-leaf grower-workers association. It was a unique and exhilarating experience to be with so many people—35,000 from 147 countries—and all the more so because we could agree that the root cause of the devastating climate changes is due to the contaminating nature of the capitalist economy.

At the inauguration, on April 20, President Morales recommended that we eat and drink more healthily. When we produce and eat healthy food (ecologically grown), we also contaminate the earth less. Coca-Cola was among products he suggested we not consume. Evo recounted a story about plumbers using Coca-Cola to unplug stopped up toilets because it has so much acid in it. He recommended instead that we drink chica, a fermented corn drink.

I thought Evo missed an opportunity here to plug Coca-Colla, which a new national firm had just begun producing. The soda, advertised as containing energizing coca from coca leaves, was on sale at the conference. The Empire’s Enjoy Coca-Cola warring falsetto is now challenged by Inca descendents’ coca-leaves.

I also thought that Evo could have mentioned other good reasons to boycott Coca-Cola, such as its hiring paramilitaries in Colombia and Guatemala to murder its workers who seek better working conditions and who join unions; and in India where its firm drains the soil of its water and nutrients and causes hundreds of thousands of farmers to quit their land.

Boycotting Coca-Cola for me began when I saw on TV a huge billboard in Vietnam’s countryside with the smiling blonde “Enjoying” Coca-Cola while US napalm was dropped on peasants behind the perverse advertisement.

We can’t boycott all the products sold by capitalist monopolies—hardly any corporation is morally better than another—but when workers of a corporation themselves ask us to do so then our solidarity morality leaves us no choice. Colombia’s SINALTRAINAL union has so asked the world’s citizens since it began a boycott of Coca-Cola in 2001, after the firm had murdered several workers and family members. The struggle still goes on, now with two dozen murdered in Colombia and Guatemala. Coca-Cola bottling companies in Brazil, Bolivia, Philippines, Zimbabwe and Turkey have also used torture and murder.

In Denmark, I helped convince some small political organizations to stop buying and selling the “drink of the death squads”; a few local union branches did the same. At this writing, about 200 universities in several countries have rejected it’s presence on their campuses. This includes such prestigious names as: Harvard and Oxford.

David Rovics sings Coke is the drink of the death squads

What are you gonna do/
We can let Coke run the world and see what future that will bring/
Or we can drink juice and smash the state
Now that’s the REAL THING!

For the week we were at the Cochabamba climate conference, Che’s image looked at us from placards, pamphlets and books while we discussed and debated what could be done about the destruction of Mother Earth. Thousands participated in several seminars and in 17 workshops. These are some of the key points we arrived at:

• “Capitalism as a patriarchal system of endless growth is incompatible with life on this finite planet…the alternatives [to both capitalism and the Soviet experience with a predatory production system] must lead to a profound transformation of civilization.”
• Instead of living a capitalistic lifestyle—the “live better” greed creed—let us develop the indigenous concept of “living well”. This enhances the environment holistically and encourages meeting everyone’s basic needs.
• Demand that the United Nations force the rich nations to reduce their CO2 emissions by 50% of 1990 levels no latter than 2017.
• These nations must use at least 6% of their Gross Domestic Product, much less than they use for wars, for mitigation of and adaptation to climate changes in the developing world.
• Recognize the universal rights of Mother Earth: the right to all life, clean water and air. Every human being is responsible for respecting and living in harmony. Guarantee peace and eliminate nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Decolonize the atmospheric space.
• Conduct a worldwide referendum of five points concerning how to protect nature: agree or not to eliminating the capitalist economy; transfer all financing for wars to finance the defense of mother earth; free our territories of troops and military bases; create an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal to judge and sanction contaminating nations and firms.
• “Capitalism responds through militarization, repression and war to the resistance of the people. It requires a potent military industry, the militarization of societies and war as conditions necessary for its process of accumulation as well as for its control over territories, mineral and energy resources, and to suppress the struggles of the people. Wars, through their direct impact on the environment (massive consumption of combustible fossil fuels, oil spills, GHG emissions, impoverished uranium contamination, white phosphorus, etc.) have become one of the primary destroyers of Mother Earth.”

En Route

After the conference, Jaime, Lorena and I boarded a modern bus and set out for Vallegrande where Che and other guerrillas had been secretly buried, October 10, 1967.

Three decades later, their remains were discovered. On June 28, 1997, seven bodies were found. When exhumed, one proved to be Che’s. In order to make a positive fingerprint comparison, the murderers sawed off Che’s hands. When the exhumed cadaver without hands was DNA tested, as was its teeth, it could be positively identified as Che’s. On July 12th, the remains of all seven were sent to Cuba. In time, the remains of a total of 30 guerrillas were exhumed and sent to Cuba where a memorial was built beside the Che museum in Santa Clara.

At the time of these liberation efforts, General René Barrientos was in power. In 1964, he had overthrown an elected president, Victor Paz Estenssoro, who was not a militarist. Naturally, the CIA backed Barrientos. Oddly enough, Barrientos made a left-leaning friend, Antonio Arguedas, Minister of the Interior. After Che’s murder, Arguedas acquired his cut off hands and a copy of his Bolivia diary. Some months later, Arguedas saw to it that both the hands and the diary got to the Cuban government. Among his assistants were friends in the Bolivian Communist Party. Their leader, Mario Monje, had refused to aid Che, going back on his earlier word to both Che and Fidel. This was a costly betrayal.¹

When Morales became president, he proclaimed Che Route as an attraction for visitors from near and far. Some even made a several day pilgrimage out of it.

On the road, we stopped at Samaipata, a small town that a guerrilla column had occupied briefly. They captured the army’s little garrison with the loss of one army soldier. Although the people were curious about the guerrillas, and respected payment in cash, they were leery about them. Of the 48 guerrillas in the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional de Bolivia-National Liberation Army) none of them came from the Santa Cruz province where the rich still maintain political power.²

When we got to Vallegrande, a town of 27,000 people, we arranged for a guided tour at the Che museum and then ate a tasty meal at María Tereza’s Café Galería de Arte. Her husband is a painter whose images of Che hang on the walls. María Tereza thinks well of Che and is proud of her father, who was jailed by the military dictator General Hugo Banzar after he grabbed power, in August 1971, from General Juan José Torres. María’s father, Dr. Gustavo C. Cárdenas Cabrera, had been mayor of the town when the more liberal Torres was president for ten months. General Torres had tolerated the “subversive” act committed by Mayor Cárdenas: that of naming the principle street, “Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara”!

The next day, our well-informed guide, Adalid, showed us the Hospital Nuestro Señor de Malta laundry room where Che’s body was brought and laid on display. This small room is now covered with graffiti honoring Che as the liberator who never dies. Che’s murderers had buried him secretly in the vain hope that he would not only physically disappear but that his memory would as well.

From there we drove a short distance to a countryside controlled by the military. It was here that the remains of 121 cadavers were eventually dug up. Thirty of these could be identified as Che and his men and Tania. The other 91 had been murdered for other reasons.

Che’s small group had been discovered close to La Higuera by 180 Bolivian soldiers. Che was captured after being wounded in the leg, his rifle smashed out of commission by a soldier’s bullet, his pistol out of bullets. The Bolivians had been assisted by two CIA agents. One of them was Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban exile counterrevolutionary who was part of the invasion force at the Bay of Pigs. Today, he lives a “hero’s life in Miami, displaying to the curious a wristwatch of Che’s.

Excavation of the land to find these bodies had started after writer Jon Lee Anderson questioned General Mario Vargas Salinas, in November1995, about what happened to Che’s body. Vargas was a captain at the time he pursued the ELN. Captain Vargas had been present when Che and the others were buried under an old airfield runway. After nearly 30 years, the general told the long kept secret, hoping to find reconciliation.

The then President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada dismissed the statement as one spoken “between whiskey and whiskey”. Anderson held a news conference and said that he had a tape recording of the conversation, which occurred between “coffee and coffee”. Vargas then admitted the truth and the president ordered the area be dug up.³

A simply made mausoleum encompasses the graves of Che and six others: three Cubans, two Bolivians and one Peruvian. Four of the seven killed from this battle were executed after capture. The guerrillas never executed any prisoner taken. That was also the moral policy of Che, Fidel and the other Cubans during the Cuban revolutionary. In fact, when soldiers were wounded and captured, Che or another doctor treated their wounds.

Nearby is a site of bodies of other guerrillas, who had been mowed down in an ambush directed by Captain Vargas. He had a peasant snitch. These guerrillas, including Tania, had been in “Joaquin’s” column (Juan Vitalio Acuña), which had gotten separated from Che’s group. Seven were killed as they crossed a river at Vado de Yeso; two more were captured and then assassinated. Now, each grave has well kept roses and plants. A cow or two may come in, however. There are no guards.

While Lorena took photographs and Jaime sat alone on a wall deep in thought, I asked Adalid about how residents here feel about Che and the other guerrillas today.

“I’d say the majority in Vallegrande is indifferent, a few are even against him, and about one-third are sympathetic. La Higuera is very small, and most there think well of him, even to the point of worshipping him. Some do here, too.”

Susana Osinaga, the nurse who cleaned Che’s corpse, saw something “miraculous” about his “strong eyes, his beard and long hair.” She told reporters that she prays to Che for guidance. She asked him to heal her ailing daughter and he did. Other locals claim that they have found lost animals upon whispering Che Guevara’s name to the sky, or by lighting a candle to his memory.

Some of the hospital’s nuns and other local women also thought of Che as Christ-like. Some of them cut clumps of his hair for good luck charms. In various homes throughout Bolivia, Che’s portrait hangs alongside Christ and Catholic saints.

There are many others, however, who see him as evil, especially those belonging to the rich class or even indigenous people into denial about their ancestry. We met some of the latter people in the town of Villa Serrano, after leaving La Higuera. We saw many people dressed in typical indigenous peasant clothing. The few I spoke with, however, told me they were Spanish and not interested in talking about Che. Their eyes indicated displeasure at seeing my red t-shirt with Che’s image. One pointed to a man dressed in Western clothing. When I approached him, his eyes spoke belligerently.

“What are you doing here in that shirt? It is an insult to us to portray that man. You and other foreigners coming here are misinformed about him. Nor should you speak of us as `Indians´. We come from Spanish stock,” his strident voice lightened as he enunciated “Spanish stock”.

Back in La Higuera, a small town of about 30 families, we had visited the school house where Che was held and shot. In the next room, the Bolivian “Willy” (Simeón Cuba Sarabia) was assassinated. “El Chino”, the Peruvian Juan Pablo Chang Navarro, was also murdered that day. All three men were shot in parts of their body that could indicate they fell in battle.

The small school is now a museum containing Che’s M2 rifle, his leather brief case, various books and documents. “I prefer to die on my feet than live on my knees” is one of Che’s sayings written on the walls.

Outside are two statutes of Che, one with a Christian cross beside it. I doubt that Che would have been happy about such adoration. He was certainly not a religious believer.

We were shown to a medical clinic where Cuban doctors care for the residents. After Morales’ election, Cuban doctors care for millions of Bolivians. At that time, 2,600 were doing so.

Broad smiling Danay Glez met us alongside her circumspect doctor husband Roberto Sanchez. The clinic was well equipped with essential necessities brought from Cuba.

“We are responsible for 806 persons in this general area; about 90 in town,” Roberto stated.

“Besides caring for the people’s health, we teach them about computation, and about Che,” chimed in Danay. “Surprisingly, many people think that he came here to kill and rape civilians.”

Surprisingly also is that the story of Che and the ELN is not taught in the schools, not even since Morales’ election.

“We are so pleased to work here in the country where Che fought and died to free the Bolivian people,” Danay said. “This is the most satisfactory moment of my life. And to think that our medical technique and our doctors cured his killer! Yes, that is the way it was. Well, that is what we stand for: curing the sick. It gives satisfaction curing one more person.”

Incredibly, Cuban doctors had operated on Mario Terán, an old blind man, at a Santa Cruz hospital two years before. The Cuban medical creation, Operation Miracle, is an ophthalmologic rehabilitation program that can cure many causes of blindness, such as cataracts. It is performed free by Cuba and Venezuela.

Terán may not have been recognized at the hospital when he was operated on in August 2006. He was living under a pseudonym (Pedro Salazar). Nevertheless, he had his son pass a letter to the Santa Cruz largest daily, “El Deber”, in which he, the killer of Che, expressed gratitude to Fidel Castro because Cuban doctors had restored his eyesight.

Mario Terán had told “Paris Match”, in 1977, what Che had told him as Terán came to kill him.

“When I came in, Che was sitting on the bench. When he saw me he said, ‘You’ve come to kill me’. I couldn’t bring myself to fire. ‘Calm down’, he said: ‘Aim well! You are going to kill a man!’”

What a strange world we live in. Cuba’s revolutionaries, especially Che, are accused by the US and many other governments of being barbarous terrorist murderers. Yet this “terrorist” Caribbean island-country sends hundreds of thousands of professionals to help millions whilst the accusers send hundreds of thousand to kill millions in their profit wars.

In the spring of 2009, five years after the operation was developed, Cuba Coopera, a website belonging to Cuba’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, reported that Operation Miracle had benefited 1,500,000 people from 35 countries. 1,331,000 were from countries other than Cuba; and 266,743 had undergone surgery at Cuban facilities. Cuba with Venezuelan financing had also donated 60 ophthalmologic centers to Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, Mali and Angola. Today, about two million people can see thanks to Operation Miracle.

Besides the truth and myths about Che is “the curse of Che” as Anderson reported.

Some people in Vallegrande believe that Che has seen to it that six of the politicians and military officers who shared responsibility for his murder died violent deaths.

The first was the very president who ordered his murder. General René Barrientos was killed in a helicopter crash in April 1969. Inexplicably, the chopper just fell out of the sky.

The peasant, Honorato Rojas, who betrayed the second column of Che’s, was taken out later in 1969 by a second ELN (failed) attempt to start a revolution.

In 1971, Colonel Roberto Quintanilla, the intelligence chief who made Che’s fingerprints, was executed in Germany.

Lt. Col. Andrés Selich was directly involved in the capture and execution of Che. Selich later led a military revolt that put General Banzer in power. When he became disillusioned with Banzer, the dictator had thugs beat him to death, in 1973.

In late May, 1976, Colonel Joaquín Zenteno Anaya was shot down in Paris by an unknown group, “Che Guevara International Brigade”. Zenteno had been commander of the Eighth Army Division pursuing Che’s group. He spoke with Che at length after his capture and he kept his rifle. Zenteno received the order to murder Che, which he gave to his superior, Colonel Selich.

On June 2, 1976, an Argentine right-wing squad took care of “liberal” General Juan José Torres. Torres had cast his vote for Che’s execution. But the left did not kill him. He was killed because he was a populist ousted by a more pro-US general. He became a victim of the CIA’s Operation Condor. Interesting operations juxtaposition: miracle and condor.

The man who actually arrested Che, Gary Prado, became a general. Later he became paralyzed when he accidentally shot himself. And, as stated, the man who actually plugged Che became blind. Mystically, the “curse” took pity on that soldier and four decades later doctors following in Che’s footsteps cured him. Why did he survive and get cured—maybe because he was not an officer.

1. Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, p. 745.
2. Of the 48 guerrillas who fought between February and November 1967, 27 were Bolivians, 16 Cubans, three Peruvians, one German-Argentine (Haídee Tamara Bunke-Tania) and the Argentine (Cuban naturalized) Ernesto Che Guevara. Eleven survived, most of whom had been captured, tortured, imprisoned and later granted amnesty. The three Cuban survivors escaped Bolivia and found their way to Cuba. Nineteen Bolivians were killed: two drowned accidentally, five were assassinated after capture, one deserted and assassinated after capture, and 11 died in combat. Two of three Peruvians died in combat; one was assassinated. All 13 Cubans killed died in combat. Tania died in combat. In addition, two international solidarity activists were captured after meeting with Che in Bolivia. Frenchman Régis Debray and Argentine Ciro Bustos were tortured, sentenced to 30 years and served nearly three in prison before release.
3. Interview with Jon Lee Anderson by Jaime de la Hoz Simanaca.

In the first years in Denmark, I worked at odd jobs and wrote free lance, while also participating in Central America solidarity activities. I met an El Salvadoran guerrilla leader in Copenhagen while he was on tour for the FMLN. We agreed that I would travel clandestinely to El Salvador where I would accompany guerrillas in the countryside. I would report and write a book.

This project led to my first visit to Cuba, in the autumn of 1987. My first book, Yankee Sandinistas: interviews with North Americans living & working in the new Nicaragua had recently been published by Curbstone Press.¹ At the recommendation of Cuba’s embassy personnel in Copenhagen, I offered it to Cuba’s foreign book publisher, Editorial José Martí, to publish a Spanish translation.

In a few days, the publishing house director told me that they wished to publish my book and assigned a translator to it. Delighted, I signed a formal contract. Then I saw Fidel hold a four-hour speech in the convention center and hung on to every word. It was true what was said about his abilities as a speaker: he was the world’s greatest orator. And what a memory he had. He could start off somewhere and go around the world describing how it was and how it is, and do so without notes or even water, and seemingly all in one long breath.

Just the year before, the government had launched a period of “Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies” as a response to economic and political stagnation. The leadership now realized that having copied the Soviet Union’s Economic Management and Planning System for 15 years had been a mistake. Rectification was aimed to diversify domestic production, reduce dependency on the mono-culture sugar export, stem marketing economy tendencies, and emphasize volunteer labor.

On October 8, I traveled with other journalists to Pinar del Rio province where Fidel inaugurated an electronics factory and held a speech on the 20th year of Che’s capture. We stood for three hours listening to Fidel speak extemporaneously. I was so impressed with this speech, “Che’s ideas are absolutely relevant today”, that I quote from it extensively.

“If we need a paradigm, a model, an example to follow, then men like Che are essential…educating by setting an example… the first to volunteer for the most difficult tasks… the individual who gives his body and soul to others, the person who displays true solidarity…who doesn’t live any contradiction between what he says and what he does…a man of thought and a man of action…”

(“Be Like Che” is the slogan to which Fidel referred during this speech and was adopted by the Pioneer Exploring Movement, Cuba’s version of the boy and girl scouts. They engage in outdoor activities, exploring nature, and do volunteer work.)

“We’re rectifying all the shoddiness and mediocrity that is precisely the negation of Che’s ideas, his revolutionary thought, his style, his spirit and his example…”

“For example, voluntary work, the brainchild of Che and one of the best things he left us during his stay in our country and his part in the revolution, was steadily on the decline. …The bureaucrat’s view, the technocrat’s view that voluntary work was neither basic nor essential gained more and more ground…We had fallen into a whole host of habits that Che would have been really appalled at. If Che had ever been told that one day, under the Cuban revolution, there would be enterprises prepared to steal to pretend they were profitable, Che would have been appalled.”

“Che would have been appalled if he’d been told that money was becoming man’s concerns, man’s fundamental motivation…the mentality of our worker was being corrupted… he knew that communism could never be attained by wandering down those beaten paths, and to follow along those paths would mean eventually to forget all ideals of solidarity and even internationalism.”

”Che had great faith in man. Che was a realist and did not reject material incentives. He deemed them necessary during the transitional stage, while building socialism. But Che attached more importance—more and more importance—to the conscious factor, to the moral factor…”

“Che was radically opposed to using and developing capitalist economic laws and categories in building socialism…”

“Che’s ideas were incorrectly interpreted and, what’s more, incorrectly applied. Certainly no serious attempt was ever made to put them into practice, and there came a time when ideas diametrically opposed to Che’s economic thought began to take over.”

“The min-brigades, which were destroyed…are now rising again…demonstrating the significance of that mass movement, the significance of that revolutionary path of solving the problems that the theoreticians, technocrats, those who do not believe in man, and who believe in two-bit capitalism had stopped and dismantled.”

(Mini-brigades were composed of workers who volunteered to be relieved of their normal responsibilities for up to two years, in order to build housing, schools and day-care centers. More day-care centers allowed more women to join the work force and volunteer brigades. But soon, with the fall of European socialism, Cuba lost 80% of its international trade and its GDP fell by 35%. Rectification turned into a national campaign for sheer survival—the Special Period in Peacetime—and voluntary work took on even greater steam with volunteer contingents doing farm work. Volunteers worked longer hours than at their normal job. They received the same wage, and the state reimbursed the original workplace for their wages. Although I did not think of it at the time, I came to wonder how Fidel could make such a strong critique of “theoreticians, technocrats, bureaucrats” destroying socialism for “two-bit capitalism” while he was the leader whom everybody knew oversaw all policies. What Fidel criticized then—the thirst for money and consumerism—is even more pronounced today.)

Fidel’s praise for the new volunteer workers included medical personnel and teachers traveling to poor countries to cure the sick and enlighten the student. Che, he said, would be proud of these people. Today, Cuba continues exporting this “human capital”, as Fidel calls the volunteers. The United Nations recognizes Cuba as the world’s leading solidarity contributor in these fields. In fact, Cuba sends more medical personnel to countries in need than do the combined countries in the UN.

In a December 2008 article commemorating 50 years of the revolution, I wrote, “Today, nearly 100,000 medical personnel, teachers, sports instructors, technicians and advisors are serving in 104 countries. In the medical arena alone, over 10 million people, in 68 countries, have been treated just this decade. Millions of people have been aided in a score of countries hit by natural disasters, such as Pakistan (2006), a US war ally. The new Cuban created Operation Miracle has cured upwards to half a million blind patients in 25 countries just since 2004. With Venezuela’s oil profits, and Cuba’s doctors and those it is training in Venezuela, the Venezuela-Cuba plan is to cure 10 million Latin Americans within a decade.”

When Fidel ended this speech of criticism of errors, I felt exhilarated. I had a hardbound copy of “Yankee Sandinistas” with me and wished that Fidel might read it, or, at least, sign his autograph on it. I handed it to a bodyguard to give to Fidel. Four days later, I received notice to collect my book. Fidel had signed it after, apparently, reading through it. I gave another copy to the assistant to give to Fidel for his library.
My contacts in El Salvador got word to me to travel to Mexico and await further instructions. I would make it into El Salvador from there and see what could happen. I was thirsty for actually doing something to advance consciousness and for revolutionary action. In Denmark, there was nothing to be done it seemed to me, nothing more than offering a bit of aid to those elsewhere in the world who were struggling. A key difference with Danes, who do protest government policies, and many other nationalities, is a lack of passion to win. They protest perfunctorily, in the main.

I had to wait in Mexico several weeks before I got word to come to El Salvador. Conditions had changed since the time I had made the agreement with the guerilla leader. Propaganda about the struggle was no longer a priority. I was asked to do other sorts of solidarity work. Not so enthused about this, I agreed to one short-lived project in Denmark and then returned to Cuba.

Editorial José Marti´s director and chief editor greeted me with broad smiles. They asked me to write a book about 27 double agents (26 Cubans and one Italian resident in Cuba) who had infiltrated the CIA and passed on vital information to Cuba security forces. It would be published in English and Spanish. These men and women had recently been called in “out of the cold”. Very few media in the “first world” were writing anything. The agents were all civilians who had other jobs than intelligence work. All had been contacted by the CIA while abroad on their work assignments for Cuban enterprises. They played along with the CIA, agreeing to accept money for information, even to assist efforts to murder Fidel, but then they told their government all they could learn. Apparently “white man” mentality influenced CIA officials to think that these “natives” would rather rake in handsome spy fees than be less well paid patriots.

The Ministry of Interior’s Department of State Security (DSE) allowed me to interview all the double agents I wished. They also showed me some of their audio-visuals of US spying, and some of the communication apparatuses that the CIA provided their assumed recruits. The two governments did not have official relations but allowed each other to have interest sections. Many of the US state department employees in Havana were actually CIA officials, and they controlled the Cubans in Cuba whom they thought were on their side.
Once I had enough material, I was prepared to return to Denmark and write the book. Then another surprise occurred. The Ministry of Culture, which oversees all publishing houses, offered me a full-time job as a “foreign technician”. I would work at José Martí publishing house as a consultant in the English department, and finish this book and write others. I would be paid a normal Cuban peso wage and live as a Cuban. There were a couple of extras, too. The ministry would find a place for me to live, which would be part of my salary. We foreigner workers had a ration card as did Cubans but we shopped at special stores with more products on sale, sometimes. Another exception was that we could possess US dollars, which I earned when selling a piece free lance. I used the extra money for traveling abroad. On July 26, 1993, Fidel told the Cuban people that they, too, could earn and use dollars.

I was overjoyed as I boarded a plane back to Denmark. The publishing house would be sending plane tickets for both of us, but Grethe decided not to move. She preferred to keep her useful job and visit me in Cuba. I wrote most of the book in Copenhagen and then Grethe and I flew to New York City. I wanted US government officials to respond about the infiltration but they stonewalled me. I contacted CBS 60 Minutes TV news about doing a story on this “worst burn in the CIA history”, as Mauro Casagrandi (the Italian double agent) dubbed it. At first, there was interest but when the US government refused to make any response, CBS dropped the big story.

Back in Cuba, I finished the book, Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, in the fall of 1988. It took two years to come out, which was frustrating for me but Cuban authors said that was quick production work. In the meantime, I worked voluntarily constructing an apartment building and cultivating the earth at a cooperative farm 50 kilometers outside Havana. And I read about Cuba’s economic forms the leadership experimented with in the early-mid 1960s.

As Minister of Industry, Che developed what he called the Budget Finance System (BFS), which competed with the Soviet-oriented Economic Finance System (EFS) being applied in other parts of the economy. The latter was overseen by a former leader of the Moscow-oriented Communist Party, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez. The Soviet economic model was based on monetary pricing, on the law of value but managed by state bureaucracies rather than individual capitalists or private monopolies.

At his most idealistic, Che even made efforts to abolish money, which was too advanced for the times. Furthermore, one state cannot fully create socialism in a world run by capitalism, especially if that state sits on an island just 150 kilometers from the policeman of the globe.

Che was also realistic in much of his endeavor to create an economy that would assure a full stomach and equality for all, eventually ending “alienation of labor”. This means implementing equality not only in productive relations—producer workers as owners with government assistance in coordination and distribution of products—but also equality in overall political and economic decision-making aimed at abolishing capitalist market values and rule.

Capitalist owners allow workers to produce for their use, to varying degrees subject to union power if such exists, but the goal is greater profits for owners, who set prices and wages. Che’s national budgetary system would set prices determined on labor time used and on costs of resources and tools necessary to make the product or the service. Che meant that economic planning must reinforce political consciousness. This requires a climate of debate and the organization of schools where workers could improve their skills and study politics, becoming more self-confident and prepared to actually run the economy and eventually the government. The ultimate goal is the “withering away of the state.”

This economic strategy, which incorporated the planned transfer of power to the working class, is a key contribution that Che made to real socialism, one not widely recognized. Che’s plan died with his death, just as Fidel said in my citation above. I don’t know what Fidel really thinks about this today, but the 6th CP Congress (April 16-19, 2011) reversed Che’s very concept of a socialist economy/workers power.

Cuba at Sea

In addition to doing volunteer work, I began research on a new book project: sailing with Cuban merchant marines to tell a story of Cuba from the sea. During a two-year period, I worked for six months on three tankers, delivering oil around the island-nation; and then to and fro Europe on container ships. These were invaluable experiences and gave me unique insights into Cubans. Unfortunately, a book could not get published in Cuba as the Special Period curtailed nearly all publishing. Cuba at Sea was eventually published in English by a small house, Socialist Resistance, in England.

When the biggest scandal in Cuba’s revolutionary history occurred, I called in stories to Pacifica radio, the network of four stations like KPFK. In June 1989, Army General Arnaldo Ochoa, Ministry of Interior General Patricio de la Guardia and his brother, Colonel Antonio de la Guardia Font, and other officers were arrested for misappropriating state funds and operating a drug racket for the past three years.

The drug scandal was extremely damaging to Cuba. General Ochoa was an awarded hero. He had held the top Cuban military posts in Nicaragua, Angola and Ethiopia. He was close to Fidel personally yet Fidel initiated the investigation. This was the first time drug smuggling had occurred since the revolutionary victory, and was especially painful and embarrassing to the president and nearly all Cubans. It is illegal to grow, sell and use any intoxicating drug. And there was almost no drug taking in Cuba, not even marijuana.

The 14 involved in drug smuggling all confessed. After a trial, four were executed within the month; the others were given long prison sentences. The death penalty is rarely used but for this high crime it was employed.

People were shocked and baffled about how such a gruesome crime could be pulled off given that the executive government exercises as much control as it does, and because of how much the leadership is opposed to drugs.

While I felt disparaged, I also felt that the government was honest in investigating the crime, in informing the people, and in punishing those who betrayed the nation’s values and laws. I decided to take a long bike trip to Santa Clara, home of Che Guevara’s museum.

When “Backfire” came out, December 1990, we held the launching at the Ministry of Interior’s museum with many of the double agents attending. It was a proud moment. I quote from the book introduction about how the doubles passed CIA “lie detector” tests.

“I thought of Mauro sitting in front of a polygraph, wired to the cold machine, concentrating on fooling its science. Che’s essay flashed through the picture:

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without contracting a muscle.

The 27 men and women, who fooled the CIA polygraphs, outwitting Agency elite officers, are the embodiment of Che’s words.

A month after the book launching, I burned my passport in Havana, in front of the US Interests Section in protest against United States’ invasion of Iraq. My lone act was covered extensively around the world. For a year, I sought to obtain a travel document elsewhere to no avail. Eventually, the US gave me another passport year-by-year on the basis that I not burn it.

Sometimes I would work voluntarily cutting sugar cane, one of the hardest jobs in the world. And the mosquitoes and chiggers love to suck our blood. One of the places I volunteered was one of the oldest plantations, Central Sanguily in Pinar del Rio, the most northern province.

I was fortunate to work with a machetero (machete cutter), who had fought with Che in the Congo (Zaire), in 1965. Pepe Arecnio Fuentes came from a part of southern Cuba where many Africans were brought from the Congo during colonial times to work sugar plantations. When we met, the former guerrilla was 50 years old. He was the quietest Cuban I have ever met. Only after winning several checker games with him, did he speak to me about his time with El Che.

“I had joined the rebel army just after the revolutionary victory. Sometime in late 1964, some of us were asked if we would volunteer for an `international mission´ that would involve armed struggle,” the muscular machetero confided in me.

“We trained for two months in three different camps. We were curious when we realized that all of us were of the same dark black skin and from the same area. Fidel called us together after training and told us we’d be fighting to liberate Africa and that we’d probably die there. Most of us wanted to liberate the country where our ancestors came from. Only two of us stayed behind; 120 went. We had no idea that we’d be led by Che. It was a marvelous surprise when we met him in the Congo,” Karakase (Pepe’s African code name) said softly, spitting on the dirt yet once again.

While the Cuban guerrillas were training, Che was traveling around much of Africa, learning the terrain he knew he would be fighting in. His opinion of many of the various African “freedom fighters” was quite low. Many of them passed time partying in hotels and brothels.

It was in this period that Che gave his last public speech, February 24, 1965. He spoke in Algiers at the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity attended by representatives from 63 African and Asian governments, as well as 19 national liberation movements. He referred to them all as brothers in a united cause, “the common aspiration to defeat imperialism”. Che made clear his anger at capitalism, imperialism, and warped socialism.

“Ever since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept the greater part of humanity in poverty, dividing all the profits among the group of the most powerful countries. The standard of living in those countries is based on the extreme poverty of our countries. To raise the living standards of the underdeveloped nations, therefore, we must fight against imperialism. And each time a country is torn away from the imperialist tree, it is not only a partial battle won against the main enemy but it also contributes to the real weakening of that enemy, and is one more step toward the final victory.

There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us. The practice of proletarian internationalism is not only a duty for the peoples struggling for a better future it is also an inescapable necessity.

If the imperialist enemy, the United States or any other, carries out its attack against the underdeveloped peoples and the socialist countries, elementary logic determines the need for an alliance between the underdeveloped peoples and the socialist countries. If there were no other uniting factor, the common enemy should be enough.

A conclusion must be drawn from all this: the socialist countries must help pay for the development of countries now starting out on the road to liberation.

Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity…

We believe the responsibility of aiding dependent countries must be approached in such a spirit. There should be no more talk about developing mutually beneficial trade based on prices forced on the backward countries by the law of value and the international relations of unequal exchange that result from the law of value.

If we establish that kind of relation between the two groups of nations, we must agree that the socialist countries are, in a certain way, accomplices of imperialist exploitation.

The socialist countries have the moral duty to put an end to their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.”

For us there is no valid definition of socialism other than the abolition of the exploitation of one human being by another.

One month after delivering this “tactless” speech, as pro-Moscow Communists saw it, Che was in the Congo. Karakase told me that Che told the Cuban combatants two important things: “We’d have to fight hard and train the Congolese, who knew next to nothing about guerrilla warfare; and we must stay away from the women.”

The most frequent sickness among the African rebels was gonorrhea.
The Cubans were there for seven months. They left on November 18, 1965 feeling they had accomplished nothing. They were distressed at the Congolese for their lack of discipline and frequent drunkenness, their wastefulness of resources, laziness and even cowardice. “To win a war with such troops is out of the question,” Che said.²

“It was even hard for us to engage in combat, because of their lack of discipline and direction” Karakase explained. “I was only in two combats. In all, we lost eight compañeros. When we left, we sailed over to Tanzania. It was the last time I ever saw Che, and I’ll never forget what he said. He explained that the strategy for independence and justice would continue but that we had to return to our homeland because conditions were not possible for guerilla warfare. Later on, four of those who fought in the Congo went with Che to Bolivia. I stayed in Cuba because I got married. Soon after Che was murdered, I left the army and went into forestry. And for the past 21 years, I do volunteer sugar cane harvesting.”

Between Che’s disappearance from public sight in the spring of 1965 until his death, he sent a message “from somewhere in the world” to the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Prensa Latina published it first on April 16, 1967. Here are excerpts:

How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe, with their quota of death and their immense tragedies, with their daily heroism, with their repeated blows against imperialism, forcing it to disperse its forces under the lash of the growing hatred of the peoples of the world!

And if we were all capable of uniting in order to give our blows greater solidity and certainty, so that the aid of all kinds to the peoples in struggle was even more effective–how great the future would be, and how near!

Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism and a call for the unity of the peoples against the great enemy of the human race: the United States of North America.

Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear, if another hand reaches out to take up our arms, and other men come forward to join in our funeral dirge with the rattling of machine guns and with new cries of battle and victory.

1. Graham Greene wrote to me after reading my book: “I found [it to be] excellent and your publishers if they want to can quote me. I have marked nearly a dozen passages as is my habit when I am enjoying a book.”
2. See Jon Lee Anderson’s Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, chapter “The story of a failure”. Grove Press, New York, 1977.

Burchett’s journalist code influenced my journalism: “It is not a bad thing to become a journalist because you have something to say and are burning to say it. There is no substitute for looking into things on the spot, especially if you are going to write on burning international issues of the day. Make every possible effort to get the facts across to at least some section of the public. Do not be tied to a news organization in which you would be required to write against your own conscience and knowledge.”

I later met Burchett. We spoke of doing some writing about Cuba but we never got to it.

I had begun working as a reporter in 1967. The written word for me is a tool I wield for our liberation from exploitation and oppression. My first reporting was for the Communist party California weekly, People’s World. My last articles were first-hand accounts from Prague just after the Soviet invasion. They were not published however, a decision taken by top party leaders over the editor’s objection, and I ceased writing for the People’s World.

Che was with me in more ways than I knew at the time. His image and revolutionary thoughts were often present at demonstrations in which I participated, especially anti-imperialist actions. But what I did not know, until I worked in Cuba in 1988, was that he had a flare for writing journalistically.

On June 14, 1988, Cuba’s Journalist Union published Che Periodista (Journalist Che) commemorating his 60th date of birth. It is a collection of chronicles, battle accounts, critiques of imperialism, ideological think pieces, and an homage to Camilo Cienfuegos, a close comrade killed in an airplane accident after the revolutionary victory.

Che’s reportage originally appeared in Verde Olivo (Olive Green), the Cuban revolutionary army magazine, written between October 1959 and April 1961. I found Che’s writings concise, freshly formulated in a crisp style.

After my Czechoslovakia report was ideologically censored by the Communist party, I sought employment in the mass media, or mainstream media (MSM). My first job was as sports editor in central California at the Hanford Sentinel (1969-70). Not knowing anything about sports writing, I learned on the job. Then, I moved up to general reporting and features. I was soon fired, because I wrote about a taboo subject: racist covenants in housing.

The editor ran my piece, “Titles Include Race Restricting Provision,” on the front page, January 29, 1970. The lead read: “Said premises shall not be sold, conveyed, rented or leased to or occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race.” I had found this restriction on deeds at a real estate agency.

When real estate advertisers complained to the publisher, he warned me to learn what to write and what not to write. After I told this to a local Mexican-American, who had told me that some of his people had been denied the right to buy certain properties, one hundred people showed up to picket outside the newspaper offices. This was the first time in its history that the paper had been picketed. The publisher fired me as they chanted to save my job.

“Twins! I had twins,” I yelled to Bill when I came to work one morning at the Riverside Press-Enterprise, my next newspaper job. The week before, I had been congratulated and promoted by the publisher after my probation period of three months. I worked on the editorial desk with Bill, our city editor. But now he wasn’t smiling as usual.

“Ron, I’ve got bad news,” Bill said glumly. “The FBI is coming tomorrow to talk about you,” his voice tapered to a whisper when mentioning the FBI.

Goddamn government! Just got back on my feet; and now with two sons I had to find another job.

The FBI agents told the chief editor and the publisher that I was secretly working with the Black Panther Party in the city. It didn’t help my case with the anti-union publisher that I was trying to organize a union as well. The publisher fired me upon hearing from the FBI.

I didn’t know it at the time but I had been a target of COINTELPRO, the Agency’s code name for its dirty tricks campaign against leftists, especially anti-war and civil rights activists, and Black Panthers. Their tactics included periodic murders, fraudulent imprisonment, and cajoling employers to fire their workers who were government opponent activists.

After leaving the Committee United for Political Prisoners, I took a reporting job at the weekly Los Angeles News Advocate (LANA), whose slogan was “radical, responsible journalism”.

I covered many topics, but concentrated on the Vietnam War and resistance to it. The publisher and I were often at odds over how radical we should be. With my last reportage for LANA I combined my activism in the anti-war movement as one of 150 delegates from US groups participating in the largest world-wide anti-war conference. The World Peace Assembly was held in Versailles, France February 11-14, 1972.

We were 1200 delegates from 84 countries. Both US anti-war coalitions were present: People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and National Peace Action Coalition. I supported both and tried to get them to cooperate in some actions, which rarely succeeded. It was a unique event for me personally because it was here where I first met Burchett. It was also my first encounter with the people that my country was murdering in Southeast Asia, and with people from Cuba, the country that would become my true homeland in years to come.

Among several well known participants was one of Bolivia’s many generals who had seized political power, Juan José Torres. In fact, General Torres had just been ousted the summer before as the nation’s top leader by another General, Hugo Banzar, in yet another coup. I did not know it at the time but Torres had been on the Joint Chiefs of Staff under yet another coup general, René Barrientos, and as such he had cast his vote to murder Che. Yet here he was a “peace” delegate.

During three days of speeches, debates, and working group sessions we adopted an extensive program of antiwar activities to occur in many parts of the world throughout the rest of the year. We were not united on priorities or tactics, however. Some wanted to concentrate on pressuring politicians to be more serious about peace negotiations; others wanted more actions against politicians for making the war in the first place, having no trust in their “peace” rhetoric.

I came under fire from some for my position to boycott the crucial war technology industry, especially war aircraft corporations. Nixon had begun to withdraw troops and was bombing all the more. While we met, in fact, the International Herald Tribune reported, on February 14: “The US Command in Saigon announced that B-52 bombers few 19 missions in the 24 hours ending at noon today, the largest number of missions flown in a day…”

My proposal to boycott and picket war industries was denounced by the French Communist Party (supported by other national CPs) as “anti-working class”. They had control of the unions in many war plants, especially in France. If my proposal took effect, workers would lose wages and even jobs. I was seen as a provocateur, something the CIA also circulated. Divide and conquer!

There was a special meeting with the leading delegates from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for all the delegates from the United States. I felt overwhelmed with admiration for them and tearfully sad.

I also met had a heartfelt meeting with Melba Hernandez, Cuba’s leading international representative. She had been a guerrilla at the Moncada barracks, Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 1953.

We concluded the conference with most of us marching in Paris against the war. Between 25,000 and 40,000 participated. At a celebration in the evening, Joe Bangert sang. He was a New York delegate of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He had been a solider in Vietnam and had gone over to the people’s side, and married a Vietnamese woman. She and her child had just been killed in a US bombing raid.

Leaving LANA, I went over to its competitor and much larger Los Angeles Free Press, or the Freep, as it was known. I was the political reporter. I continued anti-war reportage, exposing police brutality, racism in housing and in government, covering the student revolt and various liberation struggles. One of the most significant reportages was May 1972 demonstrations, which had been called for at the World Peace Assembly.

My two page spread in the forthcoming Freep started thusly:

Anti-war activists say that the government of the United States is waging an all-out war against the people of Indochina and the people of this land.

On May 11, 1,800 tons of bombs were dropped on a small area outside the town of An Loc in South Vietnam. The same day, the news media reported that 1,800 Americans had been arrested during the three-day period in protests involving hundreds of thousands against Nixon’s actions.

Furthermore, for the first time, Nixon’s generals had mined Vietnamese harbors.

In the Los Angeles area, we held demonstrations in many places, among them at Nixon’s reelection campaign headquarters. The police were extremely violent. They beat people, and chocked some unconscious with truncheons. Two civilian clothed policemen, who had been on the picket line, beat Ron Kovics with blackjacks as he sat in his wheelchair. I filmed the police violence.

Kovics had fought against the Vietnamese. After he was wounded and paralyzed for life, he began to see who the real enemy was. He eventually wrote an auto-biographical account, “Born on the 4th of July” (his birth date as well as that of the U.S. Declaration of Independence), which was made into a Hollywood movie. Kovics is still acting against US wars to this day, now in the Middle East.

On that day, four decades ago, 200 Los Angeles demonstrators were arrested for “failure to disperse when ordered”. My colleague, Earl Ofari, wrote a sidebar to my coverage:

“Among those arrested…was Ron Ridenour…as soon as he began filming Ron Kovics being pushed out of his wheelchair by police officers, two plainclothes officers whom [Ridenour] knew from other demonstrations yelled at a uniformed officer to arrest him.”

I was jailed and released hours later on bail. I was later charged with the usual “disturbing the peace,” “interfering with an officer”, “resisting arrest”, and a couple more for good measure.

My case spurred several newspapers and media associations to support my right to report and photograph without being arrested. A defense committee was also organized. Nevertheless, I was found guilty of some of these charges and sentenced to one year in prison. One charge was “disturbing the peace”: swearing in the presence of women as I was being attacked by cops.

Kovics commented: “They beat me because I represented the undeniable truth of the war. I represented the crimes of this war. …It’s absurd that [Ron] should get one year in jail for taking pictures of me being beaten.”

We appealed the case. We had many witnesses, including the ex-wife of undercover cop Stanley Frugard, who testified that he had been an undercover policeman who had been after me for years.

Appellate judges concurred that the sentencing judge had erred in not allowing my attorney to argue that I was a victim of “discriminatory enforcement”. So, I was free again. But Los Angeles “red squad” police did not rest at that.

COINTELPRO Provocation

“Ron Ridenour’s [pen has] inspired some and angered others… a copy of [Ridenour’s] 1971 Internal Revenue Service forms…
found its way anonymously to the newspaper offices. The same forms were also sent to the “Staff” [another “underground” newspaper], the Socialist Workers party headquarters, to the Peace Action Council, and to the Citizen Research Investigating Committee,” wrote Los Angeles Free Press editor Art Kunkin.

This was another COINTELPRO action, trying to cast me in the light of an agent for the US government. Someone(s) had taken my signature, the same one as was on my California driver’s license, and copied it onto fake tax forms. I was supposed to have earned $17, 784.54 from the “United States Army, Pentagon Building Arlington, Virginia.”

A handwritten note said: “I think you’ll know what to do with this information about a pig agent”; signed by “a concerned friend.”

Government agents of world destruction were trying to make my fellow activists and government critics think of me as a “pig agent” and they were nearly successful, because the “Staff” had assigned someone to write a story that I was an agent. Fortunately, Kunkin did his homework convincingly for the reporter, and others who had received the forgery, that this was, in fact, a provocateur action.

This was becoming a common tactic, which caused several honest leftists, especially Black Panthers, to be cast aside as agents. In some cases, violence was committed against innocent people.

In my case, it was ironic that in the same period that I was being smeared, a FBI memorandum from the L.A. office, dated November 28, 1973, noted:

“RIDENOUR’s long association with the ‘underground’ press as well as his affiliation with numerous subversive groups would both tend to preclude interview of subject since this would most surely be a futile effort.”

I continued writing exposes and acting against their wars abroad and brutality at home. I wish to share one more issue where I was both reporter and activist, that of Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee was part of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota. It had the highest murder rate of any area of the United States. Between 1973 and 1976, there were 170 murders per 100,000 population average, whereas the city with the highest murder rate was Detroit, Michigan with 20 per 100,000. The national average was nine per 100,000.
At Pine Ridge, poverty, alcoholism and unemployment were widespread. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ local authority, Richard Wilson, and his deputies ruled over the large reservation like concentration camp guards.

The traditional Oglala Sioux chiefs called in AIM (American Indian Movement) to help them out. This resulted in an occupation of the local post office. Then the chiefs declared secession from the United States. They declared secession and initiated the Independent Oglala Nation (ION). They sought their sovereignty long ago stolen from them by the US government despite treaties that had supposedly guaranteed them self-determination.

US Marshals, FBI agents and National Guards were sent in. Indians held their ground with rifles. The government had 15 armed personnel carriers, .50 caliber machine guns, and helicopters, as well as light weapons. Apparently, their orders were to prevent numerous deaths. Nevertheless, in the 71 days the ION held out two Indians were killed by snipers, and two, at least, were wounded. One Marshall was wounded.

This unusual militancy created a stir across the nation. Celebrities, such as Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando, spoke out for them. In fact, during the stand-off, Brando asked Apache Sacheen Littlefeather to speak for him at the Oscars where he was to be presented with the best actor award for The Godfather. She said that Marlon would not accept the award due to “poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry”.

While the Free Press’s owners and I differed over politics and their sexist sex ads, they allowed me to rent a car at their expense and drive to the battle field. Many supporters had come in stealthily as well. Among the 500 defenders of the new nation were representatives from 60 other tribes from many states. There were a few Chicanos (Mexican-Americans active in their own liberation struggle), a handful of blacks and a few Vietnam War veterans. One of those was Joe Bangert.

I came as a reporter-photographer but also helped the leadership with publicity and getting the message out. When I left, I carried information to another reservation and organized support.

One of the leaders of the movement, Carter Camp, a Poncha Indian from Oklahoma, told me: “We’re going to revive our roots; return to the ways we always lived and complete the hoop that was broken when our whole nation was broken… The new nation shares what it has. There will be no accumulation of goods. No one will have so many horses that some do not have any.”

“We identify with the oneness of all people. Black, yellow, red and white are the four scared colors and are the colors of all people.”

These Native Americans felt kinship with the 200 Indians massacred at Wounded Knee by U.S. government troops, in 1890. They now declared that, “The right to life belongs to each man. By remaining a separate nation we choose to live.”
But it was not to be that way. On May 5, a peaceful negotiation had been worked out. Some leaders were arrested but allowed to make bail, and some courts dismissed the charges. U.S. government “spin doctors” understood that the Native peoples had a lot of sympathizers around the world.

In December 2007, some activists from the 1973 takeover restarted a move to secede from the US. Representatives take their message to international bodies. I met some in Bolivia, in 2010, at the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth—about which I write further on in this series.

Besides my writings at the Freep, I was somewhat more successful at organizing a guild union there than I had been at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. But as we were negotiating a contract, the publishers fired me. They were angry about my organizing and also because I supported radical feminists who were protesting the paper’s sexist ads. Shortly after firing me, Kunkin was fired and many workers left. The union fell apart.

Free Lancing

Graham Greene’s writings influenced me deeply. One of the philosophical pearls that Greene wrote became a motto for me as well as that of Burchett’s. “I try to understand the truth even if it might compromise my ideology.”

I met Greene in Panama where he wrote a talk to launch a solidarity march with Central America for which I was an organizer and media coordinator, in 1985-6. We were 400 people from a score of countries joined to support the Contadora peace process—a Latin American initiative to pressure the El Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments to stop repressing their own people and the US-made contra war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. We crossed through much of Central America and ended in Mexico City “marching” mainly in buses we hired. The last demonstration attracted 50,000 people in Mexico City. Most of us stopped to shout our anger at the Embassy of Death, as Mexicans call the US Embassy.

For me, as a solidarity activist and Marxist thinker, the most decisive motivation to struggle is the issues and not what any political party or government advocates—first an activist and then an advocate journalist for the underdog, for the invaded peoples.

So, after being fired from several jobs both in the mass media and the alternative/left media, I went about making a so-so living free lancing rather than cow-towing to MSM ideology or too simplistic leftist ideological media.

During the next years I wrote and/or edited for scores of US newspapers, news agencies,
magazines and alternative media as a stringer, correspondent or free lancer.

One of the most popular pieces I did as a free lancer was the Playboy scoop interview with Jane Fonda, and her radical husband Tom Hayden. I knew them from the anti-war movement and convinced Fonda to do this interview. She had despised Playboy for publishing a nude or semi-nude photo of her without permission. She had always refused their interview requests.

Washington Post‘s west coast bureau chief Leroy Aarons joined me. I had to miss the fifth and final session because I started serving a six-month jail sentence for supporting striking textile workers. Four civilian clothed policemen had jumped me as I stood before a busload of Mexican workers brought in from across the border. They had not been told that the Mexican-American workers at the plant were on strike. I spoke to them in Spanish about this and encouraged them not to become scabs when the cops took me down. I was arrested for “resisting arrest”, of course.

In between free lancing for magazines and newspapers over a decade, I worked 18 months for the American Civil Liberties Union as its media chief. I got our civil liberty court cases and general message out to the media, often successfully. I also edited and wrote for our newspaper-journal.

In the mid-1970s, I had a stint as an editor/reporter at the rebellious and investigative reporting weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard. We were a handful of full and part-time editors and writers but we put out a good rag. We even won an award for pieces Dave Lindorff wrote. My forte was police brutality investigations. This was, perhaps, the best newspaper I worked on, but we couldn’t last long without advertisers. Newspapers can’t survive in the capitalist world on sales alone.

Four or five years after I was fired from the Los Angeles Free Press, the iconoclastic Larry Flynt of Hustler and Chic magazines hired me as its managing editor. Flynt had recently bought the Freep and gotten rid of the sex ads. He wanted an investigative reporting, ass kicking newspaper.

Soon after coming aboard, a whistle blower handed me a copy of the former LA Police Department chief’s auto-biographical manuscript, Hang ‘Em at the Airport, which was a reference to what chief Ed Davis had remarked on how he would handle the airplane hijacking problem:

“I’d move a portable courtroom, complete with judge, jury and executioner, out to the airport. Once a skyjacker was taken into custody, he could have the benefit of a swift and sure justice. If he was found guilty, he could be hung on the spot.”

This crazy man was running to be governor at that time, and he had the audacity to entitle his biography with that hanging judge message. Fortunately he didn’t win but not because he was crazy, I think, because several other crazy men became California governors: Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them.

There wasn’t much revealing about the manuscript and Davis hadn’t found a publisher, but we had a scoop anyway. The reporter I assigned to do the story, Bruce Henderson, called Davis’ agent-lawyer to get a response. The response came quickly in the form of an injunction against publishing any material from the book. So we wrote around it and when indicating a citation from the book, we had blank spaces around the words: “Deleted by order of commissioner Arnold Levin”.

Unfortunately, Larry Flynt was soon shot walking out of a courtroom, one of many he was forced to appear before by authorities opposed to his magazines. This was in Georgia where he and his lawyer were shot by yet another crazy man. Both men survived but Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down. Flynt’s executives did not like Flynt’s maverick ideas about radical, muckraking journalism so they closed down the Freep. I was out of a job again and went back to free lancing.

At the end of 1978, I traveled to Nicaragua and Costa Rica to cover the liberation war fought by the Sandinistas (FSLN). This was the era of President James Carter. He realized that the Somoza family dictatorship was coming to a close, and an alternative had to found—much like the imperialists have recently decided to get rid of Gaddafi. There was no alternative, other than the leftist FSLN guerrillas and they would not do for imperialism. Among those I met in death-soaked Nicaragua was Carter’s government messenger, who told me that they were working on an alternative. But before they could create one, the Sandinistas won on July 19, 1979.

Before their victory, I had met with some guerrilla fighters. Among those I interviewed were the future Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto, who also became the United Nations general assembly president years later; Father Ernesto Cardenal, who became the Minister of Culture; and the future Vice-President Serio Ramirez.

My writings appeared in magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times. I left the United States soon thereafter, in 1980. In 1984, I worked for President Daniel Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, for a while. She was the director of the Sandinista Cultural Workers Association (ASTC). I wrote public relations pieces for them, including from the war zone by the Honduran border. I also did a report about censorship affects for the Minister of the Interior, Tomas Borge.

When I moved to Denmark my pen continued painting sketches of United States-caused pain.

Ernesto Guevara was my greatest individual inspirer and Cuba’s revolution was my greatest collective inspiration—along with the Vietnamese resistance fighters. Nicknamed Che, an Argentine expression, he lived and died as he preached. Che’s internationalist ideals, his consequent actions, his integrity and charm have influenced my life all these decades.

What immediately attracted me was his forthright manner of speaking and writing, and his bravery and fairness in battle. Che’s dream was to liberate Latin America from the shackles of United States imperialism and its lackey national dictators and murderous straw men. This would be followed up by worldwide socialist revolution.

“I am Cuban and also Argentine…patriotic for Latin America…in the moment it might be necessary, I am disposed to offer my life for the liberation of whichever of the Latin American countries without asking anything of anyone.”

Those are his prophetic words printed on a calendar of photos, which I recently bought in the school room at La Higuera, Bolivia where he was murdered. The images of Che on my walls are important to me, as are some slogans, such as Fidel’s: “To be internationalist is to settle our own debt with humanity”—a moral displayed on Cuban billboards.

I began to share Che’s dream upon the end of my first life: that as a follower of the brutal and chauvinist American Dream. In my family, you were either an active American Dreamer, like my career militarist father, or a passive one like my grandmother whose motto was: “Ignorance is Bliss”. I came to feel that these codes rejected other people. When I severed that knot, I entered a world of humanistic vision and struggle. I still see myself as a youth of the 60s when many of us across the world fought the profiteering war-making empire builders.

Reading about Che and Cuba’s revolution was a part of my reeducation. Participatory journalism became important to me, too, when I began reading articles by Lionel Martin in the New York-based weekly Guardian, which I later wrote for. I met the affable Lionel in Cuba years later. I recommend his book: The Early Fidel: Roots of Castro’s Communism.

Che was born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, in Rosario, Argentina, June 14, 1928. Celia de la Serna y Llosa, his mother, and Ernesto Guevara Lynch, his father, were middle-class of Spanish-Irish descent. In his youth, Ernesto read Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx. He kept a philosophical diary and thought of writing a biography of Marx.

In 1953, Guevara graduated in medicine from the University of Buenos Aires. He made long travels by motor-cycle and hitch-hiking throughout much of Latin America. After witnessing and fighting against US intervention in Guatemala, in 1954, Che became convinced that the only way to bring down avaricious capitalism was through violent revolution.

In Guatemala, he had met a Peruvian revolutionary, Hilda Gadea. They married, in 1955, and had one daughter. Che had also met a Cuban revolutionary who later introduced him to Fidel in Mexico. Guevara signed on as the July 26 Movement’s doctor. In late 1956, 82 men loaded onto a small motor yacht, Granma, and sailed to Cuba. Seven days later they landed near Cabo Cruz on December 2. They’d lost much of their equipment and food during storms. And then they were ambushed at Alegría de Pío by a far superior force of soldiers and aircraft.

Only Fidel Castro and 12 “disciples” (or 16, according to some accounts) survived. They made a base in the mountains of Sierra Maestra from which they attacked garrisons and recruited peasants to the revolutionary army. Che started land reform and conducted educational courses in areas controlled by the guerrillas. He did less doctoring and more fighting. Despite his chronic asthma, he was not deterred by the harsh conditions and war.

Fidel made Che a major (comandante, the highest rank), and he led one of the forces that liberated central Cuba in late 1958. One of Che’s fighting companions was Aleida March. She became his second wife, in 1959. After victory, January 1, 1959, Che gained fame as an anti-imperialist orator and the leading figure next to Fidel in the revolutionary government.

In Che’s well known writing, “Socialism and Man”, he asserts that the revolution must create the “new man”. “To build communism, you must build new men as well as the new economic base.” “The goal of socialism is the creation of more complete and more developed human beings.”

Cuban revolutionaries defeated the US-equipped dictator’s army when I was 19 years old and a lowly airman in the Air Force, which I was learning to hate for its racism, lies and arrogance towards the entire world outside the U.S., and its military aggression against other nations.

One personal example of its hateful racism is what happened to me because I drank with black airmen at a “blacks only” bar in a Japanese town close to the U.S. radar station where we were assigned. The day after my “betrayal”, several white men in my barracks—all barracks were segregated—tore off my clothes and held me down on a bunk bed while they lit a can of insecticide and burned my pubic hairs and skin, then held me under the snow until nearly suffocating. I must learn to be racist like them.

Two years later, then a college student in Los Angeles, California, I participated in my first demonstration when the Yankees backed a proxy invasion of Cuba. I held tightly onto a picket sign: “US OUT of CUBA”, and marched with a couple hundred others in front of the United States Federal Building. It was April 19, 1961, and the US was getting its ass kicked in Cuba!

Two days before, US naval ships landed 1500 exile Cubans on a little beach, Bay of Pigs, in southwest Cuba. The CIA plan was to seize the beachhead and hold it long enough so they could fly in a provisional government of rich Cubans. The US government planned to recognize the new “democratic” government of Cuba and send in military support to smash the revolution.

Unlike the American public, the Cuban government knew such a plan was underway but did not know where it would be launched. Every family had received pamphlets explaining how to defend themselves. Thousands of local defense committees had been organized in armed militias. The CIA had grossly miscalculated the strength of revolutionary support. It had told the mercenary invaders that they would be welcomed as liberators. Instead they met fierce resistance from civilians before Cuban soldiers could arrive. As we few indignant Usamericans were protesting the US-led invasion, it was being defeated.

I had heard about the invasion over KPFK radio, a non-commercial progressive station, and the Guardian. The right-wing Herald Examiner reported that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) had organized the protests, and it was led by the Communist party (CP) and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party (SWP), a unique alliance for these ever feuding groups. On the front page was a photograph of me walking in front of the CP’s southern California chairwoman Dorothy Healey. The paper used her presence to claim that all demonstrators were communists.

I sent in a membership application to FPCC. (I have my membership card beside me as I write.) If I were to be accused of being a Communist for defending the right of Cubans simply to live, then I was going to find out what Communists were all about.

Dorothy’s house was in a black working class area of south central Los Angeles. I walked past tidy houses with a nervous sensation in my stomach. Was I ready to meet a real live Communist, my father’s enemy and that of the entire fatherland? I was surprised to be greeted by a tiny, white woman with bushy hair and a remarkably friendly smile. Her living room resembled a library. During the long interchange, I became enthralled with this engaging person. Dorothy had dropped out of school at 14 to become a full-time revolutionary. She knew a great deal about the US’s evil deeds against Cubans and their government. Dorothy never asked me to join her party but I did in 1964. I resigned in 1969 because of CP support for Moscow’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and because it had long ago ceased being communist or revolutionary or democratic.

President John Kennedy was furious about being dealt a misguided strategy and disinformation by the CIA and the preceding administration. The failed invasion only strengthened Cubans in the drive to socialize society and in the nationalization of large US and national capitalist properties, as Che had predicted. A frustrated Kennedy fired several leading and operative CIA officers.

It is understandable yet ironic that key CIA figures, some whom JFK had fired, were co-conspirators in Kennedy’s assassination two and one-half years after the defeat in Cuba. Their patsy was Lee Harvey Oswald, a scapegoat who faked membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I watched the assassinations of these two men on TV with my membership card in my wallet. CIA propagandists at first claimed the FPCC was involved in JFK’s murder—part of an alleged Castro conspiracy—but top government leaders decided to go with the lone man assassin lie. Nevertheless, frightened FPCC leaders closed down the committee.

The murder of Kennedy was especially pertinent to me not only because I was a member of the FPCC but also because I had recently been jailed in Costa Rica and deported back to the US for “attempting to overthrow” the Costa Rican government. I had traveled there in the hope of finding a way to Cuba where I wanted to learn first hand about the revolution. But the October 1962 missile crisis stopped me en route.

Prison leaders isolated me from all prisoners and forbade inmates and guards from speaking with me because I might subvert them. In a ritual of power, two guards shaved off my guerrilla-inspired black beard with sharp knives before all the prisoners to witness. President Francisco Orlich Bolmarcich used me as a scapegoat for a recent murderous event when national guardsmen killed several demonstrators. He concocted an incredible story that I’d been trained in Russia and sent to Costa Rica to start a revolution. Having gotten out of my presence there what they wished, authorities deported me to the US.

Mississippi Goddamn

The most moving movement I was part of was with black and white civil rights activists in Mississippi, the Freedom Summer of 1964. “Mississippi Goddamn” was a 1963-recorded song by the militant singer Nina Simone, which expressed why we organized for civil rights equality there. After that “long hot summer”, as it also became known, another activist-singer, Phil Ochs, wrote the activist song, “Going Down to Mississippi”.

I later obtained 1000 pages of dossiers kept on me by National Security Council (NSC) intelligence agencies. Some pages dealt with my participation in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) civil rights struggle for black voter registration. Here is a selection:

United States Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation
date: 9/14/64
office: Los Angeles, California

During the period March 10 through June 7, 1964, RIDENOUR attended the following functions of the Youth Action Union (YAU)…a party sponsored by the YAU for the benefit of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee… According to LA T-3, the purpose of this party was to raise funds for the organization… The April 11, 1964 edition of the PW contains an article which reflects that RIDENOUR was the Vice Chairman of the West Los Angeles Du Bois Club and also the Head of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, a group which was conducting demonstrations at various businesses, protesting discriminatory hiring practices.

Unaware of this surveillance, I proceeded to help empower people in Mississippi. After a week’s training in how to withstand violence without using violence, and in Mississippi racist history, conducted at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, I was assigned to a project in Moss Point. I had sat close to Andrew Goodman, who was one of three activists soon to be murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen and sheriffs from Philadelphia, Mississippi. (Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were the other two.)

Four of us who were to initiate the project in Moss Point drove there in my car. A black youth, Charles Glenn, was our director. Howard Kirschenbaum, a white Ivy League college student, was with us. We activists were all put up by brave black residents.

Howard and I stayed together at the Colley’s house. Mr. Colley was a carpenter with a wife and six children. He often dosed through the night in a rocking chair with a shotgun on hand. Howard was one of several activists who prepared black voter candidates for registration. Others taught subjects that black youths were interested in at our after-school Freedom School. I was the project’s administrative secretary and publicist.

One evening Howard and I were walking when a police car pulled up and the cops arrested us for “vagrancy, and we’ll see what else”. We spent a harrowing night in jail. We were told by policemen that they knew the three activists had been murdered before this was public knowledge. We were also told lies that our director had raped a white woman activist and then he had been tortured to death. We were lucky that our legal support staff could get us out the next morning.

In the summer of canvassing, registering and teaching we were able to make a dent in the numbers of blacks registered, although authorities found devious ways to prevent most from registering. But we were successful in other ways: bolstering people’s courage was one. Another was what Howard later wrote about his most significant memory, “the song we sang that summer, night after night, ever so slowly, feeling each word, extending each syllable in the traditional cadence of the Negro spiritual, as we linked arms and swayed to the chant like melody.”

We have walked through the shadow of death.
We’ve had to walk all by ourselves.
But we’ll never turn back.
No, we’ll never turn back,
Until we all are free,
And we have equality.

We have hung our heads and cried,
Cried for those like the three who died,
Died for you and they died for me,
Died for the cause of equality.
But we’ll never turn back.
No, we’ll never turn back,
Until we all are free,
And we have equality.

Once our project was over, I drove my reliable Chevy to New York with comrades from the struggle in Moss Point. I still have the Mississippi license plate, number: J16684. Forty-seven year old dirt is ground into the white metal background. It calls to me as I write.

After a short stay in New York, I drove across country to Los Angeles. The trip gave me time to reflect on that summer. I concurred with Lawrence Guyot, one of our leaders: “The Freedom Summer was the most creative, concentrated, multi-layered attack on oppression in this country.”

We also made strides in creating space for equality. Decades later it became obvious that because we had fought the good fight Barack Obama would become president of the United States. Unfortunately and predictably, President Obama does the “mans” bidding for profiteering labor exploitation and oil wars. Nevertheless, he is black and that is a positive step; as it is that women can also be bankers and “bastards” just like white men. Yes, we have more enemies now but we can not deny the universal right to equality?

Another positive aspect was participatory democracy practiced by SNCC, and the Student for Democratic Society. This egalitarian decision-making methodology allowed for the acceptance of differences. Even in heated debates there was no belittling of those with whom one did not agree. If someone did become aggressively antagonistic, he/she was spoken to, and if necessary isolated. But in the CP, and other communist parties, there was a heavy atmosphere of self-righteous adherence to “the correct line”. Dissent was tantamount to betrayal.

Our civil rights movement inspired the next phases of the black liberation movement, and all other minority liberation movements: the Mexican-American/Chicano “La Raza” movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Native-Americans’ AIM, Philippines for Philippine sovereignty, and the radical women’s movement. These were the roots of the New Left.

Shortly after the long hot summer, black nationalist Muslims, aided by the New York City police department, murdered one of the most articulate black liberationist voices, Malcolm X, on February 21, 1965. He was one of my teachers, indirectly. The other most prominent voice for justice of the races was Martin Luther King. He, too, had to be “taken out” (June 6, 1968). Both men were dangerous for the white elite, for capitalism and its wars. Malcolm X had come to see the need to unify people of all colors who were exploited by capitalism. Martin Luther King had long been convinced about racial unity and then, fatally, he began to protest capitalism’s war against Vietnam.

Among my political activities was the on-going protest of police murders and racist brutality. I lived in a century of “acceptable” lynchings of black people. From 1882 to 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, whites had murdered 4,500 blacks by lynching alone. In the time that J. Edgar Hoover was chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1924-72), half that official number had been lynched, but there were more unregistered lynchings. Like Roman worker-citizens applauding the slaughter of slaves in amphitheaters, whole families gathered picnic-style to watch a lynching and sometimes the burning of a live human being (“Strange Fruit”, Billy Holiday). Hoover did nothing to apprehend these cruel murderers, nor did local police forces in the south—almost never.

This repulsive behavior made me sick. I sought answers. If we are not to be guilty of societal-based crimes, then we cannot be passive about them; we cannot live by the “ignorance is bliss” code. In 1946, Sartre wrote Existentialism and Humanism:

When we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men…One ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception.

I chose to accept responsibility for my actions and in so doing I have never felt guilt for the state of “human nature”. And, instead of giving futile alms to poor beggars, I strive to create an economic base, a social structure where poverty would be non-existent. We have enough wealth for all to live well but many humans seek to live better.

Such a philosophy often makes me feel sad and can be isolating from most people—especially when there are lulls in protest movements. It was especially the civil rights movement that gave me the fortitude to struggle onward. It brought me the warmth of fellowship, a sense of the possibility that the goodness in some people can penetrate the hearts and actions of others and eventually win over the death machine.

Our movements had a positive impact on many Europeans too. Movements for democracy in the schools and anti-war movements forced some bourgeois governments to make reforms in schools and criticize the US’s aggressive war. We also helped inspire and support African liberation movements. They felt stronger with our solidarity, which helped defeat the colonialists.

Anti-war Movement

Many of us activists, of all colors, also supported liberation movements fought by blacks, browns, Native Americans, and radical feminists. I was the organizer of a white support group (Committee United for Political Prisoners) for Black Panther Party political prisoners. I also supported Central American liberation armed struggle movements. For these struggles, I was jailed a dozen times, once for half-a-year for supporting a textile strike.

The movement that I was most active in and for the longest consecutive time was the anti-Vietnam war movement—14 years, until Vietnam freed itself, aided by our solidarity, on Mayday, 1975. I took part in hundreds of actions, advocating a diversity of tactics: mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, leafleting people at public areas, going door-to-door canvassing, direct actions.

One successful direct action was kicking Dow Chemical job recruiters off our campus at California State College at Los Angeles, December 1967. Dow was the producer of scorching-to-death napalm. We forged an alliance with black and white students, and a few Chicanos, against the war in Vietnam and against militarist recruiters. Our boisterous anger, and a dose of stink, scared the Dow men away. In fact, they departed through a window. I was suspended from school and could not graduate until the next year, but Dow Chemical said it would never return.

In a brief period of post-war Vietnam, and during the Watergate scandal, the US government lightened up a bit, hoping to dampen our movements’ anger. One concession the government “gave” to our movements was the release of some of its record-keeping, a result of the Freedom of Information Act. The spies listed me in various categories of subversive “indexes”: chaos, agitator, rabble rouser, and the highest: Security Index Priority I. Agents, and snitches within our groups, recorded my attendance and political positions expressed at innumerable meetings, rallies and demonstrations. They noted first hand when I changed residences or jobs, and where I traveled. Here is a sample:

“On February 4, 1972, a Special Agent of the FBI observed Ridenour boarding Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 351, at 4:50 p.m., at Hollywood-Burbank Airport, en route to Oakland, California.”

A few weeks later, I am observed taking off for London, and then to the World Assembly for Peace in Versailles, France, “as a delegate of the United States during the period February 11, 1972, through February 13, 1972.”

The NSC did not limit itself to keeping tabs on “subversives” like me it also leaked dossiers to civilian friends. Right-wing propagandists used secret dossiers to fan the flames of “patriotism”. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, known as “the white voice of the south”, used secret dossiers to denounce me as a subversive in an attempt to taint the civil rights movement. LAPD red squad officer Russell D. Meltzer testified in Washington DC before a Senate committee, in 1968, that I was “the leader of that demonstration” in which Dow Chemical was ousted. The “Fire and Police Research Association of Los Angeles”, portrayed me as a “professional agitator.”

I was proud to learn that I was one of 4,000 persons chosen by the Nixon regime to be interned in concentration camps. Before we could be rounded up, however, Nixon fell from grace.

Our militant and massive actions frustrated US soldiers in Vietnam. Some gave up the imperialists’ war, others lost their humanity. A group of the latter systematically murdered about 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968. The then Major Colin Powell was sent to investigate. He secured his future appointment as George Bush’s Secretary of State by whitewashing the wanton murder of mostly children and women, many raped and tortured before being killed.

This is a quote from Powell’s whitewash: “Relationships between the American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

After this atrocity finally made news, on November 12, 1969, by a well-researched and documented story by Seymour Hersh (Dispatch News Service), my name was sometimes confused with the original source of information for Hersh: Ronald Ridenhour (with an “h” unlike in my name). He was a soldier elsewhere in Vietnam who heard about the massacre, one of hundreds but one of the worst. Ridenhour wrote to politicians about it. After being ignored, he contacted Hersh. Once the story hit the mass media, some of which were becoming critical of the dirty war without end, we held massive and angry demonstrations. This media revelation was a good example of what the “fourth estate” should be about, and this information increased opposition to the war. Middle America began to wake up from its “ignorance is bliss” slumber.

Many other Tamils, especially in Tamil Nadu, India, join hands in this humanitarian struggle. Together, they have achieved a great deal of real assistance and some recognition for their kinsmen and cousins albeit no government has yet to respond with consequent solidarity for this maligned people. The potential potency of a true humanitarian, internationalist United Nations yet once again has been left unfulfilled in the interests of monetary and territorial profits.

Tamils began fleeing Sri Lanka in large numbers following the second pogrom, in 1977. Led by Buddhist monks, Sinhalese mobs destroyed many of their homes and shops and murdered up to 300. This was the second of four pogroms Tamils suffered between 1956 and 1983, in which as many as 5000 Tamils were murdered; some were set aflame alive.

The first Tamils fled to nearby Tamil Nadu where 60 million Indian Tamils live. These Sri Lanka Tamils have been poorly treated by Indian authorities. Activism led by Tamil Nadu Tamils has been based on emotional connections they have to the Sri Lankan Tamils. It peaked in May 2009 but has been sporadic since then. There are signs of revival of support for the Tamils generally among the educated class based on rational evaluation of the situation for Tamils in the island.

Most Tamils migrated beyond Asia, spreading throughout the British Commonwealth, non-English speaking European countries, and the United States. Today, there are about one million S.L. Tamils living in 20 countries or more. Their relatives back home number around 2.5 million.

Migrants and refugees did not abandon their kinsmen. Most send remittances and many helped finance liberation movements, including the armed forces of the LTTE (Tigers). They established grass roots support committees in the countries where they migrated.

One of the oldest Tamil associations in the Diaspora in the United States is Ilankai Tamil Sangam. It has a continuous history of support activities since its founding in 1977, and is now conducting a boycott campaign of Sri Lanka garments, which accounts for a quarter of foreign currency earnings. As it writes, “We know that by linking employment of Sinhalese to the human rights of Tamils we can help secure a just future for our people.”

Another U.S. group, Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), formed in 2008, hired US attorney Bruce Fein, a conservative Ronald Reagan government official, to file human rights violation charges against Sri Lanka’s defense minister, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, also a U.S. citizen, and General Sarath Fonseca, former head of the government’s war machine and also holder of United States residency.

TAG has also filed a lawsuit in US District Court in Washington for $30 million in damages on behalf of three Tamil plaintiffs, who had family members killed by the S.L. Army.

A separate legal attempt was made in the Supreme Court to annul part of the Patriotic Act that forbids offering assistance to terrorist groups, so defined by the US government. A Sri Lankan Tamil, US citizen, and lawyer, Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, argued that supplying a liberation force, the Tigers, with “material support” is in keeping with First Amendment rights of free speech. He so contends because of perpetual discrimination by the Sinhalese governments against the Tamil population allows them no alternative but to take up arms, in order to win their rights.

On June 22, 2010, the Supreme Court denied Rudrakumaran’s case. It found, instead, that laws against “terrorism” have priority over free speech, which, for the first time, the Supreme Court has now partially criminalized.

Tamil groups in many other countries are active in boycotting Sri Lanka products—such as Act Now in Britain—and in filing lawsuits against Sri Lankan diplomats for war crimes.

Since April 2004 when the present president Mahinda Rajapaksa became prime minister, at least 34 journalists have been murdered: three Sinhalese, 29 Tamils.

Fifty-five media workers have fled into exile in that time span. Towards the end of the war, some started Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), an action group of journalists, writers, artists and human rights defenders campaigning for democracy, human rights and media freedom in Sri Lanka.

Organizing Internationally

Three international organizations have started up since the end of the war with the common goal of offering hope for Sri Lanka Tamils back at home and in the Diaspora by struggling abroad for sovereignty in Sri Lanka—Global Tamil Forum (GTF), Council of Eelam Tamil in Europe (CETE), Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE). Although they all started after the defeat and collapse of the LTTE, the Sri Lanka government considers them all to be Tiger “terrorist” followers.

The GTF has committees in 14 countries. The first ones started in Britain and Canada in the summer of 2009. The GTF held its inauguration in London’s House of Commons, February 24, 2010. Several British government officials and parliamentarians were present. Foreign Secretary David Milliband spoke. He suggested that Sri Lanka embark on a “genuinely inclusive political process. Other Establishment politicians from Europe, the US, and South Africa attended as well. This event followed the EU decision to suspend preferential trade benefits (GSP) for the Sri Lankan government in protest to its brutal abuses against Tamils.

The Forum’s leader is SJ Emmanuel, a Catholic priest and follower of Gandhi. The Forum’s vision is to seek self-determination for S.L. Tamils using principles of democracy and non-violence.

Global Tamil Forum projects include boycotts of Sri Lanka products, and aiding Internally Displaced Persons (IDP). They estimate that there are at least 80,000 Tamil widows, and many thousands of orphans. It is endeavoring to sponsor at least 1000 war orphans and provide general relief for those most affected by the war. The GTF also seeks justice for the perpetrators of genocide and war crimes. They work with the Center for War Victims and Human Rights.

In an interview with a leading participant at the inauguration, a Tamil scholar and political activist, he acknowledged that by obtaining tentative political backing by Western government officials and parliamentarians can be tricky. None of these governments have forthrightly aided the Tamil cause for self-determination or its people in any material way. Since the end of the war, U.S., EU and UN leaders have made noises about protecting Tamils’ “human rights” but have not condemned Sri Lanka or brought anyone before the International Criminal Court, as they often do to leaders of governments that they oppose. No, as I have shown in other writings herein, these Western regimes have been involved with the Sri Lankan Sinhalese governments’ genocide since the beginning in the 1950s. So, what is to be gained?
“Believe me no Tamil activist thinks of supporting US or British imperialism, just as we did not support British colonialism,” he said. “But we have to present out case wherever we can, and hope that by bringing as much pressure as we can we will one day bear fruit. In politics, there are always contradictions. Most of us are more inclined toward the liberation struggles of other peoples, such as those countries in Latin America struggling free of the United States’ `backyard´ dominance. Ironically, some of these countries have sided politically with the Sri Lankan government. I think this is misguided, but they probably have done so because they see US-EU pointing a ‘human rights’ finger hypocritically at Sri Lanka leaders. And then there is China interests over there, too.”

(The United States has invaded 66 countries 159 times since the end of World War Two. All these military operations have been aggressive—some minor, some major: Vietnam, Latin America, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The US has directly murdered several millions of people in military operations. Through wars and sanctions, such as that against Iraq following its first military intervention, millions more have starved to death.)

Shortly after the GFT was launched, Tamil activists in Norway and Switzerland began the Council of Eelam Tamil in Europe. They were soon joined by activists in Germany, France and Italy. They see themselves as activists, first and foremost. Many are second generation Tamils in the Diaspora.

In Switzerland, Tamil CETE activists ran for election in a national assembly to form Canton based councils. They see this as a way of uniting and strengthening the Eezham Tamil Diaspora, and putting a separate state in northern-eastern Sri Lanka on the agenda. Sixteen thousand eligible Tamil voters in Switzerland, 70% of the total number, held a referendum in January 2010. Ninety-nine percent voted yes for an independent Tamil Eelam.

Four European CETE councils, joined by Tamils Against Genocide, are filing war crimes charges against Sri Lanka diplomats sent to European countries.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) agreed to take up the case against the appointment of ex-SLA commander Jagath Dias as a diplomat to the Sri Lanka embassy in Germany. “SCET, the Norwegian Council of Eelam Tamils (NCET) and the US based NGO, Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), had filed an application to the ECHR in July 2010 charging the German government for violating EU Rights conventions by accepting a Sri Lankan military commander, Major General Jagath Dias, an accused in the war crimes,” wrote Tamil Net.

One representative of the Swiss CETE, Lathan Suntharalingam, a young activist and member of the Swiss Parliament for the Socialist Party, told me, “We Tamils have to work hard to bring our cause before the world. We are very sad and confused after the defeat in 2009. We need to combine all our forces and struggles: Tamils, Arabs, Latin Americans…We need to help each other, because we have common problems and goals.”

A prominent activist in the Diaspora, Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, who earned a law degree in immigration rights and constitutional law from Harvard University, saw the need for international representation of Tamil rights to sovereignty. He took the most ambitious initiative to begin the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam in the United States and throughout the Diaspora. Rudra, as he is known, called together Tamils living in many countries, mainly scholars, to a conference in Switzerland, in August 2009. Two more international meetings were held before the TGTE was officially inaugurated. Consensus was reached: a) armed struggle was defeated and is not now possible; b) the fight for sovereignty must continue.

An advisory committee of 11 persons was selected to draw up a strategy for the formation of a “Provisional Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam”. “This Government will lobby for the support of the international community and people to find a political solution to the Tamil national question on the basis of nationhood, a homeland and the right to self-determination.”

The TGTE is not to be confused with a “government in exile”, as there had been no independent state with a government that later sought relocation. It will be formed like a transnational corporation or NGO, and will campaign through political and diplomatic channels. The real government will be established in the homeland when that is physically possible.

The traditional homeland of Tamils is swarming with military personnel and camps, effectively an occupied territory. Systematic gerrymandering of electoral districts occurs. Four Tamil members of parliament, representing Tamil political parties, have been murdered under Rajapakse’s regime. Murderers of Tamils whether military personnel or police or civilians enjoy full impunity. The state prohibits equal rights for Tamils with the Sinhalese. In such circumstances, international law recognizes a right to self-determination and a right to secession. And when powerful nations back a people’s demand for sovereignty, such as in Kosovo, they get it.

TGTE strategy is to work with all existing local, national and international Tamil organizations in the Diaspora, and to create a power centre for diplomacy with all governments possible. It also seeks to work in partnership with Tamil leadership inside Sri Lanka but has not been able to establish ties, at least not officially, given the belligerent nature of the S.L. government.

The advisors’ reported on January 2010. They said that a transnational government is “rationalized on the lack of political space for the Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka to articulate their political aspirations and realize their right to self-determination and exercise their sovereignty.”

They devised an elaborate democratic procedure to elect delegates where Tamils live in the Diaspora, in order to shape a Transnational Constitutional Assembly, appoint a cabinet, and draft a constitution. One of the main provisions in a constitution will assure the special rights of Muslim Tamils, “who seek their identity based on Islamic religious faith” and are Tamil-speaking people.

The report also recommended a monitoring body to protect the guiding principles and ensure that the Transnational Government “does not act in a manner contrary to the Guiding Principles”: 

 

1. Commitment to achieve Eelam, an independent, sovereign State—nationhood, homeland and right to self-determination.
2. Tamil Eelam will be a secular state.
3. TGTE shall assist in establishing health facilities in the homeland, homes and refuges for those affected by the war; promote cultural activities stressing Eelam Tamil distinctiveness. Much of this work will have to be done indirectly as the TGTE cannot be in Sri Lanka.
4. Promote education in the homeland.
5. Promote economic welfare.
6. Conduct foreign relations through lobbying.
7. Seek prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
8. Protect the equality of women and all Tamils.
9. Provide welfare of families of martyrs, former combatants and families affected by the war. One practical project is to establish monuments for martyrs in the Diaspora since their memorials and graves have been destroyed by the Sri Lankan government.

The advisors established procedures to elect 115 Elected Representatives (ER) by direct ballot where there are contests—otherwise the sole candidate for an area automatically became an ER—in the main population centers (16 countries), and 20 Delegates to represent countries or regions where conducting elections is not feasible because of small or diffuse Tamil populations, or there exists difficulty of access. Some Delegates could be non-Eelam Tamils coming from India, primarily.

The numbers of ER and Delegates is proportional to the numbers of Tamils. For instance, Canada has the largest number, 25, to represent about a quarter million Tamils, followed by the UK with 20, for some 200,000 Tamils.

Those wishing to vote in the TGTE Constituent Assembly must be 17 years old or older and connected to Eelam Tamil culture by descent, marriage or adoption.

In the spring of 2010, elections were held in 12 countries. In some cases, the proposed candidate met no competition and so there was no election. The fact that only about 5% of the Diaspora, around 35-40,000, voted does not indicate a lack of enthusiasm since in some cases there was no need for an election. Nevertheless, participation was lower than hoped for.

Fifty-six of the 89 ER and Delegates elected gathered, in Philadelphia, to officially form the Transnational Constituent Assembly, on May 17-19, 2010. Not all countries or regions had held elections. Their spots will be filled in time.

On June 17, following the first sitting of the Assembly of the TGTE, Rudrakumaran wrote the following in a news release.
“The fact that the first session took place in Philadelphia at the same site where the US Declaration of Independence was promulgated and the US Constitution was drafted symbolized, to the world, our passion for freedom. While the Government of Sri Lanka proclaimed that [it] crushed the Tamils’ struggle for freedom…we demonstrated our thirst for freedom to the world through the setting up of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam. The manner in which we linked elected members of TGTE situated at venues in London and Geneva…portends the transnational character of the struggle we intend to take further.

The first session of the Assembly saw the election of an interim executive committee along with several action committees in order to address the immediate concerns until the time a formal constitution of the TGTE is drafted and ratified.”

The TGTE Assembly met again between September 20 and October 1, in the United Nations Plaza Hotel, New York City. Representatives in N.Y. were joined via teleconference by others from London and Paris. They ratified its Constitution.

“The opening plenary was addressed by former U.S. Attorney General Mr. Ramsey Clark, Deputy Chief Minister of Penang (Malaysia) Professor Ramasamy, Professor David L. Philips from Columbia University and who also served as UN and U.S. State Department adviser, and Mr. Ali Beydoun, Executive Director of UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic of the American University’s Washington College of Law. UNROW recently published a report on Sri Lanka War Crimes which was submitted to the UN.

After the opening session the Assembly turned to the challenging task of discussing the draft constitution. They debated and settled on a parliamentary model. The Parliament decided that the head of the government would be the Prime Minister. They also chose to create three Deputy Prime Minister posts. The Deputy Prime Ministers will be joined in the cabinet by seven other ministers.

The TGTE Parliament will have a bicameral legislature. It will consist of the Parliament of elected representatives and the Senate. The Senate will serve as an advisory body as well as provide expertise. The Parliament also codified the recall mechanism of the elected members.

After the Assembly ratified the constitution, and unanimously elected Mr. Pon Balarajan from Canada as the Speaker of the Parliament, and Ms. Suganya Puthirasigamany from Switzerland as the Deputy Speaker. The Parliament unanimously elected Mr. Visvanathan Rudrakumaran as the first Prime Minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam.

On November 3, the TGTE announced its first cabinet. Of the 10 ministers and 10 deputy ministers, five are women. The Secretariat is in Geneva. The ministries are: finance; welfare; education-culture-health; internal affairs; information; political & foreign affairs; welfare of women, children & elders; economic affairs-environment & development; investigation of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes; and IDPs, Refugees and POWs.

The cabinet meets every 14 days. It will be issuing national membership cards and a quarterly journal, plus an international website.

On the foreign relations front, the TGTE feel a victory for its recognition by being sent an invitation from the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM) leadership to be official guests of the new nation-in-formation, the Republic of Southern Sudan, in the July 2011 inaugurating ceremony.

In another area of rebellion and repression, the TGTE called upon the United Nations to protect Libyan civilians, as well as their own people. On February 25, 2011, this statement was issued:

Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE) today urged the United Nations not to fail in protecting Libyan civilians like it failed to protect Sri Lankan civilians in 2009, when around 60,000 Tamil civilians were killed. The failure of the international community to take concrete actions to protect civilians in Sri Lanka has given the green light to regimes around the world that they can also massacre civilians without any fear of consequences.

What we are witnessing today in Libya is the result of indifference the international community exhibited during the massacre in Sri Lanka and not brining Sri Lankan leaders to face war crimes charges”, said Political and Foreign Minister of Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam, Mr. Thanikasalam Thayaparan.

UN should take immediate steps to bring Sri Lanka leaders to Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, and War Crimes to show its resolve to hold those committing mass killings.

Conclusion

Among the TGTE challenges and weaknesses, which I see and have discussed somewhat with key participants, are:

1) The need to raise a treasury while avoiding the historic problem of Diaspora contributions being associated with the armed struggle of the Tigers, seen by many Tamils as having succumbed to acts of terrorism and, of course, being condemned as terrorists by many of the governments that TGTE is trying to persuade to assist it. So, it is the most active members who are paying for travel and other expenses. For now, they will not ask Tamils for money, in general. Perhaps some NGOs and grass roots groups might raise money. They must be careful about choosing their NGOs, as many are paid for by governments with special political interests—NGO imperialists, some call them.

2) TGTE must be careful about how it conducts its lobbying with governments of the “international community”, a common reference to the US and its big capitalist allies. This is a reference to what I raised earlier regarding the Global Tamil Forum. In this context, it is noted that while the SPLM has a legitimate demand for a separate state, it allowed itself to be supported economically, militarily and politically by the United States.

3) While practically every Tamil in the Diaspora still wants a sovereign nation inside the Sri Lanka island, there are strategic and tactical differences. The TGTE takes up where the LTTE ended but by using non-violent tactics. Not all in the Diaspora have yet admitted that the LTTE will not return, or that another armed struggle is impossible or unnecessary. Most GTF members support the TGTE, as do many in the CETE. But some activists wait in the background before deciding to cooperate with the TGTE; a few are against it.

While Lathan Suntharalingam is skeptical, he did help organize a Country Working Group and an election for the TGTE in Switzerland.

“We supported the election, in April 2010, for delegates to the Constitutional Assembly. I am a bit confused about it, though. I wish more action. The TGTE needs more time. I see us getting well together in two to three years.”

4) Finally, how can the TGTE become a true representative for the Tamils in Sri Lanka? How can it get feedback and backing from this frightened and suffering population? I see a related problem. All ministers are scholars or businessmen while most Tamils at home and in the Diaspora are workers. This too has to be adjusted as the credibility and trust people hold towards the government improves over time.

I am no expert on Arabic/Middle East history or politics, other than knowing that US/Israel-led imperialism has had a grip on the entire area for decades, and before that there were other foreign oppressors. I know that in part of the Arab world – not currently involved in this uproar – the US-led “humanitarian” operation has cost upwards to two million Iraqi lives, millions of migrants fled and fleeing, tens of thousands tortured, and the destruction and thievery of much cultural wealth and history. European allies assist in this butchery. Something similar is occurring in Afghanistan, and extending into Pakistan.

Wikileaks’ dispersal of US Embassy cables from Tunisia, posted in the British Guardian, December 7, 2010 and January 28, 2011, how how duplicitous and corrupted all US governments are with the Ben Ali family government for the past two decades.

US ambassador to Tunisia, Robert F. Godec, wrote, on July 17, 2009, that the Ben Ali regime is: “sclerotic;” and that “Tunisia is a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems.”

On the other hand, Godec expressed the need to continue supporting this regime because, “The government is like-minded on Iran, is an ally in the fight against terrorism…the US Mission has, for the past three years, [responded] by offering greater cooperation…notably in the commercial and military assistance areas.”

The US government supports Egypt with $1.3 billion in military aid annually, second only to Israel.

Most shamefully, a number of Arabic governments aid and abet the US in its “war against terrorism”. Egypt, and Tunisia, where the courageous uproar began a month ago, are among them. In others — Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon — many thousands of people act supportively with the Tunisian people, and with their own similar demands.

Will this lead to revolution, to socialism, as a rejection of misery under capitalism? Marxist analysis of what it takes before a socialist revolution can break out and grow entails two aspects. First, objective conditions must be present: too much poverty, exploitation and oppression to ignore; plus sufficiently high level of technology (industrial or?), and acutely antagonistic productive relations.

The second condition is subjective, in which a significant number (majority or?) of the most productive and exploited of industrial workers (perhaps also or either a significant number of land proletariat and small peasants) are conscious enough of their position as exploited, and are angry enough to take up the call for revolt. Overthrowing oppressors  — as is occurring now, or is in the process of occurring, in some Arabic nations — is a good indication that a huge percentage of folk (in many places the large majority) are ready subjectively. Many have been murdered, thousands more arrested, yet they persist, especially in Tunisia and Egypt.

(Iraq, also an Arabic nation, has not moved into supportive action. Most of its people are too brutalized by the US+ invasion and their accomplice national governments, supported by the Persian neighbor, Iran, to come into the streets. But I suggest that many have their hearts beside their Arabic brothers and sisters in uproar, and time may bring them to fore. But this will probably not occur shortly in Saudia Arabia where the US-backed multi-billionaire government leaders rule with a fascist fist.)

The objective material factors for Tunisia and Egypt are, in large part, present as well. Does the high level of production relations necessary exist? I do not know. Are the workers antagonistic enough with the bosses and do they know that (condition two)? I’d say yes to both.

I do not seek to become an oracle. I wish merely to shed us of illusions. It takes more that what is occurring now to win over not only the national oligarchies and their armies and police forces well-equipped with US-French-British armaments, but also the very Empire itself awaiting in nearby skies and waters for the signal to move in if all else fails. The people are not armed well enough.

Nevertheless, I am encouraged by a sense of pan-Arabic unity, a sense that they are all one brethren no matter the name of the State. I do not see, however, in many of these areas, that the people are well organized, that they have their own parties or unions that lead with sagaciousness, or that they lead at all. There is great spontaneity and determination. All to the good! But people never win over the oppressors unless they have organizations that formulate policy and direction.

In Tunisia, however, I see a positive development with the January 14th Front, forces involved in the revolt.  The eight organizations and political parties forming it, several illegal and operating underground, gathered into a united front on the day that the dictator fled the country. They propose 14 points to move forward, to form a people’s government and change the economic foundations.

Among the key points are anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist demands, coupled with democratic and social demands to raise the people out of poverty and exploitation:

• Eliminate all temporary governments that have any relations with the Ben Ali government and party (the RCD).

• Dissolve the existing state apparatus and create an assembly of peoples’ organizations for a new constitutional foundation.

• Eliminate the secret service and the political police.

• Jobs, health care, civil and social rights for all.

• Solidarity with all forces for liberation, especially with Palestinians in opposition to Zionism.

Most of you who read this commentary are not in the Arabic region. To you I say: we are all brothers and sisters in our common struggle! Take up what arm you can and support these people today, and hope that, one day, we will all support one another to build a universe where we are all one free people living with essential needs!

At play here could well be documents Wikileaks released that show that US diplomats communicated with their heads in Washington that British troops in Afghanistan are not very good at the job. Brits are angry about this slur, especially given their long history from the start to go “shoulder to shoulder” with Bush’s terror wars.

Also many Swedish politicians are angry after documents revealed how, unknown to its parliament, Sweden’s military and secret services work with NATO and offer more assistance with the CIA than is legally decided in Sweden.

Assange wasn’t immediately released as not all the bail money has been raised. It is difficult to get money to the defense, because the Yankee government pressured conveyors of donations and website servers for Wikileaks homepage to end cooperation. Paypal, Visa, Mastercharge, Assange’s own Swiss bank, and other Establishment businesses have frozen Assange and Wikileaks accounts.

Wikileaks must be supported. It is a main tool to maintain the little freedom we have left to have the information we need, in order to make grave decisions, like: should we go to war; should we torture people; should we destroy nature to have greater wealth…?

Michael Moore is one of several well known cultural figures who posted bail. This is what he wrote on his website, December 14: “No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed. And that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done. WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.”

I join in and urge readers to this piece to do the same. Just before writing these words, I sent my pension savings, $10,000, for our defense in Julian Assange’s name. You can do the same:

Wau Holland Stiftung Commerzbank Kassel Bank code: 52040021. Account: 2772812. IBAN DE57520400210277281200. BICCOBADEFF520

The British daily carrying Wikileaks documents, The Guardian, wrote that this is a way to get money to the right people. So, I guess I trust this.

To recall where we came into this drama let us go back to December 7 when Assange turned himself into police in London, because Sweden had persuaded Interpol to issue an international warrant for his arrest and extradition to Sweden.

The accusing women are: Social Democrat party organizer of Assange’s speaking tour last August, 31 year-old Sophia Wilén; and a Social Democrat member in the audience, Anna Ardin, a 27 year-old anti-Cuba activist allied with US-paid so-called “dissidents” in Cuba.

Ardin was, reportedly, kicked out of Cuba for subversive activities with right-wing groups there.

Her brother purportedly worked for the Swedish Secret Service/SEPO, which works with the CIA.

Anna Ardin was the person who invited Julian Assange to speak at the Stockholm meeting on August 14, hosted by the Christian Social Democrat Brotherhood organization. An article by Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett (“Assange Bersieged,” Counterpunch, 14 September) noted that while Assange went to Stockholm hoping to shield WikiLeaks from legal persecution, ‘the moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service.’ It turns out that Ardin has a brother who works in Swedish intelligence, and who was a liaison in Washington to U.S. spy agencies. Nothing but a strange coincidence?

I have read conflicting stories in various mass and alternative media about which woman organized Assange’s speaking tour. As you can read above, I write first that it was Wilén and then cite a web stating it was Ardin. I am uncertain who played what role. Another word of caution is about Ardin’s brother. While several alternative blogs and webs have stated what I wrote above, that he is a SEPO man, none have mentioned its source or his name. I have not read about this in any mainstream medium.

What does appear to be certain is that neither woman rejected Assange for days after their consensual coitus with him with busted condom or no-condom sex. Regardless of what occurred between these consenting parties, almost all mass media are reporting that Assange is wanted in Sweden on “rape crime charges” or “sexual assault charges”, according to AP’s December 14 bail story. (http://www.cbsnews.com/8601-202_162 7148650.html?assetTypeId=30&tag =contentBody;commentsStandAlone). Yet further down in the story, AP reports the truth: “Assange is wanted for questioning”, contrary to its lead sentence.

Before they complained to the police, they had boasted on Twitter and over sms texts about their escapades. Ardin, who hosted a party in Assange’s honor at her flat after his “crime” the night before, tweeted her followers that she was with the “world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!” They saw Assange over a two or three day period before they went to police, they said at first to seek assistance to speak with Assange and ask him for a sexual disease test. Why they had not spoken with him personally is not clear. After Ardin decided, or was persuaded by powerful people, to go to the police, she tried, unsuccessfully, to get her tweet expressions of blushing admiration for Julian Assange erased. (See stories in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Herald Sun in Australia).

It is certainly a strong possibility that her secret service brother—if he is that—got to her between her sexual conquest of an exciting, viral cult figure and her trip to the police station, all to help out big daddy across the Atlantic.
The supposed charges against Julian Assange are ludicrous and make a mockery of the serious crime of rape—a crime of violence. But they are also logical.

The United States portrays itself as the world’s leading land of freedom and democracy. It says it is appalled by China and Iran, and other countries that censor the Internet, and strongly supports the Nobel Peace Prize just given to a Chinese dissident.

How is it then that the “freedom-loving land of opportunity”, with a constitutional lawyer as its titular president, must stop this freedom of information worker and the information organization he helped found? Assange has not “stolen” even one document. He is only a distributor of “stolen” documents, interchanges between diplomats and their government heads—all of whom are war criminals and should be tried before the International Court of Hague for war crimes against many people—currently primarily Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Palestinians.

Four decades ago when Nixon tried to incarcerate Daniel Ellsberg, who actually stole and leaked secret documents about the US war against Vietnam—the Pentagon Papers—most of society and even the Supreme Court balked. Ellsberg was not jailed and the New York Times printed the damaging documents. And the anti-war movement grew in numbers and strength to the chagrin of the warring/lying president.

Today, we live in another world far less democratic and less solidarity than then. Today, much of the population of the US and its capitalist country allies, such as Denmark where I live, support the Empire or are passive no matter what it does. The previous Emperor even admits in a book, he allegedly wrote, that he ordered torturing people and is proud of it. Half the Danish population thinks that is OK; the other half do nothing. And even more USamericans agree that wikileaks is against their interests despite the fact that 400,000+ documents Wikileaks acquired and published show the cruelties and lies committed by the US and its warring coalition against the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Palestine. No Western masses have been drawn to fight those illegal, tortuous wars, and Wikileaks was left to continue “subverting”. The consumer public did not care. A famous voice for freedom of information, Edward R. Murrow, said long ago: “No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”

Releasing government secret documents became “old hat” by the time the first of 251,287 documents from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions were released—or so the mass media tried to depict them. Even the progressive image satire program The Daily Show took this view and sketched Wikileaks as banal, “nothing new” as though once the worst crimes imaginable are no longer unknown the crimes become acceptable. This propaganda also affected many leftists, including many who fight against capitalism and imperialism.

But suddenly the US government becomes nervous. This happened because the few hundred documents released show how cynical, arrogant and condescending US government leaders and diplomats are. The cables (“cablegate”) show the extent of US spying on its friends and allies and on the UN; how it ignores corruption and real human rights abuse of its client states; backroom deals with allegedly “neutral” states; lobbying for US corporations profit interests; and they reveal how other government heads connive and lie, and seek to tumble other governments.

The Empire’s credibility throughout the capitalist world is shattered. It can’t be trusted to keep its own secrets. Diplomats and military officials from several allied countries have recently cancelled meetings with US counterparts. The Empire is falling, so the Empire goes amok.

Information freedom fighters and their key leader must be crushed. Government terrorists, such as Homeland Security chairman Senator Joe Liberman, an outspoken Zionist, are cracking down on any associate of or link to Wikileaks. Amazon turned down Wikileaks as its server, then Pal Pal, Visa, Mastercard refused to channel donations to the organization. Many other media and businesses refuse to do business with the information freedom fighters. A Swiss bank froze Assange accounts, much of it designated for his defense. Organizations and businesses in many countries forbid their members or employees from reading or supporting in any way Wikileaks. I know an IT expert in Denmark who works for a company that forbids its employees from even looking at Wikileaks documents or speaking in its support.

According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, two-thirds of US citizens want Assange brought before a US court on espionage crimes. Yet of scores of stories I have read in the mass media there is no concern about the truth divulged in these incriminating documents.

US military services have issued orders that no personnel may possess mobile communication apparatuses that could be used to record or photograph anything that could be embarrassing, such as occurred in Iraqi torture chambers. Furthermore, personnel are forbidden to read any websites or newspapers, such the New York Times, which has posted any documents released by Wikileaks.

The US is seeking to make a new law especially against Assange and Wikileaks, a modern Espionage Act from 1917 that forbade US government employees from revealing secret documents. No matter that Assange is an Australian citizen and has not taken any documents from the US. The US wants to create a new criminal: “information terrorists”.

Republican party presidential candidate Sarah Palin calls for Assange to be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”—albeit that, in reality, the US government does not want to capture him. Remember that even the US Senate revealed that the former War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld let bin Laden live in safety in some Afghanistan mountain-tunnel and turned a US troop detachment away from engaging him. But with the leading “information terrorist” it is another matter.

Another Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, also calls for Assange’s execution. So do some Fox News commentators and many other prominent opinion makers and top level politicians. The President for “hope and change” agrees and is backing a law to try Assange in the US for espionage, and another law which would allow the extra-juridical murder of American citizens in foreign countries.

The United States pretends to be appalled by China and Iran censorship, and other countries that censor the Internet, and strongly supports the Nobel Peace Prize just given to a Chinese dissident.

But no more Wikileaks.

Thanks to the Pirate Party of Switzerland, Wikileaks can be read on its site. Donations for its defense can be made through them.

And there are hundreds of other sites that carry Wikileaks documents. Interestingly enough while there have been no grass roots public support for Assange-Wikileaks in Denmark, one of the capitalist dailies, the liberal Politiken, has placed Wikileaks released documents on its website.

In a December 9 editorial, chief editor Tøger Seidenfaden wrote: Politiken stands in “solidarity with Wikileaks and in defense of global information freedom. If the pressure [against freedom of information] continues we must find other and more extensive means of resistance.”

The Bolivian government became the first government (and the only of which I am aware) to support Wikileaks by placing some of its documents on its official website documents—those pertaining to its country. There are some 50 secret or confidential documents.

The Bolivian government has a ministry for transparency, something the US government could learn from. But, then, if there were transparency in US government affairs, there would be no wars, of fewer anyway, and corporations would earn fewer profits.

Operation Payback, activist hackers from various groups and countries, has hit back at the Empire by hacking and stopping for hours or days several of its servile servants, including Swedish government websites.

For those still in doubt about the significance of the US Embassy documents being released, I point to some of the revelations.

1. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered State Department diplomats to steal personal human material information—DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card information…—from UN officials, including from the general secretary (their own man), from other diplomats and from human rights group leaders.
2. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (the country where bin Ladin and most of the September 11 alleged terrorists come from) asked its friend, the United States government, to attack Iran.
3. Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.
4. Brits are now angry at the US for the way its leaders privately criticize British troops in Afghanistan.
5. Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing secretly. Not even the Swedish parliament knew until now. And when Assange sought residence in Sweden, the CIA threatened the government with cutting off its intelligence cooperation. SEPO has a special reason to want Assange out of the way.
6. The US knows that Sri Lanka’s government, under the Rajapaksa brothers’s rule, massacred ten thousand and more, Tamil civilians in the last days of the civil war. Sri Lanka’s government can no longer with any credibility be trusted with their lies to the contrary.
7. The US internally admits having lost control of Pakistan where it is illegally killing civilians and doing so against the protests of the national government.
8. It has also been revealed that the US is secretly killing “undesirable” civilians in Yemen.
9. In Havana, the Yankee government’s interest section head Jonathan Farrar summoned diplomats from several countries to a breakfast last February. China, Spain, Canada, Brazil (remember the “worker president” Lulu), Italy, France, Japan discussed with their friend, the US invaders of Cuba, how the last remaining semi-socialist country’s economy was doing. The conclusion was that its “financial situation could become fatal within 2-3 years”. Apparently, China was the most preoccupied. Its diplomat expressed “visible exasperation” with Cuba’s lack of making economic reforms (translated to mean capitalist market reforms). China wants joint venture partners to own more than half the businesses, and it wants its loans repaid pronto.
I wonder if Fidel will write a reflection about this. On December 14, he did publish his thoughts on Assange/Wikileaks but made no mention of the above document.
10. Lastly, I cite from a document (10 Brussels 183; header: VZCZCXRO5689, dated February 17, 2010) that describes a meeting with Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs Michael Froman in Brussels, January 27, 2010, with 25 senior EU officials, including the current EU commissioner for climate, the Dane Connie Hedegaard. At the time of this meeting, she was the key Danish government climate spokesperson during the COP 15 conference in Copenhagen, December 2009.

16. (C) It is vital to get G-77 agreement to whatever grouping we use, Hedegaard continued. Both agreed it will be important to talk to incoming G-77 chair Yemen, with Froman adding it will also be important to be in close touch with Mexico as COP-16 chair. In fact, Froman added, we need all major groups ) the EU, MEF, BASIC, G-77, the island countries ) to agree to a negotiating mechanism. Hedegaard responded that we will need to work around unhelpful countries such as Venezuela or Bolivia. Froman agreed that we will need to neutralize, co-opt or marginalize these and others such as Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador. Hedegaard noted the irony that the EU is a big donor to these countries, while Cuba, for example, is actively discouraging others from signing on to the Accord.

Until a decade or so ago, Danes had been internationally considered a peaceful, tolerant people. But in recent years, they have become a key supporting force for US-NATO wars against Yugoslavia and in the Middle East. Hedegaard cultivated an image of being tolerant and working in the interests of the environment but this document shows her and the Danish government’s true colors. When this document was recently revealed, she was forced to call a press conference midst in the COP 16 Cancun climate conference where she skirted what she had said last January:

As a media advisor for the Bolivian embassy in Denmark, I attended COP15, in December 2009, and worked with President Evo Morales there. The Bolivian delegation was insulted, as were other “third world” countries which rejected the Copenhagen Accord, by the whimsical manner in which the Danish government treated them. Soon after the COP 15 fiasco, the US announced that it was cutting out the crumbs—development aid—it extends to Bolivia and Ecuador, another ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of America) bad boy. And US-Denmark/EU pressure on the COP 16 climate conference process resulted in Bolivia standing alone for the life of the Planet.

Conclusion

The Internationalist publication in Australia recently wrote about the condomgate:

Criminal cases involving sex are notoriously difficult and messy (often no witnesses, complex relations between the individuals). However, in this case it is evident that there was no violence or coercion. None has been alleged, and whatever [the two women] may have felt afterwards, indications are the sex was consensual at the time. Add to this the judicial mishandling of the case: immediately leaking it to the press, switching prosecutors in order to reinstate the investigation, refusing to meet with Assange then demanding his extradition. Throw in a connection with intelligence agencies, and Cold War anti-Communist connections via Swedish social democracy, plus the overriding determination of the U.S. Empire to strike back at, and shut down, WikiLeaks.

The United States Government, its capitalist economic structural base, and its capitalist allies, is Organized Sickness!

Dave Lindorff, an old friend and colleague from the 1970′s Los Angeles Vanguard, wrote, in broad terms, that Assange-Wikileaks is a precedent case for the Empire, which it seeks in order to fend off provable accusations that it is the Empire itself that is the primary and initiating terrorist. So the Empire must create a new category of terrorism, that of “information terrorists.” Julian Assange is today’s Daniel Ellsberg and Phil Agee. And we mustn’t forget the brave young US soldier, Bradley Manning, who, perhaps, leaked military secrets to Wikileaks, which show, among other important crimes, that the US murders and tortures far more people than we already knew about. He will certainly be imprisoned for a long time for his bravery in the fight for peace and for real democracy—an open political process in which we all actually participate in making decisions that actually get carried out for the benefit of the human race and the planet (Pachamama).

So, we who disseminate vital information kept secret from a public that must be informed are also “information terrorists”, who aid and abet “terrorism”. And that is so, so the Establishment means, because we do not aid and abet the Empire’s terrorism!

This is not just another issue. This is a frontal attack against all who wish a decent world. Uproar!

If they succeed in putting Assange in their dungeons or crucifying him as a modern non-violent Spartacus, then goodbye to even pretenses of freedom of speech and the right to know. As Lindorff wrote, the US could “easily trump up a ‘crime’ and arrest a print publisher or radio network owner. These actions are not the actions of a democracy. They are the lawless actions of a dictatorship.”

From one “information terrorist” to an information-seeking potential terrorist public, I close with Edward R. Murrow’s adieu:

Good night, and good luck!

The essence of these guidelines, which aim to increase efficiency and production, and decrease the budget deficit, balance exports-imports, and pay the foreign debt ($20 billion), is to reduce the state’s role, delegate more authority to local governments and work sites, increase taxes and other revenues while cutting back on social benefits and subsidies.

In addition, there will be more private enterprise and foreign investment openings, and integrating more with progressive neighboring governments. Nevertheless, the document maintains that “only socialism is capable of conquering the difficulties and preserving the conquests of the Revolution”.

The state will continue to be the central economic planner using the budgetary method but it will permit more farm land as usufruct property, greater self-employment (in 178 areas) and small businesses which, for the first time, will be allowed to employ people outside the family.

Several times in the last half-century of revolutionary Cuba have citizens been allowed to discuss national policies (not international ones) but the results have been consultative rather than binding—with the exception of adopting the revolutionary constitution in 1976, and modified in 1992. Three years ago, shortly after Raul Castro took over the presidency, a widespread national debate was launched about the future of the revolution. Millions contributed ideas, but there was no real mechanism to implement anything debated.

I participated in the PCC’s fourth congress preparatory discussion, in 1991, while working on an oil tanker in Santiago de Cuba. We seamen (I was a volunteer) passed two motions concerning democratization of decision-making and in the media. Most seamen later said these discussions were a waste of words. We saw no results from our motions, but the party did listen to some of the one million complaints and proposals.

In the spring of 1994, the National Assembly called upon a “workers parliament” to discuss economic policy. The then national CTC union leader, Pedro Ross, said that these discussions would form the basis for permanent workers input with the objective of “finding and implementing solutions,” to “increase work efficiency and greater production”. However, greater worker input has not occurred since, and efficiency and production have never reached acceptable levels.

In Overall Terms

I find positive and worrisome aspects in the guidelines. First, I will sketch the major points, and then go into details in each arena.

Positive goals are those aimed at becoming self-sufficient in foodstuffs; uniting the two currencies into one so that all can buy what is offered; some decentralization of decision-making and use of more finances by local governments and companies. Then there is the admission of too much dependency on foreign capital and imports, the need to cut back on excessive costs and wastes, strengthen the desire to work, eliminate work centres operating at a loss that constantly produce less than their expenditures.

On the down side are several proposals which would continue mono-culture dependency, joint ventures-foreign capital investment, a dual economy and class inequalities generally viewed as necessary tactical setbacks in the early days of the Special Period (1990-96+). Many analysts, including myself when working in Cuba, expressed the fear that these retreats could become permanent.¹ Our fears were warranted as it is clear today that these retreats have deepened and become entrenched.

The greatest lack in these proposals is the failure to propose a transfer to workers power (real democracy), in which workers actually manage the state and the economy. Because workers do not have real decision-making power, nor do the majority have sufficient foodstuffs and essential consumer items due to low wages and little supply, there is rampant demoralization-apathy-cynicism-alienation, which results in epidemic thievery of needed items from work places and state warehouses, and an omnipresent black market. Coupled with out-of-control thievery and corruption among some government officials and in the bureaucracy, the now stagnant revolution is on the verge of self-destruction.

There have been some leftist-oriented writings about Cuba’s economic and political discrepancies, mostly published by non-Cubans who support greater socialism. Cuban media will not publish such critiques by non-Cubans or Cubans—other than by Fidel and Raul.²

Recently, however, Esteban Morales, a prominent Cuban Communist economist and leading researcher on race relations in Cuba, wrote a critical article from a left socialist perspective, “Corruption, the True Counter-Revolution” (published abroad but also allowed, for a time, on the website of Cuba’s writer-artists association (UNEAC), for which the PCC expelled him, as if affirming the widely held view that ordinary Cubans can’t have real influence. It seems some leaders took umbrage at Morales view that: “Corruption turns out to be the true counter-revolution, which can do the most damage because it is within the government and the state apparatus, which really manage the country’s resources.”

This does not bode well for the PCC congress discussion.

Another problem is that many of the state’s leading economists actually propose so-called “market socialism”, believing that the solution to scarcity is more capitalist investment and supply-demand pricing. And in the proposals are aspects oriented in that direction, coupled with so-called “socialist” self-management of individual work centers, which would result in competition between work centers. This would lead to petty-bourgeois production relations and individualistic mentality—worker-capitalists in the making, such as what the Solidarity union in Poland advocated. If one is to be paid according to what one produces and sells, as proposed, then nickel and sugar cane workers would be poorer than workers in citrus farming, for instance, when global capitalist pricing fluctuates so that mining nickel is not profitable, as is often the case in inevitable endemic cycling. Thus the basic principle of solidarity and equality is in serious danger once again.

The continued reliance on capitalist foreign trade and tourism limits investments in agriculture and other necessary goods for the population.

Furthermore, the proposals do not call specifically for greater trade with ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of America) countries, although there is a vague statement that ALBA is a priority. With the exception of Venezuela, there is little trade with ALBA. Most trade is with major capitalist countries, including the US, which is Cuba’s number one food exporter (25-30% of all foodstuffs) and its fourth importer generally.

Twelve Major Guidelines

1. Economic Management Model

Cuba’s Communist party leaders propose the continuation of the socialist budgetary planning system while being flexible in allowing “new forms of management”: mixed capital, cooperatives, usufruct farmland, renting of establishments, self-employment and other forms that will improve efficiency in social work.

Some elements include wholesale markets that sell to all production units without subsidies; companies can “decide and administer their working capital and investments” according to new rules; firms that consistently fail to balance their budgets can be liquidated; worker income based on final results; after paying taxes and costs of production, enterprises can create their own development funds and bonuses to stimulate workers; prices are to be flexible and transparent with possibility of discounts.

Cooperatives will be able to sell directly to the population thereby avoiding the middle man distributor (acopio), which causes delays, wastes and thievery. This must be a major priority!

My concerns about this model are: where will sufficient goods come from for wholesale markets to sell to all productive units? How much say will workers actually have within the companies? Who will be the managers and how will they be selected?

2. Macro-economic Policies

The general aims are to balance the budget, export-imports trade, decrease state subsidies, and prepare to unify the two currencies, plus greater taxation based upon incomes.

There seems to be a contradiction between proposal 62, which calls for maintaining the centralization of prices of production and services, with that of proposal 23, which allows for enterprises to be flexible in establishing prices and discounts.

The unification of the two currencies is hoped for but is dependent upon “increased production”, which is not a given. The discriminatory situation of today could well continue indefinitely.

3. External Economic Policy

The goal is to export more and import less. In the introduction to the guidelines, it is stated that between 1997 and 2009, Cuba lost $10.1 billion pesos in trade imbalance, about ten percent of its current GNP. It is unclear how Cuba judges the value of its pesos when publishing figures of gross national product and state budget, but I believe it is on a one-to-one basis with the US dollar. Cuba’s Office of National Statistics (ONE) does not explain currency values but CIA Factbook calculates Cuba’s economic figures in $. For 2008, it claims (without citing sources) that exports were but $3.68 billion while imports were $14.25 billion—an imbalance of nearly $9 billion, which is almost what Cuba claims is the difference in a 12-year period.

Cuba’s imports come first from Venezuela, 31%, followed by China, 10% and Spain, 9%. Cuba’s exports go mainly to China (25%), Canada (20%), Spain (7%) and the Netherlands (4.5%). Oddly enough 6% of all imports are from the US, which officially continues a blockade but since 2000 the US sells foodstuffs and medicines on a cash-on-line basis in US dollars. This places Cuba at a security risk by depending upon the whims of its main enemy for food.

Cuba continues its policies of relying on exports for its main growth. It states priorities in nickel, sugar, oil (?), foodstuffs (?), coffee, cacao (proposal 71), plus shellfish and tobacco. All this reliance on an export mono-culture economy plays into the vulnerable world capitalist market. Furthermore, it makes no obvious sense to export oil and foodstuffs when it is a major importer of both—as much as 80% of its foods are imported and much of what it grows in fresh vegetables and fruits is sold to tourists. A saner export is Cuba’s excellent bio-technology.

Apparently nothing will change regarding the Free Zones and Industrial Parks Law 77 of 1996, allowing export-import without restrictions and without any taxes on products or labor, just like in many underdeveloped capitalist countries.

Proposals 107-8 emphasize participation with ALBA and integrating the economy with Latin America. But there are no specifics proposed. And most of its trade is in exporting “human capital”—medical personnel, teachers, technicians, sports instructors—while buying petroleum from Venezuela. Cuba also sends medical-teacher aid to many other Latin America countries, and elsewhere in the world. This is positive internationalism. At the same time Cubans’ welfare services are curtailed due to the vast numbers of professionals sent around the world.

ALBA inter trade was $6.5 billion, in 2009, between the four major countries (Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.) “Information export support” website states that when Cuba and Venezuela initiated the alliance, in 2004, their trade was $1.5 billion. ALBA now has its own currency for transactions, the Sucre, which it fixes at $1.25 dollars.

According to a study conducted by Larry Catá Backer and Augusto Molina “Globalizing Cuba: ALBA and the construction of socialist global trade systems”—presented at Queen’s University, Ontario, May 7-9, 2009—six ALBA countries established a network for Food Trade and Food Security Fund, February 2009, with six countries but Cuba is not listed. Cuba, however, provides the basic ideology for ALBA.

4. Investment Policy

There is nothing new or anything to add to my overview. A major failure here is not to emphasize investments and technology to manufacture products nationally from its natural resources. This has long been an essence of colonialist and imperialist economic relations between the “first” and “third” worlds, and was a feature of USSR-Cuba relations as well. While Fidel has spoken about this in the past, there seems to be no change in conduct. I think Cuba could listen to the beginnings of change in this area from President Evo Morales, who recently stated that lithium reserves would not be exported as raw materials but products will be manufactured in Bolivia.

5. Science, Technology and Innovation Policy

Continue policies in effect, and with a new priority into research aimed at lessening the negative affects of climate change.

6. Social Policy

Continue preserving the “conquests of the revolution” in key welfare areas while reducing “excessive costs”. The party also seeks to recover the role that work should play in contributing to societal development and meeting personal needs. That means: eliminating hustling, thievery, over-reliance on remittances.

In education, the guidelines call for strengthening the role of the teacher in the classroom. But there is nothing stated about allowing teachers more room in deciding what students should read and discuss.

Proposal 143 calls for improving the quality of medical services while eliminating some costs. This does not take into account that the medical personnel inside Cuba earn very poor wages, and much less than those who work in international missions. This dichotomy is a major sore.

Proposal 152 calls for generating new sources of income in the culture arenas. But does this mean continuing the “new critics” approach, which deemphasizes revolutionary analysis and values? As James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya wrote, “The clearest threat to Cuba is from within, evidenced in the decline in revolutionary cultural production”. They outlines how from posters to films and books, Cuba’s cultural leaders are ignoring their values of solidarity from the times during the wars against Vietnam and in Africa. There has not been a “single documentary about the world-historic struggles of the Iraqi, Afghan or Somali resistance to the US directed imperial wars; the Colombia guerrilla struggle against the death-squad ‘democracy’; and the struggle of the black masses of New Orleans against capitalist eradication of their homes, schools and hospitals.”

“The new literature in Cuba—in its break with social realism—contains racial and sexual stereotypes…”

“One gets the impression from watching, listening and reading current Cuban cultural productions that there are no honest revolutionaries left in Cuba,” they say.³

Proposal 154 calls for diminishing state financing of social security by extending the contribution of workers in both state and private sectors. How can this be? One of the pillars of social welfare brought about by the socialist revolution is now to be conditioned, in part, on taxes paid by underpaid workers. Until now part of one’s “income” has been free access to health care and education and subsidized low prices for much foodstuffs and clothing. And the ration book, guaranteeing some basic foods albeit fewer and fewer, is to be eliminated (Proposal 162). That means that real wages will decrease, in effect. And where will the poorest of workers, including pensioners, get their food? The food sold in farmers markets, even the state controlled ones, are too costly to provide enough food for most people for the entire month. Will this not result in greater frustration, thievery, and reliance on remittances? Shall more people flee to capitalist countries, in order to send their families some money just to eat?

The state offers a promise of increased wages, first and foremost in the $ equivalent (CUC, which is valid only in Cuba) economy, and in agriculture, once production increases. But hungry, frustrated workers will NOT work harder before they are better paid and treated. He/she is going to be angrier and open to more corruption.

7. Agro-industrial Policy

The main stated goal is to end the cycle of food dependency, to balance export-import trade. New methods of management, already mentioned, are to be employed. There should be “greater autonomy of producers”. But is that for managers or for all workers? Plus “supply and demand” market pricing (177) shall be employed generally accompanied by ending subsidies.

Why can’t prices be based on socialist relations of production, taking into account, as well worker incomes in relationship to their necessary consumption?

While there is talk about greater national production, over half of the arable land still lays fallow! The guidelines point this out on page 6. Fidel and Raul have talked about this dilemma for many, many years. Socialist Cuba has “traditionally” imported most of its foodstuffs, first from the Soviet Union and Comecon, and since from capitalist countries. Why has this incompatibility continued?

Raul Castro said, July 27, 2009, that the 2008 policy allowing fallow state lands to be used in usufruct terms by private persons and cooperatives had already accomplished the transfer of 690,000 hectares in 82,000 approved applications of the 110,000 total number. This is 39% of idle lands. When Raul spoke, one-third of transferred lands had been planted. So progress is underway.

Nevertheless, Reuters reported, August 4, 2010, that food production fell 7.5% in the first half of 2010 from 2009. And the fall especially affected rice and beans, which had been on the incline. Rice, however, is mostly imported from Vietnam (70% of consumption), often on credit terms. And overall food production is below 2005 levels while imports are decreasing in the past two years due to lack of cash and credits.

Part of this must be due to severe hurricane destruction in 2008 and earlier draughts.

Nevertheless, while there is constant complaining about the US blockade—with the decade-old exception of foods and medicines—and praise for ALBA integration, of the top ten food importers only one is a Latin American country and that is capitalist Brazil, not an ALBA government.

Furthermore, much of the foodstuffs that Cuba imports from its enemy—everything from cereals, powdered milk, soybeans and oilseeds to poultry and beef—is infested with Genetic Modified Organisms. Cuba is now using GMO corn seeds in its own earth.

Of all the contradictions, internationalist-revolutionary socialist Cuba’s business relationship with the former Mossad chief of European operations and major Zionist Israeli capitalist Rafi Eitan is one of the most incomprehensible.

“In 1992, Eitan was approached by Irving Semmel, a successful Brazilian businessman, to bid on a contract for an agricultural deal in Cuba, which involved the cultivation of the largest citrus grove operation on the island. After winning the bid, Eitan built a partnership with four other international entrepreneurs to run the deal. The company GBM (Grupo BM) was incorporated in Cuba, but Eitan represents the company in Israel under the name ‘Reesimex’. Due to the success of the venture and the connections acquired, GBM also won the contract to build the Miramar Trade Center in Havana, and a Holocaust Memorial at the center of the Old City of Habana. Recently, GBM was awarded the “Medal for Agricultural Work” by the Cuban government,” writes Wikipedia.⁴ Eitan also owns, with the Cuban government, the largest citrus juice plant.

He was “involved in the secret planning and implementation of the attack on the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor in June 1981,” wrote Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Relations. Eitan was also Jonathan Polland’s handler. Polland was convicted of spying on the US for Israel, the only country which consistently votes in favor of the US blockade on Cuba. Between 2006 and 2009, Eitan was a member of parliament and sat on its all-powerful foreign relations and defense committee. As leader of the GIL pensioner party, he was minister for pensioner affairs.

Eitan never renounced his Zionism or his murderous operations since his retirement from those activities.

Proposal 179 calls for “Recuperating national citrus activity and assuring efficient commercialization of its products in international markets,” and there is no turning back on this imperialist capitalist. What does Cuba tell its Palestinians friends about this, not to mention Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans?

8. Industrial and Energy Policies

Cuba industrializes very little, something Che Guevara had endeavored to change without fortune. But with what little industrial development there is, these proposals call for orienting it for exportation while reducing the import component. How can Cuba meet its people’s own industrial product needs by exporting more and importing less? Now it is nearly impossible to find new clothes for sale in national pesos, for instance.

Proposal 199 calls for greater emphasis on small-scale production in local industries, which sounds healthy. Leaders also aim to produce more construction materials, and oil and gas, which provide 90% of energy use. There will be more clean energy too: biogas, hydraulic and wind. Something new will be the production of tires and packaging.

9. Tourism Policy

There is no change in direction here; just more of the same. In 2009, 2.4 million tourists visited Cuba, about the same as 2008, but spent 12% less, $2 billion, due to the global economic crisis. Twenty thousand of these were visitors to health facilities for care.

The tourism apartheid has been lessened with new rules allowing all persons as hotel guests as long as they can pay in hard currency. Today, a few of the new national Cuban bourgeoisie party alongside foreigners, including Miami Cuban “escapees”. While this eliminates the previous discrimination of nationality it heightens the inequality of Cubans, the vast majority of who could not pay for one day in a hotel with an entire year’s wage.

But the worst is that with so much investment attention and personnel in tourism revolutionary ethos has been permanently distorted. And national agriculture products are diverted from the population to tourists. This is, perhaps, impossible to calculate financially, but much of the foreign currency earnings from tourism must go to import food for national consumption.

10. Transport Policy

Nothing new is proposed here. Cuba will continue importing buses and trains from China, apparently. Leaders do propose investments in docking infrastructure, loading-unloading operations. As a former voluntary merchant marine, I personally welcome this initiative. Cuban longshoremen are (were, anyway) among the world’s slowest—something that irritated seamen and captains and caused greater costs to shipping.

The inadequate transportation system, with so many breakdowns and lack of repairs, causes tardiness and absenteeism from work and school. There is an endless vicious circle of inadequate production and services coupled with inadequate transportation.

11. Construction Policies, Housing and Hydraulic Resources

Residential housing is to increase, in part, by establishing a system of payment based upon construction results and employing double shifts.

Cuba has never had sufficient housing for the entire population. Pre-revolutionary and revolutionary governments have accepted that too many people live under the same roof—three generations is not unusual. But young people, especially those wishing to marry and have children, are not motivated by this “custom”. Nor will they be enthralled by proposal 270, which calls for more tourism construction, including: golf courses, aquatic parks, spas, and other non-necessities, thus diverting labor and materials for necessary national housing.

The traditional lack of housing and dilapidated conditions has been aggravated by unusually strong and frequent hurricanes, in part due to climate change. Between 1998 and 2008, Cuba lost over $20 billion to 16 hurricanes and three of them, in 2008, caused half those economic damages

The ministry of construction apparently does not foresee being able to meet the population’s needs so the government proposes to allow “new forms of construction organizing” (272), such as cooperatives and self-employed contractors, who will most assuredly demand convertible currency (CUC) payment, which only a minority of Cubans have enough of for residential construction.

Proposal 273 allows for increasing the “commercialization of construction materials”. Does this mean in CUCs as well?

Proposal 278 also needs explanation. It calls upon “flexible formulas” for exchange of housing (permute), buying, selling and renting”. Does this mean Cuba will change its long-held-standard of not permitting housing sales, in order to abolish speculation and inequalities in property relations?

New and better water works need to be built and repaired. One of the most frustrating aspects of living in Cuba for me was to see so much water go to waste, either through gushing leaks or permanent drippings due to faulty equipment and a lack of washers, or carelessness of many people, who let water flow out of faucets and tubes without regard to its loss. I was shocked to see the figure 58% “of water distributed is wasted,” and impressed that this was reported in Granma.⁵

So, party leaders propose (282) to promote “a culture conducive to the rational use of water” while reducing waste of all kinds. Just why is there a culture of waste? Is it not because of rampant apathy and alienation?

”The greatest obstacle has been our fear lest any appearance of formality might separate us [revolutionary leaders] from the masses, from the individual, and might make us lose sight of the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration, which is to see man liberated from his alienation,” wrote Che Guevara.⁶

12. Commercial Policy

Party leaders propose a re-structuring in commercial production and presentation of services both wholesale and retail. Non-state food services are encouraged. Leaders aim to diversity the types and increase the amount of products and services. Once there is one integrated currency, the differences in products and services available should disappear.

But where will all the wealth come from for these operations? It sounds too inflated, and too consumerism oriented, to me. There is absolutely no need, for instance, to shop in stores that sell ten toilet paper packages with different names.

Conclusion: Workers Power is the Only Future for Socialism

I have been writing for two decades that without workers power real socialism cannot be built, and even half-real socialism will fall—as we have witnessed in most countries that made attempts.

Workers power should include oversight committees staffed on a rotating basis by actual workers across the country. I firmly support what James Petras wrote: “A new income policy in itself can contribute to greater incentives for productivity if it is combined with greater direct participation of all workers in the organization and administration of the work place as well as the opening of multiple spaces to discuss the restructuring of the economy.”

”What especially requires reform is a new system of public accountability based on independent accounting authorities, consumers’ and workers’ oversight commissions with the power to ‘open the books’. Workers and professional control will not eliminate corruption altogether but it will challenge the authorities through independent periodic reviews…Greater accountability within the leadership is necessary but not sufficient. There must be control and vigilance by authorized commissions from below and by a parallel independent general accounting office…a new system of elected representatives to oversee the allocation of the budget to the various ministries and the power to summon responsible officials to televised hearing for a strict public accounting,” state Petras and Eastman-Abaya.³

When revolutionary, communist, anarchist organizers are engaged in workers struggles under capitalism, one of their best arguments when confronted by management that their demands are not economically possible is the demand: “Open the books.” So when they are told they now have their own economy, their own government, their own Cuban-Marxist state why can they not see the books?

When I first started citing Fidel’s perhaps most important speech ever, that of November 17, 2005—“This country can self-destruct…and it would be our fault”—many non-Cuban leftist solidarity activists considered me to be too critical, even bordering on treachery. Today, it must be quite obvious to nearly all that internal deterioration, physically/emotionally/ideologically, has grown such that it is beyond denial.

I will close with another, sober quotation from the grandfather of revolution:

Capitalism tends to reproduce itself under any social system because it is based on egotism and on human instincts. Human society has no other alternative but to overcome this contradiction; otherwise, it would not be able to survive.⁷

1. See my book Cuba at the Crossroads, Infoservicios, Los Angeles, California, 1994.
2. See especially Fidel’s “Self-destruct” speech at Havana University, November 17, 2005, and Raul’s speech, July 26, 2007.
3. James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, “Cuba: Continuing Revolution and Contemporary Contradictions,” Dissident Voice, August 13, 2007.
4. See Gideon Alon, “Just a Farmer in Cuba,” as cited in Petras and Eastman-Abaya. See also my “Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads”, Socialist Resistance, 2007, page 7.
5. “En este proceso quien decide es el pueblo,” November 16, 2010, in a statement by René Mesa Villafaña, president of the National Institute of Hydraulic Resource.
6. “Socialism and Man,” Marcha, Uruguay weekly, March 12, 1965.
7. Fidel Castro, “The law of the jungle”, October 13, 2008.

Fidel Castro, a prolific reader and analyst of world affairs, read the article and took a unique tactical step: he invited the Establishment writer to hear the leader of Cuba’s revolution “warn the world public opinion hoping…to contribute to avoid” yet another war in the Middle East that could “have lethal consequences for the rest of the world. This is what Fidel told his University of Havana audience, September 10, in response to Goldberg’s writings.

Fidel accepted the presence of Goldberg’s friend, Julia Sweig, the Council of Foreign Relations director for Latin American Studies, a Rockefeller Senior Fellow. Fidel and Sweig also know one another. I believe Fidel knew that with Sweig present he could send a message directly to the capitalist class and its politicians in Washington and Jerusalem.

But Fidel made a mistake by not having the sessions tape recorded. He also made a mistake in using humor, which, apparently, went over the writer’s head. As it stands now there is voluminous speculation about what Fidel really meant about two important issues: 1) Does the Cuban “model” work? 2) Did Fidel make a mistake in the 1962 missile crisis?

1) What did Fidel mean when he replied to Goldberg’s question: “I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.” Both Goldberg and Fidel agree that Fidel replied: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

Goldberg wants us to believe that there can only be the literal interpretation: it doesn’t work. And then, one is to assume Fidel is advocating some form of capitalism. Goldberg, however, is unaware of how humorous Fidel is.

Fidel explained his reply during his September 10 speech, in which his new book, The strategic counteroffensive, was launched. He said that Goldberg’s question “implicitly suggested that Cuba exported the Revolution”, something Fidel has long denied, at least since the end of the 1960s. So, I think that Fidel’s reply was a humorous way of saying Cuba does not export its economy or its revolution generally.

Fidel has always opposed the capitalist system, as he reiterated in this speech, but his government was forced to survive upon the fall of Cuba’s economic-political partners in 1989-90, and it adopted various market mechanisms, partial sales of some property and joint ventures with foreign capital, plus the use of foreign currency by all who can acquire such—still a minority of the population. These regressions from socialism have sometimes been employed by nearly all communist party-led governments from the time of the New Deal during Lenin’s life down to today.

Cuban leaders are indicating that the economy is failing, and more reforms are about to occur. What should they be? As a solidarity worker-writer for and with Cuba since April 1961, and during eight years working for the Cuban media, I have long encouraged implementing worker control, putting the working class truly in power by diminishing the nearly exclusive power of government officials (and civil servant bureaucrats) to make the most important decisions. In short, to stimulate worker enthusiasm, worker creativity and production, let Cuba be what is called a “proletarian dictatorship”, and thereby a more true democracy.

2) On the matter of whether Fidel was mistaken about the 1962 missile crisis when, according to Goldberg, Fidel “recommend[ed] that the Soviets bomb the U.S.” And Fidel allegedly answered, “After I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn’t worth it all.”

I will not try to interpret what Fidel meant, but he did not say he had been mistaken in his September 10 speech. Read Fidel’s reply. I must admit I am uncertain what Fidel really did mean. He goes on to talk about a drunken Russian president.

What is important about this question of possible nuclear war back then is that Fidel is worried about nuclear war today. It seems that he is so worried that he has taken the extraordinary step of criticizing an ally, Iran, which is aiding Cuba economically. According to Goldberg, Fidel “criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the ‘unique’ history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.”

Unfortunately, in this writing on his blog, Goldberg does not actually quote Fidel’s criticism but rather describes and interprets it. The same can be said about the title of this September 7 piece: “Fidel to Ahmadinejad: ‘Stop Slandering the Jews’”. While the inter-quotes indicate these are Fidel’s words, this is not written in the text.

Fidel seems to appeal to Jews around the world, including Zionists, by speaking favorably about them, their culture and religion, their long struggle of survival against pogroms and the Holocaust, and he spoke admiringly of their resistance and intelligence. He told Goldberg, “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims.”

Fidel seems to appeal to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Muslims around the world, in his September 10 speech: “Muslims were attacked and persecuted for their beliefs by the European Christians for much more than 12 centuries.”

He added: “Palestinians are deprived [of] their lands, their homes are demolished by gigantic equipment, and men, women and children are bombed with white phosphorous and other extermination means.” And he added that other Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq are being murdered by conflicts imposed upon them by US presidents.

Conclusion:

1. To Goldberg: Always tape important interviews with leaders. Always double check when in doubt about what they mean, especially if you are not allowed to tape record—which may have been the case with Goldberg.

2. Regardless of the exactness of the statements in question, what is important about Fidel’s initiative here is that this great political leader and statesman is speaking directly to the major players and encouraging an ally and two enemies to accept the olive branch.

3. Fidel is also encouraging criticism and self-critique among friends and allies.

I hope that government leaders, communist party members, solidarity workers with Cuba, with all ALBA lands and other countries take Fidel’s intentions to heart. We must be open to dialogue, to criticism and self-critique. And we must work tirelessly to prevent and stop wars.

PS: Fidel invited Goldberg, Sweig, and Adela Dworin, the president of Cuba’s Jewish community to see his favorite animals exercise in Cuba’s dolphin aquarium. Goldberg wrote that Fidel thinks the dolphin show is the best in the world, “completely unique”, because it is an underwater show with human divers performing acrobatics with them. And Goldberg concluded that he had never seen anyone enjoy a dolphin show as much as Fidel did.

I know the show myself. It was a favorite of mine when I lived there. What is interesting to me about this is: a) The world’s major communist leader, a fan of these intelligent kindly animals, sends a message to war makers: be as gentle as dolphins; b) On the same day, I was observing a wild dolphin “show” where Rio Sado meets the Atlantic Ocean, in Setúbal, Portugal. And this was during Europe’s largest festival (Avante newspaper) of communists and other leftists sending a message of world peace.