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Cartoon of the day

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Hundred years of empire

Just a few years ago, students at Oberlin College protested the college’s decision to fund a talk by Jeffrey Sachs, whom they considered to be a “neoliberal imperialist liar.”

As regular readers of this blog know, I am quite sympathetic with the Oberlin students’ concerns. I have called Sachs to task on many occasions (e.g., here, here, and generally here).

But it’s also true Sachs is changing his tune, at least on some issues. Here he [ht: ja] is on interventions by the United States in the Middle East:

It’s time to end US military engagements in the Middle East. Drones, special operations, CIA arms supplies, military advisers, aerial bombings — the whole nine yards. Over and done with. That might seem impossible in the face of ISIS, terrorism, Iranian ballistic missiles, and other US security interests, but a military withdrawal from the Middle East is by far the safest path for the United States and the region.

And then Sachs ups the ante: “America has been no different from other imperial powers in finding itself ensnared repeatedly in costly, bloody, and eventually futile overseas wars.”

That’s right: Sachs is accusing the United States of acting today as an imperial power—in a long line beginning with the Romans and continuing in modern times with the British, the French, and the United States itself in previous periods, from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines through Vietnam and increasingly in the Middle East. In fact, in all these cases, the United States took up the preceding wars of other imperial powers, including Spain, Britain, and France, thereby extending imperial adventures that have been “both futile and self-destructive.”

Sachs is led therefore to conclude,

The United States should immediately end its fighting in the Middle East and turn to UN-based diplomacy for real solutions and security. The Turks, Arabs, and Persians have lived together as organized states for around 2,500 years. The United States has meddled unsuccessfully in the region for 65 years. It’s time to let the locals sort out their problems, supported by the good offices of the United Nations, including peacekeeping and peace-building efforts. Just recently, the Arabs once again wisely and rightly reiterated their support for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians if Israel withdraws from the conquered territories. This gives added reason to back diplomacy, not war.

We are at the 100th anniversary of British and French imperial rule in the Mideast. The United States has unwisely prolonged the misery and blunders. One hundred years is enough.

I can only agree.

Even more: give Sachs another decade or two and he might actually become a Marxist.

On the right side of history

The extensive media coverage since Fidel Castro died has included many different voices—from those of journalists who interviewed him and wrote about him, especially in the early years, through Cold Warriors and Cuban émigrés who did battle with him to political figures whose comments have been crafted to align with contemporary constituencies and goals.* But the media have left out one important group: ordinary people who, over the years, found themselves inspired by and generally sympathetic with (even when critical of many features of) the Cuban Revolution.

I’m referring to people around the globe—students, workers, peasants, activists, and many others, throughout the Americas and across the world—who have understood the significance of the Revolution for Cuba and, as a historical example of anti-imperialism and human development, for their own attempts to enact radical political and economic change.

What we haven’t learned from recent coverage is that re-revolutionary Cuba was under the thumb of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who governed a relatively wealthy but highly unequal country in which the majority of people had no voice and suffered from high unemployment, a low level of literacy, poor health, and inadequate housing. And they were exploited in an economy dominated by large landowners, U.S. corporations, and American organized crime. The 26th of July Movement (a name that originated in the failed attack led by Fidel on the Moncada Barracks in 1953) launched an insurrection in 1956, with the landing of small force that found its way to the Sierra Maestra Mountains, and, with the support of an army of volunteers in the countryside and “Civic Resistance” groups in the cities, succeeded in overthrowing Batista. A small revolutionary organization with widespread popular support managed to confront and ultimately defeat a typical authoritarian Washington-backed Latin American regime just 90 miles off the U.S. coast.

And while a great deal of attention has been paid to the growing tensions from early on between the new Cuban government and the United States, which sponsored a series of clandestine invasions and assassination attempts, mainstream accounts have overlooked the tremendously successful campaigns to do what had seemed impossible in Cuba and elsewhere—to eliminate illiteracy, promote health, and improve living and working conditions, especially in the countryside. In fact, one of the reasons Havana became and remained so shabby (as legions of foreign visitors who rarely venture outside the capital city never fail to describe) was the Cuban government’s focus on transforming conditions in rural areas so that, in contrast to many other countries, impoverished agricultural workers and their families would have no need to move en masse into the city.

That’s what I noticed when I traveled to Cuba in the late-1970s during the administration of Jimmy Carter, when U.S. travel restrictions were allowed to lapse. I didn’t see the urban ghettoes I drove through before boarding my flight in Montreal, and nowhere did I come across the poverty and inequality characteristic of rural areas across all the countries where I’d lived and worked in Latin America.

Thanks to the Revolution, Cuba has achieved enormous progress—not only in comparison to the rest of Latin America and the Third World but even (at least in terms of indicators like infant mortality) the United States. That radical turnaround, and the ability to maintain it in the face of unrelenting U.S.-government opposition over decades, is the major reason Fidel and the Cuban Revolution have been admired around the world.

By the same token, the Cuban Revolution has not been romanticized or supported uncritically, especially as a model for left-wing movements elsewhere. For the most part, the economy has been organized around state ownership, not worker-run enterprises. And a small number of political leaders, including Fidel himself, and a single political party have managed to hold onto power, with little in the way of democratic decision-making beyond the local level—not to mention public antipathy towards and discrimination against LGBT people, the jailing of journalists and political dissidents, and so on. Economically and politically, Cuba is no paradise.

Still, for all its faults and mis-steps, the Cuban Revolution has long served as an example of the ability of people to struggle against the impossible and to win. Fidel was thus on the right side of history.

 

*Including the anti-socialist drivel offered by John McTernan, a former speech writer for Tony Blair.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day