Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

February 18, 2019

A Tuba to Cuba; Cuban Food Stories

Filed under: cuba,Film — louisproyect @ 6:41 pm

In June 2017, Donald Trump announced a get-tough policy with Cuba that would reverse Barack Obama’s easing of restrictions. In 2018, Cuba was dragged into imperialism’s growing confrontations with the governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua. As the last three states in this hemisphere that refuse to go along with the rightwing Lima Group agenda, they were naturally singled out by John Bolton as his targets in an “axis of evil” speech on November 1, 2018. As the clearest indication that Trump wants to isolate Cuba, he recently attacked an agreement reached by professional baseball and Cuba to allow Cuban players to join American teams without defecting.

Therefore, the arrival of two new documentaries about Cuba are most timely. Like “Buena Vista Social Club”, “A Tuba to Cuba” and “Cuban Food Stories” are less about ideology and much more about allowing American audiences to see the reality of Cuban life. If you’ve seen “Buena Vista Club”, you’ll realize that I am offering high praise when I tell you that they are just as good as Wim Wenders’s 1996 tribute to elderly musicians who tour the USA.

“A Tuba to Cuba” complements Wenders’s film by documenting the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s 2017 Cuban tour. This was a project initiated by Ben Jaffe, a tuba player who is the son of Allan Jaffe, the man who founded Preservation Hall in New Orleans in 1961. Allan Jaffe always dreamed about visiting Cuba since he saw it as a source of the potpourri of music that eventually evolved into jazz in the early 1900s. In addition, Jaffe was also determined to break down Jim Crow in his own way and in the spirit of other early civil rights activists.

Just by coincidence, I heard Jason Berry, the author of a new history of New Orleans, being interviewed on WFAN on Sunday morning a day before I saw “A Tuba to Cuba”. Although this is a sports talk station, Sunday morning between 6 and 8am is devoted to fascinating interviews conducted by Bob Salter, in this instance one that revealed Allan Jaffe’s role. An excerpt from Berry’s book can be read on the Daily Beast:

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and Preservation Hall featured its first officially integrated band. Al Belletto, as the Playboy Club entertainment manager, was hiring Ellis Marsalis and other black musicians to perform in bands with white musicians. Mixed bands for white tourists were not like street demonstrations for civil rights. The new mayor, Victor Hugo Schiro, abhorred confrontations. The culture forced compromises on the city. A similar breakthrough happened with gays, albeit more slowly. The Krewe of Petronious invited guests in formal attire to a lavish tableau in a rented auditorium, as mainstream Carnival krewes had done for years, thwarting NOPD’s itch to bust-and-arrest. Complaints of police violence by gays and African Americans continued for decades; but as the drag queen beauty pageant became a fixture of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street and gay Carnival krewes held by-invitation balls, the police attacks on closeted men dropped sharply by the ’80s. So, too, did the bar bribes.

None of this is covered in “A Tuba to Cuba” but suffice it to say that Allan and Ben Jaffe are men of the left and that the film is a posthumous fulfillment of his father’s long-time desire to visit a revolutionary society that destroyed its own Jim Crow system in the same year that Allan Jaffe founded Preservation Hall.

The film was co-directed by T.G Herrington and Danny Clinch. Herrington, who has a background in commercials, clearly had an affinity for Jaffe’s project since he was an executive producer for “The Free State of Jones”, the great abolitionist film. Clinch’s background is as still photographer, specializing in shots of professional musicians like Johnny Cash and Tupac Shakur.

For a scholarly account of the Cuba/New Orleans connection, I recommend Ned Sublette’s 2008 “The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square”. A New York Times review that year stated:

The author of the well-received “Cuba and Its Music,” Sublette here explores Cuba and St. Domingue as crucial influences on New Orleans.

A slave revolt that erupted in 1791 in St. Domingue ended in 1804 as free blacks proclaimed the Republic of Haiti. In 1809-10, approximately 10,000 Domingans (more than a third of them slaves) who had fled to Cuba immigrated to New Orleans, doubling its population. “No aspect of New Orleans culture,” Sublette writes, “remained untouched” by these whites, blacks and mulattoes. He is a passionate chronicler of the Africans’ resilience, of how they revived a cultural memory that gave life to music and enduring folkways — a memory that would, in the timeless words of an 1819 traveler, “rock the city with their Congo dances.” Sublette spotlights a gathering identity that formed in the open-air slave dances — hundreds of people, gyrating in sinuous rings, resurrecting tribal choreographies of a mother culture. “An African-American music was coming into existence,” he writes.

In essence, “A Tuba to Cuba” reunites New Orleans musicians with the men and women who were the roots of the tree upon whose branches they roosted. For those who think of New Orleans jazz in terms of Al Hirt and the Dukes of Dixieland, et al, I must stress that Jaffe’s band is much closer in spirit to Wynton Marsalis and even to the Neville Brothers than old-time jazz. Despite not understanding a word of Spanish, the musicians develop a remarkable affinity for traditional Cuban music as well as engage with (through a translator) Mother Africa spiritually by learning about Santeria and related beliefs. One Preservation Hall Jazz Band member is moved to tears as the head of the Tato Guines drumming school recounts the restrictions put on Africans during slavery that were as onerous as the ones John Bolton would impose if he had his way. For example, they were not permitted to make drums but as a way around the ban, they constructed furniture that could be used for dances by beating on their sides.

That kind of ingenuity continues to exist in Cuba, a country that despite all odds moves forward in the 21st century. As an act of solidarity, I urge my readers to see the film now playing at the Village East Cinema in New York and that will also be available as a DVD on March 15th. Check the film’s website for other screenings, including in S.F., L.A. and New Orleans.

Now available on iTunes, “Cuban Food Stories” was made by Asari Soto, a Cuban émigré who left Cuba during the “special period” but never became an anti-Communist. Indeed, it is obvious from this beautiful film that his implicit goal is to challenge the demonization of the island that will only make the common people, the heroes of his film, suffer.

If Ben Jaffe traveled all around Cuba to sample its music, so did Asari Soto go near and far to meet Cubans who were as talented with a stove and a frying pan as the musicians were with drums or guitar. Soto had vivid memories of the food he enjoyed before the “special period” and was anxious to find out if a return to relative normalcy might have allowed a great cuisine to resurface.

Ben Jaffe’s band members brought a gift of new instruments that they presented to music schools around the island. For his part, Soto has initiated a Culinary Initiative that is intended to allow Cuban chefs to visit the USA and vice versa. This kind of solidarity is essential in this period.

Like the late Anthony Bourdain’s CNN series, Soto’s film provides the same pleasure. You meet both restauranteurs as well as people in their homes making the best of what amounts to truly organic food. Unlike Bourdain, “Cuban Food Stories” puts the Cubans in the foreground. I understood that Bourdain was trying to challenge anti-Communist stereotypes in his show on Cuba but the merit of Soto’s film is to minimize ideological concerns.

The highlight of the film is a visit to a privately owned coffee plantation where the owner and his young son are followed by Soto as they gather ripe beans. Later in this segment, they prepare a roast pig over an open wood fire to herald the New Year. The farmer is a true product of Cuban socialism. Over and over he stresses the importance of quality rather than money. He obviously will not get rich as a small proprietor but being close to nature and having the freedom to grow and eat good food is all he really needs.

We also meet a fisherman who questions the value of being rich. If being rich means having a boat that you can sail across beautiful waters and enjoy first-class food like freshly prepared ceviche, he is already rich (we see him preparing ceviche on his boat.)

The last food expert we meet is a young hipster who owns a trendy restaurant in Havana decorated by his art. He tells Soto that he understands why people left during the “special period” but he decided to stay in Cuba. Now that things are turning around, he expects Cuba to be greater than ever.

Let’s do our best to help him and other Cubans realize their dreams. See both of these films and spread the word. You will wear a smile throughout both and be reminded that another world is possible, something so important in these cataclysmic times.

 

January 19, 2019

Verne Olson and the Cuban Revolution

Filed under: Canada,cuba,Trotskyism — louisproyect @ 4:44 pm

screen shot 2019-01-19 at 11.45.43 am

Verne Olson

What follows is chapter fifteen from volume one of Ernest Tate’s memoir, “Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s”, published by Resistance Books, London. In this chapter, using archival sources, he describes in detail how a small group of Canadian revolutionary socialists in the Socialist Educational League, S.E.L., later to become the League for Socialist Action, L.S.A., of which he was a leader, organized in 1960 to defend the early Cuban Revolution against a right-wing propaganda offensive inspired by American imperialism, designed to quarantine it from the Canadian people. Their campaign in defense of Cuba, he writes, was one of the most successful of its kind in the English-speaking world.

Ernie Tate and Jess McKenzie, who is referenced in the chapter, will be attending a conference on Trotskyism in Cuba between May 6-8. By making this chapter available to the public inside and outside of Cuba, it should help provide some background on how Canadian Trotskyists related to this historic development.

Verne Olson and the Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution, I have to admit, took our group by surprise. Sometimes, as I’ve discovered, even revolutionaries can be slow in getting off the mark when it comes to recognizing the real deal. I don’t remember us paying much attention to Cuba in the years before 1959, because in such matters we tended to take our lead from the S.W.P. There was not much in The Militant at first, as far as I can recall, and only an occasional item in the Toronto papers. Fidel Castro had been in Montreal in 1957 – and would return as Cuban Premier in 1959 — but that hadn’t registered with us much but our interest, of course, was piqued with the appearance of Fidel Castro on television when Herbert Mathews, an editor of the New York Times, interviewed him in the Sierra Maestra mountains and we became aware for the first time of the strength of the guerilla struggle against the Batista dictatorship. None of us that I recall had ever been to Cuba and I remember especially a couple of people who were close to our group, who had been vacationing in Havana around that time, telling us about a general strike they had seen and that it was obvious something important was going on there. Everywhere you went in Toronto, people were talking about it and public opinion seemed to be supportive of the resistance to Batista. As Robert Wright, a keen student of Canadian-Cuban relations writes, “editorials and letters in the Canadian dailies – throughout 1958 – were overwhelmingly supportive of the guerillas.” 1 “It began as an ill-reported and ill understood revolutionary democratic movement,” Joe Hansen observed. 2

Without any hard facts or not really knowing what was happening on the ground, I remember that in the discussions amongst ourselves, we would tend to dismiss Fidel Castro and theJuly 26 Movement as “bourgeois-nationalist”. This was also reflected in our first commentary about the overthrow of Batista in an unsigned article in our paper. Relying almost entirely on dispatches by the Globe and Mail’s Phillipe Deane, the article was very skeptical of the July 26 Movement and Fidel Castro whom it saw as a brake on the revolution. “All indications are,” we wrote, “that Castro is attempting to control the revolution and channel it into a middle-class reform programme that will leave the source of Cuba’s poverty, and misery – imperialism – basically intact. A provisional government has been set up with elections promised a long 11/2 to 2 years.”3 And according to the S.W.P.’s Lilian Kiezel writing in The Militant, “For the past year Castro has sought in various ways to convince the State Department and plantation owners that he has repudiated the aims announced in 1955 and has no intention of nationalizing industry,”4 and a year later the paper was maintaining that “The main danger to the Cuban Revolution is in its own leadership. The class background of the Castro forces is petit bourgeois.”

These comments by the two main Trotskyist currents in North America were understandably based upon some of the confusion about the aims of the Revolution as expressed by a few of its main leaders, including Castro, but they were nevertheless a mistake that we would have to rectify very soon. And we were not the only ones associated with the Fourth International who were on that track.

The F.I. initially got off to a good start by having, in early 1959, one of its leaders tour the island. She received a warm welcome and was given extensive radio time to promote the F.I., but this opportunity to establish good relations with the new government soon went off the rails and headed in a sectarian direction under the influence of Juan Posadas, a leader of the Fourth International at the time who was co-coordinating the work of the International’s Latin American sections. We now recognize that it was a golden opportunity missed, but it was probably the unfortunate by-product of an internal tendency struggle in the International between Michel Pablo and Juan Posadas on the one side and Pierre Frank, Livio Maitan and Ernest Mandel on the other.5 For a critical period, the views of Juan Posadas and the F.I.’s “Latin American Bureau” set the public tone for the F.I.’s early attitude to the revolution. That could be seen in an appeal it issued three months after the overthrow of Batista in 1959, “on the rising revolutionary struggles in Latin America”, reprinted in the Spring issue of Fourth International, the theoretical journal of the International Secretariat that referred “to the July 26 movement and similar movements as being led by ‘bourgeois parties and agents of imperialism’ whose anti-imperialist stance was due to ‘the enormous pressure that the masses bring to bear on them.’”6

At best, consciousness about the new developments in Cuba was at a low level. A leaflet, for example, put out for circulation in Britain by the International Group in Nottingham, promoting the International Secretariat’s “Winter, 1959-1960 Fourth International”, makes no mention of Cuba whatsoever.7 But those were the early days. Very soon, as I’ve said, most of us had corrected our attitude and quickly we became enthusiastic supporters of the Cuban experiment. It was destined to have a profound effect upon socialists everywhere and defending Cuba against imperialism became a central activity for the radical left in North America, helping it to emerge from the isolation imposed upon it as a result of McCarthyism.

It was only after a discussion about Cuba opened up in the S.W.P., I remember, did we in Canada fully grasp the true significance of the change in Cuba. Farrell Dobbs and Joe Hansen, two of the main leaders of the S.W.P., had toured Cuba in early 1960 and came away convinced that fundamental change was underway, and in a document written in July 1960, Joe declared that “the new Cuban government is a workers and farmers’ government…”, meaning that while the capitalists still dominated the economy, the workers and peasants had taken control of the government. Five months later the S.W.P. followed this up by declaring that a workers’ state now existed in Cuba, a characterization that recognized that the workers and peasants had defeated the capitalists and now controlled the state and economy.8 The only opposition in our ranks to this view turned out to be in the leadership of the American Y.S.A., led by Tim Wohlforth, Jim Robertson and Shane Mage. Their position was very simple: only the working class could over-throw capitalism, “led by a revolutionary party” such as Lenin’s Bolsheviks’, preferably with a “Trotskyist” programme, they said. And since such a party did not exist in Cuba what was happening in Cuba, according to them, could not be termed a “socialist revolution”. They were joined in this view by many Trotskyists of the insular variety in Britain such as those led by Gerry Healy, the Socialist Labour League and Ted Grant’s grouping, the Revolutionary Socialist League, but in hindsight, I personally shouldn’t be too critical about this.

I was initially sympathetic to some of these views myself because I was still locked into a formal way of thinking and it took me a little while to come around to supporting the majority’s views, but indirectly both Tim and Jim had helped me finally make up my mind because as the discussion unfolded, they began to disagree with each other: Jim believed Cuba had become a “deformed workers state” – a designation in our vocabulary that likened the new Cuban state to those of the authoritarian, Stalinist controlled states of Eastern Europe — and Tim was of the opinion that there had not been a revolution at all. Both were unanimous in calling for the overthrow of the new Cuban government. The S.W.P., especially through the writings of Joe Hansen, would go on to play an exemplary role in theorizing what had taken place in Cuba and ideologically arming radical activists everywhere for its defense. I know of no other socialist organization anywhere, outside of Cuba, that expended more resources and effort, carried out more internal discussions and debates, or published more articles in its press, about Cuba.

As the Cuban Revolution became more and more anti-capitalist and with the new government nationalizing key sectors of the economy and implementing a deep agrarian reform, the United States redoubled its efforts to destroy the revolution by imposing a brutal blockade against the country – that lasts to this day – and by resorting to a combination of clandestine and open military intervention against it. Amidst press speculation about such threats, the S.W.P. moved at full speed to attempt to mobilize support for Cuba in the United States, not only through the party’s press and public forums, but by trying to build as large a united front as possible of all those who supported the right of the Cubans to self-determination and independence. These were the circumstances under which the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (F.P.C.C.) was born. Initiated by Robert Taber, it became for a couple of years, the main instrument for spreading the truth about Cuba in North America. Taber, a CBS journalist who had broken the Cuban story to the world when he interviewed Castro in the mountains in 1957, had run a full-page ad in the New York Times in April 1960, defending Cuba, which was signed by many of the world’s leading intellectuals and personalities of that time, among them Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Robert F. Williams, a militant, black ex-marine from North Carolina who later would create a sensation in the Black civil rights movement because of his book, “Negroes With Guns”9, an account of his organizing along with others in his community, armed self-defense squads to protect his community from marauding white racists. Over a thousand letters of support flowed in as a result of the advertisement and Taber quickly moved to bring into being the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (F.P.C.C.).

The C.P. and the S.W.P threw their support behind the new project, with the S.W.P taking the most active role. “Within six months, the F.P.C.C. had 7000 members – 27 ‘adult’ chapters and 40 student councils” and Berta Green of the S.W.P. became one of its main organizers, writes Bill Simpich in a well documented article, summarizing the Committee’s work in building solidarity in the critical early years when the revolution was under severe external threat. The F.P.C.C. promptly set up a functioning headquarters in New York under the leadership of Richard Gibson, a black journalist. Although Simpich does not mention the internal tensions between the C.P. and the S.W.P. within the Committee,10 he nevertheless provides an excellent account of its successes.11

The American F.P.C.C. lasted barely two years, winding itself up ultimately because of the intense pressure placed upon it by the American government to compel it to register as “a foreign agent” and hand over its membership lists. The vicious right-wing smearing of the Committee (think of the “shock jocks” on today’s American radio stations) that associated Lee Harvey Oswald with the Committee at the time of John Kennedy’s assassination — was the final straw. But in its brief life, because of its hard work and through its publications, press-releases, demonstrations and protests – some with many thousands outside the U.N. headquarters in New York — it was able to have a critical influence on many people’s understanding of the illegal activity of their government and at the same time win breathing space for the revolution. The decision by the S.W.P. and the radical left – especially the youth — in the early part of the decade, in making the defense of Cuba their highest priority and through the tactic of building the broadest possible united front around a single issue, on the demand for self-determination– would provide the template for later successful organizing against the Vietnam war, a war that was then in its early stages. And it was an initial entry point for many young people into radical politics. As the Canadian academic, Cynthia Wright notes: “In both the United States and Canada, the committees were part of the difficult process of opening up political dissent within the stifling context of McCarthyism and the Cold War consensus; they were also fundamentally linked to the early phases of the civil rights movement, Black Power and the student movement.”12

The Canadian F.P.C.C. was established not long after the founding of the American Committee and was equally as successful, if not more so, and it turned out, had a much longer life and a more lasting effect. In getting it off the ground, we had benefited very much from our close relationship with the S.W.P. We in the S.E.L. had been following the S.W.P’s initiative on Cuba, with great interest, wondering how we could replicate it. Events were moving very fast and all of us believed that our solidarity work should embrace broad forces to persuade working people that Canada should not back up the U.S. Reports were already appearing in the press that the U.S., ominously, had begun threatening military maneuvers from its base at Guantanamo; we were expecting an invasion any day. By then I was on the Political Committee13 and we began discussing what possible actions we could take to carry out solidarity activity. One of our first moves – a modest one — was to issue a leaflet in the name of the S.E.L, “Hands off Cuba!” which we circulated as widely as possible, but that was clearly insufficient. We had to do more, we were convinced, if we were to have a more positive effect. Our first impulse was to organize a picket outside the U.S.Consulate14, but we concluded this might be premature and would probably have resulted in something small and ineffectual, and more than anything else a sign of our weakness.  The S.E.L. was a tiny organization at that time with at most thirty members in Toronto.   Although U.E. and the L.P.P., many times larger than us, had set up “Aid to Cuba Committees”, we noted to ourselves how very passive they had been on the issue and not very active, confining their efforts to mainly raising support within their own ranks, perhaps an expression of Moscow’s hesitation about what was going on in Havana where the C.P., literally, had been pushed aside by the July 26 Movement.  We decided that the best approach for us would be to circumvent the C.P. and set up a “defense committee”, similar to that in the U.S. where they had appealed for prominent public figures to become sponsors. We figured we might be even able to do a better job in Canada because of our broad contacts in the labour movement and the C.C.F.  We were also beginning to see that there was some awakening in the labour movement about the issue.  At its Fall convention that year, in 1960, the B.C. Federation of Labour, to overwhelming and thunderous support from its delegates, and to the discomfort of the Canadian Labour Congress, especially its vice-president, Joe Morris, agreed to send all of its top officers to Cuba for a special visit and at the same time urged all of its local unions to elect representatives to accompany them there to make sure it would be a mass delegation to find out the truth of what was going on.15  As a first step in getting something going on Cuba, we immediately requested our Toronto and Vancouver branches and our supporters in Montreal to begin the preparatory work for the setting up of a defense committee by contacting wherever they could, sympathetic prominent individuals on the campuses and in the C.C.F. and unions to see if they would be interested in such a project.16 At the conclusion of the P.C. discussion, Ross agreed he would approach Verne Olson to see if he would head up the new project and at the same time we assigned one of our most experienced leaders in Toronto, Pat Mitchell — in the event that Verne agreed — to give him full assistance.

Verne and his wife Ann had recruited me to the S.E.L. a few years earlier and I had always remained in touch with them, visiting them in their home in Swansea, from time to time. They were always warm and generous to me and Ann was an excellent cook. I had many suppers there. Verne, who had suffered from polio when a child, making it impossible for him to walk without crutches, came from a poor family in rural Saskatchewan and had remained unschooled in his childhood until a social worker intervened to have him educated. He and Ann became politically conscious in their youth and became active in the F.I. group in Toronto, with Verne becoming one of its leaders. Through single-minded concentration, he had worked hard at overcoming a lack of formal education, and when I knew him, he was employed at Ontario Hydro as a certified technologist in hydrology. It was by no means certain Verne would agree to head up the Cuba project. He suffered periodically from severe depressions – a debilitating affliction that lasted most of his life – and had been on a leave of absence from the S.E.L. at the time, for health reasons and to also spend time upgrading his technical qualifications to gain a technologist certification. We were pleasantly surprised when we heard from Ross that not only had he agreed with our proposal, but he was enthusiastic about the idea. He and Ann had been following events in Cuba very closely with the same great excitement as the rest of us and were also wondering about how we should respond. With his courage, intelligence, and profound sense of moral integrity, he turned out to be ideal for the task, and much of the eventual success of the Committee in Canada was due to his and Ann’s, single-minded dedication to leading it through its many trials and tribulations. They were central to our campaign in Canada to get the truth out about Cuba, and without them, I doubt it would have had the effect it had.

Towards the end of 1960 through our connections to the S.W.P., we managed to have Verne and Ann included in a large delegation of over 300 visitors to Cuba, organized by the American F.P.C.C. The U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Cuba while the American tour was there, the last to come from the U.S. The U.S. government placed a complete ban on their citizens visiting the island. But Verne and Ann’s visit was the breakthrough we needed in Canada, and we quickly proceeded to set up the F.P.C.C across the country, but independent of the U.S. operation that had been in existence for about a year. This Cuba solidarity work that lasted from 1960 to 1970 is well described by Cynthia Wright. It’s not my purpose here to give the full story of the Canadian F.P.C.C here — Wright does that very well – but to try to tell how it looked from inside the S.E.L and its successor organization, the League for Socialist Action (L.S.A.). I will add to Wright’s account, however, additional information about some of the difficulties we encountered due to the hostility of Canadian security forces towards us and some of the problems we encountered in the Committee’s dealing with those in Cuba who were under the influence of the Popular Socialist Party (P.S.P.), the Cuban version of the C.P., and especially about the problems we ran into in dealing with the Cuban governmental organization, the Cuban Institute for Friendship with Peoples (I.C.A.P.) that was headed up by Leon Mazzola, whom we came to believe was a P.S.P. member, or sympathizer.

The S.E.L.’s urgency in defending Cuba arose from the high importance it gave to internationalism, expressed by its membership in the Fourth International whose programme called for the workers in the advanced countries to resist their own capitalist rulers and placed a high priority in defending the struggles for self-determination and independence in the colonial world. With our limited resources – at that time, as I recall it, we could not have had more than fifty members in the whole country — we believed that the best way to help the Cuban people would be to create a broad single-issue defense campaign to let all Canadians know the truth about the revolution and its accomplishments, to counter the barrage of hostile propaganda that was regularly appearing in the Canadian media, as it swung behind American policy objectives. For us, it was the first opportunity since the Russian Revolution to publicize and promote democratic socialism through a concrete example that was unfolding before our eyes. The vehicle for this would be the F.P.C.C.

While Ann and Verne were in Cuba, we busied ourselves with lining-up speaking engagements across the country so that Verne could address Canadians about his experiences and observations. The response turned out to be greater than we could have ever imagined. Verne even got himself on television and in Toronto we kicked off his cross-country tour with a packed enthusiastic meeting of approximately four hundred supporters in the First Unitarian Church on St Clair Avenue West where we managed to sell approximately 250 memberships for the new committee, such was the excitement in the hall. Alongside Verne on the platform were Professor Leslie Dewart, a Catholic theologian from the U of T, whose family came from Cuba, Farley Mowat, one of Canada’s best-known Canadian writers on the Canadian north, along with key-note speaker, Sam Shapiro, from the New York office of the F.P.C.C. We also had Richard Gibson, the black journalist and one of the main initiators of the American Committee, on the platform. Verne announced to the meeting a list of prominent sponsors who had quickly rallied to the Canadian Committee. Among them were Kenneth McNaught, a much-respected historian at the University of Toronto and the biographer of J.S. Woodsworth17, William Irvine, Honourary Chairman of the Alberta C.C.F., Frank Hanson, editor of the party’s Saskatchewan weekly, The Commonwealth, Orville Braaten, a leader of the Pulp and Sulphite Union in B.C. and the Reverend John Morgan, a minister of the First Unitarian Church to which Verne and Ann belonged. It was the first of many large meetings across the country about Cuba and an impressive beginning for the campaign18. Until reading Cynthia Wright’s essay, I had forgotten the importance of McNaught in helping to get the F.P.C.C. up and running. The same month that the U.S. ended its diplomatic relations with Cuba and while Verne and Ann were in Cuba, an important article by McNaught had appeared in the weekly, Saturday Night, deeply critical of U.S. policy towards the island and urging Canada to reject it and to formulate its own independent position. McNaught urged readers to contact the New York office of the F.P.C.C. and give it support, which hundreds of Canadian did. Those names and addresses were turned over to those working to establish a Canadian Committee. With the successful Toronto event under his belt, Verne crossed the country speaking to all kinds of gatherings, with hundreds turning out to hear him.

We were riding a wave of enthusiasm. Committee chapters sprung up in Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver. Activists in the C.C.F. and the unions were hungry for any reliable news they could get, not trusting what they were reading and hearing in the media. By then we had managed to line up an impressive list of endorsers. On the West Coast, Bob Horne a leading member of our group, a student, moved quickly to get a B.C. wing of the Committee up and running. Soon we had the active support of some key C.C.F. people like Cedric Cox, a C.C.F.-M.L.A. and Dorothy Steeves, a founder of the Party, along with a few prominent trade-unionists such as Orville Braaten and Jerry LeBourdais of the Oil and Chemical Workers Union and. On the prairies, a young Howard Pawley — who would later become the Province’s N.D.P. Premier became a key member of the Winnipeg Committee. Other active supporters on the prairies were prominent left-wingers in the C.C.F. of course, such as Bill Irving, an early sponsor and Tony Mardiros in Edmonton. Hugh Garner, an important Canadian novelist also publicly backed the Committee. But the biggest boost to our efforts came from Cuba itself. Invariably those who visited the country came back bursting with enthusiasm and wanting to talk about their experiences, underlining the old adage that revolutions often turn ordinary people into the best of revolutionaries.

The Canadian F.P.C.C., as Cynthia Wright notes, became one of the most successful solidarity committees in the English-speaking world and during the course of its ten-year history for many activists in North America it was the main source of information about Cuba, as it went through its many achievements and various crises. Right from the beginning the Committee engaged in a vigourous publishing programme, printing many speeches by Cuban leaders, especially those by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and numerous pamphlets and reprints of articles and speeches by Cuba’s supporters around the world. Very successful was a pamphlet by Jack Scott (not to be confused with Jack Scott, the Vancouver Maoist), a very popular columnist for the Vancouver Sun, comprised of eight of his columns, “Jack Scott Takes a Second Look at Cuba”.

He had been to Cuba a couple of times before the revolution and his pamphlet about his most recent trip there, sold many thousands of copies. Another successful little publication was Leslie Dewar’s, “A Catholic Looks at Cuba”, which also sold many thousands and was distributed widely throughout the country. Eventually, the F.P.C.C. would become one of the main suppliers of English-language literature about Cuba to the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa.

It wasn’t long before a major activity of the Committee became that of organizing tours to the island so that Canadians could hear first-hand personal accounts about what was going on, and to also persuade prominent intellectuals and artists to go and see for themselves what was happening, especially on important anniversary dates, all to help counter the growing pressure from the U.S. on the Diefenbaker government to line up behind its anti-Cuba offensive that was intensifying by the day. Dorothy Steeves, a leader of the B.C. C.C.F. until the early Fifties and an important B.C. poet, went to Cuba for the first time along with Al Purdy, even then one of Canada’ major poets. They were part of a delegation of Canadians from the cultural community in the spring of 1964 who attended May Day celebrations on behalf of the F.P.C.C. Purdy later wrote a very powerful account of the destruction of a sugar refinery by counter-revolutionaries in Oriente province, along with a “Poem to the Sailors on the American Warship, ‘Oxford’…”19 When Purdy returned to Canada, he readily agreed to speak at several meetings about his experiences and I remember in Vancouver, when he was on one of his visits, he spoke to a packed meeting of the Y.S.A.

The U.S. State Department’s efforts to line Canada up against Cuba was relentless. An ominous sign about what was in store came very early when Senator Croll, a “left” Liberal and powerful influence in his Party, denounced Cuba and came out against trade with it, demanding that a Cuban trade mission then in Canada, “should be sent packing”. At about the same time, many of Cuba’s supporters became very alarmed when the Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker indicated that he had acquiesced to the Americans’ policy towards Cuba. The F.P.C.C. promptly issued a press release – one of the many over the course of its life — calling on Diefenbaker to reject the “Kennedy doctrine”, pointing out that the U.S. policy also called into question Canada’s own sovereignty. And when Cuba was bombed by ”unidentified military air-craft” in early 1961, a prelude to the Bay of Pigs’ invasion, Verne condemned it as “nothing less than a flagrant act of aggression on a member nation of the United Nations”20 and called upon the Canadian government to denounce it and just as importantly, when Kennedy launched that invasion, F.P.C.C. supporters across the country immediately mobilized to protest. The Vancouver Labour Council, led by F.P.C.C. activists in the hall, condemned the action, pledging full support to the Cuban people “in their fight for freedom and for a better life”, as did the Regina and Hamilton Labour Councils. During the course of the invasion, the Committee organized a series of pickets of several hundred each outside the Vancouver and Toronto Consulates.21

Very soon after it was organized, almost in defiance of the growing Diefenbaker hostility to Cuba, the Committee received a warm response for its goals from hundreds of young people in Canada, especially students. Five campus clubs were soon affiliated to it, most of them headed up by members or supporters of the L.S.A., by then the successor to the S.E.L. Alongside Bob Horne, Brian Belfont – who would also become a leader of our group on the West Coast — became prominent in the Committee’s activities right up to the end of the decade. A welcome find, prior to that he had spent a year studying in Cuba after which he became a very active chairman of the Committee on the University of British Columbia. In the summer of 1964, the Committee sent a delegation of 45 students from all over Canada to Cuba, led by a retired Canadian military officer, David Middleton, a left-wing leader in the Toronto N.D.P. The tour had been over-subscribed with 125 students expressing an interest in participating. Plans called for the tour to join several hundred other students from around the world to work “on the construction of the Camillo Cienfuegos School in the Sierra Maestra Mountains during July and August”.

Ross, who during the Second World War had been a lieutenant in the Canadian army, had figured Middleton would be an ideal team leader, but we later learned that he had to deal with a rebellion of his young charges who had resisted his attempts to impose a military-like discipline upon them. It all began in Mexico City where the group was waiting for a flight to Havana and continued in Cuba, when a few of the students – who were not connected to the L.S.A. – who in addition to resisting Middleton’s discipline, figured that rather than going into the mountains, they would rather experience the city life of Havana. Ruth Tate, who was a founder of the Vancouver Y.S.A. and editor of Young Socialist Forum at the University of British Columbia and Hans Modlich, then an engineering student at the University of Toronto and a leader of the Y.S.A., both members of the L.S.A., tried their best to assist Middleton in preventing the tour from falling apart. It became even more difficult once they arrived in Cuba. Ruth and Hans quickly noticed that in addition to the problem of keeping the tour on course, many of the tour group seemed to be constantly engaged with individual Cubans in discussions about the topic of Trotsky.

The views of many of the youth on that tour were not that much different from those of many non-CP activists anywhere in Canada, where the topic of Trotsky was no big deal. It would have been quite natural for them to talk about Trotsky in those days, but we were suspicious that many of these debates had been provoked by P.S.P. people who seemed intent on “setting up” the tour group as a “Trotskyist” enterprise, part of a political operation we suspected, to discredit the work of the Committee in Canada. But despite those difficulties, we – and I.C.A.P. — considered the 1964 tour a big success, with many of the students later speaking on their campuses about their experiences and bolstering the work of the F.P.C.C. “The result of that visit will always be happily remembered by our revolutionary people”, Giraldo Mazola, Director of I.C.A.P., would later say.22

From the very beginning, the Canadian Committee was treated with deep suspicion by the Tory government and soon after its formation it was added to an unofficial blacklist of “subversive” organizations the government deemed a threat to the security of the state. And the American Committee was coming under similar pressure. Soon after its formation, in the summer of 1961, the right-wing news agency, United Press International (U.P.I.) dispatched a witch-hunting article targetting the American Committee, with the headline, “Pro-Cuba Reds Infiltrating Our Campuses”. The article soon appeared in all major newspapers throughout the United States and not long after the Canadian Committee became the object of a string of virulent, red-baiting articles in the Toronto Telegram, a hard-right daily similar to today’s National Post, smearing Verne and F.P.C.C.’s work.23 The way the wind was blowing could also be seen when MacLean’s magazine told Farley Mowat that an article about Cuba that he had been preparing in consultation with their editors was no longer wanted. 24 There was also some red-baiting by the leadership of the Ontario C.C.F. and the United Auto Workers (U.A.W.) against the Committee, and Leslie Dewar and Kenneth McNaught seemed to bend to these kinds of pressure when they publicly withdrew their endorsement of the Committee, precipitating internal crises in its ranks.

“We have some intelligence concerning the people who had been appointed officials and to the executive,” Dewar told the press. He did not say where his “intelligence” came from, but as far as the L.S.A. was concerned, this was the work of the R.C.M.P., pure and simple. Their filthy finger-prints were all over the affair and could be seen in Dewar’s next comment. “McNaught and I put certain questions about policy to the Chairman, Mr. V.O. Olson”, he said. “We suggested that all governing officials of the committee should be above reproach in their loyalty to the Queen and Canada’s established constitution.”25 It was sad to see these two academics – one of whom, McNaught, was an important public intellectual in his own right and a spokesman for many progressive causes, succumbing to the state’s pressures on this issue. Verne, in no uncertain terms told the two of them where to go with their idea, letting them know that their suggestion would defeat the aim of uniting the greatest number of people behind the goal of fair play for Cuba. “It would require some committee members to investigate the political associations of elected members,” he said. “Such a policy would lead to a witch-hunt in the organization.”26 In a later report, Verne expanded on this point, characterizing it as a form of McCarthyism. “I have taken it for granted that all Committee supporters were vigourously opposed to the witch-hunt which has stultified intellectual life on this continent. We have to combat this atmosphere from the word go in order to establish the truth about Cuba. It was in this belief that I declined to become the instigator of a policy to keep the Committee ‘above reproach’.”

Backing for Verne’s position quickly flowed in from Committee supporters across the country. The Montreal F.P.C.C. likened it to “Intimidation by thought police reminiscent of (the) twenty-year Duplessis Regime.” Howard Pawley wrote: “Don’t become discouraged. We are with you in Winnipeg.” Nevertheless, Dewart and McNaught had supporters in Toronto and in a meeting of the Committee with about sixty people in attendance they proposed that it dissolve itself. The motion was defeated.27

In the midst of the crises precipitated by the Dewar and McNaught affair, Verne and Ann were also placed under continuous surveillance and subjected to harassment by the R.C.M.P., with a police car parked twenty-four hours a day outside their home. “Their resignation followed an RCMP statement appearing in the Toronto papers which said that the Mounties were ‘watching’ the F.P.C.C….” Verne wrote a correspondent.28. This kind of harassment would continue throughout the Committee’s life. In a letter to the Toronto Star, in 1967 for example, Hans Modlich, on behalf of the Committee, protested a bizarre campaign against it, when media reports appeared saying that the F.P.C.C., “was training ‘separatists’ in Quebec during Expo.”29

In September, 1961 a new crisis erupted for Verne and Ann, but from a totally unexpected direction. Robert Williams suddenly showed up on their doorstep, on the run from the F.B.I. in the U.S. Williams had been to Toronto prior to this and had helped get the F.P.C.C. started, speaking several times in support of the Committee across the country, but now he was on the run from both the F.B.I. and the R.C.M.P. From Monroe, North Carolina, where the Ku Klux Klan was a mass movement, he was a leader of the Black Power wing of the civil rights movement in the U.S. Critical of the pacifist methods of Martin Luther King, he had advocated a policy of armed self-defense and had formed a Black Armed Guard to protect his community against racist violence. During a riot in Monroe, he had been forced to flee under threat of death after the F.B.I. had issued a warrant for his arrest, declaring that he was armed and dangerous. It meant he would be shot on-sight. The S.W.P. had a good rapport with Williams that went back several year from when he was head of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) in 1958, when he was in dispute with the national organization about his advocacy for a more militant policy for the civil rights movement, and which led to his expulsion. The S.W.P. had mobilized broad public support for him when he was agitating in the courts and against the police, in what’s now known as “The Kissing Case”, where two black children had been incarcerated because, while innocently playing, one of them had kissed a young white girl. The S.W.P. made a major issue of the case that had outraged many in the U.S. and which received headlines around the world. The party would become one of the first of the so-called “white” revolutionary groups in America to fully throw its support behind the “Freedom Now” wing of the civil rights movement and through the writings of George Breitman, recognize the significance of Black Nationalism in the struggle for socialism, explaining it from a Marxist perspective and highlighting it as a critical factor in the class struggle. They gave full support to Malcolm X, and Malcolm, for his part, considered The Militant to be one of the finest newspapers around. Williams and his supporters, with their tactic of self-defense, were regarded by the S.W.P. as having set an exemplary example of resistance in the black struggle.

When Williams fled to Canada, he could be fairly certain our people would render him assistance. While on his speaking engagements in Toronto – he had been to Montreal and Toronto as recently as the previous May — he always stayed with Ann and Verne. In conjunction with the F.B.I., a manhunt had been launched in Canada by the Mounties who stated as a fact that he was armed and a “common criminal”, a characterization that the F.P.C.C., vehemently protested.30 It was touch and go whether he would be captured or not. The police and the R.C.M.P. harassed many F.P.C.C. members and supporters in looking for him, searching several people’s homes and at one point the basement of the First Unitarian Church. It was pure chance Williams wasn’t picked up. The Olson’s kept him hidden for six weeks while trying to arrange his flight into exile. Finally, they arranged for him to travel to Nova Scotia where a sizable black population lived and where he had a good chance of not being noticed. There he boarded a plane to Cuba and was granted asylum. Mabel, his wife, joined him a few months later. A lot of the details about this event, I didn’t know until I read Wright’s essay.31 In the leading committees of the League for Socialist Action (L.S.A.) (the successor organization to S.E.L.) and the F.P.C.C., it was only discussed in the most general terms and information about it was only given out, correctly so, on a need-to-know basis to protect those involved. The S.E.L., mainly through the F.P.C.C. maintained very good relations with Williams over the years, with many of our people visiting him from time to time in Havana where the Cuban government had provided him with a radio program on Havana Radio, “Radio Free Dixie”, through which to broadcast to the United States his opinions about current events in the black struggle. He also edited a small journal, The Crusader, which Ann and Verne helped him circulate in North America. A few S.E.L. members gathered at their home every month to mail it out to his subscribers, with Ann and Verne’s home address on it. We looked upon all this as part of our elementary duty of solidarity to help the black liberation struggle in the U.S.

When Verne had met with Dewart and McNaught before they severed their connections to the Committee, he hadn’t been entirely frank about the role of the S.E.L. in relation to it. He had countered their complaint about our influence by telling them that out of an eleven-member executive, only one could be characterized as being in the S.E.L. But in this he was being a little disingenuous. While perhaps technically correct, he sought to down-play the S.E.L.’s influence, trying to protect the Committee against red-baiting. Those were hard anti-communist times, but without the S.E.L., the F.P.C.C. would never have gotten off the ground, which didn’t mean it wasn’t broadly based. With a lot of support in the N.D.P. and the unions, it was by no means a “front organization”, the kind the C.P.s were infamous for putting in place and which were basically an extension of their own organization, to be used for any purpose they thought fit. While the S.E.L. had won the respect of many independent activists around the Committee, it very much had a life of its own to the degree that we would occasionally find ourselves in the minority within it. This could be seen early on when we had hoped the Committee would formally affiliate with the American F.P.C.C., something we thought everyone would be in agreement with. However, when we raised this idea, a majority opposed us. They were concerned that membership lists crossing the border might make them vulnerable to the prying eyes of American security agencies, and that possibly money from Canada might be used to publish American literature. The Committee decided to remain independent. As Pat Mitchell, a leader of the S.E.L. and the F.P.C.C.’s membership-secretary later put it, “I don’t think this was a good decision because the American committee needs any support it can get but we could not carry our position on this question.”32 Later, Verne, probably trying to make the best of this rejection, spoke positively about the committee’s “independent position”, but in the end, happily, it proved to be a wise move because in less than two years, the American organization would be forced to dissolve. It had come under worse attack than we had suffered in Canada. Hauled before various Senate Committees to explain its activities, they demanded it hand over its membership lists and register as a “foreign agent”. And there was some falling away of endorsers, among them people like Sydney Lens, then one of the United States’ best known labour historians, who was one of the first to buckle, disassociating himself from the Committee because of “Trotskyist influence” in it.

The witch-hunting only served to make us redouble our efforts to expand the work of the Committee, especially in the unions. We were convinced that sympathy by many Canadian working people for Cuba remained strong which seemed to be confirmed when Hazen Argue, the new leader of the C.C.F. took a firm stand, saying that “…in the last analysis what the Cubans are doing is asserting the soil and resources of their country should belong to them. Threats of intervention from other countries should be opposed, no matter where they come from.”33 “The real reason for the U.S. attitude is economic,” pointed out Frank Howard, the C.C.F.-N.D.P., M.P., for Skeena, B.C., referring to the Cuban expropriation of U.S. properties.34 Wherever we had members or contacts in the unions, we would persuade them to try and have resolutions passed in their local membership meetings, asking that their national unions send delegations to Cuba so that the unions could witness for themselves the achievements of the revolution. The C.L.C. sent a delegation, as did the B.C. Federation of Labour and the Vancouver Labour Council. All returned with favourable reports. To this day, there is still a deep sympathy among Canadian trade unionists for Cuba and over one million ordinary Canadians go there every year on vacation, making Canada amongst all countries, the largest source of tourists for its beleaguered economy.

Typical of the work of the F.P.C.C. in those days was that of the Vancouver chapter led by Phil Courneyeur and Cedric Cox. It had a very active life organizing protests, public meeting and promoting Cuba in the N.D.P. and in the unions. Within a couple of years there would be two other “competing” Cuban support committees in the city, one organized by the C.P., and the other organized by Jack Scott’s small pro-Mao group that had recently emerged from the C.P. We deplored this division and at various times reached out to them to try and arrange joint activities with them, but nothing much came of this. Neither was as successful as the F.P.C.C. I remember when moving out there in 1962, how impressed I was by its energy, partly due to it being led by young people. Ken Orchard – Cliff Orchard’s brother, a twenty-one-year-old, active in our youth group, was its communications director and Bud Bennet, a leader in the New Democratic Youth was its secretary. Every important Cuban anniversary, it would organize a large public event, often attended by Cuban consulate officials – and sometimes the Cuban Ambassador, Americo Cruz — with speeches and talks about Cuba, often followed by a banquet, and attended by almost two hundred people, many of them from the N.D.P. and the unions. It’s where I got to practice cooking for large numbers of people, something I had learned while helping Fred Halstead at the S.W.P.’s Mountain Spring Camp. Phil, a very bright and precocious teenager, had been recruited to our group by Ruth and Reg Bullock. With a political maturity way beyond his years, he was at the same time, secretary of the Burnaby N.D.P., a centre of the left in the party. He quickly won the respect of the Cuban Ambassador and they became close friends. Cox, also from Burnaby, an N.D.P.M.L.A., had been inspired by the revolution and had become one of its most outspoken defenders.

During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, in addition to organizing several demonstrations outside the U.S. Consulate, the Committee members distributed over twenty thousand leaflets in the Vancouver area, most of them at shopping centres, factories, high schools and at the U.B.C., all within a couple of hours of President Kennedy’s October 22nd speech, the closest the world has ever come to all out nuclear war.35. I remember one particularly scary moment after I had moved out there, during the Cuban missile crisis when we were discussing the launching of a possible protest outside the American Consulate, over other’s objections, I pushed to go ahead with it even though there had not been much preparation, expecting somehow that our supporters would simply turn out because of the crisis. Unfortunately, when we showed up at the U.S. Consulate, we were so few in number that we were immediately surrounded by several hundred hostile Americans spoiling for a fight. They had obviously been mobilized to counter us and I had learned a lesson to listen to others next time who knew the situation better than me. We were forced to end the protest early at the Consulate, later organizing a demonstration where we out-numbered our opponents.

Both Cedric and Phil at different times toured Cuba for several weeks in 1963. Their experiences and observations were put to valuable use in talks to labour groups, N.D.P. clubs and the constituencies throughout the province. A high point was the N.D.P.’s Provincial Convention that fall that saw a big upsurge in interest about Cuba among the delegates who voted for a resolution “almost unanimously” calling for sympathy and support of the Cuban people ‘in their struggle to achieve decent living standards’ and condemning the U.S. boycott of Cuba.”36 The Committee also rallied to organize material aid to Cuba whenever it suffered natural disasters. In October of that year, in addition to the difficult economic conditions that resulted from the American blockade, two of Cuba’s eastern provinces were laid waste by Hurricane Flora. The Committee responded by issuing a public appeal – “Help Cuba!” It urged people to donate generously and asked that its supporters hold social events with the specific purpose of raising money for Cuba.

Among its most popular publications — the product of an F.P.C.C. sponsored tour — was the 1964 pamphlet, “The Real Cuba, As Three Canadians Saw It”, by Michel Chartrand of the Parti Socialiste du Quebec, John Riddell from Toronto, a member of our group on the tour representing the Canadian Universities’ Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.U.C.N.D.), and Verne Olson. Many thousands were sold across the country. Another popular pamphlet, was “Four Canadians Who Saw Cuba”, featuring accounts by Cedric Cox, who, in opposition to his provincial leader Bob Strachan, had toured Cuba; John Glenn, a school principal from Ontario and provincial council member of the N.D.P. (and a member of our group); Charlie Bieseck, a columnist for the Prairie New Democrat Commonwealth and Richard Fidler, chairperson of the U of Toronto Student Committee on Cuba and also a member of our group. As Cynthia Wright remarks, most of these pamphlets circulated widely across the country and today can be found in the archives of many universities throughout North America.

Working with the Cubans was not always smooth sailing, it turned out. For successful solidarity work, of course, their cooperation was essential for us, but sometimes we faced strong head-winds in dealing with them. One of our objectives was to have as many people as possible, from the cultural community, from the unions and the C.C.F., travel to Cuba to witness the dramatic improvements in health and agriculture and to especially see the spectacular results of a reading and writing campaign that in a very short time had given Cuba a literacy level equal to that of some advanced capitalist countries. Teams of visitors were usually organized in Canada in cooperation with the Cuban Institute for Friendship with Peoples, otherwise known by the acronym, “ICAP”. Our hope was that once people returned, they would spread the good word about the reforms they had seen, and this usually turned out to be the case. In the early days of the Revolution, things were always a little chaotic in trying to arrange such visits. A tour the Montreal F.P.C.C. had organized for the winter of 1960, for example, was called off because the Cubans couldn’t provide air travel. To say that communications with Cuba “were difficult” would be an understatement. A scheduled tour would neither be on nor off and we always seemed to be in limbo, anxiously awaiting word from Havana about this or that project. A tour for the July 26, 1961 celebrations was called off by the Cubans without any explanation. Verne on one of his trips to Cuba found that many of the people he met regarded I.C.A.P. as a bit of a scandal because of its inefficiencies. I.C.A.P. would often be late getting back to Verne in response to his letters and undoubtedly some of the difficulty was caused by the chaos resulting from transforming the bureaucracy, but nevertheless we believed, rather than the problem of “inefficiency”, a lot of it was also due to the political influence of the Popular Socialist Party (P.S.P)., the name by which the C.P. was known in Cuba, which although reduced by the success of the July 26 Movement, still had considerable presence in the state apparatus and the union movement. Whenever we encountered their people as we tried to move our projects along, invariably they would be sectarian towards us, often spreading malicious rumours behind our backs and misleading others who often did not know any better into doing their dirty work for them.

In addition to the F.P.C.C.’s official visits to Cuba, the Committee also had a policy of encouraging supporters to visit Cuba for their holidays but the odd time they would become a victim of P.S.P. sectarian tactics, we suspected, and be picked up by security forces and held without any explanation or charges being laid, and then released just as mysteriously. Alan Judge, an activist in the Stanley Park C.C.F. in B.C., and supporter of the F.P.C.C., once disappeared for several weeks under such circumstances, as did John Darling, a stalwart of the S.E.L. and the Y.S.A., and a founding-member of the F.P.C.C. In Cuba for a vacation during the dangerous time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, John, an enthusiastic supporter of the Cuban Revolution, ironically, on April 17, 1961, was picked up in a sweep along with thousands of other non-Cubans and many Cubans who had a history of being opponents of the government. He was held for three weeks in La Cabana Military Prison without any interrogation or explanation or any help from the Canadian Embassy. When he returned to Toronto, in an effort to clear his name, he wrote the Cuban Ambassador that a rumour was circulating in Toronto that he “had been charged and found guilty of black marketing”. We figured elements in the L.P.P. were behind this slander. While in Cuba, “I was unable to establish my support for the Cuban government,” he wrote, “and my innocence of implied charges of being suspected of counter-revolutionary activity” he stated, requesting from the Ambassador that “you affirm that I have been released clear of all charges or suspicions, and that my detention was an error.” The Ambassador replied that his “request has been forwarded to the proper Department in Cuba and as soon as we get a reply, we will call you…”37

Bob Silverman, one of the main leaders of the Montreal F.P.C.C. also disappeared in similar circumstances to John’s, throwing his wife, Edith into a state of justifiable panic when she hadn’t heard from him for several weeks and was unable to contact him, all of it causing a flurry of frantic phone calls from Verne to Ottawa and Havana to find out where he was. He too was released without any explanation and we put it all down to a few P.S.P. elements acting in a free-lance way to harass anyone they suspected of being associated with us.

Founded in 1925, the Cuban C.P. (later to become the P.S.P) had been in its time one of the most formidable C.P.s in Latin America, a mass party with a strong working-class base and a lot of influence in Cuba’s intellectual left. We didn’t know it at the time, nor did Fidel, but Raul Castro had attended Moscow University in the early Fifties and had been a member, as was Che Guevara who had joined for a short time in 1957 in the hope of moving it to the left.38 A loyal follower of Stalin and in a comfortable relationship with Batista before he became a brutal dictator, the C.P. in its early days had played a leading role in founding the main union federation, the Cuban Confederation of Labour (C.T.C.). In cooperation with Batista – who, the C.P. stated “was no longer the focal point of reaction, but the defender of democracy” — it helped write the new Cuban Constitution adopted in 1940, and as part of his “Social Democratic Federation”, campaigned for him to be President and itself electing ten members to the Chamber of Deputies and hundreds to city councils throughout the island, including electing the mayors in two major cities and coming close to winning the mayoralty of Havana. In the build up to the Second World War, during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, like C.P.s everywhere else, it had vigorously campaigned against the war and had opposed Cuba’s entry into it. But when the U.S.S.R. declared war on Germany, it swiftly reversed itself becoming a champion of Cuba’s participation and changing its name to the Partido Socialista Popular (P.S.P.). “Blas Roca, its leader became the first to volunteer in the army of the Allies.” 39

After Batista seized power in 1952, he banned the P.S.P and many of its leaders were arrested or went into exile. Yet, curiously, some of its prominent people– many of whom had been candidates in previous elections — showed up in important positions in his regime, some of them even becoming key advisors.40 Support for the party declined under Batista’s subsequent repression, but it utilized that period to strengthen and re-organize itself. Although weaker, it was still one of the strongest political parties in Cuba at the time of Batista’s fall in 1959, but fated to end up on the wrong side of history. The P.S.P. had publicly denounced the 1953 Fidelista attack on the Moncada Fortress, that had failed but which became the opening shots in an armed struggle that would eventually transform Cuba. While condemning the repressive methods of Batista – but just in case there was any confusion about where they stood — they at the same time publicly disassociated themselves from the new movement, in a position, I must admit, that would have been shared by many Trotskyists: “We repudiate the putchist methods, peculiar to bourgeois political factions of the action in Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo which was an adventurist attempt to take both military headquarters…”41 But early in 1958, when the July 26 Movement and the National Directorate were putting plans in place for a national strike, the P.S.P., softened its position and hurried to get on board giving its support to the action, but the Directorate, for anti-communist reasons mainly, had blocked their involvement, over the objections of Fidel, to whom the P.S.P. had made a special appeal.42 Up to the seizure of power – and even after — relations remained tense between P.S.P. and the Fidelistas. (It is now recognized that some of this was also due to the anti-communist prejudices of some of the Fidelistas.) But as Scheer and Zietlin, point out, “As late as May 1958, the Communists were still referring to the 26th of July Movement as ‘those who count on terroristic acts and conspiratorial coups as the chief means of ousting Batista…” The April 1958 strike was a failure and the Party publicly declared that the strike movement did not have enough support to succeed, a statement that helped Batista defeat the workers as he quickly circulated it throughout the country.43 And when the C.P. welcomed the July 26 Movement’s “recent espousal of the general strike as a slogan…away from excessive reliance on heroic indecisive guerilla warfare…” the Fidelistas flat out rejected it and “expressed surprise that the Communist leaders, Blas Roca, Juan Marinello, and others were living peacefully in Havana without interference from Batista’s police.”44

During the lead up to the seizure of power and for a few months after, it’s understandable that many socialists around the world would be slow in recognizing the significance of what had taken place. A new phenomenon, it seemed to contradict our traditional notions of how a capitalist system would be overthrown. That was even the case with the I.S. of the F.I. which although adopting a position that Cuba was a workers’ state, had let itself be outmaneuvered by the sectarian Juan Posadas and his “Latin American Bureau” to where Posadas, with his crazy positions, was seeming to speak for the entire movement.

Difficulty in understanding what was going on was also true for many of us in North America, as I have already pointed out. Our slowness, however, did not cost us as much as it did the P.S.P. Its differences with the July 26 Movement were deeply political and the product of having a two-stage conception of how the working class and peasants would achieve power. In their view, it was first necessary to have capitalist development in Cuba and to support “progressive” capitalists to do this, and then following this phase – who knows how long that would last — a socialist revolution would be on the agenda, a conception similar to that of Canada’s L.P.P. which during every election campaigned for an “anti-monopoly coalition” that would include “progressive” capitalists. The consequence of this policy for the P.S.P was profound, causing it to lose support in a sharply radicalizing political environment. It initially kept its distance from the new government. “The fact that the C.P. of Cuba during the first months of the revolution “, says Scheer and Zietland, “continued to call for wage increases and improved working conditions, even in the new situation, indicated that it did not expect the Revolutionary Government to fulfill its program and make a revolution and that they did not have close ties to the government.”45. It was as if the P.S.P. was confronting a liberal bourgeois regime of some kind, not recognizing that a fundamental transformation was underway. Seeing their errors, and no doubt having their concentration focused by seeing their support melt away like snow from a warm spring hillside, combined with the threat of an internal split, they quickly changed course and eventually gave the July 26 Movement full support, fusing with it and the Revolutionary Directorate (R.D.), a mainly student organization based in Havana, to form a new governing party, the Integrated Revolutionary Organization (O.R.I.). Anibal Escalante, who had been a leader of the P.S.P., became O.R.I.’s Organizational Secretary and proceeded to use his position to appoint P.S.P. people to key positions in the party and government, often jumping over revolutionaries from other political backgrounds, and moving to get control over the state’s security forces.

The Canadian F.P.C.C. tour, scheduled to arrive in Havana for the July 26, 1961 celebrations, plus a proposal to send a delegation from the Canadian arts’ community at a later date, seems to have been victims of this factionalism. A list of twenty-five people had been submitted to I.C.A.P. by Verne, at the request of the Cuban Consul in Montreal, to arrive in Cuba in time for the celebrations. “(T)he list was an impressive one,” Ross Dowson wrote, trying to explain the reasons for the failure of the trip to take place, “prominent persons in the C.C.F.-N.D.P., the trade union movement and in Canadian letters…all persons who in some way or another had signified strong support of the revolution and were prepared to put themselves at the service of the revolution following their return by speaking both here and in the U.S. My name along with the secretary of the F.P.C.C. and Olson and his wife were included. At no time was there any exception to the list in any way expressed by anyone, local Cuban officials, Ottawa Embassy officials, I.C.A.P. officials in Cuba, etc., etc.”46 As the time neared when the F.P.C.C. would have to confirm to those on the list that the tour was definitely on, leadership of the Committee became anxious when nothing was heard from I.C.A.P., whose Director, Giraldo Mazola, Verne had learned, was either a member of — or was in the political orbit — of the P.S.P. In conversations with our contacts in the Cuban tourist bureau in Montreal and in our conversations with the Cuban Ambassador – all of whom we were convinced were supportive of the project – including several phone calls to I.C.A.P. in Havana — we would always be given assurances that matters were in good hands. Still nothing happened. Finally, Verne persuaded Leslie Dewart, before he had made his spectacular departure from the F.P.C.C. and whose father was Spanish and mother Cuban, to get involved. “After several contacts were made, Dewart informed V.O. (Verne Olson) that he was absolutely convinced that the Canadian F.P.C.C. was being given the run around Cuban style. He expressed the opinion it was Stalinist sabotage. He told V.O. that he had been noting that the short wave broadcasts from Cuba had been taking on more and more a C.P. character with more and more coming from Hoy and less and less from the Fidelista press services…he suggested that possibly I.C.A.P. had fallen into the hands of the C.P. and that the list was being sabotaged because there were no C.P.ers on it…”47 Although the Committee eventually sent five people to the 26th of July celebrations, we were finally forced to call off the larger tour of twenty-five, much to the disappointment of the prospective tour participants. And ours, I should add. It was a blow to the Committee and a very demoralizing one at that, not so much because the tour had been cancelled, but because of the manner in which it had happened: no explanation provided. Although we were never directly challenged about it by the Cubans, since then I’ve wondered that by placing names of Pat Mitchell and Ross Dowson on the list — two well known Trotskyists, especially that of Ross – may have been just too much for the Cubans to swallow, making it an easy target for those hostile to us in Cuba, and making it also more difficult for F.P.C.C. supporters there to give us their backing. The other proposal, made at the same time as the one for July 26th, for a tour made up of representatives from the Canadian arts world — upon which considerable effort had also been expended — was also nixed without explanation.48

By 1962, Fidel Castro had become so alarmed by the role of some P.S.P. people in O.R.I., in a major speech he created a sensation by publicly denouncing Anibal Escalante for meddling in government affairs and for creating in O.R.I. a “nest of privilege, of benefits, of a system of favours of all types,” and for alienating the party from the masses.49 Consequently, several P.S.P. people were removed from their positions in the bureaucracy, as was the head of police. With that speech by Castro, and another, “The Revolution Will Be a School Of Unfettered Thought,” both of which the F.F.C.C. quickly published in English, it confirmed to the world that Stalinist influence in the revolution would be under a watchful eye.

For the next couple of years, the Escalante affair had a major influence upon the political life of Cuba and there seemed to be an increasing openness towards the the Fourth International’s ideas. Normally regarded with anathema in China, Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R., we regarded it as important sign of acceptance when Ernest Mandel, the internationally recognized Belgian Marxist and leader of the Fourth International, whose work, “Marxist Economic Treatise” had just been published, received a formal invitation from the Cuban authorities to visit Cuba. “I’m due to leave for Cuba where very favourable developments for us are taking place,” he wrote with his typical enthusiasm.50 “Che has received my book and had whole chapters translated”, he wrote a correspondent,51 and to another, he wrote that he was, “On my way to Cuba. Cuban Ambassador has given me many parcels – expect to meet Raul and Che”52 and when he returned, “I’m just back from a long trip to Cuba (I stayed there for seven weeks in the course of which I had many long conversations with many leaders of the Revolution) …” I don’t remember if he met with Raul at that time but I remember it being reported to us that he had led several long seminars for the economics team around Che Guevara. A few years later, he also received an invitation to visit Cuba that “came through Fidel…they kept me there for six weeks”, he wrote.53

One of our best sources of information about Cuba in those years was a young intellectual in Havana who was politically close to us, Nelson Zayas Pozos, who many of our people met whenever they visited Havana. He was one of around fifteen people, some of them in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who were sympathetic to the views of the Fourth International. We got along with him so well, that at one point, one of our Toronto members, Brian Duhig, was dispatched to Havana for a lengthy stay to help him educate the people around him about our ideas. When Verne was there for a five-week trip toward the end of 1963, Nelson told him that the struggle against the C.P. was continuing. “All the preparations are being made to clean C.P.ers out of the Embassies in both Paris and London,” he said. A supporter of the Fourth International, Zayas “has many, many connections, is widely known and highly respected.”54 His closeness to the Fourth International can be later seen when he was in Paris preparing his doctorate and looking for a British publisher for his thesis, Ernest Mandel wrote a letter of introduction for him – “a very good friend of mine”, he said.55

Verne, whenever he was in Cuba, was always very careful in his dealings with the P.S.P. people he encountered. Even though they were a minority – about a third – in the new revolutionary party that the Castro forces were organizing, they still had considerable influence throughout Cuba. He would occasionally bump into them in the bureaucracy, he told us, and they would very often attempt to frustrate his work. Even in the best of times they would attempt to act as self-appointed “gate-keepers” for the people he wished to see. “Our informant reports that there were apparent efforts to frustrate his meeting and discussing with leading persons”, wrote Ross Dowson to the F.I.’s International Secretariat about one of Verne’s trips. “However, he did succeed in having several lengthy discussions with heads of departments concerned with North America. They apparently have been following our informant’s work closely, are amazed, are in complete agreement with its direction, consider it the only really important work being done in the area…”56 Verne, on one occasion, managed to meet with Raul Roa, Cuba’s United Nations’ representative, whom he reported was very supportive of the Committee’s solidarity work and insisted that all future tours be arranged through him.57 That Verne was able to function so well in such a complicated environment, I’m sure was due to his remarkable political astuteness and his experience in working class politics, but it must also have been helped by his commanding physical presence (although I knew he often harboured inner doubts about his own capacities). He stood well over six feet tall, and firmly holding his crutches under his arms, with Ann standing by his side, they exuded such a firm sense of purpose and ethical integrity, I’m sure they were able to have many doors opened to them that would have been otherwise closed.

One of the crosses Verne had to bear whenever he was in Cuba, however, was the sorry reputation of the official Cuban section of the International Secretariat, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Trotskyista) (P.O.R.(T). Because of its sectarianism and ultra-leftism, it had become an easy target for P.S.P. factionalists but in our circles, little was known about it. As far as I can remember, the S.W.P and the L.S.A. at the time of the revolution did not have many, if any, supporters in Cuba so, but what news we did have about the P.O.R.(T) had certainly alarmed us. This tiny, recently formed organization seemed to be attempting to “be more revolutionary than the revolution”. I remember one time in New York in a discussion about the situation in Cuba, Fred Halstead and Richard Garza, a leader of the New York branch of the SWP, pointing out that during a critical period when the revolutionary government was seizing American assets, the P.O.R.(T) had been on the streets demanding the take-over of industry. We later learned that it subscribed to the views of Juan Posadas on the question of a possible nuclear war. He looked upon such a nightmare as perhaps being the prelude to social revolution, and even seemed to wish it. Furthermore, the P.O.R.(T) had drawn the wrath of the new revolutionary government because of its campaign to have the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo expelled, that would have required Cuba to launch an attack upon it. It had even produced a leaflet calling for a demonstration at the base, which the Fidelistas feared, (correctly so), might act as a provocation and pretext for the intervention of American imperialism, especially in the tense international situation following the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.58

Part of our difficulty in assessing the group in those years was that we simply lacked adequate information about it. We were still in the early stages of overcoming the 1953 division in the International and it was hard to find out who was who in some countries. As I’ve mentioned, the P.O.R.(T) was part of aminority grouping within the International Secretariat, affiliated to the “Latin American Bureau”, led by Juan Posadas. An F.I. grouping had ceased to exist in Cuba for many years – it had dissolved in 1947 — but after the revolution, Posadas in early 1960, assigned some of his leading people to go there to help get one re-established. It became the official Cuban section at the Sixth World Congress in January, 1961, where the position that Cuba was a workers’ state was adopted.59 That summer, even though our organizations in North America had strong disagreements with the Posadas group, we became very alarmed about its fate when we learned that its weekly publication, Voz Proletaria had been suppressed and the typeface for a Spanish language edition of Trotsky’s book, “Permanent Revolution”, which the group had been getting ready for printing, had been destroyed, during a so-called “intervention” by the government to take over the printing industry on the island. We knew nothing of the P.O.R.(T)’s circumstance as a result those events and wondered what this signified about democratic rights under the new regime.

Not long after that, Verne used the opportunity of a visit to Cuba for the July 26th celebrations to meet with the P.O.R.(T) to see if he could provide them some assistance and get some information from them about what had gone on with the suppression of their press. What follows is based upon a report he wrote when he had returned toToronto.60 Verne reports that he met with Idalberto Ferrera, the editor of the group’s journal, and Jose Lungarzo, who had been assigned to Cuba by Posadas. In Verne’s estimation, the organization consisted of approximately forty members, many of them in the militia or in the rebel army he was told, and was mostly made up of workers along with a few intellectuals and professional people. At no point did Verne discuss their alleged position of calling for the expulsion of the Americans from Guantanamo. It’s highly likely he was not aware at the time they had promoted such a position.

According to Verne, the P.O.R.(T) had three branches, one in Havana, and the others in Guantanamo City and Santiago de Cuba respectively.  Although Hoy, the official P.S.P. journal had carried articles attacking them, and even though P.S.P.ers in the unions had been labeling them as “counter-revolutionary”, the group had been able to function openly and relatively free from harassment.  Not all workers were buying the P.S.P. line, it seems.  In one plant, they told Verne, one of their members had been elected three times to a leadership position over fierce opposition from P.S.P. loyalists. The first sign of an escalation of trouble had come just as a May, 1961, issue of Voz Proletaria was going to press. An eight-page paper larger than tabloid size, it had by then appeared eight times, beginning in April.   Just as the ninth issue was about to be printed in one of the few privately-owned print shops in Havana, it was “intervened” – that is nationalized — by the National Print organization, that coincidently, was headed up by a well-known P.S.P. member.  It was a harsh action against the group and the editor and the workers in the print shop were told the paper would not be printed any longer because it was “counter-revolutionary”. Also, in the print shop was the typeface for a Spanish edition of Trotsky’s book, “Permanent Revolution”, which was being readied for publication;

it was removed by National Print, and presumably smashed. Lacking confidence in their actions, the “interveners” refused to put anything in writing.  A few months earlier, the group’s offices in Guantanamo City had been shut down under the pretext of late payment of rent and it wasn’t allowed to rectify the error, an action carried out against them by a civic official who was a member of the P.S.P. And just before the July 26 celebrations in Guantanamo City, a P.S.P. led union and a local defense-committee, distributed a leaflet calling on the workers to attend a local gathering celebrating the 26th, to strike a blow against the enemies of the revolution and listing the Trotskyists as such enemies. In that instance, the P.O.R.(T.) responded by quickly rushing out a statement into print, a copy of which they supplied Verne. “Workers and farmers”, it stated, “– everyone come to the Civic Square on the 26th of July, the date which commemorates an anniversary of the struggle which was started against the tyranny of Batista and the imperialist Yankee. With our presence we will demonstrate once more our unity in action to advance the Socialist Revolution. We will defeat imperialism and the internal counter-revolution, intensifying our agricultural and industrial production and revolutionary consciousness. For the defense and consolidation of our Cuban Workers State, the first in Latin America. LONG LIVE OUR SOCIALIST REVOLUTION; LONG LIVE THE COLONIAL REVOLUTION; LONG LIVE THE WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION. Signed: Revolutionary Workers Party (Trotskyist), Cuban Section of the 4th International, Regional Committee of Guantanamo, Dated Guantanamo, 24th of July, 1961.” The leaflet was distributed throughout the city, but one of the P.O.R.(T.) members was arrested a few days later while he was handing it out. He worked on the railways and was subsequently, arbitrarily removed from his position in his union.

After his meetings with the POR(T) leaders, Verne met with Enrique De La Osa, the editor of Bohemia, a current-events journal published in Havana, to see if he could enlist his help. He told Verne that he was familiar with Voz Proletaria but had not known that it had been suppressed. Familiar with the works of Trotsky, he agreed with Verne that it had probably resulted from growing Stalinist influence and said he would meet with Idalberto Ferrera, the paper’s editor to see if a meeting could be arranged with Castro’s secretary, with the possibility of even meeting with Castro himself. The interview with De La Osa went very well, according to Verne, but we don’t know what happened to the possible interview with Fidel. I doubt this took place, because the attacks on the P.O.R.(T.) seemed to have the backing of Che Guevara, when he repeated some of the P.S.P.’s criticisms of the group in an interview carried in the August 15, 1961 edition of Ultima Hora, a Santiago de Chile newspaper, although Guevara in an earlier criticism, had referred to them as “Trotskyist comrades”, treating them as if they were part of a common struggle. We later learned from our sympathizer, Nelson Zayas Pozos, that Che’s first wife had been sympathetic to Trotskyism and that the only Trotskyists he had ever met were those of the P.O.R.(T.), that is until he went to revolutionary Algeria in 1964 where he met Michel Pablo and with whom he had been very favourably impressed. Pablo by that time had split from the F.I. and was functioning as an advisor to Ahmed Ben Bella, the new President of Algeria.

Within a year Posadas had hived off his Latin American Bureau from the Fourth International to “re-constitute” it as his own “Fourth International”. It lasted a few years before petering out but I remember running into the remnants of his grouping in Venezuela a few years ago, at the time of an international solidarity conference in Caracas. In my discussion with them they identified themselves to me as “supporters of Bandera Roja”, the main journal of Posadas that was no longer being published, and very quickly they revealed themselves to me to be extremely hostile to Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution. They seemed to be totally out of sync with the radicalization sweeping Venezuela and I couldn’t distinguish their criticisms from what I was reading in the right-wing press in Caracas. It seemed to me that from their ultra-left days they had travelled quite a distance to the right.

But in 1966, a few years after the suppression of the P.O.R.(T), the S.W.P.s Joe Hansen — who strongly rejected the politics of the P.O.R.(T.) — spoke for all of the F.I. when he wrote about how it had been badly treated, saying that “It was injurious to the Cuban Revolution to muzzle the Posadas group…Was the Cuban Revolution so weak ideologically that it was incapable of answering even a Posadas?…The overhead cost of suppressing the group was rather high, for it gave substance to the false charge that the Cuban Revolution is going the way of the Russian Revolution, i.e., becoming Stalinized…The slowness of the process of setting up democratic institutions of proletarian rule is of concern to many supporters of the Cuban Revolution besides the Trotskyist movement.”61

Robert Williams, the American black revolutionary to whom we had provided succour in 1961 when he was fleeing the U.S, also had had his difficulties with the P.S.P. When they were in Cuba, Verne and Ann would often make a point of getting together with him and his wife Mabel, as would others from our group when they were in Cuba. Invariably charming and generous, they always gave us a warm welcome. In December, 1963, Verne and Ann, after several long conversations with Williams, noted that he had undergone considerable political change over the previous couple of years. Referring to when he had first met Williams in 1961, Verne wrote that “it was my impression that Rob was very soft on the Communist Party of the United States as well as the C.P.-U.S.S.R…. While not a C.P.er in our usage of the term, he was not receptive to any serious political criticism of the C.P…Now he has evolved 180 degrees and almost breaks out in hives when the word communist is mentioned in front of him.”62The American C.P., which in those years, had an orientation to the most conservative wing of the Black leadership, Williams told Verne, had launched an attack upon him in the Worker. It appeared to be a signal to its “Havana branch” to initiate a “Williams Must Go” campaign as it had begun to circulate a petition among American émigrés in Cuba demanding that he, Williams, be removed from Radio Havana. The reason for the hostility was that Williams’ views on the American Black struggle were diametrically opposed to those of the C.P. “The most important struggle in the U.S. today is the “Freedom Now” struggle,” he told Verne, “but the C.P. says that the emphasis upon the race question divides the working class”. According to them, “The struggle for socialism should be paramount to the struggle for Negro freedom”, he said. Williams, who had recently been in China where he had been treated like a “head of state”, said that China had taken a public stand in support of the “Freedom Now” struggle whereas Cuba – but not Fidel – seemed reluctant and even negligent about taking a position on the issue. He complained that an article he had written for Bohemia about his visit to China had yet to appear, which he figured was due to the influence of the C.P, but when Verne met with Enrique De La Osa, its editor, he learned that the article would be published soon, something that happened while Verne was there. Williams’ position inCuba may also have been influenced by the Sino-Soviet conflict. Early on, Cuba had tended towards sympathy for the Chinese side in the dispute, but by 1966 Fidel had publicly come out with a list of grievances against China, accusing the Chinese of trying to meddle in Cuba’s internal affairs by attempting to take advantage of the country’s desperate need to import rice, as a tool to pressure political compliance.63

As a result of having very little contact with the Cuban people in their everyday lives, Williams, in Verne’s estimation, tended to live in “the immediate past” and had a very limited and distorted picture of the Cuban reality, “completely divorced” from the political struggle that was underway between the P.S.P.ers, “the sectarians”, as Verne called them, and the Fidelistas, the ebb and flow of which may have effected Williams’ situation. “He is a true exile in every sense of that word”, Verne wrote. “He sees Cuba merely as a vantage point from which he conducts his struggle back home…Cuba is good or bad in his mind to the degree that he gets cooperation or hindrance in his efforts to conduct his struggle as he sees fit.”

Williams’ instrumentalist approach towards Cuba, it turned out, happened to be also true of how he regarded the people in Canada who had helped him the most in getting to Cuba in the first place and who were now circulating his Crusader throughout North America. He was not – despite his noble intentions — above careless behavior, however when it came to his dealings with us. This was seen the next year, 1965, when he took advantage of the naiveté of two young women from our ranks, Jess MacKenzie and Joan Newbigging – new members of the Y.S. – by enlisting them to act as go-betweens with his supporters in Detroit. This came about because at the last minute, the F.P.C.C. had received an invitation from I.C.A.P to send two representatives to Havana for the 1965 May Day Celebrations, traditionally a large international gathering of many thousands of people where Fidel usually gave a major address. Jess and Joan were the only ones in the F.P.C.C. in a position to make such a trip on short notice and rather than letting the invitation lapse, the Executive Committee recommended they represent the organization. Jess and Joan, aged twenty-two, both fresh out of University, had arrived in Toronto the previous year from Scotland as landed immigrants and were overjoyed at the opportunity to go.

Jess and Joan were strong supporters of the Cuban Revolution. Like many young people in Britain in those years, especially students, Joan and Jess before they had come to Canada, had begun to develop a social awareness about the world and had been active participants in the anti-apartheid struggle and the ban the bomb movement. Through the happy circumstance of having rented an apartment in the same house where a number of our members lived, they were soon won over to our organization and had become active in the Y.S., becoming executive members and not long after, members of the L.S.A. When they were preparing to leave for Havana, Verne asked them to make contact with Williams, providing them with his phone-number and address. They met Williams several times in Havana and were given a warm welcome by him, but they were struck by how paranoid he seemed to be every time they got together with him. He was always seemed to be looking over his shoulder and suggested he was being followed by the security forces or P.S.P. people. Williams — who was moving quickly to Maoism by this time – may have aroused the suspicions of the Cubans, who began to question his motives. After all, it was the Cuban government that was helping him finance his stay in Havana and had given him a radio program on Radio Havana to speak to black Americans and was probably wondering what their famous black guest was up to. Jess says she remembers that she and Joan seemed to be also under some kind of suspicion by Cuban authorities during their visit because while they were able to participate in the celebrations without any problems, even being given favoured seats for the celebrations, they were closely followed around by the police and were restricted in where they could go in Havana, unlike other international guests, probably a result of their association with Williams.

Williams, who as Verne had noted, was relatively isolated in Cuba and effectively cut off from his supporters in Detroit because of the American travel ban, and obviously anxious keep in touch with them, through the force of his powerful personality ended up persuading Jess and Joan to become couriers for him between Havana and his supporters in Detroit for the purpose of smuggling money and documents back and forth. He swore them to secrecy about this endeavour, persuading them to keep their new “assignment” hidden from the L.S.A., including Verne and the F.P.C.C., saying it was probable that the R.C.M.P. might have spies in these organizations and it would place him and his supporters in danger.

Another memorable aspect of that May Day visit for Jess and Joan was an unexpected development in Algeria that threw their plans for returning to Toronto into chaos. Houari Boumediene, a military leader in the independence war against the French, in a counter-revolutionary coup d’état, overthrew the progressive government of Ahmed Ben Bella. Cuba, which had been in the forefront in supporting that liberation struggle against French colonialism, had mobilized its people to give assistance to the new government, was now compelled, because of fears for their safety amidst the politically uncertainty, to immediately recall its citizens who had volunteered to go to Algeria to assist with health and education. This required the re-routing of all of Cuba’s commercial air-craft to Algiers to bring them home. There would be no planes flying to Canada, Jess and Joan learned, until all the Cubans had returned from Algeria.

As a result, they were stranded in Havana for several weeks, unable to get a flight home.

By the time Jess and Joan got back to Toronto from Havana, they were in a very tense state because of their fears about carrying a large sum of money concealed on their persons through Canadian customs for delivery to Williams’ Detroit people. The L.S.A. leadership was ignorant of all these clandestine arrangements with Williams, but had noticed that since Jess and Joan had gotten back, they had been acting unusually reticent about their experiences in Cuba and seemed to be taking their distance from us, prompting Verne to have a discussion with them to find out what had gone on. That’s when he learned the details of Williams’ actions. It had been clearly a mistake to have sent such relatively inexperienced people to Cuba to be taken advantage of in this way. After learning what had happened, Verne and Ross Dowson, tried to make the best of the situation and decided to help out. A Williams’ supporter in Detroit was contacted, who immediately drove up toToronto to get the money, along with the package of documents Williams had sent. Eventually, Williams left Cuba for China where he remained for several years before returning to Detroit in the 1980’s.

Organizing representatives from the cultural community, from the labour movement and universities every year to go to Cuba to get a glimpse of the improvements the Cuban Revolution was making in the lives of ordinary Cubans, continued to be a main feature of the work of the F.P.C.C. But this activity virtually came to an end after 1965. During that summer, the F.P.C.C. – mainly Verne and Ann — had worked feverishly at organizing something special for the July 26th celebrations. The previous year’s students’ tour, despite a few difficulties, had come off very well, but what was envisaged for 1965, would be more ambitious, much larger, encompassing at least one hundred students from major university campuses across the country. In the end it all came to nothing, and would throw F.P.C.C.’s relations with the Cuban government into a severe crisis. According to the F.P.C.C., the tour had “been launched early in March after a firm commitment from the Cuban institution I.C.A.P. was obtained through the Cuban Ambassador to Canada, Dr. Americo Cruz”64 and Verne had proceeded to organize it in the knowledge that the Ambassador, whom we regarded as a firm supporter of the Committee, had also helped him formulate the original tour proposal to I.C.A.P. Even though by this time we had suspicions there might be a change of attitude by the Cubans towards the Committee — possibly as a consequence of the growing closeness of Cuba to the U.S.S.R. due to the American embargo — we figured the same arrangements for 1964 would work again this time. It was planned to be the best ever. The intention was to send 100 students for eight weeks. But the Committee was quickly thrown into a huge crisis when only two weeks before the students were to leave for Havana, Verne received the startling news “that the tour was called off by the Cuban authorities without explanation.”65

Verne immediately flew to Havana where he spent five days trying persuade I.C.A.P to reverse its decision, but I remember him telling us later that as far as he was concerned he had not received a satisfactory explanation for the plug having been pulled and had gotten the run-around from the Institute’s officials when he met with them, although some of them seemed a little embarrassed about the cancellation but seemed incapable of giving him a straight answer, only saying that I.C.A.P. was in the midst of “discussions” about its relations with all international solidarity groups. As a result, the F.P.C.C. issued a statement to the public and its supporters, under the signatures of Verne and Andre Beckerman, chairman of the Student Committee on Cuban Affairs at the University of Toronto and a member of the L.S.A., that stated, “four years’ work … has now been jeopardized, not by the external enemies of the Revolution, but by the arbitrary action of an institution of the Revolutionary Government”

The F.P.C.C., for the first time since its formation, aside from taking on I.C.A.P., and throwing all caution to the wind, was also, by implication, pointing a finger at Cuba’s revolutionary government, something I probably agreed with but from this distance in time, I have some reservations with the statement. It didn’t pull any punches nor was it very diplomatic about what it thought were the reasons for the cancellation. Using the code-word, “sectarian” to point to what it thought was the role of the ex-P.S.P. members’ influence in the affair, the F.P.C.C. asserted, gave an opinion really without any hard facts to back it up, that “the student tour was the victim of sectarian forces within the Revolution itself which have been measurably strengthened in recent months as a result of the critical international situation” and that the cancellation would be “a source of satisfaction only to the sworn enemies of the Cuban Revolution, or to hopeless sectarians”. “The Fair Play for Cuba Committee has been struck a harsh blow”, the statement concluded, “but our confidence in the Cuban people and their cause, and the pressing need to continue our activities in defense of the Revolution, is unshaken.” 66 This was followed up a couple of days later by a joint letter addressed directly to Fidel Castro, the Prime Minister, signed by, among others, Harry Kopyto, Hans Modlich and John Riddell, all members of the L.S.A. but also leaders of several campus Fair Play clubs, stating that while regretting “the strong tone of this letter”, the signatories believed that “unjust vilification has been directed toward the Committee serving as an agent for this tour…we suspect the Committee and in turn the students have become victims of pressure politicking and, if so, the exigencies of the issue warrants the immediate attention of the Cuban people” and asking for “a reversal of the unfortunate decision.”67

Stung by the F.P.C.C. criticism, I.C.A.P. wasn’t long in coming back with a sharp rebuff. In a press release issued under the signature of Giraldo Mazola, I.C.A.P’s Director that received a big play in Canadian Tribune, the L.P.P.’s weekly, he challenged the assertion that the cancellation had been “left to the last minute”. I.C.A.P. at any given moment, he stated, “confronts the need to postpone some projects not contemplated in its yearly planning due to strictly budgetary reasons”. “From the very beginning of the elaboration of this plan”, he claimed “this matter was brought to the attention of the organizers, and it was clearly pointed out to them not to encourage young students about the trip without previously having an affirmative answer.” It is not true that “the reasons for the cancellation were not explained and, far from it, that Mr. Olson had the approval from our Embassy.” And taking up the direct political attack upon I.C.A.P. in the F.P.C.C. statement that had alluded to “sectarian forces within the Revolution”, Mazola issued a strong reprimand, in an argument that one can easily see, again from this vantage point in time, the Committee could not have won, and probably had made a mistake in raising it in the first place. “(T)hey refer to certain matters, which since long ago have been overcome by our Revolution, echoing in a subtle way what the imperialists cry out and pretends to insinuate: the existence of factions, divisions or groups within the Revolution, yet this insinuation crashes against reality, stumble(s) upon the Cuban revolutionarys’ stern unity who consciously and most decisively break through all difficulties to achieve victory. Regardless of how frequent this pretended division is printed in foreign releases, it will not materialize.”

While expressing surprise at Mazalo’s assertion that he had been told not to “encourage” students about the tour, in a further comment on the matter, Verne pointed out that he had only proceeded after a “telegram received from Havana on March 6th which we interpreted as leaving in doubt only the numbers…”68 I don’t know if I.C.A.P replied to the “Postscript”, but Joe Hansen, who had been copied in on the various statements that had been going to and fro between Toronto and Havana, began to grow alarmed that the matter may have been getting out of hand. “It appears to me that it would be well to drop any further pursuit of the polemic,” he wrote to Verne, “even if the last word is left to the other side…I believe that the Canadian friends of the Cuban Revolution would stand to gain by doing their utmost to reciprocate any efforts from any quarter whatsoever in Cuba to overcome the effects of the setback…This can be done by dropping the dispute, restraining those who want to pursue it, and accepting in the most vigourous way anything offered to make up for the setback.”69 “Your advice has been digested and acted upon”, replied Verne.70

Of course, the F.P.C.C.’s members and supporters were devastated by what had transpired, but I remember we sort of comforted ourselves with what looked like a glimmer of hope in Mazola’s reply when he referred to the student tour as having been “postponed to another date, when it would be conveniently feasible” and that might mean, we hoped, that we would have I.C.A.P’s cooperation in the future, so we began to discuss a proposal for another student tour and continued with our activities in defense of Cuba. But the Committee’s relations with the Institute did not look good as could be seen later that summer when the Committee sent two representatives to Havana to represent it in the July 26th celebrations. “I.C.A.P refused to accept them as part of the Canadian delegation”, Verne wrote to Joe Hansen. “They had had several talks with secondary officials in the Institute, who revealed the deep hostility which our statement aroused. On the last day of their visit they were able to see the Director who was full of venom, labeling myself and the Committee as ‘agents of imperialism’”. And despite appearances, things were not going well with the Cuban Ambassador either. A long-time supporter of the Committee, we had assumed he had not changed his attitude to it during the whole kerfuffle over the cancellation. He had been in Cuba for three months during the dispute and when he returned he told Verne that it “was the desire of the Ministry, to repair the damage done to our Committee, and that he was prepared to undertake a tour of Canada under our auspices.”71 And at the F.P.C.C.’s annual banquet that year, on November 20th, celebrating the Fifth Anniversary of the Revolution, with close to 200 supporters in attendance, and where he was the featured speaker, “he expressed a warm appreciation of Vernel Olson, who launched the Committee, thanked the committee for its efforts to establish the truth about the Cuban revolution in Canada, and pledged himself to help the committee in every possible way in the coming years that he expected to be here.”72

But the Ambassador’s words turned out to be a kind of diplomatic double-speak, especially when it came to Vancouver where a similar banquet had taken place and where F.P.C.C.’s executive body was made up almost entirely of people not affiliated to the L.S.A., the exception being Phil Courneyour, its organizational secretary and its main leader alongside Cedric Cox. Cox and several other members, including John Macey, a prominent left-wing Vancouver lawyer, had been upset by the tour cancellation and the dispute with I.C.A.P. and were very unhappy with the public statement that Verne and Andre had issued about it. Hugh Clifford, a major figure in the left of the N.D.P, who had developed an antipathy to the L.S.A. over the previous couple of years, was of the opinion that the L.S.A. had been entirely responsible for what had happened. According to Phil, he was questioning whether because of it, he should stand again for re-election to the Committee’s executive. Despite his reassuring words to Verne, the Ambassador, it seems, during his visit to Vancouver to speak at the banquet, sought to exploit this crisis for his own purposes. He met privately with Cedric, something Phil did not find out about until two months later when he learned from Cedric that the Ambassador had told him directly that “he had been instructed to break off relations with Fair Play by Havana and that he could no longer deal with Cedric or the Vancouver Committee, (and that) he asked Cedric to form a Friends of Latin America Committee…” Cruz charged that Fair Play was “a Trotskyist organization using its influence to interfere in Cuba’s political affairs” and among other things, Verne Olson “maintains correspondence with dubious people (who are being watched). He uses his contacts in Havana to pressure the ministry and bypass normal channels. He sends Trotskyist literature to Cuba. He tries to interfere in Cuban politics…”73 The problem for the Ambassador, however, was that despite his behind the scenes maneuvering to replace the F.P.C.C. with something that he could perhaps exert more control over, he could find no one to go along with his plans and he had to face the hard reality that the Fair Play had more public support, especially on the West Coast, and had been a lot more successful in promoting Cuba than the Communist Party’s committee. So, Verne, understanding that the Ambassador was smart enough to know that Fair Play was the only game in town, and choosing to overlook his activities in Vancouver, began the difficult work at rebuilding the Committee’s relationship with him. But even though the Committee continued to send guests to Cuba for special events, such as anniversary celebrations like May Day and the 26th of July, the 1964 student tour turned out to be the last that the F.P.C.C. organized.

The crisis over the aborted 1965 tour would not be the last in the difficult relations between the Canadian F.P.C.C. and the Cubans. They would reach another low in early 1966. At the Tri-Continental Congress that year in Havana on January 15th, Fidel Castro, whom we came to believe had been influenced by Regis Debray, the French radical intellectual and writer who had been teaching in Havana and who was associated with the top circles of the former Cuban C.P., went out of his way to attack Monthly Review – an American magazine sympathetic to Cuba– and zeroed in on the ultra-leftism of the Posadists about their irresponsible speculation concerning the disappearance of Che Guevara. It is now well known that Che had left Cuba because he was preparing for the opening of a guerilla front in Bolivia, but at the time, many in the big business media were speculating – with no basis in fact –that he had been murdered by Castro. This was a slander also repeated by Adolpho Gilly, a main spokesperson for the Posadists in those years and also spread, incidentally, by many in the sectarian left — who claimed that Che, because of so-called political differences over China, had been “liquidated” by Castro. Fidel at the Tri-Continental Congress, in the process of taking up the speculation about Che, also used the occasion to launch an attack upon Trotskyism, in a tone reminiscent of the worst of Stalinism, characterizing the Fourth International as “…a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction”, referring to it as “mercenaries in the services of imperialism.”

Even though we suspected that Castro’s comments were possibly based on the grievously erroneous  positions of the Posadists, the Fourth International in order to defend itself,  was compelled  to make a sharp reply:  “The dossier you placed before the participants…is made up of amalgams and links which collapse at the slightest touch…”, it stated, showing that Castro was employing the methods of the Stalinists in attempting to connect statements and actions of individuals and groups — who had long left the organization – with the F.I. “It is shameful, Comrade Fidel Castro, to utilize your prestige and the admiration and affection which the revolutionary masses of the entire world feel for the Cuban Revolution to dig out of the dustbin of history the slanders and lies that no one dares to utter, even in the Soviet Union itself, after the twentieth and twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!”  The F.I. demanded that Castro “submit his proofs before a Tribunal of the Cuban people; five of the most representative leaders of the Fourth International are ready to stand before such a public Tribunal and answer the accuser before the people of all Cuba. Thus the people of Cuba will discover that the entire activities of the Fourth International are devoted to but one aim: the victory of the world socialist revolution!74

A few weeks later, Pierre Frank, while discussing Castro’s attack, went even further and took up some of the limitations that were inherent in the character of the Congress. At a meeting in London, which I reported on at the time, he told us that a basic weakness of the event was that many of the delegations, instead of representing independent revolutionary movements, came from states under C.P. control or from states that had won a measure of political independence from imperialism and thus were limited by the conservative bureaucratic outlook or passing diplomatic needs of the rulers of those countries. Consequently, despite its many positive achievements and declarations, the Tricontinental Congress was unable to work out a consistent world strategy of revolutionary struggle and such statements as Castro’s on January 15th made against us, Pierre said, would probably remain unchallenged by the delegates.75

Because of what they believed was its implication for Cuban solidarity in Canada, the F.P.C.C. also responded to Castro’s attack against the F.I. “We are not concerned here”, it stated, “with a defense of the Fourth International, Trotskyism or Trotskyists, real or alleged, in an academic sense. We assume they will respond as they see fit. What is of serious concern though, is the integrity of the Fair Play for Cuba and persons associated with the Committee. It goes without saying that the Committee would have to take some actions if known ‘mercenaries’ or ‘agents of imperialism’ were active in its ranks.” Stressing that the F.P.C.C. was a broad non-exclusive organization open to all those who have shown interest in furthering the truth about Cuba, the executive challenged the Castro charges head on: “For five years of experience of the Committee in Canada has shown”, they said,” “that persons who are known adherents of, or sympathizers of the organization in Canada known as Trotskyist, have been among the most active, energetic and enthusiastic defenders of the truth about the Cuban Revolution…We have no evidence to sustain or justify the allegations of Prime Minister Castro regarding Trotskysists, Adolfo Gilly or Monthly Review…These charges by the most respected leader of the Revolution – charges which are not confirmed in any respect by our experience, but on the contrary are unacceptable to any serious political tendency on the North American continent – will make this task unnecessarily difficult and will impede further development.” 76 The F.P.C.C. called upon Castro to “reassess” and “repudiate his charges against proven defenders of the Cuban Revolution.” The following year, on the anniversary of Castro’s speech when Radio Havana re-broadcast it with the attack upon Trotskyism carefully edited out, we felt a measure of vindication and comfort in our belief that Castro may have been misled on the issue by some of his advisors.

During the dispute with I.C.A.P. over the student tour, Verne, it seems, had begun to revise his views about what lay behind the cancellation. In the F.P.C.C.’s June 3rd, ,1965 statement issued under Verne’s and Andre Beckerman’s signatures that did not mention anything about the Castro leadership’s role in the affair, Verne had not too subtly ascribed the cancellation as being due to the influence of C.P. elements within I.C.A.P. But during his five-day visit to Havana as he sought to have the decision reversed, as he told Joe Hansen soon after in a letter on June 8th, he had come to see the cancellation as an expression of a general conservatizing trend within Cuba that had resulted from its growing closeness to the Soviet Union – it had ninety percent of the island’s trade – and it could be also be seen in Castro’ March 11th,, criticisms of China that year, provoked by its prevention of Cuban arms getting to Vietnam – in which he referred to the “senile Mao”. Two days later Castro called for the banning in Cuba of Hsinhua, a Chinese weekly widely read on Cuban campuses. “Up until this speech”, Verne wrote, “the Chinese view was popular and widely read on campus. Today, political discussions are rare on campus and discretion seems to be the better part of valour for all students regarding controversial subjects. This attitude seems to permeate the whole country if my sampling was indicative of a trend…” While there were justifiable concerns about C.I.A. activity on the campus, Verne wrote to Joe, many of his contacts had become alarmed by efforts by the Federation of University Students (F.E.U.) and the Young Communists “to drive from the university all students who are not completely identified with the revolution as well as counter-revolutionary students and homosexuals, etc.” “There seems little doubt”, he wrote, “that the general situation described is the basic cause of the cancellation of the Student Tour which we had organized. Information gained would suggest that this move was not a high-handed action on the part of conscious Stalinist forces but was taken with at least the knowledge of the tacit approval…(and) could well indicate a qualitative change in the relationship of forces within the revolution itself.”77

By February 21st of the following year, Verne had come to believe that the negative political trends, “the beginnings of new and profound changes”, that he had noted in his earlier letter, had further deepened. In a long, dense, closely-typed six-page letter to Joe Hansen, he wrote that part of the evidence for this change had come from, “two comrades who visited Cuba in July”, and who were told by two of their contacts “that there was no internal intellectual life in Cuba. The line was set by the top leadership and no discussion or dissent is allowed. In the libraries, Trotskyist publications have disappeared from the news rack and libraries have removed books by the Old Man (Trotsky).” Verne also criticized The Militant, the S.W.P.’s weekly paper, for taking “at face value” what Castro had said about trade with China and urged the “need for a serious evaluation of the Cuban Revolution” by the S.W.P in the light of what was occurring. Relying on anecdotal information from people such as Robert Williams – who by phone had told him that “all dissenters are being called Trotskyist” – he had come to the conclusion that there had been a serious shift to the right by the Cuban government, a shift that also could be seen in the pattern of events that included “the removal of Che” by Fidel for political reasons and Che’s disappearance from public life; the January 15th, 1966, speech by Fidel attacking the Fourth International; Cuba’s support for the Kremlin in the Sino-Soviet dispute; the clamping down of political discussion on the University of Havana campus, and the cancellation of the F.P.C.C. student tour.

According to “a Canadian friend”, Verne reported, a Fred Brown who has spent the previous 2 1/2 years teaching at the invitation of Fidel Castro at the University of Havana, “Castro himself was very angry over our statement following the cancellation of the student tour; the decision to cancel being a top level one.  Castro has been moving to the right not only in regards to foreign policy but also in regards to internal policy.  The result of this, he says, is a growing disenchantment with the leadership of the Revolution among growing layers of the Cuban masses…and was most dramatically expressed in the large, surprisingly large, numbers which our friend reported as having registered with the announcement by Castro that anyone wishing to leave could do so. The report is that 500,000, yes five hundred thousand persons registered to leave…”78  Verne was referring here to a recent propaganda offensive against Cuba by the American government when it had offered to accept anyone into the United States who wished to leave the island, an offer it would quickly revoke when the Cuban government turned the tables on it and informed its citizens that anyone who wished to leave the country could freely do so.

Joe Hansen wasn’t very long in replying to Verne’s February 21st letter, and questioned his conclusions. “The facts you report are of greatest interest”, Joe wrote, “and must be given due weight in estimating what is occurring in Cuba and what our attitude should be. I would say, however, that while we accumulate material of this kind, in addition to facts from other sources, and while we should speak out emphatically on any particular event as clear-cut as the attack in Castro’s January 15th speech, it would be premature to take the public position that a qualitative change has actually occurred; i.e., that we now face a degenerated workers state.” Regarding the growth of bureaucratism in Cuba, he wrote, “I do not have the slightest doubt that this has been occurring – and on a dangerous scale.” But has this reached the point, Joe asked, “where it can be said that a hardened caste has crystallized out, one that can only be removed by political revolution? If this is so, then we should of course say it. But I am not sure that it is the case. We should recall what happened around Escalante. At that time too, Castro appeared not to be seeing what was happening – if anything it could be concluded from a distance that he was abetting it – and incidents were rife of the kind you cite. But as it turned out the bureaucratic crust was not as deep or as hardened as it appeared to be. The experience should incline us to be all the more cautious for the time being in coming to a definitive conclusion on this.”

In taking up Verne’s concern about the half million Cubans who had recently registered to leave Cuba, Joe in his letter, cautioned against jumping to “one sided or impressionistic conclusions” about the matter. “Whatever the reasons adduced to explain this, they remain meaningless in the absence of a comparable offer from Washington to any other country”, he wrote. “How many would register to come to the United States from Venezuela or Brazil, for instance, if they were given the opportunity? Only with at least one control case could the 500,000 figure be seen in the balance – and then it might show Cuba in a favourable light. Despite all the pressure from the U.S., the tightening blockade that has lasted almost six years, the constant threat of invasion, the hardships and absence of an early perspective of substantial relief, only this number wished to leave the beleaguered fortress…whereas in Venezuela, for instance, virtually the entire population registered” when the Americans made a similar proposal. If some weariness has finally set in, Joe warned, “then it would be a considerable error to interpret this weariness as revolutionary fervor to which the leaders no long respond. It may be the other way around; the leaders are beginning to reflect the weariness of the masses.”

Regarding Che Guevara and his disappearance from public life in Cuba, Hansen countered that responsible sources in the capitalist media did not believe that Che was dead, and that the New York Times, editorially, was also speculating that, because of ill health he might be in a sanatorium, possibly in Russia. “In the absence of good evidence one way or the other it would be foolish of us to be impressed by or help circulate rumours concerning Guevara’s supposed death, particularly the version pinning guilt on Castro.” On the question of the Sino-Soviet conflict, Joe stated that this had, “enormously complicated things for the Cubans. Their economic and defense needs compelled them to maintain good relations with Moscow. The Soviet bureaucracy has taken full advantage of this to put the squeeze on them. The Cubans have paid for this in political coin up and down the line. That this has been done generally in an unprincipled way is a mark, of course, of the limitations of the Castroist leadership; but a big share of the responsibility lies at Mao’s door. Instead of being designed to help the Cubans maintain a certain distance from Moscow, Mao’s policy seems expressly designed to leave no room for Cuba to hold an independent position. By forcing Castro to come out decisively, Mao made him choose Moscow’s side. This weakened China. In analyzing this point it is necessary to look beyond the immediate issues in the debate, such as the rice-sugar deal, to the bigger moves in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The actual rift between Peking and Havana began in 1964 and the responsibility was wholly Mao’s. When the Cuban delegation ran into this in China, they could not believe what had happened since their sympathies in the dispute were with China.”

Joe concluded by restating the S.W.P.’s approach to Cuba’s internal problems. “During all these years we understood what was involved. The Cuban Stalinists were rabidly anti-Trotskyist; the new revolutionary leaders and cadres were rather sympathetic to us; but they consciously subordinated their own feelings to what they conceived to be the most realistic policy vis-à-vis Moscow. Our policy has been to strengthen the hand of those who incline in our direction, and particularly not to undertake factional moves that would make things difficult for them. That is the one reason our rating with them has remained high and why we have continued to be appreciated as a force in Cuba and not just a sectarian group.”79

But by the time of this exchange of correspondence, Nelson Zayas Pozo, a Cuban, friendly to our political views, who had worked in the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations, was in Paris to begin his studies towards obtaining his doctorate. I am assuming he is the “David” referred to in Verne’s reply of March 31st to Joe. I couldn’t find a copy of his letter in the archives, but from Verne’s reply, it seems that Zayas, one of our most reliable sources of information inthose years about the internal situation in Cuba, had earlier written to Verne and had questioned the reliability of some of his sources, especially that of the Canadian already mentioned, Fred Brown, the lecturer at the University of Havana. Although not directly saying so, Zayas had not agreed with Verne’s assessment of what was taking place in Cuba, as can be seen from a letter he wrote to him two days after Castro’s January 15th speech, in which he provided information about the positive attitude of leading figures in the government – such as Ricardo Alarcon who at the time was Director of North and South American affairs – towards the F.P.C.C. and the declining political fortunes of a few leading P.S.P. people he was aware of, including the general receptivity to Trotskyist literature among people with whom he was acquainted.80 It appears that Joe had shown Zayas, Verne’s long letter of February 21st. In his March 31st reply to Joe, Verne admits that the assessment of the Canadian, Fred Brown, about what was happening in Cuba may not have been entirely accurate: “It is quite true that Fred’s last months in Cuba were most disorienting and I do not doubt that for a period he completely lost his base, particularly under the influence of his wife who was on the verge of an emotional and mental breakdown. It is also true that some of his associates were with persons not completely tied to the Revolution. But for this reason, his testimony has a certain value and validity, if properly sifted and interpreted…” Verne goes on to say that Joe had mis-read his February 21st letter. “The sharp nature of my comments and possible overstatement of my position was the result of a desire on my part to dramatize my concern with the present course of the movement (i.e., the Fourth International) was on regarding the Cuban Revolution…I did not intend to suggest that we should draw a balance sheet on the Cuban Revolution as you suggest.” It certainly would be wrong, he wrote, to “take a public position that a qualitative change has actually occurred, i.e., that we now face a degenerated workers state…” But nevertheless, Verne goes on to presents further evidence that would go towards substantiating such a conclusion. “An apparatus loyal to the Castro leadership is well on the way to being molded”, he wrote, “and will inevitably – through gradual formulation of its own special interests – form the base of a privileged caste…At the present time Castro is able to make use of his anti-Stalinist past, and the confidence that the masses have in his leadership based on past performance, in order to institute Stalinist type practices and institutions.”81

Not long after his March 31st letter to Joe, Verne, sadly, had resigned from the L.S.A. and the F.P.C.C. His differences with the L.S.A. and S.W.P. about their assessment of the recent changes in Cuba had led him to believe he could no longer support the L.S.A.’s viewpoint in the Committee. He had developed strong disagreement, he said, with the L.S.A. team he had been part of from the beginning of the Committee. Much in line with Joe Hansen’s understanding of recent events in Cuba, the L.S.A. had maintained its analyses adopted soon after the revolution that Cuba was a workers’ state, but as yet lacking in democratic forms of workers’ control, and that socialists everywhere had a primary duty to defend it against imperialism. Verne was not challenging the need to defend Cuba, but his concerns were about the significance of the changes he was pointing to. From this vantage point now, it’s possible to see that there was no reason the discussion could not have continued. He was a hundred percent in support of Cuba and no principle was involved in the disagreement. We could have easily agreed to disagree, but by then he had “lost confidence in the movement (i.e., the L.S.A.), at all levels, resulting from deep differences with the comrades”, as he wrote in his letter of resignation from the L.S.A. “The answer which Joe gave to my initial letter”, he wrote, “also went a long way towards establishing or re-enforcing this tendency…this loss of confidence was under way before Castro’s Jan. 15th speech.”82

Verne’s position as Chairman of Fair Play was soon taken over by Hans Modlich. Verne continued to play an important part in the Committee’s activities, but not to the same degree as before and not as a member of its executive committee. Hans, a long-time member of its executive and a student leader at the University of Toronto had been part of the grouping of the L.S.A. members, such as Pat Mitchell and others, who had originally been tasked with helping Verne get it off the ground. And the Committee’s relations with the Cuban Ambassador improved to the degree that Ross Dowson, probably Canada’s best known Trotskyist, attended the first congress of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (O.L.A.S.) in Havana in 1967, at the invitation of the Cubans.83 Even though its membership had declined from when it was first formed – to “slightly less than a hundred in the Toronto area” — the Committee maintained a very active chapter in Vancouver, continued to enjoy broad support across the country. ”84 And the red-baiting by the right-wing press did not let up. In 1968 the Committee came under a severe witch-hunting attack from Peter Worthington in the right-wing Toronto Telegram – no doubt assisted by information provided by the R.C.M.P. –with photographs of Hans and others of its leadership displayed across its pages. As a result, Hans was forced to abandon his engineering career and to return to University because of the difficulty of finding work due to the witch-hunting. But most people in the broad labour movement saw the red-baiting for what it was. For example, the Workers Vanguard reports that at the tenth anniversary celebration on January 4th, 1969, where Hans Modlich chaired the event and that was attended by some 150 people, the Cuban Consul, Humberto Castanedo and his wife formally greeted the guests on the their arrival and the Master of Ceremonies was no less than Gerry Caplan, a leader of the N.D.P., and that Verne read greetings to the meeting from Stephen Lewis, then N.D.P. M.P.P. for Scarborough West. Both prominent N.D.P.ers to this day – and no friends of the Trotskyists – must have been well aware of the red-baiting the previous year.85 Every year, the Committee, right into 1970, continued with its successful banquets, to which the Ambassador would always either send messages of support, or personally attend and speak.

Nevertheless, the Committee’s activities were reduced, but every month, it kept up its commitment to the Cubans by mailing 400 copies of the English edition of the Cuban publication, Granma to its Canadian subscribers. One of the Committee’s last activities was the touring across Canada of a photographic exhibit, “Cuba Today”, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. On display for three weeks at the Sigmund Samuel Library at the U of T, it was displayed at campuses, churches and libraries across the country.86

The F.P.C.C. remained active for the rest of the decade and into the very early Seventies, holding film showings, telling the truth about Cuba to whoever would listen and celebrating its important anniversaries every year, often with speeches and gatherings at banquets, attended by hundreds of supporters, usually with the Cuban Ambassador present along with many Cuban consular officials and their families. And support for Cuba among Canadians continued to increase, no doubt helped by the Committee’s persistent work — for example, in the March1969, N.D.P. paper, the Democrat, the B.C. party’s provincial secretary reported to the membership that the following October, the party would sponsor a two-week tour of the island.87 By the end of the decade, nonetheless, Fair Play was beginning to run out of steam. There is “overload and fatigue in the members”, wrote Phil Courneyour, secretary of the Committee in Vancouver. In a letter to Toronto he reported that a film showing about Cuba, into which they had put a lot of resources to promote, had been far from a success, with only 75 people showing up.88

Verne died of a sudden heart-attack in 1999. A severe depression had forced him to take early retirement from Ontario Hydro and for a long time he had withdrawn from any serious political activity, although many of his friends from the old days would often visit him and Ann to discuss what was going on in the world. Whenever we visited, we always came away impressed with his insights and optimism about the future, though sometimes all of us despaired a little about what was happening in the class struggle with the rise of neo-liberalism. When Ann died suddenly, in 1994, I remember well that Robert Williams, although obviously in a state of poor health, made the long journey up from Detroit to stay with Verne and attend Ann’s funeral, such was his feeling of solidarity with him. Jess and I helped organize a commemoration at Verne’s funeral. Many of his comrades and old friends were there to bid him goodbye and pay tribute to his remarkable life. Even though it had been many years since Verne had been active in defense of Cuba, a delegation from the Cuban consulate made a point to be there to pay tribute to his memory and to tell the audience about the significance of his contribution in helping Cuba during some of its most difficult days. It reminded all of us that through Verne and the radical left as a whole, we had helped provide critical space so that the Cuban Revolution could be considered by Canadians on its own merits. It was a moving tribute to an exemplary life which had been dedicated to humanity’s struggle for a socialist future, and in the words of the Cuban Consul who addressed the gathering, a life that had found its most creative expression in defending Cuba against American imperialism.

Notes

1          p98, “Three Nights in Havana”, by Robert Wright, quoted in Cynthia Wright’s essay, “Between Nation and Empire”, in ”Our Place In The Sun: Canada and Cuba in the Castro Era”, edited by

Robert Anthony Wright and Lana Wylie, University of Toronto Press, 2009.

2          Review of C. Wright Mills’ “Listen Yankee”, International Socialist Review, Spring, 1960.

3          Workers Vanguard, Mid-January, 1959, Vol. 4

4          The Militant, “Cuba Ousts Batista Dictatorship”, January 12, 1959.

5“The Fourth International: The Long March of the Trotskyists”, by Pierre Frank,1979, Ink Links.

6          “How Sectarians Misrepresented Trotskyism in Cuba”, by Jose Perez, Intercontinental Press.

7          R.D. Fonds, MG, 1V 11, Cont. 109, File19, L.A.C.

8          “Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution”, Pathfinder Press, 1978.

9          “Negroes With Guns”, by Robert Williams, Wayne State University Press, 1962.

10        The C.P. “form clubs but do not affiliate to the Committee…they are not sending money”, wrote Cliff Cotton who was attending the SWP’s study camp that year and was frequently in New York talking to party activists. Letter to Ross Dowson from Cliff Cotton, November 22, 1960, MG28, 1V11, Container 105, File 16, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

11        Fair Play for Cuba and the Cuban Revolution: How American Antiwar and Solidarity

12        op.cit., Cynthia Wright, p.98.

13        Toronto resident members of the National Committee and the leading body of the group between N.C. meetings.

14        R.D. Fonds, Container 109, File 18, L.A.C.

15        Workers Vanguard, Mid-October, 1960, Vol.8, No.10.

16        Letter to Branch #1 and #2, December 29, 1960 from Ross Dowson, R.D. Internet Archives. “Within the next three weeks we anticipate we will have done sufficient preparatory work to establish such a committee here in Toronto.”

17        “A Prophet in Politics: A Biography of J.S. Woodsworth, Kenneth McNaught, University of

18        Report to the 1961, (S.E.L.,Toronto) Branch Conference about the F.P.C.C., MG 28, 1V 11, Cont. 109, File 6, R.D.Fonds, L.A.C.

19        Summer, 1964, F.P.C.C. Bulletin. The Oxford, a U.S. warship, in the aftermath of the missile crisis of 1962, constantly hovered close to the coast, in full view of Havana, spying on the island’s communications system.

21        Workers Vanguard, May 1961, Vol.6, No.3.

22        I.C.A.P. Press Release, undated, (most likely the summer of 1965) , R.D. Fonds, M.G.28, 1V, 11, Container 110, File 2, LA.C.

23        Workers Vanguard, Mid-July, 1961, Vol.6, No.5.

24        Op.cit. Cynthia Wright, p100

25        Toronto Telegram, June 27, 1961.

26        Toronto Telegram, June 28, 1961

27        Report from the Chairman, by Vernel Olson, MG 28, 1V 11, Cont. 109, File 16, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

28        Op.cit. p 108, “Between Nation and Empire”,

29        Cont.109, File 20, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

30        F.P.C.C. Statement, October,1961, MG 28,1V, Cont.109, File 20 R. D. Fonds, L.A.C.

31        Op.cit. p. 110, Cynthia Wright.

32        Letter to Harold (Vancouver) from Pat Mitchell, January 27th, 1962, MG 28, V11, Cont. 109, File 11, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

33        Undated F.P.C.C. statement, possibly 1961, Cont. 109, File 20, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

34        F.P.C.C. Bulletin, Summer 1962, Cont. 109, File 19, R.D.Fonds, L.A.C.

35        F.P.C.C. Bulletin, Summer, 1963.

36        F.P.C.C. Bulletin, Winter,1963.

37        Letter to the Cuban Ambassador, Americo Cruz from John Darling, June 10, 1961, Letter to John Darling from the Cuban Ambassador, June 19, 1961 M.G.28, 1V 11, Container 110, File 2, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

38        p14, “One Hell Of A Gamble”, Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964, by Aleksandr Furenko and Timothy Naftall,1997, W. W..Norton and Company and “Che: A Revolutionary Life”, by Jon Lee Anderson, Grove Press, 1997.

39        p124, ”Cuba, An American Tragedy”, a Penguin Special by Robert Scheer and Maurice Zietlin, 1964.

40        Op.cit. p 125

41        Cited in the Daily Worker, New York, August 5, 1953, p3, from ”Cuba: An American Tragedy”.

42        Op.cit, P. 198, Jon Lee Anderson.

43        Op.cit P.127, Scheer and Zietlin.

44        Op.cit, P.128, Scheer and Zietlin, quoting P187 from The World Today, 38

45        Op.cit. P.119, “Cuba, an American Tragedy.”

46        Letter to Joe Hansen, from Ross Dowson, August 16, 1961, MG 28, 1V, Cont. 109-11, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

47        Op.cit. Letter to Joe Hansen, August 16, 1961.

48        Op.cit, Letter to Joe Hansen, August 16, 1961.

49        ” Cuba: How the Workers and Peasants Made the Revolution,” by Chris Slee, Resistance Books, 2008, p 34.

50        Letter to Dear Friend from Ernest Mandel, February 23, 1964, Ernest Mandel Papers, 21-28, International Institute of Social History( I.I.S.H.), Amsterdam

51        March 1st, 1964, I.I.S.H.

52        Dear Alan, March 7th, 1964, I.I.S.H.

53        Letter to David Horowitz from Ernest Mandel, July 20th. 1967, File 38, I.I.S.H.

54        What looks like an untitled letter to United Secretariat of the F.I by Ross Dowson, under the pseudonym “Kent”, containing a summary of his discussions with Verne, January 17, 1964, R. D. Fonds, L.A.C.

55        Letter to Russell Stetler, January 11, 1968, I.I.S.H.

56        Op.cit. Letter to International Secretariat, January 17, 1964.

57        Op.cit. Letter to Hansen, August 16, 61.

58        Op.cit. “How Sectarians Misrepresented Trotskyism in Cuba”, by Jose Perez, I.P.

59        “The Fourth International: The Long March of the Trotskyists” by Pierre Frank, 1979, Ink Links.

60        .”REPORT OF DISCUSSIONS HELD WITH COMRADES FROM THE CUBAN SECTION— FOURTH INTERNATIONAL”, August 14, 1961. This report is unsigned and was probably meant for the International Secretariat. I know that Verne often left his name off sensitive documents in case they fell into the wrong hands, wishing to protect the F.P.C.C. against factional attacks, and not wishing to compromise its formal independence from the L.S.A. and the S.W.P. The sensitivity of the political situation in Cuba also demanded this, along with the fear of being red-baited in Canada. The report’s point form and the fact that he refers to the L.S.A. also suggests this. It’s highly unlikely an SWP member would have made this specific reference. MG 28, 1V 11, Container 109, File 11 R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

61        ”Stalinism or Trotskyism in the Cuban Revolution?” by Joseph Hansen, International Socialist Review, Vol. 27, No3, Summer, 1966. Joseph Hansen Internet Archive, 2006.

62        Letter to George Breitman from Verne Olson, January 29, 1964. Cont.109, File 16, R.D.Fonds, L.A.C.

63        Op.cit. p644, Anderson.

64        ”F.P.C.C. ,Statement On Cancellation Of The Tour”, F.P.C.C. Fall,1965 Bulletin.

65        F.P.C.C. Statement On the Cancellation Of The Tour”, F.P.C.C. Fall’65 Bulletin.

66        F.P.C.C. Bulletin, Summer-fall,’65

67        “Dear Dr. Castro”, June 5th, 1965, Cont. 112-2, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

68        Student Tour Cancellation: Postscript by the F.P.C.C.”, July 25th, 1965, Cont.112-2, L.A.C.

69        “Dear Verne” from Joe Hansen, September 21, 1965, Cont. 110-1, L.A.C.

70        ”Dear Joe”, from Verne, December 14,1965, R.D. Fonds, Cont. 110 – 1, L.A.C.

71        “Dear Joe”, from Vernel Olson, August 31, 1965, R.D. Fonds, Cont. 110 – 1, L.A.C.

72        “Ovation for Ambassador at Cuba Fair Play Supper”, Workers Vanguard, Mid-December, 1965, Volume 10, No. 7, (115)

73        “Letter to Verne Olson” from Phil Courneyour”, January 28, 1966, R.D. Fonds, Cont. 110 – 1, L.A.C.

74        World Outlook, February 18, 1966, Chris Arthur Archive, 711/B/1/3, Warwick University.

75        World Outlook, Vol. 4, No 8, March 25th, 1966, Chris Arthur Archive, 711/B/1/3, Warwick University.

76        Statement of the Toronto Executive of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, February 14, 1966,

77        “Dear Joe”, from Verne Olson”, June 8th, 1965, Cont.110-1, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

78        ”Dear Joe” from Verne Olson, February 21, 1966, Cont.110 – 1, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

79        “Dear Verne” from Joe Hansen, March 7th, 1965, Cont. 110-1, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

80        ”Letter to Verne and Anne”, January 17th, 1966,unsigned, but from internal evidence appears to be from Nelson Zayas Pozo, , Cont.110-1, R.D. Fonds,L.A.C.

81        “Letter to Joe Hansen”, from Verne Olson, March 31st, 1966, Cont. 110-1, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

82        “Letter to Ross Dowson” from Verne Olson, April 14th, 1966, Cont. 110-1, R.D. Fonds L.A.C.

83        ”L. A. Solidarity Congress Faces Che’s Challenge”, by Ross Dowson, Workers Vanguard, Volume 11, No.11 (131), Mid-July, 1967.

84        “Memorandum on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Canada”, July 28th, 1967, by Ross

Dowson, “submitted to Minrex with a copy to Fidel Castro.”  Cont. 110-1, R.D. Fonds L.A.C.

85        ”Tenth Anniversary of Cuban Revolution”, Workers Vanguard, Volume 13, No.9 (165), January

13th, 1969.

86        Cont. 105, File 17, R.D. Fonds, L.A.C.

87        Workers Vanguard, Vol. 13, No. 18 (174), May 19th, 1969.

88        Letter to Ross Dowson, July 28, 1969, MG28,1V11, Cont.109, File 6, R D. Fonds, L.A.C.

November 15, 2018

Cornered: Trump Gets Thumped on Cuba at the UN 

Filed under: cuba,Guest Post — louisproyect @ 8:02 pm

By IKE NAHEM

On November 1, 2018, for the twenty-seventh straight year, the full United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted by a near-unanimous 189-2 for “the necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” The Israeli government, as usual, voted automatically with the US without saying a word on the floor. There were no abstentions, but Moldova and the Ukraine chose not to vote at all.

[Footnote 1:  The Benjamin Netanyahu Israeli government generally jerks its knee behind the US position on the Cuba anti-US blockade votes, abstaining in the last vote in 2016 when Barack Obama was in the White House. Netanyahu’s UN representatives reverted to a No vote this time under Trump. While diplomatic relations between Israel and Cuba have not been restored since being broken in the aftermath of the 1973 Middle Eastern War, which saw major combat between Israeli forces and the armies of Egypt and Syria, Israel and Cuba carry out significant two-way economic trade and commercial relations. There is important Israeli-based capital investment in several Cuban projects and industries including irrigation technology, office towers, and agricultural production. There is also fully legal travel from each country to the other. The many thousands of Israeli travelers to Cuba, and the travel agencies that work with them, have found no anti-Semitism in Cuba and no personal hostility towards Israelis even though the Cuban government is a strong supporter of Palestinian self-determination and has normal or friendly diplomatic relations with all the Arab countries as well as Iran. Cuba promotes a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine based on UN Resolution 242, with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.]

“Clever” Tactic Fizzles Fast

The final vote had been delayed a day as the Donald Trump White House wheeled out what they apparently thought was a very clever tactic aimed at diverting attention away from Washington’s annual political isolation and defeat. The tactic was to propose a series of no less than eight “amendments” to the anti-blockade Resolution with bogus attacks against Cuba over “human rights” and political freedoms inside Cuba.

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, in her last hurrah before resigning the post by year’s end, presented the “amendments” as being formulated by directly using the past words from Washington’s NATO allies in the European Union and Canada. This year, as usual, the EU and Canadian representatives made perfunctory statements after the vote with implicit criticisms of Cuba along the lines of restrictions on democratic rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and so on, which are sometimes put in the context of the US blockade. (See my Submission to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Geneva, Switzerland, “The Case of Cuba: “Human Rights” as a Club” https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/the-case-of-cuba-human-rights-as-a-club/)

Both EU and Canadian diplomatic spokespeople quickly disabused Haley of any hope that Washington’s maneuvers would gain traction this year and bottle up the works. An Austrian diplomat speaking for the EU and the Canadian representative both made forceful statements rejecting all the “amendments.” They reiterated that the “amendments” had “no place in the current Resolution” and that the question of the “extraterritorial” US economic, commercial, and financial embargo against Cuba should not be “mixed up” with the issues raised through the “amendments.”

The General Assembly was required to vote on each Amendment separately. Haley and her boss Trump were isolated and cornered with no political way out. Each “amendment” went down in flames with 3 votes in favor (the US, Israel, and the Ukraine, which managed this time to press a button, 114 against, with 66 abstentions.

The common denominator in the near-unanimous votes, year after year in the UNGA, is the question of “extraterritoriality,” whereby the United States government gives itself the right to impose its economic, political, and travel blockading of Cuba on other countries and commercial entities who have normal or friendly relations with the Cuban workers’ state. It is this US posture, long before Trump’s regime came into power, that determined the votes of the European Union – a major capitalist trading and economic bloc with its own great political pretensions – with Cuba against US policy. Trump and Haley’s amendments ploy fizzled fast and was labeled correctly by EU and Canadian representatives as a “diversion” from the real issue, for them, of “extraterritoriality.”

The General Secretary’s Report

Most speakers from the floor referred positively to the report issued by UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres, the former Portuguese President and former President of the Socialist International, on the UNGA Resolution against the US blockade. It is a 168-page long comprehensive document. (http://undocs.org?A/73/85). Virtually every member-state plainly gives their opposition to the US blockade in their own words, as well as statements from 36 “organs and agencies of the United Nations system” from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization to the United Nations Children’s Fund to the World Trade Organization, all attacking from their own angle and perspective the US blockade and solidarizing to some degree, mostly strongly, with Cuba.

From Obama to Trump

The Trump Administration has re-tightened aspects of the US economic and travel sanctions that had been marginally loosened during the last two years of the second Barack Obama White House. Full diplomatic relations were restored between Washington and Havana in July 2015 and Trump has stopped short of moving to abrogate them. He has, however, virtually frozen US embassy functions in Havana, making it very difficult for Cuban citizens to travel to the United States. This includes family members, trade unionists, doctors and scientists, and artists and musicians. “People-to-people” licensed travel to Cuba by US citizens is still possible and Cuban-American citizens remain able to travel back and forth to the island with no special requirements.

Trump has consciously ratcheted up bellicose and provocative anti-Cuba rhetoric. This plays badly with the “public opinion” of the peoples and governments of the world, including inside the United States and among Cuban-Americans. The fusillades of hostile demagogy against the Cuban government by Trump, Nikki Haley, and National Security Advisor John Bolton only produces disdain and contempt across the political and ideological fissures in world politics. This is because the Cuban state and government practice of international solidarity – including Cuba’s vanguard role in medical internationalism and worldwide emergency disaster relief efforts – and its political principles is universally admired. It is universally recognized that Cuba’s quick action and dispatch of medical personnel was the decisive factor in containing and conquering the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa on the ground. Also very clear factually are the example of Cuba’s great human indices for the health and education of the Cuban population as a whole despite the terrible impact of decades of US economic and political aggression, and recurrent military and terrorist threats. These are all settled questions around the world. And all the huffing and puffing of Trump and his lackeys cannot change that.

For many years before Trump, the UNGA annual vote around Cuba have registered an accumulating political problem for Washington in the world, particularly across the Americas. This was the case under both Republican and Democratic White Houses and Congresses. Considerable political damage was absorbed by the US government. Well into his second term, President Barack Obama, backed by his former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the bulk of the Democratic Party, and some Republicans, decided that a political retreat was necessary. (https://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/obama-and-cuba-end-of-an-illusion/)

Months and years of serious diplomatic talks preceded the December 2014 “breakthrough” announcements by Presidents Obama and Raul Castro. The political retreat and shift by Obama required him to order the release of the Cuban Five and for the US State Department to formally remove Cuba – an historic recipient of US-sponsored terrorism in the actual world – from its “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. But the US economic, financial, and commercial embargo – which openly aims to use US power to universally blockade Cuba – remained in place and was barely tinkered with by Obama even in areas he could have.

[Footnote 2: In the 1990s, Cuba’s economy contracted sharply, and virtually overnight, following the evaporation of the island’s exchange and commercial ties with the former Soviet Union and allied Eastern European governments during the “Cold War.” Long-defeated counter-revolutionary Cuban-American organizations, with histories of violence and terrorism against Cuba, felt wind in their political sails. They illegally organized from US territory, stepping up subversive provocations against Cuba. These groups particularly targeted the rapidly expanding Cuban tourism industry which was generating much-needed foreign exchange. A terrorist bomb killed an Italian tourist. After repeated attempts to get the US government to act against all of this, a team of trained Cuban revolutionaries were dispatched to South Florida to infiltrate and monitor these groups clandestinely. Until they were arrested and convicted in a rigged Miami Courthouse in 1998, the Cuban Five – Fernando Gonzalez, Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez, and Ramon Labanino – preempted a number of planned attacks. A major international campaign organized over many years demanded freedom for the Cuban Five. The last three incarcerated Cuban heroes were released in December 2014, as part of the agreement between Cuban President Raul Castro and US President Barack Obama to restore US-Cuban diplomatic relations.]

 John Bolton Whips it Up

John Bolton, who replaced the harried Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor in April 2018, has a history of ranting and railing hard against Cuba. In 2002 he ran up the propaganda flagpole the idea that Cuba was involved in production of chemical and biological weapons. Inside the George W. Bush Administration, Bolton pushed for international inspectors to monitor Cuba’s biological facilities. This clear attempt to frame Cuba was not, and could not, gain any political traction, insofar as it was: 1) made up out of whole cloth; and 2) then-President Fidel Castro responded quickly, forcefully, and with full political impact. Bolton crawled back in his hole.

[Footnote 3: At the time Bolton thundered, “The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are concerned that such technology could support [biological weapons] programs in those states. We call on Cuba to cease all [biological weapons]-applicable cooperation with rogue states and to fully comply with all of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.”]

On November 1, 2018 in Miami, at a campaign rally in support of Florida Republican candidates in Miami, Bolton conjured up a “troika of tyranny” with Venezuela and Nicaragua as US-anointed members and Cuba the communist mastermind. The crowd of hundreds was populated with veteran Cuban counterrevolutionaries and mercenaries from Washington’s wars and terrorism against the Cuban Revolution since the 1960s.

The Last Ordeal of Nikki Haley at the UN

If I was a talented cartoonist, I would portray Nikki Haley up there at the UNGA podium, and John Bolton among the defeated, aging counterrevolutionaries, as caricatures with steam coming out of their ears. The cornered Haley could only strike the pose of relishing in her government’s isolation and pathetically trying to make a virtue out of political humiliation. Haley pouted: We. Are. Alone. We are proud of it! We are defiant!! (And we are screwed.)

The most revealing statement of all from Haley was her labeling of the proceedings as a “a total waste of time.” To begin with, the annual vote and previous votes represents a particularly powerful marker that acts as a restraint on US aggression. It is part of the world political atmosphere that creates space for the international political defiance of US policy and solidarity with Cuba. It is this solidarity that has eroded the blockade politically and economically, objectively helping revolutionary, socialist Cuba survive the economic cataclysm of the 1990s following the near-overnight collapse of its then-extensive economy ties with the former Soviet Union and the so-called “socialist camp in Eastern Europe.”

The reality is that the accumulation of political defeat for Washington year-after-year, in forum after forum, has become a material factor in world politics. Haley’s arrogance barely veils the accumulated political damage that Washington continues to endure on the “Cuba Question” in Latin American and world politics.

Haley engaged, on the stage of world politics, in what in psychology is called “minimization,” that is “a type of deception coupled with rationalization in situations where complete denial is implausible,” as defined in Wikipedia. Practitioners such as Haley are engaged in “downplaying their misdemeanors when confronted with irrefutable facts.” Haley’s bleating went so far as to portray the world body gathering as ganging up and bullying poor old Uncle Sam. Here we have Goliath turned into David. Here the schoolyard bully finds the entire school united against him and the bully cries foul. But with no allies and collaborators, the bully’s aura and the fear he counts on evaporates.

Haley and Bolton’s Bombast is Not Politically Sustainable.

All the bluster in the world cannot hide the political weakness in the Trump Administration’s policy. After the latest thumping for US policy at the UN can Trump move to implement new anti-Cuba actions beyond what he has already done? Will legal travel between the US and Cuba, including for Cuban-Americans, be closed even more, or altogether? Will diplomatic relations be unilaterally abrogated by Trump? Are subversive US “regime change” programs being reactivated and stepped up? 

US embarrassment and political isolation at the UN would likely become a political disaster and crisis for Washington at home as well as worldwide if US anti-Cuba moves sharply escalate with interventionist threats and deeds. Such moves would be far more likely to increase demands to defy Washington and back up the UNGA Resolutions with concrete deeds, despite the US veto in the UN Security Council (UNSC). Bullying in full view is rarely a winning tactic in the long run, especially when the bully is up against a politically savvy opponent full of principle and dignity such as the Cuban revolutionaries.

In any case, Trump and his team are nowhere near creating the political conditions for a US-backed military coup in Venezuela, let alone direct US military aggression.

 The interventions from the General Assembly floor began with the “geopolitical” and other groupings that claim to speak as one, from time to time, on issue by issue. On the Cuba-sponsored Resolution, top diplomats from one country lined up to denounce US policy for the bloc or group: Ethiopia for the African Group, Egypt for the Group of 77 Plus China; Venezuela for the Non-Aligned Movement; El Salvador for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC); Singapore for the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN); the Bahamas for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM); and Bangladesh for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Solidarity with Cuba was most pronounced by the representatives of countries that have benefited directly from Cuba’s socialist internationalism. The representative from the Bahamas, who spoke for the Caribbean Community gave a heartfelt tribute to Cuban medical assistance, including the free medical training of Bahamian and Caribbean doctors. These were echoed by strong language from the representatives of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Jamaica. Jamaica’s representative called the US blockade “an affront to the world.” He was echoed by many speakers when he expressed “profound disappointment that we are still meeting on this question, that this is still happening” following the steps taken under Obama’s last years which raised hopes (and illusions) worldwide and in the United States.

Part of the campus of the Latin America School of Medicine (ELAM). Since 2005 ELAM. has graduated tens of thousands of physicians from oppressed and exploited populations in Africa, Asia and the Americas, including working-class and impoverished communities in the US, with full scholarships offered by Cuba. These new young doctors make a commitment to work in underserved areas upon graduation.

South African and Namibian representatives spoke with sharp emotion of Cuba’s decisive part in the defeat of the apartheid South African state and the “democratic dispensation” in South Africa, and the winning of the independence of Namibia.

The Bolivian representative gave a militant defense of the Cuban Revolution – “the enormous island of dignity.” He called US aggression against Cuba “one of the most important issues facing the UN system…One of the most powerful countries – the host country – refuses to comply with General Assembly resolutions year after year…Cuba is an example for all humankind [with its] selfless assistance to the rest of the world. Cuba was there in Africa! Cuba was there!” He ended his rousing remarks by quoting the legendary Ernesto Che Guevara, who said “the people of Cuba are stirred when any injustice occurs in the world.”

Cuba Speaks for Itself

Before the final vote on November 1, 2019, after Haley’s amendments were defeated, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez took the floor in a powerful presentation. (http://misiones.minrex.gob.cu/en/un)

Rodriguez spoke in the tradition of Cuban revolutionary diplomacy around the world and at the UN going back to the work of the legendary Cuban UN Ambassador Raul Roa and the speeches of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara before the General Assembly. In those early decades of the Revolution, when the US blockade was at its tightest, and when the military threats and interventions of Washington and the militarized counterrevolutionary exiles was at its height, Cuba boldly made its case and defended itself politically from the platform of the UN.

[Footnote 4: It was a time when a Cuban diplomat was assassinated in the streets of Queens, New York. It was a time when terrorist bombs were set off at the offices of the 1199 Health Care Workers Union, which courageously opposed the US blockade of Cuba, in the heart of Manhattan, the offices of Casa de las Americas, Cuban-Americans who defended the Revolution, and elsewhere. The Cuban Mission to the United Nations made networks of friends and supporters of revolutionary and socialist Cuba in the 25-mile-radius New York City-area where Washington, as the host country of the UN, could not prevent a Cuban presence or Cuban revolutionary freedom of speech at the UN. These friendships and solidarity have become deeply rooted over many decades. This was recently exemplified when newly elected President of the Cuban Council of State, Miguel Diaz-Canel, came to the United Nations for the Fall 2018 opening of the General Assembly and spoke to some 2300 people from New York, New Jersey and many other cities, who packed into the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan, for a rousing evening of solidarity.]

Raul Roa and Fidel Castro at the United Nations General Assembly in 1960

Rodriguez spoke not only as Cuba’s top diplomat in making a comprehensive presentation of the human impact of the US blockade, including in Cuba’s exclusion from US-based life-saving or life-enhancing medical products, medications, technologies, and devices. Much of Rodriguez’s presentation took this up in moving detail. But he also spoke as a representative of the Cuban socialist revolution, which holds up the banner of international solidarity with the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity in opposition to the world of capitalist exploitation and imperialist war.

Rodriguez began his speech with an expression of solidarity with the Jewish community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where a Jew-hater inspired by Nazi ideology and anti-immigrant hatred gunned down eleven Jewish people in their Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27.  The Temple congregation was prominent in aiding war and other refugees migrating to the US. This evidently sparked the carnage. Rodriguez also expressed solidarity with the victims of floods and landslides in Indonesia which killed dozens.

Most powerfully the Cuban Foreign Minister was not about to listen to any lectures from Donald Trump, Nikki Haley or the United States government on Human Rights:

“The US government does not have the least moral authority for criticizing Cuba or anyone else with regards to human rights.  We reject the repeated manipulation of human rights with political purposes as well as the double standards that characterize it… The US government is the author of human rights violations against its own citizens, particularly Afro-Americans and Hispanics, minorities, refugees and migrants. In the midst of the opulence of that country, 40 million of its citizens live in conditions of poverty and 52 million live in impoverished communities.  More than half a million sleep in the streets. Twelve per cent lack medical insurance and millions of low-income persons will be left without it. Quality education is not accessible to the majority. Equal opportunities are a pipedream. It is a government of millionaires imposing savage policies…There is a different racial pattern with regards to the inmate population, the length of imprisonment terms, the application of the death penalty -which is also applicable to minors and the mentally disabled; and the number of persons being shot dead by the police. The US government builds walls and separate children -even young children- from their migrant parents and put them in cages. The United States is party to only 30 per cent of human rights instruments and does not recognize the right to life, peace, development, security, food or the human rights of boys and girls.”

Rodriguez’s speech included a strong socialist critique of the “democratic” pretensions and highfalutin words of Washington’s mouthpieces vs. the realities of capitalist politics in the United States:

”The ‘special interests,’ that is, the corporate interests, have kidnapped the US political system, which is corrupt by definition…Words and political statements do matter. While demonizing and turning political opponents, institutions, social groups and nations into enemies through the use of propaganda, division, violence, hatred, [then] crimes and wars thrive and take root…Dirty politics, indecency, amorality, lies, the redesigning of electoral districts out of political convenience and the manipulation of voters are all exacerbated. Six million low-income US voters are prevented from voting.  In Florida, 21 per cent of Afro-American voters are not entitled to cast their vote. [There is] [f]ake information [and] the monopoly over communication…The US government unscrupulously interferes in the electoral processes and internal affairs of most States in this planet.” (See Isaac Saney’s Submission to the UN Human Rights Council, “Cuba, Human Rights and Self-Determination for a clear look at Cuba’s highly participatory electoral procedures. https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/06/cuba-human-rights-and-self-determination/)

A Post-World War II, Post-Cold War World is Emerging

This year the UN vote highlighting the US economic war against Cuba converges with Washington’s – which is now Trump’s Washington – tendentiousness and political isolation on other burning issues and existing and looming crises worldwide:  Trump’s unilateral pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was reached between Iran and the United States, the UK, Russia, France, China, Germany and the EU in July 2015 and confrontations he is pushing with the EU and other powers over US “extraterritorial” pressures to tow the US line; unfolding political developments on the Korean Peninsula; Saudi Arabia’s US and UK-backed murderous war on Yemen and the mounting political crisis in the Saudi bastion of reaction in the entire Middle East region; the political aftershocks of the brutal Syrian war; prospects for a two-state settlement in Israel-Palestine; and Trump’s pulling out of the (already weak) UN “Framework Convention on Climate Change” after 2020, an issue where Washington is even more isolated than on Cuba.

Trump, in his crude branded way, blurts out US imperial arrogance in a world today that is marked by an emerging post-World War II, post-Cold War era where the full-spectrum economic, financial, and political dominance of the American Colossus is receding more and more from sight in history’s rear-view mirror. Recently, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in floated the idea of lifting some of his country’s sanctions against the North, Trump said, “They won’t do it without our approval. They do nothing without our approval.” (Both “South” and “North” Korea voted with Cuba at the UN.)

The relative decline of US capitalist power in the world of today means that the still-overwhelming military dominance Washington holds – in terms of nuclear arsenal and other unmatched firepower capability; the worldwide reach and projection of US naval and air power, with hundreds of military bases in operation worldwide – still finds great pressures and limits on the political ability to use it, particularly since the unintended consequences of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. I think this is particularly true across the Americas, even with the recent electoral advances of conservative and reactionary forces on the South American continent.

Brazil’s Election and Potential New Alignments

With the election on October 28, 2018 of Jair Bolsonaro, a rightist demagogue, Trump and Bolton quickly saw a potential weighty ally in Latin America for the perspective of putting together a political bloc against Cuba and to breach the wall of continental solidarity with it against the US blockade. Bolton welcomed Bolsonaro’s election saying, “The recent elections of like-minded leaders in key countries, including Ivan Duque in Colombia, and last weekend Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, are positive signs for the future of the region, and demonstrate a growing regional commitment to free-market principles, and open, transparent, and accountable governance… today, in this hemisphere, we are also confronted once again with the destructive forces of oppression, socialism and totalitarianism…Under this administration, we will no longer appease dictators and despots near our shores in this hemisphere. We will not reward firing squads, torturers, and murderers … The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – has finally met its match.”

Bolton shameless demagogy, as with Haley, correlates to another classic scientific category called “psychological projection.” This is, in Wikipedia’s definition, “a theory in psychology in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.” Insofar as the United States government has a crystal-clear history and legacy of supporting, sustaining, or directly installing virtually every blood-soaked military or rightist family or oligarchical dictatorship in Central America, Latin America, and the Caribbean in modern times, this is “projection” of the highest order. (Check out this US interventionist history in https://www.zompist.com/latam.html)

And let us underline that Bolton is praising a political and military figure, Bolsonaro, who came out of and defends wholeheartedly the right-wing military regime in Brazil from 1964-1986, with its documented history of death-squads, murder, and torture on a mass-scale. Bolsonaro has publicly said that the military dictatorship did not murder and torture those who resisted and fought it enough.

[Footnote 5: It should be noted that the democratically elected government of João Goulart, which attempted to carry out progressive measures in education, voting rights, taxes, and land reform that infuriated the Brazilian capitalists and large landowners. It also enraged bipartisan Washington, in this case under the liberal Democratic White Houses of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. This was mainly because Goulart opposed the US blockade of Cuba and refused to break diplomatic relations as demanded by Kennedy and Johnson. Between 1961 and 1964, the CIA performed so-called psyops, or “psychological operations” against Goulart, poured money into opposition groups, and was essentially the architect of the coup.]

Bolsonaro was elected with a ten-point margin, culminating, for now, a deepening political crisis in Brazil that was set in motion by the sharpest economic retraction and recession in modern Brazilian history that kicked in starting in 2014. This drawn-out political earthquake saw the 2016 impeachment and removal from office of Workers Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseff on dubious charges of manipulating budget statistics followed by the 2018 imprisonment and barring from running for President of PT leader and former president Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva on the relatively petty charges of receiving access to an apartment on the beach. Denied strongly by da Silva, the charges rose to the level of the absurd given the massive corruption that marks capitalist politicking in Brazil with its rampant wheeler-dealerism, kickbacks, and bribe-taking. This was the case before, during, and after Lula da Silva and the PT won the Presidency in January 2003, starting with the political forces that moved against Rousseff and Lula da Silva.

Among the aftershocks over time from the 2007-08 world economic crisis and depression was the collapse in raw materials, energy, and other commodity prices in world capitalist markets. This expedited the economic crisis in Brazil, the eighth largest capitalist economy in the world. Brazil has built up giant export platforms for oil and other raw materials to markets in advanced capitalist countries such as the US and the EU, as well as to China, over many decades. Huge capitalist farms in Brazil export products such as soy beans, sugar, and meat that brought in large sums in foreign exchange. It is an example of how even the most developed (semi-industrialized) capitalist economies in “Third World” nation-states like Brazil are dependent on the advanced capitalist economies of the United States, western Europe, and Japan and the international institutions they control like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) for markets and credits (that is, debt).

In that cyclical period of expansion driven by high commodity-raw material prices, the successive PT governments funded social-welfare programs that created real – but tenuous and ephemeral as it turned out – alleviation of extreme poverty, of which there is a tremendous amount in Brazil. These policies marginally advanced working-class access to education and health care and fueled Lula’s high levels of political support and popularity. This popularity was apparently the decisive factor in banning him from being on the ballot in the Presidential election, where most surveys had placed him in the lead.

Politically, the PT policies delivered relative class and political stability, without any disruption of the financial, economic, and social dominance of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and landowning ruling classes. The Workers Party in the October 2018 elections paid the political price for the sharp economic recession that unfolded from 2014-16, with a stagnant “recovery” today. Bolsonaro was able to exploit other issues such as the miserable living conditions in the favelas, controlled by criminal gangs running organized drug rackets that are tangled up with corrupt and murderous police forces. The Brazilian ruling classes and media oligopolies swung behind Bolsonaro decisively in the elections, burying previous derisions of him when he was “on the fringe” of bourgeois politics in Brazil.

It remains to be seen if Bolsonaro is prepared to – or is politically able to – unite with Trump in an anti-Cuba, anti-Venezuela crusade. In a November 7, 2018 Financial Times article titled “Brazil version of Trump to play hardball with Bolivian autocrat,” writer Gideon Long relishes a coming confrontation between Bolsanaro and Bolivian President Evo Morales (“one of the last survivors of the leftist ‘pink tide’”) over a natural gas deal that is up for renewal. Long further asserts the ascendancy of “a new regional order” in a Latin America that he says has “shifted rightward.”

Bolsonaro Forces Out Cuban Doctors

On November 14, 2018, the press office of the Cuban UN Mission in New York issued a Declaration from the Ministry of Public Health announcing the withdrawal of Cuban doctors from Brazil following Bolsonaro’s attacks and threats on them and the Program More Doctors organization the Cuban volunteers work through. The Declaration states:

“Jair Bolsonaro, president-elect of Brazil, who has made direct, contemptuous, and threatening comments against the presence of our doctors, has declared and reiterated that he will modify the terms and conditions of the Program More Doctors…he has questioned the qualification of our doctors and has conditioned their permanence in the program to a process of validation of their titles and established that contracts will only be signed on an individual basis…These unacceptable conditions make it impossible to maintain the presence of Cuban professionals in the Program…The decision to bring into question the dignity, professionalism and altruism of Cuban cooperation workers who, with the support of their families, are currently offering their services in 67 countries is unacceptable. During the last 55 years, a total of 600,000 internationalist missions have been accomplished in 164 nations, with the participation of 400,000 health workers who, in quite a few cases, have fulfilled this honorable task more than once. Their feats in the struggle against the Ebola virus in Africa, blindness in Latin America and the Caribbean and cholera in Haiti as well as the participation of 26 brigades of the International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Disaster Situations and Great Epidemics “Henry Reeve” in Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Venezuela, among other countries, are worthy of praise…Likewise, 35,613 health professionals from 138 countries have been trained in Cuba at absolutely no cost as an expression of our solidarity and internationalist vocation. The peoples from Our America and from all over the world know that they will always be able to count on the solidarity and humanistic vocation of our professionals.”

Cuban Doctors in Brazil

“Pinochetism” Without Pinochet?

Bolsonaro is gearing up to carry out a “neoliberal” austerity program of attacks on industrial workers, agricultural workers, landless peasants, and small and medium farmers. He looks to the “model” of the policies carried out with extreme violence by the US-backed military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the elected, constitutional President Salvador Allende in a 1973 US-backed military coup.

At each step of the consolidation of his brutal dictatorship Pinochet consulted with and was advised by various US government and academic figures. These included, famously, a group of University of Chicago (UC) conservative and reactionary economists, spawns of Milton Friedman and Frederick von Hayek. These “Chicago Boys” found themselves dominating the Economics Department at UC and were available for the cause of crushing the workers and peasants of Chile into the dirt.

Survivors and would-be revivers of that “Chicago School” are very enthusiastic backers of Bolsonaro, starting with incoming Finance Minister Paulo Guedes. In an interview with the November 2, 2018 Financial Times Guedes said Bolsonaro’s election presents a “Pinochet” moment for Brazil. “The Chicago boys saved Chile, fixed Chile. Fixed the mess.”

Of course, when class and political polarization reaches the intensity of the last years of the Allende government, the room for “parliamentary democratic” resolution diminishes. Washington and the Chilean bourgeoisie and oligarchy, including in the officer corps of the Chilean armed forces, were baying for blood and carried out economic sabotage, covert subversion, and terrorism against Allende’s Popular Unity (UP) coalition, whose mass and electoral support was increasing at the time of the coup. Nevertheless, the UP government and Chilean revolutionists were unable to counterattack effectively and derail the more-and-more open coup plotting, US covert action, and right-wing mobilizations.

[Footnote 6: See Fidel Castro on Chile, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1982 with an introduction by Elizabeth Stone, a comprehensive compilation of speeches, interviews, press conferences, and interactions with Chilean workers and trade unionists, peasants, and students from November 10 to December 4, 1971 when the Cuban revolutionary and President visited the country. In speech after speech, Castro foresees – in a cumulative master class in the Marxist method – the gathering, impossible-to-be-avoided political, social, and class showdown. Castro did everything in his power to prevent a historic defeat and slaughter of working people in Chile similar to what Ernesto Che Guevara had witnessed in 1954 Guatemala. The classic documentary The Battle of Chile, shot during the Allende years and during the coup, smuggled out of Chile, and finished in Cuba, shows how workers and peasants, ready to defend their gains, arms in hand, waited, Godot-style, to be mobilized, armed, trained, and organized as the defense of democratic space and constitutional legality was being abandoned by the Chilean ruling classes and was, in fact, collapsing.]

It would have been impossible to carry out “the fix” Guedes crows about for Chile without the destruction of democratic rights and political space and murdering thousands of trade unionists and revolutionary-minded working-class and student youth, and anyone who stood in their way. Gruesome torture was institutionalized by the “fixers” on a mass, industrial scale after the initial bloodbath. This was a pre-condition for smashing trade union legality and driving the workers movement underground. Suppressing wages and worker’s rights laid the basis for renewed “confidence” and profitability for Chilean and foreign capital. Cyclical economic expansion primarily benefited a super-affluent minority.

The workers and mass struggles that pried open political space and trade-union legality in the 1980s, leading to Pinochet’s demise, used that space to fight to raise their living standards.

Can there be an updated Pinochetism against Brazil’s highly organized working-class movement, including mass trade unions and landless peasant organizations that Bolsonaro has made a career of making harsh attacks on? Bolsonaro spoke openly during and after the election of going after “delinquent Reds,” and organizations of landless peasants and homeless people, in addition to going after pension systems for organized workers, a centerpiece of Pinochet’s “reforms” in Chile.

While many on the Brazilian “left,” including PT activists, are no doubt shaken by the election of Bolsonaro, who obviously won the votes of many disillusioned and desperate working people, it should be said that the Brazilian workers and peasant class organizations and the mass, social movements, including for Afro-Brazilian rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights, have not been defeated in struggle and combat, as was the case in Chile. Bolsonaro’s “electoral mandate” will be tested in the actual class and political struggles ahead.

Operation Condor II?

With Pinochet’s triumph in 1973 there was increased collaboration and coordination of the Latin American military regimes (joined by Argentina in 1976) under Chilean leadership (and that of the US CIA in the shadows) in the so-called “Operation Condor,” which operated death squads and organized terrorist acts on a continental scale.

The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges

Trump’s team, to the degree that they have a coherent political focus on Latin America, certainly see opportunities to advance US policies through alignments with the series of more conservative and reactionary governments that won elections in Argentina, Chile, Columbia, and Peru in recent years. Economic conditions in all these states compel them, and they all are preparing, to take on the working-class and popular movements and to use the economic crisis to reverse the advances made in the period of the “pink tide” ascent. The Mauricio Macri government in Argentina, in particular, is in a real-time crisis after a disastrous decline in the value of the Argentine peso and consequent huge rise in the country’s dollar-denominated debt, topped off with a humiliating $57 billion “bailout” loan from the hated International Monetary Fund.

It should be noted that the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico will replace a conservative “neoliberal” regime with an Administration and legislature that campaigned as progressive, anti-establishment, anti-corruption, and opposed to US interventionist policies in the Hemisphere.

Venezuela

Trump and the Latin American forces he looks to bloc with certainly would like to pounce on Venezuela, which they portray as descending into ungovernability and endless economic cataclysm, and therefore is viewed as politically vulnerable. They dream and devise plans to sweep in a pro-imperialist government in an orchestrated “regime change.” There has leaked for public consumption US discussions and collaboration with pro-coup forces inside Venezuela’s military and other state institutions. These discussions were over the viability of a US-backed coup or a direct US military intervention to overthrow the Nicolas Maduro government. Nikki Haley has spoken openly to street actions calling for Maduro’s overthrow.

The Trump White House has spent over $20 million in “humanitarian refugee assistance” under the pretext of dealing with the some 2-3 million Venezuelan refugees who have been generated from the still-deepening economic crisis, crash in production, and runaway inflation in the country. These refugees have poured mainly into Colombia, with many transiting from there to Ecuador and other Latin American countries.

It is certain that the class struggle across the Americas will intensify and deepen in period at hand and coming. And that the political alignments of today may not be the realignments of tomorrow. The “Cuba Question” is bound to be at the center of all of this. The 2018 UN vote against the US blockade strengthens Cuba’s position in this volatile and explosive period in world and Western Hemispheric politics, and in the international class and national liberation struggles, that are now unfolding.

November 15, 2018

New York City

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 8, 2017

The life of Fidel Castro: a Marxist appreciation one year after his passing

Filed under: cuba,North Star — louisproyect @ 7:26 pm

by IKE NAHEM on DECEMBER 8, 2017

 

“Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who doesn’t know where north or south is. If you don’t eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you’re lost in a forest, not knowing anything.

                                                        Fidel Castro

“[Humans] make [their] own history, but [they] do not make it out of the whole cloth; [they] do not make it out of conditions chosen by [themselves], but out of such as [they] find close at hand.”

                                                        Karl Marx

 

The Epoch of Fidel

Fidel Castro was one of the outstanding revolutionary leaders over the entire course of recorded world history. His astonishing and heroic life experiences are intertwined with the accomplishments, example, and practice of the Cuban Revolution that he was the central leader of.

The political and personal integrity of Fidel Castro stood rock-solid in the face of decades of tremendous, unremitting pressures directed by the US government to destroy the Cuban Revolution (and him personally through murder).

The skilled resistance Fidel personified at the head of the politically conscious, organized, and mobilized Cuban masses gave him the moral high ground over decades in the treacherous waters of world politics in the “Cold War” era and beyond.

As I wrote in my October 9, 2017, essay Our Che: 50 Years After His Execution:

…During the Fidel hate-fest produced by the US media oligopolies after his death, there were small demonstrations, in the hundreds at most, of “die-hard” longtime opponents of the Cuban Revolution – a clear minority today even among Cuban-Americans. The antecedents of these now fast-fading counter-revolutionary forces in 1962 filled the Orange Bowl football stadium in Miami to welcome the return to the United States of the captured mercenary invaders who were defeated at the so-called Bay of Pigs (Playa Giron in Cuba). That occurred after the Cuban revolutionary government exchanged them, well fed and in one piece – that is, never tortured – in exchange for medicines, after negotiations.

The relatively tiny and politically insignificant anti-Fidel protests in 2017 Miami were endlessly repeated in incessant, loop coverage by the cable oligopolies, in a crude manipulation aimed at creating the impression that Fidel was a hated ‘dictator.’ Meanwhile, in Cuba, millions upon millions of Cubans, across every generation, lined the cities and countryside throughout the nation to pay respect and love for ‘the undefeated’ Fidel to his final resting place in Santiago de Cuba.

The ashes of Fidel Castro on the way to Santiago de Cuba

Fidel and the enduring example of the Cuban Revolution consumed the US ruling class with an unrelenting scorn and hatred. They seethed at the sheer effrontery of the Cuban revolutionaries carrying out a socialist revolution in the interests of the working class, the peasantry, and the oppressed, that is, in the interests of the vast majority of the Cuban people.

This is the case, notwithstanding the mass migrations encouraged – and uniquely expedited legally to the United States – by Washington for decades. This reached 7-10% of the Cuban population, resulting in a kind of Cuban diaspora. This self-exiling was centered initially on the Batista-era police, army, and gangster personnel, followed by the Cuban ex-bourgeoisie and owners of expropriated latifundia, and, finally, as the political confrontation between revolutionary Cuba and the United States government intensely sharpened, quickly came to include broad layers (but by no means all) in the Cuban professional and middle classes, a relatively affluent small minority. For example, some 3,000 out of the 6,000 doctors in Cuba before the Revolution emigrated from Cuba to the United States in this period. Most Cuban workers and peasants rarely, if ever, saw a doctor their entire lives in “the good old days” when median life expectancy in Cuba was 52 (it’s now 78). For many years now, the island has produced some 10,000 Cuban doctors a year and, at the Latin American School of Medicine, the largest medical school in the world, has trained, free of charge, tens of thousands of doctors from all over the world who are now practicing in working-class and impoverished communities in their countries. Similar comparisons can be made for all other contemporary Cuban professions.

The special venom and hatred preserved for Fidel Castro by Washington and Wall Street, by all the representatives and spokespeople of world capitalism and imperialism, was, of course, a badge of honor for the Cuban revolutionary. Certainly, the once powerful virtual industry of anti-Castro misinformation and propaganda has been politically defeated worldwide. But it has resources and lingers on in the continued, weakened US anti-Cuba policy of economic war and political hostility, and in the renewed efforts by the Donald Trump White House to pressure and threaten socialist Cuba, following the establishment of formal Washington-Havana diplomatic relations in 2015.

Of course, genuine social and people’s revolutions, such as the Cuban Revolution, inevitably generate bitter hatreds and resentments from the overthrown and vanquished ruling classes. The special hatred of the overturned Cuban ruling classes, allied with Washington and defeated in the course of the Cuban Revolution, toward Fidel, the personification of their social and political vanquishers, is of a piece with how the representatives and beneficiaries of the Confederate slavocracy in their era – and their dwindling band of political heirs, to this day – felt about Abraham Lincoln, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and others, not to speak of revolutionary abolitionists like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Harriet Tubman.

Continue reading

November 27, 2016

Was there an alternative to Fidel Castro’s “Stalinism”?

Filed under: cuba — louisproyect @ 9:42 pm

Today I was shocked by the torrent of denunciations aimed at the Stalinist “dictator” Fidel Castro. No, I am not talking about CBS or CNN, where it might be expected. Rather it emanated from FB friends, most of whom supported Tony Cliff’s theory of State Capitalism but with some anarchists as well. I was also shocked by the vehemence that exceeded anything that Sam Farber or Mike Gonzalez wrote for the occasion even though they were as bad as I might have expected.

Although I had originally considered writing a longer piece on Castro’s passing, I decided instead to focus in on the question of Fidel Castro’s “Stalinism”. For people such as Farber and Gonzalez, the solution to Cuba’s difficulties would have been a “revolution from below”. Farber puts it this way:

It’s certainly not a socialist society because the working class and the rest of the population do not have democratic control over decision-making. It’s one variety of what and I and others call “bureaucratic collectivism.” Bureaucratic collectivist societies, where a ruling class controls property politically through its control of an undemocratic state rather than individually or privately, differ from each other, but share a basic character — just as capitalist countries vary among themselves: Sweden is not Japan is not the United States.

It might be pointed out that Farber is an old-line Shachtmanite rather than a State Capitalist like the ISO that he frequently writes for. The distinction between bureaucratic collectivism and State Capitalism is hardly worth going into here since we should all understand that from their respective standpoints, Cuba’s government is rotten to the core and needs to be overthrown by an aroused proletariat.

Apparently, these comrades had a different idea of the kind of change that Cuba needed in 1959. Instead of a guerrilla army working in tandem with middle-class elements in Havana, it needed a party like Lenin’s that would have taken power on the basis of worker’s committees even if none had germinated in the struggle against Batista.

Let’s imagine that such a possibility had existed and come to fruition on the basis of a leadership rooted in the working class that had aligned itself with Tony Cliff’s international movement or some reasonable facsimile. Like the sainted Bolsheviks, it would have collectivized the means of production and developed the economy with democratically decided plans hammered out by the workers themselves. It would have been the Paris Commune raised to the tenth power.

Even more in keeping with Cliff or Max Shachtman’s theories, there was complete workers democracy with a free press, the right to assemble and form parties that would contest for power in elections. But above all, the government had to conduct an assault on the American domination of the economy as JFK himself admitted:

At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands—almost all the cattle ranches—90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions—80 percent of the utilities—practically all the oil industry—and supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports.

So, let’s not mince words on this. If someone as fearless as Sam Farber or Mike Gonzalez had been the Lenin of Cuba (I should mention that Farber believes that Lenin’s anti-democratic tendencies gave rise to Stalin), the first task would have been to seize American properties. Would Washington have been less determined to crush the government if it had been committed to democracy and “socialism from below”? I feel stupid even asking such a question.

You would also have to assume that the revolutionary socialist leadership of Cuba that passed Sam Farber or Mike Gonzalez’s litmus test would have been principled enough to denounce the USSR’s treatment of dissidents, its domination of the Ukrainians and other subject peoples, and its general betrayal of the original goals of the Russian Revolution.

So simultaneously you have Cuba nationalizing American corporations that had a stranglehold on the economy and issuing proclamations calling for the overthrow of the Soviet bureaucracy. Not only would you have Esso and ITT on your case; you’d have Khrushchev so pissed off that smoke would be coming out of his ears.

But none of this would matter because Cuba would prevail on the basis of its socialist principles. All of its enemies would melt away in its path. Workers would produce sugar and tobacco for the world market even if the USA imposed a blockade just as it did for the “Stalinist” Fidel Castro. Embargo? No problem. Just remind the capitalist marketplace that Cuba has a free press. That would assuage them, I’ll bet. The NY Times wouldn’t mind Esso being seized by communists as long as there was freedom of the press. Right.

Leaving such fantasies aside, imperialism would be just as committed to the destruction of a democratic socialist Cuba as it was to a Stalinist Cuba. How do I know? Because the USA was part of the 21-nation invasion of the USSR in 1919 that cost a million deaths and production to be reduced to 20 percent of its pre-Civil War level. In fact, Cuba suffered virtually the same economic losses even though the Bay of Pigs victory reduced the possibility of a major loss of life.

In a review of Salim Lamrani’s “The Economic War Against Cuba” on CounterPunch, Daniel Kovalik writes:

Lamrani concludes that the results of this relentless 50-year blockade have cost Cuba more than $751 billion, and has “affected all sectors of Cuban society and all categories of the population, especially the most vulnerable: children, the elderly, and women.   Over 70 percent of all Cubans have lived in a climate of permanent economic hostility.”

The USA understood that economic suffering would perhaps turn the people against the government just as Ronald Reagan hoped that the contra war would make the Nicaraguans “cry uncle”. Lamrani quotes Lester D. Mallory, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, who wrote on August 6, 1960:

The majority of the Cuban people support Castro.  There is no effective political opposition.  . . .  The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection and hardship.   . . .   every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba . . . a line of action which . . . makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

But it wasn’t enough for Cuba to have to put up with this. Farber and Gonzalez insist that the government had to publicly differentiate itself from the Kremlin, taking every opportunity to denounce it for its bureaucratic crimes. So not only would Cuba have to suffer 751 billion dollars in economic losses for its democratic revolutionary socialist measures against Esso, ITT et al, it would not be able to rely on the Soviet bloc for assistance. Indeed, we could be guaranteed that Khrushchev would have been just as anxious as JFK to get rid of the troublemakers who we must assume would be providing material aid and advice to like-minded revolutionary movements in Latin America just as Lenin and Trotsky did in the 1920s.

As it happens, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara were never likely to confront the USSR because they, like most of the Latin American left in the 1950s, regarded the Soviets as defenders of socialism. Keep in mind that the USSR enjoyed enormous prestige in the 1950s for having been primarily responsible for defeating the Nazis and for its ability to recover so quickly from its wartime devastation without any outside help. Young men and women would naturally be inclined to look to the USSR for help rather to alienate its top leaders, especially someone like Nikita Khrushchev who had made a speech just three years before Castro took power that stated:

Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed these concepts or tried to prove his [own] viewpoint and the correctness of his [own] position was doomed to removal from the leadership collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the 17th Party Congress, when many prominent Party leaders and rank-and-file Party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of Communism, fell victim to Stalin’s despotism.

But the Cuban press under an anti-Stalinist editorial board like the ISO’s or New Politics would have not been satisfied with these words. It would have written scathing attacks on Khrushchev for crushing dissent in the USSR and serving the interests of a privileged bureaucracy no matter what he said.

I think by now you get the point. People like Farber and Gonzalez don’t really care about such matters since their role politically is to differentiate themselves from all the evil Stalinists of the 20th and 21st century who have betrayed the principles of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Thank god we have professors like them to stand up for True Socialism. Imagine the fat FBI file that Farber accumulated writing such courageous articles. It is a miracle that Brooklyn College did not try to fire him.

Does it matter that a government that took their advice seriously would be snuffed within a year of its taking power? Obviously not. They don’t really care about the difficulties of wielding power in a world controlled by immensely powerful capitalist states, including one that was only 90 miles from Cuba.

That they and their supporters would take the opportunity of Fidel Castro’s death to raise their litany of complaints about Stalinism while his body was still warm really fills me with disgust. I should probably expect this by now after seeing all the junk written about Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution in their press for the past 25 years or so but I still can’t get over it.

May 25, 2016

Samuel Farber: avoid Che Guevara, he is not good for you

Filed under: cuba,Samuel Farber Cubanology — louisproyect @ 9:35 pm

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Is there a more unctuous Pecksniff on the American left than Samuel Farber? I’d be hard-pressed to name one.

In an article for Jacobin, which is rapidly adopting many of the colors of the “socialism from below” part of the left that measures revolutions against its own lofty standards and invariably gives them a failing grade, Farber warns radical youth against Che Guevara like some parents warned against smoking marijuana in the early 60s—it was not good for you..

You can practically figure out what will be in Farber’s rancid article without going past the title:

Assessing Che
Che Guevara was an honest and committed revolutionary. But he never embraced socialism in its most democratic essence.

How generous of Farber to find Che “honest and committed”. But the poor thing never “embraced socialism” as presumably Farber did many years ago when he belonged to YPSL. Embracing socialism, as we all know, rather than Cuban petty-bourgeois authoritarianism is an acid test for the left. Very few souls have been pure enough to pass the test but Farber, Tim Wolforth, and James Robertson were among those who stood up for genuine Cuban socialism when a repressive, petite-bourgeois, anti-proletarian regime was making life hell for the workers.

The point of Farber’s article is to wake up the left to the fact that “Che Guevara’s politics had far more in common with the politics of the Castro brothers than many of his current admirers would care to admit.” Well, gee, I don’t know how to put this but most leftists who are ready to trash Fidel and Raul are just as ready to trash Che.

Farber’s case for seeing Che as an enemy of the vaunted “socialism from below” is consistent with his shabby record of either bending the truth or simply writing lies.

He starts off by saying that “he shared with them a revolutionary politics from above that allowed him to retain, along with the Castros, the political control and initiative on the island, based on a monolithic conception of a type of socialism immune to any democratic control and initiative from below.”

I always get a chuckle when I read Farber about the need for democratic control. This is a guy, after all, who viewed the Cuban CP as more in the socialist tradition than the July 26th movement, not being bothered apparently that the CP urged a vote for Batista in the 1930s. But the Stalinists can be forgiven because their party was the  “only significant political force in Cuba that claimed to be socialist or Marxist” in contrast to the July 26th movement that was “antitheoretical” and “antiprogrammatic”:

Last but not least, the PSP [Popular Socialist Party, the pro-Kremlin official party] was the only significant political force in Cuba that claimed to be socialist or Marxist and therefore stressed the importance of a systematic ideology and program for the development of strategy and tactics. Its ideology and program were tools used to win ideological support from radicalized Cubans seeking a systematic explanation of the country’s situation. This aspect of the PSP is even more noticeable when contrasted to the antitheoretical and antiprogrammatic stance of the Twenty-sixth-of-July movement.

–Samuel Farber, “The Cuban Communists in the Early Stages of the Cuban Revolution: Revolutionaries or Reformists?”, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 18, No. 1 1983

So that’s what “embracing socialism” means, voting for Batista and being “theoretical”. What a joke.

Moving right along, Farber contends that a sign of Che bureaucratic/centralist tendencies was his response to a difficult situation in the Congo. Che supposedly had a panacea: the creation of a “vanguard Communist Party that would singlehandedly lead a revolution” in the Congo even though he believed that it lacked “any of the necessary conditions for socialist revolution.” So what kind of asshole would be for the creation of a vanguard party in a country that could never have a revolution to begin with? Farber helps us out by linking to an excerpt from Che’s Congo Diary, which appeared in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/12/cuba.artsandhumanities. I defy you to find a single word about building vanguard parties. In fact, the excerpt is mostly a cautionary note about expecting too much out of a badly divided country and insisting on the need for practical assistance such as doctors and technicians. Does Farber expect people reading his idiotic article not to bother to check his sources? Maybe Jacobin can hire a good fact-checker so that the unwary reader does not waste his time on such shoddy journalism.

Farber does credit Che with being a radical egalitarian unlike the Castro brothers. So what made him a good guy at least on this count? It can be explained by his “bohemian upbringing” in Argentina. I don’t have a clue what Farber is talking about here. Jon Lee Anderson’s fairly decent biography does not yield a portrait of a guy walking around in sandals reading Rimbaud. Instead Che is seen as a deeply idealistic student who chooses to become a doctor so he can help the poor. Maybe because Che and a friend went “on the road” in Latin America on a beat-up old motorcycle, this is supposed to evoke Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. But if you read “Motorcycle Diaries”, the thing that stands out is his outrage over the suffering of the poor, especially the Indians. Che Guevara was no “bohemian”. He was an embryonic revolutionary.

This alleged bohemianism apparently went hand in hand with asceticism, according to Farber (as if potheads in the early 60s weren’t fond of a pint of cherry vanilla ice cream when they were feeling kind of groovy.) So ascetic was Che that he believed that the Cubans could be “educated” to live without the boob tube according to Farber’s latest book “The Politics of Che Guevara”, which is now available from Haymarket. Since the Vietnamese were building socialism without TV’s, why couldn’t Cuba? After consulting this book on Google, I could find no reference to Che’s actual words, only Farber’s extrapolation thereof from what seems like an off-the-cuff observation. You would have to search in vain to find any extended analysis that Che made about consumer goods. His main emphasis was not on living like monks but in avoiding the competition and materialism that exists in bourgeois society. All you need to do is read “Socialism and Man in Cuba” to see that the question of consumer goods is not even posed. In fact, Farber seems to grasp this in referring to his “hyper-voluntarism that expressed itself both in politics and in economic policy through his stress on moral incentives and creating a ‘New Man’ who was totally dedicated to society and oblivious to his individual fulfillment.” For that matter, you can find the same sort of revolutionary zeal in the USSR in the early years (or the French revolution for that matter) not that this would make any difference to Farber who looks just as much askance at Bolshevik rule as he does the Cuban CP.

Farber ends his article with a bouquet of platitudes:

Socialism: because the true liberation of working people can only be attained when both the economy and the polity come under the control of the women and men who through their work make social existence possible. Democracy: because majority rule and respect for minority rights and civil liberties is the only way that working people can in fact, and not in theory alone, control their destiny. Revolution: because even the most welcome, authentic reforms cannot bring about true emancipation and liberation.

You can obviously say that the USSR also failed to achieve socialism. Indeed, the entire history of the revolutionary movement since the time of Karl Marx has been marked by failure. While everybody is for the economy and the polity coming “under the control of the women and men who through their work make social existence possible”, the challenge for the left is how to bring that about.

Cuba has failed to satisfy these benchmarks for a variety of reasons. To start with, an “open society” would have been exploited by its enemies to destroy the revolution in its infancy. How do I know that? Because I saw it happen in Nicaragua where the government following Cuban advice to avoid their own excesses gave the USA the opening it needed to pour millions of dollars into the counter-revolutionary press and parties. When Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in 1861, he was facing far less of a threat than Cuba did 100 years later. Does that matter to Farber? Certainly not. He has one yardstick for Cuba and another for the rest of the world.

The other problem is that the Castro brothers and Che Guevara were men of their times. In the late 50s when they went into the mountains to launch a guerrilla war in combination with the student and trade union movement in the cities, the USSR was at the height of its prestige globally. The Russians had defeated Hitler, were providing aid to nationalist movements around the world (even if often ineffectively), and were making great industrial and scientific progress. The Cubans were likely to be influenced by ideology that diffused outwards from the Kremlin, as was obvious with Fidel’s highly critical support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The kind of people who sounded like Sam Farber in Cuba were affiliated with J. Posadas’s Fourth International. Posadas had all of the same ideas as Sam Farber and Cubans were free to read them in the Posadista bookshop, which for some reason avoided being shut down by the dictatorship. Posadas advocated a working class revolution that most certainly conformed to Farber’s strict guidelines of “socialism from below”. He also had some other odd ideas that Farber probably would have had problems with, such as advocating a first strike nuclear attack by the USSR so that socialism could emerge out of the radioactive ashes.

Fortunately, the Castro brothers steered clear of the Posadas bookstore even if it meant disappointing Sam Farber.

 

May 4, 2016

Sin Alas

Filed under: cuba,Film — louisproyect @ 5:23 pm

Sin Alas (Without Wings) is a flawed film made in Cuba by a young American who has a real flair for cinema—for Cuban politics and history much less so. The film is based on a Jorge Luis Borges short story titled “The Zahir”, which is about how its narrator became obsessed with the zahir—an Argentine coin that he associates with the Arabic word meaning “visible” or “evident”. For the Arabic-speaking masses, it summoned up the power of certain objects to have “the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad.”

After reading “The Zahir” prior to writing this review, it dawned on me why I never felt motivated to read Borges. The story is a study in erudite obscurantism of the sort that can fuel a thousand literature dissertations and one screenplay that had trouble deciding whether to be consistent with Borge’s ultra-subjectivism or to tell a story about life in Cuba today with all its social contradictions. In trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, director Ben Chace ended up with an interesting failure. If his ambitions exceeded his talents, at least you can admire a film that took considerable risks on behalf of a decidedly uncommercial project. If nothing else, the film is a stunning look at Havana street-life today, something that is surely worth the $4.99 to see it on Amazon or ITunes where it premieres today.

The main character in Chace’s film is Luis Vargas (Carlos Padrón), a seventy-year old who used to write dance reviews for Bohemia, a Cuban journal of the arts and culture. As the film begins, he sits on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building he took over from his father, an accountant with an American agribusiness who fled the island immediately after the revolution triumphed. Unlike his father, Luis stuck around since as he puts it, “I wanted to see where this thing was going”.

As he reads Granma, he discovers that a dancer named Isabela Munoz (Yulislievis Rodriguez) he had a brief affair with in 1967 has just died. After going to her funeral, he begins to become haunted by the strains of a tune that he remembered from the days he spent with her but cannot place. It becomes his zahir, so to speak.

To help him track down the composition, he recruits his oldest friend Ovilio (Mario Limonta), an accomplished guitar player who has the brilliant idea to walk around Havana asking oldsters like them if they can “name that tune” as they put it in a popular 1960s TV show. The chemistry between the two veteran Cuban actors and the obviously nonprofessionals they interact with on the streets is what makes the film so memorable and bordering on greatness.

What undercuts its success is Ben Chace’s sketchy understanding of Cuban history and politics since 1959. Although he is a minor character, Isabela’s husband—a top Cuban military officer—is rather cartoonish. At one point, Vargas tells Ovilio he was taking a big chance having an affair with his wife since such a big shot could have had him killed. This sounds much more like the sort of thing that might have happened when Batista was in power. If Chace had simply said that the man could have had him fired from Bohemia, it would have been much more plausible.

Another false note occurs when in the lobby following a performance by Isabela, her husband questions whether the ballet was “revolutionary” enough since it romanticized the sort of domestic strife that could be found in any Havana neighborhood. Vargas remonstrates with the officer, telling him that art has its own imperatives and must only be judged on its basis to stir the emotions. One wonders if Chace has any real familiarity with Cuban art and culture, which departed from socialist realist norms from its birth. Cuban ballet has never been under the thumb of bureaucrats, nor has any other art form.

To give Chace his due, he has Isabela arguing with Vargas over the possibilities of leaving Cuba where they could enjoy a life together. She says that she is too committed to the revolution which allowed a poor girl from the provinces to become a successful artist.

There are inklings that the director, who also wrote the script, was sensitive to the pressures on Cuba that might make such a rags to cultural riches impossible in the future. A minor subplot involves a married couple from Vargas’s building named Yuni and Katrina who have been forced to live with her mother due to insufficient funds. Yuni drives a pedicab and can hardly make ends meet, while Katrina works in a restaurant owned by one of Cuba’s emerging petty bourgeoisie. As he begins to put the make on her, Yuni makes plans to leave Cuba by boat. An entire film could have been made about Yuni and Katrina, one that would have been an important artistic intervention into the key question facing Cubans today—namely whether it will be possible any longer for someone like Isabela Munoz to make the transition from an impoverished countryside into the top ranks of Cuban dance.

In an interview with the Hollywood Times, Chace sounded really good on the responsibility of artists, particularly those from the USA, to tell the truth about Cuba. Even if he succeeded only partially, he deserves our respect.

That’s the strange thing, and no one gets it. No one knows what the hell’s going on down there. I wanted to just show what people were going through and hopefully show that there’s just a lot of culture and humanity and great stuff there that in a way is suffering because of our ignorance of the situation. You know if we knew how fucked up it was down there we’d try to do something to change it but no one understands that we’re just given propaganda on all sides. We’re given this very thin and shallow idea of what is going on in Cuba you know? It’s like some woman dancing, Fidel, and what else do we know about it? A couple old cars. No one really knows what the daily struggle down there is like for people and my film I think touches on it, I think I did an okay job with this one character, but it goes deeper than that. You kind of have to go, and even if you go you have to spend a lot of time to get to the truth of it because people won’t say things out loud, there’s so much implicit stuff and there’s so much that you can say out loud and stuff you just have to witness. To me, it’s a labyrinth that’s why when I was like Borges, I was like what can I do to describe this, I need like a labyrinth blueprint to like tape images to and collect this thing and hopefully it will come close to representing something about the reality of that place.

April 8, 2016

Havana Motor Club

Filed under: cuba,sports — louisproyect @ 9:18 pm

“Havana Motor Club” is a vastly entertaining documentary about the underground drag racing scene in Cuba that is also about as informative a take on the social and economic reforms being pushed by Raul Castro as you can find anywhere. It opened at the Village East theater in NY today and is by far the best documentary I have seen thus far in 2016. (Also available on Amazon and ITunes.)

In 1959 the triumphant Cuban revolution declared that since automobile racing was decadent, it must be abolished along with prostitution, gambling and other vices associated with the Batista dictatorship. Even before the dictator was toppled, the rebels struck a blow against car racing by kidnapping and holding for ransom Juan Fangio, the Argentinian who was the greatest racer in the world and regarded by some as the greatest ever. When I was at Bard College, I was part of a circle that was heavily into racing and as such worshipped Juan Fangio. I remember the night in 1961 when we showed Juan Fangio racing films in the school gym where we burned Castrol motor oil, a British brand that was favored by professional racers. The distinctly pungent scent of the burning Castrol gave the film showing authenticity.

Fangio was in Cuba to compete in the 1958 Cuban Gran Prix. Because of the kidnapping, another driver substituted for him at the last minute. During the race a Cuban competitor skidded off the track and plowed into a crowd, killing 10 and injuring 40—an event that is seen in “Havana Motor Club”. So Fidel Castro had two reasons to ban auto racing. It was a plaything of the rich as well as dangerous. As for Fangio, he issued a statement after being released: “It was one more adventure. If what the rebels did was in a good cause, then I, as an Argentine, accept it.”

The film begins with a look at the racing scene in Cuba when director Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt arrived with his crew. There were no Ferraris, but merely the antique cars that dot Havana’s streets today but with an important difference. The engines were souped up in order to compete in illegal drag races on the Cuban back roads. In a drag race, two cars compete against each other with the goal of reaching the finish line first. In the USA drag racing is a highly popular sport in which speeds of over 300 mph can be reached under 5 seconds routinely down a quarter-mile track. In Cuba, it is doubtful that the fastest cars can reach speeds of more than 140 mph. Despite that, watching Cubans race a ‘55 Chevy or a ‘62 Ford can provide ten times more excitement than an American drag race, especially when you understand the challenges that faced them.

Not only was the sport illegal, it was difficult to get parts such as a supercharger that is essential for racing. One of the drivers featured in the film has a friend in Miami who comes to Cuba frequently to help his Porsche compete. It is not explained how a Cuban could have gotten his hands on a Porsche but we can assume that his friend had something to do with it. The film focuses on the competition between the Porsche that is equipped with an oversized Chevy engine and a highly modified 1955 Chevy that belongs to a garage-owner nicknamed “El Tito” and is driven by his son.

The ingenuity some drivers show in procuring parts is awe-inspiring. When a boat that was being used to smuggle people into Florida breaks apart near the beach in Havana, a scuba diver goes beneath to salvage the engine that is then used to soup up a ’51 Ford, one called the “Black Widow”. It is not hard to imagine that once the barriers to such items are lifted, the Cuban economy has the possibility of soaring to new heights. Maybe those possibilities have finally persuaded Jose Madera, the owner of the Black Widow, to finally remain in Cuba after 5 unsuccessful attempts to reach Florida by raft.

One racer, who competes with a ’56 Ford, is a perfect symbol of the Cuban revolution today. He resents the government’s refusal to lift the ban on drag racing but appreciates the benefits that socialism has brought, including the free medical care that allowed him to receive treatment for cancer that not only left him alive but capable of doing what he loved most—racing.

In the course of the film, the government lifts the ban on drag racing as part of the reforms being spearheaded by Raul Castro. Just before a big race is scheduled, it is suspended because the barricades necessary for crowd control (they remember the 1958 disaster) are being used for the Pope’s visit. When racers become discouraged, one remains hopeful. He says that the government will see its way to seeing the benefits of a sporting event that can go against the grain of capitalism that he admits is calling the shots everywhere in the world today. Cuba will take an institution that serves capitalism and show how it can be transformed into benefiting the people.

The film concludes with an official race sanctioned by the government that pits the Porsche against El Tito’s Chevy. I won’t tell you which car wins.

Despite his name, director Bent-Jurgen Perlmutt is a Brooklynite who became interested in Cuba as a college student. He enrolled in a study program there in the spring of 2000 just before the Elian Gonzalez custody battle took place. His take on that confrontation will give you a good understanding of how he was able to see Cuba in such a balanced fashion:

This incident piqued my interest even more in this “axis-of-evil” nation and its contentious relationship with the United States. In order to learn more about Cuba/U.S. relations from a Cuban perspective, I started taking research trips to Cuba on my own. This led me to develop several different film projects over the years, all focusing on how Americans live and survive in a country that (since recently) has been officially off-limits to most of them. HAVANA MOTOR CLUB is the culmination of all my work in Cuba over the years, and I intend it to shed light on the conflicting sides of the changes happening in Cuba today.

With Havana in a kind of timewarp, its streets looking like the year 1958 preserved in amber, there are obvious reasons why many people would enjoy returning to a less complicated time. We learn that as part of the reforms, the Cuban drag racers are now permitted to take tourists around town for a fee. If that’s the kind of capitalism that is overtaking Cuba today, I for one would be amenable to it especially since I was just another 13-year-old in 1958 with a passion for the same kinds of cars.

On a Friday night in the late 1950s after the movie let out in South Fallsburgh in upstate NY, we stood on the sidewalk in front of the Rialto Theater and took in the same kind of illegal drag racing you see in “Havana Motor Club”. The cars would not exactly compete with each other since it was a two-lane road heading out of town but they would line up in front of the traffic light and rev their engines until the light turned green. Watching a ’57 Chevy or Ford tearing up the street was a way to get the testosterone flowing.

My car racing circle at Bard included a student named Paul Gommi who was the typical Bardian of that time, which is to say an atypical American youth. Paul used to compete in a drag races in a class that was designated for modified sports cars like MG’s or Triumphs, popular at the time for people on a budget. Reading the fine print in the regulations, Paul discovered that it would be possible for him to compete with a 1932 Ford Phaeton that he had equipped with a bored and stroked English Ford engine. Over the years he has developed versions of this combination that have earned him accolades. This is a recent example as featured in a Hot Rod Network magazine article:

His latest creation is this original American ’32 Ford DeLuxe V-8 Phaeton (only 974 produced). He set about improving its performance exactly like he would have in 1955, using all pre-’55 parts, materials, machinery, tools, and even methods.

According to Paul, “A hot rod is all about the engine. Modifying the engine is the greatest improvement you can make in performance.” He chose a ’37 Ford 221ci 21-stud Flathead engine. For performance, he took a ’49 S.Co.T. supercharger and adapted the 21 studder by designing and making all the pulleys, drive, and modifying the manifold with the help of his friend Tom Taros.

Paul was an art major whose 12 feet tall paintings of drag racers lined the walls of the dining commons in 1965, done to fulfill the Senior Project required of all Bardians for graduation. Paul told us that he was done with art at that point. It was ready to move on to full-time racing and car-building as a profession.

In 1989 Paul’s drag racing career came to an end as his car spun off the track and resulted in a serious accident that nearly cost his life.

All I can say is that when the film shows officials warning the crowds at Cuba’s first drag racing race to keep a safe distance from the track, they had ample reasons to stick to their guns. Unless the people stood back, the race would be suspended. They surely understood the dangers of a car hurdling toward a crowd at over 100 miles per hour can pose. The top man representing the Cuban government in this emerging new sport is 72 years old and had vivid memories of the 1958 bloodbath. Whatever flaws the Cuban government has, neglect of the safety and health of its citizens is not one of them.

June 30, 2015

Samuel Farber’s dodgy reference to Cuban per capita income under Batista

Filed under: cuba — louisproyect @ 3:20 pm

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A study in mendacity

On June 10th an article titled “Cuba’s Challenge” by Samuel Farber appeared in Jacobin that was sufficiently wrongheaded to provoke me into writing a response. Not long after his book “Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959” was published by Haymarket in 2011 (the ISO publishing wing), I had plans to write a systematic critique but terminated the project after the first installment that dealt with his claim that the government had imposed a Stalinist straightjacket on culture.

Although I find Farber’s scholarship on Cuba always in need of a rebuttal, I had simply lost the motivation for the time being back in 2012 to answer him because of the Cuban government’s wretched support for the dictatorships in Libya and Syria. I was especially upset with articles that were appearing in Prensa Latina that were indistinguishable from the garbage on Global Research et al. I suppose that the naked brutality of the Baathist dictatorship plus Cuba’s rapprochement with the USA might have had the effect of toning down Cuban media. It is too bad that it had not followed an independent and radical editorial position from the start.

Turning to Farber’s article, it makes the case that despite the misery in the countryside, things were pretty good for the urban working class:

On the eve of the 1959 Revolution, Cuba had the fourth highest per capita income in Latin America, after Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina.

In terms of its material reality, the Cuba of the fifties was on the one hand characterized by uneven modernity, fairly advanced means of communication and transportation — especially the high circulation, by Latin American standards, of newspapers and magazines — and the rapid development of television and radio. On the other hand, there were abysmal living conditions in the Cuban countryside.

For those who follow Cubanology, Farber’s article will ring a bell. The notion of Castro’s guerrillas coming in and disrupting an economy that was doing pretty good is widespread. For example, Marianne Ward and John Devereux wrote this abstract for their article “The Road Not Taken: Pre-Revolutionary Cuban Living Standards in Comparative Perspective” that appeared in March 2012 The Journal of Economic History:

We examine Cuban GDP over time and across space. We find that Cuba was once a prosperous middle-income economy. On the eve of the revolution, incomes were 50 to 60 percent of European levels. They were among the highest in Latin America at about 30 percent of the United States. In relative terms, Cuba was richer earlier on. Income per capita during the 1920s was in striking distance of Western Europe and the Southern United States. After the revolution, Cuba slipped down the world income distribution. Current levels of income per capita appear below their pre-revolutionary peaks.

You can find the same sort of thing in Manuel Marquez-Sterling’s  “Cuba 1952-1959: The True Story of Castro’s Rise to Power”:

The image of a country sunk in abject poverty and illiteracy, its people exploited by raw and rapacious American capitalism, together with a bloodthirsty and reactionary tyrant who guaranteed the exploiters the permanency of the status quo is just a grotesque myth. In 1958 Cuba was a rapidly developing country with an enterprising progressive, and well-educated middle class. And no mean part of this development and progress had been achieved during Batista’s years from 1952 to 1959.

There’s not much to distinguish Farber from these accounts except for his customary invocations for the need for democratic socialism and all the rest. It is too bad that he does not understand that in order to build a democratic socialist society, there is a need for honesty and transparency including from intellectuals who are expected to be scrupulously devoted to the truth.

When Farber writes “On the eve of the 1959 Revolution, Cuba had the fourth highest per capita income in Latin America, after Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina”, he sweeps one important detail under the rug, namely the cost of living. It doesn’t matter if the working-class in Havana was earning nearly the equivalent of an Argentine worker if the cost of living was many times greater than it was in Buenos Aires. For someone writing about the Cuban standard of living in such a decontextualized manner this is worse than being sloppy. It is a violation of the kind of intellectual honesty we expect from someone representing himself as a socialist. It rather reeks of Time Magazine or the Miami Herald.

If you want to get the real story on the urban working class in Cuba during the 1950s, I recommend Louis A. Perez Jr.’s “Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution”, a welcome antidote to Samuel Farber’s dishonest, self-serving and ideologically toxic assault on the revolution in Cuba that has largely succeeded despite repeated attempts to strangle it.

From chapter 10 of Perez (The Eclipse of Old Cuba):

Despite this appearance of well-being, the Cuban middle class was in crisis. The decade of the 1950s was a period of mounting instability and growing uncertainty. Middle-class expectations that the return of Batista in 1952 would end political turmoil proved short-lived and illusory. By the mid-1950s, Cuba was again in the grip of political violence and personal insecurity. The malaise went deeper, however, than unsettled political conditions. To be sure, by prevailing measurements of economic development Cuba boasted of one of the highest standards of living in Latin America. In 1957, Cuba enjoyed among the highest per capita income in Latin America, ranked second at $374 after Venezuela ($857). Only Mexico and Brazil exceeded Cuba in the number of radios owned by individuals (1 for every 6.5 inhabitants). The island ranked first in television sets (1 per 25 inhabitants). Daily average food consumption was surpassed only by Argentina and Uruguay. Cuba was first in telephones (1 to 38), newspapers (1 copy per 8 inhabitants), private motor vehicles (1 to 40), and rail mileage per square mile (1 to 4). An estimated 58 percent of all housing units had electricity. By 1953, 76 percent of the population was literate, the fourth highest literacy rate in Latin America after Argentina (86 per-cent), Chile (79.5 percent), and Costa Rica (79.4 percent).

The apparent affluence enjoyed by Cuba, however, concealed tensions and frustrations that extended both vertically and horizontally through Cuban society. The fluctuations of the export economy continued to create conditions of apprehension that affected all classes. The deepening political crisis of the 1950s exacerbated this uncertainty and, together with an uncertain economy, contributed to eroding the security of middle-class Cubans. They found little cornfort in statistical tallies that touted their high level of material consumption and placed the island near the top of the scale of per capita income in Latin America. The social reality was quite different. Cuba was integrated directly into the larger U.S. economic system and the concomitant consumption patterns. While Cubans enjoyed a remarkably high per capita income in Latin American terms, they lived within a North American cost of living index. Cuba enjoyed a material culture underwritten principally by imports from the United States. While Cuban currency and wages remained comparatively stable through the 1950s, consumption of foreign imports, in the main North American products, increased dramatically from $515 million in 1950 to $649 million in 1956 to $777 million in 1958. Cubans paid North American prices at a time when the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar was declining and the U.S. consumer price index was rising. The United States, not Latin America, served as the frame of reference for Cubans. And against this measure, the Cuban per capita income of $374 paled against the U.S. per capita of $2,000, or even that of Mississippi, the poorest state, at $1,000. Life in Havana, further, was considerably more expensive than in any North American city. Havana ranked among the world’s most expensive cities—fourth after Caracas, Ankara, and Manila. In 1954, Havana had the largest number of Cadillacs per capita of any city in the world.

Cubans participated directly in and depended entirely on the North American economic system in very much the same fashion as U.S. citizens, but without access to U.S. social service programs and at employment and wage levels substantially lower than their North American counterparts. It was a disparity keenly felt in Cuba, a source of much frustration and anxiety. Middle-class Cubans in the 1950s perceived their standard of living in decline as they fell behind the income advances in the United States. These perceptions were not without substance, for even the much-acclaimed Cuban per capita income represented a standard of living in stagnation. Between 1952 and 1954, the decline in the international sugar market precipitated the first in a series of recessions in the Cuban economy during the decade. Per capita income declined by 18 percent, neutralizing the slow gains made during the postwar period. In 1958, the Cuban per capita income was at about the same level as it had been in 1947. Increasingly, middle-class Cubans were losing ground, losing the ability to sustain the consumption patterns to which they had become accustomed.

No amount of favorable comparisons with per capita income in Latin America could reduce Cuban resentment over their predicament. Economist Levi Marrero expressed dismay in 1954 that while Cuba’s per capita income was twice as high as Latin America, it was five times lower than U.S. levels, and he asked rhetorically: “Why this Cuban poverty?” Three years later, writer Antonio Llanes Montes expressed a similar complaint: “Although one hears daily of the prosperity that Cuba is now experiencing, the fact is that the workers and the middle class find it more difficult each day to subsist owing to the scarcity of articles of basic necessity?’

April 23, 2015

Que maravillosa!

Filed under: cuba,dance,music — louisproyect @ 12:24 am

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