• Jamaican constitutional reform to transition the state to a republic
• A thorough review of the LANDS constitution
• The election of a new secretariat and selection of new officers for committee positions

Today, Jamaica is a Commonwealth monarchy, a relic of its past as a feudal possession of the United Kingdom. It was under the restored Charles II that Jamaica was captured from its original colonial masters of Spain; it is, perhaps, appropriate, that it will advance down the road of decolonization under the geriatric Charles III.

International solidarity is the cornerstone of the Communist movement. It is the sine qua non, the without-which-not, which defines the commitment to a Communist struggle and differentiates it from opportunism, reformism, and revanchism. We at USU stand today, and always, in solidarity with the work of our brave international comrades.

Jamaica LANDS has tackled problems of organization and mobilization that the so-called Communist parties of the United States Empire can only dream of achieving.

We salute you, comrades! May you march ever toward liberation!

This publication was launched on 22 August 2022, the two-hundred-thirty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Haitian Revolution on the island of Saint-Domingue. In an article for our launch of the Red Clarion, we covered the history of that revolution in some detail. Since the day the revolution broke out across the island, Haiti has been the subject of vicious imperialist attack. From Napoleon to Jefferson, and from Jefferson to Biden, the Western powers have tried to bring the rich lands of Saint-Domingue back under the direct political control or indirect financial control of Western, Euro-American capital.

Haiti was forced to pay enormous war indemnities by the international capitalist order for the “theft” of property from France — the “theft” of the bodies of freed Black slaves and the land stolen from the Taino people by the European invaders. The U.S. Empire has considered Haiti a U.S. protectorate since its early days as a settler-republic, dictating terms to the Haitian government and repeatedly invading the island-nation whenever it takes a step toward independence.

From 1915 to 1934, the United States Empire ruled Haiti directly through an invasion force of U.S. Marines that seized the island by order of then-president Woodrow Wilson. The invasion of 1915 was engineered by U.S. capital. The National City Bank of New York, for instance,  funded rebels to destabilize the government on the island. After invading, the U.S. installed pliant puppet regimes and created a police force, called the gendarmerie, to protect the property and interests of American capital on the island. With U.S. direction, the gendarmerie and Marines put down rebellions, tortured thousands, murdered thousands more in summary executions, and built infrastructure on the island through forced slave-labor.

In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president of Haiti. He was a former priest and a liberation theologist, and he worked to normalize Afro-Caribbean culture in Haiti. He took office in February of that year and by September he was removed by a right wing coup regime that immediately began a campaign of terror against Aristide’s supporters. We now have evidence that one of the junta’s members and the leader of the right-wing death squads, Emmanual Constant, was paid by the CIA.

Nevertheless, opinion turned against the counter-revolutionary regime both on the world stage and in the U.S. After all, the USSR had been forcibly dissolved and the specter of Communism was supposedly on the wane. Enthusiasm for Cold War-era policies was at a low ebb. Aristide had strong support among the Congressional Black Caucus and the emigree communities of the U.S. and, as a former priest and liberation theologian, also had the implicit blessing of Pope John Paul II. On September 19, 1994, 25,000 U.S. military personnel were once again on the island and marching into Haiti. President Aristide was restored to his democratically-elected office. 

In 2004, fed up with Aristide’s pro-Caribbean policies and leftward leanings, the U.S. once again intervened and funded right-wing paramilitaries, removing Aristide from his position for a second time. Aristide’s replacement, René Garcia Préval, launched a series of privatizations of the Haitian public sector. One of the coup plotters, Michael Joseph Martelly, would go on to sit as Haiti’s president from 2011 to 2016 with the support of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Martelly reconstituted the most dangerous elements of the Haitian military and created a government council of businessmen and bankers (which counted Bill Clinton among its members) to “manage” the Haitian economy. Haiti’s most recent president, Jovenel Moïse, presided over further instability; he was assassinated in 2021 by gunmen who have been publicly associated by the New York Times with the CIA — for trying to curb narcotics trafficking on the island.

Today, the United States Empire once again stands poised to launch an invasion with the blessing of the United Nations and warmongering liberals the world over. Acting president Ariel Henry, suspected of “masterminding” the assassination of his predecessor Moïse, has refused to step down in compliance with the many and various Haitian government organs and agencies that have declared his retention of power long after the assassination illegal. He has been in power since 20 July 2021, but no vote has ever been held to confirm him in office, despite his promise that “his administration will be a brief stage in a series of transitions to genuine democracy.”

Current Haitian Political Economy

In 1957 François Duvalier (known in Western culture as “Papa Doc”) became President of Haiti and would remain President for the rest of his life. The U.S. Empire viewed him as a counterbalance to Cuba and Castro, and thus helped him suppress the traditional Haitian mercantile elite through the creation of a paramilitary police force (the Tonton Makout). Under the presidency of his son Jean-Claude, clergy and local leaders began to organize the country’s poor communities into self-help organizations and peasant organizations. As the power of the repressed classes grew through organization, Jean-Claude slowly lost control of the country and, in 1986, he fled.

President Aristide was elected on 7 February 1991 as a result of this growing peasant power. Although the U.S. had acquiesced to his presidency as a matter of fact, Aristide’s attempts to reform the corrupt Haitian army and suppress the power of traditional Haitian business and mercantile elites in the led to the coup of September 1991. Aristide said of the coup, “The bourgeoisie should have been able to understand that its own interest demanded some concessions. We had recreated 1789. Did they want, by their passive resistance, to push the hungry to demand more radical measures? Pep la wonfle jodi-a li kapab gwonde demen! [‘the people who are snoring today may roar tomorrow!’]” .

By 2018, the ruling class in Haiti had consolidated its power and established a new, loyal, Haitian army. A handful of extremely rich and powerful families and individuals have a monopoly on the distribution of staple commodities. Gregory Brandt, president of the French-Haitian Chamber of Commerce controls soap and oil production. Clifford Apaid owns textile factories employing nearly 10,000 Haitians and subcontracts for U.S. garment production — his family controls 1/3rd of all Haitian the textile industry. Marc-Antoine Acra and his family are Haiti’s biggest importers or rice and sugar, and control the sheet metal, paper, and plastics industries of Haiti. Rueven Bigio runs GB Group, which is the dominant financier of the country.

Before the murder of President Moïse, Haiti operated as a semi-presidential republic, with a President, who is head of state, elected by popular vote to a five-year term and a Prime Minister, who is head of government, appointed by the president and selected from the members of the majority party in the National Assembly.

As one might expect from an imperialized colony, the Haitian state is essentially absent. Ordinary Haitians refer to the apparatus as the “phantom state.” NGOs provide around 50% of all health services and 80% of primary and secondary schools. Since the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, parasitic capitalist enterprises in the guise of NGOs and “aid” have spread through the Haitian economy. The World Bank runs the Haitian Reconstruction Fund and other NGOs and capitalist aid programs essentially run their “services” directly.

Mass Outrage and Imperialist Interference

In an economy dominated by foreign capital leeching resources to the U.S. and Europe, and in a political environment in which the last elected president was assassinated and usurped by his own Prime Minister — who now sits in his dead predecessors office, refusing to hold elections or submit to the authority of popular assemblies, a stand-off between the poorest segments of the population and the military terror-regime supporting the ruling class is threatening to descend into open civil war. The capitalist media, of course, casts the poor and laboring classes as “gangs” and the unrest as “political instability,” but knowing the history of Haiti and its current political crisis, we can see through this flimsy claim.

After decades of illegitimate government by the ruling classes, plundering of the public wealth, and the installation of U.S.-backed terror regimes, the criminal un-elected “Interim” President Henry has called for U.S. intervention. Rising energy prices (fallout from the Russo-Ukraine war), an outbreak of cholera, acute famine conditions, and the failure of the Haitian government to take any steps toward alleviating the multiple crises, have devastated the country. Opposition groups, many with substantial bases in the peasantry and poor working classes, are demanding that President Henry step down. Rather than relinquishing his grip on the country’s political system, President Henry announced the end of all fuel subsidies from the government in September.

Overnight, petroleum fuel prices doubled. The already-soaring cost of living threatened the lives of many of the country’s impoverished working class. Protests broke out in Port-au-Prince on 11 September, 2022, the day Henry announced the end of the subsidies. On 12 September, the so-called “G9 Family and Allies,” a paramilitary organization led by an ex-police officer that worked to keep the peace for President Moïse, dug a trench around the largest oil terminal in Haiti. This trench now encircles a critical depot of Port-au-Prince, in which 70% of the country’s oil reserve is held.

The demands published by the G9 and its ex-cop leader are that Henry immediately resign and that the government take steps to reduce prices of fuel and basic staple goods required to survive. On 11 October, Henry begged the U.S. capitalists to prop up his government. On 15 October, the U.S. Empire and its junior partner, Canada, sent the first armored cars and military equipment while their puppet-secretary in the U.N. called for “armed action” to remove the fuel blockade. On 17 October, the U.S. Empire and Mexico called for a non-UN force to occupy the island. On 21 October, the UN Security Council froze Haiti’s assets, instated travel bans, and imposed an arms embargo. Most foreign embassies in Haiti have closed.

As the people battle their corrupt government for economic relief, the imperialists prepare their invasion forces as they have so many times in the past. Despite the words of the Haitian anti-corruption organization Nou Pap Domi (“Historically, no U.S. or U.N. intervention has really addressed Haiti’s problem,” which is the “social and economic apartheid”), the U.S. capitalists continue to drum up energy for a direct attack. In Washington, the Biden government salivates over the potential this crisis will have on the November midterm elections in the U.S. and stalwart “progressives” like Elizabeth Warren have been sounding the trumpet for invasion. 

No to Intervention!

It is the duty of Communists within the imperialist West — the U.S. Empire and its junior partners — to oppose intervention in Haiti either through direct means or through a client state like Brazil. The problems of Haiti’s economy and politics come from the U.S. and Europe; its internal structure has been rearranged and reorganized for the benefit of international capital and the local Haitian ruling class since Jean-Jacques Dessalines helped free the island.

To the extent that the ruling powers of the U.S. Empire sit up and take note, we must make it politically untenable for them to launch their invasion. If they do launch it, we must combat it at home by increasing war friction and fatigue, through ceaseless agitation, and through the support of the Haitians and their self-determination in international solidarity.

The “crimes” against property committed in the Port-au-Prince uprising of 11 September and the unrest across the country are merely the crimes of the empire coming to fruition; they were grown from the seed of U.S. deposition or acquiescence to the deposition of the popular President Aristide, from CIA intervention and drug-smuggling, and from the support of the U.S. Empire for the comprador ruling class of Haiti, which ruthlessly exploits its people on behalf of the World Bank and U.S. monopoly capital.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Characteristics of Political Mobilization

Political mobilisation in Venezuela is very different from in Jamaica.

In Jamaica, there are 2 main political parties and they have their own branches like women, youth, young professionals, and labour unions. There is a sense of cohesion and the parties’ branches fall totally under the party, with the exception of the unions which have a greater degree of an independent identity88. You either support one party or the other; the parties don’t have coalitions with other organisations that aren’t subordinate to them or seen as one of their branches. Also, we don’t really have social movements in Jamaica; the activist space is dominated by NGOs.

In Venezuela, things are different. The Bolivarian Revolution is supported by a broad base of political parties, unions, social movements, communes, and collectives. Some political parties that support the Venezuelan government have existed from before Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro started their political careers. There are many people and organisations in Venezuela who don’t support or aren’t aligned with the ruling party but still support Nicolas Maduro.

Caracas

In Caracas, the pro-government political mobilisations are massive. I can never see where they start or end, as they are always and endless sea of people. You can see multiple flags of different political movements and parties, like the PCV and ORA.

Mérida

We were told that Mérida is an opposition state and that we should take extra measures with our security because it was one of the opposition strongholds during the Guarimba riots in 2017. You could see cracked windows and bullet holes in buses.

Nevertheless, we never really encountered any problems apart from some minor jeering when we visited Pico Bolívar. The jeering usually seems to be only playful, though we were warned of the risk of escalation into violence.

While we had a demonstration in the streets against some newly-announced sanctions, random persons on the street cheered along, some joined us, some waved from their windows with their pro-government flags and banners, and I vividly remember a truck driver smiling and cheering along even though it meant he was in traffic. Someone even took a photo with some of us. We got a few bad stares, but all of the persons who gave us bad stares were white.

Lara

Lara has a strong presence of communes and communal bodies. The PPT, a pro-government party which is distinct from the PSUV, has very strong support in Lara. When we had a meeting with the Governor of Lara, she was wearing a PPT jacket instead of a PSUV jacket even though she is from the PSUV. The PPT is one of the parties that existed before the Bolivarian Revolution or before the political careers of either Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro. The PPT is stronger in some municipalities in Lara than the PSUV is.

We saw persons of all ages involved in activities held by the commune that we visited in Lara. A sense of unity and collective pride existed there. We had some difficult conversations there about some internal issues in the Bolivarian Revolution, but unity was still able to be maintained through necessary compromises.

The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)

It’s important to note that the Communist Party of Venezuela openly supports Maduro and the government. They had supported Hugo Chavez, they have endorsed Maduro in the last 2 presidential elections, and they have maintained a coalition with the PSUV, the party of Maduro and Chavez, during legislative elections.

I don’t know how popular the PCV is, but I have met more persons – both young and old – who are from the PCV than from any other party, including the ruling party. I know more than a handful of PCV supporters who I met in Jamaica, and even more that I’ve met in Venezuela.

The PCV isn’t uncritical of the government, and their analysis of the situation is very different from the PSUV’s analysis of the situation, despite the fact that they’re allies. Of course, different persons or organisations don’t need to agree with each other on everything to be allies; the point of noting this all is that the people and organisations who support Maduro don’t do so blindly or without reason, and Maduro’s supporters are sensible people who can think for themselves. I knew this before visiting Venezuela, but I needed to point it out to others who ignore the support that Maduro has and only focuses on the expressions of the opposition. In the West, common discourse will find every reason to explain why some people support the opposition in Venezuela, but their discussions always omit reasons that people support the government; sometimes they make silly assumptions that the people only support the government because of welfare, but even this is false as I witnessed for myself that self-governed communes and community-based initiatives that don’t benefit from the government are still ardent supporters of the government.

There are grievances which are negative sides of the PSUV’s relationship with the PCV, but those specific things are typical in any multi-party democracy where a dominant coalition partner takes pride in its ‘majority’ within the coalition and feels no need to make concessions to their minor allies. These things are issues with the PSUV as a party and many of its functionaries, not specifically Maduro; I know this well because I’ve encountered issues with some of them myself and heard of some things from others, but these others are still people who support Maduro and the government. Criticism of the PSUV is distinct from criticism of Maduro.

Maduro is not a perfect leader; no-one is. This doesn’t mean that the PCV only supports him because he is the ‘lesser evil’ – it means that disagreements and criticism can exist among different forces which are aiming for the same general long term goals, especially about the path to take to get there and the pace of following that path. Criticism of the government doesn’t have to mean that persons want to change their government; many organisations and people want changes but push the government to make the changes rather than to try to overthrow the government, and that is the approach that the PCV and many other organisations and movements take. They see progress as a process, and they understand themselves to be a part of that process. rather than finding themselves antagonistic towards the government’s efforts.

It’s also important to note that the PCV takes a more hardline position on some issues. They opted not to re-join the National Assembly when the PSUV made peace with some sectors of the opposition, because they still see it as a body that it is contempt; they see the current assembly as “the key tool of imperialist aggression” – they support the Constituent National Assembly instead, and believe that it “should have taken forceful action” against Juan Guaidó when he proclaimed himself to be president. Outside of Venezuela, the Constituent National Assembly is painted as a body that was solely created to increase the PSUV’s power, but this is clearly not the case if a party that is critical of the PSUV has endorsed the body and has even complained that it doesn’t go far enough in making moves against the opposition.

The West spreads the idea that Maduro is an authoritarian dictator; however, inside Venezuela, some people complain that he isn’t authoritarian enough. Those who support or empathise with the opposition should be somewhat relieved that it is Maduro and the PSUV who are in power, and not someone from the PCV or the average supporter of the government who impatiently wait on the government to make certain moves and wish that the government would brutally crackdown on the big Capitalists and some opposition leaders.

Internationally, those who bash Maduro and the Venezuelan government don’t only do so from the right-wing; many self-labelled Socialists in the West also bash Venezuela because it still has a market economy, or other things that give them reasons to say that Venezuela doesn’t have ‘real’ or ‘pure’ Socialism. Ironically, these clowns are not anywhere close to building Socialism in their own countries, and they make excuses for compromising and supporting weak Capitalist candidates all the time. I prefer to listen to the PCV than to some Western chauvinists.

The PCV leader says that the party openly discusses Venezuela’s internal contradictions with international allies but specify that their struggle with the PSUV is an internal one and that they unite with the PSUV against the opposition locally and against the US internationally. It’s not the place of outsiders to get involved in the internal struggles of Venezuela’s Left; Comrades will of course offer their opinions and share them with each other, but that is not the same as bashing and discrediting. There is a responsible way in which Comrades and allied organisations can offer advice to each other or even to engage in critique with each other; it can be harsh, but these things should be done with discretion and in specific spaces.

Perception of Police

My friends and Comrades from different parts of Venezuela have very different views/opinions on police. My Comrades in Caracas and Petare have very negative views of the police, despite being hardline supporters of the government. This shows that their opinions of the police and of the government don’t impact each other much, if at all.

I attended a memorial service for 6 Comrades who were murdered in Barinas; there was a sense that the police were not doing enough to address the incident. Despite their negative views on police, the Comrades who mourned their deaths were hardline supporters of Maduro and the government; the murdered activists and the Comrades who mourned them were Chavistas after all, and the movement that they were from also strongly supports the government. They have held demonstrations, but they are not of the same nature as the opposition demonstrations.

When we stayed in the apartment complex in Carora, there was an interaction with police that made me and some other Comrades uncomfortable, because of our general feelings about the police in the places that we are from; a Comrade from Brazil explained how police in Brazil are reactionary, and Comrades from Caracas and Petare showed some slight discomfort. The police were there for our own protection and offered to escort us, and they interacted mainly with an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who was with us as security; a Comrade was telling me that the police officers’ intentions were good but that people would look at it in a negative light. However, the people in Lara who were hosting us said otherwise; she told us not to worry and that “the police here are different” as the Comrade from Brazil explained how bad the police in Brazil are.

I felt more comfortable after this, i.e. after our hosts in Carora told me that the police actually have decent relations with the people, even though the police in Caracas seem to be less successful with that. At another point, a Comrade from Mérida told us that the police in Mérida aren’t very aggressive or violent. A friend from Petare told me that the police in different parts of Venezuela are different, that police in Caracas and Petare are awful and don’t respect human rights but that I can trust what I’m told by Comrades from other parts of Venezuela.

We sometimes hear of how brutal police in Venezuela are, and the point of this section is to show that their character is not reflective of the character of the Bolivarian Revolution. After all, supporters of the government are open and honest about their negative views on police, and some of the police themselves are involved in the attempts to discredit or unseat the government.

On Peaceful Coexistence

I had a conversation with a Comrade about the topic of China and its role in countering the US’ hegemony and said that I would one day consider writing to the Communist Party of China on the matter. Like Khrushchev and the revisionist leaders who came after him in the USSR, China has been pursuing a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West; the idea is to maintain global peace and stability and prevent war. I have also engaged a Comrade from Cuba on this topic.

What exists in the world right now is not peaceful, and what they are trying to prevent is not violence; violence is already happening everyday as a result of US hegemony. Economic warfare continues against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, the DPRK, and other countries. The world has watched while the US and its allies attempt to destroy Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. The peace that we are trying to preserve is an illusion, while people in particular countries experience violence daily.

While progressive governments have good intentions in reconciliation with the West, they are attempting to avoid war and the most overt forms of violence while leaving themselves vulnerable to continued strategies by the imperialists to weaken them and strike again later. We saw this with the Cuban government attempting reconciliation with the US, as it has been doing for decades, with the intention of ending the brutal blockade; however, we saw that the US was intending to replace an old regime change strategy to one that they considered smarter and more effective.

While making it clear to the world that they are allies, certain countries have still negotiated with the US on an individual basis instead of forming a strong united front. Cuba, the DPRK, and Iran have all negotiated to improve their own standing – and this is understandable and expected that each country will put itself first and that such negotiations are conventionally bilateral, but conventions have all been based on existing practice rather than things set in stone. The problem is that the US will negotiate with one country while attacking 3 of its allies, and the country that it’s negotiating with is backed into a corner to be nice and maintain a smiley face with the US because it’s backed into a corner about its own conditions.

But peace between the US and other countries is a fantasy. Even during peace time, the US won’t respect other nations’ sovereignty; it was built by the destruction of many other nations as it expanded its borders Westward under a “Manifest Destiny” doctrine. As we pretend that a peaceful world under the current conditions is possible, we weaken ourselves every day; at what point do we say that enough is enough? When will we challenge and overthrow the hegemony?

How many more countries will be invaded or bombed? How many more people need to suffer the brutal effects of blockades and economic warfare? We condemn these things, but we allow them to happen. Why do we aim for peace with an entity that commits so many acts of evil? Why does it satisfy us to have peace with a government that is bombing and destroying another country at the very same time?

Where do we draw the line? It wasn’t drawn after the wars in Viet Nam or Korea, it wasn’t drawn after the invasion of Grenada, it wasn’t drawn more recently after the invasion of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands, it wasn’t drawn after the destruction of Libya, it hasn’t been drawn after decades of a genocidal economic policy towards Cuba, and it hasn’t been drawn after the US decided to engage in economic warfare against the peoples of Venezuela and Iran.

At the end of the Sao Paulo Forum, Maduro spoke of one day going on the counter-offensive against imperialism; true anti-imperialists are eager for the conditions to be right to do this and for it to be done. One could argue that it is already being done by the people’s movements resisting neoliberal policies and puppet governments in Haiti, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, and other countries.

Still, I want to know; when do we move, from just surviving despite imperialism, to overthrowing imperialism? We will have no room to construct Socialism if we always have to worry about the imperialists intervening and violently re-imposing Capitalism on our peoples.

This idea that we must try to aim for peaceful coexistence and resist confrontation at all cost is not working, considering that the cost is that people are suffering and even dying in the violent conditions that the hegemony has imposed on them. The times of ‘peace’ that we have are not peace in the real sense, and the balance of power isn’t shifting; imperialism continues to grow stronger while countries that are resisting imperialism are focusing on their own survival. We are not buying time when we accept the imaginary peace; we are weakening ourselves with delusion as we let our guard down. Peace does give us some time to manoeuvre, but we often get too complacent in these times rather than reminding ourselves that we are in a constant struggle.

This is not a rejection of peace. We want peace, but we can’t keep letting our guard down in these times of nominal peace. This is also not a call for war; war is already being waged by imperialists so anti-imperialists wouldn’t be starting one. This is also not a call to take any sudden reckless actions to intensify war, but it is a call to recognise the reality we live in and that our efforts towards peace may not actually be bringing about peace for our peoples. This is something to bear in mind, going forward. Our final goal can’t be coexisting with imperialists who don’t value our lives.

Page 60 of 65
The most radical thing we can do, then, is to reshape our international relations in light of this reality. Again, this doesn’t mean supporting any sort of violence. It can be something as simple as radically changing our trade relations to decentre the West and give it less power. Our dependence on trade with the powerful Western countries gives them the power to coerce and control us. They have hegemony over the global economy, and demanding to remain assimilated in this current economy will always have us on our knees.

Individually, progressive Nationalist governments in the Third World have been doing this. They have tried to take control of natural resources from the hands of multinational entities, and they have faced sabotage and intervention; this is not a critique of these countries. This is a critique of the other nations which sit and watch this happen, offering nice-sounding critique after the fact but not doing anything concrete.

We cannot live like this. We cannot be smiling with the West while it strangles Cuba and other nations that we care about. The international community must draw a line and take concrete action, something more than just verbally denouncing the blockade at UN sessions each year, or more than throwing shade with vague language to criticise the US. If this spineless faux-clever approach that we take to the world’s problems now was the same one that we had applied to the problem of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes in the 1930s, the Nazis would have dominated the world at the time.

Other Things

There are good things that happened that don’t have detailed notes, like a meeting with someone who will soon be sent to head Venezuela’s diplomatic mission to Jamaica, an Afro-descendants’ meeting in November that we got invited to, public canteens where people who don’t have food can eat for free, a visit to a potato farm, a visit to an archaeological museum that focuses on the history of indigenous peoples in Western Venezuela, our visit to the national pantheon, things I learned about veterinary services in Venezuela, and some other things.

Conclusion

My experiences in Venezuela are anecdotal, as anyone’s experience would be if they spent a considerable amount of time there and wrote a report. This does not mean that I spent time to talk to more than 30 million Venezuelans or that I know everything about Venezuela, but I know enough to say the things that I have said.

Despite the limitations of my observations and analyses, I think they are important experiences that depart from the narratives that are actively pushed by Western media. The things that I witnessed and experienced were not 100% positive; nonetheless, they have reaffirmed my confidence in the Bolivarian Revolution and in people’s movements in other countries – including my own – in general.

This report doesn’t have a particular central/single aim beyond documenting the things that I witnessed and experienced so that they are not lost in memory. Where some things are highlighted, the reasons that they’re being highlighted are explicitly stated. Things in this document may be cited as a reference for the organisation’s positions on issues in the future.

The Cuban Revolution has undeniably taken a monumental step forward toward the total emancipation of the oppressed. As this paper reported, Cuba’s new Family Code “is, in no uncertain terms, the most progressive and comprehensive law in history, anywhere on Earth, with regard to the emancipation of women, LGBT people, children, the elderly, and disabled people.”

But not everyone is celebrating. The Western capitalist press, serving as the propaganda arm of U.S. imperialism, is desperately sputtering and stumbling over itself to drown out any celebration of revolutionary Cuba’s historic victory. To this end, the capitalist press is peddling a multifaceted, deeply incoherent narrative — a cacophony of anti-Communist propaganda, joined by such vaunted outfits as the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Reuters. Various anti-Communist NGOs funded by the imperialists — the usual suspects, like CIVICUS and the NED — have also crawled out of the woodworks.

Most have focused on dampening Cuba’s world-historic victory by oversimpliyfing the new Family Code as “legalizing gay marriage.” At the same time, any hint of faint praise for revolutionary Cuba is carefully qualified by attacking the revolution for a “slow” pace of progress, despite the fact that revolutionary Cuba has already outpaced every country in the Americas, and most countries in the world, in the struggle for LGBT emancipation.

As we reported in the Red Clarion, Cuba’s new Family Code does, in fact, enshrine marriage equality as law — but it does so much more than “just” that.

The new Family Code is a comprehensive legal code, laying out the legal dimensions of families, children and the elderly, women, LGBT people, and disabled people. It is uniquely progressive in the world on every front. We could go on, but we will instead encourage readers to read our full summary of the new Family Code.

Yet, the Family Code has been oversimplified in the capitalist press of the United States and other Western countries as something resembling the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which tenuously legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S. — and which is now on the verge of being overturned by the current Court, dominated by far-right fascist Trump-appointees.

So, why the oversimplifications?

The capitalist press has been forced to acknowledge the most widely known and reported aspect of the Family Code: marriage equality. But the capitalists can still subtly manipulate public perceptions by “failing” to thoroughly report the facts surrounding the popular referendum — to “tell the whole truth.”

The more rabidly anti-Communist outlets accuse the Cuban government of forcing an “unwanted” Code on the people, despite the fact that the Code was passed in a popular referendum. Hardly a single capitalist news outlet, even the “moderates,” can admit that the popular referendum expressed the political will of the people. Instead, the capitalist press explains away the new Family Code’s popularity by denying the political agency of Cuba’s people.

One of the news agencies most obviously guilty of this is Reuters. “Cubans Split over Liberal Family Code as Referendum Nears” — this was the headline of an article, published by Reuters in March 2022, in the lead-up to the popular referendum. The article baselessly asserts that, “Tepid support for the reforms … threatens to hand state-backed supporters a defeat,” citing as its source three so-called “experts.” One of these “experts,” who works for a German state-sponsored think-tank, falsely claimed that the Family Code had been, “compiled by state authorities, rather than being a grassroots movement.” In fact, the Family Code underwent multiple, significant alterations in accordance with suggestions voiced by the public at the nearly 80,000 grassroots community meetings held during the four-month-long public consultation process leading up to the referendum.

We hardly need to point out now that the predictions of Reuters and its “experts,” that the new Family Code would be rejected, were predictably and embarrassingly wrong: The Code was instead ratified by a two-thirds supermajority.

The more conspiracy theory-minded are coping and seething with the assertion that the popular referendum was really a sham effort by the Communist Party of Cuba to “stabilize the regime.” For instance, the Miami Herald cites nameless (likely fictitious) sources to paint the popular referendum as “a smokescreen for a government that is in desperate need of … legitimacy.” The truth, of course, is that the Cuban government enjoys the support of the overwhelming majority of Cubans, and therefore already has “legitimacy” by any truly democratic standard; this is not changed by the fact that an insignificant minority of Cubans oppose the revolution and the Communist Party.

Reuters also indulges in its share of conspiracy theories. In an article headlined “Cuba Uses Media Blitz to Promote ‘Yes’ on New LGBT-Friendly Laws,” published a few days before the vote, Reuters accused the Communist Party of “flooding state-run media with stories and celebratory images” of LGBT people and putting up “roadside billboards touting diversity,” all in order to convince the Cuban public to support the new Family Code’s historically unprecedented expansion of LGBT rights. (How truly evil, those Communists!) The conspiracy theorists at Reuters claimed that the Communist Party’s mass public education campaign on LGBT rights, launched in the months leading up to the referendum vote, was an underhanded effort to dupe the Cuban public and cover up “anger” and “widespread protests” — demonstrations which, in actuality, have at most attracted a few hundred paid activists in Havana.

Reuters only cites “analysts consulted by Reuters” to justify its conspiracy theories. One of these “analysts” is the same German sham “expert” Reuters consulted in the previous article, who makes the truly bizarre claim that, “many people will vote [out of] loyalty to the government, much more than on content” — as if Cubans were incapable of independent thought; as if the Cuban electorate wouldn’t vote “Yes” on the Family Code for the simple and obvious reason that the majority supports the rights of LGBT people, women, children, the elderly, and the disabled. This “expert” assertion that citizens of revolutionary socialist states are mindless robots is a classic anti-Communist smear. Another of these so-called “analysts” is a right-wing fascist “dissident” — the sort who are broadly ignored as irrelevant extremists by the Cuban public, but are beloved by the rabidly anti-Communist Western capitalist press as “pro-democracy activists.” Reuters quotes this “dissident” (who lives not in Cuba, but in Madrid, Spain) as actually advocating against the Family Code — against the expansion of LGBT and other rights — for no other reason than to “punish the regime.” The “dissident” takes off the “pro-democracy” mask and admits that anti-Communists are, in truth, against democracy and emancipation. 

Why the baseless pessimism toward the people of Cuba? Why the sham “experts” stating easily disprovable falsehoods? Why the indulgence in conspiracy theories?

Doesn’t Reuters brand itself as a respected, trustworthy, “value-neutral,” and “objective” news agency?

Among other distortions appearing in the capitalist press is the widely-repeated line that the recent popular referendum was “rare” and “unusual” in Cuba — another easily disprovable falsehood. The Associated Press, for instance, released an article headlined, “Cuba Holds Unusual Vote on Law Allowing Same-Sex Marriage,” in which it characterized the referendum as a “rare” event. In fact, popular referenda are a normal feature of Cuba’s robust participatory democracy, and have been held many times in the past. The most recent such popular referendum was held in 2019, only 3 years ago, when an overwhelming 90.6% (with a voter turnout of 90.15%) of the electorate ratified Cuba’s new Constitution. The only “exceptional” aspect of this year’s popular referendum on Cuba’s new Family Code was the unprecedented level of public grassroots participation: The public consultation leading up to the referendum involved nearly 80,000 mass community meetings across Cuba and among Cubans living abroad, attended by a total of over 6.5 million Cubans (75.93% of the electorate).

Again, why the distortions? Isn’t the Associated Press one of the largest news agencies in the world, and isn’t it meant to be an “objective” source?

The fact is, the capitalist press cannot afford to admit the truth about Cuba. A two-sided pressure compels these agencies and outlets to manipulate, distort, falsify, and lie.

On the one hand, to tell the truth about revolutionary Cuba would force the capitalist press to acknowledge the progressive, democratic, and emancipatory nature of the Cuban Revolution — and, by extension, Communism. The mass media monopolists in the West will never allow this. The capitalists invest untold billions of dollars in their propaganda machines, because demonizing Communism is a crucial pillar of the capitalist class dictatorship. They must, at all costs, convince the oppressed that another world, free of exploitation, war, and all oppression, is impossible.

On the other hand, acknowledging the progressive, democratic, and emancipatory nature of the socialist revolution would expose a sharp contrast between the advancements of revolutionary Cuba and the reactionary backslides of the fascist U.S. Empire.

Let’s look specifically at the rights of LGBT people in the U.S. Empire today, and compare this abysmal situation with the progress of LGBT emancipation in Cuba.

So far this year, nearly 240 anti-LGBT bills have been filed in state governments across the U.S. Empire. In February 2022, Texas instituted a program denying life-saving medical care to transgender children, while threatening parents who accept and affirm their transgender children with prison sentences. Texas has been joined, to greater or lesser degrees, by the states of Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Utah, Idaho, and California — yes, even “liberal” California — all of which have passed (or are considering) laws banning medical care for transgender children in particular and transgender people generally. The states of Alabama, Minnesota, and Oklahoma are considering or have passed restrictions on the rights of same-sex families. In recent years, many of the same states have instituted laws that prohibit public school teachers from even discussing the existence of LGBT people. Across the country, we’ve seen LGBT pride parades and other events get attacked by cops and civilian-fascist demonstrators. At the center of it all, the current far-right Supreme Court, having overturned Roe v. Wade (the right to an abortion), is threatening to put marriage equality next on the chopping block. And it doesn’t stop there: In addition to entertaining challenges to the Obergefell decision, the far-right fascist wing of the Court has threatened to overturn the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, which legalized homosexual intimate contact, and the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, which legalized inter-racial marriages.

This is the awful state of LGBT rights in the U.S. Empire. Meanwhile, only 90 miles away from U.S. shores, Cuba’s electorate has ratified the most progressive, comprehensive law regarding the rights of LGBT people — as well as women, children, the elderly, disabled people — and the nature of the family in world history.

The capitalists can’t allow this hypocrisy to be exposed, but it will be exposed, one defiant voice at a time, all the same. No anti-Communist cacophony can drown out the fact that Cuba is thriving, while the U.S. Empire continues to descend into fascism.

We must proclaim “Death!” to this fascist settler-colonial empire, and, in the same breath, proclaim, “Long live the revolution!”

Viva Cuba! Viva la revolución! Hasta la victoria siempre!

On Sunday, September 25, 2022, in a nationwide popular referendum, a two-thirds majority of Cuba’s electorate ratified a set of sweeping, radical changes to the country’s legal code concerning families, known as the Family Code. Cuba’s new Family Code is the most progressive, comprehensive legislation of its kind in history, anywhere in the world, and is a cause for celebration not only in Cuba, but worldwide. The Cuban Revolution shines as a brilliant light of revolutionary optimism and inspiration to the world’s oppressed masses, for it has proven that, under a victorious socialist revolution, the true emancipation from all special legal and cultural modes of oppression is not only possible, but inevitable. In this long-form article, we explore the origins of patriarchal oppression in Cuba, the long struggle for de-patriarchalization under the revolution, the fundamental transformation of Cuban law and culture, and the “revolution within the revolution” that has placed socialist Cuba at the forefront of the global struggle for the emancipation of women, children, the elderly, LGBT people, and disabled people. We also summarize the major progressive provisions of Cuba’s new Family Code.

The colonial origins of anti-LGBT oppression in Cuba

Cuba inherited its legal system and culture from its colonial past. Its longstanding anti-LGBT and otherwise patriarchal legal system originated in the Spanish conquest and colonization of the island.

When the first Spaniard conquistadors and Catholic missionaries landed in Cuba, beginning with Columbus in 1492, they found an Indigenous society in which patriarchal oppression had no existence or precedent in history. Colonial officials reported with disgust that homosexual activities and partnerships, as well as “men dressing as women” — i.e., persons embodying any of a variety of Indigenous non-binaristic gender identities, some of which are included under the “Two-Spirit” umbrella, which we might today understand as transgender identities — were commonplace and perfectly normalized among a great diversity of Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. These and other traditional cultural aspects of Indigenous societies were anathema to the Western Catholicism of the invaders.

After conquering Cuba and the other lands that became “New Spain,” the Spaniards sought to enforce their empire’s colonial rule by systematically destroying and replacing the cultures of conquered Indigenous peoples. This program of colonial genocide and assimilation against the Indigenous population was carried forward first and foremost by converting the colonized natives en masse to Christianity, while systematically torturing and murdering those who refused to abandon their traditions in the Inquisition.

To this end, the Spaniards introduced colonial legal systems that criminalized homosexuality and other activities, relationships, expressions, and gender identities deemed “sexually immoral,” “satanic,” “unnatural,” and otherwise antithetical to Christianity. Persons found guilty committing “sodomy” (generally referring to sexual intercourse between gay men) were subjected to unimaginably cruel punishments: They could be burned to death at the stake, or thrown into a pit of rabid dogs to be mauled to death and devoured, or have body parts — often the victim’s ears, nose, and limbs — sliced and chopped off.

The Taíno and other Indigenous peoples suffered these extreme cruelties while enslaved under the Spanish Empire’s encomienda system, an adaptation of southwestern European feudalism that was instituted across the territories of New Spain. The Indigenous peoples of Cuba were rapidly driven to extinction by the genocidal Spaniard regime, and within a few decades, merchants began to import Black African slaves to replenish the colony’s labor force. Extracted from ports all along the western and southern African coasts, the newly arriving slaves also came from a great diversity of peoples, many of which had cultures that traditionally accepted and honored a wide spectrum of sexual expression and gender variance. As the Black population in Cuba and elsewhere in New Spain grew, their diverse cultures were similarly subjected to persecution by the colonial authorities, missionaries, and slaveholders, and they, like the Taíno before them, were forcibly converted en masse to Christianity.

The Spanish obsession with late-medieval, Western Catholic notions of sexual morality was, needless to say, deeply hypocritical. Punishment for “deviation” from these norms were enacted almost entirely against the Indigenous and enslaved subjects of the colony, and sometimes against Europeans languishing in indentured servitude, but rarely, if ever, against the slaveholding planters, merchants, colonial governors and administrators, and missionary priests who ruled colonial Cuba. Indeed, men of the ruling classes of colonial Cuba, as with other colonies, regularly committed sexual crimes against enslaved persons, and as early as the mid-16th Century, Spanish-Cuban slaveholders were widely reported to prostitute enslaved women to merchants and sailors docking at the island-colony’s ports.

Slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1875 — and was still not totally eradicated until 1886 or later — after more than 350 years.

The features of patriarchal oppression in the Spanish colonial legal system were never truly abolished. Instead, as the Spanish Empire began to collapse and lose its colonies during the 18th and 19th Centuries, the newly independent states in the Americas and elsewhere generally maintained the anti-LGBT, misogynistic, and otherwise patriarchal laws imposed by the Spanish Empire. Cuba was no exception.

Cuba and other Spanish colonies were transferred to the U.S. at the conclusion of the 1898 Spanish–American War. Cuba then endured four years of direct U.S. military occupation, after which, in 1902, the island finally gained its formal independence. However, from the outset, the “independent” Cuban government was effectively controlled by a series of U.S.-backed puppet dictators, serving, at the behest of American capitalist-imperialist interests, to keep the Cuban economy reliant on sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations, large-scale illicit drug manufacture and smuggling, and tourism from wealthy U.S. citizens. The Cuban economy was especially transformed to accommodate American tourism — especially gambling and sex tourism — after 1924. The control exercised over Cuba’s government by U.S. crime syndicates, which carried on with the tacit assent of the U.S. State Department, even had a name: gangsterismo. The transgender Communist scholar Leslie Feinberg aptly termed this opening-up of the Cuban economy to sex tourism “imperialist sexploitatation,” a system through which “U.S. big business, including crime syndicates, organized urban Cuba into a giant brothel, super-exploiting” the marginalized poor for sexual labor. The imperialist-controlled Cuban sex trade especially preyed upon Afro-Cuban women and LGBT people, which worsened existing antiblack stereotypes, rooted in centuries of antiblack oppression. As Feinberg explained it,

U.S. crime bosses ran the lucrative large-scale sex industry and interconnected casinos and drug distribution. Tens of thousands of Cuban women, men and children of all sexualities served the desires of wealthy and powerful tourists from the U.S.

Cold War anti-gay and anti-trans purges and persecution in the U.S. created the demand for an offshore prostitution network in Havana that exploited large numbers of men and boys, many of them feminine, for profit, as well as women.

During this period of colonial modernization, the Cuban comprador regime introduced liberalizing reforms to some aspects of patriarchal oppression, but the basic framework imposed by the Spaniards remained in place. LGBT people were no longer burned at the stake for our “abominable” orientations, identities, and self-expressions — an almost impossibly low bar — but LGBT life remained thoroughly criminalized, and LGBT people were forced to live false lives or to hide underground. For instance, in 1938, the Cuban comprador regime passed the infamous Public Ostentation Law, under which openly identifying as gay and engaging in homosexual activity, among other proscriptions, were “crimes” punishable by fines and prison sentences of six months.

Anti-LGBT attitudes also remained deeply embedded within the fabric of Cuban culture. Especially in rural areas, persons who were exposed as gay or trans would be ostracized by their families and communities. This led many rural LGBT Cubans to flock from the countryside to the capital, Havana, where many entered the white-collar urban workforce, while many others were folded into the sex trade.

Anti-LGBT oppression continues during the early decades of the Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution began on 26 July 1953. The revolutionary vanguard, known as the 26th of July Movement, took up the mission of overthrowing the U.S.-backed comprador military dictatorship, then led by Fulgencio Batista. After years of intense guerrilla warfare, on 31 December 1958, the 26th of July Movement revolutionaries victoriously overthrew the Batista regime, ushering in a new Cuba — democratic, pluralistic, anti-racist, and independent of Yankee imperialism. Following the victory of the anti-colonial liberation struggle, the 26th of July Movement went through a period of internal ideological and political struggle; through this process, the Movement adopted Marxism-Leninism as its guiding ideology, and was transformed into the Communist Party of Cuba. Thus, the Cuban Revolution became a socialist revolution.

Although, as Communists, we will always extend solidarity to the Cuban Revolution, we must not mince words concerning its failures.

During its first few decades, the revolutionary government was overtly and violently hostile toward LGBT people. Rather than abolishing every last element of patriarchal oppression in the colonial legal system it inherited, and rather than initiating a program to transform Cuba’s deeply homophobic, transphobic, and hyper-masculine (in Spanish, machismo) culture, the revolution instead “grandfathered in” the preceding centuries of anti-LGBT legal and cultural oppression. For example, the revolutionary government inherited and maintained the earlier-mentioned Public Ostentation Law, which, despite not being enforced since the late-1960s, was not formally repealed until 1988. Furthermore, openly gay men were systematically excluded from membership in the Communist Party and restricted against military service in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.

The revolution’s political leaders shamefully encouraged these policies. Fidel Castro, for instance, was quoted in 1965 as claiming that homosexuals are deviants who could never be considered true revolutionaries.

One of the worst injustices against gay men in the early years of the revolution was the so-called Units to Aid Military Production (UMAP), established in 1965.

In concept, UMAP was not inherently homophobic. During the first few decades of the revolution, the U.S. launched wave after wave of military operations against Cuba — some overt, like the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion, a resounding failure that brought the U.S. international condemnation and shame, but many more covert. To defend the revolution, the entire country needed to be mobilized, and every able-bodied adult man was drafted into the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. However, thousands of Cubans, such as those belonging to various pacifistic Christian sects, were conscientious objectors. Many Cubans also lacked the education necessary to become soldiers. UMAP was thus designed to accommodate these sections of the population as an alternative means of contributing to the defense of the revolution, without taking up arms.

But there was a more sinister aspect to UMAP — homophobia. Openly gay men who were willing and able to serve in the armed forces were instead assigned to UMAP.

At that time, the deeply rooted and widespread homophobia within Cuban society led to the opinion that gay men were unfit to serve in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. Furthermore, some in the government feared that anti-gay violence would run rampant within the armed forces. But the government’s misguided approach of separation only made the situation worse. Decades later, in an interview with journalist and biographer Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel explained, “Homosexuals were not drafted at first, but then all that became a sort of irritation factor, an argument some people used to lash out at homosexuals even more.” The absence of gay men in the Cuban armed forces led to the widespread public belief that gay Cubans lacked patriotism.

UMAP was not designed as a punitive institution — its facilities were not prisons or internment camps — but conditions in UMAP facilities were nonetheless appalling, and abuse against the workers was widespread. Reports of these conditions soon reached the Communist Party.

In response, the Communist Party organized a full-scale investigation of UMAP facilities, carried out in a massive secret operation. One-hundred young men in the Communist Party were sent to UMAP facilities, assigned to be regular workers, to pose as gay men, and to then report back on the treatment they experienced. Fidel himself participated in the operation: He snuck into one of the facilities at night, laid down in a hammock, and waited for a guard to walk by. Guards would often harass the workers at night by cutting the support cords of their hammocks with their sabers. But when this guard walked by, intending to do just that, he instead came face to face with Fidel — the leader of the Cuban Revolution — and was frozen with shock and embarrassment. The results of the investigation were indisputable, and after experiencing first-hand the abuses committed in the UMAP system, in 1968, the Communist Party shut it down.

Yankee imperialism exploits homophobia for Cold War aims

Following the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, many Cubans belonging to the former ruling classes — the Cuban comprador bourgeoisie, the old colonial plantation aristocracy, and the U.S.-based crime bosses — left the island for the U.S., taking as much stolen wealth as they could carry with them on their private yachts. Thousands of the war-criminal functionaries who served the overthrown military dictatorship also fled the country, rather than face the people’s justice for their atrocities. Finally, in 1980, 120,000 Cubans — out of a total population of 11 million, or about 1% — left Cuba for Miami, Florida in an event known as the Mariel Boatlift.

The U.S., desperate to reconquer its liberated colony, welcomed these defectors of the overthrown comprador regime with open arms, treating them as “political refugees,” and set them to work as agents of Cold War propaganda against the Cuban Revolution.

Among these thousands were, naturally, many gays and lesbians, whose reports of institutional homophobia the U.S. opportunistically used in the domestic media and the international stage to vilify revolutionary Cuba — nevermind that the U.S.-backed comprador regime was responsible for modernizing Cuba’s old anti-LGBT legal system, and that the revolutionary government had merely inherited this system. In fact, in the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act, the U.S. Federal Government passed legislation officially banning homosexuals from immigrating and mandating deportations of gay migrants. But American imperialism made an exception in the case of Cuban “refugees,” because they served such an important propagandistic function.

Hollywood, a premier institution of the U.S. Empire’s propaganda machine, staffed by faithful servants of American imperialism, took a leading role in the production of anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War. As the U.S. stepped up its militarist aggression against revolutionary Cuba, Hollywood dutifully produced film after film vilifying the revolution and romanticizing the military dictatorships and chattel-slavery plantations that characterized Cuba’s pre-revolutionary past. In particular, Hollywood propaganda films rewrote Cuban history, painting pre-revolutionary Cuba as a liberal haven for gay people — a utopia destroyed by the Cuban Revolution. 

Additionally, the CIA extensively operated within the pre-revolutionary underground subcultures of Havana. One study estimates that, under Cuba’s comprador regime, there were around 200,000 gay people in Havana, largely working in the illicit drug industry and sex trade. Thus, by worming its way into Havana nightlife, including gay clubs, the CIA managed to recruit a number of disaffected gay men as counter-revolutionary assets. In fact, one of the CIA’s over-600 failed assassination attempts on Fidel Castro was carried out by a gay university student leader.

This is not to say that “refugee” reports of institutionalized homophobia in revolutionary Cuba were false. On the contrary, such reports were often true.Instead, what must be understood is this: Any contingent of the oppressed masses that has been failed by a revolution is likely to be weaponized by the imperialists and their lackeys for their own counter-revolutionary ends. Every time Communists fail to uphold the progressive struggles of some sections of the oppressed masses, we jeopardize the progress of all struggles, in all their diversity, sow disunity among the oppressed masses, and diminish the revolution as a whole.

The tide turns toward progress: 1970s–1990s

Prevailing attitudes within the Communist Party of Cuba toward LGBT people finally began to change — radically, and for the better — beginning in the 1970s.

In 1971, Cuba held its first Congress on Education and Culture, at which speakers presented conflicting declarations on homosexuality. Some abandoned the view that homosexuality was a problem of decadance, and insisted that it was instead a legitimate form of sexual behavior, worth studying along the same lines as heterosexuality. Some promoted public education to normalize to normalize homosexuality, as part of the government’s broader public education on issues of sexuality, women’s rights, and reproductive health. However, other declarations called for gay people to be barred from employment as educators. Reactionary views were still out in force, but the tide was clearly turning toward progress.

In 1975, the People’s Supreme Court of Cuba ruled that gay people could not be discriminated against in employment or education on the basis of their sexuality, and ruled that gay persons who had been fired or expelled were entitled to restitution from the government and reinstatement in their former positions.

That same year, the new Ministry of Culture was established, alongside a commission to study homosexuality, leading to the full decriminalization of homosexuality in Cuba in 1979. By comparison, homosexuality was still criminalized throughout much of the U.S. under so-called “sodomy laws” until 2003.

Following these measures, LGBT life in Cuba rapidly emerged from the underground it had been confined to since the pre-revolutionary period, under the comprador regime, and stepped into the light of social visibility. The existence of gay people was becoming accepted and normalized in Cuban society. For the first time in Cuba’s long colonial history, gay people were living openly, and integrating into every sphere of public life — cultural, economic, political, and so on. Some gay Cubans who had left the island for the U.S. in previous years even decided to return. Furthermore, within the Communist Party, the reactionary view of homosexuality as a “decadent” feature of capitalism, incompatible with socialism, was soundly defeated and replaced with tolerance. Soon, thousands of gay men and lesbians were welcomed into the Communist Party, at last free to take an active role in building socialism.

In 1988, the antiquated Public Ostentation Law was formally repealed. The law was changed to make sexual harassment illegal in Cuba, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.

In an interview that year, Fidel Castro condemned the homophobic attitudes that had prevailed in Cuban society and in the Communist Party of Cuba in previous decades, and self-criticized for his own failures. In a 1992 interview, Fidel stated, “We inherited male chauvinism and many other bad habits from the conquistadors. That was a historical inheritance. In some countries more than in others, but in none was there more struggle than in ours and I believe that in none have there been more tangible and practical successes.” In his 2006 interview with Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel said, “Concerning women, there was a strong prejudice, as strong as in the case of homosexuals. I’m not going to come up with excuses now, for I assume my share of the responsibility. I truly had other concepts regarding that issue.” Fidel also accepted personal responsibility in his 2007 autobiography, My Life, for failing to struggle against widespread anti-LGBT sentiments and machismo, including his own, in his role as leader of the Communist Party.

In 1993, military service in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces was opened to all LGBT people, and protections were put in place to end discrimination within the armed forces on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Today, thousands of gay and transgender Cubans serve openly in the armed forces. 

Progress toward LGBT emancipation in Cuba has been imperfect and far too slow, but once it began, it became an unstoppable force. The popular base of the Cuban Revolution is the oppressed masses of Cuba; under the revolution’s socialist democracy, the masses have become the makers of their own collective destiny. It is thanks to this fact that social progress in Cuba is not only possible, but inevitable.

CENESEX – the “revolution within the revolution”

Every inch of real social progress is a result of social struggle, and progress under socialist revolutions is no exception to this rule. All the progress made toward the emancipation of women and LGBT people in Cuba since the revolution began has been the result of a long struggle, led by revolutionary women and LGBT people, both among the people generally and within the Communist Party itself. Communists in Cuba, including Fidel Castro, as well as Communists elsewhere in the world, have described this as “the revolution within the revolution.” 

In 1972, the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) founded the National Working Group on Sexual Education, which in 1989 became Cuba’s celebrated Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX). The FMC took a leading role in advancing the total emancipation of women under the Cuban Revolution, and CENESEX in particular was tasked with educating the public on sexual and reproductive health and women’s rights.

Additionally, CENESEX took a leading role in promoting public awareness of HIV/AIDS. CENESEX approached AIDS as a public health crisis, which could be ended through education, healthcare — which, thanks to the revolution, was and remains a universal right in Cuba — and social support. Toward this goal, the Cuban state provided, and still provides, an immense social safety net, in spite of the unilateral U.S.-imposed economic blockade on Cuba, enforced by the U.S. military, that remains in place to this day, in violation of international law. Furthermore, in Cuba, the AIDS epidemic was never blamed on gay people, but was instead understood scientifically, as a disease that can be transmitted through sexual intercourse (regardless of gender), use of dirty needles and contaminaition of open wounds, pregnancy and breast feeding, and other modes; the epidemic was and is understood in Cuba to be a matter of public health, which, through careful planning and campaigning, could be prevented and ultimately eliminated.

By contrast, in the U.S., across the West, and in most Latin American countries, public health officials and politicians blamed the AIDS crisis on LGBT people and Black people — the most acutely devastated sections of the population. The U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, refused to even publicly acknowledge the AIDS crisis for years, even as tens of thousands of people protested in the streets in cities across the U.S. Empire against the government’s inaction. With a privatized healthcare system and little to no medical infrastructure serving poor and colonized communities, millions of HIV/AIDS patients living within the U.S. Empire have been abandoned by the state. During the 1980s, the U.S. Empire manufactured the AIDS crisis in order to commit a systematic social mass murder of over 700,000 people — mainly LGBT people and Black people. The epidemic still kills over 10,000 people every year in the U.S. Empire alone.

Since the AIDS crisis began, Cuba has sent thousands of doctors across the world to aid underdeveloped countries, particularly in Africa and other Caribbean countries. This is only one of Cuba’s many internationalist medical programs.

With regard to homsexuality, CENESEX especially took guidance from advancements in social science concerning LGBT people taking place in the socialist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where homosexuality had been decriminalized in 1968, and gay people were already socially accepted and highly integrated. In 1979, CENESEX published the first of many educational materials concerning LGBT people and our struggle for emancipation: a translation of the East-German sexologist and psychotherapist Sigfried Schnabl’s The Intimate Life of Males and Females, in which the author argued that “homosexuals should be granted equal rights, respect, and recognition,” and denounced all forms of social discrimination on the basis of sexual orientaiton. A 1981 CENESEX publication, In Defense of Love, described homsexuality as a normal form of human sexuality, and argued that anti-LGBT oppression, having been inherited from colonialism, would need to be overcome by the socialist revolution.

In the 1990s, and even more so in the 2000s, CENESEX began making use of public television for the purpose of educating the public on the AIDS epidemic and other matters of sexual and reproductive health and rights. At the same time, LGBT representation in Cuban television programs, featuring sympathetic, honestly portrayed, openly gay characters, among broader LGBT positive representation, has helped to dramatically change public opinion regarding LGBT people and issues.

Progress for trans rights in Cuba

Leading elements within the Communist Party of Cuba, mainly the National Working Group on Sexual Education (the predecessor of CENESEX), alongside the Federation of Cuban Women, first took up the struggle for the rights of transgender people in Cuba more than four decades ago, in the 1970s. At first, progress was slow.

The first major victory for transgender people in Cuba came in the form of legal recognition. In 1979, a transgender man, wishing to have his legal identity papers changed to reflect his true gender identity, appealed to the Federation of Cuban Women for help. The FMC set up a special committee, to be coordinated by the National Working Group on Sexual Education. The committee’s investigations and advocacy in the case culminated in an agreement with Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Justice on issuing new identity papers to transgender people.

The FMC and the National Working Group on Sexual Education continued collaborating with transgender civil rights activists in Cuba, and the next major victory came in 1988, when doctors performed the first sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in Cuba. The surgery was a success, and no complications were reported.

This was a groundbreaking achievement for transgender healthcare in Cuba. However, transphobic attitudes still prevailed among the Cuban public, and the event garnered considerable media backlash. Public outrage was particularly focused on the fact that Cuba’s socialized, universal healthcare automatically extended to transgender healthcare. In the U.S., which has privatized healthcare and virtually no social safety net, thousands of transgender people who are too poor to afford the healthcare we need — amounting to tens of thousands of dollars — are simply forced to go without; this private-healthcare extortion leads to a lower quality of life and higher suicide rates, among other adverse personal and social consequences. Meanwhile, in Cuba, rather than being forced to seek out vital gender-affirming healthcare, including surgeries, in the extortionist private sector, transgender Cubans are automatically covered by Cuba’s national healthcare system. But to ensure that Cuba’s national health system would cover transgender healthcare, the Cuban public needed to be won over — educated to see that healthcare for transgender people was not “optional,” but vital, and that transgender people should not be “left behind” by the revolution. An internal struggle on the issue of trans rights was also carried out within the Communist Party.

Mariela Castro Espín, the current director of CENESEX, and the daughter of former President Raúl Castro and the late FMC leader Vilma Espín, later explained, “We were unable to convince the people of the need to carry out these operations. This reluctance also came from professionals in the Ministry of Public Health, who were not experts on the subject.”

The result was a considerable setback. While transgender Cubans continued to receive cost-free psychotherapeutic care, in the aftermath of the media and public backlash, access to gender-affirming surgeries was rolled back. Although CENESEX continued to carry out public education on transgender issues, the following decade represented a slump in the progress of trans rights in Cuba.

Finally, in 2004, under a new national strategy, CENESEX launched a public campaign to expand trans rights in Cuba via the National Assembly of Popular Power. CENESEX prepared by expanding and diversifying its staff, welcoming aboard transgender revolutionaries and experts on transgender issues. In 2005, CENESEX formulated a definite plan and began lobbying committees of the Cuban National Assembly. The CENESEX plan proposed expansions to Cuba’s national healthcare system to cover all transgender healthcare, including gender-affirming surgeries and hormone replacement therapy (HRT), and also sought to streamline the process for transgender people wishing to change their legal identity documents to reflect their true gender identities. The latter part of the CENESEX proposal was met with immediate approval by the Courts of Justice, and new passports were issued in 2006. Debates were held in the National Assembly on the expansion of transgender healthcare in 2007, and in 2008, Cuba’s Minister of Public Health, Jose Ramon Balaguer Cabrera, signed legislation that assured cost-free access to gender-affirming surgeries, including SRS, as well as HRT, for all transgender Cubans under Cuba’s national healthcare system. To ensure this right, the Ministry of Public Health established the National Commission for Comprehensive Attention to Transsexual Persons, under the direction of CENESEX.

This was the first law of its kind in the Americas, and one of the first in the world. By contrast, “liberal” Canada, which has a national health insurance system of universal healthcare, only extended coverage to transgender healthcare, inlcuding most, but not all, surgeries, in 2016. A key difference is that Canada, as a settler-colonial empire and a capitalist-imperialist country, funds its national health insurance through the continued dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Canada and the super-exploitation of the Third World, whereas Cuba has managed to build one of the world’s most impressive universal healthcare systems, despite suffering under a decades-long U.S. blockade, without exploiting poorer countries. On the contrary, Cuba has achieved global renown for its medical internationalism, in which it sends thousands of doctors across the world to assist countries in need.

Since the victories of the 2004–08 campaign, the FMC and CENESEX have continued their advocacy work on behalf of transgender people in Cuba. In the years that followed, CENESEX became a bastion of legal redress for transgender persons who had been harrassed, discriminated against by employers and institutions, or mistreated by the police. Based on consultations with transgender people, activists, and experts, CENESEX has launched multiple public education campaigns and expanded anti-discrimination laws that protect transgender workers. In 2013, Mariela Castro cast the first dissenting vote against a law banning anti-gay discrimination in the workplace — because the law wasn’t progressive enough: It included no provisions extending the same legal protections to transgender people.

Although the struggle of revolutionaries has transformed Cuba into one of the safest and most welcoming societies for transgender people in the world, the march of progress for trans rights still has a considerable way to go.

In the domain of healthcare, although the specific needs of transgender people are now fully covered by Cuba’s socialist health system, there are considerable delays in healthcare access. Cuba’s healthcare system has been severely affected by the U.S. blockade, which prevents the country from obtaining medical technology and supplies, and especially harms Cubans who rely on highly specialized areas of medicine, including transgender people. While the U.S. Empire denies the basic human right to healthcare to its own citizens, the Yankee imperialists, in their efforts to recolonize Cuba, also seek to strangle the Cuban Revolution by blockading the island-nation and condemning thousands of ill and disabled Cubans to needless suffering. Moreover, due to Cuba’s diminished resources, gender-affirming surgeries, HRT, and other more specialized aspects of transgender healthcare are generally only available in Havana. Transgender Cubans living outside the capital, and especially for those residing in the Cuban countryside, have consequently reported hardships in accessing adequate healthcare.

In the domain of culture, although Cuban society has radically changed in the last few decades, far from everyone is accepting of transgender people. But Cuban society is moving forward: Like the other avenues of struggle for sexual liberation, trans rights are accumulating cultural cache, and the Communist Party is working to change cultural attitudes and overcome the colonial artifact of machismo.

LGBT culture in Cuba

Gay and trans social life has long since emerged from hiding in the shadowy underground that once existed in pre-revolutionary Havana. Since the 1980s, and especially since the late 1990s, LGBT culture has become a celebrated part of Cuban society. Today, gay clubs are found in Cuban cities and towns, and LGBT nightlife is especially vibrant in the capital. Although Cuba is still in the process of systematically throwing off the chains of imperialism, the Havana of today is a far cry from the hub of gangsterism and “imperialist sexploitation” it was before the Cuban Revolution.

In 1993, a film sponsored by the Cuban government, Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), was the first in Cuban history to feature a gay main character. The plot, set in Havana, centers on a conflicted friendship between two young men: a gay artist and a straight member of the Cuban Union of Young Communists. The film explors themes of tolerance, the plight of gay men in revolutionary Cuba, and the way gay people related to the revolution, and was openly critical of the Communist Party’s previous, longstanding errors with regard to LGBT rights. The film broke box office records in Cuba and provoked controversy and discussion among the Cuban public, paving the way for further LGBT representation in Cuban cinema.

Since the early 2000s, it has been very common for Cuban films to feature openly LGBT characters and LGBT themes. A “Sexual Diversity Cinema Week” has been held in the country since 2005. LGBT themes have also become common in television and live theater in Cuba.

Since the 1990s, drag shows have entered mainstream culture in Cuba. A major contribution to the widespread interest in drag came in the form of a 1995 documentary, Mariposas en el Andamio (Butterflies on the Scaffold), which presented a positive view of solidarity between working-class women and the gay community in Havana during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Since the 2000s, local drag shows in many Cuban cities and towns have become sponsored by the Communist Party’s local Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

In 2008, Cuba planned its first pride parade, which was held in Havana. Since then, the Havana pride parade has been held every year in mid-May, usually coinciding with the  grassroots-organized International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia; the parade has grown in size each successive year since it began. This year, in 2022, Cuba became the first Latin American country to observe an LGBT History Month.

Cuba’s participatory democracy and the popular struggle for a new, progressive Constitution and Family Code

A revitalized campaign to legalize same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples, among other LGBT rights, was launched in late 2017, following over a year of campaigning championed by CENESEX. Growing activity around the issue of marriage equality, coupled with the struggles for the emancipation of children, the elderly, and disabled people, led Cuba’s National Assembly of Popular Power to begin drafting an amended version of the Constitution during its 2018 session.

The National Assembly’s drafted new Constitution included an article — Article 68 — that explicitly legalized same-sex marriage. In the former Constitution, ratified in 1976, marriage was defined specifically as “the voluntary union established between one man and one woman.” In other words, the 1976 Constitution only recognized heterosexual marriages, and stood in the way of marriage equality. The new Constitution, in Article 68, would have redefined marriage, in neutral terms, as a union between two people, having “absolutely equal rights and obligations.”

The National Assembly approved the draft of the new Constitution in a vote on July 22, 2018, and a nationwide public referendum was scheduled for 2019, so that the new Constitution would be ratified on a participatory democratic basis by the whole nation. In the meantime, a public consultation on the draft was opened, lasting from August 13 to November 15, 2018, during which mass meetings would be held at the local level to collect input, including suggested changes to the draft, from the public.

Problems arose immediately after the National Assembly vote. The new Constitution proposed by the government, and Article 68 in particular, received significant backlash from a well-organized, well-prepared, and well-funded coalition of Evangelical Chistian organizations — reportedly representing 21 denominations, including Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches. The anti-LGBT Evangelical coalition mobilized a massive petition against Article 68 of the new Constitution, which gathered 178,000 signatures, and threatened to sabotage the upcoming Constitutional referendum by turning public opinion against the expansion of LGBT rights. Missionaries organized rallies in their churches and went door-to-door flyering and putting up posters against marriage equality. Preachers united behind the slogan that heterosexual marriage is “the original design — the family as God created it.” Some anti-LGBT activists also claimed that marriage equality was incompatible with Communism, despite the Communist Party of Cuba’s longstanding endorsement of marriage equality. During the public consultation period, the Evangelical camp turned out in force to local mass meetings. By the end of the consultation period, Article 68 had become the most-discussed article, with a majority of attendees requesting its elimination.

The Communist Party and mass LGBT rights organizers were thrown off-guard, and the government was forced to adapt its strategy to combat the anti-LGBT coalition.

Only a few decades ago, Evangelicals had little organized presence, let alone power, in Cuba, as the state was officially atheistic in ideology and imposed very strict regulations on religious institutions. However, in the 1990s, Cuba transitioned from state atheism to state secularism, meaning that the state took no official position whatsoever on religion, and began to allow religious institutions greater privileges. Since then, U.S.-based Evangelical Christian organizations have funneled millions of dollars into Cuba, aiding reactionary churches and missionizing outfits active on the island. These millions represent just a drop in the bucket: American Evangelical Christians have spent untold billions of dollars proselytizing in colonially oppressed and underdeveloped countries, especially since the 1960s, when the Evangelical movement gained mainstream political traction in the U.S. Empire. In the process, the American Evangelical movement has spread the most virulent homophobia and transphobia across the Third World, intentionally exacerbating existing anti-LGBT cultural attitudes and legal codes inherited from the colonial era. LGBT people in countries across Africa and Latin America have suffered extreme forms of renewed state repression, institutional violence, and lynch-mob terror as a result of this U.S.-based colonial missionizing.

The American Evangelical movement is one of the most powerful, pervasive, and pernicious cultural institutions associated with American imperialism, and its influence presented a major, then-unanticipated challenge to the struggle for LGBT emancipation in Cuba. 

The government, in turn, quickly adapted its strategy — first, by withdrawing Article 68 from the new Constitution, and removing from the redrafted Constitution any language relating to marriage equality. Instead, in the second draft, the article concerning marriage, Article 82, reads as follows:

Marriage is a social and legal institution. It is one of the organizational structures of families. It is based on free consent and on the equality of rights, obligations, and legal capacity of spouses.

The amended article still defines marriage in neutral language, rather than along strictly heterosexual lines, but without explicitly legalizing marriage equality.

This second draft of the new Constitution was unanimously passed by a vote of the National Assembly on December 22, 2018. It was then put to a public referendum, held on February 24, 2019. The new Constitution was ratified by the Cuban electorate with 90.61% voting “Yes” (with a voter turnout of 90.15%).

Having withdrawn marriage equality from the newly ratified Constitution, the Cuban government instead planned to include it, along with a wide array of progressive reforms regarding the civil rights of LGBT people, women, and children, in a public referendum to amend the country’s Family Code.

To many pro-LGBT activists and intellectuals, the government appeared to be bending to conservative Christian interests and abandoning its professed commitment to marriage equality. For example, one Cuban professor, widely-quoted in the international English press, condemned the government’s decision, complaining that, “Equal rights to marriage in Cuba should be a presidential decree, not a referendum that exonerates the state from responsibility and opens the door to conservative homophobia.”

This is a perfectly understandable and empathetic sentiment. The Cuban government does hold the power to unilaterally institute marriage equality, and could have done so at any time, without consulting the Cuban public. (Additionally, the Cuban government has the authority to ban the reactionary Evangelical institutions for promoting anti-LGBT discrimination.) A referendum, on the other hand, is a much slower process, and its result is not assured from the outset.

But although it’s true that the government’s most “efficient” course of action would have been to simply decree marriage equality and simply ban anti-LGBT religious institutions, such an approach would have failed to carry forward the revolution’s vital task: the task of revolutionizing the masses. Revolutions cannot stand without a deeply rooted mass base of support, and revolutionaries can only plant such roots by continually proving, with real results, the righteousness of our vision. Revolutions cannot be sustained by enlightened commands, and revolutionaries must work, arduously and humbly, to continually earn the trust of the masses. Revolutions are not events, but long, historical processes, which, after all is said, can only be carried forward by continual mass struggle. It is only by involving the masses in the great historical struggle against the old, oppressive order — against the modern-colonial, capitalist, and in some places medieval order that we’ve inherited — and in the great historical struggle to build socialism, that the revolution can stand. The Cuban Revolution, like all successful revolutions, has been built on a robust participatory democracy, so that the people continue to become fully integrated with the revolution and its ultimate historical aim: the realization of a communist society.

What does this mean for the LGBT emancipation struggle in Cuba?

Cuba, like all countries, is a complex and diverse social web, and there are many contradictions among the people. For example, while the Cuban people overwhelmingly support the revolution’s aim of building socialism, many also hold conservative cultural views. Furthermore, 65% of Cubans are Christians by faith, which means that a majority of the population are at least somewhat influenced by the anti-LGBT teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and some Protestant sects. Still, even though large sections of the Cuban masses that have been misled by the reactionary Evangelical movement, polls suggest that a near-majority of Cubans have been sympathetic to expanding LGBT rights for at least the last decade; for instance, a poll conducted in 2016 found that 49% of the Cuban public were in favor of marriage equality specifically. But cultural attitudes are never set in stone, no matter how forward-thinking a society may be.

The current president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has stated unequivocally that he supports marriage equality, an end to all discrimination, and the full emancipation of LGBT people. But if he followed the advice of some activists, and simply decreed marriage equality into law, without honoring the Cuban Revolution’s participatory democratic process, then the Communist Party would risk alienating the Cuban masses and hardening public opinion against the LGBT struggle.

This is more or less how marriage equality became law in the U.S. Empire — by a decree of the Supreme Court. In the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution, a 250-year-old document written by slaveholding plantation-owners and slave-trading merchants, enshrines marriage equality. While the decision and the changes that came with it were of course welcome, and many thousands of gay couples in America have finally married as a result, we must acknowledge that this is a very flimsy legal basis for what should be considered a fundamental civil right. A fairly “moderate” Supreme Court “gave” us marriage equality — but that very same institution can take our rights away at any moment; all it needs to do is take the very same argument made by the previous Court (i.e., an appeal to the U.S. Constitution), and flip it on its head. And this isn’t a hypothetical fear: In his opinion on this year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade — repealing the previously “constitutional” right to abortions and other forms of reproductive healthcare — the extreme-right fascist Justice Clarence Thomas argued that other Supreme Court decisions that have granted civil rights protections based on esoteric and inscrutible readings of the U.S. Constitution, including the 2015 Obergefell ruling, should also be overturned. The current far-right Supreme Court is already prepared to strip us of every last “constitutional” civil right; they’re just waiting for the right cases to present themselves. Meanwhile, the Democrats, representing the left-wing of fascism in the U.S. Empire, have shown that they have no interest in passing even the most basic civil rights legislation, despite their current majorities in Congress — not least because perpetually holding oppressed sectors of the public hostage is the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s elections strategy. The result is that there is nothing in the way of today’s far-right Supreme Court, dominated by the recent wave of Trump-appointees, from repealing every last one of our “constitutional” civil rights, no matter how long those rights have been on the books as guarantees of the U.S. Empire’s “fundamental” law. 

By contrast, the goal of the Communist Party of Cuba was not to decree enlightened laws from above, but to build toward LGBT emancipation, as well as women’s and children’s emancipation, on an unshakable foundation: the will of the people. The Communist Party of Cuba clearly recognizes the need to build the revolution, and all the social progress it achieves, on this popular democratic foundation, and so it sought to win over the masses, not by decree, but through conversation and struggle, community by community, until the whole nation decreed, collectively and democratically, that emancipation would be law. Cuba’s participatory democracy was put into action in the form of a year-long public consultation process, centered on mass meetings, held at the community level, and mass educational campaigns, followed by a nationwide public referendum. By organizing local mass meetings across the country, the Communist Party encouraged the Cuban masses — of all sexual orientations and gender identities — to directly participate in the nation’s march toward LGBT emancipation.

The first draft of the new Family Code was published on September 15, 2021, and later that year, in December, a special Drafting Commission was established to organize a massive, nationwide public consultation, leading up to the popular referendum.

The public consultation lasted from February 15 to June 6, 2022. Organizers with the Federation of Cuban Women and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution went canvassing door-to-door, inviting the public to attend community meetings where they could discuss and debate the drafted Family Code, offer comments and suggestions, and participate in the drafting process. During the public consultation, the government held an astounding 79,192 community meetings across Cuba (including 1,159 among Cubans living abroad), attended by a total of over 6.5 million Cubans (75.93% of the electorate), resulting in 434,860 proposals from the public. The Drafting Commission revised and redrafted the Family Code at frequent intervals throughout the project’s run, in accordance with the public’s contributions, resulting in 25 versions of the Family Code draft. Each new version would be considered by the public, subjected to scrutiny, and returned to the Drafting Commission to be modified and refined. The huge outpouring of mass participation is illustrated by the fact that, just between versions 24 and 25 of the Family Code draft, the Drafting Commission modified nearly 50% of the draft’s 471 articles, and added 3 new articles, in accordance with the public’s contributions. The public consultation was, in and of itself, a historic success for Cuba’s participatory democracy, and, consequently, the new Family Code represented the collective political will of the entire nation.

The final version of the Family Code draft (version 25) was presented to the National Assembly and passed in July. Finally, the Family Code would be subjected to a popular referendum, held on September 25, 2022 (although polling stations opened a week earlier for Cubans living abroad).

Finally, on Sunday, September 25, 2022, the Cuban electorate voted in the popular referendum on the new Family Code. The referendum was a resounding success, with a clear, two-thirds majority of 66.85% voting “Yes” (with a voter turnout of 74.22%).

The day of the referendum, President Miguel Díaz-Canel expressed that Cuba “grew up” in the process — the educational campaigns, the mass community meetings of the public consultation process, and the mass participation in drafting and redrafting the proposed law — generated by the new Family Code.

A summary of the new Family Code

The editors have appended this mechanical translation of the new Family Code for the interested reader to browse. The translation was performed using Google translate, so is likely to contain errors and mis-translations.

Cuba’s new Family Code has been oversimplified by the capitalist press in the United States and the broader West as being something akin to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which tenuously “legalized” marriage equality in all 50 states. The Family Code is being “explained” more or less as the “legalization of gay marriage” — with little more said. 

Cuba’s new Family Code does, in fact, enshrine marriage equality as law — but it does so much more than that.

The Family Code is a comprehensive law, laying out the legal dimensions of families, children and the elderly, women, LGBT people, and disabled people. And the new Family Code is, in no uncertain terms, the most progressive and comprehensive law in history, anywhere on Earth, with regard to the emancipation of women, LGBT people, children, the elderly, and disabled people.

Moreover, Cuba’s new Family Code recognizes the fundamental, radically progressive ways that Cuba’s culture has changed regarding the place of women, LGBT people, and children in society under the socialist revolution, and aims to integrate these cultural changes with the people’s government by enshrining these ethical values as law. To this effect, President Miguel Diaz-Canal Bermudez, president of Cuba, stated the following:

This code … has developed something extraordinarily exceptional: affection as a legal value. This is why it has been called the “code of affection,” which is not a slogan; it is an essence. This norm has an undisputed ethical value; it teaches us to think [ethically] and gives us the tools to educate future generations.

The following is a comprehensive summary of Cuba’s new Family Code, as it was ratified by the Cuban electorate on September 25, 2022.

Title I lays out the law’s basic definitions. It defines the family as follows:

The State recognizes in families the fundamental cell of society… The different forms of family organization, based on relationships of affection, are created between family members, whatever the nature of the kinship, and between spouses or domestic partners.  Family members are obliged to fulfill family and social duties on the basis of love, affection, consideration, solidarity, fraternity, sharing, cooperation, protection, responsibility and mutual respect. The relationships that develop in the family environment are based on dignity and humanism as supreme values.

The Code then sets forth the guarantees that will underpin law-making, rules-making, and legal decisions in the future: It guarantees the right for all people to establish families, to enjoy family life, to have full equality in filiation (parent–child relationships), and to freely develop their personalities, intimacy, and family life. It guarantees children the right to “grow up in a happy family environment.” It extends the guarantee of full equality between women and men to the home, laying out the right of family members to expect an egalitarian distribution of time spent on domestic and care work, according to the ability of each family member. It protects the right of couples to determine whether they wish to have children, and to decide when to become parents. It reaffirms the right of women to control their bodies, and further protects “the full development of sexual and reproductive rights … regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability status or any other personal circumstance.” It guarantees a “harmonious and close family communication between grandmothers, grandfathers, and other relatives,” and standardizes the rights to “self-determination, wishes, desires, preferences, independence and equal opportunities in family life for older adults and those with disabilities.”

It replaces the legal principle of patria potestas (meaning, “authority of the father”), a reactionary, antiquated, male-chauvinist notion originating in the Roman Republic, and replaces it with the “system of parental responsibility,” which focuses on child-rearing not as an act of possession or a violent exercise of power, but as a mutual process, shared by the parent and child, based on mutual respect, conversation, and kindness. The Code treats teenagers as rights-bearing citizens, requires their thoughts and feelings to be respected by their families, and requires the recognition by family-members of the teenager’s growing and progressive autonomy. It grants all children the explicit right to be heard according to their capacity.

Title II addresses domestic violence, discrimination, and child care. The Family Code defines family violence as “hierarchical inequality within the family” and recognizes that “its main victims are women and others due to their gender, children and adolescents, the elderly, and people with disabilities.” In other words, the Code recognizes that abuse and exploitation within the family reflect social disparities in power.

In this regard, Cuba’s new Family Code stands in sharp contrast to the incoherent “domestic violence” legal regime of the U.S. Empire, in which, more often than not, no distinction is made between abusive and defensive violence. The result is that the victims of domestic violence are criminalized for acting in self-defense, while the abusers carry on with impunity. Under the U.S. regime, in recent years, we have watched in horror as child victims of sex-trafficking have been sentenced to life-terms in prison for the “crime” of killing the monsters who’ve sexually abused and exploited them.

Title II also guarantees protections against discrimination and neglect of family members on the basis of sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, disability, and so on. In other words, under the Code, all family members have a legal right to not be ostracized by their families on the basis of protected identity categories; conversely, families have a collective legal obligation to accept and include family members who are LGBT, disabled, of a different race, and so on. Furthermore, all victims of domestic violence and discrimination have the right to protection from a social safety net and the right to legal recourse, while all citizens have the obligation to report instances of domestic violence and discrimination. It goes so far as to stipulate that domestic violence is never justified, regardless of how the victim was exposed to it, thereby protecting victims of domestic violence from having their grievances dismissed by victim-blaming.

Title III concerns the vaunted title on kinship. It establishes kinship not merely as those who are related by blood, but also those related by adoption, and even those who become family members through “socio-affective kinship,” which is “based on the will and behavior between people linked in affection by a stable and sustained relationship over time…” The legal nature of such “affective unions” is further enumerated under Title VII.

In sum, persons who love one another, and want to be legally affiliated as family members, can be under Cuba’s new Family Code. Families, according to the new Code, are created by and based on affection, just as much as they can be created by and based on blood.

Kinship has rights and obligations associated with it under Title III: the obligation of parents and carers to provide and equally distribute food, the right of pregnant persons to be cared for by their families, the right of family members to communicate with each other, the obligation of able-bodied family members to ensure that disabled family members can freely communicate and express themselves, and any others determined by the Cuban legal system in any other law or ruling.

Title IV and V concern parent–child relationships and children’s rights. Title IV opens with the declaration that, “Daughters and sons are equal, enjoy identical rights, and have the same household duties with respect to their mothers and fathers.”

Both titles lay out in great detail the conditions for the legal recognition and termination of parent–child relationships. In this respect, Title IV also defines the conditions for “multiparentality,” in which a person is legally recognized as having more than two parents, which can occur through voluntary surrogacy agreements, adoptions, and other kinship processes.

Title IV also details the rights of surrogates, and establishes procedures for “solidarity gestation.” This forbids paid surrogacy, ensuring that surrogacies only take place for “altruistic reasons and human solidarity.” In effect, this prohibits the exploitation of poor persons, by wealthy individuals and couples, to serve the merely biological function of gestation — a common practice in the U.S. and many other capitalist countries.

The content of parental responsibility is laid out in Title V. The Code holds that parents have a responsibility to love their children, to provide their children with emotional stability, and to contribute to their childrens’ free development. Parents are responsible for educating their children in a positive, non-violent, and participatory manner, preparing them to “lead a responsible life,” while respecting each child’s growing capacity for autonomy as they develop and mature. Parents are responsible for communicating with their children, and for facilitating healthy communication between children and their grandparents and other extended family members. Parents are responsible for listening to their children and including their children in decision-making conversations. Parents are responsible for providing their children with safe living conditions and food, taking care of their personal hygiene needs, attending to their “physical and mental health,” and generally keeping their children safe, as well as providing their children with age-appropriate recreational activities. Parents are responsible for instilling in their children, “by example,” attitudes of social justice, such as respect for equality, civil rights, “human solidarity,” “protecting the environment,” “coexistence,” and so on.

The above are just some of the obligations outlined under the new paradigm of “parental responsibility.” Conversely, children have the legal right to expect that these obligations will be fulfilled by their parents. Furthermore, the Code stipulates that these rights must be shared equally by all of a child’s parents. 

Title VI concerns marriage. It opens by defining marriage:

Marriage is the voluntarily arranged union of two people with the legal capacity to do so, in order to live together, on the basis of affection, love, and mutual respect. It constitutes one of the forms of family organization and is based on free consent and the equality of rights, duties, and legal capacity of the spouses.

This intentionally gender-neutral language unambiguously establishes the legal equality of same-sex marriage. Not coincidentally, this has been the only Family Code title significantly covered in the Western capitalist press — and even then, only this small part of the title. The other titles have been ignored or falsified.

The age of consent to marry is set as eighteen; minors cannot consent to be married, nor can persons who have been coerced into accepting a marriage.

Title VI also enumerates the rights and duties between spouses. In the first place, spouses have a duty to uphold “equality” in the relationship, and to treat each other with mutual “respect, consideration, and understanding.” The Code holds that spouses must share equal responsibility for the work of parenting and family care, and must divide household work on an egalitarian basis, with respect to either spouse’s ability. Furthermore, the Code stipulates that, “In the event that there is a sexual division of roles and functions [in housework] during the cohabitation of the spouses, this cannot give rise to imbalances or economic damages for them.” Housework is considered real work, with real economic value, and spouses who take on a disproportionate share of that work are legally entitled to compensation for their otherwise unpaid labor. These provisions give unique legal weight to a basic, decades-old feminist goal: freeing women from unequal burdens in the domain of housework. This equality in the household also serves to undermine machismo in the home environment. Under the Code, marital property is divided equally when the marriage is dissolved.

Title VIII makes the Family Code, particularly its guarantees to protect the rights of children, applicable under foster family care and other non-family child-care.

Title IX protects the rights of the elderly and people with disabilities. It guarantees the right to a decent family life, to privacy, to communication, and to maintain links with other family members. Other listed rights are the right to autonomy, the right to choose the place of residence, to be free of discrimination and family violennce, the right to an accessible, safe, and healthy environment, and to inclusion in the family.

Under Title X, a family mediator is legally established to help mediate disputes in the family without involving carceral intervention. Mediations are out-of-court interventions led by “qualified professionals, without decision-making power.”

The last title, Title XI, deals with international law and its application under the Cuban Family Code. It begins by defining domicile and habitual residence — that is, the place of residence that a person intends to remain at (domicile), and the place where a person is physically established even if they have no permit and it appears in no registry (habitual residence). The initial chapter attempts to square foreign law with Cuban law where possible, except where its “effects are manifestly incompatible with public order.” Chapter II of Title XI addresses the regulatory standards of recognizing foreign marriages, giving power to the law of the place where the marriage was formalized. The same is true for the “affective de facto union.” Title XI grants spouses the right to dissolve their marriage under any various types of foreign laws if they both agree to it. It makes the obligation to give food international — that is, it establishes the obligation to be governed either by the law of the domicile of the obligor or Cuban law, whichever creates the greater obligation.

The final provisions of the Code integrate the old Family Law, establish civil legal capacity for minors, grant minors a proxy if they are too young to express themselves with a “sufficient degree of maturity,” and guarantees minors the right to be heard in “any process or matter that concerns them” as well as to “participate in their decisions about their person.” 

These provisions integrate other sections of the Civil Code, including succession and the right to patrimony and property, along with all the attendant circumstances of both transmission by will and intestate. Critically, it makes those who have denied support that is required under the Family Code ineligible to inherit. 

The remainder of the law brings the requirements for registration, paperwork, etc., into line with the new provisions of the Family Code such that old legal procedures are cleared away to make room for those that effectuate the new, progressive law.

Acknowledgement

For the first half of this article, we owe a considerable debt to the late Leslie Feinberg, a transgender Communist who, as a member of the Workers World Party, was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of transgender liberation. We encourage readers who are interested in learning more about the struggle for LGBT emancipation under the Cuban Revolution, up until the mid-2000s, to read her book, Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, which can be read and downloaded (as a PDF) for free here.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

The Opposition

General Reflections

Political polarisation doesn’t seem to be as serious among poorer Venezuelans as one would imagine. Jamaica has a history of political polarisation where streets or entire communities would be controlled by gangs that were affiliated with either of the 2 major political parties, and someone could be shot for just wearing the colour of one political party in the other party’s street. There was open warfare between militants of both parties in the streets, leading up to the 1980 election in Jamaica, and political violence was still seen as normal during my childhood.

The theatrics of political polarisation really seem to be from the political class and concentrated in Caracas. I met opposition supporters in Petare and Carora who have been friendly to me, despite knowing my alignment why I was there. I’ve stayed in touch with them.

The Myth of Popular Support for Juan Guaido

There is no doubt that you’ll see slogans and politicians’ names spray-painted on walls at different parts of the country; 2 opposition candidates from the 2018 presidential election had their names and faces spray-painted on walls in Lara, and both government and opposition politicians have their names spray-painted on walls in Caracas and Mérida. One name that I didn’t see, anywhere, was Juan Guaidó; this isn’t to say that his name is absolutely nowhere, because I won’t deny the possibility, but I personally didn’t see it anywhere. I think there is a higher chance that you will find the name of Henrique Capriles than that of Juan Guaidó.

Remember, Juan Guaidó was never a candidate in any presidential election before declaring himself president. This campaign to paint him as some popular alternative to Maduro is engineered by foreign media. He has never needed to run any real campaign for the presidency, and his claim to presidency was never tested by the ballot. His party refused to participate in the presidential election in 2018 and attempted to defame the politicians from other opposition parties who had decided to run against Maduro.

I’ve witnessed, for myself, that many people support the government. I also know that there are also many people who dislike the government like in any typical country, but I can’t honestly say that there are many people who support Juan Guaidó. He is not some democratic saint, or the leader of some popular movement that is being repressed; he is simply an opportunist who is seeking political power with the backing of the US.

Leopoldo Lopez

Leopoldo López is a much more influential figure in the opposition than Juan Guaidó; he is the leader of the party that Guaidó is in. Still, he is seen as “a divisive figure within the opposition” and “is often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry” by his own peers. He was jailed for his involvement in the violent riots in 2014 and has not been held accountable for decisions he made which resulted in deadly political clashes in 2002.

Some paint him as a popular figure of resistance to the government, but he is on the far-right fringes of the opposition, and there weren’t mass demonstrations in support of him when he was on trial. Actually, “the fact that he played some role in the contentious events of 2002 is widely known in his home country and has likely colored how many Venezuelans view his role” in the riots by the Guarimbas in 2014. The riots received wide media coverage, but the opinions of the many people who didn’t support them were ignored.

Direct Support from the US

At this point, it is not secret that the Venezuelan opposition has direct support from the US. They have sent over 90 million USD to the opposition this year, and they have openly endorsed some specific dangerous incidents like Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as president, the February 23 border incident, and the April 30 coup attempt. They have also been calling Venezuelan military officers to offer bribes and do other things to pressure them to turn against the government.

They were quick to vouch their support for Guaidó’s bid to oust Maduro. They also supported a coup attempt in 2002 and had allegedly met with the terrorists who attempted to assassinate the president in 2018.

The Promise of Life Support After Regime Change

Let me first establish that I don’t think regime change in Venezuela will be successful, and I am not speculating on the possibility of regime change and what may happen after. This section is strictly to speak of the opposition’s expectations, which exist whether we like them or not, and why they are dangerous and detached from reality.

The opposition is recklessly collaborating with the US on strategies that are aimed at wrecking the economy of Venezuela and making daily life miserable. This benefits them as they have fat pockets while the rest of the country is battling an economic crisis. There is a scarcity of US dollars caused by the sanctions which prevent Venezuela from exporting oil or interacting with much of the global financial system which is dominated by the US, so US dollars have become ridiculously expensive in Venezuela; the opposition having direct funds from the US government allows them to have power and influence that they would not have under normal circumstances.

The opposition expects that they can take power in Venezuela with the promise of rebuilding the country from the crisis, but the effects of the sanctions will be long-lasting, especially if Venezuela is reintegrated into the global economic system. They expect that they will take power and then they will get a lot of aid and favourable treatment from the US.

It is understandable that they expect aid and help from the US, but they are delusional if they think that it will solve the crises that Venezuela is facing. Help from the US is rarely humanitarian; they don’t care about funding social services that won’t make money. If anything, the US’ main interest would be getting returns on the investments that they have made, and they would count their regime change efforts as such. If they’re spending tens of millions of dollars to fund a change in government, they expect to be able to get something back.

Let us assume that the opposition knows that any investment the US makes in the future will be something that is economic, in terms of investing in developing or maintaining an industry; will even that be a reasonable expectation? Yes, it is reasonable that they will try but it’s not reasonable that it will work. This isn’t the first time that the US has been betting on or hoping for regime change in a country; they also salivated for Michael Manley to lose leadership of Jamaica to a politician who was US-friendly, Edward Seaga. The US went out of its way to help Seaga during his leadership in Jamaica, but that still failed and the economy was left in ruins.

The Unintended Effects of the Blockade

The Economic Effects of the Blockade

Both liberals and conservatives in the US support US imperialism, but they have different methods; the conservatives have more aggressive and overt approaches like we saw with the Bush administration in 2001-2009 and like we see now with the Trump administration, while the liberals who once supported these approaches are admitting that they don’t work to further the US’ agenda in these countries. While overt aggression is extremely damaging and does end up serving a part of the US’ agenda, they are somewhat correct in that overt aggression will not work to bring regime change in Cuba or Venezuela.

Listen carefully to the rhetoric of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and you’ll notice that they still vilify the Cuban government and speak about it condescendingly even when attempting to be peaceful. From an article in the Guardian in July 2015, it is evident that Clinton still wanted regime change in Cuba:

• She said that “no region in the world is better positioned to emerge as a new force for global peace and progress” and that “That progress had been promised to Cuba for 50 years.”
• She went on to complain that the aggressive strategy that has been used in the past have not been effective in accomplishing that; she says that it’s unwise to wait “for a failed policy to bear fruit.”
• Supporting the goals of the policy but not the approach, she recommends to “replace it with a smarter approach that empowers the Cuban private sector, Cuban civil society and the Cuban-American community to spur progress and keep pressure on the regime” to get “Cuba to reform its economy and political system more quickly.”
• The end goal is still regime change, but a softer method, because she still sees the Cuban government as adversaries and admits that the intention of a more friendly policy is still to be antagonistic to the Cuban government; “Engagement is not a gift to the Castros, it is a threat to the Castros. An American embassy in Havana isn’t a concession, it’s a beacon.”

Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State for 4 years in the earlier part of the Obama’s presidency. In the later years of his presidency, Obama had pursued very aggressive policies against Venezuela, despite attempting to soften up on Cuba. Donald Trump has reversed Obama’s policy of reproach towards Cuba, choosing to be aggressive instead, but he has continued Obama’s anti-Venezuela policies and has been brutal to both countries.

I’m not usually a fan of distinguishing between liberals and conservatives, because there is not much difference between them in juxtaposition to Socialists; Socialists and Communists are squarely on the Left, while liberals range from centrist to centre-right, and conservatives are simply right-wing. Their economic policies are pretty much the same; Obama is a neoliberal, much like the former president Ronald Reagan who we call a conservative. “Fiscal conservatism” is a big part of liberal economics; the terms have been muddled because both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ mean many different things in different contexts and different areas of policy.

Where I draw distinctions in this section, I use the term liberal is to refer specifically to neoliberals, and I use the term conservative is to refer specifically to neoconservatives. Neoliberal ideology is mostly concerned with economics, and concepts like free trade, whereas neoconservatism on the other hand is mostly concerned with foreign policy and is associated with the US’ most aggressive warmongering policies; they are not mutually exclusive, but they have different areas of priority.

Their stances on Cuba are an example of 2 approaches to the same goal; liberals believe that trade relations will influence Cuban society to reshape itself in the US’ favour, while conservatives prefer an aggressive approach that attempts to bring the Cuban people to their knees.

The approach towards China is another example, where Obama was pushing the TPP as a way to cement the US’ foothold in the Pacific through a free trade agreement, but Trump and his much more Nationalistic tendencies oppose free trade, so they scrapped those plans. This has left much ground for China to push for an alternative trade agreement which increases its influence on some of the countries that would have joined the TTP with the US, and the Trump administration’s response to China’s growing influence includes a trade war and significantly increased military activity in the Pacific rather than promoting free trade and letting the economic dynamics play out in the US’ favour to increase its influence in these countries.

All of this is said to establish that Donald Trump’s policies depart from neoliberalism, and liberal economists like Jeffrey Sachs have condemned the blockade against Venezuela; other economists have criticised other policies like tariffs on foreign goods because they are not in line with free trade. The blockade is not in line with neoliberalism because neoliberalism is about free trade, the removal of all barriers from trade; the US has never practised this perfectly but there will still be things we can say are more/less neoliberal than others or not neoliberal at all. This is not to discount the destructive nature of either Donald Trump’s policies or neoliberal policies, as both are destructive, and the US uses its power to impose its own interests in any case.

We can look at what neoliberalism has done to Haiti if we want just one example of how it ruins economies while benefitting the US. The US imposed neoliberal policies on Haiti, forcing them to cut their tariffs on rice because it was a ‘barrier to trade’ according to neoliberal ideology.

Tariffs are taxes on imported foreign goods to protect local goods from competition. Haiti had tariffs on rice; imported rice was taxed so it would be more expensive than local rice, so it was more likely for average Haitians to buy Haitian rice than American rice. “A significant portion of the economic, social and political predicament in Haiti can be traced to the decline of its agriculture sector. Up to about 30 years ago, Haiti was self-sufficient in the production of rice” but things changed.

As the competition drove Haitian farmers out of business, Haiti now produces much less rice and depends heavily on imports. As of 2010, it was said that “Haiti depends on the outside world for nearly all of its sustenance” including “80 percent of all rice eaten.”

Of course, “for Haitians, near-total dependence on imported food has been a disaster” as it has “put the country at the mercy of international prices”.

Neoliberalism has eroded Haiti’s food security. “Haiti imported only 19 percent of its food and produced enough rice to export, thanks in part to protective tariffs” in the past, but now Haiti imports most of its food and was the US’ “third largest buyer of rice, importing almost 300,000 metric tons per year” 68 by 2010.

To neoliberal economists, however, “food security” should not be a real concern. For example, one can look at statements made by a popular economist in Jamaica named Damien King, who mocks the concept of food security. This is a conversation that took place on Twitter on the 8th of September 2018.

To neoliberal economists, however, “food security” should not be a real concern. For example, one can look at statements made by a popular economist in Jamaica named Damien King, who mocks the concept of food security. This is a conversation that took place on Twitter69 on the 8th of September 2018.

Neoliberal ideology envisions a world free of conflict, a world free of political economy where politics and power imbalances don’t coerce, and a world where disasters or things like war and sanctions won’t interrupt trade. If there is a problem, they blame it on a barrier to trade. In their theories, you’ll more quickly see arguments that barriers to trade lead to conflict and that removing barriers to trade prevents conflict than you’ll see them talking about how conflict can negatively affect countries that are dependent on trade.

Neoliberals actually seem to even promote dependence on trade, and not by accident; they believe that each country should specialise in what it is most efficient in producing, and trade to attain whatever else they want or need. This is a cute ideal, but it is unrealistic. One conclusion that they draw from this is that if Country A produces food less efficiently than Country B, it should import food from Country B instead of trying to produce its own since producing its own will be more expensive for the consumers than importing.

The problem with dependence on trade is already known all too well by people who live in countries in the Caribbean or other places that have small economies or that import a lot of their important goods like food.

The market value of something that we specialise in may be high at first but may plummet at some point for reasons beyond that country’s control, which would reduce its buying power. Jamaica invested heavily in bauxite production in the 1980s, and it hit us hard when bauxite prices declined; more recently, Venezuela’s economy started to face some difficulties when the price of oil dropped by about 50% in 2014.

A conflict or natural disaster far away from Jamaica can still affect global prices of fuel, food, and other commodities, leading to these things becoming more expensive to produce or transport from wherever they were being imported. The blockade imposed by the US against Venezuela has led to fuel shortages in Cuba, because the US is outright preventing ships from transporting oil from Venezuela to Cuba72. This is a barrier to trade in the most serious sense, so I am not accusing neoliberals of supporting the blockade; however, the point is that the barrier to trade is one that wasn’t imposed by Cuba or Venezuela, but Cuba is nevertheless affected by it.

Likewise, one retort that neoliberals would bring up if you try to discuss Haiti is that American rice is subsidised and that they don’t support subsidies. It is true; the US government subsidises its agriculture and that helps its agricultural exports to undercut the prices of agricultural goods in other countries like Haiti. It’s not only the abolition of tariffs by the Haitian government that accounts for the price difference between Haitian and American rice, but the farmers in the US outright receive money from the US government. We acknowledge this and we acknowledge that neoliberals criticise subsidies, considering that free trade agreements usually argue against both subsidies and tariffs. However, the Haitian government and people are not responsible for the US’ policy of subsidising American farmers, and the economists’ criticism of the US’ policies won’t protect Haiti’s economy from the US’ tariffs, magically spawn food on Haitians’ tables, or solve its economic problems. The reality of the world we live in is that countries, especially smaller and less powerful ones, are vulnerable to things beyond their control. Food security is a real concern for us, and no country knows it better than one that is under a full blockade from the US; this is where we get to discussing Venezuela.

Before the financial sanctions and the blockade, Venezuela was exporting a lot of oil to the US and other countries; this allowed them to earn large amounts of foreign currency so that they could afford to import food and commodities. It was easier to import food than to produce its own for the most part; as a result, the urban areas consumed a lot of imported food. This wasn’t really a problem because they could afford to keep doing it. With the blockade now imposed on Venezuela, things have changed significantly; the new scarcity of foreign currency combined with the longstanding demand for foreign products has led to serious hyperinflation beyond what can be blamed on the government’s monetary policies.

1 USD was as much as 3,300 Bs.S in February. and some economists blamed the existence of currency controls and preferential trading for the problems with Venezuela’s currency; retailers were given preference for the sale of foreign currency so there was scarcity and they could sell foreign currency on the black market for higher prices than the official rate. In line with neoliberal recommendations, the government actually lifted controls on its currency which led to hyperinflation at an unprecedented rate. 1 USD was around 10,000 Bs.S when I arrived in late July, and around 17,000 Bs.S by the time I left in late August. The decision to lift the currency controls has been very unpopular among the people. Again, the current crisis of hyperinflation is the result of demand for imports combined with a lack of foreign currency to be able to buy those imports; the sanctions and blockade have severely damaged Venezuela’s ability to export, and therefore its ability to earn foreign exchange.

In the minds of idealist economists, food security is not a real concern; in reality, it is a serious issue for Haitians, Venezuelans, and people in other Global South countries. Now, Venezuelans are trying to be self-reliant in food production because their reality requires them to.

The hyperinflation and the increasing difficulty of daily life in Venezuela are intended effects of the blockade, but Venezuela’s steps to becoming self-reliant are unintended effects. With the prices of goods soaring from lack of imports, there is an opportunity for Venezuelan nationals to produce to meet the gap in demand left by lack of imports.

The blockade insulates Venezuela’s economy from the global Capitalist economy, having the exact opposite effect that free trade had on Haiti. Compared to Cuba, Venezuela has much more land and resources, as well as its own fuel, so it is more able to have a robust self-reliant economy. The neoconservatives took a big gamble, as they tried to pressure Venezuela until it would crumble, but it has not crumbled; instead, the global Capitalists are killing Capitalism in Venezuela. Import substitution is accelerating, and more young people are joining communes; I met a Comrade who was from the capital, Caracas, but moved all the way to the rural parts of Lara to join a commune there. Communes are being built even in urban areas like Caracas and Petare, but they are not physically contiguous communes; people are still organising themselves into communal councils and other social structures to manage socio-economic matters.

With global capital destroying its own ability to influence Venezuela’s internal affairs and dynamics, the Bolivarian Revolution has a chance to accelerate itself to achieve Socialism. I discussed this with a Cuban Comrade, and we both believe that some of the things I saw would be what a Communist society looks like. When I was in the communes, I could almost forget entirely about the hyperinflation. These people are organising their economies in real material terms rather than maintaining the economics of speculation.

I would ask myself, and a very few Comrades would ask me, what Communism would look like; before my trip to Venezuela, I did not know. I always thought that my generation would try to build Socialism and that Communism would be for 2-3 generations later. After what I saw when I visited Venezuela, Communism feels less like a distant ideal. I still believe that Communism is something for 2-3 generations after mine even if mine or the one after it accomplish the construction of Socialism, and I don’t think that Venezuela will somehow achieve a stateless and classless society right now or soon, but it can accelerate on its path to Socialism, and it is a beacon of hope that resistance to Capitalism and imperialism are possible.

This is not to say that I am in favour of the blockade, or to downplay its brutal effects on the lives of the Venezuelan people. It is a crime against humanity, and it must be condemned. However, we have seen that we cannot control the actions of our enemies; we see that decades of the entire world condemning the US’ blockade on Cuba has not brought about an end of that blockade, but the Cuban people still resist it. Cuba and Venezuela do not need the USA; if they must learn to survive without the USA, they will. Of course, the US knows this, which is why they design their sanctions to also sabotage relations between their targets and other countries; they try to force other countries, including their own unwilling allies, to drop economic ties with countries they dislike, i.e. Cuba, Iran, the DPRK, and others.

The main problem with the sanctions is that the US also punishes third parties for trading with the countries that they place sanctions on, so they try to stop other countries from trading with them by weaponizing the power of their currency. As the US’ currency loses its role in world trade and as the US’ actions undermine their own credibility, more countries will start to trade in other currencies and there may even be calls for relocation of multilateral bodies like the UN. The US will strain itself until it has no muscles to flex.

Political Effects of the Blockade

Another unintended effect of the blockade is that more Venezuelans realise that US intervention doesn’t benefit them. Whereas the causes of Venezuela’s problems were more obscure to some persons before, most Venezuelans – including supporters of the opposition – can now directly link their daily suffering to the US sanctions that have been imposed on the country.

Even someone who hates Maduro and continues to vilify him had to admit that the regime change strategies being used by the US government and Venezuelan opposition are harming Venezuelans and destroying their lives. Here are excerpts from an article he wrote:

“Over the past two years, Washington has imposed increasingly punitive economic sanctions on Venezuela. These sanctions have restricted the government’s access to external financing, limited its ability to sell assets and, most recently, barred it from trading oil with the United States.”
“The sanctions were designed to choke off revenues to the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Its architects claimed they would not generate suffering for Venezuelans. The reasoning was that Mr. Maduro would quickly back down, or the military would force him out before the sanctions could begin to have an effect. That was wrong.”
“The risks of famine — and what needs to be done to stop it — are lost in the conversation among Washington policymakers and the Venezuelan opposition.”
“Tell the opposition’s intellectual elites that sanctions are exacerbating the country’s crisis and you are likely to be met with silence or be told that this is false, that the country’s economic crisis began long before.”
“There is a stark contrast between their claims and the views of regular Venezuelans. A recent survey by the local pollster Datincorp found that 68 percent of Venezuelans believe sanctions have negatively affected their quality of life.”

Note that the unintended effect here is that the people directly blame the sanctions for their suffering and that anti-American sentiment is more easily brewing in the country; the brutal effects of the sanctions, in terms of it creating food shortages and making life harder for Venezuelan people, is not an unintended effect. They have attempted to strangle Cuba in the same way.

In 1960, officials in the US State Department assessed the political situation in Cuba when Fidel Castro was at the head of the revolutionary government, and they had to admit that “The majority of Cubans support Castro”, and concluded that “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

They recommended a policy “that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

They then identified that the main thing to use as an economic weapon against Cuba “would be flexible authority in the sugar legislation” because sugar was Cuba’s main export, just like US sanctions now target Venezuela’s main export, oil.

The US is essentially saying that the internal political situation of a country is not in their favour, so they are willing to create misery for people so that they will either blame their own government for misery or they’ll try to change their government just to please the US because they fear starvation.

The US is playing a sick game with itself, but no-one is winning. The West was misled to believe that Venezuela was a ticking time bomb that just needed a little more pressure; their expectation was that this pressure would lead to an explosion that would work in their favour, as their agenda is destabilisation and regime change. However, sometimes pressure turns graphite into diamond, as we have already seen in Cuba; the Bolivarian Revolution is simply becoming more hardened.

The Venezuelan Left now has an opportunity to rediscover itself under new conditions, and to reach out to those who are becoming increasingly aware of the sadistic nature of US foreign policy. Hopefully power can be consolidated in a similar enough fashion to what we see in Cuba, but with Venezuela’s own national characteristics. Life in Venezuela is not easy; it is neither a communal paradise nor a grey dystopia, but the people are getting by. I am confident in the people’s ability – through their parties, unions, collectives, communes, and movements – to resist the heavy hand of US imperialism.

US State Department officials even warned against militant opposition towards Cuba from the outside, knowing it would not work, saying that it would only strengthen the Left in Cuba82. It has been difficult to penetrate Cuban society and to create internal opposition in Cuba, which is why they resorted to economic warfare.

Venezuela is a much larger country with much more people, land borders with other large countries including US allies, and an organised domestic political opposition that existed before and still exists during the revolutionary process in Venezuela. This is why the US has openly sponsored political violence in Venezuela83, and has sent over 90 million USD84 to Juan Guaid, the opposition’s self-proclaimed president.

Many people don’t want violence85, and the opposition’s violent tactics are turning people off, even those who are critical of the government; nevertheless, violence is the only way that the adventurists in the opposition have managed to seek the attention that they desperately crave. If they can’t win by creating a popular alternative to the government, they’ll just create chaos while the US wages economic warfare to make the lives of the people miserable. Left alone without US influence, the government won’t collapse.

In July of this year, Puerto Ricans stood outside the governor’s mansion and shouted “LUMA out!” The monopoly that recently took over the colony’s power grid has failed to prevent blackouts, provide consistent power, repair damaged grid equipment, orto keep prices down. LUMA was formed overnight in January of 2020 by the enormous energy concerns Quanta Services, Inc. (U.S.) and ATCO (Canada), which own it. A secret no-bid contracting process began in June of 2020 granted a 15-year monopoly to LUMA and sold off Puerto’s Rico’s formerly-publicly-owned power grid, transforming a public utility which all of Puerto Rico relied upon into just another investment opportunity for North American monopoly capital.

The privatization of the power grid has been a dream of U.S. imperialists since at least 2017 when Hurricane Maria rocked the island. Capitalist grifter and notorious union-buster Elon Musk was the first person to publicly suggest buying out the colony’s power grid and replacing it with private “micro-grids.” His vacuous tech-company Tesla had already been given Federal grants to build private “micro-grids” on the Hawai’ian island of Kauai, and he soon moved in to the poorest and least-developed parts of Puerto Rico, promising the world, and ultimately delivering little more than weed-choked fields of solar panels and disconnected batteries. Musk left the island worse than it was before. Now, LUMA has come to try to squeeze more from the embattled people.

Now, five years after the idea was first floated, the power grid is in private hands: LUMA’s hands. In June of 2020 when LUMA was awarded the contract, power cost 17.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. In July of 2022, under LUMA’s federally-subsidized private money-making venture, power now costs 33.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. That is, in the two years since the privatization of the power grid, consumer prices for electricity in Puerto Rico have nearly doubled, while the colony’s power infrastructure has either not been improved or substantially worsened. As it has since it was taken by the United States from Spain, Puerto Rico is being made to serve as a piggy-bank for U.S. capitalists.

In 2016, under President Obama’s Administration, the U.S. imperialist class received a gift in the form of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). This was the culmination of over a century of indignities inflicted by the U.S. Empire: in 1898, as the U.S. behemoth began its first steps on the road to world-empire, Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States as booty stolen from Spain after the Spanish-American War. After over one-hundred years of U.S. vampirism, although Puerto Ricans still cannot control their own economy or political sphere, although they cannot vote for the officials who govern their island, and although the U.S. Congress has done its best to bankrupt Puerto Rico, the citizens of that island were finally informed that the ultimate decisions about how to govern Puerto Rico would not be made by politicians at all. They’d be made by businessmen.

La Junta, they call it, but the law calls it the Fiscal Control Board. There are seven board members on la Junta, all of whom are appointed by the president of the U.S. Empire — for whom the Puerto Rican people are not permitted to vote. There are five officers elected by the board. PROMESA gives all twelve of these people complete legal immunity againstlawsuits for their actions as board members. (The officers themselves, under U.S. corporate law, are also generally immune from lawsuits so long as they are acting “within the scope of their position” and not found to be violating criminal law.) These PROMESA vultures (who include Natalie Jaresko, a Ukrainian investment banker who was the Ukrainian Minister of Finance after the 2014 coup , Arthur Gonzalez, a rich lawyer and bankruptcy judge from New England, and David Skeel, a corporate law professor) determine financial policy for the Puerto Rican colony.

La Junta forced the island into privatizing the power grid and giving the contract to an American-Canadian joint-venture: LUMA. We’ve seen this pattern a thousand times before. LUMA is a corporation ready-made to loot the public coffers of Puerto Rico through the contract and the federal government through the subsidies being paid out to it. The most notable, of course, was the looting of the Weimar Republic through Nazi privitization. Even the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a bourgeois think-tank, decried the process by which Puerto Rico was forced to adopt LUMA. “[F]our of the five selection committee members gave identical scores to LUMA and one other bidder for the contract in 37 out of 38 categories; three of the members made the same mathematical mistake in tallying their scores. Scores recommended by… [a U.S. consulting company] also appeared to have been copied directly to the scoring sheets.” These scores were clearly ready-made and given to the selection committee with the instructions that LUMA be granted the contract.

According to court filings, LUMA requested $265 million in subsidies from the federal government for 2022 above and beyond the $700 million they received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to repair the power grid and the $12.8 billion approved for distribution to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which will undoubtedly filter through into LUMA’s hands as well.

What is the result of all this privatization? “Sometimes when it rains a little bit, the power goes out,” says Ramón Luis Nieves of San Juan. In April of this year, a fire at a LUMA power plant caused another island-wide outage. The figurehead governor of the island, Pedro Pierluisi, estimated that it would take eight years to rebuild the power grid. Nieves says that the outages have actually gotten worse since the LUMA takeover.

Throughout the summer and culminating at the end of July, the governor’s palace was the scene of furious protests demanding the island’s government get rid of the LUMA contract. It is only through narrow, direct campaigns like this one that the people of Puerto Rico can express their dissatisfaction with the colonizing U.S. Empire safely. To be openly critical of the U.S. is to court death, like Filiberto Ojeda Rios, who was assassinated in a shootout with agents of the FBI — one arm of the U.S. secret police. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which also targeted mainland activists, primarily Black freedom fighters like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Chairman Fred Hampton, extensively surveilled (and undoubtedly continues to surveil) “malcontents” in Puerto Rico. In 1937, for instance, the governor of the island (appointed by Franklin Roosevelt) ordered protestors to be dispersed with force and the U.S. colonial police killed 19 people.

Under U.S. rule, there have been some 2,000 political prisoners held by the colonial government. Their total sentences, added together, come to 11,116 years. There are still political activists in prison for their work denouncing the U.S. colonial overlord today. In 2017, Carlos Lopez Rivera was released on a commuted sentence after serving 36 years in prison, 12 of those in solitary confinement. People like Rivera fought and are continuing to fight to overthrow the unjust regime that foists “bargains” like the rapacious LUMA deal on Puerto Rico. This current outrage is merely the latest in a history of abasements visited on the Puerto Rican people by the United States — and all efforts must be made to stop the leeches of U.S. capital from sucking the blood of Puerto Rico for their own gain.

Hurricane Fiona even now spends its energy on Florida after it ripped through Puerto Rico last weekend. The storm once again knocked out LUMA’s power grid. “A lot of people – more than (during) Maria – lost their houses now… lost everything,” said Juan Miguel Gonzalez of San Juan. Even now, fully one week after the hurricane swept the island, of the nearly 1.5 million “customers” of LUMA on the island, PowerOutage.us reports that 800,000 are still out of power. This is the legacy of U.S. colonialism — late to the colony game, the U.S. Empire nevertheless has learned to play it well. It is time for those in the U.S. who care about the crimes our government is committing to stand up and say no more! The fight for Puerto Rico is the fight for the liberation of all oppressed nations under U.S. imperialist domination.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Che Guevara Brigade (Notes)

These were notes that were written during the Che Guevara Brigade, sometimes in transit or when visiting a site.

August 8 – General Notes on the Situation in Venezuela

Venezuela is under a near-total blockade by the USA, similar to the one imposed on Cuba. This makes it difficult to do trade with any country, because most countries trade with the USA and need USD currency even when trading with other countries. The USA’s hegemonic status amplifies the effect of any sanctions that it decides to unilaterally impose, and we could discuss the former colonial powers (like the UK, France, etc.) in a similar fashion.

The blockade has forced Venezuela to hasten its economic independence, i.e. to be less reliant on trade. Domestic production is replacing imports; as this process of import substitution advances, the effects of hyperinflation will wither, and the Venezuelan people can overcome the blockade.

One could ask why Venezuela didn’t seek economic independence earlier or why they didn’t diversify their economy, but things are more complicated, and I will address that separately. In those notes, I will try to talk about the difficulties around diversifying the economy, the attitude of economists towards the issue of food sovereignty, and the recent issue with the currency controls.

Venezuela is facing a similar situation to Cuba, but the dynamics of their internal politics differ greatly. Right now, Venezuela needs a strong government to accelerate the transformation to a self-reliant economy. This is not a critique of how much power Maduro has in national politics; he is the legitimate president and the reality on the ground doesn’t dispute this. Even those who dislike Maduro can’t deny that he is still the President. He has as much power as any other head of government and as much recognition as any other head of state. The political situation that I am trying to describe has nothing to do with the presidency.

The Bolivarian Revolution (as well as support for the government and Maduro) is upheld by a broad alliance of parties, movements, unions, communes, and collectives. The Left here is broad and popular, but its decentralised nature and the impotent ‘Democratic Socialist’ tendency of the ruling party prevent power from being consolidated in a fashion similar to the consolidation that we see in Cuba. There isn’t a Socialist dictatorship in Venezuela, but some people feel that there needs to be one.

August 13 – Alina Foods
Happy Birthday, Fidel.

We are visiting the “Alina Foods” factory. A collective of workers have been in control of the factory for 4 years, i.e. since 2015. The operations at the factory were halted by the foreign owners, so the workers seized control. They sold the leftover potatoes and got a loan from a state-owned bank to raise funds to continue operations.

They produce snacks from potatoes, plantains (not bananas), and cassava. They used bacon in the past but stopped because it was being imported. There are 63 workers, and they say that production is profitable. There were 150 workers, but the blockade has hindered things.

The opposition gained control of the state of Mérida and tried to intimidate the workers to leave the site. Workers sometimes had to guard the property themselves.

The government is giving them the necessary paperwork/documents in official recognition of their control of the place; they are already registered as a social enterprise. They are rebranding because the old owners were the ones who used the name and logo of “Alina Foods” – they are also redesigning the packaging of the snacks.

Workers have invented machine parts to create new products; one example was a cutter that creates a special type of potato chips that go well with hot dogs.

Revenue is around 6000 USD per month; this is used for wages, maintenance, and raw materials for production. After wages are paid, all revenue is reinvested in the production cycle. The factory currently operates well below its maximum capacity, largely due to the economic difficulties caused by the blockade, but production is still growing, and operations continue.

August 14 – Notes from the Border Regions

The only place I’ve seen long lines for fuel are in the border regions with Colombia. There is a lot of vehicular traffic in Caracas but no long lines for gas as far as I’ve seen, and I frequented everywhere between Petare and Catia. There are many places with food, both fresh produce and cooked meals, and without long lines.

The long lines in the border regions are due to the fact that fuel is ridiculously cheap here compared to Colombia, so a lot of fuel is bought, smuggled to Colombia, and then sold there where it is far more expensive. In addition to what I’ve seen with my own eyes about fuel, I’ve read about a similar issue with food, i.e. it is smuggled across the border because it is cheap/easy to get here while being expensive in Colombia; according to Western sources like The Guardian and Reuters, about 40% of food and medicine from Venezuela was being smuggled into other countries from as early as 2014 and was documented by another Western source as still being a significant issue in 2016.

On another note, I was communicating with my Comrades back home in Jamaica last night when I had some internet connectivity. I discussed some things that I learned about community-based production and CLAP. I learned about some of this in February, but I got a deeper understanding and more details now. Witnessing social enterprises here has softened my stance towards the “social entrepreneurship” concept pushed by Dr. K’nife and others.

I’ve also now deemed it lazy and very irresponsible to publish raw statistics on public/private sector ratios in the economy because co-operatives and community-based operations are technically considered to be privates sector in this dichotomy since they are not owned or controlled by the state, but they are not Capitalist in principle and therefore should not be lumped with the Capitalist private sector.

It is critical to be more careful, especially when discussing production, because much of the bourgeoisie here in Venezuela are lazy merchants who don’t produce anything; they import and resell commodities to accumulate capital for themselves while facilitating the depletion of national capital, i.e. they retain small percentages of the large amounts of money that leave the country to buy foreign-produced goods.

There is no real national bourgeoisie here, in Venezuela; a national bourgeoisie must be productive and able to increase national capital. I’ve been told that the bourgeoisie here hasn’t even invested in oil; oil production has been done by the state (even before the Bolivarian Revolution) and foreign investors.

A national alliance (in the way theorised by Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, or Chairman Mao) is not feasible here, in Venezuela. The bourgeoisie here is disposable, and there is more than enough fuel to cremate them or land to bury them (they can be given the choice). However, making moves against them is difficult:

• Firstly, Venezuela is the most scrutinised country in the world by Western media.

• Secondly, hostility to a powerful class with capital allows them to be a door for US intervention (as many of them already are).

But yes, we must be more careful in how we discuss the economy here. The economy is still largely Capitalist; Socialism definitely hasn’t been accomplished on a national scale yet, but it is being built.

What some persons lazily lump together and refer to the private sector includes:

• foreign investors
• the service sector (tourism, finance, telecommunications)
• big retailers/outlets (large-scale commerce)
• Capitalist producers
• Capitalist landowners
• campesinos/farmers (individual/family scale)
• small retailers/shops (individual/family scale in communities)
• collectives and communes

The ‘big Capitalists’ surely have a larger share of wealth, but the statistics on other groups are important as well. More careful analysis needs to be done than talking about a public/private sector dichotomy. A couple that operates a small shop in Petare cannot be in the same category as executives in telecommunications companies; both are private sector in a strict sense, and the operators of the small shop are trying to accumulate some capital through retail, but the operators of the small shop do not exploit labour and aren’t a part of some oligarchy. A commune that produces enough food for both self-reliance and commerce can’t be lumped with a private farm that exploits labour to produce food for profit.

Lastly, an anecdote about social enterprise to be mentioned better later: these entities don’t identify themselves as businesses (some don’t even identify themselves as enterprises), and they don’t operate for profit. Money from their small-scale operations is used to develop spaces where they provide education and other social services for free. I will elaborate on such an example with my notes on the Otro Beta movement.

August 14 – The Jesus Romero Anselmi Commune

As we visited the Jesus Romero Anselmi Commune, I no longer felt as if I was in a foreign country; most of the people here are Black. This place doesn’t look like the government did anything to develop it, but they still had Chavista signs, banners, posters, etc. – I only say this to dispel the myth that people’s support for the Bolivarian Revolution is based on poor people depending on the state for welfare. The people in this commune are self-identified Leftists; they were playing music and chanting at the imminent downfall of Macri in Argentina, and they sang along with all the Socialist chants and songs that we used in the brigade, because they knew them before. The names they use in Spanish, here and in other communes, are “Comuna Socialista…” and then their specific names; they identify specifically as Socialist communes.

The commune didn’t solely focus on agriculture; a commune is sometimes mistakenly thought of as some primitivist concept where farmers live in a collective. They produce good-quality clothing that is used by both the people in the commune and traded outside to earn money for the commune. I bought 2 dresses for a baby that was recently born in my household in Jamaica.

The municipality that we are in has 12 communes and 98 communal councils. This commune is in a cooperative with other communes; we will visit another commune in the same cooperative today. Over 2000 persons live in this commune. Over 440 hectares of land are controlled by this commune. The houses here are small flats, somewhat bigger than the 2-bedroom houses being built in many housing schemes in Jamaica. The houses seem to each have 2 bathrooms, and they also have a covered laundry area; the generic 2-bedroom model in Jamaica has only 1 bathroom and the washing area is outdoors. The yard space here is much bigger; houses are built further apart, and there are no fences or walls needed to mark boundaries.

The lands surrounding the main residential area have a lot of crops, including yucca, corn, and other things. I saw the largest passion fruit fields that I have ever seen in my life; I’ve never seen passion fruit production on such a scale before. There is a dense forested area that separates the agricultural fields from a nearby river that the residents visit and use sometimes.

August 14 – The Che Guevara Commune (Day 1)

The Che Guevara Commune takes up 25% of the land in the municipality that it is located in. It also has climate diversity, in that its lowest point is 150m above sea level (where it is warm) and the highest is ~4200m above sea level (it is cold here). It has more than 1300 families or ~3500 people living in it.

This commune is so large that it has 13 zones, each with its own communal council; 7 of these produce cocoa and 6 produce coffee. Their production is based on their climate. There is a complex including a processing plant and a greenhouse; the complex is under joint control of all the communal councils. Coffee and cocoa are produced for commerce while many other things are produced for food/subsistence. The processing plant is clean, well-maintained, and has modern machinery. A lot of chocolate is produced at the plant, and there is a sales office.

I spoke to a Venezuelan Comrade about how communal councils are elected and how they function; in each locality, members of communal councils are elected to specific positions or portfolios. For example, if there is a Culture portfolio, someone is elected to that; the person who comes 2nd for each council position serves as a deputy or substitute. The Comrade was elected to the Communications position in one of the communal councils in Petare. In the council that he is in, there are 5 positions for Finance (and therefore 5 deputies/substitutes).

Communal council elections are a standardised process nationwide; each council is elected every 2 years. Some communities have more positions than others; they create positions based on their needs, so a communal council may have a position for management of water, management of pests, or something specific to a community that isn’t in all communities.

August 15 – The Che Guevara Commune (Day 2)

The commune has a communal bank with its own digital currency and own app to circumvent the blockade and the USD.

The commune gives loans to its members in coffee; people ‘borrow’ coffee from the commune in weight, sell the coffee outside of the commune for cash to do whatever they want/need to do, then repay the ‘loan’ in coffee.

The commune has a relationship with Proinpa Foods (an industrial producer that we visited; I didn’t write notes on them during the visit).

Apart from crops, the commune also raises livestock for subsistence.

We left Mérida and headed to Lara.

August 15 – Nueva Esperanza Apartments

We visited an apartment complex called “Nueva Esperanza” in Carora, Lara – it is being built and developed by the “Pobladores” movement. The same movement seized a building in Caracas and turned it into a school.

Each building in the complex is an L-shape with 16 apartments; each apartment has 3 bedrooms and bathrooms. Each building also has an accessible roof with a covered area a bit bigger than the stairwell, and large uncovered areas. There are 4 buildings (i.e. 64 apartments) so far. Each pair of the L-shaped buildings is organised in a way that leaves a quadrangle for recreational space (including communal events).

Every family pays a maintenance fee of 300 Bs.S. The fee is very small, considering that 1 USD is about 13,000 Bs.S, so 300 Bs.S is like 0.02 USD. Even in February when 1 USD was 3,300 Bs.S, 300 Bs.S would have been 0.09 USD.

The complex falls under a communal council that is also responsible for some nearby areas, but they also have their own committees within the complex for production, organisation, planification, finance, formation, and communication.

There is a building that was being used for food and social services but is now used for administration (the office of the auditor, a warehouse) and a doctor’s office. The doctor’s office can be used/visited by persons who don’t live in the complex.

The complex is being expanded; the existing 4 buildings and 2 squares comprise 1 ‘terrace’ and 2 more terraces are being built for a total of 12 buildings (that would be 192 apartments, a total of 576 bedrooms). 110 families want to live in the complex. A family must do 60 hours of community service to earn an apartment.

The movement buys materials (cement and steel) from the government, and the government delivers the materials, but the residents and the members of the movement do most of the labour themselves. Many of the residents are elderly or at least middle-aged, so some of the labour is done by workers who are hired from the outside. Guarimbas (violent persons on the fringes of the opposition) try to attack the project and residents, so they set up a watch in the nights.

Children and their parents befriended me and a handful of other Comrades; I interacted with them a lot, and I also spent some time interacting with some of the construction workers, both the ones who live there and the ones who were hired from the outside.

August 17 – Alfareros del Gres

Workers seized control of the operations of this brick factory in 2012; it was operated by Spanish investors before that. The factory has been in operation non-stop since the workers took control, i.e. they have never needed to shut down production on a workday due to lack of supplies or a dispute or something like that. Workers’ control is recognised through their registration as a social enterprise, but they are going further by seeking total ownership instead of only control.

This is a large-scale industrial operation, though only 60 persons work here; a lot of the production processes are automated. The factory, as is, produces 190,000 bricks per month. They will also begin producing tiles. The workers that we’ve seen seem content. The factory doesn’t feel hot, despite the heavy machinery and this being one of the hotter parts of Venezuela. There are specific parts of the factory that are hot, but those places have the most automation (we don’t see any workers staying there, only passing by).

August 17 – A Refitted Brewery

We visited a factory that was once a brewery that produced beer. The owners tried to halt operations (which would cause the workers to lose their jobs), so the workers seized control and dismissed the owners in 2013. 62 workers work at the factory. Before seizing control, they had to work 12 hours per day. After seizing control, all workers’ shifts are now only 6 hours per day.

Instead of beer, they now produce flour, animal feed, and water; beer production required the input and processing of a lot of grain and water, so a lot of the old equipment was easily repurposed to produce flour, animal feed, and water.

The sale of animal feed is the main source of their revenue, while they truck water to communes and public facilities, even in other states. There is a lot of Communist imagery at the site.

August 18 – Arrival in Maizal

When I imagined communes, I imagined a homestead and a few houses or a small compound surrounded by some farmland, something like the size of a high school in Jamaica. La Comuna Maizal is the 3rd commune that I have visited; all 3 are huge areas. You can’t stay from 1 building and see everyone and everything and the people don’t all live in some compound.

These are communal spaces, but people have their own houses and yards. Some houses in the other communes are in clusters or rows like housing schemes or ‘normal’ neighbourhoods, but some are far apart like a typical rural setting. This commune doesn’t have housing; the members of the commune live in other neighbourhoods among non-members, but convene at the communal grounds for work, production, meetings, cultural activities, and other things.

August 20 – The Maizal Commune (Day 1)

Having arrived in the night, we could barely see the surrounding areas of the place we slept in. In the morning, we could see pigs, corn, cows, etc. – all the food that was eaten for dinner and breakfast are produced here by the commune.

The point of all these anecdotes isn’t to paint some romantic/feel-good sense, but rather to show that communal life is neither some Anarcho-Primitivist nonsense nor the abolition of certain personal comforts like living spaces and privacy.

We visited a ‘cultivation house’ which is a large complex with over a dozen large greenhouses, with space between them. At the time, they were trying an experiment with rice in the spaces outside between the greenhouses. The place that we stayed is not “El Maizal” – it is not their main territory, and neither is this place that has the greenhouses and the rice experiment.

The territory of the Jesus Romero Commune is more consolidated; the territory of the Maizal commune is split among different communal properties. The importance of noting this is to remind ourselves that we don’t need contiguous properties for projects or territory if we want to build a productive commune; a commune doesn’t need to begin as a single do-all physical site.

We later visited the main complex that the commune controls, the gigantic complex that they call ‘El Maizal’ – it has some workshops and factories surrounded by large crop fields. They have a gas distribution plant where 80 persons work. We visited a corn packing plant immediately after, where the shells are removed from corn and then the corn is packed into large bags. The trash from the shells is used as pig feed; the commune has a pig farm at another site. At this main site, they recently built a factory to produce corn flour; they currently have a single machine with 750hp that can produce 720 tons of flour per month (working 10 hours per day, 6 days per week).

August 21 – The Maizal Commune (Day 2)

We visited a pig farm that is one of the production sites owned and operated by the commune. 29 workers work here, producing ~4000 tons of pork per month. The workers get paid much more than minimum wage and are entitled to free lunch on workdays.

This was the last day of our stay in Lara. We headed to another state for 2 days of rest before we headed back to Caracas to reconvene.

Post-Notes

These are notes written after the Che Guevara Brigade; some things may be about encounters that took place during the Che Guevara Brigade, but they were not written until after it ended.

Invitations

I’ve been invited to visit and stay in multiple countries, though I’m not sure if I can. Comrades from Colombia were the most insistent with their invitation; one is from a movement that focuses on Afro-Colombian struggles, and she suggested that I visit the far North of Colombia where many Afro-Colombian people live. A Comrade from Argentina said that I should visit Argentina and that he would host me in his home.

Venezuelan Comrades and other persons I met insisted that I visit Venezuela again, and promised accommodation; I took their invitations seriously because they have hosted me already so I know that they can and would. I was hosted by Comrades in Petare, I was offered some help with accommodation from a Comrade in Caracas, and I was hosted by a family in Carora22. I was told by very specific persons that I have homes in Venezuela. I hope that I can return with other Comrades from the Caribbean to show them what I saw.

In the future, I hope that other Comrades from LANDS can form delegations to have these experiences, whether with me or instead of me. I am grateful for the bonds that I have built with people that I have met, but I want to eventually have a less central role in the face and image of the organisation, and I want the organisation’s relationship with other organisations to be less dependent on my personal relationships with other people.

Medication

I had taken some medication with me for the entire trip in general but for the Brigade especially, because it is guaranteed that persons will feel ill at some points. I brought some medication for headaches, diarrhoea, and vomiting; I didn’t need all of these things, but they became useful to my other Comrades. I also bought some sinus medication, but it ran out before the Brigade started, so I had to stop in a pharmacy to get more.

Hearing of medicine shortages in the media, you would think that a pharmacy’s shelves are empty or that there is less variety, especially in a pharmacy outside of Caracas. On the contrary, compared to Jamaica, the pharmacy a wider variety of over-the-counter drugs for simple things like sinusitis, and the prices were also ridiculously cheap. I was pleased. I could have waited until I had arrived in Venezuela before I bought medication.

Encounter with an Eco-Socialist

I met a Comrade who wore an Eco-Socialist shirt, and I was pleased to see it. I told her that I’ve gotten into arguments with dogmatic Westerners who say that Eco-Socialism doesn’t need to be a distinct tendency with its own name because Socialism is already environmentalist; this would be the same as saying that Marxism-Leninism doesn’t need its own name because Marxism is already inherently in favour of national liberation and anti-imperialism, a claim which would ignore the reality that many Marxists in the early 20th century were not concerned with those things.

The necessity of some sort of climate austerity and the understanding that we have to put limits on our growth goes beyond rejecting Capitalism’s infinite growth; one can reject Capitalism’s model of infinite growth without understanding that there needs to be an active effort towards degrowth of the economy that already exists. Eco-Socialism also has to be internationalist, to ensure that climate austerity is adopted where it is most needed, rather than forced on the already-marginalised people in the countries in the Third World.

Removing Populism from Socialism

Venezuelan Comrades told me that they are getting accustomed to some things during the crisis, and some of these things are normal in other countries that aren’t said to be having crises. For example, they eat less now than they did before the crisis, but they still eat more than anyone in my family. One admitted to me that they also use a lot of energy without much regard for wastage; you’ll see air conditioning in the poorest areas, something that was shocking for me as a Jamaican, and persons will have windows open while the air conditioning is on, because the price of fuel and electricity are ridiculously cheap there. Cuba, compared to Venezuela, is much more austere with energy use. Venezuelans were openly self-critical about these things, and some felt that the government made things too easy in an unsustainable way; they never had to think much about sustainability before, but they’re doing it now. This is not an indictment of the government, as they were simply pleasing the people. They will emerge from the blockade stronger than before.

Visit to Cultural Centre

The bus that we were using on our first day of the Brigade was not fit to take us for the entire journey, so we stopped at a cultural centre in small town in the state of Cojedes to wait for new buses to come so that we could change. The cultural centre was amazing; there was a lot of open space. I went in to use the restroom, and I had passed a classroom filled with young people who seemed to be practising for a theatre event, and a large open area filled with some other people practising dancing. The place was very clean, and I wish we had things like this in Jamaica; a lot of persons are interested in the arts.

Tauty TV

We visited Tatuy TV, a media house in Mérida. The persons who work here are not full-time journalists; they are all workers from other places, i.e. they have other jobs and they do the media work for Tatuy TV voluntarily.

The way that Tatuy TV operates is very different from the tendency that we see among the Left in the West, where activists or opinionated persons try to become career journalists in pursuit of attention/fame or an income. From watching Tatuy TV’s content, you don’t really see the faces of whoever is behind the work as they are not trying to become mini celebrities; at most, you will see long lists of credits. In the West, everyone wants to have their own blog or podcast, to build a sort of brand for their unchecked personal opinions; things become more about the personalities, preferences, and egos of the individuals involved in content creation, rather than the point or mission of the content itself.

Tatuy TV’s content is intended to educate and agitate. Some Comrades and I have some issues with some of their content, but we get where they are coming from, and we freely discuss these things with them, and they get what standpoint we are coming from. We (Comrades in the brigade and I) were impressed by what we saw, we built friendships with some of the Comrades from the organisation, and some of us did a lot of small activities with them separate from the main activities in the brigade.

Going forward, Tatuy TV and LANDS may have a working relationship, as they indicated interest in that. This will of course mean that we need to strengthen our Communications portfolio, and to prepare as well to develop Education as its own portfolio in the Secretariat.

Visit to Community Centre (Merida)

We visited a community centre in Mérida that was somewhat similar to the one in Petare, but it was not operated by the ‘Somos Otro Beta” movement. The building was at the corner of the block across from a park, and it had 3 floors. This area of Mérida seemed to be quiet.

The ground floor had a library and a bakery; the revenue from the bakery is likely used to fund other things at the centre. Some of us worked in there for the day, making arepas for dinner later in the night.

The floor above the ground floor had some bookshelves, a meeting area, and some offices; some activists operate a radio programme from there as well. Before arriving at the building, we were told that it’s a space that a lot of clubs and social movements use to do their work.

The top floor had an office, a kitchen, and a large balcony area. When we arrived, there were some teenagers participating in a rap battle, with many others spectating. We could see a lot of persons entering and leaving while we were there.

The main difference between this place and the one in Petare is that the one in Petare seems to focus a lot more on offering services; they have education, in that they offer multiple classes that attendees can materially benefit from, and they also have a clinic. This place in Mérida seemed to be a general community space, though nonetheless a valuable one.

We need community spaces like this in Jamaica, whether or not they will offer classes and skills training like the one in Petare. In both urban and rural areas, we could use more communal spaces for people, especially youth, to come together. In urban areas in Jamaica, there aren’t enough social spaces, so many inner-city youth convene on the street corner unless their community has a sports field; youth who aren’t wealthy are considered to be idling or loitering when they convene somewhere like a library or public space, as they are often considered to be wasting their time if they’re even at an internet café. In rural areas, people live far apart, and it would still be useful to have hubs for social activities. Petit-bourgeois youth may convene in green spaces in gated communities, or entertainment venues like restaurants and cafés; there aren’t enough developed and well-maintained public green spaces for youth to access otherwise. It would be important for youth to have spaces that they feel that they own and belong to, especially if there are scheduled activities or specialised areas for them to study, have meetings, share ideas, socialise, play, produce works of art, engage in skills training/practice, hold simple events, etc.

Visit to a Recreational Center

We visited a large recreational centre in Mérida, and we were told that there are several of them around the country. After this visit, I saw one in Barquisimeto in Lara and in another city and state that I don’t remember. The one we visited is a large cubic building with colourful external walls and 5 floors, and the 2 others that I saw looked the same from the outside.

When we entered, the ground floor has a front desk and a large playground. There were a lot of children playing when I got there, but they were leaving by the time that I got the chance to take some pictures; I had to attend 2 activities and a tour of the building. The tour started from the top:

• On the top of the building, there was a big basketball court with covering and a good quantity of seating. There were large translucent surfaces on all sides, so we could look out and see the city and surrounding neighbourhoods.
• On the top floor below the basketball court, there was a large area for fencing and a decent-sized area for table tennis; the fencing area had lockers and several lanes for fencing, while the table tennis area had 5 tables. Fencing equipment was freely available for anyone to borrow and use.
• On the floor below that, there was a boxing gym and another room that I’m not sure what it’s used for. The boxing gym had 2 boxing rings and some training equipment like punching bags. The other large room had some mats, lockers, tyres, and some mirrors; it’s possible that it’s a multi-purpose room as I can imagine it being used for yoga or for training for some types of sports.
• On the middle floor, there was a massive gym with well-maintained equipment. I was told that they were bought 5 years ago and that they’re expensive. Many persons were using it at the time that we visited, including what seemed to be a football team doing some fitness training. This gym was better than any expensive private gym that I have seen in Jamaica.
• On the floor just above the ground floor27, there was an auditorium where we held a meeting, some stands for social enterprises to display their products, some studios for community media initiatives. and restrooms.
• I went to the ground floor on my own to take pictures of the playground; it is bigger and has more things than any playground that I have ever visited before.

Access to this facility is free. When I told persons how much a gym membership costs in Jamaica, they looked at me as if I had committed a crime; the crime is Capitalism, but I am not the one committing it.

Visit to Pico Bolivar

We went to Pico Bolívar by cable cars. A Comrade took the opportunity to discuss Venezuela’s potential for tourism. Being from Jamaica, I took the opportunity to discuss some of the negative sides of Tourism with him. I said that we need to be careful and that we should avoid falling into some of the same traps that Caribbean islands have, where underpaid workers are used to keep prices low for entitled white foreigners who visit the country to get treated like gods who need to be pampered. I definitely saw Venezuela’s potential for eco-tourism and I also gave some ideas for cultural tourism; these forms of tourism depart from the colonial all-inclusive resort model, making it easier to avoid some negative things, but they are still not immune.

Somos Otro Beta in Quibor

We spent 2 days in the town of Quíbor in Lara with the Somos Otro Beta movement and visited 2 places that they operated. My Comrade from Petare, who introduced me to the movement during my first trip to Venezuela in February, explained to me that Somos Otro Beta isn’t a single movement, but rather a collaboration of multiple movements and organisations; the Comrades who led the Somos Otro Beta operations in Quíbor were also from the October 7 Collective, another organisation that operated in that city. I was too busy at the time to write any notes, but I remembered enough to include this in the post-notes.

They had taken control of a large building that was used as a public library before the local government abandoned it. The movement negotiated with the government for official control of the building so they could transform it into a community centre like the one in Petare. They had promised to maintain the library while doing other projects like the movement does in other places.

There is enough outdoor space to be used for cultivation, and there is some paved space that can be used for some sports. The space indoors is enough to fit an auditorium, a kitchen, a cafeteria, several classrooms, some offices, and activity-specific zones/areas/rooms. The movement already plotted out a floor plan for how they intend to use the space. They will need to make some repairs to the roof and install some plumbing fixtures, but the place is surely promising.

They also operate a bakery. There is a decree in the bakery, made by the October 7 Collective, that says that no individual is allowed to buy more than 4 loaves of bread per day. This suggested that the area had been struggling with food hoarding as well; they produce more than enough for everyone, but a handful of persons could together buy everything and hoard it if there was no regulation enforced.

Considerations with Diversifying the Economy

Many wannabe economists love to give a simplistic comment that some countries simply need to ‘diversify their economy’ to be better off; it has become an annoying platitude. It is true that a country is better off avoiding dependence on trade of a high-value product, but it is not that easy or simple to diversify the economy of a country with a high-value product. The Venezuelan government is trying nonetheless, and we are not saying that they shouldn’t; the main point here is that things are not that simple or easy.

Neoliberalism pressures countries towards specialisation and dependence on trade. By eroding barriers to trade that may actually be useful in protecting certain sectors of the economy, important sectors can become risky investments because of unbeatable competition from trade, or prices for domestic goods being impacted by international market dynamics.

Capital is coercive; it’s what forces farmers in many countries to prefer producing cash crops rather than focusing on food, and this is a legacy of colonialism. The economies of Third World countries have been organised around the needs and wants of consumers in the West. If an entitled European consumer is willing to pay more money for a cigar or some sugar than the average worker in Cuba or the Dominican Republic is able to pay for corn, that is pressure to produce tobacco or sugar instead of corn. The market is the language of daily life, and the people and interests with more money are the ones who are more heard. This is not something that the governments of either Cuba or Venezuela can control; they exist in a larger global economy that is Capitalist and that doesn’t care for the people or the goals of their governments.

Another problem is what neoliberal economists themselves call ‘Dutch Disease’ as explained by both the IMF and The Economist, where the export or even mere discovery of a high-value resource leads simultaneously to economic growth and increased demand for the exporting country’s currency, leading to higher domestic prices and strengthened currency; they coined this term specifically in reference to oil-rich countries.

It becomes difficult for such a country to export agricultural produce for competitive prices, because what’s cheap in its own currency is expensive for others, and dropping prices is not an easy option when costs/prices of inputs are rising domestically. It becomes easier for the consumers in such a country to buy imported food than to buy locally-produced food, so the business and workers from agriculture and other sectors suffer.

To make things easier for domestic producers, an oil-rich country could ensure its domestic prices of fuel are much lower than it sells things for to foreign countries; the thing is that Venezuela already does this, having fuel so cheap33 that I’ve been told that the price of a bottle of water is the same price as filling dozens of trucks with fuel; one consequence of this is that cheap oil/fuel is smuggled out of the country into neighbouring Colombia34, allowing a black market to boom. On the inverse, rising the domestic prices of oil to be closer to international prices would upset the people and exacerbate the damage done by Dutch Disease, simply by increasing domestic production costs35, as well as household expenses and therefore labour costs.

Of course, one does not need to think about all these things before simply saying the words “X country just needs to diversify its economy” – they just need to open their mouths and repeat a single phrase they came across once or twice as if they are cheap parrots, without doing any investigation or analysis of why the economy hasn’t been diversified or what factors impact the ability to diversify an economy.

Last weekend, for the first time, the Cuban Mission to the United Nations was permitted to send delegates to the state of Connecticut to meet directly with the U.S. people. This visit comes at a time when the island of Cuba is in dire need. The Trump government reversed gains won by the working classes of the U.S. Empire under Obama, not only undoing the steps the Obama government had been forced to take, but instituting 243 new, choking, sanctions rules, denying the Cuban people critical supplies and trade.

The delegation was led by Cuba’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta. Ambassador Pedroso was accompanied by the Deputy Representative, Yuri A. Gala Lopéz, Minister Counsellor Roberto Hernández de Alba Fuentes and Second Secretary Ernesto Sierra Pérez. Normally, members of the Cuban mission to the UN are not permitted to leave the ten-block area around the United Nations building in New York; the U.S. Empire does not have relations with the country of Cuba and does not recognize its diplomats. This was highlighted by a story Ambassador Pedroso told — he once tried to test the boundary by walking beyond the ten blocks. FBI agents sprang out of the ground and escorted him back, informing him that he “had to step back to the other side of the street.”

For two years, Connecticut’s José Oro has been working on bringing the Cuban mission to Connecticut. José is a Havana-born Cuban engineer who lives in North Haven, Connecticut and writes extensively for the website Cubadebate. He’s spent the past two years lobbying interest groups and state officials to permit the delegates from the Cuban mission to come to Connecticut in the hopes of building solidarity between the U.S. people and economically embattled Cubans. Enlisting the aid of the Greater Hartford Cuba Solidarity Committee and Connecticut State Assemblyman and Deputy Speaker for the Connecticut Hout Edwin Vargas, his efforts have borne fruit.

State Department approval was required to permit the embassy to leave its ten-block confines. It was through the efforts of Assemblyman Vargas that the Biden regime’s Secretary of State finally approved the visit. The ambassadors came to Connecticut for two days, 9 and 10 September, and made stops in Hamden, Hartford, and New Haven. They spoke at Quinnipiac University, the SEIU headquarters, and the New Haven public library before returning to the embassy in New York.

While we waited for the ambassadors to arrive at the SEIU headquarters (they had been delayed by late state department clearance), José recounted what Cuba had been like before the revolution: “They say it was flourishing. That’s a lie. It was flourishing… if you had money, were white, were Christian.” He told the gathered audience, consisting of delegates from the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition, the Connecticut Green Party, and other activist organizations, that he had grown up in an upper middle-class family in Havana. The island was heavily divided by class — and, as a result, race. José described the Catholic school in Havana he attended, run primarily by Quebecois priests. There were no Black Cubans there. Later, after the revolution, José asked the priests, “You taught us that we were all children of God… why didn’t you let Black children in?”

“It wasn’t up to us,” the priests told him. “If we had let a single Black student into the school, your parents would have pulled you out, just like that.”

This is the pre-revolutionary legacy that still lives on in Miami. “Most of the Cuban descendants in America don’t want to strangle Cuba,” he said. “That position belongs to an ultra-right group who live in Miami mansions. Unfortunately, they are very powerful. It is up to us to counteract them.”

Deputy Speaker Vargas inveigled against the powerful interests in the Democratic party that forced it to bow to the Miami rightists. “They’ll never be on our side, no matter what we do,” he cautioned. Nevertheless, he warned that the jackals of the Biden administration have abandoned their campaign promises to normalize relations with the island of Cuba precisely to appease this group of wealthy Cuban exiles. “They’re ultra-right racists,” he thundered, “And if the United States can have normal relations with the most repressive countries in the world — Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and gay people, for example — then we should be able to have normal relations with this little island that’s only ninety miles away.”

The ambassadors arrived to a standing ovation. Ambassador Pedroso began with a summary of the current relations of the U.S. Empire and Cuba. The 243 new economic measures put in place by Trump he characterized as a “strategy of maximum pressure.” As Trump fled office, in his last days, he added Cuba to the U.S. list of sponsors of state terrorism. Biden failed to review the sanctions — worse, the Biden regime has adopted new actions with the aim of enforcing the embargo. It was Biden who refused to permit Cuba to purchase oxygen during the COVID pandemic, Biden who maintains the economic stranglehold that threatens Cuba.

“It is important,” said Ambassador Pedroso, “that there are people who are working for change, and equally important that there are people who believe change can come. There is nothing in Cuba against the U.S. people. You are welcome in Cuba with open arms. Still, we are here; and we will be there. We have the right, and we have the determination to resist. We are not going to yield.”

The ambassador thanked Connecticut especially for starting the car caravans to protest the U.S. blockade, which have become a staple of pro-Cuba demonstrations across the country. They know, he told us, back in Cuba what we’re doing to try to put pressure on our bourgeois politicians. International solidarity is a keystone not only of good morality, but of Cuban policy.

He went on to describe the ways that Cuba lived up to its moral obligation of solidarity. “We send aid and, unlike the U.S. aid, the World Bank, and so forth, we take nothing back when we go.” The Cuban soldiers in Angola, he reminded us, were not there for imperialist plunder, but to end apartheid. When they left, the only things they took with them were the bodies of the Cubans who had died fighting that evil regime.

The Cuban medical cooperation missions are a point of pride. “We do not force those doctors to go abroad. They read the contract and they have the choice. And if they do go, they still get their salary at home while they’re gone,” he explained, to dispel the pernicious myths constantly repeated in the bourgeois press by figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Even when Cuba really didn’t have doctors to spare, during the pandemic, they sent doctors to Italy and the colonized periphery. Ambassador Gala added, “We do not say ‘here, have our leftovers,’ we say please, take some of the little resources we have because we want to share.”

The COVID pandemic, Ambassador Pedroso said, had marked the point of reversal from the victories the working people of the U.S. had won against the blockade. It was an opportunity for the rapacious business interests in the U.S. to turn back the clock. Capitalist crises were striking, exacerbated by the COVID crisis. U.S. businesses want to minimize their exposure. But, the ambassador warned, even under the logic of capitalism, the embargo is “a non-sense.” Cuba would pay for the commodities it needs, would help the capitalists in the short term. Their natural desire for markets is being overridden by the ultra-right elements in Miami.

Then, he pointed to Cuba’s incredible achievements, even under the embargo. Only three countries were able to manufacture COVID vaccines: the U.S., biotechnological center of the world, business and corporate center of the world; the Russian Federation; the PRC; and Cuba. Out of these four countries, Cuba is the only one that had not two, but three different vaccines. “Why is this? What is behind this?” he asked. Cuban investment not in imperialist missions, but in the people. Education. Empowerment. The rugged self-reliance of a free people; he did not say as much, but the rugged self-reliance of a Communist people.

Afterwards, José approached me and greeted me warmly. We’ve only met a few times, through other activist circles, but he was as warm as if I were a long-lost comrade. He told me that, although he was born in Havana, he loves New England, and that he was working on getting Governor Sununu to invite the Cuban ambassadors to New Hampshire. He pumped my hand as he said, “His grandfather was an American soldier stationed in Havana during the Spanish-American War. Imagine, a Republican governor meeting with the ambassador. There is a saying in Spanish: whatever hole or crack, the water must get in the coconut.”

Whatever way, we will end this blockade.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Week in Petare

I spent a week in Petare, which I am told is one of the 3 largest slums in the world. In the nights, I slept in an office in a community centre in that is run by the Otro Beta movement in Venezuela, in the Antonio Jose de Sucre barrio. While there, I was told that the persons who live in the area are friendly and open so I could approach them randomly to ask questions. Some persons aren’t always in the mood to be approached by random strangers asking questions; as someone who is like that, I wouldn’t have thought to engage persons in the community unless I was told so.

The “Cacica Urimare” Community Center

The community centre is named “Cacica Urimare” after an indigenous leader. I had visited it before in February, and the concept and operations had excited my Comrades in Jamaica because we wanted to do similar things here even before a visit was made to the one in Petare.

It is usually bustling with activity, but there were less persons during the week I spent there in July because they were doing maintenance (like painting the walls, refitting the kitchen to create a bakery, etc.) and preparing for the next term of classes that they offer there. There were still a handful of persons visiting the centre to work in the production centres, to practice dancing, to use the visual arts studio, and to hang out. If more persons had been there, I would have had more to interact with, without seeming random or risking the chance of awkward encounters.

Bakery

There was a kitchen when I visited in February, but it was being converted into a bakery when I visited in the summer. The bakery would generate more revenue for the community centre and would be better integrated with other operations there.

Mill

A room was being converted into a mill to be able to produce flour from corn and cassava; some of the equipment was already bought, and the community centre already has some agricultural production that could be used as input. The flour produced by this mill would be used for 3 things: to supply the bakery, to sell to the CLAP network, and to sell to the private sector.

“CLAP” refers to the state’s organisation of local committees that manage community-based production and distribution of some goods; it buys food and other supplies and distributes them to outlets so that they are given to the people at prices far below the market price. The community centre would begin to sell flour to CLAP at a low rate and sell the rest to the private sector (nearby shops and restaurants) at the market rate. I suggested looking into the production of pasta from the flour as well.

Textile Workshop

The community centre has a textile workshop that produces clothes. I had seen it when I visited earlier in the year. This workshop is one of the ways that the community centre generates revenue to keep itself operational. The clothes that are produced and sold there are of a good quality and are cheap compared to what is offered by the private sector. I bought 2 samples, a polo shirt and a pair of pyjama pants, to take back to Jamaica to show others.

Dance Classes

Two groups of girls – one group of teenagers and a group of much younger girls – were practising dancing. The older group was practising first. I heard some music that sounded similar to something Caribbean, so I went in the room to see, and they invited me to stay; I made myself useful while I was there, as they asked me to do two favours to assist them.

The younger group came in later on with a dance instructor, who invited me to stay as well. They played some folk music and did some dances that reminded me of some dances that were done on specific cultural days in school in Jamaica; this led me to ask someone if the music and dance that they practise is Afro-Venezuelan, and he told me yes. Even the clothes that they were wearing seemed similar to Jamaica’s national dress, and I found that to be noteworthy. There should definitely be more cultural exchange between our 2 countries.

There is a school in Jamaica called the Venezuelan Institute for Cultural Cooperation that had been offering Spanish classes, free dance classes, and free music classes – they had to suspend operations this summer because the sanctions have prevented them from paying the staff since last year; this also affected a gardening project that LANDS was doing in the yard.

Music Studio

The community centre has a music studio that persons in the community can use for free. Many young people in Jamaica are interested in music but their interest isn’t sufficiently facilitated; it is especially difficult for persons from lower-income households, as they lack time and/or resources that can help them to develop their skills. The presence of a studio for recording music is a game changer, as it provides some of those resources and it builds an enabling environment. In other places that I visited in Venezuela, there were small media houses like radio stations and video studios; the music studio can be developed to facilitate such activities as well, but still serves a great purpose if it remains just a music studio. Such a facility in Jamaican communities would be very appreciated.

Health Centre

There is a health centre which offers both traditional services and conventional medical services; they offer check-ups and have medication in compliance with modern medicine standards, but they also offer other things that earn the trust and confidence of the members of the community.

The things that they offer are not only based on indigenous traditions from people in Venezuela, but also things like acupuncture. It is safer to get something like acupuncture done there, a place that has to meet the health and cleanliness standards of a clinic, than at a random place that may not put out the same effort to meet certain strict standards.

Classes & Skills Training

The community centre welcomes children to get help with their homework and also has its own classes on a variety of practical/vocational things like photography, video editing, electrical work, coding, hair styling, hair cutting, printing/stenography, English language, yoga, textile work, event planning, manicures and pedicures, mobile phone repairs, motorcycle repairs, acrobatics, urban agriculture, and some other things.

The movement has an arrangement with the Ministry of Education to give certification to some of the courses that are offered at the centre, so they get certification from the community centre itself but also certification from a formal school whose standards the community centre’s classes meet; this allows persons who take classes at the centre to easily re-integrate into the formal education system if they had dropped out. The classes are offered to persons of all ages, not just children.

Some of the things they teach are responsible use of the internet, including YouTube and social media, to create and disseminate content. I’ve maintained contact and become good friends with one of the teachers; he is frank with me about the realities and difficulties of the situation.

Encounters in Petare

Webpage on U.S. Intervention in Latin America

I had a few visitors while staying in the community centre; I had met them earlier in the year and I stayed in touch with some of them. They always ensured that I was okay, that I was comfortable, and that I had food.

One night, 4 of them were hanging out with me. Earlier that day, I had been showing one some information on US intervention in Latin America that we compiled for LANDS; he opted to show the others as we all talked about how far the US is going with its intervention strategy and how it is connected to the current daily difficulties in Venezuela.

They read the citations from the compilation and we visited a few of the actual articles that they were cited from, and they were shocked that the information was just there in plain sight, that the journalists and the politicians are open about their agenda in Venezuela.

Bachaqueros

One day, we descended from the hilly residential area that the community centre is in and hitched a ride to the more commercial area of Petare, where the metro station and many shops are. My friend was telling me about food hoarders who were only recently forced out of the area by police; they had occupied the streets and sold goods that they hoarded. They call them “bachaqueros” like big red ants.

They operate in bands/gangs that buy up large quantities of food or consumer goods to create shortages and then sell those same goods for much higher prices; this is somewhat similar to the concept of ‘scalpers’ in the West, who buy tickets to events and resell them for a higher price after they are sold out, but they do this with food and necessities rather than concert tickets.

They exacerbate the effects of the existing perception of scarcity and they profit from the hyperinflation, as they are able to sell goods for more money than they bought them. It is rumoured that they operate in networks with connections to smugglers on the border.

In a bakery operated by some Comrades from Somos Otro Beta in town in another state, they put a limit on the amount of bread that someone can buy in a day; the limit is 4 loaves, and 1 person definitely can’t consume that much bread in 1 day in any case. This is a measure to limit hoarding by bachaqueros.

Engaging Random Youth

I introduced myself to 4 teenagers, let them know that I’m from Jamaica and that I’m only in the community for a week and asked if we could talk about “the situation in Venezuela” – all of them allowed me to, then I proceeded to ask who they think is responsible for the situation.

One boy was sitting right outside the community centre for several hours, so I approached him first to ask. He seemed young, like 14-15. I asked if he spoke English and he said no, so I let him know that my Spanish isn’t great so that I may make mistakes. We got on with the conversation and I asked who he thinks is responsible or who he blames for the situation, and he said that he blames the people, including himself. I asked why, but then he started to get a little frustrated because I couldn’t understand everything he said; he directed me to a group of boys to ask them instead, and the main one he pointed to was someone who spoke some English. When he was answering, he was talking about consumption and the inflation, but nothing about politics. I approached the group of boys a little later because I had to attend to something.

A teenage girl who practises dancing in the community centre called me over to assist with something; I took the opportunity to engage her about this as well. I asked her who she blamed for the situation, and she said the same as the boy I first spoke to; she blames the people, including herself. When I asked her why, she also spoke about the economy and not about politics.

After my conversation with her, I approached someone from the group of boys who were sitting near the community centre, across from where I was talking to the first boy I encountered. They were teenagers who seemed to be slightly older than the first boy, like 17-19. The one who I approached spoke English. He had 3 persons beside him, but they didn’t join the conversation right away. I asked him about the situation, then I asked him who he holds responsible or who he blames, and his response was “the United States” and I said that I agree; he went on to talk about the economic war. I told him that Jamaica also had an economic war in the 1970s until 1980, and we discussed the similarities. One of his friends left to get something then returned to participate.

This friend joined the conversation and blamed Maduro for the situation, but he agreed that there is an economic war. We (his friend that I was talking to at first, and I) asked if he thinks anyone else could survive this economic war, and he said no; he also said that he thinks Maduro is in a difficult position. He didn’t seem to be truly anti-Maduro as much as he was just frustrated with the situation in general; the sanctions play on these frustrations, in my opinion.

They started to ask me questions about Jamaica, after this conversation. They asked me about the size and population of Jamaica, whether I could compare it to one of Venezuela’s states, and also about whether human rights are respected there.

Reflections on the Opposition (Petare)

I took note of how peaceful the conversation was between someone who believes strongly that the problems in Venezuela are due to US intervention, and someone who blamed Maduro for the country’s problems. People in Jamaica are far more ‘tribalistic’ (divisive) in their political opinions; nowadays it will turn into peaceful but loud passionate shouting matches, but differences in political opinions used to escalate to violence.

Some of my friends in Petare are from opposition households. I met one of my friend’s parents, 2 supporters of the opposition; they knew why I was in Venezuela and what my political leanings are, but they were nice and friendly to me, nevertheless. They offered me extra food when I only needed to reheat some food that I had from earlier, and the household gave me dinner one night when I hadn’t eaten on that day. They told me that they would look out for me if I needed anything and showed me which doors to knock if I needed them, and they meant it.

Interestingly, some opposition supporters cooperate or even support localised social movements like the one that operates the community centre in Petare, even though those movements openly support the president and the government. The political situation on the ground is not as polarised as the West portrays it to be. Some persons are critical of the government and support the opposition, but don’t actually believe that Venezuela is a dictatorship. Political polarisation doesn’t seem to be a problem in a place like Petare, in my experience and from what I witnessed.

Firstly, being ‘opposition’ or opposing the government doesn’t mean support for Guaidó; he represents a fringe of the opposition that is not popular in Venezuela. There is no popular movement that is pushing for him to become president. People are going about their daily lives; they are not constantly preoccupied with the topic of who is president, as the foreign media would have you assume.

One day when I went into Caracas, I walked around with my friend to run some errands; we passed the National Assembly and a nearby building that the Constituent National Assembly has its offices located. There weren’t many police or soldiers, or any excitement; people are just going about their lives as normal.

The ‘political turmoil’ is created by well-funded and well-armed members of the fringes of the opposition who create havoc for theatrics to justify US intervention. Despite being merely theatrics, the unfortunate reality is that they often put the lives of many people at risk.