Havana conference maps plans for a new international economic order

“The climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better.” – Jason Hickel.

Viva La Solidaridad Cubano-Palestina is emblematic of Cuba’s longstanding solidarity with Palestine – which predates this poster made by Marc Rudin in 1989 and still stands today.

Meeting in Havana, Cuba on April 28 to May 1, leading scholars, diplomats and policy-makers from 36 countries mapped plans to present a program of action for establishment of a New International Economic Order that will be presented to the September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

The Havana conference – co-convened by the Progressive International and the Asociación Nacional de Economistas y Contadores de Cuba – marked the 50th anniversary of an earlier version of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), a set of proposals to end economic colonialism and dependency adopted by the UN on May 1, 1974.

A keynote speaker at the Havana conference was Jason Hickel. He teaches at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) in Barcelona and is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics. Hickel is best-known, perhaps for his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020), which presents degrowth as an anticapitalist alternative to ecological imperialism and unequal exchange.

I will say more about the Havana congress following Hickel’s address, which I thank the Progressive International for making available. – Richard Fidler

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Climate, Energy and Natural Resources

By Jason Hickel

Thank you to Progressive International for organizing this event, and thank you to our Cuban hosts, who have kept this revolution alive against extraordinary odds. The US blockade against Cuba, like the genocide in Gaza, is a constant reminder of the egregious violence of the imperialist world order and why we must overcome it.

So too is the ecological crisis. Comrades, I do not need to tell you about the severity of the situation we are in. It stares every sane observer in the face. But the dominant analysis of this crisis and what to do about it is woefully inadequate. We call it the Anthropocene, but we must be clear: it is not humans as such that are causing this crisis. Ecological breakdown is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and – like capitalism itself – is strongly characterized by colonial dynamics.

This is clear when it comes to climate change. The countries of the global North are responsible for around 90% of all cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are driving climate breakdown. By contrast the global South, by which I mean all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are together responsible for only about 10%, and in fact most global South countries remain within their fair shares of the planetary boundary and have therefore not contributed to the crisis at all.

And yet, the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown are set to affect the territories of the global South, and indeed this is already happening. The South suffers 80-90% of the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. It would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice. With present policy, we are headed for around 3 degrees of global warming. At this level some 2 billion people across the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially increased mortality risk; droughts will destabilize agricultural systems and lead to multi-breadbasket failures; and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes.

Climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonization. The atmosphere is a shared commons, on which all of us depend for our existence, and the core economies have appropriated it for their own enrichment, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth, which are playing out along colonial lines. For the global South in particular, this crisis is existential and it must be stopped.

But so far our ruling classes are failing to do this. In 2015 the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or “well below” 2 degrees, while upholding the principle of equity. To achieve this goal, high-income countries, which have extremely high per capita emissions, must achieve extremely rapid decarbonization.

This is not occurring. In fact, at existing rates, even the best-performing high-income countries will take on average more than 200 years to bring emissions to zero, burning their fair-shares of the Paris-compliant carbon budget many times over. Dealing with the climate crisis is not complicated. We know exactly what needs to be done, but we are not doing it. Why? Because of capitalism.

If I wish to get one point across today, it is this: the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better. Let me briefly describe what I mean.

The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect candidates from time to time. But when it comes to the economic system, the system of production, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter. Production is controlled by capital: large corporations, commercial banks, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets… they are the ones who determine what to produce and how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or achieve social and ecological objectives. Rather, it is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. So we get perverse patterns of investment: massive investment in producing things like fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships and weapons, because these things are highly profitable to capital… but we get chronic underinvestment in necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and regenerative agriculture, because these are much less profitable to capital or not profitable at all. This is a critically important point to grasp. In many cases renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels! But they have much lower profit margins, because they are less conducive to monopoly power. So investment keeps flowing to fossil fuels, even while the world burns.

Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it should be about public production of public goods. To do this, simply issue the national currency to mobilize the productive forces for the necessary objectives, on the basis of need not on the basis of profit.

Now, massive public investment like this could drive inflation if it bumps up against the limits of the national productive capacity. To avoid this problem you need to reduce private demands on the productive forces. First, cut the purchasing power of the rich; and second, introduce credit regulations on commercial banks to limit their investments in ecologically destructive sectors that we want to get rid of anyway: fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, etc.

What this does is it shifts labour and resources away from servicing the interests of capital accumulation and toward achieving socially and ecologically necessary objectives. This is a socialist ecological strategy, and it is the only thing that will save us. Solving the ecological crisis requires achieving democratic control over the means of production. We need to be clear about this fact and begin building now the political movements that are necessary to achieve such a transformation.

Now, it should be obvious to everyone at this point that for the global South, this requires economic sovereignty. You cannot do ecological planning if you do not have sovereign control over your national productive forces! Struggle for national economic liberation is the precondition for ecological transition, and it can be achieved with the steps that my colleagues Ndongo and Fadhel have outlined: industrial policy, regional planning, and progressive delinking from the imperial core.

So that is the horizon. But at the same time we must advance our multilateral bargaining positions. This is what we need to do:

First, we need to push for universal adoption of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty overcomes the major limitation of the Paris Agreement in that it focuses squarely on the objective of scaling down the fossil fuel industry on a binding annual schedule. The objective here is to do this in a fair and just way: rich countries must lead with rapid reductions, global South countries must be guaranteed access to sufficient energy for development, and those that are dependent on fossil fuel exports for foreign currency must be provided with a safe offramp that prevents any economic instability.

Second, global South negotiators must collaborate to demand much faster decarbonization in the global North, consistent with their fair-shares of the remaining carbon budget.

Third, we must demand substantial resource transfers to the global South. Because the global North has devoured most of the carbon budget, it owes compensation to the global South for the additional mitigation costs that this imposes on them. Our research shows that this is set to be $192 trillion between now and 2050, or about 6.4 trillion dollars per year. Conveniently, this amount can be provided by a 3.5% yearly wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the global North.

Of course, we should be clear about the fact that Western governments will not do any of this voluntarily. And it is not reasonable for us to place our hope in the goodwill of states that have never cared about the interests of the South or the welfare of its people.

The alternative is for global South governments to unite and collectively leverage the specific forms of power that they have in the world system. Western economies are totally dependent on production in the South. In fact, around 50% of all materials consumed in the global North are net-appropriated from the South. This is a travesty of justice but it is also a crucial point of leverage. Global South governments can and should form cartels to force the imperialist states to take more radical action toward decarbonization and climate justice.

And, by the way, speaking of South-South solidarity, global South governments should negotiate access to renewable energy technologies by establishing swap lines with China so that these can be obtained outside of the imperialist currencies, and thus limit their exposure to unequal exchange.

Comrades. We stand at a fork in the road. We can stick with the status quo and watch helplessly as our world burns… or we can unite and set a new course for human history. The Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation. The world is waiting. This is the generation. Now is the moment. Hasta la victoria siempre.

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More on the Congress

The 50th Anniversary Congress on the New International Economic Order adopted a “roadmap for a Global South insurgency to remake the world system.” (For a full list of participants, please click here.)

The assembled delegates debated strategies and tactics for winning a New International Economic Order and worked on major, structural reform proposals under five themes:

• Finance, Debt, and the International Monetary System

• Science, Technology, and Innovation

• Climate, Energy, and Natural Resources

• Commodities, Industry, and International Trade

• Governance, Multilateralism, and International Law

Proposals included a debtors club, cartels for critical minerals, coordination on commodity prices, BRICS financing for Southern state capacity, detailed programmes of regional integration including industrial strategy and collective public purchasing for medicines and components, reduction of material-technical dependency on the Global North, regaining national control over foreign exchange earnings, national and regional industrial policy, investment in food and renewable energy sovereignty, a global global, multilayered buffer stock system for essential commodities including food and critical minerals, coordinated exit from ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes), denunciation of bilateral investment treaties, cross-border payment systems where international reserves are deposited, mobilisation of Special Drawing Rights for Southern development, establishing an association of raw material exporters, activate force majeure clauses so that all patents to combat climate change are ended, reparations for historical CO2 emissions from the Global North, and many more.

These proposals will be developed into a renewed and detailed Program of Action overseen by a technical committee of the Progressive International, and will be carried out through online fora and at further in-person conferences, with Algeria, Honduras, Mexico and Colombia all mooted as host nations.

The conference concluded with a presentation by President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermúdez outlining the vision of the Cuban Presidency of the Group of 77 + China for the New International Economic Order.

See also: Proposals for Unilateral Decolonization and Economic Sovereignty, by Ndongo Samba Sylla (with Jason Hickel)

That other 9-11: The coup that ended Chile’s Popular Unity government

By Richard Fidler

This year, on September 11, we mark the 50^th anniversary of the coup in Chile. The violent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government put an end to a turbulent experiment in the parliamentary road to socialism initiated with the presidential election of Salvador Allende just three years earlier. The coup government headed by General Augusto Pinochet launched massive and deadly repression and inaugurated the capitalist world’s first major wave of neoliberal economic “reforms,” many of which remain in force today.

It seems appropriate to look back at the Chilean experience – the first breakthrough for the Left in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – and to think about the lessons to be learned for today’s Left and progressive movements. Allende’s electoral base, the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity, was a coalition of his Socialist party with the Communist party and several much smaller parties around a programmatic agreement that promised “revolutionary changes” to “liberate Chile from imperialism, exploitation and poverty.” And it pledged to do this in full respect for and compliance with the country’s parliamentary, legal and other institutions.

For an initial balance sheet, I recommend an important article by Ralph Miliband first published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register. Miliband was a prominent sociologist and author of numerous books on socialism and politics, including Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. His essay, too lengthy to be reproduced here, merits reading in its entirety. But here is a brief excerpt, from its concluding section, on “the question of the state and the exercise of power.”

It was noted earlier that a major change in the state’s personnel is an urgent and essential task for a government bent on really serious change; and that this needs to be allied to a variety of institutional reforms and innovations, designed to push forward the process of the state’s democratization. But in this latter respect, much more needs to be done, not only to realize a set of long-term socialist objectives concerning the socialist exercise of power, but as a means either of avoiding armed confrontation, or of meeting it on the most advantageous and least costly terms if it turns out to be inevitable.

What this means is not simply ‘mobilizing the masses’ or ‘arming the workers’. These are slogans – important slogans – which need to be given effective institutional content. In other words, a new regime bent on fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures must from the start begin to build and encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely ‘mobilization of the masses’ and the effective direction of its actions. The forms which this assumes – workers’ committees at their place of work, civic committees in districts and sub-districts, etc. – and the manner in which these organs ‘mesh’ with the state may not be susceptible to blueprinting. But the need is there, and it is imperative that it should be met, in whatever forms are most appropriate.

This is not, to all appearances, how the Allende regime moved. Some of the things that needed doing were done; but such ‘mobilization’ as occurred, and such preparations as were made, very late in the day, for a possible confrontation, lacked direction, coherence, in many cases even encouragement. Had the regime really encouraged the creation of a parallel infra-structure, it might have lived; and, incidentally, it might have had less trouble with its opponents and critics on the left, for instance in the MIR, since its members might not then have found the need so great to engage in actions of their own, which greatly embarrassed the government: they might have been more ready to cooperate with a government in whose revolutionary will they could have had greater confidence. In part at least, ‘ultra-leftism’ is the product of ‘citra-leftism’.

Salvador Allende was a noble figure and he died a heroic death. But hard though it is to say it, that is not the point. What matters, in the end, is not how he died, but whether he could have survived by pursuing different policies; and it is wrong to claim that there was no alternative to the policies that were pursued. In this as in many other realms, and here more than in most, facts only become compelling as one allows them to be so. Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.

Miliband focused his analysis on the trials and tribulations encountered by the UP government as it sought to pursue, and then retreat from, its reform program in the face of strenuous and mounting opposition by Chile’s capitalists backed by Washington. Writing from afar, he was unable to assess the reactions among the popular forces that constituted the government’s social base. That, however, is the subject matter of a remarkable study of “constituent popular power and the politics of conflict” in Chile from 1970 to 1973 that – in the words of its author Franck Gaudichaud – are “keys to understanding a thousand days that shook the world.”[1] Gaudichaud’s text, adapted from his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Michael Löwy, is a detailed analysis of the forms of “popular power(s)” created in their struggles by the workers, peasants and “pobladores” of the shanty-towns during the UP regime.

This research shows that at the heart of this period of social confrontations and political upheavals, various attempts at what we have proposed to call popular constituent power arose. A notion defined as ‘the creation of social and political experiments of organized counter-power and counter-hegemonies’ leading to ‘new forms of popular collective appropriations’ and ‘a calling into question – total or relative – of relations of production, forms of work organization, social and spatial hierarchies and material or symbolic mechanisms of domination’. It is precisely in the specific (and historically determined) configuration taken by these forms of popular power that the true originality of the Chilean process, its transformative capacity and its historical force are located. This, beyond the unprecedented nature of Allende’s project of transition to socialism or a supposed intangible stability of the democratic institutions of the ‘compromise State’. And it seems to us that there is here a path worth taking, to explore, in the study of other great political crises or Latin American revolutionary processes.

If we examine the various facets of this collective turmoil which mobilized several tens of thousands of employees, pobladores and left-wing activists, we see the emergence of a ‘grammar of protest’ little known to Popular Unity. This idée-force is that of popular power, but in this turbulent sky, one star shone more brightly than others: that of the industrial cordones.[2] Certainly, ‘the theme of the industrial cordones refers to one of the most important and successful experiences of Popular Unity, perhaps approaching one of the most realized utopias of Chilean socialism: that in which the workers built themselves as an historical actor with strong collective economic and political responsibility within the ongoing process. Appearing most of the time on the outskirts of the major cities, these are territorial bodies of class coordination, bringing together the unions of several companies in a specific urban area, with the immediate aim of realizing demands such as the extension of the nationalized sector, workers’ control of production, the self-defense of factories, the increase in wages or even, in the medium term, the establishment of a new institutional architecture, based on municipal and provincial popular councils. The cordones thus draw a new topography of struggles in urban areas, alongside other actors in the social movement. They gradually anchor themselves in a city in struggle and territories appropriated by and for massively mobilized popular classes.

A militant in the Chilean process in the early 1970s was the Peruvian peasant leader and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco, who died this year at the age of 89. Released from prison in 1970 by Peru’s revolutionary military junta, Blanco made his way to Chile. He authored many articles on the grassroots mobilizations and political conflicts under the UP government. Some were translated and published in English in Intercontinental Press, a socialist newsweekly published in New York City.[3] They provide insightful analyses into the class dynamics of the events, and can be accessed on line. Here is a representative sample:

Chilean Workers Organize Distribution, April 23, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1115.pdf#page=16&view=FitV,35

Right Wing in Popular Unity Consolidates, April 30, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1116.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Threat Mounting in Chile, May 7, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1117.pdf#page=8&view=FitV,35

The Sharpening Struggle in Chile, May 28, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1120.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Provocations, Labor Unrest in Chile, June 4, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1121.pdf#page=11&view=FitV,35

Chilean Workers Organize to Meet the Rightist Threat, June 11, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1122.pdf#page=18&view=FitV,35

The Workers’ Cordones Challenge the Reformists, June 18, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1123.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

The Role of the Cordones Industriales, November 26, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1142.pdf#page=19&view=FitV,35

Also worth reading:

Allende’s dream, Pinochet’s coup and Chile’s present By Carmen Aguirre.

People in Chile never stopped resisting the dictatorship that began 50 years ago, or seeking to revive the social reforms of the 1970s. A childhood in exile has made it impossible for me to forget that.

This article, published in the Toronto Globe & Mail September 8, is remarkable not least because it is almost unique, amongst the coverage of Chile’s coup in the business media, to remind us of the complicity of Pierre Trudeau’s government in related events before, during and after the Pinochet coup.

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[1] Franck Gaudichaud, Chile 1970-1973, Mille jours qui ébranlèrent le monde (Presses universitaires de Rennes 2013, free on-line since 2017). In French only, at present.

[2] The Spanish word cordones could be roughly translated in English as “lanyards,” that is, interlaced bodies of workers in different workplaces or geographic units.

[3] As a staff writer for Intercontinental Press in the early 1970s, I met Hugo Blanco for the first time in 1974, in Italy, at the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International.

Cuba: The single party system confronts the crisis

A critical perspective from a Cuban historian

None of the ostensibly post-capitalist regimes established since 1917 has managed to find a way to sustain mass democratic forms of governance and to build the popular consciousness and capacities needed for the transition to socialist society. Whatever their origins, these regimes have come to rely on monolithic party formations that function essentially as a part of the institutional structure of the state, not independently of it. Cuba is no exception, notwithstanding its heroic history of mobilization against imperialist threats and in internationalist solidarity.

In the following article Cuban historian Alina Bárbara López Hernández explores this dilemma in the context of the social protests that occurred throughout Cuba on July 11. She focuses in particular on the way in which the single-Party system has shielded the government from popular concerns and demands, curtailed public political debate, alienated the youth, and fostered the growth of bureaucratic lethargy that hinders efforts at economic and social reform. Although she does not suggest a solution to this problem, she emphasizes the need to open up a debate on it within Cuba, and to encourage all forms of democratic expression within that process.

Alina Bárbara López Hernández is a professor, writer and historian based in Matanzas. She is the coordinator of the on-line publication La Joven Cuba, in which this article appeared. I have revised the English translation published in International Viewpoint. – Richard Fidler

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The single party system faced with the crisis

by Alina Bárbara López Hernández

A political party that governs alone, does not compete with another organization, and does not have to run in an election to be in power, would seem to have a great advantage. Paradoxically, that privilege is, at the same time, its greatest weakness.

Not having to negotiate power, taking it for granted that it will not be disputed, leads politically to a harmful attitude that assumes any hint of social pressure is unacceptable. When it occurs, the consequent reaction shows absolute ineptitude shielded with recklessness.

This authoritarian perspective is also strengthened by the teleological, mechanistic and anti-Marxist approach to history which assumes that the socialist revolution, once victorious, cannot retreat. This over-optimism closes off the possibility of any process of successful improvement or reform.

The collapse of the socialist camp shattered many constitutions that declared it irreversible. It is not the text in a legal treatise that counts, but the involvement of the people who find in that system the embodiment of their aspirations and who can modify it with that objective in mind.

The pressure of the majorities from below is what has made political systems evolve from ancient times until today. In the one-party model of bureaucratic socialism, the real and spontaneous participation of the citizenry in political activity is not allowed. This discriminatory condition explains why, faced with the July 11 social outburst, the Party reacted with brutality, in an authoritarian way rather than politically.

The lesson of thirty years ago was not learned in Cuba. In 2002, more than ten years after the disintegration of the USSR, a constitutional article declared socialism was irreversible, while the 2019 Constitution established that the Party is the “superior leading force of society and the State (...).” From that vantage point, the Party should have been in a better position to see that the conditions for a social explosion existed in Cuba. But not only was it not, but it has also demonstrated its incapacity to interpret the true causes of the conflict and to act accordingly.

The real causes of 11-J

The internal contradictions of social processes are the fundamental and determining factors. This principle of materialist dialectics is not applied by the Party in spite of its declared Marxist affiliation. Therefore, in the face of the social unrest, it has preferred to stick to a narrative that explains what happened based solely on external factors, real but not decisive: the pressures of the US blockade on Cuba, a soft coup, a fourth generation war.

Up to now, there has not been a deep and self-critical analysis by the Party concerning itself and its responsibility for the crisis. If there were, they would have admitted that none of the key proposals that in recent times created hope for changes to transform socialism from above came to anything. They were:

1. A reform process announced in 2007, fourteen years ago now, which promised – clarifying that it would do so “without haste” – “structural and conceptual changes” that we are still awaiting in the Cuban economy. And I say “in the economy” because the reform process never included the political dimension.

2. A Constitution approved in 2019 that, despite the debate it generated and the expectations it raised by including the concept of a Socialist Rule of Law, excluded any approach aimed at the transformation of the political system.

3. Three Party Congresses: the 6th, 7th and 8th, which in less than 15 years actually engaged less and less with the idea of reforming the model. In the last one, a little more than three months ago, a bucket of cold water was basically poured over the people, by perpetuating the thesis of stagnation and failing to address the serious social and political problems that had generated concern, not only among the youth but also in society as a whole.

A socialist system that cannot be influenced from below is a pipedream, and ours is trapped in a flagrant contradiction: we have approved a Constitution that is not viable. One part of it tends to sustain a situation of infringement of freedoms – especially in its Article 5 which declares the superiority of the single Party – while another part recognizes these rights and freedoms under a Socialist Rule of Law.

No exclusively economic reformist process is feasible because, when the citizenry is not actively involved in controlling the direction, results and speed of the transformations, changes run the risk of being dismantled or curtailed. Cuba has been no exception. The bureaucracy has become a “class for itself” within society and hinders changes and reforms that, although it accepts them on paper, it has delayed in practice.

A great unresolved conflict, wherever bureaucratic socialism is established, is that of converting state property into true social property. This aspiration has been utopian due to the lack of democratization, the lack of citizen participation in economic decisions, and the fact that the unions are no longer organizations that defend the interests of the workers.

The arrogant attitude of the Party is typical of a political model that failed. In February 1989, the Soviet magazine Sputnik devoted an issue to the stagnation that characterized the period of Leonid Brezhnev, and it asked these questions:

“Should the Party leadership become a special organ of power, which is above all other organs? If the Central Committee is a special organ of power, how do we control it? Can its decisions be protested as unconstitutional? Who is responsible in the event of failure of a decreed measure? If this superior organ in fact directs the country, then shouldn’t it be elected by all the people?”

In this political model the Party is selective, a “vanguard,” and not a popular party open to all, so that if it declares itself as a force superior to society it also sets itself above the people. For this not to be so, the people should be able to elect those who head the Party, and this is not allowed. If it is over and above everybody, and it is not “an electoral party,” it is out of the people’s control. That’s the political model that must be changed.

The younger sectors have no memory of the initial and most successful social policy stages in the revolutionary process. To them, the revolutionary narrative, the evident transformations and the benefits of the first decades have little impact.

They have known the last thirty years, with its legacy of poverty, a sustained increase in inequality, failed life prospects and the anticipation of emigration at ever-younger ages. The arrival of the Internet has coordinated them as a generation, allowing them to contrast opinions, build virtual spaces for participation that the political model denies them, and to generate actions.

So we must recognize that the main contradictions that led to the 11th July outburst are eminently political. The demands were not only for food and medicine or against the power cuts. These may have been the catalyst, but the “freedom” slogans that swept the island indicate the demand of the citizens to be recognized in a political process that has ignored them up to now.

Bread, circuses… and Senate

The party was totally disoriented by the 11th July events. This was shown by:

• the brutal scenes of repression against the demonstrators;
• the declarations calling for violence by the newly appointed first secretary of the Party – later toned down;
• an urgent meeting of the Political Bureau the day after the events – of which nothing has been revealed;
• and the usual organized acts of revolutionary reaffirmation almost a week later.

However, although it never acknowledges or apologizes, the Party knows that it made a very costly mistake.

Voices have been raised from sectors of the left and some prestigious figures and organizations, demanding respect for the political rights of peaceful demonstration and for freedom of expression in Cuba. Several governments, and the European Union as a bloc, have criticized the violent repression, surely unconstitutional.

Palliative measures are now beginning to be taken to alleviate the tragic shortages: an increase in the amount of rice, a staple in the standard food basket, effective this month until December; free distribution of products donated to Cuba (grains, pasta, sugar, and in some cases oil and meat products); a price reduction in some services of Etecsa, the communications monopoly.

In addition, long-standing requests that would have served to mitigate the crisis much earlier have now been approved: imports of food and medicines without restrictions and free of customs charges; credit sales in stores. Others may be announced in the coming days.

There is no doubt that the situation will be somewhat alleviated, but the Party must be very aware that none of these decisions will solve the Cuban dilemma which is, as I have already stated, of a political nature.

Perhaps they believe that by applying these palliatives they are discovering a new politics. They are wrong. Thousands of years ago, the Latin poet Juvenal, in his Satire X, immortalized a phrase that designated the practice of the rulers of his time: “Bread and circuses.”[1] It was the plan of Roman politicians to win over the urban plebs in exchange for wheat and entertainments so that they would lose their critical spirit, feeling satisfied by the false generosity of the rulers.

In Cuba we need bread and circuses, we are a suffering people, but – above all – we need to govern from below. We need to be the Senate, since our Senate has disappeared from the political scene. There is not a single statement from any member of the National Assembly of People’s Power, as such, in spite of the seriousness of the violent acts against a part of the people they are supposed to represent.

They have violated the legislative schedule saying it is impossible to meet in the middle of a pandemic. However, under the same conditions, the Party held its 8th congress and, after July 11, massive activities were organised in support of the government in all the provinces.

There has not yet been an official pronouncement from the Party leadership analyzing the facts, offering exact figures of the cities and towns involved, participants in the protests, people arrested and prosecuted. It was of no use to the single Party to have analyzed in the Political Bureau, a few days before the 8th Congress, a report entitled: “Study of the socio-political climate of Cuban society.” They understood nothing of that climate, or those who wrote the report did not portray reality.

Single Party bureaucratic socialism creates a kind of political demiurge that escapes the rule of law, since it places itself above it, accentuates political extremism and separates itself from the citizenry. So far all models with these characteristics, far from leading to a socialist society, have disguised a state capitalism with features of corruption and elitism.

It is time to debate this and organize ourselves to change it. It is possible now. As the president of the People’s Supreme Court declared to the international press, in Cuba the Constitution guarantees the right to peaceful demonstration.

July 30, 2021

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[1] “Panem et circenses,” Juvenal suggests, are the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political freedom. https://www.ancient-literature.com/rome_juvenal_satire_x.html. – RF.

Cuba’s Crisis, Our Response

With Cuba at a crossroads, we must respond to recent protests by listening to the Cuban people and recognizing the country’s accomplishments and its shortcomings, its past and its potential.

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet with a long history of social activism in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, as well as the United States. In Mexico, she  cofounded the bilingual journal, El Corno Emplumado. Among her best-known books are Cuban Women Now, Sandino’s Daughters, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, and When I Look into the Mirror and see You: Women, Terror and Resistance (all oral history with essay). In this article, which appeared first on the NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) website, Randall imparts some well-chosen and necessary advice to everyone sympathetic to revolutionary Cuba and its people.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Cuba’s Crisis, Our Response

By Margaret Randall

The recent protests in Cuba, especially those on July 11, 2021 have provoked consternation in some and hope in others. The protests, which began in the Havana suburb of San Antonio de Los Baños, the eastern city of Palma Soriano, and quickly spread nationwide, are the first examples of visible large scale discontent since the demonstrations that took place in 1994 at the height of the economic crisis brought on by the Soviet Union’s collapse.

By and large, the “news” reflects entrenched positions. Corporate media publishes opinion pieces about a people bravely seeking freedom and treats these protests as if they are the beginning of the end of the Cuban revolution. The virulent Right screams about fake disappearances and invented torture, while remaining silent about countries such as Colombia and Nicaragua where such horrors are actually being perpetrated. Meanwhile, acritical sectors of the Left deny any sort of official violence or justify it in the name of the revolution’s survival. None of these lenses reflect the real story. Unsurprisingly, the most factual and complete accounts come from Cubans who live in the country and have for years contributed to constructing its revolution.

It has been 40 years since I’ve lived in Cuba and, although I visit frequently, I know it makes a difference that I am not there on the ground right now, experiencing current events for myself. When reading the variety of interpretations that have emerged over the past several weeks, it is important to take into account not only the writer’s political position but where she or he lives. A Cuban who resides in Cuba, a Cuban who is part of the vast diaspora, or a foreigner defending a particular political position: each of these placements has its lens. And in a country that has surprised us for so long, any opinion may be nothing more than a snapshot of the moment.

The Cuban government’s response to the mass demonstrations set a disturbing tone for their immediate aftermath. President Díaz-Canel went to San Antonio de los Baños hoping to calm the crowd as Fidel Castro had so often been able to do. But Díaz-Canel misjudged the protest’s importance and temperature. Phrases such as “the streets belong to the revolutionaries” and “we are prepared for anything” met genuine discontent with thoughtless dogmatism. To say that this was a poor response is an understatement. Inside as well as outside of Cuba criticism came swiftly.

Díaz-Canel apologized, and the Cuban government announced conciliatory measures on July 14 in an attempt to address the people’s legitimate concerns. The changes, which included lifting some taxes and import limits on medications and food, announcing changes to the state sector’s salary scale, and loosening some restrictions on food rationing, may be all that are possible given the country’s dire economic situation. However, they probably won’t be enough to placate long frustrated demands.

The Cuban Communist Party has demonstrated its ability to remain in power through decades of crises. And those of us who know and love the revolution fear that the focus on survival at any cost will leave us with a situation that is far from the one envisioned by the revolution’s creators. I speak as someone who experienced the revolution’s glory years: nationalized natural resources, newly acquired literacy, free education and healthcare, almost full employment, an equitable distribution of food and other necessities, a legal system with real input from people who discussed new law at neighborhood meetings, extraordinary promotion of the arts and sports. Cuba also developed programs of international solidarity and disaster relief beyond anything carried out by much wealthier countries. While the rich nations offer their surplus, what Cuba offers often means sacrifice for its own population. During the decade (1969-1980) I lived and raised four children there, these achievements weren’t statistics but the day-to-day reality.

Cuba’s reality today is one in which education and healthcare are still free and universal, but also one in which important constitutional changes and party promises aimed at producing a more equitable society have been enacted in word only. In the midst of tremendous economic and social stress, follow-through has not materialized or been too slow.

It isn’t unusual for politicians to promise more than they can produce. It happens on a daily basis in the United States and in most of the world’s countries. But in Cuba, where a genuine people’s revolution created mechanisms for transparency and change, this contradiction is not acceptable. Not to the old timers who remember what life under the Batista dictatorship was like, and not to the youth who, like youth everywhere, demand justice and demand it now.

In Cuba, the list of challenges seems endless. On top of the extreme economic problems brought on by 62 years of blockade and a difficult transition from a socialist system to one that can function in today’s world, Covid-19 is out of control. The country’s excellent biochemical industry has developed two proven vaccines, Soberana (91.2 percent efficacy) and Abdala (92.28 percent efficacy) and is attempting to vaccinate its entire population. But even with Cuba’s organizational expertise, a shortage of syringes—one outcome of the blockade—has rendered this a slow process. The severity of the pandemic has also devastated tourism, putting an additional strain on the country’s economy. A long-awaited consolidation of the monetary system has been rocky. In July, a major power plant suffered a breakdown, causing frequent blackouts. Scarcities became more acute. Tropical storm Elsa was another blow. Many Cubans are frustrated beyond their ability to wait for incremental change.

Over the past decade Cuba has foolishly cracked down on artists and others whose work has protested the status quo, creating the current complex situation. Despite this pattern of repression, authoritative voices from inside Cuba—including Andrés Perdomo Guanche, Jorge Fornet, Arturo Arango, Margarita Alarcón, and Víctor Heredia, to name just a few—are attempting to situate the protests in context.

La Tizza, an independent Cuban news source that describes itself as “a venue for thinking and making socialism,” in its July 15 editorial wrote: “Those who came out to protest the State and socialism in Cuba were ordinary people….Those who continue to read Cuba as if the Caribbean were the Baltic are excitedly sharing via social media images of Berlin or Prague at the moment of European socialism’s demise. They don’t know that the Cuban Revolution won’t melt like some merengue because it’s never been made of merengue. Not because it hasn’t been sweet, but rather because it’s also had its moments of bitterness, which up to now we’ve been able to transform into strength.”

The La Tizza editorial goes on to describe protests not between the people and the state but between two groups of people with two very different social projects. One group, victim of capitalist propaganda, has given up on its dream of a just society. The other is unwilling to relinquish the revolutionary aspirations it has nurtured for generations, the legality of a socialist constitution ratified by democratic referendum, or the idea of a nation of peace, social justice, and national dignity exemplified by a revolution resting on tarnished laurels rather than opening new pathways to the future.

Beloved singer-songwriter and truth-teller Silvio Rodríguez asks, “who are the comrades responsible for the fact that, after two Communist Party congresses and what is set forth in the Constitution, what needs to change hasn’t changed? Who,” he asks again, “in the upper echelons of government? I want names and positions. And I want to hear what they have to say for themselves.”

Marcia Leiseca, one of the founders of Casa de las Américas, who even at an advanced age is still active in cultural work, writes, “it’s time to speak, to exercise opinions and offer ideas.…We must establish a dialogue with young people, encourage their participation in a new present and future. What happened on July 11 has been manipulated by the extreme Left and the extreme Right, the former blaming the unjust blockade and outside interference, overstating the resultant vandalism and absolving us of all responsibility. The latter exaggerates what took place, invents horrors such as disappearances, torture, and violation of human rights.”

Cuba is at a crossroads, and how the current crisis is handled may well determine the revolution’s survival. The U.S. government needs to repeal its blockade and stop the overt and covert operations designed to destroy the revolution. Cuba’s leaders must issue verifiable lists of detainees and name and punish those officials who beat protestors or otherwise failed to follow Cuba’s own civil guarantees.

Cuba is rightly indignant that the United States continues to interfere in its internal affairs. An analysis of social media bots shows that many, although not all, of the protests are being organized and funded from outside the country, by U.S. government agencies and rightwing Cuban forces. During the protests, people received repeated messages claiming that provincial governments had fallen to the demonstrators and urging people to join a victorious situation that didn’t exist. This is understandably a sore point in a country that has endured attacks from the United States throughout the history of its revolution. I hope the Cuban government will begin to answer the protests with dialogue rather than repression.

Before July 11, dissent in Cuba was sporadic and limited to specific social groups or isolated experiences of censorship or repression. On that day, they were larger and more comprehensive. Thousands have protested excessive government control. I believe they should be heard.

I also believe that the Cuban government has a responsibility to issue information about incidents of violence on both sides, make available lists of those currently being detained, and name and punish police and other officials who have gone against the country’s own constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly and dissent. At the same time, I think it is worth noting that Cuba is a nation of eleven million. The recent protests are far from constituting a tipping point.

I urge people on all sides to think about how extraordinary it is that a tiny island 90 miles from U.S. shores has been able to survive for more than half a century against every sort of covert and overt attack. Let us help Cuba become what its revolution has promised rather than try to mold it to some specious image in which profit obliterates justice and equality.

August 11, 2021

For more on Margaret Randall and her works, see Margaret Randall (Wikipedia) and her website: http://www.margaretrandall.org/.

The July 11 protests in Cuba

 

Photo: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The following article by Cuban academic and feminist activist Ailynn Torres Santana outlines what happened in Cuba on July 11, discusses the issues raised by the protesters and the government’s response, and concludes that in the wake of the protests Cuba needs political solutions that resist all forms of co-optation. This article was originally published in Spanish and English by OnCuba News. I follow her article with some suggestions for further reading in relation to the July 11 events. – Richard Fidler

J-11 in Cuba

By Ailynn Torres Santana

July 22, 2021

Protests began in Cuba July 11, 2021 (J-11). They spread gradually from San Antonio de los Baños (Artemisa province) and Palma Soliano (Santiago de Cuba province) to other parts of the country. Digital traces show that social media played a central but not singular role in this process. Social media had a kind of contagion effect, spreading protests from one area to another, or served to directly call people to the streets. This also meant that what happened rapidly reached beyond Cuba through “direct” connections on social media and by content going viral on people’s personal profiles and in foreign media.

An unmanageable amount of information circulated and continues to circulate on social media, quickly becoming difficult to process. Fake news with traces of truth and lies also started to emerge. Confronting fake news was a price to pay for accessing information via citizen journalism. Meanwhile, official media exclusively reported the government’s line.

Ailynn Torres Santana

At the time of writing, the government speaks of “turmoil” (disturbios) while others speak of “social outcry” (estallido social), like the popular uprisings in Latin America throughout 2019, 2020, and 2021. An uprising or not, what happened in Cuba touched the region. No one has remained silent. And the country’s politics continues to be a red line in imaginations, instincts, and political agendas and arguments in Cuba, Latin America, and the world.

Numerous artists, influencers, intellectuals, and politicians with different political leanings have weighed in. From [Argentine] neoconservative Agustín Laje—who released a diatribe about what he called “the blockade myth” and has said that “a nation has awakened” against the “left” (zurdaje) in Cuba—to Residente of Calle 13, Noam Chomsky, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Frei Betto, Ignacio Ramonet, Claudia Corol, Gerardo Pissarello, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, and many others.

Internationally, Cuba sparks polarized passions that—it must be said—are caricatures. Some outright claim that the recent protests are nothing more than a U.S. plot amplified by sensationalized media coverage and that the only thing we know for sure is that this is an attack on the Cuban Revolution. Others celebrated the “end of the dictatorship,” seeing protesters as fulfilling their prophecies of the “end of the regime.” It is fair to say that there have also been attempts to critically analyze the situation.

Seen from Cuba—the Cuba both within and outside the island—the situation is more intense and complex. Our material, spiritual, political, and moral life depends on it. For the government, the protests were a mechanism of counterrevolutionary destabilization, led from the United States, that capitalized on “confused” people and manipulated discontent stemming from unmet needs. For some people, these days of protests were a mistake because they worsened the crisis in the country. Other diverse voices called for urgent—and improbable—humanitarian or military intervention to address medical and food shortages; these commentators, often weighing in from outside Cuba, held up the protests as the realization of their own aspirations. They don’t want dialogue with the government and, reaching ever-louder extremes, claim that it’s time to “kill the communists.” They make lists of “pro-government” figures, “disgusting communists,” and anyone who does not align with their political agendas.

For other people and groups, all intervention is unacceptable, and merely the suggestion of it is reprehensible. The anti-intervention camp has achieved a significant level of consensus, but it also contains differences within it. Part of this camp rejects the protests, viewing them as a threat that could spur the restoration of capitalism in the country. Another faction calls for listening to the people in the streets and starting a civic dialogue process. This group does not subscribe to the idea that the demonstrators are puppets of U.S. policy, but rather sees the protests as an expression of exhaustion on the part of at least some Cuban people due to: the impossibility of material survival; the accelerated shrinking of “equality zones,” particularly in terms of health services and supplies, that previously dulled Cuba’s successive crises beginning in the 1990s; absent or insufficient guarantees of rights to civil and political association, participation, and expression; absent or ineffective institutional responses to growing precarity; and the conviction that, if unchecked, this unsustainable situation will continue.

This sketch of different positions is not fixed nor final. There are other perspectives. And the sectors mentioned here sometimes fluctuate, overlap, and change quickly. Nevertheless, this gives a general sense of the landscape.

Agendas, Actors, and Violence

Shortly after the protests started in San Antonio de los Baños on July 11, President Miguel Díaz-Canel went there. This move continued the repertoire that Fidel Castro epitomized in 1994 during the “Maleconazo,” a popular protest in Havana responding to the crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Díaz-Canel soon spoke on national television. He described the protests, not yet expanded to many areas, as part of a “soft coup” attempt or “unconventional war” organized from the United States. He also said that the protesters were “confused revolutionaries” and “people with unsatisfied needs” who had been manipulated by “counterrevolutionaries.”

In the same address, he said, “the streets belong to the revolutionaries,” “the order to fight has been given,” and “we are prepared for everything.” He received strong criticism for these statements. The speech was read as an authorization of violence between civilians. Violence did indeed occur: there were civilians who went out into the streets to confront protesters because they saw them as a threat to their political ideas or to Cuba’s sovereignty; there were civilians who were taken or called by labor and political organizations to do so; and there were law enforcement officers dressed in civilian clothes that acted as para-police. There was violence, and the matter of violence—including its magnitude, actors, means, and settings—is important.

The protests started peacefully, and there is evidence that they continued this way in many places. There was also damage to property, especially police vehicles and state-owned businesses, particularly the new freely convertible currency (MLC) stores. These stores only accept payment in cards charged with the newly approved single official currency, either in a local Cuban bank or online from abroad. [Editor’s note: In January, Cuba underwent a long-awaited monetary reform that unified its former two-currency system, leading to inflation]. There was violence between civilians and between demonstrators and uniformed police forces. This all happened. But the official narrative zoomed in on protester violence against pro-government civilians, the police, and state property. This narrative ignored the peaceful demonstrations and the many cases of violence against protesters. There has been much discussion about this in recent days. But there have been few attempts to connect the violence that took place during these days to the other forms of violence before and after.

Geopolitically, the violence that the United States exerts against the Cuban state and society—through the economic, commercial, and financial blockade and destabilization policies, such as federal funds for “regime change”—are part of these protests. These policies leverage a systematic, one-way force that squeezes the Cuban collective subject and its sovereignty. This violence is important not only because of how it strangles Cuba, but also because of how it links up with other kinds of violence.

Seen from within, from below, and looking into the eyes of those who demonstrated, the violence during the days of protests cannot be understood separate from the violence that deprives them every day of the material conditions of survival. It doesn’t matter, as the president said, that the electricity cuts or the lack of medicines and food are not a malicious strategy on the part of the Cuban government against the people. People can understand the reasons for the crisis and the role the blockade plays. But what does matter, at the scale of survival, is that life is not sustainable.

Many other things also matter: The Cuban government’s proven systematic inefficiency in designing and implementing economic policies. The unprecedented slowdown of the agricultural reform, while millions of pesos, without a clear economic logic, are funnelled into expanding hotel infrastructure. The incomprehensible and zigzagging measures that affect people’s lives here and now and that dramatically increase uncertainty. The demonstrable reduction in social assistance in the last decade. The 30-year decline in real wages, which has become more acute since the start of the monetary reordering (Tarea Ordenamiento). The absence of labor rights in the private sector because it is not regulated, and the absurd reluctance to operate and recognize small and medium-sized businesses with efficient state regulation. The unprecedented halt in the expansion of non-agricultural cooperatives that truly function as cooperatives and that embody democratic forms of production. The lack of interest in workers’ democracy and unions. The impossibility of creating legally recognized associations and the slow passage of a new association law that will allow the dense fabric of Cuban civil society to become formalized. The fact that the most important governing documents for economic and social reform and party congresses do not center a discussion of poverty and inequality. The opacity on issues that people are concerned about and on which many solutions could be provided. Secrecy and lack of transparency, and the criminalization of various kinds of activism as if they were inherently and undoubtedly a threat to institutions and the government itself.

At least a good part of the items identified in this long, incomplete list of issues could be considered together with and in spite of the U.S. blockade—which, besides, will remain in place for an indefinite amount of time and to our detriment.

The blockade was at least partly at stake in the protests, though some want to capitalize on it and others want to ignore it. People demanded “medicines,” “food,” “vaccines,” and “freedom.” They said, “the people united will never be defeated” and “we are not afraid.”

During the protests, criminal offenses were committed, including looting and attacks on MLC stores. Noting that it was MLC businesses as opposed to, for instance private businesses, does not justify the damage. But it allows us to understand part of the logic behind these actions. State media have reported that mostly high-value electronic appliances were stolen, suggesting that these were profit-seeking acts, not acts out of necessity. Even if we assume this to be true, this version of events fails to account for how the popular economy works and how one could sell this equipment later to generate income or meet consumption needs that are forbidden for the popular classes. In any case, the videos aired on national television show people taking mattresses, drinks, soap, and toilet paper in addition to appliances. In one video of these lootings, someone says: “All that belongs to the people.” Theft, looting, and encouraging these acts are crimes. Yet so is ignoring the economic violence, stemming from both external and internal factors, that some sectors of the population experience.

As the government has stated, there are “established channels” for expressing “dissatisfaction” or needs. But those “established channels” don’t work or no longer have legitimacy—and that doesn’t need to be a problem. Institutions respond to people, not the other way around. If, after these protests, the government insists that the only way to channel this unrest is through the “established channels,” in practice that means that the avenues for handling these conflicts and needs are closed off or unacceptably narrow. In any society, the “established channels” are never the only way to intervene in public life. The way civil society has organized for many years during tornadoes, cyclones, and other emergencies has outgrown the “official channels.” For that and other reasons, people should and do explore routes, spaces, and repertoires that they feel represent them and that help to put general and specific political agendas on the table.

Such exploration was also part of the recent protests. A very clear example is that of trans women who asserted their presence in the protests. Their concerns: food shortages, police harassment of trans people, social discrimination of trans people, specific labor policies for the trans community, and the lack of condoms to ensure their sexual and reproductive rights. In the protests they sought space to dignify their existence and to denounce violence in general and specifically against them as trans women. Different groups will try to capitalize on, co-opt, or otherwise wield trans women’s participation in the protests, but “politics doesn’t fit in the sugar bowl,” as Cuban songwriter Carlos Varela sings.

Violence also came after the protests. There was a technological and telephone blackout. People, especially women, visited police stations to get information about their detained loved ones, file appeals, and bring supplies. The president recognized that people could have been unjustly detained, but many innocent people now have criminal records under their belts. At the time of writing, July 15, there are detainees whose whereabouts remain unknown.

There is also violence on social media, including a dispute over arbitrary classifications and reclassifications—an accelerated mission to annihilate difference and frame the narrative. Every character, comma, and screenshot seeking to prove guilt contains cruelty. There are doomsday pronouncements and expressions of the brutality with which “the communists”—or those who want to “dialogue with the dictatorship” or those in “la gusanera”—will be finished off.

“The Bad Victim”

Up to a point, being recognized as a victim is a privilege. It means that you are seen and you are subject to protection. When an attacked person is no longer thought of primarily as a victim, they are erased from the scene.

The government’s handling of the conflict has chosen some victims and erased others. The president and other official political voices have recognized that the protests expressed some legitimate needs and that they contained different groups, who have been classified and reclassified in recent days. At the same time, the narrative constructing the protests as entirely violent paints the actors involved in them mainly as people who carried out “vandalism,” as “criminals,” and as people who interrupted a peaceful family Sunday.

Words have context and referents. President Sebastián Piñera in Chile and former President Lenín Moreno in Ecuador, among many others, also called people who demonstrated during those countries’ respective social uprisings vandals, vagabonds, and criminals. There, the governments responded to protests in a deeply bloody way. Discourses that classify protesters in this way, such as in Cuba now, do little to effectively handle the situation politically. Rather, it shows disinterest, if not directly sets up barriers. This also reproduces the myth that legitimate claims are those of “good citizens,” an idea that is both widespread and classist.

If those who demonstrated were vandals, then so are a good part of those who make up the impoverished population. Some of the images broadcast on national television to support the vandalism narrative show ordinary young people, dressed in the clothes surely sent by family members who send remittances, through which the state survives with revenues from the MLC stores. Criminal acts must be avoided, prosecuted, and condemned. But that is different from the arbitrary classification of good vs. bad citizens that results in erasing some kinds of violence while visibilizing others. No victim can be written off, as happened with Diubis Laurencio Tejeda.

Laurencio Tejeda was the only person killed in the demonstrations that has been officially acknowledged. The statement noted that “36-year-old citizen Diubis Laurencio Tejeda died…with a criminal record of contempt, theft, and disorderly conduct, for which he served a prison term.” Laurencio Tejeda’s criminal record was completely irrelevant in the events leading to his death, just as the way a woman was dressed or whether or not she had ever been convicted matters at the time of a femicide. Communicating Laurencio Tejeda’s death in this way strips him of victimhood, as if he is not deserving of mourning.

Where Is J-11 Going from Here?

We can see a clear transformation in the institutional political discourse in recent days. Since the president’s J-11 “combat order,” the language has progressively transitioned to a vocabulary of conciliation and calls for solidarity, unity, and peace. That matters.

From now on, seeking political solutions is essential. The government announced new measures on July 14. One lifts customs taxes and limits on the entry of medicines, food, and toiletries for travelers. This will cushion some domestic needs of those who have family or close friends abroad who can travel to Cuba. The measure is important not only in content, but because it responds to a demand from Cubans inside and outside the island. The government also announced changes in the salary system in the state sector and access to food ration distribution for people who live in areas other than where they are legally registered.

These measures should be understood as part of the current situation, but they do not respond to it in a broad sense. An extensive discussion and political transformation that allows the protests to be processed is essential. Different strategies are most essential at this time, even more so considering that the change in U.S. policy toward the island will now slow down even further. There are urgent tasks: building a more inclusive framework, recognizing not only the legitimacy of demands but also different ways to express them, imagining a diversity of solutions, and continuing to translate the people’s exhaustion into civic power to propose collective solutions and resist all forms of cooptation of what began on J-11.

Although the protests sparked shock, political upheaval, and sadness, the protests were not the cause. A society does not break down with a social uprising. It goes the other way around. A social uprising occurs when society is already broken. It had already exploded, silently. No matter how carefully it is charted out, there will be no return to total “normality.” The protests did not end when people left the streets. Different sectors tested their strength in public space, and that experience will continue to be deeply processed at home, in neighborhoods, online, on the sidewalks, and in the body.

Crises solidify cracks, and the cracks show the losses. But the losses can also have transformative effects and produce reflections about the meaning of political community and about the awareness that my fate is inseparable from yours and that Cuba is only partly mine and ours because it also belongs to others. If the government resorts to old dogmas, it will effectively blow up bridges and make the political rage of at least a sector of the population unintelligible. More than ever, the question of what is good and just for Cuba is an open question. And now more than ever, the answers cannot be captured in a single still photo or tone of voice.

Ailynn Torres Santana is a postdoctoral researcher with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC), visiting scholar at the Freie Universität (Berlin), and associate researcher at FLACSO Ecuador. She has a PhD in social sciences from FLACSO Ecuador.

Further Reading:

Canadians Reject Economic War Against Cuba: Thousands Already Sign Parliamentary Petition

Britain: Cuba Solidarity Campaign statement on the current situation in Cuba

Social explosion in Cuba: The ignored signals (Alina Bárbara López Hernández)

From Cuba: a description of the protests (Comunistas)

Cuba today: Homeland, people and sovereignty (Julio César Guanche)

A scream: Leonardo Padura on the recent protests in Cuba

Cuba's two pandemics: The coronavirus and the US embargo

The Trump administration is trying to hinder Cuba's efforts to tackle the coronavirus emergency at home and abroad.

Cuban doctors attend a farewell ceremony before departing to Kuwait to assist the country's ongoing fight against COVID-19, Havana, Cuba on June 4, 2020 [Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters]

by Josefina Vidal Ferreiro

Josefina Vidal Ferreiro is the Cuban Ambassador to Canada. This article was first published on Al Jazeera.com.

21 June 2020

As soon as the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in Cuba, our country mobilised all its resources to contain the spread of the virus.

Our healthcare workers go door to door checking people for possible symptoms. Those with symptoms are transferred to specially designated centres to receive treatment, mostly with medication developed by Cuba's own pharmaceutical and biotech industry. The medical examinations and treatments are all provided free of charge.

As of June 20, 85 people have died of COVID-19 in Cuba. Our mortality rate of 3.9 percent is very low compared to the rest of the world. We reached the peak of the disease on April 24, but we are still encouraging people to respect physical distancing, isolation and sanitary measures.

Internationally, Cuba has responded to requests for collaboration from more than 20 countries, mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Cuba has a long history and tradition of international solidarity with other countries in the health sector that dates back to the 1960s, when we started sending healthcare workers to help other countries. From then on, more than 400,000 Cuban doctors and health professionals have provided services in 164 countries. We have helped strengthen local healthcare systems, provided services in remote areas and trained doctors.

Based on this long experience, in 2005 Cuba decided to create the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to respond to natural disasters and serious epidemics across the world. Since then, this brigade of over 7,000 doctors, nurses and other health specialists has provided services in more than 20 countries.

We sent doctors and nurses to staff 32 field hospitals after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. We sent a medical team to Indonesia in 2006 after the devastating tsunami. We sent more than 1,700 health workers to Haiti in 2010 after the catastrophic earthquake and the ensuing cholera epidemic. In 2014, we sent brigades to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone to combat Ebola.

Even Samantha Power, former US President Barack Obama's UN Ambassador, praised Cuba for its outstanding role in the fight against Ebola.

We even had brigades ready to assist Louisiana after New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina but the US government rejected our cooperation.

Assisting others has always been part of who we are as a country and part of the ethical training Cuban doctors and health professionals receive.

In response to the current pandemic, Cuba has dispatched 28 contingents of the Henry Reeve Brigade to help 26 countries. This is in addition to the more than 28,000 Cuban doctors, nurses and health professionals who were already overseas before the pandemic.

Unfortunately, Cuban doctors and the Henry Reeve Brigade, in particular, have come under increasing attacks by the Trump administration, which has gone so far as to falsely accuse Cuba of human trafficking through its doctor programme.

It is a shame that the United States government has been trying to discredit Cuba's international assistance, including using pressure and threats against countries to force them to cancel these medical cooperation agreements.

They have even tried to pressure governments to reject Cuba's help during the coronavirus pandemic. They claim the Cuban government is exploiting these doctors because in the case of countries that can afford to provide monetary compensation, a portion of it is kept by the Cuban government.

However, working overseas is completely voluntary, and the portion the Cuban government keeps goes to pay for Cuba's universal health system. It goes to purchasing medical supplies, equipment and medication for Cuba's 11 million people, including for the families of the doctors who are providing their services abroad. This is how we are able to provide free, high-quality healthcare for the Cuban people.

Instead of exacerbating conflict during a pandemic, our countries need to work together to find solutions. For years, Cuba has been developing pharmaceuticals and vaccines to treat different diseases, from psoriasis and cancer to heart attacks. Now we are helping patients recover from COVID-19 with Interferon Alfa2b Recombinant, one of 19 medications being developed or under clinical trial in Cuba by our biotech and pharmaceutical industries to treat different stages of COVID-19. Globally, we have received more than 70 requests for pharmaceuticals developed by Cuba.

This would be a clear avenue for Cuba-US cooperation but unfortunately, the Trump administration is wasting this opportunity by dismantling the limited progress made by Cuba and the US during the Obama administration.

President Trump strengthened the 60-year US blockade against my country, implementing 90 economic measures against Cuba between January 2019 and March 2020 alone. These measures have targeted the main sectors of the Cuban economy, including our financial transactions, tourism industry, energy sector, foreign investments - which are key for the development of the Cuban economy - and the medical cooperation programmes with other countries.

These unilateral coercive measures are unprecedented in their level of aggression and scope. They are deliberately trying to deprive Cuba of resources, sources of revenue and income needed for the development of the Cuban economy. The effects of these measures are being felt in Cuba, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The blockade is stopping Cuba from getting much-needed medical supplies. For example, if more than 10 percent of the components in the medical equipment or medications we want to buy are of US origin, then Cuba is not allowed to purchase them.

In addition, the US has imposed restrictions on banks, airlines and shipping companies to stop Cuba from receiving materials that other countries are donating or sending to Cuba.

In April, the Alibaba Foundation of China tried to donate masks, rapid diagnostic kits and ventilators to Cuba, but the airline contracted by Alibaba to transport those items to Cuba refused to take the goods because they were afraid the US would sanction them.

A ship recently arrived in Cuba with raw materials to produce medications but it decided not to unload because the bank involved in the transaction decided not to make the payment out of fear it would be sanctioned by the US government.

So this is why we say we are suffering from two pandemics: COVID-19 and the US blockade. For that reason, it is so important that people of goodwill around the world continue to raise the demand to end the blockade of Cuba and to forcefully assert that these are times for solidarity and cooperation, not sanctions and blockades. In the meantime, Cuba, as a country that understands the value of solidarity, will continue to do our best to stop the spread of coronavirus at home and globally.

For a more general description of Cuba’s healthcare, see the just-published book by Don Fitz, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution (Monthly Review).

Marta Harnecker, presente!

The following tribute by Federico Fuentes, a long-time collaborator with Marta, and a translator of many of her publications, appeared first in Green Left Weekly.

The international left has lost one of its most lucid intellectual, pedagogical educators and determined activists with the passing of Marta Harnecker on June 14, aged 82.

Marta will forever be remembered as one of the most influential and prolific writers on the Latin American left, having written almost 90 books covering a wide array of topics and debates on the left. Her collected works in many ways serve as insights into her lifelong commitment to learning, educating and defending the revolutionary cause throughout the continent.

Born in Chile, Harnecker began her activism in the early 1960s as a Catholic student activist before moving to France, where she studied under Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Returning to her home country as a committed Marxist, Marta dedicated herself to popularising these ideas by producing numerous pamphlets such as Exploited and Exploited, Capitalist Exploitation, Social Classes and Class Struggle and Capitalism and Socialism.

Together with arguably her most famous work, Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism, which was based on notes she prepared for Latin American students studying Althusser, these texts quickly became almost obligatory reading for leftists across the region.

Marta also threw herself into supporting the newly-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, particularly in her role as editor of the political weekly Chile Hoy.

Forced to seek refuge from the military dictatorship that followed Allende’s overthrow, Marta left for Cuba, which had captured her attention when she first visited it shortly after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

In Cuba, Marta married her first husband, Manuel Piñeiro — Comandante “Red Beard” — a leading figure in the Cuban Revolution. Together they had a daughter, Camila, before his untimely death in a car accident in 1998.

There she also published Cuba: Democracy or Dictatorship? a collection of testimonies and experiences of popular power she documented.

Her constant quest to both learn from others and transmit these lessons as widely as possible led Marta to spend much of the next two decades collecting extensive interviews with key figures from the Latin American left, starting with guerrilla commanders from Central America and Colombia in the 1980s and leaders of some of the emergent left forces in South America in the ’90s.

In these interviews, which were later published in various testimonials, Marta sought to draw out the lessons of defeats suffered, the strengths and weaknesses of differing tactics and strategies, the challenges of left unity and how revolutionary forces could begin to rebuild themselves and accumulate the forces required to turn ideas into reality.

Marta also set up the Popular Latin American Memory Centre of Investigations (MEPLA) in Cuba to study and disseminate real-life experiences of communities working to build a better world.

The lessons Marta extracted from these interviews and experiences, combined with her own original contributions and ideas on topics such as globalisation and the collapse of the Soviet Union, became the basis for The Left on the Threshold of the 21^st Century: Making the Impossible Possible.

Published in 1999, the book came out just as Hugo Chávez was elected in Venezuela — the first of what became a string of progressive presidents elected in the region.

For the next two decades Marta devoted herself to studying these experiences, steadfastly defending them while never being afraid to express her criticisms. She collated many invaluable lessons learnt along the way, firstly in Rebuilding the Left, and then A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism.

After reading The Left on the Threshold, Chávez granted Marta an extensive interview, in which Marta — in her customary manner — challenged and probed him like few dared to do. The experience led Chavez to ask Marta to come and work with him, where she continued to challenge him whenever she disagreed.

Marta moved to Venezuela with Michael Lebowitz, her second husband, who, like her, had dedicated his life to enriching Marxist ideas. Together they shared a profound belief in the revolutionary potential and creativity of ordinary people engaged in struggle, along with a deep love for each other.

They helped organise two international solidarity gatherings in Caracas, in 2004 and 2005, and were fundamental to the establishment of the Miranda International Centre (CIM) in 2006 as a space for Venezuelan and international intellectuals to contribute their ideas to the process.

In between giving workshops in communities and workplaces and constant meetings with activists seeking advice, or simply wanting to discuss politics, Marta continued to collect testimonies from anyone she felt others could learn from.

As part of her work in CIM, she organised a series of panels bringing together key figures from the new left in Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Ecuador, during which she would conduct a collective interview with the aim of encouraging comradely discussion and debate between the participants.

She always sought to include all voices in these panels, believing everyone had something to contribute and that by opening such space we could learn from each other. Participants often commented that such encounters seemed almost impossible at home but were of great value, helping bridge seemingly unbridgeable divides.

As a result of these interviews, Marta published a series of unique books chronicling the rise and challenges of these new left parties, encompassing their differing viewpoints.

Marta was able to do all this while dedicating much of her time to highlighting various experiences in popular participation at the community level, travelling across Venezuela to listen and debate with local activists.

These community experiments became of intense interest and concern for Marta, who saw in them not just the embryos of local self-government but everyday schools that could foster the revolutionary subject required to push the process forward.

Through this work Marta played a critical role in bringing the Venezuelan government’s attention to various experiences in building communal councils. Chávez would go onto embrace the communal councils and then the communes as central to his emancipatory project of 21^st Century Socialism and asked Marta to become an advisor for the new Ministry of Popular Participation, which he created in 2005. 

Becoming acutely aware of some of the negative state practices that were undermining this process, Marta publicly spoke out about them, even when it earned her the ire of some in government.

The lessons she obtained from the communal councils and communes, together with other experiences she studied in Kerala, India and Porto Alegre, Brazil, nourished the ideas she outlines in Planning from Below: A Decentralized Participatory Planning Proposal, which is due to come out just weeks after Marta lost her battle with cancer.

Without doubt, Marta will forever have a place among the key left thinkers of the past century. Her extensive collection of books, pamphlets and articles will serve as invaluable tools for activists, young and old, new and experienced, for many years to come.

For those like me, who had the pleasure of working with her, and countless others who had the opportunity to meet her, she will always be remembered as much more.

She will forever be that Marta who always wanted to listen and learn from others, who always had an encouraging word to say, who believed everyone had something to contribute, and whose profound and unwavering belief in humanity was not simply something she preached, but something she practiced every day of her life.

Compañera Marta Harnecker, presente! Now and forever!