In Latin America, Backers of Leftist Dictatorships Look the Other Way
As Latin American dictators marginalize and jail protesters, the leaders rely on backing from prominent but obtuse individuals and organizations
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.
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