What
a night it was for the delegation of the Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA) last June as they gazed down on the Venezuelan capital of
Caracas from the five-star, luxury Gran Meliá Hotel.
“View from
the dancefloor, it’s absolutely beautiful here,” tweeted delegate Jen
McKinney, while fellow delegate Tom Wojcik contented himself with the
words “Caracas” and images of the hotel’s glittering façade, where a
room for a night costs more than 70 times the Venezuelan monthly salary.
The
attendees were ostensibly in town to participate in the Congreso
Bicentenario de los Pueblos del Mundo, set to commemorate the 1821
victory of Simón Bolívar over royalist forces at the Battle of Carabobo.
But in fact the gathering served as a kind of magnet for partisans of
the region’s various authoritarian governments. The DSA junket to
Venezuela was part of a growing trend of “anti-imperialist”
revolutionary tourism in Latin America where well-heeled outsiders come
to glory in the necrotic splendor of dead or aging revolutionary leaders
while carefully eschewing any discussion of what kind of conditions
citizens in said countries live under. It is an alliance inspired not by
loyalty to progressive and leftist ideals and values but of fealty to
rulers and power.
In office since the 2013 death of Venezuelan
President Hugo Chávez, his successor Nicolás Maduro portrays himself and
the country’s ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) as
vanguards of an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist nexus of regional
powers including Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia.
As the delegation of
the DSA proved, however, interest in Venezuela’s government does not
extend to curiosity about the country’s tumultuous history or tormented
present. Visiting Chávez’s gravesite, DSA member Sean Estelle tweeted
that former President Carlos Andrés Pérez — the mercurial populist who
nationalized the oil industry and served as vice president of the
Socialist International for 16 years — was a “right winger.”
The
incuriosity was complemented by an intolerance for critique or even
discussion. Venezuela’s Partido Socialismo y Libertad, itself a left
party largely inspired by the Argentine Trotskyist leader Nahuel Moreno,
wrote that the DSA delegation “lost the opportunity to meet with worker
activists, feminists, the LGBTQ community, indigenous activists,
peasants and youth from the popular sectors and the independent left.”
As Venezuelans begged the DSA to take a more nuanced approach to the
country, DSA member Austin Gonzalez sniffed on Twitter: “Something i
would appreciate most is if people did not try to talk down to me when
it comes to Venezuela…I’m fully aware of everything going on.” Later,
after the DSA was given an opportunity to meet Maduro himself (lovingly
documented on DSA social media and by Venezuela’s state-run Telesur
network), Gonzalez gushed that “who I met was not a dictator” but “a
humble man who cares deeply about his people.”
So, if one takes
the DSA — an organization with which at least four U.S. members of
Congress (Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida
Tlaib) claim affiliation — at their word, that they were indeed “fully
aware of what was going on,” exactly what kind of regime were they
giving their full-throated endorsement to? And beyond the gates of the
Gran Meliá and the conference halls of the Congreso, what kind of
reality do Venezuelans face every day?
According to the
International Organization for Migration, more than 5.6 million
Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, many living in
extremely precarious conditions in neighboring countries such as Brazil
and Colombia. The 2020-21 Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida
(National Survey of Living Conditions) from the Universidad Católica
Andrés Bello in Caracas found that 76.6% of Venezuela’s 28 million
residents live in extreme poverty. A 2020 World Food Program report
ranked Venezuela among the top four countries worldwide suffering from
food insecurity, just behind Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Afghanistan. In a 2020 bulletin, Caritas Venezuela noted that over the
past year there had been a 73% increase in levels of acute malnutrition
in children under 5. All this being the case, it was perhaps in
questionable taste for DSA delegation member Marvin Gonzalez to tweet
out photos of his lunch fare while bragging that he “had a dope ass
sancococo today!”
When one points out statistics confirming the
destitution, the automatic response among DSA types — almost a catechism
at this point — is that U.S. sanctions are to blame for Venezuela’s
woes. That, simply put, is a lie, but a lie whose eternal repetition
some apparently believe will transform it into truth.
During the
2002-03 strike at Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) — the state oil
company that Carlos Andrés Pérez had nationalized — the Chávez
government fired 19,000 career employees, replacing them with political
flunkies, reneging on deals with oil companies, stealing assets and
failing to reinvest in the industry. It was a recipe for disaster.
Nevertheless, in 2013, just before Venezuela’s economy began its
terrifying downward spiral, Center for Economic and Policy Research
(CEPR) co-director Mark Weisbrot, a longtime acolyte of the regime and
certainly a contender for worst economist in the world, wrote in The
Guardian that warnings of the country’s impending collapse were the work
of “Venezuela haters” and “the international and Venezuelan media”
responsible for peddling a false “catastrophic view” of the country’s
economy, when in fact “economic disaster was always just around the
corner but never quite happened.”
Some six years later, in a 2019
report co-authored with Jeffrey Sachs (an economist whose shock therapy
created chaos in Russia in the 1990s), Weisbrot attempted to argue that
sanctions caused 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018, using the bizarre
metric of comparing Venezuelan and Colombian oil production before and
after a 2017 round of U.S. sanctions against the regime. An analysis of
CEPR’s study by the Brookings Institute published a few weeks later
concluded that “the bulk of the deterioration in living standards
occurred long before the sanctions were enacted in 2017,” with
“worsening trends across all of the socio-economic indicators … well
before the sanctions were imposed.”
A culture of robber barons,
the famous “boligarchs” who preached socialist revolution but practiced
savage capitalism, came to the fore. One official alone — Chávez’s
former energy czar Javier Alvarado — stands accused in various legal
challenges of diverting $15 million from PDVSA as he lived lavishly and
acquired homes in Madrid, Cartagena and Miami. Last year the Swiss
newspaper 24 heures reported how Zurich police have identified
questionable billions linked to the Venezuelan state in hundreds of bank
accounts in Switzerland. This past June, Spain’s El País reported on a
vast network circumventing U.S. sanctions on Venezuela traveling through
30 countries and moving money among various tax havens to create opaque
multimillion-dollar businesses.
A Human Rights Watch report on a
series of roiling April 2017 protests against the government concluded
that “security forces and armed pro-government groups attacked
protesters in the streets, using extreme and at times lethal force,
causing dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries.” The report went on
to detail the torture that detainees were subject to: electric shocks,
severe beatings, asphyxiation and sexual abuse including rape. That same
year, pro-government thugs stormed a meeting of the
opposition-dominated Asamblea Nacional, savaging legislators and their
staff and leaving them bloodied and injured. A subsequent Human Rights
Watch report from 2019 characterized the actions of the government’s
Fuerza de Acciones Especiales (FAES) — a branch of the Policía Nacional
Bolivariana that many Venezuelans consider as little more than a death
squad — as committing “serious human rights violations [and] abusive
policing practices in low-income communities.” From 2016 to 2019 alone,
the Venezuelan police and security forces had killed nearly 18,000
people for alleged “resistance to authority.” A July 2019 statement from
the Programa Venezolano de Educación-Acción en Derechos Humanos
(PROVEA) human rights organization decried what it said had become “a
factory for executions” in poor neighborhoods where security forces
would burst in late at night, kidnap suspects (often those alleged to
have participated in political demonstrations) and then summarily kill
them. Another PROVEA report detailed how, in the state of Lara,
Venezuelan security forces committed at least 135 extrajudicial killings
in the first six months of 2020 alone. A report in Peru’s El Comercio
detailed how, in the poor Caracas barrio of José Félix Ribas (a
20-minute drive from the Gran Meliá where the DSA delegation stayed),
the FAES murdered at least 10 people in January 2019 after residents had
joined a massive protest against Maduro. A 411-page 2020 report by
United Nations investigators implicated Maduro and other high-ranking
officials in systematic human rights abuses, including killings, torture
and sexual violence, amounting to crimes against humanity.
With
just an eight-minute drive from their hotel, the DSA delegation could
have spoken to the employees of the Hospital Clínico Universitario de
Caracas, where most employees are paid less than $1 per month by the
regime; doctors and nurses are forced to bring chlorine from home to
clean the facilities and desperately search for sutures, gloves or masks
though private donations; and employees freely admit (as they did in a
June 2021 article in the newspaper El Nacional) that the government had
“destroyed” the institution.
The DSA members were far from the
only arrivistes in town. Also in Caracas for the Congreso was Vijay
Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research
and Manolo De Los Santos, described as a “researcher” for Tricontinental
and the co-director of The People’s Forum. During their visit, Prashad
posed for a portrait with a member of the security services terrorizing
Venezuela while De Los Santos raved on Twitter about the pair’s
“unforgettable evening with a dear comrade” (Maduro). The People’s Forum
has recently begun boosting an organization called BreakThrough News,
which also had correspondents on the ground in Venezuela at the time.
BreakThrough News includes among its commentators those who previously
worked with the In the NOW and Soapbox video channels, produced by
Maffick LLC, a Los Angeles-based social media digital content company
frequently identified as “Russia state-controlled” because of its links
with the Russian state-funded news organization RT, an assessment a U.S.
court agreed with in 2020. According to the Charity Navigator website,
the address for The People’s Forum — 320 West 37th Street in New York
City — is also the registered address for BreakThrough News.
In
nearby Bolivia, the looking-glass perspective of much of the
international left has been similar, as it tries to erase a
well-documented authoritarian power grab that ended in calamity.
In
a 2016 constitutional referendum, Evo Morales, who had served as
president since 2006, sought voter approval to allow the president and
vice president to run for an additional consecutive term. When the
measure was defeated by a 51.3% majority, Morales appealed to Bolivia’s
Supreme Court (stuffed with regime loyalists), which struck down the
vote — the democratic expression of the Bolivian people — claiming that
the American Convention on Human Rights, to which Bolivia is party,
guaranteed Morales the right to run as a “human right.” In response,
Luis Almagro, the secretary general of the Organization of American
States (OAS), which is responsible for enforcing the treaty, said the
document did “not mean the right to perpetual power.”
In Bolivia’s
subsequent October 2019 general election (where a substantial amount of
preelection polling showed majorities believing Morales’ reelection
would be illegal), widespread reporting of irregularities and
allegations that Morales’s ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS)
artificially inflated its tally to avoid going to a second round were
borne out by an OAS report that recommended new elections. Here, too,
the CEPR issued its own report, unsurprisingly siding with the Morales
government and failing to engage with many critiques of the
irregularities identified by the OAS, the European Union and local
observers. The election’s integrity was further eroded by the presence
of a slew of partisan elections officials as well as computer server and
chain-of-custody concerns.
After a November 2019 uprising (during
which both pro- and anti-MAS forces committed violence) drove Morales
from power, a conspiracy theory centered on Bolivia’s reserves of
lithium took hold, much of it resting on a July 2020 tweet from
eccentric Tesla founder Elon Musk, where he bragged, “We will coup
whoever we want! Deal with it.” This theory was strongly undercut by
observations of those such as Pablo Solón Romero, who had served as
Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. under Morales. He noted that it was
Morales himself who had thrown the country open to lithium speculators
and that in the southwestern department of Potosí, for example, “the
opposition to the government radicalized before the elections due to the
signing of a 70-year contract without payment of royalties for the
production of lithium hydroxide in the salt flats of Uyuni.” Oppression
in Potosí by the MAS party party (after a year long interim presidency
by Jeanine Áñez, in 2020 MAS presidential candidate Luis Arce won with
55.1% of the vote) continues today, with members of the local Comité
Cívico Potosinista continuing to be subjects of police harassment and
extrajudicial arrests.
But these facts are of little interest to
some foreign commentators such as the former British Labour leader
Jeremey Corbyn (whose fringe politics and taste for fanaticism managed
to hand the party its worst electoral defeat since 1935 two years ago),
who last October penned an article claiming that in the 2019 elections
“the final result would hand Morales a clear first-round victory as
votes from rural, indigenous-populated and Morales-supporting areas,” a
view by no means universal among Bolivia’s people.
“The MAS
government has been very clever in constructing a false local and
international narrative of care and protection for Mother Earth
(Pachamama) and respect for human and indigenous rights, which in
practice does not exist,” said Alex Villca Limaco, an activist with the
Coordinadora Nacional de Defensa de los Territorios Indígenas
Originarios Campesinos y Áreas Protegidas de Bolivia (National
Coordinator for the Defense of Indigenous Peasant Territories and
Protected Areas of Bolivia or CONTIOCAP). “This has only served to
distract and hide its ambition for merely extractive economic power and
hegemonic and totalitarian political power … [They have] only served to
continue a policy of looting, dispossession and destruction of
indigenous territories and protected areas.”
The
situation is far more dire in Nicaragua, where since 2007 Daniel Ortega
of the ostensibly left-wing Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional
(FSLN) has ruled as president. Since 2017, his wife, Rosario Murillo, a
failed poet with more than a whiff of Lady Macbeth about her, has served
as vice president. Once revered as the rebel group that helped oust
dictator Anastasio Somoza from power in 1979, the FSLN has grown
increasingly dictatorial, extractive and repressive during its current
reign.
Since 2015, settlers in the country’s heavily indigenous
northeast — whom many see as backed by the government — have killed more
than 60 indigenous people, according to the Centro por la Justicia y
Derechos Humanos de la Costa Atlántica de Nicaragua (CEJUDHCAN). (The
FSLN has a history of violent hostility against Nicaragua’s indigenous
communities, documented well in the 1980s by the geographer Bernard O.
Nietschmann.) A recent report by the investigative news site Divergentes
revealed that the Ortega-Murillo regime has made 60% of Nicaragua’s
surface available to large international investors for mining
concessions. A study – based on surveys of excess mortality – published
last month by the Observatorio por la Transparencia y Anticorrupción
concluded that the regime had purposely undercounted COVID-19 deaths in
the country by 6,000 to 9,000.
In April 2018, the regime finally
ripped away its veneer of democracy after the government’s proposal to
increase taxes and cut social security benefits ignited long-standing
grievances. Protests broke out around the country. The government
responded with immense brutality that has continued in fits and starts
ever since. A May 2018 report by Amnesty International found that in
response to the protests, “the Nicaraguan government adopted a strategy
of violent repression not seen in the country for years. More than 70
people were reportedly killed by the state and hundreds were seriously
injured.” In December 2018, the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos
Independientes (GIEI), a collection of independent analysts selected by
the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, published a report
concluding that the Ortega government “committed crimes against
humanity” and that Ortega used “public institutions and pro-government
armed groups to establish a repressive state apparatus, with the
intention to kill and persecute those who opposed their policies.”
But
among many self-described leftists, one hears little of this. As
Nicaragua held farcical elections last month with all major contenders
for the presidency but Ortega jailed along with over a hundred other
political prisoners (the youngest believed to be 21-year-old feminist
and student activist Samantha Jirón), the North American Congress on
Latin America (NACLA) published an article praising the regime. It was
written by John Perry, an expat Brit living in Nicaragua who, under the
pseudonym Charles Redvers, disseminated a “confession” from student
protester Valeska Sandoval made when she had a gun pointed at her head
by government agents and little choice but to comply with her captors.
During
the elections themselves — where the abstention rate was 81.5%,
according to the Urnas Abiertas citizen watchdog organization — a
carnival sideshow of figures descended on the country to be feted by a
regime better known for killing, jailing and exiling journalists than
accrediting them. Among them was Craig “Pasta” Jardula, an American
podcaster with no experience in the country who told Business Insider
that Caleb Maupin, a political commentator at Russia’s state RT
propaganda organ, had invited him to come down. Though Jardula had paid
for his flight from the U.S., the Nicaraguan government had “covered our
rooms and food and that sort of thing” as well as the cost of his
flight from Managua to a polling station in the country’s northeast. (In
terms of government spending priorities, by contrast, in some of the
country’s regions nearly 30% of children under 5 suffer from chronic
malnutrition.) Jardula would later tweet out that Nicaragua was “a true
Democratic [sic] country.” Also ubiquitous was the U.S. journalist Ben
Norton, affiliated with the website The Grayzone, which has made
something of a cottage industry of defending dictators and their crimes.
A reliable government booster nonetheless forced to admit on state
television that there were no lines at polling booths, Norton was
lampooned by the Nicaraguan blog Bacanalnica as a “cartoon … who hangs
out with the most nefarious governments on the planet.” The site went on
to ask: “Where were you when members of 100% Noticias were imprisoned
and their offices closed? Did you ask for justice when they raided and
closed Confidencial? Did you complain when La Prensa’s paper was
detained at customs?”
Unlike the visiting Americans, the charade
was too much for many regional leaders, with Peru’s left-wing government
saying the vote “did not meet the minimum criteria of free, fair and
transparent elections” and deserved “the rejection of the international
community.” Carlos Alvarado Quesada, the left-wing president of
neighboring Costa Rica, wrote that “due to their lack of democratic
conditions & guarantees, we do not recognize the elections in
Nicaragua” and called on the government to free its political prisoners.
Nicaraguans themselves believe they see the true face of the regime for what it is.
“Ortega
is more willing to sell out the national patrimony than even Somoza
was,” said Bianca Jagger, the Nicaraguan-born human rights and social
justice activist. “When we talk about what people think of this idea of a
leftist revolution, they better think twice. If anyone betrayed the
principles that inspired this revolution, it was Daniel Ortega. The left
needs to come to terms that their utopian dreams of what these
revolutions have brought to these countries are completely and totally
fictitious. These revolutions have betrayed the very ideals they began
to fight for.”
All of this finally brings us
to Cuba, the site of the hemisphere’s oldest dictatorship and the nation
where sanguinary tyranny marketed with a T-shirt and a beret have
seduced more people into dictatorial apologia than any other. When
protests erupted on the island this past July, many acted as if the
event was unexpected. But in fact the pressure had been increasing
heavily in recent years, propelled by both an intolerant, lily-white
political and military elite and the ever-tightening grip of sanctions
imposed by the United States, theoretically to pressure the regime but
in reality punishing ordinary citizens.
Ruled by the Castro family
and their allies since 1959 and not having seen a democratic election
since 1948, Cuba is a case study in optics versus reality. For more than
60 years, the country has been led by Fidel Castro (1959 to 2008), Raúl
Castro (2008 to 2019) and Miguel Díaz-Canel (2019 to present) — three
white men — as they have presided over a police state that in its early
era rounded up and tortured gay men in concentration camps (an
experience searingly documented in the book “Antes que anochezca” by
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas), has aided liberation struggles elsewhere
in Latin America and in Africa while denying its own citizens the
ability to choose the political or economic system by which they wished
to be governed, and has remained passionately hostile to independent
expressions of Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ identity. The government sent cadres
of doctors abroad but then used them as a source of hard currency,
gobbling up most of their salaries and imposing severe curbs on their
freedom of expression and freedom of association. To Venezuela, it sent
security personnel and torturers. Memorably described by their former
close ally Carlos Franqui as a couple of puritanical, intolerant
bumpkins from the rural backwater of Birán aghast at the “decadent”
Afro-Cuban culture they encountered in cities like Santiago de Cuba and
Havana, the Castro brothers set in motion a square, macho military
culture on the island that remains very much the ruling aesthetic today.
The
latest round of protests can arguably be traced back to 2018, when many
young artists and intellectuals began protesting against Decree 349, a
draconian edict prohibiting musicians, artists, writers and other
performers from operating in public or private without prior approval by
Cuba’s Ministry of Culture. This would eventually lead to the formation
of the Movimiento San Isidro, a collective named after a poor and
historically marginalized Havana neighborhood and encompassing a wide
range of artists, writers and musicians. Led by people such as the art
historian and gallerist Yanelys Núñez Leyva, the Afro-Cuban poet Amuary
Pacacecho and the performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the
protests would dovetail in May 2019 with what many see as Cuba’s
“Stonewall moment.” Hundreds of LGBTQ activists attempted a conga parade
through La Habana Vieja, an unauthorized event that was separate from
the regime’s “official” LGBTQ events affiliated with the Centro Nacional
de Educación Sexual (CENESEX, founded by Raúl Castro’s daughter Mariela
Castro). The march was immediately set upon by security forces, its
leaders beaten and arrested. This in turn was followed by a November
2020 demonstration in front of Cuba’s Ministry of Culture — viewed by
many as a turning point with public expression of dissatisfaction with
the regime — when hundreds of protesters (many of them young,
Afro-Cuban, queer or otherwise marginalized) called on the regime to
free imprisoned rapper Denis Solís.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
grew up in Cerro, one of Havana’s poorest neighborhoods with a rich
tradition of Afro-Cuban culture. When I spoke to him in late 2020,
before the recent upheavals and before he disappeared again into the
regime’s gulag (he had previously been arrested more than 30 times), he
told me bluntly that “the Cuban regime is weighted on the basis of white
men — macho, patriarchal, white men — with white women and wives as
well. Cuban television and all the Cuban cultural apparatus still
operate on a racist basis.”
Even today, white Cubans are five
times more likely than Black Cubans to have a bank account and control
98% of the island’s private businesses.
At the beginning of last
year, an anthemic song “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and Life,” itself a
refutation of the Cuban revolutionary slogan “Fatherland or Death”), a
collaboration by Yotuel of the rap group Orishas, Descemer Bueno, the
group Gente de Zona, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Maykel Osorbo and DJ
El Funky, was released and seized the popular imagination. Its lyrics
(“No more lies! / My people demand freedom! / No more doctrines! / No
longer shall we cry ‘Fatherland or death’ / But ‘Fatherland and life!’”)
seemed to articulate the boiling struggle and frustration of ordinary
Cubans (the song went on to win the Latin Grammy for song of the year
last month).
On July 11 of last year, protests over shortages of
basic goods, economic hardship and the government’s handling of the
coronavirus pandemic began in the western city of San Antonio de los
Baños. The protests soon spread all over the country in an unprecedented
display of frustration and civil disobedience. From Havana in the west
to Santiago de Cuba in the east, thousands of Cuban citizens took to the
streets chanting both “patria y vida” and “change the system.”
Initially taken by surprise, Cuban security forces responded with
brutality and mass arrests of protesters, with Díaz-Canel appearing on
state television to say, “the order to combat has been given.” Hundreds
of people (including at least 44 minors) were arrested (14 of the latter
remain in prison). The government cut off internet access around the
island, but it was too late. The images of protests and the merciless
response of state security forces quickly were seen around the world, as
were messages like that of Afro-Cuban rapper Roberto Álvarez, who said,
“The streets of Cuba belong to the Cubans. Not to the Communist Party.
Not to the Cuban military. Not to the Castro family. To the Cubans.”
The
protests laid bare the often thinly disguised racism in the
paternalistic discourse of the island’s Communist elite, at this point
little more than a wretched, bloated ruling caste guarding their hotels
(the Cuban regime spends 57 times more on tourism than they do on
healthcare). At the height of last July’s protests, Aleida Guevara
March, the daughter of Che Guevara (whose own caustic racism led him to
label people of African descent as “lack[ing] an affinity with bathing”
as well as being “indolent … spending [their] meager wage on frivolity
or drink”) huffed that the protesters “showed a very low level of
culture.” When “Patria y Vida” won a Grammy in November, José Carlos
Rodríguez Ruiz, Cuba’s aging (and white) ambassador to Italy, tweeted a
link to an article clutching its pearls that the young upstarts had
“sneaked into the same space” as other artists of superior “caliber.”
In
a report published this past October, Human Rights Watch found that the
Cuban government “systematically engaged in arbitrary detention, ill
treatment of detainees, and abuse-ridden criminal prosecutions in
response to overwhelmingly peaceful antigovernment protests” in July.
Both Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Osorbo are among those in
prison and learned of “Patria y Vida” winning a Grammy from behind bars.
In November, UNICEF expressed its concern over the ongoing detention of
minors in connection with the July events.
“The Cuban government
sells itself as a leftist, progressive government, but the reality is
just the contrary,” Abraham Jiménez Enoa, an Afro-Cuban journalist, told
me this month. “Historically, those who occupy the highest positions
here are almost always white. … It’s the same with the treatment of the
opposition. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is in jail, Maykel Osorbo is in
jail, but meanwhile with [white oppositionists] the government
negotiates exile. … [They] can get on a plane. It’s structural racism
and it’s clear how it functions in Cuba.”
The Havana regime —
after more than six decades of uninterrupted, total power — still has
its apologists. University of Glasgow professor Helen Yaffe tut-tutted
in the pages of The Guardian about the “violent” protests (though the
protesters damaged some property, nearly all the physical violence came
at the hands of the regime). She argued that “US funding and
coordination” were behind the protests, as if Cubans were too ignorant
and lazy to become fed up on their own with being pauperized and beaten.
Yaffe frequently promotes pro-regime content from outlets with links to
the Russian government such as Redfish and others like MintPress News,
which in 2013 published an article falsely claiming anti-Assad rebels
had staged a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta
(which one of the authors then denied writing).
The official Black
Lives Matter organization (distinct from the ethos and movement of the
same name), which had previously praised Fidel Castro and whose
co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors owns palatial homes in Los Angeles and
Atlanta, issued a press release praising the regime, condemning the
embargo but eschewing any mention of the brave Black and brown Cubans
being brutalized and terrorized by the regime. In an absurd open letter
last November ahead of more planned protests that the regime averted by
turning virtually the entire island into an armed camp, a litany of
signatories that included both the criminal (former Ecuador President
Rafael Correa, in exile and convicted of corruption at home) and the
useless (Castro family chronicler and former Le Monde Diplomatique
editor Ignacio Ramonet) attacked the dissidents as “irrelevant within
Cuba but praised by the international press with the purpose of damaging
the image of the revolution.” The letter accused them of “civil
disobedience, anarchy and chaos, with the sole purpose of ending the
current political system.” The words were richly ironic, especially
coming from signatories like former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff,
herself once a member of the Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária guerrilla
group in Brazil.
But in many ways the July protests marked a
serious break with the regime’s formerly good press among the left. René
Pérez, better known as Residente, a member of the Puerto Rican musical
group Calle 13 and with impeccable anti-imperialist credentials, posted
an Instagram message of support for the demonstrators “so that they
manifest themselves with all force. … Demonstrating is a human right
anywhere in the world.” He added his belief that “this demonstration was
born from a tired people … who woke up.” The Puerto Rican singer Ricky
Martin, reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee, Mexican singer Julieta Venegas
and Spanish singer Alejandro Sanz also all expressed their support for
the protesters. In December, more than 300 prominent figures — including
Isabel Allende, Paul Auster, John Lithgow and Orhan Pamuk — released an
open letter calling on Cuba’s government to immediately stop its abuses
against Cuban artists, intellectuals and others.
There are real-world implications for this ideological rigidity.
Last
November, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Reinforcing Nicaragua’s
Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform (RENACER) Act. It calls for
new initiatives to monitor and address corruption by Nicaragua’s
government and abuses by its security force as well as expansion of
sanctions against key officials. It also orders a formal review to
determine whether Nicaragua should be allowed continued participation in
the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). When the bill came up
for a vote in the House of Representatives earlier that month, however,
many members of the body’s left (including New York Reps. Bowman and
Ocasio-Cortez, Missouri Rep. Bush, Michigan Reps. Andy Levin and Tlaib
and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar) joined members of the extreme right such
as Florida Rep.Matt Gaetz, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and
Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie in trying to defeat it.
A more
party-line vote followed for House Resolution 760, a measure “expressing
solidarity with Cuban citizens demonstrating peacefully for fundamental
freedoms, condemning the Cuban regime’s acts of repression, and calling
for the immediate release of arbitrarily detained Cuban citizens.” It
also called for the U.S. government to “assess whether the United States
can develop methods to allow remittances, medical supplies, and other
forms of support from the United States to directly benefit the Cuban
people in ways that alleviate humanitarian suffering without providing
United States dollars to the Cuban military.” While no Republicans
opposed the measure, 40 Democrats voted no, among them all of the
aforementioned Democrats as well as California Rep. Maxine Waters, New
York Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez and Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva. When I
contacted some of the above members to explain their vote, the offices
of only two responded: Bush, who declined comment, and Grijalva, who in a
statement said, in part, “Both bills contained serious economic and
humanitarian policy concerns that were not taken into account when these
pieces of legislation were rushed to the House floor. The legislation
perpetuates a counterproductive foreign policy that would harm millions
of innocent civilians instead of the regimes in power.” How either bill,
neither of which proposed broad general economic sanctions, would have
done this is unclear.
So what is the way forward for those in the
principled left who want to stand in solidarity with disenfranchised
people instead of regimes composed of their torturers and oppressors?
There
is a sector of the Western left eternally enamored of flags, slogans
and ceaseless homages to dead leaders that is every bit as illiberal as
the caustic right and whose support seems to have less to do with any
kind of coherent humanitarian policy outlook and more to do with facile
anti-Americanism and an impulse for dictator worship, as if defending
the abusive practices of security forces in Venezuela is better than
defending them in Colombia, or defending the extractive policies of a
left-wing government in Bolivia is somehow more appropriate than
defending the same policies when done by the right-wing government of
Brazil.
There needs to be an international realignment among left
forces and more willingness to listen to movements on the ground rather
than only governments. In the recent victory of left wing Gabriel Boric
in Chile’s presidential elections — a man whose solidly progressive
bonafides did not keep him from calling Nicaragua’s recent elections a
“farce” and declaring “solidarity with the people rising up in Cuba and
not the Díaz-Canel government” — we may be seeing the beginnings of a
regional third way.
Throughout Latin America, there are heroic
progressive forces laying down their lives in the service of the most
vulnerable every day, fighting to defend the environment, people of
African and indigenous descent, the marginalized and the LGBTQ
community. It is to them those of us among the international left should
extend our loyalty and support, not their jailers and executioners.
