Jose Marti was among the glorious legion of patriots who. throughout the second half of the 19th century, fought against the loathsome colonialism brandished by Spain for 300 years. Marti most clearly foresaw such a dramatic destiny and expressed this view in the last lines he would write prior to engaging in tough combat against a well-equipped and battle-hardened Spanish column. He declared that the primary objective of his struggles were “… preventing in time, by Cuba’s independence, that the United States should expand through the Antilles and pounce with that added strength on our lands of America. Everything that I have done up to now and will do in the future shall be done for this purpose.”

Today one cannot be a patriot or a revolutionary without thoroughly understanding this profound truth.

Without a doubt, the mass media, the monopoly of technical resources, and the substantial funds earmarked for misleading and making the masses mindless today represent considerable but not insurmountable obstacles.

Cuba showed that —despite being a factory of Yankee colonialism with widespread illiteracy and generalized poverty— it was possible to stand up to the country that threatened to definitively take over the Cuban nation. No one can argue that at the time there was a national bourgeoisie that was opposed to the empire. In fact, the Cuban bourgeoisie at the time had developed such close ties to the empire that, shortly following the triumph of the Revolution, it sent 14,000 unprotected children to the United States based on the horrendous lie that Cuba was to abolish parental authority. History would come to remember this event as Operation Peter Pan and as one of the worst manipulations of children for political ends ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Barely two days after the triumph of the Revolution the national territory was invaded by mercenary forces —made up of former Batista soldiers and sons of landowners and the bourgeoisie— armed and escorted by the United States with ships from the US Navy fleet including aircraft carriers with equipment ready for action. The defeat and capture of almost the entire force of mercenaries in less than 72 hours, and the destruction of their planes that were operating out of Nicaraguan bases and naval transportation means, represented a humiliating defeat for the empire and their Latin American allies who had underestimated the Cuban people’s capacity to fight.

Responding to the stoppage of oil supplies from the US, the previous total suspension of traditional Cuban sugar quotas in the US market, and the ban on trade in place for more than 100 years, the USSR began to supply fuel, to buy our sugar, to trade with our country and, finally, to supply the arms that Cuba could not acquire in other markets.

The idea of a systematic campaign of pirate attacks organized by the CIA, sabotages and military actions by groups created and armed by the US, before and after the mercenary attack and that would culminate with the United States’ military invasion of Cuba, gave rise to the events that pushed the world to the brink of total nuclear war that no sides or even humanity itself would have survived.

Those events no doubt cost Nikita Jruschov his job. He had underestimated his adversary, ignored opinions and information, and did not consult his final decision with those of us who were in the frontline. What could have been a significant moral victory became a costly political setback for the USSR. For many years the US continued to commit the worst crimes against Cuba and many, such as its criminal blockade, are still carried out today.

Jruschov made extraordinary gestures to our country. At the time I did not hesitate in strongly criticizing the agreement reached with the United States without consultation. But it would be ungrateful and unjust to not acknowledge his extraordinary solidarity at difficult and decisive junctures for our people in their historic battle for independence and their revolution in face of the powerful US empire. I understand that the situation was extremely tense and that he did not want to lose a minute when he made his decision to remove the missiles and the Yankees, very secretly, agreed to not carry out their invasion.

Despite all the decades that have passed and make up more than half a century, the Cuban fruit has not fallen into Yankee hands.

Current news from Spain, France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, England, the Malvinas and several other parts of the planet are serious and all foretell political and economic disaster due to the foolhardiness of the United States and its allies.

I will limit myself to just a few topics. I must point out that the campaign to select a Republican candidate as the possible future president of this globalized and far-reaching empire has become —I say this in all seriousness— the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been heard. But as I have things to do, I cannot dedicate any time to this topic. I knew it would be like this.

I prefer to analyze some other press dispatches that show the incredible cynicism generated by the decadence of the West. One of these reports, with amazing tranquility, tells the story of a Cuban “political prisoner” who, according to the article, died after a 50-day hunger strike. A journalist from Granma, Juventud Rebelde, radio or any other [Cuban] news agency might make a mistake writing on any given topic, but they would never make up a news story and fabricate a lie.

The article published in Granma confirms that the 50-day hunger strike did not take place. The prisoner was in jail for committing a common crime and sentenced to four years for an assault that left his wife’s face battered. The man’s own mother-in-law went to the police to request their help. All family members were aware of all the procedures taken regarding the medical care he received and were thankful of the efforts carried out by the specialist doctors who attended him. The article goes on to say that he received care at the best hospital in eastern Cuba, as any other citizen would have received. He died as a result of secondary multiple organ failure associated with an acute respiratory infection.

The patient had received all the available medical care from a country that possesses one of the best medical systems in the world and that provides these services free-of-charge, despite the empire’s blockade against our country. It simply represents a duty in a country where the Revolution proudly respects, as it always has for more than 50 years, the principles that gave it its invincible force.

Given their excellent relations with Washington, it would be best if the Spanish government went to the United States to take a look at what happens in Yankee prisons, their ruthless treatment of millions of prisoners, their electric chair policy, and the horrors committed against prisoners and public protesters.

On Monday, January 23, Granma published a full-page, hard-hitting editorial entitled Cuba’s Truths. The article details the exceptional degree of shamelessness in the latest campaign of lies launched against our Revolution by some governments “traditionally committed to anti-Cuban subversion.”

Our people are well aware of the standards that have governed over the irreproachable conduct of our Revolution since the first combat and that has never been sullied throughout more than half a century. They also know that they can never be pressured or blackmailed by their enemies. Our laws and regulations will invariably be abided by.

This is worthwhile to point out with total clarity and openness. The Spanish government and the beat-up European Union, in the midst of an acute economic crisis, should know what to abide by. It is a disgrace to read declarations from both regions in news reports that are full of shameless lies attacking Cuba. Try to save the Euro first if you can, try to resolve chronic unemployment that increasingly affects young people, and respond to the indignados who have only received attacks and constant beatings from the police.

We cannot ignore that those who currently govern in Spain are admirers of Franco, who sent members of the Blue Division along with SS and SA Nazis to kill Soviets. Close to 50,000 of them participated in the bloody attacks. In the most cruel and painful operation of that war, the Leningrad Blockade where one million Russian citizens died, the Blue Division were part of the forces that attempted to strangle the heroic city. The Russian people will never forgive that horrendous crime.

The right wing fascists led by Aznar, Rajoy and other servants of the empire must know about the 16,000 fatalities suffered by their predecessors of the Blue Division and the Iron Crosses that Hitler awarded the officials and soldiers of that division.

It is not a surprise then to see how the Gestapo police are treating the Spanish men and women who demand the right to work and bread in the country with the highest unemployment in Europe.

Why do the mass media outlets of the empire lie so shamelessly?

Those who control those media outlets are determined to deceive and make the world mindless with their gross lies, maybe believing that they represent the main recourse necessary to maintain the global system of domination and plunder, especially against those victims close to the mother country —the close to 70 million Latin Americans and Caribbean people who live in this hemisphere.

The fraternal republic of Venezuela has become one of the main targets of this policy. The reason is obvious. Without Venezuela, the empire would have imposed its Free Trade Agreement on all of the people of the continent living south of the United States; an area that holds the planet’s largest reserves of land, fresh water and minerals as well as great energy resources, which, when managed in solidarity with the other people in the world, constitutes resources which cannot and must not fall into the hands of transnationals that impose a suicidal and despicable system.

It is enough, for example, to look at the map to understand the criminal dispossession carried out against Argentina of a piece of its territory in the far south. In the Malvinas, the British employed their decadent military apparatus to assassinate inexperienced Argentine recruits dressed in summer clothing in the middle of winter. The United States and their ally Augusto Pinochet shamelessly supported England in this endeavor. Currently, with the London Olympics on the horizon, British Prime Minister David Cameron is once again proclaiming, as did Margaret Thatcher, his right to use nuclear submarines to kill Argentines. The British government is unaware that the world is changing and that the disdain felt in our hemisphere by the majority of the people against the oppressors is growing with each day.

The case of the Malvinas is not alone. Does anyone know how the conflict in Afghanistan will end? A few days ago US soldiers committed outrages against the bodies of Afghani combatants, killed by NATO drone aircraft.

Three days ago a European news agency published an article stating that Afghani President Hamid Karzai gave his support of a negotiated peace settlement with the Taliban, stressing that it must be resolved by citizens in his country. Hamid Karzai added that the peace and reconciliation process belongs to the Afghani nation and that no foreign country or organization can take away this right from Afghanis.

An article in the Cuban press written in Paris reported:

Today France suspended all its military training and support operations in Afghanistan and threatened to move up the date for the withdrawal of its troops after an Afghani soldier killed four French military officers in the Taghab valley in the province of Kapisa…Sarkozy gave instructions to Defense Minister Gerard Longuet to immediately travel to Kabul, and warned of the possibility of an early withdrawal of troops.

When the USSR and the Socialist Camp disappeared, the United States government thought that Cuba would not be able to support itself. George W. Bush had already prepared a counter-revolutionary government to preside over our country. The same day that Bush began his criminal war against Iraq, I requested that our authorities stop with the policy of tolerance towards the counter-revolutionary leaders in Cuba that had been hysterically calling for an invasion of Cuba. In reality, their actions constituted an act of treason against the Homeland.

Bush and his stupidities reigned for eight years at a time when the Cuban Revolution had already lasted for more than half a century. The ripe fruit has never fallen into the lap of the empire. Cuba will never become another force used by the empire to expand over the people of the Americas. Marti’s blood will not have been shed in vain.

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.

During our meeting yesterday, I noted that the Iranian president was absolutely calm and tranquil, completely unconcerned about the Yankee threats and, fully confident in the capacity of his people to confront any aggression and in the effectiveness of their arms —which, in large part, they produce themselves— to inflict an unpayable price on its aggressors.

In reality, we hardly spoke about the topic of war. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was focused on the ideas he had presented at the Main Hall of the University of Havana during his conference on the struggle of humankind:

Moving towards reaching and achieving peace, security, respect and human dignity as a fundamental desire of all human beings throughout history.

I am convinced that Iran will not commit any rash actions that might contribute to setting off a war. If a war were to be unleashed, it would inevitably be completely as a result of the recklessness and congenital irresponsibility of the Yankee Empire.

I believe that the political situation surrounding Iran and the associated risks of a nuclear war that involves us all —regardless of whether one possess nuclear weapons— are extremely delicate because they threaten the very existence of our species. The Middle East has become the most troubled region on the planet, the same region that produces the energy resources vital for the world’s economy.

The destructive power and the mass sufferings caused by some of the weapons used in World War Two led to a strong movement to ban weapons such as asphyxiating gas and others. Nevertheless, conflicting interests and the huge profits made by arms manufacturers led to the production of crueler and more destructive weapons; modern technology has now added the means and material to build weapons that if used in a world war would lead to extinction.

I support the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all those with a basic sense of responsibility, that no country big or small has the right to possess nuclear weapons.

They never should have been used to attack two defenseless cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating with horrible and long-lasting effects hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, in a country that had already been militarily defeated.

If fascism indeed forced the allied nations against Nazism to compete with this enemy of humanity in the production of such weapons, once the war ended and the United Nations was created, the first duty of this organization should have been to prohibit nuclear weapons without exception.

However, the United States, the strongest and richest power, forced the rest of the world to follow its lead. Today, they have hundreds of satellites that spy and monitor the entire world from outer space. Their naval, air and land forces are equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons; and they control the world’s finances and investments at their whim via the International Monetary Fund.

Analyzing the history of each Latin American nation, from Mexico to Patagonia, by way of Santo Domingo and Haiti, one can observe that each and every country, without exception, have suffered for 200 years, from the beginning of the 19th century up until today. And, in one way or another, they are increasingly suffering the worst crimes that power and force can commit against the rights of a people. Brilliant Latin American writers are emerging in an increasing number. One of them, Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that describes the aforementioned, has just been invited to open the prestigious Casa de Las Americas Awards as a recognition to his outstanding body of work.

Events happen incredibly fast; but technologies report them to the public even faster. On any given day, like today, important news comes out a dizzying pace. A cable report dated from January 11 states:

The Danish presidency of the European Union confirmed on Wednesday that a new series of more severe European sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear program, will be discussed on January 23. The new sanctions will not only target the oil industry but also the Central Bank.

During a meeting with international journalists, Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal said that “We will increase sanctions against the oil industry in addition to sanctions against financial structures.” This clearly demonstrates that, in order to impede nuclear proliferation, Israel can go on accumulating hundreds of nuclear warheads while Iran is not allowed to produce 20% enriched uranium.

Another article, from a respected British news agency, states that “China gave no hint on Wednesday of giving ground to U.S. demands to curb Iran’s oil revenues, rejecting Washington’s sanctions on Tehran as overstepping …”

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Just look at these lines reported by another important European news agency:

The murder on Wednesday of Iranian nuclear specialist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan [a scientist at the Natanz nuclear plant] was the fourth attack to kill a leading scientist in the country in almost exactly two years.

On January 12, 2010:

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University is killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle explodes outside his home in the capital.

On November 29, 2010:

Two attacks target leading Iranian nuclear scientists on the same day. Majid Shahriari, a key member of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, is killed in Tehran by a limpet bomb attached to his car. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani is also targeted by a bomb attached to his car, but escapes.

The car was parked in front of the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran where both men worked as professors.

On July 23, 2011:

Gunmen shoot dead Dariush Rezaei-Nejad, a senior scientist who is reportedly associated with the defense ministry, and wound his wife as they waited for their child outside a Tehran kindergarten.

On January 11, 2012 —the same day that Ahmadinejad travelled from Nicaragua to Cuba to give a conference at the University of Havana—, scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “a deputy director at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, is killed in a car bomb blast outside the [Allameh Tabatabai] University in east Tehran.” As in previous years “Iran once again accused the United States and Israel.”

The killings represent a systematic and selective slaughter of brilliant Iranian scientists. I have read articles by known Israeli sympathizers who write about crimes carried out by Israeli intelligence services in cooperation with the United States and NATO as if they were the most normal occurrence.

At the same time, Moscow news agencies report that “Russia warned that in Syria a similar scenario is developing as to that in Libya, and added that this time the attack will be launched from neighboring Turkey.

The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said the West wants to ‘punish Damascus not as much for repressing the opposition, but because it is unwilling to sever ties with Tehran.

…NATO members and some Persian Gulf states, operating according to the Libya scenario, intend to move from indirect intervention in Syrian affairs to direct military intervention…This time the main strikes forces will not be provided by France, the U.K. or Italy, but possibly by neighboring Turkey.

Washington and Ankara are now assumed to be negotiating a “no-fly” zone over Syria, where Syrian armed insurgents can be trained and concentrated, added Patrushev.

News is not only coming out of Iran and the Middle East, but also from other parts of Central Asia near the Middle East. These reports show the great complexity of the problems that can arise from this dangerous region.

The United States has been led by its contradictory and absurd imperial policy to get involved in serious problems in countries such as Pakistan, whose borders with Afghanistan were drawn up by the colonialists without taking into account culture or ethnicities.

In Afghanistan, which defended its independence against English colonialism for centuries, drug production has multiplied in the wake of the Yankee invasion. Meanwhile, European soldiers, supported by drone airplanes and armed with sophisticated US weapons, carry out deplorable massacres that increase the people’s hatred and ward off any possibilities of peace. All this and other dirty actions are also reported by Western news agencies.

WASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 – US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the actions of four U.S. marines who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan “utterly deplorable” The video of the act was circulated in the Internet.

I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable…

This conduct is entirely inappropriate for members of the United States military and does not reflect the standards of values our armed forces are sworn to uphold…

In reality, Panetta neither confirms nor denies the action, and anyone, including the Secretary of Defense himself, may harbor doubt.

But it is also extremely inhumane that men, women and children, or an Afghani combatant fighting against the foreign occupation, be murdered by bombs dropped by drone planes. Another very serious incident: dozens of Pakistani soldiers and officials who safeguarded the country’s borders have been killed by these bombs.

Afghani President Karzai stated that the outrage committed against the bodies was “simply inhumane.” He asked for the US government “to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

Meanwhile Taliban spokespersons declared that “over the last ten years, hundreds of similar acts have been carried out that were not reported…”

One even feels sorry for those soldiers, thousands of kilometers away from their family, friends and country, sent to fight in countries that they might not have even heard of during their school days, where they are assigned the task of killing or dying to enrich transnational companies, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous politicians who each year squander funds needed to feed and educate the uncountable millions of hungry and illiterate people around the world.

Many of these soldiers, victims of the trauma suffered, end up taking their own lives.

Is it an exaggeration to say that world peace is hanging by a thread?

“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.

Speaking to about 500 Mussolini Democrats and more than a dozen reporters at the tactically sophisticated Invertebrates For Obama think tank in Washington, Obama lashed out at “so-called progressives” clamoring for an expanded New Deal.

“Far too many Americans are looking for a hand-out, not a hand up,” he said, apparently targeting the growing Occupy Wall Street movement and its sympathizers. “The reason we must reject socialist economics is that it conflicts with our core political philosophy about the purpose of government.”

“We cannot preserve liberty for ourselves and our posterity if government fails to fulfill its obligation to sustain the free market system with trillions of dollars of bailout money for selfless Wall Street firms deemed ‘too big to fail.’” Therefore we must seek common ground with the GOP and renounce relics of the Communist era like Social Security and Medicare.” To sustained applause the president added, “I hereby do so.”

Obama called for a reform of his own health care law to include a “private option” that would allow HMOs to deport Americans without health insurance to Cuba, in hopes of bankrupting the free health care system available on the Communist-ruled island. “The cost of treating fifty million uninsured Americans should bring down the Castro brothers once and for all,” proclaimed Obama gleefully.

The president said he would grant federal aid to states expelling the medically needy to Cuba, adding that he would veto any attempt to have them treated in the U.S. “We’ve got to get beyond the idea that democratic government means doling out aid to irresponsible citizens who refuse to pull their own weight.” The president emphatically rejected appeals for government assistance from ordinary Americans. “As we all know from civics lessons the only legitimate function government has is performing those tasks that Americans cannot perform themselves – like carpet-bombing foreign nations and giving away the store to transnational corporations and international banks.”

The president went on to state that his reformed health care reform bill would prove itself a more efficient system than the universal care available through Medicare. “Obviously the market is more efficient than government,” said Obama. “I mean, how much equity is returned to stockholders under Medicare? Absolutely none! Whereas under HMOs investors are making a killing, if you’ll pardon the expression,” the president said. Asked about the much higher administrative costs under privatized care, Obama explained that those “don’t count,” because they are passed on to the public.

On issues like declaring the war in Iraq “over,” Obama portrayed himself as the candidate who goes the extra mile for peace. “George Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq only once, while I am now working on my second final withdrawal from that liberated country,” the president said with obvious pride.

Obama also called for “staking out the middle ground” by privatizing Social Security, outsourcing the public schools to China, and handing over municipal water systems to corporate polluters in need of infusions of public capital in order to pay off fines imposed for systematically polluting the environment.

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!

Denmark elected a staunch right winger as prime minister. Denmark joined in military attacks with imperialist states against weaker states. I turned to journalist Ron Ridenour, who lives in Denmark, to give a first-hand voice to what is taking place.

I support revolution against occupation, oppression, exploitation; however, I hold that the long-term viability of a revolution must be rooted in the people — not in a personality. Therefore, I have reservations about “leaders” — for example, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — who (besides implementing socialism for the masses) seemingly covet the esteem, if not the perks, of governmental office. Ridenour speaks Spanish, has lived in Cuba, written many books about the revolution there, so he is an informed go-to person for reflections on the revolution there and elsewhere.

Ridenour, notably, has also given voice to the very marginalized plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, has long been active in journalism, has his own website, and in his own words, “Besides using words in an effort to eradicate racism, inequality and wars, I have been an activist against wars, racism, chauvinism and for socialist solidarity.”

This week, I interviewed Ridenour about Denmark, Cuba, and the leaderless revolutionary stirrings against the financial elitists.

Kim Petersen: Denmark is supposed to be a peace-loving state with an envious social safety net. You pointed out in a recent article that the Danish political landscape has slanted rightwards? What caused this? And how can progressivist politics become predominant?

Ron Ridenour: The causes are several, both historical and contemporary. Leftist parties and unionists in Denmark, like people in most of the world, lost faith and hope in socialist-communist solutions due to the atrocities and corruption of Communist parties in power, and then with the fall of those governments in eastern Europe. Even those governments still calling themselves communists base their economies on capitalism today.

One of the main problems of nearly all leftist parties and governments is that they do not believe that the mass—unionists, unemployed, family farmers, students—are actually capable of ruling “sensibly.” One of the best of benevolent “dictators,” Fidel Castro, does not believe such either. Most leaders believe in themselves and not the mass. So, in fact, real socialism has yet to be attempted. No party in power has ever really begun the process of educating workers+ to use political power and then turning over power to the working class, as our ideology calls for.

Another factor, especially Danish, is a national inferiority complex. That is, “We’re just a little country, you know,” so we can’t expect to run things ourselves. This was actually a folksy saying of one of Denmark’s best known politicians, Erhard Jacobsen. For decades, Denmark relied upon Germany and since WWII it relies on the US, first for its economic Marshall Plan and since for its military might. And today Denmark is not a peace-loving state. It is involved in four wars alongside its Big Daddy.

Then there is the national complex of indifference, or “ligegladhed.” There has been a lot of charitable giving of money to the poor abroad but little engagement or true solidarity. Even the left-ish parliamentary party, Unity List (Enhedslisten), opposes support for opponents of the terrorist terror laws, or for armed resistance by the invaded of US-NATO wars.

One can never answer fully what causes policy without taking the economy into account. Danes still live comfortably economically, almost all, in relationship with others even European neighbors. I think that the left parties rely on parliamentarian politics because of this. They do not believe that significant numbers of people will actually support grass roots radical struggles. And the unions long ago aligned themselves with capitalist reformism and oppose extra-parliamentary struggles, including sustaining strikes, of any consequence. Why risk being arrested, losing your job and then your mortgage, your car or one of them simply to do the “right thing”?

How can progressive (?) politics become predominant? Well, if progressive means pushing for reformist policies within capitalism that is becoming dominant now for the two Danish so-called socialist parties in parliament. (Unity List and People’s Party/SF), and it has been so for the major Social Democratic party for decades. But if progressive means radical, then the economy has to collapse, or when it is in deep crises as it is now, then grass roots groups have to take to the streets and stay there just as is possibly happening with Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Uproar, perhaps in Spain and Greece. We have to kick the parliamentary-based politics out of our movements. We have to feel the power in ourselves and push the politicians out.

Yes, there must also be strong unions and workers must strike and/or join Occupy Wall Street. Radical-revolutionary political parties must educate and protest with sensible and morally just programs. They should not act against the more autonomous oriented grass roots groups but in parallel.

KP: This touches on the previous questions, in many countries, people scoffed that Americans could “elect” a born-again, foot-in-mouth, right-winger such as George W. Bush as president. Yet Canadians soon found themselves with Prime Minister Stephen Harper (a man to the right of Bush), and Danes wound up with Anders Fogh Rasmussen as prime minister (also a hawkish right-winger). Why do you think this is happening in much of the western world?

RR: Precisely because the left gave up actually being left. It was too difficult and most got too comfortable within the capitalist system. The left adopted the bourgeois democratic premise of making policy within parliaments whose role is to protect finance power. In Copenhagen, Wall Street is Børsen and its building is literally next door to parliament and the executive government.

When finance crises occur, you only have two sources to acquire money to pay for it: from the workers-pensioners-students or from the owners of capital and industry. The latter approach would mean that the rich will refuse to pay for their crises and so, you must nationalize their “private” property, that is, the production centers where wealth originates and the banks that manipulate the wealth for a few. But that takes guts, struggle, sacrifice.

PM Fogh Rasmussen was awarded the greater job of being the commander of NATO. He is loved by the warmongers on Wall Street and the Pentagon, and hated by the peoples who are invaded, but all the parliamentary parties here congratulated him. He should have been ostracized as well as the biggest of capitalists here, AP Møller-Mærsk, the world’s biggest shipper and a major warmonger. Instead his supermarkets, which take in half the food sales, are much of the left’s favorite stores because they are cheap.

We have to find that indignation that many Arabs have found, that some Spanish and Greeks are finding, that is part of OWS, and that us oldies had in the 60s-70s. We have to practice what we preach. Boycott the worst companies (like Mærsk and Coca-Cola…). Go on strike. Refuse to do the system’s bidding. Find our inner strength and alternative life styles. Act in solidarity with the oppressed-exploited-invaded.

KP: The progressivist image of Denmark is further diminished now with its participation in the NATO (currently headed by Fogh Rasmussen) invasion of a sovereign state. There are reports of Danish troops engaging in torture and massacres. How do you read this playing out on the streets in Denmark?

RR: Unfortunately, nothing is happening regarding these atrocities. There is one small group of pacifists who conduct a vigil in front of parliament daily since the beginning of the war against Afghanistan. But it is more of a curiosity than a threat. The anti-war movement died, in part because the Unity party dropped out of protesting because its leaders wanted “influence” with lucrative jobs in parliament. And the climate movement has so far refused to take up wars as part of their anti-pollution protests albeit wars are a major cause of pollution and adverse climate changes. I think they are just too scared of being accused of being outsiders or radicals….

KP: You hinted at a “shaky future” for the Cuban revolution. Do you see Cuba falling further away from the socialism won through the revolution? Who will stand to benefit (or lose) from Cuba’s opening to capitalism?

RR: Yes, I am afraid that what I foresaw in that piece nearly a year ago it occurring rapidly now. More and more openings for capitalism have been adopted even before the Communist party national conference body has met and decided on precise policies to propose to the state. Raul Castro as both leader of the state and the party, following his brother, has already decided. Now, private property (housing) can be bought and sold; cars can be bought in hard currency at big prices, which very few Cubans can acquire legitimately; small enterprises are encouraged to employ workers, and thereby opening up officially for exploitation of labor.

Who will benefit is a new class of small capitalists and real estate hustlers, and speculation will become widespread. Relatives of Cubans in Miami and Spain will be even more privileged than those Cubans without such remittances. Wall Street will benefit in the end, because the blockade against Cuba will be lifted in the not distant future. Other Wall Streets in the world already benefit.

KP: In a summer article on the state of the revolution in Cuba, you defined ethics partially as “We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.” You added, “We struggle to create equality for all.” If, indeed, the revolution is a revolution of the people and not about a personality or personalities, what does the unbroken political “leadership” of Fidel Castro from 1959 to 2008 speak to such ethics?

You also quoted from Che that “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.”

In general I support much of what Fidel Castro has helped to bring about in Cuba, but I find that his one-man leadership of the revolution is dangerous in that it embeds the revolution in a person (in this case in a family) rather than in the people. Is Fidel Castro the only person besides his brother fit to “lead” (and do the people require a leader?) the revolution for Cubans?

RR: The points you quote from my piece and your question are part of dialogue, both fraternal and violently hostile, the non/anti-capitalist left has had for more than a century. In my own view, after half a century of struggle and thought that also embraces these points, my conclusion is NO to your question. And that, of course, holds true for Hugo Chavez (and all other leaders), albeit most of the left in Venezuela, as well as a large sector of the general population, believes Chavez is unique and most be their one and only leader for, perhaps, a lifetime. That was also the case with the Cuban people and Fidel for the first decade or so. Well, that is what the Arab uproar wants to end, albeit those gruesome dictators cannot be compared to the kind-hearted Fidel.

The main problem with one leader syndrome is that it saps the vision, inspiration and energy from the mass. I have seen this happening before my eyes during the eight years I worked in Cuba and lived with the people. They lost hope that socialism could actually be the best solution when they always had to wait for answers/permission/resources/materials from above. The same happened in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Now it has come to past that most Cubans, I think, really don’t believe socialism is worthwhile and they want a chance to try supply-demand marketing. This will split the people into classes and further antagonize the true solidarity amongst themselves and with other peoples that they had assiduously built. And that is the essence of what Che meant in the cited quotation—the state and the party have become isolated from the mass and they see no other way out than capitalism with some bourgeois democratic-oriented reforms, such as what the big powers are endeavoring to impose on the Arab rebellion.

Another major mistake that Cuban leaders made is not separating some powers between the state and the Communist party. As the unity strategy goes in Cuba when the state makes a policy for short-term economic benefit or for some diplomatic reason—such as backing the genocidal, brutal governments of Sri Lanka against the entire Tamil population—the party is disallowed from criticizing this or for showing solidarity with, for instance, the much discriminated-against Tamils.

KP: There is growing dissent in the United States, but it is marginalized and propagandized in the corporate media (nothing surprising there). The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US seems to be gathering momentum, having staying power, and perhaps causing ripples in the system. If the grassroots activism proves influential in the US, how do you think this might affect Europe?

RR: I see that 66% of the people Gallop polled in the US want the rich to be appropriately taxed, and 54% want all politicians out of a job. It is that spirit that has to take root, and that is growing in Europe too.

The most important and radical elements in these protests are that they are 1) anti-capitalist, 2) not led by self-interest seeking persons or parties. In fact, OWS is more radical than what we created in the 60s-70s, because it is primarily aimed at the true enemy: capitalism, which is the main cause for adverse climate changes and aggressive wars.

The first solidarity demos with OWS in Denmark are taking place Saturday (October 15) alongside hundreds other cities in scores of lands. This initiative was taken by the indignados in Spain. There, and in other countries on the verge of bankruptcy such as Greece, there is greater potential for sustained radical movements than there is right now in Scandinavia and Germany. But this economic crisis will not just melt any time soon—a spell of anger is mounting. I think in a few European countries protests will arise and continue sporadically, at least.
I see it as a positive development, in fact, that in the recent Danish election, the so-called red block won and with it the Unity party and SF have dropped key programmatic elements of any socialist nature. I think the Unity Party/SF sellout will help create a backlash that could become a true protest movement. But we must also recognize that too few people are really hurting enough economically here to cause them to develop a real sustained fight. I hope I’m wrong.

In Denmark, we must not go to a demo to hear jazz music and a handful of “leaders” speak and then go home to TV or to a cafe for beer and wine. We must find that inner indignation and with it empower ourselves. We must develop leadership in all of us. We must take over tactical areas and stay there. We have one big problem, even greater than the might of police brutality, and that is the weather. Already temperatures are falling to freezing in the evenings in some of Europe and in NYC it is getting cold too. We might have to postpone our staying power over the cold, raining, snowy winter months and return in even greater numbers and strength in the spring.

I close with a quote from Naomi Klein’s talk at Wall Street, October 6. “We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening… Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets… Don’t give in to that temptation… Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world.” “It is!” and she points to her favorite sign: “I care about you!”

The Chinese/Russian veto has revived hopes of peace and security among developing countries, who have watched the orgy of violence unleashed by NATO bombings in Libya over the past 8 months with horror and outrage.

The security forces of the Syrian Arab Republic have been battling armed gangs backed by Western intelligence agencies since February. Thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of security personnel have been killed. NATO’s Blitzkrieg on the people of Libya and the covert war on the people of Syria have  proven the extent of the desperation that now besets Western capitalism and have served to highlight the sharp divide that now exists between progressive countries who are striving to create a multipolar world and the cancerous Western plutocracies now engaging in looting, pillaging and mass murder in a desperate attempt to maintain their global hegemony.

AlBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, have been unwavering in their support for the Great People’s Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahirya and the Syrian Arab Republic in their long struggle against NATO backed terrorists.

On October 9th a delegation of Alba officials visited the Syrian capital Damascus to express their solidarity with the terror-stricken country. The delegation included Bolivian Communications Minister Eban Canelas, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro Moros, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodriquez, Deputy Foreign Minister of Ecuador, Pablo Villa Gomez, and Deputy Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, Maria Rubiales.

Nicolas Madura, Venezuela’s minister for foreign affairs told Syrian television on October 10th:

The world order which dominates the media is using media terrorism, political and psychological warfare to impose its vision on the world.

Madura added that during the past thirty years:

This order has imposed its own culture on the world, a culture of violence, of death and of drugs and it has formed a network of television stations and newspapers to subjugate the world.

The Bolivian communications minister Ivan Canelas told the same TV station:

What we saw on our visit to Syria was very different to what the foreign press have been showing us. We found peace and security here. People go about their business and live their lives normally. It is clear proof that many of the media outlets are working for the profits of the imperialist powers who have made attempting to damage the sovereignty and dignity not only of Syria but of other peoples in the world such as Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador, Cuba and Peru.

Mr. Canales also stressed the necessity for radical reform of the United Nations so as to free the organization from US control.

Maria Rubiales, Nicaragua’s vice minister for foreign affairs said:

When an immense crisis occurs in the West, especially in the United States of America, the  easiest way for them to get out of it is by destroying other countries.

Referring to the existence of terrorist groups in Syria armed by the West, Rubiales said:

If that happened in the United States of America, they would send in the army to put down the armed terrorists.”

The arrival of the Latin American delegation in Damascus is another poignant example of the growing isolation of the Atlantic imperialist cult.  As more and more people tune into alternative media around the world, the lies and propaganda of the Atlantic imperialist configuration are being continually exposed.

AlBA countries, Venezuela in particular, have close relations with the Syrian Arab Republic. In November 2010, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro visited Damascus where 10 joint projects involving Syria, Belarus and Venezuela were agreed upon.

He told reporters “we are making a tour to consolidate the projects established with these brother countries, for the construction of a new world that has been designed in concrete terms.”

Belarus has been a close partner with Venezuela for many years. Minsk has been able to reduce its oil dependency on Russia through a deal with Caracas involving the importation of up to 10 million metric tons of oil.

On the other hand, Caracas has also benefited from close relations with the former Soviet Republic. Belarus has been helping Venezuela in its ambitious Mision Casa Vivienda, Great Housing Mission, which aims at overcoming the housing deficit in the country.

Belarus has also come under attack from the New World Order with several attempts at regime change there through US orchestrated ‘’colour revolutions’’.

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko told Russian reporters on October 7th:

They tried to push a revolution in Belarus through social networks. The person, who was running those social networks is in Poland, guarded by special services and funded by we know whom.

Bilateral trade ties between Syria and Belarus have intensified since 2007. Like the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance, Syria and Belarus strive for autonomy, national sovereignty and independence. The special trade agreements between Venezuela, Belarus and Syria are a cogent example of the desire of developing countries to create a multi-polar world.

The visit of the ALBA delegation to Syria was, unsurprisingly, ignored by the Western media. But the visit is highly significant. Syria has, since February, been fighting a covert war waged by Western intelligence agencies using Islamist terrorists presented to the world as ‘’peaceful protestors’’ by the corporate media.

Many of the ALBA countries have experienced US- orchestrated terrorism in the past.

The  US trained terrorists known as the “contras” used against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s cost up to 30,000 Nicaraguan lives.  The Nicaraguan terrorists were presented by the Western press as ‘freedom fighters’ just as the terrorists in Syria today are being portrayed as “pro-democracy” and victims of ‘state terror’.  The US backed terrorism campaign was so successful in Nicaragua, Washington decided to send its principal organizer Michael Kozak to Belarus as US ambassador. Kozak told the Times newspaper on September 3, 2001 that ‘’the objective and to some extent methodology are the same” in Belarus as in Nicaragua.

The ALBA delegation’s recent visit to Syria has made it clear that the real international community is aware of the “objectives” and “methodologies” of US imperialism in the Middle East and throughout the world, and, in particular, the nefarious role of the corporate media in misinforming the general public about the reality in Syria. But above all, the ALBA delegation’s visit has sent a signal to the degenerate Euro-Atlantic elites that their attempt to dominate the planet with their “culture of violence, death and drugs” is doomed to fail.

Aggression Rights

It is, of course, well established that the United States has aggression rights, and that international law applies only to others, although clients like Israel also have such exemptions by virtue of their clienthood, tail-wagging-dog capabilities, and power of their protector.²  U.S. aggression rights were made perfectly clear with the U.S. attack, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which was as clear a violation of  the UN Charter as Saddam’s invasion-occupation of Kuwait in 1990. In the latter instance, the UN rushed to condemn Saddam on the very same day his tanks and troops rolled into Kuwait, and that great law-enforcer, the United States, rushed to oust him by massive force.

On the other hand, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, this was merely a case of tolerable “birth-pangs of a new Middle East” (Condoleezza Rice), so that when the UN came into the picture it was more to protect poor little Israel from future pea-shoots from Lebanon than to protect Lebanon from current and future attack and invasion by a state that had already aggressed against it twice.  Even more interesting was the invasion of Rwanda by elements of the Uganda army in October 1990, just two months after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Here, as in Lebanon, the invading forces were supported by the United States, so the UN imposed no impediment or penalty, and in various other ways aided the invading party and facilitated a genocidal process that followed later in the 1990s (and extended into the Democratic Republic of  the Congo).

Assassination Rights

Assassination rights follow in the same manner, flowing from military and economic power, arrogance, self-righteousness, and client status. As of this moment (early September, 2011), it is not clear whether Moammar Gadaffi is dead or alive—or, if alive, will long survive—but it has been openly acknowledged that the United States and its NATO allies have more than once bombed Gadaffi’s compound in Tripoli in an effort to kill him, the first incident occurring as early as March 20, the second day of the war.  This is by no means the first time that the enlightened West has tried to assassinate Gadaffi.  The British and French both tried, and the United States made an earlier effort in 1986 when it bombed Gadaffi’s residence in Tripoli, missing him but killing his baby daughter and many nearby civilians.

Assassination of civilians violates numerous international  prohibitions of such killing beyond military necessity; and it violates a stream of U.S. executive orders that declare, for example, that “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination” (F.O. 12333, 1981 [Reagan]). This is regularly ignored by U.S. leaders, hence by the media and by any potential-theoretical national or international law enforcement bodies.

The rationales for ignoring law and executive orders can be funny.  We can go after Gadaffi because he is “commander-in-chief” of the Libyan armed forces, hence a military target.  (Obama would, of course, be a legitimate military target for the Taliban, or Libyan armed forces, as I’m sure the editors of the New York Times would agree.)  One exposition of assassination law notes that “it seems fairly obvious that eliminating Gadaffi will go far toward bringing attacks on civilians to an end.”³  This might be especially true if his elimination would have ended NATO attacks on Libyan civilians, which, along with those of the NATO-supported insurgents, seem to have far exceeded those of Gadaffi and his forces.

Bringing a war to a quicker end has long been a rationalization for attacking civilians. During the bombing war against Yugoslavia in 1999 the stepped up attacks on Serbian civilian structures and civilian occupants was explicitly designed to force a quicker surrender; and the bombing of the Belgrade state broadcasting station (16 killed) was explained on the ground that the station served up state propaganda and was therefore a quasi-military target whose destruction would hasten an end to the war.  Then, of course, U.S. wars are always a matter of self-defense, against the threat of weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds rising over New York harbor, or some other threat to the pitiful giant. So assassination prohibitions never come into play—for us.

Israel‘s Assassination Rights

Or for our pitiful little client in the Middle East, which is a kind of pioneer in “targeted assassinations” and “preventive strikes.”  Israel has been killing Palestinians in extra-judicial actions for many years, both in the occupied territories and in Israel itself. The Palestine Centre for Human Rights estimates 604 targeted killings of Palestinians between September 2000 and March 2011, plus another 256 “collateral damage” bystanders killed. B’Tselem estimates 228 executions carried out by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) between September 2000 and October 2006, plus 154 non-targeted civilians. This, of course, just scratches the surface of the forms of violence carried out by the Israeli state and its settlers against the untermenschen who stand in the way. The IDF uses only rubber bullets in Israeli protests, but live ammunition in dealing with the Palestinians. The assassination programs are built on the foundation that Israel is confronted with “terrorists,” who can be dealt with summarily. That the dispossessing IDF is the operative body of a system of wholesale terrorism that daily violates international law is unrecognized not only in Israel but throughout the Free World.  Similarly, the Israeli wars of aggression in Lebanon and the genocidal war on Gaza in 2009 do not elicit sanctions or war crimes tribunals or discredit the Israeli state or leadership. Its right to aggress and assassinate remains intact.

In 2006 the Israeli assassination program received the imprimatur of the Israeli Supreme Court, which found that the assassinations of “terrorists” who had not been tried in any court of law were legal.  “We cannot determine in advance that all targeted killings are contrary to international law,” the court ruled.  “At the same time, it is not possible that all such liquidations are in line with international law.”  But the court did make it illegal to carry out an assassination attack where more than one sure victim was unidentified and was possibly an innocent.⁴   Of course, the non-innocence of the properly liquidated targets had not been determined in a court of law, but this extra-judicial decision-making, which flies in the face of  international law, was acceptable to the court. The court also required that if feasible the terrorists should be arrested rather than simply assassinated.  Of course, if the target resisted their arrest killing them would be acceptable, and assassinating them where an arrest was not practicable was also acceptable.

This was a de facto “license to kill,” that would only put the killing establishment to some minor pains to keep the record clean and lawful.  “Targeted Assassinations—a License to kill” was, in fact, the title of an article published in Haaretz on November 27, 2008 by Uri Blau, using some IDF internal documents that described well how the Israeli Supreme Court’s assassination-approving decision would only slightly inconvenience the IDF’s assassination program. Blau shows that the Israeli military regularly carried out assassination operations, planned in advance as targeted killings, under the guise of planned arrests.  Blau cites evidence that top Israeli officers approved in advance the killing of Palestinians defined as “wanted.” This has been a scandal in Israel, with the alleged leaker of documents (Anat Kam, a then 23-your-old former IDF soldier) under arrest and Blau a refugee in England fearful of returning to Israel.  Needless to say Blau’s “License to kill” and  its findings have not been widely disseminated in the Free Press, nor has the freedom of speech scandal gotten much attention.

The United States: From Assassination Rights to Global Free-Fire-Zone Rights

Of course, with its vastly greater capacity to kill on a global scale, the U.S. “license” far surpasses client Israel’s. And, despite its serious domestic problems and resource scarcity for its civil society needs, the U.S. permanent war establishment is upping-the-ante in pursuing its villain choices across the globe.  The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill testified before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2010 that the U.S. Special Operations Forces and Central Intelligence Agency have steadily expanded their ongoing “shadow wars” around the world, conducting missions in 60 countries during the Bush administration, and as many as 75 under Obama’s.  As Scahill added, the Obama “administration has taken the Bush era doctrine that the ‘world is a battlefield’ and run with it.”

Based on press reports dating back to June 17, 2004, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (U.K.) estimated that by the end of August 2011, between 2,309 and 2,880 persons had been killed in the U.S. “Covert Drone War” in Pakistan, with air strikes by these remote-controlled aerial killers under Obama outnumbering Bush’s 243 to 52.   These researchers found the reported civilian death-toll to be between 392 and 783—though the actual civilian toll is likely far greater, as the press reports which form the basis of this research tend to repeat the U.S. and Pakistani government line that every strike kills “militants,” and only in exceptional cases are civilian fatalities acknowledged in the reports.⁵

A photographic exhibit in London last summer by the Pakistani Noor Behram, titled Gaming in Waziristan, detailed the wreckage caused by the U.S. drone war.  Behram’s theme, in his own words, is “that far more civilians are being injured and killed than the Americans and Pakistanis admit.”  As he told the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont: “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant.  I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed.”⁶

A lawsuit filed in Islamabad against the retired C.I.A. lawyer John A Rizzo on behalf of two surviving family members of drone attacks accuses him of having played a role in determining targets for the attacks, and thus deciding who should die.  This and similar evidence in other U.S. free-fire zones such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere (Libya, for example, until the overthrow of the Gadaffi government in late August), stands in dramatic contrast with the reassuring words of White House’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan, who said in answer to a question on June 29 that the “types of operations that the U.S. has been involved in in the counterterrorism realm—nearly for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”  During the same speech, Brennan previewed the United States’ strategy in its Global War On Terror for the years ahead.  Unsurprisingly, remote-controlled drones and U.S. Special Forces Operations moving in-and-out of different countries against which no official U.S. declaration of war has ever been made were featured prominently.⁷

Brennan was, of course, lying about the sure-sightedness of this method of kill, and six weeks later, the New York Times helped him get-off-the-hook when he “adjusted the wording of his earlier comment on civilian casualties,” no longer saying that “there hasn’t been a single collateral death” in the past year, but that “American officials could not confirm any such deaths.”  In an amazing gloss on the argument over drones, Georgetown University Pakistan expert C. Christine Fair also told the Times: “This is the least indiscriminate, least inhumane tool we have.”⁸

Given the monumental scale of the violence and of the death and the destruction caused by U.S. military attacks against multiple countries around the world (formally or informally, in uniform or by hired-hands), the reported deaths in Pakistan to date are indeed relatively small, when compared to the deaths of 1 to 2 million Iraqis caused by the United States and its allies from August 1990 to the present.  But perhaps the most important point to note is the institutionalization, growth, and normalization of the work of the U.S. military machine. The CIA has grown in size and especially in its killing activities, featuring its drone war management, which Gareth Porter contends is unstoppable because of bureaucratic imperatives and power.⁹   It is, in the words of one CIA official, “one hell of a killing machine,” but it is probably exceeded in its death-dealing by the semi-secret Joint Special Operations Command, which “has killed even more of America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.” ¹⁰

These, along with the Pentagon, have made the entire globe a free-fire zone in which people are assassinated without trial at U.S. discretion. NATO has been integrated into this process, expanded greatly since the break-up of the Soviet Union, whose alleged threat was the rationale for building NATO, and with NATO now stressing “out of area” operations that gear well with the U.S. “projection of power.” It was noted recently in a reflection on 9/11 that America’s wars have greatly increased rather than decreased since the demise of the Soviet Union and the ending of that supposed threat to international peace and security.¹¹   But that seeming paradox rested on the belief that it was the Soviets who needed to be contained, rather than the United States and its allies. The latter still do.  And as during the Vietnam war where U.S. policy—free-fire zones, chemical warfare, massive killings of civilians in napalm and bombing raids—created a steady stream of recruits to keep fighting the aggressor, so today the U.S. (and Israeli) killing machine continues to produce recruits and resistance to its “out of area” advances. As this is a permanent self-fulfilling enemy- and war-generating process, it is ominous and may be an Armageddon March.

•  Article first appeared in Z Magazine, October 2011

1. “638 tries to kill Castro,” Guardian, August 3, 2006
2. Herman, “Aggression Rights,” Z Magazine, February, 2004
3. “Assassination under International & Domestic Law,” on the IntLawGrrls website, May 2, 2011
4. “Israeli court backs targeted killings,” BBC News, December 14, 2006
5. Chris Woods, “Drone War Exposed,” and David Pegg, “Drone Statistics Visualized,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 10, 2011
6. US drone in Pakistan claiming many civilian victims, says campaigner,” July 17, 2011
7. “U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy; Ensuring Al-Qaida’s Demise,” Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2011
8. Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Is Disputed On Civilian Toll In Drone Strikes,” August 12, 2011
9. “CIA’s Push for Drone War Driven by Internal Needs,”, IPS News, September 5, 2011
10. Dana Priest and William Arkin, “’Top Secret America’: A look at the military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” Washington Post, September 2, 2011
11. Greg Jaffe, “On a war footing, set in concrete,” Washington Post, September 5, 2011

The US brags about its political systems as being based on the separation of powers between the Executive (President and Vice-President), the Legislature and the Judiciary and a resulting built-in checks and balances system. This is supposedly a superior form of democracy based on checks and balances to avoid abuse of power by one or the other of the three branches forming the US government. In the US Constitution Article II Section 2 states that the US president has “the power to grant reprieves and pardons…” Every indication is that President Obama, far from using his constitutional powers to free the Cuban Five, made it clear to the Supreme Court judges that they should rule against revision.¹

This has obviously been a political case right from day one. It is even further revealed by the Supreme Court’s decision and the shameless refusal of the judges to publicly explain to the world the basis of their ruling. Of course the judges are not obliged to divulge it according to the American legal system. However, in a case such as this one which the whole world and many governments are watching, a public explanation was necessary. We are perhaps witnessing one of the greatest ironies in the current international political scene. The Cuban Five are cruelly and politically persecuted for their peaceful anti-terrorist motivations and activities. The reason? They are acting on behalf of and supporting the Cuban government. One of the main charges that Washington levies against Cuba is lack of democracy, that it is does not, amongst other characteristics exhibit a political system similar to the American one which would include checks and balances. The Cuban system is in fact one unified revolutionary peoples’ political power, from the top down and from the bottom up including the judiciary, each enjoying its own respective fields of competence. The relationship and inter-action of all the different Cuban state levels between themselves including the judiciary and all of these institutions in turn with the citizens, is a feature of the Cuban type of democracy. There is no need to get into a debate as to whether the Cuban system is more democratic than the American model. However, if one takes into account this latest Supreme Court episode of US democracy in action on the one hand and my direct experience and study of the Cuban political system on the other hand, Cuba has no “democracy” lessons to take at all from the USA.

1. See Ruben Campa, et al., Petitioners v. United States of America and Wayne S. Smith, “Free the Cuban Five!” Nation, 13 July 2010.

Regarding this issue, since March fourth to date the international media, especially based in Miami, Washington and Madrid, are concentrating on Havana, the Gross trials and legal challenges.

For those who may be puzzled by the Supreme Court decision, it would be useful to examine briefly what has happened in the United States — not Cuba — between March fourth to date in order to perhaps shed some light onto the Supreme Court’s confirmation of the lower court’s resolution. In this five-month period, the Obama Administration has on many occasions repeated its policy of interfering in the internal affairs of Cuba under the guise of “democracy promotion”. For example, the Congress has recently ratified once again the decision to spend 20$ million in the next year explicitly dedicated to subversion in Cuba, including the type of activities that Gross had carried out and for which he has been arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced. On many occasions the Obama Administration in collaboration with their mercenaries on and off the island did not reduce, but rather reinforced, their provocative activities against the sovereignty of Cuba, one of the legal principles violated by Gross as a US agent contractor.

While Obama visited Chile on March 21, 2011, not long after the original trial and sentencing of Gross, the US President spoke about the need to defend “democracy and human rights within our borders [USA and Chile], let us recommit to defending them across our hemisphere…. And yes, that includes the people of Cuba.”

How do readers think that the Cuban government and judiciary had taken this? By adding insult to injury, Obama stated in an interview to a Chilean newspaper as a prelude to his visit to Santiago de Chile that “The Chilean experience, and more particularly its successful transition to democracy and its sustained, growing economy, is a model for the region and the world.”

When the news was released on August fifth regarding the Cuban Supreme Court decision, it was the same day that those of us who follow the news through Telesúr and other alternative media were able to bear witness to how the Chilean police violently attacked the students and professors demanding education, economic and political rights. There were according to official sources 874 arrests and hundreds wounded. Is this the example that Obama meant of Chile being a model of democracy and economic development for Cuba? The scenes of Chilean state brutality resembled more the emblematic steps (Escalanita) of the University of Havana before the January 1, 1959 Triumph of the Revolution, when the US-backed Batista dictatorship unleashed their forces so many times against the youth, professors and workers. Many students were killed in these assaults in Havana, but so far at the time of writing in any case, there has been no deaths in Chile during the course of the current confrontations.

Despite the demands to Obama from around the world declared by Nobel Prize winners, individual parliamentarians, parliaments and personalities for the release of the Cuban Five, what has Obama done between March fourth and today? He has done nothing, and we are heading into a most crucial period for the soon-to-be concluded Habeus Corpus process for Gerardo Hernández Nodelo, with nothing yet positive in sight at this time. The Cuban Five are imprisoned since 1998 because they attempted to curb US-backed terrorist interference in the internal affairs of Cuba.

Given all these provocations and repeated confirmations from the White House and the US Congress that they have every intention to continue their program of attempting to subvert Cuba’s constitutional order, how else can the Cuban government and judicial authorities react? They have no choice but to make it clear that they will continue to defend their sovereignty as it is the right of every country to do so, big or small.

Allan Gross and his family should blame their own government for their predicament. The White House got him into it in the first place. By carrying out the same policies against Cuba since March fourth to date, it has given no reason for the Cuban judiciary to decide otherwise.

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.

On April 26, 2011, Venezuelan immigration officials, relying exclusively on information from the Colombian secret police (DAS), arrested a naturalized Swedish citizen and journalist (Joaquin Perez Becerra) of Colombian descent, who had just arrived in the country. Based on Colombian secret police allegations that the Swedish citizen was a ‘FARC leader’, Perez was extradited to Colombia within 48 hours. Despite the fact that it was in violation of international diplomatic protocols and the Venezuelan constitution, this action had the personal backing of President Chavez. A month later, the Venezuelan armed forces joined their Colombian counterparts and captured a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Guillermo Torres (with the nom de Guerra Julian Conrado) who is awaiting extradition to Colombia in a Venezuelan prison without access to an attorney. On March 17, Venezuelan Military Intelligence (DIM) detained two alleged guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), Carlos Tirado and Carlos Perez, and turned them over to the Colombian secret police.

The new public face of Chavez as a partner of the repressive Colombian regime is not so new after all. On December 13, 2004, Rodrigo Granda, an international spokesperson for the FARC, and a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, whose family resided in Caracas, was snatched by plain-clothes Venezuelan intelligence agents in downtown Caracas where he had been participating in an international conference and secretly taken to Colombia with the ‘approval’ of the Venezuelan Ambassador in Bogota. Following several weeks of international protest, including from many conference participants, President Chavez issued a statement describing the ‘kidnapping’ as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and threatened to break relations with Colombia. In more recent times, Venezuela has stepped up the extradition of revolutionary political opponents of Colombia’s narco-regime: In the first five months of 2009, Venezuela extradited 15 alleged members of the ELN and in November 2010, a FARC militant and two suspected members of the ELN were handed over to the Colombian police. In January 2011 Nilson Teran Ferreira, a suspected ELN leader, was delivered to the Colombian military. The collaboration between Latin America’s most notorious authoritarian right wing regime and the supposedly most radical ‘socialist’ government raises important issues about the meaning of political identities and how they relate to domestic and international politics and more specifically what principles and interests guide state policies.

Revolutionary Solidarity and State Interests

The recent ‘turn’ in Venezuela politics, from expressing sympathy and even support for revolutionary struggles and movements in Latin America to its present collaboration with pro-imperial right wing regimes, has numerous historical precedents. It may help to examine the contexts and circumstances of these collaborations:

The Bolshevik revolutionary government in Russia initially gave whole-hearted support to revolutionary uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Finland and elsewhere. With the defeats of these revolts and the consolidation of the capitalist regimes, Russian state and economic interests took prime of place among the Bolshevik leaders. Trade and investment agreements, peace treaties and diplomatic recognition between Communist Russia and the Western capitalist states defined the new politics of “co-existence”. With the rise of fascism, the Soviet Union under Stalin further subordinated communist policy in order to secure state-to-state alliances, first with the Western Allies and, failing that, with Nazi Germany. The Hitler-Stalin pact was conceived by the Soviets as a way to prevent a German invasion and to secure its borders from a sworn right wing enemy. As part of Stalin’s expression of good faith, he handed over to Hitler a number of leading exiled German communist leaders, who had sought asylum in Russia. Not surprisingly they were tortured and executed. This practice stopped only after Hitler invaded Russia and Stalin encouraged the now decimated ranks of German communists to re-join the ‘anti-Nazi’ underground resistance.

In the early 1970s, as Mao’s China reconciled with Nixon’s United States and broke with the Soviet Union, Chinese foreign policy shifted toward supporting US-backed counter-revolutionaries, including Holden Roberts in Angola and Pinochet in Chile. China denounced any leftist government and movement, which, however faintly, had ties with the USSR, and embraced their enemies, no matter how subservient they were to Euro-American imperial interests.

In Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China, short-term ‘state interests’ trumped revolutionary solidarity. What were these ‘state interests’?

In the case of the USSR, Stalin gambled that a ‘peace pact’ with Hitler’s Germany would protect them from an imperialist Nazi invasion and partially end the encirclement of Russia. Stalin no longer trusted in the strength of international working class solidarity to prevent war, especially in light of a series of revolutionary defeats and the generalized retreat of the Left over the previous decades (Germany, Span, Hungary and Finland) .The advance of fascism and the extreme right, unremitting Western hostility toward the USSR and the Western European policy of appeasing Hitler, convinced Stalin to seek his own peace pact with Germany. In order to demonstrate their ‘sincerity’ toward its new ‘peace partner’, the USSR downplayed their criticism of the Nazis, urging Communist parties around the world to focus on attacking the West rather than Hitler’s Germany, and gave in to Hitler’s demand to extradite German Communist “terrorists” who had found asylum in the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s pursuit of short term ‘state interests’ via pacts with the “far right” ended in a strategic catastrophe: Nazi Germany was free to first conquer Western Europe and then turned its guns on Russia, invading an unprepared USSR and occupying half the country. In the meantime the international anti-fascist solidarity movements had been weakened and temporarily disoriented by the zigzags of Stalin’s policies.

In the mid-1970s, the Peoples Republic of China’s ‘reconciliation’ with the US, led to a turn in international policy: ‘US imperialism’ became an ally against the greater evil ‘Soviet social imperialism’. As a result China, under Chairman Mao Tse Tung, urged its international supporters to denounce progressive regimes receiving Soviet aid (Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, etc.) and it withdrew its support for revolutionary armed resistance against pro-US client states in Southeast Asia. China’s ‘pact’ with Washington was to secure immediate ‘state interests’: Diplomatic recognition and the end of the trade embargo. Mao’s short-term commercial and diplomatic gains were secured by sacrificing the more fundamental strategic goals of furthering socialist values at home and revolution abroad.

As a result, China lost its credibility among Third World revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, in exchange for gaining the good graces of the White House and greater access to the capitalist world market. Short-term “pragmatism’ led to long-term transformation: The Peoples Republic of China became a dynamic emerging capitalist power, with some of the greatest social inequalities in Asia and perhaps the world.

Venezuela: State Interests versus International Solidarity

The rise of radical politics in Venezuela, which is the cause and consequence of the election of President Chavez(1999), coincided with the rise of revolutionary social movements throughout Latin America from the late 1990s to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century (1995-2005). Neo-liberal regimes were toppled in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina; mass social movements challenging neo-liberal orthodoxy took hold everywhere; the Colombian guerrilla movements were advancing toward the major cities; and center-left politicians were elected to power in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay. The US economic crises undermined the credibility of Washington’s ‘free trade’ agenda. The increasing Asian demand for raw materials stimulated an economy boom in Latin America, which funded social programs and nationalizations.

In the case of Venezuela, a failed US-backed military coup and ‘bosses’ boycott’ in 2002-2003, forced the Chavez government to rely on the masses and turn to the Left. Chavez proceeded to “re-nationalize” petroleum and related industries and articulate a “Bolivarian Socialist” ideology.

Chavez’s radicalization found a favorable climate in Latin America and the bountiful revenues from the rising price of oil financed his social programs. Chavez maintained a plural position of embracing governing center-left governments, backing radical social movements and supporting the Colombian guerrillas’ proposals for a negotiated settlement. Chavez called for the recognition of Colombia’s guerrillas as legitimate ‘belligerents” not “terrorists’.

Venezuela’s foreign policy was geared toward isolating its main threat emanating from Washington by promoting exclusively Latin American/Caribbean organizations, strengthening regional trade and investment links and securing regional allies in opposition to US intervention, military pacts, bases and US-backed military coups.

In response to US financing of Venezuelan opposition groups (electoral and extra parliamentary), Chavez has provided moral and political support to anti-imperialist groups throughout Latin America. After Israel and American Zionists began attacking Venezuela, Chavez extended his support to the Palestinians and broadened ties with Iran and other Arab anti-imperialist movements and regimes. Above all, Chavez strengthened his political and economic ties with Cuba, consulting with the Cuban leadership, to form a radical axis of opposition to imperialism. Washington’s effort to strangle the Cuban revolution by an economic embargo was effectively undermined by Chavez’ large-scale, long-term economic agreements with Havana.

Up until the later part of this decade, Venezuela’s foreign policy – its ‘state interests’ – coincided with the interests of the left regimes and social movements throughout Latin America. Chavez clashed diplomatically with Washington’s client states in the hemisphere, especially Colombia, headed by narco-death squad President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010). However, recent years have witnessed several external and internal changes and a gradual shift toward the center.

The revolutionary upsurge in Latin America began to ebb. The mass upheavals led to the rise of center-left regimes, which, in turn, demobilized the radical movements and adopted strategies relying on agro-mineral export strategies, all the while pursuing autonomous foreign policies independent of US control. The Colombian guerrilla movements were in retreat and on the defensive – their capacity to buffer Venezuela from a hostile Colombian client regime waned. Chavez adapted to these ‘new realities’, becoming an uncritical supporter of the ‘social liberal’ regimes of Lula in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Vazquez in Uruguay and Bachelet in Chile. Chavez increasingly chose immediate diplomatic support from the existing regimes over any long-term support, which might have resulted from a revival of the mass movements. Trade ties with Brazil and Argentina and diplomatic support from its fellow Latin American states against an increasingly aggressive US became central to Venezuela’s foreign policy. The basis of Venezuelan policy was no longer the internal politics of the center-left and centrist regimes but their degree of support for an independent foreign policy.

Repeated US interventions failed to generate a successful coup or to secure any electoral victories against Chavez. As a result, Washington increasingly turned to using external threats against Chavez via its Colombian client state, the recipient of $5 billion in military aid. Colombia’s military build-up, its border crossings and infiltration of death squads into Venezuela, forced Chavez into a large-scale purchase of Russian arms and toward the formation of a regional alliance (ALBA).

The US-backed military coup in Honduras precipitated a major rethink in Venezuela’s policy. The coup had ousted a democratically elected centrist liberal, President Zelaya in Honduras, a member of ALBA, and set up a repressive regime subservient to the White House. However, the coup had the effect of isolating the US throughout Latin America – not a single government supported the new regime in Tegucigalpa. Even the neo-liberal regimes of Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Panama voted to expel Honduras from the Organization of American States. On the one hand, Venezuela viewed this ‘unity’ of the right and center-left as an opportunity toward mending fences with the conservative regimes; and on the other, it understood that the Obama Administration was ready to use the ‘military option’ to regain its dominance.

The fear of a US military intervention was greatly heightened by the Obama-Uribe agreement establishing seven US strategic military bases near its border with Venezuela. Chavez wavered in his response to this immediate threat. At one point he almost broke trade and diplomatic relations with Colombia, only to immediately reconcile with Uribe, although the latter had demonstrated no desire to sign on to a pact of co-existence.

Meanwhile, the 2010 Congressional elections In Venezuela led to a major increase in electoral support for the US-backed right (approximately 50%) and their greater representation in Congress (40%). While the Right increased their support inside Venezuela, the Left in Colombia, both the guerrillas and the electoral opposition lost ground. Chavez could not count on any immediate counter-weight to a military provocation.

Chavez faced several options. The first was to return to the earlier policy of international solidarity with radical movements; the second was to continue working with the center-left regimes while maintaining strong criticism and firm opposition to the US backed neo-liberal regimes; and the third option was to turn toward the Right, more specifically to seek rapprochement with the newly elected President of Colombia, Santos, and sign a broad political, military and economic agreement where Venezuela agreed to collaborate in eliminating Colombia’s leftist adversaries in exchange for promises of ‘non-aggression’ (Colombia limiting its cross-border narco and military incursions).

Venezuela and Chavez decided that the FARC was a liability and that support from the radical Colombian mass social movements was not as important as closer diplomatic relations with President Santos. Chavez has calculated that complying with Santos political demands would provide greater security to the Venezuelan state than relying on the support of the international solidarity movements and his own radical domestic allies among the trade unions and intellectuals.

In line with this Right turn, the Chavez regime fulfilled Santos’ requests – arresting FARC/ELN guerrillas, as well as a prominent leftist journalist, and extraditing them to a state which has had the worst human rights record in the Americas for over two decades in terms of torture and extra-judicial assassinations. This Right turn acquires an even more ominous character when one considers that Colombia holds over 7600 political prisoners, over 7000 of whom are trade unionists, peasants, Indians, students;  in other words, non-combatants. In acquiescing to Santos requests, Venezuela did not even follow the established protocols of most democratic governments: It did not demand any guaranties against torture and respect for due process. Moreover, when critics have pointed out that these summary extraditions violated Venezuela’s own constitutional procedures, Chavez launched a vicious campaign slandering his critics as agents of imperialism engaged in a plot to destabilize his regime.

Chavez’s new found ally on the Right, President Santos, has not reciprocated: Colombia still maintains close military ties with Venezuela’s prime enemy in Washington. Indeed, Santos vigorously sticks to the White House agenda: He successfully pressured Chavez to recognize the illegitimate regime of Lobos in Honduras- the product of a US-backed coup in exchange for the return of ousted ex-President Zelaya. Chavez did what no other center-left Latin American President has dared to do: He promised to support the reinstatement of the illegitimate Honduran regime into the OAS. On the basis of the Chavez-Santos agreement, Latin American opposition to Lobos collapsed and Washington’s strategic goal was realized. A puppet regime was legitimized.

Chavez’s agreement with Santos to recognize the murderous Lobos regime betrayed the heroic struggle of the Honduran mass movement. Not one of the Honduran officials responsible for over a hundred murders and disappearances of peasant leaders, journalists, human rights and pro-democracy activists are subject to any judicial investigation. Chavez has given his blessings to impunity and the continuation of an entire repressive apparatus, backed by the Honduran oligarchy and the US Pentagon.

In other words, to demonstrate his willingness to uphold his ‘friendship and peace pact’ with Santos, Chavez was willing to sacrifice the struggle of one of the most promising and courageous pro-democracy movements in the Americas.

And what does Chavez seek in his accommodation with the Right?

Security? Chavez has received only verbal ‘promises’, and some expressions of gratitude from Santos. But the enormous pro-US military command and US mission remain in place. In other words, there will be no dismantling of the Colombian para-military-military forces massed along the Venezuelan border and the US military base agreements, which threaten Venezuelan national security, will not change.

According to Venezuelan diplomats, Chavez’s tactic is to ‘win over’ Santos from US tutelage. By befriending Santos, Chavez hopes that Bogota will not join in any joint military operation with the US or cooperate in future propaganda-destabilization campaigns. In the brief time since the Santos-Chavez pact was made, an emboldened Washington announced an embargo on the Venezuelan state oil company with the support of the Venezuelan congressional opposition. Santos, for his part, has not complied with the embargo, but then not a single country in the world has followed Washington’s lead. Clearly, President Santos is not likely to endanger the annual $10 billion dollar trade between Colombia and Venezuela in order to humor the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s diplomatic caprices.

Conclusion

In contrast to Chavez’s policy of handing over leftist and guerrilla exiles to a rightist authoritarian regime, President Allende of Chile (1970-73) joined a delegation that welcomed armed fighters fleeing persecution in Bolivia and Argentina and offered them asylum. For many years, especially in the 1980s, Mexico, under center-right regimes, openly recognized the rights of asylum for guerrilla and leftist refugees from Central America – El Salvador and Guatemala. Revolutionary Cuba, for decades, offered asylum and medical treatment to leftist and guerrilla refugees from Latin American dictatorships and rejected demands for their extradition. Even as late as 2006, when the Cuban government was pursuing friendly relations with Colombia and when its then Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque expressed his deep reservations regarding the FARC in conversations with the author, Cuba refused to extradite guerrillas to their home countries where they would be tortured and abused. One day before he left office in 2011, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denied Italy’s request to extradite Cesare Battisti, a former Italian guerrilla. As one Brazilian judge said – and Chavez should have listened: ”At stake here is national sovereignty. It is as simple as that”.

No one would criticize Chavez’s efforts to lessen border tensions by developing better diplomatic relations with Colombia and to expand trade and investment flows between the two countries. What is unacceptable is to describe the murderous Colombian regime as a “friend” of the Venezuela people and a partner in peace and democracy, while thousands of pro-democracy political prisoners rot in TB-infested Colombian prisons for years on trumped-up charges. Under Santos, civilian activists continue to be murdered almost every day. The most recent killing was yesterday (June 9,2011), Ana Fabricia Cordoba, a leader of community-based displaced peasants, was murdered by the Colombian armed forces. Chavez’s embrace of the Santos narco-presidency goes beyond the requirements for maintaining proper diplomatic and trade relations. His collaboration with the Colombian intelligence, military and secret police agencies in hunting down and deporting Leftists (without due process!) smacks of complicity in dictatorial repression and serves to alienate the most consequential supporters of the Bolivarian transformation in Venezuela.

Chavez’s role in legitimizing of the Honduran coup-regime, without any consideration for the popular movements’ demands for justice, is a clear capitulation to the Santos – Obama agenda. This line of action places Venezuela’s ‘state’ interests over the rights of the popular mass movements in Honduras. Chavez’s collaboration with Santos on policing leftists and undermining popular struggles in Honduras raises serious questions about Venezuela’s claims of revolutionary solidarity. It certainly sows deep distrust about Chavez’s future relations with popular movements who might be engaged in struggle with one of Chavez’s center-right diplomatic and economic partners.

What is particularly troubling is that most democratic and even center-left regimes do not sacrifice the mass social movements on the altar of “security” when they normalize relations with an adversary. Certainly the Right, especially the US, protects its former clients, allies, exiled right-wing oligarch and even admitted terrorists from extradition requests issued by Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina. Mass murders and bombers of civilian airplanes manage to live comfortably in Florida. Why Venezuela submits to the Right-wing demands of the Colombians, while complaining about the US protecting terrorists guilty of crimes in Venezuela, can only be explained by Chavez’s321 ideological shift to the Right, making Venezuela more vulnerable to pressure for greater concessions in the future.

Chavez is no longer interested in the support from the radical left: His definition of state policy revolves around securing the ‘stability’ of Bolivarian socialism in one country, even if it means sacrificing Colombian militants to a police state and pro-democracy movements in Honduras to an illegitimate US-imposed regime.

History provides mixed lessons. Stalin’s deals with Hitler were a strategic disaster for the Soviet people. Once the Fascists got what they wanted they turned around and invaded Russia. Chavez has so far not received any ‘reciprocal’ confidence-building concession from Santos’ military machine. Even in terms of narrowly defined ‘state interests’, he has sacrificed loyal allies for empty promises. The US imperial state is Santos primary ally and military provider. China sacrificed international solidarity for a pact with the US, a policy that led to unregulated capitalist exploitation and deep social injustices.

When, and if, the next confrontation between the US and Venezuela occurs, will Chavez, at least, be able to count on the “neutrality” of Colombia? If past and present relations are any indication, Colombia will side with its client-master, mega-benefactor and ideological mentor. When a new rupture occurs, can Chavez count on the support of the militants, who have been jailed, the mass popular movements he pushed aside and the international movements and intellectuals he has slandered? As the US moves toward new confrontations with Venezuela and intensifies its economic sanctions, domestic and international solidarity will be vital for Venezuela’s defense. Who will stand up for the Bolivarian revolution:  the Santos and Lobos of this “realist world” or the solidarity movements in the streets of Caracas and the Americas?

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.

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.

The words they find it very difficult to say — “civil war”.

Libya is engaged in a civil war. The United States and the European Union and NATO — The Holy Triumvirate — are intervening, bloodily, in a civil war. To overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. First The Holy Triumvirate spoke only of imposing a no-fly zone. After getting support from international bodies on that understanding, they immediately began to wage war against Libyan military forces, and whoever was nearby, on a daily basis. In the world of commerce this is called “bait and switch”.

Gaddafi’s crime? He was never respectful enough of The Holy Triumvirate, which recognizes no higher power, and maneuvers the United Nations for its own purposes, depending on China and Russia to be as spineless and hypocritical as Barack Obama. The man the Triumvirate allows to replace Gaddafi will be more respectful.

So who are the good guys? The Libyan rebels, we’re told. The ones who go around murdering and raping African blacks on the supposition that they’re all mercenaries for Gaddafi. One or more of the victims may indeed have been members of a Libyan government military battalion; or may not have been. During the 1990s, in the name of pan-African unity, Gaddafi opened the borders to tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans to live and work in Libya. That, along with his earlier pan-Arab vision, did not win him points with The Holy Triumvirate. Corporate bosses have the same problem about their employees forming unions. Oh, and did I mention that Gaddafi is strongly anti-Zionist?

Does anyone know what kind of government the rebels would create? The Triumvirate has no idea. To what extent will the new government embody an Islamic influence as opposed to the present secular government? What jihadi forces might they unleash? (And these forces do indeed exist in eastern Libya, where the rebels are concentrated.) Will they do away with much of the welfare state that Gaddafi used his oil money to create? Will the state-dominated economy be privatized? Who will wind up owning Libya’s oil? Will the new regime continue to invest Libyan oil revenues in sub-Saharan African development projects? Will they allow a US military base and NATO exercises? Will we find out before long that the “rebels” were instigated and armed by Holy Triumvirate intelligence services?

In the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia was guilty of “crimes” similar to Gaddafi’s. His country was commonly referred to as “the last communists of Europe”. The Holy Triumvirate bombed him, arrested him, and let him die in prison. The Libyan government, it should be noted, refers to itself as the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. American foreign policy is never far removed from the Cold War.

We must look closely at the no-fly zone set up for Iraq by the US and the UK (falsely claimed by them as being authorized by the United Nations) beginning in the early 1990s and lasting more than a decade. It was in actuality a license for very frequent bombing and killing of Iraqi citizens; softening up the country for the coming invasion. The no-fly zone-cum invasion force in Libya is killing people every day with no end in sight, softening up the country for regime change. Who in the universe can stand up to The Holy Triumvirate? Has the entire history of the world ever seen such power and such arrogance?

And by the way, for the 10th time, Gaddafi did not carry out the bombing of PanAm Flight 103 in 1988.1 Please enlighten your favorite progressive writers on this.

Barack “I’d kill for a peace prize” Obama

Is anyone keeping count?

I am. Libya makes six.

Six countries that Barack H. Obama has waged war against in his 26 months in office. (To anyone who disputes that dropping bombs on a populated land is act of war, I would ask what they think of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.)

America’s first black president now invades Africa.

Is there anyone left who still thinks that Barack Obama is some kind of improvement over George W. Bush?

Probably two types still think so. 1) Those to whom color matters a lot; 2) Those who are very impressed by the ability to put together grammatically correct sentences.

It certainly can’t have much otherwise to do with intellect or intelligence. Obama has said numerous things, which if uttered by Bush would have inspired lots of rolled eyeballs, snickers, and chuckling reports in the columns and broadcasts of mainstream media. Like the one the president has repeated on a number of occasions when pressed to investigate Bush and Cheney for war crimes, along the lines of “I prefer to look forward rather than backwards”. Picture a defendant before a judge asking to be found innocent on such grounds. It simply makes laws, law enforcement, crime, justice, and facts irrelevant.

There’s also the excuse given by Obama to not prosecute those engaged in torture: because they were following orders. Has this “educated” man never heard of the Nuremberg Trials, where this defense was summarily rejected? Forever, it was assumed.

Just 18 days before the Gulf oil spill Obama said: “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”¹ Picture George W. having said this, and the later reaction.

“All the forces that we’re seeing at work in Egypt are forces that naturally should be aligned with us, should be aligned with Israel,” Obama said in early March.² Imagine if Bush had implied this — that the Arab protesters in Egypt against a man receiving billions in US aid including the means to repress and torture them, should “naturally” be aligned with the United States and — God help us — Israel.

A week later, on March 10, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told a forum in Cambridge, Mass. that Wikileaks hero Bradley Manning’s treatment by the Defense Department in a Marine prison was “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid.” The next day our “brainy” president was asked about Crowley’s comment. Replied the Great Black Hope: “I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are.”

Right, George. I mean Barack. Bush should have asked Donald Rumsfeld whether anyone in US custody was being tortured anywhere in the world. He could then have held a news conference like Obama did to announce the happy news — “No torture by America!” We would still be chortling at that one.

Obama closed his remark with: “I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Pvt. Manning’s safety as well.”³

Ah yes, of course, Manning is being tortured for his own good. Someone please remind me — Did Georgieboy ever stoop to using that particular absurdity to excuse prisoner hell at Guantanamo?

Is it that Barack Obama is not bothered by the insult to Bradley Manning’s human rights, the daily wearing away of this brave young man’s mental stability?

The answer to the question is No. The president is not bothered by these things.

How do I know? Because Barack Obama is not bothered by anything as long as he can exult in being the president of the United States, eat his hamburgers, and play his basketball. Let me repeat once again what I first wrote in May 2009:

The problem, I’m increasingly afraid, is that the man doesn’t really believe strongly in anything, certainly not in controversial areas. He learned a long time ago how to take positions that avoid controversy, how to express opinions without clearly taking sides, how to talk eloquently without actually saying anything, how to leave his listeners’ heads filled with stirring clichés, platitudes, and slogans. And it worked. Oh how it worked! What could happen now, having reached the presidency of the United States, to induce him to change his style?

Remember that in his own book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Obama is a product of marketing. He is the prime example of the product “As seen on TV”.

Writer Sam Smith recently wrote that Obama is the most conservative Democratic president we’ve ever had. “In an earlier time, there would have been a name for him: Republican.”

Indeed, if John McCain had won the 2008 election, and then done everything that Obama has done in exactly the same way, liberals would be raging about such awful policies.

I believe that Barack Obama is one of the worst things that has ever happened to the American left. The millions of young people who jubilantly supported him in 2008, and numerous older supporters, will need a long recovery period before they’re ready to once again offer their idealism and their passion on the altar of political activism.

If you don’t like how things have turned out, next time find out exactly what your candidate means when he talks of “change”.

Dear Lord, please save us from the Holy Republican Empire

Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, John Boehner, and many other Republicans often find it difficult to speak about domestic or foreign issues without bringing religion into the picture. Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner, for example, in a recent talk at the National Religious Broadcasters conference stated that America’s national debt is a “moral hazard.” The Washington Post (March 5, 2011) reported, “Boehner made clear that this fiscal crisis requires people to get on their knees.”

Rep. Joe Barton of Texas justified his opposition to controlling greenhouse gases because “you can’t regulate God.”

Arizona Senator Jon Kyl accused Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid of “disrespecting one of the two holiest of holidays for Christians” for considering keeping Congress in session during Christmas.

Rep. Steve King of Iowa compared Democrats to Pontius Pilate, the ancient Roman official who sentenced Jesus to be crucified.⁴

And South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint recently declared that “the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets. … America works, freedom works, when people have that internal gyroscope that comes from a belief in God and Biblical faith. Once we push that out, you no longer have the capacity to live as a free person without the external controls of an authoritarian government. I’ve said it often and I believe it –– the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets. As people become more dependent on government, less dependent on God.”⁵

So, in a futile attempt to enlighten the likes of these esteemed Republican members of Congress, I feel obliged to point out the following:

On the 4th day of November 1796, a “Treaty of peace and friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and subjects of Tripoli, of Barbary” was concluded at Tripoli [Libya]. Article 11 of the treaty begins: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion … ” Be it further noted: Article VI, Section II, of the United States Constitution states: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The creed of America’s founders was neither Christianity nor secularism, but religious liberty.

After the terrorist attacks of 9-11, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”⁶

“With or without religion, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things — that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

The Bad Guys

I’ve written on many occasions about America’s ODE — Officially Designated Enemies: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hasan Nasrallah, Moammar Gaddafi, and others. Once the government of the United States of America makes it clear that an individual foreign leader is not one of the Good Guys, that he doesn’t believe that America is God’s gift to humankind, and that he is not willing to allow his country to become an obedient client state, the US mainstream media invariably picks up on this and goes out of its way to denigrate the individual at every opportunity. (If any reader knows of any exceptions to this rule I’d be interested in hearing from them.)

Juan Forero has long been a Latin American correspondent for the Washington Post. He’s also the same for National Public Radio. I used to send letters to the Post pointing out how Forero was distorting the facts each time he wrote about Hugo Chávez, errors of omission compounded with errors of commission. None were printed, so I began to send my missives directly to Forero. He once actually replied saying that he (sort of) agreed with me on the point I had raised and implied that he would try to avoid similar errors in the future. I actually detected some improvement after that for a short period, then it was back to usual. During the current unrest in Libya he wrote: “Chavez said it ‘was a great lie’ that Gaddafi’s forces had attacked civilians.”⁷

Well, how stupid can Hugo Chávez think the world is? We’ve all seen and read of Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians.

But it turns out that if you find the original Spanish you get a fuller and different picture. According to the United Press International (UPI) Spanish-language report, Chávez said that the fighting in Libya was a civil war and those who were attacked were thus not simply protestors or civilians; they were on the other side of the civil war; i.e., combatants.⁸

Al Jazeera in America

The uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have given a great boost to al Jazeera, the television network based in Doha, Qatar. Until recently Americans shied away from the station; it was just too easily associated with the Middle East and Muslims, which of course leads easily to thinking about terrorists and “terrorists”; and certainly any well-brought-up American knew that the station could not be as unbiased as CBS, CNN, NPR or Fox News. The station had reason to be paranoid about its office in the United States, land of ten million crazies (more than a few of them holding public office). It occupies six floors in a downtown Washington, DC office building, but its name doesn’t appear on the building directory.

But US mainstream media now quote al Jazeera English and show their news footage. Many progressives, including myself, have taken to watching the station in preference to US mainstream media. In general, the news is of more substance, the guests are mainly more or less progressive, and there are no commercials. However, the more I watch it the more I realize that the station’s presenters and correspondents are not necessarily as well imbued with the progressive perspective as they should be.

One case in point of many I could give: On March 12 al Jazeera correspondent Roger Wilkinson was reporting about the trial in Cuba of Alan Gross, the American arrested after he dispensed electronic equipment to Cuban citizens. Gross entered Cuba as a tourist but was actually there in behalf of Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), a private contractor working for the Agency for International Development (AID), a division of the State Department. Gross was thus a covert unregistered agent of a foreign government. Wilkinson reported this very controversial story with all the innocence and distortion of the US mainstream media. He mentioned in passing that the Cuban government tries to control the Internet. What can one conclude from that other than that Cuban officials want to hide certain information from its citizens? Just like the US mainstream media, Wilkinson gave no examples of any Internet sites blocked by the Cuban government; for the simple reason, perhaps, that there aren’t any. What is the terrible truth that Cubans might learn if they had full access to the Internet? Ironically, it’s the US government and US multinationals who impinge upon this access, for political reasons and by pricing their services beyond Cuba’s means. This is why Cuba and Venezuela are building their own undersea cable connection.

Wilkinson spoke of AID’s program of “democracy promotion”, but gave no hint that in the world of AID and the private organizations that contract with it — including Gross’s employer — this term is code for “regime change”. AID has long played a subversive role in world affairs. Here is John Gilligan, Director of AID during the Carter administration:

“At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”⁹

AID has been but one of many institutions employed by the United States for more than 50 years to subvert the Cuban revolution. It is because of this that we can formulate this equation: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to American government. Cuba’s laws dealing with activities typically carried out by the likes of AID and DAI reflect this history. It’s not paranoia. It’s self-preservation. In discussing a case like Alan Gross without considering this equation is a serious defect in journalism and political analysis.

Hopefully the Gross case will serve to temper the nature of US “democracy promotion” efforts in Cuba.

Washington’s policy — and therefore Britain’s policy — toward Cuba has always stemmed mainly from a desire to keep the island from becoming a good example for the Third World of an alternative to capitalism. But Western leaders actually do not, or do not dare, understand what can motivate people like the Cuban leaders and their followers. Here’s one of the Wikileaks US-Embassy cables, March 25, 2009 — William Hague, then-British Conservative MP and Shadow Foreign Secretary, giving the US embassy in London a report on his recent visit to Cuba: Hague “said that he was slightly surprised that the Cuban leadership did not appear to be moving toward more of a Chinese model of economic opening, but were rather still ‘romantic revolutionaries’.” In his conversation with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez “the discussion turned to political ideology, during which Hague commented that people in Britain were more interested in shopping than ideology.” [Oh dear, what a jolly good defense of the Western way of life. Rule Britannia! God Bless America!] Hague then reported that “Rodriguez appeared disdainful of the notion and said one needed shopping only to buy food and a few good books.”

Japan devastated by an earthquake and tsunami. America devastated by the profit motive.

Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s first Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, speaking of how the nuclear industry has learned from every previous nuclear accident or disaster: “It’s safer than working in a grocery store,” she said.

Whitman is now co-chairwoman of the nuclear industry’s Clean and Safe Energy Coalition.¹⁰

1. Washington Post, May 27, 2010.
2. March 4, 2011, Democratic Party function, Miami, FL, CQ Transcriptions.
3. Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2011.
4. For this and the previous two examples, see “Jim DeMint’s Theory Of Relativity: ‘The Bigger Government Gets, The Smaller God Gets’“, Think Progress, March 15, 2011.
5. Fox News Sunday, December 19, 2010.
6. Washington Post, September 19, 2001.
7. Washington Post, March 7, 2011.
8. UPI Reporte LatAm, March 4, 2011 (email me for the text).
9. George Cotter, “Spies, strings and missionaries”, The Christian Century (Chicago), March 25, 1981, p.321.
10. “Former EPA chief: Nuke crisis ‘a very good lesson‘,” Politico, March 14, 2011.

Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
(Nov 11 2010)

Muslim Americans are slowly beginning to make their mark on their conflicted society. There are more Muslims than Jews in the US now — approximately 5 million. They are the most diverse of all American believers, 35 per cent born in the US (25 per cent Afro-American), the rest — immigrants from southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Traditionally they have voted Republican, but have shifted to Democrat and Green parties in recent years.

Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is the son of black converts, raised in New York, a community organiser now environmental adviser to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. His book about Islam and the environment — Green Deen — is a stimulating overview of both the US environmental movement and how American Muslims are becoming part of it, bringing their own unique perspective.

Abdul-Matin sees the weakness of the environmental movement today in its secular, legalist approach to problems: pass enough laws and you can curb the negative practices of business and consumers, and push them along an environmentally-friendly path.

But this, as he shows here, is not enough. He interprets Islam’s focus on One Creator as giving “humankind the opportunity to be one and to have a common purpose”, to bring back ethical principles into our daily lives. He points to six principles which underlie Islam and shows how they relate to our relationship to the environment:

*understanding the Oneness of God and His creation (tawhid);

*seeing signs of God (ayat) everywhere;

*being a steward (khalifah) of the Earth;

*honouring the trust we have with God (amana) to be protectors of the planet;

*moving toward justice (adl); and

*living in balance with nature (mizan).

Deen or din, meaning religion in Arabic, is used in the Quran to refer both to the path along which righteous Muslims travel to comply with divine law (Sharia) and divine judgment or recompense, which all humanity must inevitably face — without intercessors — before God. The word probably derives from the Persian Zoroastrian concept Daena — insight, the Eternal Law. In Hebrew din means law or judgment. In Islam, the word implies an all-encompassing way of life lived in accordance with God’s divine purpose as expressed in the Quran and hadith.

The author recalls a moving childhood experience, hiking on Bear Mountain near New York, his first time in the wilds. He watched as his father cleared a spot in the forest to pray, explaining to him, “The Earth is a mosque.” He considered other religions as a youth but reaffirmed his father’s decision to follow the deen, “a living tradition that is spiritually nourishing and intellectually coherent”.

For Abdul-Matin, there is no conflict between religion and science – - humans are the best of God’s creation, and, as stewards blessed with intelligence and reason, have a responsibility towards the rest of God’s creation. He points to the verse, “Corruption has appeared on the land and in the sea because of what the hands of humans have wrought,” as proof that God warned people about their possible harmful impact on the planet, “a taste of the consequences of their misdeeds that perhaps they will turn to the path of right guidance”. (Quran 30:41) In this sura, The Romans, God warns humanity not to disturb the balance of Nature.

Green Deen is a refreshing mix of theory and practice. Concern for mizan translates as: “Where does your trash come from? Where does it go? How can you be actively involved in making the world a cleaner, less toxic place?”

Ayat are everywhere: “He has made subject to you the sun and the moon, both diligently following their courses; and the Night and the Day.” (Quran 14:32-3) While a hardnosed scientist might dismiss this as poetic license, the author interprets these ayat as indeed serving us every day, allowing us to travel, giving us heat and light, time to sleep and time to work. “To everything there is a season” is Ecclesiastes’ expression of this truth.

Stop using “energy from hell” — coal and oil, the latter associated with today’s wars, both devastating in their ecological footprint, and betraying both khalifa and amana. Use “energy from heaven” — solar power, wind energy. He could have mentioned woodchips, which can be burned efficiently and are bi-products, “waste”, from manufacture. (For a khalifah, there is no such thing as waste).

For someone with a more secular worldview, all this is still very relevant. In the past two centuries, science has reduced to the lifeless pursuit of technology. There is no poetry in this, only money and novelty. It is the very poetry of the Quran, this quaintness of the belief that Nature was made subject to humans, that is what is necessary for leading us to any change towards reincorporating morality into our lives, whether religious or secular, given our disconnect with Nature.

The author gives a brief overview of the development of ecological awareness, starting with the conservation president Theodore Roosevelt, who in some sense recognised his role as khalifah, and set up the system of national parks at the beginning of the twentieth century, making humans’ relationship to Nature part of America’s political dialogue. The next step forward was not until the 1950s, when the American Dream, which captured the world’s imagination, was accompanied by a sudden sharp decline in bird populations and an equally sharp rise in cancer rates.

The realisation that growth was not without “external economies” started a popular movement to regulate toxic chemicals. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement empowered marginalised communities to build on this foundation. Now, the generalised problem of global warming demands that everyone should transform their lifestyles, as we are all “marginalised” communities now.

These developments reflect the six principles of a Green Deen. “The environmental movement can be seen as an attempt to restore balance and justice to the Earth after the environmental destruction caused by overconsumption,” itself the result of an obsession with creating, producing, finding self-worth in consuming.

This is the heart of the problem for the author, a result of our 20th- century economic systems — both capitalist and socialist, the author claims — which reduce us to units of production. “We become relevant only by what we can create.” In contrast, Islam teaches that “we come with intrinsic value. We are also an ayat of Allah” and “do not need to consume or create to have worth.”

***

The author’s analysis breaks down at this point. He is limited in what he can say, given American biases. Damning socialism along with capitalism is a typical American cop-out, but socialism was the secular attempt to reintroduce morality into the economy, to fulfill the six principles that underlie Islam — minus God.

Socialism never had the chance to deal with the dilemma of over-consumption; the system, as identified with the Soviet Union, never had the luxury of luxury, always fighting for survival in the face of the more powerful capitalist world. Cuba is the only remnant of that socialist experiment and has a much better environmental record than the West. Abdul-Matin makes no mention of its secular attempts to find mizan though they are encouraging and follow his by now standard recommendations: urban market gardens, solar energy, bicycling and walking, but above all, making do with less.

Islam has a lot in common with socialism, a comparison Abdul- Matin implicitly makes in the principle of adl — social justice. Umm Kholthum boldly referred to the Prophet Mohamed as “the imam of socialism”. The Prophet’s wife Aisha related that, “He himself removed the lice from his clothing, milked his goats, and did all his work himself.” No need to exploit others to fulfill your needs.

The author can’t hide his own socialist leanings entirely — green jobs (minimising inputs, producing durable, environmentally friendly outputs) must be linked to adl – justice and equality — or they will just perpetuate the current inequalities. Water should not be sold for profit. The famous hadith about Uthman buying the Ruma Well and making it waste-free, responding to the Prophet’s call, is recounted.

The author also skirts around the issue of neocolonialism, considering the colonies liberated in the 20th century as “postcolonial”, though suffering from the “economic control of large corporations”. More tip-toeing through the US ideological minefield: America as the imperial ogre, the big waster, wreaking havoc around the world, does not make an appearance. Nor does the world’s worst polluter — the US military. Watch Avatar, set far into the future, to see that there is nothing “post” about so-called post-colonialism.

Traditional societies were not over-consumers. Their no-brainer philosophy was Eat in order to live, not Live in order to eat, as we do today. The Western disdain for the “primitive” inherently dismisses their natural wisdom.

Abdul-Matin’s defence of Islam implicitly asserts this wisdom, which is not unique to Islam. However, due to Islam’s care to conserve the original message of 15 centuries ago, it has not been erased, as it has from the other monotheisms, so successfully incorporated into the modern world. He provides a fascinating example of how Islam can be practised in the modern world in new ways. A Muslim community in Chiapas, Mexico lives off the grid, with organic farms, few cars, solar panels made of scrap metal, sun-drying their fruit. They have rediscovered how relevant “backward” ways of living are to today’s needs, giving “civilisation” a new meaning.

The root of the problem is not just over-consumption, but the colonisation of the world, which destroyed — and destroys — cultures based on religion with its moral truths and respect for nature. Instead of “What is a just price?” the question is “What can I get away with?” This negative freedom (freedom to do anything subject to constraints) has taken the place of positive freedom (freedom as defined by an understanding and willingness to follow a path in accord with divine law), as embodied in religion.

The various stages in environmental awareness in the West have tried to overcome this by regulations, the result of popular resistance — both community- and religious-based movements. The next step forward, according to the author, is an environmental justice movement, which he says is slowly coming about “as a response to the disconnection between people and planet” and which must incorporate the principles he outlines.

The author enthuses about the “smart grid” and other self-regulating systems, which use computer monitoring and feedback to adjust the various components in environmental systems (temperature, air quality, energy use) given the situation and needs. That is all well and good. But aren’t we still just consumers, even if more careful about our footprints?

The author’s intrinsic bias is still lifestyle-related: consume responsibly, but consume. Don’t rock the boat. Nowhere does the author address the economic mechanism that lies behind colonialism and its tendency to over-consume — the maximizing of the surplus we produce, profits — whether or not we need this material excess. As long as we put profit on a pedestal, we are slaves to the destructive logic undermining the ecological balance.

“Let there be no change in the work wrought by Allah: that is the true Religion. But most among mankind understand not.” (Quran 30:30) That ayat calls for us to minimise the surplus we extract from Nature in the form of profits. “Leave well enough alone.” As scientists of the economy and Nature do, we should maximise something worthwhile, like efficiency of production, green jobs, renewable energy use, clean air. In his care not to tread on capitalist-crazed American toes, the author misses the startling and highly relevant insight that Islam has for us: to seek balance, minimise consumption.

That is the hidden truth here, for both Muslims and non-Muslims, religious and secular minds alike. We are witnessing today environmental heedlessness in Westernised Muslim societies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. In Cairo the choking exhaust fumes, the casually disposed-of garbage on streets, the unthinking use and discarding of “free” plastic bags, the misuse of water — this behaviour surprises foreigners, already more “environmentally aware”. Sadly, Muslims are today “catching up” in the negative sense.

By abandoning socialism, embracing Western neoliberalism, Egypt lost what little (socialist, anti-imperialist) morality there was that held society together, morality which found deep and heart-felt response in the common people. True, Egypt’s socialist experiment was flawed. It suffered from paranoia — how to maintain power in the face of both Western Cold War intrigues and the difficulty of incorporating the greater truths of Islam in a largely secular movement — which eventually defeated it. There was no easy path to tread. Socialism’s professed secular nature was a stumbling block that eventually brought it down.

Perhaps the new awareness Abdul-Matin points to, sparked by the environmental movement in the West, will indeed find inspiration in Islam; and East and West will work together to revive the patient. A similar coming-together of activists in the West and the Muslim world is now trying to cure the other poison infecting the Middle East — Israel’s refusal to come to its senses and make peace with its neighbours. Westerners concerned with adl are finding eager allies in Muslims, who need no convincing about the evils of colonialism when it comes to Greater Israel. For both East and West, realising that the mentality behind colonialism also lies behind the ecological crisis is the real next step forward.

The author imagines another electricity blackout as happened most recently in 2003, and imagines houses of worship off the grid, “shining beacons of light in a sea of darkness”.]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/ecology-and-islam-review-of-abdul-matins-green-deen-2010/feed/ 3 http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/12/more-on-haitis-raging-cholera-electoral-fraud-and-deportations/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/12/more-on-haitis-raging-cholera-electoral-fraud-and-deportations/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:00:01 +0000 Stephen Lendman http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=26914 Haitians remain plagued by a perfect storm combination of earthquake devastation, crushing poverty, raging cholera, electoral fraud, exploitation, persecution, Obama-ordered deportations, and world indifference to their plight, with few exceptions like Cuba and Venezuela.

Post-quake, their aid was some of the first to arrive. After cholera struck, Chavez sent a Ministry of Health team with medications, intravenous drips and rehydration tablets. He promised more as needed for “our Haitian brothers and sisters (exploited) by savage capitalism and imperialism.”

Since 1998, Cuba’s had hundreds of doctors, nurses, and other medical specialists in Haiti to help. Post-quake, it sent more, and after cholera struck, more still with supplies to set up new facilities and deliver heroic services under the most adverse conditions, including in hard to reach rural areas.

Dr. Lorenzo Somarriba, Cuba’s Medical Brigade (BMC) coordinator, said the team numbers 908, including Cuban-trained professionals from 19 other countries, mostly Latin American, Carribbean and African ones, serving with its own staff. Included are doctors, nurses, technicians and logistics experts. They speak Creole, know the terrain, provide more aid than other nations by far, and stand ready to send more as needed.

On December 16, Granma International’s Juan Diego Nusa Penalver headlined, “Cuban volunteers establish important cholera treatment center,” saying:

“In record time,” Cuba’s BMC established a 100-bed treatment center in Carrefour for its 400,000 residents, 20 km from Port-au-Prince. Its “comprehensive cholera treatment areas” have 32 doctors and staff. In tents, 38 units are operating. “(H)ospitals adapted to confront the disease….which through December 12 had treated 34,309 patients” with a mortality rate of 0.75%.

In total, Cuba plans 20 Treatment Centers throughout the country, including in Mirebalais, Hinche, Saut-d’eau, L’Estere, Plateau-du-Nord, Belladere, Plaisance and Carrefour. “Work is (also) underway to find space and mount an additional 11 facilities of this type….The philosophy of unity (is committed) to defeat an enemy as powerful as cholera….”

On December 19, Granma said additional medical team members arrived, increasing the total to 1,160, including 62 from the Henry Reeve International Contingent for Emergency Situations in Disasters and Epidemics.

Official reports say over 2,500 died. Another 115,000 are ill. According to Operational Biosurveillance, these figures way understate the problem by a factor of four. A recent update said:

In many areas of Haiti, we are documenting outbreaks that are not being accounted for in the official statistics. We therefore estimate the upper bound of estimated total (subclinical and clinically apparent) case counts to be one million. From a practical operations point of view, these estimates are academic, and we….believe (a more accurate total is) closer to 500,000….The bottom line is the epidemic continues to spread without restraint.

In addition, infected health care workers have been reported, and “more cases (are expected) in the United States. We (already) believe it likely (that) more cases are inside the US unreported. Implications for the United States are non-significant,” given the ability to treat them.

On December 15, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its 4,000 Haitian staff and 315 international employees treated 62,000 patients, continues to treat another 2,000 daily, and increased its mission in Northern and Southern areas. While some locations have stabilized, others show continued spread, including in Northern cities and rural locations. “Despite the significant logistical challenges involved in reaching isolated parts of both departments, MSF teams are expanding the number of units, treatment centers, and rehydration points in both areas.”

“Meanwhile, the epidemic has (also) increased sharply in the South.” New facilities were set up in Pignon, St. Raphael, Ranquitte (Nord), Gaspard (Nord Ouest), and Jeremie (Grande Anse). “However, as the epidemic continues to spread, the response by local and international organizations remains inadequate.”

Resolving Haiti’s Electoral Fraud Delayed

On December 18, AP reporter Jonathan Katz headlined, “Haiti election results could be delayed for weeks,” saying:

OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza “asked (Preval) to delay announcing election results until an international panel of experts can review the vote, officials said Saturday.” However, “the panel of up to five electoral, legal and information-technology experts has not even been formed, and waiting for its review could drag into the new year….Preval’s office could not be reached for comment….”

On December 20, Al Jazeera headlined, “Haiti poll results delay rued,” saying:

“The proposed delay….has been met with fierce criticism from some of the candidates. (Haiti’s electoral commission) plans a recount of tally sheets in the presence of the three main candidates, although” first place winner Mirlande Manigat and third place one Marcel Martelly won’t participate.

Final results were due out December 20. Most candidates, including Martelly, want the fraudulent election re-held with all 19 candidates participating. Washington, Preval and the OAS may be delaying to “run out the clock,” defuse public anger, and show only token recount changes to legitimize a bogus process.

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) said disputed results will be rapidly reviewed. Rapidity is now delay. In addition, disgruntled candidates got until December 15 to appeal. Verification of preliminary results hasn’t happened. On December 14, the OAS/CARICOM (MOEC) Joint Electoral Observation Mission learned that establishing the commission was postponed.

On December 19, a CEP statement said:

Until the end of the litigation stage of the electoral process, the arrival and the completion of the work of an expert mission to the OAS….the PRC has decided to postpone the publication of final results of the first round. No new date (was) specified. However, depending on what we have learned, Opont Pierre Louis, the Director General of the PRC, reportedly (said) ‘we gather on (December 20) to fix a new date. A date that is safe and good for the country.’

Perhaps so for its oligarchy, Obama officials and complicit OAS/UN functionaries. Not at all for ordinary Haitians to be exploited, left out, betrayed, and bludgeoned if they complain.

Obama Orders Diaspora Haitians Deported

Announced earlier in December, The New York Times noticed on December 19 in Kirk Semple’s article headlined, “Haitians in US Brace for Deportations to Resume,” saying:

“The Obama administration has been quietly moving to resume deportations of Haitians for the first time since” the January quake. US diaspora ones aren’t amused, saying “an influx of deportees will only add to the country’s woes,” never mind the injustice.

After Congress established Temporary Protection Status (TPS) in 1990, Washington granted 260,000 Salvadorans, 82,000 Hondurans, and 5,000 Nicaraguans protection, then extended it on October 1, 2008. It lets the Attorney General grant TPS to undocumented residents unable to return home because of armed conflict, natural disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

Past recipients also included Kuwait, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Montserrat, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Angola. Haitians never got it, yet granting it is the simplest, least expensive form of aid so Port-au-Prince can concentrate on its crisis, while diaspora Hatians help through remittances back home.

No matter. In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began rounding up Haitian immigrants ahead of resuming deportations in mid-January. According to ICE spokeswoman, Barbara Gonzales, only those convicted of felonies or two or more misdemeanors, who’ve served their sentences, will be affected, “consistent with our domestic immigration enforcement priorities.”

Founded in 1996 in Haiti, Alternative Chance is “a self-help peer counseling program….challeng(ing) the injustice of US immigration policies and assist(ing) immigration attorneys in fighting against deportation.”

On December 16, it expressed shock about announced deportations. Pre-quake, it saw firsthand how criminal deportees are treated “in Haiti’s DCPJ police administrative building and in other police stations or prisons in and around” Port-au-Prince. Uncharged in Haiti, “their detention is illegal under Haitian law and international standards.”

Yet, in grossly overcrowded conditions, they’re denied “due process, a release date or an attorney.” Many may face indefinite detention for months, in 24-hour lockups, without “food, treated drinking water, medical or mental health care.” They have no toilets, sinks, lighting, or room to lie down. Instead, they “must lay directly on insect, rat infested cement floors” in sweltering heat.

Post-quake, conditions are even worse. No matter. Washington-ordered deportations will resume. In a December 16 letter to Obama, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) also objected after 100 Haitians got final orders, were rounded up, and transferred to Louisiana. Outraged, CCR said:

“Sending people to Haiti under these circumstances will end up being a death sentence for many. Sending additional people from the US into the Haitian prison system will also further stress the resources available to the impoverished” already there.

CCR wants deportations halted on humanitarian grounds. Since taking office in January 2009, Obama officials showed Haitians no compassion, in spite of dire post-quake conditions, raging cholera, and the aftermath of the fraudulent election they engineered.

Contemptuously, they now want minor offenders returned to hellish conditions so bad it may kill them. It’s a shocking indictment of a criminally unjust administration, planning anguish, human misery and exploitation, not aid, for desperately needy people. Mass outrage is needed to stop them. The lives and welfare of everyone sent back are at stake.

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.

Marxism is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation.

— Lenin

On September 13, 2010 the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) – the mass trade-union organization that is a central component and pillar of the Cuban workers’ state and the revolutionary government headed by Raul Castro – issued an announcement which codified and specified new measures and significant changes in economic, financial, and commercial policies that will be implemented in Cuba over the coming months and years. These new economic policies have been long-debated and broadly discussed inside Cuba from local grass-roots mass organizations and work places to the highest levels of government and state. They come as a surprise to no one in Cuba.

We can expect these measures to be implemented prudently, deliberately, transparently and over time without the slightest sense of panic, extremism, or adventurism. Their purpose is to develop, modernize technologically, and industrialize Cuba’s economy and bolster its finances in order to preserve and strengthen Cuba’s workers’ state and socialist revolution in the concrete objective domestic and international situation it faces. They signal that correcting Cuba’s economic weaknesses, imbalances, inefficiencies, and low labor productivity can be put off no longer. At the center of the measures is a radical reduction in the number of Cubans employed in state and government bureaucracies, some 500,000 in the coming months and year.

Propaganda Campaign Against Socialism

The Cuban announcement sparked a one-note campaign in the US and internationally presenting these measures as “capitalist” and “free market” and more confirmation of the “failure” of “socialism” in general and “Cuban socialism” in particular. (It should be added that this bourgeois propaganda campaign has been pathetically complemented by a layer of ultra-left sectarians, most of whom were already hostile to the Cuban Revolution and its historic leadership, who assert these measures are a “sellout” or “capitulation” to “capitalism.”)

It would certainly be a boon for capitalist propaganda if the revolutionary government of Cuba were indeed throwing in the towel, particularly at a time when the world capitalist system is at the opening stages of its greatest structural crisis since the so-called “Great Depression” of the 1930s. But the opposite is the truth.

The measures announced in Cuba were presented in the international big-business press as analogous to the harsh austerity measures that are being carried out – at varying paces and degrees and with mounting working-class resistance – in the advanced capitalist countries by conservative, liberal, and social-democratic governments. Under the guise of resolving government “deficits” these include large-scale layoffs in the “public sector” complementing mass unemployment in the “private sector;” cuts in social services and benefits in health care, education, child and family support; and attacks on pensions and unemployment benefits.

None of this has anything in common with the new policies unfolding in Cuba. There will be in Cuba no growth of mass unemployment – or as Marx put it a “reserve army of labor” that suppresses the cost of labor power for capitalist employers – and the subsequent growth of poverty and destitution as is now becoming the norm in all of the advanced capitalist economies not to speak of dependent “Third World” capitalist economies. Individuals let go from redundant, unproductive state and government positions will be able to return to university or technical schools for specialized training, with wage support, for new jobs in addition to those choosing to be self-employed, or join newly established co-operatives. Savings from the reductions in state expenses and budgets will go to preserve social services, modernize and improve free medical care and education, and so on. Cuba’s advances in implementing these measures and confronting its serious economic weaknesses is deeply in the interests of the world working class and is in reality a great aid in the developing struggles against capitalist austerity worldwide.

Washington’s 50-year-old economic and political war to subvert and overturn the Cuban Revolution continues under the Barack Obama Administration. Cuba needs time and space to continue to hold out until new revolutionary triumphs of workers and peasants, new socialist revolutions occur out of the mounting long-term world capitalist depression that first burst into the open in 2008. To do so and not be swamped and drowned under the weight of economic stagnation and obstacles, Cuba must raise its level of labor productivity which also means it must increase the size of the agricultural and industrial proletariat. Cuba needs more industrial workers and farmers and less government officials and bureaucrats. The Cuban workers state needs to reduce the size of its government bureaucracy. Entrenched privileged state and government bureaucracy is also the main source and mass base of any potential capitalist restoration in a workers’ state, not particularly the small layers of “proprietors” that are likely to emerge in Cuba in the coming years.

What the revolutionary government in Cuba is attempting to consciously and deliberately implement is a process that will lead to the numerical growth, social expansion, growing political weight of industrial workers, agricultural workers, and working farmers – private-family and cooperative . This will be greater than the inevitable rise in petty-bourgeois layers involved in retail services, brokerage, and speculation. These class demographic changes will emerge out of the accompanying decline (a good thing!) in the numbers of bureaucrats in state institutions and enterprises whose official jobs breed demoralization insofar as they register nonproductive activity which, in the framework of scarcity and economic pressure,  can foster corruption and thievery.

The concomitant growth of petty bourgeois layers will undoubtedly foster relative social inequality, but, of course, this has been happening and reproducing anyway in the form of the so-called “black market” and illegal economic activity unregulated by the workers’ state. And if labor productivity and the social surplus product increases, within the framework of the workers state, the material basis (and also the political basis) for advancing social equality will also advance. Increases in labor productivity and a radical expansion in agricultural output will allow for large savings in foreign exchange currency that can then be used for industrialization and the “light industry” production of consumers products and quality services.

Cuba is a Workers’ State

Cuba’s political economy will continue to be guided by rational, economic planning to which commodity and exchange “markets” will be strictly subordinate and which will be mediated and creatively guided by increasingly democratic mass participation, most importantly by the expanding Cuban working class organized in the CTC, and less by rigid bureaucratic “models.” It is no accident that it was the CTC that made the initial announcement about the scale and scope of the slashing of government functionaries and the restructuring goals and policies.

Cuba’s banks will continue to be the property of the workers’ state. Cuba’s international trade will continue to be solely mediated by organs and institutions of the workers’ state. There will thus be a state monopoly of foreign trade, one of the fundamental characteristics and criteria in the origins and character of a workers’ state. (Others include the destruction of the previous capitalist state’s police, military, and juridical institutions; the nationalization of the major industrial means of production and finance; the establishment of new social and economic relations that obviates the existence and reproduction of a modern bourgeoisie or capitalist class; and the primacy of conscious planning and cooperation for human needs within the new state over the profit-seeking dynamics and mechanism of the capitalist market and competition.)

The foreign trade monopoly is of decisive importance, or as stated by V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, “in the present epoch of imperialism the only system of protection worthy of consideration is the monopoly of foreign trade.”¹

While private foreign capitalists will be able to invest capital and make a profit in partnership with Cuban state firms, they will be subject to Cuban social relations that have been forged by fifty years of socialist revolution and which are dominated by the interests and political weight of workers and farmers. The problem at hand, however, is not the solidarity of Cuba’s marvelous social relations compared to the atomized, every-man-for-himself fostering of privilege and submission in capitalist societies but increasing labor productivity, industrialization, and modernization. Clearly bureaucratism, waste, corruption, and theft of social property are in Cuba today the greatest threat to the social relations forged out of the Cuban Revolution.

Lenin put it like this in the last year of his active political life as he struggled to reorient and rebuild the economy and finances of the young Soviet republic after the devastation and ruin of the 1918-1921 civil war and imperialist interventions. This included strong efforts to attract foreign capital and business deals with capitalist firms and states. “The capitalists are operating alongside us,” Lenin spoke. “They are operating like robbers; they make profit; but they know how to do things. But you – you are trying to do it in a new way; you make no profit, your principles are communist; your ideals are splendid; they are written out so beautifully that you seem to be saints, that you should go to heaven while you are still alive. But can you get things done?”²

The challenge for Cuban “business people” – the agents of the workers’ state – will be to negotiate the deals and contracts that are mutually beneficial to the Cuban economy and the representatives of foreign capital. This requires cadre with particular revolutionary qualities, including a steel disposition, political consciousness, and diplomatic personality skills to carry out such tasks and remain uncorrupted.

As Fidel Castro put it in the November 2005 speech:

Some of our businessmen make million dollar deals, and the fine art of corruption as it is practiced in capitalist circles is as subtle as a serpent and worse than a rat. They will anesthetize you while you are being ‘bitten’ and it can rip off a hunk of flesh in the middle of the night.  This was the way the Revolution was being put to sleep so that a piece of flesh could then be ripped away. In a few cases, corruption was out in the open.  Many knew about its existence, or they suspected it, when they observed the life-style changes the new car, the house being redecorated, adding little decorative touches here and there because of pure vanity.  We have heard such stories time and time again, and measures must be taken even though it will not be resolved easily.

In no way will the proposed restructuring foster the formation of a Cuban national capitalist bourgeoisie, although it is certain and inevitable that there will be an expansion of petty-bourgeois layers in Cuban society which may coagulate into a political opposition to the socialist Cuban government with a real social base inside the country, as opposed to the pathetic current gang of so-called “dissidents” that are appendages of the US government. But this is by no means certain or inevitable. It depends on many national, and especially international, political factors, first and foremost the coming big developments in world politics – depression, war, and revolution. In any case, this is a risk that must be accepted and struggled against consciously and intelligently.

The expansion of “self-employment”

Clearly the revolutionary government has concluded that traditional “services” such as shoe repairers, barbers and beauticians, plumbers and myriad other small scale operations are not now – if they ever were – most productive and efficient as a category of central economic planning. Such essentially retail functions which are voluminous but atomized in society become a burden and an obstacle to increasing labor productivity and may be more useful as a category of self-employment or co-operative arrangements autonomous or independent from central government planning and direction and subject to taxation. The logic of this measure is underlined when the existence of the extant and widespread “black market” in Cuba – by definition private, unregulated, untaxed, and having a parasitical relation to a “state property” – is recognized. It is better for this reality – which objective material conditions do not allow to be transcended – to be legal, transparent, above board, and revenue-producing, that is, taxable for the workers’ state and the social needs of Cuban society.

Expansion of retail operations, small merchants and peddlers, and self-employed services are not the same thing as capitalist commodity production. Any expansion of small-scale private retail consumer goods sales and services will not be supplied directly by capitalist manufacturing but by enterprises owned or controlled by the Cuban workers’ state. Any such private “businesses” will not be able to transition their monetary wealth into private ownership and financing of means of production. The Cuban State Bank is, as part of the new economic policies, studying and discussing, with the purpose of formulating rules, policies for loans to the small businesses that are going to be established.

The main question and problem for the still-underdeveloped, still far from adequately industrialized Cuban workers’ state – literally an island of the dictatorship of the proletariat in an ocean of the dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeoisie – is not the individual, family, or co-operative that repairs your shoe, cuts your hair, fixes your leaking roof, or paints your house. On the contrary, it is producing in factories with financing, raw materials, modern machinery, and a skilled, trained industrial working class that can actually make the shoes, utensils, roofing materials, and paint in the first place.

Attractive restaurants with good food are fine (and I’ve been to quite a few very nice ones, both family-run and “public” in Havana) and nothing in Marxist theory or revolutionary practice mandates the “nationalization” of small businesses, private professional services or retail operation in principle.

It should also be pointed out that, under conditions of monopoly capitalism in the United States and other advanced capitalist societies, more and more of these small “family service businesses” are subsumed by large-scale corporate chains. “Mom and Pop” retail operations may start to flourish in “communist” Cuba even as giant chains and national brands make them, under monopoly capitalism, a dying breed in the United States.

From the point of view of the political power of the working class, these petty bourgeois, normally capitalist-aspiring layers can be won as potential allies to a regime where industrial and agricultural producers dominate. Like the overwhelming majority of Cubans, many incorporating these layers that will expand are imbued with a patriotic and anti-imperialist consciousness and the understanding that it was Cuba’s socialist revolution that conquered and has defended genuine national independence and social dignity for the Cuban people. But this is a political question and – again – for a Marxist must be viewed concretely.

The real question here is whether the Cuban workers’ state is better off with bloated government payrolls stacked with people doing no productive labor and of very little use or value to anyone, or by releasing those layers into production and service where they can learn skills, even if working in a joint venture or private business that can raise the productivity of labor in Cuba. Is it better for the workers’ state to have workers engaged in productive labor — that is, engineering, constructing, manufacturing, and transporting means of production, infrastructure, items for consumption, or retail services to meet the pent-up needs and demands of the Cuban working people — or to retain government officials whose “jobs” are increasingly parasitic (and thereby demoralizing to the people involved) even if this means working in a joint venture with foreign capital or even a private enterprise?

Is it better to have more employed, productive workers and less government officials and bureaucrats even if it means having a larger layer of “proprietors” and other petty-bourgeois elements? Who is more useful, who contributes more to the Cuban workers’ state and Cuban society: a new family farmer, self-employed plumber, or member of a barber’s cooperative on the one hand, or the Assistant to the Assistant in Charge of Blah-Blah-Blah in the Ministry of God-Knows-What on the other? Cuban working-class public opinion is fed up with a reality where work needs to be done and, despite scarcity of resources, can be done, but is bottled up by bureaucracy, waste, and the theft of state resources.

In any case, and again contrary to the spin in capitalist media outlets, public or state property in industry will not be weakened but strengthened, and the controls of the Cuban workers’ state and Cuba’s highly progressive labor laws, will be fully applicable to any “joint” enterprises established in negotiations with private capital. What is most useful and progressive socially for Cuba is to create more machinists, millwrights, lathe operators, steelworkers, railroad workers, carpenters, and so on.

The absorption of the projected 500,000-person reduction in state bureaucracy will not be – as implied by all the nonsense being written – primarily via the category of self-employment; that is, in retail sales and exchange of goods and services. Certainly there will be space opened up –- and there is nothing “wrong” with this from the standpoint of state power firmly in the hands of the working class and peasantry –- of small business owners, primarily in retail sales and services. But it should be emphasized that many of these operations and services will have forms other than family businesses, mainly co-operatives.

The key mode here for the foreseeable future will be the management by the Cuban government, unions, and farmers’ organizations of a process that will necessarily involve both centralization on the so-called macro scale, and decentralization on a so-called micro scale.

The “revolutionary offensive” of 1968

Most private retail operations and private professional services were “nationalized” in Cuba in 1968 under the so-called “revolutionary offensive” The context for the “revolutionary offensive” was the defeat of Ernesto Che Guevara’s attempts, carrying out the strategic line of the Cuban Revolution and government, to organize a continental revolutionary battleground and army in Latin America, and the developing rout of the revolutionary guerrilla forces in other countries. Cuba was thoroughly isolated in Latin America and the Caribbean; only Mexico maintained diplomatic relations with it. Reactionary oligarchic regimes backed to the hilt by Washington dominated the continent and would for more than a generation.

Economic problems on the island were mounting. An effort to lessen dependence on the Soviet Union led to a huge effort to produce 10 million tons of sugar. The labor mobilizations involved cause severe disruptions in other economic sectors and the effort eventually fell short by nearly 2 million tons. In this context the revolutionary government was clearly worried about the existence of points of support for US-backed counter-revolutionary forces and aggression.

There is in 2010 a very different objective and subjective reality. US imperialism is much weaker politically and no longer able to dictate and control politics and economics in its Latin American “backyard.” Cuba has normal, good, or excellent relations, and growing economic ties, with virtually every Latin American and Caribbean country.

Genesis of the Cuban Economic Crisis

It is certainly no secret that revolutionary Cuba has been in a permanent structural economic and financial crisis within which concrete advances and setbacks have unfolded since the late 1980s and early 1990s. The onset of this crisis – known in Cuba as the “Special Period” – was catalyzed by the collapse of the ruling governments in the former Soviet Union and its allied Eastern European states from 1989 to 1991.

Insofar as Cuba had carried out some 85% of its economic exchange with these regimes, the so-called “socialist camp,” the impact of what was, in effect, an overnight amputation of the overwhelming majority of its previous economic relationships was drastic and devastating for the Cuban economy and population. Almost instantly a dynamic of severe economic retraction unfolded that reached around 35%, perhaps over double that of what is referred to as the Great Depression in the United States. At one point the Cuban currency was so debased that the US dollar was the functional currency for the country.

It was taken for granted by Cuba’s powerful enemies in Washington, its former ruling classes exiled in Miami and the US, the Latin American reactionary oligarchies, and even many sympathizers and friends of Cuba that the revolutionary government could not possibly survive such overwhelming material blows. Washington, of course, moved in for the kill. Under the first George Bush and then expanded under the Democratic William Clinton Administration, the US economic and political war against the island was intensified. The passage of the notorious Torricelli and Helms-Burton legislation attempted to implement a de facto international economic blockade against the Cuban workers’ state.

Under these concrete conditions Cuba and its revolutionary government had no choice but to develop and forge economic and commercial relations and exchange within world capital markets and legal mechanisms utterly dominated by the advanced capitalist countries, and with capitalist states, private firms and enterprises, pursuing whatever openings it could in the face of US hostility.

Fidel Castro described what Cuba faced with the Special Period in a landmark speech at the University of Havana in November 2005, a speech which was the template for the extensive debates and discussions in Cuban society that culminated in the new economic policies now being implemented:

[We] had been left without oil overnight, with no raw materials, no food, no cleaning products, nothing…the country suffered a shattering blow when overnight [the Soviet Union] fell and we were left alone, all on our own, and we lost all the markets on which to sell our sugar and we stopped getting supplies, fuel, even the wood with which to give a Christian burial to our dead. And everyone thought: ‘This will fall apart’, and the idiots still believe that it is all going to fall apart here and that if it doesn’t fall apart now it will fall apart later.

The Cuban working people, defending the revolution and social relations deeply rooted in their unity and consciousness, clawed their way to survival and a certain stability and progress through wrenching adaptations and flexibility. Most amazingly this was done without in the slightest compromising on fundamental revolutionary principles and in particular maintaining a revolutionary internationalist foreign policy based on solidarity.

Among the measures adopted by the Cuban government, then led by Fidel Castro, at the origins of the Special Period, were great efforts to find and secure capital to rebuild the tourism industry and other economic projects, which were done in partnership with various foreign capitalist firms. This large expansion of tourism – which involved huge investment in the construction and fitting of hotels and other accompanying tourism infrastructure – was successfully carried out and soon began to bring in significant amounts of so-called hard currencies; that is, the foreign exchange that was used to maintain, among other priorities, Cuba’s excellent – and free – health care and education systems. Some private commercial activity, particularly in the sales of agricultural output, including through brokeraging, became legal and contributed to relative agricultural advances from a deep depression marked by a great scarcity of farm implements, machinery, fertilizer, and chemicals.

All of these necessary measures increased social inequality, speculation, and street hustling and were never idealized by the Cuban government. Previously eradicated social problems, such as prostitution, reappeared, not in the traditional pre-revolution large-scale business of organized crime, with pimps, brothels, and a flourishing commercial sex industry, but individual Cuban women catering to tourists to get cash.

Nevertheless the measures prevented a total economic collapse and the social dislocation – the goal of Washington’s blockade policies – including famine, which would have created the conditions for direct US military aggression and the final, violent destruction of the Revolution.

By the mid-1990s the Cuban economy as a whole began to revive as new economic partnerships developed. Among the most important were with China. Further crucial advances occurred as a result of Cuba’s political and diplomatic campaigns in Latin America and the growing atmosphere of solidarity that made possible increased economic ties with Latin American and Caribbean countries. In particular, the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, registering a growing class-conscious militancy among Venezuelan working people, led to strong and growing economic ties between Cuba and Venezuela.

Following the mass mobilizations in Venezuela that defeated pro-imperialist coup attempts in 2002 and 2003, large numbers of Cuban doctors, other medical workers, and teachers volunteered for work in Venezuela leading to great advances in access to medical care and education for working people there. Venezuelan oil and energy exports and expertise were expanded to Cuba at favorable prices, a central factor in the stabilization of the Cuban economy and finances.

The University of Havana Speech

As mentioned above on November 5, 2005, eight months before his near-fatal medical emergency and surgery that led to removing himself from his formal leadership posts in the government and state, Fidel Castro gave a remarkable, sweeping speech at the University of Havana (To read the entire speech, which I strongly recommend to understand the current developments) which laid out the framework for the economic and social crisis facing Cuban socialism and the general line of march on how to move forward. It is a good starting point to understand the origins of the new economic policies that are now being concretely formulated and codified.

The speech was brutally frank, nothing less than a tour de force revealing, explaining, and attacking – with facts, humor, anger, sarcasm, and real passionate humanity – examples of corruption, inefficiency, bureaucratism, and the administrative mentality that had to be addressed and transformed for the viability of the socialist revolution and its survival. “This country can self-destruct; this Revolution can destroy itself, but they can never destroy us; we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault.”

At a time when Cuba was producing less than one-and-a-half million tons of sugar a year, Fidel, to cite just one example, said to the gathered students, “You will be amazed when I tell you that, according to its inventory, the Ministry of Sugar has 2000 to 3000 more trucks than it had when it was producing 8 million tons of sugar. It’s tough, but I’m going to tell it like it is.”

At the time of Fidel’s November 2005 speech the Cuban economy and finances had been steadily advancing, with several years of regular, and in some years strong, economic growth. Economic ties with Latin America and China had increased significantly. Revenues from tourism were high and growing. And it was in this framework, ascendant from the miserable depths of the Special Period, that Fidel addressed head-on the structural and systemic problems, the new contradictions that were accumulating.

New Blows

Within a few years, however, the revolutionary government now led by Raul Castro was grappling with the same problems as laid out by Fidel in 2005 but now magnified many times over by a number of concrete national and international developments. First and foremost was the extensive material devastation caused by the 2008 Hurricane season, particularly the effects of Hurricanes Gustav and especially Ike (no relation to the author of this essay).  In the hurricane damage over 320,000 houses were destroyed or severely damaged with over 2 million Cubans displaced. In the agricultural province of Villa Clara over 70% of agricultural production was destroyed. Over 3300 tobacco houses were destroyed. And so on. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated damages at nearly $4 billion.

What truly marked the beginning of an unfavorable new dynamic in the Cuban economic reality was the world-historical concrete new fact of the 2007-08 world capitalist financial crash. Among other direct consequences of this for Cuba was a radical drop in the world market price of nickel, a major Cuban-produced raw material commodity essential in many modern manufacturing processes. (Of course, the modernization of Cuban nickel-mining operation was a result of a Cuban partnership with foreign capitalist firms – those with the capital – most notably the Canadian Sherritt International Corporation.) There was also a significant drop in the revenues brought in by tourism as the effect of the world capitalist crisis and retraction hit consumer spending in the advanced capitalist countries where much of the vacation travel to Cuba comes from.

Acquiring Capital for the Cuban Workers’ State

Given the paucity of capital in Cuba – that is, the monetized savings in hard currency for investing in agricultural and industrial machinery, factories, rolling stock for railroads and other industrial infrastructure, and so on – it is inevitable that, for the foreseeable future, what the revolutionary government must do, will necessarily involve co-operative and contract agreements with private or “state” firms in capitalist countries. These firms will invest, of course, not out of the goodness of their hearts but in order to generate profits. (Although some individual “investors” may harbor sentimental feelings or affection for Cuba. Good if that’s the case, but even those will want and need to make money.) In that sense they will be allowed to siphon off a portion of the surplus value created by the labor output of the Cuban industrial workers employed in these enterprises.

Cuba, of course, has much to offer to firms willing to invest in Cuban means of production; in particular, a highly educated and healthy population. Cuba also has a number of products and services from its already existing industries such as biotechnology that with further development and market access will have high demand on world markets

Within the borders of Cuba, the capitalist market is no longer dominant but Cuba functions in a world economic framework where private capital — that is, a handful of giant capitalist firms operating through a handful of advanced capitalist states — utterly dominate world production and exchange. Cuba must trade in hard currency (that is, the currency of advanced imperialist countries) which it can obtain only with great difficulty due to the US attempts to blockade it.

Developing Cuba’s Oil Fields

Perhaps the most crucial economic project being undertaken now in Cuba involves the extraction of apparently large oil deposits discovered in Cuban territorial waters. This will involve deep-sea drilling from massive platforms. Years of searching, chartering, mapping, discovery, and preparation are now finally giving way to actually building the platforms and extracting the oil. These fields, once they start producing, will be a tremendous boost to the Cuban economy. But Cuba is nowhere near having the capital, technology, or management expertise to undertake this huge task without the assistance of foreign capital and either foreign private capitalist monopoly enterprises or state-owned firms from capitalist countries.

After these firms take their slice – and it will have to be enough to make it worth their while – then the remaining surplus value created will go to workers wages, plant maintenance, and the Cuban workers’ state to bolster, among other things, free medical care and education. Not a dime will line the pockets of a private bourgeoisie in Cuba.

(Washington, which waived safety rules and regulations and turned a blind eye to the recklessness of BP leading to the 2010 Gulf oil spill disaster, has tried to stoke fears about the Cuban project.)

The legacy of Che

Cuba needs capital in the form of advanced technology and the financing of means of production in order to industrialize, digitalize, build and rebuild its railroads, bridges, aqueducts, water systems, electrical grid, and other infrastructure and also create myriad light industrial projects that can produce quality consumer items for the Cuban people and for the tourism industry. Cuba also needs to modernize and render more rigorous and transparent its accounting methods, which suffer especially from bureaucratism as Fidel Castro stressed in his University of Havana speech. This was a central theme in the economic writings and methods of Che Guevara in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

Central to the development of the Cuban economic and financial system as it developed under siege from US imperialism has been political and moral appeals to working people and revolutionary-minded intellectuals to defend their revolution and state power. This is particularly identified with the figure of Che Guevara and his writings on the “new socialist man and women,” moral and material incentives, voluntary labor, and revolutionary internationalism. One example of this precious legacy is in the Cuban medical and educational internationalist missions around the world and the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana.

This will continue within the new orientation and the new drive to raise productivity, living standards, technological advances in the modes of production, industrialization, and increased production of materials for housing and other pressing needs. But appeals to working-class and revolutionary consciousness can turn into clichéd phrase-mongering if bureaucracy, inefficiency, and deteriorating work habits due to scarcity and corrupt mismanagement come to dominate the process of work and production.

Moral incentives, as formulated and practiced by Che Guevara, were always promoted as part and parcel of hard work, raising productivity, strict control and accounting of resources, application of the most modern technology, absolutely minimum bureaucratism, and integrity, honesty, and personal sacrifice at the center of everything.

No change in Cuban socialist internationalism

If the new economic policies announced in Cuba indicated a subjective embrace of the capitalist market and capitalist methods on the part of Cuba’s communist leadership, then this would be reflected in a shift toward renunciation of revolutionary struggle and accommodation with imperialism; that is, the movement of Cuban foreign policy to the right. There is, of course, no evidence of this whatsoever. Neither is there any signal whatsoever that Washington, under the Obama Administration, has any perspective of ending US sanctions and normalizing relations with the island. Washington continues its goal of subverting and eliminating the socialist revolution and workers’ state in Cuba.

The revolutionary government of Cuba continues to expect, look for, and, above all, politically be in active solidarity and promotion of new upsurges and victories of workers’ and peasants’ power anywhere in the world. It is a government, true to the legacy of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, which has tied its fate ultimately to the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity.

1. Lenin’s Final Fight, Pathfinder Press, p. 207
2. Lenin’s Final Fight, p. 58