2019 Cuba May Day Brigade

U.S. contingent of the 2019 Cuba May Day Brigade

Recently I was privileged spend two weeks as a member of the 2019 Cuba May Day Brigade. This was my second time as a member of this international Brigade where 328 members from 21 countries came to Cuba to give their solidarity. This blog will look at the reasons why I found that time in Cuba so inspiring.

In order to appreciate this perspective, perhaps it is best to look at a few facts about my life. I have been a communist in the United States for about forty-six years. During that time, the press, the government, as well as the corporate world have labeled communism as the worst affliction humanity has ever suffered.

These powerful forces haven’t just made this argument, they have gone to war, supposedly to stop communism in Korea and Vietnam. These wars cost the lives of millions of people. They have had people arrested, fired from their jobs, and blacklisted all for arguing that human needs should be a priority over profits.

Saying this, being a communist in this country hasn’t been easy, but no leader of the communist movement ever argued that this would be an easy perspective to advance. So, allow me to take a look at what it means to live under the yoke of the capitalist system in the United States of America.

I believe that most people in the capitalist world need to dedicate themselves to the day-to-day crusade of “making a living.” This means adopting your life to the needs of en employer. You might be asked to work any hour of the day or night. You might need one, two, or even three jobs just to “make a living.” As much work as you do, there is a foreman who routinely demands that you do more. What are the results of this state of affairs?

I am presently retired. Judi and I have a home to live in, enough food to eat, a car, and access to health care. Saying this, I pay money for health care insurance. A representative of the insurance company informed me that our savings could be wiped out if either of us needs to be treated for cancer.

I can also say that there are tens of millions of people in the United States who do not have the advantages that we do. There are millions in the U.S. who do not have enough food to eat, or who lack housing or a car, or are functionally illiterate. People who live under these conditions typically work at horrendous jobs, with grossly repressive and dangerous environments, so the most affluent people in the world can maximize profits on their investments.

I can also say that there are tens of millions of people who have more financial resources than I do. Most of these people took a chance and either obtained degrees from universities or managed to run their own business. These people might have larger homes, more than one car, more time for vacations, more time to eat out at restaurants or travel, and possibly even a vacation home.

Having these things means that these people managed to circumvent the terrible “D’s”. These are: divorce, driving accidents, drug addiction, discrimination, and disease. Clearly people who have more resources are better able to deal with the terrible D’s than people with fewer resources. Jeffery Bezos, CEO of Amazon, recently divorced his former wife. He and his wife were each awarded tens of billions of dollars. I don’t believe that this was an unbearable hardship. 

I mentioned that people in the capitalist world, need to take a chance with their lives. This is because capitalist governments always make it their priority to advance the interests of corporations and not workers. This explains the fact that seven out of every ten workers in the world live on ten dollars per day or less. So, our standard of living depends, to a large extent, on the luck of the draw.

Because of this state of affairs, capitalist politicians need to promise all kinds of things. However, every worker who has any experience knows that all capitalist politicians give us an iron-clad guarantee, that as long as we live in the capitalist world, there will be war, poverty, destruction of the environment, as well as discrimination. Most people have tolerated all of this because they have been able to make a living, as well as raise a family.

Human History

Understanding this reality, we might take a brief look at our history. For most of human history our ancestors lived in communal societies where the idea of private property was unknown. Humanity needed to work collectively in order to survive.

Under those conditions, men were usually the hunters. Women did most of the other work that included: carrying heavy loads of water and wood from the forest, planting and harvesting the crops, providing medical care, and even building the homes. Because women were so important to these societies, they had real political power. Men needed the approval of women to become leaders.

Then, because of a combination of circumstances, the slave empires of Greece and Rome came into being. These slave empires lasted for hundreds of years. The Roman Empire went through many years of decline and eventually was overthrown.

Feudal regimes of kings and queens came to power. Craft guilds emerged and technology advanced. Serfs were not slaves and they had a right to farm the land where they lived. However, the feudal laws required peasants to never leave the manors where they worked.

Then, the revolutions against feudalism erupted. The revolution of the thirteen colonies was the first to make a clean break from feudalism in the world. However, the revolutionaries who created the United States also advanced the genocidal war against Native Americans, and gave support to the system of chattel slavery.

The Civil War removed slave owners from the positions of political power they held in the United States. However, after the defeat of radical reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan took political power in the former slave states and made Jim Crow segregation the law. The federal government supported these measures even though Jim Crow was a flagrant violation of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution.

In the year 1929 the stock market collapsed and the United States experienced about nine years of depression. During those years, the labor movement erupted and millions of workers began to join unions. So, while corporations claimed they had no money, they found the money to pay workers when they faced determined strikes by unions.

The two world wars were cash cows for corporations, and the United States became the world’s superpower. While workers risked their lives to fight in these wars, they saw no improvement in their standard of living.

So, after the Second World War hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike demanding union recognition, improved salaries, and working conditions. Corporations responded by granting many of the demands of unions. They also arrested and blacklisted union leaders who identified themselves as communists. It was in this climate that the United States government ordered the military to carry out holocausts in Korea and then Vietnam.           

I graduated from high school in the year 1971. This was a time of upheaval in the United States. During the late 1960s the National Guard invaded many cities in order to suppress rebellions in the Black community that were erupting in protest to police brutality. In my hometown of Newark, New Jersey, the National Guard murdered about 20 people including three children.

During these same years, the government ordered soldiers in the armed forces to go to war against the people of Vietnam, as well as Southeast Asia. Millions died in that war, including close to 60,000 U.S. soldiers. Yet, the U.S. government never actually declared war against Vietnam, making that so-called war an international crime.

Working people began to see the reality of the horrors of that war every evening on the nightly news. A student movement erupted and universities went on strike across the United States. The government responded by murdering protesters at Kent State University, at Jackson State, and in Los Angeles.

The combined effort of the Vietnamese resistance and the international anti-war movement forced the United States government to withdraw from Vietnam. Many people in Vietnam viewed the time after the war as the good years when they no longer were confronted with the day-to-day horrors of war. There was a delegation from Vietnam in our Cuba May Day Brigade.

In the United States, the early 1970s were the zenith of the standard of living for workers. I remember working a factory job at that time. I was young and wanted a job with fewer hours. So, I took a day off of work and looked for another job. In one day I was offered six jobs merely by walking into a factory and asking if they needed any help. Today someone looking for work usually needs to apply with a resume on a computer and rejections for those applications are routine.

In those days, tuition for a New Jersey resident at Rutgers University was $200 per semester. Today it is $10,000 per semester. Most employers offered health care insurance, and health care costs were largely affordable. At that time a high school graduate, who was willing to work, could afford a place to live, a car, and raise a family.

So many of those who were active in the labor, civil rights, or anti-war movements decided to take a step back, raise a family, and adopt to the reality of capitalism in those years. The standard of living in the United States has deteriorated sharply since those years.    

I’m writing about this history to show that, while there have been clear advances from the past, today we are in real danger of seeing our standard of living continue to plummet. Placing this history in context, I found that Cuba has given the world a clear example of how the world can be transformed.

The History of Cuba and the United States

During our two weeks in Cuba our Cuban representative gave us a talk about the history of his country. He argued that the revolutionary government that came to power in 1959 was a culmination of the revolutionary movements that had been erupting on the island since the year 1868.

The 1800s

In the year, 1868 the Civil War in the United States was over and slavery was abolished in this country. However, slavery continued to be a routine way of life in Cuba.

Trinidad, Cuba

Our Brigade visited the beautiful town of Trinidad on the southern coast of Cuba. During the 1800s Trinidad was a center for the slave trade on the island. Our Brigade felt the hot afternoon sun in this town. When slavery was the law, slaves worked under that same hot sun from sun-up until sun-down.

Before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States, there was a revolution in Cuba’s neighboring island of Haiti. A government of former slaves took power away from the former slave owners. So, the anti-slavery sentiment, as well as the demand for independence from Spain, became irresistible in Cuba.

For thirty years the Cubans battled the heavily armed Spanish military under the leadership of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Maximo Gomez, Jose Martí, and Antonio Maceo. When the revolutionary forces were about to become victorious, the United States entered the conflict.

Antonio Maceo

The Black Cuban Major General Antonio Maceo led an army known by the African word mambi. These were Black, caucasian, as well as Chinese Cubans who defeated the heavily armed Spanish forces in battle after battle.

During the same years as the first Cuban Revolution, the United States government made a decision to ignore the equal rights provision in the Constitution and give political power to the terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time as Cubans fought for their liberation, racists murdered thousands of Black people and the federal government made no effort to prosecute the murderers. 

After fighting in two battles in Cuba, the United States declared victory. They completely ignored the thirty years of revolutionary ferment in Cuba, and demanded that the U.S. government have veto power over the new Cuban government. This veto power became known as the Platt Amendment.

The 1900s

During the intervening years between 1898 and 1959 the revolutionary sentiment continued in Cuba. As in all nations where dire poverty is the norm, ruthless dictatorships became the ruling power on the island. One of the few ways to achieve a better economic life in those years was to support corrupt and ruthless dictatorships.

Because there was mass opposition to the government and because legal opposition to the regime of Fulgencio Batista became impossible, Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro engaged in an armed struggle. Their plan was to raid the Moncada military barracks in Santiago and take the arms in those barracks to the surrounding Sierra Maestra Mountains, where they would carry out a guerrilla war.

We might think about the fact that there was a battle before the American Revolution known as the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The idea of this battle was to defend an arms depot used to supply those who were advancing a revolutionary war for independence.

Then, in 1859 John Brown led his raid on the military garrison in Harpers Ferry, in what was then the state of Virginia. His idea was to capture weapons and retreat to the Allegheny Mountains where his forces would carry out a guerilla war against slave owners.

We might conclude that the battles of Lexington and Concord, Harpers Ferry, and Moncada all ended in defeat. We might also conclude that these battles led to revolutionary movements that eventually achieved victory.

So, on July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries raided the Moncada Barracks in Santiago. The armed forces that defended the regime of Batista murdered most of the revolutionaries. Fidel and others served time in prison.

Then, in August of 1955 racists in Mississippi murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till allegedly for whistling at a white woman. Till’s mother took his mutilated body to be viewed in Chicago, so people would know the barbarity her son suffered.

The murder of Emmett Till was the spark that ignited the civil rights movement. By December of 1955, the police of Montgomery, Alabama arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the back of a segregated bus. The NAACP responded to this arrest by organizing the 385-day Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Then, on January 1, 1959 the victorious Cuban revolutionary armed forces marched into Havana and established a new government. The decades of ruthless dictatorships were over. Enthusiastic crowds greeted Fidel and the revolutionaries as they entered Havana.

One of the first measures of the revolutionary government was to organize a literacy drive. At that time there was a large percentage of the population that didn’t know how to read. Because there weren’t enough teachers for this task, the government recruited young people who knew how to read.

They lived in the countryside teaching people who worked the land how to read. While the Cubans learned to read, they also began to understand that the only reason why they experienced poverty was to enrich some of the most affluent people in the world.

At the same time as this literacy drive was taking place, the legal system of Jim Crow segregation was the law in the United States. The government barred Black people from having access to the same public facilities caucasians used.

The murder of Emmett Till was clear evidence that even the lives of Black children were not safe where Jim Crow segregation was the law. By 1965 the U.S. government bowed to the demands of the Civil Rights movement and outlawed Jim Crow segregation.

However by 1966 through 1968 rebellions erupted in cities and towns across the United States. The cause of these rebellions had to do with the fact that even though segregation had been outlawed, police brutality was a routine reality in the Black community.

During these years, Fidel Castro came to New York City to speak at the United Nations. He had difficulty finding a room at a hotel, and Malcolm X arranged for Fidel to stay at the Teresa Hotel in Harlem. While the U.S. government was doing everything in it’s power to overthrow the Cuban government, Malcolm X and the residents of Harlem gave the Cuban revolutionaries a warm welcome.

Cuba continued to defend itself during the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) invasion, as well as being threatened with atomic bombs during the so-called Cuban missile crisis.

Then, in 1976 Cuba mobilized its military forces to prevent the South African backed invasion of Angola from seizing power. Thousands of Cubans died in that war, but by 1991 the forces backed by the South African apartheid regime were defeated. This defeat was one of the reasons why the government of Pretoria released Nelson Mandela from 27 years in prison. Mandela then became the president of South Africa.

Anyone interested in the history of this war can read about it in Piero Gleijeses book: Visions of Freedom – Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991. My review of this book can be seen at: Visions of Freedom

While Cuba was battling against apartheid in Angola, the United States government was in the midst of greatly increasing the prison population. Today the United States has more prisoners in its dungeons than any other nation in the world. These facts can be seen in Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow – Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.      

Today we can see the effects of sixty years of revolutionary policies by the Cuban government. Clearly the Cubans would acknowledge that they have made mistakes. However, today everyone in Cuba knows how to read. The educational system in Cuba has also created an atmosphere where today, there are three times more doctors per-capita in Cuba than in the United States.

In the January 18, 2019 issue of the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof compared the Cuban Health care system to health care in the United States He argued that because the infant mortality rate in Cuba is lower than in the United States, perhaps 7,500 children die every year in this country because we don’t have Cuban health care. Why is this the reality?

Cuban doctors live in the same neighborhoods as their patients. Pregnant women and children receive regular checkups from their neighborhood doctors. This is not the case in the United States, especially for people who don’t have a lot of money.

Kristof had this to say about the difference between the health care systems in Cuba and the United States: “In many ways, Cuban and United States health care systems are mirror opposites. Cuban health care is dilapidated, low-tech and free, and it is very good at ensuring that no one slips through the cracks. American medicine is high-tech and expensive, achieving some extraordinary results while stumbling at the basics: a lower percentage of children are vaccinated in the United States than in Cuba.”

When we begin to understand the tremendous change in Cuba that came about because of the revolution, we can also begin to appreciate the enthusiastic support the Cuban people have for their government. Our May Day Brigade witnessed this support when we viewed over one million Cubans celebrating their government on May Day of this year.

So, when we look at this long history, we see two different perspectives. One vision comes from Cuba. The other from Washington. In Cuba they use their limited resources to advance the interests of everyone. In the United States, resources are used to dominate the world, maintain conditions of dire poverty, and to tighten the sixty-year embargo against Cuba.

Our Brigade witnessed over one million Cubans in Havana enthusiastically supporting their government. Imagine women, and men, who were Black, white, and Chinese all marching together not to protest, but to support their government. In the United States this would only be a dream. In Cuba it is the reality.

Returning to the United States we learned that the embargo against Cuba is becoming even more aggressive. This will mean that life for the Cuban people will become more difficult. However, Cuban resistance to this criminal embargo will teach the world what humanity is capable of. Cuba has resisted the hostility of the United States government for over sixty years. Together with the solidarity of people throughout the world, Cuba will continue to inspire the support of everyone who feels that working people deserve to be treated with dignity.