Everyday Cuba

‘In Cuba there’s a lot of solidarity, you feel relaxed’

 

BY RÓGER CALERO

NEW YORK — “I’ve never seen anything like it! It was very impressive to see how officials came to assist those who needed to evacuate from less secured homes,” Luisa Coxall told me when she came back from Cuba. She described how the revolutionary government there organized the massive evacuation of 1.7 million people before the devastating landfall of Hurricane Irma Sept. 9. Coxall is a Cuban-American from Brooklyn who was visiting relatives in Havana when the storm hit.

“Buses and trucks came to pick up people, along with their belongings, and they all knew where they were going,” she said. “They only have six television channels, but they kept people informed — calmly and accurately — at every stage of the hurricane.”

She described how the civil defense workers came “down to each block in the neighborhood.”

I met Coxall in 2015 when we both joined a march here to protest the cop killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island. She’s a hospital worker, a member of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 for 26 years, who is now retired. This was her first extended visit back to Cuba since she came to the U.S. in 1966 as a child.

She said it was a revelation to see how working people in Cuba use their mass organizations — with the full support of their government — to advance their society and to mobilize to preserve human life when hurricanes or other natural disasters strike.

I said that this, along with the other accomplishments of the socialist revolution in Cuba, are living proof that working people can unite, organize, fight and transform ourselves as we participate in struggles. It’s the road workers and farmers in Cuba have been on since January 1959 when they took political power from the capitalist rulers and began building a society based on human solidarity.

She described other everyday experiences she witnessed during her stay that really had an impact on her. “I went to a dental clinic,” said Coxall. “Don’t expect to find a chair like the ones you see here in the United States, where they press a button and it moves up and down. No, they have to crank it up into position with a pedal. But the care was good, and it was free of charge.

“The doctor addresses you by first name, and with respect,” she said. “And they don’t lie to you about what you need to have done, because it’s not about money, they’re not going to charge you.”

Cubans don’t have medical insurance because health care is free and available to all.

“My sister got a beautiful set of new dentures for 20 Cuban pesos — less than one dollar!” she said, still in disbelief at the contrast with life under the capitalist profit system in the U.S.

“I saw a lot of solidarity. The neighbors look after each other, you feel relaxed,” she said, “You don’t have the shootings we have here. You can walk at night safely anywhere.”

“And I did,” she said with a smile. 
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2017/8146/814657.html

Syria today

....The crisis that led to the civil war in Syria remains unsolved. Assad’s regime has been bombarding towns and villages in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta — one of the de-escalation zones. Some 400,000 people live there. Syrian forces have held these towns under siege since 2013, resulting in famine and devastation. Children’s malnutrition levels there, the U.N. reported Nov. 29, are “the highest ever recorded in Syria” and one-third are “stunted.”

Weeklong airstrikes and mortar attacks against Eastern Ghouta killed more than 118 civilians as of Nov. 21, Dr. Faiz Orabi, a spokesman for the area’s health directorate, told the Wall Street Journal. Three hospitals were also struck.

Most residents see no alternative to staying put, regardless how bad things are. “Where are all the people going to go? To homes that aren’t theirs? To tent camps?” Anas Al-Khole, a journalist and government opponent in Eastern Ghouta, told the Journal. “Most of the people say that death is more merciful than leaving my home.”

Since 2011, some 75,000 people arrested by the government have been “disappeared” and at least 26,446 children are recorded as killed, a vast majority by government forces, reported the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

Assad regime targets Syrian Kurds

The Assad regime is taking aim at the Syrian Kurds, who are seeking to establish an autonomous region in northern Syria. Assad regime officials say they plan to oust the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces “occupiers” from territory in Raqqa and parts of Deir el-Zour province.

“I believe what happened in Iraq must become a lesson to the SDF,” Syrian presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban said Nov. 7, referring to the attacks by Iraqi forces and Iranian-backed Hashd al-Shaabi militia on Kurdistan Regional Government territory following the referendum there for independence.

Turkish President Erdogan, who once railed against Assad’s rule, now says he’s for cooperating with Assad in rolling back gains won by the Kurdish YPG in Syria. The Turkish rulers fear the impact that an autonomous Kurdish region along Syria’s northern border with Turkey will have on inspiring the fight by some 15 million Kurds in Turkey against national oppression and for their own homeland.

“There is a concept of a new war against the Kurds in all four parts of Kurdistan that aims to annihilate all the gains Kurdish people have made in recent years,” said Feleknas Uca of the Kurdish-based People’s Democratic Party (HDP) at a rally in Van, Turkey, Nov. 25.

More than 30 million Kurdish people — the world’s largest nationality without their own state — live in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. The rulers in all these countries oppose any moves toward Kurdish independence or autonomy.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon “is likely to announce” that Washington has about 2,000 troops in Syria, two U.S. officials told Reuters Nov. 24. Before this, Washington had only admitted to having 503 U.S. troops there, as well as 5,262 in Iraq. And they aren’t going anywhere soon.  
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2017/8146/814605.html

Zimbabwe today

....working people there face the consequences of a decadeslong capitalist economic crisis, a product of both the worldwide capitalist contraction and disastrous policies by Mugabe’s government designed to enrich his family and allies. In the midst of uncontrollable inflation in 2009 the government abandoned the currency, the Zimbabwe dollar. While the U.S. dollar replaced it in larger-scale commerce, for the overwhelming majority of Zimbabwe’s people barter became the norm. Over 90 percent of Zimbabwean toilers live outside what the government calls its “formal economy.”

From:

http://www.themilitant.com/2017/8146/814602.html

“Politically correct” liberal media act self-righteously as prosecutor, judge and executioner all at the same time.

Defend women’s rights! Protect right to presumption of innocence!

 

BY EMMA JOHNSON

Widespread and disturbing revelations about sexual attacks and abuse, starting with Hollywood and reaching into the halls of Congress, have come out over recent weeks. Something that has been widely known but talked about only behind closed doors has suddenly exploded into the open. To anyone who’s worked under a boss determined to get his own way and has control over hiring, firing, job assignments, pay raises and conditions at work, all this has a familiar ring.

But the situation is nowhere close to what it was half a century ago, before the modern movement for women’s rights emerged. “Women continue to be integrated into the workforce, and barriers to women and men working alongside each other as equals, performing the same jobs, are progressively being breached in both imperialist and semicolonial countries,” the Socialist Workers Party explained in its 2005 resolution, “Their Transformation and Ours.”

I traveled to Bangladesh a couple years ago to talk to garment workers, and this was really brought home to me. Millions of women had left their villages and started working together in a fast-growing garment industry. For the first time, they were part of a collective workforce, fighting together. In addition to safer workplaces, higher wages and shorter hours, they stressed the important gains they were making against the bosses’ sexual harassment and threats. This was a central demand of their unions and labor federations.

The same thing happened in the U.S. earlier. As barriers to women’s employment in one job and industry after another were battered down, so too were sexist behavior and abuse beaten back.

This political fight for women’s rights and dignity needs to be on the banner of the unions, an issue for all working people.

Anyone who says they’ve faced such abuse must have their charges seriously considered. If convicted, the perpetrators should go to jail.

But just because the acts are so despicable, it’s important not to throw out the window political rights and protections the working class has won over decades of battle. What’s involved are key questions for the working class.

Today the “politically correct” liberal media act self-righteously as prosecutor, judge and executioner all at the same time. Actors have been fired, dropped from future productions and publicly pilloried without any chance to defend themselves. None of the accusations have so far led to charges, let alone indictments.

This liberal hysteria has totally thrown out any presumption of innocence.

“The presumption of innocence has taken hundreds of years for working people to win,” SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes told a September 1988 meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, on the eve of the opening of the frame-up trial of party member and packinghouse unionist Mark Curtis on charges of rape. It is “one of the most important milestones on the march to human solidarity.”

While the courts are not an arena where working people find justice, the presumption of innocence is one elementary protection from being railroaded to prison or executed at the whim of the ruling class and their anti-labor press.

“It’s not that you’re innocent until proven guilty. You are innocent. Innocent,” Barnes said. “This is a country where everything is the opposite. It’s the presumption of guilt that dominates in the ‘democratic’ United States.”

In addition to the presumption of innocence, other indispensable rights workers have won include the right to face and confront your accuser, not to be tried twice on the same charge and laws covering statutes of limitation.

Whenever the rulers want to frame up and victimize someone, they whip up a campaign in the media and move to undercut our rights. It helps them a lot if they’ve chipped away at those rights beforehand, using particularly vile incidents to do so.

When inroads are made into these protections, it comes down hardest on the working class, especially the most vulnerable among us. We will find no justice in the rulers’ “justice system” — their cops, prosecutors and courts, their crooked grand juries and “plea bargain” system. We shoot ourselves in the foot if we allow ourselves to be convinced to throw out the presumption of innocence in the name of fighting abuse.

Today workers face blows from the boss class’s drive to make us pay for the crisis of their capitalist system. We can expect bigger battles ahead over our rights and more frame-ups promoted by the employers and their government!

Defend women’s rights! Protect the hard-fought political rights we’ve won and need! 
 
 

Source:

http://www.themilitant.com/2017/8144/814405.html

IN DEFENSE OF OCTOBER: A REPLY TO CHRIS TROTTER

https://convincingreasons.wordpress.com/2017/11/15/in-defense-of-october-a-reply-to-chris-trotter/

To conquer power, workers need to build communist parties

....

The war roused the working class to its feet in the revolutionary sense. Was the working class, because of its social weight, capable of carrying out the revolution before the war? What did it lack? It lacked the consciousness of its own strength. Its strength grew in Europe automatically, almost imperceptibly, with the growth of industry. The war shook up the working class. Because of this terrible and bloody upheaval, the entire working class in Europe was imbued with revolutionary moods on the very next day after the war ended. Consequently, one of the subjective factors, the desire to change this world, was at hand. What was lacking? The party was lacking, the party capable of leading the working class to victory. …

In 1917, in Russia we have: the February-March revolution; and within nine months — October. The revolutionary party guarantees victory to the working class and peasant poor. In 1918 — revolution in Germany, accompanied by changes at the top; the working class tries to forge ahead but is hurled back time and again. The proletarian revolution in Germany does not lead to victory. In 1919, the eruption of the Hungarian proletarian revolution: its base is too narrow and the party too weak. The revolution is crushed in a few months in 1919. …

In September 1920, we lived through the great movement in Italy. Precisely at that moment in the autumn of 1920 the Italian proletariat reached its highest point of ferment after the war. Mills, plants, railways, mines are seized. The state is disorganized, the bourgeoisie is virtually prostrate, its spine almost broken. It seems that only one more step forward is needed and the Italian working class will conquer power. But at this moment, its party, that same Socialist Party which had emerged from the previous epoch, although formally adhering to the Third International but with its spirit and roots still in the previous epoch, i.e., in the Second International — this party recoils in terror from the seizure of power, from the civil war, leaving the proletariat exposed. …

In Italy, in September, the working class was eager for battle. The party shied back in terror. In Germany the working class had been eager for battle. … But its efforts and sacrifices were not crowned by victory because it did not have at its head a sufficiently strong, experienced and cohesive party; instead there was another party at its head which saved the bourgeoisie for the second time, after saving it during the war. And now in 1921 the Communist Party of Germany, seeing how the bourgeoisie was consolidating its positions, wanted to make a heroic attempt to cut off the bourgeoisie’s road by an offensive, by a blow, and so it rushed ahead. But the working class did not support it. Why not? Because the working class had not yet learned to have confidence in the party. It did not yet fully know this party while its own experience in the civil war had brought it only defeats in the course of 1919–1920. …

The relations between the parties and the classes, between the Communist parties and the working classes in all countries of Europe are still not mature for an immediate offensive, for an immediate battle for the conquest of power. It is necessary to proceed with a painstaking education of the Communist ranks in a twofold sense: First, in the sense of fusing them together and tempering them; and second, in the sense of their conquering the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the working class. 

The Militant - November 20, 2017 -- To conquer power, workers need to build communist parties

http://themilitant.com/2017/8143/814349.html

Constitutional right to the presumption of innocence

Revoked Obama directive had zero to do with 
women’s rights

 

BY SETH GALINSKY

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos issued interim guidelines Sept. 22 to replace an executive order issued by the Barack Obama administration that gutted the constitutional right to the presumption of innocence in the name of fighting sexual harassment on college campuses....

Full story:

http://themilitant.com/2017/8138/813851.html