“Es claro que tenemos a un presidente que ve de forma diferente a las personas que no son blancas”

28 September 2019

“Es claro que tenemos a un presidente que ve de forma diferente a las personas que no son blancas”

Por José Javier Pérez

El Nuevo Día

(Read the original article here)

El periodista estadounidense residente en Puerto Rico, Michael Deibert, documentó las secuelas del huracán María en el libro "When the Sky Fell"

Winter Park, Florida.– Ver que tanta gente murió innecesariamente durante la secuela del huracán María detonó en la mente y corazón del periodista Michael Deibert la necesidad de plasmar lo ocurrido en Puerto Rico a partir de aquel 20 de septiembre de 2017.

Para este escritor norteamericano, de 46 años, documentar las secuelas de María era un asunto de honor. Se trataba de una historia que debía quedar plasmada en el eterno récord que permite el lenguaje escrito para dejar claro que, si bien ese huracán causó un desastre devastador, ya en la Isla coexistía un catálogo de problemas que el ciclón colocó en una vitrina internacional.

La relación colonial de Puerto Rico con Estados Unidos, que los boricuas son ciudadanos americanos de segunda clase, y la decepción nacional que los partidos políticos puertorriqueños tradicionales han sembrado en la Isla durante las últimas décadas son algunos de esos problemas que saltan en “When the Sky Fell”, cuya presentación ocurrió anoche sábado en el establecimiento Stardust Video & Coffee en la ciudad de Winter Park.

El tema isleño no es abstracto para Deibert. Conoce Puerto Rico por sus viajes frecuentes a la Isla, porque sus abuelos vivían en Mayagüez y porque desde mayo ubicó su residencia en el Viejo San Juan, en un lugar entre la Calle Sol y la Calle Cruz. Actualmente labora como reportero del Caribe para Bloomberg.

El “#RickyRenuncia” fue en realidad un proceso de catarsis colectiva a través de la cual los residentes exorcizaron los demonios que venían acumulando desde mucho tiempo atrás, dijo el escritor en una breve conversación con El Nuevo Día previo a la presentación de su libro.

Deibert fue claro en expresar que la devastación que dejó María se convirtió en una catástrofe mucho mayor cuando la ayuda que Puerto Rico esperaba del gobierno de Estados Unidos nunca llegó, y sugirió que esta escasa o nula respuesta estuvo motivada por la visión prejuiciada del presidente Donald Trump.

“Es claro que tenemos a un presidente que ve de forma diferente a las personas que no son blancas”, dijo. “La respuesta fue nula o escasa y hubo miles de personas que murieron y que no debieron haber muerto. Es algo que no se debe olvidar”, dijo.

Es claro también que, a dos años del paso de ese ciclón, la Isla aún atraviesa las secuelas tempestuosas de ese evento, especialmente en el tema político. Según dijo, hay un desencanto general con los partidos políticos tradicionales y esto es especialmente entre la gente joven”, comentó.

“Hay que ver qué pasará en Puerto Rico en las próximas elecciones. ¿Habrá la misma energía que se generó cuando se logró sacar el gobernador (Ricardo Rosselló)? ¿Se traducirá esa militancia en una fuerza política?”, se preguntó Deibert quien como periodista ha escrito sobre Puerto Rico, Haití y otros países latinoamericanos.

Entre sus publicaciones están "Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti"; “The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair"; “In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico”; y “Haiti will not Perish: A Recent History”.

What is forcing thousands of migrants to flee their home countries?

Wed 5 Dec 2018 15.48 GMT

What is forcing thousands of migrants to flee their home countries?

The United States is more to blame for its immigration problem than it would like to take credit for

By Michael Deibert

The Guardian

(Read the original article here)

The mass of humanity living in a makeshift encampment at the US border with Mexico is driven by historical forces of which many Americans are only dimly aware.

Demonized by Donald Trump as an “invasion” of miscreants who should be housed in concentration camp-like tent cities, the migrants, many of whom are in fact planning on applying for asylum, persist under the weight of a US history in their home countries as heavy as any burden they carry with them.

Though several caravans have made the trek to the United States over the last year, the one that attracted Trump’s attention left San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, on 12 October. It was largely made up of citizens of that country, as well as some from El Salvador and Guatemala.

Traversing a route infamous for its danger – the Mexican leg of the journey crosses states long in thrall to the country’s powerful drug cartels – their safety in numbers logic is self-evident. What is forcing thousands of people into such a precarious flight?

In Honduras, where the caravan originated, the past decade has seen the terrorizing effects of street violence by criminal gangs exacerbated by an increased presence of Mexican cartels, police abuses and the murder of human rights and environmental activists, most notoriously that of Berta Cáceres in 2016.

Much of this current instability can be traced back to the June 2009 ouster of its then president, the erratic leftist Manuel Zelaya. Though the then US president Barack Obama declared the ouster “not legal”, his administration subsequently worked with regional powers such as Mexico to assure Zelaya did not return to office.

After Zelaya’s overthrow, Honduras was run by a series of rightwing leaders. When the most recent of them, Juan Orlando Hernández, looked likely to lose his re-election last year to the former journalist Salvador Nasralla, his government responded with a repression that Amnesty International characterized as having “violated international norms and the right to personal integrity, liberty and fair trial guarantees”.

At least 31 people, the vast majority civilians, died in the violence, but Orlando Hernández continued in office, with Trump’s state department congratulating him on his victory while stressing “the need for a robust national dialogue”.

Honduras is hardly the only country whose society has been undermined by US political decisions both recent and historic.

In neighboring Guatemala, the US provided extensive aid to the Guatemalan military during the country’s 1960 to 1996 civil war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people. The war itself was to a large extent an outgrowth of a US-backed coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz, in 1954.

More recently, the Trump administration has lent its support to attempts to neutralize the Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (Cicig), a United Nations-backed body tasked with investigating organized crime and its links to political actors.

One of those actors is Guatemala’s current president, former comedian Jimmy Morales, who is under investigation for allegedly accepting illicit campaign contributions, and came to power with the support of some of the most reactionary elements of the country’s military.

Under the rule of Morales, the Guatemalan government was one of only a handful that followed Trump’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem this past May. With his undercutting of Cicig, many view Trump as returning the favour.

But perhaps no country’s history attests to the US role in helping to create the conditions for this latter-day exodus than El Salvador.

After an October 1979 coup resulted in a military-civilian junta, the US government, first under Jimmy Carter and then under Ronald Reagan, supported the junta even as its civilian members resigned and it grew more violent.

As political polarization accelerated, a bubbling multi-front guerrilla insurgency united under the umbrella of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In turn, the FMLN was met with increasing death-squad activity by the right. Much of this violence was orchestrated by US-trained Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former intelligence official.

The United States worked furiously to prevent a D’Aubuisson victory in 1984 elections that saw center-right José Napoleón Duarte come to power. Despite its role in preventing D’Aubuisson’s election, the US government for years poured money into Salvadoran military bodies such as the Atlacatl Battalion, whose chief military maneuver appears to have been the massacre, a tendency which it carried out in mass killings in hamlets such as El Mozote and El Calabozo and even in the capital, where it murdered six Jesuit priests and two lay workers in 1989.

Both during his campaign and his president, Trump has frequently inveighed against criminal organizations with links to El Salvador and their malign influence on the United States. Here, too, the history is more complicated – and more shaped by the US – than many acknowledge.

During El Salvador’s civil war, which lasted until 1992 and killed an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans, hundreds of thousands fled to the United States, especially to southern California. There, young Salvadoran boys found themselves endangered by local gangs and coalesced into their own groups, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

When some of these young gang members, not US citizens though culturally American, were deported back to El Salvador, they took California’s gang culture with them. The gangs have since proliferated throughout Central America. Though MS-13 remains the bete noire of Trump and his acolytes, the American origins of the gang go almost unreported.

All this being the case, it is rather irresponsible for the United States to take such an active role in creating the conditions that make people want to flee the countries that make up the Central American isthmus and then profess shock when they do so.

The caravans themselves push on, as the assassinated Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton once wrote, “far from where hope is already left behind”.

Moment of Truth

Moment of Truth

Text of Michael Deibert's address at Millersville University Literary Festival

2 November 2018

Good evening to all of you and thank you for coming. Thank you also to Millersville University and the Writing Center for inviting me to speak. As Bill mentioned I grew up in Lancaster and have spent much of my career as a journalist and author traveling the world and working in different countries, and that’s one of the ways I know it is particularly auspicious that I have been invited to give a talk on November 2nd which, in Haiti, is Gede, which celebrates the lwa or spirits of death and fertility, and in Mexico and in many places in Central American Dia de los Muertos, which marks los que se fueron, or those who have departed.

It’s interesting for a guy who grew up as a lower middle-class kid here in Lancaster to see what changes have taken place since I was young. The city seems to have really blossomed into a very vibrant, multicultural politically active place over the years and, of course, thanks to the advancements in communications, people really have the world at their fingertips if they choose to avail themselves of it these days.

Having been to something like 60 countries or thereabouts now, one of the messages I try to communicate to people here in the United States is that, despite the current political discourse of the day, you don’t have to be afraid of people who don’t look like you, speak like you, follow your religion or dress like you. There are predators in every country & every culture, but in general in my travels I’ve found people to be more or less ok.

There is something you should be frightened of, and I would like to talk to you about it tonight.

Americans are cocooned and cushioned by the reality many (though not Native Americans or African–Americans, to name but two groups) have shared since the country’s founding, decades of stable institutions and, in the national main, political fair play. They cannot imagine how quickly, and how violently, things can change.

I can.

In my 20 years as a journalist reporting on international affairs, I have come across the template we see being used in the United States before, employed by those whose political behavior is marked by, as Robert Paxton said in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism

(An) obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

In Côte d’Ivoire I saw how Laurent Gbagbo’s promoting his ethno supremacist cult of Ivorité took one of Africa’s richest countries and toppled it over into civil war. In Haiti, I saw how Jean Bertrand Aristide took the rancour of the masses and stoked it into an attempt to create a kind of garish fiefdom modeled on those of Uganda’s Idi Amin and the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bédel Bokassa. In Guatemala, I watched former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who oversaw the country’s worst period of genocidal bloodletting, form a political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG), whose entire motor ran on anti–elite rage and was eventually revealed to be more criminal enterprise than political vessel.

As I come from the exact strata of American society – the white, blue collar, Rust Belt working class – among whom the current president’s message has the most resonance - and have seen its like up close before, I feel a special duty to speak out.

People with a strong work ethic feel all their hard work has been spat upon and shunted aside by years of free trade deals championed by both parties and a tax system that lavishes breaks on the wealthy and penalizes those of more modest means (championed, ironically, by the very same party to which they now claim allegiance). There is real pain and real despair there. But there is also a whining self pity that often can’t see anyone’s struggle as worthy as their own and a nearly millenarian sense of grievance that sees politics not as the art of the possible but as an apocalyptic struggle between a largely white industrial world that has gone and will never return against a confusing kaleidoscope of liberal urban elites, the country’s burgeoning non–white population, immigrants, alternative sexual orientations and other shocks to their system. If Trump voters often sound as if they think the world is about to end, it’s because the world as they have known it is ending. But these forces of demography cannot be reversed, and it is not a world my fellow working–class whites need to fear, but fear is the currency on which our president trades.

The American democratic project has been characterized by inconsistencies since it commenced in 1776. Some of these tensions involved America’s actions abroad, and some in the way it treated its most vulnerable citizens at home. But, with the exception of a wrenching civil war that saw over 600,000 Americans die, few have ever questioned the value of the project itself.

When, at the end of the Revolutionary War, a group of dissident officers in the Continental Army all but suggested a coup against the newly inaugurated Congress in what came to be known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, the army's commander in chief (and future first U.S. President) George Washington gave an impassioned speech in which he inveighed on behalf “of our common country,” charging

As you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man, who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country; and who wickedly attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.

America has had a complicated, schizophrenic history and it has been a messy project.

In the mid-1700s, a group of Scotch-Irish frontiersmen who had settled along the Susquehanna River became known as the Paxton Boys and conducted a spate of racially-motivated violence here in the south-central and eastern portions of Pennsylvania.

On December 14 1763, the gang murdered six members of the Susquehannock tribe (known as Conestoga among English-speakers) and burned their cabins for good measure. When 16 of the remaining Susquehannock were placed in protective custody in the old city jail in Lancaster (just next to the site of the present-day Fulton Opera House), on 27 December, the Paxton Boys broke into the jail and killed, scalped and dismembered the six adults and eight children who sheltered there.

Just last year, Scott Wagner, who is running for governor, was recorded disparaging the businessman and philanthropist George Soros as a “Hungarian Jew” who harbored “a hatred for America.” Soros, along with a number of prominent other individuals and journalists was sent a bomb last month,

Also last year, a white supremacist organization called Identity Evropa held a rally in Penn Square, and at around the same time stickers and posters promoting it were found plastered at Elizabethtown College and here at Millersville.

That’s part of our history and present. But equally a part of it is Lancaster’s  prominent role as the political base of the fierce abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, who represented the region in the U.S. Congress for most of the era between 1849 to 1868. Equally part of it is Lancaster’s history of religious tolerance and welcoming attitude towards those fleeing persecution. The fact that the county welcomes 20x as many refugees per capita as the rest of the country is something you can all be proud of. The future is unwritten.

But need to think very carefully about the path we are heading down.

In the July 1932 elections in Germany, also a democracy at the time, the Nazis received 37% of the vote, the most they every got. In the next election four months later, their share shrank to 32%. But by then it was too late. The serpent was already in the garden. Tellingly, in their quest for absolute power, the Nazis were aided unwittingly by leaders such as the German Communist Party’s Ernst Thälmann, who thought the centre left was a greater danger than the extreme right. Before he realized his miscalculation, he was arrested, held in solitary confinement for eleven years and then shot in Buchenwald.

In the 1990s, the people of the Balkans put their faith in leaders like Serbia's Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić who led the region into ethnic cleansing, genocide, NATO bombing and bloody war for a decade. In 1999, the people of Venezuela, desperate and vengeful after being ignored by their politicians for years, turned the reigns of their country over to former coup leader Hugo Chávez, his successor Nicolás Maduro and their “Bolivarian revolution.” They haven’t gotten it back since.

In Cuba, where I have spent a lot of time and which has its own experience with strongmen promising to expunge a collective grievance through a cleansing release of violence, after the 1959 overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista, the new government, led by Fidel Castro, executed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people tied to the ancien régime after only the most summary trials (and many with no trial at all). Whether all or even most of them were guilty will never be known. The cry of paredón (to the wall) resounded, and the will of the maximum leader had to be obeyed. Today, one can still visit El Morro, where so many of them died, and El Capitolio, where Cuba’s congress met and debated, but which was shuttered after 1959, and remains so to this day.

Now, at another time, in another place, that cry raises its sanguinary voice again, with  calls for political opponents to be jailed, for journalists to be arrested and killed, for desperate people who could just as easily be any one of us to be described in terms of vermin and plague and for those who speak out against this rhetoric of terrorism to be attacked and battered into submission.

When things like this start, at first it might be the opposition party that is sent to the wall. It might be Jewish journalists, or Muslims, or Latinos or immigrants. But one of these days, not too long from now, the mob will scream for blood and it will be someone you love who is brought to the wall, for some transgression real or imagined. It might even be you. In my 20 years as a journalist I’ve seen it in countless countries before. People think it can’t happen here, but it can.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Tucydides discussed a reinvention of vocabulary for the civil war in Corcyra that went thusly:

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant one was totally unfit for action.

So what is the solution to all of this, when we’re confronted with such cruelty and brutal machinery - when things like building tent camps in the desert for children who have been forcibly separated from their parents and calling journalists “enemies of the people” - a direct reference to genocidal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin - have become normalized?

One of the writers who had the biggest influence on me over the years was the British author George Orwell. A lot of people know his anti-totalitarian fables 1984 and Animal Farm, perhaps fewer his gripping account of fighting against the forces of fascism during the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, and perhaps still fewer his 1937 study of the living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the north of England, The Road to Wigan Pier. But there are some words from that book that I think are worth reading here tonight

The people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent. This means that the small-holder has got to ally himself with the factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the schoolmaster with the garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them to do so if they can be made to understand where their interest lies….Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain-pen.

I encourage all of you here to night to embrace the world as much as you can, not to shrink from it. Along with my time spent in distant lands, my view of the world and its struggles have been equally shaped by the books I have read, as literature as an art form, both fiction and non-fiction, can be a kind of pinnacle of dissent. Writers like Reinaldo Arenas, Marguerite Duras, Milan Kundera and Mario Vargas Llosa helped influence me and hone my analytical mind in a way that, say, engaging on Twitter does not.  And as the struggle to build a more decent and just world continues, I try to remember the words of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who, in her penultimate book, A hora da Estrela (The Hour of the Star) wrote of her main character, Macabéa’s, struggle to survive in Rio de Janeiro, that “she saw among the stones lining the gutter the wisps of grass green as the most tender human hope.”

Don’t give up.

Thank you.

San Juan’s Iconic La Perla Neighborhood Defies Trump

San Juan’s Iconic La Perla Neighborhood Defies Trump 

Battered by disasters natural and man-made, this ebullient Puerto Rico area refuses to give up or give in.

Michael Deibert

09.17.18 5:05 AM ET

The Daily Beast

(Read the original article here)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Just above the tumbling Caribbean surf in the San Juan neighborhood of La Perla, Antonio Rosario Fernández sips a beer after a day’s work and watches the sun begin its slow descent into the sea.

“We are in survival mode, here,” says Rosario, a 44-year-old salsa band leader sitting in a makeshift bar in what was once a home that was largely destroyed by Hurricane Maria last September. “This place was abandoned, with no light, no water and very little information, for a long time and there are still a lot of houses where people can’t live.”

One year after Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico and caused an estimated 2,975 deaths, this iconic neighborhood, nestled along a narrow band of land between the walls of the Castillo San Cristóbal and the ocean, is clawing its way back.

Its story says a lot about where Puerto Rico finds itself today.

First settled at the tail-end of the 19th century on the site of what was then a slaughterhouse, La Perla was initially home to many descendants of former slaves and poor arrivals from the countryside. Over the years, the neighborhood’s distinctive homes—first mere wooden shacks and now mainly concrete structures painted ebullient colors—became one of the iconic images of Puerto Rico.

The neighborhood was celebrated in a 1978 salsa song by Ismael Rivera, who praised the neighborhood’s “noble citizens” who “earn their bread with sweat” and whose “youth dream of tomorrow.” In 2009, the band Calle 13, whose members, like Rivera, did not themselves hail from the neighborhood, released their own song “La Perla” in collaboration with the Panamanian salsero Rubén Blades. Its hard-edged lyrics and joyful music capture something of the neighborhood’s never-say-die spirit. Perhaps most famously, the quarter served as the setting for the video of the song “Despacito,” by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi and reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee.

Despite its cultural heft, after Maria, the residents of La Perla felt largely abandoned by the federal and local governments, so residents had to pitch in and help one another.

“All of our community—adults, children, young people—had to come together to clean up after the storm,” says Sonia Viruet, 62, who has lived her whole live in the neighborhood. “We had aid from private agencies and artists like Luis Fonsi, but we didn’t get a lot of help from the federal government, the island government or the mayor’s office.”

According to Vivuet and other residents, people living in La Perla whose homes have been totally or partially destroyed have received sums as little as $1,000 to rebuild them from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which has been criticised for its slow and inefficient response to the hurricane.

A Department of Homeland Security document released earlier this week appeared to show that the Trump administration had siphoned off $10 million of FEMA’s funding and redirected it towards U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency currently under fire for its role in separating hundreds of immigrant children from their families.

A FEMA spokesperson told The Daily Beast that Privacy Act restrictions prevented them from releasing information specific to the neighborhood, but that more than $65 million has been approved for the municipality of San Juan under FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program.

While residents are furious at the feds, they are also unhappy with local leaders like San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, whose offices are in the Viejo San Juan (Old San Juan) neighborhood next to La Perla. Cruz gained international fame for strongly criticizing Trump’s callous indifference to the storm’s human cost, which he reaffirmed this week by lying about the storm’s death toll, and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria, Back home, however, some see her as having been largely absent since, politicking and appearing with Democratic Party luminaries on the mainland.

“The government gave us nothing, not the federal government nor the municipal government,” says La Perla resident Irma Navarez Gonzalez, 56. “The military helped us when they were here, but the government,  in general, we haven’t really seen them.”

Cruz’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The island’s internal politics—with some like Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s party favoring full statehood for the island, and others favoring a continuation of its current Commonwealth status and still others favoring independence—may go part of the way to explain the atmosphere of mutual recrimination. In the most recent plebiscite on the issue, held last year, 97 percent voted for statehood, but only 23 percent of eligible voters participated, a historic low for such a vote.

One issue that is particularly galling, say residents, is the federally appointed Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), which was established in 2016 to combat the island’s $70 billion debt. The FOMB has the power to unilaterally impose austerity measures on the island and has consistently pushed for secrecy to the point of being reprimanded by federal judges for failing to comply with the island’s local disclosure requirements.

“We are getting deeper into the colonial relationship and they’re not solving that lack of democracy,” says Juan Ruiz-Robles, a 31-year-old vacation rental property manager who lives in Old San Juan and helped set up a soup kitchen in La Perla after the storm. “Nobody voted for [the FOMB], it’s completely undemocratic.”

La Perla may be struggling, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made in today’s Puerto Rico. A few hundred yards away, in Old San Juan, where cruise ships began docking only three months after the storm, the streets have been restored to something resembling their former glory, with gaggles of tourists passing in front of its ornate colonial building and dining in its varied restaurants.

The incentives for mainlanders to do business in Puerto Rico are substantial: Puerto Rico imposes no federal personal income taxes mor a capital gains tax and has tax incentives extremely favorable to U.S. businesses.  This past summer, Gov. Rosselló signed a bill to privatize the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) , the island’s power company and one of the largest public utilities in the United States. He also actively courted the tech sector as a way to bring investment to the island.

After the storm, a wave of investors and entrepreneurs with links to the cryptocurrency industry arrived in Puerto Rico from the mainland, their most visible representative being Brock Pierce, an eccentric former child actor who became a multimillionaire via the industry. As they rented out palatial buildings in Old San Juan and started speaking of how they were going to transform the island, ambitions that seemed to go beyond mere investing, this new form of capitalism seemed reminiscent to some of the old form of colonialism. The pushback was intense.

“We are infested with these people who think they are coming to save the primitive people of Puerto Rico who can’t get it together,” says Gabrielle Perez, 27, who works as a shop assistant in one of the stores selling trinkets to tourists in Old San Juan. “How dare you? It hurts, it’s insulting. They want this garden and they see us as the weeds.”

For their part, the new flock on investors insist they come in peace.

"I'm aware that the crypto community came down here without a well thought-out game plan," says Adam Krim, Acting Executive Director of the Restart One Foundation, which describes itself as a non-profit organization supporting the redevelopment of Puerto Rico and which was largely seed-funded by Pierce. "Nonetheless, they came down with the proper intention. We’re in the process of building that trust, which is going to take time.”

But in a country whose present was almost erased by a monstrous storm and whose past is so often badly understood by the mainland, nearby La Perla remains stubbornly, emphatically Puerto Rican.
For years, investors and developers have looked upon La Perla’s enviable seaside location and salivated with plans about how to redevelop the place. But its residents have remained planted where they are, through good times and bad.

On a recent night, people sat in a little park beneath the colonial castle’s walls, laughing and talking as the sound of crashing waves echoed nearby. The strains of salsa and reggaeton weaved through the palm fronds of the moonlit trees.

“This kind of life…” said Juan Ruiz-Robles, the property manager who helped run the soup kitchen after the storm, as he took in the scene. “This is a kind of resistance.”

Trump Says Puerto Rico Is ‘Unsung Success.’ Actually, Power Still Goes Out and People Aren’t Coming Back.

Trump Says Puerto Rico Is ‘Unsung Success.’ Actually, Power Still Goes Out and People Aren’t Coming Back.

Thanks to FEMA’s fumbling response, the island isn’t back to normal a year after Hurricane Maria.

Michael Deibert

09.12.18 12:26 PM ET
 

The Daily Beast 

(Read the original article here)  

UTUADO, Puerto Rico—As he briefed reporters on the approach of Hurricane Florence towards the Carolinas on Tuesday, President Donald Trump claimed the federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria had been “tremendous” and called it “an incredible, unsung success.”

Tell that to Annie Salva Mercado.

“Electricity comes and goes but we never know when,” she told The Daily Beast behind the counter at the bakery she runs in Utuado, in the island’s lush central mountains. “We’ve had lots of bad weather events in the past, but nothing like Hurricane Maria. Things remain very fragile.”

Or tell that to the families of the 2,975 who died as a result of the storm and its aftermath, according to a study commissioned by Puerto Rico’s government and George Washington University.

Nearly a year after Maria roared onto shore, some life has returned to this community of 35,000, with coffee shops, small informal bars and clothing stores doing a brisk business. But elsewhere, the town’s lanes are lined with shuttered businesses, a legacy not only of Maria but also of the island’s economic crisis which has seen at least 500,000 people leave over the last decade, taking advantages of what local residents refer to as “the Jet Blue solution,” where only a driver’s license is needed to emigrate to the mainland United States. Those who stay behind are struggling mightily to salvage their community.

“We didn’t have electricity for two months, but we had a generator so I was able to start serving people a week after the storm,” says Victor Díaz, a pharmacist in Utuado who says he lost “at least” five patients to death in the wake of the hurricane. “I had to go to San Juan almost every day to get merchandise because no one was bringing it. It was chaos. You had to wait from one day to the other, or go to Arecibo or Manatí, looking for gas. And things have not gone back to normal, we are not even at 30 percent of what we were before the hurricane.”

The devastation of the island’s energy grid presented a significant challenge for the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), which was already in distress before the storm and is currently groaning under $9 billion of bond debt. When one drives through the central mountains, one still often encounters communications poles bent nearly double over the roadside. On some secondary roads, cables and tree branches remain across the path.

On a mountainside near the town of Jayuya, one PREPA contractor who would only give his name as Javier, checking on utility poles, gave the same assessment of the country’s energy infrastructure as Mercado had in Utuado: “fragile.”

“The lack of response was worse than the hurricane,” says Cynthia García Coll, a psychologist and visiting professor at the Universidad de Puerto Rico. “If there had been immediate response, it would have been a completely different story. What Maria did, no one was protected. People who had diabetes and renal patients and those who had cancer just died and died and died.”

Though FEMA has sought to blame the delays in its response on Puerto Rican officials and the George Washington University report characterizes many in the island’s government as woefully unprepared, an investigation by NPR and PBS Frontline earlier this year revealed that the agency’s response to the storm was one defined by poor planning, material and personnel shortfalls and general chaos. In violation of federal rules, FEMA did not pre-position enough supplies on the island before the hurricane struck, and cycled through a series of inexperienced companies to provide residents with tarps, many of which never arrived.

A FEMA spokesperson disputed this characterization, pointing to air drops of food and water in the wake of the storm, and told The Daily Beast it has promised to pay communities for relief, including $3.8 million to Utuado. Some in Utuado see it differently.

“We thought FEMA was going to be more proactive with the people of Puerto Rico,” says Victor Díaz. “People have been going around begging for help and getting ‘no’ all the time.”

In Puerto Rico today, one has the sense that the small amount of autonomy the island had enjoyed in its commonwealth relationship with the United States — islanders are U.S. citizens with freedom of movement who elect their own local government but cannot vote in U.S. elections while resident here — has been all but extinguished.

The federally appointed, unelected Financial Oversight and Management Board , established by a law in 2016 to combat a debt crisis of about $70 billion, has the power to unilaterally impose austerity measures on the island’s citizens. FOMB has consistently pushed for secrecy and been reprimanded by federal judges for failing to comply with the island’s local disclosure requirements.
A 2017 agreement with the U.S. government requires the island to slash its Medicaid spending by $840.2 million by 2023, an astronomical sum for a territory where the federal government covers only 19 percent of the island’s Medicaid costs, as opposed to the 83 percent it would pay if Puerto Rico were a state. The $4.8 billion Congress approved last February to cover the shortfall is likely to run out with the next year. Almost 50 percent of the island’s residents qualify for Medicare or Medicaid.

The Puerto Rican government has also announced plans to close 283 schools this year, following the signing of a bill by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló that will begin a charter school pilot program and private school voucher initiative next year. Between 2010 and 2015, the island closed 150 schools.
Despite these enormous hurdles, though, a sense of resilient defiance remains present in Utuado, from the vibrant street art one sees depicting the colors of the Puerto Rican on buildings and the iconic jíbaro (peasant) in local murals to the fierce pride in its history.

For decades, Utuado had been a wealthy city built on the production of coffee (or oro negro, black gold, as it was called). Then, in October 1950, it served as the flashpoint for an abortive October 1950 uprising by partisans of the Puerto Rican independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos, who sought to wrest control of the island from commonwealth and U.S. authorities.

The putsch failed, with four rebels summarily executed in the city jail [five others survived]. Albizu Campos subsequently spent much of the rest of his life in prison, dying in poor health after less than a year of freedom in 1965. But his image can still be frequently seen around town.

In one local bodega, selling beer and foodstuffs and candies that children come to purchase after school, a mural of Albizu Campos, the leader’s face depicted just above a painted machete, gazes somberly down at patrons.

Referencing a popular tune by the singer Roy Brown, it reads Aunque naciera en la luna, sigo siendo puertorriqueño.

Even though I was born on the moon, I'm still Puerto Rican.

On the Ground: Michael Deibert interview with Sam Schindler on What We Will Abide

26 August 2017

Journalist Michael Deibert has called several countries –if not continents– home, and has written several books, including In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico, and most recently Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History, which came out earlier this year.

He’s had articles published in The Guardian, Truthdig, The Huffington Post and Slate among others.

He currently resides in Lancaster, but as his résumé clearly shows, staying put isn’t exactly his game. We sat together on a relatively cool summer morning in the cemetery adjacent to St. James’ Church in the heart of Lancaster City, where he was born and the city he calls home – for now.

Listen to the full interview here. 

A few notes on the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners meeting

What I witnessed yesterday at the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners meeting was a disgrace and an affront to democracy.

In a packed house, as citizen after citizen rose to voice to their opposition to the city's collaboration with the Trump administration's nakedly racist policies targeting immigrants, Muslims and others - and to express that there are now whole communities in Miami that are living in fear - the speakers were consistently cut off and silenced by Commissioner Esteban L. Bovo, Jr., who presided over the meeting with the glittering arrogance of colonial proconsul addressing his imperial subjects. 

As voter after voter spoke - some removed from the Chamber by Bovo even though they were no way being disruptive, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez ignored the proceedings entirely, standing off to one side laughing and joking with his cronies. The dynamic finally erupted into a walkout and protest by many of those assembled (including me).

For those interested who would like to see video confirmation of my story, I posted three videos of the meeting and the aftermath that I took with my phone here.

The Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners has clearly forgotten who they work, so I suggest from here on out we remind them, not just on voting day but at every meeting henceforth. They work for us, the city of Miami, and we always have been and remain a city and a county of immigrants and a refuge for the persecuted, all the stronger for our diversity. 

This will not pass. Ni un paso atrás.

Some Monday thoughts from a fading democracy

 Protest at Thomas Paine Plaza, Philadelphia, 26 January 2017. Photo credit: Ben Deibert.

I think we are in a very dangerous moment in the United States at present.

There are clearly yawning fissures within and between our institutions - the Executive, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the judiciary - that should worry any clear-eyed observer, especially given the fact that Steven Bannon (who, don't forget, is a former Navy officer) is exercising so much control over Trump.

The fact that CBP (whose union, remember, endorsed Trump and whose more moderate leader was ousted once he took office) brazenly ignored a valid court order for hours and treated attorneys and even elected officials like Cory Booker with scorn when they tried to intervene, even invoking Trump's name in the process, has, to my knowledge, never happened before. 

Also, make no mistake, both the Muslim Ban and the omission of Jews on Holocaust Memorial Day feed into white nationalist narrative that Bannon promotes (which is in no way undercut by the happenstance Jewishness of Trump's son in law). 

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio mentioned yesterday if this is where Trump is starting, imagine where the government is heading. And imagine what their response will be when the next terrorist attack happens (and it will). I fully expect unprecedented attacks on the judiciary, the free press, the separation of powers, and I think people need to be prepared for the worst. Looking at all the signs and based on my years of reporting on politics abroad, I fear there is a strong chance this could get violent before it's all over. 

I wish I had better news for you, I'm sorry...

Love to you all,

M

To my progressive friends: Common ground with your erstwhile conservative foes

Dear progressive friends: There ARE some conservatives and GOP folks who, to varying degrees, see Trump for what he is and realize the danger he poses. These may be people I don't agree with on a lot of issues, but on this they have (thus far ) been fairly sober when it comes to the unique peril the nation currently finds itself in. Among those I would suggest following (Twitter handles after their names):

-Senator John McCain, @SenJohnMcCain

-Senator Lindsey Graham, @LindseyGrahamSC

-Senator Rob Portman, @senrobportman

-Senator Susan Collins, @SenatorCollins

-Senator Jeff Flake, @JeffFlake  

-Gov. John Kasich, @JohnKasich

-David Frum, @davidfrum

-John Weaver, @JWGOP

-Ana Navarro, @ananavarro

-Jonah Goldberg, @JonahNRO

-David French, @DavidAFrench

-Bill Kristol, @BillKristol

-George F. Will, @GeorgeWill

-David Brooks, @nytdavidbrooks

-Eliot A Cohen, @EliotACohen

-Max Boot, @MaxBoot  

-Evan McMullin, @Evan_McMullin

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I know there are issues (choice, the meaning of the 2nd amendment) on which I and these individuals would strongly disagree. But if there is one thing I have seen about despots in my 20 years as a journalist covering them (and make no mistake, that is where we are heading), it is that it takes a broad based coalition to bring them down, not a sectarian one. It is going to take bridge building on all sides for the country to get through this in one piece, and even then I think it will be a challenge like we haven't faced since the Great Depression or the Civil War. Before liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, we must now act as Americans.

Fight Trump every day.

Never give up.

L'union fait la force.

Closing Arguments

This Tuesday, Americans will make a fateful decision regarding the direction the country will take in coming years.

On one side, we have Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Secretary of State, senator from New York and Fist Lady who started her career working at the Children's Defense Fund and who has been, for better and for worse, at the heart of the nation’s politics, both foreign and domestic, for the last 25 years.

On the other side, we have a man who represents a threat to American democracy unique in the country’s 240 year history.

During this past primary season, Republican voters had, in the persons of Jeb Bush and John Kasich, a chance to nominate the popular current or former governors of vital swing states who had a clearly articulated vision of conservative principals and had demonstrable records of reaching across the aisle and working with those of the other party in the day to day business of keeping their states chugging along.

Instead, Republican voters chose a television curiosity with no political experience and a glaring ignorance of national and international affairs, a confessed sexual predator, a publicly committed racist and misogynist who said he would ban an entire religion, kill innocents in a nebulous war on terrorism, called on a hostile foreign intelligence agency to disrupt the democratic process of the United States, conspired (at least rhetorically) with a fugitive accused rapist openly hostile to U.S. interests, who vowed to destroy the separation of powers, who pledges to put both his opponent and journalists like myself in prison and who traffics in dark conspiracy theories in a brazen appeal to white nationalism and the most putrid strain of America’s polarized politics.

Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of the institutional Republican Party itself. Once an internationally minded entity run on an ethos of voter enfranchisement, especially of African–Americans (anyone who doubts that fact should read John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction After the Civil War), decided, with the election of the country’s first African–American president, that, when in opposition, its job wasn’t, in fact, to help govern the nation and that indeed it wasn’t beholden to the rules of democracy, after all.

The threats of violence from the Republican “base” against President Obama began from almost the day he took office as well as Democratic members of congress, which in the case of  Arizona’s then–congresswoman Gabby Giffords were acted on with catastrophic results. Rather than reasoned debate on the issues, policy differences were met with a government shutdown and reckless threats to default on the country’s debt. Realizing that the shifting demographics of the United States were against the party’s increasing drift into a white identity entity, the party whose members once died trying to register black voters became, nationwide, the party of voter suppression. The president’s prerogative of filling Supreme Court vacancies was met by an unprecedented stonewalling.

Enter Donald J. Trump, reality tv host and dubious businessman who began his campaign by deriding citizens of Mexico, our southern neighbor and one of our most important trading partners, as murderers and rapists and who has continued through the months selling a vision of our country is little more than a nightmare tapestry of lies held together by threads of racial and social rancour.

Consistently from the stage, Trump has claimed that the murder rate in the United States is the ‘highest it’s been in 45 years.” That is a lie, and it is not. He has demeaned the Indiana–born judge overseeing the lawsuit against Trump’s bogus “university” based on the Mexican heritage of the judge’s parents. He unforgivably slandered the family of Captain Humayun Khan, killed fighting in Iraq in 2004 with anti–Muslim slurs. He has promoted an economic plan that has been denounced by economists as “a dangerous, destructive choice for the country” based on “magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.” He has all but vowed to default on America’s debt, depriving the economy of a crucial safety net, in what the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman called an example of “extrapolating from his own business career, in which he has done very well by running up debts, then walking away from them.” His refusal to release his tax returns, and his dishonest explanations for why he would not do so, means voters are in the dark about his web of debts and financial entanglements. Both Trump and his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, have praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, with Trump also lavishing praise on the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. He has grotesquely hinted at the potential desirability of the assassination of his opponent, and for months has been calling for violence against any and all who speak out against him.

The violent rhetoric of Trump and his supporters directed at journalists in general and Jewish journalists in particular, many of whom appear, with great justification, to sense the threat Trump poses on a molecular level, should be the canary in the coal mine for all of us to see. Though I am not Jewish, after I spoke against Trump’s recycling of far right anti–semitic conspiracy theories about “international bankers” and “George Soros,” I was deluged with hundreds of death threats on Twitter, threats which Twitter refused to act against claiming they didn’t violate their terms of service. It is not for nothing that Bradley Burston, a columnist for Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, looked aghast at Trump and wrote that he is “sadistically vindictive, flagrantly hypocritical, proudly divisive. He will harm anyone, say anything, declare the opposite, to get what he wants.” Lest anyone miss the point, Trump concluded his campaign with a nakedly anti–semitic ad basically suggesting a trio of prominent Jews are responsible for all of the country's financial woes.

We have been forced to live in Trump’s gutter so long I think that many of my fellow Americans have simply been battered into believing that such behaviour and discourse is normal for a presidential candidate. It is not normal, and if such a thought process is married to all the tools at the disposal of the president, it will lead the country over the cliff on which it now teeters and into the abyss.

There have been precious few voices raised against Trump within his own party, but those that have done so deserve mention. In March, Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential candidate, warned that Trump’s “imagination must not be married to real power.” In May, Jeb Bush declared that Trump had “not demonstrated that temperament or strength of character (to be president and that) he has not displayed a respect for the Constitution....I cannot support his candidacy.” The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg wrote that “Trump is a fundamentally dishonorable and dishonest person, and has been his whole adult life...An insecure, morally ugly, man-child who thinks boasting about how he can get away with groping women ‘because you’re a star’ impresses people. He’s a grotesque, as a businessman and a man full stop.” The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephen’s wrote that “it will not do for Republicans to say they denounce Mr. Trump’s personal slanders; his nativism and protectionism and isolationism; his mendacity and meanness and crassness; his disdain for constitutional protections, and still campaign for his election. There is no redemption in saying you went along with it, but only halfway; that with Mr. Trump you maintained technical virginity. To lie down with him is to wake up with him. It’s as simple as that.” While other evangelicals have spat upon their own professed beliefs to endorse him,  veteran GOP operative Peter Wehner wrote that “Trump’s character is antithetical to many of the qualities evangelicals should prize in a political leader: integrity, compassion and reasoned convictions, wisdom and prudence, trustworthiness, a commitment to the moral good.” More than 50  members of the Republican national security community signed a joint letter in which they warned that they were “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency...His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle” and that “Mr. Trump’s own statements lead us to conclude that as president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world.”

But most of the Republican establishment has demonstrated no such courage. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsed Trump after an untold number of outrages, and though the latter declined to campaign for Trump after a recording revealing the nominee bragging about sexually assaulting women came to light he supinely ran back into the fold in recent days. They have indelibly stained the GOP to such a degree that its image as a coherent party with a set of principals and values has almost ceased to exist. Should Trump win, Trump surrogates like Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and Jess Sessions will be remembered for playing with alacrity their roles as the American equivalents of Franz von Papen, Constantin von Neurath and other career politicians who gave Adolf Hitler the political cover he needed to form his first cabinet, complimenting Steve Bannon in his role as Joseph Goebbels and Breitbart News in its role as Der Stürmer.

(I won’t even mention the so called third party candidates, a pothead former governor with memory recall issues and a daffy heiress who believes being “founder and past co-chair of a local recycling committee appointed by the Lexington Board of Selectmen” is qualification of being president of the world’s most influential country, save to say it is a sad state of affairs that the fate of the republic may hang in the balance of their candidacies.)

Americans are cocooned and cushioned by the reality many (though not Native Americans or African–Americans) have shared since the country’s founding, decades of stable institutions and, in the national main, political fair play. They cannot imagine how quickly, and how violently, things can change. Those who dismiss Trump’s rhetoric as simply buffoonish bluster will be startled at how quickly things go downhill should he enter the office of the presidency. But make no mistake, with the powers bestowed on that office, Trump’s shredding of the constitution is not only a possibility but a forgone conclusion

In my 20 years as a journalist reporting on international affairs, I have come across the Trump template before, employed by those whose political behavior is marked by, as Robert Paxton said in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism

(An) obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

In Côte d’Ivoire I saw how Laurent Gbagbo’s promoting his ethno supremacist cult of Ivorité took one of Africa’s richest countries and toppled it over into civil war. In Haiti, I saw how Jean Bertrand Aristide took the rancour of the masses and stoked it into an attempt to create a kind of garish fiefdom modeled on those of Uganda’s Idi Amin and the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bédel Bokassa. In Guatemala, I watched former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who oversaw the country’s worst period of genocidal bloodletting, form a political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG), whose entire motor ran on anti–elite rage and was eventually revealed to be more criminal enterprise than political vessel.

I come from the exact strata of American society – the white, blue collar, Rust Belt working class – among whom Trump’s message has the most resonance, relatively unworldly people with a strong work ethic who feel all their hard work has been spat upon and shunted aside by years of free trade deals championed by both parties and a tax system that lavishes breaks on the wealthy and penalizes those of more modest means (championed, ironically, by the very same party to which they now claim allegiance). There is real pain and real despair there. I see it every time I go back to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. But there is also a whining self pity that often can’t see anyone’s struggle as worthy as their own and a nearly millenarian sense of grievance that sees politics not as the art of the possible but as an apocalyptic struggle between a largely white industrial world that has gone and will never return against a confusing kaleidoscope of liberal urban elites, the country’s burgeoning non–white population, immigrants, alternative sexual orientations and other shocks to their system. If Trump voters often sound as if they think the world is about to end, it’s because the world as they have known it is ending. But these forces of demography cannot be reversed, by Trump or anyone else, and it is not a world my fellow working–class whites need to fear, but fear is the currency on which Trump trades.

The American democratic project has been characterized by inconsistencies since it commenced in 1776. Some of these tensions involved America’s actions abroad, and some in the way it treated its most vulnerable citizens at home. But, with the exception of a wrenching civil war that saw over 600,000 Americans die, few have ever questioned the value of the project itself.

When, at the end of the Revolutionary War, a group of dissident officers in the Continental Army all but suggested a coup against the newly inaugurated Congress in what came to be known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, the army's commander in chief (and future first U.S. President) George Washington gave an impassioned speech in which he inveighed on behalf “of our common country,” charging

As you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man, who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country; and who wickedly attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.

This Tuesday we will find out if the ethos of the man we call the Father of the Country is still subscribed to by the people who live here now.

History has amply warned us of the path we are poised to go down.

In the July 1932 elections in Germany, also a democracy at the time, the Nazis received 37% of the vote, the most they every got. In the next election four months later, their share shrank to 32%. But by then it was too late. The serpent was already in the garden.  In the 1990s, the people of the Balkans put their faith in leaders like Serbia's Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić who led the region into ethnic cleansing, genocide, NATO bombing and bloody war for a decade. In 1999, the people of Venezuela, desperate and vengeful after being ignored by their politicians for years, turned the reigns of their country over to former coup leader Hugo Chávez, his successor Nicolás Maduro and their “Bolivarian socialism.” They haven’t gotten it back since.

In Cuba, where I spend a lot of time these days and which has its own experience with strongmen promising to expunge a collective grievance through a cleansing release of violence, after the 1959 overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista, the new government, led by Fidel Castro, executed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people tied to the ancien régime after only the most summary trials (and many with no trial at all). Whether all or even most of them were guilty will never be known. The cry of paredón (to the wall) resounded, and the will of the maximum leader had to be obeyed. Today, one can still visit El Morro, where so many of them died, and El Capitolio, where Cuba’s congress met and debated, but which was shuttered after 1959, and remains so to this day.

Now, at another time, in another place, that cry raises its sanguinary voice again, in my own country in the form of a candidate and his supporters who call for his opponent to be jailed, for journalists to be arrested and killed, and for all those who speak out against hm to be attacked and battered into submission.

To Trump’s supporters, I say this: Today it might be the Democrats who are sent to the wall. It might be Jewish journalists, or Muslims, or Latinos or immigrants. But should this man ascend to to power, one of these days, not too long from now, his mob will scream for blood and it will be someone you love who is brought to the wall, for some transgression real or imagined. It might even be you. In my 20 years as a journalist I’ve seen it in countless countries before. People think it can’t happen here, but it can.

On Tuesday, when you go to the polls, vote as if your life depends on it. Because it does.

Notes from a fading democracy?

Donald Trump - who I have resisted writing about until now - has for months advocated deporting/excluding millions of people on an ethnic/religious basis and seen his poll numbers continue to climb and won three primaries in a row. You think the fact that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz yelled at him last night will halt his ascent? Don't be so naive.

What I watched last night, as I have noted before, appeared to be half reality tv show, half Nuremberg Rally, with Trump playing his rivals so skillfully that at one point he had Rubio and Cruz arguing over who would be more willing to let people die in the street without healthcare as if it were a good thing. 

Make no mistake, terrifying as he is - xenophobic, bigoted, corrupt, tapping into a fetid well of nativism, racism and paranoia - Trump is one of the most naturally gifted politicians to come along in many years. The Dems need to seriously weigh their options this fall. I was leaning towards Sanders - though I am not a reflexive Clinton hater like some - but if Facebook news feeds convinces you that endorsements by the Cornel Wests of the world will sway voters in places like Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania and Hillsborough County, Florida, I ask you to step outside your bubble and the weird religious cult aspects the Sanders campaign has begun to assume. Hillary has her own stark negatives, as well. 

The Dems have two flawed candidates, and whoever wins will have their work cut out for them beating someone who represents a lot of things in America I think many wish we had left behind.

We should be worried.