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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="http://www.fightbacknews.org/2021/7/26/western-left-intellectuals-and-their-love-affair-attempted-color-revolution-cuba">fightbacknews.org</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Western left intellectuals and their love affair with the attempted ‘color revolution’ in Cuba</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Analysis by Josh Bergeron | July 26, 2021<br></div>
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<p>Chicago, IL - Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar, Paul Le Blanc, Suzi
Weissman, Tithi Bhattacharya, Charlie Post, Robert Brenner, Gayatri
Spivak, Alex Callinicos, Ashley Smith, Eric Toussaint, Marc Cooper,
Etienne Balibar. These are a handful of the over 500 signatories on an
open letter directed to the blockaded Cuban government on July 12
demanding "respect for the democratic rights of all Cuban people" and
the release of "dissident Marxist" Frank García Hernández and his
comrades from jail after the protests of July 11.</p>
<p>These signatories are high-profile academic socialists in the U.S.
and Europe, featured prominently in the publication catalogue of Verso
and Haymarket Books, or on the editorial boards of online journals like
New Politics, Tempest, Spectre, Socialist Worker, and other
ex-International Socialist Organization (ISO)-now-Democratic Socialists
of America (DSA), Socialist Equality Party, or UK Socialist workers
Party related outlets. Their work also frequently appears in more
mainstream left outlets, such as <em>Jacobin </em>and <em>the Nation</em>. Their opinions on the left reach a wide audience and, in some cases, carry significant weight.</p>
<p>Their petition circulation effort drew major support on social media
in the days after the initial protests in Cuba, helping to stitch
together a left-reinforcement to the edifice of the mainstream press,
which described the event as an uprising by "political dissidents''
against an "oppressive bureaucratic regime" in the pursuit of democracy
and freedom of expression. The definition of “freedom” pursued and the
political orientation of the protesters in question differed between the
tales spun by the <em>New York Times </em>and those of the Socialist Worker, but the story was the same: Repressive government arbitrarily detains political dissidents.</p>
<p>And while these signatories differ among themselves over their
characterization of the Cuban government and its revolutionary tradition
- ranging from the view that Cuba is a “state capitalist” that harbors
no revolutionary potential to the view that the once-revolutionary state
has become an intransigent bureaucracy that is still preferable to the
neoliberal model - all seem to find common ground with co-signer Gilbert
Achcar’s warning about “the anti-imperialism of fools.”</p>
<p>Achcar condemns those who oppose U.S. imperialism no matter its
target, because he believes this misses the “nuanced” view that U.S.
imperialism might be instrumentalized by popular movements in the
pursuit of their own liberation. Our “knee-jerk” rejection of the notion
that any positive could ever come from the machinations of empire, in
Achcar’s formulation, puts us in the camp of “defending murderous
regimes.” Ostensibly, sharing co-signature real estate with the likes of
Achcar would suggest that the other petitioners agree with him that
anti-imperialism is not always a principled position and the events in
Cuba are an example of a situation in which they do not want to end up
on the side of “fools.” So without further investigation, they and 500
others signed an open letter condemning the Cuban government for its
“repression and arbitrary detentions” of “critical communists.”</p>
<p><strong>An alternate view from the ground</strong></p>
<p>On July 17, a different narrative emerged from the mouths of Frank
García Hernández's Cuban colleagues themselves. The Comunistas
collective Editorial Board, of which García Hernández is a founder,
published an account of events that was much more balanced and far less
negative in its appraisal of the Cuban government and its response to
the protests than the narrative that was promoted by the petition’s
signatories. Rather than a repressive response to an organic anti-state
uprising, they portray the events of July 11 as unprecedented protests
with a variety of origins and compositions, some legitimate and others
manufactured. In their account, the protests were composed of three
flanks: a small group of U.S.-funded counterrevolutionaries with massive
reach and influence, a small group of anti-state intellectuals with
legitimate grievances that were co-opted by the reactionaries, and a
much larger group of "non-political" demonstrators demanding an end to
austerity and shortages a crisis which the Comunistas Editorial Board
attributes, with some reservations, almost entirely to the exacerbating
U.S. blockade and global pandemic. In short, the most explicitly
anti-government slogans and orientations were crafted and carried by the
U.S.-funded counterrevolutionaries, whereas the majority of the
demonstrators lacked a cohesive political consciousness and simply
wanted a reprieve from their very real material hardships. As the
Editorial Board asserts, "The protests did not represent a majority.
Most of the Cuban population continues to support the government."</p>
<p>Notably, this closely mirrors the public address of Cuban President
Miguel Díaz-Canel, who stated, “The protests involve many revolutionary
citizens who want an explanation for the current situation in the
country, but are also contaminated by groups of opportunists who take
advantage of the current crisis to undermine order and generate chaos.”
And while Díaz-Canel expressed full faith in the Cuban people to engage
in productive dialogue to resolve the present crises, his calls for
revolutionaries to take to the streets to defend the nation against
opportunistic attacks and U.S.-financed subversion campaigns was met
with scorn from the self-described “anti-campist” or “third campist”
Western left.</p>
<p>For these Western left critics of the Cuban state, Díaz-Canel’s calls
for popular defense of national sovereignty represented a cynical
demand by the Cuban state for its supporters to engage in vigilante
violence against dissidents like Frank García Hernández. The fact that
Frank’s comrades - who engage in frequent criticism of the Cuban
government themselves - did not subscribe to this narrative of events
nevertheless did not discourage the petitioners from propagating the
perspective that Frank García Hernández’s arrest was the smoking gun
evidence of Cuba’s authoritarian roundup of “critical communists.”</p>
<p><strong>Arbitrary detention or safeguarding the revolution?</strong></p>
<p>No such roundup took place. The arrests that did occur followed
outbreaks of violence and vandalism after mostly peaceful and unharassed
protests in a number of cities, which the Comunistas collective
describes as: "Violent groups carried out acts of vandalism, attacking
communist militants and government supporters with sticks and stones."
The Cuban police and defenders of the revolution engaged in kind. In
other words, according to this collective of Cuban critics of the state,
the violence was largely carried out by counterrevolutionary forces
against government supporters and other communist partisans. This
resulted in scattered arrests.</p>
<p>This is a far cry from the narratives emerging out of the U.S.
corporate media and academic left circles, which characterized the
violence as a one-sided repressive crackdown by an intransigent
bureaucratic "regime" and its paid supporters against dissidents
striving for freedom and plenty.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Frank García Hernández and some others were arrested -
the catalyst for the petition. Frank's comrades at the Comunistas
collective address this too. It turns out, García Hernández was not
arrested for being a "dissident" participant in the protests. In fact,
García Hernández is a member of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) who
merely watched but did not partake in the protests and was arrested by
“confusion” as he put it. Frank García Hernández and another
intellectual named in the petition, LGBTQ activist Maykel González
Vivero, who did participate in the protests, were picked up after a
nearby act of counterrevolutionary violence resulted in injuries and
vandalism late in the night. By García Hernández’s own admission, they
were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The next day they
easily proved their innocence and were released without incident.
According to his colleagues at Comunistas collective, "During his little
more than 24 hours of detention, Frank affirms that he did not receive
physical abuse, nor any type of torture." No other person associated
with the publication was arrested or targeted.</p>
<p>But here a key detail emerges. Frank's release actually preceded the
publication of the open letter demanding his release by his "comrades"
in the U.S. and Europe. And while Comunistas collective maintained their
own criticisms of the Cuban government, their characterization of the
genesis of the protests, the response of the government to the protests,
and the appraisal of the revolutionary process in general, differ
significantly from the ostensibly "progressive" critics of the Cuban
government in the U.S. and Europe who organized the petition to release
their friend who had in fact already been released. Again, these
significant discrepancies have not been addressed by any of the
prominent signatories and circulators of the petition.</p>
<p>In fact, on July 17, the day that the Comunistas blog collective
published their retrospective of the protests and arrests, some of the
U.S.-based petition endorsers republished the original petition in
Tempest Magazine without mention of any of the above critical
divergences from on-the-ground reports. Further, the editorial board of
Tempest broadened the appeal to a call for the release of “all detainees
in Cuba.” Even the Comunistas collective demanded only the release of
the detainees “as long as they have not committed actions that have
threatened the lives of other people.”</p>
<p>In the week that followed the July 11 protests, the Open Letter left
were confronted with an excess of evidence and investigative research
documenting the existence of U.S. alphabet agency subversion projects,
tens of millions of dollars funneled into counter-revolutionary
activities, coup-propagating social media bot farms and other examples
of hybrid warfare that served as the backdrop of the unrest. And yet,
they maintained their political line that all arrests were arbitrary and
illegitimate. One signatory even asserted that the duty of the left in
the West is to support all such protests, “whatever people's politics
involved in these struggles - against whatever states and ruling
classes, even those who falsely claim the mantle of ‘socialism.’” This
is, of course, a tacit endorsement of the reactionary tail that wags the
dog of these astroturfed “color revolutions,” disguised as they are as
organic movements of workers and oppressed peoples.</p>
<p><strong>Whither opposition to empire?</strong></p>
<p>Taken in isolation, a charitable reading could view signing such an
open letter as a political slip-up brewed in the fog of war that is a
developing foreign event. But for many of the most prominent left
signatories, this was the only public statement or call to action made
regarding the unprecedented events in Cuba. Too few matched their
outrage of the arrests with equal outrage over the ongoing illegal
blockade of the island by the U.S., and even fewer (close to none)
circulated open letters or petitions calling for anti-imperialist
solidarity with Cuban sovereignty against the now well-documented
imperialist provocations that played an important role in the outbreak
and international media coverage of the protests in Cuba.</p>
<p>Even after statements of support for the gains of the Cuban
revolution came from all corners of the world, demanding an end to the
illegal blockade and hybrid warfare, the signatories spared little
attention for the very real threat of escalating imperialist
intervention. When the mayor of Miami called on the U.S. government to
bomb Havana, none of the open letter endorsers change their tune. None
came to the defense of Black Lives Matter after the organization’s
condemnation of the U.S. blockade brought them heavy backlash. At most,
as in the petition itself, the blockade and imperial provocations were
mentioned as an almost unrelated preamble to the real point, despite
their absolute centrality. No open letter was signed and circulated by
this group of Western academic leftists demanding an end to the blockade
after the 29th consecutive UN General Assembly majority vote to end the
economic siege in June, and neither was there an effort on their part
to circulate the campaign to send millions of much-needed syringes to
the island to help put Cuban-made COVID vaccines into Cuban arms. When
President Joe Biden announced that he would not change course on Cuba
and called the nation a “failed state” without reference to the
blockade, they issued no scathing open letter. They did not collectively
come to the defense of a patriotic Cuban woman who was censored on
Twitter after she demanded that the UN Human Rights Council stop using
her image as the symbol for the anti-government protesters, when in
reality she was in the streets of Cuba defending her revolution.
Similarly, their silences on the ongoing violent U.S.-backed state
repression of a months-long popular uprising in Colombia, or the
years-long popular uprising in Haiti, grew more pronounced with the
circulation of this petition. Their priorities were laid bare.</p>
<p>When confronted on social media about this unfortunate discrepancy
between stated ideological commitments and real political actions, many
of these prominent signatories responded by blocking, unfriending,
ignoring, or dismissing criticisms and questions. When they did respond,
it was often full of slanders against “tankies” and “Stalinists” and
strangely even one reference to Assad. Those that disagreed were accused
of supporting “repression” and “ignoring voices on the ground.” No
intellectually honest reference was made to the voices on the ground of
the 100,000 Cubans who took to the streets of Havana in defense of their
revolution. No mea culpas were issued after even Reuters was forced to
admit that the media had fallen for lies and manipulations about the
protests and the repression that ostensibly followed. Their perception
of events, one must assume, remains the same as it was on July 12. Their
own political orthodoxy, it seems, left little room for "dissident
Marxists" engaging them in criticism among comrades.</p>
<p>On July 22, U.S. President Joe Biden announced a new round of
sanctions on Cuba, which he promised were “just the beginning.” The
Biden administration’s intransigence - and its cynical hypocrisy in
denouncing “mass detentions and sham trials” in Cuba that presumably
does not describe the U.S,-run torture camp known as Guantanamo Bay -
saw a rapidly organized response in the pages of the <em>New York Times</em>
on July 23. In a full-page advert, the People’s Forum, Code Pink, the
ANSWER Coalition and over 400 “former heads of state, politicians,
intellectuals, scientists, members of the clergy, artists, musicians and
activists from across the globe,” issued an open letter to the U.S.
government demanding the end to its economic warfare against the Cuban
people. Here is an example of the kind of public statement with
prominent endorsers that places the responsibility for human rights
abuses at the feet of U.S. imperialism and that expresses solidarity
with the working and oppressed people of the globe who resist empire. A
rare few signatories of the July 12 petition directed against the Cuban
government did sign the “Let Cuba Live” letter in the <em>New York Times</em>,
including Noam Chomsky. One can only wonder what the political
priorities are of those who condemn the imperialism of their own
government only after first making demands and criticisms upon the
targets of that imperialism.</p>
<p><strong>Beware the “anti-anti-imperialist left”</strong></p>
<p>File this away as one more example of Western academic socialists and
progressives being captured by the ideological manipulations of U.S.
State Department propaganda and their own internalized colonial
chauvinism toward revolutionary projects in the Global South. Other
targets of these petitions and open letters in recent years and months
have been Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. Notably, all are
targets of ongoing and well-documented subversion operations, economic
sanctions and electoral interference by the United States, something
that is rarely remarked upon by the signatories. The outraged open
letter from prominent leftist intellectuals making demands upon
anti-imperialist counties and other targets of Western imperialism is
one of the most insidious and effective propaganda efforts by non-state
actors in the imperial core, as it serves to confuse and disorient the
broader left within the belly of the beast, weakening our capacity to
collectively undermine and resist the U.S. empire, thus relegating the
burden of the struggle against imperialism to the revolutionary peoples
of the Global South alone. This is a dereliction of our revolutionary
duties.</p>
<p>As progressives and revolutionaries living within the empire, we must
express an unqualified and unwavering solidarity with Cuba and all
targets of U.S. imperialism, and we must organize to put an end to U.S.,
aggression, political interference and economic strangulation so that
Cuba and all working and oppressed peoples of the world can breathe.</p>
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