Biden Calls Cuba “Terrorist” While The People Demand An End to U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba

[Pictured: Thousands of Cubans gather to celebrate the country’s National Rebellion Day, a yearly commemoration of the Cuban revolution]

By Calla Mairead Walsh

While Biden doubles down on Cuba's designation as a so-called “State Sponsor of Terrorism," the US people are calling for an end to US terrorism and sanctions against Cuba.

On Tuesday, May 23rd, the State Department reported that Cuba — along with Iran, Syria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Venezuela — are not “not cooperating fully” in the United States’ supposed fight against terrorism. The Biden administration officially designates Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” (SSOT), as well as Iran, Syria, and the DPRK.

Literally 0% of Americans view Cuba as a serious threat, and the Biden administration has provided no evidence of Cuba supporting terrorism in any way. Cuban and American officials even met earlier this month in Havana to discuss cooperating on anti-terrorism measures. So why is Biden keeping Cuba on the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list?

Sixty-four years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the United States is still waging an economic and media war against Cuba. The administrations of Trump and now Biden have weaponized the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list to isolate Cuba internationally and justify continuing the genocidal American blockade.

The impacts of being labeled a “State Sponsor of Terror”

It goes without saying that the United States is the biggest “State Sponsor of Terrorism” in the world. The US is the only country with over 800 foreign military bases and spends more on its military than 144 countries combined. The US has launched 251 foreign military interventions since 1991. A report recently published by Brown University shows that the post-9/11 wars the US waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan killed at least 4.5 million and displaced 38 to 60 million people. But the word “terrorist” is almost never applied to the US government. The term is highly politicized and subjective in the United States, used to demonize internal and external enemies and justify waging war on them, be it by bombs or blockades.

Designating Cuba as “terrorist” exacerbates the already devastating impacts of the American blockade, which has stolen an estimated $144.4 billion from the Cuban economy from the early 1960s to 2020, according to the United Nations. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) determined that US sanctions on Cuba “constitute the most severe and prolonged system of unilateral coercive measures ever applied against any country.”

On top of the blockade, Cuba’s “terrorist” designation restricts American foreign assistance, exports of dual-use items, and loans from the World Bank. It has also prevented Cuban Americans from transferring money to family in Cuba, stopped faith-based groups from shipping humanitarian supplies, and inhibited American universities from working with Cuban academics and institutions. Non-US citizens who have traveled to Cuba, a supposedly “terrorist” country, also have restrictions on visas to enter or visit the United States.

Despite being a list created and maintained only by the United States, because of its enormous power over the global financial system, the designation inhibits the ability of Cuba — and the other countries listed — to trade normally with the rest of the world. Banks don’t want to risk giving loans to a country labeled as “terrorist” by the hegemonic United States. The United States has sued foreign companies and banks for hundreds of millions of dollars for violating American sanctions on Cuba, and many major international banks no longer provide services to Cuba for fear of retaliation. The blockade as a whole is extraterritorial and thus violates international law.

The history of Cuba’s “terrorist” designation and US terrorism against Cuba

President Ronald Reagan first added Cuba to the terror list in 1982, citing Cuba’s support for national liberation movements across the world, such as giving military aid to Angola to defeat a US-backed invasion by the South African apartheid regime. Meanwhile, the United States was backing violent terrorism to sabotage the Cuban Revolution.

As Cuba expert Professor William LeoGrande said, Cuba’s “terrorist” designation “is ironic because in the 1960s, the CIA sponsored assassinations attempts, sabotage and paramilitary raids against Cuba—what today would be called state-sponsored terrorism—and CIA-trained Cuban exiles continued such attacks for the next several decades.”

Luis Posada Carriles, the mastermind behind many of these US-backed terrorist attacks — including the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 and a series of hotel bombings in 1997 — died peacefully in Florida in 2018, protected by the US government and lionized by the right-wing Cuban-American community in Miami. But Cuba, according to the State Department, was the real terrorist.

🧵 The terrorist attack the US doesn't want you to know about: Cubana Flight 455 🇨🇺

The CIA trained Cuban exiles who planted 2 time bombs on the plane on October 6, 1976. All 73 passengers & crew were murdered, including the entire Cuban Olympic fencing team. pic.twitter.com/UwORmyD5SL

— Calla (@CallaWalsh) March 10, 2023

During President Barack Obama’s second term, he pursued a policy of “rapprochement” with Cuba, restoring diplomatic relations and lifting some travel and trade restrictions. The Obama administration removed Cuba from the terror list, saying, “we will continue to have differences with the Cuban government, but our concerns over a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions fall outside the criteria that is relevant to whether to rescind Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.”

Obama’s “friendly” policy was still aimed at regime change through a new set of tactics, and he continued funding covert operations and “democracy promotion” programs aimed at undermining the Cuban Revolution. Nevertheless, rapprochement had positive effects for the Cuban and American people, especially renewed travel and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries. All of this was undone by Donald Trump.

Trump tightened the blockade and added an additional 243 sanctions on Cuba. Then, just four days after the January 6th insurrection, Trump and his neoconservative Secretary of State Mike Pompeo redesignated Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” They made this last-minute move in bitter spite of Cuba, but also to create a political obstacle for President Biden, who would be pressured from different sides to keep or remove Cuba’s “terrorist” designation.

Biden and Trump’s hawkish Cuba policy

Many Cubans and Americans alike hoped Biden would re-normalize US-Cuba relations as he promised during his campaign, when he said he would “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” But Biden has changed little. He slightly eased some Trump-era restrictions in May 2022 but has also renewed his predecessor’s harshest measures. As a result, Cuba — also impacted by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine — is experiencing its worst economic crisis and fuel shortages in decades.

The economic crisis in Cuba is fueling a political crisis for Biden at the border, as more Cubans than ever are leaving for the United States to escape the crushing impacts of sanctions. A group of Democratic lawmakers is urging Biden to lift Trump-era sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela to slow the surge of migration, but Biden has not moved a finger. Instead, he follows the line of conservative Cuban-American lawmakers on Cuba policy, especially Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who Biden needs to push his appointments through the confirmation process.

21 House Democrats urged @POTUS last week to lift Trump-era sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela contributing to record levels of migration:

“Ending these indiscriminate economic sanctions is an indispensable part of addressing the migrant crisis.”https://t.co/VZbkZ7AgRZ pic.twitter.com/useckZPg96

— Belly of the Beast (@bellybeastcuba) May 15, 2023

Menendez, who is currently under investigation for corruption, lambasted his fellow Democrats’ push against Trump-era sanctions and claimed that the Cuban and Venezuelan governments — not US policy — were solely responsible for the economic crises in those countries. The Washington Post reported that “Privately, senior Biden officials have conceded that picking a fight with [Menendez] is not worth whatever benefit might come from relaxing sanctions on [Cuba and Venezuela], even if it would fulfill a campaign promise Biden made to restore President Barack Obama’s policies toward Cuba.”

Despite Biden claiming to care about “human rights” and “supporting the Cuban people,” he is not changing his internationally condemned policy — which violates Cuba’s sovereignty and human rights — because doing so is not politically expedient.

Activists who support normalizing US-Cuba relations have concentrated on pressuring Biden to remove Cuba from the terror list because, as Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad wrote in Peoples Dispatch, “Biden can remove Cuba from this list with a stroke of his pen. It’s as simple as that” — unlike the blockade, which is a complex amalgamation of hundreds of different laws in the hands of Congress.

In the State Department’s most recent public remarks on Cuba, they have doubled down on Trump’s policy of keeping Cuba on the list. Earlier this year, far-right Florida Republicans Maria Salazar and Marco Rubio introduced the FORCE Act in the House and Senate, respectively, to codify into law Cuba’s “terrorist” designation so that it could only be removed by Congress, not the President alone.

And not only that. Cuba would have to meet impossible criteria, completely changing their political and economic system to be what the United States defines as “free,” in order for the designation to be lifted. As People’s Dispatch wrote, “Essentially, Salazar is demanding that the Cuban people overthrow their own government and overturn the Cuban political system which has been built by the people and for the people over the last 60 years.”

It could not be more clear that the terror list has nothing to do with preventing actual terrorism; rather, it is about harming enemy states of the US. In March, when Salazar interrogated Secretary of State Antony Blinken about Cuba’s “terrorist” designation, he said that Cuba would have to “meet a very high bar” to be removed from the list and the State Department had no plans to do so.

Earlier this month, Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez stumped State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel when she asked him “Why is Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list if you are trying to work with them to fight against terrorism?” He completely dodged the question, refusing to provide any examples of Cuban terrorism.

Cuba is on the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list. But "what evidence is there that Cuba sponsors terrorism?" @LizOlivaFdez asked @StateDeputySpox yesterday.

His answer was a new one from the @StateDept.

Apparently, it has nothing to do with terrorism at all. pic.twitter.com/vMJiz1fMuB

— Belly of the Beast (@bellybeastcuba) May 3, 2023

Even anti-Cuba mainstream US media has reported that the “terrorist” designation is “bogus.” NBC News wrote, “according to half a dozen interviews with former intelligence analysts and officials who worked on Cuba policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations, the ‘consensus position’ in the US intelligence community has for decades been that the communist-led nation does not sponsor terrorism.”

Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration said that “‘Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism’ was a mantra from the moment I walked into the State Department to the moment I walked out. It’s a fiction that we have created…to reinforce the rationale for the blockade.”

Similarly, Congressman Jim McGovern (Democrat-Massachusetts) and Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat-Vermont) published an op-ed in The Boston Globe explaining that “[i]t’s an open secret in Washington that Cuba does not belong on the list and that the previous false justification by the Trump administration was politically motivated.”

The #OffTheList campaign

The US government does not represent the American people on most issues — especially Cuba. The blockade of Cuba persists against the democratic will of the American people, a majority of whom have consistently opposed the blockade, especially restrictions on trading medicine and food with Cuba.

In the United States, Cuban-Americans, solidarity activists, labor unions, and local governments, have organized resistance to Biden’s designation of Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” Since January 2023, the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a coalition of over 50 organizations across the US working to end the blockade, has been leading an international campaign to get Cuba #OffTheList.

On June 25th, this movement will rally at the White House — and in other locations around the world — to demand Biden take Cuba off the list, lift all US sanctions, and end US terrorism against Cuba. The NNOC is organizing these rallies alongside the Canadian Network on Cuba, ANSWER Coalition, CODEPINK, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE), the International People’s Assembly, and over 70 other groups.

The voices of the American people and our progressive movements are clear: we want normalized relations with Cuba. Just in the past couple of years…

• Labor unions and city councils have passed over 80 resolutions supporting an end to the blockade, promoting scientific collaboration with Cuba, and urging that Cuba be removed from the terror list. And, just last week, the Washington, DC Council unanimously voted to pass a Cuba solidarity resolution and sent copies to Biden and key congresspeople urging them to end the blockade. Combined, these resolutions represent well over 50 million Americans.

• The 33 member states of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) demanded that the United States remove Cuba from the terror list and “reiterated their rejection of the US unilateral lists and certifications that affect Latin American countries.”

• Across the world, there have been monthly rallies and car caravans initiated by Cuban-Americans calling to end the blockade, take Cuba off the list, and build Puentes de Amor (bridges of love) between the American and Cuban people.

• Over 100 Democratic House members urged Biden to remove Cuba from the SSOT list and normalize US-Cuba relations. Their open letter was signed by big names like Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations Chair Barbara Lee of California, Rules Committee Chair James McGovern of Massachusetts, and Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks of New York.

• Nearly 9,000 Cuban and American business owners sent a letter to Biden demanding he lift Trump-era sanctions and deliver on promises to help Cuba’s private sector, with the main demand being to take Cuba off the terror list.

• Over 10,000 people and 100 progressive advocacy groups signed an open letter organized by CODEPINK urging Biden to reverse Trump’s terrorism designation for Cuba and to reinstate Obama-era policy with the island.

• Hundreds of US lawyers wrote to Biden urging him to take Cuba off the list.

• We are rallying at the White House — and around the world — to tell Biden that Cuba is not a terrorist state, and the American people won’t stand for US terrorism against Cuba.

🚨 CALL TO ACTION! #OffTheList

Rally with us on June 25 to tell President Biden:

🇨🇺 CUBA IS NOT A TERRORIST STATE!

🇨🇺 END US ECONOMIC TERRORISM AGAINST CUBA!

Join us in DC for a weekend of action, organizational unity, and solidarity with Cuba: https://t.co/8XBARZMOow pic.twitter.com/rlDRfUa5Rb

— National Network on Cuba 🇨🇺 (@NNOCuba) May 22, 2023

Calla Walsh is an anti-imperialist organizer and writer. She is a co-chair of the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 50+ organizations across the United States working to end the US war on Cuba.

Today, Defense of The Revolution Rests with the Media

Photo: © Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Shutterstock.com

By Saheli Chowdhury and Steve Lalla

Víctor Dreke, legendary commander of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, called for those defending the Revolution today to recognize that the battlefield of the 21st century is the media.

The comments were made at a conference held on Thursday, April 22, commemorating the 60-year anniversary of the Bay of Pigs—Playa Girón to the Spanish-speaking world. Comandante Dreke, now retired at age 84, spoke alongside author, historian, and journalist Tariq Ali; Cuba’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Bárbara Montalvo Álvarez; and National Secretary of Great Britain’s Cuba Solidarity Campaign, Bernard Regan.

“It is no longer about us, the over-80s,” said Dreke. “It is the next generation, those who are here, who are going to be even better than us. It will no longer be a case of combat… Right now, the media across the world has to defend the Cuban Revolution, and we and you have to be capable of accessing the media across the world to spread the truth about the Cuban Revolution. That is the battle we are waging today—to fight attempts to weaken the people, to soften the people, to try to take the country again. They have changed their tactics. We are ready, but we want to say to our friends in the Americas and around the world that Cuba, the Cuba of Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida, the Cuba of Che Guevara, will never fail, neither with us nor with the future generations.”

Dreke joined the 26 July Movement in 1954, fought under Che Guevara in the Cuban Revolutionary War and in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1965, and commanded two companies in Cuba’s historic defeat of US imperialism at the Bay of Pigs. Dreke’s autobiography, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, was published in 2002.

Cuba and Venezuela provide inspiration for Latin America and the world

Comandante Víctor Dreke drew a comparison between Cuba’s historic defense of the revolution and that of Venezuela, as both countries now face a common weapon in the arsenal of imperialism: the economic blockade.

“They block medicines for Cuba, they block aid for Cuba,” said Dreke. “They blockade the disposition of aid for Venezuela because of the principles of Venezuela, the principles of Chávez, the principles of Maduro, the principles of Díaz-Canel, the principles of this people, due to the historical continuity of this people.”

Regarding the failed 1961 US invasion of Cuba, Dreke remarked, “it was an example for Latin America that proved that the US was not invincible; that the US could be defeated with the morality and dignity of the people—because we did not have the weapons at that time that we later acquired. It had a meaning for Cuba, the Americas, and the dignified peoples of Latin America and around the world.”

Tariq Ali: we must see through ideological fabrications to defeat imperialism

Tariq Ali, esteemed author of more than 40 books, recalled the precursor of the US invasion of Cuba, the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala in which President Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown and forced into exile. A young Ernesto Guevara was living in Guatemala at that time and bore witness to the multifaceted CIA operation PBSuccess, which included bombing campaigns with unmarked aircraft and a propaganda blitz of leaflets and radio broadcasts. Ali described the evolution of CIA tactics since then:

“Normally the way they choose is to occupy a tiny bit of territory, find a puppet president, and recognize the puppet president. They are doing that in the Arab world today, or have been trying to do it. They did it with Guaidó in Venezuela, except that the Venezuelan army would not play that game and it blew up in their face, their attempt to topple the Maduro regime. They are trying it in parts of Africa. The weaponry has changed, it is more sophisticated, but the actual method they use, ideologically, is the same. That’s why it always amazes me as to why so many people believe the rubbish they read when a war is taking place.”

Ali also weighed in with a forecast for US foreign policy under the Biden administration:

“We can be hopeful for surprises… But effectively, whoever becomes president of the United States, whether it is Obama, or Biden, or Trump, or Clinton, or Bush, they are presidents of an imperial country, an imperial state, and this imperial state is not run all the time by the Congress or the Senate or the Supreme Court. The military plays a very important role in the institutions of the state, and the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency are in and out of the White House, so the president who decides to make a sharp shift—it can be done, I am not saying it cannot be done—would have to be very brave and courageous indeed.”

“Whoever from the Democrats gets elected—whatever their position—immediately comes under very heavy pressure,” Ali elaborated. “If you look at AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]… initially very radical, but now she is totally on board… I have never heard her say sanctions should be lifted, and she certainly supports even the old Trump line on Venezuela.”

Hybrid warfare in the information age

“Direct warfare in the past may have been marked by bombers and tanks, but if the pattern that the US has presently applied in Syria and Ukraine is any indication, then indirect warfare in the future will be marked by ‘protesters’ and insurgents,” detailed Andrew Korybko in the publication Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change. “Fifth columns will be formed less by secret agents and covert saboteurs and more by non-state actors that publicly behave as civilians. Social media and similar technologies will come to replace precision-guided munitions as the ‘surgical strike’ capability of the aggressive party, and chat rooms and Facebook pages will become the new ‘militants’ den.’ Instead of directly confronting the targets on their home turf, proxy conflicts will be waged in their near vicinity in order to destabilize their periphery. Traditional occupations may give way to coups and indirect regime-change operations that are more cost effective and less politically sensitive.”

Hybrid warfare, waged today by the US and its political allies in conjunction with transnational corporations that wield powerful influence over mass media and political institutions, comprises the fields of economic warfare, lawfare, conventional armed warfare, and the information war. This last and most important—according to Commander Dreke—element in turn includes the manipulation of the press to serve capitalist and imperialist interests, the manufacture of fake news stories out of whole cloth, and targeted attacks on individuals, parties, or peoples who speak out against the failings of the present order. Moreover, hybrid warfare extends to interference in the political field and in electoral processes, the mounting of media campaigns to drive public attention into particular channels, and myriad assaults on our consciousness that attempt to turn us against each other, prevent us from seeing our common interests, and confuse us as we try to overcome defeatism and work to build a better world.

Originally published by Orinoco Tribune.

Reviving the Brazilian and Bolivian Left

By Yanis Iqbal

Left-wing politics has experienced a stratospheric decline in Brazil and Bolivia. In Brazil, the democratically elected president of Worker’s Party (PT) was ousted through a parliamentary coup in 2016. After this, a right-wing extremist named Jair Bolsonaro has assumed the presidency and has mercilessly blemished the healthcare through his bluff and bluster. This has led to more than 200,000 cases, 15,000 deaths and already 2 health ministers have resigned due to Bolsonaro’s adamant insistence on the use of hydroxychloroquine. Similarly, Bolivia has also seen the ouster of Evo Morales in November, 2019 through a rightist-military orchestrated coup which has led to the appointment of Jeanine Anez as the president who is an ardent catholic and racist. Anez has unleashed the “Bolsonarofication of Bolivia” in the Covid-19 crisis which has caused the erosion of the Unified Health System, the banishment of Cuban doctors and the reduction of myriad health and cash transfer programs.

The dramatic deterioration of the left in both the countries is causing an unprecedented damage to the people living in these countries. With the astronomic rise of the right-wing bloc, full-fledged neoliberalism has again dug its fiendish claws in the flesh of Brazil and Bolivia. A catastrophic situation like this necessitates the re-establishment of a new left-wing politics that is capable of waging a counter-war against the overtly barbarous and crudely capitalist right-wing camp. For this to happen, we need to critically analyze the previous structure of leftist governments and highlight its weaknesses and pro-corporate proclivities so that a truly revolutionary architecture can be built.

Throughout their existence as a prominent political-electoral force, the Brazilian and Bolivian left have been characterized by a neo-developmentalist statist agenda. This type of political project is foundationally a reformist program which fundamentally aims to reconcile antagonistic classes through the conquest of the state.

 The discursive construction of non-antagonistic class relations in a reformist leftist politics is regulated through the use of the state. State starts serving as the site of class unity where irreconcilable demands are negotiated and an unstable equilibrium is maintained through the concessions which the bourgeoisie is willing to grant to the working class. These class compromises are made to co-opt the working class into the restricted rationality of neoliberalism. The bourgeoisie not only co-opts the working class but also reformulates their demands through new anti-revolutionary perspectives and creates the intelligible terrain on which economic-political demands are made. Through the assimilation and reformulation of anti-capitalist forces, a polyclassist pact is produced which is presented by the state as a “revolutionary measure”. Therefore, the definitive role of the state in a neo-developmentalist system consists in its ability to cooperate with the capitalists and to set up itself as the mediating agent in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.  

Due to its status as a moderator of class struggle, the state has to follow the rules of the global market and has to repeatedly constrict the social movements when they cross the thresholds defined by neoliberalism. Along with constriction, the state also enables a market ideology by generating a consumerist culture and encouraging possessive individualism. In this process of constriction and enablement, we need to highlight two important tactics.

(1) The first tactic of neo-developmentalist state refers to its attempts to help in the proliferation of a market-centric ideology through amorphous political lexicon. For example, the Brazilian state under the PT administration was increasingly adopting a class-insensitive political system by lumping together the working class in the category of the “poor”. This was done indiscriminately in the 2010 election campaign of Dilma Rousseff in which she was presented as the “mother of the poor”. Notions like these facilitated the erasure of the class combativeness of the working class by interpellating them as “impotent individuals” who could be rescued by the welfare policies of state. Along with the introduction of the category of the poor, the Brazilian state also added a consumerist tinge to its programme of fragmenting the working class. In a video released by PT in 2013, it was said that “college education, vacations, air travel, a home, a car, meat on the table and shopping are today a right for all”. The depiction of poverty reduction in terms of different possessions surreptitiously inserts a market logic in which economic status is measured in terms of access to specific goods and not on the basis of the ownership of means of production. The Worker’s Party has partly replaced the concept of the poor with the equally amorphous concept of nation and in a statement given by it in 2017, it said that “our experiences and formulations are not the property of the Worker’s Party; they belong to the heritage of the Brazilian people”.  This statement reflects the hesitance of PT to combatively confront the bourgeoisie of Brazil.

(2) The second tactic involves the direct efforts of the neo-developmentalist state to subvert class-based social movements. In this aspect, Bolivia serves as a paradigmatic example. In the December 2005 elections, Evo Morales had secured a majority with 54% of the votes and decided to build a constituent assembly which would encapsulate the popular will of the suppressed and indigenous people. Surprisingly, in September 2006, MAS (Movement Towards Socialism), the party to which Evo Morales belongs, decided that social movements could not send their representatives to the constituent assembly and only political organizations were allowed to do so. This decision was momentous because it came during the time of an aggressive class war in which the capitalists of the Media Luna (Half Moon) of the eastern lowlands, who owned the oil and gas industry, were belligerently trying to weaken the strength of the indigenist-leftist bloc by capturing state power. Therefore, the decision to debar social movements from joining the constituent assembly implicitly indicated the capitalistic tendencies within the Morales government. But this decision soon had to be revoked in April 2009 due to the opposition presented to it by the social movements.

Through the two statist tactics of constriction and active facilitation, the Brazilian and Bolivian states were able to contain the radicality of left-wing politics. By pursuing a regressively reformist policy stance, a newfangled marketized-welfare state was created which embroidered the unvarnished mechanism of capitalism with a left-progressive ideology. For example, Brazil was able to utilize the commodity boom of the 2000s to institute some welfare policies like the Bolsa Familia which benefitted 12 million families. There was also a 50% increase in the minimum wages and higher education was also made accessible. Along with the instauration of these programmes, there was also the concealed and simultaneous reprimarization of economy and the enhancement of a neo-extractive, agro-export economic infrastructure. This was the result of the supposed global market integration of Brazil which increased the economic dependency of Brazil on other countries. Brazil, under PT, also witnessed the construction of new dams such as the Belo Monte dam, Madeira river dams and 4 dams on the Teles Pires River. The increasingly export-oriented, environmentally damaging and extractive economy of Brazil was also obscured by the “democratization drive” in which participatory institutions such as the Participatory Budgeting (PB) was introduced. These democratic platforms actually professionalized the civil society, statified resistance movements and only allowed for “friendly dialogue” rather than serious power sharing.

A similar situation was seen in Bolivia during the question of oil nationalization. During the politically turbulent time in which the question of the nationalization of oil was gaining prominence, Morales had temporarily adopted a centrist position in which he supported Carlos Mesa’s soft-neoliberal decision to raise the level of royalties paid by oil corporations. But the adverse effects of this diluted neoliberal position were clearly shown by the mere 18% percent of vote which MAS garnered in the 2004 Municipal Elections. Morales had to reverse his position due to this electoral setback and in 2006 he announced the nationalization of Bolivia’s oil. This nationalization too was not complete because it did not expropriate these companies but increased the stakes of the state and raised the royalties and taxes. An incomplete Nationalization of oil was not the only measure which contradicted the post-neoliberalism of Bolivia. The presence of Chinese and Japanese mining companies on the salt flats of Altiplano, the increase in foreign direct investment from 278 million dollars in 2006 to 1.18 billion dollars in 2013 also questioned the growing economic independence of Bolivia.  But due to the commodity boom between 2006 and 2014, Morales’s Bolivia was able to increase its revenues and alleviate poverty from 64% of the population in 2002 to 36.3% in 2011. Extreme poverty too was reduced to approximately 17%. This compensated for its capitalistic economic edifice which remained intact despite these progressive measures.

Due to an unstable compromise which the Bolivian and Brazilian governments had to maintain between the bourgeoisie and working class, there emerged certain cracks in the thinly veiled capitalism of both these countries. In 2015, Brazil saw the neoliberal re-adjustment of the economy in which unemployment rose by 38%, extreme poverty increased from 7.9% to 9.2% and there was 4.6% increase in self-employed workers, signifying the informalization of labor. These measures were enacted due to the decline in the windfall from the commodity boom which the Lula administration had utilized by exporting some major commodities to China such as iron ore, raw sugar and soybeans. But now the Dilma government had to mould its economy according to the rules of the global market which was experiencing a contraction. Bolivia too saw the emergence of economic – political fissures in which the Morales government started diluting and de-intensifying its revolutionary proclamations. From 2006 to 2013, the percentage of primary product exports as a share of total exports increased from 89.4% to 96%. This denotes the extractivist economic structure of Bolivia in which soybean production has increasingly assumed a major role. In Santa Cruz, large landowners and soy producers represent only 2% of the farm units but own more than 70% of land. Land ownership concentration is not only restricted to Santa Cruz but is rather the integral part of Bolivian economy in which the soy complex is the most prominent. In the capitalist circuit of soy complex, agro-chemicals and machineries are imported and these are then distributed to the agribusiness oligarchy of Bolivia which exacerbates the economic existence of small soybean producers by making soybean production a capital-intensive process.

Gradually, the fissures of reformist capitalism started widening and these ultimately prepared the fertile ground for the growth of a fascistic right. The right was able to expand its social base by re-articulating the various weaknesses of the weakly socialist governments. In Bolivia, for example, the right highlighted the transition of Evo Morales from a Mallku and a supporter of cabildo abiertos (open councils) to a caudillo or strongman. By portraying Evo Morales and his socio-economic system as authoritarian, the right paved the way for an extra-institutional paradigm of mobilization which used the idiom of leftist mass-based activism to unleash violence. Brazilian right also reaped the growing discontent of the masses and this was most visible when Jair Bolsonaro was touting himself as an anti-system presidential candidate who could change everything. This anti-system position then metamorphosed into an anti-democratic agenda which countered the meek reformism of the neo-developmentalist left with cultural-symbolic combativeness.

The unpropitious circumstances in Brazil and Bolivia are politically incapacitating the left. It seems that the left-wing camp in both these countries is still not adopting a new strategy and wants to rehash its hackneyed program of weak socialism. But it should now acknowledge that its dime-store developmentalism and unimaginative cesspool of socialist state conquest is based upon a fundamental misreading of Marxism. The Bolivian and Brazilian left apprehended the state as a pivotal instrument in the entire power project of leftism and ignored what Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had said. In Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx had said that the state is the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. Similarly, Lenin had said that bourgeoisie state, “whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. Bolivian and Brazilian leftists made their first fundamental mistake by misunderstanding the state as a universal apparatus which could guarantee the peaceful living of all the people. By universalizing the state and understanding it as an arbitrator above the class relations, the Bolivian and Brazilian left got ensnared in the vortex of bourgeoisie ideology which obviates the emergence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat is of utmost necessity because it involves the exterior dictatorialization of the bourgeoisie and the internal democratization of the organization of living. This internal democratization is diametrically opposed to the democratic drivel of the capitalism which is restricted to formal parliamentarianism and is fearful of genuine mass based activism. Therefore, the Brazilian and Bolivian left has to undauntingly espouse the strategy of the dictatorship of the proletariat which alone can guarantee the complete annihilation of the bourgeoisie cultural-legal state apparatus and its replacement by a new revolutionary state which in unwilling to make invisibilize class struggle.

The second mistake made by the Brazilian and Bolivian state follows from the first one. By not smashing the old state apparatus and refusing to support the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Brazilian and Bolivian state discarded the concept of communism and substituted it with socialism. Dictatorship of the proletariat is only present during the phase of socialism which Lenin defined eloquently as “a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism”. In this situation of socialism, the socialist state has to establish itself and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the objective of constantly decentralizing its power and always working towards the goal of communism or classless society. But the Bolivian and Brazilian states did not regard socialism as a goal towards communism but as a destination in-itself. Due to the erasure of communism, both the states instituted socialism not as a contradictory and tensional period of continuous class struggle in which the state is present to empower grassroots movement, but as a period of “class collaboration” in which different classes live as unified individuals under the state authority. This entrenchment of class collaboration is quite similar to the idea of the 1936 Soviet constitution in which Stalin had anointed Soviet Union as the “State of the whole people”. Brazilian and Bolivian left can navigate their way through their Stalinist embroilment by reinstating communism as the primary objective and seeing socialism as a period of intense class struggle and devolution of power.

The two remedial measures mentioned above can greatly facilitate the construction of a new revolutionary strategy which is politically potent and economically exhaustive. These stratagems can be crafted only if the reformist left of Bolivia and Brazil admits that there is no alternative to class struggle and produces a cohesive communist campaign which openly opposes the peremptory pronouncements of neoliberalism.

Sanctioning Syria

By Chris Ray

This was originally published at Monthly Review.

The United Nations was willing to pay for doors, windows and electrical wiring in Alaa Dahood’s apartment but not for repairs to her living room wall torn open by a mortar strike. That was deemed to be ‘reconstruction’—an aid category forbidden in Syria. “My mother and I used our savings to fix the wall ourselves,” Alaa, a primary school English teacher, told me.

Alaa lives with her widowed mother Walaa in Saif al-Dawla, a suburb of Aleppo that became a frontline between government troops and opposition forces in 2012. After their low-rise housing block came under sniper fire the family fled to a government-controlled sector of the city and, later, to the relative safety of Damascus.

“The stress was too much for my father; he was a nervous man and he died from a heart attack in 2013. My mother and I came home in 2017, when Aleppo was safe,” Alaa said as she served spiced coffee in the living room of her modest two-bedroom home.

More than 521,000 war-displaced Aleppans had returned home by the end of 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported. Very few found their properties undamaged. However, in all of Syria, only 42,000 residents got UN ‘rehabilitation’ aid—the assistance category that covered Alaa’s repairs. UN help was largely restricted to short-term emergency relief—the only aid category acceptable to major UN donors who oppose the continued rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Alaa got no help with her wall but her UN-financed windows are at least made of glass. In Hanano, a suburb of eastern Aleppo previously under rebel control, a young security guard, Mohamed, showed me his family apartment, which overlooks a football field crammed with the skeletons of burned-out buses and cars. Mohamed installed windows made of plastic sheeting last winter, when the temperature fell below freezing. He got the plastic in a UN-supplied Do-It-Yourself ‘shelter kit’ that included pinewood for window frames, fiberboard for doors, expansion foam, nails and tools.

“Plastic is no good for winter but it is better than nothing,” said Mohamed, who did not want his last name published. Despite a severe fuel shortage he managed to buy enough heating oil to warm the bedroom of his frail 13-year-old sister, Asma, for a couple of hours every night. Mohamed has replaced plastic with glass in one window and is putting aside money to do the rest.

Shelter kits come under the heading of short-term emergency aid. The UNHCR says the kits covered about 92,000 Syrians in 2018—more than twice the number who benefited from home rehabilitation. The UN values shelter kits at around US$500 but recipients often sell them for much less or burn the wood for fuel, according to Syrian agencies that implement internationally-funded programs.

One of the UN’s biggest Syrian partners, the Greek Orthodox aid agency Gopa-Derd, refuses to distribute the kits. “We won’t be a part of putting plastic sheets over window frames where there should be glass. Plastic sheets are not going to fix a hole in a wall or keep a family warm in winter,” said Sara Savva, Gopa-Derd’s deputy director.

Another UN partner, the Syria Trust for Development, which managed Alaa’s repairs, wants shelter kit money redirected to rehabilitation. “We did 1000 shelter kits in 2017 then decided no more. They are a waste of time and resources,” said the Trust’s Aleppo director, Jean Maghamez. He added, however, that the Trust’s rehabilitation program covered only 200 Aleppo apartments in 2019 due to UN funding cuts.

A March 2019 joint statement by the governments of the  U.S., UK, France and Germany reaffirmed their opposition to any reconstruction assistance in Syria until “a credible, substantive, and genuine political process is irreversibly underway.” The UN’s position was set out in a 2018 internal directive from its Office of Political Affairs, then headed by a  U.S. career diplomat, Jeffrey Feltman. “Only once there is a genuine and inclusive political transition negotiated by the parties, would the UN be ready to facilitate reconstruction,” it said.

A negotiated settlement remains distant, however. A UN-backed peace plan drawn up in 2012 is moribund. Separate talks overseen by Assad’s patrons Russia and Iran together with Turkey, which supports elements of the jihadist opposition have also made little progress.

Use of UN funds to rebuild the wall of Alaa Dahood’s apartment would have risked crossing what UN staff in Syria refer to as a “red line” between rehabilitation and reconstruction. Neither term is clearly defined but the line is zealously policed. UN staff in Damascus told me they frequently field questions from governments, other UN donors and “human rights monitors” alert to any infringement of the reconstruction ban.

A June report by New York-based Human Rights Watch wagged a disapproving finger at the UN Development Program (UNDP), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Oxfam and others for having rebuilt water sanitation networks and healthcare facilities in government-held Syria. Any project aimed at “rebuilding and sustainable restoration of infrastructure, services, housing, facilities, and livelihoods can carry risks of entanglement in serious human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch claimed.

To avoid breaching the reconstruction ban, the Syria Trust generally will not rebuild any apartment wall with a hole bigger than two square meters, its lead engineer in Aleppo, Ragheb Al Mudarres, told me. Gopa-Derd wants rehabilitation broadly interpreted to allow homes to be made safe for occupation. “If there is a hole in the wall we block it, if water drips from the ceiling we fix it, if there is no door or windows we install them. Some donors consider this to be reconstruction—we don’t,” Sara Savva said.

UN employees say they follow an unwritten guideline to avoid work on any public building with more than 30 percent structural damage. In one case, the reconstruction ban obliged agencies to reject a neighborhood committee’s plea for help to rebuild three schools. Funds were available, the proposal was technically sound, and the schools were in eastern Aleppo—once hailed by regime-change supporters as a bastion of revolution.

Across the country, 1.75 million children have no school to attend and the need in eastern Aleppo is particularly acute. However, its population apparently can expect little help from former foreign sponsors who walked away after the shooting stopped.

The UN describes Syria’s humanitarian needs as “staggering.” About 5.6 million people have gone abroad—about two thirds as refugees—and about 80 percent of the 18 million who remain need assistance. One third of the housing stock has been destroyed, leaving more than six million people without a permanent home.

Some 7.6 million suffer from an acute lack of clean drinking water and 4.3 million women and children are malnourished. Previously eradicated diseases like polio, typhoid, measles and rubella have returned and one in three children misses out on life-saving vaccines. About 1.5 million people live with permanent, conflict-related disabilities.

In this environment, restrictions on foreign aid are onerous but trade and financial sanctions are lethal. They have “contributed to the suffering of the Syrian people” by blocking imports of anti-cancer drugs, antibiotics and rotavirus vaccines, medical equipment, food, fuel, crop seeds, water pumps and other essentials, the UN Special Rapporteur on sanctions, Idriss Jazairy, reported in 2018. Jazairy called the sanctions “pernicious” and said they obstructed efforts to restore schools, hospitals, clean water, housing and employment.

U.S. measures are the most punitive of overlapping sanctions regimes also applied by the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. In the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, the U.S. is waging “economic war” to “strangle to death” Assad’s government. The casualties are the poor, the sick and children—not the political and business elite.

In Damascus, rebel rockets no longer fall on residential districts that have remained loyal to the government through almost nine years of war. However, rather than celebrating the relative safety, Syrians I meet are exhausted by prolonged and worsening economic hardship. “I lived with war every day for seven years and got used to it. I can’t get used to not being able to feed my family,” a state employee said.

EU and U.S. fuel embargoes have hit hard, with nationwide electricity shortages and long queues for rationed petrol and bottled gas. Pharmaceuticals are even harder to obtain than fuel. The World Health Organization says sanctions block the import of anti-cancer drugs, which were subsidized at low prices by the public health system before the war. Sara Savva said medicine for diabetes or heart disease, when available, could cost an average employee a month’s salary. “Forget about chemotherapy or cancer medication—that’s ridiculously expensive,” she said.

Medical equipment is obsolete because the health ministry can’t import parts or update software. Doctors at a major Damascus hospital told Reuters about 10 percent of patients suffering from kidney failure are dying due to the hospital’s inability to source parts for European-made dialysis machines.

Humanitarian exemptions from sanctions supposedly exist but are difficult and costly to obtain. In any case, financial sanctions have isolated the country from global banking and payment systems, which is why foreign ATM and credit cards are useless in Syria. Even international aid organizations are forced to carry cash across the Lebanese border in vehicles or use informal money traders. So tightly drawn is the noose that European banks have refused to open bank accounts for UN staff when the word “Syria” appeared in their job title.

The UN has not endorsed sanctions but their effect on humanitarian aid has been “chilling,” Jazairy said. Exporters, transport companies, and insurers have refused to do any business with Syria for fear of inadvertently violating U.S. sanctions, which are extraterritorial. They apply to any transaction which involves a U.S. connection, such as goods with more than 10 percent  U.S. content, or use of  U.S. dollars.

In one case, European manufacturers declined to tender for supply of wheelchairs to the UN in Syria. The market is potentially big—about 86,000 Syrians have reportedly lost limbs in the conflict—but not lucrative enough to justify the risk of losing access to  U.S. customers. In his 2018 report, Jazairy argued for the release of Syrian central bank assets “frozen” by the EU. His suggestion that the money be set aside to pay for wheat and animal fodder imports to meet the “urgent survival needs of the population” was ignored.

The UN says its Syrian operations merely complement the work of state bodies, which are primarily responsible for meeting the humanitarian emergency. However, the 2019 national budget was set at less than US$9 billion—half the 2011 level—and actual expenditure is almost certainly lower. In eight years of war, GDP has fallen by between one half and two thirds. During December 2019, the Syrian pound fell to around six percent of its pre-war value.

The government still subsidizes fuel, bread, rice and other staples, but, with ministry budgets shrinking, welfare services are increasingly delivered by local non-government organizations such as the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, Gopa-Derd and the Syria Trust. In the Aleppo suburb of Hanano, the Trust runs a UNHCR-funded community center housed in a former Islamic State prison. On the day I visited, a teacher was helping children to model the Earth’s relationship to the Sun with the use of globes and torches. Legal aid was on offer to divorced women seeking child custody and a female doctor was seeing patients.

The center also provides what its English teacher, Walaa Kanawati called a “psychological counselling service.” She said it was in high demand from parents worried about children’s behavior and women subjected to domestic violence. According to Kanawati, the center spends a lot of time trying to teach children and young adults how to disagree without fighting. “We role-play two individuals or two teams and help each side to defend their opinion,” she said. “We pose topics that come out of society, like early marriage, which is a big problem in this area. We’ve got mothers as young as 15.”

The Trust was also holding remedial English and math classes for children who missed years of school when living in rebel-held districts. Kanawati said those children struggle to keep up with lessons and often drop out of school.

Alaa Dahood, the primary school teacher from Saif al-Dawla also talked about the challenge of educating students from what she called “the other side.” “They are two, three and four years behind other children and I have to stay back after class to teach them to read and write,” she said. Some got no schooling in opposition-controlled zones while others were only given religious instruction. But, “parents from the other side usually appreciate education. They want their children to be as good as their classmates,” Alaa said.

In Damascus Gopa-Derd operates a UN-funded community center in the eastern suburb of Dweila. The area is an uneasy mix of residents subjected to years of mortar fire from neighboring Ghouta, a jihadist wartime stronghold, and Ghouta refugees who fled air strikes leading up to the army’s takeover in 2018.

Center staff try to promote integration by making services available to both groups. They also encourage boys and girls to attend classes together. Families displaced from opposition areas typically believe sexes should be segregated at a young age and “only boys are important,” said Remi Al Khouri, a Gopa-Derd manager. She said single-sex primary school classes were unknown in Syria before “the crisis,” adding: “We want to show that it is normal for boys and girls to go to class together and play together.”

In the nearby suburb of Kashkoul, another Gopa-Derd community center was focused on combatting sexual abuse of children. According to the center’s manager, Lina Saker, child abuse got worse during the war. I observed a class of boys and girls aged between five and ten engrossed in an exercise on “body safety and personal boundaries”; a female teacher used a wall chart to indicate the body’s “no touch” areas. “Some of these children are already victims and we want them to know it is unacceptable for people to touch certain parts of their body,” Saker said.

Getting children off the streets and into school would make them less vulnerable but displaced families often rely on sons and daughters to earn income. The center is trying to help children as young as nine who sell bread on the street, prepare shisha pipes in cafes, collect rubbish for recycling and help out on construction sites. It arranged medical treatment and schooling for a 14-year-old girl whose health suffered from her work in a charcoal factory.

While the body safety class was in session, the children’s mothers were in a nearby room talking about early marriage. Most had married before the legal age of 18 and a center employee was encouraging them to open up about the physical, emotional and material consequences. “We want to persuade them to stop their own daughters from marrying early and to give them a good education,” Saker said.